Pun Salad

It is a truth universally acknowledged that, overall, politicians score several sigma off the mean on numerous (um) personality traits. E.g., narcissism, psychopathy, machiavellianism…; you can look it up!

So Jim Geraghty's headline should be understood on a relative scale: Republicans’ Midterm Hopes Rest on the Insanity of Their Opponents. Or: "Republicans hope they're running against Democrats crazier than they are." Jim has entertaining examples:

Alas, here in New Hampshire, our politicians are nuts in more "respectable" ways. In our primary yesterday:

• Governor Ayotte (R) cruised to an easy win, and conventional wisdom says she'll probably win in November, beating Cinde Warmington (D).

• For the U.S. Senate seat that Jeanne Shaheen is vacating, both John E. Sununu (R) and (my current CongressCritter) Chris Pappas (D) scored pretty easy wins. Most polls score (sigh) Pappas as a slight favorite for November.

• The most interesting race was for the House seat Chris Pappas is leaving. Anthony DiLorenzo (R) beat his nearest opponent (Hollie Noveletsky) by 25 percentage points. But the D-side contest turned into a three way, with Jeanne Shaheen's daughter, Stefany, winning with only 37.3% of the vote, just 2.3 percentage points ahead of Maura Sullivan (35%). The leftiest candidate, Carleigh Beriont, gathered 21.8%.

Polls say Stefany has (probably) the better shot at being my next CongressCritter. I've long been a non-fan. My first look at her was an old-fashioned fisking of her 2023 pro-gun contol op-ed in my lousy local newspaper, Foster's Daily Democrat. At the time, she was (I am not making this up) chair of the Portsmouth Police Commission.

Among other actions, she advocated "Banning the sale of semi-automatic weapons" and a "mandatory assault weapon buyback program." You can click over if you want, to read my snarky rejoinders.

But that was then, reader. Gun control was vitally important to Stefany back in 2023. Now, in 2026, you can peruse her campaign website's "Priorities" page and discover … nothing at all about guns. (At least I can't find anything, and neither can Google. Let me know if you can.)

Hm. Into the memory hole! How… Machiavellian!

Some other Pun Salad history:

• My reaction to Stefany's entry to the race last year: Gun-grabbing Ditz Enters the Ring.

• I noted her "rambling, difficult to follow" answer to a query about guys on women's sports teams here.

• A little mother-vs-daughter dustup about the government shutdown-ending vote explored here.

• Her avoidance (via a pastry-wielding staffer) of answering questiions about Graham Platner here

• Her anti-semitic pander here.

• And her sudden discovery that she (a) supports Bernie's "Medicare for All" proposal, but (b) disfavors aid to Israel here

Recently on the movie blog:

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A weird little movie, but I was intrigued by the trailer I ran across at Facebook. And I've been strangely intrigued by Katie Holmes' occasional crooked grin.

Katie plays Miss Meadows, and trailer-level/movie poster spoiler: she shoots first and asks questions… never, because she tends to leave no survivors. Arguably, she's only delivering rough vigilante justice.

But that's not quite right; she doesn't go out looking for bad guys, like Batman. She just finds herself in situations where it's appropriate for her to pull the cute chrome-plated semi-auto .25 from her purse.

She's an oddball in other ways, too, thanks to being emotionally scarred by a traumatic childhood incident, only revealed near the end of the movie. She takes up with the local sheriff who's charged with investigating some of her shootings. (That's James Badge Dale, who played a very bad guy in Iron Man 3.)

The movie is unrated by the MPA, but it's pretty intense in some spots; see IMDB's parental guidance page.

I toyed with headlining "Instapundit is Garbage", but I'm not there yet. However, this post Ed Driscoll put up yesterday afternoon, MOVE ALONG CITIZEN, NOTHING TO SEE HERE:, is certainly disheartening. It consists only of an embedded tweet:

A Microsoft engineer found that a smart thermostat in a tabulation room in the Georgia 2020 election was talking to a tabulation server, reporting the votes back to China.

As technology gets more and more advanced, our elections will become more and more unsecure. Paper ballots… pic.twitter.com/awqN8tGl68

— The SCIF (@TheSCIF) September 7, 2026

The X-truncated sentence at the end: "Paper ballots are the only way."

What's wrong with this? Merely that rudimentary Googling reveals that it is, in fact, utter bullshit.

• It's presented as something that's just been uncovered. In fact, this particular claim (with the same video) was first promulgated in December 2020, about a month after the election. (Example.)

• And it was near-immediately debunked back then.

• The "Microsoft engineer" was never named, and perhaps never existed.

• The Savannah "tabulation room" where this allegedly occurred was never identified. (Chatham County Georgia currently has 83 voting locations.)

• No supporting evidence was ever put forth. Server logs, IP addresses, dates and times? Fuhgeddaboutit!

• Oh, and although the tweet implies otherwise, Georgia did have paper ballots in the 2020 election. There were a couple of recounts. Vote changes were small. Biden still won.

• Going into much more detail on this is Timothy Noah in the New Republic (July 2022): What Comic Genius Gave Us the Nest Thermostat Election Conspiracy?. He identifies the guy in the video as Russell Ramsland. Noah's article is full of partisan snark, but also full of fun facts, e.g.:

  Ramsland (who told the Post he had never spoken to Trump) is a piece of work. He is, for instance, on record saying the following: “George Soros [who was born in 1930] helped form the ‘Deep State’ in Nazi Germany in the 1930s along with George H.W. Bush’s father [Prescott Bush], the Muslim brotherhood, and ‘leftists.’” (At the risk of being pedantic: Soros is Jewish, the Nazi party was created 10 years before Soros was born, and Hitler came to power when Soros was 3.)

• For (even) more on Ramsland, there's a May 2021 article in the WaPo: The making of a myth.

I came this close (imagine my thumb and index finger about 2 millimeters apart) to commenting at Instapundit. But dealing with election conspiracy advocates is pointless; they are poster children for confirmation bias. Example: see the comment thread on a January 2021 Granite Grok article on a different Georgia allegation: SHOCKING PROOF!!! CHINA CAUGHT Hacked Into Fulton County, GA Voting Machine. Rebuttal on these matters is treated as if it's a turd dropped into a punchbowl.

So I just blog about it here. And you'll notice I don't have a commenting feature.

And for the record:

• Yes, paper ballots are a good idea; I plan to fill one out later today down at the American Legion Hall.
• And (also yes), requiring voter ID is another good idea. It's already required in New Hampshire.

And now on to the usual hodgepodge...

• $14 for a matinee ticket after my senior discount?! I'm with Kyle Smith: Hollywood, Heal Thyself.

  It’s nice to get paid more than you’re worth, but it isn’t so nice when your labor union is so strong that it creates an untenable cost structure for your employer. Management might be forced to shut down in the face of international competition, or move jobs overseas to avoid union costs.

  Everyone knows this is the way the U.S. economy runs, which is why only 5.9% of private-sector jobs are still unionized. Government, which can’t be outsourced, is heavily unionized at all levels.

  Hollywood is one of the most union-intensive businesses in America. Practically everybody on the set of a film, from the makeup lady to the centimillionaire titans like Ryan Reynolds and James Cameron, is a union member. But grim “Jurassic Park”-style rumblings of doom started to be heard in Southern California over the past 10 years. So what did the unions do? They went on strike for even higher wages.

  Kyle goes on to (convincingly) demonstrate that government bailouts/subsidies/incentives to the movie guys are a waste.

  And there's always the small detail that AI is gonna destroy traditional film-making. If it hasn't already. (Depends on when you're reading this.)

• I love Lan Lam. But Elizabeth Nolan Brown goes a different way: RFK Jr.'s 'Real Food Show' is government propaganda but I kind of love it.

  We're now three episodes into The Real Food Show, a YouTube cooking class hosted by Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. And I'm hooked.

  Don't get me wrong: In principle, I hate it. The government has no place being in the business of making cooking shows. And this one is rife with propaganda, including thanking President Donald Trump for the new U.S. dietary guidelines and casual mentions of things like fisheries regulation or an executive order on regenerative agriculture. Even if you can put aside the ick-factor of HHS trying to sneak political content to viewers like some parents might hide broccoli in muffins, this just makes it a worse show. As a cultural or entertainment product, it would be better off without random references to the likes of the Magnuson-Stevenson Act.

  Besides, the presence of RFK Jr., who hosts each episode alongside a popular chef, doesn't add much. He spends most of each episode whisking eggs or doing some other sort of kitchen-helper task while the guest chef talks. Then he periodically bursts in with some propaganda while elbow-deep in chickpea salad.

  Puzzled by this item's header? Well: When I get the urge, I watch Lan Lam's Techniquely episodes on Netflix. They're short, interesting, occasionally funny, and she doesn't yammer about seed oils. Even though I'm unlikely to ever make anything she cooks up, it all looks delicious, and she's a lot easier on the eyes than RFKJr.

• And now a word from the Plundercrats. Two of them, Austin Clemens and David Mitchell, take to the Hill with a headline that is only reassuring if you don't notice the word "wealth": Don’t panic about the national debt — the US has the wealth to handle it. They start out OK:

  The U.S. national debt recently passed $40 trillion, hitting this monstrous milestone months ahead of Congressional Budget Office projections, in part due to tariff refunds increasing the total deficit.

  In March, the federal debt held by the public reached the size of U.S. annual gross domestic product, nearing its all-time peak from more than 80 years ago, when we were paying off World War II.

  These headlines have renewed calls for austerity, but the truth is, America is nowhere near broke. On the contrary, the nation holds a staggering amount of wealth — far more than the debt it owes. The real question is not whether we have the resources to manage the debt, but whether we have the will to use them.

  Yes, it's a plea to tax wealth. Eventually, they start rattling off the possibilities:

  If the U.S> [sic] is willing to look at what it owns, versus only at what it earns, it would open up a new set of options for paying down the debt: taxes on wealth and property, and reforms to how inheritances and capital gains are taxed, among them. Of course, people will disagree about which, if any, to use. But ultimately, that is a debate about priorities and political will, not about whether we have the ability to pay off our debt. Because we do.

  Note the game-playing with the pronouns I've bolded. For example. the U.S. should look at what "it" owns. Smuggling in the idea that "it" owns all that wealth instead of … well, the people who actually own it. And "we" are entitled to as much of that wealth as "we" feel like expropriating.

  Well, the arguments against wealth taxation are well known, I've made a lot of them here, and I probably don't need to repeat them. But I will deploy that evergreen Bastiat quote:

  When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.

  Folks, Austin and David are exactly who Bastiat was talking about back in 1848.

Power Line points us to our Eye Candy du Jour:

That's from WalletHub's ranking the Hardest-Working States in America in 2026. Boy, New Hampshire really stands out there in the Northeast, doesn't it? (I have to admit, being retired for over ten years: I'm not doing my part.)

My other Eye Candidate was from Mr. Ramirez: AI wishes you a happy Labor Day. But (caveat clicker) I disclaim any responsibility for any nightmares you experience as a result.

Also of note:

• Sounds like a plan! A totally demented plan, but what are you gonna do? The WaPo editorialists discuss President Trump's latest unhinged rant: Trump’s new plan to lower interest rates? Extort the Fed. (WaPo gifted link)

  President Donald Trump’s preferred monetary policy is simple. Is the economy sluggish? Cut interest rates. Is it heating up? Also cut interest rates. Now there’s a new addendum: If his handpicked Federal Reserve chair won’t play ball, hold the economy hostage.

  At least, that’s what Trump threatened on Friday on Truth Social. He wrote that if the Fed doesn’t “get smart” and lower rates, he will halt trade entirely with any country that maintains a trade deficit with the United States. That would include China, Mexico, Canada, Vietnam, South Korea and dozens of others — in short, many of America’s top trade partners.

  Perhaps related is Frank Miele's speculation at Real Clear Politics Does Trump Really Want To Win the Midterms? It would explain a lot of his actions if the answer is "no".

• It's "direct action", James. Mr. Lileks looks into the leftist snakepits, and wonders: Is There Any Capitalist’s Murder That ‘Isn’t’ Justified? (NR gifted link)

  The stabbing death of a New York mother and Bank of America vice president by a mentally unstable woman has brought out the absolute finest in revolutionary commentary. From a Palestinian-American filmmaker who tweeted out a bat signal with Luigi Mangione’s face instead of America’s favorite gravel-voiced vigilante, to various commie-kids on X justifying the murder because the victim was involved in (waves hands) all the capitalism, we see how ethically wretched political systems corrupt the humanity of people who believe them.

  The fact that she was a VP at a bank was reason enough to spit on the corpse, because her job surely consisted of meeting with poor hopeful people who sat across the desk twisting their caps in their calloused hands, begging the bank not to foreclose on their lean-to. She looked at them with a glacial expression and said no and then refused to validate parking for their pack mule. She did this all day. Her job title was probably Vice President in Charge of Maintaining Structural Poverty, so yes, those are precisely the people whose demise Luigi would have nodded with Che-like sagacity. Also, the Bank of America has ties to Israel, which means that when you deposit your check there, it’s instantly converted into a bomb designed to strew tetanus-infected nails in a Gaza preschool. Also, Bank of AMERICA. Say no more.

  That's a free link, so all you participants in capitalistic enterprises will want to check out the imagined interview with the "young DSA woman who lives in a $1.7 million townhouse" setting out the guidelines for justifiable homicide.

  (I note that the Wikipedia entry for direct action waits until the second paragraph to admit "Direct action may include activities that can be either violent or nonviolent …")

• "Where we're going we don't need roads." At USA Today, Ilya Somin observes: Democratic socialists and MAGA share a dangerous flaw.

  Democratic socialism is a terrible ideology. If implemented, its agenda would cause grave harm and imperil democracy itself. And in seeking massive state control of the economy, today's socialists ironically have much in common with the MAGA nationalists they claim to oppose.

  Both promote government control over the economy, and both paths undermine liberty, prosperity and democracy. Socialists do not control the Democratic Party in the way MAGA largely dominates the Republicans. But their influence is growing.

  Yes, it's "bothsidesism". But … isn't it appropriate when (metaphorically) both sides are fighting over the steering wheel of a car careening down the Read to Serfdom?

• Won't be missed. Becket Adams sees little reason to mourn, anyway: The Professional Fact-Check Is Dead.

  The crisis of professional “fact-checking” is not new. For more than 15 years, observers have watched with alarm as the genre degraded itself to serve partisan politics.

  Yet little has been written about the discipline in its present state. Its original raison d’être long discarded, it lingers now as a zombie, ambling aimlessly in pursuit of mindless satiation.

  Take Snopes, that relic of the early web that once existed to dismantle viral myths and spare the public from conspiracies, humorous hoaxes, and harmful falsehoods. Recently, it sought to calm concerns that the late Dolly Parton might have done something nice for Jews.

  “Did Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library donate books to children in Israel?” asked a Snopes headline. The subhead reassured readers: “PJ Library, which provides free books to Jewish children, was inspired by Parton’s organization. But the two have no formal relationship.”

  Phew! That was close! (This episode is funnier when one discovers that the article’s author, Nur Ibrahim, “started her career as an associate producer with Al Jazeera English” — because of course she did.)

  Becket provides plenty more examples from Politifact, FactCheck.org, the WaPo, USA Today, the AP, and NBC. A diverse field of partisanship disguised as "fact".

  And he doesn't even mention Wikipedia!

It's on X, used to be Twitter:

I repeat: the two great lessons of the 20th century—taught to us through buckets of blood, human misery, and pointless cruelty—were that we need a better grasp of economics, and that ideology is how you turn IQ points against themselves, good people into monsters, and rich…

— Greg Lukianoff (@glukianoff) September 5, 2026

Continues:

Easy prediction: We'll be seeing plenty of examples of the kind of thing Greg's talking about over the next few weeks and years.

And… Maybe even today:

• We could also use a better grasp on that whole "checks and balances" thing. Eric Boehm points out that Trump is expanding executive power. Democrats are already eyeing the new tools.

  President Donald Trump has greatly—and, in many cases, quite recklessly—expanded the executive branch's power over private businesses.

  The Trump administration has invoked claims of "national security" to levy higher tariffs on everything from steel to musical instruments. It has used the same argument to seize equity shares in more than two dozen private companies, including a so-called "golden share" in U.S. Steel that grants the president the authority to veto future attempts to relocate headquarters or make changes to its production facilities.

  And if you think a future Democratic administration will try to stuff those executive powers back into their proper, constitutional boxes, well…don't hold your breath.

  Further down in the article, J.D. Vance is quoted: "We cannot be afraid to do something because the left might do it in the future." Or that classic second-grade taunt: Come on, don't be a scaredy cat!

  A mere couple days ago I pointed to Daniel Hannan's observation: JD Vance declares war on economics. He's also declaring war on our country's Constitutional structure.

  "We cannot be afraid"? J.D., with people like you running the country, why the hell not?!

• Continuing our theme du jour… At the Dispatch, Matthew Mitchell & Steven Globerman look at Socialism: The Newest Old Idea That Won’t Work. And guess who's one of their bad examples?

  “It is characteristic of the unlearned,” observed Calvin Coolidge in 1919, “that they are forever proposing something which is old, and because it has recently come to their own attention, supposing it to be new.”

  “I think what is so unique and refreshing about Donald Trump’s economic policies,” says Vice President J.D. Vance in 2026, “is that it is not the same old economic ideas that you would have heard 30, 40 years ago.”

  Vance is right to a point. It’s hard to imagine Bill Clinton directing the federal government to take ownership stakes—totaling $26.7 billion—in 30 private companies. Or Ronald Reagan hiking the average U.S. tariff rate to Sudanese levels, thereby imposing thousands of dollars of additional taxes on American families. George H.W. Bush would have never claimed a “golden share” in U.S. Steel, gaining a say in a private company’s board membership, factory locations, capital investment, employment, worker pay, and naming rights. And, it is safe to say that no past president would direct the Pentagon to go into the oil business with an accused money launderer and an unelected Venezuelan socialist.

  Ironically, the tweet linked in the second paragraph above is sourced from Fox News, and Fox's chyron says "GOP FIGHTS BACK AGAINST SOCIALISM".

  Fox, I wish!

• Good question. And Jeff Maurer asks it: Does the U.S. Already Have Universal Health Insurance?

  In lefty circles, “Medicare for All” is often treated as a synonym for “universal health insurance”. But the phrases are different; M4A is one type of universal coverage, and conflating the two is like saying “Ferrari” when you mean “micropenis compensation device”. Contrary to what some people think, there is not one health insurance system used by every advanced country except the US; other countries achieve close-to-universal coverage through various combinations of public insurance, private insurance, regulation, and Dutchness.

  About eight percent of Americans don’t have health insurance. Obamacare cut the number of uninsured almost in half, but the eight percent figure has held remarkably steady for several years. According to Twitter accounts with a red rose and a Palestinian flag next to their name — my #1 source of news — the existence of that eight percent represents a profound failure of the American system. And there’s some agreement here: I would like 100 percent of Americans to have health insurance. If I were in charge, I’d make big changes, and only most of them would involve getting other people to bankroll my shit. But even while acknowledging that it would be better if more American had health insurance, a closer look at the eight percent of uninsured Americans reveals that not every uninsured person is a destitute peasant being ground to dust by capitalism. In fact, you could argue that we kinda, sorta already have something close to universal coverage.

  Jeff does a super-wonkish job at crunching the statistics, and (my take, not his) you'll get an appreciation for how far down the Road to Serfdom we are already.

• Learn from this history: Thomas W. Hazlett explains how it came to be that "freedom of the press" doesn't extend to ABC vs. Trump and the Broadcasters’ Free-Speech Sellout. (WSJ gifted link)

  While most media operate in a laissez-faire regime, terrestrial radio and television broadcasting are licensed, and their airwave access has sometimes been deemed a privilege, not a right. Harvard Law’s Laurence Tribe traces the anomaly to a technical error: “a profound fallacy about spectrum scarcity.” Or as comedian George Carlin put it, “radio and television [are] the only two parts of American life not protected by the free speech provisions of the First Amendment to the Constitution. I’d like to repeat that because it sounds vaguely important.”

  Whose cockamamie idea was this? Why, the broadcasters’ own.

  The 1927 Radio Act’s “public interest” language was written by the National Association of Broadcasters, as the bill’s sponsor, Sen. Clarence C. Dill (D., Wash.), explained in his 1938 book, “Radio Law.” From the start, Dill saw that “the ‘twilight zone’ between censorship and the refusal to renew a station license because of the service rendered, is undetermined.”

  The broadcasters traded freedom for free licenses and a lucrative, protected market. Upstart rivals—the DuMont Television Network in the 1940s and ’50s, then cable TV and satellite in the 1960s—were suppressed, while only a handful of viable stations were assigned to more than 80 TV channels. In return, regulators gained clout over an industry and influence over content.

  Which has led to a long history of threats and abuse. Think of the broadcasters as battered wives who are learning that their spouses are inherent, unreformable, short-fused bullies.

• But maybe Nellie will cheer us up? Nope, sorry. Her TGIF column, written before the mistrial was declared, is pretty bleak, especially if you're a kid.

  → Lindsay Clancy jury deadlocked: I know the Lindsay Clancy trial is not technically the most consequential story of the week, but in my circles (moms) it is The Only Conversation, so bear with me. The jurors are deadlocked. Twice they have gone to the judge to say the jury cannot come to a decision. If they cannot reach a verdict, the judge could declare a mistrial. There are some clues as to what may be happening. For example, at least three of the female jurors were spotted curiously wearing pink, the color worn by Clancy supporters who think she is the victim of pharmacology and maternal stress and believe that—after a stint in a healthcare facility where she will be declared no longer a danger, which, by the way she has already been declared—she should go free. The deeper idea being proposed here seems to be that moms should kind of be able to kill their kids. Like, if they’re really, really stressed. In Canada, that’s the law already. If a parent kills a kid under the age of 1, it’s a maximum five-year sentence. We’re now going to see a movement to bring that to the U.S., and also to expand it to older kids. Death cults will death cult.

  Here’s the CBC this week. They called up criminal law expert Isabel Grant, a professor at the University of British Columbia, to say how this is a perfect example of how the infanticide law should expand to older kids.

  Technically, in Canada, Clancy could have raised infanticide as a defense for the murder of Callan, who was eight months old, said Grant, the criminal law professor at UBC. But the killing of Clancy’s older children could not be defended as infanticide even if she hadn’t recovered from the birth of the youngest child when she killed them, she added. “That is a shortcoming in the Canadian law.”

  A shortcoming in the law, says the law professor, is that a mom might be in jail longer than five years if she kills a bunch of kindergartners since the postpartum might not carry over to each killing. Maybe postpartum should last until the kid’s 18, right? Maybe moms—if they’re under a lot of pressure and like, super, super stressed and changing Zoloft dosages and can’t figure out the Snoo—should be able to kill her offspring at any age? It’s pro-choice taken to the nth degree. My moderate take on “pro-choice until the second trimester” will soon be seen as the radical right position. New battle lines: Are you pro-choice till 1, 5, or 18 years old? The new moderate is saying you draw the line at a 5-year-old. A psychologist will be like, after 5, the children have too many neurons and are, in fact, not fair game.

  I assume beating your kids is still illegal in Canada? Just killing them seems like an easy out.

It's Andrew Heaton, so: watch, learn, and laugh.

You'll learn stuff. About data centers, sure. But also how to fill in the blank: "The best thing you can do with an almond is              ."

The answer might surprise you!

Also of note:

• Another reason for Washington State taxpayers to be peeved. The state's university got caught violating one of their instructors' civil rights: Washington professor who parodied university ‘land acknowledgment’ wins $600K settlement. FIRE has the story:

  The University of Washington paid $600,000 after punishing Professor Stuart Reges for parodying a university-approved “land acknowledgment” in his syllabus.

  The payout comes after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit held administrators liable under the First Amendment for retaliation and viewpoint discrimination.

  Today’s settlement concludes the legal battle that began with a 2022 lawsuit by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression on Reges’s behalf. Besides the monetary settlement, the agreement stipulates that the university cannot take any further action against Reges. While Reges’s appeal was pending, UW also rescinded and replaced the vague antiharassment policy used to punish the professor for his speech.

  “I am deeply grateful to FIRE for this legal victory which will remind public universities that they are obligated to respect the First Amendment rights of their students, faculty, and staff,” said Reges. “More importantly, I hope that my protest can help reverse a decade-long trend towards ideological conformity in academia and help to convince them that instead of ‘protecting’ students from controversial ideas, they should be helping them to learn how to cope with disagreement. Only then can we heal the deep divisions that confront us today.”

  So, good for Stuart, and good for FIRE. I first blogged about him back in 2018, when UWash was pissed about an article he wrote at Quillette: Why Women Don't Code.

• 

  Darn. Noah Smith has a long and thoughtful review of Where Is My Flying Car? by J. Storrs Hall. Unfortunately, Noah's headline is discouraging: Why you won’t get a flying car.

  In 2011, Peter Thiel famously said: “We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.” When I first saw that quote, I chuckled, because for my entire life, we’ve had flying buses. And again and again, as I sit on a flying bus and marvel at the thrill of takeoff, and reflect on how amazing it is that man has conquered the air, I look around and see my fellow passengers with their window shades drawn, their noses buried in a book or staring at a phone.

  If we had flying cars, we’d enjoy the thrill for a few weeks, and then we’d be back to tweeting on our phones and wondering when the trip would be over.

  I’ve noticed a loose collection of beliefs and attitudes that I’ve decided to call “engineerism”, because I see it most often among engineers. I coined the term when I was in college, when I noticed that the engineering majors in my physics classes tended to think differently about the world than the physics majors like myself did. Later, I recognized “engineerism” in various sci-fi novels — Lucifer’s Hammer and Footfall by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, The Peace War by Vernor Vinge, and so on.

  When I say “engineerism”, I am not talking about Friedrich Hayek’s “engineering mentality” — the belief that society can be designed and optimized like a machine.2 Nor am I referring to Evgeny Morozov’s “technological solutionism”, which is the idea that social problems can be fixed with technology. If I had to define what I call “engineerism” in succinct, simple terms, it would be something like: “The idea that if a technology can be built, we ought to build it.” Simply put, engineers like to engineer things, and they become disgruntled when society does not give them the resources to do this.

  I reported on Where Is My Flying Car? back in 2022, but Noah's review is better.

• Actual trickle-down economics at work. Our state's outgoing senior senator, Jeanne Shaheen, made Commie Radio New Hampshire Public Radio notice her turn at the pork barrel: Shaheen requests $5M to study 'sailor campus' at old Portsmouth Naval Prison.

  A feasibility study on the future of the former Portsmouth Naval Shipyard building, long ago abandoned by the Navy, may be on the horizon.

  This spring, Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-NH, requested $5 million in federal funding in the fiscal year 2027 appropriations legislation for a planning study. The funds would be used to determine whether “The Alcatraz of the East” could be given new life and reutilized as a “sailor campus" over a phased process, according to Shaheen’s request.

  (Originally an article at the Portsmouth Herald, where it is paywalled.)

  Now $5 million, while it might be a lot of money to you or me, is a very small drop in the very large bucket of federal spending.

  But I can't help but wonder into whose pockets that money will eventually go. Like any good Democrat, Jeanne has long been a foe of "trickle-down economics", which is how they refer to any proposal that lets people keep more of their own money.

  But when it comes to doling out millions for a "study"… well, good luck on tracking down the cui bono there.

• On the LFOD watch. Louis Cannon writes at the Pagosa Daily Post (the "online community magazine for Pagosa Springs, Colorado") and my Google News Alert rang for his recent article, READY, FIRE, AIM: Live Free or… You Know… Like, Die. Yes, it concerns New Hampshire's motto. And it's not awful; he talks about George Maynard's effort in the 1970s to not display it on his car's license plate, which eventually went to SCOTUS.

  I did want to mention where Louis goes badly wrong, in discussing the state quarter released in the year 2000:

  The coin also includes an image of ‘The Old Man of the Mountain’ — a peculiar rock formation which happens to be one of the few tourist attractions in New Hampshire.

  Well, practically anyone coulda told Louis that he shoulda put that in past tense: the Old Man's face fell off Cannon Mountain back in 2003.

  Also: tourism is, in fact, New Hampshires second-largest economic sector. (Mainly we get a lot of folks stopping on US3, wondering "So where's the Old Man?")

  And, for the record: Colorado's official state motto is Nil Sine Numine, which is Latin for "Nothing without Providence" or (perhaps) "Nothing without the Deity". There is no danger of it ever appearing on Colorado license plates.

Recently on the book blog (finally):

I'm pretty old now, but back in the 1960s, as a teenager, I checked out Frank Meyer's book, In Defense of Freedom, from the Omaha Public Library. Even then, I was impressed by his argument. I would occasionally get creeped out by some of the other National Review writers. But it seemed to me back then that Meyer got it pretty much right. And that belief has (more or less) continued for sixty years or so.

Although Meyer didn't care much for the term, the political philosophy he argued for came to be known as "fusionism". What's being fused? The two ideals of liberty and virtue. Meyer argued for a compromise between those conservative factions, noting that neither was a credible standalone position: over-reliance on virtue could easily slide over into state tyranny, and libertarian absolutism could devolve into anarchistic squalor.

Against the virtucrats, Meyer argued that a virtue enforced by state coercion wasn't true virtue; it must be a freely-chosen position. And to the out-there libertarians, his position was remarkably similar to that promulgated by the American founders. (E.g., James Madison: "To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people, is a chimerical idea." You could look it up.)

So I was gratified to hear about Stephanie Slade's book. Fusionism has long been an interest of hers. Here is her article in Reason's March 2021 issue, which asks: Is There a Future for Fusionism?) And more recently, in the July 2026 Reason: What is fusionism? America blends liberalism and religion.

I ordered the book pretty much as soon as I heard about it. It's an impressive combination of history, political philosophy, and shoe-leather journalism. Slade looks at the contentious history of conservatism and libertarianism, concentrating on Meyer's intellectual odyssey. (He started out as an actual Communist. But he got better.) But plenty of other folks are examined, with careful detail and sometimes surprising insights. (I thought I knew the intellectual history relatively well, but Slade kept digging out details of which I was unaware.)

Slade notes, accurately, that fusionism's greatest electoral success was in the 1980s, typified by the landslide victories of Ronald Reagan in 1980 and 1984. He wasn't perfect, but at his best he could be a passionate advocate of fusionist ideas. (Here's Slade again, in the July 2025 Reason: The fusionist politics of Ronald Reagan.)

Slade notes that since then, things have gotten worse (to put it mildly) on the GOP/right-wing side of things. Trump has shown little respect for fusionist ideals of limited government and free-market economics, preferring "pitchfork populism". Trump's heir apparent, J.D. Vance, is even worse. Most of the Republican Party seems to docilely follow along. And, out there on the fringes, there are some really scary folks: "theocons, natcons, and neoreactionaries", all calling for grabbing the reins of government power to impose their frightening visions.

In short, Slade has written an excellent book, and I recommend it to anyone interested in where we've been poltically, and where we might be going.

Of course, our Amazon Eye Candy du Jour provides one possible choice. But Christian Schneider's headline in NR is pretty good too: There's No Problem Government Creates That It Can’t Make Worse. His current example:

It would probably make the motto too long, but I'd add the infuriating punchline: "… while insisting at every step it was doing you a favor."

But speaking of government-created problems, here's Gabriel R. Llanes at the Federalist describing another one: The Wealth Gap Is Real, And Washington Created It.

I'm not a fan of the class-warfare implications—it's not the fault of the wealthy that they're in position to take advantage of monetary policy, and they don't deserve to be punished for it. Still…

Coincidentally, Bryan Caplan has a number of insightful Reflections on Americans’ Net Worth. Those reflections are based on the Federal Reserve's "Survey of Consumer Finances". And, as Bryan says, they demonstrate "the chasm between populist pessimism and actual data on Americans’ net worth."

Bryan has 20 of them. Here are the first three:

… and I recommend you check out numbers 4-20.

Also of note:

• Unfortunately, we're all collateral damage. Daniel Hannan notes bellicosity: JD Vance declares war on economics.

  JD Vance is the latest postliberal to embrace what is now, for all intents and purposes, an anti-growth position.

  In his latest book, Communion, Vance inveighs against those perennial straw men, the GDP-obsessed economists. We keep hearing about these mysterious figures, cold-hearted calculators who believe that GDP is the only measure that counts. Oddly, despite running the world’s foremost classical liberal think tank, I have yet to meet one.

  Vance, though, is convinced that people who “struggle to put a value on anything that can’t be specifically measured” not only exist, but run America. The country is governed, he tells us, “by numbers on a spreadsheet and the people who built those spreadsheets.”

  Also in the running for Pun Salad Official Motto: "Beware politicians who claim to know what would make you truly happy."

• Good question. And the WaPo editorial board asks it: State control over oil broke Venezuela. Why is Trump doubling down? (WaPo gifted link)

  President Donald Trump’s removal of socialist dictator Nicolás Maduro in January offered a generational opportunity to counteract the failures of Venezuela’s socialist policies. A pro-America opposition appeared ready to usher in a free market and end the state’s suffocating grip on oil production. Eight months later, the White House’s deal with Maduro’s former vice president risks entrenching the people and policies that tanked the country’s economy in the first place.

  Under the sketchy terms of an agreement Trump unveiled this week with Venezuela’s interim leader, Delcy Rodríguez, the Pentagon receives a 35 percent stake in North American Blue Energy Partners, which has just been granted 100-year concessions to drill in 17 oil fields that contain an estimated 65 billion barrels. The State Department receives rights to buy 20 percent of the output at cost and gets first dibs on purchasing the remainder. The Venezuelan government would purportedly receive $200 billion in tax and royalty payments over the next 25 years.

  The Trump administration has earned a bad reputation for crony capitalism by taking equity stakes in at least 30 private companies, including Intel and Westinghouse. But a deal of this magnitude makes the U.S. government, at least on paper, one of the world’s largest corporate holders of oil. State control of the industry was an original sin of Chavismo, named for left-wing populist strongman Hugo Chávez, whose despotic rule from 1999 to 2013 included a nationalization drive that kicked off Venezuela’s economic death spiral.

  Also in the running for Pun Salad Official Motto: "Beware politicians who think they can run businesses."

• And finally: do not vote for any pol who babbles about "genocide". And don't believe what you read in the New York Times, either: Because, as David Harsanyi documents: The 'Gaza Genocide' Is a Hoax.

  In May 2025, Tom Fletcher, the United Nations under-secretary-general for humanitarian affairs, went on BBC Radio and told the audience that 14,000 babies in Gaza were going to die "in the next 48 hours unless we can reach them."

  According to UNICEF, there are around 20,000 babies in the entirety of Gaza. Which means 70% of all infants were in danger of dying in mere hours. An "utterly chilling" figure, Fletcher stressed.

  The New York Times, along with numerous other establishment media outlets, relayed Fletcher's allegation to its credulous audience without any skepticism. The usual experts were summoned to discuss this unfolding famine on cable news. And the antisemites across social media amplified the claim.

  No matter how far-fetched a story is about Israel, including preposterous evidence-free accusations that it trains dogs to rape Palestinians, papers such as The New York Times will spread it to feed the perception that the Jewish state operates as a genocidal entity. And no matter how often the claims are debunked, they keep at it.

  David lays out the facts. His bottom line: "There is no genocide. And there was no famine. There was a war. And the bad guys lost."

Recently on the book blog:

I have an embarrassing number of bought-but-never-read books on my shelves. This is yet another of those, purchased sometime in the 1970s. In case you haven't heard: it's about rabbits in England. In the book's universe, they can talk to each other, with occasional specialized vocabulary. (Fortunately, there's a "Lapine Glossary" in the back of the book for unfamiliar rabbit words.) The rabbits can also converse in a limited way with other species, but not people.

In the peaceful (but somewhat regimented) rabbit warren in Sandleford, there is trouble a'brewing. A small rabbit named Fiver, with soothsaying abilities, knows there's bad danger afoot. (And we readers know it too, as there's a sign announcing the imminent construction of "high class modern residences".) And that construction will involve the destruction of the rabbit habitat.

Fiver is convincing enough to get a small group of rabbits to abandon Sandleford and start looking for a new home. (Just in time, as it turns out.) Their travels are danger-filled. And there's another issue: they have no lady rabbits in their group, which (even rabbits know) doesn't auger well for their community's long-term survival. Their efforts to gain some females cause them to run afoul of an extremely militaristic warren. Our bunnies are no match for them in brawn; can they out-think them?

Spoiler: yes. But it's a close-run thing. If you're thinking about reading this to the kids: there's a lot of (rabbit) violence and even some PG elements of rabbit sex.

James Freeman notes an embarrassing vote in the House of Representatives: Handful of House Democrats Vote to Denounce Murderous Marxism. (WSJ gifted link)

"Embarrassing" in the sense that the GOP designed it to embarrass Dems. But there's a local angle for Granite Staters:

For those not plugged into New Hampshire politics, the democratic socialist running against Pappas in the primary next week is Karishma Manzur. Her latest allegation is described by Michael Graham in NHJournal: Manzur: I’m the ‘Real Democrat,’ Pappas Is the Sellout.

Pappas was one of 22 Democrats voting to censure Tlaib. This was back in 2023, before his spine gelatinized.

Tomorrow I plan to blog David Harsanyi's column, but here's a sneak preview link: The 'Gaza Genocide' Is a Hoax.

I'm torn about whether I want Manzur to beat Pappas in the primary. She'd be a weak candidate against her probable opponent in November, John E. Sununu. On the other hand, I'd like to think New Hampshire Democrat voters weren't buying the socialist shtick.

Also of note:

• 

  More from Slade. I promise that I will report on my reading of Stephanie Slade's great book, Fusionism, Real Soon Now. Just not today. But to further whet your appetite, here's an "adapted-from" article at the WSJ: Meet the ‘Bronze Age’ Young Men of the New American Right. (WSJ gifted link)

  When the Supreme Court this summer upheld the constitutionality of birthright citizenship, the right-wing internet erupted with rage. Prime among its targets were the four female justices who had signed on to the majority opinion. In one representative post on X, the Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh declared that “the worst Supreme Court Justices of all time have all been women. That’s just a fact. Republican presidents should take the hint.”

  The outburst was in keeping with a strain of rhetoric popular among a subset of very online young men. It holds that women are too emotional to occupy positions of influence in society; that female suffrage was a mistake; and that the fairer sex’s purpose in life is to look good, make babies, and serve a husband’s every need.

  To understand where all of this is bubbling up from, it helps to be acquainted with the “vitalists,” a certifiably weird subculture led by internet personalities with pseudonyms like “Bronze Age Pervert” (real name: Costin Alamariu) and “Raw Egg Nationalist” (real name: Charles Cornish-Dale), who look back longingly to a time when white men were in charge and other groups submitted humbly to rule by their betters.

  And of course, you can always use the Amazon link at your right.

  I'd like to think that Slade's just "nut-picking", and the "vitalist" influence is negligible compared to (say) the DSA's influence on the Democrats. But I dunno for sure.

• And ego. Don't forget his ego. Jacob Sullum notes that we'll soon have a Trump Monument in DC. Specifically: Trump’s White House ballroom is a monument to his lawlessness.

  After President Theodore Roosevelt began building the East Wing of the White House in 1902, he thanked Congress for approving the project and appropriating the necessary funds. When President Donald Trump demolished the East Wing last fall, by contrast, he acted without permission from Congress, which the Constitution empowers to control federal property.

  That difference is unlikely to matter in practice, thanks to a stay the Supreme Court issued on Monday, which allows Trump to continue work on the huge ballroom he is building on the site of the East Wing. But Trump's insistence on acting unilaterally will make his vanity project a monument to his disregard for the rule of law and the separation of powers.

  But that's not all…

• Are there no limits to this guy's narcissism? On a related matter, Noah Rothman looks at yet another example of Trump's Petty Caesarism, as exhibited by…

  Available for purchase today at 12PM ET: 2026 President Donald J. Trump $1 Coin. These coins are also in circulation, so check your pocket change. Collect them today! #CoinCollecting #America250https://t.co/g4eJes21ER pic.twitter.com/4OqkQ2sa9W

  — United States Mint (@usmint) September 2, 2026

  Donald Trump’s visage is already circulating on these gold-finished brass coins. Some have taken exception to the “controversial move” of putting a sitting president’s face on legal tender, but their objections are unreasonable.

  Sure, this hasn’t been done in 100 years, and the last person to do it was arguably the least imperial president in that century: Calvin Coolidge. Never mind that his face was partially eclipsed by George Washington’s. And like the 1926 coin, this one will cost a lot more than it’s worth.

  “The rolls of $1 coins (25 to a roll) go for $61. A bag of 100 coins goes for $154.50,” ABC News reported. Likewise, back in 1926, “few people cared to part with the required $1 to purchase a commemorative half dollar,” the historian David Bowers observed. “When all was said and done, the staggering quantity of 859,408 half dollars went back to the Mint to be melted!” Perhaps the same fate is in store for Trump’s coins.

  "Gold-finished brass"? Kinda cheesy, Don.

Recently on the book blog: