Pun Salad

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He's right, you know.

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

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

Also of note:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Also of note:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Which brings us to…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Veronique de Rugy doesn't care for either end of the horseshoe: The American Experiment Isn't What's Failing.

Politicians on the horseshoe ends are awful. But to a certain extent, they're just responding to the sour and resentful moods of their spoiled-brat voters. (I can say that because I'm not running for office.)

Also of note:

• Unlike a sinking drug boat, it's a moving target. Jim Geraghty has been paying attention to The Trump Team’s Convoluted, Conflicting Accounts of the Drug-Boat Sinking. After liberally quoting what Trump, Rubio, Hesgeth, et al. have been saying over the past few weeks…

  Depending upon which administration official you’re listening to or when, the boat was “headed to Trinidad or some other country in the Caribbean,” and it was also “an immediate threat to the United States.” It remained an “immediate threat” even after it turned around. The president said that Hegseth told him a second strike on survivors “didn’t happen.” Hegseth said he “watched that first strike live” and also said he “did not personally see survivors.” Hegseth is “going to be the one to make the call” and also simultaneously, “Admiral Bradley made the correct decision to ultimately sink the boat and eliminate the threat.” The target of the second strike was the cargo, or the target of the second strike were the survivors, to ensure they did not call anyone to pick them up and retrieve the cargo. Also, President Trump said he wouldn’t have wanted a second strike on survivors.

  And the entire narrative of a second strike is “completely false,” according to the Pentagon spokesman, except for the parts that were later corroborated.

  No doubt, there are plenty of Democrats and members of the media want to create as many headaches as possible for the Trump administration. But the administration creates problems for itself when it does not give a straight story, based upon verifiable facts, from day one. And unsurprisingly, members of Congress — both Democrats and Republicans — get hostile quickly when they feel like their requests for additional information are being ignored or rejected.

  I can't exactly blame people who pick and choose what they want to believe out of this morass of probable lies.

• The "MRGA" hats are probably being made as I type. Jeff Jacoby looks at Putin's number one fanboy: Trump's Ukraine 'peace' plan makes Russia great again.

  RUSTEM UMEROV, the head of Ukraine's security council, did his best to put on a brave face. "US is hearing us," Kyiv's lead negotiator said to reporters in Florida, where Ukrainian and American officials held four hours of talks on Sunday. "US is supporting us. US is working beside us," he said, as if he were willing those words to be true.

  Alas, they aren't true. Under the Trump administration, the United States is not supporting Ukraine as it fights for its survival, and it is certainly not working beside those who have been valiantly defending their sovereignty against a ruthless aggressor.

  There has never been much question where President Trump's sympathies lie. From blaming Ukraine for having "started" the war to fawning endlessly over Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, from insulting President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine as an incompetent and an ingrate to using his bully pulpit to reinforce the Kremlin's talking points, Trump has left little doubt that he is drawn irresistibly to the American enemy who launched this war and indifferent to the pro-Western nation resisting it.

  But now the administration's betrayal of Ukraine has reached a shocking new extreme. The White House is pressing for a "peace" that would amount to Ukrainian surrender and a Russian victory — a Munich for our time.

  Jeff repeats the "old maxim": "It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but fatal to be its friend."

• Thanks of a grateful nation. Bjørn Lomborg speculates in the WSJ: Climate Change Might Have Spared America From Hurricanes. (WSJ gifted link)

  The 2025 Atlantic hurricane season ended on Sunday, and not a single hurricane made landfall in the continental U.S. this year. This is the first such quiet year since 2015; an average of around two hurricanes strike the U.S. mainland annually. You’d think this would be cause for celebration—or at least curiosity about what role, if any, global warming played. Instead there has been resounding silence.

  We heard plenty about Hurricane Melissa, the monster storm that hit Jamaica in late October with 185-mile-an-hour winds and flooding, causing roughly 100 deaths across the Caribbean. Headlines screamed that climate change was to blame. Attribution studies quickly followed, concluding that human-induced warming made Melissa more likely and worse.

  Yes, the narrative must be promoted: Climate change can only make things worse, never better.

Calling it as he sees it: A sickening moral slum of an administration. (WaPo gifted link) After looking at the Venezuelan drug boat survivor-shooting and the handling of Putin's wishlist for Ukraine, he makes a more general point:

I fear he's right. More on the drug boats below.

Also of note:

• We have moved on to the ass-covering phase of the operation. Andrew C. McCarthy has been my go-to guy for honest coverage. Here's his update from last evening: Pete Hegseth Says He Ordered & Observed First Missile Strike, Not Second. (archive.today link) After quoting from Hesgeth's tweet:

  As we’ve said before, vessel strikes on narco-terrorists will continue until their the poisoning of the American people stops.
  
  Today, at the direction of President Trump, the Department of War carried out a lethal kinetic strike on a vessel operated by a Designated Terrorist… pic.twitter.com/gQF9LpSjqD

  — Secretary of War Pete Hegseth (@SecWar) November 7, 2025

  Andrew comments:

  I get it that Hegseth sees his job as pleasing the president, who revels in this style of tough-guy, take-no-prisoners, death-to-all-the-seditionists BS. If you’re going to play that game, however, and especially if you’re going to play it for the ostensible purpose of “defending” yourself from war crimes accusations, you can’t be too surprised if people suspect that you just might have given an order to kill everybody.

  And bigger picture: We are dealing with an activity — cocaine trafficking — that is not an act of war, is not terrorism, is not killing thousands of Americans (that’s fentanyl), and is traditionally handled in the United States by criminal prosecution under an extensive, decades-old set of laws. Yet, President Trump, Secretary Hegseth, and the administration have speciously claimed that cocaine shipments — many of which are not even destined for our country — are the functional equivalent of mass-murder attacks; that, they claim, authorizes them to invoke the laws of armed conflict so they can kill people rather than prosecute them.

  Under the circumstances, it is hardly unreasonable for people to conclude that the administration is not especially fastidious about who is and is not a legitimate target under the laws of war.

  The things the administration is not "fastidious" about seems to grow daily.

• Closed, locked, key thrown away. John McCormack & Michael Warren bemoan The Closing of the Conservative Mind. (archive.today link)

  Last April, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute invited eight college students to what an ISI staffer described in an email as an “exclusive retreat and dinner with Tucker Carlson” in Florida.

  Founded nearly 75 years ago, ISI is a prominent conservative collegiate intellectual institution in the United States. ISI also runs the Collegiate Network, a collection of alternative conservative newspapers on college campuses across the country, and the eight student journalists had been selected by ISI to attend the retreat and dinner because their campus newspapers were top-performing publications. After a Journalism 101 session at the Art Ovation Hotel in Sarasota, the students filed into a shuttle for a 90-minute trip to Carlson’s home on Gasparilla Island, where Carlson dispensed career advice.

  “Thanks to @TuckerCarlson for joining three generations of @amconmag editors/executive directors for a dinner with campus journalists from @ISI’s @collegiatenet,” ISI President Johnny Burtka posted on Twitter alongside a photo of himself, Carlson, then-Collegiate Network Executive Director Dan McCarthy, and The American Conservative editor Curt Mills. “It was an unforgettable evening that our students will cherish for years to come.”

  One person left out of Burtka’s photo was Carlson’s special guest at the dinner that night: Alex Jones, who appeared on Carlson’s podcast that aired the next day, April 9.

  Back in my college days, I was sorta involved with ISI. A long time ago. Sad to see what it's become.

• Sometimes only a Hayek quote will do. And Eric Boehm deploys one early: Trump's deals with Intel and others are a form of socialism.

  One danger of nationalism, Friedrich Hayek warned in 1960, was the "bridge" it provides "from conservatism to collectivism."

  "To think in terms of 'our' industry or resource," he wrote, "is only a short step away from demanding that these national assets be directed in the national interest."

  That's a short step that President Donald Trump has eagerly taken. In the first nine months of his second term in office, the president has overseen a giant government leap into the boardrooms of strategically important businesses.

  In June, Trump demanded (and the federal government received) a so-called golden share in U.S. Steel, which effectively gives the White House veto power over much of the company's future. Two months later, the Trump administration purchased a 10 percent equity stake in Intel, the once-dominant and recently struggling American chipmaker. Similar stakes in at least four other companies followed, including ones that produce nuclear power or mine metals such as lithium and copper that are necessary for building high-tech chips and advanced batteries.

  I must recycle my ChatGPT cartoon from back in August:

• To be fair, most economic doom will be in the future. But Jeff Maurer looks at today's whining and wonders: What Causes Economic Doomerism? And I will steal his impressive graphic:

  Here are some charts that most people probably assume are hallucinated bullshit, like when you ask AI to design a house and it puts the toilet in the middle of the kitchen:

  

  These charts are real…but how can they be? We’re constantly told that we’re living in tough economic times — I hear that the middle class has been “hollowed out”, and that you have to perform sexual favors on your local Albertson’s manager just to buy a dozen eggs. Generation Z — the story goes — is beyond screwed; the only jobs for them will be OnlyFans modeling and gig work delivering bubble tea to robots. These beliefs are so widespread that in a recent conversation between Sam Harris and George Packer — in which they spoke intelligently on many topics — the notion that Gen Z is struggling economically went unchallenged. It was like hearing two physicists discuss the finer points of quantum field theory and then reveal that they think that thunder is caused by a giant farting dragon in the sky.

  Jeff has possible theories aplenty.

• But some (relatively) good news The Fraser Institute has released its report on the Economic Freedom in North America, which analyzes and compares US and Mexican states, Canadian provinces. And…

  In the all-government index—which takes account of federal as well as state/provincial policies—the most economically free jurisdictions in North America are New Hampshire, South Dakota, and Idaho.

  The data Fraser used is from 2023, so I assume the demise of New Hampshire's Interest & Dividends Tax will keep us well in front of South Dakota and Idaho in the near term.

Recently on the book blog:

I put this book on my get-at-library list thanks to its "Best Novel" Edgar Award nomination. I surprised myself by liking it quite a bit. Some of my usual warning signs are here: damaged female characters, rotten male characters, "flowery" writing full of home decor descriptions, multiple POVs, jumping around in time, … What can I say, it turned out to work well for me anyway.

The mystery, such as it is: one day young girl Laika vanishes on her way to school. Leaving her younger sister, Willa, to wonder what happened. Laika's disappearance turns into an obsession for Willa; long after the tabloids have moved on to different lurid crimes, Willa keeps trying to find her. And thinks she keep seeing her, only to be disappointed.

But decades later, at a dinner party thrown by Robyn, Willa's friend and past lover, a stranger is invited, and (yes) Willa thinks it could be… But is it?

Another book for which I can't recall the reason I put on my get-at-library list. Doesn't matter much, I guess. I enjoyed it a lot.

If you plan on reading it, my suggestion would be to go in as cold as possible: don't read reviews, don't look at the cover blurbs, don't let your eyes wander down Amazon's book page. Just start reading.

It is (mostly) narrated by Demeter, an AI in charge of an interstellar spaceship, plying the route between Sol and Alpha Centauri. Her (I think I got the pronoun right) perspective is (literally) inhuman, but she has a strong sense of honor and duty. Which explains why she is more than a little aghast when she discovers that the ship's crew and passengers are all dead. (Don't worry, that is only a page-six spoiler.)

But you may recognize her name (I didn't), and get a small hint as to the identity of the culprit.

As the book progresses, there is much conflict, mostly gory. Unexpected characters show up, some antagonistic, some allies in the fight against murderous evil.

Katherine Mangu-Ward reveals something about the inner workings of the magazine she edits in her latest print-edition editorial: Friedrich Hayek's 'socialists of all parties' quote is apt today.

I'll be pointing out "nearly every essay" as each one emerges from behind the paywall. And I may include a Hayek quote here and there.

But, for today, here's a reasonable article not from Reason, in which Daniel J. Smith explains Why Modern Socialists Dodge Definition.

As Hayek would say: Bingo!

Also of note:

• In the land of obfuscation, finger-pointing, and whataboutism… Andrew C. McCarthy notes there is a New Explanation: Hegseth Did Not Order That All Boat Operators Be Killed. (NR gifted link)

  (Caveat Lector: Andrew's article is (as I type) 24 hours old; by the time you read this, it might be wildly out of date.)

  In a post on Saturday evening, I contended that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s first “defense” of a second U.S. missile strike on September 2, which killed two shipwrecked survivors of an initial missile strike, was more like a guilty plea. With indignation, but without trying to refute any of the factual claims in a Washington Post report about the strikes, Secretary Hegseth asserted, “As we’ve said from the beginning, and in every statement, these highly effective strikes are specifically intended to be ‘lethal, kinetic strikes.’” But the laws of armed conflict prohibit lethal, kinetic strikes against combatants who’ve been rendered hors de combat (i.e., out of the fighting); hence, it is not a defense to say, “But it was our intention all along to kill them.”

  Not surprisingly, the White House figured out that this wasn’t going to fly, so we now have an actual defense. According to President Trump, Hegseth now says he didn’t order what the Washington Post’s unidentified sources say he ordered — to wit, that everyone on the vessel suspected of trafficking illegal drugs on the high seas was to be killed.

  I hope that’s true. Of course, if it is true that he didn’t give the order, how odd was it that Hegseth’s first two responsive posts over the weekend were exactly what you would expect from someone who did give such an order: first, the above unflinching declaration of intention to execute “lethal” strikes, and second, the cruder, “We have only just begun to kill narco-terrorists.”

  I hope that’s true. Of course, if it is true that he didn’t give the order, how odd was it that Hegseth’s first two responsive posts over the weekend were exactly what you would expect from someone who did give such an order: first, the above unflinching declaration of intention to execute “lethal” strikes, and second, the cruder, “We have only just begun to kill narco-terrorists.”

  Almost certainly there will be more to come. Sorry.

• One of the few things I remember from Confirmation classes. The English word "love" is very, very, ambiguous. Translations of the New Testament map four different Greek words into one hunka hunka burnin' "love" in English. Including one I hope Noah Smith isn't using in his headline: I love AI. Why doesn't everyone?

  New technologies almost always create lots of problems and challenges for our society. The invention of farming caused local overpopulation. Industrial technology caused pollution. Nuclear technology enabled superweapons capable of destroying civilization. New media technologies arguably cause social unrest and turmoil whenever they’re introduced.

  And yet how many of these technologies can you honestly say you wish were never invented? Some people romanticize hunter-gatherers and medieval peasants, but I don’t see many of them rushing to go live those lifestyles. I myself buy into the argument that smartphone-enabled social media is largely responsible for a variety of modern social ills, but I’ve always maintained that eventually, our social institutions will evolve in ways that minimize the harms and enhance the benefits. In general, when we look at the past, we understand that technology has almost always made things better for humanity, especially over the long haul.

  There are always those who will proclaim "This time is different." Maybe. But that's not the way to bet, I'm pretty sure.

• I've been wondering about this myself. Arnold Kling notes the funny way people think about one specific service: What's Different about Health Care?

  When it comes to health care policy, you can try to sound sophisticated by citing “asymmetric information” as an explanation for why government intervention is appropriate. But I think that those rationalizations are off base.

  The reason that we have government intervention in health care is that we have an instinct that making an individual pay for health care is immoral. It is taking advantage of the individual’s misfortune.

  When someone is desperately poor and needs to borrow money to keep from starving, charging interest is regarded as immoral. Back in the day, that is what made usury a sin and made Shylock a villain.

  When someone is suffering from illness, making them pay for treatment is analogous to usury. Still, we understand that health care providers deserve to get paid. So we turn payment for treatment into a collective problem, to be dealt with by insurance or, ultimately, by socialism (government).

  I think that the moral intuition that an individual suffering from a health problem should not have to pay for treatment is something that we need to re-think. In the 21st century, the array of medical services is so vast and so varied that it is no longer appropriate to take away the individual’s responsibility for paying. As an individual, you think you have “good” health insurance if it pays for eyeglasses and teeth cleaning and for every precautionary MRI. But for society as a whole, it is not good.

  Arnold goes on to mention the weirdness of the term "health insurance", which, in practice, works totally differently from other types of insurance.

• A palate-cleanser? Not really. But Brian Philips The Olivia Nuzzi and RFK Jr. Affair Is Messier Than We Ever Could Have Imagined. It's pretty R-rated funny the whole way through.

  There’s no way around it. If you read this article, you are going to have to imagine Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the United States secretary of health and human services, having an absolutely eyeball-melting orgasm. You’re going to have to imagine a sweaty, leathery man in his early 70s, the scion of the celebrated Kennedy political dynasty, bellowing like a Spartan as his body yields to the sweet, sweet release. Knees buckling. Sinews straining. What does it sound like when RFK Jr. bellows? I’ll go out on a limb and say it’s gritty. His normal speaking voice is basically a garbage disposal. When the big one hits, it must be like tossing a fork in.

  I’m sorry for this, truly. I would protect you from these images if I could. But in the latest, grossest plot twist in the ongoing saga of RFK’s affair with the acclaimed political journalist Olivia Nuzzi, RFK appears to have written a poem to his lover about—and please remember that I hate my own life as much as you’re about to hate yours—his own ejaculation. He calls it “my harvest.” Lines from the poem were published Saturday on the Substack of Nuzzi’s ex Ryan Lizza, who is also a political journalist and who was engaged to Nuzzi at the time of the alleged affair. Lizza has launched a multipart Substack series chronicling Nuzzi’s infidelities, to counter what he claims are Nuzzi’s misrepresentations in her forthcoming memoir, which was recently excerpted in Vanity Fair, where Nuzzi currently works.

  It's sordid and also hilarious. Except you might choke back some laughter when you remember that Junior's current job requires sound, sober judgement.

I was gonna make a "filled with hot air" joke, but elementary Googling informs me that Macy's balloons are inflated via helium.

No clue about how Marx would have felt about being filled with a noble gas. One that makes you talk funny.

Also of note:

• Apocalyptic Prophecy from the Book of Williamson. Specifically, Kevin D. He warns of The Four Schmucks of the Apocalypse. (archive.today link)

  The Trump administration is always good for a curveball: It put out a peace plan that was originally written in Russian when I was expecting one that was originally written in crayon.

  Talk about “the soft bigotry of low expectations”! You couldn’t see my expectations from the third sub-basement of Challenger Deep right about now.

  “The matter is delicate,” Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said of European engagement with the United States on the Ukraine matter, “because nobody wants to discourage the Americans and President Trump from ensuring that the United States remains on our side.”

  What kind of wild-eyed optimist thinks President Trump is on the Europeans’ side now? He sure as hell is not on the Ukrainians’ side.

  More to the point: What kind of wild-eyed optimist thinks President Trump is on the American side? The conspiracy-theory corner is chock-full of amusing little notions about why it is that Donald Trump so energetically and self-abasingly serves the interests of Vladimir Putin: sex tapes of a nature as to embarrass even such a man as Trump, who has appeared in no fewer than three pornographic films; dirt relating to his Slovenian-born wife’s dodgy family or to his sons’ personal and financial shenanigans; possibly some heavy off-the-books loans from state-controlled Russian banks or the Russian mob. All fun parlor-game stuff, but, as far as I can tell, all of the available hard evidence points toward my pet theory of the case, i.e. that Donald Trump is a punk and a coward who, like most weaklings of his kind, instinctively takes on the subordinate role in relationships with hard men such as Putin. I enjoyed The Manchurian Candidate, but, in a sense, it does not matter whether Donald Trump is some kind of a Russian asset under the influence of kompromat—he would not be doing anything different if he were.

  Russia has launched a war of aggression against a European democracy, and the president of the United States of America is on Moscow’s side: All pretense and political window-dressing to one side, that’s how it is. Trump means to give Putin what Putin wants. Fortunately for the cause of the Free World, Donald Trump does not run U.S. foreign policy. Unfortunately, some combination of Marco Rubio, J.D. Vance, Steve Witkoff, and Jared Kushner does—freedom is in the greasy paws of a quadrumvirate of self-serving grifters, phonies, cowards, and imbeciles.

  KDW sounds pessimistic, right? Am I detecting some pessimism there?

• A question the great minds of science will debate for the next century. Becket Adams wonders How Did Katie Couric Become an Elder Stateswoman of Journalism? (archive.today link)

  You have to hand it to Katie Couric.

  Unlike disgraced former anchor Dan Rather, who was drummed out of the news business in 2006, she has never faced any serious professional consequences for her shoddy, dishonest brand of journalism.

  In fact, despite a thoroughly blemished record, she has managed, late in her career, to reinvent herself as a kind of elder stateswoman of the news media, explaining to her loyal following everything that’s wrong with modern journalism. Leading Democrats, journalists, and pundits are all too eager to do interviews on her podcast or Substack to talk politics and the culture wars.

  This is despite the long list of people Couric has mischaracterized, misreported on, and mistreated. Instead of pariah status, she receives expressions of tribute and respect, all while criticizing those she deems unworthy of the title she has wielded unworthily for more than four decades.

  Becket has the receipts, as the kids say. He is especially hard on Katie's creative editing of her interview with Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

• No fair! Hors de Combat is in a foreign language! Jed Rubenfeld, legal correspondent at the Free Press contends Killing Narco Speedboat Survivors Is a War Crime. (archive.today link)

  On September 10, eight days after the first U.S. bombing of a “narco” speedboat in the Caribbean, The Intercept—a left-wing news site—reported that there were people on board who had survived the initial air strike, but were then killed in a “follow-up attack.” No details were offered, no such second strike was shown in the video of the bombing posted by President Trump, and the allegation seemed to vanish. But yesterday, The Washington Post made the very same accusation, this time filled in with explosive details.

  After the first bomb struck the boat, the Post reported, a drone video feed showed two survivors “clinging to the smoldering wreck” in the open sea. According to the Post, mission commander Admiral Frank Mitchell Bradley then ordered a second strike specifically to kill the two survivors.

  Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has called the Post story “fabricated, inflammatory, and derogatory,” reiterating that the speedboat attacks have been approved “by the best military and civilian lawyers.” But Hegseth did not specifically deny any of the particulars in the Post’s account.

  If the Post is right—and we don’t know yet whether it is—Bradley committed murder. No ifs, ands, or buts about it.

  This is turning otherwise reasonable conservatives into defenders of the indefensible. Sad!

• Tyler Cowen piles on. Specifically, shooting the fish in the barrel: The Myth of the $140,000 Poverty Line. (archive.today link)

  When a flood of people start emailing me the same article, I know something is afoot. That is the case with Michael W. Green’s “The Valley of Death: Why $100,000 is the New Poverty,” which was recently adapted from his Substack and published in The Free Press. Green’s core argument is that participating in the basics of American life costs much more than it used to, and as a result, we should set a new poverty line: up from about $32,000 a year for a family of four with two kids, to $140,000 a year.

  Fortunately for us, this is all wrong. The underlying concepts are wrong, the details are wrong, and the use of evidence is misguided. There are genuine concerns about affordability in the United States, but the analysis in this article is not a good way to understand them.

  Green goes off the rails right away when he defines the poverty line by quoting a statement based on a 1965 research paper by Mollie Orshansky: “The U.S. poverty line is calculated as three times the cost of a minimum food diet in 1963, adjusted for inflation.” He uses this sentence as the foil for his own analysis, noting that rising costs of healthcare, housing, and other factors mean that food is a rapidly decreasing proportion of a household’s overall costs. Orshanksy’s formula, therefore, is outdated.

  The problem is that this mischaracterizes how the poverty line is calculated today.

  I am feeling sorry for Michael W. Green.

Recently on the book blog:

Recently on the movie blog:

Nicholas Wade has had a long career as a science journalist, and in recent years has become a controversial science journalist. For details on the controversial stuff, I recommend his Grokipedia entry, which seems far more even-handed than Wikipedia's, which has an unrebutted anti-Wade bias.

I reported on one of his controversial works, A Troublesome Inheritance, back in 2014. In more recent years, he has written in favor of the lab-leak origin of Covid; my posts on that are here, here, here, and here.

This book looks at how humans have organized themselves into governing groups over their long existence; Wade feels (with much justification) that the role of our underlying genetic code has been given short shrift. To a certain extent this is ideology-driven: the notion that humans are born as "blank slates" and their cultural environment can mold them arbitrarily, shedding ancient ideas of sex roles, opening up a utopian vision of an egalitarian future.

Wade notes that blank-slatism has been thoroughly debunked. He details the experiment with kibbutzim in early Israel, where idealists set up communities based on collective ownership, sexual equality, child-rearing by the community instead of mom and dad, etc.; over the span of a relatively few years, this proved unstable, and the communities mostly reverted to more traditional ways.

Our original social organizations were tribal, similar in many ways to our chimp cousins, and they were a decent evolutionary "solution" to the problems of cooperation, defense, production, and cultural survival. They "worked" for many millennia, after all. And they still persist in some parts of the world. But cultural evolution has molded most of us into citizens of nation-states, a model that has more survival value in the modern world.

Wade argues that humanity is still constrained by the realities of our genetic heritage; ideologies that (for example) deny the fundamental differences between guys and gals are always going to wind up in disappointment, but not before causing a lot of misery along the way.

He also argues that the traditional bonds that hold nation-states together seem to be badly fraying today: common languages, religions, ethnicities. He points out increasing social stratification caused by assortive mating in our meritocracy.

So, Wade provides quite a bit to think about. Progressives aren't going to like his take on a number of contemporary issues. Even I am not convinced of the semi-determinism that his evolution/genetic insights seem to imply. Back in (say) 1750, a Wade-like essayist could have looked at the historic record of chattel slavery and concluded that it was destined to be with us forever as part of our genetic heritage. But it wasn't, thank goodness.