Pun Salad

At the American Institute for Economic Research, William Ruger and Jason Sorens tell us about New Hampshire’s Lesson for America.

Conspicuous by its absence from the article: the word "marijuana".

(Not that it matters, but East Coast Cannabis is only about 15 minutes away from Pun Salad Manor. So New Hampshire's reluctance is a non-issue here.)

(Or it would be a non-issue if I were in the market, which I'm not.)

Also of note:

• But even in the LFOD state, there are limits on free speech. NH Journal has the sad tale of a guy who may have read the First Amendment too literally: No Bail for UNH Staffer Who Threatened Ramaswamy.

  Brought into court by federal agents and wearing the Strafford County House of Corrections’ inmate uniform, Tyler Anderson managed to stay quiet for Monday’s short hearing.

  If he had mastered that same self-control before he allegedly started threatening GOP politicians, Anderson might not have been in court at all.

  Anderson, 30, threatened to kill Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy at a campaign event planned for Monday morning, U.S. Attorney Jane E. Young said in a statement. And days before that threat, Anderson allegedly threatened a mass shooting at a different Republican presidential candidate’s events and made threats to multiple other candidates, according to court records.

  Tyler, as noted, is an employee of the Unversity Near Here, an "administrative assistant" in the "Natural Resources and the Environment" department. (As I type, his staff directory page is still working.) That department is part of COLSA, the College of Life Sciences and Agriculture, where Mrs. Salad used to teach. It is one of the more woke-soaked colleges. Can't help but wonder if Tyler had to write a "diversity statement" to get hired.

• Keep it clean, officer. John McWhorter says it true to the boys in blue: Cussing Cops Poison Race Relations.

  A recent documentary on the George Floyd incident includes body cam footage largely unseen by the American public until now. There are some important revelations in this footage that I suspect will enter national discussion gradually. What first struck me was that Officer Thomas Lane, who approached Floyd sitting in his car, addressed him with profanity (specifically, the word “fuck”) very freely. This is a problem endemic to the way cops in the United States speak to people they detain—it goes some way towards explaining what happened with Floyd, as well as countless other incidents—and it needs to be penalized.

  Floyd, likely because of the drugs in his system, was confused and anxious about what was happening and resisted putting his hands up. Lane’s response to this was to issue commands, twice using the word “fuck.” One has reason to assume that this is the way Lane addressed people regularly in cases of conflict and that he was not alone on the force in this.

  Sorry for the profanity, but I've decided to eliminate bowdlerization in quoted material.

  The documentary to which McWhorter links is "The Fall of Minneapolis", which I have not seen. But Jerry Coyne has, and he reports that he came away with the feeling that "at the very least George Floyd wasn’t obviously murdered by police." Which is actually pretty big, if true.

• People who say otherwise are trying to sell you a scary narrative. Wilfred Reilly looks at the stats, and comes away with some (relatively) good news about The Race War That Isn’t.

  Throughout modern internet culture, we often see snickering references to the idea that black people commit virtually all modern crime, and that a huge amount of this crime targets white people. The common phrases “13/52” and “13/60,” for example, are oblique references to the allegation that African Americans make up (X) percentage of the U.S. population but commit (Y) percentage of either murder or all violent crime. This sort of claim is hardly marginal: No less a giant of the modern Right than President Donald Trump once tweeted out a famous graphic asserting that, in the representative year of 2015, “whites killed by blacks” made up 81 percent of all white murder victims.

  The majority of stuff like this is not even in the same ballpark as the truth. The black homicide rate, specifically, is quite high. But, by most accounts, over 80 percent of the murderers of white Americans are themselves suntan-challenged, and the person most likely to kill you — “Cherchez la femme” — is your wife or husband. More broadly, there exists a national crime report (the “BJS-NCVS”) which comes out annually, and we can . . . just look at it to get a near-exact fix on totals, rates, and trends across all crimes nationally. Per this data, in 2018–19 (the last year to include Asian Americans as a distinct category, and a year during which white and Hispanic crime totals were reported separately), blacks made up “just” 21.7 percent of the offenders responsible for index violent crimes. This is, importantly, according to a victim-reported table subject to neither racial bias effects nor intentional under-reporting by the police.

  Periodic reminder: Statistics don't kill people. People kill people.

• This grates my cheese too. Gerard Baker chronicles some higher education, specifically: Higher Education’s Slide From ‘Veritas’ to ‘My Truth’. (Amusing subhed: "On free speech, university leaders suddenly sound like Voltaire. But they’ve long operated like Lenin.") It's a look at Harvard's President Gay's testimony and subsequent apology for that testimony. But this is the thing that really irritates Baker:

  Few phrases are as reliable as “my truth” for identifying seasoned purveyors of cant and doubletalk. Truth isn’t something that can be identified or modified by a possessive pronoun. If my truth is different from your truth and your truth is different from her truth, these aren’t truths. “My truth” is the device deployed to elevate the particular viewpoint of a member of a particular group or identity, by claiming the validation of the “truth” for a narrow ideological cause.

  And this is what we saw last week at that hearing—the narrow, exclusive intolerance of the ideology that has our universities in its grip.

  Certainly "my truth" deserves a spot on the "Academic Bullshit" bingo card.

Recently on the movie blog:

Julia Roberts has a great idea: arrange for a small vacay out on Long Island without telling her husband (Ethan Hawke) ahead of time. You'd think that would be a pretty good sitcom premise, but no, this is an end-of-the-world thriller. They're off to a very nice AirBnB house near the beach with their teenage son and preteen daughter.

Things start going a little off when (preview-level spoiler) their trip to the beach is interrupted by an oil tanker running aground right in front of them. And later, the house's owner, a black guy (Mahershala Ali), shows up at the doorstep with his daughter (Myha'la). At least that's what they claim. Julia's kind of suspicious about that.

Eventually, it becomes undeniable that something really bad is going on in the country. The Internet goes out, phones go out, the TV goes out, deer start acting funny,… power stays on, though. And, did I mention the Teslas? No? Good, that would have been a spoiler.

Everyone, including the kids, drop the f-word a lot.

It's way too long (two hours). The theme of heightened paranoia between countrymen is as subtle as that oil tanker running aground. (I blame the preview of that oil tanker for gulling me into watching the movie.)

And (oh yeah) there are unexpected names in the opening credits: executive producers Barack Obama and Michelle Obama. Apparently producing tedious movies is one of their gigs now.