Pun Salad

Recent analysis from Erica York and Alex Durante of the Tax Foundation: The Economic Impact of the Trump Trade War. With a graphic they invite me to embed:

And a few of their bullet points are, to be honest, kind of infuriating:

A citation on that first point above soberly informs us: "A tax is a mandatory payment or charge collected by local, state, and national governments from individuals or businesses to cover the costs of general government services, goods, and activities." So: a huge tax increase, unpassed by Congress, the way taxes are supposed to work. Under, y'know, the Constitution.

This is an example of what I meant in yesterday's post, about Our Side no longer believing in the Constitutional order. And, unfortunately, not the only example.

I'm currently reading The Parasitic Mind by Gad Saad. (Amazon link at your right.) And happened on this bit of advice:

Trump’s detractors should perhaps be spending more effort engaging their central route of persuasion by evaluating his policy positions in a dispassionate and detached manner.

Fine advice. Difficult for me to follow when I consider the damage he's doing to the Constitution. Sorry, Gad.

David Harsanyi's headline is The Left Doesn't Believe in the Constitutional Order. True dat!

Exactly. Just one more bit of badness from Wilson. Progressives, if it's so important to have "independent" Federal agencies working their will on the citizenry, avoiding checks and balances: write and pass a constutional amendment, and try to get it ratified.

Oh, and the word I would add at the end of David's headline is: "either": making it "The Left Doesn't Believe in the Constitutional Order Either". It's not as if Our Side has been fastidious about that over the past eleven months.

For what it's worth, I have no opinion, pro or con, on Netflix buying Warner. I just hope Trump stays out of it.

Also of note:

• I have concerns. Wesley J. Smith is pretty certain that Robots Should Not Have 'Rights' (archive.today link)

  We live in an era when activists of various stripes argue that, well, everything should have rights. Animals, nature, plants, the moon, rivers, AI/robots, you name it.

  Now, in Newsweek, the transhumanism popularizer and California gubernatorial candidate Zoltan Istvan argues that we should give robots rights so they will show mercy on us. Seriously. From his article, “Why Giving Rights to Robots Might One Day Save Humans”:

  The discussion about giving rights to artificial intelligences and robots has evolved around whether they deserve or are entitled to them. Juxtapositions of this with women’s suffrage and racial injustices are often brought up in philosophy departments like the University of Oxford, where I’m a graduate student.

  This is the problem with all non-human-rights activists. They continually compare their favored supposed rights-bearers with human beings who were denied equality in the past. But those denials were wrong — and in some cases evil — because inherent equals were treated as if they were unequal.

  We live in a time where a lot of people don't think human beings should have the right to life if they have yet to be born. So my concerns will fall on a lot of deaf ears:

  • We have rights thanks to our living consciousness and free will.
  • Living consciousness and free will are (probably) emergent properties of a sufficiently complex nervous system.
  • There's no inherent reason that a "sufficiently complex nervous system" needs to be biology-based.
  • So …

  So I don't think Wesley's argument is a slam dunk. We're not there yet, but someday… maybe.

• Here I am, stuck in the middle with… Josh & Bernie?! Veronique de Rugy takes a look at the latest horseshoe woe: Coming for Your Credit Card From Left and Right.

  Take legislation introduced earlier this year by what would have once been an unlikely duo: Sens. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.). Their "10 Percent Credit Card Interest Rate Cap Act" — also reflecting a Trump idea from the 2024 campaign — sounds compassionate. Who enjoys paying 25% interest?

  In practice, price controls of all sorts are disastrous. Credit card interest rates are high because unsecured consumer lending is very risky. They're the price for the lender taking a chance on a person. If the government artificially caps rates far below the market rate, banks will stop lending to riskier borrowers. That doesn't just mean broke shopaholics. It includes the working single parent using a financial last resort before payday.

  Just as rent controls can create a housing shortage by reducing the attractiveness of supplying those homes, interest-rate caps can create a credit shortage. They put millions of working-class Americans — the people proposals like these are supposed to protect — at risk of being "de-banked." Stripped of their credit cards, some will turn to payday lenders, loan sharks and pawn shops, whose charges are far higher.

  Vero is not saying anything that complicated or controversial. We live in a time when people flaunt their economic ignorance on purpose.

• It doesn't help to have the nickname "the Stupid Party". Yuval Levin explains it, hopefully with small enough words so that Josh Hawley can understand: Why Republicans Lose Every Healthcare Debate.

  Of course, medical care is not like other commodities. It involves life-and-death situations that threaten the people we love, there are enormous knowledge gaps between providers and consumers, and the most urgent and important services are often very expensive. That’s why we want to purchase insurance in advance, rather than directly buying care. And it’s why it makes sense to subsidize coverage for people who can’t afford it. That could be done in line with the economic logic of healthcare by using subsidies to give everyone the resources to enter competitive insurance markets as consumers making choices.

  But this is where politics gums things up. The fact is, most of us don’t actually want a lot of choice when it comes to healthcare. We just want to believe that everything is paid for. That creates an incentive to hide costs by routing most payments through insurers or government, which sustains the illusion that everything is free to the consumer. This has yielded a healthcare system without real prices, and therefore without enough pressure to restrain spending. In turn, that’s led to ever-rising costs paid for by ever-rising subsidies.

  For decades, this has meant that health policy proposals that make economic sense do not make political sense, and vice versa.

  Yuval's bottom line: "You can't beat something with nothing." Which is what the GOP's got.

• 

  Stark's other lesson was "Live Free or Die". But that's not what George Will is talking about when he explains A stark lesson about the president’s war powers. (WaPo gifted link)

  In “The President Who Would Not Be King: Executive Power Under the Constitution,” Michael W. McConnell, Stanford law professor and former federal judge, writes that Article I vests in Congress legislative powers “herein granted” and enumerated. Article II simply assumes the president shall exercise all powers executive in nature. Those powers were negligible in 1789, when the executive bureaucracy was smaller than Congress. Today, executive power is everywhere.

  The Constitutional Convention changed Congress’s power from “to make war” to “to declare war,” thereby expanding presidential war power. The Convention worried that if the power to “make” war belonged to Congress (which often was out of session), the president could not repel sudden attacks. Also, the power to declare war was already almost a nullity: Most wars then (and since) were declared by beginning them — waging war before, or rather than, declaring war. In Federalist 25, Alexander Hamilton noted that “the ceremony” of formally declaring war “has of late fallen into disuse.” Congress has not declared war since 1942 (against German allies Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania), many wars ago. Congress has, however, passed authorizations for uses of military force.

  Citing decisions of self-restraint by presidents Washington (dealing with Native American tribes), John Adams (the Quasi-War with France) and Thomas Jefferson (the Barbary War), McConnell concludes that an originalist understanding of war powers is that “congressional authorization is required before the President may employ the armed forces in offensive military operations that constitute acts of war.”

  McConnell's book sounds good. Amazon link at your right.

• Sounds like the setup for a bad SNL skit. But it's not. Ronald Bailey says NIMBYism is forcing AI into the Final Frontier: Google, SpaceX, and Blue Origin plan to put AI in space.

  The growth of the U.S. economy is being fueled by the hectic quest to build out massive data centers to run increasingly popular generative AI models like ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, and Gemini. The power-hungry AI data centers are driving up electricity costs in some regions and sparking local "not-in-my-backyard" opposition.

  Consequently, some Big Tech players are looking to locate their data centers in space. They think that low earth orbit could mitigate the problem of pesky, annoyed neighbors and offer perpetual sunshine to power constellations of AI satellites.

  In November, Google unveiled Project Suncatcher, "a research moonshot to scale machine learning compute in space." A team of Google researchers is exploring how to deploy and fly fleets of solar-powered AI satellites that would beam down data from orbit.

  I foresee cooling problems. But I assume the big brains have figured that out already.

Recently on the book blog:

That skit (with Steve Martin, Kevin Nealon, Nora Dunn, Dana Carvey, and Victoria Jackson) was from season 13 of Saturday Night Live, airing October 17, 1987. A little over 38 years ago.

Something to keep in mind when you hear people complaining about how dumb kids are these days.

But if you watch to the end, you'll be able to complete the headline quote above.

Also of note:

• And then he said that the beatings would continue until morale improves. Liz Wolfe's "Reason Roundup" dials up the sarcasm: Trump tells voters to buy less while his tariffs raise prices.

  Trump's affordability tour: "You know, you can give up certain products. You can give up pencils," said President Donald Trump at a speech in Mount Pocono, Pennsylvania, that was supposed to help alleviate people's worries about affordability and help Republicans figure out salient messaging ahead of the midterms.

  What a fascinating tack to take.

  "You always need steel. You don't need 37 dolls for your daughter," he continued. "Two or three is nice, but you don't need 37 dolls. So, we're doing things right. We're running this country right well."

  "I can't say affordability is a hoax because I agree the prices were too high. So I can't go to call it a hoax because they'll misconstrue that," said Trump. "But they use the word affordability. And that's the only word they say. Affordability. And that's their only word. They say, 'Affordability.' And everyone says, 'Oh, that must mean Trump has high prices.' No. Our prices are coming down tremendously from the highest prices in the history of our country."

  Liz goes on to note that Trump A"displays approximately zero self-awareness and shares no admissions of guilt."

  But when was the last time any US President admitted guilt? According to Google's AI: Bill Clinton "who admitted to lying under oath about his affair with Monica Lewinsky during a deposition." (Although the AI does point out that Trump was convicted of 34 felonies connected to Stormy Daniels' hush money payments, he refused to admit guilt there either.)

• Good news, I guess. James Freeman looks at recent polling from the Economist/YouGov: Socialism Still Not That Popular. (WSJ gifted link)

  When asked whether capitalism or socialism is the better economic system, 46% of registered voters say capitalism, 22% say socialism, and 32% say they’re not sure, according to the Economist/YouGov.

  After all the misery that socialism has caused over the last century, it’s amazing that it commands any popularity at all. On the other hand, given that socialist Zohran Mamdani is weeks away from taking office as mayor of the country’s largest city—the traditional world headquarters of capitalism—perhaps it’s nice to be reassured that the New York City electorate remains a weird outlier in the American political scene.

  This may also explain in part why Mr. Mamdani had a surprisingly friendly visit to the White House recently—one can only hope he’s begun to understand how bad his ideas are.

  It looks like 2026 is going to be an (um) interesting year. If, that is, you're interested by politicians and pundits trying to scare the crap out of you pointing out how awful the other side is.

  And worse, they will mostly be correct about that.

• Speaking of trying to scare the crap out of people… Andrew C. McCarthy is not a fan of a recent neologism: ‘Narco-Terrorism’ Is a Legally Meaningless Term. (archive.today link)

  Andrew quotes a dizzying array of administration apologists using the term. Only problem being:

  For the umpty-umpth time, “narco-terrorism” is just political rhetoric. It has no standing as a legal term — no significance in the extensive bodies of federal law defining narcotics trafficking and terrorism. Transparently, the incantations of narco-terrorism by the president’s amen corner are intended to benumb the public into assuming that his administration’s designation of drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations provides a tenable legal basis for lethally striking vessels suspected of transporting narcotics. It doesn’t. On the other hand, as with the president’s alien enemies invocation, and his claims of “rebellion” as a predicate for deploying National Guard troops in American cities, there could be litigation over the extent to which the courts may review the executive branch’s determination that drug trafficking activity warrants a terrorism designation.

  Our law has processes for designating foreign terrorist organizations (FTOs) and global terrorists. There is no designation of narco-terrorists. That is unsurprising, since narcotics trafficking, while a serious crime, is not terrorist activity as that term is extensively and exactingly defined in federal law. (In a previous post, I’ve outlined the conduct covered by that definition, in Section 1182(a)(3)(B)(iii) of federal immigration law.)

  It's fair to say that anyone using the intelligence-insulting term is trying to bamboozle you.

• A less legalistic analysis… is provided by Jonah Goldberg, who points out the facts on the ground: Cocaine Is Not Mustard Gas. (archive.today link)

  In my life I’ve seen many kinds of whores, figuratively speaking: media whores, attention whores, power whores, and so on. I even know, thanks to some poor decisions in my youth, that one can be a coke whore. But as for mustard gas whores, I declare I’ve never encountered one.

  I bring this up because a line of argument on social media caught my attention recently. “Imagine Venezuela was releasing Mustard Gas in cities across the United States and had killed about half a million people in the last 10 years who breathed it in,” writes one X user. “Would ANYONE be against stopping boats bringing Mustard Gas into the US? Now do drug boats.”

  There are more examples of this from some more prominent folks, including a tendentious challenge from MAGA-aligned lawyer Kurt Schlichter, who asks “If you agree that we can destroy boats carrying barrels of mustard gas headed to our country, can you tell me the difference between the drugs and the mustard gas?” Schlichter adds: “I submit that the only meaningful difference is that drugs have killed nearly 100,000 Americans in the last year, and mustard gas has killed zero Americans.”

  Read the whole thing, but if I may summarize: you would have to be a "MAGA-aligned lawyer" to make an analogy so stupid.

Jeff Maurer suggests Democrats Should Make Trump Pay for Selling Pardons.

A long excerpt, but the key phrase seems to be "nobody cares about the president being a crook."

If you care, though, Google is your friend; check out the back stories on Cuellar, Zhao, Santos, and the rest.

For fun, you might also want to check out the CNN segment that asks the musical question: What if the accused pipe bomber claims he’s already been pardoned?

Also of note:

• Not just a crook, but a murderous one. Jacob Sullum claims Trump’s word games can’t disguise his murderous anti-drug strategy. (You would hope not, anyway.)

  I have a riddle for you. If we call a drug smuggler a combatant, how many combatants died when SEAL Team 6 killed 11 men on a cocaine boat near Venezuela on September 2?

  Zero, because calling a drug smuggler a combatant does not make him a combatant. That reality goes to the heart of the morally and legally bankrupt justification for President Donald Trump's bloodthirsty anti-drug campaign in the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific, which began on September 2 and so far has killed 87 people in 22 attacks.

  Jacob goes on to point out a simple truth: "Americans want cocaine." If they didn't, those drug boats would simply not exist.

• And a good man is hard to find. Kevin D. Williamson muses on Good Things and Hard Things. It's long and somewhat (but wonderfully) rambling, but:

  The good news is that our main economic problems can be mitigated through fairly straightforward policy changes. The bad news is that nobody wants those policy changes to be made, because they would mean reduced government benefits, higher taxes on the middle class as well as on the affluent, less access to subsidized credit for higher education or buying houses, and a period of economic adjustment that probably would be at least as painful as the one Americans went through at the end of the Jimmy Carter years and the beginning of the first Ronald Reagan term, when a relatively responsible governing class acting under the leadership of Fed chairman Paul Volcker (who heroically blew smoke from his Antonio y Cleopatra Grenadiers and the occasional Partagas at the elected rabble throughout congressional testimony) screwed its collective political courage to the sticking place and did the needful thing.

  As a matter of pure political calculation, it is worth keeping in mind (should anyone in Washington feel the unaccustomed stirring of political courage) that while Americans in the 1980s sure as heck did not enjoy the process of fixing the inflation problem they really, really enjoyed having fixed it, and President Reagan went from being a basement-dwelling Gallup poll bum in 1982 to winning a 49-state landslide (recount Minnesota!) in 1984, largely on the strength of economic recovery: Real GDP growth topped 7 percent going into the 1984 election season. Average real GDP growth in the Reagan years was more than half-again as much as in the first Trump term or in Obama’s eight years, and more than under Joe Biden, when the economic figures were boosted by the post-COVID recovery.

  With respect to KDW's aside about Minnesota: It was the only state Mondale won in 1984, and that was by the thinnest of margins: 0.18 percentage points, or 3,761 votes out of over 2 million cast.

That Critter, Chris Pappas, is running for the US Senate. And my best guess is that his campaign advisors are telling him he has to pose as a "fighting fighter who fights" and stir up populist resentment. So we get:

Your cheap demagoguery might work to get you into the Senate! Congratulations, I guess.

— Paul Sand (@punsalad) December 8, 2025

I could quibble: that "2,900" number cited by "More Perfect Union" is a worldwide figure. A recent WSJ article breaks it down more accurately: "America Has 1,135 Billionaires. Here’s What We Know About Them." (WSJ gifted link)

Fun fact: that article puts the total net worth of American billionaires at "about $5.7 trillion."

Further fun fact: Uncle Stupid spent $7.01 trillion in FY2025.

So: Even if Chris managed to expropriate US billionaires' entire net worth, it wouldn't even fund federal government for a single year. And after that, it would be gone.

And of course, that's fantasy economics. Any effort to "legally" grab that wealth would quickly destroy that wealth. For example, Warren Buffett owns about $149 billion worth of Berkshire Hathaway stock. If he had to dump that in order to pay his Pappas-decreed tax bill, what would that do to the share price? And what would it do to the company itself?

Multiply that by every one of those billionaires, selling off stock, real estate, artworks, … Imagine how that might affect your IRA, your 401(k), your home value, …

But I mainly object to Pappas's vague implication to the know-nothings that he's trying to get to vote for him next year: You are poor because they are rich. That's actually a dangerous message to send to some people, as we've seen of late.

Also of note:

• He's got 'em on the list / And they'll none of 'em be missed. Andrew C. McCarthy passes along the latest Report: Pete Hegseth Gave Order to Kill Boat Operators Because They Were on a Target List. (NR gifted link)

  Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered the Navy commander of the September 2 missile strikes against a suspected drug boat to kill everyone on board because all eleven of them were on a list of approved military targets, NBC News has reported.

  The report is based on three anonymous sources — “two U.S. officials” and “one person familiar with the congressional briefings” that were provided last week by the commander, Admiral Frank M. Bradley. If the report is accurate, it lends more credence to the original (and much criticized) Washington Post report, which asserted — also according to anonymous sources — that the gist of Hegseth’s order was “to kill everybody” on board.

  Hey, it only took them a couple weeks to come up with this. Imagine Secretary-of-War Pete slapping his forehead over the weekend, shouting: "Oh, right, I forgot! The list! They were on the list!"

  Andrew notes there is (indeed) nothing new about kill-em-all orders over the past few administrations. But there's a "but":

  But here is the difference: The al-Qaeda-related drone strikes by Obama, as well as by Presidents George W. Bush, Trump, and Biden, were all pursuant to the post-9/11 congressional authorization of the use of military force (AUMF), which went into effect with overwhelming bipartisan approval a week after al-Qaeda killed nearly 3,000 Americans in our homeland, destroying the World Trade Center and striking the Pentagon. That is why there was not more scandal attached to the use of lethal force away from the battlefield — or, as I outlined in the piece on Obama’s drone strikes, to the killing of hundreds of civilians and to the 2011 drone strike that killed Anwar al-Awlaki (a dual American and Yemeni citizen) along with several of his companions in Yemen.

  I think it's OK to fill in the "committed war crimes" spot on your impeachment bingo card.

• Probably not an impeachable offense. But, as Eric Boehm relates, Trump's Tariffs Were Supposed To Cut the Trade Deficit and Boost U.S. Manufacturing. They're Not Working.

  How should we assess whether President Donald Trump's tariffs have been effective?

  It's an important question—yet frustratingly difficult to answer. Trump has outlined overlapping, confusing, and sometimes competing goals for the tariffs.

  He's celebrated them as a source of government revenue, for example, but also claimed they are meant as a negotiating tactic. They can't be both. Tariffs used for negotiation are meant to be removed (once negotiations are complete), rendering them useless for long-term revenue. For Trump, tariffs are a solution to every problem, and the trade war is more about the vibes than the economics.

  But, as Eric shows, to the extent administration spokesmodels did provide goals for the tariffs to accomplish, they have failed.

• Not so fast, homeowners. James Freeman puts an asterisk on his headline: California Allowed Someone to Rebuild a Home* (WSJ gifted link). Quoting a news report about 915 Kagawa Street:

  It is the first rebuilt home in the Palisades to receive a certificate of occupancy, according to the mayor’s office, since the deadly fire there ravaged the area nearly a year ago while destroying 6,837 structures.

  I've provided the Google Maps link; the "street view" (from September) shows the house under construction. With no next door neighbors. And no next doors, for that matter.

  But why the asterisk? Nobody's actually moving into the house. James reports it's owned by a developer who plans to use it as a show house.

  James goes on to describe further dysfunction as only California government can provide:

  Nearly a decade ago, Los Angeles County voters overwhelmingly approved Measure M, a half-cent sales tax to fund projects focused on public transportation, street and sidewalk repair, and traffic reduction. The idealistic vote gave park-starved and transit-hungry Angelenos a lot to look forward to, including a $365 million plan for an 8-mile bike path along the Los Angeles River, which would close a crucial gap between existing paths lining LA’s concrete channelized waterway. The expected opening date: 2025.

  But, as the year nears a close, the bike path still isn’t open. In fact, construction hasn’t even started, and the environmental review process is still in the early stages. In the meantime, rising construction costs and other factors have increased the total project cost to approximately $1 billion.

  Bottom line: "One can ask how it’s even possible to spend $1 billion on a bike path, but remember it’s still not clear they’re going to get their bike path."

• Asked and answered. Allysia Finley in the WSJ: Why Is Autism Exploding? Welfare Fraud Is One Reason. (WSJ gifted link)

  Diagnosis rates of autism among children have more than tripled over the past 15 years. One reason, which Minnesota’s welfare scandal lays bare with shocking details, is Medicaid fraud and abuse.

  Medicaid pays healthcare providers big bucks to diagnose and treat children with autism—sometimes tens of thousands of dollars a month for a single child. Yet states rarely verify that kids who are diagnosed actually meet the medical criteria for the disorder or that they get appropriate treatment from qualified specialists.

  The result: Children covered by Medicaid or the government-run Children’s Health Insurance Program are 2.5 times as likely as those with private coverage to be diagnosed with autism. Many lower-income kids are labeled autistic merely because they have behavioral or developmental problems.

  Allysia's explanation is a lot more credible than RFKJr's "It wuz the vaccines" theory.

Recently on the book blog:

From the WSJ in a recent editorial: The Great Entitlement State Grift. (WSJ gifted link)

That political ecology is also apparent in Democrats' demands to extend those hallowed Obamacare "tax credits", no questions asked.

A straight-news report from Politico has a predictable "Republicans pounce" headline: Obamacare fraud report has Republicans crying foul. But the plain facts are pretty damning:

Exercise for the reader: if you object to the WSJ's allegation that "Democrats won't acknowledge fraud"… please try to find a Democrat acknowledging the GAO report.

Also of note:

• I'm not an Objectivist, but… Robby Soave finds some prescience within it: Ayn Rand denounced FCC censorship 60 years ago.

  In 1962, Rand penned a prophetic warning about the public interest standard, which then–FCC Chair Newton N. Minow was citing to justify pressuring television companies to create more educational programming. Minow famously railed against a supposedly "vast wasteland" of shoddy television shows, and he claimed that the FCC's charter empowered him to push for editorial changes to the medium that would align with his view of the public interest.

  "You must provide a wider range of choices, more diversity, more alternatives," said Minow in his well-remembered 1961 speech. "It is not enough to cater to the nation's whims; you must also serve the nation's needs."

  Minow repeatedly claimed that he was not in favor of government censorship and was not trying to tell broadcasters what they could and could not say. Rather, he charged them to make nebulous and ill-defined improvements to the product that he believed would be better appreciated by the American public—i.e., the public interest.

  In her March 1962 essay "Have Gun, Will Nudge," Rand argued that this was censorship by another name. "It is true, as Mr. Minow assures us, that he does not propose to establish censorship; what he proposes is much worse," she wrote. Unlike explicit bans on speech, Rand warned, the modern method of censorship "neither forbids nor permits anything; it never defines or specifies; it merely delivers men's lives, fortunes, careers, ambitions into the arbitrary power of a bureaucrat who can reward or punish at whim."

  I was only 11 years old in 1962, and had no blog back then anyway, so I was unaware of Ayn's abolishment advocacy. But in 2007, when this blog not quite two years old, I linked approvingly to Jack Shafer's Slate article which advocated killing the FCC. It's an idea whose time has come is long past.

• Clear eyes at the Boston Globe. They belong to Jeff Jacoby, who informs his readers The 'two-state solution' is an article of faith, not a path to peace.

  AFTER Pope Leo XIV met with Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan last month, he reiterated what has become one of the most familiar refrains in international diplomacy: The "only solution" to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, he told reporters, is the creation of a Palestinian state alongside Israel.

  The pope has said as much before, as have other popes before him and an endless array of presidents, secretaries of state, prime ministers, foreign ministries, UN officials, international organizations, think tanks, academic luminaries, and prominent journalists.

  But political doctrines, unlike articles of faith, are supposed to be judged by how they work in the real world. And the doctrine of the "two-state solution" has been tested repeatedly for nearly a century — and it has failed every time.

  Jeff goes through the history and its legacy of continued, deadly, pointlessness.

Recently on the book blog:

Today's headline is a quote from the widely-reviled "Spock's Brain" episode of good old original Star Trek (Relevant nine-second excerpt here.) And my further inspiration is Dave Barry's recent substacked essay: My Brain.

Dave's brain is accurate, as you can verify here.

He goes on to justify his claim of full-brain syndrome. It's a fine, funny article, and I recommend it to you. Also, subscribing, because Dave deserves your support. Also check out Monty Python's Dennis Moore sketch, if you need further chuckles.

But Dave got me thinking (with my brain). I'm not quite as old, but I'm always alert to signs of brain failure. Which happen far too often these days. ("Why did I walk into this room?")

But the news from my self-reflection is more often good than bad. I do 13 crossword puzzles a week—seven from the New York Times, six from the Wall Street Journal—usually without Google-cheating. I also hit the NYT's daily Wordle and Connection puzzles. And, not to boast, but I've been on a hot streak working out the WSJ's Friday "Crossword Contest" meta-puzzle.

And of course, Jeopardy!. I'm not at contestant-level, if I ever was, but I still can cough up correct responses often enough, shouting them out … to my cat, who has the good manners to ignore me.

So I'm happy about that, but I'm really impressed with something I (and probably you) take for granted too often: my brain's ability to easily dredge up factoids that I haven't thought about in years, or even decades. And to do that within a fraction of a second! (Today's NYT 36-Across clue: "Emmy-winning actor Ray"; ah, that's "LIOTTA"! Spelled correctly, too!)

How does that work? And, even more navel-gazingly: why does it work? As a result, allegedly, of a few billion years of evolution, what is the species-survival value of me remembering Ray's last name, how it's spelled, and (for that matter) most of the plot of GoodFellas?

Which brings me to one more self-reporting anecdote, also movie-related. I watched the 1964 Beatles movie A Hard Day's Night the other evening. I saw it back then, over sixty years ago, but not since. Cute in spots, but (to be honest) doesn't hold up that well.

And I found myself speaking this line, uttered in the movie by George Harrison, about a second before he does:

He's right, you know.

Certainly not in anyone's list of "greatest movie quotes". And yet, it just popped out. How did you do that, brain? And why?

Andrew Heaton tells us: More text here: What America can learn from Japanese housing.

Also of note:

• Tale as old as time. Noah Smith says They need to make you hate some group. "They" being…

  In the 2010s, a bunch of right-wing types suddenly became big fans of Martin Luther King Jr.’s views on race. If you saw someone on Twitter quote MLK’s nostrum that people should “not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character”, it was almost certainly someone on the right — quite a change from the type of person who probably would have cited King’s words half a century earlier. This is from an Associated Press story back in 2013:

  King’s quote has become a staple of conservative belief that “judged by the color of their skin” includes things such as unique appeals to certain voter groups, reserving government contracts for Hispanic-owned businesses, seeking more non-white corporate executives, or admitting black students to college with lower test scores.

  Many progressives railed against the idea of a colorblind society, arguing that statistical disparities between racial groups — income gaps, wealth gaps, incarceration gaps, and so on — couldn’t be remedied without writing race into official policy and becoming much more race-conscious in our daily lives.

  In the policy space, this idea manifested as DEI, which implemented racially discriminatory hiring policies across a broad swath of American business, government, academia, and nonprofits. In the media space, this manifested as a torrent of op-eds collectively criticizing white people as a group — “White men must be stopped: The very future of mankind depends on it”, “It’s Time for White People to Understand Their Whiteness”, “What is Wrong With America is Us White People”, and so on. Reputable institutions brought in speakers who made claims like “Whites are psychopaths,” and so on. Making nasty jokes about white people carried few if any professional consequences.

  In that kind of environment, it’s understandable that lots of people on the right would turn to individualist principles like the ones espoused by MLK in his famous speech. Asking to be judged by the content of your character is a reasonable defense against people who are trying to judge you based on your membership in a racial group.

  Fast-forward a few years, however, and the shoe is on the other foot.[…]

  Noah notes that Donald Trump and Steven Miller are enthusiastically back in the business of judging people, not by the content of their character, but by their color/ethnicity/religion/country of origin/etc.

  I think Noah's misguided in thinking this is something new. Or that the lefties have repented their demagoguery. It's just so cheap and easy to do, when investigating "content of their character" one-by-one is such hard work!

• Well, it should do that, then. George Will notes a case flying under the radar: The Supreme Court can strike another blow against political cynicism. (WaPo gifted link)

  Some of the damage done by “campaign finance reforms” has been reversed. And Tuesday, the Supreme Court will hear arguments in a case that likely will continue the court’s dismantling of measures the political class has enacted to control political speech about itself.

  This case can extinguish an absurdity: a campaign regulation supposedly intended to prevent parties from corrupting their own candidates. The multiplication of, and subsequent unraveling of, reformers’ laws to ration political speech is a decades-long lesson about cynicism in the guise of idealism.

  Here is a simplified history of the reformers’ priorities: beginning in the 1970s, to empower government to regulate “hard” money — that given to particular candidates. Then to limit “soft” money given to parties for organizing and advocacy. Next, to regulate “express advocacy” — speech by independent groups advocating the election or defeat of an identifiable candidate. Inevitably, to solve the “problem” of spending on issue advocacy by such groups, limiting this remnant of civic discourse unregulated by government. Reformers nibbled away at the First Amendment, an artichoke devoured leaf by leaf.

  I guess we can expect the Usual Suspects to wail about "money in politics". But money just sits there; their real hatred is aimed at the political speech that money allows to make it to listeners.

• We hardly knew ye. David Harsanyi says RIP: War Powers Are Dead.

  Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine promises he'll refile a war powers resolution in the Senate demanding President Donald Trump ask for congressional approval before launching any military strikes against Venezuela.

  A similar bill failed by a 49-51 vote in the Senate last month.

  Why does the bill specify "Trump" and "Venezuela"? For the same reason that a similar bill in June specified "Trump" and "Iran." Democrats aren't serious about constitutional war powers. They're grandstanding.

  David notes that recent Presidents, both blue and red, have pretty much done what they wanted war-wise, without involving that pesky Article I of the Constitution.

• Someone should keep score. Jeff Maurer notes, informally, that The So-Called “Experts” Have Been “Right” About “Several Crucial Things” Recently. (I think the reader is supposed to imagine Jeff making air quotes in his headline.)

  The brain-dead right and the brain-damaged left both love railing against experts. Negging expertise is a staple of the Trump administration, and leftists treat the entire field of mainstream economics as a vast, centuries-long capitalist plot. Experts, of course, are wrong about some things sometimes, which has led some people to conclude that the smart thing to do is to listen to whichever deluded rage goblin their social media algorithm shits into their feed.

  But — quietly — the experts are on a bit of a winning streak. Several recent major things have gone pretty much exactly how experts said they would. And I can’t wait for them to get credit for being right…how could they not get that credit? Experts said “If you do A, then B will happen,” and then thing A happened, followed by B, which strongly suggests that they knew what they were talking about. Probably any minute now, “mea culpas” will start rolling in from the drunk shut-ins, shameless clout chasers, and Russian chaos bots who questioned the experts in the first place.

  The first area where the experts deserve some credit is tariffs. Most economists responded to Trump’s tariffs with repulsion-bordering-on-nausea, which seems justified in hindsight: Manufacturing is down and prices are up, with the strongest effects happening in sectors most affected by tariffs. The only good news about Trump’s tariffs is that they’re: 1) Illegal, and 2) A facilitator of graft as much as an economic policy; if not for those factors, things would be worse.1 For a while, we were told that Trump’s tariff strategy was 4D chess, but if this is chess, then Trump's queen has been captured, his knight is stuck up his ass, and the board has caught on fire and is igniting several Picassos that happened to be sitting nearby.

  I'm no expert, but I thought the folks predicting tariff malfunctions were probably right.

  I don't think Jeff mentions this, from a few days ago: Nature Retracts Study Predicting Catastrophic Climate Toll

And so does Don Boudreaux, who tells us What the Economics of Envy Can't Answer.

I guess I'm not surprised by the Pope, but hasn't he heard of the Tenth Commandment?

Anyway: Don proposes a number of "probing questions" to ask folks whose go-to solution to every social woe is "tax the rich". Here's one:

Maybe not a question to pose at the holiday table, but you be you.

Also of note:

• Could be a good title for a Bon Jovi song. Veronique de Rugy thinks the US is Living on Borrowed Credibility.

  New research by Zefeng Chen, Zhengyang Jiang, Hanno Lustig, Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh, and Mindy Xiaolan on three centuries of fiscal history offers a sobering lesson for today’s United States.

  The Dutch Republic, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain, and the modern United States all became dominant safe-asset suppliers in their eras. In each case, investors – both domestic and global – were willing to hold more of the hegemon’s debt than its future primary surpluses could justify. The bonds of a hegemon carry a convenience yield (a premium investors pay for safety and liquidity), making them overvalued relative to their fiscal backing. The hegemon can thus run persistent fiscal gaps without immediate consequences. In fact, the overvaluation itself temporarily functions as an extra source of revenue, meaning that unfunded spending might not generate inflation in the short run. For a time, markets behave as if the government has a larger stream of future surpluses than it actually does. Until it doesn’t.

  … and when it doesn't, the history says things get ugly very quickly.

• I'll stop posting about the drug boat stuff someday. But today is not that day. Not if Jacob Sullum has anything to say about it. And he does: Boat strike commander says he had to kill 2 survivors because they were smuggling cocaine.

  If we call a cocaine smuggler an "unlawful combatant" in an "armed struggle" against the United States, the Trump administration says, it is OK to kill him, even if he is unarmed and poses no immediate threat. And according to Adm. Frank M. Bradley, who commanded the newly controversial September 2 operation that inaugurated President Donald Trump's deadly anti-drug campaign in the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific, it is still OK to kill that cocaine smuggler if he ends up in the water after a missile strike on his boat, clinging to the smoking wreckage, provided you determine that he is still "in the fight."

  Bradley, who answered lawmakers' questions about that attack during closed-door briefings on Thursday that also included Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Dan Caine, knew that the initial missile strike, which killed nine people, left two survivors. But because the survivors had radioed for help from their fellow drug traffickers, The New York Times reports, Bradley ordered a second missile strike, which blew apart both men. That second strike was deemed necessary, according to unnamed "U.S. officials" interviewed by the Times, to prevent recovery of any cocaine that might have remained after the first strike.

  On its face, the second strike was a war crime. "I can't imagine anyone, no matter what the circumstance, believing it is appropriate to kill people who are clinging to a boat in the water," former Air Force lawyer Michael Schmitt, a professor emeritus at the U.S. Naval War College, told the Associated Press. "That is clearly unlawful….You can only use lethal force in circumstances where there is an imminent threat."

• But, hey, what about… Andrew C. McCarthy wonders Is Trump Following the Obama Drone Strike Model? (archive.today link)

  My friend Marc Thiessen makes some excellent points in his Washington Post column today (which I recommended to listeners of our podcast during my discussion with Rich Lowry this morning). He defends the Trump administration against war crime allegations related to the now infamous “double tap” strike that killed two alleged drug traffickers who were shipwrecked (because of the first missile strike) off the coast of Venezuela.

  Relying on David Shedd, formerly of the Defense Intelligence Agency, Marc observes that double taps are not unusual. In combat, initial strikes often do not eliminate the threat and additional strikes are necessary to destroy the targeted enemy asset. This is obviously why, as I noted on Tuesday, the Trump administration has tried to shift the focus of the second strike from the shipwrecked people (the focus of media coverage initially, to which the administration did not effectively respond) to the remnants of the ship and its cargo.

  Marc also points out that, in targeting cartels that it has designated as foreign terrorist organizations, the Trump administration is closely following the playbook of President Barack Obama […]

  Andrew notes one legalistic detail: Obama was operating under a Congressional "authorization of military force" (AUMF). Something that Trump lacks! And, for that matter, …

  You know how you know the cartels are not conducting terrorist activity? As we discussed on the podcast today, if the cartels had conducted terrorist mass-murder attacks against the United States, rather than shipping cocaine to the lucrative American market for that drug, we wouldn’t be talking about double taps and Trump’s lack of congressional authorization. If a terrorist ship was loaded with explosives and guns rather than bags of cocaine, everyone would agree that our armed forces would need to strike the target as many times as it took to destroy it. And Trump would already have congressional authorization because, as was the case after 9/11, lawmakers of both parties would be demanding to vote in favor of military force; they would enact an AUMF even if Trump didn’t ask for it.

  Which brings us to…

• Time to simply declare defeat. At Cato, Jeffrey A. Singer calls it An Incoherent Encore in a Failed Drug War.

  With Secretary of War Pete Hegseth embroiled in controversy over the extrajudicial killings of alleged drug smugglers operating a small, short-range boat off the coast of Venezuela, it’s worth examining how this all began.

  President Trump has repeatedly claimed that “narcoterrorists” are on these boats, transporting large quantities of fentanyl and other illegal drugs into the US to poison Americans, and he wants them obliterated. He asserts that each boat destroyed by the Navy with missiles saves 25,000 lives. As of this writing, 22 boats have been sunk, which amounts to 550,000 lives saved since early September—more than five times the nation’s annual overdose toll.

  First, drug smugglers do not sneak into the US, abduct random Americans, and forcibly inject them with fentanyl. They sell products to willing customers. These are voluntary commercial transactions, not acts of terrorism. If Americans did not want to buy illicit substances, traffickers would not profit from smuggling them and would quickly stop.

  Well, at least it seems to have gotten the Epstein stuff off the front pages. I guess that really did turn out to be a nothingburger.

• A lesson for all bloggers. Jeff Maurer is probably wishing he hadn't: I Have Hired A "Disabled" Columnist Who Will Probably Never Write a Column.

  I Might Be Wrong is pleased to announce a new addition to our staff: Cameron Este is our new columnist covering health and well-being. Cameron will join Ethan Coen, our Junior Assistant Film Critic, Jacob Fuzetti, an award-winning war correspondent who covers Hollywood gossip, and Paula Fox, who writes about tech issues and the naughty MILFs who will be joining her live on webcam to dine on her sopping undercarriage.

  Cameron’s credentials are impeccable: He recently graduated magna cum laude from Stanford with a double major in Journalism and Nutrition Science. Of course, I wish I had hired him after I had read Rose Horowitch’s Atlantic article about disability inflation at top universities. Horowitch’s eye-opening finding is that disability claims have skyrocketed at elite universities: The number of students claiming disability at the University of Chicago has tripled in eight years, and it’s quintupled at UC Berkeley in 15 years. Most of the “disabilities” involve lightly-scrutinized claims of sometimes-blithely-diagnosed conditions like ADHD, anxiety, and depression, and they generally require accommodations like receiving extra time on tests or being allowed to use otherwise-prohibited technology. Astoundingly, 38 percent of Stanford undergraduates this year are registered as having a disability.

  Immediately after being hired, Cameron informed me of the flotilla of maladies he possesses that require accommodation. He has ADHD, anxiety, dyslexia, autism, hypertension, a gluten allergy, shape blindness, and Stage 4 Restless Leg Syndrome. He has something called “Sarcastic Bowel Syndrome”, which is apparently when your digestive system responds to certain foods by flooding your brain with sassy put-downs that shatter your self-esteem. He has a wallet full of cards that say things like “I am having a seizure, please keep me away from sharp objects” and “I am experiencing echolocation hypersensitivity, please strangle any bats or dolphins that come near me”. I don’t know how he’s supposed to quickly find the right card in an emergency, especially since he apparently suffers from Sudden Onset Digital Paralysis, a.k.a. “finger narcolepsy”.

  I, for one, have a severe procrastination disability. You might get my Christmas cards before MLKJr's birthday, if I can manage it.