Sep
9
2025

Junior: Quack, Junkie, or Loon?

We have a diversity of opinion on that issue today! Mr. Ramirez seems to be leaning toward "quack."

On the other hand, Kevin D. Williamson examines Kennedy's Junkie Thinking:

If you want to get clear about the chaos over at Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Department of Health and Human Services, I have an explanation that seems to me to have at least some utility, though many readers will find it mean-spirited or cranky: A big part of the problem is that there is a junkie in charge.

One of the things you will learn if you spend enough time around drug addicts is that the controlling variable isn’t the drug but the addict. Another way of expressing that—and I would like to communicate this with all necessary charity but with no more charity than is necessary, inasmuch as clarity is here paramount—is that a heroin addict becomes a heroin addict owing to factors that have less to do with the character of opiate and opioid drugs than with the character of the man or woman in question. It is much the same with other intoxicants: About six and a half years of my life are pretty blurry (alas, some moments are not as blurry as I would prefer!), a fact that is only incidentally related to the chemical composition of Wild Turkey 101 but much more directly related to the psychological and moral composition of your obedient correspondent, who has a terrible habit of going through life as though everything worth doing were worth overdoing.

Jeff Maurer is, on the third hand, wistful. Things could have worked out better If Only There Had Been Signs That RFK Jr. Is Nuts.

It appears that some Senators feel duped. In his confirmation hearing, Kennedy said that he’s not anti-vaccine, but he’s implemented several anti-vaccine measures at HHS: He cancelled funding for mRNA vaccines, stopped ads for flu vaccines, and fired the entire 17-member panel that sets vaccine schedules and is replacing them with vaccine skeptics. Kennedy is acting like someone influenced by fringe anti-vaccine conspiracies — if only there had been signs that he’s an unqualified loon with out-of-the-mainstream views. You can’t blame Senators for giving Kennedy their vote when there were no clues whatsoever that he might have a screw loose.

Of course…I mean…if you want to be really thorough — if you want to pick though Kennedy’s past with a fine-tooth comb — I suppose an extreme skeptic could find one or two subtle indications that Kennedy might not be playing with a full deck.

For example, there’s the fact that a worm ate his brain. According to Kennedy, doctors found a parasite that had crawled into his head, eaten part of his brain, and then died. But that’s not really odd behavior by Kennedy — that’s odd behavior by the worm. You’re supposed to eat dirt, dumb worm! It’s not Kennedy’s fault that a parasite chowed down on his frontal cortex like a football team at a pig pickin’, and trying to infer something about Kennedy’s makeup from that data point is pure partisanship.

If only … um, maybe the quacking duck, or a loon, had been early enough to get that worm… no, sorry, I can't make that work.

Also of note:

  • We need 'em more than ever. At Cato, Chris Edwards looks at Billionaires. He is inspired by a graphic-heavy WSJ story: America Has 1,135 Billionaires. Here’s What We Know About Them. (WSJ gifted link)

    What Chris would like you to know up front:

    The Journal finds that two-thirds of US billionaires have self-made wealth, while just one-third inherited much, or all, of it. Ryan Bourne and I came to similar conclusions in our study on wealth. Generally, American billionaires build their wealth by succeeding in finance, technology, real estate, manufacturing, retail, and other competitive industries. Most of America’s wealthiest people are entrepreneurs who built their fortunes.

    More good news is that the share of America’s wealthiest people who are self-made has risen. Figure 1 shows that the self-made share of the Forbes 400 wealthiest Americans increased from 40 percent in 1982 to 67 percent by 2024. That increase reflects beneficial dynamism in our economy. There has also been a large turnover in the top 400 over time as new business innovations and fortunes supplant past ones. 

    Whether you're driven by mere curiosity or base envy, both worth reading.

    Fun fact: there's only one Rockefeller among the 1135 billionaires.

  • You're not seriously claiming that ideological bias could be in play here, are you? Becket Adams wonders: Where’s the Critical Coverage of Left-Wing Conspiracy Theorists? And the latest example: "the Donald death-watch hysteria."

    A family member remarked last weekend that she heard President Trump had died. Neither my sister-in-law nor I had any idea what this was about, but we soon found our answer. The more deranged and self-harming corners of left-wing social media evidently decided that the president had died and that the public was being kept in the dark. The conspiracy theory went viral, escaping the echo chambers of X etc. and landing in the laps of nonpolitical types such as my family member.

    Trump is not dead, by the way.

    By any objective standard, this trending topic was completely batty. It’s ridiculous that anyone believed the president had quietly died and that “influencers” somehow knew about it, in spite of the White House’s supposed efforts to hide “the truth.” It’s crazier that these rantings crossed over into civil discourse.

    It’s also deeply annoying that the left’s obviously alarming behavior will once again escape the scrutiny that the media traditionally apply to similarly alarming delusions from the far right.

    As I type, deep thinkers at MSM strongholds are probably wondering how they can talk about QAnon some more.

  • Come on, it's not that hard. But nevertheless, Sean Malone's report is titled The Hard Truth About the Abolition of Slavery.

    British satirist and cultural commentator Konstantin Kisin — author of An Immigrant’s Love Letter to the West (2022) — recently shared a debate clip from Doha, Qatar, in which he made a simple observation: Slavery has existed in every human society and across the whole of human history. 

    It’s a statement so uncontroversial it should have, at most, drawn some polite nods. Instead, it provoked gasps, giggles, boos, and tut-tuts from the hostile audience (see below).

    [Amazon Link]
    (paid link)

    This runs against all sorts of woke narratives, and Sean mentions a few.

    That includes a book I'm currently reading, Capitalism and its Critics by John Cassidy (Amazon link at your right). At 624 pages, it's a slog, but I'll put up a report on the book blog at some point. I'll be watching to see if Cassidy (eventually) recognizes that two capitalist nations, Britain and the US, took the lead in stomping out slavery worldwide.

  • A mind is a terrible thing to change. But President Trump seems to have managed it, as Jeff Luse notes: Trump called Biden's $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill 'terrible.' Now he's pretending he signed it.

    When Democrats pushed the $1.2 trillion Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL) through Congress in 2021—with hardly any bipartisan support—Donald Trump warned Republicans not to vote for it. "Patriots will never forget!" said Trump, who described the bill as "a loser for the USA, a terrible deal, and makes the Republicans look weak, foolish, and dumb."

    Patriots may never forget, but it appears that Trump—who is now taking credit for projects funded by the bill—has.

    Under the Biden administration, many project sites sponsored by the BIL displayed signs crediting former President Joe Biden and his infrastructure law for funding the job. In recent months, these signs have been changed to predominantly credit Trump for making these projects happen, reports The New York Times.

    Which reminds me of this sign I snapped last year:

    I was pretty nasty about it back then, and I'd like to think I'd be equally nasty about Trump.