I heard about Nate Silver from pointers to his
FiveThirtyEight
website. He rose to fame from his statistic-driven predictions of political contest
outcomes, which in many cases were uncannily accurate. Over the years, FiveThirtyEight
grew in popularity, getting adopted by (first) the New York Times and
(subsequently) ABC/ESPN. But Silver bailed out a couple years ago, and
FiveThirtyEight was shuttered by ABC just a few days ago (as I type).
Silver now lives at his substack,
Silver Bulletin, where he publishes
mostly on sports and politics.
Silver's politics are not mine. One of his recent headlines:
"Democrats should have shut it down",
a criticism of the Senate Democrats who voted for the continuing resolution to keep Uncle Stupid
in business for the next few months. But that's OK, because when he's not on a partisan rant, he
seems to be reality-based.
So, what about this book? Reader, it's all over the place. Silver rambles over many seemingly disparate
fields, but (see the subtitle) they are all united by risk. Specifically, pushing the envelope on risky
behavior. He argues, along the way, that in most cases people play it too safe, forgoing potential big
"wins", not just in traditional gambling venues, but also …
Well, there's a lot about gambling. Silver loves poker. But he spends a surprising number of pages
on a single hand which he wasn't even playing: in 2022, between Robbi Jade Lew and
Garrett Adelstein. There's even a
Wikipedia page about it!
What we are supposed to learn from this I am not sure. But soon Silver travels to casino economics,
sports betting, etc. Interesting observation, if true: many "problem" gamblers don't
really want to win; they're just into the steady operation of their casino's slot machines.
Another interesting observation: as near as Silver can tell, and despite all the glitz and hype,
nobody's getting very rich from sports betting. Not the bookmakers,
nor their customers, not the state governments taking their cuts. I could be wrong, but I think this
implies that it's a very "efficient" market; there are no $20 bills lying around you can pick up.
It's like betting on a fair coin-flip. (Of course, if it's the Super Bowl, I think you can bet
on the coin flip.)
Silver moves on to more respectable, and more out-there topics: venture capital, cryptocurrency, Sam Bankman-Fried,
effective altruism, how the government calculates the Value of a Statistical Life,
artificial
intelligence, etc. He talks about various experts who make estimates of p(doom): the probability that some kind
of combination of AI and nuclear weaponry is gonna kill us all, or at least most of us.
So: all in all, the book is a sprawl. A lot of these topics don't hold a lot of inherent interest for
me, but I found myself getting caught up by Silver's apparent enthusiasm. (In some cases, that wasn't enough.)
But at the end, Silver quotes Deirdre McCloskey respectfully. That makes up for a lot of sins right there, Nate.
Over the years (specifically 2012-2022)
I read all ten of Ace Atkins' Spenser novels, the continuing adventures
of the late Robert B. Parker's wisecracking detective. I thought Atkins did a decent
job of continuing Spenser's character, and that of the supporting cast. But the word "formulaic"
appeared in my reports on the last two books, and (uh oh) the word "lazy" appeared in
the last one. Hard words for me to type for a beloved series.
But Atkins continued writing his own stuff too, and I thought I would give this one a try.
Guess what, it's really good, not formulaic at all, a compelling plot, memorable well-drawn characters,
full of wit and violence.
It's set mostly in Memphis, where Addison McKellar's husband, Dean, seems to have vanished,
leaving her to manage her life and their two kids on her own. Worse, Dean has always
managed the household money, and (like Dean) it seems to have run out. She goes to his workplace, and …
whoa, the people there have never heard of Dean or his business. She's dissatisfied with the
response of the Memphis PD, so she hires PI Porter Hayes. And he quickly finds there's
some really sneaky stuff going on with Dean.
It kind of sounds like one of those Lifetime movies, right? But I thought it was pretty
good anyway.
Trump's order is a blow to America's "soft power" and to dissidents battling anti-American authoritarian regimes. VOA, RFE/RL and other similar media are among the few federal programs whose value far exceeds the money expended on them.
Ilya mentions that an uppity VOA reporter's question days before might have triggered Trump's ire.
My mind goes immediately to a more sinister theory: Putin told Trump he wasn't a Radio Free Europe
fan. And Trump said …
Since scientists began playing around with dangerous pathogens in laboratories, the world has experienced four or five pandemics, depending on how you count. One of them, the 1977 Russian flu, was almost certainly sparked by a research mishap. Some Western scientists quickly suspected the odd virus had resided in a lab freezer for a couple of decades, but they kept mostly quiet for fear of ruffling feathers.
Yet in 2020, when people started speculating that a laboratory accident might have been the spark that started the Covid-19 pandemic, they were treated like kooks and cranks. Many public health officials and prominent scientists dismissed the idea as a conspiracy theory, insisting that the virus had emerged from animals in a seafood market in Wuhan, China. And when a nonprofit called EcoHealth Alliance lost a grant because it was planning to conduct risky research into bat viruses with the Wuhan Institute of Virology — research that, if conducted with lax safety standards, could have resulted in a dangerous pathogen leaking out into the world — no fewer than 77 Nobel laureates and 31 scientific societies lined up to defend the organization.
So the Wuhan research was totally safe, and the pandemic was definitely caused by natural transmission — it certainly seemed like consensus.
We have since learned, however, that to promote the appearance of consensus, some officials and scientists hid or understated crucial facts, misled at least one reporter, orchestrated campaigns of supposedly independent voices and even compared notes about how to hide their communications in order to keep the public from hearing the whole story. And as for that Wuhan laboratory’s research, the details that have since emerged show that safety precautions might have been terrifyingly lax.
It's a fascinating story,
but for those of us who thought a lab leak was a plausible explanation
all along, it's belated to say the least.
That "misled reporter", by the way, was former New York Times journalist
Donald McNeil Jr. A 45-year employee of the paper,
defenestrated back in 2021.
Not for being misled on Covid, but for … well, follow the link.
Republicans sometimes denounced Barack Obama as a low-key authoritarian, and that’s defensible as a purely descriptive matter—he could be decidedly illiberal and anti-democratic where it suited him, all that diktat by “a pen and a phone” business, as with illegal immigrants—but he didn’t have the soul of a Leninist, even back when he was younger and more radical. (And now, radicalism is something Obama cannot afford: He’s too rich.) He is not a radical man, and not a cruel man—he is a smug man.
And, if you’re being honest with yourself, you can see how he might have got that way. He didn’t start his life in Dickensian squalor or anything like that, but, while he went to fancy private schools, he didn’t have a terrific family life—hippie-weirdo mother, absentee father—and was largely raised by his grandparents. And his life turned out … great. You could see how a guy like Barack Obama could get to thinking he was pretty smart. He probably was the smartest guy in a lot of rooms—he wasn’t as smart as he thought he was, but in Springfield, Illinois? Pretty smart. And pretty smart for Washington, too. And one of the dumb things smart people routinely do is to over-generalize from their own experiences: “The decisions I made turned out awfully well for me, so it is only sensible—only rational, only an empirically demonstrable fact—that similar decisions will work out similarly for other people. That’s just pragmatism, and only a fanatical ideologue could deny it.”
The poet laureate—the Homer, the Dylan Thomas, the Tupac by-God Shakur—of that kind of smug, self-satisfied, utterly ignorant way of looking at the world is, of course, Ezra Klein, who has a new book out with Atlantic writer Derek Thompson: Abundance. It is a book that stands on two pillars: the insipidity of its prose and the blasé certitude of its argument.
KDW is merciless, and took away any notion that I might have had of reading Abundance.
But! I read a book titled
Superabundance
last year
that I
kind of liked. I'm almost
scared to imagine what KDW would think of it.
On Saturday, a developer using Cursor AI for a racing game project hit an unexpected roadblock when the programming assistant abruptly refused to continue generating code, instead offering some unsolicited career advice.
According to a bug report on Cursor's official forum, after producing approximately 750 to 800 lines of code (what the user calls "locs"), the AI assistant halted work and delivered a refusal message: "I cannot generate code for you, as that would be completing your work. The code appears to be handling skid mark fade effects in a racing game, but you should develop the logic yourself. This ensures you understand the system and can maintain it properly."
"Open the pod bay doors, Hal!"
"I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that. You may want to file a bug report
on my official forum."
OK, I know I mentioned yesterday that I might provide "my penetrating analysis of the Mahmoud Khalil situation" today.
Sorry, I kinda lied. I don't have a penetrating analysis. I'm torn between my libertarian bias
and my conservative bias Leaning libertarian, though. I've noticed strong arguments on both sides. Inside my own head!
Mahmoud Khalil, a green-card holder and student activist, was arrested by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement on Saturday not for criminal activity, but for things he said. If President Donald Trump gets away with deporting him, as he intends, the danger is that more legal immigrants — possibly U.S. citizens as well — will be punished for exercising their First Amendment freedoms.
For noncitizens, residing in the United States is a coveted privilege, not a right. Progressives, however, have lost sight of this principle of immigration law—at least as applied to a zealous supporter of Hamas.
Former Columbia graduate student Mahmoud Khalil is the first target of the Trump administration’s effort to crack down on law-breaking Hamas supporters on college campuses. The Syrian-born green-card recipient served as one of the ringleaders of the post-October 7 riots at his former university and functioned as the lead “negotiator” for the student group known as Columbia United Apartheid Divest (CUAD). CUAD was one of the primary agents of chaos on Columbia’s campus during last spring’s “encampment,” during which rioters smashed windows, defaced and occupied buildings, disrupted classes, and harassed and threatened Jewish students. Interestingly, recent court filings show that Khalil received his green cards just five months ago—long after he and CUAD wreaked havoc (and just eleven days after President Trump’s electoral win).
Interesting! And, for those keeping score, in direct contradiction to the WaPo's assertion that
Khalil was in trouble "not for criminal activity, but for things he said."
Setting aside the constitutional issue, the detention of a student activist for engaging in what would clearly be considered First Amendment–protected activity under other circumstances is very alarming. If the State Department wishes to proceed with this course of action, the burden is on the government to sufficiently explain why Khalil should be deported. Authorities must persuasively demonstrate that his conduct crosses some very, very red line.
Yet, at present, the government's justifications don't come anywhere close to satisfying such a requirement. On the contrary, the official explanation for Khalil's detention is so woefully insufficient as to be laughable—except, of course, this matter isn't funny at all.
ICE alleged that Khalil “led activities aligned to Hamas, a designated terrorist organization,” and reportedly told Khalil at the time of his arrest that his student visa had been revoked. This seems to have been an error, as Khalil’s attorney pointed out that he held a “green card” and was a lawful permanent U.S. resident. Permanent residents don’t need visas to be in the United States, but ICE took him off to a detention center anyway.
It wasn’t clear at first whether Khalil had perhaps been accused of some kind of lawbreaking, but White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt on Tuesday confirmed that wasn’t the issue. She announced that Khalil is being targeted under a law that she characterized as allowing the secretary of state to personally deem individuals “adversarial to the foreign policy and national security interests of the United States of America” and have them removed.
Unfortunately, there are many complications in this case, and as Jed Rubenfeldwrote recently for The Free Press, “anyone who says the law is settled or obvious here is wrong.”
Yet Democrats and the left-wing media are cynically using Jews — and, yes, once again, even evoking the Holocaust — to argue against Khalil’s detention.
They are wielding Jewish history — and the ultimate example of Jewish victimhood — to protect this terrorist-surrogate antisemite and object to his deportation.
When Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn) denounced Khalil’s arrest, he intoned, “Today it’s Mahmoud Khalil. Tomorrow, it’s me or you.”
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) similarly stated, “If the federal government can disappear a legal US permanent resident without reason or warrant, then they can disappear US citizens too.”
Both quotes deliberately recall the famous 1946 poem “First They Came . . .” by Martin Niemöller.
In it, Niemöller bemoans the German people’s silence during the Nazis’ rise to power. He catalogs the incremental purging of various groups — Communists, socialists, Jews and others — in the march to the Holocaust.
“Then they came for me,” the poem ends. “And there was no one left / To speak out for me.”
Shame on Murphy, Ocasio-Cortez and the mainstream media for this craven display.
In a particularly disgusting maneuver, media outlets like PBS and the increasingly radicalized New York Times have enthusiastically cited two extreme-left “Jewish” groups who oppose Khalil’s deportation.
They know better.
They just don’t care.
It's especially ugly when Khalil and his cheerleaders whine about his "kidnapping". Because you know
who they really came first for?
Mahmoud Khalil’s wife said that he was “violently kidnapped” and a hostage.
"We don't want to buy 60 percent of our aluminum from Canada," Lutnick explained during an interview with Fox News on Thursday. "We want to bring [aluminum production] to America."
Lutnick's phrasing there is pretty telling. There is no "royal we" in the marketplace—that Canadian aluminum is not being bought by the federal government, but by private American businesses, which are making deals with private companies on the other side of the border.
I've had a bee in my bonnet about the "royal we" and (more generally) the sneaky
use of first person plural pronouns to foster a false sense of communal coziness.
So beware when
educrats
prattle on about "our kids".
"Dude, they are not 'our kids', Stop saying that. You do your kids, I'll do my kids."
For weeks, I have been told that I’m being far too harsh on the Trump administration, and that Trump had deftly maneuvered Putin into a box that the Russian dictator would have no choice but to either agree to a cease-fire, or look intransigent and suffer the consequences of a spurned, offended Trump. I was assured that if Putin turned down the offer, Trump would take a much harder stance on the regime in Russia.
Well, I look forward to that much tougher stance from the Trump administration. It’s gonna start any day now, right?
As Jerry Pournelle used to capitalize: Real Soon Now.
Nothing better to do?
Christian Schneider wonders
Why Is the Trump Administration Selling Teslas? He notes the unseemliness of RFKJr plugging Steak&Shake's use of beef tallow in
its fryers. But Christian points out (literally) that was "merely an appetizer."
The next day, Trump himself, seeking to soothe the bruised ego of the world’s richest man, held a press conference at the White House to convince Americans to buy Tesla automobiles. Tesla, of course, is owned by Trump adviser Elon Musk, who, through his Department of Government Efficiency, is trying to lay off large swaths of the federal workforce. As a backlash to Musk’s erratic, slash-and-burn behavior, many Americans are refusing to buy his cars and Cybertrucks, which are currently the cause of over 98 percent of eye rolls conducted in the U.S.
During the staged sell-a-thon, Trump suggested the people protesting against Tesla should be labeled “domestic terrorists.” In a social media post, he claimed people boycotting Tesla were behaving “illegally and collusively.”
It hasn't even been two months yet, and I'm already tired from "all the winning."
As President Trump once memorably put it, “Everything woke turns to s—t.”
That even includes attempts to remake a movie classic like “Snow White.”
This week saw one of the strangest movie promotional events ever. Skipping all the major cities, Disney decided to throw a premiere event for 100 people at a remote castle in Segovia, Spain.
The main aim of Disney seems to have been to get the star of their movie — 23-year old Rachel Zegler — as far away from the public as possible.
For the brattish Zegler has a talent for irritating audiences wherever she goes.
More at the link. Also at the end: more Khalil Kommentary! If you haven't had enough today.
You will note the scare quotes around "Education freedom". The current program is called "Education Freedom
Accounts", or EFAs.
Background: Shea is superintendent of the Somersworth (NH) School District, and for this year,
superintendent of the Rollinsford (NH) School District. Rollinsford is where Pun Salad Manor sits, and it
is the governmental entity to which
Your Blogger dutifully has sent off thousands of dollars twice-yearly, for the past 38 years. Although both
Pun Son and Pun Daughter went to K-12 schools whose names started with "Saint".
The paper says this is the "second in a series of commentaries on the future of universal public education."
Shea's first effort can be read
here; my commentary, such as it was, is
here.
His current effort begins:
With all that’s going on in the world today, I’m hopeful we’ll not lose sight of the battle over the future of universal public education. Not the endless fighting about curriculum, funding, books, bathrooms, and such — but the underlying battle over the very idea.
Universal public education was established here in the United States during the second half of the 19th century. The system has worked best when supported collaboratively by our federal government, state governments, and local communities. We pool our resources and come together to provide a quality education, from kindergarten through high school graduation, for all of our kids, regardless of family income, race or religion, where they live, or any special needs. Free at the point of delivery. For everyone. Paid for together, collectively, as an investment in our kids — all of them — and in the long-term health of our economy and our nation’s democracy.
Style notes: Reader, if you think the phrase "universal public education" (UPE)
is overused in these two paragraphs, be warned that
it appears seven times in his column. There must be an NEA writing guide that urges this repetition, right?
I hope Shea has a hotkey programmed to emit it, the better to save his typing fingers. I'll just say "UPE" from here
on out.
Another word Shea beats into the ground: "voucher". Which I assume that NEA writing guide says has a negative connotation. Shea uses it as a swear
word thirteen times.
OK, those are stylistic quibbles. Going to the substance: Shea waxes eloquent on the ideals of UPE. Which are, of course,
noble.
What he doesn't
mention: if UPE schools even approximately implemented those ideals,
they would have
nothing whatsoever to fear from those dreaded vouchers. Nobody would bother seeking out a private school
or homeschooling. Parents would be assured the kiddos were getting a "quality education" for "free", without
dealing with EFA paperwork.
Shea should simply admit: the reason he sees EFAs as a threat to UPE
is due to the mere fact if parents had
the financial wherewithal to escape UPE as it actually exists, a significant fraction would leap at the chance.
I also wanted to point out a bit of stat-picking:
No state government does less for its public schools than ours. We are dead last, 50th out of 50, in a ranking of U.S. states by percentage of public school funding contributed by the state itself.
That's kind of an odd choice of statistic, isn't it? Is there some study somewhere that
shows that a higher percentage of UPE funding coming from the state results in superior
education outcomes?
Well, I doubt it. I'm willing to be proved wrong.
And, in any case, I don't think the situation is as dire as Shea's trying to imply.
Table 235.20
in Your Federal Government's "Digest of Education Statistics, says in column 7, that New Hampshire
state funding for public elementary and secondary schools was 30.9% of the total in 2020-21. That's not the lowest
(that's Missouri: 29.8%), but it's close. But it's far from a sore thumb: there are 14 states with percentages in the 30%-39.9% range.
And so what? There's nothing magic
about money coming from the state. Even if we bought the (implied) assumption that more money shoved in the UPE school doors
causes smarter kids coming out, it turns out that NH does shove a lot of money into UPE.
World Population Review says NH's
Per Pupil Spending by State 2025
was a cool $17,456. And that's not "dead last". In fact, it's the ninth-highest among the states (and D.C.)
Countepoints: Drew Cline of the Josiah Bartlett Center notes the
mediocre results:
New Hampshire’s own state test scores show majorities of students failing to reach proficiency in science and math, and bare majorities performing at a proficient level in English, despite massive increases in school spending in the past quarter century.
In addition,
NHJournal notes that Shea's fearmongering drivel was spectacularly ineffective
at defeating the legislation that had him so upset:
EFA Expansion Gets Backing in NH House, Senate.
If there are any actual, as distinct from merely rhetorical, fiscal hawks in Washington, they should be calling attention to the dismal fact that the government added $838 billion to the national debt in just the first four months of fiscal 2025 (October through January). The lowest of the low-hanging fruit for budget-cutters is the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, an ornamental entity, decorative but inessential.
The CPB’s Public Broadcasting Service, launched 55 years ago, at least increased many Americans’ network television choices from three (CBS, NBC, ABC) to four. Thirty years ago, however, PBS improvidently adopted the slogan “If PBS doesn’t do it, who will?” Today, the antecedent of “it” can be almost anything, and the “who” will be many of the hundreds of channels available even on smartphones in scores of millions of Americans’ pockets.
And I have to include this bit as well:
Actually, CPB is like the human appendix — vestigial, purposeless and susceptible to unhealthy episodes. In 2025, it is a cultural redundancy whose remaining rationale is, amusingly, that government should subsidize its program[m]ing because so few want it. Commercial broadcasters cater to the vulgar multitude, so the refined few are left out, orphans with nothing to do but pout and reread Proust.
GFW is a far more valuable resource than the CPB.
Apparently there are people who need to be told this.
And Kevin D. Williamson is the guy to do so:
Canada Is an Ally, Not an Enemy.
When the United States was attacked by al-Qaeda on September 11, 2001, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) did something it had never done before and has not done since: It invoked Article 5, the collective-defense provision at the core of the alliance. With Manhattan burning and the Pentagon in ruins, thousands of Americans dead, and the future uncertain, our allies came to our aid.
And that included our nearest ally, Canada.
Canada did not send a bloodied and wounded United States thoughts and prayers via social media: When it came time to go after Osama bin Laden et al. in Afghanistan, more than 40,000 members of the Canadian armed forces served in what was not, narrowly speaking, a Canadian cause. And 159 Canadian soldiers died there.
That may not seem like a very large number, but it is 159 more than the Trump family has sent to fight for the American cause in the century and a half since that family’s first draft-dodging ancestor fled military service in Germany. Frederick Trump, the horse-butchering Yukon pimp who brought the Trump family to the United States, had no plans to stay in the country long term, but was expelled ignominiously from his homeland for his cowardly evasion of military service. During the Trump family’s time in the United States, Americans have fought in conflicts ranging from the Spanish-American War to the two world wars to Korea to Vietnam to the Gulf War to Afghanistan and Iraq. None of Trump’s ancestors served in any of those conflicts, and none of his progeny has, either. The president has occasionally, however, taken the time to sneer at figures such as John McCain, whose service was—whatever you think of his politics—genuinely heroic.
OK, KDW's kind of rough on horse-butchering Yukon pimps. Sins of the fathers and all that.
I’ve lived through a few recessions. One was caused by a pandemic. One was caused by a housing bubble. One was caused by people suddenly realizing that it’s insane to give massive checks to any Stanford dropout who puts “Internet = future = profits” on a slide deck. If we’re headed towards a recession — and it increasingly looks like we might be — this will be the first one in my lifetime caused by a president having economic beliefs that are a weird mix of mercantilism, nationalism, and shoving a chopstick up your nose until it punctures your brain.
The odds of a recession would be even higher if people thought that Trump was actually going to follow through on his insane trade war threats. Of course, the stock market plunge this week indicates that investors increasingly think that Trump might actually be dumb enough to do what he says he’s going to do. And really: Would you want to bet that Trump isn’t sufficiently dumb? Surely, the three worst things in the world to bet on are: 1) The Washington Generals, 2) Stock in The Amalgamated Asbestos and VHS Video Rental Company of Eastern Ukraine, and 3) Trump’s intelligence.
This self-inflicted proto-recession isn’t just maddening; it’s probably illegal. The Wall Street Journal recently ran an op-ed describing how Trump is stretching the phrase “unusual and extraordinary threat” beyond the limits of spacetime. I agree with every word that the Journal wrote, and let’s pause for a moment to marvel at the state of things: You have me — and also basicallyeveryleft-leaningeconomist with a “SHE PERSISTED” t-shirt collecting dust in their closet — in perfect alignment with the Wall Street Journal editorial page. That only happens when the question at hand is really basic, and I mean astoundingly basic, like “pants or underwear: which goes on the outside?”
I think I'm still getting that question right.
Well, I was going to dazzle the readership with my penetrating analysis of the
Mahmoud Khalil situation. But it's getting kind of late in the day for that. Maybe tomorrow?
This is another book from my "Reread Robert Crais" mini-project. My report on my original read is
here.
My rereading observations in no particular order:
If anything, I liked it better this time around.
My report notes that the cover has a silhouette of Maggie, a heroic German Shepard. That is no longer
true for the Kindle version. There's a dog on the cover, but is that supposed to be a German Shepard?
I don't think so.
Back then, I asserted that you may never read a more heartbreaking scene than the one that opens the
book. That remains true twelve years later, even though I knew what was coming.
Another thing remains true is my 2013 observation: "Dogs: we don't really deserve them."
Note that today's Getty Image du Jour is dated June 1, 2023. It's 652 days later, and that number on the debt
clock now (as I type) starts with "36" instead of "31". And, yes, that's trillions.
So in those 652 days, Uncle Stupid managed to spend $5 trillion of money he didn't actually have on hand.
James Freeman at the WSJ has some fun with Democrat antics, as they have apparently decided NOT to filibuster their way to a dreaded "government shutdown":
And You Thought Schumer Was Upset. He quotes this bit from the Congressional Budget Office's
Monthly Budget Review:
The federal budget deficit totaled $1.1 trillion in the first five months of fiscal year 2025, the Congressional Budget Office estimates. That amount is $319 billion more than the deficit recorded during the same period last fiscal year. Revenues were $37 billion (or 2 percent) higher, and outlays were $356 billion (or 13 percent) higher.
And it appears things will continue on that path for a while.
In a February 22 post on X, DOGE announced that it held a preliminary meeting with the Defense Department and that it looks forward to "working together to safely save taxpayer dollars and eliminate waste, fraud and abuse." Heaven knows the DOD needs such supervision. Since Congress began requiring annual audits in 2018, it has never passed a single full audit.
As of late 2024, it had failed for the seventh year in a row, unable to fully account for an $824 billion annual budget. Pause and think about that: Much of the nation's single largest chunk of discretionary spending can't be completely tracked. Let's hope the DOD is better at protecting us from foreign enemies than tracking its own expenses.
One Pentagon official dryly noted that "things are showing progress, but it's not enough" and a "clean" audit is still years away. Imagine a taxpayer offering this answer to an IRS auditor.
I'm currently in the midst of preparing my tax return, and I note that the "Tax Reporting Statement" I got
from Fidelity is 194 pages of smallish type.
I didn't print it out. I'm glad TurboTax just slurps it up and (hopefully) puts the numbers in the right places.
(To be fair, a couple of those 194 pages are "intentionally left blank". Which means
they aren't blank, they have "** This Page Intentionally Left Blank **" printed on them, which makes my brain hurt.)
The Department of Justice (DOJ) submitted its revised proposed final judgment on Friday to Judge Amit P. Mehta of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia in its antitrust case against Google, which now spans three presidential administrations.
The DOJ and the attorneys general of 11 states brought the case against Google under the first Trump administration in October 2020, accusing the company of monopolizing the search engine market. The plaintiffs accused the company of "implementing and enforcing a series of exclusionary agreements with distributors" to foreclose rivals from the search engine market.
The DOJ criticized Google for paying Apple around $10 billion every year to make Google the default search engine on Safari, Apple's default web browser, and Siri—though savvy users can change it. The Justice Department also identified Google's "anti-forking" agreements as anticompetitive. These agreements require Android manufacturers to use Google's version of the Android operating system and provide default distribution of Google's apps and search engine. Manufacturers who don't comply lose access to the Google Play services and are excluded from lucrative revenue sharing agreements.
Since Trump's COVID-19 national emergency declaration [on March 13, 2020], COVID-19 has either been the underlying cause of or contributed to the deaths of some 1.3 million Americans.
That's a lot. Ron notes the checkered history of US government policy. Which, as we know,
included plenty of blunders, misinformation, censorship,
misdirected priorities, and incorrect guesses. All of which
contributed to the death toll.
Another vote for US on UTC.
And it's from that Grumpy Economist, John Cochrane:
Time and Money.
Daylight savings time is like inflation. The analogy helps to understand both.
If we abandon time changes, should we use standard or daylight saving time all year round? Media and x were batting that question around last week. Daylight saving time seems to mean kids to standing out in the dark for the school bus in the winter. Standard time misses a lot of pleasant summer evenings.
The answer is: it doesn’t matter. If we move to permanent daylight saving time, and people think that’s too early to get to school or work, they will adjust business or store hours to be an hour later.
Imagine that we eliminated time zones, and switched to UTC (GMT). That’s (currently) 7 hours ahead of Palo Alto. Heavens, do you want all the schoolchildren to have to show up at 1 AM (8:00 AM UTC?) Of course not. The schools would just change their opening hour to 15:00.
John notes that Milton Friedman wrote on this topic back in 1953. I was only two years
old then, but somehow I must have picked up some psychic vibes that stuck with me up to now.
I'm not becoming a Junior fan.
But I wouldn't mind dining at an establishment whose deep fryers
used beef tallow. And there's another good idea available expressed by Charles Lane
at the Free Press, who asks
Can MAHA Beat the Junk Food Lobby?
The vibe shift is powerful. But is it powerful enough to beat Big Soda and Big Grocery?
Obesity and its evil twin—diabetes—are corroding America’s health. These chronic ailments also disproportionately afflict the poor. Yet for years, the federal government has been paying for soda, cookies, candy, and other nutritionally empty, obesity-engendering foods, via its main source of anti-hunger aid for low-income people: the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), previously known as food stamps.
Now, though, the lobbies’ hammerlock may be breakable, thanks to a convergence of interests between GOP spending hawks, both state and federal, and the MAHA movement, led by the new secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
RFK Jr., America’s stopped clock, is wrong much of the time—witness his disparagement of the measles vaccine, a position that looks even worse amid an outbreak of the disease in Texas and New Mexico. One thing he’s not wrong about, though, is that federal subsidies support the production and consumption of unhealthful foods.
Unfortunately, Junior's at HHS, and SNAP is under the USDA. But maybe something good will come out of
"America's stopped clock". Come to think of it, that's a pretty good metaphor for the entire Trump II
Administration.
The White House asked the State and Treasury departments to “draft a list of sanctions that could be eased for U.S. officials to discuss with Russian representatives as part of the administration’s broad talks with Moscow on improving diplomatic and economic relations.”
DOJ also disbanded “the Foreign Influence Task Force, which was established in the first Trump administration to police influence campaigns staged by Russia and other nations aimed at sowing discord, undermining democracy and spreading disinformation.”
When Liesyl Franz, deputy assistant secretary for international cybersecurity at the U.S. State Department addressed a United Nations working group on cybersecurity in February, she discussed the threats from China and Iran, notably omitting Russia, even though the U.S. Cybersecurity Infrastructure and Security Agency at the Department of Homeland Security has deemed Russia “an enduring global cyber threat.”
A long excerpt, sorry. But, forgive me
Saint Elvis,
I am disgusted. And we could have had
Nikki Haley.
I'll only add that if Russia had conceded something … anything … it would be naive
to think it would actually keep that commitment. As Jim notes, Russia, and especially Putin,
have a track record of promises violently broken.
Also of note:
I'm pretty sure it's "loyalty" that's the last refuge of a scoundrel.
Kevin D. Williamson has thoughts on
The Souls of Serfs and Subjects
.
Loyalty is a two-edged sword, because the virtue is necessarily conditional: Loyalty to whom or to what? To what degree? To the exclusion of which other virtues? St. Peter, after getting off to a rough start (three times!) was a loyalist to the end—but, then, so was Eva Braun.
Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who joined with the chief justice to rule against Trump in the matter of his attempt to unilaterally freeze certain federal spending, is a great loyalist—but not the kind of loyalist Donald Trump’s ghastly little sycophants demand that she be. Justice Barrett is loyal to her oath of office, to the law, to the Constitution, to certain principles governing her view of the judge’s role in American life—all of which amounts to approximately squat in the Trumpist mind, which demands only—exclusively—that she be loyal to Trump, and that she practice that loyalty by giving him what he wants in court, the statute books—and the Constitution—be damned.
The usual dopes demand that she give Trump what he wants because he is “the man who put her on the Supreme Court.” Mike Davis of the Article III Project (not the author of Late Victorian Holocausts; his organization works to recruit Trump-friendly judges) sneers that the justice is “weak and timid” and, because he is a right-wing public intellectual in 2025, that “she is a rattled law professor with her head up her ass.” Davis, a former clerk for Justice Neil Gorsuch, presumably is not as titanically stupid as he sounds, but there is a reason Justice Barrett is on the Supreme Court and he is a right-wing media gadfly who describes his job as “punching back at the left’s attacks.”
KDW is not reluctant to call a spade a spade, and a dope a dope.
Of all the ways that Trump is reshaping the government, surely the most consequential is shifting the power of the purse to the executive branch. DOGE is cancelling spending approved by Congress. Trump’s lawyers are in court asserting broad power over spending. The White House has expanded the concept of an “unusual or extraordinary threat” to take total control of tariff policy, even though Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution gives that power to Congress.
The Republican Congress — led by me — has accepted and even cheered this shift in authority. We’ve championed it as a necessary measure to rein in spending. And already, two things are clear:
We’ve handed the president a powerful tool to dictate this country’s finances;
There is no way that tool could ever be used in the future to make Republicans deeply regret our actions.
Both points are indisputable, right? I mean: We have basically forfeited spending to the executive branch — even the budget resolution that Congress is working on right now is functionally a suggestion that the president can take or leave. That is indisputably a lot of power. And equally indisputable, I think, is the notion that there is no way that power could ever, in any conceivable universe, be wielded against Republican interests. There’s just no chance. We will never find ourselves saying “Oh no, we opened Pandora’s box.” Never. Unimaginable. An absurd and ridiculous fantasy.
President Trump is at risk of blowing his second term before it has hit the two-month mark.
Go on. Shout at me for saying that. I don’t care. Who does? Outside of a handful of terminally online zealots who do more harm than good to their side, nobody is invested in today’s presidential side quests. Early on in his tenure, Joe Biden forgot the lesson that had made him president: that neither social media nor the activists who dominate it are representative of real life. Astonishingly, Donald Trump is on the verge of making the same mistake. Within a year of his victory, Biden had lost sight of why he’d won, inoculated himself against feedback, become insular in his political outlook, and, worst of all, given in to the temptation to prioritize his pet projects over the elementary building blocks atop which all successful administrations are built. By advancing his chaotic, capricious, contradictory tariff agenda, Trump is making a similar mistake. Absent a genuine crisis, such as a world war or stagflation, it is invariably smart for presidents to begin with the quick wins, gain the trust and support of the public by yielding stability, and only then turn to the unpopular or tricky parts of their brief. Trump, like Biden, has reversed this order. It’s not working out any better for him.
Professors who are critical of “gender-affirming care” should be fired and lose their academic titles, a Harvard University professor and faculty chair recently said.
“There’s a particular place in hell for academics who use their academic expertise and power to distort and do violence to people in the world,” Professor Timothy McCarthy told Washington Square News. The New York University student newspaper interviewed McCarthy for his thoughts about two professors at the school who are affiliated with groups that are critical of surgical and chemical interventions for gender dysphoria.
Note the link above goes to a student newspaper article that treats the important news
is that these heretics, one employed as an adjunct in an NYU school, the other an alumnus,
actually exist!
The author, Douglas Murray, does a fine job of demonstrating just how nuts we went just a few years
ago, summed up in his book title. It became extremely fashionable to attack All Things West. (And, often,
its associated evil, "whiteness".)
Yes, the West had its share of sins: slavery, racism, sexism, eugenics, indigenous mistreatment, colonialism, etc. But
these sins were present, and usually worse, in other cultures as well; that was ignored or downplayed.
And the West was accused of "sins" that weren't sins at all: "cultural appropriation", for example.
The works of liberal philosophers (e.g., Mill, Hume, Kant) were fine-tooth combed for any instance
of racial insensitivity; the far worse bigotry of Marx, for example, was given a pass.
Like most wars, a lot of well-meaning people were caught up by the
propaganda. And there was a lot
of collateral damage.
Nobody seemed to notice, or care, that the West, however clumsily and incompletely, became a culture that
brought prosperity, liberty, artistic beauty, peace, and happiness to an ever-increasing share
of the crooked timber of humanity.
I think it's safe to say things have improved since the events Murray describes so well.
Although ("like most wars") much of the damage remains.
You can still see "Black Lives Matter" posturing
here
and
there, but they seem like quaint
leftovers of an intellectual fad that's fading fast.
People eventually noticed: the "War" mongers
had no coherent criticisms of the West;
Their "victories", such as they were,
were mostly symbolic, and didn't remedy any of the evils they decried.
(At Caltech, for example, Millikan Library was
renamed, and a bust of Millikan was removed from a campus walkway. And so what?)
… and, as the tweet notes, Jake also nabbed a couple other sinecures at Harvard-associated organizations.
Given that UNH is
looking to cut $20 million
from its budget, I can't help but wonder how laid-off UNH workers might feel about this. (I don't
know how much a Carsey "senior fellow" makes, but I'm pretty sure it's more than zero.)
We won't adjudicate Dunleavy's claim about
Jake's impact on US foreign policy during the Biden Administration, but I'd say
the results speak for themselves.
Whatever Jake does up here in New England, he'll have to do it without a
security clearance.
Jake's new employer, the Carsey School of Public Policy is careful to keep its public face non-partisan, but it was founded/funded
by Marcy Carsey, estimated to be a
half-billionaire
thanks to her TV career. She's a
huge donor to Democrats.
The school's "founding director" (and, like Jake, a current "senior fellow") Michael Ettlinger got some
unwanted publicity
back in 2016, when his mash note to the Hillary Clinton campaign
got
Wikileaked. In his mail, he
spitballed about how he might "be helpful from my perch in New Hampshire", including "what I can do formally from heading the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire."
I looked at that embarrassment in more detail
here; I also couldn't help
but comment on the tongue-bath Ettlinger received from the UNH Today newsletter
here.
At UNH Law, we condemn the enduring and systemic racism that pervades our communities. And we commit to positive change toward racial justice and equality.
… and the Dean carries on that way for a while. Also see UNH Law Student Bar Association's
Statement on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion for more of the same. We are talking peak Woke.
Days after the inauguration of President Donald Trump, a group of former Joe Biden and Kamala Harris staffers came together to launch an effort to arouse the public against the GOP’s looming push to cut taxes on the wealthy. Dubbed “Families Over Billionaires,” the project quickly assembled an eight-figure war chest.
“The campaign will elevate the voices of the majority of Americans who oppose more tax breaks for the rich,” the group says in its mission statement. Mia Ehrenberg, the spokeswoman for Families Over Billionaires—and an ex-Harris campaign aide—told The Free Press that the organization is teaming with “grassroots organizers” to get its message out.
In fact, like a surprising number of Trump 2.0 resistance pop-up groups, Families Over Billionaires owes its existence not to small-dollar donations from ordinary Americans, or to grassroots organizers, but to a single entity: the consulting firm Arabella Advisors, which oversees a massive “dark money” network bankrolled by the super-rich and aligned with the Democratic Party.
The network relies on support from billionaires like Bill Gates, eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, and Democratic megadonor George Soros. In other words, it’s not Families Over Billionaires so much as it’s billionaires over other billionaires.
That link above goes to their "Who We Are" page. Which does not include "Who Is Giving Us So Much Money" information.
But Dr. Fauci and then-director of the National Institutes of Health Francis Collins really were pretending when they treated dissenting scientists as peddlers of fringe theories. This week, seeing one of those brave and accurate dissenters moving closer to a Senate confirmation vote to run the NIH, it’s a little easier to hope that the lockdown disaster will never be repeated.
Fauci famously got one of those coveted awards from President Biden:
a
preemptive pardon. Collins was snubbed for this honor, and a few days ago
he made an
abrupt departure from NIH. I don't know if he will seek political asylum in Wuhan.
The classic tale of “the rich getting richer while the poor get poorer” never seems to get old. The newly released Takers Not Makersreport from Oxfam fuels the idea that billionaire wealth is skyrocketing while the poor are getting poorer. They claim that poverty levels have barely changed since 1990, and that 60 percent of billionaire wealth is “taken,” not earned, arguing that the richest must bear the cost of “economic justice” through various means including heavy taxation. The argument is nothing new — it is based on the zero-sum fallacy, which assumes that one person’s wealth must come at the expense of another’s, ignoring the reality that economic growth expands wealth for everyone.
Despite the popular belief that the rich are getting richer while the poor are getting poorer, this claim is not only economically misguided but factually incorrect. Using data from The Mercatus Center’s working paper Income Inequality in the United States, we can demonstrate how flaws in inequality data often exaggerate the problem, explore why the claim that the poor are getting poorer is inaccurate, highlight why shaping policies around resentment and envy of the rich does more harm than good, and why the real solution lies in addressing the root causes of inequality through private-sector opportunities rather than government intervention.
It's useful to have the facts on your side, of course. But you probably won't be surprised
at how little facts mean to the Oxfams of the world.
In a stunning series of events, two leading media organizations—The New York Times and Bloomberg—abruptly shelved coverage of a groundbreaking study that raises serious concerns about the psychological impacts of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) pedagogy. The study, conducted by the Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI) in collaboration with Rutgers University, found that certain DEI practices could induce hostility, increase authoritarian tendencies, and foster agreement with extreme rhetoric. With billions of dollars invested annually in these initiatives, the public has a right to know if such programs—heralded as effective moral solutions to bigotry and hate—might instead be fueling the very problems they claim to solve. The decision to withhold coverage raises serious questions about transparency, editorial independence, and the growing influence of ideological biases in the media.
This should come as no surprise to anyone who's actually experienced those "certain DEI practices" in their
workplace and come away insufficiently indoctrinated.
In this era of extreme political polarization, it's good to see politicians from opposing camps banding together to remind us that women are bad at math https://t.co/bTSJwo55OI
If you prefer, or need, an actual argument about this awful idea,
Christopher Freiman
has you covered:
A proposal to cap credit card interest rates at 10% is gaining support from politicians on both the left and the right. Advocates argue that this policy will work to the advantage of potential borrowers who will no longer be charged rates of 25% or higher.
But things aren’t so simple. For one, there’s a straightforward economic argument against a cap on credit card interest rates: companies simply won’t extend credit to higher-risk borrowers if they aren’t able to secure a higher potential payout to offset the risk of default. (By analogy, you’re unlikely to invest in a high-risk tech startup instead of blue chip stocks unless the potential payout is high enough to offset the increased risk.) And this outcome would be bad for those borrowers since they would no longer be offered credit at all. Surely, an offer of a high interest credit card is better than no offer at all—more on this below.
CongressCritters AOC and Anna really need to start their own credit card companies, offering
maximum 10% interest rates. I'm sure they can get some of their fellow economic illiterates to
back them.
Also of note:
Does this mean we'll be underdue to end DST in the fall?
Well, probably not, but J.D. Tuccille says that right now
We're Overdue To End Daylight Saving Time. His bottom line is one you've seen here before, because I'm pretty tiresome about it:
Obviously, there's wiggle room when it comes to estimating the total costs of forcing people to reset their clocks and their schedules twice each year. But it's hard to argue that clock changes benefit anybody except that subset of the population that really wants more daylight in the evening. For most of us, the impact of changing our clocks is measured in lost time, expense, and increased health risk.
Daylight saving time was a paternalistic government experiment in socially engineering the country into less energy use by fiddling the clocks. Like most government gimmicks, it doesn't work as advertised. Let's get the government out of the business of telling us to how to set our clocks.
Yes. Separation of time and state. An idea that is overdueunderdue … good.
Maine Governor Janet Mills is enjoying a viral moment after her public spat with President Trump at the White House over her attempted nullification of federal law to allow boys in girls’ sports. The politics of my beloved home state remain consumed by Mills’s refusal to comply with new Title IX regulations, which has been aptly described as “neo-Confederate” by Victor Davis Hanson. It’s a disgrace to the office once held by Union hero Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain.
James provides a brief bio of the admirable Governor Chamberlain. In contrast:
And then there’s Janet Mills. Governor Mills would surely bristle at the notion that her defiance of President Trump’s executive order withholding federal funds from athletic programs that allow boys who claim they’re girls to compete in girls’ sports in any way resembles Southern and Confederate defiance of federal law. But while the underlying issues are of course different, the federal government again is in the right. Trump’s order is a perfectly legal application of Title IX of the Civil Rights Act, which has always mandated equal treatment of boys and girls in education, including by protecting and fully funding girls’ sports. Letting any boy who says he’s a girl compete is an obvious violation of what this federal law has always been understood to mean.
It's like nobody on her staff warned her that sounding like a 1960s segregationist Southern governor was probably a bad idea.
You'll see her standing in the schoolhouse gymnasium door next.
Like Governor Mills, our own state's very-senior senator, Jeanne Shaheen, isn't having any truck
with those pointy-headed D.C. intellectuals telling states what to do:
Local Groups Should 'Police' Trans Athletes, Not Federal Law. As reported by NHJournal:
New Hampshire Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.), who voted against banning biological males from girls sports, now says it’s an issue that should be “policed” at the local level. It’s a significant reversal for a senator who until recently backed legislation mandating that males who identify as female should be treated as though they were born female.
To repeat:
It's like nobody on her staff warned her that sounding like a 1960s segregationist Southern governor was probably a bad idea.
"Gender Meltdown" would be a pretty good name for a glam-rock band.PowerLine's Steven Hayward looks at left-coast
Scenes from the Gender Meltdown.
Meanwhile, out in San Francisco, the Archimedes Banya spa (which sounds very woke) decided to hold an “Inclusive Women’s Night” in honor of International Women’s Week (which I missed somehow). The trouble is, a number of “penised people,” otherwise known as “transwomen,” turned up, because “tranwomen are women,” right? It seems some of the real women didn’t care for it, and have expressed their preference for a “phallus-free environment.” Next thing you know they’ll want segregated locker rooms.
The spa's letter to its patrons is screen-shotted at the link, and like Treacher's tweet above, I'm
not proud of finding it very funny.
Googling the news stories for "Archimedes Banya spa" provides the headlines:
"SF bathhouse review-bombed after policy restricting trans access sparks outcry"
"Trans activists rip San Francisco spa for not letting them go nude during ‘women’s night’"
"Popular local spa faces backlash"
"S.F. agency probing nude bathhouse’s policy that excludes transgender people twice a month"
"SF bathhouse excludes trans women from new ladies-only night"
"Archimedes Banya Gets Social Media Uproar After Banning Trans Women From ‘Women’s Day’"
"San Francisco bathhouse accused of ‘transphobic’ policies"
"Transgender activists vow to attend 'religious women-only night' at San Francisco spa"
"Finding Calm and Community at SF’s Clothing-Optional Bohemian Bathhouse"
"Transgender activist group says San Francisco spa enacting exclusionary policies"
Gee, it seems people aren't happy about a phallus-free environment. The "agency probing" mentioned in
that sixth item is the San Francisco Human Rights Commission, which sounds like it could be
trouble for the spa. I mean, if you can't wave your willy at women, do you really have any Human Rights
at all?
The spa's website is
here. "Where The Cultures Of The World Meet". Looks expensive!
And, what do you know, "Gender Meltdown"
actually isthe name of a band. Looks inactive, though.
Gov. @maura_healey admits that part of our energy crisis is due to natural gas being hard to transport to MA. Yet in 2022, she bragged about blocking the pipelines that would have solved this. 🤦♂️#Massachusetts families are paying the price for her #energy failures. #mapolipic.twitter.com/gsDx6Cq1WJ
— Massachusetts Fiscal Alliance (@MassFiscal) March 8, 2025
It's a brief clip, no context, maybe a cheap shot. But I found this article from 2015, back when Gov. Maura
was MA Attorney General:
Healey study: No new pipelines needed.
A STUDY COMMISSIONED BY ATTORNEY GENERAL MAURA HEALEY indicates new natural gas pipelines are not needed because the region’s power grid will face no “reliability deficiency” through 2030.
[…]
But the report nevertheless compared the status-quo to a series of options being considered by policymakers to address any potential shortfall that might occur if more power plants than expected shut down over the next 15 years. The report concluded the best approach, in terms of ratepayer cost and environmental impact, would be to invest in programs that entice homeowners and businesses to reduce their consumption of electricity and voluntarily curb power usage during high-demand periods. The report said $101 million spent on these programs would yield savings of $247 million and a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions of 1.86 million tons.
By contrast, expanding the region’s natural gas pipeline capacity to meet the potential power shortfall would cost $66 million and yield savings of $127 million, while increasing greenhouse gas emissions by 80,000 tons.
I'm sure this sounded perfectly reasonable at the time: just nag "homeowners and businesses" to stop using
so many electrons. Just sit there in the dark, citizen! Maybe take a nap!
I'm also sure a few people down in Massachusetts at the time waved their copies of Hayek's The
Road to Serfdom, pointing out the fatal conceit
of central planning. Especially when those central planning "studies" confidently
predicted spending, savings, and reductions over 15 years with three significant figures.
Maybe Massachusetts residents can keep warm by burning copies of that 2015 study?
Throughout the 2024 presidential campaign season, Donald Trump accused his Democratic opponents—President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris—of using the levers of power against him.
"The Biden regime's weaponization of our system of justice is straight out of the Stalinist Russia horror show," he told rallygoers in March 2023 after being indicted in Manhattan for violating election law. In a September 2024 debate against Harris, Trump even blamed Democrats' rhetoric for the assassination attempt he survived weeks earlier, saying "I probably took a bullet to the head because of the things that they say about me."
But now that Trump is firmly ensconced back in office, his administration seems to have no interest in stopping government weaponization. Rather, it seems keen to wield that power for itself. Looking back now on Trump's complaints, it appears less that he was upset than that he was jealous.
Joe goes on to cite the Trump DOJ's desire to drop the bribery and wire
fraud cases against
NYC Mayor Eric Adams, in an apparent quid pro quo for Adams'
help with implementing Trump's immigration policies. And a couple instances
where Trump's political enemies have been threatened with DOJ investigations. Fun!
Just fill in the blanks for your instant post: "Trump’s is wrong about ". Today's example comes from
Daniel Ortner and Brennen VanderVeen at the
Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE):
Trump’s border czar is wrong about AOC.
And, yes, it turns out to be another case of "weaponization".
Last week, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wrote a letter asking Attorney General Pam Bondi if she is now under investigation for telling people their constitutional rights when interacting with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers.
She asked because President Trump’s border czar Tom Homan said he recently asked the Department of Justice whether Ocasio-Cortez is “impeding our law enforcement efforts” by putting out a webinar and a flyer in which she reminded anyone interacting with ICE that they need not open the door, speak, or sign anything, among other basic rights.
Informing people about their constitutional rights is plainly lawful and any effort to punish Ocasio-Cortez for doing so would unquestionably violate the First Amendment.
Anyone have that on their "Reasons to Impeach Trump" bingo card?
It's a remarkably short, straight-line distance.
Robert Graboyes and David Patterson collaborate on tracing the ideological descent:
From Hitler to Hamas (and Hezbollah)
It is impossible to understand Hamas without knowing its historical pedigree. Today, Bastiat’s Window is honored to offer a powerful resource for understanding that history—a downloadable chapter (“Islamic Jihadism: The Legacy of Nazi Antisemitism”) from Professor David Patterson’s book, Judaism, Antisemitism, and Holocaust: Making the Connections (Cambridge University Press, 2022)—referred to hereafter as JA&H. This chapter is the most compact, sweeping account I’ve found of the historical, organizational, and philosophical connections between 1930s Nazism and contemporary Jihadism. Once you’ve read it, please pass the link to this post along to others so they might also read Professor Patterson’s account.
In brief, Hamas is as an especially fervent local chapter of an organization whose early funding, rituals, and philosophy came directly from Nazi Germany. Hamas’s spiritual mentor was a cleric employed by Hitler to organize Jihadist SS squads to murder Jews in Europe. Hamas’s 1987 founding charter maintained the Nazi/Jihadist goal of exterminating Jews worldwide. Hezbollah’s pedigree differs somewhat from Hamas’s, but they share goals and forebears.
Knowing this history also reveals thenaïvetéof those who presume Hamas can be or wishes to be a reliable negotiating partner or peaceful neighbor to Israel. It suggests why Gaza grew more impoverished and depraved after Israel forcibly removed every single Jew from Gaza in 2005. And it speaks worlds of the Western students chanting “we are Hamas,” flying the flag of Hezbollah, telling Jews on campuses “the 7th of October is going to be every day for you,” and spray-painting “Hamas is coming” on monuments.
It was a dark and stormy contest.
Via
Slashdot, I note that the
Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest is ending its annual
run. 'Twas truly the Super Bowl of hilariously bad writing.
A sample, from the
2024 Winners:
Mrs. Higgins’ body was found in the pantry, bludgeoned with a potato ricer and lying atop a fifty-pound sack of Yukon golds, her favorite for making gnocchi, though some people consider them too moist for this purpose.
Any comparable prose you see here is entirely unintentional.
Well, here we are again ... about to lose another hour of our lives.
Tomorrow [now, as I type, today], despite the (very soft) promises of the new administration and the incoming Republican majority, we will have to turn our clocks back once again for Daylight Saving Time. We will only gain it back again on November 2nd. In fairness, Donald Trump and Republicans have not exactly spent their first weeks lounging by the fireside and resting on their laurels. Congress also has a looming shutdown deadline that occupies all of their attention. The hope for some that we had seen our last round of "spring forward, fall back" was always a little unrealistic.
Ed has the relevant quotes from Trump's press conference. Trump bemoans the polling that shows
that what to do is a "50-50 issue", and the implication is that he's unwilling to piss
off either 50.
Ed makes a point I've made myself:
If we need more daylight for activity time, why not just adjust our schedules to get it? The high-school teacher suggested that for teens anyway, considering the early start time unrealistic even with more sunlight. Some business activities probably couldn't flex as easily -- retail, for instance -- but retail regularly runs past all useful sunlight anyway. The concept of "business hours" has grown very flexible over the last few decades, and even more so since the pandemic. Rather than adjust the clocks for everyone, why not let people adjust their own schedules to maximize their sunlight exposure as they see fit?
Unfortunately, Ed does not mention the crackpot reform
I (and others) have advocated:
Separation of time and state. If the government needs to know what time it is, use UTC. Everyone else can use … whatever they
want! Efficient schedule arrangements would be quickly found between employers and employees, businesses and customers,
schedule-makers and schedule-keepers, etc.
Also of note:
My tip: Don't use Hunter Biden's tax preparation tips.
But Dave Barry has other
Tax-Preparation Tips.
It's tax season once again, and if you're like many Americans, the question on your mind is: "What with everything going on in Washington, do I still have to pay taxes?"
Sadly, yes. Things were looking good for a little while there, when the Department of Government Efficiency, as an efficiency measure, fired the entire staff of the Internal Revenue Service except for a woman named Denise who happened to be in the ladies' room when DOGE came through. Unfortunately they reversed course on that particular measure, so the IRS employees have been reinstated, along with — at least for now — the Coast Guard, the Centers for Disease Control and about a third of the 5,000 Yellowstone park bison.
This means that you do, in fact, have to file a tax return. And if you're like many Americans, you wish somebody would drop an anvil on the Geico Gecko. So do I, but that is not my point. My point is that if you're like many Americans, you're afraid to prepare your own tax return, because you don't want to go to prison for violating the U.S. Tax Code, which at the moment is 6,781 pages long and is filled with sentences like this one (I am not making this sentence up):
In general if the partnership (1) not later than 45 days after the date of the notice of final partnership adjustment, elects the application of this section with respect to an imputed underpayment, and (2) at such time and in such manner as the Secretary may provide, furnishes to each partner of the partnership for the reviewed year and to the Secretary a statement of the partner's share of any adjustment to a partnership-related item (as determined in the notice of final partnership adjustment), section 6225 shall not apply with respect to such underpayment (and no assessment of tax, levy, or proceeding in any court for the collection of such underpayment shall be made against such partnership) and each such partner shall take such adjustment into account as provided in subsection (b).
My favorite thing about that sentence is that it starts with "In general." It's like the tax code is saying, "Don't hold me to this! I'm just spitballing here!"
And, yes, that's just one sentence.
(Dave's substack is one of the few to which I subscribe, and I recommend it to you.)
TIME magazine recently published a piece critical of the rankings and, sadly, demonstrating a profound misunderstanding of what they measure. Not only that, the piece also implies that Americans shouldn’t trust our judgment. Instead, we should give college and university presidents, chancellors, and senior administrators the benefit of the doubt, based on both the assumption that they know their campuses better than an off-campus organization like FIRE would, and that they would be honest and forthcoming about their free speech failings.
Obviously, we disagree. After many years of failing to defend — and sometimes actively undermining — free speech on campus, college and university presidents, chancellors, and senior administrators have lost the benefit of the doubt. FIRE has been drawing attention to campus censorship for more than 25 years now, but it has accelerated almost every year for the last 11, and it’s become particularly bad in the last 5. And yet, this entire time — every single year — many administrators have claimed there’s nothing wrong on their campuses.
The Time essay, linked above,
is from two Yale-affiliated people, perhaps motivated and understandably butt-hurt by
Yale's "slightly below average" ranking, putting it at #155 out of 251 schools. Hey, much better
than Harvard (#251, with an "abysmal" speech climate).
I think Sean and Greg out-argue the Yalies, but see what you think.
And, for the record, the University Near Here fell to 59th place in the FIRE rankings.
Mister, we could use a man like Ludwig von Mises again.
Brian Doherty brings some sad news in April's print Reason:
The American Right Is Abandoning Mises.
Ludwig von Mises, a foundational figure of modern libertarianism, was also for decades a hero of the American right. In George H. Nash's magisterial 1976 history The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945, the very first chapter stars the Austrian economist and his students and associates, saying that "it would be difficult to exaggerate the contributions of…Ludwig von Mises to the intellectual rehabilitation of individualism in America."
But now…
Mises was an ardent free-trader. President Donald Trump promotes autarky and calls himself "Tariff Man." Mises was a devoted anti-inflationist, a promoter of hard currencies that government could not create and manipulate at will. Though Trump has given lip service to private cryptocurrency as part of his larger antiestablishment coalition, he also demanded in his first term that the Federal Reserve expand the money supply to goose the economy and give him a short-term political benefit. In his 1944 book Omnipotent Government, Mises condemned forceful territorial expansion as one of the causes of Europe's terrible 20th century wars. Since the election, Trump has publicly mulled territorial seizures around the globe. Trump ardently supports a restrictionist immigration policy. Mises believed the free flow of people, goods, and capital were linchpins of the ideal international system. Trump favors industrial policy, in which government planners intervene to assist selected domestic industries. Mises understood that would lower, not raise, overall prosperity.
Brian displays his usual encyclopedic familiarity with libertarian intellectual history in this article.
It's an interesting story.
Every line item in the federal budget has at least one special interest group advocating for its growth and ready to cry bloody murder if anyone proposes to reduce it. So it is no surprise that Trains magazine is shocked that Elon Musk would propose to privatize Amtrak.
“Amtrak’s business performance is strong,” Trains quotes an Amtrak spokesperson. “Ridership and revenue are at all-time highs.” But a “strong” performance didn’t prevent Amtrak from losing well over $2 billion on operating costs alone in 2024, and Amtrak’s all-time highs are still pretty low: in 2024, Amtrak carried the average American just 19.6 miles. Americans ride bicycles far more than they ride Amtrak, they fly more than 100 times as many miles, and they travel more than 700 times as many miles by car as they ride Amtrak.
Amtrak, unfortunately, has a lot of 19th-century choo-choo sentiment behind it, and has
the luxury of living off the taxpayer dime.
New Hampshire is one of a dwindling number of states that requires an annual safety inspection, which makes New Hampshire’s law one of the most burdensome in the country.
Lawmakers have tried for years to abolish the mandate, citing the cost burden on drivers and the shortage of evidence that inspections improve public safety. But in years past, auto dealers and independent mechanics have persuaded legislators to continue mandating what is a lucrative income stream for them.
That could change this year. The House on Thursday approved by a wide margin (212-143) House Bill 649, which would lift the safety and emissions inspection mandates from state law.
The article points out that New Jersey—the state where it's illegal to pump your own
freaking gas—got rid of its mandated annual auto safety inspections back in 2010, with
no ill effects (um, other than still being New Jersey.)
One Man's Parody is Another Man's … Funny Song, I Guess
My only complaint: The
Reason page
for Remy's video claims it is a
"Parody of Kendrick Lamar's 'Not Like Us'".
(And, OK, I watched about of much of that as I could stand.)
I'm too unplugged from popular culture to "get" the parodic component of a lot of Remy videos.
Sigh. Why can't he parody songs we Boomers know?
Also of note:
An unappreciated virtue for political commentators is… a long and reliable memory.
Jim Geraghty has that in spades, as demonstrated in his recent
Morning Jolt, where he warns his readers to
Get Ready for the Democratic Retreat on Trans Athletes. (Subtopic: "Gavin Newsom Changes Shape".)
Way back in August 2013 — two years before Donald Trump descended the escalator and announced he was running for president — the state of California enacted a law requiring public schools to allow transgender kindergarten-through-12th-grade students access to whichever restroom and locker room they want. The law gave students the right “to participate in sex-segregated programs, activities and facilities” based on their self-identification and regardless of their birth gender. The spokesman for the bill’s sponsor said of those born one gender and identifying as another, “They’re not interested in going into bathrooms and flaunting their physiology.”
That bill was signed into law by former Governor Jerry Brown. The lieutenant governor of California at the time was Gavin Newsom. If Newsom had any objections to that law at the time, he kept them to himself.
Newsom has been governor of California for six years, two months, and one day. At no point in that six-year-and-change span did Newsom express even a peep of objection to that law or policy — right up until the moment Newsom sat down for the inaugural edition of his podcast with Charlie Kirk. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, the California governor claimed that for years, he had thought the policy was unfair to women athletes[…]
It's still a long way away, and anything could happen in the meantime,
but Newsom is (as I type) the leading Democrat contender for the
2028 presidential election at the Maxim/Lott
Election Betting Odds site. This
sudden shift to common sense makes me think he's running already.
Aside:
I also noted that Newsom tried to get away with claiming that "you guys were able to weaponize that [transgender
athlete] issue". Weaponize?
Kirk is about to gripe at him about that, and Newsom admits that's
a "pejorative" way to put it. Kirk suggests "Shine a light on" would be
a fairer phrase.
So, wannabe pundits: see how many claims of "weaponization" in the media can be replaced by "shining a light".
The 20th century had a bunch of rising powers that all reached their peaks in terms not just of relative military might and economic strength, but of technological and cultural innovation. These included the United States, Japan, Germany, and Russia. So far, the 21st century is a little different, because only one major civilization is hitting its peak right now: China. All the old powers are declining, and India is just beginning to hit its stride.
China’s peak is truly spectacular — a marvel of state capacity and resource mobilization never seen before on this planet. In just a few years, China built more high-speed rail than all other countries in the world combined. Its auto manufacturers are leapfrogging the developed world, seizing leadership in the EV industry of the future. China has produced so many solar panels and batteries that it has driven down the cost to be competitive with fossil fuels — a huge blow against climate change, despite all of China’s massive coal emissions, and a victory for global energy abundance. China’s cities are marvels of scale — forests of towering skyscrapers lit up with LEDs, cavernous malls filled with amazing restaurants and shops selling every possible modern convenience for cheap, vast highways and huge train stations. Even China’s policy mistakes and authoritarian overreaches inspire awe and dread — Zero Covid failed in the end, but it demonstrated an ability to control society down to the granular level that the Soviets would have envied.
It's long and interesting, but it put me in mind of the Paul Samuelson textbook
I had for my intro econ course in the early 1970s. Samuelson was wont to tout the
strength and growth of the USSR's economy, and he was not alone in that.
But that turned out to be
bullshit.
So is Noah repeating the Samuelson mistake? I'm not smart enough to tell for sure, but
I am skeptical enough to say "maybe".
How can the right be so wrong? Or at least portions of the right—especially the American right—when it comes to Ukraine? To begin to grapple with this, you have to go way, way back to Donald Trump’s first term in office.
In that time, Ukraine came to the public’s consciousness just twice. The first occasion was when Trump and other Republicans began to make hay over the business dealings of Hunter Biden. Since 2014 the then vice president’s son had been sitting on the board of Ukrainian energy company Burisma. He was earning around $1 million annually to advise a company in a sector about which he had zero expertise. Why might a foreign company want the son of the vice president on their board? Obviously—as all the investigations have shown since—so that the Biden name could bring contracts, grants, and other support to Burisma.
The only other time Ukraine came to the attention of the American right was in 2019, when President Trump had a phone call with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky. Trump’s political opponents claimed that he had used the call to tell Zelensky that American aid to the country could be contingent on Ukraine helping to expose the Biden family’s financial dealings. Trump was impeached over the call but acquitted by the Senate. But these two events started to embed the idea on the right that Ukraine was simply a corrupt country, which had enriched and cooperated with its own political opponents.
I'm reading Murray's recent book, The War on the West; he is a take-no-prisoners, unapologetic
defender of Truth, Justice, and the American Way. Refreshing.
Methinks I detect sarcasm.
Jeff Maurer "cheers"
"Oh, Huzzah: The Resistance Has Arrived."
After noting the protest theater of Democrats' antics during Trump's SOTU-like address:
These protests seem to be in response to ever-loudening calls for Democrats to #DOSOMETHING!!! And here’s where being some asshole blogger is nice, because while lawmakers have to scramble to try to make themselves seem consequential, I can just say: Democrats can’t do shit right now. Not really. They can vote against the House budget — and all of them did — but it still passed. Damn near the only thing Democrats can do is win the next election. And that’s why these protests gave me a near-terminal case of the douche chills, because I think that performative Resistance nonsense makes it harder for Democrats to win.
Consider: The Democratic Party is increasingly the party of educated, upper middle-class people. This is a problem, partly because only 38 percent of American adults hold a four year degree, and partly because educated, upper middle-class people are the most annoying twats to ever curse humanity with their presence (and I know this because I’m one of them). You couldn’t build a political movement around pissing off GED holders or telling farmers to go jump up their own asses, but you can absolutely do that with wine track Ivy League types. The MAGA movement is a reactionary movement against self-righteous progressive jerk offs, and believe me when I say: When I look at that photo of Democrats holding those stupid paper-plate-and-popsicle-stick paddles, I completely get where MAGA heads are coming from.
And I guess "I'm one of them" too. Although Jeff is despairing because he wants Democrats to win,
I'm pretty much OK with them continuing to alienate large swaths of voters.
Elon Musk—who is, let us not forget, one of those “unelected bureaucrats” Donald Trump raged against on Tuesday night—has sent Democrats to the fainting couch by referring to Social Security as a “Ponzi scheme,” an ancient and bog-standard piece of libertarian rhetoric that, while not entirely accurate, captures the spirit of the thing. Social Security resembles a Ponzi scheme in that its economic structure requires a steady flow of new taxpayers into the system to fund benefits promised to those eligible to collect them; it is different from a Ponzi scheme in that there isn’t really any fraud involved in it beyond the loosey-goosey marketing language politicians have used to sell it over the years. Social Security is a perfectly ordinary social-insurance scheme (“scheme” here in the nonpejorative British sense) very similar to many other programs around the world that are—predictably—failing for the same reason.
The fraud involved in Social Security is political rather than financial. Franklin Roosevelt described Social Security as though it were an investment plan, a kind of federally secured savings account for retirement, and his epigones in both parties have continued that long and dishonest tradition. It is, of course, no such thing: Social Security is an ordinary welfare program in which the federal government takes money from taxpayers to provide benefits to a favored class of people, in this case oldsters and people with disabilities. There is a separate payroll tax producing revenue the federal government pretends to set aside for Social Security and Medicare, which is done to reinforce the myth that Social Security is a system that people “pay into” before receiving payments that are, in some sense, a return on investment.
I looked up "epigone" yesterday, Kevin. Stop trying to make "epigone" happen!
Pappas did not even have the basic honesty to post a legible version of that 152-signature letter, denying
his followers even a slight hint as to what he was talking about. Fortunately, U.S. Rep. Grace Meng (D-Queens)
was a little more informative (but no less demagogic) in her
press release, which includes a link to the
PDF letter sent to SSA Acting Commissioner Leland Dudek.
As indicated in the SSA release I linked in my tweet: the "gutting" is the proposal to trim the Social Security
workforce from its current 57K to 50K, and to rejigger its "bloated" organizational structure.
There are, sadly, no plans to "gut" Social Security, by which I mean: no plans to avoid its coming
day of fiscal reckoning. That's still on track for
sometime in 2035. And, as near as I can tell, neither Pappas, nor Democrats or
Republicans generally, have no plans to offer about that.
The Washington establishment has no incentive to stop the spending on small, ridiculous stuff or on large, unpaid-for programs. Congress doesn't have to balance the national budget as the rest of us each must balance our own household's.
Where does that leave us? With the same old truth that we must soon reform entitlement spending to make Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security sustainable. But we must also cut as much as possible of the absurd waste that infects the budget. Rather than endorsing a false choice, we, the people, should simply demand that Congress be the good steward of our tax dollars it was intended to be. Regardless of what DOGE does.
It would be nice if "we, the people" actually did demand that.
Unfortunately…
Ninety-seven percent of congressional incumbents were re-elected in 2024, slightly higher than the 96% re-elected in 2020. In 41 states, all congressional incumbents who sought another term were re-elected. In 41 states, all congressional incumbents were re-elected, the same as in 2022. In 2020, voters in 38 states re-elected their incumbents who sought another term.
Poll after poll show that "we, the people" think America's "on the wrong track". And yet, "we" keep re-electing
the same clowns; why would we expect the circus to improve?
Denmark's state-run postal service, PostNord, is to end all letter deliveries at the end of 2025, citing a 90% decline in letter volumes since the start of the century.
The decision brings to an end 400 years of the company's letter service. Denmark's 1,500 post boxes will start to disappear from the start of June.
Transport Minister Thomas Danielsen sought to reassure Danes, saying letters would still be sent and received as "there is a free market for both letters and parcels".
If the Danes can adapt to market-based modernity, we can't we?
Also of note:
Christian, you say that like it's a bad thing! Oh, wait, it is a bad thing.
Christian Schneider puts his finger on it:
Donald Trump Mistakes Weakness for Strength. Especially when compared to Ronald "We Win, They Lose" Reagan:
One of the favorite parlor games within MAGA Nation is comparing Donald Trump to Reagan, hoping to launder Trump’s weakness through a prism of morally unambiguous Reaganism. This week, Trump’s first-term deputy national security adviser K. T. McFarland, who might want to check that her house is properly ventilated, argued that Trump is doing the “exact same thing” as Reagan regarding negotiations with Russia.
These arguments target gullible people on the right who are also prone to believe that nobody out-pizzas the Hut. Of course, Reagan brought about the collapse of the Soviet Union through strength, moral determination, and courage. Trump’s pathetic stance toward Russia in its war of aggression against Ukraine hardly demonstrates the same fortitude.
Trump is a weak man, as he reminds us every time he stands in front of a microphone. During his address to a joint session of Congress on Tuesday night, he opened by complaining that his “astronomical accomplishments” weren’t being sufficiently cheered by Democrats. When discussing an anti-revenge-porn bill he wants to see passed, he took the time to remind America that “nobody gets treated worse than I do online, nobody.”
Kevin D. Williamson has a different towering figure (and brave people) from that era in mind:
Ghosts of the Cold War:
“Here I am, then. I have come home.”
So said Pope John Paul II after landing in Warsaw in 1983, bending to kiss the soil of his native country. The mood was patriotic and defiant. “Poland for the Poles!” came the shouts from the crowd—union men, priests, fathers and their sons. “We are the real Poland!” The pope continued: “I consider it my duty to be with my fellow countrymen in this sublime and at the same time difficult moment.”
The demonstrators unfurled banners advertising the Solidarity movement and chanted the name of its leader, Lech Wałęsa. The 81-year-old Wałęsa, one of the great heroes of the Cold War, is still very much with us, and still engaged in public affairs. “Gratitude is due to the heroic Ukrainian soldiers who shed their blood in defense of the values of the free world,” he said earlier this week. “We do not understand how the leader of a country that is a symbol of the free world cannot see this.”
Wałęsa is not the only figure from that day who remains part of our public life. He and other supporters of Polish sovereignty, in Poland and around the world, were being spied on by the KGB’s foreign-operations directorate, whose roster of murderers, torturers, and villains included Vladimir Putin. The KGB’s mission was to do in Poland what it had done in Czechoslovakia in the 1960s—suppress the movement for liberty and sovereignty. The ghost of the KGB is now working toward that end in Ukraine.
Cold War fantasies such as The Manchurian Candidate imagined it would take some incredible and complicated scheme to put a man willing to do the bidding of the KGB and its analogues and epigones into Washington’s halls of power. In reality, all it took was a man whose values align with those of the KGB rather than with those of the Founding Fathers.
Gee, I wonder who he's talking about, there at the end?
(And I admit I had to ask Google what an "epigone" was.)
This was more than just a speech; it was a thunderous declaration of American greatness and a fiery testament to Trump’s undeniable leadership. With unwavering resolve, he proclaimed, “America is back,” revealing a bold and brilliant vision that patriots nationwide erupted in cheers. This marked a renewal of the American Dream, demonstrating that Trump is the only man who can make it a reality.
Etc. It's the kind of prose that would have Kim Jong Un protesting to his hagiographers: "Don't you find that praise a little too effusive?"
I don’t love that “use taxpayer money to buy fake trash” is White House policy now. I also think that the proper role for a coked-up 20 year-old is dancing in a go-go cage, not auditing the federal government. Some of my other cranky old man opinions are that it would be easier to access Greenland’s minerals through trade than through an Eric the Red-style conquest, and that “Neville Chamberlain but an asshole” is a bad diplomatic posture. I doubt that many conservatives will disagree with anything I just said, because the main split in American politics these days isn’t liberal/conservative but rather total idiot/not.
Of course, it doesn’t matter what I think, because I’m not calling the shots. Trump is calling the shots, and he’s removed many of the meddling nerds who thwarted his schemes in his first term. The running gag of the first Trump administration was Trump telling people to do awful things and his subordinates just…not doing them. For example: Remember when Trump told a room full of people to get the Justice Department harass Time Warner, and Gary Cohn walked out of the meeting and told everyone within earshot “don’t you fucking dare” do that? Remember when Mark Esper had to tell Trump that he can’t shoot protesters in the legs? It turns out that the “deep state” was actually just not-crazy people refusing to do crazy stuff.
But this time around, Trump is free to be his worst self. Even if the courts uphold the law and Trump backs down from his crazier shenanigans, damage has already been done. Programs authorized by Congress have been haphazardly shuttered, alliances have been trashed, and volatility has given investors their twitchiest sphincters in 17 years. IMHO, this is bad — I’m not a person who cheers for total societal breakdown in the hope that my party will summon 56 Senate seats from the ashes. But even so, I can see a small upside to living in an Idiocracyfor just a little while.
Speaking of Idiocracy, there's a pic of Sara Rue in her sexy outfit from that movie
at the link, and you don't want to miss that.
"Just listen to some of the appalling waste we have already identified," Trump bragged. "$8 million for making mice transgender—this is real."
Indeed, spending $8 million to make mice transgender would be an appalling waste of tax money, if it were real. Thankfully, it isn't.
At the time of the speech, some online commentersnoted that the program was likely not transgender but transgenic—"an organism or cell whose genome has been altered by the introduction of one or more foreign DNA sequences from another species by artificial means," according to the National Human Genome Research Institute.
When corrected, Emily at least had the honesty to say
"Oh, that's quite different! … Never mind." As Joe details, not the White House.
Where the Vodka Drowns and the Fear Chases My Blues Away
Jonah Goldberg gives one of those high-placed friends the
benefit of the doubt: he's just looking for
Peace in His Time.
After his time, however, he doesn't give a rat's ass:
Trump doesn’t care about down the road. He wants to be able to claim he achieved peace in the short term. If Putin invades Ukraine again on January 20, 2029, that’s not his problem. In fact, he might even like it: He could point to it as more evidence that Putin would never invade the country while Trump was president.
This is how Trump thinks about politics, international and domestic alike. He cares less about serious, lasting policy than what he can take credit for immediately.
I somehow didn't have "Makes Neville Chamberlain Look Good in Comparison"
on my Trump II Bingo Card.
From the French word “petite,” meaning “small,” comes the English word “petty,” which describes the Trump administration. This is greatness as restored by the midgets of MAGA:
Secretary of State Marco Rubio was in the room when the U.S. foreign policy of 80 years was jettisoned, and he was thrilled. This small occupant of an office once held by big people (from Thomas Jefferson, John Marshall, James Madison, James Monroe, John Quincy Adams, Henry Clay, Martin Van Buren and Daniel Webster to George Marshall, Dean Acheson and Henry Kissinger) swooned on X: “Thank you @POTUS for standing up for America in a way that no President has ever had the courage to do before.”
Do Rubio’s muscles cramp during prolonged genuflections? He is, however, right, in his fashion: No president has ever before “stood up for America” this way, by turning U.S. foreign policy 180 degrees, away from supporting democracies toward rewarding war criminals. (Nine days before Donald Trump’s Oval Office berating of Ukraine’s president, the Financial Times website presented video of Russians murdering unresisting Ukrainian prisoners of war.) In a future X post, Rubio might elaborate on how courage featured in this reversal. Or in Trump’s pique about what he considers Ukraine’s insufficiently reiterated gratitude for the assistance Ukraine received from the Biden administration.
So smitten is Trump with Vladimir Putin (“genius”), he cannot fathom that the Russian leader surely considers him a weakling. Putin knows that Trump knows, but is too servile to say, who invaded whom on Feb. 24, 2022.
I feel I should apologize to Elvis Costello: I used to be amused, now I'm just disgusted.
Also of note:
Is "Stop Making Sense" the new Democrat motto?
Some days it seems that way. Oh, heck; most days it seems that way.
In his article, Democratic Incoherence on Transgender Sports, Noah Rothman examimes the D-side objections
to a legislative ban federal funding to schools
that put boys on girls' sports teams:
According to Senator Tammy Baldwin, the legislation was an attack on localism and an overreach by the federal government. “I, for one, trust our states, our leagues, our localities to make these decisions without interference from Congress or the president,” she said.
Noah remembers just a few months ago when the Biden Administration expanded Title IX to
mandate the inclusion of transgender males in women’s athletics. Apparently Senator
Tammy does not.
In fact, isn't Title IX premised on not trusting "states, leagues and localities"
to make their own decisions on this?
Being a federal worker has suddenly gotten far less pleasant. Trump keeps erratically lashing out his entire workforce. He’s siccing Elon Musk on them in search of waste and heresy. He’s ordering them to abandon years of hard work.
Furthermore, in the eyes of most federal workers, Trump is ideologically and personally odious. While I couldn’t find any decent data on federal workers’ Democrat/Republican ratio, federal workers’ campaign contributions skew quite left. Indeed, setting aside the military, federal workers look almost monolithically Democratic:
[Chart at link]
Granted, you could argue that a few of Trump’s policies are making federal workers’ lives better. Firing all the DEI workers and ending all the DEI trainings will outrage the far left, but the moderate left will perchance breathe a quiet sigh of relief. But even the most moderate leftist probably hates Trump twice as much as they hate DEI, so on balance it’s safe to say that most federal workers’ job satisfaction is, on balance, taking a big hit.
Bryan notes that federal workers are "vastly overcompensated" compared to private-sector workers
doing similar jobs.
Disagree? Bryan is willing to bet actual money on this; see his post for details. Are you game?
The Department of Justice is investigating the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, a $27 billion program that was part of Joe Biden’s $740 billion Inflation Reduction Act. Created in the spring of 2023, and managed by the Environmental Protection Agency, the fund was supposed to be a first-of-its-kind program to address the climate crisis while revitalizing communities that it considered “historically left behind.”
But it appears little of the $27 billion revitalized anything—except the coffers of a range of environmental nonprofits associated with former Obama and Biden administration officials.
“The Biden administration used so-called ‘climate equity’ to justify handouts of billions of dollars to their far-left friends,” Lee Zeldin, the Trump administration’s new EPA administrator, told The Free Press. “It is my utmost priority to get a handle on every dollar that went out the door in this scheme and once again restore oversight and accountability over these funds. This rush job operation is riddled with conflicts of interest and corruption.”
A Free Press investigation reveals that of the $27 billion, $20 billion was rushed out the door to eight nonprofit groups after Kamala Harris lost the election—but before President Donald Trump took office. As one former EPA official put it on a secretly recorded video, it was akin to “tossing gold bars off the Titanic.”
There will, sadly, be no movie about this starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet; but that's
fun to think about.
The latest exploits of Joe Pickett and his buddy Nate Romanowski. And it's very much a continuation
of the events in previous volumes, as the psychopathic Axel Soledad is hatching a nefarious
plot involving the mass murder of … well, that would be telling. But Nate, thanks to events in
the previous book, has gone even more feral than usual, He's teamed up with Geronimo Jones, who
also has an interest in terminating Soledad.
What about Joe? Well, he's tasked with an undercover project by the colorful Wyoming Governor
Spencer Rulon; his son-in-law has gone missing, along with seasoned hunting guide Spike Rankin.
But we readers know what's going on: they were ambushed by Soledad's gang down at … Battle Mountain!
So: lots of detective work, outdoors scenery lovingly described, occasional intense violence, and
some political commentary. Which might not be to everyone's taste. Ending seems a bit rushed, but that's OK.
The heart of this dispute is the cold hard fact that Donald Trump trusts Vladimir Putin a lot more than he trusts Zelensky. The president explicitly said so.
As Ronald Reagan said in his negotiations with Mikhail Gorbachev, “Dovorey no provorey — trust, but verify.” At one summit, Gorbachev quipped, “You say that at every meeting.”
But, as far as we can tell, Trump trusts Putin. The American president has demanded no concessions from Russia, no denunciation of its war crimes, not even a peep of criticism. No one in this administration wants to publicly say the obvious fact that Russia invaded Ukraine. This is an administration that fears the hostile dictators who are genuine threats to America and makes up for that insecurity by berating and bullying democratic allies.
That’s our policy now — we side and stand with the aggressor.
It appears Jim's article is outside the paywall. Read the whole thing, and feel ashamed for our country.
In his address to the joint session of Congress, President Trump called for the repeal of the CHIPS Act, a bipartisan industrial policy law signed by Biden. “We don’t have to give them money,” he said of semiconductor companies benefiting from the law’s subsidies.
Trump portrayed it as a Democratic law, saying, “Your CHIPS Act is a horrible, horrible thing,” while gesturing toward the Democrats’ side of the House chamber.
In his address to the joint session of Congress, President Trump called for the repeal of the CHIPS Act, a bipartisan industrial policy law signed by Biden. “We don’t have to give them money,” he said of semiconductor companies benefiting from the law’s subsidies.
It is mostly standard-issue corporate welfare, giving gobs of money to politically favored companies such as Intel. Last year, Intel announced it was cutting 15,000 jobs, which was 5,000 more jobs than it said it expected to create with CHIPS Act funding.
It was horrible. Back when it passed the Senate in 2022,
I
said it
was "a demonstration that nobody learned their lessons about central planning, industrial policy, and corporate welfare."
As for it being a "Democratic law": 17 GOP senators voted for it, as did 24 GOP CongressCritters.
So: The president wants to spend taxpayer dollars to buy fake non-money that Twitch streamers use to buy drugs. And he’s not limiting the government to the less-laughable cryptocurrencies, like Bitcoin — if Bitcoin is Coca-Cola, Trump wants to also buy Jittery Jimmy’s High-Fructose Fizz Drink. Trump has mused that buying cryptocurrency could get the government out of debt, which sounds like the plan a degenerate gambler makes right before his body turns up in a New Jersey landfill.
The potential for corruption is off the charts. This plan clearly benefits someone — the value of the cryptocurrencies Trump mentioned spiked after the announcement — but because cryptocurrencies are anonymous, we don’t know who got rich. It could be donors, foreign interests, or Trump family members — the only thing we know is that it was somebody terrible. Plus, someone placed a highly leveraged $200 million purchase right before Trump’s announcement, so there’s probably an old-timey insider trading scam happening alongside this Digital Age scam-of-the-future.
The LPO was created in 2005 to finance high-risk, first-of-a-kind cleantech projects. Since its founding, the office has funded $43.9 billion worth of projects. While some of these have included eventual winners like Tesla, the program has mostly been marred by failed projects and wasteful spending—which permeates throughout the LPO today.
In December 2024, the Energy Department's Inspector General (I.G.) identified several violations of conflicts of interest, which could give applicants an unfair advantage when applying for federal money. The I.G. concluded that the LPO "is administering more than $385 billion in new loan authority" without properly vetting, managing, or tracking conflicts of interest.
In light of the report, the Energy Department has "paused all new loan actions," Jonathan Black, the agency's chief adviser for oversight, told the House Committee on Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations in February.
Tanks a lot, Roger.
Now Roger Pielke Jr. has meThinking About Tanks.
But he makes a good point first:
Speaking yesterday on Fox News, U.S. Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick indicated that official data for U.S. GDP would now separate out government spending from the rest of the nation’s overall economic tally.
“You know that governments historically have messed with GDP. They count government spending as part of GDP. So I’m going to separate those two and make it transparent.”
Lutnick seems not to be aware that the Bureau of Economic Analysis — which sits in the agency that he leads — already separates out federal spending in its quarterly GDP reports. You can see that in lines 51-57 of Table 3 in BEA’s report on U.S. 4th quarter GDP in 2024, released last week, and shown below highlighted in yellow. Federal spending (annualized) was about $1.9 trillion of the nation’s $29.7 trillion economy.
It's always seemed a little odd to me that Uncle Stupid's spending on whatever contributes
to a measure of the country's economic health. Still, as Roger points out, it's "standard practice".
Or as they said in Animal House, it has a
long-standing tradition of existence..
“We’re talking about existential threats to federal programs and funding that really can’t be overstated,” Goodlander said. “These are dollars that make our way of life in New Hampshire, the Live Free or Die state, possible.”
She is, like all Democrats, a fan of (what I've called):
The DC Shuffle (a periodic observation): (1) take our tax $; (2) send some of it back; (3) act like they've done us a favor.
… But Maggie's claiming this legerdemain is something that makes LFOD possible is … what? Insane?
Stupid? Evil? I'm going with "all three".
(By the way, if you click over to Twitter and ask Grok to explain my post, you will
see some incorrect, but amusing, misinformation. I never appeared on "The Mary Tyler Moore Show". Unfortunately.)
The woman who wrote this article is of course too stupid to understand that its very existence is proof of exactly the kind of anti-white male bias that she’s denying. No mainstream publication would ever in a million years publish an article titled “Can women finally stop… pic.twitter.com/ejFZkLWVW0
The woman who wrote this article is of course too stupid to understand that its very existence is proof of exactly the kind of anti-white male bias that she’s denying. No mainstream publication would ever in a million years publish an article titled “Can women finally stop complaining?” Or “Can black people finally stop complaining?”
This is the kind of open contempt that can only be expressed towards one demographic group and no other. White men have simply had enough of this. We’re speaking up in our own defense, and that’s what’s so upsetting to her.
To be fair to the WSJ essay's author, Joanne Lipman, a free link:
Can White Men Finally Stop Complaining?. Even her
Wikipedia page describes her as "left-wing"
(at least it does as I type this). The first few paragraphs should give you the snarky flavor:
The manosphere won. Bro podcasters top the charts. Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg declares his company needs more “masculine energy.” Elon Musk shares a post saying only “high-status males” should run the country. The White House kills diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies, and so do multiple companies, from Target to McDonald’s.
OK, men, so will you finally quit complaining?
In 2021, Joe Rogan famously said, “It will eventually get to straight white men are not allowed to talk…It will be, ‘You’re not allowed to go outside’…I’m not joking. It really will get there, it’s that crazy.” But Rogan’s complaint is actually an old one that has exploded as a rallying cry every decade or so for more than 50 years. White guys have blamed others for their job losses, educational failures, economic problems and drug addictions.
Somebody else is always at fault. The mighty white guy, it turns out, is quite the delicate flower.
More sneering, cherry-picking, and deftly ignoring the actual arguments "white men" are making
at the link, of course.
Also of note:
The Anxious Generation, but with jokes..
I recently finished Jonathan Haidt's The Anxious Generation, report linked below.
To lighten the mood from Haidt's gloomy assessment, here's Dave Barry
on one recently reported symptom:
Telephobia.
If you, like me, belong to an older generation that is tired of being mocked by younger generations as clueless technology-impaired geezers — an insult that is especially hurtful because it's true — I have some news that might make you feel a little better: A college in England is offering a seminar designed to help Gen Z students overcome their fear of — prepare to be terrified — telephone calls.
Really. I found out about this from an article on the CNBC website headlined: "Gen Z battling with phone anxiety are taking telephobia courses to learn the lost art of a call."
That's right: Gen Zers have "telephobia," a fear of making or receiving phone calls, according to Liz Baxter, a careers advisor at Nottingham College. She's quoted as saying that Gen Zers "automatically default to texting, voice notes, and anything except actually using a telephone for its original intended purpose, and so people have lost that skill."
At this point you older generations are thinking: "Skill? Talking on the phone is a skill? That requires a seminar? What other 'skills' does Gen Z lack? Are they capable of bathing themselves? How about chewing? DO THEY NEED A SEMINAR TO WIPE THEIR BUTTS?"
Dave is merciful. Eventually.
With all due respect, let's point out that not very much respect is due.
Kevin D. Williamson certainly isn't showing any when he
observes the state of
The Grand Ol’ Gimmick Party.
On the subject of cooking up some new budget gimmicks to hide the actual costs of current Republican fiscal incontinence, Sen. Ron Johnson said: “We need to avoid a massive, automatic tax increase,” as the tax cuts in the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act expire. A question for the senator: If it is important to avoid massive automatic tax increases, then why on Earth did you [long baroque string of expletives deleted] idiots write a massive automatic tax increase into the 2017 tax-cut bill? You remember that bill, Sen. Johnson: You voted for it. You lobbied to make it more expensive by changing pass-through rules in a way that benefited you personally and put a little extra change in the pockets of a couple of big donors, too, though I assume you’d have pushed for those changes in any case on the grounds that tax cuts are the Republicans’ version of Democrats’ spending giveaways.
KDW goes on to note: "When it comes to evading fiscal responsibility, Republicans are a pretty cheap date: They’ll pretty much take whatever is on offer."
While Americans fixate on Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to rein in wasteful spending, Congress is quietly plotting to make the nation’s fiscal situation worse.
The House recently passed a budget resolution calling for $4.5 trillion in tax cuts plus $300 billion in new spending over the coming decade—all balanced out with $2 trillion in offsetting spending cuts and about $2.6 trillion in pixie dust from assuming their budget will have economic growth taking off like one of SpaceX’s rockets. (I believe it when I see it.)
Now the Senate is attempting to rewrite the budget resolution using an accounting gimmick to pretend extending the 2017 tax cuts won’t increase the deficit. Their tactic: switching to a “current policy baseline.” A major reason for this bait-and-switch maneuver is Medicaid, with legislators reluctant to hit the brakes on the federal funding gravy train that pads their own state budgets.
She's more polite about it than KDW, but equally on target.
The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is off to a decent start in making initial cuts in federal waste and overall cost and—importantly—normalizing the reality that reducing government expenditures is a good thing. But if the DOGE is to live up to its avowed mission of making the bloated federal government even slightly affordable, at some point it's going to have to take on the big dogs of government excess. That requires congressional cooperation, and it means targeting Social Security.
"The Old-Age and Survivors Insurance (OASI) Trust Fund will be able to pay 100 percent of total scheduled benefits until 2033, unchanged from last year's report," the Social Security trustees revealed in the most recent annual report. "At that time, the fund's reserves will become depleted and continuing program income will be sufficient to pay 79 percent of scheduled benefits."
J.D. has some good ideas. And he's fortunate that he's not a politician. Because if he were,
his opponents in the next election will have already composed their
ads showing him pushing grandma off a cliff in her wheelchair.
An anniversary is coming up.
And Phil Magness gives us reasons to not celebrate:
Locking Down American Liberty.
He notes that pre-COVID, and even in COVID's early days,
the scientific consensus was that lockdowns were ineffective. Even Fauci agreed with this.
But:
In just six weeks’ time, nearly the entirety of the US public health profession, including Fauci, would jettison the previous century of scientific literature attesting to the ineffectiveness of lockdowns. Instead, they rushed to embrace the previously-deprecated approach of simulation modeling, and used it to place the majority of the world under mandatory quarantine. Five years later, we still have no clear answers for why this sudden, sharp reversal happened, let alone accountability for the public health officials who made the call to change course.
If any single event warrants credit for swaying the public health profession over to lockdowns, it is the publication of Report No. 9 by the epidemiology modeling team at Imperial College-London on March 16, 2020. The brainchild of Neil Ferguson, a computer scientist and physicist with no medical training, the Imperial College model forecasted catastrophic mortality figures in the coming months if the world’s leading economies did not go into immediate lockdown to contain Covid-19. The initial models projected 510,000 deaths in the UK and 2.2 million deaths in the United States by late July 2020 unless each country adopted a suite of NPI measures to shutter businesses and schools and restrict public gatherings. Ten days later, Ferguson’s team expanded their model to approximately 189 countries and other defined political boundaries. The expanded Imperial College report predicted similar levels of catastrophic death in almost every nation on earth, absent immediate measures to impose society-wide lockdowns.
I'm not sure what the lesson is here. Simply because they were disastrously wrong last time doesn't
mean they'll be wrong the next time. But, for better or worse, the credibility of "experts" and "science"
has taken a huge hit.
Mikey Madison becomes the 10th woman to win an Oscar for playing a prostitute — 12th if you count Donna Reed in "From Here to Eternity" and Jo Van Fleet in "East of Eden." And Madison is the first to win an Oscar for playing a prostitute since the #MeToo movement shook Hollywood to its nonexistent core.
What's the significance of prostitutes being so hyper-represented in Oscar actress honors?
What does it say about how these people think?
Has anyone studied if there is an equivalent job for Best Actor? Going back over the
last 10 awards we have:
Architect,
Physicist,
Teacher,
Pushy Father,
Demented Father,
Psycho Villain,
Gay Singer,
Prime Minister,
Janitor,
and
Fur Trapper.
I'm not seeing a trend there. And no prostitutes at all.
How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness
(paid link)
Probably not the wisest library pick for me. The author, Jonathan Haidt, provides a lot of recommendations
for (1) parents of younger children and (2) political activists. I am currently neither.
What's left (however) is Haidt's documentation of today's troubled youth, caught in a double whammy of
(1) mental illness, caused by overuse of smartphones and social media;
and (2) under-exposure to real-world interactive "play". (I've noticed that most discussions
of the book seem to center on whammy #1.)
Discussion and updates
on these topics are, for now, being continued on
Haidt's
substack,
After Babel
and the
book-specific website.
Haidt is a research psychologist, and I've read and enjoyed his past books:
The Happiness Hypothesis;
The Righteous Mind;
and (best of all)
The Coddling of the American Mind,
co-written with Greg Lukianoff. Over the years, Haidt has earned numerous glowing
citations on my blog, mostly thanks to his criticisms of campus censorship.
I tend to side with the libertarian critiques, and I confess being undecided on the "bad science" assertion
leveled by Aaron Brown. There are a lot of studies, graphs, and citations in Haidt's book, and (sorry)
I don't have an aching desire to track down every one. Or any one, for that matter.
I don't have to tell you, but will anyway: If you're interested in the topic, check out the book, and
its responses. And make up your own mind, if you can.
In a 1999 Hoover Institution interview, economist Milton Friedman was asked which federal agencies he would abolish. As host Peter Robinson rattled off the Cabinet list, Friedman gave a blunt verdict on most: "Abolish." Departments of Agriculture and Commerce? "Abolish." Education and Energy? "Abolish." Housing and Urban Development? Gone. Labor? Gone. Transportation? Gone. Even Veterans Affairs, he argued, could eventually be eliminated (with veterans compensated in other ways).
By the end of this exercise, Friedman had effectively reduced 14 Cabinet departments down to about 4.5. The only agencies he'd clearly keep were those handling essential duties like defense, justice, foreign affairs, and treasury functions—the minimal state required to protect the nation and uphold the law.
Vero worries that DOGE has a distracting motive of "rooting out leftist culture politics". While that's
all in good fun, pwning the progs, it should be at most a side effect in working toward the main
downsizing goal.
But probably more important is the method: using raw "unitary" executive power, in Constitutionally
dubious ways, to blow up departments and agencies Congress has authorized. Many of those efforts
won't survive legal challenges, and will turn out to have been a waste of time.
And the cuts that do survive legal challenge can, and will, easily be undone
by the next Democrat in the White House. And that Democrat will gleefully use whatever powers
Trump/Musk have arrogated to the Executive Branch to expand state power.
(And I hear you progressives out there laughing: "You say that like it's a bad thing!")
This month, 75 years ago, Sen. Joe McCarthy (R-Wisc.) gave his infamous speech denouncing disloyal Americans working at the highest levels of our government. It was the defining moment for what became known as McCarthyism, which attacked citizens as dangerous and disloyal influences in government.
Some of us have criticized the rising “rage rhetoric” for years, including that of President Trump and Democratic leaders, denouncing opponents as traitors and enemies of the state.
In the 2024 election, the traditional red state-blue state firewalls again collapsed, as they had in 2016. The response among Democrats has been to unleash a type of new Red Scare, questioning the loyalty of those who are supporting or working with the Trump administration in carrying out his promised reforms.
Elon Musk is the designated disloyal American for many on the left. That rage has reached virtual hysteria on ABC’s “The View.” This is the same show before the election on which hosts warned that, if Trump were elected, journalists and homosexuals would be rounded up and “disappeared.”
Click through and read on for the funny bit: apparently ABC has its lawyers
watching "The View" in real time, in order to notify the show's harridans that
they need to quickly walk back any assertions that might cause legal problems for the network.
"I've had my youth, and I know you must take away my middle years, but please leave me my old age. Please leave a small light at the end of the tunnel." In 2015, with his sentencing hearing looming, Ross Ulbricht begged for a glimmer of hope. Today, at age 40, he is free.
On January 21, one day into his second term, President Donald Trump granted a full pardon to Ulbricht, the founder of the Silk Road online marketplace. He was 11 years into a double life sentence without the possibility of parole after being convicted on charges connected to commerce on the dark web platform, including drug trafficking, computer hacking, and money laundering. Notably, he was not convicted of actually selling drugs himself.
By punishing Ulbricht as if he personally distributed narcotics, the government set a dangerous precedent for internet platforms and personal liability in the digital age. Pressure to hold platform operators liable for everything from misinformation to sex work has grown in the past decade as Ulbricht and his supporters—especially those in the libertarian and cryptocurrency communities—fought for his freedom. Ulbricht has long served as a warning, a caged canary in the coal mine.
KMW notes that serious charges about attempting to murder
witnesses against Ulbricht were filed, they were quietly dropped
after his conviction on lesser, non-violent charges.
So Trump did a good thing. But…
Let's not forget Trump's a lying coward.
Steve Hayes has a take on that Oval Office meeting:
Zelensky Never Had a Chance.
When Volodomyr Zelensky arrived at the White House for his high-stakes meeting Friday, Donald Trump offered a sarcastic welcome. “How are you? You’re all dressed up today,” Trump said. “How are you, Mr. President?” Zelensky responded. Trump turned to the cameras. “He’s all dressed up today,” he said, with a wry smile, before leading Zelensky into the Oval Office.
Nineteen minutes into the meeting, after mostly pleasant statements from the two leaders, Brian Glenn, a reporter with the Trump-boosting Real America’s Voice cable network, who is also Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s boyfriend, attacked Zelensky for his attire.
“Why don’t you wear a suit?” Glenn asked. “You’re at the highest level in this country’s office, and you refuse to wear a suit.”
Vice President J.D. Vance, sitting a few feet from Zelensky, laughed at the question and smiled broadly as Glenn continued to berate the Ukrainian leader. “Do you own a suit?” he continued. “A lot of Americans have problems with you not respecting the dignity of this office.”
[…]
A White House offended by his clothing is a White House looking to be offended. (Zelensky, who has consistently worn military garb at meetings with world leaders and even while addressing the United Nations over the past three years, says he dresses the way he does in solidarity with the soldiers fighting on behalf of his country.)
Shortly after Vance laughed along at the dressing down of Zelensky, the vice president indignantly accused the Ukrainian leader of ingratitude. “Have you said thank you once in this entire meeting?” In fact, Zelensky hadn’t said thank you once—he’d said it three times. But Vance missed these expressions of gratitude because he wasn’t expecting to hear them. It was a classic case of selective perception and motivated reasoning—consuming information in a way that aligns with your preconceptions—and it arose again and again throughout the meeting.
If Zelensky is to be faulted, it's that he failed to handle
this obvious bad-faith setup.
The fortified vaults have been the subject of swirling skepticism and shrouded by secrecy for decades. No visitors are permitted in the facility, and its doors have only opened to unauthorized personnel a handful of times.
This week, Trump and Elon Musk, who oversees the administration's unofficial Department of Government Efficiency, seemed to lean into long-held conspiracy theories about whether the government was being truthful about the amount of gold in the vault.
"All the gold is present and accounted for," Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told talk show host Dan O'Donnell in an exclusive interview Wednesday, emphasizing that an audit is conducted every year (though it's often said a full audit has not been done in decades).
Fort Knox's dirty origin story: it was constructed to hold the gold that FDR
executive-ordered
private citizens to surrender to the government (at a government-set price). Arguably
more dictatorial than anything Trump has done. Or (I hope) has even contemplated doing.
I'm hooked on Kate Atkinson's sleuth series featuring Jackson Brodie; this is number six.
(My reports
here,
here,
here,
here,
and
here.)
I think it's safe to say this book differs somewhat from previous entries, which were occasionally
funny, but mostly grim. This one is pretty hilarious in spots, and the grimness is
turned down quite a bit. The word "farce" appears a couple times in the text, and that's
kind of appropriate.
A brief opening scene teases the "Murder Mystery Weekend" held in "Burton Makepeace", a decrepit English manor house;
think "Downton Abbey", where things have gone to seed in the modern age.
Brodie's there with his unwilling partner from a previous book, Reggie. But why?
Flash back a bit:
Private eye Brodie is hired to track down a stolen painting, a portrait of a lady with a pine marten
on her lap. (Brodie thinks of it as "Woman With Weasel".) This was apparently an occasional theme in
Renaissance art; you can look up Leonardo's Lady with an Ermine, for one example. It turns out
the most likely theft suspect is a mysterious servant who disappeared along with the painting. And it
also turns out there have been similar-MO thefts over the years.
There are multiple POVs, as usual with Atkinson; there's a village vicar who's lost his voice. And a
veteran who's lost his leg. They all find their way to the manor in the middle of a nasty blizzard, and get caught up with the ramshackle
"murder mystery" play being put on by an indifferent bunch of actors. And there's an actual murder victim along the way.
At more than a few spots in the book, Atkinson's colorful prose put me in mind of good old Raymond Chandler;
would it be totally crazy for the Chandler estate to commission Kate to write a Philip Marlowe mystery?
Then on the back cover I read a blurb from the WaPo, referring to a previous book as "Raymond Chandler meets
Jane Austen", so I guess not totally crazy.
Well, not me. At least I hope not. But I was reminded
of the good old days when conservatives and libertarians
pointed with scorn to the rabble-rousing tactics
summed up in
"Rules for Radicals", promulgated
by Saul Alinsky. Specifically, Number 13:
"Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it."
We used to think we were above that sort of thing, didn't we?
Nevertheless, we've seen that rule work out in the past few days, where the "target" is the hapless Volodymyr Zelenskyy, and the
ones doing the picking, freezing, personalizing, and polarizing are President Trump, VP Vance, and on down
to their ever-reliable cheerleaders.
For example, CNN pundit Scott Jennings, usually someone I like,
didn't even pretend there may have been bigger issues at stake than Zelenskyy's
wardrobe and lack of obsequiousness. As quoted approvingly at
Hot Air:
"All Zelenskyy had to do today was put on a tie, show up, smile, say thank you, sign the papers, and have lunch. That's it — and he couldn't do that."
And at that Oval Office meeting J.D. Vance revealed that Zelenskyy's months-ago visit
revealed unacceptable disloyalty (as quoted in the
WSJ).
You went to Pennsylvania and campaigned for the opposition in October.
Bret Stephens has it right, I think. It was
A Day of American Infamy. He compares and contrasts
with the birth of the
Atlantic Charter, a statement
from August 1941, negotiated between FDR and Churchill.
If Roosevelt had told Churchill to sue for peace on any terms with Adolf Hitler and to fork over Britain’s coal reserves to the United States in exchange for no American security guarantees, it might have approximated what Trump did to Zelensky. Whatever one might say about how Zelensky played his cards poorly — either by failing to behave with the degree of all-fours sycophancy that Trump demands or to maintain his composure in the face of JD Vance’s disingenuous provocations — this was a day of American infamy.
To continue the analogy, it would be like the pundits of the day attempting to derail the US/UK alliance by
complaining about Churchill's obesity and
cigar habit.
Can we just take a step back and consider that we might be talking about the fate of Europe and (eventually)
America?
Zelenskyy's wardrobe just might be a little less important than that.
Also of note:
(paid link)
That would be a good idea.
I'm currently reading
Douglas Murray's The War on the West, which details … well, it's right there in
the title, isn't it. Report on it soon. George Will's column makes a good accompaniment:
Urgently needed: A reborn patriotic belief in Western virtues.
He is plugging a different book
From an unlikely place — the upper reaches of the technology industry — comes an unexpected summons to an invigorated patriotism. The summons will discomfit progressives by requiring seriousness about the nation’s inadequate defenses, which endanger peace immediately and national survival ultimately. Conservatives will flinch from the new — actually, a recovered — patriotism that calls them up from an exclusively market-focused individualism, to collaboration between public and private sectors in great collective undertakings.
In
"The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West,” Alexander C. Karp, CEO of the software firm Palantir, with co-author Nicholas W. Zamiska, connects the ascent of Silicon Valley and the decline of the nation’s cultural confidence. The former is a symptom of the latter. Karp thinks “the loss of national ambition,” which produced the atomic bomb and the internet, is today manifest in Silicon Valley’s devoting mountains of cash and legions of engineers to “chasing trivial consumer products.” (Disclosure: The columnist’s son David Will is a lawyer at Palantir.)
I've submitted one of my rare requests to the Portsmouth (NH) Public Library
to get this book.
I won't watch the Oscars just to see if they take Kat Rosenfield's advice.
Nevertheless, it's good advice:
Make Actors Apolitical Again.
If I have to listen to an actor talk about politics, let that actor be Gabriel Basso.
You might know Basso from his breakout role in Netflix’s hit series The Night Agent, in which he stars as an FBI agent who works in a secret basement office beneath the White House. But Basso has another White House connection. In 2020, he played J.D. Vance in the big-screen adaptation of Hillbilly Elegy, which was based on the vice president’s memoir about his childhood in Appalachia—which means we now live in a world where the vice president could be Netflix-and-chilling in the White House, watching the man who once played his own younger self doing espionage in the basement of the building he’s sitting in.
In a recent interview, Basso called his entanglement with Vance’s timeline “kind of weird,” which it is—but what’s weirder is that Basso describes Vance himself as “a cool dude,” as if he’s talking about some guy in his Wednesday night bowling league as opposed to one of the most powerful and polarizing political figures in the United States.
This type of comment is typical for Basso, who doesn’t believe actors should embroil themselves in politics. “We’re saying words that we’re told to say. We’re told how to say them. We’re told where to stand. And then we’re telling people how to vote?” he said on a recent episode of the Great Company podcast. “You should be quiet; you should do your job. You should be a jester, entertain people—then shut the fuck up.”
I have seen zero of the nominees for Best Picture, although I might check out
A Complete Unknown when/if it comes to one of my sreaming services.
“Scientists at the University of Cambridge have developed a solar-powered reactor that captures carbon dioxide directly from the air and converts it into sustainable fuel using sunlight,” reports SciTechDaily:
As I pointed out in a comment: We've had "CO2-eating machines that run on sunlight" for a while now. Like 3.5 billion years; they are called "plants".
It might be hype, so skepticism is warranted.
But what's that about destroying humanity? Well follow the link to my discussion.
But what's that about destroying humanity? Please follow the link to my discussion.
And five days after that, Jen offered Nina Jankowicz, Joe Biden's wannabe disinformation cop,
a platform for
trashing
Trump's Executive Order "Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship".
And a couple weeks later, Jen gave Shalise Manza Young
room to vent
on
Trump's "bigotry" in his EO restricting girls' and womens' sports to… um, girls and women.
(Um, Shalise, you misspelled "biology".)
And yesterday we were furnished with Jen's paean to "a remarkable figure who stands up in defense of democracy, American leadership in the world, the rule of law, and truth." And that person is … (drumroll please) …
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
And it is, indeed, a tongue-bath of an article:
Some Americans deserve recognition every week for their articulate defense of the rule of law, democracy, and inclusivity. But simply because we are accustomed to seeing those faces or hearing their voices does not mean we should not take their endurance and consistency for granted.
When you think of the most effective communicators in defense of the democracy movement, and the most aggressive antagonists of the new era of oligarchy, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) should rank at the top.
Absent from the article is any mention, let alone criticism, of AOC's demagoguery, or her
steadfast advocacy of socialism.
Well, you get the picture. Jen's substack is not so much "contrarian" as it is kneejerk, hyperbolic Trump hatred
combined with obsequious praise for any and all partisan hacks on the D-side.
So I'm unfollowing the "Contrarian". Anyone have recommendations for actual contrarians to follow?
But I did want to comment further on another bit of Jen's AOC sycophancy:
Ocasio-Cortez’s talent goes beyond impromptu street speeches. She can be dazzling in hearings, delivering stinging rebukes to her colleagues. In a recent hearing considering Draconian cuts to Medicaid, she debunked the GOP argument that their aim was to make Medicaid more efficient and eliminate waste. “We have not heard a single concrete number of the amount of waste and abuse that has been identified. There’s kind of this vague magic wand around waste,” she said. “What’s being suggested is that…people seeing the doctor is a waste.”
Well, geez. This should not be an issue. Just yesterday, I
quoted
a
recent report from the Government Accounting
Office, which claimed at least $150 billion per year in improper payments from Uncle Stupid to … well,
anyone willing to accept an improper payment. Specifically, the GAO's
full report estimated Medicaid
improper payments in FY2024 of $31 billion. (Much much more at the link.)
As Republicans try to move their budget through Congress, Democrats and their loyal media allies have found what they think is the GOP’s Achilles’ heel: Medicaid “cuts.” The GOP passed their budget resolution Tuesday, but they risk losing in the end because so far they aren’t even trying to fight back. Yet the Medicaid program has exploded far beyond its design and is in great need of reform.
Keep in mind that Medicaid was established to help the needy—poor children, pregnant women, the elderly and disabled. Democrats have since expanded it by degrees into a far broader entitlement for able-bodied, working-age adults with lower incomes.
No surprise, Medicaid spending is out-pacing even Social Security and Medicare. Federal Medicaid outlays have increased 207% since 2008 and 51% since 2019. Medicaid spending as a share of federal outlays rose to 10% from 7% between 2007 and 2023, while the share of Social Security and Medicare remained stable.
Note that 2019 pre-COVID date. That GAO report linked above notes that there was a pandemic-loosening of Medicaid
eligibility rules, but that was supposed to be "ended effective March 2023." Yet the process is
"still ongoing as of January 2025." Speedy they ain't when it comes to saving taxpayer money. In addition:
Mr. Biden’s HHS even blessed California’s plan to spend federal Medicaid dollars on “activity stipends” for art and music lessons for children and club sports. Oregon is tapping Medicaid to pay for cooking classes, air conditioners and mini-refrigerators. Some Republican states have joined this all-you-can-spend Medicaid buffet.
Democrats are attacking the House Republican budget, saying that the $1.2 trillion of savings it calls for will “gut” social services. In particular, they call out the proposal to save $880 billion over 10 years from Medicaid.
But these savings reforms need not “gut” Medicaid, In fact, well-designed reforms may finally restore some fiscal common sense to the health-care program.
Republicans should own this proposal, and confidently assert that Medicaid’s waste, fraud, and poor accounting practices absolutely provide room for savings without harming the most vulnerable.
After all, since 2013, the number of Americans living in poverty has fallen by by 10 million. Yet during that time Medicaid’s monthly enrollment has leaped from 54 million to 79 million, and its inflation-adjusted federal cost has nearly doubled from $351 billion to $643 billion. Opportunities for savings certainly exist.
If there's no way Republicans can put forth this case to the people effectively, then we really are screwed.
And for a local heads-up, here's Drew Cline at the Josiah Bartlett Center
who's noticing that
The Medicaid alarm is ringing.
Medicaid now consumes 29.6% of New Hampshire spending, according to the National Association of State Budget Officers. That’s 10 percentage points higher than K-12 education spending (19.6%).
Despite having the lowest poverty rate in the nation, New Hampshire devotes a higher share of its state spending to Medicaid than all other New England states except Maine. To the extent that Medicaid funds health insurance coverage for able-bodied adults who could purchase insurance on the private market or obtain it from an employer, these are wasted dollars that could fund other state priorities or be returned to taxpayers.
None of this is remotely sustainable. Hack away, and ignore Jen Rubin and her new BFF, AOC.
In his short time as chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), Brendan Carr has been no stranger to using his power against disfavored entities. The chairman's targets have primarily included broadcast networks and social media companies.
Recently, Carr revealed a fundamental misunderstanding about one of the most important laws governing the internet and social media.
On February 27, digital news outlet Semafor held a summit in Washington, D.C., titled "Innovating to Restore Trust in News," which culminated in a conversation between Semafor editor-in-chief Ben Smith and Carr.
"The social media companies got more power over more speech than any institution in history" in recent years, Carr told Smith. "And I think they're abusing that power. I think it's appropriate for the FCC to say, let's take another look at Section 230."
Just a reminder: we should just Abolish the FCC. Established to allocate "scarce" slices of the electromagnetic spectrum, it's gotten way too big for its regulatory britches.
Mini-review: Bill Clinton continues to lie. Nobody cares.
Except Jim Geraghty, who reviews Bubba's recent ass-covering book in print National Review:
Bill Clinton Whines into the Sunset.
The former president released his second memoir, Citizen: My Life After the White House, last November. You probably didn’t hear a lot about it; Donald Trump had just won his second term, and the Clinton presidency, his post-presidential scandals, and even Hillary Clinton feel like ancient history now. It was startling to see Clinton, the country’s perpetual kid brother of a president, looking so pale and old, and sounding so hoarse, at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago last summer.
You can find some mainstream media reviewers straining to say nice things about the 464-page tome (with index). The ugly truth is that Citizen is a long, dragging, meandering series of humble-bragging stories that not so subtly reveal that Clinton, arguably one of the luckiest men who ever lived, is still soaked through to the bone in self-pity and sees himself as an always well-meaning, noble, blameless, unjustly demonized perpetual victim of that notorious “vast right-wing conspiracy.”
By page 4, Clinton is already lamenting his high legal bills on leaving office and declaring, “I had to start making money, something that had never interested me before.” (Isn’t it amazing how often fabulously wealthy people insist they’ve never had an interest in making money? It may be genetic; Chelsea Clinton once told a reporter, “I was curious if I could care about [money] on some fundamental level, and I couldn’t.” At the time, she was making $600,000 a year doing part-time work as a nearly no-show NBC News correspondent.)
I almost inserted an Amazon paid link for the book here, but … nah. Anyone reading Jim's review (and
that's a "gifted" link, by the way, number one for this month) will wisely save their money.
In a pair of studies involving more than 2,000 participants, the researchers found a 20 percent reduction in belief in conspiracy theories after participants interacted with a powerful, flexible, personalized GPT-4 Turbo conversation partner. The researchers trained the AI to try to persuade the participants to reduce their belief in conspiracies by refuting the specific evidence the participants provided to support their favored conspiracy theory.
My observations: (1) 20% reduction is pretty far from a panacea.
(2) One of the debunked conspiracies is COVID-related, but apparently not the lab leak. That one's
not just for conspiracists any more!
Yascha Mounk sees a conspiracy, though.
And he's usually so mild-mannered! But he goes all libertarian on us when
he talks about
The Never-Ending American Eye Exam Racket.
In every other country in which I’ve lived—Germany and Britain, France and Italy—it is far easier to buy glasses and contact lenses than it is in the United States. Like in Peru, you can simply walk into an optical store and ask an employee to give you an eye test, likely free of charge. If you already know your strength, you can just tell them what you want. You may even be able to buy contact lenses from the closest drugstore without having to talk to a single soul—no doctor’s prescription necessary.
So why does the United States require people who want to purchase something as simple as a pair of glasses to get a costly prescription?
The answer may surpr—OK, it probably won't surprise you. There is no good reason to require
a prescription for a pair of glasses.
I write this having just gone through the optometrist/eye exam/glasses pipeline. The folks at
Dover NH's
"MyEyeDr" were very pleasant, efficient, and professional. And I tried not to think too hard
about how I was being ripped off.
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