Sep
12
2026

Trust Me on AI

"Because I'm Always Right and I Never Lie"

[Amazon Link]
(paid link)

But maybe you'd also want some advice from Jeff Maurer, who asks Which Self-Serving Weirdo Should I Trust on AI?

An Anthropic employee publicly resigning over fears that AI is spiraling out of control has turbocharged the discussion around regulation. Virtually every politician who matters rushed out a statement, and so did Chris Murphy. Our nation has been plunged into a high-stakes conversation about technology, which seems like a tall order for a country currently stumped by the question of whether Lucia from Grand Theft Auto VI has an ass that’s egregiously Latina, insufficiently Latina, or possibly Latina-but-in-a-settler-colonialist sort of way.

Few people understand AI; it’s not even clear that the people building AI have their heads around it, which is the problem. We’re all forming opinions based on claims made by folks who maybe sorta understand some of what they’re saying, but also maybe not. Whom should you trust? None of the main players inspire confidence.

My lousy local newspaper, Foster's Daily Democrat, published two columns about AI Data Centers, one from Amy Miller and the other from Guy Trammell Jr. Point/Counterpoint? Well, here's Amy:

These buildings are simply the most concrete manifestations of artificial intelligence, a technology that poses threats to the environment, human creativity and most frightening of all, our existence on Earth. Few familiar with AI would argue that this is hyperbole.

Amy, you might have led with "Data Centers will kill us all!"

Guy, are you the more reasonable voice here?

Data centers use a lot of electricity that creates a need to expand the electric system, an expansion paid for by customers hit with higher utility bills. Alabama already has one of the nation’s highest utility rates.

[Guy is from Tuskeegee.]

And the centers sit on acres and acres of former wildlife habitat, their fuel-powered backup generators filling the air with noise and respiratory pollutants that trigger diseases such as asthma.

Also, the chips are cooled by evaporating enormous amounts of water, leaving little for the community just so billionaires can maintain their own opulent lifestyle.

Opulent billionaire lifestyles must be destroyed, lest we be choked with their respiratory pollutants!

Also of note:

  • Kiss your opulent billionaire lifestyle goodbye. My current CongressCritter and wannabe-future Senator, Chris Pappas has (so far) opposed Bernie Sanders-style "Medicare for All". But the Democrat lady looking to replace him in the House, Stefany Shaheen? Well, initially, she was against it. But then she came out for it.

    So prepare yourself; James Freeman tells us What Happens When ‘Medicare for All’ Ends Your Health Plan. (WSJ gifted link)

    Large federal interventions in U.S. healthcare are a big reason medical inflation has outpaced general inflation for decades. But if politicians now impose a fully government-run system on Americans under the euphemism “Medicare for All,” it is patient suffering that will go through the roof.

    The plan, authored by Sen. Bernie Sanders (socialist, Vt.) and backed by a number of Democratic candidates in this year’s elections, would outlaw most private health coverage in the United States. Continuing to provide an ugly preview is the U.K.’s National Health Service, where bureaucrats impose scarcity as policy.

    I can't imagine that people will like M4A when they hear the details.

  • Can I just keep my money? That would be simpler. The WSJ editorialists chime in with their own metaphor: Trump Has a $5,000 Bridge to Sell You. (WSJ gifted link)

    President Trump has a special talent for exposing the cynicism of modern politics, and he knows it. A Trumpian classic is his promise Wednesday night of a $5,000 “dividend” for every U.S. adult citizen if Republicans retain control of Congress in November.

    “Here is my promise: If the Republicans win the House of Representatives and the United States Senate . . . I will issue a dividend to every adult citizen in the United States of America for $5,000,” Mr. Trump said at the GOP’s midterm convention in Dallas.

    There are roughly 240 million American adult citizens. Multiply that by $5,000 and you get about $1.2 trillion. The amount is so preposterous that you’d almost think Mr. Trump is trying to show voters the absurdity of such income redistribution. It’s the reductio ad absurdum of welfare state politics.

    It was already pretty absurd.

  • Executive Summary: the University Near Here is a mixed bag. But check out your own favorite school from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE): their 2027 College Free Speech Rankings. Skipping to my favorite school:

    The University of New Hampshire ranks 44 out of 261 schools in the 2027 College Free Speech Rankings with a score of 67 and a D+ speech climate grade.

    UNH lands in the bottom 50 for “Comfort Expressing Ideas,” indicating students feel constrained sharing views on controversial topics. It also tumbled 140 places from last year into the bottom 50 for “Political Tolerance,” showing reduced student willingness to host controversial speakers. The data shows no top 50 strengths.

    The campus maintains a “green light” Spotlight rating. UNH should adopt the pro-free speech Chicago Statement and an official commitment to institutional neutrality. It should respond clearly and forcefully to defend free speech whenever censorship occurs or is demanded. Doing so will demonstrate the university’s commitment to free speech and build community trust that the administration will defend expressive rights.

    Seems pretty straightforward. They should do that.

  • And now our weekly palate cleanser. As usual, Nellie Bowles finds something amusing in her TGIF column.

    → The dignity of our White House: Here we have a beautiful example of late 2026 AI art in the Incel style.

    These are official White House communiqués. There are a lot of negatives to the American right embracing a more fascist strongman approach, but one thing you would hope for is fascinating fascist art à la Italian Futurism (that’s right, I took AP Art History). Or even just trad art. Maybe we could get a revival of Norman Rockwell and things such as that. You’d expect, at least, a cornice. Nope. That green ring must look so cool if you are 22 and a virgin. This is our taxpayer-funded art.

    I miss Biden's White House, which at least tried to hide the boss's dementia for a while.

Sep
11
2026

Not Forgetting

Mr. Ramirez remembers:

I posted my minor memoir of the day back in 2008, and have nothing to add to it.

On a related "remember this" matter: Like most libertarian-leaners, I've been pummelling Trump and his FCC lackeys for threatening TV networks about their negative news coverage. But John J. Miller had a plus ça change sorta-relevant column in the WSJ a few days back, bringing us A 9/11 Story Some Want Us to Forget. (WSJ gifted link)

A television miniseries disappeared down the memory hole. “The Path to 9/11” aired exactly once, two decades ago. Then it vanished. ABC hasn’t shown it since. The network has refused to release it on a disc or as a download. No streaming service carries it.

It’s almost like someone doesn’t want you to watch it.

Read the whole thing; The show's crime was apparently to portray Sandy Berger, President Clinton's National Security Advisor, in a negative light. Among other pressures exerted, ABC got a bullying letter from five Democrat senators, including then-Majority Leader Harry Reid and future Minority Leader Chuck Schumer.

ABC's immediate response was craven: "The scene with Berger was chopped up."

Miller doesn't mention Berger's 2004 unauthorized removal and destruction of classified documents from the National Archives, for which he got a serious wrist-slapping.

Also of note:

  • I had no choice but to link to this. Sabine Hossenfelder's headline could be slightly misleading: Neuroscience’s Case Against Free Will Is Falling Apart. Her video explains:

    I think the neuroscience stuff doesn't say much about free will in the first place. But I just blogged about that a few weeks ago (and embedded another of Sabine's videos) so I won't repeat myself.

  • But let's not forget the Steak-umm Hypothesis. Somehow I missed this important contribution to the debate back in May:

    The science is settled! Credit where due: Jeff Maurer brought it to my attention, with the headline query Is the Steak-Umm Twitter Account the Standout Philosopher of Our Time? And does Betteridge's Law of Headlines apply here? You make the call!

    It’s easy to feel unmoored these days. Lies are everywhere, and wisdom is rare. The touchstones that used to perform quality control on our dialogue have been degraded, while opportunistic know-nothings abound. People yearn for a voice with knowledge and insight, but that voice is hard to find.

    But what if I told you that a sage capable of matching wits with the great thinkers of any age walks among us? And what if I told you that that philosopher is whoever runs the Twitter account for America’s #1 flash-frozen chipped beef meat product? I speak of the Steak-Umm Twitter feed, which any reasonable observer will agree provides better commentary on life, culture, and the human condition than 99.999% of the chattering class.

    I've followed Steak-umm, but I am shamefully late to the game.

  • I will not be able to hold my nose hard enough to vote for this guy. Eric Boehm tweets, and don't miss the "readers added context":

    Charlie Cooke is also pretty disgusted: Trump Breaks Glass, Joins Socialists, Embraces Bribery. (NR gifted link)

    Painfully aware that, once the midterms are over, he risks being gradually consigned to irrelevance, President Trump has hit once again upon a Hail Mary plan for political success. That plan is bribery. Last night, after vocally condemning the rise of socialism in the United States, Trump pledged some of his own. “If the Republicans win,” he told a crowd in Dallas, “I will issue a dividend to every adult citizen in the United States of America for $5,000.”

    No, no, no, no, no.

    Did I mention “no”?

    The Democrats who have condemned this idea are, of course, ridiculous, for in trying to trade votes for cash, Trump is merely adopting their approach without the middlemen or the euphemisms. But that is not a defense of the move — which is, in every sense possible, catastrophic.

    "Spouting arrant bullshit" is probably not an impeachable offense. But if it was, it would be pretty easy to convict both Trump and Vance.

Sep
10
2026

Stuck in the Middle With No Clue

And Mr. Ramirez pictures (um, metaphorically) what trade protectionism looks like:

Eric Boehm takes a look at the latest volley: Trump bans Canadian beer, wine, motorcycles, and more.

Seemingly no longer content to merely hike taxes on imports from Canada, President Donald Trump has now taken the next logical step in his war against free trade.

On Tuesday, the White House announced that dozens of Canadian products would be banned from entering the United States, starting later this month.

The import ban covers a range of alcoholic drinks, motorcycles, various types of molasses, and some dairy byproducts like whey. The ban was accompanied by a new set of tariffs targeting Canadian motorboats and engine equipment, as well as cheese and other dairy products.

In short, the latest escalation of the pointless trade war with Canada means that Americans will no longer have the option of paying a hefty tax for the opportunity to import Canadian beer, wine, or liquor. That choice has now been revoked by the whim of one man—who is determined to substitute his own preferences for the free will of American businesses and consumers, the vast majority of whom do not quarrel with their trading partners on the northern side of the border.

Unfortunately, that lady Mr. Ramirez pictures looks like she could use a couple shots of Canadian Club. Sorry, dearie, President Trump says no.

On a related note, Audrey Fahlberg looks at (a) Trump's earnest hope and (b) other Republicans' greatest fear: ‘Pretend I’m on the Ballot’ Is Trump’s Midterm Strategy.

“I’m asking you to pretend that I’m on the ballot,” an upbeat and high-energy Trump told the crowd in a characteristically long keynote address Wednesday evening, during which he touted his record, railed against the “Dumbocrats,” and urged his supporters to help him buck the headwinds and defy history this election cycle. “Just one more time, because if we lose, you’re going to lose your border. You’re going to lose your tax cuts. You’re going to lose your safety and security. You’re going to lose your wealth.” Elect Republicans, he said, and every adult American will get a $5,000 check. “It will be called the Trump dividend.” Quick estimates suggest that proposal would cost north of $1 trillion.

I will probably vote a straight Republican ticket in November, but I will have to remind myself that Trump's not on the ballot, just some of his sycophants.

Also of note:

  • Well, that didn't take as long as I thought it would. 'Twas just a few weeks back, that I wrote about Massachusetts explicitly legalizing abortion up until birth. And I wrote: "Apparently the Massachusetts government (and probably a good fraction of the citizenry) believes that the event of "birth" is a bit of biological magic that transforms a legal "medical procedure" into a heinous crime."

    I didn't see Lindsay Clancy coming. It appears that infanticide is no longer so heinous down there. David Strong writes at Hot Air: Mothers Aren't Just Embracing Lindsay Clancy'; They Are Embracing Clancyism.

    For most of us, the fact that Clancy clearly was having trouble with her mental health may help explain how she decided to kill her children, but for nobody I know does that excuse the fact that she chose to respond to her despair by killing her own children.

    I can understand, at some level, the feeling of empathy for Clancy's struggles; I cannot and will never understand turning her into a hero. There is nothing heroic about killing children, especially one's own. It ranks up there as the most, or at least one of the most, horrific betrayals a person can make.

    Women have contributed over a million dollars to Clancy's parents to help fund her defense, lined roadways to cheer her on, and even concocted bizarre conspiracy theories to explain why everything is her husband's fault, despite Clancy never having denied strangling her own children.

    It's demonic.

    It's looking to be a tough time for kids, especially down in Massachusetts.

  • Or not. Task was boring. Kimberley A. Strassel takes to the WSJ to urge us: Make Mark Ruffalo Great Again. (WSJ gifted link)

    Republicans are fighting for their midterm lives, so it’s something to watch the president finally rally them together with a plan to lock down the Hollywood academy and California’s liberal political class.

    And the Oscar for Most Self-Defeating Politics goes to . . .

    “I am going to suggest that Republicans and Democrats get together, and immediately craft Legislation to save the Movie, Television, and Entertainment Business in America. Congress should approve, immediately, a Federal Production Incentive to create Entertainment Jobs in America,” Donald Trump enthused on Truth Social Monday. This was followed by a Tuesday post praising the “great bipartisan response” to his great Hollywood bailout, then by yet another, of the president thumbs-upping it with his Hollywood ambassador, Jon Voight.

    Geez, what an awful idea. Another reason for Republicans to fervently hope that their voters not pretend that Trump is on the ballot in November.

  • And here's one more reason. Veronique de Rugy looks at yet another Bad Idea: A Convoluted Scheme to Pay Parents to Stay at Home.

    Vice President JD Vance wants to pay married parents to stay home with their children, and he wants to do it with money Congress appropriated to help low-income families afford day care. Whatever one thinks of the goal, which may prove popular, the proposal fails every test we should apply to government subsidies.

    That's because the proposal corrects no market failure. It pays people for choices they're already making. It adds a new claimant class to a budget that cannot carry the ones already promised something. And it does all of this without a workable plan to pay for it.

    Under a draft rule now circulating at the Department of Health and Human Services, married couples in which one spouse works at least 35 hours a week and the other stays home would become eligible for the federal child care subsidy — about $9,000 per child, per year — as payment for "parent-based childcare." The money would come from the Child Care and Development Fund, a $12 billion block grant created in the 1990s to help low-income parents pay for care while working or finishing school.

    At times, the only thing you can do is shake your head in despair.

Sep
9
2026

Politicans? Insane? Well, …

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:

Sep
8
2026

Instapundit is … Disappointing

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:

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.


Last Modified 2026-09-08 12:48 PM EDT
Sep
7
2026

… Or Hardly Working?

Power Line points us to our Eye Candy du Jour:

Hardest-Working States in America

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.)

Americans are hard workers, putting in an average of 1,800 hours per year, according to the World Economic Forum. That’s 468 hours per year more than Germans work, but 405 fewer than Mexicans do, for example.

Even when given the chance to take time off, many Americans won’t, as nearly half of workers don't expect to use all of their allotted vacation days. It is possible to work hard without overdoing it, though. Hard work is key to success, and the residents of some states understand that better than others.

To determine where Americans work the hardest, WalletHub compared the 50 states across 10 key indicators. They range from average workweek hours to the share of workers with multiple jobs to the average leisure time spent per day.

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!


Last Modified 2026-09-07 11:07 AM EDT
Sep
6
2026

X-Rated Wisdom

It's on X, used to be Twitter:

Continues:

… countries into disasters.

And we have chosen to learn neither.

Yes, I think this is an indictment of our K–PhD education system, but I also think it is an indictment of our ability to learn a damn thing from history.

And yes, I am talking right and left

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.

Sep
5
2026

Fun(ny) Facts About Data Centers

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.

  • [Amazon Link]
    (paid link)

    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):

Sep
4
2026

A Worthy Contender For Pun Salad's Official Motto

[Amazon Link]
(paid link)

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:

Take socialist New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani [Please -- PS], who has cooked up a plan to set up five government-owned grocery stores in the city. Mamdani has said that these city-owned stores, the last of which is set to open in 2029, will offer up to 30 percent discounts on some items.

Yet this government “solution” to higher grocery prices (exacerbated, incidentally, by the president’s actions to increase tariffs on imported goods), has run into an obvious roadblock. Local grocery stores and bodegas won’t be able to compete with taxpayer-subsidized stores, so many of them will go out of business, turning the supposed “food deserts” the government stores were meant to ameliorate into actual ones.

No problem, says Mamdani’s grocery czar — the city is considering “policies and programs, grants, incentives that can come alongside these grocery stores to support other local independent businesses.”

In other words, taxpayers are not only going to be forced to subsidize discounted groceries for certain shoppers; they are then going to be forced to subsidize other private grocery stores so they can compete with those government stores. The city wants to pour more cash into a problem the city itself is creating. (Nonetheless, the existing grocery stores and bodegas are suing the city to prevent this unfair competition from becoming a reality.)

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 have spent 17 years in Republican politics, and I owe my party a hard truth: The desperation those men feed on is arriving here. The gap between the wealthy and the middle class is real, it is growing, and it is unsustainable. Federal Reserve data now shows the top 1 percent of households holding nearly 32 percent of the nation’s wealth — more than the entire American middle class, the 50th through 90th percentiles, combined. The bottom half of the country holds 2.5 percent. Seven months ago, New York City, the capital of American capitalism, inaugurated a democratic socialist mayor. Voters are not imagining the disease. They are being sold the wrong diagnosis — and a cure my family has already survived twice.

Here is what actually happened. For decades, Washington spent money it did not have; the national debt has now crossed $40 trillion, and the government spends $1.33 for every dollar it collects. To keep that borrowing painless, the Federal Reserve turned to quantitative easing, creating trillions of new dollars to buy government bonds. The flood shows up in a statistic called M2, the total money in the economy: cash, checking, and savings. After 2020, M2 exploded by roughly 40 percent in two years, growth rates the St. Louis Fed notes exceeded even the inflationary 1970s.

When money multiplies that much faster than the goods it chases, prices rise, but never evenly. The new dollars land first in asset markets — stocks, bonds, real estate — and reach paychecks last. Economists have understood this since the 1700s; the Austrian school calls it the Cantillon effect. If your wealth was a portfolio and a home, the flood lifted you. If your wealth was a wage and a savings account, it drowned you. The wealth gap was not built by free markets. It was built by a government printing press, the largest quiet transfer of wealth from the middle class to the asset-holding class in American history.

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:

  1. Economists have long known that inequality is relatively low for consumption, medium for income, and high for wealth. What they rarely emphasize, however, is how much wealth depends on age. The richest Americans aged 65-69 are worth about 30x as much as the richest Americans aged 18-24.

  2. Net worth is very high in absolute terms. The median is over six figures by the mid-30s. Americans at the 75th percentile are millionaires by their mid-50s. Americans at the 90th percentile are millionaires by around 40. Claims about middle-class, middle-aged Americans who “can’t afford” eggs or gas or beef are nonsense.

  3. The most sensible argument for worrying about trade deficits is that we’re “living beyond our means.” Trade deficits represent borrowing, and we can’t keep borrowing forever. But given Americans’ extraordinary net worth, the most sensible argument for worrying is still senseless. After 50 years of unbroken trade deficits, we’re wealthier than ever.

… 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:

Sep
3
2026

What Do They Have Against Groucho?

[Amazon Link]
(paid link)

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:

Yes, the fact that just 12 out of 213 House Democrats were willing to stand up and condemn history’s most murderous ideology is still pathetic. Among the Democrats voting against the Crank resolution known as H.Res. 1490 was Rep. Chris Pappas (D., N.H.), who is perhaps not yet convinced that a late endorsement from former Vice President Kamala Harris can save him in a Senate primary against a democratic socialist. He’s among 192 Democrats who voted no. Eleven House Democrats didn’t vote and two, Reps. Maggie Goodlander of New Hampshire and Chrissy Houlahan of Pennsylvania, voted “present.”

Ms. Goodlander has her own primary challenge from a Sandernista. Yet recent polls still show the incumbent with a commanding lead, so this hardly seems like an excuse, even for those inclined to accept political expediency as a justification.

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.

Karishma Manzur insists she’s not trying to drag the Democratic Party to the left. Instead, she’s trying to rescue it from “corporate Democrats” like U.S. Rep. Chris Pappas.

“I don’t even understand why we have to call ourselves progressives,” the U.S. Senate candidate said during an online town hall hosted by Progressive Democrats of America. “We should just call ourselves Democrats. It’s the corporate Democrats that need a new label because they have sold us out.”

And one of those corporate Democrats, according to Manzur, is Pappas.

“He has never co-sponsored Medicare for All,” she said. “He takes a lot of money from AIPAC. He has approved billions of dollars of weapons transfers to Israel to fuel a genocide. He voted to censure Rashida Tlaib.”

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:

  • [Amazon Link]
    (paid link)

    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…

    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: