Pun Salad

• Okay, Alex Berenson isn't my cup of tea. But that doesn't make this OK, as described by Vivek Ramaswamy and Jed Rubenfeld: Twitter Becomes a Tool of Government Censorship.

  Alex Berenson is back on Twitter after being banned for nearly a year over Covid-19 “misinformation.” Last week the former New York Times reporter settled his lawsuit against the social-media company, which admitted error and restored his account. “The First Amendment does not apply to private companies like Twitter,” Mr. Berenson wrote last week on Substack. But because the Biden administration brought pressure to bear on Twitter, he believes he has a case that his constitutional rights were violated. He’s right.

  In January 2021 we argued on these pages that tech companies should be treated as state actors under existing legal doctrines when they censor constitutionally protected speech in response to governmental threats and inducements. The Biden administration appears to have taken our warning calls as a how-to guide for effectuating political censorship through the private sector. And it’s worse than we feared.

  This should be, and I am not kidding, an impeachable offense.

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• A funny article with which I mostly disagree. Jeff Maurer is a former writer for some news/comedy show I don't watch, and never have watched. He brings written irreverence to energy policy: Green Energy Subsidies Are the Future!!! (Will They Work, Though?). Beware: colorful and vulgar language.

  The debate, in its most dumbed-down form (which is all this blog offers), is sometimes framed as a “push” versus a “pull”. That is: Do you push green technology by offering incentives like subsidies for things like lean energy, or do you pull people kicking and screaming into a green future by punishing pollution with things like a carbon tax?

  I’ve long thought that a pull would be more effective than a push. Most economists feel the same way (perhaps to a fault). This is basically because attaching a price to carbon creates an incentive to reduce emissions any way you can. On the other hand, “pushing” green technology is great for that technology but neglects everything else.

  The problem, as always, is politics. Carbon taxes are roughly as popular as pubic lice. Even in deep blue jurisdictions — places where “IN THIS HOUSE WE BELIEVE” signs dot every lawn and products from radial tires to band saws are billed as “organic” — carbon taxes can’t win popular support. This has caused policymakers to wonder what else might work, and the “what else” turns out to be basically locking the green tech industry in a cash-grab booth for the next several years and hoping for the best.

  I'm pretty much in the Lomborg/Koonin climate non-panic camp, but it's nice to read something out of my confort zone that's amusing and takes its own side critically. Maurer makes some claims about the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act spurring an upsurge in renewable energy innovation, as measured by patents granted; I'd like to see if that can be debunked.

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• The first step is admitting your powerlessness in managing your addiction. Veronique de Rugy doesn't think the CDC's 11-step program is gonna work: CDC Admits Dysfunction But Misses Big Problems.

  CDC director Rochelle Walensky went all out in discussing her agency’s terrible handling of the coronavirus pandemic and the resulting need to overhaul that bureaucracy. At least that’s what she thinks and what the media happily report. The problem is that, while there is a lot of truth in what Walensky said, she omitted the CDC’s most blatant failures and the role that she played in these disasters. These failures, to be specific, are the CDC’s excessive caution, its misguided use of studies to impose its excessive risk aversion on all Americans, and the influence it exercised to keep schools closed (and, when they opened, to keep the kids masked and scared).

  The CDC’s oversized risk aversion manifested itself in many ways, but the most obvious one was its eagerness to continue to recommend mask wearing late into the pandemic, which was especially harmful for children. The CDC loves mask wearing so much that it even issued a guidance suggesting that mask-wearing by travelers can help protect against “many diseases, including monkeypox.” This particular recommendation was laughed out of the room so fast that after a mere 18 hours the CDC removed the guidance. This little fact matters, since politicians with a taste for mandates remain eager to use CDC guidelines to justify their intrusive actions.

  I can not see Dr. Walensky on TV or in print without murmuring "Rochelle, Rochelle".

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• Using a gambling analogy… and expanding his analysis to include Dr. Fauci, John Tierney at the WSJ: Fauci and Walensky Double Down on Failed Covid Response.

  The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention belatedly admitted failure this week. “For 75 years, CDC and public health have been preparing for Covid-19, and in our big moment, our performance did not reliably meet expectations,” Director Rochelle Walensky said. She vowed to establish an “action-oriented culture.”

  Lockdowns and mask mandates were the most radical experiment in the history of public health, but Dr. Walensky isn’t alone in thinking they failed because they didn’t go far enough. Anthony Fauci, chief medical adviser to the president, recently said there should have been “much, much more stringent restrictions” early in the pandemic. The World Health Organization is revising its official guidance to call for stricter lockdown measures in the next pandemic, and it is even seeking a new treaty that would compel nations to adopt them. The World Economic Forum hails the Covid lockdowns as the model for a “Great Reset” empowering technocrats to dictate policies world-wide.

  Yet these oppressive measures were taken against the longstanding advice of public-health experts, who warned that they would lead to catastrophe and were proved right. For all the talk from officials like Dr. Fauci about following “the science,” these leaders ignored decades of research—as well as fresh data from the pandemic—when they set strict Covid regulations. The burden of proof was on them to justify their dangerous experiment, yet they failed to conduct rigorous analyses, preferring to tout badly flawed studies while refusing to confront obvious evidence of the policies’ failure.

  Neither Vero nor John mention the word "Trump". Apparently all this dysfunction happened under nobody's presidential watch.

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• Ridin' that train… The Fox station in Denver reports: Colorado is the nation's cocaine use capital.

  The United States saw a 15% increase in drug overdose deaths, according to the most recent provisional figures from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In 2021, there were 107,622 overdose deaths, up from 93,655 in the previous year.

  Colorado State Patrol has seized records amounts of drugs this year and in 2021. At least one statistic points to higher-than-average drug use in the Centennial State. Colorado is the most cocaine-using state in the union, according to survey data from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Service Administration.

  Well. The precise stat the TV station reports is the percentage of people 12-years-and-up who have used cocaine in the past year. And that's 2.24% for Colorado.

  The funny thing about that is the three significant digits of precision.

  The other funny thing is the reported statistic for the second-place state, New Hampshire. And that number is 2.23%.

  Yes, we're only behind Colorado by 0.01 percentage point.

So back in June, Kevin D. Williamson wrote a National Review Corner post, "Infantilization", which began:

I know this is an old and familiar observation, but it is worth reminding ourselves: There is a theme that runs through a great deal of progressive thinking, from gun control to student-loan giveaways to speech codes and safe spaces and the universal basic income, and that theme is — infantilization. The Left wants a government that will treat you like a child, keep dangerous things out of your hands, put the other kids in time-out if they step out of line, and give you an allowance.

I don't often comment at NR post, but:

The corollary to infantilization is dependence. Progressives seem to see "progress" as making ever more swaths of people dependent on government. Think "Life of Julia" kicked up to 11.

Commenter "d3jo" replied to that:

Good point. I seem to recall a bald-headed writer putting out an entire tract on "The Dependency Agenda." It was pretty good, too.

Oops. I caught the gentle rebuke. My comment was like trying to teach physics to Feynman. So I bounced over to Amazon and bought the book for a cool $5.99.

Cheap, right? Well, the "book" is 43 small pages of largish print. Not much longer than a longish magazine article. Cost per word? I don't know, but pretty high, I bet.

But it's KDW, so I'd think it's still a bargain. He looks at the evolution of Federal Government handouts. (The government takes your money; gives some of it back to you in cash or "free" stuff; convinces you it has done you a favor.) Starting with FDR's Social Security, originally designed as a program to help out poor oldsters who had way outlived their life expectancy, now throwing cash at everyone who's made it to 67 or so.

But it took LBJ's "Great Society", specifically the "War on Poverty", to give us programs explicitly designed to make large swaths of American citizens dependent on transfer payments from the state. (Credibly alleged, but disputed, LBJ quote: "I'll have those [invidious term for members of a certain racial group] voting Democratic for 200 years.")

Not only the direct recipients of cash are made dependent; other (willing) dependents on state largesse are the armies of bureaucrats both in and out of government devoted to providing "services to the needy". Whose very careers would be endangered if those services actually worked to make people non-needy.

Jesus said we'd always have the poor with us. He probably saw this coming.

The book lacks footnotes, a shame. But I think KDW's usually quite meticulous in his reporting.

It would be nice if we could reverse things: let people keep more of their money, instead of getting "free" stuff that the government thinks they should have. Encourage private philanthropy, localism, and the like. Unfortunately, the nature of the titular agenda is to get its users hooked like addicts, and their "fix" is voting for continued dependence at the polls.

Through the vagaries of my book-picking process, I found myself reading this Joe Ide novel just a few days after I had read his attempt at a Philip Marlowe novel. (They were in different stacks.) <voice imitation="professor_farnsworth">Good news, everyone!</voice> Ide does a much better job with his own characters than he did with Raymond Chandler's.

This is the fourth novel in Ide's "IQ" series, with unlicensed private investigator Isaiah Quintabe. Isaiah is a neighborhood hero, with his superpower being his detecting skills. Just like Batman, with the downside that Isaiah is nowhere near rich enough to afford a costume, cave-equipped mansion, batmobile, batplane,…

But what he could really use is a secret identity. IQ's life is an open book, leaving him open to coercion by the local weapons merchant Angus. Angus's daughter Christiana is the likely suspect in the murder of her boyfriend Tyler, and Angus demands that Isaiah exonerate her. If not, he'll mutilate the hands of Isaiah's sorta-girlfriend, Stella.

Complicating matters is that Christiana has a bunch of personalities, none of whom seem to be able, or willing, to clarify the circumstances of the murder. The reader finds out pretty quickly who the actual murderers are, as eventually does Isaiah. But who hired them? Finding out is perilous, pitting Isaiah against a gang of murderous white supremacists.

Coming along for the ride are the surviving members of Isaiah's retinue from previous books: Grace, his true love; Dodson, his ne'er-do-well sorta-partner; TK, his junkyard-owning mentor; and many more.

If you've read the description of the fifth entry in this series, you know this one doesn't end in total victory for IQ. So maybe don't read that, or this paragraph.

I'm (apparently) a sucker for a good time-loop comedy movie starring a Saturday Night Live alumnus. This one isn't Groundhog Day, but what is? I still had a pretty good time. It went straight to Hulu last year. It's not the worst reason to subscribe to Hulu, either; they have other good stuff too.

Andy Samberg plays Nyles; as the movie opens, he's already been in the time loop for a long time, and is accustomed to the rules: he can't die, and breaking out is seemingly impossible. Instead of February in Punxsutawney, though, it's… well, you see the title. And it's a wedding! Nyles rescues Sarah (played by the saucer-eyed Cristin Milioti) from a disastrous reception speech, and they go off to canoodle, and … Nyles gets shot by an arrow aimed by a pissed-off Roy (J. K. Simmons!). For some reason, Nyles runs off to a glowing cave, Sarah follows against his advice, and she gets trapped in the loop as well. And in the next loop iteration, she's pissed off at Nyles too.

I had fun. That's all I ask. I'm pretty sure it wasn't as tightly plotted as Groundhog Day and not quite as funny.

It's slim pickings for comic actors these days, I guess. If you want to get depressed about that, Google is your friend.