Pun Salad

Bryan Caplan fanboy here. I picked up this book from Amazon back in March, 2024. Last October I drove up to the University of New England in Biddeford, Maine to see Bryan participate in its President’s Forum and I got him to sign it. And now I finally got around to reading it.

It is a (literal) comic book, and I mean no disrespect by that; its fantastic, clever illustration is by Ady Branzei. Bryan appears as a chacter, explaining his thesis to the reader.

And that thesis is straightforward and ably presented: deregulation of housing policy is pretty close to a panacea. It would not only solve the obvious problem (often described as a "housing crisis" here in New Hampshire), but also help ameliorate a host of associated social woes. Although the book is published by the libertarian Cato Institute, Bryan notes that such deregulation should appeal to other factions in the political landscape: egalitarians, for example, should like that it gives the less well-off a better chance at decent shelter. It has environmental benefits! It would facilitate people moving from low-productivity, low-wage areas to better their economic situation! It would make having babies more practical, staving off demographic collapse! ("It slices! It dices!")

Of course, the deregulation Bryan champions has its problems with political feasibility. Making housing "more affordable" translates to, for existing homeowners, a decline in their property values. And homeowners tend to vote their pocketbooks. (This March 2025 story from our local TV station shows how this is playing out in New Hampshire.)

I'm not proud of reading this book, but it was available at Portsmouth (NH) Public Library, and I guess I was in kind of a trashy mood, so…

The author, Maureen Callahan, has a simple theme: women who get involved with Kennedy men (and also women born into the Kennedy family) are destined for various kinds of misery and tragedy. Some picks are obvious: Jackie, Mary Jo Kopechne, Marilyn Monroe. Others are slightly more obscure (if you, like me, don't peruse the gossip mags and tabloids): Carolyn Bessette, Mary Richardson Kennedy, Joan Kennedy, Rosemary Kennedy, "Kick" Kennedy, Martha Moxley, the matriarch Rose, Pamela Kelley, Mimi Beardsley, Diana de Vegh.

Callahan leads off with an apt quote from The Great Gatsby, the one about "careless people". And she proceeds to provide plenty of examples of that carelessness, and shows in great detail just what that carelessness leads to. Some of these details are cringe-inducing: Jackie getting splattered with JFK's blood and brains; a clinical description of Rosemary's lobotomy; JFK Jr's plane crash, killing himself and wife Carolyn; Mary Jo Kopechne's probable lengthy struggle to survive in the back seat of Teddy's sunken Oldsmobile; … Yeesh!

The plain "everyone knows" facts are bad enough, but Callahan dips at times into rumor, speculation, and amateur (probably simplistic) psychosocial analysis of the participants and their milieu. Her prose is lurid; but to be fair, she's describing some pretty lurid behavior.

The book could have used some fact-checking; for example, Callahan claims that JFK set the goal of a 1960s American manned moon landing in his inaugural address; it was actually in September 1962. Also copy-editing: Callahan misuses "passive voice" and "begs the question". Neither being a big deal, but makes one wonder how solid her more serious claims are.

Another book for which many readers had a different experience than I did. Although you can read much praise for it at Amazon, I didn't care for it at all. (The readers at Goodreads seem to be much more critical, but they're not trying to sell you anything.) I liked two other books by the author, Alex Finlay (my reports here and here), well enough to pick this one up at the library.

The book opens with a grim scene: five kids from the "Savior House" foster home each firing one .22 bullet into a corpse in a makeshift grave in a dark and rainy forest. Making a pact to stay mum about it, of course.

But twenty-five years later, the kids seem to have become the target of assassins. Concentrating on three of them: Grown-up Donnie is an alcoholic rock star on decline; Nico is a reality-TV producer; Jenna is a retired contract killer with a devoted husband and a resentful teenage stepdaughter. All have near-misses with death, and must hustle to find out what's going on.

The dialog is wooden, characters are cardboard, the prose is padded and leaden, the plot is super-contrived, and lazy clichés abound. One "climactic" sequence near the book's end reads like a parody: people sneaking up behind other people, betrayals, characters-not-who-they-seem, … Everything in the book seems to be a random selection of stuff from other books.

I'll be generous and give this two stars at Goodreads.

Another book down on my "reread Crais" project. My report from my previous read about 9.5 years ago is here.

Don't have much more to add to it except: If anything, I liked this book even more the second time around. I think I missed some subtle Craisian flourishes back in 2015.

I really wanted to like this book better than I did. The very first page seemed designed to appeal to me, a transcript of a radio interview with Nobel Prizewinner Valentine Pillman:

Interviewer:… I suppose that your first important discovery, Dr. Pillman, was the celebrated Pillman radiant?

Dr. Pillman: I wouldn't say so. The Pillman radiant wasn't my first discovery, it wasn't important, and, strictly speaking, it wasn't a discovery. It's not entirely mine either.

If you're like me, you've already cast Bob Elliott as the interviewer, and Ray Goulding as Dr. Pillman, delivering those lines with impeccable comic timing.

Unfortunately, the rest of the book doesn't continue with that nostalgic wackiness. Although Dr. Pillman does show up later to explain the book's title.

Aliens have made a brief visit to Earth years ago, in six "Visit Zones". The Zones are dangerous, filled with mysterious and incomprehensible objects and forces. Visitors are subject to violence, hallucinations, and changes to their biology. Yet, the "stalkers" are tempted by possibilities of retrieving some alien technology that will make them rich. For most, it's a bad bet.

Pillman's guess is that the aliens landed on Earth simply as a "roadside picnic" spot, a place to stretch their legs (or whatever), have some lunch, see the sights, and then carry on to their actual destination. And so, humanity is left with trying to make the most of alien litter.

The main character is Redrick "Red" Schuhart, one of those stalkers. The book details his three expeditions into one of the Zones, filled with danger and disaster. In the final installment, he's in search of the "Golden Sphere", which is alleged to grant the owner's wishes. No spoilers, but this is not the kind of book where everyone, or anyone, lives happily ever after.

Don't let my low rating dissuade you from reading this. Theodore Sturgeon gave an earlier version (Soviet-censored) a rave; Ursula K. Leguin wrote the forward for this recent definitive, restored, edition; she finds it swell. The Wikipedia page lists the many other honors and plaudits the book has received over the years.

Last month, I looked at Matt Zwolinski's essay, titled Libertarianism's Democracy Problem. In it he referred to this book by Hans-Hermann Hoppe (H3 from here on). And also Against Democracy by Jason Brennan, which I read and liked quite a bit.

But I was intrigued enough to request H3's book, which arrived from Brandeis U, thanks to the Interlibrary Loan Service of the University Near Here. (The inner cover says the book was purchased for the Brandeis library by the "Brandeis National Women's Committee", which strikes me as an odd choice for a Women's Committee, but never mind.)

Anyway: I didn't care for the book much. It's not really about democracy, but a manifesto detailing and advocating H3's political philosophy. Which his subtitle calls "natural order", but most of us fellow travellers of the libertarian camp know as anarchocapitalism: all property is private, its justice system (police, justice, punishment) provided by firms competing for voluntary customers in the marketplace.

H3's inspiration is in the Austrian school of economics, particularly Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard. Those two are quoted and praised extensively, with the fervor of a old-style bible-thumper quoting the Good Book. The (equally Austrian) Friedrich Hayek is relatively ignored, relegated to some footnotes. (H3's excuse: Hayek studied under early Mises, before the Misesian system was entirely worked out, and hence is a heretic. Rothbard got Mises later, and therefore is his true intellectual heir.)

H3's political/economic views are heterodox. For example, he likes old-style monarchy better than democracy, because the monarch "owns" the state, and is constrained in his behavior as is any business owner: his ability to please the customers. Democratic governments, on the other hand, are all on a slippery slope eventually, inevitably, leading to socialist totalitarianism; it's just that some countries got there quicker than others.

As for America: the Declaration was great, the resulting Revolution was inspiring, the post-Revolutionary government was admirable, and the Constitution was a big fat mistake, giving too much power to the Federal Government. Arguable!

Even more arguable is H3's sympathy for the secessionist "Southern Confederacy" decades later; after all, weren't they just insisting on doing the same thing America did when it seceded from Britain? (H3 admits, finally, that "the issue of slavery" might have "complicated and obscured the situation in 1861." Gee, ya think?

Along the way H3 disdains liberal pieties, for example multiculturalism. He claims "no multicultural society—and especially no democratic one—has ever worked peacefully for very long." Uh, Hans, simply as an editing pedantry: if no such society exists, then the aside about democratic ones is superfluous at best.

H3 can also be hair-on-fire apocalyptic: "The U.S. government does not protect us. To the contrary, there exists no greater danger to our life, property, and prosperity than the U.S. government, and the U.S. president in particular is the world's single most threatening and armed danger, capable of ruining everyone who opposes him and destroying the entire globe."

The book is ©2001, by the way. U.S. Presidents have just been "biden" their time in destroying the globe.

Bottom line: even as a mostly-libertarian, I can't recommend H3. He's right about some things, utterly wrong about way too many others. If you want a libertarian critique of democracy, Jason Brennan's a better choice.

I find that I'm reading a disproportionate amount of non-fiction books by woman authors with the initials A. S.: Amity Shlaes, Allison Schrager, and now here's Abigail Shrier. Funny coincidence, or a bug in the simulation?

Also: Shrier's first book, Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters, was the target of a cancellation campaign back in 2020. One of the lead cancellation advocates was an ACLU lawyer! (Is that ironic?)

And I note that, while I found this book at the Portsmouth (NH) Public Library, they do not carry Irreversible Damage. Which means it probably will not show up in their prominent "Banned Books Week" display this year, or any other year. (I'm pretty sure that's ironic.)

Anyway, this book: Shrier's subject is the psychological damage to children caused by mental health professionals, semi-professionals, and (yes) even some parents. This isn't a new phenomenon; one of my wise-cracking middle school teachers back in the 1960s occasionally smirkingly remarked that he "didn't want to give us a complex" after expressing even an innocuous opinion.

But Shrier argues that it's gotten worse, and she backs up her argument with plenty of evidence of "iatrogenic" harm to the kiddos. The incentives involved in the mental health industry are all wrong, she (convincingly) says; quirks are magnified into neuroses, everyday disappointments blow up into major trauma, "surveys" are performed that normalize destructive behavior, and more.

My take: A good book for parents to read. And maybe teachers too. But Shrier was pushing on an open door in my case; some of the negative Amazon reviews accuse her of cherry-picking data, misinterpreting/misrepresenting the sources she cites, and so on. Since my kids are in their 30s, and I haven't been in a classroom for a couple decades, I'm not motivated enough to judge.

This is Don Winslow's (allegedly) penultimate book, and the middle volume of his "Danny Ryan" trilogy. It is a generic page-turning crime thriller, but with pretensions. I read elsewhere that Winslow got some plot inspiration from the Aeneid, which explains some of the unlikely events here.

At the end of the previous book, City on Fire, Danny was one of the few survivors of a Providence, Rhode Island gang war. Disgusted, dispirited, mourning his late wife, he, his infant son, senile dad, and his ragtag crew need to get out of town and go into hiding, avoiding both the law and surviving still-hostile mobsters.

So: off to sunny Southern California. And (speaking of unlikeliness) Danny and his crew get involved with a big-budget movie based on that Providence gang war. And Danny gets, um, involved with the glamorous leading lady, looking to reboot her career after tabloid-fodder history of booze, drugs, and scandal. Spoiler: It turns out poorly.

There's lots of sex, violence, and bad language. And soap operatics. Consumer note: If you tackle the trilogy, you might not want to spend as many months as I did between reading volumes. I found ("at my age") that it was unclear why characters were (variously) killing, betraying, and bonking each other. Oh well, just turn the pages, Paul.

About eight years ago, I started a "reread Heinlein" reading project. This winds it up. I wisely left his last few books for the end. This one was ©1987; RAH passed away in May 1988.

And (humph) apparently it's out of print! Amazon doesn't sell new copies anyway. I was unaware, and somewhat surprised, that could possibly happen.

And (as far as I know) this is the only one of his books to have a racy Boris Vallejo cover of a nekkid lady (with strategically flowing hair).

That's Maureen Johnson, and this is mostly her autobiography, told in the first person. It's interspersed with her "current" predicament, where she wakes up (naked, of course) next to a dead man and a live cat named Pixel. This puts her in a bit of legal peril, and escaping from that simply seems to land her in illegal peril, and…

But it's mostly her autobiography, and she leads an interesting life, as one of the early participants in the "Howard Foundation" effort to breed long-lived people. Which is spectacularly successful in her case, as she's the mother of Lazarus Long. The story is full of what I think of as Heinleinian dialog and monologue, and if you've read many of his books you will know what I mean by that. The book is also very risqué, bawdy, ribald, racy, and a bunch of other synonyms. Maureen is very fond of having good clean fun in, and out of, the sack.

And it's also iconoclastic, because there's a lot, a lot, of taboo-breaking, mostly involving every possible kind of incest.

So (consumer note) you might want to read a number of Heinlein's books before you tackle this one, as characters from them show up here. To find out which, skip to the back of the book where "Associated Stories" are listed, and use your judgment. Or, if you don't mind spoilers, see the Wikipedia page.

Last month, I noticed George Will's praise of this book by Alexander C. Karp and Nicholas W. Zamiska. Half-thinking that I might cause some fretting at Portsmouth (NH) Public LIbrary, I submitted it to them as a suggested purchase. They bought it, I borrowed it, and here we are.

I probably didn't need to suggest it. Amazon notes that it is (as I type) their "#1 Best Seller" in the "Government & Business" genre. And it was, at some point, a "INSTANT #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER". In addition to GFW's two-thumbs-up, the WSJ review was also positive.

Author Karp is CEO of Palantir, a high-tech defense contractor; Co-author Zamiska is Palantir's head of corporate affairs and legal counsel. Palantir is noted for (among many other things) taking over Project Maven, the Defense Department's effort to incorporate AI into its tactics, after Google dropped out, thanks to "activist" employee protests.

So you would think Karp might be a Trump cheerleader, like his friend (and Palantir co-founder) Peter Thiel. Nope. He has described himself as a socialist and a progressive, voted for both Hillary (2016) and Kamala (2024). And (by the way) he lives in Grafton County, NH; at least that's the location of one of his "10 cross-country ski huts".

The big part of the book is its forthright advocacy of high-tech American patriotism, and its warnings that the US must not be caught with its AI pants down by (for example) China. Silicon Valley companies should not be averse to contracting with the US military. Unfortunately, high-tech employees have largely been indoctrinated in higher-ed's woke view of the world, leading to a different concentrations, typically involving consumer eyeball-catching. As they put it: "A significant subset of Silicon Valley today undoubtedly scorns the masses for their attachment to guns and religion, but that subset clings to something else—a thin and meager secular ideology that masquerades as thought." Ouch!

Other parts of the book are more business-oriented, discussing the nature of startups, founders, venture capitalists, As you might guess from the above, a number of the book's observations are idiosyncratic and unpredictable. (Some odious to me, like the suggestion that the US needs to reinstate the military draft.)

So, bottom line: interesting, and likely to both anger and elate its readers.