Pun Salad

We will celebrate that, somehow. But we have another candidate for death row:

NH next? https://t.co/d5nxFNDswA

— Chris Maidment (@ChrisMaidmentNH) December 28, 2024

Well, here's hoping. It's a cash cow for politically powerful car dealerships and service centers, so… From that Huffines Foundation tweet:

Granite Staters will immediately correct that bit about Texas being "the ONLY Republican-led state" with mandated inspections.

Otherwise it's all about Jimmy Carter:

Not that it matters, but Carter was the only in-office president I saw in real life. And it was totally by coincidence, and from a long distance, about 300 yards. I was working at NIH at the time, failing to get my doctoral research finished. I was walking home on Wisconsin Avenue one evening, the Presidential Helicopter landed across the street at the (then) Bethesda Naval Hospital, and Jimmy popped out. I waved, but I'm pretty sure he didn't notice.

(Other than that I saw Joe Biden when he visited UNH as Veep; Donald Trump in 2014; and Ronald Reagan, campaigning in Durham for the 1976 New Hampshire Primary, which he lost, but I shook his hand, so….

• Speaking of that era… George Will points out Jimmy Carter was the president who made Ronald Reagan necessary.

  Jimmy Carter’s melancholy fate was to be a largely derivative figure: He was a reaction against his elected predecessor and the precursor of his successor. Richard Nixon made Carter tempting; Carter made Ronald Reagan necessary.

  Carter’s signature achievement, peace between Israel and Egypt, diminished the threat of another conventional Middle East war. In his post-presidency interventions in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, however, his hostility toward Israel was proportional to his admiration for the terrorist Yasser Arafat. Here Carter was mostly harmless because the “peace process” was mostly chimeric.

  Okay, well how about…

• Is there a libertarian case to be made for Jimmy? Well, if there is, Gene Healy would be the guy to make it: RIP Jimmy Carter, the 'Passionless' President. There's a lot to dislike, because Carter was in office at an unlikeable time, but:

  Amid half-baked pop-philosophical musings about conspicuous consumption and "our longing for meaning," Carter laid out a policy agenda aimed at solving the ongoing energy crisis. "All the legislation in the world can't fix what's wrong with America," he averred. Still, he seemed determined to give it a try, with an "energy security corporation" devoted to the promotion of "gasohol," solar power, and other alternative fuels; import quotas on foreign oil; and a windfall profits tax that would undermine the stated goal of more domestic production.

  The president blamed the gas lines on "excessive dependence" on the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries and foreign oil. Actually, as Carter's own energy secretary, James Schlesinger, admitted: "There would be no lines if there were no price and allocation controls." Here again, Carter managed to stumble toward the correct solution, signing a bill removing regulatory barriers to a national market in natural gas and then, via administrative action, removing most price controls on oil.

  On transportation deregulation, Carter moved with far greater confidence and clarity. He knew what he was doing when he picked Alfred Kahn to head up the Civil Aeronautics Board (CAB) in 1977. Kahn, an academic economist with formidable political skills, had previously told Congress that transportation was "the leading example" of an area where "something close to complete deregulation is long overdue." The CAB had used its authority over routes and pricing to squelch competition and keep fares artificially high: From 1950 to 1974, it rejected all 79 applications it received from companies looking to provide domestic service.

  But let's forget about that de mortuis nil nisi bonum stuff…

• And rabbits didn't care for him either. Philip Klein isn't in the mood for hagiography: Jimmy Carter Was a Terrible President — and an Even Worse Former President.

  Carter’s true legacy is one of economic misery at home and embarrassment on the world stage. He left the country in its weakest position of the post–World War II era. After being booted out of office in landslide fashion, the self-described “citizen of the world” spent the rest of his life meddling in U.S. foreign policy and working against the United States and its allies in a manner that could fairly be described as treasonous. His obsessive hatred of Israel, and pompous belief that only he could forge Middle East peace, led him to befriend terrorists and lash out at American Jews who criticized him.

  A former governor of Georgia who had little charisma and national name recognition when he began campaigning for president, Carter ended up in the White House as a fluke. He presented an image as an honest, moderate, and humble southern Evangelical Christian outsider — an antidote to the corruption of the Watergate era. He also benefited from the vulnerabilities of the sitting president, Gerald Ford.

  Once in office as an unlikely president, Carter spent his one and only term showing the American people, and the rest of the world, that he was not up to the job.

  Philip apparently received some pushback on his screed, so he has a followup: In Defense of Speaking Ill of Jimmy Carter

• It's hard to be a saint in the White House. But in any case, as Kevin D. Williamson points out: Jimmy Carter Was No Saint. There's a lot of wisdom in this (admittedly long) excerpt:

  I can hear the Carter apologists already: It wasn’t Reagan who got those hostages freed, it was Carter—Reagan merely benefited from suspiciously exquisite timing. Carter didn’t cause that oil crisis—it was the Iran-Iraq War. Inflation had been acting up since the 1960s. A lot of that deregulatory stuff that Reagan gets credit for was Carter’s doing—and it was Carter who appointed Paul Volcker, who ultimately would give Reagan the big win over inflation.

  There is plenty of truth in all that. Presidents do not dictate world events, and they do not have a magical steering wheel attached to the economy—and “the economy” isn’t even a thing, only a figure of speech by which we attempt to simplify something that is incomprehensibly complex. But even so, Carter was no great shakes when it came to what he could do. He tried to manage the energy crisis by giving Americans hectoring little speeches on obeying the speed limit and turning down their thermostats. His administration’s attempt to rescue the hostages, Operation Eagle Claw, was an absolute fiasco, aborted because U.S. forces couldn’t organize a few working helicopters and then crashed one of the few they had in a sandstorm. Volcker wasn’t appointed until 1979, and Carter and his congressional allies did very little—and nothing effective—against inflation on their own. 

  But the case against Carter is a lot more than that. He was unsteady and inconstant, a blame-shifter who exemplified the opposite of that “the buck stops here” quality associated with Harry Truman. As an executive, he was incompetent. Carter got up one fine morning and fired most of his Cabinet, leaving even his friends (and all of his enemies) publicly wondering if he’d lost his grip. “Official Washington was stunned, some critics questioned Mr. Carter’s sanity,” as one reporter put it at the time. As a politician, he was ruthless and, at times, cruel, “one of the three meanest men I’ve ever met,” as Hunter S. Thompson described him.

  And he was an admirer of the cruel and the power-hungry and the vicious: He praised and coddled Yasser Arafat, pronounced himself “fond” of the monstrous Fidel Castro, affirmed that he “never doubted Hugo Chávez’s commitment to improving the lives of millions of his fellow countrymen.” These were not simply bad politicians, but tyrants and murderers and torturers—and Carter loved them all. His attitude toward the only liberal democracy in the Middle East, on the other hand, was indistinguishable from the more refined kind of antisemitism. He posed as a saint and then deployed the moral capital he accrued to slander the Jewish state as the moral equivalent of apartheid-era South Africa—it was Carter who did more than anybody else to popularize the use of “apartheid” to describe Israel’s efforts to defend itself against jihadists bent on murdering men, women, and children at every opportunity.

  So I wonder if Jimmy will be joining Castro, Chavez, and Arafat in the afterlife. Gee, I hope not, but I'm not sure how that works.

Recently on the book blog:

Well, I managed to squeeze in one more book in 2024, bringing me to 100 on my official list. I've done better in previous years; we'll see how 2025 goes.

Consumer note: Amazon has the hardcover for a mere $5.62 as I type. You could do worse.

The author, David Harsanyi, is one of my favorites. Here, he explains (basically) why the USA should ignore the constant whines of 'Europhiles' who wonder why we can't be more like that prosperous, cosmopolitan, ecological, left-wing continent across the pond.

Harsanyi can be credibly accused of cherry-picking his data and anecdotes, only mentioning the stuff that supports his thesis. Are European countries really the totalitarian hellholes he paints? Sure, they have serious problems. All countries do. Some problems worse than others? Yup, sure.

But he points a pretty damning picture, chapter by chapter, on how Europe is worse: a lot of people fall through the cracks of their ballyhooed healthcare systems; the continent is rife with ethnic and racial strife; their commitment to free expression is increasingly shrinking; demographically, they are headed for fiscal disaster as fewer young people pay for the pensions of more and more geezers; the European Union is an autocratic nightmare, out of democratic control; their "green" environmental policies are unsustainable. And more.

One country Harsanyi doesn't mention much: Switzerland. (Another one of my favorite writers, Kevin D. Williamson, is a 'Swissophile'.) Going through the index entries…

· Page 20: he admits the Swiss score high on the World Happiness Report; he attributes that to their wealth. (Other European countries report similar wealth-linked happiness.)

· Page 159: Switzerland is one of the countries where "faith is dying", but churches are propped up by taxation. (Wikipedia says this happens at the canton level,)

· On a related note, page 210 notes that a Swiss census revealed that religious mothers were bearing "nearly twice" as many children as non-religious mothers.

· Page 221: Assisted suicide is legal in Switzerland, and there are quite a few Europeans who travel there to be killed. Honest.

· And, finally, page 225: Switzerland (similarly to most other European countries) kills the vast majority of unborn babies who test positive for Down syndrome.

As another measure, I looked at the latest Cato/Fraser Institute Human Freedom Index, ranking most of the world's countries, personal and economic liberty-wise (as of 2022). Make of this what you will: The USA is in 17th place in their rankings scoring worse than the European nations of Switzerland, Denmark, Luxembourg, Ireland, Finland, Sweden, Iceland, Estonia, Norway, Germany, Netherlands, and Czechia. And we are tied with the United Kingdom.

As a mostly-libertarian guy, I'd say we could take some lessons from some European countries. While Harsanyi is telling an important story, he's not telling the whole story.

We resurrect (once more) Newsweek's cover from November 19, 1973. I'm old enough to remember getting that issue in the mail. And young enough to recall my reaction: what did you expect to happen with price controls?

We could all stand a reminder, though, and Peter Suderman provides one: Everybody Hates Prices. He begins by examining one example of "everybody", unfortunately in a position of power:

Great. Now I'm hungry. The Baconator is $8.19 at my local Wendy's, Liz.

Suderman's article is a fine discussion of the malady of governments trying to coerce sellers and buyers of products and services to transact at some price they would otherwise not both freely agree to. His bottom line:

Also of note:

• This article could have been longer. Tal Fortgang kept it manageable, though: The Shamelessness of Ta-Nehisi Coates. He notes Coates' latest effort, The Message, in which he opines on Hamas and Israel, a topic on which he holds simplistic and foolish views. But:

  Shamelessness is one thread running through Coates’s short but eventful stint as the darling oracle of race-obsessed Americans. It did not begin with The Message. There’s a shamelessness to insisting with a straight face that white Americans are engaged in an ongoing race war against black Americans when the most basic facts that might prove such a claim actually point the other direction. (There is no race war, which you could have figured out by the amount of time Coates spends mind-reading in Between the World and Me, for which he won several awards.) There’s a similar shamelessness to hearing Dokoupil point out that Coates’s book about a region has completely ignored the eliminationism animating one side of a conflict and responding, yeah, that’s just, like, your opinion, man.

  Yeah. I'm reading Christopher Cox's biography of Woodrow Wilson, which contains vivid descriptions of American race warfare. We ain't doing that any more.

• Shoulda, coulda, woulda. Ann Althouse looks at a WaPo article that contains:

  In private, Biden has also said he should have picked someone other than Merrick Garland as attorney general, complaining about the Justice Department’s slowness under Garland in prosecuting Trump, and its aggressiveness in prosecuting Biden’s son Hunter, according to people familiar with his comments.

  Ann observes:

  But look how clearly the article states that Biden intended to use the Justice Department to destroy his political adversary!

  Too true. But that charge that Garland was "aggressive" in going after Hunter Biden shouldn't go unchallenged. Note that Hunter's pardon goes all the way back to anything he might have done on or after January 1, 2014. Andy McCarthy notes:

  The breathtaking expanse of Hunter’s pardon – nearly 11 years for someone the president repeatedly told us had done nothing wrong – is clearly an effort to foreclose any further investigation of the president’s son over the 2014-16 period from which the Biden Justice Department quite intentionally averted its eyes.

• On the LFOD watch. The Valley News editorializes. Wanted: A state librarian who’s eager to ban books.

  “The Live Free or Die state seeks a strong leader who is truly passionate about banning books and censoring other library materials. Reporting to the wing-nut caucus of the Legislature and Executive Council, the successful candidate will be responsible for creating and maintaining an updated list of proscribed materials for the state’s 234 public libraries, including but not limited to those that address gender, sexuality and race in a way that contravenes evangelical Christian and Roman Catholic doctrine or the views of any individual parent. Send resume and censorship samples to Gov.-Elect Kelly Ayotte, state of New Hampshire.”

  Welcome to the Granite State, where reality so often gives hyperbole a run for its money. Earlier this month on his way out the door, Gov. Chris Sununu withdrew his nomination of the well-qualified Mindy Atwood to be state librarian in the face of objections by conservative activists and some members of the Executive Council. Their opposition — you couldn’t make this up — was centered on Atwood’s advocacy against book censorship. Thus the fanciful job description posted above.

  Heh. Well, this is pretty standard stuff. It boils down to "Trust the librarians to decide what books to make available to your kiddos." Parents who might not want their children to be able to pick up a copy of Gender Queer should … I don't know, run for their library's Board of Trustees?

  Apparently this was a successful effort by RebuildNH, a conservative activist group who argued:

  Mindy Atwood has a history of promoting progressive library policies, including preventing school boards from removing pornographic materials. This nominee will use her position as State Librarian to continue her political advocacy efforts and undermine parents and school boards.

  They could have had a point, although I'd like to see the evidence. New Hampshire Commie Public Radio has a story about the imbroglio, slanted as you would expect, but you can dig some facts out of it.

• Losing their religion. Building on a story we found hilarious a couple days ago, Jerry Coyne has resigned from his position on the "Honorary Board" of the "Freedom From Religion Foundation"; their management took down a blog post he made on their site, which defended the notion that sex is biologically binary, a rebuttal to an essay from Kat Grant ("What is a woman?") which argued otherwise.

  Also resigning from the Honorary Board are Steven Pinker and Richard Dawkins. From the Pinker link above, Jerry excerpts Steven's (correct) observation:

  With this action, the Foundation is no longer a defender of freedom from religion but the imposer of a new religion, complete with dogma, blasphemy, and heretics. It has turned its back on reason: if your readers “wrongfully perceive” the opposite of a clear statement that you support the expression of contesting opinions, the appropriate response is to stand by your statement, not ratify their error. It has turned the names Freethought Today and Freethought Now into sad jokes, inviting ridicule from its worse foes. And it has shown contempt for the reasoned advice of its own board members.

  Small correction: it's not only inviting "ridicule from its worse foes", but also ridicule from people like me, who don't think about it much at all.

If you're into retrospectives, and who isn't, your must-read du jour is Dave Barry Year in Review: 2024 was an exciting year, and by ‘exciting,’ we mean ‘stupid’.

Excerpt-wise, there is so much to pick from. And if you're as wise and as deft with your mouse as I suspect you are (and also immune to shameless flattery), I'd guess you've already clicked over and started reading.

But let's go to (I think) 2024's Peak Stupidity Month:

It's not as if the other 11 months were full of rationality, either. Boeing is featured prominently. Sometimes implicitly, as in "You will never in a million years guess the name of the company that built this spacecraft."

Also of note:

• Okay, one more retrospective. It's from Jacob Sullum, who is not as funny as Dave Barry, and he describes How pols and cops blamed victims and passed the buck in 2024. Many examples, here's one you may have missed:

  Collision Coverage. Last February, Police Chief Harold Medina of Albuquerque, NM, ran a red light and slammed his department-issued pickup truck into the side of a sports car, severely injuring the driver.

  Medina, who said he was fleeing from a fight between two homeless men that had escalated into gunfire, blamed “gun violence” for his reckless driving.

  You may recall that the TV show Breaking Bad was set in Albuquerque. No wonder they never caught Walter White.

• But seriously, folks. I mentioned yesterday that I was on "Team H1B". Let me excerpt steal Harvard econ prof Greg Mankiw's post explaining why: The Case for More H1B Visas.

  Apparently, there is an ongoing debate in Trumpworld about whether more H1B visas are a good thing. From an economic perspective, the answer is a clear yes.

  From the standpoint of economic efficiency, allowing a highly skilled immigrant to work at a U.S. firm is, for standard reasons, beneficial. The transaction is voluntary, so both the employee and employer are better off.  And there are no obvious negative externalities (not counting, of course, pecuniary externalities). In addition, the U.S. government collects more revenue in the form of payroll and income taxes.

  From the standpoint of economic equality, allowing a highly skilled immigrant is again beneficial. The relative wage of skilled versus unskilled workers depends on, among other things, the relative supply of the two types of worker. When highly skilled workers immigrate into the United States, the demand for less skilled workers rises. 

  Think of technology firms that need both engineers and janitors. When the supply of engineers rises, the demand for janitors increases, leading to higher janitor wages.

  So an increase in H1Bs visas not only expands economic liberty (arguably a good thing in itself) but also increases both efficiency and equality.

  Score one for Vivek and Elon.

  Update: A friend points out there may be significant positive externalities in form of new knowledge that highly skilled immigrants would produce. I agree. That strengthens the case.

  A slam-dunk, but unfortunately that doesn't make it inevitable.

The Wall Street Journal looked Behind Closed Doors: The Spy-World Scientists Who Argued Covid Was a Lab Leak. It's an eye-opening investigation, and that's a gifted link, so click away. Excerpt:

The article's pretty long, so I wouldn't blame you if you skipped over to Jim Geraghty's Morning Jolt for a summary. He was one of the early adopters of the lab leak theory years ago. He's not gloating through.

Bold added.

Roll Call is reporting that Joe Biden's search for Covid's origins has taken him to the residence of Bill and Connie Neville, Christiansted, Virgin Islands, for a six-night fact-finding mission, where I am sure he is not resting, because he said he wouldn't back in 2021. (The New York Post has details of the current locus of his investigation: Biden again staying at St. Croix home of wealthy 'friends'.)

Also of note:

• They may have to change their name. Jerry Coyne is a rather strident atheist; if you go to his website "Why Evolution is True", for example, you'll see a number of links plugging his 2015 book Faith Versus Fact: Why Science and Religion Are Incompatible.

  So you'd think that a group called the "Freedom From Religion Foundation" (FFRF) and he would get along. In fact, he is on their Honorary Board of Directors!

  But they're now fighting, Jerry's mad, and I'm amused. Read Jerry's blog article: The FFRF removed my piece on the biological definition of “woman”. Summary: Jerry's "guest blog" piece claiming "biology is not bigotry", defending the sex binary, briefly appeared and was subsequently taken down. And an abject apology from FFRF co-presidents Annie Laurie Gaylor and Dan Barker to those who experienced "distress". Jerry's comment to that:

  But it’s the last six paragraphs of the FFRF’s post where they explain why they took down my piece. It is because it caused “distress” and “did not reflect [the FFRF’s] values or principles.” I’m not sure what values or principles my piece failed to reflect. Does the FFRF think that sex is really a spectrum, that there are more than two sexes in humans, or that the most useful definition of biological sex doesn’t involve gamete size? I don’t know, nor do they say.

  As for my words causing “distress,” well, I’m sorry if people feel distress when I explicate the biological definition of sex or estimate how few people fail to adhere to the sex binary. But this is all material not for censorship but for back-and-forth discussion, especially on a site called “Freethought Now!” (Should it be called “Freeethought Not!” instead?)

  It's a little kludgey, but maybe they could change their name to "Freedom from Any Distress-Causing Thoughts Foundation".

• Trouble in Trumpville Already? Jonah Goldberg's column is titled "A MAGA Schism" and I hate that because I never can pronounce that stupid word with only one vowel. But some folks are mad that advocates of H1B rule-loosening might have Trump's ear. (The unshot one.)

  Up against the nationalists is Team DOGE, led by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy. Again, it’s a shorthand. I’m sure there are DOGE fans who believe we should gut the H-1B visa program. In fact, one could be forgiven for thinking Ramaswamy was one of them given that when he was running for president he vowed to “gut” the program he used 29 times when he was a CEO of a pharmaceutical company. That’s the thing about Vivek: He never fails to tell his target audience what it wants to hear. But now that his target audience isn’t primary voters but Elon Musk, the Count Dracula to his Renfield, he’s saying something a bit different.

  I'm on Team H1B myself. But I'm prepared to be disappointed.

• Hey, let's look back at … Good for George Will, who's prepared to get a chuckle out of recent history: Thanks for the laughs, 2024, you ridiculous year. (alleged free link). A two-paragraph sample:

  Illinois’ legislature passed a bill renaming some “offenders” as “justice-impacted individuals.” Five crime-busting Mississippi cops arrested a 10-year-old for peeing behind his mother’s car. He was sentenced to three months’ probation, with drug tests at his probation officer’s discretion. Embracing today’s rule “Never miss an opportunity to criminalize something,” an Ohio legislator, incensed not by the rioters but by their excuse for rioting, proposed legislation making it a felony to plant a visiting team’s flag at the center of Ohio State’s football field. Elsewhere in education, Chicago’s teachers unions (a.k.a. the city’s government) pronounced it “misogynistic” to report that 4 in 10 Chicago public school teachers (median salary: $95,000) were “chronically absent.”

  Brooklyn’s PS 261, where the “Arab Cultural Arts” program is funded by Qatar, had a map of the Middle East with Israel omitted. An Amnesty International report this year began: “On 7 October 2023, Israel embarked on a military offensive …” One wonders why. The New York Times reported that on Oct. 9, 2023, “senior administrators at Harvard University” removed the word “violent” from the description of Hamas’s attacks because a dean explained that it “sounded like assigning blame.”

  George is 83; as I said yesterday about Thomas Sowell; I can't imagine I'll be cranking it out at his age. And I have zero expectations I'll ever be that good.

New Thomas Sowell content at the WSJ! I can't imagine I'll still be cranking it out when I'm 94.

He considers the implications of a simple fact: The World’s Biggest Landlord Is Washington.

Yeah, do that. And be sure the proceeds are used for debt reduction, not new spending.

To go along with this wonderful idea. Veronique de Rugy suggests: Privatize the Postal Service, Amtrak, airports, and more.

And click over for the rest. Hope Elon and Vivek are reading.

Also of note:

• A serious question from a funny guy. Jeff Maurer wonders: What if We Restricted Athletes Like We Do Tech Workers?

  My Christmas gift this year was watching the tech right and the MAGA right get into a good ol’ fashioned Twitter brawl. It started when Trump appointed Sriram Krishnan to be a senior advisor on Artificial Intelligence. The pick surprised me because Krishnan is: 1) Qualified, and 2) Not accused of paying teenagers for sex — Trump is really mixing it up with this choice! But MAGA Twitter was surprised because Krishnan has called for removing the country-specific caps on H1b visas, which are often used by tech workers, especially Indian tech workers. This led to anti-Indian invective bubbling up on social media, which has the potential to sully MAGA Twitter’s reputation as an egalitarian safe space for the tolerant and open-minded.

  Trump allies Elon Musk and David Sacks stuck up for Krishnan, and for the concept of hiring foreign workers, generally. In response, MAGA heads lost what’s left of their minds. I side with Musk and Sacks — even a clock that fried its brain on acid is right twice a day, right? To my mind, much of MAGA Twitter is making the same mistake that many leftists make when arguing against merit-based hiring: They fail to realize that these are companies, not jobs programs, and the number of jobs grows or shrinks depending on how those companies do. Also like the left, they imagine that that you can restrict the pool of workers without any drop off in quality, and that’s the part of the argument that I want to address.

  Just two snide comments about that "clock right twice a day thing": (1) It only applies to those clocks with analog hands. And who has those any more? Your grandma, maybe.

  And (2): Under Daylight Saving Time, it's theoretically possible for a stopped clock to be right three times a day. On that cursed 25-hour day when you "fall back", assuming it's stopped between 1:00 and 2:00.

  I'll be happy with DOGE if the only thing it does is to get rid of Daylight Saving Time.

• It starts with "P", and that stands for… Deirdre McClosky discovers The Fourth Ism.

  Three big political isms came to mind and language 1776 to 1848, and have had enormous influence right down to the present— liberalism, nationalism, and socialism. I’ve said this before. When put into action, especially in the 20th century, liberalism pursued vigorously had wonderful results. The other two pursued vigorously, by using the power of the big modern state, had terrible results. Liberalism resulted in human enrichment, from art and science to health and housing. Nationalism led to the Paraguayan War, and socialism led to Venezuelan impoverishment.

  Recently I’ve realized that there’s another big 19^th-century -ism with 20^th-century consequences, protectionism. It uses the power of the state to protect these Brazilian capitalists from foreign competition by blocking entry to Brazil, or it protects these American plumbers from domestic competition by blocking entry to plumbing. Another ism-word for it would be syndicalism, from Greek súndikos, advocate,” itself from “with justice.” Ha, ha. Its claim, absurd on its face but very popular, is that if we make this capitalist and this plumber richer by letting them combine in a syndicate against society, preventing the liberty of contract to buy where you wish, then all of us—the non-capitalists and the non-plumbers—will also be protected and indeed enriched. Ha, ha, ha.

  We can only hope that this folly is quickly realized, repealed, and forgotten.

• But protectionism isn't Trump's wackiest idea. Jim Geraghty takes a look at President-Elect Trump's Greenland New Deal.

  On Christmas Day, President-elect Trump shared on Truth Social his wishes for a merry Christmas “to the people of Greenland, which is needed by the United States for National Security purposes and, who want the U.S. to be there, and we will! . . .”

  On December 22, Trump announced Ken Howery as his choice for U.S. ambassador to Denmark; Howery was the co-founder of PayPal and the Founders Fund, and he served as Trump’s ambassador to Sweden in his first term. Trump added, “For purposes of National Security and Freedom throughout the World, the United States of America feels that the ownership and control of Greenland is an absolute necessity.”

  Good luck, Ken!

  If you click through, you'll find yourself learning more about Greenland than you ever thought possible. Fun facts: (1) Greenland "is the location of the Pentagon’s northernmost installation, Pituffik Space Base (pronounced “bee-doo-FEEK”), formerly known as Thule Air Base." (2) "Greenland’s population is roughly 56,000, which means every last citizen of Greenland could sit in any NFL stadium with seats to spare." And (3) "About 88 percent are Greenlandic Inuit, indigenous peoples traditionally inhabiting the Arctic and subarctic regions of North America". And (finally, 4) “the majority of the people speak the Inuit language, Kalaallisut, which is the official language, while the second language of the country is Danish.”

Recently on the book blog:

I think I put this book on my get-at-library list thanks to an interesting review by Adrian Woolfson in the WSJ. The author, Philip Ball, is a "freelance writer", and was an editor at Nature for over twenty years.

The book was considerably more daunting and detailed than I expected. (I had no idea there were so many different kinds of RNA!) As often happens when I'm out of my depth, I fell into my "looked at every page" mode for some stretches. My personal rules say this still counts as "reading". And when Ball slows down a bit and writes for a "more general audience" (me), he's quite interesting and accessible.

One of Ball's major points here is a pushback against vulgar reductionism, that posits the genome as kind of computer program that produces… well, us, and every other living thing on Earth. It's important, but seems to be overhyped. Like I kept saying about (for example) The 1619 Project: it's an important story, but it's far from the whole story. Ball tries to tell the whole, very complex, story.

Come to think of it, it's pretty amazing how you and I came to be, starting with a fertilized ovum that commenced dividing, and dividing, and differentiating, and … well somehow, wound up with brains, lungs, eyes, veins, livers, fingers, bones, etc., all in the right place, with skin on the outside instead of somewhere else. And all working together pretty well. Especially amazing when you look at the unsharp, floppy, shaky tools involved: proteins with amino acid chains that have to be folded just so (or pretty close), with affinity sites placed in just the right place to link to… well, like I said, it works well enough to get us out of bed in the morning.

Ball explicitly denies "intelligent design", saying confidently that this was all a matter of fumbling, dumb-luck evolution. And I suppose I buy that at about an 80% credence level; the other 20% is saying: "Oh, really? Suuuure. Pull the other one." For example, the multicellularity we take for granted: the evolutionary jump from unicellularity seems to have happened only once in the entire gigayears of history, and it's unclear what the evolutionary advantage of it was (page 222).

Bottom line, a pretty obvious one: life is complex, there's a lot we don't understand.

In breaking away from reductionism, Ball is free to engage in metaphors of his own choosing. He ascribes causality as an emergent property of sufficiently complex arrangements, causality that can't be found in any of the components. He has an entire chapter on "Agency", which is (he says) "how life gets goals and purposes". This is a red flag for some, because it edges away from the strict determinism a lot of people cling to, making room for their bugaboo, free will.

So (unsurprisingly) it turns out my favorite determinist, Jerry Coyne, has kind of a bee in his bonnet about Ball. See, for example his "review of a review": Yet another misguided attempt to revise evolution.

Hope everyone had a fine Christmas. But now that it's in the rear view mirror, it's time for end-of-year retrospectives, best-of lists, predictions for 2025. So here's an example, from Gerard Baker in the WSJ; even with a few days left to go, he confidently asserts 2024 Was a Year of Excellence, Ironic and Otherwise.

Gerard also reveals his choices for:

• The Dan Rather Prize for Media Fiction.
• The Herb Stein Award for Bafflingly Bad Economics.
• The Yahya Sinwar Memorial Award for Ivy League Student of the Year.
• The Al Gore Award for Convenient Untruths About the Climate.
• The Herschel Walker Political Newcomer of the Year Award.
• The Bruce and Caitlyn Jenner Award for Controversial Sportswoman of the Year.

You don't want to miss any of those, and that's a "gifted" link so check it out.

Also of note:

• A belated Christmas gift from Trump II. We'll have to wait until he actually takes office, but Eric Boehm saw what he has in his bag: Trump's tariffs will shrink the economy and reduce investment, CBO says.

  President-elect Donald Trump's proposed tariffs would result in higher prices, lower economic growth, less investment in the United States, reduced productivity by American workers, and fewer exports.

  On the other hand, they would marginally reduce the federal budget deficit.

  The higher tariffs would lower the budget deficit by about $2.7 trillion over the next 10 years, the CBO also estimated. In other words, American consumers would be paying $2.7 trillion more in federal taxes over the next 10 years if Trump's tariff plans are implemented—regardless of whatever other changes to the federal tax code the incoming Trump administration and Congress might implement this year.

  And those trade-offs skew heavily towards costs, rather than benefits.

  Well, not for the first time, and probably not the last:

  Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard. (Mencken)

Recently on the book blog:

I'm still kind of pissed off that the New York Times had zero Amor Towles books on its list of the 100 Best Books of the 21st Century. They claim to have polled "hundreds of literary luminaries". I can only speculate as to the "luminary" criteria, and my speculation is not pretty.

(The NYT also polled readers; Towles showed up with two books on the readers' list. Hm.)

This book is a collection of six short stories and one novella:

"The Line"

A story of the Russian peasant Pushkin and his wife, as they deal with the infant Soviet Union. Moved off his tenant farm, Pushkin finds a new career, holding peoples' places in the lines that have become part of everyday life in the USSR. This causes his life to take some major unexpected turns.

"The Ballad of Timothy Touchett"

Timothy fancies himself a writer, but has no experiences worth writing about. Also missing, it seems: intelligence, writing talent, and character. His life is changed by accepting employment with a shady dealer in used and rare books, who discovers Timothy's actual talent: aping the handwriting style of famous authors.

"Hasta Luego"

The narrator, Jerry, makes a new friend in Smitty at LaGuardia Airport, where their travel plans are spoiled by bad weather. They cooperate in finding a place to eat, drink, and lodge. But soon Jerry finds that Smitty has a much more complex life, and a more iffy character, than he was counting on.

"I Will Survive"

The narrator's wife, Nell, has a mother, Peggy, who requests their help in finding out what's going on with Peggy's husband, who's been fibbing about his whereabouts. And it turns out there's a pretty good reason for that. Involving roller skating.

"The Bootlegger"

A couple attend a concert at Carnegie Hall, but the husband gets flustered and offended by the odd man in an adjacent seat, who appears to be illegally taping the concert. Dudgeon is high! But there's an innocent explanation! Or is there?

"The DiDomenico Fragment"

An idle heir is in danger of his fortune declining to levels which will not support his lifestyle. It's threatening to go from "lavish" to "slightly less lavish"! But financial salvation might be had if he can arrange for a lovely bit of artwork to be sold to a deep-pocketed collector. Unfortunately, it belongs to someone else. Nevertheless…

"Eve in Hollywood"

This is the novella, and it is sort of a sequel to Towles' first novel, Rules of Civility. It's set in the mid-1930s. At the end of that book, Eve was leaving New York to return to her parents' home in the midwest. But at the last minute, she changes her mind, leaves her parents waiting at the station in Chicago, and decides to seek her fortune in… well, you see the title. And (eventually) makes the acquaintance of an actual movie star. Who has a problem with blackmail.

This last one is a lot of fun. If the Raymond Chandler estate wants to get a good novelist to write another Marlowe novel, Towles would be a great choice. Example, the description of a Hollywood denizen with a tragic flaw:

Because here's the thing: Ma and Pa loved to see the girl next door, all right, sitting on top of the silver screen. But the only thing they loved more was seeing her tumble back to earth. That didn't mean Ma and Pa were bad people. There wasn't a mean-spirited bone in their bodies. They just couldn't help themselves. The Krauts call it schadenfreude, Litsky called it human nature—which is just a fancy term for the God-given flaws we have no intention of giving back.

So: interesting tales of interesting people, told with incandescent style.

"It's Christmas, you crazy old fart!"

So Merry Christmas, everyone! We lead off with a couple of Scrooge takes to accompany the seriously demented Getty Image du Jour.

David R. Henderson takes a Nobelist to task: Krugman Misstates the Lesson of Christmas Carol.

In his defense, Krugman's Nobel was in Economics, not Literature. And that "December 23" column was in the print edition on December 24, 2010.

But here's a classic from Steven E. Landsburg, in a 20-year-old Slate article: What I like about Scrooge.

I'd say Steven deserves a Nobel for that insight.

Also of note:

• Your tax dollars, paying for stuff you don't want or need. An annual tradition: Dr. Paul Releases 2024 ‘Festivus’ Report on Government Waste.

  This marks Dr. Paul’s tenth edition of the Festivus Report as he continues working to alert the American people to how their federal government uses their hard-earned money.

  Some of the highlights include the National Endowment for the Arts funding ice-skating drag queens and promoting city park circuses. Additionally, the Department of the Interior (DOI) invested in the construction of a brand new $12 million Las Vegas Pickleball complex. DOI also allocated $720,479 to wetland conservation projects for ducks in Mexico. This year, the Department of State is featured eleven times, with expenditures including $4.8 million on Ukrainian influencers, $32,596 on breakdancing, $2.1 million for Paraguayan Border Security, $3 Million for ‘Girl-Centered Climate Action’ in Brazil, and much more!

  The PDF report is 41 pages, make sure you've taken your blood pressure meds before reading.

• Ah, I miss the old days of "rum, romanism, and rebellion". Michael Graham goes a different alliterative way: This Christmas, Dems Are Party of Protests, Pardons and Paganism.

  So who are Granite State Democrats celebrating this Christmas season? Could it be… Satan?

  Technically the ghoulish, goat-headed statute outside the state house is the pagan deity Baphomet, but given that it’s sponsored by The Satanic Temple (TST), that’s close enough for most people.

  How do we know the statue came from the Satanic Temple? Because Democratic state rep. Ellen Read of Newmarket said so. In fact, Read told the press she came up with the idea for the TST to stand their pagan statue next to the traditional Nativity scene to send a message.

  “Read also said she is a member of TST but has not participated in any of its meetings or events,” Fox News reported. 

  That old GOP slam at Democrats is described at Wikipedia, back in the days when anti-Catholicism was a Republican thing. These days, not so much.

  There was an effort last year to tag the Dems with …

  Ingraham: Ok, here’s what the Democrats’ platform is, ready? Pot, porn, Planned Parenthood pic.twitter.com/iOmSFXEzS5

  — Acyn (@Acyn) August 23, 2023

  … but that quickly became a bumper sticker snapped up by Democrats.

• And then there was a guy who… liked to talk about "pointy-headed professors who can't even park a bicycle straight." But he was a Democrat. These days, Christian Schneider points out: Republicans Descend Into Anti-Intellectualism.

  “The trouble with our liberal friends is not that they're ignorant,” Ronald Reagan quipped in his famous 1964 “A Time for Choosing” speech, “it's just that they know so much that isn't so.”

  Reagan’s gentle jibe came just days before the candidate he supported, Barry Goldwater, got his posterior handed to him in the presidential election. But while Republicans lost that battle, they eventually won the war. Reagan’s speech posited conservatism as the ideology for smart people who understood free markets, individual liberty, and military strength. Thus, an army of young pointy-headed, bow-tie-wearing Milton Friedman acolytes was born.

  But to be a conservative these days, one must not only know so much that isn’t so, one must constantly berate those who call out such misinformation and disinformation on the right. Swimming in GOP waters today means cozying up to self-interested scammers of all varieties who pitch nonsense to make Republicans believe they are constantly being victimized.

  Yeah, well… at least Republicans weren't the ones insisting that Biden was "as sharp as a tack" until Nancy Pelosi told them it was OK to stop.

• One of many. Dominic Piro provides us with An Example of Why Bidenomics Didn’t Catch On. And it's one of Pun Salad's favorite punching bags:

  In 2021, Amtrak was given $66 billion in the bipartisan infrastructure law that Biden immediately claimed as his own after he signed it into law. For an idea of what that money was supposed to do, let’s go back to news coverage at the time.

  On November 8, 2021, NBC News quoted Amtrak CEO Bill Flynn as saying, “We have a clear vision for how we want to grow our business and reach more of America.” Flynn added, “This represents the largest investment of its kind since Amtrak was founded in 1971.”

  The Association of American Railroads and the Rail Passengers Association praised the funding. The university professor quoted in the piece said, “I would expect a good portion of that $22 billion is probably going to the Northeast Corridor,” considering that that’s where most of Amtrak’s ridership is and the needs are great.

  We don’t even have to go back that far to get glowing reviews of how the extra money for Amtrak was going to change the world. “President Biden Advances Vision for World Class Passenger Rail by Delivering Billions in New Funding,” reads a White House statement from November 2023. “Bidenomics and President Biden’s Investing in America agenda are tackling long-standing infrastructure needs, supporting communities nationwide, and making it possible to get people and goods where they need to be safely, quickly, and conveniently,” it begins.

  But you can almost see what's coming down the track, can't you?

  Yet service reliability on the Northeast Corridor has gotten worse, and the Christmastime travel rush this year has been a disaster.

  According to the Department of Transportation, in the past three quarters, on-time performance for the Acela, Amtrak’s flagship service, has declined from 83 percent to 69 percent. On-time performance for non-Acela trains on the Northeast Corridor, Amtrak’s most-used services, went from 86 percent to 74 percent. In July, only seven of Amtrak’s 47 services had on-time performances higher than 80 percent, which is supposed to be the minimum federal standard.

  Amtrak delenda est.

Elon Musk living rent-free in the heads of woke media personages.

And Elon seems to enjoy it, as shown in one of his responses:

You elevate Tourette’s to poetry

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 20, 2024

Brought (literally) home to me last night as I was channel-surfing and landed with a thunk on MSNBC's Rachel Maddow. For about 20 seconds (all I could stand) I must have heard Rachel and her apparatchiks say "Musk" a half-dozen times.

Want more examples? Brittany Bernstein's got 'em: For Liberal Pundits, New Elon Musk 'Derangement Syndrome' Emerges.

(I got the Olbermann tweet and Musk's response from Brittany too.)

And that's my last "gifted" NR link of the year. Enjoy!

Also of note:

• Just a reminder from Sabine: Science Does Not Work By Consensus.

  Her lead-in:

  A group of philosophers and sociologists have come up with the idea to regularly poll scientists in order to establish and maintain a “scientific consensus.” While this might sound plausible, it’s a terrible idea. Here’s why.

  "A group of philosophers and sociologists…" Hm. Surely we can come up with a better word than "group"! You know, like a "gaggle of geese".

  Unfortunately, this Merriam-Webster article on collective nouns doesn't help.

  How about "a fallacy of philosophers and sociologists"?

• Could he be worse if he wasn't decaying? J.D. Tuccille makes an obvious libertarian point: A decaying Joe Biden underlines the need for a less powerful presidency.

  Observers of the American presidency warn with increasing frequency that the office of the country's chief executive has acquired power more befitting a monarchy than a republic with elected officials. But what if the person holding that office is a placeholder for aides who cocoon the president and who really make the decisions? That is, what if all that growing power is wielded by an unelected and relatively faceless circle of advisers? That brings us to the Biden administration which, in just one term, has powerfully reinforced the argument for making the presidency much less important.

  "Presidents always have gatekeepers," Annie Linskey, Rebecca Ballhaus, Emily Glazer, and Siobhan Hughes wrote last week for The Wall Street Journal. "But in Biden's case, the walls around him were higher and the controls greater, according to Democratic lawmakers, donors and aides who worked for Biden and other administrations. There were limits over who Biden spoke with, limits on what they said to him and limits around the sources of information he consumed."

  So there are clear problems with accountability; we don't know who's actually in charge, we don't know who to blame. (Or praise, but let's face it, these days it's mostly blame.)

  But beyond accountability, as J.D. goes on to explain, there are real problems with the sheer monarchical power of the Executive.

  And also the Federal Government generally, but you get the idea.

• Literally making a Federal Case out of it. Speaking of the general centralization of power, my CongressCritter is doing his bit:

  As we enter the height of the holiday gift-giving season, package theft remains a significant concern.
  
  That’s why I’m pushing to pass the Porch Pirates Act to increase penalties, deter theft, and help hold those responsible accountable.https://t.co/sT5m9Kmh2P

  — Rep. Chris Pappas (@RepChrisPappas) December 18, 2024

  Yes, he wants Uncle Stupid to go after porch pirates. What would James Madison say?

• What was the thought process here? Scott Johnson tries to find it in Biden’s jailbreak, death row edition.

  President Biden has commuted the death sentences of 37 federal death row prisoners. The White House has just posted Biden’s statement on the commutations here. The White House has also posted a “fact-sheet” on the commutations here.

  These are documents of sickening dishonesty. Biden purports to rest his commutations on opposition to the death penalty — “I am more convinced than ever that we must stop the use of the death penalty at the federal level” — but Biden leaves out the Boston bomber, the Pittsburgh synagogue shooter, and Dylan Roof.

  The fact-sheet exempts “cases of terrorism and hate-motivated mass murder…” Good old garden variety mass murder is not too loving either, but c’est la vie, so to speak.

  Biden’s list includes at least five child killers and several mass murderers. Only a principled opposition to the death penalty could support the commutations, but Biden doesn’t go that far in his actions. The exceptions refute the stated principle of the commutations.

  I'd guess the choices were made on a publicity basis: "Let's still kill the guys people are likely to have heard of."

• Yeah, but that's nothing new. Rich Lowry points out Biden’s horrific commutations are a grotesque abuse of the US justice system.

  President Biden, or whoever is running the White House, has grotesquely abused the pardon power, yet again.

  Biden commuted the sentences of 37 out of 40 of the prisoners on federal death row in response to the lobbying of opponents of the death penalty, keeping intact his nearly unbroken record of bending to left-wing pressure groups while in office.

  Biden, or whoever is running the White House, put out a statement averring that the president has long been committed to “ensuring a fair and effective justice system.”

  Even if true, this is a non-sequitur, since there’s nothing to suggest the handling of these cases was unfair. 

  Fun fact from later in Rich's column: "On top of this, the Biden Justice Department just filed a death-penalty charge against the UnitedHealthCare CEO assassin, Luigi Mangione."

• I don't think of myself as a "Trump Hater". And I'm planning on enjoying Christmas just fine. Still, I was thinking maybe Eddie Scarry would have some good advice for me. And maybe you: How To Enjoy This Christmas If You’re A Trump Hater (Or If You Sadly Know One).

  First, take solace in the fact that Trump is term-limited, and this is the last time he can constitutionally serve as president of the United States, be the commander-in-chief, and hold more power than any one person on earth. It’s four years, but if you made it the first time, surely you can do it again. Sit back and let come what may. It’s easier this way.

  Next, consider that your family and loved ones still care for you, even if you didn’t see eye to eye about the election. Cutting them off would hurt you just as much as them. Elections unfortunately come with bragging rights, and your MAGA cousins and uncles deserve the same opportunities to don the red hats you might rather toss in a fire pit.

  Lastly, understand that the holiday isn’t about you and your misplaced emotional investment in politics. It’s about everything but that. Don’t be a narcissist. Join your family and friends, give them a hug, and wish them a Merry Christmas. I promise you’ll feel better and so will everyone else, all through the house.

  That last bit of advice could have been better worded: "Try to be less of a narcissist than Trump is."

Or perhaps you need to fly off somewhere. Let me dust off a little ditty Remy came up with last year:

You can read the lyrics at the link. And there are sublinks to explanations of some of the more obscure lyrics.

Will this become a holiday tradition at Pun Salad? Last year we linked to a classic TSA press release, TSA detects bullets artfully concealed in diaper at LaGuardia Airport. Artfully!

Well, this year, another scofflaw was detected: TSA officers at LAX discover surprising number of prohibited items in traveler’s carry-on.

What does it take to surprise TSA officiers, you might ask.

I almost expected them to finish up that list with "… and a partridge in a pear tree."

Shall we do this again next year? Assuming I'm still around, and Reason's advice to Abolish the TSA is not taken.

Also of note:

• Just a reminder of why he won't be missed. Speaking of Reason, their January 2025 issue is a compendium of goodbye-and-good-riddance reminiscences for the Dotard-in-Chief. Example: Joe Biden Tried To Use the Regulatory State To Micromanage Everything.

  On domestic regulatory issues, Biden has shown initiative and a willingness to go above and beyond what is called for. It's too bad that's the opposite of what a good presidential job performance entails. The ideal candidate here is someone unwilling or unmotivated to find new outlets for regulation, but the Biden administration has proved all too eager to expand the regulatory state's reach.

  Take Biden's obsession with "junk fees," by which he means basically anything a business charges for perks (such as checking bags during a flight) or as penalties (like bank overdraft fees). Such fees can serve important and legitimate purposes, but Biden has framed them all as simple points of corporate "greed." Because it can't directly eliminate them, the administration has decided they must be disclosed in particular ways—saving Americans from the pain of, say, having to read about cable costs in two separate lines instead of one.

  Let me refer you, once again, to my GOVERNMENT WARNING post from 2012.

• Apparently, they were shushed one too many times. At Granite Grok, Arlene Quaratiello brings some holiday cheer: New Hampshire Defunds the American Library Association.

  A recent article on the New Hampshire Public Radio (NHPR) website regarding Governor Sununu’s withdrawal of his state librarian nominee confirms that the previous state librarian withdrew the New Hampshire State Library (NHSL) from the American Library Association this year. While the reason given for this withdrawal was that “the yearly dues were not worth what the association provided,” there is more to this story.

  Last February, as a New Hampshire State Representative and a librarian opposed to the ALA’s agenda, I wrote the letter below to Sarah Stewart, the Commissioner of the New Hampshire Department of Natural and Cultural Resources, which oversees the NHSL. This letter was co-signed by 100 other state representatives who shared my opposition. Along with fellow Representative Mike Drago (Raymond, NH), I met with Commissioner Stewart and State Librarian Michael York at the State House. We explained the reasons for withdrawing from the ALA as detailed in the letter that I presented to Commisioner Stewart at the end of our meeting. It appears that our demands were heeded and that New Hampshire has joined the growing list of states that have defunded the ALA!

  Arlene provides the text of her letter. New Hampshire joined "Montana, Texas, Alabama, Missouri, South Carolina, and Florida" in disaffiliating with the ALA, saving "a few thousand dollars". And, if you're interested, her substack is titled No Shushing Now: Exposing Today's Woke Libraries. It's low-volume, but I've signed up.

Recently on the book blog:

This is the ninth book down in my James Bond reading mini-project. Technincally, it's mostly re-reading, as I gobbled them up as a 60s teenager. Until my mom read a few pages of The Spy Who Loved Me and forbade me from further exploits.

The novel has an interesting backstory that Wikipedia covers: it began as a screenplay by Fleming and four other writers, got dragged into a legal wrangle. Largely due to its unique legal status, it formed the basis for two movies, eighteen years apart, both with Sean Connery playing Bond.

The edition I read is one that's been sanitized for modern, easily offended readers. No idea what was changed.

The book is unevenly paced, with a beginning that's pretty hilarious: Bond is overindulging on booze, cigarettes, and rich food, and (unfortunately) his boss, M, is on a health food kick, and orders Bond to take the cure at a naturopathic clinic, "Shrublands". Despite the book being over sixty years old, it's amazing how much the folks he encounters sound so much like today's health nannies. But in a coincidence that Charles Dickens might deem "a little far-fetched", one of his fellow patients is Count Lippe, agent of Ernst Stavro Blofeld's criminal organization SPECTRE. Lippe piques Bond's curiousity, but Lippe notices and decides Bond must die! But Bond lives, and gets his revenge. And since this throws off the timing of Blofeld's fiendish plot, Blofeld puts a hit on Lippe.

All this takes up about the first 25% of the book.

But Blofeld's audacious scheme is to hijack a British bomber carrying two atomic bombs, fly it down to the Bahamas, ditch it in the ocean, extract the nukes, and hold the American and British governments for ransom. It's a pretty good plan, because the plot is being carried out by the equally devious Emilio Largo, owner of the hydrofoil yacht Disco Volante (Italian for "flying saucer"). His cover is that he and his fellow SPECTRE goons are diving for sunken pirate treasure. But Bond finds Largo's weak spot: his mistress, Domino Vitali.

Domino smokes a lot, and takes about four pages telling the story she made up about the sailor pictured on her favored brand, Players Navy Cut.

It all culminates in a ten-page final underwater battle between Largo and SPECTRE squaring off against Bond, Felix Leiter, and a bunch of US Navy guys. Guess who wins? (And who gets away.)

Pangolin? Yeah, probably. They are considered endangered. And they are prominently mentioned in Robert Graboyes' essay: Pangolins, Bats, Zionism, and Patriarchy. But first:

What Robert's essay is actually about is "the central mechanism by which academicians impose ideological conformity—the doctoral dissertation." And, even as someone who never managed to generate mine, it's interesting.

And, for another take on What's Wrong With Our Cherished Institutions, Michael Shermer offers his view: Wokeness Poisons Science. An excerpt from his long and infuriating essay:

Shermer provides plenty more examples of scientific wokeness. If you care about science, you might want to double up on your blood pressure meds before reading.

Also of note:

• 

  Speaking of bad science… Megan McArdle is not a Junior fan, and the reason is simple: RFK Jr.’s vaccine half-truths tell a great, dangerous lie.

  I suppose it is good news that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. says he supports polio vaccination. But only in comparison to the alternative, like finding out that your cancer is “only” Stage 3.

  Sure, it’s nice for him to acknowledge that polio is worth preventing. But when it comes to the proposed head of the Department of Health and Human Services, you’d rather that went without saying. The reason it doesn’t is that Kennedy has spent much of his life casting doubt upon one of the greatest public health achievements in human history.

  We’ve eradicated smallpox, brought polio to near extinction, and made various other killing, blinding and crippling diseases into rare curiosities. Yet that victory remains fragile thanks to the efforts of people like Kennedy. Vaccination rates are declining, and diseases such as measles, which used to kill hundreds of people a year, are rising: In 2023, the United States had four measles outbreaks and 59 cases, while this year, we had 16 outbreaks and 283 cases. Only 92.6 percent of kindergartners had received the full four doses of polio vaccine in the most recent data, and though this is still above the 80 percent vaccination rate thought to provide herd immunity, several states, such as Indiana and Idaho, are inching close to that line.

  Megan looks at Junior's co-authored book Vax-Unvax (Amazon link at your right, "#1 Best Seller in Epidemiology" as I type); she finds the book "Pushing conspiracy theories [as] part of a broader pattern of weak evidence bolstered by dubious assertions."

• Why the worst get on top. Arnold Kling has an interesting and persuasive explanation in his essay: If the doctrine fits, ...

  So why do Communist regimes turn out to be so evil? My hypothesis is that the Manichean nature of the ideology selects for leaders who are psychopaths and for followers who are willing to rationalize the cruelty of the leaders.

  Because you are fighting for utopia against enemies who are trying to maintain the illegitimate status quo, the ends justify violent, repressive means. But I speculate that it is the violent means that appeal to the men who rise to the top of the Communist pyramid. The psychopaths who attain leadership positions claim to be aiming for the ends, but in fact what appeals to them is the moral license to engage in cruelty. What their followers think of as temporary and unfortunate is what the leaders find intoxicating.

  Communism works out badly because it provides diabolical men with a moral license and an avenue to obtain power.

  I think Arnold could apply this observation more broadly to many non-Commie political ideologies.

• A good idea for the LFOD-mottoed state. Drew Cline proposes a New Year Resolution for state government: N.H. should prioritize deregulation in 2025.

  New Hampshire is the freest state in the country and on the continent. But on some measures of economic freedom, we do poorly. Most Granite Staters would probably be surprised to learn that New Hampshire is in the top 20 most regulated states in the nation.

  Researchers at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University have tracked the growth of state regulations since 2019. New Hampshire ranks as the 18th most heavily regulated state. We are more heavily regulated than every other New England state save Massachusetts, which ranks 9th.

  Plenty of room for improvement, in other words. (Yes, for some reason, I'm feeling optimistic today.) You can get some detail on the Mercatus Center's take on New Hampshire here.

• Did I just say I was optimistic? Well… Yascha Mounk takes a look at Bluesky and finds: The Cruelty Is the Point.

  After Donald Trump won reelection, scores of Americans once again failed to make good on their loudly shared and oft-repeated plan of moving to Canada; but a good number of them did partake in a different, rather less cumbersome, exodus. Complaining that Twitter had been unrecognizably transformed under the ownership of Elon Musk—whom they also blame for supporting Trump—hundreds of thousands of progressives decamped to Bluesky.

  […]

  In accordance with the platform’s policy of moderating content much more aggressively than X has done under Musk, Bluesky’s moderators have been quick to act when users flout the site’s ideological consensus. In the last weeks, both small accounts with few followers and well-known writers with an established audience have seemingly been banned for such trivial “infractions” as suggesting that the Democratic Party leaving X would be a counterproductive form of “purity politics.” And yet, it was on Bluesky that prominent journalists—including, but not limited to, the infamous Taylor Lorenz—openly rejoiced in the murder of Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare. As long as progressives perceive the victims of a crime to be morally evil, the moderators on Bluesky appear to believe that threatening violence against them is justifiable.

  More recently, Bluesky users with major followings reveled in the prospect of violence against Jesse Singal, a center-left journalist who has ended up in progressive crosshairs because of his reporting about detransitioners and involvement in other heated debates regarding trans issues. Some consisted in crude death threats: “I think Jesse Singal should be beat to death in the streets,” one wrote. But a surprising number explicitly justified calls for violence as being necessary to defend themselves against the ways in which he supposedly put them at risk. “Jesse Singal and assorted grifters want us dead so i similarly want him dead,” another user wrote.

  I got a Bluesky account just to see what was going on. Not very interesting; a lot of folks reposting the Gospel According to MSNBC and Jacobin, though.

These evil cars in Germany are out of control.
Why do these cars keep doing this? pic.twitter.com/r6UpPUXwE0

— Wall Street Mav (@WallStreetMav) December 20, 2024

As I often do, I point you to Google's second definition of fetishism: "worship of an inanimate object for its supposed magical powers or because it is considered to be inhabited by a spirit." Also exemplified by the tiresome folks who natter about "gun violence".

So, what about that guy driving the car? Well, the WSJ story about him might surprise you. It surprised me. Suspect in German Christmas Market Ramming Had One Main Enemy: Islam.

The story goes on to note the driver was "working as a psychiatrist". Aha, perplexity over! Let's yank psychiatrists' driver licenses! It's the only way to be sure!

Also of note:

• It's even long since stopped being fun to dance on its grave. George Will bears the sad glad tidings: The Equal Rights Amendment, still dead after all these years.

  Pausing their denunciations of Donald Trump’s disregard of governing norms and disrespect of the Constitution, 46 Democratic senators have urged Joe Biden to do more of his own disregarding and disrespecting. Given his rule-of-law record (regarding student loan forgiveness, pardons and many other matters), he might.

  The 46 have urged Biden to order Colleen Shogan, the national archivist, whose remit includes publishing and certifying constitutional amendments, to declare the Equal Rights Amendment ratified. If the president issues such an order, she will disregard it. Otherwise, Shogan would violate her written assurances to the Senate that confirmed her appointment: She said only a court order would cause her to certify the ERA’s ratification.

  The ERA issue merits a final revisit because progressives’ latest maneuver illustrates their merely intermittent and selective devotion to constitutional and democratic proprieties, and their belief in limitless presidential power.

  GFW's history is recommended.

  And, yes, my state's senators, Jeanne Shaheen and Maggie Hassan, both signed on, displaying "their merely intermittent and selective devotion to constitutional and democratic proprieties, and their belief in limitless presidential power."

• Don't hate him just because he's a goat with wings. Carrie Robison of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) calls for some fire and brimstone to be rained down upon those who would deny Satanic principles in our state's capital: O holy fight: New Hampshire Satanic Temple statue threatened by more than vandals.

  It’s the holiday season, when the lights are blinking, the bells are ringing, and families are lining up to see festive displays of the demon-god Baphomet in the town square.

  But this year, citizens in Concord, New Hampshire, might not get to enjoy all the holiday cheer after vandals decapitated the Baphomet display set up by the Satanic Temple. In fact, the display has proven so controversial that city officials promised to review the display policy next year.

  Concord’s government would do well to remember that any rules about expressive displays in public spaces must be viewpoint-neutral, meaning the Satanic Temple has the same right to put up a holiday display as any other group.

  Protecting the Satanic Temple’s right to speak also protects the expressive rights of Christians — and Buddhists, Muslims, Jews, and everyone else.

  I'm a fan of Baby Jesus, but I see FIRE's point here.

• Just in time for Christmas. Professor Jacobs offers five true things relevant to the murdering-health-insurance-executives controversy. Short and worth reading. And he links to the same Kevin D. Williamson column we linked to back on December 10, but features a different excerpt:

  If Americans as individuals and families cannot afford to pay for routine health care, then how the hell are Americans as one big indiscriminate national lump supposed to afford paying for routine health care? If nobody can afford it, then how can everybody afford it?”

  That is… an excellent question.

• But speaking of KDW… He writes on the (apparently over for now) budget battle, and observes that we are Living Under Ad-Hocracy.

  Everybody knows what needs to be done. Nobody will do it. Anybody who tried to do it probably would suffer political annihilation at the next election. After the trainwreck, Americans will be looking around for someone to blame. They won’t need to look far.

  I was too young to be a fan of the Pogo comic, but I do recall its most famous quote: "We have met the enemy and he is us."

A guy named "Bonchie" imagines an intern who probably doesn't exist:

Politifact intern: "What if we go with the lie that Joe Biden was fit to serve? Or how about the lie that Biden wouldn't pardon his son? Those were hugely impactful."

Politifact editor: "Nah, we're doing the dog thing." https://t.co/x65rPMjsKs

— Bonchie (@bonchieredstate) December 18, 2024

I would imagine the ideological bubble at Politifact is impervious enough to ensure that no intern that uppity would ever be hired.

For actual lie-revealing journalism, this WSJ story went online yesterday, and is in today's print edition: How the White House Functioned With a Diminished Biden in Charge. It's long, but that's a free link, so click away. Sample:

From further down in the article, an unnamed aide recalls the reason he was given for a rescheduled meeting in the spring of 2021: "He has good days and bad days, and today was a bad day so we’re going to address this tomorrow.”

The WaPo came up with its "Democracy dies in darkness" slogan in Trump Year One. Four years later, it, and many other sources turned out the lights, preferring not to report on what must have been increasingly obvious. Causing Jeffrey Blehar to wonder: After the Biden Revelations, of What Value Is the Mainstream Political Media?.

I must also quote Jeffrey's eloquent conclusion:

Reader, that "say it is they do here" link goes exactly where you might hope and expect.

For the record, Pun Salad was kind of late to the party, waiting until February of this year to introduce the "President Dotard" monicker. (And, if you look back at that post, it was pretty obvious to everyone honest at the time.)

Also of note:

• Maybe you can think of a seventh? I can't. Arnold Kling proposes Six Laws of Social Learning. And I'll just list 'em, click over for his insightful commentary on each:

  1. We decide what to believe by deciding who to believe.
  2. The motive to seek status competes with the motive to seek truth.
  3. Better ideas emerge from a competitive process.
  4. We should trust people who try to persuade, not to delegitimize.
  5. We should trust people who allow for the possibility that they could be wrong.
  6. We should trust people who do not dismiss contrary evidence.

  With respect to #5: I probably glommed onto Jeff Maurer's substack because its title is I Might Be Wrong.

• They are large, they contain multitudes. Over at Reason, Joe Lancaster looks at some ugly public displays of cognitive dissonance: Prominent Progressives Struggle To Condemn Murder Without Defending the Murderer. Joe talks about the same pols we have: Bernie, Liz, AOC.

  But when it comes to half-hearted condemnations of violence, filmmaker Michael Moore takes the cake.

  The Oscar-winning documentarian's 2007 film Sicko criticized the American health care industry, advocated a single-payer system like in Canada or Europe, and even touted the health care system in Cuba. Mangione's manifesto seemed to cite Moore for having "illuminated the corruption and greed" of American health insurers.

  Moore penned a lengthy Substack post over the weekend, winkingly titled "A Manifesto Against For-Profit Health Insurance Companies," in which he addressed whether he would condemn Mangione's act of violence.

  "Throughout my adult life, I have repeatedly stated that I'm a pacifist," Moore writes. But after Thompson's murder, "there was an immediate OUTPOURING of anger toward the health insurance industry. Some people have stepped forward to condemn this anger. I am not one of them."

  Well, fine. Over the years, we've all been treated to mainstream media's condemnation of really serious right wing/fascist violence that's gonna happen any day now. But when it comes to actual murderous violence, we get mealy-mouthed excuses.

• Of course they are. The Google LFOD news alert sounded for this article in CNHINews: NH electors a diverse group.

  Four New Hampshire women — one transgender, one an immigrant from Venezuela, one Indian-American, and an African-American pledged the state's four Electoral College votes for Vice President Kamala Harris to be President of the United States and Tim Walz vice president at a ceremony on Tuesday.

  Picture of this virtue-signaling ceremony at the link. But where's LFOD? Ah, there it is, in a quote from Somersworth's Geri Cannon, the transgender member from Somersworth:

  "When I was a teenager, I knew I was different," she said. "I kept my secret safe in a closet. I didn't open that closet door until I learned there were more people like me. I didn't know what would happen to me or how people would react. We live in a state where our motto is 'Live Free or Die,' I decided to find out if it really is."

  Um. "It really is" what?

George Will observes strange shipmates: Longshoremen and Trump are in the same anti-automation boat.

Today's Getty image is of a Chinese port, indicating the Commies have a better grasp on what improves productivity than our incoming president.

And I had to Google that "horny-handed son of toil" phrase, since it sounded literary. And it was! Oxford Essential Quotations attributes it to Lord Salisbury. He also coined "too clever by half". And also…

I imagine Lord Salisbury is pontificating in heaven, in a special room where brandy is sniffed and snipped, and fine cigars smoked.

Also of note:

• Still crazy after all these years. On occasion, James Lileks will provide his Bleat readers with The Wednesday Reivew of Modern Thought. Yesterday, he took on (for some reason) a 2017 article in the Guardian by one Abi Wilkinson: Why not fund the welfare state with a 100% inheritance tax? Excerpt:

  Let us have a look at some key arguments.

  Yes, the desire to pass on property to your descendants may be natural – but

  Need we go on, having run into the tell-tale but? Sure.

  but why should we be slaves to our biology? Social progress has frequently depended on our ability to transcend individualistic urges and work together for the common good.

  Wanting to give your children your property is a matter of being a slave to biology. After all, we went to the moon by hiring a lot of unrelated people, right? Bad example; waste of money, wasn’t social progress. Well, pick a social issue, and you’ll see it was solved by transcending individualistic urges - a feat that was achieved entirely by volunteers, of course, not the application of the force of the state.

  In contemporary times, most people agree that tax should facilitate transfer of wealth from those who “have” to those who “need”.

  “Most people” being everyone she knows. Other people have a notion that the purpose of a tax is not to facilitate transfer of wealth but to fund the various duties the state has assumed or been given authority to perform by the governed.

  Yeah, and it's not as if they're doing a real bang-up job at that. How about they leave off doing anything more sophisticated unless and until they master doing the stuff that's in (for example) the Constitution?

• Slack cut. Jacob Sullum is no Trump acolyte, but he sees some possibilities: Trump's January 6 pardons could address some real injustices.

  On his first day in office, President-elect Donald Trump promises, he will pardon at least some of the 1,500 or so people who have been charged with crimes in connection with the riot at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. He notes that most of those defendants were not violent and that they faced a lot of pressure to plead guilty, as about 1,000 have done so far.

  Trump's most vociferous critics are apt to view any pardons in these cases as an outrageous and self-interested attempt to excuse the behavior of "insurrectionists" who sought to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. But even though Trump himself is largely to blame for the riot, which was inspired by his unfounded insistence that Joe Biden had stolen the election, he raises some valid points about prosecutorial power, which can lead to unjust results that might be remedied by the prudent use of presidential clemency.

  Jacob's bottom line:

  When you combine that sort of discretion with the puzzling practice of imposing sentences after trial based on allegations that the prosecution failed to prove beyond a reasonable doubt, it is not hard to see why some January 6 defendants may have received excessively severe penalties. If Trump draws appropriate distinctions and uses his clemency powers carefully—a big if—he can mitigate those injustices.

  What's the probability he will use "his clemency powers carefully". Er… um … well, let us be charitable as befits the season, and say "We'll see."

• And it's a spectator sport we can all enjoy. At Townhall, Rebecca Downs observes The Trump Team Sure Loves Trolling Elizabeth Warren. Rebecca looks at a recent WaPo story about Senator Warren's complaints/allegations about Elon Musk's potential conflicts of interest in running that government efficiency department, DOGE.

  The report also contains comment from Karoline Leavitt, who was the press secretary for the Trump campaign and the transition, and who will serve in such a role during the Trump-Vance administration. 

  "President Trump has assembled the most impressive and qualified team of innovators, entrepreneurs, and geniuses to advise and staff our government," Leavitt said in a statement that looks to have represented the Trump team well. "Pocahontas can play political games and send toothless letters, but the Trump-Vance transition will continue to be held to the highest ethical and legal standards possible — a standard unfamiliar to a career politician whose societal impact is 1/1024th of Elon Musk’s."

  Karoline Leavitt ran for Congress in my district against Chris Pappas back in 2022. She lost by about 8 percentage points. I'm pretty sure I voted for her, but so far she seems pretty good in her fallback job.

• We're all gettin' old, I suppose, but… For some reason, the folks at Dotdash Meredith started sending me issues of People magazine. For free!

  So, dutifully, every week I page through an issue, marvelling at how few of today's celebrities I've heard of.

  But their latest issue had a short article about a new Netflix series starring Ray Romano and Lisa Kudrow (No Good Deed).

  And here's the thing: I'm pretty sure I would not recognize Lisa Kudrow if I saw her in public. (Recent pic on your right. What do you think?)

  What's the story? Aggressive plastic surgery? This MSN article seems to weigh in favor of Botox.

  Anyway, I watched the first episode of No Good Deed, and … nah, too dark for me. And Lisa's face is a tad disconcerting.

From the folks who gave us the "Inflation Reduction Act", we now have the "Social Security Fairness Act". My state's senior senator is in a rush to dole out (additional) taxpayer cash to the "dedicated". And also to dance at the behest of her union puppet masters:

The Social Security Fairness Act would support our teachers, firefighters, law enforcement officers and so many other state and local employees that are dedicated to bettering our communities. I urge the swift passage of this important bipartisan bill. https://t.co/zIUJF9t6o4

— Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (@SenatorShaheen) December 17, 2024

Let's make that passage swift! The swifter the better!

The WSJ editorialists have a more jaundiced view: it's A GOP Gift for Randi Weingarten.

But Reason's Eric Boehm has had it up to here [imagine me holding my palm horizontally about eight inches over my head] with talk about "fairness": Social Security is deeply unfair. The Social Security Fairness Act won't fix that. He shares some of the irate comments he received about his previous article about the legislation (Senate tees up $200 billion Social Security giveaway to public sector workers, also recommended).

Eric's bottom line:

But, then, they should be honest about what's happening. This isn't an attempt to make anything more or less fair. It's just a politically powerful special interest group trying to grab a bigger slice of the pie for its members.

Also of note:

• My washer is covered, except… I just signed up to extend my warranty on my LG clothes washer.

  I did this, even though I know extended warranties are ripoffs.

  I did this even though my past experience with LG repair service found it to be slow and tedious.

  And I did this even though the service contract I agreed to has a daunting list of twenty-six things that are not covered. I was especially impressed by:

  5. Breakdown caused by acts of God or other disaster (whether natural, man-made, local or catastrophic), abuse, acts of war, civil disorders, corrosion, dirt, mold, earthquake, fire, hail, insects or other animals, liquid immersion, malicious mischief, misuse, negligence, nuclear accident, riot, rust, sand, smoke, storm, terrorist attack, vandalism, and wind;

  Yes, in the event the Seabrook reactor (only 30 crow-flies miles away) decides to target my washer with a fatal blast of radiation, I'm out of luck.

• We're number… 17!? Cato has issued this year's edition of the Human Freedom Index, comparing the liberty enjoyed (or not) by the inhabitants of 165 jurisdictions around the world. It "uses 86 distinct indicators of personal and economic freedom" in the areas of

  • Rule of law
  • Security and safety
  • Movement
  • Religion
  • Association, assembly, and civil society
  • Expression and information
  • Relationships
  • Size of government
  • Legal system and property rights
  • Sound money
  • Freedom to trade internationally
  • Regulation

  That about covers it, right?

  Spoiler: the USA is tied with the United Kingdom for 17th place. Ahead of us, freedom-wise: Switzerland, New Zealand, Denmark, Luxembourg, Ireland, Finland, Sweden, Iceland, Australia, Estonia, Canada, Norway, Japan, Germany, Netherlands, and Czechia.

  It would be nice if the incoming administration made it a goal to move us up in the rankings. Are you telling me we can't out-freedom Canada?

• This is probably the best argument that can be made. That incoming administration (Trump II: Sacre Bleu) has indicated that they want to get rid of our twice-a-year clock fiddling. Nate Silver, a serious thinker, disagrees, thinking we should Save Daylight Savings Time.

  Last week, President-elect Trump pledged to “eliminate” Daylight Savings Time1, which he called “inconvenient, and very costly to our Nation”. The idea may have been inspired by DOGE, the Department of Government Efficiency, an agency set to be run by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, after Musk and Ramaswamy pitched a similar plan earlier this month.

  I suppose I’m not anti-DOGE, though it’s hard to say because its structure and its mandate are unclear. I’d certainly like for it not to cost $2.5 billion to build a single mile of subway track in New York, for instance. But without having any real teeth to implement its policies, DOGE may focus more on gimmicks — and will run the risk of violating the precept of Chesterton's Fence by changing things that are perfectly fine or where the current rules are in place for a reason.

  Daylight Savings Time is a perfect example of this. Eliminating it would deprive the average American of 40 minutes of waking daylight in the summer months. This is a terrible idea.

  Nate is a data-driven guy, and he's dug out some very interesting data ("The average American claims to be sleeping from 10:06 p.m. to 6:42 a.m.") and generates more.

  I am kind of a radical, arguing not only for the abolition of DST, but getting the government out of the business of dictating what time it is. See, if you dare, my magnum opus from 2013: The Right Number of Time Zones is Zero.)

  So Nate didn't convince me. But see what you think.

  (Note to the Reader: if you want 40 more minutes of waking daylight in the summer, just wake up 40 minutes earlier. Or maybe later, I'm not sure which way that works. But you're smart, you can figure that out.)

• "It's a bold strategy, Cotton. Let's see if it pays off for 'em." Penzeys is a retailer of spices, apparently. And they are (also apparently) trying to build their brand on …

  Their website even has an "About Republicans" page. I find it kinda-sorta passive-aggressive, but see what you think. And their past tweets seem to tilt aggressive. Example:

  You act as though people have no choice but to support the racism, January 6, environmental destruction, vaccine lies & all the rest. But they do have a choice. Republicans are choosing to end democracy & destroy the planet. What more would they have to do before you say enough?

  — Penzeys Spices (@PenzeysSpices) February 6, 2022

  Well, it's not as if I'm gonna shop there, I guess. Nearest store: Arlington MA; kind of a hike for chili powder.

  (Item headline quote here. You probably knew that.)

Charles C.W. Cooke thinks that Political Opportunists Make This a Silly Season to Remember.

I, for one, see solid arguments for forgetting it ASAP. But here's Charlie:

Other Constitution-trashers named and shamed by CCWC: Bill Kristol, Steve Bannon. (And, as noted yesterday, we in New Hampshire can add our CongressCritters Chris Pappas and Annie Kuster to the naughty list.)

Also of note:

• Because there's a little Madame Defarge in all of us? I don't think Becket Adams (writing in the Hill) ever gets around to delivering the answer his column's headline promises: Why they're so eager to make excuses for murder. He does detail the mealy-mouthedness of figures like Elizabeth Warren and AOC who seemingly can't simply say "Murder is wrong" without having their next word be "but".

  Becket poses the interesting hypothetical:

  As a quick exercise, let’s imagine that Mangione had murdered an abortion doctor, provoking days of celebration on right-wing social media. What would the reaction from polite society be if, for instance, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) were to rationalize this celebration as a natural response from people who sincerely believe that abortion is murder?

  How do you think the press would react? It would be shock and disgusted, and rightly so. But there is no widespread shock in the media over the remarks made by Ocasio-Cortez and Warren. We see no great outcry over their rationalizations. This is because deranged left-wingers enjoy representation in the news media, unlike deranged right-wingers.

  Hey, remember when Bill Clinton had his Sister Souljah moment? It would be nice if more Democrats had those.

• Oh, the humanity! An AP story is headlined: Journalists anticipate a renewed hostility toward their work under the incoming Trump administration. At Power Line, John Hinderaker says: Pity the Poor Reporters. It's kind of a classic fisking, with excerpts from the AP interspersed with John's comments.

  Skipping down to the end:

  Finally, the AP takes a sympathetic view of ProPublica’s attempt to smear Pete Hegseth:

  Pete Hegseth also used social media to say that ProPublica — he called it a “Left Wing hack group” — …

  ProPublica is a left-wing hack group, although the AP describes its editor in chief as the “prominent editor” of a “nonprofit news outlet,” and quotes him positively in another context.

  …was about to knowingly publish a false report that he hadn’t been accepted into West Point decades ago. The news site had contacted him after officials at the military academy contradicted Hegseth’s claim of acceptance. Hegseth provided proof that those officials were mistaken, and ProPublica never published a story.

  The AP sees no problem with ProPublica’s collaborating with someone at the USMA who was trying to smear Hegseth to help block his nomination as Secretary of Defense. It was only because Hegseth happened to keep his acceptance letter from West Point, and, I take it, was able to produce the letter within the one hour allotted by ProPublica, that the lie did not go forward.

  “That’s journalism,” noted ProPublica’s Jesse Eisinger. But a narrative had taken hold: “ProPublica’s botched Pete Hegseth smear,” the New York Post called it in a headline.

  That’s journalism? Well, yes, that’s journalism in the eyes of the Associated Press and the rest of the liberal media. I have seen no reason to believe that any significant number of journalists have looked in the mirror and honestly tried to assess why most Americans now view them with contempt. Let me spell it out: the liberal press is dishonest. It is a tool of the Democratic Party and the left. It lies and misleads, constantly, about Republicans and conservatives, while consistently covering up stories that reflect badly on Democrats and liberals.

  Until journalists start correcting their misbehavior, they are going to continue to feel nervous. Because, as the AP says, quoting the executive director of the Reporters Committee for the Freedom of the Press, “our most important audiences are the courts and the public.”

  I, for one, am pretty disgusted with the New York Times, which doesn't have a single book by Amor Towles on its list of the 100 Best Books of the 21st Century.

  But a slight redemption: in their accompanying Readers Pick article, A Gentleman in Moscow weighs in at #3, and The Lincoln Highway is at #75.

• Spoiler: Die Hard doesn't make the cut. James Lileks asks, and answers: What, exactly, is a "Christmas Movie"?

  I am not rigid about what is and is not a Christmas movie, if you’re wondering. Hallmark movies fit the definition, even though they’re just Harlequin paperbacks with sleigh-bell soundtracks. Sample plot:

  A busy career woman learns the true meaning of Christmas when she falls under the spell of a darkly charismatic European, only to realize that its her working-class man, who literally would walk barefoot across broken glass for her, is her true love, and -

  No, wait, that’s Die Hard. More like this:

  Kendee Kermle is a busy New York businesswoman who runs her own candy caramel company, called Better than Sects, a reference to her troubled history escaping a religious cult. She thinks she is in love with her fiancé Harcourt X. Groyne, a man who imports Campari to the US then exports it right back, because it’s awful. A few days before Christmas she gets a cryptic message from a high school sweetheart Truman Paynter in her home town of Kincaid: it says only “do you remember when.” She realizes that she does not, in fact, remember when, and must go home to learn the mysteries of her past. She runs out on her fiance and drives to Kincade through a picturesque snowstorm, and arrives just in time to meet up with Truman, who runs a dog shelter / yoga studio, and they make the candies that will put the charity drive to save the town gazebo over the top. It’s the best Christmas ever!

  And there's a great AI-generated pic of James crawling through the Nakatomi Plaza ductwork.

Recently on the book blog:

This book is "Volume One of Bomb Light". And it's a mere 303 pages of text, considerably downsized from Neal Stephenson's previous doorstops. And (slight spoiler) it ends on kind of a cliff-hanger.

Hm, could it be a cold-blooded marketing ploy to get us Stephenson fans to pony up for two (or three, or four, or…) volumes instead of one?

Doesn't matter. Buying Stephenson books in hardcover is simply paying my fan club dues.

Back when I read Stephenson's "Baroque Cycle" books, I speculated (more than once) that he had a time machine to zap back to the past times and places he described with such meticulous and vivid detail. Here, he fires up that device once again for the 1930s, visiting both the USA (San Francisco; Washington D.C.; Chicago; Seattle; Fort Sickles, North Dakota) and the Soviet Union (Moscow; Magnitogorsk; Leningrad nee Petrograd, nowadays Saint Petersburg).

Those are all visited by Dawn Rae Bjornberg whose exploits this book follows. She's a devout Commie, but also an independent spirit, and that's a tough role to play in both countries, especially when you keep finding yourself in situations of violence, betrayal, x-rays, balloons, and … well, also the "Century of Progress International Exposition", aka the 1933 Chicago World's Fair.

There are also cameos from actual people: military men, Commie thugs, and (oh yeah) a teenager who will someday become a famed scientist. No spoilers here, but, yeah, I've blogged about him a lot over the years. (And, yes, he actually attended the Chicago World's Fair, according to his biographer.)

I love capitalism because it has lifted much of the world out of poverty, made lifesaving innovations easily accessible, and allowed millions of people to live happy lives full of passion and love

You hate capitalism becaue someone you've never met owns a yacht and you don't

— Kiyah Willis (@kiyahwillis) December 14, 2024

I'm really not a fan of explaining the beliefs of my political opponents via their psychological quirks. And yet… there's gotta be some explanation for it, right?

Anyway, that's from Daniel J. Mitchell's latest entry in his ongoing series: The Case for Capitalism, Part VII. He links to and quotes Domenic Pino's July 2023 column for Law & Liberty, Why Markets Work. Which is excellent, I'll excerpt a slice that overlaps his:

Whittaker Chambers was also, famously, not an Ayn Rand fan.

Anyway, I encourage you to read Dan's post, and also its predecessors, parts I-VI.

Also of note:

• Maybe God will grant him mercy, but… Kevin D. Williamson says History Will Not Have Mercy on Joe Biden.

  President Joe Biden—forgotten but not gone as Jim Geraghty so nicely put it over at National Review—is a much-reduced figure, and one naturally wants to be charitable toward him as his failure as a politician and his failure as a father are fused together in the waning days of his presidency, a period dominated by his dishonest and impolitic pardon of his son Hunter, who was duly convicted of tax and gun offenses in a case brought not by some overreaching political enemy but by Biden’s own Justice Department.

  Charity is a virtue. But, as journalists refresh their pre-writes of the president’s obituary (and I do not mean the political one) and the historians begin their first drafts in earnest, honesty is a superseding virtue. There is simply no way to tell the truth about Joe Biden’s life and career without kicking him while he is down—it is not like he is about to get back up and make of himself a more sportsmanlike target.

  The defining qualities of Joe Biden the political man were arrogance and dishonesty, compounded by stupidity. That Biden lasted as long in politics as he did—he first was elected to the Senate the year your gray-bearded correspondent was born—and that he rose as high as he did is an indictment of the state of Delaware, the Democratic Party, and the American electorate, which was wise to choose Biden over Donald Trump in 2020 but foolish to put itself in such a dilemma to begin with.

  KDW actually makes the same point as in this item's headline.

  But wait! Biden's being urged to make one last assault on the Constitution, as reported by Annie Karni of the New York Times: Gillibrand Presses Biden to Amend the Constitution to Enshrine Sex Equality.

  "But wait," you are no doubt thinking. "The President has no role in amending the Constitution."

  Well, the argument NY Senator Gillibrand is making is: the Equal Rights Amendment has been ratified, ignoring the time limits set by Congress and the ratification rescissions by six states.

  So all Biden needs to do is order the US Archivist to "publish" the ERA as a working amendment. Constitution amended by presidential decree!

  House Democrats are also advocating this Constitutional end-run including, shamefully, both current New Hampshire CongressCritters, Chris Pappas and Annie Kuster.

  And scary part is that I wouldn't be surprised a bit if Biden undertook this gambit to fully cement his legacy as a wannabe tyrant.

• Those New Jersey drones are powered by beef tallow, I tells ya! A wild-eyed Andy Kessler asks: It’s All a Conspiracy, Right?

  Robert F. Kennedy Jr., nominated to run the Department of Health and Human Services, has brought conspiracy theories back into the mainstream. In the past, he has claimed vaccines cause autism (since debunked), that we should drink raw milk (last month it was found possibly to contain bird flu), and that 5G broadband is used to “control our behavior” (well, it does tell my Uber driver where to go).

  Mr. Kennedy recently tweeted: “Seed oils are one of the most unhealthy ingredients that we have in foods.” He’ll even sell you a $35 “Make Frying Oil Tallow Again” hat. Ending corn and other farm subsidies would solve their overuse—but tallow? Cardiologists suggest that saturated fat in beef tallow increases heart disease. Can we agree that policy should never be based on lawyers’ theories?

  Humans are gullible. We like to be told tall tales. We eat them up. The Central Intelligence Agency killed John F. Kennedy. It must be true, I saw it in an Oliver Stone movie! Go to the Texas School Book Depository in Dallas, and you’ll find a 1980 Texas Historic Landmark sign that reads: “When Lee Harvey Oswald allegedly shot and killed President John F. Kennedy.” Allegedly? Well, those dissecting frames 313 to 316 of the Zapruder film think so.

  And, no, Paul McCartney is not dead.

• Feel-good story of the day. An analysis by Jeffrey Blehar: Trump ABC Defamation Suit: George Stephanopoulos’s Partisan Irresponsibility Costs Network.

  Stephanopoulos claimed, in an aired interview with Nancy Mace, that a jury found Trump "liable for rape".

  He made that claim twice.

  But (in actual fact) the jury in question explicitly declined to do that.

  So I'm in complete agreement with Jeffrey's take:

  Yes, I’m reacting to news of the ABC payout to Trump to settle his defamation suit with the same line that old Grandpa Blehar — a hardworking western New York railroad man — used whenever the Yankees won: “Ain’t the beer cold, boys?” I love to see this. Nobody will ever mistake me for a Trump partisan, but by the same token I yield to no man in my contempt for the corruption, bias, and sloth of the mainstream media, which has shucked its skin of respectability and devolved into a niche market for the few aging progressives who still get their news from television.

  I enjoy seeing ABC get what’s coming to it for its arrogance and carelessness, and it couldn’t have involved a more deserving agent of disaster than the odious Stephanopoulos, who will otherwise pay no price professionally for the incident. I saw one former mainstream media journalist dismiss the $15 million settlement as analogous to “Disney avoiding legal costs” and had to laugh. Big media corporations do not drop that much money, plus attorneys’ fees and a televised apology, merely to avoid costs. They do so because they fear that worse things might become public. Neither side would have enjoyed the discovery process in this case, but ABC had far, far more to lose than Donald Trump.

  That $15 million is a lot of Disney+ subscriptions.

David Friedman has good advice: First ask what it means. Example: “Healthcare Is A Human Right” Analysis:

The Beastie Boys once told me that I should fight for my right to party. In fact they said I had to do it. Try and figure out what they meant by that!

Also of note:

• So here's the good news… The WSJ editorialists bid An Unfond Farewell to Lina Khan.

  One benefit of the recent election is this: Lina Khan soon won’t have American business to kick around anymore. This week Mr. Trump named Andrew Ferguson to replace Ms. Khan as chair of the Federal Trade Commission. She won’t be missed, except perhaps by corporate lawyers who are racking up billable hours defending against her antitrust revanchism.

  The FTC lawsuit filed Thursday against Southern Glazer’s Wine and Spirits is a classic Khan job. She has resurrected the dormant 1936 Robinson-Patman Act to sue the nation’s largest liquor distributor for alleged illegal price discrimination. The FTC hasn’t litigated a claim under this law for more than 30 years.

  Robinson-Patman says suppliers cannot “discriminate in price between different purchasers of commodities of like grade and quality.” The FTC alleges that Southern Glazer’s squeezed mom-and-pop businesses by selling them booze at higher prices than to larger chains, which it claims resulted in fewer choices and higher prices.

  The FTC offers no evidence for the latter, and volume discounts are ubiquitous in retail. Most retailers charge customers lower marginal prices on products bought in bulk. This reduces prices. There’s also no evidence mom-and-pop shops have been harmed by these volume discounts. Liquor and convenience stores have added roughly 24,000 jobs in the last five years.

  Trivia: The FTC's Andrew Ferguson is not the same guy as this Andrew Ferguson. (We used to link to him all the time. Fun example here.)

• … and here's the bad news. Brought to you by Jack Dicastro: Trump's pick of Mark Meador for FTC is bad for consumers.

  President-elect Donald Trump announced Tuesday his intention to nominate Mark Meador as a commissioner of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). If confirmed, Meador would take over the commissioner slot currently held by FTC Chair Lina Khan, whose term expired on September 26.

  Meador is an accomplished antitrust litigator, but his antagonism toward Big Tech, and bigness per se, will compromise Trump's stated goals of maintaining America's economic and technological dominance.

  He has long opposed big business, from Google to Ticketmaster, and regards the free market as merely a means to the end of human flourishing, not as an end in and of itself. Meador's stance on economic freedom reflects his explicitly anti-libertarian conception of freedom as "requir[ing] order and restraints upon our passions." Achieving Meador's vision of freedom apparently also requires restraints upon trade.

  This is why we can't have nice things.

Jeff Maurer lays down his non-negotiable point: "Baby It's Cold Outside" is Good, So Bite Me and Happy Holidays.

It's from the 1949 movie Neptune's Daughter, which is available for your viewing pleasure for a few bucks at Amazon Prime, link at your right. That's Ricardo Montalban, Kaaaaaahn himself, as the Lothario, centuries and light years away from his various encounters with James T. Kirk.

Also in the flick: Red Skelton. "Now, that's a name I've not heard in a long time."

Further fun fact: "Baby, It's Cold Outside" was a substitute for a Frank Loesser song that the studio censors thought was even dirtier.

Also of (non-musical) note:

• In the mood for some libertarian red meat? Check out the Cato Institute Report to the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). It makes those "Project 2025" folks at Heritage look like a bunch of lefty squishes.

  It's a mere 37 pages (PDF). But it's pithy. Example: Under the "Remove Energy Regulations and Subsidies" section, here's a list for Congress:

  • Abolish the DOE, transfer the nuclear weapons program to a national nuclear weapons agency under the direction of a civilian official in the Department of Defense, and privatize the national laboratories.
  • Abolish the NRC and allow states to fill the void if they so choose.
  • Repeal the Federal Power Act of 1935 and abolish the FERC.
  • Repeal the Public Utility Regulatory Policy Act of 1978.
  • Repeal the Energy Policy Act of 2005.
  • Repeal the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), especially the energy subsidies.
  • Return to taxpayers all grants issued pursuant to the IRA.
  • End the national energy policy of net zero by 2050.
  • Unravel the Renewable Fuels Standard and other federal biofuel programs.

  But that doesn't let Trump off the hook. Here's his list:

  • Immediately limit the payout of energy subsidies in the IRA by tightening IRS guidance.
  • Cancel subsidies to all energy technologies, including research and development subsidies to renewable energy and nuclear power.
  • Ensure DOI and other agencies allow for domestic energy production and related commodities, such as critical minerals.
  • Withdraw from the Paris Climate Agreement.
  • Nominate a FERC chair who will 1) prioritize electric grid reliability and affordability and 2) reverse costly transmission expansion rules like Order No. 1920.
  • Nominate an NRC chair who will remove regulatory barriers to nuclear energy deployment.
  • Encourage states to allow novel ways to supply electricity, including through private grids.
  • Urge states to repeal costly technology-specific mandates, including for offshore wind.
  • Lift the “pause” on exports of liquefied natural gas.
  • Stop discriminating against unconventional energy uses (such as Bitcoin mining) and energy resources.
  • Prevent agencies with no energy jurisdiction, such as the Securities and Exchange Commission, from engaging in energy or climate regulation.
  • Reject carbon taxes styled as greenhouse gas–based tariffs.
  • Clarify that subsidies cannot form the basis for EPA regulations.
  • Resist pressure from green groups to rapidly expand the electric transmission grid.
  • Repeal the several statutes that created the energy-efficiency regulations administered by the DOE.
  • Amend the Clean Water Act and other statutes to allow entrepreneurs to supply American shale gas to regions that demand it, including New England.
  • Auction off and shut down the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.

  Any bets on how much of that will actually happen?

• Emma Camp is brave. Libertarians have a knee-jerk attitude about taxes: cut 'em. But on the table for 2025 are the expiring cuts from Trump Part I: You'll Miss Me When I'm Gone. And Emma points out: Keeping individual income tax cuts is a bad, expensive idea.

  Extending the individual income tax portions of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) is supposed to be a good thing, right? After all, who doesn't love lower taxes? However, data from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) predicts that, without accompanying spending cuts, these tax cuts are going to cost the government.

  If the cuts continue, it's possible that "the positive effects of lower taxes would be counteracted by the negative effects of higher debt," according to a Tuesday report from the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB).

  "Despite claims that tax cuts pay for themselves," the CRFB adds, "analyses from across the political spectrum have found that the economic effects of extending the expiring parts of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) would offset 1 to 14 percent of the revenue loss – falling well short of the 100 percent needed to pay for itself."

  I'm pretty sure the voters made it clear over the past few elections: please continue the irresponsible spending, and I don't want to pay more taxes.

• Unions hate him! Drew Cline reports, with a straight face, that New Hampshire could boost manufacturing jobs with one simple trick: becoming a right-to-work state.

  Reviving American manufacturing is a hot topic in the nation and New Hampshire once again. A new Department of Business and Economic Affairs report on the state’s advanced manufacturing sector has drawn attention to that field’s recent growth here (well above the New England average) as well as its economic benefits (tens of thousands of jobs, billions in economic output).

  Policymakers hoping to help specific industries tend to suggest protectionist measures (such as tariffs). But with manufacturing, as with the economy as a whole, recent research shows that enhancing individual freedom by repealing protectionist regulations is a more effective way to stimulate significant job growth.

  To create a surge in domestic manufacturing jobs, all a state has to do is pass a right-to-work law.

  The absence of a right-to-work law is (yet another) out-of-whack oddity of our LiveFreeOrDie state.

  If you'd like to read a rebuttal, NHJournal has an anti-RTW column from Rich Gulla, claiming Advocates For 'Right to Work' Are Wrong. Gulla is president of the State Employees’ Association of New Hampshire. Which is a union for state employees. For a counterpoint to him, check out the New Hampshire Archives of the National Right to Work Committee.

• Jeanne shakes her Hamas pom-poms. My state's senior senator seems to be edging into the Sanders/Warren camp. Michael Graham reports In Latest Slap at US Ally, Shaheen Accuses Israel of 'Starving' Gaza.

  U.S. Sen. Jeanne Shaheen followed up her vote against selling offensive weapons to Israel by accusing America’s closest ally in the Middle East of holding up food aid to the people of Gaza. It’s the same charge the anti-Israel International Criminal Court (ICC) has leveled against the Jewish state.

  It’s also a charge that has been repeatedly debunked, supporters of Israel say.

  Shaheen, who has long supported more cooperative relations with the terror-sponsoring regime of Iran, is stepping up her anti-Israel rhetoric as she prepares to become the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

  Shaheen was one of just 18 Senate Democrats who voted to block the sale of some U.S. weapons to Israel last month. The country is in a war with both Hamas and Hezbollah — two Iranian proxies that have spent years attacking Israeli civilians and are committed to Israel’s destruction — as well as facing missile barrages launched directly from Tehran.

  “I voted in favor of the joint resolutions today because I believe the Netanyahu government needs to change course on the conduct of the war in Gaza,” Shaheen said.

  If Senator Jeanne has any demands for Hamas to "change course", they don't seem to have made the news.

Randall Munroe highlights The Maritime Approximation:

The Google agrees.

I just have to point out that "The Maritime Approximation" would have been a good title for a seagoing episode of The Big Bang Theory.

And, yes, of course Wikipedia has a List of The Big Bang Theory episodes. Nothing "maritime", but they had three "approximations": "The Einstein Approximation" (Season 3 Episode 14); "The Prestidigitation Approximation" (Season 4 Episode 18); and "The Expedition Approximation" (Season 8 Episode 6).

And now on to less important matters:

• Reliably making an ass of herself. We talked about Senator Warren's "but" yesterday, but her fellow progressive wasn't far "behind" in scraping the "bottom" of the argument barrel. Jeffrey Blehar notes: AOC Casts Her Vote for Elizabeth Warren and Team 'But'. (Emphasis added.)

  So, let’s also proudly induct Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez into the club, for today she chose disgrace. In an interview outside the Capitol this afternoon, Ocasio-Cortez went on the record with her take on the Thompson murder, and, much like Elizabeth Warren, she likes big “buts” and she cannot lie:

  This is not to say that an act of violence is justified, but I think for anyone who is confused or shocked or appalled, they need to understand that people interpret and feel and experience denied claims as an act of violence against them. People go homeless over the financial devastation of a diagnosis that doesn’t get addressed. When we talk about how systems are violent in this country, in this passive kind of way, our health care system is like that for a huge amount of Americans.

  As I am often fond of saying, Read that one again, folks. Amazingly, Ocasio-Cortez’s response somehow managed to be almost as repulsive as Warren’s while remaining perfectly in sync with it. (You have to hand it to AOC: She’s not about to be outperformed by some shriveled bag of bones like Warren in the “Most Viably Progressive” branding sweepstakes on the Left.) Being told “no” by an insurance company — something I have been told many times, with no better answer to turn to — is now commensurate to an act of violence, and for no other reason than the fact that we culturally ceded the commonsense definition of the term to activists and affectedly wounded fauns like Ocasio-Cortez over a decade ago. What does the “violence” of pumping five slugs into the back of a stranger merely for holding the wrong symbolic job really mean, Ocasio-Cortez asks us to consider, compared with the “passive kind” of violence of the health care system?

  I say: throw the "bums" out.

  (Yes, sometimes against my better judgment, I decide to live up down to this blog's title.)

• They are mythapprehensions. There are probably more than ten of them, all told, but Brian Riedl picks the low-hanging fruit at the Manhattan Institute: Correcting the Top 10 Tax Myths.

  Picking at random, let's look at Myth 7: “Taxing Millionaires and Corporations Can Eliminate the Deficit”:

  Just as “tax cuts for the rich” are falsely blamed for causing nearly all budget deficits, it is commonly claimed that raising taxes on corporations and wealthy families can eliminate budget deficits and even finance a Scandinavian-style welfare state. Once again, the uncompromising math shows otherwise.

  Let’s begin with an extreme example. Even seizing all the wealth from America’s 800 billionaires—every home, business, investment, car, and yacht—and somehow reselling it all for full market value would raise only enough revenue to finance the federal government one time for eight months (while cratering the stock market, where much of that wealth had been held).[23] Taxing million-dollar earners at 100% marginal tax rates would not balance the long-term budget even if each of these taxpayers continued working for zero net pay. Only slightly more realistically, a Bernie Sanders–style tax agenda consisting of federal income-tax rates as high as 52%, capital-gains tax rates of 62%, a 35% corporate tax that includes all multinational income, a 12.4% Social-Security payroll tax on wages above $250,000, a wealth tax at a rate as high as 8%, an estate-tax rate as high as 77%, new financial transaction taxes, and countless other surtaxes and tax increases would raise, at most, 2% of GDP in tax revenues out of a current-policy budget deficit heading to 9% of GDP in a decade and 14% of GDP in three decades.[24] Even those revenue figures implausibly assume that people and corporations would continue working, saving, and investing, despite combined (federal and state) marginal tax rates on labor and investment approaching 80% to 100%. Actual tax revenues would likely increase by closer to 1% of GDP.

  The mathematical reality is that there are simply not enough millionaires, billionaires, and undertaxed corporations to close a 30-year budget deficit of $115 trillion–$180 trillion (depending on the baseline used). A federal tax system that set every “tax the rich” policy dial at its revenue-maximizing levels—without regard to the resulting economic damage—could raise, at most, 1%–2% of GDP in new revenues (while surely killing jobs and lowering wages across the economy). Obviously, deficit reduction should put all policies on the table, including some new upper-income taxes. However, middle-class taxes finance most of Europe’s exorbitant spending levels, and they would have to provide the bulk of any tax-heavy solution to America’s budget deficits.

  See if Brian debunked your favorite myth. And he includes eight "smaller myths" after the top ten.

• Your tax wampum at work. Jerry Coyne is slightly dismayed by yet another lame-duck initiative from the current paleface in the White House: Indigenous knowledge and climate change: a new collaboration.

  Will Indigenous knowledge, as instantiated in Native North American tribal “ways of knowing”, help ameliorate climate change? One would think “not much” because anthropogenic climate change, now a virtual certainty, is caused by the accumulation of greenhouse gases, and it’s hard to imagine that Native Americans either generate much of those gases or have any knowledge to slow their accumulation, which derives mostly from industrial countries.

  But the Biden administration thinks otherwise, perhaps for two reasons: the “progressive” sacralization of indigenous people and their knowledge, and, second, the assumption that Native American knowledge, which derived largely from finding empirical ways of making a living (when to grow food, how to hunt, etc.), made them “stewards of the environment.” The latter isn’t really the case, as Native Americans engaged in several practices, among them overhunting of bison and overburning of the prairie and woodlands (the latter also was done to facilitate hunting). At any rate, a reader sent me a link to the right-wing Free Beacon site below that reports a last-minute Biden Administration initiative to meld modern science with Native American ways of knowing to attack the problem of climate change. Below that is the press release from the Administration that gives details and links to the official government memorandum of collaborating with indigenous people.

  Jerry's a liberal in good standing, and his distaste at linking to the Free Beacon is palpable. But here you go: Biden Orders Scientific Agency To Expand Use of 'Indigenous Knowledge' in Final Days.

  Elon? Vivek?

• Well, that's a shame. Jack Nicastro notes the Supreme Court Punts on Racial Discrimination Case.

  The Supreme Court declined to hear Boston Parent Coalition for Academic Excellence Corp. v. The School Committee for the City of Boston (Boston Parent) on Monday. The court's refusal to take up the case is bad news because it leaves unresolved a circuit split on what constitutes a violation of the 14th Amendment's Equal Protection Clause.

  The Boston Parent Coalition sued the city of Boston in February 2021 for changes to the admissions process for Boston's prestigious "exam schools," which they allege were intended to decrease the number of admitted white and Asian students. These allegations are evidenced by the Exam School Admissions Criteria Working Group's "Projected Shift" chart, which accurately predicted the exam schools' altered racial composition, and by a member of the group telling the Boston School Committee that the new system would "allow our exam schools to more closely reflect the racial and economic makeup of Boston's kids," per PLF's opening brief.

  Apparently, the Boston School Committee successfully argued that they had changed their admission policy so it wasn't quite so racially discriminatory, rendering the case moot. So Constitutional clarity on this will have to wait.

• Vero's more optimistic than I. Despite Trump's denials that he would do anything to Uncle Stupid's entitlement programs, she says: Don't Write Off DOGE. Sample:

  Medicaid and Medicare are the source of at least $100 billion a year in fraud and over $100 billion annually in improper payments. Obviously, ending fraud should be a priority. And according to the Government Accountability Office, 74% of improper payments are simple overpayments. However, the government is making little effort to recover the funds.

  In fact, to the extent that any effort is expended, it's by health care providers (mostly hospitals who are large beneficiaries of Medicare's fee-for-service improper payments) and Congress, who try to slow down the rate of improper payment recovery by audit contractors. Why we should tolerate such a scandal, I don't know.

  Nor do I.

Well, the senior senator from the great state of Massachusetts didn't go full Monty Python but…

For shame, @SenWarren. “Violence is never the answer, but people can be pushed only so far,” she says of Brian Thompson's murder. What other vicious crime would she downplay? Or is it only the killing of a CEO that she's quick to makes excuses for?https://t.co/Q88hdwSWkK

— Jeff Jacoby (@Jeff_Jacoby) December 11, 2024

Yeah, pretty close. Unfortunately Jeff Jacoby's article is paywalled at the Boston Glob, so let's take a look at Charles C.W. Cooke's take: Elizabeth Warren Is a Disaster for the Democrats.

CCWC likes Senator John Fetterman's take better. So do I. Click over to read it, that's one of my NR "gifted" links for December.

The WSJ editorialists also take on Luigi Mangione’s Senate Explainers. Not just Warren, but also:

But surely UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson's murder will create a medical utopia, right? No, says J.D. Tuccille: UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson's murder won't create a medical utopia.

Don't worry, J.D.; I'm sure things will get worse anyway.

Recently on the book blog:

This book is a counterweight and rebuttal to what the author, Alex Epstein, calls the "mainstream knowledge system" in the realm of fossil fuels and climate change. Epstein previously wrote The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels, which I enjoyed (my book report here). He makes a (very) expanded argument in this book.

He says that fossil fuels are uniquely suited to provide our current and future energy needs. The have huge and irreplaceable advantages over "green" energy sources, which remain a small fraction of our energy picture, even after decades of subsidies and green propaganda. Simply speaking, trying to get rid of fossil fuel use will only make our lives miserable, as we come to depend on unreliable solar and wind sources. Not to mention the current fraction of poor people, who our policies will doom to remain poor.

Also: the doom predicted by the catastrophizers if we don't mend our sinful energy ways is (to put it mildly) unlikely. In fact, fossil fuel use will allow us to mitigate any possible climate-change scenarios.

People will react in horror to this denial of the "mainstream" consensus. Epstein argues that the "knowledge system" is biased against showing the benefits of fossil fuel use, which are many. We are presented daily with a mythic, and misanthropic, picture of the delicate, benevolent ecosystem that's only harmed by the impact of humanity. An ideal world, in this view, would be one where we would have no impact. As if humans didn't exist at all.

Epstein says: fiddlesticks. Beautiful as Mother Nature is, left to her own devices she can be a psycho killer bitch, visiting upon humanity plagues, pestilence, fires, floods, droughts, … bringing death to many thousands at a whack. And it's only due to our massive investments and innovations in fossil energy that we've managed to avoid the worst of that.

I had some problems with the Epstein's writing style, unfortunately. It's repetitive; he's a big fan of "tell them what you're going to tell them, then tell them, then tell them what you've just told them." He latches onto various words and phrases, and uses them over and over: e.g., "human flourishing framework" (as opposed to the "anti-impact framework"); "climate mastery"; "arguing to 100"; "machine labor"; "ultra-cost-effective"; "delicate nurturer"; etc. It's a long book (430 pages of text in the hardback) and this just makes it longer. And also seem longer.

It may be pretty lousy on economic freedom (ranking #41 among the 50 states in the latest Fraser institute study), but: New Jersey Law Prohibits Book Bans in Public, School Libraries.

So their long Fahremheit 451 nightmare is over, finally. David Zimmerman keeps a straight face while he reports:

Jim Geraghty sums up that last paragraph: You're Not Allowed to Ban Any More Books, Except the Ones That Deserve It. From the law itself:

“Censorship” means to block, suppress, or remove library material based on disagreement with a viewpoint, idea, or concept, or solely because an individual finds certain content offensive, but does not include limiting or restricting access to any library material deemed developmentally inappropriate for certain students.

So ‥ less than meets the eye, says Jim:

Meanwhile, if Governor Phil really wants to improve the liberty of New Jersey citizens, he might want to concentrate on getting that Fraser ranking up.

Also of note:

• And it will not be televised. Based on recent murders, Jeff Maurer complains: This Proletariat Revolution Sure Is Taking Its Sweet-Ass Time.

  I would summarize Lenin’s contributions to communist theory as: “Fuck this — let’s just do it ourselves.” Marx believed in a historical process in which agricultural laborers would move to cities and became the proletariat, and proletariat anger would overthrow capitalism. Lenin noticed that the Russian underclass weren’t storming out of their factories and overthrowing the Czar; they were mostly harvesting wheat by hand and going to church. So, he decided to give history a li’l boost, with “li’l boost” being the cutest euphemism that you’ll ever hear for a bloody revolution.

  Deep befuddlement at the proletariat revolution's stubborn refusal to arrive seems to be the default state of leftist thought. And I’ve been thinking about that state of mind this week, as leftists seized on the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson as possible evidence that THIS — FINALLY!!! — was the moment when popular anger had begun to boil over. But now a suspect is in custody, and he’s not a downtrodden laborer appalled by the depravities of capitalism: He’s an Ivy League graduate from a wealthy Maryland family. How wealthy? Well, students at Loyola University Maryland might be familiar with thee Mangione Aquatic Center, named for the alleged shooter’s grandparents. And that pool might be due for a rebrand now that that name sounds a little bit like “Manson Field House” or “The Bin Laden Baseball/Softball Complex”.

  (Inspiration for this item's headline here. Ah, good times.)

  Also piling on the irony is Kevin D. Williamson, who writes about The Country Club Radical.

  The fact that the man who has been charged in the shot-in-the-back murder of health insurance CEO Brian Thompson is a literal country club radical—Thompson comes from a working class background, the killer’s family made a fortune in the golf course business—is almost too on-the-nose.

  Because the killer has been celebrated by certain grotesques on the left as a kind of folk hero, the right will, of course, try to make of him a millstone to hang around the collective neck of their perceived politico-cultural enemies across the aisle. (It is tempting to imagine what that daft chiseling lunatic Robert F. Kennedy Jr. would be saying right now if he were not, incredible as it is to write, up for a Cabinet appointment.) That kind of project usually is foolish. What we know about the killer so far is that his friends and family seemed to be worried about him and that he was something of a Unabomber groupie. These people tend to be politically mixed up: Think of Charles Manson, the good-time hippie prophet with the swastika carved into his forehead; Mark David Chapman, who tried to drop himself into The Catcher in the Rye by murdering John Lennon but who would have taken Johnny Carson as a consolation prize; John Salvi, who carried out shootings at abortion clinics motivated by his belief that abortion is a great evil and … that the Freemasons and the Mafia and the Vatican were engaged in a vast conspiracy to manipulate fiat currencies.

  Well, that explains it.

• Credit where it's due. David Henderson approves of this bit of Trump's Meet the Press interview:

  First, Trump notes that the huge increase in California for fast-food restaurants (he doesn’t mention fast food—he mentions restaurants) is wiping out some restaurants. He could have noted that that means some jobs were lost but I think that was implicit.

  Second, Trump says that it doesn’t make much sense to have a high minimum wage for the whole country, given the disparity in cost of living. He gives as examples Alabama and Mississippi, where the cost of living is low. So the federal $7.25 an hour goes a long way.

  Trump could have mentioned that even in those two southern states, only a small percent of people make the minimum wage and most make well above $7.25 an hour. He also could have then pointed out that that means that market forces drive wages above the federal minimum. It’s possible that that’s what he meant when he said that $8 or $9 an hour wouldn’t have much effect.

  It would have been asking too much, probably, for Trump to make the libertarian argument: if an employer and an employee come to agreement on the employee's wage rate, the government should mind its own damn business.

  You know, an attitude like Tim Walz briefly pretended he was in favor of.

• But, alas… Jacob Sullum finds fault in a different part of the MTP interview: Trump, the Self-Described 'Tariff Man,' Does Not Understand How Tariffs Work.

  "I'm a big believer in tariffs," President-elect Donald Trump said this week, not for the first time. "I think they're beautiful."

  Trump claims the heavy tariffs he plans to impose during his second term are "going to make us rich," at no cost to American businesses or consumers. That is a dangerous fantasy.

  Trump's position on tariffs begins with his longstanding misconceptions about international trade, which he erroneously views as a zero-sum game with rules that are rigged against the United States. "We're subsidizing Canada to the tune (of) over $100 billion a year," he told Kristen Welker on "Meet the Press." "We're subsidizing Mexico for almost $300 billion."

  That's not true, as Jacob goes on to point out.

  (I think I'm going to start referring to all authors I link to by their first names. Or initials. I'm sure they won't mind. Or even be aware.)

• And finally, something on which we can all agree. In our last article from Reason's "Abolish Everything" issue, Robby Soave says we should Abolish the TSA.

  In response to 9/11, President George W. Bush created the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), bringing the country's myriad airport security protocols under one central authority. Two decades later, the results of this experiment are a complete disaster. The agency has not made air travel safer. The agency has merely made it costlier and more time-consuming to fly.

  The TSA has some 58,000 employees and a budget of $11.8 billion for FY 2025. Its ever-changing screening process involves forcing passengers to wait in long lines, remove their shoes and sweaters, place their electronics in separate bins, and throw away liquids over a certain size (or to fork over a fee and personal information for TSA PreCheck). TSA agents riffle through luggage in search of contraband items and subject travelers to aggressive pat-downs of their genitals. Navigating these intrusive procedures often requires showing up to the airport much earlier than would otherwise be necessary, creating inefficiencies for the airlines and their customers. A Cornell University study suggests that some people choose to drive long distances rather than fly in order to avoid the headaches associated with airport security, which is both a financial loss for the airline industry and a net negative for safety—per mile traveled, car travel is much, much more dangerous than flying.

  More at the link, but: the TSA is demonstrably bad at its useless job. Elon and Vivek, do your thing.

They shoulda come for this one:

Luigi Mangione’s last quote he liked on Goodreads speaks volumes pic.twitter.com/nOK75yAEW6

— Taco (@ThatDudeTaco) December 9, 2024

Instead they went after And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, et al. Was anyone ever inspired to murder by If I Ran the Zoo?

Twitter's embed is clipping a lot of the quote. Sorry. The quote is also rife among Amazon products, example at your right.

And, indeed Luigi Mangione seemed to Care a whole awful lot. With emphasis on the awful.

But I had a more pressing question, and fortunately a little Googling brought me to the answer at Barstool Sports:

I have spent the last hour scouring twitter and google for info to make sure there is no relation between Luigi and THE LEGENDARY Chuck Mangione. One of the greatest trumpet players of all time and heir to the title of "greatest trumpet solo of all time". This will be too soul-crushing for us.

Video at the link. Recommended.

But the murder has caused some serious chin-pulling commentary about American health care policy. Kevin D. Williamson has his finger on a big part of the problem: No Mandate, But Still a Mess.

A literate, non-insipid take is available from Allysia Finley at the WSJ: UnitedHealthcare and the ObamaCare Con.

Unfortunate reality: everyone knows that Obamacare was sold via lies. But Americans have spoken: we don't care.

But surely insurance companies are the main villain of the US health system, right? Well, bunkie, Noah Smith has to disagree with that: Insurance companies aren't the main villain of the U.S. health system. It is a very reality-based analysis, highly recommended, and let's just skip way down to the ugly truth:

Sermon: We would be far better off if health care was viewed as (simply) another part of the capitalist economic system, where goods and services are primarily provided via the market. Which has, you may have noticed, done a pretty good job of providing affordable products to the vast majority of customers. Based on what those customers want, not what government thinks they should have.

Also of note:

• Persecuting the successful. Elizabeth Nolan Brown notes the imminent non-fictional remake of Atlas Shrugged: Incoming Trump administration is coming for big tech companies.

  President Joe Biden's administration has been horrible for tech companies. The incoming Trump administration may be just as bad.

  That's disappointing, if not really surprising. During Donald Trump's first presidential term, he frequently railed against big tech companies via his social media accounts, called for European-style regulation of tech businesses, and set out to ban TikTok, while the Department of Justice (DOJ) sued Google and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) sued Facebook. And incoming vice president J.D. Vance hasn't just been critical of major tech companies; he has praised current FTC head Lina Khan, who has aggressively pursued those companies using an expansionist concept of antitrust law.

  Elon, could you talk to Donald about this?

• 

  Also on the "things could be worse, and probably will be" beat… Jacob Sullum takes another hard look at the prospective FBI Director: Trump will defer to ‘very fair’ Kash Patel in deciding whether to investigate opponents.

  Donald Trump has repeatedly declared that various people who have crossed him, including state and federal prosecutors, members of Congress, and President Joe Biden, should be investigated, prosecuted, and jailed. But in a Meet the Press interview on Sunday, the president-elect said he would not direct his subordinates to follow through on those threats after he takes office on January 20. Trump told the show's host, Kristen Welker, he would instead leave those decisions to his appointees at the FBI and the Justice Department.

  That commitment is not exactly reassuring, since Trump's pick to run the FBI, Kash Patel, has repeatedly threatened to "come after" Trump's political opponents, including journalists as well as current and former government officials. Patel published an enemies list as an appendix to his 2023 book Government Gangsters, which alleges a "Deep State" conspiracy against Trump that Patel equates with a conspiracy to subvert democracy and the Constitution. The list, which includes 60 names, is limited to people who have served in the executive branch. Patel notes that it does not include "other corrupt actors of the highest order," such as Rep. Adam Schiff (D–Calif.), Rep. Eric Swalwell (D–Calif.), and "the entire fake news mafia press corps."

  Jacob also has some literary analysis of Patel's children's classic The Plot Against the King (Amazon link at your right) which includes the key character "a wizard called Kash the Distinguished Discoverer."

  This is why my writing career never got far off the ground: I never had the inspiration to name one of my characters "Paul the Notable Nerd".

• Another warm and fuzzy department to kill. Veronique de Rugy takes part in Reason's "Abolish Everything" issue: Abolish the Small Business Administration.

  Everyone loves small businesses. But that's no reason to keep an agency dedicated to extending loans and other privileges to some of them at the expense of everyone else.

  Contrary to common belief, it is not the role of government to subsidize private companies. This statement is true whether the company is green, minority-owned, small, or gargantuan. Besides, the fetish for small businesses is annoying. Small businesses employ 45.9 percent of American workers, according to the Small Business Administration (SBA). That sounds impressive until you realize that 99.9 percent of businesses in America are small. That means 0.1 percent of businesses in the country employ more than half of the work force.

  Only one thing left to abolish! Coming up tomorrow!

Recently on the book blog:

The fourth in the "Pentecost/Parker Mystery" series. I recommend you read the previous books in the series before you tackle this one; there are some continuing characters and plot threads.

My previous reports on the series: here, here, and here. I guess I'm hooked.

Backstory, if you need it: set in post-WWII New York City, Ms. Lillian Pentecost runs a well-known detective agency. Her assistant, and the books' narrator, is Willowjean Parker, a streetwise, cynical lesbian, handy with a gun, knife, and blackjack. Not all at the same time.

Here, Ms. Pentecost is hired by a lawyer to try to find his firm's ex-secretary, Perseverance Bodine. After Perseverance retired, she became sort of reclusive, sticking to her apartment. And, oh yeah, she has an eidetic memory. And (also) she's become a hoarder, accumulating piles of newspapers and other detritus. And now, for some reason, she's gone missing.

Well, not for long. But that only causes more complications for the detectives.

And, as a side plot, Parker gets hoodwinked out on Coney Island, conked on the head, and robbed of her gun, keys, and wallet. She's too embarrassed to confess this to her Ms. Pentecost, so must find her assailants without assistance.

My usual gripe: Ms. Pentecost figures out, at least partially, whodunit, well before the end of the book. But we readers aren't told!

And, oh yeah: this book ends on a cliffhanger. Which I assume will be continued in book number five, coming out in a few months. As said above, I'm hooked.

The author, Nellie Bowles, is a journalist currently working at the Free Press, an online samizdat site run by her wife, Bari Weiss. Both Ms. Bowles and Ms. Weiss previously worked for the New York Times.

This book is a collection of essays ("dispatches") that recall good old Tom Wolfe writing about "Radical Chic" in the 1970s. It's all very journalistic, but—really—the attitude is clear: she's trying to keep a straight face while reporting on the antics and delusions of … well, for lack of a better word, let's say: the woke. Sometimes her straight face is covering up amusement. Sometimes disgust. Sometimes even despair. Outrage, perhaps? Just guessing, of course. But what's the appropriate emotion when an editor you work with says of your lover: "She's a Nazi. She's a fucking Nazi, Nellie."

Ms. Bowles also reports on how Johns Hopkins University just last year defined "lesbian" as a "non-man attracted to non-men." It's a real stride for feminism, isn't it, that "a woman" must now be defined in terms of what she's not: a man.

I think she's mainly amused here.

Her essays range over Antifa; Black Lives Matter; antiracist and transgender ideology; the "autonomous zones" that were set up in Minneapolis and Seattle for a time; the (literal) enshittification of San Francisco; and more. As an example of her straight-face reporting:

A couple of years ago, one of my friends saw a man staggering down the street, bleeding. She recognized him as someone who regularly slept outside in the neighborhood, and called 911. Paramedics and police arrived and began treating him, but members of a homeless advocacy group noticed and intervened. They told the man that he didn't have to get into the ambulance, that he had the right to refuse treatment. So that's what he did. The paramedics left, the activists left. The man sat on the sidewalk alone, still bleeding. A few months later, he died about a block away.

I'm pretty libertarian on drug use, but Ms. Bowles knocked me a couple notches back toward conservatism here.

Our Amazon Product/Eye Candy du Jour has a remarkably sexist "recommended uses": "Home decoration, Dorm decoration, Office decoration, Gift for women and teen girls". That's too bad, because I think Harry Litman, a 66-year-old male-identifying lawyer and political commentator, could have used one on his desk.

Instead, he's the subject of a Jonathan Turley post: “This is Not the Time for Balance”: LA Times Columnist Resigns in Protest . . . Over Balanced Commentary.

Well, fine. I note that Harry has also stomped off Twitter/X:

Man the Lord-of-the-Flies vibe is getting really acrid over here. I’m going to stop posting regularly, though I will come back now & again to try to scoop up stray followers. If you do follow me here,pls think about following me, and some actual discussion, over at AZURE HEAVENS.

— Harry Litman (@harrylitman) December 8, 2024

"AZURE HEAVENS", get it? Don't worry if you don't. The "actual discussion" Harry seeks to have there will be balance-free. Seldom will be heard a discouraging word, and the skies won't be cloudy all day.

Also of note:

• Put on your green eyeshade for… the Dispatch, where Alex Demas is Assessing Claims About Social Security Contributions for High Earners.

  Do lower-income Americans pay a larger proportion of their income toward Social Security than wealthy Americans? According to a viral social media post, they do.

  “A worker making $50,000 a year contributes to Social Security with 100% of their income,” the Threads post reads. “A CEO making $20 million a year contributes to Social Security with less than 1% of their income. It’s time to scrap the cap.”

  Well, yes. If you weren't aware. Demas uses small (but many) words to describe the "cap" on "contributions": you and your employer each kick in 7.65% of your wages to Social Security and Medicare, but only on the first $168,600 of salary (this year).

  The "scrap the cap" language is punchy, fits on a button or placard, and reeks of populist demagoguery. It seems to have origins with a group calling itself SocialSecurityWorks.

  But here's the thing:

  This cap, however, also applies to Social Security benefits, meaning the lower-salaried worker also receives a much higher proportion of benefits relative to their earnings than the wealthy CEO. According to the Social Security Administration, a CEO who made $20 million per year for his or her entire career and retired in 2024 at the full retirement age of 67 would receive a maximum benefit of $45,864, the same amount someone making an average of $200,000 per year would receive, and only 0.23 percent of their pre-retirement income. A worker making only $29,813 per year on average would, by contrast, receive $15,477 in benefits, or 52 percent of their pre-retirement income.

  According to Andrew Biggs, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and expert on Social Security reform, this is one of the reasons that the tax cap persists. “If the payroll tax ceiling were abolished, benefits would increase as well—since taxes and benefits are calculated based on the same wage base. If the payroll tax ceiling were abolished, a CEO earning $20 million per year would end up receiving an annual Social Security benefit of over $1.5 million,” Biggs told The Dispatch Fact Check. “This isn’t simply an absurd amount, it also would offset much of the improvement to Social Security’s solvency that eliminating the payroll tax ceiling seemingly would achieve.”

  I don't know if the "SocialSecurityWorks" folks deal with that. I admittedly didn't look very hard.

• "Talks collapse" almost as often as "Republicans pounce". In case you haven't heard, Ron Bailey will tell you: U.N. Global Plastics Treaty talks collapse.

  The nations of the world were supposed to complete negotiations on a Global Plastics Treaty on December 1. They didn't. The main sticking point was some countries' demand for a global cap on the future production of plastics.

  That "global cap" is supported by a lot of countries, some you've probably heard of. It sounds remarkably totalitarian, and probably unworkable, given the remarkable ubiquity and low cost of existing plastic use.

  Bailey does a fine job of detailing the issues and describing possible future developments.

• Unafraid of going after the sacred cows. Eric Boehm wants to axe a federal "service" that probably most Americans feel warm and fuzzy about: Abolish the National Park Service.

  Atop one of the highest peaks in the eastern United States sits a picturesque example of what America's national parks could be—if only the government hadn't effectively outlawed commerce within their boundaries.

  This is LeConte Lodge, built in 1926 and accessible only by a series of hiking trails that wind up the side of 6,500-foot Mt. LeConte. The Tennessee lodge exists only because it was grandfathered in when the boundaries of Great Smoky Mountains National Park were drawn in 1934. Farmers, logging companies, and other property owners in the area were given the boot. Thankfully, the lodge was allowed to stay.

  Nearly a century later, it's time for the federal government to recognize private investment need not be at odds with the goal of protecting nature for future generations. Ending the National Park Service (NPS) will mean more facilities like LeConte Lodge can thrive—and entice more Americans to experience the most beautiful parts of the country in new ways.

  Well, check out his sensible argument. And prepare for the demagogic responses. I imagine people have accused him of wanting to put waterslides in the Grand Canyon.

Never listen to people who want you to enjoy fewer things. https://t.co/FqjFy03nBm

— Greg Lukianoff (@glukianoff) December 1, 2024

And now on to the miscellany:

• As promised. Over the past few I've linked to a couple items that were supercritical of Kash Patel's promise that Trump Part 2: The Entrumpening would "come after the people in the media who lied" (here and here). But I promised that I would link to someone who (sorta) takes the other side, Holman W. Jenkins Jr., who saith: The Media Is Scared of Kash Patel. Good. His dismissal of the "come after" issue:

  Relax. The law doesn’t allow scope for this. An FBI chief might help, though, by championing the release of classified documents to encourage the press to decide it no longer pays to stonewall. In three cases, the FBI and fellow agencies made use of false “Russian intelligence” concerns to get away with illegal or improper acts to influence our domestic politics. The press has been covering it up.

  Best case: As FBI Director, Patel would forego his promise to "come after" Trump's political adversaries, and instead start shining a bright light on that coverup.

• Reminder: You are free to dislike and undisplay the motto. The Valley News, over there on the other side of the state, reminisces about The Upper Valley fight over NH’s ‘Live Free or Die’ motto.

  Half a century ago the Upper Valley was ground zero for a battle between state power to compel citizens to display a message they disagreed with and determined dissenters willing to resist, even to the point of going to jail for their beliefs.

  Over a period of several years the struggle included a determined conservative governor from Orford, aggressive Lebanon police and a waffling state court system against a diverse assortment of people from Claremont, Lebanon, Cornish, Plainfield and Hanover bent on fighting for what they believed were their free-speech rights.

  It would take a precedent-setting ruling from the U.S. Supreme Court to finally settle the matter, and it would be a total victory for those who took on the state in defense of their protections under the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The outcome asserted that free speech rights also include the right not to say anything.

  It's a pretty good summary of the legal wrangling back then. And I was unaware of this bit:

  [Defendant] Maynard was completely vindicated, but that wasn’t the end of the story. The district court had ordered the state to pay the $20,000 in legal fees Maynard incurred during the long legal slog.

  But the state wasn’t paying up.

  So the judge called in the U.S. marshal and instructed him to go to the New Hampshire Liquor Commission store in Hooksett and collect from the registers the cash needed to settle things up. The store manager was on the phone immediately to his boss in Concord and frantic calls to the governor’s office finally got the money on the way from the state treasury.

• Don't the ghouls know Halloween is over? Jeff Maurer looks at what they are saying, and observes: “Pay Every Claim” Is Not a Viable Model for Any Health Insurance Company. The issue is the "glee" with which some are greeting the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, combined with the allegations about unjustly denied claims from health insurers.

  But to those dancing on Thompson’s grave, the issue is not complicated: UnitedHealthcare denies patients’ claims, and that is immoral. Many of the social media comments about Thompson’s death include stories of a particular claim that was denied, and in many cases, those stories are heart-wrenching. And that’s true even when you factor in that 90 percent of what’s said on social media is total bullshit.

  But no world exists in which any health insurance company will pay every claim. A company that pays every claim is not a health insurance company: That’s a sugar daddy. That’s a mythical creature far more fanciful than anything C.S. Lewis or Dr. Seuss ever imagined. That company would also go broke in the blink of an eye — I would invest in a company that makes shit-flavored breath mints before I’d invest in an insurance company that says “okey dokey!” to every single claim.

  Say what you will about Kash Patel, I'm pretty sure he hasn't advocated murdering FBI agents that promoted the Steele Dossier.

• "Simple" is good. Alex Tabarrok provides Some Simple Economics of the Google Antitrust Case. Sample:

  The case is straightforward: Google pays firms like Apple billions of dollars to make its search engine the default. (N.B. I would rephrase this as Apple charges Google billions of dollars to make its search engine the default–a phrasing which matters if you want to understand what is really going on. But set that aside for now.) Consumers, however, can easily switch to other search engines by downloading a different browser or changing their default settings. Why don’t they? Because the minor transaction costs are not worth the effort. Moreover, if Google provides the best search experience, most users have no incentive to switch.

  Consequently, any potential harm to consumers is limited to minor switching costs, and any remedies should be proportionate. Proposals such as forcing Google to divest Chrome or Android are vastly disproportionate to the alleged harm and risk being counterproductive. Google’s Android has significantly increased competition in the smartphone market, and ChromeOS has done the same for laptops. Google has invested billions in increasing competition in its complements. Google was able to make these investments because they paid off in revenue to Google Search and Google Ads. Kill the profit center and kill the incentive to invest in competition. Unintended consequences.

  Fun fact: The highest-rated comment on Tabarrok's post states "Old people do not know how to switch browsers." I resent that remark!

• I'm in favor. Although it won't happen, Joe Lancaster makes a good case that we should Abolish the IRS.

  Imagine you need a job and somebody's hiring. After negotiating a wage that you both can live with, work begins. But when payday arrives, before you can even take your earnings to the bank or the bar, someone else swoops in with an outstretched hand and demands his "cut"—or else.

  A mob boss? A pimp? Nope: the Internal Revenue Service (IRS).

  The 16th Amendment gave Congress "power to lay and collect taxes on incomes" in 1913, after the Supreme Court had previously ruled such taxes "unconstitutional and void." Later that year, President Woodrow Wilson signed the Revenue Act of 1913, instituting a progressive federal income tax nationwide.

  Well, that was a mistake.

  To amplify Lancaster's point, I'll embed a short PDF (retrieved from here):

On that topic, a belated thanksgiving suggestion from Andrew C. McCarthy: Democrats Can Thank Themselves for the ‘Preemptive Pardon’ Histrionics. ACMC notes that attempting to blame the pardon (and perhaps upcoming "blanket" pardons) on Trump's hypothetical lawfare campaign will not fly:

You know who would make an excellent FBI Director? Andrew C. McCarthy.

Also of note:

• She was correct to observe she's not a biologist. Megan McArdle observes that A civil rights debate won’t be enough to protect transgender people.

  But the gem I want to excavate is different. Remember when Ketanji Brown Jackson was asked by Senator Marsha Blackburn to define 'woman'?

  And Justice Brown Jackson replied "I'm not a biologist"?

  Further confirmation of her answer was provided in the oral arguments in U.S. v. Skrmetti, where Uncle Stupid is arguing against a Tennessee law that prohibits minors from taking puberty blockers or hormones for the purposes of gender transition.

  Two hours in, Tennessee Solicitor General J. Matthew Rice remarked that giving testosterone to a biological male with a hormone deficiency is different from giving it to a biological female with gender dysphoria. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson asked what basis he had for saying that. Didn’t they do the same thing in the body?

  No, said the solicitor general, who sounded faintly surprised. “If you give a boy testosterone … that allows him to go through and develop the reproductive organs associated with being a male,” Rice said. “If you give it to a girl, it renders the girl infertile.”

  I'm sure she was gobsmacked by biology's refusal to act the way her ideology assumed it would.

• Ketanji may have a subscription. Jeff Jacoby writes about a mag that may have to change its name: Not-so-scientific American.

  WHEN LAURA HELMUTH was hired as editor-in-chief of Scientific American in the spring of 2020, anyone looking at her formal credentials would have thought her ideally suited for the job. She had earned a PhD in cognitive neuroscience from the University of California at Berkeley, had been a staff writer and editor at Science and National Geographic, and for several years was The Washington Post's editor for coverage of health, science, and the environment.

  But on Helmuth's watch, Scientific American —the nation's oldest mainstream science magazine, published continuously since James K. Polk was in the White House — has increasingly abandoned its commitment to rigorous science reporting and become just another outlet for progressive tendentiousness. Earlier this month, following an unhinged election night rant on social media, Helmuth announced that she was resigning from the magazine and would "take some time to think about what comes next."

  It was a sad but suitable end to Helmuth's tenure at SciAm. During her reign, the publication deteriorated into a journal less concerned with careful science reporting than with playing the part, to quote the liberal journalist Jesse Singal (a former Globe opinion colleague), of "a marketing firm dedicated to churning out borderline-unreadable press releases for the day's social justice cause du jour" and contributing in the process to "the self-immolation of scientific authority — a terrible event whose fallout we'll be living with for a long time."

  I was devoted to Scientific American when I was a youngster. But even back then it threw its weight against American development of anti-ballistic missile systems, aka "Star Wars". But, on that topic, they also recently explained Why the Term 'JEDI' Is Problematic for Describing Programs That Promote Justice, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion.

• We promise to say something nice about Kash Patel. Someday. Not today. Jacob Sullum weighs in on the nominee: Kash Patel threatens journalists, making him an alarming choice to run FBI.

  Kash Patel, President-elect Donald Trump's pick to replace Christopher Wray as director of the FBI, has threatened to "come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens" and "helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections." What exactly does he mean by that? Given the position that Patel will hold if he is confirmed by the Senate, the answer could have serious implications not only for the anti-Trump journalists he has in mind but also for freedom of the press generally.

  Seriously, I will link tomorrow to an explanation why this shouldn't bother me (and Sullum) as much as it does. Promise.

• The Right Minimum Wage: $0.00 That's what the New York Times opined back in 1987. And now Reason has gone there too. Billy Binion says we should Abolish the Minimum Wage.

  The idea that the federal minimum wage should exist in some form may sound beyond debate to most Americans, the vast majority of whom have not lived in a time when it wasn't a political reality. The debate is arguably settled, but maybe not in the way most think.

  "There's a virtual consensus among economists that the minimum wage is an idea whose time has passed," wrote a prominent newspaper's editorial board a few years back. "Raising the minimum wage by a substantial amount would price working poor people out of the job market….If a higher minimum means fewer jobs, why does it remain on the agenda of some liberals?"

  Binion credits the NYT for its nearly 38 year old insight, which remains applicable.

How old do you have to be to recognize our headline's source?

"But that's not important right now." Eric Boehm points to an unsurprising but still bad choice for Trump Part II: Electric Boogaloo: Peter Navarro should not have power over U.S. trade policy.

If you click over to Read The Whole Thing, as you should, you have a low but non-zero chance of seeing "Pun Salad" named as a Reason supporter in their webathon ad. You don't want to miss that! (I'm looking forward to receiving an "Abolish Everything" t-shirt.)

Also of note:

• When content production takes precedence. Robert Graboyes looks at the sad state of punditry, concentrating on a couple recent examples of Idiot America Indeed.

  Today’s post is not about politics but, rather, about contemporary journalism’s compulsion to besoil itself in the service of politics. The excess and carelessness engendered by political servility plopped squarely this week upon the heads of Charles P. Pierce (Esquire magazine) and Ana Navarro-Cárdenas (ABC’s The View). Both sought to justify Joe Biden’s sweeping pardon of Hunter Biden by pointing to peculiar antecedents. Pierce cited George H. W. Bush’s pardon of his son Neil, and Navarro-Cárdenas cited Woodrow Wilson’s pardon of his brother-in-law Hunter deButts. Their examples were peculiar because (1) Neil Bush was never convicted or even charged with any crimes, and (2) Hunter deButts never existed. Navarro-Cárdenas learned of Hunter deButts’s pardon from the often-hallucinatory ChatGPT. Pierce apparently bypassed electronic sources, plumbed purported facts from the depths of his own imagination, shunted them past whatever vestigial fact-checking routines exist at Esquire, and shot them out to gullible readers. Across the Internet some of those readers are yet spreading the Parables of Neil Bush and Hunter deButts.

  My inner ten-year-old makes me smile at "Hunter deButts".

• But seriously, folks. Robby Soave is a more careful journalist than Charles P. Pierce and Ana Navarro-Cárdenas ("put together"), and he concludes Hunter Biden's pardon is unprecedented.

  It's true that past presidents have issued controversial pardons: Gerald Ford, for instance, pardoned his embattled predecessor, Richard Nixon. There are also examples of presidents pardoning someone close to them: Bill Clinton pardoned his half brother, Roger Clinton.

  The Hunter pardon is far more comprehensive, however, in that it covered not just his convictions for drug-related activities and tax fraud, but any other criminal behavior since 2014—the year that Hunter joined the board of Ukrainian energy company Burisma. It has been alleged that Hunter's job was essentially to trade on the family name and sell his access to dad. This may not have been illegal, but it does mean that the pardon is clearly designed to offer preemptive protection not just to Hunter, but to Joe Biden himself.

  The defenses of the pardon I've seen, even the ones not involving Hunter deButts, are pretty lame. And they don't mention the issue above.

• Like a fine wine, he improved with age. Michael Shermer explains his evolution for us: Why I Am No Longer Woke.

  Before the transmogrification of the word woke into the pejorative slur against far-left politics it represents today, I would have called myself woke—and even a social justice warrior—inasmuch as I believe in civil liberties, civil rights, women’s rights, LGBTQ rights, animal rights, and the continued expansion of the moral sphere to include all sentient beings. As the author of a book-length defense of the principles behind these social justice movements for which previous generations were woke to—The Moral Arc—I think I have earned the moniker, and yet because of how the word and concept has devolved, along with the ever-leftward shift into lunacy of woke social justice activists—I must distance myself from the label, ultimately because of its flawed theory of human nature as a blank slate.

  Shermer goes on to cite numerous Pun Salad heroes: Sowell, Pinker, and Hayek, for example.

  And he doesn't even mention the termination of his long-running Scientific American column in 2019. (He wrote about that here in 2021.)

• Frank J. Fleming is just trying to help. He offers a bunch of Ways to Cut Government Waste.

  • Stronger chain on pens at the DMV. We can’t keep replacing pens.

  • Train law enforcement in using katanas to save on ammo.

  • Send out a survey to government employees about what they do, and include an optional space to declare your pronouns. Then fire everyone who fills in that space; we can safely assume none of them do anything useful.

  • Steve in Health and Human services asks for a new box of paperclips every week. There is no way he’s using that many paperclips. Look into that.

  That's just the first four. You will want to pay attention to that Steve guy.

• I, for one, am pining for the fjords. But Jeff Maurer entertains, briefly, the theory that left-wing populism will be a hit with the masses, and Maybe Appalachia is Secretly Pining for Elizabeth Warren.

  But I want to excerpt one of his by-the-way points about polling with "absurdly slanted" questions, as exemplified by Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy's report that (for example) "88% of respondents either strongly or somewhat agree that a handful of enormous multinational corporations wield a massive amount of influence over the quality of our lives without accountability or transparency to the public."

  Look at the word choices: “enormous multinational corporations”, “economic elites”, “big, profit-driven technology companies” — these questions are taking voters by the hand and leading them to a specific answer. It’s like asking voters: “Do you think education should be run by folks in your neighborhood or by bureaucrats far away in Washington?” Or how about: “Should veterans be given the best health care money can buy, or warehoused in piss-smelling flop houses where they battle feral dogs for scraps?” This is not serious polling — this is worthless slant-polling, probably by a consulting firm that just ripped off Chris Murphy for a bunch of money.

  And even if people hold some populist sentiments — which they might — it’s another thing to assume that those opinions are strongly held and will determine how people vote. If voters are motivated to lash back against economic elites, then they’ve been keeping that fact to themselves when answering exit polls: Those polls found that in 2024, people cared most about inflation, immigration, and transgender issues. If voters are motivated by economic populism, it’s also unclear why they just elected a rich1 businessman who cut taxes for the wealthy and corporations in his first term and who famously played an elite asshole who enjoyed firing people on TV. Murphy’s poll questions were so slanted that they probably elicited a lot of “yeah, sure” responses that don’t reflect deeply held convictions.

  I lost count of the number of "surveys" I got with mirror-image slanted questions from Republicans. After the first few, I just fed those "survey" envelopes into the shredder, unopened.

  It's nice to know that Democrats see the same kinds of polls. And those poll questions are probably written by the same people doing the Republican ones. Or maybe ChatGPT. Slant is slant.

• Not to sound like a Ron Paul crank or anything, but… I've come to admit that he might have had a point. Brian Doherty is a non-crank who thinks we should Abolish the Fed.

  In a 1995 interview, I asked Milton Friedman whether "it would be preferable to abolish the Fed entirely and just have government stick to a monetary growth rule?"

  Friedman answered: "Yes, it's preferable. And there's no chance at all of it happening."

  He didn't live to see the abolition of the Fed; perhaps no one reading this will. Still, a couple of years after Friedman's 2006 death, a semi–mass movement calling to "End the Fed!" arose in the aftermath of Rep. Ron Paul's first Republican presidential run in 2008. The Texas congressman found during that campaign a surprising (even to him) number of youngsters blaming the central bank, founded in 1913, for government sins from inflation to war (which is easier to wage when it can be financed by cash from a central bank summoned more or less at will).

  The Fed's performance since Paul's campaign has not blunted the urgency of the message. From 2008 to 2011, the central bank spit out as much new money as had entered the U.S. economy in the previous century, and it grew the value of the financial instruments it bought as an instrument of this money generation by $1.35 trillion in just part of 2008.

  Like Delta House, the Fed has a "long-standing tradition of existence to its members and to the community at large." So …

Hey, our state made the front page of the WSJ yesterday, where the question was asked: How Free Is New Hampshire? A Fight Over Doughnuts Is About to Decide.

The shop in question is Leavitt's Country Bakery, and it's making me hungry just typing about it. And it is unfortunately far away from Pun Salad Manor, about a 90-minute drive. A further fun fact that I don't think the WSJ story points out: the painting doesn't even face the highway (NH-16) that goes by.

We wrote about this last year. And observed at the time:

It's easy for Granite Staters to be saddened by the antics of the Conway Roadside Art Police (CRAP). So we'll have to take some comfort from our rankings from the just-released Fraser Institute's Economic Freedom of North America 2024.

It's bad news for Canada, though. Alberta is the freest Canadian province, about as free as Tennessee. British Columbia has Massachusetts-level freedom. And all th other provinces are down there in the California/New York Gulag.

And Mexico… ay caramba, don't even think about it.

Also of note:

• 

  Kash Patel, you're FIREd. Specifically: raked over the coals by Ronald K. L. Collins at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, who calls Trump's choice for FBI Director a clear and present danger to freedom of the press. Collins provides a lot of quotes, including this from a year-old article in the Hill: Bannon, Patel say Trump ‘dead serious’ about revenge on media: ‘We’re going to come after you’. Eek!

  Steve Bannon and Kash Patel claimed that former President Trump is “dead serious” about exacting revenge on his political enemies if he wins a second term as president, and they warned members of the media to take the threats seriously, saying Tuesday, “We’re going to come after you.”

  “We will go out and find the conspirators — not just in government, but in the media,” Patel told Bannon. “Yes, we’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections.”

  “We’re going to come after you. Whether it’s criminally or civilly, we’ll figure that out. But yeah, we’re putting you all on notice, and Steve, this is why they hate us. This is why we’re tyrannical. This is why we’re dictators,” Patel said, suggesting those were terms used sometimes to describe them. “Because we’re actually going to use the Constitution to prosecute them for crimes they said we have always been guilty of but never have.”

  I'm sure there are going to be questions about that in his confirmation hearings. What's he going to say? "Just kidding"?

  Patel has also written some books, including The Plot Against the King, Amazon link at your right, and there's a multi-page sample available there. I'd consider it disqualifying all by itself, because it's awful, but that's just me.

• If you, like me, are looking for amusement. My favorite funny guy, Jeff Maurer, writes at the Dispatch: What’s Funny About a Second Trump Term? Gotta be something, right?

  With Donald Trump set to return to the White House in a few short weeks, journalists are already thinking out loud about how they’ll cover his second term. These reflections amount to a tacit admission that the methods of covering Trump’s first term can’t be repeated, even if professionalism keeps journalists from using phrases like “we screwed the pooch sideways” or “we dumped our credibility in a port-a-potty and then lit that port-a-potty on fire.” To be fair, it’s hard to know how to cover Trump, since he can’t seem to put on his socks in the morning without doing 10 to 12 things that would doom any other administration.

  But journalists aren’t the only ones in need of introspection. My profession, comedy, should also be thinking about how we’re going to approach the next four years. With a few notable exceptions, we didn’t exactly cover ourselves in glory in Trump’s first term. I personally wrote a few bits that I now consider comedy abominations that should be locked away in a dank cellar. The sanctimonious outrage and focus on day-to-day shenanigans that characterized so much comedy during Trump’s first term arguably didn’t work very well, and it definitely won’t work this time around.

  Believe it or not, there was a time when Trump material felt fresh and exciting. I remember working on the “Drumpf” piece for Last Week Tonight with John Oliver in early 2016, which—according to always-accurate internet chatter—“DISMANTLED” and “DESTROYED” the soon-to-be Republican nominee. There was a sense that we were working on something big and important. I now know that feeling was: 1) Hilariously wrong, and 2) Poisonous for comedy. Humor shouldn’t be self-righteous; no one walks out of a stand-up set and says, “I really liked the comic who scolded us!” The strangeness of the moment led comics at every level to imagine that we served some vital social function. But that sense was mostly overblown—if democracy could only be saved by the witticisms that I flung at six alcoholics at McZany’s Topless Joke Bunker, then democracy probably wasn’t worth saving in the first place.

  I think it's fair to say Jeff provides no recipes, but he does dust off a John Mulaney gag from one of his Netflix specials that worked pretty well.

• A myth is as good as a mile. I know I've said that before, what can I say, I always thought it was funny. Noah Smith has his eye on six, count 'em: "Paycheck-to-paycheck" and five other popular myths.

  Senator Bernie Sanders is the latest guy to utter "60% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck", (immediately following "This is what Oligarchy looks like"). and that pushed Smith over the edge:

  The claim that “60% of Americans live paycheck-to-paycheck” comes from a survey by the fintech company LendingClub. The company refuses to release its survey methodology, but we can get a general idea from its website, which says: “For those Americans, [living paycheck to paycheck] means that they need their next paycheck to cover their monthly financial outflows.” So what LendingClub is probably claiming is that around 60% of Americans don’t have enough cash in their bank accounts to live off of for one month.

  But LendingClub’s survey is probably just flat-out wrong about this. The Federal Reserve does a very careful annual survey called the Survey of Household Economics and Decisionmaking, or SHED.1 This survey asks whether people have a “rainy-day fund” sufficient to cover at least three months of expenses. And it pretty consistently finds that over half of Americans do have such a fund.

  Smith gives a sneak preview of those other five myths:

  • “Exercise doesn’t make you lose weight”

  • “Pay and productivity have diverged”

  • “America’s education system is lagging the rest of the world”

  • “Japan doesn’t allow immigration”

  • “America spends more on defense than the next ten countries combined”

  … unfortunately his debunking of them is behind his substack paywall. We'll have to imagine.

• Big if true. Power Line's Steven Hayward wonders Are Liberals Raising the White Flag on Immigration? Taking center stage is this tweet:

  Holy. Shit.
  
  UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer just admitted that Western leaders have been running an “open borders experiment”…
  
  "This happened by design, not accident. Immigration policies were reformed deliberately. It has been a failure. They pretended it wasn’t happening.” pic.twitter.com/vHVibQnG38

  — Geiger Capital (@Geiger_Capital) November 29, 2024

  Interesting because I just read The Great Experiment by Yascha Mounk, which I liked quite a bit (My report is here.) But right from the start, Mounk strenuously denied exactly the claim PM Starmer is making.

  So someone's either lying or using language in an unconventional manner. I've e-mailed Mounk requesting clarification.

• No white flag raised here. Christopher Freiman writes probably the most provocative abolition proposal in Reason's "Abolish Everything" issue: Abolish Borders.

  You've probably moved across state lines at some point in your life. Maybe it was to attend college or take a higher-paying job. Maybe you wanted to live closer to friends and family after having kids or to join a new religious or political community. It could even be as simple as deciding to move from Dallas to Philadelphia because you prefer attending the home games of a successful football team.

  No right-minded person would have the government interfere with any of this. If a business offers you a job and you accept, that's between you and the business—not you, the business, and the state. The same goes for buying a house from a willing seller or joining a welcoming religious congregation. To borrow from Robert Nozick, these are "capitalist acts between consenting adults." Granted, these capitalist acts took place across state borders, but so what? The rights to offer and take jobs, buy and sell property, and assemble freely don't depend on your location relative to a government-drawn line.

  If government-drawn lines within your country don't possess some sort of moral magic that voids your rights, why would government-drawn lines between countries?

  Think before you answer, statist!

Our Amazon Product/Eye Candy du Jour features a quote President Dotard liked to deploy here and there. Little did we know…

Oh, heck: I knew. And I bet you did too.

Jeff Maurer turns his substack over to the still-President, who expands on his pardon announcement: Hey: You Can't DOUBLE Destroy Your Legacy!.

We still have 47 days to go in Biden's reign, and who knows what lies [are] ahead.

In a more serious and insightful take, Nate Silver observes: The expert class is failing, and so is Biden’s presidency. Here he concentrates his fire on the "expert class of academics, journalists and like-minded types" that he dubs the "Village". (Not to be confused with the Village People.)

Glenn Reynolds reacts to Silver's article, saying: Welcome to the Party, Pal (cont'd). "Cont'd" because the Blogfather has been pointing to the decline of experts for years. He quotes extensively from a 2017 column he wrote for USA Today on The Suicide of Expertise. The intervening years have only buttressed his point.

"Indeed."

Also of note:

• Why don't we just send them some more solar panels? Bjørn Lomborg points out at the WSJ: Climate-Change Colonialism Keeps Poor Countries Impoverished.

  At the latest United Nations climate summit, developing nations slammed rich countries’ pledge to spend $300 billion annually on climate reparations as “crumbs.” The reality is much worse. Wealthy nations likely won’t conjure up $300 billion in new spending. Europe has been roiled by protests against radical climate policies and the 2024 U.S. election was an indictment of, among other things, aggressive climate regulations. Instead, wealthy nations will do what they’ve done before: raid development funds to the detriment of the people they claim to help.

  Members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development currently spend $223.7 billion a year trying to do good in poor countries through bilateral and multilateral aid and development spending. It is politically much easier for politicians intent on green spending to shift this money to climate purposes than try to get voters to go along with fresh outlays. Rich nations have diverted much of this funding to climate-change initiatives. OECD members spent one-third of their direct development aid on climate in fiscal 2021-22, the most recent year for which data are available. Development banks have twisted their purpose even further: The World Bank last year sent 44% of its lending to climate causes, the African Development Bank 55% and the European Investment Bank 60%.

  This charade needs to stop. As part of President-elect Trump’s reforms to wasteful government, he should return development aid to policies that make a real difference.

  Lomborg notes that poor countries need (among other things) cheap and reliable sources of energy, which means, at least in this day and age, fossil fuels.

• 

  It's getting difficult to tell 'em apart, but… David Harsanyi notes a significant difference between the two ends of the political horseshoe: The Left’s Conspiracy Politics Far More Successful than Right's.

  The Democratic Party’s closing argument for the 2024 campaign season had little to do with policy or good governance. Rather, it was a stark warning about semi-fascists led by a modern-day Hitler coming to strip minorities of rights, execute journalists, send people to camps, erect a real-life Handmaid’s Tale, and initiate a Christian theocracy. Scary stuff. Communicating through “dog whistles” and propped up by “dark money,” these Fifth Columnists had even cataloged their devious plans in a scary-sounding book called “Project 2025.”

  Over the past decades, the American Left and its institutions have ratcheted up political paranoia to the extent that its policy prescriptions — even what it views as our most pressing societal problems — are often tethered to groundless or sensationalized anxieties, myths, revisionist histories, pseudoscientific alarmism, and outright lies. For modern Democrats, every political loss, no matter how inconsequential, is a chilling threat to “democracy.” H. L. Mencken famously quipped, “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.” From the Russia collusion conspiracy to Jim Crow 2.0 to climate change, on the left, it’s hysteria and apocalypticism all the way down.

  Harsanyi has a new book covering lefty conspiracism at length, and it looks pretty good. Amazon link at your right.

• The language continues to devolve. Lloyd Billingsley notes another milestone: Not Transgender Women.

  Actual women such as Riley Gaines, Paige Spiranac, J. K. Rowling, and the female Israeli soldiers Steve helpfully displays each week, just got the news from the New York Times that they should be known as “non-transgender women.” This drew flak from tennis great Martina Navratilova, British Olympian Sharron Davies, and Rep. Nancy Mace, among others. The dynamics going on here will be of interest to all people.

  NYT reporter [sic] has surrendered to to the Dictatorship of the Subjunctive Mood, institutionalized and enforced unreality. Under DSM a person can proclaim themselves to be anything, and everybody must follow along or stand accused of “transphobia,” “misgendering” and such. As Mace tweeted, “what bs,” but there’s more to it.

  Billingsley references Orwell's classic essay "Politics and the English Language", but uses a different quote than the one we keep yammering about here. Check it out.

• Another relic of America's flirtation with fascism. And it was unaccountably omitted from Reason's "Abolish Everything" issue. Veronique de Rugy says we should Abolish the Securities and Exchange Commission.

  The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) was created as an independent agency in 1934. It's been called the mother-of-all-securities regulator. This agency is remarkably good at killing trees to produce hundreds of millions of paper reports for shareholders and at employing bureaucrats who interfere in U.S. financial markets. p>It is not, however, very good at preventing the corporate fraud that it was created to stop.

  Despite its enormous annual budget of $2.5 billion, 4,800 employees, and vast regulatory powers, the SEC has failed to detect major frauds like Bernie Madoff's Ponzi scheme and Enron's accounting deceptions. It's not for lack of being warned. For instance, Madoff whistleblower Harry Markopolos testified that the SEC ignored his exhortations for years, focusing instead on smaller fry. In fact, the SEC has been accused of disproportionately targeting smaller retail investors while being lenient with large institutions.

  Hope Elon and Vivek are reading the Reason website.

Recently on the book blog:

Another book down on the "reread Crais" project. Amazon tells me I bought the Kindle version on January 23, 2012, and my original book report is here. It remains a pulse-pounding story filled with violence, suspense, and ace detective work from both Elvis and his partner Joe Pike.

Unlike many Crais books, the title is pretty straightforward about what's going on in the text. Kidnapping, not eminent domain.

And I didn't remark on this back in 2012: an ATF agent leaves a message on Elvis's phone, identifying himself as "Kim Stanley Robinson". Do actual ATF agents use SF-author pseudonyms? Wouldn't put it past 'em.

Take it away, Nate:

A selfish and senile old man.

— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) December 2, 2024

Robby Soave has it as the lead story on yesterday's Reason News Roundup: Joe Pardons Hunter.

Nate Silver's tweet is also available at Soave's article, as are a number of other responses.

Schadenfreude is such a useful word, but it doesn't apply here. Is there a German word that expresses the concept of "a sick pleasure in witnessing partisan hacks demonstrating their obvious sycophancy"? Ann Alrhouse scratches that itch by embedding a tightly edited 9-minute montage of lavishing praise on Joe Biden for not pardoning his son.. And so will I:

One of the best supercuts ever.

President Biden won't pardon Hunter because Joe Biden is a man of great character! 🤣😂pic.twitter.com/lM8aTRGrq5

— MAZE (@mazemoore) December 2, 2024

How many apologies are due from these toadies? How many will we actually get?

Jim Geraghty is appropriately, and unmercifully, honest: The Biden Crime Family Gets Away with It.

That last quote is from John Harwood, once a "journalist" covering the White House for CNN during the Biden Administration.

But just a reminder from Charles C.W. Cooke: This Is Who Joe Biden Has Always Been.

Don't hold back, Charlie. Tell us how you really feel.

Also of note:

• America doesn't do aristocracy well. Kevin D. Williamson opines on The Aristocrats.

  If there’s a word for the guy with the hook who yanks vaudeville performers off the stage after they’ve overstayed their welcome, I’m the premature version of that. Too eager. When Barack Obama wrested the Democratic nomination from Hillary Rodham Clinton in 2008, I wrote that I was grateful at least that we wouldn’t have to write about the Clintons anymore. Now, I worry they’ll try to run Chelsea next time around. When Donald Trump announced his 2016 campaign, I wrote a piece headlined “Witless Ape Rides Escalator,” and when he was dragged out of office in 2021, I capped off—or so I thought!—my Trump commentary with “Witless Ape Rides Helicopter.” But like whatever iteration of the “Donkey Kong” franchise we’re on now, some simian specimens from the 1980s don’t know when to go extinct. I’ll probably end my professional days writing about the ghastly little spawn he named after the imaginary friend he invented to lie to the New York Post about his sex life.

  But the one that might hurt the most: I really thought we were done with the Kennedys.

  But, no. The Kennedys, like the Annenbergs—another family of jumped-up gangsters who spent the 20^th century playing aristocrats—have become fully institutionalized, with Trump having selected nanny-molesting junkie criminal weirdo Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—that great bolus of messianic pretension expelled by Millbrook into the world of dopey left-wing activism—to head up the Department of Health and Human Services. He’s a cretin in every way that matters.

  I assume the article is paywalled, so consider this a teaser advertisement to get you to subscribe to the Dispatch.

• It has a long-standing tradition of existence, and also of killing people. Another fat target deserving the death penalty in Reason's "Abolish Everything" issue: Abolish the FDA. The verdict is handed down by Jeffrey A. Singer:

  It takes 10–15 years and hundreds of millions of dollars for a pharmaceutical company to navigate the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulatory process and bring a new drug to market. Many seriously ill people die waiting for the FDA to approve drugs that regulators in other advanced countries have already approved, a phenomenon called "drug lag." It is impossible to imagine how many drug remedies remain undiscovered and how many people needlessly suffer because pharmaceutical companies must divert excessive research and development dollars to the drug approval process, a phenomenon called "drug loss."

  This is not a new stance for Reason (or reasonable people generally). Back in 2021, the sainted Katherine Mangu-Ward also advocated that we Abolish the FDA. Gee, what was going on back then? Oh, right:

  Last year, hashtag activists were ready to #AbolishICE, in part over the deaths of about 20 immigrants in custody in 2020. Protesters called on the government to "defund the police" over more than 1,000 killings by law enforcement during the same period. Those deaths are tragic, and many could have been prevented with better policy. But they pale in comparison to the blood on the hands of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) over the last 12 months.

  Faced with the challenge of COVID-19, the FDA screwed up on nearly every level. When the agency did do something right, it was almost always by making exceptions to its normal policies and procedures.

  […]

  The FDA screwed up in prohibiting researchers from testing affected populations in the early days of 2020, when the virus might have been better contained upon arrival in the United States. It screwed up in refusing to lift requirements for mask manufacturers and by declining to allow good substitutes for masks in short supply. It screwed up by collaborating with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to protect a monopoly on testing tools that ended in a disastrous shortage. FDA staffers tasked with approving both treatments and vaccines screwed up by delaying meetings and taking days off as Americans were dying in unprecedented numbers of a disease for which the agency had potential solutions. At press time, the AstraZeneca vaccine, which was widely available in many other nations, remained unapproved in the U.S., for reasons that are opaque to Americans desperate to resume normal lives.

  Maybe Trump and Junior could get Kevin D. Williamson to crack a smile if they managed to take Reason's advice.

Dave Barry issued a NOBEL PRIZE ALERT for the Earworm Eraser:

From the (apologies in advance) NPR story: All I want for Christmas is ... help getting this song out of my head.

And, yes, I really did have Linda Ronstadt's "Dreams Of The San Joaquin" stuck in my head for days after it came up on the iPod. (I accept no responsibility if you click on that link and get earwormed.)

Also of note:

• Betteridge's law of headlines seems not to apply. Steven Hayward wonders: Did Biden Make His Anti-Semitism Official? Because our Dotard-in-Chief was photographed…

  … emerging from a Nantucket bookstore holding in plain sight the book he purchased: Rashid Khalidi’s The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonial Conquest and Resistance, 1917-2017. Khalidi is a former spokesperson for the PLO, defender of Hamas terrorism, and a vicious anti-Semite, full stop. He is also an emeritus professor of Middle East studies at Columbia University, naturally.

  As I mentioned recently over on the book blog, I spotted Khalidi's book at the Portsmouth (NH) Public Library. According to the library's online catalog, it's also available at Portsmouth High School's library. Useful for any kiddos who want to apply to Columbia and swing with the serious Hamas cheerleaders.

  But I doubt that Biden reads books. This purchase was mere signalling of hostility to Israel.

  Last year Issues & Insights wondered: Does Anybody Know What Books Biden Reads? Or If He Reads? The media, after years of wondering what tomes were on presidential bedside tables, went strangely silent when Joe got in.

• And as my rear-view mirror warns me, it may be closer than it appears. Kevin D. Williamson admits a mistake: I Thought Happiness Was ‘Idiocracy’ in the Rear-View Mirror.

  I owe Mike Judge an apology.

  When the brilliant satirist behind Beavis and Butt-Head and Office Space came out with his 2006 masterpiece Idiocracy, I enjoyed the film but was critical of it. I thought it was too cynical, too cruel, that it took too low a view of human beings in general and of U.S.A.-American-type human beings in particular.

  Eighteen years later, the Trump administration is plumbing the world of professional wrestling for the next secretary of education.

  So, to the Prophet Mike Judge (peace be upon him), to President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Camacho, to Frito Pendejo, to Beef Supreme and all the rest of the Idiocracy gang, all I can think to say is … Idiocracy was still wrong, damn it, just not in the direction I thought it was. Incredible as the fact may be: Mike Judge took far too generous a view of boobus Americanus.

  It’s like we jumped off the ledge, landed in the world of Idiocracy, and then started digging until we were 20,000 leagues underneath whatever muck it is that is morally and intellectually beneath Idiocracy.

  As an American, I mourn this. As a journalist, well, it’s awesome. I have a vision of the 2028 presidential election, and it is going to be a hoot.

  If I were (somehow) elected to Congress, my first official duty would be to author a bill changing the National Anthem to The Who's "Won't Get Fooled Again".

• Whew, that's a relief, kemo sabe. Do you lie awake nights, tortured by the question Am I on Indigenous land? Fortunately, Noah Smith provides an answer: No, you are not on Indigenous land.

  The United States, like all nations, was created through territorial conquest. Most of its current territory was occupied or frequented by human beings before the U.S. came; the U.S. used force to either displace, subjugate, or kill all of those people. To the extent that land “ownership” existed under the previous inhabitants, the land of the U.S. is stolen land.

  This was also true before the U.S. arrived. The forcible theft of the land upon which the U.S. now exists was not the first such theft; the people who lived there before conquered, displaced, or killed someone else in order to take the land. The land has been stolen and re-stolen again and again. If you somehow destroyed the United States, expelled its current inhabitants, and gave ownership of the land to the last recorded tribe that had occupied it before, you would not be returning it to its original occupants; you would simply be handing it to the next-most-recent conquerors.

  If you go back far enough in time, of course, at some point this is no longer true. Humanity didn’t always exist; therefore for every piece of land, there was a first human to lay eyes on it, and a first human to say “This land is mine.” But by what right did this first human claim exclusive ownership of this land? Why does being the first person to see a natural object make you the rightful owner of that object? And why does being the first human to set foot on a piece of land give your blood descendants the right to dispose of that land as they see fit in perpetuity, and to exclude any and all others from that land? What about all the peoples of the world who were never lucky enough to be the first to lay eyes on any plot of dirt? Are they simply to be dispossessed forever?

  Smith's article is long, funny in spots, thoughtful in others. Glad that his Kamala cheerleading is over.

• Speaking truth to power. It can get you some pretty serious criticism if you're a Massachusetts Democrat. But as James Freeman points out at the WSJ, CongressCritter Seth Moulton is Still Not Cancelled. Freeman excerpts Moulton's WaPo op-ed:

  Two days after Donald Trump’s victory, I gave an example of how Democrats spend too much time trying not to offend anyone, even on issues where most Americans feel the same way. Speaking as a dad, I said I didn’t like the idea of my two girls one day competing against biological boys on a playing field. My main point, though, is what I said next: “As a Democrat, I’m supposed to be afraid to say that.”

  The blowback, which was swift, included the chair of a local Democratic committee calling me a Nazi “cooperator” and about 200 people gathering in front of my office to protest a sentence. My unimpeachable record of standing up for the civil rights of all Americans, including the trans community, was irrelevant.

  What has amazed me, though, is what’s happening behind the scenes. Countless Democrats have reached out, from across the party — to thank me. I’ve heard it again and again, from union leaders to colleagues in the House and Senate; from top people from the Obama, Biden and Harris teams to local Democrats stopping me on the street; from fellow dads to many in the LGBTQ+ community: “Thank you for saying that!”

  I assume Moulton's position will soon be common wisdom, and the unhinged criticism of it will be memory-holed.

• Whoa, what's next? Abolish the Department of Motherhood? Another one of the entries in Reason's "Abolish Everything" issue that won't happen: Jonathan H. Adler says we should Abolish the EPA.

  The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) does not have a typical origin story. Congress did not create it by enacting a statute; President Richard Nixon created it by presidential edict. Perhaps that explains why it's hard to reconcile what the EPA actually does with a robust theory of the federal government's role in environmental protection.

  Nixon created the agency in response to a broad sense of environmental crisis in the nation (and a desire to gain partisan advantage). Apocalyptic tracts and sensationalized events, such as the infamous and poorly understood 1969 fire on the Cuyahoga River, fed fears that environmental problems were getting inexorably worse and federal intervention was necessary. Yet before Nixon reorganized the federal bureaucracy to create the EPA, key environmental trends were already improving.

  Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, as demand for environmental protection increased, state and local governments adopted various protective measures. By 1966, every state had adopted water pollution legislation of some sort—and key water pollution measures were improving well before the EPA got into the game. Similarly, key indicators of urban air quality were improving before the EPA appeared.

  Speaking of Mike Judge (see above), maybe Elon will ask EPA employees:

I happened to notice the NYT headline from this tweet:

“Letting go of the male breadwinner norm is not an instant fix for our culture, but we can’t move forward without that step,” Sarah Bernstein writes.

Read: https://t.co/SETBj7v0ZM

— New York Times Opinion (@nytopinion) November 30, 2024

To repeat: "Our Messed-Up Dating Culture Gave Us Donald Trump".

I have no idea whether, or to what extent, that is true. It seems implausible, but I didn't read Ms. Bernstein's essay.

I couldn't help but try this out on the Google. There are some interesting theories out there on how we got Trumped:

• At the Hot Springs Sentinel Record, Bradley Gitz says: The Democratic Party gave us Donald Trump.

• An alternate explanation from Tim Alberta, as reviewed by the WaPo: How the Republican Party’s capitulation gave us Donald Trump.

• At Politico, Tom McGrath explains How 1980s Yuppies Gave Us Donald Trump.

• But the Some More News YouTubed podcast explains How Ronald Reagan Gave Us Donald Trump.

• James R. Rogers set the causality slightly different at Law & Liberty: How George H.W. Bush Gave Us Donald Trump.

• Back in 2019, Vox's Peter Kafka interviewed the NYT TV critic James Poniewozik who provided a cinematic explanation: How Rodney Dangerfield and “Caddyshack” gave us Donald Trump.

• Another leftie take at In These Times: The War on Terror Gave Us Donald Trump.

• Or, for a different take, there's Robert Scheer, pointing his shaky finger at The American Villain Who Gave Us Donald Trump. (Spoiler: 'twas Roy Cohn, who died 38 years ago.)

• Steven Klein ("Senior Lecturer in Political Theory @Kingspol_econ") tweeted a geographic explanation:

  Jackson Hole gave us Donald Trump

  — Steven Klein (@stevenmklein) November 6, 2024

• CNN gave credence to Timothy Stanley's J'Accuse: The guy who really gave us Donald Trump. (Spoiler: Roger Ailes.)

• A 2017 LTE from one Kathryn Krumsee, in the Chicago Tribune: Greed, ignorance, intolerance and indifference gave us Donald Trump.

• Back in 2016, Robert Maranto supplied the Atlanta Journal-Constitution with a twofer: How public schools gave us Donald Trump and the 1619 Project.

• Jamelle Bouie, calling them "Brothers in White Resentment", explained it quite simply: What gave us Donald Trump is what gave us Dylann Roof.

• Another progressive explanation emanated from Thomas Frank whose 2016 book Listen, Liberal was reviewed at Dissent: Zombie Neoliberalism! (Aiee!) The subhed on the article is "How 'There Is No Alternative' gave us Donald Trump."

  You are supposed to know what that means. I had to Wikipedia it: There is no alternative.

Well, I could go on. Everyone, seemingly, has a theory on who or what gave us Donald Trump. Fortunately, nobody's blaming Pun Salad.