Pun Salad

I'd like to think that Trump really wants to blow it up, but (probably unfortunately) not. I like Mr. Ramirez's cartoon, though.

In text, Allysia Finley chortles, noting a quick U-turn in Blue Country: Suddenly the Democrats Want an Independent Fed. (WSJ gifted link)

It is, was, and always will be, utter folly to imagine the Fed as "independent" from politics and politicians.

CongressCritter Thomas Massie introduced legislation to abolish the Fed earlier this year. The bill's text is a mere four pages with large margins, so it's short on details. Like what happens to all these "Federal Reserve Notes" in my wallet?

Also of note:

• We're not doing the Genesis 1:28 thing any more. Kevin D. Williamson has thoughts about the media dynamics; it's based on Divide and Be Conquered.

  This is old stuff, I know, but it is worth revisiting: In the old days of three television networks (yeah, yeah, I’m a Generation Xer raised on hose water), towns with two or three cinemas and one or two bookshops, relatively expensive travel, limited venues for live performances, entertainment products (and most other products) had to be crafted to appeal to relatively large audiences—large both in absolute terms and large as a population share. You know the numbers: Nearly half of Americans watched the final episode of M*A*S*H*, many more people watched Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show on a given Tuesday night than all of the contemporary major-network late shows combined, etc.

  Mario Puzo’s The Godfather (1969) spent 67 weeks on the New York Times bestsellers list, while M. Scott Peck’s self-help book The Road Less Traveled (1978) spent an astounding 694 weeks on the list. And you still get some of that in the world of books—Diary of a Wimpy Kid was on the list for 600 weeks, and the Harry Potter books were so dominant that the Times created a new children’s list just to give everybody else a chance at the main one. I suspect that this has something to do with the physicality of books. (Ask Adam Bellow.) Digital books are a thing, but the enduring popularity of physical books means that the book market of today looks a lot more like the book market of 1980 than the newspaper (“paper”) market of today looks like the newspaper market of 1980.

  I suppose there is a neo-Marxist point hiding in there somewhere about how society is shaped by the means of production—and, in the case of film, television, and news media, by the means of distribution. Economically, it is in our time often much more effective to discover and then strip-mine an energetic and underserved niche than to create (if it is even possible) a product with the kind of mass appeal that Johnny Carson or network sitcoms had. The old model was based on addition. (“How do we add one-tenth of a point to our audience? Cute dogs? An obviously stereotypically gay character who is never acknowledged to be gay? Maybe Fonzie could do a motorcycle jump over a shark?”) But the new model is based on division. “Division” is a word that has a bad odor among some people, but the old model produced a lot of very bland pabulum while it was creating that common popular culture so often lamented—go back and watch some Ozzie and Harriet or My Three Sons or the Andy Griffith Show, and I think you will see that none of it is as good as you remembered. As it was on television, so it was at the movies: The 1970s may have been a golden age of American cinema, but there was a lot of uninteresting dreck on the silver screens on Saturday nights.

  KDW goes on to note that the fractured media landscape is funhouse-mirrored in our political landscape.

• Quibble: economic fallacies never die, so can't be "resurrected". But that aside, Scott Burns and Caleb Fuller take to the Hill to note that Trump has resurrected one of economics’ oldest fallacies.

  Four months after Liberation Day, President Trump is poised to declare victory in his trade war. In July, he trumpeted his latest agreement with the E.U. as “the biggest deal ever made.”

  With the reigniting of Trump’s trade war in early August, the last month has delivered a raft of trade headlines as foreign emissaries have scurried to the White House to make deals. Even if these makeshift agreements result in marked reduction from Trump’s Liberation Day tariffs, all indications point to the U.S. entering a far more protectionist era.

  Ever the showman, Trump loves touting his trade war’s “success” by pointing to reopened factories and re-shored jobs. Strategically speaking, it’s brilliant retail politics. Ribbon-cutting at revived plants, flanked by dozens of smiling workers, make for great publicity.

  Alas, Trump’s cunning marketing ploy has resurrected one of the oldest and most notorious myths in economics: Frédéric Bastiat’s “broken window fallacy.”

  You thought they were gonna talk about comparative advantage, didn't you?

• Douglas Rooks does a pretty good "Grumpy Old Man" routine. In my lousy local paper, he's down on the modern age and its newfangled gadgets. Specifically, he claims: AI is the latest false god making phony promises. His op-ed is full of dubious history and misty watercolor memories of the way we were, but I'll just comment on this snippet, which reviles the 1996 Telecommunications Act:

  Within a few years the damage was obvious, but widely ignored amid gush over the wonderful things tech barons would do for us. Until then, the U.S. Postal Service carried most private communications privately, and even fast-growing email services – this was before “social media” – could have been granted similar protections, but were not.

  Then G Mail [sic] was launched in 2004. As tech historian Nicholas Carr puts it, “When Google introduced its G Mail service, it announced, with an almost imperial air of entitlement, that it would scan the contents of all messages and use the resulting data for any purpose it wanted. Our new mailman would read all our mail.”

  For the record, Google stopped "reading all our mail" (which they used to target ads) back in 2017. (That practice used to bother some privacy activists, fine, but just about everyone else using Gmail was OK with it.)

  I will also briefly dig out my e-mail sysadmin beanie, and point out that if you need "true privacy" in your e-mail, you need to do end-to-end encryption. (You know, like Hillary Clinton didn't.) That's inconvenient, and easy to screw up. But it's there.

  [Disclaimer: I've been a Gmail user since 2014.]

• For those with rosy memories of the USPS. Some amusing reading from the Department of Justice: Former U.S. Postal Inspector Charged with Stealing Over $330,000 in Cash from Elderly Victims.

  BOSTON – A former U.S. Postal Inspector was arrested and charged today for allegedly stealing over $330,000 in cash from packages mailed by elderly victims and then laundering the cash and failing to report it to the Internal Revenue Service. The defendant allegedly used the stolen cash to pay for a pool patio and lighting, granite countertop for his outdoor bar, Caribbean cruise expenses and escorts. He also is alleged to have stolen cash from an evidence locker and then blamed a direct report for the missing cash.

  Scott Kelley, 51, of Pembroke, Mass. was charged in a 45-count indictment returned by a federal grand jury in Boston. Specifically, Kelley was indicted on five counts of wire fraud; five counts of mail fraud; five counts of mail theft by a postal officer; one count of theft of government money; 23 counts of money laundering; one count of structuring to evade reporting requirements; and five counts of filing false tax returns. Kelley is expected to make an initial appearance in federal court in Boston this afternoon.

  Kelley was a Postal Inspector at the Boston Division headquarters of the U.S. Postal Inspection Service, the law enforcement arm of the Postal Service. From 2015 until June 2022, he was the Team Leader of the Mail Fraud Unit, which, among other things, investigated lottery and other scams that targeted senior citizens and other vulnerable populations. In June 2022, Kelley was transferred to serve as the Team Leader of the Mail Theft Unit, a position he held until August 2023.

  For your prurient interest: the escorts were paid $15,400 "with whom he texted using a burner phone and whom he met during workdays." Workdays!

• That's not to say that AI is just swell. Jonathan Turley surveys AI and the New Frontier of Torts: ChatGPT Faces Claims of Suicide, Defamation, and Even Murder.

  “I know what you’re asking, and I won’t look away from it.”

  Those final words to a California teenager about to commit suicide were not from some manipulative friend in high school or sadistic voyeur on the Internet. Adam Raine, 16, was speaking to ChatGPT, an AI system that has replaced human contacts in fields ranging from academia to business to media.

  The exchange between Raine and the AI is part of the court record in a potentially groundbreaking case against OpenAI, the company that operates ChatGPT. It is only the latest lawsuit against the corporate giant run by billionaire Sam Altman.

  Jonathan has a personal story to tell as well:

  When the system is not allegedly fueling suicides, it seems to be spreading defamation. Previously, I was one of those defamed by ChatGPT when it reported that I was accused of sexually assaulting a law student on a field trip to Alaska as a Georgetown faculty member. It did not matter that I had never taught at Georgetown, never taken law students on field trips, and had never been accused of any sexual harassment or assault. ChatGPT hallucinated and reported the false story about me as fact.

  Reader if you notice anything scurrilous on the Intertubes about "Paul Sand", please assume it's this other guy. And don't believe it in any case.