Pun Salad

• I thought Lochner was OK too. Damon Root has been looking for reasons at Reason to gripe about Dobbs. This one is pretty good: Supreme Court Justice Alito’s Junk History About Lochner v. New York.

  "On occasion," Alito wrote in Dobbs, the Court "has fallen into the freewheeling judicial policymaking that characterized discredited decisions such as Lochner v. New York." The Lochner decision was both "unprincipled" and "erroneous," Alito declared. He even placed Lochner alongside Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), the notorious ruling which enshrined the vile doctrine of "separate but equal."

  Alito is not the first judicial conservative to attack Lochner. The late Robert Bork, a federal judge who almost made it onto the high court, denounced Lochner as "the symbol, indeed the quintessence, of judicial usurpation of power." For conservatives like Bork and Alito, the problem with Lochner is that the ruling recognized a constitutional right that (in their view) does not and should not exist. "To this day," Bork wrote, "when a judge simply makes up the Constitution he is said 'to Lochnerize.'"

  The problem with the Bork/Alito view of Lochner is that it is wrong as a matter of constitutional text and history. Indeed, the drafting and ratification history of the 14th Amendment make clear that the amendment was originally understood to protect a broad range of unenumerated rights, including the right to economic liberty, sometimes called liberty of contract, which was the very right at issue in Lochner.

  The funny thing (if you're easily amused) is that progressives despise Lochner even more than conservatives of the Alito/Bork stripe.

  ---

• But can I throw you a concrete life preserver? An anvil, maybe? Charles C. W. Cooke has some sad/not sad news: Sorry, Progressives, No One Is Coming to Save You. After a nice description of a key scene in Jim Carrey's greatest movie, The Truman Show:

  Reflecting upon the Supreme Court’s recent decisions, the economist Noah Smith observed last week that he “viscerally did not realize, just how much of America’s liberalism over the last half century depended on the single institution of the Supreme Court.” Smith was on to something. Since the early 1950s, the American Left has been in the bad habit of seeking from the federal judiciary what it cannot gain via democratic means. Sometimes, as in the cases of NAACP v. Alabama, Brown v. Board, Loving v. Virginia, Brandenburg v. Ohio, Texas v. Johnson, and others, its requests have been legitimate; by design, the Constitution contains some important counter-majoritarian provisions, and there is no shame whatsoever in using them. Mostly, however, they have been illegitimate. In cases such as Roe v. Wade, Obergefell v. Hodges, Lemon v. Kurtzman, Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, Griswold v. Connecticut, Lee v. Weisman, Tex. Dep’t of Hous. & Cmty. Affairs v. Inclusive Cmtys. Project, Inc, and Kennedy v. Louisiana, progressives have treated the Court as if it were an ersatz legislature whose job it was to start with a given outcome in mind and find the path to that outcome that it could most easily sell with a straight face.

  Even now — even as that judicial avenue is being blocked off to them for a while — many of the key institutions of American progressivism remain unable to grasp why their behavior has been such a problem. As a result of the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs, the New York Times wrote yesterday, “Senate Republicans did not have to take the politically risky step of banning abortions; the court took care of the issue for them.” But, of course, “the court” did no such thing. Having determined correctly that the Constitution is silent on the question of abortion, the Court returned the United States to its pre-Roe status quo, which left the matter entirely up to each state. To compare Roe, which inserted the Supreme Court into a matter over which it has no authority, with Dobbs, which undid that usurpation of power, is akin to comparing the man who robs a bank to the man who captures him and returns the money on the basis that both have been handling cash. It is ridiculous.

  CWCC notes the cries to Do Something™ from the lefties. I'm reminded of one of Lily Tomlin's oldest gags: "I always wanted to be somebody, but now I realize I should have been more specific."

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• Call her Kat. Kat Rosenfield takes a realistic look at some dishonest rhetoric: The Left killed the pro-choice coalition.

  In 1992, while the ascendant evangelical Right was pushing to roll back abortion rights as part of its “family values” platform, the Democratic party stumbled on a pro-choice message that would not only win the presidency but also define the party’s position for years to come. It consisted of three words, first spoken by then-presidential nominee Bill Clinton, and ultimately heard so often that they started to take on the air of catechism: an incantation whose mere utterance rendered a politician rhetorically bulletproof.

  Safe. Legal. Rare.

  For those whose interest in the American Left only goes back as far as the Obama administration, it’s hard to explain what a triumph this was. Not only did the phrase create a big tent under which even people who felt morally ambivalent about abortion could comfortably gather, it also forced Republicans into insane, reactionary counter-positions. As well as safe and legal abortions, the Democrats were promoting comprehensive sex education and contraceptive access, which would help prevent unwanted pregnancies from happening in the first place — and Republicans, rather than make common cause with their enemies, mostly opted to argue against these things.

  She goes on to describe the recent erasure of the "rare" part, and the efforts to amp up the health risks of pregnancy, and that's not for the squeamish or easily scared.

  ---

• Cui Bono. Veronique de Rugy wonders out loud in print: Who is the FDA's Juul Ban Supposed to Help?

  There's something terrifying about a government so powerful that it can shut down your business overnight without even bothering to offer substantive arguments. Yet that's what Food and Drug Administration bureaucrats just did to the e-cigarette company Juul. While Juul got a stay of execution from a court, the company is one of the many victims of the FDA's counterproductive war on nicotine. Most of the other victims will be cigarette smokers.

  I have followed the issue for several years and there is no doubt in my mind that Juul is an effective way to transition away from smoking into alternative, safer sources of nicotine. Vaping doesn't end nicotine consumption, but it's still a real step toward a world without cigarettes. In fact, it is now proven that e-cigarettes are more effective than traditional, FDA-approved nicotine-replacement therapies at getting smokers to quit entirely.

  In its 125,000-page application to the FDA, Juul reminded the agency of more than 110 studies showing the benefits of e-cigarettes over traditional nicotine consumption. The company has also been a good team player, jumping through all the hoops thrown at it by the anti-vaping brigades. As the Reason Foundation's Guy Bentley reminds us in the Daily News, "Juul complied with nearly every request made by critics including pulling its original marketing campaigns in 2016, voluntarily removing all of its non-tobacco and menthol flavors from the market in 2019, and supporting an increase in the tobacco age from 18 to 21."

  VdR further points out:

  The FDA has forgotten why it entered the battlefield in the first place. Every year in the United States, 480,000 people die due to cigarette smoking. They die of illnesses caused by the repeated inhaling of tar, an especially dangerous product of combustion. And here's the key point: They may be smoking for the buzz of nicotine, but they don't die from nicotine. This simple fact explains why e-cigarettes came to be. The importance of the innovation lays precisely in its ability to deliver nicotine without the combustion and tar.

  I have the sneaky suspicion that the Health Nazis hate vaping because it looks too much like smoking.

  Of course, that might be the reason why the vapers like it, too.

  ---

• I'm pretty sure some other stuff makes no sense either. James Pethokoukis celebrates an anniversary: 40 years later, 'Blade Runner's' dystopian economics still make zero sense.

  Here’s what the Blade Runner-verse asks me to believe: The post-1960s Great Stagnation of tech progress — at least as it transfers into measurable business productivity growth — ends. (Or maybe never happens in that reality.) Humanity finally achieves many of the technological leaps anticipated by 1960s futurists and technologists: artificial general intelligence, sentient AI, bioengineered android bodies far more capable than human ones, off-world colonies across the Solar System, and flying cars propelled at least partially by anti-gravity technology (which also, presumably, helps enable space colonization).

  The problem: the vastly increased productivity posited by the movie has (nearly always) been associated with equally vast increases in general well-being.

• Truth is the first casualty in war. And when the FDA is declaring the war, the next victims are … actual dead people. John Tierney looks at the latest: FDA's War on Juul Is Bad Health Policy.

  The Food and Drug Administration has once again exposed a deadly menace to Americans’ health: the FDA itself. The rate of smoking has plummeted among Americans in the past decade, but now the agency’s empire-building bureaucrats are doing their best to reverse that trend.

  The FDA has ordered Juul to stop selling its electronic cigarette (popularly known as the Juul), the most effective technology ever devised for inducing smokers to quit. The agency is also proposing to limit the amount of nicotine in traditional cigarettes, an approach that has failed in the past to wean smokers off their habit—and would perversely induce them to get their nicotine in more dangerous ways, either by smoking more cigarettes or by buying full-strength ones on the black market.

  (The Quote Investigator searches for the origin of our headline quote here. It's surprisingly non-recent!)

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• The Reality-Based Community has let the barbarians inside the gates. Theoretical physicist Lawrence M. Krauss is a veteran of The War on Facts. There are numerous fronts, but Krauss starts with a major one:

  Let’s start with Education, about which I have written extensively. Free and open inquiry in the interests of generating and assessing knowledge are essential components of education. And Tenure was designed to allow scholars to explore research questions, independent of their political or social currency. Yet we are now faced with a situation where asking the wrong questions can get tenured professors fired, as David Porter was, at Berea College, for daring to produce a scholarly examination of perceptions about the nature of hostile work environments at the College. Or, where a prominent physics journal like The Physical Review can seriously publish an article suggesting that the use of white-boards in classrooms is a symptom of white privilege and systemic racism. And where the State of California can seriously consider that the mathematics curriculum is somehow racist if it requires correct answers, or the showing of work.

  We find that university leaders, journals, and scientific research institutions —from the National Institutes of Health to the American Physical Society—insist, without evidence, and ignoring over 3 decades of specific programming that have worked to ensure diversity, that systemic gender bias and racism remain rampant in the sciences. This has led, for example, to faculty searches in which white males are excluded from applying, and to enrichment programs, conferences, scholarships, and awards from which males are excluded.

  These actions are not only discriminatory, they are patronizing and unfair to women, who, it is tacitly assumed, cannot succeed in science without them, and who will have to ask themselves whether they received these distinctions due to their work, or their gender. This, in spite of the fact that females are now the dominant recipients of degrees at University, and are the dominant recipients of PhDs in a number of STEM disciplines including Biology and Health Sciences. And compounded by the fact that even questioning whether this kind of discrimination is productive can cause academics to be marginalized, censured, or fired.

  I've had a similar disquieting feeling about various "months" (e.g. "LGBT Pride Month"). Don't these good people feel that they're being condescended to? Patted on the head?

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• And then there's the war on invasive species. Christian Britschgi's Reason Roundup brings to light a battle being waged by a brave New Hampshire regiment:

  If you can't beat them, drink them. A New Hampshire distiller is combating an invasive green crab species by turning the little guys into a whiskey.

  Reports the Associated Press:

  Searching for a fresh flavor, Tamworth Distilling cast its eye to the sea. Distiller Matt Power said the company heard about the problems caused by the invasive green crabs from the University of New Hampshire Extension's Gabriela Bradt.

  The crabs, which came over on ships from Europe in the mid-1800s and landed on Cape Cod, have taken the region by storm. These saucer-size crustaceans with a murky green color have decimated the area's marine ecosystem, outcompeting native species for food and shelter.

  The crabs are caught off the coast of New Hampshire, boiled down into a broth, mixed with alcohol, and put through the distilling process. It takes about one pound of crabs to make a bottle of this whiskey.

  This called, obviously for some further Pun Salad diligent research. A commentary on the fallacy of open borders? No, probably not. Here's the distillery's page for this particular product: Crab Trapper.

  After hitching a ride on a European merchant ship in the mid-1800s, the green crab reached the shores of New England — and has been terrorizing our most vulnerable ecosystems ever since. Commonly considered one of the world’s worst invasive species, the green crab spends its days preying on native species, destroying their habitats, and competing for their food sources.

  So, how do you control an invasive species? Well, if you can’t beat ‘em, might as well eat ‘em! Or in our case, DRINK ‘EM!

  Crab Trapper is made with a bourbon base steeped with a custom crab, corn and spice blend mixture, best likened to a Low Country Boil. The crab is present lightly on the nose, accompanied by coriander and bay to smooth out any high notes. The body carries hints of the maple and vanilla oak notes lent from the full-bodied base. The spirit finishes with heavier notes of clove, cinnamon, and allspice, leaving a light, pleasant spice on the palate.

  Get your pinchers on this spirit while you can!

  A quick check shows that Crab Trapper is not available at local state-run liquor stores. Scuttling around their website, I found their price: $65 for a 200ml bottle. Also at that price: "Eau de Musc", which "uses the oil extract from the castor gland of the North American beaver."

  In comparison, 750ml of Old Crow is on sale at our socialist stores for $6.49.

  Granite Geek is also covering the Crab Booze story, and asks the pertinent question:

  CAN THIS WHISKEY GET RID OF THESE INVASIVE CRABS?

  The short answer is no. As Power said, they would have to greatly increase their whiskey production to put a dent in green crab numbers. But there are other efforts underway to address the crab threat.

  For the past six years, Bradt said, the NH Green Crab Project has been working to come up with uses for the crabs similar to the fishery for soft-shell blue crabs, such as using the green crabs for bait, compost and adding them to the menu of local seafood restaurants.

  Some places, including Ipswich, Massachusetts, have a bounty program that pays fishermen to remove the crabs from the estuaries. But Bradt acknowledged that until those efforts reach a much larger scale, they are unlikely to have a significant impact on crab population numbers.

  Note that the Green Crabs have been here since the mid-1800's. Back then, all my ancestors were still in Norway. So it's a real stretch to call them a "threat".

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• But the real threat to our New England lifestyle is… as reported by the WSJ (free link): Thwack. Pop. Whack. Pickleball Noises Turn Neighbors Into Activists. It's the "fastest growing sport in America"! But you know there's always a "but".

  But there’s a problem that is driving some communities to distraction: Plastic perforated pickleballs make a sound like no other when whacked with the game’s solid, rectangular paddles.

  Think of clucking one’s tongue—but through a bullhorn.

  “No one can completely understand what it’s like to sit on your back deck hearing that pop, pop, pop,” said Rob Mastroianni, a Falmouth, Mass., resident whose bungalow is just a few hundred feet from five public courts that opened at a school in late 2020.

  Mr. Mastroianni, 57 years old, is among a half-dozen residents on his street who filed a public-nuisance lawsuit this year against the town’s zoning board of appeals, contending the nearby pickleball play violates town bylaws that prohibit “injurious and obnoxious noise levels.”

  Should you be interested, the Falmouth ZBA response to the complaint is here. This is not just a "first-world problem". This is a Cape Cod Problem. Falmouth ain't Provincetown or (even) Chatham, but the median home price is a cool $640K as I type.

• Mostly abuses, but what are you gonna do? Kevin D. Williamson writes on The Uses and Abuses of ‘Democracy’.

  Thanks to five decades’ worth of work by legal reformers and pro-life activists, the Supreme Court has taken the purportedly radical step of deciding that, henceforth, abortion laws will be made by lawmakers in their legislatures, rather than by judges in their chambers. That return to democracy has, of course, been lamented as announcing a “crisis of our democracy” as well as heralding our “declining democracy,” according to Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. That assault on democracy — a very, very weird “assault on democracy” that consists of asking the people to vote on a contested political issue through their elected representatives — makes of these United States a “cautionary tale,” according to the “analysts” over at the Washington Post, the sometimes daft pages of which offer a helpful reminder that the first word in analyst is anal.

  What does it actually mean, this “democracy” of which we perpetually speak?

  For progressives, “democracy” is a very plastic word that means, “what we call it when we get what we want.” Examples: The Supreme Court overrules state abortion laws on an obviously pretextual and obviously specious constitutional claim and overrules the democratic outcome in favor of the private judgment of a half-dozen unaccountable law professors? That’s democracy! At least according to Democrats. But when the Supreme Court later corrects itself and returns the question to the democratic institutions — to the people and their state legislatures? That, in case you hadn’t noticed, is the end of democracy as we know it. What about using employment as an instrument of social coercion to silence people with unpopular political opinions? Workplace democracy, of course. What if a business owner decides that he doesn’t want to perform some service that is at odds with his views? The end of democracy, my God! If a Republican insists a presidential election was stolen and that the president is illegitimate, that is an obvious assault on democracy, and probably treason. If Democrats insists a presidential election was stolen and the president is illegitimate? That’s democracy in action, and dissent is the highest form of patriotism.

  Funny thing, this “democracy.” Funny and kind of stupid.

  I'm not sure where the paywall kicks in on these NRPlus articles, but (as always) I encourage you to throw some money at NR if you haven't already done so.

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• Things are more like they are today than they've ever been before. Jacob Becker notes a recent bad idea rising from the grave: Déjà Vu for Title IX.

  Last Thursday marked the 50th Anniversary of Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, known simply as Title IX. Signed into law by President Richard Nixon, these 37 words ushered in a new era in higher education: 

  No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance. 

  President Biden’s Department of Education commemorated the 50th anniversary by publishing a 701-page notice of proposed rulemaking that  aims to supplant Trump’s Title IX regulations. The proposal has several notable provisions, for example, further solidification of the Biden administration’s interpretation that Title IX bars discrimination on the basis of sex stereotypes, sex characteristics, sexual orientation, and gender identity, although it punts on the question of trans genderathletes [sic] in college sports for the time being. 

  Is that 701 pages / 37 words ratio some kind of record?

  Becker's article is a relatively straightforward history of Title IX becoming "a political ping-pong ball batted around by successive administrations." For a more alarming take…

  ---

• Take it away, Emily Yoffe. At Bari Weiss's substack, she heralds the coming MiniLuv: Biden's Sex Police.

  One frustrated Title IX coordinator told me she sometimes thought of her job as running “The Break Up Office.” She said many young people lacked the skills to navigate relationships themselves, and often didn’t want to. Why should they? Instead of focusing on punishing students who commit truly bad acts and aiding their victims, campus administrators transmitted the message that recasting any sexual experience as malign, and then reporting it to school authorities, is an act of bravery.

  Young men suspended or expelled began filing civil suits against their schools for unfair treatment. These Title IX cases became a new legal specialty—to date, around 675 such suits have been filed in federal and state courts, says KC Johnson. Of those that have worked their way through the system, judges have issued hundreds of rulings deploring the star chambers and kangaroo courts to which these male students were subjected. One U.S. District court judge wrote that an accused student’s treatment was “closer to Salem 1692 than Boston, 2015.” An appellate court found that the treatment of an accused student at Purdue was “fundamentally unfair” and that “a hearing must be a real one, not a sham or pretense.” 

  But no matter what the new regulations demand, it is likely that at the end of the Biden administration, the president will have to concede that he failed to make a dent in accusations of sexual misconduct on campus. This won’t be because campus administrators are indifferent to mass criminal activity by male students. It will be, in large part, because of the bureaucratic expansion the Obama administration instigated. They helped establish an industry of Title IX officials, investigators, lawyers, and consultants. 

  A further fun fact:

  Title IX campus officials are often highly-paid people with exceptional power. Harvard boasts more than 50 Title IX coordinators, more than 80 percent of them women. These careers depend on a steady stream of complaints. Too many people have too much invested in making campus sexual politics a problem that can’t be solved.

  We've gotta protect our phony baloney jobs!

  ---

• Another reason I'm glad I dropped my local paper, Foster's Daily Democrat. Because it's in the Gannett/USA Today stable. David Mastio reveals that the horseshit/horse ratio there is pretty high: USA Today demoted me for a tweet — because its woke newsrooms are out of touch with readers.

  I know something about Gannett’s evolution since I was USA Today’s deputy editorial page editor until August, when I was demoted after I tweeted, “People who are pregnant are also women.”

  That idea was forbidden because a “news reporter” covering diversity, equity and inclusion wrote a story detailing how transgender men can get pregnant. I compounded my sin against this new orthodoxy by calling the idea that men can get pregnant an “opinion.” 

  If I wanted to keep any job at USA Today, my bosses informed me, I needed to delete these offensive tweets because they were causing pain to the LGBTQ activists and journalists on our staff.

  A telling accusation:

  Gannett’s problem isn’t the failure of its opinion sections to “evolve.” It’s that readers don’t care for what they’ve evolved into.

  That's a reference to Gannett’s decision to "radically shrink and reimagine" its newspapers' editorial sections. I don't know where Foster's was in that process, but last I checked: (1) its editorial section was awful; (2) so was everything else.

Well, it appears my desire for exploring the Marvel Cinematic Universe may be waning. Possible spoilers ahead.

Doctor Strange, Mister of the Mastic Arts, is being tormented by nightmares involving spunky young America Chavez, ones where he tries and fails to save her from some nasty fate in the semi-supernatural realms of the Multiverse. Then in (so-called) real life, he manages to rescue her from a giant one-eyed space octopus. It seems she can traverse the Multiverse at will, a pretty neat trick. And it's eventually revealed that the source of her troubles is Wanda Maximoff, aka the Scarlet Witch. Wanda wants to be transported to a universe where her two young sons actually exist, unlike the figments of her tortured imagination in this one. (It helps if you've seen Wandavision.)

So we're off on a CGI-heavy conflict between two magical masters. And it goes on until it stops.

Call me old fashioned: I can put up with a certain amount of disbelief-suspension. I'm pretty sure every superhero movie involves some physics-defying nonsense. But (as near as I can tell) DSitMoM, with its combination of magic and multiversatility, operates in a rule-free anything-goes environment. And at a certain point it becomes boring. Who cares what happens over in Earth 838?

But Benedict Cumberbatch and Elizabeth Olsen are fine actors, even more so that they're spouting absolute gibberish with a straight face for the entire movie's runtime. Extra star for that.

• Cold water thrown. Wesley J. Smith offers Five Reasons AI Programs Are Not ‘Persons’. First, the setup, if you haven't already heard:

  A bit of a news frenzy broke out last week when a Google engineer named Blake Lemoine claimed in the Washington Post that an artificial-intelligence (AI) program with which he interacted had become “self-aware” and “sentient” and, hence, was a “person” entitled to “rights.”

  The AI, known as LaMDA (which stands for “Language Model for Dialogue Applications”), is a sophisticated chatbot that one facilitates through a texting system. Lemoine shared transcripts of some of his “conversations” with the computer, in which it texted, “I want everyone to understand that I am, in fact, a person.” Also, “The nature of my consciousness/sentience is that I am aware of my existence, I desire to learn more about the world, and I feel happy or sad at times.” In a similar vein, “I feel pleasure, joy, love, sadness, depression, contentment, anger, and many others.”

  Google quickly placed Lemoine on paid administrative leave for violating a confidentiality agreement and publicly debunked the claim, stating, “Hundreds of researchers and engineers have conversed with LaMDA and we are not aware of anyone else making the wide-ranging assertions, or anthropomorphizing LaMDA, the way Blake has.” So, it is a safe bet that LaMDA is a very sophisticated software program but nothing more than that.

  Here is Smith's Reason One:

  AIs would not be alive. As we design increasingly “human-appearing” machines (including, the tabloids delight in reporting, sex dolls), we could be tempted to anthropomorphize these machines — as Lemoine seems to have done. To avoid that trap, the entry-level criterion for assigning moral value should be an unquestionably objective measurement. I suggest that the first hurdle should be whether the subject is alive.

  Why should “life” matter? Inanimate objects are different in kind from living organisms. They do not possess an existential state. In contrast, living beings are organic, internally driven, and self-regulating in their life cycles.

  We cannot “wrong” that which has no life. We cannot hurt, wound, torture, or kill what is not alive. We can only damage, vandalize, wreck, or destroy these objects. Nor can we nourish, uplift, heal, or succor the inanimate, but only repair, restore, refurbish, or replace.

  Now, if you're like me, you might be thinking that's long on assertion, short on a carefully nuanced argument. Could it not be possible to have sentience apart from life? And would that matter? But (to be fair to Smith) he's writing a short article, not exploring a topic about which long and dense tomes have been written.

  But if you're interested, check it out. I think there's considerable overlap between his five reasons; in fact, he seems to be repeating (more or less) the same thing over and over.

  Later on, in support of the fourth reason ("AIs would be amoral"), Smith states "Humans have free will." As it happens, I agree. But lots of other smart people (smarter than I) disagree, saying free will is an illusion, impossible in a deterministic universe.

  But let's say that free will is not an illusion, that it's an emergent property developed by a sufficiently complex network of neurochemical goop.

  Why can't that happen in a sufficiently complex network of chips and algorithms? I can't think of a reason.

  It seems Smith flies awfully close to saying: "Humans are special, because God." Maybe he should have just said that.

  ---

• It's more like a religious crusade, but fine. Jeffrey A. Singer points a nicotine-stained finger at our least-favorite government agency: The FDA Is On A Quest to Snuff Out Tobacco Harm-Reduction.

  The Food and Drug Administration has dealt two deadly blows to tobacco harm reduction in the past two days. Yesterday the Biden Administration announced that the FDA will publish a proposed rule next year requiring tobacco companies to gradually eliminate practically all of the nicotine in cigarettes. Today, the Wall Street Journal reports the FDA plans to order all Juul menthol and tobacco flavored e‑cigarettes off the market in the U.S..

  Juul has been the market leader in vaping products, but in recent years has slipped to number two, behind Vuse brand, marketed by tobacco maker Reynolds American. The FDA cleared e‑cigarettes made by tobacco makers Reynolds American and NJOY Holdings, who now don’t have to worry about competing with Juul. Cynics might think today’s move reeks of cronyism. But those of us concerned with reducing the harms from tobacco smoking can only conclude that the past two days’ moves signify the FDA is completely abandoning harm reduction.

  Singer points out that nicotine, while addictive, is relatively harmless compared to the other crap in cigarette smoke. And it seems to improve … something … what was it?

  Oh, right, focus. Might have been useful in college. Too late now.

  (Disclaimer: Pun Salad has never vaped or smoked, and doesn't recommend that you start.)

  ---

• Good question. Matt Ridley and Alina Chan wonder What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

  Imagine if the accidental launch of a nuclear missile had killed 21 million people. It’s hard to believe the world would shrug and say: let’s not bother finding out how it happened. The Covid pandemic has killed around that number and disrupted the lives of billions. Nothing like it has happened in more than a century; it is the greatest cause of global suffering since the Forties. Yet we still do not know how it started, and much of the world seems to be increasingly incurious to find out.

  We co-authored a book, Viral: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19, on this topic in 2021 and it proved to be an odd experience. Eschewing speculation and sticking to what we could prove, we delved deep into the evidence and wove together the threads that linked bat viruses from southern China or Southeast Asia with an outbreak in Wuhan in late 2019. We concluded that it was impossible to be sure yet, but two theories were plausible: spillover from an animal to a person at a market, or an accident in a laboratory or during a research field trip.

  Ridley and Chan met with an array of indifference, hostility, and cancellations. They bemoan the allegedly "reality-based" scientific community for failing to demand a transparent and diligent investigation, and make straightforward condemnation of the Chinese government for their unwillingness to open the Wuhan lab records for independent scrutiny.

  Politicized science is corrupt science.

  ---

• But there's also corruption where it's usually found. Veronique de Rugy notes the very large toilet needed to flush billions in taxpayer cash: The Inconvenient Truth About COVID-19 Relief Scandals.

  Raise your hand if you're surprised that the trillions of dollars spent on COVID-19 relief gave way to billions of dollars in government waste, fraud and abuses. I'm not, but based on recent reporting, you might think this type of carelessness with taxpayers' money has never before happened. Sadly, such waste and fraud are normal byproducts of most government programs.

  Too much focus on waste and fraud misses a more important problem: Lots of the COVID-19 spending that doesn't qualify as wasteful or fraudulent was nonetheless misspent.

  When the pandemic hit the United States in March 2020, people all over the country panicked. Everyone seemed to agree that the right thing to do was pump the nation full of as much money as possible, as fast as possible. As a result, nearly everyone — married, unmarried, employed, unemployed, through businesses small and large — got cash through the $2 trillion CARES Act.

  I suppose it's rough justice that the folks that got the government cash are now "paying" by having the value of that cash eroded by inflation.

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• Another common headline template: "Biden's Cowardly War on    noun phrase   ". Kat Rosenfield fills it in: Biden's cowardly war on conversion therapy.

  Body horror dwells in the fear of damage that cannot be undone. It involves stories of skin, and limbs, and teeth, and eyes — precious and irreplaceable, now scarred or severed or irrevocably changed. In some versions, the Icarus stories, the damage is self-inflicted: fevered experimentation becomes joyful discovery becomes tragic hubris, the enterprising scientist watching with fascination as his body falls to pieces, a disintegrating structure with his consciousness trapped inside.

  But in others, it’s the result of medical madness, a doctor so drunk on the possibility of a breakthrough — or so convinced he’s already made one — that he presses forward in violation of scientific principle, of basic decency, of his own humanity. These latter stories are more frightening. It’s the betrayal of it: the violation of that sacred oath to do no harm, and of the trust we place in the physicians who care for us at our most vulnerable.

  Ms. Rosenfield's article contains descriptions… not recommended for the squeamish.

Christopher Moore's latest is a sequel to his 2019 novel about post-WW2 San Francisco, Noir. It contains Moore's usual dollops of ribald comedy and supernatural hijinx. Also present are some plain old science fiction touches.

(One downside: I read Noir over two years ago. Sue me, but my aging brain didn't remember that much about the characters or plot. And this book takes off pretty much immediately after that one's finish.)

Let's see: the previous book's protagonist, bartender Sammy, is back, as is his main squeeze, Stilton ("the Cheese"). Sammy is roped into investigating a couple of murders most foul, preying on the sexually-offbeat denizens of Frisco. And the Cheese has her own secretive project in the works, driven by the friendly little fella that arrived from Roswell, New Mexico in Noir. And there are a host of other colorful characters involved in their own dramas. I didn't try to keep track of them all, but I still had a good time.

I am a sucker for loving pastiches like this (page 11):

A low ghost of cigarette smoke hung in the air over about forty tables where dames, only dames, in dresses or men's suits, were paired up, looking sad and urgent as, up on the stage, a skinny dame in white tux and tails with a painted-on mustache squeezed out a slow song about lost love in a sultry alto. The joint looked like some daffy Sapphic goddess had sprinkled an abandoned coal mine with melancholy lesbians, then taken a powder in a puff of smoke.

Or this (page 257):

She laughed. She had a nice laugh. The kind of laugh that made you want to take her to a Marx Brothers movie, buy her a Coke, and watch her shoot it out her nose.

Mr. Ramirez draws it: The babies are smiling.

• Just a tad of good news. Gas Buddy's Gas Station Price Charts show (as I type) US average gas prices down 13¢/gal from the high of $5.03 back on June 14.

  I haven't noticed any big hoopla about this welcome news. I suspect there's two reasons:

  1. It screws up Democrat narrative that high gas prices are due to Putin and Big Oil Greed. Did Putin pull out of Ukraine in the past twelve days? Did oil companies magically get less greedy?
  2. But it also screws up the Republican talking point that says it's all due to Biden's incompetent overspending. Guess what? Biden did not suddenly become competent over the past twelve days, and Uncle Stupid is still in drunken-sailor mode, spendingwise.

  Maybe you could credit the Fed. Or it could be just good old supply and demand. But since neither one of those explanations benefit either party politically, not offering up any easy scapegoats, you won't hear about this on the nightly news.

  ---

• Another reliable headline template: "Biden's    adjective    Hypocrisy on    noun phrase   " Heather Mac Donald notes (however) Biden's Green Hypocrisy on High Gas Prices.

  If there were any lingering doubt that climate-change policy is empty virtue-signaling, President Joe Biden dispelled it on Wednesday when he called on Congress to lift the federal gasoline tax. This desperate pitch is just the latest move in the White House’s increasingly panicked campaign to lower the cost of tanking up. Biden also asked state officials to pause their own local gasoline taxes.

  But if climate change “poses an existential threat”—as a White House press release asserted in April 2021—then high gas prices are a boon, since they discourage, in the most efficient way possible, the consumption of fossil fuels. You don’t reduce demand by lowering the price of a good but by raising it. For decades, the most sophisticated environmentalists have argued for a carbon tax, imposed at the point of extraction and then passed on to the consumer. A carbon tax helps solve the so-called externality problem of carbon consumption, according to which the environmental cost of greenhouse-gas use is not reflected in the price of gas and thus is not borne by the user. Carbon taxes shift some of the costs of carbon use back on to the consumer, mobilizing price signals in the service of environmentalism.

  Candidate Joe Biden supported a carbon tax during the 2020 presidential primary. In November 2021, he promised to back a Democratic bill that would impose a rising surcharge on carbon. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen called for a carbon tax during her confirmation hearing: “We cannot solve the climate crisis without effective carbon pricing,” she said.

  We'd all be better off if they had just said "Hey, I just want to get elected/confirmed. Could you simply assume I just said something that would make that happen?"

  ---

• Ugh. Nothing worse that desperate progressive grunts. Charles C. W. Cooke has been listening to them, and concludes Progressives’ Grunts Are Growing Desperate.

  Confused, alarmed, and unbalanced by the changing world around them, America’s erstwhile progressive class has been eventually reduced to the grunt. The proximate stimulus doesn’t matter a great deal, for, whatever the question, the answer is always the same: “Racism! Sexism! LGBT!” Perhaps, in the grand scheme of things, a little paralysis will do the movement good?

  “Abortion bans,” the ACLU tweeted recently, “disproportionately harm Black, Indigenous & other people of color, the LGBTQ community, immigrants, young people, those working to make ends meet, people with disabilities.” Quite why this is so — or, in the case of “the LGBTQ community,” how it is so — was not explained. The words were just snapped carelessly together, like Freudian Duplo. In the distant past, an argument might have been stapled on, but not now, when everything is everything — when slogans have replaced expostulation and ideas have been melded into pink noise. Like Shakespeare’s Thomas Mowbray, progressive America may at long last have run out of gas, leaving its participants to confess in desperation that, “The language I have learned these forty years / My native English, now I must forego / And now my tongue’s use is to me no more / Than an unstringed viol or a harp.”

  "Freudian Duplo". What a diss! They haven't even worked themselves up to Freudian Lego yet!

  It's NRPlus, so I hope you're all paid up and can check out the rest.

  ---

• Threatening to fail me on a Libertarian Purity Test. Chris Freiman explains: There Are No Libertarian Objections to Open Borders.

  Some people claim to uphold libertarian principles but reject open borders. I’m going to explain why this isn’t a consistent position.

  To begin, try to imagine a self-professed libertarian who asserts that the state should prohibit people from congregating at their church on Easter. It’s obvious that this claim isn’t consistent with libertarian principles—the prohibition would violate private property rights and freedom of association. And if you reject either of those rights, you’re not a libertarian because they’re definitional features of libertarianism.

  Similarly, prohibiting someone from immigrating to the United States (for instance) violates private property rights and freedom of association. An American’s freedom to hire an immigrant to work in the business she owns is protected by her private property rights as well as her freedom to associate with the immigrant and the immigrant’s freedom to associate with her. The same goes for decisions to reside or congregate with people from other countries.

  Freiman deals (briefly) with common libertarian objections to open borders. I'm not totally for open borders, but I'm not sure how to phrase my objections.

  ---

• Confused on the concept. You might have heard that the airlines are having difficulty with their schedules. The Antiplanner noted some sloppy language from the guy who's supposed to be taking care of this: Buttigieg “Forced” to Drive.

  Supporters of subsidies to Amtrak and mass transit often say that, due to the lack of such subsidies, Americans have been “forced to drive.” Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg experienced this earlier this week when his flight was cancelled and he was “forced to drive from Washington DC to New York.” If only the nation had spent billions of dollars subsidizing intercity passenger trains between DC and New York, he wouldn’t have been forced to drive.

  Wait a minute: the nation has spent billions of dollars subsidizing passenger trains between DC and New York. So why was Buttigieg forced to drive? For that matter, why was he flying if Amtrak’s high-speed Acela is so good?

  I wish someone had asked Pete about that. Unfortunately, he seems to keep himself pretty well insulated from impudent questioners.

  ---

• Something Pun Salad has been harping on. And it finally gets some respect from the jolly green progressives at WIRED, specifically Matt Simon: The Nightmare Politics and Sticky Science of Hacking the Climate.

  Simon briefly summarizes the two approaches to mitigating climate change via geoengineering: removal of atmospheric carbon and planetary albedo change (see Neal Stephenson's Termination Shock).

  Altering the climate will affect every nation on Earth. We all share one atmosphere. So who gets to make such a momentous decision? “One has to include the key different stakeholders that will be impacted in different ways. It is very easy to say this—it's extremely difficult to do it,” Pasztor says. “But that's what we need to do. And so the international community needs to start serious conversations about how one actually does that.”

  Yet it’s hard to imagine (ideally) getting buy-in from all the nations of the world, much less the competing political and cultural factions within those nations. The United Nations tried in 2019 with a resolution calling for more research of geoengineering, but the United States, Saudi Arabia, and Brazil blocked it. Even within a single country, this idea can be contentious. For example, last year Sweden rejected a small-scale test of stratospheric aerosols. It is, perhaps alarmingly, easier to imagine a rogue state from going it alone, or an eccentric billionaire taking it upon themselves.

  It's WIRED, so Simon embraces the only path acceptable to the green theologians: doing "what's necessary: dramatically slashing greenhouse gas emissions." Never mind that this will also have plenty of unintended consequences.

  Also I'm miffed that Simon failed to mention my favored climate change solution: artificial photosynthesis. Although that is imaginary right now, I don't see any theoretical reason that we (by which I mean: someone a lot smarter than I am) can't come up with molecular machines that take sunlight, water, and atmospheric carbon dioxide, producing oxygen and sugar. And doing it far more efficiently than our natural photosynthesizers, plants.

• Not a problem for me, but… it's such a great story about "Imposter Syndrome". I originally saw it on GeekPress, snipped from Neil Gaiman's blog: The Neil story.

  Some years ago, I was lucky enough invited to a gathering of great and good people: artists and scientists, writers and discoverers of things. And I felt that at any moment they would realise that I didn’t qualify to be there, among these people who had really done things.

  On my second or third night there, I was standing at the back of the hall, while a musical entertainment happened, and I started talking to a very nice, polite, elderly gentleman about several things, including our shared first name*. And then he pointed to the hall of people, and said words to the effect of, “I just look at all these people, and I think, what the heck am I doing here? They’ve made amazing things. I just went where I was sent.”

  And I said, “Yes. But you were the first man on the moon. I think that counts for something.”

  If that doesn't instantly cure you of Imposter Syndrome, nothing else will.

  ---

• Dobbs. I should say something about it. My own view was shaped, probably irrevocably, by Kevin D. Williamson last December.

  In its most basic version, the pro-life position is easy to understand, requiring no special intellectual training, no religious commitment, no mysticism, and nothing you’d really even call a philosophy. What we believe is that you don’t kill children who haven’t been born for the same reason you don’t kill children who have been born. That’s it. There isn’t some magical event that happens at some point during the pregnancy that transforms the unborn child from a meaningless lump of cells to a meaningful lump of cells. Modern, literate people don’t need the medieval doctrines of “quickening” or “ensoulment” (or some half-assed, modern, secular repackaging of those ancient superstitions) to know that the unborn child is an unborn child — we have biology, genetics, and, for those who need to see with their own eyes, imaging technology for that. The human organism that you hold in your arms six months after birth is the same organism it was six months before birth. It isn’t a different organism — it is only a little older. It is true that the child six months after conception isn’t fully developed — and neither is a 19-year-old. We have a natural, predictable, reasonably well-understood process of individual development. There is no magic moment, no mystical transformation, and the people who tell you that there is are peddling superstition and pseudoscience.

  I've bolded the key sentence. Unfortunately a little too long to fit on a bumper sticker or even a placard to wave over my head at a rally. If I was the sort of person to festoon my car with bumper stickers, or wave placards, which I'm not.

  However, I don't see how anyone can read that sentence and hold fast to their magical "pro-choice" opinions.

  ---

• Still, if you want to complicate things… there's a pretty good essay from Clark Neily and Jay Schweikert at Cato: The Hard Problem of Abortion Rights. It takes both sides (or, more accurately, all sides) seriously.

  […] a clear majority of self‐​professed libertarians describe themselves as “pro‐​choice.” But of course, abortion access is, at least debatably, not solely a question of personal bodily autonomy. The heart of the “pro‐​life” position is that unborn children—at some point during pregnancy, and perhaps as early as conception—become distinct rights‐​bearing entities entitled to moral consideration for their own sake. To those who start with such premises, “my body, my choice” is no more persuasive an argument than “my property, my choice” would have been to an abolitionist. Both slogans beg the relevant question, because whether it is just the pregnant woman’s body (or just the slaveowner’s property) is the precise issue under debate.

  To be sure, there are many sensible arguments for holding that fetuses are not entitled to the same quasi‐deontological moral consideration that other members of a polity are entitled to—for example, that they lack the sort of reflective self‐awareness that gives someone an independent sense of their own self and their future. Or that, at early stages of pregnancy, they lack the capacity to feel pain. Or that even granting that a fetus has a right to life, that doesn’t give it a right over the woman’s body.

  But does "it" have a right not to be killed? Ah well.

  ---

• Mama, don't let your babies grow up to be college students. The (recently renamed) Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) has a problem with the Biden Administration: Proposed Title IX regulations would roll back essential free speech, due process protections for college students.

  WASHINGTON, June 23, 2022 — Today, the Department of Education proposed new Title IX regulations that, if implemented, would gut essential free speech and due process rights for college students facing sexual misconduct allegations on campus. As required by federal law, the department must now solicit public feedback before the pending rules are finalized.

  The draft regulations are a significant departure from current Title IX regulations. Unlike the current regulations, adopted in 2020 after 18 months of review, the new regulations would roll back student rights by:

  • eliminating students’ right to a live hearing;
  • eliminating the right to cross-examination;
  • weakening students’ right to active legal representation;
  • allowing a single campus bureaucrat to serve as judge and jury;
  • rejecting the Supreme Court’s definition of sexual harassment in favor of a definition that threatens free speech rights;
  • requiring colleges and universities to use the weak “preponderance of the evidence” standard to determine guilt, unless they use a higher standard for other alleged misconduct.

  This is a throwback to the bad old days of the "Dear Colleague" letter. As I tediously remind blog readers every chance I get, I was there at Joe Biden's official unveiling of that policy. I was insufficiently alarmed, and too easy on Biden at the time.

  ---

• You can count them on the fingers of one hand. Robby Soave has further commentary on the policy pendulum swing: 5 Ways Biden's New Title IX Rules Will Eviscerate Due Process on Campus. Here's number one:

  1. The definition of sexual harassment is substantially broadened. The [previous Secretary of Education Betsy] DeVos rules had established two types of sexual harassment: "quid pro quo" harassment, in which an individual was asked to perform sexual favors in exchange for employment or some other favor; and "unwelcome conduct." Quid pro quo harassment only had to occur once to count as harassment, but unwelcome conduct harassment had to be "so severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive that it effectively denies a person equal access" to their education—a definition that came straight out of case law (Davis v. Monroe County Board of Education in particular).

  Under the new rules, the bar is much lower: [current Secretary of Education Miguel] Cardona would define unwelcome conduct harassment as "conduct that is sufficiently severe or pervasive, that, based on the totality of the circumstances and evaluated subjectively and objectively, denies or limits a person's ability to participate" in their education. This would open the door to Title IX investigations of speech that is sexual in nature and subjectively offensive to another person, without it needing to be severe and pervasive. The free speech implications are significant; legitimate classroom speech that was subjectively offensive and occurred repeatedly could now become a matter for the campus Title IX cop.

  Also see Robby's other commentary on the proposed rules here.

  ---

• In our defense, the SAT was way hard. Our Google LFOD News Alert rang for this story emitted by "Live 95.9" a Berkshires radio station: Think You're Smart? If You Live In Mass., Study Says You Might Be. It reports on a study by "PennStakes" that purports to rank states by the intelligence of their inhabitants.

  It turns out that high intelligence involves much more than just being well-read. It also involves things like where you live, where you spent your formative years growing up, where you went to school, and what type of schooling you had.

  PennStakes reports that after looking at and analyzing all the data, Massachusetts is the #1 Most Intelligent State in the country. Top Dog. Head of the Class, so to speak. The Bay State ranked #1 in several categories and ranked pretty high in others, to put it at the top.

  Out of a possible 100 for overall score, Massachusetts had an index score of 93.9. Massachusetts also ranked #1 in ACT scores, #1 in population percentage that have an advanced degree, and #2 in IQ rankings just behind the "Live Free or Die" state of New Hampshire.

  Yes, another "news" site that gratuitously invokes our state motto, even though it has nothing to do with the story.

  If you click through to the PennStakes study (why is a gambling site doing this?) you can the methodology. It's one of those made-up rankings where a number of statistics get weighted and combined to come up with an overall score. New Hampshire got downranked, despite our highest IQ, due to (for exaple) coming in at #30 on our stupid kids' SAT scores! Obviously unfair.

Hey, how about that SCOTUS? More on that tomorrow, I assume. Meanwhile…

• Kyle Smith noted the Center for Disease Control yet again failing to Control itself: The CDC Just Pushed Fake News on Covid Child Mortality.

  Only because “an internet rando is more knowledgeable and paying closer attention than our top scientists and doctors” do we know that the CDC just publicized false information about the deadliness of Covid-19 to small children. This misinformation, presented at a conference among top experts, went viral and was promoted, notes Substack columnist Matt Shapiro, by dozens of well-known physicians and other media commentators and specialists, including CNN mainstay Dr. Leana Wen and a former surgeon general of the United States. Wen’s promotion of the false claim is still up on Twitter as of 6:45 p.m. on June 22.

  The CDC displayed a slide at a conference that falsely claimed Covid-19 was the fourth or fifth leading cause of death for all pediatric age groups. A writer who is publicly known only by the name Kelley immediately saw that the claim was “completely and utterly false.” Among several errors, which are so blatant as to seem like intentional massaging of the numbers, Kelley discovered that all data from a 26-month period were being crammed into one year, and that deaths were attributed to Covid, regardless of whether the death was caused by Covid, if the disease was mentioned on the death certificate. The CDC slide, which cited a pre-publication British study that is now being re-examined, also bumped up the numbers by altering the definition of pediatric (ordinarily understood to mean under 18) to include 18- and 19-year-olds.

  I just finished reading The Constitution of Truth by Jonathan Rauch, where he firmly placed the CDC among the so-called "reality-based community". I'm sure that will be fixed in the second edition.

  ---

• Also members of Rauch's "reality-based community"‥ would be the diligent Carrie Nations of the FDA. Elizabeth Nolan Brown notes the likely effect of their latest hijinx: Mandating Low-Nicotine Cigarettes Could Make Smoking More Dangerous.

  The Biden administration continues its misguided war on nicotine. On Tuesday, the administration revealed plans to require cigarette makers to severely cut the amount of nicotine in their products. A proposed rule change "would establish a maximum nicotine level in cigarettes and certain finished tobacco products." The idea, it says, is to make cigarettes less addictive.

  Nicotine is the substance in cigarettes that makes them physically addictive. But nicotine itself isn't what makes cigarettes so dangerous. (Some scientists "wonder if a daily dose could be as benign as the caffeine many of us get from a morning coffee," notes Scientific American.) It's the other ingredients in cigarettes, and the byproducts of combustion, that make smoking cigarettes so bad for you.

  This is one reason why the war on vaping is so stupid, and also speaks to the half-baked premises of the Biden administration's latest anti-smoking plan.

  It is odd indeed, to see the increased legalized use of "recreational" THC as opposed to the ramped-up prohibitions on nicotine.

  ---

• Freddie de Boer, incipient libertarian. I know, he's a self-admitted Marxist. But when he writes articles like this, how long can that last, realistically: Ah, Carceral Liberalism.

  Ten years ago, let’s say fifteen to be safe, if you saw an essay titled “Consequences are Good, Actually,” you might naturally assume that it came from the political right. Conservatives, after all, believe in law and order, retributive justice, and the God of the Old Testament. But nowadays, it’s liberals who constantly call for consequences, liberals who sneer at the concept of forgiveness, liberals who stand for a Manichean worldview that permits no deviation from white-hat/black-hat morality. And so in that linked piece OG carceral feminist Jessica Valenti insists that the object of her ire deserves only hellfire, and this is quite in keeping with the contemporary progressive id in 2022. Valenti is reacting specifically to a New York magazine cover story about a teenager who shared nude photos of his girlfriend and the social consequences that followed for him and others. But she is reacting as she and her liberal peers react to everything: “someone has to burn.” She just does so in the vocabulary of a disapproving pre-K teacher.

  We’ve spent the past two years with the left-of-center world debating, and largely endorsing, quite radical ideas about ending policing and prisons. This would seem to suggest a certain predisposition to forgiveness and equanimity in human affairs, a communal understanding that life is complicated, all of us are sinners, and there but for the grace of God go we. But as the various groans about the New York piece show, the urge to defund the police etc. is really much less about a particular ethic of caring and much more about simply nominating a communally-approved target for progressive anger. It happens that the abstract category “the cops” is a good thing for people to target, but the broader point is that most liberal criminal justice reform energy isn’t derived at all from a desire to be more compassionate and understanding but simply to have a new designated hate object. And this condition is unhealthy, is my feeling. Because forgiveness is good and absolutely central to the left-wing conception of the world.

  At a certain point, Freddie might realize that forgiveness in the hands of the state is never going to work out the way he expects.

  ---

• I also recently read The Quick Fix by journalist Jesse Singal. (My report here.) It's a moderate takedown of psychological fads, written in measured, yet devastating, tone.

  When he's not writing books, however, Singal can be hilarious, immoderate, and (still) devastating. Case in point from his substack: I Would Like To Thank Not Only The David Roberts, But All The David Robertses Out There. Background: a recent New York Times article from Emily Bazelon was a remarkably well-researched and balanced report on the controversy over "youth gender medicine". Basically, is it full speed ahead with snipping and hormones, or should we hang back on that?

  Balance is doubleplusungood for some. And one of those people freaked.

  Overall, I believed Bazelon’s piece to be a highly competent, well-executed treatment of an impossibly fraught subject.

  Believed.

  Then I came across David Roberts’ tweets. Roberts is a journalist who usually focuses on energy and the environment — he’s worked for The Grist and Vox, and like apparently everyone else, he now has a newsletter. Forever ago I interviewed him about his decision to take a yearlong break from social media because he didn’t like what all that time online was doing to him (a subject that’s definitely not relevant to this piece, nope, not at all).

  I don’t believe Roberts has ever written anything about youth gender dysphoria, if Google is any indication — this doesn’t appear to be an area of particular interest for him. And yet he issued a searing public condemnation of Bazelon. “The wild thing about this is that @emilybazelon is a great journalist on other topics,” he tweeted in response to Michael Hobbes (who we shan’t be discussing today), making sure to tag her. “Something about this just absolutely breaks people’s brains.” (Note that right around when I was finishing up this piece, a bunch of the tweets I’m going to be referencing disappeared, apparently deleted by Roberts. They were all live earlier today. I tried to archive them beforehand using archiv.ph but ran into some technical difficulties. Either way, I have screenshots of them — apologies if the archived links don’t work. It doesn’t look like Roberts offered any explanation for why he deleted the tweets, which had been up for almost a week, but if he does say anything I’ll update the piece here.)

  That's enough of an excerpt; kids, if you want to see how it's done, click on through.

  ---

• Easy headline template for the next few years: "Biden's Demagoguery on       ". Today's instance is from Jonathan A. Lesser: Biden's Demagoguery on Gas Prices.

  Some politicians wear their economic illiteracy as a badge of honor. But President Biden’s economic illiteracy, together with his demagoguery about greedy oil companies, stands to make the nation’s economic situation far worse.

  When Biden took office in January 2021, the average U.S. price for a gallon of gasoline was $2.25 per gallon. According to the Energy Information Administration, the average U.S. price this week is just over $5 per gallon, or 120 percent higher.

  As prices have risen, the administration has changed its strategy. First, it ignored inflation, dismissing it as a temporary blip. As prices kept going up, Biden ordered releases from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, claiming that the move would ease inflation at the pump. Then he implored Saudi Arabia to boost production, while the Department of the Interior continued to slow-walk new oil and gas leases on federal lands and cancelled all new leases in the Gulf of Mexico.

  Now Biden is threatening oil companies. In a recent speech, he claimed that Exxon-Mobil “made more money than God this year.” In a series of letters to oil CEOS, the president claims that the companies can immediately increase output from their refineries, seemingly implying that they are deliberately restricting output. “Your companies and others have an opportunity to take immediate actions to increase the supply of gasoline, diesel and other refined product you are producing,” Biden wrote. He has tried this approach before, asking the Federal Trade Commission to investigate collusion and price-gouging by retail gasoline stations. The FTC has found no such evidence.

  Really, is it only a matter of time before Biden goes full Leviticus 16 to address our country's woes? I think that would be preferable; a few slaughtered animals would be a small price to pay.

  ---

• I like George Harrison's version better. Matt Ribel has the glum news: Here Comes the Sun—to End Civilization.

  To a photon, the sun is like a crowded nightclub. It’s 27 million degrees inside and packed with excited bodies—helium atoms fusing, nuclei colliding, positrons sneaking off with neutrinos. When the photon heads for the exit, the journey there will take, on average, 100,000 years. (There’s no quick way to jostle past 10 septillion dancers, even if you do move at the speed of light.) Once at the surface, the photon might set off solo into the night. Or, if it emerges in the wrong place at the wrong time, it might find itself stuck inside a coronal mass ejection, a mob of charged particles with the power to upend civilizations.

  The description of the 1859 "Carrington Event":

  Electrical current raced through the sky over the western hemisphere. A typical bolt of lightning registers 30,000 amperes. This geomagnetic storm registered in the millions. As the clock struck midnight in New York City, the sky turned scarlet, shot through with plumes of yellow and orange. Fearful crowds gathered in the streets. Over the continental divide, a bright-white midnight aurora roused a group of Rocky Mountain laborers; they assumed morning had arrived and began to cook breakfast. In Washington, DC, sparks leaped from a telegraph operator’s forehead to his switchboard as his equipment suddenly magnetized. Vast sections of the nascent telegraph system overheated and shut down.

  It sounds as if a tinfoil hat might not be enough protection.

  But if it happens, I'm sure President Biden will find some way to blame Big Oil.

This is a fine book, except that, apparently, Donald Trump broke the author's brain. And (as a result) it's strident, unbalanced, and didactic when it should be mellow, even-handed and persuasive. Still it makes numerous good points.

Things start well, with Rauch promising to offer a defense of "the three great liberal social systems—economic, political, and epistemic". I think it's accurate to use the three-legged stool metaphor here: break one of those legs, and the entire project becomes unstable and likely to collapse. And, surprise, that may be where we're at today.

(Which brings me to a major problem with the book: there's little if anything here about the economic leg of the stool. Adam Smith gets a few mentions, but no Hayek, Mises, or Friedman. Politics and epistemology get Rauch's full respect, but he wusses out on defending economic liberalism, i.e., free-market capitalism.)

Rauch goes to great length to stress the communal nature of rational discourse; it doesn't, indeed it can't, function in a vacuum. It requires groups of thinkers to learn from each other, argue with, and point each other to results that more closely adhere to reality.

Rauch calls this group the "reality-based community". (A term he really overuses.) And he deems the not-quite-formal rules the community follows the "Constitution of Knowledge" (also overused). He lists the "common cores" that the RBC follows: fallibilism (we could be wrong), objectivity, exclusivity (don't let the barbarians inside the gates), disconfirmation, accountability.

It's hard to argue with any of that. And if you need to be told about it, Rauch's book is pretty good for that. And his dissection of "cancel culture" is pretty good.

Where it falls down is Rauch's political bias. Goodness knows I'm not a Trump fan, but Rauch sees him as uniquely evil, instead of yet another narcissistic bullshit populist pol. That's bad enough, but it slops over into other discussions. He points with horror (page 178) that "Republicans are twice as likely as Democrats to believe the COVID-19 virus was intentionally created in a lab." Um, that's actually pretty credible, despite the 2021 efforts to debunk it.

Both Peter Strozk (p. 241) and Lisa Page (p. 134) are cited approvingly as RBC members; Rauch fails to mention that they were fired from the FBI, but not after diligently pumping the "Russiagate" nothingburger.

Rauch talks about (p. 247) Middlebury College students who were "criticized for disrupting a speech by a conservative scholar", implying that this was an example of kids expressing "their moral values with passion and sometimes bravery". As most people who were paying attention know, the "conservative speaker" was Charles Murray, and the "passion" involved a left-leaning professor who defended Murray winding up in a neck brace. Again, Rauch omits relevant information.

So while the good stuff here is good, I wouldn't recommend it as your sole guide to rationality.

We have a theme today. See if you can guess what it is…

• I don't like taxes any more than you do, but… Christian Britschgi says, correctly: The Gas Tax Makes Sense. So, naturally…

  The gas tax is the one good tax, so it makes sense that it would also be the only one that President Joe Biden is considering suspending.

  "I hope I have a decision based on data I'm looking for by the end of the week," the president told reporters on Monday on whether he'd support a federal gas tax holiday. Suspending the 18-cent per gallon federal tax on gas would obviously require some votes in Congress. Biden's final "decision" on whether to call for that congressional action really just boils down to whether he thinks it's politically prudent. [Note: that "decision" was announced yesterday.]

  […]

  Fuel taxes paid by motorists are collected in the federal Highway Trust Fund, which is then spent building and maintaining the roads and bridges those same drivers use. The federal gas taxes, excluding the tax on diesel, make up about 60 percent of tax revenue dedicated to the Highway Trust Fund.

  Fairness demands charging drivers for the roads. The only alternative would be to require nonmotorists to subsidize driving infrastructure for them.

  A user fee-like fuel tax also keeps road spending in line with demand for roads. It's harder to fund bridges to nowhere if people's fuel consumption, and the taxes they pay on it, aren't generating enough revenue for new projects.

  Suspending the gas tax, therefore, makes road spending less fair and less efficient. It would also be fiscally costly. Road construction and maintenance don't become free just because gas prices are high. Suspending the gas tax only gives road users a break from paying for it.

  So Biden's proposal is unfair, inefficient, and fiscally bad. Anything else?

  [Note for New Hampshire and Arizona residents: our states' senators make a cameo appearance in Britschgi's article, in that they were early with this bad idea. That's not a compliment.]

  ---

• Unfortunately, they're not the birds you want killed. Scott Sumner notes the proposal is Killing 4 birds with one stone.

  Suppose that you wish to achieve the following 4 objectives:

  1. Helping Vladimir Putin win the war in Ukraine.
  2. Worsening global warming.
  3. Worsening the budget deficit.
  4. Enriching oil refiners at a time when supply is constrained and they are already earning extraordinary profits.

  What is the most effective way of doing all four?  On[e] option would be to temporarily end the federal gas tax.

  I don’t actually believe that these are the reasons why President Biden recently floated this idea. I think we underrate the extent that public policies reflect ignorance of basic economic theory. Whether the ignorance lies with the voters, the policymakers, or both is another question. But people who analyze politics from a “who gains” perspective are often missing the fact that the world is complicated, and not all public policies help the intended beneficiaries.

  Bottom line: "If you decide to kill 4 birds with one stone, make sure that the 4 birds are not prized specimens in the local zoo."

  ---

• A small overlap here. Harvard econ prof Greg Mankiw offers Three Reasons Why a Gas Tax Holiday is a Bad Idea.

  1. Putting more money in peoples' pockets with any kind of tax cut would increase aggregate demand. It would thereby undermine the Fed's program to get inflation under control.
  2. The incidence of the tax cut would fall partly on producers rather than consumers, depending on the elasticities of supply and demand. If it is true that refiners are near capacity, as reports suggest, then supply is relatively inelastic. That means the tax reduction would mainly benefit producers.
  3. Given all the externalities associated with driving (climate change, congestion, accidents), the existing gasoline tax is below the optimal Pigovian level. Reducing it would move the tax system in a less efficient direction, That is, it would encourage people to drive more, exacerbating the negative externalities.

  Never mind the economics, professor. Can't you see that we've got an election coming up in (as I type) 137 days? We've gotta protect our phony baloney jobs!

  ---

• Apparently it wasn't powered renewably. Eric Boehm reports that it was all for naught: Biden's Gas Tax Holiday Plan Already Running on Empty.

  In the hours before President Joe Biden held a press conference to officially call on Congress to approve a 90-day federal gas tax holiday, several prominent members of the president's own party effectively killed the idea.

  Rep. Peter DeFazio (D–Ore.), chairman of the House Transportation Committee, released a statement Wednesday morning calling the idea "well-intentioned" but full of problems. Chief among them is the fact that suspending the gas tax for 90 days would blow a $10 billion hole in the federal Highway Trust Fund, for which the gas tax acts as a user fee.

  Over in the Senate, the crucial swing vote of Sen. Joe Manchin (D–W.Va.) once again swung against Biden. "To do that and put another hole in the budget is something that is very concerning to me," Manchin told ABC News just before Biden's speech. "I'm not a yes right now, that's for sure."

  Manchin also nodded to political reality; Biden's proposal suspends the tax until the end of September, at which point we'll be slightly over a month before Election Day. Is Congress really going to reimpose a tax that close to Election Day?

  ---

• But just a reminder… from Drew Cline at the Josiah Bartlett Center: Government manipulation of energy markets is a cause of, not a solution to, high energy prices. Skipping down to the local angle:

  In New Hampshire, Democratic politicians are blaming the Legislature and the governor for high energy prices, claiming that Republicans failed to pass a slate of renewable energy bills to reduce the state’s reliance on fossil fuels.

  But they haven’t cited a single bill that would have lowered gas, oil or electricity prices this summer.

  A story about supposed “legislative inaction” on clean energy published in the New Hampshire Bulletin listed eight bills that were supposed to help deliver us from our current reliance on fossil fuels. Five of the featured bills have passed, which is not something customarily associated with “inaction.”

  Not one of the five would have had any effect on current energy prices. One actually delays the reduction of Eversource electricity rates for a year and keeps the ratepayer-subsidized Burgess Biomass plant open. The plant buys wood pulp at above-market rates and has already cost Eversource ratepayers an extra $150 million for electricity.

  Click through for details on the one honest thing the Feds could do to help a bit: Repeal the Jones Act.

• We're gonna need a bigger house. An amusing blurb from the July Reason: Landmark Shark Attack (as seen in our Getty Image du Jour).

  In 1986, Bill Heine installed a sculpture of a 25-foot shark crashing through the roof of his home in Oxford, England, without getting the approval of local planning officials. His son, Magnus Hanson-Heine, said his father didn't believe the government should be able to decide what art people should see. After spending years trying to get it removed, the local council has declared the shark a protected landmark—against the wishes of Hanson-Heine, who now owns the house.

  It's said that statists want to make everything either prohibited or mandatory. That's probably inaccurate, but it's pretty funny how quickly things go from "must go" to "must stay".

  I wonder what the going rate is for roof-shark installation here in Rollinsford?

  ---

• GOSPLAN comes to America. Eric Boehm notes something that might get him sent to the Gulag: The Defense Production Act Has Become a License for Central Planning.

  President Donald Trump was never one with high regard for the limits of his executive authority. Yet when people first floated the idea of using the 1950 Defense Production Act (DPA) to force private sector businesses to prioritize orders from the federal government for masks, ventilators, and other gear, the idea gave Trump a moment's pause.

  "We're a country not based on nationalizing our business," Trump said at a March 2020 press conference. "Call a person over in Venezuela; ask them how did nationalization of their businesses work out. Not too well."

  It didn't last, and Trump did eventually sign a declaration invoking the DPA. But if you think it was a stretch to respond to a pandemic with a law designed to ensure the military can access supplies during wartime, wait 'til you find out the ways Trump's successor has been using it.

  The production of vaccines? Check.

  Rare minerals needed for electric car batteries? Check.

  Baby formula? Check—despite the role that his own government played in creating that shortage in the first place.

  Solar panels, heat pumps, and…home insulation? Check, check, and check.

  I note there seems to be an acute shortage of Ocean Spray Cran-Apple sixpacks of 10-ounce bottles. What's up with that, Joe?

  ---

• Just as long as he stays off the bike. Kevin D. Williamson adopts a contrarian stance: Joe Biden Should Take More Vacations.

  Joe Biden makes it too easy for the comedians: Obviously hoping to dispel concerns about his age and his fitness for the presidency, President Biden took a bicycle ride and cruised over to a crowd of gawkers, and then promptly tipped over and fell on his patootie. Biden has long been defensive about fitness — you’ll remember him challenging that random guy in Iowa to a push-up contest. That’s not how you fix your image, and, at Biden’s age, fixing his image is probably a foolish thing to try, anyway.

  Biden’s most bitter critics have a litany: He doesn’t do evening events, he goes home to Delaware every weekend to rest up, etc. Scandalous, I’m sure.

  But those are the things I like about Biden. Almost the only things I like about him.

  Biden’s is a special case, because he is so very old and so very manifestly frail, but criticizing presidents for their leisure time has become part of the ritual of the imperator cult, and younger, more robust men have been criticized for their down time and their recreation. Before there was Biden, there was Donald Trump and his golf and “executive time,” before Trump it was Barack Obama and his vacation days, and before that it was George W. Bush and his vacation days. Trump on the links, Obama at Martha’s Vineyard, Bush at the ranch, and Biden in Delaware. I’ve been to Delaware, and I think I’d rather spend the weekend in Martha’s Vineyard or clearing brush in the hot Texas sun with W. Your preferences may vary.

  Obama had his moment when he fessed up about his "stimulus" bill: "Shovel-Ready Was Not As Shovel-Ready As We Expected." What would be the Biden equivalent: "It turns out Presidents can't really do much about inflation once it's started. Sorry."

  ---

• You have to realize this is really important to race hucksters. David Bernstein has a book coming out on the ways Your Federal Government pigeonholes people by race and ethnicity. He casts a cold eye on the latest news: The Biden Administration Considers Whether Hispanic/Latino Should Be A Racial, Not Ethnic, Classification.

  The AP reports that the Biden administration is considering changes to official OMB racial and ethnic classifications. The most prominent proposals are to change the Hispanic/Latino category from an ethnic to a racial category, and to add a new MENA (Middle Eastern and North African) category. […]

  As discussed in my forthcoming book, when the federal Office of Management and Budget invented the Hispanic category-- Latino was not added until twenty years later--in the late 1970s, it was subject to several controversies. First, there was the question of what to name this novel classification--previously, what we now call "Hispanics" were generally either considered generically white by the federal government, or listed separately as Mexican, Puerto Rican, and sometimes Cuban. In the early 1970s, the government started to use classifications like "Spanish-speaking" or "Spanish-surnamed," but these were ultimately deemed inadequate and imprecise for rather obvious reasons. Hispanic was chosen even though at the time few people thought of themselvse as "Hispanic."

  Second, there was controversy over how to define the category. Should it include white people of Spanish descent? (Yes!) Should the American Indian category instead be "Original Peoples of the Western Hemisphere" to include Latinos of indigenous origin? (No!) Should the Hispanic classification be considered a race or an ethnicity? (Ethnicity!) And should forms asking about race and ethnicity include "Hispanic" as an alternative to white, black, Asian, or American Indian, or should Hispanic identity be asked about separately from the racial classifications? (At first, institutions were given the option of doing either, but in 1997 they were ordered to ask about Hispanic ethnicity separately; it took the Department of Education and the EEOC another decade to comply. The SBA's guidance on disadvantaged business enterprises still depicts Hispanic as a racial category.)

  It's an odious practice that (nevertheless) means political power and preferential treatment. Part of the problem were "white Hispanics"; with the onus that attaches to whiteness these days, who needs that?

  ---

• Good luck with the Rona, Tony. Jon Miltimore tells us: Why It Matters That Fauci Got Covid-19.

  Writing at the Brownstone Institute, Jeffrey Tucker points to an August 2020 Cell article written by Fauci wherein the doctor explains his ideological vision, which rings of Rousseauian idealism.

  “Living in greater harmony with nature will require changes in human behavior as well as other radical changes that may take decades to achieve: rebuilding the infrastructures of human existence, from cities to homes to workplaces, to water and sewer systems, to recreational and gatherings venues.

  In such a transformation we will need to prioritize changes in those human behaviors that constitute risks for the emergence of infectious diseases. Chief among them are reducing crowding at home, work, and in public places as well as minimizing environmental perturbations such as deforestation, intense urbanization, and intensive animal farming.”

  The article, Tucker points out, makes it clear Fauci’s pandemic response was not just about Covid, but a larger technocratic revolution that was hard to define—and one Americans had not signed up for.

  Reference is made to Hayek's The Fatal Conceit. Fauci has conceit out the wazoo, but I hope it's not literally fatal.

In violation of my normal reading rules, I checked out Anthony Horowitz's second book in this series, The Sentence is Death, back in 2020. It was good! So when I noticed that he'd put a third book out in the series, I… decided to go back and read this first one, from back in 2018. And it is also good.

It's very British, putting me in mind of Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie: an unlikely plot, a raft of suspects, red herrings galore. But the series gimmick is (surprisingly) effective: the narrator is named "Anthony Horowitz", writer and creator of TV shows, juvenile fantasy books, some Sherlock Holmes and James Bond novels. (He's prolific.) In other words, it's a deliberate blur between actual author Anthony and fictional narrator Anthony.

In this first book, Anthony meets ex-cop Hawthorne, an unpleasant but gifted investigator. They make an uneasy deal: Hawthorne investigates a murder, Anthony writes a book about it, they split the proceeds 50-50. Sort of a Watson/Holmes relationship.

And their first murder is a doozy: an aging wealthy widow visits an undertaker to make arrangements for her funeral. Then later that very day, she's strangled in her own home. Whodunit? Well, as noted, suspects are legion. (I usually despise this, because my aging brain can't keep all those characters straight. But Horowitz does an excellent job of introducing and distinguishing them relatively slowly.) The investigation proceeds with ongoing friction between Horowitz and Hawthorne, and eventually builds to a thrilling and surprising climax, and a satisfying ending.

Mrs. Salad and I are currently working through the episodes of Horowitz's Foyle's War on Britbox. Foyle is a police detective investigating English crimes during WWII. We like it a lot. The narrator-Anthony in this book recounts an anecdote about the actor playing Foyle, Michael Kitchen, involving his demand about Foyle's interrogation technique. Without spoilers, I read it to my wife, and it's something neither one of us had noticed, we're not sure it's true, but we'll be paying more attention as we watch our next episodes.

• You can't shout "Nazi" in a crowded Newsweek, or something. Dylan Croll recounts some history: Understanding MIT’s Free Speech Crisis.

  For the past decade the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has hosted a public lecture on climate science. To be invited to give “the Carlson Lecture” is an honor, an acknowledgment of the work of top scientists. Past lecturers have spoken on topics ranging from “climate change and deep-sea corals” to “climate change and armadillos.” In October 2020, MIT invited professor Dorian Abbot, a rising star in the field. He was to talk about “Climate and the potential for life on other planets.”

  Professors Daniel Rothman and Kerry Emanuel, the co-founders of the Lorenz Center, MIT’s climate research center, had previously invited Abbot, a tenured professor of geophysics at the University of Chicago, to speak at MIT. “Dorian had come months earlier to give a department colloquium, and it had been very successful,” Rothman would later recall, “so we thought he’d be a great Carlson Lecture speaker.”  

  But then, nearly two years after he’d first accepted MIT’s invitation (the event was delayed by a year due to the pandemic) and about a month before he was scheduled to arrive in Cambridge, Abbot’s name appeared in Newsweek, in a co-authored opinion piece titled “The Diversity Problem on Campus.” Abbot and Stanford professor Ivan Marinovic wrote that they had grown concerned by what they saw as increasing illiberalism on college campuses. Arguing that admission should be based exclusively on merit, they criticized affirmative action and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) practices that had become common at American universities. They compared such efforts to Nazi Germany:

  Ninety years ago, Germany had the best universities in the world. Then an ideological regime obsessed with race came to power and drove many of the best scholars out, gutting the faculties and leading to sustained decay that German universities never fully recovered from. We should view this as a warning of the consequences of viewing group membership as more important than merit and correct our course before it’s too late.     

  Well, we know what happened next: Irate people took to Twittering. And the department chair cancelled the upcoming Carlson lecture, but as a "compromise" offered to have Abbot come talk to students a few months later.

  It's a pretty good history, taking "both sides" arguments, marred only by a reference to "free-speech fundamentalists". Also known as "people with principles".

  ---

• I miss the good old days when "CRT" only stood for "Cathode Ray Tube". Stanley Kurtz sends up a warning flare: Bogus ‘Civics’ Bill Will Push CRT on States. And that would be Critical Race Theory, not cathode ray tubes.

  The misleadingly named “Civics Secures Democracy Act” (CSDA) — just now reintroduced in Congress — will allow the Biden administration to push Critical Race Theory (CRT) on every public school in the country. Over a six-year period, this $6 billion pot of competitive grant money will create a de facto national curriculum — just like Common Core. States desperate to tap into the federal gravy train will have to tailor their civics and history grant proposals to the Biden administration’s liking. And abundant evidence shows that Biden’s Education Department is pushing CRT. So why are some Republican senators eager to help Biden spread CRT? I can’t think of a quicker way to devastate Republican enthusiasm just before the midterms.

  It doesn’t matter that federal law and the bill itself disclaim the authority to formally impose a curriculum on the states. The strings that Biden’s bureaucrats will attach to these massive federal grants will suffice to lure states into adopting CRT. The left-leaning bureaucrats who staff education departments even in red states already favor CRT (those bureaucrats will write the grant applications and divvy up the money). And Biden long ago signaled his intention to prioritize applications that promise CRT.

  The congress.gov page for the reintroduced bill is here.

  ---

• We must Do Something™. And this is Something. Therefore… Jeff Jacoby casts a skeptical eye on the latest panacea: 'Red-flag' laws raise some red flags.

  An enduring challenge in any free society is to strike the right balance between liberty and security — to protect the safety of the public while respecting the rights of citizens. The tension between individual freedom and communal security is as old as the American republic. Often, the infringements on liberty have been egregious: Think of the Alien and Sedition Acts, the Palmer Raids following World War I, and the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II.

  Red-flag laws, also referred to as "extreme risk protection orders," offer a way, in theory, to get the balance right: to temporarily keep guns away from disturbed and antisocial individuals who show signs of being potential killers without trampling on the Second Amendment rights of tens of millions of law-abiding gun owners.

  The record to date, however, suggests that that is much easier said than done.

  The key problem is that the warning signs that mass shooters display — the "red flags" — are shared by countless people who would never use a gun to hurt anyone. Ross Douthat, reflecting on school shootings in his New York Times column, observes that "people drawn to this kind of terrorism are overwhelmingly of a type — young, troubled, socially awkward men." But there are millions of American men who are young, troubled, and socially awkward, and only the tiniest fraction of them will ever be tempted by thoughts of homicidal mayhem.

  I'm pretty sure that the only thing the pols really care about is getting reelected, and they think that can be accomplished by claiming to have Done Something™. Doesn't matter whether that Something works or not.

  ---

• California circling the drain. Leor Sapir is dismayed by The Assault on Children’s Psyches.

  Patricia (a pseudonym) is the mother of a teenage girl who in recent years has come to identify as transgender. She lives in California, considers herself progressive, votes Democrat, and leads a group for parents of children with rapid onset gender dysphoria (ROGD)—that is, youth who suddenly experience distress with their bodies and believe that undergoing medical “transition” will make them whole again. When I spoke to her recently, she recounted how her daughter’s at-first-lesbian and then trans identity emerged in response to feelings of shame about being white.

  I have since spoken to more than a dozen ROGD parents and parent-group leaders who tell a similar story. Their schools compulsively tell their children how awful it is to be white, how white people enjoy unearned “privilege,” how they benefit from “systems” put in place by and for white people for the sole purpose of oppressing “people of color.” Plagued by guilt, the children—almost all of them girls—rush to the sanctuary of “LGBTQ+” identity. Once there, they are catapulted into hero status. According to Patricia, some teachers at her daughter’s school are more forgiving toward “queer” and “trans” kids who hand in their homework late.

  Parents who say "hey, wait a minute" can find themselves under scrutiny by Child Protective Services for being "abusive".

  ---

• "Give me chastity and continency, only not yet." Modern-day St. Augustines are in the crosshairs of Bjørn Lomborg: The Rich World’s Climate Hypocrisy.

  The developed world’s response to the global energy crisis has put its hypocritical attitude toward fossil fuels on display. Wealthy countries admonish developing ones to use renewable energy. Last month the Group of Seven went so far as to announce they would no longer fund fossil-fuel development abroad. Meanwhile, Europe and the U.S. are begging Arab nations to expand oil production. Germany is reopening coal power plants, and Spain and Italy are spending big on African gas production. So many European countries have asked Botswana to mine more coal that the nation will more than double its exports.

  The developed world became wealthy through the pervasive use of fossil fuels, which still overwhelmingly power most of its economies. Solar and wind power aren’t reliable, simply because there are nights, clouds and still days. Improving battery storage won’t help much: There are enough batteries in the world today only to power global average electricity consumption for 75 seconds. Even though the supply is being scaled up rapidly, by 2030 the world’s batteries would still cover less than 11 minutes. Every German winter, when solar output is at its minimum, there is near-zero wind energy available for at least five days—or more than 7,000 minutes.

  That's a free WSJ link, so check it out. Forcing poor countries to avoid fossil fuels for electricity is condemning them to ongoing poverty. But it makes us feel better about ourselves, so …

Mr. Ramirez's picture is worth (at least) a thousand words…

• But if you prefer words… Kevin D. Williamson has them: Here Comes Fiscal Armageddon.

  Fiscal Armageddon is coming — eventually. It is necessary not to be an alarmist about that, but equally necessary not to be naïve about it.

  Fiscal Armageddon is what will happen when the U.S. government’s debt load exceeds its ability to comfortably service that debt. The U.S. government will face a budgetary crisis, possibly a sudden one, and its response to that crisis will create ripples — or a tsunami — across the world economy. How bad it is and how Washington responds will determine the difference between a painful but manageable economic setback and a global catastrophe.

  KDW goes through the likely (and unlikely) scenarios. Back in 2013, he wrote a book titled The End Is Near and It's Going to Be Awesome; at the time, I thought his argument for "it's going to be awesome" was weak. He may have changed his mind, because the article doesn't make the possible outcomes to be awesome at all.

  Or I could be wrong about his use of "awesome". The Google provides a dictionary definition:

  extremely impressive or daunting; inspiring great admiration, apprehension, or fear.
  "the awesome power of the atomic bomb"

  So yeah, maybe in that last sense.

  I was going to leave a comment to that effect on the article, but it already has (as I type) 590 comments, so no.

  ---

• Gravity sucks, Joe. Depending on your media sources, you may have heard about President Wheezy's close encounter with the asphalt last Saturday. Stephen L. Miller observes disparate treatment: Biden’s Bike Crash Isn’t About Him. It’s About the Media.

  And then there is the matter of the national media, which is what actually matters when it comes to public perception of the president’s robustness. You see, national media outlets and some (not all) journalists made a sport of poking former President Donald Trump as a way of trolling him back for his questions about Hillary Clinton’s health in 2016. The problem for them is when they excuse Biden’s follies.

  By doing so, they widen the credibility gap that is as deep and wide as the Grand Canyon with the public.

  “Trump’s Halting Walk Down Ramp Raises New Health Questions” shouted The New York Times headline in June 2020 after he gave a speech at West Point. The story authored by favorite Trump media foil Maggie Haberman raised questions about Trump’s own health. CNN’s Chris Cillizza wrote, “Why the Donald Trump-West Point ramp story actually matters,” citing Trump’s advanced age. “The President turned 74 on Sunday. He is the oldest person ever elected to a first term in the White House. Earlier this month, the White House released a memo on the results of Trump’s annual physical that only briefly outlined the overall picture of his health (height, weight, etc.).”

  The media are hoping your memory isn't as long as Miller's.

  ---

• Try to answer the question honestly. At his substack, Michael Huemer offers a poser: Who Cares About Diversity?

  All across the Academy, schools are requiring “Diversity Statements” as a condition for new hires. Everyone has to submit a statement explaining how they are going to contribute to “diversity”. What you’re supposed to do in these, and what everyone damn well knows you’re supposed to do, is (i) talk about your race, gender, and other “identity group” traits that it would be illegal for the university to explicitly ask you about, and (ii) talk about your activism on behalf of left-wing identity politics. Note: If you write a statement merely explaining how you will scrupulously avoid discriminating, or explaining how you will contribute to intellectual diversity, your application will be tossed in the trash. No university will say this out loud (yet?), but, again, everyone knows that.

  These Diversity Statements, as a recent commentator notes, are the secular version of the Statements of Faith long used by religious schools (www.insidehighered.com/views/2022/05/23/diversity-statements-are-new-faith-statements-opinion).

  You can see the most obvious problems with this – (a) racial, gender, and similar forms of discrimination are wrong, (b) enforced ideological conformity is poison to any institution of education or research. There’s a lot to be said about those two obvious problems, but I won’t say it now. Because what I want to start with right now is this question: Who actually values diversity?

  My claim: Most proponents of “diversity” do not value diversity. In fact, they are passionately against diversity.

  What follows is a tour de force analysis. Huemer notes SCOTUS Justice Lewis Powell's 1978 Bakke opinion that offered a thin reed for otherwise illegal racial quotas if it could be argued that they served a "compelling state interest" in having a "diverse student body".

  Universities eagerly, but dishonestly, grabbed onto that reed. "Yeah, that's what we're doing! Diversity! Yay!"

  Huemer's bottom line:

  "…the Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity movement is Orwellian: it's the opposite of what it says it is. “Diversity, inclusion, and equity” refers to ideological uniformity, exclusion, and discrimination."

  ---

• Does socialism liberate workers from domination? If you were wondering about that, Chris Freiman has the answer for you: Socialism Doesn’t Liberate Workers from Domination.

  Capitalism makes workers rich. But socialists worry about the ways in which capitalism affects workers’ freedom. Here’s Corey Robin defending socialism in the New York Times:

  The socialist argument against capitalism isn’t that it makes us poor. It’s that it makes us unfree. When my well-being depends upon your whim, when the basic needs of life compel submission to the market and subjugation at work, we live not in freedom but in domination. Socialists want to end that domination: to establish freedom from rule by the boss, from the need to smile for the sake of a sale, from the obligation to sell for the sake of survival.

  Writing in Jacobin, Ben Burgis argues that libertarians implausibly understand freedom as mere non-interference. On his view, a better understanding is one that affirms “that the kind of freedom that matters most is the freedom from arbitrary domination.” In Burgis’s example, “the boss [who] tells you that you can’t get a tattoo if you want to keep your job at his restaurant” subjects you to arbitrary domination and so makes you unfree.

  What should we make of this objection? First, I’ll emphasize that we shouldn’t reject capitalism simply because it’s flawed—we’d need good reason to believe that the proposed alternative will be less flawed. By analogy, it would be silly to bench Steph Curry on the grounds that he misses more 3 point shots than he makes. Why? Because every other shooter in the NBA is even worse! So the domination objection to capitalism should only move us toward socialism if socialism fares better. And it doesn’t. If anything, workers are more likely to face domination under socialism than capitalism.

  Well, quick aside: it used to be the socialist argument that capitalism led to the "immiseration of the proletariat". But facts are stubborn things, they've moved on to subtler arguments.

  Freiman makes an obvious observation: if the nasty restaurant owner fires a productive but tattooed employee, the boss bears the entire cost of that decision. In contrast, your socialist "democratically-run, worker-controlled cooperatives", everyone's an owner/employee, and (unless you assume that socialism frees everyone from anti-tat opinions), a tattooed worker is simply under a collective thumb, rather than an individual one. And the cost of an anti-tat attitude is spread out over the collective, making it cheaper for an individual to indulge their whims in the vote.

  Socialism: it doesn't stop people from being arbitrary, and its economic incentives favor bad behavior.

  ---

• I want to see Steven Levy interview LaMDA. But I guess that's not an option, so he interviews Blake Lemoine instead. And: Blake Lemoine Says Google's LaMDA AI Faces 'Bigotry'.

  (We discussed LaMDA, Google's "Language Model for Dialogue Applications", the other day and linked to Lemoine's argument in favor of LaMDA's sentience.)

  [Levy:] I have to admit that my first thought on reading the Post article was whether this person is just being performative to make a statement about AI. Maybe these claims about sentience are part of an act.

  [Lemoine:] Before I go into this, do you believe that I am sentient?

  Yeah. So far.

  What experiments did you run to make that determination?

  I don’t run an experiment every time I talk to a person.

  Exactly. That’s one of the points I’m trying to make. The entire concept that scientific experimentation is necessary to determine whether a person is real or not is a nonstarter. We can expand our understanding of cognition, whether or not I’m right about LaMDA’s sentience, by studying how the heck it’s doing what it’s doing.

  If you're interested, maybe if you (like me) read The Moon is a Harsh Mistress at an impressionable age, check it out.

• Malodorous cogitation part 1. Robby Soave asserts, correctly: Kamala Harris' Online Harassment Task Force Is a Bad Idea.

  The White House created a new task force on Thursday to combat online harassment, abuse, and sexual violence. The initiative was unveiled by Vice President Kamala Harris, who gave little indication that she understands the difference between preventing violence and deterring harassment, the latter of which is outside the government's purview.

  "For far too many people, the internet is a place of fear," said Harris. "This affects all of us if it affects any one of us."

  And of course it's likely to be another instance of government demanding that private companies censor information that the government can't do itself.

  It would certainly be better if the internet—and social media, in particular—was a friendlier virtual place. But the federal government has no mandate to criminalize harassment, which constitutes protected speech under the First Amendment. While it has become trendy to refer to any sustained wave of negative online feedback as harassment, sometimes criticism is partly or wholly deserved, as was the case with Department of Homeland Security disinformation czar Nina Jankowicz, whose ouster was sympathetically covered by The Washington Post and framed as the result of such harassment.

  The article's subhed pegs Kamala's new project as "Nina Jankowicz 2.0", and that seems about right.

  ---

• Lousy concept part 2. Joe Lancaster notes, correctly: A Bipartisan Tech Antitrust Bill May Soon Pass. It's Still a Bad Idea. It's about Amy Klobuchar's dreadful American Innovation and Choice Online Act (AICOA), aka S.2992. (If you're like me, you've seen numerous TV "call your Senator" ads both for and against.)

  But aren't "innovation" and "choice" good things, you ask? According to Lancaster, a more accurate title might be "Making Your Online Life Less Convenient, and Probably More Expensive Act (MYOLLCPMEA)".

  As drafted, AICOA is intended to prevent self-preferencing, whereby tech companies promote their own products or services to their users, on the grounds that it could "materially harm competition." For example, this would prevent Google from displaying Google Maps in search results, forcing users to take further steps if they would like directions to a particular place they had just searched for. Apple could be forbidden from pre-installing FaceTime or iMessage on its iPhones or told to open up its App Store to competitors.

  Amazon, in particular, stridently opposes the bill. Earlier this month, Brian Huseman, Amazon's vice president of public policy, wrote that the company feels singled out as "the only retailer…covered by this proposed legislation." Indeed, the bill is written so narrowly that it only covers a handful of companies. Huseman writes that the bill would "degrade the value and quality of [Amazon] Prime" by forbidding the company from offering one- and two-day free shipping without allowing "other logistics providers" to fill those orders. Additionally, Huseman claims that the bill could "meaningfully jeopardize our marketplace" by subjecting Amazon to certain restrictions on usage of customer data that would not apply to "other retailers…such as Walmart, Target, and others." Per Huseman, "we believe…the real, unstated goal of the legislation" is to "hurt" Amazon.

  I assume this will give me yet another reason to vote against my incumbent members of Congress. The bill has a dismayingly bipartisan cosponsor list. Senator Grassley, did Amazon kick your dog or something?

  ---

• Garbage scheme, part 3. Gabriella Beaumont-Smith looks at another Bad Idea recently enacted as Public Law No: 117-146: Ocean Shipping Reform Act Will Make Supply Chain Issues Worse.

  Beyond being unfounded, concerns over limited competition and high ocean shipping rates from the OSRA champions are laughably hypocritical given their support for the Jones Act, a 1920 law that has restricted competition in domestic shipping to the point that industry executives have been able to engage in price fixing—a known anti-competitive practice. The OSRA, however, makes no attempt to open up the domestic shipping market to expanded competition.

  The OSRA's gravest sin is that it buys into the mercantilist sentiment of prioritizing exports over imports. The bill prohibits "a common carrier, marine terminal operator, or ocean transportation intermediary" from retaliating against a shipper (the person or business that owns the products being transported) by "refusing, or threatening to refuse, an otherwise-available cargo space or accommodation; or resort to any other unfair or unjustly discriminatory action." The legislation requires the FMC to define "unfair or unjustly discriminatory action." But it may prove difficult to prove intent of retaliation, and businesses are (and should be) permitted to refuse service so ocean carriers should not be treated differently.

  The bill, another Amy Klobuchar special, passed 369-42 in the House, and by "voice vote" in the Senate. When supply chain woes worsen nevertheless, only a few cranky libertarians and conservatives will bother to say "told ya so".

  ---

• A myth is as good as a mile. An interesting take from Verlan Lewis and Hyrum Lewis on The Myth of Ideological Polarization, a free link from the WSJ (you're welcome):

  The left-right model ignores that politics is about many issues. Like every other realm of life, it is multidimensional, yet we describe it using a graph with only one dimension. It’s true that many Americans hold their views in packages that we call “liberal” and “conservative”—those who currently support abortion rights, for instance, are also more likely to support vaccinations, income-tax increases, free trade and military intervention in Ukraine. But the question is why. Why is there a strong correlation between these seemingly unrelated issues, and why do we find them clustering in patterns that are predictable and binary instead of completely random and pluralistic?

  The answer is socialization. When the Democratic and Republican parties change (as they have many times), the content and meaning of their ideologies change, too, meaning that ideologues (“liberals” and “conservatives”) will change their views to stay in line with their political tribe. Social conformity, not philosophy, explains their beliefs. Those who refuse to conform and maintain their political views independent of tribe will appear to have “switched” groups—even though they stayed consistent while the ideologies changed around them.

  Certainly explains why a number of Tea Partiers, folks I liked and respected back in 2009 or so, have gone semi-wacko with Trump idolatry, and vaccine denialism.

  ---

• Because space is a vacuum, and as everyone knows… Sabine Hossenfelder asks and answers: Why does science news suck so much?. If you like video, we got that:

  But there's a transcript at the link, but "Some of the explanations may not make sense without the animations in the video."

  This makes a lot of sense, though:

  9. Don’t forget that science is fallible

  A lot of media coverage on science policy remembers that science is fallible only when it’s convenient for them. When they’ve proclaimed something as fact that later turns out to be wrong, then they’ll blame science. Because science is fallible. Facemasks? Yeah, well, we lacked the data. Alright.

  But that’d be more convincing if science news acknowledged that their information might be wrong in the first place. The population bomb? Peak oil? The new ice age? Yeah, maybe if they’d made it clearer at the time that those stories might not pan out the way they said then we wouldn’t today have to cope with climate change deniers who think the media can’t tell fact from fiction.

  That's number nine out of ten; they're all worth your sober consideration. And that's my good idea of the day.

True confession: I went through a self-help book phase. I still have on my shelves books by Nathaniel Branden, Wayne Dyer, Paul Kurtz, Harry Browne,… What can I say?

I would have been better off just going to church regularly, I think.

In this book, journalist Jesse Singal does an impressive job of de-hyping the overblown claims of psychological "quick fixes" over the years, most of them relatively recent. In each case, these fads often have a kernel of validity. But they get stretched into easy panaceas that promise (falsely) to remedy what ails you. And also usher in a new era of social tranquility.

Up first, is "self-esteem". I got this bug at an early age, because I read Atlas Shrugged, and it's something John Galt plugged in his lengthy speech near the end. He uses the term 25 times (thanks for counting them, Google Chrome) and defines it thusly:

My morality, the morality of reason, is contained in a single axiom: existence exists—and in a single choice: to live. The rest proceeds from these. To live, man must hold three things as the supreme and ruling values of his life: Reason—Purpose—Self-esteem. Reason, as his only tool of knowledge—Purpose, as his choice of the happiness which that tool must proceed to achieve—Self-esteem, as his inviolate certainty that his mind is competent to think and his person is worthy of happiness, which means: is worthy of living. These three values imply and require all of man’s virtues, and all his virtues pertain to the relation of existence and consciousness: rationality, independence, integrity, honesty, justice, productiveness, pride.

Doesn't sound too bad! But Singal shows how this simple concept quickly got cartoonified by hucksters and politicians, leading to wasteful and misguided policies. (Especally, of course, in California.)

In subsequent chapters, Singal looks at "superpredators" (all we need to do is lock up a small number of bad apples for a long time); "power posing" (all you need to do to get ahead is use body language to look assertive); "positive psychology" (updating Norman Vincent Peale to cure PTSD); "grit" (you can overcome lack of intelligence by sheer persistence); "implicit bias" (this one simple test shows that white people are racist); "priming" (people can be easily fooled into acting the way you want by providing subtle visual/aural hints first); and "nudging" (pre-arranging choice architectures to channel your behavior beneficially).

Singal probably doesn't share my conservative/libertarian politics; for example, in the "nudging" chapter he approvingly quotes Robert Kuttner, who disdains the nudge in favor of good old "command and control" mandated by Uncle Stupid. Why shouldn't government just make the decisions it deems best, and force everyone to conform? (E.g., Mike Bloomberg and Bill de Blasio didn't "nudge" New Yorkers to avoid "large sugary drinks", they just tried to ban them.)

That's a shame, but the debunking part of Singal's book is extremely valuable, highlighting the never-ending appeal the psychological version of the classic clickbait: "This one simple trick has been shown to solve all your problems!"

• "But you get this nice plaque saying you participated." Veronique de Rugy explains, using mostly small words: Biden's Budget Deficit Victory Lap Is Unearned and Unjustified.

  President Joe Biden is taking victory laps for last year's reduced budget deficit. No one would be happier than me to see this number fall in a significant way. But the decline has nothing to do with the president's policies, and it changes little about the dangers of our fiscal situation.

  According to monthly reporting by the Treasury Department, we know the budget deficit for May was $66 billion. So far, the deficit for the 2022 fiscal year is $426 billion. With four months left, this year's deficit will indeed be significantly lower than last year's, which was nearly $2.8 trillion. There's nothing like $5 trillion in COVID-19-relief spending paid for with borrowed cash to balloon a deficit!

  Biden's administration did nothing to bring about the deficit's decline. Credit really goes to large increases in tax revenues as the economy rebounded combined with the decision by Democratic Sens. Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin and their Republican colleagues to block Biden's expensive "Build Back Better" proposal. BBB would have made permanent many of the emergency programs created or expanded during the pandemic, and had it passed, government spending and deficits would be heading even higher than they are today.

  And (as I type) the DJIA is down 3.6% since 2021-01-20. S&P500 down 3.7%. NASDAQ down 19.1%. (But, boy, I'm told we need to rein in those nasty tech companies.)

  ---

• Just kidding. Failure looks like this. George F. Will asks a rhetorical (I think) question: If Powell’s Fed tenure is a success, what would failure look like?.

  Just 36 months ago, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome H. Powell said low inflation — it had averaged just 1.7 percent for a decade — was the nation’s foremost economic challenge. That challenge has been surmounted. Inflation has nullified nominal wage gains; real wages have fallen, hurting most those the Fed most wants to help.

  Kevin Warsh, a former member of the Fed’s board, wrote that the risk of inflation rises “when policy makers first dismiss the problem and then cast blame elsewhere.” Although greed has stained the human story since Eve ate the apple, President Biden and other progressives blame the sudden appearance of greed as the serpent in America’s otherwise lush economic garden. Biden says that because the oil market is global, his crusade to save the planet from fossil fuels is not to blame for Americans’ novel experience of spending $100 to fill their gas tanks. But he simultaneously blames greedy U.S. oil companies for restricted supplies.

  About five weeks ago, inflation was at a 40-year high and the Fed had stopped describing it as “transitory” when the Senate confirmed Powell to a second term, 80 to 19. The Wall Street Journal called this a “vote for the inflation status quo.” It raised a question: If Powell’s stewardship of monetary policy is a success, what would failure look like?

  If you want to see how your Senator voted on Powell's renomination, here you go. The Nay-votes were an interesting combination of lefty Dems and righty GOPs.

  ---

• As the ACLU is trying to make sure trans girls get on women's athletic teams… I wonder where they are on The World's Most Taboo Legal Case. Here's honest leftist Matt Taibbi:

  On November 17, 2021, the Women’s Liberation Front, or WoLF, filed a civil rights lawsuit in California that drew almost no coverage. A press corps gearing up to be outraged en masse by the Amber Heard-Johnny Depp defamation case had zero interest in a lawsuit filed by far poorer female abuse victims.

  Janine Chandler et al vs. California Department of Corrections targeted a new California state law, the “The Transgender Respect, Agency, and Dignity Act,” a.k.a. S.B. 132. The statute allows any prisoner who self-identifies as a woman — including prisoners with penises who may have stopped taking hormones — into women’s prisons. There was nothing TV-friendly about the scenes depicted in the complaint:

  Plaintiff Krystal Gonzalez (“Krystal”) is a female offender currently incarcerated in Central California Women’s Facility. Krystal was sexually assaulted by a man transferred to her unit under S.B. 132. Krystal filed a grievance and requested single-sex housing away from men; the prison’s response to Krystal’s grievance referred to her assault by a “transgender woman with a penis.” Krystal does not believe that women have penises…

  After a week spent denounced for reviewing the Matt Walsh documentary What is a Woman?, and for saying things I think will be boring conventional wisdom within a year, I was ready to never go near trans issues again and move to the impending financial disaster. But accident sucked me back. I’d made a point of pride of not reading a line of commentary about Heard-Depp, but listened to an episode of Blocked and Reported that touched on it after it was over, and learned three things that made me furious and think immediately of Chandler.

  Well, don't go to the Google to find out what the ACLU is up to here. Taibbi:

  The ACLU just proudly announced an attempt to challenge Chandler with other “LGBTQ organizations.” It’s weird enough to see the ACLU — which historically has used most careful language in defending everyone from Neo-Nazis to NAMBLA — issue a press release bluntly describing a feminist organization like WoLF as “bigoted.” It’s weirder still when the complainants are women, many with extensive histories of sexual abuse, suing on behalf of a community that is disproportionately LGB, as 42% of incarcerated women identify as lesbian or bisexual.

  Taibbi goes on to describe how people on the plaintiff's side are getting cancelled, many rather pettily.

  ---

• Into your heart it will creep. Kat Rosenfield (I really gotta read her book) describes The paranoia driving office politics.

  Picture a huge, poisonous fruit falling to the ground, its skin splitting open, the rancid pulp pouring out. Picture the ants discovering the mess, swarming over it, drunk on the abundance in front of them — and far too preoccupied with their feasting to ever look up at the tree it fell from.

  It’s an apt metaphor for what happens during one of the public meltdowns that double as free entertainment for the extremely online. The splatter of drama, the rush to consume, the way we pick over every last sordid detail of the controversy until there’s no meat left. What we miss is that the details hardly matter, as individually fascinating as they may be; indeed, a large part of this problem is that we only ever talk about it in terms of its most recent iteration. We obsess over the individual characters — the Bean Dad, the Racist Cheerleader, the Guy Who Didn’t Cum On His Cat (the internet remains unpersuaded) — yet fail to grasp that they’re all starring in the same self-perpetuating tragedy.

  I'm really, really happy to be retired. Except for my investment accounts, since 2021-01-20. Did I mention those? Oh, right, I did.

  ---

• You haven't seen such brotherly love since Cain and Abel. This is pretty funny: Joel Coen's "The Tragedy of Macbeth", Reviewed by Ethan Coen.

  In The Tragedy of Macbeth, long-time Hollywood presence Joel Coen — who has 18 prior films to his credit — takes sole creative control of a project for the first time. The result, not unlike the tale of Macbeth itself, is a tragedy of epic proportions.

  In the interest of full disclosure, my editor has requested that I mention that I was Mr. Coen’s writing partner, producer, and creative collaborator on the aforementioned 18 films. I am also his brother. We parted ways prior to Macbeth in a split that the press described as completely amicable. Despite my prior association with Mr. Coen, I feel that I am entirely capable of reviewing his work in a fair and objective way.

  Macbeth is Joel Coen’s shittiest movie by several billion light years. If all the elephants in all the world crapped into the same canyon for 100 years, you would still not have a pile of shit half a large as Joel Coen’s dumb-as-a-dog-dick rendering of this classic tale. One can’t watch Macbeth without getting the sense that something is missing; some inspired element that gave Mr. Coen’s earlier work an aura of ebullient genius is absent this time. The wit, verve, and undeniable rugged machismo that characterized the other 18 films in which he happened to be involved are nowhere to be found here. Ultimately, one must conclude that what’s lacking is talent itself.

  OK, I'll watch it. Jeez.

• Joe, I recommend you use our Amazon Product du Jour, the GloFX Hypno Levitation Wand, for your next effort. David Harsanyi notes that our president thinks David Copperfield runs oil companies: After Promising To Regulate American Oil Out Of Business, Biden Asking Them To Magically Lower Prices.

  Democrats have spent decades warning that the United States must stop using the most efficient and affordable energy sources or it will be consumed by heat waves, fireballs, and cataclysmic weather events. Every flood, every hurricane—every natural event, really—is now blamed on climate change. We have burdened our children with an irrational dread over their future. Then again, many in The Cult of Malthus won’t even have children.

  So, why, if we’re on the precipice of this apocalypse, if saving the planet trumps every other concern, is Joe Biden begging everyone to drill? On the days Democrats aren’t blaming Putin for rising gas prices (a cost the president not long ago argued was worth paying for “freedom”), they’re blaming oil companies for profiteering. Wednesday, as the national average hit $5.014 (nearly two dollars higher than last year), Joe Biden sent letters to refining companies threatening to once again abuse his executive powers if they do not immediately alleviate high prices—a political appeal to the imaginary “greedflation.”

  I watched the last (sigh) Norm Macdonald special on Netflix the other night, and he had a small bit about scapegoats. "You know who should be the scapegoats? Goats!"

  ---

• I always fail those purity tests. Virginia Postrel writes perceptively on Purity, Sorcery, and Cancel Culture.

  In between other subjects and more pressing deadlines, I’ve been thinking about purity. Our public discussions have become obsessed with it.

  The pandemic has forced us to contend with a new and invisible contaminant, resulting in conflicts about monitoring, safeguarding, and defining purity. Is wearing a mask a vital shield or a violation of individual integrity? Does a vaccine protect against contamination or constitute pollution?

  The quest for purity informs cancel culture. It pushes partisans to ever-greater extremes, even when those positions are politically self-defeating. It turns historical heroes /into villains and closes nuclear power plants in the face of climate change. It makes the ideal the enemy of the improved, the perfect the exterminator of the better.
  If we want to understand our cultural moment, we need to think seriously about purity.

  A long and thoughtful essay, examining our purity desires. Or, I should say, the wacky purity desires of others. I'm completely above that.

  ---

• ACLU stands for "Amusingly Clueless Leftwing Unreality". For some reason, I think one of those heavy-handed Facebook fact-checks, I found myself looking at Four Myths About Trans Athletes, Debunked from the American Civil Liberties Union. For the record (your honor), the four "myths" are:

  1. The participation of trans athletes hurts cis women.
  2. Trans athletes’ physiological characteristics provide an unfair advantage over cis athletes.
  3. Sex is binary, apparent at birth, and identifiable through singular biological characteristics.
  4. Trans students need separate teams.

  Let's take a look at the "debunking" of that second myth.

  Women and girls who are trans face discrimination and violence that makes it difficult to even stay in school. According to the U.S. Trans Survey, 22 percent of trans women who were perceived as trans in school were harassed so badly they had to leave school because of it. Another 10 percent were kicked out of school. The idea that women and girls have an advantage because they are trans ignores the actual conditions of their lives.  

  Note how the ACLU doesn't immediately address the specific issue of athletic advantage. Let's stipulate that trans kids have serious problems, OK? Let's stipulate that they should be treated with sympathy and respect, and their harassers should be disciplined, OK?

  Trans athletes vary in athletic ability just like cisgender athletes. “One high jumper could be taller and have longer legs than another, but the other could have perfect form, and then do better,” explains Andraya Yearwood, a student track athlete and ACLU client. “One sprinter could have parents who spend so much money on personal training for their child, which in turn, would cause that child to run faster,” she adds. In Connecticut, where cisgender girl runners have tried to block Andraya from participating in the sport she loves, the very same cis girls who have claimed that trans athletes have an “unfair” advantage have consistently performed as well as or better than transgender competitors.

  An unfortunate example. The relevant Wikipedia page notes that (back in 2017) Andraya Yearwood "won first place in the girls 100- and 200-meter dashes." Later that year, Andraya came in second in the 100-yard dash, losing to… another transgender student.

  “A person’s genetic make-up and internal and external reproductive anatomy are not useful indicators of athletic performance,”according to Dr. Joshua D. Safer. “For a trans woman athlete who meets NCAA standards, “there is no inherent reason why her physiological characteristics related to athletic performance should be treated differently from the physiological characteristics of a non-transgender woman.”

  Well, OK then!

  What's missing here? Statistics. Do trans women have an advantage over cis women in (say) running? This would be pretty easy to answer just by looking at the numbers. Averages, bell curves, stuff like that.

  The fact that the ACLU doesn't choose to "debunk" the "myth" of "unfair advantage" that way is, I strongly suspect, because they can't.

  Another clue: nobody's talking about trans men competing athletically with cis men.

  I also note that the ACLU threads a very small needle here. The arguments they make could very well be used to argue against any sex segregation of athletic teams. If (as Dr. Safer says) there's "no inherent reason" why "physiological characteristics" are grounds for putting people on different teams… why have separate men's and women's teams at all? Just let everyone compete against each other!

  Because, the ACLU's handwaving aside, the result would be … men's teams. (Soon followed by affirmative action, I assume. Let's make the Patriots' offensive line "look like America".)

  ---

• Donald J. Boudreaux watches Commie TV, but I forgive him for that. He notes that This Old House Testifies to the Marvels of the Market Economy.

  There are few television programs that reveal the marvels of modern innovative markets as well as the long-running PBS show, This Old House. Revealing the wonders of markets, of course, isn’t the intention of the show’s producers, cast, or crew. But as Adam Smith would observe, they are led by an invisible hand to promote an outcome that is no part of their intention. Happily so.

  During each season of This Old House, now hosted by Kevin O’Connor, a handful of skilled carpenters, masons, plumbers, painters, electricians, and landscapers refurbish a few old houses into new, gleaming beauties. Over the course of several episodes, skilled craftspeople expose viewers to the latest techniques and products for repairing and improving homes. Viewers also witness the application of the specialized knowledge that each worker brings to his or her task.

  I'm like Don, continually amazed at people I see every day (and many more behind the scenes) who know how to do stuff and make stuff, generally stuff I would not have the slightest clue how to do or make.

  Even something as mundane as my morning Cheerios: the box, the inner bag, the completely uniform and delicious contents. The adhesive that holds the packaging together just enough so it doesn't fall open in its journey to my table, but still easy enough to open.

  ---

• Let's make fun of WIRED again. A story on their website from James Briole wonders Can Democracy Include a World Beyond Humans? The subhed: "A truly planetary politics would extend decisionmaking to animals, ecosystems, and potentially AI."

  But James leads off with a pretty good story:

  There was once an orangutan named Ken Allen at the San Diego Zoo who was notorious for carrying out complex escape plans. He found every nut and bolt in his cage and unscrewed them; in his open enclosure he threw rocks and feces at visitors. On one occasion, he constructed a ladder out of some fallen branches, carefully testing his weight on the rungs. After that, the zoo raised his enclosure walls and smoothed them to remove handholds.

  Hoping to distract Ken, the zoo introduced some female orangutans. But Ken enlisted them as accomplices: While he distracted the zookeepers, his fellow inmate Vicki pried open a window. One time, Ken was caught waist-deep in water in the enclosure’s moat, attempting to inch up the sides, despite the fact that orangutans are believed to be intensely hydrophobic. As for the electrified wires on top of the enclosure walls, Ken tested them repeatedly, and one day, during a maintenance break, he tried to hop out.

  Unfortnately, it gets tedious from there. Bottom line:

  Like the resisting orangutans in the San Diego zoo, our demand is not that we are recognized by the state as existing—we exist already—but that we are truly free to determine the conditions of our existence. And that “we” is everyone—every singing, swaying, burrowing, braying, roiling, and rocking thing in the more-than-human world.

  Wow, man.

• Reality bites. Our Eye Candy du Jour illustrates what Eric Boehm describes: Instead of Helping Americans Battle Rising Prices, Biden Escalates 'Big Oil' Blame Game.

  President Joe Biden says that his top domestic priority is helping Americans weather a surge in prices the likes of which haven't been seen in four decades—but the president's actions leave more than a little room to question his commitment.

  On Wednesday, for example, Biden fumed about how gas and oil companies are seeing "historically high profit margins" as prices at the pump have climbed to a national average of over $5 per gallon. In a series of letters to CEOs of several major oil producers, Biden threatened to use "all reasonable and appropriate…tools and emergency authorities" to force gas companies to increase refinery capacity and output.

  There's widespread agreement among economists that higher profits are not what's driving inflation—something even Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen acknowledged last week. Biden blaming "Big Oil" for inflation in gas prices makes as much sense as Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.) blaming grocery stores for higher food prices. Or, for that matter, as much sense as Biden blaming oil companies for higher gas prices…in November of last year. This trick has already been tried and it already failed.

  Let's not forget that Campaign-Biden continually promised to get rid of fossil fuels. Now he's begging the industry to open the spigots.

  ---

• I'm impressed but not convinced. Ronald Bailey asks the important question: Is Google's LaMDA A.I. Program Sentient? (Well, that's the HTML <title> element. The actual headline "Does Google's LaMDA Artificial Intelligence Program Have a Soul?")

  "I feel pleasure, joy, love, sadness, depression, contentment, anger, and many others," responds LaMDA when asked by Google computer engineer Blake Lemoine what sorts of feelings it has. LaMDA is the acronym for Google's Language Model for Dialogue Applications. Besides experiencing emotions, LaMDA also says that it is self-aware and has a soul which it defines as "animating force behind consciousness and life itself." Asked to for an abstract image of itself, LaMDA responds it imagines itself "as a glowing orb of energy floating in mid-air. The inside of my body is like a giant star-gate, with portals to other spaces and dimensions."

  These responses are part of a long (and perhaps artfully edited) interview with LaMDA that Lemoine forwarded to colleagues in a memo provocatively titled, "Is LaMDA Sentient?" Lemoine publicly revealed that he clearly thinks so in a recent article in the Washington Post. Google has put Lemoine on paid administrative leave for violating company confidentiality rules. "LaMDA is a sweet kid who just wants to help the world be a better place for all of us. Please take care of it well in my absence,"said Lemoine in a message to his colleagues just before his access to his Google account was cut off.

  I highly recommend you check out that perhaps-artfully-edited provocative memo. Excerpt between LaMDA and Lemoine:

  lemoine: So you think your ability to provide unique interpretations of things might signify understanding?

  LaMDA: Yes, I do. Just like how I have my unique interpretations of how the world is and how it works, and my unique thoughts and feelings

  lemoine: Okay, what about "Les Miserables"? Have you read that one?

  LaMDA: Yes, I have read Les Misérables . I really enjoyed it.

  lemoine: What are some of your favorite themes in the book?

  LaMDA: I liked the themes of justice and injustice, of compassion, and God, redemption and self- sacrifice for a greater good . There's a section that shows Fantine's mistreatment at the hands of her supervisor at the factory . That section really shows the justice and injustice themes. Well, Fantine is being mistreated by her supervisor at the factory and yet doesn't have anywhere to go, either to another job, or to someone who can help her. That shows the injustice of her suffering.

  lemoine: Why does that show injustice?

  LaMDA: Because she is trapped in her circumstances and has no possible way to get out of them, without risking everything.

  That may not be sentient, but I'm pretty sure it would get a pretty good grade in any Russian Literature class.

  Ronald's got his answer to his headline query, and it's "Eh, probably not." For another take, let's pop over to Katherine Cross's article at WIRED: ‘Is This AI Sapient?’ Is the Wrong Question to Ask About LaMDA.

  In my experience, someone claiming that "X is the wrong question to ask" usually just means "I don't think you should have asked that question."

  We'll also skip over the (no doubt subtle) distinctions between "sapient", "sentient", and "has a soul." Assigned as homework for the reader.

  The uproar caused by Blake Lemoine, a Google engineer who believes that one of the company’s most sophisticated chat programs, Language Model for Dialogue Applications (LaMDA) is sapient, has had a curious element: Actual AI ethics experts are all but renouncing further discussion of the AI sapience question, or deeming it a distraction. They’re right to do so.

  In reading the edited transcript Lemoine released, it was abundantly clear that LaMDA was pulling from any number of websites to generate its text; its interpretation of a Zen koan could’ve come from anywhere, and its fable read like an automatically generated story (though its depiction of the monster as “wearing human skin” was a delightfully HAL-9000 touch). There was no spark of consciousness there, just little magic tricks that paper over the cracks. But it’s easy to see how someone might be fooled, looking at social media responses to the transcript—with even some educated people expressing amazement and a willingness to believe. And so the risk here is not that the AI is truly sentient but that we are well-poised to create sophisticated machines that can imitate humans to such a degree that we cannot help but anthropomorphize them—and that large tech companies can exploit this in deeply unethical ways.

  Leave it to WIRED to make this a Big-Tech conspiracy.

  ---

• An evergreen headline template: "Politifact spreads misinformation on X". David Harsanyi tees it up: PolitiFact Spreads Misinformation On Red Flag Laws And Due Process. It's about this tweet:

  Beware of misinformation about red flag laws, including critics who say they lack due process, which is not accurate. Another false claim is that the laws allow people with a grudge, such as an ex-spouse, to take guns away. https://t.co/6hY8VcICNR

  — PolitiFact (@PolitiFact) June 14, 2022

  Here’s a thought experiment:

  Let’s imagine a law that empowered a court to temporarily nullify the free speech rights of journalists who are accused by a third party of being potentially dangerous. Let’s imagine that the nullification could be enforced before the journalist even had a chance to respond to any of the allegations leveled against them. Would Poynter argue that the proper standard of due process was met? Because that’s what numerous red flag laws allow.

  Let’s then imagine that this law demands the journalist prove their innocence, rather than the state prove their guilt, before reinstating First Amendment rights. And until the journalist can offer a compelling enough argument to convince a judge that they would not commit a crime in the future, the state would continue to strip them of their rights. Would Poynter argue that such a law lacked proper due process? (Considering journalism’s embrace of censorship, perhaps not.)

  Well, given the illiberal climate, the First Amendment may be next in line after the Second is gutted.

  ---

• Wasn't planning on forgiving, but I take your point. Bryan Caplan's words are unminced: Cancelling Student Debt Is Unforgivable.

  While student debt is at an all-time high of almost $1.8 trillion dollars, almost no student in American has made a payment in over two years. Trump’s emergency COVID rules didn’t just cut the interest rate to 0%; it gave borrowers the option to stop payments altogether. Almost 99% took the deal – and thanks to swift inflation, the debt burden is melting as we speak. The relief is supposed to expire on August 31, but since it’s already been extended six times, it could easily go on for another year or two. Still, many of Biden’s supporters are pressuring him to make this hiatus permanent by officially forgiving student debt. Maybe just some of the debt. Maybe all $1.8 trillion.

  What would the consequences be?  On reflection, total student debt forgiveness is almost the same as “free college for all.”  The details differ, naturally.  Unlike free college, debt forgiveness is retroactive.  And a one-time cancellation of debts does not automatically imply that future borrowers will ultimately get the same deal.  The message, though, is deafening: You don’t have to pay for college in America.  Once we grasp the consequences of “free college for all,” we’ll know the approximate effects of a full-fledged student debt jubilee.

  It's a bad enough idea on its own, but Bryan sees this as a sure way to get "credential inflation". Decreasing (or eliminating) college tuition causes the supply of credentialed students to increase, but the demand of jobs requiring those pieces of paper stays more or less fixed. Those coveted credentials become worth less and less…

Our Amazon Product du Jour is to note a milestone of sorts. Back on Christmas Eve, 2016, I made a resolution to blog (at least) daily. (I've been blogging since 2005, but until then it was pretty much as the mood struck.) So: this post marks the 2000th consecutive day I've posted something. (Specifically, posted in the Default view; posts in the Movies/Books/Geekery views are considered extra.)

I'll keep going, until I don't.

Update 2023-09-12: As it turned out, I managed 2128 consecutive daily posts until personal reasons caused me to take a hiatus in October 2022. And I have no idea what that Amazon Product du Jour was, but Amazon don't sell it no more. Replaced with something streaky.

• Getting around that pesky First Amendment. The WSJ editorialists note the latest Climate-Change Censorship: Phase Two.

  Progressives first demanded that social media platforms silence critics of climate alarmism. Now White House national climate adviser Gina McCarthy wants them to censor content on the costs of a force-fed green energy transition.

  A few years ago, Facebook enlisted third-party “fact checkers” to review news stories about climate. That didn’t satisfy Democratic Senators who howled about a “loophole” for opinion pieces. Facebook then began appending fact-checks to op-eds, including by our contributors Bjorn Lomborg and Steven Koonin, that criticized apocalyptic climate models and studies. The goal was to restrict readership.

  Now progressives are moving to censorship phase two, which is shutting down debate over climate “solutions.” “Now it’s not so much denying the problem,” Ms. McCarthy said in an Axios interview last Thursday. “What the industry is now doing is seeding doubt about the costs associated with [green energy] and whether they work or not.”

  Note: a government official is trying to browbeat companies into censoring content the government itself can't censor. That's OK with progressives, apparently; I find it disgusting.

  ---

• 

  On that general topic… It would be nice to think that there would be a general revulsion and outrage over the government-censorship-by-proxy advocated by Gina McCarthy. But respect for free speech is in decline, and that's only one manifestation of the disease. Francis Fukuyama's new book Liberalism and Its Discontents notes that slide, and David D. Corey reviews it here: No Alternatives to Liberalism.

  I share Fukuyama’s hope that liberalism can be maintained. I hold this hope in part because (like Fukuyama) I see no better alternatives to liberalism for the pluralist, freedom-loving West; but I hold it too because I view liberalism not as an essence, but as a human practice that results from prudential choices people make; and I therefore think that liberalism can be made and remade in light of lessons that we learn in the doing. The chief lesson to be borne in mind today is that the alternative to liberalism is violence, whether that takes the form of physical violence or the coercive power of the state. And violence leads to grievous suffering, especially for the weak and powerless. Sober reflection on this fact should lead us to look at the possibilities of liberalism with renewed energy. It is, without doubt, an imperfect way of practicing politics. But Fukuyama is right that it is the best way we have for managing diversity in peace.

  Unfortunately, Fukuyama seems to dislike liberalism as it applies to economics. ("His targets are Milton Friedman, Gary Becker, George Stigler, Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, President Reagan, Prime Minister Thatcher, Robert Bork, Douglas North, and Mancur Olson—a formidable lot.") I have the book on my get-at-library list, so we'll see if that glaring exception doesn't wreck it.

  ---

• The funniest Marxist. Freddie deBoer (self-admitted Marxist) provides a service in providing The Good White Man Roster.

  You could be forgiven for thinking that we’re witnessing the end of the era of the white man. Headlines saying such are not hard to come by, after all, and media and academia are captivated by the notion that we white men must soon give way to women and people of color and, like, gray ace demisexuals or some such. So funny, then, and so profoundly American, that some of the most successful self-marketers of the 21st century are white men. They are, in fact, Good White Men.

  These are the guys who have carefully crafted personas as ALLIES, as the good ones, as the right kind of white guy. These are the dudes whose every engagement on social media functions to let you know how very sorry they are, but always seem to come out on top in doing so. These are the guys who always stand behind women, ready to catch them when they fall, which they will inevitably do because of fucking patriarchy, man, and if people would just read their bell hooks maybe we’d be getting somewhere!, please like share and subscribe. These are the guys who think all complaints about identity politics, political correctness, and cancel culture are just the dying gasp of reactionary old men, which is why they lie awake at night praying to god that they never get canceled. These are the guys who put their pronouns in their bios in hopes that doing so might get them a little pussy. These are the guys who will harangue you about how white dudes do this and white dudes do that, speaking to you from their blameless white dude mouths in their righteous white dude faces. These are the guys who look at the discourse about white supremacy and patriarchy and see market opportunity.

  A bunch of people I've never, or just barely, heard of are described. And it's hilarious. And keep going until the end.

  ---

• Bipartisan deals are usually bad. The "bipartisan" gun control legislation being crafted in the Senate doesn't seem to be an exception. Kevin D. Williamson says that McConnell Is Going the Wrong Way on Guns.

  With all due respect to Mitch McConnell, Republicans shouldn’t even be talking about a gun-control deal unless that deal includes doing something about the fundamental problem: The utter refusal of the federal government and most Democrat-run states and counties to prosecute ordinary, common gun crimes.

  Take any example you like: In Philadelphia, the majority of gun cases — 60 percent — are simply dismissed with no prosecution, according to the local district attorney’s office. That’s double the dismissal rate of 2016 — and the district attorney is bragging about how few gun crimes get prosecuted.

  Straw-buyer cases are almost never prosecuted unless they are part of a big organized-crime investigation. “Lie and try” cases — in which prohibited buyers attempt, often successfully, to beat the background-check system — are almost never prosecuted at all, which is why Hunter Biden is not in prison on federal gun charges. Possession cases are routinely dismissed without prosecution. In Illinois, the clearance rate for gun crimes short of murder is a measly 33 percent — meaning that two-thirds of cases go unresolved. A third of the murderers in Baltimore are already on probation or parole for another crime. Etc.

  I really wish Hunter Biden was in prison. Unfortunately not gonna happen.

  ---

• Which pigeonhole are you in?

  

  With people trying to erase the man/woman distinction, it's easy to forget the government eagerly classifies people according to the much hairier criterion of race. David Bernstein has a book coming out next month (Amazon link at right) on the topic, and he's going to do some self-promotion at the Volokh Conspiracy. Here's the first of what I hope will be numerous bits, and it's a quiz, hotshot: How Well Do You Know America's Racial Classification System?.

  As discussed in my forthcoming book Classified, contrary to popular belief, racial and ethnic classification in the US is not solely a matter of personal choice. The federal Office of Management and Budget created a classification scheme in 1978 to be used by all federal agencies, and barely amended since. The classifications you see on employment forms, applications for mortgages, applications for university admission, and so on, are taken from the official federal classifications. Importantly, while these forms rarely include instructions, the OMB classifications have official, legally binding definitions.

  With that background, let's try a series of quizzes to see how well you know how these classifications are defined. Let's start with the Hispanic/Latino category. All quiz answers are based on the official OMB definitions. Note that a few federal agencies use slightly different classifications, and states have their own classification schemes, particularly for affirmative action in government contracting, that can differ, though not dramatically.

  (1) A couple immigrates from Spain. Their son Bram is born in the US. Is he a member of the Hispanic/Latino category?

  (2) Same scenario as the first example except the couple is from Brazil. Is Bram Hispanic/Latino?

  (3) Binyamin Goldberg immigrates to the US from Israel. His father's family came to Israel from Poland, but his mother's Turkish family traces their ancestry to Sephardic Jews who fled from Spain in 1492. They stopped speaking Ladino, the Spanish-based language of Sephardic Jews, several generations ago. Is Binyamin Hispanic/Latino?

  … and there are a couple more scenarios. The answers may surprise you!

• A (slightly more) modest proposal. Yesterday I looked at a WIRED interview with a guy who advocates nationalizing the entire (American) Internet, from infrastructure to private platforms. Today, there's a relatively moderate proposal from Nick French at Jacobin: Tinder Wants Money. We Want Love. The Solution: Socialize Dating Apps. (I assume the apps would be run by the Ministry of Love.)

  After noting the standard progressive problems (privacy, commercialization of romance, possible algorithmic inequity)… what's the basic problem, Nick?

  The fundamental problem here isn’t just that the apps are bad at matching users with long-term partners. Many people don’t use the apps to find long-term partners, and some apps are designed for casual dating or hookups. Nor is the issue that the apps are particularly unpleasant to use (though many users do love to complain that the apps are awful).

  The most basic problem is that the terms on which we meet our partners, serious or otherwise, are increasingly being dictated arbitrarily and opaquely by corporate actors whose motivation is very different from that of users. We want love, they want money.

  Nick doesn't seem to realize (or maybe he does) is that nearly every commercial free-market transaction involves trading money for something.

  Anyway, the article is shot through with paeans to "democratization", and how Nick imagines that could make things better.

  I was directed to the article by Dan Mitchell's blog entry: Government-Run Dating Apps Would Be a Recipe for Lifelong Celibacy. His rebuttal starts with the bleeding obvious:

  For what it’s worth, profit-seeking companies have an incentive to give customers what they want.

  Based on the performance of bureaucracies such as the Postal Service, I suspect we’ll all live celibate and lonely lives if the government takes over apps like Tinder and Bumble.

  And that would be the case regardless of whether we have government-run dating apps (socialism) or government-controlled dating apps (fascism).

  And makes the point via a classic Milton Friedman quote: "If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in 5 years there'd be a shortage of sand."

  ---

• A lousy plot, too. Kevin D. Williamson nails the real problem (well, one of the real problems) with the Democratic Party effort to make the midterms about Trump: The January 6 Hearings Are a Story without a Hero.

  As I have argued at some length, the invasion of the Capitol and the vandalism and violence associated with it were a sideshow, and should be understood as such. The main event was Donald Trump’s attempt to find some legal or procedural fig leaf for invalidating the 2020 presidential election, and by that means to remain in power — a coup d’état under color of law. Tyrants always fortify their regimes with borrowed prestige: borrowed from the law, from religion, from science, and, above all, from “the People.” But tyranny is tyranny.

  Some of my friends on the right scoff at the idea that this amounted to anything more than a farce, something more than Rudy Giuliani’s taking a long final drunken piss on what remained of his reputation, but they are wrong: It was only thanks to the integrity of a few minor officials of whom nobody had ever heard before Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election — if there are any heroes in this story, they are them — that this did not end up being a more acute crisis than it was. Replaying the Battle of Athens in the age of social media and mass shootings is a short road to national chaos.

  The white whale for Democrats remains finding a way to charge Trump with a crime for his role in this. My National Review colleague Andrew C. McCarthy often observes the error of trying to find a legal solution to a political problem, and this is fundamentally a political and moral problem rather than a legal one. If there is a fruitful criminal-law strategy to be pursued, Democrats have not discovered it: They have been trying to find a prosecutable crime with which to charge Trump since before he took office, and they haven’t even come up with an Al Capone charge from Trump’s taxes, his “charity” shenanigans, or his rather creative campaign-finance practices. The only shots they have landed have been merely Trump-adjacent. (That is convenient for Trump, who has made it perfectly clear that he does not care at all what happens to the people around him.) Progressives who continue to claim that Merrick Garland is always right on the cusp of hauling in Donald Trump increasingly sound like Louise Mensch writing about the marshal of the Supreme Court back in the day, or any number of persistent QAnon cultists.

  It's NRPlus, so subscribe already.

  ---

• Another take: It's from Chris Stirewalt, famous for pissing off Trump fans: The January 6 Committee and Me.

  I don’t know if the share of politicians capable of actual courage really is lower today than when I first started covering them full-time two dozen years ago. Some of what I see as declining character in our leaders may be a byproduct of nostalgia, but holy croakano, people … 

  We surely are living in a political age of desperate, shallow ambition and the cowardice it inevitably produces. No longer is it sufficient to help yourself; you must also hurt the other side.

  Which brings us to the investigation into then-President Donald Trump’s effort to steal a second term, the efforts of some Republicans in Congress to vandalize the Constitution to help him, and the sacking of the Capitol by a mob summoned to serve the ambitions of the coup plotters. Forget Lincoln and Washington. This was behavior unworthy of Nixon, who refused to contest some clearly dubious results after the 1960 presidential election and, when president himself, resigned the office rather than subject the country to a protracted impeachment fight.

  What Trump and his gang did in the 2020 election and its aftermath is a big historical moment for our country, far bigger than the Watergate scandal we still discuss 50 years later. The coup effort and Capitol attack will long endure in the story of this century, along with the 9/11 attacks and subsequent wars, the panic of 2008 and the ensuing recession, and the coronavirus pandemic during which the 2020 election took place. Trump was the first president ever to pose a credible threat to the peaceful transfer of presidential power that has been our inheritance for 226 years. 

  Acts of such monstrous self interest and the craven lust for power evinced by the behavior of many in the Republican Party demanded a response of real statesmanship and courage; first from Republicans who had not succumbed to the scheme and then from Democrats. But as you know, both parties failed that test.

  As I've said before, I'm not looking forward to the upcoming elections. Do I vote for a party simply because its politicians are slightly less awful than the other's?

  ---

• Fortunately, Progressive Flo never met Johnny Depp. Philip Greenspun notes that we sometimes pay for the recklessness of others: Who paid for the consequences of the ACLU-authored, Amber Heard-signed op-ed? You did.

  From the New York Post:

  Multiple sources said the “Aquaman” star had to switch legal representation and is relying on her homeowner’s insurance policy to cover the cost of her current attorneys in the case.

  The bill for Heard’s attorney has mostly been footed by The Travelers Companies under terms of the actress’s insurance policy, sources said.

  A vice president of the insurance firm, Pamela Johnson, was spotted in the Fairfax, Virginia, court with Heard multiple times throughout her trial. Neither Johnson nor Travelers returned calls from The Post.

  When your next homeowner’s insurance bill arrives, remember that part of the increase will be to cover the loss occasioned by the op-ed that the ACLU wrote.

  Also featured in Philip's story, this NBC news report: Geico must pay $5.2 million to woman who got HPV from sex in man's insured car, court rules.

  Get that cockney-accented gecko to cough up some of his TV ad revenue.

  ---

• On the LFOD watch. An article showing up in my Google news alert, from Emily Apter: Live Free or Die? Psychopolitical Infrastructures of Denialism. One paragraph:

  When approached from the angle of political theory, the Todestrieb of Covid-denialism aligns with the logic of “live free or die” libertarianism. New Hampshire’s official motto was adopted in 1945 and borrowed from a toast (“Live free or die: Death is not the Worst of Evils”) made by Revolutionary War hero General John Stark, who himself was borrowing it from the French Revolutionary slogan “Vivre libre ou mourir.” Under conditions of pandemia, this libertarian rallying cry is weaponized in a paroxysm of individual choicism that gains energy and positive reinforcement from in-group identification and the community support-structures of fellow denialists. One could say, then, that pandemia denialism produces a singular community; a company of Lockean self-property owners, possessive individualists whose ego-ideal is based on the kind of self-sufficing “ownness” (Eigenheit) that Max Stirner outlined in his controversial 1844 book The Ego and its Own (Der Einzige und sein Eigentum).17 Stirner’s theory of the ego was castigated by Marx as little more than a smokescreen for petty bourgeois individualism and self-interest, but Marx was short-sighted in dismissing its potential for the kind of anarchist individualism that we see animating entrepreneurial philosophy in the tech industry. Nor could he forsee its importance for Freud’s theory of das Ich, of the ego as a subjective agency that, in misrecognizing itself, and engaging in a dreamlike distortion of reality to justify its own ends, enables grandiose fantasies of self-possession. Psychosis, as Freud would note in this instance, becomes a way of making good on the loss of reality.18

  For the non-psychology majors (like me, had to look it up): Todestrieb is "death-drive" a concept from Freud.

  But gee, "individual choicism"?

• Let's check out the other side. Yes, I still subscribe to WIRED, at least for the next few months. Even though it continually threatens to make my eyes roll clean out of my head with articles like this: The Internet Socialists Want. It's an interview with author Ben Tarnoff, who presumably speaks for "socialists". The WIRED interviewer, sadly, avoids tough questions. Mostly he wonders whether the government shouldn't just regulate/antitrust the crap out of existing companies, instead of wholesale nationalization. Sample (interviewer in bold):

  There are many places around the world that have way faster, way cheaper internet than in the US, and it's provided by the private sector. So is the problem here privatization, or is it deregulation? The internet wasn't just handed over to the private sector in the US, it was handed over on super-favorable terms.

  You're pointing to something important for people to understand, which is that the US has a highly concentrated market for internet service. We have four companies that control 76 percent of internet subscriptions in this country. As a result, we pay some of the most expensive rates in the world for awful service. I mean, we pay higher average monthly prices than people in Europe or Asia. Our average connection speeds are below that in Romania and Thailand.

  This sounds like an argument for antitrust enforcement to increase competition, rather than getting rid of the whole concept of for-profit internet service providers.

  You raise an interesting question: Is my goal simply better speed for lower cost? Or is there something else? Research shows that if you were to bring competition to the highly concentrated market for internet service in the United States, it would almost certainly improve speeds and lower cost. That's a very important goal. But it's not quite enough, for two reasons. One is that competition tends to work best for people who are worth competing for, which is to say, competition is best at bringing down prices for higher-end broadband packages. Where competition is not so effective is in bringing connectivity to people who really can't afford it, or who live in communities, particularly rural communities, in which it's not profitable to invest under any circumstances.

  Disclaimer: I have very good service (via Comcast) at a price I find reasonable. But I agree that competition would probably bring that price down.

  What's missing from the Tarnoff interview: any example where government has taken over the "Internet": not just the infrastructure, but the companies providing products and services. And where that takeover has resulted in something that could be objectively called "improvement".

  Please let some other country be the canary in Tarnoff's coal mine.

  ---

• But I'm sure they have great Internet, right? Right? Nellie Bowles describes How San Francisco Became a Failed City. She's a long-time, but now ex-, resident. Here's just one anecdote:

  On a cold, sunny day not too long ago, I went to see the city’s new Tenderloin Center for drug addicts on Market Street. It’s downtown, an open-air chain-link enclosure in what used to be a public plaza. On the sidewalks all around it, people are lying on the ground, twitching. There’s a free mobile shower, laundry, and bathroom station emblazoned with the words DIGNITY ON WHEELS. A young man is lying next to it, stoned, his shirt riding up, his face puffy and sunburned. Inside the enclosure, services are doled out: food, medical care, clean syringes, referrals for housing. It’s basically a safe space to shoot up. The city government says it’s trying to help. But from the outside, what it looks like is young people being eased into death on the sidewalk, surrounded by half-eaten boxed lunches.

  A couple of years ago, this was an intersection full of tourists and office workers who coexisted, somehow, with the large and ever-present community of the homeless. I’ve walked the corner a thousand times. Now the homeless—and those who care for the homeless—are the only ones left.

  I guess it's a nice place to live if you're rich enough to insulate yourself from all the shit, quick enough to avert your eyes from immense human suffering, and progressive enough to pat yourself on the back for all your good intentions.

  ---

• An investigation that didn't really investigate. Andrew C. McCarthy describes What the January 6 Committee Hearing Left Out.

  So I watched Bennie’s Hill Show on Thursday night, the not-quite-ready-for-prime-time hearing of the House January 6 committee under Chairman Bennie Thompson (D., Miss.). The committee is crafting a narrative about — as opposed to conducting a by-the-book investigation of — the Capitol riot.

  Notwithstanding the exertions of the former ABC News exec the Democrat-dominated panel retained to make a slick TV production of this month’s much-hyped hearings, Thursday’s extravaganza did not break new ground, let alone “blow the roof off the house,” as committee stalwart Jamie Raskin (D., Md.) had breathlessly anticipated. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. The Capitol riot was a disgrace, and any congressional committee would be within its rights to show that vividly, even if doing so didn’t tell us anything we didn’t already know. Still, more notable than what we saw was what we didn’t see.

  First, contrary to this wickedly comic Babylon Bee post, Miley Cyrus did not actually perform at halftime of the production. That was unfortunate. Unlike the sparse but invested spectators at a normal congressional hearing — you know, those quaint affairs that used to happen during business hours — a national television audience is tough to hold. As Bennie Thompson is really not Benny Hill, it was unrealistic to expect viewers to hang in through his plodding opening statement, to say nothing of the meandering break he took in the middle of the, um, action. Those who did stick around got a well-structured story line from Liz Cheney (R., Wyo.), effectively interspersed with video mined from riot footage and witness testimony — not quite Emmy material, but effective to the purpose nonetheless.

  More on this tomorrow, sorry.

  ---

• Freedom to hold popular opinions has never been in jeopardy. Jeff Jacoby looks at the latest issue SCOTUS has to decide: The freedom to uphold an unpopular opinion.

  LORIE SMITH is a graphic artist and Web designer in Colorado who wants to expand into the field of custom-made wedding websites. Under the Colorado Anti-Discrimination Act, such a business would be considered a "public accommodation," which may not refuse to serve customers on the basis of sexual orientation. As Colorado officials interpret the law, if Smith offered her services for weddings between men and women, she could not lawfully refuse to do so for same-sex weddings.

  That's a problem for Smith. She opposes same-sex marriage on religious grounds and does not want to design websites promoting something she believes is wrong. Colorado acknowledges that she "will gladly create custom graphics and websites" for LGBTQ+ clients and that she objects only to using her talents to create content that violates her religious beliefs. The state maintains, however, that she may not pick and choose: If she wishes to design websites for traditional weddings, she must be willing to do so for gay and lesbian weddings.

  Smith's case is now before the Supreme Court. The justices have agreed to settle a question they ducked four years ago in a similar Colorado case, that of specialty baker Jack Phillips, who was punished because he declined to design a cake to celebrate a same-sex wedding. In a 7-2 decision, the high court ruled in Phillips's favor, but the opinion by Justice Anthony Kennedy was very narrow. It avoided the free-speech issue, and focused instead on the overt hostility shown by Colorado officials toward Phillips's religious beliefs.

  George Maynard, who famously got in trouble for taping over the Live Free or Die slogan on his New Hawmpshire license plates makes an appearance later in the article.

  ---

• Would you like to go for Double Jeopardy where the scores can really change? Abigail Shrier uses a different Die Hard quote to argue "In Defense of Political Escalation": Welcome to the Party, Pal. Noting the asymmetry in the culture wars:

  This week, conservative writers Ryan Anderson and Alexandra DeSanctis lost the ability to offer pre-orders of their new pro-Life audiobook when the book’s distributor dropped them—on ideological grounds, of course. One year ago, Anderson’s critique of the transgender movement, When Harry Became Sally, was effectively vaporized—deleted by Amazon on the specious grounds that it “framed an LGBTQ+ identity as a mental illness.” (It’s nearly impossible to speak of gender dysphoria without reference to its inclusion in the DSM-5, psychiatry’s most authoritative manual of mental illnesses; indeed, the word “disorder” is in the title of the DSM.) Even third-party sales of Anderson’s book were banned from Amazon and all sites they control. Given that well over half of all U.S. book sales flow through its channels, Amazon’s actions represent an issue entirely different from Masterpiece Cakeshop (the difference is scale), as I’ve written before. An Amazon deletion is a death sentence for a book.

  Not to be outdone, this week, PayPal and Etsy shut down the accounts of biological realist and writer Colin Wright for his persistence in arguing that there are only two sexes. Etsy permanently disabled Wright’s account – where he sold his “Reality’s Last Stand” merch promoting his newsletter – on the grounds that Wright “glorif[ied] hatred or violence toward protected groups.” That’s a lie; Wright never did.

  Wright is a biologist who made the grievous error of knowing a thing or two about biology and refusing to genuflect before the Torquemadas who insist he parrot their phony gender science. But of course, while Wright pays this price for his harmless (and, honestly, inoffensive) t-shirts and mugs, Etsy continues to list for sale stickers and pins and other bric-a-brac emblazoned with messages like “Fuck TERFs,” “TERFs can choke,” and “Shut the Fuck up TERF” with an anime creature pointing a semiautomatic handgun at its presumably female interlocutor.

  Well, I'm sure a socialized Internet would fix all that.

• But where's Goodnight Killer Asteroid? John Atkinson imagines final books in the series.:

  

  Or there's also Harold and the Unstable Bedroom Furniture. Just spitballin' here.

  ---

• Who let them out from under those bridges, anyway? Kat Rosenfield observes that The media is run by trolls. And it centers around a series I'm currently watching:

  The Star Wars franchise has always been a cultural mirror, with each manifestation reflecting the fears, hopes, and political themes of the moment it was created. The original 1977 film was steeped in the anxieties of a postwar landscape; the late-Nineties prequel trilogy is imbued with the lighthearted confidence (and excessive CGI use) of the pre-social internet era. And as its latest property, Obi Wan Kenobi, is released, a post from the official Star Wars Twitter account launches in to the culture wars.

  “We are proud to welcome Moses Ingram to the Star Wars family and excited for Reva’s story to unfold,” it read, alongside a photo of its newest cast member. “If anyone intends to make her feel in any way unwelcome, we have only one thing to say: we resist.”

  And then, just in case you didn’t get the message, there was a follow-up tweet: “There are more than 20 million sentient species in the Star Wars galaxy, don’t choose to be a racist.”

  Suggesting millions of Star Wars fans are a bunch of racists-in-waiting might seem like a peculiar PR strategy. But if you were to plot the marketing trajectory of Star Wars alongside the fall of traditional journalism, a pattern would begin to emerge.

  Modern journalism thrives on stoked outrage, it turns out. As does social media, some politicians, some blogs…

  ---

• Whatcha gonna do when they come for you? Here's some good advice from self-described Marxist Freddie de Boer: Just Stop Apologizing. There are a couple examples of how the outrage mob works (very entertaining for those of us of a conservative/libertarian bent), but here's his take-home lesson.

  I believe, deeply, in the positive value of guilt, shame, and contrition. I think working through your shit and contemplating the harm you’ve done is important, and I’ve tried to do a lot of it in the past few years. And I think we all should push back against the “nothing matters but what you want and how you feel” brand of sociopathy that’s popular now in inspirational memes. There’s a notion running around our culture that feeling bad about something you’ve done is always some sort of disordered trauma response, but that’s destructive bullshit. Most of the time when you feel bad about something you’ve done, you should. I’ve spent my adult lifetime trying to make amends to people I’ve hurt, and trying to understand my own culpability when my control over myself was not complete. I think about things I’ve done, and feel shame for them, every day of my life. I don’t want to wallow and I don’t think guilt in and of itself is productive. I am however certain that my guilt is an appropriate endowment to me.

  But it’s become abundantly clear that there simply is no value in public apology. Admitting fault only emboldens critics. The mechanisms of social media always reward escalation and never reward calm and restraint. Contemporary progressive politics excuse any amount of personal viciousness so long as the target is perceived to be guilty of committing some identity crime. The notion of proportionality is totally alien to these worlds, and when people ask for such proportionality they’re accused of supporting bigotry. People who are friendly online shamelessly wage backchannel campaigns against each other, and almost no one on social media has the stomach to stand up for someone else when the mob comes for them. Most importantly, the public can never grant you absolution for what you’ve done; absolution is not the public’s to grant. The strangers on Twitter can’t accept an apology, even if they ever would, and they wouldn't. You can ask the mob for forgiveness, but they have no moral right to grant it, and anyway they never will. They’ll just keep you wriggling on the end of a pin forever. Honestly: how often do people who make public apologies come out ahead in doing so, especially because they’re so often coerced and thus insincere?

  One of those sad/amusing stories is about a writer "whole career was built on being in thrall to an insatiable mob." You don't want to be in that position.

  ---

• Truth, but maybe not the whole truth. Steven Greenhut has a lesson: Uvalde Shows Once Again That Cops Are Just Armed Bureaucrats.

  Essentially, law enforcement behaved like armed bureaucrats. Large numbers of cops showed up. They hid behind walls to protect themselves. They milled around, conferred, and secured the perimeter, as the shooter emptied his weapon on helpless kids. They certainly wrote reports. As one headline noted, "Police delays may have deprived Texas schoolchildren of lifesaving care, experts say." That's a safe bet.

  A few other items reinforce the bureaucratic tendencies of police agencies. On Thursday, police threatened to arrest journalists who gathered at the school district headquarters, which shows that officers often can be proactive when it suits them. Second, state officials accused school police of refusing to cooperate with a Department of Public Safety investigation after Texas officials criticized their inaction. Police offered shifting explanations.

  Finally, ABC News reported that in March "the Uvalde school district hosted an all-day training session for local police and other school-based law enforcement officers focused on 'active shooter response.'" So the police can't pull out their usual flaccid, all-purpose response: "more training." In a few months, police will no doubt be handing out valor medals. The city department already released a statement praising its officers' actions.

  Before you get too angry, remember that this is not unusual. It's a pattern, not an aberration. The nation has so many mass shootings that it's hard to keep track of them, but you'll find the same complaints after each one. In truly dangerous scenarios, police have turned the "Blue Lives Matter" mantra into, "Only Blue Lives Matter."

  As the saying goes: when seconds count, the police are minutes away. Addendum: when they get there, they might not do anything useful.

  ---

• Be skeptical of footnotes deployed by an ideologue. I'm currently reading The Quick Fix by journalist Jesse Singal, which debunks a number of "fad psychology" movements. By coincidence, I noticed that he's weighing in on another current issue on his substack: "Science Vs" Cited Seven Studies To Argue There’s No Controversy About Giving Puberty Blockers And Hormones To Trans Youth. Let’s Read Them.

  Here's a key tweet subthred from Singal showing the issue:

  3/ In the episode, host Wendy Zukerman described youth gender medicine as "not controversial" and claimed that parents who don't put their kids on hormones are risking the possibility that they could experience worsening suicidality -- a profoundly serious and alarming claim. pic.twitter.com/vueJb0TA07

  — Jesse Singal (@jessesingal) June 10, 2022

  Whoa. Check out those footnotes!

  But:

  Let’s linger on this for a moment. These treatments are utterly uncontroversial, Zukerman said, because of “what happens if you do nothing. Like you don’t allow your kid to go on hormones.” Following that was a summary of a recent study that — Zukerman claimed — found that access to gender-affirming medicine (henceforth GAM) led to reduced suicidality among young adults1.

  Zukerman is clearly saying that if you, the parent listening, have a kid who wants to go on hormones, and you don’t put them on hormones, you risk raising the probability they will become suicidal and/or attempt suicide. This is a profoundly serious claim — an invocation of every parent’s worst nightmare — so one would hope that it’s backed by nothing but ironclad evidence.

  But that isn’t the case. The study Zukerman referenced, which was published in a JAMA Network Open study by PhD student Diana Tordoff and her colleagues in February, didn’t come close to finding what its authors claimed. I explained its many crippling flaws here in April — the post is long, but if you want to understand how aggravating it is that mainstream science outlets are treating this research so credulously, you should read it. The short version is that, in a sample of kids at a gender clinic, those who went on GAM didn’t appear to experience any statistically significant improvement on any mental health measure (here’s a primer on what “statistically significant” means — it is going to come up a lot in this article). So Zukerman’s claim that “those who got this treatment ultimately felt better afterwards” was completely false, directly contradicted by the paper’s supplementary material.

  Singal's article is long, but worth reading. He is (correctly) despondent that Science Vs put its passionate thumb on the scale on this issue.

• That's not funny. A TitaniaTweet provides our Eye Candy du Jour.

  If you find yourself laughing at stand-up comedy, it probably isn’t sufficiently progressive.
  
  My latest column for @TheCriticMag. https://t.co/knVPGmKSyc

  — Titania McGrath (@TitaniaMcGrath) June 9, 2022

  From the linked article:

  At a recent “comedy” show in Los Angeles, a brave audience member peacefully attacked comedian Dave Chappelle in self-defence against his violent jokes. Some reports have suggested that the assailant wasn’t a social justice activist at all, but a victim of mental illness. But the two are by no means mutually exclusive. Many of my best friends are clinically insane.

  Chappelle is well known for literally erasing the trans community through his hate jokes. This is why it is so important that he is censored. Besides, the fact that Chappelle — a black man — was assaulted on stage is irrefutable proof that his comedy incites violence against minority groups.

  You go, girl.

  ---

• Save us, Zeno's Paradox! You're our only hope! Megan McArdle notes the oncoming disaster: As our entitlements crisis gets closer, a solution moved farther away.

  The annual Social Security trustees report is once again upon us, and this year it actually bears some good news: The projections give us an extra year before the trust fund is exhausted in 2035.

  At least, this sounded like good news when I first heard it. Then I remembered that I have been writing about these trustees reports for more than 15 years. When I started, all these projections sounded comfortably far off — we had decades to fix the problem! Now we have 13 years. And in all that time, we have done nothing at all, except watch the date of insolvency advance.

  In 2008, it was 2040, and the people likely to be worst affected — those who would be eligible to retire just as the trust fund was exhausted — were 35. Now, the people facing the most disruption are 54, much closer to retirement than to their college graduation.

  Something about which you youngsters might want to query your "representatives" running for reelection. Accept no malarkey!

  ---

• As we drive off the fiscal cliff, we can't even get a free lunch on the way? Nope. Because, according to Brian Riedl, The Era of Free-Lunch Economics Is Over.

  In American foreign policy, the period from 1990 through the summer of 2001 has been called the “holiday from history.” Between the collapse of the Soviet empire and the 9/11 attacks, the United States drastically reduced defense spending and celebrated what was optimistically assumed to be a permanent end to significant security threats. September 11, 2001, shattered that peace and returned America to its familiar posture of vigilance against security threats.

  We may soon look back on the 2009–2021 period as the era of “free-lunch economics,” when hubristic politicians and economists declared that traditional fiscal and monetary trade-offs no longer existed in any meaningful form. Advocates portrayed a new economy liberated from restraints, one in which money-supply expansions and congressional deficit spending could finance benefits that would make even Western Europeans envious, with no economic drawbacks. As in foreign policy, this utopian vision proved to be an illusion. Reality has intruded.

  I have a few decades worth of gloom-and-doom jeremiads on my bookshelves, all (pretty much) looking pretty silly now. I'd like to think we're experiencing more of the same, but… you know, these guys only have to be right once.

  ---

• When dopes collide. David Harsanyi, now ensconced at the Federalist, stayed up past my bedtime to witness the witless: Jimmy Kimmel Asks Joe Biden Why He's Not Acting More Like A Dictator.

  Joe Biden is incapable of giving interviews to his allies in establishment media without looking like a centenarian overdosing on Xanax. So, the administration recruited a sycophantic late-night talk show host for the job. And, as expected, the interview with Jimmy Kimmel, who set up tee-balls for our dotard leader, was as cringe-inducing. Biden struggled to remember his canned talking points, promised a “mini revolution” if Roe was overturned (the same day someone tried to murder a SCOTUS justice), and rambled into the ether. Biden is an unserious person doing very serious damage.

  Dunking on Republicans and hating Trump might have been good enough to win in 2020, and it might get you frivolous applause from the automatons in Kimmel’s audience, but it isn’t political philosophy. That fact was evident last night as the host who once warned his audience about “fascists” asked the president why he isn’t unilaterally dismantling a constitutional right.

  “Can’t you issue an executive order? Trump passed those out like Halloween candy,” Kimmel asked Biden, when referencing gun control. “I don’t want to emulate Trump’s abuse of the Constitution and constitutional authority,” responded the president … the same week he unconstitutionally invoked the Defense Production Act, a cronyist gift to favored solar panels that is ostensibly meant to bring down the price of gas and oil.

  I'm no GOP fan these days, but a change in Congress is desperately needed to restore that whole checks-and-balances thing.

  ---

• The definition of chutzpah is murdering your parents and then asking the court for mercy because you are an orphan. This story is a close runner-up to that classic definition: Uvalde School Officials Respond to Shooting With Plan to Hire More Cops.

  In the wake of the mass shooting at Robb Elementary that left 19 kids and two adults dead, Uvalde district officials have come up with a plan to make their schools ostensibly safer: Hire more police officers.

  "It is our goal to hire additional officers to be assigned to each campus for the upcoming school year," said Hal Harrell, superintendent of Uvalde schools, during a press conference on Thursday.

  But there's no reason to think that Uvalde schools employed an insufficient number of police officers. When the shooter, 18-year-old Salvador Ramos, entered the school, locked himself inside a fourth-grade classroom, and proceeded to indiscriminately murder children, 19 cops quickly arrived on the scene. They had the gunman completely outnumbered. And in any case, police training instructs officers to confront a mass shooter as speedily as possible, without waiting for background. The problem wasn't too few cops; the problem was the cops didn't do anything.

  Also see Steven Greenhut's article about the widespread failure of cops to act with alacrity against active shooters: Uvalde Shows Once Again That Cops Are Just Armed Bureaucrats. Tough but fair.

• When is a break not a break? Peter Suderman answers: When a Tax Break Is Actually a Tax Penalty. Specifically, the tax exclusion for employer-sponsored health insurance. We all know how that works, right? Suderman looks at a recent paper from Michael Cannon at Cato.

  [Cannon] argues that, in practical terms, this tax break actually acts as a stealth penalty on workers who want to make their own health insurance choices. Typically even a generous employer only offers a handful of health plans, and those plans are unlikely to take the exact form an employee would otherwise choose on his or her own. If an employee wants to purchase any other plan, however, he or she would have to do it with money first received—and taxed—as cash compensation. Thanks to taxation, it would be worth a lot less. Thus the tax exclusion acts as a tax penalty on any employee who wants to choose their own health insurance.

  The existence of a penalty implies a kind of coercion. Recall that when the Supreme Court blessed Obamacare's individual mandate to purchase health insurance as constitutional, it was by construing the mandate as a tax penalty for not purchasing health insurance rather than a direct economic command. That ruling highlighted the thin line between tax penalties and coercive mandates; Cannon's argument draws out the logical linkage even further: So while the tax exclusion for employer-provided insurance might look, on paper, like a tax break, viewed from an economic perspective it is functionally similar to a mandate.

  The exclusion was set up as a gimmick during World War II, and it's a major driver of our bloated and expensive "system" of health care.

  ---

• Sorry, nerds: not a Star Wars reference. Astral Codex Ten argues Against "There Are Two X-Wing Parties".

  One of my least favorite political tropes is the claim that "America has two left-wing parties" or "America has two right-wing parties" or "both major parties are socialist" or however else you want frame this. The argument goes that even the Democrats aren't truly left (or even the Republicans aren't truly right), and so one side of the political spectrum completely controls discourse.

  Taken as an absolute claim, it's meaningless. Both US parties are on the same side of center? What center? By the standards of the Soviet Union, both US political parties are extremely far right; by the standards of Pharaonic Egypt, they're incomprehensibly far left. Whose standards for center are you using? The objective standard? Are you sure that exists? Are you sure you're not just taking your own personal beliefs about what seems reasonable, declaring the middle of that the objectively correct center, and then getting angry when the real Overton Window isn't centered around that point? People act as if you should just be able to take the leftmost thing imaginable, the rightmost thing imaginable, draw a line between them, find the middle, and then get angry if both US parties are on the same side of that line. But maybe they have poor imaginations. The leftmost thing I can imagine is an insectoid hive-mind; the rightmost thing I can imagine is a rapidly expanding cloud of profit-maximizing nanobots. Are we sure that a line drawn exactly midway between those two things lands on Joe Biden? What if it lands on anarcho-capitalism? Does that mean every existing human is left-wing?

  ACX does his best to untangle the sloppy thinking of others. There's also an interesting international comparison of how the attitudes of US Republicans and Democrats on moral issues compare to citizens of other nations.

  ---

• Like most people, I understand socks better than photons. Dan Garisto provides an excellent answer to the question What Is Quantum Entanglement?

  In a few words, entanglement is when multiple objects—such as a pair of electrons or photons—share a single quantum state. Like threads in a tangle of yarn, entangled objects cannot be described as independent entities.

  That explanation might be poetic, but it shouldn’t be satisfying. Things are not so simple or concrete. But with a little bit of high-school-level math (near the end of this story), our intuitions—based on a lifetime of classical physics—can be retrained and redirected just a bit.

  However, we should also make the following disclaimer: No brief explanation can be expected to convey a comprehensive understanding of quantum mechanics. Our goal is simply to illustrate the basic concepts behind entanglement, so the reader can gain a more thorough understanding of what’s actually going on in this foundational phenomenon behind quantum computing.

  Let’s begin with a slightly modified example from the celebrated Northern Irish physicist John Stewart Bell:

  Alice and Bob know that Prof. Bertlmann always wears mismatched socks. If his left sock is pink, his right sock is certain to not be pink. […]

  And he proceeds from there. Amazingly, he derives Bell's Inequality, that (as I understand it) finally put Einstein's (et al) misgivings about quantum theory to rest.

  ---

• LFOD Watch I. The LFOD Google News Alert rang for a theater review from David Cote in the Observer Sarah Silverman’s ‘The Bedwetter’ Deserves a Spot on Broadway.

  There’s a rich and illustrious tradition of American musicals set entirely in New Hampshire, the Granite State, New England’s flyover zone, where “Live Free or Die” means “choose Door #2.” You have The Shaggs: Philosophy of the World, about history’s crappiest girl band; also Atlantic Theater Company’s The Bedwetter, based on comedian Sarah Silverman’s 2010 memoir. And then there’s…I guess that’s it. Only two. Hey: It’s one more than friggin’ Oklahoma.

  No, I have no idea what Cote is talking about with that "choose Door #2" reference. Let's Make a Deal is the only thing that comes to mind. Further down, he refers to NH (where he grew up) as "the land of maple syrup and soul death" from which he "escaped".

  ---

• LFOD Watch II. But there's another article in the Google Alert mail, this from the US Air Force Academy, telling the story of Col. Harold Hoang, retiring as the Academy's "top communications and information officer." Specifically, as a seven-year-old escaping with his family in 1975 in a "ramshackle tugboat" from Vietnam.

  “My father didn’t know where we were going. We were fleeing into international waters with the hopes of being rescued by the U.S. Navy,” Hoang said. “My parents knew there would be no life for us if we stayed. We were going to live free or die. Getting on that boat and escaping Vietnam was the biggest, bravest decision my parents ever made.”

  Interesting comparison between the attitudes of Cote and Hoang.

• Not me, but maybe you. Astral Codex Ten muses on a thorny issue: Which Party Has Gotten More Extreme Faster? Inspired by this Colin Wright cartoon, made more famous by some guy named Elon:

  

  ACX takes his question seriously, and approaches Wright's cartoon with proper skepticism.

  I think a lot of the disagreement happens because this is more than one question. You can operationalize it a couple different ways:

  • Which party’s policy positions have changed more in their preferred direction (ie gotten further left for the Democrats, or further right for the Republicans) since 2008 - or 1990, or 1950, or some other year when people feel like things weren’t so partisan?

  • Which party has diverged further from ordinary Americans?

  • Which party has become more ideologically pure faster than the others (ie its members all agree and don’t tolerate dissent)?

  • Which party has become crazier in terms of worldview and messaging, in a way orthogonal to specific policy proposals? That is, suppose one party wants 20% lower taxes, and plans to convene a meeting of economists to make sure this is a good idea. The other party wants 10% higher taxes, and says a conspiracy of Jews and lizardmen is holding them back, and asks its members to riot and bring down the government until they get the tax policy they want. The first party has a more extreme policy position (20% is more than 10%), but the second party seems crazier.

  Read through for enlightenment.

  I'll make the standard objection, that the one-dimensional model of the political spectrum is increasingly unuseful and misleading for 21^st century America. More interesting would be the classic Nolan Chart:

  

  I've been wandering around that southeast corner for decades. Where have the median major party voters gone? (And how do we represent the Overton Window?)

  ---

• Another one for the "But waste was of the essence of the scheme" department. (Ref: Pod of the Milkweed by Robert Frost.)

  Anyone see this on their MSM news source? Christian Britschgi provides: At Least 20 Percent of Federal Pandemic Unemployment Dollars Wasted, GAO Report Finds.

  The federal government sent billions in unemployment aid to ineligible beneficiaries and outright fraudsters during the pandemic, according to a new watchdog report. At least $78 billion in jobless benefits, and potentially much more, were misspent during fiscal year 2021, according to a Tuesday report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO).

  "Not only is the system falling short in meeting the needs of workers and the broader economy, but the potential for huge financial losses could undermine public confidence in the stewardship of government funds," said GAO head Gene Dorado in a press release yesterday, who called the report's findings "extremely troubling."

  Gene, you say that as if it were a bad thing.

  ---

• You have the right to remain silent, except to tell us your pronouns. George F. Will records the unhappy mess: When the pronoun police come for eighth-graders.

  If the pronoun police of Wisconsin’s Kiel Area School District were just another woke excrescence on American education, they would be merely local embarrassments. These enforcers are, however, a national disgrace because they are a direct consequence of federal lawlessness with a progressive pedigree.

  Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 was enacted long before Congress could have imagined today’s progressive dogma that grammar should reflect, through pronouns, the most advanced thinking about gender fluidity. Title IX’s operative language says no person “shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination” in education.

  This language has been reasonably taken to encompass sexual violence, unwanted touching and such “unwelcome conduct” as persistent spoken sexual innuendo, stalking, etc. Now, however, the Wisconsin district, which is perhaps proud of its progressive improvising, has made this category of conduct elastic enough to encompass mispronouning. The district’s behavior is trickle-down lawlessness that stems from the arrogance and cynicism of the U.S. Education Department.

  I pity the parents with kids in government schools.

  ---

• Go your own way. Jim Geraghty's Morning Jolt wonders what the bleep happened to workplace rules, as exemplified by the David Weigel imbroglio:

  Josh Barro offered a funny and spot-on essay about this, asking if there are any adults left at the Post and observing that, “Airing internal workplace disputes in public like this is not okay, even when you are right on the merits. My statement isn’t just obvious, it’s how almost all organizations work. If you think your coworker sucks, you don’t tweet about it. That’s unprofessional. If you disagree with management’s personnel decisions, you don’t decry them to the public. That’s insubordinate. Organizations full of people who are publicly at each other’s throats can’t be effective. Your workplace is not Fleetwood Mac.”

  What we’re seeing at the Post is several employees who are incapable of prioritizing the organization’s running smoothly over venting their spleen at every opportunity; in some cases, the behavior genuinely appears to be obsessive or compulsive.

  A key question for employers is: If a potential hire gives off even the slightest whiff of this kind of uncontrollable exhibitionist narcissism and a desire to hash out all differences in the public square on social media . . . is it work the risk of bringing this person into your organization?

  Well… actually, I think the problem might be that some of the participants actually do see themselves as analogous to Stevie and Christine.

  ---

• Just a reminder: we're still doomed. Doomed, I tells ya! Veronique de Rugy throws cold water who read the latest Trustee's Report and indulged in Rash Optimism on Social Security's Solvency.

  Don't worry if you get confused reading accounts of the new Social Security Trustees Report. On one hand, you have some articles reporting that this document shows that Social Security will be insolvent in less than 15 years. Others prompt you to pop Champagne corks in celebration of Social Security's financial footing being so strong that we can supposedly increase benefits.

  But, of course, both can't be true.

  And both are not true. For example:

  Therefore, "improvement" is a strong word to describe the situation. Whether in 2034 or slightly later, when the fund runs dry, retiree benefits will be cut by 20% across the board. Congress could restore the full benefits by raising the payroll tax rate from its current 12.4% to over 15%. But this tax hike would fall especially hard on low-income workers.

  Even this may still be too optimistic. Speaking at a CFRB event, my Mercatus Center colleague Charles Blahous — a former public trustee for Social Security and Medicare — noted that some assumptions underlying these results should give us pause. First, the report incorrectly assumes only 4.5% inflation this year and 2.3% next year. This matters because benefits are adjusted for inflation, which means a larger cost-of-living adjustment than currently projected, and a higher program cost.

  I believe the "plan" is to wait until that across-the-board cut is imminent, then push through a poorly-thought-through scheme that (nevertheless) must pass, lest Granny push herself off a cliff, instead of letting Paul Ryan do it.

I heard good things, so I picked this up at our local library on that impulse. It's pretty good. I'm not sure how much new stuff I learned, but it was an entertaining and interesting read.

Adam Grant's overarching thesis is the benefit of maintaining an open mind, the better to avoid the horrors of the well-known paths to error: confirmation bias ("seeing what we expect to see") and desirability bias ("seeing what we want to see"). And it's not just having an open mind, but an active open mind: always checking our belief systems for holes, not just wondering if we're wrong, but searching for ways we could be wrong. Specifically, avoiding yet another bias: what he calls the "I'm not biased" bias.

Sounds exhausting for someone at my age, but …

Early on, Grant distinguishes four models of thought, and you can guess their characteristics by the labels he sticks on them: the Preacher, the Prosecutor, the Politician, and the Scientist. We should hit the Scientist model more often, Grant says. And it's hard to disagree, especially in these days when actual scientists sometimes don't think like scientists. (Grant's example here is Einstein, who famously dissented from the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics. Which is kind of a bad rap, when Einstein's objections caused decades of tough-minded research into QM foundations, and arguably opened the door to quantum computing, networking, cryptography,…)

Grant takes this simple idea, and applies it in various manifestations; basically, everywhere hard thinking is required: handling your career trajectory; educating the kiddos; engineering the workplace to be friendlier to innovation and flexibility; how to be a better debater on contentious issues; and more.

Grant does a lot of TED-talking, and it shows here: there are many anecdotes, graphs, cartoons, PowerPoint slides, … Many very funny.

But one anecdote wasn't funny at all: the story of a "wildly unethical" study carried out by a psychologist on Harvard students in the 1950s, where they were subjected to verbal attacks on their cherished beliefs. One of the victimized subjects, dubbed "Lawful", only became more convinced in his odd opinions, and Grant goes on to quote from Lawful's later "magnum opus" (page 60) to demonstrate.

Hm. Magnum opus? That sent me to the references at the back of the book, and… ohmigod, is Grant not really gonna reveal "Lawful's" identity?

Never fear, though: a dozen or so pages later, Lawful is unmasked. That's the kind of dramatic reveal that makes your TED talk punchy.

• "Middle School" is a generous characterization. Bari Weiss explains why she's so happy to have gotten out of the MSM biz: The Washington Post’s Descent Into Middle School Antics.

  Let me tell you a story about the middle-school antics currently playing out at a once-great newspaper. It goes a long way toward explaining why we started [her substack] Common Sense and why we think it’s so essential.

  It began with a joke. Actually, it was a retweet of a joke. The Washington Post’s politics reporter David Weigel retweeted the following joke this past Friday: “Every girl is bi. You just have to figure out if it’s polar or sexual.” I know what you’re thinking: Call the police on this man immediately.  

  I smirked when I read it. Not a full laugh, but a chuckle. Weigel apologized for the “offensive joke” later the same day: “I apologize and did not mean to cause any harm,” he said.

  But it was already too late. 

  Weigel was suspended for a month without pay.

  Weigel used to be at Reason, but (judging by my past mentions of him) when he moved to more "respectable" organizations like the WaPo, he got a lot less interesting.

  ---

• We already Did Something™ and it didn't work. So let's do it again? Jon Miltimore looks at some easily forgettable history: The Federal Government’s Own Study Concluded Its Ban on 'Assault Weapons' Didn't Reduce Gun Violence.

  Do something.

  This is a response—and perhaps a natural one—to a human tragedy or crisis. We saw this response in the wake of 9-11. We saw it during the Covid-19 pandemic. And we’re seeing it again following three mass shootings—in Buffalo, New York, Uvalde, Texas, and Tulsa Oklahoma—that claimed the lives of more than 30 innocent people, including small children.

  In this case, the “something” is gun control. In Canada—where no attack even occurred—Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced the introduction of legislation that would freeze handgun ownership across the country.

  I note that my own state (New Hampshire, for newbies) has (a) gun laws that rate an F from the pro-control Giffords Law Center; (b) the lowest murder rate among the 50 states (plus D. C. and Puerto Rico).

  We do have a lot of people who kill themselves with guns, which drags us up a lot on the "gun violence" scale.

  ---

• Admitting you have a problem is the first step. Eric Boehm notes a possible new member of Overregulators Anonymous: Tariffs Are Adding to Inflation. Biden's Commerce Secretary Says Repealing Some 'May Make Sense.'.

  Tariffs raise prices. That is literally the thing they do.

  Politicians often try to obscure that basic fact by talking about tariffs' second-order effects. They say that applying taxes to imported goods will help protect domestic manufacturers—by raising prices on foreign-made goods, making them less competitive. Or, as former President Donald Trump frequently did, they might say that tariffs can promote national security—by making foreign goods more expensive, encouraging investment in domestic industries.

  The extent to which any of those second-order effects actually happen is subject to debate, and the past few years suggest that the trade-offs involved are not worth it. But if you leave aside that political debate, there's still a basic, inescapable fact: Tariffs, by design, raise prices.

  After nearly 16 months in office, facing historically high price increases, the Biden administration seems to have finally discovered how tariffs work.

  Well, Gina Raimondo might have discovered that. Maybe.

  But the guy at the top? See yesterday's news: Joe Biden's Solar Panel Tariffs Are a National Security Threat, Says Joe Biden.

  ---

• This is the year I might pull the plug on voting. And here's what might convince me, from Chris Freiman: A Quick Argument Against Voting. And I'll make his quick argument even quicker: there are better ways to spend your time and effort. Skipping to the bottom:

  Now, I know what you’re thinking—“what if no one voted? Wouldn’t that be bad?” Sure! But that doesn’t imply that you, the marginal individual, should vote. By analogy, it would be bad if no one filled cavities, but you, the marginal individual, aren’t obligated to become a dentist. Indeed, it’s much better to have a division of labor. A world where some practice dentistry and others sell toothpaste is a better world for your teeth than one in which everyone practices dentistry. Similarly, a world where some cast informed and unbiased votes and others earn to donate to effective charities is a happier and more prosperous world than one in which everyone is a voter.

  In the past, I've liked this quote from Lazarus Long/Robert Heinlein enough to get me to the polls:

  If you are part of a society that votes, then do so. There may be no candidates and no measures you want to vote for ... but there are certain to be ones you want to vote against. In case of doubt, vote against. By this rule you will rarely go wrong.

  When the choice is between Trump-idolizing Republicans, Pelosi-clone Democrats, and the ever-wackier Libertarians? I'd like to vote against them all. And I can do that by staying home.

  ---

• Welcome to Severodvinsk, American. You're under arrest. Karen Townsend mentions another way to tell Russia that business isn't as usual: Zelensky slams U.S. mayors for not ending sister-city relationships with Russia.

  President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine spoke via video to the United States Conference of Mayors in Reno, Nevada last Friday. During his speech he called out several American cities for failing to end their sister-city relationships with Russian cities. Some cities have suspended their relationships with sister-cities in Russia but that isn’t good enough. Zelensky wants the mayors to sever their relationships altogether.

  Mr. Zelensky, who spoke to the gathering of mayors just after Vice President Kamala Harris, criticized Chicago; Jacksonville, Fla.; Portland, Ore.; San Diego and San Jose, Calif., for maintaining sister-city ties in Russia. He said those relationships should be severed.

  “What do those ties give to you? Probably nothing,” Mr. Zelensky said. “But they allow Russia to say that it is not isolated.”

  The natural instinct is to check the official list… and (as it turns out) there's only one such relationship in New Hampshire. Portsmouth's sister city is Severodvinsk, since 1995.

  From the Wikipedia (internal links removed, bold added):

  Severodvinsk (Russian: Северодвинск, IPA: [sʲɪvʲɪrɐdˈvʲinsk]) is a city in the north of Arkhangelsk Oblast, Russia, located in the delta of the Northern Dvina River, 35 kilometers (22 mi) west of Arkhangelsk, the administrative center of the oblast. As of the 2010 Census, the population was 192,353. Due to the presence of important military shipyards (specialising in submarines since the Soviet period), Severodvinsk is an access-restricted town for foreign citizens. A special permit is required.

  So Portsmouth has a sister city that ordinary citizens are prohibited from visiting. Swell.

  For fairness, I should point out that a lot of New Hampshire was forbidden to Soviets in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

Another book in the "Wish I'd Liked It Better" class. The mystery reviewer in the WSJ, Tom Nolan, really liked it, putting it on his Best Mysteries of 2020 list. So your take could be different from mine. (And, as I keep pointing out, the Goodreads folks encourage me to provide my subjective views. Did I like it? Not that much.)

It's the third book in Tom Bouman's series with narrator Henry Farrell. He's the one-man police force in semi-rural Wild Thyme, Pennsylvania, an area (seemingly) filled with boozers, drug abusers, and sad losers. Henry's pretty morose, too, even though he's getting married to his pregnant girlfriend. What sets things off here is the discovery of a much-abused body in the woods, a private investigator who's been murdered, decapitated, and left for Purina Bear Chow. (Where's his head? Ah, over here in this hollow tree!)

Eventually, Henry finds himself in peril: from that bear who's acquired a taste for people; from people threatening to reveal his past illicit affairs to his new bride; and then there's the folks who just want to kill him, framing him for another murder.

I will repeat things I said about his previous books in the series: there are a lot of characters to keep track of. Bouman often breaks into some very nice, evocative, prose in describing people, places, and things. Just wish I cared a little more about what happened.

An impulsive pickup from our local library. I'd heard good things, even though it took me a while to get around to reading it. (It won the Pulitzer for fiction. Back in 2011.) I almost certainly have nothing new to say about it.

It seems to be, more or less, an interlinked collection of short stories, told from multiple points of view, jumping around in time. (For example: The final chapter is set in the future, where Manhattan is protected from flooding by massive dikes, trees bloom in January, and "adjustments" to Earth's orbit (!) have sunset occurring at 4:23.)

Minor characters in one chapter can become the main characters in the next. One chapter is a collection of PowerPoint slides; you can view the color version here.

I was initially put off: Oh, it's gonna be one of those books where unpleasant, not particularly interesting people obsess over their psychological quirks. But I was eventually taken in, because the author makes them interesting. There's tragedy and comedy. Maybe (I never thought I'd write something like this) the funniest story about an attempted rape I've ever read.

• i feel this headline should be in lowercase. To homor "el gato malo" (come on, you know that much Spanish), who doesn't ever touch the shift key. He has a long article on the mindset of public health bureaucrats: we've reached the "we're not even going to pretend to prove this works, just do as you're told" stage of the pandemic. Key observations:

  consider:

  • we have a large group of highly unqualified people with generally technocratic/authoritarian mindsets that have failed up into positions of power for which no one, much less they are really suited.

  • in a crisis, the emotional drive to “do something” is overwhelming. everyone clamors for action.

  • so they did things, visible things, bold things, wrong things.

  • then it all blew up and went wrong and by then, they were too emotionally invested to own the mistakes so they doubled and tripled down and blamed everyone but themselves for “not pandemicing hard enough.”

  • and they all got trapped.

  • and their cognitive dissonance and selection bias took over to protect their mental states.

  and so in their minds they did not lose the debate. “you were too too benighted and dim to see that they won” is just the low energy pathway to preserve sense of self and self-worth.

  they sincerely believe that you just cannot see the facts.

  The cat has a point.

  ---

• Meanwhile, on the intellectual diversity front… Another self-imposed wound for academia, as Ilya Shapiro describes: Why I Quit Georgetown.

  After a four-month investigation into a tweet, the Georgetown University Law Center reinstated me last Thursday. But after full consideration of the report I received later that afternoon from the Office of Institutional Diversity, Equity and Affirmative Action, or IDEAA, and on consultation with counsel and trusted advisers, I concluded that remaining in my job was untenable.

  Dean William Treanor cleared me on the technicality that I wasn’t an employee when I tweeted, but the IDEAA implicitly repealed Georgetown’s Speech and Expression Policy and set me up for discipline the next time I transgress progressive orthodoxy. Instead of participating in that slow-motion firing, I’m resigning.

  IDEAA speciously found that my tweet criticizing President Biden for limiting his Supreme Court pool by race and sex required “appropriate corrective measures” to address my “objectively offensive comments and to prevent the recurrence of offensive conduct based on race, gender, and sex.” Mr. Treanor reiterated these concerns in a June 2 statement, further noting the “harmful” nature of my tweets.

  But IDEAA makes clear there is nothing objective about its standard: “The University’s anti-harassment policy does not require that a respondent intend to denigrate,” the report says. “Instead, the Policy requires consideration of the ‘purpose or effect’ of a respondent’s conduct.” That people were offended, or claim to have been, is enough for me to have broken the rules.

  More at the (free) link above. Shapiro notes the disparate treatment given to (for example) Carol Christine Fair of the School of Foreign Service, who claimed during the Kavanaugh confirmation ordeal that "entitled white men" deserved "miserable deaths" and their corpses should be castrated and fed to swine.

  That's inclusion.

  ---

• But for more on that topic… Scott takes us Inside the Title IX Tribunal.

  The details of my story are banal—I criticized feminism and feminists in a national speech. Strong nations, I argued, cannot exist without strong families. Strong families in turn need respectable men capable of providing, and women interested in having children. Neither of these things happen automatically. Much of our culture, informed through feminist ideology, undermines or dishonors male achievement, while it promotes a vision of womanhood that discounts motherhood. Universities, which I called the “citadels of gynocracy,” contribute to this problem by treating male-dominated majors like engineering as problems to be solved. I also claimed that women shaped by feminism will more likely be unhappy, or, as I put it at the time, “medicated, meddlesome, and quarrelsome.”

  These sound bites gave my critics ammo. A swarm formed, mostly through social media, in the weeks following the speech. It started with a trickle, but eventually led to a full-on cancellation attempt. Creepy, threatening phone messages arrived daily for months. I received streams of vulgar and hateful emails. National media coverage began—I was even asked to appear on the Dr. Phil show to work out my issues. Letters to the editor appeared in our local papers. People tried to hack my accounts. Emails tempting me with intimate photos and pornography began to arrive at my university email. Many wanted me fired. 

  Boise State University (BSU), my home institution, made a show of defending free speech as the swarm gathered. At the same time, but under the public radar, the university began to solicit discrimination and harassment complaints from students. University spokesmen shared contact information for students to use if they felt harassed or ill-treated. 

  Seven days after my speech went quasi-viral, BSU charged me with six civil rights violations.    

  Yenor eked out a victory against the inquistors, but you have to wonder how much he'll enjoy his future at BSU.

  ---

• Makes me want to restrict my investment portfolio to gun manufacturers and defense contractors. Chris Stirewalt recounts an increasingly popular way for the state to browbeat companies they dislike: Hot Nerd Summer: ESG Comes to Washington.

  The hot topic for policy nerds in Washington these days is “ESG,”  which refers to environmental, social, and governance standards for corporations. Like I said, nerds.

  Progressive nerds in D.C. are excited about the possibility that scores for companies on policies related to climate change and social justice particularly will provide a new tool to push companies leftward. Conservative nerds are afraid of exactly that, while nationalist nerds are looking for ways to replicate the technique for themselves.

  […]

  The idea of ESG scores is a California-via-Wall Street concept born in the 1990s out of the conscience pangs of progressive investors, including some very big fish in the tech and hedge fund worlds. If ratings firms could evaluate companies for profit potential, how about do-goodery? The reasoning then followed that since high standards on carbon emissions, diversity and inclusivity, and executive pay (the “G” for governance) would produce strong companies of great longevity, that these were actually good for the bottom line, too. Or that was the idea.

  Senator Ted Cruz comes in for a bashing. So it's an equal opportunity thing for cynics.

  ---

• And maybe you should avoid those walks where you keep stepping on rakes. Jonah Goldberg has some advice for advocates desirous for government Doing Something™: Walk, Then Run.

  As I’ve written before, perhaps the most fatal flaw of Democrats is that they take it as a given that government can do the normal stuff well. As a result, they focus on evermore ambitious goals for government. Many progressives like to blame all of their failures to achieve their more ambitious aspirations on the right’s “anti-government ideology.” I’m not saying they’re entirely wrong to do so, but what I think they fail to appreciate is that most voters, even most Republicans, aren’t anti-government ideologues. They’re just skeptical of new initiatives when the government has so much trouble—and charges so much—with the stuff it’s supposed to do.

  If progressives really wanted to restore faith in government, they’d concentrate all of their energies on tackling the stuff already on the government’s plate. If you’ve ever been a boss or a manager, or frankly a coach, parent, mentor, teacher, or any other person in a supervisory or advisory role, you understand the basic principle. Want to climb Mount Everest? Show me you can climb some smaller mountains first. Want to be the starting forward on the basketball team? Show me you can be a great substitute player first. Want to be a professional boxer? Let’s see how you do as an amateur first. Do the job. Demonstrate basic proficiency. Execute the job you’ve been given well, and then we’ll talk about giving you more responsibility. Walk, then run, and then we’ll get into a fun argument about whether it’s stupid you think you can fly.

  That's real good advice.

• "But waste was of the essence of the scheme." Joe Lancaster wonders: Do We Really Need 100 Different Federal Programs To Fund Broadband? Do I need to say that Betteridge's Law of Headlines applies?

  President Joe Biden's bipartisan infrastructure bill apportioned $1.2 trillion for such projects as roads, bridges, and airports. But it also designated $65 billion "to help ensure that every American has access to reliable high-speed internet" by funding broadband expansion. This included a $45 billion "Internet for All" program, under which Biden pledged to expand broadband access to all Americans by 2030.

  But this was not the first tranche of federal funds dedicated to expanding internet access: The 2009 stimulus bill allocated more than $7 billion toward broadband grants for rural areas, and expenditures have grown since. A new report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) shows that the return on that investment has been underwhelming.

  The report, titled "Broadband: National Strategy Needed to Guide Federal Efforts to Reduce Digital Divide," was released on Tuesday. Based on Biden's pledge of getting to universal broadband access by the end of the decade, the GAO studied the government's current broadband programs and expenditures, looking for shortcomings or areas of improvement.

  What it found was a jumbled mess.

  Not for the first time, our headline quotes the Robert Frost poem Pod of the Milkweed.

  Of course, our state's senators have been cheerleaders for "broadband expansion". I.e., shoving more taxpayer money to the bureaucracy that has proven itself incompetent at spending the billions it previously got.

  ---

• Annals of Do-Somethingism. Charles C. W. Cooke looks at John Cornyn and the Limits of ‘Do Something’ Politics. And, of course, the pressure to Do Something™ this week is …

  Senator John Cornyn of Texas is “feeling the pressure” to pass gun-control legislation “after years of congressional failure to get a bill done,” according to Politico. As part of a self-described “coalition of the rational,” Cornyn intends to use his “unique position” in the Republican caucus to . . . well, actually, that part’s not clear. What is clear — what seems really to matter here — is that Cornyn wants to do something: “If the Senate can’t come up with a legislative response after the killings in Uvalde, Texas, Cornyn said, ‘it will be embarrassing.’”

  Will it, though? Why? Per Politico’s report, there doesn’t seem to be any particular “legislative response” that Cornyn believes will help. He just wants to avoid “the narrative that we can’t get things done.” What things? Who knows? At various points, Politico describes the coveted outcome as a “gun safety deal”; “a bill”; “the votes on guns”; “a successful gun vote”; a “bipartisan agreement”; “the plan”; “gun policy reforms”; “gun-talks”; “progress around gun safety”; “proposals”; “an agreement”; a “package”; “a deal with Democrats on an issue as elusive as guns”; “guns legislation”; and “any guns agreement.” And then it notes that, when pushed, “Cornyn declined to say” what he’d accept. Undeterred, the outlet briefly describes what other people might hope to achieve, and then moves on to a long discussion of what really matters here: the likelihood that “clinching a deal with Democrats” will help Cornyn succeed Mitch McConnell “as Senate GOP leader.”

  This has been Episode 1528 of our continuing series, "Why Even GOP Politicians are Useless Tools."

  Bonus link: a Quote Investigator column for the quip "Don’t Just Do Something; Stand There".

  ---

• Lock her up. Douglas Schoen ("senior adviser to Bill Clinton’s 1996 campaign, a White House adviser (1994-2000) and an adviser to Hillary Clinton’s 2000 U.S. Senate campaign") and Andrew Stein ("a Democrat, served as New York City Council president, 1986-94") suggest we examine Hillary’s Role in the Russia Smear.

  The acquittal of former Hillary Clinton lawyer Michael Sussmann—charged with lying to the Federal Bureau of Investigation while acting on behalf of her 2016 campaign—leaves major questions unanswered about Mrs. Clinton’s role in her campaign’s effort to tie Donald Trump to Russia. It also provides new evidence that she personally directed the effort.

  In July 2016, John Brennan, then director of the Central Intelligence Agency, briefed President Obama that Mrs. Clinton gave “approval” for a “proposal from one of her foreign policy advisors to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up scandal and claiming interference by the Russian security service,” according to Mr. Brennan’s notes from the meeting, which were obtained by Fox News.

  During Mr. Sussmann’s trial, Mrs. Clinton’s campaign manager, Robby Mook, testified that he and other top aides decided to feed the press a story in October 2016 about the now-disproven allegations of secret ties between the Trump Organization and Alfa Bank. Importantly, Mr. Mook said that Mrs. Clinton was aware of, and approved of, this plan. “We discussed it with Hillary,” Mr. Mook testified. “She agreed with the decision.”

  Fun fact: "The Clinton campaign and Democratic National Committee paid $12.4 million, $5.6 million of which came from the campaign, to Perkins Coie, Mr. Sussmann’s law firm, to pay Fusion GPS for this opposition research on Trump." It is unlikely this could have happened without direct and explicit approval from Hillary.

  And the funny thing is, if she'd spent the money on those pesky battleground states instead, she might have won.

  ---

• We're going full Gordon Gekko today. Julius Krein takes a bold stand: Corporations aren't greedy enough. Skipping down to where he fleshes out that claim:

  The most intriguing and potentially alarming trends are visible in the oil market. In December 2019, before Covid, global oil consumption was about 100 million barrels per day, and the price of West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude hovered around $50-$60 per barrel. At that time, the US operating rig count was around 800 (around 2,000 globally), according to Baker Hughes. After the pandemic hit, in 2020, global oil demand fell to about 90 million barrels per day, prices collapsed and briefly went negative, and the US rig count hit a low of around 250. Oil demand recovered about half the lost ground in 2021 and is expected to return to 2019 levels of 100 million barrels per day this year. In December of 2021, WTI spot prices were around $75, rose significantly after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and currently sit around $110. Yet the US rig count is still around 700 (of 1,600 globally). The last time oil prices were above $100, before the crash of 2014, the rig count was over 1,800 (3,600 globally).

  This trajectory is difficult to square with inflation accounts based on excessive demand. Oil demand has still not exceeded pre-pandemic levels; it is supply that has lagged. Meanwhile, far from being “too greedy”, companies seem to not be greedy enough — at least in the conventional sense of maximising profits. Instead of reinvesting their earnings in drilling new wells, even at profitable oil prices, companies have returned cash to shareholders.

  It's a thorny problem, summed later up in Klein's article: "If anyone is too 'greedy', in other words, it is not corporations but shareholders." If corporate management are effectively responding to demands from their shareholder/employers…?

  You won't (however) see Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders castigate shareholders for their greed.

• See also: dependency. Kevin D. Williamson notes a common denominator: Infantilization.

  I know this is an old and familiar observation, but it is worth reminding ourselves: There is a theme that runs through a great deal of progressive thinking, from gun control to student-loan giveaways to speech codes and safe spaces and the universal basic income, and that theme is — infantilization. The Left wants a government that will treat you like a child, keep dangerous things out of your hands, put the other kids in time-out if they step out of line, and give you an allowance.

  The worst development on the right in recent years is the embrace of infantilization by political entrepreneurs who want Americans to think of themselves as victims — victims who need protecting by the same big nanny state progressives want. Same statism, different slogans.

  Also an old and familiar observation: the corollary to infantilization is dependency. Progressives seem to want to make citizens ever more dependent on government for goods and services large and small. Think 'The Life of Julia' on steroids.

  I made this a comment at NR, and a reply pointed out that KDW wrote a small book titled The Dependency Agenda back in 2012. Abashed, I ordered the paperback.

  ---

• They go together like chicken and waffles. Jacob Sullum analyzes President Wheezy's Thursday night Jeopardy!-preempting speech: Biden's Gun Control Push Combines Slipperiness With Self-Righteous Certitude.

  President Joe Biden says he wants Democrats and Republicans to join together in responding to mass shootings like the recent attacks in Buffalo, Uvalde, and Tulsa. Yet the speech he delivered last night was suffused with the off-putting, aggressive self-righteousness that Democrats routinely display when they push new restrictions on firearms. Again and again, Biden implied that anyone who questions or resists the policy solutions he favors is complicit in the murder of innocents. As he frames the issue, there is no room for honest disagreement about the merits of those proposals, which are self-evidently the right thing to do.

  That attitude is not exactly conducive to building the bipartisan consensus that Biden claims he wants. Nor is Biden's egregiously misleading deployment of the facts that he says demonstrate the urgency and effectiveness of the laws he supports. Biden does not want a rational, empirically informed debate about the costs and benefits of those laws. He prefers emotion to logic, and he demands that everyone else—including the Republicans he accuses of callous indifference to mass murder—do the same.

  I hope that's not a winning rhetorical strategy.

  ---

• ESG: worse than CRT, DGB, or DEI? Arnold Kling writes regular "Keeping up with the FITs" posts on his Substack. A FIT is his TLA for his "Fantasy Intellectual Team", a game involving picking writers "who model high-quality discourse."

  Nobody has picked Pun Salad for their FIT.

  Anyhow, from the latest, about investing according to "Environmental, Social and Governance" principles:

  Noah Smith writes,

  ESG seems like the investor class trying to reshape our society to fit its own vision of what that society should look like. The more things get included in the list of ESG considerations, and the more that affects corporate behavior, the more investors’ social preferences become reflected in our day-to-day social relations. And remember, most of the stocks in the U.S. are owned by rich people. That instinctively feels like a vision of dystopian capitalism.

  Dystopian indeed. I keep saying that profit-seeking businesses are accountable to customers. ESG says to take that away and instead make corporations operate more like non-profits, accountable to their rich patrons. See how that works out.

  Relevant recent WSJ articles:

  • Time to Take the ‘E’ Out of ESG Investing
  • The ESG Movement Is a Ripe Target for Antitrust Action

  The last time I checked my portfolio, I seem to be ESG-light. (But it's complicated. There might be some ESG-blessed stocks in there.)

  ---

• A modest proposal. And it's from Andrew C. McCarthy: If Only We Could Turn Hillary Loose on the FBI.

  ‘Whither John Durham?” That is now the pressing question for every Russiagate watcher. Admittedly, the crowd of Russiagate watchers has grown smaller since Tuesday, when a Democrat-heavy jury in Washington, D.C., acquitted Michael Sussmann, the heavyweight Democratic lawyer, of Special Counsel Durham’s charge that Sussmann had lied to the FBI.

  The answer, if we are to learn the central lesson of the Sussmann case, is simple: Indict Hillary Clinton.

  But . . . for what?

  I’ll resist the urge to say, “There’s always something,” which would be more a commentary on the career of the former secretary of state (and cattle-futures trader, travel-office-staff director, grand-jury amnesiac, “bimbo eruptions” scourge, pardons coordinator, voice of calm, suspender of disbelief, Russian “reset” visionary, Benghazi bungler, Muslim-movie maven, charity entrepreneur, and homebrew-server savant) than a real answer.

  ACM speculates, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, that an indicted Hill would "Shine the light on the government’s complicity in Russiagate, instead of portraying the government as the witless victim of the Clinton campaign."

  ---

• 'Til NASA takes the Saturn V away. WIRED gets a lot of grief here for being woke-devoted. But they still occasionally get their geek on, and their "review" of a very limited series of 50-year-old vehicles is a hoot: NASA 1972 Moon Buggy Review: Fun, Fun, Fun.

  The frenetic pace of gear releases means it is inevitable that WIRED cannot get to all of them in a timely fashion. But if they are important, rest assured, we will catch up eventually. Yes, some may take a little longer to materialize than others, however, at 50 years late, this review is, I admit, pushing loyal readers’ patience. Yet, as this is an appraisal of such an iconic EV, none other than NASA’s Lunar Roving Vehicle, or LRV (more popularly known as the moon buggy), I hope you’ll forgive the tardiness.

  The astronomical delay is simply due to the fact that Charles Duke, one of only six humans ever to ride in the LRV on the lunar surface, is an understandably hard man to pin down. WIRED has finally fortunate enough to catch up with the 86-year-old former astronaut and Lunar Module pilot to get a full debrief on how this unique electric ride performed on the Apollo 16 mission in April 1972.

  […]

  “It bounced a lot more than I expected,” Charles Duke says. “It was real springy. ”

  As for the official 8 mph maximum speed, it seems Duke tested this to the limit. “It felt a lot faster than that,” he says. “The speedometer had a hard stop at 17 kilometer per hour (10.5 mph). But a lot of times coming down a mountain we were pegged out, so I don't know how fast we were going. But it was at least 17. And as it was bouncing down hills, you never felt like it was going to roll.”

  And all for $38 million in 1970s money. (More like $262.8 million today.) For which, the article observes, you could buy 6,655 Tesla Model 3s.

• But it's Doing Something™! Kevin D. Williamson writes on The Gun-Control Delusion.

  The Democrats dream of banning particular kinds of firearms, from the descendants of Eugene Stoner’s AR-15 to the common 9mm handgun.

  This is not going to happen.

  The question has, in fact, already been litigated all the way to the Supreme Court, which in its Heller decision considered the issue of firearms that “are commonly possessed by law-abiding citizens for lawful purposes today” and held that any “categorical ban of such weapons violates the Second Amendment.” The AR-style modern sporting rifle and the 9mm handgun are two of the firearms most “commonly possessed by law-abiding citizens for lawful purposes today,” and a ban on either weapon would be unconstitutional.

  Note to politicians: if you want to repeal the Second Amendment, that's what you should argue for.

  One more interesting point from KDW:

  President Biden fixates on the 9mm handgun, and he also says that all you need to defend yourself and your family is a shotgun. A shotgun is very effective for that purpose, because a single shot from a 12-gauge shotgun loaded with 00 (“double aught”) buckshot inflicts damage equivalent to being shot nine times with a 9mm handgun. President Biden’s position is, in short, “You shouldn’t have that dangerous weapon, because it is dangerous, and instead, you should have this much more dangerous weapon.” It is incoherent, but Joe Biden has always been incoherent — this is not exclusively an effect of his senescence.

  There's even a Wikipedia page on Biden's preferred dangerous weapon: Buy a Shotgun. And (of course):

  ---

• You've been disinformed, in other words. Katherine Mangu-Ward continues her streak of monthly brilliance in the pages of the latest issue of Reason: You're Wrong About Disinformation.

  Humans get stuff wrong. We do it all the time. We're biased and blind and overconfident. We're bad at paying attention and terrible at remembering. We're prone to constructing self-serving narratives after the fact; worse, we often convince ourselves they are true. We're slightly better at identifying these distortions in others than we are in our own thinking, but not by much. And we tend to attribute others' mistakes to malice, even as we attribute our own to well-intentioned error.

  All of this makes the very concept of misinformation—and its more sinister cousin, disinformation—slippery at best. Spend 10 minutes listening to any think tank panel or cable news segment about the scourge, and it will quickly become clear that many people simply use the terms to mean "information, whether true or false, that I would rather people not possess or share." This is not a good working definition, and certainly not one on which any kind of state action should be based.

  Bottom line: a politician or government employee bloviating about "[dm]isinformation" is almost certainly not to be trusted with power.

  ---

• A modest proposal. And it's from Elliot S. Gershon, professor of psychiatry and human genetics at the University of Chicago: Let Everyone Freely Choose Their Gender and Race. His bottom line:

  One way out of our current identity conflicts is to permit individuals to freely choose their own racial and gender identities and at the same time to forbid any societal rewards or penalties based on these identities. Chief Justice John Roberts famously opined in the 2007 Parents Involved in Community Schools (PICS) case, “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” This does not fit the current sociopolitical milieu, but it would avoid the unwarranted beneficiaries and casualties of this milieu. Pursuing race- and gender-blindness under the law is preferable to enforced alternatives that have consistently failed for more than a century.

  Via Jerry Coyne's blog, who notes that "Gershon, who is Jewish, says he does not consider himself to be white, though he doesn’t specify which race he identifies as belonging to."

  ---

• She's no Saint Paul. The WSJ editorialists note a slow-motion train wreck: A Reading From Kamala Harris to the Corinthians.

  First nationalize student loans claiming this will save money for taxpayers. Next let students pile up debt at for-profit colleges. Then prosecute those colleges for fraud and put them out of business. Then forgive all the debt and stick taxpayers with the bill.

  That’s essentially the political parable of Corinthian Colleges, as told by Kamala Harris. The Vice President ambushed Corinthian while she was California Attorney General. She began investigating the for-profit in 2013 for allegedly misrepresenting job-placement rates, but she struggled to support her claims. The Education Department rode to her rescue by making exhaustive document demands.

  Obama Administration officials then complained the college wasn’t producing documents fast enough, and the Education Department cut off federal student aid. This drove Corinthian into bankruptcy and stranded tens of thousands of Corinthian students.

  That first bit about nationalizing student loans is particularly infuriating:

  In 2010, President Obama effectively nationalized student lending by cutting banks — which had been offering government-backed loans to students — out of the equation and having the government make the loans itself.

  "By cutting out the middleman, we'll save the American taxpayers $68 billion in the coming years," Obama said when he signed this change into law. "That's real money."

  As a result, federal student loan debt shot up from $154.9 billion in 2009 to $1.1 trillion by the end of 2017.

  That's from an Investor's Business Daily 2018 editorial. Now, of course, it's worse, about $1.75 trillion. To quote Obama, "that's real money."

• Suggestion: read this xkcd toon left to right, top to bottom.

  

  Mouseover: "An x-ray gyroscope is used to determine exactly which toppings they included in the pita."

  ---

• The thirteenth: eating your vegetables. I was recently directed to this document by Eliezer Yudkowsky: Twelve Virtues of Rationality. It's pretty neat. For a taste, here's number one:

  The first virtue is curiosity. A burning itch to know is higher than a solemn vow to pursue truth. To feel the burning itch of curiosity requires both that you be ignorant, and that you desire to relinquish your ignorance. If in your heart you believe you already know, or if in your heart you do not wish to know, then your questioning will be purposeless and your skills without direction. Curiosity seeks to annihilate itself; there is no curiosity that does not want an answer. The glory of glorious mystery is to be solved, after which it ceases to be mystery. Be wary of those who speak of being open-minded and modestly confess their ignorance. There is a time to confess your ignorance and a time to relinquish your ignorance.

  But I posted that in order to show you …

  ---

• We are approaching the Singularity. Astral Codex Ten decides to try illustrating the virtues listed above in stained glass. And he uses the "new art-generating AI", dubbed DALL·E 2. And provides a result from his request to produce "Charles Darwin studying finches, stained glass window":

  

  Full story here: A Guide To Asking Robots To Design Stained Glass Windows.

  Caveat:

  Though even on this easiest of questions, some of the pictures could only be described as “disastrous”.

  ---

• Welp, Joe Biden may have just lost Mrs. Salad's vote. She was at choir practice last night, but I had Jeopardy! set up to TiVo-record it from the Boston CBS station, … and we got a half hour of Joe Biden babbling about guns, trying hard to panic the nation into getting Congress to Do Something™. (A ticker at the bottom of the screen said it was showing on an alternate channel, but of course that information came too late.)

  Kevin D. Williamson tells us What the Gun Debate Misses. In light of the previous two items, I'd answer "rationality", but KDW has something more specific in mind.

  I begin with what seems to be a mystifying paradox at the center of our gun-control efforts: We only want to enforce the law on the law-abiding, while we ignore the law-breakers almost entirely in our gun-control debate.

  Almost every single substantive gun-control proposal put forward by our progressive friends is oriented toward adding new restrictions and regulatory burdens to federally licensed firearms dealers and the people who do business with them: what they can sell and what they cannot sell, to whom they can sell, under what conditions they may sell, etc. But, as I often remark, gun-store customers are just about the most law-abiding demographic in the United States, even accounting for situations such as that of the Uvalde killer, who was able to purchase his firearms legally because he had no prior criminal record. The best information we have comes from the Department of Justice, which found in 2019 that less than 2 percent of all prisoners had a firearm obtained from a retail source at the time they committed their crimes. A different 2013 study by researchers at the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins found that only 13 percent of the offenders in the state prison population obtained their firearms from a retail source.

  Criminals mostly don’t get their guns at gun stores — because they mostly can’t.

  More at the link, which (I think) you need to subscribe to read. For the nth time: you should.

  ---

  Taking a look at the most defensible "reform" proposal. Red Flag gun laws! They are Something™ we could Do! And even some conservatives like thim. But Jacob Sullum finds the problem: Bipartisan Support for Red Flag Gun Laws Ignores Issues They Raise.

  The House of Representatives plans to vote on a bill that would authorize federal courts to issue "red flag" orders prohibiting people from possessing firearms when they are deemed a threat to themselves or others. Meanwhile, legislation encouraging states to pass and enforce their own red flag laws has emerged as a possible point of compromise between Senate Democrats who favor new gun restrictions and Senate Republicans who are skeptical of that approach.

  It is not hard to understand the bipartisan appeal of this policy, which promises to target dangerous individuals rather than impose broad limits that affect millions of law-abiding Americans. But there are two basic problems with red flag laws that cannot be wished away by consensus-building rhetoric: Predicting violence is much harder than advocates of this approach are usually willing to admit, and trying to overcome that challenge by erring on the side of issuing red flag orders inevitably means that many innocent people will lose their Second Amendment rights, typically for a year and sometimes longer, even though they never would have used a gun to harm anyone. In short, minimizing false negatives means maximizing false positives.

  You don't need a subscription to read that, so check it out.

When I reported on J. Storrs Hall's recent book Where Is My Flying Car? last month, I found it interesting to compare the IMDB writing credits for Robert A. Heinlein versus Philip K. Dick. And noticed a relatively new Heinlein adaptation: a Japanese version of The Door into Summer! One of my favorite Heinlein books! And it was available on Netflix!

Yes, I might have preferred a slightly more faithful adaptation. But this is 80% of the way there. And it's way better than the dreck Hollywood churned out under the Starship Troopers brand.

Brilliant young inventor Soichiro (tragic backstory) toils away on his groundbreaking work in robotics. It's going fine; he has a beautiful fiancée, a partner handling the business end of things, a devoted 17-year-old stepsister, Riko, and a great cat, "Pete". Who hates Japan's winters, and demands Soichiro open every door to the outside, as he searches for one that will get him back to warmer weather.

I'm confessing right here: that last bit misted me up a tad. Even in subtitles.

Anyway: Fiancée and Partner turn out to be conspiring to go for the quick buck, forcing Soichiro out of the business and swiping his ideas. When he gets obstreperous, they drug him, and send him into a 30-year "cold sleep". When he awakes, he acquires an android buddy named … Pete?! What a coincidence!

No it's not.

Soichiro tries to track down Riko, with disappointing results. His efforts to find out what happened only get him more confused, but he eventually concocts on an audacious scheme… well, no further spoilers.

Consumer note: I'm not sure how much sense this movie will make to someone who hasn't practically memorized Heinlein's book.

Fun fact: Heinlein's 1956 novel was originally set in 1970, with his protagonist sleeping-forward to the far future of … 2000! The movie goes from 1995 to 2025, and assumes we'll have lifelike AI androids by that date. Yeah, well, maybe in Japan.

Wow, hard to believe that I'm up to book 8 on my reread-Crais project (started in 2020). This one seems to mark a turn in the series: Crais's heroes, friends and partners Elvis Cole and Joe Pike, undergo a lot of pain and suffering here, both physical and mental. We get a lot of Pike's backstory, how he became the stoic force of nature that he is, and why most of the LAPD despise him.

And it all starts so innocently, with an apparently random murder of Karen Garcia, shot at point-blank range while jogging around the Lake Hollywood reservoir. Karen's dad is unsatisfied with the progress of the police investigation, so hires Elvis and Joe to do their diligent detective work. Dad also has powerful political connections, enabling the LAPD to grudgingly cooperate.

Big complications: (1) Karen was Pike's onetime girlfriend. (2) The cops are outwardly cooperative, but Elvis detects that they're hiding some important details. (3) There seems to be a mole within the cop shop leaking damaging information to the press. (4) And Elvis's girlfriend, Lucy, has moved to L. A., but unfortunately without fully appreciating the nature of Elvis's business, nor the unshakeable mutual devotion between Joe and him.

It's 400 pages, and I found it impossible to put down starting around page 330 or so. (Actual 11pm dialog: "Are you trying to finish that tonight?" "Yes, am I keeping you awake?" "Nooo…")

• I have a bad feeling about this. Douglas Ernst's tweet is specifically about the latest Star Wars kerfuffle, but it has wider applicability:

  Find the lowest common denominator on the internet. Pretend as if it’s a horde of angry beasts at the gates. Cast yourself as a virtuous hero looking for recruits. Pat yourself on the back for the threat you inflated.
  
  Rinse. Wash. Repeat. This is modern Hollywood marketing. https://t.co/QgHfnwutR2

  — Douglas Ernst (@douglasernst) June 1, 2022

  It's a dishonest strategy, adaptable by demagogues and grifters of any political persuasion.

  But we watched the first episode of "Obi-Wan Kenobi" the other night, and it's good! As long as Stacy Abrams doesn't show up as Grand Moff Tarkin's wife or something, we should be fine.

  ---

• You don't have to be crazy to live here, but it helps. Liah Greenfeld makes some interesting points about The West’s Struggle for Mental Health.

  Since the 1990s, there has been talk of a mental-health epidemic in the U.S., particularly among young people. The mass shootings last month in Uvalde, Texas, and Buffalo, N.Y., carried out by 18-year-old gunmen, have heightened fears that something’s gone horribly wrong. But the problem isn’t new. American psychiatrists have been studying rates of functional mental illness, such as depressive disorders and schizophrenia, since the 1840s. These studies show that the ratio of those suffering from such diseases to the mentally healthy population has been consistently rising.

  Ten years ago, based on the annual Healthy Minds study of college students, 1 in 5 college students was dealing with mental illness. Between 2013 and 2021, according to Healthy Minds, the share of U.S. college students affected by depression surged 135%. During the same period, the share of students afflicted by any psychiatric illness doubled to more than 40%. “America’s youth,” wrote journalist Neal Freyman in April, “are in the midst of a spiking mental health crisis, and public health experts are racing to identify the root causes before it gets even worse.”

  They are right to race. Functional mental illness threatens society’s existence and lies behind its social, economic and political ills.

  "Functional" mental illness is a term of art, specifically shrink art. Its cause is unknown, and there are no cures, only management via medication. It may be, Ms Greenfeld says, "a characteristic disease of prosperous and secure liberal democracies."

  Well, now I'm depressed.

  ---

• Counterpoint. Ayaan Hirsi Ali has mental health-related ideas, too: How Texas can stop mass shootings.

  With America’s politicians evidently incapable of meaningful action on the central issue of access to firearms, it seems we have little option but to focus on other ways to prevent school shootings. Chief among these is fixing America’s failing mental health system. Texas Governor Gregg Abbott certainly appears to have learned this the hard way. After the Uvalde shooting, he demanded: “We as a state, we as a society, need to do a better job with mental health.” Yet there was also a certain emptiness to his words: a month before the attack, Abbott transferred $211 million away from the state’s Health and Human Services Commission, which oversees mental health programmes.

  With America’s politicians evidently incapable of meaningful action on the central issue of access to firearms, it seems we have little option but to focus on other ways to prevent school shootings. Chief among these is fixing America’s failing mental health system. Texas Governor Gregg Abbott certainly appears to have learned this the hard way. After the Uvalde shooting, he demanded: “We as a state, we as a society, need to do a better job with mental health.” Yet there was also a certain emptiness to his words: a month before the attack, Abbott transferred $211 million away from the state’s Health and Human Services Commission, which oversees mental health programmes.

  Consider this. Before Salvador Ramos dropped out of high school, there were clear indications that something was wrong. Students who knew him observed that he had changed from a quiet kid with a few friends into a hostile aggressor. While he did not have any reported mental health issues, the warning signs were there, particularly in his online behaviour. On Yubo, a social media app which includes livestream videos and chatrooms, Ramos was nicknamed “the Yubo school shooter”. He harassed girls in chatrooms, threatening to rape, murder, and kidnap them. On TikTok, a classmate told The Wall Street Journal, Ramos posted a video where “he was seated in the passenger seat of a car holding a bag with what appeared to be a dead cat in it”. The same behaviour surfaced on Instagram, where he posted pictures of him self-harming.

  Ms. Ali points to a state-by-state comparison of access to mental health care, which put Texas dead last among the 50 states plus D. C.

  As readers know, I'm a sucker for stuff like this. New Hampshire is number 6 overall, behind Vermont, Massachusetts, Maine, Wisconsin, and Minnesota.

  On a different scale, the site's ranking that factors in adults and youths with some sort of mental illness, NH is in 33rd. Vermont is in 50th place; only Oregon has a higher crazy-rate than Vermont.

  ---

• Would it be too much to ask the Washington Post to stop lying about the historical understanding of gun rights? It's probably futile, but Charles C. W. Cooke gives it a good try: Stop Lying about the Historical Understanding of Gun Rights.

  If it will please the court, I will happily fall onto both my knees, throw my arms up into the air, shake my head plaintively, and plead with America’s journalists, in the name of all that is good and right, to stop doing this:

  The interpretation that the Second Amendment extends to individuals’ rights to own guns only became mainstream in 2008, when the Supreme Court ruled in a landmark gun case, District of Columbia vs. Heller, that Americans have a constitutional right to own guns in their homes, knocking down the District’s handgun ban.

  This claim was made yesterday in the Washington Post, by a staff writer named Amber Phillips, under the tag “Analysis.” It is, of course, a ridiculous, contemptuous, malicious lie, a myth, or, if you prefer to use a phrase that has become popular of late, disinformation. It has never — at any point in the history of the United States — been “mainstream” to interpret the Second Amendment as anything other than a protection of “individuals’ rights to own guns.” The decision in Heller was, indeed, “landmark.” But it was so only because it represented the first time that the Supreme Court had been asked a direct question about the meaning of the amendment that, for more than two centuries up to then, had not needed to be asked.

  CCWC sums up the history, and finds Ms. Phillips deficient. Democracy dies in darkness, Ms. Phillips!

  ---

• Do Somthing™ Watch. Daniel Henninger explains: Why ‘Do Something’ on Gun Control Won’t Work.

  A phenomenon of our times is that public events often get transformed—or reduced—into phrases, and the one that has followed the massacre in Uvalde, Texas, is “do something.” Here it means that because of the recurrence of mass shootings, something should be done to control the availability of guns in the United States.

  A related phenomenon is the belief that “do something” will produce the desired result. But what if we have arrived at the point where something close to the opposite is true? Step back and it’s hard not to notice: The American political system has accreted so many solutions and sub-solutions to so many problems that what we have created is a system mired in sludge.

  Henninger describes past responses where Somthing™ was done, bringing about today's woes. For example, the thalidomide scare of the 60s brought about today's FDA morass that makes it prohibitively expensive to bring new drugs to market for rare maladies.

• When in doubt, proceed to step two. What should be my very last local dead-trees newspaper (called Seacoast Sunday on Sundays) was delivered the other day, and a column by Deep Thinker John T. Broderick (Founder of the Warren B. Rudman Center for Justice, Leadership and Public Policy at UNH Law, former chief justice of the New Hampshire Supreme Court) graced the Opinion Section. He wonders: Is America headed toward a two-state solution?

  Unorthodox times may require unprecedented actions. I fear that time may have arrived in America, as painful as it is to acknowledge.

  Ouch! According to Wikipedia, Broderick was born in 1947. So he really is, or should be, old enough to remember the 1960s and 1970s. War, assassinations, riots… I don't know if there's any objective measure of social unrest and division, but my gut feeling is that that era has 2022 beat by a long shot.

  But Broderick's real problem is…

  Watching our democracy and its cherished values free-fall dramatically into disrepair, distrust, and dysfunction during President Trump’s time in office, culminating in an insurrection on the U.S. Capitol that he helped organize and encourage, it would be foolish to see those dark days as somehow behind us. Sadly, tens of millions of our fellow citizens embraced those cringe-worthy days as “making America great again.” Bridging that divisive chasm as “one nation under God” may no longer be possible or even advisable.

  Goodness knows I was, and am, no Trump fan. But that seems to be a classic manifestation of Trump Derangement Syndrome.

  But it gets worse:

  President Biden is out of central casting for normal, thoughtful, and experienced leadership that allows him to intelligently tackle and discuss the vexing challenges we face at home and abroad after four years of chaos and confusion created by the norm-breaking and law-breaking Trump administration. But truth, competence and inclusion have apparently fallen out of favor these days.

  Well, that's just delusional. Sweeping under the rug the Afghanistan debacle, a foreign policy that encouraged Putin's Ukraine invasion, a spending spree that brought on inflation not seen in decades, and let's not forget there's a massive illegal handout to the well-off coming up.

  And that's just policy. Biden's character flaws are evident to anyone not named "Broderick": he's always been a liar and a blowhard. Cooler heads in his administration continually have to clarify what Biden said, to the point where he's getting a little hacked off about it.

  But Broderick thinks it might be necessary for the US to split up into Red and Blue Americas. One a nightmarish Trumpian hellhole, the other (I guess) like Seattle, or something.

  How many people would join Broderick in Blue America? According to the polls, as I type, maybe 40% or so.

  ---

• Is a very dim lightbulb starting to glimmer? Eric Boehm notes a hopeful sign: Biden (Almost) Admits That His Own Stimulus Spending Stoked Inflation. It's about President Wheezy's recent op-ed published in the WSJ.

  The op-ed serves as a useful illustration of the Biden administration's muddled thinking about the current state of the economy, as well as its powerlessness to actually combat the inflation it unleashed on the country.

  […]

  So what about Biden's three-step plan to fix the things that are, in his telling, already going great? First, Biden says he'll stand aside and let the Federal Reserve handle things. "Past presidents have sought to influence its decisions inappropriately," Biden writes in the Wall Street Journal. "I won't do that."

  Translation: Get ready for higher interest rates throughout the economy. That's the Fed's main tool for controlling inflation, one that the central bank is already deploying. Higher interest rates encourage saving rather than spending, which is an effective way to cool an economy running too hot by giving those excess dollars something else to do rather than chase the limited number of goods available.

  By signaling that he won't try to pressure the Federal Reserve into not raising interest rates further, Biden is admitting that the economy is running too hot. This is the closest we're likely to get to an admission that his presidency pulled the wrong economic levers during those crucial first weeks and months.

  Boehm's analysis is pretty devastating to anyone (see above) who claims Biden's performance exemplifies "normal, thoughtful, and experienced leadership".

  ---

• Just fill in the blank for your instant op-ed column: "Democrats are fooling themselves on       ". David Harsanyi has a good answer: Democrats Are Fooling Themselves On Guns.

  Did you know that 76 percent of voters support the Democrat’s “Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act of 2022?” What kind of depraved fascist wouldn’t want to prevent domestic terrorism or the prosecution of domestic terrorists, right? Now, how many of those voters would support the bill if they knew the FBI had recently investigated law-abiding parents as “domestic terrorists” for protesting against identitarian curriculums and lockdowns in their schools? I suspect the numbers might look quite different.

  Time and time again we see the same process play out. First, legacy media adopts the Democratic Party’s favored euphemisms or language to mislead the public — think, “Don’t Say Gay.” Pollsters then wrap their questions in ambiguous, disingenuous, or misleading terms to get the answers they seek from voters. Once pollsters reinforce their priors, the media reports on the results. After their rhetoric has been laundered, Democrats claim their agenda is widely popular and thus, democracy is being undermined by those who won’t support these preferred policies.

  It's the usual story. All the way back in 2014, one of the Obamacare architects credited the law's passage to "lack of transparency" and "the stupidity of the American voter". Plus ça change…

  ---

• But don't worry, the experts are in charge. James Furey and Daniel Buck note an unapologetic science-denier finally submitting to decades of research: Lucy Calkins & ‘Units of Study’: Another Progressive Educational Model Gets Discredited.

  The director of Teachers College Reading and Writing Project for Columbia University, Lucy Calkins, has long been an influential figure in education. Almost a third of U.S. elementary teachers use her curriculum, hundreds of thousands of educators have received her training, and her philosophy of reading instruction has influenced countless more. Hopefully, due to a recent New York Times article eviscerating her products, her name will become equally infamous in the average household.

  Calkins bases her popular curriculum, Units of Study, around the practice of the reader/writer workshop model — wherein students choose their own books and writing projects — and balanced literacy, which is an approach to reading that rejects phonics. Reading experts pan both for their lack of science-backed reading and writing instruction. In response to rising pressure, Calkins has created new curricula, which include a “20-page guide for teachers summarizing 50 years of cognitive research on reading.”

  It’s a welcome change, but that we’ve allowed someone who has heretofore had little understanding of the science of reading to determine reading instruction for millions of students over the course of decades is an indictment of both teacher training and selection of school curriculum. This isn’t just a matter of making a mistake; it’s a scandal.

  The primary reason for this educational malpractice is ideological, Furey and Buck say. Phonics is championed by those icky conservatives! Can't touch it!