Pun Salad

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".

• Fair question. Noah Smith wonders: Is China inventing big important things?

  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".

• Are those red baseball caps too tight on their heads? Douglas Murray has a theory about How MAGA Lost Its Way on Ukraine.

  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.

• Worst scheme ever. Kevin D. Williamson asks the musical question: Is Social Security a Ponzi Scheme?

  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!