Pun Salad

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.