Pun Salad

… but it's also hilarious, so we'll allow it.

New Yorkers: if you hear voices, vote for the one named Zohranhttps://t.co/oJ1dt7PlxQ pic.twitter.com/iB5wHgrFkE

— The People's Cube (@ThePeoplesCube) June 29, 2025

By the way, I noticed that Twitter's "Grok" AI will now generate a "Profile Summary" for users. Here's what it figured out for me:

Pretty close, although two occurrences of "witty" might be over the top.

Also of note:

• As a humanitarian gesture, allow evacuation first. But otherwise, I agree with Rich Lowry: Blow Up Washington, D.C.’s Brutalist Buildings — and the Sooner, the Better.

  There’s a reason God created dynamite.

  The brutalist federal buildings that have blighted Washington, D.C., for decades deserve the same fate as Carthage after the Third Punic War, and the nation’s capital is finally beginning to move on from these concrete monstrosities.

  The Department of Housing and Urban and Development just announced that it is leaving its godawful headquarters in Washington for a less hideous space in Northern Virginia. HUD Secretary Scott Turner has described the structure as “the ugliest building in D.C.,” which is a dubious claim only because there are so many other buildings in Washington that compete for that distinction.

  He’s not the first HUD secretary to hate the building. Jack Kemp called it “ten floors of basement.”

  Meanwhile, the FBI is also departing its HQ, designated by the U.K. building materials retailer Buildworld as the ugliest building in the United States and the second ugliest in the world.

  Concentrating on D.C., Rich doesn't mention Boston City Hall. Which made the news earlier this year:

  Boston City Hall, known for its brutalist architecture, is now an official historic landmark despite once being named the fourth-ugliest building in the world.

  Mayor Michelle Wu and the Boston Landmarks Commission announced the decision in a press release on Friday. They said the structure has civic and cultural significance.

  Nobody asked me, but here's my opinion about BCH's "significance": it is a grotesque symbol of how far Boston, the onetime cradle of liberty, has driven down the road to serfdom.

• It's the health of the state. David R. Henderson describes Why Libertarians Should Be Critical of War.

  I'm sure that many of you are familiar with the libertarian-designed "World's Smallest Political Quiz." (It’s available on line at http://www.theadvocates.org/quizp/index.html.)

  Let me ask you a question: How many questions does that quiz have on foreign policy? [Someone in the audience answered, correctly, "Zero."] We libertarians have honed our principles and applied them to literally hundreds of domestic policy issues. We've done a great job. The depth of our understanding of how to apply our principles to these issues and of the importance of peace in the domestic realm is truly something for us to be proud of. But we haven't given nearly the same care to examining foreign policy.

  Even our language reflects the relatively primitive state of libertarian thinking about war and foreign policy. I don't know many libertarians who, in talking about the 1993 Clinton tax increase, say, "We raised taxes." They're much more likely to say, "Clinton and Congress raised taxes." In other words, they put the responsibility on the people who acted. But I frequently run into libertarians who will say, without the slightest hint of irony, "We bombed Nagasaki" or "We went to war with Iraq." In other words, they switch from the clear, clean language of individualism that they use in discussing domestic policy to the dark, obfuscatory language of collectivism in discussing foreign policy.

  I'll admit that when it comes to foreign policy, I tend to let the "conservative" side of my psyche come to the fore. But David (of course) makes a powerful argument as to why I shouldn't do that.

  But I don't think I could ever be a "Blame America first" type. And I'd worry that if the US went full-peacenik, we'd find ourselves being bullied and intimidated by other countries without such compunctions.

• I was almost prepared to dislike this article. But Kevin Frazier won me over with his carefully-described worries: The coming techlash could kill AI innovation before it helps anyone.

  The residents of New Braunfels, Texas, didn't volunteer to help accelerate AI development. Their once quiet corner of the state now buzzes with construction crews building power plants to sustain data centers—industrial warehouses that could soon consume as much electricity as entire cities to power state-of-the-art AI models. Meanwhile, thousands of miles away in Irvine, California, scores of video game developers laid off by Activision Blizzard back in 2024 may still be still looking for their next gig as the entire industry sees AI take over more and more tasks leading to thousands of total jobs being cut.

  These aren't isolated incidents. They represent a small sample of an emerging public techlash that could derail AI development before the technology delivers on its most significant promises to revolutionize everything from education to health care.

  Kevin notes that similar anti-tech sentiments in the past set back civilian nuclear power and stoked unwarranted fears of genetic engineering. Arguably, we're worse off today due to that.

• I'm not sure a "race" is the appropriate metaphor here, but… I appreciate the libertarian sentiment when Stephen Moore says that For America to Win the AI Race, Keep Government's Hands Off.

  At the birth of the internet age in the early 1990s, the U.S. and Europe took opposite approaches to advancing this new economy-changing technology.

  Europe tried the approach of industrial policy: They allowed government to regulate, subsidize and then tax the swarm of new tech companies that emerged.

  Here in the U.S., Congress and the Clinton administration made a wiser choice. We passed laws that kept internet startups regulation-, tax- and lawsuit-free. It was the Wild West of startup technology companies. A Darwinian race to excellence and survival. Some of the big initial companies like AOL, Netscape and MySpace gave way to superior competitors like Google, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon and Facebook.

  We all know the end of this story. For three decades America and Silicon Valley came to entirely dominate these earliest innings of the digital age. Today we have our Magnificent Seven tech companies -- many with a market cap above $1 trillion -- that are, combined, worth more than every company in Europe combined.

  I'm convinced by my usual argument: there's nothing wrong with AI that government regulation and central planning can't make much, much worse.

Unfortunately, Jonathan Turley thinks it's a bad thing: The Chilling Jurisprudence of Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson. It's about her dissenting opinion in Trump v. CASA. Just a slice:

James Taranto also comments on Ketanji:

An underappreciated passage of Justice Jackson's dissent in CASA is her appeal to the authority of a fictional space alien. pic.twitter.com/IEzqHgIn7j

— James Taranto (@jamestaranto) June 28, 2025

Sorry, the Twitter embedding code does some unfortunate clipping. The full paragraph:

A Martian arriving here from another planet would see these circumstances and surely wonder: “what good is the Constitution, then?” What, really, is this system for protecting people’s rights if it amounts to this—placing the onus on the victims to invoke the law’s protection, and rendering the very institution that has the singular function of ensuring compliance with the Constitution powerless to prevent the Government from violating it? “Those things Americans call constitutional rights seem hardly worth the paper they are written on!”

I take issue with the Martian arriving here "from another planet". Almost certainly, he'd be coming in from Mars, right?

Also of note:

• What would Ketanji's Martian think about this? Veronique de Rugy notes an entirely predictable upcoming disaster: Social Security and Medicare are racing toward drastic cuts—yet lawmakers refuse to act.

  Considering recent news, you may have missed that the 2025 trustees reports for Social Security and Medicare are out. Once again, they confirm what we've known for decades: Both programs are barreling straight toward insolvency. The Social Security retirement trust fund and Medicare Hospital Insurance trust fund are each on pace to run dry by 2033.

  When that happens, seniors will face an automatic 23 percent cut in their Social Security benefits. Medicare will reduce payments to hospitals by 11 percent. These cuts are not theoretical. They're baked into the law. If nothing changes, they will be made.

  I have nothing against cuts of this size. In fact, if it were up to me, I would cut deeper. Medicare is a terrible source of distortions for our convoluted health care market and needs to be reined in. Social Security was created back when being too old to work meant being poor. That's no longer the case for as many people.

  I don't want to toot my own horn (too much) but this is the twentieth-year anniversary of this blog post in which I linked to this (still-online!) Will Wilkinson article at the American Spectator. Which (in turn) noted then-Senator Barack Obama demagoguing away at then-President Bush's proposal to (among other things) establish personal retirement accounts, deeming such things "Social Darwinism".

  Gee, whatever happened to that Obama guy, anyway?

• Tomorrow is Bastiat's birthday! And, at the Unseen and Unsaid substack, Jack Salmon notes we now have Eight Years to Fix Social Security.

  There is a line in Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises where a character is asked how he went bankrupt. “Two ways,” he replies. “Gradually, then suddenly.” It’s the perfect epitaph for America’s entitlement crisis.

  According to the Social Security Administration’s newly released “Trustees Report,” the retirement trust fund — the pool from which benefits are paid — is set to be depleted in 2033. When that day comes, retirees will see a mandatory 23% cut in their checks, regardless of income, need, or political promises made on the campaign trail. The rapidly depleting trust fund is partly due to the misnamed Social Security Fairness Act, which increases benefits to state employees with already generous pensions. Medicare's hospital insurance trust fund will also dry up in 2033, with an 11% cut to payments for seniors.

  We’ve known for years that the system is paying out more than it collects. That’s what happens when you design a pay-as-you-go pension scheme in a country with falling birth rates, rising life expectancy, and a Congress that treats long-term actuarial projections like unread user agreements.

  And yet, Washington remains in a state of wilful paralysis. Former President Biden pledged never to touch a penny of Social Security. President Trump has promised the same. Neither party wants to face the fact that if nothing is done, today’s 59-year-olds will reach full retirement age just in time to receive a quarter less than what they’ve been promised.

  It's easy, and somewhat appropriate, to blame the politicians. But to reiterate a point I made in a different post back in 2005: this is a democracy, we're the ones electing these cowards and demagogues. The finger always points back at us.

• Reading the by-line, checking it twice. The WaPo headline puts it plainly: Zohran Mamdani’s victory is bad for New York and the Democratic Party. (WaPo gifted link)

  And it's not from George Will, Megan McArdle, or Jim Geraghty. It's from the frickin' Washington Post Editorial Board.

  Zohran Mamdani, the charismatic 33-year-old who is now the front-runner to be the next mayor of New York, might seem like a breath of fresh air for a Democratic Party struggling to move past its aging establishment. In fact, New Yorkers should be worried that he would lead Gotham back to the bad old days of civic dysfunction, and Democrats should fear that he will discredit their next generation of party leaders, almost all of whom are better than this democratic socialist.

  […]

  Now, a man who believes that capitalism is “theft” is in line to lead the country’s biggest city and the world’s financial capital. His signature ideas are “city-owned grocery stores,” no bus fares, freezing rent on 1 million regulated apartments and increasing the minimum wage to $30 an hour. No doubt these might strike some voters as tempting ideas. But, as with so many proposals from America’s far left, the trade-offs would hurt the people they are supposed to help.

  Fun fact: over 4000 comments on the editorial, and my non-AI summary of the WaPo's AI summary: the readers don't like it.

  For not the first time, and probably not the last, this Menckenim: "Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard."

• And about those city-owned grocery stores… Joe Lancaster checks the history, and finds: America has plenty of experience with government-run stores, and it isn't pretty.

  Some have come to Mamdani's defense, saying city-owned grocery stores are not as radical as they sound—in fact, some states already have them, without becoming socialist hellscapes. Some have compared this plan to states that control liquor sales. But in each case, the comparison is unflattering to Mamdani's proposal.

  When I lived in the D.C. area back in the 1970s, we had the socialist-sounding "Peoples Drug" chain. Despite the name, it was privately owned, but I always told Mrs. Salad I was headed there with a bad Russian accent: "I'm off to Pipples Drugs, dollink. You is needing anything?"

  Here in the Live Free or Die state we have those state liquor stores. Which aren't bad. But if you like the occasional gin-and-tonic, you have to go to two different stores, one for the gin, one for the tonic. Or jump across the border to Maine.

Recently on the movie blog:

Please note the "2" exponent. That's how it shows up in the movie itself, I looked up the Unicode, and I think it looks cooler than just a bare "2".

I watched the previous movie in this series back in 2017 My report here, but I thought it was pretty good. Unfortunately, a major bright spot in that movie, the pride of Portland ME, Anna Kendrick, does not show up in this sequel. But the other bright spot, J.K. Simmons, does! Uh, briefly.

Oh, heck, this isn't much of a spoiler: Simmons' character, Ray King, gets pretty much killed right at the beginning, but he leaves a clue scrawled in pen on his arm: "FIND THE ACCOUNTANT". That's Ben Affleck, whose on-the-spectrum skills serve both to uncover financial skulduggery and other misbehavior. He also is pretty good at fisticuffs, gunplay, explosions, and fast driving. He must have picked that up from being, occasionally, Batman.

He gets help from his estranged, equally skilled hit-man brother, Braxton (Jon Bernthal). (Sorry, a spoiler from the first movie.) All this in support of a thin but complex plot involving a hit woman, her kidnapped child, money laundering, … I had a difficult time figuring that out.

The movie is very violent, but also funny in spots. The chemistry between The Accountant and his brother generates some chuckles.

I just think Mr. Ramirez's latest cartoon is pretty cool looking.

And just in case you were wondering. I can't vouch for the material I quote from other sources, but as it says over there on your right: Unquoted opinions expressed herein are solely those of the blogger.

Not some bot.

At least not yet.

Also of note:

• 

  It's a matter of degree. Kevin D. Williamson reflects on the victory of Zohran Mamdani in the NYC mayoral primary, and wonders: Does ‘Socialism’ Still Mean Anything?

  People are interested in socialism. The light little book I wrote on socialism more than a decade ago has been by far the best-selling of any of my books, and I am amused from time to time to see advertisements for the Portuguese version of it that was apparently well-received in Brazil. (Parents often buy the book as a graduation present for college-bound students, and many of them ask me to write some version of “Don’t believe everything those commies at Brown tell you next year!” in signed copies.) I shouldn’t be surprised by that, given that people are also very interested in such exotic nonsense as astrology and veganism, but socialism does seem like one of those things we should all have gotten over before now. 

  There are very few socialist countries left in the world, and those that remain tend to be basket cases such as North Korea and Cuba. India is constitutionally socialist, but that is strictly parchment socialism. It probably would not be accurate to describe the so-called People’s Republic of China as socialist, but it would be fair to say that it is a country in which the single-party police state that runs the place is led by men who take socialism seriously, who think of themselves as socialists and their project as a socialist project. 

  I bought and read KDW's "light little book" back in 2011; my report is here, and you can use the link on your right to get it at Amazon.

  From that report, by the way:

  [… KDW] uses the word "syncretic" on page 52. And I've resolved to look that up some day.

  And if I did that, I've forgotten what it means.

• Unseen, unsaid, and probably undone. At my newly-discovered Substack, The Unseen and The Unsaid, contributor Joshua Rowley provides Seven Options to Replace Byrded-Out Savings in OBBBA. That's the "One Big Beautiful Bill Act", now getting attention from the Senate. Specifically, the Senate Parliamentarian's attention, who's pointing out the provisions that are subject to filibusterization, and hence won't make it ("Byrded-out") into the final version.

  This one might make me wince a bit:

  2. Remove the new deduction for seniors. The House version of OBBBA includes a new $4,000 deduction for seniors as a nod to President Trump’s campaign pledge to eliminate taxes on Social Security benefits. This new deduction is in addition to an existing deduction for the blind and elderly that equaled $1,550 last year. The Senate version raises the new deduction to $6,000, with a $91 billion price tag — a substantial cost for a policy that amounts to simple pandering to an age demographic already at the top of the wealth distribution.

  Sure, go ahead and push granny off the cliff.

  When I think about all the dollar flows between me, my employers, and Uncle Stupid over the years, I've developed a deep appreciation of how arbitrary it all is. I'm sure whatever comes out of the latest process will be just another layer on that cake.

• Just making it up as they go. Jessica Riedl looks at that topic from a different angle: The Collapse of GOP Policymaking.

  Republicans vociferously claim their tax legislation—the One Big Beautiful Bill Act passed by the House and working its way through the Senate—would unleash an economic boom so colossal that its resulting tax revenues would offset the entire cost. This dubious boast was shredded by a recent Congressional Budget Office (CBO) reality check showing that the bill’s broader economic effects actually increase the 10-year cost projection by $356 billion.

  According to this “dynamic score,” the bill is so poorly designed that it would fail to produce any significant long-term increase in economic growth. Instead, the tiny amount of growth revenues would be swallowed by $441 billion in added 10-year federal debt interest costs that would result from the bill raising interest rates across the economy and on the entire federal debt. Those “dynamic” interest costs from rising rates are in addition to $551 billion in interest costs that would be paid specifically on the bill’s $2.4 trillion in 10-year borrowing.

  Rather than address the bill’s extraordinary cost, Republicans responded by attacking the CBO. They challenged the agency’s historical accuracy by claiming that it failed to competently score the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA)–even as CBO’s subsequent revenue estimate achieved 99.5 percent accuracy up until the pandemic. President Donald Trump accused the CBO of being run by Democrats even though its director is a Republican. Sen. Tim Scott produced a video claiming that CBO also erroneously scored tax cuts in the 1930s and 1960s—which is impossible because CBO did not exist until 1974, not to mention that those 1930s tax cuts actually took place in the 1920s. All because the CBO refused to pretend that the House Republican tax bill would pay for itself or even offset a portion of the cost.

  Like Joshua above, Jessica uses the p-word in characterizing the GOP's efforts: "lazy special-interest pandering combined with an almost mystical belief in an economic nirvana that never arrives."

  That is, they sound more like Democrats every day.

• Almost? So you're saying there's a chance? George Will thinks Exploding U.S. indebtedness makes a fiscal crisis almost inevitable. (WaPo gifted link)

  Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JPMorgan Chase, was more tantalizing than illuminating when he recently said, regarding the nation’s fiscal trajectory, “You are going to see a crack in the bond market.” Details, even if hypotheticals, would be helpful concerning the market where U.S. debt is sold.

  Twenty-five percent of Treasury bonds, about $9 trillion worth, are held by foreigners, who surely have noticed a provision in the One Big Beautiful Bill (1,018 pages). Unless and until it is eliminated, the provision empowers presidents to impose a 20 percent tax on interest payments to foreigners. The potential applicability of this to particular countries and kinds of income is unclear. It could be merely America First flag-waving.

  But foreign bond purchasers, watching the U.S. government scrounge for money as it cuts taxes and swells the national debt in trillion-dollar tranches, surely think: What the provision makes possible is possible. Such a significant devaluation of foreign-purchased Treasury bonds would powerfully prod foreign investors to diversify away from Treasurys, which would raise the cost of U.S. borrowing an unpredictable amount.

  And so on that cheerful note… see you tomorrow, I hope.

Attention should be paid when Jim Harper thinks The Engineers at the ACLU Have Some Good Things to Say.

I read Identity Crisis back in 2009 (after buying it in 2007); my report is here.

And—sigh—I got my "REAL ID" driver license earlier this year.

Also of note:

• A complete unknown. I noticed a new (to me) substack in town, The Unseen and The Unsaid; a subtle Bastiat reference, yay! And one of the contributors is Pun Salad favorite, Veronique de Rugy. Who, earlier this week, pleaded for some honest language: Stop Saying We Need to “Pay for the Tax Cuts.” We Need to Pay for the Spending, Not Tax Cuts.

  Few talking points in Washington are more misguided than the demand that we must “pay for the tax cuts” or that “we don’t need to pay for tax cuts.” As Congress debates whether to extend parts of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA), this stale refrain is back, and it’s just as wrongheaded as ever – but not for the reasons you think.

  Let me explain. The primary (and I would argue, sole) purpose of the tax code is simple: to raise revenue to fund the government that voters say they want. That requires that we debate what we think the size of the government should be. I believe it should be very small, with most functions currently handled by the federal government instead being carried out by the private sector, by state and local governments, or the voluntary sector including philanthropy and civil society. Most people seem to disagree with me.

  Either way, whatever we decide the size of government should be, we should then decide what is the best way to design a tax code that raises the necessary revenue with the least economic distortion. Economists have been debating this question for a long time, and a consensus seems to have emerged about consumption taxes being significantly better and less distortive than income taxes.

  I'm in total agreement. Although I am at the stage in life where I planned to cut back on income, but keep on consuming. We call that "retirement", and a certain amount of my financial planning over the decades assumed that strategy.

  Oh well. The way things seem to be proceeding, a consumption tax might be the least painful alternative for me.

• Don't work blue. Jay Nordlinger has moved his "Impromptu" schtick from National Review over to a Substack. And it's his usual blend of decency, attention paid to repression, and oddball observation. Example from yesterday: Blue Streaks, &c.

  Normally, this column does not “work blue.” If there are swear words, they are usually accompanied by asterisks (though not always). (Sometimes asterisks can be prissy.) But let me quote you an article, published yesterday:

  On Tuesday, President Trump dropped a bomb—not a bunker-buster but the F-bomb. Talking to the press about Israel and Iran, he said, “We have two countries that have been fighting so long and so hard that they don’t know what the fuck they’re doing.”

  I wrote that article for The Spectator World. Here is the second paragraph (the first being the one I have already quoted):

  There is a lot to say about this statement—starting with the implied moral equivalence between the two countries. But let’s focus on the F-bomb. Has a president ever before used this word in public? Used it deliberately, in a public statement? Trump seems to have recorded a first.

  Yes. From there, I went through a little history—a history of presidential profanity—“from Truman to Trump,” as the subheading of the piece says (alliteratively).

  Call me crazy, but I think pols should work as clean as Bill Cosby used to.

Recently on the book blog:

I've been taking my time working through Mary Roach's books. (Fortunately, the Portsmouth (NH) Public Library book-selector seems to be a fan as well.) This one is from 2003, and it's Mary's usual travel guide into weird, gross, and (occasionally) hilarious topics that would be considered off-limits in polite dinner party conversation. In this case, as the subtitle says, it's about dead people and what can happen to their bodies (or parts).

There are a lot of possible paths and destinations: organ donation, of course; anatomy class; crash testing; wound research; testing the authenticity of the Shroud of Turin; cannibalism. And more.

One of Mary's investigations takes her to the island of Hainan to investigate reports of cannibalism. Reader, it's not a tourist spot.

Another fun fact: painter Diego Rivera was not just a fan of Marxism also cannibalism!

Mary is often irreverent, with a smart-ass remark never far away. I get the feeling that her everyday conversation can be considerably more R-rated than the prose that makes it into her books. But some things are (literally) dead serious here; one example is her description of the detective work carried out on the recovered bodies from the doomed TWA Flight 800 in 1996. Was it a bomb? A missile? A bolide? Theories abounded, but the investigators managed to debunk them, thanks to clues provided by the corpses.

It never hurts (much) to be reminded that our survivors are going to need to somehow dispose of our remains, and Mary devotes a couple final chapters discussing possible alternatives. There are a lot of them! One intriguing one was "alkaline hydrolysis", which involves a few hours in a pressure cooker, submerged in a lye solution. The process results in a pH-neutral sterile liquid that can safely go in the sewage system, and crumbled-up bones. It is, at least theoretically, more environmentally-friendly than usual cremation via flame.

As noted, this book is from 2003. Surely, things have changed since then? A little Googling shows that progress has been slow on that front. Although there have been a lot of euphemistic names proposed for the procedure: "water cremation", "aquamation", "resomation", …

But what really surprised me: it's illegal in New Hampshire! Your survivors, if they desire to go that route, will need to trundle you off to Vermont or Maine.

I will remind you that the NH motto is "Live Free or Die". Perhaps they should add "But when you die, don't think about being free to use alkaline hydrolysis."

(My guess is that Catholic opposition to the process explains its continuing illegality here. Also verboten is "human composting", another possibility Mary describes.)

I notice that after a long hiatus, Mary has a new book coming out in September: Replaceable You. If I haven't undergone alkaline hydrolysis by then, I'll be grabbing it off the library shelf.

The fifth (and, as I type, most recent) book in Stephen Spotswood's "Pentecost and Parker" series. "Pentecost" is Lillian Pentecost, famed proprietor of her late 1940s New York City detective agency. And "Parker" is Willowjean, her diligent, wisecracking investigative assistant, who narrates most of the book. (There are some excerpts from Lillian's journal.) Two out of the five back cover blurbs make reference to the similar, obvious, precedent of Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe/Archie Godwin mysteries.

But this one moves off formula: an antagonist has been shot in the head at a shindig where he had promised to reveal a dark part of Lillian's family history to the world. Lillian arrives to confront him, and … bang, bang, he's dead, apparently shot by Lillian. Ballistics seem to point to her gun! Lillian is arrested, awaiting trial in the wretched "House of D" ladies' prison. To make it worse, one of the prison guards has it in for her.

So Willowjean is tasked with clearing her boss's name, finding the truth about what happened. It is a classically convoluted plot, with numerous possible suspects, each with possible motives. A lot of red herrings. Never fear, eventually the truth is uncovered, Lillian is cleared. This is a continuing series, after all; the outcome is never in doubt. And there's a setup for (I assume) book number six.

Trivia, not that it matters: I caught an anachronism at the start of chapter 38, where Willowjean's girlfriend, Holly, is "stubbing out her Chesterfield in the Folgers can." Ah, in 1947, that would have been a "Folger's can", with an apostrophe. The brand didn't lose its apostrophe until 1963 when acquired by Proctor & Gamble.

The mystery follows the "classic" formula in another way I've always found a tad irritating: Lillian and Willowjean figure out the true culprit, and accumulate supporting evidence, without telling the reader. Yes, this sets up for the Grand Reveal at Lillian's trial later. But this I-know-but-you-don't game kind of emphasizes the artificiality of the narration.

I also found it unfortunate that Spotswood saw fit to append a virtue-signalling "Author's Note" where he bemoans "a wave of laws passed across the country criminalizing gender and sexuality, and stripping women of their bodily autonomy." Sigh. Eye roll. Shut up and write.

Bryan Caplan's defense of "libertarian" free will: Solipsism>>Determinism.

I'm with Bryan. And his choice of words is telling: he's "long believed in" free will. "Believing in" something means your certainty is strong, but way short of 100%. Would that all philosophical pundits adopted this implicit humility.

(What does this have to do with solipsism? See Bryan's post for his explanation.)

I would love to see a debate on free will between Bryan and Sabine Hossenfelder. Here's a recent video from Sabine:

I think there's a logical gap between asserting (1) "I can't understand how free will would work" and (2) "Free will can't work". I'm perfectly OK with (1); I don't think it necessarily entails (2).

And I'm pretty sure (although she seems to claim otherwise), in her everyday life, Sabine has conscious, rational, control of her actions.

No matter on which side of the free will debate people land on, they all manage to make decisions on matters large and small, every day. (Well, I think so anyway, but—see Bryan—I'm not a solipsist.)

Also of note:

• Trump dropped a different kind of bomb. Not a bunker-buster, the one beginning with F. Christian Schneider comments: Donald Trump Is the Real Obscenity.

  It shouldn’t be at all surprising that on Tuesday Donald Trump became the first president to willingly say the word “fuck” in front of the media. To date, he has sprinkled his stump speeches with the occasional “bullshit” or “ass,” although he had never uttered the Queen Mother of profanities in front of microphones.

  [Video at link]

  But Trump is a walking obscenity, unable to control his emotions or impulses, making American governance a byproduct of his glandular outbursts, not of law or tradition. Using a swear word is merely a symptom of his coarse imbecility, not the cause of it. It is simply further evidence that he has no respect for norms or etiquette if they restrict him in any way.

  Trump uttered the f-word when expressing disgust at Israel and Iran for continuing to bomb each other after the U.S. bombed Iranian nuclear facilities over the weekend. Trump had taken credit for a cease-fire between the two nations, but got the “new phone, who dis” treatment from both nations when they decided to resume attacking each other. When he lashed out, Trump wasn’t mad that more people were being incinerated by warheads, he was incensed that the latest round of bombing made him look like a feckless boob. They had stolen the thing he craves the most: credit.

  Christian looks at how the f-bomb has worked its way into political discourse. ("Disraeli it ain't," he says, and true dat.) It's been a long time coming, and he links to his 2020 Bulwark article about the trend.

• "Don't look at me, I just work here." Ramesh Ponnuru comments on Lutnick's Sadness.

  Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick joined the administration pile-on against Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell, whose sin is not cutting interest rates. There are good arguments on both sides of the interest-rate question. Then there’s Lutnick’s argument.

  Justifying a go-slow approach to reducing rates, Powell said that tariffs have already caused prices to increase for some products, such as personal computers. Lutnick calls that “really sad”: “You would think Powell would know there are no tariffs on personal computers. They currently don’t exist.”

  This is . . . not true. Some of the data showing it’s not true come from the Department of Commerce. In fairness, tariffs have been hard to keep track of lately — but that’s not a defense that Lutnick can make.

  Fortunately, I'm not currently in the market for a new PC. What, your kid needs one for school? Gee, that's too bad.

• Keep this in your back pocket. For the next time some Green advocate claims otherwise, point her or him to Adam N. Michel's fact-check: Fossil Fuel Subsidies Are Mostly Fiction, But the Real Energy Subsidies Should Go.

  You’ve probably heard the claim that fossil fuels are heavily subsidized by the federal government. The Biden administration estimated there were at least $35 billion of fossil fuel subsidies in the tax code alone. Elon Musk recently expressed a similar sentiment, insinuating that oil and gas receive subsidies comparable to those received by electric vehicles and solar.

  This common refrain simply doesn’t hold up. Official government data show that renewables are subsidized 30 times more than fossil fuels. Most of the subsidies are in the tax code, where 94 percent of the fiscal cost goes to green energy technologies. And even this breakdown is overstated. Most of what critics label as fossil fuel subsidies are standard tax treatments available to many industries.

  I haven't checked, but probably you won't see this at Politifact.

At TechDirt, Mike Brock rails Against Ironic Detachment. After desperately seeking some appropriate Eye Candy to illustrate "ironic detachment", I decided to go with xkcd: Hipsters:

And see, there's "ironic detachment" right there in the mouseover:

You may point out that this very retreat into ironic detachment while still clearly participating in the thing in question is the very definition of contemporary hipsterdom. But on the other hand, wait, you're in an empty room. Who are you talking to?

This comic is from 2013, so you can see that "ironic detachment" has been disrespected for quite awhile.

I, on the other hand, have adopted the Elvis Costello attitude: I used to be disgusted, Now I try to be amused. If you had to sum up "ironic detachment" in a pop lyric, I think that comes very close.

So anyway, here's Mike, who thinks he has something new to say:

Just an excerpt. Read the whole thing, and see what you think. Here's what I think:

Mike lacks humility, tolerance, and sympathy. You will, I'm pretty sure, look in vain for any specific examples, good or bad, of which he speaks, let alone specific recommendations for activism or policy.

Maybe I missed something. It was pretty tedious reading "good things are good, bad things are bad" over and over again. Broad, generalizing brushstrokes abound.

But most important, Mike fails to appreciate the dangers of moral certainty, even after it has undoubtedly fueled the actions of (examples off the top of my head) Luigi Mangione, Elias Rodriguez, Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, …

Of course, your lack of ironic detachment doesn't have to make you a cold-blooded killer. You can stop short of that and merely be a humorless, self-important, strident, overwraught kvetch.

Speaking of which, Mike has a substack, Notes From The Circus. Browse as desired, up to the "Keep reading with a 7-day free trial" notices.

And, yes, today's headline is loosely based on a famous line from William Butler Yeats' "The Second Coming".

Also of note:

• Obligatory Ghostbusters quote: "There is no Dana, only Zuul!" That's probably not what Charles C.W. Cooke meant to evoke with his NR headline: There Is No Trumpism—Just Trump.

  When, in 1898, Lord Salisbury was informed of the death of Otto von Bismarck, he is said to have asked aloud, “I wonder what he meant by that.”

  President Trump does not exhibit Bismarck’s cunning, inscrutability, or proclivity for complicated diplomacy. Nevertheless, there is something impenetrable about the man that renders pat classification impossible. For the better part of a decade, figures who spend most of their time around ideologically consistent thinkers have attempted to define what Trump represents. What is Trumpism (and MAGA, America First, and the rest)? Which factions does it exemplify? Which historical strands has it picked up? To which school of international relations theory does it belong? Is Trump a populist? Is he a Jacksonian? Does he owe more to the New Deal or to the Reagan Revolution? Jurisprudentially, does he side with the originalist or common-good school?

  Ten years in, this project seems rather silly. Clearly, there is no Trumpism. There’s just Trump.

  I think CCWC is getting it really right here. Hopefully, this means that after Trump is out of the picture, we'll start making principled arguments instead of shaking our pom-poms in support of whatever Trump said or did a few hours ago.

  Yeah, well, maybe.

  But it also means that Trump has no principles other than his own self. It's a trait others have labeled as narcissism.

  And … I'm out of NR gifted links this month, so subscribe, hippie.

• Another exercise in futility. They Don’t Even Want to Impeach Him Anymore. "They" being "most Democrats in the House." (WSJ gifted link)

  Damage assessments continue regarding the U.S. strike on Iran’s nuclear sites. Back here in the U.S., a pernicious and dishonest movement that began after the 2016 elections appears to have been completely flattened. The spectacular implosion on the House floor Tuesday could be seen from as far away as the outer limits of C-Span cable households. Most House Democrats voted against initiating an impeachment of President Donald Trump even after he ordered a bombing without seeking congressional approval.

  Among those rising to Mr. Trump’s defense were Minority Leader Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D., N.Y.) and former Speaker Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.). These are politicians who have spent years “resisting” our twice-elected president as if he were an illegitimate ruler. They even impeached him once for demanding a Ukrainian investigation of Biden enrichment schemes that any reasonable person would say should have been investigated.

  Clearly their hearts are no longer in the effort to deny the results of our national elections, though they may try to keep bellowing about alleged authoritarianism at activist gatherings. It seems that many elected Democrats have been wanting to drop the “resistance” shtick for a while, but didn’t want to have to oppose another Trump impeachment publicly. Now they’re on the record affirming that he should continue to serve as our president. How can any of them ever rail about his alleged threat to democracy again with a straight face?

  Memo to Mike Brock: I don't think you can chalk this up to "ironic detachment."

  Voting breakdown is here. It took up, according to this record, slightly over 35 minutes of floor time yesterday.

David R. Henderson has worthwhile thoughts on a relevant topic: War and the Constitution. From a talk he gave on September 17, 2007, the 220th anniversary of the signing of the U.S. Constitution.

My heartfelt advice to youngsters: put not your trust in government officials, or those aspiring to be government officials.

Also of note:

• Justice in Washington caught peeking out from under her blindfold. David Keating notes a small problem with campaign finance laws: Campaign Finance Laws Institutionalize Corruption.

  There's new evidence in Washington state that enforcement of campaign finance laws often isn't about better government—it's about punishing political opponents.

  Consider four recent cases there that reveal the system's nature.

  The Service Employees International Union Healthcare 1199NW—a union of more than 30,000 healthcare workers across Washington, created by employees to advocate for common interests—failed to report $430,000 in political contributions until after the 2024 election, including $200,000 each to the Kennedy Fund, an arm of the Washington State Senate Democratic Caucus, and the Harry Truman fund, a PAC connected to the House Democratic Caucus.

  For such a huge omission, the Washington State Public Disclosure Commission issued a $6,000 fine, with only $3,000 required to be paid—less than one percent of the concealed amount.

  Compare that to tax-cut activist Tim Eyman, who was hit with over $8 million in fines, fees, and interest for campaign finance violations. The court acknowledged that the punishment left him "impoverished and almost destitute." His alleged violation was the late filing of campaign disclosures and using campaign funds for personal expenses.

  David's other examples are also telling.

  And for additional reading, check out Rich Lowry's This Is What They Wanted to Do to Trump, a look at (apparently successful) "lawfare" waged against Marine Le Pen in France. ("Elections are so much easier if your opponent can’t run.")

• L’Chaim. Martin Gurri has a moving essay on the Meaning Of It All: The Mortalist.

  The human condition is inescapably tragic. We suffer a thousand varieties of pain; then, without sense or explanation, the flame of life flickers out forever. There are no happy endings.

  The Buddhists console us with the thought that misery is illusion. Christianity promises a realm beyond the reach of pain. But most religions converge in the belief that this world—this narrow valley darkened by the shadow of death—is a place of tears and tribulations.

  So what’s the point of living?

  No one who has ever bounced a kid or a grandkid on a knee would ever ask that question. No one who has shared a life with a loving spouse would ask it. No one who has exchanged a secret laugh with a best friend, or enjoyed a brilliant conversation or felt a bond to someone or something that enlarged or even transcended the limited self—none would ask it.

  This isn’t logical or rational, because the tumultuous “gale of life” precedes logic and reason. We find ourselves here, alive, aware, deeply in love with as many things as cause us to suffer. That’s the starting position. We can’t back away. We can’t be unborn. No doubt there are evolutionary and biological drivers attaching us to the world—selfish genes, electrochemical impulses, etc.—but this doesn’t matter; only the abiding feeling of love and attachment does.

  As the Electric Light Orchestra didn't say: "Don't bring me down … Bruce!"

• 

  Betteridge's Law of Headlines Confirmed. Jack Santucci asks the question: Is Ranked-Choice Voting Working for New York?

  Just six years after adopting ranked-choice voting for primaries and special elections, New York City may be headed for another round of electoral reform—this time sparked by a tumultuous mayoral race.

  The fragmented Democratic primary means tomorrow’s winner will likely be determined by how voters rank candidates. If the result fractures the party, the general election could be similarly splintered—this time under a single-vote system. That outcome could prompt another push for reform, timed to coincide with the forthcoming revision of the city’s charter.

  In November 2019, New York City voters adopted RCV for closed party primaries. The goal was to select the nominee who best unifies a party’s primary electorate. Democratic voters first used the system in 2021 to choose Eric Adams, who went on to win the general election.

  Two major research findings suggest that ranked-choice voting does not live up to advocates’ promises. First, RCV often fails to produce a winner who earned a majority of all votes cast. Two political scientists warned of this possibility in a 2014 scholarly article on “ballot exhaustion.” This occurs when voters truncate their rankings—leaving some choices blank—or rank a frontrunner below a candidate eliminated early in the count. When enough ballots are exhausted in this way, the eventual winner may secure a majority of remaining ballots, but not a majority of total ballots cast. The most comprehensive study to date finds that 97 of 185 U.S. RCV elections from 2004 to 2022 suffered from this kind of “majoritarian failure.”

  As Bryan Caplan convincingly demonstrated in his The Myth of the Rational Voter, even Plain Old Single-Choice Voting is rife with irrationality and ignorance. Ranked-choice voting manages to add to that incorrect assumption, that voters will apply some sort of 4-dimensional chess game theory to filling in their ballots. "Good luck with that."

So I finally made it to the end of July's Reason magazine, where they resurrect pungent quotes from old issues in their Archives. Guess the date on this one. (I've elided a couple of clues):

Give up? It's the second paragraph in "Guts Check" by Carolyn Lochhead. And it is dated July 1, 1995.

Which makes it 30 years old.

The target date by which Republicans vowed to balance the budget? 2002. Actual budget deficit in FY2002: $157.8 billion, which was about 1.5% of GDP.

In comparison, the FY2024 deficit: $1833 billion, about 6.4% of GDP.

Sigh. And we're now looking at the course of 21st-century government.

Further down in the Archives is a 50-year-old interview with… guess who?

OK, that was probably a softball. The full interview with Ronald Reagan from Reason's July 1975 issue is here.

Also of note:

• Alternate: "So what are you gonna do about it?" Eric Boehm points out an inconvenient truth: Trump’s military attack on Iran clearly violates the War Powers Act.

  Hours after the U.S. bombed several sites in Iran, President Donald Trump called the operation a "spectacular military success."

  Whether or not that turns out to be true, the attack looks rather different as a legal matter. Trump appears to have significantly overstepped his authority, as the attack was not authorized by Congress and was not in response to an attack on American soil or American troops. The best the White House has been able to come up with so far is that Trump acted under the legal authority "afforded to him as Commander in Chief," as a White House official told Real Clear Politics on Saturday night.

  Sorry, but that simply isn't good enough.

  Um, Eric? "Good enough" for what?

  It's probably more politic than what Trump might have said himself: "Who's gonna stop me?"

• Fill in the blank: On            , Nancy Pelosi Is a Ridiculous Hack. Charles C.W. Cooke does it this way: On War Powers, Nancy Pelosi Is a Ridiculous Hack. (NR gifted link) Inspired by this bit of hackery:

  Tonight, the President ignored the Constitution by unilaterally engaging our military without Congressional authorization.
  
  I join my colleagues in demanding answers from the Administration on this operation which endangers American lives and risks further escalation and…

  — Nancy Pelosi (@SpeakerPelosi) June 22, 2025

  Charles responds:

  I wish that Pelosi wouldn’t do this. I, too, am of the view that President Trump needed congressional authorization for this strike. (For those interested, I wrote about it here, and debated Andy McCarthy on the topic here.) But my quarrel is not with Trump; it is with the entire post-WWII collection of precedents. In essence, my argument is a) that, per the terms of the Constitution — and the way in which they were understood at the time of the Founding — Congress must authorize changes in military policy; b) that Congress granted such authorizations as a matter of routine until 1950 (see: the First Barbary War, the War of 1812, the Second Barbary War, the Mexican-American War, the Spanish-American War, World War I, and World War II); and c) that, while it is now 75-years-old, the alternative arrangement that has obtained since then is illegal. My argument is not that President Trump has done something that no other recent president has done, or that he is a dictator, or that he ought to be impeached.

  You got my last NR gifted link for this month up there, so check it out.

• Virgil, quick come and see! There goes the Robert E. Lee! Jeff Jacoby is brutal on misguided symbolism: Trump makes treason great again, one Army base at a time.

  PRESIDENT TRUMP addressed the troops at Fort Bragg, N.C., earlier this month, delivering a speech so partisan, it was likened to a campaign rally. In addition to prompting uniformed troops and their families to jeer the press and boo the mention of former president Joe Biden, Trump derided Los Angeles as a "trash heap," labeled the governor of California "Gavin Newscum," and railed against undocumented immigrants as "the most heinous people."

  He also announced that he would restore the names of all Army bases that were named for Confederate generals during the Jim Crow era — names that Congress ordered changed in a law passed over Trump's veto in 2020.

  Among those bases was Fort Bragg. Originally named for the undistinguished Confederate general Braxton Bragg in 1918, it was redesignated Fort Liberty in 2023. Last year Trump vowed that if he returned to the White House, he would resurrect the former name. In February, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth signed an order changing the huge installation's name back to Fort Bragg.

  But to circumvent Congress's mandate that military facilities no longer evoke Confederate officers who fought against the United States in defense of slavery and the rupture of the Union, the name change came with a twist: The Pentagon now claims Fort Bragg honors a little-known World War II private named Roland L. Bragg — not the Confederate general.

  It's a long post, and Jeff also takes Robert E. Lee down more than a few pegs.

• "Mistake" is too mild a word, but… that's what on Andy Kessler's headline: Trump’s Golden-Share Mistake. (WSJ gifted link)

  Last week brought us the Golden Share. No, that isn’t a James Bond movie, or a detail from the Steele dossier, although the plot is as sinister. It’s the Trump administration’s first step to nationalize the steel industry.

  In exchange for approval of Nippon Steel’s merger with U.S. Steel, the government receives a single preferred share, which includes voting rights and all sorts of control over U.S. Steel’s ability to close factories, invest capital and relocate jobs outside the U.S. This “Golden Share” is a bad idea. Nationalization is a fool’s errand, a slippery slope to fascism’s “government controlling the means of production.” Don’t do it.

  Andy relates the long, sad, sordid history of US government nationalization. Worth pondering.

Nevertheless, I've updated yesterday's post which approvingly quoted Kevin D. Williamson, who said "We have an indecisive president—and it is decision time". This apparently turned out to be, um, a misguided missile.

So I guess it's time to look at the resulting commentary. The National Review editors are OK with bomb, bomb Iran: Trump Enforces His Red Line on Iran.

There's a bit of Constitutional throat-clearing later: "As we noted previously, such action should have been approved by Congress."

How about the WSJ editorial board? They say: Trump Meets the Moment on Iran.

I don't think the WSJ mentions that Congressional thing. For that, let's turn to Matthew Petti, Reason's resident peacenik: Trump Shreds the Constitution By Bombing Iran.

In case I haven't mentioned it recently: I am totally unqualified to comment on foreign policy, including war policy. I'm old enough to remember a long line of policy "experts" making confident predictions and plausible recommendations that turned out to be total wrong-headed garbage. So what chance do I have to do better?

All I can do is hope this makes things better in the long run.

Also of note:

• I'm always a sucker for a Casablanca reference. And Jonathan Turley brings it: The Claude Rains School of Constitutional Law: Democrats Denounce Iranian Attack as Unconstitutional.

  Yesterday, I wrote a column in the Hill discussing how Trump is unlikely to go to Congress in launching an attack on Iran and how he has history on his side in acting unilaterally. The column noted that many Democratic politicians and pundits who were supportive of such unilateral actions by Democratic presidents such as Bill Clinton and Barack Obama are suddenly opposed to Trump using the same power. It is the Claude Rains School of Constitutional Law where politicians are “shocked, shocked” that Trump is using the authority that they accepted in Democratic predecessors.

  Jonathan notes how silent today's Democrats were after (for example) Obama's bombing of Libya. And some who were not silent gloated jubilantly.

  But that was then, and this is…

• I missed Porcfest again. It was all the way up in Lancaster, from where Pun Son, my dog, and I witnessed the solar eclipse last year. And it cost money to get in!

  Probably David D. Friedman got in free, though. He was inspired by one of the speakers, "Angela McArdle, sometime chair of the Libertarian Party and currently of the Mises Caucus" to muse on Strategies for Libertarians.

  Andrea recounted the LP's flirtation with Trumpism, which caused the freeing of Ross Albricht and appointment of "libertarian" RFK Jr to be HHS Secretary. Win? David notes two problems with such a strategy:

  The first is to the reputation of the libertarian movement. The Libertarian Party has long labeled itself “The Party of Principle;” part of the attraction of the libertarian movement is the appearance of consistent support of liberty across a wide variety of issues, from drug laws to professional licensing to immigration, of being motivated by a consistent philosophy of freedom. If the party is seen as visibly supporting Trump, as it will be by anyone who listened to McArdle’s webbed talk, it will be seen as sharing the responsibility for all of his actions, some of them far from libertarian. That will make it harder to recruit or retain as members, of the movement as well as the party, anyone opposed to Trump’s policies. Since Trump is not a libertarian that is likely to include not only anyone left of center but also anyone seriously committed to libertarianism.

  The second cost is the effect of alliance with Trump, or with any other non-libertarian movement, on libertarian doctrine. Libertarians who are Trump allies will feel pressure to minimize the conflict between his beliefs and theirs, to create libertarian defenses for unlibertarian policies in order not to feel obliged to attack their allies. That effect will be reinforced by the change in the personnel of the movement as Trump supporters join, libertarians hostile to Trump’s policies leave. In enough time the result is likely to be a “libertarian” party, possibly a “libertarian” movement, that is no longer libertarian.

  I'm glad I'm not a political joiner.

Recently on the book blog:

Recently on the movie blog:

Pun Son and I went down to Newington for an early Saturday night viewing of the latest entry in the 28 Time Periods Later saga. Summary: it's horror, but not a simple squirm-and-screamer. It's got brains! (Braaaaiiins!)

The powers that be determined the repopulation/reconstruction effort attempted for Great Britain in 28 Weeks Later was a dismal failure. It was assumed that the victims infected with the "rage virus" would eventually starve to death. Which turned out to be untrue; they'll eat anything! And, as this movie makes explicitly clear, they also, um, reproduce. So the rest of the world quarantines the island, ruthlessly enforced by international navies; Great Britain becomes, literally, flyover country.

But there is a stronghold of uninfected humanity just off the coast in the Scottish Highlands, connected to Zombieland by a narrow causeway that is only passable at low tide. The community values safety, alcohol, and ruthless violence. The movie's hero is 12-year-old Spike, whose dad is eager for him to be initiated into killing the infected. And whose sickly mom is stridently opposed to that.

Spike's foray onto the mainland is, um, eventful, and he discovers something that may provide hope for his mother. And, later, he also discovers something less than admirable about his dad. Which sets him up for an even more, um, eventful expedition. Where he meets all sorts of interesting survivors.

The movie's opening scene eventually makes sense in the movie's final scene. Be patient, viewer.

And, while the movie is grim, it's not unremittingly grim; a shipwrecked Swede named Erik had some lines that made me chuckle.

Back in my youth, a book by Clifford D. Simak was an automatic buy. It helped that I was a member of the Science Fiction Book Club for a while, and they invariably featured his latest novel as a pick-of-the-month.

For some odd reason, these books languished on my shelves, mostly unread. I have no good explanation for that. Between cheap SFBC hardbacks and paperbacks, I counted 19. (And there are a bunch more I don't own.)

So: a new reading project was born. I fed these 19 titles into my book-picking system, and this one was the first up. It is from 1975, and the paperback cost me $1.25. Amazon will charge you more these days.

It is set on Earth, but an oddball one. There are Terran flora and fauna, the sun rises in the east, and so on. But there are non-humans aplenty; a goblin appears in Chapter One, soon to be followed by ogres, witches, gnomes,‥ The reader might ask: are we talking about a forgotten past, a strange future, or what? Neither, as it turns out, but I don't want to spoil a half-century-old book for you.

Anyway, the book opens with a scholar, Mark Cornwall, discovering a short manuscript hidden in a dusty tome in a candlelit university library. This is surreptitiously observed by a monk. And both Cornwall and the monk are being spied on by the "rafter goblin", Oliver. All note the importance of the hidden text. The monk informs a local bunch of cutthroats of Cornwall's find … and here's why you shouldn't trust a cutthroat: the monk gets his throat cut for his troubles.

But Oliver seeks out Cornwall to warn him that he's in mortal peril for being in posession of this manuscript. Cornwall takes the opportunity to light out on a dangerous quest to uncover the secrets described in his find. He also accumulates a ragtag crew of co-pilgrims, each with their own reason for helping out.

It's a lot of fun. Simak's prose style is unfancy, garnished with occasional dry wit. Think "Minnesota Nice" in print.

Hey, the live-action Lilo & Stitch worked well for me. And I gotta say this looks good too:

Hope it's true to the original. And not like Snow White.

Also of note:

• Don't be fooled by the headline. The Options Market is not about those sliver futures I hope you own. Kevin D. Williamson looks at the unfortunate fact: "We have an indecisive president—and it is decision time."

  Donald Trump, whose gift for self-contradiction is often demonstrated within a single illiterate clause of a single dotty sentence, to say nothing of a full speech, insisted on the 2024 campaign trail that he would be a peacemaker, that he would end the Russian war on Ukraine in a matter of hours (the Ukraine peace plan must be filed in the same folder as Trump’s health care program, three weeks away from completion for a decade now) and achieve peace throughout the Middle East, too.

  But he also averred (as his press team has been reminding us) over and over that he believed Iran must be prevented from getting a nuclear weapon.

  Trump is, famously, a man who likes to keep his options open. (Ask Mrs. Trump. Or Mrs. Trump. Or Mrs. Trump. Or the star of Porking with Pride 2.) Whether his dangling the promise of negotiations with Tehran was part of a strategic rope-a-dope to help Israel pull off its brilliant assault on Iran or whether it was something more like happy happenstance hardly matters, inasmuch as it was Trump doing what Trump is instinctually inclined to do: stalling. It was, from Trump’s perspective, a win-win: If the Iranians came to the table before the Israeli attack, then he could play peacemaker; if they came to the table after receiving a good beating, then he could extract more humiliating concessions than he might otherwise have dared; if the Israelis were wildly successful, then Washington’s hand would be strengthened by Iran’s degradation; if the Israelis met catastrophe, then Trump could—and surely would!—insist that things would have gone better if they had listened to him.

  Who knows, a decision could have been made by the time you read this. It could have been made while I've been typing this.

  [2025-06-22 Update: Well, as it turns out, KDW's "indecisive" slam apparently turned out to be well off-target. We'll see how this plays out, but … ]

• Did my eyes just roll clean out of my head? The Federalist shakes its pom-poms for the latest example of Trump bein' Trump: Trump Calls For Special Prosecutor To Probe Rigged 2020 Election.

  Didn't we litigate this out the wazoo already? Yes.

  And didn't Trump get skunked? Yes.

  And didn't Fox pay Dominion Voting systems a whole bunch of money for lying about this stuff? Yes.

  But:

  President Donald Trump is calling for the appointment of a special prosecutor to investigate the rigged 2020 election, polluted by everything from suspect absentee ballots to Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s “Zuckbucks.”

  “Biden was grossly incompetent, and the 2020 election was a total FRAUD! The evidence is MASSIVE and OVERWHELMING,” Trump wrote on Friday on Truth Social.

  Geez, did Sidney Powell finally release the Kraken? Nope.

  It's nice to remember that our President, in addition to being indecisive, is also delusional, at least on this.

• "But all the cool kids are doing it!" One of my Facebook friends from high school will occasionally post crazed leftist bullshit. That's OK, it's very occasional. But it's nice to be reminded that our President isn't the only delusional one; check out this Substack article She Won. They Didn't Just Change the Machines. They Rewired the Election.

  Yes, it's the funhouse-mirror image of Trump's election denial. And you can almost imagine without reading; it's gonna be (to quote myself) "one of those dot-connecting conspiracies, corkboards with ragtag newspaper clippings, pushpins, and connections in red yarn."

  The mastermind of this half-vast conspiracy? Leonard Leo, onetime owner of Tripp Lite, maker of uninterruptible power supplies! Which was sold to Eaton Corp! Which had a partnership with Peter Thiel. And…

  To most, Tripp Lite was just a hardware brand—battery backups, surge protectors, power strips. But in America’s elections, Tripp Lite devices were something else entirely.

  They are physically connected to ES&S central tabulators and Electionware servers, and Dominion tabulators and central servers across the country. And they aren’t dumb devices. They are smart UPS units—programmable, updatable, and capable of communicating directly with the election system via USB, serial port, or Ethernet.
  

  ES&S systems, including central tabulators and Electionware servers, rely on Tripp Lite UPS devices. ES&S’s Electionware suite runs on Windows OS, which automatically trusts connected UPS hardware.

  If Eaton pushed an update to those UPS units, it could have gained root-level access to the host tabulation environment—without ever modifying certified election software.

  … and, well, it goes on like that for awhile. I almost suspect it's a wicked parody of 2000's Kraken Konspiracy Kids, but it seems legitimately deranged. The substack also has "She won" parts II and III, so they're really putting some effort into it, and I'm sure they would appreciate your attention.

• My heart won't let my feet do things that they should do. James Lileks has a useful guide for the conflicted wedding planner: Best & Worst Wedding Dance Music.

  There are two kinds of music you’ll hear at wedding parties.

  1. The modern songs the couple’s demographic cohort likes, and

  2. Good music

  Yes, I’m trading in tired topes again, trotting out agist notions of taste and quality, but I have the advantage of being objectively correct. When the modern music comes on, everyone stands around, waves back and forth, and sings along to the droning melody with a sense of generational solidarity. Good for them. But when the old stuff comes on, everyone jumps up and hits the floor. And I mean everyone. The twenty-somethings can be seen doing the Hustle with grandma, risking cracked hips with merry abandon. The Father of the Bride starts pointing like Travolta. Hoots and whoops as Mom . . . gets down, as they said so many decades ago.

  He goes on about ABBA, "Sweet Caroline" (BAHMP BAHMP BAHMP), Zager and Evans, Don MacLean, …

Recently on the movie blog:

As part of my preparation for seeing 28 Years Later, I felt I should perform due diligence and review its predecessors. It's a good thing, too, because while my blog assures me that I watched this movie in a theater back in 2007, I remembered even less about this than I did about 28 Days Later.

Reviewing my report from back then, I note I was pretty spoiler-averse about the plot. After 18 years, I think it's safe to reveal a tad more. An opening act reveals Don (Robert Carlyle) as a cowardly weasel, abandoning his wife to the virus-infected horde, barely escaping with his life.

But then, months later, all the "zombies" on Great Britain have (finally) starved to death, and reconstruction/repopulation is under way. The first group to re-inhabit includes Don's kids, who were fortunately away in Spain during the zombie apocalypse. A joyous reunion, marred by the fact that Don lies about the cowardice that doomed their mom. They get resettled into a nice, secure, apartment, guarded by snipers like Jeremy Renner. But the kids miss their old place, sneak out of their enclave, and discover… hey, Mom's still alive! But not exactly herself!

One major quibble: the resulting carnage is actually all the fault of those darn disobedient kids. Nobody seems to blame them, though, and they don't seem to be wracked by guilt. Someone should have given them a good talking to!

At my age, I often fall asleep while watching movies at home. Not a problem with this one.

I watched this in preparation for going to see 28 Years Later in an actual movie theater. Fortunate, because while I'm sure I watched this back in 2002 when it came out, I remembered nearly nothing except "fast zombies".

Except they are technically not zombies: they have been infected with the "rage virus", thanks to the efforts of some earnest, well-meaning, PETA-style activists who break into a primate lab where it's being studied. One of the mad apes gets out, infects a human, and before you know it, Britain is full of starving, pissed-off, infectious, and doomed humans.

There are a handful of the uninfected. For example, J. Robert Oppenheimer "Jim" (Cillian Murphy) who wakes up in a hospital bed, where he's (apparently) been comatose while all this was going on. Like the viewer, he's clueless. But eventually he meets up with a few uninfected folks, and after some scary encounters, they make for a promised refuge run by the army, and 75% of them succeed. But it's not all it's cracked up to be.

George Will notes a newfound devotion to Constitutional checks and balances among the enlightened: Progressives suddenly remember presidents shouldn’t act monarchically. (WaPo gifted link)

As I was looking for appropriate Eye Candy at Amazon, I noted there is a lot of "No Kings" merch already available, no doubt from the very same people that will be happy to sell you MAGA merch as well. I went with something more festive instead, welcoming the latest newcomers to belief in the non-Living Constitution.

I don't know how long they'll stay at the party, but I'll be nicer to them while they're in attendance.

Also of note:

• I question the headline's hypothesis. Robert Corn-Revere has some suggestions: If Brendan Carr Cares About Free Speech, He Should Make These Changes at the FCC.

  Brendan Carr used to talk a big game on free speech. In 2021, when members of Congress urged the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to block the sale of a Miami radio station over its perceived political slant, Carr—one of the agency's commissioners—called that move "a deeply troubling transgression of free speech and the FCC's status as an independent agency." He urged his colleagues to push back and assured the public that the FCC's review of the transaction would be "free from political pressure."

  These days, Carr has little credibility
on freedom of speech. Now the chair of the Commission, he has been busy reopening
investigations against broadcast networks
because of their editorial policies, threatening public broadcasters ostensibly about how they raise sponsorship funds (but really about their editorial positions), threatening media companies over their hiring practices, and strong-arming technology companies about issues well beyond the FCC's limited statutory mission.

  Robert has a number of excellent recommendations, and I fear that not a single one of them will be followed.

• “Like the feather pillow, he bears the marks of the last person who has sat on him.” Kevin D. Williamson analyzes Trump's shifting policy on illegal immigrants: TACO, Loco.

  Donald Trump is a remarkably weak man. Consider his administration’s constant immigration flip-flopping.

  Immigration—illegal immigration most specifically and urgently, but immigration in general, too—is the reason Donald J. Trump, game-show host and cameo performer in porn films, is president of these United States. In a world in which the immigration issue had been treated seriously by Republicans (or—ho, ho!—by Democrats), Trump never would have been the 2016 nominee and never would have been president. Trade has long been Trump’s No. 1 issue, but immigration has been a close No. 2 for about a decade. Ironic, then, that his trade and immigration policies change every 15 minutes.

  Sometimes, we get TACO Trump—TACO being Wall Street’s reassuring acronym: Trump Always Chickens Out. He has done that a lot with tariffs, but he also did it (for a few hours, at least) with the recent immigration crackdown, presumably after someone explained to him that his policies were creating problems for farmers, restaurateurs, and hoteliers, all of whom rely heavily on immigrant workforces and some of whom employ a non-trivial number of illegal immigrants. “Our great Farmers and people in the Hotel and Leisure business have been stating that our very aggressive policy on immigration is taking very good, long time workers away from them, with those jobs being almost impossible to replace,” Trump wrote last week. So—TACO?

  Not so fast. Trump un-TACO’d his own TACO—or at least he tried to.

  If you, dear reader, were hoping to get consistency and clarity on this matter from DJT, well… how does it feel to hope?

• "… But were afraid to find out". I would imagine that most readers of this blog have known about this for a long time, but Charles Blahous summarizes:

  What's going on with Social Security? @mercatus senior research strategist Charles Blahous summarizes the newly released 2025 trustees' report: https://t.co/Tx629tOU0U

  — Discourse Magazine (@Discourse_Mag) June 18, 2025

  Just the first two (of seven) takeaways:

  1. Social Security is going insolvent. According to the trustees, Social Security now faces a financing shortfall equal to roughly 22% of its scheduled benefit obligations (which include future scheduled payments for individuals who are already receiving benefits today).

  2. The financing shortfall is massive and growing increasingly difficult to correct. Although press reports tend to focus on the trust funds’ projected date of depletion, the specific date is not really what matters. What matters is the size of the shortfall and whether it still remains practicable to close it. This is increasingly open to question as lawmakers procrastinate and the shortfall grows. Already, the shortfall is of such a size that closing it now would require generating savings equal to an across-the-board benefit cut of roughly 27% in the benefits going forward from this year indefinitely into the future. Because lawmakers would likely never enact such sudden benefit cuts and would instead gradually phase in any changes, the eventual percentage reductions would almost certainly need to be even larger. If lawmakers were to delay action to the point that Social Security trust fund depletion became imminent, even complete elimination of all new benefit claims would be insufficient to prevent program insolvency.

  There are too many demagogues and cowards in Congress. And we have a President that (somehow) manages to be both.

• Missing him all over again. Itxu Diaz predicts, with hope: The Second Coming of America’s Funniest Writer.

  Though P. J. O’Rourke passed away three years ago, his sharp wit and defense of freedom continue to resonate in a world still tempted by interventionist solutions. Reclaiming his work is more vital now than ever. What he told us through laughs and jabs in recent decades has proven to be one of the sharpest diagnoses of the dangers of postmodern left-wing ideology—and one of the most inspired reflections on why we must root our societies in individual liberty, private property, the free market, and the Judeo-Christian values that shaped the West for centuries.

  Progressives want bigger government, and often conservatives don’t want it as small as we ought to like. O’Rourke knew all too well that the larger the state grows, the smaller individuals become. He devoted much of his work to explaining this in a way anyone could understand—even those not particularly interested in politics. His words resonate today in a new light, and fortunately, they remain easy to access: the Internet is full of O’Rourke’s articles, and all his books are still in print. The ideas, the jokes—the profound, the outdated, and even the ones that haven’t aged all that well—are still out there, waiting to be discovered by any digital wanderer with a sense of humor and a thirst for sharp thinking. It’s almost frightening to realize that some of O’Rourke’s tech-related jokes would go completely over a millennial or zoomer’s head today. And it’s even more pitiful to think that some of his old comments would be cancelled in today’s dull, hypersensitive postmodern world. Perhaps it’s because, as he once said, “One of the problems with being a writer is that all of your idiocies are still in print somewhere.” Incidentally, that’s where O’Rourke found his only point of agreement with environmentalists: “I strongly support paper recycling.”

  Itxu Diaz, his bio reveals, is Spanish. I recommend he immigrate, we need him.

I've been pretty slipshod over the years about Juneteenth. Let me change that with a relevant Coleman Hughes article, describing What American Students Aren’t Taught About Slavery.

Cakewalk?! Well, sure: Wikipedia has an article.

But Coleman provides balance to the story of slavery: it wasn't confined to America, and it wasn't just Blacks. His students were dumbfounded to be told.

Also of note:

• Only safely viewable from a distance, preferably hundreds of miles. Jeffrey Blehar confesses: New York’s Mayoral Race Is a Glorious Dumpster Fire, And I Love It. (NR gifted link)

  Among the choices, Eric Adams; Andrew Cuomo ("Governor Nosferatu"); and…

  Meanwhile, New York City progressives hate Cuomo every bit as much as they hate Adams, and they have chosen to rally — with their typical semireligious fervor — around State Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani. Mamdani, the Indian-Ugandan Muslim son of a filmmaker and a Columbia University poli-sci professor, might as well have been purpose-built by Soros-funded scientists in a lab to activate every fashionably progressive erogenous zone in city politics.

  A handsome and affable public speaker, Mamdani thrills crowds of educated hyper-woke young white women with his visions of a “more equitable” New York: He is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America. He calls for universal health care and the increased use of “social workers” as opposed to police. He promises to eliminate bus fares, open city-run grocery stores, and institute rent freezes. Do you even need to ask whether Zohran embraces the full spectrum of the LGBT rainbow? He’s so woke his own biography is practically the living embodiment of the DEI ideal.

  And on international affairs — something that actually matters for the mayor of New York, the world’s most important city and home of the United Nations — he is unspeakably awful.

  He is a vocal supporter of the boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement that has plagued college campuses and academic institutions over the past 15 years. He openly labels Israel’s war in Gaza a “genocide.” Just yesterday, in an interview with Tim Miller of The Bulwark, Mamdani refused to condemn the phrase “Globalize the intifada,” saying that, when he hears those chants, “What I hear . . . is a desperate desire for equality and equal rights in standing up for Palestinian human rights.” He further embarrassed himself by saying “intifada” was how the Holocaust Museum translates the Warsaw Ghetto “uprising” into Arabic, as if the two were functionally equivalent. (The problem, of course, is that Mamdani sincerely believes they are.)

  Long excerpt, free link. Check it out.

• And has she been fired yet? Jeff Maurer wonders: What, In Theory, Is Tulsi Gabbard's Job? (His subhed: "Tulsi: What would you say ya do here?")

  Yesterday, Trump had this to say about Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard’s assessment of Iran’s nuclear program:

  “I don't care what she said.”

  I think this was a rare shrewd assessment from the president. Trump and I don’t agree often, but we’re definitely on the same page here. Here is a partial list of people I would rather the president listen to than Tulsi Gabbard on foreign policy matters:

  • Jared Kushner

  • The “Son of Sam” dog

  • Chat GPT

  • Laffy Taffy wrappers

  • A pig that makes foreign policy decisions by eating from troughs labeled “bomb” and “do not bomb”

  • The Great Gazoo

  • Beatles records played backwards

  • An infinite number of monkeys at an infinite number of typewriters

  Trump’s comment wasn’t a one-off; Gabbard appears to have been sidelined. Axios reports that Trump’s “entire top foreign policy team” recently met at Camp David to discuss Israel and Iran, but notes that Trump’s top foreign policy team doesn’t include Gabbard. That seems…strange — she’s technically the director of national intelligence. If the president held a summit of Chinese-American cellists and didn’t invite Yo-Yo Ma, I don’t think I’d be nuts to assume that the president might have some beef with Yo-Yo Ma.

  A quick Googling shows she hasn't quit yet. In theory, the DNI might be a useful and important component of a foreign policy structure. Hey, maybe bring back John Bolton!

• Fire away! Noah Smith looks at some poor polemical marksmanship: Progressives take their best shot at Abundance (but it falls short).

  It continues to be the case that almost none of Abundance’s critics seem to have actually read the book. The first wave of critics basically ignored the ideas in it, and talked about their own ideas instead. Later critics became more aggressive, frenetically lobbing insult-words at the authors — “libertarian”, “Republican”, “oligarch-funded”, etc. — that completely ignored the book’s argument that excessive regulation is holding back big government. Occasionally, these shouters would admit that they had not, in fact, read the book they were insulting.

  What explains this frantic, scrambling assault? I have no doubt that many progressives instinctively feel that anyone who criticizes any kind of regulation is a small-government pro-corporate neoliberal. But Marc J. Dunkelman’s book Why Nothing Works — which makes the same exact point as Abundance, with more depth on the history and legal details of anti-government regulation — has provoked no such outpouring of vitriol.

  My best guess is that it’s not the ideas in Abundance that frightened progressives, but the identities of the authors — or, more specifically, one of the authors. Marc J. Dunkelman is a bookish academic, and Derek Thompson is a well-read wonkish opinion writer, but Ezra Klein is a powerful tastemaker and arbiter of opinion within the Democratic party. If Ezra Klein says that it’s time for the Democrats to start concentrating their energies on raising state capacity, then there’s a good chance that five years later, “raising state capacity” is what the party will be all about.

  My best guess is that it’s not the ideas in Abundance that frightened progressives, but the identities of the authors — or, more specifically, one of the authors. Marc J. Dunkelman is a bookish academic, and Derek Thompson is a well-read wonkish opinion writer, but Ezra Klein is a powerful tastemaker and arbiter of opinion within the Democratic party. If Ezra Klein says that it’s time for the Democrats to start concentrating their energies on raising state capacity, then there’s a good chance that five years later, “raising state capacity” is what the party will be all about.

  I recently read the Dunkelman book — my report here — and wasn't too impressed. Although it did a pretty good job of convincing me that Progressivism isn't a very coherent political philosophy.

I could not resist replying:

"Y'know, that 'deplorables' thing worked so well for Hillary... we should double down on that."

— Paul Sand (@punsalad) June 17, 2025

Goodness knows I'm not a Trump fan, but flinging childish insults about his supporters is no way to woo people to your side.

Also of note:

• Fetish (n): an object believed to have magical powers. Recently outing himself as a fetishist is New Hampshire State Representative David Meuse, in the editorial pages of my worthless local newspaper, Foster's Daily Democrat. His headline reveals what he thinks is really to blame for a recent atrocity: Assassinations in Minnesota part of nation's larger plague of gun violence.

  Meuse will not be the first politician, nor the last, to point with horror at the murder weapon, and not the monster wielding it.

  But where is the standard followup, the part where one or more gun control measures are advocated? Meuse is a state legislator, after all. You don't even need to come up with something that would have prevented the horror in Minnesota! Goodness knows, that's never stopped other wannabe gun-controllers!

  Well it gets pretty lame, and I've bolded his proposed "solution":

  Until we do more to protect ALL of us from gun violence, we will continue to live with the consequences of brutal and unnecessary tragedies like the one in Minnesota.

  That's it. "Do more."

  It's just that simple!

• Welcome to Serfdom! Population: Us. Jim Geraghty reports: We Saw ‘Government Motors,’ Now Trump Has Created ‘U.S. Government Steel’. Quoting Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick's tweet:

  President Trump has secured a perpetual Golden Share as part of Nippon Steel’s acquisition of U.S. Steel. This partnership between the United States and Nippon Steel includes historic $14 billion investment in U.S. Steel by Nippon Steel that will revitalize this strategic and…

  — Howard Lutnick (@howardlutnick) June 14, 2025

  That "perpetual Golden Share" essentially makes U.S. Steel a nationalized industry. Click through for the superpowers it awards to "the President of the United States or his designee".

  Jim comments:

  I hope all the Republicans who justifiably objected, loudly and frequently, to the U.S. government purchasing shares of General Motors – earning the company the derisive nickname, “Government Motors” – remember to object to this arrangement. The board of directors of U.S. Steel and those who own the 226 million shares of U.S. Steel stock no longer really make the decisions for the company; now the U.S. government gets to veto the decisions listed above.

  Jim also fondly remembers that "Before, during, and after the taxpayer bailout, GM continued to make millions of vehicles that could kill you if your key chain was too heavy."

  My take on the GM bailout, back in the day, may be viewed here.

• “A government bureau is the nearest thing to eternal life we’ll ever see on this earth.” (Ronald Reagan.)

  At Cato, Nicholas Anthony looks at a program that hasn't been used by anyone since 2022: Postal Banking Continues to Fail.

  For anyone wondering, “What is the postal banking pilot program?” here’s a brief breakdown to get you up to speed. The United States Postal Service (USPS) offered banking services up until 1966. It was largely discontinued because the service wasn’t popular. More recently, however, people have been calling for a return to postal banking. The argument is that having the government provide bank accounts would help the millions of Americans who do not have accounts.

  The USPS needs Congress to sign off on such a radical change, and there’s little sign of that happening. So, the USPS did the next worst thing: it exploited past expansions of its authority to create the postal banking pilot program. Almost overnight, the USPS launched the new program in four cities. People could now bring in their payroll checks and get them loaded onto prepaid gift cards, albeit for a fee of $5.95 and a daily limit of $500.

  Of course, the employees that keep track of postal banking's lack of use go on drawing a salary.

  Pun Salad's previous article on postal banking may be found here. Unsurprisingly, Elizabeth Warren was a fan back then.

• Going out on a limb. The AntiPlanner predicts Amtrak Will Not Be Profitable by 2028.

  “With steady, sustained support from Congress and the administration, Amtrak’s passenger train service will become operationally profitable by FY 28,” says Amtrak in its latest request for subsidies from U.S. taxpayers. This is, at best, deceptive and at worst an outright lie.

  Even as Amtrak promises to be profitable in three years, it admits that it is losing more money now than in 2019 despite carrying record numbers of passengers. It blames this on costs rising faster than revenues, reductions in state support for many trains, and increased costs “treated as operating costs” even though they are supposedly really capital investments. Unless Congress dramatically cuts Amtrak’s capital funding, it isn’t clear how any of these trends will be reversed in the next three years.

  Amtrak or its backers have promised that profitability was just around the corner ever since it began. […]

  Amtrak is asking Congress for a cool $2,427,000,000 in FY2026. What I'd like to see in response is: "How about nothing? Does nothing work for you?"

• Speaking of spending money we don't have… Allison Schrager writes on Fair-weather Hawks.

  I’ve seen some very strong opinions about the Big Beautiful Bill. Everyone suddenly seems to have found debt religion. Welcome to the club! Though I’m wary of these new debt hawk allies—because their objections strike me as more politically convenient than a sudden and sincere concern about the debt. No one is speaking out against anything their political constituency actually favors. I don’t hear Republican debt hawks naming a single tax cut they don’t like. (For the record, I favor extending the TCJA and restoring bonus depreciation—though I’d prefer thoughtful tax reform.) I hate increasing the SALT limit, the tax on tips, and all the other new distortions we’re throwing in that will never go away.

  Meanwhile, Democrats are incensed that ANYONE might lose Medicaid coverage—even able-bodied young men—especially if anyone else is getting a tax cut. We’ve expanded Medicaid a lot over the years. Are they arguing every expansion must be irreversible? Just say you see Medicaid as a backdoor way to create a government option that covers most people—even those who are borderline middle class.

  I wrote for Bloomberg that both Democrats and Republicans need to get real. Republicans must accept that taxes need to go up; Democrats must accept that we can’t afford a welfare state for the middle class. If they did, we could actually make progress. We could broaden the tax base (get rid of all the deductions), lower rates, and implement a VAT. We could also agree that welfare is for the needy and unlucky, make it work better for the people who need it, and remove all the incentives that make work expensive if you live on benefits. That would not only save us lots of money and fix the debt problem—it would also boost growth.

  My memory may be fading, but I still remember that it's a bad idea for Republicans to buy a tax increase now for a pinky-swear promise of spending reductions in the future. Cue up the Who's "Won't Get Fooled Again".

xkcd: Exoplanet System:

Mouseover: "Sure, this exoplanet we discovered may seem hostile to life, but our calculations suggest it's actually in the accretion disc's habitable zone."

I've previously remarked on how some factions of science fandom (and even some scientists) are incredibly hopeful that there are earthlike planets out there somewhere. That's no way to approach a scientific question, is it?

I confess, I have a preference for the Rare Earth hypothesis. Where I interpret "rare" as "probably just us." Based on nothing more than general contrariness, probably with a bit of leftover religion of my youth.

If you want to see the real deal on that last thing, though, head on over to The Institute for Creation Research, for the full It-Wuz-God explanation.

I'd bet against them, but not a lot.

Also of note:

• Here's hoping my dishwasher holds up. Why? Because, according to Jack Nicastro at Reason: Trump is putting a 50 percent tariff on home appliances.

  President Donald Trump has been celebrating in recent weeks as his administration strikes bilateral trade deals following "Liberation Day." Some products, however, will soon be subject to increased duties, not lower ones. Starting June 30, imports derived from aluminum and steel will be subject to a 50 percent ad valorem tariff. These duties will hit imports of common household appliances like refrigerators and dishwashers and increase the cost of living for everyday Americans.

  Trump issued two executive orders on February 10 directing the Commerce Department to subject aluminum and steel imports to the 25 percent ad valorem tariffs imposed during his first administration. The orders cite the January 2018 reports of then-Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross warning that steel and aluminum imports threatened to impair U.S. national security. These reports provided Trump the statutory authority to modify the Harmonized Tariff Schedule of the U.S. (HTSUS) under Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962, which "allows the President to impose restrictions on goods imports…with trading partners if the U.S. Secretary of Commerce determines…that the quantity or other circumstance of those imports 'threaten to impair' U.S. national security."

  As mentioned just yesterday: this kind of thing will hurt the less-well-off much worse than tax changes in the One Big Beautiful Bill.

• As my neighbor advises: if you really want to be exhausted, get your kids a DoubleDoodle puppy. Or if you want to go the other way, you could read Kevin D. Williamson's take: Against Exhaustion.

  For a bonus, KDW leads off with a Bastiat quote:

  We must confess that our adversaries have a marked advantage over us in the discussion. In very few words they can announce a half-truth; and, in order to demonstrate that it is incomplete, we are obliged to have recourse to long and dry dissertations.

  And continues:

  Readers of these pages of course know Jonah Goldberg. Alberto Brandolini is an Italian computer programmer who gave us Brandolini’s Law, which holds: “The amount of energy needed to refute bullsh-t is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it.” According to lore, Brandolini was inspired to put this into succinct form by seeing a television interview with Silvio Berlusconi (in his day, the Luciano Pavarotti of bulls—t) right after reading Thinking, Fast and Slow. (I will here confess some envy at the fact that Brandolini’s Law has caught on, while Williamson’s Ratio—40.44:1, the average number of intelligent English words it takes to refute one word of dishonest and illiterate horsepucky—is gathering dust on a shelf at the Museum of Exanimate Rhetorical Devices.) The same idea has been expressed for centuries in various misattributed adages about fast-moving lies and slowpoke facts lacing up their boots. “Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it,” wrote Jonathan Swift, which seems to be the OG version of the proverb in its most familiar form.

  As always, I'm grateful to the Dispatch editors for saving my delicate eyes from seeing that "i" in "bullshit".

• From all the whining, you would think it was more. I think it's fair to say Jim Geraghty is unimpressed with the DOGEizing results so far: DOGE Takes a Nibble Out of Big Government. (NR gifted link)

  Begin with the upside: President Donald Trump was never much of a fiscal hawk in his first term, but at least for the first stretch of his second term, he established the Department of Government Efficiency and put the world’s most energetic — probably hyperactive — billionaire in charge of it, and made cutting wasteful spending a priority.

  As of this writing, according to DOGE’s data, it has identified an estimated $175 billion in savings — about $1,086 per taxpayer — from a combination of “asset sales, contract/lease cancellations and renegotiations, fraud and improper payment deletion, grant cancellations, interest savings, programmatic changes, regulatory savings, and workforce reductions.”

  That sounds good. But if you paid attention during Trump’s big Madison Square Garden rally on October 27, 2024, you’ll recall that Elon Musk pledged to future Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick that DOGE would save taxpayers “at least $2 trillion.” By March, President Trump was boasting that DOGE was going to save so much money that the savings would be returned to taxpayers in the form of “DOGE checks.”

  And you don't hear much about that any more, do ya?

  Note: that's an article from the August print issue of National Review, so you'll want to hit that gifted link if you're not a subscriber.

  But here's the funny part. In Jim's Morning Jolt newsletter yesterday:

  ADDENDUM: A lot of readers detest the recent magazine piece on the disappointments of Elon Musk and DOGE and argue it is far too negative. Apparently, the article focuses too much on what DOGE actually did and the actual numbers, and not enough on how hard Musk and his team tried, and how good their intentions were. I am informed it is “smug” to expect Musk and DOGE to find $2 trillion in savings, just because Musk stood on stage at a rally for Donald Trump in New York’s Madison Square Garden and said, when asked, “How much do you think we can rip out of this wasted $6.5 trillion Harris Biden budget?” responded, “I think we could do at least 2 trillion.” I regret the error of daring to remember things that happened seven months ago.

  Unfortunately, in those heady days, it was easy to forget that (1) Congress has the power of the purse, and (2) "we" keep electing the same big spenders.

• 

  One for the University Near Here Interlibrary Loan Staff. At the WSJ, Judge Glock looks at George Seldin's latest. False Dawn, an economic history of the Great Depression.

  For those who lived through the Great Depression, the strangeness of it was hard to convey. The nation had suffered no great natural disaster. The farmers were still farming, and the factories were still standing. Yet there lay rotting food that people couldn’t afford to buy and empty factories next to shanty towns filled with the unemployed.

  In 1932 Franklin Delano Roosevelt won the presidency with the promise to restore prosperity. But he and his advisers had no clear explanation for the collapse and his subsequent New Deal would amount to a series of experiments. FDR admitted to the nation that some of his proposals took the nation down “a new and untrod path.” If they failed to “produce the hoped-for results, I shall be the first to acknowledge it.”

  George Selgin’s “False Dawn” asks if the New Deal’s varied experiments produced the promised recovery. In dispassionate, careful and finally devastating detail, “False Dawn” shows that, with a few exceptions, FDR’s experiments did not work. And he did not acknowledge it.

  Hope I get to it. I'm not a young person any more.

From our lousy local newspaper, Foster's Daily Democrat, came the opinions of "The Observer", one Ron McAllister. Apparently Ron gets his picture of rich people from… well, read for yourself: Scrooge McDuck would be a fan of One Big Beautiful Bill.

Yes, he draws important insights about rich Americans by … well, it's unclear whether he's recollecting old comic books, or watching Duck Tales reruns on the Disney Channel. Doesn't matter, I think. His opinions are literally cartoonish.

Ron's arguments, such as they are, heavily rely on insult-flinging, hand-waving, and resentment-mongering. A slice:

You wouldn't know from Ron's description that the OBBB's effect on "rich people" is to leave their marginal income tax rates where they've been since 2018; they were otherwise due to go from 37% back to where they were before that: 39.6%. So, roughly speaking: if Elon, Jeff, or Mark net an additional million bucks, Uncle Stupid would grab $396,000 of that instead of $370,000.

Does that make them "big winners"? Eh: the Tax Foundation estimates that the 2026 tax bill for the "upper 1%" might go down about 4%.

To translate that into a cartoon Ron might understand better: it wouldn't raise the moola level in the money bins of Musk, Bezos, and Zuckerberg by a noticeable amount.

(Not that I'm a Trump fan; I think there will be big economic woes in store for everyone, caused mostly by runaway deficit spending, but also by his stupid tariffs.)

Also of note:

• Unfortunately, students won't automatically get smarter. But Emma Camp describes other salutary effects: What happens if Trump and Congress abolish the Education Department? A slice:

  "Most of the discussion from the administration and in Congress is about moving Department of Education functions to other departments," says Neal McCluskey, director of the Cato Institute's Center for Educational Freedom. "If that is what is done, it will not change what the federal government does in education, only which agencies do those things."

  According to McCluskey, federal funding to K-12 schools and colleges would likely just move to another department, though he notes there are "proposals to consolidate, at least, programs and turn them into block grants to states, which would cut down on bureaucratic compliance costs." The federal student loan program "would likely go to the Treasury Department or possibly the Small Business Administration, both of which have experience with financial instruments, including loans," he adds.

  "Almost everything the Department of Education does is unconstitutional," McCluskey says. "The Constitution gives the federal government only specific, enumerated powers, and authority to govern in education is not among them. So almost all the spending and activities should go away."

  That (a) would be nice; and (b) won't happen. At least not soon.

• A reminder that the CDC wanted to kill you. (Well, statistically speaking.) Megan McArdle recalls How one meeting in 2020 and a GOP senator helped create RFK Jr.’s vaccine wreck. (WaPo gifted link)

  In more than 20 years of covering policy, I have witnessed some crazy stuff. But one episode towers above the rest in sheer lunacy: the November 2020 meeting of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices. Sounds boring? Usually, maybe.

  But that meeting was when the committee’s eminent experts, having considered a range of vaccine rollout strategies, selected the plan that was projected to kill the most people and had the least public support.

  In a survey conducted in August 2020, most Americans said that as soon as health-care workers were inoculated with the coronavirus vaccine, we should have started vaccinating the highest-risk groups in order of their vulnerability: seniors first, then immunocompromised people, then other essential workers. Instead of adopting this sensible plan, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advisory committee decided to inoculate non-medical essential workers ahead of seniors, even though its own modeling suggested this would increase deaths by up to 7 percent.

  Why did they do this? Social justice. The word “equity” came up over and over in the discussion — essential workers, you see, were more likely than seniors to come from “marginalized communities.” Only after a backlash did sanity prevail.

  Yes, that murderous advisory committee is the same one Junior recently fired everyone from. Not that his replacements are better; they're probably gonna be worse.

• 

  I reckon it's a tough road to travel. Daniel Akst reviews What Is It Like To Be an Addict? by Owen Flanagan, Amazon link at your right:

  Addiction is a problem that defenders of liberty need to face, for if citizens cannot control their appetites, the state may be inclined to take over the job for them. Freedom depends on self-command supported by a fragile web of norms and relationships that lets us keep our own lives in order and get along with one another. Addiction is the acute case of the appetites run amok, as they often do when unfettered by such constraints as wealth, religion, and community.

  Owen Flanagan's new book, What Is It Like To Be an Addict?, should be welcomed by anyone concerned with these issues. Despite its modest size, this is a work of large ambition and broad range informed not just by the author's long career as a prominent philosopher but by his many years as a desperately addicted abuser of alcohol and sedatives.

  […]

  Unsurprisingly given his experience, Flanagan stresses that we should pay close attention to what the addicted have to tell us. And among the most important things addicts say is that they are by no means blameless just because they supposedly have a disease. On the contrary, many feel shame (for being an addict) and guilt (for behaviors that are slowly destroying them and harming their loved ones).

  I recently read Freedom Regained by philosopher Julian Baggini that had an entire chapter revolving around how addiction is related to "free will". Baggini actually went out to talk with a few addicts. Eye-opening. It sounds as if Flanagan covers some of the same issues.

How did this happen? pic.twitter.com/vSzXIix2Tb

— Jacob Shell (@JacobAShell) June 11, 2025

Apparently, it's a Rorschach test for leftism, as indicated by Natalie Sandoval at the Daily Caller: ‘It’s Bullsh*t’: Liberals Seethe At Diversity Debunking Study.

I'm not exactly seething, but I left my own comment on the study over at Facebook:

This has been a constant sore point for those of us on the right who hold the correct positions about everything, all the time.

Also of note:

• A sweet story. I don't mean to keep posting about this musical genius, but I can't resist clipping out this anecdote from Bob Greene in yesterday's WSJ: Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys, My Endless Inspiration. (WSJ gifted link)

  I had called my friend Gary Griffin to shoot the breeze, as I’d been doing a couple of times every week. This was in the early 1990s; Gary was the keyboard player for surf rockers Jan and Dean, and I had just started to tour with them singing backup.

  He was at home in Panorama City, Calif., and I was in Chicago. He was out in his recording studio. “My friend Brian’s here,” Gary said.

  “Who’s Brian?” I said.

  “Wilson,” Gary said.

  Oh. That’s all.

  “What a coincidence,” I said. “John Lennon’s over at my house.”

  Gary laughed and handed the phone to Brian, the man whose music had thrilled me from the time I was a boy, the man I had never dared to imagine ever meeting. He said hello and, not knowing what to say to him, I asked: “What are you going to sing in Gary’s studio?”

  “I don’t know,” Brian said. “What do you think I should sing?”

  I could scarcely process this. For some reason I said:

  “ ‘Stupid Cupid.’ ”

  The 1958 Connie Francis Top 40 hit. What a ridiculous thing to say to Brian Wilson. Of all the songs in the world to blurt out.

  “ ‘Stupid Cupid’?” Brian said. “That’s a great song.”

  And then, in one of the wonderful moments life will sometimes hand you, I heard him start to play the piano, and to sing:

  “Stupid Cupid, you’re a real mean guy . . .”

  Across the time zones I listened, entranced.

  “I’d like to clip your wings so you can’t fly . . .”

  He wasn’t doing it sarcastically; he was a man without guile. He had driven to Gary’s house to sing, and “Stupid Cupid” was fine with him. I sat there, an audience of one—well, with Gary, two—and counted my blessings.

  More at the link, of course.

• Theory: Those too crazy to be family therapists wind up teaching wannabe family therapists. Also in the WSJ a few days back: Naomi Epps Best Santa Clara University’s Crazy Idea of Human Sexuality. (WSJ gifted link)

  I’m a graduate student in marriage and family therapy at Santa Clara University, a Jesuit institution. Recently, I walked out of class. Prof. Chongzheng Wei had just played a video of a female “influencer” engaging in sexual bondage activity. When the lights came up, the professor smiled and asked if we wanted to try it ourselves. Maybe it was a crass joke to break the tension, but I didn’t want to find out if a live demonstration was next.

  What began as a simple accommodation request in a required course called Human Sexuality turned into a case study in the reshaping of therapy training—not by science but by critical theory, a worldview that filters human experience through left-wing assumptions about power, oppression and identity, particularly regarding race, “gender” and sexuality.

  More information about Naomi's efforts to avoid the offensive looniness at the link.

  But that's just part one of her story. Part two showed up Thursday:

  Blew the whistle in @WSJopinion on ideological rigidity in therapy training. A week later, I am fired from my internship with the regret of my boss. This field is in crisis. The public needs to know. pic.twitter.com/EldOjq0hOG

  — Naomi Best (@naomieppsbest) June 12, 2025

• Won't get fooled more than five or six times again, tops. J.D. Tuccille points out: Europeans pay exorbitant taxes for their 'free' government services.

  People who want a larger, more active state frequently point to their favorite European country (usually a small Scandinavian nation) and ask why America doesn't provide lots of "free" services like that alleged utopia. The answer is that it could but that wouldn't necessarily make people happier. The U.S. is a large and diverse country where people don't nearly agree with each other on what they want, and it's difficult for government to provide more services without fueling arguments over what and how much should be provided. Importantly, too, those services aren't free—they carry a very high price tag.

  "Governments with higher taxes generally tout that they provide more services, and while this is often true, the cost of these services can be more than half of an average worker's salary, and for most, at least a third of their salary," Cristina Enache wrote last week for the Tax Foundation. "Belgium has the highest tax burden on labor at 52.6 percent (also the highest of all OECD countries), followed by Germany and France at 47.9 percent and 47.2 percent, respectively. Switzerland had the lowest tax burden at 22.9 percent."

  I assume one way they get away with this is envy-based egalitarianism. You can be reassured when sitting in a DMV-style waiting room that millionaires are sitting there with you, not paying more money for better access as they might do in, say, America.

Recently on the movie blog:

I remember watching this movie as a young fan of Raymond Chandler back in 1973.

I hated it.

So, 52 years later, I decided to give it another chance. Perhaps noting the movie's Wikipedia page says the movie's "critical assessment has grown over time."

Nope. It still sucks.

My first two attempts to rewatch this ended in failure, as I fell asleep at some point. On my third try, I still fell asleep, but powered through via the rewind button on my Roku remote. Just to say that I watched it.

It starts with sleuth Philip Marlowe (Elliot Gould) being awoken (still fully dressed) in his bed by his cat at 3am demanding food. He's out of cat food! He tries to concoct something the cat will eat, but fails. He travels to the all-night grocery, but they are out of the cat's favorite brand. (He's also buying brownie mix, requested by the near-naked girls in a neighboring apartment.) But when Marlowe tries to fake out the cat with a different kind of food, the cat detects the subtrefuge and runs away.

All this takes an hour to tell. OK, maybe not an hour, but it seemed that long.

Eventually, the main plot creaks into motion. Marlowe's pal, Terry Lennox, shows up and asks Marlowe to drive him to Tijuana, because "a lot of people might be looking for him." This (it turns out) is due to the fact that his wife has been brutally murdered. Marlowe agrees, but that puts him into trouble with the cops, gets him acquainted with drunk writer Roger Wade (Sterling Hayden) and his wife (Nina van Pallandt), and sadistic mobster Marty Augustine.

Trivia: Uncredited performances by David Carradine and Arnold Schwarzenegger. (Only Arnold's second movie role, after his 1970 appearance in Hercules in New York.) Jack Riley, who was wonderful as Mr. Carlin on "The Bob Newhart Show", plays a bar musician here. Music by John Williams, including a dreadful song that keeps showing up, including a brief, awful, performance by Mr. Carlin. Screenplay by Leigh Brackett, who also had screenwriting credits for The Big Sleep (the one with Bogie, back in 1946) and The Empire Strikes Back (the best Star Wars movie).

Two movies you should watch instead.

But as far as the screenplay goes, IMDB trivia sez:

I got that impression about Elliot Gould's performance too, but have no evidence other than my own eyes and ears.

But in any case, the movie has little to do with Raymond Chandler's classic book. It's a travesty.

Veronique de Rugy advises you to not get your hopes up: Tax Cuts Yes, But Don't Expect 'Big, Beautiful' Growth. Skipping down to the caveats:

And more. I hate to be the turd in the punchbowl, but I fear Vero and the other critics of the One Big Beautiful Bill are right.

On the wasteful, dumb, absurd, and unconstitutional front:

• Who doesn't love a parade? Billy Binion at Reason for one: Trump's military parade is a waste of millions of taxpayer dollars.

  President Donald Trump has described the upcoming military parade using a familiar theme: its size. It will be a "big, beautiful" event, he told NBC's Meet the Press last month.

  Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. The parade will, however, objectively be big, from the contents of the parade itself—25 M1 Abrams main battle tanks! Dozens of other military vehicles! Aircrafts! 6,600 soldiers marching!—to the price tag, which is currently estimated to come out somewhere between $25 million and $45 million for an approximately 90-minute event. That comes out to $277,778–$500,000 per minute.

  A majority of Americans, it turns out, do not think that big cost is beautiful; 60 percent of respondents in a recent poll said the parade is not a good use of taxpayer money. The sample size was 40 percent Republican and 40 percent Democrat, with the remaining 20 percent identifying as "independent/none."

  The millions of dollars the public is paying to fund the parade—which will take place on Saturday, Trump's 79th birthday—are "peanuts," the president said, when "compared to the value." Yet it is difficult to reconcile that position with one of his hallmark campaign promises: reining in wasteful government spending.

  Well, maybe there will be some cool video involved.

• Who doesn't love dumb government grocery stores? As long as the ill effects don't extend up here, I'm in agreement with Jeff Maurer: I Want Zohran Mamdani to Become Mayor of New York So That I Can Watch His Dumb Government Grocery Stores Fail.

  New York is reaching the end of the term of Eric Adams, a Democrat embraced by Trump because he shares Trump’s deep commitment to corruption. The options in the Democratic primary have basically dwindled to a socialist nitwit and a mediocre pervert, where “mediocre” refers to the candidate’s ability as a legislator, not his résumé as a pervert. It’s also not impossible for Adams to win reelection, hence the video above. Other off-the-wall scenarios are also in play, because this election is like hearing something rustle in the bushes in Prospect Park: Any manner of surprising awfulness might emerge.

  If I still lived in New York, I would probably vote for the mediocre pervert. But I don’t live in New York; I left a few years ago for Washington, DC, where civic politics is a sophisticated tête-à-tête between philosopher kings and queens, producing the enlightened utopia that you see before you today. So, my rooting interest here is purely as a shit-stirring outsider — I’m just in it for the LOLs, folks. And that’s why I want Socialist candidate Zohran Mamdani to win so that I can watch his dumb plan for city-owned grocery stores go up in flames like a Waymo in Los Angeles.

  I didn't include the video, but it's somewhat amusing, if you're not a sheep. Mamdani's plan is (incredibly) even worse than you might expect from the general rule that "socialism doesn't work".

• Who doesn't love "campaign finance reform"? George Will doesn't, and he views Peak absurdity on campaign finance reform heads to the Supreme Court. (WaPo gifted link)

  Developments in recent decades reflect diminished respect for the First Amendment. These include campus speech codes, political pressure for censorship on social media platforms, and a society-wide “cancel culture” that inspires self-censorship lest “harmful” speech “trigger” offended hearers.

  The most serious speech-regulation began half a century ago, under the antiseptic rubric of “campaign finance reform.” On Wednesday, the Supreme Court can begin removing another shackle reformers have clamped on political speech. The court will consider taking a case about whether the First Amendment is violated by limits on what political parties can spend in coordination with their candidates’ campaigns.

  The biggest problem I have with political speech is how to avoid it. I'm pretty sure it causes brain rot.

• And who doesn't love government funding of public broadcasting? Jeffrey Miron asks Should Government Fund Public Broadcasting? And guess what Betteridge's Law of Headlines says about that?

  On May 27, NPR, Aspen Public Radio, Colorado Public Radio, and KSUT Public Radio filed a lawsuit challenging President Donald Trump’s executive order that would cancel all federal support for public media.

  The lawsuit argues that the order violates the First Amendment and the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967, which prevents federal agencies from controlling the CPB. The CPB distributes federal funds to local public radio and television stations.

  We set aside whether a president or only Congress can cancel federal funding for CPB and instead address whether such funding is good policy. Our answer is no.

  The main reason is that such funding is inconsistent with the First Amendment. Any government policy or program has a viewpoint, but funding television and radio broadcasting is especially problematic, since government financing inevitably subsidizes some perspectives over others. Even a formally ‘neutral’ grant process cannot escape this effect: public money sustains the editorial judgments of the recipients and leaves rival voices to fend for themselves.

  This should not be hard.

Recently on the book blog:

Pity the author, Marc J. Dunkelman! This book, dealing as it does with the perceived difficulty of implementing grand government-driven schemes lumped under the broad category of "progress", seems to cover very similar ground as does another book: Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. And Abundance seems to be getting a lot more attention.

For example, I could easily find Dunkelman's book at Portsmouth (NH) Public Library; in contrast, PPL owns three copies of Abundance, and they are all checked out (as I type).

Dunkleman's thesis is pretty simple. He adapts the terminology of the early 20th century Progressive, Herbert Croly, who was famous for his advocacy of using "Hamiltonian means to achieve Jeffersonian ends". (Croly was also one of the leading examples/villains of Jonah Goldberg's classic title Liberal Fascism, but we won't get into that.) Dunkleman is not as hostile toward Jefferson as Croly was, though. His approach is that your standard Progressive harbors both (a) a "Hamiltonian" yen to accomplish Big Projects under the direction of wise and benvolent central planners and bureaucrats; and (b) a "Jeffersonian" impulse that central authorities have too much unchecked power to run roughshod over individuals and communities that don't have as much political pull. Currently, he believes, the Jeffersonian ideal holds sway; it's why we can't have nice things, like high-speed rail, "affordable" housing, and hydro power from Quebec down here in New England.

Dunkleman is a Progressive, and is mostly aiming his argument at other Progressives. He views one Hamiltonian/Jeffersonian oscillation as "the yin turned to yang, the ebb turned to flow, and the teeter-totter crossed its fulcrum." The idea that there might be some fundamental, and essentially insoluble, problems with Progressive central planning is not seriously considered. Friedrich Hayek's The Road to Serfdom is briefly mentioned along the way, but only as a sign of increasing skepticism of the Progressive project. I kept looking for other serious criticisms: mentions of public choice theory, for example, but if they were there, I missed them. To his credit, Dunkleman does seem to recognize the problem of regulatory capture, especially when he looks at passenger airline deregulation. (Which happened largely thanks to … Progressive Ted Kennedy!)

As noted, one of Dunkleman's examples is a local one: he goes into great detail on the Northern Pass project, meant to string high-voltage power lines down through northern New Hampshire, down to Concord, Deerfield, and (eventually) Massachusetts.

The book is full of tales like that; I confess I found many of them not as interesting. Dunkleman keeps hammering them into his Hamiltonian/Jeffersonian thesis, though, to a somewhat tiresome extent. That gets repetitious.

The book's subtitle promises that Dunkleman will reveal "how to bring [progress] back". This, he finally gets around to telling the reader, is kind of misleading. On page 330 of the 333-page text: "This book was written not to prescribe thee specific changes that should be made in every realm of public policy, but to argue for a shift in narrative." Sigh. Fine.

I'll keep looking for Abundance.

I have nothing to say about Israel's strikes on Iran except… well, good job, Israel. Hope things work out well.

But we are going for amusement today, for example the video genius of Austin Bragg and Andrew Heaton at Reason, imagining a celebration slightly different from the one scheduled tomorrow: D.C. parade fail.

If I were still living in the area, I might take the Metro downtown to check that out.

Also of note:

• On the LFOD watch. My Google News Alert notified me of the provocative headline at (I am not making this up) Big Think: Why don’t Americans trust experts? Just ask a paranormal investigator.

  Well, of course. The average paranormal investigator is totally qualified to provide insights into the US zeitgeist.

  But things kind of go off the rails and into the New Hampshire wilderness in the interview with Matt Hongoltz-Hetling:

  Big Think: Why do so many people in New Hampshire see ghosts, aliens, and cryptids?

  Hongoltz-Hetling: New Hampshire has a perfect storm of dynamics within its culture. First, New England is much more infused with a sense of history and age than other parts of the country; it was settled first, and there’s a constant homage to the past. 

  New Hampshire is also famously individualistic. This expresses itself in various ways. It’s the country’s libertarian hotspot. It has very high rates of atheism, which is sort of an opting out of an institution. It has its “Live free or die” motto. Those factors have also made New Hampshire the leader in institutional distrust. So all of those things together are a perfect recipe for breeding increased belief in supernatural phenomena.

  Showcasing this, New Hampshire has had some truly seminal moments in paranormal history. It was the site of the first widely popularized UFO abduction story, the Betty and Barney Hill incident.

  I think [that incident] seeded the local and regional communities with a higher awareness of those sorts of things. Instead of just reading about it through an AP story or seeing it talked about on The Tonight Show, you may know somebody who is connected to this big UFO incident. And that was just one of a handful of incidents to have occurred in New Hampshire.

  For all those reasons New Hampshire is in the perfect place at the perfect time to inherit an increased awareness of, and belief in, those “out there” phenomena. 

  Uh, fine. Although that answer does kind of have that uncanny AI LLM feel to it, where random Granite State factoids were pulled up from the web to form a superficially plausible explanation.

  So, history, individualism, LFOD, atheism? Let me throw in another possible factor.

  New Hampshire had the highest consumption of alcohol, with alcohol consumption per capita of 4.76 gallons. `

  Reader, the second-place state, Delaware, is not even close to us, at 3.52 gallons.

  (Matt Hongoltz-Hetling, by the way, authored A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear, on which I opined back in 2020.)

• Gee, it's been days since we insulted Greta Thunberg. So, take it away, David Harsanyi: Greta Thunberg is the embodiment of progressive vapidity.

  Professional leftist Greta Thunberg was brought to Israel this week after the “selfie yacht” she was traveling on attempted to break through a naval blockade of Gaza. The “Madleen” was part of a “flotilla” pretending to deliver aid to alleviate an imaginary famine. The same day, 62 Israeli trucks carrying food entered the Gaza Strip.

  The 22-year-old was given food and shelter and sent home by the Israeli government, which she accused of “kidnapping” her. All the usual suspects went along with this predictable framing.

  If Thunberg really wanted to better understand the concept of an abduction, she might have asked Hamas to visit the Israelis still being tortured in a dank basement somewhere in Rafa. But the “human rights activist,” which is how the media unironically describes her, has never once called for the release of the hostages taken by Islamists. Indeed, the flotilla effort was reportedly organized by a “Hamas operative.”

  That "Hamas operative" is Zaher Birawi, described as a "founding member" of the "Freedom Flotilla Coalition". Unsurprisingly, our local Hamas cheerleader, pastor of the Community Church of Durham, is over there in Israel. Among other things, plugging "Freedom Flotilla Coalition" videos at his blog.

• It's a negative-sum game all the way down. It's another confirmation for Betteridge's Law of Headlines as Scott Sumner asks: Borrow billions for babies?

  The administration has proposed giving newborn babies (whose parents have Social Security numbers) a savings account containing $1,000, which must be saved at least until the child reached the age of 18. Here is Ryan Teague Beckwith at MSNBC:

  If a lower-income family added no money to their Trump account, after 18 years that $1,000 would have grown to around $2,000, if we assume a generous 4% rate of return.

  So…

  Imagine the typical baby were to invest the $1,000 in government bonds yielding 4%. Then at age 18, they would come into possession of two things:

  1. A $2,000 government bond.

  2. An expectation that they’ll have to pay an extra $2,000 in future taxes (in present value terms) in order to service that debt.

  In other words, on average, they will be no better off than if the program had never been created. Under the assumption of Ricardo/Barro equivalence, they should just hold onto the bonds forever.

  In other words, there’s no such thing as a free lunch.

  Might be able to fool 'em though.

• I still like Joni Ernst. And she was a good sport to accept Jeff Maurer's invitation to expand on her recent Iowa town hall remarks at his substack: When I Said "We're All Going To Die", I Meant "Soon"

  Recently, I made waves when, during a town hall meeting, I responded to an audience member’s concern that Medicare cuts will cause people to die by saying “Well, we all are going to die.” I expanded on my comments in a social media post, but that hasn’t lessened the uproar. The liberal media are determined to twist my words and portray my position as something that it’s not.

  So, let me be clear: I was not being flippant about that audience member’s concerns. Nor was I viewing a serious issue through an abstract lens. I was making a key point directly relevant to the conversation: We are all going to die. Not at some distant point in the future — imminently. I’m talking weeks, if not days. Why are we fighting about Medicare when the Reaper is at our doorstep?! We are all going to be worm food tout de suite, folks! And it seems like that really should override some pedantic point about Medicare.

  Liberals are cynically trying to make hay from my remarks. Activists, social media crusaders, and the lamestream media are portraying me as callous and out-of-touch — the progressive spin machine is going full throttle! They want you to think that I don’t care about people losing health insurance; they’re trying to turn this into a “let them eat cake” moment though misrepresentation and deceptive editing.

  It's been nice knowing you all. See you in the afterlife!

Recently on the book blog:

I put this book by Louise Hegarty on my get-at-library list thanks to a positive review from Tom Nolan in the WSJ. I was intrigued by Tom's promise of "a work of metafiction as written by the Marx Brothers." Yeah, OK. I was hoping for Groucho, and I think I got Zeppo.

It starts out as one of those old-style Agatha Christie-like mysteries: a group gathered in a rental mansion to celebrate the birthday of Benjamin and also the new year. The party-giver, Benjamin's sister Abigail, has arranged one of those "murder mystery night" contests for entertainment. But in the morning of January 1, Benjamin turns up dead! Soon enough, the gifted and egotistical consulting detective Auguste Bell appears on the scene, with his friend/assistant Sacker to investigate.

But (as promised) things get weird pretty quickly. Ms. Hegarty inserts "fair play rules", presented by T.S. Eliot, Father Knox, and S.S. Van Dine: guidelines that good mysteries should follow. (Don't have the butler do it, for example.)

You'll also notice a conspicuous lack of basic forensic detail about Benjamin's death. Sure, the door to the "murder scene" was locked. But what about…

As it turns out, that lack of detail matters quite a bit. Details keep shifting out from underneath the reader. Chapters about Bell's investigation are interspersed with descriptions of Abigail's increasingly disheveled mental state. And (slight spoiler here) what puts the meta in this fiction is that Bell seems to know that he's a character in a book.

Cute, but I found myself not caring very much. Without looking, I'm thinking the Goodreads ratings will have a bimodal loved it/hated it distribution.

… what my life would have been like without Brian Wilson. It was only a few days ago that I adapted one of his song titles in a headline. A longtime fan, since my days as a pimply teenager in Omaha. Still remember listening to "Pet Sounds" for the first time with Jeff Gross.

Yes, he could be pretentious and silly, sometimes concurrently. That's OK.

Let me stick in an Eye Candy video, one recommended by Dave Barry:

Sweet. But let's do some words too. There are a lot to choose from, but I will go with Brian Doherty's at Reason: Brian Wilson was an exemplary American.

Rest in peace, Brian.

Also of note:

• LFOD, unless you work for a living. The Center Square reports on the latest report from ALEC: Northeast states get low marks for labor freedoms. And things here in the Granite State are pretty mediocre:

  New Hampshire, the "live free or die" state, didn't fare much better than other New England states, with the report's authors ranking it 34th in the nation for overall labor policies. But the Granite State was ranked in a tie for first in the nation for its $7.25 per hour minimum wage, which is tied to the federal level.

  ALEC is the "American Legislative Exchange Council", and they lean conservatarian. Their own page about their report is here.

  New Hampshire got dinged for not having a right-to-work law, and having a relatively large slice of government employees belonging to unions.

  Still, our 34th place showing was better than Maine (43), Rhode Island (45), Connecticut (46), and Massachusetts (49).

  Still, we got beaten by Vermont (30). Vermont! As in, "People's Republic Of". Come on, we can do better than that.

• I told you I was bored by immigration and rioting. And I still am. So let's ignore Jim Geraghty's Morning Jolt headline (Los Angeles Lawmakers Request the LAPD Break the Law on ICE Raids) and skip down to something more interesting:

  I told you Tulsi Gabbard was going to hate the job of Director of National Intelligence.

  Do you remember ever seeing any other director of national intelligence releasing a video weighing in on U.S. foreign policy on his or her still-active personal social media account? I suspect that you barely remember hearing at all from Avril Haines, John Ratcliffe, Dan Coats, Dennis Blair, etc. And that’s the way it’s supposed to be, because the director of national intelligence isn’t a public-facing job, and the person in it isn’t supposed to be a celebrity.

  And yet, Tuesday afternoon, Gabbard felt the need to announce to the American people, “We stand here today closer to the brink of nuclear annihilation than ever before.”

  Really? I was halfway through my research when I found Noah Rothman had beaten me to it:

  Are we really closer to the “brink of nuclear annihilation” today than we were during the Cuban Missile Crisis? Are we closer than we were on November 9, 1979, when a malfunction indicated to NORAD that a massive nuclear attack on the U.S. was underway? Is it worse than June 3, 1980, when a similar false alarm proved so convincing that Zbigniew Brzezinski resolved to not wake his wife so she would be vaporized painlessly in her sleep? Is the geopolitical situation more unstable than it was in September 1983, when the Soviets experienced their own false alarm — a persistent one that continued despite rebooting the system — in which one Soviet missile officer’s discretion alone averted unimaginable disaster?

  Never mind her likely unfamiliarity with the history of the subject, if you’re going to ominously declare that we’re “closer to the brink of nuclear annihilation than ever before,” with an Angelo Badalamenti–esque ominous soundtrack playing in the background, shouldn’t you . . . explain how we’re so close to a nuclear exchange? Was she referring to Russia? India and Pakistan? North Korea?

  Regretably, Tulsi's a show horse, not a workhorse.

• Who wants to go to Oklahoma City, anyway? The AntiPlanner brings the latest success story: Texas Cancels Amtrak Funding.

  The Texas legislature has declined to continue funding a train between Fort Worth and Oklahoma City. Amtrak calls the train a “vital transportation option,” but in fact few people ride it and it is a costly burden to Oklahoma and Texas taxpayers.

  The train, Amtrak says, served “over 80,000 customers in FY24 and reach[ed] $2.2 million in ticket revenue,” which is supposed to somehow sound impressive. Amtrak’s press release fails to mention that the train cost $9.6 million to operate, not counting depreciation, which means it cost taxpayers at least $92 per rider, and probably much more. In short, taxpayers have to pay more than three quarters of the cost, much more than the average Amtrak train, for which taxpayers cover “only” about 59 percent of the cost (which is still too much).

  I took the Amtrak Downeaster down to Boston and back last month, to see Jimmy Webb in concert. It was kinda arduous and time-consuming, but I suppose I needed to be reminded of that.

• Nine? Oh, right. George Will lists Nine reasons for cautious optimism about individual liberty. (WaPo gifted link)

  I did not expect his leadoff word…

  Aristotle’s axiom “one swallow does not make a summer” suggests caution in anticipating large reverberations from a Supreme Court ruling last week. But the court’s unanimous affirmation of a principle that is commonsensical but now controversial might indicate its readiness to temper the racialization of American law and governance, to which the court has contributed.

  In 2019, Marlean Ames, a heterosexual Ohio woman who had worked in a state agency since 2004, was denied a promotion for a job that went to a lesbian colleague with less experience at the agency and lesser academic credentials. Ames was subsequently demoted to a position involving a 40 percent pay cut, and her prior position was filled by a gay man.

  Ames filed a lawsuit saying she was discriminated against, in violation of Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, because of her sexual orientation. She lost in a district court, and in her appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit, which held that she had not demonstrated “background circumstances” (not defined, anywhere) to justify her suspicion of discrimination. This demonstration requires, the 6th Circuit said, a member of a majority to show that her employer is “that unusual employer who discriminates against the majority.”

  GFW is eloquent, as always, and notes that we'll see pretty soon how willing SCOTUS is to apply this "commonsensical" principle in upcoming decisions.

• So long, Abe. David R. Henderson asks if you have Thoughts For Your Penny? (I must admit mine are curmudgeonly.)

  One of the concepts you come across in a well-taught monetary economics course is the idea of seigniorage. An online dictionary does a pretty decent job of defining it: “The profit made by a government by issuing currency, especially the difference between the face value of coins and their production cost.” Although the definition highlights coins, the concept applies to paper money also.

  The US government makes a pretty penny (pun intended) on seigniorage. It’s not as much as it used to be because more and more people use credit cards and even cryptocurrency to buy goods and services. Still, it’s a good amount.

  The biggest gain from seigniorage is on the $100 bill. Printing one costs the federal government just 9.4 cents. So, when the feds spend this $100, they make a nice profit of $99.90. Not bad. Printing a $1 bill costs the feds 3.2 cents. So even on a $1 bill, the feds make 97 cents.

  But minting small coins loses money for the feds. In its 2024 Annual Report, the US Mint reports the cost of producing each coin denomination. The cost of producing a penny was $0.03. In other words, the cost of producing a penny was three times the value of the penny. Interestingly, the feds went underwater even on the nickel, whose cost, at $0.11, was over twice the value of the nickel. That’s why I stated earlier that the federal government should stop producing nickels also. It isn’t until you get to the dime that you find a coin that the feds make money on. Interestingly, the cost of producing a dime, at $0.045, is less than the cost of producing a nickel.

  I have no interest in nickel-and-diming the Mint, but there's no reason to sob over the fact that the seigniorage on two particular types of currency is negative. That simply doesn't matter a hill of beans in this crazy world.

  And it's a useful reminder of how debased our currency is.

Matthew Hennessey bids us Welcome to the Age of Excusability. (WSJ gifted link)

But, as Matthew goes on to note: "The excusability crisis is bipartisan." Use the gifted link, if necessary, to Peruse the Thing in its Entirety.

Also of note:

• 

  I think I agree with Anthony Comegna and (maybe) David Graeber. Writing in the July issue of Reason, Anthony's headline says: The Best Democracy Is Anarchy. He is reviewing David Graeber's The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World . . . and the Amazon link is at your right.

  Long before European governments or their colonies began to embrace "democracy," something far more democratic was widely practiced in the world's vast ungovernable spaces.

  Black Sam Bellamy's 1717 pirate crew was "a collection of people in which there was likely to be at least some firsthand knowledge of a very wide range of directly democratic institutions," wrote David Graeber, the late anarchist and anthropologist, in one of his essays collected posthumously in The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World…. Those institutions ranged "from Swedish things to African village assemblies to Native American councils": a rich assortment of influences as the sailors found themselves "forced to improvise some mode of self-government in the complete absence of any state." The very ungovernability of the Atlantic itself, the vast inland frontiers, the dense forests and swamplands, made it "the perfect intercultural space" of experiment and improvisation.

  For Graeber, it was the occupants of those democratic spaces, and not any politician or political theorist, from whom we should be taking our historical cues. Democracy, he argued, is not representative government, where the people select appointees to make decisions for them. That's Roman nonsense. Democracy is a daily exercise. It is (or can be) practiced in your workplace or family or place of learning, because those units are the most basic and consequential to daily life. It lives in cultural practice and not in states, and states cannot be democratized.

  Could be. I'll see if I can wangle a copy from some library.

• Junior fires the experts. In fact, he announced it in the WSJ yesterday with an anodyne headline: HHS Moves to Restore Public Trust in Vaccines.

  Vaccines have become a divisive issue in American politics, but there is one thing all parties can agree on: The U.S. faces a crisis of public trust. Whether toward health agencies, pharmaceutical companies or vaccines themselves, public confidence is waning.

  Some would try to explain this away by blaming misinformation or antiscience attitudes. To do so, however, ignores a history of conflicts of interest, persecution of dissidents, a lack of curiosity, and skewed science that has plagued the vaccine regulatory apparatus for decades.

  That is why, under my direction, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services is putting the restoration of public trust above any pro- or antivaccine agenda. The public must know that unbiased science guides the recommendations from our health agencies. This will ensure the American people receive the safest vaccines possible.

  Today, we are taking a bold step in restoring public trust by totally reconstituting the Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices (ACIP). We are retiring the 17 current members of the committee, some of whom were last-minute appointees of the Biden administration. Without removing the current members, the current Trump administration would not have been able to appoint a majority of new members until 2028.

  Well, I'm sure those 17 folks have day jobs they can fall back on.

  Roger Pielke Jr. has a simple question: Whose Experts? He has a chart showing where ACIP sits in Uncle Stupid's vaccine approval process. And another chart that shows that public trust in the "people running medicine" has been on the decline for more than 50 years.

  It is certainly problematic that the Biden administration appointed all former members of the ACIP. At the same time, it is also problematic that the Trump administration believes that they should expect to appoint a majority of the committee.

  To the extent that partisan considerations play a central role in ACIP empanelment, we defeat the entire purpose of soliciting expert advice. Cherry picking experts is just as bad as cherry picking scientific studies. It allows the creation of a politically expedient portrayal of reality, but there is no guarantee that reality is real.

  The WSJ editorialists waited until today to comment on the move: RFK Jr. Conducts His Vaccine Purge. (WSJ gifted link)

  The HHS Secretary has broad discretion over the panel’s remit and composition. There might be a constitutional argument for eliminating the committee and other outside advisory panels because they can weaken executive accountability. Agency leaders have sometimes shifted political responsibility for controversial decisions to advisory panels.

  But Mr. Kennedy’s beef seems to be that the committee’s members know something about vaccines and may have been involved in their research and development. “Most of ACIP’s members have received substantial funding from pharmaceutical companies, including those marketing vaccines,” he writes. How does he define “substantial”?

  Some members have been paid by vaccine makers—typically sums less than their salaries—to assist with clinical trials in which they help evaluate the vaccines for safety and efficacy. These trials are double-blinded, meaning doctors don’t know which volunteers receive the vaccine or placebo so there’s no financial incentive to tilt the data in favor of manufacturers.

  Fortunately, I'm all caught up on my shots. I hope Junior's new panel of "experts" don't prevent me from getting my next ones.

Recently on the book blog:

The author, Julian Baggini, is (I think it's fair to say) a pop philosopher. A serious thinker combined with a considerable amount of self-promotion. ("Not that there's anything wrong with that," said the blogger.) I became aware of this book when I looked back at his WSJ review of Science and the Good, which dealt tangentially with the issue of "free will." I've been a longtime fan of that topic.

I was very impressed with Baggini's approach to "free will": he's not so much arguing for a position for or against, but outlining his earnest search for the truth behind the topic. Perhaps unique for a book of this type, Baggini goes out and interviews other philosophers and researchers. Also artists and addicts. He fairly presents their views and insights. For a relatively short book, it's a real tour de force. His writing style is clear and mostly accessible to even a philosophical dilettante like me.

Baggini urges the reader to avoid the trap of thinking of "free will" as a binary, all-or-nothing deal, where we are either (a) completely deterministic bags of molecules, perhaps with some quantum coin-flipping going on; or (b) completely in control of our actions with the ability to choose any future path at any moment.

The truth, argues Baggini, is somewhere in between, depends on our situations, values, and past histories. Which makes things a little messy, but manageable. For this (very bad) Lutheran, his deployment of Martin Luther's famous quote "Here I stand, I can do no other" was very on-target.

Baggini's exploration takes him to various free will-related topics, some surprising: artistic expression, legal responsibility, addiction, mental illness, and more.

Not that I'm in total agreement. Almost as an aside, Baggini claims "Freedom merely as absence of constraint and presence of consumer choice is a very thin value indeed". Whereas I think, given its relative rarity and fragility, it's actually a pretty good deal, and not a "very thin value" at all.

Baggini's also read Free Will, by anti-free willer Sam Harris. Interestingly, he quotes the same bit of the text that I did back in 2015, where Harris is musing about Joshua Komisarjevsky, participant in a 2007 Connecticut rape-murder. Harris makes the (to me) sloppy, albeit astounding, claim:

If I had truly been in Komisarjevsky's shoes on July 23, 2007—that is, if I had his genes and life experience and an identical brain (or soul) in an identical state—I would have acted exactly as he did.

Baggini lets this go largely unremarked, but I thought back then (and still do) that there's a real problem with "I" in Harris's sentence. Given Komisarjevsky's brain, genes, experience, etc.: there's no room for Harris's "I" to squeeze in.

At the end, Baggini comes close to making a fully-libertarian argument. But then backs off considerably with (to me) weak hand-waving about the justified role of the state in providing health care, education, transportation infrastructure. Ah well.

I realize that I'm coming close to complaining that Baggini didn't write the book the way I would have. So don't get me wrong: if you're interested in "free will", this is a very good book to check out.

In case you haven't noticed: Pun Salad is a personal blog, where I post on whatever strikes my fancy. And, to adapt that old Wittgensteinism: Whereof one cannot get interested, thereof one's blog must be silent.

But, oh heck, here's some Eye Candy from Mr. Ramirez:

I was slightly amused by the WaPo's AI-written summary of comments

Man, the commenters are a tough crowd.

Also of note:

• Sorry, we didn't actually realize we were in charge. Peter Suderman asks for a do-over: Put the Libertarians Back in Charge.

  A common gripe in American politics is that for too long, libertarians have been in charge, wielding too much power.

  Sometimes this complaint comes from progressives in the mold of Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.), who argue that hands-off economic policy—often derisively cast as "neoliberalism"—has fueled the growth and concentration of corporate power at the expense of small business and labor, resulting in an economy that's rigged against the little guy.

  Sometimes this complaint comes from conservatives, particularly New Right voices who insist that libertarians and classical liberals have ignored the consequences of unfettered free markets for American industrial capacity and rural downscale workers while allowing the left to control major cultural institutions. In this view, libertarianism fails to prioritize the interests of America, American values, and ordinary Americans.

  The charge has always carried a whiff of desperation, given how little power actual self-identified libertarians have in the corridors of government. But after four years of Joe Biden running a White House that was a hotbed of Warrenite progressivism, and the early months of Donald Trump's presidency marked by all manner of New Right paranoia and kookiness, maybe it's time to revise the complaint: Libertarians don't have enough power.

  Given today's political climate, it's unlikely that Peter's demand will be met. As you may be tired of hearing me say: we'll just have to be satisfied with being right about everything, all the time.

• For example, this libertarian insight… Mark Jamison goes out on a limb: Innovation Shouldn’t Be a Liability in the United States.

  America’s antitrust enforcers say they want to protect innovation. But their current cases against Big Tech are only punishing it.

  The Department of Justice (DOJ) and Federal Trade Commission (FTC) have launched aggressive antitrust cases against companies like Alphabet, Amazon, and Meta, arguing that these firms are too dominant and that their success undermines competition. The government’s solution: break them up or force them to share the innovations and resources they created and that made them successful—like data and infrastructure—with rivals. Or even worse, obstructing the companies’ AI innovations, as in the case of Google search.

  Here’s the problem: these firms didn’t become dominant by suppressing competition. They became leaders by out-innovating everyone else.

  I'm just guessing that a President Nikki Haley would have realized this.

• Speaking of the FTC… Elizabeth Nolan Brown notes a strange transformation: FTC Pivots From Competition to Children.

  A Federal Trade Commission (FTC) summit last week on protecting children online previewed an odd pivot. Apparently, the agency wants to be a sort of family values advocacy group.

  "This government-sponsored event was not a good-faith conversation about child safety—it was a strategy session for censorship," said the Free Speech Coalition (FSC), a trade group for the adult industry.

  What stands out most to me about last Wednesday's event—called "The Attention Economy: How Big Tech Firms Exploit Children and Hurt Families"—is the glimpse it provided into how the FTC's anti-tech strategy is evolving and the way Republicans seem intent on turning a bipartisan project like online child protection into a purely conservative one.

  Or could it be they are cynically junking old and tired arguments for ones that will rouse more rabble?

• 

  It's as good as a mile. Mark Pulliam writes on The Myth of Victimization, a review of Jason L. Riley's book, The Affirmative Action Myth. (Amazon link at your right.) A slice:

  As it is practiced today, “civil rights” is an industry in which many activists, scholars, bureaucrats, journalists, and organizations have a vested interest in perpetuating the myth of black victimization and helplessness. Riley argues (with extensive supporting footnotes) that “blacks have made faster progress when color blindness has been the policy objective.” Allowing equal treatment to be replaced by a regime of “oppression pedagogy” and identity politics, Riley suggests, is “one of our greatest tragedies.” Racial preferences “have been a hindrance rather than a boon for blacks,” he contends.

  Riley makes a persuasive case. He reprises the work done by scholars such as Thomas Sowell, Walter Williams, Robert Woodson, Shelby Steele, John McWhorter, and Wilfred Reilly; as he notes, much of the research on this topic by center-right figures tends to be done by black academics, possibly due to white scholars’ well-founded fear of repercussions. (If you doubt this, recall the pariah treatment accorded Charles Murray, Amy Wax, Ilya Shapiro, and others who refused to genuflect to the prevailing orthodoxy.) Riley also draws upon the work of Stephan and Abigal Thernstrom, Richard Sander and Stuart Taylor Jr., and many others. Readers may be familiar with some of this work, but Riley usefully summarizes it and supplements it with census data, lesser-known academic studies, and historical and biographical profiles such as Hidden Figures, the book and movie about pioneering black mathematicians who helped NASA’s space program in the 1960s.

  I strongly suspect I'll have to get this via Interlibrary Loan.

Recently on the book blog:

It took me awhile, but I eventually got taken in by the Slow Horses series on Apple TV. And, after getting caught up with that, I decided to check out this first book in Mick Herron's series. (On which the first season of the TV show is based.)

As it turns out, the TV show is a remarkably faithful adaptation of the book. It's a mixture of very dark humor, violence, cynicism, betrayal, and suspense. Mick Herron is a skillful, stylish writer; I found myself smiling every few pages at some deftly executed sentences.

Summary: Jackson Lamb is in charge of "Slough House", an island of misfit MI5 spies. It's where agents who have screwed up badly get sent, a dead-end posting designed to get them to resign. Lamb helps in that effort by being abusive to his charges, reminding them at every opportunity of their worthlessness. The newest arrival, River Cartwright, was set up to fail by a rival spy… or was there something else going on? In any case, he's now relegated to sorting through mounds of disgusting garbage, retrieved from the bins of a disgraced right-wing journalist. And (of course) finding nothing.

Ah, but could there be a connection with a fanatical, even more right-wing, group who have abducted a Pakistani student/stand-up comic, promising to decapitate him on video in a couple days? (Spoiler: yes.) And will the Slow Horses be involved in all this. (Also yes.)

There are some changes; for example, book-Lamb does not lip-sync to the Proclaimers' "500 Miles". You'll have to watch the show for that. And you should, it's hilarious.

This should be a no-brainer. But Karoline Leavitt is the Trump administration's leading example of non-braininess. Robby Soave spells it out: Terry Moran Insulted Stephen Miller? That's None of the Government's Business.

Karoline is an unhappy tweeter:

Last night, in a since deleted post, so-called “journalist” @TerryMoran went on a rampage against Stephen Miller and called President Trump “a world class hater.”

This is unhinged and unacceptable.

We have reached out to @ABC to inquire about how they plan to hold Terry… pic.twitter.com/HsgusJEIvH

— Karoline Leavitt (@PressSec) June 8, 2025

Robby belabors the obvious, but that's OK:

This is not to excuse Moran, whose surname is only one letter away from… no, I won't go there.

Also of note:

• For the nth time: I am not a lawyer, but… Jed Rubenfeld wonders Are White People a Protected Class Now? And he leads off with a stunning stat:

  For a year after the 2020 George Floyd riots, America’s largest corporations pretty much stopped hiring white people. According to Bloomberg News, of the over 300,000 new jobs filled at S&P 100 companies in 2021, only six percent—you read that right, six percent—went to whites, who make up some 61 percent of the U.S. population. This was done in the name of “inclusivity” and “diversity.”

  That's a four-year-old number, and Bloomberg published it in September 2023. So: grain of salt. But it seems to be based on Official Government Statistics.

  And here we get into the legal weeds. Jed looks at the recent unanimous SCOTUS ruling in Ames v. Ohio Department of Youth Services:

  Writing for the full Court, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson held that Title VII protects “individuals,” not groups, and protects “minority and majority” alike. The Sixth Circuit’s rule, Jackson said, violated the “basic principle” that discrimination law “does not vary based on whether or not the plaintiff is a member of a majority group.”

  This is a major decision for the Court. The “basic principle” it reaffirms—that discrimination law protects individuals, not groups, and does not vary depending on minority or majority status—plainly applies not only to sexual orientation, but to race as well, calling all DEI hiring into question.

  Fundamentally, Ames blows a hole in a concept central to DEI thinking. For a long time, discrimination law in America has been organized around the idea of “protected classes.” Thousands of cases hold that the first requirement of any Title VII discrimination claim is that the employee must show that he “was a member of a protected class.” The Sixth Circuit’s opinion in Ames repeated this statement.

  It's not just the judicial branch blowing a big hole in the DEI juggernaut; the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission now has a new sheriff in town, Andrea Lucas, and she issued a stern warning in a March press release: EEOC and Justice Department Warn Against Unlawful DEI-Related Discrimination. Which includes links to helpful documents: What To Do If You Experience Discrimination Related to DEI at Work; and What You Should Know About DEI-Related Discrimination at Work.

  This is all welcome news. The documents "clarify" for the DEIdolators: there are no "protected classes"; there are protected characteristics: race, sex, etc.

  And we are all protected (or should be) from discrimination based on those characteristics.

  (See Wikipedia for the full list of protected characteristics.)

• Shut up, they explain. Jesse Singal has the unpromising headline: Contra Evan Urquhart On The Right To Journalistic Exclusion. But he's examining a specific example of a more general censoriousness:

  Last week The New York Times released The Protocol, a six-part podcast series about the American fight over youth gender medicine. The podcast is hosted by Austin Mitchell and centers on the work of Azeen Ghorayshi, the science section’s point person on this subject. […]

  For now, I’d like to talk a bit about the reaction. Or preaction, to be more precise. Well before the podcast was released, activists were outraged. They were outraged, at root, because they do not think there should be any meaningful debate over any substantive aspect of youth gender medicine. I understand that many activists would claim otherwise, that I am caricaturing their position, but their actions speak otherwise. And the more honest members of this group are open about their views.

  To her credit, Julia Carrie Wong, a senior reporter at The Guardian US, expressed this explicitly on Bluesky: “The idea that there should be a public debate about the appropriate medical care for a minuscule population of children remains one of the most absurd lies that these liberal transphobes, NYT edit board included, tell themselves. No there shouldn’t! It’s not an appropriate matter for public debate!”

  Because these critics are opposed to any genuine coverage of this issue but aren’t usually willing to say so out loud, they often have to reverse-engineer reasons to be mad. In the case of The Times, which has come under a lot of unfair fire from these activists in recent years, that has led to all sorts of ridiculously bad faith accusations, some of which can fairly be called lies.

  These folks don't just put fingers in their ears to avoid hearing contrary opinions and facts. They want to put their fingers in your ears too.

Scott Lincicome makes one:

Seeing the unseen: "Automotive Tariffs are Dramatically Shifting Buyer Habits, Study Says" https://t.co/5YVs6lnNMk pic.twitter.com/1FOQO80r9p

— Scott Lincicome (@scottlincicome) June 7, 2025

That, in turn, causes Donald Boudreaux to issue his Question for Fans of Tariffs and of Tariff Man:

Since I have no patience with subtlety, I'll point you to Bastiat's famous Candlestick makers' Petition, which argues for that industry's "protection" against the "rival who apparently works under conditions so far superior to our own for the production of light."

(Also, Tariff Man's superpower of tax-setting only applies to tariffs. Right? I mean, he couldn't arbitrarily impose a sales tax on used cars! Um, he couldn't, could he?)

Also of note:

• Remind you of anyone? Jeffrey Blehar thinks recent news implies That's a Wrap for Greta Thunberg. (NR gifted link)

  A brief note on everybody’s least favorite hectoring eco-scold: I regret to inform you that Greta Thunberg is in the news again. It barely matters why, really — more nonsense about Gaza and “genocide.” We’ll get to that in a moment, but that’s not really why we’re here.

  You remember young Greta, right? The vinegar-rictused, Swedish ecological activist whom the media turned into a global celebrity back in 2018? You probably recall some of the details, but it’s always healthy to remind ourselves of what an amazingly different era 2018 was: A teenage girl successfully leveraged her ecological neuroses to trick her parents into letting her skip school on Fridays.

  This would have been impressive enough, but then — in a move that surely must have surprised even her — the global leftist elite also decided to grant Thunberg worldwide fame and Unquestionable Moral Authority in the bargain. She was the perfect avatar, after all, eager to read from a script they had been writing in their hearts for decades now: The planet is dying, future generations are doomed to tragedy, it’s all the fault of us selfish oil-guzzling adults — and now, here’s an enraged 15-year-old girl to guilt-trip you about it.

  Jeffrey is firmly in the pantheon of Pun Salad's Favorite Writers.

  But to the query in this item's headline: Greta's trajectory is reminding me of Cindy Sheehan's descent into obscurity, once she transformed herself from "tragic peacenik mom" into "raving Marxist loon."

  The media only love you when you're useful for Establishing Their Narrative.

• On the other hand, none of us would be here without it. Carrie Lukas thinks Michelle Obama’s Latest Lament Hints at a Gender Politics Reset.

  ​On a recent episode of her podcast, Michelle Obama said that “the least of what” a woman’s reproductive system does is “produce life.” The comment drew quick criticism — and for good reason. To be fair, Obama quickly added, “it’s a very important thing that it does,” but her initial statement confirmed a too-familiar callousness toward the miraculous process of producing a life.

  Obama’s dismissiveness of childbearing, however, may be “the least of what” was revealed in her statements. The perpetually aggrieved Obama wants to lean back into a comfortable narrative in which women are victims and progressive Democrats like her are their champions. As she puts it:

  So many men have no idea about what women go through, right? We haven’t been researched. We haven’t been considered. And it still affects the way a lot of male lawmakers, a lot of male politicians, a lot of male religious leaders, think about the issue of choice as if it’s just about the fetus. The baby.

  Obama is right, of course, that no man knows the experience of inhabiting a female body, let alone the physical experience of growing another human being. This doesn’t mean that men shouldn’t weigh in on the issue of abortion, as Obama seems to imply, but certainly it’s good advice that men should take care to recognize the profound implications that any pregnancy has on a woman anytime they are discussing abortion.

  Michelle is probably not going to go the Cindy/Greta route, but she's almost as irritating in her dismissal of "males".

• "Due process" fans aren't making a lot of noise about this. Jacob Sullum looks at the ins and outs, ups and downs, and what the Hell happened to the Sixth Amendment: Charging a runner for using an unapproved trail defies Trump's overcriminalization order.

  When the federal government decided to prosecute mountain runner Michelino Sunseri for using an unapproved trail while setting a record for ascending and descending Grand Teton in September 2024, it seemed like a good example of a problem that President Donald Trump decried in an executive order last month: "overcriminalization in federal regulations." The National Park Service (NPS) ultimately agreed, saying it was "withdrawing its criminal prosecution referral" after "further review" in light of the president's order. But the Justice Department proceeded with the case anyway, resulting in a two-day bench trial that ended on May 21.

  That disagreement, revealed in an email chain that Sunseri's lawyers obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request, raises questions about whether prosecutors met their constitutional obligation to share information that would have been helpful to the defense. It also casts doubt on whether the Justice Department is complying with the policy described in Trump's order, which said federal prosecutors should eschew charges involving regulatory crimes unless they have evidence indicating that the defendant knowingly violated the law.

  What was I saying about the Sixth Amendment? Oh, right:

  [U.S. Magistrate Judge Stephanie] Hambrick rejected Sunseri's request for a jury trial, which she was allowed to do under a "petty offense exception" that the Supreme Court has atextually carved out of the Sixth Amendment. That amendment says defendants "in all criminal prosecutions" have a right to "a speedy and public trial" by "an impartial jury."

  "Atextually" here means that SCOTUS made up an exception to the Sixth Amendment's guarantee in complete contradiction to the its plain language. Kinda outrageous.

Recently on the movie blog:

Ridley Scott is back, baby, and (as near as I can tell) uses his time machine to send a film crew back to Imperial Rome, a few years after that gladiator who looked a lot like Russell Crowe managed to work his way into a fatal encounter with that nasty Roman emperor who looked a lot like Joaquin Phoenix.

I went in not knowing too much about the movie, and I recommend that. I was taken unawares by some of the big plot twists.

It starts out with Hanno (Paul Mescal) about to defend his city against the invading Roman Navy. His wife Arishat (Yuval Gonen) is a deadly archer, and before you can say "Gee, I bet she's not gonna do well here" … she does not, thanks to a specific order given by Roman General Acacius. Hanno is taken prisoner, he's recognized for his fighting talent by gladiator-manager Macrinus (Denzel Washington!), and pretty soon he's in the Coliseum fighting big lugs on rhinos, sharks, … while all the time plotting revenge.

Things are complicated by a holdover from Gladiator: Lucilla (Connie Nielson) is now (gasp!) married to Acacius, and is an occasional attendee at the Coliseum, where she … well, you should watch the movie.

And I don't make that claim lightly. Dave Barry brings us The News from Florida. Of course he recounts the recent invasion of "popular recreation area" Crab Island by the United States Army. But he also reviews hurricane preparedness, because 'tis the season. For example…

The only clunker is the suggestion to "Drive to Nebraska and remain there until Halloween." Dave, they have tornadoes.

Also of note:

• One day the bottom will drop out. Dan Greenberg confesses at Cato: I Shot the Tariff (But I Swear It Was in Self-Defense)

  The Constitution assigns Congress the sole and exclusive power to lay and collect tariffs and to regulate commerce with foreign nations. That literal reading of the Constitution demonstrates that Congress has the power to impose tariffs, but the president has no such power. However, the IEEPA hands the president some power to regulate some extranational transactions. But the statute explains that such powers “may only be exercised to deal with an unusual and extraordinary threat with respect to which a national emergency has been declared.” More particularly, the IEEPA gives the president the power to “regulate … importation” in order to “deal with any unusual or extraordinary threat … to the national security, foreign policy, or economy of the United States, if the president declares a national emergency with respect to such threat.”

  That apparently is the theory of Trump’s Liberation Day: The “unusual and extraordinary threat” identified by the president is trade deficits en masse, and the president can “deal with” this threat by declaring that our nation’s trade with every single country on earth is a national emergency; more precisely, he can “deal with” this threat by using his power to regulate imports so as to place tariffs on them. But the theory of Liberation Day seems inherently implausible: how can it be that every country’s trade policy is simultaneously extraordinary—or even simultaneously unusual? If there is something that is identified as unusual and extraordinary, this implies that some other things must necessarily be usual and ordinary.

  This logical inference raises a relevant question: Surely there are some usual and ordinary states of affairs that would not justify a presidential declaration of emergency? If the president is never disallowed from making such declarations, it would imply that things are never usual or ordinary, because by definition things can’t be unusual or extraordinary 100 percent of the time.

  Dan, I'm pretty sure politicians use that "unusual and extraordinary" excuse all the time, about anything. But (you're right) that's why we need the men and women in robes to (fingers crossed) point that out and say no.

• And then the tariffs shot back. Eric Boehm describes How Tariffs Are Breaking the Manufacturing Industries Trump Says He Wants To Protect.

  When President Donald Trump announced a sweeping set of tariffs on nearly all imports, he promised that April 2—what the White House dubbed "Liberation Day"—would "forever be remembered as the day American industry was reborn."

  That's not the way Michele Derrigo-Barnes sees it. Trump's tariffs are "killing" small American manufacturers like hers, she tells Reason.

  As CEO of Plattco Corporation, a small business that makes industrial valves, Derrigo-Barnes runs the sort of blue-collar industrial production shop that Trump and his allies say they want to help. Instead of being helped, she found herself dealing with fallout from the tariff announcement: canceled orders, higher prices, and enough uncertainty to put on hold a planned expansion of the company's Plattsburgh, New York, manufacturing center on the banks of Lake Champlain.

  What would she tell Trump if she got the chance? "Stop the nonsense. We've worked hard to get us to a place where we can perform well and we can take care of our customers, and this is putting that in jeopardy."

  Unfortunately, stopping the nonsense seems to be the last thing on Trump's mind. To a jaundiced eye, it appears he likes nonsense, the kind he creates, most of all.

• And that's why he had to go. Veronique de Rugy takes sides: Musk Is Right to Want End of Green & Black Subsidies.

  In the fight between President Trump and Elon Musk, I would say that Elon Musk is right. The One Big, Beautiful Bill is fiscally irresponsible because, for the benefit of special interests, it fails to make the most pro-growth provisions permanent. It is also because of its lack of spending cuts or the closing of tax loopholes. (Jack Salmon and I have a list of all the tax expenditures that should be eliminated from the tax code here.)

  Mr. Trump claims that “Elon’s upset because we took the EV mandate . . . which was a lot of money for electric vehicles and, you know, they’re having a hard time, and they want us to pay billions of dollars in subsidies.” The president also noted that these subsidies are silly and shouldn’t exist. He is correct. He added that “Elon knew this from the beginning; he knew it from a long time ago.” But his accusation doesn’t align with Musk’s public statements.

  Geez, Vero, are you saing that Trump has an iffy relationship with the truth? Hard to believe.

Provided via Hot Air's David Strom, the song stylings of NY Senator Chuck Schumer: Big Beautiful Bill Will Kill Us All.

UNHINGED: @SenSchumer says "WE'RE ALL GOING TO DIE" if we pass the largest tax cut in history, block illegals from taxpayer-funded health care, and cut the deficit.

These are NOT serious people. pic.twitter.com/AFeiDuaYjR

— Rapid Response 47 (@RapidResponse47) June 4, 2025

But of course Remy did it better, seven years ago:

In related news, the Nation (hopefully) thinks Joni Ernst’s Cruelty and Sarcasm Might Cost Her Her Job. And in case you haven't heard, the subhed:

Iowa’s Republican senator says gutting Medicaid is no worry because “we all are going to die.” Voters seem to disagree.

So: sarcastic? I can see why one might think so.

Cruel? That's a matter of opinion, I think.

But accurate? Yes, absolutely. If "voters disagree" I've got some bad news for them.

Also of note:

• On a related note… Kevin D. Williamson goes Nietzschean! Or maybe not, but that was my first thought reading his headline: Beyond Good and Evil.

  I recently participated in a debate/discussion with regulation scholar Wayne Crews, my colleague at the Competitive Enterprise Institute and author of the invaluable annual regulatory survey Ten Thousand Commandments. The subject was DOGE, about which we just barely disagree: His position is that DOGE is better than nothing, and mine is that DOGE is worse than nothing. Where we agree is that in concerns touching both spending and regulation, Congress is the solution—because Congress is the problem. 

  Or, more precisely, Congress is the problem most closely at hand. 

  Politicians who face the voters periodically have a schedule of incentives that is different from what businesses experience in the marketplace—it didn’t take two years for consumers to offer a verdict on New Coke or the Ford Edsel—and the nature of the incentives is different, too, but they do ultimately respond to the voters who either reward or punish them. That’s another way of saying that peoples who have recourse to democratic processes get approximately the government they deserve. Our Congress problem ultimately proceeds not from the character of House Speaker Mike Johnson or Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer but from the character of the American people, of whom Elon Musk is about as good a representative as a harem-keeping ketamine-addled billionaire from South Africa could hope to be.

  Musk and the Muskovites talk about the world of politics and policy in terms of good and evil, and most of the idiotic catchphrases of the contemporary right—elites, Deep State, woke, etc.—are just dumb and/or dishonest ways of saying evil. Progressives rely on roughly the same figures of speech when they talk about corporations or the Federalist Society or, when the subject comes up, me. This thinking, if we are to flatter it with that illustrious gerund, extends from individuals to institutions, with millions of Americans apparently believing in all sincerity that Harvard and Google and this or that bloc on the Supreme Court and whichever political party isn’t theirs have the priorities and values they have because the people involved are evil.

  We don't give the voters enough disrespect. (See previous item.)

• I won't dance, don't ask me. Martin Gurri has a question that should worry us all: Will You Be a Dancing Monkey in the Age of AI?

  Tyler Cowen is usually the smartest person in the room. I consider him a friend, so I’ve often been in the room with him, and when he speaks, on any number of subjects, there tends to be a pause in the conversation as people reach for their notepads.

  With Avital Balwit, Cowen recently co-wrote a fascinating article, published by The Free Press, on the many ways the arrival of artificial intelligence will reconfigure our basic humanity. I don’t know Balwit personally, but she tells us that at 26 she holds an important position at Anthropic, the company responsible for an AI large language model called Claude. So I suspect that she, too, is extraordinarily smart.

  So here we have two extremely intelligent humans confronting the reality of transcendentally intelligent machines—and while the vision of the future they describe in their article very much leans on the side of optimism, their gut reaction is to feel diminished. AI, they tell us, will trigger “the most profound identity crisis humanity has ever faced.” The reason? AI spells the end of “human intellectual supremacy—a position we’ve held unchallenged for our entire existence.” That is, people who once thought of themselves as the pinnacle of brainpower will now struggle “to live meaningful lives in a world where they are no longer the smartest and most capable entities in it.”

  My initial reflection on reading this was, Whew, could be a lot worse . . . I’m a baby boomer. The big, scary invention in my youth was the nuclear bomb, which threatened to cause the end of human existence, rather than just existential anguish. Those who survived being pulverized would be eaten by 40-foot mutated insects, Hollywood reliably informed us.

  As a boomer myself, I'm inclined to agree with Martin. See what you think. Or get an AI to tell you what you should think.

• This is what happens after decades of grade inflation. Jay Nordlinger has a substack, and it's a reliable source for keeping track of international despotism. I therefore kinda regret that I'm going to nitpick his recent Cries for Freedom. Near the beginning:

  The Oslo Freedom Forum is a conference of the Human Rights Foundation, based in New York. The CEO of HRF is Thor Halvorssen, a Venezuelan with a Norwegian name. (People have never been confined within boundaries, for long.) He greets the attendees at the 2025 Forum by saying that our “shared mission” is “to champion individual liberty and to confront tyranny wherever it persists.”

  Authoritarian regimes “control more than two thirds of the world’s population,” he says. Resistance can seem futile; change can seem impossible.

  What?!

  The source of this two-thirds claim seems to be the 2021 Global State of Democracy Report from "International IDEA" ("an intergovernmental organization (IGO) with a mandate to support sustainable democracy worldwide.") And their actual claim is a bit more, um, "nuanced":

  More than a quarter of the world’s population now live in democratically backsliding countries. Together with those living in outright non-democratic regimes, they make up more than two-thirds of the world’s population.

  And, yes, I bet you saw this coming:

  The Global State of Democracy 2021 shows that more countries than ever are suffering from ‘democratic erosion’ (decline in democratic quality), including in established democracies. The number of countries undergoing ‘democratic backsliding’ (a more severe and deliberate kind of democratic erosion) has never been as high as in the last decade, and includes regional geopolitical and economic powers such as Brazil, India and the United States.

  And that's how you get "authoritarian regimes" controlling two-thirds of the world population: include the US. In 2021.

  (And don't say: "Well, yeah, COVID.")

• Okay, maybe they have a point about authoritarianism. Kevin Corcoran notes one recent incursion that DOGE seems to have missed: Your Seat Room Exceeds Your Allowable Freedom. About a recent recall notice going out for the Volkswagen "ID.Buzz":

  Well, it turns out Volkswagen had given passengers in the back row too much space. In most three row vehicles, the seats in the last row tend to be small and cramped, but Volkswagen designed their vehicle to make the seats comfortable and spacious, allowing for a pleasant seating experience. Regulators, however, would have none of this. You see, the back row consists of two seats, both wide enough to comfortably seat two full size adults. In fact, the seats were so spacious that regulators argued people might decide to squeeze a third person in the back row, between the two designated seats. But that third person wouldn’t have a seatbelt! Therefore the only acceptable option according to regulators is to make sure that the seats can only barely fit two people. If you let car manufactures provide space to safely and comfortably fit two passengers, people might take the opportunity to unsafely and uncomfortably squeeze in three passengers. So the rules require you only allow enough space to seat two people uncomfortably.

  In order to bring things in line with what The Rules Require™, Volkswagen will take in the recalled vehicles and install a barrier in between the two seats in the back row, effectively shrinking the seating space available to convert it into the kind of cramped seating the law demands. I imagine a lot of current ID.Buzz owners will decline to get their car “fixed” in this way and just ignore the recall, but future owners will not be so lucky.

  But of course, if you let people sit in the imaginary third seat… people will die!

I'm glad Mr. Ramirez didn't use my headline for a punchline, though.

But here are some words on that topic, from Clark Packard and Alfredo Carrillo Obregon at Cato: Meet the New Steel Tariffs, Same as the Old Steel Tariffs.

As near as I can tell, explicit references to "Won't Get Fooled Again" lyrics are only in the article's headline. I hope, reader, you stocked up on steel and aluminum.

Also of note:

• Time will tell. As it usually does. That doesn't stop Jeffrey Blehar from asking: What Did Elon Musk Actually Accomplish, Except His Own Downfall?.

  As most are no doubt already aware, yesterday Elon Musk broke his silence about the “big, beautiful” spending bill that is currently wending its way through a Republican Congress. Calling it a “disgusting abomination,” he added, “Shame on those who voted for it: you know you did wrong. You know it.” This bill, of course, is likely to end up being the primary legislative accomplishment of Donald Trump’s first year back in office. He pushed the House Republican caucus furiously to get it across the finish line there, to the point where its passage by a few votes felt — despite the seeming last-minute drama of it all — a bit like scripted kabuki theater.

  One can only imagine how unhappy the Trump administration is with this, especially since several Senate lawmakers have used the opportunity afforded by Elon’s apostasy to poke their heads out from behind his protective skirt and chip in with their own reservations. (Profiles in cowardice, nearly all of them, with Rand Paul as a notable exception.) The Trump administration has, as of this writing at least, held its fire — uncharacteristic when a former ally directly criticizes it. It’s easy enough to grasp why in this case: Nobody wants to anger the world’s richest man, especially when he also happens to own and control the world’s most relevant social media site. Perhaps Trump may just let Elon stew online, rather than provoke a MAGA civil war. Perhaps not. Regardless of whether fireworks follow, this was always the way the story was going to end.

  That last link goes to Jeffrey's February post, which was headlined How Elon Musk’s Service to Trump Will Probably, Eventually End. He now reveals that the "Probably" was demanded by his editors. I think he got a bunch of "toldya so" credits.

• Violent rhetoric from local Democrat. New Hampshire House Democratic leader Alexis Simpson talks tough in my lousy local paper: Fight now for NH public schools before it's too late.

  Over the past few months, in Rindge, school officials warned they might need to cut their championship winning sports programs entirely just to balance the budget. In Wolfeboro, part of the ceiling at the high school literally caved in. And in Manchester, the state’s largest school district, administrators say they can’t afford to replace retiring teachers or move forward with long-planned expansions to athletic programs.

  This is not a dystopian projection; it’s happening right now in New Hampshire. While communities are scraping together every last local property tax dollar to keep public schools running, the state is already pouring tens of millions into a school voucher program to pay for private and religious schools with virtually no oversight — even subsidizing private ski passes, music lessons, and undisclosed Amazon and Walmart purchases.

  Yes, it's another broadside against the proposal to expand New Hampshire's Education Freedom Account (EFA) Program. Making the usual arguments. Some observations:

  • Can you read Alexis's first paragraph and not get the niggling thought: "Gee, Rindge, Wolfeboro, and Manchester schools are really poorly managed."
  • Apparently New Hampshire Dems have given up arguing what's good for students and parents. It's all about what's best for "public schools". Not exactly the same thing.
  • Alexis uses the term "voucher" twelve times in her short column. Voucher, voucher, voucher! Apparently, that's a word that focus groups have found has unfavorable connotations among the citizenry.
  • Alexis fails to deal with a pretty obvious point: if "public schools" were doing a decent job of meeting the needs of students and parents, there would be no use of the EFA program. Nobody would bother with the extra work involved.

  Which brings us to our next item.

• Doing less with more. Above, Alexis relies on rabble-rousing rhetoric. At the Josiah Bartlett Center, Andrew Cline has some facts: Per-pupil spending in NH nearly doubles from 2001-2024 as district public schools spend $1.25 billion more on 54,000 fewer students.

  Average per-pupil spending in New Hampshire district public schools has nearly doubled this century, as student enrollment declined sharply and reading and math assessment scores fell, a new Josiah Bartlett Center for Public Policy study finds.

  Total public school district spending in New Hampshire increased by an inflation-adjusted $1.25 billion, or 45%, from 2001-2024 as enrollment fell by 54,381 students, or 26%, state data show.

  The large increase in total spending combined with the large drop in enrollment caused a near doubling of average per-pupil spending, the new study shows. Total per-pupil spending in district public schools rose by an inflation-adjusted 96% from 2001-2024, meaning that the average district public school student in New Hampshire had 96% more in real resources devoted to his or her education in 2024 than in 2001.

  It's not a pretty picture, Emily Alexis.

• I've noticed this mysel… Oh, wait, you said "cents". Max Raskin bids farewell to a small bit of hard money: As We Get Older and Stop Making Cents. (WSJ gifted link)

  It’s wise for the U.S. Mint to stop putting pennies into circulation next year. President Trump’s decision will save taxpayers money: The penny cost about 2 cents to make in 2007, and costs nearly 4 cents today. But the death of the penny says something unfortunate about our economy. The 1-cent piece is an important barometer of monetary health.

  Hard currency is a check on government profligacy. Government prefers cheaply produced money, which has a high seigniorage: the difference between the face value instrument and its production costs. The greater the seigniorage, the more money politicians have to spend. In the U.S., this means a preference for paper bills. According to the U.S. Mint, the production costs of American currency vary from a few cents to print small paper bills to about 15 cents to mint a quarter. Even the costliest greenback, the $100 bill, costs only 9 cents. And the penny has the worst seigniorage of the bunch.

  It will save taxpayers money; but (as I have previously said): it's not a lot of money.

Jeff Maurer turns his substack over to "Deniz Güneş”, [not really] the director of the Center for Public Information at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Deniz posts for an admirable reason: The CDC Would Like to Get Ahead of RFK Junior’s Future Statements.

And there's more. Much more. Deniz tries to cover the obvious bases, but with Junior, who knows?

Also of note:

• Gutting, slashing, cutting, … Reporters are working their thesauri overtime looking for description of budget decreases. Liz Wolfe goes with the G-word: The Gutting of the National Park Service.

  Why should the National Park Service be funding so many sites? And what would happen if some of those properties were transferred to state or tribal management?

  The Trump administration is asking those sensible questions, and is proposing to cut $1.2 billion from the agency's budget, "mainly by shedding sites that it considers too obscure or too local to merit federal management" per Bloomberg. This is a pet issue of mine: It's always been unclear to me why we expect taxpayers across the country to pay for the upkeep and management of so many designated sites, including ones they will never visit and have never heard of. Do you really need to be paying for New York City's Theodore Roosevelt Birthplace National Historic Site? Or North Dakota's Knife River Indian Villages National Historic Site?

  I say this as a nature and history appreciator. My interest is not in having these places razed; it's in making sure the federal government is careful about where its money goes and what's actually in the national interest.

  "The National Park Service (NPS) responsibilities include a large number of sites that are not 'National Parks,' in the traditionally understood sense, many of which receive small numbers of mostly local visitors, and are better categorized and managed as State-level parks," reads a federal memo on the matter. Hear, hear! "The Budget would continue supporting many national treasures, but there is an urgent need to streamline staffing and transfer certain properties to State-level management to ensure the long-term health and sustainment of the National Park system." Though an official list of sites whose management will be shifted is not yet available, Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum (whom you may remember from the 2024 Republican presidential primary) says that only the 63 "crown jewel" national parks will remain under NPS control.

  That link in the second paragraph goes to a story with the headline "Trump Plans to Offload National Park Sites, But States Don’t Want Them". Gee, that's a shame. Maybe auction them off to see if anybody wants them.

  I know: the NPS is one of the more sacred of cows in the federal barnyard, and any discussion of budget cutting will automatically be characterized as putting a waterslide on El Capitan. So I'm not optimistic that's a fight that Burgum will win.

• The nation that controls drone batteries will control the world! Noah Smith sees cause for alarm in Ukraine's drone strike against Russian bombers: How Chinese drones could defeat America. And it quickly turns into a blame-Trumpfest:

  The Ukrainian attack on Russia’s nuclear bombers shows how insane and self-defeating the GOP’s attack on the battery industry is. Batteries were what powered the Ukrainian drones that destroyed the pride of Russia’s air fleet; if the U.S. refuses to make batteries, it will be unable to make similar drones in case of a war against China. Bereft of battery-powered FPV [First-Person Vision] drones, America would be at a severe disadvantage in the new kind of war that Ukraine and Russia have pioneered.

  Unfortunately, Trump and the GOP have decided to think of batteries as a culture-war issue instead of one of national security. They think they’re attacking hippie-dippy green energy, sticking it to the socialist environmentalist kids and standing up for good old red-blooded American oil and gas. Instead, what they’re actually doing is unilaterally disarming America’s future drone force and ceding the key weapon of the modern battlefield to China.

  In any case, unless America’s leaders wake up very quickly to the military importance of batteries, magnets, injection molding, and drones themselves, the U.S. may end up looking like the British Navy in 1941 — or the Italian Navy in 1940. A revolution in military affairs is in process, and America is willfully missing the boat.

  Noah's plenty worried! And (aside from his TDS) he makes some good points. But I would hope that our military bases and warships already have decent defenses against FPV drones. (If not, it's probably time to fire some more generals.)

• Insufficient loyalty to the Dear Leader. In Trump's eyes, that's enough to put the Federalist Society in the Crosshairs. Jonah Goldberg:

  Last week, the Court of International Trade delivered a blow to Donald Trump’s global trade war. It found that the worldwide tariffs Trump unveiled on “Liberation Day” as well his earlier tariffs pretextually aimed at stopping fentanyl coming in from Mexico and Canada (as if) were beyond his authority. The three-judge panel was surely right about the Liberation Day tariffs and probably right about the fentanyl tariffs, but there’s a better case that, while bad policy, the fentanyl tariffs were not unlawful.

  Please forgive a lengthy excerpt of Trump’s response on Truth Social, but it speaks volumes:

  How is it possible for [the CIT judges] to have potentially done such damage to the United States of America? Is it purely a hatred of ‘TRUMP?’ What other reason could it be? I was new to Washington, and it was suggested that I use The Federalist Society as a recommending source on Judges. I did so, openly and freely, but then realized that they were under the thumb of a real ‘sleazebag’ named Leonard Leo, a bad person who, in his own way, probably hates America, and obviously has his own separate ambitions. … In any event, Leo left The Federalist Society to do his own ‘thing.’ I am so disappointed in The Federalist Society because of the bad advice they gave me on numerous Judicial Nominations. This is something that cannot be forgotten!

  Let’s begin with the fact that Trump cannot conceive of a good explanation for an inconvenient court ruling other than Trump Derangement Syndrome. It’s irrelevant that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), the 1977 law the administration invoked to impose the relevant tariffs, does not even mention the word “tariff” or that Congress never envisioned the IEEPA as a tool for launching a trade war with every nation in the world, “Penguin Island” included. Also disregard the fact that the decision was unanimous and only one of the three judges was appointed by Trump (the other two were Reagan and Obama appointees).

  Trump is the foremost practitioner of what I call Critical Trump Theory—anything bad for Trump is unfair, illegitimate, and proof that sinister forces are rigging the system against him. No wonder then that Trump thinks Leonard Leo, formerly a guiding light at the Federalist Society, the premier conservative legal organization, is a “sleazebag” and “bad person.” Note: Leo is neither of those things.

  Uncoincidentally, the WSJ reported on Leonard Leo the other day, and found This Conservative Is Doing Just Fine, Thank You, After Getting Dumped by Trump (WSJ gifted link).

• To make it even more socialistic? Were it not for Jonathan Turley, I probably would not have known what Michael Moore was up to these days. As it turns out, it's baking Pie-Crust Patriotism: Michael Moore Rewrites the Pledge of Allegiance.

  Rev. Francis Bellamy would not likely be won over by the Moore remake. (The phrase “under God” was incorporated later into the Pledge of Allegiance on June 14, 1954). Here is the new version:

  “I pledge allegiance to the people of the United States of America. And to the democracy for which we all stand: One person, one vote, one nation, part of one world, everyone! A seat at the table! Everyone! A slice of the pie! With liberty and justice, equality, and kindness and the pursuit of happiness for all.”

  As an initial matter, I fail to see how the nation is embodied by a run-on sentence that has more exclamation marks than a pre-teen’s text to bffs.

  In case you haven't heard my rant about Pledge: its original author, Francis Bellamy, was a Christian socialist, and inveighed against the evils of capitalism from his Baptist pulpit in Boston. I'm in agreement with Gene Healy's Cato essay What's Conservative about the Pledge of Allegiance?, in which he deemed it "a slavish ritual of devotion to the state, wholly inappropriate for a free people."

I'm sure that serious point is in here somewhere, but there's also an appeal to my inner 14-year-old. Thanks, Remy!

For a flatulence-free explanation, see this March article from Jack Nicastro: What will Trump's strategic crypto reserve look like?

And, yes, Fartcoin is real. For a sufficiently hand-waving definition of "real".

Also of note:

• A newfound respect. Katherine Mangu-Ward's lead editorial in the July issue of Reason is Welcoming Anti-Trump Liberals to the Free Trade Club.

  After decades of shouting into the void that free trade is good, those of us in the "eliminate tariffs, embrace comparative advantage, and let me buy my haggis-flavored chips online without an import tax" crowd are experiencing something that hasn't happened in a while: new friends. Things have been especially lonely in recent years, as the right veered away from offering even lip service to free trade while the left coasted on the fumes of its union-driven protectionist past.

  But a recent poll from the Polarization Research Lab shows those same lefties making a sudden and striking turn. At the start of 2024, liberals and conservatives were nearly identical in their lukewarm support for unrestricted trade—about 20 percent each in favor. Following President Donald Trump's electoral win and renewed protectionist rhetoric, liberal support has more than doubled to over 40 percent.

  And, yes, like Fartcoin, haggis-flavored chips are real. KMW's bottom line:

  If you're ready to get serious about dismantling the tariffs that strangle global exchange, grab a seat. (Or in the immortal words of Mean Girls: "Get in, loser. We're going shopping.") But if you're just here to score points in the tribal partisan war of the moment, don't expect us to hand over the aux cord. You can sit with us and listen—but the playlist is Milton Friedman, Frédéric Bastiat, and David Ricardo. And we're playing it on repeat.

• We haven't said this enough lately. Robert Tracinski writes at Discourse: End the FCC.

  Like free trade, Trump's weaponization has awakened liberals to the danger of "unfettered power" in the executive branch.

  There are many chickens coming home to roost in the second Trump administration. For more than a century, we have been creating weak spots in our constitutional system that pose a huge potential for abuse by a power-hungry chief executive. Now Donald Trump is seeking all of them out and using them.

  Let’s zero in on one particularly dangerous area: his abuse of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), the regulator for the airwaves and therefore for broadcast media.

  Shortly after taking office, Trump went on social media to direct his new FCC chair, Brendan Carr, to punish CBS because Trump didn’t like reports about Ukraine and Greenland on “60 Minutes.” He said that the network “should lose their license,” and he urged Carr to “impose the maximum fines and punishment, which is substantial, for their unlawful and illegal behavior.” The FCC does not license the network itself, as Trump seems to think, but it does control the licenses for the network’s individual local TV stations.

  Robert goes into the long history of FCC abuses, with Trump's only the most recent. His specific proposal: "Shrink it down into a technical office for the registration of broadcast rights." Not quite drowning it in the sink, but that works for me.

• It's not rocket science, but it is physics. Bjorn Lomborg takes to the WSJ to reveal The Physics Behind the Spanish Blackout (WSJ gifted link).

  When a grid failure plunged 55 million people in Spain and Portugal into darkness at the end of April, it should have been a wake-up call on green energy. Climate activists promised that solar and wind power were the future of cheap, dependable electricity. The massive half-day blackout shows otherwise. The nature of solar and wind generation makes grids that rely on them more prone to collapse—an issue that’s particularly expensive to ameliorate.

  Spanish authorities were warned. They kinda knew. They are, even now, averting their eyes.

• This one simple trick will solve everything. Eli Lehrer at the Dispatch advocates Harm Reduction to Heal America.

  Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has claimed that 5G causes cancer. He has alleged that vaccines are part of a vast pharmaceutical industry conspiracy. He’s questioned the safety of fluoridated water, food dyes, and weed killers. Some of his claims are demonstrably false, others speculative, and a few—like the health effects of food additives and ultra-processed diets—deserve a careful look. But set aside the conspiracies for a moment, and Kennedy is onto a real issue: Americans are dying younger not because of poor doctors or bad hospitals, but because of the way they live.

  For all the nation’s medical innovation and spending (both lead the world), U.S. life expectancy currently trails nearly every other wealthy country. An American born today can expect to live about 78.4 years, compared to 81.1 in the United Kingdom, 83.1 in France, and 84.1 in Japan. And the gap isn’t because of less access to care or lower-quality doctors—on measures of medical treatment from cancer to acute hospital care Americans fare much better than the rest of the world.

  And serious research from dozens of sources confirms this. A landmark report from the National Academy of Sciences found that Americans die younger than people in peer nations not because of inadequate medical care, but because they suffer more from what is called “adverse health-related behaviors.” A 2023 study from the Bloomberg American Health Initiative drilled deeper and found that the bulk of the U.S.-U.K. life expectancy gap is explained by just four factors: cardiovascular disease (resulting from obesity and work stress), drug overdoses, car accidents, and gun deaths (overwhelmingly suicides)—all of which are lifestyle- or environment-related, not failings of the health care system. Even where Americans already have made a lifestyle change for the better, they’ve generally done so later than their counterparts in other wealthy countries. Thus, even though American smoking rates today are about average for rich places, the damage resulting from historically higher rates of smoking continues to impact mortality figures.

  Well, that's sobering news. Albeit not sobering enough to get me to stop drinking wine.

  As stated in the headline, Eli recommends "harm reduction", a non-nannying approach to decrease the damage Americans are doing to themselves. He outlines various approaches to ameliorate obesity, opioid addiction, smoking, traffic fatalities, and more. Interesting!

I responded to a recent tweet from my state's (very) senior senator:

Actually... https://t.co/uAzaYOpJSZ

— Paul Sand (@punsalad) June 1, 2025

As an unknown genius observed: "It ain’t so much the things that people don’t know that makes trouble in this world, as it is the things that people know that ain’t so."

Also of note:

• Let's get them on the record. Eric Boehm says Congress must vote on Trump’s tariff policy.

  President Donald Trump's unilateral attempt at imposing tariffs has evolved into a quantum state.

  You probably already know that Trump has repeatedly threatened, imposed, paused, delayed, raised, lowered, and "chickened out" on various tariff plans. In the past 48 hours, things got even crazier. The Court of International Trade blocked most of Trump's tariffs with an injunction issued Wednesday, but that injunction was temporarily paused by a federal appeals court on Thursday. Meanwhile, a second federal court also ruled Thursday that the tariffs are unlawful.

  The tariffs, which constitute one of the largest tax increases in American history, are simultaneously active and unlawful, subject to change at the president's whim, and could be turned off once again within weeks (when the appeals court's temporary stay will be reviewed).

  As of this moment, that means an American importer doesn't know whether it is due a refund for tariffs already paid, or whether it will owe more taxes for the next shipment of goods.

  This is, obviously, no way to run tax policy.

  To be honest, I'm not sure what Eric's "quantum" comment refers to, except both tariff policy and quantum physics use the word "uncertainty" a lot.

• It's where you learn how to be a good party member, I guess. WSJ reporter Chun Han Wong reports Harvard Has Trained So Many Chinese Communist Officials, They Call It Their ‘Party School’ (WSJ gifted link).

  U.S. schools—and one prestigious institution in particular—have long offered up-and-coming Chinese officials a place to study governance, a practice that the Trump administration could end with a new effort to keep out what it says are Chinese students with Communist Party ties.

  For decades, the party has sent thousands of mid-career and senior bureaucrats to pursue executive training and postgraduate studies on U.S. campuses, with Harvard University a coveted destination described by some in China as the top “party school” outside the country.

  It would be nice if they returned to China as dedicated champions of liberty, but there's no evidence that a Harvard education provides that.

• Live not by lies. Jack Butler fantasizes about: The Commencement Address Harvard Needs.

  These ought to be exciting times for attendees of a certain school in Boston. Perhaps one could call Harvard University’s ongoing conflict with the Trump administration exciting. But certainly not in the way that its graduates this year would have expected by the time of their commencement this past Thursday.

  The institution is coping as it knows best: through self-congratulation. Abraham Verghese, this year’s commencement speaker, assured graduates that “more people than you realize are grateful for Harvard for the example it has set” and praised the school’s “clarity in affirming and courageously defending the essential values of this university, and indeed of this nation.”

  [I assume he didn't mention that Harvard was the favorite school of Chinese Communists -- pas]

  Harvard’s attitude is that it has done nothing wrong, either lately, or in the past several decades. This is not the kind of honest introspection that aids the pursuit of the Veritas the school claims to seek. For that, we must turn to a Harvard commencement speaker from decades past. He used the occasion to deliver a righteous philippic that transcended his immediate audience, and the time in which he gave it.

  As you might have guessed, that speaker was Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.

• How about just anti-authoritarian? I read the The UnPopulist, even though it sometimes seems to just be a reflexive anti-Trump site.

  For example, their recent criticism of Trump's efforts to get NPR and PBS off the taxpayer tit didn't really object to Trump's stated rationale, but instead imagined the real reasoning was that those outlets "don't parrot MAGA talking points".

  But this article from self-described Bleeding Heart Libertarian Matt Zwolenski has some thoughtful points: To Fight Authoritarianism, Libertarians Need to be More Pro-Liberty, Not Just Anti-State.

  Recently, the center-left economic blogger Noah Smith apologized to the libertarian movement. This caught me by surprise. My own estimation of that movement, of which I’ve long considered myself a part, has taken a sharp downward turn over the last few years. Lured by a vague hope of deregulation and the more immediate pleasure of sticking it to the woke left, too many libertarians set aside their commitment to the rule of law and soft-peddled Trump’s threat. Some even threw their weight fully behind him. The Libertarian Party in particular experienced a takeover by a reactionary wing and is now an eager foot solider in MAGA’s culture wars against the left, as The Unpopulist has been chronicling.

  So this was a strange moment to be issuing an apology to the libertarian movement when even many libertarians are souring on it. But Noah’s piece was of course not issuing an apology to the MAGAfied libertarian movement or the Libertarian Party but the libertarianism that steadfastly stood for relatively free markets, free trade, and limited government even when these ideas weren’t popular anywhere else on the political spectrum. These commitments played a crucial role in keeping a lid on some rather reactionary right-wing tendencies and left-wing excesses. In his words, “Free-market ideology, for all its flaws, was keeping a lid on the right’s natural impulse toward Peronism” in addition to serving as “the proper foil for progressivism.”

  As I've said before: we'll just have to settle for the simple pleasure of being right about everything, all the time.

Recently on the movie blog:

Observation 1: Well, if you want to see Harrison Ford transform into a CGI Red Hulk, this is probably your only option. On the other hand, if you just want to see Mr. Ford as the US President, I recommend Air Force One instead.

Observation 2: If anger makes you into a Red Hulk, why did Bruce Banner turn into Green Hulk? Overcome by envy?

Observation 3: I watched this the night after I watched Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning. I'll give this movie credit for having a slightly more credible plot.

Observation 4: As it turns out, I really missed some continuity. The major plot driver is the presence of "Celestial Island" in the Indian Ocean made out of the miraculous metal adamantium. Which threatens war between the major powers, the US and … Japan?! It must have landed there in some other Marvel movie I missed. Googling… yeah, probably The Eternals.

Anyway: Sam Wilson, previously the Falcon, is the new Captain America. He's still got his wings, though, aided by Cap's shield. This helps him investigate a nefarious scheme involving President Thaddeus Ross (Mr. Ford), mind control, that adamantium isle, and so on.

Oh, and Liv Tyler shows up. Nice!

At National Review, Michael Washburn requests Sympathy for the Unpublished Young White Male Author (NR gifted link). After some discussion of "Conduit Books", a UK effort to publish "the work of male authors", he gets to the reason some might find such things necessary or desirable:

I discussed this issue a few times in recent years, examples here and here.

Today's data point: of Kirkus Reviews' Best Debut Fiction of 2024 list. Here are titles, authors, and (after a little Googling) my pigeonholing on their race, sex, ethnicity, and other relevant info:

• LET THE GAMES BEGIN by Rufaro Faith Mazarura (Black female, "British Zimbabwean")
• THE MINISTRY OF TIME by Kaliane Bradley (White female from Britain)
• MARTYR! by Kaveh Akbar (Iranian American male)
• GREAT EXPECTATIONS by Vinson Cunningham (Black male)
• HOUSEMATES by Emma Copley Eisenberg (White "American queer writer", apparently uses "she/her" pronouns)
• WHAT KINGDOM by Fine Gråbøl (White female from Denmark)
• JELLYFISH HAVE NO EARS by Adèle Rosenfeld (White female from France)
• HOMBRECITO by Santiago Jose Sanchez ("queer Colombian American writer and artist")
• YR DEAD by sam sax (White guy, lowercased name, self-identified as "a queer, jewish [sic], writer and educator")
• THE HISTORY OF SOUND by Ben Shattuck (Hey, an apparently straight white guy, married to onetime SNL cast member Jenny Slate)
• GOD BLESS YOU, OTIS SPUNKMEYER by Joseph Earl Thomas (Black male)
• THE SAFEKEEP by Yael van der Wouden (Dutch female)
• OURS by Phillip B. Williams (Black male)

I actually read one of those! Report here; executive summary from this Philistine: Meh.

But out of that baker's dozen titles, I count one unambiguously straight, white male. Back in my day, sonny, we'd call that guy a "token".

So (as I said before): aspiring authors who are in the wrong pigeonhole would be advised to have a backup career plan, unless you are married to a Saturday Night Live comic.

I should also mention that there's an attempted rebuttal to the Joseph Savage article linked above by Alex Skopic at Current Affairs: The White Male Writer is Fine, I Promise. It's long, wide-ranging, well-written, and … not that convincing.

Also of note:

• Hey, you got your subtext on my context! Jonah Goldberg writes on Pretext Upon Pretext. And what is a pretext? Jonah has examples from the world of politics:

  In his first term, Donald Trump used Covid as a pretext to deport illegal immigrants. Biden kept that pretext going for a while too. He tried over and over to cancel student loans invoking all sorts of arguments that were just obviously pretextual—including Covid. Biden also used Covid as a pretext for extending a moratorium on rental payments, which Trump had issued on a pretextual basis as well. The rent freeze and eviction ban made sense when the country was on lockdown, but keeping it around long after the lockdowns was simply politics.

  I focus on the Covid stuff because crises are the mother of pretextual politics. In our system, the only time a president has the ability to assume quasi dictatorial powers and subvert the rule of law, checks and balances, etc., is during a national emergency, especially a war.

  This is not new to Trump or Biden. The founders, having lived through the impotence of the federal government under the Articles of Confederation, recognized that the government needed the ability to deal with emergencies. “The circumstances that endanger the safety of nations are infinite, and for this reason no constitutional shackles can wisely be imposed on the power to which the care of it is committed,” Alexander Hamilton writes in Federalist 23.

  And, as, Jonah goes on to note: "[V]irtually the entire agenda of the second Trump administration is grounded in pretextual arguments."

  Contra Jonah, I think there are pretty good arguments for some of the stuff Trump wants to do, like defunding NPR and PBS; the relevant executive order makes those arguments pretty well.

  But on (say) tariffs, Jonah's pretty on target: the crazy-quilt nature of the implementation belies any principled rationale Trump might claim.

• Irony, on the other hand, is alive and well. Andrew Follett claims Another Harvard Scandal Proves That Science Is Broken.

  Aonce-prominent Harvard University professor was stripped of her tenure and fired this week for outright fabricating data on numerous academic studies of dishonesty and unethical behavior. The timing couldn’t be worse for Harvard: The troubled university currently faces a critical dispute over funding and foreign student visas with the Trump administration.

  Francesca Gino was regularly cited as an authority by prominent left-leaning outlets such as National Public Radio and the New York Times. Both outlets now admit that Gino’s research was likely fabricated. Disturbingly, the flaws in her research were exposed not by the allegedly robust university system of peer review, but by a series of posts by science bloggers.

  One can almost imagine ex-prof Gino muttering in her best Scooby-Doo villain voice: "And I would have gotten away with it too, if it wasn't for these blasted science bloggers."

• LFOD shows up at TechDirt. And Tim Cushing's headline is appropriately dirty: Trump, Republicans Have Fucked This Nation So Hard We’ve Created A New Class Of Refugees. It's largely based on this Guardian article we discussed back in April.

  We’ll start with the story of a teacher who abandoned New Hampshire for Vermont because of the state’s efforts to erase critical race theory and other things that might inform students that white doesn’t always mean right.

  John Dube, a high school teacher with 35 years of teaching under his belt, went up against local lawmakers’ attempts to ban CRT theory from being discussed in public schools. This put him in the crosshairs of far right activists, who engaged in a campaign of harassment so worrisome federal and local law enforcement stopped by to warn the teacher of what they had observed online..

  The backlash was instant. Granite Grok, a local rightwing website, posted the names of all New Hampshire signatories, and within hours of that Dube received a Facebook message that read: “Whats up homo? I heard your teaching Marxist commie CRT in your classrooms. You can fuck right off you garbage human.”

  Dube calmly replied that he would not be intimidated.

  Within days, police officers turned up at his house, having been dispatched by the FBI. Dube’s name was circulating on obscure chatrooms frequented by violent militia members. He was urged to install security cameras at home, but when he asked why the police didn’t arrest the perpetrators of the threats, he was told that was impossible on free speech grounds.

  So much for the “Live Free or Die” state. It’s now just the “Fuck Off and Die” state, heavily populated by people who believe your rights (and possibly, your life) end where their beliefs begin.

  Dube has since relocated to Vermont to teach. He’s not the only one fleeing persecution and/or prosecution in his former home state due to legislation passed by Trump sycophant’s or the disturbing actions of those who support Trump and his rampant destruction of constitutional rights.

  I won't repeat my previous comments here, except: (1) it's regrettable that people can get harassed for their political beliefs, although (2) the harassment in Dube's case didn't appear to rise to the "true threat" level that would trigger law enforcement; and (3) Dube seems to have made his Vermont getaway during the Biden Administration. Tim's effort to link it to Trump is kind of stretchy.

  I'll also note that most data on interstate migration flows typically show a net inflow to New Hampshire, and an outflow from Vermont. How many "refugees"?

Recently on the movie blog:

Pun Son and I trundled down to the Regal Cinemas in Newington (NH) to see what Tom hath wrought. No major surprises, but I was impressed with the stunts and special effects.

I usually report on the plot, but I will not do so here. Suffice to say: it's unbelievably ludicrous, just a framework to hang the action scenes on. It's a sequal to the previous franchise entry; my report on that is here. That entry was two hours and 43 minutes, and I said it could use some tightening up; this one is two hours and 49 minutes, and… ditto. (You might think that the movie is winding up, but then you correct yourself: no, they haven't done the biplane thing yet.)

Still, it was fun, and I enjoyed the epicness of it. There's a sweet connection to the very first movie in the series, which I liked as well.