Pun Salad

• Let's begin with a fine video from Tim Carney: Victims of government financing. It's well made.

  Good, right? Now if only more politicians would pay attention…

  Tim Carney's recent book, Alienated America, was one of my favorite recent reads. Check it out if you get the chance.

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• Kevin D. Williamson was on Bill Maher's HBO show, and has observations as a result: Bill Maher & New York Times -- Mob Politics: A Double-Edged Sword. It's good all the way through, and is kinder to Maher than Maher deserves; here's the ending:

  I stopped Maher at one point during the show and scolded him a little for having delivered what I rightly described as “a stupid, cheap applause line.” The subject was abortion and my view that abortion should be prohibited as a homicide. (If it is not a homicide, then it is nothing of any importance; it is not tax evasion, or littering, or failing to use the right font size in an OSHA poster.) “What about the men who get women pregnant” Maher demanded. “Do you want to punish them, too? Huh?” I’ve heard 10,000 variations on that line, and every one of them was stupid.

  That line of argument in fact represents exactly what it is we pro-lifers always are accused of by the pro-abortion camp: proposing to punish people for having sex. As a political matter, meaning as a matter of regulation, I do not care who has sex with whom, even a little bit. If we are talking about consenting adults, I am perfectly content that the law remain silent on the question of who and whom and how many and in what combination or combinations — and even, contra my friend Madeleine Kearns, whether money changes hands. Nor do I believe that the law should take any note of contraception. I only insist that, if the sex should result in a pregnancy, we do not legally permit the willful killing of individual living human organisms. I don’t care about the sex — I care about the violence, about the killing.

  It is strange that so many so-called liberals cannot quite make out the difference between consensual sex and premeditated homicide, and that they are so eager to punish people for engaging in consensual sex. Not that they really believe it. They only believe that people will nod approvingly or, in the case of a television audience, applaud like trained seals at the concluding harrumph. No self-respecting person could take Maher’s argument seriously — and that is true irrespective of anyone’s belief about the question of abortion as such.

  It is difficult to resist the urge to deliver vapid applause lines, to please a crowd when one is in front of one. But we ought not allow that temptation to cause us to say things that are, beyond question, stupid. Living in abject need of the mob’s applause is no different from living in abject fear of the mob’s criticism — it is to be a creature of the mob in either case. The only freedom and independence are in learning to be equally indifferent to both praise and obloquy.

  (I’ll let you know when I’ve managed to achieve that.)

  (I've achieved that by nobody asking me to say things in front of a crowd. Not an option for KDW.)

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• At Reason, Jacob Sullum describes The False Premises of the Ruling Against Johnson & Johnson.

  This week an Oklahoma judge ruled that Johnson & Johnson should pay $572 million to "abate" a "public nuisance" the company created in that state by minimizing the hazards and overselling the benefits of prescription opioids. A few months ago, a North Dakota judge rejected a very similar claim against Purdue Pharma under a nearly identical "public nuisance" statute.

  The difference between those two decisions partly reflects the difference between broad and narrow understandings of "public nuisance." But the diametrically opposed rulings also pit a simple narrative of the "opioid crisis" with a clear set of villains against a more complicated story that's closer to the truth.

  Click through for the details, but I think (cynically, as usual) that the litigants imagined huge piles of cash in the J&J money vaults, and decided to "legally" get as much of it as possible.

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• At the American Conservative, Rod Dreher writes about Yale & The Crisis Of American Elites. Long, worth reading, but what really got my attention was this abstract of a peer-reviewed article by Donna Riley, head of the Purdue University department of engineering education.
  Rigor is the aspirational quality academics apply to disciplinary standards of quality. Rigor’s particular role in engineering created conditions for its transfer and adaptation in the recently emergent discipline of engineering education research. ‘Rigorous engineering education research’ and the related ‘evidence-based’ research and practice movement in STEM education have resulted in a proliferation of boundary drawing exercises that mimic those in engineering disciplines, shaping the development of new knowledge and ‘improved’ practice in engineering education. Rigor accomplishes dirty deeds, however, serving three primary ends across engineering, engineering education, and engineering education research: disciplining, demarcating boundaries, and demonstrating white male heterosexual privilege. Understanding how rigor reproduces inequality, we cannot reinvent it but rather must relinquish it, looking to alternative conceptualizations for evaluating knowledge, welcoming diverse ways of knowing, doing, and being, and moving from compliance to engagement, from rigor to vigor.

  Yes, that's where we are today, kids. Department chairs arguing against "rigor" in teaching engineering.

  My advice: over the next few decades, try to avoid driving over any bridge, using any product, flying on any plane, etc. which has had Purdue-trained engineers in its development cycle. You can't be too careful.

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• And the Google LFOD News Alert rang for an essay at Splice Today from one Tom DiVenti: Gun Crazy.
  When you’re stuck, keep moving. A moving object is harder to hit. The road is long, time is short and death is patiently waiting. The key is to travel light at breakneck speed to the end. Pushed and pulled willy-nilly like a rag doll on a carnival ride. Shot like a bullet into the air. Hot lead spinning like a demon dervish gyroscope in the stratosphere of total emptiness. A crowded void filled with dead weight and fear among the vast wasteland of crumbling cities. Small arms fire crackles in the night.

  And (check for yourself) it goes on like that for a while. The crack Google lords of worthiness apparently thought this deranged rant crossed the line into "news".

  But LFOD? Ah, there, last paragraph:

  To live free or die by the gun is an easy choice. Nothing good has ever come out of a gun. There’s no protection against ignorance. It’s a loaded question. Do guns save lives? I don’t think the innocent victims murdered by guns would agree. Life is cheap. The price of an average 9mm bullet costs 14 cents per round.

  I have to admit that Tom did his research for that single fact.

James Lee Burke is, as I type, 82 years young. His Louisiana cop hero, Dave Robicheaux, is at best only a few years younger than that. But he's still working. And as long as that goes on, I'm on board to watch. So I snapped up this one when the hardcover price dropped to $11.84 at Amazon. (Right now, it's down to $10.26, even better.)

I can't say that it isn't more of the same, but for JLB, "the same" means "pretty darn good". Dave is confronted with an array of corpses, dispatched with few clues other than deranged references to Tarot cards. Also, an array of suspects, lowlifes, corrupt cops, a weirdo hitman operating under his own twisted moral code, decadent Hollywood types, and … well, there's an attractive new lady cop who's way too young for Dave, but seems to show some inklings of romantic interest in him. Too good to be true? It doesn't help that she's got dark secrets in her past. Also not helping: Dave's daughter Alafair is involved with the Hollywood folks. Gee, I wonder if that will work out well.

And the ghosts that appear in these books also show up. Bad news: they tend to show up for people who are about to kick the bucket.