Pun Salad

In a WSJ column related to his new book, Taking Religion Seriously, Charles Murray's headline is: Can Science Reckon With the Human Soul? (WSJ gifted link)

I quibble with the headline. I'm pretty sure it's scientists who would need to "reckon with the human soul."

I'm also pretty sure that many scientists would prefer not to.

Charles reports on a phenomenon of which I hadn't heard: "terminal lucidity", when people without functioning brains seem to temporarily recover their consciousness. And then shortly die. Interesting!

Taking Religion Seriously is on the top of my non-fiction to-be-read pile, and it's relatively short, so I will probably report on it at some point in the coming weeks. (But—egad—at the top of my fiction to-be-read pile is James Joyce's Ulysses, clocking in at >640 pages of very small type. So I may need to do some juggling.)

Also of note:

• How many headlines could begin with the words "Trump Erroneously Thinks…"? A lot, I'm sure, and Jacob Sullum has one: Trump Erroneously Thinks Killing Suspected Smugglers Is the Key to Winning the Drug War.

  During a press conference in the Oval Office this week, a reporter asked President Donald Trump about his new policy of summarily executing suspected drug smugglers in the Caribbean Sea, which so far has included five military strikes on speedboats, killing a total of at least 27 people. "Why not have the Coast Guard stop them," as it is "empowered by law to do?" the reporter wondered. That way, he suggested, "you can confirm who's on the boat" and "ensure that they're doing what you suspect."

  Trump's answer was not that drug smuggling is tantamount to violent aggression, as he has repeatedly claimed, or that it merits the death penalty, as he has long argued. Nor did he aver that blowing up the boats is consistent with the law of war because the United States is engaged in an "armed conflict" with drug cartels, as the White House recently told Congress. Rather, Trump claimed his literalization of the war on drugs was necessary because the usual interdiction methods have been "totally ineffective" for "30 years."

  The latter assessment is accurate; for more than a century, in fact, the government has been trying and failing to prevent politically disfavored intoxicants from reaching American consumers. But Trump is wrong to think that the added deterrent of simply killing people suspected of transporting illegal drugs will finally accomplish that impossible mission, and his overestimation of that policy's benefits is coupled with a disregard for its costs. Ordering the military murder of drug suspects simultaneously corrupts the mission of the armed forces, erasing the traditional distinction between civilians and combatants, and obliterates longstanding principles of criminal justice, dispensing with the need for charges or proof.

  Jacob makes the case that, in addition to being dangerously unlawful, Trump's murderous antics will be totally ineffective. Twofer!

• Soybeans, that is. Kevin D. Williamson talks Trump's trade war, and finds it to be A Hill of Beans to Die On. (archive.today link) He is cursed with a long memory:

  To understand the idiotic trade war with China launched by Donald Trump in his second administration, study the idiotic trade war with China launched by Donald Trump in his first administration.

  When Trump took office in 2017, the negative balance of trade with China—the so-called trade deficit—was about $375 billion. Under Trump’s anti-trade policies, it was soon ... $418 billion in 2018. Back down to $343 billion in 2019, $308 billion in 2020, and back up to $353 billion in 2021, the year Trump reluctantly left office after attempting to stage a coup d’état to remain in power. Biden’s administration coincided with two years of sub-$300 billion trade deficits—not because the U.S. economy was so strong but because it was weak: When Americans are struggling, they consume less than they would have otherwise, which typically means lower imports.

  Trump’s first-term trade war with China produced very little in the way of favorable trade results for U.S. firms. There was no radical and long-lasting change in the balance of trade and very little reform of Chinese trade practices. Trade deficits are essentially meaningless as an economic metric and do not actually tell us very much about trade policy (trade deficits are the flip side of capital surpluses; nations with relatively high savings rates tend to invest more of their earnings from exports and spend less on imported consumer goods) but, on that score, there was no progress: The U.S. trade deficit in 2016 was $502 billion, and in 2021 it was $861 billion, a record high, having hit $677 billion in 2020, Trump’s last full year in office.

  KDW's bottom line: "The Trump administration’s policies are dumb and destructive, and they have shown themselves to be failures even on Trump’s own supposed terms."

• Why, it's almost as if that's what they want. Christian Schneider points out a downside of wokeness: Ethnic Gatekeeping in the Arts Doesn't Remove Barriers, It Builds Them. (archive.today link)

  In late 2023, the San Diego County Library’s Rancho Santa Fe branch invited author and actress Annette Hubbell to perform a few selections from her book Women Warriors, which tells the tales of female heroes throughout history. Weeks before the March 2024 performance, however, Hubbell was informed that she needed to remove two black historical figures, Harriet Tubman and Mary McLeod Bethune, from the show.

  The reason? Hubbell is white.

  “Our administration was uncomfortable with you performing a black character as a white woman,” the branch manager told Hubbell, asking her to replace these women with white historical figures. When Hubbell refused to pay tribute only to white women, the library canceled the performance altogether.

  I would imagine (but haven't checked) that the San Diego County Library’s Rancho Santa Fe branch had the usual self-righteous posturing display for "Banned Books Week".

  Anyway, Ms. Hubbell is suing (see that last link), and Pun Salad wishes her well.

• The candy displays went up back in August. So it's coming, and Dave Barry notes that Halloween has changed since he was a kid.

  The holiday that we know as Halloween began as a Druid religious festival in ancient Britain. Back then, groups of Druid youths would go door-to-door demanding treats, and if you refused to give them one, they would burn down your house. If, however, you gave them a treat, they would still burn down your house. That’s how religious they were. Today we know them as British soccer fans.

  But the point is that from the beginning, Halloween was more fun for young people than for homeowners. This was still the case when I was a young person growing up numerous decades ago in Armonk, N.Y. Back then Halloween was a LOT of fun for us kids. The only bad part was when we had to bob for apples. I don’t know if they still make youngsters bob for apples on Halloween, but I hope not, because for a supposedly fun activity, it sucks. You have to get down on your knees and stick your entire head into a tub of cold water, and for what? An apple. It’s like waterboarding, but with fruit.

  The only other part of Halloween I didn’t like was when you went to the trouble to trick-or-treat a house, and instead of real candy, by which I mean chocolate, they gave you some lame “treat” such as raisins, which are practically a vegetable; or licorice, which tastes like insect repellent; or “Necco wafers,” which are not candy at all but mislabeled sidewalk chalk; or “circus peanuts,” which look like radioactive dog turds.

  I confess that I wanted to excerpt enough to get in the line about radioactive dog turds.

  But it's Dave, and you will want to Read the Whole Thing.