Pun Salad

For personal reasons, I'm suspending normal ("Default") Pun Salad blogging. It will probably last for the rest of the month.

I will still post as warranted in the other views: Books, Movies, and perhaps even Geekery.

Thanks for reading. Best wishes to all.

I've had a pretty frustrating time trying to get this one important bit of my blogging intfrastructure back up and running. So I'm giving up for the day, and instead treating you to a mini-tirade about something that bugs me. And that thing is:

"meteoric rise"

It's a very common phrase. As I type, a Googling for news stories yields the headlines:

• Bitcoin's Meteoric Rise Shakes Up the Financial World (Onesafe, 3 hours ago)

• Nvidia’s Meteoric Rise Has Made Jensen Huang Almost as Rich as Warren Buffett (Investopedia, 2 days ago)

• The meteoric rise of David Corenswet, the actor who gave up his quiet life to become Superman (EL PAÍS, 4 days ago)

• Lamine Yamal's 18th birthday: Barcelona, Spain star's meteoric rise in 18 key moments (ESPN, 2 days ago)

• Kaleb Wing’s meteoric rise on mound has him as one of the country’s top MLB Draft prospects (Santa Cruz Sentinel, 2 days ago)

That's just the first five in the Google feed. It's an epidemic, I tells ya!

The problem that has probably already occurred to you: meteors do not rise! They fall. And very quickly!

And it's not as if people don't notice. Actual astronomer Phil Plait griped about this a long time ago on his Bad Astronomy blog.

A little Googling on that comes up with a candidate for what Phil read: a WaPo story from June, 1996, headlined LEBED'S METEORIC ASCENT. (WaPo gifted link).

"Ascent", not "rise". Not that that's any better. But later on, the reporter is unafraid to go back to the tried and true:

Twenty-nine years!

Editors, get out whatever your modern red-pencil equivalent is, and stop your reporters from using this silly phrase!

(And, not that it matters: "Lebed" in the WaPo story is Alexander Lebed, who lived until 2002, when his helicopter encountered electric lines in the fog. Wikipedia says that at least one person mentioned sabotage as a possibility. Putin was the Russian president at the time.)

Just a Ramireztoon today. (I'm not sure whether I should add "sorry" to that.)

Geeky explanation, not that it should matter to you: One of Google's long-promised/threatened "upgrades" to Chrome has nuked a major chunk of my blogging infrastructure. Specifically, the wonderful old chromix-too browser extension that allowed me to access some bits of Chrome's API from the Linux shell has been permanently banned.

I knew it was coming, but I procrastinated about coming up with a fix. Chromix-too's author is a very nice guy, but is uninterested in maintaining it. And it's in Javascript, with lots of coding idioms I find incomprehensible.

Still, I think I almost have it. So maybe we'll be back to normal… tomorrow? Not promising that.

So I got this mail in my spam folder yesterday from "Mike Zhang", who is the "Service Manager" for "Domain Registrar (Head Office)". The opening line is interesting:

As the kids say these days: "Wait, what?"

Ignore the mail if it affects me? That seems… counterintuitive.

Anyway, what our CEO should know is:

So I Googled. And this popped up: Dear CEO scam is causing trouble. And sure enough, "Mike Zhang" was sending out the exact same mail (with fill-in-the-blank domains) back in 2019.

And that site says:

This scam has been hanging around for over years [sic].

Still, if they haven't bothered to make the opening paragraph sensible, it must work occasionally.

Also of note:

• No, it's not. Impeach his orange ass. Damon Root wonders: Trump won’t enforce the TikTok ban. Is that constitutional?

  The U.S. Constitution requires the president to "take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed." Yet President Donald Trump has not only refused to enforce the federal law banning TikTok, but his administration has also told multiple tech companies that they may openly violate the TikTok ban "without incurring any legal liability" because the Department of Justice is "irrevocably relinquishing any claims" against the companies "for the conduct proscribed in the Act."

  But wait, may the president do that? May Trump encourage private parties to violate a duly enacted federal law while simultaneously vowing to free them from present and future liability for their lawbreaking? Is that constitutional?

  As Damon details, there's a long history of presidential, um, discretion about "faithfully executing" laws. Back to Jefferson! But Trump's pressing against the boundaries even harder.

• At last, Pam Bondi explains the Epstein deal. Jeff Maurer turns over his substack for Pam to come clean: Whoops: That Was a Menu for EPSTEIN'S DELI on My Desk.

  MAGA land is obsessed with the so-called “Epstein files”. This trove of documents related to Jeffrey Epstein — especially his alleged “client list” — is thought to be the smoking gun that will expose a cabal of rich and powerful sex abusers. MAGA land was ecstatic when I told Fox News in February that the files were “sitting on my desk right now”. Finally, the predatory men who join in Epstein’s abuse and then plotted his murder would be exposed! Or, so some people thought.

  On Tuesday, the Justice Department concluded that there was no client list and that Jeffrey Epstein killed himself. This is consistent with previous law enforcement findings. The questions remains, though: Why did I say that the Epstein files were “on my desk”? Was it because I was afraid to puncture the delusions of the paranoid shut-ins who are an important part of the Trump base? Not, it’s not that. The truth is that what I thought was the Epstein files turned out to be a menu for a local restaurant called “Epstein’s Deli”. Whoopsie. My bad, everyone — talk about Mistake Town, population “me”. I thought I had evidence of an international conspiracy, but it turned out to be a promotion for an eatery offering sandwiches, paninis, and soups made fresh every morning. Egg on my face, table for one, am-I-right?

  It's an honest mistake that anyone with an IQ of 80 could make, Pam.

• Another good question. Tyler Cowen asks it at the Free Press: Why Won’t Socialism Die? Some theories are offered, concocted by some very smart people:

  It is a long-standing task of social scientists—perhaps the most tireless one—to try to explain the popularity of socialism. Economics Nobel laureate Friedrich A. Hayek attributed it to mankind’s atavistic instincts, left over from earlier, poorer societies when extreme sharing was necessary. Milton Friedman treated the socialists as though they were well-intentioned individuals who simply had not learned enough good economics. Joseph Schumpeter believed it was the curse of capitalism that the intellectuals would turn against it—an idea later seconded by Robert Nozick.

  Peter Thiel, more recently, has blamed student debt and the high cost of buying a home. “When one has too much student debt or if housing is too unaffordable, then one will have negative capital for a long time,” he said. “And if one has no stake in the capitalist system, then one may well turn against it.” As usual, Peter has a point.

  There is truth in all of these hypotheses (and there are others yet), but focusing on 2025, I have a more concrete and perhaps more depressing explanation. Socialism is surging right now because American society has simply turned more negative. We complain more, we whine more, and we are more likely to dislike each other. And if we are more negative, that means we are more negative about everything around us—including capitalism. Big business has never been bigger, and we have never spent more time with it, whether it is scrolling on our smartphones, calling up an Uber, or flying to another city.

  The only upside for people like me is we get to say:

  "That won't work."

  Followed in a few months or years by:

  "See, I told you it wouldn't work."

• I think they'll figure it out someday, actually. Ars Technica attended a Democrat stunt dressed up as “Things we’ll never know” science fair highlights US’s canceled research.

  None of the "researchers" are identified by name or institution in the article. And very few of the cancelled projects seem to be dedicated to actual scientific research. One exception:

  The damage is far from limited to education and diversity issues. Despite having been in power during a pandemic that ultimately killed well over a million Americans, the administration has decided that any pandemic-related work is not a priority. So, an entire pandemic preparedness program was scrapped. A pair of researchers was there to talk about the Antiviral Drug Discovery program (AViDD), which had been funded to develop drugs that target various emerging viral threats, such as coronaviruses and the families that include Ebola, Zika, and measles. The idea behind AViDD is to have treatments ready that could limit the spread of any new, threatening version of these viruses in order to give us time to develop vaccines.

  AViDD had been funded to the tune of $1.2 billion, included nine dedicated research centers, and involved researchers at 90 institutions. In total, it had spent about half that money in developing 35 treatment candidates that targeted seven different viral families. And then the funding for the entire program was eliminated before any of those candidates could be pursued any further—the researchers likened it to building half a bridge.

  $1.2 billion spread over 90 institutions? Sounds a little boondoggly to me. Maybe it's not, but the Ars Technica report doesn't mention that possibility.

I couldn't help but chuckle at the relevance of today's xkcd comic:

Because the WSJ highlighted the recent hijinks of The National Education Association in their "Notable and Quotable" op-ed yesterday (WSJ gifted link):

(Probable unnecessary emphasis added.)

Who knew that "the survival of civilization itself" could be had for a mere $3500?

And (for that matter) who could imagine that it would cost $1625 to not deal with the ADL?

This is via school choice advocate Corey DeAngelis, who also shares the oratorical stylings of Rebecca Pringle:

Stop everything you're doing and watch the president of the nation's largest teachers union screaming at their "Leadership Summit." pic.twitter.com/reQXOFfixP

— Corey A. DeAngelis, school choice evangelist (@DeAngelisCorey) July 8, 2025

Fun fact: Propublica furnishes the NEA's Form 990, which puts Ms. Pringle's 2022 compensation at $433,413 (plus $142,498 "other").

Also of note:

• In other "education" news… Brace yourself for the headlined f-bomb, from Liberty Unyielding: Left-wing professor admits she only works at her university to 'build power' for leftist causes, says 'fuck the University,' 'I don't care about' it.

  A professor at the University of Chicago on Saturday admitted she is using her platform at the school to “build power” and rally support for socialist and pro-Palestinian causes.

  Eman Abdelhadi, an assistant professor and director of graduate studies at the university, told attendees at at an annual socialism conference in Chicago on July 5 that she uses her platform as a professor to mobilize support for socialism and Palestine and “build power” for the movement. Abdelhadi also described the university as “evil” and said it is a “colonial landlord.”

  “I don’t care about this institution, like fuck the University of Chicago,” Abdelhadi said.

  “I work at one of the biggest employers in the city of Chicago,” Abdelhadi continued. “A place where I have access to thousands of people that I could potentially organize … This is where I need to build power. This is my best possible structural leverage.”

  How many people in the audience were thinking: Geez, she shouldn't be saying the quiet part out loud!

  Also devoting some bandwidth to Prof Eman is Jonathan Turley: UChicago Professor Denounces School as an “Evil” and “Colonialist” Institution . . . But Wants to Stay.

  While universities have largely purged their faculty ranks of conservatives, there often seems to be no academic who is too far left for hiring committees. The latest example is University of Chicago Assistant Professor and Director of Graduate Studies Eman Abdelhadi, who used her appearance at the Socialism 2025 conference to denounce UChicago as “evil” and a “colonialist” institution. (For full disclosure, I graduated from UChicago as an undergraduate).

  Since we're doing full disclosure: I was accepted into the graduate physics program at UChicago. No money, though, so I went to the University Near Here instead.

• I'm just happy they will let me keep my shoes on. Kevin D. Williamson sings the Airline Blues.

  U.S. air travel is, of course, a goat rodeo. Like the DMV, it is one of those places in American life where the people who did the at-home reading in high school get held hostage by those who didn’t. From the lazy and stupid and cow-eyed people who work at the airline check-in counters to the lazy and stupid and cow-eyed and thieving miscreants who star in the TSA’s imbecilic security theater, getting on an airplane provides a textbook example of what happens when you combine mediocrity with job security.

  There are few, if any, better examples of corporatism in American public life than air travel, with its heavily regulated cartels, public- and private-sector unions, airport authorities, etc. The point of corporatism—too often misunderstood—is not to maximize corporate profits but to coordinate business and political activity to maximize the political benefits of economic activity, by creating a lot of relatively high-wage, high-benefit, high-security jobs without too much consideration about whether that actually serves the interests of consumers and shareholders. From the politicians’ point of view, people are not assets but liabilities, and one way to take that liability off the books is to put the person into a job with good pay and benefits and very low chances of being laid off—and it does not matter to the politicians if that job actually creates any real value. They would have us use spoons to dig trenches if they could. 

  (You know the story: Milton Friedman was visiting a Chinese public construction project and was flabbergasted that the workers were using picks and shovels and carts instead of modern earth-moving machinery, and asked his hosts what was going on. “We know how to create jobs,” came the answer. Friedman thought about the answer for a moment and then asked: “Then why not use spoons?”)

  I dropped in a comment about that last paragraph:

  Predating Milton Friedman in China: the book The Boys in the Boat has a brief aside about the construction of the 1936 Olympic Stadium in Berlin. By Hitlerian decree, pick-and-shovel labor was preferred to earth-moving machinery.

  Totalitarians gotta totalitarianate, I guess.

• Oh come, oh come, Emmanuel. Oops: It turns out George Will is talking about Rahm, who spells it with one 'm': If Emanuel runs, he’ll bet on candor defeating the ‘culture police’. (WaPo gifted link)

  A good story:

  An avid bicyclist, Emanuel, when he retired from the mayor’s office, took a two-week, 900-mile ride around Lake Michigan with a friend. During the ride, he made a sociological discovery: “The worse the cellphone coverage is, the nicer people are.”

  Niceness is sometimes secondary for Emanuel, whose salty vocabulary expresses the serrated edge of his personality. But his discovery of the inverse relationship between smartphones and congeniality indicates his interest in today’s culture, and his party’s contribution to its strangeness. Although politics is the Democratic Party’s business, it currently has scant aptitude for it.

  Politics is mostly talk. In an interview, Emanuel says, more in anger than in sorrow, that too many Democrats speak as though their words have been “focus-grouped in a faculty lounge.” He has a point.

  I'm probably too set in my electoral ways to vote for any D, but he's not the worst choice out there. (As I type, he doesn't show up at all as a 2028 possibility at the Stossel/Lott Election Betting Odds site.)

• Big stupid Congress won't cancel the big stupid rocket. James B. Meigs is not happy: Congress Crushes Hopes for NASA Reform.

  When Donald Trump returned for his second stint in the White House, advocates for NASA reform were optimistic. In particular, they hoped the president’s team would end the notoriously expensive Space Launch System (SLS) rocket program and allow the space agency to rely instead on the more affordable rockets flown by Elon Musk’s SpaceX and other private companies. That was the policy advised by many space experts, including Jared Isaacman, the administration’s reform-minded nominee to be NASA Administrator. (It was also the approach I recommended in my April 2025 Manhattan Institute report, “U.S. Space Policy: The Next Frontier.”) These observers hoped a more mission-focused NASA—freed from the SLS program’s obscene costs and delays—could finally deliver on long-promised plans to return U.S. astronauts to the moon and ultimately send them to Mars.

  Today, less than six months into Trump’s second term, those hopes are dashed. Tucked among its hundreds of measures, the Big Beautiful Bill signed by President Trump last week includes a kind of poison pill for NASA reform. The bill allocates an extra $10 billion for SLS and related programs and stipulates that the rocket must be used for at least four more missions, a timeline that will take NASA years to achieve. Hopes for a leaner, more effective space agency will have to wait.

  If they ever launch the next SLS mission (currently penciled in for "no earlier than April 2026), and I'm still breathing, I'll watch it, I suppose. And I'll be happy if it works.

• It's crazy, but it just might work. Michael Munger schemes: The Penny Problem Has a Third Option: Buy Them Back (With Interest)

  This may sound ridiculous, but I’m serious: instead of making brand-new pennies, what if the government simply bought back some of the 114 billion pennies already floating around in drawers, jars, and couch cushions across America?

  Think about it. The vast majority of those pennies aren’t being used in everyday transactions, or even every year transactions. They’re collecting dust. But what if the government offered, say, 1.5 cents for every penny returned? That’s “more than the coin is worth” — so people would have an incentive to dig them out — and it’s still far cheaper than making new ones.

  Buying back 3.2 billion pennies at 1.5 cents apiece would cost the government about $48 million. Compare that to the $120 million that it cost us to make the same number of pennies. We would have saved more than $70 million a year, and we’d be “recycling” (actually, reusing) all that copper (and zinc, since pennies are mostly zinc, with a copper coating).

  It probably won't happen. Like most good ideas.

Our Eye Candy Du Jour is page 24 from Jessica (nee Brian) Riedl's very informative November 2024 chart book covering all aspects of Federal spending, taxation, and associated myths and disasters. It appears in Dominic Pino's NR Corner post headlined Spending Till Kingdom Come While Raising Taxes Would Also End Badly. Which is a counterpoint to a post from Mark Antonio Wright's post headlined Spending Till Kingdom Come While Cutting Taxes Will End Badly,

With all due resepct to Mark, I'm on team Dominic. Both pieces are well worth your perusal, but here's Dominic's takeaway from the chart:

I'll take a "moderate" stance: Certainly Uncle Stupid has not shown himself to be a responsible steward of the 17-18% of GDP he's getting now. Maybe he should demonstrate that before demanding more.

Also of note:

• Cut 'em off at the past. Matthew Hennesey cheers: Planned Parenthood Gets Cut Off. (WSJ gifted link)

  Yes, one surviving benefit of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act is the defunding of the abortion mill.

  For all the beauty of the one big bill, the reaction to the abortion-funding provision is bound to get ugly. It’s the nature of the beast. The president of Planned Parenthood Affiliates of California called it “nothing short of cruelty for cruelty’s sake.” Planned Parenthood president and CEO Alexis McGill Johnson is claiming in interviews that the new law will be “devastating” for patients who live in what she calls “maternity healthcare deserts.”

  None of that adds up. Planned Parenthood’s defenders insist that abortion is only a small part of what the organization does. They claim its core business is providing poor women in underserved areas with access to cancer screenings, mental-health counseling and birth control. If that’s the case, and so much vital healthcare provision is at stake, why get so worked up about the abortions? Why not let the controversial aspect of the business go and keep doing the Lord’s work?

  Because the vital healthcare claim is hogwash, and everyone knows it. Killing babies is what Planned Parenthood does, to the tune of 400,000 a year. Abortion—not pap tests or mental health—is the reason for its existence. Take that away and Planned Parenthood is nothing more than a glorified school nurse’s office.

  Matthew's column was written before a federal judge in Massachusetts demanded that Planned Parenthood funding be restored, in defiance of the legislation. We'll see how that works out.

  (Classic headline reference.)

• Or, put another way: "There are no solutions, only trade-offs." Kevin D. Williamson describes What ‘Clear but False’ Ideas Get Wrong About Policy.

  “Winning the fight against hunger starts here,” reads the notice at a local restaurant, advertising a campaign against food waste. This is an example of something that Jonah Goldberg talks about from time to time, citing the political scientist Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn: the “clear but false idea.” It makes superficial sense: If there were less waste, there would be more food available to eat, which would make it easier to feed hungry people. That’s the idea, anyway.

  The truth is that waste makes food less expensive rather than more expensive. The optimal amount of food waste in a restaurant or a grocery store is not zero, which may seem counterintuitive until you consider the fact that it costs money to reduce waste: You have reached the optimal amount of waste when the cost of preventing $1 in waste equals $1. The people who run Whole Foods and McDonald’s and Starbucks are logistically sophisticated, and they keep a hard eye on expenses—their goal is not to end waste for the sake of ending waste, but to reduce waste to the extent that doing so makes good business sense. The kind of enormously sophisticated, detailed planning and extremely precise execution necessary to radically reduce food waste in a restaurant chain would be very, very expensive. Eliminating waste would be—perverse though it may seem—wasteful.

  To reiterate a frequent theme of mine: Serious policy discussions are generally focused on things such as tradeoffs, incentives, and transaction costs; unserious policy discussions are almost always moralistic. The anti-waste stuff is moralistic in a classically American and puritanical way—as Benjamin Franklin wrote: “All things are cheap to the saving, dear to the wasteful.” As with a great many things that the witty Founding Father wrote and said about a great many subjects, that is persuasive, clear, and false. It is a moral sentiment masquerading as an economic observation. 

  Here's an idea: vote against any politician who claims their "solution" to some social ill will make you (or your children!) "safe".

• I think it's going to rain today. Jeff Maurer predicts: There’s a 110 Percent Chance That Our Discomfort With Statistics Is Costing Us. He quotes Nick Silver: "For years, when the Weather Channel said there was a 20 percent chance of rain, it actually rained only about 5 percent of the time."

  Basically: If there’s a five percent chance of rain, the Weather Channel will say there’s a 20 percent chance. And that’s because if they say “five percent,” people hear “There is no chance of rain whatsoever today. If you’re planning a picnic for the Suede Lovers of America, or hauling a bunch of sugar cubes in a pickup, today’s the day, because it won’t rain and if I’m wrong you can come to my house and kick me in the face.” The Weather Channel says “twenty percent” just so that you won’t yell at them if your sugar cube-hauling plans go awry.

  There’s no doubt about it: Many people don’t really understand probability. The conversation around every baseball team is a monsoon of probability ignorance despite the fact that baseball has been a stats-based game since back when the bat was a Civil War soldier’s amputated leg. Las Vegas is a city of modern-day palaces built on the misconceptions of people who look at the grandeur and think “Uh-hilk! I’ll bet they built this by giving out big paydays to people like me!” Every multiplayer board game should be called “Who Can Most Effectively Exploit The Simpleton?” Many people understand basic concepts like uncertainty and small sample size, but a shocking number don’t, and I think that catering to the people who don’t is making it hard to get accurate information.

  The trade-off here is pretty obvious. As Herbie Spencer said long ago: “The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly is to fill the world with fools.”

• No sir, that's not my baby. I get the impression that James Pethokoukis has grown tired of the demographic doomsayers. He takes to AEI to make The Baby Bust Reality Check.

  Every challenge isn’t a crisis. Nor does every challenge have a ready-to-go, five-point policy agenda — or any solution at all.

  So maybe it’s time to dial back the emerging panic about falling fertility. True, birth rates have collapsed across rich nations. South Korea manages around one child per woman, while Japan, Italy, Canada, and Greece hover around 1.5. This demographic reality is prompting politicians to throw money at the problem through costly natalist schemes. Yet empirical evidence suggests the demographic apocalypse narrative may be overblown.

  Modern adults increasingly view kids as competing with career ambitions and personal fulfillment rather than central to adult life. Anyone doomscrolling on TikTok knows that social media amplifies “intensive parenting” expectations, making child-rearing seem prohibitively daunting, both emotionally and financially. As such, most policies merely shift birth timing rather than increasing lifetime fertility. For example: A 30-year-old might claim a baby bonus but still end up with fewer children overall.

  Japan's population peaked back in 2010. They're dealing OK with it.

• "Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent." Isaac Asimov had one of his Foundation characters say that. I was never enough of a peacenik to buy that totally, but recently every day seems to bring fresh illustrations of his point. Jonathan Turley writes: “Have You Tried Gasoline?”: Democrats Admit Followers are Embracing Violent Rhetoric.

  “What we really need to do is be willing to get shot.” Those words to a Democratic member are part of a chilling Axios story on the rising violent rhetoric on the American left. As alleged Antifa members are arrested in Texas for the attempted murder of ICE agents, Democratic members are beginning to express private concerns over unleashing uncontrollable rage after their election defeat.

  Axios reported on conversations with Democratic members who admit that followers are turning to violence and rejecting messages of political reform.

  One House member explained that there is a “sense of fear and despair and anger” among voters that “puts us in a different position where … we can’t keep following norms of decorum.” The member does not address how Democratic leaders are fueling the rising violent rhetoric and imagery (including the most recent posted picture of House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D., N.Y.) brandishing a baseball bat).

  One House Democrat told Axios, “Some of them have suggested … what we really need to do is be willing to get shot.”

  I suppose the "House Democrat" was too politic to just respond: "You first."

America doesn't need more leadership, it needs less followership

— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) July 6, 2025

Nine words of wisdom right there. And as Bob Dylan might (even now) add: "Watch the parkin’ meters."

Also of note:

• 

  Brush up on your Newspeak. Jim Geraghty notes the latest word from the Trump Administrataion: We have always been at war with Eastasia, and There Is No Jeffrey Epstein ‘Client List’. Back in February, Fox News' John Roberts' interview with Attorney General Pam Bondi:

  Anchor John Roberts: The DOJ may be releasing the list of Jeffrey Epstein’s clients?

  Attorney General Bondi: It’s sitting on my desk right now to review. That’s been a directive by President Trump. I’m reviewing that, I’m reviewing JFK files, MLK files, That’s all in the process of being reviewed, because that was done at the directive of the president from all of these agencies.

  And now it seems that was bullshit. Jim goes on to then-and-now quote Dan Bongino similarly. (Then: loudmouth podcaster; Now: FBI Deputy Director.) Bottom line:

  We have a lot of people in our government who lie, and who don’t really think there’s anything all that wrong about lying. They don’t think it’s wrong to lie about sexual abuse. They don’t think it’s wrong to claim to have seen evidence that they didn’t see and that apparently never existed. They don’t see any contradiction in making media appearances for years, making accusations of the most salacious and notorious crimes, and then, once they’re in a position of power and authority to bring criminal charges, shrugging their shoulders and announcing that there’s no evidence.

  They think you will be just fine with all of this.

  And when you object, they will claim you don’t appreciate their hard work and sacrifice.

  It might be a good time to review (or re-view) Harry Frankfurt's classic book. Amazon link above and to your right,

• Accompanied, as usual, with much signaling of virtue. Jack Butler is not impressed: The Left’s Rediscovery of the Founding Is Opportunistic and Shallow. (NR gifted link)

  The Fourth of July weekend is an especially fitting time for patriotic displays. It is meant to celebrate the nation’s Founding and its principles on the anniversary of the occasion of its self-declared separation from England. Ostensibly animated by this spirit, many on the left have spent the past few days protesting Donald Trump’s actions as president on the basis that we have “no kings” in this country, echoing similar protests just a few weeks ago.

  That they are doing so nearly 250 years after the Declaration of Independence shows the endurance of the Founding era as an essential part of our politics. The left is welcome to attempt to invoke it. But the nature of this attempt, weighed against both immediate and more distant history, makes it awfully convenient — and fundamentally flawed.

  There has been a certain whiplash in the left’s treatment of the trappings of patriotism. Now, some on the left are embracing Revolutionary garb. In the American Prospect earlier this year, Harold Meyerson called for protesters embracing the Founding to protest Trump to “have some fifes and drums, some three-cornered hats.” For true fealty to our “patriotic heritage,” they could perhaps add “some burnings in effigy, that sort of thing.” When the Tea Party embraced such trappings, however, it met accusations of racism from the left. The NAACP condemned “its drive to push our country back to the pre-civil rights era.” And I’ve straight-up lost track of whether patriotic flags are acceptable.

  To put it mildly: don't believe 'em.

• The right time to listen to politicians after natural disasters is "never". Roger Pielke Jr., however, is not a politician, so check out his take on the latest horror: The Texas Flash Floods.

  Before getting to relevant data and research, my view — This tragedy occurred in a location that has among the greatest risks in the nation of flash flooding, where kids in summer camps have previously been swept away to their deaths, and where warning systems are (apparently and incredibly) not in place. This tragedy never should have happened and it should never happen again.

  Among other things, Roger shares an Accuweather graphic from 2022 calling the area "Flash Flood Alley".

• Following in the moccasin-shod footsteps of Elizabeth Warren. Robby Soave points out Colleges created a diversity box-ticking game—Zohran Mamdani just played it.

  Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic Party's newly minted candidate to be the next mayor of New York City, found himself in some hot water last week after The New York Times reported that he claimed to be both "Asian" and "Black or African American" on his college application to Columbia University in 2009.

  Mamdani holds U.S. citizenship, but was born in Uganda to Indian parents. He is African, and he is American, but he is definitely not black, which is what the term "African American" implies.

  The news prompted criticism of Mamdani from some black New Yorkers, including incumbent Mayor Eric Adams, who is actually black, and who is running for re-election as an independent. "The African American identity is not a checkbox of convenience," he declared in a statement. "It's a history, a struggle and a lived experience. For someone to exploit that for personal gain is deeply offensive."

  By personal gain, Adams means Columbia University's race-conscious admissions policies, which awarded preferential treatment to certain applicants on the basis of race. Or, in plain English, the university discriminated in favor of prospective students who were black, Hispanic, or Native American. Checking the "Black or African American" box would have earned Mamdani extra points toward admission at the time. (Mamdani ultimately failed to gain admission.)

  I endorse Robby's conclusion: "If you want to be mad at someone, be mad at colleges that incentivize applicants to be misleading about their skin pigmentation because false value is assigned to it."

Jacob Sullum is not one of those cheering: By Settling Trump's Laughable Lawsuit Against CBS, Paramount Strikes a Blow at Freedom of the Press

That should worry anyone who values liberty, of course. David R. Henderson notes that old Buffalo Springfield lyric applies too well.

And Kruiser is, unfortunately, not a lone voice.

Look: there's no question in my mind that CBS fiddled with its interview to try to make Kamala appear less of a word-salad nitwit than she was. That's reprehensible, but it shouldn't be illegal.

But it doesn't seem that long ago that it was the lefties griping about "misinformation" and "disinformation", threatening government action against perpetrators and facilitators.

Gee, come to think of it, we haven't heard much from Nina Jankowicz lately. The last update from her "American Sunlight Project" is three months old. Did the "disinformation" problem go away?

Also of note:

• Another LTE zinger in the WSJ. It's from Cliff Asness and Michael Mendelson, reacting to the Zohran's recent eliminationist rhetoric: "I don't think we should have billionaires."

  First, we aren’t too comfortable with anyone saying that “we shouldn’t have” a class of people. The young assemblyman merely wants to tax these scoundrels into oblivion, not something worse, though it’s easy to be confused about the intentions of the guy who seems OK with globalizing the intifada.

  We have substantial inequality in this country. But it’s also true that on many broad-based economic indicators, the U.S. is doing wonderfully, regardless of what populists on either end of the horseshoe say. Unless you can claim that “billionaires” have made their money in underhanded ways—or ignore that they already pay a large tax burden, on which the city relies—where does he get off saying this? We could list the incredible innovations brought to you by companies founded by billionaires—who didn’t start out that way—but you’re likely familiar with the litany.

  Instead of slogans that attack a class he finds it politically expedient to savage, perhaps Mr. Mamdani should focus on his own policies. Doubling down on rent control that economists, near ubiquitously and across political divides, say has destroyed every city it has touched. Coming for low-margin bodegas with city-run grocery stores. Wanting to seize “the means of production,” because, you know, real communism has never been tried. Such disastrous policies always hurt the poor, who mainly didn’t vote for him, more than the rich, who did.

  We are tempted to end by saying, with considerably more evidence than Mr. Mamdani, that “we shouldn’t have socialists.” The country would be better off without such noxious and destructive ideas. But unlike him, we know we don’t get to decide who exists and who doesn’t.

  I wonder who will get the guillotine franchise in NYC when the Zohran assumes power?

• Another Zohran-related article. Well, incidentally. Jonathan Turley is (I think) amused: New York Times Struggles to Explain Why It Reported News to Traumatized Readers.

  This week, the New York Times experienced an uprising in its ranks and among its readers. The paper was denounced by its own staff and liberal pundits called for the entire editorial staff to be canned. Why? Because The New York Times actually reported news that was deemed harmful to the Democrats, specifically Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani. The newspaper took the additional step of publishing a cringing explanation of why it reported the news that Mamdani lied on his Columbia application in claiming to be black.For liberals, it was an utter nightmare. For a party still defined by identity politics, Mamdani’s false claim over his race left many uncertain about how to react.The left has always maintained a high degree of tolerance for false claims by its own leaders, from Sen. Elizabeth Warren claiming to be a native American to Sen. Richard Blumenthal claiming to have served in the Vietnam War.

  The problem is when a news eco-chamber for many readers is shattered by an errant outbreak of journalism. Many Times readers live within a hermetically sealed news silo, relying on MSNBC for cable, The New York Times for print, and BlueSky for social media. You can literally go all day without being exposed to an opposing view or fact. Then suddenly this happens.

  The result is often anger. It is the same response many in higher education have to “triggering” views being expressed on campus by conservative or libertarian speakers.

  It's really a thing. I'm reminded of this incident from a few months back, where a Peterborough (NH) citizen named "Elizabeth" excoriated her Democrat state rep, Jonah Wheeler, for voting Incorrectly on a transgender issue:

  “I think you know your constituents,” she said. “I believe that you do. Why did you vote in a manner that would upset us?”

  And, gee, why am I getting a Glenn-Close-in-Fatal-Attraction vibe here?

• On the Chanda watch. Since she departed Twitter for Blue Sky, I seldom encounter the thoughts of Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, physics prof at the University Near Here. But sometimes she draws the attention of the Collge Fix, like today: ‘Queer agender’ physicist: Non-binary folks grasp part of quantum mechanics better.

  The “queer agender” University of New Hampshire physicist who argued “white empiricism” creates “barriers” for black women entering STEM fields recently claimed that non-binary folks grasp an aspect of quantum mechanics better than others.

  At the July 4 Socialism 2025 Conference session titled “Reclaiming the Future: Outer Space as a Site of Organizing and Imagination,” Chanda Prescod-Weinstein said “There are good arguments for why, for example, non-binary people find wave-particle duality very straightforward.”

  Uh huh. Wave-particle duality is just one aspect of quantum weirdness, and I will resurrect this old Feynman quote from one of his lectures aimed at civilians:

  What I am going to tell you about is what we teach our physics students in the third or fourth year of graduate school—and you think I'm going to explain it to you so you can understand it? No, you're not going to be able to understand it. Why, then, and I going to bother you with all this? Why are you going to sit here all this time, when you won't be able to understand what I'm going to say? It is my task to convince you not to turn away because you don't understand it. You see, my physics students don't understand it either. That is because I don't understand it. Nobody does.

  I don't know if Feynman was hobbled in his quantum understanding by his binary sexuality. I'd like to see the evidence.

• Crossing this off my "wanna see" list. Philip Greenspun escaped the Idaho heat in a movie theater, and provides an Elio Movie Review.

  All of the good humans in the movie are Latinx and/or Black. The senior military officers are Latinx and female. The military base is Latinx (“Montez Air Force Base” in a city called “Montez”). The big bad bully kid is… white male.

  Well, shoot. I guess I'll wait for live-action Up. Where is it, Disney?

Jay Nordlinger describes ‘The Varied Carols I Hear’.

And many more. Jay's lucky. Because, more often than I would like, what I get stuck in my head is something like…

Peter Pan, the hot dog
And the hamburger bun.
You'll never have a better
Or a tastier one.

Or…

Look what we did.
Look what we did.
Look what we went and did.
We put a brand new label
On the same great product.
At Roberts Dairyland, Roberts Dairyland,
Where all great milk products come from

I may not have the lyrics exactly right, but what do you want after sixty-some years?

But anyway, what I really wanted to point out about Jay's wonderfully meandering column was:

Yes. One of my major problems with (say) the 1619 Project or (worse) the Zinn Education Project, besides the obvious leftist bias, is their "warts only" approach to history.

It's a story, sure. But it's far from the whole story.

Let me repost a quote from Michael Huemer's substack article Can Teaching the Truth Be Racist?

I'm sure you have already answered Michael's question, but you can click through to see his answer.

Also of note:

• And that's a good thing. A letter in the WSJ adds on to the op-ed I mentioned the other day. Max Raskin tells us Why We Should Thank Friedrich Hayek for AI.

  Gary Saul Morson and Julio M. Ottino are right that Friedrich Hayek would likely be skeptical of the use of artificial intelligence for centrally planning an economy (“What Would Hayek Think of AI?,” op-ed, July 1). But they miss an opportunity to point out the overlooked role the economist’s thought played in the development of neural networks and, therefore, the modern AI revolution. Hayek considered his contribution central to his thought and was disappointed that his psychological theories didn’t receive wider attention.

  In “The Sensory Order” (1952), he proposed a theory of mind that relies on neurons firing and wiring together in response to external stimuli. A deterministic explanation of how those wirings form a beautiful mind is an inscrutable mystery, but instead of trying to understand it, the founders of modern AI took Hayek’s model as a given and started firing artificial neurons together. His work was cited by Frank Rosenblatt, who created the world’s first neural network, and was also an inspiration to Jimmy Wales, who co-founded Wikipedia.

  What would Hayek think of the technology? Among many things, that people should give him more credit for it. After all, we’re living in his world.

  I've started following Max on Twitter, because in plugging his LTE, he comments:

  Most people think The Sensory Order was written by his cousin Salma. But it wasn't.

• It's an Ism like no other. Francis Menton makes a point I'll try to keep in mind: Its Defenders Need To Understand That "Capitalism" Is Not An "Ism"

  Think about it. In every instance other than the word “capitalism,” the suffix “ism” is used to designate something as a system of beliefs. The implication of the “ism” suffix is that there are adherents who have adopted these beliefs, and who think that these beliefs are the correct and moral ones that should be adopted by everybody. Such, they think, is the way to a better world. Thus religions are clearly all “isms”: Catholicism, Protestantism, Mohammedism, Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, even Paganism. In the political realm, most any organized system of beliefs with advocates on its behalf gets the “ism” suffix: not just socialism and communism, but fascism, anarchism, liberalism, conservatism, environmentalism, and plenty more. Even sets of policy prescriptions associated with a particular politician can become an “ism”: think Reaganism, Obamaism, or Trumpism.

  But “capitalism”? It’s just a fundamentally different thing. Capitalism is not a belief system. Nobody “believes” in capitalism per se. The word “capitalism” is better understood as a descriptive term for the natural order that arises in the presence of private property and free exchange. The natural order is full of warts and flaws, as are all human institutions. The combination of private property and free exchange could perhaps make a good case for being designated an “ism,” but it turns out that we don’t have that concept in a single word.

• "I would like… to feed your fingertips… to the wolverines." At Liberty Unyielding, Hans Bader has news you probably can't use: Wolverines make a comeback in Finland.

  Wolverines are making a comeback in southern Finland, where they were wiped out in the 19th century.

  (Classic headline reference you probably don't need.)

I think the MSM has run short on synonyms to describe government agencies getting less than they think they deserve.

But more needs to be done, my friends, because…

Dominic Pino has some wise words for Independence Weekend: Americans Must Declare Independence from the Federal Retirement State. (NR gifted link)

Well, we know the story. Especially because I keep tiresomely harping on it. Skipping down to Dominic's bottom line:

Americans shouldn’t look to the government for sustenance at any stage of life. Voters should want to declare their independence from the federal retirement state on their own terms, before a fiscal crisis forces the issue, and politicians should want to restore to the people the power over their own personal finances. Yet in this supposedly populist age, the elites continue to lie about entitlements with, so far, no political consequences from the voters.

I know my state keeps electing the same liars, telling the same lies, every few years.

Also of note:

• A worthy debate. Skeptic hosts one about the future of America. First up is Mark Skousen, making The Case for a Free & Prosperous Society.

  In July 1778, during the American War of Independence from Great Britain, then-American ambassador Benjamin Franklin received a letter from a British official using the alias Charles de Weissenstein, hopeful that he would agree to begin negotiations for a peace settlement.

  Franklin wrote a lengthy reply but never sent the letter, stating, “Your Parliament never had the right to govern us, and your King has forfeited that right through his bloody tyranny.” Full independence was Franklin’s goal, but he took the time to outline his philosophy of an “independent state.” He wrote, “We purpose, if possible, to live in peace with all mankind.” He saw no need for “fleets or standing armies,” believing that “our militias … are sufficient to defend our lands from invasion.” Franklin argued there was no need to expand beyond a “small civil government” with “no offices of profit, nor any sinecures or useless appointments, so common in ancient and corrupted states.” He concluded, “We can govern ourselves for a year with the sums you pay in a single department,” summing up the role of the state in one sentence: 

  A virtuous and laborious [industrious] people may be cheaply governed.

  Today’s federal government is a far cry from Franklin’s vision of a laissez-faire state. As Thomas Jefferson presciently observed, “The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield, and government to gain ground.”

  Mark makes an urgent recommendation to start moving back toward Ben's vision. It's not impossible. But my inner cynic adds "… also not likely."

• But there's a counterpoint. And you probably wouldn't be permanently brain-damaged by reading The Case for Democratic Socialism. from Ben Burgis, a columnist from the real-deal socialist magazine, Jacobin. You know, named after the famed fans of the guillotine.

  The United States has long been one of the most antisocialist nations in the developed world. Socialist parties have been elected to power in many countries over the course of the last century. This happened several times even in the United Kingdom, a nation linked to the U.S. by history, cultural affinity, and a diplomatic special relationship. While the UK’s Labour Party has long since drifted to the political center, when it first became one of the country’s major parties, Clause IV of its constitution, drafted by Sidney and Beatrice Webb in November 1917 and adopted by the party in 1918, committed the party to:

  Secure for the workers by hand or by brain the full fruits of their industry and the most equitable distribution thereof that may be possible upon the basis of the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange, and the best obtainable system of popular administration and control of each industry or service.

  No political force with similar goals has ever been a major part of American politics.

  You can probably guess where my sympathies lie. But (as if I needed to tell you) judge for yourself.

• Oh, and just a reminder. It's from Miranda Devine at the NYPost, passing along the latest from the CIA: Obama’s Trump-Russia collusion report was corrupt from start. Reporting on the early DC fireworks:

  A bombshell new CIA review of the Obama administration’s spy agencies’ assessment that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election to help Donald Trump was deliberately corrupted by then-CIA Director John Brennan, FBI Director James Comey and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, who were “excessively involved” in its drafting, and rushed its completion in a “chaotic,” “atypical” and “markedly unconventional” process that raised questions of a “potential political motive.” 

  Further, Brennan’s decision to include the discredited Steele dossier, over the objections of the CIA’s most senior Russia experts, “undermined the credibility” of the assessment.

  Of course, you should be open to the possibility that under President Newsom in 2029, another "review" will come down the pike saying this one was full of beans, the Comey/Brennan/Clapper stuff was totally cool, and…