Pun Salad

■ YMMV, but I find Proverbs 16:32 a little too pacifistic for my tastes:

³² Better a patient person than a warrior,
    one with self-control than one who takes a city.

Patience has its place—it's one of the Seven Heavenly Virtues after all—but when you need a city taken, I'd recommend the impatient U. S. Army.

■ Robby Soave relates a New Hampshire-related story at Reason: This Sociology Professor Insists Australia Isn't a Country and Failed a Student For Saying Otherwise

A 27-year-old stay-at-home mom taking an online sociology class was shocked to get a failing grade on her final project. She was even more shocked at why she failed: Her professor was convinced that Australia is not a country.

The project required the student, Ashley Arnold, to compare a social norm in America with one in a different country, according to BuzzFeed. Arnold chose Australia. Her instructor, an unidentified professor at Southern New Hampshire University, denied that this was a valid selection.

"Australia is a continent; it is not a country," the professor wrote in an email to Arnold. "That error made it nearly impossible for you to accurately complete your week 2 research outline correctly."

I am not looking to supplement my income, but if I was, it's nice to know that I'm qualified to be a sociology instructor at SNHU. At least better qualified than the ones they hire.

■ Jonah Goldberg's G-File is up at NRO: Politics as the Crow Flies. There's stuff about Rob Porter, but also about Senator Rand Paul, the lonely Senate Republican speaking for fiscal sanity in opposition to the "bipartisan" effort to blow up the federal spending caps.

I have been very hard on Rand Paul over the last year or so, but in this instance, he was on the side of the angels. For the last decade, at least, conservatives have insisted that they were ideologically opposed to precisely the sort of turd burger we saw getting sizzled on the congressional grill this week. Regardless of Paul’s political calculations, his arguments were entirely right. If you passionately insisted that runaway deficit spending was an abomination under Barack Obama, there really is no way you can defend the same thing under Donald Trump. I argued for years that the tea parties were in no small way a delayed backlash against the profligate spending of George W. Bush as much as they were a backlash against Barack Obama. The psychological reasoning boiled down to: “We felt we had to put up with the crap under Bush because of the war or because he was our guy, but we’ll be damned if we’re gonna put up with it from this guy too.”

I hope there are plenty of Libertarians on the ballot in November; I would need a damned good reason to vote Republican again.

■ And, hey, we got a New England-related xkcd comic:

Mouseover text: "Great news for Maine—we're once again an independent state!!! Thanks, @unicode, for ruling in our favor and sending troops to end New Hampshire's annexation. 🙏🚁🎖️""