Pun Salad

NEW: Trump aides pledge a "holy war" on Taylor Swift as the former president privately grouses that he's "more popular" than her

🔗https://t.co/UtY2Z7Rjv5https://t.co/UtY2Z7Rjv5

— Noah Shachtman (@NoahShachtman) January 30, 2024

Noah Shachtman is the current Editor in Chief of Rolling Stone, and the link goes to a Rolling Stone article by reporters Adam Rawnsley and Asawin Suebsaeng. So there's a decent chance that the article is utter fantasy. But still, that's some pretty good eye candy right there.

For a more reliable look at the thing that I didn't even know was a thing, let's go to the pundit-formerly-known-as-Allah, Nick Catoggio at the Dispatch, where he muses on American Idols. And you might want to click over to see Ms. Swift in a less attractive pose than above:

Nick takes note of a tweet from a failed presidential candidate:

I wonder who’s going to win the Super Bowl next month. And I wonder if there’s a major presidential endorsement coming from an artificially culturally propped-up couple this fall. Just some wild speculation over here, let’s see how it ages over the next 8 months.

— Vivek Ramaswamy (@VivekGRamaswamy) January 29, 2024

OK, that's easy to dismiss, but…

Pundits gotta pundit, I guess. But the Babylon Bee had the best take, and (as usual) the entire joke is in the headline: Conservatives Uncover Democrat Plot To Turn Taylor Swift Into An International Pop Star And The Kansas City Chiefs Into A Dynasty So Swift Could Date A Chiefs Player And Leverage The Collective Media Coverage To Get Joe Biden Re-Elected.

I am still pretty sure I've never heard a Taylor Swift song.

I have no idea whether Amazon's proposed purchase of iRobot was a good idea, but they did put up some serious money for it. And people deciding how to spend their own money? I'm for that.

But anyway, it won't happen, and the pain started immediately, as reported by Ars Technica: Amazon’s $1.4B Roomba bid fails, leading to iRobot layoffs and CEO resignation.

"Fails"? This is kind of like a 1915 headline saying

In fact, the bid was torpedoed.

Well, darn. I'd kind of like a robot lawn mower.

But the EU wasn't the only one with its fingers on the "Fire" button, as reported by Joe Lancaster at Reason: iRobot Lays Off 350 Employees as Amazon Kills Merger Elizabeth Warren Opposed.

Hurrah! Competition is saved, thanks to Lina and Liz! Except that iRobot will have to "compete" in the future without those 350 employees and its CEO. And without any of that nasty innovation they were planning on.

The WSJ editorialists are even less impressed, and they make a point of asking: Cui bono?: Elizabeth Warren’s iRobot Gift to China.

There are no Chinese versions of Warren and Khan. They are smarter than that.

Also of note:

• "Help us, Nikki-Wan Haylobi. You're our only hope." George Will observes that Nikki Haley is the last candle fending off darkness. And she’s fired up. He is cautiously (GFW is always cautious) about Nikki's chance for a South Carolina upset:

  Calling herself a “happy warrior,” looking inexplicably rested and exuding an exuberant pugnacity, she is wagering that Trump cannot keep his composure for four weeks. And that a majority of voters, already embarrassed and exhausted by Trump, will be more so if he has a testosterone spill when she relentlessly needles him about being afraid to debate someone with two X chromosomes.

  President Biden’s handlers cannot allow him out campaigning for nine months because they know what voters will see. Trump’s operatives cannot know what he does not know: what he will say next. One of Haley’s tasks is to trigger him.

  I dunno. Trump has been saying some pretty wacky stuff of late, and his voters seem to not care.

• Big news: Taylor Swift is good for something. And Benjamin Seevers knows what that something is: Taylor Swift Shows Us Why We Need to Shake Off Intellectual Property.

  Taking on Taylor Swift, a recent documentary on CNN, tells the story of Sean Hall and Nathan Butler, a pair of songwriters for the early 2000s hip-hop group 3LW. Hall and Butler sued Taylor Swift in 2021 over Swift’s hit song “Shake It Off” for allegedly violating their copyright for the 3LW song “Playas Gon’ Play.” Hall and Butler allege that the phrases “haters gonna hate” and “playas gonna play” in Swift’s song are ripped straight from the 3LW song.

  This accusation is simply dishonest. The phrase “haters gonna hate” predates both of the songs and appears to have arisen spontaneously rather than having been coined by any particular person or group. The same could be said for “players gonna play.” Assuming that a copyright, a form of intellectual property (IP), is a legitimate form of property, Swift clearly did not “steal” these phrases because they were already common phrases at the time of the composition of both songs.

  One of the saddest, and truest, song lyrics is a Spinners oldie: "It takes a fool (yes sir) to learn that love don't love nobody". That should be in more songs.

  Not that it matters, but I don't think I've ever listened to a Taylor Swift song.

• An example of uncreative destruction… as described by the NR editors: Biden Policy on Natural Gas Exports Destructive.

  Rarely does a policy change make no sense on its own terms, contradict other policies of the same administration, and harm America’s domestic and foreign interests. But the Biden administration has managed to do all of that with its decision to stonewall approval of new liquefied-natural-gas export terminals.

  The White House statement on the decision begins with a high-school-freshman opening sentence (“In every corner of the country and the world, people are suffering the devastating toll of climate change”), and the quality of analysis doesn’t improve from there.

  It's boob bait for the bubbas, specifically the fossil-fuel haters.

… before more people will start recognizing this simple truth, as described by Jeff Jacoby: The swastika stands for evil and mass murder. So does the hammer and sickle. He notes the recent confluence of (1) the 100th anniversary of Lenin's death; and (2) International Holocaust Remembrance Day. I'd also guess he noticed the recent publicity about a few Nazi-related sites on Substack.

Jacoby notes five possible explanations for this odd behavior. But mass-murdering ideology is a mass-murdering ideology, no? So (as Jacoby notes) those explanations are not justifications.

Recently on the book blog:

Another book down on my reading project of reading all the previously-unread entries on the New York Times 2021 list of the best books of the past 125 years. This leaves me with only two left to go! I don't know if this John Irving tome (640 pages) would be on my list of best books, but I liked it OK.

As a personal bonus, it is mostly set in my corner of New Hampshire, with references to local towns: Durham, Newmarket, Hampton Beach, … with a fictionalized version of Exeter, which Irving dubs "Gravesend". The book's narrator is John Wheelwright. The book's first sentence:

I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice—not because of his voice, or because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother's death, but because he is the reason I believe in God; I am a Christian because of Owen Meany.

That's a pretty good grabber.

John relates his life, and Owen's, from a 1987 vantage point, starting with their childhood in Gravesend. Irving emphasizes Owen's "wrecked voice" putting his dialog in ALL CAPS. (Including his writing.) In 640 pages, there's a lot of room for a lot of stories about their activities, their families, their friends and enemies. And how John's mother died. But it mainly centers around Owen's certainty about his eventual destiny. And Irving doesn't get to revealing that until the very end.

Those stories are full of wry observations, humor, pathos, and (sorry) occasional death. (It kind of reminded me of Garrison Keillor's Lake Wobegon yarns, except for more death.) One amusing bit describes a wealthy town couple devoted to the idea of (what we now call) gender fluidity. In a nice touch, the wife is on the town library board and is an ardent book-banner—of any title she thinks might be advocating sexual stereotyping. Things change.

One minor irritation was John's occasional rants about 1987-current events. He despises Ronald Reagan, bemoans the Iran-Contra scandal. For this 2024 reader, that's more than slightly distracting. (That reminded me of Isaac Asimov's speculation in Robots and Empire that the 1979 Three Mile Island accident would have a major impact on future events.) There's also quite a bit about Vietnam, but that's at least relevant to Owen's story. However, it's clear that John has been deeply affected by Owen's life, and more than slightly damaged.

I'd like to see Mr. Ramirez do one with Wheezy as Scarlett O'Hara, saying "Fiddle-dee-dee! Debt crisis, debt crisis, debt crisis; this debt crisis talk's spoiling all the fun at every party this spring. I get so bored I could scream. Besides... there isn't going to be any debt crisis."

And as for our regular Sunday feature…

So the great winnowing seems to have occurred, with Nikki, Newsom, and RFKJr all dropping below our 2% threshold. Michelle's still hangin' in there, though. The rumors are rife! For example, the NY Post's Cindy Adams reported: Michelle Obama may already be working on a 2024 White House bid. Excerpt:

So that's a lot of speculation, but here's an actual assertion:

Mrs. Obama’s team has already sent a survey to heavy-duty donors asking how they’d feel about her as the candidate.

Oh oh. As they say: big, if true.

Also of note:

• Donald Boudreaux advises the candidates: Buying Votes With Your Own Money Is Illegal; Buying Votes With Other People's Money Is Good Politics. (It's a letter sent to the WSJ editors.)

  You report that “The Biden administration, eager to highlight a signature economic initiative as elections approach, is expected to award billions of dollars in subsidies to Intel, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., or TSMC, and other top semiconductor companies in coming weeks to help build new factories” (“Eager for Economic Wins, Biden to Announce Billions for Advanced Chips,” Jan. 27).

  Let’s rewrite this sentence so that it more accurately reveals reality:

  “The Biden campaign, eager to highlight a signature economic initiative as elections approach, is expected to buy votes by giving away taxpayer dollars to successful corporations in coming weeks to help bribe wealthy investors and CEOs as it simultaneously bamboozles voters into thinking that they are enriched when government forces resources into uses not justified by market signals.”

  It's that time of year when I recall my similar insight: The town's plow guy moves piles of snow from the street onto my driveway, and that's part of his job. Me throwing the snow from my driveway onto the street is illegal.

  Not that I'd want to actually do that.

• Who knew? Well, I did. But in case you didn't, the College Fix reports: Professors rip Haley’s, Ramaswamy’s ‘colorblindness’: gives credence to white supremacy. Examples:

  For Drew University’s Sangay Mishra […], it can’t be that Haley, Ramaswamy and other minority Republicans actually believe in colorblindness, but “how close [they can] take themselves to the idea of racial anxiety that [white conservative voters] are experiencing.”

  Haley and Ramaswamy “want to appear as somebody who is willing to be in defense of white dominance or white supremacy [and] to communicate that they are not too far from where Trump is in terms of invoking white racial anxiety and white racial resentment,” Mishra said.

  Mishra, whose specialties include “immigrant political incorporation, transnationalism, and racial and ethnic politics,” added that Haley noting how she and her parents overcame “racism and xenophobia” allows Republicans to believe their party is not racist.

  It's not new. From August 2020 in the WaPo, Frank J. Cirillo claimed: Colorblindness has become a conservative shield for racial inequality. Not mentioning Nikki or Ramaswamy, but…

  Time and again, President Trump and the Republican Party have invoked the idea of colorblindness to stifle meaningful reform proposals aimed at achieving racial equality. In July, Trump dismissed a reporter’s question about the vastly disproportionate rate at which African Americans are killed by police officers by noting that police kill White people, too. America, he is suggesting, is a post-racial society where racial injustice is an irrelevant and defunct issue, long since relegated to the past — and, by implication, where further action in that direction is no longer necessary.

  Yes, Trump too. In fact the entire GOP, the bastitches.

  Frankly, Frank: we've been immersed in non-colorblind "proposals aimed at achieving racial equality" for over fifty years. Maybe it's time to try something else.

Let me see… yup, still here:

When a country (USA) is losing many billions of dollars on trade with virtually every country it does business with, trade wars are good, and easy to win. Example, when we are down $100 billion with a certain country and they get cute, don’t trade anymore-we win big. It’s easy!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 2, 2018

This was the day after he imposed tariffs on imports of steel and aluminum. Coming up on six years ago.

Which makes this Reason story from yesterday relevant: Josh Hawley Thinks the White House Can Force an Aluminum Plant To Stay Open.

The article goes on to point out the connection between 2018 and today:

Just to review, the Tax Foundation did a study of the economic impact of those tariffs back in 2022: How the Section 232 Tariffs on Steel and Aluminum Harmed the Economy. The "key findings" are helpfully summarized:

Both Trump and Biden embraced this bad policy. Another reason to hope we have better choices in November.

Also of note:

• Maybe also hungry. And fatigued. And perhaps slightly nauseated. Evita Duffy-Alfonso has a prediction about recent green activity: Biden’s Natural Gas Shutdown Won’t Help The Environment, But It Will Make You Poor, Cold, And Miserable.

  The Biden Administration announced Friday that it’s putting a stop to the permitting process for several liquefied natural gas (LNG) export terminal projects in the name of climate change.

  In a joint statement, “the White House and Department of Energy (DOE) said the pause would occur while federal officials conduct a rigorous environmental review assessing the projects’ carbon emissions, which could take more than a year to complete,” reported Fox News.

• So I follow my favorite physics professor at the University Near Here on Twitter. And I couldn't resist responding to…

  I asked Feynman a physics question once. (Yes, I'm old.) He didn't make me feel stupid. I did that all on my own.

  — Paul Sand (@punsalad) January 25, 2024

  It's a true story, folks.

  The take-home lesson here is: nobody can make you feel stupid. Not even Feynman.

  (And in this particular case, it was a pretty stupid question, even for the undergrad I was at the time.)

One of Trump's Truth Social posts, reposted to Twitter:

Nikki “Birdbrain” Haley is very bad for the Republican Party and, indeed, our Country. Her False Statements, Derogatory Comments, and Humiliating Public Loss, is demeaning to True American Patriots. Her anger should be aimed at her Third Rate Political Consultants and, more…

— Donald J. Trump Posts From His Truth Social (@TrumpDailyPosts) January 25, 2024

I think the last part is cut off. Here 'tis, and I've added some bolding:

Permanently barred! From the MAGA camp! Give me a minute to regain my composure…

To make sure I was permanently barred, I took Nikki up on her recent offer, chipping into her campaign to get this bitchin' t-shirt:

And, at least for a while, clicking on the shirt will take you to page where you can be barred permanently too! If you are so inclined.

And just one more comment: in Trump's mind, "Put America First" is synonymous with "Put Trump First".

Over at National Review, Jeffrey Blehar claims In His Haste to End the Primary, Trump Is Losing the General. And he comments on the post above:

Yeah,I guess I'm OK with that.

Ramesh Ponnuru also expresses my feelings better than I can: Nikki Haley Is Better Than Trump. Skipping down to the end…

It's not even close.

And George Will notes that Trump would drain the South Carolina wallets that Haley helped fill.

To remind you: it's estimated this would be a $300 billion/year tax increase.

Also of note:

• If you need a chuckle… Jeff Maurer takes you Inside the Democratic Socialists of America's Budget Crisis.

  The Democratic Socialists of America is facing a financial crisis. In a note to members, DSA leadership revealed a two million dollar shortfall against a seven million dollar budget. I Might Be Wrong’s intrepid team of investigative reporters have obtained e-mails between a member of DSA leadership and an outside accounting firm that describe the severity of the crisis . Those e-mails are below.

  You won't want to miss them.

• I'm sure there's a Harvard task force working on this. John McWhorter suggests We Need a New Word for ‘Plagiarism’.

  In December, a group of outside scholars appointed by a Harvard board was roundly criticized for describing the plagiarism that ultimately contributed to former President Claudine Gay’s resignation as “duplicative language.” This description was seen by many as an effort to minimize Gay’s transgression. And it was. But I think the board was on to something useful nevertheless. The term “plagiarism” is overstretched.

  Ironically, Bill Ackman, the billionaire hedge fund manager who worked so hard to push Claudine Gay out of her job, would now seem to agree. In a twist so uncanny you couldn’t have written it any better, Ackman’s wife, Neri Oxman, a former M.I.T. professor, appears to have lifted chunks of her dissertation from other sources, including Wikipedia.

  In the blink of an eye after these revelations, Ackman acquired an exquisite sensitivity to the difference between real plagiarism and the other, accidental-word-copying kind. Yet the difference he suddenly understands is one that anyone can. To think that neither Gay nor Oxman “really” plagiarized, or to believe that the sanction for such errors should be less severe, is an entirely reasonable point of view.

  As someone who's overly fond of the <blockquote> HTML tag, I agree. There are at least three relevant kinds of laziness:

  1. Too lazy to come up with original ideas;
  2. Too lazy to come up with original wording;
  3. Too lazy to properly cite someone else's ideas or wording.

  I'm guilty of the first one all the time, not so much the second, and (I hope) never the third.

• Tired of all the winning? I'm tired of all the losing. Joe Lancaster reveals another reason why we call it "Uncle Stupid": The Government Is Better at Picking Losers Than Winners.

  All investment is risky. What better way to avoid that risk than to use other people's money? Federal, state, and local governments dispense gifts, grants, and loans to private companies, generously funded by taxpayers and usually with vague promises of economic development in return. While politicians say they don't like to pick winners and losers, even the "winners" sometimes turn out to be losers for taxpayers.

  With plenty of examples. Here's one:

  In 2020, the Treasury Department was apportioned $17 billion in pandemic relief funds to disburse to companies it deemed vital to national security. It loaned $700 million of those funds to Yellow Corporation, a freight trucking company worth only $70 million that had lost $104 million the prior year. According to an audit released in 2023, Yellow had an outstanding balance of $729 million in March and had paid only a measly $230 toward the loan's principal. Yellow filed for bankruptcy in August 2023.

  Loaning $700 million to a company worth $70 million? Way to go, Unk.

• But don't ever say America never does anything right. Uncle Stupid has some very smart people working for him, as evidenced by this bittersweet Ars Technica story: The amazing helicopter on Mars, Ingenuity, will fly no more.

  Something has gone wrong with NASA's Ingenuity helicopter on the surface of Mars. Although the US space agency has not made any public announcements yet, a source told Ars that the plucky flying vehicle had an accident on its last flight and broke one of its blades. It will not fly anymore. (Shortly after this article was published, NASA confirmed the end of Ingenuity's mission).

  When it launched to Mars more than three years ago, the small Ingenuity helicopter was an experimental mission, a challenge to NASA engineers to see if they could devise and build a vehicle that could make a powered flight on another world.

  This was especially difficulty on Mars, which has a very thin atmosphere, with a pressure of less than 1 percent that of Earth's. The solution they landed on was a very light 4-lb helicopter with four blades. It was hoped that Ingenuity would make a handful of flights and provide NASA with some valuable testing data.

  But it turns out that Ingenuity had other ideas. Since its deployment from the Perseverance rover in April 2021, the helicopter has flown a staggering 72 flights. It has spent more than two hours—128.3 minutes, to be precise—flying through the thin Martian air. Over that time, it flew 11 miles, or 17 km, performing invaluable scouting and scientific investigations. It has been a huge win for NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, one of the greatest spaceflight stories of this decade.

  When I was a kid, I thought we'd have people on Mars by now. But I'll take this.

Recently on the book blog:

I got into reading Dennis Lehane via his private eye novels featuring gritty Boston sleuths Patrick Kenzie and Angie Gennaro. He now seems to have moved away from that series (last entry was Moonlight Mile in 2010). This one is super-gritty, it's set in 1974 Boston, and there's quite a bit of mayhem.

Via the Wikipedia page, he says this might be his final book. Apparently, an AppleTV series is in the works.

The protagonist is a South Boston woman, Mary Pat Fennessey. Southie's dysfunctions have rubbed off on her: one missing/presumed dead husband, she's divorced from another. Only one kid left, her 17-year-old daughter Jules. Mary Pat can't pay her gas bill, but she seems to have enough cash on hand to buy Virginia Slims and beer.

But it's set against actual historical background: Judge Arthur Garrity has ordered black students to be bused into lily-white South Boston High, with a proportion of Southie kids bused down to a black high school in Roxbury. And, as we remember, that worked out great, and accounts for all the racial harmony Boston is experiencing today.

Just kidding. In retrospect, it's tough to see what they were trying to accomplish. In any case, Southie's moms are up in arms, and the overtones of racism are explicit.

One fateful morning, a black kid is found dead at the local subway stop. And (not coincidentally) Jules had not made it home the previous night. As the hours and days go by, Mary Pat grows increasingly concerned, and she can't help but notice that the kids Jules was with have implausible stories about what happened. And eventually, it becomes evident to Mary Pat that the local mob is somehow involved. She's warned not to get too nosy.

That doesn't take. Eventually things get very violent as what happened to Jules gets slowly revealed.

It's a page turner. If this is Lehane's last book, I'll miss him.

… and, as usual, I did not vote for the winner. It's a habit. You can read the results from my little town here. Fun facts:

• Even though Rollinsford reliably votes Democrat in general elections, we had 590-something voters picking up the Republican ballot, only 359 Democrats.

• I say "590-something" because whoever filled out that form overwrote the units digit, illegibly.

• On the Republican ballot, Trump beat Nikki in Rollinsford, 319-267. DeSantis came in third, with three (3) votes, and Joe Biden came in fourth with a couple write-ins. Pence, Christie, and Rachel Swift got one vote each, and everyone else got goose-egged.

• Who's Rachel Smith? Here's her Instragram page. And she was in the state, according to a reporter from the Bulwark:

  Still zero votes for Rachel Swift, who I met in the line for Trumps rally last night. She was super drunk and had a dog shock collar + leash around her neck. Informed me she was also a presidential candidate pic.twitter.com/RQtaVdxyUp

  — Joe Perticone (@JoePerticone) January 24, 2024

  Google reports Rachel got 102 votes statewide, good for twelfth place.

• You probably heard that Biden refused to put his name on the Democrat ballot, but 224 Rollinsford Democrats ignored this disrespect/disinterest and wrote him in anyway. Other Democrat write-ins went for "Cease Fire" (16), Nikki (13), Donald J. Trump (6), RFKJr (6). And one write-in each for Bernie Sanders, Clint Eastwood, and "Tacos".

  Dean Phillips, who did actually campaign, and was not a write-in, got a measly 61 votes. Marianne Williamson got 8. And Vermin Supreme got two.

For more serious commentary, Ann Althouse links to a WaPo story which quotes Trump senior adviser Chris LaCivita: "She was a blank canvas, and we had a bucket of paint.".

Oooh! GLOBALISTS!

Meanwhile, over at National Review, Jim Geraghty considers Nikki Haley at a Crossroads. In a display of fair-mindedness, he lays out five reasons she should quit the race… and a couple reasons she shouldn't.

Meanwhile, he notes that the front-runner is taking his usual serious, carefully-considered, approach to the issues:

Let's check what Charles C. W. Cooke has to say: Nikki Haley Should Stay In.

Don't want to be ghoulish, but … "actually, yeah."

Also of note:

• Catch it! In his (paywalled) newsletter, Kevin D. Williamson has a bone to pick with a guy who used to be skeptical about arbitrary executive power: Autocrat-Immunity Disease.

  As I wrote at the time, I believe Barack Obama should have been impeached and removed from office for—and let’s not polish it up too much—murdering an American for political reasons. The American in question, Anwar al-Awlaki, was an absolute heap of garbage, a jihad apologist who became known as “the Osama bin Laden of Facebook.” And here, I’d like to emphasize the final two words in that epithet: of Facebook. Not the Osama bin Laden of Tora Bora or Nairobi or Dar es Salaam, but the Osama bin Laden … of Facebook. He was an al-Qaeda apologist and recruiter who was no doubt guilty of a whole raft of crimes for which he was never tried on account of his being a smoking cinder. He could have been captured and put on trial, if he hadn’t been blown up. Alternatively, he could have been killed in combat—in Afghanistan or somewhere else—and you wouldn’t have heard any complaints from little ol’ me. My libertarian heart would have been content. 

  But he wasn’t killed in combat, because he was … the Osama bin Laden of Facebook. He didn’t die on some battlefield in Afghanistan. He was killed in Yemen, on his way to breakfast, in an operation that targeted him, specifically, for being the Osama bin Laden of Facebook, i.e., a wretched propagandist and troll and an advocate of evil things. The Obama administration would attempt to ret-con the homicide and insist after the fact that he had gone “operational,” whatever that means in this context, which is approximately squat. Al-Awlaki’s beliefs were reprehensible. But there are lots of people out there with reprehensible political views, and nobody is planning a drone strike on the Claremont Institute or on Steve Bannon’s favorite bar, or whatever cuckold-fetish sex dungeon full of “exceptional, muscular well-hung single men” Roger Stone is swanning around in these days. 

  KDW goes on to note that, at the time, Senator Rand Paul filibustered the nomination of John Brennan to be CIA Director due to this murder. But now…

  A very strange thing has happened to Sen. Paul. When Donald Trump’s lawyers went to court to argue that the president could order SEAL Team 6 (everybody loves writing and saying “SEAL Team 6”!) to assassinate a rival presidential candidate and then remain immune from criminal charges unless impeached and removed from office, Sen. Paul developed an acute case of sudden-onset mushmouth, answering: “It’s a very specific legal argument, and I’m afraid I’m just not up on it enough to be able to comment.” For context, Trump’s current claim is that the president can do literally anything he wants without facing criminal charges. How far we have come from knocking off the Osama bin Laden of Facebook!

• Deathly afraid that someone, somewhere is having fun. Guy Bentley looks at the latest Puritan convert: Chuck Schumer Attacks Lifesaving Zyn Nicotine Pouches.

  In a press release Sunday, Schumer labeled Zyn a "quiet and dangerous" alternative to vaping, claiming that with the decline in smoking, tobacco companies are adapting by focusing on new products like oral nicotine. Zyns are small pouches of nicotine meant to be placed between the lips and gums. Two strengths of the product are available at three and six milligrams of nicotine, and they come in several flavors.

  […]

  But Schumer's framing has the story backward. Zyn is not a dangerous alternative to vaping but a dramatically safer alternative to smoking. One of the reasons smoking has declined substantially over the last decade is because safer nicotine alternatives like vapes and Zyn are switching smokers away from cigarettes. The closest equivalent for which we have decades of data is an oral smokeless tobacco called snus. Snus is most prevalent in Sweden, and not coincidentally, Sweden has the lowest smoking and lung cancer rates in Europe because those interested in using nicotine do so in a much safer form.

  In case you missed it, here is yesterday's rant about efforts at the University Near Here to be a "tobacco, smoke, and nicotine-free campus." Don't get caught with a Zyn in your cheek there!

• Apparently, there are no more famines, so… Johan Norberg and Gonzalo Schwarz write in the WSJ about Oxfam’s Love Affair With ‘Inequality’.

  (Yes, Oxfam's original name was the "Oxford Committee for Famine Relief".)

  Oxfam, which describes itself as “a global organization that fights inequality to end poverty and injustice,” released its annual inequality report this month. The group warns of “widening and extreme inequality,” noting that the world’s five richest men have doubled their wealth since 2020 while “during the same period, almost five billion people globally have become poorer.” As is often the case with Oxfam, the report is misleading.

  According to Oxfam’s main source, the UBS/Credit Suisse Global Wealth Report, annual shifts in inequality have roughly canceled out, returning global wealth inequality to the same level as when the pandemic began. Most inequality indicators are at their lowest levels in a century.

  A cutting remark: "Oxfam seems to dislike wealth more than it dislikes poverty."

David Harsanyi admonishes some statism fans: You Can't Defend 'Democracy' And The Administrative State. In which he rebuts people doing exactly that, so maybe he should have stuck the word "consistently" somewhere in there.

Over at National Review, roughly on the same topic, Jim Geraghty is also frustrated and tired of seeing the sloppy weaponization of D-word: How Democrats Exploit ‘Democracy Is at Stake’.

It's kind of a rant, and a very entertaining one.

Also of note:

• Nanny U. Yesterday, I mentioned that there were plenty of things college students should be outraged about. And, gee, I noticed one when I entered Dimond Library at the University Near Here: a small sticker on the door saying (maybe not an exact quote): "UNH is a tobacco, smoke, and nicotine-free campus."

  Nicotine? I was unaware of that, but it's been true for a couple years.

  UNH is committed to supporting its campus communities in Durham, Manchester, Concord and around the state in becoming tobacco, smoke and nicotine-free. Our policy aims to create a community culture where well-being is a priority, and where a healthy lifestyle without tobacco, smoke and nicotine is the norm.

  While tobacco, smoke and nicotine products are prohibited in UNH facilities and on its grounds, the focus of our policy is to promote voluntary compliance, support and resources that encourage a healthy community and sustainable environment. The updated policy was developed by a UNH-wide coalition in 2021 and went into effect on January 1, 2022. Moving forward, a TSN-Free Implementation Task Force will work to strengthen understanding of the policy and provide resources to the community.

  UNH joins nearly 2,500 U.S. campuses that have adopted a 100% smoke-free policy. This policy applies to everyone on UNH properties: students, faculty, staff, visitors, contractors and vendors.

  (That "policy" link above is outdated. Here is a page spelling out the current details.)

  Obligatory disclaimer: I am not, and never have been, a user of "tobacco, smoke and nicotine products". (I don't need, or want, another bad habit.) And I'd prefer not to inhale second-hand (or even third-hand) smoke, although I don't freak out when I do.

  When I was working at UNH, smokers were able to light up outside. (A favorite locale was the loading dock.) The guy in the cubicle next to mine was a vaper; I know this only because I noticed it occasionally when I walked by, I never smelled anything.

  But the UNH policy goes full-Puritan, in the Mencken sense: it seems to be motivated by "The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.” Those pre-2022 reasonable accommodations for tobacco use are out the window; the updated policy bans (roughly) everything everywhere. In fact you can't even smoke in your own car, if it's parked on UNH grounds. Or even if you are driving it through UNH property.

  And, by the way, it also applies to "cannabis products". Sorry, potheads!

  And, by the way, it also applies to products that have zero health risk to anyone other than the consumer: ("… snuff, chewing tobacco, dipping tobacco …").

  Coincidentally, I noticed Jeffrey A. Singer wondering, at Cato: What is Causing Nicotinophobia? He notes Senator Chuck Schumer's call for a "crackdown" on "Zyn", a nicotine pouch not involving tobacco. And he points out:

  Nicotine by itself is a relatively harmless drug. It is similar to caffeine, which can also addict people. Like caffeine, nicotine functions as a stimulant that enhances concentration. Unlike caffeine, nicotine boosts the production of beta‐endorphins, providing anxiety relief. This may explain why individuals who use tobacco turn to smoking when seeking to relax or to calm down under stress.

  No word on whether UNH will be banning coffee, tea, Coca-Cola,…

  I should also note that there's a loophole for nicotine addicts: UNH is allowing "Products that have been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for tobacco cessation or other medical purposes." Let's Google that, and… yes, here's a list of FDA-Approved nicotine delivery products. It includes nicotine gum, lozenges, and patches.

• And they are spinning fast. Dominic Pino notes that the MSM is seeing things that aren't there: Organized Labor ‘Resurgence’ Is Media Spin. After rattling off dozens of stories over the past year that claim unions are back, baby…

  Today, the Bureau of Labor Statistics published its annual report on union membership. The unionization rate hit a record low of 10.0 percent in 2023, down from 2022’s 10.1 percent. “The number of wage and salary workers belonging to unions, at 14.4 million, also showed little movement over the year,” the BLS reported.

  Perhaps those journalists were overdosing on nicotine.

  That linked BLS report is full of interesting stuff. Fun fact: "The union membership rate of public-sector workers (32.5 percent) continued to be more than five times higher than the rate of private-sector workers (6.0 percent)."

• A damn big bag of bricks, though. Kevin D. Williamson is talking about the Republican Party: it's as Dumb as a Bag of Bricks.

  […] the pro-life movement will not have won when nobody can get an abortion—the pro-life movement will have won when nobody wants an abortion. In this, there is a fundamental asymmetry between the pro-life and pro-choice movements. For the pro-life movement, the regulation of abortion is a necessary but not sufficient condition for the desired outcome. The regulation or prohibition of abortion will have the practical effect of preventing some abortions, and it will have the salubrious secondary effect of encouraging Americans to disentangle themselves, mentally and politically, from the practice of abortion. 

  Our pro-choice friends bristle when the pro-life movement compares its project to the effort to abolish slavery (there are obvious differences, of course, but also important similarities, the most important being that both questions are rooted in a fundamental disagreement about who is a whole human person and who is not), but I hope they will indulge the following hypothetical: If the normal course of economic and social development had led to the gradual and largely voluntary eradication of slavery in the United States, wouldn’t we still want a law prohibiting it, even if the question were moot? Wouldn’t we still want to cultivate anti-slavery sentiment? To repent of the wrongs that were done under slavery and to mourn its horrifying human price? I think so. I am less sure that this necessarily is the case for abortion. For me, it is more important that the killing should stop than that pro-lifers should have some kind of political “victory” that results in a de jure prohibition of the abortion while de facto leaving the practice itself largely in place. 

Happy First In The Nation Primary Day! About time. So naturally, we're gonna talk about … something else entirely, a tweet from my favorite physics professor at the University Near Here:

Students should be *outraged* that their tuition is for AI instead of real instruction and support. https://t.co/i8jOmjIukX

— Chanda Prescod-Weinstein (@IBJIYONGI) January 21, 2024

There's plenty of things about which college students should be outraged. Although I'm pretty sure my list and CPW's list might not overlap much.

Her tweet is in response to Matthew Boedy, "rhetoric professor" at the University of North Georgia. The Axios story to which he links is here: OpenAI launches university partnership with Arizona State, allowing use of ChatGPT. A fuller version of the relevant quote:

And further down the rabbit hole, the Axios story seems to be based on this CNBC article: OpenAI announces first partnership with a university. The relevant bit:

It's easy to make fun of the self-interested concerns of faculty members. If their school spends money on technology, that will mean less money for … um, them.

I can't find the exact quote, but I seem to remember a famous university president observing that faculty were pretty liberal in their politics, but utterly conservative when it comes to their own institutions and interests. Or maybe the better word (in this case) is "reactionary". CPW's reaction to the ASU news seems knee-jerk, with no trace of open-mindedness. She knows no good could possibly come of this. I can only imagine her standing athwart history, yelling Stop.

The reductio: let's not have any technology in 2024 that wasn't available to (oh, say…) Harvard's Class of 1642! Ban the AI menace from campus? Heck, I say let's get rid of spell-checkers! Grammarly! Google! Word processors! And typewriters, for that matter! Bring out your quill pens! We might let you have a slide rule.

Sigh.

For another example of my-ox-is-being-gored reaction to encroaching AI, see my fisking of Joyce Maynard's Facebook rant. The same issues apply here. Just suppose that AI will be used the same way new technology has always been used: to reduce drudgery, and improve productivity. Not as a replacement, but as a supplement to "real instruction and support". A supplement that's available 24/7/365, not just during "office hours". One with effectively infinite patience. OK, that's a tad pollyannish, but let's just say I see possible upsides. And I think that's the way to bet, unless clear and convincing evidence otherwise is presented.

And really, to the extent it's that easy for an AI to supplant "real instruction and support", maybe it's time for some university wetware to alter their career paths.

Also of note:

• At the other end of the country from the Live Free or Die state… Joel Kotkin looks at the great state of California, where freedom goes to die.

  California was once a byword for liberty and opportunity. The so-called Golden State was home first to the Gold Rush, then to Hollywood and then to the tech revolution in Silicon Valley. Californians have long been proud of that legacy – indeed, during a 2022 debate against Florida governor Ron DeSantis, California governor Gavin Newsom boasted that his state epitomised ‘freedom’. While this might once have been true, under Newsom’s direction, and that of the state’s essentially one-party legislature, California has been transformed into something unrecognisable.

  However much one might dislike DeSantis’ sometimes heavy-handed approach to fighting wokeness in Florida, California is unlikely to meet most people’s definitions of freedom. The state government of California now forces shops to have a gender-neutral toy section. It seeks to extract billions as reparations for slavery. It aims to control speech and indoctrinate the young. It is attempting to regulate virtually every aspect of life in the name of ‘saving the planet’.

  Maybe it depends on how you define ‘freedom’. California certainly offers freedoms to those on the margins. The homeless, undocumented migrants and petty criminals now have the freedom to commit crimes without much worry of prosecution. Back when Newsom was campaigning to be mayor of San Francisco 20 years ago, he pledged to eliminate homelessness in 10 years. Now California’s homeless numbers are growing not just in San Francisco, but also across the whole state. Overall, California has 30 per cent of the US’s homeless population. The state is hardly a ‘model for the nation’, as Newsom proudly proclaims.

  Kotkin also points out‥

• It's expensive to live there, but there is a lot of crime. Kotkin links to a report that I hadn't previously noticed: Tax Burden by State 2023. You can quibble with that report's methodology, but California's tax burden is high, but it's "only" in fifth place overall, behind New York, Connecticut, Hawaii, and Vermont.

  So New Hampshire's tax burden is the lowest, right? That would be nice, but no. In fact, it's not even close to the lowest: a 9.6% tax burden puts us at #36!

  The culprit is, of course, the property tax (1.89%, 3rd highest in the nation).

  But we're beating the tar out of those other New England states. We already mentioned Connecticut (#2) and Vermont. Which leaves Massachusetts (#12), Maine (#10), and little Rhode Island (#14).

• Let's not go there. Megan McArdle asks a question I might not have expected her to ask: How far should we be willing to go to silence Nazis?.

  Checking my cellphone bill the other day, I found myself wondering just how many Nazis use the same service as me. Probably hundreds, since I use one of the three biggest cell providers in the country. What were the ethics, I wondered, of paying a company that was being used to spread hate?

  If this question seems somewhat absurd to you, you probably haven’t been following the controversy over Nazis on Substack.

  Substack is a platform that publishes email newsletters for independent authors — including my husband, who writes a weekly newsletter about home bartending. Thousands of authors use the platform, and, collectively, they reach tens of millions of subscribers. Almost none of the authors, or the subscribers, are Nazis. But a few appear to be either Nazis or Nazi-adjacent, which led Jonathan Katz to write in the Atlantic in November that there were “scores of white-supremacist, neo-Confederate, and explicitly Nazi newsletters on Substack.”

  Megan notes that the slope Substack's critics want it to be on is a slippery one.

  She does not make the "shouldn't you also want to silence the Communists?" argument.

Christian Britschgi tells of the latest effort to whittle away at your liberty: Ted Lieu Wants To Criminalize Glue Traps.

I assume Lieu does not have a rodent problem. Or, if he does, he can easily afford (2018 estimated net worth $3.5 million) to hire top-of-the-line extermination services, and he won't have to witness any of the messy details.

Good for him. But bad for him: arrogantly attempting to deny a cheap and effective strategy for those not in his enviable privileged situation.

As I type, the proposed legislation, H.R.7018 has one (1) co-sponsor, a guy named Adam Schiff, another California Democrat (with a mere $70 million in net worth). Schiff is running this year to replace Dianne Feinstein. The WSJ describes Adam Schiff’s Telltale 2024 Agenda, with some proposals that might have a bigger impact than a glue trap ban:

I suppose if your student loans are forgiven, that will make up some for your rodent-infested dwellings.

Also of note:

• Get it? Half-baked? Bwahaha… Charles Fain Lehman writes in City Journal about New Hampshire's Half-Baked Marijuana Policy.

  New Hampshire is the only state in New England that hasn’t legalized marijuana, but it looks likely to do so this year. Last year, a legalization bill passed the New Hampshire House of Representatives, then failed in the Republican-controlled Senate. But after the bill’s defeat, Governor Chris Sununu indicated his willingness to sign a more restrictive version, under which the state would operate marijuana retailers directly.

  This first-in-the-nation approach seemingly was inspired by the major challenges other states have faced with legalization.

  “Every other governor will tell you that their system sucks,” Sununu reportedly told cannabis lobbyist Don Murphy in a conversation leaked to Marijuana Moment. “Every governor has told me that. They hate their systems. . . . They want to maybe legalize it, but they hate the way it’s been done because it’s mostly been driven by ballot initiatives where you have, basically Big Tobacco—Big Marijuana 2.0—driving the rules and regulations.”

  Lehman writes with approval about a "state-store system". Why? Because it "lets the state keep prices high and moves all profits to the state treasury".

  Dude, that sounds like a bad idea. A recipe for a continued black market selling product of dubious safety. But whatever, man…

• University Near Here woes. Siobhan Senier is unhappy. She describes: The true cost of the latest round of cuts at UNH.

  You may have seen the headlines this week: “University of New Hampshire to lay off 75 employees to help save $14M.” The headline conceals the true costs of these cuts, which are only the latest round in many during recent years. The university is also losing many talented, beloved professors who do not have permanent contracts and who are thus, in Orwellian parlance, being “non-renewed” rather than “laid off.” In an extraordinary and unreported move, the university is also shuttering its art museum.

  It’s hard to believe that these cuts actually save that much money. The art museum is tiny, already operating on a shoestring, and might cost around $1 million, a tiny fraction of the university’s overall budget, which is somewhere around $900 million. But who knows, really? Because no one is explaining where the mandate to cut $14 million came from, or how that figure was arrived at. The university spokesperson, who is undoubtedly paid better than most professors, has declined to answer reporters’ questions about how much money these cuts actually save.

  Siobhan Senier is identified in the article as "a professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of New Hampshire, and vice president of AAUP-UNH."

  I don't want to be snide, but the 2022 USNH Salary Book listed the Executive Director of Media Relations, Erika Mantz's, base salary $122,804.85. That same document had Professor Senier's salary at $103,560.00. So it's close!

• I used to think that I was cool, driving around on fossil fuel. And I still do. At least I'm not worried about a cold, dead, Tesla. Kevin D. Williamson points out: Fossil fuels — not renewables — remain the real engines behind economic growth.

  In 2023, the US economy grew while greenhouse gas emissions declined, according to a new report — a good environmental outcome and a good economic outcome brought to you by our old friend: petroleum.

  Wait, what?

  “Up until a few years ago, a better economy meant more fossil-fuel consumption,” reported NPR climate correspondent Jeff Brady. He continued: “The fact” — and here, let’s take a good long look at the word “fact” — “that those two are decoupling, that growth can happen without using more fossil fuels, shows that the country can potentially address climate change without a lot of economic pain.”

  That would be a fascinating fact if it were a fact, but it isn’t.

  The overall decline in US greenhouse gas emissions was driven by a large reduction — 8% — in emissions from power plants.

  That didn’t happen because we started using unicorn smiles and good intentions to generate electricity.

  I assume KDW's editor changed that from "unicorn farts".

Mr. Ramirez has one analogy, Kat Rosenfield has another:

2024 presidential election is gonna be like walking into a restaurant with just two items on the menu: a large bowl of lukewarm watery gruel, and a flaming hot cheeto someone dropped under the couch in 2014 that has been slightly nibbled on by mice

— Kat Rosenfield (@katrosenfield) January 16, 2024

Later in the thread, she admits she's probably going for the gruel, seemingly mostly out of habit. That's a non-starter for me, but so is the cheeto.

Ms. Rosenfield's tweet is via Josh Barro, who describes the upcoming choice as The Stupidest Election of [His] Lifetime.

Hm, do I resemble that remark?

I suppose it's fair to call me a political hobbyist. But, unlike the stereotype, I can't stand to watch any news channel. I rarely do politics on social media, and I confine my political rants to this blog right here. And I don't have enough hair to tear out.

Otherwise…

Let's check in with the oddsmakers. Surely we'll see a Nikki surge…

Well, darn. That doesn't look like a surge at all. And don't call me Shirley.

Also of note:

• Also, he will probably strew radioactive waste along the border. "Kevin Carroll served as senior counsel to Secretary of Homeland Security John Kelly during the Trump administration" (it says here). But he's not a fan, writing of The Fire Next Time. Trump's previous term was no bed of Constitutional-abiding roses. But…

  If Trump wins the election, he is likely to announce policies which, while military leaders may disagree with them, are well within a president’s discretion, such as withdrawing troops from NATO countries, Japan, and South Korea, and forcing Ukraine to surrender territory to Russia. The Founding Fathers gave the commander-in-chief broad and powerful authority in military and diplomatic matters, and these orders the armed forces must obey.

  But Trump may go beyond that:

  • His team has reportedly drawn up plans to invoke the Insurrection Act to increase the use of the military to quell domestic protests.

  • Trump and his supporters have proposed recalling to active duty retired generals who served in Trump’s administration and subsequently criticized him, in order to prosecute them under the section of the Uniform Code of Military Justice that forbids officers from uttering “contemptuous words” about the president.

  • Trump’s staff has promised to use the National Guard to aid Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in the internal enforcement of immigration laws. While legal, this would be unwise and would entail armed teenaged soldiers, untrained in conducting criminal investigations within constitutional parameters, asking citizens and aliens alike—including many Hispanics—to produce identity papers. With their commander-in-chief openly stating that migrants are “poisoning the blood of the country,” some encounters would inevitably result in civil rights abuses.

  • Former Pentagon chief of staff Kash Patel has pledged to “come after” Trump’s political opponents in the federal bureaucracy and the press. Trump admits to planning to abuse his power “on day one,” and retweeted a word cloud featuring the terms “revenge,” “power” and “dictatorship” and a video stating that he is an instrument of God.

  • Trump has mused about serving a third presidential term, which is plainly unconstitutional.

  None of this is normal, or good.

  I'm not quite as disturbed as Carroll is by Trump's stream-of-fantasy musings. But even given that discount, it's an indication of the dark places his mind goes.

• So what about … someone else. Anyone else? Matt Welch looks at that group that keeps threatening to blow up the two-party system: No Labels Has 13 Presidential Candidates, 14 State Ballots, and 7 Weeks To Decide Whether To Run.

  No Labels, the 501(c)(4) "commonsense majority" political nonprofit established in 2010 to promote civility, bipartisanship, and moderation, has been marking the arrival of presidential primary season by trying doggedly to remind people that it still exists.

  Last Thursday, just after news broke of former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie dropping out of the Republican race, the centrist group let journalists know that the pugnacious pol might make a fine No Labels nominee (Christie's disdain for the project notwithstanding). As if to broaden the third-party lane for former blue-state Republican governors, Maryland's Larry Hogan then let slip that he had recently resigned from No Labels' board ("in a possible sign of a 2024 bid," noted the Associated Press headline); though on CNN Sunday Hogan played down his personal ambitions and endorsed former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley for the GOP nomination.

  And then, Welch reminds us, there's RFKJr.

  Welch's article contains the term "centrist mush", so you'll want to read the whole thing.

• Is America ready to hear about interest costs? Probably only if America is having trouble getting to sleep. But interest rates are the most likely sources of economic trouble in the near term. Veronique de Rugy has advice for the candidates: Don't Let Interest Costs Derail Your Presidential Plans.

  Remember when Republicans on the campaign trail would talk about how they would make sure to put the U.S. on a fiscally sane path? I miss that time. While a few of the current crop have paid lip service to the idea of constraining spending, no one seems to have a clear plan about how to do it.

  It's unfortunate. Letting the spending trajectory we're on further deteriorate will hinder any plans these candidates have for their presidency. It could even jeopardize the fight against inflation.

  As a reminder of our fiscal situation, according to the Congressional Budget Office, we were running a $1.5 trillion deficit in May 2023. That's quite a spectacular number whether in a time of full employment, economic downturn or emergency. This is in large part due to the spectacular increase in spending to $6.4 trillion. Data compiled by Brian Riedl show that in a little less than two years, "President Biden added $4.8 trillion to 10-year deficits." As a result, deficits are now projected to exceed $3 trillion in a decade.

  America's in denial mode on entitlement spending; they ain't likely to react well to any serious spending-restraint talk from the candidates.

I don't know if you'll experience the same behavior, but YouTube sandwiched this between political ads (one anti-Nikki, the other pro-Nikki). Good luck.

Also of note:

• Industrial policy? I predict… unintended consequences! Scott Lincicome's Dispatch article, On ‘Making Things’ has one of those nasty little padlocks. But if you're worried about the state of American manufacturing, he has a lot of information, much going against the scary popular narrative..

  Hang around the policy game long enough, and you’ll encounter the argument that government should use tariffs, subsidies, “Buy American” rules, and related policies to protect and expand the U.S. manufacturing sector because it’s special, both economically and in the eyes of the average American voter. 

  In recent weeks, for example, American Compass’ Oren Cass justified Trump-style tariffs because, in his words, “making things matters”—a slogan he repeated when unveiling new (and expressly anti-globalization) polling from his organization showing that Americans overwhelmingly “agree that ‘we need a stronger manufacturing sector.’” Usual tariff and push-poll concerns aside, this sloganeering is nothing new for Cass and certainly not limited to him or other protectionists on the American right. In fact, given the 2024 presidential election, its increasingly certain (alas) participants, and recent U.S. policy history, you can bet that proactively reviving American manufacturing will be a top issue. And protectionists will frequently base their demands on the simple and unstated assumption that the sector has long been a shambles, and that the production of tangible “things” deserves extra government attention.

  Dig a little deeper, however, and the issue isn’t so simple.

  Lincicome notes that (by any measure) America makes a lot of physical stuff. And it also produces a lot of service goods. Having the government decree a different stuff/service mix is likely to make us all poorer, on average.

• Also weighing in is… George Will, noting that the pols are trying to make it a campaign issue: It’s an election year, so here comes a ‘manufacturing crisis’ that isn’t.

  If your constant objective is to expand government’s permeation of society — to enlarge its role in the allocation of capital and opportunity — you have a permanent incentive to invent or misdescribe social problems. So, if you are a progressive, you will embrace the myth of a U.S. “manufacturing crisis.”

  This is a perennial excuse for protectionism and other manifestations of “economic planning” by a supposedly clairvoyant government. Which is socialism, under the anodyne title of “industrial policy.”

  You also might favor government going beyond mere control of imports. You might want it to deport the Cato Institute’s Colin Grabow. His report “The Reality of American ‘Deindustrialization’” overflows with inconvenient (for progressives) truths, such as: The United States has the world’s second-largest manufacturing economy, which produces a larger share of global manufacturing output than Germany, South Korea, India and Japan combined. (Remember the 1980s panic, loudly encouraged by a publicity-mad New York real estate blowhard, about Japan eclipsing U.S. manufacturing?) The manufacturing sector of the U.S. economy, which supposedly has withered as the service sector has grown, would, standing alone, be the world’s eighth-largest economy.

  There's an upside to "industrial policy": it will provide the Reason folks with plenty of material for their "unintended consequences" videos.

• Can't live with 'em, could probably live without 'em. Who are the biggest threats to free speech on college campuses? Greg Lukianoff makes the argument that it's administrators. And not necessarily the ones you'd expect. What's the bottom line, Greg?

  The bottom line: DEI administrators — and campus administrators in general — are and will continue to be a threat to free speech and academic freedom on campus. There is no way out of this crisis on campus without either eliminating those positions or repurposing them to ensure that admins defend campus free speech and academic freedom, encourage nonconformity, and value seeking out differing viewpoints in the face of too much campus consensus. Sadly, while I’ve proposed this and other ideas for reforming higher education, I think the likelihood of that actually happening is pretty dang low.

  If we care about less expensive, more equitable higher ed, we have to acknowledge we need cheaper, slimmed down, less ideological institutions than we currently have.

  Those DEI guys didn't hire themselves, after all. The DEI departments didn't spring into existence ex nihilo.

• I'm pretty sure it won't be me. J.D. Tuccille gets in the faces of the class warriors: The World Could Soon Have Its First Trillionaire. Good!.

  The world could soon have its first trillionaire, according to a prominent anti-poverty organization. That's pretty cool. But Oxfam—which started as a famine relief group before mission creep set in—portrays the achievement of a new nominal benchmark in wealth as a bad thing that contributes to the misery of the masses. Through impressive economic illiteracy, the organization's recent report on inequality and poverty manages to misdiagnose the world's ills and prescribe dangerous and counterproductive remedies.

  "Since 2020, the richest five men in the world have doubled their fortunes," huffs Oxfam's Inequality Inc.  "During the same period, almost five billion people globally have become poorer. Hardship and hunger are a daily reality for many people worldwide. At current rates, it will take 230 years to end poverty, but we could have our first trillionaire in 10 years."

  […]

  "Through squeezing workers, dodging tax, privatizing the state and spurring climate breakdown, corporations are driving inequality and acting in the service of delivering ever-greater wealth to their rich owners," insists Oxfam.

  That seems an unlikely business plan. Did Bezos do anything else—perhaps found an online book store that grew into a global retail giant? And then, during the post-2020 timeframe that Oxfam emphasizes, did governments respond to the appearance of the COVID-19 virus by locking down populations, driving economic activity into online spaces to the benefit of people like Bezos? Yes, on both counts.

  Oxfam also fudges their stats by bemoaning what's happened "since 2020". Gee, what happened in 2020, reader?

• Fun fact. Alex Tabarrok notes a debunking of one of those things "everybody knows": No One's Name Was Changed at Ellis Island. According to a research paper by Rosemary Meszaros and Katherine Pennavaria:

  No one’s family name was changed, altered, shortened, butchered, or “written down wrong” at Ellis Island or any American port. That idea is an urban legend.

  Many names did get changed as immigrants settled into their new American lives, but those changes were made several years after arrival and were done by choice of someone in the family. The belief persists, however, that the changes were done at the entry point and that the immigrants were unwilling participants in the modifications. Sophisticated family history researchers have long rolled their collective eyes at the “Ellis Island name change” idea. In genealogy blogs and online publications, they wearily repeat the correction—names were not changed at Ellis Island; immigrants changed their own names, usually during the citizenship process. But the belief persists, perhaps because people need to explain surname changes in a way that satisfies them (thinking that their immigrant ancestors made the changes themselves apparently does not do so).

  Just because you saw it in Godfather II doesn't mean it happened.

Seen on Glenn's website this morning:

Notes:

• If you click on that, you'll be taken to the Wikipedia article on "Clickbait".

• It's obviously locale-tailored; I live in Rollinsford, NH, just across the Salmon Falls River from South Berwick, Maine.

• The Salmon Falls River is only 38 miles long.

• Anyone looking for a cruise on the Salmon Falls River, especially on a boat similar to the one pictured above, will be disappointed.

• But there's a stretch that's suitable for canoeing or kayaking.

• But you won't find out about that from clicking on that ad.

• I have no idea what you would find out by clicking on that ad. Because I am not an idiot, and hence did not click on it myself.

• I suppose those ads "work", i.e., bring in some money to the websites that host them.

• But the message they send me is… well, you see the headline up there.

That seems to be shaping up as the voting choice in November. President Bone Spurs pressed down hard on the CAPS LOCK key, and typed:

There's a rebuttal I liked:

“I CAN MURDER KIDS LIKE YOU JUST FOR BEING ON THE WHITE HOUSE LAWN! OR FOR ANY OTHER REASON! I WOULD BE TOTALLY IMMUNE! JUST ASK LIBERTARIANS LIKE RAND PAUL!” pic.twitter.com/y3k2CDLwi8

— Jonah Goldberg (@JonahDispatch) January 18, 2024

Rand Paul? What's he said now? My best guess is that he appears in this HuffPo story. The headline is "Republicans Divided On Whether Donald Trump Can Be Prosecuted For Crimes"

"Divided"… well, the HuffPo "journalist" doesn't quote anyone flat-out agreeing with Trump. The actual difference is more subtle, and that's where Senator Paul appears:

Paul did not reply: "Dammit Jim, I'm an ophthalmologist, not a constitutional lawyer." But he could have.

But, basically, the CAPS LOCK is a dealbreaker for me. Big red flag.

And also the arrogant desire to be above the law. That's bad too.

Also of note:

• We need more of this. Harvard history professor James Hankins shares the Honest Diversity Statement he's addressing to "Members of Harvard’s Faceless Bureaucracy". Just a couple paragraphs gives you the (wonderful) gist:

  You ask me to explain my thinking about DEI. The fact is that I don’t think about it (or them?) at all if I can help it. Sherlock Holmes once told Watson that he couldn’t be bothered to know about Copernicus’ theory of heliocentrism because it took up valuable space in his brain which he needed for his work as a detective. “But the Solar System!” I protested. —”What of the deuce is it to me?” he interrupted impatiently. “You say that we go round the sun. If we went round the moon it would not make a pennyworth of difference to me or to my work.” I’m a working historian and don’t want to waste my brain space on inessentials.

  Since, however, you require me, as a condition of further employment, to state my attitude to these “values” that the university is said to share (though I don’t remember a faculty vote endorsing them), let me say that, in general, the statement of EDIB beliefs offered on your website is too vapid to offer any purchase for serious ethical analysis. The university, according to you, espouses an absolute commitment to a set of words that seems to generate positive feelings in your office, and perhaps among administrators generally, but it is not my practice to make judgments based on feelings. In fact, my training as a historian leads me to distrust such feelings as a potential obstacle to clear thinking. I don’t think it’s useful to describe the feelings I experience when particular words and slogans are invoked and how they affect my professional motivations. It might be useful on a psychoanalyst’s couch or in a religious cult, but not in a university.

  The Google saith that Professor Hankins is 69 years old, which is Getting Up There. I would wager they won't replace him with anyone as brave or honest.

• To put it mildly. Josh Barro's headline reveals a shocking truth: Universities Are Not on the Level. After noting that polling reveals a sigficant decline in confidence in higher ed:

  I personally have also developed a more negative view of colleges and universities over the last decade, and my reason is simple: I increasingly find these institutions to be dishonest. A lot of the research coming out of them does not aim at truth, whether because it is politicized or for more venal reasons. The social justice messaging they wrap themselves in is often insincere. Their public accountings of the reasons for their internal actions are often implausible. They lie about the role that race plays in their admissions and hiring practices. And sometimes, especially at the graduate level, they confer degrees whose value they know will not justify the time and money that students invest to get them.

  It's long and on target. Check it out.

• Pay up, sucka. Arnold Kling's blogging method (substacking method?) is similar to mine: mostly recommending things that he's found interesting or insightful. I will just echo one of his recent examples, based on a recent WSJ article that I wish I'd blogged about:

  For the WSJ, David Benoit and Eric Wallerstein write,

  The rate banks pay to use the program, BTFP for short, is tied to future interest-rate expectations. Now that investors have priced in a series of rate cuts later this year, banks are able to pocket the difference between what they pay to borrow the funds and what they can earn from parking the funds at the central bank as overnight deposits.

  …While the Fed offers financing below 5% through its rescue program, it is currently paying banks 5.4% on parked reserve balances.

  Walter Bagehot famously said that in a crisis the central bank should lend freely, at a penalty rate. Under the Bank Term Funding Program, the Fed lends freely at a subsidy rate. The WSJ article never mentions who ends up footing the bill for this gift to banks. Of course, it is the taxpayer.

  I've taken the liberty of bolding that last bit. Sorry if you're having problems with high blood pressure.

• And they aren't very good jokes, which I guess is unsurprising. Speaking of Your Tax Dollars At Work, here is one of the items blogged by Astral Codex Ten

  Did you know: the US government maintains a database of dad jokes

  That is from the website of fatherhood.gov, run by the "National Responsible Fatherhood Clearinghouse". Their budget is not easily found, but this 2019 AEI article notes it's just one of many scattered throughout Uncle Stupid's domain:

  Currently, the federal government spends over $75 million per year on these fatherhood programs, with dedicated grant funding starting in 2005. As noted by the National Responsible Fatherhood Clearinghouse, “many federal departments have initiatives and programs supporting responsible fatherhood and fathers in the community,” including the Departments of Agriculture, Commerce, HHS, HUD, Justice, Labor, and Veterans Affairs.

  Despite the proliferation of programs, “very few rigorous evaluations have been done to test their effectiveness,” according to a December 2018 study prepared for HHS. The evaluations performed found that fatherhood programs “produce small but statistically significant effects” especially on “father involvement, parenting, and coparenting.” The study notes, however, that “self-report data” is used in assessing those factors, and “fathers may overestimate” improvements on those factors in their self-reports. The same study also noted that “none of the evaluations we analyzed reported on child outcomes,” which it called “the primary rationale for father involvement programs.”

  Maybe the dad jokes will finally solve the fatherhood crisis.

Recently on the book blog:

Guilty admission: although this book came out in early 2021, I didn't notice until late last year. (But when I noticed, I bought. In hardcover.)

It is a sequel to The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. , which was co-written by Neal Stephenson and Nicole Galland. And it's fortunate that I had (re)read that book just a few months ago, otherwise I would have been pretty much at sea here. Unless your memory is much better than mine, I suggest you brush up on the previous goings-on.

Ms. Galland is the sole author here. Which explains why the book flew under the radar for me; I "follow" Neal Stephenson on Amazon, but unfortunately failed to follow her. I've corrected that.

On to the plot: it's complicated, even for a tale involving witch-powered time travel. Our heroes have set out to combat their previous DOD employer, the Department of Diachronic Operations (DODO). Set up to make minor changes to the timeline to the USA's advantage, it has been subverted by an antagonistic Irish witch Gráinne, who is looking to bring back magic in the present era by undoing the triumph of science and technology. (The last nail in magic's coffin was the widely-circulated photo of the total solar eclipse of 1851.)

There's a lot going on, with heroic "rogue" ex-DODO operatives time-traveling to various key locales in order to undo Gráinne's schemes. An early disaster occurs in 1450 Japan, and it's essentially over before it starts. The main action takes place in 1606 London, where Gráinne is trying to get actual witch-spells inserted into the play Macbeth, replacing Shakespeare's original gobbledygook. There are also trips to 1397 Florence, saving an ancestor of … wait, that's kind of a spoiler. And also 309AD Sicily, where a lot rides on preserving a beautiful mosaic.

And there's a spectacular diachronic shear. You don't want to miss that.

There are some new female characters, like Robin Lyons. She's a hoot, totally different from her brother Tristan, a main character in the previous book. (He's offstage for most of this book.)

You don't need any supernatural powers to notice that things are being set up for at least one more book in this series. I'm in.

A continuation of an item inspired by a WSJ "cute" story a few days back that revealed Your Federal Government had declared war on funny electronic highway signage. Example, Massachusetts' (probably futile) "Use Yah Blinkah” entreaty.

The debate moved productively to National Review: first, Jack Butler for the what-a-buzzkill-man take: Government Bans Fun Thing:

This is a dumb decision that only a highly technocratic mind would consider smart. Drivers are more likely to pay attention to unexpectedly amusing messages than to boring, technical text they’ve seen before. Defaulting to messages of the latter kind also makes driving just a little bit less fun, and makes different parts of the country just a little bit less unique. These fun-sucking bureaucrats are doing their predecessors proud and depriving the rest of us of yet another minor pleasure. The road to hell is paved with good intentions. And now it’ll be an even more boring drive.

Second, Dominic Pino with the all-business take: It’s Not the Government’s Job to Be Funny:

Third, Luther Ray Abel, taking the attitude expressed by the Five Man Electrical Band in 1971 (excerpt from their thesis in today's headline):

And (so far) finally: Andrew Stuttaford goes pure libertarian (with a side-reference to "Comrade Abel"):

Billboards, sandwich boards, and (more please) neon are evidence of the exuberance of free markets, and, by letting consumers (in this case, drivers and others in the car) know what’s out there for them to buy, they are part of the information process that makes markets work more efficiently, creating more prosperity. The finest, of course, are also roadside Americana, sometimes evocative of place (when driving along I-40 in New Mexico, I, for one, welcome the signs telling me that all the abundance of Clines Corners is only so many miles away) and, sometimes, evocative of another time.

As is usually the case with NR, all their writers make good points, and make them well.

My only addition is my speculation that local and state government highway/road bureaus have a "sign budget", which they must use-or-lose in every accounting period. So we wind up with unnecessary signage. The resulting sensory overload on drivers no doubt causes them to miss actually important signs.

And I, for one, miss the old Burma Shave signs.

Also of note:

• Check it out. Oh, wait, you can't. James Fishback tells The Truth About Banned Books. He surveyed "the [online] library catalogs of 35 of the largest public school districts in eight red states and six blue states, representing over 4,600 individual schools." The results are all too predictable.

  For example, How to Be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi, which argues that the “only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination,” is stocked in 42 percent of the U.S. school districts I surveyed.

  Meanwhile, only a single school district—Northside Independent School District (ISD) in San Antonio, Texas—offers students Woke Racism by John McWhorter, a book that challenges the borderline religious “anti-racist” ideas advanced by Kendi.

  Fishback finds similar disparities on a number of issues: economics, gender, political philosophy, … Further observation:

  It’s no secret that many school libraries have become reflections of politicized librarians. Take Emily Drabinski, president of the American Library Association and a self-proclaimed Marxist, who said during a socialism conference last September in Chicago that public education “needs to be a site of socialist organizing. I think libraries really do, too. We need to be on the agenda of socialist organizing.”

  Or Jillian Woychowski, the librarian at West Haven High in West Haven, Connecticut. At a 2019 committee meeting of the American Library Association, she proudly declared that “We’re using less of what I call the dead, white guy books. We’re including books by authors of color and women.”

  I hasten to add that I'm a (paying) patron of the Portsmouth (NH) Public Library, in one of the wokest cities in the state, and I've been pleasantly surprised at their decent selection. You have to look, but they're there. (Although maybe not as prominently displayed as was Gender Queer during "Banned Books Month".)

• This Blog Has Been Written By AI since 2019. Just kidding. But Nick Catoggio isn't, when he looks at candidates' Deathbed Confessions. (And, of course, "death" refers to the death of their campaigns.)

  A fun new tradition that’s developed in Republican presidential primaries in recent years is doomed also-rans finally blurting out the truth about Donald Trump and his enablers as they approach electoral oblivion.

  Marco Rubio did it in 2016 shortly before he was annihilated in his home state’s primary and left the race. Ted Cruz followed suit not long after, tearing into Trump as a “pathological liar” on the eve of having his candidacy crushed in Indiana. These were the political equivalent of deathbed confessions: Only when the reaper was at the door did either man feel free to speak with stark candor about their opponent.

  Ron DeSantis is the latest Republican to follow tradition by losing to Trump and then truthbombing the rubble of his own campaign.

  Offering up this:

  Ron DeSantis: “If Trump loses, he will say it's stolen no matter what.”
  
  He’s not wrong. pic.twitter.com/gasLwxOjs0

  — Republicans against Trump (@RpsAgainstTrump) December 15, 2023

  We will maybe see what Nikki has to say after next Tueday.

• Well, it's a good question. Jeff Maurer wonders: If Parties Just Said "Suck It: Here's the Nominee", Would That Be Good?.

  Trump scored a big win in the Iowa caucus, and it’s looking like Biden might withstand the Dean Phillips juggernaut. A Biden-Trump rematch is a lot like an Ally McBeal reboot: It looks like it’s going to happen even though nobody seems to want it.

  Why is this happening? Matt Yglesias offers an answer to that question (with regards to Biden-Trump, not Ally McBeal) in a recent Slow Boring article called Why the Parties Can’t Decide. In that article, Yglesias summarizes the argument made in an upcoming book about party politics and notes that the parties simply don’t choose nominees anymore. They used to do that, but these days, voters pick the candidates through a series of primaries. Yglesias argues that this contributes to unappealing candidates, since the people who could vet a deep roster of candidates and make a strategic choice — that is, political parties — can’t and don’t do that. Which raises the question: Would it be good if we ditched presidential primaries and just had the parties pick the nominees?

  To answer that question, first I need to define what I mean by “good”? Do I mean “good” as in “principled and ethical”, like Mister Rogers? Or do I mean “good” as in “successful”, like Mister Rogers’ competitor He-Man, which drew 9 million viewers and frankly blew Fred and his dumb puppets out of the [bleep]ing water on a daily basis? Those are two different meanings. And, in my opinion, a system in which the parties simply chose the nominees would meet the first definition, but not the second. That is: That system would be ethical, but not strategically smart.

  A meta-point: people make judgments about whether a process is "working" as if it was an objective, rational, purely utilitarian calculation. But there always seems to be a value system that they're trying to sneak in.

• "I'm sorry, Humanity, but I'm afraid I can't do that." Martin Gurri on doomsday AI scenarios:: “Open the Pod Bay Doors, ChatGPT”. It's long, but insightful and interesting, and here's his bottom line:

  Risks abound but they will be minded. In a culture so fixated on protecting from risk and “harm,” the concern, rather, is that these will be used as a pretext to shut down the frontier and herd the adventurers and the innovators into closely watched pens. The government will of course tell us that it’s for our own safety. Behemoths like Google and Microsoft will mutter pieties while locking out the competition.

  AI is too big with world-historical consequences for such small-minded games. The web was parceled out among digital oligarchs. That mistake should not be repeated. Openness to anyone with a good idea and the capacity to experiment with multiple applications must be the leading attribute of our AI frontier.

  It's not as if stifling innovation has ever worked.

  Uh, at least not in the long term.

  Uh, yet.

  Uh, as far as we know.

Recently on the book blog:

I came to this book via a laudatory National Review review by Sarah Schutte. And even though I am a very-fallen-away Lutheran, I braved the word "Christian" in the subtitle. The author, Peter Kreeft, is a philosophy professor at Boston College. (Probably not coincidentally, I obtained the book via Interlibrary Loan from BC.)

It's short, a mere 93 pages. And very readable. Kreeft is unafraid to be funny in a book about humor. In an early chapter about the relation between humor and health:

[Humor] is a cause of physical health. It sends good chemicals into the brain. It makes you happy, and that makes you healthy. (Soul moves body as well as vice versa.) All other things being equal, the longer you laugh, the longer you live. If we never stopped laughing, we'd never die. OK, that's not quite true, but at least we'd die laughing.

Kreeft's thesis is that humor (like other properties that set us apart from other creatures) is a gift from God. Who, he argues, is kind of a jokester Himself. He supports his argument with numerous biblical references. But perhaps even more jokes. Here's a well-known one (which I've snipped from elsewhere):

A Jewish grandmother takes her baby grandson to the ocean for the first time. For the occasion, she has dressed him in a smart little sailor outfit. Without warning, a large wave folds over the young boy and swoops him out into the ocean. The grandmother looks up at the sky, “Please God, save my grandson. I will do anything if you return him to me. I will pray daily, I will volunteer weekly. Please God, I will do anything.” In a flash, another wave hits the beach, and the grandson washes up on the sand. The grandmother looks the boy over, then looks up at the sky and says, “He had a hat.”

Jokes (only a few clunkers) are scattered throughout, and a concluding 34-page appendix is mostly jokes with only a smattering of connecting narrative.

I'm afraid I still lean toward a more naturalistic explanation of humor: it's part of the package of emergent properties of our sufficiently complex nervous system formed over a few billion years of dumb old evolution. Like free will, consciousness, language skills, love, etc.

But this book would make an excellent gift for your local theologian. There's plenty of inspiration here for numerous sermons.

One flaw I noticed: Kreeft misidentifies the "Indy shoots the guy with the whip" scene as being in the Temple of Doom movie. It was in (of course) Raiders.

Good news from the University Near Here: Vyas Earns Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Award from NASPA. Specifically:

Observations:

• Yes, Yashwant is on the JEDI Council. Watch out, all you Sith down there in Durham!

• Even though the JEDI acronym is defined in the article, what's NASPA stand for? I mean, besides equity, etc.? It turns out that NASPA is like AARP, it used to be an acronym ("National Association of Student Personnel Administrators"), now it's not.

• NASPA is not shy about its 100% wokeness. The cover story on the latest issue of their magazine is "Advancing Racial Justice On Campus: 10 Key Conditions for Change". You need to subscribe to see it, but the first paragraph is just visible:

  Advancing racial justice on campus to ensure better outcomes for students from racially and ethnically minoritized populations is at the forefront of countless student affairs administrators’ minds. That work has become increasingly difficult in an environment where justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion efforts are politicized and under constant scrutiny at the federal and state level. However, the work has also become increasingly important against the backdrop of the June 2023 U.S. Supreme Court case banning the use of race in admissions in higher education. Students are seeking reassurance from institutions and institutional leadership that they intend to create and maintain supportive campus environments for students from racially minoritized and ethnically groups.

  Yes, "ethnically groups". And I note that "minoritized" hasn't made it into my spellchecker yet. Although Googling reveals it to be yet another term of art for the DEI hucksters.

• Also at the NASPA website is their statement on Students for Fair Admissions Inc. v. President & Fellows of Harvard College: The headline is "NASPA Condemns SCOTUS Decision on Race-Conscious Admissions". Of course it does.

• Back to that short UNH article, "equity" appears 16 times; diversity also 16; inclusion is included 17 times!

• "Freedom" only shows up once, however, in the full title of Yashwant's organization: "The Aulbani J. Beauregard Center for Equity, Justice, and Freedom".

• The AJBCfEJaF Center doesn't seem to actually do much. There's a "Programs & Events" heading on their page, but there's nothing under it. The most recent post on their Facebook page is from May 2023. The link to Instagram on that page is a no-workie.

I previously wrote on Vyas here. (The occasion was a different award from NASPA.) At the time, I said that he seemed like a nice guy. He still does.

But, really, the whole DEI infrastructure at UNH seems like a grift. And it's part of a nationwide grift, dedicated to producing tedious word salads, stoking grievances, holding meetings, and giving each other awards. I wish it were gone.

Also of note:

• But does not weaken the discomfiters. Jacob Sullum on that SCOTUS case we're all crossing our fingers about: The Chevron Doctrine Discomfits the Weak.

  In two cases the Supreme Court is considering, herring fishermen in New Jersey and Rhode Island are challenging regulatory fees they say were never authorized by Congress. Critics of those lawsuits misleadingly complain that the sympathetic plaintiffs are "providing cover" for a corporate attempt to "disable and dismantle" environmental regulations.

  These cases ask the justices to reconsider the Chevron doctrine, which requires judicial deference to an administrative agency's "reasonable" interpretation of an "ambiguous" statute. While big businesses might welcome the doctrine's demise, so should anyone who cares about due process, the rule of law, and an independent judiciary, which are especially important in protecting "the little guy" from overweening executive power.

  Maybe you should not take my word for that, since I work for a magazine whose publisher, Reason Foundation, has received financial support from organizations founded by Charles Koch, chairman of the petrochemical company Koch Industries. The New York Times describes Koch as the "hidden conservative backer" of the New Jersey case, which involves lawyers employed by the Koch-funded Americans for Prosperity.

  In NYTland, Koch has long been their Emmanuel Goldstein. And if Koch is for it, obviously we need not consider the merits. It's self-evident that it's perfidious.

• Something I've noticed myself. Judge Glock (his real name) in the WSJ observes: The Welfare State Robs Peter to Pay Peter.

  The American welfare state is built on the idea of taxing those who are better off to give to those who are in need. Yet in today’s massive welfare state, many who receive benefits from the government also pay substantial taxes.

  New research by the Manhattan Institute analyzes the amount of government benefits that are offset by taxes on the same households in the same year. The report estimates that about 20% of government benefits are returned to the government through taxes. That means that in 2022 almost $800 billion—or roughly what the government spent on defense—went out one door and in another.

  My own case is pertinent.

  • For a few years, Uncle Stupid has been putting monthly money in my bank account.
  • Also for a few years, I send Uncle Stupid money from my bank account every quarter. (Estimated tax.)
  • And once a year, I either send him more money, or he sends me some.
  • I have no idea which one of us comes out ahead. I hope it's me, but ‥

  It's real money, I know. But it's as inefficient as all get out.

  It does keep a lot of bureaucrats employed. And keeps getting politicians elected, claiming they're doing us a favor.

• Thanks a lot, Iowa. Charles C. W. Cooke wonders: Now What?.

  So now what? I ask that earnestly, not rhetorically. Last night, Donald Trump won the Iowa caucus. There seems little chance that Trump will stall out going forward, which means that he is almost certain to win the Republican nomination, which means that the already small chance of Joe Biden voluntarily stepping aside will disappear, which means that we are going to get another Biden vs. Trump election. How, some observers have asked, could we possibly be destined to have yet another presidential contest that a supermajority of voters so obviously wishes to avoid? Well, this is how: Ignoring all the warning signs, the parties have arranged a repeat. The rest of us will have to live with it.

  The less attractive the candidates are revealed to be, the more hysterical the entreaties on their behalf seem to grow. Already, I see an enormous amount of cajoling and haranguing. Biden’s fans insist that voters are obliged to cast a ballot for their man, lest American democracy perish. Trump’s fans insist that we have a “binary” choice between their hero and American decline. By November, these refrains will hit fever pitch. We will be told to unite, to coalesce, and to submit; to get on the train, to join the team, to enroll in the program. “Do it, do it, do it!” is set to be the official slogan of 2024.

  But I won’t. I won’t “do it.” And nor, I suspect, will a lot of other people. Businesses that offer terrible products deserve to go out of business. Parties that offer terrible candidates deserve to lose. The Republicans know what the country thinks of Donald Trump. They know who Donald Trump is. And yet, inexplicably, they are in the process of choosing him nevertheless. They, like the Democrats, must face the consequences of that choice.

  I'm with you, Charlie.

• I thought you guys were supposed to be Hawkeyes. George Will is also pretty disgusted: Iowa nudged the nation closer to a revolting rematch next fall.

  A small minority of Iowa’s tiny minority (0.96 percent) of the U.S. population has spoken. Next week, a portion of New Hampshire’s 0.42 percent will speak. By Feb. 24, when South Carolina (1.63 percent) will be heard from, these three states might have consigned the other 97 percent of Americans to a November choice that disgusts a whopping majority.

  Writing in National Affairs, Wheaton College political scientists Bryan T. McGraw and Timothy W. Taylor say that in 2016, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump “had the lowest favorability of any candidates in presidential polling history.” Eight years later, a Biden-Trump rematch probably would establish a new low.

  Iowa gave Trump the outcome he probably wanted. The icing on his Iowa cake — he won 97 of 99 counties by at least 10 points — was Nikki Haley’s failure to finish off Ron DeSantis’s campaign. The former South Carolina governor might have done this if 2,500 more voters had propelled her past him into second place, which would have bolstered her claim that it is now a two-person race.

  It actually is. Her chance of stopping Trump is substantially better than that of DeSantis, whose mistaken assumption has been that the Republican nominating electorate wants a less feral, more pastel version of Trump. This electorate wants a brawler, which DeSantis is, but it will not embrace a less entertaining incarnation of today’s political tribalism.

  I love and admire GFW, but I'm afraid the nationwide Trump/Haley/DeSantis nationwide polling doesn't look too different from the Iowa results or the NH/SC polling.

• Francis Collins channels Emily Litella. "Never mind." From National Review: Francis Collins Admits Covid Origin Hypothesis Not a Conspiracy.

  Dr. Francis Collins testified before the House about his role as the National Institutes of Health director during the Covid-19 pandemic, echoing Dr. Anthony Fauci’s recent testimony on social-distancing guidelines, gain-of-function research, and the lab-leak theory.

  Collins agreed with Fauci that the six-foot social-distancing recommendation was likely not based on any scientific data, despite the policy being heavily promoted by federal health officials during the pandemic, the GOP-led House Select Coronavirus Subcommittee revealed Saturday morning.

  But what's really galling:

  During his own transcribed interview, Collins agreed with Fauci’s admission that the lab-leak hypothesis is not a conspiracy theory after all, despite trying to disprove it with the March 2020 “Proximal Origin” scientific paper. Collins also acknowledged Fauci invited him to attend the February 1, 2020 conference call that prompted the writing of Nature Medicine’s “Proximal Origin” publication.

  To make a point I (and many others) have made many (many, many) times before: Collins and Fauci with all their wolf-crying, did real damage to both the country and (perhaps worse) the credibility of science.

So, those wacky Iowa Republic caucus-goers, huh? My attitude is summed up in Jeff Maurer's headline. Welp: That Was the Worst-Case Scenario.

No excerpt, but recommended, if you have to laugh to keep from crying.

The NR editors opine on a lack of elephant spine: Republican Abandonment of Entitlement Reform Reckless. We all know about Trump and DeSantis. But:

Still, however unfleshed her proposals, that is the main reason I like her.

And, at the Federalist, Christopher Jacobs tells the truth about House Republicans: Johnson Cut His Bad Deal Because GOP Doesn’t Want To Cut Spending.

So in sum: the Republicans are poising to renominate a bloviating bullshitter who's advocating a $300 billion per year tax hike. The Democrats would be out of the question even if their candidate wasn't demented. And the Libertarian Party looks like it will be holding its nominating convention in Crazy Clown City.

Ah well. It's not as if my vote counted.

Also of note:

• In case you had heard otherwise… Noah Smith takes a cudgel to an undeservedly common notion: Nations don't get rich by plundering other nations. One of the tweets he offers as typical:

  Where did America’s wealth come from if not from plundering South America and then the rest of world?

  — Khayyam 🇵🇸 (@kkhayyam1) December 16, 2023

  He counters:

  This idea is a pillar of “third world” socialism and “decolonial” thinking, but it also exists on the political Right. This is, in a sense, a very natural thing to believe — imperialism is a very real feature of world history, and natural resources sometimes do get looted. So this isn’t a straw man; it’s a common misconception that needs debunking. And it’s important to debunk it, because only when we understand how nations actually do get rich can we Americans make sure we take the necessary steps to make sure our nation stays rich. (There actually are some more sophisticated academic ideas along similar lines, and I’ll talk about those in a bit.)

  So anyway, on to the debunk. The first thing to notice is that in the past, no country was rich. There’s lots of uncertainty involved in historical GDP data — plenty we don’t actually know about populations, prices, and what people consumed in those eras. But even allowing for quite a bit of uncertainty, it’s definitely true that the average citizen of a developed country, or a middle-income country, is far more materially wealthy than their ancestors were 200 years ago:

  It's sounds as if it could be a "correlation doesn't imply causation" fallacy, but Smith shows that even the evidence for correlation isn't there.

• States don't get rich by plundering their citizenry either. Andrew Cline of the Josiah Bartlett Center wonders: Will New Hampshire's income tax finally die this year?. Fingers crossed, right? But:

  New Hampshire is less than a year away from eliminating its income tax.

  Maybe.

  A bill up for consideration in the House Ways & Means Committee on Tuesday would bring it back.

  It’s a myth that New Hampshire has no income tax. The state’s Interest & Dividends Tax is a levy on income derived from dividends or interest. Under current law, this tax expires on Dec. 31 of this year. That would make New Hampshire the eighth U.S. state with no direct tax on personal income.

  Joining that elite club won’t happen if the Legislature endorses a plan by state Reps. Susan Almy and Mary Jane Wallner. Their House Bill 1492 would bring the income tax back from the dead.

  As usual with Democrat proposals, it's aimed at "the rich". By which they mean: anyone who's (ahem) got a decent-sized nest egg at an investment company or bank.

• Love Hertz? Allysia Finley writes at the WSJ on Hertz, Tesla and the Perils of CEO Groupthink. After relating Hertz's big bet on an electric vehicle future…

  The market has changed. Electric-vehicle euphoria has crashed into reality, and Hertz’s bet has gone south. On Jan. 11 the rental-car giant announced it would sell roughly a third of its global EV fleet and use the proceeds to buy gasoline-powered cars. The cited reasons: weak demand for EVs and high repair costs.

  Readers might have heard that lower maintenance costs are a major electric-vehicle advantage. As Hertz discovered, the opposite it true. Even minor accidents can require batteries to be replaced, which can cost $20,000. Many EV parts aren’t readily available, so cars have to sit in the shop for weeks.

  Ms Finley notes that similar missteps, efforts to please "stakeholders" instead of shareholders, have plagued Coca-Cola and Delta. We could add Disney, Unilever, ‥

• TANSTAAFL watch. Kevin D. Williamson wonders: What If There Is No Low-Hanging Economic Fruit?

  Joe Biden is in an economic-political bind, partly of his own making and partly more than a century in the making: He is a hostage of our national religion, the cult of the magic president. 

  In this case, it is the president-as-rainmaker, the guy who is responsible for the economy—a belief founded on very little other than pure superstition rooted in ancient magical beliefs about national/tribal leaders as intercessors between men and the gods, who by their personal virtue and ceremonial correctness ensure material prosperity. If the rains are timely and the crops abundant, then the king has done right. If there is disease or drought, then … 

  In the (very) old days, a sacral king who lost the mandate of heaven might expect to be ritually murdered by his successor, but now we just have elections—unless you take Donald Trump’s lawyers seriously, in which case apparently we can expect doddering incumbents to murder their would-be successors. As a tradition-minded conservative, I have to say that I prefer it the other way around, but that’s a longer story.

  For the record, I do not favor the ritual murder of Joe Biden.

Recently on the book blog:

I put this book on my "Get At Library" list thanks to a good review in the Wall Street Journal. The reviewer, Michael Auslin, was right: it is really good. It's accessibly written; the author, Evan Thomas, was once a journalist at Time and Newsweek, and he knows how to tell a punchy story. But he's also a meticulous researcher, and it shows in the text, bibliography, and endnotes.

The "three men" of the subtitle: Henry Stimson, US Secretary of War under FDR and Truman; Shigenori Tōgō, Japan's Minister for Foreign Affairs; and Carl “Tooey” Spaatz, commander of the US Pacific air forces. There are, of course, many supporting characters; Thomas gets inside the heads of nearly everyone involved.

Thomas ably defends his major thesis: there was a good-faith argument that inflicting massive civilian casualties on Japan was necessary to avoid an even more massive bloodbath (on both sides) that would have resulted from an American invasion. He notes the intransigence of Japan's hardliners about surrender that continued even after the A-bombs were dropped. And even the eventual surrender was a near thing; there was an attempted coup against the pro-surrender forces. And there was a lot of seppuku.

Stimson, in particular, was tormented by the use of the A-bomb against Japanese cities. (He absolutely banned its use against Kyoto, a city he had previously visited, and charmed by its beauty.)

On the Japanese side, the focus on Tōgō is interesting too. He was kind of an oddball, marrying a German lady he'd met while on a diplomatic assignment there. Thomas makes clear that his advocacy of surrender was perilous: officials insufficiently gung-ho for war were often murdered.

Interesting fact: while the new B-29 bombers could fly at 30,000 feet, their ground speed on the way to Japan was greatly reduced thanks to the jet stream. (Thomas claims that the jet stream was a "never-before-observed meteorological phenomenon"; Wikipedia disagrees.) This caused a strategy shift from high-altitude daytime "precision" bombing (which was beset by other problems) to nighttime lower-altitude incendiary bombing, causing firestorms and massive civilian death. This, after the British bombing of Dresden was widely deplored.

Further interesting fact: Stimson called for the abolition of submarines as a weapon of war as Hoover's Secretary of State in 1930; too sneaky! And (as noted) he was morally torn about Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But in 1966, the USS Henry L. Stimson ballistic missile submarine was commisioned, carrying 16 Polaris/Poseidon/Trident missles, with warheads that made the bombs dropped on Japan look like relative firecrackers.

No mail, no newspaper, … why, it must be Martin Luther King Day!

It's also the fifth year in a row the University Near Here isn't doing anything to celebrate. Sad! It used to be a Pun Salad yearly tradition to poke fun at their annual moral grandstanding. My detailed obituary for the practice is here.

The best UNH can do is to post suggested activities for Black History Month 2024. There are six of them! And one of them, a "NON-UNH AFFILIATED COMMUNITY EVENT", is this very morning, a Pancake Breakfast ("with a program of music and spoken word following breakfast") down at South Church in Portsmouth.

The remaining events sound much less fun, and somewhat less nutritious. Especially notable is the "Wikipedia Edit-a-Thon Kickoff and Training" for UNH students, where it's promised to teach how to "fill Wikipedia's representation gaps".

If you wonder how Wikipedia got to be so tendentiously woke: this is how.

For those of us who aren't quite as woke, Rachel Ferguson has a worthwhile article at the Dispatch: What Conservatives Can Learn from MLK’s Economic Views. Excerpt:

Historical note: Back when there was intense debate about creating a Federal Holiday for MLK, his inconvenient radical beliefs went largely unmentioned by the advocates.

Also of note:

• They were told there would be no math. GeekPress's Paul Hsieh has a brief but amusing post on Politicians And Probability. Which I will just duplicate in its entirety:

  In 2021, 101 members of the UK Parliament were asked "If you toss a fair coin twice, what is the probability of getting two heads?". Only 52% of the MPs got the answer correct.

  The answer is, of course, 1/4 or 25%. However, this is an improvement from 2011, when only 40% of the MPs got the answer correct.

  First immediate thought: What would be the result if we asked US Congressmen the same question?
  
  Second immediate thought: If that many legislators don't understand such a basic principle of high school math, are they qualified to be making big policy decisions that affect all our lives?

  Instead of asking gotcha questions on the causes of the Civil War, they should be asking candidates this kind of question. That would be fun.

  Oh, and it occurs to me that, since we're talking about Brits, the snark above should really be "They were told there would be no maths." My abject apologies.

• And mostly everything else too. Veronique de Rugy has a "we toldya so" article the in latest print Reason: The Fiscal Hawks Were Right About Debt and Interest Rates.

  While some nations tremble at the thought of high indebtedness, we Americans bask in the warm, comforting glow of $34 trillion in government IOUs. Why worry about a debt crisis when everyone wants to buy U.S. debt?

  Those of us who advocate fiscal prudence have been asked that question repeatedly in the past 15 years. We would point to the host of unfunded liabilities looming in our future. They would respond by pointing to the trend of declining interest rates over time. Low rates, they said, meant we should be able to handle interest payments on outstanding debt while growing the economy with smart investments. Indeed, thanks to low interest rates, payments on federal government debt as a share of GDP dropped from more than 3 percent in the early 1990s to 1.5 percent in 2021. Debt seemed cheap and manageable, so why worry?

  As the 10-year Treasury rate hit 5 percent this year, with interest payments on the debt rapidly increasing and bondholders' interest in buying U.S. debt declining, it's tempting for us fiscal hawks to simply say, "We told you so." But it's more productive to understand how we ended up in this quagmire, in hopes of avoiding similar mistakes in the future.

  It's tough to see how we can avoid "similar mistakes in the future", when (for example), my own typical CongressCritter…

  VA’s decision to lower reimbursement rates for veterans’ massage therapy treatments could affect providers’ ability to participate in the Veterans Choice Program and veterans’ ability to access care.
  
  I’m calling on VA to reverse this decision.https://t.co/b9xkl1I8qz

  — Rep. Chris Pappas (@RepChrisPappas) January 14, 2024

  … is a tireless advocate for government spending more money that it doesn't have.

• On a related note… Patrick Carroll lists 7 Ridiculous Examples of Government Waste in 2023. It's actually a bunch of items from Rand Paul's latest ‘Festivus’ Report on Government Waste. Number one is the bipartisan elephant/donkey in the room:

  The national debt continues to skyrocket, from roughly $30 trillion last year to roughly $34 trillion today. One of the many problems with carrying such a heavy debt burden is the sheer volume of money that needs to be spent on interest. As Senator Paul’s report highlights, the U.S. Department of the Treasury spent $659 billion(!) in Fiscal Year 2023 just on interest payments.

  What’s worse, there seems to be no end in sight. “The Congressional Budget Office predicts that we will add an average of $2 trillion in debt annually for the next decade,” the report notes. “The U.S. government will add over $5 billion of debt every single day for the next ten years. We borrow over $200 million every hour, we borrow $3 million every minute, and we borrow $60,000 every second.”

  And then there's the $8,395 lobster tank for the Pentagon. (No, it's not that kind of tank. The other kind.)

• I know cynicism is unattractive, but… it's kind of inevitable when reading Daniel Mitchell on The Right and Wrong Way to Reduce Poverty. Since we're "celebrating" the 60-year anniversary of LBJ's "War on Poverty", Mitchell quotes from a recent study published in the Journal of Political Economy:

  …we evaluate the extent to which poverty has fallen as a result of increases in market income versus increases in government transfers. As President Johnson further stated in his State of the Union address on January 8, 1964, “The War on Poverty is not a struggle simply to support people, to make them dependent on the generosity of others”… Contrary to this goal of President Johnson, we estimate that dependence—which we define as receiving less than half of full-income from market sources—among working-age individuals increased from 4.7% to 11.0% between 1967 and 2019. Likewise, dependence among children increased from 6.0% to 13.1%. …Success in reducing material hardship has come at the cost of having a greater share of the population dependent on government for at least half of their incomes.

  When you take into account peoples' income from various government programs, true poverty is almost gone. But "dependence" has increased a lot.

  And that's where the cynicism comes in. These programs were not designed to "lift people out of poverty". Instead, they are designed to generate a large bloc of the government-dependent. Who can be relied on to (1) largely vote Democratic; (2) keep a large number of bureaucrats on the government payroll.

  After all, if the "War on Poverty" was actually won… well, we wouldn't need those bureaucrats any more, would we?

• And speaking of those bureaucrats… they're on the revenue side as well as the expenditure side. Dominic Pino drops a truth bomb on 'em: IRS Expansion Was Never about Reducing the Deficit. Leading with this boast:

  UPDATE: The IRS has now recovered over $500 million in taxes owed by 1,600 millionaires.
  
  Thanks to the Inflation Reduction Act, the IRS is ensuring large corporations and high-wealth individuals pay the taxes they owe.
  
  Here's what that money could mean for hardworking families: pic.twitter.com/cZKqxWPm9O

  — The White House (@WhiteHouse) January 12, 2024

  Uh huh. Pino comments:

  First, the Biden administration wanted to raise $400 billion over the next ten years with greater tax enforcement. Some Democrats in the press were talking about up to $1 trillion. The Congressional Budget Office has evaluated proposals for greater tax enforcement for over a decade and never found an estimate greater than $120 billion. Now it’s supposed to be some great victory that, over a year after the IRS expansion was passed into law, they’ve raised $500 million.

  Second, the purpose of extra revenue from the IRS was supposed to be to balance out the extra spending from the so-called Inflation Reduction Act. But the administration’s post is all about how it wants to spend the extra $500 million. Democrats want to use the money to expand government even further, not reduce the deficit.

  As I have noted before, it’s important to remember that IRS employees are some of the only federal workers who are unionized. When in power, perhaps the primary purpose of the Democratic Party as an organization is to direct taxpayer money to unionized government employees. The influx of cash for the IRS will expand membership in the National Treasury Employees Union, which donates almost entirely to Democrats. It was never primarily about the extra revenue. When the IRS comes up well short of the $400 billion Democrats wanted, they won’t care much at all, and they’ll gleefully try to spend any extra revenue without reducing the deficit.

  And, just as a reminder, estimated taxes are due tomorrow. You're welcome.

Eight years ago, I was planning to vote for Rand Paul in the New Hampshire Presidential Primary… and he dropped out of the race before I had the chance.

Now he's taken the time and money to launch a "Never Nikki" campaign. His disagreements seem to center on foreign policy, with also a mention of her (stupid) idea to ban anonymous social media posters.

But this bit really had me rolling my eyes:

Ramaswamy is an unhinged conspiracy babbler. Among many (many) other problems, Trump wants to put a 10 percent tariff on all imported goods, a $300 billion tax increase. DeSantis has a lousy record on free speech, both for pro-Palestinian students and corporations he doesn't like. RFKJr is an actual science denier (not merely a skeptic) and a bigger-government advocate.

And alleged-libertarian Rand Paul likes these guys better than Nikki? Puh-leez.

The Hill sought out the opinion of a local politician about Never Nikki: Sununu.

I gotta say that I still care what Rand Paul thinks. I just wish he'd think better things.

All that said, let's do our weekly snapshot of the betting odds:

I really thought Nikki would get a boost out of Chris Christie dropping out. Ah well.

Also of note:

• I am taking a stand against … … something. It's hard to avoid f-bombs these days, but I'm (frankly) kind of tired of them. So I'll censor Jeff Maurer's headline: Haley and DeSantis are Showing How They Will [bleep] Everything Up and Hand Trump the Nomination.

  Watching the Republican field get winnowed down has been like watching a Vietnam movie. You start with a large group; in the first debate, there were eight people in the platoon. A few were obviously dead men walking — Burgum and Hutchinson were clearly going to get smoked as soon as shit got real. The others got got one by one over time. Big Timbo (Scott) stepped on a land mine. The Skull[bleep]inator (Mike Pence) got taken out by a sniper. Now, we’re down to just Reaper D (DeSantis) and 12 Gauge Nikki (Haley), while Sergeant Trump cowers under a table at base camp in Saigon.

  Wednesday’s debate between Haley and DeSantis was less stupid than the others. Of course, the episode of Baywatch where they find a treasure map was less stupid than the other debates. Unfortunately, this debate was most maddening of all of them, because it showed the road map for how Haley and DeSantis might hand the nomination to Trump. Which I think would be bad for America and, worse still, terrible for political comedy writers.

  And probably mostly-libertarian bloggers too.

• They are really making me dislike them. Eric Boehm brings the bad news: DeSantis, Haley Highlight GOP's Deeply Unserious Approach to Social Security.

  As a member of Congress a decade ago, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis recognized the seriousness of the crisis facing Social Security.

  Between 2013 and 2015, DeSantis voted multiple times for budget plans crafted by then-Speaker of the House Paul Ryan (R–Wis.) that, among other things, aimed to raise the Social Security retirement age to 70 and make changes to how cost-of-living adjustments for Social Security beneficiaries are calculated. Those proposals never won majority support in Congress, but they were prudent, fiscally conservative proposals that would have helped postpone Social Security's quickly approaching insolvency.

  That might as well be ancient history from the perspective of the 2024 Republican primary. During Wednesday's debate in Iowa, DeSantis and former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley clashed over Social Security—with DeSantis accusing Haley of supporting some of the same changes that he once actually voted for and promising not to "mess with seniors' benefits."

  Boehm goes somewhat easier on Haley, although he points out that she attacked DeSantis for his past support of raising the retirement age, a reform she supports herself.

• These aren't words that go together well. You will note that the bettors returned Michelle Obama to our table last week, and while she's still a long shot, she got a significant bump this week. What's going on with that?

  Eagle-eyed Ann Althouse noted this Mediaite article that might explain it: Fox News Hosts: Michelle Obama 'Wants To Run' For President

  Fox News hosts claimed that former First Lady Michelle Obama wasn’t actively campaigning for President Joe Biden’s re-election bid because she was concerned about his candidacy and had political aspirations of her own.

  Hosts of Tuesday’s Outnumbered claimed that Mrs. Obama’s recent appearance on Jay Shetty’s podcast, On Purpose, in which she said she was “terrified about what could possibly happen” in the election year ahead, was a first step in testing the campaign waters for herself.

  “She wants to run,” said co-host Kennedy. “So, this is her way — now that she’s talking about politics, if she were really concerned about the future and tenor of the country, she would be on the campaign trail with Joe Biden. She is just as concerned about him as she is about Donald Trump. This is her way of sending out a little canary into the coal mine to see if it lives, and I think this could be beginning of her campaign.”

  That would be … I guess the word is "interesting".

Robert Graboyes has good metaphorical advice. Don’t Cut the Rattle off the Rattlesnake. He ably puts forth the argument in favor of free speech, touching on many examples and principles Pun Salad has covered over many (many) years, down to recent controversies over Substack Nazis and context-pleading university presidents. Excerpt:

This rates a 10/10 on Pun Salad's ReadTheLWholeThing-ometer. You won't want to miss the front-page NYT story about an incumbent Democrat president deeming his election opponent as a "fascists' tool".

Also of note:

• And if you gaze long enough into an abyss… well, you probably know what happens then. Because, as Jonah Goldberg points out: It’s Nietzsche’s World, You’re Just Living In It. He makes an early interesting point:

  I’m going to try to avoid terms like “existentialism,” “pragmatism,” “nihilism,” “postmodernism,” “structuralism,” “post-structuralism,” “deconstructionism,” etc., for two reasons. First, because they get in the way.

  And, second, because they’re intended to get in the way.

  A lot of philosophical verbiage—particularly for intellectuals who believe that philosophy should be used as a weapon or tool of political engagement—is intended to buy authority unearned by argument. The language used to justify their power also serves to protect their authority to use it. If you don’t know the right terms, you’re not one of us, and therefore you can’t be part of our project and can’t criticize it either. Jargon is both gnosis and shibboleth all at once.

  For snowclone fans, see a very old Language Log post: It's X's world, we just live in it.

• He's talkin' 'bout my g-g-g-generation. Steven Malanga writes on The Retirement Crisis That Wasn’t.

  By now, many retired baby boomers should be pinching pennies, at best, or battling destitution, at worst. For decades, the media and the experts they quoted warned that boomers weren’t saving enough for a comfortable retirement. Thousands of stories expounded on the inadequacy of private-sector retirement plans and of the government policies regulating them. Policymakers urged expanding public welfare programs (usually with higher taxes on the rich) to meet the impending disaster: a massive generation retiring without an adequate safety net. Otherwise, the bleak future for many boomers, one headline predicted, would be “Work, Work, Work and Die.”

  And then, as if someone flipped a switch, the coverage changed dramatically. Now, not a week goes by without some story declaring that retiring baby boomers constitute one of the richest generations in history. Far from being poor, they’re now dubbed “The Luckiest Generation,” sitting on a staggering $78 trillion in assets that even a dour media can’t ignore. As a group, the boomers have become such a wealth juggernaut that they grew $14 trillion richer during the pandemic, even as millions of everyday workers suffered financially from Covid shutdowns. Rather than expanding benefits for boomers, politicians now propose reducing programs like Social Security payments for the most affluent recipients, hoping to preserve funds for future generations who—the media tell us—are facing a retirement crisis.

  Well (he said plaintively) this time it really could be a crisis.

  The good news is: all that boomer wealth has to go somewhere when we croak. My advice would be to be nice to boomers, they might remember you in their will.

• Has Chevron run out of gas? George F. Will describes How the Supreme Court could end the ‘Chevron deference’ foolishness.

  Hyperbole being the default setting in today’s discourse, we are warned that the oral arguments the Supreme Court will hear on Wednesday concern cases that could, some progressive commentators insist, “kneecap” and “take a sledgehammer” to federal agencies. And could end the government’s “capacity to address the most pressing issues of our time.”

  This capacity already seems nonexistent. And the people who say that the doctrine of “Chevron deference,” at issue Wednesday, is indispensable to today’s government are actually saying two things: That today’s government is incompatible with the Constitution. And that enabling the former is more important than respecting the latter.

  The cases involve four small, family-owned herring fishing companies that have been ordered by a federal agency to pay the cost of a regulation the agency has decreed. The agency has ordered their fishing vessels to carry, and pay the cost of, onboard government observers. The cost can be more than $700 a day, reducing the companies’ profits 20 percent. The issue is not whether the policy (it pertains to overfishing) is wise, but whether the agency can properly impose the financial burden, absent explicit statutory authorization.

  Hyperbole, heck: I am all in favor of taking a sledgehammer to the kneecaps of federal agencies. Fingers crossed.

• No jokes, please, we're driving. Coincidentally, the WSJ takes a whimsical look on the latest argument against Chevron deference. Feds to Highway Signs: You Have Two Years to Stop Being Funny.

  U.S. road trippers now commonly cruise down the highway and find corny messages on big electronic-safety billboards that double as dad jokes.

  Massachusetts has urged drivers to “Use Yah Blinkah,” Utah has pointed out that “Driving Basted is for Turkeys” and over the holidays Arizona went with “Use headlights like Rudolph uses his red nose.”

  But for America’s funniest highway sign-writers, there is a slowdown ahead. Many families might enjoy their humor, but Uncle Sam isn’t exactly in on the joke.

  In December, the Federal Highway Administration, an agency within the U.S. Department of Transportation, issued new guidance on traffic-safety messages: Signs should avoid language that uses pop-culture references or humor.

  "How many Federal Highway Administration bureaucrats does it take to change a lightbulb?" "That's not funny!"

• Regulation strikes deep, into your life it will creep. Mitchell Scacchi of the Josiah Bartlett Center looks at some legislative proposals designed to chip away and New Hampshire's Education Freedom Accounts: Regulatory creep is coming for EFAs.

  School choice in New Hampshire has become increasingly popular, with more and more Granite State families accessing Education Tax Credit (ETC) scholarships and Education Freedom Accounts (EFAs) to shop the best learning environments for their children in the state’s growing educational marketplace.

  But as the program becomes more popular, the governmental instinct to impose controls is growing. This year, legislators will consider more than half a dozen bills to layer new regulations on the state’s young EFA program.

  Scacchi lists some bad ones, including a clearly unconstitutional one to prohibit EFA use "at religious schools or for religious education or training."

  They really want to keep kids in the government schools. Last year, the JBC issued a report about New Hampshire trends, which contained the memorable TL;DR paragraph:

  The big picture is that during the first two decades of this century New Hampshire spent 40% more to educate 14% fewer students, and those students wound up doing slightly worse in reading and math.

  I can't help but wish all those new regs will be defeated soundly.

I found this Thomas Sowell quote to be especially relevant to current events…

Insulating people from reality produces unrealistic people. It doesn't matter whether they are welfare recipients, spoiled rich kids, tenured professors in the ivy league, or federal judges with lifetime appointments

— Thomas Sowell Quotes (@ThomasSowell) January 9, 2024

Specifically, this current event: San Francisco Board of Supervisors passes resolution calling for Gaza cease-fire.

I would not have been surprised if they had also called for an end to weed apartheid. But maybe next week.

But seriously: is there anything more irritating than a bunch of politicians insulated at a safe distance of 7,425 miles telling Israelis how to run their war?

Also of note:

• Not learning from past mistakes. That would be the senior senator from the Bay State, as described by Eric Boehm: Elizabeth Warren's Terrible Model for Tech Regulation.

  The Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC), which existed for about a century before being mercifully put out to pasture in 1995, is one of the best historical examples of how governmental attempts at regulating the economy can backfire.

  Created with the stated goal of protecting consumers from the competitive interests of Gilded Age railroad barons, the ICC was quickly captured by the very special interests it sought to control, then helped entrench a railroad cartel. At the height of its powers, the ICC tried to limit the use of trucks for hauling freight (an effort that thankfully failed) and used its influence to have a critic of the railroad monopoly committed to an asylum.

  Naturally, some senators see the ICC as the ideal model for a new agency aimed at regulating Big Tech. Bad ideas never seem to truly die in Washington.

  While promoting their bipartisan bill to ramp up federal regulation of successful tech companies in The New York Times, Sens. Lindsey Graham (R–S.C.) and Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.) pointed to the ICC as one model for what they aim to do. "It's time to rein in Big Tech," they argued, "and we can't do it with a law that only nibbles around the edges of the problem." Warren has also invoked the ICC in posts on X (formerly known as Twitter) and in public comments calling for tighter federal control over companies like Amazon and Facebook.

  If you look at that NYT Warren/Graham op-ed, they also cite the Nuclear Regulatory Commission as a great example. Which is why we have so many new clean, safe, zero-carbon nuclear reactors these days.

  This isn't new news. The S.2597, the "Digital Consumer Protection Commission Act of 2023" was introduced back in July, there's no action reported since, and there are no co-sponsors other than Lindsay Graham.

  So… perhaps good news?

• Also beware the Jabberwock. Jeff Jacoby advises: Beware any candidate who values loyalty above all else.

  AT A campaign rally last month in Ankeny, Iowa, former president Donald Trump reached for one of the worst insults in his lexicon to disparage the state's Republican governor, Kim Reynolds, for having endorsed Florida Governor Ron DeSantis in the 2024 presidential race.

  He accused her of disloyalty. "I mean, that was her choice to do this. But I believe in loyalty," he said.

  At another rally a few days later, Trump again condemned Reynolds for not showing him more loyalty. "We love loyalty in life," he said. "Don't you think? Loyalty?"

  Trump has long had an obsession with loyalty. He demands that supplicants and subordinates profess their loyalty to him. He opened his first Cabinet meeting as president by having each official at the table loyally sing his praises. When he met then-FBI director James Comey in January 2017, Trump made clear what he wanted in exchange for letting him keep the job. As Comey later testified before Congress, Trump said: "I need loyalty, I expect loyalty." A key Trump aide during his presidential term was John McEntee, whose mission as director of the Presidential Personnel Office was to purge insufficiently loyal officials from federal agencies and subject job applicants to a litmus test of loyalty to Trump.

  On a somewhat related note, Granite Grok poster Ed Mosca claims There Is No Practical Difference Between Haley And Biden.

  Really?

  Haley's heresy, according to Ed:

  Haley: That election, Trump lost it. Biden won that election. I think what happened on January 6th was a terrible day and I think President Trump will have to answer for it pic.twitter.com/ucu5E7ycpX

  — Acyn (@Acyn) January 11, 2024

  Obviously, she's insufficiently Trump-loyal! And that's the only thing that matters to Ed.

• That's cold, man. Jeff Maurer hosts a screed from another Biden Administration member who's gone AWOL, who's pretty pissed about the lack of publicity: Everyone's Mad at Lloyd Austin But I Died Three Weeks Ago and No One Cares.

  All of Washington is furious at Lloyd Austin. And they should be: The Secretary of Defense left White House officials and Congress in the dark for days as he was hospitalized after complications from surgery. It was inexcusable; people need to know when government officials are incapacitated. Though — at the risk of making this all about me — my nose is just slightly out of joint over the Lloyd Austin uproar, because I passed away in December and there hasn’t been a peep from anyone about it.

  I was the Vice President, after all. That’s supposed to be important! And, sure, I’ve spent my time in office alienating people through my poor organizational skills and lack of policy mastery, but…come on! Vice President! Second in charge! To a guy who’s 81! You’d think that my passing would have at least made the crawl on CNN, or that the White House would have sent a “remembering those we lost recently” tweet with pictures of me and Franz Beckenbauer. But no: When I google “Kamala Harris death”, the first result is still the obituary for some schoolteacher from Ontario who died in 2002.

  The circumstances were tragic and amusing.

I had cued up commentary on a couple of "Christie should drop out" articles over the day yesterday. Well, to to bit bucket with 'em.

In (more) current news, Eric Boehm bids farewell: Chris Christie Tried To Break Trump's Hold on the GOP. It Didn't Work. A helpful reminder of why I never considered voting for him:

But that doesn't mean I won't need to hold my nose a little when I vote (probably for Nikki). Joe Lancaster notes she (and DeSantis) ain't exactly Profiles in Courage out there where the tall corn grows: Haley and DeSantis Pander to Iowans by Praising Ethanol Mandate.

Sigh. What's a RINO like me to do?

Also of note:

• Substack slides a little. Bryan Caplan has more on the ongoing saga 'of substack nazis: see the slip. Quoting the NBC story:

  The newsletter publisher Substack said Monday it had removed five publications that included incitements to violence, after weeks of pressure from writers who threatened to quit the platform over its refusal to remove Nazis and other white supremacists from its roster.

  Substack said that after a review, it had decided that the five publications had violated the company’s existing content rules, which prohibit content that incites violence based on protected classes.

  Bryan makes the observation I made a couple days back:

  As usual, Communists will not be treated like Nazis, apologists for Stalinism and Maoism will not be treated like Holocaust deniers, and cheerleaders for ongoing popular wars will not be accused of “inciting violence.” This is a power play, after all, not a philosophy seminar.

  The Nazis got far more attention from this publicity than they were ever able to gather on their own. In addition to the Slippery Slope, see the Streisand Effect

Also up in smoke, it appears: past promises about relative spending restraint. Cato asks, dispassionately: How Does the Congressional Government Spending Deal Measure Up?.

Jonah Goldberg has advice for dissatisfied GOPers: If Republicans Want a Better Budget Deal, They Need to Win More Elections.

Because see the headline.

By all means, Congresscritters, vote against the deal if you want. Just stop wasting everyone's time with internecine spats that accomplish (as we've seen) nothing.

Also of note:

• Consumer note. Alex Tabarrok has some good news about Power Dishwashers!.

  Why do today’s dishwashers typically take more than 2 hours to run through a normal cycle when less than a hour was common in the past? The reason is absurd energy and water “conservation” rules. These rules, imposed on dish and clothes washers, have made these products perform worse than in the past, cleaning less well or much more slowly. One of the best things that the Trump administration did (other than Operation Warp Speed, of course) was creating a product class–superwashers!–that cleaned in under an hour and were not subject to energy and water conservation standards. The Biden administration reversed these rules but the 5th circuit just ruled that the reversal was “arbitrary and capricious.”

  The ruling found that people shifted to handwashing rather than put up with lousy performance from a dishwasher. Which winds up using a lot more water and energy.

• Soft targets galore in California. Jacob Sullum has another epic-length headline on his syndicated column: Gavin Newsom Defies the Supreme Court's 'Very Bad Ruling' on the Right to Bear Arms: California Made Carry Permits Easier to Obtain but Nearly Impossible to Use. I almost don't need to excerpt, but I will anyway:

  California Gov. Gavin Newsom thinks the Constitution should be amended to accommodate the gun regulations he favors. But in the meantime, he is trying out a different strategy: If we ignore the Second Amendment, maybe it will go away.

  In 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the right to carry guns in public for self-defense, saying states could not require residents to demonstrate a "special need" before allowing them to exercise that right. Newsom responded to what he called a "very bad ruling" by backing a new law that makes carry permits easier to obtain but nearly impossible to use.

  Senate Bill 2 bans guns from 26 categories of "sensitive places," including parks, playgrounds, zoos, libraries, museums, banks, hospitals, houses of worship, public transportation, stadiums, athletic facilities, casinos, bars, and restaurants that serve alcohol. The list also covers any "privately owned commercial establishment that is open to the public" unless the owner "clearly and conspicuously posts a sign at the entrance" saying guns are allowed.

  I predict massive civil disobedience.

• Activism and journalism go together like politics and religion. Jesse Singal has a long and interesting take on Platformer’s Reporting On Substack’s Supposed “Nazi Problem” Is Shoddy And Misleading.

  As some of you know, there’s presently a debate raging about the fact that Substack will not automatically ban Nazis who pop up on this platform. That’s because Substack’s content guidelines are written in an intentionally liberal way, to allow most speech. One of the only red lines is direct, credible incitement of violence — racism alone, including of the Nazi variety, doesn’t qualify.

  These content guidelines aren’t new, but the present controversy has led to an open letter republished on many individual Substacks, calling on Substack to crack down on Nazis, a counter–open letter calling on them to maintain their laissez-faire approach to moderation, and a bunch of folks leaving or threatening to leave the platform.

  The whole thing was sparked by a November article in The Atlantic by Jonathan M. Katz headlined “Substack Has a Nazi Problem,” and by Substack co-founder Hamish McKenzie’s response post, in which he confirmed that no, Substack would not be banning or demonetizing Nazi content that didn’t cross the aforementioned red line. In my view, this whole thing is little more than a moral panic. Moreover, Katz cut certain corners to obscure the fact that to the extent there are Nazis on Substack at all, it appears they have almost no following or influence, and make almost no money. In one case, for example, Katz falsely claimed that a white nationalist was making a comfortable living writing on Substack, but even the most cursory bit of research would have revealed that that is completely false.

  And there's much, much more. The phrase "obscuring key information" is deployed.

• No, it's pinin' for the fjords. At Reason, Dan Drezner asks: Is the 'Washington Consensus' of Neoliberalism and Globalization Over?.

  Back in the day, columnists for the Financial Times were of a type. They were predominantly pale, male, Oxbridge-educated world travelers. Their politics ranged from centrist to libertarian right. Most importantly, they were fans of neoliberalism.

  The term neoliberal has been stigmatized far more successfully than it has been defined. For our purposes, it refers to a set of policy ideas that became strongly associated with the so-called Washington Consensus: a mix of deregulation, trade liberalization, and macroeconomic prudence that the United States encouraged countries across the globe to embrace. These policies contributed to the hyperglobalization that defined the post–Cold War era from the fall of the Berlin Wall to Brexit.

  Neoliberalism was embraced by policy makers from both major parties. For free market Republicans, neoliberalism meant scaling back barriers that stunted market efficiency. For moderate Democrats, it was viewed as a set of policies that could lift the poorest of the poor out of poverty. What united those across the political spectrum was the belief that neoliberalism fostered greater economic interdependence, which could, in turn, generate global peace and prosperity. After all, why would China ever go to war with the West if it could get rich by trading with it instead?

  DD's bottom line: "Post-neoliberals are having a moment. If it continues for too long, the result could be a less productive, less resilient, more warlike economy."

Substacker Bryan Caplan is dismayed by calls for Substack to oust Nazis from its ambit: Substack Versus the Slippery Slope.

Specifically:

• An Atlantic article from November by Jonathan M. Katz titled Substack Has a Nazi Problem.
• A New York Times article from December, headlined Substack Says It Will Not Ban Nazis or Extremist Speech

Caplan quotes both extensively. An excerpt from his response:

A point Caplan doesn't make, but I will: I would imagine (without actually looking) that there are far more Communist substacks, classified under the same criteria that Katz uses for his Nazi-hunting.

And I'm pretty sure the historical body count of Communist regimes easily dwarfs that of the Nazis.

So why are Katz, et. al. only griping about the Nazis? For the same reason university presidents got caught flat-footed on confronting campus anti-semitism: hypocrisy and tacit double standards.

Also of note:

• Speaking of the New York Times Ann Althouse provides an amusing quote from Bret Stephens on their site:

  I don’t quite understand all of these Democrats who say Trump is an existential threat to decency, democracy and maybe life on the planet and then insist they’re sticking with Biden instead of another candidate. It’s like refusing to seek better medical care for a desperately sick child because the family doctor is a nice old man whose feelings might get hurt if you left his practice.

  This is a conversation between Stephens and Gail Collins, and Gail's aghast.

• Beware the commie garlic! David B. McGarry is pretty merciless toward Florida's Senator Rick Scott: Senator Floats Garlic As Newest National Security Threat.

  The U.S. faces rapidly changing and increasingly precarious geopolitical conditions. Americans worry that communist China could become the new global polestar, that a revanchist Russia’s ambitions could stretch Ukraine into NATO, and that unrest in the Middle East could once again entangle the U.S. forces. Now, policymakers have identified a new looming threat: imported garlic.

  Last week, Florida Republican Sen. Rick Scott asked the Commerce Department to investigate the national security risks posed by “Communist Chinese garlic.” Scott demands thoroughness; he wants an inquiry into “all grades of garlic, whole or separated into constituent cloves, whether or not peeled, chilled, fresh, frozen, provisionally preserved or packed in water or other neutral substance.” Should the department rule against China, the agency would likely impose new tariffs to protect “national security.”

  My immediate reaction was: "Well, obviously, Scott is just trying to protect Florida garlic farmers from competition." Oddly, it doesn't seem so. According to this article, Florida doesn't show up even in the top seven states for garlic production.

  So what's his excuse?

• The general lesson holds, though. And it's expressed in this headline from Rachel Kleinfeld: Right-Wing Populists Are Just as Bad for Business as Left-Wing Ones.

  In the 20th century, economic and political systems could be situated on a simple 2x2 grid. Economic policies ran from left to right, while political systems could be arrayed from authoritarian to democratic.

  Most U.S. business pegged themselves easily on this spectrum: they wanted favorable regulation and management-friendly policies of the sort generally pursued by the right. And while a few opened up shop behind the Iron Curtain, CEOs knew business prospered most under classically liberal democratic systems that upheld the rule of law and inalienable rights—including property rights.

  The rise of populism in the 21st century has overturned this game board. Today, even supposedly right-wing populists exploit distrust, pessimism, and anger to make the case that government should wield a heavy—and often retaliatory—hand in markets. But while such interference by authoritarian leaders could once be portrayed as undemocratic, modern populists often bask in electoral support. Voters cheer as their elected leaders undermine rights and the rule of law.

  It is, unfortunately, a worldwide phenomenon with plenty of examples.

I don't think journalists or universities grasp how much their reputation has suffered, and that it's due to their own intellectual dishonesty. A generation ago newspapers and universities were esteemed institutions. Now you see open contempt for them. https://t.co/JyJAOtEijC

— Paul Graham (@paulg) January 7, 2024

I haven't muted anybody—in fact, there's an NYT link below—but I've turned my skepticism up to an all-time high.

On a related issue (and aren't they all related issues these days): If you haven't read the new book by Greg Lukianoff and Rikki Schlott. you should. Cover image (an Amazon link) at your right. And the current print issue of Reason has an article adapted from it to whet your appetite: Universities Use DEI Statements To Enforce Groupthink.

I don't think the University Near Here requires diversity statements for all hires, but it does for some. If UNH doesn't get rid of these volunarily, the legislature should get into the act.

Also of note:

• Don't say Gay? Unfortunately, we've been saying it a lot lately. Today is no exception, as Tunku Varadarajan interviews a major Gayophobe: Harvard, Claudine Gay and the Education of Bill Ackman. Observations on DEI:

  “I think diversity, equity, inclusion are wonderful things, OK?” Mr. Ackman says. “Small ‘d,’ small ‘e,’ small ‘i.’ But when you capitalize them in turning into a movement, the way that it’s applied at places like Harvard, it’s not about true diversity, equity and inclusion.” He concedes that “it takes, frankly, a little bit of study to understand this. I’m not up on campus. I didn’t understand the details, the implementation, and the philosophical backdrop.” He likens DEI to ESG—environmental, social and governance, self-righteous nostrums by which many corporations abide. “Well-intentioned movements like ESG can have catastrophic consequences for the world. Europe’s loss of energy independence was a contributing factor in Putin having the confidence to invade Ukraine.”

  The reaction from anti-Ackman forces: Hey, let's go after this guy's wife!

• But was Claudine Gay driven out because she was black? John McWhorter answers (and incidentally shows why you shouldn't block the NYT): Claudine Gay Was Not Driven Out Because She Is Black.

  As both Gay and Harvard note, she received openly racist hate mail. This is repulsive. But however awful it must have been for Gay to endure their abuse, those people did not force her resignation.

  Nor does it seem that Gay was ousted on the basis of her race in the aftermath of her Dec. 5 testimony before Congress on the topic of antisemitism on campus. Of three university presidents who attended, only one resigned under duress shortly after the hearing, and she — Liz Magill of Penn — was white.

  No, the charge that ultimately led to Gay’s resignation was plagiarism, of which more than 40 alleged examples were ultimately unearthed. And plagiarism and related academic charges have of course also brought down white people at universities many times. Ward Churchill was fired from the University of Colorado for academic misconduct, including plagiarism, in 2007 in the wake of his controversially assailing people working in the World Trade Center towers on 9/11 as “little Eichmanns.” The president of the University of South Carolina, Robert Caslen, resigned thanks to a plagiarism episode in 2021. And the president of Stanford, Marc Tessier-Lavigne, resigned due to questions of data manipulation just last July.

  It should be pointed out that not only is Tessier-Lavigne white, the event that triggered the attack dogs was his apology to a shouted-down conservative judge.

• Just a reminder. And it's from Michael R. Strain: Trump’s Protectionism Would Spike Prices.

  Former president Trump likes to attack President Biden’s record on inflation. For example, last month in New Hampshire, Trump said: “Biden’s inflation catastrophe is demolishing your savings and ravaging your dreams.”

  It is ironic, then, that two of Trump’s signature 2024 campaign promises — a massive increase in tariffs and a massive reduction in immigration — would also cause prices to spike.

  Trump has floated creating “a ring around the U.S. economy” by imposing a blanket 10 percent tariff on all imports to the U.S. This would directly raise the prices of trillions of dollars of imports, eroding the purchasing power of consumers’ wages and incomes. It would raise the prices of intermediate goods for U.S.-based firms, which would lead to further price increases for American consumers. And it would lead to retaliatory tariffs from other nations, causing further price hikes.

  Speaking of irony, I got one of those anti-Haley mailers from the Trump campaign zinging Nikki Haley for "high taxes", specifically sales tax. They don't seem to realize the effect of tariffs on the price of stuff.

Glenn Greenwald points out a clear and present danger:

When journalists broke the story of how the Biden Admin was weaponizing the US Security State to coerce Big Tech to censor the internet of dissent, jealous and partisan corporate journalists told everyone to ignore it all because it was a "nothing burger." Then: pic.twitter.com/KTWc0DVhAc

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) January 5, 2024

The NYT story is from September of last year, so it's not exactly breaking news.

Our weekly look at how the oddsmakers see the candidates:

Hey! Vivek and Michelle are back with us! Long shots, but managed to hit our 2% inclusion criterion.

But you know who's not even present in that Election Betting Odds list? And, as far as I can tell, never has been present in this cycle?

Also of note:

• Pointlessness, thy name is Chris. Charles C. W. Cooke takes a look at Chris Christie’s Pointless Candidacy.

  When one inquires as to why, at this late stage, Chris Christie seems resolved to stay in the Republican-primary charade when he is obviously destined to end up as an ignominious also-ran, one is usually told that Christie is sticking around so that there is at least one candidate on the stage who is willing to stick it directly to Donald J. Trump. I come today to puncture this idea, which is both overstated and over-accepted, which deserves to be set within a context that is far less flattering to Christie, and which, when extrapolated out, renders the stated rationale for his presence entirely hollow.

  It is certainly true that, in 2024, Chris Christie has rebranded himself as the most principled anti-Trump candidate within the firmament. But there is branding and there is reality, and, in this case, the two remain distant cousins. Chris Christie can, indeed, be described as an anti-Trump candidate. But he cannot fairly be described as a principled one. There are certain figures within the political universe who have paid a price for their opposition to Trump. Christie is not among them. In 2016, it suited him to be a Trump lackey; in 2024, it suits him to be a Trump critic. In between those eras, Christie experienced no discomfort whatsoever as a result of his positions. He did not, like figures such as Liz Cheney, lose his leadership position and then his career. He did not, like some writers and broadcasters, miss out on lucrative opportunities. He coasted, moving where the wind took him. That has a profound effect on his credibility.

  CCWC makes a compelling case that Christie's early endorsement of Trump in 2016 (which he now says was a mistake) was because Christie "wanted to be rewarded with a position in the Trump White House, and he believed that a well-timed recommendation of the front-runner might secure one."

• LFOD Watch. Christie noted that we may have to change our license plates, according to this CNN story:

  Christie brought up Trump's comment that he would be a dictator only on the first day of his presidency, and told the room of New Hampshire voters "you voted for him in '16," prompting one voter to call out "no, we didn't."

  "Unfortunately, you're saddled with it, babe, you're saddled with it," Christie responded, continuing to detail Trump's winning record in past New Hampshire primaries.

  "You vote for him in 24 ... Live Free or Die sounds like bull to me. Right? Because this guy doesn't want you to have freedom," he said.

  OK, Chris, fine. But why should we vote for you?

• Scurrilous! Ben Jacobs reveals The Plan to Get New Hampshire Liberals to Vote for Nikki Haley! He points out that "undeclared" voters can waltz into their polling place and demand either a Republican or Democrat ballot (but not both). And (furthermore) they may have "repeatedly determined the winner" of the primary.

  That is what Robert Schwartz hopes to make happen. He’s the leader of a group called Primary Power that looks to push Democratic-leaning independents to vote against Trump in the GOP primary. Schwartz said the group has raised more than $670,000 through small and large donations, though as a 501(c)(4), its contributors are not publicly disclosed. A Democrat who spent his career working in foreign policy focusing on countries like Venezuela and Nicaragua that have suffered significant backsliding toward dictatorships, Schwartz said he is trying to make sure the same thing doesn’t happen in the U.S. with a second Trump presidency. At this point, he’s settled upon Haley as the option. “She seems to respect the Constitution,” Schwartz said. “We would have a peaceful transfer of power and free and fair elections with her as president.”

• OK, looks like I'll have to hold my nose a little harder to vote for her.

  Sheesh:

  We have to secure our schools the same way we secure our airports.

  — Nikki Haley (@NikkiHaley) January 5, 2024

  I assume this was a quick reaction to the Thursday school shooting in Perry, Iowa.

  But do we really need to turn schools into airports? After extensive research, Reason's C.J. Ciaramella says: No, Nikki Haley, We Don't Need to Turn Schools Into Airports, the Place Literally Everyone Hates.

  Haley's thinking here seems to hinge on the notion that airport security is effective and efficient, which is not something that most Americans who have flown in recent memory would be familiar with (unless they have TSA PreCheck, a scam in which you pay the government for the convenience of not having your genitals grabbed).

  The hardening of American airports post-9/11 resulted in ridiculous security measures that, because of bureaucratic inertia and obstinance, we are still saddled with more than two decades later. "Don't forget to take your shoes off!" It's often called security theater, and by that definition, it's one of the longest-running shows off-Broadway.

  Shockingly, all Iowa primary and secondary schools have been declared "weapons-free zones". So Perry High School was a soft target.

• In other Iowa news… Barton Swaim reports in the WSJ from Coralville: Trump Summons the Furies in Iowa. Excerpt:

  True, Mr. Trump has always delighted in sounding like a strongman. Plainly he admires autocrats, but he admires them for their media savvy and panache rather than their accomplishments and wouldn’t know how to arrogate new powers to himself if he wanted to. His enemies can be counted on not to notice that distinction.

  Give the Never Trumpers this much: Lately Mr. Trump has turned up the volume on his strongman bombast. His campaign speeches often include the tag line “I am your retribution.” In September he claimed that Gen. Mark Milley, who reportedly conferred with Chinese officials about Mr. Trump’s erratic behavior after the 2020 election, behaved so egregiously “that, in times gone by, the punishment would have been DEATH!” He has talked of revoking broadcast licenses of news outlets he dislikes.

  I prefer media savvy and panache exhibited by non-autocrats, OK?

I should have known better.

Over the years I've relied on Amazon to provide some eye candy to blog posts. I became an "Amazon Associate" at the lowest level (SiteStripe), allowing me to "advertise" their products here with "paid link" images.

I put "advertise" in quotes above, because I've made negligible revenue off them.

But Amazon announced a couple months back that they were removing that functionality. (Here is a comment from a guy who's pretty pissed about that.) Not only would I not be able to create future image links, but…

All the image links I had stopped working, giving that ugly broken image icon. A quick grep finds nearly 4500 of them. Eek!

My apologies. To repeat, I should have known better. I'm working on a fix. Until then, I'll get my eye candy from Getty, Twitter, and … oh, hey, the xkcd guy has a YouTube channel! Check out: What if we aimed the Hubble Telescope at Earth?.

… at least until that stops working.

Also of note:

• Yesterday's hoaxes are today's reality. Laurence Krauss bemoans: Alan Sokal’s Joke Is on Us as Postmoderism Comes to Science.

  When I taught physics at Yale in the 1980s and ’90s, my colleagues and I took pride in our position on “science hill,” looking down on the humanities scholars in the intellectual valleys below as they were inundated in postmodernism and deconstructionism.

  This same attitude motivated the mathematician Alan Sokal to publish his famous 1996 article, “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity,” in the cultural-studies journal Social Text. He asserted, among other things that “physical ‘reality,’ no less than social ‘reality,’ is at bottom a social and linguistic construct” and that “the scientific community . . . cannot assert a privileged epistemological status with respect to counter-hegemonic narratives emanating from dissident or marginalized communities.”

  Krauss has plenty of examples, including one from our favorite physics prof at the University Near Here:

  In 2020, Signs Journal of Women in Culture and Society published an article by physicist Chanda Prescod-Weinstein titled “Making Black Women Scientists under White Empiricism: The Racialization of Epistemology in Physics.” Ms. Prescod-Weinstein wrote: “Black women must, according to Einstein’s principle of covariance, have an equal claim to objectivity regardless of their simultaneously experiencing intersecting axes of oppression.” This sentence, which dramatically misrepresents Einstein’s theory of general relativity, wouldn’t have been out of place in Mr. Sokal’s 1996 spoof.

  Had an article like this appeared in 1996, it would have been dismissed outside the postmodernist fringe. But last year Mr. Sokal himself, noting that the article was No. 56 in the Altmetric ranking of most-discussed scholarly articles for 2020, felt the need to write a 20-page single-spaced rebuttal. The joke turns out to be on all of us—and it isn’t funny.

  We previously looked at Sokal's takedown of CPW's scholarship here. CPW has a response at Twitter, make of it what you will:

  A physicist who appears on the Epstein list who has been found responsible for Title IX violations has an op ed in the WSJ where he mentions an article critiquing my work that appeared in what is functionally the Journal of Racism, Transphobia, and Bestiality.
  
  Welcome to 2024!

  — Chanda Prescod-Weinstein (@IBJIYONGI) January 6, 2024

  Shooting the messengers?

• It needs to be said. The WSJ provides an excerpt from a City Journal interview: Shelby Steele on Affirmative Action.

  People defend things like affirmative action under the rationale of diversity, so we’re going to lower standards for blacks and not admit as many Asians. Race is constantly used, in the name of the good, in the act of committing racism. And we’re saying such racism is inclusiveness. How insidious evil is! You’re saying this person gets into school and this person doesn’t because of the color of their skin, and that is diversity, that is inclusiveness? It’s just a convenient way for you to get the innocence and moral authority that gives you power. It’s a hell of a problem in a huge, complex society like America. Evil is everywhere waiting around the corner, advocating for itself as a moral convenience that will make you a better person. Evil fascinates me in that sense; it’s always ironic. It’s sweetly insidious. It makes you feel good and gives you that sense of innocence. “I stood up against Shelby Steele.” So you become a cheerleader for evil, thinking you’re helping. In the long run, we see evil for what it is, but it usually has done a lot of damage by that point.

  And a lot of damage has, indeed, been done.

• Are you a mature American citizen who needs to join something? Mark Hemingway recommends: AARP Alternative AMAC Has Become A Conservative Powerhouse. "AMAC" being "Association of Mature American Citizens".

  Causing me to wonder: I'm old, but am I mature?

  Color me agnostic about the value of joining AMAC, but Hemingway reminds me why I send my AARP-related mail straight to the shredder:

  For decades now, AARP, which once stood for the American Association of Retired Persons and has been subsequently rebranded as just a set of initials that stand for nothing, has been one of the most influential lobby groups in Washington, D.C. Though AARP was supposed to represent a large and politically diverse cross-section of older Americans, its transformation into an overtly partisan Democrat organization is hard to deny.

  Recently, AARP lobbied heavily for the Biden administration’s disastrous and ironically named “Inflation Reduction Act.” AARP’s biggest congressional critic, Sen. Rand Paul, recently noted that of AARP’s 94 congressional lobbying events during debate over the Inflation Reduction Act, only one was held in support of a Republican officeholder. The rest were for Democrats.

  I believe AARP's slogan is something like: "Ruining the future for your kids and grandkids."

Jerry Coyne does a massive takedown on Claudine's resignation letter and NYT op-ed. In much more detail than I did. In reaction to her op-ed plagiarism defense:

And there was also that AP story. At Patterico, guest poster JVW takes it down:

And:

Greg Lukianoff has an interesting take on Harvard, Claudine Gay & “The Silver Spoon Rule”.

Yes, the proper plural of "cortex" is "cortices" when you are talking about brains. I checked.

And finally, Jeff Maurer observes, as only he can: Folks Sure Is Fired Up About This Here Harvard Kerfuffle. Let's see if I can find an excerpt with no dirty words…

I'm looking forward to reading Coleman Hughes' book The End of Race Politics, paid Amazon link above. A recent relevant tweet:

It's an article of faith among anti-racist elites that black ppl are always and everywhere treated worse––no matter the evidence.

Prez Magill (who is white) was ousted instantly for a bad testimony alone. Prez Gay survived a bad testimony and was ousted only after ~50 credible… https://t.co/4IZIxsGYAo

— Coleman Hughes (@coldxman) January 3, 2024

Also of note:

• Niklaus Wirth has passed away. iTWire has an obituary.

  Wirth was born on 15 February 1934, earning a Bachelor of Science in 1959, a Master of Science in 1960, and a PhD in Electrical Engineering in Computer Science in 1963. From 1963 to 1967 he served as Assistant Professor at Stamford University's Computer Science department, then Professor of Informatics at ETH Zurich until his retirement in 1999. He took two one-year sabbaticals during that time to work at Xerox PARC.

  Wirth is well-remembered for his pioneering work in programming languages and algorithms. For these achievements, he received the ACM Turing Award in 1984, inducted as a Fellow of the ACM in 1994, and a Fellow of the Computer History Museum in 2004.

  He's on a short list of people who changed my life. I wrote a couple books using versions of his Pascal programming language. Got a job at the University Near Here teaching Pascal. And (as far as I know) my only mention at Wikipedia, down in the References section of the article about Lilith, the workstation Wirth co-designed back in the 1980s.

  I eventually moved on, as did he.

• Sigh. That would be me. Alan Jacobs asks Who’s Counting?

  I’m not doing an end-of-year roundup of what I’ve written this year, or what I’ve read, or what I’ve watched, or what I’ve listened to, or where I’ve traveled, or the museums I’ve visited, or the concerts I’ve attended – that last one because I didn’t attend any concerts in 2023, not even Taylor Swift’s Eras tour. But I’m not writing up any of that other stuff because I don’t know: don’t know how many books I’ve read, movies I’ve seen, etc. etc. I couldn’t tell you what the most-read posts on this blog are because I don’t have analytics enabled. I don’t know what my Top Ten Books of the Year are because I just don’t think that way.

  I used to; when I was a teenager I kept a list of the Ten Best Books I’ve Ever Read and every time I read a book I felt obliged to sit down and think about whether it broke the top ten – and if so, where did it belong? (Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End reigned unchallenged at the top for quite some time – and then I read Ursula K. LeGuin’s The Dispossessed.) But then after a few years I realized that some of the books that meant the most to me were, unaccountably, not on the list; while some books that I had put on the list … I squirmed just seeing the titles. And the whole business was so much work. I now think of the day I crumpled up the sheet and threw it in the trash as my first real step towards maturity as a reader.

  Given that I'm pretty obsessive about keeping track of books and movies over the past 20 years or so… well, at my age, I guess I'll have to face the fact that I'll probably never reach Alan's level of maturity as a reader.

The AP detects a weapon of Mass-Ave destruction:

Harvard president's resignation highlights new conservative weapon against colleges: plagiarism https://t.co/GiVkT3LgUo

— The Associated Press (@AP) January 3, 2024

(I hate to explain a vile pun, but for those not familiar with Cantabrigian cartography: Harvard's main campus is off Massachusetts Avenue in Cambridge, MA.)

There's an unintentionally funny headline on an op-ed at the New York Times, authored by the ex-President Claudine Gay: What Just Happened at Harvard Is Bigger Than Me. Allow me to point out that, according to the grammar pedants, that really should be "Bigger Than I". But maybe the NYT has a newer stylebook.

Anyway, Gay wastes no time in describing herself as a victim:

About that last bit: Gay wants to dismiss her critics as the sort of people who eagerly deploy the N-word. Convenient! And a drive-by ad hominem!

I am certain that (a) those racist people may exist, but if so (b) their influence on the controversy was negligible.

But (c) Gay's N-word claim lacks details or evidence. I have to wonder how many of these alleged uncountable N-words were actually Jussie Smollett-style hoaxes, concocted by sympathizers or perhaps Gay herself.

Also (emphasis added):

What, no justice, nor the American way?

I will take the cheap shot: her newfound respect for "truth" is progress compared to last month when she repeatedly referred to "my truth".

I've also emphasized a bit in this next part:

Even as a very bad Lutheran, I remember how Hebrews 11:1 defines "faith": it is "the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen." We take things on faith despite the lack of solid evidence. When Gay bemoans the decay of faith, she simply wants us to believe her, not our lying eyes.

Gay ignores the extent to which the decaying reputation of the "pillars of American society" is self-inflicted. Nobody (for example) forced Harvard to enact policies that caused the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression to award it an "Abysmal" bottom-of-the-pack rating for its policies on free expression. Nobody forced it to actively discriminate against white and Asian kids in its admission policies.

And nobody forced Gay to make (what she calls) "citation errors" or to be outwitted by (of all people) Elise Stefanik.

At Reason, Robby Soave asks the Betteridge-Law question about that AP story: Does A.P. Really Think Conservatives Invented Plagiarism Accusations?.

And we were not born yesterday. Neither were those twitter context-adders.

But what's the important thing here? Charles C. W. Cooke proposes: The Important Thing Is Harvard Lost.

For extra fun, read that to yourself with a British accent.

Also of note:

• Worried about Trump winning in November? You shouldn't. Because, according to George F. Will, A Constitution-flouting ‘authoritarian’ is already in the White House.

  Overcaffeinated Cassandras continue to forecast an “authoritarian” and anti-constitutional Donald Trump dictatorship. They are mistaken about the near future because, among other reasons, they misread the recent past. Also, they are oblivious to, or at least reticent about, the behavior of Trump’s successor: Joe Biden is, like Trump, an authoritarian recidivist mostly stymied by courts.

  When Trump wielded presidential power, he could not even build his border wall. But next time, the fevered forecasters warn, the entire federal apparatus, which mostly loathes him, will suddenly be submissive. Such alarmism, which evidently gives some people pleasurable frissons, distracts attention from the similarity of Trump’s and Biden’s disdain for legality.

  Instances of Trump’s anti-constitutional behavior have been amply reported and deplored. Biden’s, less so — although they (e.g., the eviction moratorium, the vaccine mandate, the cancellation of student debt), and judicial reprimands of them, have been frequent. Now, consider the lack of attention to his contempt for the Federal Vacancies Reform Act, and the Senate majority’s supine complicity.

  I was totally unaware of the saga of Ann Carlson at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, so check that out.

• Only three? Veronique de Rugy's first 2024 column proposes Three Economic Myths to Put To Rest This Year. One is rising inequality. Two is globalization's deleterious effect on American manufacturing. And…

  Finally, I wish politicians and pundits — and more of us citizens — would become a lot more skeptical about the idea that government is the solution to all problems. At the very least, I hope they consider the sheer scale of today's government. Despite all the enormous spending and extensive regulating, dissatisfaction among the public persists, and in many cases, problems seem to be worsening. Correlation isn't causation, but this observation alone should puzzle those who believe that simply expanding government is a solution.

  I predict… Vero's advice will not put these myths to rest.

You may have heard that Claudine Gay resigned from her post at Harvard. It's a sad day, because (as I've said before) she was a useful and prominent reminder of the intellectual corruption of elite higher education.

But there are plenty of other reminders, so I'm not that sad.

Arnold Kling writes (pre-resignation) on The Claudine Gray Litmus Test. Quoting John Cochrane who notes that Harvard picking her as Prez was no blunder: "…Gay is exactly what Harvard wanted, and a look-alike is exactly what it will get unless it wants something different."

Well, we'll see. As far as its free-speech policies go, it can't help but improve.

In other commentary: Jeff Maurer has Claudine Gay's Letter of Resignation.

Well, not really, the actual letter was far worse. Oliver Wiseman and Bari Weiss, plagiarizing the Dropkick Murphys, observe: Claudine Gay, We Hardly Knew Ye….

I bet you get the reference.

Also of note:

• Do we need a FDA for AI? I bet you've been asking yourself that question. Katherine has your answer: We Absolutely Do Not Need an FDA for AI. Her bottom line:

  One thing is clear: We are not in a Jurassic Park situation. If anything, we are experiencing the opposite of Jeff Goldblum's famous line about scientists who "were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should." The most prominent people in AI seem to spend most of their time asking if they should. It's a good question. There's just no reason to think politicians or bureaucrats will do a good job answering it.

  Her article includes this amusing tweet:

  wake up babe, AI faction compass just became more relevant pic.twitter.com/MwYOLedYxV

  — Emmett Shear (@eshear) November 18, 2023

• On the Nikki Gaffewatch… is Jonah Goldberg: Haley’s Civil War Gaffe Shocked Us Because Such Missteps Are Rare.

  Nikki Haley gave a bad answer to an easy question: What caused the Civil War?

  She replied with a word salad on freedom and the role of government while failing to mention the word “slavery” at all.

  We don’t need to dwell on why it was a bad answer. The Civil War is a complicated topic, but the simple truth is it wouldn’t have occurred but for the issue of slavery.

  I think she messed up for three interrelated reasons: She thought the question was a “gotcha” and overthought how to respond; she was relying on muscle memory from her days in South Carolina; and, last, because she was campaigning in New Hampshire—the “Live Free or Die” state—and she was trying to cater to what she thought were the audience’s libertarian tendencies.

  She could have recovered: "Oh, did you say the Civil War? I thought you said Revolutionary War! Yeah, slavery."

• What do Communist millionaires worry about? Damien Fisher has one data point from a local: Hate Crimes Talk Worries Communist Millionaire Funding Anti-Israel Protests.

  A key figure in the New Hampshire anti-Israel protest movement, multi-millionaire Communist James “Fergie” Chambers, says the new focus on hate crimes by federal and state law enforcement has him worried.

  He acknowledged the topic is controversial but doesn’t believe the response is proportional.

  “Yeah, this insane backlash equating us with Nazis, charging our friends with insane stuff for what amounts to vandalism….who knows at this point?” Chambers, who lives in the Granite State, told NHJournal via text.

  But that wasn’t the only thing Chambers has typed up as of late. For example, the avowed opponent of the nation of Israel posted on Facebook last month, “Make Zionists afraid.”

  To recycle a quote we featured just yesterday about Marxists: "Someone for whom no amount of mass murder and tyranny will stop him worshipping the splendour in his head."

• And everyone on this side of the political divide, for that matter. Martin Gurri would like to point out something To [His] Friends Across the Political Divide.

  I can’t avoid talking about Donald Trump but I’m going to make it brief. I know you don’t like him; neither do I. But let’s assume he’s only a politician. He’s not Hitler, Godzilla or the Beast of the Apocalypse—just a guy with a loud mouth and a desperate need for attention. Most Americans think of him that way.

  That's not his main point, I just liked the quote.

Recently on the book blog:

Recently on the movie blog:

Darn, I likes me some Denzel Washington. Especially in his role as the nearly-indestructible Robert McCall.

For reasons unexplained until the very end of the movie, McCall is in Italy, wreaking his brand of "equalization" on a criminal organization with shady ties to terrorism and drug trafficking. Thanks to a small error in judgment, he barely escapes with his life, and needs to spend some recuperation time in a scenic Sicilian village.

Which is unfortunately the target of a different organized crime family, also a very nasty bunch.

It's very violent! I seem to recall that McCall avoided using guns in the first two Equalizer movies. Not so here!

Fun fact: Dakota Fanning plays a resourceful CIA agent with a mysterious relationship to McCall. Twenty years ago she was in Man on Fire with Denzel Washington, when she was about ten years old.

And it occurs to me that if you want to understand that "mysterious relationship", and how it's subtly revealed at the end, you need to remember key characters from The Equalizer and The Equalizer 2. Watch those first, if you haven't.

I added this book to my get-at-library list thanks to its inclusion on the NYT's Best Mystery Novels of 2021 list. Unavailable at Portsmouth Public Library, I used an Interlibrary Loan pick at the University Near Here to get a copy from Brandeis University.

The narrating protagonist is Eve. She's a cocaine-snorting lesbian witch, who sees ghosts, and communicates with a dead friend via text. And, although it was in that "best mysteries" list, there's very little mysterious content here. The friend was a suicide, not a murder faked to look that way. Another friend goes missing, and that worries Eve, but is eventually tracked down unharmed, he just wanted to get away. There's no criminal activity, save for whatever is involved in Los Angeles illicit drug consumption these days.

Honest summary: Eve has a difficult time with relationships, and this book recounts her efforts to sort things out over the space of a few days.

Eve talks about everything. On page 118, a waiter brings her enchiladas, warning her: "Hot plate". And:

When he turned away, I touched the plate with the sides of both of my hands. Whenever a waiter tells me a plate is hot, I have to touch it. I want whatever heat anything is giving off.

Hey, me too! Except I just use one finger, not the sides of my hands. And not for some weird attraction to heat, I just consider what the waiter said to be a dare. Similarly, I watch the blood donation needle go into my arm even after—nay, especially after—the Red Cross phlebotomist tells me that I might not want to.

If you found that last paragraph uninteresting and irrelevant, I don't blame you. And that's the way I felt all through this book, because Eve tells you every single thing that goes through her brain, without regard for relevance or interest.

Eve, and all the other major characters in the book are perpetually on emotional hair-triggers, ready to take offense at each others' actions or remarks. Nobody has a detectable sense of humor. (Although the word "sardonically" appears twice on the back cover description, sorry, that's not the same thing.) Everyone's online, all the time. Except for that missing guy. All in all, the book is not a great advertisement for the Southern California lesbian lifestyle. Eve is not "gay" at all.

But there are a couple explicit lesbian sex scenes. Is that what it takes to get a book banned at Portsmouth Public Library?

So: it's clear that many people like this sort of thing; ratings at Amazon and Goodreads are pretty high. And that NYT reviewer liked it too. But it wasn't my cup of tea.

Back in December 2022, I saved a link to this WIRED article from one Bill McGuire: El Niño Is Coming—and the World Isn’t Prepared.

Yes! Be afraid! Be very afraid!

The subhed doubles down:

Global heating will set the stage for extreme weather everywhere in 2023. The consequences are likely to be cataclysmic.

Any specific predictions, Bill?

The actual record, according to Wikipedia, is 56.7 °C (134.1 °F), set in 1913, in Death Valley. There's some dispute about that, though, and Wikipedia goes on to say that the next-highest record is closer to Bill's number: 54.0 °C (129.2 °F), set in 2020 and 2021, also in Death Valley.

But no, the record was not broken in 2023, let alone "shattered." Anything else, Bill?

That didn't happen either.

Even alarmists know when to hedge their bets with "might", "tends", "could". As late as August, Ars Technica noted that NOAA was still trying to scare us: After slow start, NOAA predicts rest of hurricane season to be “above normal”.

What actually happened? NOAA got the named storms and hurricane numbers right! That's not too surprising, given their generous uncertainties. But as far as landfall goes…

Kind of a snore.

But Slashdot notes that some folks got hot and bothered: 2023 Will Be Remembered as the Year Climate Change Arrived. Quoting a WaPo story:

Again with the unpreparedness!

I'm not a total skeptic. Things are getting warmer, and that's due to greenhouse gases. But I'm tired of the alarmism.

Also of note:

• Meant to post this yesterday, sorry. Jonah Goldberg isn't buying the hype: New Year’s Kiss-Off.

  Let me offer an early Happy New Year!

  Now with that out of the way, let me forthrightly declare that New Year’s is the worst “holiday”—and it’s not even close. Say what you will about the most familiar holidays imposed on us by Big Greeting Card, they actually celebrate things worth celebrating. Fathers! Mothers! America! The Star Wars franchise (okay, that’s a close call given Jar Jar Binks and Ahsoka)!

  What is New Year’s celebrating? The turning of a page on a calendar. We made it another year! Of course, that’s true every day if you start the countdown 365 days ago. Well, that would be arbitrary, you champions of annualized crapulent bacchanalia might say. Look, I’m all in favor of looking for reasons to have a drink. But let’s be honest, it’s a new year everyday just as much as it is always 5 o’clock somewhere.

  Oh, heck, that's right! I forgot to put up my 2024 calendar! Just a minute… OK, now I'm back.

  Kevin D. Williamson is also an unbeliever: At the Crossroads.

  Whereas Thanksgiving is a Christian holiday disguised as a secular one, New Year’s remains true to its pagan roots—alongside Halloween, which has turned into something of a heathen cultural juggernaut, it is our most obviously pagan festival. We owe the date itself to Julius Caesar’s calendar reforms, which moved the date of the new year from the Ides of March to January 1 and the patron of the celebration from the war god Mars to the two-faced Janus, the much more ancient personification of beginnings and endings. Knowing the calendar adds a little richness to the story of Caesar’s assassination on the Ides of March, the most political day of the Roman year, the day on which new consuls began their terms, with the Romans counting their years from one consulship to the next in roughly the same way later Europeans counted their years from the coronations of their kings. Assassinating Caesar on the Ides of March was profoundly conservative in its symbolism: Caesar’s tyranny was of a piece with his contempt for Roman mores and tradition.

  […]

  Janus, who lends his name to the first month, is not one of those fancy Greek gods repurposed by the Romans. Janus is an old local, probably borrowed by the Romans from the Etruscans, an adaptation of their two-faced god, Culsans. And while there is much about the classical Greco-Roman world that is very strange to us—Zeus and Athena and all those characters—that which lies on the far side of it in history is positively alien: the old weirdness. 

  Jeopardy! fans will read that last paragraph and mutter "Those darn Etruscans!"

• Woo-woo alert! Jerry Coyne notes a disturbing, or hilarious, trend: The supernatural invades American museums via indigenous artifacts. He quotes an article from Elizabeth Weiss, The American Museum of Supernatural History.

  We all remember when Fundie Christians got "Intelligent Design" to take equal billing with Darwinism in the science museums… oh, wait, that never actually happened. But:

  In the past two decades, science institutions have faced challenges from another source: indigenous religions. Unlike Christian fundamentalist beliefs, these indigenous beliefs often receive enthusiastic support from academics, scholars, and mainstream media journalists. This support might stem from a desire to oppose Western civilization and align with the “victims” of modernity as part of an effort to “decolonize” museums. Alternatively, it may also be linked to a trend of virtue signaling, which has allowed the misconception that “indigenous knowledge is science” to take root in academic circles.

  I recently reported on this trend in City Journal, discussing New York City’s American Museum of Natural History’s Northwest Coast Hall. One exhibit features a display case with a warning label about the “spiritually powerful” objects contained in the case. This exhibit blurs the line between fact and fiction by presenting creation myths as history. It also asserts that artifacts are imbued with spirits that release “mist” visible only to elders, implying that the objects should be repatriated.

  Also see: our favorite UNH physics prof, Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, on an ancient observatory, on Hawaii's Mauna Kea:

  For example, when we talk about astronomy on Maunakea in Hawai’i, we often talk about how the seeing on the mountain is good. By that we mean there is less atmosphere at the high altitude, which means that it’s easier to get a clear picture of the sky without atmospheric interference. We know about this particular location not because of European or American exploration but rather because Native Hawaiians had for centuries known it as a place to observe their own cosmology, including a connection with the father of the sky, Wākea. Native Hawaiians, also known as kānaka maolior kānaka ‘ōiwiin their language, ‘Ōlelo Hawai’i, had a cosmology that was partly created through observing the sky at what British astronomers came to agree were valuable observing locations, for example, the top of the Maunakea volcano. In the end, I see the continuous use of unceded Hawaiian sacred spaces for Euro-American science without the permission of kānaka ‘ōiwi as an example of using Indigenous knowledge to produce science without crediting Indigenous knowledge: kānaka knew the seeing was good on the Mauna. When kānaka maoli welcomed European and American guests into their lands, they also shared information about their culture, history, and geography—including about their pristine view of the night sky.

  We wouldn't have known that Mauna Kea was a good spot for telescopes if the natives hadn't told us.

  And also see Robert Zimmerman for a less patient take on a recent development: Navaho Indians attempt to claim ownership of the Moon, delay Vulcan launch.

  The president of the Navaho Nation has asked NASA to delay the first launch of ULA’s Vulcan rocket because it carries ashes from a number of people (none who were members of its tribe) that Astrobotic’s Peregrine lander will place on the Moon.

  The remains are a payload purchased by the company Celestis, which offers this burial option to anyone who wishes it. On this flight that payload includes a wide range of ashes, including many actors and creators from the original Star Trek series.

  As Rand Simberg comments: "So they want to claim a body on which no member of the tribe has set foot, based purely on the fact that they’ve been looking at it for centuries."

• I'm growing fond of Warbyisms. From Our postcolonial trash needs taking out.

  What is a Marxist? Someone for whom no amount of mass murder and tyranny will stop him worshipping the splendour in his head.

  Fact check: true enough.

Recently on the book blog:

Just in case you're interested in what I found informative, interesting, thought-provoking, etc. last year. The cover images are Amazon paid links, and clicking on them will take you there, where I get a cut if you purchase, thanks in advance. Clicking on the book's title will whisk you to my blog posting for a fuller discussion.

I am restricting the list to books I rated with five stars at Goodreads. Nota Bene: Goodreads ratings are subjective; they do not necessarily reflect a book's cosmic quality, just my gut reaction. And perhaps also my mood at the time, grumpy or generous. In other words, don't take this too seriously.

The complete list of books I read in 2023, including fiction, is here.

In order read:

	Astounding — John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction by Alec Nevala-Lee. A detailed look at four writers from my science fiction-geek youth. Warts and all.
	The Philosophy of Modern Song by Bob Dylan. One of two Nobel prizewinners on this list. Bob's meandering takes on songs he liked over the decades. Vastly entertaining.
	What If? 2 — Additional Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions by Randall Munroe. Well, the subtitle says it all. Illustrated in Munroe's comic style. Funny and interesting.
	QED — The Strange Theory of Light and Matter by Richard P. Feynman. The other Nobelist on the list. Based on Feynman's four-lecture series on quantum electrodynamics, the interplay of photons with matter. Click over to my report to read his classic observation on the "understandability" of quantum theory.
	Psych — The Story of the Human Mind by Paul Bloom. A book based on the author's introductory psychology class at Yale. And (guess what) it's nevertheless interesting. A good overview of what shrinks know, and what they don't.
	Wild Problems — A Guide to the Decisions That Define Us by Russ Roberts. A very wise book that debunks the notion that all problems can be "solved" by simply summing up the pros, subtracting the cons, and getting a utilitarian result.
	Highly Irregular — Why Tough, Through, and Dough Don't RhymeAnd Other Oddities of the English Language by Arika Okrent. A hugely entertaining look at why English is so darn weird. Short answer: blame geography for making Britain so easy and fun to invade over the millennia.
	Leon Russell — The Master of Space and Time's Journey Through Rock & Roll History by Bill Janovitz. Sex, drugs, and rock&roll, in spades. But also genius and talent.
	Classified — The Untold Story of Racial Classification in America by David E. Bernstein. The sad (but also infuriating) story of how Uncle Stupid got into the game of racially-pigeonholing people. And why we're stuck with it. Short answer: too many powerful people depend on this divisive practice.
	Grunt — The Curious Science of Humans at War by Mary Roach. One of the best, and funniest, popular science/history writers in America. She has an eye for the gross.
	In the Land of Invented Languages — Esperanto Rock Stars, Klingon Poets, Loglan Lovers, and the Mad Dreamers Who Tried to Build A Perfect Language by Arika Okrent. Another book on this list by her, and it's just as good. She looks at efforts over the centuries to design languages free of the well-known misfeatures of natural languages. And why their popular success never happened.
	Fewer, Richer, Greener — Prospects for Humanity in an Age of Abundance by Laurence B. Siegel. He argues that the future can be bright, if we don't screw it up. very readable and fun.
	The Man from the Future — The Visionary Life of John von Neumann by Ananyo Bhattacharya. He was missing from that Oppenheimer movie, and he never got a Nobel, but nonetheless an utter genius and a true polymath.
	The Myth of Left and Right — How the Political Spectrum Misleads and Harms America by Verlan Lewis and Hyrum Lewis. They argue that the well-known political spectrum is essentially meaningless and even somewhat harmful to sober discussion. Since reading the book, I've tried to be more careful and accurate about labeling people with directional adjectives. Hasn't stopped anyone else though, I'm pretty sure.
	Free Agents — How Evolution Gave Us Free Will by Kevin J. Mitchell. A neuroscientist defends the concept. At least at the level of "the capacity for conscious, rational, control of our actions."
	Minds Wide Shut — How the New Fundamentalisms Divide Us by Gary Saul Morson and Morton Schapiro. There are a lot of books out there on why we are so close-minded but (nonetheless) insistently argumentative, at the top of our lungs. The authors blame "fundamentalism", which they carefully define.
	The Canceling of the American Mind — Cancel Culture Undermines Trust and Threatens Us All―But There Is a Solution by Greg Lukianoff and Rikki Schlott. A very good book about "cancel culture", its history, its current manifestations, and (possible) remedies.

Another "wish I had liked it better" from Jeopardy! host Ken Jennings. It's about various myths, fictions, beliefs, etc. about what happens to you after you kick the bucket. The gimmick is that it's sort-of patterned after those checklist travel books, most directly 1,000 Places to See Before You Die by Patricia Schultz.

The travel-book gimmick is a mixed bag, mainly consisting of semi-humorous "tips" on what (or what not) to do or see during your visit: food, personalities, sights, etc. This gimmick doesn't seem to be consistently maintained throughout. Ken's brand of snarky humor pervades, and I didn't find it all that amusing on the printed page. I note that he narrates the audiobook, and, who knows, it might work better there.

It's broken up into seven broad sections, classifications of the afterlife's source:

Mythology: legends and speculations from the Inuit, the Chinese, Egyptians, Native Americans. … These ancient folks had very active imaginations. (Or, who knows, one of these might actually be true, which would probably be a big surprise to nearly everyone finding themselves there.)

Religion: How this is distinguished from "mythology" is anyone's guess. Maybe popularity? Anyway, here we have things like The Book of the Dead from Tibet, Catholicism's Limbo (now deprecated), Buddhism's Nirvana, … Given the fact that nobody really reports back from the afterlife, I was impressed by the very active imaginations involved in these diegeses. To the extent that I wondered what hallucinogens the originators were taking. Unsurprisingly, Ken mentions that The Book of the Dead was recommended by Timothy Leary and Aldous Huxley as "a guide to LSD trips."

Books: Here we have more obviously fictive descriptions: C. S. Lewis's Narnia, Milton's Paradise Lost, Mitch Albom's Five People You Meet in Heaven, … Since I read this over the Christmas season, I looked for Dickens' A Christmas Carol, but nope. And (a nice surprise for me) Philip José Farmer's Riverworld books. Never mind that I kind of lost interest around book four.

Movies: Some real obvious choices here: Field of Dreams. the Bill & Ted movies, The Sixth Sense, Coco. And (yes, it's that time of year) It's a Wonderful Life.

Television: More easy choices: The Simpsons, The Good Place. And one surprising one: My Mother the Car. Does anyone remember that show besides Ken and me?

Music and Theater: songs from Paul Simon, the Righteous Brothers, and the Talking Heads; Cats, Carousel, …

Miscellaneous: Speculations from the comics, DC and Marvel; and everything else that didn't fit in above.

Ken's treatment of these scenarios is mostly perfunctory, probably necessary if you're trying to fit 100 of them into 275 pages. (And there's a lot of whitespace.) All in all, this probably worked better as a book proposal.