Pun Salad

For the record: back in 2016, I noticed that I was getting kind of lackadaisical about blogging. So I made an early New Year's resolution to blog daily. For better or worse (your mileage may vary), it worked. Today completes the fifth year of daily Pun Salad posts. This is my 1826th post in that streak. (Fortunately, I know how to get my computer to count those up.) I have no plans to stop.

• Or any other Greek letter. From the reliably wonderful Mr. Ramirez

  "Didn't see that coming" will be a recurring theme over the next few years, I fear.

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• Well, that wasn't a true story. But someone did make it up. It's becoming a dog-bites-man story. Ed Morrissey of Hot Air reports: White House "clarification": Biden's story about Manchin admitting "misleading" him was false. Details at the link, but here's the more interesting part:

  It’s not as if the fact-check industry would have questioned Biden’s claim. With the exception of Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler (in 2020 for similar claims), none of the professionals of this guild have thus far bothered to even look at Biden’s absurd claim last week to have spent his young adulthood having “desegregated restaurants and movie theaters” during the Civil Rights movement. Not PolitiFact. Not FactCheck.org. Not Snopes either. It has been largely memory-holed as I predicted it would be, the same way most of Biden’s self-serving and bald-faced lies are, and the opposite of how the fact-check guild obsessed over Donald Trump’s self-serving presidential lies for four years.

  Which brings us to…

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• Yeah, well, you know, that's just like, uh, your opinion, man. A longtime New Hampshire blogger points out the Open letter from The British Medical Journal to Mark Zuckerberg. Key bits:

  In September, a former employee of Ventavia, a contract research company helping carry out the main Pfizer covid-19 vaccine trial, began providing The BMJ with dozens of internal company documents, photos, audio recordings, and emails. These materials revealed a host of poor clinical trial research practices occurring at Ventavia that could impact data integrity and patient safety. We also discovered that, despite receiving a direct complaint about these problems over a year ago, the FDA did not inspect Ventavia’s trial sites.

  The BMJ commissioned an investigative reporter to write up the story for our journal. The article was published on 2 November, following legal review, external peer review and subject to The BMJ’s usual high level editorial oversight and review.

  But from November 10, readers began reporting a variety of problems when trying to share our article. Some reported being unable to share it. Many others reported having their posts flagged with a warning about “Missing context … Independent fact-checkers say this information could mislead people.” Those trying to post the article were informed by Facebook that people who repeatedly share “false information” might have their posts moved lower in Facebook’s News Feed. Group administrators where the article was shared received messages from Facebook informing them that such posts were “partly false.”

  Readers were directed to a “fact check” performed by a Facebook contractor named Lead Stories.

  We find the “fact check” performed by Lead Stories to be inaccurate, incompetent and irresponsible.

  For the record, the "Lead Stories" folks respond here.

  And, of course: Classical reference in headline.

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• Can't be. We're not all dead. Kevin D. Williamson notes that The Long Run Is [finally] Here.

  Joe Biden and congressional Democrats are doing their best to make inflation worse by spending vast sums of money to reward key political supporters and to try to buy themselves some love before the midterms, currently looking like they will be a slaughter for their party. (The Republican polling advantage today is stronger than it has been in 40 years — Democrats should think about how much people must hate them to vote for the party of Marjorie Taylor Greene and Ivermectin junkies.) But the way you end inflation — the thing you end up doing once all the painless options have been tried and failed — is raising interest rates. You might remember that back in 2008, we raised interest rates a smidgen, which caused ridiculously inflated housing prices to come a little closer back to Earth — and sparked a worldwide economic emergency. Raising interest rates is going to play havoc on the cheap-credit model of selling houses, cars, and college educations, along with much else. And it could be very hard for the biggest debtor of all: the U.S. government, which already spends more than half a trillion dollars a year just on interest payments. We spent $522,767,299,265.34 on interest payments in 2020, with interest rates that were low by historical standards. If interest rates start to move back toward their historic average, that number could easily double or treble — or much worse.

  This is the predictable stuff. Nobody saw Covid-19 coming (though I suppose there is a reason we’ve had all those zombie movies and zombie television series for so many years — a kind of folk intuition, perhaps), but, this stuff, we see it coming. You can dick around with different economic models and debate sticky prices and the velocity of money and all that stuff, but that’s just Wile E. Coyote out there in the Arizona desert insisting that the anvil that’s about to fall on his head weighs only 100 pounds instead of 200 pounds. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders may insist that there is no anvil, but sensible people can foresee that the big heavy 50c-Rockwell anvil-shaped hunk of steel with “Acme Anvil Corp.” engraved on the side and hurtling toward our delicate little American skulls is probably — wild guess! — an anvil.

  Gold and silver prices have been pretty flat over the past year, so I'm not quite as pessimistic on inflation as is KDW. But I'm just guessing; he could be right.

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• "But waste was of the essence of the scheme." Robert Frost called it before Joe Lancaster: Biden To Spend $7.5 Billion on Chargers That Electric Car Owners Likely Won't Use.

  As part of its recently passed infrastructure bill, the Biden administration plans to spend $7.5 billion building 500,000 chargers for electric vehicles. But will drivers actually want to use those chargers?

  The two biggest impediments to the widespread adoption of electric vehicles are the vehicles' range and their upfront cost. Right now there are only five varieties of electric vehicles with a range of more than 350 miles per charge, and none of them retail for a base price of less than $47,000. And while the Build Back Better Act passed by the House last month contains tax rebates for new electric vehicle purchases, none of the five qualify for the full amount. For comparison, a base model Ford Focus costs considerably less and can go further on a full tank of gas.

  Hey, does anyone remember the good old USSR and its Five-year plans? Joe Biden does!