Pun Salad

At TechDirt, Mike Brock rails Against Ironic Detachment. After desperately seeking some appropriate Eye Candy to illustrate "ironic detachment", I decided to go with xkcd: Hipsters:

And see, there's "ironic detachment" right there in the mouseover:

You may point out that this very retreat into ironic detachment while still clearly participating in the thing in question is the very definition of contemporary hipsterdom. But on the other hand, wait, you're in an empty room. Who are you talking to?

This comic is from 2013, so you can see that "ironic detachment" has been disrespected for quite awhile.

I, on the other hand, have adopted the Elvis Costello attitude: I used to be disgusted, Now I try to be amused. If you had to sum up "ironic detachment" in a pop lyric, I think that comes very close.

So anyway, here's Mike, who thinks he has something new to say:

Just an excerpt. Read the whole thing, and see what you think. Here's what I think:

Mike lacks humility, tolerance, and sympathy. You will, I'm pretty sure, look in vain for any specific examples, good or bad, of which he speaks, let alone specific recommendations for activism or policy.

Maybe I missed something. It was pretty tedious reading "good things are good, bad things are bad" over and over again. Broad, generalizing brushstrokes abound.

But most important, Mike fails to appreciate the dangers of moral certainty, even after it has undoubtedly fueled the actions of (examples off the top of my head) Luigi Mangione, Elias Rodriguez, Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, …

Of course, your lack of ironic detachment doesn't have to make you a cold-blooded killer. You can stop short of that and merely be a humorless, self-important, strident, overwraught kvetch.

Speaking of which, Mike has a substack, Notes From The Circus. Browse as desired, up to the "Keep reading with a 7-day free trial" notices.

And, yes, today's headline is loosely based on a famous line from William Butler Yeats' "The Second Coming".

Also of note:

• Obligatory Ghostbusters quote: "There is no Dana, only Zuul!" That's probably not what Charles C.W. Cooke meant to evoke with his NR headline: There Is No Trumpism—Just Trump.

  When, in 1898, Lord Salisbury was informed of the death of Otto von Bismarck, he is said to have asked aloud, “I wonder what he meant by that.”

  President Trump does not exhibit Bismarck’s cunning, inscrutability, or proclivity for complicated diplomacy. Nevertheless, there is something impenetrable about the man that renders pat classification impossible. For the better part of a decade, figures who spend most of their time around ideologically consistent thinkers have attempted to define what Trump represents. What is Trumpism (and MAGA, America First, and the rest)? Which factions does it exemplify? Which historical strands has it picked up? To which school of international relations theory does it belong? Is Trump a populist? Is he a Jacksonian? Does he owe more to the New Deal or to the Reagan Revolution? Jurisprudentially, does he side with the originalist or common-good school?

  Ten years in, this project seems rather silly. Clearly, there is no Trumpism. There’s just Trump.

  I think CCWC is getting it really right here. Hopefully, this means that after Trump is out of the picture, we'll start making principled arguments instead of shaking our pom-poms in support of whatever Trump said or did a few hours ago.

  Yeah, well, maybe.

  But it also means that Trump has no principles other than his own self. It's a trait others have labeled as narcissism.

  And … I'm out of NR gifted links this month, so subscribe, hippie.

• Another exercise in futility. They Don’t Even Want to Impeach Him Anymore. "They" being "most Democrats in the House." (WSJ gifted link)

  Damage assessments continue regarding the U.S. strike on Iran’s nuclear sites. Back here in the U.S., a pernicious and dishonest movement that began after the 2016 elections appears to have been completely flattened. The spectacular implosion on the House floor Tuesday could be seen from as far away as the outer limits of C-Span cable households. Most House Democrats voted against initiating an impeachment of President Donald Trump even after he ordered a bombing without seeking congressional approval.

  Among those rising to Mr. Trump’s defense were Minority Leader Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D., N.Y.) and former Speaker Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.). These are politicians who have spent years “resisting” our twice-elected president as if he were an illegitimate ruler. They even impeached him once for demanding a Ukrainian investigation of Biden enrichment schemes that any reasonable person would say should have been investigated.

  Clearly their hearts are no longer in the effort to deny the results of our national elections, though they may try to keep bellowing about alleged authoritarianism at activist gatherings. It seems that many elected Democrats have been wanting to drop the “resistance” shtick for a while, but didn’t want to have to oppose another Trump impeachment publicly. Now they’re on the record affirming that he should continue to serve as our president. How can any of them ever rail about his alleged threat to democracy again with a straight face?

  Memo to Mike Brock: I don't think you can chalk this up to "ironic detachment."

  Voting breakdown is here. It took up, according to this record, slightly over 35 minutes of floor time yesterday.

David R. Henderson has worthwhile thoughts on a relevant topic: War and the Constitution. From a talk he gave on September 17, 2007, the 220th anniversary of the signing of the U.S. Constitution.

My heartfelt advice to youngsters: put not your trust in government officials, or those aspiring to be government officials.

Also of note:

• Justice in Washington caught peeking out from under her blindfold. David Keating notes a small problem with campaign finance laws: Campaign Finance Laws Institutionalize Corruption.

  There's new evidence in Washington state that enforcement of campaign finance laws often isn't about better government—it's about punishing political opponents.

  Consider four recent cases there that reveal the system's nature.

  The Service Employees International Union Healthcare 1199NW—a union of more than 30,000 healthcare workers across Washington, created by employees to advocate for common interests—failed to report $430,000 in political contributions until after the 2024 election, including $200,000 each to the Kennedy Fund, an arm of the Washington State Senate Democratic Caucus, and the Harry Truman fund, a PAC connected to the House Democratic Caucus.

  For such a huge omission, the Washington State Public Disclosure Commission issued a $6,000 fine, with only $3,000 required to be paid—less than one percent of the concealed amount.

  Compare that to tax-cut activist Tim Eyman, who was hit with over $8 million in fines, fees, and interest for campaign finance violations. The court acknowledged that the punishment left him "impoverished and almost destitute." His alleged violation was the late filing of campaign disclosures and using campaign funds for personal expenses.

  David's other examples are also telling.

  And for additional reading, check out Rich Lowry's This Is What They Wanted to Do to Trump, a look at (apparently successful) "lawfare" waged against Marine Le Pen in France. ("Elections are so much easier if your opponent can’t run.")

• L’Chaim. Martin Gurri has a moving essay on the Meaning Of It All: The Mortalist.

  The human condition is inescapably tragic. We suffer a thousand varieties of pain; then, without sense or explanation, the flame of life flickers out forever. There are no happy endings.

  The Buddhists console us with the thought that misery is illusion. Christianity promises a realm beyond the reach of pain. But most religions converge in the belief that this world—this narrow valley darkened by the shadow of death—is a place of tears and tribulations.

  So what’s the point of living?

  No one who has ever bounced a kid or a grandkid on a knee would ever ask that question. No one who has shared a life with a loving spouse would ask it. No one who has exchanged a secret laugh with a best friend, or enjoyed a brilliant conversation or felt a bond to someone or something that enlarged or even transcended the limited self—none would ask it.

  This isn’t logical or rational, because the tumultuous “gale of life” precedes logic and reason. We find ourselves here, alive, aware, deeply in love with as many things as cause us to suffer. That’s the starting position. We can’t back away. We can’t be unborn. No doubt there are evolutionary and biological drivers attaching us to the world—selfish genes, electrochemical impulses, etc.—but this doesn’t matter; only the abiding feeling of love and attachment does.

  As the Electric Light Orchestra didn't say: "Don't bring me down … Bruce!"

• 

  Betteridge's Law of Headlines Confirmed. Jack Santucci asks the question: Is Ranked-Choice Voting Working for New York?

  Just six years after adopting ranked-choice voting for primaries and special elections, New York City may be headed for another round of electoral reform—this time sparked by a tumultuous mayoral race.

  The fragmented Democratic primary means tomorrow’s winner will likely be determined by how voters rank candidates. If the result fractures the party, the general election could be similarly splintered—this time under a single-vote system. That outcome could prompt another push for reform, timed to coincide with the forthcoming revision of the city’s charter.

  In November 2019, New York City voters adopted RCV for closed party primaries. The goal was to select the nominee who best unifies a party’s primary electorate. Democratic voters first used the system in 2021 to choose Eric Adams, who went on to win the general election.

  Two major research findings suggest that ranked-choice voting does not live up to advocates’ promises. First, RCV often fails to produce a winner who earned a majority of all votes cast. Two political scientists warned of this possibility in a 2014 scholarly article on “ballot exhaustion.” This occurs when voters truncate their rankings—leaving some choices blank—or rank a frontrunner below a candidate eliminated early in the count. When enough ballots are exhausted in this way, the eventual winner may secure a majority of remaining ballots, but not a majority of total ballots cast. The most comprehensive study to date finds that 97 of 185 U.S. RCV elections from 2004 to 2022 suffered from this kind of “majoritarian failure.”

  As Bryan Caplan convincingly demonstrated in his The Myth of the Rational Voter, even Plain Old Single-Choice Voting is rife with irrationality and ignorance. Ranked-choice voting manages to add to that incorrect assumption, that voters will apply some sort of 4-dimensional chess game theory to filling in their ballots. "Good luck with that."

So I finally made it to the end of July's Reason magazine, where they resurrect pungent quotes from old issues in their Archives. Guess the date on this one. (I've elided a couple of clues):

Give up? It's the second paragraph in "Guts Check" by Carolyn Lochhead. And it is dated July 1, 1995.

Which makes it 30 years old.

The target date by which Republicans vowed to balance the budget? 2002. Actual budget deficit in FY2002: $157.8 billion, which was about 1.5% of GDP.

In comparison, the FY2024 deficit: $1833 billion, about 6.4% of GDP.

Sigh. And we're now looking at the course of 21st-century government.

Further down in the Archives is a 50-year-old interview with… guess who?

OK, that was probably a softball. The full interview with Ronald Reagan from Reason's July 1975 issue is here.

Also of note:

• Alternate: "So what are you gonna do about it?" Eric Boehm points out an inconvenient truth: Trump’s military attack on Iran clearly violates the War Powers Act.

  Hours after the U.S. bombed several sites in Iran, President Donald Trump called the operation a "spectacular military success."

  Whether or not that turns out to be true, the attack looks rather different as a legal matter. Trump appears to have significantly overstepped his authority, as the attack was not authorized by Congress and was not in response to an attack on American soil or American troops. The best the White House has been able to come up with so far is that Trump acted under the legal authority "afforded to him as Commander in Chief," as a White House official told Real Clear Politics on Saturday night.

  Sorry, but that simply isn't good enough.

  Um, Eric? "Good enough" for what?

  It's probably more politic than what Trump might have said himself: "Who's gonna stop me?"

• Fill in the blank: On            , Nancy Pelosi Is a Ridiculous Hack. Charles C.W. Cooke does it this way: On War Powers, Nancy Pelosi Is a Ridiculous Hack. (NR gifted link) Inspired by this bit of hackery:

  Tonight, the President ignored the Constitution by unilaterally engaging our military without Congressional authorization.
  
  I join my colleagues in demanding answers from the Administration on this operation which endangers American lives and risks further escalation and…

  — Nancy Pelosi (@SpeakerPelosi) June 22, 2025

  Charles responds:

  I wish that Pelosi wouldn’t do this. I, too, am of the view that President Trump needed congressional authorization for this strike. (For those interested, I wrote about it here, and debated Andy McCarthy on the topic here.) But my quarrel is not with Trump; it is with the entire post-WWII collection of precedents. In essence, my argument is a) that, per the terms of the Constitution — and the way in which they were understood at the time of the Founding — Congress must authorize changes in military policy; b) that Congress granted such authorizations as a matter of routine until 1950 (see: the First Barbary War, the War of 1812, the Second Barbary War, the Mexican-American War, the Spanish-American War, World War I, and World War II); and c) that, while it is now 75-years-old, the alternative arrangement that has obtained since then is illegal. My argument is not that President Trump has done something that no other recent president has done, or that he is a dictator, or that he ought to be impeached.

  You got my last NR gifted link for this month up there, so check it out.

• Virgil, quick come and see! There goes the Robert E. Lee! Jeff Jacoby is brutal on misguided symbolism: Trump makes treason great again, one Army base at a time.

  PRESIDENT TRUMP addressed the troops at Fort Bragg, N.C., earlier this month, delivering a speech so partisan, it was likened to a campaign rally. In addition to prompting uniformed troops and their families to jeer the press and boo the mention of former president Joe Biden, Trump derided Los Angeles as a "trash heap," labeled the governor of California "Gavin Newscum," and railed against undocumented immigrants as "the most heinous people."

  He also announced that he would restore the names of all Army bases that were named for Confederate generals during the Jim Crow era — names that Congress ordered changed in a law passed over Trump's veto in 2020.

  Among those bases was Fort Bragg. Originally named for the undistinguished Confederate general Braxton Bragg in 1918, it was redesignated Fort Liberty in 2023. Last year Trump vowed that if he returned to the White House, he would resurrect the former name. In February, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth signed an order changing the huge installation's name back to Fort Bragg.

  But to circumvent Congress's mandate that military facilities no longer evoke Confederate officers who fought against the United States in defense of slavery and the rupture of the Union, the name change came with a twist: The Pentagon now claims Fort Bragg honors a little-known World War II private named Roland L. Bragg — not the Confederate general.

  It's a long post, and Jeff also takes Robert E. Lee down more than a few pegs.

• "Mistake" is too mild a word, but… that's what on Andy Kessler's headline: Trump’s Golden-Share Mistake. (WSJ gifted link)

  Last week brought us the Golden Share. No, that isn’t a James Bond movie, or a detail from the Steele dossier, although the plot is as sinister. It’s the Trump administration’s first step to nationalize the steel industry.

  In exchange for approval of Nippon Steel’s merger with U.S. Steel, the government receives a single preferred share, which includes voting rights and all sorts of control over U.S. Steel’s ability to close factories, invest capital and relocate jobs outside the U.S. This “Golden Share” is a bad idea. Nationalization is a fool’s errand, a slippery slope to fascism’s “government controlling the means of production.” Don’t do it.

  Andy relates the long, sad, sordid history of US government nationalization. Worth pondering.

Nevertheless, I've updated yesterday's post which approvingly quoted Kevin D. Williamson, who said "We have an indecisive president—and it is decision time". This apparently turned out to be, um, a misguided missile.

So I guess it's time to look at the resulting commentary. The National Review editors are OK with bomb, bomb Iran: Trump Enforces His Red Line on Iran.

There's a bit of Constitutional throat-clearing later: "As we noted previously, such action should have been approved by Congress."

How about the WSJ editorial board? They say: Trump Meets the Moment on Iran.

I don't think the WSJ mentions that Congressional thing. For that, let's turn to Matthew Petti, Reason's resident peacenik: Trump Shreds the Constitution By Bombing Iran.

In case I haven't mentioned it recently: I am totally unqualified to comment on foreign policy, including war policy. I'm old enough to remember a long line of policy "experts" making confident predictions and plausible recommendations that turned out to be total wrong-headed garbage. So what chance do I have to do better?

All I can do is hope this makes things better in the long run.

Also of note:

• I'm always a sucker for a Casablanca reference. And Jonathan Turley brings it: The Claude Rains School of Constitutional Law: Democrats Denounce Iranian Attack as Unconstitutional.

  Yesterday, I wrote a column in the Hill discussing how Trump is unlikely to go to Congress in launching an attack on Iran and how he has history on his side in acting unilaterally. The column noted that many Democratic politicians and pundits who were supportive of such unilateral actions by Democratic presidents such as Bill Clinton and Barack Obama are suddenly opposed to Trump using the same power. It is the Claude Rains School of Constitutional Law where politicians are “shocked, shocked” that Trump is using the authority that they accepted in Democratic predecessors.

  Jonathan notes how silent today's Democrats were after (for example) Obama's bombing of Libya. And some who were not silent gloated jubilantly.

  But that was then, and this is…

• I missed Porcfest again. It was all the way up in Lancaster, from where Pun Son, my dog, and I witnessed the solar eclipse last year. And it cost money to get in!

  Probably David D. Friedman got in free, though. He was inspired by one of the speakers, "Angela McArdle, sometime chair of the Libertarian Party and currently of the Mises Caucus" to muse on Strategies for Libertarians.

  Andrea recounted the LP's flirtation with Trumpism, which caused the freeing of Ross Albricht and appointment of "libertarian" RFK Jr to be HHS Secretary. Win? David notes two problems with such a strategy:

  The first is to the reputation of the libertarian movement. The Libertarian Party has long labeled itself “The Party of Principle;” part of the attraction of the libertarian movement is the appearance of consistent support of liberty across a wide variety of issues, from drug laws to professional licensing to immigration, of being motivated by a consistent philosophy of freedom. If the party is seen as visibly supporting Trump, as it will be by anyone who listened to McArdle’s webbed talk, it will be seen as sharing the responsibility for all of his actions, some of them far from libertarian. That will make it harder to recruit or retain as members, of the movement as well as the party, anyone opposed to Trump’s policies. Since Trump is not a libertarian that is likely to include not only anyone left of center but also anyone seriously committed to libertarianism.

  The second cost is the effect of alliance with Trump, or with any other non-libertarian movement, on libertarian doctrine. Libertarians who are Trump allies will feel pressure to minimize the conflict between his beliefs and theirs, to create libertarian defenses for unlibertarian policies in order not to feel obliged to attack their allies. That effect will be reinforced by the change in the personnel of the movement as Trump supporters join, libertarians hostile to Trump’s policies leave. In enough time the result is likely to be a “libertarian” party, possibly a “libertarian” movement, that is no longer libertarian.

  I'm glad I'm not a political joiner.

Recently on the book blog:

Recently on the movie blog:

Hey, the live-action Lilo & Stitch worked well for me. And I gotta say this looks good too:

Hope it's true to the original. And not like Snow White.

Also of note:

• Don't be fooled by the headline. The Options Market is not about those sliver futures I hope you own. Kevin D. Williamson looks at the unfortunate fact: "We have an indecisive president—and it is decision time."

  Donald Trump, whose gift for self-contradiction is often demonstrated within a single illiterate clause of a single dotty sentence, to say nothing of a full speech, insisted on the 2024 campaign trail that he would be a peacemaker, that he would end the Russian war on Ukraine in a matter of hours (the Ukraine peace plan must be filed in the same folder as Trump’s health care program, three weeks away from completion for a decade now) and achieve peace throughout the Middle East, too.

  But he also averred (as his press team has been reminding us) over and over that he believed Iran must be prevented from getting a nuclear weapon.

  Trump is, famously, a man who likes to keep his options open. (Ask Mrs. Trump. Or Mrs. Trump. Or Mrs. Trump. Or the star of Porking with Pride 2.) Whether his dangling the promise of negotiations with Tehran was part of a strategic rope-a-dope to help Israel pull off its brilliant assault on Iran or whether it was something more like happy happenstance hardly matters, inasmuch as it was Trump doing what Trump is instinctually inclined to do: stalling. It was, from Trump’s perspective, a win-win: If the Iranians came to the table before the Israeli attack, then he could play peacemaker; if they came to the table after receiving a good beating, then he could extract more humiliating concessions than he might otherwise have dared; if the Israelis were wildly successful, then Washington’s hand would be strengthened by Iran’s degradation; if the Israelis met catastrophe, then Trump could—and surely would!—insist that things would have gone better if they had listened to him.

  Who knows, a decision could have been made by the time you read this. It could have been made while I've been typing this.

  [2025-06-22 Update: Well, as it turns out, KDW's "indecisive" slam apparently turned out to be well off-target. We'll see how this plays out, but … ]

• Did my eyes just roll clean out of my head? The Federalist shakes its pom-poms for the latest example of Trump bein' Trump: Trump Calls For Special Prosecutor To Probe Rigged 2020 Election.

  Didn't we litigate this out the wazoo already? Yes.

  And didn't Trump get skunked? Yes.

  And didn't Fox pay Dominion Voting systems a whole bunch of money for lying about this stuff? Yes.

  But:

  President Donald Trump is calling for the appointment of a special prosecutor to investigate the rigged 2020 election, polluted by everything from suspect absentee ballots to Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s “Zuckbucks.”

  “Biden was grossly incompetent, and the 2020 election was a total FRAUD! The evidence is MASSIVE and OVERWHELMING,” Trump wrote on Friday on Truth Social.

  Geez, did Sidney Powell finally release the Kraken? Nope.

  It's nice to remember that our President, in addition to being indecisive, is also delusional, at least on this.

• "But all the cool kids are doing it!" One of my Facebook friends from high school will occasionally post crazed leftist bullshit. That's OK, it's very occasional. But it's nice to be reminded that our President isn't the only delusional one; check out this Substack article She Won. They Didn't Just Change the Machines. They Rewired the Election.

  Yes, it's the funhouse-mirror image of Trump's election denial. And you can almost imagine without reading; it's gonna be (to quote myself) "one of those dot-connecting conspiracies, corkboards with ragtag newspaper clippings, pushpins, and connections in red yarn."

  The mastermind of this half-vast conspiracy? Leonard Leo, onetime owner of Tripp Lite, maker of uninterruptible power supplies! Which was sold to Eaton Corp! Which had a partnership with Peter Thiel. And…

  To most, Tripp Lite was just a hardware brand—battery backups, surge protectors, power strips. But in America’s elections, Tripp Lite devices were something else entirely.

  They are physically connected to ES&S central tabulators and Electionware servers, and Dominion tabulators and central servers across the country. And they aren’t dumb devices. They are smart UPS units—programmable, updatable, and capable of communicating directly with the election system via USB, serial port, or Ethernet.
  

  ES&S systems, including central tabulators and Electionware servers, rely on Tripp Lite UPS devices. ES&S’s Electionware suite runs on Windows OS, which automatically trusts connected UPS hardware.

  If Eaton pushed an update to those UPS units, it could have gained root-level access to the host tabulation environment—without ever modifying certified election software.

  … and, well, it goes on like that for awhile. I almost suspect it's a wicked parody of 2000's Kraken Konspiracy Kids, but it seems legitimately deranged. The substack also has "She won" parts II and III, so they're really putting some effort into it, and I'm sure they would appreciate your attention.

• My heart won't let my feet do things that they should do. James Lileks has a useful guide for the conflicted wedding planner: Best & Worst Wedding Dance Music.

  There are two kinds of music you’ll hear at wedding parties.

  1. The modern songs the couple’s demographic cohort likes, and

  2. Good music

  Yes, I’m trading in tired topes again, trotting out agist notions of taste and quality, but I have the advantage of being objectively correct. When the modern music comes on, everyone stands around, waves back and forth, and sings along to the droning melody with a sense of generational solidarity. Good for them. But when the old stuff comes on, everyone jumps up and hits the floor. And I mean everyone. The twenty-somethings can be seen doing the Hustle with grandma, risking cracked hips with merry abandon. The Father of the Bride starts pointing like Travolta. Hoots and whoops as Mom . . . gets down, as they said so many decades ago.

  He goes on about ABBA, "Sweet Caroline" (BAHMP BAHMP BAHMP), Zager and Evans, Don MacLean, …

Recently on the movie blog:

George Will notes a newfound devotion to Constitutional checks and balances among the enlightened: Progressives suddenly remember presidents shouldn’t act monarchically. (WaPo gifted link)

As I was looking for appropriate Eye Candy at Amazon, I noted there is a lot of "No Kings" merch already available, no doubt from the very same people that will be happy to sell you MAGA merch as well. I went with something more festive instead, welcoming the latest newcomers to belief in the non-Living Constitution.

I don't know how long they'll stay at the party, but I'll be nicer to them while they're in attendance.

Also of note:

• I question the headline's hypothesis. Robert Corn-Revere has some suggestions: If Brendan Carr Cares About Free Speech, He Should Make These Changes at the FCC.

  Brendan Carr used to talk a big game on free speech. In 2021, when members of Congress urged the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to block the sale of a Miami radio station over its perceived political slant, Carr—one of the agency's commissioners—called that move "a deeply troubling transgression of free speech and the FCC's status as an independent agency." He urged his colleagues to push back and assured the public that the FCC's review of the transaction would be "free from political pressure."

  These days, Carr has little credibility
on freedom of speech. Now the chair of the Commission, he has been busy reopening
investigations against broadcast networks
because of their editorial policies, threatening public broadcasters ostensibly about how they raise sponsorship funds (but really about their editorial positions), threatening media companies over their hiring practices, and strong-arming technology companies about issues well beyond the FCC's limited statutory mission.

  Robert has a number of excellent recommendations, and I fear that not a single one of them will be followed.

• “Like the feather pillow, he bears the marks of the last person who has sat on him.” Kevin D. Williamson analyzes Trump's shifting policy on illegal immigrants: TACO, Loco.

  Donald Trump is a remarkably weak man. Consider his administration’s constant immigration flip-flopping.

  Immigration—illegal immigration most specifically and urgently, but immigration in general, too—is the reason Donald J. Trump, game-show host and cameo performer in porn films, is president of these United States. In a world in which the immigration issue had been treated seriously by Republicans (or—ho, ho!—by Democrats), Trump never would have been the 2016 nominee and never would have been president. Trade has long been Trump’s No. 1 issue, but immigration has been a close No. 2 for about a decade. Ironic, then, that his trade and immigration policies change every 15 minutes.

  Sometimes, we get TACO Trump—TACO being Wall Street’s reassuring acronym: Trump Always Chickens Out. He has done that a lot with tariffs, but he also did it (for a few hours, at least) with the recent immigration crackdown, presumably after someone explained to him that his policies were creating problems for farmers, restaurateurs, and hoteliers, all of whom rely heavily on immigrant workforces and some of whom employ a non-trivial number of illegal immigrants. “Our great Farmers and people in the Hotel and Leisure business have been stating that our very aggressive policy on immigration is taking very good, long time workers away from them, with those jobs being almost impossible to replace,” Trump wrote last week. So—TACO?

  Not so fast. Trump un-TACO’d his own TACO—or at least he tried to.

  If you, dear reader, were hoping to get consistency and clarity on this matter from DJT, well… how does it feel to hope?

• "… But were afraid to find out". I would imagine that most readers of this blog have known about this for a long time, but Charles Blahous summarizes:

  What's going on with Social Security? @mercatus senior research strategist Charles Blahous summarizes the newly released 2025 trustees' report: https://t.co/Tx629tOU0U

  — Discourse Magazine (@Discourse_Mag) June 18, 2025

  Just the first two (of seven) takeaways:

  1. Social Security is going insolvent. According to the trustees, Social Security now faces a financing shortfall equal to roughly 22% of its scheduled benefit obligations (which include future scheduled payments for individuals who are already receiving benefits today).

  2. The financing shortfall is massive and growing increasingly difficult to correct. Although press reports tend to focus on the trust funds’ projected date of depletion, the specific date is not really what matters. What matters is the size of the shortfall and whether it still remains practicable to close it. This is increasingly open to question as lawmakers procrastinate and the shortfall grows. Already, the shortfall is of such a size that closing it now would require generating savings equal to an across-the-board benefit cut of roughly 27% in the benefits going forward from this year indefinitely into the future. Because lawmakers would likely never enact such sudden benefit cuts and would instead gradually phase in any changes, the eventual percentage reductions would almost certainly need to be even larger. If lawmakers were to delay action to the point that Social Security trust fund depletion became imminent, even complete elimination of all new benefit claims would be insufficient to prevent program insolvency.

  There are too many demagogues and cowards in Congress. And we have a President that (somehow) manages to be both.

• Missing him all over again. Itxu Diaz predicts, with hope: The Second Coming of America’s Funniest Writer.

  Though P. J. O’Rourke passed away three years ago, his sharp wit and defense of freedom continue to resonate in a world still tempted by interventionist solutions. Reclaiming his work is more vital now than ever. What he told us through laughs and jabs in recent decades has proven to be one of the sharpest diagnoses of the dangers of postmodern left-wing ideology—and one of the most inspired reflections on why we must root our societies in individual liberty, private property, the free market, and the Judeo-Christian values that shaped the West for centuries.

  Progressives want bigger government, and often conservatives don’t want it as small as we ought to like. O’Rourke knew all too well that the larger the state grows, the smaller individuals become. He devoted much of his work to explaining this in a way anyone could understand—even those not particularly interested in politics. His words resonate today in a new light, and fortunately, they remain easy to access: the Internet is full of O’Rourke’s articles, and all his books are still in print. The ideas, the jokes—the profound, the outdated, and even the ones that haven’t aged all that well—are still out there, waiting to be discovered by any digital wanderer with a sense of humor and a thirst for sharp thinking. It’s almost frightening to realize that some of O’Rourke’s tech-related jokes would go completely over a millennial or zoomer’s head today. And it’s even more pitiful to think that some of his old comments would be cancelled in today’s dull, hypersensitive postmodern world. Perhaps it’s because, as he once said, “One of the problems with being a writer is that all of your idiocies are still in print somewhere.” Incidentally, that’s where O’Rourke found his only point of agreement with environmentalists: “I strongly support paper recycling.”

  Itxu Diaz, his bio reveals, is Spanish. I recommend he immigrate, we need him.

I've been pretty slipshod over the years about Juneteenth. Let me change that with a relevant Coleman Hughes article, describing What American Students Aren’t Taught About Slavery.

Cakewalk?! Well, sure: Wikipedia has an article.

But Coleman provides balance to the story of slavery: it wasn't confined to America, and it wasn't just Blacks. His students were dumbfounded to be told.

Also of note:

• Only safely viewable from a distance, preferably hundreds of miles. Jeffrey Blehar confesses: New York’s Mayoral Race Is a Glorious Dumpster Fire, And I Love It. (NR gifted link)

  Among the choices, Eric Adams; Andrew Cuomo ("Governor Nosferatu"); and…

  Meanwhile, New York City progressives hate Cuomo every bit as much as they hate Adams, and they have chosen to rally — with their typical semireligious fervor — around State Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani. Mamdani, the Indian-Ugandan Muslim son of a filmmaker and a Columbia University poli-sci professor, might as well have been purpose-built by Soros-funded scientists in a lab to activate every fashionably progressive erogenous zone in city politics.

  A handsome and affable public speaker, Mamdani thrills crowds of educated hyper-woke young white women with his visions of a “more equitable” New York: He is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America. He calls for universal health care and the increased use of “social workers” as opposed to police. He promises to eliminate bus fares, open city-run grocery stores, and institute rent freezes. Do you even need to ask whether Zohran embraces the full spectrum of the LGBT rainbow? He’s so woke his own biography is practically the living embodiment of the DEI ideal.

  And on international affairs — something that actually matters for the mayor of New York, the world’s most important city and home of the United Nations — he is unspeakably awful.

  He is a vocal supporter of the boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement that has plagued college campuses and academic institutions over the past 15 years. He openly labels Israel’s war in Gaza a “genocide.” Just yesterday, in an interview with Tim Miller of The Bulwark, Mamdani refused to condemn the phrase “Globalize the intifada,” saying that, when he hears those chants, “What I hear . . . is a desperate desire for equality and equal rights in standing up for Palestinian human rights.” He further embarrassed himself by saying “intifada” was how the Holocaust Museum translates the Warsaw Ghetto “uprising” into Arabic, as if the two were functionally equivalent. (The problem, of course, is that Mamdani sincerely believes they are.)

  Long excerpt, free link. Check it out.

• And has she been fired yet? Jeff Maurer wonders: What, In Theory, Is Tulsi Gabbard's Job? (His subhed: "Tulsi: What would you say ya do here?")

  Yesterday, Trump had this to say about Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard’s assessment of Iran’s nuclear program:

  “I don't care what she said.”

  I think this was a rare shrewd assessment from the president. Trump and I don’t agree often, but we’re definitely on the same page here. Here is a partial list of people I would rather the president listen to than Tulsi Gabbard on foreign policy matters:

  • Jared Kushner

  • The “Son of Sam” dog

  • Chat GPT

  • Laffy Taffy wrappers

  • A pig that makes foreign policy decisions by eating from troughs labeled “bomb” and “do not bomb”

  • The Great Gazoo

  • Beatles records played backwards

  • An infinite number of monkeys at an infinite number of typewriters

  Trump’s comment wasn’t a one-off; Gabbard appears to have been sidelined. Axios reports that Trump’s “entire top foreign policy team” recently met at Camp David to discuss Israel and Iran, but notes that Trump’s top foreign policy team doesn’t include Gabbard. That seems…strange — she’s technically the director of national intelligence. If the president held a summit of Chinese-American cellists and didn’t invite Yo-Yo Ma, I don’t think I’d be nuts to assume that the president might have some beef with Yo-Yo Ma.

  A quick Googling shows she hasn't quit yet. In theory, the DNI might be a useful and important component of a foreign policy structure. Hey, maybe bring back John Bolton!

• Fire away! Noah Smith looks at some poor polemical marksmanship: Progressives take their best shot at Abundance (but it falls short).

  It continues to be the case that almost none of Abundance’s critics seem to have actually read the book. The first wave of critics basically ignored the ideas in it, and talked about their own ideas instead. Later critics became more aggressive, frenetically lobbing insult-words at the authors — “libertarian”, “Republican”, “oligarch-funded”, etc. — that completely ignored the book’s argument that excessive regulation is holding back big government. Occasionally, these shouters would admit that they had not, in fact, read the book they were insulting.

  What explains this frantic, scrambling assault? I have no doubt that many progressives instinctively feel that anyone who criticizes any kind of regulation is a small-government pro-corporate neoliberal. But Marc J. Dunkelman’s book Why Nothing Works — which makes the same exact point as Abundance, with more depth on the history and legal details of anti-government regulation — has provoked no such outpouring of vitriol.

  My best guess is that it’s not the ideas in Abundance that frightened progressives, but the identities of the authors — or, more specifically, one of the authors. Marc J. Dunkelman is a bookish academic, and Derek Thompson is a well-read wonkish opinion writer, but Ezra Klein is a powerful tastemaker and arbiter of opinion within the Democratic party. If Ezra Klein says that it’s time for the Democrats to start concentrating their energies on raising state capacity, then there’s a good chance that five years later, “raising state capacity” is what the party will be all about.

  My best guess is that it’s not the ideas in Abundance that frightened progressives, but the identities of the authors — or, more specifically, one of the authors. Marc J. Dunkelman is a bookish academic, and Derek Thompson is a well-read wonkish opinion writer, but Ezra Klein is a powerful tastemaker and arbiter of opinion within the Democratic party. If Ezra Klein says that it’s time for the Democrats to start concentrating their energies on raising state capacity, then there’s a good chance that five years later, “raising state capacity” is what the party will be all about.

  I recently read the Dunkelman book — my report here — and wasn't too impressed. Although it did a pretty good job of convincing me that Progressivism isn't a very coherent political philosophy.

I could not resist replying:

"Y'know, that 'deplorables' thing worked so well for Hillary... we should double down on that."

— Paul Sand (@punsalad) June 17, 2025

Goodness knows I'm not a Trump fan, but flinging childish insults about his supporters is no way to woo people to your side.

Also of note:

• Fetish (n): an object believed to have magical powers. Recently outing himself as a fetishist is New Hampshire State Representative David Meuse, in the editorial pages of my worthless local newspaper, Foster's Daily Democrat. His headline reveals what he thinks is really to blame for a recent atrocity: Assassinations in Minnesota part of nation's larger plague of gun violence.

  Meuse will not be the first politician, nor the last, to point with horror at the murder weapon, and not the monster wielding it.

  But where is the standard followup, the part where one or more gun control measures are advocated? Meuse is a state legislator, after all. You don't even need to come up with something that would have prevented the horror in Minnesota! Goodness knows, that's never stopped other wannabe gun-controllers!

  Well it gets pretty lame, and I've bolded his proposed "solution":

  Until we do more to protect ALL of us from gun violence, we will continue to live with the consequences of brutal and unnecessary tragedies like the one in Minnesota.

  That's it. "Do more."

  It's just that simple!

• Welcome to Serfdom! Population: Us. Jim Geraghty reports: We Saw ‘Government Motors,’ Now Trump Has Created ‘U.S. Government Steel’. Quoting Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick's tweet:

  President Trump has secured a perpetual Golden Share as part of Nippon Steel’s acquisition of U.S. Steel. This partnership between the United States and Nippon Steel includes historic $14 billion investment in U.S. Steel by Nippon Steel that will revitalize this strategic and…

  — Howard Lutnick (@howardlutnick) June 14, 2025

  That "perpetual Golden Share" essentially makes U.S. Steel a nationalized industry. Click through for the superpowers it awards to "the President of the United States or his designee".

  Jim comments:

  I hope all the Republicans who justifiably objected, loudly and frequently, to the U.S. government purchasing shares of General Motors – earning the company the derisive nickname, “Government Motors” – remember to object to this arrangement. The board of directors of U.S. Steel and those who own the 226 million shares of U.S. Steel stock no longer really make the decisions for the company; now the U.S. government gets to veto the decisions listed above.

  Jim also fondly remembers that "Before, during, and after the taxpayer bailout, GM continued to make millions of vehicles that could kill you if your key chain was too heavy."

  My take on the GM bailout, back in the day, may be viewed here.

• “A government bureau is the nearest thing to eternal life we’ll ever see on this earth.” (Ronald Reagan.)

  At Cato, Nicholas Anthony looks at a program that hasn't been used by anyone since 2022: Postal Banking Continues to Fail.

  For anyone wondering, “What is the postal banking pilot program?” here’s a brief breakdown to get you up to speed. The United States Postal Service (USPS) offered banking services up until 1966. It was largely discontinued because the service wasn’t popular. More recently, however, people have been calling for a return to postal banking. The argument is that having the government provide bank accounts would help the millions of Americans who do not have accounts.

  The USPS needs Congress to sign off on such a radical change, and there’s little sign of that happening. So, the USPS did the next worst thing: it exploited past expansions of its authority to create the postal banking pilot program. Almost overnight, the USPS launched the new program in four cities. People could now bring in their payroll checks and get them loaded onto prepaid gift cards, albeit for a fee of $5.95 and a daily limit of $500.

  Of course, the employees that keep track of postal banking's lack of use go on drawing a salary.

  Pun Salad's previous article on postal banking may be found here. Unsurprisingly, Elizabeth Warren was a fan back then.

• Going out on a limb. The AntiPlanner predicts Amtrak Will Not Be Profitable by 2028.

  “With steady, sustained support from Congress and the administration, Amtrak’s passenger train service will become operationally profitable by FY 28,” says Amtrak in its latest request for subsidies from U.S. taxpayers. This is, at best, deceptive and at worst an outright lie.

  Even as Amtrak promises to be profitable in three years, it admits that it is losing more money now than in 2019 despite carrying record numbers of passengers. It blames this on costs rising faster than revenues, reductions in state support for many trains, and increased costs “treated as operating costs” even though they are supposedly really capital investments. Unless Congress dramatically cuts Amtrak’s capital funding, it isn’t clear how any of these trends will be reversed in the next three years.

  Amtrak or its backers have promised that profitability was just around the corner ever since it began. […]

  Amtrak is asking Congress for a cool $2,427,000,000 in FY2026. What I'd like to see in response is: "How about nothing? Does nothing work for you?"

• Speaking of spending money we don't have… Allison Schrager writes on Fair-weather Hawks.

  I’ve seen some very strong opinions about the Big Beautiful Bill. Everyone suddenly seems to have found debt religion. Welcome to the club! Though I’m wary of these new debt hawk allies—because their objections strike me as more politically convenient than a sudden and sincere concern about the debt. No one is speaking out against anything their political constituency actually favors. I don’t hear Republican debt hawks naming a single tax cut they don’t like. (For the record, I favor extending the TCJA and restoring bonus depreciation—though I’d prefer thoughtful tax reform.) I hate increasing the SALT limit, the tax on tips, and all the other new distortions we’re throwing in that will never go away.

  Meanwhile, Democrats are incensed that ANYONE might lose Medicaid coverage—even able-bodied young men—especially if anyone else is getting a tax cut. We’ve expanded Medicaid a lot over the years. Are they arguing every expansion must be irreversible? Just say you see Medicaid as a backdoor way to create a government option that covers most people—even those who are borderline middle class.

  I wrote for Bloomberg that both Democrats and Republicans need to get real. Republicans must accept that taxes need to go up; Democrats must accept that we can’t afford a welfare state for the middle class. If they did, we could actually make progress. We could broaden the tax base (get rid of all the deductions), lower rates, and implement a VAT. We could also agree that welfare is for the needy and unlucky, make it work better for the people who need it, and remove all the incentives that make work expensive if you live on benefits. That would not only save us lots of money and fix the debt problem—it would also boost growth.

  My memory may be fading, but I still remember that it's a bad idea for Republicans to buy a tax increase now for a pinky-swear promise of spending reductions in the future. Cue up the Who's "Won't Get Fooled Again".

xkcd: Exoplanet System:

Mouseover: "Sure, this exoplanet we discovered may seem hostile to life, but our calculations suggest it's actually in the accretion disc's habitable zone."

I've previously remarked on how some factions of science fandom (and even some scientists) are incredibly hopeful that there are earthlike planets out there somewhere. That's no way to approach a scientific question, is it?

I confess, I have a preference for the Rare Earth hypothesis. Where I interpret "rare" as "probably just us." Based on nothing more than general contrariness, probably with a bit of leftover religion of my youth.

If you want to see the real deal on that last thing, though, head on over to The Institute for Creation Research, for the full It-Wuz-God explanation.

I'd bet against them, but not a lot.

Also of note:

• Here's hoping my dishwasher holds up. Why? Because, according to Jack Nicastro at Reason: Trump is putting a 50 percent tariff on home appliances.

  President Donald Trump has been celebrating in recent weeks as his administration strikes bilateral trade deals following "Liberation Day." Some products, however, will soon be subject to increased duties, not lower ones. Starting June 30, imports derived from aluminum and steel will be subject to a 50 percent ad valorem tariff. These duties will hit imports of common household appliances like refrigerators and dishwashers and increase the cost of living for everyday Americans.

  Trump issued two executive orders on February 10 directing the Commerce Department to subject aluminum and steel imports to the 25 percent ad valorem tariffs imposed during his first administration. The orders cite the January 2018 reports of then-Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross warning that steel and aluminum imports threatened to impair U.S. national security. These reports provided Trump the statutory authority to modify the Harmonized Tariff Schedule of the U.S. (HTSUS) under Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962, which "allows the President to impose restrictions on goods imports…with trading partners if the U.S. Secretary of Commerce determines…that the quantity or other circumstance of those imports 'threaten to impair' U.S. national security."

  As mentioned just yesterday: this kind of thing will hurt the less-well-off much worse than tax changes in the One Big Beautiful Bill.

• As my neighbor advises: if you really want to be exhausted, get your kids a DoubleDoodle puppy. Or if you want to go the other way, you could read Kevin D. Williamson's take: Against Exhaustion.

  For a bonus, KDW leads off with a Bastiat quote:

  We must confess that our adversaries have a marked advantage over us in the discussion. In very few words they can announce a half-truth; and, in order to demonstrate that it is incomplete, we are obliged to have recourse to long and dry dissertations.

  And continues:

  Readers of these pages of course know Jonah Goldberg. Alberto Brandolini is an Italian computer programmer who gave us Brandolini’s Law, which holds: “The amount of energy needed to refute bullsh-t is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it.” According to lore, Brandolini was inspired to put this into succinct form by seeing a television interview with Silvio Berlusconi (in his day, the Luciano Pavarotti of bulls—t) right after reading Thinking, Fast and Slow. (I will here confess some envy at the fact that Brandolini’s Law has caught on, while Williamson’s Ratio—40.44:1, the average number of intelligent English words it takes to refute one word of dishonest and illiterate horsepucky—is gathering dust on a shelf at the Museum of Exanimate Rhetorical Devices.) The same idea has been expressed for centuries in various misattributed adages about fast-moving lies and slowpoke facts lacing up their boots. “Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it,” wrote Jonathan Swift, which seems to be the OG version of the proverb in its most familiar form.

  As always, I'm grateful to the Dispatch editors for saving my delicate eyes from seeing that "i" in "bullshit".

• From all the whining, you would think it was more. I think it's fair to say Jim Geraghty is unimpressed with the DOGEizing results so far: DOGE Takes a Nibble Out of Big Government. (NR gifted link)

  Begin with the upside: President Donald Trump was never much of a fiscal hawk in his first term, but at least for the first stretch of his second term, he established the Department of Government Efficiency and put the world’s most energetic — probably hyperactive — billionaire in charge of it, and made cutting wasteful spending a priority.

  As of this writing, according to DOGE’s data, it has identified an estimated $175 billion in savings — about $1,086 per taxpayer — from a combination of “asset sales, contract/lease cancellations and renegotiations, fraud and improper payment deletion, grant cancellations, interest savings, programmatic changes, regulatory savings, and workforce reductions.”

  That sounds good. But if you paid attention during Trump’s big Madison Square Garden rally on October 27, 2024, you’ll recall that Elon Musk pledged to future Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick that DOGE would save taxpayers “at least $2 trillion.” By March, President Trump was boasting that DOGE was going to save so much money that the savings would be returned to taxpayers in the form of “DOGE checks.”

  And you don't hear much about that any more, do ya?

  Note: that's an article from the August print issue of National Review, so you'll want to hit that gifted link if you're not a subscriber.

  But here's the funny part. In Jim's Morning Jolt newsletter yesterday:

  ADDENDUM: A lot of readers detest the recent magazine piece on the disappointments of Elon Musk and DOGE and argue it is far too negative. Apparently, the article focuses too much on what DOGE actually did and the actual numbers, and not enough on how hard Musk and his team tried, and how good their intentions were. I am informed it is “smug” to expect Musk and DOGE to find $2 trillion in savings, just because Musk stood on stage at a rally for Donald Trump in New York’s Madison Square Garden and said, when asked, “How much do you think we can rip out of this wasted $6.5 trillion Harris Biden budget?” responded, “I think we could do at least 2 trillion.” I regret the error of daring to remember things that happened seven months ago.

  Unfortunately, in those heady days, it was easy to forget that (1) Congress has the power of the purse, and (2) "we" keep electing the same big spenders.

• 

  One for the University Near Here Interlibrary Loan Staff. At the WSJ, Judge Glock looks at George Seldin's latest. False Dawn, an economic history of the Great Depression.

  For those who lived through the Great Depression, the strangeness of it was hard to convey. The nation had suffered no great natural disaster. The farmers were still farming, and the factories were still standing. Yet there lay rotting food that people couldn’t afford to buy and empty factories next to shanty towns filled with the unemployed.

  In 1932 Franklin Delano Roosevelt won the presidency with the promise to restore prosperity. But he and his advisers had no clear explanation for the collapse and his subsequent New Deal would amount to a series of experiments. FDR admitted to the nation that some of his proposals took the nation down “a new and untrod path.” If they failed to “produce the hoped-for results, I shall be the first to acknowledge it.”

  George Selgin’s “False Dawn” asks if the New Deal’s varied experiments produced the promised recovery. In dispassionate, careful and finally devastating detail, “False Dawn” shows that, with a few exceptions, FDR’s experiments did not work. And he did not acknowledge it.

  Hope I get to it. I'm not a young person any more.

From our lousy local newspaper, Foster's Daily Democrat, came the opinions of "The Observer", one Ron McAllister. Apparently Ron gets his picture of rich people from… well, read for yourself: Scrooge McDuck would be a fan of One Big Beautiful Bill.

Yes, he draws important insights about rich Americans by … well, it's unclear whether he's recollecting old comic books, or watching Duck Tales reruns on the Disney Channel. Doesn't matter, I think. His opinions are literally cartoonish.

Ron's arguments, such as they are, heavily rely on insult-flinging, hand-waving, and resentment-mongering. A slice:

You wouldn't know from Ron's description that the OBBB's effect on "rich people" is to leave their marginal income tax rates where they've been since 2018; they were otherwise due to go from 37% back to where they were before that: 39.6%. So, roughly speaking: if Elon, Jeff, or Mark net an additional million bucks, Uncle Stupid would grab $396,000 of that instead of $370,000.

Does that make them "big winners"? Eh: the Tax Foundation estimates that the 2026 tax bill for the "upper 1%" might go down about 4%.

To translate that into a cartoon Ron might understand better: it wouldn't raise the moola level in the money bins of Musk, Bezos, and Zuckerberg by a noticeable amount.

(Not that I'm a Trump fan; I think there will be big economic woes in store for everyone, caused mostly by runaway deficit spending, but also by his stupid tariffs.)

Also of note:

• Unfortunately, students won't automatically get smarter. But Emma Camp describes other salutary effects: What happens if Trump and Congress abolish the Education Department? A slice:

  "Most of the discussion from the administration and in Congress is about moving Department of Education functions to other departments," says Neal McCluskey, director of the Cato Institute's Center for Educational Freedom. "If that is what is done, it will not change what the federal government does in education, only which agencies do those things."

  According to McCluskey, federal funding to K-12 schools and colleges would likely just move to another department, though he notes there are "proposals to consolidate, at least, programs and turn them into block grants to states, which would cut down on bureaucratic compliance costs." The federal student loan program "would likely go to the Treasury Department or possibly the Small Business Administration, both of which have experience with financial instruments, including loans," he adds.

  "Almost everything the Department of Education does is unconstitutional," McCluskey says. "The Constitution gives the federal government only specific, enumerated powers, and authority to govern in education is not among them. So almost all the spending and activities should go away."

  That (a) would be nice; and (b) won't happen. At least not soon.

• A reminder that the CDC wanted to kill you. (Well, statistically speaking.) Megan McArdle recalls How one meeting in 2020 and a GOP senator helped create RFK Jr.’s vaccine wreck. (WaPo gifted link)

  In more than 20 years of covering policy, I have witnessed some crazy stuff. But one episode towers above the rest in sheer lunacy: the November 2020 meeting of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices. Sounds boring? Usually, maybe.

  But that meeting was when the committee’s eminent experts, having considered a range of vaccine rollout strategies, selected the plan that was projected to kill the most people and had the least public support.

  In a survey conducted in August 2020, most Americans said that as soon as health-care workers were inoculated with the coronavirus vaccine, we should have started vaccinating the highest-risk groups in order of their vulnerability: seniors first, then immunocompromised people, then other essential workers. Instead of adopting this sensible plan, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advisory committee decided to inoculate non-medical essential workers ahead of seniors, even though its own modeling suggested this would increase deaths by up to 7 percent.

  Why did they do this? Social justice. The word “equity” came up over and over in the discussion — essential workers, you see, were more likely than seniors to come from “marginalized communities.” Only after a backlash did sanity prevail.

  Yes, that murderous advisory committee is the same one Junior recently fired everyone from. Not that his replacements are better; they're probably gonna be worse.

• 

  I reckon it's a tough road to travel. Daniel Akst reviews What Is It Like To Be an Addict? by Owen Flanagan, Amazon link at your right:

  Addiction is a problem that defenders of liberty need to face, for if citizens cannot control their appetites, the state may be inclined to take over the job for them. Freedom depends on self-command supported by a fragile web of norms and relationships that lets us keep our own lives in order and get along with one another. Addiction is the acute case of the appetites run amok, as they often do when unfettered by such constraints as wealth, religion, and community.

  Owen Flanagan's new book, What Is It Like To Be an Addict?, should be welcomed by anyone concerned with these issues. Despite its modest size, this is a work of large ambition and broad range informed not just by the author's long career as a prominent philosopher but by his many years as a desperately addicted abuser of alcohol and sedatives.

  […]

  Unsurprisingly given his experience, Flanagan stresses that we should pay close attention to what the addicted have to tell us. And among the most important things addicts say is that they are by no means blameless just because they supposedly have a disease. On the contrary, many feel shame (for being an addict) and guilt (for behaviors that are slowly destroying them and harming their loved ones).

  I recently read Freedom Regained by philosopher Julian Baggini that had an entire chapter revolving around how addiction is related to "free will". Baggini actually went out to talk with a few addicts. Eye-opening. It sounds as if Flanagan covers some of the same issues.