Pun Salad

Jeff Maurer points out the underlying context: The Groups Protesting on College Campuses Don't Think Israel Should Exist.

It's not just the Ku Klux Kollege Kids. Just last week, we mentioned the Action Alerts page of the Community Church of Durham (NH); their lead item demands "Justice for Palestine-Israel" and traces back the real problem to:

As Maurer says, this number is not arrived at by accident. The "problem", according to this Christian church, is linked to the mere existence of the Jewish state.

One more bit from Maurer:

Maurer is more charitable toward the "peace activists" than I am. Should they get their way, God forbid, Jews would be violently purged "from the river to the sea". The activists, safe in America, would shrug and smugly say: "well, I wasn't in favor of that, although Israel was asking for it"… and proceed to their next crusade.

Also of note:

• For those who think otherwise… or if you just want some rhetorical ammo to provide to those asserting otherwise: Israel Is Not Committing ‘Genocide’ in Gaza. (My last gifted NR link for this month.)

  Has Israel erred in service of its aims? Absolutely. The recent accidental killing of seven World Central Kitchen aid workers is a tragedy, and those who played a role have rightly been held accountable. But such is the reality of all war; miscalculations are made, the wrong people get killed. And that is especially true in a war against an enemy that strategically embeds itself within civilian sites for the express purpose of maximizing death tolls among its own people. Yet that hasn’t stopped widespread accusations against Israel of systematically targeting civilians. And while some may be ignorant of the relevant statutes, the Geneva Conventions and other elements of international humanitarian law are clear: The standard for the death of civilians is the word “willful.” No credible source has presented evidence of Israel’s willful targeting of Palestinian civilians.

  These distinctions matter for putting genocide charges into the context of antisemitism. The term “genocide” was coined for the specific purpose of naming the systematic, state-sponsored persecution of the Jewish people during the Holocaust. Recognition of the special nature of Jewish suffering has given way to frequent accusations that Jews seek to benefit from an exclusive claim on victimhood, that they have weaponized the Holocaust as a way to insulate Israel from all criticism and moral obligation, and have turned the Nazi genocide into a get-out-of-jail free card. This manipulation of the Holocaust and the concept of genocide is textbook antisemitism, according to the widely adopted International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition. That it is being used by, among others, deniers of the Holocaust only deepens the irony.

  The world must not ignore the sadistic pleasure taken by those charging Israel with genocide. It is an attempt to neuter Jewish trauma in order to wage political war against Israel. By positing a moral equivalency between what was done to Jews then and what the Jewish state is now doing in its defensive war against Hamas, the atrocities of the Holocaust are delegitimized, and Jews can no longer reap the supposed illicit advantages granted by their history. Indeed, the false charge of “genocide” is what has allowed critics to continue excusing Hamas’s terrorism as a justifiable act of resistance, desecrating Jewish storefronts with swastikas and slurs, or holding signs saying “Hitler would be proud” with total impunity.

  A similarly-weaponized word from Israel-haters: "apartheid".

• Not exactly "contempt" in my case, but… Louis Markos asserts at the Federalist: Contempt For Ordinary Voters Undermines Opposition To Trump.

  A complaint I hear increasingly leveled at contemporary American politicians is that they are out of touch with voters, if not downright contemptuous of them. On a number of core issues, politicians seem less concerned with pursuing policies that are deeply unpopular with ordinary Americans than with upholding the ideologies and self-interests of the ruling elite. Two dramatic examples of this political disconnect with average citizens are the refusal of urban governments to prosecute violent criminals, which has caused a surge in crime, and the White House’s tolerance of mass immigration, which threatens jobs, security, and the rule of law.

  As I survey the current political and intellectual landscape, I cannot help but see a resurgence of the arrogance and disdain of the 18th-century French revolutionaries for those they considered to be incapable of rational thought and moral behavior. But I am moving too fast. Let me slow down and give some historical background.

  Not to kvetch, but I really think the headline should be "underlies", not "undermines".

  Markos's thesis is that today's progressives echo the attitude of Diderot toward the "multitude", which he thought was shot through with "wickedness, stupidity, inhumanity, unreason, and prejudice".

  I am a mild-mannered Trump opponent myself. And I don't get all misty-eyed about the voting public; see my reports on Bryan Caplan's The Myth of the Rational Voter, Jason Brennan's Against Democracy, and Garett Jones' 10% Less Democracy.

• A KDW article outside the Dispatch paywall! So check it out: Pinching Pennies for Putin.

  There is a William F. Buckley Jr. line for every occasion, and the one for Sen. J.D. Vance is: “I won’t insult your intelligence by suggesting that you really believe what you just said.”

  Vance came to his heartland populism via an education at Yale Law School, Peter Thiel’s money, Hollywood, and the New York Times bestseller list. A venture capital man who once denounced Donald Trump as unfit for the presidency and who currently is so intimately and uncomfortably attached to Trump that it is impossible to distinguish him from a hemorrhoid, Vance has decided to be the clown prince of a very small kingdom: the realm of people who feel very strongly that the U.S. government should accommodate Vladimir Putin’s imperial project in Ukraine and beyond. Vance is not stupid, and he has seen how far a clown prince can go in Washington. He even has some reason to hope that he is 1,659 days away from being elected president of these United States after serving as Donald Trump’s vice president and riding that lame duck as far as he will waddle.

  It is difficult to feel much other than contempt for what Vance has become and pity for the way he became it. My own background is similar to his in the worst ways, and I sympathize when it comes to the temptation to say to the world, as Vance has, “Tell me what sort of man you want me to be, and I’ll pretend to be that sort of man.” I can understand it, and even forgive it. (Eventually.) But you can never trust a man who has decided to be the Tom Ripley of American politics.

  I liked Vance's book Hillbilly Elegy. Now I wonder how honest he was being there.

An amusing comment on a recent speech by Massachusetts Secretary of Transportation, Monica Tibbits-Nutt:

1) They always tell you to never say or do anything that will get you in the paper. Unfortunately for @MassDOT secretary monica tibbits-nutt, her arrogant statements last wk are going to keep her in print for days if not weeks.
2) This @bostonherald cover is an all-timer. #mapoli pic.twitter.com/js5G759wE7

— chip goines (@chipgoines) April 22, 2024

Chip Goines is not some right-winger: his Twitter blurb admits that he "turned out voters" for Ayanna Pressley's "historic 2018 campaign". His real gripe with Monica seems to be her excessive plain-talk honesty about her goals, values, and plans. Which all seem to involve getting more money from the citizenry.

Monica came to my attention via my Google LFOD news alert pointing me to this Boston Herald story: Massachusetts border tolls idea another way to 'unnecessarily' take money, New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu says.

Howie Carr is a right-winger, and is pretty gleeful: Massachusetts' Secretary of Transportation Monica Tibbits-Nutt is quite nutty.

Yes, Howie, pretty much always.

Relegated to the Memory Hole: the 'millionaires tax' Massachusetts voters OKd all the way back in… 2022. I recall the incessant TV ads in favor. It was of course billed as the "Fair Share Amendment". And it was promised to bring in "billions in yearly support for transportation and public education."

Guess what? Given Monica's demands, it really should have been dubbed the "We'll Be Back For More in a Couple Years Amendment".

Meanwhile, the Boston Globe—yes, even the Boston Globe—reports on the inevitable result of treating your citizens as targets for plunder: People are leaving Massachusetts in droves. Who are they?

In related news: Boston faces $1.5 billion shortfall from declining commercial property taxes, report warns. Covid knocked down the idea of people commuting into the city to work in office, and many did did not return.

All this punctures a big hole in the arguments New Hampshire Democrats have been making for extending MBTA commuter rail up to Manchester. Ridership projections were always too rosy, and now are even more divorced from reality.

And Monica wants your money, commuters.

Also of note:

• What "anti-Zionism" really means. Bari Weiss has a couple of examples: They Were Assaulted on Campus for Being Jews.

  For a second, imagine that black students at Columbia were taunted: Go back to Africa. Or imagine that a gay student was surrounded by homophobic protesters and hit with a stick at Yale University. Or imagine if a campus imam told Muslim students that they ought to head home for Ramadan because campus public safety could not guarantee their security.

  There would be relentless fury from our media and condemnation from our politicians.

  Just remember the righteous—and rightful—outrage over the white supremacist “Unite the Right” march in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, where neo-Nazis chanted “The Jews will not replace us.”

  This weekend at Columbia and Yale, student demonstrators did all of the above—only it was directed at Jews. They told Columbia students to “go back to Poland.” A Jewish woman at Yale was assaulted with a Palestinian flag. And an Orthodox rabbi at Columbia told students to go home for their safety.

  Bari's Free Press has both stories.

• Who's afraid of due process protections? The Biden Administration, as it turns out. Emma Camp reports: Biden's New Title IX Rules Erase Due Process Protections in Campus Sexual Assault Cases.

  On Friday, the Biden administration unveiled final Title IX regulations, nearly two years after the administration proposed dramatic changes to how colleges handle sexual assault allegations. The new rules largely mirror proposed regulations released last year and will effectively reversing Trump-era due process reforms.

  According to the final regulations, accused students will lose their right to a guaranteed live hearing with the opportunity to have a representative cross-examine their accuser. This is accompanied by a return to the "single-investigator model," which allows a single administrator to investigate and decide the outcome of a case.

  Further, under the new rules, most schools will be required to use the "preponderance of the evidence" standard, which directs administrators to find a student responsible if just 51 percent of the evidence points to their guilt. Schools are also no longer required to provide accused students with the full content of the evidence against them. Instead, universities are only bound to provide students with a description of the "relevant evidence," which may be provided "orally" rather than in writing.

  Not good. It seems we are going back to the Bad Old Days of 2011. Thirteen years ago, Joe Biden came up to the University Near Here to announce the Obama Administration's similar travesty. I reported on the visit at the time, and I was way too charitable about it. (In my defense, Biden's description of the rule changes was fuzzy and anodyne.)

• For more on that… Let me gift you a link to Madeleine Kearns' take on the topic: Biden’s Outrageous Title IX Rewrite.

  On Friday, the Department of Education announced its final Title IX regulations, broadening the definition of sex-based discrimination to include “gender identity.” This effectively prohibits all educational entities in receipt of federal funds from acknowledging biological reality when individuals dispute it. As well as undermining free speech and due-process rights, the new rule will have sweeping and disastrous consequences for women and girls, the very people Title IX was supposed to protect.

  The Biden administration is framing the final rule as a delivery of a campaign promise to better protect LGBTQ students from harassment “just because of who they are” and to restore Obama-era kangaroo courts for sexual misconduct on college campuses, which the Trump Department of Education (DOE), under Betsy DeVos, reformed to protect due-process rights and investigatory integrity.

  So: worse than 2011.

• Just say no to Jimmy Wales. Spurred by current events, Emil O. W. Kirkegaard looks at The Wikipedia fundraising scam.

  Wikipedia, and its parent organization Wikimedia, has been making the rounds on Twitter. This seems to be because Chris Rufo is attacking the new CEO of NPR (US public 'radio'), Katherine Maher. It turns out that Maher previously served as the CEO of Wikimedia. This got a lot of people looking into her behavior there, and this brought up the Wikipedia fundraising scam into the limelight. In the interest of making this information more publicly known, I provide a summary of it here as well. Many of the sources I draw on are published by minor accounts and writers, who clearly deserve a bigger audience.

  Kirkegaard has accumulated some impressive numbers, effectively debunking any claim that you need to send Wikipedia money in order to keep the server farm up and running. Instead, you'd be funding the Wikimedia Foundation. Which (in turn) heavily funds woke bullshit. Example:

  The Wikimedia Foundation defines racial equity as shifting away from US and Eurocentricity, White-male-imperialist-patriarchal supremacy, superiority, power and privilege to create an environment that is inclusive and reflects the experiences of communities of color worldwide. These modes of privilege mentioned above function as setting the dominant social, political, legal, policy-oriented, and cultural norms around the world.

  Hey, I just want to know about cannibalism in Papua New Guinea.

Key lyric: "Once upon a time there were cannibals; Now there are no cannibals anymore".

But that may not be enough to mollify the hurt feelings, as reported by the Guardian: ‘Lost for words’: Joe Biden’s tale about cannibals bemuses Papua New Guinea residents. (Subhed: "President’s suggestion that his ‘Uncle Bosie’ was eaten by cannibals harms US efforts to build Pacific ties, say local experts")

But, as Mark Knopfler says…

Why does this remind me of a Monty Python sketch?

Which brings us to our usual Sunday look at the betting odds and candidate phoniness:

If anything, President Wheezy's delusional gory fantasies seem to have helped him with the punters, gaining nearly a full percentage point edge on Bone Spurs.

And Kamala's odds have dropped below our 2% inclusion threshold. Who knows, an actuarial event could bring her back pretty quickly.

Also of note:

• Dueling observations from Power Line's Hinderaker. I admit I'm slightly puzzled by the headlines: Why Biden Can’t Win and Why Trump Might Win. In the former, he looks at the polling:

  How can Biden win when, apart from his other defects, 57% think he is simply too old for the job? And that perception is not going to weaken between now and November. Biden has signaled that he does not intend to debate Donald Trump. I don’t think he can. He isn’t up to it. The Democrats will try to sell the absurd idea that Biden isn’t afraid to debate, he just doesn’t want to “legitimize” Trump by sharing a stage with him. Right. When Biden refuses to debate Trump, it will seal the conclusion in just about every voter’s mind that he simply isn’t up to the job.

  And in the latter:

  Well, he gets to run against Joe Biden. That is the main reason. But one of the extraordinary features of this year’s race is the Democrats’ lawfare. In a series of civil cases and criminal prosecutions, they are trying to bleed Trump’s financial assets and, more important, convict him of a “felony” to convince voters not to vote for him. The prosecutions range from selective (Trump’s handling of classified information) to idiotic (the Georgia RICO case and the case in New York that is now in trial).

  Good points all.

Recently on the movie blog:

Matthew Continetti states the obvious: Israel Is Right to Reject Biden’s Bad Advice.

The architects of our Afghanistan debacle should be extremely modest in making suggestions about how other countries should defend themselves.

On a related note, Biden may not be trying to appease Iran as much as he's trying to appease the Israel-haters inside his own party. John Hinderaker notes a big reason why that's misguided: Joe, It Isn’t About Israel.

Hinderaker includes a tweeted video of some brave souls who took some American flags to a "pro-Palestine protest" in New York. The results (vandalism, theft, threats) tend to confirm Hinderaker's thesis. Data point:

Sigh.

By the way: mystified by today's headline? See the USA Today story: Was Joe Biden's uncle eaten by cannibals during World War II? (Betteridge's Law of Headlines applies: nope.)

And then you can be amused by USA Today's semi-dismissal of this yarn as just one of Biden's "long history of embellishing stories".

Not Biden's "long history of lies and delusions".

Also of note:

• Suggestion: Ask her to name more than two examples of "settler colonialism". Damien Fisher profiles two brave souls who have ensconced themselves into the local white supremacist patriarchy: 'Pro-Hoe' Activists and BLM Leaders Bring DEI to NH Public Schools. They are both tedious, but I'll concentrate on Rachael Blansett, Diversity, Equity, Inclusion & Justice Director at Oyster River School District (Durham/Lee/Madbury NH), salary $95-105K.

  Blansett, who never worked as a regular classroom teacher before getting the Oyster River job, is responsible for “work(ing) with teachers, administrators, and students to integrate DEIJ throughout the district. (Blansett) will lead trainings for teachers, revise curriculums so they align with district values of equity and inclusion, and act as a resource for anyone in the Oyster River community to ask questions about DEIJ taught in a classroom,” according to the district.

  Blansett's LinkedIn page — what she chooses to share with the world — contains a couple of presentations she's apparently authored or co-authored: "Are You Down With the Cause" and "White Tears in the Classroom". In the former, she identifies herself (because it's important!) as a "Black/biracial, queer femme"). In the latter (subtitle: "Examining how whiteness & white supremacy presents within the classroom"), Robin DiAngelo is approvingly quoted on "white fragility":

  I've had people tell the term itself is offensive…which is classic white fragility.

  Why would anyone send their kids to Oyster River schools?

• He's probably right. Jesse Walker is tired. It's Another Day, Another Doomed Plan To Defund NPR.

  Rep. Jim Banks (R–Ind.) announced yesterday that he will introduce a bill to defund National Public Radio (NPR). Marsha Blackburn (R–Tenn.) has said she hopes to do the same in the Senate. We live in strange times, anything can happen in politics, and there may be no faster route to looking like a fool than to issue a prediction. With that throat-clearing out of the way: No, of course Congress isn't about to defund NPR.

  This latest wave of Defund NPR! sentiment follows an article by Uri Berliner in The Free Press, in which the NPR editor and reporter—make that former NPR editor and reporter, since he has since resigned—argues that the network "lost America's trust" by shutting out opinions disfavored by the center-left hivemind. I think Berliner's piece wavers between claiming too much (it would have been more accurate, though probably less SEO-friendly, to replace "lost America's trust" with "saw its niche grow somewhat smaller") and claiming too little (it ends with a plea not to defund public radio, since Berliner believes there's "a need for a public institution where stories are told and viewpoints exchanged in good faith"). But at this point the specifics of his essay are almost beside the point, since the debate it has unleashed goes far beyond what the article says. The proof is that people have been using it as a springboard to call for cutting off NPR's federal dollars even though Berliner goes out of his way to stress that that's not the result he wants.

  Walker provides three reasons why NPR-resistance is futile: (1) Biden would veto a defunding bill; (2) NPR's government-funding network is a tangled web that would be difficult to extract from "the rest of the public-broadcasting ecosystem"; and (3) come on, "most of the GOP has no serious interest in defunding public broadcasting."

  I've said this before: NPR is great to listen to, if you enjoy people who are unaware of how much they sound like Titania McGrath.

• She was pretty good on Saturday Night Live. Kevin D. Williamson does a reality check: Caitlin Clark’s Salary Isn’t an Injustice.

  There is, however, an economic answer to the question of why Caitlin Clark, the University of Iowa standout and first overall pick in Monday’s WNBA draft, will make an annual salary of only around $77,000 compared to the $12.1 million or so that Victor Wembanyama, the first overall pick in last year’s NBA draft, made this season. That reason is the number 4,067, which is the average attendance at games hosted by Clark’s new team, the Indiana Fever, and the number 40, which is how many games the Indiana Fever will play during the upcoming WNBA regular season. For Wembanyama and his San Antonio Spurs, those numbers are 18,110 and 82, respectively—with average ticket prices far greater than the $41 Fever fans paid in 2021. Add in the fact that the NBA is reportedly poised to sign a TV rights deal this summer worth between $60 billion and $72 billion over a multi-year period and the reason for the discrepancy becomes even clearer.

  Total WNBA revenue in the coming season is projected to be around $200 million, which is a nice bit of money—but NBA revenue is 52.5 times that, about $10.5 billion. For comparison, consider: The most successful car salesman in Poughkeepsie makes a pretty good living, but the most successful car salesman in Los Angeles has private-jet money—not because he is necessarily a better car salesman, or because he has an Ivy League MBA, or because he puts in more hours, but because he is at the top of a much bigger market. A pretty good actor in Hollywood makes a heck of a lot more money than the best actor in Copenhagen, which is why we have all those people named Mikkelsen and Mortensen running around in the California sunshine to which Danes must adapt with some difficulty. As it happens, there isn’t technically any rule that says Caitlin Clark has to play in the WNBA instead of the NBA. She could always go take Nikola Jokic’s job.

  Since I mentioned it:

  See? Told you.

• Not exactly unexpected. Jerry Coyne reports: Dickey Betts died. He was 80, so it's somewhat surprising that he made it that far.

  Jerry has a number of videos, and if you want to see/hear some amazing guitar playing, check them out. He also protests the "bizarre" Rolling Stone list of the "250 greatest guitarists of all time", which has Betts at #145. I agree with Jerry: that's remarkably insane..

We'll probably get tired of reading/posting about Katherine Maher and Commie Radio at some point, but we have not reached that point today.

First up is Reason's Robby Soave, who observes, accurately, that NPR's Uri Berliner Has Shown That DEI Is About Punishing Heresy.

I'm old enough to remember one of the cardinal justifications for affirmative action was that it would automagically bring diverse viewpoints to too-stodgy academia and business. Kathy's not down with that:

That Silicon Valley v Russia thread was pretty funny — until it got onto ideological diversity. In case it’s not evident, in these parts that’s often a dog whistle for anti-feminist, anti-POC stories about meritocracy. Maybe’s not what the author meant. But idk, maybe it is?

— Katherine Maher (@krmaher) July 6, 2018

In other unsurprising news, Tristan Justice digs out a story that you might have thought would worry our Official Civil Libertarians: New NPR CEO Took Wikipedia Censorship Orders From Feds. Quoting a clip excavated by Christopher Rufo:

EXCLUSIVE: Katherine Maher says that, as CEO of Wikipedia, she "took a very active approach to disinformation," coordinated censorship "through conversations with government," and suppressed content related to the pandemic and the 2020 election.

NPR's new censor-in-chief. pic.twitter.com/BoKZlrJuLE

— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) April 17, 2024

This is (as we have seen a lot lately) government censorship via a complaisant proxy.

Meanwhile Rufo interviewed a semi-famous Wikipedia co-founder, now a severe critic: Larry Sanger Speaks Out .

Yeah, I'd think Wikipedia contributors would like to know that.

But the lady herself takes to the pages of Jeff Maurer's substack to explain, in a guest column. And asks the musical question: Who the Fuck Did You THINK Ran NPR?

Sounds totally legit.

Also, sounds like Pun Salad has entirely abandoned its keep-it-PG13 language stance. Ah well.

Also of note:

• 

  I can't recommend our Amazon Product du Jour. Nor can I recommend its use on Hamas-loving college students. But I can understand. As the Free Beacon reports: Columbia Students Claimed They Were Sprayed With an Israeli Chemical Weapon. It Was Actually Fart Spray Purchased on Amazon, New Lawsuit Says.

  Chemical weapons are typically associated with Middle Eastern warzones, not Ivy League colleges. So when one of them was allegedly deployed at Columbia University, it ignited a media frenzy.

  Pro-Palestinian protesters told the Columbia Spectator they had been sprayed with "skunk," a crowd-control chemical developed by the Israeli Defense Forces, at a rally in January. Mainstream media amplified the allegations, and Columbia suspended a student involved in the "attack"—who had previously served in IDF—within days.

  The narrative was a progressive fever dream: At one of the best universities in the country, an Israeli student had deployed chemical weapons against peaceful student protesters for challenging the alleged depredations of the Jewish state.

  Columbia president Minouche Shafik repeated this claim at a meeting of the university’s senate. "Demonstrators," she said, "were sprayed with a toxic chemical."

  It now appears that the "toxic chemical" was a harmless fart spray purchased on Amazon for $26.11.

  According to a lawsuit filed against Columbia on Tuesday, the suspended student had in fact dispersed "Liquid Ass"—a "gag gift for adults and kids," per its product description—at an unsanctioned pro-Palestinian rally. He sprayed the substance in the air, not at any particular individual, in what the lawsuit describes as a "harmless expression of speech." The result was a swift suspension for which the student is now suing, alleging that the university "rushed to silence Plaintiff and brand him as a criminal" through "biased misconduct proceedings."

  Let me just say that searching for "Liquid Ass" on Amazon brings up a disquietingly large selection of items.

• A headline from the future? No, it's from today, and it's at Ars Technica: Big Tech can’t hoard brainwave data for ad targeting, Colorado law says.

  On Wednesday, Colorado expanded the scope of its privacy law initially designed to protect biometric data like fingerprints or face images to become first in the nation to also shield sensitive neural data.

  Shield neural data? Why, by cracky, in my day we just used tinfoil. It was hot, and made us look stupid, but we liked it!

BIDEN: "I made it clear to the Israelis — don't move on Haifa!"

Haifa is a major city *IN* Israel. pic.twitter.com/BdNgoDlGkM

— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) April 18, 2024

Sure, that's sort of funny. It's all fun and games, until, as David Harsanyi notes, The World Is Paying A Deadly Price For Barack Obama’s Foreign Policy.

And as long as he's making demands: Hands off Haifa, Bibi!

What does it say that I've found Jeff Maurer to be the most honest commentator on this? His streak is kept alive: The Israel/Iran Situation, But With Jokes.

A pungent observation:

The [Iranian] government was outraged by the Damascus embassy attack and argued that embassies are sacrosanct, though they implored people not to google “Iranian embassy attack”.

Also of note:

• I'm old enough to remember… … the outrage when the Dubya Administration was threatening to comb through our phone records and library lending histories. A "chilling intrusion"!

  Well, guess what? Trump's onetime Attorney General noticed that The Securities and Exchange Commission Is Watching You.

  The Securities and Exchange Commission is deploying a massive government database—the Consolidated Audit Trail, or CAT—that monitors in real time the identity, transactions and investment portfolio of everyone who invests in the stock market. As SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce describes it, by allowing the commission to “watch investors’ every move in real time,” CAT will make it easier to investigate insider trading or market manipulation.

  But as a lawsuit being filed Tuesday in Texas federal court makes clear, CAT crosses a constitutional red line. Accepting this sweeping surveillance would eviscerate fundamental privacy protections. That a few bad apples might engage in misconduct doesn’t justify mass surveillance of everyone’s private affairs.

  The SEC conceived of CAT during the Obama administration. Now, without congressional authorization and under the radar of most Americans, the commission is trying to impose it by executive fiat. CAT will reportedly be the single largest government database targeting the private activities of American citizens.

  The lawsuit-filing good guys: the New Civil Liberties Alliance, identified here as a "conservative think tank". I guess you have to be a conservative these days to stand up for civil liberties.

• Worst theme park ride ever. George F. WIll says Whee! The nation flies past another trillion-dollar milestone.

  This nation, tobogganing swiftly down a steep slope of fiscal irresponsibility, barely notices a blur of alarming milestones. Last week, we sped past this one: A $1.1 trillion deficit in the first six months of fiscal year 2024 that began Oct. 1 resulted in almost as many dollars spent on debt service ($429 billion) as on defense ($433 billion).

  This, at the most menacing geopolitical moment since 1945, makes one hope that JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon was radically wrong in saying recently that interest rates could reach 8 percent or more in coming years. If they do, deficits will explode even before the Social Security and Medicare trust funds are exhausted, within 10 years.

  FWIW, gold hit an all-time high of $2,408/oz earlier today. (It's dropped back a bit since, to $2396/oz, as I type.)

• Pun Salad agrees. The NR editorialists come around to my position: Defund NPR.

  National Public Radio has every right to operate as a left-wing propaganda outlet masquerading as a legitimate news organization. But it is not entitled to pursue this goal with taxpayer money. The latest revelations about the ideological rot at NPR have only made this case stronger.

  Before his resignation on Wednesday, Uri Berliner had worked at NPR for 25 years, most recently as a senior editor. But after being suspended for last week writing a long essay for the Free Press criticizing the organization for its bias, Berliner decided to resign, saying he could no longer work there comfortably.

  In his essay, Berliner argued that while NPR always had “a liberal bent,” in the past, it at least attempted to provide some balance. These days, he wrote, “those who listen to NPR or read its coverage online find something different: the distilled worldview of a very small segment of the U.S. population.”

  Sigh. I remember when, at least, NPR could be funny. (That link is from 2006.

• AI can do some jobs better. Josh Fruhlinger runs the Comics Curmudgeon blog, in which he appends acerbic commentary to newspaper comic strips. Like yesterday's Blondie:

  

  Josh did something unusual: he asked ChatGPT to

  Write a description of a three-panel Blondie comic strip on the theme of "there should be an app for loading the dishes!"

  Reader, ChatGPT came up with something much funnier than the allegedly-human-written comic above. Check it out.

And that random thought occurred to me when I looked at the picture of Joe Biden illustrating Jim Geraghty's NR Corner post: Excuses for Joe Biden Skipping Debates Start to Pile Up: Gee, Biden looks more like that ventriloquist's puppet every day.

Now, who was that guy? Google, google, google…

Oh, right. The ventriloquist was Jeff Dunham. And I was thinking of his cranky geezer puppet Walter. And‥

I discovered that Dunham was way ahead of me:

Cheap shots, but funny ones.

But (ahem) getting back to that Geraghty post:

Even if one or more Trump-Biden debates come off, you couldn't pay me to watch.

Well, you couldn't. Or at least wouldn't. Nor would I expect you to. Sorry, didn't mean to imply otherwise.

We are left to wonder what debate-evading excuses Frum, Durbin, and Coons would have made up if Nikki Haley had been the GOP nominee.

Also of note:

• Commie Radio goes full Stalin. Never go full Stalin. But at least NPR has the story: NPR suspends veteran editor as it grapples with his public criticism.

  (No, I'm not kidding. That link goes to the NPR story.)

  NPR has formally punished Uri Berliner, the senior editor who publicly argued a week ago that the network had "lost America's trust" by approaching news stories with a rigidly progressive mindset.

  Berliner's five-day suspension without pay, which began last Friday, has not been previously reported.

  Yet the public radio network is grappling in other ways with the fallout from Berliner's essay for the online news site The Free Press. It angered many of his colleagues, led NPR leaders to announce monthly internal reviews of the network's coverage, and gave fresh ammunition to conservative and partisan Republican critics of NPR, including former President Donald Trump.

  Indeed, Trump reacted with his usual caps-lock subtlety:

  Can't have that!

  At the NR Corner, Jeffrey Blehar has an interesting take on the essay: Uri Berliner Burned His Bridges at NPR, Then Set the House Ablaze.

  When I read it, I had two reactions, one to the text and one to the subtext. The text of Berliner’s piece was of course an eloquent and sensitively written exposé of the accelerating editorial rot behind the scenes at NPR. Berliner’s argument is not about bias — NPR’s liberal tilt is structurally unavoidable given the kind of people who want to work there — as much as it is about the complete internal corruption of journalistic ethics. (To wit, his discussion of the Hunter Biden laptop scandal is the ultimate confirmation of priors for suspicious conservatives: “I listened as one of NPR’s best and most fair-minded journalists said it was good we weren’t following the laptop story because it could help Trump.”)

  The subtext of the piece, however, was clear: “Now that I’ve aired our dirty laundry, I dare you to fire me before I eventually resign.” This was, for all its eloquence, functionally a career-terminating act. The various official responses from NPR, including a defensive rebuttal from NPR’s standards & practices editor and a five-day suspension without pay for “freelancing without permission,” indicate clearly that he is now persona non grata. To be fair, Berliner either certainly expected this or should have. As Phoebe Maltz Bovy aptly asks, “How many jobs are there where you could write a big essay about your beef with your workplace and keep your job?” Berliner was clearly dismayed enough about the situation at NPR that he was prepared to leave, and since as an NPR liberal he is more genteel than Homer Simpson, he chose to burn his bridges publicly and rhetorically, rather than literally.

  That last link goes to…

  

  Blehar also notes Berliner's references to NPR's new CEO, Katherine Maher. Who is described as the "Kwisatz Haderach of white wokeness, presumably bred through generations of careful genetic selection to be the supernaturally perfect embodiment of Affluent White Female Liberalism."

  Overstated? Well, for additional information on that, Matt Taibbi provides New NPR Chief Katherine Maher's Guide to the Holidays. (Only partially free, but enough.)

  Dumb old me didn't realize that one of Maher's previous gigs was at the Wikimedia Foundation. Where, if you responded cash-wise to one of Jimmy Wales' Wikipedia beg-a-thons, you were mostly funding a lot of tedious wokism.

I was tempted to do a full fisking of a recent column appearing in Sunday's local paper. It's by the pastor of the Community Church of Durham (NH), one Rev. David Grishaw-Jones, pictured at your right. He asks the musical question: Should New Hampshire really penalize nonviolence?

You're expected to say "Gee, of course not" at this point.

Let's find out what the Rev is actually talking about:

We'll ignore the question-begging assertions about Israel. I just want to point out that the legislation is also nonviolent. It's very nature is tit-for-tat: you refuse to do business with Israel, New Hampshire refuses to do business with you.

Governor Sununu's executive order last year made New Hampshire the 37th state to act in opposition to the so-called "Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions" (BDS) movement.

I count 18 sponsors of SB439 in the NH Senate. (And there are only 24 senators.) The Rev tries to paint this as an insidious plot, sourced from "extreme right wing think tanks (such as the American Legislative Executive Council)". A check of that sponsor list should debunk the relevance of the bill's provenance; it includes (for example) Democrats David Watters and Debra Altschiller. Are they unwitting pawns of the Great Right-Wing Jewish Conspiracy?

It goes without saying that the BDS effort is entirely aimed at Israel. The Middle East is full of dreary little despotisms. The only one that is rated "Free" by Freedom House is, that's right, Israel.

Rev, if you want to target citizen oppression, there are more likely targets.

The Rev's church is very (um) socially involved. They have a Action Alerts page letting people know where they stand on eight issues. Number One: "Justice for Palestine-Israel". What do you make of this?

Over 73 years. Why I do believe they are referring to 1948, the year Israel was created.

It appears the Rev's church isn't just opposed to Israel's policies; they are, instead, opposed to the idea of a Jewish state. Real river-to-the-sea advocates. Lets make the entire Middle East unfree!

If that happened, of course, the Rev and his allies might spend a few minutes tsk-tsking about all the violence. (But not without explaining that Israel had it coming.)

Also of note:

• A backbone of Jello. Eric Boehm explains that Bone Spurs ain't going to make it into an updated edition of Profiles in Courage, describing Donald Trump's Cowardice Over Warrantless Spying.

  In a social media post on Wednesday afternoon, former President Donald Trump delivered an all-caps message to members of Congress. "KILL FISA," he wrote. "IT WAS ILLEGALLY USED AGAINST ME, AND MANY OTHERS."

  Trump was referring to Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which allows intelligence services to scoop up electronic communications between Americans and individuals overseas. Those communications are stored in a massive database—the true extent of which is unknown and perhaps unquantifiable—that is routinely queried by the FBI and other law enforcement agencies, giving them a back door to spy on Americans' communications without a warrant.

  Trump is right to be mad about how Section 702 has been used, and he's also right that he is far from the only target. In 2021, for example, the FBI used its FISA powers to run more than 3.3 million queries through the Section 702 database. A Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court report unsealed in May showed that the FBI improperly used its warrantless search powers more than 278,000 times during 2021—targeting "crime victims, January 6th riot suspects, people arrested at a protest in the wake of the police killing of George Floyd in 2020," and donors to congressional candidates.

  Last week, as Congress was considering the periodic renewal of Section 702, some lawmakers (including some of Trump's closest allies in the House) were pushing for a requirement that law enforcement agencies get a warrant before trolling through the FISA database. That effort failed, 212–212, with Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R–La.) casting the tie-breaking vote.

  And how did Trump react to all that?

  "I'm not a big fan of FISA," the former president reiterated to reporters after meeting with Johnson at Mar-a-Lago on Friday night. "But I told everybody, 'Do what you want.'"

  I don't know what Nikki Haley's position on FISA reauthorization was, but whatever it was, I bet it lasted more than a few hours.

• An insightful take. And it's from Jeff Maurer: Comedy Has Gotten More Political Partly Because Opinions are Easy and Jokes are Hard. He recalls the good old days of Conan O'Brien being funny. (Click over to see "Awesome Dave’s Counting Channel" video.

  The reasons why networks can’t or won’t make a Conan-style show are many and varied. I’ve written a lot about how comedy has changed, and I’ll probably write more. But because I’m so definitively in the political/comedy space,1 I can say something that non-political-comedians are usually too polite to say: Writing jokes is a lot harder than writing opinions. And one reason why there’s a lot of political comedy out there is that it’s simply easier.

  Political comedy has been my full-time job for a decade. I’ve had lot of time to think about what hits, what doesn’t, and why. I find there are basically two things that people respond to. One is humor — some of my most popular pieces are goofy things that are barely political at all. And the other thing that people like is — you’ll love how obnoxiously pretentious this is — a statement. Generously interpreted, “a statement” means “a trenchant analysis of important matters.” Less-generously interpreted, it means “some shit people agree with.” But probably the most accurate interpretation is: “a cynical regurgitation of your audience’s beliefs that flatters their self-image, which creates a fucked-up relationship based on mutual puffery that — somehow, some way — ends in you getting money.”

  `

  Not for nothing, there's a Wikipedia page for clapter.

Recently on the book blog:

Recently on the movie blog:

Via Power Line, some rough language:

"If you care about your fucking country, read Ludwig von Mises and the six lessons of the Austrian economic school, motherfuckers."

- @moicanoufc pic.twitter.com/P5yeToKQNB

— 𝐏𝐨𝐬𝐭𝐬 𝐅𝐫𝐨𝐦 𝐔𝐧𝐝𝐞𝐫𝐠𝐫𝐨𝐮𝐧𝐝 (@the_posts) April 14, 2024

Okay, you ready to learn about the six lessons? Here you go, from Clint Smith: The 6 lessons of Ludwig Von Mises.

And he proceeds to itemize seven lessons. Oh well, give or take. They are (1) Methodological Individualism; (2) Subjective Value; (3) Praxeology; (4) Spontaneous Order; (5) Business Cycle Theory; (6) Economic Calculation Problem; and (7) Critique of Interventionism.

That last one may be a bonus. Perhaps produced by spontaneous order.

Also of note:

• Unwarranted Optimism Department. Kevin D. Williamson has some unsolicited advice for the Biden campaign: Democrats think that simply not being Trump is enough to beat him — but it won’t be.

  Democrats seem to have lost one of the most basic of all political skills: asking those who are not already committed supporters for their votes.

  It is an elementary thing, but, as with many other elementary things, Joe Biden does not seem quite up to it.

  If he wants to win, he should figure that out.

  I am not sure that there is such a thing as a “Nikki Haley Republican,” but the former South Carolina governor beat Donald Trump in the Vermont and DC Republican primaries, took about 40% of the vote in New Hampshire and South Carolina, and finished up her campaign having won more than 20% of the vote in the races she contested.

  That’s not nothing.

  True, that support wasn’t nearly enough for Nikki Haley to beat Donald Trump in a Republican primary.

  But it would be more than enough for Joe Biden to beat Donald Trump in a general election.

  The share of alienated Republicans who don’t want to vote for Trump isn’t 40% — it isn’t even 20%.

  And it doesn’t have to be.

  Well less than half that would do it for Biden — if he would lift a pinky finger to try to win those votes.

  Note KDW seamlessly adapting the New York Post editorial style of one-sentence paragraphs.

  He doesn't do that in any other forum, as far as I can tell.

  But as to his main point: I'm not sure what Biden could do to win my vote in November.

  That's just not in the cards, Joe.

• The windmills of his mind. James Lileks has an amazing essay at Discourse: Art That’s Just for Me.

  I’m working on a book celebrating the work of a commercial artist, Chester Gallsworth Dahleigh—“Chet” to his friends. He signed his most personal work “Petey,” so I suppose Chet G. “Petey” Dahleigh is the proper term. This summer, I plan to release an online collection of his most striking work, an examination of the works he did not for paying corporate clients, but instead rendered in his sleep.

  There are hundreds of such works, and they all express a peculiarly cheerful nightmare about American culture in the 1950s.

  Some say they’re a result of his wife’s long effort to poison her husband with various herbs and mushrooms from the family garden—a theory bolstered, no doubt, by her conviction for murdering her husband by poison in 1960—but others insist that Dahleigh’s daytime work painting anodyne scenes of commercial joy posed an affront to his talent and soul, and he would rise at night to explore the id of the American dream in the 1950s. In his work, there is always joy:

  Eventually, Lileks confesses: "Chet G. Petey Dahleigh" is actually Chat-GPT Dall-E. And those illustrations (seven at the link) were AI-generated, and they are, indeed, cheerful nightmares. Check 'em out.

Brought to my attention by Jonah Goldberg:

Words. Just say words until someone cheers. pic.twitter.com/HvOB0UsnQT

— Jonah Goldberg (@JonahDispatch) April 14, 2024

For the record, Schnecksville, an actual place, is about 40 miles away from Valley Forge, about 100 miles away from Gettysburg, and about 50 miles away from where Washington crossed the Delaware.

Well, he's not running for American History Professor, I guess.

Meanwhile, President Wheezy and Bone Spurs were tied at the EBO site last week. This week, Wheezy has opened up a slight lead:

Trump's still in a near-unassailable, over 4-to-1 lead in phony hit counts, though.

Also of note:

• Hey, kids, what time is it? Well, according to Kurt Schlichter, it's Time to Rethink Your Never Trumpism. Ah, finally. Someone to present me with a set of rational arguments why I should, for the first time, vote for Trump.

  You'd think. But no:

  Okay, my Trump-shy friends, it’s time to put aside your fussy principles about how icky Donald Trump is. This is serious, and we need all hands on deck to throw Biden overboard before he gets a whole lot more Americans killed. I get that you don’t like Trump. Let’s agree that he’s icky for the purposes of this discussion. Let’s agree that his tweets are mean, that he’s not a conservative ideologue, that he says dumb things and gets into useless fights, and that he does many other unseemly and annoying things. Let’s agree that this is all true. Let’s concede that in normal times, one might want to forgo supporting a guy like that. But these aren’t normal times.

  So my principles are "fussy". I think Trump is "icky". And later:

  So, this is for you guys who are having difficulty making that leap and backing Trump 2.0. I’m assuming that you are susceptible to reason. Some of you might not be. Let’s face it: A little bit of ego is involved here. There’s a performative aspect to not backing Donald Trump. You dug in against him, and digging yourself out and publicly changing your mind is tough. I get it. But when facts change, choices need to change. And boy, have the facts changed.

  Thanks for that head-shrinking, Kurt.

  So (to summarize), Kurt is accusing me of prissyness ("fussy"), childishness ("icky"), and moral posturing ("ego"/"performative").

  Kurt, this is not an effective way to convince people.

  Other than that, it's just a recycled Flight 93, storm-the-cockpit rant. Trying to scare me into supporting Trump.

  Sorry, Kurt, that's also a non starter.

  Kurt talks a lot about Israel and Gaza. Ukraine is unmentioned.

  Not that it matters, but the Flight 93 crash site is about 200 miles from Schnecksville. I don't know if Trump mentioned that.

• A more accurate adjective than "icky". And it's supplied by Kevin D. Williamson: Trump’s Toxic Touch. Analyzing Trump's recent announcement of his abortion position:

  The Dobbs decision returned abortion to the states, and if Donald Trump sounds indifferent about how that plays out in the states, it is not because he is indifferent, exactly, much less possessed of “disinterest” as Jamelle Bouie put it with perfect wrongness (subsequently edited away) in the New York Times—it is because he subordinates the abortion issue, like every other issue, to his own narrow self-interest. Trump was, recall, a self-described “pro-choice” Manhattan playboy and reality-television grotesque who made occasional cameos in pornographic films before he decided that he wanted to chase the Republican presidential nomination. As with the Second Amendment, traditional marriage (ho, ho!), and much else, Trump lurches from position to position, precisely as one would expect a man with no moral anchor to do.

  Trump has long been to the left of the longstanding Republican consensus on many issues: abortion, gun control, taxes, entitlements, marriage and family—almost every issue other than immigration, in fact, though even on immigration he has at times been an amnesty supporter and a “path to citizenship” advocate, when he thought it would benefit him. For a different kind of politician, that discongruity might have a moderating effect and provide some basis for seeking broader and deeper political compromises than American politics has produced in recent years. But Donald Trump suffers from a particularly toxic combination of character defects—laziness, stupidity, arrogance, insecurity, and profound personal cowardice—that make such an outcome impossible. 

  Too much? No: Laziness, because Trump’s stand is the one that requires the least work; stupidity, because he doesn’t understand that “Let the states decide” is a dodge that works under Roe but not under Dobbs, when the states are, in fact, deciding; arrogance, because he has good reason to believe this will be enough for the rubes who are going to support him no matter what; insecurity, because a better kind of man (with a lead in the polls) might do some good by making the case forthrightly, but Trump is an inferior kind of man and knows it; profound personal cowardice, because Trump fears losing something he wants more than he fears being on the wrong side of a question when wrong equates to millions of dead children.

  See, Kurt, it's a little bit more serious than just finding DJT to be "icky".

  (By the way, KDW's Jamelle Bouie aside reflects the NYT's stealth-editing his print-edition words:

  Trump’s fundamental disinterest in the truth value of his words is the only context that matters…

  into the online:

  Trump’s fundamental lack of interest in the truth value of his words is the only context that matters…

  This is the sort of thing that KDW views with minor contempt.

• Oh, and by the way… Steven Greenhut has the standard libertarian take on "disinformation" at Reason: Combat Disinformation With Better Norms, Not More Laws. Setting a bad example:

  In a typically unhinged social-media post last month, Donald Trump expressed the desire to jail former U.S. Rep. Liz Cheney (R–Wyo.) and the members of the select congressional committee investigating the January 6 riot or insurrection or peaceful demonstration or FBI false-flag operation (pick your narrative). It's one in a long series of posts in which the former president and 2024 GOP nominee has touted tactics usually reserved for third-world strongmen.

  More recently, the judge in the case involving Trump's hush-money payments to adult-actress Stormy Daniels slapped a gag order on him "after repeatedly targeting the judge's daughter in social media posts," per USA Today. Not long ago, Trump said he would tell Russia to do "whatever the hell they want" to NATO member countries that don't pay their bills. And, of course, he continues to falsely claim the 2020 election was stolen.

  And I hear you asking: Did Trump really …? Sure did:

  Hey, Kurt? Greenhut could have called this "icky", but he chose a more accurate adjective: "unhinged".

• We used to rail against the "Imperial Presidency". But now… … it's just "the presidency". Andy Kessler at the WSJ: The Presidency, I’m Against It. He advocates a path for a Trump presidency that almost certainly will not be taken:

  Expectations for a second Trump term include mass deportations, threats against allies, and huge tariffs on Chinese products. But what will be Mr. Trump’s legacy? Let’s face it, someone who splashes his name on tall buildings across the country cares about legacy. How does Mr. Trump change his legacy from authoritarian blowhard to transformative president? Simple. Go rogue. Do something no one ever thought he would do. Like Nixon going to China. Or “Bedtime for Bonzo” Hollywood actor Ronald Reagan becoming a free-market, Soviet-busting genius.

  How? Reduce the power of the executive branch. Mr. Trump told Sean Hannity he plans to be a dictator for only a day. Fine, close the border, end DEI, get NATO partners to pay, cancel Mr. Biden’s executive orders, and reverse his industrial strategies, er, policies. But then pull the ladder up behind you so no future president can repeat the Biden administration’s power grabs.

  That would be neat.

• Here's how to do it right, Kurt. Power Line hosts Daniel B. Klein, writing on Libertarians and Civic Virtue.

  An interview between two libertarians provides an opportunity to think about how libertarians need to raise their game. David Boaz of the Cato Institute is interviewed by Nick Gillespie of Reason magazine. Among other things, they discuss the 2024 presidential election. The conversation exemplifies a failure in civic virtue among some libertarians.

  I say ‘some’ libertarians, because others are more like Milton Friedman. In a 2005 interview, Friedman said: “I always say I am Republican with a capital ‘R’ and libertarian with a small ‘l’.”

  More than 50 years earlier, in 1953, Milton Friedman wrote: “I see no objection to his [the economist’s] saying, ‘In my opinion…A is the best policy to achieve our agreed objectives. However, if you do not like A for political or other reasons, B is the next best policy,’ and so forth.”

  That is, Friedman urges the classical liberal to be comfortable saying, “I favor classical liberalism but in a choice between two less-good options, I think that B is the one that is less less-good.”

  If the choice between two less-good options is a salient and important choice for people at large, civic virtue calls on one who pronounces on public issues to speak to that choice—plainly, calmly, and fairly, like Milton Friedman. I agree with Friedman that the Republicans are the lesser evil, and I don’t think Donald Trump is an exception.

  It's an argument Klein puts forth with respect to his audience. I'm not all-the-way convinced, but he puts together a rational case, not one based on name-calling and fear.