Pun Salad

I liked the built-in cognitive dissonance of the Amazon Product du Jour: socks that say Don't Tread on Me. But maybe I'm reading too much into this product. [Update 2023-04-30: replaced original APdJ with a different one.]

• Kevin D. Williamson, writing at National Review, bemoans The Radicalism Arms Race of American Politics.

  It is sobering to realize that there are young Americans serving in Afghanistan today who had not been born on September 11, 2001, who have only known post-9/11 politics and a post-9/11 America, with all the angst and paranoia that goes along with them. This profoundly abnormal period in our history is their normal, the only world they have ever known. For them, there is no return to normalcy and no possibility of it. “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.” These young Americans were not around to hear all those fine speeches about how turning away from our national ethos of liberty and citizenship, turning toward fear and hatred and turning against each other, would mean, in the inescapable phrase of the time, that “the terrorists have won.”

  Haven’t they?

  Maybe. I occasionally think/hope the country will muddle through, as it always had before. Other times, there doesn't seem to be a lot of political support for anything resembling "muddling through".

  ---

• A possibly related question from Scott Sumner at Econlib: Are libertarians being purged?. Specifically, from the GOP. He notes the shove given to Rep. Justin Amash, a likely primary challenge to Rep. Thomas Massie, and the annual "FreedomFest" gathering moving in "a noticeably Trumpian direction".

  Given Trump’s opposition to free speech, free trade and immigration (both legal and illegal), as well as his support for the War on Drugs and higher spending on social programs, it’s hard to see why “FreedomFest” would want to move in a Trumpian direction. While I’ve never attended that event, I do receive an enormous amount of material (both paper and e-mail) from various free market organizations. In the past two years I’ve seen a big upswing in hard right nationalist advocacy from traditionally libertarian-leaning groups. Now I see calls for things like “industrial policy” and protectionism, which libertarians would have opposed even 5 years ago. I’m not clear as to whether this represents a turnover of personnel or a change of views of people who previously supported libertarian positions, but the change is quite pronounced.

  As conservatism changes its focus from the previous free market/religious/hawkish coalition to a more nationalistic posture, there is a danger that the movement will become more intolerant of dissent. Throughout history, nationalists have favored controlling information in such a way as to impose one view. Thus history books are re-written to glorify the homeland, and are sanitized of events that make the nation look bad. (Of course the left has its own problems when it comes to writing history—PCism.)

  Jonah Goldberg seems to have been prescient in calling his podcast "The Remnant".

  Of course, he did that explicitly crediting Albert Jay Nock who wrote of the "Remnant" back in 1936, a perhaps even darker time for liberty. (Note: link goes to unz.com, which is kind of problematic, but that's where Nock's essay is). And Nock was referring back to the Old Testament prophet Isaiah. Who was writing at a pretty dark time himself.

  So cheer up, I guess. Things have been worse.

  ---

• But speaking of worse, Mark J. Perry writes at AEI: Backfire economics: Trump’s steel tariffs have harmed US steelmakers, who are suffering from job losses and falling stock prices. He's put a handy graph into a tweet:

  Backfire economics: Trump's steel tariffs have harmed US steelmakers, who are suffering from job losses and falling stock prices https://t.co/WkORz1h0vL via @AEI

  — Mark J. Perry (@Mark_J_Perry) September 30, 2019

  Tariff Man’s tariffs on imported steel were supposed to help revitalize the US steel industry by protecting them from more efficient foreign rivals. But it turns out that the Mercantilist-in-Chief’s trade policy has seriously backfired as Eric Boehm reported recently at Reason.com:

  Eric provides data on stock price declines, layoffs, shutdowns. His conclusion:

  Bottom Line: It is well past time to stop believing that tariffs are going to resurrect or save the American steel industry. Trump has given little more than false hope and faulty economics to the steelworkers and other blue collar employees for whom he’s promised a return to the good old days. The slow decline of American steelmaking cannot be halted or reversed by executive order or presidential tweet. Unfortunately, most of the Democrats running to unseat Trump in 2020 are promising the same sort of protectionism. The beatings, it seems, will have to continue until morale improves.

  I find it difficult to believe that steel can't be made competitively in the USA. I do know that "protecting" the industry is only likely to make steelmakers less competitive.

  ---

• Reason's Jacob Sullum continues to be a lonely voice of sanity on vaping. CDC Confirms That the Vast Majority of Vaping-Related Lung Disease Cases Involve THC Products.

  Today the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) finally confirmed that the vast majority of patients with vaping-related respiratory illnesses have reported using cannabis products, typically purchased on the black market. Among 514 patients for whom the information was available, the CDC found, 77 percent reported using THC products. Just 16 percent said they had vaped only nicotine, although the types, sources, and brands of the products were not identified.

  Just yesterday, my local Sunday paper, Seacoast Sunday, contributed to the panic with the headline "Early signs of vaping health risks were missed or ignored". (Reprinting this Bloomberg article.) There's one mention of that inconvenient THC fact, far down in the article. Otherwise, it's blanket fear and loathing of vaping products.

  ---

• LFOD fans will want to check out this informative article from Valley News: How New Hampshire adopted its famous motto. Something I didn't know:

  At the end of 1944, The Manchester Union (a predecessor of today’s New Hampshire Union Leader, albeit with a different owner and editorial perspective) noted that New Hampshire was the last state in the country without a motto. The newspaper sponsored a public, statewide contest to solicit potential mottos. Under the terms of the contest, a panel of judges convened by the newspaper would review the entries, choosing one that would be forwarded to the New Hampshire Legislature, where it would be considered for adoption.

  Public response to the contest was enormous. More than 1,500 people submitted some 3,500 entries. It took the committee of judges months to review the entries, and in late April 1945, the committee made its recommendation.

  The winner was “Strong and Steadfast as the Granite Hills,” proposed by a then well-known writer from Gilmanton, Curtis Hidden Page.

  "Strong and Steadfast as the Granite Hills"—sheesh. How did we manage to dodge that bullet? We can thank Rep. J. Walker Wiggin, of Manchester.

  The Valley News writer, by the way, makes it clear that he considers LFOD to have been a poor choice.

  ---

• And Valley News also weighs in with a perennial non-starter: Seat belt law eyed in N.H..

  Debates over whether to mandate seat belt use go back decades in New Hampshire and tap into the state’s “libertarian tradition and ethos,” said Dean Spiliotes, a political scientist and professor at Southern New Hampshire University.

  Opponents often refute calls for more regulation, such as seat belt and helmet laws, by pointing to the state motto of “Live Free or Die” or characterizing them as “nanny-state issues,” Spiliotes said.

  Typically, only progressive Democrats champion seat belt laws and are challenged by Republicans, Spiliotes said. However, moderate Democrats appear split on the matter amid crossover opposition.

  That was made clear to Rep. Mary Jane Mulligan, D-Hanover, when she sponsored a seat belt law last year. The legislation was ultimately killed, with 23 Democrats joining 172 Republican to vote in opposition.

  Mulligan said she heard from several people who felt that wearing a seat belt is too uncomfortable. Others just refused to start buckling up or retorted “Live Free or Die.”

  “I am really tired of people telling me that,” she said in a phone interview on Thursday. “Who doesn’t want to be free? It’s a small group of people that try to define what freedom means for all of us.”

  Mary Jane Mulligan doesn't want these picky definitions of "freedom" get in the way of passing laws to force people to do what she wants them to.

I picked up this book on a lark off the new book table at Portsmouth Public Library. Why not? It was cute, short, perhaps lighthearted! Might be fun!

It was fun in spots. But even at 183 small pages with medium-size type and ample margins, I think it was way too long for the thesis the author, Cecelia Watson, seems to want to make.

The semicolon is despised by some writers. Some of them you've probably heard of, like Kurt Vonnegut. (Unmentioned by Ms. Watson: Elmore Leonard, who warned against using them in dialogue; presumably they were OK outside quotation marks.) The mark was originally "invented" (to the extent that this punctuation stuff could be said to have been invented) to signal a pause, like a rest in music. A shorter pause than a period, but a longer one that a comma.

But then didacts came up with Rules. And the more semicolons used, the more the rules multiplied and became hopelessly complex.

Worse, legislators started using them in laws. Now, legislators are not really that great at knocking the ambiguity out of words; things arguably get worse when you throw a bunch of punctuation symbols into the mix. The book goes into great detail on a Massachusetts law that, depending on the interpretation of a wayward semicolon, might have prohibited the sale of liquor in hotels between 11pm and 6am. And that issue made it to the Mass Supremes.

OK, fine. Ms. Watson is a little more laissez-faire on Rules than I am. I think that any rule-promulgator should explicitly append Orwell's last one: "Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous."

But that implies having at least a nodding familiarity with the rules in the first place.

Anyway, a few problems with Ms. Watson's book:

• A footnote on page 87 claims the late Antonin Scalia "believed that the U.S. Constitution should be applied with reference to its writers' intentions."

  Ms. Watson elsewhere fuzzes up the difference between original meaning and original intent when doing Constitutional interpretation. It's not clear she appreciates the difference. But all she had to do was to check the relevant Wikipedia entry to find a Scalia quote:

  The theory of originalism treats a constitution like a statute, and gives it the meaning that its words were understood to bear at the time they were promulgated. You will sometimes hear it described as the theory of original intent. You will never hear me refer to original intent, because as I say I am first of all a textualist, and secondly an originalist. If you are a textualist, you don't care about the intent, and I don't care if the framers of the Constitution had some secret meaning in mind when they adopted its words. I take the words as they were promulgated to the people of the United States, and what is the fairly understood meaning of those words.

  Not a huge deal, but…

• 

  Ms. Watson also disses (pp. 165-171) one of my faves, the late David Foster Wallace, taking him to task for his overly-pro-rule Harper's essay (April 2001, original here, also in Consider the Lobster, Amazon link at right.

  No point in going into details, but I encourage you to read both Wallace and Watson and make your own call.

• And on pp 179-180, there's this drive-by:

  During the 2012 elections, when Mitt Romney ran aggressive campaigns misconstruing President Obama's statements on entrepreneurship, Jon Stewart capped off an indictment of Romney's strategy with…

  Well, never mind what Jon Stewart said; it was the usual bleeped Comedy Central f-bomb, designed to elicit clapter from the audience. (If you're interested: here.) There's no clue about what Obama said about "entrepreneurship". There's not even a reference to Romney's "aggressive campaigns". Cecelia, WTF are you trying to pull here?

  A balanced take from Tim Cavanaugh at Reason is here; it may jog your memory.

Today's Amazon Product du Jour ($8.99 for a new hardcover, but as I type, available for $2.92 used) is brought to you by the fading campaign of Kamala Harris. The oddsmakers have dropped her winning probability below our 2% threshold, so we wave bye-bye and exclude her from the phony standings. At least for now.

And I can't resist posting this quote from The Incredibles:

Helen Parr / Elastigirl: Everyone is special, Dash.
Dash Parr: That's just another way of saying no one is.

But Kamala decided to … go another way in her book.

The other big sinkers this week: Trump and Biden, who seem to be on a path of mutually assured destruction. ("It's not just for nuclear superpowers any more!") The big gainer was Elizabeth Warren.

The overall big loser? That would be the American people.

There was also an across-the-board decrease in Google phony hits. This means nothing, but if it did mean something, it would mean that people were finally tiring of observing the candidates were phony and simply taking it as a given.

Or not:

Warning: Google result counts are bogus.

• Jim Geraghty's Morning Jolt (from last Thursday) had an interesting take: The Impeachment Fervor Isn't Going Anywhere. So read that, but be sure not to miss his observation on Elizabeth Warren's ethical tergiversations:

  Just how conditional is the outrage of Democratic presidential candidates when it comes to elected officials leveraging their position for personal gain? Really conditional.

  Taking questions from reporters following a town hall event in the first-in-the-nation presidential primary state of New Hampshire, the Massachusetts Democrat was asked if she would allow her vice president’s child to serve on the board of a foreign company if she were president. Warren quickly answered, “no.”

  When asked why, she said, in a rare moment where she appeared flustered: “I don’t know. I have to go back and look at the details.”

  The “details” to which Warren was referring are from the two ethics plans she’s unveiled to tackle corruption in government. Her campaign later clarified to the Washington Post that the plans wouldn’t prevent any child of a vice president from serving on such a board.

  Elizabeth Warren is supposed to be like Xena the Warrior Princess when it comes to powerful business interests influencing government policy. So why was she so confused and contradictory on this question?

  That's not a difficult question for me to answer: she's a phony. Specifically, being consistent in her self-proclaimed high-and-mighty ethical principles might be damaging to her electoral prospects.

  ---

• At National Review, John Hirschauer notes the interesting intra-party debate: Joe Biden vs. the Democratic Economy Truthers.

  Joe Biden had a revealing exchange with a reporter at a campaign stop in Iowa last week, one that put the ideological divide between him and his fellow Democratic primary candidates into stark relief. The reporter asked Biden — who by this point in the interview was visibly exhausted — why Iowans should vote for him or, indeed, any other Democratic candidate with the statewide unemployment rate at well below 3 percent under the Trump administration. As the Obama legacy’s apparent heir, the former vice president replied that Trump had inherited a recovering economy from Obama. “They were employed before [Trump] got elected,” he said, “He’s not the reason for that employment rate being down.”

  The former claim isn’t strictly true — the unemployment rate in Iowa was 3.4 percent when Trump first took office, and at last count was down to 2.5 percent — but the local reporter, if she knew that, did not point it out. Instead, she responded by asking why, even if Biden’s claims were true, “people [should] want to make a change” at all. After (parsimoniously) insisting that it is “up to [Iowans] to decide,” she pressed Biden yet again: “Make your case.” Biden, running out of steam, dejectedly insisted “I’m not going to.”

  "Kid, don't you get it? I am not Trump. What better case do you need?"

  Hirschauer goes on to point out the increasing desperation of the non-Biden Democrats, trying to find some statistical darkness lurking in the otherwise rosy economic picture. While ignoring that whole upcoming-fiscal-disaster thing, of course.

  ---

• The editorialist at the Las Vegas Review-Journal notes the obvious: Bernie Sanders wants to eliminate rich people.

  One of Bernie Sanders’ charms, according to his followers, is that he’s an unapologetic advocate for his beliefs. Never mind that most of the 20th century stands as a monument to the catastrophic dangers of his collectivist philosophy, Bernie’s no phony!

  True to form, comrade Sanders this week unveiled how he plans to pay for the gargantuan expansion of the federal government that will be necessary to provide his extensive handouts: He plans to harness the power of the state to fatten the Beltway bureaucracy with a new trillion-dollar pipeline carrying other people’s money.

  To quote a Twitterer's take on Bernie (and, to be fair, a lot of politicians): "lets [sic] demonize a small group of people, blame them for our problems and act like the world would be a better place if we could just get rid of them.”

  Or another, who compares old Bernie with new Bernie:

  2015: MILLIONAIRES ARE EVIL
  
  2016: MILLIONAIRES AND BILLIONAIRES ARE EVIL
  
  2017: MILLIONAIRES AND BILLIONAIRES ARE EVIL
  
  *becomes millionaire*
  
  2019: BILLIONAIRES ARE EVIL pic.twitter.com/qS6dmL8VIN

  — Razor (@hale_razor) September 24, 2019

  ---

• Google takes us to some strange places in our search for phoniness. For example, the Black Agenda Report ("News, commentary, and analysis from the black left"), where Margaret Kimberley writes on The WFP, Phony Outrage and Black Misleaders. The "WFP" is … well, let Margaret tell you:

  The co-founder of Black Lives Matter has struck a cynical deal with corporate Democrats to boost Elizabeth Warren by attacking Bernie Sanders forces as racist.

  “The Working Families Party is a perfect partner for the fraud because it exists only as a cover for the Democrats.”

  The black misleadership class and their friends are preparing for the 2020 presidential election in a predictably shameful manner. In an effort to do the bidding of the Democratic Party establishment they are cynically using claims of racism in an effort to prop up Elizabeth Warren as the faux progressive choice. In the process they have relegated black voter concerns to the whims of the group whose corrupt and inept machinations put Donald Trump in the White House.

  Well, that's an interesting take.

  ---

• But back on Planet Conventional Wisdom, subdivision New York Times, N. Gregory Mankiw asks and answers an easy question: Yang vs. Warren: Who Has the Better Tax Plan?. Let's look at the non-better one:

  Senator Warren has proposed a new tax on millionaires and billionaires. Every year, households would be taxed 2 percent on wealth exceeding $50 million or 3 percent on wealth exceeding $1 billion. The revenue, Senator Warren has said, would fund programs such as universal child care and tuition for public higher education.

  The political appeal is clear. Millions of Americans would benefit from this new public spending, while a small sliver of the population would bear the cost. According to a new paper by the University of California, Berkeley economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, who helped to design the Warren plan, less than 0.1 percent of families would pay this tax.

  Determining how much those families would owe, however, would be devilishly difficult. One problem is that many kinds of wealth have no market valuation.

  Take Rihanna. She is fabulously wealthy, but to put a number on her wealth, the I.R.S. would have to also estimate the present value of her songs and their possible future royalties. Sometimes, such intangible assets are sold on markets — Michael Jackson once bought the rights to Beatles songs — but often there is no market price for them.

  It all makes more sense if you assume that Warren isn't putting forth a reality-based proposal because she thinks it's a good idea; she's putting forth a unicorn-fart idea that will appeal to the resentment-fueled Democratic Party base.

  ---

• Meanwhile, Trump's GOP opponents are contending to see who can be the biggest clown in the car. Karen Townsend of Hot Air: Arby's trolls Mark Sanford with humor to set record straight.

  Standing outside an Arby’s restaurant in Iowa with a note pad and sandwich in his hands, Sanford launched into his grievances held against President Trump – where’s the wall he promised? What about eliminating the debt? The premise is that Trump hasn’t fulfilled his campaign promises. He asked, “Where’s the beef?” Oops.

  Good old Arby's:

  Sir, this is an Arby's.

  — Arby's (@Arbys) September 25, 2019

  Sanford's attempt at fumble recovery was even worse.

  But it's nice to see that Arby's is in on the meme.

• At the Federalist, David Harsanyi asks us to cheer up already: Here Are a Bunch Of Charts That Prove The World Is Better Than Ever.

  […] whenever I write pieces that point out that life has vastly improved for billions of people despite climate change, angry readers inundate me with links about glaciers and coral reefs and heat waves. These events are allegedly apocalyptic proof that we’ve left a rickety planet to our kids. Never once do any of these emailers consider the tradeoffs that accompany the authoritarian system they propose to fix climate change. For many, of course, the authoritarian system is the point.

  Now, I can’t disprove forecasts about our impending collapse. But I can point out that Malthusian environmentalists have been consistently and spectacularly wrong going on five decades and that even in a warming planet, nearly every quantifiable measure of human existence is improving. The retreat of socialism — exactly the kind of system environmentalists would like to bring back to fight global warming — has led to extraordinary gains in the most important aspects of human existence over the past 30-40 years.

  There are a lot of charts, reader. Here's one that's easy to embed, and it moves when you click thereon:

  The remarkable decline in child mortality, where each dot is a country. pic.twitter.com/HKhbklmjPu

  — Todd R. Jones (@toddrjones) September 21, 2019

  Statists will never run out of excuses to demand increasing statism. Crises and catastrophes are always under the bed, around the corner, or barrelling right at us like a runaway train! Eek!

  ---

• And not only that, but as James Pethokoukis at AEI claims: American workers are doing better than you think — and have been for some time.

  Is there a more endangered species than the American worker? Threats abound: Offshoring, robots, trade, the gig economy. And even if they survive, wages will continue to stagnate. Same as it ever was for this victimized creature of modern, globalized, tech-enabled capitalism.

  Or perhaps the US labor market is a bit more resilient than assumed. And I’m not just talking about the low jobless rate and rising real wages, especially at the bottom. So many worrisome predictions just haven’t panned out. 

  For instance — back in 2007, economist Alan Blinder predicted the combo of fast computers and broadband internet made nearly 30 percent of jobs offshore-able. But a new analysis by Upwork economist Adam Ozimek found “no relationship between job growth and offshoring risk.” Instead of hiring overseas workers, there’s a growing relationship with remote work right here in America. Ozimek: “By enabling more remote work opportunities, technological advancement provides greater freedom, more flexibility, shorter commutes, and the potential to redistribute those opportunities within the US.”

  Also Pethokoukis-debunked: the travails of the gig economy and stagnant wages.

  ---

• OK, maybe I'm a little Pollyanna-ish today. There's that whole looming fiscal disaster caused by runaway entitlements. And, hey, you remember those corporate bailouts that we Tea Partiers were all upset about back in 2008-2009? Well, as Veronique de Rugy notes, they're back, baby, and they're bigger than ever: Cronyism Yields a Bumper Crop with Farm Bailouts. And nobody (except us libertarian cranks) cares this time around!

  Cronyism is the unhealthy marriage between corporations, or other special interests, and the government. And farmers have been willing participants in this relationship for decades, at the expense of taxpayers and good economic policy. They've received subsidies and other government-granted privileges despite being relatively well-off and part of an industry that's not more subjected to adversity than many others. Conservative, free market and even left-wing advocates have used buckets of ink complaining about the handouts.

  On closer inspection, it's obvious that these farm bailouts are the culmination of everything that is wrong with cronyism. They came about after the president imposed duties on steel and aluminum in order to protect those industries from competition, which is cronyism. Then China, the European Union, Canada and Mexico retaliated by targeting U.S. agricultural exports. From soybean to corn farms, from steel nails to bicycles, this trade war is hurting many businesses, some of which are closing their doors.

  But none of Trump's trade war victims are as powerful and important a voting bloc as farmers, who secured two agriculture bailouts over the past two years, totaling $28 billion — so far. For perspective, Bloomberg reminds us that this "farm rescue is more than twice as expensive as the 2009 bailout of Detroit's Big Three automakers, which cost taxpayers $12 billion." Many Republicans at the time rightfully decried the auto bailout, yet most have nothing to say about the farm bailouts. Many have even joined in and demanded more for the farmers in their states.

  Wouldn't it be nice if Trump simply declared victory in the Great War on Trade, dropped tariffs, canceled bailouts, and otherwise just moved us to a freer economy?

  ---

• Unfortunately, the Great War on Trade is not the issue on which Trump is in trouble. It's that Ukraine thing, and (as mentioned previously) Trump fans say it's a Nothingburger, and Trump haters say it's an Obvious Smoking Gun. Does Jonah Goldberg offer a bit of middle ground? Maybe: Trump Did It, but Should He Be Impeached?.

  Impeachment is ultimately a question of whether a president violated the public trust. But there’s nothing in the Constitution that says a president must be impeached for violating the public trust. I can list any number of occasions when presidents have done that and it never even occurred to anyone that they should be impeached for it.

  It’s a prudential question with good arguments on both sides. If I were Nancy Pelosi, I’d be even more torn than she’s clearly been. In the modern era, we’ve never had the drama of an impeachment process in a president’s first term or in the run-up to a reelection. We’ve never had a lot of things that we’ve had under Trump.

  Absent new facts, the GOP-controlled Senate will not remove Trump. The president would claim “exoneration,” and his behavior would become normalized for future presidents. So I’m not sure Democrats are right to pursue impeachment. I’m sure Republicans are wrong to pretend that what Trump did was totally fine.

  We're supposed to view Trump as a sudden anti-corruption champ? Jonah has made the completely obvious point that Trump has taken no similar action with countries that are more corrupt than Ukraine. Let's not hold our breath on that.

  ---

• And Reason's Eric Boehm notes another campaigner's latest absurdity: Beto Goes to Kent State, Argues Only the Government Can Be Trusted With Guns. And Beto thought it was such a great argument, he even Tweeted it:

  Yesterday, people brought assault weapons to our rally at Kent State—where 4 students were shot dead in 1970.
  
  I told them nobody should show up with an AK-47 or an AR-15 to seek to intimidate us in our own democracy.
  
  We need to buy back every single one of them. pic.twitter.com/U7N5fWUlvv

  — Beto O'Rourke (@BetoORourke) September 26, 2019

  Eric eloquently makes the obvious point:

  Kent State is, of course, the location of the infamous 1970 shooting that left four students dead and nine others injured. The shots were fired not by private citizens but by members of the Ohio National Guard, who shot at a crowd protesting America's involvement in the Vietnam War.

  Invoking armed agents of the state gunning down unarmed civilians is an interesting way to argue that Americans would be better off if the government forcefully disarmed private citizens. But hey, I guess that's why we keep being told Beto's an "unconventional" candidate.

  The sheer rhetorical dishonesty packed into those two words, "buy back", is massive even by politician standards.

Slim pickings today, sorry.

• I'm having a tough time wading through the commentary on Trump/Ukraine; 90+% of it seems to be case studies in confirmation bias. Trump supporters see nothing wrong; Trump haters see their worst suspicions ratified.

  Fortunately, there's Kevin D. Williamson: Donald Trump & Impeachment: His Personal Flaws Led Him Here.

  ‘L’etat, c’est moi,” the Sun King is supposed to have said, “I am the state.” Louis XIV was one of the architects of modern dictatorship, and President Donald Trump likes more about his style than merely his taste in armchairs. President Trump, in a fashion unbecoming the chief administrative officer of a republic — which is all he is — habitually confuses himself and the state.

  One example among many: President Trump, asked whether his trade war might hurt his standing among U.S. farmers, who are paying the price for it, answered: “They can’t be too upset, because I gave them $12 billion, and I gave them $16 billion this year.”

  Wait, now — who did what again? The president, of course, did not give anybody $12 billion, or twelve cents. The subsidies paid out to farmers to offset the damage from President Trump’s ill-advised trade war — “great, and easy to win!” if you’ll recall — are not personal largesse. This is not a mere figure of speech, the linguistic tic of an ordinary megalomaniac. It is how Donald Trump sees the presidency and how he sees the world.

  Which is a big part of why he is in the trouble he is in.

  Indeed. That's from the beginning of Kevin's article, and here's the end:

  Trump’s character is in fact a practical liability, one that has seriously impeded his ability to pursue his agenda. His egoism, laziness, arrogance, and above all his habitual dishonesty are crippling. That is why he has been most effective on ordinary Republican priorities such as taxes and judges, those areas in which he can deputize such old swamp-dwelling dinosaurs as Mitch McConnell and the ladies and gentlemen of the Federalist Society to actually get things done. Left to his own devices, he’s an ordinary Twitter troll and conspiracy nut with very little in the way of direction or a coherent policy agenda.

  He isn’t Richard the Lionheart, he’s Prince John, the phony king.

  And so that leaves at least one conservative simultaneously believing four things that are difficult to keep under the same hat:

  1) I am glad that Hillary Rodham Clinton is not the president;

  2) Based on what we know right now, I do not want to see Donald Trump impeached and removed from office;

  3) I do not want to see Elizabeth Warren being sworn in as president in January 2021;

  4) Donald Trump cannot be gone soon enough.

  Yeah, make that at least two conservatives.

  ---

• Jacob Sullum at Reason asks a couple questions. Did Trump Commit a Crime by Seeking a Ukrainian Investigation of Joe Biden? And Does It Matter for Impeachment Purposes?. Spoiler: it's a double verification of Betteridge's law of headlines: no, and also no. For example, was it treason?

  This week, former Massachusetts governor William Weld, who is notionally challenging Trump for the Republican Party's 2020 presidential nomination, claimed Trump is guilty of "treason, pure and simple." He added that "the penalty for treason under the U.S. Code is death."

  The legal definition of treason requires waging war against the United States or "adher[ing]" to its enemies (defined as nations or organizations that are at war with it) by giving them "aid and comfort." Ukraine is a U.S. ally, not an enemy. It is not at war with the United States. (Neither is Russia, which may be the country Weld had in mind.) In any event, Trump's alleged aim was not to help Ukraine (or Russia) but to help himself by getting its government to dig up dirt on a man who wants to take his job away. Weld, who as a former U.S. attorney certainly should know better, also erroneously claimed death is "the only penalty" for treason. The possible penalties include prison and fines as well as execution.

  Weld is making Trump look good in comparison. That's impressive. (See the rest of Jacob's article for other possible crimes, and why it doesn't matter anyway.)

  ---

• Christopher Ryan wonders at Wired Why Are Rich People So Mean?.

  No, honestly, that's the headline of the article. Subtitled: "Call it 'Rich Asshole Syndrome'—the tendency to distance yourself from people with whom you have a large wealth differential."

  You would expect Ryan's lead example to be, well, some rich asshole distancing himself from people with whom he has a large wealth differential. But instead:

  In 2007, Gary Rivlin wrote a New York Times feature profile of highly successful people in Silicon Valley. One of them, Hal Steger, lived with his wife in a million-dollar house overlooking the Pacific Ocean. Their net worth was about $3.5 million. Assuming a reasonable return of 5 percent, Steger and his wife were positioned to cash out, invest their capital, and glide through the rest of their lives on a passive income of around $175,000 per year after glorious year. Instead, Rivlin wrote, “Most mornings, [Steger] can be found at his desk by 7. He typically works 12 hours a day and logs an extra 10 hours over the weekend.” Steger, 51 at the time, was aware of the irony (sort of): “I know people looking in from the outside will ask why someone like me keeps working so hard,” he told Rivlin. “But a few million doesn’t go as far as it used to.”

  Yup: the "asshole" here is committing the crime of continuing to work hard, being a productive citizen, when he could kick back and (literally) join the idle rich.

  But basically, the article is a moralistic screed against those well-off folks who don't behave the way Christopher Ryan believes they should.

  Elsewhere on the Wired site, you can read a review of the Alfa Romeo 4C Spider which will set you back a cool $72,595. (There's even a "BUY NOW" button on the page.)

• Daniel J. Mitchell has a handy compendium of Elizabeth Warren’s Reckless Scheme to Expand the Social Security Burden and Undermine American Competitiveness.

  Social Security is projected to consume an ever-larger share of America’s national income, mostly thanks to an aging population.

  Indeed, demographic change is why the program is bankrupt, with an inflation-adjusted cash-flow deficit of more than $42 trillion.

  Yet Senator Elizabeth Warren wants to make a bad situation even worse.

  In a blatant effort to buy votes, she is proposing a radical expansion in the old-age entitlement program.

  Click over for Daniel's gory details.

  Her plan would dump a lot more money on me and Mrs. Salad, so there's that. My guess is that we'd need it, because she would also raise the taxes we're paying on our private investments. And also make those investments worth a lot less, for reasons discussed yesterday.

  But mainly, it would kick our kids in the teeth, directly and indirectly.

  ---

• Also on the Fauxcahontas front, the Washington Free Beacon reports: Warren Flustered by Hypothetical Ethics Question on Hunter Biden.

  Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) appeared flustered when a reporter asked if her ethics plan would bar her potential vice president's child from serving on the board of a foreign company.

  The Warren campaign singled out fossil fuel companies that "spend freely on influence peddling" when she debuted an ethics policy intended to "end Washington corruption" on Sept. 16. But she fumbled with an answer when asked about whether the policy would apply to her vice president—a hypothetical scenario alluding to Hunter Biden's lucrative appointment to the board of a Ukrainian gas company while Joe Biden served in the Obama administration.

  "No," Warren said, before haltingly adding, "I don't—I don't know. I mean, I’d have to go back and look at the details on the plan."

  I looked; her plan document requires "senior government officials to divest from privately-owned assets that could present conflicts of interest." Does that mean their families too? Maybe, because the document mentions investments used to "further enrich themselves and their families". (Emphasis added.)

  But why stop at families? How about close friends? How about Facebook friends?

  One part of me says we won't have to worry about normal people enriching themselves under a Warren administration. We'll all be a lot poorer.

  Another part of me says that corruption is inevitable under the leviathan state. With the Warren Administration in charge of grabbing piles of money out of private hands and passing it around to its favored groups, there will be plenty of corruption; Liz just won't consider it to be corruption, because the money will be flowing from her perceived enemies to the folks on her side.

  ---

• Since I'm old and cranky, I find myself in sympathy with Bob Maistros at Issues & Insights when he urges his readers to Admit It, Greta Thunberg Is A Spoiled Brat.

  Despite her youth and reported autism diagnosis, the demand for hands-off treatment of Greta and — let’s call it what it is — the outright, downright rudeness and insolence she displayed in New York is yet another highly public exhibit in the downward spiral of manners and protocol that plagues society today.

  There was a darn good reason your parents told you when you were growing up to “respect your elders.” To give deference to people in authority. And to honor the office even if you didn’t care for or agree with the man or woman who held it.

  I thought teenagers were stupid even when I was a teenager. I remember being booed and hissed in a class discussion in the late sixties when I came out against lowering the voting age to 18.

  So I guess I've always been old and cranky, deep down in my soul.

  ---

• But the Google LFOD News Alert rang for this take from American Thinker's John Klar on the general trend of kid-indoctrination: Democrats Expect Terrified Children to Lead the Climate Propaganda Push.

  Social media have amplified society's cultural upheaval, increasing anxiety and depression in American children.  Adults have foisted the entire globe's problems on a small group of so-called youth activists.  This unprecedented politicization of America's children is causing irrevocable psychological damage.

  And things are especially bad in a neighboring state:

  Vermont is the Petri dish where progressive experiments are easily conducted on children, whether it is widespread displays of Black Lives Matter flags in schools, transgender surgeries for children, or third-trimester abortions.  Youths are encouraged in Vermont to protest, by numerous organizations, teachers, and government officials.  They protest race, sex, guns, nudity, marijuana, and border children.  Currently, there is a week-long protest to rescue the planet from climate change.  

  Ah, but what of LFOD? There it is, in the concluding paragraph:

  The key to reducing the destruction of the planet is personal responsibility.  Lowering personal consumption, by personal conscience and choice, is the only effective means to constructively alter human behavior — government mandate rarely works.  Instead, those who recklessly thrust terrified children into a manufactured climate "crisis" embrace government as the arbiter of responsibility.  This is the difference between "Live Free or Die" and "Live Green or Die": the first is a call to personal responsibility, the second a threat of totalitarian domination by robotized children.

  Yes, "Live Green or Die" is a thing. Of course, it's a thing. There's even a website (dot-org, naturally!)

  Welcome gentle being of unestimatable worth. This webspace is just a temporary landing place for all Human Beings with an awareness to understand the dangers of human activity induced global warming and the desire to manifest right action to address it.

  Man, can't you just hear the wind chimes and the babbling brook, and smell the incense? Which is not doing a great job of masking the pot smoke?

  ---

• 

  At Patheos, Carl Gregg reflects on This Life: Secular Faith & Spiritual Freedom, a book by Martin Hägglund. Reader beware: Gregg is a Unitarian Universalist, Hägglund is a cheerleader for "more democratic socialism", and there are a more names in the article with funny diacritical marks (Brontë! Knausgård!)

  Anyway:

  For now, I appreciate the case Hägglund does make for what he calls secular faith: putting your trust, your devotion not in an afterlife or a next world, but in this life and in this world (5). His other primary emphasis is spiritual freedom: creating systems in which we finite humans can choose what we should do with the limited time we have (12)./p>

  Along these lines, when someone says that they have to do something, I’m occasionally reminded of the fierce motto of New Hampshire: “Live Free or Die.” Do I have to do ______? I sometimes want to say, “All I have to do is live free or die.” But there is immense power in what I (or we) choose to do with whatever freedom we have (27).

  Good point, Carl Gregg! Or should that be Cârl Grégg?

  ---

• And finally, the Pie News (offering "news and business intelligence for the global international education industry") notes, alarmingly: US government turns to social media to vet incoming international students. Problematic!

  David Di Maria, associate vice provost for international education at the University of Maryland Baltimore County, told The PIE that there is a risk that information gleaned from social media for immigration purposes might be misconstrued.

  “Any time information is taken out of its original cultural and historical context there is definitely potential for misunderstandings to occur,” he explained.

  He pointed to a domestic example: “Many outside of the US would be alarmed to view a social media posting containing the phrase, ‘live free or die,’ but within the US, these words are understood as the official state motto of the state of New Hampshire,” he said.

  Hopefully, none of those alarmed foreigners would be French or fans of William Wordsworth.

• We'll get to our Amazon Product du Jour momentarily, but first this question from Jacob Sullum at Reason: Why Is the CDC Still Fostering Potentially Deadly Confusion About Vaping and Lung Disease?.

  Media outlets, following the lead of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), continue to blame recent cases of severe respiratory illnesses among vapers on "vaping" and "e-cigarettes" in general, falsely implying a link to legal nicotine products. This misinformation is fostering public confusion that may lead to more disease and death, both from smoking and from the black-market products that have been implicated in the lung disease cases.

  Based on the available information, the overwhelming majority of patients with respiratory illnesses had used black-market cannabis products. While a small percentage of patients say they vaped only nicotine, they may be reluctant to admit illegal drug use, and they may not know what they actually vaped if they purchased cartridges on the black market. If nicotine products are involved in any of these cases, it is almost certainly because of additives or contaminants in counterfeit cartridges or e-fluid, since legal e-cigarettes have been in wide use for years without reports like these.

  To repeat: an official agency of Your Federal Government is sowing potentially deadly confusion. ("What, again?!")

  ---

• At Econlog, David Henderson notes the sweet-sounding proposal from the Marianne Williamson campaign: "I believe the United States should institute a program whereby every American citizen between the age of 18 and 26 can perform one year of National Service." Good news, David says: Marianne Williamson Gets Her Way and Doesn't Realize It.

  Guess what? The United States already has such a program. It’s called freedom. Every American citizen who’s not in prison is now free to perform one year, or half a year, or two years, or ten years of “National Service.” Many are already doing so. When I went to a McDonald’s for breakfast in San Francisco this morning, someone served me. When I went with my my friend Charley Hooper for dinner in San Francisco last night, someone served us. In both cases, they did it with a smile and they were paid and, in the case of the dinner, with a nice tip on top.

  I can imagine the objection: But… but… but… that's not the same thing!

  Exactly. Funded by voluntary transactions instead of mandatory taxation; performing services that people actually want, instead of what government decides they must have; developing skills useful in the marketplace, instead of government dependence.

  ---

• But the big news—and this is why you might want to purchase our Amazon Product du Jour—is described by Mairead McArdle at National Review: Bernie Sanders' Wealth Tax -- Senator Calls for 'National Wealth Registry' to Enforce New Tax.

  Democratic presidential candidate Senator Bernie Sanders on Tuesday rolled out his plan to levy an “extreme wealth tax” on millionaires and billionaires, which he plans to enforce through the creation of a “national wealth registry.”

  “Today, the United States has more income and wealth inequality than almost any major country on Earth, and it is worse now than at any time since the 1920s,” Sanders said in his proposal.

  Sanders’ annual tax on the top 0.1 percent would apply to Americans with a net worth of over $32 million, or about 180,000 households, and would raise approximately $4.35 trillion over the next decade, the Sanders campaign estimates.

  It's time for me once again to tediously point out:

  

  • Sanders/Warren-style socialist demagogues would like you to imagine that the rich people they target have their wealth in a Scrooge McDuck-style money bin. All you have to do is scrape x% off the top of that! (Warren probably knows better; Sanders, I'm not so sure.)
  • In reality, rich people own stuff: houses, buildings, land, stocks, bonds, companies, patents, copyrights, jewelry, artwork, planes, trains, automobiles…
  • And the only objective measure of what that stuff is worth is what you can sell it for.
  • But what you can sell it for is danged slippery; first, if all property is subject to arbitrary Bernie/Liz expropriation, it's no longer a reliable store of value. Meaning it's worth significantly less.
  • And if you have to sell stuff to meet your Bernie/Liz tax obligation, you're selling into a buyer's market; nobody especially wants your hot-potato Monet, when they'll just have to sell it next year to meet their tax obligation. Unless you offer fire-sale pricing. Another markdown of your "wealth".
  • So the first-order effect of a Sanders/Warren wealth tax would be to destroy a significant fraction of American wealth before the IRS even gets to it.

  It's a stupid, evil idea. Probably unconstitutional too.

  ---

• At Cato, Chris Edwards analyzes Bernie's Wealth Tax more closely. Here's a detail Liz and Bernie should be asked, especially while in Iowa:

  Reporters should ask Warren and Sanders whether farmland would be taxed under their plans. Obviously, the farm lobby would never let that happen, thus blowing a hole in theoretical wealth tax revenues. If a wealth tax were imposed, there would be a massive flow of money into tax-exempt farmland, which in turn would wreak havoc on the farming industry. Rich people would jack up their borrowing to shrink their net wealth tax bases, and then proceed to purchase much of Kansas.

  Can you make that argument effectively, when it requires people to follow 80 words or so?

  ---

• At his blog, Greg Mankiw notes another feature (and a significant difference between the Sanders and Warren proposals): The Trophy Wife Tax Credit.

  As I have pointed out, ElizabethWarren's wealth tax, as described, involves a substantial marriage penalty. Now Bernie Sanders comes along with his own wealth tax proposal. He solves the marriage penalty problem by halving the thresholds for singles.  This approach introduces the opposite problem--a marriage bonus.

  As I understand the plan, if a single man is worth $30 million, he pays $140,000 per year under the Sanders wealth tax. If he marries his assistant, who has a wealth of less than $2 million, their tax liability falls to zero.

  For a single man with higher wealth, the marriage bonus is even larger. Under the Sanders plan, for someone worth $100 million, marriage reduces the tax liability by $410,000 per year.

  Put another way, this plan can be viewed as imposing a tax on widows and widowers. A married couple worth $30 million does not pay anything. When one spouse dies, the surviving spouse then owes $140,000 per year.

  I'm imagining an episode of Duck Tales where Scrooge needs to find a suitably poor bride.

  ---

• And finally our Google LFOD News Alert rang for the Houston Chronicle's enthusiastic plug for Thelma And The Sleaze.

  Thelma and the Sleaze is based in Nashville and their leader, LG started the band after her previous group, the Trampskirts disbanded. LG has made it her mission to create authentic, all female, queer, southern rock. She has succeeded in creating a sound and aesthetic that will chew you up and spit you out and most importantly, feels real.

  They are playing tonight at Houston's Continental Club! Unfortunately, our PG-13 policy prevents us from mentioning the title of Thelma's new album.

  But LFOD? Ah, there 'tis:

  In her true live free or die fashion she adds, “I want my story to be, here’s a girl who has worked really hard, written some good songs, stuck to her guns and never compromised.”

  It's nice to see LFOD invoked with unbridled admiration.

• David Harsanyi writes at the Federalist on The Tragedy Of Greta Thunberg.

  Sixteen-year-old Swedish climate change activist Greta Thunberg lives in the healthiest, wealthiest, safest, and most peaceful era humans have ever known. She is one of the luckiest people ever to have lived.

  In a just world, Thunberg would be at the United Nations thanking capitalist countries for bequeathing her this remarkable inheritance. Instead, she, like millions of other indoctrinated kids her age, act as if they live in a uniquely broken world on the precipice of disaster. This is a tragedy.

  Our Amazon Product du Jour is (as I type) the "#1 New Release in Children's Social Activists Biographies", so there David. There's still hope for the world!

  In my case, it's "hope that the world wises up before spooky, clueless, Greta gets her way." Whatever that is.

  ---

• At Cato, Diego Zuluaga wonders: Was the Housing Bailout Good Business for the Taxpayer? You'll be happy (or not) to know Betteridge's law of headlines applies.

  As the GSEs’ [Fannie Mae's and Freddie Mac's] long-overdue exit from government “conservatorship” becomes a more realistic possibility, some market participants with a vested interest are telling us that Uncle Sam actually made money by rescuing the mortgage giants – to the tune of $110 billion. Since putting taxpayer resources into failing firms is such good business, perhaps we should stop worrying and learn to love bailouts.

  If you think that’s a good idea, I have a “liar loan” to sell you. No, the bailouts were not a sound investment. They weren’t really an investment at all in the usual sense, but rather a political imposition on taxpayers in the heat of the meltdown. And they definitely weren’t sound. Whoever makes that claim is committing two economic fallacies at once: ignoring alternative uses of scarce capital and neglecting the high risk that rescuing Fannie and Freddie involved at the time.

  Let’s start with the opportunity cost of bailout funds. The Treasury has so far spent around $190 billion to keep Fannie and Freddie in the black. It has collected around $300 billion in dividends from the two GSEs. That gives a cash accounting profit of $110 billion, for a cumulative rate of return of 57 percent, or 5.7 percent each year that the GSEs have been in conservatorship.

  But nearly every decent investment did better than that over that time period. It's a classic seen/unseen fallacy: "seen" are the surviving GSEs; "unseen" are the foregone investments not entered into because of the bailout.

  ---

• Jeff Jacoby wonders: Where's the clamor over our disastrous national debt?.

  A DECADE AGO, Americans clamored in outrage over the government's growing mountain of debt. Today, as that mountain erupts to monstrous new heights, the clamor has been replaced with crickets.

  As a presidential candidate, Barack Obama condemned George W. Bush for "driving up our national debt from $5 trillion . . . [to] over $9 trillion." Such a sea of red ink was "irresponsible" and "unpatriotic," he said, promising that as president he would shrink it.

  He didn't.

  As soon as he was inaugurated, Obama began aggressively lobbying Congress to adopt a vast "stimulus" package to revive the economy and put Americans to work. Congress obliged with one of the most gargantuan spending bills in US history. The stimulus failed to stimulate and unemployment went up, not down. But that didn't stop Washington from continuing to spend money at an unprecedented rate, dragging the nation deeper and deeper into debt to pay for it.

  Don't worry, folks! Greta Thunberg, and her enablers, have plans to make everything far worse.

  ---

• Fox News reports on one of the alleged GOP adults wanting to be president: Bill Weld suggests Trump could face execution over Ukraine phone call.

  Weld was responding to claims that Trump pressured [Ukrainian President Volodymyr] Zelensky to investigate Hunter Biden -- the son of former vice president and current Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden -- and threatened to withhold military aid to Ukraine as leverage. Trump has denied wrongdoing.

  “Talk about pressuring a foreign country to interfere with and control a U.S. election, it couldn’t be clearer. And that’s not just undermining democratic institutions, that is treason," Weld said on MSNBC's "Morning Joe." "It’s treason pure and simple. And the penalty for treason under the U.S. Code is death. That’s the only penalty.”

  Leave it to Fox, however, to correct onetime attorney Weld:

  While the U.S. Code does list the death penalty as a punishment for treason, Weld’s claim that it is the only penalty is false. Treason is covered by 18. U.S. Code § 2381, which says that a person guilty of treason “shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.”

  When Fox News asked Weld’s campaign about this, they did not immediately respond.

  Fun fact: Apparently the current approved method for carrying out Federal executions is lethal injection.

  ---

• 

  Randall Munroe has a fun sample from his new book, How To (Amazon link at right). Specifically: How to Send a File. One possible method:

  

  I assume Randall's book is full of humor, math, physics, insights,… With any luck, a Christmas present.

  ---

• The Google LFOD News Alert rang for an article in Connecticut (!) News Junkie by Terry Cowgill: Lamont Feeds Connecticut Cynics With One Mistake After Another. "Lamont" being Connecticut Governor Ned Lamont. It's a sneak preview of the Elizabeth Warren Administration. But what I found interesting was the LFOD part:

  Lamont’s erratic governorship has led the state’s largest newspaper, the Hartford Courant, to suggest in an editorial that he’s the “do-over governor.” In that same newspaper, a wealthy couple from Glastonbury who have decided to retire to New Hampshire and “live free or die” took some serious parting shots at the state.[…]

  My colleague Susan Bigelow, an admitted Connecticutophile, fired back at the Glastonbury goblins, saving CT News Junkie readers the trouble of penning their own missive by writing a clever form letter asking readers to fill out a multiple-choice template complaining of every ill — real or imagined —that plagues the state.

  So those last two links are interesting on their own. In the first, Gary and Michelle Vallo (aka the "Glastonbury goblins"; Cowgill has no problem with literally demonizing them) explain their CT-to-NH move:

  We are the retirees whom Connecticut would be smart to retain. We worked hard to build successful careers. We raised well-educated, successful children. We built homes — beautiful homes — in Glastonbury, where we lived for 35 years, that contributed to the property tax base that supported a wonderful community. We were among the top 10 percent of earners who paid the majority of Connecticut’s income taxes. We were the good citizens who voted in every state and local election.

  But Connecticut’s political class has made it clear that people like us are no longer welcomed. They have created an environment that is hostile toward business, resulting in anemic long-term economic growth. Simultaneously, they have grown state government spending at a faster pace, driven by outrageously generous and unsustainable state employee union contracts.

  So, welcome Gary and Michelle, wherever you decided to settle up here. Please don't vote for Democrats; they'd like nothing better than to turn our state into a copy of the one you just left.

  The second link is pretty funny. Sample:

  It’s apparently the time of year again when well-off white conservatives sell their expensive homes and feel compelled to write editorials about why they are, regretfully, taking the piles and piles of money they earned here and leaving the state.

  If you’ve ever felt like flouncing loudly out of Connecticut like a teenage girl from a Livejournal group, but weren’t sure how to write the necessary opinion piece, I have great news. Presenting: The “Write Your Own ‘I’m Leaving And Never Coming Back, So There’ Template®!”

  "Funny" in the sense that the author, Susan Bigelow, is apparently seething with resentment that the Vallos have declined to shut up and keep paying ever-higher taxes, tolls, and fees to support a spendthrift state government.

  Earlier this year, Bloomberg reported that Connecticut was the "biggest loser" in terms of people voting with their feet:

  Connecticut lost the equivalent of 1.6% of its annual adjusted gross income, as the people who moved out of the Constitution State had an average income of $122,000, which was 26% higher than those migrating in. Moreover, “leavers” outnumbered “stayers” by a five-to-four margin.

  So it's not just the Vallos. I'd suggest that Susan Bigelow and Terry Cowgill keep encouraging this trend; it will only make it more obvious that Connecticut is a bad example for us to follow.

  ---

• In National Review Kevin D. Williamson is Against Straws.

  Everybody wants to give me a straw: Starbucks, the café at the gym (shut up, all of you), even the occasional drink-drink bar, depending on what you order. A decade or so ago, half the drinking establishments in the civilized world were for about 18 months filled with young Paris Hilton impersonators drinking from little miniature bottles of champagne with straws sticking out of them.

  Whiskey Tanqueray Frangelico?

  Being as I am not: 1.) an invalid 2.) a 16-year-old girl in a 1950s malt shop in some charming old Technicolor movie 3.) a Howard Hughes-level germ-and-bug strange-o, no thanks—hard pass on the straw. I’ll drink like a functional adult who can lift a glass to his face, thanks.

  But Madeleine Kearns demurs. She's For Straws, against Kevin.

  First, Kevin does not wear lipstick. For if he did, he would know that straws play an essential role in preventing the smudging and smearing, not of one’s character (since, in fairness, he does know about that), but of one’s facial polish.

  Second, Kevin does not drink smoothies. For again, if he did, he would know that an unwanted purple mustache would probably accompany his — what was it? — pledge to “drink like a functional adult who can lift a glass to his face.”

  I'd speculate further that Kevin has not been drinking from a glass containing unstable arrangements of ice. You lift the glass to your face, and an internal microavalanche causes a mini-tsunami of Diet Coke up toward your mug, overflowing onto your shirt.

  Nobody wants that.

Mr. Ramirez does it again: Area 51 invasion.

If necessary, this Commie Radio article will fill you in on the subject. And now on to our normally scheduled program:

• Dost thou need yet another reminder to not trust mainstream media? Charles C. W. Cooke provides one at National Review: Colt AR-15 Production: ABC Bends the Truth to Fit the Narrative.

  This, from ABC, is a nice example of a news organization deliberately bending the truth in order to advance a narrative that it wishes were true but is not:

  Venerable gun manufacturer Colt says it will stop producing the AR-15, among other rifles, for the consumer market in the wake of many recent mass shootings in which suspects used the weapon.

  … leaving the strong implication of cause and effect. But way down in the article:

  The company did not mention mass shootings in its statement about stopping production and instead blamed the indefinite pause in making the weapon on a “significant excess manufacturing capacity.”

  Charles comments:

  The phrasing in the above paragraph is remarkable. The reason that the company “did not mention mass shootings” is because mass shootings have nothing to do with its decision. And Colt didn’t “blame” its decision on anything, because its decision isn’t a problem for which “blame” needs to be assigned. As Colt has made clear, it believes that “there is adequate supply for modern sporting rifles for the foreseeable future,” and so it is temporarily shifting its production priorities in order to focus on the military side of its business. That’s it. That’s the whole story.

  Charles notes that the Associated Press managed to handle the story without pushing the gun-grabber narrative.

  ---

• At Reason, Robby Soave has an observation and a suggestion: Josh Hawley Says Libertarians Who Defend Tech Are Enamored with Power. He Should Look in the Mirror..

  Sen. Josh Hawley (R–Mo.) had an eventful Thursday, meeting with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg for a "frank conversation."

  "[I] challenged him to do two things to show FB is serious about bias, privacy & competition," wrote Hawley on Twitter. "1) Sell WhatsApp & Instagram 2) Submit to independent, third-party audit on censorship. He said no to both."

  Well, that escalated quickly.

  It is discouraging that an ostensible conservative would make it his personal crusade to destroy the Big Tech boogeyman by ceaselessly threatening government intervention. But this is the path Hawley has chosen. Oddly, he thinks libertarians should be applauding him for it.

  That is odd. But what's not odd at all is yet another politician attempting to run a business. It's as if they believe they've done such a good job at making the government work well, they're entitled to dust off their hands, congratulate themselves on their excellent work, and graciously extend their genius to the private sector.

  ---

• At Issues & Insights, Henry I. Miller and Andrew I. Fillat poke a few holes in the "renewable energy" balloon: The Rush To Renewable Energy Defies Science, Economics, And Common Sense. (What, that's all?)

  Here's four points out of many, these concentrating on not-particularly-glamorous battery tech:

  • No step-function improvement in batteries has been attained in spite of 25-plus years of huge investment, including that from dozens of innovative startup companies. Counting on a breakthrough at this point is probably wishful thinking.
  • To store the energy equivalent of a single barrel of oil, which can be stored in a $20 container at minimal cost, requires $200,000 and 10 tons of Tesla batteries.
  • Tesla’s “Gigafactory” produces only enough batteries in an entire year to store three minutes of U.S. power demand. That is not enough to handle a cloudy or calm day for the renewables, let alone provide the needed two months of backup. Proper backup would require the equivalent of almost 30,000 production-years of similar factories.
  • A single car requires 1,000 pounds of batteries. This, in turn, requires mining, moving, and processing some 500,000 pounds of raw materials. So, imagine scaling that up to provide batteries for a public utility the size of ConEd or Pacific Gas & Electric.

  There's a lot of Nerd Harder fallacy involved in renewables. Unfortunately, the authors succumb to this too: "The long-term solution, we believe, is nuclear fusion."

  How? Well, we'll get the nerds to nerd harder on that front.

  ---

• Ashe Schow, writing at the Daily Wire lists helpfully: 5 Signs You’re In The Midst Of A Moral Panic.

  Moral panics, or instances of mass hysteria, have occurred throughout history. Two of the most notorious are the Salem Witch Trials of the 1690s and the Satanic Panic of the 1980s and '90s. The panics almost exclusively involve women and children and fears for their safety, especially from sexual abuse.

  We are in the midst of another such panic, but despite the similarities to past episodes, we are still unable to recognize it as such. The current panic has been playing out in the military and on college campuses for nearly a decade, but with the advent of the #MeToo movement, the mass hysteria is creeping into our regular legal system as well. The following are five of the biggest signs that we are experiencing another bout of mass hysteria, this time over sexual assault and harassment.

  I'll summarize:

  1. Due Process Goes Out The Window
  2. “Believe The Victim”
  3. Misleading And Faulty Statistics
  4. Evidence, Schmevidence
  5. Pseudo-Scientific Theories About Memory Reign Supreme

  Apply/adjust as needed to panics about guns, drugs, climate change, …

  ---

• And this is just insanely great: The Weight performed by Robbie Robertson (in Los Angeles), Ringo Starr (in an undisclosed location), and a worldwide ensemble of musicians (located all over):

  "The Weight" is turning 50. I didn't like it much back then, but I've seen the light since.

  The video is in support of Playing for Change, "a movement created to inspire and connect the world through music." Are they tediously political? Not that I could detect.

Just a small methodology change to announce: the "WinProb" calculations you see in the table are now scraped directly from the Election Betting Odds site provided by Maxim Lott and John Stossel. I was attempting to duplicate their calculation that derives winning probability from Betfair's posted odds but, oh heck, it's easier simply to trust that Lott and Stossel are doing that correctly.

So what's new, odds-wise? Elizabeth Warren is the biggest gainer, widening her lead on Wheezy Joe slightly. A couple of big >1% decreases for Bernie and Kamala; Kamala now seems to be in the "circling the drain" territory.

But that doesn't necessarily mean anything; back in mid-April, Warren's chances looked similarly bleak.

But I really suspect that a lot of people decided that they couldn't stomach a president whose main character trait is laughing uproariously at her own jokes. That's a deal-breaker.

In phony news, Trump's hit count came crashing back to earth, and an impressive increase for Mayor Pete results in the slimmest of differences between the two. As always, that means … nothing.

Warning: Google result counts are bogus.

• At American Consequences, P. J. O'Rourke looks at Election 2020 so far…. You will, of course, want to Peruse It In Its Entirety. But a sample:

  The remaining Democratic presidential hopefuls are engaged in a free-for-all. Literally. Promising everything free for all of us.

  The Democrats are vying to see who can promise the most free stuff – college tuition, student-loan forgiveness, Medicare-For-All, Universal Basic Income – and throw in the kitchen sink of subsidized housing for the homeless who crowd the sidewalks of places where everybody votes Democratic like San Francisco and Portland.

  The Democrats say we can have a government that gives everything to everybody.

  And what that government will give us isn’t limited to material things like pre-paid PhDs, $0 doctor bills, and a paycheck for doing nothing.

  Government will also give us encouragement, approval, validation, and self-importance. Government will celebrate our identities and provide us with a good feeling about ourselves as people.

  This isn’t a “Move to the Left.” This is a “Move Back In With Mom.”

  Government as your mother. Think that over before you vote for it.

  Whether you’re 26 or 60… you’ll be living in the basement. She’ll bug you about who you’re dating. And she won’t let you borrow the car.

  Brutal. But largely true.

  ---

• Cameron Cawthorne of the Free Beacon notes some Polk County phoniness: Dems Cook 10,500 Steaks While Lecturing Americans About Eating Less Meat.

  Several Democratic presidential candidates will be attending an annual steak fry event, despite lecturing Americans about the need to eat less meat because of climate change.

  The organizers of the Iowa Polk County Democratic Party's annual steak fry will be grilling 10,500 steaks and 1,000 vegan burgers on 10 grills, during Saturday's event. Some of the candidates will grill steaks themselves.

  Okay, now I'm hungry. Queen Kamala is quoted, among others:

  "As a nation, we actually have to have a real priority at the highest level of government around what we eat and in terms of healthy eating because we have a problem in America," Harris said. "But there has to be also what we do in terms of creating incentives that we will eat in a healthy way, that we will encourage moderation and that we will be educated about the effect of our eating habits on our environment."

  Sure thing, Mom. (See P. J. above.)

  ---

• Bonnie Kristian identifies The worst oppo researcher in Washington. in the Week. Hint: it's President Bone Spurs. Bonnie issues a tutorial:

  Here is how a regular politician would do it:

  • Hire an opposition research firm to investigate an opponent.
  • Pay them above the table with campaign funds duly reported to the Federal Election Commission.
  • Review the information they gather.
  • Put it in television ads with scary voiceovers, feature it in direct mail and email campaigns designed to frighten elderly supporters' fixed incomes right out of their checkbooks, and mention it at every debate or interview possible.

  Here is what Trump seems to do instead:

  • Either personally or through one of his children or underlings (and the extent of Trump's own involvement isn't always clear) make contact with a foreign official or some other shady person with ties to a foreign state.
  • Have compromising communications with that person, whether by email ("If it's what you say, I love it, especially later in the summer"), by phone, or in person.
  • Attempt to strike a deal to get the desired information.
  • Get caught.
  • Deny everything.
  • Admit everything.
  • Deny there's anything wrong with everything admitted.
  • Get accused of treason.
  • Declare it's all a hoax, fake news, persecution of Your Favorite President, etc.
  • Deploy the TV sycophants to say the same.
  • Hold a rally to be comforted by the implacable support of thousands.
  • Make ads, mailings, emails, and talking points about the aforementioned persecution instead of actual wrongdoing by the targeted opponent.
  • End up without any demonstrably true and actionable oppo research.
  • Craft instead a barrage of vague and mercurial accusations to lob on Twitter whenever the news cycle isn't going your way.

  The funny thing is that in this case, he'd actually have a pretty good case, if not for his inept fumbling making the news instead.

  ---

• But as always the field is getting plenty of fertilizer from Senator Liz. At a new blog set up by the editorializers at Investors Business Daily: Warren Says She Can End Corruption, But Her Policies Will Feed It.

  Despite Warren’s description of her plan as “far-reaching and aggressive,” it amounts to little more than a grab bag of reforms, many of which have been tried before in one way or another. She’d stop the revolving door between government service and lobbying. She’d ban lawmakers and their staff members from serving on corporate boards. She’d create a new Office of Public Integrity.

  Whatever the merits of Warren’s specific anti-corruption proposals, the simple truth is that the rest of her agenda would have the exact opposite effect.

  The problem with all these “anti-corruption” efforts is that they are trying to treat the symptom, not the disease.

  And that disease is, of course, big intrusive government.

  Warren has already co-sponsored a constitutional amendment to degrade the "free speech" part of the First Amendment; I imagine one to deny the right to "petition the government for a redress of grievances" wouldn't be far behind it in a Warren Administration.

  ---

• At the Federalist, Christopher Jacobs notes Elizabeth Warren Has a Plan—For Avoiding Your Health Care Questions.

  She claims “I’ve got a plan for that” on just about every issue, but the proverbial cat got Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s tongue on health care. And you can bet that’s Warren’s plan.

  Rather than answering tough questions about the single-payer health care scheme she now endorses, Warren wants to keep the focus on 1) bashing insurance companies and 2) telling people they will receive great health care under socialized medicine. Telling people they will lose their current coverage, and figuring out how to pay for this $30 trillion-plus system? Warren doesn’t want to bother answering questions about those minor details.

  I wish that she'd say something like: "You may have heard that 'You get what you pay for.'. Well, we're gonna change that to: 'You'll pay what we tell you to; you'll get what we decide to give you.'"

  That would, at least be honest.

  ---

• And Hannah Natanson indulges some hagiography about photography in the WaPo: Frederick Douglass photos smashed stereotypes. Could Warren's selfies do the same?.

  They look nothing alike.

  Frederick Douglass — a black man campaigning for the abolition of slavery in the 1840s — appears alone in almost every photograph, staring down the camera in isolated, thoughtful splendor. Elizabeth Warren — a white woman campaigning for the presidency in 2019 — features today in countless iPhone photos and Instagram feeds, her arm around voter after voter, always bearing the same wide grin.

  The two are separated by race, gender and more than 100 years of history that forged an America that would probably be unrecognizable to Douglass. Still, experts say, their use of photography collapses the distance: Douglass sat for scores of pictures to normalize the idea of black excellence and equality, and Warren’s thousands of selfies with supporters could do the same for a female president.

  Uh, sure. What would we do without "experts" to tell us about collapsing distances?

  Frederick Douglass was a Republican, for what it's worth.

  ---

• And my local paper, Foster's Daily Democrat, profiles Mark Sanford.

  Former South Carolina governor and congressman Mark Sanford warns the exploding federal deficits and $22.5 trillion debt are the “greatest single threat facing our nation.”

  Sanford, who earlier this month launched a long-shot challenge against President Donald Trump for the Republican nomination, said “we are at unprecedented numbers in terms of debt, in terms of projected deficits.”

  In a meeting with the Seacoast Media Group editorial board Friday, the fiscal conservative said “we’ve never ever in our country’s history been projected to run $1 trillion-plus deficits in the next 10 years, which is now the case, in a benign economic environment.”

  Sanford lays part of the blame for the fiscal emergency the country’s facing on Trump.

  And on from there. Observations:

  • Sanford is not wrong about the problem.
  • He's also correct that Trump is inept and rudderless on the issue.
  • He proposes nothing concrete himself, other than promisng to "lead on this issue" and to "go out and have hundreds of town hall meetings."

  And, yes, the Foster's reporter inserts a paragraph about Sanford's Appalachian Trail trek that somehow involved getting in the sack with an Argentinean floozy.

  But the article winds up with an LFOD reference, which is what brought it to my attention:

  “New Hampshire has a lot of things that fit with my candidacy, I believe,” he said. “I [sic] idea of ‘Live Free or Die’ fits with some of my liberty based political philosophy.”

  Some?

• I'm not recommending this Wired story by Matt Simon except as an example of the latest excuse for statist totalitarianism: Capitalism Made This Mess, and This Mess Will Ruin Capitalism. Matt is alarmed, and he knows who to blame:

  You and I have the unfortunate honor of facing down a crisis the likes of which our species has never before seen. Rapid climate change of our own making is transforming every bit of ocean and land, imperiling organisms clear across the tree of life. It’s killing people by way of stronger storms and hotter heat waves and unchecked pollution.

  We all can and should do our part—fly less if possible, buy local foods that haven’t been shipped thousands of miles, get solar panels and an electric car. But let’s not lose sight of the root cause of this crisis: rampant capitalism. Capitalism has steamrolled this planet and its organisms, gouging out mountains, overexploiting fish stocks, and burning fossil fuels to power the maniacal pursuit of growth and enrich a fraction of humanity. Since 1988, 100 corporations have been responsible for 70 percent of greenhouse gas emissions.

  If you're like me, you probably read the above while muttering "Bullshit … bullshit … bullshit …". And we could dig up refutations that would at least drag the discussion back to calmer, saner, waters.

  But that last link, let's follow that. It's to a 2017 Guardian article, which in turn references something called the Carbon Majors Report. It purports to trace back greenhouse gas emissions not to the emitters themselves, but to the fossil fuel "producers".

  The number one "corporation" is "China". For the grand total of its coal mining. The list is replete with state-owned enterprises. Not exactly "capitalism", Matt.

  But Matt goes on to repeat the "100 corporations are responsible for 70 percent of emissions" unfact.

  Anyway, this is all a pretext for an interview with one Jason Moore, "environmental historian and sociologist at Binghamton University". Jason's big idea:

  You would have to have a democratically controlled accumulation fund. I think that banking and finance have to be socialized because otherwise you're continually at the mercy of big capital deciding what's profitable or not.

  In other words, a worldwide takeover not only of energy producers, but also the "banking and finance" sector. It would be "democratic" of course. We'd all get to vote, maybe?

  So, if you haven't shaken your head in despair enough this week at statist cluelessness, I recommend the Wired article.

  ---

• Bernie, AOC, et. al. are forever denying that they want that icky socialism of the USSR or Venezuela. No, they want Sweden! But at the American Institute for Economic Research, Phillip W. Magness reminds us: Even Swedish Socialism was Violent.

  Sweden’s government has actually been trending away from the centrally planned economic approach favored by Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez. The country reined in public spending with a system of budget caps in the 1990s, scrapped its wealth tax in 2007, and has generally followed a path of privatization and deregulation over the past two decades.

  But there’s also a neglected dark side to the Swedish welfare model that its “democratic socialist” admirers seldom mention. That same welfare system developed in explicit conjunction with a violent and coercive eugenics policy, intended to ensure its fiscal solvency and prevent abuses of its programs by persons who were deemed genetically “unfit” by the state.

  Click through for the nasty details. It's unsurprising that the folks who want to redesign a political/economic system from the top down need to eliminate the little obstacles in the way of utopia.

  ---

• At National Review, Kevin D. Williamson has a provocative title on his essay: American Universities: Envy of the World. Wait a minute, Kevin. Are you sure we are talking about the same thing?

  For the ideologue, “take government out” is a self-recommending policy. The conservative might take a different view, as I do. There is a lot that is silly, meretricious, distasteful, and genuinely destructive going on in American universities, especially at the second-rate institutions and in second-rate programs. (The thing about second-rate schools is, they’re second-rate.) But there also is much that is splendid, productive, admirable — and, indeed, the envy of the world.

  And if you do not believe that American universities are the envy of the world, ask the world. The number of students from abroad who travel to the United States to study dwarfs that of any other country: The United Kingdom, whose top universities have for centuries attracted the best and brightest, doesn’t have half the foreign students the United States does. France has about a third the number; Germany, a quarter.

  And top academics from around the world flock to American campuses, too — for good reason. If you are among the world’s best in any significant intellectual field, chances are excellent that an American university is the place you want to be. For a rough indicator, consider which universities have the most Nobel laureates associated with them. What do you imagine that list looks like? The top ten includes the two British universities you’d guess (Oxford and Cambridge) and eight U.S. universities: Harvard, Berkeley, Chicago, Columbia, MIT, Stanford, Cal Tech, and Princeton. You won’t find a continental European university on the list until No. 13 (Humboldt) and only four more in the top 20 (University of Paris, Göttingen, Munich, Copenhagen). You won’t find a single Asian, African, South American, or Middle Eastern university on the list.

  Envy of the world? No question.

  There's much to recommend here. Or it could be that we're bad, and everyone else is even worse.

  ---

• Are you worried that partisan politics is getting in the way of government spending? Well, first, are you high? But second: At Reason, Nick Gillespie says Don’t Worry, Partisan Politics Isn’t Getting in the Way of Government Spending.

  What's got your goat right now? Maybe it's all those climate-change strikes that are giving schoolkids cover for playing hooky on a beautful early Autumn day. Or maybe it's that we're not doing enough to combat climate change. Blackface is back in the news, thanks to Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's compulsion to impersonate other races. What else is going on? Unending modifications by Democratic presidential candidates to the theme of "Medicare for All." An intriguing and emerging possible scandal involving Donald Trump, the Ukraine, and interference in the 2016 presidential election. Or maybe it's actually an intriguing and emerging scandal involving the deep state trying to hamstring a president.

  There isn't a day—an hour, really—that goes by where you can't lose yourself in breaking news or developments in all sorts of stories. Which is exactly how the people running the federal government probably want it. While we're outraged or flummoxed by the latest outrage du jour, the feds manage to keep spending more and more money that we don't have. The practice is so routine that only oddballs such as Rep. Justin Amash (I–Mich.) even bother pointing it out anymore:

  The only thing more predictable will be the shock and outrage when it all comes crashing down.

  ---

• Justin O. Smith of the American Thinker takes his theme from our license plates: 'Live Free or Die' and Government Gun 'Buybacks'.

  Live Free or Die. Some of us meant those words when we say them.

  Americans may mouth the words, but when push comes to shove, too many either really don't care or they are cowards deep down, who will allow the status quo to carry on, no matter how sorry a state of affairs has grown around it; or, their own ignorance is so deep that the God Given nature of our individual rights is beyond their grasp and understanding, and those words in the mouths of the timid, the weak and unsure become mere noises like the squeaking of a mouse eking out an advertising catch-phrase. Their words are empty and void of any sense of duty and obligation to themselves, their families and their country and what one must do to actually maintain a free society.

  Justin plans to start shooting, I think, when they come to take his firearms away. Even if they have a check (which they've deemed to be adequate payment) in hand.

  I can't recommend that, but I can't say I blame him.

• So I'm paying a little extra attention to Corey Lewandowski these days, because he probably wants to be my state's senator come January 2021. This would involve (1) winning the GOP primary sometime around September 2020; and (2) beating Jeanne Shaheen in November 2020.

  (1) maybe, but (2) seems unlikely. But what do I know? I thought Trump was toast in 2016.

  Anyway, there's stuff like this, from Jacob Sullum at Reason: Trump’s Bizarre Meeting With Corey Lewandowski Suggests a Consciousness of Guilt.

  Testifying before the House Judiciary Committee yesterday, former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski confirmed a bizarre episode described in Special Counsel Robert Mueller's March report on Russian attempts to influence the 2016 presidential election. On June 17, 2017, according to the report, Lewandowski had a one-on-one meeting with Trump in which the president dictated a message for Attorney General Jeff Sessions, asking him to publicly state that the Russia investigation was "very unfair" to Trump, who had done nothing wrong. The message also asked Sessions to tell Mueller that his investigation should focus on the threat of Russian meddling in "future elections."

  One reading of that encounter is that Trump was trying to obstruct an investigation of his own attempts at obstruction, since such allegations were part of Mueller's charge. Another interpretation—the one endorsed by Attorney General William Barr before he took office and by Lewandowski yesterday—is that there was nothing inappropriate or illegal about Trump's arm's-length overture to Sessions, since the president is ultimately in charge of the Justice Department and can tell it to start, expand, narrow, or end investigations whenever he likes. But that take on the president's powers, which Mueller explicitly rejected, is hard to reconcile with Trump's furtive behavior.

  Of course, if Trump was really and truly furtive, would he have used Lewandowski as a go-between? That isn't exactly subtle.

  Disclaimer: Our Amazon Product du Jour does not star Trump and Sessions. That's Julie Christie and Alan Bates.

  ---

• At the Bulwark, Molly Jong-Fast has a modest proposal: Let Corey Be Corey. It's about a different part of Corey's testimony.

  Corey Lewandowski wants to beat a woman. I’m talking about incumbent New Hampshire Sen. Jeanne Shaheen. Why, what did you think I meant?

  Yesterday Corey Lewandowski admitted to the world that he is a liar and he did it under oath, during his congressional testimony, while hoping to use the media attention as a rollout for a Senate campaign. It was one of the trumpiest displays of Trumpism the world has ever seen.

  Molly's not exactly fair to Corey. On the other hand, she's not exactly wrong either.

  ---

• And via the Google LFOD News Alert, the Hill reports on what Meghan McCain said on the View after Corey's testimony. Specifically, that his running against Senatory Jeanne would be "an absolutely ridiculous crap show".

  "[Lewandowski] running for Senate in New Hampshire, anyone who has been to New Hampshire, they are the most independent voters. The widest verse in the nation. Live free or die," McCain said on the ABC's "The View."

  "Get your popcorn and whiskey," she continued. "It’s going to be an absolutely ridiculous crap show. It's such a joke if he thinks he can just go and run in the state of New Hampshire."

  More anti-Corey quotes at the link. I'm wondering if popcorn and whiskey go together well. I'm not a whiskey fan, but maybe with enough popcorn…

  ---

• And in other LFOD news, the Monadnock Ledger-Transcript covers Bill Weld in Peterborough.

  Presidential hopeful Republican Bill Weld stopped in at the Post & Beam Brewery in Peterborough Tuesday afternoon to sit down with the Jackman brothers for their Pints & Politics web show.

  Weld, when offered "any draft in the house" by the owner, opted for a "tall glass of water". (He's been accused of alcoholism by President Trump. But Trump has been known to toss out garbage accusations in the past, right?)

  Anyway, LFOD:

  “I’m fiscally conservative, I’m socially open and welcoming and tolerant and supportive whatever you want to say – for whatever minority, period,” Weld said. “I was the first out-of-the-box on the LGBT issues. First out-of-the-box on legalizing medicinal marijuana. … I was alone, for 20 years, on those issues. So people in the “Live Free or Die” state appreciate that by-and-large. I’m appealing to even Democrats. ‘Vote against Trump early,’ if you don’t buy his package, come and vote in the Republican primary against him, early.”

  OK, so… maybe.

  ---

• Yesterday, I cheered the NH Legislature's failure to override Governor Sununu's veto of the crony-capitalist biomass bill. Today, let's give a mild thumbs up for the opposite action, as reported by (honest) the Cannabis Business Times: New Hampshire House Overrides Governor's Veto and Approves Home Cultivation Bill.

  “It’s encouraging to see the House vote so strongly in favor of HB 364. This bill is critical for patients who are successfully using cannabis to stay off opioids, but are unable to afford the high-priced products that are available from dispensaries," said Marijuana Policy Project New England Political Director Matt Simon. "Sadly, 10 senators voted against HB 364 earlier this year, putting the preferences of a few police chiefs ahead of the needs of patients and their families. Residents of the ‘Live Free or Die’ State overwhelmingly support cannabis policy reforms, so it’s clear that any senator who opposes this simple step forward is incredibly out of touch with their constituents. Patients, caregivers, and their advocates will be watching the Senate vote closely and hoping that common sense and compassion will finally prevail."

  Unfortunately, this will have to fall into our "Nice Try" department. As reported by the Keene Sentinel: NH Senate sustains governor's home-grow marijuana veto

Permit me a small milestone announcement: Back in late 2016, I made an early New Year resolution to post to this blog daily, not counting the book/movie/geekery posts.

This is the 1000th daily post since then. Not all gems, but I'm pretty happy with them, overall.

A good time to thank you for reading.

• I discussed yesterday the effort to override Governor Sununu's veto of the "biomass" bill. Biomass magazine (a magazine of which I was previously unaware) has the news: New Hampshire House fails to override veto of biomass bill.

  I'd imagine that Biomass is less happy than I about that outcome, but their reporting is pretty straight.

  Sununu vetoed HB 183 on Aug. 5. In his veto message, Sununu said HB 183 “creates another immense subsidy for New Hampshire’s independent biomass plants, the third such bill sent to me in as many years.” He also claimed the bill would cost state ratepayers approximately $20 million a year over the next three years, on top of the existing subsidies those plants already receive. “This bill picks winners and losers in a competitive energy market,” Sununu continued. “Furthermore, it harms our most vulnerable citizens for the benefit of a select few. I remain committed to advancing renewable energy generation and fuel diversity, but we must do so without unjustly burdening the ratepayers of New Hampshire.”

  In addition to the economic impact, a bunch of environmental groups were also in favor of sustaining the veto, due to the general filthiness of biomass-burning plants.

  I note that my letter to my state representatives was, um, ineffective at persuading a single one to vote to sustain the veto.

  ---

• If you're not a geek, you may not have heard of Richard Stallman, aka "RMS". He's an interesting mixture of good (a major force behind the free software movement) and bad (toxic political/economic views, strident my-way-or-the-highway moralism).

  But he's also a recent victim of cancel culture, due to his (um) unconventional views of the controversies surrounding Jeffrey Epstein and MIT. Wired has the story: Richard Stallman and the Fall of the Clueless Nerd.

  Yesterday RMS resigned from MIT and the Free Software Foundation he founded. For those who have followed his free-software movement, Stallman leaving MIT is like the big dome on Massachusetts Avenue itself getting an eviction notice. But after decades of tone-deaf comportment and complaints now emerging from women about his behavior, Stallman’s time was up.

  The moment goes beyond Stallman, a MacArthur “genius” grant recipient and author of key pieces of the open source software that basically runs our world these days. MIT itself is melting down because of Epstein, the now deceased serial rapist who insinuated himself into the Media Lab with his money and what its leaders considered his charm. The lab’s director, Joi Ito (who was a contributing writer to WIRED), resigned under pressure, and now people are calling for the ouster of MIT’s president, who apparently OK'd the payments. But the Stallman affair touches on something else: a simmering resentment about the treatment of women by the scruffy brainiacs who built our digital world, as well as the Brahmins of academia and business who benefited from the hackers’ effort. With the Epstein revelations that resentment has boiled over.

  One of those links is to a Medium article by "Selam G.", who is one of the activists pushing for Stallman's ouster. I have to share this bit, even though it's incredibly geeky, and probably not understandable by readers not steeped in that culture.

  Selam:

  Long before this incident, Stallman was contributing to an uncomfortable environment for women at MIT in a very real and visceral way. Alumni from as far back as the 1980’s reached out to me and told horrifying stories, such as:

  I recall being told early in my freshman year “If RMS hits on you, just say ‘I’m a vi user’ even if it’s not true.”

  — Bachelor’s in Computer Science, ’04

  Horrifying!

  I have very little difficulty in believing that Stallman had personality issues that caused difficulties in establishing healthy relationships with women. And, also, men.

  In short: yeah, probably most normal people would see a semi-creepy jerk.

  Does that justify his ouster? I'm having a hard time agreeing with that.

  ---

• At Reason, Jacob Sullum is a lonely voice of sanity, describing The Alarming Epidemic of Misguided Meddling With E-Cigarettes.

  Banning flavored e-cigarettes is all the rage among politicians these days. It's an alarming trend that poses a clear and present danger to public health.

  The epidemic of misguided meddling began earlier this month when Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer announced that she planned to unilaterally criminalize the sale of e-cigarettes in flavors other than tobacco. The contagion quickly spread to the White House, where President Donald Trump said his administration plans to impose a similar ban at the federal level; New York, where Gov. Andrew Cuomo this week declared an "emergency" ban; California, where Gov. Gavin Newsom said he would copy Cuomo if it were legally feasible; and Chicago, where Mayor Lori Lightfoot called for legislation aimed at closing "the gateway" to adolescent nicotine addiction.

  Sullum notes that prohibiting vaping products that adults prefer will predictably cause an increase in smoking disease and death. In the name of "health".

  ---

• 

  I'm currently reading a book (Amazon link at right) co-written by Phillip W. Magness on the general corruption of the higher education biz. If you want to get a taste of his thoughts on a related topic, see his recent article at AIER: How Twitter is Corrupting the History Profession.

  About a week ago I began scrutinizing how the New York Times’ 1619 Project relied upon the work of the controversial “New History of Capitalism” genre of historical scholarship to advance a sweeping indictment of free markets over the historical evils of slavery. The problems with this literature are many, and prominent among them is its use of shoddy statistical work by Cornell University historian Ed Baptist to grossly exaggerate the historical effect of slave-produced cotton on American economic development. Baptist’s unusual rehabilitation of the old Confederacy-linked “King Cotton” thesis is unsupported by evidence and widely rejected by economic historians. His book The Half Has Never Been Told has nonetheless acquired a vocal following among historians and journalists, including providing the basis of a feature article in the Times series on slavery.

  Curious about the following Baptist’s work had acquired despite its clear problems, I presented several questions on Twitter for its enthusiasts in the academy.

  Were they aware that Baptist’s statistics, including his estimate of slavery’s share of the antebellum economy, arose from a documented mathematical error? Did they know his thesis had been scrutinized by leading economic historians, who found problems of misrepresented evidence and citations to documents that did not support what Baptist claimed? Had Baptist made any effort to respond to his critics? Or, more importantly, had he corrected his statistical mistakes, which continue to be cited in the press, in academic works, and even in congressional hearings on the legacy of slavery despite their inaccuracy?

  The response from academics was … unprofessional.

  I almost said "shockingly unprofessional" there, but that would have been less than honest. I'm no longer surprised, let alone shocked, by unprofessional behavior from academics.

  ---

• At NR, Matthew Continetti chronicles a recent mugging. Specifically: George Packer Gets Mugged by Reality.

  Few journalists are as respected by, and respectable to, liberals as The Atlantic’s George Packer. The author of The Assassin’s Gate (2005), The Unwinding (2013), and a recently published biography of Richard Holbrooke, Our Man, Packer has written for bastions of liberal thought from the New York Times Magazine to The New Yorker in a distinguished, decades-long career. His latest piece for The Atlantic, “When the Culture War Comes for the Kids,” is essential reading.

  Why? Because it relates, in Packer’s haunted and sympathetic style, the experience of having a child enrolled in a New York City school system corrupted by politics. For anyone who believes in individualism, the freedoms of speech and conscience, and the equal dignity of human beings, the experience sounds like a nightmare.

  It's not a pretty picture, Emily.

  ---

• And last year's World Series champs will … not be repeating this year. But they had a role to play in what Paul Mirengoff calls Coolest baseball story of the year.

  Mike Yastrzemski, grandson of the great Carl Yastrzemski, hit a home run in his first appearance at Fenway Park in Boston, where Carl excelled for 23 seasons. Mike was playing for the visiting San Francisco Giants.

  The elder Yastrzemski toured the field with his grandson before the game. He provided tips on how to play balls hit off of left-field wall (the Green Monster). Many say that no one played them better than Carl.

  Then, in the fourth inning, Mike hit a home run, not over the Green Monster, but to straightaway center field. It was his 20th home run of the season. The Fenway Park crowd showed its appreciation with robust applause for the opposition player.

  Mike was called up to the Giants on May 25, hitting (as I type) .266 with 20 home runs. Watching the game on TV, I noticed that "Yastrzemski" barely fit on the back of his jersey.

• Veronique de Rugy notes the Export-Import Bank is up to its old tricks: Ex-Im “Reform” Documents Look Like More of the Same Crony Capitalism.

  It has been disheartening, though not completely surprising, to watch the Republican party move from being the driving force behind terminating the crony capitalist agency known as the Export-Import Bank to a party that will do anything to not step on the toes of the president. Mr. Trump used to think Ex-Im was corporate welfare too, but he now would like to use the Bank as a national security tool to compete with China.

  What has been surprising is just how acquiescent Republican senators have been to the president’s pivot to embrace Ex-Im. Take a look, for instance, at the list of those who voted in favor of the nomination of Kimberley Reed as the new Ex-Im head. That vote effectively brought the agency back to life after a four-year hiatus. You will find the names of senators who supposedly are opposed to Ex-Im.

  Unfortunately, only 16 Senate Republicans (and Bernie Sanders) voted against Reed's nomination. That's how unpopular principled opposition to cronyism is in today's politics.

  ---

• At the New York Post, Betsy McCaughey has easy pickings finding Democrats’ biggest health care lies. She lists four whoppers, and here is…

  Whopper 1: ObamaCare is affordable. Joe Biden’s running a television ad in Iowa pledging to stand by ObamaCare because “every American deserves affordable health care.” Iowans aren’t going to buy that. They’re not hayseeds.

  Truth: In Iowa, 90% of ObamaCare customers who paid their own way in 2014 have dropped their coverage. ObamaCare is affordable only if you qualify for a subsidy. Middle-class people who earn too much to get taxpayer-funded help can’t afford to stay enrolled.

  They “have taken it on the chin,” reports Larry Levitt of the Kaiser Family Foundation. Why is the number of uninsured in America suddenly rising again? Blame ObamaCare for pricing the middle class out of insurance.

  To be fair, another good reason to drop "coverage" is that you are no longer getting fined for not having it.

  ---

• At the Washington Free Beacon, Cameron Cawthorne added to the Pun Salad "Of Course He Did" department. Specifically, he noticed Joe Biden: Child Tax Credit Will 'Put 720 Million Women Back in the Workforce'.

  Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden on Tuesday made the incredible claim that his proposed child tax credit would "put 720 million women back in the workforce."

  The former vice president was speaking at the Workers’ Presidential Summit in Philadelphia when he made the remarks about his proposal for an $8,000 child tax credit. He said his words made him "sound like a wonk."

  Joe, I'm pretty sure "wonk" is not the word you were looking for there.

  But the article also made me think about the journalistic niche job of "listening carefully to every politician's speeches, remarks, and public conversations to catch gaffes, illiteracies, and general incoherence." That sounds like it could be a dreary, soul-deadening job in most cases. But if you're assigned Joe Biden? That could be entertaining.

  It also allowed me to fantasize about a couple punchlines:

  • "When asked to clarify, Biden said: 'Did I say 750 million? Sorry, I meant 750 billion.'"
  • "Asked to comment on Biden's assertion, Kamala Harris responded: 'Shit. I can't believe I'm losing to this guy.'"

  ---

• The Democrat-controlled New Hampshire Legislature is attempting to override some of Governor Sununu's vetoes; one is of HB 183, which is generating an odd alliance of cranky libertarians (me) but also, according to Michael Graham's Inside Sources… Environmental Groups Urge NH Legislators to Sustain Sununu’s Veto of Biomass Bailout Bill.

  Several local, state, and national environmental groups sent a letter to New Hampshire state legislators today urging them to sustain Governor Sununu’s veto for HB 183, legislation that would require an estimated $20 million in ratepayer bailouts each year to six wood-burning biomass power plants. According to the latest EPA data (2017), four of the six biomass plants are among the top 10 air polluters in the state.

  The groups, which include the New Hampshire Sierra Club, Toxics Action Center Campaign, and Partnership for Policy Integrity, called the bill “harmful to our health, our environment, our wallets, and our climate.”

  I was unaware that in addition to the usual damage Democrats do to the operation of markets, the bill would also assist in degrading the environment. You'd think that would be a deal-breaker for Democrats, but we'll see.

  The article caused me to do something unusual: (1) look up my state representatives' e-mail addresses; (2) make a contact list; (3) send them mail asking that they vote to sustain the veto.

  ---

• I noticed that a group of Arizona Democrats are upset with Senator Kyrsten Sinema for being occasionally independent-minded, not mindlessly anti-Trump. Not too interesting; who cares what a bunch of Arizona Democrats do? But the news article did point me to an interesting page on Nate Silver's Five Thirty Eight site: Tracking Congress In The Age Of Trump. Slick and easy to use, you can see how your state's senators and your own Congresscritter stacks up with their peers as far as supporting Trump's positions. In my case:
  • My own Congressman Chris Pappas has a "Trump Score" of 4.4%; this is near-bottom. Only 11 other Congresscritters have a lower score. Ilhan Omar has a higher score (6.7%) fer goodness' sake.

  • On the Senate side, Jeanne Shaheen clocks in with 30.5% Trump support; Maggie Hassan is at 29.2%. In comparison, Kyrsten Sinema is at 54.5%.

  You can also split things up by congressional session. I'm not sure what that means, but…

This book from Yuval Levin explores the contentious relationship between two rough contemporaries, Eddie Burke and Tommy Paine. They had fundamental disagreements about the nature of man, government, history, and social change; they worked these disagreements out in public via books, letters, and articles. And, Yuval shows, that long-ago conflict echos in our world today, in the differing political philosophies of left and right.

Paine, of course, was one of the major propagandists of the American Revolution. He was a thoroughgoing believer in natural rights of the individual, equality, and (above all) Reason with a capital R. This led him to believe that each generation of a free people could and should design their political institutions de novo according to their wishes.

Burke was on the side of tradition, order, obligation; this dictated that social/political changes should be gradual, with a decent respect for the system bequeathed by our ancestors.

Burke also looked with favor on the American Revolution, but for different reasons than Paine: he saw the British as trying to overturn the decades-old relationship with the colonies by an abrupt and arbitrary imposition of taxes, and other abuses. This offended his views of tradition.

Yuval notes, amusingly, that Burke and Paine ignored different parts of the Declaration of Independence: Burke neglected the first part, with its airy theorizing about rights; Paine ignored the second half, with its tedious list of grievances against the Crown.

Their differences blew up over the French Revolution, though. Paine was a huge fan of overthrowing the monarchy, and starting everything from Year Zero; Burke saw nothing but trouble was likely to ensue.

Yuval meticulously teases out their differing philosophies. I'd say he's scrupulously fair in his descriptions, although I might have detected a slight preference for Burke's sentiments, a slight bias against Paine's hubris in assuming reason's ability to design optimal political arrangements. That might just be my own viewpoint shining through.

Yuval's prose is … not sparkly, sorry. He's done a great amount of careful research, makes some good insights, and (unfortunately) lays it on the page in the dullest and driest manner possible.

An impulse checkout from the Portsmouth Public Library. And it turned out to be a lot of fun, William Poundstone's latest exploration into the deep dark woods of fringe science, contemplating some of the ultimate questions of physics and probability.

It begins with a description of the "Copernican method" invented and popularized by J. Richard Gott III, a respected physicist; its purpose is to estimate the lifetime of something, when the only thing you know about something is how long it has been around so far. Called "Copernican" because it assumes that there's nothing particularly "special" about your observation in either time or space. But especially, here, time.

The argument is: you're unlikely to be observing this something either at the beginning or the very end of its lifetime. The most likely scenario is: you've come across it sometime in its middle age. And that gives you a shot at predicting how long it's going to last.

Gott came up with this in 1969, viewing the Berlin Wall, it being 8 years old at the time. He predicted with 50% confidence that it would not be there in 1993.

And (ahem) it was not.

Poundstone explores Gott's Copernican method, where it applies and where it doesn't. And then goes on to visit related and unrelated weirder areas of scientific/mathematical speculation. For example, Zipf's Law, which states that the Nth most-common word in English text has a frequency proportional to 1/N. So, for example, the 50th most common word will occur about twice as frequently as the 100th most common word.

And the math behind this is similar to the math behind the Copernican method. Hm.

Poundstone covers a lot of area. The Fermi Paradox ("Where are all the space aliens?"); Are we living in a simulation created by others? Why are there three macroscopic spatial dimensions? That fine-structure constant, a dimensionless value approximately 1/137: a little bigger, or smaller, and atoms would not be able to exist. The possible menace of Artificial Intelligence (Poundstone is less sanguine about such menace than Steven Pinker). The implication of the many-worlds interpretation of quantum theory. The possibility that our universe is simply a "bubble", one of many created out of a high-energy vacuum.

And more. I suggest you read this book in relatively small doses; there's so much mind-blowing theorizing herein, you might walk around in a daze for days.

This movie is the based-on-true story of the first detachment of American soldiers to Afghanistan after 9/11: twelve (see title) Green Berets tasked with helping the native anti-Taliban fighters take the strategic town of Mazar-i-Sharif. The big stars are Thor himself, Chris Hemsworth, playing Captain Mitch, the leader. He is assisted by Michael Shannon and Michael Peña.

The movie unashamedly admires the soldiers' devotion to their duty, even when it involves them leaving their loving families to go on a mission where the odds of them returning in one piece aren't very good. There's nary a hint of the usual Hollywood anti-Americanism here. The movie also does an unusually decent job of setting up the details of battles, what the stakes are, the geography of the area, and how things unfold.

There are a lot of very boilerplate war-movie tropes, too. For good reason, of course, but I found myself saying "Yeah, saw that coming" at a number of points.

It was especially appropriate to watch this movie in the context of current events, the President wanting to negotiate with the same guys we were trying so hard to kill back then, with the probable outcome of them taking over the country once again.

As always, the History vs Hollywood site is your go-to for how sorta-true this movie is. Not too bad, as it turns out.

So shortly after I read Linda Ronstadt's "musical memoir", Mrs. Salad and I drove down to Portsmouth to see this new documentary covering roughly the same topic at the Music Hall.

What can I say? I've been a Linda fanboy for decades.

If you want to choose only one, though, I'd recommend the movie. In addition to Linda's narration^*, there are a bunch of famous talking heads: Ry Cooder, Peter Asher, Bonnie Raitt, Dolly Parton, Emmylou Harris, … So we get multiple viewpoints, always a good thing. But the same lesson shines through both book and movie: Linda was primarily about her music, not so much her career. (Ry Cooder makes this point explicitly.) She could have been content with her career niche: pop/rock goddess, singer of oldies and ballads. Instead she went to projects that interested her: old American standards, Mexican songs, operetta, vocal partnerships with singers she admired.

When I read the book, I noticed that her $500K gig at Sun City, in apartheid South Africa, was totally missing. That's briefly covered here in archival footage of an interviewer asking about it, and her self-defense.

You'll hear something about Jerry Brown in both book and movie. You will hear about George Lucas and Jim Carrey in neither.

There's a bittersweet ending to the film: 2019 footage showing Linda singing along with her nephew Peter and cousin Bobby. Well, sort of singing. Parkinson's disease has weakened her singing voice. (Although I'd bet she can still sing better than 99% of American citizens.)

Oh, yeah: Peter Asher kind of looks like Yoda these days.

^* Given her illness, I don't know if she actually does the narration. It's someone who sounds like her, anyway, speaking in first-person singular.

• Jeff Jacoby gives thanks to Beto O'Rourke's gift to the GOP. Specifically, a year after claiming that his position on guns was "you own a gun, keep that gun, nobody wants to take it away from you" (while running against Ted Cruz in Texas):

  During the Democratic presidential candidates' debate last Thursday, O'Rourke dropped the pretense that he "jealously guard[s]" gun owners' Second Amendment rights. When ABC moderator David Muir asked him whether it's true that he would force owners of semiautomatic rifles — "You know that critics call this confiscation. Are you proposing taking away their guns?" — the former Texas congressman was bluntness itself:

  "Hell, yes!" he replied, as the audience of Democratic Party activists cheered. "We're going to take your AR-15, your AK-47."

  Within the hour, the O'Rourke campaign put out a fundraising tweet playing up his anti-gun stance. Under a picture of an AR-15, it proclaimed: "Beto has a ban for that." Forty-five minutes later, the campaign was marketing a new T-shirt. "HELL YES WE'RE GOING TO TAKE YOUR AR-15" it says in red, white, and blue letters. ($30; available in sizes from XS to 3XL).

  An unofficial version of the t-shirt is our Amazon Product du Jour. Wear it in safe spaces only, please.

  Jeff also links to the Washington Free Beacon video showing a host of Democratic politicians and media figures ("but I repeat myself") assuring that "nobody wants to take your guns away." Truly a herd of independent minds.

  ---

• At the WaPo, Megan McArdle correctly tells us: A vaping ban would be hysteria masquerading as prudence.

  At this point, the best information suggests that a recent spate of deaths from a vaping-related lung disease — six at last report — had little or nothing to do with legal e-cigarettes. Rather, the deaths, and more than 300 confirmed cases of the disease in dozens of states, seem to be linked to illegal cartridges, mostly using marijuana derivatives that had been emulsified with vitamin E acetate, according to Food and Drug Administration investigators. The FDA has warned against using it for inhalation, and it isn’t used in legally manufactured e-cigarettes.

  Naturally, the government wants to ban legally manufactured e-cigarettes.

  It's stupid, bordering on insane. Also, unfortunately, typical.

  ---

• At the Federalist, David Harsanyi: The Smearing Of Brett Kavanaugh Is An Attack On The Supreme Court.

  Sure, it’s about partisanship and peddling books and selling newspaper subscriptions, but in the end, Democrats’ smearing of Brett Kavanaugh is also about delegitimizing the Supreme Court—the only institution that will inhibit the progressive agenda no matter who wins elections.

  Conservatives justices aren’t merely wrong, they’re nefarious and racist and extremist, you see, so virtually anything Democrats do to try and stop them is now rationalized. In this world, the accused, rather than the accuser, bears the “burden of proof.” In this world hucksters like Michael Avenatti are turned into experts and major news outlets will eagerly repeat and spread slander as news.

  Hey, remember when Democrats deplored McCarthyite tactics? How old do you have to be to remember that?

  ---

• Reason's Christian Britschgi contibutes to our "Of Course He Did" Department today: Bernie Sanders’ Housing Plan Calls for $2.5 Trillion in New Spending and Nationwide Rent Control.

  In a speech to trade union members in Las Vegas, Nevada, on Saturday, Sanders laid out his vision for tackling high housing costs, homelessness, and gentrification through a mix of nationwide rent control, increased federal spending on housing vouchers and public housing construction, and higher taxes on the wealthy.

  "I don't have to tell anyone in America that we have an affordable housing crisis in Nevada, in Vermont, and all over this country that must be addressed," Sanders said. "It is unacceptable to me that over 18 million families in America today are paying more than 50 percent of their limited incomes on housing."

  Don't bother checking your copy of the Constitution to try to find where your Federal Government is empowered to do any of that. It ain't there. And Bernie don't care.

  ---

• At the Library of Economics and Liberty, Pierre Lemieux notes the weird and incoherent role of the kiddos in our political debates: Power to the Children and Hail to the State!.

  Specifically: think of Greta Thunberg, the 16-year-old who we are supposed to take as a fountain of wisdom on climate change. Or David Hogg on guns.

  Then look at all the arguments that kids are "fragile snowflakes to be protected from alcohol, tobacco, vaping, ideas, and life in general."

  In fashionable political discourse, then, children are presented either as role models to justify future tyranny or as little parentless incompetents, depending on how exactly their exploitation is required to advance state power. Granted that some statocrats (politicians and bureaucrats) and public-health or environmental crusaders might be consumed by good intentions, but as German poet Johan Christian Hölderlin wrote (quoted in Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom),

  What has always made the state a hell on earth has been precisely that man has tried to make it his heaven.

  Mark J. Perry composed one of his famous Venn diagrams to illustrate:

  

• With respect to our Amazon Product du Jour goes, Kurdistan does not appear in the latest edition of the Fraser Institute's Economic Freedom of the World. Because, technically, it's not a country. Some major points:
  • Hong Kong and Singapore, as usual, occupy the top two positions. The next highest scoring nations are New Zealand, Switzerland, United States, Ireland, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and Mauritius.
  • The rankings of some other major countries are Japan (17th), Germany (20th), Italy (46th), France (50th), Mexico (76th), India (79th), Russia (85th), China (113th), and Brazil (120th).
  • The 10 lowest-rated countries are: Iraq, Republic of Congo, Egypt, Syria, Democratic Republic of Congo, Angola, Algeria, Sudan, Libya, and, lastly, Venezuela.

  I can't recall which country Bernie thinks we should be more like, but it's not Hong Kong.

  ---

• At National Review, Kevin D. Williamson writes (NRPLUS article, don't know what that means): ‘Resistance’ Politics Degrades Civic Life. Interesting question: which side really has a better "resistance" argument?

  The Democrats, after all, have shown themselves to be thoroughgoing authoritarians. Many of our progressive friends spent the Obama years lecturing us that opposition to the president and his agenda was tantamount to sedition or treason. They tell us now that failing to knuckle under to their political agenda is treason. Democratic prosecutors have been conducting investigations of companies and political activists for having the wrong opinions on global warming; Democrats in California have just declared the National Rifle Association a terrorist organization because it opposes them politically, and Democrats threaten companies doing business with the NRA with governmental retaliation; Democrats have proposed to gut the First Amendment; Democrats propose to put people in prison for showing films with political content without government permission; Democrats have resurrected 19th-century Know-Nothingism in their bigoted and unconstitutional campaign to keep Catholics off of federal courts; Democrats have illegally and unethically abused the powers of the IRS and other government agencies to harass and punish political rivals. It isn’t Republicans who want to censor political speech. It isn’t Republicans employing violence against college students and visitors at Mizzou or firebombing buildings at Berkeley.

  And now Robert Francis O’Rourke has finally decided to confess what everybody already knows by openly declaring his intention to seize Americans’ firearms in direct violation of the Bill of Rights — a proposal that other leading Democrats already have endorsed.

  I'm too old for "resistance", but Democrats/Leftists should keep in mind that old "sow the wind, reap the whirlwind" adage.

  ---

• Jeff Jacoby states, correctly: The case against fracking is based on ideology, not science.

  By unleashing vast quantities of clean-burning natural gas, fracking dramatically changed the economics of electricity production. As natural gas grew more and more affordable, fewer and fewer power plants continued to burn coal. Indeed, more than half of all US coal-fired plants have closed over the past 10 years. According to the Energy Information Administration, 35 percent of America's electricity in 2018 came from natural gas; just 27 percent was from coal. No one would have thought those percentages were possible in 2000, when half of the nation's electricity was generated by coal-fired plants and less than one-sixth came from natural gas.

  Because natural gas releases only half as much carbon dioxide as coal, the sweeping shift to gas-fueled plants has led to a dramatic reduction in America's greenhouse gas emissions. So dramatic, in fact, that no other nation matches it, as President Obama observed in his 2014 State of the Union address: "Over the past eight years, the United States has reduced our total carbon pollution more than any other nation on Earth."

  For anyone who worries about climate change and is intent on carbon reduction, all this should be cause for rejoicing. Fracking, which has made it possible, should be extolled as a boon to environmental progress.

  The Democrat candidates are split on the issue, with Bernie, Kamala, and Elizabeth taking the anti-science viewpoint.

  ---

• And our Google LFOD alert rang for an opinion piece in the Buffalo (NY) News, about their state's license plate kerfuffle: Cuomo, DMV need to rethink plan to replace license plates.

  The comedian George Carlin had some observations about state license plates: “The most dramatic license plate of all has to be New Hampshire’s, which says, ‘Live free or die.’ On the other end of the spectrum is Idaho’s, which says, ‘Famous potatoes.’ It would seem to me that somewhere in-between the truth lies.”

  So it is with Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo’s plan to mandate the replacement of older license plates in New York. Critics call it an unseemly cash grab by Albany. Cuomo says it is a necessary step to keep up with technology. We suspect the truth lies in the middle.

  Well, maybe. Apparently the proposed new NY plate uses the official motto "Excelsior", which besides being something Stan Lee said all the time, allegedly is also Latin for "Ever Upward".

  Which is an odd thing to have on a car. Because they sometimes go downhill too.

One of Mrs. Salad's picks. She's from the scene of the crime itself, Fall River, Massachusetts. Although it happened well before she was born (good alibi, honey!) and in a swankier part of town than hers. The movie's R rating is due to "violence and grisly images, nudity, a scene of sexuality and some language."

In case you haven't guessed, it's a retelling of the Lizzie Borden story. Which you probably know: Lizzie's father and stepmom axed to death, Lizzie acquitted at trial, no charges brought against anyone else.

So there's room for a considerable amount of theorizing as to the culprit, motive, and methods. One hint from the cast list: starlet Kristen Stewart plays the maid, Bridget, so it's safe to assume she's a major part of the yarn. Which, in this version is pretty sordid, and not complimentary to anyone involved.

It's kind of boring at the beginning, setting up the characters and their mostly toxic interactions. Lizzie and Bridget give each other a lot of hot, lingering, open-mouthed stares. ("OK, we get it!")

We start this week with Michael Ramirez' Avengers-themed toon about Bernie's proposed eugenic scheme to fight climate change.

Yep. On to this week's standings! The Betfair bettors smiled once again on Elizabeth Warren, frowned upon Wheezy Joe, but most notably pretty much gave up on Kamala, sending her winning probability down below that of Andrew Yang.

As far as phoniness goes: although all candidates gained some hits over the week, President Bone Spurs continued to pull away from the pack.

"WinProb" calculation described here. Google result counts are bogus.

• The great Andrew Stiles wrote earlier in the week on the then-upcoming debate on ABC: Democratic Debate Preview: Why Your Candidate Is The Worst (Part 1) and (Part 2). Lots of red meat there, but let's look at what Andrew has to say about… oh, Bernie Sanders:

  People who have spent their entire careers attacking rich people really don't like to be reminded of the fact that they are, in fact, rich. Michael Moore, for example. Bernie Sanders is no different. Earlier this year, the derelict senator who owns three houses and has railed against the prevalence of superfluous deodorant brands, snapped at a New York Times interviewer: "I wrote a best-selling book. If you write a best-selling book, you can be a millionaire, too."

  Perhaps in response to Elizabeth Warren's shadow candidacy, Sanders has been ramping up his efforts to stand out from the Democratic field. After previously proposing to extend voting rights to convicted felons, including Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, Sanders recently endorsed population control as a means to combat climate change. He also praised China as the country that has "made more progress in addressing extreme poverty than any country in the history of civilization." Grandpa needs a nap.

  How can this guy be losing?

  ---

• The President, of course, rails against news he doesn't like. E.g., polls, specifically one from the WaPo and ABC:

  ....This is a phony suppression poll, meant to build up their Democrat partners. I haven’t even started campaigning yet, and am constantly fighting Fake News like Russia, Russia, Russia. Look at North Carolina last night. Dan Bishop, down big in the Polls, WINS. Easier than 2016!

  — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 11, 2019

  From Vox: Trump is trying to discredit recent polls because he’s losing in nearly all of them.

  Wednesday, the president accused pollsters of conspiring with Democrats against him, discounted the polls, and argued respondents had been wrongly swayed by the press. He had particular animus for an ABC News-Washington Post poll that also drew his ire earlier in the week over its findings on the president’s approval rating, referring to it as a “phony suppression poll, meant to build up their Democrat partners.”

  Trump does have a point: polls can be wrong. But there's no reason to assume they're wrong on purpose.

  ---

• Jamil Smith watched the debate and concluded for Rolling Stone: Joe Biden Should Drop Out. Now Jamil is firmly on the left, and his characterizations are accordingly wacky. But he reproduces the answer Biden gave to the question “What responsibility do you think that Americans need to take to repair the legacy of slavery in our country?”…

  Well, they have to deal with the — look, there’s institutional segregation in this country. From the time I got involved, I started dealing with that. Redlining banks, making sure we are in a position where — look, you talk about education. I propose is we take the very poor schools, triple the amount of money we spend from $15 to $45 billion a year. Give every single teacher a raise to the $60,000 level.

  Number two, make sure that we bring in to help the teachers deal with the problems that come from home. The problems that come from home, we have one school psychologist for every 1,500 kids in America today. It’s crazy. The teachers are — I’m married to a teacher, my deceased wife is a teacher. They have every problem coming to them. Make sure that every single child does, in fact, have 3, 4 and 5-year-olds go to school. Not day care, school.

  Social workers help parents deal with how to raise their children. It’s not that they don’t want to help, they don’t know what to play the radio, make sure the television — excuse me, make sure you have the record player on at night, the — make sure that kids hear words, a kid coming from a very poor school — a very poor background will hear 4 million words fewer spoken by the time we get there.

  MODERATOR: Thank you, Mr. Vice President.

  Biden: No, I’m going to go like the rest of them do, twice over. Because here’s the deal. The deal is that we’ve got this a little backwards. By the way, in Venezuela, we should be allowing people to come here from Venezuela. I know Maduro. I’ve confronted Maduro. You talk about the need to do something in Latin America. I’m the guy that came up with $740 million, to see to it those three countries, in fact, changed their system to people don’t have to chance to leave. You’re acting like we just discovered this yesterday. Thank you very much.

  Yes. Make sure you have the record player on at night.

  Part of me hopes for a Trump/Biden debate where they compete on who can give the less coherent answers.

  Another part of me dreads that, for the good of the country.

  ---

• But there's good news from Christian Schneider at the Bulwark: The Democrats are Blackmailing Themselves. That's about the ecology of "opposition research" firms who sell their dug-up dirt on Candidate X… to Candidate X himself!

  But these days, such firms are on the wane, thanks to candidates who are self-incriminating via Google. Example:

  The race’s denouement took place last Thursday morning, when South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg suggested that people who drink from straws or eat hamburgers are “part of the problem” in America, comparing the climate change crisis to World War II and the Great Depression. (Naturally, it took Twitter users a nanosecond to exhume photos of Buttigieg drinking from straws and flipping a full grill of meat, presumably leaving a trail of eco-death in his wake.)

  For comparison, the number of Americans who like cheeseburgers currently stands at 86 percent, slightly higher than the 4 percent of Democrats who prefer Pete Buttigieg.

  As we've seen, Bernie's come out against motherhood. Julian Castro (as well as former candidate Kirsten Gillebrand) came out against the flag, at least the Betsy Ross version. Next week in the crosshairs: apple pie whose inventor will be shown to have once read Huckleberry Finn and To Kill a Mockingbird.

  ---

• Ann Althouse notes another bit of debate dreadfulness, this time with Joe on the right side: "Let's be constitutional! We've got a Constitution!" — said Joe Biden, responding to Kamala Harris, who said....

  "Well, I mean, I would just say, hey, Joe, instead of saying, no, we can't, let's say yes, we can."

  I.e.: "Yes we can subvert the Constitution! The one I took an oath to 'support and defend'. Never mind that!"

  Ann adds that "transcript cannot convey the feeling and expression" in Kamala's response. It was "awful", "lightweight", and "dismissive of constitutional law."

  And at Reason, Jacob Sullum noticed the same: Kamala Harris Does Not Understand Why the Constitution Should Get in the Way of Her Gun Control Agenda.

  Instead of explaining the legal basis for the "executive action" she has in mind, Harris made a weak joke: "Hey, Joe, instead of saying, 'No, we can't,' let's say, 'Yes, we can.'" Then she launched into a description of the casualties from mass shootings, adding, "The idea that we would wait for this Congress, which has just done nothing, to act, is just—it is overlooking the fact that every day in America, our babies are going to school to have drills, elementary, middle and high school students, where they are learning about how they have to hide in a closet or crouch in a corner if there is a mass shooter roaming the hallways of their school."

  That is not an argument in favor of any particular gun control policy, let alone an argument for the president's authority to impose it unilaterally. "Let's be constitutional," Biden said. "We've got a Constitution." To which Harris replied, in effect, "Constitution, schmonstitution. Why should that get in the way of my agenda?" Even voters who tend to agree with Harris about gun control should be troubled by her blithe dismissal of the legal limits on the powers she would exercise as president.

  Well, the voters seem to be turning against her. Unfortunately, I suspect, not for the right reasons.

  ---

• But let us turn our phony attention to the (gulp!) Democrat front-runner. Peter Suderman, bless him, is being paid by Reason to keep track of her phoniness. For example: Elizabeth Warren Issues Misleading Claim That Three Industries Are Responsible for 70 Percent of Carbon Pollution.

  Take, for example, her claim at last week's CNN town hall on climate change that 70 percent of airborne carbon pollution comes from three industries. Warren made this argument in response to a question about whether the government should tell people which lightbulbs they have to use. 

  "This is exactly what the fossil fuel industry hopes we're all talking about," she said. "They want to be able to stir up a lot of controversy around your lightbulbs, straws, and cheeseburgers when 70% of the pollution of the carbon that we're throwing into the air comes from three industries." Because this is 2019, Warren also posted the claim on Instagram. 

  Via Politifact, the "three industries" are…

  • Transportation. (Which, Peter notes, is more of an "activity" than an "industry".)
  • Electricity production. (Ditto.) And…
  • Industry. Yes, one of the three industries that account for 70% of carbon is "industry."

  Politifact rated Warren's claim "half true". Showing, pretty much that they are totally in the bag for her.

  ---

• But that's not all! At the (probably paywalled) WSJ, Phil Gramm and Mike Solon described Warren’s Assault on Retiree Wealth.

  As a retiree myself, I pricked up my ears at that.

  Her “Accountable Capitalism Act” would wipe out the single greatest legal protection retirees currently enjoy—the requirement that corporate executives and fund managers act as fiduciaries on investors’ behalf. To prevent union bosses, money managers or politicians from raiding pension funds, the 1974 Employee Retirement Income Security Act requires that a fiduciary shall manage a plan “solely in the interest of the participants and beneficiaries . . . for the exclusive purpose of providing benefits to participants and their beneficiaries.” The Securities and Exchange Commission imposes similar requirements on investment advisers, and state laws impose fiduciary responsibility on state-chartered corporations.

  Sen. Warren would blow up these fiduciary-duty protections by rewriting the charter for every corporation with gross receipts of more than $1 billion. Every corporation, proprietorship, partnership and limited-liability company of that size would be forced to enroll as a federal corporation under a new set of rules. Under this new Warren charter, companies currently dedicated to their shareholders’ interest would be reordered to serve the interests of numerous new “stakeholders,” including “the workforce,” “the community,” “customers,” “the local and global environment” and “community and societal factors.”

  Hm. My guess, which you should ignore: coming spike in gold prices.

  ---

• And we've been pretty easy on Andrew Yang; Google (meaninglessly) considers him the least-phony credible candidate. But he comes in for a slap from Mark Krikorian at National Review: Do the 2020 Democratic Candidates Know Anything About Immigration Policy?.

  Yang was the most likeable of the bunch on stage last night but, like so many people, he thinks that because his dad came from the old country, he knows all he needs to know about immigration. Following Elizabeth Warren’s call to “expand legal immigration” (without offering any numbers, of course), Yang said, “I would return the level of legal immigration to the point it was under the Obama-Biden administration.”

  Unfortunately for Yang’s narrative, legal immigration is at the level it was under the Obama-Biden administration. The number of people granted lawful permanent residence (green cards), which is what we mean by “legal immigration,” averaged 1.06 million from Fiscal Year 2009 to 2016. The total for FY 2017 was 1.13 million, for 2018 was 1.1 million, and annualizing from the first quarter of FY 2019 yields a projected total of 1.03 million. Fluctuation within 100,000 is common (in 2013, the total was only 990,000), so the level is essentially unchanged. It could be that the green-card total will decline next year, because of the smaller number of refugees converting to green cards and, possibly, the new public charge rule leading to a reduction in the number of parents of adult U.S. citizens, but neither of these things has happened yet.

  I'm wishy-washy on immigration, mainly because (1) I'm generally in favor but (2) also favor enforcing the laws, even stupid ones.

• Peter Suderman is devoting much of his Reason time to noticing a certain candidate's prevarications and outright lies. And this is no exception: Elizabeth Warren Doesn’t Want to Say How She’d Pay for Her Health Care Plan. She doesn't have a plan of her own, opting to support Bernie's "Medicare For All" instead. But:

  But despite endorsing Sanders' plan, Warren has repeatedly declined to say that middle-class taxes would have to go up. She dodged the question in earlier debates this year. And at the debate last night, she once again all but refused to answer the question directly.

  Instead, she offered a vague promise that "middle-class families are going to pay less" while insisting that "those at the very top—the richest individuals and the biggest corporations—are going to pay more."

  When a debate moderator pressed her specifically on the question of taxes, she still declined to offer a direct response. Families have to deal with "total cost," she said, reiterating her support for Medicare for All. "Costs are going to go up for wealthier individuals, and costs are going to go up for giant corporations. But for hard-working families across this country, costs are going to go down, and that's how it should work under Medicare for All in our health care system." The specific question—Would taxes rise for middle-class families?—remained unanswered. 

  When politicians start talking about "total cost", you know they're playing a shell game: of course your taxes will go up, and you'll get something, maybe, in exchange. Whether you consider that a good deal or not? That's irrelevant. You won't have a choice in the matter.

  ---

• I bet you've been wondering whether more aid to education will make it more affordable. Maybe you're hoping that more aid to education will make it more affordable. Well, sorry. Veronique de Rugy and Jack Salmon, writing at the American Institute for Economic Research, have some bad (but not unexpected) news: More Aid to Education Will Not Make It More Affordable.

  In a recent study published by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, we reviewed the existing literature, as well as publicly available data, to determine whether more federal aid is the correct treatment for the problem of rising tuition prices. The evidence broadly suggests that colleges respond to increased federal funding by reducing institutional aid, so that for each dollar of additional federal aid students receive, they lose between 60 cents and 83 cents of institutional aid, depending on the type of aid and institution.

  Further, by subsidizing tuition through federal student aid, the government creates artificially high demand for college degrees, driving tuition prices higher and increasing overall costs for students and taxpayers. Policymakers’ solution to the issue of increasing costs has traditionally been to increase federal funding, which results in college getting ever more expensive over time. 

  You'd think that Democrats wouldn't bother with promises about spending vastly more money on education, since the teacher unions and the higher ed establishment are already in their pocket. Are they worried these constituencies won't stay bought?

  ---

• In the Pun Salad "Billion? Oh, good, I thought you said 'million'" Department, this report from AP: Study finds the universe might be 2 billion years younger.

  The universe is looking younger every day, it seems.

  New calculations suggest the universe could be a couple billion years younger than scientists now estimate, and even younger than suggested by two other calculations published this year that trimmed hundreds of millions of years from the age of the cosmos.

  "Why you don't look a day over 10 billion!"

  ---

• Speaking of old things, people of a Certain Age might be interested in How Eric Clapton Created the Classic Song "Layla".

  The story of Eric Clapton and “Layla” has always bothered me because to understand it is to understand how fallible and crazed any of us can be when it comes to love. We understand that our rock gods are human, but there’s something about Clapton falling in love with the wife (Pattie Boyd) of one of his best mates (George Harrison, a freakin’ Beatle, man!) and then writing a whole album about it, that is just unsettling. Is this something tawdry writ epic? Or is this something epic that has the wafting aroma of tawdriness?

  Polyphonic takes on the behind the scenes story of this rock masterpiece and rewinds several centuries to the source of Layla’s name: “Layla and Majnun,” a romantic poem from 12th century Persian poet Niẓāmi Ganjavi based on an actual woman from the 6th Century who drove her poet paramour mad. Lord Byron called the tragic poem “The Romeo and Juliet of the East,” as unrequited love leaves both Majnun and Layla dead after the latter’s father forbids her to be with the poet.

  Originally imagined as a ballad, but then … Duane Allman happened. Also Jim Gordon.

  ---

• And the Google LFOD alert rang for some big shoe news: Concepts x Timberland LFOD 6” Boot Drop.

  Concepts and Timberland have reunited for a new 6” Boot collaboration, this time focusing on an all-weather style that will last through the winter months. The Concepts x Timberland 6” “LFOD” boot is specifically built to withstand urban terrain and is well-prepared for inclement weather in rougher seasons.

  Featuring a textured GORE-TEX®️ black-suede upper, the boots also pay tribute to New England, the original home of both brands. The boots are decorated with bold white embroidery that reads “LIBERUM VIVERE AUT MORI” across a black corduroy collar in all caps, which loosely translates to New Hampshire’s state motto, “Live Free or Die” (LFOD). As a cherry on top of its New England inspiration, the boot also features tartan sock liners. Finally, a soft seafoam green leather patch with a purple Concepts logo completes the shoe.

  A pair will set you back $240. Tempting, but…

  Bright idea: the state should offer Latin-version plates for a modest extra fee, with "Liberum Vivere aut Mori" replacing "Live Free or Die". For people who want to add a certain highbrow seasoning to their in-your-face revolutionary attitudes.

Oh, yeah, I almost forgot that Pun Son and I trundled down to Newington to check this out. We'd seen the previous one back in 2017, also at Newington. This one is also, eh, OK.

The loser kids from the previous movie are back in flashbacks, but mostly this is about their 27-year-older selves. One has grown to be Jessica Chastain, another to be James McAvoy, still another to be Bill Hader. Who I miss on Saturday Night Live, but that's not too relevant here.

It turns out the evil clown Pennywise did not get seriously killed in the previous flick. (Is that a spoiler?) So the gang gathers together one more time… except for this one guy who commits suicide rather than go through that again. (Is that a spoiler?)

Anyway, we're in for more gore, more special effects, more running, more fighting with inner demons, more f-bombs.

So I'm thinking the title is pretty unoriginal. It Chapter Two? How about It Again? It's Back? Or, most honestly, It's Time To Give Steven King More Of Your Money?

You want a somewhat more negative review, John Podhoretz is your guy. He points out that the ending is pretty stupid, and he has a point.

• Bryan Caplan notes that for gaining and maintaining political power, truth is overrated. Instead: Monopolize the Pretty Lies.

  Why do dictators deny people the right to speak freely? The obvious response is, “The truth hurts.” Dictators are bad, so if people can freely speak the truth, they will say bad things about the dictator. This simultaneously wounds dictators’ pride and threatens their power, so dictators declare war on the truth.

  But is this story right? Consider: If you want to bring an incumbent dictator down, do you really want to be hamstrung by the truth? It’s far easier – and more crowd-pleasing – to respond to a pack of official lies with your own pack of lies. When the dictator claims, “I’ve made this the greatest country on earth,” you could modestly respond, “Face facts: we’re only 87th.” Yet if it’s power you seek, you might as well lie back, “The dictator has destroyed our country – but this will be the greatest country on earth if we gain power.” Even more obviously, if the current dictator claims the sanction of God, the opposition doesn’t want to shrug, “Highly improbable. How do you even know God exists?” Instead, the opposition wants to roar, “No, God is on our side. Our side!”

  Freedom of speech is immensely valuable, but it's easy to attribute powers to it that it doesn't have. Politicians of all stripes know that lies and half-truths are more effective than honesty.

  Speaking of monopoly, our Amazon Product du Jour is very hard to get, with an absurdly high price to match. But you might want to click over to Amazon anyway, because the some of the questions and their answers are hilarious. ("Is the board waterproof so Progressive tears won’t ruin it?" "Its coated with VEGAN oil and comes with a brush made from the armpit hair of 200+lb female anqueefa loser.")

  (OK, I googled it: "anqueefa" is a very offensive misspelling of "Antifa". I don't recommend googling it.)

  ---

• Richard A. Epstein writes in the latest issue of Reason on The Progressive Feeding Frenzy. After rattling off the new government spending "Progressives" demand:

  How then are these gargantuan expenditures to be funded? The first problem is that the private sector will be so debilitated that government revenues will fall even if tax rates are kept at their current rate. But taxes won't stay at their current rate, because the progressive mindset ignores incentives and treats all wealth transfers as zero-sum. They assume that no amount of taking will ever lead to less earning and that the top 1 percent of Americans, who earn about 20 percent of total income, comprise a deep well.

  But that well has already been tapped; today these same rich people also pay 40 percent of federal and state taxes. Some of that money generates return benefits in the form of government goods and services. But today, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and lesser entitlement programs consume an ever-larger fraction of public wealth. We are on the wrong side of the Laffer curve, where higher taxes will generate even smaller revenues. Foreign investors will stay away or pull up stakes and move elsewhere. Many older professionals will choose to retire rather than take a cut in after-tax income. Meanwhile, everyone else will lobby to get on the government gravy train.

  [I've said this before but:] there is not a dollar in private hands that statists don't imagine they could spend more wisely and humanely.

  ---

• At National Review, Kevin D. Williamson looks at The Lawfare Campaign against Gunmakers.

  It is remarkable how little our elite law-enforcement agencies and prosecutors are willing to do when it comes to policing the criminal use of firearms. The U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Illinois, whose office has responsibility for Chicago, has for years maintained a policy of refusing to prosecute most straw-buyer cases unless they are part of a larger organized-crime investigation, partly because those cases are a lot of work and partly because they tend to net a lot of sympathetic defendants, the girlfriends and grandmothers and nephews with clean records who buy firearms illegally for convicted felons. Local officials in Chicago and Illinois practically never pursue gun-trafficking cases: As ProPublica reports, between 2014 and 2017 Cook County authorities charged only twelve gunrunning cases and zero gun-trafficking cases. Chicago police made only 142 arrests for illegal gun sales over the course of a decade — and no arrests at all for gun trafficking. Of the many arrests for illegal possession of firearms, few led to prosecutions and fewer still to convictions. Similar stories play out less dramatically in jurisdictions around the country and in the federal system: Thousands of gun purchases are wrongly approved in federal background checks every year, but the ATF makes no effort at all to recover those guns.

  There are reasons for that. The people who are driving Chicago’s sustained murder problem are young and mobile. Chasing them is hard work, catching them is harder still, and convicting them brings very little in the way of headlines or glory.

  It's no surprise that law-abiding companies that make and sell guns are "a much easier target". So the hell with the rule of law.

  ---

• Matt Weidinger of AEI brings out some Highlights of the new 2018 Census Bureau poverty data. Most notably:

  1.      Poverty fell again. The official poverty rate (now 11.8 percent) and the number of people in poverty (38.1 million) both fell again in 2018. The poverty rate is now the lowest it has been since 2001 (when it was 11.7 percent). Since peaking at 46.7 million in 2014, the number of people in poverty has fallen by over 8 million. This continued decline in poverty is what you would expect at this point in the economic cycle, given strong job growth and very low unemployment rates – recently at levels seen only at the end of the 1990s expansion, and before that, not since the late 1960s.

  I'm as unfond of clichés and adages as the next person. But "a rising tide lifts all boats".

  Also: What leftists endlessly deride as "trickle down economics" works.

  Granite Staters will immediately want to thumb through the report to see how we're doing. That's actually easier to find at the Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM) report. By the "official" poverty measure, NH averaged a 6.4% poverty rate between 2016-2018; that's by far the lowest rate in the country.

  The SPM takes transfer payments and the local cost of living into account; things aren't quite as rosy in our case. The 2016-2018 average SPM poverty rate in NH was 8.2%. A bunch of states, mostly in the midwest (Iowa, Kansas, Minnesota, Rhode Island, Wisconsin) clock in slightly lower than that.

• Veronique de Rugy returns to an evergreen theme: Trump's Tariff and Trade Aches and Pains.

  On the campaign trail, candidate Donald Trump said that, if elected, "We're going to win so much. You're going to get tired of winning. You're going to say, 'Please Mr. President, I have a headache. Please, don't win so much.'" Unfortunately, Trump's definition of winning seems to mean flexing his presidential muscles, beating his chest and changing his mind without hesitation — all with an utter disregard for the actual impact of his policies on the economy and American workers.

  The president's profound misunderstanding of what victory looks like is particularly visible in his multifront attack on trade and globalization. All in the name of putting America first, he withdrew from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, treated our trade partners like enemies, forced a renegotiation of NAFTA with no clear idea of whether the new deal (the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement) could ever be ratified, implemented tariffs to fight imaginary national security menaces and started a trade war with China without any clearer strategy than his willingness to jack up tariffs at all costs.

  Yes, our Amazon Product du Jour is a rerun. But it's a good rerun. From the product description:

  Get this before the tariffs hit the shirt companies, because prices rise and you'll end up paying more for this exact shirt. If you don't think Donald Trump would do such a move, think again! This is the classiest tariff shirt around, believe me.

  If you believe in supporting vendors who market their wares with a sense of humor, go for it.

  ---

• As Philip K. Dick taught us, androids dream of electric sheep. And as Kevin D. Williamson teaches us: Democrats Dream Of Nation Without Republicans.

  Michelle Goldberg of the New York Times has a dream, a dream in which about half of the American people are deprived of an effective means of political representation, a dream of one-party government in which the Democrats are the only game in town — “Dare We Dream of the End of the GOP?” her column is headlined — which also is a dream of visiting vengeance upon those who dared to vote for their own interests as they understood them and thereby schemed “to stop the New America from governing.”

  That quotation is from a new book by Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg bearing the title R.I.P. G.O.P. Greenberg himself has a new column in the Times on the same theme. “The 2020 election will be transformative like few in our history,” he writes. “It will end with the death of the Republican Party as we know it . . . [and] liberate the Democratic Party from the country’s suffocating polarization and allow it to use government to address the vast array of problems facing the nation.”

  Well, that's a darn shame. Too bad the GOP hasn't done much since 2016 to deserve our support or trust.

  ---

• Up in the Great White North, Maclean's looks at funny old America's politics, specifically: Don’t count out Andrew Yang, the populist technocrat who wants to be president. And looks at his visit to New Hampshire, specifically Laconia and Belknap County:
  [Belknap County is] also fertile ground for Yang’s radical proposals. When he first rolled into New Hampshire in January, he preached the Freedom Dividend as a panacea. But [chair of the Laconia Democrats Carlos] Cardona convinced him to ease up on that, to pivot instead to local issues of addiction and unemployment. Belknap County suffers the second-highest rate of overdose deaths in New Hampshire, which itself is the fourth most lethal state for opioid deaths. Yang took his advice, and Cardona has watched the candidate’s crowd sizes grow with every subsequent visit. He now draws a through line from financial insecurity to anxiety, depression and addiction. Audience members nod along. They get it. Fifty of them signed up to receive Yang Gang emails after he left the stage. “Live Free or Die,” their state motto goes. To win the nomination, Yang needs voters to agree this is not rhetorical: freedom means a monthly dividend. The alternative, quite literally, is death.

  Or the "Freedom Dividend" could be used to buy more heroin. That's the way I'd bet.

  ---

• Andrew Yang's campaign motto is "MATH". Which, allegedly, stands for "Make America Think Harder."

  I suppose that's better than "PB4WEGO".

  Elizabeth Warren. on the other hand, might go with: "But America Doesn't Merit A Trustworthy Head" → BADMATH.

  Because, as Peter Suderman points out at Reason: Elizabeth Warren’s Plans Don’t Add Up. (Also in the October print issue.)

  The Warren worldview is thus both bloodless and moralizing. It is also dangerous, combining self-righteous certainty about the perils of the economy with dubious data and an instinct for bureaucratic paternalism. Warren wants the federal government to be the American economy's hall monitor, telling individuals and companies what they can and can't sell or buy and making some of the nation's most successful businesses answer to her demands.

  It seems to be working. During the first six months of 2019, this strategy vaulted Warren into the top tier of Democratic primary contenders, helping her raise more than $19 million during the year's second quarter and placing her among the top three or four candidates in the party's crowded field. Focus groups and political reporting have consistently found that Democratic voters are warming not only to the substance of Warren's ideas but to the very fact that she has them.

  Yet Warren's wonkery and her populist fury are both based on myths and misdirection, often perpetuated by Warren herself. Although she styles herself as a data-driven champion of the little guy, she has run a campaign based on a dismal representation of the U.S. economy that fails to account for factors that complicate her story. And although she has received kudos for the volume and specificity of her plans, Warren has a history of pushing misleading research and cherry-picked data designed to support politicized conclusions.

  Peter's article is a long, interesting, scary picture of Liz's rise to political power, supported by shoddy scholarship along the way.

• Jeff Jacoby bids an unfond farewell to a recently departed leader: To Hell with Robert Mugabe. And reveals a certain willful blindness of American higher ed:

  Determined to suppress all political opposition, Mugabe ordered the fearsome Fifth Brigade — a North Korea-trained military unit — to move against the Ndebele minority in the country's southern province of Matabeleland. The Ndebele, who constituted about one-fourth of Zimbabwe's population, were supporters of Joshua Nkomo, a national hero and the leader of a key opposition party. Mugabe, a member of the country's Shona majority, unleashed what he called a gukurahundi — a "wiping away" — against the Ndebele in Matabeleland. Beginning in February 1983, thousands of victims were being massacred. Many were shot dead in public executions after being forced to dig their own graves. The atrocities committed by Mugabe's forces were reported on at the time by human rights organizations and international media. By 1987, the death toll carried out in Matabeleland had reached 25,000.

  That didn't keep the University of Massachusetts from awarding Mugabe an honorary degree. In October 1986, Zimbabwe's increasingly ruthless ruler was extolled in a special convocation on the Amherst campus as a champion of human rights. The UMass chancellor, Joseph Duffy, hosted Mugabe at a dinner in his home, where he praised his leadership and economic reforms and expressed the hope that Mugabe's record in Zimbabwe was a preview of what a post-apartheid South Africa would look like.

  According to Jeff, the slow-motion UMass revoked Mugabe's degree 22 years later, in 2008.

• No jokes or snarkiness up front today. Our Amazon Product du Jour is the new book from Garrett M. Graff. He has an article about the book at the Atlantic: On September 11, Blind Luck Decided Who Lived or Died. Which starts:

  Joseph Lott, a sales representative for Compaq computers, survived one of the deadliest days in modern American history because he had a penchant for “art ties,” neckties featuring famous masterpieces. “It began many years earlier, in the ’90s,” he said in an oral history with StoryCorps. “I love Impressionist paintings, and I use them as a way to make points with my kids. I’d put on an art tie, and then I would ask my kids—I have three daughters—I would say, ‘Artist identification?’ And they would have to tell me whether it was a van Gogh or a Monet, and we would have a little conversation about the artist.”

  On the morning of September 11, 2001, he had put on a green shirt before meeting colleagues at the Marriott hotel sandwiched between the Twin Towers, in advance of speaking at a conference that day at the restaurant Windows on the World. Over breakfast, his co-worker Elaine Greenberg, who had been on vacation the week before in Massachusetts, presented him with a tie she’d spotted on her trip that featured a Monet.

  “It was red and blue, primarily. I was very touched that she had done this,” Lott explained. “I said, ‘This is such a nice gesture. I think I am going to put this on and wear it as I speak.’ She said, ‘Well, not with that shirt. You’re not going to put on a red-and-blue tie with a green shirt.’” So when breakfast was done, his colleagues headed up to Windows on the World, located on the 104th floor of the North Tower, and Lott went back to his hotel room to change shirts. He ironed a white one, put it on, and then headed back down toward the hotel lobby. “As I was waiting to go from the seventh floor back down to the lobby and over to the bank of elevators that would take me to the top, I felt a sudden movement in the building,” he recalled.

  Graff notes the role of random chance and seemed-inconsequential-at-the-time decisions that can knock one's life in a new and unalterable direction. Or end it.

  Something to think about when you're having trouble sleeping. It won't help you sleep.

  A quote I saw years ago from an old Roman playwright, Plautus, has stuck with me ever since:

  The gods play games with men as balls.

  He said it in Latin, of course. I have no idea what sort of games the ancient Romans played with balls. But here's what I imagine: you, a happy little ball, just sitting in the grass, living your bally life.

  Unfortunately, the gods are playing some sort of polo. And you hear distant hoofbeats, growing louder, deafening… And suddenly, whack, the mallet finds you, you're speeding off in some unknown direction, perhaps to oblivion.

  Well, that's life.

  ---

• In other news, Mark J. Perry has updated his classic graphic, based on the latest report on incomes and poverty from the Census Bureau.

  Maybe the most important finding from today's Census Bureau report on Income. Yes, the middle class is disappearing but it's because they're moving up to higher income groups. The share of US households making $100K (2018 $$) has more than tripled since 1967, from 9% to 30.4%. pic.twitter.com/1ZS9IzNmzo

  — Mark J. Perry (@Mark_J_Perry) September 10, 2019

  Will trends continue? If my math is right, a straight-line extrapolation says the middle-income segment will disappear in… about 176 years.

  The Low-income group? Even quicker: they're gone in about 153 years.

  Everybody will be high-income then. But Bernie Sanders will still find something to gripe about.

  ---

• At Reason, Jacob Sullum extracts a probably-unintended lesson: Congressional Report on ‘Deaths of Despair’ Highlights the Hazards of Drug Prohibition. Bottom line:

  The upward trend in opioid-related deaths not only continued but accelerated after the government succeeded in reducing opioid prescriptions, pushing nonmedical users toward black-market substitutes. It's not hard to see why: Legally produced opioids come in uniform, predictable doses, while illegal opioids vary widely in potency, making fatal mistakes more likely. The emergence of fentanyl and its analogs as heroin boosters and replacements has only magnified that hazard. Based on mortality data published by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, combined with drug use estimates from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health and the RAND Corporation, heroin is roughly eight times as deadly as prescription opioids.

  Just as prohibition made drinking more dangerous, it has made drug use more dangerous, both by favoring more-potent products and by creating a black market where consumers do not know what they are buying. After considering the broader puzzle posed by "deaths of despair," the report concludes that "we clearly remain in the grip of a national opioid crisis that requires the attention of policymakers." But depending on the form that attention takes, it can easily make matters worse rather than better.

  The government: killing people in the name of "compassion".

  ---

• David French, at National Review notes something that shouldn't surprise us: Elizabeth Warren’s Plans Consistently Unconstitutional. The latest example (well, the latest as of September 6):

  On my first day as president, I will sign an executive order that puts a total moratorium on all new fossil fuel leases for drilling offshore and on public lands. And I will ban fracking—everywhere.

  — Elizabeth Warren (@ewarren) September 6, 2019

  Yep, she’s going to ban fracking. When I read the tweet, I flashed back in my mind to Ronald Reagan’s famous retort to Jimmy Carter in a 1980 presidential debate — “There you go again.” Here the “again” isn’t just proposing a bad plan (it would have extraordinary negative effects on domestic energy production and would likely increase dependence on more “dirty” fuels to generate power), it’s proposing an illegal policy. She simply can’t ban fracking on her own.

  In fact, the executive branch’s authority over fracking is rather profoundly limited by statute. Beginning in 2012, the Obama attempted to introduce “additional regulatory effort and oversight” of fracking by introducing new regulations through the Bureau of Land Management (BLM). In 2015, the states of Wyoming and Colorado filed petitions for judicial review of the Obama regulations, and on June 21, 2016, federal district court judge Scott Skavdahl (an Obama appointee) held that the fracking rule was “unlawful.”

  She doesn't want to be President. She wants to be Queen. The old-style kind, that could issue unquestionable decrees and behead people.

  ---

• At the Technology Liberation Front, Adam Thierer asks: should we Socialize Journalism in Order to Save It?. Adam looks at Bernie Sanders' proposals and also one from a group at the University of Chicago.

  “The Sanders scheme would add layers of regulatory supervision to the news business,” notes media critic Jack Shafer. Sanders promises to prevent or rollback media mergers, increase regulations on who can own what kinds of platforms, flex antitrust muscles against online distributors, and extend privileges to those employed by media outlets. The academics who penned the University of Chicago report recommend public funding for journalism, regulations that “ensure necessary transparency regarding information flows and algorithms,” and rolling back liability protections for platforms afforded through Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.

  Both plans feature government subsidies, too. Sen. Sanders proposes “taxing targeted ads and using the revenue to fund nonprofit civic-minded media” as part of a broader effort “to substantially increase funding for programs that support public media’s news-gathering operations at the local level.” The Chicago plan proposed a taxpayer-funded $50 media voucher that each citizen will then be able to spend on an eligible media operation of their choice. Such ideas have been floated before and the problems are still numerous. Apparently, “saving journalism” requires that media be placed on the public dole and become a ward of the state. Socializing media in order to save it seems like a bad plan in a country that cherishes the First Amendment.

  Suggested Bernie slogan: "Awful ideas on innumerable levels."

Jim Baer writes occasionally in the Concord Monitor; I admit that over the 14+ years of this blog (and, for that matter, the 68+ years of my life) I've managed to pay him no attention whatsoever. Other than the Monitor having an obnoxious paywall, I have no excuse, and I accept full responsibility.

But his recent op-ed column, "Look around, and you’ll see mediocrity everywhere", triggered my Google News Alert for "Live Free or Die". And I found it difficult to pick out a short excerpt of the column to respond to, my usual M.O..

So I'll break out the old fisking template. I am reproducing Jim's entire op-ed here, on the (appropriate) left, with a lovely #EEFFFF background color; my comments are on the right.

This 2011 novel was Elmore Leonard's last; he passed away in 2013 at the age of 87. He wrote it just as the TV series featuring US Deputy Marshal Raylan Givens, Justified was in its early years.

It's set in a slightly different universe than the TV show. It's also set in a slightly different universe than Leonard's previous Givens-featuring novella Fire in the Hole; at the end of that one, Boyd Crowder has been shot deader than dead. But in Raylan, (surprise!) he's back, healthier than ever.

The novel interweaves three plot threads: (1) a transplant nurse masterminds a gang who steals victims' kidneys; (2) a ruthless coal company exec comes to town to try to negotiate the sale of a mountain; (3) Raylan is asked to track down a fugitive college-aged poker player, but gets caught up with a sleazy pimp who is branching out into bank robbery, with the help of his stable.

People who are familiar with the TV show will recognize plot elements and characters mutated semi-recognizably from the book. (For example, the book has Dickie and Coover as members of the Crowe family, under the thumb of their daddy. On TV, they were Bennets, and it was their mom, the unforgettable Mags Bennett, who was running their criminal show.

And the wonderful, precocious, Loretta McCready has a cameo.

All in all, a fun read. This ends my Elmore Leonard reading project, at least for now. It's been fun.

• Seen on a Power Line "Loose Ends" post, attributed to Geoff Whisler:
  How ’bout a demonstration of government regulation working? You guys successfully ban telemarketers and then we’ll talk.

  A related question: Who is this guy named "Scam Likely" and why does he keep calling me from so many different numbers?

  Until the happy day when the FCC figures out how to deal with this (can you imagine how well they would have handled Net Neutrality?) you might want to check out our Amazon Product du Jour.

  ---

• A wistful query from Adam Mill at the Federalist: What If Americans Wanted Freedom As Much As Hong Kongers Do?.

  As I watch the fearless Hong Kong protesters risk life and limb, standing up to the Chinese juggernaut to protect freedom, I can’t help but wistfully wish we’re witnessing the beginning of a spreading popular movement. In my heart of hearts, it’s my fondest hope that these courageous, freedom-loving protesters succeed and that their message of hope catches fire in other countries in desperate need of the Hong Kong formula.

  I’m not referring to a spread into mainland China, which would also be wonderful. No, here I’m hoping their thirst for freedom also spreads to the United States.

  I’m not saying the United States isn’t free. But it’s a whole lot less free than the special experiment of Hong Kong. For one thing, the Heritage Foundation rates Hong Kong’s as the freest economy in the world, and the United States as the world’s 12th-freest. That’s embarrassing.

  Worse than embarrassing. Sad. Outrageous.

  ---

• Michael Huemer is a professor of philosophy at the University of Colorado (which, not that it matters, eked out a win against my beloved Cornhuskers on Saturday). He's in a good position to opine honestly on the World’s Longest Running Scam: The Academy. Longish, but well worth it.

  Sometimes, I feel as though my profession is a giant scam. I don’t mean that we’re not doing anything of value. I mean that what people think we’re doing, which explains why they pay us so much, is not what we’re actually doing. And when I reflect on that, sometimes, I wonder how long it will take for the world to catch on, and then stop giving us tons of money, at which point most of us will have to find real jobs. That might be good for society, but I hope it doesn’t happen before I’ve retired.

  Well, I made it out. So did Mrs. Salad. I'd wish good luck to Michael, but (honestly) I hope this "catching on" thing happens sooner rather than later.

  ---

• At the Washington Free Beacon, Andrew Stiles asks the musical question: What Is The Point of CNN?.

  And, spoiler, sorry, the subheadline gives the answer away: "Nothing".

  CNN is a mid-tier cable news network that provides non-stop breaking news to bored airport travelers and internet journalists. The network has breathlessly covered President Donald Trump's every fart and utterance since 2015 and has contributed to the "national dialogue" through countless interviews with serious public intellectuals. Michael Avenatti, for example.

  One of CNN's most recent hires, former FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe, was found to have lied to federal investigators under oath prior to his firing in March 2018. In addition to his role as CNN contributor, McCabe has a new side hustle: Keynote speaker at Democratic Party fundraisers.

  And speaking of the network's keen eye for talent, CNN invited celebrity white nationalist Richard Spencer on in June to discuss Donald Trump's "racist tweets." Brian Stelter, who hosts a show called Reliable Sources, recently nodded along as his guest, former Duke University chair of psychiatry Allen Francis, argued that Trump "may be responsible for many more million deaths" than genocidal dictators Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, and Mao Zedong.

  It's not so much that CNN (etc.) are blatant Democratic Party cheerleaders, it's that they're so inept at it.

  ---

• 

  Sean Carroll, probably the best the world has to offer in the realm of "actual scientist willing to explain things clearly to the masses", writing in the New York Times: Even Physicists Don’t Understand Quantum Mechanics.

  “I think I can safely say that nobody really understands quantum mechanics,” observed the physicist and Nobel laureate Richard Feynman. That’s not surprising, as far as it goes. Science makes progress by confronting our lack of understanding, and quantum mechanics has a reputation for being especially mysterious.

  What’s surprising is that physicists seem to be O.K. with not understanding the most important theory they have.

  Sean (I call him Sean) has a new book (out tomorrow, Amazon link at right) that advocates the “many-worlds” interpretation of quantum mechanics. Which I've resisted buying into so far, but I'll check it out when the book becomes available at the library.

  ---

• New material from Dave Barry at the Miami Herald on Grandparents Day: Grandfather Dave Barry on lessons learned. Now, I'm not a grandparent (as far as I know), you might not be either, but I can assure you that even if you're not, Dave's worth reading:

  You may not be aware of this, but today [actually, as I type, yesterday, sorry], September 8, is Grandparents Day. It’s also — really — Literacy Day, Star Trek Day and Iguana Awareness Day.

  I don’t know why we need a special day to be aware of iguanas. It’s definitely unnecessary in South Florida, which is IguanaPalooza. Spend an hour walking around my neighborhood and there’s a good chance you’ll encounter a green lizard the size of a small dog, glaring at you with a look that says: “If I were larger, I would swallow you in one gulp, like the Tyrannosaurus Rex that ate the lawyer in ‘Jurassic Park.’ ”

  That’s the iguana community’s favorite movie. It’s showing 24/7 down at the LizardPlex.

  So we South Floridians don’t need Iguana Awareness Day. What we need is Stop Sign Awareness Day, or Your Car Has Turn Signals For A Reason Awareness Day, or It’s Not A Great Idea To Celebrate Festive Occasions By Shooting Your Gun Into The Air You Moron Awareness Day.

  But getting back to Grandparents Day…

  I'm a few years behind Dave, agewise, so I consider him like an early warning system of what's coming up.

Another week with no additions or deletions to our phony candidate lineup. And no huge movements in the betting odds at Betfair to talk about, either.

In fact, the only big change is the increase in phony hits for President Donald J. Trump:

"WinProb" calculation described here. Google result counts are bogus.

• Trump's phony bump was spurred, no doubt, by…

  Such a phony hurricane report by lightweight reporter @jonkarl of @ABCWorldNews. I suggested yesterday at FEMA that, along with Florida, Georgia, South Carolina and North Carolina, even Alabama could possibly come into play, which WAS true. They made a big deal about this...

  — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 2, 2019

  And thanks to his Sharpie alteration of an out-of-date NOAA hurricane projection map, we now have "Sharpiegate" in our political lexicon. And further note that our Amazon Product du Jour attests to the rapidity with which "book" self-publishers can leap at this sort of thing. [Update 2023-04-30: sigh. Original APdJ gone, having served its stupid purpose. But do you need some fine-point permanent markers, I've replaced it.]

  ---

• So I know Beto! is long-gone from our major-candidate list. This more complete list of election odds has him, as I type, tied with Amy Klobuchar and (hm) Michelle Obama. But he recently tried to revive things with what J.D. Tucille calls Beto’s Impossible Gun Ban Dreams.

  "The newest purity test for Democrats is whether to mandate assault weapons buybacks," The Washington Post reported recently—with "buybacks" a popular euphemism for compensated confiscation. Donkey party potentates including Sens. Bernie Sanders (Vt.) and Cory Booker (N.J.) share Beto's taste for imposing a new form of prohibition.

  Maybe that's a winning formula for harvesting votes, but it's terrible as policies go, unless they really want to make the government look thoroughly impotent. Similar bans, restrictions, and confiscations have been tried before, with minimal success.

  "More than a year after New Jersey imposed the toughest assault-weapons law in the country, the law is proving difficult if not impossible to enforce," reported The New York Times in 1991. "Only four military-style weapons have been turned in to the State Police and another 14 were confiscated." Police also knew "the whereabouts of fewer than 2,000 other guns"—out of an estimated 100,000 to 300,000 privately owned weapons in the state.

  As with so many proposals, it's difficult to decide whether

  1. Candidates are unaware that gun prohibition and confiscation is unworkable, unconstitutional, and counterproductive (in which case they are stupid); or
  2. Candidates know that such proposals are unworkable, etc., nevertheless claim to favor them because they know their stupid followers will buy them.

  Which is worse?

  ---

• James Freeman at the (perhaps paywalled) WSJ wonders: Can the Climate Cause Survive the Democratic Primaries?. He notes the disconnect between candidates who (a) tell us that fossil fuel emissions are “an existential threat”, but (b) say no to nuclear power. Especially droll is Mr. Bernard Sanders:

  We’re facing an immediate need to turn our economy upside down to avoid a planet-destroying disaster—but nuclear power is off the table because it may not represent a solution for the infinite future? Vermont’s Sen. Bernie Sanders raised a similar objection about long-term storage. He also addressed the generation of nuclear power and said he’s concerned about the costs, which would a be a first for the man who backs a $16 trillion climate plan on top of his $33 trillion health plan.

  Bernie, do you even listen to yourself?

  ---

• At Real Clear Politics, Ben Shapiro describes How the Quest for Power Corrupted Elizabeth Warren. Ben describes how just a few years ago, Liz was (1) against housing market regulation; (2) in favor of school choice; (3) skeptical about taxpayer-funded daycare; and…

  She ardently opposed additional taxpayer subsidization of college loans, too, or more taxpayer spending on higher education directly. Instead, she called for a tuition freeze from state schools. She recommended tax incentives for families to save rather than spend. She opposed radical solutions wholesale: "We haven't suggested a complete overhaul of the tax structure, and we haven't demanded that businesses cease and desist from ever closing another plant or firing another worker. Nor have we suggested that the United States should build a quasi-socialist safety net to rival the European model."

  So, what happened to Warren?

  Power.

  Warren probably is the smartest candidate on either side. Which is not good news, because see above: she's tailoring her advocacy of silly, destructive policies simply to cater to the D-side electorate.

  ---

• Chrissy Clark of the Federalist watched the CNN town hall with the ten Democrats taking turns on … well, let's just say this was not the hardest column Chrissy has ever had to write: 10 Craziest Things About Dems' Economy-Wrecking Climate Extremism. Let's pick one… oh, we haven't mentioned Wheezy Joe yet, have we?

  Issac Larkin, a doctoral candidate at Northwestern University, accused Biden of going to a fundraiser with a fossil fuel executive the next day. Larkin was also introduced as a staunch Sanders supporter.

  Now, I know you signed the no fossil fuel money pledge, but I have to ask, how can we trust you to hold these corporations and executives accountable for their crimes against humanity, when we know that tomorrow you are holding a high-dollar fundraiser hosted by Andrew Goldman, a fossil fuel executive.

  “He’s not a fossil fuel executive,” Biden responded.

  Goldman is a fossil fuel executive.

  So (as usual): Biden either didn't know he was lying, or did know. Which is worse?

  ---

• And the headline in the Daily Mail really says it all: Elizabeth Warren demands ban on bump stocks 5 months AFTER Trump outlawed them.
  Elizabeth Warren told a New Hampshire campaign crowd on Monday that the federal government should ban 'bump stocks,' a device the Trump administration outlawed in March.

  OK, I have a hard time believing that was intentional. Sometimes I overestimate Warren's intelligence, I guess.

• Charles C. W. Cooke trills the truth from his NR perch: "Meghan McCain is right about AR-15 confiscation and you know it." Specifically, Ms. McCain claimed that gun confiscation would prompt "a lot of violence". This caused Beto, a would-be confiscator, to tut-tut. Comments Charlie:
  There are just two types of people engaging in this debate: People who know that Meghan McCain is correct, and people who are pretending that they do not know that Meghan McCain is correct. It doesn’t not especially matter what your politics are, or what you think of private gun ownership in the United States. It does not matter, either, whether you want Meghan McCain to be right or you want her to be wrong. If you have read any American history at all, you know that, as a matter of dull, neutral fact, McCain is correct. Americans defied and resisted the prohibition of alcohol, often violently, even after it was passed into law by a supermajority in Congress and in the states. And, eventually, they won. Americans have defied and violated the prohibition of drugs, often violently, since it began. And, slowly, but surely, they are winning. Americans already ignore most gun-control measures — even in states with significant pro-gun control majorities. Were confiscation to be tried, they would defy and resist it, often violently. And, eventually, they would win, as they did the last time around.

  I would like to think that's true. Is the Spirit of 1775 still alive enough?

  ---

• It's been a while since we quoted any f-bombs here. But it's from Reason, Katherine Mangu-Ward quoting someone else: Don’t Just Do Something.

  "I don't know what the answer is," Kacey Musgraves shouted during her set at Lollapalooza on August 7, "but obviously something has to be fucking done." The country music star then led her fans in a chant that perfectly encapsulates the future of American politics: "Somebody fucking do something!" she screamed. "Somebody fucking do something!" the crowd screamed back.

  Musgraves was, understandably, upset about the horrific back-to-back mass murders that took place the first weekend of August in El Paso and Dayton. She did not offer a specific something to be done. This may have been an attempt to appear nonpartisan, it may have been honest uncertainty, or it may just have been a sensible intuition that the middle of a music festival was not the right place to workshop public policy.

  I would have thought that the old (over thirty years old!) BBC show "Yes, Prime Minister" would have ridiculed this sort of argument to a well-deserved death:

  There's even a Wikipedia page for the Politician's Syllogism:

  1. We must do something
  2. This is something
  3. Therefore, we must do this.

  So, Ms. Musgraves: not only are you pottymouthed, you've shown your ignorance of 1980s British comedy. Either should get you banned from the Grand Ole Opry.

  (Left a related comment at Reason.)

  ---

• Drew Cline of the Josiah Bartlett Center, remembers the good old days of the Clamshell Alliance, and wonders how they're feeling today: 50 years after start of anti-Seabrook protests, a turn toward nuclear power.

  If San Francisco tech bro hipsters invented a carbon-free way to generate power 24/7, they would be hailed as saviors of the planet. Though they might yet come up with some use for a venti Matcha Green Tea Frappuccino, the energy technology in question predates them and even their retro clothes. In 1951 in Idaho, scientists for the first time used a nuclear reaction to generate electricity.  

  Though 59 nuclear power plants generate about 55 percent of the non-carbon-emitting power in the United States, they are still opposed by environmental activists who came of age in the 1970s.

  One of Drew's factoids: "A planned second reactor at the site was scrapped after lengthy legal battles. The additional 1,150 mw of power that would have been generated by a second reactor were instead generated by fossil-fuel-burning plants."

  Thanks a lot, Seabrook protesters!

  ---

• You may have noticed CVS commemorating the five-year anniversary of its decision to stop selling tobacco in its stores. Unfortunately for CVS, so did Josh Bloom of the American Council on Science and Health. And he relates The Hypocrisy of CVS. Among other things he looks at the store's Homeopathic EarAche ear drops.
  For $9.99 you can buy 0.33 ounces of water with absolutely nothing useful in it. This can be ascertained simply by looking at the list of "active ingredients," assuming that you can even read it:

  

  Josh's translation:

  

  And it just gets better from there.

  ---

• And finally, our Google LFOD news alert rang for an ill-tempered rant from a guy named "Monte Belmonte", apparently the wine columnist for a Massachusetts publication called the Valley Advocate. Because he was struck by the desire to write about "how the New Hampshire State Liquor Store is a crock of crap!”: New Hampshire’s tax-free liquor lie.

  The reason I was hit with this bolt of lightning idea must have been 1) I often stop at the New Hampshire State Liquor Store on the way to Southern Maine in order to stock up for the trip. 2) we were going away on tax-free weekend in Massachusetts. New Hampshire, famously, does not have a sales tax. Live free or die. And 3) I remembered having seen a Facebook post, written by one of Massachusetts’ most important movers and shakers in the world of wines and spirits, Table & Vine’s Michael Quinlan. In the post Quinlan decried the decision of our sister publication, the Daily Hampshire Gazette, to echo New Hampshire’s tax-free marketing propaganda to Massachusetts consumers.

  The promo stated "no taxation on our libations" and provided customers with a discount coupon equal to twice their state's sales tax rate. (Despite a having no sales tax, NH residents could get one for 13% off.)

  Monte's quite put out; he reads the promotion as implying that Massachusetts imposes sales tax on wine and liquor; they got rid of that (via ballot question) a few years ago. Hence the "lie" and "propaganda". But that didn't stop him from getting a couple bottles at the Hampton store off I-95.

  I'm not seeing the lie myself. It's not as if the promo says "Massachusetts charges a sales tax on liquor and wine"—that would be a lie. If I'm reading the relevant websites correctly, our other neighboring states, Maine and Vermont do, apparently, charge their sales tax rates on those items. So do Connecticut, New York, and Rhode Island.

  [Update 2019-09-08: sorry, according to this page this page Rhode Island doesn't impose a sales tax on wine. They more than make up for it with a large excise tax.]

  Did Monte really expect a simple promo to go into state-by-state details?

• Obligatory note: Wired is probably the least politicized of the publications in the Condé Nast collection, but that's a very low bar. But they recently started putting up cartoons on their website, and I got a chuckle out of this one:

  

  See, it's funny because… oh, never mind.

  ---

• A few days ago, Michael Huemer opined that Google Is Evil. Yeah, or maybe it's just very sick. Daniel Henninger wrote his WSJ (probably paywalled) column exploring The Google Syndrome.

  It may be time to take the big G out of Google. The company called Google has turned itself into a generic metaphor for our politicized times. In addition to being the name of a U.S. technology company, “google” should become a lowercase word for a psychological syndrome—such as attention-deficit disorder, paranoia or dissociative identity disorder. A person with google disorder would be diagnosed as being in the grip of an uncontrollable political mania.

  During the company’s early years, in keeping with what it called its culture of “openness” and the notion that employees should “bring their whole selves to work,” Google allowed thousands of internal message boards to proliferate. This must have seemed like a good idea at the time since Google employees are supersmart and presumably full of interesting, innovative thoughts.

  Henninger goes on to eviscerate Google's recent "Community Guidelines" memo addressed to its employees: "One of the striking things about [it] is how much of it sounds like a second-grade teacher talking to 7-year-olds."

  Being a recent University employee, I can relate.

  ---

• Nick Gillespie at Reason relates 4 Memorable Moments From CNN’s Climate Town Hall. But before he does that:

  The Democratic contenders have laid out plans costing anywhere from about $1 trillion (Pete Buttigieg) to $16 trillion (Bernie Sanders) in direct federal spending on climate change over the next decade. About half of the candidates have endorsed the Green New Deal proposed by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D–N.Y.) and Sen. Ed Markey (D–Mass.), which could cost as much as $90 trillion to implement. As important as any specific policy or position outlined last night were the general attitudes that were widely shared by the participants.

  A number likened fighting climate change to the effort to win World War II, a metaphor that perhaps says more about their comfort with regimenting society than the speakers intended. During World War II, all industrial production was overseen by the federal government, food and fuel were rationed, and civil liberties were sharply curtailed in the interest of defeating the Axis powers.

  And of course, about 70-85 million people perished in World War II. Modern governments are extremely good at killing people.

  ---

• Reader, I bet you've never wondered if you can call people "terrorists" just for having different viewpoints.

  But you are not a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors.

  Jim Geraghty speaks truth to that particular power: You Can't Call People Terrorists Just for Having Different Viewpoints.

  We live in a time when authorities attempt to brazenly redefine the meaning of words by sheer force of will right before our eyes: “By a unanimous vote, San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors have passed a resolution declaring the National Rifle Association a domestic terrorist organization and urging other cities to follow their example.” The resolution also orders city employees to “take every reasonable step to limit” business interactions with the NRA and its supporters.

  […]

  These city supervisors aren’t the FBI. They’re not the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives. They’re not the National Counterterrorism Center.

  Terrorism is a crime, not merely a viewpoint. Being a member of Occupy Wall Street does not make you a terrorist. Being a member of Occupy Wall Street and planning to blow up a bridge makes you a terrorist. Being a Trump supporter doesn’t make you a terrorist. Being a Trump supporter and mailing pipe bombs to people you see as his enemies does make you a terrorist.

  Can anyone in San Francisco grasp the danger in letting politicians declare by proclamation that those who have committed no crimes but who have differing views are terrorists? Can anyone over there imagine how this mentality could turn out badly for someone they like?

  I believe the answers to Jim's questions in that last paragaph are, respectively, (1) Probably, but not enough to matter politically; and (2) No.

  ---

• You may have been following the recent travails of Leif Olson. If not, Walter Olson will recap and summarize at Cato: Man Engages In Sarcasm On Social Media. Career Survives..

  This week, in one of the most unfair hatchet jobs I’ve seen over the years as a watcher of Washington journalism, a Bloomberg Law reporter took a heavily sarcastic Facebook post Leif Olson wrote three years ago and presented it as meant in all sincerity – complete with a partial screenshot which clipped off the comments that followed hailing the post as an elaborate exercise in sarcasm, which it obviously was.

  The original Bloomberg Law headline: "Trump Labor Aide Quits After Anti-Semitic Facebook Posts Surface" (and that's still in the URL).

  Current headline: "Trump Labor Aide Quits After Facebook Posts Surface (Corrected)".

  The article's author, Ben Penn, is whining about the understandable reaction, e.g.:

  My fellow journalist ⁦@jpodhoretz⁩ is DMing me that I’m a “miserable prick” and a “repugnant child.” All over this piece: https://t.co/68kDvaFn0h pic.twitter.com/VJGLaD9vTZ

  — Ben Penn (@benjaminpenn) September 3, 2019

  As I type, Leif Olson has regained his post at the Labor Department.

  Also as I type, the miserable prick/repugnant child Ben Penn has apparently not been fired yet.

  ---

• But Bloomberg isn't totally worthless. Michael R. Strain's column on the Elizabeth Warren Wealth Tax is worth reading. There are practical reasons why the tax won't collect anywhere near the amounts Warren claims. But (I think) the most important objections are at the end of Strain's column:

  The ostensible purpose of the wealth tax would be to finance the expanding entitlement state the Democrats want — the Green New Deal, Medicare for All, free college, universal child care, student debt forgiveness. According to Saez and Zucman, another aim would be to reduce the political power of the wealthiest households. They argue that the “root justification” for high tax rates “is not about collecting revenue.” Instead, “they aim at preventing an oligarchic drift that, if left unaddressed, will continue undermining the social compact and risk killing democracy.”

  I am not such a purist as to think that the only purpose of taxation should be to collect revenue — for example, I support tax credits for low-income households to encourage labor force participation and to fight poverty. But the “save democracy” approach is a bad use of the tax code.

  For one, it won’t work. You need a lot less than $50 million to be politically influential. And influence is much more diffuse than the plan’s advocates seem to think.

  Warren’s wealth tax would be an abuse of government power. It is the tax-code equivalent of looting mansions. What is wrong with the way these 75,000 families made their money? Why should we have special tax rules for a tiny fraction — 0.06% — of households?

  Paying taxes is not a punishment, and the tax code should not be used to penalize any group of citizens. Not even the very rich.

  The easiest way to destroy wealth is to make it subject to arbitrary confiscation. All those goodies suddenly seem to be worth a lot less when it becomes known that it's fair game for the legal plunderers.

This book has a clunky title. And somewhat misleading. The actual subject is in the subtitle: what the author, Arthur M. Diamond, Jr., calls "innovative dynamism" (which I'll just call "ID" from here on out.)

As Schumpeter observed, modern entrepreneurial capitalism involves both ID and "creative destruction". Can't have one without the other, as new ways of doing things leapfrog and obsolete the status quo. Diamond gives a full-throated defense of this process. Or, actually, celebration. Because, of course, we're unimaginably richer thanks to a few centuries of ID. And we should fervently hope for more in the future.

The book concentrates strictly on economic/business dynamism. (Appropriate, since Diamond is an econ prof at the University of Nebraska-Omaha.) Culture is the tail wagged by the economic dog here. I think that might be a slight problem, but it's a minor one at best. Diamond tells a rich and interesting story with lots of examples, both recent and historical. Colorful tales, for example, dying Steve Jobs demanding a more esthetically designed oxygen mask.

In my case, I didn't need a lot of persuading, but his thesis is pretty convincing: a healthy level of ID benefits society generally and nearly all individuals.

Problems: stifling regulations, onerous taxation both hold back ID. He makes a pretty good defense of patents (although he advocates reforms that would quash overly broad ones).

Although the book is published by Oxford University Press, there's nothing in here that would challenge a bright high schooler or an interested undergrad. Highly recommended.

This sat in my "get at library" queue for a long time, and my newly-acquired Portsmouth Library card allowed me to get it, and so… sorry, I was kind of disappointed.

The author, Philip K. Howard, is unhappy, nay, disconsolate, with the state of American governance. In a phrase, we have become "rule happy", ever-increasing layers of detailed regulations that impede or prevent all sorts of worthy endeavors. Lots of anecdotes, like about the Bayonne Bridge road-raising project; it was delayed (but not successfully) by seemingly endless (but not actually endless) environmental review and litigation (probably frivolous).

Howard's argument is weak. He laments America's inability to "make public choices". But: one of the things he bemoans (page 41) is New Jersey's then-Governor Chris Christie's call to kill a plan to build a "much-needed train tunnel under the Hudson River".

But I wanted to protest to the author: that was a public decision made by an accountable official. In other words, the sort of thing you said you wanted to happen! And as near as I can tell, there's been no effort to revive this fantastically expensive project now that Christie's out of office.

Howard conveniently sums up his thesis in 18 "propositions", developed throughout the book. (Example, number 7: "Official authority requires an open area of choice defined by legal boundaries". Fine.)

His solution? Five (count 'em, five) constitutional amendments; he calls them collectively the "Bill of Responsibilities".

They aren't awful. There are even theoretically good ideas in there, like giving the President a line-item veto of spending items. But amendments are devilishly difficult to enact. My objection is the same as it is to a "balanced budget" amendment. If there's sufficient public agreement and sentiment for an amendment to do accomplish goal G, there's enough agreement to accomplish G legislatively. (I.e., just balance the freakin' budget, Congress; it only takes a majority vote.)

Linda Ronstadt's "musical memoir" is not great, but somewhat interesting to this longtime fan. She's a much better singer than she is a writer. (In fact, after reading some painful passages, I thought: "this is what a bad writer thinks a good writer writes like".)

One interesting observation is the stuff she leaves out. For example, back in the eighties, she played Sun City, in South Africa, during apartheid. For $500,000. In the face of an active boycott. And people were pissed.

There is nothing about Sun City in this book.

Also she had a relationship with George Lucas. Yes, the Star Wars guy. But… nothing about George here. (She only mentions that her great album Cry Like a Rainstorm was recorded at the Skywalker Sound studios.)

So it's incomplete. Linda just talks about what she wants to talk about. It's a real contrast to some of the other musician memoirs I've read, which get down into serial sexual infidelities, substance abuse details, scrapes with the law, etc. There's some of that here, like Linda claiming that the only time she tried cocaine and wound up having her nose cauterized. Ouch! And she got arrested once because her manager bought stolen airplane tickets for a trip to Hawaii.

So she mostly concentrates on the music. And I was impressed with her hands-on direction of her career; she could have just been a rock/pop goddess the entire time. But she followed her muse instead: Mexican music from her childhood, singing with her friends Dolly and Emmylou, American songbook classics, opera. Fine, but geez, I would have liked a few more rock/pop albums. Selfish, I know.

She's mostly complimentary to everyone. The only person she really slags is Jack Nitzsche, and only then because he was a very mean drunk. (This gets tedious after a while, say about the fiftieth time she compliments an acquaintance's amazing musicianship.)

I liked the first one just fine. But this one could not hold my interest.

Disclaimer: maybe the parts I dozed through were great.

But for the parts I saw: Newt Scaramander has lost most of the charming quirkiness he had in the first movie. Jacob Kowalski not as goofily clueless. Johnny Depp is "Grindelwald", and he's seemingly somnambulistic. Everything's dark. (I guess it's cheaper to do CGI in the dark.)

So, no movies 3, 4, or 5 for me, Ms. Rowling. Unless Mrs. Salad insists.

• We start today with a Tweet from Justin O'Donnell, Libertarian candidate for the New Hampshire seat in the US Senate currently occupied by Jeanne Shaheen:

  Be the America that Hong Kong thinks we are... pic.twitter.com/oJp4l2lZL3

  — Justin O'Donnell (@ODonnell4NH) August 16, 2019

  This is not an endorsement or a prediction that I'll be voting for Justin next November. But I like that meme.

  ---

• David Harsanyi suggests Democrats use more honest language in their "gun control" proposals. To wit:

  The media should stop using absurdly lazy phrases like “mandatory gun buybacks.” Unless the politician they’re talking about is in the business of selling firearms, it’s impossible for him to “buy back” anything. No government official—not Joe Biden, not Beto O’Rourke, not any of the candidates who now support “buyback” programs—has ever sold firearms.

  What Democrats propose can be more accurately described as “the first American gun confiscation effort since Lexington and Concord,” or some variation on that theme. Although tax dollars will be meted out in an effort to incentivize volunteers, the policy is to confiscate AR-15s, the vast majority of which have been legally purchased by Americans who have undergone background checks and never used a gun for a criminal purpose.

  It's sad that this proposal polls as well as it does even with the euphemized rhetorical fog in which pollsters present it. But I guess the original Prohibition polled well at the time too, and we had to see it in practice before dumping it.

  ---

• Jeff Jacoby suggests: We've had enough arrogant presidents. We need a humble one.

  Humility is out of fashion these days, particularly in the presidential realm. The current occupant of the White House is a pathological braggart, who boasts about everything from the size of his brain to the size of his crowds to the size of his fortune. Donald Trump claims to have "the world's greatest memory" and to "know more about ISIS than the generals." He even declares himself "much more humble" than anyone realizes.

  Trump's immodesty is plainly off the charts, but his predecessor was also possessed of a severely swollen ego.

  "I'm a better speechwriter than my speechwriters," Barack Obama told aides as a candidate for the White House. "I know more about policies on any particular issue than my policy directors. And I'll tell you right now that ... I'm a better political director than my political director." His accomplishments, he informed an interviewer in December 2011, superseded those of every other president, with the "possible exceptions" of Lincoln, FDR, and Lyndon Johnson.

  Politicians' personalities are probably several sigmas off the mean on any number of traits. Humility would be nice for a change, but I'm not sure non-humility is a dealbreaker.

  Probably I'm saying that because I listened to this week's Econtalk podcast between Russ Roberts and David Deppner. Among one of the least humble politicians: Winston Churchill. I can't argue that was a bad thing for Britain to have in a leader at that time.

  ---

• Jacob Sullum writes at Reason, indicating that 1984 was probably 35 years too early: Defending ‘Reasoned Debate About Public Safety,’ San Francisco Supervisors Declare the NRA a ‘Domestic Terrorist Organization’.
  Yesterday the San Francisco Board of Supervisors unanimously declared that the National Rifle Association is a "domestic terrorist organization," because words no longer have any meaning.

  Jacob supplies the text of the resolution so you can make your own call. Furthermore:

  The resolution does not mention any evidence that the NRA "incite[s] gun owners to acts of violence." But this quote from Supervisor Catherine Stefani, who introduced the resolution, gives you an idea of what she and her colleagues may have had in mind: "When they use phrases like, 'I'll give you my gun when you pry it from my cold, dead hands' on bumper stickers, they are saying reasoned debate about public safety should be met with violence."

  That is not what they are saying. Even on a literal level, the slogan means that the person affixing it to his bumper is ready to forcibly resist any attempt to forcibly deprive him of his fundamental right to armed self-defense. More realistically, it is a hyperbolic way of saying the Second Amendment is really important to that person. It does not mean he is ready to shoot Catherine Stefani for advocating gun control. Nor should Stefani interpret the Gadsden Flag as a threat to sic rattlesnakes on her, or New Hampshire's state motto as an incitement to violent revolution.

  Hey, LFOD made it into Reason again!

  But we are long on despair today. Because you know that organization that prides itself on free and open discussion of all ideas, even ones you find hateful? Well…

  ---

• Michael Graham of Inside Sources reveals The Anti-Biden Flier The New Hampshire ACLU Doesn't Want You To See.

  The national ACLU has some serious questions for former Vice President Joe Biden about his record on civil rights. They’ve paid for and sent out 100,000 copies of a flier pressuring him to answer those questions to Democratic-leaning households in South Carolina.

  But zero in New Hampshire.  Why?

  Here's a clue: African-American voters make up more than 60 percent of the electorate in the Democratic primary in South Carolina. And in New Hampshire the fraction is … somewhat less than that.

• In our occasional "Because Of Course They Did" Department, Reason's Matt Welch notes that Republicans Choose Trumpism Over Property Rights and the Rule of Law.

  In more placid times, news that the president of the United States was encouraging aides to break the law by seizing swaths of private property along the southwestern border to build a wall might have caused more than a day's ripple.

  After all, legitimate controversy over the promiscuous threat of eminent domain (as well as illegitimate fears of a NAFTA Superhighway) dogged former Texas Gov. Rick Perry for a full decade, prompting him to eventually abandon his dreams of a Trans-Texas Corridor tollroad. And Perry wasn't out there dangling pardons and barking "take the land" to his staff.

  All I need? Some Republican who isn't worse.

  The Amazon Product du Jour comes up when searching for property rights. It has nothing to do with property rights, but I chuckled anyway.

  ---

• At NR, Kevin D. Williamson muses on the Texas Shooting -- Gun-Control Proposals That Would Not Reduce Gun Crime.

  What might a serious proposal look like?

  For one thing, a serious proposal would not carry the hallmark of the unserious proposal — i.e., it would not be focused, as progressives’ proposals almost exclusively are, on creating additional restrictions for federally licensed firearms dealers and the people who do business with them, people who constitute one of the statistically least criminally inclined demographics in these United States. It is difficult to become a licensed firearms dealer, and doing business with one — which is the exercise of a constitutional right — requires a lot more scrutiny than does, say, voting: valid photo identification from a small list of approved sources, background check, copious paperwork, etc.

  The so-called assault rifles that make up a large part of the dealers’ inventories — because they are the most popular sporting firearms in the United States, owned by millions and millions of Americans — are used in crime so rarely that the FBI doesn’t even bother keeping statistics on them. Yes, they are sometimes used in the theatrical public shootings that sometimes command our national attention — which is what these acts of theater are intended to do — but those acts constitute a vanishingly small portion of violent crime in the United States. All “long guns” together — all rifles, shotguns, etc. — account for about 3 percent of murder weapons. For perspective: People who are beaten to death with the bare hands of their assailants are about double that percentage of all murder victims.

  Another key quote from the article: "There is not very much cause for panic, and there is not very much cause for a panicked crackdown on the legal sale of firearms through firearms dealers. But demagogues benefit from panic. Demagogues love nothing better than a population that is ignorant and terrified, one that needs only someone to blame."

  That's an observation that can be more widely applied outside this particular area.

  ---

• At the Federalist, Willis L. Krumholz demands that The Right Needs To Adopt This Revolutionary Higher Ed Reform Plan Now. Ooh! What is it? Well, here's the first plank:

  Require every college that receives subsidized student loans to disclose the average income earned by graduates in each major, at least three years after graduating, and the percentage of graduates in that major who work in a field related to that major. The “personal responsibility” crowd says if you took out substantial student loans, its your own fault. But 18-year-olds shouldn’t be trusted with much, let alone picking a school and a major, while understanding the real cost of the loans they are taking out and their employment prospects after — when everyone is telling them to go to college.

  I'm more of a [Bryan] Caplanite than is Mr. Krumholz. There wouldn't be a need for additional regulation of higher ed if the government just minimized (or zeroed out) its role in the first place.

  Still, if you're not on board with that, Krumholz's ideas are worth a look.

  ---

• The Bulwark can get sort of tedious with that anti-Trump shtick. But they write on other stuff too, for example Robert Tracinski with a debunking of the latest environmental hysteria of the hour, fires in the Amazon: The Problem Isn't the "Lungs of the Earth." It's the Brains of the Earth..

  A normal cycle of seasonal fires in the Amazon region touched off an international hysteria, with celebrities and politicians screaming that “the lungs of the Earth are in flames.”

  My favorite over-reaction is lefty writer Franklin Foer proposing a kind of eco-imperialism. Because Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro has “presided over the incineration of the world’s storehouse of oxygen,” Foer argues that “inherited ideas about the sovereignty of states no longer hold in the face of climate change.” So we shouldn’t have invaded Iraq, but we should invade Brazil: “The destruction of the Amazon is arguably far more dangerous than the weapons of mass destruction that have triggered a robust response.”

  All that this demonstrates is the enormous contempt for science among those who loudly proclaim themselves to be on the side of science.

  They're on the side of science as long as they can use it as a tool to support increasing statism. Other than that, who cares?

  ---

• And an evergreen topic is covered by David Harsanyi: Democrats Continue To Turn On The Constitution. Here's his column-length effort at Constitutionalism 101:

  The state isn’t here to give you everything you want—not even if what you want is extraordinarily popular with your fellow Americans.

  This is, no doubt, disorientating for voters who grew up believing they live in a “democracy.” In reality, our un-democratic constitutional bulwarks temper the vagaries of the majority. “Had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates,” James Madison quipped, “every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob.”

  The left will mock you for making this obvious observation. Yet many progressives don’t seem to understand the distinction between united states and a united state. MSNBC’s Chris Hayes, for instance, recently took some heat from conservatives for claiming that the “weirdest thing about the electoral college is the fact that if it wasn’t specifically in the Constitution for the presidency, it would be unconstitutional.”

  Of course, there’s nothing “weird” about diffused democratic institutions. There is nothing weird about arguing for federalism. These should be the foundation for every policy debate. Every governing institution in the country, to some degree, is counter-majoritarian. Quite often, the counter-majoritarianism is the entire point. Hayes is under the impression that “one man, one vote” means every ballot needs to be plugged into a direct democracy, which is absurd.

  "Democracy" is a magic word to today's statists, but it's not in the Constitution. Neither is "equality" for that matter.

• Will newsrooms be saved by Bernie Sanders' socialist nostrums? Do you remember what "nostrum" means? Find out the answer to both these burning questions at Jeff Jacoby's site: Newsrooms won't be saved by Bernie Sanders' socialist nostrums.

  WHEN YOUR only tool is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail to be pounded. When you're Bernie Sanders and your only tool is socialism, every problem looks like a capitalist to be bashed.

  The septuagenarian senator from Vermont is an unabashed lifelong socialist, whose solutions to most problems involve more government, less freedom, and higher taxes. This week, in a 1,700-word essay published in the Columbia Journalism Review, he proposed a "plan for journalism" involving — can you guess? — more government, less freedom, and higher taxes. The capitalist-bashing begins in the second sentence: "Today's assault on journalism by Wall Street, billionaire businessmen, Silicon Valley, and Donald Trump presents a crisis — and [is] why we must take concrete action."

  Bernie's op-ed specifically singles out Gannett’s proposed merger with Gatehouse Media (which, not that it matters, owns my local newspaper, Foster's Daily Democrat). Generally, he proposes a whole bunch of government prohibitions, taxes, subsidies, regulations on the press in order to … promote a free press?

  "We had to destroy the village in order to save it." (Yes, I know that's a bogus quote.)

  But that's not all …

  ---

• Nick Gillespie also lacks mixed feelings about Bernie's plan. Because Bernie Sanders’ Plan To Save Newspapers Is Wrong on Every Level. Sample:

  Sanders' distress over media consolidation rings hollow not simply because he merely rehashes old, played-out perennial complaints. Remember back in 2000 when the merger of AOL and Time Warner spelled the absolute doom of an independent press? Better yet, can you even remember AOL or Time magazine, once massive presences in media that are now desiccated ruins of their former selves? At a point when traditional broadcast TV and radio have never had less influence on public discourse, is the solution making sure that the "right" type and number of people—however defined—own the appropriate number of stations? Does anyone in their right mind think, as Sanders does, that a "targeted tax" on online advertising and "tech companies" will actually work to fund "independent public media" that will somehow report earnestly on the very government that ensures their existence?

  This is malarkey and it doesn't help that Sanders wraps it up in the same populist billionaire-baiting rhetoric he covers everything in, ideological maple syrup to sweeten what can only be understood as an unprecedented power grab over freedom of speech and the press.

  And that power grab?

  It's an absolute certainty that a Sanders administration would deploy that grabbed power asymmetrically against the perceived enemies of "progress" and "reform".

  ---

• I'm noticing an upswell of "Hate Has No Home Here" yard signs. Kind of a secular version of what Jesus noticed and discussed in Matthew 6:5.

  So this article in Quillette from Geoffrey Miller is interesting: 'Virtue Signalling' May Annoy Us. But Civilization Would Be Impossible Without It. Skippng to the bottom line:

  What distinguishes good virtue signaling from bad virtue signaling isn’t just the reliability of the signal. It’s the actual real-world effects on sentient beings, societies and civilizations. When the instincts to virtue signal are combined with curiosity about science, open-mindedness about values and viewpoints, rationality about priorities and policies, and strategic savvy about ways and means, then wonderful things can happen. These more enlightened forms of virtue signaling have sparked the Protestant Reformation, American Revolution, abolitionist movement, anti-vivisection movement, women’s suffrage movement, free speech movement, and Effective Altruism movement. But when the instincts to virtue signal are not combined with curiosity, open-mindedness, rationality and strategic savvy—that’s when you get Robespierre’s Reign of Terror, Stalin’s Holodomor, Hitler’s Holocaust, Mao’s Cultural Revolution…and Twitter.

  If that intrigues you, click through for the argument leading up to it.

  ---

• So "virtue signalling" might be OK at times. But how about that lefty bugaboo, "cultural appropriation"? At NR, Alec Dent carves out an exception: Linguistic Evolution Is Not ‘Cultural Appropriation’.

  Late last week, BuzzFeed published an article on the phrase “sksksksksk,” which was . . . about as silly as you’d imagine. The long and short of its argument? Among today’s youths, “sksksksksk” is a popular slang term that originated in the black community, and if you’re white and use it, you are “appropriating language from black communities.”

  The concept of cultural appropriation is hardly new, but the linguistic policing that serves as the basis for the BuzzFeed article takes it to a new level. Accusations of cultural appropriation are usually leveled against white people who adopt elements of another ethnicity’s culture in a way that is perceived as making light of that culture’s history and traditions. (I say “perceived” because, of course, perception does not align with reality in every case.) But sksksksksks is different. It has no rich history; it is a rather young phrase, which, the author admits at the very end of the article, started in Brazil as a variant of “kkkkkkkk,” a standard phrase Brazilians use to express laughter in text. What’s more, English, like any language, is built on adopting new words and phrases into the mainstream. And by necessity, in order to become mainstream, a word must cross racial and cultural divides.

  Comparing this article with Geoffrey Miller's, I'd suggest to Alec: there's good cultural appropriation and bad. Probably civilization would be impossible without it to some degree. Might as well take the big-tent approach to the concept, then focus in on what's really bothering you about a particular case, and whether that can be generalized without [Warning: cliché ahead] tossing the baby out with the bathwater.

  ---

• Seems like only yesterday that two exemplars of ideologies everyone assumed to be mortal enemies managed to cooperate in kicking off one of the great horrors. Bryan Caplan looks at you, Communism and Fascism.

  In September of 1939, almost exactly 80 years ago, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union started World War II  by invading Poland.  Though Hitler double-crossed Stalin two years later, the secret provisions of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact explicitly divided Eastern Europe between them.  How was this alliance possible – and what was it all about?  False modesty aside, I think that my encyclopedia articles on Communism and Fascism are a fine place to start.

  A good thing to remember.

Happy Labor Day! Or, as we know it at Pun Salad Manor: Monday, except no mail or Wall Street Journal. Capitalist swine that I am, let me share a bit of propaganda from AEI:

And for our regularly-scheduled programming…

• Daniel J. Mitchell does a fine job of accumulating links demonstrating The Recycling Folly. His bottom line?

  The bottom line is that most recycling programs impose a fiscal and personal cost on people for very meager environmental benefits.

  Indeed, the benefits are often negative once indirect costs are added to the equation.

  So why is there still support in some quarters?

  In part, it’s driven by contributions from the companies that get paid to process recycled material.

  But that’s only part of the story. Recycling is a way for some people to feel better about themselves. Sort of an internalized version of virtue-signalling.

  That’s not a bad thing. I like a society where people care about the environment and feel guilty about doing bad things, like throwing trash out car windows.

  But I’m a bit old fashioned in that I want them to feel good about doing things that actually make sense.

  Landfills are (as Mitchell notes) "cheap, safe, and plentiful". They should be encouraged. Instead, we get the Great Pacific garbage patch.

  ---

• At the Daily Wire, Ashe Schow deflates another Cause for Alarm: MSNBC Claims National Zoo Could Lose Pandas Due To Trade War With China. There Is No Evidence To Support This..

  On Thursday, the network ran a segment claiming the National Zoo in Washington, D.C. “could lose pandas over Trump’s trade war.” The 1 minute, 40 second segment offered exactly zero evidence that this was anything other than a completely made up fear from MSNBC.

  “The president’s trade war with China could soon cost the National Zoo in D.C. its most beloved attraction,” said Ayman Mohyeldin, filling in for Katy Tur. “As tensions rise between the U.S. and China over trade, the pandas that thousands flock to see eat bamboo and tumble down their habit could be sent to China, which technically owns them. The vulnerable species is only on loan here in the U.S.”

  Sounds like another case of reporters desperately making up stories. They can't just say "sorry, no news today".

  And, after all, it's not like pandas are difficult to get…

  Yeah, kids are great but have you ever had an apple? pic.twitter.com/HAagBJUSOO

  — Michael Moran (@TheMichaelMoran) August 28, 2019

  ---

• Wow. Tyler Cowen interviewing Neal Stephenson. That's like a perfect storm of smartness. Sample:

  [Cowen:] If we had a Mars colony, how politically free do you think it would be? Or would it just be perpetual martial law, like living on a nuclear submarine?

  [Stephenson:] I think it would be a lot like living on a nuclear submarine. Being in space is almost like being in an intensive care unit in a hospital, in the sense that you're completely dependent on a whole bunch of machines working in order to keep you alive. A lot of what we associate with personal freedom becomes too dangerous to contemplate in that kind of environment.

  Um, good point. If I were to emphasize one point in my "Genealogy" of Morality post from a few days ago, it's that general facts about the social environment (specifically: you're on Mars, and the outside atmosphere is 6 mbar of mostly CO₂) can drastically change your moral code.

  ---

• At National Review, Kevin D. Williamson reminds us why Joe Biden is Unfit for the Presidency.

  There are two possible explanations of Joe Biden’s inability to tell the truth about things: One is that his mind is failing him, the other is that his honor is. In neither case is Biden fit to hold the office of president of the United States of America, and Democrats would discredit themselves and endanger the nation to nominate him.

  Yes, yes, go ahead — “But, Trump!” etc. — and continue when you’ve completed the ritual of equivocation, and don’t think too hard about how far and in what direction that line of moral self-justification has carried the Republican party.

  Joe Biden is a plagiarist and a liar, among other things. In the most recent example, detailed by the Washington Post, Biden made up a story in which he as vice president displayed personal courage and heroism in traveling to a dangerous war zone in order to recognize the service of an American soldier who had distinguished himself in a particularly dramatic way. It was a moving story. “This is the God’s truth,” he concluded. “My word as a Biden.”

  Upside: Trump-Biden debates might be the most surreal TV series ever.

This 2016 movie was nominated for six Oscars, including Best Picture. So about time I saw it, right? (Not that it matters, but I've now seen seven out of the nine nominees from that year. Only missing the winner, Moonlight, and Manchester by the Sea.)

Opening is in desperately poor India, where young Saroo and his older brother Guddu try to make things a little better for their mom and baby sister by swiping coal from passing trains, and selling it for milk. Which is fine, except one night Saroo and Guddu get separated, Saroo gets on a train looking for him, and promptly gets whisked away to far-off Calcutta.

Saroo avoids one disaster after another; Calcutta is a lousy place to be a kid on your own. But eventually, he's adopted by a saintly Australian couple.

Fast-forward a couple of decades, and Saroo is a young man with a hot girlfriend. But he's tormented with memories of his lost family, and undertakes to backtrace his journey, and find them. This causes a lot of stress. But eventually… Well, do you think this movie would have been made if Saroo failed to get back to his boyhood home?

So, not bad, but Netflix thought I would like it better.

Continuing with my "Catch Up on Steve Hamilton" reading project. This one's from 2012. Getting there!

It's in his series of books with protagonist Alex McKnight. Ex-ballplayer, ex-cop, ex-PI, Alex just wants to live in Michigan's Upper Peninsula and quietly rent his cabins to tourists. But as usual…

It's a sad time for Alex's Native American friend Vinnie; his mother has passed away. She was a wise old bird, and Vinnie's disconsolate. And soon, very drunk. And then inexplicably goes missing, in the company of his ne'er-do-well cousin Buck.

And (oh oh) this disappearance comes at the same time as a mass murder carried out at a small remote airfield, where incoming Canadian hydroponic marijuana is traded for cash. This is no coincidence.

Alex is still a decent detective, and accompanied by Vinnie's long-lost father (who everyone assumed was still in jail), he sets off to track down his missing friend. It's a safe bet that he'll find himself in mortal danger.

Pretty good outing for Alex, I kept turning the pages. An ending I did not see coming.

Another likely candidate for whenever next I do a "Ten Best" list for books. Tyler Cowen attempts to earn respect for an institution that gets way too little admiration and respect in modern America. Case in point:

A lot of giant companies refer to themselves as “American.” But let’s face it, they only have one real loyalty: Their shareholders. A Warren administration will halt the hollowing out of American cities and create good American jobs. Here’s how. pic.twitter.com/pX0VpRXqqR

— Elizabeth Warren (@ewarren) August 25, 2019

So Liz and her fans would be a great target audience for this. Unfortunately, I'm not sure how realistic it would be to expect that to happen.

In my case, however, Tyler's pushing on an already-open door. But I found it still worth reading, because of his contrarian takes, useful statistics, and unexpected insights. (He's a polymath, and it shows.) He's not a Pollyanna about corporations; he points to attitudes and trends that that should change. But on the realistic whole: big business is a massive plus for the USA.

He conveniently takes up, analyzes, and (mostly) refutes common criticisms, one chapter devoted to each:

• Are businesses more fraudulent than the rest of us? Tyler lists some biggies right up front: Volkswagen, Theranos, Wells Fargo. Bad actors, no doubt. But a good question to ask in reply is: Compared to what?

• Are CEOs paid too much? Most of such criticism is based on envy and resentment. There's also commonly bad faith involved: the critics are simply using the argument to bolster their own goals, typically political. (Tyler doesn't make this argument much, but I will.)

  But Tyler notes that good CEOs are expensive; you can't just promote a middle-management schlub and expect him to have the necessary skill set. Supply of CEO-grade execs is limited. And the value of an excellent CEO is extreme.

• Is work fun? This one's easy: no matter how we complain about our jobs, people without jobs are, on average, undeniably worse off. And the psychology is pretty unequivocal: a job done well, no matter how menial, is rewarding to the doer, even over and above his take-home pay.

• How monopolistic is American big business? Outside of a few limited areas (health care, cable TV, cellular providers) there's not a lot to worry about here. Whatever the theoretical market dominance in an area might be, prices stay low, service remains fine; that's what really matters.

• Are the big tech companies evil? They're not great, but evil is a stretch.

• What is Wall Street good for, anyway? The preeminence of American financial service companies is too little appreciated. And it's little known (at least I didn't know it) how America is a tax and banking haven for the rest of the world.

  People demonize Wall Street largely because they don't understand finance. (I don't demonize Wall Street, even though I don't understand finance; I'm just happy with the performance of my retirement and non-retirement funds.)

• Crony capitalism: How much does big business control the American government? This one was a little eye-opening, because crony capitalism has been a big bugaboo for me. Tyler agrees with the problem, but simply convinces me that it's not a huge problem, because the magnitude in comparison with the total economy is small.

• If business is so good, why is it so disliked? Or: what is Elizabeth Warren's deal anyway? Tyler's answer revolves around the idea of "corporate personhood"; even the people who deny corporate personhood in one context can act as if it were a real thing in another. (Business doesn't help when it markets itself in anthropomorphic terms: "Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there." "If you can't afford your medication, AstraZeneca may be able to help.)

You really need to read the book to get the full weight of Tyler's arguments, and if you're at all interested (you read down to here, anyway) I strongly recommend you check it out.

Welcome to September 2019; we have 163 days to go before the New Hampshire Primary.

No major changes in our table this week. Same lineup. Yes, Kirsten dropped out of the race, but Betfair bettors gave her effectively zero chance long ago.

Speaking of Betfair, they (again) judged the odds of President Elizabeth Warren to be slightly better this week than last. Bernie improved a bit, too. Wheezy Joe Biden was the largest probability loser. And Mayor Pete continues to hover just above our elimination threshold.

Joe also (understandably) had the biggest increase in phony hits this week; see below.

"WinProb" calculation described here. Google result counts are bogus.

• At the Federalist, Alex Castellanos offered The Pundit's Guide To Handicapping The Democratic Nomination. He has a lot to say about all the major candidates, and minor ones too. Here's part of his take on Kamala;

  Candidates with depth don’t attack an opponent for holding the same position they do on busing, as Harris did. Serious candidates don’t attack the same Medicare for All bill they have sponsored, although Harris did that as well. More importantly, Harris has tied herself into a knot running away from her prosecutorial record in California.

  Instead of owning it and demonstrating strength, e.g., “Darn right, I was a tough prosecutor. If you commit a crime, if you victimize the weakest among us, and especially if you target disadvantaged African-American victims, I’m going to come after you, regardless of whether you are black, white, or purple.”

  No, Harris tried to pretend she had been something she was not, while her record mysteriously disappeared from the government of California’s website. As I’ve said of Harris, when you’ve locked up more black Americans than George Wallace, it’s hard to be the greatest civil rights advocate in American history. And when you float around like a butterfly on issues and process your record through a blender, you raise doubts you can lead the nation.

  In her favor, she's the best-looking of the Democratic candidates not named Tulsi.

  ---

• In his Morning Jolt column at National Review, Jim Geraghty takes issue with a WaPo writer who made a wildly off-target characterization of an earlier piece about President Trump. Jim clarifies, and I quote because it's a pretty good approximation to my own:

  I never liked Trump’s character or how he sees the job on the presidency — talk-radio-caller-in-chief, don’t-bother-him-with-policy-details, demagogue-when-convenient — but I like some of the policies. I like almost all of the judicial nominations. I like tax cuts. I like rolling back federal regulations. I’m glad ISIS has been beaten to a pulp, if not completely eliminated. I like Right to Try for those facing terminal illnesses. I like the majority of the criminal-justice-reform legislation, particularly the anti-recidivism programs in federal prisons. I like getting rid of the individual mandate to purchase health insurance. I like keeping foreign aid money from paying for abortions. I want a secure border and concur with the Customs and Border Patrol that additional miles of barriers, or “bollard fence,” or whatever you prefer to call it is part of the solution (but not the entire solution). I like that the United States is now the world’s largest oil producer and a net natural-gas exporter, while our carbon emissions are declining slightly. I like blowing up Syrian air bases when Assad uses chemical weapons. I like NATO allies spending more on defense.

  I also think that Trump only says variations of about six things — I am the greatest, that good thing that happened was because of me, it’s not my fault, my critics are terrible people, here’s a version of history that I just made up in my head, and look at that woman’s appearance. He’s got no business lecturing anybody else about loyalty, and he’s easily fooled by sycophantic idiots; his attacks on critics cross the line into racism; he has indeed stoked xenophobic attitudes in this country, in part because he’s never contradicted his supporters’ belief that citizenship is conditional; he has the impulse control of a sugar-filled toddler; he constantly blames others for his own bad decisions; and he seems wildly naïve in his dealings with Kim Jong-un and certain other dictators.

  I have an often-irritating president who gives me some of what I want — or who will at least sign some of what I want into law — up against a variety of options who pledge to give me almost nothing I want, and who are promising to repeal the things I like. I don’t particularly like this status quo, but I prefer it to a Bolshevik Revolution or turning our already-too-divided society into an endless status competition of woker-than-thou.

  I could have written that. If I were a ten times better writer.

  ---

• Nick Gillespie of Reason also has a "balanced" view of Trump. And he recently noted If You Freak Out Over This Trump Fan Video, You’re Playing Into His Hands. For the record, I did not freak out; see how you do:

  Observant Nick notes, in case you missed it, the testicular oscillations on the bull illustrating the DJIA rise. More:

  What should be shocking to people are the ways in which Trump deviates from worn-out GOP positions and embraces some Democratic policies too. He's been good on criminal-justice reform, for instance, has spoken out against military adventurism, and was better than Hillary Clinton on ending marijuana prohibition. He has been more forward on school choice than any president and he embraces paid family leave too. These are not all good things, in my view, and his negatives, especially on immigration and trade, are disturbing as hell. But especially from a libertarian perspective, he's a mixed bag, as are all presidents.

  Put slightly differently, he is mostly an abomination, but that merely makes him the most recent president, not history's greatest monster.

  Um, good point there. Things could be worse. Odds are, they will be.

  ---

• At NR, Kat Timpf notices something you may not have: Beto O’Rourke Wants to Be an Instagram Model.

  Think about it: Beto O’Rourke has become (in)famous for insisting on posting videos of himself doing everyday things. Like getting his haircut. Or changing a tire. Or visiting the dentist. Truly, he actually seems to be clinically unable to prevent himself from doing so. In fact, even after a relaunch of his campaign on August 15 gave him the chance to set a different tone, he simply could not resist posting a video of himself struggling to make the world’s saddest cheeseburger just a matter of weeks later.

  The bad news for you, Beto, is that approximately no one wants to see a politician doing this. The good news? There is another (sort of) profession that not only accepts, but also actually requires this kind of content. Yes — I am talking about the Instagram model.

  Given that Beto! has Betfair odds way worse than Hillary Clinton's, Kat's strategy has literally no downside.

  ---

• Still at NR, Mairead McArdle reports on the latest about Mayor Pete: Buttigieg denounces 'Hypocrisy' of Vice President, Other Christian Politicians.

  Asked by Religion News whether he would call “sinful” those Christian politicians who supported the Trump administration’s since-scrapped policy of separating families arrested after crossing the southern border illegally, Buttigieg declined to go that far.

  “I’ll be careful to use that word to kind of point out a speck in my brother’s eye,” the South Bend, Ind. mayor replied. “What I would say is that it’s clear that some naked sins are being at best condoned by people who then summon religious arguments. That rings more and more hollow.”

  “It’s not just that we might have a different interpretation of faith, it’s that these arguments no longer stack up even on their own merits, right?” the openly gay Buttigieg continued. “For example, Mike Pence’s view of Christian sexuality is obviously a little different than mine. But even with his view, it makes no sense to condone this president and his behavior. So there’s two layers to this. There’s the fact that I subscribe to a vision of faith that leads me to a certain place politically. But it’s also just seeing the hypocrisy among people who now endorse people and practices that are offensive, not only to my values, but to their own.”

  Let me just say that Buttigieg has a point there.

  But let me also say that Matthew 7:1-5, to which Buttigieg refers, is too easily interpreted as "the only sin that matters is hypocrisy". And I think Mayor Pete makes that mistake.

  ---

• 

  And (back at Reason again) J.D. Tuccille notes that Elizabeth Warren’s ‘Economic Patriotism’ Doubles Down on Bad Policy.

  Perhaps the only person who dislikes foreigners and free trade more than the economic ignoramus who occupies the White House is another economic ignoramus who wants to occupy the White House.

  "A lot of giant companies refer to themselves as 'American,'" snipes Elizabeth Warren, Democratic presidential wannabe and U.S. Senator from Massachusetts, in a recent campaign advertisement. "But face it, they have no loyalty or allegiance to America."

  I have just finished reading Tyler Cowen's new book, Big Business (currently a steal at Amazon for a mere $11.26 as I type) which makes a directly relevant point: the people who (unfairly) jeered Mitt Romney's 2016 "Corporations are people" remark… are the same people who, like Warren, talk about corporations as if they are or should be people.

  More on Tyler's book later today on the book blog. (Link available on your right.)

  ---

• Ah, but there are weeks when this entire feature could just be about Joe 'I’m Not Going Nuts' Biden.

  Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden told supporters in New Hampshire on Friday he was "not going nuts," when he stumbled over the location of where he spoke at an event a few hours earlier.

  "We are so close, so close to being able to do some incredible things for this country. Incredible things," Biden said. "I just spoke at Dartmouth on health care at the medical school or not—I guess I wasn't actually on the campus, but the people from the medical school—I want to be clear. I'm not going nuts and I'm not sure whether it was a medical school or where the hell I spoke, but it was on the campus."

  It's understandable. Wheezy Joe is just going where people tell him, getting on and off planes, in and out of cars… Pretty soon, it becomes a blur where you only remember small soundbites to clue you on your location, like "Dartmouth" or "medical school".

  And in that atmosphere so very removed from normal life, it's easy to confuse reality with a good story. Unfortunately, reality-based reporters will listen to you and, knowing your reputation, will fact-check your ass. Also at the Free Beacon: WaPo Investigation Finds 'Almost Every Detail' of Biden War Story False.

  A Washington Post investigation found that a war story frequently told by 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden on the campaign trail was false in nearly every detail.

  At a Friday New Hampshire rally, Biden told the crowd that as vice president he had once been asked to travel to the dangerous Kunar province in Afghanistan to pin the Silver Star on a war hero who had rappelled down a steep wall to retrieve the body of a fallen comrade. Biden said he ignored others who warned him not to go. "We can lose a vice president," he remembered saying. "We can't lose many more of these kids."

  In Biden's telling, as he pinned the medal to the hero's chest, the tearful Navy captain told Biden that he didn't deserve the medal because he hadn't saved his friend in time. "This is the God's truth," he told the audience. "My word as a Biden."

  Except it wasn't. "Almost every detail in the story appears to be incorrect," the Post reported Thursday. "Based on interviews with more than a dozen U.S. troops, their commanders and Biden campaign officials, it appears as though the former vice president has jumbled elements of at least three actual events into one story of bravery, compassion and regret that never happened."

  With reference to "We can lose a vice president, we can't lose many more of these kids.": Biden went to Afghanistan in 2008, before he was Veep. During (roughly) the Obama-Biden Administration, 2009-2016 there were 1729 US fatalities in Afghanistan.

  So maybe Joe should take Jonah Goldberg's advice: Biden's best bet is a front-porch campaign.

  Biden is crushing Donald Trump in the polls in no small part because he is a known quantity, having been on the public stage for decades, most notably as VP for eight years under Barack Obama. Biden’s lead in matchups between Trump and various Democratic candidates is his single greatest advantage in the Democratic primaries.

  The risk for Biden is that he’s not a good presidential campaigner, as his two prior attempts demonstrated. While he may be showing signs of age, the truth is that he’s always been prone to gaffes, malapropisms, exaggerations, and misstatements. Every time Biden opens his mouth in an unscripted situation, there’s a chance he’ll say something goofy that undercuts his elder-statesman status.

  So why play the game the way the others are playing it? In most sports, when you’re ahead by double digits, the smart (though boring) strategy is to play it safe and sit on your lead. Getting into arguments with political Lilliputians such as Senator Corey Booker and Andrew Yang elevates their profile while lowering Biden’s. And if Biden loses his cool and starts shouting, “And you can take those ducks to the bank!” or “My pants are made of iron!” the game is over.

  Downside: a heavily-scripted Biden is a much less entertaining Biden. And I can see certain upsides to a candidate periodically revealing himself as a blustering phony untethered from reality. He can always tell himself: Hey, this worked for Trump.