Alexander Muse has been publishing excellent essays this year. On Iran's purported victory lap:

[A] closed strait [of Hormuz] is a chokehold on Iran’s own windpipe, because the overwhelming share of Iran’s trade and oil exports must pass through that same water.... A chokepoint you can obstruct but cannot profit from, defended by a navy that no longer exists, is not a lever of power. It is a siege, and Iran is on the losing side of it.

... The essay’s hidden premise is continuity, an Iran picking up where it left off, only leaner and bolder. Compare the two trajectories honestly. The Iran of the road not taken had a maturing missile and drone industry, a rebuilding air-defense network, an intact ring of proxies, and Hormuz leverage backed by a genuine fleet, all of it shielding a nuclear program as it advanced toward a survivable deterrent. The Iran of June 2026 has a defense-industrial base gutted by 90%, a navy measured in decades of repair, proxies severed and fending for themselves, an economy in freefall, and a command structure Cooper described as “shattered.” The first Iran was being built. The second is being salvaged.

[The uranium] ... sounds like a card Tehran still holds. It is closer to a noose. A stockpile is not a deterrent by itself. A deterrent requires a survivable means to build, conceal, and deliver a weapon, and an air-defense umbrella to keep the effort alive long enough to matter. Iran has lost all three. Nasr himself warns that ordinary Iranians increasingly see the bomb as their only shield. Precisely so. A hollowed-out state whose last available move is a dash toward a weapon it cannot protect is not safer for having the material. It is more exposed, because that dash is the single act most certain to summon the finishing blow the regime has so far been spared by President Trump.

Endorsed

Some of us get both the Seax and the Dirk, I would think. 

It's sad that there was a murder, but the carrying of a Kirpan is one of the best features of any religion. I strongly hold to approximately the same values as undergird that practice, even if I don't share their religious context at all.

Jokes on the Occasion of Pride Month

If any of you happen to be gay, allow me to convey that I don't have anything against it; indeed, the longer I live with a woman the more I can see the appeal. It's just not in me, you know? 

That to the side, there are some great memes this year for marking the occasion.

UPDATE: Ok, jokes are always fraught, but c'mon. Some of this is funny stuff.

The primary-defector pool that doesn't follow through

I recommend Alexander Muse's substack. This is a thoughtful article about the very slight impact on a general election of a bitterly contested primary fight, which is instructive in the case of Cornyn vs. Paxton. Frankly, not even Cornyn himself is urging the absurd choice of a Talarico (give me a break) vote in protest against the impervious horrors of a Paxton victory.

Lonna Rae Atkeson’s seminal paper “Moving Toward Unity” in American Politics Quarterly found that supporters of losing primary candidates revert to the eventual nominee at predictable rates as the general election approaches. Jeffrey Lazarus, writing in Legislative Studies Quarterly, established that the apparent correlation between divisive primaries and weaker general-election performance is not causal at all, but a joint product of candidate quality and pre-primary expectations. Fouirnaies and Hall at Stanford in confirmed that in base-state seats with partisan leans above 7 points, the measurable divisive-primary penalty is statistically indistinguishable from zero. Texas leans R+10 to R+13. It is the cleanest possible case for the proposition that the primary will leave no footprint on the general election.

But the historical record is where this argument lives or dies. The frame is simple. The runner-up’s coalition comes home. It has always come home. The mechanism is what political scientists call partisan reversion, and it has been visible in every contested base-state primary of the modern era.

It Is Time for Us to Become Poets

For the Sake of a Single Poem, by Rainer Maria Rilke

… Ah, poems amount to so little when you write them too early in your life. You ought to wait and gather sense and sweetness for a whole lifetime, and a long one if possible, and then, at the very end, you might perhaps be able to write ten good lines. For poems are not, as people think, simply emotions (one has emotions early enough) – they are experiences. For the sake of a single poem, you must see many cities, many people and Things, you must understand animals, must feel how birds fly, and know the gesture which small flowers make when they open in the morning. You must be able to think back to streets in unknown neighborhoods, to unexpected encounters, and to partings you had long seen coming; to days of childhood whose mystery is still unexplained, to parents whom you had to hurt when they brought in a joy and you didn’t pick it up (it was a joy meant for somebody else-); to childhood illnesses that began so strangely with so many profound and difficult transformations, to days in quiet, restrained rooms and to mornings by the sea, to the sea itself, to seas, to nights of travel that rushed along high overhead and went flying with all the stars, – and it is still not enough to be able to think of all that. You must have memories of many nights of love, each one different from all the others, memories of women screaming in labor, and of light, pale, sleeping girls who have just given birth and are closing again. But you must also have been beside the dying, must have sat beside the dead in the room with the open window and scattered noises. And it is not yet enough to have memories. You must be able to forget them when they are many, and you must have the immense patience to wait until they return. For the memories themselves are not important. Only when they have changed into our very blood, into glance and gesture, and are nameless, no longer to be distinguished from ourselves – only then can it happen that in some very rare hour the first word of a poem arises in their midst and goes forth from them.

Waterfall

I own a waterfall. Waterfalls in this part of North Carolina are so commonplace that they didn’t even mention it when we bought the property. It wasn’t on the listing; it never came up in the sale. Only after we’d closed did the former owner say, “Oh, by the way…”

It’s a pretty spot in the summertime. 

Cathead

People dig in to these so fast I can’t even get a picture before the biscuits are gone! I hope my grandmother would be proud of them. 

The Wickwick solution

Steven Green doesn't think Big Glenn deserves to be scuttled, but suggests that NASA's SLS probably does. The damage to Amazon from the launch explosion does, however, appear to be dramatic. Not all rocket companies are equally adapted to failure as a learning mode.

Travels in Appalachia

My passage through the Tennessee mountains went smoother than that of certain German prisoners of war. Of course, I know better than to trespass on Granny's property.

Tennessee Highway

The only downside to the recent trip to Tennessee was how very hard it is to get there from here and vice versa. We went out by US 64, which was fine except that then you have to pass an unnatural barrier in the form of Chattanooga, which currently has hundreds of thousands of semis every day trying to pass through. I've never seen it without a massive traffic jam, but this time it took three hours to get through the city because one of those semis had wrecked on the interstate and was blocking one of only two lanes where it was. 

Ah, beautiful Chattanooga.

The other main route across the line is I-40, which...

The project to repair the eastbound lanes of I-40 washed away in Haywood County during Hurricane Helene is progressing on-time, but the heavy lift has really just begun. When Helene tore through Western North Carolina in 2024, it inundated the embankment supporting the highway so vital to interstate commerce, washing away about a million cubic yards of rock and dropping the eastbound lanes into the water below.... 

state officials and project supervisors said the project is scheduled to be completed — or at least close enough to fully open both the eastbound and westbound lanes — by fall 2028.

That's a solid four years of construction; it's another three-hour crawl through the gorge if you want to go that way. 

We came back through the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, which can also be quite slow especially when sightseers spot a bear. It's shady and cool, though, especially once you come up towards Newfound Gap. 

Prosecutorial Nullification in VA

A small minority of prosecutors in Virginia have stated that they will not prosecute violations of the "facially unconstitutional" 'assault weapons' ban.

In a letter addressed to the County Sheriff shared with 29News, Powhatan Commonwealth’s Attorney Rob Cerullo said “significant” parts of that law are “facially” unconstitutional, citing, in part, the famous Heller ruling.

“The provisions mentioned above place both my office and yours in an untenable position,” Cerullo wrote. “We can either honor our oath to preserve the Constitution, or enforce statutes which are clearly unconstitutional.”

In a public letter, Pulaski Commonwealth’s Attorney Justin Griffith wrote that he will not take “law abiding citizens as of June 30 and criminalize that same behavior on July 1.”

“The General Assembly just really overstepped,” van Cleave said. “What they passed in one year, other places would have probably taken a decade to do all of that. But they just crammed it down everybody’s throats.”

The state government says they expect prosecutors to enforce the laws whether they agree that the laws are constitutional or not.  

UPDATE: Virginia State Police announce they have reinstated mandatory background checks on private sales of firearms, despite a court order requiring them to desist. GOA is suing them for contempt of court.