Pun Salad

²⁸ The prospect of the righteous is joy,
    but the hopes of the wicked come to nothing.

You almost—almost—feel sorry for the wicked. So far, just in Proverbs 10, their cravings have been twharted (10:3); their mouths have been both overwhelmed by (10:6) and conceal violence (10:11); their names are rotting (10:7); their earnings are sin and death (10:16); their hearts are of little value (10:20); they'll be overtaken by what they dread (10:24); they are swept away by storms (10:25); and they are doomed to a short life expectancy (10:27).

Sucks to be them.

• Democrats More Positive About Socialism Than Capitalism.
• We’re all getting dumber, says science.

The former is really bad, a misery-inducing failure wherever it's been tried; the latter… well, many of the countries implementing "social democracy" actually outscore the US on economic freedom.

So would-be "socialists" should make it clear what they're arguing for. Not that I'm holding my breath.

What does it mean to be a hypocrite in politics?

Stephen Miller, an adviser to President Donald Trump, has been denounced in the pages of Politico for his “hypocrisy,” by his uncle, no less. Miller, like the president, supports a more restrictive approach to immigration. His uncle, David S. Glosser, insists that this is an instance of “grim historical irony,” proving that all these generations after his Polish-speaking forebear uttered his first words of English, Mr. Glosser doesn’t quite know what “irony” means.

I sympathize, I'm always getting "irony" wrong myself.

Williamson notes that the appeal to hypocrisy argument is fallacious. (It's somehow even more fallacious when the hypocrisy is over something that happened decades ago to your ancestors.)

The charge of hypocrisy is, in this context, only another expression of the ad hominem fallacy. “Never mind your argument, who are you to make that argument?” Miller’s arguments on immigration — and Trump’s, and Krikorian’s, and mine, and yours — are either good arguments or poor ones, productive or unproductive, leading to better policies or to worse ones. Whether those arguments are made by the offspring of Jewish immigrants from Belarus — or their uncles, or the grandsons of Bavaria-born hoteliers, or Armenian Americans, or dam-builders who show up in Texas one day from parts unknown — is irrelevant to the underlying question.

The main advantage to making an appeal to hypocrisy: it's very easy to find hypocrisy wherever you look.

Joseph Curtatone, the Democratic mayor of Somerville, Massachusetts, is calling on city residents to boycott the beer company Sam Adams for profiting off President Trump's "white nationalist agenda."

Boston Business Journal reports that Sam Adams founder Jim Koch and other business executives dined with the president last Wednesday. During dinner, Koch reportedly thanked the president for a tax cut that would greatly help his business compete against foreign brewers. According to the report, Koch told Trump, "The tax reform was a very big deal for all of us, because 85 percent of the beer made in the United States is owned by foreign companies." He added that American beer companies paid 38 percent in taxes while foreign competitors paid 20 percent.

I will diligently try to offset any politically-motivated decline in Sam Adams consumption.

But more seriously: Sam Adams was an early Massachusetts anti-tax activist; it's disappointing, but not surprising, that today's Mass-Tories want to trash any reminder of that proud history.

Much like Job from the Bible, Stephen Bowen found his faith tested by Satan when calamity struck, giving him extremely unreliable internet for three whole hours one evening.

 It started as he sat down to continue binge-watching Supernatural. The show buffered and buffered but would not load. Plugging and unplugging the modem brought no solace. He had to eat his Hot Pockets in silence, but his faith did not waiver.

Next, Bowen was suddenly struck with extreme curiosity as to where the abbreviation for pounds comes from, but Google would not load the answer. So he stood there in ignorance, but still he worshiped: “The Lord gives bandwidth, and the Lord takes it away. Blessed be the name of the Lord!”

I'm not sure I would be as strong as Stephen.