Oct
5
2026

Need a Smile on Your Face Today?

This should do the trick:

It's old, I had seen it before. But it's really timeless. And amazingly well-done.

But if you need additional cheering up…

Perhaps you noticed the grim story out of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health a few months back: Proximity to nuclear power plants associated with increased cancer mortality. Uh oh.

U.S. counties located closer to operational nuclear power plants (NPPs) have higher rates of cancer mortality than those located farther away, according to a new study led by Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

The study is the first of the 21st century to analyze proximity to NPPs and cancer mortality across all NPPs and every U.S. county. The researchers emphasized that the findings are not enough to establish causality but do highlight the need for further research into nuclear power’s health impacts.

To repeat: Uh oh!

The HTHCSoPH story refers to the concurrent publication in Nature Communications: "National analysis of cancer mortality and proximity to nuclear power plants in the United States." Prestigious! Here's the abstract:

Understanding the potential health implications of living near nuclear power plants is important given the renewed interest in nuclear energy as a low-carbon power source. Here we show that U.S. counties located closer to operational nuclear power plants have higher cancer mortality rates than those farther away. Using nationwide mortality data from 2000-2018, we assess long-term spatial patterns of cancer mortality in relation to proximity to nuclear facilities while accounting for socioeconomic, demographic, behavioral, environmental, and healthcare factors. Cancer mortality is higher across multiple age groups in both males and females, with the strongest associations among older adults, males aged 65–74 and females aged 55–64. While our findings cannot establish causality, they highlight the need for further research into potential exposure pathways, latency effects, and cancer-specific risks, emphasizing the importance of addressing these potentially substantial but overlooked risks to public health.

Wow, they used a lot of controls. Sounds like science!

But you might want to read those articles quickly before they are memory-holed. Because:

Pun Salad readers may have noted my occasional references to the University Near Here. As it turns out, "statistics show" that living in proximity to a public college is associated with 626,212 cancer deaths.

Aieee! I'd be safer if I moved down to Seabrook!

You can read Adam Stein's twitter thread, or you can read his and Deric Tilson's article at the Ecomodernist: Things that Apparently Cause Cancer. Excerpt:

It would shock you to know that Costco, according to a new Harvard School of Public Health methodology, caused 120,687 cases of cancer mortality nationally every year, simply due to living in close proximity to their warehouses. Private colleges accounted for 83,782 more. Harvard itself is responsible for 5,842 cancer deaths. Living near a Major League Baseball field causes almost 19 times as many cancer deaths as living near a Major League Soccer pitch. These conclusions are obviously absurd, but they come from the exact same methodology that researchers at Harvard use to “prove” that nuclear power plants cause cancer in nearby communities.

Earlier this year, Adam Stein and I called out a series of Harvard studies showing that nuclear power plants were associated with higher rates of cancer incidence and cancer mortality as nonsense. Now that we’ve spent the last few months replicating the analysis and expanding it, we are able to show that no matter what landmark you use, their methodology will show an increased cancer risk and mortality. The studies simply do not prove anything about cancer incidence.

What follows is a brutal takedown of the Harvard study. Reader, you may get cancer (it happens), but it will not be because you lived too close to a Costco.

Oct
4
2026

Channel Your Inner Physics Geek

With this recent xkcd cartoon: Accelerator Energies:

[Accelerator Energies]

And there's a good mouseover: "Fans at Daytona always get extra excited when officials decide to introduce some antimatter cars circling the track in the opposite direction."

Also of note:

  • Who is Zohran Mamdani? His definition of "socialism" has people chattering (and I am apparently no exception). For example:

    Continues:

    […] breath. Housing, childcare, public transit. No one should be priced out of these things. These are non-negotiables, you need these to live”

    If your eyes haven't rolled completely out of your head yet, I'll make the first, obvious, point: when Mamdani says "it is the government's job", what that boils down to is that it's the taxpayer's job. The government simply facilitates the coerced transfer of funds, after skimming a hefty share off the top for its employees.

    While expecting everyone to be grateful for its service.

    Coincidentally, I noticed philosopher Michael Huemer making a related point, exactly five years ago. Michael's original post is now behind some kind of anti-bot software with which I declined to cooperate, but here's an excerpt from my original excerpt:

    The [socialist] system rewards those who are behaving badly according to the values of the socialists themselves, and punishes those who are behaving rightly according to those same values. That is the core problem that [Ayn] Rand saw with socialism.

    That is partly a consequentialist problem, and partly a problem of justice: One cannot hope to promote some set of values by punishing anyone who acts according to those values and rewarding the opposite behavior. That is just not going to work out. It’s also obviously, paradigmatically unjust, if you think those are the correct values.

    Michael linked to a lengthy excerpt from Atlas Shrugged, a soliloquy from an ex-employee of The Twentieth Century Motor Company, where he describes the firm's quick slide into the void after democratic approval of a plan that "everybody in the factory would work according to his ability, but would be paid according to his need." A key paragraph:

    “Well, we got what we asked for. By the time we saw what it was that we’d asked for, it was too late. We were trapped, with no place to go. The best men among us left the factory in the first week of the plan. We lost our best engineers, superintendents, foremen and highest-skilled workers. A man of self-respect doesn’t turn into a milch cow for anybody. Some able fellows tried to stick it out, but they couldn’t take it for long. We kept losing our men, they kept escaping from the factory like from a pesthole—till we had nothing left except the men of need, but none of the men of ability.

    I've previously plugged "Francisco's Money Speech" from Atlas Shrugged. This one is longer, and almost as good.

  • But I thought we were supposed to "stand on the shoulders of giants." Robert Graboyes headlines the lyrics to an old Tom Lehrer song, relevant to our AI era: Plagiarize! Plagiarize! Plagiarize! Only Be Sure Always to Call It, Please, “Research.”.

    Artificial intelligence (AI) and the internet scramble age-old definitions of and ethical rules surrounding authorship, intellectual property, and plagiarism. As in the previous Bastiat’s Window column (“AI, Internet, and Rapid Advances in the Technology of Fraud”), this post was inspired in part by Jorge Luis Borges’s 1940 short story, “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” a quote from which appears in the graphic atop this piece. The title of today’s essay is cheerfully stolen from songwriter/satirist Tom Lehrer, who cheerfully stole from others and urged others to steal from him.

    Does a large percentage of output from and usage of AI platforms (e.g., ChatGPT, Grok, Claude) constitute plagiarism—and if so, is it feasible to define, detect, and prohibit what has long been considered intellectual property theft? Large-language-model (LLM) AI platforms scamper about the internet, gathering authors’ writings, and reconfiguring those borrowings into new documents for users. This raises two questions:

    • Do they lift whole paragraphs or pages from existing texts and paraphrase them to evade plagiarism detectors? This would constitute paraphrase plagiarism.

    • Are AI users presenting AI output as their own original work? This would constitute AI plagiarism—a problem so new that there’s no agreed-upon term or ethical standard governing its usage.

    Robert makes interesting and subtle points, and uses ChatGPT to plagiarize Barry Goldwater's 1964 acceptance speech. Plus, plus, plus.

  • Not even getting the basics right. Kevin D. Williamson takes on the latest capital punishment scandal: Tennessee Poison. (Dispatch gifted link)

    Assessing the conditions in Reading Gaol, Oscar Wilde remarked: “If this is the way Queen Victoria treats her convicts, she doesn’t deserve to have any.” I wonder whether We the People of the United States deserve to have any convicts at all, or condemned men—or condemned women.

    The story of Christa Pike, whom Tennessee officials have—so far—twice tried to poison to death, would be the blackest of black comedy if there were any comedy in it. Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee, being a Republican in 2026, is funny only unintentionally, saying of the twice-botched execution of his state’s only condemned female murderer: “Tennesseans deserve a justice system that is fair, that’s consistent, that is faithfully administered. My responsibility is to uphold the sentences that Tennessee juries have handed down, even when it’s difficult, and that is exactly what we intend to do in the days ahead.” If words mean anything, then the governor’s words would seem to mean that his state intends to try to kill her again in the interest of consistency and faithful administration and responsibility. I am tempted here to take the Lord’s name in vain.

    KDW's bottom line, with which it is difficult to disagree: "If Tennessee is going to wield the power of life and death in this slapstick fashion, then Tennessee does not deserve to have it."


Last Modified 2026-10-04 8:25 AM EDT
Oct
3
2026

Sing Along With the AIs

Or Read Alan Jacobs

Via Alex Tabarrok at Marginal Revolution: a debate over an essay by Arvind Narayanan & Sayash Kapoor: AI as Normal Technology. Lede:

We articulate a vision of artificial intelligence (AI) as normal technology. To view AI as normal is not to understate its impact—even transformative, general-purpose technologies such as electricity and the internet are “normal” in our conception. But it is in contrast to both utopian and dystopian visions of the future of AI which have a common tendency to treat it akin to a separate species, a highly autonomous, potentially superintelligent entity.

Well, that's (kind of) a relief. But it sponsored a lively debate. In a YouTube rap battle!

(Actually, I don't know if "rap battle" the proper nomenclature. I'm not young. But both sides include very catchy tunes.)

Up first, a rebuttal to Narayanan and Kapoor:

Which brought a tweeted response from Kapoor:

Both created "almost entirely" by AI.

Don't ask me who wins here, both sides seem pretty smart. I'll just put Fleetwood Mac's "Don't Stop (Thinking About Tomorrow)" on an iPod loop. And maybe read Alan Jacobs, who (I think) has a relevant point as well: This Changes Nothing.

That world-transforming, world-shattering, world-saving technology/person/event? The one that “changes everything”? It changes nothing. You're still you, and the same challenges confront you that have always confronted humanity and will always confront humanity. Every week you give yourself a new reason why you now don't have to think about loving your neighbor as yourself, turning the other cheek, doing justly and loving mercy and walking humbly with your God. It’s a crisis! It’s Flight 93! But come on: you're kidding yourself. Everything important is what it was, and wherever you go, there you are. Hey, I get it: All you want is to get off Mr. Bones’ Wild Ride. But it ain't happening. The ride never ends ... until you do. 

Let me add a bit of wisdom that Ike never actually said: "Things are more like they are today than they have ever been before."

Also of note:

  • It's not euphemism, it's meephemism. I recently subscribed to John McWhorter's NYT column, and it's all good, man, and I especially liked this one from July: Euphemism Won’t Save Young Black Men’s Lives. (NYT gifted link)

    The Fourth of July weekend was “marked by dozens of U.S. deaths from gun violence,” according to The Guardian. A few weekends ago, there were 27 shootings in Chicago, with eight fatalities. This set folks scratching their chins about “gun violence prevention.”

    The term is now so common it’s easy to miss how strained it is. “Gun violence” sounds as if guns are committing the violence. The expression artfully excises from the equation the actual person doing this “violence” — the shooter. This passive construction evades the fact of someone’s pointing a weapon and pulling a trigger and sending a bullet into a person’s flesh and bone. It turns shootings into abstract formless phenomena, like gravity or ultraviolet light. Note in contrast that we never talk about “knife violence” when someone uses a knife to attack others, we just call these assaults stabbings.

    The term became much more common in the 1990s, as the horrifying wave of murders and woundings and terror in poor Black neighborhoods began to be seen as a public health issue.

    A commenter notes that the obfuscation runs even deeper: the "gun violence" statistics lump in gun suicides with the homicides. Inflating the "public health" issue, pointing the blame at the gun.

  • Irony can be … pretty ironic sometimes. Daniel J. Flynn welcomes an annual celebration, and observes: Censorship Prevails Among Those Who Decry Censorship. (NR gifted link)

    Banned Books Week, which begins this Sunday, ironically presents to the public a more monolithic face than the modern-day Anthony Comstocks it purports to counteract.

    The four chairs of Banned Books Week include anti–Second Amendment activist Bess Kalb, who has written comedy for Jimmy Kimmel and Hillary Clinton; Marshall Romero, a self-described “transgender teenager with aspirations in politics”; and Azeemah Sadiq, whose bio lists her interests as “fighting for equity in underserved communities” and “electoral justice.” Given the heavy-handed DEI book displays one inevitably encounters at all times in any big-city library (a trip to my local library this week revealed three consecutive tables that highlight books by feminists, gays, and immigrants, respectively), the notion pushed by the American Library Association and other allied groups that libraries, schools, and other institutions overwhelmingly populated by left-wing employees do not themselves censor politically incorrect books but instead succumb to pressure by intolerant, external forces on the right seems rich.

    Let me (again) point out a pretty good book I recently read about censorship carried out in the name of DEI: That Book is Dangerous! by (self-admitted socialist) Adam Szetela. Which, good for them, I got at the Portsmouth (NH) Public Library. I wonder if they'll put it in their Banned Books Week display?

  • And as usual: Nellie Bowles' TGIF column, this week headlined: No Fatties, No Beardos, No Weirdos. A long-but-worth-it excerpt:

    → AI summit delivers some great body language: All the Big Tech leaders came together with President Donald J. Trump to sign a “morally binding” pact that they won’t build artificial intelligence that kills us all. I love that. Morally binding. Call it what it is: a pinky swear for boys. I feel as though morally binding is another term for not legally binding, if you get me. It’s like if someone says they’re “morally monogamous” in this marriage, so I immediately understand they are cheating on each other. Here’s the president: “The biggest people in the world signed that and I signed it as president. And it really is a form of protection.” And: “I’m seeing tremendous self-policing.” Again: Self-policing means absolutely no policing. This meeting of kings was organized by House Speaker Mike Johnson. Now, on the one hand, morally binding and self-policing are both completely fake things that mean utterly nothing. Morally binding to whom? Trump? Morally binding. . . to Trump. At best, that means nothing. At worst, it means our tech leaders are about to collectively get a new set of younger, hotter wives. On the other hand, do I actually want the government regulating AI? The man who gathered everyone together for this high-tech summit of the future, Speaker Mike Johnson, literally doesn’t believe in evolution. Sorry, he believes in morally binding evolution. Intelligent self-design, if you get my drift. I’m not faulting the speaker for that, per se; I’m just suggesting that perhaps our government bodies are not the best group to decide complex regulations for developing technologies. Maybe it’d be better if AI regulated our government. Just an idea. It already made such a good website for us. I think AI would make a nice president. Cold, direct, and yet sycophantic. Take my vote!

    The best part of the summit was watching Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei trying to act normal. At some point he gave a brief statement and then when someone in the press asked a question, he got so flustered that he started stimming, excused himself from the dance circle, then turned to hide behind someone (anyone), and it’s all so awkward that everyone around him tried not to laugh. Poor Dario. He wanted to make the computer do tricks and talk about rationalism on a bean bag chair and now there’s a CNN reporter screaming at him about data center water usage. Someone get this man his fidget spinner and give him back his over-the-ear headphones.

    As part of the summit, Trump rebranded artificial intelligence to “super intelligence.” And I guess this encouraged everyone to get .si domain names. Trumpo has so many corruption schemes that at this point I’m very open to new, baseless corruption conspiracies, and here’s one: Maybe Trump told insiders about his “super intelligence” rebrand early because before anyone announced anything, a lot of people scooped up all the good .si domain names. It’s lucrative stuff. For example, Build.si seems to be for sale for $10 million. That’s a nice, tidy sum. Also, if you didn’t think artificial intelligence versus super intelligence would become a new culture war issue, think again, my homies!

    Uh, thank you? But is this what America is asking for? Is this the new Gulf of Mexico versus Gulf of America? Artificial, super, I don’t really care. Just as long as it tells me I’m right.

    … and also compliments me on asking insightful and important questions. Like Claude does.

Oct
2
2026

Embrace the Power of "And"

Mr. Ramirez seems a tad irritated:

That's his commentary on this: America Will Never Be a Communist Country.

And if you missed the initial brouhaha about the ad, the WSJ article from a few days ago will clarify: U.S. Government Airs Pro-Trump, Anti-Communism Ad. (WSJ gifted link)

On Wednesday night [September 23], a local CBS News reporter in Miami noticed something unusual during a Fox News commercial break: a punchy pro-Trump ad that said it was paid for by the U.S. government.

The ad begins with President Trump saying a frequent line he uses on the campaign trail: “Together we will defeat communism, Marxism in America once and for all.” The ad follows with dozens of images of the president at White House events. Playing in the background is a choir singing “Love Me.” Trump ends by saying “America will never be a communist country” and in small letters at the bottom of the screen it reads, “Paid for by the U.S. government.”

Creepy? Offensive? Out of the pages of 1984? See today's headline: it can be all those things. Not to mention "illegal". The WSJ story continues:

The administration’s decision to fund an advertisement that appears to include a voice clip from the Republican National Convention could violate federal law, ethics experts said.

“This is an astonishing misuse of public resources in the campaign context, one of the most blatant I’ve ever seen,” said Daniel Weiner, a former campaign finance official and senior director at the Brennan Center for Justice, which has been critical of Trump on ethics issues.

Unfortunately, anyone in a position to make the call on law violation is firmly in Trump's pocket. For example, FCC Chair Brendan Carr is more interested in going after journalists.

Coincidentally, via Patterico's Pontifications:

So we're kinda getting a mixed message from the Executive Branch about Commies.

Also of note:

  • "Look, Dave, I can see you're really upset about this." Sorry, that's what sprung to my mind while reading Anil Seth's essay, The Mythology Of Conscious AI. He's pretty convincing that "intelligence" is, at bottom, a tool for doing stuff. While "consciousness" is a different kettle of fish:

    The propensity to bundle intelligence and consciousness together can be traced to three baked-in psychological biases.

    The first is anthropocentrism. This is the tendency to see things through the lens of being human: to take the human example as definitional, rather than as one example of how different properties might come together.

    The second is human exceptionalism: our unfortunate habit of putting the human species at the top of every pile, and sometimes in a different pile altogether (perhaps closer to angels and Gods than to other animals, as in the medieval Scala naturae). And the third is anthropomorphism. This is the tendency to project humanlike qualities onto nonhuman things based on what may be only superficial similarities.

    I may be wrong, but I think of consciousness (and its cousin, free will) as "emergent properties": functionality that develops (via evolution, for you God-evaders) out of interactions of sufficiently complex nervous systems that are not themselves conscious.

    And I've recently thought there's nothing to stop a sufficiently complex computing system from developing the same way.

    But (on the other hand) there may not be any reason to expect that a computing system's "emergent properties" would look anything like human consciousness. We humans might not even be able to recognize it, let alone predict its behavior.

    Well, sorry, that's for you college sophomores to discuss in your dorm rooms.

  • Free Luigi (with the purchase of another Luigi of equal or greater value). Jonathan Turley notes some disturbing attitudes down at Harvard Med School. “Free Luigi”: Rutgers Professor Calls for the Liberation of Accused Murderer Mangione.

    Roxane Gay is the Gloria Steinem Endowed Chair in Media, Culture, and Feminist Studies at Rutgers University–New Brunswick. She currently serves as the artist-in-residence at Harvard Medical School and called this week for the “liberation” of accused assassin Luigi Mangione. Gay (the cousin of former Harvard University President Claudine Gay) is the latest example of the radical chic of higher education.

    Professor Gay was on a panel on “fat liberation” at Harvard Medical School. In a video posted to X, Gay responds to a question about the health industry by declaring “Free Luigi, for one.” She added that “The health insurance industry is equal opportunity evil. They are terrible for thin people, for fat people, for white people, for black people … They just want to prioritize profit over bodies and health.”

    It appears that it is not evil to murder UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in December 2024, leaving a widow and children without a husband and father

    Roxane was one of the prime panic-inducers cited by author Adam Szetela in his book That Book Is Dangerous!: How Moral Panic, Social Media, and the Culture Wars Are Remaking Publishing, which I reported on over at the book blog a few days ago. She's an enthusiastic culture warrior, apparently much tougher on authors that offend her than she is on cold-blooded murderers.

  • Also college administrators. Jeffrey A. Singer discusses some nanny-statism: Smoking Is Bad for You. Nicotine Isn't—but Politicians Keep Trying To Ban It.

    Easthampton just became the 25th Massachusetts municipality to adopt a "nicotine-free generation" policy. Anyone born after January 1, 2006, will never be old enough to legally buy nicotine products there. The ban doesn't just apply to cigarettes. It also applies to noncombustible nicotine products that can help smokers reduce their risk.

    Decades of anti-smoking campaigns have dramatically reduced cigarette use, especially among young people. That's great news. But somehow along the way nicotine itself became associated with the worst harms of smoking, even though the chemical is not responsible for the cancers, the lung disease, or most of the cardiovascular disease caused by combustible tobacco. Worse, the pendulum has swung so far in the maximalist anti-nicotine direction that we risk criminalizing some of the most effective smoking-cessation alternatives.

    As we've previously discussed, the University Near Here tossed nicotine in with tobacco products in its draconian prohibition policy. Read Jeffrey's article to find out how that's pointless and (worse) counterproductive.

Oct
1
2026

According to Google, It Rhymes With "Jonah Rides"

[Amazon Link]
(paid link)

Katherine Mangu-Ward makes The case for good faith.

I've never been sure how to pronounce it. Bo-nah feed-ays? Bah-nah fieds? The term bona fides trips me up every time. But it's an important concept, so I try my best. You might even say I make…a good faith effort.

To argue in good faith—the literal translation of the Latin—means assuming that the person on the other side is saying what he actually believes and that disagreement is not itself evidence of corruption, cowardice, or deceit. And vice versa.

The assumption and practice of good faith makes intellectual debate possible. And yet it feels increasingly rare.

Katherine's Exhibit A is J.D. Vance, whose announced views on Trump and economics pirouetted just when he felt he needed to be elected.

Also of note:

  • A bad idea. And it's being pushed by my state's outgoing US Senator:

    Translation: she wants American taxpayers to pay for baby-killing. What a ghoul.

  • Another bad idea. And it's being pushed by a "bipartisan" array of CongressCritters: Federal Film Tax Credit Would Push Industry's Labor Costs on All Americans.

    Hollywood has been in decline for years as studios cut spending and shift production overseas. Now the companies and unions that run the town are seeking a bailout from federal taxpayers in the form of a costly “incentive,” and their friends in Congress are happy to oblige.

    Last week, lawmakers released the Motion Picture, Television, and Entertainment Revitalization Act — a gilded name for an open-ended subsidy to the film industry. The bill would create a federal tax credit for movies and television shows produced predominantly in the United States, covering 20 percent of nearly all their labor costs. Bonuses for special conditions could raise a project’s subsidy rate up to 30 percent. One such bonus is for filming in declared disaster areas, which — because of last year’s wildfires — includes all of Los Angeles County until 2030.

    The NR editorialists note the irony of many Democrat pols who usually decry "trickle-down economics" supporting this, where the whole theory is that the tax credits will generate benefits (for, say, Tom Cruise) that will shower down on the nearby plebians (say, Tom Cruise's Ferrari dealer).

    But at least it doesn't kill babies.

  • There are no "controlled substances"; there are only controlled citizens. Thomas Szasz said (something like) that long ago. But as Jacob Sullum notes, it's a problem: Hazy Federal Criteria for Classifying Drugs Invite Arbitrary Bureaucratic Judgments: A GAO Report Notes That the Controlled Substances Act Does Not Define 'Potential for Abuse' or 'Accepted Medical Use'

    Half a century ago, Congress approved the Controlled Substances Act, which established a system for classifying drugs based on their "medical use" and "potential for abuse." But as a recent report from the Government Accountability Office notes, the statute does not clearly define either criterion, opening the door to debatable and changeable regulatory judgments with far-reaching criminal justice implications.

    Jacob details the vagueness and (therefor) inherent arbitrariness this implies. And, of course, it's all fun and games until it's time to start sending people to jail. Bottom line:

    The GAO thinks the FDA should specify "the criteria and process for determining a substance's 'potential for abuse.'" The lack of clarity highlighted by the report is astonishing, given how long Americans have been living with the CSA, which criminalizes a wide range of peaceful conduct and prescribes penalties based on arbitrary bureaucratic distinctions.

  • You could just ignore them and hope for the best. Whatever. Look at Kevin D. Williamson's article as a likely prediction and good advice: How to Think About Impeachment No. 3—and the One After That. (Dispatch gifted link)

    The Democrats are sitting on a clutch of very promising-looking political eggs, but they won’t be hatched until the first Tuesday in November. You never know about chickens, but the widely held consensus is that the Republican majority in the House is fixing to be as dead as the fried ones over at KFC, and more than a few observers are betting on a Senate flip, too.

    It is of some interest that Republican dogs are not barking much about impeachment. Donald Trump’s foundering popularity is such that Republicans rat-paddling away from the sinking ship of his administration evidently have calculated that there is not a lot of cheese to be got from squeaking about the threat of a third impeachment. Rep. Jim Jordan, who is only the second most detestable Republican from Ohio on the political scene, complained last week that Democrats would conduct a campaign of “nonstop weaponized investigations” once in the majority. Coming from a Trump loyalist, that is a little like hearing the ghost of Sonny Barger complaining that a few of the mourners didn’t wear ties to his funeral.

    Mostly, Republicans are not talking much about the possibility of another Trump impeachment, mainly because doing so would perforce remind voters that Donald Trump is still the president of these United States and that they are sycophants groveling along behind in his debased wagon train and making barely a peep as he and his circle loot and murder their way around the globe.

    In case you need reminding why impeachment is richly deserved:

    There are three broad categories of misdeeds to consider, those being personal corruption (the improper enrichment of the Trump family and its allies in matters ranging from the largesse of Russian oligarchs to questionable government contracts awarded to Trump-connected firms), lawlessness (the illegal wars in Venezuela and Iran, the illegal imposition of a new national system of taxation in the form of unauthorized tariffs, ongoing attempts to rule by decree, etc.), and incompetence (Pete Hegseth is always ready for his close-up).

    A new month, and a new round of Dispatch Gifted Links! I hope to choose the rest as wisely as I did this one.

  • Justin Wolfers is right. I want to get that out of the way, because he recently admitted: My Libertarian Friends Were Right. Key paragraphs:

    My libertarian-leaning friends have consistently argued against a powerful federal government in favor of individual freedoms. I had — somewhat naively — never taken their views seriously enough. My friends who worked in government were good people, I reasoned, and surely that’s true more broadly.

    But I’ve had to admit to my libertarian friends that they were right. Concentration of power can be abused. We’re seeing it happen right now.

    And that’s led me to become more small-c conservative. The old conservative idea was that we have rules of the game that have served us well for generations. We should be slow to change them. Our children should be handed the same set of opportunities we had, if not better ones.

    Pun Salad has not always been kind to Wolfers. It's been a mostly unmixed bag. See my (1) cheer and (3) jeers here (cheer), here (jeer), here (jeer), and here (another jeer).

Sep
30
2026

I Was Tempted to Find a Pic of Salma Instead

But I've done that before. So I went with Fritz to illustrate Adam D. Thierer's City Journal article: What Hayek Can Teach Us About AI Safety.

Fears about artificial intelligence have gone mainstream, and an intense panic now grips the minds of the press, policymakers, and the public. A familiar cast of technocratic leaders—Barack Obama, Rahm Emanuel, Kamala Harris, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and even King Charles—have chimed in with calls for some sort of “AI pause” or other steps to give government major new powers to ensure proper “alignment” of AI models, algorithmic applications, and advanced computation.

It’s a good moment to recall some timeless lessons from social thinker Friedrich Hayek. Today’s AI alignment debate contains echoes of the old economic calculation debate and the planner’s mentality that viewed society as a math problem to be solved. Hayek (1899–1992) spent his life demolishing that reasoning, while warning of the “fatal conceit” of elites who thought they could reorder entire economic systems and remake human nature through freedom-crushing, top-down interventions.

Previously, AI safety discussions were hidden from public view, confined to nerdy tech conferences, obscure internet discussion boards, and the plots of sci-fi stories and movies. That all changed following the splashy resignations of some AI lab employees, worried that developers like Anthropic and OpenAI may have lost control of their creations. Over 1,300 AI lab employees also signed a letter calling for “pacing the frontier” of AI development, and the CEOs of many major labs have called for government assistance in slowing the advancement of recursive self-improvement (RSI) or artificial general intelligence (AGI).

The AI debate increasingly features even more apocalyptic overtones and extreme proposals than did debates during the nuclear era. Regulatory ideas include moratoria on AI development potentially enforced by new global regulatory treaties and bureaucracies; mandated “kill switches” that let government take control of AI systems; nationalization of leading labs or “golden share” socialization schemes to give governments ownership stakes in leading firms; “FDA for AI”-like licensing regimes; and more. At the state level, more than 1,800 AI bills have been floated to regulate virtually every facet of computational innovation and algorithmically enabled speech, creating an unprecedented patchwork of technocratic red tape.

I think Adam-channelling-Friedrich is a pretty good combination.

Also of note:

  • It's not as if we don't have other things to worry about. The WaPo editorialists predict When America’s pot of debt will overflow. (WaPo gifted link)

    The 2030s are crucial because, if present trends continue, the United States will begin running out of fiscal space by the end of the decade.

    What does that mean? Think of debt as water inside a pot made of soft clay. The potter is the American workforce, and the government is pouring the water. The national debt is the total accumulation of water in the pot. The amount of room left in the pot is fiscal space.

    Fiscal space is the difference between the government’s current level of debt and the maximum amount of debt it could take on before undermining confidence in its ability to pay it back. The government needs fiscal space so that it can manage events, such as major wars, recessions, pandemics or natural disasters, that might require an unexpected surge in borrowing.

    The editorial is filled with charts that illuminate the dire problem. And as usual with the WaPo most of the commenters are in denial about needing to get spending under control, with a concentration on entitlements.

  • Among the many things we could stop spending money on… Noah Smith has a suggestion sure to anger your local schoolmarms: Stop spending money on smaller classes. Along the way, he makes a good point about Nikole Hannah-Jones' faulty argument about the lousy NYC school she sent her daughter to:

    What can fix our crappy schools? Hannah-Jones blames a lack of funding for low-income predominantly Black schools:

    [N]ationally, schools in predominantly nonwhite districts receive $23 billion less in annual funding than their heavily white counterparts, according to a 2019 analysis by EdBuild. In everything that we measure, these schools have less, even though the economically struggling student bodies they serve need more. And so the test scores and poor academic performance that typify these schools reflect not just the disadvantage of the students but, more essentially, the disadvantage of the schools.

    This is absolutely ridiculous, and represents a very basic math error. Obviously what should matter here is spending per student, not total spending. We spend more on predominantly white districts than on predominantly nonwhite districts because there are a lot more predominantly white districts in America!

    Well, it wouldn't be the first time Hannah-Jones used a dodgy argument to score ideological points.

    Noah's grand conclusion, after a diligent look at the studies showing little effect of class sizes on learning outcomes:

    We should be spending more money on educating our poorest and most disadvantaged students. But that money should be spent less on flooding those schools with ever more teachers of questionable quality, and more on raising pay to attract highly competent people capable of making a big difference in disadvantaged kids’ lives. If we did that, then stories like Nikole Hannah-Jones’ might be more of a rarity in America.

    I'll disagree in part. If the only thing you do is increase teacher salaries, the first-order effect will be nicer cars in the teachers' parking lot, and nothing on learning outcomes. Higher salaries have to be accompanied concurrently with getting rid of the teachers who don't teach well.

  • When you're out of ideas… At the WSJ "Free Expression" newsletter, Matthew Hennessey observes: Democrats Want You Afraid.

    The midterm elections are five weeks away. Most everybody agrees Democrats will have a big night on Nov. 3. But what are they running on? What are they promising to do come January?

    There are no policies underpinning the Democratic grand strategy, no major proposals on the table for discussion and debate. There are only the Four Fears.

    Fear of artificial intelligence. Every Democrat at every level has gotten the memo. The companies racing to develop AI must be slowed or stopped before they kill us all. From Barack Obama to your local town councilman, the mantra is the same. If you don’t elect us it could be your life. Be terrified. Be very terrified.

    Fear of data centers. This is a related fear, though a much more immediate and digestible one than AI itself. The billionaires and oligarchs want your land. They want to hog your electricity and suck up all your water. Oppose this or watch your beautiful town descend into a humming, throbbing hellscape of warehouses and air pollution. If you aren’t afraid, you aren’t paying attention.

    Fear of Donald Trump. He will deport your remaining immigrant neighbors. He will legitimize discrimination against trans children. He will send your sons and daughters to die in a war. He will try to engineer a third term for himself. He is a threat to all you hold dear. Left unspoken this campaign season has been the likelihood of a third impeachment. Perhaps it isn’t necessary to say such things anymore.

    Fear of MAGA. Tie down the patio furniture all ye who love democracy. Jan. 6, 2021, was only a dress rehearsal for what the fascists have planned this time. “We have never prepared for an election sabotage event like we have now,” Ezra Levin of the left-leaning group Indivisible told the Associated Press. Scared yet?

    Certainly, our local (NH) Democrats have been leaning heavily on the third fear. And not really "fear", more like hatred.

  • An impressive list of synonyms. Via Ann Althouse, who points to a WaPo column from Matthew Gwyther: Trump can’t resist a temptation known since the fall of man. And that temptation is…

    That humans have long been aware of the corrosive danger from kowtowing, toadying, sucking up, piling it on thick, apple-polishing and otherwise bootlicking is shown by the extensive array of synonyms and expressions for sycophancy.

    I recently interviewed that repentant sycophant Anthony Scaramucci, who famously lasted 11 days as White House spokesman in 2017. What was interesting about the Mooch’s musings was that he thinks Trump actually despises those who debase themselves before him, because he finds their weakness contemptible. Yet those who speak plainly to Trump, without fawning, are soon discarded.

    Gwyther makes the interesting observation about that "fall of man", from Milton's Paradise Lost, which featured the serpent's flattery of Eve's "Beautie". Maybe Trump could use a snake?

Recently on the book blog:

Sep
29
2026

What a Wonderful World it Would Be

Seen in a Matt Yglesias tweet:

I don't follow Yglesias, but this is via Scott Summer's page of September 2026 links, which has other good stuff too.

Ah, but what is this Effective Altruism, you ask? Check out Bryan Caplan's take on it: The Good, the Bad, and the Buggy.

Effective altruists have been getting a lot of hate lately. But if you ever actually meet a group of effective altruists, even their harshest critics will struggle to maintain their anger. In person, they’re some of the most cheerful, friendly, curious, and smart people you will ever meet. Effective altruists are the opposite of the angry, self-righteous, apathetic, asocial youths who have given their generation a bad name. (And yes, strange as it seems, human beings can be angry, self-righteous, apathetic, and asocial at the same time).

Not only are EAs extraordinarily likeable; they have also made strong arguments that have causally improved actually-existing philanthropy. Mainstream charities mostly run on a combination of wishful thinking and Social Desirability Bias. As a result, they often do little good or are actively counterproductive. EAs, in contrast, closely study the evidence to figure out how to get the most bang per donor buck. This, in turn, has led to large cash infusions for three charities with demonstrably high benefit/cost ratios: deworming, anti-malaria, and Give Directly. While the typical college EA meeting is just a social club, these social clubs have ultimately made philanthropy better, especially by inspiring tech donors.

Reader, can you guess the first word of Bryan's next paragraph?

But despite their high IQs and winning personalities, EAs are sadly short on common sense. Like other humans, they’re prone to groupthink and paranoia. As a result, many have basically lost interest in philanthropy that demonstrably saves many human lives at low cost, and started obsessing about AI risk.

Well, darn. "Obsessing" doesn't sound good. See what you think. I'm still persuadable either way on "AI risk", but I thought that Pinker stuff I posted yesterday made extremely good points.

Also of note:

  • Speaking of AI… I've been looking for an excuse to embed this Flight of the Conchords video:

    Which nicely illustrates James Freeman's query: Did the Associated Press Hurt AI’s Feelings? (WSJ gifted link)

    President Donald Trump wisely told the United Nations last week that the U.S. would “totally reject” any “globalist scheme” to control artificial intelligence. Fortunately he’s also still rejecting a domestic scheme to shield prominent creators of technology tools from liability and competition.

    Jody Godoy reported on Friday for Reuters:

    US Federal Trade Commission Chairman Andrew Ferguson said on Friday he would resist describing AI agents as autonomous actors that “break loose” with “wills and desires of their own,” suggesting the developers who instruct agents would be the ones liable ‌for harm.

    […]

    Believe it or not, the Associated Press is also seeking to affirm reality. An X account for the AP Stylebook posted last week:

    Artificial intelligence systems do not think, feel, want or understand. Avoid language that gives them human characteristics. This is called anthropomorphizing, when we ascribe human traits, emotions or behaviors to non-human things, such as animals or inanimate objects. Instead, explain what a system does, how well it performs, who built it and who could be affected by it.

    Until clear and convincing proof is shown otherwise, I'm with James: "Here in the nonfictional world, people are responsible for their actions."

  • Another scapegoat escapes. At Reason, Daniel Foster debunks: No, Private Equity Isn't Ruining Your Sandwiches, Your Apartment, or Grandma's Nursing Home. His Example One is Jersey Mike's, a sub chain acquired by Blackstone in 2024, to complaints from, well, the usual people who complain about such things. But:

    Jersey Mike's revenue increased by more than 10 percent in the first year after the Blackstone deal, and in July the firm went public, raising $1 billion in the largest U.S. consumer initial public offering of the year. Now the brand is bigger than ever, with hundreds of new locations. In 2026, it broke Chick-fil-A's 11-year run as the top-rated fast-food restaurant in the American Customer Satisfaction Index.

    This is a familiar story. If you listen to anti–private equity outfits like the Private Equity Stakeholder Project or ProPublica or usual-suspect gadflies on the left, private equity is just another mutation of predatory capitalism: "vampires" engaged in "legalized looting" per Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.); "vultures" embodying "corporate greed at its most disgusting" by the lights of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.).

    Critics marshal an impressive breadth of bogeymen to make their case, seizing on private equity's infiltration of everything from hospitals to prisons to for-profit schools, and their reliance on extractive financial gizmos like "leasebacks," "roll-ups," and "dividend recapitalizations" to make billions for the few while zombifying the portfolio companies relied upon by the many.

    What these critics want you to believe is that there is something uniquely bad about private equity, that it's a poisonous form of hypercapitalism. But case studies and a review of the evidence tell a different story. Private equity isn't a panacea, and it isn't without flaws. But from Italian subs to nursing homes to state pensions, it has plenty to offer both capitalists and consumers. Viewed in this context, it's clear that much of the hatred directed at private equity is just a familiar form of statist opposition to free markets.

    As usual with markets, people make mistakes. But generally they are making mistakes with their own money.. Can Liz and Bernie say the same?

  • Speaking of markets, I'm always in the market for people who want to tell me how to think. AEI's Peter J. Wallison gives it a shot: How to Think About Trump and Iran.

    Although a lifelong Republican, I am not a fan of Donald Trump. He continues to shock me with almost everything he says and does—promising $5,000 to every American if the Republicans win the House and Senate, breaking relations with Canada, and threatening to rename New Mexico as New America—only the most recent examples of his nonpresidential behavior. If these were jokes, I’ve lost my sense of humor.

    For those fellow Americans who oppose Trump’s Iran policy, however, I have a simple question: What do you think would happen if Iran were to successfully develop a nuclear weapon? I don’t even have to answer that question. It would be a catastrophe, and Trump is the only president in my lifetime who has faced that question realistically.

    He has recognized that a nuclear-armed Iran would threaten the world, not just its neighbors, and would be completely immune from any effort by the United States or others to change its government or eliminate its threats to the Middle East, Israel, the US, and the world at large. Previous presidents have been aware of this nightmare, and many tried to do something, but they lost their nerve. They “settled.” But they just bought time, figuring that if Iran actually gets a nuclear weapon, it would be someone else’s problem.

    Trump, I think, is trying to do something essential in Iran, which—if successful—would be invaluable for all of us in the future. This of course requires gritting our teeth and remaining patient as he pursues such unworthy personal goals as having his name emblazoned on the Kennedy Center in Washington, enriches himself and his family, and fumbles around with stories about “negotiations.”

    Even given the desirability of the outcome, Wallison admits that Trump has been lousy at explaining things to us, a "failure of leadership."

    Random thought, however: If "New Mexico" gets renamed to "New America", can New England be far behind?

  • But in other areas… Francis Fukuyama thinks Trump’s “Golden Fleet” Is Still Ridiculous.

    Of the many ridiculous, counterproductive, and outright harmful things that Donald Trump has done, his effort to create a “Golden Fleet” of “Trump-class” battleships is far from the worst offense. But it is absolutely typical of the personalistic and processless state into which American national security decision making has fallen in his second term.

    The United States has not commissioned a new battleship since it launched the USS Missouri in 1944. There are good reasons for this: in an age of naval aviation and missiles, battleships become huge floating targets liable to be sunk way before any of their weapons can be put to use. Battleships had already been made obsolete by aircraft carriers during the Second World War, and since then have been used for shore bombardment when facing an enemy like Iraq that didn’t have the means of fighting back. They would be worse than useless in a war with China or even Iran, both of which field huge numbers of ballistic and cruise missiles that could easily strike such big targets.

    Fukuyama says Trump is basing this effort on his watching Victory at Sea, a WWII documentary, at an impressionable age. Unfortunately, this is credible.

Recently on the book blog:

Sep
28
2026

Advice: Give Up the Mental Investments You Made in a Future That Didn't Pan Out

From across the pond, Daniel Hannan is looking askance:

Speaking of sunken expections vis-à-vis China, Jim Geraghty has some: No, the U.S.-China Relationship Is Not the Best It Has Ever Been.

President Trump’s toast to Xi at the state dinner Thursday night:

For Americans, we inherit a legacy of faith from Jerusalem to Rome, the democracy of ancient Athens, the triumphs of Sparta, and the freedom proclaimed in Philadelphia 250 years ago. As the leaders of our two nations, President Xi and I both understand that we represent different systems, but the ties between our people endure and we’ve never gotten along better.

Regarding “legacies of faith,” Christian churches that do not recognize the supremacy of the state are oppressed in China. It is terrific that China released Pastor Ezra Jin earlier this year, but eight of his colleagues from his church remain in prison. The Chinese government has “long restricted the religious freedom of the country’s Catholics, who are permitted to worship only in official churches under the government-run Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association. . . . [Chinese authorities are] arbitrarily detaining, forcibly disappearing, torturing, and subjecting underground Catholic bishops and priests to house arrest.”

Jim details an impressive number of additional data points. Summary:

On just about every conceivable front — arming and assisting U.S. adversaries, espionage, hacking and cyberwarfare, stealing intellectual property, smuggling oil, nuclear testing, detaining American citizens — the regime of the People’s Republic of China headed by Xi Jinping acts against American interests. These regime acts are not innocent misunderstandings or miscommunications. This is a ruthless totalitarian autocratic regime that wants a not-too-distant future where they are universally hailed as the ascending global power and the U.S. is pitied and mocked as a rapidly declining former great power — and, with de facto lackey regimes in Moscow, Tehran, and Pyongyang, calls the shots on the global stage.

Well, that's pretty disgusting. Sorry, Elvis, it's impossible for me to follow your lead here.

Also of note:

  • Gee, I wonder if Kevin D. Williamson is going to cut any slack to … Unstatesmanlike Statesmen.

    Magic 8-Ball says: "Don't count on it."

    If it means anything, then “America First” means Americans first, even Americans as dotty and useless as Joe Biden, a contemptible and grubby little grasper who did not have much of a working brain back when he had something of a working brain. If you are a nationalist in any genuine sense, then your people are your people. But, of course, Trump is not a nationalist in any meaningful sense, for the same reason he isn’t really much of a patriot or a racist or a Christian—Trump is his own god, and he recognizes no loyalty at odds with his interests and no good that is not in accord with his appetites and desires. Trump may say that he cares about “America First,” but naturally he will wait and see what Xi Jinping or Vladimir Putin or some Qatari potentate has to offer to him, too. Trump has on a hundred occasions sold out genuine American interests in the service of his own vanity and greed, and he’ll probably do it a hundred more times before he leaves office, however he leaves office.

    Magic 8-Ball also says: "Sorry, out of Dispatch gifted links this month. Subscribe."

  • The right way to conduct a discussion. As (unsurprisingly) demonstrated by Steven Pinker, who pens An Open Letter to Scott Alexander.

    Background: Scott challenged Steven to a public debate on the usefulness of AI "doomerism". Scott is (fair to say) on the doomer side, Steven thinks that's a no-workie.

    Steven notes his previous thoughts on the more general topic, which he stands by:

    In fact my principal contribution to mass discourse on existential risk is a 31-page chapter called “Existential Risk” in my 2018 book Enlightenment Now. It addressed the criticism that the Scientific Revolution, Enlightenment, and ideal of progress were terrible mistakes because they will lead to human extinction by (among other things) runaway AI. My counterargument said nothing about maleness, polyamory, paranoia, or other irrelevancies. It did criticise doomer scenarios like the paperclipalypse, the AI that would cure cancer by conscripting all humans as guinea pigs in lethal experiments, the AI that would solve climate change by exterminating humanity, the AIs that would launch a global holocaust because humans were inconvenient, or the AIs that would grow exponentially until they boiled the oceans away with their waste heat or froze the planet with their spaceborne solar collectors. I argued that these scenarios had one or more of the following flaws:

    1. They had an underdeveloped conception of intelligence which treated it as a quantity of power which may be extrapolated from animals to dull humans to smart humans to AI to Artificial Superintelligence, the latter consisting of perfect omniscience. (This was the focus of my later exchange with Scott Aaronson.) I argued that any intelligent system is a mechanism which is good at solving some problems but not others, and which is inherently limited by knowledge about the world attainable only by observation and experimentation.
    2. They conflated intelligence with motivation, particularly self-preservation and dominance. I argued that these motives happened to come bundled with intelligence in Homo sapiens because we are products of natural selection, but they are not inherent to intelligent systems that are engineered.
    3. They assumed that an artificially intelligent system would monomaniacally pursue a single goal, heedless of side effects. I argued that trading off multiple competing goals is the essence of intelligence, so no genuine AI would wreak the ridiculous havoc imagined in the doomer scenarios.
    4. They assumed that human engineers would grant these systems unlimited and irreversible control over the earth’s physical infrastructure, amounting to omnipotence over every atom on the planet.

    Now, these arguments may be wrong, but they are far from trash talk. Similar ones have recently been made by many informed commentators, including Blaise Agüera y Arcas, Jerry Kaplan, Gary Marcus, Melanie Mitchell, Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor, and Andrew Ng. A 2025 Rand Corporation modelling analysis steel-manned the AI-extinction hypothesis by granting the assumption that AI had the objective to wipe out humanity, and concluded that there is “no describable scenario in which AI is conclusively an extinction threat to humanity.”

    This is far better than calling the people you disagree with a bunch of poopyheads.

Recently on the movie blog:

Sep
27
2026

Coming Soon: DNA Ethnicity Testing for Authors

Bret Stephens, the token sensible columnist at the NYT, presents The Literary World’s D.E.I. Checklist. (NYT gifted link)

Last week, the longlists for the National Book Awards were announced. Among the 20 authors in the fiction and nonfiction categories, nearly all are straight white males. Most are also on the political right, some even on the far right. Remarkably, mainstream media outlets haven’t reported this, perhaps because they don’t think it’s noteworthy. It’s as if we were living in 1956 rather than 2026.

If you’re scratching your head at this “news,” well, it’s because I made it up. Or rather, I inverted the particulars about the authors’ identities and their political views to make a point: If today, as a reader, you recoil at the thought of a time in which minorities were systematically marginalized when it came to the literary world’s public honors (and so much else), shouldn’t you also recoil now that the tables have been almost completely turned? And if you object to the right’s efforts to politicize the arts, won’t you also object when the efforts come from the left?

For a sense of what I mean, let’s walk through the National Book Foundation’s announcement of the longlist for fiction, 10 books selected out of 451 titles submitted by publishers.

Hannah Lillith Assadi’s novel, “Paradiso 17,” is “inspired by the life of her late Palestinian father.” Kimberly Blaeser, a poet, is the “founding director of Indigenous Nations Poets.” Edwidge Danticat is a Haitian American writer whose novel “Dèy” reflects on “the many forms of mourning experienced through immigration, gentrification and diasporic identity.” Julián Delgado Lopera’s novel “Pretend You’re Dead and I Carry You,” set in 1990s Bogotá, “explores Colombia’s queer underground community.” Louise Erdrich, the highly acclaimed author of “Python’s Kiss,” is identified in her N.B.F. biography as “a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa.” Marlon James’s novel “The Disappearers” is a “queer epic” set in Kingston, Jamaica. Valeria Luiselli is a writer born in Mexico whose “Beginning Middle End” spans “continents, languages and four generations.” Kenan Orhan is a Turkish American writer; his first novel, “The Renovation,” is a story about a family migrating from Istanbul to Italy. Morgan Thomas’s book “Mad Eden” is about “a trans health care worker” who has been diagnosed with autism.

Bret has more examples of what passes for "diversity, equity, and inclusion" in the rooms where nominations and awards are bestowed in the book game. If you're a heterosexual white guy looking to break in as an author, you'd be well advised to have a solid backup plan.

Also of note:

  • The old normal wasn't great, but… At Reason, Jacob Sullum describes How Murdering Suspected Drug Smugglers Became the New Normal .

    President Donald Trump was excited about a new military operation. "Earlier this morning," he announced on the afternoon of September 2, 2025, "U.S. Military Forces conducted a kinetic strike against positively identified Tren de Aragua Narcoterrorists in the SOUTHCOM area of responsibility." That attack should "serve as notice to anybody even thinking about bringing drugs into the United States of America," he said. "BEWARE! Thank you for your attention to this matter!!!!!!!!!!!"

    Those 11 exclamation points might have seemed like overkill. But Trump was right that Americans should have been paying attention. His Truth Social post, which included a 29-second video clip showing a speedboat in the Caribbean Sea exploded by a missile, marked a radical and alarming shift in U.S. drug policy.

    In case you're wondering what the current body count is, Jacob provides a link to the current scoreboard maintained by the NYT. As I type: 70 strikes, 234 people killed. Jacob comments further:

    With a few exceptions, we do not know who those people were, let alone what evidence the government might have had to implicate them in drug trafficking. But Trump assures us they were all "narcoterrorists" who richly deserved their fate, even though they would not have faced the death penalty under U.S. law and, judging from what happened to drug smugglers arrested around the same time, probably would not have been prosecuted at all if they had been lucky enough to be caught by the Coast Guard.

    I assume the dirtbag percentage among those 234 individuals was high. Still, it's not something we should be proud of.

  • Deirdre McCloskey has market advice. Unfortunately, not of the "hot stock tip" variety, just a general suggestion: Let It Work. Despite the massive numbers of nay-sayers and quibblers decrying "market failures" and saying nasty things about "market fundamentalists"…

    Well, why do I, after 84 years on this planet (on September 11, thanks), most of it spent thinking about the evidence on how economies work, disagree with the numerous non-believers?

    For one thing, as a resident of an economy, I live daily inside a massive experiment proving that it does work pretty much as supply and demand says. So do you live inside it. São Paulo is an enormous city. It exhausts me to drive across it. Yet somehow every day when you go to get a morning coffee, there it is. When you want to buy a new shirt, there it is. If you had the misfortune to live in a country that so strongly denies market forces that it makes them illegal, such as North Korea or the old Soviet Union, this would not be the case. The Soviets made endless jokes about it not being the case.

    For another, as an economic historian, I know, and can show you massive evidence, that liberated people become amazingly creative and then make themselves and everyone else amazingly rich. It has happened from 1776 to the present, I’ve told you frequently, to the extent of 25 thousand percent, for the first time in history. In a century or so, if the economists and politicians don’t intervene, everyone will be twice as rich as the average Swiss person now. I mean Africa. I mean everywhere.

    For another, as an economist of a mathematical and philosophical bent, I have a vision of the economy as an enormous spontaneous order, like the Portuguese language or the history of art or even the pattern of your own sweet life.

    It’s lovely. Let it work.

    I hope I'm as sharp as Deirdre if and when I make it to 84.

  • Well, it's not as if he had any choice in the matter. Jerry Coyne takes on another believer in free will: Rob Henderson completely messes up when discussing free will.

    You can read Henderson's messed up article in his newsletter here: Apparently Criminals Don’t Have Free Will, But Elites Do. It was originally published at the WSJ's "Free Expression" newsletter back in May, and I blogged about it (and partially disagreed with it) back then.

    What's Jerry's gripe? Well, the usual, and it's kind of rough:

    Apparently one of Henderson’s “luxury beliefs” is belief in free will, as you can tell from the title of his Substack post below. But his thesis is not only wrong, but a dog’s breakfast of a meal. For one thing, he never defines free will. And he makes a ton of statements about it that are simply full of holes. I could write a substantive essay about how Henderson’s short piece is misguided, but it doesn’t deserve that. So what I’ll do is put his statements in bold, indented type, and put my responses in plain text flush left. Truly, I don’t understand why this guy doesn’t understand.

    Let me start by saying that, as always, I conceive of free will as “contracausal” or “I could have done otherwise” free will, explained as the ability of a person in a given situation, with all the molecules of the universe poised at the moment of decision/action, to have done more than one thing. It does appear that Henderson has that notion, too, but he doesn’t say so.

    Well, let's assume he didn't think he needed to. Jerry conflates two different things, "decision" and "action", and places them in the same "moment". But clearly the "decision" precedes the "action." Maybe by milliseconds, maybe longer. In some cases, the decision process can take far longer than a "moment".

    Jerry's right that at the "action" moment, it's too late to change. By definition it happened just then, at t=0.

    But the "decision"? Nah. And that's where "free will" comes in.

    No, I don't know how it works, at the level of synapses and neurochemistry. But I think it does.

Recently on the book blog:


Last Modified 2026-09-28 7:20 AM EDT
Sep
26
2026

I'm Getting a Breaking Bad Vibe Here

What could go wrong? Joe Lancaster at Reason: Trump reportedly rejected building codes for his White House ballroom. You've probably already heard about the spats between Trump and his original ballroom architect, James C. McCrery, II, causing McCrery to withdraw from the project. But now:

"McCrery informed the White House that Trump's ballroom design did not meet fire safety codes, which require the majority of guests to be able to quickly exit through the main entrance during an emergency," per the Post. "The architect also pointed out that alternative emergency exit routes out of the building were insufficient, and that there was little in the design to prevent a kitchen fire from rapidly spreading into the event space on the floor above."

Trump allegedly had a troubling response: "The president countered that no building codes apply to White House construction," the Post continued. He also reportedly stated, "I am the code."

Um.

Also noticing that quote was Nellie Bowles in this week's TGIF column.

→ Quotes of the week: “I am the code.” That’s Trumpo telling the (now former) White House ballroom architect to stop worrying so much about building safety codes. Note to self: Do not ever enter the White House ballroom. If you flush a toilet in there, the chandelier is going to crash down.

Explanation of my headline above: I've been re-watching Vince Gilligan's Breaking Bad series on Netflix. And, as luck would have it, recently went through Season 4, Episode 6, which contains Walter White's chilling response to wife Skyler's concerns:

Skyler White: Walt, please, let's both of us stop trying to justify this whole thing and admit you're in danger!

Walter White: Who are you talking to right now? Who is it you think you see? Do you know how much I make a year? I mean, even if I told you, you wouldn't believe it. Do you know what would happen if I suddenly decided to stop going into work? A business big enough that it could be listed on the NASDAQ goes belly up. Disappears! It ceases to exist without me. No, you clearly don't know who you're talking to, so let me clue you in. I am not in danger, Skyler. I am the danger. A guy opens his door and gets shot, and you think that of me? No. I am the one who knocks!

So I'm wondering if Trump has been watching Breaking Bad reruns too. And drawing the wrong lessons.

Also of note:

  • But we ain't talking chump change. Kevin D. Williamson doesn't mince words: Farmers Are Chumps. (Dispatch gifted link)

    American farmers rely on imports for many of their most critical inputs—fertilizer, chemicals, machinery—and rely on exports to large overseas markets such as China for a big part of their profits, and, as such, conducting a series of trade wars fought with tariffs is just about the worst possible economic policy for them as a group. Naturally, American farmers and farming communities keep voting roughly two-to-one for trade wars—a vote for Donald Trump, the guy who insists that “trade wars are good and easy to win,” is a vote for trade wars.

    Farmers voted for trade wars, and trade wars they got.

    And—surprise!—agriculture is in something like a full-blown recession, with farm incomes projected to decline by a whopping 5.5 percent in real terms this year. Farm bankruptcies are up 46 percent since 2024, and some 15,000 farming operations went dark last year. This is an entirely predictable outcome of the 2024 presidential election.

    In much the same way that Americans lately have been promised that gasoline and diesel prices are just on the verge of going back down—and in much the same way that the Republican standard-bearer has been three weeks away from a healthcare plan for 12 years now and running—Trump keeps saying that the Chinese have committed to buying $x billion worth of this or that commodity from U.S. farmers, and—surprise!—those commitments continue to go unrealized, with China being at the moment many, many billions of dollars behind on promised orders from U.S. farmers. “We like to hear commitments from Chinese buyers, but we also need to see beans on boats headed west,” says a board member of the American Soybean Association. It is almost as though one cannot quite trust in the good intentions of an authoritarian police state run by Communist Party oligarchs or in the sound judgment of a serially bankrupt former game show host who once tried to overthrow the U.S. government. Which raises the question:

    Why are American farmers such a bunch of chumps? 

    KDW goes on to cite another Pun Salad fave, Bryan Caplan, and describes his depressing, and probably accurate, thesis.

    … and that's my last gifted Dispatch link for September. Reader, don't let it go to waste!

  • There are no winners in a word war. David Skinner reviews the latest battleground: A Word War Shapes American English. (WSJ gifted link)

    The best-known American dictionary is now a little bigger. Merriam-Webster announced last week it had added another 1,400 words and definitions to its online lexicon.

    Such lists are nothing if not fun. Who doesn’t smile at “California sober” (“informal . . . using only marijuana while abstaining from alcohol and other drugs”) being added to the lexicographical roll? Merriam-Webster’s entry for “yacht rock” includes a quotation mentioning Toto, Steely Dan and others. A dictionary is no Princeton eating club, but it’s still amusing to see such phrases standing in line, then finally let in.

    New additions “looksmaxxing,” “promposal” and “trash panda” are charismatic megafauna of the English word-hoard. Subtle changes in function and sense among more-familiar words receive less notice. But the emphasis on novelty and laughs in these lists evokes a longstanding linguistic debate between the party of the past and the party of the present, between purists and impurists.

    I'm a little surprised to see "bao" as a new word. I had my first bao from a street vendor in San Francisco over fifty years ago. About time M-W caught up with me.


Last Modified 2026-09-28 7:21 AM EDT