Pun Salad

²⁰ A wise son brings joy to his father,
    but a foolish man despises his mother.

Seems pretty straightforward… Wait, what about the daughters? What does their wisdom, or foolishness, portend?

I know, Ancient Israel. Nobody cared about the daughters, save that they would someday become mothers.

There are a handful of U.S.-based steel companies operating a relatively small number of facilities and employing about 142,000 people. That’s nothing to sneeze at, and we should wish them all well. But holding practically the entire U.S. manufacturing sector and construction sector hostage to the narrow corporate self interests of small but politically connected group of companies is deeply foolish. It’s also unjust.

But I suppose that’s only of interest to people who live in buildings or drive cars, or who consume products that are made and stored in buildings or transported via truck, train, ship, or airplane. And the shareholders and workers at Caterpillar, GM, Boeing, Ford, Toyota, United Technologies . . .

It is somewhat ironic (however) to hear the protests coming from Bernie Sanders fans. Because (as even Politifact knows), Trump and Bernie had "very similar" views on trade.

Last month, Congress authorized a massive increase in defense spending as part of a two-year budget deal. In 2018 alone, the Pentagon will receive an additional $80 billion, increasing the topline number to $629 billion. War spending will push the total over $700 billion. Though such a windfall might prompt Defense Department to ignore cost-saving measures, the White House pledged that “DOD will also pursue an aggressive reform agenda to achieve savings that it will reinvest in higher priority needs.” Noticeably absent, however, was another Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC), even though Secretary of Defense James Mattis, and at least four of his predecessors, have called for such authority in order to reduce the military’s excess overhead, most recently estimated at 19 percent.

That's a lot of moola.

Our state's senators both oppose another BRAC, because one of the obvious candidates for cutting wasteful Defense spending is the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard. My CongressCritter/Toothache Carol Shea-Porter is also opposed. The ladies are united in mainly seeing the DOD budget as a welfare spigot for (some) NH residents.

A piece in New York Magazine last weekend pressed the case for abandoning the term “gun control” in favor of the less frightening “gun reform.” Writer Benjamin Hart calls the former an “unhelpful phrase.” He says it “has long been the default for well-meaning citizens who want to curb the killings that are a fact of American life. But it’s well past time to retire it and come up with something more effective.”

The amusing thing here is that "gun control" is already a euphemism. To adapt an old Thomas Szasz quote: There's no such thing as "gun control"; there is only citizen control.

Steven Pinker coined the term "euphemism treadmill" to describe how people invent "polite" language to replace offensive/emotional words or phrases; but eventually that polite language also offends, requiring new euphemisms to be created. This isn't quite the same thing, but pretty close.

Iowa? The state that looks, on a map, like it’s Minnesota’s commode? Not that we would say such things out loud, but look at our neighborhood. Wisconsin leans into us like a drunk who won’t shut up about the Packers. North and South Dakota stand there like twins with nothing much to say, and Canada is the roof covered with snow. Iowa is what Minnesota would be if it fell into a trash compactor.

Not that I'm a fanboy or anything, but in a "best states" competition, Minnesota should probably get some extra credit for being home to James Lileks. (And Florida would get some love for Dave Barry, but not enough to get it out of fifteenth place.)

Penguin poop visible from space just helped scientists discover a previously unknown, massive colony of Adélie penguins on a chain of remote Antarctic islands, according to a new study published in Scientific Reports.

Facebook, Inc. sent a personal message Friday to each publisher using its service, warmly reminding them that they are utterly dependent on the social media giant for traffic and that it is in complete control of their livelihood.

“Publishers are important to Facebook,” the message sent to countless page admins read. “We want you to know that we care about you. Also, we will not hesitate to choke off your traffic until your organization ceases to be financially viable, should we feel the desire to do so at any time.”

I eagerly await the Snopes fact check on this!