Pun Salad

George F. Will tries to find a pony in all the… well, you know that joke: On the bright side, maybe Democrats and Republicans will be chastened. That's a gifted link, so click away. Skipping down to the tariff stuff:

Samuelson was wrong about some big things (like the economic performance of the USSR), but he was right about Ricardo.

Also of note:

• Oh, right. It's Game Day. Dave Barry answers Frequently Asked Questions About The Super Bowl. And the insights of Dave's two-year-old daughter, Sophie, about a televised football game:

  Sophie watched it for only a few minutes, but in that brief time she was able to grasp the essence of the sport of football, as follows:

  — When the players went to the line of scrimmage, she said: "Ready!"

  — When they ran a play, she said: "Fall down!"

  — When a player got injured, she said: "Boo-boo."

  That's really it. Football has three components: Ready, Fall Down and Boo-boo. In between these components there are team meetings, called "huddles," and timeouts that can last as long as dental school, and — if it's a really important game — Taylor Swift. But these are just fillers; without them the game would be over in ten minutes and there would be no mechanism for showing billions of dollars worth of TV commercials.

  I'd add, for when the zebras throw a flag: "UH-Oh". But, like Samuelson, Sophie had the big things right.

• Four words often preceding a bad decision: "Let's make this interesting." George F. Will (yes, again, so sue me) on gambling: Here comes the betting and fretting. Many sage observations, including:

  In the 1630s, Massachusetts Puritans, who disliked the innate human desire to play, passed a law against gambling. Fourteen decades later, George Washington deplored his soldiers’ rampant gambling at Valley Forge. He liked, however, the lottery that helped finance construction in the city that bears his name. Lotteries also helped fund the Jamestown settlement, the Continental Army, Dartmouth, Harvard and Princeton.

  The pursuit of wealth without work is naughty but not new. And most sports betting probably is done as much in pursuit of amusement as of money.

  I did some betting at DraftKings back in 2021. Came out ahead, and walked away.

• I'd bet against this, though. John McWhorter urges us to keep the baby while tossing the bathwater: DEI Must Change.

  In combating DEI, Donald Trump is doing the right thing. In that sentence I just wrote, I almost choked writing the six final words. But it is what I believe. A stopped clock is right twice a day, and it is high time America engaged in an honest conversation about this business called Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.

  However, the actual substance of Trump’s Executive Order “Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing” reveals—big surprise—a smash of the knout, a coarse, unreflective bleat in the guise of statecraft. Getting DEI right while retaining the moral sophistication our nation is capable of will require actions much more specific—intelligent, even.

  John admits that DEI has strayed down the wrong anti-white, anti-male path. He thinks (however) that is a recently-developed flaw, and the "baby in the bathwater" is Affirmative Action, as imagined by LBJ back in the 1960s.

  I'm not so sure. Ideally, we can all get behind the concept he champions: "People should be given a fair shake regardless of sex or color." But for decades, that goal has been sullied with quotas and unfair social engineering.

  But see what you think. John's pretty smart, and I'm not.

• Words from one in a position to know. Betsy DeVos was Trump's Secretary of Education, 2017-2021. And she takes to the Free Press to argue that we: Shut Down the Department of Education.

  She eloquently describes the dance I have called the "D.C. Shuffle":

  The Department of Education does not run a single school. It does not employ any teachers in a single classroom. It doesn’t set academic standards or curriculum. It isn’t even the primary funder of education—quite the opposite. In most states, the federal government represents less than 10 percent of K–12 public education funding.

  So what does it do? It shuffles money around; adds unnecessary requirements and political agendas via its grants; and then passes the buck when it comes time to assess if any of that adds value.

  Here’s how it works: Congress appropriates funding for education; last year, it totaled nearly $80 billion. The department’s bureaucrats take in those billions, add strings and red tape, peel off a percentage to pay for themselves, and then send it down to state education agencies. Many of them do a version of the same and then send it to our schools. The schools must then pay first for administrators to manage all the requirements that have been added along the way. After all that, the money makes it to the classroom to help a student learn—maybe.

  I don't know how likely it is, but a guy can dream.

Recently on the book blog:

The official title of this book is Robert B. Parker's Hot Property. With those first three words being the largest font on the cover. This is a convention the books have followed ever since other authors took over writing duties after Mr. Parker died fifteen years ago.

So to clarify the title: the property in question was not owned by Mr. Parker. (It is, in fact, not a house either, let alone one on fire.)

So this convention is confusing and lame. But (sigh) I assume it's been focus grouped as an optimal way to squeeze the maximum amount of cash from people (like me) who remember Mr. Parker fondly, designed to take cold advantage of our weird psychological urge to find out what's up with our favorite fictional characters. Like Spenser, Mr. Parker's ageless wisecracking private investigator.

So I e-plunked down $14.99 for the Kindle version.

An opening act has Spenser and (the equally ageless) Hawk visiting a cad who's been hassling Rita Fiore, a beautiful, libidinous defense attorney who's also one of Spenser's longtime friends. But then Rita is near-fatally shot. The cops (Quirk, Belson) are on the case. But Spenser and Hawk are too. And others from the Parker universe soon join in: Susan, Henry Cimoli, Vinnie Morris, even Jesse Stone. It takes a village.

(Which is something Spenser says on page 283.)

Eventually, it becomes evident that there's a tie between Rita's shooting and the drowning, allegedly accidental, of a charismatic politician, one of Rita's (many) ex-lovers. And (finally) there's a connection to the titular Hot Property, down in Southie, on which some shady folks want to build a casino. (Widett Circle, which turns out to be an actual place.)

Plenty of suspects. And more bodies pile up. The bad guys seem to think the easiest way to get what they want is to shoot people who might be problematic.

It's pretty formulaic. Doesn't matter, I've been hooked.

Stylistic note: the largest Boston paper is referred to throughout as "The Globe". "The" italicized with an uppercase T. That looks weird to me! I would have thought it more conventional to say "the Globe": lowercase t, "the" unitialicized. Any editorial mavens want to weigh in on this?