Pun Salad

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:

And at that Oval Office meeting J.D. Vance revealed that Zelenskyy's months-ago visit revealed unacceptable disloyalty (as quoted in the WSJ).

It was actually September. And any "campaigning" escaped the notice of contemporaneous news stories.

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.

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:

• 

  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.

• Finally. I've been a tireless advocate for the "Crackpot Idea That Will Save, Or Destroy, Humanity" Artificial Photosynthesis. Now I see an encouraging sign, described at Liberty Unyielding: Scientists build a CO2-eating machine that runs on sunlight.

  “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.