Pun Salad

The WSJ brings some worrisome news: Many Democrats Break With Israel, Back Measure Stripping Military Aid. (WSJ gifted link)

All 104 supporters of the aid cut were Democrats, save for the measure's author, Thomas Massie. The WSJ article names them for your convenience. My CongressCritter, Chris Pappas voted against. [UPDATE: Now that I looked at the roll call, it turns out Pappas actually voted "Present". Accordingly, my estimate of his spinelessness has been increased by a few points.] Somewhat surprisingly, New Hampshire's other CongressCritter, Maggie Goodlander, voted in favor of eliminating the aid. She tweeted her excuse:

My statement on Rep. Massie’s amendment to H.R. 8595.https://t.co/PHxcP6rHLQ pic.twitter.com/wXs5Xxg9dk

— Congresswoman Maggie Goodlander (@RepGoodlander) July 16, 2026

As I don't need to tell you: make your own judgment about Maggie's tergiversation. I assume she is feeling some heat from her primary opponent. NH Journal includes that angle in its story: Centrist No More? Goodlander Votes to End Israel Aid.

Paige's campaign website's issues page is here, and … well, immediately after I looked at it, I read Jeff Maurer's recent post about a different campaign, which contained the capsule summary: "It’s a hodgepodge of shallow sound bites that appeal to morons[.]"

Also of note:

• Pirates of the Strait of Hormuz? Kevin D. Williamson belittles Trump's inconstant and whimsical approach to Strait Gangsterism. (archive.today link)

  Iran is being swept by a wave of nationalism, while the United States is being swept by a wave of explosive diarrhea—do you ever get the feeling that Hegelian capital-H History is laughing at you?

  In a war with a filthy little junta in Tehran, Donald Trump has managed to make the United States of America the bad guy. If you are looking for a quick-and-easy definition of shmuck, there you go. Of course, it doesn’t help that it is an illegal and immoral war being waged by an incompetent game show host.

  What did it take to get Iran’s former dissidents to line up shoulder-to-shoulder with the ayatollahs who have been murdering and torturing them? A former opponent of the ruling cabal in Tehran—one who had been tear-gassed and beaten so badly that “he couldn’t move for days” during the 2022 protests—tells the Wall Street Journal: “They said that a civilization was going to be destroyed, not a regime.” You’ll remember that post, no doubt. I guess the Iranians haven’t heard whatever the Persian is for “take him seriously, not literally.” It is a pity that Lindsey Graham, the Rudy Giuliani of the Senate, is no longer around to explain it to the long-suffering Iranian people, who surely would have benefited from the wisdom of his experience and the constancy of his judgment.

  Let me put on my Pollyanna hat and say: It could still work out well, eventually, because Trump might accidentally hit on a working strategy.

  Still, we wouldn't be in this situation under President Nikki Haley.

• Send in the clown. Jacob Sullum observes; During His Confirmation Hearing, Todd Blanche Defends Trump's Blatantly Corrupt IRS 'Settlement'.

  "I'm his lawyer," Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Wednesday, describing his relationship with President Donald Trump. Blanche quickly corrected himself: "Was his lawyer," he clarified. But the slip went to the heart of the main question that senators should be asking as they decide whether to confirm Blanche's nomination as attorney general: Would he use that position to pursue justice or to advance Trump's personal interests?

  Probably the latter, judging from Blanche's central role in Trump's brazenly corrupt "settlement agreement" with the IRS, which a federal judge this week condemned as the "improper" product of blatant self-dealing. That cozy arrangement, which was predicated on a lawsuit that U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams said was phony from the beginning, delivered huge favors to Trump, his family, and his followers at taxpayers' expense.

  One more Article of Impeachment, assuming that CongressCritters grow a spine. But …

• Worrying about what people will think. Audrey Fahlberg looks at the possibilities: A Third Trump Impeachment? Some Democrats Aren’t So Sure.

  If the Democratic Party is united on one issue, it is opposition to President Donald Trump. Yet despite their shared desire to impede the president’s policies and reclaim the White House in 2028, Democrats are deeply divided about how far to go in fighting Trump in the meantime. A struggle among Democratic factions could determine whether Trump will be impeached for a third time.

  This debate is playing out behind closed doors. Back in March, House Democrats gathered in Seattle for a policy retreat organized by the party’s campaign arm. At one point, Representative Adam Smith of Washington, the highest-ranking Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, warned his colleagues that impeaching Trump again would be a mistake—and could backfire on the party politically. Most people in the room applauded, according to two people who attended.

  For Smith, the political calculus is straightforward. Polls consistently suggest that Democrats will claim a House majority after this year’s elections and regain the power to launch impeachment proceedings. Yet doubters such as Smith believe that impeaching Trump a third time wouldn’t make him go away; it would only rerun a failed political playbook that previously benefited Republicans. “We impeached him twice last time; both times he got stronger after we did it,” Smith said in a recent interview with The Free Press.

  This is not going to merit a new chapter in Profiles in Courage, in other words: Democrats worrying less about the country, more about possibly jeopardizing their political future.

Recently on the book blog:

I got a bargain on the Kindle version: $4.99. My reader reports main text (not counting footnotes and references) is 1012 pages, so that works out to be slightly under a half cent per page! What a deal.

As you can deduce from that page count, however, it is a meticulously detailed biography. For example, at one point it reports: "From 1933 through 1938 the seminar met at 2:15 on Mondays…". And Hayek was only one of the three seminar conveners!

And the book only goes up to 1950. Volume II is apparently in process.

So I confess: I skimmed a lot along the way. Still, I got a pretty good picture of Hayek's life: his family and friends (and some enemies), his intellectual development, his professional odyssey, and ongoing controversies. And a lot of history, economic and otherwise.

I was especially taken by the book's description of the economic climate that caused Hayek to write his most popular book, The Road to Serfdom, a jeremiad against socialist central planning. I did not fully appreciate how many "men of science", especially in Britain, advocated strongly for a "planned economy" during and after World War II. (They were also pretty moon-eyed about Stalin and the USSR.) Hayek and a few others were pretty lonely in their advocacy of free markets, private property, and liberalism in general. Arguably, Hayek's book saved the US (and eventually other countries) from disaster. (At least until now.)

The book also discusses Hayek's troubled love life. His first marriage to Hella was continually roiled by his infatuation with his first love (and distant cousin) Lenerl. Who was married to someone else. Hella was adamantly opposed to divorce, which caused Hayek no end of professional, romantic, legal, and financial woes. Eventually, the divorce happened, but Hayek doesn't come off well, even in the book's sympathetic retelling.

This is making the rounds.

In the Senate primary, Michigan Democrats have a choice between a candidate who wants to abolish prisons and campaigns with Hasan Piker and whatever Haley Stevens is doing. pic.twitter.com/UqZeXy2BoA

— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) July 13, 2026

Some people think of "Pat", Julia Sweeney's androgenous character from the early 90's. I'm not really seeing it. ("Pat" is an example of SNL's past tendency to feature characters long past their expiration date.)

I'm also seeing people suggesting "Matt Foley". Yes, definitely! Although that's not too complimentarry to CongressCritter Stevens… I don't care. If the shoe fits, ma'am.

However the first character I thought of was Molly Shannon's Sally O'Malley. Just sayin'. (If Sally and Foley had a baby…)

And some cads out there are making predictable comments about SNL not being funny any more. Pshaw! I think it's never been funnier!

Let's skip over to more serious analysis from David Drucker, who wonders rhetorically: Do Michigan Democrats Want Populism or Pragmatism?

So Sally Haley might actually be the better choice. I'm just considering myself lucky to not being a Michigan Democrat.

Also of note:

• No, she's not talking about socialism. Ann Althouse's headline is pretty dire: Get ready. It's coming. That thing you thought you wanted. Illustrated with a tweet:

  This will be such a nightmare. pic.twitter.com/qrD03wxEdl

  — Julian Mille☈ (@ATLAreaWx) July 14, 2026

  Ann's commentary:

  Children going to school in the dark. Dangerous. It will become obvious. A child's name will be on the repeal legislation.

  I'll dissent: Ann is assuming that people won't demand that work and school schedules be adjusted so that kids don't go to school (and adults to work) in the dark.

  As usual, I will link back to my own crackpot idea from 2013: The Right Number of Time Zones is Zero. Wherein I call for the separation of time and state!

• Let's stay off the Road to Serfdom. Emma Camp thinks Capitalism Gets a Bum Rap. (WSJ gifted link)

  Capitalism has been getting a bad rap. According to one 2025 Gallup poll, only 54% of Americans have a positive view of capitalism. More Democrats think highly of socialism than capitalism. Another survey, from 2019, found that younger Americans were the least likely to have positive feelings about capitalism.

  Capitalism has been getting a bad rap. According to one 2025 Gallup poll, only 54% of Americans have a positive view of capitalism. More Democrats think highly of socialism than capitalism. Another survey, from 2019, found that younger Americans were the least likely to have positive feelings about capitalism.

  As Matthew Yglesias argued recently, when many people say “capitalism,” they mean “the status quo,” even if that status quo involves a lot of problems caused not by free markets, but by government regulation and cronyist intervention. The housing market, he notes, is the most obvious example of this: “Younger people’s lived experience of ‘capitalism’ is of central planning and massive shortages of the single most important item they consume.”

  The result is that anything that seems to be going wrong in American life, no matter how large or small, no matter how unrelated to free markets, will pretty reliably be blamed on capitalism.

  One major component of the satus quo is, of course, Donald Trump. Barring unforeseen events, we've got him status quoing for (as I type) 920 more days.

• Are we sure the doctors got all the brain worms? Somebody in the Reason offices has to pay attention to the stupid news, and I guess Marc Oestreich has that job this week. He notes: RFK Jr. wants the government to teach everyone how to cook again.

  In a recent interview with U.S. News, the secretary for the Department of Health and Human Services laid it out. Medical students will take cooking classes, then "go out into the communities and teach people how to cook in a mobile unit." The roughly 5,000 uniformed officers of the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps are "taking nutrition classes and developing teaching kitchens." A new federal platform will post recipes for eating well on $10 a day, plus videos on grocery shopping and—his words—"how to use cutlery and cutting boards." The diagnosis behind the whole program, offered at a conference in March: "people have forgotten how to cook."

  Maybe some have. Americans could certainly stand to cook more. But the institution volunteering to teach them has spent 46 years issuing dietary instruction with total confidence, reversing much of it, and responding to each failure by extending its reach.

  You may have thought we libertarians were kidding about the encroaching nanny state.

A recent example:

The Washington Post editorial page made a public pivot to "personal liberties and free markets," and then you go to the comments, and the readers are obviously BlueSky types leftover from the woke era. Not sure if this will work -- it feels like Antiques Roadshow pivoting to…

— Jeff Maurer (@JeffMightBWrong) July 13, 2026

The tweet-embedder clips off Jeff's final words: "… being a kickboxing tournament."

I hope it works. For today's example of the WaPo editorialists kickboxing a bad policy, see: Tariffs are (still) taxes on Americans. (WaPo gifted link)

I assume the "BlueSky type" commenters will go easier than usual on the editorialists for this take, since it's Trump-critical.

Also of note:

• My diagnosis: they take John Lennon's "Imagine" way too seriously. Kevin D. Williamson thinks The Socialists Don’t Really Want Socialism. (archive.today link)

  George Orwell was a man of the left who was clear-eyed about socialism and its practitioners: “One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words ‘Socialism’ and ‘Communism’ draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, ‘Nature Cure’ quack, pacifist, and feminist in England,” he wrote. In the U.S. context, he’d have had to have added “Jew-hating weirdos” and a few other categories.

  The Democratic Socialists of America, which has a foothold in the Democratic Party and is earnestly—and, at the moment, successfully—working to take it over, offers one of the all-time great motte-and-bailey propositions: When it is time to talk to normie voters, it’s all: “Oh, pish-posh, ‘socialism’ just means things like public roads and public schools, and those right-wingers who say that we’re a front for a bunch of communists kowtowing to Mao are just trying to scare you.” That’s the motte; the bailey is ... well, here is a screenshot of the homepage of the DSA’s “liberation caucus” you probably heard Jonah Goldberg talking about:

  [screenshot elided]

  Not every member of the DSA is a confessing Maoist or Leninist. All of them make common cause with confessing Maoists and Leninists, and with other advocates of a political movement that killed some 100 million people in the 20^th century. That isn’t the same thing as admiring Denmark or enjoying public libraries.

  If everything government does from sidewalks to national security is socialism, then socialism does not really mean anything. Happily, we do not have to entertain seriously that canard. Allow me to revisit some territory that will be familiar to longtime readers but maybe new to a few of you. The work of education is never completed.

  

  KDW goes into the econ-textbook description of "public goods", and how a lot of people get it wrong.

  Not that it matters, but I'm currently finishing up reading a Hayek bio (Amazon link at your right.) It only goes up to 1950, but covers the origin of the Mont Pelerin Society, designed to defend free markets and personal liberty (see above) against the attractions of post-WW2 socialism. One of the tales associated with the society's first meeting involved Ludwig von Mises stomping out of the room, declaring "You're all a bunch of socialists!"

• Will you guess correctly? Matt Welch makes a pretty obvious choice in his article, headlined The most corrupt presidency in American history. You might remember Bill Clinton's pardon of Mark Rich; Matt does and describes its sordidness well. But…

  You have likely never heard the name Trevor Milton, yet in a couple of key respects his 2025 pardon by President Donald Trump was worse. The founding CEO of the electric vehicle manufacturer Nikola Corporation, Milton in 2022 was convicted on three counts of investor fraud that could have brought him four years in prison and a staggering $676 million worth of mandated restitution to shareholders. Among his more notorious stunts was a 2018 promotional video of a supposedly functional prototype Nikola truck that was not in fact operational but had instead been rolled down a desert hill. Milton, represented in court by the brother of then–Attorney General Pam Bondi, was still awaiting final sentencing when he got the call from Trump announcing an unconditional pardon, no restitution (or remorse) required. When asked about the clemency, the president said: "They say the thing that he did wrong was he was one of the first people that supported a gentleman named Donald Trump for president….He supported Trump. He liked Trump." Milton and his wife, The Wall Street Journal reported, had donated "at least $3.2 million to Trump's 2024 election and to political groups and people in Trump's orbit." The couple had not previously demonstrated a financial interest in politics.

  `

  Milton's family paid more in political donations than Rich's. He had exponentially more in fines and restitutions taken off the table, and he has spent his post-clemency life not in humiliated exile but in lavish Washington excess, hobnobbing with the president and Cabinet members at investment conferences and black-tie events to gin up interest in his latest schemes. Such is the rule, not the exception: When it comes to plausibly pay-for-play pardons, Trump in his second term makes Bill Clinton and every other president look like pikers.

  Just one more item to add to next year's articles of impeachment. And Matt has more.

• A little less carnage. Randal O'Toole, the Antiplanner, summarizes Highway Accidents Killed 36,640 People in 2025.

  In April, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration announced that motor vehicle accidents killed 36,640 people in 2025, a 6.7 percent decrease from 2024. Last week, the agency released a breakdown of 2025 fatality data for various categories. For example, urban freeway fatalities were down 10 percent; urban arterials down 12 percent; pedestrians down 8 percent; but bicycle fatalities were up 4 percent.

  A further fun fact:

  Although fewer people died in each of the years between 2009 and 2015 than in 2025, 2025’s fatality rate per billion vehicle-miles of travel is almost the lowest it has ever been. While more than 100 people died per billion miles of travel in every year from 1900 to 1945, only 11.0 people died per billion in 2025. Out of the 125 years for which records have been kept, the only year that was lower was 2014, when 10.8 people died per billion vehicle-miles.

  Amazingly counter-intuitive: judged by fatality rate, Massachusetts is one of the safer states to drive in: 5.7 fatalities per billion vehicle-miles. New Hampshire is blood-soaked in comparison, with 9.9 fatalities per billion vehicle miles. (The worst state: New Mexico, 15.9.)

• Mister, we could use some painters like Church and Cole again. Megan Pidcock writes in the WSJ's "Free Expression" newsletter: Up the Hudson and Into the Heart of America.

  The Hudson River School, widely recognized as America’s first major artistic movement, holds a special place in my heart. Growing up, I often visited the movement’s collection at the Cleveland Museum of Art. I was drawn to the intricate landscapes and gorgeous skies painted carefully by human hands, as in “The View of Schroon Mountain” by the movement’s founder, Thomas Cole. It depicts the vastness of the Adirondacks with a burst of fall colors and detailed foliage. A group of Native Americans blends into the foreground and, if you squint, a canoe rests on the water at the mountain’s base. Though I traveled somewhere a few hours north (and a few months off) of this particular scene, it was thrilling to see scenery so similar to one of my favorite paintings in the world.

  The Hudson River School started in 1825 when Cole traveled to Catskill, N.Y., from New York City. After dabbling in portraiture, he wanted to make it as a landscape artist. Cole’s student, Frederic Edwin Church, carried on the tradition after Cole’s death in 1848. The style peaked in popularity in the 1850s and 1860s, capturing America’s fascination with nature untouched by man at a time when Romanticism was in its prime and “Manifest Destiny” reigned.

  I had my jaw-dropping intro to the Hudson River School when meandering through the Smithsonian's National Gallery of Art back in the 1970's, and perused The Voyage of Life, Thomas Cole's four paintings showing… well, the voyage of life. As my friend Emden Gansner asked, as I stared: "Where are you today?"

  I'm also a fan of Cole's less allegorical Notch of the White Mountains, an 1839 painting of Crawford Notch, viewed from the north. And driving on US 302, you can see what it looks like today.

  Crawford Notch was also the scene of the avalanche that killed the Willey family in 1826. By utter coincidence, the street on which Pun Salad Manor sits is named after them.

'Twas only five years ago:

Family members and peers are often best positioned to witness signs of mobilization to violence. Help prevent homegrown violent extremism. Visit https://t.co/bql36iSbig to learn how to spot suspicious behaviors and report them to the #FBI. #NatSec pic.twitter.com/ZwJp5h5bWD

— FBI (@FBI) July 11, 2021

For the record, the snitchy URL is now a no-workie. Memory hole!

But imagine the progressive freakout if the Trump Administration/FBI Director Kash Patel posted something similar today.

Just kidding. I have no idea, maybe they have posted something similar, and it's just escaped my notice amidst the usual torrent of wannabe fascism.

But anyhow that was from my five-year-ago post, which also looked at the bad vibes from Cuban dictator Miguel Díaz-Canel, CNN medical analyst Leana Wen, the United States Postal Service, and the Federal Trade Commission. Enjoy!

Also of note:

• Mass Incompetence. An op-ed authored by one Mindi Messmer appearing in my lousy local newspaper, Foster's Daily Democrat carried the ominous headline: The Merrimack sewage disaster was not an accident.

  On June 27, a severe storm overwhelmed Haverhill's wastewater system, and a 1970s-era 42-inch sewer force main cracked in two places. For days, roughly 8 million gallons of raw sewage poured into the Merrimack River daily. Bacteria counts at some locations reached 40 times the safe level. Forty-one Massachusetts beaches were closed. Shellfishing beds from Gloucester to Salisbury were closed. A temporary bypass stopped the discharge on July 1, but the river remains contaminated. Beaches remained closed through the July 4th holiday weekend, during a record heat wave, as families who just wanted to swim were told to stay out of the water.

  Mindi says "not an accident." So… sabotage?

  Nah. It was an accident, of the "Gee, we were hoping that wouldn't happen" variety. According to Mindi, it's due to …

  This is a funding crisis masquerading as a management crisis. The federal government's combined sewer overflow grant program, intended to serve more than 800 communities nationwide with aging combined sewer systems, has $41 million in funding. When municipalities cannot afford the fixes, the EPA moves the deadline. What should take 5 years takes 20 or 30. The infrastructure failure at the heart of this crisis belongs to both parties, across decades of governance at every level. The consent decree was signed under a Democratic administration. The grant program has been chronically underfunded through Republican and Democratic Congresses alike. The people who coulden't [sic] take their children to Crane Beach this July 4th were not checking which party is in power. They were checking whether it was safe to go into the water and were told no.

  Ah, it's Uncle Stupid's fault for not funnelling more cash to Haverhill!

  Or maybe it was Haverhill's (or the state of Massachusetts') fault for relying on the D.C. Shuffle.

  Look: Massachusetts has the highest per capita income among the 50 states. And the state has an income tax! There is no reason that the state couldn't fund this local infrastructure itself, especially since the eminently foreseeable "disaster" disproportionately affected other Massachusetts locales.

  Federal aid might be justifiable to fund projects in (say) Mississippi or West Virginia, poorer states that arguably need a fiscal handout. Demanding that poorer states, on net, fund Massachusetts repairs should be a non starter.

• Unfortunately, neither party wants to change its name. Issues & Insights awards dunce caps: Minimum-Wage Bill Shows Yet Again That Congress Is A Refuge For Know-Nothings.

  Democrats have many problems, not the least of which is an inability to understand, and for some the refusal to accept, basic economics. If they did, there wouldn’t be proposals to raise the federal minimum wage to a preposterous $25 an hour.

  House Resolution 8555 would “place the federal minimum wage on a durable path toward a living wage,” requiring “large, highly profitable corporations to lead the transition.” Under its yoke, large employers would have to raise their lowest wage from the current $7.25 an hour to $15 an hour on Jan. 1, 2027, a more-than-double spike that would shock the market.

  You can track H.R.8555's progress here. It shows 30 cosponsors, all Democrats. Amusingly, AOC is not on the cosponsor list. Neither is either NH CongressCritter.

• But let's sling some insults the other way too. From across the pond, the Daniel Hannan of the Institute for Economic Affairs reports: Donald Trump goes full Third World. That sounds bad! And it is:

  America at 250 has never been wealthier or more powerful. It has grown two thirds faster than Western Europe over the past 20 years. Rival ideologies – Chinese authoritarianism, Islamism – are hideously unappealing.

  Yet, at the same time, the US is starting to behave like a tinpot autocracy. The best way I can describe it is as Third Worldery. The attempt to browbeat the Nobel Peace Prize Committee; the obsession with building big arches; the tariffs; the annexation threats against Canada, Denmark, and Panama; the renaming of public institutions after a living leader; the successful attempt to bully FIFA over a red card. Such things are the hallmark of insecure dictatorships, not of confident democracies.

  Opting for strongman government seems to have opened the way to Third Worldery across the board. Once you build your head of state into a Father of the Nation type, once dissent from his latest whims is portrayed as a form of treachery, other things follow.

  Daniel goes on to look at Trump's kleptocracy. Not a pretty picture, Emily.

• Attention should be paid. Alex Tabarrok is not one to succumb to Trump Derangement Syndrome, so take his post seriously: The Nationalization of American Science

  OMB, joined by some forty grantmaking agencies—NSF, HHS, DOE, NASA, DOD among them—has proposed a sweeping rewrite of the rules governing all federal grants, the Regulation for Federal Financial Assistance.

  American science has long been state funded but not state directed. Since Vannevar Bush, money has flowed through many agencies to independent universities, allocated largely by peer review. The system has flaws—conformity, gerontocracy, waste—but it had one great virtue, the system was decentralized and not under state control. This rule proposes to bring science funding under top-down, state control.

  Program goals must now be “aligned with administration policies and priorities” (§ 200.202). Merit review is subordinated to politics: “senior appointees must conduct these reviews,” ensuring “that discretionary awards advance the President’s policy priorities,” while “peer review remains advisory and does not replace agency discretion” (§ 200.205). And every grant becomes terminable at will, whenever it “no longer effectuates program goals, Federal agency priorities, or the national interest *as they exist at the time of the termination*” (§ 200.340, emphasis added). Universities must even ensure their subrecipients don’t “significantly damage the reputation of… the Federal Government” (§ 200.332)—a loyalty clause for scientists.

  All this is sold as cutting “burdensome conditions,” a goal I would support, but sadly that is bullshit. The proposed rules add more paperwork and many more layers of bureaucratic review. Payment requests must include written justifications. Every disbursement gets screened through Treasury’s “Do Not Pay” system. Every recipient must run E-Verify. Applicants must disclose any employee who worked at the awarding agency within two years. And on top of the existing review machinery sits a new pre-issuance review committee of “senior appointees” second-guessing the experts. Fixed amount awards—pay for outputs, not inputs—an innovative reward mechanism are *eliminated*, so every award now gets routine cost monitoring and financial reporting.

  Alex has more in a followup post: The Trump Administration's Threat to Scientific Research

• Maybe reading the Book of Isaiah? Jeff Maurer guests over at the Dispatch, soliciting: Any Advice for the Soon-To-Be Politically Homeless? (Dispatch gifted link) Excerpt:

  I’m a comedian, but I did not find Donald Trump’s political ascendence funny. Funny is a monkey in a tuxedo; funny is a cartoon skunk with pre-MeToo values pursuing a cat. Choosing a president who has all of the qualities of the president in Idiocracy except for the good ones isn’t funny; it’s just a bad idea.

  When Trump became supreme leader of the GOP, I felt schadenfreude watching some conservatives—many of whom are now Dispatch readers—react with revulsion. That was petty on my part, and I don’t defend it, but please remember: I, an Obama liberal, had many erudite, all-caps shouting matches with those folks on Facebook message boards. Remember Mitt Romney’s “binders full of women”? Remember Barack Obama’s tan suit? Oh, we had fun back then! It’s odd to have sepia-toned memories of calling someone “Super Hitler” in a fight about Obama’s mom jeans, but here we are.

  Now, Democrats are going through something a lot like what happened to Republicans a decade ago. The left’s online id has taken corporeal form and scored a few primary wins. Now, the takeover is far from complete; it’s not guaranteed that the 2028 nominee will be either Lenin’s reanimated corpse or someone even worse. But for the first time, I’m contemplating the possibility of a Democratic Party that shares none of my values, which include empiricism, free speech, and being able to say words other than “oligarchy,” “Zionist,” and “don’t judge me by my old tweets.”

  It's free of Jeff's usual smutty vocabulary, so if that's what's been keeping you away from my links to his substack, click away!

Recently on the book blog:

Recently on the movie blog:

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I found myself in the Noir mood, and this oldie from 1947 was available (free-to-me-with-ads) on the Tubi service, so… It's the real deal, with Burt Lancaster, Kirk Douglas, and Lizabeth Scott providing a lot of black and white chemistry.

Burt plays Frankie Madison, just out of the slammer after 14 years. He didn't squeal on his criminal partner, Noll Turner (Kirk) back then, and he's looking to redeem a promise Noll made to him just before he was nabbed about being 50-50 partners.

After escaping the law, Noll did OK for himself, acquiring a fancy nightclub and a sultry blonde singer/girlfriend, Kay. (That is, of course, Lizabeth Scott.) Only problem is that Noll is kind of a greedy, manipulative weasel; he has no intention of making Frankie his co-partner. If only Frankie had paid attention in Criminal School, where they taught that there's no honor among thieves!

The movie details Frankie's efforts to get what's coming to him, involving shifting alliances with Kay, and also Noll's bookkeeper, Dave (Wendell Corey!). Eventually there's a savage beating (delivered mainly by Mike Mazurki!), a murder, a frame-up, a shootout, …

So, pretty standard fare, but I stayed awake.

In my youth, I was a physics major, and my graduate career, such as it was, was at the University of New Hampshire. (I got my Masters degree before flaming out pre-PhD.) I try to keep up with the field at a dilettante level, and pay some attention to the doings at UNH's Department of Physics. Which is how I became aware of Chanda Prescod-Weinstein (CPW); she is (now) a tenured Associate Professor in the department, and also in Women's and Gender Studies. I reported on her first book, The Disordered Cosmos, here.

Back in the day, physics "survey" courses were labeled, somewhat disdainfully, "Physics for Poets". (The geology version: "Rocks for Jocks".) Especially in the early going, this book reads like transcribed lectures from CPW's "Physics for Poets" course, if she had ever given one. (That hypothesis is strengthened by the book's subtitle.)

And there's nothing wrong with that! CPW is enthusiastic about the field, and she does a decent job conveying the mysteries and weirdnesses that abound in modern physics and cosmology. But one of the constraints of a "for poets" course (or book) is math: you can't write a freaking formula, lest >90% of your students (or readers) zone out (or stop reading). Alas, the only tool we have to describe such phenomena accurately is math. Without that, you're mostly handwaving, albeit in an entertaining way.

CPW's shtick is to interlace her physics with hard-left ranting; odd and irrelevant observations; plugs for her favorite authors poets, and TV shows; and occasional f-bombs (keeping it real!). This may work better for some readers than it did for me. Unfortunately, the rant/physics ratio seems to go up as the book moves along. Genocide, the Middle Passage, Colonialism, capitalism (with its associated evil, neoliberalism), etc., etc., etc. are continual targets of CPW's drive-by commentary.

She is a big fan of the late thug/poet Nikki Giovanni; this made me recall what I wrote about her back in 2009, when UNH invited her to keynote its 2010 Martin Luther King "celebration". (Which they stopped celebrating a few years ago.)

CPW does not like Erwin Schrödinger, avoiding terms like "Schrödinger's Cat" and "Schrődinger Equation". Even though she's complimentary about "queer" manifestations of sexuality, it seems that Erwin's type of queerness was a bridge too far.

Some things just made me wonder what point CPW was trying to make. She identifies Plato as "a philosopher from the Balkan peninsula of Asia." She's talking about Greece! (A couple pages later, Aristotle is "another Balkan peninsula philosopher.")

CPW refers throughout to the "nightmare global-warming scenario", seemingly unaware that even its past advocates have given up on its plausibility.

A trip to Dodger Stadium would not have been complete without the mention of the "mostly Mexican-American families" that Los Angeles kicked out of Chavez Ravine for its construction.

For same reason, CPW can't help but observe that John Stewart Bell (he of Bell's Inequality) "absolutely comes off like a bit of a queen."

Some outright bloopers seemed to have been missed. Ones I noticed: a footnote on page 80 uses the word "acceleration", which should have been "direction"; there's a missing minus sign on an exponent on page 86; the word "enormity" is misused on page 176; and this discussion of a plot point on Star Trek: Discovery on page 250 is truly mystifying:

But it turns out while Dr. Culber was dying at the end of set nonbreaking space between his husband—ship's engineer Paul Stamets (beautifully played by Anthony Rapp)—unintentionally transferred Culber's essence to a fungal network with a kiss.

Nonbreaking space: the final frontier!

As seen in Power Line's "Week in Pictures":

These days you take your patriotism as you can find it. As the WSJ editorialists point out, you might need to look elsewhere than in those museums on the National Mall: How the Smithsonian Lost America’s Plot. (WSJ gifted link)

You can download "Saving America's Story" here. The Trump Administration does a lot of stupid and despicable stuff, and there's a lot of Trumpish crap on that page, but the document itself is pretty convincing.

Also of note:

• It's a high bar, but they're trying to clear it. George Will notes Democrats’ extremism and stupidity are catching up with the GOP’s. (WaPo gifted link)

  Platner’s campaign was born of the cynicism that permeates the Democrats’ devotion to identity politics. Never mind that Platner is a lout whose work résumé is thinner than his record of sponging off his parents. Rather than assess him as — Heaven forfend! — an individual, Democrats anointed him the embodiment of a category: the working class. He could be their favorite thing, a victim. He could make vivid their simpleminded binary of “oppressors” and “oppressed.” Oblivious of their insult to America’s working class, Democrats wonder why what once was their base has abandoned them.

  Republicans, however, should shed any post-Platner delusions of moral superiority. Ten years ago, they turned the louche star of the “Access Hollywood” tape, and the payer of hush money to his porn star paramour, into a president. Conjured from the populism of celebrity worship, he today is frighteningly out of his depth, dumbstruck that his son-in-law, in tandem a New York real estate crony, cannot pacify Iran and end the war against Ukraine.

  America’s still-multiplying embarrassments are rank weeds fertilized by the manure of populism. And by populism’s inherent, aggressive disdain for the importance of character in politics. Populism is almost everything rejected by America’s unsentimental Founders, who, a few days ago, the nation briefly, and often uncomprehendingly, celebrated.

  "Manure of populism" is a slightly nicer way of saying "populist bullshit."

• Gratitude is fine, but she could also use my Amazon links. David Harsanyi has some advice: AOC Should Thank Baby Boomers for the World They Left Her. (I assume the same advice applies to any boomer-basher.)

  Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez says she knows why socialism is on the rise: Blame it on the boomers.

  "Millennials and Gen Z combined, now for the first time, are eclipsing the number of baby boomers," she explained recently. "Young people overall feel a tremendous amount of betrayal about the world we've been left."

  It's inarguable that younger generations feel this way. The notion that millennials and Generation Z are toiling in a uniquely grueling economic era, however, is utterly delusional.

  But convincing young people they've been handed a broken world only fostered an unprecedented sense of hopelessness. You are not victims of "oligarchs," unfettered capitalism or any other imaginary monsters.

  And our periodic reminder to the youngs: yes, we Boomers got wealth, but we are not taking it with us. We haven't figured out how to do that.

• As it turns out, there was another lie involved. As reported by NPR (and many others) back in 2013: Obama's 'You Can Keep It' Promise Is 'Lie Of The Year'.

  But calling it the "Affordable Care Act" was apparently another fib, as the WaPo editorialists document: Of course ACA premiums are rising. (WaPo gifted link) Using small words where possible:

  If it wasn’t obvious before that the famous bill passed to make health care more affordable has done anything but, it should be now: Individual plans on the Affordable Care Act exchanges are projected to spike by about 14 percent in 2027, according to recent insurer filings.

  The ACA imposed a wide array of mandates on health insurance. Those mandates are expensive. To make up for the increase in costs, the ACA distributes subsidies so consumers don’t feel the impact of the increase.

  Unfortunately, the editorial writers leave some room for blaming private insurers for the unaffordability. If you missed it, here's Noah Smith's take (blogged here last month): Insurers aren't the main villain of the U.S. health care system.

• Aw, say it ain't so, Chris. The Free Beacon's headline puts my current CongressCritter (and possibly my state's future Senator) in the spotlight's glare: 'Anti-Corruption' Senate Candidate Chris Pappas, Whose Ex-Lobbyist Husband Works for Uber, Sits on House Transportation Committee That Uber Heavily Lobbies.

  Rep. Chris Pappas (D.), running for Senate in New Hampshire on an "anti-corruption" agenda against "corporate special interests" in Washington, serves on a House committee that oversees Uber, where his husband, a former lobbyist, serves in an executive policy role.

  Pappas, a member of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, is married to Vann Bentley, a policy manager for cybersecurity and privacy at Uber who previously worked as a lobbyist for Amazon, according to his LinkedIn profile.

  I wasn't planning on voting for him anyway.

  Interestingly, the article mentions that Pappas is "running against former senator John Sununu". Who hasn't actually won the nomination yet. But his primary opponent, Scott Brown, goes unmentioned in the article.

… he just keeps on demonstrating it:

In case you'd like to check out his inspiration:

[Click the pic for the Wikipedia article. Don't contribute if asked.]

Also of note:

• Add this to the list. Veronique de Rugy points out: We Should Still Abolish the SBA: The $45 Million "Small Business" Edition. (Apologices, it's kind of a belated Independence Day link.)

  On the Fourth of July, because nothing says “Liberty!” like a bigger federal subsidy, the Small Business Administration doubled the ceiling on its guaranteed loans to $10 million, the most it has ever offered. The symbolism is almost too perfect. Few phrases in American politics are as sacred as “small business.” It conjures images of corner hardware stores and family farms. What it protects is something else.

  Consider – as Wharton’s Brian Feinstein did in the WSJ – what Washington means by “small.” A homebuilder pulling in $45 million a year qualifies. So does a manufacturer with 1,500 employees. In the median industry, the revenue ceiling runs around $21 million; in some it reaches $47 million. That $45 million builder is larger than 99 percent of American firms with any employee other than the owner, and at construction’s typical margins, its proprietor clears roughly $2.7 million a year. This is not the plucky underdog of campaign ads. It’s a prosperous, established company collecting benefits that most Americans believe are going to the underdog.

  Both Vero's article and the WSJ op-ed she links to are eye-opening and sensible. Abolition is unlikely, however, thanks to (as she points out) the sacredness of that particular cow.

• Try guessing the answer. John C. Goodman asks, rhetorically: Why Do Democrats Hate Medicare Advantage?

  A bill introduced by Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D., Texas) and co-sponsored by more than 40 House Democrats would sharply reduce government payments to Medicare Advantage plans—private policies for Medicare enrollees. The bill purports to end practices of questionable value, and the press announcement makes the bill out to be an effort at saving taxpayers money.

  Mr. Doggett’s floor speech introducing the bill suggested a different motive. He said it would “level the playing field” between traditional Medicare and Medicare Advantage plans.

  It is no secret that many congressional Democrats dislike private health insurance even though private insurers were heavily involved in designing ObamaCare. Politicians on the left often speak about the desirability of a “public option.” But Medicare has already had a competing public option for more than two decades. It’s called traditional Medicare, and it has been losing the competition. More than half of all Medicare enrollees are in private plans.

  The bill is now up to 48 co-sponsors as I type, all Ds. Neither New Hampshire CongressCritter has signed on, but a lot of Usual Suspects have: AOC, Ilhan Omar, Chellie Pingree, Ro Khanna, … Here's hoping it goes nowhere. I'm not in a Medicare Advantage plan, but (generally speaking) I'm satisfied with my situation, and there ain't nothing wrong with it that these jokers won't make worse.

• "If we wanted to take some hobbits to see a Komodo dragon…" Ars Technica adds some science to the Bob and Ray sketch: Flores Hobbits' eating habits offer clues about their evolutionary past.

  Until about 60,000 years ago, diminutive hominin cousins, Homo floresiensis (affectionately nicknamed Hobbits for obvious reasons), shared the island of Flores with Komodo dragons, pygmy elephants, and giant rats.

  Based on the presence of hominin and pygmy elephant bones in the same layers of cave sediment, it originally looked like the Hobbits had hunted and butchered dwarf elephants—an impressive feat for such a tiny hominin. But according to University of Tübingen anthropologist Elizabeth Veatch and her colleagues, it was the Komodo dragons that were the hunters, while the Hobbits only showed up to scavenge what was left.

  If Veatch and her colleagues are right, their findings may challenge some of the assumptions we’ve made about Homo floresiensis—and about which hominin species was the first to venture into the wider world beyond Africa.

  `

  Yery interesting, because science, of course. But for me it's just an excuse to repost this:

• Sucks to be UK. Our excerpt from this week's TGIF:

  → Hell yeah, America: In great news, the International Monetary Fund has released updated growth predictions for 2026. America’s economy is forecast to grow 2.3 percent, nice and steady, just what we like to see. France: 0.6 percent. The UK: 1.0 percent (you get ’em, lads!) Basically, Europe is a lemonade stand compared to our 24/7 lemonade factory. The real economic growth comes from China, which is projected to grow 4.6 percent, and India, projected to grow 6.4 percent. Okay, whoa, take it easy there, China and India. Smell the roses for once. Me, I like the idea of us as somewhere between India (crazy!) and France (dead). America is full of stories like this one:

  [WSJ headline: He Earns $33 an Hour as a Costco Cashier. Now He’s a Millionaire.]

  This Costco cashier worked a steady job, saved money, and has a good life. The forbidden truth is that things are pretty good here, and if you work hard, even as a cashier, you can earn beyond what an entire European village does in a decade, probably. Our healthcare is pretty good too—our cashier’s wife had brain cancer, and her surgeries were covered by Costco’s insurance plan, and he even took a year off (paid). With his salary, he has taken the family on European vacations (two in the last decade!). When you’re done with that story, I recommend this phenomenal Atlantic piece as a chaser:

  [Atlantic headline: How Britain Became as Poor as Mississippi]

  Paraphrasing the piece: The NHS has a backlog of 6 million patients. It spends more money settling maternity-malpractice claims than providing maternity care. One in 10 Brits have taken to doing their own dental work, including tooth extractions, because the wait is too long for a dentist. I won’t remove my own split ends, and these people are taking molars out by the root.

  In short: I love it here. For me, every day is the Fourth of July.

  Indeed. But read Nellie's entire thing, OK?.

Recently on the book blog:

Back in the 1980s I read the legal thriller/mystery Presumed Innocent by Scott Turow, his first novel. At the time, it was a blockbuster. It got made into a Harrison Ford movie!

I read maybe a couple more Turow novels after that, but kind of lost interest.

But a few weeks ago, I noticed that Turow's latest novel Presumed Guilty was nominated for a "Best Novel" Edgar Award. And (as it turns out) the protagonist from that first book, lawyer Rusty Sabich, is featured in it.

Ah, but (also as it turns out) this book, Innocent, came out back in 2010, also featuring Rusty. So I decided I'd better read this first.

[By the way, reader, if you're wondering if you have to read Presumed Innocent before Innocent, I'd say no, you don't have to. I don't think there are any spoilers for that book in this one. I recommend it though.]

Page one spoiler: Rusty finds his wife, Barbara, unexpectedly dead next to him in bed. Inexplicably, he waits for nearly a day before even notifying their (now grown) son, Nat about her death. Why? His explanations are poor. And it doesn't take long before suspicion falls upon him. You see, in that previous book, Rusty was put on trial for the murder of a different woman, but the prosecutors failed to make their case. Could he be trying to get away with murder again?

The book's style is tricky, some chapters written with a few different first-person narrators. And some chapters third-person. There's also some jumping back-and-forth in time. What is completely obvious is that Rusty isn't telling us all he knows in his narrative. (Geez, just like that first book.)

And there's a lot of (what I call) navel-gazing, even in the third person. We get to know a lot about everyone's motivations, flaws, opinions, etc. Just not everything.

Plot twists abound; there's always one around the corner. Just when you thought things couldn't get any more byzantine, another trap door opens under your feet. Turow is a master at that.

Reader, I thought I had a good idea about What Really Happened. I didn't.