Pun Salad

Hey, our state made the front page of the WSJ yesterday, where the question was asked: How Free Is New Hampshire? A Fight Over Doughnuts Is About to Decide.

The shop in question is Leavitt's Country Bakery, and it's making me hungry just typing about it. And it is unfortunately far away from Pun Salad Manor, about a 90-minute drive. A further fun fact that I don't think the WSJ story points out: the painting doesn't even face the highway (NH-16) that goes by.

We wrote about this last year. And observed at the time:

It's easy for Granite Staters to be saddened by the antics of the Conway Roadside Art Police (CRAP). So we'll have to take some comfort from our rankings from the just-released Fraser Institute's Economic Freedom of North America 2024.

It's bad news for Canada, though. Alberta is the freest Canadian province, about as free as Tennessee. British Columbia has Massachusetts-level freedom. And all th other provinces are down there in the California/New York Gulag.

And Mexico… ay caramba, don't even think about it.

Also of note:

• 

  Kash Patel, you're FIREd. Specifically: raked over the coals by Ronald K. L. Collins at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, who calls Trump's choice for FBI Director a clear and present danger to freedom of the press. Collins provides a lot of quotes, including this from a year-old article in the Hill: Bannon, Patel say Trump ‘dead serious’ about revenge on media: ‘We’re going to come after you’. Eek!

  Steve Bannon and Kash Patel claimed that former President Trump is “dead serious” about exacting revenge on his political enemies if he wins a second term as president, and they warned members of the media to take the threats seriously, saying Tuesday, “We’re going to come after you.”

  “We will go out and find the conspirators — not just in government, but in the media,” Patel told Bannon. “Yes, we’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections.”

  “We’re going to come after you. Whether it’s criminally or civilly, we’ll figure that out. But yeah, we’re putting you all on notice, and Steve, this is why they hate us. This is why we’re tyrannical. This is why we’re dictators,” Patel said, suggesting those were terms used sometimes to describe them. “Because we’re actually going to use the Constitution to prosecute them for crimes they said we have always been guilty of but never have.”

  I'm sure there are going to be questions about that in his confirmation hearings. What's he going to say? "Just kidding"?

  Patel has also written some books, including The Plot Against the King, Amazon link at your right, and there's a multi-page sample available there. I'd consider it disqualifying all by itself, because it's awful, but that's just me.

• If you, like me, are looking for amusement. My favorite funny guy, Jeff Maurer, writes at the Dispatch: What’s Funny About a Second Trump Term? Gotta be something, right?

  With Donald Trump set to return to the White House in a few short weeks, journalists are already thinking out loud about how they’ll cover his second term. These reflections amount to a tacit admission that the methods of covering Trump’s first term can’t be repeated, even if professionalism keeps journalists from using phrases like “we screwed the pooch sideways” or “we dumped our credibility in a port-a-potty and then lit that port-a-potty on fire.” To be fair, it’s hard to know how to cover Trump, since he can’t seem to put on his socks in the morning without doing 10 to 12 things that would doom any other administration.

  But journalists aren’t the only ones in need of introspection. My profession, comedy, should also be thinking about how we’re going to approach the next four years. With a few notable exceptions, we didn’t exactly cover ourselves in glory in Trump’s first term. I personally wrote a few bits that I now consider comedy abominations that should be locked away in a dank cellar. The sanctimonious outrage and focus on day-to-day shenanigans that characterized so much comedy during Trump’s first term arguably didn’t work very well, and it definitely won’t work this time around.

  Believe it or not, there was a time when Trump material felt fresh and exciting. I remember working on the “Drumpf” piece for Last Week Tonight with John Oliver in early 2016, which—according to always-accurate internet chatter—“DISMANTLED” and “DESTROYED” the soon-to-be Republican nominee. There was a sense that we were working on something big and important. I now know that feeling was: 1) Hilariously wrong, and 2) Poisonous for comedy. Humor shouldn’t be self-righteous; no one walks out of a stand-up set and says, “I really liked the comic who scolded us!” The strangeness of the moment led comics at every level to imagine that we served some vital social function. But that sense was mostly overblown—if democracy could only be saved by the witticisms that I flung at six alcoholics at McZany’s Topless Joke Bunker, then democracy probably wasn’t worth saving in the first place.

  I think it's fair to say Jeff provides no recipes, but he does dust off a John Mulaney gag from one of his Netflix specials that worked pretty well.

• A myth is as good as a mile. I know I've said that before, what can I say, I always thought it was funny. Noah Smith has his eye on six, count 'em: "Paycheck-to-paycheck" and five other popular myths.

  Senator Bernie Sanders is the latest guy to utter "60% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck", (immediately following "This is what Oligarchy looks like"). and that pushed Smith over the edge:

  The claim that “60% of Americans live paycheck-to-paycheck” comes from a survey by the fintech company LendingClub. The company refuses to release its survey methodology, but we can get a general idea from its website, which says: “For those Americans, [living paycheck to paycheck] means that they need their next paycheck to cover their monthly financial outflows.” So what LendingClub is probably claiming is that around 60% of Americans don’t have enough cash in their bank accounts to live off of for one month.

  But LendingClub’s survey is probably just flat-out wrong about this. The Federal Reserve does a very careful annual survey called the Survey of Household Economics and Decisionmaking, or SHED.1 This survey asks whether people have a “rainy-day fund” sufficient to cover at least three months of expenses. And it pretty consistently finds that over half of Americans do have such a fund.

  Smith gives a sneak preview of those other five myths:

  • “Exercise doesn’t make you lose weight”

  • “Pay and productivity have diverged”

  • “America’s education system is lagging the rest of the world”

  • “Japan doesn’t allow immigration”

  • “America spends more on defense than the next ten countries combined”

  … unfortunately his debunking of them is behind his substack paywall. We'll have to imagine.

• Big if true. Power Line's Steven Hayward wonders Are Liberals Raising the White Flag on Immigration? Taking center stage is this tweet:

  Holy. Shit.
  
  UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer just admitted that Western leaders have been running an “open borders experiment”…
  
  "This happened by design, not accident. Immigration policies were reformed deliberately. It has been a failure. They pretended it wasn’t happening.” pic.twitter.com/vHVibQnG38

  — Geiger Capital (@Geiger_Capital) November 29, 2024

  Interesting because I just read The Great Experiment by Yascha Mounk, which I liked quite a bit (My report is here.) But right from the start, Mounk strenuously denied exactly the claim PM Starmer is making.

  So someone's either lying or using language in an unconventional manner. I've e-mailed Mounk requesting clarification.

• No white flag raised here. Christopher Freiman writes probably the most provocative abolition proposal in Reason's "Abolish Everything" issue: Abolish Borders.

  You've probably moved across state lines at some point in your life. Maybe it was to attend college or take a higher-paying job. Maybe you wanted to live closer to friends and family after having kids or to join a new religious or political community. It could even be as simple as deciding to move from Dallas to Philadelphia because you prefer attending the home games of a successful football team.

  No right-minded person would have the government interfere with any of this. If a business offers you a job and you accept, that's between you and the business—not you, the business, and the state. The same goes for buying a house from a willing seller or joining a welcoming religious congregation. To borrow from Robert Nozick, these are "capitalist acts between consenting adults." Granted, these capitalist acts took place across state borders, but so what? The rights to offer and take jobs, buy and sell property, and assemble freely don't depend on your location relative to a government-drawn line.

  If government-drawn lines within your country don't possess some sort of moral magic that voids your rights, why would government-drawn lines between countries?

  Think before you answer, statist!

Our Amazon Product/Eye Candy du Jour features a quote President Dotard liked to deploy here and there. Little did we know…

Oh, heck: I knew. And I bet you did too.

Jeff Maurer turns his substack over to the still-President, who expands on his pardon announcement: Hey: You Can't DOUBLE Destroy Your Legacy!.

We still have 47 days to go in Biden's reign, and who knows what lies [are] ahead.

In a more serious and insightful take, Nate Silver observes: The expert class is failing, and so is Biden’s presidency. Here he concentrates his fire on the "expert class of academics, journalists and like-minded types" that he dubs the "Village". (Not to be confused with the Village People.)

Glenn Reynolds reacts to Silver's article, saying: Welcome to the Party, Pal (cont'd). "Cont'd" because the Blogfather has been pointing to the decline of experts for years. He quotes extensively from a 2017 column he wrote for USA Today on The Suicide of Expertise. The intervening years have only buttressed his point.

"Indeed."

Also of note:

• Why don't we just send them some more solar panels? Bjørn Lomborg points out at the WSJ: Climate-Change Colonialism Keeps Poor Countries Impoverished.

  At the latest United Nations climate summit, developing nations slammed rich countries’ pledge to spend $300 billion annually on climate reparations as “crumbs.” The reality is much worse. Wealthy nations likely won’t conjure up $300 billion in new spending. Europe has been roiled by protests against radical climate policies and the 2024 U.S. election was an indictment of, among other things, aggressive climate regulations. Instead, wealthy nations will do what they’ve done before: raid development funds to the detriment of the people they claim to help.

  Members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development currently spend $223.7 billion a year trying to do good in poor countries through bilateral and multilateral aid and development spending. It is politically much easier for politicians intent on green spending to shift this money to climate purposes than try to get voters to go along with fresh outlays. Rich nations have diverted much of this funding to climate-change initiatives. OECD members spent one-third of their direct development aid on climate in fiscal 2021-22, the most recent year for which data are available. Development banks have twisted their purpose even further: The World Bank last year sent 44% of its lending to climate causes, the African Development Bank 55% and the European Investment Bank 60%.

  This charade needs to stop. As part of President-elect Trump’s reforms to wasteful government, he should return development aid to policies that make a real difference.

  Lomborg notes that poor countries need (among other things) cheap and reliable sources of energy, which means, at least in this day and age, fossil fuels.

• 

  It's getting difficult to tell 'em apart, but… David Harsanyi notes a significant difference between the two ends of the political horseshoe: The Left’s Conspiracy Politics Far More Successful than Right's.

  The Democratic Party’s closing argument for the 2024 campaign season had little to do with policy or good governance. Rather, it was a stark warning about semi-fascists led by a modern-day Hitler coming to strip minorities of rights, execute journalists, send people to camps, erect a real-life Handmaid’s Tale, and initiate a Christian theocracy. Scary stuff. Communicating through “dog whistles” and propped up by “dark money,” these Fifth Columnists had even cataloged their devious plans in a scary-sounding book called “Project 2025.”

  Over the past decades, the American Left and its institutions have ratcheted up political paranoia to the extent that its policy prescriptions — even what it views as our most pressing societal problems — are often tethered to groundless or sensationalized anxieties, myths, revisionist histories, pseudoscientific alarmism, and outright lies. For modern Democrats, every political loss, no matter how inconsequential, is a chilling threat to “democracy.” H. L. Mencken famously quipped, “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.” From the Russia collusion conspiracy to Jim Crow 2.0 to climate change, on the left, it’s hysteria and apocalypticism all the way down.

  Harsanyi has a new book covering lefty conspiracism at length, and it looks pretty good. Amazon link at your right.

• The language continues to devolve. Lloyd Billingsley notes another milestone: Not Transgender Women.

  Actual women such as Riley Gaines, Paige Spiranac, J. K. Rowling, and the female Israeli soldiers Steve helpfully displays each week, just got the news from the New York Times that they should be known as “non-transgender women.” This drew flak from tennis great Martina Navratilova, British Olympian Sharron Davies, and Rep. Nancy Mace, among others. The dynamics going on here will be of interest to all people.

  NYT reporter [sic] has surrendered to to the Dictatorship of the Subjunctive Mood, institutionalized and enforced unreality. Under DSM a person can proclaim themselves to be anything, and everybody must follow along or stand accused of “transphobia,” “misgendering” and such. As Mace tweeted, “what bs,” but there’s more to it.

  Billingsley references Orwell's classic essay "Politics and the English Language", but uses a different quote than the one we keep yammering about here. Check it out.

• Another relic of America's flirtation with fascism. And it was unaccountably omitted from Reason's "Abolish Everything" issue. Veronique de Rugy says we should Abolish the Securities and Exchange Commission.

  The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) was created as an independent agency in 1934. It's been called the mother-of-all-securities regulator. This agency is remarkably good at killing trees to produce hundreds of millions of paper reports for shareholders and at employing bureaucrats who interfere in U.S. financial markets. p>It is not, however, very good at preventing the corporate fraud that it was created to stop.

  Despite its enormous annual budget of $2.5 billion, 4,800 employees, and vast regulatory powers, the SEC has failed to detect major frauds like Bernie Madoff's Ponzi scheme and Enron's accounting deceptions. It's not for lack of being warned. For instance, Madoff whistleblower Harry Markopolos testified that the SEC ignored his exhortations for years, focusing instead on smaller fry. In fact, the SEC has been accused of disproportionately targeting smaller retail investors while being lenient with large institutions.

  Hope Elon and Vivek are reading the Reason website.

Recently on the book blog:

Take it away, Nate:

A selfish and senile old man.

— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) December 2, 2024

Robby Soave has it as the lead story on yesterday's Reason News Roundup: Joe Pardons Hunter.

Nate Silver's tweet is also available at Soave's article, as are a number of other responses.

Schadenfreude is such a useful word, but it doesn't apply here. Is there a German word that expresses the concept of "a sick pleasure in witnessing partisan hacks demonstrating their obvious sycophancy"? Ann Alrhouse scratches that itch by embedding a tightly edited 9-minute montage of lavishing praise on Joe Biden for not pardoning his son.. And so will I:

One of the best supercuts ever.

President Biden won't pardon Hunter because Joe Biden is a man of great character! 🤣😂pic.twitter.com/lM8aTRGrq5

— MAZE (@mazemoore) December 2, 2024

How many apologies are due from these toadies? How many will we actually get?

Jim Geraghty is appropriately, and unmercifully, honest: The Biden Crime Family Gets Away with It.

That last quote is from John Harwood, once a "journalist" covering the White House for CNN during the Biden Administration.

But just a reminder from Charles C.W. Cooke: This Is Who Joe Biden Has Always Been.

Don't hold back, Charlie. Tell us how you really feel.

Also of note:

• America doesn't do aristocracy well. Kevin D. Williamson opines on The Aristocrats.

  If there’s a word for the guy with the hook who yanks vaudeville performers off the stage after they’ve overstayed their welcome, I’m the premature version of that. Too eager. When Barack Obama wrested the Democratic nomination from Hillary Rodham Clinton in 2008, I wrote that I was grateful at least that we wouldn’t have to write about the Clintons anymore. Now, I worry they’ll try to run Chelsea next time around. When Donald Trump announced his 2016 campaign, I wrote a piece headlined “Witless Ape Rides Escalator,” and when he was dragged out of office in 2021, I capped off—or so I thought!—my Trump commentary with “Witless Ape Rides Helicopter.” But like whatever iteration of the “Donkey Kong” franchise we’re on now, some simian specimens from the 1980s don’t know when to go extinct. I’ll probably end my professional days writing about the ghastly little spawn he named after the imaginary friend he invented to lie to the New York Post about his sex life.

  But the one that might hurt the most: I really thought we were done with the Kennedys.

  But, no. The Kennedys, like the Annenbergs—another family of jumped-up gangsters who spent the 20^th century playing aristocrats—have become fully institutionalized, with Trump having selected nanny-molesting junkie criminal weirdo Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—that great bolus of messianic pretension expelled by Millbrook into the world of dopey left-wing activism—to head up the Department of Health and Human Services. He’s a cretin in every way that matters.

  I assume the article is paywalled, so consider this a teaser advertisement to get you to subscribe to the Dispatch.

• It has a long-standing tradition of existence, and also of killing people. Another fat target deserving the death penalty in Reason's "Abolish Everything" issue: Abolish the FDA. The verdict is handed down by Jeffrey A. Singer:

  It takes 10–15 years and hundreds of millions of dollars for a pharmaceutical company to navigate the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulatory process and bring a new drug to market. Many seriously ill people die waiting for the FDA to approve drugs that regulators in other advanced countries have already approved, a phenomenon called "drug lag." It is impossible to imagine how many drug remedies remain undiscovered and how many people needlessly suffer because pharmaceutical companies must divert excessive research and development dollars to the drug approval process, a phenomenon called "drug loss."

  This is not a new stance for Reason (or reasonable people generally). Back in 2021, the sainted Katherine Mangu-Ward also advocated that we Abolish the FDA. Gee, what was going on back then? Oh, right:

  Last year, hashtag activists were ready to #AbolishICE, in part over the deaths of about 20 immigrants in custody in 2020. Protesters called on the government to "defund the police" over more than 1,000 killings by law enforcement during the same period. Those deaths are tragic, and many could have been prevented with better policy. But they pale in comparison to the blood on the hands of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) over the last 12 months.

  Faced with the challenge of COVID-19, the FDA screwed up on nearly every level. When the agency did do something right, it was almost always by making exceptions to its normal policies and procedures.

  […]

  The FDA screwed up in prohibiting researchers from testing affected populations in the early days of 2020, when the virus might have been better contained upon arrival in the United States. It screwed up in refusing to lift requirements for mask manufacturers and by declining to allow good substitutes for masks in short supply. It screwed up by collaborating with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to protect a monopoly on testing tools that ended in a disastrous shortage. FDA staffers tasked with approving both treatments and vaccines screwed up by delaying meetings and taking days off as Americans were dying in unprecedented numbers of a disease for which the agency had potential solutions. At press time, the AstraZeneca vaccine, which was widely available in many other nations, remained unapproved in the U.S., for reasons that are opaque to Americans desperate to resume normal lives.

  Maybe Trump and Junior could get Kevin D. Williamson to crack a smile if they managed to take Reason's advice.

Dave Barry issued a NOBEL PRIZE ALERT for the Earworm Eraser:

From the (apologies in advance) NPR story: All I want for Christmas is ... help getting this song out of my head.

And, yes, I really did have Linda Ronstadt's "Dreams Of The San Joaquin" stuck in my head for days after it came up on the iPod. (I accept no responsibility if you click on that link and get earwormed.)

Also of note:

• Betteridge's law of headlines seems not to apply. Steven Hayward wonders: Did Biden Make His Anti-Semitism Official? Because our Dotard-in-Chief was photographed…

  … emerging from a Nantucket bookstore holding in plain sight the book he purchased: Rashid Khalidi’s The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonial Conquest and Resistance, 1917-2017. Khalidi is a former spokesperson for the PLO, defender of Hamas terrorism, and a vicious anti-Semite, full stop. He is also an emeritus professor of Middle East studies at Columbia University, naturally.

  As I mentioned recently over on the book blog, I spotted Khalidi's book at the Portsmouth (NH) Public Library. According to the library's online catalog, it's also available at Portsmouth High School's library. Useful for any kiddos who want to apply to Columbia and swing with the serious Hamas cheerleaders.

  But I doubt that Biden reads books. This purchase was mere signalling of hostility to Israel.

  Last year Issues & Insights wondered: Does Anybody Know What Books Biden Reads? Or If He Reads? The media, after years of wondering what tomes were on presidential bedside tables, went strangely silent when Joe got in.

• And as my rear-view mirror warns me, it may be closer than it appears. Kevin D. Williamson admits a mistake: I Thought Happiness Was ‘Idiocracy’ in the Rear-View Mirror.

  I owe Mike Judge an apology.

  When the brilliant satirist behind Beavis and Butt-Head and Office Space came out with his 2006 masterpiece Idiocracy, I enjoyed the film but was critical of it. I thought it was too cynical, too cruel, that it took too low a view of human beings in general and of U.S.A.-American-type human beings in particular.

  Eighteen years later, the Trump administration is plumbing the world of professional wrestling for the next secretary of education.

  So, to the Prophet Mike Judge (peace be upon him), to President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Camacho, to Frito Pendejo, to Beef Supreme and all the rest of the Idiocracy gang, all I can think to say is … Idiocracy was still wrong, damn it, just not in the direction I thought it was. Incredible as the fact may be: Mike Judge took far too generous a view of boobus Americanus.

  It’s like we jumped off the ledge, landed in the world of Idiocracy, and then started digging until we were 20,000 leagues underneath whatever muck it is that is morally and intellectually beneath Idiocracy.

  As an American, I mourn this. As a journalist, well, it’s awesome. I have a vision of the 2028 presidential election, and it is going to be a hoot.

  If I were (somehow) elected to Congress, my first official duty would be to author a bill changing the National Anthem to The Who's "Won't Get Fooled Again".

• Whew, that's a relief, kemo sabe. Do you lie awake nights, tortured by the question Am I on Indigenous land? Fortunately, Noah Smith provides an answer: No, you are not on Indigenous land.

  The United States, like all nations, was created through territorial conquest. Most of its current territory was occupied or frequented by human beings before the U.S. came; the U.S. used force to either displace, subjugate, or kill all of those people. To the extent that land “ownership” existed under the previous inhabitants, the land of the U.S. is stolen land.

  This was also true before the U.S. arrived. The forcible theft of the land upon which the U.S. now exists was not the first such theft; the people who lived there before conquered, displaced, or killed someone else in order to take the land. The land has been stolen and re-stolen again and again. If you somehow destroyed the United States, expelled its current inhabitants, and gave ownership of the land to the last recorded tribe that had occupied it before, you would not be returning it to its original occupants; you would simply be handing it to the next-most-recent conquerors.

  If you go back far enough in time, of course, at some point this is no longer true. Humanity didn’t always exist; therefore for every piece of land, there was a first human to lay eyes on it, and a first human to say “This land is mine.” But by what right did this first human claim exclusive ownership of this land? Why does being the first person to see a natural object make you the rightful owner of that object? And why does being the first human to set foot on a piece of land give your blood descendants the right to dispose of that land as they see fit in perpetuity, and to exclude any and all others from that land? What about all the peoples of the world who were never lucky enough to be the first to lay eyes on any plot of dirt? Are they simply to be dispossessed forever?

  Smith's article is long, funny in spots, thoughtful in others. Glad that his Kamala cheerleading is over.

• Speaking truth to power. It can get you some pretty serious criticism if you're a Massachusetts Democrat. But as James Freeman points out at the WSJ, CongressCritter Seth Moulton is Still Not Cancelled. Freeman excerpts Moulton's WaPo op-ed:

  Two days after Donald Trump’s victory, I gave an example of how Democrats spend too much time trying not to offend anyone, even on issues where most Americans feel the same way. Speaking as a dad, I said I didn’t like the idea of my two girls one day competing against biological boys on a playing field. My main point, though, is what I said next: “As a Democrat, I’m supposed to be afraid to say that.”

  The blowback, which was swift, included the chair of a local Democratic committee calling me a Nazi “cooperator” and about 200 people gathering in front of my office to protest a sentence. My unimpeachable record of standing up for the civil rights of all Americans, including the trans community, was irrelevant.

  What has amazed me, though, is what’s happening behind the scenes. Countless Democrats have reached out, from across the party — to thank me. I’ve heard it again and again, from union leaders to colleagues in the House and Senate; from top people from the Obama, Biden and Harris teams to local Democrats stopping me on the street; from fellow dads to many in the LGBTQ+ community: “Thank you for saying that!”

  I assume Moulton's position will soon be common wisdom, and the unhinged criticism of it will be memory-holed.

• Whoa, what's next? Abolish the Department of Motherhood? Another one of the entries in Reason's "Abolish Everything" issue that won't happen: Jonathan H. Adler says we should Abolish the EPA.

  The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) does not have a typical origin story. Congress did not create it by enacting a statute; President Richard Nixon created it by presidential edict. Perhaps that explains why it's hard to reconcile what the EPA actually does with a robust theory of the federal government's role in environmental protection.

  Nixon created the agency in response to a broad sense of environmental crisis in the nation (and a desire to gain partisan advantage). Apocalyptic tracts and sensationalized events, such as the infamous and poorly understood 1969 fire on the Cuyahoga River, fed fears that environmental problems were getting inexorably worse and federal intervention was necessary. Yet before Nixon reorganized the federal bureaucracy to create the EPA, key environmental trends were already improving.

  Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, as demand for environmental protection increased, state and local governments adopted various protective measures. By 1966, every state had adopted water pollution legislation of some sort—and key water pollution measures were improving well before the EPA got into the game. Similarly, key indicators of urban air quality were improving before the EPA appeared.

  Speaking of Mike Judge (see above), maybe Elon will ask EPA employees:

I happened to notice the NYT headline from this tweet:

“Letting go of the male breadwinner norm is not an instant fix for our culture, but we can’t move forward without that step,” Sarah Bernstein writes.

Read: https://t.co/SETBj7v0ZM

— New York Times Opinion (@nytopinion) November 30, 2024

To repeat: "Our Messed-Up Dating Culture Gave Us Donald Trump".

I have no idea whether, or to what extent, that is true. It seems implausible, but I didn't read Ms. Bernstein's essay.

I couldn't help but try this out on the Google. There are some interesting theories out there on how we got Trumped:

• At the Hot Springs Sentinel Record, Bradley Gitz says: The Democratic Party gave us Donald Trump.

• An alternate explanation from Tim Alberta, as reviewed by the WaPo: How the Republican Party’s capitulation gave us Donald Trump.

• At Politico, Tom McGrath explains How 1980s Yuppies Gave Us Donald Trump.

• But the Some More News YouTubed podcast explains How Ronald Reagan Gave Us Donald Trump.

• James R. Rogers set the causality slightly different at Law & Liberty: How George H.W. Bush Gave Us Donald Trump.

• Back in 2019, Vox's Peter Kafka interviewed the NYT TV critic James Poniewozik who provided a cinematic explanation: How Rodney Dangerfield and “Caddyshack” gave us Donald Trump.

• Another leftie take at In These Times: The War on Terror Gave Us Donald Trump.

• Or, for a different take, there's Robert Scheer, pointing his shaky finger at The American Villain Who Gave Us Donald Trump. (Spoiler: 'twas Roy Cohn, who died 38 years ago.)

• Steven Klein ("Senior Lecturer in Political Theory @Kingspol_econ") tweeted a geographic explanation:

  Jackson Hole gave us Donald Trump

  — Steven Klein (@stevenmklein) November 6, 2024

• CNN gave credence to Timothy Stanley's J'Accuse: The guy who really gave us Donald Trump. (Spoiler: Roger Ailes.)

• A 2017 LTE from one Kathryn Krumsee, in the Chicago Tribune: Greed, ignorance, intolerance and indifference gave us Donald Trump.

• Back in 2016, Robert Maranto supplied the Atlanta Journal-Constitution with a twofer: How public schools gave us Donald Trump and the 1619 Project.

• Jamelle Bouie, calling them "Brothers in White Resentment", explained it quite simply: What gave us Donald Trump is what gave us Dylann Roof.

• Another progressive explanation emanated from Thomas Frank whose 2016 book Listen, Liberal was reviewed at Dissent: Zombie Neoliberalism! (Aiee!) The subhed on the article is "How 'There Is No Alternative' gave us Donald Trump."

  You are supposed to know what that means. I had to Wikipedia it: There is no alternative.

Well, I could go on. Everyone, seemingly, has a theory on who or what gave us Donald Trump. Fortunately, nobody's blaming Pun Salad.

… I assume some of the electrons powering my blog-authoring computer come from there. Just a reminder from Ron Bailey: Nuclear Energy Prevents Air Pollution and Saves Lives.

Bottom line: "They estimate the U.S. lost 141 million life years due to the slowdown in nuclear power deployment." So this is your usual reminder: governments kill people, while pretending they are doing you a favor by keeping you "safe".

Also of note:

• I'm thankful for Nellie. She's married to Bari Weiss, and she writes a funny TGIF weekly for the Free Press. Her post-Thanksgiving column is especially heavy on the thanks, including:

  → The Kamala Harris campaign: I’m thankful for Kamala Harris’s campaign. First of all, they raised $1.5 billion dollars and spent it in 15 weeks. It sounds wasteful. But in fact, taking $1.5 billion dollars from some of America’s silliest people and then giving it away to hardworking ones is what I call distributive justice. Just think of the caterers who had to work around literally dozens of Kamala staff’s allergies and gluten intolerances. They deserved that cash. Think of the event planners, young women who want to save up for their own extravagant eco resort weddings. Kamala gave them a shot at Hawaii instead of the Dominican Republic. Think of the driver of that abortion van clocking overtime during the DNC who just told himself “eyes ahead, not your problem, eyes ahead.” So many worthy Americans.

  But most importantly: I’m grateful that this movement refuses to accept they could have done anything better. Anything at all.

  That last link goes to a YouTubed "Pod Save America" podcast running about 90 minutes, featuring Kamala's campaign staffers, which I didn't watch, but if you're into schadenfreude you might enjoy it.

  I'm currently reading Ms Bowles' book Morning After the Revolution: Dispatches from the Wrong Side of History, and it's also good. My report will eventually show up at the book blog.

• It has failed so much that I'm already sick of failing. Holman W. Jenkins, Jr. points out that Antitrust Is the God That Fails and Fails.

  As taxpayer, consumer or citizen, don’t expect any benefit from the government’s antitrust lawsuit against Google. Given much precedent, however, it will generate hundreds of millions of dollars in billing and career advancement for the antitrust bar.

  Two Brookings Institution-affiliated economists asked 20 years ago whether antitrust improved consumer welfare. “The empirical record . . . is weak,” they said, and the record is hardly better now that courts have been routinely throwing out case after case on which taxpayers have spent millions.

  Which brings us to Google. I rarely use its search engine anymore. Instead of a list of documents in which I might or might not find my desired answer, now a chatbot supplies an answer plus a list of supporting documents.

  Google’s search engine also increasingly fails as a navigation tool, trying to propagandize or distract me when I only want to be directed to a web document that I know exists.

  Ah, these kids today with their "chatbots" and "skynets" and "terminators"…

  We've long inveighed against so-called "hipster antitrust" as exemplified by Lina Khan and her retinue. But Jenkins seems to be making a good case that even non-hipster antitrust is an idea whose time has passed.

• We knew this already. But it never hurts to be reminded, and Tyler Cowen does so: Massachusetts has occupational licensing for fortune tellers. He has a link to the mass.gov page: Massachusetts law about fortune tellers. Which itself has links to laws, cases, and articles.

  We looked at this back in 2007 concentrating on (of course) Salem MA: I See a Licensed Psychic in Your Future. (Sadly, after 17 years, many of the links are non-workies.)

  After all, you wouldn't want to be scammed by a fake psychic.

• As a final act, they can arrange for transportation of fired employees back to their home states. Christian Britschgi takes aim at another obvious target in Reason's "Abolish Everything" issue: Abolish the Department of Transportation.

  "Who will build the roads?" That's the classic gotcha question posed to libertarians, who do in fact have a lot of answers for who will build the roads. The most straightforward retort is "not the U.S. Department of Transportation, which doesn't even build the roads now."

  Of all the organs of the federal government, the Department of Transportation (DOT) is the most like the gallbladder: a useless sac that, when inflamed, prevents proper circulation in the rest of the body. It should be abolished.

  To understand why it could be safely eliminated, consider what it actually does now.

  First, it provides infrastructure grants to state and local governments. Second, it owns and operates the nation's outdated air traffic control system, in which floppy disks are still essential. Finally, it acts as a safety regulator for the various modes of transportation, from cars to buses to trucks to trains. None of these functions requires the existence of a federal, cabinet-level department, which serves mostly to increase costs and reduce efficiency.

  ‥ and provide Mayor Pete with something to do for a few more weeks.

It's early, but (via Ann Althouse) I have a feeling this is the most amazing thing I'll see today:

Ann also has a short video response from some guy named Roger Daltrey.

Also of note:

• A modest proposal. Arnold Kling recommends separation of University and State.

  I am fond of saying that government involvement in an industry typically consists of subsidizing demand and restricting supply. In the case of higher education, supply is restricted by requiring schools to be accredited, and then turning the accreditation process over to the incumbent institutions. Naturally, this leads to a strong barriers to entry.

  To subsidize demand, the government provides all sorts of loans and grants to students and faculty. Higher education is one of the most powerful lobbies in the country. Because the public is lulled by the non-profit status of universities, there is no outcry over “Big Higher Ed” the way that there is about Big Pharma or Big Tech or Big Finance.

  Universities claim to be essential to upward mobility. They have lobbied for “college for everyone” as a goal. I feel sorry for anyone who buys into this.

  I believe that we need many fewer people going to college, many fewer professors, and many fewer administrators. Instead, we need many more alternatives: trade schools, apprenticeships, online education, innovative teaching models, and even far-out ideas like a network university.

  Couldn't happen too soon. Helping along (as reported by Cory Stahle at Hiring Lab: Educational Requirements Are Gradually Disappearing From Job Postings.

  And we also need undoing of Occupational Licensing.

• Jay's Journey. It's been interesting to witness Jay Bhattacharya's odyssey From “Fringe” to Mainstream. As described by John Tierney at City Journal:

  Four years ago, Jay Bhattacharya was ostracized by his colleagues at Stanford and censored on social media platforms thanks to a campaign against him by the public-health establishment. The director of the National Institutes of Health, Francis Collins, sent an email to another NIH official, Anthony Fauci, urging a “quick and devastating published takedown” of Bhattacharya and his fellow “fringe epidemiologists.”

  Bhattacharya is far from the fringe today. Donald Trump nominated him this week for Collins’s old job, director of the NIH. Assuming the Senate confirms him, it will be a major victory for science and academic freedom—and a serious threat to the universities that suppressed scientific debate and promoted disastrous policies during the pandemic, causing public trust in science to plummet. Academic researchers and administrators have mostly refused to acknowledge their mistakes, much less make amends, but Bhattacharya promised yesterday to “reform American scientific institutions so that they are worthy of trust again.”

  Also optimistic about Bhattacharya's prospects is John Sailer, writing in the WSJ: Jay Bhattacharya Can Bring Science Back To NIH.

  The distorted priorities of American academia often have roots in the federal government. The National Institutes of Health pours millions of dollars into universities for large-scale hiring efforts based on diversity, equity and inclusion. Jay Bhattacharya, President-elect Trump’s nominee to lead the NIH, can put an end to it.

  The NIH’s Faculty Institutional Recruitment for Sustainable Transformation program, or First, bars universities who receive its grants from hiring on the basis of race, but my reporting shows that many schools do it anyway. In one galling example, a grant recipient stated bluntly via email: “I don’t want to hire white men for sure.” The First program is modeled on the NIH’s own “distinguished scholars program.” Through a Freedom of Information Act request, I acquired records that show how the NIH makes these selections. Application reviewers repeatedly highlight candidates’ sex and minority status and favor those fluent in the vocabulary of progressive identity politics.

  On paper, the program doesn’t involve racial preference. As Hannah Valantine, former NIH Chief Officer for Academic Workforce Diversity, described it in a lecture, the program aims to “change the culture” by recruiting “a critical mass” of scientists “committed to diversity, to inclusion, to equity, and to mentoring.” “Notice that I did not say any particular racial, ethnic or group or gender,” Ms. Valantine added, “because legally we cannot.”

  The implied unvocalized addon to that quote: "… but, trust me, we're doing whatever we think we can get away with."

  For another example, see the "Statement on Race-neutral Admissions" on the "Diversity, Equity, Access & Inclusion" page at the University Near Here.

• A belated Thanksgiving link. The Miami Herald excavates a twenty-year old Dave Barry column: We'd rather eat turkey.

  Thanksgiving is that very special holiday when we take a break from our hectic everyday lives to spend quality time with our loved ones, rediscovering all the reasons why we don't actually live with them.

  But Thanksgiving is also a spiritual time of quiet reflection - a time when we pause to remember, as generations have remembered before us, that an improperly cooked turkey is - in the words of the U.S. Department of Agriculture - "a ticking Meat Bomb of Death."

  Yes, it is a tragic but statistical fact that every Thanksgiving, undercooked turkeys claim the lives of an estimated 53 billion Americans (source: Dan Rather). Sometimes the cause is deadly bacteria; sometimes - in cases of extreme undercooking - the turkey actually springs up from the carving platter and pecks the would-be carver to death.

  One interesting thing to note here is that Dan Rather was a credibility punchline twenty years ago, thanks to "Rathergate".

• A long tradition of failure. Jacob Sullum probably has the most predictable recommendation among Reason's many targets for abolition: Abolish the DEA.

  In 1973, the year the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) was born, the federal government counted about three drug-related deaths per 100,000 Americans. By 2022, when the DEA had been waging the war on drugs for half a century, that rate had risen tenfold.

  That does not look like success. Nor do trends in drug use. In a 1973 Gallup poll, 12 percent of Americans admitted they had tried marijuana. According to federal survey data, the share had risen fourfold by 2023, when the percentage reporting past-year drug use was more than double the 1995 number.

  What about drug prices, which the DEA aims to boost through source control and interdiction? From 1981 to 2012, according to the Office of National Drug Control Policy, the average, inflation-adjusted retail price for a pure gram of heroin fell by 86 percent. During the same period, the average retail price for cocaine and methamphetamine fell by 75 percent and 72 percent, respectively. In 2021, the DEA reported that methamphetamine's "purity and potency remain high while prices remain low," that "availability of cocaine throughout the United States remains steady," and that "availability and use of cheap and highly potent fentanyl has increased."

  The inability of our elected representatives to recognize a failed policy has caused me to be bitterly sarcastic at times.

  I can't promise I'll improve anytime soon.

As we look around the news today, searching for things to be thankful for, this might seem to be an odd choice. Noah Rothman was confused by the Israel/Hezbollah "cease-fire deal", but: Now It Makes Sense.

And at Patterico's Pontifications, JVW is even less complimentary: History Repeats Itself: Outgoing Democrat Administration Petulantly Screws Israel.

By "history repeating itself", JVW is recalling the 2016 US abstention from a UN Israel-condemning resolution by the outgoing Obama/Clinton/Kerry Administration, widely (and accurately) seen as a stab in the back.

And now…

You may recall that Oval Office pic we posted just last week:

Yes, that's FDR in the large middle portrait, surely it was Biden's decision to feature him so prominently.

Say what you will about FDR, at least he knew which side had to be ground into dust in World War II. Another area where Biden is hopeless.

So here's what I'm thankful for: in a few weeks, he, and Kamala, and Blinken, and Kerry will be headed out the door.

Also of note:

• Just a reminder. We should Abolish the FCC. TechDirt's Mike Masnick points out, the next FCC chair is already giving us new reasons to do that ASAP: Brendan Carr Makes It Clear That He’s Eager To Be America’s Top Censor.

  When Donald Trump announced that he was appointing current FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr to be the next chair of the FCC, it was no surprise. Nor was it a surprise that Trump tried to play up that Carr was a “warrior for free speech.”

  Commissioner Carr is a warrior for Free Speech, and has fought against the regulatory Lawfare that has stifled Americans’ Freedoms, and held back our Economy.

  However, this is all projection, as with so much in the upcoming Trump administration. In reality, Brendan Carr may be the biggest threat to free speech in our government in a long while. And he’s not being shy about it.

  Carr is abusing the power of his position to pressure companies to censor speech he disagrees with, all while cloaking it in the language of “free speech.” As an FCC commissioner, he has significant regulatory authority over broadcasters, and he’s wielding that power to push his preferred political agenda. He has no real authority over internet companies, but he’s pretending he does. He’s threatening broadcasters and social media companies alike, telling them there will be consequences if they don’t toe his line.

  Well, that's a shame. Masnick's article is long and detailed, and the only glimmer of good news is that Carr won't actually have the power to do any of the things he threatens to do.

• Well, I guess she has experience. Monica Crowley's in a sycophantic swoon about our probable next Attorney General: Pam Bondi Is the Perfect Pick to End the Fentanyl Crisis.

  Um, not so fast, says Jacob Sullum, somewhat more believable: Florida Drug Deaths Rose Dramatically as Pam Bondi Did Her 'Incredible Job' of Reducing Them.

  […]Trump says she did "an incredible job" in "work[ing] to stop the trafficking of deadly drugs and reduce the tragedy of Fentanyl Overdose Deaths." Fox News likewise notes that when Bondi took office as attorney general in 2011, she "quickly earned a reputation for cracking down on opioids and the many 'pill mills' operating in the Sunshine State." It quotes state prosecutor Nicholas Cox, who notes that Florida "was the epicenter of the opioid crisis" at the time. Aronberg "credits his former boss as being the person 'most responsible for ridding the state of Florida of destructive pill mills.'"

  The implication that Bondi's anti-drug efforts succeeded in reducing overdose deaths does not find much support in data reported by the Florida Department of Health. The age-adjusted rate of "deaths from drug poisoning" did fall a bit after she took office, from 13.7 per 100,000 residents in 2011 to 12.1 in 2013. But then it resumed its upward trajectory, reaching 25.1—nearly double the 2011 rate—by the time Bondi left office in 2019. The death rate rose sharply in 2020 (as it did across the country), rose again in 2021, and declined slightly in 2022, when it was 34.9 per 100,000.

  In 2019, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Florida ranked 20th on the list of states with the highest drug death rates, down from 15th in 2011. But despite that relative improvement, Florida's rate as reported by the CDC rose by 66 percent during that period. In absolute terms, the number of drug deaths rose by more than 80 percent.

  Fun fact: in that same (2019) CDC data set, New Hampshire nabbed tenth place in the "Drug Overdose Death Rate", beating the pants off Florida.

  Further Fun Fact: More recently (2022 data), we've dropped to 21st place. But not because the OD death rate dropped in those three years.

  It rose, from 32 deaths/100K to 36 deaths/100K.

  It's just that many states are doing (even) worse and passed us in the rankings.

• To be fair… this is a Trump appointment I kind of like: Jay Bhattacharya at the NIH. According to Tyler Cowen:

  Trump has announced the appointment, so it is worth thinking through a few matters. While much of the chatter is about the Great Barrington Declaration, I would note that Bhattacharya has a history of focusing on the costs of obesity. So perhaps we can expect more research funding for better weight loss drugs, in addition to other relevant public health measures.

  Bhattacharya also has researched the NIH itself (with Packalen), and here is one bit from that paper: “NIH’s propensity to fund projects that build on the most recent advances has declined over the last several decades. Thus, in this regard NIH funding has become more conservative despite initiatives to increase funding for innovative projects.”

  I would expect it is a priority of his to switch more NIH funding into riskier bets, and that is all to the good. More broadly, his appointment can be seen as a slap in the face of the Fauci smug, satisfied, “do what I tell you” approach. That will delight many, myself included, but still the question remains of how to turn that into concrete advances in public health policy. Putting aside the possibility of another major pandemic coming around, that is not so easy to do.

  Bhattacharya has made a number of Pun Salad appearances over the years. Most recently, I linked to his Reason review of Anthony Fauci's memoir, headlined Anthony Fauci, the Man Who Thought He Was Science.

• In case you were wondering if women were better than men at long-distance swimming… I suggest you read Jeff Maurer's take: The “Women Are Better at Long-Distance Swimming” Talking Point Is Basically Bullshit.

  Gender denialism is currently the fuzzy testicle drooping out of the intellectual left’s gym shorts: it’s obvious, embarrassing, and people are wondering “are you gonna do something about that?” The debate over trans women in sports has made it clear that some on the left not only deny that male physiology confers advantages that perhaps can’t be reversed with hormones: They deny that male physiology confers any advantage in sports whatsoever. They seem to think it’s mean to admit that the average man is bigger, stronger, and faster than the average woman, even though everyone knows that, and it feels like we’ve suddenly decided to debate whether five is bigger than three.

  The latest clown to step into the biology denialist dunk tank is — oh, God, this one hurts — Neil deGrasse Tyson. That really sucks — I like Neil deGrasse Tyson! He produces the Carl Sagan-type wonderment that I often enjoy after a long day in the comedy mines.

  Maurer provides a clip of NdGT on Bill Maher's HBO show, where he attempted an argument from (scientific) authority. Maurer debunks convincingly, and amusingly.

• Whoa, really? Well, maybe. A few of the entries from Reason's "Abolish Everything" issue are out there. In the sense that (a) nobody's talking about them and (b) they probably won't ever happen. Still, Matthew Petti, Reason's lefty peacenik, advocates that we Abolish the Army.

  The people who created the U.S. Army did not want it to last forever. George Washington, the first commander of the Continental Army, wrote that "a large standing Army in time of Peace hath ever been considered dangerous to the liberties of a Country," though he supported a small frontier force. Other Founding Fathers struck similar notes.

  "Standing armies are dangerous to liberty," wrote Alexander Hamilton in Federalist No. 29. "A standing military force, with an overgrown Executive will not long be safe companions to liberty. The means of defense against foreign danger have been always the instruments of tyranny at home," warned James Madison at the Constitutional Convention. "What, sir, is the use of a militia? It is to prevent the establishment of a standing army, the bane of liberty," said Elbridge Gerry during the debates over the Bill of Rights.

  No wonder, then, that they put an expiration date on any American army. Article 1, Section 8, Clause 12 of the U.S. Constitution states that Congress has the power "To raise and support Armies, but no Appropriation of Money to that Use shall be for a longer Term than two Years." The next clause, authorizing the U.S. Navy, imposes no limits on spending. The message was clear: America needs a peacetime defense force at sea, not on land.

  A standing army might be useful if Canada ever gets obstreperous. But otherwise?

I subscribe to Jonah's take here:

this is ungood. It feels like a QVC segment where it ends with her finishing her margarita and saying, “that’s why our healing crystals are 50% off for the first 100 callers.” https://t.co/XyZ4Ak5tgv

— Jonah Goldberg (@JonahDispatch) November 27, 2024

But I also hold out the possibility that we are looking at the result of more than one edible.

If you'd like more reasons to be Thankful, Scott Johnson of Power Line has a longer video: A message from Kamala Harris. His preview/review:

Who knew that Marianne Williamson would not be the weirdest Democrat running for President this year?

Also of note:

• But the cartoons are still good, right? At Tablet, Armin Rosen is impressed as he watches a printed parade go by: The New Yorker’s Cavalcade of Ignorance. Twelve essays covering twenty print pages in the mag, and the summary is: "Some of the greatest minds in America have gathered in the pages of the country’s leading weekly to declare how little they understand things now, and how little they care to understand them moving forward." Example:

  “American Fascist,” Yale historian Timothy Snyder’s contribution, uses some variation on the word “fascist” 44 times across two and a half pages, along with 15 combined mentions of Hitler, Mussolini, and Putin. One imagines the interior of Snyder’s brain as a scarcely endurable popcorn machine, a rhythm of repetitive hissing and clicking that produces buckets of nearly identical thought kernels. Perhaps silence would be even harder for Snyder to endure. He offers one accidental moment of reflection, which serves to frame the entire New Yorker feature: “A fascist is unconcerned with the connection between words and meaning … When a fascist calls a liberal a ‘fascist,’ the term begins to work in a different way, as the servant of a particular person, rather than as a bearer of meaning.”

  I shall not deploy my George Orwell quotes on "fascism" today. You're welcome.

  But if you missed them the first N times, here's my latest.

• "May you live in interesting times." As we've noted before, that's not a Chinese curse. But nevertheless someone seems to have loosed it upon us. Kevin D. Williamson looks at one symptom: Procedure or Chaos?

  If you will forgive a ponderous opening question, I have one:

  What is justice?

  […]

  One of the sharp bright dividing lines between populists—right and left—and conservatives and traditional liberals is that very question. It comes down to matters of procedure vs. matters of outcome, and how we weight those respectively. The economic case is the simplest to understand. The classical liberal-conservative view emphasizes procedure: If the rules have been followed, if nobody has been deprived unjustly of his property or his ability to work and earn and trade, if property rights and contract and the rule of law all are respected, then the distribution of wealth and income that resorts of this is just, or at least not positively unjust, even when the results are not precisely what we would like. The populist view often emphasizes the role of luck and happenstance in economic life—some people have natural talents, some are born to better-off parents, some people just have bad luck, some people are victimized by callous employers or other economic actors whose deeds may technically satisfy the formal rules of the system but are infused with an underlying malice or inhuman indifference. What matters from their point of view is the justice or injustice of the outcome—if Elon Musk is a wicked man (says the lefty populist), then he does not deserve to be so wealthy, especially when there are more deserving people who have less. Populists will point out that the system is far from perfect; the classical liberal-conservative view is that the justice of the system doesn’t depend on its being perfect, only on its being applied to everyone equally, and those rules of course are subject to revision, but only carefully. 

  Populists feel aggrieved by the state of things—the state of their own lives or the state of the republic—and their grievances are central to their understanding of the world. About 89 percent of populism comes down to a conviction, however vaguely stated, that the wrong sort of people are on top, and that the more deserving people are being kept from rising. There’s a lot of “Rich Men North of Richmond” in that. When I ask my right-populist friends (and some who are not my friends) what it is they want to do or what they want the government to do, the answer is almost always some form of: “I want them to act like they care more about the kind of people I care about and give less weight to the priorities and preferences of the sort of people who go to fancy schools, get advanced degrees, run tech companies, swan around Davos, and that sort of thing.” There rarely is any very coherent sense of what would come out of that listening—of what the government might actually do differently—as though the act of listening more to x and less to y were a whole and complete political goal in and of itself. And I suppose it may be: As I have been arguing for a long time (and the argument is hardly original to me) in a society as wealthy and blessed as ours, there is a tendency to switch from fighting over scarce material resources to fighting over status, which is one of the few truly zero-sum games in town, being entirely relative. The idea is that if Mitt Romney had become president, then that would have been a collective victory for the private-equity guys and McKinsey types and the Harvard Business School graduates—and that the status elevation of that group is an issue entirely independent of anything that a President Romney would have wanted to do as a policy initiative. 

  There's much more, of course, but Dispatch-paywalled, I assume. I think KDW is more on-target with his criticism than those twelve New Yorker essayists.

• Another modest abolition. C. Jarrett Dieterle suggests we Abolish the Federal Alcohol Tax and Regulation System.

  When the 21st Amendment was ratified in 1933, ending America's "noble experiment" with nationwide alcohol Prohibition, it supposedly meant the federal government was getting out of the business of regulating booze. But few governments willingly give up power, and even fewer give it up absolutely.

  In 1935, Congress passed the Federal Alcohol Administration Act (FAA Act), allowing the feds to collect alcohol excise taxes, prevent unfair trade practices, and protect consumers. Determining which agency should administer the FAA Act has been quite a journey—the Internal Revenue Service; the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF); and, for the last 21 years, the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB) have all taken turns. But one thing hasn't changed: The FAA Act still remains the main authorizing legislation empowering the federal government to regulate alcohol markets.

  Dieterle notes the TTB is also in charge of "notorious alcohol labeling regulations". So let me (once again) point out one my oldie but goldie posts: my objection to that GOVERNMENT WARNING on your beer and wine containers.

Recently on the book blog:

… or just sell the buildings to the highest bidder. I'm OK with that too.

We look at various abolition arguments today, including the one from Neal McCluskey at Reason: Abolish the Department of Education.

McCluskey notes that the Feds contribute a small fraction of educational funding, but not small enough that localities can afford to run afoul of its regulations and "guidelines".

David Friedman examines multiple approaches to implement Trump's promise to "ultimately eliminate the federal Department of Education".

Over at the Federalist, Auguste Meyrat eyes bigger plans: Abolishing The Ed Dept. Is Just The First Step In Fixing Schools. He likes Linda McMahon, Trump's nominee for secretary of the department. But

And of course, there's Student Loa… oops, sorry, Dominic Pino says we should Stop Calling Them ‘Student Loans’. Some history you may have forgotten:

Politifact—yes, even Politifact—called Obama's 'If you like your health care plan, you can keep it' pledge its 2013 Lie of the Year. Certainly "we’ll save American taxpayers $68 billion in the coming years" should qualify for runner-up.

And finally: Jessica Gavora pens a scary tale at the Dispatch: The Revenge of the Title IX Dads.

Title IX became a cudgel for Uncle Stupid forcing whatever progressive nostrums came into vogue. (We also saw this at the college level, where it was used to eliminate due process protections for college men accused of sexual misbehavior.

Also of note:

• This should not stand. The WSJ editorialists weigh in on how the Biden Administration is Punishing Google for Its Search Success.

  How badly does the Biden Administration want to punish Google? So much that the Justice Department’s antitrust cops are now asking a federal court to hobble the search giant, even though their proposals would hurt consumers and could benefit China. That’s only the start of the reasons to be skeptical of this government market meddling.

  In a court filing last week, the DOJ proposed a slew of remedies for Google’s alleged antitrust violations. Federal Judge Amit Mehta ruled in August that Google had maintained an illegal search-engine monopoly by paying web browsers and device manufacturers to be featured by default, even as he acknowledged this wasn’t the primary reason for its success.

  “Google has not achieved market dominance by happenstance. It has hired thousands of highly skilled engineers, innovated consistently, and made shrewd business decisions,” Judge Mehta wrote. “The result is the industry’s highest quality search engine, which has earned Google the trust of hundreds of millions of daily users.”

  No matter, the government now wants to degrade Google’s search-engine quality to help less successful rivals. Start with its proposal to require Google to divest its popular Chrome browser, which by default uses the company’s web search. DOJ says Chrome lets Google collect more data on users to better target ads and refine search results. Yet if advertisers and users benefit from this product integration, what’s the antitrust problem?

  As previously noted, I use Google as my default search engine, but also Chrome, Gmail, Calendar, Maps, Translate, Drive, their online "office" apps, their Password Manager, … and probably some other stuff. I'd be really pissed if this stuff starts breaking by some cockamamie Federal decree.