Pun Salad

Unfortunately, that's unlikely, but we can fantasize:

Also of note:

• I sometimes say I aspire to be a dilettante. Kevin D. Williamson thinks it's an insult, though. He writes: Trump and Musk: Billionaire Dilettantes.

  “The federal bureaucracy situation is much worse than I realized,” Elon Musk, the billionaire dilettante tasked by that other billionaire dilettante with reforming the federal bureaucracy, said earlier this week. “I thought there were problems, but it sure is an uphill battle trying to improve things in D.C., to say the least.” The Tesla boss is out of DOGE and out of the administration and has announced a general retreat from political engagement, having discovered—as one will—that all this “easy” and “obvious” and “common sense” stuff turned out to be … hard.

  Welcome to the party, you plank.

  We’ve been here before, of course. Donald Trump and his team have been three weeks away from announcing a groundbreaking new health care plan for … what, just about a decade now? Donald Trump’s confidence in addressing a complex subject has a linear relationship to his ignorance regarding that subject, and so we have got gems like this presidential declaration of ineptitude: “Nobody knew that health care could be so complicated.” It isn’t the case that nobody knew—lots of people knew. Some of those people had good ideas, some had terrible ideas, but they knew it was complicated. The guy who didn’t know? The one who spent most of his life as a Manhattan gadfly, a game-show host with side hustles in pro wrestling and porn. That guy didn’t know.

  The problem—one of the problems—is that that guy doesn’t know what he doesn’t know.

  Aw, KDW would probably say the same thing about the little girl in our Eye Candy above. He's mean.

• You know, Bobby, Harvard fires people for doing this sort of thing. Jim Geraghty reports: RFK Jr.’s “Healthy” Report Cites Fake Studies, Gets Busted.

  I was never a fan of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The guy with brain worms who dumps baby bear carcasses and decapitates whales always seemed like an odd fit at best at the Department of Health and Human Services and a potentially catastrophic one at worst. It was not reassuring when Kennedy strode into his confirmation hearing and made clear that he didn’t know which one was Medicaid and which one was Medicare. (Those programs make up 85 percent of the budget at HHS.) Nor was it comforting when Kennedy assured Dr. Phil McGraw and his audience that he thinks the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is behind the phenomenon of “contrails” and that “I’m going to do everything in my power to stop it.”

  But President Trump picked him for the job, and 52 Senate Republicans voted to confirm him, and so the country is stuck with him, at least for the time being.

  On May 16, the Department of Health and Human Services unveiled “The MAHA Report,” and a few days later, in a ceremony with President Trump standing beside him, Kennedy boasted, “This is a milestone. There’s — never in American history has the federal government taken a position on public health like this. . . . It’s not just one cabinet secretary, it’s the entire government that is behind this report.”

  But alas, it was sloppy and lazy, riddled with errors. Jim suspects an AI in full-hallucination mode might have been at work.

  But good old Karoline Leavitt blamed it on "formatting issues".

  Confession: I voted for her back in 2018 when she was running against Chris Pappas for CongressCritter. I regret that now.

• And don't tell the Conway Roadside Art Patrol about their acronym. Jeff Maurer has advice: Don't Tell Trump About "TACO", "POTATO", "CASPER CORP" or "CART O’ PENIS BACON, MEL"

  Recently, Wall Street coined a term: “TACO trade”. “TACO” stands for “Trump Always Chickens Out”, which is the mantra for traders who have noticed Trump’s pattern of threatening astronomical tariffs, seeking a “deal”, and then backing down. The traders are right, of course: Trump is rattling the global economy and causing damage, but the sturm und drang usually culminates in a press release along the lines of “DEAR LEADER SECURES GLORIOUS TWO PERCENT DISCOUNT ON GLUE STICKS IMPORTED FROM BOLIVIA!!!”

  Disastrously, though, Trump recently found out about “TACO”. A reporter — presumably from the NARC Daily News — asked Trump about the term, and Trump reacted badly. He began by describing his master negotiating strategy of opening with a ridiculous bluff, even though one could argue that announcing “I’M BLUFFING” to a group of reporters is not something a master negotiator would do. But the bigger problem was the way that Trump bristled at the question: “That’s the nastiest question,” he said, “Don’t ever say that”. There’s a danger that Trump might react to the TACO talk by obstinately not backing down, at which point our problems would grow even larger.

  As one commenter put it: “The first rule of TACO trade is that you don’t tell Trump about TACO trade.” Hear hear. A defiant Trump set on seeing his idiotic schemes through to their disastrous conclusions is a clear and present danger. It’s bad enough that Trump found out about “TACO” — if he finds out about POTATO, CASPER CORP, or CART O’ PENIS BACON, MEL, then we’ll have real problems.

  I hope you don't have to subscribe to find out about the penis bacon one.

  [BTW, my most recent take on the Conway Roadside Art Police is here.]

• Nellie Bowles is a great national resource. Her TGIF "week in review" column is full of chuckles and insight. For example, yesterday's comments about the Scammander in Chief.

  → I can’t afford a pardon: The White House vending machine is giving out pardons this week! Scott Jenkins, a Virginia sheriff convicted of conspiracy, fraud, and bribery for accepting piles of cash in exchange for letting rich folks have fake sheriff’s badges, got a Trump pardon. So did reality show stars and fraudsters Todd and Julie Chrisley, who’d initially been sentenced to 12 and 7 years, respectively, for conspiring to commit bank fraud and (obviously) conspiracy to commit tax evasion. And a random tax criminal has also been pardoned—right after his mother gave Trumpo $1 million at a fundraising dinner. That gentleman had been ordered to pay the state $4 million restitution alongside his prison sentence, so the $1 million payment to the president is a better deal in many ways.

  At this point, paying your taxes directly to the Trump family is a better deal and probably safer than using the IRS. Trump wanted to slash red tape, and slash red tape he has. Now he just puts a briefcase on the table and nods. I pay my cleaning lady in cash, and that’s how I will probably pay my taxes now too. Every April, I will throw wads of dirty bills in a brown paper bag, scrawl my Social Security number (666-66-6666) on it, and leave it at Tiffany Trump’s door. How do I calculate what’s owed? Well, it’s based on my income, of course, plus extra in my case for being a blue state libtard and for not losing the baby weight. Deductions offered for pictures of a local ballot showing Trump written in for every option, especially library board; being a guy with beer cozies and acceptably strong biceps because we need more of you fellows; and being a woman with anything above a B-cup. I get two of three deductions this year!

  After Trump held a crypto dinner last Thursday night, crypto moguls who paid to be there felt scammed that the president didn’t even stick around at the event they’d hoped to do their own scams at. I saw someone describe him as the apex scammer. Our Scammander in Chief. Give me a pen and a ballot for the Upper West Side library committee because I need to add one more name.

  Indeed. Maybe more on this tomorrow.

Recently on the book blog:

A science-fiction mystery! I heard good things! Specifically, from Katherine Mangu-Ward at Reason.

The setup is intriguing: humanity has been wiped out by "the fog", which has (um, allegedly) enveloped the entire planet except for one small island, with about 125 inhabitants, including three "scientists", the remainder being "villagers". All is idyllic, although you'll note some early-on strangeness. There's a first-person narrator, "Abi", who can talk to everyone, but doesn't seem to be actually present. And when a new villager arrives, it means an older villager must die. Tsk!

So, it's bizarre. Gradually, details, hidden secrets, and lies are revealed about the nature of the villagers, the scientists, and Abi. And that titular murder happens, which also happens to turn off the island's defense against that deadly fog, which starts its inexorable creep forward. And tech has wiped everyone's memory of what happened during the murder window. One villager, Emory, is tasked with solving the mystery; she's an Agatha Christie and Conan Doyle fan, so it could work out.

There are a lot of characters. A lot of red herrings and investigative dead ends. The reviews are laudatory, but it mostly wasn't my cup of tea. Like that guy who wrote "Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd", I found it difficult to care about identifying the perp here.

A checkout from Portsmouth (NH) Public Library. Appropriate, because Portsmouth is the only New Hampshire town with a Whole Foods Market. I picked it up based on the recent mini-review from Katherine Mangu-Ward in Reason.

As KMW notes, this is a mashup of "a business book, a spiritual journey, and a personal journal." John tells his story of starting his first "natural food" store with his then-girlfriend out of a Victorian house in Austin, Texas. (Dubbed "Safer Way", get it?) And, oh so gradually, developing the chain of Whole Foods Markets that grew and thrived under his leadership. His personality is an interesting mix of far-out hippie and button-down no-nonsense libertarian capitalist.

He discusses his admiration for Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman early on, and touches on his attitude toward free markets and voluntary exchange throughout. (He says "win-win-win" a lot.) Occasionally this led to conflict. For example, he refers to his 2009 WSJ op-ed on healthcare policy, on which the editors attached a headline more partisan than he would have preferred: The Whole Foods Alternative to ObamaCare. It also featured Margaret Thatcher's classic quote: "The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people's money." (Back in 2009, I blogged about the op-ed and the resulting controversy quite a bit, for example here, here, here, and here.)

John also writes of his opposition to unionization efforts, another thorn in the side of his largely-progressive customer base. He was largely successful in denying the unions. ( The United Food and Commercial Workers International Union was successful in unionizing one (1) store in Philadelphia earlier this year, long after John left the company.) And there were conflicts with regulators, pretty bogus in his telling: the SEC, the FTC, even local "weights and measures" bureaucrats.

There's also a lot of discussion of John's efforts to keep Whole Foods aligned with his vision, navigating the stormy waters of the biz: venture capitalists, IPOs, activist investors, fractious board members, and so on. It all culminates with Whole Foods selling out to Amazon in 2017, which eventually leads to John's decision to part ways with his baby.

There are a lot of good yarns along the way. One early-days supplier of hand-wrapped baked goods to the first Whole Foods store was quite popular, until one new employee declares during a taste test: "This is a Sara Lee muffin!" And a surprise visit to the supplier's "bakery" discovers, yup, a "pile of empty Sara Lee boxes".

The hippie side is well-represented too. John's pretty fond of psychedelics: MDMA, psilocybin, LSD. (Although he says there was a 25-year period where he didn't take them in a "significant" amount.) He's into meditation and breathing, etc. Hey, whatever gets you through, man.

A final interesting (to me) note: John notes the dichotomy between "foodies" (his term) and "health nuts" (my term). He's the latter, and at some point he goes full vegan, but he's aware that Whole Foods had appeal to both factions. So Whole Foods sold "animal products" (meat, dairy), although John did not buy them.

So other than John's paean to his favorite smoothie recipe, there's not a lot here about really enjoying food.

The WSJ headline is: We Made This Film With AI. It’s Wild and Slightly Terrifying..

Okay, but I'd add "amazing", "beautiful", "funny", and "eye-opening". In case you were unaware of what the kids are doing in their labs and studios…

Thought experiment: probably today it would take at most a few months to write and shoot a sequel to… oh, let's say Casablanca. Starring, as far as anyone could tell, perfect re-creations of Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman, Claude Rains, and Paul Henreid. Oh, yeah, Dooley Wilson too, somehow.

"Rick, the Germans have captured Victor! Can you help?" "I'll see what I can find out, kid. Louie, who do you know in the resistance near that prison camp?"

The biggest expenses would probably be a first-rate screenplay and evocative music. (But you don't have to pay royalties for "La Marseillaise" do you?)

Who could possibly complain? Well, the Screen Actors Guild, probably.

Also of note:

• It's hard to sympathize. Karl Rove thinks Tariffs May Cost the GOP in 2026 (WSJ gifted link).

  The [tariff] story isn’t good for the GOP. While President Trump’s general job-approval numbers in the RealClearPolitics average on Wednesday were 47.8% approve to 49.7% disapprove, on handling the economy he was at 42.3% approve to 52.8% disapprove.

  His tariff demands are weighing him down. Only 37% of Americans told a May 15 Marquette Law School poll that they approve of tariffs, while 63% disapproved. Fifty-eight percent said tariffs hurt the U.S. economy; a mere 32% believe they help. That starts to explain why stock markets drop when Mr. Trump rattles his trade saber and rebound when he walks back his tariff threats.

  The president’s frenetic back-and-forth on the subject, declaring a trade war one day then postponing new tariffs the next, leaves voters confused. Early Friday, the president posted on Truth Social that discussions with the European Union were “going nowhere” and announced a 50% tariff on all EU goods. Later that morning, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent went on Fox News to reposition the comment, saying the president was trying to “light a fire” under the EU to accelerate a trade agreement. Americans are left wondering what the White House’s real policy aims are.

  Another example: Last month Mr. Trump acknowledged tariffs would mean higher prices for Americans. “Maybe the children will have two dolls instead of 30,” he said, admitting they’d “cost a couple of bucks more.” Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick later contradicted him, saying, “Don’t buy the silly arguments that the U.S. consumer pays.” Instead, “businesses and the countries” exporting to the U.S. will “primarily eat the tariff.”

  Maybe these apparent flip-flops were all planned by the master of the Art of the Deal. But to many, it looks like cleanup on aisle six.

  If you've been paying attention to the news… you probably know more than I about what's going on.

• An early Thanksgiving. Declared by Dominic Pino: Thank Goodness for Libertarian Law Firms. But first, let's note the scorn heaped upon cowards and toadies:

  On April 2, Donald Trump unilaterally imposed tariffs on all imports, in violation of the Constitution. The law he cited to do so, the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, had never before been used to impose tariffs. Article I of the Constitution clearly grants the tariff power to Congress, which was not involved in creating the original policy.

  The unconstitutionality was plain as day, but the president went through with the policy anyway. The question became: Who will do something about it?

  One might think Congress would. Its authority was usurped, and it has the legislative power to do something about it. It could assemble a veto-proof majority to force the president’s hand.

  That assumes Congress is actually interested in using its constitutional authority. It isn’t. A handful of lawmakers introduced resolutions to terminate the bogus national emergencies that Trump declared to impose the tariffs, and those efforts failed.

  With Congress impotent, one might think that business groups would challenge the tariffs. Some of America’s largest corporations, including Walmart and Amazon, rely heavily on international trade. They would face enormous tax bills and would likely have to pass the costs on to their price-sensitive customers. Cash-strapped small businesses that import could face extinction.

  Yet there were no lawsuits from Walmart, Amazon, the Chamber of Commerce, or the National Federation of Independent Business. Big businesses seem to have calculated that they are better off trying to kiss up to Trump than to challenge him. Small businesses often lack the resources to bring a major lawsuit on their own.

  Therefore, the most likely candidates to stop the unconstitutional tariffs are out of commission. Thankfully, there are libertarian public-interest law firms to pick up the slack.

  It's like we're living in an Ayn Rand novel. (This comment also left on the article.)

• How about 'Make America Free Again'? You may not have noticed, but Jeffrey A. Singer, Terence Kealey, and Bautista Vivanco did. At Cato they find Premade Conclusions, Post-Hoc Data: The Problem with the MAHA Report.

  The MAHA Report, released by Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. in late May amid much fanfare, was produced by the Make America Healthy Again Commission, which was established under President Trump’s executive order issued on February 13, 2025. This order required the commission to develop a “Make Our Children Healthy Again Strategy” within 100 days of the order’s date.

  Again? Make America Healthy Again? It’s an odd slogan in a country that has long ranked last in health outcomes among its peers. If the United States were merged with Canada, Greenland, and Panama, our average health statistics would improve overnight. […]

  Happily, the Commission already knows why US children are uniquely unhealthy. By a strange coincidence, these reasons happen to be the ones the Commission’s chairman, one Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has been trumpeting for years. They include US children’s consumption of ultra-processed food, their use of smartphones, the chemicals in their environment, their lack of exercise, their stress levels, their lack of sleep, and their overmedicalization, especially with those pesky vaccines.

  Oddly, however, the data in the report bears little relationship to its conclusions. For example, the first sentence of the introduction reads: “Despite outspending peer nations by more than double per capita on healthcare, the United States ranks last in life expectancy among high-income countries—and suffers higher rates of obesity, heart disease, and diabetes.” But the graph the Commission supplies shows that, dating back to 1970, the US has always ranked last in life expectancy among comparator nations. Were Americans back in 1970 dying sooner than Canadians, Europeans, or the Japanese because of ultra-processed food, smartphones, chemicals, a lack of exercise, stress levels, a lack of sleep, and overmedicalization? Probably not.

  The authors note many, many additional problems with the report. As did (eventually) the report's authors as well. A site called "NOTUS" (News Of The United States) reports: The MAHA Report Has Been Updated to Replace Citations That Didn’t Exist

  The White House is downplaying the “Make America Healthy Again” Commission report’s citation issues, even as it scrambles to fix them.

  A NOTUS investigation published Thursday found that at least seven of the report’s citations appeared to not actually exist. The White House publicly blamed any problems with the report on “formatting issues.”

  "Hey, we didn't think anyone was gonna actually read this."

• Need a couple more things to fret about? Veronique de Rugy notes something that should have been fixed after the previous disaster, wondering Are We Headed for Another Disaster With Fannie and Freddie?

  The movie The Big Short—dramatizing the reckless behavior in the banking and mortgage industries that contributed to the 2008 financial crisis—captures much of Wall Street's misconduct but overlooks a central player in the collapse: the federal government, specifically through Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

  These two government-created and government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) encouraged lenders to issue risky home loans by effectively making taxpayers cosign the mortgages. This setup incentivized dangerous lending practices that inflated the housing bubble, eventually leading to catastrophic economic consequences.

  Another critical but overlooked factor in the collapse was the Community Reinvestment Act. This federal statute was intended to combat discriminatory lending practices but, starting in the 1990s, instead created substantial market distortions by pressuring banks to extend loans to borrowers who might otherwise have been deemed too risky. Under threat of regulatory penalties, banks significantly loosened lending standards—again, inflating the housing bubble.

  After the bubble inevitably burst, Fannie and Freddie were placed under conservatorship by the Federal Housing Finance Agency. The conservatorship imposed rules aimed at preventing future taxpayer-funded bailouts and protecting the economy from government-fueled market distortions.

  Now President Donald Trump's appointee to lead that agency, Bill Pulte, is considering ending this conservatorship without addressing the core structural flaw that fueled the problem in the first place: implicit government guarantees backing all Fannie and Freddie mortgages. If Pulte proceeds without implementing real reform, taxpayers on Main Street are once again likely to be exposed to significant financial risks as they are conscripted into subsidizing lucrative deals for Wall Street.

  Without genuine reform, the incentives and practices that led to the crisis remain unchanged, setting the stage for a repeat disaster.

  Oh goody.

• How dumb does she think New Hampshire Democrats are? NHJournal reports the bold stand taken by recently-announced Congressional candidate: Stefany Shaheen Supports Males in Women's Sports on 'Case by Case' Basis.

  In a rambling, difficult-to-follow answer to a direct yes-or-no question, Democratic candidate for Congress Stefany Shaheen said she supports allowing biological males to compete in girls’ sports on a “case-by-case basis.”

  “It depends on the situation. It depends on the sport. It depends on the athlete. And I think we need to make these on a case-by-case basis,” Shaheen said regarding her view of transgender athletes (biological males who identify as female) playing on girls’ sports teams.

  You can read Stefany's rambling and vacuous response on this issue here.

  Journalist Hanna Trudo, a New Hampshire native and progressive Democrat who briefly considered entering the race, told NHJournal she was unimpressed by Shaheen’s answer.

  “I’m not a sports person, but I can’t stand these types of non-answers framed around ‘fairness.’ We hear them a lot now,” Trudo said.

  “New Hampshire is the ‘Live Free or Die’ state. Last time I checked, that includes freedom for trans people. How is it fair to exclude them? Why would any Democrat want to limit freedoms for our most marginalized?

  You can use LFOD to support just about any position.

Recently on the book blog:

Some mystery authors who have established a well-known franchise protagonist will branch out to start new a new series, with a different hero. Michael Connelly is today's example; in the past, he's introduced Mickey Haller and Renée Ballard into his Harry Bosch universe. And now this new book brings in Stillwell. (I don't think his first name is disclosed.)

Stillwell is the lead representative of the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department on the offshore island of Catalina. Catalina is seen as the "Island of Misfit Toys" as far as the department's concerned; a place where cops who are considered to have blundered on the mainland, but not badly enough to be fired, are exiled. But, as it develops, Stillwell's only mistake was being too diligent and honest.

As the book opens, Stillwell is investigating a gory crime: someone has decapitated one of the island's beloved bison population. (Which, reader, is an actual thing.) And soon an even more heinous crime is uncovered: a bloated body has been discovered in the island's yacht harbor. It's a woman with a purple (specifically "nightshade") streak in her hair. She's linked to the island's exclusive "Black Marlin Club", which (coincidentally?) has just reported the theft of a jade sculpture of (what else?) a marlin jumping out of the sea.

It's the stuff dreams are made of.

As mentioned, Stillwell is a diligent detective, but he has a lot to deal with. The animosity that relegated him to Catalina is still festering on the mainland. He's got a girlfriend, but their relationship is fragile. Some of his staff are less than competent, and one is laid up with a concussion incurred in a bar brawl. And, unfortunately, the closer he gets to the culprits in these crimes, the more perilous his situation becomes.

Connelly does his usual excellent job of getting me to flip Kindle pages.

George F. Will knows it when he sees it: The Trump administration is pure progressivism in action (WaPo gifted link). Lightly edited to HTMLize GFW's list:

GFW goes on to outline possible political futures. He's not a fan of J.D. Vance, who (he says) "shares the current president’s comprehensive hostility to actual conservatism: government limited by respect for its Madisonian architecture — the separation and enumeration of powers, and judicial review."

Also of note:

• An amusing juxtaposition. Philip Greenspun digs out the quotes I couldn't lay my hands on yesterday: Media that isn’t state-affiliated can’t survive without state funding.

  NPR in 2023, about quitting Twitter over being labeled (first) "state-affiliated media" and (then) "government-funded media":

  The news organization says that is inaccurate and misleading, given that NPR is a private, nonprofit company with editorial independence. It receives less than 1 percent of its $300 million annual budget from the federally funded Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

  That was then. This was two days ago:

  [Trump's executive order defunding NPR] threatens the existence of the public broadcasting system, upon which tens of millions of Americans rely for vital news, information, and emergency alerts.

  "How much do you need for just the emergency alerts?"

  I looked, and (indeed) NPR hasn't posted to Twitter since April 2023, when it breathlessly covered Alvin Bragg's indictment of Donald Trump and Disney's live-action remake of Moana.

• Gutsy move. Steven Kurtz takes to the NR Corner to write Harvard University Is Illegitimate: A Reply to Steven Pinker.

  This past Sunday’s New York Times opinion section featured a long op-ed by Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker in defense of his university. A frequent internal critic of Harvard, Pinker acknowledged real problems at the school. Yet he also went after those supposedly afflicted by what he calls Harvard Derangement Syndrome, a disorder that causes critics to lose all perspective, seeing only evil where a mixture of good and bad exists.

  Pinker’s piece is heartfelt, thoughtful — and off target. Harvard has rightly lost legitimacy in the eyes of a goodly portion of the American public. The school has betrayed its very motto and purpose — the search for truth, veritas. Harvard has become an effectively partisan institution, undeserving of public support.

  This does not mean that important scientific research and valuable, apolitical instruction in introductory languages and basic sciences does not also take place at Harvard, as Pinker says. Nor does it prevent the occasional plucky conservative student from running the gauntlet of opposition and emerging the better for it. The existence of these goods may pose practical challenges to a complete cutoff of federal support. Yet none of that gainsays the fact that Harvard has sacrificed its legitimate claim on the public purse.

  I'm sure I've said this before, but you know that concept of "separation of church and state"? That's a pretty good idea. And the same argument holds for the separation of education and state. It's something to strive for generally, rather than targeting one lousy hive of scum and villainy.

• But if you do want to target that hive of scum and villainy… Tyler Cowen has a suggestion: There’s a Better Way to Fight Harvard.

  If you hold some grudges against Harvard, what else might you do instead of trying to wreck it? How about trying to beat it for influence?

  You could support institutions of higher education that deviate from the standard orthodoxy, such as the University of Austin, the departments of economics and law at George Mason University, or Francisco Marroquín University in Guatemala (disclaimer: I have affiliations with all three).

  Or how about right-leaning podcasts and YouTube channels? They too compete with Harvard, and very often they have more influence on how people actually think. Comedy is another institution that often is right-leaning. I’ve also spent significant time with the leading AI models, and find they are considerably more centrist and objective than our institutions of higher education.

  Interesting! Especially the AI part.

• The Antiplanner has a plan. Specifically, one for California high-speed rail: Give It to Brightline.

  He links to recent advocacy to keep throwing money at the project, and his response is golden:

  Are these people on the payroll of the companies earning millions in profits building rail lines that few people will ever use? Or are they just train lovers with no conscience who think everyone else owes them a heavily subsidized ride on trains that will travel less than half as fast as and cost more to ride than airliners?

  Never mind that costs have quintupled. They admit they don’t care how much cost they are imposing on taxpayers. Neve mind that ridership estimates for the California line are at least four times too high. They don’t care if anyone else rides it; they just want to be there for the first trip. Never mind that the steel, concrete, and petroleum required to build it spews trillions of grams of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. If it will get just one car off the road, one advocate told me, it will be worth it.

  Advocates act like fiscal conservatives have some sort of double standard when it comes to rail vs. roads. But 96 percent of the cost of driving is paid for by the users while only half the cost of Amtrak, and far less than half the cost of high-speed rail, would be paid for by riders. Don’t forget, the same fiscal conservatives who oppose California high-speed rail also opposed things like the Bridge to Nowhere in Alaska.

  If a (semi) private firm like Brightline can't make it work, the Antiplanner suggests perhaps "it could be used as special truck lanes for moving produce out of the Central Valley."

News from NHJournal about another candidate who wants to be my CongressCritter: Stefany Shaheen Steps Into NH01 Dem Primary.

Stefany's campaign website is here. Her Facebook page has the video:

Her key campaign planks seem to be:

• Outrage!
• Fighting!
• Medical research!
• Because her daughter has diabetes!

I find the exploitation of her daughter's illness (including heart-tugging pics of her in a hospital bed) to be more than a little creepy, but that's me.

My previous take on Stefany was a couple years ago, when she was Chair of the Portsmouth Police Commission. Back then, her thing was gun control, and I fisked the op-ed that appeared in our local newspaper, where (among other things) she advocated a "mandatory assault weapon buyback program."

Didn't work as an issue for Beto O'Rourke, and I wouldn't be surprised if Stefany's decided to emphasize less controversial positions?

Also of note:

• It's kind of amazing that they thought otherwise. At the Free Press, Jed Rubenfeld points out: NPR and PBS Aren’t Entitled to Your Tax Dollars.

  National Public Radio is suing the Trump administration for cutting off its federal funds, which, according to NPR’s complaint, is a “blatant,” “textbook” First Amendment violation.

  But NPR seems to have forgotten some free speech basics. As the District of Columbia District Court—the court where NPR filed suit on Tuesday—stated just a few weeks ago, “the government does not abridge the right to free speech by choosing not to subsidize it.”

  Amusingly, PBS's twitter self-description touts its "editorial independence" and "unbiased reporting".

  Not to be outdone, NPR claims to be "an independent news organization".

  So they're both big on "independence"… except when it comes to funding.

• Gee, ya think? Jim Geraghty wonders if the blinders are coming off" Trump Starts to Suspect that Vladimir Putin Isn’t Such a Swell Guy. To go along with his classless Memorial Day post…

  […] this weekend, President Trump jumped onto Truth Social to announce to the world, “I’ve always had a very good relationship with Vladimir Putin of Russia, but something has happened to him. He has gone absolutely CRAZY!”

  Trump has given this topic some thought; earlier this month, the Wall Street Journal reported that Trump asked advisers if they thought Putin “has changed since Trump’s last time in office, and expressed surprise at some of Putin’s military moves, including bombing areas with children.”

  While speaking to reporters before boarding Air Force One Sunday, Trump reiterated how surprised he was by the way Putin and the Russian forces are fighting the war:

  Trump: I’m not happy with what Putin’s doing. He’s killing a lot of people, and I don’t know what the hell happened to Putin. I’ve known him a long time, always gotten along with him, but he’s sending rockets into cities and killing people, and I don’t like it at all. Okay? We’re in the middle of talking and he’s shooting rockets into Kyiv and other cities. I don’t like it at all.

  Q: Mr. President, what do you want to do about that?

  Trump: I’m surprised. I’m very surprised. We’ll see what we’re gonna do.

  Got that? Trump is “very surprised” by Putin’s actions.

  What will Trump be surprised at next? That tariffs don't work? The First Amendment? Measles outbreak?

• A sensible recommendation. You might think Megan McArdle's advice would be uncontroversial: If Trump’s health declines, the GOP should take its own medicine (WaPo gifted link).

  When I decided to write a column on Joe Biden’s cognitive decline and the many people who covered for him, I anticipated pushback from my more liberal readers. As you can see from comments on that column, they delivered, in the thousands.

  Wasn’t Biden a great president? Didn’t I know he’d just been diagnosed with metastatic cancer? Why kick a man when he’s down? More important, why pick on Biden? Wasn’t Ronald Reagan suffering from Alzheimer’s during his time in office? Isn’t the current occupant of the Oval Office — in addition to his many offenses against our democratic norms — acting a little addled?

  This deflection is not good for the country or for the Democratic Party, which remains less popular than the Republican Party despite Trump’s erratic, cruel and occasionally unconstitutional policies. Democrats must rebuild trust with the public, and it’s not enough to shout “But what about Trump?” and hope the current president will do the job for them.

  Nor is it true that Biden is just one of many presidents who were similarly diminished. Watch Reagan’s final news conference from December 1988 and you’ll see him give sharp answers to questions for a good half hour, something the Biden of 2024 couldn’t seem to manage for five minutes. As for Trump, a good deal of what he says is nonsense. But it’s mostly the same kind of nonsense he’s been spewing for years.

  I especially like that last bit: Trump's not demented, he's the same.

• It's crazy, but it just might work… Oh, wait, no it won't. Jeff Maurer wonders Could a Wickedly Ribald Zinger Take Down Trump? But Betteridge's Law of Headlines applies:

  How does a man attract a woman? That’s simple: Acquire. Goats. Acquire goats to signal that your farm is prosperous, and that a woman will not want for fig wine or turquoise-encrusted finery should she come to be under your roof. If you acquire the goats through battle, all the better, and be sure to place your enemies’ heads on spikes outside your hut so that all may know your prowess as a warrior. Chicks dig that.

  You might be thinking: “Jeff, that advice seems pretty specific to ancient Mesopotamia — I’m not sure it applies today.” To which I say: Your racism against ancient Mesopotamians has gotten out of control — I have reported you to BlueSky, and their agents will be knocking on your door soon.

  But I suppose I’ll allow that — in theory — something that works in one time and place might not work in another. And I’m willing to concede that point because I recently read a column by Nicholas Kristoff about how humor (and other actions) can undermine authoritarian governments. Kristoff cites the work of a political scientist named Gene Sharp, who recommended 198 nonviolent actions that activists can take against authoritarian rulers. Sharp’s work helped take down dictators in Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Asia, and Kristoff believes that the same “tool kit” could work against Trump.

  Jeff illustrates why it won't with the (heh!) "Laugher Curve":

  

And I think he has a point.

Tweeting "Happy Memorial Day" is like tweeting "Happy 9/11" https://t.co/P1iYuJXy3t

— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) May 26, 2025

You would think that even Trump might take Memorial Day to be an opportunity for somber, non-partisan, reflection and gratitude for past sacrifice. But nooooo…

Ann Althouse also comments:

I especially like the all caps and the "21,000,000 MILLION." That's 21 trillion.

Also of note:

• Doesn't sound like a good idea. Dirk Auer observes a disturbing trend at Reason: Courts Are Quietly Taking Over the Internet.

  Who do you think decides what you see and how you interact on your favorite online service? Most would point to Silicon Valley engineers and product managers tinkering behind the scenes. However, an underappreciated reality is emerging: judges and regulators are increasingly the ones who decide how online platforms operate. The blueprint for tomorrow's internet is being drawn up in courtrooms and government offices. This should concern us all.

  Today's leading tech platforms were initially shaped by market forces. Governments did not tell Google to display blue links, Apple to invent the App Store, or Amazon to introduce the "Buy Box." But legal battles and regulations are now redefining how platforms are built and run. This includes deciding how firms can monetize their services, how they display content to users, and which features can be rolled into a single service.

  It should disturb democracy fans, since our judicial branch is the least democratic.

  Not that either the executive or legislative branch would be any more likely to wisely dictate how businesses should work online. Unfortunately, laissez-faire has largely gone out of favor.

• Unclear on the concept. Matthew Hennessey notes many peoples' misapprehensions about "markets". Including (unsurprisingly) one person near the top: JD Vance Is Wrong: The Market Isn’t a ‘Tool’ (WSJ gifted link).

  On a recent podcast, New York Times columnist Ross Douthat asked Mr. Vance for an example of how his Catholicism influences his politics. His first instinct wasn’t to cite the social issues typically associated with conservative Catholic political concerns—abortion, immigration, sexual ethics—but to launch a missile at the market. “Well, I think one of the criticisms that I get from the right is that I am insufficiently committed to the capital-M market,” he answered. “The market is a tool, but it is not the purpose of American politics.”

  Mr. Vance indulges here in some sneaky sleight of hand. His answer to Mr. Douthat’s question combines an obvious (though irrelevant) truth about the purpose of American politics with a total falsehood about the nature of the market. Nobody, not even these editorial pages—whose longstanding motto is “free people, free markets”—capitalizes the “M” in markets. The market isn’t a proper noun, and it also isn’t a tool. The market simply is. Nobody controls it. Nobody worships it, but only a fool ignores it.

  Mister, we could use a man like Ronald Reagan again.

• Also out of favor: fiscal sanity. Kevin D. Williamson writes on Unmet Obligations.

  There’s a story about Donald Trump—who knows if it is true?—teetering on the edge of one of his many bankruptcies and using the occasion as a teaching moment for Ivanka on the streets of New York: “See that bum over there?” he supposedly said, pointing out a vagrant sleeping on the street. “He is worth $1 billion more than me.” In Trump’s own telling, his unpaid debts added up to a sum of not $1 billion but billions.  

  New York City knows Donald Trump: a deadbeat, a frequent filer in bankruptcy court, a gonif who often couldn’t pay his bills and often refused to pay them even when he could. He calls himself “the king of debt” and wrote (“wrote”) this about his unpaid debts: “I figured it was the banks’ problem, not mine. What the hell did I care? I actually told one bank, ‘I told you you shouldn’t have loaned me that money.’”

  Memo to the bond market: “I told you you shouldn’t have loaned me that money.”

  Of course, the word needed in that sentence isn’t me—it is us. 

  You see that bum over there? He’s worth $37,000,000,000,000.00 more than we are. 

  Make that $37 trillion and counting. 

  KDW's near-bottom line: "In the short term, you can get a lot of juice out of rage and stupidity. In the long term, math always wins."

• Historical note. I recently watched a 39-year-old movie, Sweet Liberty, link to my report is below. In an early scene, Alan Alda's character notes John Adams' use of the phrase "the sweets of liberty". Which sent me to the quote farms, and I happened across this letter, archived by (who else) the National Archives: John Adams to Zabdiel Adams, 21 June 1776. Which contains this, sadly relevant to current events:

  Statesmen my dear Sir, may plan and speculate for Liberty, but it is Religion and Morality alone, which can establish the Principles upon which Freedom can securely stand. . . . The only foundation of a free Constitution, is pure Virtue, and if this cannot be inspired into our People, in a greater Measure, than they have it now, They may change their Rulers, and the forms of Government, but they will not obtain a lasting Liberty.—They will only exchange Tyrants and Tyrannies.

  Given recent history, who can say he wasn't totally prescient?

Recently on the movie blog:

I saw this movie in a theater when it came out in 1986, and was pretty charmed by it at the time. For some reason, it's unavailable through normal streaming services, but YouTube claims that it has the full movie. I went for the Blu-ray, which was on sale at Amazon. Alan Alda deserves whatever royalties he can get, I figure. He wrote, directed, and stars.

Mr. Alda plays Michael Burgess, a history professor in the small college town of Sayeville. He's written a book about a Revolutionary War episode that featured a battle and a plucky patriot heroine. Hollywood bought the book, and (as the movie opens) the movie company descends on Sayeville to shoot on location.

A lot of stuff goes on: Michael is enraptured by the actress playing the historical heroine, and who can blame him, it's Michelle Pfeiffer. This threatens his already-rocky relationship with girlfriend Gretchen (Lise Hilboldt). He gets horrified by the ahistorical liberties taken with his book by the scriptwriter (Bob Hoskins) and the brash director (Saul Rubinek). And Michael's dotty mother (Lillian Gish!) is developing health issues. The actor playing a British general (Michael Caine) is an impulsive loose cannon, with designs on anyone wearing a skirt, including Gretchen.

It's complicated, but moves along with its own screwball logic.

Both Lillian Gish and Michael Caine absolutely steal every scene in which they appear.

And, hey, that's John C. McGinley, in what IMDB claims to be his first movie role. Not to be his last.

Does this piss you off?

⁦@JeffBezos⁩ Someone in your company doesn’t know ‘where Jews belong.’ pic.twitter.com/IqpBwm11ZC

— Richard Kirk (@Bbr6dgcwscKirk) May 23, 2025

That tweet is from a Town Hall "Tipsheet" article with the provocative headline: WaPo Finally Takes Down Post About 'Where Jews Belong,' but Why Was It Up in the First Place?. To which I was sent via the "Headlines" section of HotAir. I think.

The Town Hall article begins:

So I was all ready to unload on the WaPo too. Obviously the borderline anti-semites on the paper were looking to sow doubt on whether Jews belonged… well, anywhere. Those danged rootless cosmopolitans! And then they tried to cover it up by deleting the post! Media ethics dying in darkness!

But wait a minute. That original story is still up (gifted link). And it still has that allegedly problematic subhed: "The killings of two Israeli Embassy staffers amplify the confusion felt since the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks about where Jews belong."

Is it asking too much for people to read the first three paragraphs of the story?

So, it's not those vile anti-semites wondering where Jews "belong". It's this actual rabbi. And (as the article continues) she's not alone in feeling disoriented and confused, with our country perceived to be turning away from its aspirations to be a place where people would not be targeted for harassment and violence because of their Jewishness.

So the WaPo is guilty of nothing here other than (as they say) a tweet that people misconstrued, perhaps willfully. This is not hard to suss out from a little light reading. And I went from being (potentially) pissed at the WaPo to being (actually) pissed at Town Hall. Did they intentionally try to gin up outrage in their readers? Did they do this out of laziness, ignorance, or malice? Does it matter? Maybe some combination of all three.

Also of note:

• Don't get a PSA test, Mr. President, you're gonna die soon anyway. Assuming that people are telling the truth about this may be risky, but Allysia Finley assumes that risk, and writes on Biden’s Prostate Cancer and the Tyranny of the Experts (gifted link). .

  Joe Biden’s stage 4 prostate cancer diagnosis raises many questions, not least why a U.S. president with access to the best healthcare in the world didn’t have routine blood screenings that could have caught the disease before it turned deadly.

  One possible culprit is an excessive deference to so-called experts, many of whom believe older people shouldn’t be screened for cancer because they are likely to die in short order anyway. This is the view of liberals like Ezekiel Emanuel, an Obama and Biden adviser, who want to put government in control of all Americans’ healthcare.

  A Biden spokesperson last week said the former president hadn’t received a prostate-specific antigen blood test since 2014, when he was 71 or 72. A high level on the test can signal cancer, though it can also raise false alarms. On the flip side, it doesn’t miss many cancers.

  In 2008 the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force—an independent panel of putative experts that reviews evidence for preventive screenings and treatments—categorically recommended against screening men 75 or older for prostate cancer. Four years later, the panel advised against PSA screening in all men.

  That advice hasn't made its way to New Hampshire as yet, apparently. I'm 74, and have a PSA test scheduled for July.

  But please tell me how this "expert" advocacy doesn't translate into the blunt advice in this item's headline.

• I find it difficult to believe that Hunter Biden could have participated in fraud.

  Just kidding! That's totally credible!

  Jeff Blehar has recently become one of my favorite writers at National Review, and he points out: The Biden Family Shares the Responsibility for Biden’s Fraud (gifted NR link, my last one for May).

  Once upon a time, back in the hazy mists of July 2023, before the 2024 presidential campaign got fully underway, my esteemed colleague Charles C. W. Cooke wrote a column for National Review about how “Joe Biden Is a Jerk” — actually, er, when you click through to the piece, Charlie tells you how he really feels:

  President or not, Biden is a decrepit, dishonest, unpleasant blowhard. He’s a nasty, corrupt, partisan fraud. He is, as Shakespeare had it, “a most notable coward, an infinite and endless liar, an hourly promise breaker, the owner of no one good quality.” Biden is twice as irritating as he believes himself to be, and half as intelligent into the bargain. From the moment he arrived on the scene — nearly 50 years ago, Lord help us — he has represented all that is wrong with our politics. A century hence, his name will be set into aspic and memorialized under “Hack.”

  It’s an excellent piece that resonates even more deeply now — in retrospect, its only flaw is that he could have expanded upon it. To support his argument, Charlie cited then-current reporting from Axios’s Alex Thompson, who during those years undermined the myth of “avuncular Grandpa Joe” with multiple stories about Biden’s visible mental and physical decline that cut against the grain of complaisant silence from the media about the issue. Uncoincidentally, Thompson happens to now be the coauthor of the most talked-about political book of the moment.

  […]

  Something else emerges, however. The accumulation of anecdotes over a steady chronological narrative is devastating, and at every step of the way it is Joe Biden’s family itself that behaves the most unforgivably — selfishly, foolishly, delusionally — of all. Sister Valerie and daughter Ashley are largely absent from this narrative. (Brother James is nowhere to be found either, which doesn’t make him any less ethically compromised.) This is the story, first and foremost, of Hunter and Jill Biden. They weren’t the ones making the policy decisions during the last four years (neither was Joe, as it turns out) — but it was these two more than anyone else, as Biden’s closest family advisers, who were the engine of Joe Biden’s continuing fraud upon the American people. As those closest to him, they were the truly necessary element to keep the imposture going for as long as it did.

  Yes, even Dr. Jill. Tsk!

• 

  I wouldn't bet against Betteridge's Law of Headlines here. Still, Rachel Ferguson makes a provocative query: Can We End Racism by Ending the Idea of Race Itself?

  Is race real? In The Raceless Antiracist, a follow-up to her 2022 book Theory of Racelessness, Sheena Michele Mason argues not only that it isn't, but that trying to stop racism while keeping the concept of race is like fighting "a flood by pouring water on it."

  Mason, a literature professor at SUNY Oneonta, suggests that these futile approaches fall into two categories: "anti-racist resistance" and "color-blindness." While the first reifies race by making it the key to understanding most social phenomena, the second reifies it by treating it as a real thing that ought to be ignored, thus downplaying the reality of the racism that relies on it.

  The Raceless Antiracist asks us to do something very uncomfortable: to adopt a new mental model, to think in a completely different set of categories. It doesn't deserve a snap judgment. It's a book for chewing on and wrestling with. It may puzzle or even disturb you.

  Gee, just when I had more or less adapted to the view of Harvard geneticist David Reich, who took to the NYT to describe How Genetics Is Changing Our Understanding of ‘Race’. (I also read Prof Reich's book on the topic; my report is here).

  Nevertheless: Amazon link to Prof Mason's book at your right. Paperback is $10 ("for a limited time"), Kindle $9.99. Not at Portsmouth (NH) Public Library. I will go for Interlibrary Loan, though.

Our yearly reminder: with whatever fun we're having today, let's all not forget to remember.

Story about the picture here.

Just a small rant about online surveys that often follow my purchases of goods and services. They always seem to ask some variety of the question:

On a scale from 0 to 10, where 0 is not at all likely and 10 is extremely likely, how likely are you to recommend           to a friend or colleague?

And nearly always, my honest answer is: zero. And it doesn't matter how happy or unhappy I am with          .

Why? Sometimes there's a subsequent question asking for my rating reason. Here's (roughly) what I would say, if I cared enough to respond:

As it turns out, we can blame one guy for this stupid ubiquitous query. From the relevant Wikipedia entry (lightly edited):

Net promoter score (NPS) is a market research metric that is based on a single survey question asking respondents to rate the likelihood that they would recommend a company, product, or a service to a friend or colleague. The NPS was developed by Fred Reichheld and has been widely adopted by large companies, initially being popularized in Reichheld's 2003 Harvard Business Review article.

So, gee, thanks a lot, Fred.

That Wikipedia article has a Criticism section, mostly aimed at its dubious value for the organization asking the question. There is also a link to a WBUR interview with Fred from January, and (let me retract my previous disrespect) he seems like a genuinely nice guy:

So I (slightly) regret messing up Fred's survey methodology. Maybe when I get asked the would-you-recommend question, I should just close the browser tab and move on.

… these guys?

Also of note:

• Speaking of which… Jeff Maurer notes the latest candidates for rusty-razor belly-shaving, all 100 members of the US Senate: Republican, Democrats Unite to Do Dumb, Bad Thing.

  It often seems that politics exists in a perpetual stalemate, with Republicans and Democrats unable to find common ground. So, it was notable this week when both parties put aside their differences to advance a Senate bill by unanimous vote! WOW! Deadlock is NOT a foregone conclusion! The cynics are wrong — Republicans and Democrats can still come together to do big things!

  If only the thing that they did hadn’t been a huge pile of elephant shit that will make America worse. Unfortunately, it was — the Senate’s “no tax on tips” bill advances a concept supported by virtually no economist in the world. The one thing that our leaders can agree on seems to be that America needs more loophole-ridden legislation that sounds like something that would win fourth prize in a “how I would make America better” grade school essay contest. The Senate bill would complicate the tax code, worsen a tipping epidemic that has already reached the level of a biblical plague, and pander to the working poor without actually helping them. The fact that the Senate joined hands to do this doesn’t warm my heart so much as make me want to move to a cabin in the woods and throw mud at anyone who tries to bother me.

  Later in the article: "The strongest argument for this bill seems to be 'It won’t actually do anything.'"

• If you can stand one more article on Biden… Let it be by Steve Hayes, on Mortal Sin.

  In an interview last week, Joe Biden’s national security adviser claimed he was stunned to see his boss’ disastrous debate performance in June 2024. “What happened in that debate was a shock to me,” Jake Sullivan said. “I think it was a shock to everybody.”

  Seeing the president incapable of completing sentences and lost in a tangle of words may have been shocking for someone who routinely avoids the news. But it wasn’t surprising to anyone paying even casual attention to Biden over the past several years. And it certainly wasn’t a surprise to Jake Sullivan.

  On December 9, 2022, more than 18 months before the debate that would end his political career, Biden forgot the names of two White House senior officials. One of them was Jake Sullivan.

  Jake now says he "doesn't recall" this.

  He has a pretty cushy position at the University Near Here. I don't know what it actually involves, or how much it pays, but I'm hoping it involves public forums where he can be questioned about this.

• Meet the new boss… … same as the old boss, as reported by Jack Nicastro: Andrew Ferguson is taking up Lina Khan's antitrust work at the FTC.

  On February 26, new Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Chair Andrew Ferguson announced the creation of the Joint Labor Task Force, continuing former Chair Lina Khan's departure from what is known as the consumer welfare standard.

  Congress established the FTC in 1914 to prevent unfair competition and deceptive business practices. This has primarily meant "protecting Americans in their role as consumers," according to Ferguson. The FTC enforces the Clayton Antitrust Act, which outlawed price discrimination between customers, exclusive dealing, interlocking directorates, and mergers or acquisitions that "substantially reduce competition."

  But Khan was more interested in Americans' role as producers than consumers. In 2022 she signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with the National Labor Relations Board to "protect workers against unfair methods of competition, unfair or deceptive acts or practices, and unfair labor practices," such as restrictive contract provisions. In August 2023, Khan signed a similar MOU with the Department of Labor recognizing both agencies' shared commitment to protecting workers from deceptive earnings claims, restrictive noncompete and nondisclosure contracts, and the "impact of labor market concentration."

  I've been dumping on Lina Kahn for around 4.5 years. (First example of many here.) It looks like we'll have someone else to kick around now.

• What governments can do well: kill people and stage publicity stunts. Robert F. Graboyes has an interesting essay at his substack: Central Planning Meets Socialist Realism. It is in response to a reader's question (paraphrased): Why did central planning work for the Allies in World War II, and not anywhere else? Roberg begins:

  Of course, WWII America was not a Soviet-style planned economy, but 50% of the economy was government, and the government did exert an unusually heavy influence over the private sector during that period. So, a central planning enthusiast can plausibly argue that the U.S. had a quasi-centrally planned economy and that it was a rousing success. But the key to that success (versus the Soviets’ 75-year failure) was that in WWII, America had a single, clear, time-limited, objectively verifiable goal—survival. Everything else was secondary. There was essentially universal agreement among Americans of all political groupings with that urgent and temporary goal. Given the extreme threat posed by the Axis Powers, Americans were willing to endure great sacrifices they would not ordinarily tolerate. And they were willing to put aside much of the self-interested behavior that characterizes more normal times.

  A shared goal in the face of external threat can temporarily provide a burst of bureaucratic efficiency and selflessness that is unsustainable for more than a few years. In 2006, I attended a lecture by Burt Rutan, the aviation pioneer who built the first successful private-sector manned spacecraft—Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipOne. In his lecture, Rutan explained why NASA (which he called “NAY-SAY”) went from nothing to manned lunar landings in eleven years and then sank into a dreary 34-year (now 53-year) doldrums in manned spaceflight. He argued that in NASA’s fertile decade, Americans viewed the Soviets as a constant and lethal threat and saw the space program as a tool for beating the Communists into submission. NASA operated like the central planner’s dream, with everyone working relentlessly, minimal bureaucratic squabbles, high tolerance for risk, absence of self-serving behavior. Plus, the American people were overwhelmingly willing to hand over to NASA whatever resources were necessary to do the job.

  It's interesting and insightful all the way through.

• Defending the indefensible. Aaron Kheriaty and Jeffrey Tucker attempt to explain: Why Trump’s Prescription Drugs Order Promotes A Freer Market.

  For the same pharmaceutical products, U.S. prices can be anywhere between two and ten times higher in U.S. markets compared to prices across the border. Nor is importation allowed, even though this would drive prices toward equilibrium by facilitating market competition.

  This problem has persisted for decades. U.S. taxpayers and health insurance subscribers subsidize pharmaceutical products for the rest of the world. While many politicians have denounced this problem, and sworn to fix it with a genuine competitive market, the barriers have traced to the same source: entrenched industrial interests that like the rigged monopolistic system of price gouging as it is.

  I'm dubious. But see what you think.

Kristi may be weak on Constitutional rights, but she can compose a mean (literally mean) letter to the Harvard International Office:

This administration is holding Harvard accountable for fostering violence, antisemitism, and coordinating with the Chinese Communist Party on its campus.

It is a privilege, not a right, for universities to enroll foreign students and benefit from their higher tuition payments… pic.twitter.com/12hJWd1J86

— Secretary Kristi Noem (@Sec_Noem) May 22, 2025

Also on Harvards' case is Johanna Berkman at the Free Press: Attacking Jews at Harvard Doesn’t Just Go Unpunished. It Gets Rewarded..

Well, that's disgusting.

But let me be clear: I was just kidding the other day about wanting to see Steven Pinker perp-walked into a Federal courthouse. I like him! And he takes to the NYT to ask for relief for his employer: Harvard Derangement Syndrome (gifted link).

Steven is a voice of sanity, of course. So is Yascha Mounk, who's also saying the Administration has gone too far: Trump’s Assault on Harvard Is an Astonishing Act of National Self-Sabotage.

Well, that's a lot of information on both sides. I'm admittedly torn.

Also of note:

• It was only yesterday Senator Maggie was lionized for quoting our state's motto! And in fact my Google LFOD news alert still has items about her berating Kristi Noem for not knowing her habeas from her corpus.

  But that LFOD thing only goes so far for Maggie, and for our state's other Senator as well. NHJournal reports: Shaheen, Hassan Vote to Uphold CA's Ban on Gas-Powered Cars.

  Both New Hampshire senators voted against a resolution ending California’s ban on the sale of gas-powered cars, giving the Granite State delegation an 0-4 record on the issue.

  The GOP-controlled Senate passed the resolution Thursday over nearly unanimous Democratic opposition, including Sens. Maggie Hassan and Jeanne Shaheen. (Michigan’s Sen. Elissa Slotkin was the sole Democrat to support the resolution.)

  The same resolution passed the House earlier this month with the support of 35 House Democrats, but Reps. Maggie Goodlander and Chris Pappas were both “no” votes.

  And, yes:

  Critics say banning consumers from buying gas-powered cars violates the Live Free or Die ethos of New Hampshire.

• Dominic Pino is someone to watch. He has an LTE in the WSJ today: New York, SALT and the ‘Donor State’ Myth (gifted link). It is a masterpiece of concise argumentation. And I'm going to copy-n-paste the whole dang thing for your reading pleasure:

  In his May 17 letter “Why I Won’t Give In on the SALT Deduction,” Rep. Mike Lawler (R., N.Y.) writes that “New York is a donor state, receiving less money back than it sends to the federal government in tax revenue.” That hasn’t been true for the four most recent years for which data are available. Thanks to Covid spending, New York’s comptroller has reported receiving more money from Washington than the state’s taxpayers have given in fiscal years 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2023. As Matthew Schoenfeld wrote in these pages in 2020, the claim that New York is a donor state is based on including such sums as military pay and Social Security retiree benefits while excluding things like the tax exemption for municipal bonds—all of which make blue states look more like “donors” than they really are.

  New York’s state government spends twice as much as Florida’s does, despite the latter having more residents. No state has abused ObamaCare Medicaid expansion to the extent New York has. The healthcare program that is supposed to be for poor children and the disabled covers 44% of New York residents, about half of whom are able-bodied, working-age adults, and about a third of whom are likely ineligible for the program. If anything, New York should be more of a “donor” because the federal government should stop giving it billions of dollars in matching funds for enrolling able-bodied, working-age adults in Medicaid.

  If that’s how New Yorkers want to govern themselves, so be it, but they aren’t entitled to ask taxpayers in the rest of the country to pay for it. Nor are they entitled to an unlimited tax deduction for their state’s profligacy.

  The "big beautiful bill" the House passed yesterday, upped the "SALT cap" to $40K.

• Speaking of the BBB… Charles C.W. Cooke looks at it and concludes: Trump Is Not Different.

  The House of Representatives has passed the “big beautiful bill” (BBB). It will now travel down the assembly line to the Senate, where, in all likelihood, it will remain mostly intact.

  This is disappointing news, for the BBB — could we perhaps stop calling omnibus legislation “BBB”? — is not a good law. It undoes much of what was good about the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. It includes a bailout for blue states such as California, New York, and New Jersey. It declines to effect a full repeal of the disastrous and dishonest “Inflation Reduction Act” of 2022. And, above all else, it fails to cut spending. As a result of its changes, the nation’s tax code will become more dysfunctional, our federal deficits will grow yet bigger, and our already-spiraling national debt will continue to mount indefinitely.

  Charles points out that the Trump-led GOP is acting pretty much the same as the "old guard" they contemptuously dismissed as RINOs.

• A whole lotta "buts". Noah Rothman: A Man of the Left.

  Somewhere between the time when Luigi Mangione’s psychopathy led him to shoot United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson in the back and the point at which artists and musicians lionized him, his visage etched onto prayer candles and his ravings canonized on popular merchandise, too many Democratic politicians admitted that he had a point.

  “But” became the watchword. Yes, “violence is never the answer,” Democrats like Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Chris Murphy, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and others perfunctorily intoned. “But people can only be pushed so far,” Warren said. “But,” AOC added, people “interpret and feel” the banal machinations of the insurance industry “as an act of violence against them.” “But,” Sanders observed, “people are furious” at the health-care system. And the American system is “broken” anyway.

  You know who else had a point, according to the Democratic Party’s luminaries: the vandals, brutes, and criminals who made up the most menacing vanguard of the pro-Palestinian protest movement that erupted, grotesquely enough, within hours of the worst single-day slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust. That movement and the expressions of violence that so regularly accompanied it were subject to a similarly contrived beatification.

  Noah writes this "in the wake of the slaughter of two Israeli Embassy staffers, Sarah Lynn Milgrim, an American, and Yaron Lischinsky, because the time for pleasantries is over."

  Keep your eye out for the "But"ters.

Recently on the movie blog:

Okay, I realize this (like so many commercial offerings these days) is one more effort to squeeze some more cash out of people who recall enjoying an original creative product. And it may work for Disney. There was an article in the WSJ yesterday about it: Why Disney’s ‘Lilo & Stitch’ Is Set to Beat ‘Mission: Impossible’ at the Box Office (gifted link).

And, hey, it worked for me. In fact, I splurged for the 3-D glasses. (Consumer note: if you've been unimpressed by 3-D movies in the past, I doubt you'll be impressed here.)

I usually do a plot summary, so here you go: Stitch is a creation of an alien mad scientist, a weapon of war. So dangerous, he's marked for destruction by the alien government. But he's also resourceful and smart, escaping his keepers' clutches, hijacking a small spaceship, crash-landing on Earth. Specifically, Hawaii, where he decides to hide out by getting adopted by cute-as-a-button six-year-old Lilo, an orphan living with her equally orphaned sister, in an unstable living situation. The aliens send an inept undercover team to recover Stitch. Merry mayhem ensues.

There are numerous differences between the old animation and this new movie, including one biggie: Stitch really should be more afraid of water than he is.

The talking points went out to the fake news…

Trump “ambushed” the president of South Africa by playing a video montage of South African leaders calling for White genocide.

The media is complicit. pic.twitter.com/zTNqAE0OIf

— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) May 21, 2025

Haley Strack at National Review manages to avoid saying "ambush": Trump Argues With South African President over Country's Treatment of White Farmers.

Haley does (as far as I can tell) a good job of debunking Trump's "mass slaughter" characterization. Although South Africa's homicide rate is yuge (Wikipedia: List of countries by intentional homicide rate), relatively few of them are white farmers.

Also of note:

• Another press triumph. Noah Rothman looks at Yet Another Gaza Famine That Wasn’t. And yet another black mark on our watchdog press:

  Such was the commitment of the international press to the notion that Israel is deliberately engineering a famine in the Gaza Strip that it accepted at face value a claim so logically deficient that an elementary school student should be able to identify the sophistry in it.

  “Around 14,000 babies could die in the next 48 hours if many more aid trucks do not reach Gaza, the U.N.’s humanitarian chief says,” read the claim promulgated by a variety of news outlets, including a since-deleted social-media post promoted by NBC News.

  The first tell readers of this piece will encounter is that the initial 540 words of the report accompanying the post are devoted not to the imminent humanitarian catastrophe that is about to befall the Palestinian population. Rather, it is replete with quotes from critics of Benjamin Netanyahu insisting that the resumption of Israeli combat operations against Hamas risks consigning the Jewish State to “pariah state” status. Indeed, for the prime minister, “killing babies is a pastime,” one of his domestic critics charged.

  You can't distrust these guys enough.

• My LFOD News Alert blew up. All describing pretty much the same story. DHS Secretary, and famed dog-shooter, Kristi Noem up against my state's junior senator Maggie Hassan. Let's go with ABC's take: Kristi Noem fumbles habeas corpus, denies DHS will host citizenship TV show.

  Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem incorrectly responded to a lawmaker's question on the definition of habeas corpus during a Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee hearing on the Department of Homeland Security budget for the upcoming year on Tuesday.

  Sen. Maggie Hassan, D-N.H., asked Noem, "What is habeas corpus?"

  The secretary responded, saying, "Habeas corpus is a constitutional right that the president has to be able to remove people from this country."

  "Excuse me, that's -- that's incorrect," Hassan interjected.

  "Habeas corpus is the legal principle that requires, requires that the government provide a public reason for detaining and imprisoning people. If not for that protection, the government could simply arrest people, including American citizens, and hold them indefinitely for no reason," she said.

  "Habeas corpus is the foundational right that separates free societies like America from police states like North Korea," Hassan added. "As a senator from the 'Live Free or Die' state, this matters a lot to me and my constituents and to all Americans."

  To be fair, I'm not sure how your average New Hampshire resident would do if challenged to define habeas corpus.

  But Maggie has a law degree from Northeastern, Kristi a mere BA in Poli Sci from South Dakota State U. Still, you might expect her to be up on her Con Law basics.

• Another day older, and… … as Veronique de Rugy observes, America's Credit Is Falling—and the Government Is Still Digging Deeper Into Debt.

  America's debt-addicted government just lost its triple-A credit rating from Moody's, as it previously had from fellow rating agencies S&P and Fitch. Many in Washington shrugged the move off as minor or as unfair treatment of the Trump administration. The truth is more sobering: a flashing red signal that the United States is no longer seen as a "perfect" credit risk and that politicians should stop pretending economic growth alone can bail us out.

  Yes, the mess is real, and it's because habitual deficit financing—the very disease fiscally-minded Founding Father Alexander Hamilton warned against—has become business as usual.

  The reckoning comes as House Republicans push to extend the 2017 Trump tax cuts with a "big, beautiful bill." If handled correctly, it's a good idea. But while the legislation aims to avoid tax hikes, it pairs modestly pro-growth provisions with a smorgasbord of costly special interest giveaways. Worse, it assumes we can afford yet another $3 trillion to $5 trillion in debt without serious consequences. That's the kind of magical thinking that spurred the credit downgrade.

  I see that the "big, beautiful bill" passed by a single vote a few hours ago as I type. So: do you believe in magic?

  (Headline reference to this great old song. Saint Peter don't you call us…)

• It ain't us, babe. Daniel J. Mitchell looks at an international comparison to answer the burning question: Mirror, Mirror, on the Wall, What Nation Has the Most School Choice of All? He links to the 2023 edition of the Freedom of Education Index. The top five "best" countries, ed-freedom-wise: Ireland, Netherlands, Belgium, the UK, Chile.

  The US is in a solid 19th place (as of 2023, when the numbers were collected). That showing, while not as good as it could be, doesn't really support the continued assertion that assertion that school choice efforts are this close to destroying America's K-12 "education system".

  The lowest five countries on educational freedom: Afghanistan, Eritrea, North Korea, North Macedonia, and Saudi Arabia.

• Have I let Trump off too easy today? I better link to Kevin D. Williamson to fix that. He looks at the President's Low-Energy Leninism.

  Given that Donald Trump is a borderline illiterate, he has chosen a strange strategy as president: being a writer.

  He is a writer of “executive orders,” many of them press releases disguised as diktats. He is a writer of memos and tweets and presidential statements. I mean that he is a writer of these in the same way he is the writer who wrote The Art of the Deal—which is to say, he didn’t write the thing, but it is, in a broader sense, his work.

  And the thing about work is, Trump does not like it.

  Post-election politics and substantive policymaking—distinct but related activities—require a lot of boring, labor-intensive, grinding work. The really hard part of politics starts after Election Day, and there have always been grinders to be found among the great American politicians qua politicians: James Madison, Lyndon Johnson, Sam Rayburn, Arthur Vandenberg. Sen. Vandenberg may be best remembered for a speech—“The Speech Heard ’Round the World”—but his achievement was in putting that speech into effect by remaking the domestic political landscape of American foreign policy, dragging the GOP out of its isolationist bunker in the face of World War II.

  President Trump doesn’t really do politics—because he is, in fact, utterly incompetent at negotiation, which is why he spends so much time insisting that he is a master of the art. Trump mainly does politics only in those areas where he can operate without much, or any, negotiation: in making appointments, of course, and in doing all that writing that has not and will not amount to much of anything.

  Reader, you really should subscribe to the Dispatch, because concepts like "… hitting yourself with a ballpeen hammer in the body parts that are right there in the name of the instrument" are there for the taking.

Recently on the movie blog:

Since I had such a good experience with getting Harvey on DVD from the Portsmouth Public Library, I decided to pick up The Wild Bunch (two-disc Directors Cut) on my most recent visit. I was in the mood (apparently) for Doomed Male Camaraderie with Extra Violence and also Betrayal. Result: not as good as I remembered.

I remember being impressed with the violence when I saw this as a much younger age. Compared to today's movies, it's not that striking. And the movie really beats you over the head with its protagonists' testosterone-fueled bad decisions.

However, I was more impressed with the movie's cinematography this time around. Surprised it didn't get an Oscar nomination for that.

I also noticed something right at the beginning, and was somewhat surprised that it also made the IMDB trivia list:

Don't piss off Peckinpah, actors.

Anyway: it's the story of the last days of the outlaw gang led by Pike (William Holden). It's a fractious group, including Ernest Borgnine, Warren Oates, Ben Johnson, Edmond O'Brien, Jaime Sánchez, and (for a few minutes) Bo Hopkins as "Crazy Lee", aka "Sacrificial Lamb". Pike's gang is being pursued by … well, everyone, but most notably a gang of depraved bounty hunters led by Thornton (Robert Ryan, aka "Horse's Ass"). Who, long ago, was Pike's comrade, now is being coerced by Powerful and Corrupt Forces into betrayal.

Spoiler: not many survive.

Amazon has an astounding variety of Biden/Blue Ribbon merch. Just one example on your right. Never underestimate the alacrity of capitalists to try to make some money off someone else's misfortune.

But in the interest of equal time, journalist Taylor Lorenz extends her own best wishes:

Hopefully he rots in hell and rests in piss pic.twitter.com/pohF5pJYSJ

— Taylor Lorenz (@TaylorLorenz) May 19, 2025

Classy!

Jim Geraghty has thoughts on A Spectacularly Ill-Timed Decision to Halt PSA Testing in Joe Biden.

Jim's post also examines an under-reported story from that Tapper/Thompson book everyone's talking about: the Biden family's (and their doctors') lies and obfuscations about Beau Biden's ultimately fatal brain cancer. Example:

[Neurologist Dr. Wai-Kwan Alfred Yung] told the public that they had removed a “small lesion” from Beau’s brain. In fact, it was a “tumor slightly larger than a golf ball,” Biden later revealed.

This, while Beau was Delaware Attorney General.

Megan McArdle prescribes a course of treatment for the guilty: The Biden cover-up demands deep soul-searching (gifted link). .

All the time we were being assured …

But speaking of dereliction of duty, which I guess we were, James Freeman takes a look at Harris, Biden’s Cabinet and the 25th Amendment.

Not only did our "public servants" fail to do their due diligence, the self-righteous "Democracy Dies in Darkness" journalists didn't exactly cover themselves in glory either.

And on the legal news front:

• Anyone else reminded of that Beastie Boys album title? Jonathan Turley writes on The Red Line: Democratic Officials Claim a Dangerous License for Illegality.

  Across the country, a new defense is being heard in state and federal courtrooms. From Democratic members of Congress to judges to city council members, officials claim that their official duties include obstructing the official functions of the federal government. It is a type of liberal license that excuses most any crime in the name of combating what Minn. Gov. Tim Walz called the “modern-day Gestapo” of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

  The latest claimant of this license is Rep. LaMonica McIver (D-NJ), who was charged with assaulting, resisting, and impeding law enforcement officers during a protest at Delaney Hall ICE detention facility in Newark, New Jersey. McIver is shown on video forcing her way into an ICE facility and striking and shoving agents in her path.

  Where was the horn guy when LaMonica needed him?

  (Headline reference if you want it.)

• She's no RBG. Dan McLaughlin looks at Justice Jackson’s Strange Agnosticism About Precedent and Democracy. She was on the "2" end of a 7-2 SCOTUS ruling in favor of Maine legislator Laurel Libby:

  The Supreme Court has rightly moved to order, in Libby v. Fecteau, that Maine state representative Laurel Libby be restored to her voting rights while the First Circuit considers her appeal. Libby was suspended from speaking or voting in the Maine House because of her public speech on Facebook criticizing the participation of biological males in women’s sports.

  The pretext for the suspension was that Libby’s Facebook post “identified the student’s high school, identified the student by their current name and previous name, and posted photos of the student, embellished with yellow lines encircling them from head to toe.” The Maine House Speaker, Ryan Fecteau, claimed that this was a violation of the student-athlete’s safety. But this is a viewpoint-based rule: the press routinely publishes the names, images, and schools of high school athletes, and Fecteau himself has done so in the past. The entire basis for the demand that Libby apologize or face suspension was that the name and image were presented with a viewpoint about transgender athletes, with which Fecteau and the Maine Democrats disagree. And the images of athletes are very much germane to the question of whether biological males have, in fact, an unfair biological advantage over females and whether it is unsafe for them to compete together. In response to a district court’s buying the Maine Democrats’ claim of legislative immunity from suit — a contention that collides with prior Supreme Court precedent — the attorneys general of West Virginia, Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Montana, Nebraska, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Virginia filed a joint amicus brief debunking the notion that allowing lawsuits simply to vindicate federal First Amendment rights by restoring a legislator’s power to vote would be any sort of infringement on federalism.

  I think Representative Libby would have gotten a lot more sympathetic treatment from Justices Jackson and Sotomayor if she'd tried to deck out some ICE agents.

• And for another free speech victory… Emma Camp notes the good news from my Live Free or Die state: Judge rules in favor of New Hampshire bakery in fight over donut mural.

  A New Hampshire bakery has won a crucial victory in its fight to preserve a mural of donuts and other baked goods above its storefront. While town officials have attempted to force the bakery to remove the mural, citing zoning regulations, a federal court ruled on Monday that the city cannot enforce its sign rules against the bakery.

  In 2022, Sean Young, the owner of Leavitt's Country Bakery, a popular bakery in Conway, New Hampshire, collaborated with a local high school art class to paint a mural for the bakery's storefront. The students' mural depicted baked goods forming the shape of a mountain range, with a multicolored sunrise in the background. Initially, the mural didn't cause any controversy—and it was even covered positively by local media. However, about a week after being installed, Conway's Code Enforcement Officer Jeremy Gibbs told Young that the mural violated town zoning rules.

  We previously covered the antics of the Conway Roadside Art Police (CRAP) here and here.

Recently on the book blog:

Coming up to the last few books on my Bond/Fleming reading project. Kind of a lackluster title. Another title might have been Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, but I suppose that was taken.

As the book opens, Bond has composed his resignation letter from the spy game. The architect of the "Thunderball" caper, Ernst Stavro Blofeld, escaped at the end of that book. Bond and the entire British intelligence apparatus have tried to track him down to no avail. So 007 is down in the dumps, until (Chitty Chitty!) his Bentley gets passed by a gorgeous girl in a hot car (specifically, a "Lancia Flaminia Zagato Spyder"). The race is on! The girl is Tracy, troubled daughter of a Corsican crime lord. Bond falls hard for her.

But in the meantime, there's a lead to Blofeld's current location, a remote ski resort in the Swiss Alps. Bond goes undercover to confirm his identity, and to suss out his current nefarious scheme. Which involves a bevy of different beautiful women, a harrowing, narrow escape, and an off-the-books paramilitary operation with plenty of gunplay, explosions, and another harrowing chase.

And finally the ending (Bang Bang!). No spoilers, even for a 62-year-old book. But I remember reading this as a young 'un (my mother hadn't issued her 007 book ban yet), being very shocked at the conclusion, and having my appetite seriously whetted for the next book in the series.

[I seldom recycle Amazon Eye Candy, but this is the third time around for today's. I'll also recycle my previous Consumer Note: it is described at Amazon as a "George Orwell Quote". It is not. The actual quotee has an amusing article at American Thinker: George Orwell is stealing my work.]

All that for a bit of outrage, exemplified by an excerpt from a National Review editorial on Biden’s Cancer Diagnosis.

Wait a minute, Jake. The White House was lying? No.

Instead, it's Jake Tapper who's lying. Or at best, intentionally obfuscating the facts. Houses don't lie, people do. What are their names? What exactly did they say? When did they say it?

Ah, well. Let's skip over to Brianna Lyman at the Federalist who nails it: Biden Cancer Diagnosis Makes Jake Tapper’s Anonymous Sourcing Even More Scandalous. About Tapper's book (with co-author Alex Thompson), Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, It’s Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again, out today:

Ah, the "White House" not only lies, it also strategizes! Deliberately!

I remember Senator Howard Baker's famous drawled query during the Watergate hearings back in 1974: "What did the President know, and when did he know it?"

OK, I realize Biden "knowing stuff" might be an iffy concept. I still want names of the actual liars and conspirators. It doesn't seem that information will be forthcoming from Jake Tapper.

Also of note:

• Hanna Trudo, all is forgiven! Hanna's thinking about running for US Congress from my district (NH-01), and she recently tweeted:

  As a 4th generation Granite Stater, I take our state motto in N.H., Live Free or Die, seriously.
  
  Under Donald Trump, we are no longer free.
  
  Dems need to stop chasing the magical land of bipartisanship. We need to fight NOW.#nhpoliticshttps://t.co/NBBA6Dc4GK via @nbcnews

  — Hanna Trudo (@HCTrudo) May 5, 2025

  The "we are no longer free" thing kinda seemed like an exaggeration.

  But maybe less free, something J.D. Tuccille writes about at Reason: Americans, especially women, feel less free. They're not wrong.

  "For the third year in a row, Americans are less satisfied with their personal freedom than the rest of the world, including their peers in other wealthy, market-based economies," Gallup's Benedict Vigers and Julie Ray reported of survey data on May 14. "While Americans have been less satisfied in recent years, satisfaction with personal freedom has remained higher and steady worldwide. A median of 81% across 142 countries and territories expressed satisfaction with their freedom in 2024."

  Specifically, Americans' satisfaction "with their freedom to choose what they do with their lives" started falling after 2020, when it was 85 percent; this was comparable to the peak 87-percent median recorded in the 38 developed, democratic countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and a bit higher than the 80-percent median recorded globally. U.S. satisfaction peaked several times over the past two decades at 87 percent, making 2020 unremarkable.

  As of 2024, after a brief and mild pandemic-era dip, OECD residents' satisfaction with their freedom stands at 86 percent and the global median is at 81 percent. Satisfaction with freedom among Americans, by contrast, has plunged to 72 percent.

  Note the data J.D. is working from is pre-2025, so not directly related to Hanna's Trump-blaming. Still…

• But when they get behind closed doors… Jesse Singal blabs an open secret: Of Course Liberal Institutions Are Engaging In Illegal Hiring Practices On The Basis Of Race.

  Harvard University initially received plaudits for its resistance to the Trump administration. After all, the list of demands the administration sent Harvard — apparently accidentally — was insanely onerous. They weren’t the sort of demands Harvard, or any university, could actually accede to while remaining a center of learning in any real sense.

  Last week, though, The New York Times reported that the Trump administration is escalating its conflict with Harvard (or as I call it, Tufts on the Charles), perhaps most menacingly with the potential of a federal civil-rights violation investigation.

  The turnaround has been quick:

  Harvard has basked in acclaim from White House critics for fighting back so far. After Mr. Trump threatened the school’s federal funding, Harvard sued the administration, and legal experts said the university has a strong case.

  But behind closed doors, several senior officials at Harvard and on its top governing board have acknowledged they are in an untenable crisis. Even if Harvard quickly wins in court, they have determined, the school will still face wide-ranging funding problems and continuing investigations by the administration.

  Some university officials even fear that the range of civil investigations could turn into full-blown criminal inquiries.

  "Tufts on the Charles", heh!

  I won't be happy until I see Steven Pinker perp-walked into a Federal courthouse.

• As opposed to Democrats, who aren't expected to take the national debt seriously at all. Eric Boehm observes: Not Even the Moody's Downgrade Can Make Republicans Take the National Debt Seriously.

  In a world where federal policymakers were treating America's national debt with the seriousness it deserves, Friday might have been a crucial turning point in Washington.

  First, the House Budget Committee voted down President Donald Trump's tax proposal when four Republican members of the committee broke ranks over concerns about how the bill is projected to increase the budget deficit and the debt. "This bill falls profoundly short," said Rep. Chip Roy (R–Texas), one of those four GOP members, during the committee's debate on the bill. "It does not do what we say it does with respect to deficits."

  Hours later, Moody's Ratings seemingly agreed with those objections when the credit rating agency downgraded the federal government's debt—a signal to investors that buying Treasury bonds is a riskier bet than it used to be. In a statement, Moody's said that the downgrade reflected the fact that Congress and the president "have failed to agree on measures to reverse the trend of large annual fiscal deficits and growing interest costs," and noted that "current fiscal proposals under consideration" would not do anything to reduce spending and deficits.

  Also not taking the national debt seriously: American voters, who keep reelecting incumbents anyway.

• Mister, we could use a man like … Ebenezer Scrooge again. Jeff Maurer speaks wisely: "Some People Are Lazy Dirtbags" is the Magic Phrase that Lets Democrats Talk About Medicaid Work Requirements.

  Republicans in Congress are making work requirements for Medicaid part of their budget bill. This is popular; 62 percent of Americans support work requirements for Medicaid. And, honestly, I’ll bet that number would be higher if a lot people weren’t thinking of Medicare and wondering “how do you force a bunch of 85 year-olds back to work — how many greeters does Walmart need?”

  Many on the left think that Medicaid work requirements are bad policy; their main point is that the cost “savings” come overwhelmingly from eligible Medicaid recipients who fail to navigate bureaucratic hurdles. I agree with those analyses — adding a work requirement to Medicaid is like “family style” dining in that it sounds great but sucks in practice. A lot of deserving people will get hurt by the effort to root out the undeserving, and the government won’t reduce costs so much as move them around.

  Jeff is convinced that implementing a work requirement for the able-bodied moochers wouldn't be worthwhile. I'm open to that argument, but see Cato: Medicaid’s Funding Formula Rewards Overspending and Fuels Fraud

Recently on the book blog:

Inspired by a WSJ review, I put this on my "Things to Check Out" list. (That review is from January 2019, which should give you some indication of the slow churn of my TtCO list. Fortunately the topic is timeless.)

As you can tell from the book's subtitle, the authors believe that the effort to use scientific insights and objective facts to illuminate and discover a solid foundation for human morality has been, and will continue to be, an utter failure. Not for lack of trying; the book describes efforts going back centuries by very smart people: Grotius, Mill, Herbie Spencer, Hume, and many more.

Speaking of Hume, there have been attempts to refute or evade his classic "Is–ought problem", essentially the linguistic observation that you can't proceed from statements about what reality "is" to deduce what people "ought" to do.

But people try. The authors note, usefully, different "levels" of possible scientific explication. The gold standard is "Level One": science settling longstanding moral questions unambiguously. Somewhat weaker is "Level Two": science providing solid evidence of some outstanding moral claim or theory. Finally, there's "Level Three": science indicating the origins of some aspect of our moral sense in the raw facts of evolution, neurochemistry, etc.

Scholars in the field are so far stuck on Level Three, although there are aspirations and claims otherwise. For example, the evolutionary explanation for "altruistic" behavior, where individuals self-sacrifice for the betterment of their community gene pool. Fair enough.

It would seem that, from a 100% "science" view, the "moral nihilists" have the high ground in this discussion. When you consider the fundamentals, it's all just interactions of mindless particles and fields, physics and chemistry. The authors helpfully list some concepts that (from a "disenchanted" viewpoint) are, at best, illusory: purposiveness, consciousness, the self, free will, intentionality, and (gulp) life itself.

But never say never; maybe someday "science" will suss things out.

(Obtained via the University Near Here's Interlibrary Loan wizards from Brandeis University. Thanks as always.)

We don’t need @jaketapper or anyone else to tell us Biden has been increasingly senile since the 2020 election. We need them to tell us who was actually running the federal government from 2020-2024 and how they did it. You’re not coming clean until you come clean about that.

— Randy Barnett (@RandyEBarnett) May 17, 2025

But was Biden's senility the only thing they were hiding?

This is the Most Dangerous Cover-up in the History of the Presidency:

Last summer, White House Physician Dr. Kevin O’Connor swore to the American people that Joe Biden was “completely fit for the Presidency” — no issues, nothing to see.

Now we learn Biden has “advanced”prostate… pic.twitter.com/JryrV92wXv

— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) May 18, 2025

You'll want to click over to read Benny's tweet in its entirety.

I don't want to either (a) bore you or (b) gross you out, but I can personally attest that if you are a male of a certain age, doctors pay special attention to that particular gland, sometimes in ways that you might just as soon they didn't.

And, as one urologist cheerfully told me: even if they detect prostate cancer, it's usually slow-moving enough so that something else will kill you first.

But it sounds as if Joe might be an exception? Well, I'm sure we'll be reading and hearing more than we want to about that.

Also of note:

• And then he started singing Lou Christie's "Two Faces Have I". Speaking of Presidential health woes, the WSJ editorialists note an indication of Dissociative Identity Disorder: Donald Trump Plays Walmart CEO (gifted link).

  Which American politician said the following?

  Item one: “Walmart should STOP trying to blame Tariffs as the reason for raising prices throughout the chain. Walmart made BILLIONS OF DOLLARS last year, far more than expected. Between Walmart and China they should . . . EAT THE TARIFFS, and not charge valued customers ANYTHING. I’ll be watching, and so will your customers!!!”

  Item two: “After causing catastrophic inflation, Comrade Kamala announced that she wants to institute socialist price controls . . . Her plan is very dangerous because it may sound good politically . . . This is Communist; this is Marxist; this is fascist.”

  If you guessed that both are statements by Donald Trump, you have broken the code on the bizarro world of the President’s second-term economic policies. Last year he blasted Kamala Harris’s proposal for price controls on groceries. But now he is attacking Walmart for warning that it will have to raises prices in the wake of Mr. Trump’s tariffs.

  The only sour note here is the bottom line:

  Mr. Trump is trying to duck the political fallout for his misguided tariff policy by blaming everyone else. Americans are too smart to fall for it.

  I'm not sure about that.

• The good news is that the question is posed in the past tense. Noah Smith wonders: So why *did* U.S. wages stagnate for 20 years?

  A week ago I wrote a post arguing that globalization didn’t hollow out the American middle class (as many people believe): [link].

  After I wrote the post, John Lettieri of the Economic Innovation Group wrote a great thread that strongly supports my argument. He showed that the timing of America’s wage stagnation — roughly, 1973 through 1994 — just didn’t line up well with the era of globalization that began with NAFTA in 1994. In fact, American wages started growing again right after NAFTA was passed. Check it out!

  

  It's a long post that examines various likely and unlikely explanations. But Noah doesn't find any of them particularly believable.

  I'll note that people are still griping about stagnant wages, pretty much ignoring the last thirty years.

• Don't fight the future. Tyler Cowen observes: Everyone's Using AI To Cheat at School. That's a Good Thing.

  Accurate data is hard to come by, but one estimate suggests that up to 90 percent of college students have used ChatGPT to do their homework. Rather than debating the number, professors and teachers simply ought to assume (and I do) that your students have an invisible, very high-quality helper. As current norms weaken further, more students learn about AI, and the competitive pressures get tougher, I expect the practice to spread to virtually everyone.

  This state of affairs has set off a crisis among educators, parents, and students. There has been a flurry of recent stories capturing how the cheating is done, how hard it is to catch, and how it is wrecking a lot of our educational standards.

  Unlike many people who believe this spells the end of quality American education, I think this crisis is ultimately good news. And not just because I believe American education was already in a profound crisis—the result of ideological capture, political monoculture, and extreme conformism—long before the LLMs.

  That's at the Free Press, and I hope you can figure out a way to read the whole thing. Tyler foresees a radically changed future for higher ed, and he's pretty convincing.

• Speaking of wretched hives of scum and villainy… The Issues & Insights editorialists say it's time to nuke the site from orbit: Medicaid: End It, Don’t Mend It.

  As soon as Republicans mentioned cutting spending on Medicaid as part of their “reconciliation” bill, the usual suspects started rolling out their standard talking points. They’re cutting health care for the poor to pay for tax cuts for the rich! Millions will lose coverage! The disabled will suffer! Oh, the humanity!

  Well, if the GOP is going to be accused of destroying Medicaid when all they are proposing is a minor haircut, why not go all out and scrap this hopelessly flawed, fraud-riddled, budget-busting disaster of a program and start over from scratch?

  First, let’s dispense with the claim of “devastating” cuts to Medicaid. The House reconciliation bill would reduce Medicaid spending by $625 billion. That might sound like a lot, but it’s stretched out over 10 years, at a time when Medicaid is on track to spend $8.6 trillion. Medicaid spending will still go up every year under the House bill, just a tiny bit more slowly.

  Yes, I know I mixed my SF movie quotes there.

  But I&I is asking this of Republicans. The same party who came into power in 2011 promising to "repeal and replace" Obamacare. With a much larger legislative majority in the House than they do now.

In words, the NR editorialists find nothing to like either: Prescription Drug Price Controls Are Wrong Approach

The problems are easy to foresee, and the editors describe them further.

Also of note:

• It has a long tradition of existence. My local paper's occasional columnist, Douglas Rooks, doesn't adapt that classic Animal House line in his recent column about the USPS, but he comes pretty close, in Reversing the Postal Service’s ‘inevitable’ decline. I won't excerpt the whole thing, but I have a few comments:

  One little-noticed departure was Louis DeJoy, the logistics expert hired during Trump’s first term to oversee the nation’s oldest public service, existing under the Articles of Confederation before the Constitution was ratified.

  See? "A long tradition of existence."

  DeJoy, like his recent predecessors, positioned the post office to compete with UPS and FexEx for the growing package business, while ignoring the only thing it’s constitutionally required to do: deliver the mail.

  Ackshually, the Constitution merely grants Congress (Article I, Section 8, Clause 7) the power to "establish Post Offices". It's not a requirement, any more than granting "Letters of Marque and Reprisal" (a few clauses down) is a requirement.

  But he went to greater extremes, relentlessly increasing the price of a First Class stamp while steadily decreasing service provided, a sure-fire formula for continued decline in mail volume leading to extinction unless halted and reversed.

  Ackshually, first class postage has lately kept pace with overall inflation pretty well. See the graph here, which goes up to 2023.

  But what is to be done?

  First, create several public and consumer slots on the Postal Board of Governors, which generally rubber-stamps whatever the postmaster general wants. The postal unions that have seats seemed all too willing to indulge DeJoy’s shenanigans as long as he didn’t cut their pay.

  More importantly, we have to reverse the trend to fewer and fewer places handling the mail. It’s as if government responded to the first PCs by mandating that everyone had to continue to use IBM mainframes that would get larger and larger as time goes by.

  Decentralized processing – yes, bring back the Augusta and Lewiston [Maine] centers and add local sorting at every sizeable post office, and we’d drive down costs while increasing the speed of delivery. We have smartphones at our fingertips; surely we can phase out giant but ineffective sorting machines.

  The decline in First Class volume has clearly become a self-fulfilling prophecy under DeJoy and likely his successor. Americans still want to mail things, and they should be able to expect they are delivered promptly.

  Rooks provides no evidence for his dubious assertion that adding USPS sorting/routing centers (with no doubt unionized staffing) will "drive down costs". It's likely that will just cause an increase in USPS losses, which will need to be covered by… guess who?

  Also not in evidence: any indication that "Americans still want to mail things." In fact, the decline in moving paper from one point to another is a global phenomenon.

  Most importantly, Rooks never provides good reason for his advocacy other than good-old-days nostalgia.

• What are the impeachers waiting for? Andrew C. McCarthy is disgusted by The $TRUMP Meme Coin Scheme (gifted link). And I dare say, unless you're a cheerleader for the team, you will be too:

  On January 17, 2025, Donald Trump took to social media with an announcement that was as dumbfounding in its crassness as it was unprecedented in the history of American presidents-elect — to say nothing of presidents-elect less than 72 hours from being inaugurated to hold the most powerful political office in the world.

  In the announcement, Trump urged the public, in the United States and across the world, to buy his new meme coin, $TRUMP. In his four ensuing months in office, the president has made a fortune on these sales. The exact amount is hard to quantify because, as we’ll see, meme coin values fluctuate wildly and Trump has partners in the venture. Still, Forbes has assessed that “it’s safe to assume the president walked away with at least $110 million after tax.” And that was in early April, before some more recent and significant revenue-raising developments.

  Much of this haul has come from foreign sources. Just this week, while the president was spinning as a triumph his face-saving retreat from the trade war he’d started with China, an obscure tech company tied to China announced that it would buy a mind-blowing $300 million of Trump’s meme coin. And although investors in these digital tokens may make or lose money — mostly lose because, as we’ll see, meme coin marketing often operates like a pump-and-dump scheme — the marketing of $TRUMP is structured to earn the Trumps a transaction fee: i.e., they make money every time the tokens change hands. They appear to have cleared between $320 and $350 million in transaction fees so far.

  "Sleazy" is too mild a word.

• Why wasn't the 25th amendment used on Biden, anyway? Jonathan Turley listens so you don't have to. “For Posterity’s Sake”: Why the Biden-Hur Tapes is a Virtual Racketeering Indictment.

  “For posterity’s sake.” Those words from President Joe Biden sum up the crushing impact of the leaked audiotapes from the interview between then-President Joe Biden and Special Counsel Robert Hur. Not only did they remove any serious doubt over Biden committing the federal crimes charged against President Donald Trump, but they also constituted what is akin to a political racketeering indictment against much of the Washington establishment.

  The interview from Oct. 8-9, 2023, has long been sought by Congress, but was kept under wraps by the government even as Biden campaigned for a second term.

  Many of us balked at Hur’s conclusion that no charges were appropriate despite the fact that the President removed classified material for decades, stored it in grossly negligent ways, and moved it around to unsecure locations, including his garage in Delaware.

  Bottom line:

  The real indictment that comes out of these tapes is a type of political racketeering enterprise by the Washington establishment. It took a total team effort from Democratic politicians to the White House staff to the media to hide the fact that the President of the United States was mentally diminished. If there were a political RICO crime, half of Washington would be frog-marched to the nearest federal courthouse.

  Of course, none of this complicity in the cover-up is an actual crime. It is part of the Washington racket.

  After all, this is Washington, where such duplicity results not in plea deals but book deals.

• She's better looking than Bernie, anyway. One possible candidate for my CongressCritter in the midterm election is Hanna Trudo. The Daily Caller has (it's fair to say) a hit piece: Journalist-Turned-Would-Be-Democrat Congressional Candidate Exposed For Allegedly Hiding Luxurious Elite Lifestyle. Sample tweet and Hanna's deflecting response:

  Sorry gentlemen, I like fashion AND Medicare for All! $15 minimum wage.
  
  You can try and shame me into not running for #NH1 because you hate progressives, but not for being a fabulous woman
  
  Live Free or Die #nhpolitics https://t.co/7NxPKLSEAB

  — Hanna Trudo (@HCTrudo) May 16, 2025

  I suppose if AOC can get elected, this could work too.

Recently on the book blog:

Recently on the movie blog: (Yes, I watched an actual movie! Second one this year!)

True story: I got this book from the Portsmouth (NH) Public Library. But only after failing to find it in the "New Non-Fiction" area, but noticing that it had been placed on the "New Fiction" table. I assume that was due to some jerkwad Portsmouth atheist thinking he was clever.

But for the rest of us, this is a really excellent book. The author, Ross Douthat, is not some Bible-thumping yokel, but a columnist for the New York Times (and movie reviewer for National Review). He can, and does, speak the language of urban sophisticates. Although, thank God (or whoever), I'm not one of those.

Douthat's argument for "believing" is laid out carefully in stages. In the early going, he makes some powerful points that indicate a universe, planet, environment, and nature that screams "not an accident". If the fundamental physics of reality were just slightly different, there could be no elements, no galaxies, no biology, … And even if you accept that dice-throw, there are further unlikely happenstances: the complex interactions between life and environment involving convoluted biochemical pathways to keep things moving and procreating.

And don't get me started on free will, consciousness, and the moral sense most of us have.

And we are supposed to believe that all this sorta fell together by sheer chance and accident? Brother, pull the other one.

After that, Douthat starts moving up the mountain of faith. He notes the prevalence of seeming inexplicable occurrences of the mystic and supernatural. He argues against exploring the spiritual on your own; that would be like trying to conduct particle physics research from scratch. Instead, be like Newton, and "stand on the shoulders of giants", taking the accumulated wisdom of millennia as a given.

And finally, he recounts his own path, from childhood Episcopalianism to his mainstream Roman Catholic faith today.

All in all, a fine read. I'm not going back to the pews myself this Sunday morning, but I look at the folks who do with considerable extra respect.

I remember watching this movie at some point in my youth—it's only one year older than I am—and enjoying it a lot. Have decades of cynical existence since caused that enjoyment to slacken? Heck, no. If anything, I liked it better this time around.

Elwood P. Dowd (Jimmy Stewart) lives in a nice house with his sister Veta (Josephine Hull) and her daughter Myrtle Mae (Victoria Horne). Veta and Myrtle Mae despair of leading a normal social life due to Elwood's firm insistence on the existence of Harvey, a six-foot talking rabbit. Elwood and Harvey are the best of friends, but he's invisible to most of the rest of the world. And most of the rest of the world thinks Elwood is insane. Pleasant, but entirely cuckoo. And the movie revolves around Veta and Myrtle Mae plotting to have Elwood committed to the local booby hatch, so Veta can get Myrtle Mae married off to some sucker eligible bachelor.

Hilarity ensues. It really does. Josephine Hull won an Oscar for her performance, and Jimmy Stewart got nominated for Best Actor. (José Ferrer won for playing another seeming lunatic, Cyrano de Bergerac. Irony?)

I was going to briefly rant about how streaming services tend to ding you a few bucks for watching older movies. But as I type, Harvey is available for no additional charge on Prime Video for a short time. (I went old-school and borrowed the DVD from Portsmouth (NH) Public Library.)

There's no mystery (heh) why I checked out this book at Portsmouth (NH) Public Library: it won the 2025 Edgar Award for "Best Novel". And (for once) I agree with the Mystery Writers of America: it's pretty good.

But while I was verifying that, I came across this abject apology:

Mystery Writers of America wishes to clarify the use of images of Humphrey Bogart and Edgar Allan Poe in a video shown at our recent Edgar Awards. Member authors wrote the script, but AI tools were used to animate the images of Bogart and Poe. Such use is inconsistent with our otherwise staunch support of our members’ fight against unauthorized use and potential for piracy of their work through AI. We apologize and have taken steps to assure this won’t occur in the future.

I get that some writers are upset with their works being used to train AIs. They are fine with people reading their books; they're unhappy with non-people reading their books. Or something.

Anyway: the main character here is British police detective ("DI" or "Detective Inspector") Caius Beauchamp. He and his team work on two unlikely cases: the more recent one being the discovery of that lady whose hand appears on the cover, drowned in the Thames; she's connected to a long-ago embezzlement of a company's pension fund.

And there's the matter of another dead body that shows up at a play Caius is attending; the victim appears to have been obsessed with the long-ago disappearance of a teen girl from a boarding school.

And, in the meantime, Caius has met a possible new romantic interest at that play: Calliope, milliner to the posh.

Could all these things be connected somehow. Sure, in some ways, not in others. Advice to readers: pay particular information to the party blather in Chapter One: you'll know things that don't become apparent to the principals until much later in the book.

Lots of Britishisms, which you, American, may have to either look up, figure out, or ignore. (Or, if you watch enough Britbox, maybe you know.)

Andrew Heaton asks and answers in a pretty funny, but also insightful, video: What happens to your kids if we abolish the U.S. Department of Education?.

As one of those shoe companies says: just do it, already.

Also of note:

• I'm pretty sure you've already guessed the answer here. And Betteridge's Law of Headlines doesn't apply.

  Nate Silver's headline asks: Did the media blow it on Biden?

  Beginning in 2023, I repeatedly criticized both the media and Democratic partisans for failing to take former President Biden’s age and fitness for office seriously enough. This was not exactly a popular opinion at the time: the more common complaint, at least until Biden’s disastrous debate, was that the press was covering the story too much.

  So I’ve been pleased to see two new high-profile books on Biden, Fight by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes, and Original Sin by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson, which include extensive reporting on his struggles to hold onto the Democratic nomination and — no less importantly — to manage his presidential duties.1 If you read these books, it’s pretty clear that Biden was not fit for the presidency by the end of his term — it is, after all, the hardest job in the world. With limited uptime and sometimes more severe symptoms like an inability to recall basic names and facts — Original Sin reports that Biden couldn’t even recognize George Clooney at a Hollywood fundraiser — his Cabinet worried about his capacities in a crisis.

  When it comes to criticizing Democrats, you probably can't distrust the mainstream media enough. I've found myself pretty confortable with Democrats like Nate.

• If KDW was wrong, I was probably wrong too. Kevin D. Williamson is another example of out-of-the-MSM thinking, and he's willing to call a foul on himself: Why I Was Wrong About Head Start.

  One should always be open to reevaluating long-held beliefs—and an especially good time to reevaluate them is when a guy with a Nobel Prize in the relevant subject tells you that you’ve got it wrong. 

  In at least a half a dozen articles and speeches, probably more, I have repeated something that I’ve understood to be a well-established fact for so long that I do not even remember when or where I first learned it: that Head Start does not work, that it provides no meaningful lasting results. Professor James Heckman of the University of Chicago, inconveniently enough for my longstanding belief, not only was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics (that is, the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, as Jay Nordlinger taught me) but was so honored specifically for his work on developing rigorous methods for the evaluation of social programs. I do not immediately knuckle under to appeals to authority, but I am inclined to listen to guys who have equations named after them.

  […]

  Heckman, who does not want for confidence in his convictions, rejects the notion that randomized trials should be understood as the “gold standard” and mocks those who believe otherwise as a “cult.” But, as he tells the story, even if we were to accept the primacy of randomized trials here, we’d want them to be good randomized trials. “This all really comes from one experiment,” he says, referring to the 2005 Head Start Impact Study. “Students were randomized out of Head Start, and the ones randomized out were the control group. But what were they randomized out into?” Head Start, and pre-K education more generally, is a varied and decentralized enterprise, and many of the students randomized out of Head Start in the experiment in question ended up attending other Head Start programs or other kinds of preschool. “Some of them went to Head Start elsewhere. Some of them went to something better.” Better data from a better sample produces different results—results that point to a different outcome about Head Start’s efficacy.

• But speaking of Jay Nordlinger… He's separated from his longtime perch at National Review, where he was a reliable voice for liberty and decency. And (at least for now) he's started a substack. A recent article shows what he's up to: War and Peace, &c.

  One of the most loaded words I know is “pro-war.” It was used by Peter Szijjártó, Hungary’s foreign minister, yesterday. I have written a fair amount about Szijjártó. As Viktor Orbán’s emissary, he has nurtured relations with Russia, Iran, and China. In late 2021, as Russian troops massed on the Ukrainian border, Szijjártó received the Kremlin’s Order of Friendship from the hand of Putin himself.

  In a tweet, Szijjártó said that Radek Sikorski, Poland’s foreign minister, was “pro-war”—one of “the most pro-war politicians.” Oh?

  A couple of years ago, Senator Mike Lee, the Utah Republican, responded to a critic by saying, “You support this war. I don’t.” He was talking about the Ukraine war.

  Let me quote from a post of mine, please:

  I once wrote a book about war and peace. For a meditation on peace—an essay drawn from that book—go here. The terms “pro-war” and “anti-war” are bizarre. No one supports war, except for psychopaths. (There are more than a few of those, to be sure.) As a rule, debates are between those who think that war is necessary, or just, and those who do not.

  Do the Ukrainians have a right to defend themselves against invasion and subjugation? Should the United States support them? This is what people are talking about.

  Um, bingo. That's why I've liked Jay in the past. And why I like Mike Lee (and others) a lot less than I used to.

• GFW says the bloom should be off the Rose, and stay off the Rose. We're talking baseball, and specifically Pete Rose (gifted link).

  Our polymath president should concentrate on his fields of intellectual mastery — geopolitics, macroeconomics, renaming mountains and gulfs — and spare a smidgen of American life from his perfectionist interventions. Including baseball.

  Does anyone believe that Major League Baseball would be reinstating Pete Rose if one of the president’s whims had not demanded it? Never mind MLB’s lawyerly rationale that the rule against gambling by baseball people need not protect the game from deceased gamblers. MLB has aligned baseball with the zeitgeist, which is no longer persnickety about lying and contempt for norms. Exhibit A is Rose’s twice-elected rehabilitator.

  Since we're talking about people I trust to tell it to me straight… yeah, George Will is one of those.

Neal Stephenson has a substack! He could post his grocery list, and it would be worthwhile reading. His most recent is Remarks on AI from NZ. And here's an excerpt that shows his "bet you didn't think of this that way" approach:

Today's Eye Candy is one of Getty Images' pictures of eyelash mites. Neal also has one at the link above. In case you hear eight tiny feet tromping around your eyes at night, you'll know who to blame: Neal.

Also of note:

• Big, if true. David Strom at Hot Air notes the bad news, as reported by the Big Eye network: 60% of Americans Are Poor? CBS Says 'Yes' They even tweeted it:

  The bottom 60% of U.S. households don't make enough money to afford a "minimal quality of life," according to a new analysis. https://t.co/Kc8peRJPUi

  — CBS Evening News (@CBSEveningNews) May 14, 2025

  They are quoting a report from the "Ludwig Institute for Shared Economic Prosperity". Which says its mission is "to improve the economic well-being of middle-and lower-income Americans through research and education."

  They also claim that 24.3% of the US labor force is "functionally unemployed".

  As you might guess, their methodology is aimed at making things look as economically bad as possible. I'll keep my eyes open for rebuttals. (And when my eyes are closed, I've instructed my eyelash mites to keep their eyes open.)

• Just to let you know about the coming (literal) dark ages. Marc Oestreich has the latest on the Green New Deal: Spain’s grid collapsed in 5 seconds. The U.S. could be next.

  Across Spain and Portugal, more than 50 million people recently experienced the largest blackout in modern European history. Thousands of commuters stood stranded on the concourses of Spain's transit system. In the span of five seconds, 60 percent of the country's electricity supply vanished. This wasn't caused by a storm or a cyberattack—just bad policy and the most underappreciated force in modern engineering giving way: inertia.

  When a power plant trips offline or demand suddenly spikes, the power grid has no cushion; it must respond instantly or it unravels. That's where inertia comes in. In coal, gas, and nuclear plants, massive turbine rotors spin at thousands of rpm. Even when power is cut, they keep turning, releasing stored energy that slows frequency shifts and buys precious time—seconds to a minute—for backup to kick in. It's not backup power, it's breathing room. Like the flywheel on a Peloton, it keeps things steady even when input falters.

  What's worse: the Iberian grid designers: (1) knew this was a possibility, and decided to live with it; or (2) didn't know about it?

  According to Wikipedia: "At least seven people died as a result of the blackout in Spain. Six deaths were recorded in Galicia, including three members of the same family who died of carbon monoxide poisoning believed to have been caused by a faulty generator in a home in Taboadela. The seventh death was recorded in a fire at a house in Madrid that left 13 others injured."

• Enshittification. That's the concept widely attributed to Cory Doctorow. And my speculation is that's the answer to Noah Smith's query: Why has American pop culture stagnated?

  In recent years, I’ve read a bunch of people talk about a stagnation in American pop culture. I doubt that this sort of complaint is particularly new. For decades in the mid-20th century, Dwight Macdonald railed against mass culture, which he viewed as polluting and absorbing high culture. In 1980, Pauline Kael wrote an op-ed in the New Yorker entitled “Why Are Movies So Bad? or, The Numbers”, where she argued that the capitalistic incentives of movie studios were causing them to turn out derivative slop.

  So if I try to answer the question “Why has American pop culture stagnated?”, there’s always the danger that I’ll be coming up with an explanation for a problem that doesn’t actually exist — that this is just one of those things that someone is always saying, much like “Kids these days don’t respect their parents anymore” and “Scientists have discovered everything there is to discover.” To make matters worse, there’s no objective definition of cultural stagnation in the first place; it’s a fun topic precisely because what feels new and interesting is purely a matter of opinion.

  I haven't even tried to listen to popular music recently. My movie consumption is also way down. (I plan on going to see the live-action Lilo & Stitch next week. Although that's a remake, another signal of Hollywood failing to come up with anything new and interesting.)

• Not exactly a riddle wrapped in an enigma, Donald. Veronique de Rugy analyzes: Trump's Tax Plan Is a Leftist Economic Agenda Wrapped in Populist Talking Points.

  If you voted for President Donald Trump last November because you believed he'd increase economic freedom, it's safe to say you were fooled. Following a reckless tariff barrage, the White House and its allies are preparing a new wave of tax code gimmickry that has more in common with progressive social engineering than pro-growth reform. And don't forget a fiscal recklessness that mirrors the mistakes of the left.

  Defend these policies if you like, but let's be clear: The administration shows no coherent commitment to free market principles and is in fact actively undermining them. Its approach is better described as central planning disguised as economic nationalism.

  This week's example is an executive-order attempt at prescription drug price control, similar to Democrats' past proposals. If implemented, it would inevitably reduce pharmaceutical research, development, and innovation.

  Trying to put lipstick on this pig, by the way, is the Federalist, with a reality-optional headline query: Will Trump’s Free-Market Drug Pricing Solution Cut Out Greedy Middlemen?

  "Greedy middlemen" have long been socialist punching bags.

• Just hope he doesn't go back to sleep on it. Jim Geraghty has an "it's about time" headline: Trump belatedly wakes up to Putin’s brutality (gifted link).

  President Donald Trump in recent weeks, according to the Wall Street Journal, asked advisers if they think Russian dictator Vladimir Putin “has changed since Trump’s last time in office, and expressed surprise at some of Putin’s military moves, including bombing areas with children.”

  You can almost excuse the question about Putin changing; Russia analysts have wondered whether Putin’s long isolation during the pandemic altered his thinking and made him (even more) paranoid and reckless. Others have wondered whether Putin has some secret health issue affecting his actions and worldview.

  But Trump is surprised at the brutality and callousness of Russia’s military aggression? Surprised?

  Jim notes the credible reports of Trump's lassitude in getting briefed on national security issues.

… because he noticed Abigail Adams' headline query at National Review: Do Ballerina Androids Dream of Electric Nutcrackers? Inspired by this post from "gorklon rust":

pic.twitter.com/ZbrZmfjHpd

— gorklon rust (@elonmusk) May 14, 2025

Being a philistine dance-wise, I was mainly creeped out by Optimus's resemblance to the Empire's killer droids I'd just seen in Andor Season 2, Episode 8. Eek! They're here already!

Also of note:

• One must have a heart of stone to read of the negation of the earlier election of David Hogg without laughing. Jonathan Turley tells the story while keeping a straight face, though. Circling the Firing Squad: The Democratic Party Moves to Negate Earlier Election of David Hogg.

  The Democratic National Committee (DNC) is about to show the perils of circling a firing squad. In its announcement that it will nullify the election of David Hogg and another Vice Chair, the DNC reminded the public why they have left the Democratic Party. The sudden decision that there were procedural irregularities in the election (after Hogg said that he would target older Democratic incumbents) leaves the DNC looking more like the CCP. However, it gets worse.

  Hogg caused a controversy by announcing that he will work to primary older Democratic incumbents through his group, Leaders We Deserve, to bring young candidates into the party. The leadership ordered him to retract the pledge or resign. He did neither.

  Then, the DNC announced that there were “irregularities” in how he and Pennsylvania state Rep. Malcolm Kenyatta won two of the three vice chair positions.

  The reason? One of the losing candidates, Kalyn Free, filed a complaint during the original election alleging that the DNC failed to follow rules on gender diversity.

  For additional amusement, click over for video of DNC leaders trying to explain those rules.

• Well, I got mine anyway. I was wondering if we'd have (additional) airport chaos last week as TSA's "deadline" for REAL ID compliance hit. Jim Harper was paying attention, and… REAL ID Day After-Action Report: Stalemate.

  On May 7, 2025, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) was scheduled to attack American air travel. Terrorism works by inducing overreaction from victim states. So, yes, the TSA’s work to restrict travel by law-abiding Americans gives a win to the 9/11 attackers, nearly a quarter-century on. No doing business in other states, no visiting the new grandbaby—unless you have enrolled in the national ID system created by the REAL ID Act.

  But the attack didn’t come. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kristi Noem announced the day before that American travelers would not be turned away. As The Wall Street Journal’s travel columnist reported, lines were shorter at many airports. My experience flying on May 9 without a federally compliant ID was smooth. I decline strip-search machines, so I already get a pat-down (or “freedom massage”) each time I fly, which is probably what travelers with noncompliant IDs got.

  But internal contradictions exist with the policy, Jim thinks, and he predicts "collapse, sooner or later, of the national ID project." So, good.

• You don't have to be a moron to understand it, but it helps. Jeff Maurer sees a silver lining: The Qatari Plane Scandal is Different Because Morons Understand It.

  Those of us who have spent years stunned by Trump’s flagrant and frankly kind of impressive corruption often ask ourselves: “Why does nothing ever stick to this guy?” Trump is so corrupt that corruption seems to be the only thing he devotes energy to other than sexual harassment and golf. Most of us have forgotten Trump scandals that would have sunk any other president; if George H.W. Bush had run for office while hawking $100,000 watches from a personal merch store, there would be a chapter in every civics textbook titled “Watchgate”. But when Trump does it, we laugh it off as Dennis the Menace-esque hijinks.

  The simplest explanation for why Trump gets away with so much is that most of his scandals are just barely too complex to put the national panties in a twist. Many people seemed to view the Mueller Report as a report on whether or not prostitutes peed on the president, and when the answer was “no”, tales of obstruction of justice felt like a bait-and-switch, a bit like luring people into a porno theatre and then showing My Dinner with Andre. Trump’s first impeachment included the phrase “Ukrainian Prosecutor General”, which must be one of the most brain-numbing three word phrases possible, right up there with “Consumption Tax Study” and “Canadian Sorghum Yields”. January 6 might have sunk Trump had his timing not been perfect; Republicans skipped impeachment because they thought Trump would just go away, and by the time Trump ran again, the public forgot where things left off, like that SNL sketch where no one on The Sopranos can remember what happened on the previous season of The Sopranos.

  In this morning's news: Democratic congressman pushes Trump impeachment but backs down from vote. Come on, you guys!

• Speaking of morons… Saul Zimet (who is not a moron) notes the ends of the horseshoe keep getting closer: MAGA Adopts One of Karl Marx’s Key Misconceptions.

  “Globalization” has become a pretty notorious buzzword, and this can sometimes obscure the fact that it is largely (although not entirely) reducible to a set of private voluntary exchanges that occur across national borders. To the extent that President Donald Trump’s MAGA movement has consistent policy positions, those positions are predominantly about reducing globalization by preventing Americans from making voluntary transactions with those who lack U.S. citizenship—for example, tariffing imports to hinder U.S. citizens from engaging in international trade and barring commerce between U.S. citizens and many immigrants by detaining or deporting those immigrants or prohibiting their entry into the country.

  When a government deploys mass coercion against peaceful people, as we have seen under Trump’s trade and immigration policies (which is not to say that all illegal immigrants are peaceful), the government’s representatives and apologists tend to roll out a series of moral justifications. These arguments can elucidate the character of the political faction in power, and MAGA has been no exception. Throughout the last few months, one of their defenses of Trump’s trade and immigration policies, contrary to the pre-MAGA Republican Party’s free market rhetoric, has frequently been the allegation that low wages for voluntary labor are exploitative.

  “Globalization” has become a pretty notorious buzzword, and this can sometimes obscure the fact that it is largely (although not entirely) reducible to a set of private voluntary exchanges that occur across national borders. To the extent that President Donald Trump’s MAGA movement has consistent policy positions, those positions are predominantly about reducing globalization by preventing Americans from making voluntary transactions with those who lack U.S. citizenship—for example, tariffing imports to hinder U.S. citizens from engaging in international trade and barring commerce between U.S. citizens and many immigrants by detaining or deporting those immigrants or prohibiting their entry into the country.

  When I was a youngster reading about Marx's ideas, I couldn't help but notice his "exploitation", shorn of moralistic language, essentially meant nothing more or less than "paying people market wages".

I assume this is in response to Trump's May 4 interview with Kristen Welker on Meet the Press. From the (slightly reformatted) transcript:

I get what Trump is trying to say: he considers the actual legal issues to be unresolved.

But—geez, Donald: When you are asked whether you need to uphold the Constitution, you simply answer, "Yes, of course."

Also of note:

• Another mile down the Road to Serfdom. Gee, we didn't have to wait very long to get (as the WSJ editorialists say) Trump’s Worst Idea Since Tariffs (gifted link).

  President Trump and Republicans appear to be shrinking from reforming Medicaid, but that’s not the worst of it. To replace the spending slowdown they won’t get in Medicaid, they may expand drug price controls. For that trade we could have elected Democrats.

  Trump officials are pitching Republicans on a “most-favored nation” drug-pricing regime for Medicaid. While the details are hazy, the idea is for Medicaid to pay drug makers the lowest price charged by other developed countries. Mr. Trump proposed a similar scheme for Medicare Part B drugs at the end of his first term, and it was a bad idea then too.

  That's an older article, but things did not get better, according to Michael F. Connon at Cato more recently: Trump Attempts Price Controls on Prescription Drugs.

  I’m usually the guy reminding everybody, “It is not a ‘price control’ when the government reduces the prices [it] pays for drugs.” I expected that I would be singing that tune again this morning when President Trump released an executive order on drug pricing. To my knowledge, Trump has never taken any steps to impose actual price controls on prescription drugs (read: coercive restraints on pharmaceutical transactions outside of government programs).

  I was wrong. Unlike the Inflation Reduction Act or Trump’s past proposals, Trump’s executive order is an attempt to impose government price controls on pharmaceuticals.

  I'm (I guess) amused at the efforts of Trump cheerleaders to find some way to shake their pom-poms at this. Example at the Federalist: Dems Sworn To Oppose Trump Land Awkwardly On The Side Of Higher Drug Prices.

• But to be fair… Jacob Sullum, in a Reason post timestamped one minute after midnight today: Trump rightly decries "absurd and unjust" overcriminalization in federal regulations. So yay!

  After mountain runner Michelino Sunseri ascended and descended Grand Teton in record time last fall, his corporate sponsor, The North Face, heralded his achievement as "an impossible dream—come true." Then came the nightmare: Federal prosecutors charged Sunseri with a misdemeanor punishable by up to six months in jail for using a trail that the National Park Service described as closed, although it had never bothered to clearly inform the public of that designation.

  Sunseri unwittingly violated one of the myriad federal regulations that carry criminal penalties—a body of law so vast and obscure that no one knows exactly how many offenses it includes. An executive order that President Donald Trump issued last week aims to ameliorate the injustices caused by the proliferation of such agency-defined crimes, which turn the rule of law into a cruel joke.

  The Code of Federal Regulations "contains over 48,000 sections, stretching over 175,000 pages—far more than any citizen can possibly read, let alone fully understand," Trump's order notes. "Worse, many [regulations] carry potential criminal penalties for violations."

  Good job, Team Orange. But…

• With Trump, the bad news is never far away. In a post timestamped at 5:50pm yesterday (so just 6 hours and 11 minutes before the one linked above) Jacob Sullum brings it: Since immigration is an 'invasion,' a top Trump adviser says, the president might suspend habeas corpus.

  The writ of habeas corpus, a right deeply rooted in English common law and recognized by the U.S. Constitution, allows people nabbed by the government to challenge their detention in court. That complicates President Donald Trump's immigration crackdown. Last month, for example, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously ruled that foreign nationals who allegedly are subject to immediate deportation as "alien enemies" have a right to contest that designation by filing habeas petitions. And foreign students have used the writ to challenge the claim that they are "subject to removal" because their political opinions undermine U.S. foreign policy interests.

  Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff for policy, has a potential solution to this inconvenience. Last Friday, he told reporters that Trump is "actively looking at" suspending habeas corpus to facilitate the deportation of unwanted foreigners. "The Constitution is clear," Miller said. "The privilege of the writ of habeas corpus can be suspended in a time of invasion."

  I am not a lawyer, but, yeah, that sounds … unconstitional.

• Not being British, we have no excuse. Kevin D. Williamson attempts to jog our American memories. The Forgotten Word: Sex.

  “There are only two genders!” Up goes the battle cry from certain quarters of the right and from the president whose line they toe with such perfect servility. Over at Facebook, it was 54 genders before it was 72 before it was … whatever it is today.

  In reality, the number of genders is neither two nor 72 nor anything in between: The number of genders, outside of grammar textbooks, is zero. “Gender” is a grammatical term that became, over time, a figure of speech masquerading as an indelible (for purposes of discrimination law) yet infinitely fluid (for other rhetorical purposes) personal trait, one that is conflated—often intentionally, with its less malleable non-synonym, sex.

  As George Orwell observed in his famous essay “Politics and the English Language,” the corruption of language goes hand-in-hand with the corruption of thought. One of the reasons we have such an excruciating time talking our way through sensitive questions about sex and about what we call “gender” is simple linguistic imprecision. The activists on the progressive side of this issue never cease shouting that sex and gender are not the same thing, and, in that much at least, they are correct–and we should start acting like it.

  Headline explanation, if you want it,A here. (And KDW refers to it too, so subscribe, hippie.)

• Advice about which I have mixed feelings. Robert F. Graboyes offers it to the Democrats: Persuasive Beats Abrasive.

  Here are my dozen suggestions for how Democrats might persuade my hand (and the hands of similarly-minded Americans) to gravitate toward the “D” on the 2028 ballot. Consider this in the vein of a “Chautauqua”—the social movement that encouraged discourse even between those who disagreed with one another and which Theodore Roosevelt referred to, near the movement’s peak, as “typical of America at its best.”

  [1] If your message only works when shouted, you won’t persuade me. “DONALD TRUMP IS A THREAT TO OUR DEMOCRACY!!!!!” is a message that only tends to be delivered loudly and angrily—and shouting almost never persuades. (Say that sentence softly, with a smile, and you’ll sound a bit unhinged.) If you think Donald Trump is a threat to democracy, calmly itemize his behavior on January 6, his unsettling third-term chatter, and his suggestions that the U.S. take Greenland by force. To help you distinguish between these modes of communication: Bernie Sanders, AOC, Chuck Schumer, and Jasmine Crockett always shout. Josh Shapiro, Ro Khanna, Abigail Spanberger, John Fetterman, and Ritchie Torres tend to discuss.

  … and there are eleven more suggestions at the link. All good ideas. It's hard to imagine Democrats taking many of them.

Via Paul Hsieh at GeekPress:

A mathematician Pope going up against a machine god superintelligence is the most cyberpunk thing ever. https://t.co/NBLRRyCf9f

— Will Kinney (@WKCosmo) May 11, 2025

Complete text of the Vatican News tweet:

Explanation (that I had to look up): He was a math major at Villanova.

But (ahem): "defence"? "labour?" Your Holiness, I thought you were an American?

Also of note:

• Also, don't call me Shirley. Jonah Goldberg suggests you watch your language: Don’t Call This Conservatism.

  Is the “New Right” conservative?

  If you spend any time following the most vocal defenders of Donald Trump or various populist causes generally, some version of this question may have occurred to you. If you find yourself listening to defenders of a supposedly extreme right-wing Republican president’s signature policies, and then wondering aloud, “Wait, I thought conservatives were in favor of free markets?” you have an idea of what I am getting at. If you’re perplexed by the way many on the right celebrate and lionize a rogue’s gallery of libertines, scapegraces, sybarites, caitiffs, roues, abusers, and cads, you might wonder why you didn’t get the memo explaining that the right no longer cares about “moral rearmament,” or “family values.”

  In short, if you’re a lifelong conservative, you might be struggling with the question of whether “the right” is where you belong. If being a principled defender of the constitutional order, limited government, free markets, traditional values, and an America-led world still makes you a conservative, are you still on “the right” when the loudest voices on the right reject most or all of those positions?

  Confession: I had to look up a couple of those words.

• Just say no. Jim Geraghty channels his inner Laocoön: Beware of Foreign Powers Bearing Gifts. And cleverly juxtaposed with with past GOP outrage over the Chinese "donations" to the Penn Biden Center at the University of Pennsylvania…

  We all agree that backdoor payments and cash contribution to the president and his family are bad, right?

  Right?

  Because while we’re at it . . .

  . . . the president of the United States should not be accepting a “new Air Force One” from the government of Qatar:

  In what may be the most valuable gift ever extended to the United States from a foreign government, the Trump administration is preparing to accept a super luxury Boeing 747-8 jumbo jet from the royal family of Qatar — a gift that is to be available for use by President Donald Trump as the new Air Force One until shortly before he leaves office, at which time ownership of the plane will be transferred to the Trump presidential library foundation, sources familiar with the proposed arrangement told ABC News.

  The gift is expected to be announced next week, when Trump visits Qatar on the first foreign trip of his second term, according to sources familiar with the plans.

  Trump toured the plane, which is so opulently configured it is known as “a flying palace,” while it was parked at the West Palm Beach International Airport in February.

  ABC News reports, “The highly unusual — unprecedented — arrangement is sure to raise questions about whether it is legal for the Trump administration, and ultimately, the Trump presidential library foundation, to accept such a valuable gift from a foreign power.”

  "What do I have to do to put you into this slightly used, but very opulent, 747 today?"

• I suppose I should post something about New Hampshire's own David Souter. All seemed to agree he was a nice guy. Damon Root has analysis: David Souter shaped the Supreme Court through the backlash he inspired.

  Supreme Court Justice David Souter, who died last week at age 85, will probably not be remembered as the author of any truly momentous majority opinions, because he never really wrote any of those. Nor will Souter be remembered as one of the Court's great dissenters, because none of his dissents inspired the next generation to keep the faith about unpopular ideas. Souter's career will likely be remembered for a more unusual reason: the severe and enduring backlash that he inspired.

  Appointed to the Supreme Court in 1990 by Republican President George H.W. Bush, Souter quickly emerged as a consistent "liberal" vote in high-profile cases about hot-button issues such as abortion and affirmative action. This was supremely disappointing to conservative legal activists, who had hoped Bush would pick someone in the mold of Justice Antonin Scalia, the outspoken conservative tapped four years earlier by President Ronald Re[a]gan.

  But…

• Worst rom-com ever. Paul G. Kengor recalls: When Biden and Rudman Wept. Recounting NH Senator Warren Rudman's tireless push to get Souter confirmed:

  Rudman had pushed the Souter nomination. He ensured [sic] liberal colleagues that Souter was their guy. Rudman, a pro-choice Republican, had been Souter’s boss at the New Hampshire office of attorney general. He privately concluded that Souter would not vote against Roe. Rudman’s reasons, which he acknowledged only after he left the Senate, ranged from the legal to humanitarian: Given that Souter was “a compassionate human being,” averred Rudman, he would naturally support continued legalization of abortion—which has produced the deaths of over 40 million unborn babies since 1973.

  But Rudman’s allies on the Democratic side weren’t so sure. And Rudman had to walk a fine line, since his pro-life president wanted a pro-life justice. So, Rudman quietly sought to assuage liberals. He urged them to trust him.

  That silent trust was critical, since Souter’s position on abortion had to be dealt with stealthily. In fact, it was handled so delicately that the nominee’s true thinking was apparently unknown even to the White House.

  Alas, with Casey v. Planned Parenthood, America had its answer, as Souter authorized the sanctity of Roe v. Wade.

  As fate would have it, on that same day Senator Rudman and Senator Joe Biden bumped into each other at the train station, not in Washington, DC but in Wilmington, Delaware.

  “At first, I didn’t see Joe; then I spotted him waving at me from far down the platform,” Rudman later recorded in his memoirs, Combat: Twelve Years in the U.S. Senate. “Joe had agonized over his vote for David, and I knew how thrilled he must be. We started running through the crowd toward each other, and when we met, we embraced, laughing and crying.”

  An ecstatic Biden wept tears of joy, telling Rudman over and over: “You were right about him [Souter]! … You were right!”

  The two men were so jubilant, so giddy—practically dancing—that Rudman said onlookers thought they were crazy: “[B]ut we just kept laughing and yelling and hugging each other because sometimes, there are happy endings.”

  Except for all those dead babies, who didn't even get beginnings, let alone happy endings.

• Lest we forget… Tyler Cowen provides Sentences to ponder, excerpting from. Richard Hanania's substack.

  In fact, it was the Obama administration that paused funding for high-risk [gain of function] studies in 2014. The ban was lifted by none other than Donald Trump in 2017. At the time, outlets like Scientific American and Science covered the decision, in articles that quoted scientists talking about what could go wrong.

  To be fair, "was lifted" points to an NIH press release authored by Francis Collins, and the first person singular pronoun is prevalent there. Sure, it happened under Trump, but …

I can't recommend our Amazon Eye Candy du Jour; the author, John Quiggin, is an Aussie economist whose blog claims he writes "from a socialist and democratic viewpoint". So, no. But it's nevertheless a good illustration of Andy Kessler's WSJ op-ed: The New Right’s Zombienomics (gifted link).

Jeff Jacoby is also kinda hacked off at the Doll Commissar: The tone-deafness of 'just two dolls'. But he does resurrect a fond memory of funnier times, Dana Carvey's Grumpy Old Man:

In words:

Also making cameo appearances later in the column: P.J. O'Rourke and Boris Yeltsin. Check them out.

Also of note:

• But Gorsuch! Billy Binion recounts an amusing exchange at SCOTUS: Government Argues It's Too Much To Ask the FBI To Check the Address Before Blowing Up a Home.

  The Supreme Court last week heard a case from a family whose home was wrongly raided by the FBI, after which they were barred from bringing their civil suit to trial. Before the Court: Should the plaintiffs have been able to sue the government under the Federal Tort Claims Act (FTCA)?

  Oral arguments got into the weeds of the FTCA, under which plaintiffs Curtrina Martin and Toi Cliatt were prohibited from suing, even though Congress revised that law in the 1970s to give recourse to victims of federal law enforcement misconduct. But there was one particularly instructive exchange between the Court and Frederick Liu, assistant to the solicitor general at the Justice Department—a back-and-forth that is decidedly less in the weeds.

  Liu: The officers here were weighing public safety considerations, efficiency considerations, operational security, the idea that they didn't want to delay the start of the execution of the warrants because they wanted to execute all the warrants simultaneously. Those are precisely the sorts of policy tradeoffs that an officer makes in determining, 'Well, should I take one more extra precaution to make sure I'm at the right house?' Here, Petitioner suggests, for example, that the officer should have checked the house number on the mailbox.

  Justice Neil Gorsuch: Yeah, you might look at the address of the house before you knock down the door.

  Liu: Yes. And, and, as the district court found at 52(a), that sort of decision is filled with policy tradeoffs because checking the house—

  Gorsuch: Really?

  Liu: —number at the end of the driveway means exposing the agents to potential lines of fire from the windows.

  Gorsuch: How about making sure you're on the right street? Is that…you know, asking too much?
  

  This case is pretty horrific, hope it works out well for the victims.

• Political science. Jerry Coyne is righteously irked: Nature tackles race and eugenics in a torturous and tortuous article.

  Yes, folks, the science journals are still flaunting their virtue in articles that are similar to a gazillion articles published before. This time (and not the first time), the article is torturous because the assertions are mostly misleading.  And it’s tortuous because it weaves back and forth between two themes: eugenics and the assumed beneficial effect of diversity on scientific productivity. And the material in the article contradicts some of its own claims. The author, Genevieve L. Woicik, is identified as “an associate professor of epidemiology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health,Baltimore, Maryland, USA.”

  […] If you were to read it without knowing better, you would get two false impressions:

  1. The world, and especially America, is gearing up for a big bout of eugenics.
  2. Race is a social construct that has nothing to do with biology

  I see no evidence for #1 unless one is oblivious to reality, while #2, as Luana and I showed in our paper on The Ideological Subversion of Biology, is misleading. I recommend you read section 5, which is headed by one of the statements about genetics and evolutionary biology that we consider misleading: ““Race and ethnicity are social constructs, without scientific or biological meaning.”

  The two-page PDF of the Nature article is here.

• Hey, I noticed! Christopher Caldwell writes at the Dispatch about The Consequential Trump Move No One’s Noticed.

  Three weeks ago, Donald Trump struck another blow to the civil-rights regime. It was easy to miss, given he did so through an executive order aimed at a legal concept. But the president has taken another step toward uprooting the second constitution that has been in place since the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

  Trump’s Executive Order 14281, aimed at “Restoring Equality of Opportunity and Meritocracy,” targets the judicial doctrine of “disparate impact,” which has stood since the 1970s.

  You may not know the ins and outs of disparate impact, but you’ve surely seen its effects. Under disparate impact, a business owner can be found guilty of discrimination even if he did not intend to discriminate. An aptitude test that winds up narrowing the pool of eligible black candidates, height requirements that exclude women from a police force, a job application that asks about criminal records—any hiring process that produces a lower-than-random number of protected minorities is suspect. Such actions and institutions might carry no ill intent, but they can put an employer on the wrong side of civil-rights law.

  Christopher's not quite right about the "no one's noticed". We blogged about this last month!

  At the time, the WaPo claimed that Trump's EO would "repeal key components of the Civil Rights Act of 1964". That was nonsense, and remains so. But Christopher points out:

  That disparate impact is reaching the end of the line is far from certain. Civil-rights law is a collection of public authorizations and private sector incentives. Trump can take the government out of the business of suing, regulating, and jawboning businesses for the next few years, but civil litigation will likely continue. George H.W. Bush’s Civil Rights Act of 1991 introduced disparate impact into black-letter U.S. law. It would have to be repealed to bring about the meritocracy Trump seeks. That would require more skepticism about civil-rights law than currently exists in Congress. But perhaps minds are changing, now that Trump’s executive orders are showing both parties what a devastating weapon civil-rights law can be—and, indeed, always has been.

  Christopher does a great job in documenting the history of this pernicious concept. There's still work to do on getting rid of it.

Today's Getty Eye Candy has the description:

Ah, good times. But I wanted to point out the "HANDS OFF OUR MONEY!" sign. Being held up by (it appears) a masked man, appropriately. And… well, see my headline.

In the present day, James Freeman is not sympathetic to the plight of the masked men. He thinks Washington Needs a Lot More DOGE (gifted link).

But there's plenty of delusion.

Also of note:

• Who made him the Doll and Pencil Commissar anyway? Emma Camp speaking truth to power: Trump is wrong. Cheap goods are awesome.

  Donald Trump doesn't think Americans deserve stuff. The right number of pencils for a family? Five. The right number of dolls for a little girl? Two, maybe three. His comments in recent interviews bear a striking similarity to those of left-wing Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.), who in 2015 famously bemoaned that consumers have too many deodorant options.

  How did Trump—who campaigned on a promise of reducing inflation—become so eager to have Americans pay more for everyday commodities? While Trump may have made overtures to reducing prices, he's long supported the kinds of economic interventions most likely to lead to inflation. And if you believe that protectionism is the path to prosperity for everyday Americans, your definition of prosperity starts to change pretty quickly.

  Just a few months into his second term, Trump has so far enacted a sweeping protectionist agenda. He's levied staggering tariffs that have hiked prices on everything from mattresses to cars to strollers and tanked the stock market. However, Trump and his defenders have remained strident, arguing that Americans just don't need affordable imported goods.

  I guess you don't get to the top of either party these days without being an arrogant asshole, eager to assume you're the best person to determine what Americans "really need".

• Achtung, kinder! Wie viel uhr ist es? At Skeptic, Gerald Posner answers: It’s Time for Papal Transparency on the Holocaust.

  The Catholic Church has a new leader—Pope Leo XIV—born in 1955 in Chicago, Robert Francis Prevost is the first American to head the church and serve as sovereign of the Vatican City State. Many Vatican watchers will be looking for early signs that Pope Leo XIV intends to continue the legacy of Pope Francis for reforming Vatican finances and for making the church a more transparent institution.

  There is one immediate decision he could make that would set the tone for his papacy. Pope Leo could order the release of the World War II archives of the Vatican Bank, the repository with files that would answer lingering questions of how much the Catholic Church might have profited from wartime investments in Third Reich and Italian Fascist companies and if it acted as a postwar haven for looted Nazi funds. By solving one of last great mysteries about the Holocaust, Pope Leo would embrace long overdue historical transparency that had proved too much for even his reform-minded predecessor.

  I would like to think the church has nothing to hide. But if so then why so secretive?

  But my main takeaway from the article is: Whoa, I am older than the Pope.

• Jonah Goldberg says "shibboleth", I say … how do you pronounce that anyway? Before you answer, be glad you don't live in Ephraim.

  But back to Jonah, who writes on The ‘Neoliberalism’ Shibboleth.

  My friend Cliff Asness is fond of tweeting his dismay over the horseshoeing of American politics when it comes to economics (and other things). One of his pithier expressions of this lament: “We now have two economically far left (and economically ignorant) parties, they just differ in their preferred pronouns.”

  Now, Cliff isn’t using “pronouns” literally. His point is that the fringier economic policies of the left and the fringier economic policies of the right are substantially similar but culturally or stylistically opposed to each other. If you’re an advocate for industrial policy on the left, you’ll use different buzz-phrases and shibboleths than an advocate of industrial policy on the right will. But you’re still for industrial policy. You might have different winners and losers in mind, but you’re still picking winners and losers. Then again, sometimes, both the left and right are just haggling over the same constituency, making losers of everybody else.

  Might be paywalled. Subscribe, hippie.

Background for people (understandably) not paying attention to New Hampshire politics: Our state's senior senator, Democrat Jeanne Shaheen, is not running for reelection in 2026. So my CongressCritter, Democrat Chris Pappas is running to replace her. Which means New Hampshire Congressional District One is up for grabs. Which (in turn) is drawing clowns eager to join the DC circus.

And it appears one of those clowns is…

I haven’t decided yet about a run in #NH1, but as we see, the right is already on the attack.

I’m not afraid to take this message anywhere: Democrats must forcefully oppose Trump. #nhpolitics https://t.co/vXETOHLuUb

— Hanna Trudo (@HCTrudo) May 5, 2025

Let's give Hanna credit for linking to a National Review article by Brittany Bernstein: Reporter Moves from Covering Dems to Running as One. (Here's a gifted link if you need it.)

There's a certain amount of self-dramatization here. Hanna's not afraid! Even though she's being attacked by the right!

In fact, Brittany's article is pretty far from an "attack"; it consists mainly of sketching Hanna's journalistic career, and quotes her extensively and accurately. (I left a comment on Hanna's tweet to that effect, with no response.) Let's take a look:

Writing with fire! And spitting it!

Continuing the rhetoric:

Well, you get the idea. The closest Brittany comes to an "attack" is pointing out the thinly disguised partisanship of her past journalism.

If you're interested, this NHJournal article has more on Hanna and the local political scene. As I type, the only announced Democrat candidate for NH01 is Maura Sullivan.

Also of note:

• Sorry, Mark, you lost this one. The last time Pun Salad featured NH pol Mark Fernald was back in 2011 when he penned a silly op-ed column with a bunch of ideas on how to balance the federal budget. Which involved tax increases, and no spending decreases.

  Mark's op-ed silliness continues, years later, in my lousy local paper: How vouchers will destroy public education. It's the usual, mostly. For example:

  The voucher system advocated by New Hampshire Republicans is a dagger aimed at the heart of public education—and therefore, at the heart of our democracy—by creating a system that disfavors our public schools.

  The public schools are subject to minimum standards set by the state; they must provide special education services; they must accept all comers; they are free; and they administer standardized tests each year in grades 3 through 8.

  Schools taking the voucher money have no such requirements. There are no rules, no accountability, and they are free to reject students who are difficult or expensive to educate.

  Note that Mark has the usual Democrat definition of "free": paid for by taxpayers.

  But his claim that non-government schools have "no rules"? That's a lie. Tsk. In just a few seconds of Googling, I found New Hampshire's Office of Nonpublic Schools which contains (among other resources) a 19-page PDF CHAPTER Ed 400 APPROVAL OF NONPUBLIC SCHOOLS which has plenty of rules.

  But what really gets my goat:

  With new money being offered for private school education, you can be sure the market will respond. New private schools will open, and existing private schools will expand, to take advantage of the free state money.

  And therein lies the danger.

  Public school enrollment will decline, as middle class families choose the voucher money. As families leave the public schools, support will dwindle at the polls, and school budgets will be cut, causing more middle class families to leave the public schools.

  Mark avoids the issue. If public schools were as great as he claims, parents would not send their kiddos to private schools even under a "voucher" system. Why would they bother?

  Mark is essentially admitting that given even minimal incentives, parents would choose to yank their children out of public school, and undergo the hassle and additional expense of private (or home) schooling.

  Meanwhile, as our local TV station reports: NH Republicans advance bill to expand Education Freedom Accounts

• Contra Fernald. The Josiah Bartlett Center has FAQs about "Education Freedom Accounts", the school choice program at issue here in NH. For example: Is an EFA a voucher?

  No. A voucher is a payment from the government directly to an education provider. With an EFA, the state approves a list of providers, but does not pay the provider directly. Each student’s state adequate education grant amount is deposited in an account managed by a state-approved vendor, in this case the Children’s Scholarship Fund NH. When a parent chooses a provider from the approved list, the parent submits an invoice to the Children’s Scholarship Fund for payment. The payment can be for tuition or tutoring services, or for individual educational expenses allowable by law under RSA 194-F:2. The payment is made from the Children’s Scholarship Fund to the vendor. Every payment is scrutinized for compliance with state rules.

  Or: Would EFAs defund public schools?

  Opponents of school choice have long predicted that giving parents the option to leave their assigned public school would trigger a mass exodus that would collapse school budgets. That low opinion of district public schools is not shared by most parents. “As yet, the growing trend of giving parents public funds for private education hasn’t decimated school budgets,” Education Week reported last year. “Even in states where private school choice is open to all students, the overwhelming majority of K-12 students still attend public school.” A New Hampshire state representative opposed to EFAs acknowledged in legislative testimony this year that “very, very, very, very few students are actually leaving their public school district to take a voucher.” Data compiled by EdChoice show that at the start of 2025 only 2.2% of students nationwide participated in a school choice program. In Florida, which has the highest school choice participation rate, 82.5% of students have enrolled in a public school of some kind, whether a district, magnet or charter school. In Arizona, 86.3% of students have chosen public schools. Just as public schools aren’t a good fit for every child, neither are EFAs. The EFA program is designed to be an alternative for students who need it, not to replace public schools.

  I'm pretty sure Josiah Bartlett has the better of this argument.

• Just another reminder of what a jerk President Biden was. Kimberley A. Strassel tells of Biden’s Energy-Loan Free-For-All (gifted link).

  It’s no secret Joe Biden’s team spent its final days shoveling money out the door, and in ways designed to limit Donald Trump’s ability to claw it back. Officials working under Department of Energy Secretary Chris Wright have now completed a review of the Loan Programs Office (LPO)—the government entity that brought you Solyndra— and the extent of the shenanigans is remarkable.

  Figures and documents provided to me show a loan free-for-all: More than $90 billion showered on entities in a matter of months, a lot of it to companies of questionable taxpayer value. The highlights of DOE’s review:

  Unprecedented sums: LPO was created in 2005 under George W. Bush, though it was ramped up by Barack Obama’s 2009 “stimulus” package (which funded Solyndra, Abound Solar and other failures). Biden built on that history, earmarking hundreds of billions from his Covid-era spending packages for green-energy loans. After Kamala Harris lost the election, LPO went in overdrive. From 2009 to the final quarter of 2024, LPO had obligated some $42 billion in loans. From Election Day 2024 through Inauguration Day 2025, LPO closed on $53 billion in loans and made an additional $40 billion in commitments—or more than double what it has spent over the prior 15 years.

  As Kimberly goes on to point out, some of those "loans and commitments" have gone to firms that are already in danger of going belly-up. But not before absconding with the taxpayer largesse.

Dave Barry writes, hilariously, on Influencers at Sea.

For some reason, Dave devotes a good deal of attention to …

Regan's Facebook page also claims she was "Miss America 2012", but the relevant Wikipedia page doesn't support that. She may have stuck that in under the influence of Clase Azul Gold.

(In case you're wondering if you can get Clase Azul Gold Tequila for less up here in NH: nope.)

Also of note:

• Good for Noah Smith. He's a Democrat, Kamala voter, backed Biden's "industrial policy", but there's a line he will not cross.

  These incompetent people haven't built a single mile of working train, and they're telling us there won't be a single mile of working train for 20 more years.
  
  DEFUND THEM. https://t.co/mK6bdEbIjK

  — Noah Smith 🐇 (@Noahpinion) May 7, 2025

  When you've lost Noah, choo-choo fans, it's time to pack it in.

• Not even trying to make a good argument. James Freeman "hails" the Champions of the Donor Class.

  A few Republican members of the House are using bogus Democratic talking points to get tax breaks for rich liberals while discouraging blue states from enacting pro-growth reform. Now these rogue GOP lawmakers are even threatening to trigger nationwide tax hikes if they don’t get their way.

  Tobias Burns reports for The Hill on a group of five Republicans who are demanding that the state and local tax (SALT) deduction be raised above its current cap of $10,000:

  The lawmakers are saying they’re prepared to vote no as a group on the wide-ranging tax and spending cut package key to President Trump’s agenda if they don’t get the raise they want.

  The group consists of Reps. Andrew Garbarino (N.Y.), Nick LaLota (N.Y.), Mike Lawler (N.Y.), Young Kim (Calif.) and Tom Kean Jr. (N.J.) — Republicans from wealthier suburban districts of major U.S. metropolitan areas, where higher property taxes make the increased cap especially valuable to taxpayers.

  The federal SALT deduction is terrible policy because it takes the pressure off profligate state governments run by Democrats to restrain their own taxes. A proper cap would be set at zero, so that Americans nationwide would not have to subsidize the high-tax policies of New Jersey, New York and California. Without the ability to deduct heavy state and local taxes on federal returns, citizens of blue states would be fully accountable for their bad political choices and would be motivated to demand reform at the state level.

  Just a note if you missed it back in February: Tom Kean Jr. has the "distinction" of being the only GOP CongressCritter representing one of the top 15 richest districts in the US.

Well, I thought I had come up with a clever new term. Turns out it's old, maybe already tired. From a year ago:

AIsplaining: is a pejorative term meaning for an AI to explain something, to a human, in a condescending, overconfident, and often inaccurate or oversimplified manner" https://t.co/x42ZepFbvS

— Jeff Saucerman (@jsauce7) May 10, 2024

But I did find a pretty good example. Starting from this morning's Bleat from James Lileks, which dug out this old newspaper clipping:

Interesting, because I used to live in Nebraska, and zoomed back and forth on I-80 quite a bit.

James also provides a recent Google Street View of "Erma's Desire", one of the sculptures:

But I wanted to see the rest of that article! Where's page 14B?! So I googled the headline "Bicentennial art fails Nebraska road test" and … failed, alas.

But I did check Google's "AI Mode". Which contained (among other things) an indication of what the AI thought might be the Real Issue:

Reader, that's AIsplaining.

For the record, I can no longer duplicate that result. But I swear it's accurate!

(It turns out "Erma's Revenge Desire" is eminently Googleable, so if you're interested…)

And we know how that movie turns out, don't we?

At the WSJ, Holman W. Jenkins, Jr. gives two big thumbs-down for Trump’s Bad Hollywood Trade Movie (gifted link).

This, from Giancarlo Sopo at NR, also explains a lot: Netflix’s CEO Wants You Lonely and Miserable. Excerpt (one that doesn't have much to do with that headline):

Consumer note: I have purchased a ticket for the new live-action Lilo & Stitch, two weeks from today. In 3D! This will be the first time I've been to a theater since (see above) Twisters, back in July of last year.

I know: Disney. But the trailer made me laugh, and I have fond memories of the original animated version. So here's hoping it doesn't suck.

Also of note:

• Sorry, Don: 50% is not a passing grade. Jonah Goldberg points to a continuing problem with Team Orange: Right Ends, Wrong Means.

  Perhaps the most frustrating thing about being a conservative critic of Trumpism is that you often start by agreeing with Trumpworld about ends while disagreeing about means.

  This pleases nobody. The left, broadly speaking, considers the ends as illegitimate as the means, and the pro-Trump right thinks that if you’re against the means you really don’t desire the ends. I’m against the abuse of power, even for my own “side.”

  For instance, I’ve argued for decades that liberal media bias is real and a problem. I think you can exaggerate the problem, particularly these days (Fox has dominated cable news for decades). But, yes, the MAGA crowd is right that much of the “legacy” media is often reflexively hostile to Republicans. But that doesn’t mean I support the way Trump’s Federal Communications Commission is bullying various media organizations for being critical of Trump, or that I applaud Trump’s jihad against the Associated Press for refusing to call the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America.”

  Did anyone notice when Governor Ayotte started calling the "Gulf of Maine" the "Gulf of New Hampshire"? No? Maybe that was a dream I had.

• But the real problem is neither means nor ends. It is, as Kevin D. Williamson says: Trump Is a Socialist.

  Socialism doesn’t mean high taxes or an expensive welfare state. You don’t need socialism to have a portfolio of social-welfare programs. Japan has an extensive social-welfare apparatus, and it is far from socialist. Singapore is super-capitalist, and it offers my favorite kind of welfare: direct money payments to poor people. Even the big-spending Scandinavians have long abandoned the experiments in socialism that wrecked their economies in the postwar decades: In the high-tax European countries that so many of our progressive friends profess to admire, the trend for a generation has been away from state enterprise and central planning and toward privatization, trade, and investment. American progressives say they envy European health care systems they generally know nothing about; their European counterparts sincerely envy an American entrepreneurial ecosystem that they understand all too well but remain unable to replicate. It’s a funny old world.

  Socialism does not mean government-funded education and retirement benefits and health care subsidies—those things are simply welfare, and there are better and worse ways to go about doing such things. Socialism means a centrally planned economy, one that is dominated by state action irrespective of whether it is dominated by formal state enterprises. Food stamps are welfare—socialism can mean state-owned farms and grocery stores, but more often it means a state apparatus that runs the farms and grocery stores as though it owned them, setting prices, negotiating the terms of employment, and determining how business is to be done—a little more of this crop, a little less of that commodity, etc.

  V.I. Lenin described his ideal society as one managed as though it were “one big factory.” The Leninist view, it is worth keeping in mind, was profoundly influenced by some of the big ideas and most influential and prestigious thinkers of late 19^th-century and early 20th-century capitalism, especially the mania for “scientific management” associated with Frederick Winslow Taylor.

  And of course KDW gets around to Trump's comment about America being a "department store", characterizing it accurately as "quasi-monarchical Leninism".

  Yes, I'm willing to grant that Kamala would have been worse.

• "Dad, why did we get off at the "Serfdom" exit?" Jared Dillian also notes the Lenintastic Lunacy at the top: Trump’s 'they can have 5' moment is an attack on capitalism.

  While recently aboard Air Force One, President Donald Trump told reporters that "a young lady—a 10-year-old girl, 9-year-old girl, 15-year-old girl—doesn't need 37 dolls. She could be very happy with two or three or four or five." He doubled down in an interview with NBC's Kristen Welker, saying that Americans "don't need to have 250 pencils. They can have five."

  Trump is referring to the economic hardship that is inevitable due to his tariffs. Toys are a particular focus, many of which come from China and are subject to the highest tariffs. Trump is asking Americans to make sacrifices, and not with the eloquence of John F. Kennedy—the sacrifices we make are simply to satisfy his pride.

  "OK, OK, I'll go to six pencils, kid. You drive a hard bargain."

• A very slick visualization reminding us that we're doomed. Well, not me. My kids maybe. From Cato: Social Security's Financial Crisis: The Trust Fund Myth Uncovered.

  There’s a big problem with Social Security.

  Most people misunderstand its trust fund, believing it holds real financial assets that ensure future benefits—the equivalent of a piggy bank stuffed with dollar bills.

  Yeah, it ain't that.

  On that topic, Dave Burge is righteously pissed enough to speak truth to power at Twitter:

  If I get hit by a car the day before I turn 65 who inherits my fucking money https://t.co/wxvY1OBAou

  — David Burge (@iowahawkblog) May 7, 2025

  It's a thread, and it's no contest: David can out-f CongressCritter Pocan. Pocan apparently got the memo that Democrats should cuss a lot more than they used to.

Recently on the book blog:

Bryan Caplan fanboy here. I picked up this book from Amazon back in March, 2024. Last October I drove up to the University of New England in Biddeford, Maine to see Bryan participate in its President’s Forum and I got him to sign it. And now I finally got around to reading it.

It is a (literal) comic book, and I mean no disrespect by that; its fantastic, clever illustration is by Ady Branzei. Bryan appears as a chacter, explaining his thesis to the reader.

And that thesis is straightforward and ably presented: deregulation of housing policy is pretty close to a panacea. It would not only solve the obvious problem (often described as a "housing crisis" here in New Hampshire), but also help ameliorate a host of associated social woes. Although the book is published by the libertarian Cato Institute, Bryan notes that such deregulation should appeal to other factions in the political landscape: egalitarians, for example, should like that it gives the less well-off a better chance at decent shelter. It has environmental benefits! It would facilitate people moving from low-productivity, low-wage areas to better their economic situation! It would make having babies more practical, staving off demographic collapse! ("It slices! It dices!")

Of course, the deregulation Bryan champions has its problems with political feasibility. Making housing "more affordable" translates to, for existing homeowners, a decline in their property values. And homeowners tend to vote their pocketbooks. (This March 2025 story from our local TV station shows how this is playing out in New Hampshire.)

Oh, wait. That sounds like a bad idea.

The cheap green lie

You are told that solar and wind are cheap

But cramming in more solar and wind just makes electricity more and more costly

because solar and wind are worthless when not sunny and windyhttps://t.co/Fu6eY3AKx1 pic.twitter.com/Zc1Jk7m8X3

— Bjorn Lomborg (@BjornLomborg) May 4, 2025

And there's more to come for countries on the right edge of the chart, according to this Reuters report: EU power grid needs trillion-dollar upgrade to avert Spain-style blackouts.

My translation of what "authorities" are saying: "We're still checking, but we're pretty sure the answer is that you need to give us a lot more money."

Also of note:

• She's the grift that keeps on grifting. Jonathan Turley notes an unintentional good idea from an unexpected source: NPR’s Katherine Maher Continues to Make the Case for Defunding.

  Recently, we discussed how National Public Radio CEO Katherine Maher made the conclusive case before Congress why funding for NPR should be terminated. Not to be outdone, Maher seemed to return to CBS to build her case further against her state-sponsored media outlet. Objecting to President Donald Trump’s criticism of NPR, Maher explained that “from my perspective, part of the separation of the First Amendment offers is to keep government out.” Precisely.

  The portrayal of NPR as unbiased and balanced is laughingly absurd. Indeed, many of us objected to Maher’s selection after years of declining audiences and increasing criticism. Maher had a long record of far-left public statements against Republicans, Trump, and others.

  This is the same CEO who attacked a respected senior editor who tried to get NPR to acknowledge its bias and restore greater balance on the staff.

  That respected NPR senior editor is Uri Berliner, and his essay last year at the Free Press ("Here’s How [NPR] Lost America's Trust") preceded his suspension and resignation from NPR by a few days.

• I used to be an annoying grad student, but I recovered. Jeff Maurer doesn't care for the Bernie/AOC messaging: The Problem With “Oligarchy” Is That It’s Annoying-Grad-Student Coded. Leading with an amusing anecdote:

  Last week, Senator Elise Slotkin of Michigan got into a public spat with Bernie Sanders about the latter’s use of the word “oligarchy”. In an interview with Politico, Slotkin said that the party should say “kings” instead of “oligarchy”. Sanders — who, by the way, is on a tour called the “Fighting Oligarchy Tour” — replied that Americans “are not quite as dumb as Ms. Slotkin thinks they are.”

  As of press time, Senator Slotkin has not clarified exactly how dumb she thinks the American people are. Though I wish that she would — I’d like to see her give a press conference and say “Senator Sanders, with all due respect: Take a gander at these freaks. You ever go to a swap meet? Walk around one of those for a bit and then tell me that you don’t think that even words like ‘red’ and ‘the’ might be too much for these half-apes. This country is one big fucking Tard Farm, and we need to speak in the guttural burps that they understand.”

  Senator Slotkin has not said that. As of press time.

  Click over for more, including a lot more bad words. Jeff's (still) a Democrat, but I heartily agree with his attitude: "I’m less worried about people who don’t know the word “oligarchy” than people who do."

• Magic 8 Ball says: "Ask again later." Tyler Cowen wonders: Is Classical Liberalism for Losers?

  Are classical liberals a bunch of pathetic losers? Losers both because they have lost in the political realm, while simultaneously handing over key institutions to the illiberal left?

  That is a common charge you hear from right-wing intellectuals these days, as exemplified by commentators such as Patrick Deneen, Adrian Vermeule, Sohrab Ahmari, Christopher Rufo, and others.

  Their argument is twofold.

  First, they say that classical liberals are temperamentally incapable of putting up much of a fight when faced with threats from the far left. And they don’t struggle to find examples: Harvard, all of the Ivy League, our major publishing houses, and most of the nonprofit ecosystem, for starters.

  The second part of the argument is that there is something inherent to liberalism itself that makes it vulnerable to its own collapse. In other words: The freedom liberalism facilitates is also its weakness. It is so free, so open, and so tolerant that it is vulnerable to attack by people who seek to destroy it, whether that be religious fundamentalists, the most extreme element of woke, or other intolerant movements.

  Eh. Losing is no fun, but sometimes you just have to be satisfied with being right about everything, all the time.

• From a most unexpected source. Matthew Continetti recounts The Wisdom of The Donald.

  You may have noticed that Donald Trump is not the most self-reflective person. At least, not in public. But last week at the University of Alabama, Trump delivered a commencement address that revealed more about his mind than any speech since taking office. Naturally, the press missed the story.

  Trump “weaved” together talking points and ad libs with something novel and unexpected: a 10-point distillation of his personal philosophy. If you watch or read the full speech, you get to know what Trump values, and what he believes is behind his success in business, entertainment, and politics. Such insight is fascinating—or should be to anyone interested in the psychology of the world’s most powerful man.

  And, guess what? Goodness knows I am no Trump fan, but each one of his 10 points looks pretty good to me.

• So, naturally, I have to point out… this WSJ editorial which discovers A Tariff Lesson at the Nucor Steel Mill (gifted link).

  When JD Vance visited a Nucor steel plant in South Carolina last week, did the company take it as an opportunity to press the Vice President for a tariff exemption? That dismally hilarious question comes to mind after listening to the steel maker’s first-quarter earnings call.

  Nucor loves the tariffs that President Trump has imposed on its competition from imported steel. But the company also warned about the ways that Mr. Trump’s global tariffs will increase its costs for both equipment and raw materials, specifically pig iron and direct-reduced iron, or DRI.

  Who could have seen that coming? Not Donald or JD, I guess.

I think this is missing some important features of both franchises. But who cares, it's funny.

Mini review: The first 12 minutes of Andor season two were fantastic. But since then: way too many hushed conversations between coiffed and clad characters on well-designed sets.

I'll keep watching, though.

Also of note:

• His latest stupid idea.

  pic.twitter.com/1gBo8jYAZR

  — Donald J. Trump Posts From His Truth Social (@TrumpDailyPosts) May 5, 2025

  Liz Wolfe comments on the news: Trump declares he will impose 100 percent tariffs on all foreign films.

  "Other nations have been stealing the…movie-making capability of the United States. I said to a couple of people, 'What do you think?' I have done some very strong research over the last week, and we are making very few movies now," [Trump] told reporters over the weekend. "Hollywood is being destroyed. Now you have a grossly incompetent governor that allowed that to happen, so I am not just blaming other nations, but other nations, a lot of them, have stolen our movie industry. If they are not willing to make a movie inside the United States, and we should have a tariff on movies that come in. And not only that, governments are actually giving big money. They are supporting them financially. So that is sort of a threat to our country in a sense."

  Stealing is an odd way of putting it. Did he just learn that other countries make movies too? And, yes, other countries will give special breaks to their film industries, in much the same way U.S. states already do: They vie for business, offering tax credits and other incentives to try to get movie production to their states. (This is why plenty of headlines have heralded Georgia, specifically Atlanta, as "Hollywood of the South.")

  And that's just for starters. As for "propaganda", I'm pretty sure there's plenty of it in domestically-produced movies too. And (as Liz notes) Trump has been dilly-dallying about enforcing the TikTok ban, arguably an impeachable offense. And TikTok is an actual foreign product. Liz comments, probably accurately:

  This leads me to suspect that he's not actually worried about propaganda, but is just experimenting with using "national security" justifications for all manner of big-government interventions—a time-honored American tradition, but not a good one. Regardless, it is not the government's job to shield us from ideas, even propagandistic ones.

• As with so many other things… Dan McLaughlin reveals Trump Has Hollywood's Foreign Propaganda Problem Backwards (gifted link). He notes that Hollywood has been all-too-willing to dink its movies to avoid Chinese censorship. And:

  In short, China has leverage over our movie industry precisely because we have a trade surplus in exporting our films to China. That’s the exact opposite of the problem Trump claims to be fighting. If there’s good news to be had, it’s that American film revenues from China have been in sharp decline for several years now from their peak of a decade or so ago (and China is cracking down on them further in retaliation against Trump). But our problem isn’t too much buying from China — it’s too much selling to China.

  For the record, I've just watched one actual movie so far this year, The Electric State. Apparently filmed mostly in Georgia, some in California, with (according to IMDB) "additional photography" in France and Brazil. How big a tariff, Donald?

• If only we could put a hefty tax on arrogance. Jonathan Turley writes on The Cost of Arrogance: NPR’s Undoing is a Cautionary Tale for the Media.

  NPR was ultimately undermined by its own arrogance. Editors and journalists did not have to worry about the fact that its shrinking audience was overwhelmingly white, liberal and affluent. Due to its support in Congress, it could make the vast majority of the country, which does not listen to its programming, help pay for its programming.

  It will now have to choose between sustaining its bias or expanding its audience. It certainly has every right to be a left-leaning outlet (as do right-leaning outlets), but it has to sustain itself in the marketplace. It is the same question that other media outlets must face as more Americans turn to new media. With polls showing the press at record lows in trust, media companies are increasingly writing for each other rather than most of the public.

  I note that Viking Pundit tried to listen to NPR and gave up in disgust after four minutes. I'm wondering if I could do that well.

• Throw them a concrete life preserver, maybe. Jim Geraghty has some news. Good? Bad? Your call: The Obamas Aren't Going to Rescue the Democrats.

  Let’s begin with the full quote, in context. Former first lady Michelle Obama appeared on a podcast hosted by British entrepreneur and investor Steven Bartlett, discussing a wide variety of topics. At one point, she addressed her fears when her husband chose to run for president, and won:

  How do you raise kids in the White House? It’s dangerous. As the first black potential president, we knew there would be death threats. There were just all the — how would we afford it? Because it’s, it’s expensive to live in the White House! As many people don’t know, I mean, much is not covered. You’re paying for every food — every bit of food that you eat. You know, you’re not paying for housing and the staff in it, but everything, even travel if you’re not traveling with the president if your kids are coming on a Bright Star, which is the first lady’s plane — we had to pay for their travel to be on the plane. It is an expensive proposition, and you’re running for two years, and not earning an income. So, all of that was in my mind. How would we manage this?

  Jim's rebuttal is dead solid perfect:

  You know who else pays for “every bit of food” that their children eat? Just about every other family in the country.

• I suspect Alinsky's "Rule #13" is involved. Bryan Caplan wonders how their minds work: Koch vs. Trump: A Puzzle of Leftist Demonology.

  Ten years ago, the Koch brothers were clearly the left’s most-hated “right-wing billionaires.” It’s not totally clear that Trump even ranked #3. Only in 2016 did Trump attain the top spot in leftist demonology. Even today, Charles Koch (brother David died in 2019) probably retains the #2 spot on the left’s list of Most Evil Billionaires. Which plausibly gives him the #3 spot on the left’s list of Most Evil Americans after Trump and Vance. And conceivably even the #3 spot on the left’s list of Most Evil Living Humans, though I guess Putin and Netanyahu now outrank him.

  Last Thursday, I saw Charles Koch win the Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty. Mid-ceremony, a well-camouflaged group of about fifteen leftist protestors crashed the party, waving signs like “Can’t take blood money to hell.” Which reminded me of a question I’ve long asked myself: What the hell is wrong with leftist demonology? How can Charles Koch and Donald Trump possibly be on the same list?!

  Bryan goes on to compare and contrast Trump and Koch. Trump fans will not like his observation #9:

  9. In starkest contrast, whatever you think about Trump’s ideas, he is obviously an absolute pig of a human being. To paraphrase Tolkien’s Treebeard, “There is no curse in Elvish, Entish, or the tongues of Men” to describe how loathsome the man is. The way he talks! The way he treats people! If a family of staunch Trump supporters contained a person who acted like Trump, he wouldn’t even be allowed to come to Thanksgiving. Unless, of course, he was rich and famous enough to implicitly bribe his family to endure his presence. (If you are reading this, Donald, I am only a messenger. Repent).

  (Alinsky's Rule #13: ""Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.")

Ira Stoll has a good question at the WSJ: Is Harvard Complying With the Tax Code? (gifted link)

With respect to Ira, this really does sound like the flip side of the IRS going after conservative 501(c)3 groups in the last decade. (If you need a partisan refresher on that, here's a timeline compiled by the GOP-controlled House Ways and Means Committee. If you'd like to see how Wikipedia whitewashes the scandal, here you go.)

But speaking of political activities from 501(c)3 corporations…

I've been visiting some "public media" websites, partially taxpayer-funded, also claiming tax-exempt 501(c)3 status. On the "propaganda" front: going to New Hampshire PBS's site, nhpbs.org will assault the surfer with an initial popup:

The advertised website, "Protect My Public Media" does the standard stuff: forms to contact your CongressCritters, a petition you can sign, get on their mailing list, follow them on social media.

If you skip past the popup, there are still ads for protectmypublicmedia.org on the page.

Lobbying? Enough to yank their tax-exempt status? Probably not. Still, the "keep the taxpayer money coming, sucker" posturing is … unseemly. Or so it seems to me.

Also of note:

• Who you gonna believe? Me or your own ears? NHJournal describes the (Chico) Marxist defense from the state's public radio: NHPR Denounces Trump's 'Campaign Against Press Freedom,' Denies Any Partisan Bias.

  Executives at New Hampshire’s taxpayer-subsidized media outlets are responding to President Donald Trump’s attempts to end federal funding by claiming he’s attacking “all independent reporting.”

  And the head of New Hampshire Public Radio denied suggestions his programming has a left-of-center political bias, claiming the outlet can “ensure editorial integrity, balance and objectivity.”

  That's NHPR's President/CEO Jim Schachter, protecting his $260K yearly compensation. There's kind of an iffy relationship between "independent reporting" and "demanding continued taxpayer subsidies", isn't there?

• Need a short class in how to dodge questions? NHJournal also presented a Q&A: NHPR's Schachter On Why Taxpayers Should Keep Paying. Sample:

  [NHJournal:] While NPR/PBS provides a solid lineup of liberal news content, from “Morning Edition” to PBS “News Hour,” would it be accurate for NHJournal to report that you have no center-right content broadcasting in NH? If you do, could you please identify the program and the host(s)?

  [Schachter:] Your question wrongly assumes that all journalism is biased. Our public service missions are clear that our content is designed to inform and educate, so that people can make up their own minds about where they stand on issues. We believe that spending time with our news and public affairs programming will confirm that we serve everyone in our communities.

  In addition, we are dedicated to accountability and engage in regular reviews of practices and standards to ensure editorial integrity, balance, and objectivity. We are also responsive to our local community through our Community Advisory Boards, which are open to all.

  I don't want to belabor the obvious, but Schachter failed to answer a pretty direct question there.

  But: Accountability? Integrity? Balance? Objectivity? To adapt one more movie quote: "You keep using those words. I do not think they mean what you think they mean."

• News You (Probably) Can't Use. Peter Suderman asks and answers a very relevant question: What if Trump doesn't want to spend money allocated by Congress?

  Imagine, for a moment, a president who doesn't want to spend money. Given the last several decades of presidential history, this may sound fanciful. But assume that a president has successfully campaigned on spending less money, and perhaps even balancing the federal budget, and then, once in office, has decided to try to carry out that program. What would such a president do?

  If a president wants the federal government to spend less money, then somewhere, somehow, at some time, someone with appropriate authority needs to actually stop spending money.

  This is even more difficult than it sounds.

  It's not just that in Washington, plans to spend more, but less than otherwise expected, are frequently denounced as debilitating cuts. Nor is it simply that bureaucrats stamp their feet and leak stories of supposedly draconian spending reductions to friendly media outlets. Nor is it even that the voting public, in its mass incoherence, seems to prefer a mix of high spending and low taxes—a luxury government lifestyle that it literally cannot afford.

  There is an underrated impediment to spending less: the Constitution itself, at least if you're the president. The Constitution grants Congress the sole power of the purse. The executive branch is tasked with faithfully executing the laws Congress passes. If Congress passes a law saying jump, it's the president's job to jump. And if Congress passes a law that says spend, it's the president's job to spend.

  Peter does his usual diligent job of historical and legal analysis. But if you like the Constitution…

• And now for something completely different. I'm pretty interested in the philosophy and science involved in "free will". So I'm linking to a Yascha Mounk interview with Kevin Mitchell on Free Will. (Determinists will argue that I had no choice but to do so.)

  It's long, but there's a transcript. Sample:

  If you look at the philosophical or theological literature, there’s a lot of armchair thinking, trying to divine from logical postulates how we could have free will given a particular supposed state of the universe and so on. My own feeling is that we don’t have to think about this issue in these really abstract terms. We can actually get quite concrete. If we’re asking, Do we really make decisions? or Are we in control when we make decisions?—those are actually biological questions. We can get into the neuroscience of decision making, and the biology of control more generally, and explore how these kinds of systems could have evolved.

  How could it be that living things can act in the world in ways that non-living physical things can’t? There are some deep metaphysical questions there, but you can get a handle on them by really getting into those biological details and making the discussion a lot more concrete.

  If I urge you to read or listen to the interview and make up your own mind on the issue, is that prejudicial?

  [UPDATE: Oops, forgot to mention that I read Kevin Mitchell's book Free Agents: How Evolution Gave Us Free Will back in 2023, and my report is here.]

I was today years old when I learned these two words:

• Haruspicy is divination via the inspection of the entrails of sacrificed animals, especially the livers of sacrificed sheep and poultry; while
• Anthropomancy is the same thing, except with sacrificed people.

Nate Silver is—let's be charitable—a notable haruspex when it comes to examining polling data, and if you want to know whether Americans approve or disapprove of Trump…

But Mr. Ramirez's cartoon was wondering about Rs and Ds generally. So we have recent polling reported by Newsweek: Republican Support Collapses Under Donald Trump. Excerpt:

And for the Democrats we have (also in Newsweek): Democrats Face 'Major Wake-up Call' as Trump Trounces Them in Polling. Excerpt:

What does it all mean? I'm self-polling and show a 50/50 tie between "I don't know" and "I don't care". How about you?

Also of note:

• Need a reason to hate Republicans? Well, it depends on your attitude toward government spending. Kim Strassel says that for many Rs, it's Spend, Baby, Spend (gifted link).

  It’s go time in Washington for the GOP reconciliation bill, as House committees this week begin to flesh out their respective pieces of a plan to cut both taxes and spending. Which means Republicans finally must grapple with an ugly truth within the party of “limited government”: Most of them don’t want to cut spending on anything.

  But it’s the cuts that must come first. Republicans have a solid idea of what needs doing in the tax realm, yet the final configuration will hinge on what they drum up in new revenue or offsets. Committees have each been assigned spending reduction targets, with an aggregate goal of at least $1.5 trillion in spending cuts (over 10 years). This is paltry: Federal spending has soared more than 50% since 2019, and the pandemic emergency is long past. Democrats bet that Republicans would lack the courage to dismantle their blowouts on entitlements, infrastructure, green energy, semiconductors and the like—and the left is again showing which side is smarter at the long game.

  Kim goes on to list a number of issues where powerful Republicans are wimping out on spending cuts. Make sure you've got plenty of blood pressure meds stocked up, and check it out.

• Who do you want to play Milwaukee County Circuit Court Judge Hannah Dugan in the Netflix movie? Kevin D. Williamson doesn't weigh in on that issue, but provides a title: Judge Dread.

  “I am the law!” declared Judge Dredd, the cinematic supercop played by Sylvester Stallone in the eponymous 1995 film. Milwaukee County Circuit Court Judge Hannah Dugan seems to have come to a similar conclusion, and she has been charged with a felony and a misdemeanor in the matter of Eduardo Flores-Ruiz, an illegal immigrant who was scheduled to appear before her on domestic battery charges and whom—according to the federal police agencies today under control of people who won their positions by insisting we should not trust federal police agencies—the judge tried to help evade arrest and presumable deportation. 

  Let us assume, arguendo, that Judge Dugan does not have a special place in her heart for supposed domestic abusers. If she is, as it seems, engaged in the same proud tradition of civil disobedience as such heroes as Henry David Thoreau, then she should go to jail for it as happily as Thoreau did when he observed:

  Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison. The proper place today, the only place which Massachusetts has provided for her freer and less desponding spirits, is in her prisons, to be put out and locked out of the State by her own act, as they have already put themselves out by their principles. It is there that the fugitive slave, and the Mexican prisoner on parole, and the Indian come to plead the wrongs of his race should find them; on that separate, but more free and honorable, ground, where the State places those who are not with her, but against her.

  As you might suspect, Kevin does not let Trump or his minions off lightly. Bottom line:

  This is, for the moment, a minor kerfuffle. But if Congress does not step up, be sure that someone will. If you think Judge Dugan is being irresponsible and reckless, then you almost certainly are not going to like who and what comes next as the lawlessness and chaos continues. Chaos begets chaos. And the hard part for honest and intelligent Americans will be that, whatever dumb and destructive excesses Trump’s opponents get up to, nobody will be able to say that they don’t have a point.

• And maybe lower education too? One thing at a time, and Dominic Pino made the easy call: Let’s Cut All Federal Funding for Higher Education.

  On today’s edition of The Editors, National Review Rhodes Fellow Dominic Pino said the administration should “treat universities like we treat churches.” This comes on the heels of President Trump’s vow to remove Harvard’s tax-exempt status and the outrage from the university.

  Pino isn’t thrilled about the administration’s approach to the issue, and said it “would be on much better grounds” if it said, “‘We’re going to treat universities like we treat churches. They’re going to be tax exempt, but we’re not going to give them federal funding. And we’re going to force them to stand on their own.’”

  Probably not politically possible, but I like the libertarian take: separation of school and state.

• Do they realize how ludicrous they sound? Ashley Belanger writes at Ars Technica “Blatantly unlawful”: Trump slammed for trying to defund PBS, NPR. It's pretty much follows the usual script, but this stuck out for me:

  For example, Ed Ulman, CEO of Alaska Public Media, testified to Congress last month that his stations "provide potentially life-saving warnings and alerts that are crucial for Alaskans who face threats ranging from extreme weather to earthquakes, landslides, and even volcanoes." Some of the smallest rural stations sometimes rely on CPB for about 50 percent of their funding, NPR reported.

  Will nobody think of the Alaskans facing volcano threats? We'll have more on that after this story from All Things Considered movie reviewer Bob Mondello.

  But seriously, move the emergency warning and alert capabilities to the Department of Homeland Security.

  (By the way, Ed pulls down a cool $181,735 yearly compensation as President/CEO of the tax-exempt Alaska Public Media Inc.)

• There are many reasons: laziness, sloppiness, narcissism, … At Cato, Terence Kealey wonders: Trump’s Cuts to Federal Science Budget Are Justified, So Why Doesn't He Justify Them (Properly)?

  President Donald Trump’s cuts to the federal science budgets have provoked vast alarm, yet the cuts are justified. Unfortunately, though, Trump has not justified them, at least not properly. This blog post will do so by rebutting three myths of government science funding: 1) the supposed economic benefits, 2) the supposed health benefits, and 3) the supposed technological benefits. There is little evidence to justify the claims of big benefits from government funding of science.

  It's an interesting counter to…

I live very close to Maine; walking distance from Pun Salad Manor across the bridge to South Berwick is, according to Google Maps, about 0.9 miles.

Also, it turns out the most direct route to the Portsmouth (NH) Public Library takes me down Maine State Route 236. Where I swear the most common phrase on the roadside signage these days is "Recreational Cannabis".

A few years back, Maine's official tourism slogan was "The Way Life Should Be". (Pic at your right.) Which I always thought was kind of arrogant for a state in 43d place among the 50 states in terms of personal and economic freedom.

They have recently changed their tourism motto to the less offensive "Welcome Home". (And every time I see it, I mutter "I'm just going to Portsmouth, OK?")

They are insufferably statist, have been for a long time, but even that didn't prepare me for the recent news, as described by Emma Camp: Maine Legislator Barred From Voting Over Social Media Post.

The usual progressive sites that are (often rightly) irate over the Trump Administration's efforts to suppress free speech are, as near as I can tell, silent on this. Dissent from transgender ideology is effectively heresy for progressives. And must be punished by whatever sanctions are at hand.

At National Review, Dan McLaughlin calls it: Maine’s Shocking Assault on Democracy & Free Speech. Sorry, no gifted link. You can get the gist from his headline, though.

But Laurel Libby did not call for a killing spree on her political opponents. That would be a different Maine resident, as reported by Jonathan Turley: “Take out Every Single Person Who Supports Trump”: Maine Teacher Calls for the Secret Service to Go on a Killing Spree.

Yes, an updated Ring Lardner witticism: "F**k you, she explained."

Maybe I should stay on this side of the state line for awhile.

Also of note:

• Boon, meet doggle. The Daily Wire reports on a small part of Uncle Stupid's business-as-usual: Federal ‘Job Corps’ Spends Up To $764K Per Graduate. Participants Go On To Earn $17K Annually.

  A Labor Department program designed to train 16- to 24-year-olds to join the workforce spends more per person annually than Ivy League colleges, but participants wind up making minimum wage on average — raising questions about whether it should continue to exist.

  The Job Corps pays teenage runaways, high school dropouts, and twentysomething ex-cons to live in dormitories and receive their GEDs and vocational training. The national cost per graduate was $188,000, with the average graduate staying 13.5 months. Of more than 110 campuses, the 10 least efficient averaged a cost of $385,000 per graduate. Job Corps participants earn $16,695 per year on average after leaving the program, according to new government data.

  Nearly $2 billion in federal taxpayer money is spent annually on residential Job Corps campuses, a boon for the for-profit contractors who run them. But the dismal statistics about the program’s efficacy have never been fully public until the Trump administration released a “Transparency Report” last week.

  A sweet deal for those "for-profit contractors", in other words.

  The New Hampshire Job Corps campus is pictured here. I have no idea whether they have any more cost-effective results than the US average, but I have my doubts. I assume it's yet another example of the Pun Salad adage: When Uncle Stupid starts dropping cash from helicopters, there will be plenty of people out with buckets.

• Well (ahem) I believe it. Steven Davidoff Solomon, lawprof at UC Berkeley, has the clickbait headline: You Won’t Believe the Tax Breaks for Professors (gifted link).

  Stanford brags that “it’s pretty ‘sweet’ to be connected with Stanford” thanks to the perks its professors and staff receive. Perhaps the sweetest perks Stanford and other elite universities provide are the multimillion-dollar tax-free housing and tuition stipends they lavish on faculty, staff and their children. They’re tax giveaways most Americans don’t get to enjoy, though they effectively cover the cost. It’s long past time to close these tax loopholes.

  Need I confess: the tuition discount was a perk Mrs. Salad and I took advantage of for our kiddos when they attended the University Near Here.

  To be honest, I thought of it as more of, um, a scholarship. Yeah, that's the ticket! But Steven's right: it's an income transfer from ordinary joes and jills to some pretty well-off folks. Should go away.

Recently on the book blog:

I'm not proud of reading this book, but it was available at Portsmouth (NH) Public Library, and I guess I was in kind of a trashy mood, so…

The author, Maureen Callahan, has a simple theme: women who get involved with Kennedy men (and also women born into the Kennedy family) are destined for various kinds of misery and tragedy. Some picks are obvious: Jackie, Mary Jo Kopechne, Marilyn Monroe. Others are slightly more obscure (if you, like me, don't peruse the gossip mags and tabloids): Carolyn Bessette, Mary Richardson Kennedy, Joan Kennedy, Rosemary Kennedy, "Kick" Kennedy, Martha Moxley, the matriarch Rose, Pamela Kelley, Mimi Beardsley, Diana de Vegh.

Callahan leads off with an apt quote from The Great Gatsby, the one about "careless people". And she proceeds to provide plenty of examples of that carelessness, and shows in great detail just what that carelessness leads to. Some of these details are cringe-inducing: Jackie getting splattered with JFK's blood and brains; a clinical description of Rosemary's lobotomy; JFK Jr's plane crash, killing himself and wife Carolyn; Mary Jo Kopechne's probable lengthy struggle to survive in the back seat of Teddy's sunken Oldsmobile; … Yeesh!

The plain "everyone knows" facts are bad enough, but Callahan dips at times into rumor, speculation, and amateur (probably simplistic) psychosocial analysis of the participants and their milieu. Her prose is lurid; but to be fair, she's describing some pretty lurid behavior.

The book could have used some fact-checking; for example, Callahan claims that JFK set the goal of a 1960s American manned moon landing in his inaugural address; it was actually in September 1962. Also copy-editing: Callahan misuses "passive voice" and "begs the question". Neither being a big deal, but makes one wonder how solid her more serious claims are.

Let us go direct to the NPR site for the good news: Trump orders end to federal funding for NPR and PBS.

The article goes on to note that NPR stations get about 10% of their funds from federal funding. For PBS stations, it's about 15%. So this isn't a death sentence ("unfortunately").

Let me recycle a couple quotes from a Pun Salad article last month from Michael Chapman at Cato: End All Taxpayer Funding of CPB, NPR, PBS.

And later in the article:

I also pointed out that back in the previous century we really did have a (sorta) national newspaper sponsored by the "Committee on Public Information". Like many bad ideas of the era, it was the brainchild of Woodrow Wilson and (Wikipedia says) "the first state bureau covering propaganda in the history of the United States."

But not the last. Yesterday's news also brought word of the modern "national newspaper" published by Uncle Stupid: the White House Wire. It's the only newspaper Trump needs to read!

And four boos for Trump:

• George Will is on target: The Trump GOP’s attacks on universities advance the left’s agenda (gifted link).

  Even academics are educable, so universities might emerge from their current travails improved — more willing to include intellectual diversity on campuses, or at least be more circumspect about impeding it. This is the good news.

  The bad news: Republicans rejoicing about breaking academia to the saddle and bridle of federal government supervision demonstrate that we have two parties barely distinguishable in their shared enthusiasm for muscular statism. As “conservatives” mount sustained attacks on left-dominated educational institutions, they advance the left’s perennial agenda — the permeation of everything with politics.

  Such statism will extinguish the core conservative aspiration: a civil society in constant creative ferment because intermediary institutions — schools, businesses, religious and civic organizations — are given breathing room, and are free to flourish or fail without supervision from above by a minatory central authority.

  Will is in favor of "protecting Jewish students from campus antisemitism." I'd go a little farther to expose and fight universities' race-biased admissions and hiring.

• Is Trump a RINO? It's getting tough to tell, according to Jim Geraghty: Trump Echoes Bernie Sanders in Opposing Consumer Choices. He resurrects Bernie's horror about the capitalist cornucopia encountered at Walgreens and Foot Locker: "You don’t necessarily need a choice of 23 underarm spray deodorants or of 18 different pairs of sneakers when children are hungry in this country."

  I can't imagine how nonplussed Bernie was when…

  Taking questions during a cabinet meeting, President Trump shrugged off the possibility of empty shelves or limited selection as a result of a trade war with China:

  I told you before, they’re having tremendous difficulty because their factories are not doing business. Uh, they made a trillion dollars when, with Biden, a trillion dollars even a trillion one with Biden, selling us stuff — much of it we don’t need. You know, somebody said, “oh the shelves are going to be open.” Well maybe the children will have two dolls instead of 30 dolls, you know. And maybe the two dolls will cost a couple of bucks more than they would normally.

  This is a really, really bad defense of the likely economic consequences of the tariffs and trade war with China. Remember, the ships stopped leaving from China to America’s West Coast ports, and the amount of trucks leaving Los Angeles last week was comparable to Thanksgiving and Christmas Day, usually the lowest-volume days of the year.

  Bernie: "Those putzes stole my shtick!"

  More economic incoherence to come, unfortunately…

• Sounds like the worst Marvel movie ever. Veronique de Rugy imagines this supervillain team-up: The Doll Tyrants and the iPhone Fantasists (gifted link).

  The first degrowth president  of the United States, President Trump, recently defended his tariffs with this gem: “They have ships that are loaded with stuff we do not need” and “Maybe the children will have two dolls instead of 30 dolls, and maybe the two dolls will cost a couple of bucks more than they would normally.” Meanwhile, his commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick, former CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald, lamented: “We invent the iPhone, which is awesome. Why do we let everyone else build it? Why can’t we build it here? . . . We need hundreds of thousands of Americans who work in those factories.”

  \

  It’s hard to overstate how economically ignorant, politically tone-deaf, and philosophically tyrannical these statements are.

  Note the "gifted link", number one for the merry month of May. Vero does not hide her disdain.

• And for more on that… Liz Wolfe is also unimpressed with the administration's efforts to drive us down the Road to Serfdom: Howard Lutnick wants more Americans to work in factories.

  I am not cut out for the factory life: Sorry to disappoint Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, who apparently has big plans for us all.

  "You go to the community colleges, and you train people!" he says, before listing two universities—Arizona State University and Grand Canyon University—that are decidedly not community colleges. "It's time to train people not to do the jobs of the past, but to do the great jobs of the future. You know, this is the new model where you work in these kinds of plants for the rest of your life and your kids work here and your grandkids work here. You know, we let the auto plants go overseas. Now you should see an auto plant, it's highly automated but the people, the 4-5,000 people who work there, they are trained to take care of those robotic arms."

  Not just you working there, but your kids and grandkids! Is that what you always dreamed about, or was it a nightmare?

Recently on the book blog:

Another book for which many readers had a different experience than I did. Although you can read much praise for it at Amazon, I didn't care for it at all. (The readers at Goodreads seem to be much more critical, but they're not trying to sell you anything.) I liked two other books by the author, Alex Finlay (my reports here and here), well enough to pick this one up at the library.

The book opens with a grim scene: five kids from the "Savior House" foster home each firing one .22 bullet into a corpse in a makeshift grave in a dark and rainy forest. Making a pact to stay mum about it, of course.

But twenty-five years later, the kids seem to have become the target of assassins. Concentrating on three of them: Grown-up Donnie is an alcoholic rock star on decline; Nico is a reality-TV producer; Jenna is a retired contract killer with a devoted husband and a resentful teenage stepdaughter. All have near-misses with death, and must hustle to find out what's going on.

The dialog is wooden, characters are cardboard, the prose is padded and leaden, the plot is super-contrived, and lazy clichés abound. One "climactic" sequence near the book's end reads like a parody: people sneaking up behind other people, betrayals, characters-not-who-they-seem, … Everything in the book seems to be a random selection of stuff from other books.

I'll be generous and give this two stars at Goodreads.

Noah Smith saith: I owe the libertarians an apology. You can click through to read his continuing problems with libertarian ideology; being only about 68% libertarian these days, I see his point about (say) foreign policies.

So let's get down to his apology:

Unfortunately, Senator Paul's "grow a spine" resolution to terminate the "emergency" under which Trump claims authority to set tariffs failed to get a majority in the Senate yesterday. And even if it had prevailed there, its prospects in the House were dismal. And Trump promised a veto in any case.

Also of note:

• And why would you expect otherwise? Jonah Goldberg points out: There’s Nothing Conservative About Donald Trump’s Trade Philosophy.

  In an interview with Time magazine, President Donald Trump explained how he approaches tariffs and trade negotiations. I use the word “explained” with some trepidation, because explanations imply a certain delineation of reasoning, facts, and logic along with opinion and perspective. If you ask me to explain my support for abolishing rent control and I respond, “Because vests have no sleeves and turtles smell of elderberries,” have I really offered an explanation? Or have I merely revealed what passes for my thinking?

  “We’re a department store, a giant department store, the biggest department store in history,” Trump “explained” at great length. “Everybody wants to come in and take from us. They’re going to come in and they’re going to pay a price for taking our treasure, for taking our jobs, for doing all of these things.”

  “I own the store, and I set prices,” Trump says. He will set those prices based on “statistics” and whatever else he—and he alone—deems relevant.

  Now, suffice it to say, department stores don’t work like that, America is nothing like a department store, and the president is in no way the owner of America or its economy. Countries trading with America don’t “take” our treasure. They sell us things that millions of consumers and businesses need or want. Trump believes that because we buy more foreign goods (he ignores our trade surplus in services) than foreigners buy from us—i.e. trade deficits—is proof we’re being “ripped off.” If that were true, every time you handed over your money for a coffee or a car, you’d be robbed. But you’ve heard these arguments before.

  Yes, he really did say "I own the store."

• They should have put Bizarro Superman in one of the movies. But we'll have to settle for an unfortunate real-world example, according to Robert Corn-Revere: Brendan Carr’s Bizarro World FCC.

  Carr, who has been an FCC commissioner since 2017, used to say things that reflected an understanding that the government’s authority to regulate the media is sharply constrained by the First Amendment. When Democratic congressmen tried to exert political pressure on broadcasters over their coverage of COVID-19 and the 2020 election, for example, Carr called it “a chilling transgression of the free speech rights that every media outlet in this country enjoys,” adding in no uncertain terms, “a newsroom’s decision about what stories to cover and how to frame them should be beyond the reach of any government official.” Or when members of Congress urged the FCC to reject a Miami radio station transfer based on the political viewpoints of the proposed new owner, Carr rebuffed this effort “to inject partisan politics into our licensing process,” correctly calling it “a deeply troubling transgression of free speech and the FCC’s status as an independent agency.”  

  Less than a year ago Carr proclaimed the United States does not need “the FCC to operate as the nation’s speech police,” adding, “if there ever were a time for a federal agency to show restraint when it comes to the regulation of political speech and to ensure that it is operating within the statutorily defined bounds of its authority, now would be that time.” Back then, Carr wore an American flag lapel pin, suggesting a commitment to the Constitution he swore to uphold. He’s since traded that for a Donald Trump lapel pin that looks like a prize fished out of a cereal box, and it suggests an allegiance to … something else. 

  Unacquainted with Bizarro Superman? Wikipedia has you covered. (I was there at the creation, seven-year-old me buying Superboy No. 68. (Which cost me 10¢, and … whoa, look at what a copy would cost you today.)

Recently on the book blog: