Pun Salad

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.