Pun Salad

Somehow I missed talking about SpaceX's spectacular Polaris Dawn mission while it was going on, and I was totally unaware of this additional bit of awesome: Astronaut plays John Williams’ ‘Star Wars’ theme in first-ever violin solo in outer space.

And here 'tis. Even my fellow philistines will enjoy:

Also of note:

• Don't be so shy, Mr. Williamson. Tell us what you really think about The Exotic Cat-Eaters of Springfield, Ohio. (Subhed: "A pretty long story about a thing that didn’t happen.")

  SPRINGFIELD, Ohio—They come to Ohio from one of the most desperately poor places in the Western Hemisphere. They have few to no belongings. In many cases, they are uneducated, and most don’t speak English well. They do not understand the local culture where they have settled—and it shows: in their dress, in their speech, in their manners, in their housing arrangements, in the food they eat, and in the music they dance to. 

  Most profess to be Christians, but many maintain superstitious folk magic traditions from their homeland, and many quietly hold to a belief in witchcraft. They blithely violate social taboos. Locals complain that they are stealing their jobs, driving up costs, and consuming too much in the way of social services. And then there are the dietary norms: Though the rumors no doubt exceed the reality, some of them eat animals not generally considered food by the good people of Ohio. Ask the locals, and many of them will quietly say that they wish they would all go back to where they came from.

  But that was a long time ago. And while J.D. Vance’s hillbilly ancestors may not have been the inbred, possum-eating, superstitious bushwhackers of legend and lore, as they descended on Ohio from the hills of Kentucky they had more than a little in common with the Haitian immigrants Sen. Vance now spends his days vilifying in terms that would have been familiar to Fritz Hippler, the filmmaker whose 1941 propaganda film Der ewige Jude comes to its climax with images of leering kosher butchers covered in the blood of animals slaughtered in the service of “the so-called Jewish religion.”

  Lord Acton would have us believe that it takes absolute power to corrupt absolutely. But even the dream of the vice presidency—that “bucket of warm piss” in the immortal words of Vice President John Nance Garner—will do the trick, if you are the right kind of person.

  By which, of course, I mean the wrong sort of person—the wrong sort to wield power. You can send little J.D. to Yale to make him polished, you can send him to Silicon Valley to make him rich, and you can send him to the Senate to make him powerful, but you cannot stop him from being what it is he apparently wants to be: Cleetus [sic] the Gap-Toothed Twitter Troll.

  Equal time for David Strom at Hot Air, who's really … um, hot, I guess, about KDW's story: 'Conservative' Writer Calls J.D. Vance 'Gap-Toothed Cletus'.

  Well, as you can plainly see from the final quoted paragraph above, KDW said J.D. Vance aspires to being gap-toothed Cletus. But onto the steamy stuff:

  We keep on being sold the line that Trump is unfit to be president because he uses hateful rhetoric, and I admit that I wished Trump used less incendiary words often enough.

  But the people who make this complaint are, if anything, much worse. Trump directs his ire at what are in the end serious problems making the lives of everyday Americans worse, and in return his critics call him a Nazi, an existential threat to America, and make the most disparaging remarks about his supporters.

  Um, yeah. I think Strom is badly misunderstanding the point KDW was making in his article. As noted, he actually went to Springfield, talked to people, made keen observations. As is his wont. The article doesn't seem to be paywalled, so I urge you to check for yourself. His bottom line:

  Vance has turned Solzhenitsyn’s maxim on its head: “Let the lie come into the world, but only through me, and only if I get something good out of it.” A man who is not suffering from whatever disease of the soul with which Vance is afflicted would have a hard time even imagining wanting to be vice president—of all petty things!—that bad. A different and better sort of man would understand that bearing false witness against 15,000 poor and vulnerable people in the pursuit of political power is the same as bearing false witness against anybody else. 

  But I’ll give Vance the last word. Here he is on Twitter, back when Twitter was Twitter and J.D. Vance was J.D. Vance: “Trump makes people I care about afraid. Immigrants, Muslims, etc. Because of this, I find him reprehensible. God wants better of us.”

• Also reporting from Springfield… in the imagination of Jeff Maurer anyway, is veteran reporter Jacob Fuzetti, whose headlien reads: I’ve Been Sent to Ohio to Research People Eating Cats, for Some Reason.

  The presidential election may hinge on whether Haitian immigrants in Ohio have eaten cats. Former President Trump repeated the rumor in last week’s debate, and the subsequent days have seen an intense discussion among influencers and journalists about whether there’s any validity to the rumors whatsoever. And now, I’ve been drawn into the kerfuffle; I write to you from a hotel room in Hamilton, Ohio, where I sit confused, defeated, and more than a little depressed about the state of journalism and my life.

  This assignment is partly my fault. I’ve been begging I Might Be Wrong editor Jeff Maurer to let me write about the election; he usually assigns me to pop culture nonsense and Gen Z fluff that makes me wish I didn’t view retirement as a grim prison in which I will await my death. I was excited when Jeff came to me and said “J-Fuzz — you down for some of that in-person reporting that you never shut the fuck up about?” But then I learned that he was going to send me to Ohio to investigate cat-eating, which somehow felt more degrading than the time he assigned me to talk about the news with what appeared to be an AI bot trained on porn.

  “What does cat-eating have to do with who should be president?” I asked.

  “Everyone’s talking about it,” Jeff replied.

  “But isn’t it a red herring?” I said.

  “Cats,” Jeff replied, “not fish.”

  I like Fuzetti, and I hope Maurer keeps humiliating him.

• "Scientific American is neither scientific nor American. Discuss." Wesley J. Smith claims Scientific American Kamala Harris Endorsement Harms Science.

  The science establishment continues to politicize “science” — and that ain’t good for science.

  In July, Nature — supposedly the most respected science journal in the world — endorsed Kamala Harris. Now, following the ideological leader, so has Scientific American.

  And what a sad joke the endorsement is. For example, the editorial repeats the lie that Trump told people to inject bleach to fight Covid. From the editorial:

  Trump touted his pandemic efforts during his first debate with Harris, but in 2020 he encouraged resistance to basic public health measures, spread misinformation about treatments and suggested injections of bleach could cure the disease.

  No. He. Did. Not.

  Goodness knows that I ain't voting for Trump (or Kamala either), but if your go-to argument against him is the bleach lie, you just aren't working very hard.

  But the self-immolation of Scientific American is old news. Jerry Coyne has been on their case for a long time (here is what his search engine provides); back in 2022, he called it "a woke joke of a rag."

• Praising with faint damns. Harvard Econ Prof Jason Furman took to the op-ed pages of the WSJ to argue that Kamala Harris Is the Safer Economic Choice.

  The first modern presidential race between two candidates with undergraduate degrees in economics hasn’t thrilled economists. Both Donald Trump and Kamala Harris have floated bad ideas, including that Nippon Steel’s proposed acquisition of U.S. Steel is a national-security risk, that tip income shouldn’t be taxed, and that grocery prices are currently elevated because of price gouging.

  Yet economists are obliged to compare and quantify. In this race, the evaluation is clear: Mr. Trump’s ideas on tariffs, the budget and the Federal Reserve pose a much greater risk to the economy than Ms. Harris’s.

  Furman was chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers during Obama's second term, and he's a pretty solid Democrat. He gives Kamala a lot of slack that he doesn't provide to Trump. And he suggests we don't worry: a couple of her worst ideas "would require legislative approval, which neither is likely to get."

• Lileks on cybesecurity. I subscribe to his substack, so should you, but if you don't, I don't know he much you'll be able to read of his latest: Username: Mattress / PW: Under. Inspired by his run-in with home budgeting software:

  The budget program I chose was slick and attractive. Step one: It needed to know how much lucre I had in the bank, of course, so it could warn me that I was running on fumes when I put down the card for a big-ticket item like a TV or a pound of lean ground beef. It asked for my bank password and account numbers.

  I stared at the window on the screen, the cursor blinking expectantly in the text field.

  I closed the program, uninstalled it, zero’d out my hard drive, removed the hard drive, smashed with a hammer, ran it through a bandsaw a few times, then buried the pieces in six locations ten miles apart.

  Then I changed my bank passwords from 123456 to 1234567. Can’t be too safe.

  Yes, I am so paranoid about banking account numbers and passwords that the mere act of asking for them made me back out. Once I had to send bank account and routing information to daughter, and I put it in an encrypted pdf, with instructions about the password:

  “Original name of second dog with first syllable in Latin + number of windows in your bedroom + number of city blocks to high school + first hamster name + birthday (month, day) X # of hamsters owned

  Lileks' column in his dead-trees Minneapolis newspaper was cancelled, so this is what he's doing now. I was happy to subscribe.

Just over a month, as it turned out:

In Minnesota, just like here in Wisconsin, we respect our neighbors and the personal choices they make.

Because we know there's a golden rule. Mind your own damn business. pic.twitter.com/CXv54UxD1z

— Tim Walz (@Tim_Walz) August 7, 2024

But now…

Tim Walz tells voters to approach strangers at the grocery store and have "hard conversation[s]" about the need to vote for the Harris campaign
pic.twitter.com/pd1RDaR7G8

— The Post Millennial (@TPostMillennial) September 14, 2024

Gee, Tim, the hardest conversation I've had in my grocery store lately was about the baseball cap I was wearing. Long story.

But if you prefer text over tweets, the Federalist's Jason Miyares notes that Tim Walz Brags About Passing Laws That Restrict Speech.

That's not "Minnesota Nice"; it's Minnesota Authoritarian.

(It's Constitution Day, by the way. Maybe someone could give Tim one of those pocket-size versions, with the First Amendment bookmarked?)

Also of note:

• Consigned to the Memory Hole. Megan McArdle recalls the good old days when Democrats weren't shy about expressing their fondest desires for the country. But now: Democrats downplay extremist positions. Do they even remember them?

  The correction is the most underrated journalistic form. Almost no one reads them except other journalists. But read properly, each one tells a little story not just of what the journalist got wrong, but how they missed it. Sometimes that story is pretty dull: Names can be spelled many ways! But sometimes it’s a revealing tale, and that’s what you’ll find in the whopper of a correction that Time issued last week:

  “The original version of this story mischaracterized as false Donald Trump’s statement in the presidential debate accusing Vice President Kamala Harris of supporting ‘transgender operations on illegal aliens in prison.’ As a presidential candidate in 2019, Harris filled out a questionnaire saying she supported taxpayer-funded gender transition treatment for detained immigrants.”

  The mistake is understandable, to a point, because it sounds too bizarre to be true. (It also slipped past the legendarily persnickety fact-checkers at the New Yorker.) The fact that Kamala Harris endorsed a policy so extreme that it sounds like an urban legend tells you just how badly Democratic politicians misunderstood their voters in 2019 — just as its peremptory dismissal by two publications tells you how badly many of those voters still misunderstand their politicians today.

  If you notice Kamala saying that we have always been at war with Eastasia, and the WaPo and the New Yorker agreeing, … then you'll know we got trouble. Right here in River City.

• A good question, well put. And it's posed by J.D. Tuccille: How Much Will the Major Presidential Candidates Steal From You?

  We know that taxation is theft, and we also know that whichever political candidate wins the upcoming presidential popularity contest will steal from us. The question is, how much will a President Kamala Harris or a President Donald Trump take—information we need to help us appropriately choose our fate? Fortunately, the candidates have told us something of what they have in mind, sometimes grudgingly, so we can compare their effects on the economy and our personal finances.

  After some number-crunching, the bottom line: "For the short term […] Trump's tax and revenue plans look preferable—especially if he can resist his urge to erect tariff barriers that would spark a trade war."

  That's a mighty big if, considering Trump's loose-cannon whims.

  But note that "for the short term" caveat. Both candidates' policies would cause, according to the Penn-Wharton Budget Model, Uncle Stupid's inevitable default on debt. And that would be very bad.

  That's the long term, though. And you know what Keynes said about that. (I plan on leaving apology notes to my kids: sorry we wrecked your country!)

• I've heard it said that video killed the radio star. Maybe so. But Joe Lancaster says: Prohibition Killed Matthew Perry.

  Last month, federal prosecutors indicted five people for the overdose death of a celebrity the previous year. Three have pleaded guilty so far, and this month, a trial date was set for the other two. Many of the details certainly reveal heinous behavior, but the case makes clear that prohibition itself bears the most responsibility.

  On October 28, 2023, Matthew Perry—the actor best known as Chandler Bing on the long-running sitcom Friends—died at his Los Angeles home. The county medical examiner announced in December that Perry's death primarily resulted from "the acute effects of ketamine"; the full autopsy indicated that he drowned in his hot tub when a sizable dose of the drug depressed his breathing and caused him to slip into unconsciousness.

  Lancaster's account of Perry's demise is unsparing; the five people indicted are truly wretched people. But so was Perry. And the only speck of coercion was Perry's demands on his "personal assistant", who administered the dose that knocked him out. With the implicit "… or I'll fire you."

  Lancaster's right to blame prohibition, which caused Perry to deal with some unsavory characters. But how would things have been different in the absence of prohibition?

• They don't even look alike. Martin Gurri writes on Mistaking Leviathan for God. Specifically. "demanding personal validation from an institution [the modern "democratic" state] explicitly designed not to provide it."

  Let me suggest a medical name for this cognitive disorder: “Greta Thunberg Syndrome.” Young Thunberg was one of Haidt’s sufferers, healed by the miracle of environmental activism.

  “Before I started school striking I had no energy, no friends and I didn’t speak to anyone. I just sat at home, with an eating disorder,” she tweeted. “All that is gone now, since I have found a meaning, in a world that sometimes seems shallow and meaningless to so many people.”

  Thunberg is a fairly typical specimen of those who confuse politics with redemption. With an almost gnostic fervor, she hates the society in which she lives quite comfortably, and keeps breathlessly anticipating its doom. She’s wholly focused on personal theater—not surprisingly, her father is an actor, her mother an opera singer—with few, if any, perceptible consequences. She’s sustained by the absolute certainty that she embodies Truth in the eternal war against Falsehood. Above all, she needs the fuel of rage to lift her spirit above this meaningless world—the angrier she gets, the happier she is.

  Greta's transformed herself into a full-on Hamas cheerleader, by the way. We should not have expected different.

Recently on the book blog:

Another book down on my "reread Crais" project. Amazon tells me I bought this book in hardcover back in 2011 for $16.17; nowdays it goes for $7.29, cheaper than either the Kindle version or the paperback.

My original report on the book is here. And I don't have that much to add, except: whoa, what was wrong with me back then? Seems I didn't appreciate the evolution in the characters of either Joe Pike or Elvis Cole, Elvis is more somber than in previous books, Joe's more human. This time around I was fine with that. And, given that, I was more impressed with the procedural details: Elvis's detective skills really shine here, and so do Pike's skills in … well, being Pike.

I will point out that, once again, I can't connect the book's title with anything actually in the book. I assume Crais is being too subtle for me on that score, and not for the first time.

A Van Gogh down by the river pic.twitter.com/O8AnfQxonY

— Wilder Larkin (@LarkinWilder) September 1, 2024

Also of note:

• You betcha. Christian Britschgi asks: Should We Blame Fauci for the COVID Pandemic? It's from the current print issue of Reason, now out from behind the paywall. It's a longish look at Fauci's onetime "rock star" status, now tarnished by numerous revelations about his (probable) involvement in the virus's origins, and his subsequent efforts to cover that up. Sample:

  In 2023, the incoming Republican House majority had reorganized the coronavirus subcommittee to investigate the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic. The information they'd uncovered, supplemented by years of dogged investigative journalism, was damning for Fauci and his agency.

  Fauci had long denied his agency had ever funded controversial gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) in Wuhan, China, where the COVID-19 pandemic originated. But weeks before Fauci's testimony, a senior NIH official admitted that the NIAID had funded such research. Days later, President Joe Biden's administration would strip EcoHealth Alliance—the nonprofit that the NIAID had paid to do that gain-of-function research—of its federal funding, citing the organization's lack of transparency and oversight failures at the WIV.

  Soon after, the select subcommittee revealed that Fauci's senior scientific adviser, David Morens, told EcoHealth scientists in emails that Fauci would "protect" the group from public scrutiny about the pandemic's origins and that Morens could pass any needed communications from EcoHealth to Fauci via a private back channel that was safe from public records requests.

  There is a suspicious lack of outrage about all things COVID. I suspect the media is reluctant to admit their role in mishandling and misreporting COVID news. And ashamed that they turned Fauci into a "rock star", when he's just another obfuscating, lying, bureaucrat.

• Wait, they're eating them? I thought they were just for voodoo sacrifice! Well, whatever. Jacob Sullum notes our possible one-heartbeat-away candidate is doing his own Fauci-like dance with fantasy: J.D. Vance Says It Does Not Matter Whether 'Rumors' of Pet-Eating Migrants Are True.

  Sen. J.D. Vance (R–Ohio), Donald Trump's running mate, is sticking with the debunked story about Haitian immigrants who supposedly have been eating purloined pets in Springfield, Ohio. That tall tale provoked wide ridicule after Trump repeated it during his debate with Vice President Kamala Harris last week. Undaunted, Vance told CNN's Dana Bash on Sunday that he preferred "the firsthand account of my constituents who are telling me that this happened" to the denials from Springfield officials, who say there is no evidence to substantiate it.

  Whether or not it is true that Haitians are dining on stolen cats and dogs, Vance said, the story has proven important in calling attention to the problems that Springfield is experiencing as a result of a migrant influx. "I've been trying to talk about the problems in Springfield for months," he told Bash. "The American media totally ignored this stuff until Donald Trump and I started talking about cat memes. If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that's what I'm going to do."

  "Gee, nobody was paying attention to what I was saying about migrant problems until I started making wild accusations about kitty-eating Haitians."

  I can understand his argument, although I don't think it's as solid a justification as he thinks it is.

Recently on the movie blog:

I have fond memories of loving this movie back in the 1970s, Peter Bogdonovich's resurrection of the screwball comedy genre. Now, fifty years later, I still laughed, maybe not quite as heartily as before, but still…

Here's the story: Iowa musicologist Howard Bannister (Ryan O'Neal) comes to San Francisco to learn whether he's been awarded a prestigious research grant from the Larrabee Foundation. (He is investigating whether cavemen were able to make crude music by beating on igneous rocks.) He has his domineering fiancée Eunice (Madeline Kahn) along with him. On the scene comes Judy Maxwell (Barbra Streisand), and she unaccountably falls into love with Howard (literal love at first sight). She successfully inveigles her way into his life, but not without causing much hilarious misunderstanding and impressive amounts of property damage.

A subplot involves four lookalike bags, one containing Howard's research rocks. The others containing top secret documents purloined by a wannabe whistleblower; a fortune in jewelry; and Judy's clothing. And of course they get mixed up. Adding to the hilarity and destruction.

Morbid me, couldn't help but notice that most of the stars here are no longer with us. Still (apparently) alive, however: Barbra, Michael Murphy, Randy Quaid.

I get the feeling the movie is poorly paced near the end, but I still had a good time.

Robert F. Graboyes has already written his Presidential Election Pre-Postmortem so it will be ready to go on November 6. Sample:

And here's our weekly look at what the bettors are saying:

Yeah: it's still close, but that's quite a swing to Kamala since last week. What happened? Oh, right: the debate. You can actually see the odds flip around 10pm last Tuesday using the Election Betting Odds graphing function.

Also of note:

• She's still a nitwit, though. Jeffrey Blehar paints an unappetizing picture: Kamala Harris Spits Up Word Salad All Over Her Lapels During Interview.

  Big news in the world of politics: The Democratic nominee finally spoke to the press! Yes, Kamala Harris took her first-ever one-on-one interview with a mainstream-media outlet yesterday afternoon, and don’t be shocked if it’s her last, because I am at a loss to tell you how bad it was.

  The interview was with Philadelphia’s local ABC affiliate, and credit to interviewer Brian Taff: He asked straightforward, no-nonsense questions like a professional journalist aware he might be giving Harris the only serious ten minutes of her entire campaign. What Harris did with those ten minutes was cringeworthy beyond belief, revealing every single one of her flaws — her inability to complete a basic sentence or answer even the simplest of questions about policy that haven’t been pre-rehearsed with Philippe Reines for a week in advance. I am only going to print here Taff’s first question to Harris, and then I will simply transcribe for you Harris’s response. May God have mercy on your soul after you read this.

  (And I beg of you: Watch the full ten-minute interview. Don’t deny yourself.)

  TAFF: At the debate the other night you talked about creating an “opportunity economy” — what if we can drill down on that a little bit. When you talk about bringing down prices and making life more affordable for people, what are one or two specific things you have in mind for that?

  HARRIS: Well I’ll start with this. I grew up a middle-class kid. My mother raised my sister and me, she worked very hard. Um, she was able to finally save up enough money to buy our first house when I was a teenager. I grew up in a community of hardworking people, construction workers, and nurses and teachers, and I try to explain to some people who may not have had the same experience, you know, if, but, a lot of people will relate to this, you know I grew up in a neighborhood of folks who were very proud of their lawn. [smiles and nods with hands upheld] You know? And, um, and I was raised to believe and to know that all people deserve dignity. And that we as Americans have a beautiful character. You know, we have ambitions and aspirations and dreams. But not everyone necessarily has access to the resources that can help them fuel those dreams and ambitions. So when I talk about building an opportunity economy, it is very much with the mind of investing in the ambitions and aspirations and the incredible work ethic of the American people, and creating opportunity for people, for example, to start a small business. Um, my mother, you know, worked long hours, and our neighbor helped raise us. We used to call her, it was, I still call her, our “second mother.” She was a small business owner. I love our small business owners, I learned who they are through my childhood, and she was a community leader, she hired locally, she mentored, our small businesses are so much a part of the fabric of our communities, not to mention, really, I think the backbone of America’s economy.

  Blehar praises interviewer Brian Taff for his questions; I praise him for his restraint, in not begging Kamala to shut up already.

• "Might" does a lot of work here. Steve Chapman speculates Kamala Harris Might be Less Injurious to the American Economy than Trump.

  Many Americans have fond memories of the state of the economy during the Trump presidency and in the last debate Donald Trump reminded them of that: Until the Covid pandemic hit, inflation was mild, unemployment was low, growth was respectable, and the stock market hit 126 all-time highs. According to a pre-debate poll by the Pew Research Center, 55% of registered voters place greater trust in Trump than Harris on economic issues. Whatever his faults, they regard him as clearly preferable to his Democratic opponent when it comes to economic issues. They are, however, badly mistaken.

  It’s not that Harris harbors a secret fondness for Atlas Shrugged or that she is a market enthusiast. She generally mentions corporations only when she’s accusing them of shafting consumers, abusing workers, or crushing competition. Despite majoring in economics at Howard University, and despite declaring “I’m a capitalist,” you will wait in vain to hear her celebrate the vital role of markets in satisfying consumers, generating innovation, and raising living standards.

  Still, contrary to MAGA caricatures, she’s far short of a progressive darling: After veering leftward in her 2019 presidential campaign, Harris has moved back to the center, firmly abandoning her endorsement of “Medicare for all,” a ban on fracking, and higher taxes on everyone making more than $100,000 a year. Although her campaign has been light on specifics, it’s safe to classify her as a standard Democrat, not the rabid leftist who inhabits GOP fantasies. And given that she seized the presidential nomination without a fight, she owes nothing to the party’s ultra-progressive faction.

  I think Chapman is too confident that Harris's current positions are her "true" ones, not the ones she espoused during her 2019 "veering leftward" days.

• The obligatory "to be sure" item. Robby Soave notes the disparate treatment afforded the candidates during the debate: ABC’s Moderators Failed to Fact-Check Kamala Harris.

  This week's first and possibly only debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump was not nearly as consequential as the June debate, which ended President Joe Biden's political career. It also differed in another key way: The moderation was incredibly one-sided and unfair.

  This was not true of the previous debate, between Biden and Trump. CNN's Jake Tapper and Dana Bash asked questions but did not interrupt or attempt to fact-check the candidates—they left that to Trump and Biden. Such an approach is preferable; politicians make so many incorrect statements that if the moderators really felt the need to intervene every single time, debates would devolve into showdowns between the moderators and each candidate, which isn't the point. There are also frequent examples of moderators asserting that a given claim is abjectly false when it may be complicated, ambiguous, or a case where reasonable minds disagree.

  ABC's David Muir and Linsey Davis thrice followed a remark by Trump with an attempt to fact-check him. These fact-checks introduced valid, conflicting information; Trump said violence in the U.S. was out of control and the moderators pointed to FBI data that contradicts this, and Trump said that Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating pets—a completely erroneous claim.

  But when Harris made statements that could have been fact-checked, the moderators declined to do so.

  Trump could have done his own fact-checking on Harris, but… no, he couldn't. That would have required some mental discipline.

• More people are noticing what Kevin D. Williamson points out: The Anti-Americanism of Donald Trump.

  Donald Trump is a funny kind of patriot. 

  He loves America—except for the cities, the people who live in the cities, about half of the states, the universities, professional sports leagues, Hollywood, Silicon Valley, Wall Street, the legal system, immigrants, the culture. He thinks the Capitol Police are murderers and that the FBI is a gestapo, that the government is an illegitimate junta maintained through election fraud, that the January 6 rioters are political prisoners, that the nation is a ruin, that it is “failed.” And when it fell to him to explain to Tuesday’s debate audience why he should be president, he spent most of his time repeating the praise of Hungarian autocrat Viktor Orbán.

  Trump’s enemies are all Americans, his friends are all foreign dictators, and his money lives in Dubai and Indonesia. Some nationalist. 

  Trump lives in a very strange little bubble: His world is Palm Beach, a handful of golf courses and hotels, and Fox News. The smallness of his frame of reference is a problem for him: Trump’s remarks about the 2017 fiasco in Charlottesville really are routinely misrepresented, and he is right to try to correct the record, but going on ABC and insisting that the story had been “debunked” by “Jesse”—and expecting the ABC debate audience to know that he meant Jesse Watters of Fox News—is just one example of Trump’s inability to speak to any constituency beyond the one he already has: the constituency that is holding him hostage. 

  I don't know how much you can see of KDW's rant if you're not Dispatch-subscribed, so…

• And KDW didn't even mention Laura Loomer. But Jeffrey Blehar (yes, him again) does: Laura Loomer Is a Visible Symptom of Trump’s Problems, Not the Cause of Them.

  As a general rule, I prefer to ignore repulsive internet cranks and lunatics until forced by events to take notice; Greta Thunberg barely interests me anymore, and Tucker Carlson morally and intellectually wrote himself off with his Russia trip — until his transparent “Nazi-curious” antics got entangled with a presidential race and forced us to pay attention to him for a minute longer. But now I guess I have to talk about another despicable internet nutjob, because Laura Loomer is making real news now, not merely “extremely online” news. It is incredibly difficult to do proper justice to how full-tilt insane and repulsively cheap Loomer’s entire public adult life has been, and to recount it would be to list one shockingly vile or comically stupid act after another.

  So let’s do it! Loomer is but one representative of an entire toxic ecosystem of online fanatics known for their alt-right associations, contempt for the truth, and undying loyalty to the person of Donald Trump. Loomer herself is completely a product of the Trump era: In mid 2017, she invaded the stage to protest a performance of Julius Caesar in New York City where Trump was portrayed as Caesar, and she became a viral news story for it.

  She has been on a nonstop quest for online relevance ever since, and has dived happily into the filthiest toilets of right-wing politics. The spread of pure misinformation and paranoid conspiracy theories has historically been her bread and butter. The idea of 9/11 being “an inside job,” which Loomer has endorsed (of course), is only the beginning of it; in 2018 she repeatedly claimed, Alex Jones–style, that the victims of both the Parkland, Fla., and Santa Fe, Tex., mass school shootings were in fact “crisis actors” staging an assault on gun rights. (She also averred that the 2017 Las Vegas mass shooter was in fact an ISIS plant and the truth was being covered up — a conspiracy theory she fought with fellow lunatic Jack Posobiec over for proper “credit.”)

  That's a "gifted" link, so check it out. As his headline indicates, Blehar's real target is not Loomer, but Trump. Specifically, what Trump's inclusion of Loomer in his "private entourage" indicates:

  Trump knows by now the kind of people he wants surrounding him (see: Roy Cohn). And the reason Trump prefers mindless flatterers and psychopathic attack dogs to sober and loyal employees is because Donald Trump does not want to be — and cannot be — saved from himself.

Our Eye Candy du Jour is an old Michael Ramirez cartoon, apparently from 2013, but Daniel J. Mitchell dug it out to illustrate The Santa Claus Election.

The latest from Trump is that he wants to exempt overtime pay from income taxation. A few weeks after he said he wanted to exempt tips from income taxation.

I noticed Scott Lincicome's query:

Can someone get paid in primarily tips and overtime? Asking for a few million friends.

— Scott Lincicome (@scottlincicome) September 13, 2024

• Might be useful if you venture onto a college campus. Greg Lukianoff guests on Quillette to provide Answers to 12 Bad Anti-Free Speech Arguments. Let's just look at the first one:

  Assertion 1: Free speech was created under the false notion that words and violence are distinct, but we now know that certain speech is more akin to violence.

  Answer: Speech equals violence isn’t a new idea. It’s a very old—and very bad—idea.

  On campus, I often run into people—not only students, but professors—who seem to think they’re the first to notice that the speech/violence distinction is a social construct. They conclude that this means it’s an arbitrary distinction—and that, since it’s arbitrary, the line can be put where they please. (Conveniently, they draw the line based on their personal views: if it’s speech that they happen to hate, then it just might be violence.) But, ironically, the whole point of freedom of speech, from its beginning, has been to enable people to sort things out without resorting to violence. A quotation often attributed to Sigmund Freud (which he attributed to another writer) conveys this: “The first human being who hurled an insult instead of a stone was the founder of civilisation.”

  Yes, a strong distinction between the expression of opinion and violence is a social construct, but it’s one of the best social constructs for peaceful coexistence, innovation, and progress that’s ever been invented. Redefining the expression of opinion as violence is a formula for a chain reaction of endless violence, repression and regression.

  What I learned from this: Freud wasn't wrong about everything.

• It's not just the left, but OK. Jonathan Turley has a WSJ op-ed describing The Left’s Assault on the Constitution.

  Kamala Harris declared in Tuesday’s debate that a vote for her is a vote “to end the approach that is about attacking the foundations of our democracy ’cause you don’t like the outcome.” She was alluding to the 2021 Capitol riot, but she and her party are also attacking the foundations of our democracy: the Supreme Court and the freedom of speech.

  Several candidates for the 2020 presidential nomination, including Ms. Harris, said they were open to the idea of packing the court by expanding the number of seats. Mr. Biden opposed the idea, but a week after he exited the 2024 presidential race, he announced a “bold plan” to “reform” the high court. It would pack the court via term limits and also impose a “binding code of conduct,” aimed at conservative justices.

  Ms. Harris quickly endorsed the proposal in a statement, citing a “clear crisis of confidence” in the court owing to “decision after decision overturning long-standing precedent.” She might as well have added “because you don’t like the outcome.” Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D., R.I.) has already introduced ethics and term-limits legislation and said Ms. Harris’s campaign has told him “that your bills are precisely aligned with what we are talking about.”

  Turley has gathered an impressive collection of quotes from (mostly) professors and politicians, decrying (in one case) "that little piece of paper", the Constitution, that's an obstacle on the Road to Serfdom.

• On the "crack down" watch. Ars Technica reports the latest: Biden moves to crack down on Shein and Temu, slow shipments into US.

  The Biden administration has proposed rules that could make it more costly for Chinese e-commerce platforms like Shein and Temu to ship goods into the US.

  In his announcement proposing to crack down on "unsafe, unfairly traded products," President Joe Biden accused China-founded e-commerce platforms selling cheap goods of abusing the "de minimis exemption" that makes shipments valued under $800 duty-free.

  Platforms taking advantage of the exemption can share less information on packages and dodge taxes. Biden warned that "over the last 10 years, the number of shipments entering the United States claiming the de minimis exemption has increased significantly, from approximately 140 million a year to over 1 billion a year." And the "majority of shipments entering the United States claiming the de minimis exemption originate from several China-founded e-commerce platforms," Biden said.

  As a result, America has been flooded with "huge volumes of low-value products such as textiles and apparel" that compete in the market "duty-free," Biden said. And this "makes it increasingly difficult to target and block illegal or unsafe shipments" presumably lost in the flood.

  I've seen a lot of Temu ads online, offering low low low prices on crap I don't want.

  But this "crack down" sounds like yet another anti-consumer protectionist move, with the usual excuses about "safety", and substituting the government's judgments of "value" for the customer's.

• USPS delenda est. At Reason, Jack Nicastro asks the musical (and rhetorical) question: 10 Years and $3 Billion for a New Mail Truck?.

  The new U.S. Postal Service (USPS) Next Generation Delivery Vehicles (NGDVs) have delighted drivers since hitting the road in Georgia last month, the Associated Press reports. But given the $5 billion investment required, taxpayers might be a tad less enthusiastic.

  USPS prides itself on being "generally self-funded" through revenue from the sale of stamps, products, and services. As laudable and uncommon as this general self-funding is for federal agencies, USPS received $3 billion from the Inflation Reduction Act. USPS also has a pension system with a $50 billion unfunded liability for which the taxpayer may ultimately have to foot the bill, Reason's Eric Boehm explains.

  Altogether, USPS expects its total investment in new vehicles to reach $9.6 billion. Considering a significant portion of this investment comes out of the U.S. Department of the Treasury (read: from taxpayers present and future), the public is entitled to scrutinize how this money was spent.

  So scrutinize away, suckers taxpayers.

  I did a stamps-by-mail order a few months back, and now the USPS sends me their quarterly catalog USA Philatelic, which is a slick compendium of "stamps and stamp-inspired products" that they'll be happy to sell you. (You can request your very own copy here; browse an incomplete archive of past issues here.)

  Even a philistine like me can appreciate the beauty of some stamps. But I can't help but wonder how much money USPS would save by just issuing one Forever Flag stamp, and leaving the beauty to the private sector.

  A "Forever" stamp will run you 73¢ these days, by the way.

… well, you know what. (If you don't here you go.)

And the pony is: I'll take some cheer knowing one of these guys will lose. Remy you're with me on this, right?

Ah, I knew you would be! Also, Veronique de Rugy has a Fitting H. L. Mencken Quote on the Debate, one we've deployed here a number of times:

Downside: they're taking the rest of us with them.

Of all people, George F. Will finds his "optimum" pony: Post-debate, the optimum 2024 political outcome comes into view.

GFW pins his hopes on President Kamala being routinely constrained/frustrated by a GOP-controlled Senate. Not great, but probably the best we can hope for.

Also of note:

• The miracle of misleading labels. It's so simple! And Daniel Shuchman finds bipartisanship: Trump and Biden Agree: Just Call Debt 'Wealth' Instead!

  Amidst campaign discord, a bipartisan idea is emerging: America can set aside taxpayer dollars for special projects and brand it a national "wealth fund" to help improve public perception of the national debt and deficit spending.

  Speaking at the Economic Club of New York last Thursday, former President Donald Trump asked, "Why don't we have a sovereign wealth fund? Other countries have wealth funds. We have nothing." He suggested that this new account would be capitalized with "tremendous amounts of money" that the federal government would take in by imposing tariffs and "other intelligent things," and that the United States would have the "greatest sovereign wealth fund of them all." How big might it be? Trump did not specify, but said he would consult with billionaire hedge fund manager and adviser John Paulson. In a separate interview, Paulson said, "it would be great to see America join this party and, instead of having debt, have savings."

  An appealing aspiration to be sure, though scarcely conceivable in the foreseeable future. He referenced Norway's $1.7 trillion wealth fund as a potential goal. That may sound like a lot of money—until one considers that the U.S. federal government spends that much in just four months. It is hard to fathom how it would be the basis of a long-term and meaningful store of national wealth in the context of the U.S. economy. (Norway has a population of just 5.6 million, so it's very meaningful there.)

  A fund that size would amount to barely 4 percent of the accumulated $35 trillion U.S. national debt. Trump predicted that the proposed wealth fund would "return a gigantic profit," which would help pay down the debt. That profit would have to be gigantic indeed—on the order of a 20-fold return, and soon—to offset our national debt. And that's assuming the debt didn't continue to increase in the meantime due to our structural deficits, currently running in the range of $2 trillion annually. We are effectively adding more than an entire Norwegian wealth fund to the national debt every year. In the annals of investing history, it would be a pretty impressive achievement for a pool of capital to appreciate at a rate sufficient to offset our preexisting and accumulating debt, if not totally unprecedented at this scale.

  Uncle Stupid as a savvy investor? No, no, no.

• Obfuscate the actor! Arnold Kling comments on a long-standing Pun Salad gripe: Policy and the Passive Voice.

  In passive voice, it is easy to say “All illegal immigrants should be deported.” But in active voice, that means sending government agents in uniform to knock on everyone’s door, demanding proof of citizenship from those inside. Your door and my door would be knocked on, because until they try everyone’s door, the agents have no way of knowing which residences house illegal immigrants and which do not.

  In passive voice, it is easy to say, “Misinformation on social media should be banned.” But in active voice, that means assigning specific individuals to sift through social media content and determine what is misinformation. Presumably, they will need help from software, but specific people with specific ideas will have to design that software. The people writing the software and making the decisions will be ordinary humans, with their flaws and biases.

  Or, given that previous item about the "sovereign wealth fund": "Funds would be invested in…" invites much less scrutiny than "Government employees will invest in…"

• I am old enough to get the reference. Tyler Cowen titles his post Strawberry Alarm Clock! And leads off with this tweet:

  OpenAI just released an AI as smart as most PhDs in physics, mathematics and the life sciences. Wake up. The world will never be the same and in many ways, it will be unrecognizable a decade from now.

  — Deep Prasad (yug-cybera) 🏴‍☠️ (@Deepneuron) September 12, 2024

  That deserves a "Whoa!" Especially from a guy who didn't actually get his PhD in physics. (Came close, though.)

  Could turn out to be big news, could be the biggest news of the freakin' decade, … or it could be hype. See what you think.

• I know what I'll be doing October 16 at 6pm. I'm going to see Bryan Caplan, who's scheduled as part of a panel discussion at the University of New England campus in Biddeford, Maine. Closer than Portland! Free (yay!) and open to the public (which is me)!

  I've been posting Caplan's stuff since 2005, when this blog was a young 'un.

I've ranted incessantly about entitlement programs, but Phil Gramm and Jodey Arrington take to the op-ed page of the Wall Street Journal with a contrarian view: Welfare Is What’s Eating the Budget.

Further fun fact:

After counting all transfer payments as income to the recipients and taxes as income lost by taxpayers, and adjusting for household size, the average households in the bottom, second and middle quintiles all have roughly the same incomes—despite dramatic differences in work effort.

That's huge. Why work?

Also of note:

• Of course he did. I'm bored by all the debate post-mortems, but Reason's Emma Camp noticed something non-boring: Trump Threatens ABC's Broadcast License After Rocky Debate Performance.

  Former President Donald Trump gave a floundering, erratic performance in last night's debate. However, he's blaming an unlikely culprit for his uninspiring showing: ABC News.

  "ABC took a big hit last night," Trump said during an interview on Fox and Friends Wednesday morning. "I mean, to be honest, they're a news organization. They have to be licensed to do it. They ought to take away their license for the way they did that."

  According to The Hill, ABC and other large networks don't have or need Federal Communications Commission (FCC) licensing. Trump's call to shut down ABC is simply another in a long line of preposterous, dubiously legal, claims that his enemies should face government crackdowns—which, just recently, have ranged from calls to throw in jail everyone from flag-burners to "Lawyers, Political Operatives, Donors, Illegal Voters, & Corrupt Election Officials," who allegedly caused his 2020 defeat.

  Trump and Kamala seem to be in a furious competition to see who can disgust me more.

• Both candidates are awful on this too. At the Dispatch, Scott Lincicome lists Tariff Myths, Debunked. For example, Myth 1 is "Foreigners Pay Protective Tariffs". Nope.

  Perhaps the silliest of all tariff myths is the one Donald Trump keeps repeating. By law, a U.S.-based person or company importing a product into the country will be liable for paying any tariff (tax) owed on that product. In theory, however, the ultimate burden of those taxes—who actually pays—will depend on whether a foreign seller wants to stay in the U.S. market so much that he’s willing to lower his price enough to offset any tariff amount being applied to his product. In the case of, say, a 25 percent tariff on a widget that used to be sold for $100, a foreign widget seller could lower his price to $80 to offset the $20 in new tariffs that a U.S. importer paid when it entered the country, thus keeping the widget’s total price at $100. (American consumers rejoice!) However, if the foreign seller doesn’t lower his price, then someone in the United States will ultimately be paying the tariff (so, $25 on a $100 widget), with no exceptions. (The Tax Foundation’s Erica York patiently walks through these choices in a recent Cato Institute essay.)

  How tariffs’ “economic incidence” shakes out in the real world will depend on lots of things, such as an exporter’s profit margins, the type of product, and whether there are reasonable alternative markets or products available elsewhere in the world. And it’s not all or nothing—often importers and exporters share a tariff burden.

  For Trump and his fellow American protectionists, however, there are two big problems with the “foreigners always pay” argument. First and foremost, a tariff paid by foreigners can’t also protect domestic manufacturers (like Trump says his tariffs did) because the total import price ($100 in the example above) won’t change after the tariff is applied and thus won’t change the purchasing decisions of still-price-conscious Americans. Thus, George Mason University economist Don Boudreaux explains (emphasis mine):

  A protective tariff serves its purpose only if the importer passes on at least part of that cost to its customer. The very purpose of tariffs is to increase demand for domestically produced goods by raising the prices that consumers pay for imports. A tariff that doesn’t raise prices paid by consumers doesn’t protect domestic producers.

  You can’t have it both ways.

  Second, we now have piles of real-world evidence showing that American companies and individuals bore almost all the Trump-era tariffs’ economic burdens, whether as additional import taxes or higher prices of both foreign and domestic goods (more on the latter in a sec). Along with the many first-person accounts of companies and individuals paying these tariffs and often passing them on to U.S. consumers, York summarizes the extensive economic research showing a “near complete pass-through of the 2018–2019 tariffs”—on steel and aluminum, on Chinese imports, on washing machines, on solar panels—to American companies and consumers.

  That's a long excerpt, but it's a long article. Lincicome has Myths 2-9 as well:

  2. Protective Tariffs Don’t Increase U.S. Prices
  3. Tariffs Made America Great
  4. Tariffs Can Reduce the Trade Deficit
  5. U.S. Tariffs Can Boost the U.S. Economy on Net
  6. American Manufacturing Needs Tariffs to Compete
  7. America Has No Tariffs, While Every Other Country Has Tons
  8. Tariffs Are Good and Effective Negotiating Leverage to Achieve Real Free Trade (and That’s All Trump Wants)
  9. Tariffs Can Replace the Income Tax

  As always, I recommend a Dispatch subscription.

• "If it saves one life…" Reason assistant editor Jack Nicastro reveals: The Government Thinks It Can Save 67 Lives for the Low Price of $48 Million. Specifically, rulemakers at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) have proposed a standard which "would establish test procedures simulating a [pedestrian]-head-to-[vehicle]-hood impact and performance requirements to minimize the risk of head injury." Nicastro's bottom line:

  The NHTSA estimates that its proposal, if approved, would "mitigate approximately 67.4 fatalities annually." Not 67.4 hundred—just 67.4 lives. While the number of lives saved is small, the cost of the program is anything but, with "total annual costs rang[ing] from $48.94 to $60.43" million. Using discount rates of 3 and 7 percent, the NHTSA's regulation costs $1.1 million per life saved. There are cheaper ways to save a life.

  Bureaucrats need to justify their continued employment somehow. Or as Mel Brooks observed, more pithily:

  I embed that video clip a lot, don't I?

News:

• I voted in our state's non-Presidential primary yesterday, and everyone I voted for won! That may be a first. Perhaps also a last.
• Didn't watch the debate, (see headline and our Eye Candy du Jour). But everyone seems to agree that Trump lost.
• The questions on Jeopardy! seem harder this year.
• I'm pretty sure I had never seen the episode of The Big Bang Theory I watched last night: ("The Skywalker Incursion", pretty funny.)
• I know it's September 11, but I have nothing new to say about that.

• I've been pretty hard on Kamala lately. But, as Kevin D. Williamson notes, the alternative is A Would-Be Tyrant and His Willing Accomplices.

  There are two aspects of Donald Trump’s character that are important to understand in September 2024: First, that he is a lunatic; second, that he is a coward. 

  Trump’s personal cowardice is, of course, legendary. His campaign has worked very hard to find something disqualifying in Minnesota Gov. Tim Waltz’s 24-year military career, and it has been nauseating to watch Marine veteran J. D. Vance play the attack dog (think yappy little dachshund) on that front, acting on behalf of a man whose father bought him a phony diagnosis of bone spurs (which miraculously healed without treatment!) to keep him out of military service when his country came calling during the Vietnam era.

  Trump is manifestly afraid of all sorts of things: germs (handshakes are “barbaric,” he once whined), birds, women who are not on his payroll, etc. But he also is afraid to do his own lunatic dirty work.

  Trump has recently intensified his habit of reposting Truth Social content of a barking-mad nature—calling for military tribunals to hear cases against Liz Cheney and Barack Obama, sedition charges against members of the January 6 committee, things of that nature. He reposts QAnon content, vague (and not-so-vague) threats to use violence against his political opponents. That these are reposts on his little-used narcissistic social-media platform rather than things he says himself in public is a way of avoiding direct accountability for this lunacy. Low-bottom sycophants and cowards such as Sen. Ted Cruz and Speaker of the House Mike Johnson find it easier to blow off questions about Trump’s reposts on an obscure digital outlet than questions about the lunatic things that come out of the man’s own mouth or phone.

  But those things are bonkers, too.

  There's more, much more. As always, I encourage you to subscribe.

  For the record, grep tells me I've referred to Trump as "Bone Spurs" 62 times since 2018. (And Biden as "Wheezy" 167 times.) Juvenile, but …

• Not that we're letting Kamala go unscathed. Jack Salmon at Reason says she's large, she contains multitudes: Kamala Harris Pledges To Soak the Wealthy—But Her Policies Have Enriched Them.

  As the presidential race enters its final weeks, Vice President Kamala Harris is positioning herself as the champion of middle-class America, vowing to finally make the wealthy pay their fair share. Yet a closer look at her record over the past four years reveals a stark contrast between her rhetoric and reality. Far from soaking the rich, Harris' policies have funneled resources to the wealthy and corporations while burdening middle-class taxpayers.

  Corporate subsidies have exploded under the Biden-Harris administration. In 2021, the 10-year budget allocation for corporate subsidies was $1.2 trillion. Three years later, it has now surpassed $2 trillion.

  The 2022 CHIPS and Science Act included $54 billion in corporate subsidies—Intel alone received almost $20 billion in grants and loans through the CHIPS Act. The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) uncapped a slew of energy subsidies, massively expanding energy production and investment tax credits, and according to the Brookings Institution, will cost an estimated $780 billion, just in corporate welfare, by 2031.

  The beneficiaries of this largesse are extremely concentrated. Three-quarters of the benefits of the IRA are shared by just 15 large corporations, seven of which are foreign. Wind turbine manufacturers like General Electric, Vestas, and Siemens/Gamesa—who collectively produce 79 percent of all turbines—are among the biggest winners. These companies also have a presence on the board of the wind energy lobby, the American Clean Power Association.

  Kamala recently visited our fair state to extol small business and describe all the taxpayer largesse that she would drop upon them.

  And then later excoriate the more successful ones as price-gougers, shrinkflationists, greedheads,…

• Turnabout may be fair play, but it's often not a good idea. Jacob Mchangama has Reflections on Right-Wing Cancel Culture.

  “The Left started it.”

  That was the common retort from right-wing X accounts like Libs of TikTok and their supporters, who attempted and often succeeded at getting people fired for making tasteless social media posts about the assassination attempt on Donald Trump back in July. 

  Most of their victims weren’t public figures but regular Americans like Home Depot employees, firefighters, chefs, and school counselors. This was fine and good, many argued, because it constituted sweet revenge for cancel culture excesses driven by the Left. At The American Spectator, Nate Hochman claimed that the only way to get the Left to change is to make them “understand, at a visceral level, the penalties for the system that they themselves constructed—so much so, in fact, that they are no longer interested in perpetuating it.”

  But the idea that the Left invented cancel culture is a poor and convenient excuse for satisfying the intolerant impulses that have tempted all humans throughout history regardless of political orientation. Using similarly flawed logic, Catholic persecution of paganism was justified since emperor Nero “started it.” Protestants would be entitled to persecute Catholics, as Protestant states frequently did, because the Church excommunicated Luther, banned his books, and punished heretics. We would also have to reevaluate the censorship and persecution in socialist and communist states. After all, Marx, Lenin, and Stalin were all subject to harsh censorship from various political and religious factions of the “bourgeoisie” before the establishment of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat turned the censored into censors.

  Just don't try to wreck peoples' lives just because they have some oddball, even odious, opinions.

• Not me, but I get it. Kat Rosenfield observes We Are All ‘Walz’s for Trump’.

  As we bate our collective breath for an October surprise, the American electorate is celebrating an even more beloved political tradition. Ladies and gents, this is Backstabbing September, that magical month when the most disgruntled members of a candidate’s extended family take to the airwaves, the papers, social media platforms—to let the public know that their politically ambitious relative is a monster and utterly unfit for office.

  Last week’s headline betrayal came courtesy of a group of Tim Walz’s Midwestern relatives, who posed for a photo announcing their support for Donald Trump, complete with a giant “TAKE AMERICA BACK” banner and matching MAGA aesthetic t-shirts that read NEBRASKA WALZ’S FOR TRUMP. In addition to triggering a meltdown among copy editors everywhere (Pro tip: The plural of “Walz” is “Walzes”), the photograph was met with outrage from Tim’s more loyal relatives: His sister said she didn’t recognize the people in it, and his mother identified them as distant cousins.

  But unfortunately for Tim, this was not the first dissenting Walz to throw a wrench in the works of his vice-presidential aspirations. The week before the faithless Nebraskans made their social media debut, Tim’s brother, Jeff, wrote a Facebook post publicly declaring his opposition to Tim’s ideology.

  Nobody has been enjoying this spectacle more than Donald Trump, who thanked Jeff on Truth Social, writing: “I look forward to meeting you soon!” But Trump is far from safe when it comes to backstabbing relatives. He’s got Mary Trump, the grudge-holding niece whose loathing for her Uncle Donald is so intense that she’s published three books about it in four years. (Her new memoir, Who Could Ever Love You, is out today.) And then there’s her brother, Fred Trump III, who hopped aboard the Trumps Against Trump train this summer with his own less-than-complimentary memoir about the family. Subtitle: “The Trumps and How We Got This Way.”

  Fortunately, all my relatives make an honest living.

Recently on the book blog:

Consumer note: $5.99 for the Kindle version at Amazon.

I, however, shelled out $9.99, because I put in my order when the book was announced. It's the third book in his "Nick Mason" series, previous entries being The Second Life of Nick Mason and Exit Strategy.

Spoiler for that last one: Nick's "exit strategy" from his life as a gangster's "ninja" (i.e., hired killer) didn't work out well: he's simply been transferred to a different puppet master, even shadier than the gangster. But one thing doesn't change: Nick's being coerced into his violent behavior by credible threats against his ex-wife and daughter.

So: Nick is sent off to Indonesia to take out a terrorist. He's working with a small team of people, and nobody seems to like him much. And, worse, his assassination attempt ends in dismal failure (but much carnage). So they must regroup and try again. (And again. And again.) Nick goes through a lot of mental and physical anguish, and a lot of bodies pile up along the way. And, yes, there's a setup for the next book in the series.

I got a chuckle out of some dialog on page 168, where the bad guy snarls at Nick: "You need to stop acting like this is some kind of cheap American action movie." For better or worse, I'd been thinking that this book was extremely suitable to be made into an American action movie. Maybe not a cheap one, but…

The Dewey Decimal number was 535, placing it solidly as a physics book, so I checked it out without much further investigation. Reader, there's some physics in here, and I can understand they had to put some number on it, but it's really all over the place: history, occultism, literary and movie criticism, biology, military strategy, materials science, even a quick bit about economics, …

That's not a bad thing though. The author, Philip Ball, takes the reader down a bunch of unexpected paths, and tells a lot of good stories. The concept of invisibility has been with us for a long time. Even in pre-scientific times, people noticed the invisible forces of magnetism and static electricity causing things to move without being touched. Imaginative as we humans are, that was quickly generalized, given healthy doses of fantasy, superstition, and grift …

Right at the beginning, we're told Plato's story of Gyges, who discovered a ring that, when you turned it on your finger, made you invisible. Gyges quickly used this power for schemes of rape, murder, and usurpation. (Wikipedia mentions this yarn as a possible source of Tolkien's One Ring.)

There were a lot of early magical recipes for turning yourself invisible; they were inevitably gross. ("One involves grinding together the fat or eye of an owl, a ball of beetle dung, and perfumed olive oil, and then anointing the entire body while reciting a selection of unlikely names.") PETA would not approve.

Interestingly, the advent of science seemed to give fantasies of invisibility more credence. Telegraphy and radio worked invisibly to send information hither and yon. If that works, why not telepathy? Over the years, people have speculated about phlogiston and the luminiferous ether, both undetectable to the eyes.

And (of course) today we have "dark matter". Which meets the very definition of invisibility: it doesn't seem to interact with light much, if at all. And not to mention: efforts to "visualize" quantum reality yield nothing but frustration; as near as we can tell, there's nothing to see, it's just math down there.

H. G. Wells and his The Invisible Man get a number of pages; like Gyges, Wells' titular character was quickly corrupted by his invention, turning to murder and mayhem. Fun story about the movie: Wells' deal with the movie studio gave him veto power over the screenplay. And (as a result) the project went through four directors and ten screenwriters! (Still turned out pretty decently.)

Also considered is the different sort of invisibility pictured by Ralph Ellison in his Invisible Man.

Other neat stuff: a discussion of how Hamlet's father's ghost was handled over the centuries. Should the ghost be played by an actor, or should it be invisible everyone except Hamlet? We learn about hydraulic fright wigs.

I mentioned economics above: Ball briefly mentions Adam Smith's "famous invisible hand" metaphor. In a confused passage, he attributes the "true provenance" of the metaphor to the notion of the hand of God taking an active role in human affairs. But, one sentence later, he partially disclaims that "provenance", saying that's clearly how his readers would have read it, "whether Smith intended it or not." With an asterisk leading to a snarky footnote about neoliberalism.

Without going into detail, that's just wrong. There's nothing necessarily supernatural about Smith's use of the term. And it wasn't particularly "famous" at the time; it was pretty much ignored until the 20th century.

Other than that clunker, though, I enjoyed the book.

I very seldom post stuff to Facebook. But I found this kinda irresistible:

Need a headline reference? Here you go.

Also of note:

• The bull variety, I think. Jeff Maurer does his duty: Oh, Shit -- Kamala Posted Some Policies! And I Bit the Bullet and Read Them..

  To this point, the Harris campaign has been about as policy-dense as your typical Clifford the Big Red Dog book. That’s not entirely her fault; she was a last-minute replacement when her boss’ plan to slather makeup on his brain to make it look ten years younger somehow didn’t work. Some in the media have encouraged Harris to flesh out her plans, arguing that posting “SHE SO BRAT! 🥥🥥🥥” on Instagram does not constitute a policy platform. Yesterday, Harris gave in to this pedantic nitpicking and posted an issues page called “A New Way Forward”, probably because “A New Start” would have made people think of this Arrested Development joke:

  

  [Figure caption elided]

  What’s in Harris’ plan? Words, unfortunately. And words’ sinister cousin: numbers. This ensures that virtually no one will read the plan — even media folks who were hounding Harris about details will get bored around the time they encounter the phrase “long-term capital gains” (second paragraph) and instead write a story about the New Cold War between Taylor Swift and Brittney Mahomes.

  Maurer is remarkably sympathetic, noting that she's more or less consistent about posing as "moderate" as Democrats get these days.

  It doesn't hurt, in that regard, that apparently large swaths of her "issues" page were lifted directly from Joe Biden's now-defunct campaign site. Ed Morrissey comments:

  How ironic can this get? Joe Biden got plagiarized. The man who once claimed Neil Kinnock's origin story in a speech, and reportedly plagiarized his work in law school as well? Not only did Biden get plagiarized, he got plagiarized by the replacement he insisted on endorsing ... and the one who keeps promising a "new way forward" to boot. 

  Meet the new way forward, same as the old way forward, I guess.

• As Joe Biden would say, "Not a joke". The NYPost editorialists apparently got a chuckle anyway: Kamala Harris' freshly released policy ideas are a joke.

  Kamala Harris has finally posted some policy positions on an “Issues” page on her website — but they’re a joke.

  The intro, like Harris herself, uses a ton of words to say next to nothing: She plans on “building up the middle class,” creating an “Opportunity Economy where everyone has a chance to compete and a chance to succeed” and “bringing together organized labor and workers, small business owners, entrepreneurs, and American companies to create good paying jobs.”

  In the next update, she’ll surely come out in favor of apple pie, cute kittens and adorable puppies.

  And when she isn’t spewing platitudes, she’s doubling down with more pablum and outright bad ideas.

  To bring down the record-high costs of basic goods pummeling American families, she’ll “crack down on anti-competitive practices that let big corporations jack up prices,” and push through “a federal ban on corporate price gouging on food and groceries.”

  For a campaign that used "freedom" as a catchword, she's big on "cracking down" and "banning".

• But there are now nicer cars in the IRS parking lot. At Patterico's Pontifications, JVW is following the money: Democrats Spend Dollars to Recoup Dimes.

  Remember the Democrats demanding that $80 billion in additional money be allocated to the IRS over a ten-year period so that all of those super-wealthy tax-cheats can be tacked down and forced “to pay their fair share”? They got most of what they wanted in the end, and despite the Biden Administration’s claims that the money would be used for technology modernization and for “taxpayer services,” over half the money ($45.6 billion) went to “tax enforcement” (read: hiring new agents, lawyers, and bureaucrats) and another huge chunk ($25.3 billion) went to “general operations” (read: new office buildings, travel budgets, etc.).

  But hey, at least the IRS recouped tens of billions of dollars in the first couple of years, suggesting that this program will pay for itself in short order, right? Yeah, not so much:

  The IRS in February 2024 launched an initiative to pursue 125,000 high-income, high-wealth taxpayers who have not filed taxes since 2017. [. . .] In the first six months of this initiative, nearly 21,000 of these wealthy taxpayers have filed, leading to $172 million in taxes being paid.

  The IRS in the fall of 2023 launched a new initiative using Inflation Reduction Act funding to pursue high-income, high-wealth individuals who have failed to pay recognized tax debt, with dozens of senior employees assigned to these cases. This work is concentrated on taxpayers with more than $1 million in income and more than $250,000 in recognized tax debt. The IRS was previously unable to collect from these individuals due to a lack of resources. After successfully collecting $38 million from more than 175 high-income, high-wealth individuals last year, the IRS expanded this effort last fall to around 1,600 additional high-income, high-wealth individuals. Nearly 80% of these 1,600 millionaires with delinquent tax debt have now made a payment, leading to over $1.1 billion recovered. This is an additional $100 million just since July, when Treasury and IRS announced reaching the $1 billion milestone.

  So there you have it: in the first year this $80 billion “investment” over ten years has yielded gains of about $1.3 billion. Let’s say that number manages to grow at a robust 35% annually in years 2 through 10. That would only yield a net ten-year return of $76 billion, still below the money allocated for this ridiculous undertaking. And who among us expects the amount recouped to grow by 35% a year for a whole decade?

  A radically simpler tax code is not in the offing, no matter who wins.

• There's nothing wrong with Google that this won't make worse. We got our state's primary election. And a debate. And, as Elizabeth Nolan Brown notes: Google Goes On Trial (Again) Today.

  Google goes on trial today in the second of two antitrust cases brought by the federal government. This time around, the Department of Justice (DOJ) is accusing the tech giant of illegally maintaining a monopoly on digital advertising technologies.

  "Google has used anticompetitive, exclusionary, and unlawful means to eliminate or severely diminish any threat to its dominance over digital advertising technologies," the DOJ alleges in a civil lawsuit joined by eight states. It wants to force Google to divest parts of its ad tech stack, a suite of products that helps broker ad sales between website publishers and digital advertisers.

  Google contends that the government is making a mistake that will harm not just Google but website publishers and digital advertisers. "Ad buyers and sellers have a huge range of choices among ad tech providers, and they exercise those choices daily," wrote Google's Vice President of Regulatory Affairs Lee-Anne Mulholland in a September 8 blog post. "The average advertiser uses three platforms to buy ads—and can choose from hundreds of options. And the average large publisher uses six platforms to sell ads—and can choose from over 80 options."

  ENB notes that the DOJ is griping about Google's acquisition of possible competitors, but those acquisitions were given the thumbs up back when they happened. Seems iffy.

• The real voting scandal. Back when it was an issue, I thought the dark conspiracy theories about Dominion Voting Systems' machines somehow swinging the 2020 election to Joe Biden were hogwash. I still do.

  But John Hinderaker notes something much more concerning: Voter Fraud? What Voter Fraud?

  In Minnesota, our legislature has enacted laws that 1) allow illegal immigrants to get drivers’ licenses, and 2) automatically register those who get drivers’ licenses to vote. Secretary of State Steve Simon assured us that there is nothing to be alarmed about; safeguards are in place, he guaranteed, to make sure that unqualified voters don’t get ballots.

  Now, several honest (and legal) non-citizens have contacted the Republican Party to say that they received ballots in the mail after having obtained drivers’ licenses. Republicans are calling for an investigation, but Secretary of State Simon disclaims any responsibility, pointing his finger at the Department of Motor Vehicles. Of course, he was the one who told us there was no possibility of these new laws enabling unqualified persons to cast ballots.

  How many illegal ballots are cast in every election cycle? No one knows. Liberals assure us that the number is close to zero. But how could we know that? The hallmark of a successful fraud is that it is not discovered. And in most places, little effort is made to detect voter fraud, even when that is possible. Nevertheless, there are a large number of successful prosecutions of illegal voters.

  This is what I worry about, when I worry about such things: rules designed to make voting easy can be easily abused to make voting fraud easy, and also undetectable.

  That said, I'm about to go down to the American Legion hall to cast my primary ballot. Wish me not luck, but wisdom.

But he's making that difficult to resist:

Hayek nails it again 😂 pic.twitter.com/uot5QBGs4r

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 8, 2024

I'm going to keep calling it "Twitter", though.

Also of note:

• They got scooped, and they're pissed. I'm no fan of sloppily slapping ideological labels on people you don't like. (Disclaimer: I am probably not innocent of that sin, although I'm trying hard to be better.)

  For a (minor) example, today's edition of my awful local newspaper, Foster's Daily Democrat, has a story about a shady pol (but I repeat myself): NH House candidate in Dover area who faced investigation exits race.

  I'm not that interested in the sordid details, you can dig those out of the links if you want. Instead, this bit caught my eye [bold added]:

  Kennedy, a former state representative from Manchester under the name Andrew Bouldin, has been the subject of news stories by NH Journal, a right-wing media outlet, regarding an investigation into him by the Manchester Police Department in 2023. A police report was obtained by Foster's Daily Democrat and Seacoastonline. Kennedy was never charged.

  Quibble: as near as I can tell, NHJournal had one story about Kennedy, posted back on August 15, not "stories": the one linked to in the quoted paragraph above.

  But what I really want to point out is that "right-wing" label.

  Yes, NHJournal has a conservative slant. It's far from "right-wing". (They'll even publish dissenting views: (here's a recent example).

  But the label is not just inaccurate, it's gratuitous. It's totally irrelevant to the Foster's story, unless…

  Ah: unless it's the paper's subtle ass-covering excuse for not covering the story themselves. There's an air of bitter resentment that they were scooped on this weeks ago. It's information they knew about, but decided to withhold from their readers, even shorn of its icky right-wingitude.

• 

  I've never called her a Commie. But… Also recently in my worthless local newspaper, an opinion column from local bearded sage Ron McAllister. who claims: Kamala Harris is neither a commie nor an idiot. And he fits right in with the theme of the previous item: sloppy ideological labelling:

  In recent weeks, Kamala Harris has been called a fascist, a Marxist, a communist and a socialist. You don’t need to know the precise historical meaning of these words, of course. They all imply the same thing — that Kamala Harris is “foreign” and therefore dangerous. Labeling is far easier than linguistic accuracy. If you don’t have an argument as to why people should vote for you, calling the opposition scary names might help.

  The accusers are not trying to make an actual argument. Their purpose is to spread fear that foreign and dangerous things will happen if the opposition is elected. The litany of tired, old “isms” can still frighten voters. That’s the goal.

  Now, McAllister provides a few paragraphs with brief and tedious high-school-level definitions of "fascism", "socialism", "Marxism", and "Communism". And he's correct that it's wrong and facile to hammer the square peg of Kamala into the round holes of any of these ideologies.

  We won't even bother to provide examples of the labels folks attach to Trump. I'm sure MacAllister deplores them too, although he doesn't get around to condemning them.

  But what I really wish he'd said is something George Orwell pointed out seventy-eight years ago:

  The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable’.

  And ditto for those other labels MacAllister denies apply to Kamala.

  But he merely asserts without evidence that Kamala is "not an idiot either."

  Now, I prefer the terms "nitwit" and "phony" over "idiot". But that's me. To resurrect a link I posted a few days back: Harris' problem: She's a complete phony.

  It’s not that she’s liable to pull a literal face-plant the way Mr. Biden was; it’s that she has a tendency to get stuck in catchphrase loops when she speaks about subjects with which she is not comfortable or familiar. When she’s out of her depth on a topic, she sounds like it, and everyone listening knows that she has no idea what she’s talking about.

  I would love for both Trump and Kamala to be asked at their debate about the last serious non-fiction books they read, and what they liked and disliked about them.

• If Google honchos are as smart as it think they are… They should seriously consider Andy Kessler, who wonders in the WSJ: Is the Google Breakup Coming? He distinguishes between a government-mandated breakup, and one that the company could do itself:

  Self-directed breakups don’t always work, but many do. HP split its profitable printer (really ink) business from other enterprise products. Johnson & Johnson split Band-Aids from its drugs and medical devices division. General Electric, albeit late, spun out its healthcare division and recently split aerospace and power generation. The smartest thing eBay has done in 20 years is spin out PayPal. Last week saw stories of potential Intel and Topgolf breakups.

  Should “monopolist” Google dump YouTube? Or its Android smartphone operating system? Or open its data cache to all takers? Maybe, but it shouldn’t be forced to. Google probably should have spun out YouTube to shareholders years ago. Or set up a stand-alone phone company to compete with Apple head to head. Now government bureaucrats might force changes that are almost guaranteed to be wrong, late and damaging to consumers as markets change.

  I know next to nothing about such business strategies. But thanks to the wizards at Fidelity, I'm "heavily" invested in Alphabet, Google's parent. So I'm along for the ride, no matter what happens. And I hope that Google writes its own destiny, instead of having the government write it.

Recently on the movie blog:

I was in a film-noirish mood, I guess, so I went searching for one I hadn't seen. This 1954 one fit the bill. Couldn't help but notice that it was made a full 10 years after Fred MacMurray came to his bitter end in Double Indemnity. It has Kim Novak as the dame that lures him to his doom, not Barbara Stanwyck.

It leads off with a bank heist, the perps getting away with a cool $200K. (This inflation calculator says that's well over $2.2 million today.) And one of the thieves, Wheeler, also kills a bank guard, who's foolish enough to play hero.

Then there's a quick transition to Fred (playing cop Paul Sheridan) unaccountably picking up Kim (playing floozy Lona McLane). Wait, what does that have to do with anything? It turns out Sheridan is part of the team investigating the bank job; they've determined that Wheeler is Lona's boyfriend. So (apparently this was accepted cop practice in the 1950s) Sheridan was tasked with going undercover and, uh, getting under the covers, with Lona.

(It's the 1950s, so that's not made explicit, but come on.)

So Lona and Paul (a) fall in love and (b) hatch a scheme to entrap Wheeler, and abscond with the bank cash. Things keep going wrong for them, complicating their already complex plans. Paul's cop co-workers get increasingly suspicious. And, inevitably,…

This was Kim Novak's first major movie role. Based on the title, I kept thinking/hoping that she would reveal her truly nefarious scheme to make Paul the patsy, and abscond with the money all for herself, because she (correctly) saw him as an easy … Pushover.

Spoiler: that does not happen.

That video, from 2020 I think, is a post from John Lucas's substack, headlined Kamala Harris, Back When She Was Not Afraid to Give Interviews.

Let's not go into detail on Stephen Colbert's "gee, sorry that I need to pretend to ask you a tough question" obsequiousness. Amid all the sycophancy, he manages to get it out:

How did that transition happen? How do you go from being such a passionate opponent on such bedrock principles for you, and now you guys seem to be pals?

He's referring to Kamala's "passionate" race-based accusations hurled at Biden in their June 2019 debate. And:

Repeating non sequiturs while cackling is hardly responsive. (Also see: "My values haven't changed")

Kamala's campaign only lasted a few more months after her debate performances. (And, as she clearly implied to Colbert, they were performances.) She didn't wear well with the electorate.

Are we already seeing that happen? Let's look at the betting odds, as I type:

Hm. A definite Trumpward trend? Stay tuned, it's been a funny old year so far.

Also of note:

• Thank goodness for parenthetical clarification. I, for one, wish George F. Will were posing the Tuesday night questions: How to cause indecent exposure (of their minds) at the Harris-Trump debate. Taking a sample:

  For him: Accepting the 1984 Democratic presidential nomination, Walter F. Mondale said: “Mr. Reagan will raise taxes, and so will I. He won’t tell you. I just did.” Because of your candor in promising high tariffs, which would be taxes paid by consumers, are you not a Mondalean?

  For her: “Unstable as water, thou shalt not excel” (Genesis, 49:4). What research changed your thinking about banning fracking, imposing a single-payer health-care system, questioning cash bail and the existence of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, calling the southern border “secure,” etc.? You have jettisoned so many of your long-espoused convictions, why should voters believe the sudden restocking of your mental pantry?

  For both: A joke perennially pertinent in Washington concerns an economist and a normal person falling into a deep pit with sides too steep to climb. The normal person exclaims, “We’re trapped!” The economist placidly replies, “Don’t worry, we will simply assume a ladder.” What do each of you assume — torrid economic growth forever, 20 million elderly Americans moving to Australia, whatever — to justify your shared promise not to alter Social Security and Medicare, which are driving the nation off a fiscal cliff as their trust funds disappear?

  If I knew that any of GFW's questions would be asked, I'd probably tune in.

• I might write in "Drax the Destroyer" on my November ballot. Jacob Sullum points out yet another quote that indicates unfitness for high office: 'Sometimes You Need a Strongman,' Trump Declares.

  During his Fox News interview with Sean Hannity on Wednesday night, Donald Trump bragged about Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán's "respect" for him. "They say he's a strongman," Trump said. "Sometimes you need a strongman. He's a strongman."

  Since Orbán is not known as a circus performer, Trump's meaning was clear. He was referring to the political version of strongman, variously defined as "a leader who rules by the exercise of threats, force, or violence"; "one who leads or controls by force of will and character or by military methods"; or someone who "has great power and control over his country, although his methods may sometimes be violent or morally wrong." As has long been clear, these are qualities that Trump admires.

  Orbán, a self-described proponent of "illiberal Christian democracy," was elected to his third consecutive term as Hungary's prime minister in 2022. Trump endorsed Orbán's reelection, praising his "strong leadership." At a rally last January, he called Orbán "a very great leader" and "a very strong man." Although "some people don't like him because he's too strong," Trump added, "it's nice to have a strongman running the country."

  Naw, I'll probably stick with either leaving that space blank or writing in Nikki.

The Google News Alert brought me a Concord Monitor story about the Democrat-side race for the New Hampshire gubernatorial nomination, and the headline was kind of a giggle, maybe you'll like it too: As Warmington and Craig attack, Kiper hopes his ambiguity is an advantage.

I'm pretty sure the headline writer meant "anonymity". Kiper is not getting a lot of attention; candidates Cinde Warmington and Joyce Craig are the big guns, and aiming their barbs mostly at each other.

Wonkery: Kiper's big idea is to impose additional taxes on "second homes, many of which he presumes are owned by out-of-state residents." I've seen estimates that this will raise around $30 million/year.

Which is about 1% of the current state budget.

(This was ostensibly an article about the "Live Free or Die Debate" last night at New England College, which is why I saw it.)

It's certain that government policies will keep encountering them: Great Moments in Unintended Consequences (Vol. 17).

Also of note:

• Chris thinks I'm Not Too Bright. The other day, I got a campaign mailer from Chris Bright, who's running for the Republican nomination for New Hampshire Congressional District 1. And it includes the shocking promise:

  Chris will rid our streets of dangerous drugs like fentanyl.

  My immediate thought: Huh. No he won't.

  And then I mused about how incredibly stupid Chris Bright must think his potential voters are.

  Does he have an actual, effective, plan to "rid our streets of dangerous drugs"? One that has escaped the well-meaning schemes of (probably) thousands of legislative drug warriors over (literally) decades?

  Big news if true. But it goes unmentioned at his campaign website. Why would he be hiding his wonderful drug-eradication plan from potential voters?

  I'm pretty sure I can guess, and I bet you can too.

• Good question. Randal O'Toole wonders: What Is Wrong With Our Country? But he starts out with a transit yarn:

  Four people were shot and killed on a Chicago Blue Line elevated train early Labor Day morning. Police say the victims, who were not seated together, appeared to be asleep at the time and “may have been homeless.” A suspect is in custody, and police say it was “an isolated incident and a random attack,” as if that is supposed to make people feel safer.

  When I learned about these murders, I had already been thinking about transit crime because of a story that appeared in the St. Paul Pioneer Press about the decline of the intersection of Snelling and University, two of the most important commercial corridors in Minnesota’s capital city.

  “The Green Line light rail, which launched in 2014, was supposed to reactivate economic development in an area that had seen more than its share of commercial departures,” says the article. “Instead, much of the commercial energy at the intersection is long gone.”

  “The light rail was the start of it going downhill,” says a local bookstore owner who has had to keep doors locked and buzz in customers on a case-by-case basis due to vandalism and violence. Another business owner, who originally favored the light rail, now says “it’s become one of the city’s biggest safety concerns.”

  The news is full of stories about the recent Georgia school shooting that also left four dead. But I bet you didn't hear about the four dead in that Chicago suburb. Or, unless you follow Chicago news, the six additional Labor Day weekend murders in the city proper.

  Well, the Chicago killings were more or less business as usual, I guess.

  But there's another point made in O'Toole's post. Our current Democratic candidates for New Hampshire governor are enthused for bringing Boston commuter rail up to Nashua, Manchester, and (even) Concord. They promise that the areas around the rail stations will undergo commercial revitalization. As seen, that's hardly guaranteed.

• I'd gladly pay you … never … for a subsidy today. The WSJ editorialists look at The Biden-Harris Subprime Bank.

  Move over Countrywide Financial (of housing panic fame). Washington’s new favorite subprime lender is none other than Uncle Sam. In a little noticed report last week—make that not noticed at all—the Congressional Budget Office estimated that the feds will lose $65.2 billion on risky loans and other “credit assistance” in the next fiscal year.

  Federal agencies play by fictional accounting rules under which they don’t account for the market risk of their loans. Look ma, no defaults. This lets bureaucrats and Congress disguise the cost of their spending. CBO thus estimates that Uncle Sam will lose a mere $2.4 billion on loans and loan guarantees issued in the 2025 fiscal year under government accounting standards.

  Ah, but under the rules that private businesses use, the cost balloons to $65.2 billion. That’s about twice as much as in 2019. Blame Congress for creating new lending programs. Biden officials are also underwriting more debt and easing payments and credit standards for borrowers.

  I'm finding it very tough to be amused by this, and keep sliding back into disgust. Help me, Elvis Costello!

• Blue Bloods gets more fictional every year. The NYPost reports: Feds raid home of NYPD Commish Edward Caban, other close Eric Adams allies.

  Federal agents hit NYPD Commissioner Edward Caban and members of the nation’s biggest police force this week — amid a stunning spate of raids on others in Mayor Eric Adams’ inner circle, sources said Thursday.

  Agents showed up to the homes of Caban, Deputy Mayor for Public Safety Phil Banks and the townhouse shared by Schools Chancellor David Banks and First Deputy Mayor Sheena Wright with search warrants early Wednesday and seized their electronic devices, according to law-enforcement sources.

  If Frank Reagan were the actual NYPD Commissioner, he'd be leading the investigation, not a suspect in it.

• I think he might know something we do not. The National Review editorialists noted Hunter Biden’s Air of Entitlement and did not like it one bit.

  Bowing to overwhelming evidence and political reality, Hunter Biden finally pleaded guilty to tax charges on the day his trial was to begin with jury selection in Los Angeles federal court.

  Even now, already scheduled for sentencing for federal firearms felonies of which a Delaware jury found him guilty, the president’s 54-year-old son exhibited the haughty air of entitlement that has marked his adult life and disastrous choices.

  The normal defendant who is caught red-handed negotiates a plea, admits guilt, and asks for mercy from the court. Not Hunter. As a throng of prospective jurors descended on the courthouse to begin the selection process, Biden’s lawyers took prosecutors and Judge Mark Scarsi aback: Biden announced that he was prepared to plead guilty to all charges, and to concede that prosecutors could prove their case, yet he would continue to maintain his innocence.

  Read on (looks like a free link) to read about Hunter's effort to make an "Alford plea". And what an "Alford plea" is.

  But the bottom line is: expect Joe to pardon Hunter.

Recently on the movie blog:

Old fogy that I am, I couldn't help but think during this movie's lesbian love scenes: Y'know, I don't think they do this for the heterosexuals any more. It's like there's a different set of rules for the ladies-only crowd.

It's co-written and directed by Ethan Coen, half of the Coen brothers. I was inspired to watch it not only because of his famous name, but also his brother's R-rated review, guest-posted at Jeff Maurer's substack.

I liked it OK. Nobody's going to confuse it with Fargo or The Big Lebowski, but it's very deadpan funny. (And also very violent in parts.) It takes some cheap shots at family-values Florida Republicans, but what are you gonna do?

It's a road-trip story. Very-out lesbian Jamie is coming off a breakup with her cop girlfriend; very closeted Marian is tired of fending off guys at her workplace. So they take a "drive-away" job, driving a Dodge Aries down to Tallahassee, Florida. Little do they know that they've been hired by mistake, and they're transporting a briefcase with mysterious contents. And also Pedro Pascal's head, for some reason. And murderous bad guys are on their trail.

A subplot involves Jamie's efforts to get Marian to, um, loosen up. And those efforts are somewhat successful. But Marian also gets Jamie to settle down.

Confession: I'm pretty sure I've never watched a Tucker Carlson show other than breezing by it with the TV remote. But I've posted quite a bit about other people commenting about Carlson over the years. Recently, it's been stuff like this, where I quoted numerous people eviscerating him, deservedly, for his rapturous take on Russia.

He's gotten worse, much worse over the years, according to his onetime friend, Jonah Goldberg, and his latest antics are reprehensible:

I’ve known Tucker for 30+ years. For most of that time, if I told him he’d become this guy one day, he’d have laughed, cursed me out, or punched me. This is just sad. It’s pathetic whether he’s doing it sincerely or as a grift. https://t.co/liy0NtW8Ct

— Jonah Goldberg (@JonahDispatch) September 4, 2024

That tweet's via Nick Catoggio's article at the Dispatch (probably paywalled): Free-for-All.

Also commenting is Power Line's Scott Johnson: The Tucker op; he includes a recent tweet from Cooper (@martyrmade), commented on by Abigail Shrier:

Tucker Carlson is a very bright man. He has the largest conservative podcast in the country, and eight weeks before a presidential election, he is approvingly boosting Nazi apologists.

The Occam's Razor explanation?

He wants Kamala Harris to win. pic.twitter.com/MzIDHXTuKZ

— Abigail Shrier (@AbigailShrier) September 4, 2024

Concludes Scott: "The damage Carlson is doing to the conservative movement has yet to be fully registered. There is more to come." And Jim Geraghty is wondering: Is Vance still going to hang out with Tucker Carlson, even now?.

Someone's gotta tell J.D. that proverb about lying down with dogs, getting up with fleas.

Also of note:

• Also on the Russia sucker list. Jeff Maurer looks at the latest: Political Influencers Are Taking Russian Money, and I Can’t Believe I Haven’t Gotten in on That.

  The Justice Department has charged two employees of a Russian state news agency with funneling nearly $10 million to several prominent right-wing YouTubers. The influencers who received money appear1 to be Dave Rubin, Tim Pool, Benny Johnson, and Lauren Southern — you may not know those names, but you probably would if you were a sexually frustrated 19 year-old who thinks that a second civil war would be the coolest thing to ever happen on this flat Earth. The DOJ also seized 32 internet domains that were part of a Russian propaganda effort called “Operation Doppelganger”, which sounds like a book that John le Carré must have written but somehow didn’t.

  This revelation raises questions about who can be trusted in independent media. Which funding sources are okay? What obligation does a content creator have to disclose where their money is coming from? In the interest of leading by example, I’d like to assert that I Might Be Wrong receives no outside money: My work is funded entirely by subscriptions from readers like you. Which raises the question: How the fuck am I missing out on this gravy train? What the fuck, Russia? This blog is doing well, and I’ve made it beyond clear that I’ll debase myself for a modest fee — Russia…come on! You can’t even shoot me an e-mail and see what my integrity would cost?

  He's joking, tovarish!

  For the record, Maurer links to (credible) denials from Dave Rubin and Tim Pool that they had any idea about this funding.

  And, who knows? It could be a lawfare operation from the Biden DOJ that will turn out to be another nothingburger.

  (I've had some nice things to say, at least indirectly, about Dave Rubin in the past. But you know what they say about past performance.)

• Speaking of past performance… Damien Fisher reports on some sad news for the University Near Here: Once A Bastion of Free Speech, UNH Falls in Latest Ranking.

  For years, the University of New Hampshire had a reputation for fostering free speech and a diversity of ideas on campus. But that reputation has been under assault of late, and now its standing in the latest Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) annual rankings for campus speech has fallen from third in the nation to 59th.

  “I did not expect such a drop,” State Rep. Daniel Popovici-Muller (R-Windham) told NHJournal. He was the prime sponsor of a new law protecting free speech on campus passed earlier this year.

  You can peruse FIRE's 2025 College Free Speech Rankings for yourself. I can't find any explanation for UNH's precipitous drop, although it could well be more students reporting feeling a censorious atmosphere.

• Nvidia is a wildly successful American corporation, so naturally… OK, I have to admit I didn't expect this, as reported by Ars Technica: DOJ subpoenas Nvidia in deepening AI antitrust probe, report says.

  The Department of Justice is reportedly deepening its probe into Nvidia. Officials have moved on from merely questioning competitors to subpoenaing Nvidia and other tech companies for evidence that could substantiate allegations that Nvidia is abusing its "dominant position in AI computing," Bloomberg reported.

  I assume the corporate officers failed to give enough money to the DNC? No, that doesn't seem to be true. Donations to Kamala outweigh those to Trump by nearly 8-to-1.

Recently on the book blog:

A very good overview of the concept of "democracy" by Jason Brennan. With a philosopher's care, he sets out the book's purpose (pp. 4-5):

My goal is to give you a guided tour of the best and most important arguments for and against democracy over time. I want you to understand why a reasonable person might think democracy is the ideal form of government and that all the problems of democracy can be fixed with more democracy. I also want you to understand why a reasonable person might think democracy has built-in flaws that must be contained, or why democracy is simply bad. I want you to see why a reasonable person might think democracy is the end of history, and why a reasonable person might think the era of democracy should give way to something better.

Brennan looks at five values that thinkers have, at one time or another, held up as reasons to value (or criticize) democracy: (1) its stability; (2) its ability to promote virtue in the citizenry; (3) the wisdom of the choices it produces; (4) its effects on personal liberty; and (5) its effects on equality. Each value gets two chapters: one cheering for democracy, the other booing. There's some overlap between the chapters, and some of the thinkers he discusses resist his pigeonholing, but overall it's a decent way to proceed.

Caveat: You might get an idea of Brennan's own views on the matter if you check out his previous book, provocatively titled Against Democracy. And just so you know where I'm coming from, I liked that one a lot too. So I'm perhaps not the best one to judge how fairly Brennan presents his for/against arguments. Are Spooner's and Nozick's views presented too sympathetically? Rawls' and Rousseau's too critically? Judge for yourself.

For people concerned with personal liberty, I found the strongest pro-democracy argument to be a strictly empirical one: the strong correlation between (independently-judged) levels of democracy and freedom in international comparsions. Can't argue with results! Well, you can, and Brennan does, but…

Whatever, I found Brennan's "guided tour" to be approachable and jargon-free, perhaps appropriate for the fabled "bright undergraduate" in a political science course.

The author, Becky Chambers, won a Hugo for this book, in the "Best Novella" category. In Googling around, I learned that it's part of the "solarpunk" genre, which is an optimistic look at a world devoted to sustainability, small-is-beautiful solar power, etc.

The protagonist, "Sibling Dex", is a "tea monk", traveling in a pedal-powered tea wagon to various communities on the idyllic moon of Panga. That civilization used to be industrial, relying on fossil fuels and AI robots. But centuries previous, the robots decided to self-exile from humanity, and nobody's seen them since.

Except Dex. Because, on a perilous quest to explore the once-inhabited "wild" lands that are in the long process of reverting to nature, Dex meets Mosscap, a robot on its own quest to find out how humanity is holding up these days.

Reader, Mosscap does not show up until page 50 in this 147-page book. Sorry for the spoiler, but it's also revealed on the book flap, so…

Dex's interactions with Mosscap are charming and occasionally funny. Things wind up with an exploration of an ancient temple/inn and a discussion of the "purpose" of people and robots.

It would be a good book for the kiddos, except for Dex dropping occasional f-bombs.

Chambers consistently refers to Dex with "They/Them" pronouns. Which I, as an old fogy, found slightly grating. But Dex, when speaking, refers to "themself" as "I/Me" instead of the expected "We/Us". So we are left unsure what we are supposed to think about that, or what the point of this particular usage is.

One must have a heart of stone to read the tweets of Ruth Ben-Ghiat and Hal Corley without laughing:

As I said in my earlier tweet today, the strategy of the NYT seems to be to cast doubt on the competency of Harris. Images are powerful and this one shows Harris as "coming apart" & lacking focus- also gender stereotypes. https://t.co/B0XKSQKDd8

— Ruth Ben-Ghiat (@ruthbenghiat) September 2, 2024

"Help! I was annoyed by a Bret Stephens column clearly marked 'Opinion'!"

The little things add up: Corley claims to have "no effing words left', although I count 19 of 'em, including the only racial/sexual dismissive slur you can use in polite company: "white male". And one cannot imagine what grand "strategy" Ben-Ghiat thinks the NYT is operating under.

Problem: Kamala's a nitwit, and if you're a partisan hack, this is something that must not even be hinted at in a medium that voters might notice.

Similar to pointing out Joe Biden's cognitive woes pre-June 24.

I'd imagine a similar response to a different NYT article, as reported by James Freeman: New York Times Discovers That Democrats Aren’t Always Truthful.

If you're an NYT-only reader, I would assume you would have no idea what Freeman is talking about.

Also of note:

• Shut up, they explained. In the current print Reason, J.D. Tuccille considers The Soft Totalitarianism of the Political Class.

  It's no secret that governments around the world are chiseling away at people's liberties. Rights advocates document a nearly two decade decline in freedom. Civil liberties activists warn of a worldwide free speech recession. And while American restrictions on government power hold the line better than pale equivalents elsewhere, the political class seems determined to end-run those protections and impose creeping totalitarianism by leveraging the authority of allies in other countries.

  "Obrigado Brasil!" Keith Ellison, Minnesota's attorney general, wrote this week to thank that country's authoritarian Supreme Court for its recent ban on the X social media platform.

  The court demanded X censor political views it called "disinformation" and appoint a new legal representative to receive court orders—after threatening the previous one with arrest. Importantly, the ban threatens ordinary Brazilians with hefty fines if they evade the prohibition on the social media network. Nevertheless, demand for blockade-piercing VPNs surged in Brazil after the court decision.

  Ellison serves alongside Minnesota's Gov. Tim Walz, who is the Democratic candidate for vice president and has falsely claimed "there's no guarantee to free speech on misinformation or hate speech." He's also not the only prominent politician to have a real hate-on for X and its CEO, Elon Musk.

  Don't worry, J.D. Tuccille gets to J.D. Vance as another bad example further along.

• But there's also… Jonathan Turley notes that possibly the next POTUS is no fan of people saying stuff: “That Has to Stop”: Harris Denounces Unfettered Free Speech in 2019 CNN Interview.

  I previously wrote how a Harris-Walz Administration would be a nightmare for free speech. Both candidates have shown pronounced anti-free speech values. Now, X owner Elon Musk and former independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. have posted a Harris interview to show the depths of the hostility of Harris to unfettered free speech. I have long argued that Trump and the third-party candidates should make free speech a central issue in this campaign. That has not happened. Kennedy was the only candidate who was substantially and regularly talking about free speech in this election. Yet, Musk and Kennedy are still trying to raise the chilling potential of a Harris-Walz Administration.

  In my book “The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage,” I discuss how the Biden-Harris Administration has proven to be the most anti-free speech administration since John Adams. That includes a massive censorship system described by one federal judge as perfectly “Orwellian.”

  In the CNN interview, Harris displays many of the anti-free speech inclinations discussed earlier. She strongly suggests that X should be shut down if it does not yield to demands for speech regulation.

  What is most chilling is how censorship and closure are Harris’s default positions when faced with unfettered speech. She declares to CNN that such unregulated free speech “has to stop” and that there is a danger to the country when people are allowed to “directly speak[] to millions and millions of people without any level of oversight and regulation.”

  You think that the mainstream media might have taken a slightly greater notice if she had spoken this way about newspapers or TV networks?

  And I hasten to point out: in her recent interview with Dana Bash, Kamala averred not once, not twice, but thrice, that her values have not changed. Simply because she flipflopped on so many issues.

• Potholes on the Road to Serfdom? Speaking of things that didn't get a lot of MSM attention, Jeff Jacoby says Most climate policies have something in common: They don't work.

  IN SEPTEMBER 1945, the classical liberal scholar (and future Nobel laureate) Friedrich Hayek published "The Use of Knowledge in Society." One of the most influential articles in modern economics, it explained that far-reaching government policies often fail because policy makers invariably lack all the knowledge required to understand a problem well enough to solve it. Consequently, government policies frequently backfire, trigger unintended consequences, or simply prove unavailing.

  Examples of Hayek's insight, often called "the knowledge problem," abound. Urban renewal tore apart once-vibrant communities, displacing tens of thousands of residents or relocating them into housing projects that became centers of poverty and crime. The war on drugs resulted in mass incarceration, yet drugs remain widely available and overdose deaths are at or near an all-time high. Crop subsidies have routinely led to overproduction, distorted markets, and the enrichment of agribusiness giants at the expense of small farmers. Minimum wage laws, intended to boost the earnings of vulnerable workers, invariably cost many of those very workers their jobs.

  Time and again, reality makes hash of the misbegotten assumption that politicians and regulators have sufficient information to plan or fine-tune complex economic systems. The bigger and more complex the system, the more likely that government policies designed to control it will turn out to be ineffective. And what system could be bigger or more complex than planetary climate change?

  Jacoby goes on to mention the Science story that we looked at a few days ago.

• In our "you gotta laugh to keep from crying" department… In hopping over to NESN last night, I noticed that Jordan's Furniture CEO Eliot Tatelman is pushing his store's summer promotion:

  If the Red Sox win the World Championship, anything you buy now through September 8th will be free!

  Uh, well… According to this morning's Wild Card Standings, the Red Sox are a solid 5.5 games out of wild card contention. They are at an even 0.500 for the season, they've lost five straight, and their last-10 game record is 3-7.

  The one bit of good news: they are hosting the woeful Chicago White Sox for three games over the weekend.

  But then it's three games with the Orioles and three with the Yankees. OK, stranger things have happened, but…

A tweet from Jeff Blehar:

One to remember. pic.twitter.com/o7ffS08Tso

— Jeff Blehar is *BOX OFFICE POISON* (@EsotericCD) September 2, 2024

I know, making judgments based on a split-second physical appearance is unwarranted and juvenile, but … geez louise.

Blehar's associated text is at the NR Corner where it may be paywalled. Excerpt: Kamala Harris Campaign Stall Reflected by Non-Scandals It Promotes.

Isn't there enough actual stuff around to get outraged about, we have to get outraged about the phony stuff too?

For example, Matt Welch recalls just a few weeks ago When Biden's 'Bubble Wrap' Burst.

Had the "liars and hacks" Welch describes, above and later in his article, decided to be honest and non-hackish, we might have had a more "democratic" outcome, where the voters had some say in the Democrat-side nomination. Instead… well, see above, Welch's first paragraph.

Also of note:

• If you don't express yourself, ain't nobody gonna give a good cahoot. Kevin D. Williamson says we face A Nonbinary Choice in the voting booth.

  […] there are a couple of ways of approaching a vote in a presidential election. The first and most obvious—and the one I recommend—is: voting for the candidate you prefer. (A subset of that approach is not voting if you don’t like any of the candidates: That, too, is usefully expressive.) The second is: voting to send a message to one party or the other. If (to stick with the earlier case) Trump’s vote share in Texas declines a bit more in 2024, then that will tell Republicans something. But—and here is where I suppose my Bulwark friends and Joe Scarborough et al. really have their heads—it makes a difference whether Harris’ share of the vote goes up, too, or if Trump simply bleeds votes to the Libertarian Party or to Mitch Daniels or whomever it is my friend in Tarrant County is writing in. A voter who goes from the GOP to the Libertarians is a loss of one vote, but a voter who goes from the GOP to the Democrats is, in effect, a two-vote loss: Minus one for Trump and plus one for Harris. And if that is the message you want to send—or if you are a Democrat who wants to vote for Donald Trump to … I don’t know, maybe punish your party for failing to stage a coup d’état the last time it lost an election?—that’s how you do it. You add your voice to the other voices making the same point or a complementary one. 

  That’s all good.

  But don’t inflict your “binary choice” horsefeathers on your friends and the general public. There are lots of ways to use your vote, many of them effective as political expression and almost none of them likely to be very consequential in determining the outcome.

  I'll figure out some way to express myself in November. Probably not until then.

  And yes, I mashed up lyrics from Sly and the Family Stone and the Staple Singers in this item's headline. I swear, that's how I heard them in my head.

• Writing in "Nikki Haley" perhaps. The WSJ editorialists are disappointed in Biden, Harris, Trump, Vance and the Dumbest Economic Idea.

  A sign of the rotten political times is that President Biden, Kamala Harris, Donald Trump and JD Vance all agree on the dumbest economic idea of the presidential campaign so far: opposing Nippon Steel’s $14.1 billion acquisition of U.S. Steel.

  We’ll admit that the competition for the dumbest economic policy is fierce these days—with prices controls on food, a 10% across-the-board tariff, and national rent control on the table. But opposition to the Nippon deal deserves careful consideration for this distinct dishonor given the deal’s manifest benefits and nonexistent harm.

  Ms. Harris is apparently undaunted by economic illiteracy, telling a Monday rally in Pittsburgh that “U.S. Steel should remain American-owned and American-operated.”

  A politician with the U.S. national interest in mind would celebrate the Nippon Steel deal, which would boost U.S. manufacturing. The Japanese firm has promised to spend $2.7 billion refurbishing the Pittsburgh steel maker’s aging plants. It has also agreed to honor U.S. Steel’s collective-bargaining agreements with the United Steelworkers.

  I aassume there are economists advising both campaigns that are holding their noses real tight about this.

• A question that needs to be asked. And Jeff Maurer asks it: Is the GOP the Stupid Party Forever Now?

  This is something I’ve touched on before: Both parties are in something of an unnatural state right now. The so-called “conservative” party has the judgement of a goldfish who just tried cocaine for the first time. Meanwhile, the liberal party — which is supposed to be the domain of hippie freaks — has a sizable contingent of left-brained squares who like to talk about Ukraine and interest rates. It’s weird. And what I wonder is: Is this a temporary situation, and things will go back to normal after Trump? Or is this the early stages of a massive political realignment like what happened in the century after the Civil War?

  I dunno, but Maurer lays out the arguments for "just temporary" and "maybe not" with his usual R-rated gusto.

• More "studies" that you should have ignored. Geek Press wonders Are Blue Zones Of Longevity Based On Bad Data? Summary of an article that caught his attention:

  Blue Zones -- geographical regions that supposedly have the world's most long-lived people -- are dubious. Whether it's Sardinia, Okinawa, or Greece, the numbers of old people are wrong, due to census mistakes or "pension fraudsters". These errors propagate false claims about the benefits of wine-drinking or plant-based diets. Researchers seriously interested in longevity must look for better data.

  I decided long ago to pay strict attention to that wine one.

Recently on the book blog:

I am an unabashed Jim Geraghty fan, been reading his stuff for literally decades. (First reference here at Pun Salad was when the blog was only a few weeks old back in 2005; unfortunately the link no longer works.) When he branched into writing fiction. I was on board. My reports on his previous books: The Weed Agency; Between Two Scorpions; Hunting Four Horsemen; and Gathering Five Storms.

I'm sorry to report that this one falls solidly in the "wish I liked it better" category. That's me, I may just have been grumpy, you can read all kinds of rave reviews at Amazon.

It starts out in roughly present-day Ukraine, where Alec and Katrina, members of the CIA's loose-cannon "Dangerous Clique" are off to interview a heavily-tattooed terrorist, held in custody. After nearly getting blown up by a Russian bomb, they arrive at the prison… only to find the terrorist has been brutally slain.

Then nothing much happens except talk, talk, talk for way too long. And I'm not sure they ever figured out who killed that guy. I could have missed it.

Eventually, the main plot point is revealed: a working, practical quantum computer has been developed and is initially used to break through the cryptographic safeguards on CIA computers blow the cover identities of its spies all around the globe. Including our heroes, putting them in even more danger than usual.

The problems I've had with Geraghty's previous books continue here: clunky dialogue, too much reliance on wisecracks and pop-culture references, yet another ludicrous plot. The CIA mole (who's been completely obvious to readers for a long time) is finally revealed to our protagonists, and they are surprised for some reason. And it seems to have become a trademark: a final action-packed showdown in a skyscraper, this one in Taipei.

But this time the plot has weird seemingly-supernatural overtones. Really? Well, it's left as a loose end, so I guess we'll see more in the next installment.

Which, yes, I plan on buying.

The non-Presidential New Hampshire Primary is a week from today, and I hate going into the booth unprepared, so I went to the Secretary of State's sample ballots page and downloaded…

You'll note there are only two contested races, so I don't have a lot of choices to make. And if you believe the University Near Here Survey Center, it appears Kelly Ayotte is way ahead of second-place Chuck Morse 65% to 21% in the gubernatorial contest.

They also have Russell Prescott in the lead for the right to oppose my current CongressCritter, Chris Pappas in November. But he's at 19%, and "Don't Know/Undecided" is at 60%!

I did get a mailer from Russell Prescott the other day. Endorsed by Rand Paul! That's a plus!

But I went to his campaign website. Here's a bit of his brave stance on Uncle Stupid's fiscal mess:

The overall problem is not that our government taxes too little; it is that it spends too much. I will take that same attitude to Washington, supporting a Balanced Budget Amendment, zero-based budgeting, and always looking for ways to give taxpayers back more of their hard-earned money.

I've said this before, but I think advocating a "Balanced Budget [Constitutional] Amendment" is phony. Passing a Constitutional Amendment is hard. And if you had enough Congressional votes (two-thirds) to pass a Balanced Budget Amendment, Mr. Prescott, you could just pass a balanced budget. You only need a simple majority for that!

But it gets worse. What to do about Social Security and Medicare? Nothing, as it turns out:

Promises made, promises kept. I will never vote to touch benefits that Granite Staters have rightfully earned. In Congress, I will be willing to make tough decisions elsewhere to ensure our seniors are protected and find solutions to ensure the program remains solvent for current and future generations.

He's "willing to make tough decisions elsewhere". But not there.

To be fair, scanning the other candidates' sites fails to find any profiles in courage on entitlements. See if you agree:

• Walter J. McFarlane III
• Hollie Noveletsky
• Max Abramson; to be fair, he does appear to have a gonzo "007 Tax Cut Plan"
• Chris Bright
• Joseph Kelly Levasseur
• Andy Martin

As long as we're looking at candidate websites, you might want to check out gubernatorial candidate Shaun Fife's, which includes his "Free Energy Solutions":

Choose life vote fife and free us from energy dependence by production of real local grown heirloom foods with gravity powered, ultra localized, power generation as the engine of food production.

You might like Kelly Ayotte, but where does she stand on gravity powered power generation as the engine of heirloom food production?

Also, um, unconventional but perhaps entertaining: Frank Negus Staples, and Robert Wayne McClory. Don't miss McClory's 6 Point Patriot page!

Also of note:

• "Terrible" is an understatement. Tyler Cowen thinks Taxing unrealized capital gains is a terrible idea. And he's kind of shocked that Harvard Econ Prof Jason Furman is for it, based on his tweets and his 2022 WSJ op-ed

  Let me start with [Furman's] quick summary:

  I like the Biden-Harris proposal to tax unrealized capital gains. For any given level of capital taxation it’s more efficient & fair to tax unrealized gains, reduces lock in & tax planning.

  Read through Jason’s own words in the WSJ — do you really think a system that complicated is going to reduce tax planning?  How about figuring out what percentage of liquid vs. illiquid assets to hold?  Whether to finance ventures through private equity vs. public markets?  Which risky assets to buy and sell before December 31?  How much to put into your foundation, so as to adjust your net wealth status?  Might there not be other “tricks” to adjust your tax eligibility as well?  What about those “live in Puerto Rico” decisions?

  When it comes to your assets, how is “tradeable” defined?  (Narrator: It isn’t)

  How about the “…rules to prevent taxpayers from inappropriately [sic] converting tradeable assets to non-tradeable assets”? Those are going to go down nice and smooth, right? And imagine the legal squabbles over what “tradeable” and “non-tradeable” mean. How about bundling assets and deliberately making them less tradeable? How does that count? Chopping up assets to make them less tradeable? Do we have to measure the intent of the investor? And doesn’t this make it much harder to invest in your own start-up? (As we will see below, Jason and others cite “capital flowing freely” as a supposed benefit of this plan — but their plan harms capital flows a great deal.)

  … and more. At the end, Cowen asks: "How many countries have ever made a system like this work?"

  And, reader, his answer is simple: "None."

• Clearing up some misconceptions. J.D. Tuccille points out some news I'd missed: Massachusetts Switchblade Ban Overturned on Second Amendment Grounds.

  The Second Amendment to the United States Constitution undisputedly protects the individual right to own and carry firearms for self-defense, sport, and other uses. But the amendment actually says nothing about guns; it refers to "the right of the people to keep and bear Arms," of which firearms are just one example of what dictionaries define as "a means (such as a weapon) of offense or defense." In Massachusetts, last week, that resulted in a decision by the state's highest court striking down a law against switchblade knives.

  "We conclude switchblades are not 'dangerous and unusual' weapons falling outside the protection of the Second Amendment," wrote Justice Serge Georges Jr. for the court in an opinion in Commonwealth v. Canjura that drew heavily on two landmark U.S. Supreme Court cases: Bruen (2022) and Heller (2008). The decision found the state's ban on switchblade knives unconstitutional and dismissed charges against the defendant.

  A rare bit of good news on the legal front.

• Aw, you're no fun any more. The Google LFOD News Alert brought some sad news: New Hampshire Ranked Nearly Last for Most Fun State in America. And "Krissy", writing at "B98.5 Central Maine's Country" is critical:

  I'm gonna tell you right now, I find this ludicrous. New Hampshire being ranked and degraded as one of the least fun states in the world is just a serial killer move. Yeah, so here we go. Let me give you the facts. According to the guys (or girls) over at WalletHub, New Hampshire is the 43rd "least fun" state out of 50 (obviously), and Maine falls at #38. I get it, we're not Miami, but that's the beauty of it.

  You're going to tell me Portsmouth, New Hampshire, isn't a blast every time you bar hop on the water? Riverjack's Restaurant? Lazy Jack's Restaurant? C'mon, those are some elite establishments to people watch at. Not to mention the shopping in Portsmouth. There are all the little boutiques like Open & Oak, and there's a Bobbles & Lace location that I know Portland, Maine, girlies love.

  OH, I almost forgot. Another huge reason why New Hampshire is awesome and should be given a higher score on the fun scale: the Liquor Outlet is off the highway there. Not to mention there's no sales tax in the state. Go crazy! I mean, their state slogan is literally, "Live Free or Die", so I don't know how much more I have to say here. I'll agree that it might not be the most fun state, but it still isn't "#43 out of 50 states" boring.

  Yeah! Take that, WalletHub!

• On the other hand: The Google LFOD News Alert also rang for "Kira's" article at Q96.1 (a different Maine radio station) pointing out: New England State Named the #1 Best State in the U.S to Retire. And that would be us.

  When a person reaches that stage of life, many factors come into play in terms of deciding WHERE they would like to retire. For many the ideal retirement spot would:

  • have nice weather
  • be affordable
  • be close in proximity to family friends
  • have lots of activities/a sense of community

  Now, New Hampshire checks a few of those boxes. But I'd be lying to you if I said I wasn't flabbergasted that a publication called retirementliving.com named New Hampshire #1 spot for U.S. retirement destinations for the second year in a row!

  […]

  And let us not ignore the lack of income tax, estate tax, and sales tax. We have a lot more freedom than other states. It says Live Free or Die on our license plates for a reason.

  It's a far better slogan than "Boring But We Like It That Way".

I've been a minor Van Morrison fan for awhile, own 20 albums of his. (Which barely scratches the surface; he's very prolific and has been doing this for decades.) And I just preordered his new album. (And so can you; Amazon link at your right.)

And he's starting his US tour next month in (of all places) Jimmy's Jazz & Blues Club in Portsmouth, NH! A mere 13.5 miles from Pun Salad Manor.

But I won't be going. I learned about his visit from Drew Cline at the Josiah Bartlett Center for Public Policy, who pleads: Baby, please don't go banning "price gouging" of concert tickets.

But the kicker, as Cline details, is that some of the tickets will only be available via Ticketmaster's "dynamic pricing system". And:

The top seats there went for $2,502.50 and $3,102.50 each, plus more than $500 in fees, according to NHBR.

And, yes, I could do that. But I'm not gonna.

Like Cline, I don't have a problem with this. Or any other lawful free market transactions between consenting adults.

But I'll point out that it would be far cheaper for me to buy a ticket for one of his Los Angeles Orpheum shows, even when you factor in the cost to fly out to LA and back.

Not that I'm not gonna do that either. I'll just crank up the home stereo and pretend.

Also of note:

• It's far from "liberalism", Matt. I really disapprove of Matt Taibbi's headline: Liberalism Removes its Mask. But he's right that a mask is being removed:

  In the Washington Post today, under the headline, “Musk and Durov are facing the revenge of the regulators”:

  While freewheeling internet companies have long clashed with authoritarian regimes — Google in China, Facebook in Russia or pre-Musk Twitter in Turkey — Western governments until recently generally did not regard social media and the vision of free speech they promoted as being fundamentally at odds with democracy… Banning entire social networks or arresting their executives simply wasn’t something liberal democracies did… Now, for better or worse, it is.

  Columnist Will Oremus noted that although the Durov and Musk cases differ, both “involve democratic governments losing patience with cyberlibertarian tech moguls” who “thumbed their noses at authorities.” He highlighted a “vibe shift,” noting that “high-flying tech leaders will have to think a bit more carefully” about “whose soil they’re on when they step off a plane.”

  American liberalism railed against Bush conservatives who said those who didn’t break the law had nothing to hide. Now, once-liberal voices are tripping over each other to make more extreme versions of the same argument. Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich published a guide to how to “rein in” Elon Musk in The Guardian that includes a recommendation that “regulators around the world should threaten Musk with arrest,” adding cheerfully that “global regulators may be on the way to doing this, as evidenced by the 24 August arrest in France of Pavel Durov.” Following up its July article about how “The First Amendment is Out of Control,” the New York Times also has a piece titled, “The Constitution is Sacred. Is it Also Dangerous?”

  To repeat: it ain't "liberalism". The best word I can come up with is "tribalism". Musk is threatening Reich's tribe. And that of those NYT writers.

  And there's always Tim Walz. Someone should ask him (and Kamala) about this.

• Not fitting their narrative, I guess. Becket Adams is disgusted, not amused at all, when the Media Pretend Government Censorship Is a Nothingburger

  Few things in modern news media are as useless as the journalist who insists a legitimate news story is not, in fact, a legitimate news story.

  There’s a lot of this going around these days.

  Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg claimed last week that the federal government “pressured” his company, Meta, into censoring political content during the 2020 election and the Covid-19 pandemic.

  You’d think that journalists would be all over this story — that, of all industries, the press would be the most outraged by Zuckerberg’s allegations, demanding answers and explanations from the relevant government authorities. But you’d be wrong.

  That's my first of five "gifted" NR links this month, so I encourage your clicking.

• But speaking of authoritarians… Yeah, it's not as if the Other Guys wre any better. Here's Stephanie Slade in the current print Reason: J.D. Vance Shares Donald Trump's Authoritarian Instincts.

  In September 2021, Hillbilly Elegy author J.D. Vance—then still a long shot candidate for the Republican Senate nomination in Ohio—made an appearance on Fox News' Tucker Carlson Tonight. In a crisp white button-down and navy blazer, no tie, he laid out a proposal to use the powers of the federal government to punish private universities and nonprofits for promoting "radical left-wing ideology."

  "Why are we allowing the companies that are destroying this country to receive tax preferences?" he asked. "Why don't we seize the assets of the Ford Foundation, tax their assets, and give it to the people who've had their lives destroyed by their radical open-borders agenda?"

  The questions were part of Vance's effort to endear himself to former President Donald Trump in the only way that seemed available to him at the time: by launching a culture-war offensive against progressives, rule of law be damned. His bet paid off this summer when Trump chose Vance—now a first-term senator from Ohio—as his vice presidential running mate.

  I can only assume that these folks on the "left" and "right" got a whiff of authoritarianism during the pandemic (see the Becket Adams item above), and got addicted.

• Trust me, even back in the day, Caltech admitted some non-Nobelists. Charles Murray takes to the WSJ, examining The Roots of STEM Excellence.

  Every advanced nation has a small group of people who have the potential to accelerate scientific progress and foster the advances in living that go with it. People are eligible for that group not because of their personalities or virtues. They are eligible because they have exceptionally high cognitive ability in science, technology, engineering or mathematics—STEM.

  “Exceptionally high cognitive ability” doesn’t mean the top percentile but something far more demanding. Consider the top percentile of basketball ability. A member of the starting lineup of any U.S. men’s college basketball team is almost certainly in the top percentile of basketball ability among American males. So is LeBron James. That’s how wide the top percentile is. Every starter in the National Basketball Association is almost certainly in the top hundredth of the top percentile—the top 10,000th.

  Murray's advice: identify and encourage the tippy-top talents as early as possible.

  Later in the article, he discusses my alma mater's recent boast (as I did last week):

  It should be one of the nation’s highest educational priorities to get its most brilliant STEM students into those elite universities. Until a few years ago, the California Institute of Technology was the model. Caltech admitted from the top down based on evidence of exceptional talent and then put its students through a demanding curriculum that only those with zeal and a capacity for hard labor—the other requirements for great achievement—could survive. The record of achievement among Caltech graduates and faculty speaks for itself—46 Nobel Laureates, 66 awarded National Medals of Science and 75 elected to the National Academy of Sciences, all generated by a school that enrolls only about 1,000 undergraduates and 1,400 graduate students at a time.

  Caltech might have gone wobbly. It suspended standardized-test requirements in undergraduate admission for four years starting in 2020, and its website boasts that “holistic review is the cornerstone of our admissions process” and this month Caltech announced that “in a historic milestone,” its freshman class will be majority female. But we still have the example of the old Caltech that every elite STEM department should emulate: require evidence of exceptional academic ability in the applications, admit those of top ability regardless of race, sex or social skills, holistic review be damned, and then push those students to their limits.

  It does no favors to kiddos who are admitted "holistically". If you're interested, Caltech's slicing-and-dicing of their undergrad class of 2028 is here. Check out the Asians!

  And also check out their Graduation Rates over the past ten years; the ladies have a higher graduation rate in (check my math) seven years out of ten. That's hardly an indication that they've been lowering their standards for women. (Can't say the same for their "Underrepresentated Minority" students, unfortunately.)

  Also, note that they seem to endorse a gender binary on both these pages: it's just "Men" and "Women". Is that even allowed in California?

Katherine Mangu-Ward notes Hanlon's Razor Is Getting Rusty in the 2024 Election.

Kudos to KMW for crediting Heinlein. (But were Heinlein and Hanlon ever seen in the same room together?)

Our regular Sunday feature shows that Kamala did herself no favors with the CNN interview, at least not with the folks betting their own money:

So basically, it's a coin flip.

Also of note:

• But what if her plan is to have no plan? Jim Geraghty is wonderfully old-fashioned about some things: Kamala Harris Breaks the Taboo on Running for President without a Plan.

  Does anything a presidential candidate says on the campaign trail matter? Or is the Harris campaign “ahead of the curve” in a way, by behaving as if there’s no point in laying out policy proposals during a presidential campaign, because once she’s in office, she can and will do whatever she wants, and whatever she has enough congressional support to pass?

  My Washington Post colleague Jason Willick argues that while new presidents can break promises they made on the campaign trail, the point of getting them to make these promises is to fence them in once they’re in office, and to create a penalty for deviating from their stated positions:

  The mainstream media has significant power to shape the behavior of Democratic presidential candidates, as the frenzy that expelled Biden from the race showed. If liberal outlets could embarrass Biden into stepping aside, they could also embarrass Harris into engaging in a modicum of policy discussion.

  But it’s important to be clear-eyed about the reason such discussion is urgent and necessary: to box Harris in, extracting commitments not only of what she would do but of what she wouldn’t. Of course, Harris is not interested in having her mandate limited in this way, but with political guardrails eroding, that’s precisely the purpose of a free press.

  Like the old poster on Fox Mulder’s wall in The X-Files, “I want to believe.” But I’m not sure I believe.

  Speaking about what we don't believe: I don't believe Kamala has any guiding principles. Her only guide is her ambition.

• Remember the "phony campaign"? Those candidate-name links in the above table still go to Google's search result to the name plus "phony". And the top link for Kamala's result is Tim Murtaugh's op-ed at the Washington Times, headlined Harris' problem: She's a complete phony.

  Why that's right up our (old) alley!

  Her political problem was always simple to identify but difficult to solve. Her policy positions, many of which have been part of her public record for decades, are radically out of step with those of most Americans, and trying to renounce them won’t be remotely believable.

  So, in the lead-up to the CNN interview, her staff laid the groundwork for her and notified reporters on background that the candidate had allegedly changed her views on some big things.

  Mind you, these new positions aren’t true or accurate because, as a California Democrat, she has never believed such things. But this will be her strategy, and it is dishonest.

  For example, how will she ever convince natural gas workers in western Pennsylvania that she supports fracking to protect their jobs when she hasn’t and doesn’t?

  In fact, she was adamantly and emphatically against fracking when she ran for president early in the 2020 Democratic primary cycle (she bowed out in December 2019), and she was an original co-sponsor of the Green New Deal, which sets its sights on eliminating fossil-fuel use.

  A list of her other flipflops follows. Bottom line:

  he truth is that Ms. Harris has never held any of these points of view, and she doesn’t hold them now. There is no reason for anyone to take her word on any policy pronouncement because she has often lied about her intentions.

  Breaking her media boycott in a joint CNN interview with Mr. Walz, serving as a human shield of sorts by his presence, does nothing to alleviate all of this, because the facts are what they are.

  Ms. Harris has a problem. She’s a San Francisco liberal pretending not to be one. And no one should buy it.

• Vacuity, thy name is Kamala. She doesn't hold those "San Francisco liberal" positions out of some long process of thoughtful consideration, though. Jeffrey Blehar takes the single revelation from her CNN interview: The CNN Interview Revealed Only That Kamala Harris Is as Vacuous as Her Campaign.

  We have been waiting ever since the day Joe Biden dropped out of the presidential race for Kamala Harris to sit down in front of a camera and take questions from an interviewer. And if nothing else, we have learned why: In the friendliest possible format — a joint interview with VP nominee and emotional-support midwesterner Tim Walz, conducted by Dana Bash with the delicacy of an ornithologist gently hand-feeding hatchling chicks — Harris has revealed that her gaseously mindless word-cloud of a campaign is in fact an accurate reflection of her own personal vacuousness.

  To be sure, Harris did not memorably self-destruct tonight. Whatever her failings, they are not those of Joe Biden, who couldn’t even articulate his words without slurring by the end. Her inarticulateness tonight was of the sort already known to be a Harris trademark, the endless jumble of nonsensical, comically vapid stock language. When she could fall back on a memorized list of talking points, she presented somewhat normally; the second she was required to respond directly to a question, then she began to spin out otiose nonsense like a pasta chef catering a Sicilian banquet. You could practically see the gears turning inside her head as she cast her eyes downward, stared laser-beams into the floor, and groped for cliches. She was more muted tonight than usual — her aides clearly ordered her never to display mirth under any circumstances, for fear the Kamala Kackle might emerge — and as a result, while she simulated sobriety for the most part, her body language was pronouncedly downbeat.

  And if you're into food metaphors, Blehar also mentions the interviewer's "cream puff" questions, and Kamala's resulting "word salad".

• Same place as her interview bounce, I think. Ed Morrissey has a (rhetorical, I think) question: Say, Where's Kamala's Convention Bounce?

  Did the Democrat convention boost Kamala Harris' poll numbers? Yes, and also no. Or no, and also yes, depending on what one watches.

  It's been a while since we took a look at polling in the race, and honestly, perhaps it's still too soon to look at the numbers for any conclusions or predictions about where the race is heading. The replacement of Joe Biden with Kamala Harris five weeks ago turned this into a new contest, and until Harris sets out her agenda for a new term as president, most of the numbers are just, well ... vibes.

  Of course, that's why Democrats keep hiding Kamala from reporters. Vibes may be all they have for victory after four years of Bidenomics and foreign-policy disasters.

  Confession: I'm not feeling any vibes. From either candidate.

• I'd like to make something out of all this. Maybe Veronique de Rugy can help out: What to Make of Harris Campaign's Embrace of Freedom.

  Democrats are embracing freedom and love of country as their campaign message. Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz took the stage at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago and announced that the difference between Republicans and Democrats is "freedom." Similarly, Vice President Kamala Harris insisted that Democrats "believe in freedom, opportunity, and the promise of America." She added that her greatest privilege is being an American.

  With the GOP's old mix of freedom and optimism no longer front and center, I am just glad that someone, anyone, in these elections is willing to loudly say that America is indeed the greatest country there is. Millions of immigrants like me have left everything behind precisely because they believe this to be so. And many millions more would love to come and experience the American dream.

  At least there's one candidate that's willing to at least pretend that the USA is the greatest country in the world.