Jun
6
2025

As the Prophet Remy Foresaw…

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

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!