Pun Salad

Our favorite physics professor at the University Near Here tweets on Zadie Smith ("ZS"):

I’m just gonna put up the sign reminding everyone that ZS called her kids quadroons in an art review and AFAIK has never expressed regret about the choice to do sohttps://t.co/8ood5kJTg3 https://t.co/8ZfJ2DeqJx

— Chanda Prescod-Weinstein (@IBJIYONGI) May 5, 2024

CPW restricts replies to those she follows or mentions, but that's why I have a blog.

Quadroons? Sounds bad. Let's take a look. This outrage happened in the July 2017 issue of Harper's, in Smith's article Getting In and Out. There are two occurrences. First, about her kids:

And second:

The context: Smith is discussing the reaction to a painting by Dana Schutz titled Open Casket, an abstract depiction of Emmett Till in his coffin, which was included in the 2017 Whitney Biennial.

Dana Schutz is white. That mere fact caused the excrement to impact the air circulation device. Smith quotes a "widely circulated letter to the curators of the Whitney Biennial" from artist/writer Hannah Black:

Others piled on with criticism which clearly would not have been made had the hand holding the paintbrush had been of a darker hue.

So Smith wonders how people might react if her "sort of yellowy" kids decided to make art. Would it be acceptable for them to "take black suffering as a subject"?

I admit, I don't find Smith's use of an archaic term to describe her kids to be offensive, especially since she obviously doesn't use it in a derogatory way. (You don't need my permission, but I'll give it anyway: make your own call on that issue.)

But in 2024, CPW is dissing Zadie Smith simply as an ad hominem against her New Yorker essay. And maybe CPW is pissed at Smith's bottom line:

I don't agree with everything she says (Zadie obviously despises Netanyahu, I kind of like him), but that's pretty good.

Also of note:

• Meanwhile at the University Near Here… NHJournal summarizes UNH President James ("Don't Call Me Jimmy") Dean's point in a recent radio interview with Drew Cline: We Did the Right Thing Shutting Down the Encampment.

  University of New Hampshire President James Dean said Monday morning his decision to clear encampment-building protesters from campus last week was the right one, and his administration was ready for another round of anti-Israel protests.

  Protest organizers like the Palestine Solidarity Coalition (PSC) don’t agree, accusing UNH of silencing dissent and demanding Dean’s resignation.

  “I think our response was appropriate,” Dean told WFEA radio’s Drew Cline, noting that anti-Israel activists had held seven previous protests at UNH without a problem. Not this time, he said.

  “We worked with people who had the permit for the protest over the weeks and hours before the protest started. They told us over and over again that there would be no encampment, that it would just be the same kind of protest that we’ve had seven times before.Q

  “It wasn’t true,” Dean said.

  NHJournal reproduces this lovely advertisement for a "walkout" for (as I type) yesterday:

  

  Okay, so what happened there? NHJournal reporter Evan Lips was at the scene: UNH Protesters Denounce Police Crackdown, Chant 'Piggy, Piggy' at Monday Protest.

  Days after University of New Hampshire police cleared out an unauthorized overnight encampment staged by anti-Israel student groups, the same demonstrators returned on Monday afternoon to the scene of the mayhem — but with a different message.

  Previous rallies have urged “Free Palestine,” while much of the rhetoric at Monday’s midday walkout was about “freeing” students and activists who were arrested last week on charges ranging from trespass to assaulting a police officer.

  “Maybe we should be cutting [police budgets] because they don’t keep us safe,” said UNH women’s and gender studies professor Siobhan Senier said Monday.

  Monday’s rally against Israel and the UNH administration was peaceful and arrest free. The 100 or so anti-Israel protesters chanted “Long Live the Intifada,” a celebration of the deadly terror campaign waged by Palestinians against Israelis between 1987 and 2005.

  "Maybe we should be cutting the budget of UNH's Women's and Gender Studies department," a random blogger suggested. "As I reported a few months ago, Professor Senier is reported to be pulling down a cool $103,560.00 yearly."

  In only slightly-unrelated news, the College Fix reports that school for kids that couldn't get into Caltech is giving up a woke requirement: MIT bans mandatory DEI statements in faculty hiring.

  Leaders of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have told faculty to discontinue the practice of requiring mandatory diversity, equity and inclusion statements in faculty hiring.

  “On Saturday, an MIT spokesperson confirmed in an email to me that ‘requests for a statement on diversity will no longer be part of applications for any faculty positions at MIT,’ adding that the decision was made by embattled MIT President Sally Kornbluth ‘with the support of the Provost, Chancellor, and all six academic deans,'” John Sailer reported for Unherd.

  Can the University System Near Here hold onto its wokeness? A simple Google search for "diversity statement" at USNH's "jobs" site still gives… well, I'm not counting them, but a lot of hits.

• This is the business we've chosen. The NR editors note Trump’s Overdue Embrace of Early and Mail Voting.

  On April 16, 2024, once and future Republican nominee for president Donald Trump wrote a curious post on his social-media website, Truth Social: “ABSENTEE VOTING, EARLY VOTING, AND ELECTION DAY VOTING ARE ALL GOOD OPTIONS. REPUBLICANS MUST MAKE A PLAN, REGISTER, AND VOTE!” Only a year and a half ago, he was writing on the same platform: “REMEMBER, YOU CAN NEVER HAVE FAIR & FREE ELECTIONS WITH MAIL-IN BALLOTS – NEVER, NEVER, NEVER. WON’T AND CAN’T HAPPEN!!!”

  Yeah, that's Trump: hitting the keyboard with the Caps Lock key taped down.

The WSJ asks a poignant question: Drunken-Driving Deaths Are Up. Why Are DUI Arrests Down? And it includes an "arresting" (heh) graphic:

Let me say it so you don't have to: correlation is not causation. Still…

Looking at those graphs, the natural question is, "Gee, what happened in 2020?"

The pandemic, of course. But that's over now, and drunk drivers are still killing others (and themselves). Eventually, in paragraph 21 of the article

Then came 2020. Soon after the pandemic began, George Floyd’s killing in Minneapolis provoked a nationwide backlash against police, including in the area of traffic stops. “The perception was the public wasn’t supportive of traffic enforcement,” [Jonathan Adkins of the Governors Highway Safety Association] said.

George Floyd's death was unconscionable. The aftermath of his death, it appears, has killed a lot more people.

Also of note:

• Not to be confused with the curious incident of the dog in the night-time. Kevin D. Williamson relates a story that has no need of detective skills: The Curiously Relevant Case of Rick Perry. And, amazingly, there's a connection with the item above. But it's a general discussion of the thorny topic of …

  Regarding the legal (and legalistic) issues related to the current raft of criminal cases lodged against former game-show host, occasional pornographic-film performer, and disgraced ex-president Donald J. Trump, I commend to you the expert opinions of Dispatch legal analyst Sarah Isgur and frequent Advisory Opinions podcast guest David French of the New York Times.

  For my part, I have a narrow, but relevant, example to put forward: the felony case against former Texas Gov. Rick Perry, who was indicted by a Travis County prosecutor entrusted with countering political corruption throughout the state of Texas. The prosecutor, a wildly corrupt and out-of-control drunk named Rosemary Lehmberg, indicted Perry for threatening to veto funding for a specific state expenditure: her office.  

  While she was a Travis County prosecutor, Lehmberg was arrested for drunk driving, which is not a great surprise for someone who was consuming about two liters of vodka a week for more than a year in addition to whatever other drinking she did. (I sympathize.) She was pulled over after driving erratically, found with an open bottle of vodka in the car, and came in at about three times the legal blood-alcohol content. That is not great, but the much worse part is that while in custody, she attempted to use her position to bully and threaten sheriff’s officers and other personnel into giving her special treatment and letting her go. She threatened to have them arrested and jailed, among other things.

  Perry rightly understood this to be an unbearable outrage against the public interest in clean and fair government, and sought—unsuccessfully—to have Lehmberg removed from office. He subsequently announced that as governor he would use his veto powers to block state funding for the office as long as Lehmberg was the incumbent—if Travis County wanted to protect its corrupt prosecutor, Travis County could pay her.

  Lehmberg retaliated by indicting Perry on felony corruption charges on the theory that, while the governor of Texas has entirely open-ended veto power, it was an act of political corruption for him to use that veto power to try to pressure her to leave office. That was pure nonsense, as the courts eventually decided, and everybody knew it was a vindictive, frivolous case: another outrageous abuse of power from a prosecutor inclined to the abuse of power. Perry was at the time campaigning in the Republican presidential primary while under felony indictment—Donald Trump is not the first to have done so.

  Wow, kind a long excerpt. And it was hard to stop there. Skipping down to the bottom line:

  Rick Perry was indicted on felony charges for threatening a veto. The case against Donald Trump isn’t anything so obviously vindictive or trivial. But the history of our republic does not begin with Donald Trump and—one hopes—it will not end with him, either. This is something we need to get sorted out before there is an even more corrosive test case. The taste for tyranny is not limited to men as lazy and stupid as Donald Trump—and we simply have to prepare for the possibility of a more competent and capable demagogue.

• Be a savvy Amazon customer. You'll want to avoid "workbooks". Warren Kozak has a tale to tell in the WSJ: My Fake Amazon ‘Workbook’.

  Shortly after my book “Waving Goodbye: Life After Loss” was published April 9, I noticed a companion volume for sale on Amazon for $12.99. Its title: “Workbook for Waving Goodbye By Warren Kozak: Absolute Guide to Living Your Life even After Loss.” I hadn’t written any such workbook, so I contacted my publisher, Anthony Ziccardi, at Post Hill Press. He already knew about it. “It’s the dark side of what’s happening with A.I. generated books on Amazon,” he told me in an email.

  I wrote “Waving Goodbye” as a guide for grieving widows and widowers after my wife died in 2018 and I found little help from the books I was given. Many were written in an academic style used by psychologists and psychiatrists that I found impossible to read or understand—in part because the brain doesn’t function at its normal capacity after this kind of trauma. A line in Joan Didion’s memoir, “The Year of Magical Thinking,” has stuck with me: “After a year I could read headlines.”

  I can't find the "workbook" on Amazon this morning, but Kozak describes what he found in the preview:

  What do you get for $12.99? The introduction says: “THIS PLACE, WE TRULY WISH TO SEE YOU REACH SUCCESS!” That is the entirety of page 2. There’s another gem on page 3: “Get acquainted now that deceiving yourself is one of the most foolish things you can do. Try as much as possible to be honest and straight forward during your usage of this book.” Sage advice. The workbook is 36 pages long, although I was allowed to preview only through page 5. I assume the rest is equally erudite.

  My story: I bought a "Futurama Calendar" one year that turned out to be a shoddy ripoff. ("Futurama Calendar 2022: Anime-Manga OFFICIAL Calendar 2021-2022 ,Calendar Planner 2022-2023 with High Quality Pictures for Fans Around the World!") I assume this product (which is "Out of Print--Limited Availability.") is a similar deal.

• Grown-ups are back in charge. Or so we were told by the Financial Times back in 2021. The good old days.

  But that was then, this is now, and the Daily Caller looked at one recent incident: ‘I Don’t Get It’: Biden’s Chief Econ Advisor Struggles To Explain Theory Underpinning ‘Bidenomics,’ Mass Spending.

  Biden chief economic adviser Jared Bernstein struggled to explain modern monetary theory underpinning “Bidenomics” and mass spending in a newly released documentary.

  Bernstein stuttered and pondered as he attempted to explain why the U.S. government borrows money when it is capable of printing its own currency.

  “Like you said, they print the dollars. So why, why does the government even borrow?” an interviewer asked Bernstein.

  “Well, um, the uh … so the … I mean, again, some of this stuff gets — some of the … language that — some of the language and concepts are just confusing. I mean, the government definitely prints money and it definitely lends that money, which is why … um … the government definitely prints money and then it lends that money by, uh, by selling bonds. Is that what they do? … They, they uh … they, yeah, they um … they sell bonds … yeah, they sell bonds. Right? Since they sell bonds and then people buy the bonds and lend them the money,” Bernstein said in the documentary, “Finding The Money.”

  I also noticed some wag wondering: why do we even pay taxes, when the government can just print all the money it needs to buy stuff it wants?

So this happened:

This is much better with Twin Peaks music. https://t.co/SqYoSUEvf3 pic.twitter.com/8dGub6pZlX

— 🎃 Dave Scheidt 🎃 (@DaveScheidt) April 30, 2024

Is it just me, or is Drew Barrymore doing an impression of Kate Hudson doing an impression of Drew Barrymore?

If you don't know what I'm referring to there, please use your mouse or other pointing device to watch this, "it is a delight!"

Drewie's yearning for a government official to be a Nurturing, Caring, Sharing Mother To Us All is pathetic. Her all-female audience eats it up, though.

If you prefer text to video, Ann Althouse has some of that: "We all need a mom.... We really all need a tremendous hug in the world right now. But in our country, we need you to be 'Momala' of the country.".

Elsewhere in the interview, she discussed her trademark, the Inappropriate Cackle.

Kamala Harris says people “still gotta get used to” her being the “first woman” and her staff have noticed “some people love to talk about the way I laugh.”

She continued to make her cracks about her cackle an issue of sexism by explaining she grew up around women “who laughed… pic.twitter.com/FL8mqahllk

— Julia 🇺🇸 (@Jules31415) April 28, 2024

Lady, I got no particular problem with the way you laugh. It's that you do it for no reason whatsoever.

(And if you care: Classical reference in headline.)

Unfortunately, Momala failed once again to make our 2% probability threshold for inclusion in our phony table:

And, hey: Trump managed to retake a slim lead over Biden in the bettors' eyes.

Also of note:

• But seriously, folks. Jim Geraghty notes fear at the White House: Biden-Harris a Profile in Cowardice on Campus Disorder.

  In the past few weeks, Americans have witnessed a stark contrast between the written statements and fierce condemnations from the likes of National Security Council spokesman John Kirby, and Biden’s on-camera, off the cuff, mushy, “I condemn the antisemitic protests. That’s why I’ve set up a program to deal with that. I also condemn those who don’t understand what’s going on with the Palestinians and their — how they’re being. . . .”

  White House communications staffers kept telling us how much the president firmly believed “forcibly [taking] over a building on campus is absolutely the wrong approach,” but for some reason, the president, who is rarely more than a few steps away from television cameras, just couldn’t come out and say so himself.

  It turns out Biden was willing to stand up and call out the illegal actions committed by the anti-Israel protesters . . . but only after the worst-offending protesters had been put in zip-ties.

  I suppose there are some folks out there who hang on Biden's every public pronouncement.

  But I eagerly await a prestigious news outlet to do something like the Boston Globe did in March 1980: "accidentally" headline an editorial about the sitting president "Mush from the Wimp".

• One more embedded tweet, sorry.

  The Libertarian Party is selling Trump-themed merch ahead of a speech by Donald Trump, the presumptive GOP nominee, at the Libertarian National Convention. https://t.co/S0zelJMszJ https://t.co/msMmma51o2 pic.twitter.com/vN9T0napjF

  — Zach Weissmueller (@TheAbridgedZach) May 1, 2024

  Just another reminder that I'm politically homeless.

• Friends, Granite Staters, Countrymen: lend her your ears. River Page at the Free Press pays attention to the wackos who are seriously discussing Barron Trump, American Caesar.

  Barron Trump is the future American Caesar. I’m told he is keeping a list of enemies so that he can one day avenge his father. I’m told that one day, he will cross the Potomac with 10,000 men to dissolve the Senate. I’m told that he will do these things, and become my God Emperor and yours, because he is six feet, seven inches with an aquiline nose.

  According to memes from the very online right, Donald Trump’s 18-year-old son is destined to save the nation.

  I suggest cutting back on the LSD.

• But, hey, what about RFK Jr? The WSJ took a look Inside RFK Jr.’s Chaotic 2024 Election Campaign.

  As the presidential election was heating up in February, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s campaign made an announcement to staff: Charles Eisenstein, the director of messaging, would spend weeks in Costa Rica, “reconnecting with spirit.” While there, he recorded a podcast interview in which he said some of his boss’s ideas were “actually repugnant” but that Kennedy was still the best candidate.

  In recognition of his sojourn in the Central American country, Eisenstein took a pay cut for working less: rather than earning $21,000 a month, he started billing the campaign $14,000.

  The episode highlights the unusual nature of the Kennedy operation, which even by the standards of freewheeling political campaigns stands out for its eclectic mix of characters, poor financial planning and what some staffers describe as a dysfunctional, unprofessional atmosphere.

  Nobody ever offered me $14K/month for calling my boss's ideas repugnant while connecting with my spirit in Costa Rica. I guess I made some bad career choices.

• That's a low bar to set, George. But Mr. Will has a point: The 2024 electorate is more interesting than either candidate.

  Like the Gorgons in Greek mythology whose glances could turn people to stone, today’s sour candidates have calcified our presidential politics with their glowering contest. “Rancor,” said José Ortega y Gasset, “is an outpouring of a feeling of inferiority.” Both men have much about which to feel inferior. The electorate, however, is at least interesting.

  Some of those interesting factoids:

  In 2016, Hillary Clinton became a harbinger — and casualty — of today’s ongoing class-based realignment. If her White working-class turnout and percentages of support had matched those of Obama in 2012, she would have won Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Iowa, Florida and the presidency. She would have won Wisconsin and Michigan if she had matched Obama’s 2012 turnout in Milwaukee and Detroit.

  Because so many Democratic voters are in California (13.7 percent of the party’s national popular vote total in 2020) and a few other noncompetitive states (e.g., Illinois, New York), the party probably must win the national popular vote by more than 3 percentage points to win 270 electoral votes. Oddities abound. Gerald Ford came closer to defeating Jimmy Carter in the 1976 popular vote than Mitt Romney came to defeating Obama in 2012. Clinton, losing to Trump in 2016, won the popular vote by a larger margin (2.1 points) than John F. Kennedy did defeating Richard M. Nixon in 1960.

  But GFW's bottom line holds: "Finally, for 50 years, the percentage of Americans calling themselves moderate has remained constant, around 40. Yet, remarkably, the ascent of glowering Gorgons has turned moderates away from politics."

  I don't consider myself a moderate: I'm a pretty wacky mongrel libertarian/conservative mix. But, as noted above: the Gorgons have made me politically homeless.

Here's the (sort of) good news from David French: Colleges Have Gone off the Deep End. There Is a Way Out. But let it not be said he's unaware of the inner rot:

Boy, do I have an easy go-to for a faculty members at the University Near Here supporting unlawful protest:

Please read this testimony from my friend and colleague Joshua about what really happened on our campus this week:

Police instigated violence at unh protest, not campus protesters, retired prof says https://t.co/4u7pQhctEF

— Chanda Prescod-Weinstein (@IBJIYONGI) May 3, 2024

So what's the good news? French suggests the "way out": institutional neutrality on "matters of public dispute"; don't "permit one side to break reasonable rules that protect education and safety on campus." Pretty easy. And I'm pretty happy that UNH seems to be getting this mostly right.

As promised, the bad news:

• Fortunately, there's just one set of rules for speech, right? Ah, you wish. Abigail Shrier notes: There Are Two Sets of Rules for Speech. For example:

  In 2017, an anonymous jerk put flyers up around American University’s campus. The flyers displayed a Confederate flag, a stem of raw cotton, and read “Huzzah for Dixie” and the like.

  American University immediately launched into emergency response mode, treating the flyers as a criminal threat. It published CCTV video and solicited help from the public in identifying the man who posted the flyers. An all points bulletin called “CRIME ALERT” went out for the man’s arrest. The New York Times covered the incident; the words “free speech” do not appear once in the article. Instead, it approvingly noted that in a previous incident—when bananas were found hanging from nooses around campus—the FBI had been called to investigate.

  Nor could I find any evidence of any free speech organization rushing to defend the man who posted the flyers—nor the racist provocateurs in any of dozens of similar incidents. No prominent “free speech absolutists” appear to have considered the expressive value of “Huzzah for Dixie” worth defending. Nor did pundits claim that inviting law enforcement to investigate such acts of hate—i.e., “calling the police on your own students”—was in any sense inappropriate or disproportionate. In almost every single case—at schools like Stanford, Johns Hopkins, Michigan State, University of Florida, Duke, and American University—where a symbolic noose was discovered on a campus, it was treated as a criminal threat, never as speech.

  After the Huzzah for Dixie flyers were found, the president of American University quickly issued a statement: “I ask you to join me in standing together and show that we will not be intimidated. AU will respond strongly to attempts designed to harm and create fear,” she wrote. “When one of us is attacked, all of us are attacked.”

  Today, in the face of months of bloodthirsty cries aimed at Jewish students (“globalize the Intifada”), university presidents line up to assure the protesters of their right to free speech.

  An example from the Bad Old Days (2004) at the University Near Here: University of New Hampshire Evicts Student for Posting Flier

• OK, but … hey, raising the tax cap would save Social Security, right? Wrong, says Brian Riedl: Raising the Tax Cap Cannot Save Social Security.

  The reason Social Security taxes are capped is that Social Security benefits are, too. Because the program is a social-insurance system, retirees can claim that they “earn” their benefits because the benefits are tied to their tax contributions. The Social Security tax reaches its ceiling at $168,600 in wages (adjusted annually for inflation) because any wages earned above that level no longer earn additional benefits. Raising the limit without adjusting benefits accordingly would delink the two, turning Social Security into more of a traditional welfare system.

  That said, even if we did do away with the tax ceiling—with no corresponding benefits provided—doing so would not come close to bringing long-term solvency to the program. The Congressional Budget Office projects that Social Security’s annual shortfall will level off at about 1.7 percent of GDP within 15 years. Yet, abolishing the cap would raise 0.9 percent of GDP, closing a little more than half of those shortfalls. In fact, Social Security actuaries calculate that the system would fall back into deficits within just five years.

  Riedl has a more detailed analysis at the Manhattan Institute: Don’t Bust the Cap: Problems with Eliminating the Social Security Tax Cap.

• Hey, we can solve the 'wicked problems' of central planning with AI, right? Sorry, pilgrim, Arnold Kling says nay: AI Can't Solve the 'Wicked Problems' of Central Planning.

  The term wicked problem has become a standard way for policy analysts to describe a social issue whose solution is inherently elusive. Wicked problems have many causal factors, complex interdependencies, and no ability to test all of the possible combinations of plausible interventions. Often, the problem itself cannot be articulated in a straightforward, agreed-upon way. Classic examples of wicked problems include climate change, substance abuse, international relations, health care systems, education systems, and economic performance. No matter how far computer science advances, some social problems will remain wicked.

  The latest developments in artificial intelligence represent an enormous advance in computer science. Could that technological advance give bureaucrats the tool they have been missing to allow them to plan a more efficient economy? Many advocates of central planning seem to think so. Their line of thinking appears to be:

  1. Chatbots have absorbed an enormous amount of data.
  2. Large amounts of data produce knowledge.
  3. Knowledge will enable computers to plan the economy.

  These assumptions are wrong. Chatbots have been trained to speak using large volumes of text, but they have not absorbed the knowledge contained in the text. Even if they had, there is knowledge that is critical for economic operations that is not available to a central planner or a computer.

  Anyone who's read The Moon is a Harsh Mistress knows that even Mike, the self-aware AI on the moon, couldn't provide a free lunch.

• 

  But… we need to regulate AI to prevent it from running amok, right? Nay, friend: Ronald Bailey makes the plausible case that AI Regulators Are More Likely To Run Amok Than Is AI.

  Deploying the precautionary principle is a laser-focused way to kill off any new technology. As it happens, a new bill in the Hawaii Legislature explicitly applies the precautionary principle in regulating artificial intelligence (AI) technologies:

  In addressing the potential risks associated with artificial intelligence technologies, it is crucial that the State adhere to the precautionary principle, which requires the government to take preventive action in the face of uncertainty; shifts the burden of proof to those who want to undertake an innovation to show that it does not cause harm; and holds that regulation is required whenever an activity creates a substantial possible risk to health, safety, or the environment, even if the supporting evidence is speculative. In the context of artificial intelligence and products, it is essential to strike a balance between fostering innovation and safeguarding the well-being of the State's residents by adopting and enforcing proactive and precautionary regulation to prevent potentially severe societal-scale risks and harms, require affirmative proof of safety by artificial intelligence developers, and prioritize public welfare over private gain.

  The Hawaii bill would establish an office of artificial intelligence and regulation wielding the precautionary principle that would decide when and if any new tools employing AI could be offered to consumers.

  As always, Virginia Postrel's The Future and Its Enemies saw all this coming. Amazon link at your right.

Stay tuned. None of this stuff is going away, and neither am I.

Jeff Maurer looks at a reasoned response by an embattled college administrator: UC Santa Barbara Responds to Debauched, Topless Protests for Palestine.

Just an excerpt should tell you what the UCSB administration was forced to deal with:

I agree with Maurer that UCSB ("brought to you by Bud Light Lime") has set a useful precedent for other institutions of higher education.

But (as Jerry Coyne notes), the university on the other side of our state (and the other side of the country from UCSB) went in a different direction: A statement from Dartmouth’s President.

You can click over to read Bellock's humor-free missive. Unfortunately, the lack of jocularity alse extended to Dartmouth faculty, as reported by our local TV station: Dartmouth professor arrested during protest.

I assume Professor Orleck was engaging in a tactic made popular elsewhere: linking arms with a cohort of like-minded people to form a "human wall" to prevent law enforcement from thwarting the attempt of "protestors" to set up an encampment, which they were informed beforehand would not be tolerated; it wasn't a Dean Wormer-style douple-secret prohibition.

And honestly, Annelise, nobody wants to see your sweater puppies either.

A similar scenario played out at the University Near Here, with fewer arrests. The New Hampshire chapter of the ACLU deplored this.

My first reaction: seriously?

More reasoned response: UNH and Dartmouth have every right to impose reasonable "time, place, and manner" regulations on campus demonstrations. This is a well-established principle of First Amendment law. And there doesn't seem to be any question that they did so here. ACLU-NH ignores this issue entirely. As did Annelise. And hence neither has to deal with the question: what should these schools have done instead?

Also of note:

• Which they will probably blow. NR's Nic Dunn claims the present day is Conservatives’ Golden Opportunity to Win the Minimum-Wage Argument.

  California’s new $20-an-hour minimum wage for fast-food workers has again sparked a familiar debate about upward mobility. In an election year, with more voters paying attention than usual, policy debates take on added weight. This offers free-market conservatives a unique opportunity to win over persuadable voters by articulating a compelling vision of opportunity that’s framed in moral, rather than purely economic, language.

  While it’s important to recognize that minimum-wage hikes can indeed have unintended consequences, conservatives should emphasize the harmful impact of the hikes on workers, a point articulated well by the American Enterprise Institute’s Beth Akers.

  “It’s precisely these most vulnerable workers in our economy who are probably the ones who need the most support and are most likely to lose from these sorts of policies,” Akers said during a recent episode of Sutherland Institute’s Defending Ideas podcast. “If what we care about are the people who are most economically vulnerable. . . . these sorts of policies are actually pushing in the wrong direction.”

  Up in this corner of the country, I've found it near-impossible to avoid TV ads sponsored by the Massachusetts Coalition for Independent Work, a coalition of app-based companies (Uber, Lyft, Doordash,…) trying to defeat legislation that would classify drivers as employees (subject to a host of regulations) instead of independent contractors (which aren't).

  It would be nice if the fights were over getting less regulation for the labor market, instead of defending the statist status quo.

• Inanity, thy name is Thune. What is it with South Dakota anyway. First Noem, now… The Inanity of Politicians Talking Trade, the poster boy being the state's senior senator:

  An example of just how bonkers – and bipartisanly so – are many allegedly serious discussions by political types of trade is found in this short report on a recent hearing on Capitol Hill. In this hearing, Sen. John Thune (R-SD) complained about America’s trade deficit in agricultural goods. And U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai (also at this hearing) apparently treated this complaint as if it is economically meaningful.

  But of course an “ag trade deficit” is no more economically meaningful than is a “yellow-things trade deficit” or a “things-bigger-than-a-breadbasket trade surplus.” There is absolutely no reason to expect that a country will export – during any year or over time – the same amount of agricultural products that it imports. Indeed, because of the principle of comparative advantage, each country will import things that it doesn’t produce at home and export different things. In short, countries are supposed to have so-called ‘trade deficits’ in some things and so-called ‘trade surpluses’ in other things.

  That's from Don Boudreaux at Cafe Hayek, who's not averse to calling "bonkers".

• Trying to pull some facts back out of the memory hole. Scott Johnson joins in the Power Line pushback on efforts to rehabilitate a lousy, disgraced "journalist": Rather full of it. Scott viewed the recent Netflix documentary (a sycophantic, soft-focus tongue bath). I did want to point this out:

  Former CBS News producer Wayne Nelson weighs in: “Was it planned [i.e, planned to disgrace CBS News] — we’ll never know.” According to Douglas Brinkley, those wily Republicans have become adept at coming up “with schemes.” In the world of Rather, we are to kneel down and give thanks for the innocence of Democrats, left-wing historians, and reporters such as Rather.

  It's a conspiracy, I tellz ya! I'm sure Brinkley and Nelson could get Hillary Clinton to chime in on that.

• Asking and answering the important questions. Via Marginal Revolution: Who wrote the music for In My Life? Three Bayesian analyses. It is from Andrew Gelman is a professor of statistics and political science at Columbia University. (Unarrested, as far as I know.):

  A Beatles fan pointed me to this news item from a few years ago, “A Songwriting Mystery Solved: Math Proves John Lennon Wrote ‘In My Life.'” This surprised me, because in his memoir, Many Years from Now, Paul McCartney very clearly stated that he, Paul, wrote it.

  Also, the news report is from NPR. Who you gonna trust, NPR or Paul McCartney? The question pretty much answers itself.

  And the bottom line is:

  Moral of the story: Don’t trust NPR.

  Comments are pretty good too.

So I looked at the headline at Persuasion: Dear Media, Stop Taking Students Too Seriously.

And I immediately thought: "This is what people say when media coverage isn't supporting their narrative."

But I was wrong. Shalom Auslander has an interesting take.

Example:

Well, you can click over to find out the answer to that question. He's not wrong.

At the Free Press, Suzy Weiss tells A Tale of Two Columbias. And (among other things) is able to get an actual Columbia student on the record:

Via Ann Althouse, a tweet from the irrepressible Joyce Carol Oates:

interviewer asks Columbia student to comment on the forcible takeover of the university building & the young woman says, "I think it's a false narrative." he asks her to comment on custodial staff being held captive by the occupiers of Hamilton Hall & she says, "I think that's a…

— Joyce Carol Oates (@JoyceCarolOates) May 1, 2024

I'm thinking: sure, we take college students too seriously. But I'm also thinking that we are not taking the intellectual rot at prestigious college campuses seriously enough.

Also of note:

• Yeah, probably. Veronique de Rugy wonders: Will California Hobble the US Railroad Industry?

  American federalism is struggling. Federal rules are an overwhelming presence in every state government, and some states, due to their size or other leverage, can impose their own policies on much or all of the country. The problem has been made clearer by an under-the-radar plan to phase out diesel locomotives in California. If the federal government provides the state with a helping hand, it would bring nationwide repercussions for a vital, overlooked industry.

  California pols love choo-choos, as long as they're carrying passengers, and are heavily taxpayer-subsidized. Ordinary freight trains carrying items people want to get from one place to another? Not so much.

• In theory, I could afford lots of stuff I don't want. Don Boudreaux takes on a superficial economic argument: They Can Afford It!

  A few years back, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) offered, in the pages of USA Today, what they obviously believe to be an economically airtight argument in favor of the minimum wage:

  If Walmart can afford $20 billion for stock buybacks to enrich wealthy shareholders, it can afford to raise the pay of its workers to a living wage. It would cost Walmart less than $4 billion a year to raise its minimum wage to $15 an hour. Taking this step would benefit nearly one million of its struggling workers.

  Earlier this year a spokesman for California governor Gavin Newsom offered the same argument to justify that state’s recent hike in the minimum wage for workers at fast-food restaurants. As recounted by the Wall Street Journal, this spokesman declared that “fast-food companies can afford to give their workers a deserved bump in pay.”

  The argument offered here by Sanders, Khanna, and Gov. Newsom’s office is common. Rarely does a semester pass that I’m not asked by a student – following a lecture on the economic consequences of minimum wages – why “rich” companies, such as Walmart and McDonald’s, would cut employment when minimum wages rise. “They can afford it!” my students protest. “These companies are highly profitable and have lots of assets.”

  There's a utilitarian argument, of course (which Boudreaux makes). There's also a moral argument: why should government interfere in a free-market employment transaction between consenting adults?

  But there's also the snarky argument, that I like: why don't Sanders, Khanna, and Newsom (and their ilk) simply start their own companies and see how "affordable" it is to hire lots of low-productivity people at exorbitant wages?

Jeff Maurer observes that We Seem to Be Re-Learning Free Speech Principles From Scratch.

Well, some of us.

Congratulations to Jeff for avoiding bad words in his first two paragraphs.

Also of note:

• Also going over the basics, again: Rachel Lu. Who's bemused by Hayek Among the Post-Liberals.

  I first picked up F. A. Hayek sometime around 2010. Everyone was doing it; it was the right’s Hayekian moment. I had not had occasion to read Hayek, having written my dissertation on Scholasticism. I was unable to find a Latin translation of The Road to Serfdom, so I had to settle for reading it in my native language, but I still managed to capture a bit of the heady sensation of stepping into a different world. Hayek introduced me to the logic of limited government. I still think he is as good an introduction as one can find, at least for readers too mature to be delighted by John Galt.

  We are now living through a profoundly un-Hayekian moment on the right. The battle between liberals and post-liberals rages on with no real sign of abating. The Road to Serfdom turned 80 this year, and Hayek’s fans noted the occasion, but much of the right today has become accustomed to talking as though Hayek, and classical liberalism generally, is archaic or discredited. The Hayekian moment feels like ancient history.

  It’s not, though. Hayek used to be cool. Today my enduring fondness for him marks me clearly as a rotting-flesh Reaganite, but in fact, I originally cracked the cover only to please my populist interlocutors, years after Reagan was cold in his grave. It really makes one think about the dizzying progression of fads American conservatism has been through in the twenty-first century. The volatility is depressing, and yet there is an interesting sense in which conservatism has been mapping the road to serfdom, exploring its highways and byways by aggressively testing the limits of Hayekian reasoning. I’m not sure we’ve found them yet, but we may have learned some things along the way.

  It has been a long time since Maggie Thatcher removed a copy of Hayek's The Constitution of Liberty from her handbag, slammed it on the conference table, and declared "This is what we believe."

  We could use that again.

• After the election, he'll have more flexibility. Apparently, higher-ups decided having a bunch of cranky Black voters denied their nicotine delivery system of choice would be a bad idea. The NR editors chronicle Biden’s Menthol-Ban Backpedal.

  It has been a goal of progressives for years to ban smoking. Not quite able to convince enough people to go all the way, they have settled for piecemeal measures, such as banning smoking in public places or raising excise taxes on tobacco products.

  One of those piecemeal measures was supposed to be banning menthol cigarettes. This measure was exigent because it was also anti-racist, progressives said. Menthols are popular among black smokers, so banning them would help improve disparate racial health outcomes, the argument goes.

  Like many “anti-racist” arguments, this one sounds more racist the more you think about it. Not being able to ban a product in general but settling for only banning the version of it popular with black people doesn’t put very much faith in the decision-making abilities of black people, who are fully capable of evaluating their decisions just like anyone else.

  If you'd like to see the Progressive Future, let me point (again) to the Tobacco-, Smoke-, & Nicotine-Free Policy of the University Near Here. Excerpt:

  The TSN-Free policy applies to all University of New Hampshire facilities, property, and vehicles, owned, or leased, regardless of location. Smoking and the use of tobacco products shall be prohibited in any enclosed place, including, but not limited to, all offices, classrooms, hallways, waiting rooms, restrooms, meeting rooms, community areas, performance venues and private residential space within UNH housing. TSN products shall also be prohibited outdoors on all UNH campus property, including, but not limited to, parking lots, paths, fields, sports/recreational areas, and stadiums, as well as in all personal vehicles while on campus. This policy applies to all students, faculty, staff, and other persons on campus, regardless of the purpose for their visit.

  Gee, do you think they forgot anything?

• Best headline of the day. The award goes to Virginia Postrel: TMI and Monsters from the Id.

  My friend and former Chapman University colleague John Thrasher recently introduced me to the concept of pluralistic ignorance. This is a social science term describing situations in which individuals know their own thoughts and behaviors but assume most people are different, when in fact they aren’t. The classic example is college students who don’t drink that much themselves but assume their classmates are always getting drunk, when those others also drink moderately.

  John’s twist is to suggest that the breakdown of pluralistic ignorance explains the recent erosion of political and social norms of behavior—an erosion so extensive that “conservative Christians” who once upheld traditional norms of propriety in family and business life now avidly support Donald Trump, who is proud to be an unscrupulous operator and a serial adulterer.

  VP assumes a certain amount of cultural literacy. You probably know about "TMI". But "monsters from the id"? I have a soft spot there, the very first movie I saw in a theater in Oakland, Iowa. And as a five-year-old in 1956, it scared the crap out of me.

• We shouldn't wait until he double dares us. Do it now! Jimmy Quinn paid attention to what a UN official said, and it is glorious: U.N. Official Dares America to Slash Its Budgetary Contribution.

  On Wednesday, the United Nations’ top human-rights official, Volker Türk, practically dared Congress to slash America’s massive contribution to the U.N.’s main budgetary fund, called the regular budget, when he spoke out about “a series of heavy-handed steps taken to disperse and dismantle protests” across U.S. college campuses. He expressed concern that law enforcement was using force in a disproportionate way.

  Obviously, anyone is entitled to his view on the anti-Israel college demonstrations and steps taken by university administrations and law enforcement in response, no matter how ridiculous.

  But Türk’s statement — in his official capacity as the U.N.’s high commissioner for human rights — is an abuse of authority that won’t go over well in Washington.

  Or in New Hampshire.

And, really, it shouldn't be a plus in a candidate for high office. Jim Geraghty notes we got two guys who, in reality, would be flunking the job interview badly: Our Oblivious Presidential Candidates.

Consumer note: you really get a lot of weird results when you search Amazon for "oblivious".

Also of note:

• Speaking of weirdness… Someone named Yanis Varoufakis observes that we are living in The Age of Cloud Capital.

  I have no idea what he's talking about, but he persuaded the gatekeepers at Persuasion that his thesis was insightful enough to publish:

  Capitalism is now dead, in the sense that its dynamics no longer govern our economies. In that role it has been replaced by something fundamentally different, which I call technofeudalism. At the heart of my thesis is an irony that may sound confusing at first but which I contend makes perfect sense: the thing that has killed capitalism is… capital itself. Not capital as we have known it since the dawn of the industrial era, but a new form of capital, a mutation of it that has arisen in the last two decades, so much more powerful than its predecessor that like a stupid, overzealous virus it has killed off its host. What caused this to happen? Two main developments: the privatization of the internet by America’s and China’s Big Tech. And the manner in which Western governments and central banks responded to the 2008 great financial crisis.

  And it just gets loopier from there.

  If capitalism were dead, or even seriously ill, you'd think that would have shown up in my investment portfolio. So I'm dubious. Or maybe oblivious (see above).

  Still, for a guy I had never heard of, Yanis is actually pretty famous.

• A good idea? Clyde Wayne Crews has a decent proposal: Subsidy-free capitalism may require a constitutional amendment.

  As I described over at Forbes, the absence of subsidies among the enumerated powers of the federal Constitution hasn’t deterred their rise to a dangerous prominence. Despite evidence showing the shortcomings of economic and social engineering subsidies, market interventionism remains popular and unabated much to the chagrin of free enterprise advocates who have yet to persuade policymakers—who often know better—to reject them.

  Subsidies famously privatize profits while socializing losses. They distort markets and steer talent into unproductive ventures; they can hinder genuine regulation by shielding actors from liability. Moreover, subsidies are accompanied by regulatory strings and chains, which in Biden’s America means the coercive promotion of progressive policies and an expansion of the administrative state’s reach.

  The history of state-level subsidies offers valuable lessons, as described in an important Mercatus Center paper called “Outlawing Favoritism: The Economics, History, and Law of Anti-Aid Provisions in State Constitutions.” While most 19th-century state constitutions contained or added clauses to prohibit private aid, loopholes emerged, leading to a resurgence of subsidies.

  I would very much like to see "subsidy-free capitalism". But Crews' proposal for a constitutional amendment? Summary: you need two-thirds vote in both houses of Congress, plus three-fourths of state legislatures to say yes.

  If you've got that kind of political support for an amendment, you have way more than enough support to just repeal existing subsidies and not enact new ones. Problem solved, with a lot less fuss.

• The FDA wants to get back into the business of killing people. Okay, maybe that's a tad overblown, but … no, it's pretty much what's going on, as described by Ron Bailey: FDA Once Again Stands Athwart Biomedical Innovation, Yelling 'Stop!'.

  As earlier threatened, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has just issued new rules that will significantly slow down the development of new diagnostic tests. Specifically, the agency requires that all laboratory-developed tests (LDTs) be submitted to its regulators before the tests can be offered to patients and physicians. As I explained earlier, LDTs are in vitro diagnostic (IVD) tests for clinical use that are designed, manufactured, and performed by individual laboratories. They can diagnose illnesses and guide treatments by detecting relevant biomarkers in saliva, blood, or tissues; the tests can identify small molecules, proteins, RNA, DNA, cells, and pathogens. For example, some assess the risks of developing Alzheimer's disease or guide the treatment of breast cancer.

  Until now, the FDA had not sought to exercise regulatory control over the development and deployment of such tests.

  "LDTs are being used more widely than ever before—for use in newborn screening, to help predict a person's risk of cancer, or aid in diagnosing heart disease and Alzheimer's. The agency cannot stand by while Americans continue to rely on results of these tests without assurance that they work," said FDA Commissioner Robert M. Califf in a press release.

  The bureaucratic delay and expense involved in getting tests approved under the proposed rules guarantees stifled innovation, which means… yup, more people not getting diagnosed, which means… more corpses. Sad!

  But, as Bastiat would observe, if he were around: those dead folks are "unseen"; what's "seen" is only the FDA, working diligently to "protect" us.

• It's a funny business. If you are a book reader, you might be surprised to learn: No one buys books. Elle Griffin did the research, and …

  In 2022, Penguin Random House wanted to buy Simon & Schuster. The two publishing houses made up 37 percent and 11 percent of the market share, according to the filing, and combined they would have condensed the Big Five publishing houses into the Big Four. But the government intervened and brought an antitrust case against Penguin to determine whether that would create a monopoly.

  The judge ultimately ruled that the merger would create a monopoly and blocked the $2.2 billion purchase. But during the trial, the head of every major publishing house and literary agency got up on the stand to speak about the publishing industry and give numbers, giving us an eye-opening account of the industry from the inside. All of the transcripts from the trial were compiled into a book called The Trial. It took me a year to read, but I’ve finally summarized my findings and pulled out all the compelling highlights.

  I think I can sum up what I’ve learned like this: The Big Five publishing houses spend most of their money on book advances for big celebrities like Britney Spears and franchise authors like James Patterson and this is the bulk of their business. They also sell a lot of Bibles, repeat best sellers like Lord of the Rings, and children’s books like The Very Hungry Caterpillar. These two market categories (celebrity books and repeat bestsellers from the backlist) make up the entirety of the publishing industry and even fund their vanity project: publishing all the rest of the books we think about when we think about book publishing (which make no money at all and typically sell less than 1,000 copies).

  It's a long, but interesting, read. Not book-length.

For some reason, I still follow my ex-CongressCritter (and all-time toothache) Carol Shea-Porter. And I felt this demanded a reply:

"Joe Biden is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I've ever known in my life."

— Paul Sand (@punsalad) April 28, 2024

Don't recognize the reference? Reader, you got yourself some movie-watchin' to do.

Also of note:

• Where is Nina Jankowicz on this? Scott Johnson notes revisionist disinformation on one of the "major" networks: Rathergate: 100 proof fraud.

  The Daily Beast’s John Fiallo reports that Dan Rather returns to CBS News today 18 years after his involuntary departure. Fiallo writes (emphasis added):

  The former CBS News anchor Dan Rather will make a brief return to the network Sunday, appearing in a live interview 18 years after his controversial exit. Rather, 92, is slated to be profiled on CBS News Sunday Morning through an interview with correspondent Lee Cowan, the network announced. The segment will, in part, promote the soon-to-be released documentary Rather, which chronicles the legendary newsman’s “rise to prominence, his sudden and dramatic public downfall, and his redemption and re-emergence as a voice of reason to a new generation,” the doc’s producers wrote in a statement. Rather’s falling out with CBS began with his 2004 60 Minutes II report about George W. Bush’s National Guard record that relied on documents CBS failed to authenticate—something the then-president skewered the network for. The incident shattered Rather’s reputation, despite the documents never being proven to be forgeries. The controversy, which was dubbed “Rathergate,” was dramatized in the 2015 film Truth. Rather’s return to CBS will air at 9 a.m. EST on Sunday.

  The documents “were never proven to be forgeries” in roughly the same sense that Alger Hiss was never proven to be a Communist spy. Fiallo to the contrary notwithstanding, the proof is overwhelming. Indeed, there is no proof to support the authenticity of the documents. None. Zero. Nada.

  What follows is a recap of the largely blog-driven debunking of CBS's effort to smear Bush with a pre-election hit piece. It's a great story, long, and worth your while. The effort to rehabilitate Dan Rather and the other shoddy journalists involved in the sham is pathetic and disgusting.

  So I'm not kidding, Nina Jankowicz! Your "American Sunlight Project" mission statement promises to "Expose deceptive information practices and the networks and money that drive them." Who's behind this effort to deceive the American people?

  Of course, it could be that you're a partisan hack, Nina. Gee, I hope not.

• Specifically, the kind that's funny, and doesn't involve mass murder. Andy Kessler notes the increasing relevance of The Other Kind of Marxism.

  Today’s politicians are steeped in Marxism. Not Karl, but Groucho, who is supposed to have said: “Those are my principles, and if you don’t like them . . . well, I have others.”

  On Jan. 22, 2021, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said of Donald Trump’s second impeachment: “Make no mistake, a trial will be held in the United States Senate and there will be a vote whether to convict the president.” Fast forward to a week ago, when articles of impeachment were delivered to the Senate against Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. Mr. Schumer said: “Impeachment Article 1 does not allege conduct that rises to the level of high crime or misdemeanor . . . and is therefore unconstitutional.” No trial. No vote.

  This tossing of principles can be found everywhere. In 2020 President Trump tried to ban social-media app TikTok over national-security concerns. Now Mr. Trump is against a ban, writing last month on Truth Social: “If you get rid of TikTok, Facebook and Zuckerschmuck will double their business. I don’t want Facebook, who cheated in the last Election, doing better.”

  In August 2020, Joe Biden told ABC’s David Muir, referring to Covid: “I would shut it down. I would listen to the scientists.” By October 2020, Mr. Biden insisted, “I’m not going to shut down the country, I’m going to shut down the virus.” Lockdowns continued.

  Kessler is correct that Groucho is "supposed to have said" that quote. The Quote Investigator is on the case, and finds the evidence inconclusive.

• Better stay away from those that carry around a fire hose. Jeffrey Blehar demonstrates the increasing relevance of a song written nearly sixty years ago: You Don't Need to Be a Weatherman to Know Which Way The Wind's Blowing at Columbia.

  If you have a heart, then it is tough to sit in the position that I do and savage dumb college kids all day without at least a twinge of guilt. They are kids, after all — the one thing they definitively lack, especially en masse, is maturity. And those of us lucky enough to be born and raised before the iPhone era will never fully understand how the advent of “everything now” infinite content, panopticon online peer pressure, and the status opportunities afforded by public performance on social media have permanently warped the younger generation.

  Bluntly put, subjecting young people to these conditions is a great way to sow the seeds of narcissistic sociopathy. So should we be surprised that we’ve now reaped a harvest of elite college youths who, from our older perspective, come across like uniquely narcissistic sociopaths? What commands the most attention about the campus protests against Israel is not the vehemence of the hatred on display, but the ultimate vapidity of the majority of students involved.

  These students may not necessarily know what they want, but they certainly enjoy the social frisson of what they’re doing. They are led only by their all-conquering personal need for psychological validation. But that does not make them any less of a civic threat — their belief in their innate virtue rather than in any political principle other than the cause of the moment makes them easily molded clay for people with actual agendas.

  Futher advice: Don't follow leaders, watch the parking meters.

• On the Oppressor/Oppressed axis… John Hinderaker describes The Power of Weakness.

  Modern liberals have distilled the true essence of Marxism, which is the idea that every human relationship is exploitative. Lenin summed it up as “who/whom”–who is doing what to whom?

  Of course this idea is ridiculous. Most human relationships, whether personal or economic, are not exploitative. But Marx’s idea has a perennial appeal to the discontented, and is endlessly malleable to suit the neuroses of the day. Thus, modern Marxists have no interest in the purported oppression of the “proletariat.” Far from it! But the Marxist model can easily be made to fit other preoccupations.

  He embeds a couple of perceptive Elon tweets, here's one of them:

  The axiomatic error undermining much of Western Civilization is “weak makes right”.
  
  If someone accepts, explicitly or implicitly, that the oppressed are always the good guys, then the natural conclusion is that the strong are the bad guys.

  — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 26, 2024

  It sounds as if Elon might have read Arnold Kling's The Three Languages of Politics, which observed that progressives hammer controversies into an "oppressor-oppressed" heuristic. The Kindle version is a mere $3.99, and it's money well spent.

• That's right, he said zero. Articles from the new dead-trees issue of Reason, which has an AI theme, are coming out from behind the paywall, and this one by Andrew Mayne is wonderfully contrarian: In the AI Economy, There Will Be Zero Percent Unemployment

  I'm an AI developer and consultant, and when OpenAI released a preview in February of its text-to-video model Sora—an AI capable of generating cinema-quality videos—I started getting urgent requests from the entertainment industry and from investment firms. You could divide the calls into two groups. Group A was concerned about how quickly AI was going to disrupt a current business model. Group B wanted to know if there was an opportunity to get a piece of the disruptive action.

  Counterintuitively, the venture capitalists and showbiz people were equally split across the groups. Hollywood producers who were publicly decrying the threat of AI were quietly looking for ways to capitalize on it. Tech startups that thought they had an inside track to disrupting Hollywood were suddenly concerned that they were about to be disrupted by a technical advance they didn't see coming.

  This is the new normal: Even the disruptors are afraid they're about to be disrupted. We're headed for continuous disruption, both for old industries and new ones. But we're also headed for the longest period of economic growth and lowest unemployment in history—provided we don't screw it up.

  If you needs some palate-clearing optimism, this is a good choice.

Recently on the book blog:

President Dotard's increasing signs of unawareness and detachment from reality don't seem to have hurt him with the bettors:

Fun fact: the Stossel/Lott betting-odds site also tracks the bets placed on the GOP VP nominee. If you really want to see a precipitous drop in probability, check what's happened to Kristi Noem's odds in the past few days.

What is it with politicians and dogs, anyway?

Also of note:

• Equal time. We've been pretty hard on President Wheezy recently. So just a reminder that the Other Guy is no prize either. Jeff Maurer brings us The Trump Trial Opening Arguments, But With Jokes. (Subhed: "'Trump's just sleazy' is the DEFENSE")

  [The prosecution's] starting point was a 2015 meeting between Trump, Michael Cohen, and National Enquirer publisher David Pecker, who has the porn-y-est name in this story despite the fact that it involves an actual porn star. In that meeting, the trio allegedly discussed how the Enquirer might help Trump, which provided the trial’s first bombshell: The National Enquirer might not be a trustworthy source of news. This was a shocking charge against the august publication that broke landmark stories like The 20 Worst Beach Bods of 2009 and I’m Being Haunted By Lucille Ball’s Ghost. In much the same way that Watergate testimony shed light on unsavory aspects of the Nixon White House, this trial has revealed that the publication that tried to tie Ted Cruz to the JFK assassination might be politically motivated.

  The prosecution alleges that the trio discussed a “catch-and-kill” system that worked like this: If someone claimed to have dirt on Trump, the Enquirer would buy the story, not publish it, and Trump would pay them back. It’s like when a movie studio buys a script from a talented writer, doesn’t produce it, and instead makes Harry and the Hendersons 2: Squatch in the City. But this plan would have a nefarious purpose: It would seek to keep voters from thinking that Trump is a lecherous, philandering pervert. Even though that’s exactly how Trump portrayed himself for 30 years prior to the meeting.

  The alleged plan worked well at first: Pecker is said to have squashed a story from a doorman who said that Trump fathered a child out of wedlock. That story could have been damning to Trump, because if he has an unknown child, then why does he keep running duds like Don Junior and Eric in front of the camera? The plan eventually faltered, though, because Pecker failed to account for the fact that Donald Trump is the cheapest bastard who ever walked God’s green Earth. After Pecker secured the rights to Playboy model Karen McDougal’s story for $150,000, Trump didn’t pay him back. The catch-and-kill plan floundered, though it would still prove to be by far the most effective program of Trump’s political life.

  You know who would have paid back Pecker? Nikki Haley, that's who.

• They call me Mister… Kevin D. Williamson has a bone to pick with titles: Mr. Trump in Court.

  Todd Blanche, one of the unhappy attorneys defending Donald Trump in one of the criminal actions against him, insisted this week the former president deserves to continue to be called “President Trump” out of respect, that this is something the former game-show host and quondam pornographer “has earned.” That is pure drivel, of course, but Trump, who has a thing about titles, has insisted for years that employees and sycophants continue calling him “President Trump.”

  The continued use of the title “president” before Trump’s name is, of course, a violation of republican norms. We do not have aristocratic titles in the United States—we have job titles, and we have only one president at a time. (Goodness knows one is enough.) Trump isn’t the first ex-president to cling pathetically to the title, though Trump’s insistence takes on a special valence because he also insists that he is the rightfully elected president and attempted to stage a coup d’état in 2021 to hold onto the office. So there is more at work here than etiquette.

  Perhaps most hurtful of all:

  Nikki Haley is still “ambassador,” as though she were an envoy from some faraway planet where Republicans didn’t suck quite so badly.

  (Classic movie quote here.)

• We used to call this a "reality distortion field". Charles C. W. Cooke observes, sagely: Donald Trump Is Now Whomever His Critics and Backers Need Him to Be. I'm out of gifted NR links this month, so read what you can, or, better, subscribe:

  It is fitting, perhaps, that a man who launched his reelection campaign by transmuting himself into a series of gaudy nonfungible tokens would eventually be transformed into an avatar. Donald Trump has long served as a Rorschach Test, but, as he heads undeterred into his third bid for the presidency, he has become something more protean besides. At this stage, there are thousands of Trumps, each tailored to the predilections of the observer. Trump is a myth, an archetype, an emblem. How can it be that a country full of people who speak the same language cannot agree on the elementary facts that attach to the man? Simple: Because each involved in the debate has pulled a different trading card from an increasingly extensive pack.

  Take the question of Trump’s involvement in the recent bill that provided $60 billion in military aid to Ukraine. There, the plain details are these: Rather than emphatically oppose further funding for Ukraine, Donald Trump submitted that “Ukrainian survival and strength . . . is also important to us”; rather than attempt to sink it behind the scenes, Trump contrived the idea that the aid should be cast as a “loan” — an idea that was adopted, and that proved crucial to its passage; rather than criticize Speaker Mike Johnson for his role in shepherding the package through the House, Trump said publicly that Johnson is a “good person” and “a good man,” who is “trying very hard.” Given his previous rhetoric, it is unclear precisely why Trump did and said these things, but do and say them he most decidedly, indisputably, unequivocally did.

  Or, at least, the real Donald Trump mostly decidedly, indisputably, unequivocally did. The fictionalized versions of Trump did whatever those writing about him needed him to do. Thus far, two fabricated variations of the man have emerged. One, as contrived by his enemies, fought desperately against more help for Ukraine. The other, as contrived by his fans, did nothing worthy of critique. And never the twain shall meet.

  CCWC notes, amusingly, that a Bill Kristol commentary on Trump "made no attempt to hide that it had been written backwards from its foreordained conclusion". I read a lot of stuff like that, the light only slowly dawning on me that I've been wasting my time.

• Getting back to phoniness… Yes, I used to call this Sunday feature "The Phony Campaign". But now phoniness is the water we goldfish swim in, so it's not so much a revelation any more.

  But here's a WSJ commentary of a pol who vanished from our radar last month. Kenneth L. Khachigian wonders: What Ever Happened to Gavin Newsom?

  ‘Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio?” If Simon & Garfunkel were political pundits they might ask: Where have you gone, Gavin Newsom? When Joe Biden’s stumbling, mumbling fortunes seemed to slip away, the left crowned Mr. Newsom as the obvious heir to the throne. It was near impossible to click on a link or touch the remote without seeing him romp across America, preaching California’s acceptance of abortion or flying off to China to shake hands with Xi Jinping.

  But Mr. Newsom never knew where to draw the line on primping. When he hired a portrait photographer to accompany him to China and take pictures of him at the Great Wall, even the left-leaning Politico magazine couldn’t refrain from lampooning his portrait, as he attempted to look presidential at a faux Asian summit.

  The staged visit exposed the governor’s most fatal political flaw—his lack of authenticity. That phony factor is one he can’t escape and was summarized in a recent exposé by the nonprofit news organization CalMatters: “Governor Newsom has long touted his baseball career, including that he played at Santa Clara University. But he was never on the roster, among other misperceptions of his accomplishments. Newsom hasn’t corrected his record.”

  And, given the competition, why should he?

Recently on the book blog: