Pun Salad

The beginning of a mini-reading project, Philip José Farmer's "Riverworld" five-book series. This one, the first, won the Best Novel Hugo back in 1972!

I own all five books, but for some reason I don't remember, I didn't read them all, I don't remember why.

And now this one is (apparently) out of print, with ludicrous Amazon pricing on some editions; as I type, someone is asking $71.26 for the paperback I bought for $1.50 back in 1971!

Anyway: the bold premise here is that the entire run of humanity, going back to Homo neanderthalensis, has been resurrected, naked, on Riverworld: about 36 billion souls "scattered" on the banks of the near-infinite River. They are penned into the river valley by impassable mountains. Food, drink, and some luxuries, are provided by "grails"; containers that can be attached to the "grailstones" up and down the valley, which will magically resupply them.

Nobody knows what's going on. But that doesn't stop some of them from reverting to bad behavior: murder, rape, theft, you name it.

The main character here is Richard Francis Burton, an actual historical figure (1821-1890). For unknown reasons, he was awakened briefly pre-resurrection, in the "factory" where bodies were constructed and souls implanted. An inveterate explorer in real life, he's driven to find out the creators of Riverworld and their motives. He assembles a motley crew (including Alice Hargreaves, another actual person) and sets off upriver. Where he encounters more danger and violence, along with clues about the designers.

But it's only the first book of five, so don't expect to get all your questions answered.

For personal reasons, I'm suspending normal ("Default") Pun Salad blogging. It will probably last for the rest of the month.

I will still post as warranted in the other views: Books, Movies, and perhaps even Geekery.

Thanks for reading. Best wishes to all.

I've had a pretty frustrating time trying to get this one important bit of my blogging intfrastructure back up and running. So I'm giving up for the day, and instead treating you to a mini-tirade about something that bugs me. And that thing is:

"meteoric rise"

It's a very common phrase. As I type, a Googling for news stories yields the headlines:

• Bitcoin's Meteoric Rise Shakes Up the Financial World (Onesafe, 3 hours ago)

• Nvidia’s Meteoric Rise Has Made Jensen Huang Almost as Rich as Warren Buffett (Investopedia, 2 days ago)

• The meteoric rise of David Corenswet, the actor who gave up his quiet life to become Superman (EL PAÍS, 4 days ago)

• Lamine Yamal's 18th birthday: Barcelona, Spain star's meteoric rise in 18 key moments (ESPN, 2 days ago)

• Kaleb Wing’s meteoric rise on mound has him as one of the country’s top MLB Draft prospects (Santa Cruz Sentinel, 2 days ago)

That's just the first five in the Google feed. It's an epidemic, I tells ya!

The problem that has probably already occurred to you: meteors do not rise! They fall. And very quickly!

And it's not as if people don't notice. Actual astronomer Phil Plait griped about this a long time ago on his Bad Astronomy blog.

A little Googling on that comes up with a candidate for what Phil read: a WaPo story from June, 1996, headlined LEBED'S METEORIC ASCENT. (WaPo gifted link).

"Ascent", not "rise". Not that that's any better. But later on, the reporter is unafraid to go back to the tried and true:

Twenty-nine years!

Editors, get out whatever your modern red-pencil equivalent is, and stop your reporters from using this silly phrase!

(And, not that it matters: "Lebed" in the WaPo story is Alexander Lebed, who lived until 2002, when his helicopter encountered electric lines in the fog. Wikipedia says that at least one person mentioned sabotage as a possibility. Putin was the Russian president at the time.)

Just a Ramireztoon today. (I'm not sure whether I should add "sorry" to that.)

Geeky explanation, not that it should matter to you: One of Google's long-promised/threatened "upgrades" to Chrome has nuked a major chunk of my blogging infrastructure. Specifically, the wonderful old chromix-too browser extension that allowed me to access some bits of Chrome's API from the Linux shell has been permanently banned.

I knew it was coming, but I procrastinated about coming up with a fix. Chromix-too's author is a very nice guy, but is uninterested in maintaining it. And it's in Javascript, with lots of coding idioms I find incomprehensible.

Still, I think I almost have it. So maybe we'll be back to normal… tomorrow? Not promising that.

Thomas Szasz is a lot of fun to read. This book is from 1996, and centers around—see the title—the notion of "mind". Szasz argues it is a mistake (although a common one) to use that word as a noun. It should be used solely as a verb. As in: "Mind your own businesss". "Minding" is an activity, your self-communication to make decisions and guide actions.

Szasz is especially contemptuous of determinists who equate the "mind" with one's brain, and deniers of "free will". I'm on his side here.

One advantage of reading older books: you get to read how confident predictions made decades ago turned out. For example, on pp. 77-8, Szasz quotes from a 1995 Time article, still online: "Glimpses of the Mind". Why, science is on the verge of letting us "clarify the mysteries of consciousness but also to understand and treat such devastating mind malfunctions as Alzheimer's disease, depression, drug addiction, schizophrenia and traumatic brain damage -- research projects have multiplied dramatically."

And that's why, 30 years later, nobody suffers any more from Alzheimer's disease, depression, drug addiction, schizophrenia and traumatic brain damage. Thanks to dramatically multiplied research projects!

Well, that was interesting.

Amazon will tell you:

Named One of the 10 Best Books of 2023 by The Washington Post and Publishers Weekly • One of Barack Obama's Favorite Books of 2023• A National Bestseller • A New York Times Editor's Choice pick • Nominated for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction

Fiction, I suppose, although it's about real people. John von Neumann, mostly. The book's author, Benjamín Labatut, tells that part, chapter by chapter, in the words of von Neuemann's family, colleagues, and friends. And also enemies. Each in his or her own style. (But mostly, not all, in long multiple-page paragraphs, which can get a little tiring.) It works out to be a biography, sort of.

I read a more conventional bio back in 2023, and one common theme between this book and that one is that genius can be accompanied by mental misery. (That bio discussed Gödel, Turing, Wolfram, George R. Price. This one throws in Paul Ehrenfest, who committed suicide after murdering his own son. Yeesh.

One "contributor" is Richard Feynman, who worked with von Newmann on the Manhattan Project. I've read quite a bit about Feynman, and (it seems to me) that Labatut rendered his part pretty well.

But as far as I could tell, each contributor was an actual person. Even Nils Aal Barricelli; as I was reading his chapter, I said, "This guy has to be made up." Nope. He's real, and he's in Wikipedia! So there.

But when von Neumann dies, the book's not over! The final hundred pages or so is relatively straight reportage about the game of Go, its human masters, and Google's effort to develop a Go-playing AI to beat the humans. (Chess is trivial in comparison.) It concentrates on the showdown between Lee Sedol, probably the greatest (human) Go player ever, and Google's "AlphaGo", which beat him badly back in 2016. Also interesting.

I read A. J. Jacobs' book The Puzzler back in 2022 and enjoyed it quite a bit. This one, not so much, but it's very readable, and has some good stories.

Mr. Jacobs' gimmick here is to live a year of his life "consitutionally". Which can mean various things, of course, especially if you are Joe Biden or Donald Trump. But Mr. Jacobs took to wearing a tricorne hat (pictured on the cover), and engaged in numerous imaginative (I assume publisher-financed) deeds of patriotic significance. He participated in a Revolutionary War reenactment, "dying" early, but in a shady spot. He proposed a Constitutional amendment to a polite Senator, which would expand the presidency to three people. (You may have noticed that didn't happen.) He visits Independence Hall in Philadelphia, where the Constitution was written and signed.

One of the better stories is his exploration of the Third Amendment, the one about soldiers getting quartered in a house without the owner's consent. Jacobs wants to give consent, and wangles a visit! The Army officer he billets is of Indian descent, dines on some authentic 18th-century British food (shepherd's pie) but needs to spice it up a bit with some Mexican hot sauce.

Might be the most American scenario ever.

Unreasonable searches by state agents? Apparently you can make your statement to the TSA before your next flight by buying underwear with "Read the 4th Amendment, Perverts" emblazoned with metallic ink, so it will show up on the x-ray.

Jacobs is a solid Democrat, and this (unfortunately) colors a lot of his commentary, which has a definite blue tinge. For example, the SCOTUS decision in Sackett v. EPA? Jacobs summarizes that it "pared back the power of the EPA to monitor wetlands". I'd suggest reading some analysis that more accurately describes the issue. Other issues are handled similarly: superficially and clearly D-biased.

So I got this mail in my spam folder yesterday from "Mike Zhang", who is the "Service Manager" for "Domain Registrar (Head Office)". The opening line is interesting:

As the kids say these days: "Wait, what?"

Ignore the mail if it affects me? That seems… counterintuitive.

Anyway, what our CEO should know is:

So I Googled. And this popped up: Dear CEO scam is causing trouble. And sure enough, "Mike Zhang" was sending out the exact same mail (with fill-in-the-blank domains) back in 2019.

And that site says:

This scam has been hanging around for over years [sic].

Still, if they haven't bothered to make the opening paragraph sensible, it must work occasionally.

Also of note:

• No, it's not. Impeach his orange ass. Damon Root wonders: Trump won’t enforce the TikTok ban. Is that constitutional?

  The U.S. Constitution requires the president to "take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed." Yet President Donald Trump has not only refused to enforce the federal law banning TikTok, but his administration has also told multiple tech companies that they may openly violate the TikTok ban "without incurring any legal liability" because the Department of Justice is "irrevocably relinquishing any claims" against the companies "for the conduct proscribed in the Act."

  But wait, may the president do that? May Trump encourage private parties to violate a duly enacted federal law while simultaneously vowing to free them from present and future liability for their lawbreaking? Is that constitutional?

  As Damon details, there's a long history of presidential, um, discretion about "faithfully executing" laws. Back to Jefferson! But Trump's pressing against the boundaries even harder.

• At last, Pam Bondi explains the Epstein deal. Jeff Maurer turns over his substack for Pam to come clean: Whoops: That Was a Menu for EPSTEIN'S DELI on My Desk.

  MAGA land is obsessed with the so-called “Epstein files”. This trove of documents related to Jeffrey Epstein — especially his alleged “client list” — is thought to be the smoking gun that will expose a cabal of rich and powerful sex abusers. MAGA land was ecstatic when I told Fox News in February that the files were “sitting on my desk right now”. Finally, the predatory men who join in Epstein’s abuse and then plotted his murder would be exposed! Or, so some people thought.

  On Tuesday, the Justice Department concluded that there was no client list and that Jeffrey Epstein killed himself. This is consistent with previous law enforcement findings. The questions remains, though: Why did I say that the Epstein files were “on my desk”? Was it because I was afraid to puncture the delusions of the paranoid shut-ins who are an important part of the Trump base? Not, it’s not that. The truth is that what I thought was the Epstein files turned out to be a menu for a local restaurant called “Epstein’s Deli”. Whoopsie. My bad, everyone — talk about Mistake Town, population “me”. I thought I had evidence of an international conspiracy, but it turned out to be a promotion for an eatery offering sandwiches, paninis, and soups made fresh every morning. Egg on my face, table for one, am-I-right?

  It's an honest mistake that anyone with an IQ of 80 could make, Pam.

• Another good question. Tyler Cowen asks it at the Free Press: Why Won’t Socialism Die? Some theories are offered, concocted by some very smart people:

  It is a long-standing task of social scientists—perhaps the most tireless one—to try to explain the popularity of socialism. Economics Nobel laureate Friedrich A. Hayek attributed it to mankind’s atavistic instincts, left over from earlier, poorer societies when extreme sharing was necessary. Milton Friedman treated the socialists as though they were well-intentioned individuals who simply had not learned enough good economics. Joseph Schumpeter believed it was the curse of capitalism that the intellectuals would turn against it—an idea later seconded by Robert Nozick.

  Peter Thiel, more recently, has blamed student debt and the high cost of buying a home. “When one has too much student debt or if housing is too unaffordable, then one will have negative capital for a long time,” he said. “And if one has no stake in the capitalist system, then one may well turn against it.” As usual, Peter has a point.

  There is truth in all of these hypotheses (and there are others yet), but focusing on 2025, I have a more concrete and perhaps more depressing explanation. Socialism is surging right now because American society has simply turned more negative. We complain more, we whine more, and we are more likely to dislike each other. And if we are more negative, that means we are more negative about everything around us—including capitalism. Big business has never been bigger, and we have never spent more time with it, whether it is scrolling on our smartphones, calling up an Uber, or flying to another city.

  The only upside for people like me is we get to say:

  "That won't work."

  Followed in a few months or years by:

  "See, I told you it wouldn't work."

• I think they'll figure it out someday, actually. Ars Technica attended a Democrat stunt dressed up as “Things we’ll never know” science fair highlights US’s canceled research.

  None of the "researchers" are identified by name or institution in the article. And very few of the cancelled projects seem to be dedicated to actual scientific research. One exception:

  The damage is far from limited to education and diversity issues. Despite having been in power during a pandemic that ultimately killed well over a million Americans, the administration has decided that any pandemic-related work is not a priority. So, an entire pandemic preparedness program was scrapped. A pair of researchers was there to talk about the Antiviral Drug Discovery program (AViDD), which had been funded to develop drugs that target various emerging viral threats, such as coronaviruses and the families that include Ebola, Zika, and measles. The idea behind AViDD is to have treatments ready that could limit the spread of any new, threatening version of these viruses in order to give us time to develop vaccines.

  AViDD had been funded to the tune of $1.2 billion, included nine dedicated research centers, and involved researchers at 90 institutions. In total, it had spent about half that money in developing 35 treatment candidates that targeted seven different viral families. And then the funding for the entire program was eliminated before any of those candidates could be pursued any further—the researchers likened it to building half a bridge.

  $1.2 billion spread over 90 institutions? Sounds a little boondoggly to me. Maybe it's not, but the Ars Technica report doesn't mention that possibility.

I couldn't help but chuckle at the relevance of today's xkcd comic:

Because the WSJ highlighted the recent hijinks of The National Education Association in their "Notable and Quotable" op-ed yesterday (WSJ gifted link):

(Probable unnecessary emphasis added.)

Who knew that "the survival of civilization itself" could be had for a mere $3500?

And (for that matter) who could imagine that it would cost $1625 to not deal with the ADL?

This is via school choice advocate Corey DeAngelis, who also shares the oratorical stylings of Rebecca Pringle:

Stop everything you're doing and watch the president of the nation's largest teachers union screaming at their "Leadership Summit." pic.twitter.com/reQXOFfixP

— Corey A. DeAngelis, school choice evangelist (@DeAngelisCorey) July 8, 2025

Fun fact: Propublica furnishes the NEA's Form 990, which puts Ms. Pringle's 2022 compensation at $433,413 (plus $142,498 "other").

Also of note:

• In other "education" news… Brace yourself for the headlined f-bomb, from Liberty Unyielding: Left-wing professor admits she only works at her university to 'build power' for leftist causes, says 'fuck the University,' 'I don't care about' it.

  A professor at the University of Chicago on Saturday admitted she is using her platform at the school to “build power” and rally support for socialist and pro-Palestinian causes.

  Eman Abdelhadi, an assistant professor and director of graduate studies at the university, told attendees at at an annual socialism conference in Chicago on July 5 that she uses her platform as a professor to mobilize support for socialism and Palestine and “build power” for the movement. Abdelhadi also described the university as “evil” and said it is a “colonial landlord.”

  “I don’t care about this institution, like fuck the University of Chicago,” Abdelhadi said.

  “I work at one of the biggest employers in the city of Chicago,” Abdelhadi continued. “A place where I have access to thousands of people that I could potentially organize … This is where I need to build power. This is my best possible structural leverage.”

  How many people in the audience were thinking: Geez, she shouldn't be saying the quiet part out loud!

  Also devoting some bandwidth to Prof Eman is Jonathan Turley: UChicago Professor Denounces School as an “Evil” and “Colonialist” Institution . . . But Wants to Stay.

  While universities have largely purged their faculty ranks of conservatives, there often seems to be no academic who is too far left for hiring committees. The latest example is University of Chicago Assistant Professor and Director of Graduate Studies Eman Abdelhadi, who used her appearance at the Socialism 2025 conference to denounce UChicago as “evil” and a “colonialist” institution. (For full disclosure, I graduated from UChicago as an undergraduate).

  Since we're doing full disclosure: I was accepted into the graduate physics program at UChicago. No money, though, so I went to the University Near Here instead.

• I'm just happy they will let me keep my shoes on. Kevin D. Williamson sings the Airline Blues.

  U.S. air travel is, of course, a goat rodeo. Like the DMV, it is one of those places in American life where the people who did the at-home reading in high school get held hostage by those who didn’t. From the lazy and stupid and cow-eyed people who work at the airline check-in counters to the lazy and stupid and cow-eyed and thieving miscreants who star in the TSA’s imbecilic security theater, getting on an airplane provides a textbook example of what happens when you combine mediocrity with job security.

  There are few, if any, better examples of corporatism in American public life than air travel, with its heavily regulated cartels, public- and private-sector unions, airport authorities, etc. The point of corporatism—too often misunderstood—is not to maximize corporate profits but to coordinate business and political activity to maximize the political benefits of economic activity, by creating a lot of relatively high-wage, high-benefit, high-security jobs without too much consideration about whether that actually serves the interests of consumers and shareholders. From the politicians’ point of view, people are not assets but liabilities, and one way to take that liability off the books is to put the person into a job with good pay and benefits and very low chances of being laid off—and it does not matter to the politicians if that job actually creates any real value. They would have us use spoons to dig trenches if they could. 

  (You know the story: Milton Friedman was visiting a Chinese public construction project and was flabbergasted that the workers were using picks and shovels and carts instead of modern earth-moving machinery, and asked his hosts what was going on. “We know how to create jobs,” came the answer. Friedman thought about the answer for a moment and then asked: “Then why not use spoons?”)

  I dropped in a comment about that last paragraph:

  Predating Milton Friedman in China: the book The Boys in the Boat has a brief aside about the construction of the 1936 Olympic Stadium in Berlin. By Hitlerian decree, pick-and-shovel labor was preferred to earth-moving machinery.

  Totalitarians gotta totalitarianate, I guess.

• Oh come, oh come, Emmanuel. Oops: It turns out George Will is talking about Rahm, who spells it with one 'm': If Emanuel runs, he’ll bet on candor defeating the ‘culture police’. (WaPo gifted link)

  A good story:

  An avid bicyclist, Emanuel, when he retired from the mayor’s office, took a two-week, 900-mile ride around Lake Michigan with a friend. During the ride, he made a sociological discovery: “The worse the cellphone coverage is, the nicer people are.”

  Niceness is sometimes secondary for Emanuel, whose salty vocabulary expresses the serrated edge of his personality. But his discovery of the inverse relationship between smartphones and congeniality indicates his interest in today’s culture, and his party’s contribution to its strangeness. Although politics is the Democratic Party’s business, it currently has scant aptitude for it.

  Politics is mostly talk. In an interview, Emanuel says, more in anger than in sorrow, that too many Democrats speak as though their words have been “focus-grouped in a faculty lounge.” He has a point.

  I'm probably too set in my electoral ways to vote for any D, but he's not the worst choice out there. (As I type, he doesn't show up at all as a 2028 possibility at the Stossel/Lott Election Betting Odds site.)

• Big stupid Congress won't cancel the big stupid rocket. James B. Meigs is not happy: Congress Crushes Hopes for NASA Reform.

  When Donald Trump returned for his second stint in the White House, advocates for NASA reform were optimistic. In particular, they hoped the president’s team would end the notoriously expensive Space Launch System (SLS) rocket program and allow the space agency to rely instead on the more affordable rockets flown by Elon Musk’s SpaceX and other private companies. That was the policy advised by many space experts, including Jared Isaacman, the administration’s reform-minded nominee to be NASA Administrator. (It was also the approach I recommended in my April 2025 Manhattan Institute report, “U.S. Space Policy: The Next Frontier.”) These observers hoped a more mission-focused NASA—freed from the SLS program’s obscene costs and delays—could finally deliver on long-promised plans to return U.S. astronauts to the moon and ultimately send them to Mars.

  Today, less than six months into Trump’s second term, those hopes are dashed. Tucked among its hundreds of measures, the Big Beautiful Bill signed by President Trump last week includes a kind of poison pill for NASA reform. The bill allocates an extra $10 billion for SLS and related programs and stipulates that the rocket must be used for at least four more missions, a timeline that will take NASA years to achieve. Hopes for a leaner, more effective space agency will have to wait.

  If they ever launch the next SLS mission (currently penciled in for "no earlier than April 2026), and I'm still breathing, I'll watch it, I suppose. And I'll be happy if it works.

• It's crazy, but it just might work. Michael Munger schemes: The Penny Problem Has a Third Option: Buy Them Back (With Interest)

  This may sound ridiculous, but I’m serious: instead of making brand-new pennies, what if the government simply bought back some of the 114 billion pennies already floating around in drawers, jars, and couch cushions across America?

  Think about it. The vast majority of those pennies aren’t being used in everyday transactions, or even every year transactions. They’re collecting dust. But what if the government offered, say, 1.5 cents for every penny returned? That’s “more than the coin is worth” — so people would have an incentive to dig them out — and it’s still far cheaper than making new ones.

  Buying back 3.2 billion pennies at 1.5 cents apiece would cost the government about $48 million. Compare that to the $120 million that it cost us to make the same number of pennies. We would have saved more than $70 million a year, and we’d be “recycling” (actually, reusing) all that copper (and zinc, since pennies are mostly zinc, with a copper coating).

  It probably won't happen. Like most good ideas.

Our Eye Candy Du Jour is page 24 from Jessica (nee Brian) Riedl's very informative November 2024 chart book covering all aspects of Federal spending, taxation, and associated myths and disasters. It appears in Dominic Pino's NR Corner post headlined Spending Till Kingdom Come While Raising Taxes Would Also End Badly. Which is a counterpoint to a post from Mark Antonio Wright's post headlined Spending Till Kingdom Come While Cutting Taxes Will End Badly,

With all due resepct to Mark, I'm on team Dominic. Both pieces are well worth your perusal, but here's Dominic's takeaway from the chart:

I'll take a "moderate" stance: Certainly Uncle Stupid has not shown himself to be a responsible steward of the 17-18% of GDP he's getting now. Maybe he should demonstrate that before demanding more.

Also of note:

• Cut 'em off at the past. Matthew Hennesey cheers: Planned Parenthood Gets Cut Off. (WSJ gifted link)

  Yes, one surviving benefit of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act is the defunding of the abortion mill.

  For all the beauty of the one big bill, the reaction to the abortion-funding provision is bound to get ugly. It’s the nature of the beast. The president of Planned Parenthood Affiliates of California called it “nothing short of cruelty for cruelty’s sake.” Planned Parenthood president and CEO Alexis McGill Johnson is claiming in interviews that the new law will be “devastating” for patients who live in what she calls “maternity healthcare deserts.”

  None of that adds up. Planned Parenthood’s defenders insist that abortion is only a small part of what the organization does. They claim its core business is providing poor women in underserved areas with access to cancer screenings, mental-health counseling and birth control. If that’s the case, and so much vital healthcare provision is at stake, why get so worked up about the abortions? Why not let the controversial aspect of the business go and keep doing the Lord’s work?

  Because the vital healthcare claim is hogwash, and everyone knows it. Killing babies is what Planned Parenthood does, to the tune of 400,000 a year. Abortion—not pap tests or mental health—is the reason for its existence. Take that away and Planned Parenthood is nothing more than a glorified school nurse’s office.

  Matthew's column was written before a federal judge in Massachusetts demanded that Planned Parenthood funding be restored, in defiance of the legislation. We'll see how that works out.

  (Classic headline reference.)

• Or, put another way: "There are no solutions, only trade-offs." Kevin D. Williamson describes What ‘Clear but False’ Ideas Get Wrong About Policy.

  “Winning the fight against hunger starts here,” reads the notice at a local restaurant, advertising a campaign against food waste. This is an example of something that Jonah Goldberg talks about from time to time, citing the political scientist Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn: the “clear but false idea.” It makes superficial sense: If there were less waste, there would be more food available to eat, which would make it easier to feed hungry people. That’s the idea, anyway.

  The truth is that waste makes food less expensive rather than more expensive. The optimal amount of food waste in a restaurant or a grocery store is not zero, which may seem counterintuitive until you consider the fact that it costs money to reduce waste: You have reached the optimal amount of waste when the cost of preventing $1 in waste equals $1. The people who run Whole Foods and McDonald’s and Starbucks are logistically sophisticated, and they keep a hard eye on expenses—their goal is not to end waste for the sake of ending waste, but to reduce waste to the extent that doing so makes good business sense. The kind of enormously sophisticated, detailed planning and extremely precise execution necessary to radically reduce food waste in a restaurant chain would be very, very expensive. Eliminating waste would be—perverse though it may seem—wasteful.

  To reiterate a frequent theme of mine: Serious policy discussions are generally focused on things such as tradeoffs, incentives, and transaction costs; unserious policy discussions are almost always moralistic. The anti-waste stuff is moralistic in a classically American and puritanical way—as Benjamin Franklin wrote: “All things are cheap to the saving, dear to the wasteful.” As with a great many things that the witty Founding Father wrote and said about a great many subjects, that is persuasive, clear, and false. It is a moral sentiment masquerading as an economic observation. 

  Here's an idea: vote against any politician who claims their "solution" to some social ill will make you (or your children!) "safe".

• I think it's going to rain today. Jeff Maurer predicts: There’s a 110 Percent Chance That Our Discomfort With Statistics Is Costing Us. He quotes Nick Silver: "For years, when the Weather Channel said there was a 20 percent chance of rain, it actually rained only about 5 percent of the time."

  Basically: If there’s a five percent chance of rain, the Weather Channel will say there’s a 20 percent chance. And that’s because if they say “five percent,” people hear “There is no chance of rain whatsoever today. If you’re planning a picnic for the Suede Lovers of America, or hauling a bunch of sugar cubes in a pickup, today’s the day, because it won’t rain and if I’m wrong you can come to my house and kick me in the face.” The Weather Channel says “twenty percent” just so that you won’t yell at them if your sugar cube-hauling plans go awry.

  There’s no doubt about it: Many people don’t really understand probability. The conversation around every baseball team is a monsoon of probability ignorance despite the fact that baseball has been a stats-based game since back when the bat was a Civil War soldier’s amputated leg. Las Vegas is a city of modern-day palaces built on the misconceptions of people who look at the grandeur and think “Uh-hilk! I’ll bet they built this by giving out big paydays to people like me!” Every multiplayer board game should be called “Who Can Most Effectively Exploit The Simpleton?” Many people understand basic concepts like uncertainty and small sample size, but a shocking number don’t, and I think that catering to the people who don’t is making it hard to get accurate information.

  The trade-off here is pretty obvious. As Herbie Spencer said long ago: “The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly is to fill the world with fools.”

• No sir, that's not my baby. I get the impression that James Pethokoukis has grown tired of the demographic doomsayers. He takes to AEI to make The Baby Bust Reality Check.

  Every challenge isn’t a crisis. Nor does every challenge have a ready-to-go, five-point policy agenda — or any solution at all.

  So maybe it’s time to dial back the emerging panic about falling fertility. True, birth rates have collapsed across rich nations. South Korea manages around one child per woman, while Japan, Italy, Canada, and Greece hover around 1.5. This demographic reality is prompting politicians to throw money at the problem through costly natalist schemes. Yet empirical evidence suggests the demographic apocalypse narrative may be overblown.

  Modern adults increasingly view kids as competing with career ambitions and personal fulfillment rather than central to adult life. Anyone doomscrolling on TikTok knows that social media amplifies “intensive parenting” expectations, making child-rearing seem prohibitively daunting, both emotionally and financially. As such, most policies merely shift birth timing rather than increasing lifetime fertility. For example: A 30-year-old might claim a baby bonus but still end up with fewer children overall.

  Japan's population peaked back in 2010. They're dealing OK with it.

• "Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent." Isaac Asimov had one of his Foundation characters say that. I was never enough of a peacenik to buy that totally, but recently every day seems to bring fresh illustrations of his point. Jonathan Turley writes: “Have You Tried Gasoline?”: Democrats Admit Followers are Embracing Violent Rhetoric.

  “What we really need to do is be willing to get shot.” Those words to a Democratic member are part of a chilling Axios story on the rising violent rhetoric on the American left. As alleged Antifa members are arrested in Texas for the attempted murder of ICE agents, Democratic members are beginning to express private concerns over unleashing uncontrollable rage after their election defeat.

  Axios reported on conversations with Democratic members who admit that followers are turning to violence and rejecting messages of political reform.

  One House member explained that there is a “sense of fear and despair and anger” among voters that “puts us in a different position where … we can’t keep following norms of decorum.” The member does not address how Democratic leaders are fueling the rising violent rhetoric and imagery (including the most recent posted picture of House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D., N.Y.) brandishing a baseball bat).

  One House Democrat told Axios, “Some of them have suggested … what we really need to do is be willing to get shot.”

  I suppose the "House Democrat" was too politic to just respond: "You first."