Pun Salad

■ Proverbs 20 is kind of an olio, but Proverbs 20:27 is pretty sweet:

²⁷ The human spirit is the lamp of the Lord
    that sheds light on one’s inmost being.

No further comment.

■ My local paper covers the latest at the University Near Here: UNH takes hard look at cultural misdeeds. Sample:

According to Holly Cashman, a professor in the Languages, Literatures and Cultures (LLC) Department, she and a team of faculty members organized the teach-in after witnessing students celebrate Cinco De Mayo on campus and because of the deadly event in Charlottesville,West Virginia, in August. Cashman said her department has organized events of multicultural appreciation in the past, but this year, they felt they needed to be more direct in their effort to reach students.

Because students looking for a drinking excuse inevitably leads to deadly clashes between demonstrators, I guess.

[Cashman] said her department is interested in incorporating ideas of diversity and inclusion into the required curriculum of classes. “It’s great to have events like these, but often we are preaching to the choir. So we made a real effort to reach out to Residential Life and Greek Life and make them aware of this event. The hope is that we reached more than our usual crowd of students,” she said.

News flash: faculty member hopes that students will be required to take courses that she teaches.

Halloween is only a few weeks away, with the opportunity to further hector the students about their problematic costumes.

■ Eugene Volokh notes that President Trump is not alone in his ignorance/disdain of the First Amendment: Congress members threaten Twitter with regulation if it doesn’t suppress ‘racially divisive communications’ and ‘anti-American sentiments’. Bonnie Watson Coleman (D-N.J.) and Emanuel Cleaver (D-Mo.) wrote a letter to the Twitter CEO, containing:

[...] we are concerned that insufficient government oversight over your firm is inadvertently leading to deeper racial divisions and threats to our democracy. If Twitter continues to prove unable or hesitant to grasp the seriousness of this threat and combat the racialized climate that is being stimulated on your platforms, we, as Members of Congress, will be left with little option but to demand for increased regulations and government oversight of this industry to address these problems.

What's the bigger "threat to our democracy": Twitter, or Democrat Congresscritters who invariably want to "regulate" speech, or have others do it for them?

■ @kevinNR writes on fiscal woes: The Black Budget. [The reference being to chairman of the House Budget Committee, Diane Black.]

Representative Black (R., Tenn.) has been chairman of the House Budget Committee for about a year, and she’s enjoyed the experience so much that she’s . . . trying to get the hell out of Washington, hoping to head to Nashville as Tennessee’s next governor. (She declined to comment on the gubernatorial race.) It is difficult to blame her for not wanting to cling to that gavel: Running the House Budget Committee is kind of a stupid job.

Not that it’s an unimportant job — far from it: In fact, it is a critically important post. A few years ago, I was invited to speak to a group of Republicans on the House Budget Committee, and I told them as plainly as I could that the decisions made by their panel and its Senate counterpart over the next several years would very likely mean the difference between a relatively manageable national fiscal crisis at some point in the future and an uncontrollable national fiscal catastrophe with worldwide consequences. I also told them that I was not entirely confident that they’d make the right choices. I wasn’t invited back.

A few years back, Kevin (I call him Kevin) wrote a book titled The End Is Near and It's Going to Be Awesome; now it sounds as if he may have changed his mind about the awesomeness thing. (I left a comment on the article to that effect.)

■ George F. Will writes on The widening gyre that is Trump.

With Trump turning and turning in a widening gyre, his crusade to make America great again is increasingly dominated by people who explicitly repudiate America's premises. The faux nationalists of the “alt-right” and their fellow travelers like Stephen Bannon, although fixated on protecting America from imported goods, have imported the blood-and-soil ethno-tribalism that stains the continental European right. In “Answering the Alt-Right” in National Affairs quarterly, Ramon Lopez, a University of Chicago Ph.D. candidate in political philosophy, demonstrates how Trump's election has brought back to the public stage ideas that a post-Lincoln America had slowly but determinedly expunged. They were rejected because they are incompatible with an open society that takes its bearing from the Declaration of Independence's doctrine of natural rights.

I find it difficult to believe that Trump buys into the alt-right bullshit; for one thing (as Will notes) that would mean that he's thought about it, and there's no sign that he thinks that hard about anything that abstract.

But what Trump almost certainly notices is that alt-right creeps are his most reliable cheerleaders. And he loves that.

■ And our Google LFOD alert buzzed on this article from the Garden City (Kansas) Telegram: Banda sentenced to 12 months probation.

Medical marijuana advocate Shona Banda was sentenced on Friday to 12 months of mail-in probation after being convicted in August of possession of drug paraphernalia with intent to manufacture, a level-five drug felony, following approval of a plea agreement.

But what's the big LFODing deal with that?

Banda is well-known for her use of cannabis oil to treat her Crohn’s disease. She wrote a book on her healing process using cannabis, titled “Live Free or Die,” where she extensively documented the reasoning behind her lifestyle choices. She also has been featured in numerous YouTube videos and online articles, where she espoused her belief in the medicinal benefits of cannabis oil. The story of her son’s removal from her home in 2015 drew national attention and calls to decriminalize medical marijuana in Kansas.

Ah, I get it. Kansas is one of the few states that hasn't even tried to legalize medical marijuana.