Pun Salad

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.