Pun Salad

Neal Stephenson has a substack! He could post his grocery list, and it would be worthwhile reading. His most recent is Remarks on AI from NZ. And here's an excerpt that shows his "bet you didn't think of this that way" approach:

Today's Eye Candy is one of Getty Images' pictures of eyelash mites. Neal also has one at the link above. In case you hear eight tiny feet tromping around your eyes at night, you'll know who to blame: Neal.

Also of note:

• Big, if true. David Strom at Hot Air notes the bad news, as reported by the Big Eye network: 60% of Americans Are Poor? CBS Says 'Yes' They even tweeted it:

  The bottom 60% of U.S. households don't make enough money to afford a "minimal quality of life," according to a new analysis. https://t.co/Kc8peRJPUi

  — CBS Evening News (@CBSEveningNews) May 14, 2025

  They are quoting a report from the "Ludwig Institute for Shared Economic Prosperity". Which says its mission is "to improve the economic well-being of middle-and lower-income Americans through research and education."

  They also claim that 24.3% of the US labor force is "functionally unemployed".

  As you might guess, their methodology is aimed at making things look as economically bad as possible. I'll keep my eyes open for rebuttals. (And when my eyes are closed, I've instructed my eyelash mites to keep their eyes open.)

• Just to let you know about the coming (literal) dark ages. Marc Oestreich has the latest on the Green New Deal: Spain’s grid collapsed in 5 seconds. The U.S. could be next.

  Across Spain and Portugal, more than 50 million people recently experienced the largest blackout in modern European history. Thousands of commuters stood stranded on the concourses of Spain's transit system. In the span of five seconds, 60 percent of the country's electricity supply vanished. This wasn't caused by a storm or a cyberattack—just bad policy and the most underappreciated force in modern engineering giving way: inertia.

  When a power plant trips offline or demand suddenly spikes, the power grid has no cushion; it must respond instantly or it unravels. That's where inertia comes in. In coal, gas, and nuclear plants, massive turbine rotors spin at thousands of rpm. Even when power is cut, they keep turning, releasing stored energy that slows frequency shifts and buys precious time—seconds to a minute—for backup to kick in. It's not backup power, it's breathing room. Like the flywheel on a Peloton, it keeps things steady even when input falters.

  What's worse: the Iberian grid designers: (1) knew this was a possibility, and decided to live with it; or (2) didn't know about it?

  According to Wikipedia: "At least seven people died as a result of the blackout in Spain. Six deaths were recorded in Galicia, including three members of the same family who died of carbon monoxide poisoning believed to have been caused by a faulty generator in a home in Taboadela. The seventh death was recorded in a fire at a house in Madrid that left 13 others injured."

• Enshittification. That's the concept widely attributed to Cory Doctorow. And my speculation is that's the answer to Noah Smith's query: Why has American pop culture stagnated?

  In recent years, I’ve read a bunch of people talk about a stagnation in American pop culture. I doubt that this sort of complaint is particularly new. For decades in the mid-20th century, Dwight Macdonald railed against mass culture, which he viewed as polluting and absorbing high culture. In 1980, Pauline Kael wrote an op-ed in the New Yorker entitled “Why Are Movies So Bad? or, The Numbers”, where she argued that the capitalistic incentives of movie studios were causing them to turn out derivative slop.

  So if I try to answer the question “Why has American pop culture stagnated?”, there’s always the danger that I’ll be coming up with an explanation for a problem that doesn’t actually exist — that this is just one of those things that someone is always saying, much like “Kids these days don’t respect their parents anymore” and “Scientists have discovered everything there is to discover.” To make matters worse, there’s no objective definition of cultural stagnation in the first place; it’s a fun topic precisely because what feels new and interesting is purely a matter of opinion.

  I haven't even tried to listen to popular music recently. My movie consumption is also way down. (I plan on going to see the live-action Lilo & Stitch next week. Although that's a remake, another signal of Hollywood failing to come up with anything new and interesting.)

• Not exactly a riddle wrapped in an enigma, Donald. Veronique de Rugy analyzes: Trump's Tax Plan Is a Leftist Economic Agenda Wrapped in Populist Talking Points.

  If you voted for President Donald Trump last November because you believed he'd increase economic freedom, it's safe to say you were fooled. Following a reckless tariff barrage, the White House and its allies are preparing a new wave of tax code gimmickry that has more in common with progressive social engineering than pro-growth reform. And don't forget a fiscal recklessness that mirrors the mistakes of the left.

  Defend these policies if you like, but let's be clear: The administration shows no coherent commitment to free market principles and is in fact actively undermining them. Its approach is better described as central planning disguised as economic nationalism.

  This week's example is an executive-order attempt at prescription drug price control, similar to Democrats' past proposals. If implemented, it would inevitably reduce pharmaceutical research, development, and innovation.

  Trying to put lipstick on this pig, by the way, is the Federalist, with a reality-optional headline query: Will Trump’s Free-Market Drug Pricing Solution Cut Out Greedy Middlemen?

  "Greedy middlemen" have long been socialist punching bags.

• Just hope he doesn't go back to sleep on it. Jim Geraghty has an "it's about time" headline: Trump belatedly wakes up to Putin’s brutality (gifted link).

  President Donald Trump in recent weeks, according to the Wall Street Journal, asked advisers if they think Russian dictator Vladimir Putin “has changed since Trump’s last time in office, and expressed surprise at some of Putin’s military moves, including bombing areas with children.”

  You can almost excuse the question about Putin changing; Russia analysts have wondered whether Putin’s long isolation during the pandemic altered his thinking and made him (even more) paranoid and reckless. Others have wondered whether Putin has some secret health issue affecting his actions and worldview.

  But Trump is surprised at the brutality and callousness of Russia’s military aggression? Surprised?

  Jim notes the credible reports of Trump's lassitude in getting briefed on national security issues.

… because he noticed Abigail Adams' headline query at National Review: Do Ballerina Androids Dream of Electric Nutcrackers? Inspired by this post from "gorklon rust":

pic.twitter.com/ZbrZmfjHpd

— gorklon rust (@elonmusk) May 14, 2025

Being a philistine dance-wise, I was mainly creeped out by Optimus's resemblance to the Empire's killer droids I'd just seen in Andor Season 2, Episode 8. Eek! They're here already!

Also of note:

• One must have a heart of stone to read of the negation of the earlier election of David Hogg without laughing. Jonathan Turley tells the story while keeping a straight face, though. Circling the Firing Squad: The Democratic Party Moves to Negate Earlier Election of David Hogg.

  The Democratic National Committee (DNC) is about to show the perils of circling a firing squad. In its announcement that it will nullify the election of David Hogg and another Vice Chair, the DNC reminded the public why they have left the Democratic Party. The sudden decision that there were procedural irregularities in the election (after Hogg said that he would target older Democratic incumbents) leaves the DNC looking more like the CCP. However, it gets worse.

  Hogg caused a controversy by announcing that he will work to primary older Democratic incumbents through his group, Leaders We Deserve, to bring young candidates into the party. The leadership ordered him to retract the pledge or resign. He did neither.

  Then, the DNC announced that there were “irregularities” in how he and Pennsylvania state Rep. Malcolm Kenyatta won two of the three vice chair positions.

  The reason? One of the losing candidates, Kalyn Free, filed a complaint during the original election alleging that the DNC failed to follow rules on gender diversity.

  For additional amusement, click over for video of DNC leaders trying to explain those rules.

• Well, I got mine anyway. I was wondering if we'd have (additional) airport chaos last week as TSA's "deadline" for REAL ID compliance hit. Jim Harper was paying attention, and… REAL ID Day After-Action Report: Stalemate.

  On May 7, 2025, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) was scheduled to attack American air travel. Terrorism works by inducing overreaction from victim states. So, yes, the TSA’s work to restrict travel by law-abiding Americans gives a win to the 9/11 attackers, nearly a quarter-century on. No doing business in other states, no visiting the new grandbaby—unless you have enrolled in the national ID system created by the REAL ID Act.

  But the attack didn’t come. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kristi Noem announced the day before that American travelers would not be turned away. As The Wall Street Journal’s travel columnist reported, lines were shorter at many airports. My experience flying on May 9 without a federally compliant ID was smooth. I decline strip-search machines, so I already get a pat-down (or “freedom massage”) each time I fly, which is probably what travelers with noncompliant IDs got.

  But internal contradictions exist with the policy, Jim thinks, and he predicts "collapse, sooner or later, of the national ID project." So, good.

• You don't have to be a moron to understand it, but it helps. Jeff Maurer sees a silver lining: The Qatari Plane Scandal is Different Because Morons Understand It.

  Those of us who have spent years stunned by Trump’s flagrant and frankly kind of impressive corruption often ask ourselves: “Why does nothing ever stick to this guy?” Trump is so corrupt that corruption seems to be the only thing he devotes energy to other than sexual harassment and golf. Most of us have forgotten Trump scandals that would have sunk any other president; if George H.W. Bush had run for office while hawking $100,000 watches from a personal merch store, there would be a chapter in every civics textbook titled “Watchgate”. But when Trump does it, we laugh it off as Dennis the Menace-esque hijinks.

  The simplest explanation for why Trump gets away with so much is that most of his scandals are just barely too complex to put the national panties in a twist. Many people seemed to view the Mueller Report as a report on whether or not prostitutes peed on the president, and when the answer was “no”, tales of obstruction of justice felt like a bait-and-switch, a bit like luring people into a porno theatre and then showing My Dinner with Andre. Trump’s first impeachment included the phrase “Ukrainian Prosecutor General”, which must be one of the most brain-numbing three word phrases possible, right up there with “Consumption Tax Study” and “Canadian Sorghum Yields”. January 6 might have sunk Trump had his timing not been perfect; Republicans skipped impeachment because they thought Trump would just go away, and by the time Trump ran again, the public forgot where things left off, like that SNL sketch where no one on The Sopranos can remember what happened on the previous season of The Sopranos.

  In this morning's news: Democratic congressman pushes Trump impeachment but backs down from vote. Come on, you guys!

• Speaking of morons… Saul Zimet (who is not a moron) notes the ends of the horseshoe keep getting closer: MAGA Adopts One of Karl Marx’s Key Misconceptions.

  “Globalization” has become a pretty notorious buzzword, and this can sometimes obscure the fact that it is largely (although not entirely) reducible to a set of private voluntary exchanges that occur across national borders. To the extent that President Donald Trump’s MAGA movement has consistent policy positions, those positions are predominantly about reducing globalization by preventing Americans from making voluntary transactions with those who lack U.S. citizenship—for example, tariffing imports to hinder U.S. citizens from engaging in international trade and barring commerce between U.S. citizens and many immigrants by detaining or deporting those immigrants or prohibiting their entry into the country.

  When a government deploys mass coercion against peaceful people, as we have seen under Trump’s trade and immigration policies (which is not to say that all illegal immigrants are peaceful), the government’s representatives and apologists tend to roll out a series of moral justifications. These arguments can elucidate the character of the political faction in power, and MAGA has been no exception. Throughout the last few months, one of their defenses of Trump’s trade and immigration policies, contrary to the pre-MAGA Republican Party’s free market rhetoric, has frequently been the allegation that low wages for voluntary labor are exploitative.

  “Globalization” has become a pretty notorious buzzword, and this can sometimes obscure the fact that it is largely (although not entirely) reducible to a set of private voluntary exchanges that occur across national borders. To the extent that President Donald Trump’s MAGA movement has consistent policy positions, those positions are predominantly about reducing globalization by preventing Americans from making voluntary transactions with those who lack U.S. citizenship—for example, tariffing imports to hinder U.S. citizens from engaging in international trade and barring commerce between U.S. citizens and many immigrants by detaining or deporting those immigrants or prohibiting their entry into the country.

  When I was a youngster reading about Marx's ideas, I couldn't help but notice his "exploitation", shorn of moralistic language, essentially meant nothing more or less than "paying people market wages".

I assume this is in response to Trump's May 4 interview with Kristen Welker on Meet the Press. From the (slightly reformatted) transcript:

I get what Trump is trying to say: he considers the actual legal issues to be unresolved.

But—geez, Donald: When you are asked whether you need to uphold the Constitution, you simply answer, "Yes, of course."

Also of note:

• Another mile down the Road to Serfdom. Gee, we didn't have to wait very long to get (as the WSJ editorialists say) Trump’s Worst Idea Since Tariffs (gifted link).

  President Trump and Republicans appear to be shrinking from reforming Medicaid, but that’s not the worst of it. To replace the spending slowdown they won’t get in Medicaid, they may expand drug price controls. For that trade we could have elected Democrats.

  Trump officials are pitching Republicans on a “most-favored nation” drug-pricing regime for Medicaid. While the details are hazy, the idea is for Medicaid to pay drug makers the lowest price charged by other developed countries. Mr. Trump proposed a similar scheme for Medicare Part B drugs at the end of his first term, and it was a bad idea then too.

  That's an older article, but things did not get better, according to Michael F. Connon at Cato more recently: Trump Attempts Price Controls on Prescription Drugs.

  I’m usually the guy reminding everybody, “It is not a ‘price control’ when the government reduces the prices [it] pays for drugs.” I expected that I would be singing that tune again this morning when President Trump released an executive order on drug pricing. To my knowledge, Trump has never taken any steps to impose actual price controls on prescription drugs (read: coercive restraints on pharmaceutical transactions outside of government programs).

  I was wrong. Unlike the Inflation Reduction Act or Trump’s past proposals, Trump’s executive order is an attempt to impose government price controls on pharmaceuticals.

  I'm (I guess) amused at the efforts of Trump cheerleaders to find some way to shake their pom-poms at this. Example at the Federalist: Dems Sworn To Oppose Trump Land Awkwardly On The Side Of Higher Drug Prices.

• But to be fair… Jacob Sullum, in a Reason post timestamped one minute after midnight today: Trump rightly decries "absurd and unjust" overcriminalization in federal regulations. So yay!

  After mountain runner Michelino Sunseri ascended and descended Grand Teton in record time last fall, his corporate sponsor, The North Face, heralded his achievement as "an impossible dream—come true." Then came the nightmare: Federal prosecutors charged Sunseri with a misdemeanor punishable by up to six months in jail for using a trail that the National Park Service described as closed, although it had never bothered to clearly inform the public of that designation.

  Sunseri unwittingly violated one of the myriad federal regulations that carry criminal penalties—a body of law so vast and obscure that no one knows exactly how many offenses it includes. An executive order that President Donald Trump issued last week aims to ameliorate the injustices caused by the proliferation of such agency-defined crimes, which turn the rule of law into a cruel joke.

  The Code of Federal Regulations "contains over 48,000 sections, stretching over 175,000 pages—far more than any citizen can possibly read, let alone fully understand," Trump's order notes. "Worse, many [regulations] carry potential criminal penalties for violations."

  Good job, Team Orange. But…

• With Trump, the bad news is never far away. In a post timestamped at 5:50pm yesterday (so just 6 hours and 11 minutes before the one linked above) Jacob Sullum brings it: Since immigration is an 'invasion,' a top Trump adviser says, the president might suspend habeas corpus.

  The writ of habeas corpus, a right deeply rooted in English common law and recognized by the U.S. Constitution, allows people nabbed by the government to challenge their detention in court. That complicates President Donald Trump's immigration crackdown. Last month, for example, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously ruled that foreign nationals who allegedly are subject to immediate deportation as "alien enemies" have a right to contest that designation by filing habeas petitions. And foreign students have used the writ to challenge the claim that they are "subject to removal" because their political opinions undermine U.S. foreign policy interests.

  Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff for policy, has a potential solution to this inconvenience. Last Friday, he told reporters that Trump is "actively looking at" suspending habeas corpus to facilitate the deportation of unwanted foreigners. "The Constitution is clear," Miller said. "The privilege of the writ of habeas corpus can be suspended in a time of invasion."

  I am not a lawyer, but, yeah, that sounds … unconstitional.

• Not being British, we have no excuse. Kevin D. Williamson attempts to jog our American memories. The Forgotten Word: Sex.

  “There are only two genders!” Up goes the battle cry from certain quarters of the right and from the president whose line they toe with such perfect servility. Over at Facebook, it was 54 genders before it was 72 before it was … whatever it is today.

  In reality, the number of genders is neither two nor 72 nor anything in between: The number of genders, outside of grammar textbooks, is zero. “Gender” is a grammatical term that became, over time, a figure of speech masquerading as an indelible (for purposes of discrimination law) yet infinitely fluid (for other rhetorical purposes) personal trait, one that is conflated—often intentionally, with its less malleable non-synonym, sex.

  As George Orwell observed in his famous essay “Politics and the English Language,” the corruption of language goes hand-in-hand with the corruption of thought. One of the reasons we have such an excruciating time talking our way through sensitive questions about sex and about what we call “gender” is simple linguistic imprecision. The activists on the progressive side of this issue never cease shouting that sex and gender are not the same thing, and, in that much at least, they are correct–and we should start acting like it.

  Headline explanation, if you want it,A here. (And KDW refers to it too, so subscribe, hippie.)

• Advice about which I have mixed feelings. Robert F. Graboyes offers it to the Democrats: Persuasive Beats Abrasive.

  Here are my dozen suggestions for how Democrats might persuade my hand (and the hands of similarly-minded Americans) to gravitate toward the “D” on the 2028 ballot. Consider this in the vein of a “Chautauqua”—the social movement that encouraged discourse even between those who disagreed with one another and which Theodore Roosevelt referred to, near the movement’s peak, as “typical of America at its best.”

  [1] If your message only works when shouted, you won’t persuade me. “DONALD TRUMP IS A THREAT TO OUR DEMOCRACY!!!!!” is a message that only tends to be delivered loudly and angrily—and shouting almost never persuades. (Say that sentence softly, with a smile, and you’ll sound a bit unhinged.) If you think Donald Trump is a threat to democracy, calmly itemize his behavior on January 6, his unsettling third-term chatter, and his suggestions that the U.S. take Greenland by force. To help you distinguish between these modes of communication: Bernie Sanders, AOC, Chuck Schumer, and Jasmine Crockett always shout. Josh Shapiro, Ro Khanna, Abigail Spanberger, John Fetterman, and Ritchie Torres tend to discuss.

  … and there are eleven more suggestions at the link. All good ideas. It's hard to imagine Democrats taking many of them.

Via Paul Hsieh at GeekPress:

A mathematician Pope going up against a machine god superintelligence is the most cyberpunk thing ever. https://t.co/NBLRRyCf9f

— Will Kinney (@WKCosmo) May 11, 2025

Complete text of the Vatican News tweet:

Explanation (that I had to look up): He was a math major at Villanova.

But (ahem): "defence"? "labour?" Your Holiness, I thought you were an American?

Also of note:

• Also, don't call me Shirley. Jonah Goldberg suggests you watch your language: Don’t Call This Conservatism.

  Is the “New Right” conservative?

  If you spend any time following the most vocal defenders of Donald Trump or various populist causes generally, some version of this question may have occurred to you. If you find yourself listening to defenders of a supposedly extreme right-wing Republican president’s signature policies, and then wondering aloud, “Wait, I thought conservatives were in favor of free markets?” you have an idea of what I am getting at. If you’re perplexed by the way many on the right celebrate and lionize a rogue’s gallery of libertines, scapegraces, sybarites, caitiffs, roues, abusers, and cads, you might wonder why you didn’t get the memo explaining that the right no longer cares about “moral rearmament,” or “family values.”

  In short, if you’re a lifelong conservative, you might be struggling with the question of whether “the right” is where you belong. If being a principled defender of the constitutional order, limited government, free markets, traditional values, and an America-led world still makes you a conservative, are you still on “the right” when the loudest voices on the right reject most or all of those positions?

  Confession: I had to look up a couple of those words.

• Just say no. Jim Geraghty channels his inner Laocoön: Beware of Foreign Powers Bearing Gifts. And cleverly juxtaposed with with past GOP outrage over the Chinese "donations" to the Penn Biden Center at the University of Pennsylvania…

  We all agree that backdoor payments and cash contribution to the president and his family are bad, right?

  Right?

  Because while we’re at it . . .

  . . . the president of the United States should not be accepting a “new Air Force One” from the government of Qatar:

  In what may be the most valuable gift ever extended to the United States from a foreign government, the Trump administration is preparing to accept a super luxury Boeing 747-8 jumbo jet from the royal family of Qatar — a gift that is to be available for use by President Donald Trump as the new Air Force One until shortly before he leaves office, at which time ownership of the plane will be transferred to the Trump presidential library foundation, sources familiar with the proposed arrangement told ABC News.

  The gift is expected to be announced next week, when Trump visits Qatar on the first foreign trip of his second term, according to sources familiar with the plans.

  Trump toured the plane, which is so opulently configured it is known as “a flying palace,” while it was parked at the West Palm Beach International Airport in February.

  ABC News reports, “The highly unusual — unprecedented — arrangement is sure to raise questions about whether it is legal for the Trump administration, and ultimately, the Trump presidential library foundation, to accept such a valuable gift from a foreign power.”

  "What do I have to do to put you into this slightly used, but very opulent, 747 today?"

• I suppose I should post something about New Hampshire's own David Souter. All seemed to agree he was a nice guy. Damon Root has analysis: David Souter shaped the Supreme Court through the backlash he inspired.

  Supreme Court Justice David Souter, who died last week at age 85, will probably not be remembered as the author of any truly momentous majority opinions, because he never really wrote any of those. Nor will Souter be remembered as one of the Court's great dissenters, because none of his dissents inspired the next generation to keep the faith about unpopular ideas. Souter's career will likely be remembered for a more unusual reason: the severe and enduring backlash that he inspired.

  Appointed to the Supreme Court in 1990 by Republican President George H.W. Bush, Souter quickly emerged as a consistent "liberal" vote in high-profile cases about hot-button issues such as abortion and affirmative action. This was supremely disappointing to conservative legal activists, who had hoped Bush would pick someone in the mold of Justice Antonin Scalia, the outspoken conservative tapped four years earlier by President Ronald Re[a]gan.

  But…

• Worst rom-com ever. Paul G. Kengor recalls: When Biden and Rudman Wept. Recounting NH Senator Warren Rudman's tireless push to get Souter confirmed:

  Rudman had pushed the Souter nomination. He ensured [sic] liberal colleagues that Souter was their guy. Rudman, a pro-choice Republican, had been Souter’s boss at the New Hampshire office of attorney general. He privately concluded that Souter would not vote against Roe. Rudman’s reasons, which he acknowledged only after he left the Senate, ranged from the legal to humanitarian: Given that Souter was “a compassionate human being,” averred Rudman, he would naturally support continued legalization of abortion—which has produced the deaths of over 40 million unborn babies since 1973.

  But Rudman’s allies on the Democratic side weren’t so sure. And Rudman had to walk a fine line, since his pro-life president wanted a pro-life justice. So, Rudman quietly sought to assuage liberals. He urged them to trust him.

  That silent trust was critical, since Souter’s position on abortion had to be dealt with stealthily. In fact, it was handled so delicately that the nominee’s true thinking was apparently unknown even to the White House.

  Alas, with Casey v. Planned Parenthood, America had its answer, as Souter authorized the sanctity of Roe v. Wade.

  As fate would have it, on that same day Senator Rudman and Senator Joe Biden bumped into each other at the train station, not in Washington, DC but in Wilmington, Delaware.

  “At first, I didn’t see Joe; then I spotted him waving at me from far down the platform,” Rudman later recorded in his memoirs, Combat: Twelve Years in the U.S. Senate. “Joe had agonized over his vote for David, and I knew how thrilled he must be. We started running through the crowd toward each other, and when we met, we embraced, laughing and crying.”

  An ecstatic Biden wept tears of joy, telling Rudman over and over: “You were right about him [Souter]! … You were right!”

  The two men were so jubilant, so giddy—practically dancing—that Rudman said onlookers thought they were crazy: “[B]ut we just kept laughing and yelling and hugging each other because sometimes, there are happy endings.”

  Except for all those dead babies, who didn't even get beginnings, let alone happy endings.

• Lest we forget… Tyler Cowen provides Sentences to ponder, excerpting from. Richard Hanania's substack.

  In fact, it was the Obama administration that paused funding for high-risk [gain of function] studies in 2014. The ban was lifted by none other than Donald Trump in 2017. At the time, outlets like Scientific American and Science covered the decision, in articles that quoted scientists talking about what could go wrong.

  To be fair, "was lifted" points to an NIH press release authored by Francis Collins, and the first person singular pronoun is prevalent there. Sure, it happened under Trump, but …

I can't recommend our Amazon Eye Candy du Jour; the author, John Quiggin, is an Aussie economist whose blog claims he writes "from a socialist and democratic viewpoint". So, no. But it's nevertheless a good illustration of Andy Kessler's WSJ op-ed: The New Right’s Zombienomics (gifted link).

Jeff Jacoby is also kinda hacked off at the Doll Commissar: The tone-deafness of 'just two dolls'. But he does resurrect a fond memory of funnier times, Dana Carvey's Grumpy Old Man:

In words:

Also making cameo appearances later in the column: P.J. O'Rourke and Boris Yeltsin. Check them out.

Also of note:

• But Gorsuch! Billy Binion recounts an amusing exchange at SCOTUS: Government Argues It's Too Much To Ask the FBI To Check the Address Before Blowing Up a Home.

  The Supreme Court last week heard a case from a family whose home was wrongly raided by the FBI, after which they were barred from bringing their civil suit to trial. Before the Court: Should the plaintiffs have been able to sue the government under the Federal Tort Claims Act (FTCA)?

  Oral arguments got into the weeds of the FTCA, under which plaintiffs Curtrina Martin and Toi Cliatt were prohibited from suing, even though Congress revised that law in the 1970s to give recourse to victims of federal law enforcement misconduct. But there was one particularly instructive exchange between the Court and Frederick Liu, assistant to the solicitor general at the Justice Department—a back-and-forth that is decidedly less in the weeds.

  Liu: The officers here were weighing public safety considerations, efficiency considerations, operational security, the idea that they didn't want to delay the start of the execution of the warrants because they wanted to execute all the warrants simultaneously. Those are precisely the sorts of policy tradeoffs that an officer makes in determining, 'Well, should I take one more extra precaution to make sure I'm at the right house?' Here, Petitioner suggests, for example, that the officer should have checked the house number on the mailbox.

  Justice Neil Gorsuch: Yeah, you might look at the address of the house before you knock down the door.

  Liu: Yes. And, and, as the district court found at 52(a), that sort of decision is filled with policy tradeoffs because checking the house—

  Gorsuch: Really?

  Liu: —number at the end of the driveway means exposing the agents to potential lines of fire from the windows.

  Gorsuch: How about making sure you're on the right street? Is that…you know, asking too much?
  

  This case is pretty horrific, hope it works out well for the victims.

• Political science. Jerry Coyne is righteously irked: Nature tackles race and eugenics in a torturous and tortuous article.

  Yes, folks, the science journals are still flaunting their virtue in articles that are similar to a gazillion articles published before. This time (and not the first time), the article is torturous because the assertions are mostly misleading.  And it’s tortuous because it weaves back and forth between two themes: eugenics and the assumed beneficial effect of diversity on scientific productivity. And the material in the article contradicts some of its own claims. The author, Genevieve L. Woicik, is identified as “an associate professor of epidemiology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health,Baltimore, Maryland, USA.”

  […] If you were to read it without knowing better, you would get two false impressions:

  1. The world, and especially America, is gearing up for a big bout of eugenics.
  2. Race is a social construct that has nothing to do with biology

  I see no evidence for #1 unless one is oblivious to reality, while #2, as Luana and I showed in our paper on The Ideological Subversion of Biology, is misleading. I recommend you read section 5, which is headed by one of the statements about genetics and evolutionary biology that we consider misleading: ““Race and ethnicity are social constructs, without scientific or biological meaning.”

  The two-page PDF of the Nature article is here.

• Hey, I noticed! Christopher Caldwell writes at the Dispatch about The Consequential Trump Move No One’s Noticed.

  Three weeks ago, Donald Trump struck another blow to the civil-rights regime. It was easy to miss, given he did so through an executive order aimed at a legal concept. But the president has taken another step toward uprooting the second constitution that has been in place since the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

  Trump’s Executive Order 14281, aimed at “Restoring Equality of Opportunity and Meritocracy,” targets the judicial doctrine of “disparate impact,” which has stood since the 1970s.

  You may not know the ins and outs of disparate impact, but you’ve surely seen its effects. Under disparate impact, a business owner can be found guilty of discrimination even if he did not intend to discriminate. An aptitude test that winds up narrowing the pool of eligible black candidates, height requirements that exclude women from a police force, a job application that asks about criminal records—any hiring process that produces a lower-than-random number of protected minorities is suspect. Such actions and institutions might carry no ill intent, but they can put an employer on the wrong side of civil-rights law.

  Christopher's not quite right about the "no one's noticed". We blogged about this last month!

  At the time, the WaPo claimed that Trump's EO would "repeal key components of the Civil Rights Act of 1964". That was nonsense, and remains so. But Christopher points out:

  That disparate impact is reaching the end of the line is far from certain. Civil-rights law is a collection of public authorizations and private sector incentives. Trump can take the government out of the business of suing, regulating, and jawboning businesses for the next few years, but civil litigation will likely continue. George H.W. Bush’s Civil Rights Act of 1991 introduced disparate impact into black-letter U.S. law. It would have to be repealed to bring about the meritocracy Trump seeks. That would require more skepticism about civil-rights law than currently exists in Congress. But perhaps minds are changing, now that Trump’s executive orders are showing both parties what a devastating weapon civil-rights law can be—and, indeed, always has been.

  Christopher does a great job in documenting the history of this pernicious concept. There's still work to do on getting rid of it.

Today's Getty Eye Candy has the description:

Ah, good times. But I wanted to point out the "HANDS OFF OUR MONEY!" sign. Being held up by (it appears) a masked man, appropriately. And… well, see my headline.

In the present day, James Freeman is not sympathetic to the plight of the masked men. He thinks Washington Needs a Lot More DOGE (gifted link).

But there's plenty of delusion.

Also of note:

• Who made him the Doll and Pencil Commissar anyway? Emma Camp speaking truth to power: Trump is wrong. Cheap goods are awesome.

  Donald Trump doesn't think Americans deserve stuff. The right number of pencils for a family? Five. The right number of dolls for a little girl? Two, maybe three. His comments in recent interviews bear a striking similarity to those of left-wing Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.), who in 2015 famously bemoaned that consumers have too many deodorant options.

  How did Trump—who campaigned on a promise of reducing inflation—become so eager to have Americans pay more for everyday commodities? While Trump may have made overtures to reducing prices, he's long supported the kinds of economic interventions most likely to lead to inflation. And if you believe that protectionism is the path to prosperity for everyday Americans, your definition of prosperity starts to change pretty quickly.

  Just a few months into his second term, Trump has so far enacted a sweeping protectionist agenda. He's levied staggering tariffs that have hiked prices on everything from mattresses to cars to strollers and tanked the stock market. However, Trump and his defenders have remained strident, arguing that Americans just don't need affordable imported goods.

  I guess you don't get to the top of either party these days without being an arrogant asshole, eager to assume you're the best person to determine what Americans "really need".

• Achtung, kinder! Wie viel uhr ist es? At Skeptic, Gerald Posner answers: It’s Time for Papal Transparency on the Holocaust.

  The Catholic Church has a new leader—Pope Leo XIV—born in 1955 in Chicago, Robert Francis Prevost is the first American to head the church and serve as sovereign of the Vatican City State. Many Vatican watchers will be looking for early signs that Pope Leo XIV intends to continue the legacy of Pope Francis for reforming Vatican finances and for making the church a more transparent institution.

  There is one immediate decision he could make that would set the tone for his papacy. Pope Leo could order the release of the World War II archives of the Vatican Bank, the repository with files that would answer lingering questions of how much the Catholic Church might have profited from wartime investments in Third Reich and Italian Fascist companies and if it acted as a postwar haven for looted Nazi funds. By solving one of last great mysteries about the Holocaust, Pope Leo would embrace long overdue historical transparency that had proved too much for even his reform-minded predecessor.

  I would like to think the church has nothing to hide. But if so then why so secretive?

  But my main takeaway from the article is: Whoa, I am older than the Pope.

• Jonah Goldberg says "shibboleth", I say … how do you pronounce that anyway? Before you answer, be glad you don't live in Ephraim.

  But back to Jonah, who writes on The ‘Neoliberalism’ Shibboleth.

  My friend Cliff Asness is fond of tweeting his dismay over the horseshoeing of American politics when it comes to economics (and other things). One of his pithier expressions of this lament: “We now have two economically far left (and economically ignorant) parties, they just differ in their preferred pronouns.”

  Now, Cliff isn’t using “pronouns” literally. His point is that the fringier economic policies of the left and the fringier economic policies of the right are substantially similar but culturally or stylistically opposed to each other. If you’re an advocate for industrial policy on the left, you’ll use different buzz-phrases and shibboleths than an advocate of industrial policy on the right will. But you’re still for industrial policy. You might have different winners and losers in mind, but you’re still picking winners and losers. Then again, sometimes, both the left and right are just haggling over the same constituency, making losers of everybody else.

  Might be paywalled. Subscribe, hippie.

Background for people (understandably) not paying attention to New Hampshire politics: Our state's senior senator, Democrat Jeanne Shaheen, is not running for reelection in 2026. So my CongressCritter, Democrat Chris Pappas is running to replace her. Which means New Hampshire Congressional District One is up for grabs. Which (in turn) is drawing clowns eager to join the DC circus.

And it appears one of those clowns is…

I haven’t decided yet about a run in #NH1, but as we see, the right is already on the attack.

I’m not afraid to take this message anywhere: Democrats must forcefully oppose Trump. #nhpolitics https://t.co/vXETOHLuUb

— Hanna Trudo (@HCTrudo) May 5, 2025

Let's give Hanna credit for linking to a National Review article by Brittany Bernstein: Reporter Moves from Covering Dems to Running as One. (Here's a gifted link if you need it.)

There's a certain amount of self-dramatization here. Hanna's not afraid! Even though she's being attacked by the right!

In fact, Brittany's article is pretty far from an "attack"; it consists mainly of sketching Hanna's journalistic career, and quotes her extensively and accurately. (I left a comment on Hanna's tweet to that effect, with no response.) Let's take a look:

Writing with fire! And spitting it!

Continuing the rhetoric:

Well, you get the idea. The closest Brittany comes to an "attack" is pointing out the thinly disguised partisanship of her past journalism.

If you're interested, this NHJournal article has more on Hanna and the local political scene. As I type, the only announced Democrat candidate for NH01 is Maura Sullivan.

Also of note:

• Sorry, Mark, you lost this one. The last time Pun Salad featured NH pol Mark Fernald was back in 2011 when he penned a silly op-ed column with a bunch of ideas on how to balance the federal budget. Which involved tax increases, and no spending decreases.

  Mark's op-ed silliness continues, years later, in my lousy local paper: How vouchers will destroy public education. It's the usual, mostly. For example:

  The voucher system advocated by New Hampshire Republicans is a dagger aimed at the heart of public education—and therefore, at the heart of our democracy—by creating a system that disfavors our public schools.

  The public schools are subject to minimum standards set by the state; they must provide special education services; they must accept all comers; they are free; and they administer standardized tests each year in grades 3 through 8.

  Schools taking the voucher money have no such requirements. There are no rules, no accountability, and they are free to reject students who are difficult or expensive to educate.

  Note that Mark has the usual Democrat definition of "free": paid for by taxpayers.

  But his claim that non-government schools have "no rules"? That's a lie. Tsk. In just a few seconds of Googling, I found New Hampshire's Office of Nonpublic Schools which contains (among other resources) a 19-page PDF CHAPTER Ed 400 APPROVAL OF NONPUBLIC SCHOOLS which has plenty of rules.

  But what really gets my goat:

  With new money being offered for private school education, you can be sure the market will respond. New private schools will open, and existing private schools will expand, to take advantage of the free state money.

  And therein lies the danger.

  Public school enrollment will decline, as middle class families choose the voucher money. As families leave the public schools, support will dwindle at the polls, and school budgets will be cut, causing more middle class families to leave the public schools.

  Mark avoids the issue. If public schools were as great as he claims, parents would not send their kiddos to private schools even under a "voucher" system. Why would they bother?

  Mark is essentially admitting that given even minimal incentives, parents would choose to yank their children out of public school, and undergo the hassle and additional expense of private (or home) schooling.

  Meanwhile, as our local TV station reports: NH Republicans advance bill to expand Education Freedom Accounts

• Contra Fernald. The Josiah Bartlett Center has FAQs about "Education Freedom Accounts", the school choice program at issue here in NH. For example: Is an EFA a voucher?

  No. A voucher is a payment from the government directly to an education provider. With an EFA, the state approves a list of providers, but does not pay the provider directly. Each student’s state adequate education grant amount is deposited in an account managed by a state-approved vendor, in this case the Children’s Scholarship Fund NH. When a parent chooses a provider from the approved list, the parent submits an invoice to the Children’s Scholarship Fund for payment. The payment can be for tuition or tutoring services, or for individual educational expenses allowable by law under RSA 194-F:2. The payment is made from the Children’s Scholarship Fund to the vendor. Every payment is scrutinized for compliance with state rules.

  Or: Would EFAs defund public schools?

  Opponents of school choice have long predicted that giving parents the option to leave their assigned public school would trigger a mass exodus that would collapse school budgets. That low opinion of district public schools is not shared by most parents. “As yet, the growing trend of giving parents public funds for private education hasn’t decimated school budgets,” Education Week reported last year. “Even in states where private school choice is open to all students, the overwhelming majority of K-12 students still attend public school.” A New Hampshire state representative opposed to EFAs acknowledged in legislative testimony this year that “very, very, very, very few students are actually leaving their public school district to take a voucher.” Data compiled by EdChoice show that at the start of 2025 only 2.2% of students nationwide participated in a school choice program. In Florida, which has the highest school choice participation rate, 82.5% of students have enrolled in a public school of some kind, whether a district, magnet or charter school. In Arizona, 86.3% of students have chosen public schools. Just as public schools aren’t a good fit for every child, neither are EFAs. The EFA program is designed to be an alternative for students who need it, not to replace public schools.

  I'm pretty sure Josiah Bartlett has the better of this argument.

• Just another reminder of what a jerk President Biden was. Kimberley A. Strassel tells of Biden’s Energy-Loan Free-For-All (gifted link).

  It’s no secret Joe Biden’s team spent its final days shoveling money out the door, and in ways designed to limit Donald Trump’s ability to claw it back. Officials working under Department of Energy Secretary Chris Wright have now completed a review of the Loan Programs Office (LPO)—the government entity that brought you Solyndra— and the extent of the shenanigans is remarkable.

  Figures and documents provided to me show a loan free-for-all: More than $90 billion showered on entities in a matter of months, a lot of it to companies of questionable taxpayer value. The highlights of DOE’s review:

  Unprecedented sums: LPO was created in 2005 under George W. Bush, though it was ramped up by Barack Obama’s 2009 “stimulus” package (which funded Solyndra, Abound Solar and other failures). Biden built on that history, earmarking hundreds of billions from his Covid-era spending packages for green-energy loans. After Kamala Harris lost the election, LPO went in overdrive. From 2009 to the final quarter of 2024, LPO had obligated some $42 billion in loans. From Election Day 2024 through Inauguration Day 2025, LPO closed on $53 billion in loans and made an additional $40 billion in commitments—or more than double what it has spent over the prior 15 years.

  As Kimberly goes on to point out, some of those "loans and commitments" have gone to firms that are already in danger of going belly-up. But not before absconding with the taxpayer largesse.

Dave Barry writes, hilariously, on Influencers at Sea.

For some reason, Dave devotes a good deal of attention to …

Regan's Facebook page also claims she was "Miss America 2012", but the relevant Wikipedia page doesn't support that. She may have stuck that in under the influence of Clase Azul Gold.

(In case you're wondering if you can get Clase Azul Gold Tequila for less up here in NH: nope.)

Also of note:

• Good for Noah Smith. He's a Democrat, Kamala voter, backed Biden's "industrial policy", but there's a line he will not cross.

  These incompetent people haven't built a single mile of working train, and they're telling us there won't be a single mile of working train for 20 more years.
  
  DEFUND THEM. https://t.co/mK6bdEbIjK

  — Noah Smith 🐇 (@Noahpinion) May 7, 2025

  When you've lost Noah, choo-choo fans, it's time to pack it in.

• Not even trying to make a good argument. James Freeman "hails" the Champions of the Donor Class.

  A few Republican members of the House are using bogus Democratic talking points to get tax breaks for rich liberals while discouraging blue states from enacting pro-growth reform. Now these rogue GOP lawmakers are even threatening to trigger nationwide tax hikes if they don’t get their way.

  Tobias Burns reports for The Hill on a group of five Republicans who are demanding that the state and local tax (SALT) deduction be raised above its current cap of $10,000:

  The lawmakers are saying they’re prepared to vote no as a group on the wide-ranging tax and spending cut package key to President Trump’s agenda if they don’t get the raise they want.

  The group consists of Reps. Andrew Garbarino (N.Y.), Nick LaLota (N.Y.), Mike Lawler (N.Y.), Young Kim (Calif.) and Tom Kean Jr. (N.J.) — Republicans from wealthier suburban districts of major U.S. metropolitan areas, where higher property taxes make the increased cap especially valuable to taxpayers.

  The federal SALT deduction is terrible policy because it takes the pressure off profligate state governments run by Democrats to restrain their own taxes. A proper cap would be set at zero, so that Americans nationwide would not have to subsidize the high-tax policies of New Jersey, New York and California. Without the ability to deduct heavy state and local taxes on federal returns, citizens of blue states would be fully accountable for their bad political choices and would be motivated to demand reform at the state level.

  Just a note if you missed it back in February: Tom Kean Jr. has the "distinction" of being the only GOP CongressCritter representing one of the top 15 richest districts in the US.

Well, I thought I had come up with a clever new term. Turns out it's old, maybe already tired. From a year ago:

AIsplaining: is a pejorative term meaning for an AI to explain something, to a human, in a condescending, overconfident, and often inaccurate or oversimplified manner" https://t.co/x42ZepFbvS

— Jeff Saucerman (@jsauce7) May 10, 2024

But I did find a pretty good example. Starting from this morning's Bleat from James Lileks, which dug out this old newspaper clipping:

Interesting, because I used to live in Nebraska, and zoomed back and forth on I-80 quite a bit.

James also provides a recent Google Street View of "Erma's Desire", one of the sculptures:

But I wanted to see the rest of that article! Where's page 14B?! So I googled the headline "Bicentennial art fails Nebraska road test" and … failed, alas.

But I did check Google's "AI Mode". Which contained (among other things) an indication of what the AI thought might be the Real Issue:

Reader, that's AIsplaining.

For the record, I can no longer duplicate that result. But I swear it's accurate!

(It turns out "Erma's Revenge Desire" is eminently Googleable, so if you're interested…)

And we know how that movie turns out, don't we?

At the WSJ, Holman W. Jenkins, Jr. gives two big thumbs-down for Trump’s Bad Hollywood Trade Movie (gifted link).

This, from Giancarlo Sopo at NR, also explains a lot: Netflix’s CEO Wants You Lonely and Miserable. Excerpt (one that doesn't have much to do with that headline):

Consumer note: I have purchased a ticket for the new live-action Lilo & Stitch, two weeks from today. In 3D! This will be the first time I've been to a theater since (see above) Twisters, back in July of last year.

I know: Disney. But the trailer made me laugh, and I have fond memories of the original animated version. So here's hoping it doesn't suck.

Also of note:

• Sorry, Don: 50% is not a passing grade. Jonah Goldberg points to a continuing problem with Team Orange: Right Ends, Wrong Means.

  Perhaps the most frustrating thing about being a conservative critic of Trumpism is that you often start by agreeing with Trumpworld about ends while disagreeing about means.

  This pleases nobody. The left, broadly speaking, considers the ends as illegitimate as the means, and the pro-Trump right thinks that if you’re against the means you really don’t desire the ends. I’m against the abuse of power, even for my own “side.”

  For instance, I’ve argued for decades that liberal media bias is real and a problem. I think you can exaggerate the problem, particularly these days (Fox has dominated cable news for decades). But, yes, the MAGA crowd is right that much of the “legacy” media is often reflexively hostile to Republicans. But that doesn’t mean I support the way Trump’s Federal Communications Commission is bullying various media organizations for being critical of Trump, or that I applaud Trump’s jihad against the Associated Press for refusing to call the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America.”

  Did anyone notice when Governor Ayotte started calling the "Gulf of Maine" the "Gulf of New Hampshire"? No? Maybe that was a dream I had.

• But the real problem is neither means nor ends. It is, as Kevin D. Williamson says: Trump Is a Socialist.

  Socialism doesn’t mean high taxes or an expensive welfare state. You don’t need socialism to have a portfolio of social-welfare programs. Japan has an extensive social-welfare apparatus, and it is far from socialist. Singapore is super-capitalist, and it offers my favorite kind of welfare: direct money payments to poor people. Even the big-spending Scandinavians have long abandoned the experiments in socialism that wrecked their economies in the postwar decades: In the high-tax European countries that so many of our progressive friends profess to admire, the trend for a generation has been away from state enterprise and central planning and toward privatization, trade, and investment. American progressives say they envy European health care systems they generally know nothing about; their European counterparts sincerely envy an American entrepreneurial ecosystem that they understand all too well but remain unable to replicate. It’s a funny old world.

  Socialism does not mean government-funded education and retirement benefits and health care subsidies—those things are simply welfare, and there are better and worse ways to go about doing such things. Socialism means a centrally planned economy, one that is dominated by state action irrespective of whether it is dominated by formal state enterprises. Food stamps are welfare—socialism can mean state-owned farms and grocery stores, but more often it means a state apparatus that runs the farms and grocery stores as though it owned them, setting prices, negotiating the terms of employment, and determining how business is to be done—a little more of this crop, a little less of that commodity, etc.

  V.I. Lenin described his ideal society as one managed as though it were “one big factory.” The Leninist view, it is worth keeping in mind, was profoundly influenced by some of the big ideas and most influential and prestigious thinkers of late 19^th-century and early 20th-century capitalism, especially the mania for “scientific management” associated with Frederick Winslow Taylor.

  And of course KDW gets around to Trump's comment about America being a "department store", characterizing it accurately as "quasi-monarchical Leninism".

  Yes, I'm willing to grant that Kamala would have been worse.

• "Dad, why did we get off at the "Serfdom" exit?" Jared Dillian also notes the Lenintastic Lunacy at the top: Trump’s 'they can have 5' moment is an attack on capitalism.

  While recently aboard Air Force One, President Donald Trump told reporters that "a young lady—a 10-year-old girl, 9-year-old girl, 15-year-old girl—doesn't need 37 dolls. She could be very happy with two or three or four or five." He doubled down in an interview with NBC's Kristen Welker, saying that Americans "don't need to have 250 pencils. They can have five."

  Trump is referring to the economic hardship that is inevitable due to his tariffs. Toys are a particular focus, many of which come from China and are subject to the highest tariffs. Trump is asking Americans to make sacrifices, and not with the eloquence of John F. Kennedy—the sacrifices we make are simply to satisfy his pride.

  "OK, OK, I'll go to six pencils, kid. You drive a hard bargain."

• A very slick visualization reminding us that we're doomed. Well, not me. My kids maybe. From Cato: Social Security's Financial Crisis: The Trust Fund Myth Uncovered.

  There’s a big problem with Social Security.

  Most people misunderstand its trust fund, believing it holds real financial assets that ensure future benefits—the equivalent of a piggy bank stuffed with dollar bills.

  Yeah, it ain't that.

  On that topic, Dave Burge is righteously pissed enough to speak truth to power at Twitter:

  If I get hit by a car the day before I turn 65 who inherits my fucking money https://t.co/wxvY1OBAou

  — David Burge (@iowahawkblog) May 7, 2025

  It's a thread, and it's no contest: David can out-f CongressCritter Pocan. Pocan apparently got the memo that Democrats should cuss a lot more than they used to.

Recently on the book blog: