Pun Salad

In case you haven't noticed: Pun Salad is a personal blog, where I post on whatever strikes my fancy. And, to adapt that old Wittgensteinism: Whereof one cannot get interested, thereof one's blog must be silent.

But, oh heck, here's some Eye Candy from Mr. Ramirez:

I was slightly amused by the WaPo's AI-written summary of comments

Man, the commenters are a tough crowd.

Also of note:

• Sorry, we didn't actually realize we were in charge. Peter Suderman asks for a do-over: Put the Libertarians Back in Charge.

  A common gripe in American politics is that for too long, libertarians have been in charge, wielding too much power.

  Sometimes this complaint comes from progressives in the mold of Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.), who argue that hands-off economic policy—often derisively cast as "neoliberalism"—has fueled the growth and concentration of corporate power at the expense of small business and labor, resulting in an economy that's rigged against the little guy.

  Sometimes this complaint comes from conservatives, particularly New Right voices who insist that libertarians and classical liberals have ignored the consequences of unfettered free markets for American industrial capacity and rural downscale workers while allowing the left to control major cultural institutions. In this view, libertarianism fails to prioritize the interests of America, American values, and ordinary Americans.

  The charge has always carried a whiff of desperation, given how little power actual self-identified libertarians have in the corridors of government. But after four years of Joe Biden running a White House that was a hotbed of Warrenite progressivism, and the early months of Donald Trump's presidency marked by all manner of New Right paranoia and kookiness, maybe it's time to revise the complaint: Libertarians don't have enough power.

  Given today's political climate, it's unlikely that Peter's demand will be met. As you may be tired of hearing me say: we'll just have to be satisfied with being right about everything, all the time.

• For example, this libertarian insight… Mark Jamison goes out on a limb: Innovation Shouldn’t Be a Liability in the United States.

  America’s antitrust enforcers say they want to protect innovation. But their current cases against Big Tech are only punishing it.

  The Department of Justice (DOJ) and Federal Trade Commission (FTC) have launched aggressive antitrust cases against companies like Alphabet, Amazon, and Meta, arguing that these firms are too dominant and that their success undermines competition. The government’s solution: break them up or force them to share the innovations and resources they created and that made them successful—like data and infrastructure—with rivals. Or even worse, obstructing the companies’ AI innovations, as in the case of Google search.

  Here’s the problem: these firms didn’t become dominant by suppressing competition. They became leaders by out-innovating everyone else.

  I'm just guessing that a President Nikki Haley would have realized this.

• Speaking of the FTC… Elizabeth Nolan Brown notes a strange transformation: FTC Pivots From Competition to Children.

  A Federal Trade Commission (FTC) summit last week on protecting children online previewed an odd pivot. Apparently, the agency wants to be a sort of family values advocacy group.

  "This government-sponsored event was not a good-faith conversation about child safety—it was a strategy session for censorship," said the Free Speech Coalition (FSC), a trade group for the adult industry.

  What stands out most to me about last Wednesday's event—called "The Attention Economy: How Big Tech Firms Exploit Children and Hurt Families"—is the glimpse it provided into how the FTC's anti-tech strategy is evolving and the way Republicans seem intent on turning a bipartisan project like online child protection into a purely conservative one.

  Or could it be they are cynically junking old and tired arguments for ones that will rouse more rabble?

• 

  It's as good as a mile. Mark Pulliam writes on The Myth of Victimization, a review of Jason L. Riley's book, The Affirmative Action Myth. (Amazon link at your right.) A slice:

  As it is practiced today, “civil rights” is an industry in which many activists, scholars, bureaucrats, journalists, and organizations have a vested interest in perpetuating the myth of black victimization and helplessness. Riley argues (with extensive supporting footnotes) that “blacks have made faster progress when color blindness has been the policy objective.” Allowing equal treatment to be replaced by a regime of “oppression pedagogy” and identity politics, Riley suggests, is “one of our greatest tragedies.” Racial preferences “have been a hindrance rather than a boon for blacks,” he contends.

  Riley makes a persuasive case. He reprises the work done by scholars such as Thomas Sowell, Walter Williams, Robert Woodson, Shelby Steele, John McWhorter, and Wilfred Reilly; as he notes, much of the research on this topic by center-right figures tends to be done by black academics, possibly due to white scholars’ well-founded fear of repercussions. (If you doubt this, recall the pariah treatment accorded Charles Murray, Amy Wax, Ilya Shapiro, and others who refused to genuflect to the prevailing orthodoxy.) Riley also draws upon the work of Stephan and Abigal Thernstrom, Richard Sander and Stuart Taylor Jr., and many others. Readers may be familiar with some of this work, but Riley usefully summarizes it and supplements it with census data, lesser-known academic studies, and historical and biographical profiles such as Hidden Figures, the book and movie about pioneering black mathematicians who helped NASA’s space program in the 1960s.

  I strongly suspect I'll have to get this via Interlibrary Loan.

Recently on the book blog:

It took me awhile, but I eventually got taken in by the Slow Horses series on Apple TV. And, after getting caught up with that, I decided to check out this first book in Mick Herron's series. (On which the first season of the TV show is based.)

As it turns out, the TV show is a remarkably faithful adaptation of the book. It's a mixture of very dark humor, violence, cynicism, betrayal, and suspense. Mick Herron is a skillful, stylish writer; I found myself smiling every few pages at some deftly executed sentences.

Summary: Jackson Lamb is in charge of "Slough House", an island of misfit MI5 spies. It's where agents who have screwed up badly get sent, a dead-end posting designed to get them to resign. Lamb helps in that effort by being abusive to his charges, reminding them at every opportunity of their worthlessness. The newest arrival, River Cartwright, was set up to fail by a rival spy… or was there something else going on? In any case, he's now relegated to sorting through mounds of disgusting garbage, retrieved from the bins of a disgraced right-wing journalist. And (of course) finding nothing.

Ah, but could there be a connection with a fanatical, even more right-wing, group who have abducted a Pakistani student/stand-up comic, promising to decapitate him on video in a couple days? (Spoiler: yes.) And will the Slow Horses be involved in all this. (Also yes.)

There are some changes; for example, book-Lamb does not lip-sync to the Proclaimers' "500 Miles". You'll have to watch the show for that. And you should, it's hilarious.

This should be a no-brainer. But Karoline Leavitt is the Trump administration's leading example of non-braininess. Robby Soave spells it out: Terry Moran Insulted Stephen Miller? That's None of the Government's Business.

Karoline is an unhappy tweeter:

Last night, in a since deleted post, so-called “journalist” @TerryMoran went on a rampage against Stephen Miller and called President Trump “a world class hater.”

This is unhinged and unacceptable.

We have reached out to @ABC to inquire about how they plan to hold Terry… pic.twitter.com/HsgusJEIvH

— Karoline Leavitt (@PressSec) June 8, 2025

Robby belabors the obvious, but that's OK:

This is not to excuse Moran, whose surname is only one letter away from… no, I won't go there.

Also of note:

• For the nth time: I am not a lawyer, but… Jed Rubenfeld wonders Are White People a Protected Class Now? And he leads off with a stunning stat:

  For a year after the 2020 George Floyd riots, America’s largest corporations pretty much stopped hiring white people. According to Bloomberg News, of the over 300,000 new jobs filled at S&P 100 companies in 2021, only six percent—you read that right, six percent—went to whites, who make up some 61 percent of the U.S. population. This was done in the name of “inclusivity” and “diversity.”

  That's a four-year-old number, and Bloomberg published it in September 2023. So: grain of salt. But it seems to be based on Official Government Statistics.

  And here we get into the legal weeds. Jed looks at the recent unanimous SCOTUS ruling in Ames v. Ohio Department of Youth Services:

  Writing for the full Court, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson held that Title VII protects “individuals,” not groups, and protects “minority and majority” alike. The Sixth Circuit’s rule, Jackson said, violated the “basic principle” that discrimination law “does not vary based on whether or not the plaintiff is a member of a majority group.”

  This is a major decision for the Court. The “basic principle” it reaffirms—that discrimination law protects individuals, not groups, and does not vary depending on minority or majority status—plainly applies not only to sexual orientation, but to race as well, calling all DEI hiring into question.

  Fundamentally, Ames blows a hole in a concept central to DEI thinking. For a long time, discrimination law in America has been organized around the idea of “protected classes.” Thousands of cases hold that the first requirement of any Title VII discrimination claim is that the employee must show that he “was a member of a protected class.” The Sixth Circuit’s opinion in Ames repeated this statement.

  It's not just the judicial branch blowing a big hole in the DEI juggernaut; the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission now has a new sheriff in town, Andrea Lucas, and she issued a stern warning in a March press release: EEOC and Justice Department Warn Against Unlawful DEI-Related Discrimination. Which includes links to helpful documents: What To Do If You Experience Discrimination Related to DEI at Work; and What You Should Know About DEI-Related Discrimination at Work.

  This is all welcome news. The documents "clarify" for the DEIdolators: there are no "protected classes"; there are protected characteristics: race, sex, etc.

  And we are all protected (or should be) from discrimination based on those characteristics.

  (See Wikipedia for the full list of protected characteristics.)

• Shut up, they explain. Jesse Singal has the unpromising headline: Contra Evan Urquhart On The Right To Journalistic Exclusion. But he's examining a specific example of a more general censoriousness:

  Last week The New York Times released The Protocol, a six-part podcast series about the American fight over youth gender medicine. The podcast is hosted by Austin Mitchell and centers on the work of Azeen Ghorayshi, the science section’s point person on this subject. […]

  For now, I’d like to talk a bit about the reaction. Or preaction, to be more precise. Well before the podcast was released, activists were outraged. They were outraged, at root, because they do not think there should be any meaningful debate over any substantive aspect of youth gender medicine. I understand that many activists would claim otherwise, that I am caricaturing their position, but their actions speak otherwise. And the more honest members of this group are open about their views.

  To her credit, Julia Carrie Wong, a senior reporter at The Guardian US, expressed this explicitly on Bluesky: “The idea that there should be a public debate about the appropriate medical care for a minuscule population of children remains one of the most absurd lies that these liberal transphobes, NYT edit board included, tell themselves. No there shouldn’t! It’s not an appropriate matter for public debate!”

  Because these critics are opposed to any genuine coverage of this issue but aren’t usually willing to say so out loud, they often have to reverse-engineer reasons to be mad. In the case of The Times, which has come under a lot of unfair fire from these activists in recent years, that has led to all sorts of ridiculously bad faith accusations, some of which can fairly be called lies.

  These folks don't just put fingers in their ears to avoid hearing contrary opinions and facts. They want to put their fingers in your ears too.

Scott Lincicome makes one:

Seeing the unseen: "Automotive Tariffs are Dramatically Shifting Buyer Habits, Study Says" https://t.co/5YVs6lnNMk pic.twitter.com/1FOQO80r9p

— Scott Lincicome (@scottlincicome) June 7, 2025

That, in turn, causes Donald Boudreaux to issue his Question for Fans of Tariffs and of Tariff Man:

Since I have no patience with subtlety, I'll point you to Bastiat's famous Candlestick makers' Petition, which argues for that industry's "protection" against the "rival who apparently works under conditions so far superior to our own for the production of light."

(Also, Tariff Man's superpower of tax-setting only applies to tariffs. Right? I mean, he couldn't arbitrarily impose a sales tax on used cars! Um, he couldn't, could he?)

Also of note:

• Remind you of anyone? Jeffrey Blehar thinks recent news implies That's a Wrap for Greta Thunberg. (NR gifted link)

  A brief note on everybody’s least favorite hectoring eco-scold: I regret to inform you that Greta Thunberg is in the news again. It barely matters why, really — more nonsense about Gaza and “genocide.” We’ll get to that in a moment, but that’s not really why we’re here.

  You remember young Greta, right? The vinegar-rictused, Swedish ecological activist whom the media turned into a global celebrity back in 2018? You probably recall some of the details, but it’s always healthy to remind ourselves of what an amazingly different era 2018 was: A teenage girl successfully leveraged her ecological neuroses to trick her parents into letting her skip school on Fridays.

  This would have been impressive enough, but then — in a move that surely must have surprised even her — the global leftist elite also decided to grant Thunberg worldwide fame and Unquestionable Moral Authority in the bargain. She was the perfect avatar, after all, eager to read from a script they had been writing in their hearts for decades now: The planet is dying, future generations are doomed to tragedy, it’s all the fault of us selfish oil-guzzling adults — and now, here’s an enraged 15-year-old girl to guilt-trip you about it.

  Jeffrey is firmly in the pantheon of Pun Salad's Favorite Writers.

  But to the query in this item's headline: Greta's trajectory is reminding me of Cindy Sheehan's descent into obscurity, once she transformed herself from "tragic peacenik mom" into "raving Marxist loon."

  The media only love you when you're useful for Establishing Their Narrative.

• On the other hand, none of us would be here without it. Carrie Lukas thinks Michelle Obama’s Latest Lament Hints at a Gender Politics Reset.

  ​On a recent episode of her podcast, Michelle Obama said that “the least of what” a woman’s reproductive system does is “produce life.” The comment drew quick criticism — and for good reason. To be fair, Obama quickly added, “it’s a very important thing that it does,” but her initial statement confirmed a too-familiar callousness toward the miraculous process of producing a life.

  Obama’s dismissiveness of childbearing, however, may be “the least of what” was revealed in her statements. The perpetually aggrieved Obama wants to lean back into a comfortable narrative in which women are victims and progressive Democrats like her are their champions. As she puts it:

  So many men have no idea about what women go through, right? We haven’t been researched. We haven’t been considered. And it still affects the way a lot of male lawmakers, a lot of male politicians, a lot of male religious leaders, think about the issue of choice as if it’s just about the fetus. The baby.

  Obama is right, of course, that no man knows the experience of inhabiting a female body, let alone the physical experience of growing another human being. This doesn’t mean that men shouldn’t weigh in on the issue of abortion, as Obama seems to imply, but certainly it’s good advice that men should take care to recognize the profound implications that any pregnancy has on a woman anytime they are discussing abortion.

  Michelle is probably not going to go the Cindy/Greta route, but she's almost as irritating in her dismissal of "males".

• "Due process" fans aren't making a lot of noise about this. Jacob Sullum looks at the ins and outs, ups and downs, and what the Hell happened to the Sixth Amendment: Charging a runner for using an unapproved trail defies Trump's overcriminalization order.

  When the federal government decided to prosecute mountain runner Michelino Sunseri for using an unapproved trail while setting a record for ascending and descending Grand Teton in September 2024, it seemed like a good example of a problem that President Donald Trump decried in an executive order last month: "overcriminalization in federal regulations." The National Park Service (NPS) ultimately agreed, saying it was "withdrawing its criminal prosecution referral" after "further review" in light of the president's order. But the Justice Department proceeded with the case anyway, resulting in a two-day bench trial that ended on May 21.

  That disagreement, revealed in an email chain that Sunseri's lawyers obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request, raises questions about whether prosecutors met their constitutional obligation to share information that would have been helpful to the defense. It also casts doubt on whether the Justice Department is complying with the policy described in Trump's order, which said federal prosecutors should eschew charges involving regulatory crimes unless they have evidence indicating that the defendant knowingly violated the law.

  What was I saying about the Sixth Amendment? Oh, right:

  [U.S. Magistrate Judge Stephanie] Hambrick rejected Sunseri's request for a jury trial, which she was allowed to do under a "petty offense exception" that the Supreme Court has atextually carved out of the Sixth Amendment. That amendment says defendants "in all criminal prosecutions" have a right to "a speedy and public trial" by "an impartial jury."

  "Atextually" here means that SCOTUS made up an exception to the Sixth Amendment's guarantee in complete contradiction to the its plain language. Kinda outrageous.

Recently on the movie blog:

Ridley Scott is back, baby, and (as near as I can tell) uses his time machine to send a film crew back to Imperial Rome, a few years after that gladiator who looked a lot like Russell Crowe managed to work his way into a fatal encounter with that nasty Roman emperor who looked a lot like Joaquin Phoenix.

I went in not knowing too much about the movie, and I recommend that. I was taken unawares by some of the big plot twists.

It starts out with Hanno (Paul Mescal) about to defend his city against the invading Roman Navy. His wife Arishat (Yuval Gonen) is a deadly archer, and before you can say "Gee, I bet she's not gonna do well here" … she does not, thanks to a specific order given by Roman General Acacius. Hanno is taken prisoner, he's recognized for his fighting talent by gladiator-manager Macrinus (Denzel Washington!), and pretty soon he's in the Coliseum fighting big lugs on rhinos, sharks, … while all the time plotting revenge.

Things are complicated by a holdover from Gladiator: Lucilla (Connie Nielson) is now (gasp!) married to Acacius, and is an occasional attendee at the Coliseum, where she … well, you should watch the movie.

And I don't make that claim lightly. Dave Barry brings us The News from Florida. Of course he recounts the recent invasion of "popular recreation area" Crab Island by the United States Army. But he also reviews hurricane preparedness, because 'tis the season. For example…

The only clunker is the suggestion to "Drive to Nebraska and remain there until Halloween." Dave, they have tornadoes.

Also of note:

• One day the bottom will drop out. Dan Greenberg confesses at Cato: I Shot the Tariff (But I Swear It Was in Self-Defense)

  The Constitution assigns Congress the sole and exclusive power to lay and collect tariffs and to regulate commerce with foreign nations. That literal reading of the Constitution demonstrates that Congress has the power to impose tariffs, but the president has no such power. However, the IEEPA hands the president some power to regulate some extranational transactions. But the statute explains that such powers “may only be exercised to deal with an unusual and extraordinary threat with respect to which a national emergency has been declared.” More particularly, the IEEPA gives the president the power to “regulate … importation” in order to “deal with any unusual or extraordinary threat … to the national security, foreign policy, or economy of the United States, if the president declares a national emergency with respect to such threat.”

  That apparently is the theory of Trump’s Liberation Day: The “unusual and extraordinary threat” identified by the president is trade deficits en masse, and the president can “deal with” this threat by declaring that our nation’s trade with every single country on earth is a national emergency; more precisely, he can “deal with” this threat by using his power to regulate imports so as to place tariffs on them. But the theory of Liberation Day seems inherently implausible: how can it be that every country’s trade policy is simultaneously extraordinary—or even simultaneously unusual? If there is something that is identified as unusual and extraordinary, this implies that some other things must necessarily be usual and ordinary.

  This logical inference raises a relevant question: Surely there are some usual and ordinary states of affairs that would not justify a presidential declaration of emergency? If the president is never disallowed from making such declarations, it would imply that things are never usual or ordinary, because by definition things can’t be unusual or extraordinary 100 percent of the time.

  Dan, I'm pretty sure politicians use that "unusual and extraordinary" excuse all the time, about anything. But (you're right) that's why we need the men and women in robes to (fingers crossed) point that out and say no.

• And then the tariffs shot back. Eric Boehm describes How Tariffs Are Breaking the Manufacturing Industries Trump Says He Wants To Protect.

  When President Donald Trump announced a sweeping set of tariffs on nearly all imports, he promised that April 2—what the White House dubbed "Liberation Day"—would "forever be remembered as the day American industry was reborn."

  That's not the way Michele Derrigo-Barnes sees it. Trump's tariffs are "killing" small American manufacturers like hers, she tells Reason.

  As CEO of Plattco Corporation, a small business that makes industrial valves, Derrigo-Barnes runs the sort of blue-collar industrial production shop that Trump and his allies say they want to help. Instead of being helped, she found herself dealing with fallout from the tariff announcement: canceled orders, higher prices, and enough uncertainty to put on hold a planned expansion of the company's Plattsburgh, New York, manufacturing center on the banks of Lake Champlain.

  What would she tell Trump if she got the chance? "Stop the nonsense. We've worked hard to get us to a place where we can perform well and we can take care of our customers, and this is putting that in jeopardy."

  Unfortunately, stopping the nonsense seems to be the last thing on Trump's mind. To a jaundiced eye, it appears he likes nonsense, the kind he creates, most of all.

• And that's why he had to go. Veronique de Rugy takes sides: Musk Is Right to Want End of Green & Black Subsidies.

  In the fight between President Trump and Elon Musk, I would say that Elon Musk is right. The One Big, Beautiful Bill is fiscally irresponsible because, for the benefit of special interests, it fails to make the most pro-growth provisions permanent. It is also because of its lack of spending cuts or the closing of tax loopholes. (Jack Salmon and I have a list of all the tax expenditures that should be eliminated from the tax code here.)

  Mr. Trump claims that “Elon’s upset because we took the EV mandate . . . which was a lot of money for electric vehicles and, you know, they’re having a hard time, and they want us to pay billions of dollars in subsidies.” The president also noted that these subsidies are silly and shouldn’t exist. He is correct. He added that “Elon knew this from the beginning; he knew it from a long time ago.” But his accusation doesn’t align with Musk’s public statements.

  Geez, Vero, are you saing that Trump has an iffy relationship with the truth? Hard to believe.

Provided via Hot Air's David Strom, the song stylings of NY Senator Chuck Schumer: Big Beautiful Bill Will Kill Us All.

UNHINGED: @SenSchumer says "WE'RE ALL GOING TO DIE" if we pass the largest tax cut in history, block illegals from taxpayer-funded health care, and cut the deficit.

These are NOT serious people. pic.twitter.com/AFeiDuaYjR

— Rapid Response 47 (@RapidResponse47) June 4, 2025

But of course Remy did it better, seven years ago:

In related news, the Nation (hopefully) thinks Joni Ernst’s Cruelty and Sarcasm Might Cost Her Her Job. And in case you haven't heard, the subhed:

Iowa’s Republican senator says gutting Medicaid is no worry because “we all are going to die.” Voters seem to disagree.

So: sarcastic? I can see why one might think so.

Cruel? That's a matter of opinion, I think.

But accurate? Yes, absolutely. If "voters disagree" I've got some bad news for them.

Also of note:

• On a related note… Kevin D. Williamson goes Nietzschean! Or maybe not, but that was my first thought reading his headline: Beyond Good and Evil.

  I recently participated in a debate/discussion with regulation scholar Wayne Crews, my colleague at the Competitive Enterprise Institute and author of the invaluable annual regulatory survey Ten Thousand Commandments. The subject was DOGE, about which we just barely disagree: His position is that DOGE is better than nothing, and mine is that DOGE is worse than nothing. Where we agree is that in concerns touching both spending and regulation, Congress is the solution—because Congress is the problem. 

  Or, more precisely, Congress is the problem most closely at hand. 

  Politicians who face the voters periodically have a schedule of incentives that is different from what businesses experience in the marketplace—it didn’t take two years for consumers to offer a verdict on New Coke or the Ford Edsel—and the nature of the incentives is different, too, but they do ultimately respond to the voters who either reward or punish them. That’s another way of saying that peoples who have recourse to democratic processes get approximately the government they deserve. Our Congress problem ultimately proceeds not from the character of House Speaker Mike Johnson or Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer but from the character of the American people, of whom Elon Musk is about as good a representative as a harem-keeping ketamine-addled billionaire from South Africa could hope to be.

  Musk and the Muskovites talk about the world of politics and policy in terms of good and evil, and most of the idiotic catchphrases of the contemporary right—elites, Deep State, woke, etc.—are just dumb and/or dishonest ways of saying evil. Progressives rely on roughly the same figures of speech when they talk about corporations or the Federalist Society or, when the subject comes up, me. This thinking, if we are to flatter it with that illustrious gerund, extends from individuals to institutions, with millions of Americans apparently believing in all sincerity that Harvard and Google and this or that bloc on the Supreme Court and whichever political party isn’t theirs have the priorities and values they have because the people involved are evil.

  We don't give the voters enough disrespect. (See previous item.)

• I won't dance, don't ask me. Martin Gurri has a question that should worry us all: Will You Be a Dancing Monkey in the Age of AI?

  Tyler Cowen is usually the smartest person in the room. I consider him a friend, so I’ve often been in the room with him, and when he speaks, on any number of subjects, there tends to be a pause in the conversation as people reach for their notepads.

  With Avital Balwit, Cowen recently co-wrote a fascinating article, published by The Free Press, on the many ways the arrival of artificial intelligence will reconfigure our basic humanity. I don’t know Balwit personally, but she tells us that at 26 she holds an important position at Anthropic, the company responsible for an AI large language model called Claude. So I suspect that she, too, is extraordinarily smart.

  So here we have two extremely intelligent humans confronting the reality of transcendentally intelligent machines—and while the vision of the future they describe in their article very much leans on the side of optimism, their gut reaction is to feel diminished. AI, they tell us, will trigger “the most profound identity crisis humanity has ever faced.” The reason? AI spells the end of “human intellectual supremacy—a position we’ve held unchallenged for our entire existence.” That is, people who once thought of themselves as the pinnacle of brainpower will now struggle “to live meaningful lives in a world where they are no longer the smartest and most capable entities in it.”

  My initial reflection on reading this was, Whew, could be a lot worse . . . I’m a baby boomer. The big, scary invention in my youth was the nuclear bomb, which threatened to cause the end of human existence, rather than just existential anguish. Those who survived being pulverized would be eaten by 40-foot mutated insects, Hollywood reliably informed us.

  As a boomer myself, I'm inclined to agree with Martin. See what you think. Or get an AI to tell you what you should think.

• This is what happens after decades of grade inflation. Jay Nordlinger has a substack, and it's a reliable source for keeping track of international despotism. I therefore kinda regret that I'm going to nitpick his recent Cries for Freedom. Near the beginning:

  The Oslo Freedom Forum is a conference of the Human Rights Foundation, based in New York. The CEO of HRF is Thor Halvorssen, a Venezuelan with a Norwegian name. (People have never been confined within boundaries, for long.) He greets the attendees at the 2025 Forum by saying that our “shared mission” is “to champion individual liberty and to confront tyranny wherever it persists.”

  Authoritarian regimes “control more than two thirds of the world’s population,” he says. Resistance can seem futile; change can seem impossible.

  What?!

  The source of this two-thirds claim seems to be the 2021 Global State of Democracy Report from "International IDEA" ("an intergovernmental organization (IGO) with a mandate to support sustainable democracy worldwide.") And their actual claim is a bit more, um, "nuanced":

  More than a quarter of the world’s population now live in democratically backsliding countries. Together with those living in outright non-democratic regimes, they make up more than two-thirds of the world’s population.

  And, yes, I bet you saw this coming:

  The Global State of Democracy 2021 shows that more countries than ever are suffering from ‘democratic erosion’ (decline in democratic quality), including in established democracies. The number of countries undergoing ‘democratic backsliding’ (a more severe and deliberate kind of democratic erosion) has never been as high as in the last decade, and includes regional geopolitical and economic powers such as Brazil, India and the United States.

  And that's how you get "authoritarian regimes" controlling two-thirds of the world population: include the US. In 2021.

  (And don't say: "Well, yeah, COVID.")

• Okay, maybe they have a point about authoritarianism. Kevin Corcoran notes one recent incursion that DOGE seems to have missed: Your Seat Room Exceeds Your Allowable Freedom. About a recent recall notice going out for the Volkswagen "ID.Buzz":

  Well, it turns out Volkswagen had given passengers in the back row too much space. In most three row vehicles, the seats in the last row tend to be small and cramped, but Volkswagen designed their vehicle to make the seats comfortable and spacious, allowing for a pleasant seating experience. Regulators, however, would have none of this. You see, the back row consists of two seats, both wide enough to comfortably seat two full size adults. In fact, the seats were so spacious that regulators argued people might decide to squeeze a third person in the back row, between the two designated seats. But that third person wouldn’t have a seatbelt! Therefore the only acceptable option according to regulators is to make sure that the seats can only barely fit two people. If you let car manufactures provide space to safely and comfortably fit two passengers, people might take the opportunity to unsafely and uncomfortably squeeze in three passengers. So the rules require you only allow enough space to seat two people uncomfortably.

  In order to bring things in line with what The Rules Require™, Volkswagen will take in the recalled vehicles and install a barrier in between the two seats in the back row, effectively shrinking the seating space available to convert it into the kind of cramped seating the law demands. I imagine a lot of current ID.Buzz owners will decline to get their car “fixed” in this way and just ignore the recall, but future owners will not be so lucky.

  But of course, if you let people sit in the imaginary third seat… people will die!

I'm glad Mr. Ramirez didn't use my headline for a punchline, though.

But here are some words on that topic, from Clark Packard and Alfredo Carrillo Obregon at Cato: Meet the New Steel Tariffs, Same as the Old Steel Tariffs.

As near as I can tell, explicit references to "Won't Get Fooled Again" lyrics are only in the article's headline. I hope, reader, you stocked up on steel and aluminum.

Also of note:

• Time will tell. As it usually does. That doesn't stop Jeffrey Blehar from asking: What Did Elon Musk Actually Accomplish, Except His Own Downfall?.

  As most are no doubt already aware, yesterday Elon Musk broke his silence about the “big, beautiful” spending bill that is currently wending its way through a Republican Congress. Calling it a “disgusting abomination,” he added, “Shame on those who voted for it: you know you did wrong. You know it.” This bill, of course, is likely to end up being the primary legislative accomplishment of Donald Trump’s first year back in office. He pushed the House Republican caucus furiously to get it across the finish line there, to the point where its passage by a few votes felt — despite the seeming last-minute drama of it all — a bit like scripted kabuki theater.

  One can only imagine how unhappy the Trump administration is with this, especially since several Senate lawmakers have used the opportunity afforded by Elon’s apostasy to poke their heads out from behind his protective skirt and chip in with their own reservations. (Profiles in cowardice, nearly all of them, with Rand Paul as a notable exception.) The Trump administration has, as of this writing at least, held its fire — uncharacteristic when a former ally directly criticizes it. It’s easy enough to grasp why in this case: Nobody wants to anger the world’s richest man, especially when he also happens to own and control the world’s most relevant social media site. Perhaps Trump may just let Elon stew online, rather than provoke a MAGA civil war. Perhaps not. Regardless of whether fireworks follow, this was always the way the story was going to end.

  That last link goes to Jeffrey's February post, which was headlined How Elon Musk’s Service to Trump Will Probably, Eventually End. He now reveals that the "Probably" was demanded by his editors. I think he got a bunch of "toldya so" credits.

• Violent rhetoric from local Democrat. New Hampshire House Democratic leader Alexis Simpson talks tough in my lousy local paper: Fight now for NH public schools before it's too late.

  Over the past few months, in Rindge, school officials warned they might need to cut their championship winning sports programs entirely just to balance the budget. In Wolfeboro, part of the ceiling at the high school literally caved in. And in Manchester, the state’s largest school district, administrators say they can’t afford to replace retiring teachers or move forward with long-planned expansions to athletic programs.

  This is not a dystopian projection; it’s happening right now in New Hampshire. While communities are scraping together every last local property tax dollar to keep public schools running, the state is already pouring tens of millions into a school voucher program to pay for private and religious schools with virtually no oversight — even subsidizing private ski passes, music lessons, and undisclosed Amazon and Walmart purchases.

  Yes, it's another broadside against the proposal to expand New Hampshire's Education Freedom Account (EFA) Program. Making the usual arguments. Some observations:

  • Can you read Alexis's first paragraph and not get the niggling thought: "Gee, Rindge, Wolfeboro, and Manchester schools are really poorly managed."
  • Apparently New Hampshire Dems have given up arguing what's good for students and parents. It's all about what's best for "public schools". Not exactly the same thing.
  • Alexis uses the term "voucher" twelve times in her short column. Voucher, voucher, voucher! Apparently, that's a word that focus groups have found has unfavorable connotations among the citizenry.
  • Alexis fails to deal with a pretty obvious point: if "public schools" were doing a decent job of meeting the needs of students and parents, there would be no use of the EFA program. Nobody would bother with the extra work involved.

  Which brings us to our next item.

• Doing less with more. Above, Alexis relies on rabble-rousing rhetoric. At the Josiah Bartlett Center, Andrew Cline has some facts: Per-pupil spending in NH nearly doubles from 2001-2024 as district public schools spend $1.25 billion more on 54,000 fewer students.

  Average per-pupil spending in New Hampshire district public schools has nearly doubled this century, as student enrollment declined sharply and reading and math assessment scores fell, a new Josiah Bartlett Center for Public Policy study finds.

  Total public school district spending in New Hampshire increased by an inflation-adjusted $1.25 billion, or 45%, from 2001-2024 as enrollment fell by 54,381 students, or 26%, state data show.

  The large increase in total spending combined with the large drop in enrollment caused a near doubling of average per-pupil spending, the new study shows. Total per-pupil spending in district public schools rose by an inflation-adjusted 96% from 2001-2024, meaning that the average district public school student in New Hampshire had 96% more in real resources devoted to his or her education in 2024 than in 2001.

  It's not a pretty picture, Emily Alexis.

• I've noticed this mysel… Oh, wait, you said "cents". Max Raskin bids farewell to a small bit of hard money: As We Get Older and Stop Making Cents. (WSJ gifted link)

  It’s wise for the U.S. Mint to stop putting pennies into circulation next year. President Trump’s decision will save taxpayers money: The penny cost about 2 cents to make in 2007, and costs nearly 4 cents today. But the death of the penny says something unfortunate about our economy. The 1-cent piece is an important barometer of monetary health.

  Hard currency is a check on government profligacy. Government prefers cheaply produced money, which has a high seigniorage: the difference between the face value instrument and its production costs. The greater the seigniorage, the more money politicians have to spend. In the U.S., this means a preference for paper bills. According to the U.S. Mint, the production costs of American currency vary from a few cents to print small paper bills to about 15 cents to mint a quarter. Even the costliest greenback, the $100 bill, costs only 9 cents. And the penny has the worst seigniorage of the bunch.

  It will save taxpayers money; but (as I have previously said): it's not a lot of money.

Jeff Maurer turns his substack over to "Deniz Güneş”, [not really] the director of the Center for Public Information at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Deniz posts for an admirable reason: The CDC Would Like to Get Ahead of RFK Junior’s Future Statements.

And there's more. Much more. Deniz tries to cover the obvious bases, but with Junior, who knows?

Also of note:

• Gutting, slashing, cutting, … Reporters are working their thesauri overtime looking for description of budget decreases. Liz Wolfe goes with the G-word: The Gutting of the National Park Service.

  Why should the National Park Service be funding so many sites? And what would happen if some of those properties were transferred to state or tribal management?

  The Trump administration is asking those sensible questions, and is proposing to cut $1.2 billion from the agency's budget, "mainly by shedding sites that it considers too obscure or too local to merit federal management" per Bloomberg. This is a pet issue of mine: It's always been unclear to me why we expect taxpayers across the country to pay for the upkeep and management of so many designated sites, including ones they will never visit and have never heard of. Do you really need to be paying for New York City's Theodore Roosevelt Birthplace National Historic Site? Or North Dakota's Knife River Indian Villages National Historic Site?

  I say this as a nature and history appreciator. My interest is not in having these places razed; it's in making sure the federal government is careful about where its money goes and what's actually in the national interest.

  "The National Park Service (NPS) responsibilities include a large number of sites that are not 'National Parks,' in the traditionally understood sense, many of which receive small numbers of mostly local visitors, and are better categorized and managed as State-level parks," reads a federal memo on the matter. Hear, hear! "The Budget would continue supporting many national treasures, but there is an urgent need to streamline staffing and transfer certain properties to State-level management to ensure the long-term health and sustainment of the National Park system." Though an official list of sites whose management will be shifted is not yet available, Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum (whom you may remember from the 2024 Republican presidential primary) says that only the 63 "crown jewel" national parks will remain under NPS control.

  That link in the second paragraph goes to a story with the headline "Trump Plans to Offload National Park Sites, But States Don’t Want Them". Gee, that's a shame. Maybe auction them off to see if anybody wants them.

  I know: the NPS is one of the more sacred of cows in the federal barnyard, and any discussion of budget cutting will automatically be characterized as putting a waterslide on El Capitan. So I'm not optimistic that's a fight that Burgum will win.

• The nation that controls drone batteries will control the world! Noah Smith sees cause for alarm in Ukraine's drone strike against Russian bombers: How Chinese drones could defeat America. And it quickly turns into a blame-Trumpfest:

  The Ukrainian attack on Russia’s nuclear bombers shows how insane and self-defeating the GOP’s attack on the battery industry is. Batteries were what powered the Ukrainian drones that destroyed the pride of Russia’s air fleet; if the U.S. refuses to make batteries, it will be unable to make similar drones in case of a war against China. Bereft of battery-powered FPV [First-Person Vision] drones, America would be at a severe disadvantage in the new kind of war that Ukraine and Russia have pioneered.

  Unfortunately, Trump and the GOP have decided to think of batteries as a culture-war issue instead of one of national security. They think they’re attacking hippie-dippy green energy, sticking it to the socialist environmentalist kids and standing up for good old red-blooded American oil and gas. Instead, what they’re actually doing is unilaterally disarming America’s future drone force and ceding the key weapon of the modern battlefield to China.

  In any case, unless America’s leaders wake up very quickly to the military importance of batteries, magnets, injection molding, and drones themselves, the U.S. may end up looking like the British Navy in 1941 — or the Italian Navy in 1940. A revolution in military affairs is in process, and America is willfully missing the boat.

  Noah's plenty worried! And (aside from his TDS) he makes some good points. But I would hope that our military bases and warships already have decent defenses against FPV drones. (If not, it's probably time to fire some more generals.)

• Insufficient loyalty to the Dear Leader. In Trump's eyes, that's enough to put the Federalist Society in the Crosshairs. Jonah Goldberg:

  Last week, the Court of International Trade delivered a blow to Donald Trump’s global trade war. It found that the worldwide tariffs Trump unveiled on “Liberation Day” as well his earlier tariffs pretextually aimed at stopping fentanyl coming in from Mexico and Canada (as if) were beyond his authority. The three-judge panel was surely right about the Liberation Day tariffs and probably right about the fentanyl tariffs, but there’s a better case that, while bad policy, the fentanyl tariffs were not unlawful.

  Please forgive a lengthy excerpt of Trump’s response on Truth Social, but it speaks volumes:

  How is it possible for [the CIT judges] to have potentially done such damage to the United States of America? Is it purely a hatred of ‘TRUMP?’ What other reason could it be? I was new to Washington, and it was suggested that I use The Federalist Society as a recommending source on Judges. I did so, openly and freely, but then realized that they were under the thumb of a real ‘sleazebag’ named Leonard Leo, a bad person who, in his own way, probably hates America, and obviously has his own separate ambitions. … In any event, Leo left The Federalist Society to do his own ‘thing.’ I am so disappointed in The Federalist Society because of the bad advice they gave me on numerous Judicial Nominations. This is something that cannot be forgotten!

  Let’s begin with the fact that Trump cannot conceive of a good explanation for an inconvenient court ruling other than Trump Derangement Syndrome. It’s irrelevant that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), the 1977 law the administration invoked to impose the relevant tariffs, does not even mention the word “tariff” or that Congress never envisioned the IEEPA as a tool for launching a trade war with every nation in the world, “Penguin Island” included. Also disregard the fact that the decision was unanimous and only one of the three judges was appointed by Trump (the other two were Reagan and Obama appointees).

  Trump is the foremost practitioner of what I call Critical Trump Theory—anything bad for Trump is unfair, illegitimate, and proof that sinister forces are rigging the system against him. No wonder then that Trump thinks Leonard Leo, formerly a guiding light at the Federalist Society, the premier conservative legal organization, is a “sleazebag” and “bad person.” Note: Leo is neither of those things.

  Uncoincidentally, the WSJ reported on Leonard Leo the other day, and found This Conservative Is Doing Just Fine, Thank You, After Getting Dumped by Trump (WSJ gifted link).

• To make it even more socialistic? Were it not for Jonathan Turley, I probably would not have known what Michael Moore was up to these days. As it turns out, it's baking Pie-Crust Patriotism: Michael Moore Rewrites the Pledge of Allegiance.

  Rev. Francis Bellamy would not likely be won over by the Moore remake. (The phrase “under God” was incorporated later into the Pledge of Allegiance on June 14, 1954). Here is the new version:

  “I pledge allegiance to the people of the United States of America. And to the democracy for which we all stand: One person, one vote, one nation, part of one world, everyone! A seat at the table! Everyone! A slice of the pie! With liberty and justice, equality, and kindness and the pursuit of happiness for all.”

  As an initial matter, I fail to see how the nation is embodied by a run-on sentence that has more exclamation marks than a pre-teen’s text to bffs.

  In case you haven't heard my rant about Pledge: its original author, Francis Bellamy, was a Christian socialist, and inveighed against the evils of capitalism from his Baptist pulpit in Boston. I'm in agreement with Gene Healy's Cato essay What's Conservative about the Pledge of Allegiance?, in which he deemed it "a slavish ritual of devotion to the state, wholly inappropriate for a free people."

I'm sure that serious point is in here somewhere, but there's also an appeal to my inner 14-year-old. Thanks, Remy!

For a flatulence-free explanation, see this March article from Jack Nicastro: What will Trump's strategic crypto reserve look like?

And, yes, Fartcoin is real. For a sufficiently hand-waving definition of "real".

Also of note:

• A newfound respect. Katherine Mangu-Ward's lead editorial in the July issue of Reason is Welcoming Anti-Trump Liberals to the Free Trade Club.

  After decades of shouting into the void that free trade is good, those of us in the "eliminate tariffs, embrace comparative advantage, and let me buy my haggis-flavored chips online without an import tax" crowd are experiencing something that hasn't happened in a while: new friends. Things have been especially lonely in recent years, as the right veered away from offering even lip service to free trade while the left coasted on the fumes of its union-driven protectionist past.

  But a recent poll from the Polarization Research Lab shows those same lefties making a sudden and striking turn. At the start of 2024, liberals and conservatives were nearly identical in their lukewarm support for unrestricted trade—about 20 percent each in favor. Following President Donald Trump's electoral win and renewed protectionist rhetoric, liberal support has more than doubled to over 40 percent.

  And, yes, like Fartcoin, haggis-flavored chips are real. KMW's bottom line:

  If you're ready to get serious about dismantling the tariffs that strangle global exchange, grab a seat. (Or in the immortal words of Mean Girls: "Get in, loser. We're going shopping.") But if you're just here to score points in the tribal partisan war of the moment, don't expect us to hand over the aux cord. You can sit with us and listen—but the playlist is Milton Friedman, Frédéric Bastiat, and David Ricardo. And we're playing it on repeat.

• We haven't said this enough lately. Robert Tracinski writes at Discourse: End the FCC.

  Like free trade, Trump's weaponization has awakened liberals to the danger of "unfettered power" in the executive branch.

  There are many chickens coming home to roost in the second Trump administration. For more than a century, we have been creating weak spots in our constitutional system that pose a huge potential for abuse by a power-hungry chief executive. Now Donald Trump is seeking all of them out and using them.

  Let’s zero in on one particularly dangerous area: his abuse of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), the regulator for the airwaves and therefore for broadcast media.

  Shortly after taking office, Trump went on social media to direct his new FCC chair, Brendan Carr, to punish CBS because Trump didn’t like reports about Ukraine and Greenland on “60 Minutes.” He said that the network “should lose their license,” and he urged Carr to “impose the maximum fines and punishment, which is substantial, for their unlawful and illegal behavior.” The FCC does not license the network itself, as Trump seems to think, but it does control the licenses for the network’s individual local TV stations.

  Robert goes into the long history of FCC abuses, with Trump's only the most recent. His specific proposal: "Shrink it down into a technical office for the registration of broadcast rights." Not quite drowning it in the sink, but that works for me.

• It's not rocket science, but it is physics. Bjorn Lomborg takes to the WSJ to reveal The Physics Behind the Spanish Blackout (WSJ gifted link).

  When a grid failure plunged 55 million people in Spain and Portugal into darkness at the end of April, it should have been a wake-up call on green energy. Climate activists promised that solar and wind power were the future of cheap, dependable electricity. The massive half-day blackout shows otherwise. The nature of solar and wind generation makes grids that rely on them more prone to collapse—an issue that’s particularly expensive to ameliorate.

  Spanish authorities were warned. They kinda knew. They are, even now, averting their eyes.

• This one simple trick will solve everything. Eli Lehrer at the Dispatch advocates Harm Reduction to Heal America.

  Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has claimed that 5G causes cancer. He has alleged that vaccines are part of a vast pharmaceutical industry conspiracy. He’s questioned the safety of fluoridated water, food dyes, and weed killers. Some of his claims are demonstrably false, others speculative, and a few—like the health effects of food additives and ultra-processed diets—deserve a careful look. But set aside the conspiracies for a moment, and Kennedy is onto a real issue: Americans are dying younger not because of poor doctors or bad hospitals, but because of the way they live.

  For all the nation’s medical innovation and spending (both lead the world), U.S. life expectancy currently trails nearly every other wealthy country. An American born today can expect to live about 78.4 years, compared to 81.1 in the United Kingdom, 83.1 in France, and 84.1 in Japan. And the gap isn’t because of less access to care or lower-quality doctors—on measures of medical treatment from cancer to acute hospital care Americans fare much better than the rest of the world.

  And serious research from dozens of sources confirms this. A landmark report from the National Academy of Sciences found that Americans die younger than people in peer nations not because of inadequate medical care, but because they suffer more from what is called “adverse health-related behaviors.” A 2023 study from the Bloomberg American Health Initiative drilled deeper and found that the bulk of the U.S.-U.K. life expectancy gap is explained by just four factors: cardiovascular disease (resulting from obesity and work stress), drug overdoses, car accidents, and gun deaths (overwhelmingly suicides)—all of which are lifestyle- or environment-related, not failings of the health care system. Even where Americans already have made a lifestyle change for the better, they’ve generally done so later than their counterparts in other wealthy countries. Thus, even though American smoking rates today are about average for rich places, the damage resulting from historically higher rates of smoking continues to impact mortality figures.

  Well, that's sobering news. Albeit not sobering enough to get me to stop drinking wine.

  As stated in the headline, Eli recommends "harm reduction", a non-nannying approach to decrease the damage Americans are doing to themselves. He outlines various approaches to ameliorate obesity, opioid addiction, smoking, traffic fatalities, and more. Interesting!