Pun Salad

But Andrew Heaton asks the specific question: Is Donald Trump a socialist? Spoiler: his answer is "No, but…"

Semi-accurate (and much less funny) transcript at the link.

Also of note:

• Warning: adult in room. His name is Charles Blahous, and he's leaping onto that third rail with Reforming Social Security: A How-To Guide.

  In early October, the Mercatus Center published my guide to designing comprehensive Social Security reforms. The guide was written in response to interest expressed by federal lawmakers and their staffs about how to best avert Social Security insolvency. Time is rapidly running out to fix this problem. A solution enacted today would already need to generate savings roughly equal to a 27% across-the-board reduction in future benefit claims. By the time Social Security’s combined trust funds are nearing depletion in 2034, even suddenly stopping all new claims would not avert insolvency. Faced with this impending crisis, lawmakers have two choices:

  1. Act responsibly, enacting comprehensive reforms to repair Social Security’s financing shortfall and address other problems facing the program.

  2. Be irresponsible, papering over the financing shortfall with accounting gimmicks and further escalating federal debt.

  What they can’t do is nothing, because then the program would become insolvent and the benefit checks would stop going out. This would be an intolerable situation not only for beneficiaries but for all the politicians who depend on their votes, so one way or the other, legislation will be enacted. My guide is meant to inform lawmakers who wish to take the responsible approach.

  I don't know for sure what's going to happen, but "Be irresponsible" is the way I'd bet. And it will be accompanied by an amount of dishonesty and demagoguery that will make the current shutdown imbroglio look like a Victorian ball.

• Trust me, you don't want to see the video. James Freeman has a verbal description though: Wokesters Gone Wild. (WSJ gifted link)

  New York City notwithstanding, there are signs that Democrats are starting to turn away from the race, gender and climate obsessions of the progressive left. Now along comes a cautionary tale about an outfit that tried to combine all of them under one roof. This bubbling cauldron of “resistance” may have done more harm to those cooking up the foul brew than it ever did to President Donald Trump.

  David A. Fahrenthold and Claire Brown report for the New York Times:

  The Sierra Club calls itself the “largest and most influential grass roots environmental organization in the country.” But it is in the middle of an implosion — left weakened, distracted and divided just as environmental protections are under assault by the Trump administration.

  The group has lost 60 percent of the four million members and supporters it counted in 2019. It has held three rounds of employee layoffs since 2022, trying to climb out of a $40 million projected budget deficit.

  Here's a free link to the NYT article, and if that turns into a pumpkin, here's an archive.today link. (But see below.) As Oscar Wilde might observe: "One must have a heart of stone to read about the death of the Sierra Club without laughing."

• More on the "Wokesters". Charles C.W. Cooke appreciates a good riposte, especially one from a comely lass: Sydney Sweeney Highlights the Wokesters' Fatal Flaw. (NR gifted link)

  Again, Sydney Sweeney shows how it’s done. Per Newsweek:

  Asking Sweeney directly about the backlash, Stoeffel said: “The criticism of the content, which is that maybe, specifically in this political climate, white people shouldn’t joke about genetic superiority, like that was kind of the criticism, broadly speaking, and since you are talking about this I just wanted to give you the opportunity to talk about that, specifically.”

  Sweeney said in response, “I think that when I have an issue that I want to speak about, people will hear.”

  Perfect.

  Newsweek goes on to suggest that this response has caused “backlash.” But this is nonsense. There has never been any backlash against Sweeney or her American Eagle ad. This whole thing has been an obsession of the weirdest people in America. It is true, alas, that a disproportionate number of those weird people work in the media. But, as Sweeney adroitly showed, they don’t actually have any power that isn’t willingly given to them by their targets. There is no reason that Sweeney should have to explain to a journalist that she’s not a white supremacist, because there was never any reason for anyone to have suspected that Sweeney was a white supremacist in the first instance. The idea is stupid from the ground up. And because it’s stupid from the ground up, the only correct response to it is to ignore the line of inquiry completely while staring contemptuously at the person delivering it.

  That's the polite version. At Hot Air, Beege Welborn is less circumspect: Advice for AWFLs: You Come at the Sweeney, You'd Best Not Miss.

  Gracious goodness, didn't this just crack me up.

  The smug, slouching creature with the bad Prince Valiant coif, garbed in a puke-green cotton t reminiscent of a slacker Star Fleet Academy cadet who's graduating at the bottom of her class but will hint broadly to everyone she missed Valedictorian by half a point, is the features director at GQ.

  Her name is Kat 'Rhymes With AWFL' Stoeffel.

  Beege goes downhill from there. It's tough out there for a GQ features director.

  And I looked it up because I had to: AWFL is an acronym for "affluent white female liberal/leftist".

• Advance warning. Recently, I noted a lot of sites were posting "archive.*" URLs that allowed access to some articles on ordinarily paywalled sites. I have a lackadaisical attitude toward copyright violation, so I joined in.

  But Ars Technica notes that there's some pushback from the Feds: FBI orders domain registrar to reveal who runs mysterious Archive.is site.

  The Federal Bureau of Investigation is trying to unmask the operator of Archive.is, also known as Archive.today, a website that saves snapshots of webpages and is commonly used to bypass news paywalls.

  The FBI sent a subpoena to domain registrar Tucows, seeking “subscriber information on [the] customer behind archive.today” in connection with “a federal criminal investigation being conducted by the FBI.” The subpoena tells Tucows that “your company is required to furnish this information.”

  So it's a possibility that this gravy train will come to an end in the future. Sad! Especially for Dispatch articles; unlike (say) the NYT, the WaPo, the WSJ, or NR, they have no means for even subscribers to generate "gifted" links.

  Even more reasonable is (heh) Reason, which frees articles out of paywall jail after a few weeks.

  So, how about it, Dispatch?

Also of note:

• Yes. Next question? Note that David R. Henderson prefers his original headline on his article, and I agree: Should Billionaires Be Allowed to Exist?. An interesting point, aside from the mere fact that billionaires accumulate wealth by being pretty good at producing things that a lot of people want:

  First, consider the argument for respecting billionaires’ rights to their wealth. I could make my argument for rights in a vacuum, but Bernie Sanders has already provided a road map for that argument. After he became a millionaire, Senator Sanders quit attacking millionaires and raised the ante: he shifted to attacking billionaires. Something he said when he became a millionaire is quite relevant here. He had written a book that had sold well and here is how he explained and defended his newfound wealth. He stated, “I wrote a bestselling book. If you write a bestselling book, you can be a millionaire, too.”

  Notice something important that is implicit in his statement. Sanders thinks that he has a right to the $1.06 million that, according to this news story, he made on the book. His implicit moral claim is worth a lot. For many decades, Sanders described himself as a socialist. The term “socialist” can be used to mean many things, all the way from wanting an expanded welfare state to having an all-powerful government that claims ownership of everything and takes people’s wealth. Wherever Sanders is on that spectrum, his statement makes clear that he rejects one important tenet of extreme socialism, namely, that productive people should not be able to keep what they earn. So far, Bernie and I are on the same page.

  But that raises an issue. Does that same thinking apply to billionaires? Bernie made money by selling a book that many people wanted to buy. Billionaires make money by producing many things that people want to buy. Do they deserve to keep what they earned?

  If they don’t deserve to keep what they earned, there must be some numerical dividing line. Where is that line? In Sanders’s case, the dividing line now seems to be above a few million dollars. Although it’s possible that I’ve missed it, I don’t recall his castigating decamillionaires—people with a net worth of $10 million. So, we’ve narrowed it down a bit. The dividing line seems to be somewhere between $10 million and $1 billion. Let’s say it’s $100 million. Having a net worth of $100 million is fine, but if you’re a centi-millionaire who engages in a transaction that makes you an extra $10,000, that’s not fine. But why? Why is it bad to make that extra $10,000?

  Why it's almost as if the Sanderses of the world didn't think about this very hard.

• I love this Slashdot headline. Doesn't it capture the California ethos? Mark Zuckerberg Opened an Illegal School At His Palo Alto Compound. His Neighbor Revolted. It's a simple link to this WIRED story with the same headline.

  One can only imagine the Palo Alto SWAT team descending on the "illegal" school, with a megaphone: "THROW OUT ALL YOUR COLORED CHALK AND COME OUT WITH YOUR HANDS UP."

  The Crescent Park neighborhood of Palo Alto, California, has some of the best real estate in the country, with a charming hodgepodge of homes ranging in style from Tudor revival to modern farmhouse and contemporary Mediterranean. It also has a gigantic compound that is home to Mark Zuckerberg, his wife Priscilla Chan, and their daughters Maxima, August, and Aurelia. Their land has expanded to include 11 previously separate properties, five of which are connected by at least one property line.

  The Zuckerberg compound’s expansion first became a concern for Crescent Park neighbours as early as 2016, due to fears that his purchases were driving up the market. Then, about five years later, neighbors noticed that a school appeared to be operating out of the Zuckerberg compound. This would be illegal under the area’s residential zoning code without a permit. They began a crusade to shut it down that did not end until summer 2025.

  I can imagine Zuck being somewhat amazed that it might be illegal to teach kids stuff on his own property.

• No Kings, either. Jeffrey A. Singer boldly advocates: No Swords, No Subsidies: Let the Market Set Drug Prices.

  On November 6, President Donald Trump announced that the government will refrain from tariffs on Eli Lilly’s and Novo Nordisk’s imported products and active pharmaceutical ingredients and that Medicare and Medicaid will subsidize the use of their drugs. In exchange, the pharmaceutical companies will significantly cut prices for their GLP‑1 weight-loss medications, Zepbound and Wegovy. Medicare and Medicaid will pay approximately $245 per month to the companies for the products, and Medicare Part D beneficiaries will have a $50 co-pay.

  Jeffrey goes on to note that simply making the GLP-1 drugs available OTC would save people a lot more money, and also relieve a hefty burden on taxpayers.

• This shouldn't be controversial, should it? J.D. Tuccille thinks Americans Shouldn't Be Governed by People Who Hate Half of Us.

  At September's televised memorial service for Charlie Kirk, President Donald Trump commented on the conservative commentator's character, saying, "He did not hate his opponents; he wanted the best for them." He then added, "That's where I disagreed with Charlie. I hate my opponents. And I don't want the best for them."

  Like too much of the political class across the ideological spectrum, Trump is prone to despising those he disagrees with. It raises questions about why people should ever submit to the governance of those who hate them—and whether politicians realize they're a big part of what brought us to this unfortunate moment.

  "It's long past time for all Americans and the media to confront the fact that violence and murder are the tragic consequence of demonizing those with whom you disagree," Trump had told the nation on the day of Kirk's assassination, at a perhaps more self-aware moment. "This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we're seeing in our country today."

  It's easy to play the "whataboutism" game here. Let's not.

Recently on the book blog:

This was kind of a frustrating read for me. It's a mixture of very good observations and very poor recommendations. The authors, Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, note that various roadblocks stand in the way of their imagined utopia (visions of plentiful housing, lots of green energy, affordable health care, high-speed rail, etc.) And the good observation is that a lot of those roadblocks have been set up by the Blue Team: endless environmental reviews, restrictive zoning, onerous regulation, nuclear energy phobia, diversity mandates, etc.) Klein and Thompson also steadfastly oppose the "degrowthers" on the left; they are all for increasing the size of the economic pie, spurring innovation, invention, and research, so good for them.

Ah, but Klein and Thompson are huge fans of hands-on good government directing all this. Just not bad government. I am unconvinced they can tell one from another. "Hayek" does not appear in the book's index. Neither does "Solyndra". They don't talk about incentives much. They are frustrated by the escalating costs, endless delays, and shrinking scope of California's high-speed rail project, but they never seem to draw the obvious conclusion that maybe it wasn't a good idea in the first place. They are also True Believers in Climate Change Catastrophe, something that even Bill Gates has moved away from.

There's a certain amount of selective amnesia involved, too. Back in the day, Klein was an enthusiastic cheerleader for ObamaCare. Memorably claiming that Joe Lieberman, a conscientious objector in the original debate, was “willing to cause the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people in order to settle an old electoral score.” Never mind the present-day reality that ObamaCare failed its goal of "bending the cost curve"; we've has moved on to designing the next Big Plan That Will Solve Everything. (And if you don't go along, it's probably because you want to kill hundreds of thousands of people.)

All this is accompanied by a lot of sweet, gauzy rhetoric. Designed (successfully) to appeal to "progressive" readers who push policy books onto the best-seller lists, while only making minor quibbles about their bankrupting philosophies. So: read for the good stuff, ignore the road-to-serfdom cheerleading for big government.

If you're looking for a laff riot, maybe you should look elsewhere. I thought Woody Allen's previous book, his autobiography, was funnier. (Some Amazon reviewers were more amused than I, though, so…)

It's a novel, his first and (so far) only. Like his autobiography, there are no chapters. It's just one page after another. And it kind of reads like a novelization of a movie, one that could be funny. But, alas …

"Baum" of the title is the neurotic Asher Baum, a writer of plays, novels, and non-fiction, all relatively obscure and tepidly received by critics. He is on his third marriage. He (literally) talks to himself, not always in private. (Something that might work better in a movie.) He's haunted by worries about his wife's (imagined) infidelity, and he's continually tempted to engage in infidelities of his own.

The plot driver doesn't show up until about 70% of the way through the book. Up to then it's all character study. And those characters are ones that work words like "egregious" into their most emotional dialogue. (Which is actually kind of funny in itself.)

"We will prove that there is no problem too large for government to solve and no concern too small for it to care about."

Genuinely one of the most horrifying quotes I've ever heard from a politician. pic.twitter.com/2Je148KEvy

— Jason Howerton (@jason_howerton) November 5, 2025

Tutto nello Stato, niente al di fuori dello Stato, nulla contro lo Stato.

Before you try that out at Olive Garden, be aware of the translation:

Everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State.

So, good luck with that, New York City.

Also of note:

• An idea all Americans can embrace. J.D. Tuccille suggests that we Keep the federal government closed.

  That the "government shutdown" is disruptive is an indictment of just how far we've let the federal Leviathan intrude into areas it doesn't belong. Of course, it's not really a shutdown; it's a temporary suspension of nonessential activities while lawmakers posture over budget issues for the edification of their core supporters. But we still see the air traffic control system in chaos and all too many Americans complaining that they won't get full Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits because government officials always inconvenience the public first even as most of the federal behemoth chugs on as always. They want to convince us we need the state and get us begging for it to reopen.

  Instead, we should ween [sic] ourselves from government and relegate the federal apparatus to the irrelevance—or even nonexistence—that it deserves.

  I assume eventually our representatives will tire of the posturing, find some face-saving off-ramp, and life will return to, more or less, the normal level of fiscal insanity. Still, it's nice to imagine the citizenry seeing it as a wakeup call for shrinking Uncle Stupid's role in our everyday lives.

• Defining Deviancy Down. That was Daniel Patrick Moynihan's pithy phrase for the normalization of behavior once considered shocking and unacceptable. Veronique de Rugy notes that, if anything, we've come to think "emergency" is the normal state of affairs: Washington's Use of the 'Emergency' Label Comes to a Head.

  In Washington today, the word "emergency" is a magic key; it unlocks powers Congress never granted, suspends the discipline of regular order and decorates bloated bills with provisions too dubious to pass on their own. What was once meant to be a narrow exception for genuine crises has become a routine pretext for government overreach — a means of inflating executive power and corroding the nation's fiscal credibility.

  Start with the most brazen claim, and one soon to be scrutinized by the Supreme Court: that a president may impose sweeping tariffs under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act merely by declaring that a half-century of trade deficits constitutes an emergency.

  Apparently, this argument didn't fare well at SCOTUS yesterday, but we'll see what happens there.

• Well, good. Jeff Coller notes some serendipity: Operation Warp Speed Aimed at Covid and Hit Cancer.

  A new study has found that patients who received mRNA Covid-19 vaccines while undergoing certain cancer treatments lived significantly longer than unvaccinated patients receiving the same treatments. What began with Operation Warp Speed has the potential to achieve something even more historic: an end to cancer.

  Presidents from both parties have promised to wage a war on cancer, but progress has been slow and the results have fallen short of the rhetoric. With continued investment in mRNA research, Donald Trump could turn the stalemate against cancer into a decisive breakthrough.

  Jeff is identified as "a professor of RNA biology and therapeutics at Johns Hopkins University, founder of the Alliance for mRNA Medicines and a co-founder of Tevard Biosciences." So: very knowledgable, but maybe not disinterested. Still, I'm glad I got my booster.

Hans Bader uses the above image to illustrate what should be good news: America finally stops getting fatter. And his caption, duplicated above, may strike some as—ouch!— uncharitable. But it's accurate. Google Lens tracks down the original, as publicized by Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar:

Today, we heard from Felecia, a single mom of four who works up to three jobs at a time to make ends meet. She counts on SNAP to help put food on the table.

This is who Republicans in Congress are trying to take food away from.

Listen to her story. pic.twitter.com/JpP4Mv4sEd

— Senator Amy Klobuchar (@SenAmyKlobuchar) June 12, 2025

Many comments on Senator Amy's tweet are similarly, um, insensitive.

Amy, you're not addressing the elephant in the room.

— Alt-Middle (@MiddleAlt38607) June 12, 2025

Amy seems to have a knack for "sob stories" that feature people who, sorry, just aren't that sympathetic Just a couple weeks ago. she drew attention to a couple who were saddened by those "skyrocketing" Obamacare premiums; as it turned out, they were early retirees living on a six-figure yearly pension.

It's probably mean of me, but from here on out, when politicians attempt to pluck our heartstrings by highlighting the dire straits of ostensibly sympathetic recipients of government subsidies, I want those stories to be accompanied by an independently-audited review of those recipients' financial situations and spending patterns. Maybe an inventory of their refrigerators, kitchen shelves, and medicine cabinets too. As a mostly-libertarian, I don't begrudge these folks' lifestyle choices, but I'd maybe like to not finance them.

But back to Hans Bader's article, it's actually pretty good news:

If you follow that first link, by the way, it turns out we're barely in the top 10, and only when you look at men. Throw in women, and we're down at #19.

And, whoa, they are really porky in American Samoa! Felecia would fit right in.

Also of note:

• "Immunity Syndrome" would be a pretty good Star Trek episode title. Oh, wait, it was.

  But it's also the headline on Kevin D. Williamson's latest observations (archive.today link) on President Donald J. Trump.

  More or less open corruption in the White House. Pardons for sale. Wanton murder on the high seas. Using the Justice Department as a political hit squad.

  Chief Justice John Roberts’ creation, ex nihilo, of presidential immunity from criminal prosecution looks dumber every day.

  The 2024 immunity case, Trump v. United States, was an attempt to deal with a tricky bit of constitutional engineering: We have a separation of powers among the branches, so that none is subordinate to the others in the performance of its constitutional role. That implies that certain laws passed by Congress directed at the president could be unconstitutional. For example, if Congress passed a law making it a crime for the president to pardon a member of his Cabinet, the president would be able to go to court and have an indictment on the charge thrown out because the law would be plainly unconstitutional: The Constitution gives the president wide pardon powers and does not empower Congress to restrict them. The president would be “immune” from prosecution under that law only in the sense that any other American is immune from prosecution under an unconstitutional law.

  KDW is not a fan. And he's not wrong.

• And worse… Trump has seemingly lit a fire under Democrat voters across the country to turn out in an off-year election. Let's check out what Jeff Maurer has to say: My Hot Election Take Is That We Probably Didn’t Learn Much.

  The most click-worthy headline I could publish right now is probably “NEW YORK SUCCUMBS TO MARXISM!!!” Of course, since there are more Beltway Dweebs in my audience than there are sex criminals at a Roblox tournament, “SPANBERGER, SHERRILL PROVE BENEFITS OF MODERATION” probably would have done well, too. Frankly, any version of “EVENTS VALIDATE YOUR PREFERRED NARRATIVE” would work, because that’s what most modern political commentary is: Shading reality to fit your audience’s worldview so that they subscribe. Which reminds me…

  [Jeff's "subscribe" button elided]

  Commentators of all stripes have an incentive to pretend that election night was a game-changer. Socialists and Trumpists will agree that Mamdani’s win means that the Marxist revolution has arrived, the former so that they can have a parade and the latter so that they can use that parade as a pretext to nullify the Bill of Rights. Moderates will point out that Spanberger and Sherrill won while running campaigns that were moderate, practical, sensible, shrewd, and other words that mean “designed to convince suburbanites that their administration won’t be some goddamned woke freak show.” Cable news will lead with “HUGE NEWS TONIGHT” because it’s bad TV to start a broadcast with “Kind of a boring day today — I’d watch a Malcolm in the Middle rerun if I were you.” As for political scientists, these results will lead to new iterations of the single most common political science paper, which is one that should be called: “Please Don’t Cancel My Funding! I Have a Family and No Other Skills, I Promise to Publish Splashy (And Probably P-Hacked) Results That Might Get Traction on Twitter, Oh God Please Don’t Cut Me off I Don’t Want to Work at the Amazon Store: A Meta-Analysis of the 2025 Elections.”

  Here's my "preferred narrative", Jeff: We'd be in a lot better shape if my fellow GOP primary voters had gone for Nikki Haley last year instead.

• I'd like to hear what my friends at Reason have to say. But for now, we'll go with Bob Zubrin at National Review, who is not a fan of Trump’s Bizarre Pick for Surgeon General: Casey Means and Psychedelic Therapy. (archive.today link)

  President Trump’s nominee for surgeon general, Casey Means, will soon appear before the Senate for confirmation hearings. The nomination, first made on May 7, has come under some question. While Means graduated from the Stanford University School of Medicine, she later dropped out of her residency program. However, the reasons senators should be skeptical of this nomination are more substantial.

  A friend of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has recommended her to Trump as a “fantastic” candidate, Means is an advocate and practitioner of the use of illegal psychedelic drugs, including psilocybin and ecstasy, for medical purposes. Her brother, Calley Means, is a Trump administration health adviser and investor in biopharmaceutical start-up companies. In 2024, the two co-wrote a book titled Good Energy, making the case for “psychedelic therapy.”

  According to the Means, in the book, “Strong scientific evidence suggests that this psychedelic therapy can be one of the most meaningful experiences of life for some people, as they have been for me.” Referring to her use of psychedelics as “plant medicine,” Means says she took magic mushrooms in 2021, after she was inspired by “an internal voice that whispered: it’s time to prepare.” Soon, she says, “I felt myself as part of an infinite and unbroken series of cosmic nesting dolls of millions of mothers and babies before me from the beginning of life. . . . Psilocybin can be a doorway to a different reality that is free from the limiting beliefs of my ego, feelings, and personal history.”

  I'm not quite as anti-psychedelic as Bob, but the "internal voice" and the "infinite and unbroken series of cosmic nesting dolls" might be kind of a deal-breaker for me. (Casey, how did you know that series was actually infinite?) Still, I'll keep my eye open for what Reason has to say. Jacob Sullum, are you listening?

• In a hole, he kept digging. Also at National Review, Rich Lowry is aghast: Tucker Carlson Outdoes Himself. (archive.today link)

  Nick Fuentes hit the jackpot.

  The white-nationalist influencer made it on the Tucker Carlson Show, the nation’s foremost vehicle for laundering noxious ideas into the conservative mainstream.

  Fuentes is a Holocaust denier and self-avowed racist whose goal is to remake the right in his image.

  Carlson, who prides himself on asking the supposedly telling questions when it comes to promoting any number of conspiracy theories, couldn’t really bring himself to ask any of Fuentes. Instead, he gave the 27-year-old Nazi sympathizer a tongue bath and said at one point of the Fuentes ideological project, “I guess you won.”

  It was bad enough when Carlson was shaking his pom-poms for Putin. What's next? "You know, the Khmer Rouge really didn't deserve their bad press back in the Seventies."

Recently on the book blog:

In case you can't see the book cover from where you are sitting: this book by Jean Hanff Korelitz is a sequel to her 2021 thriller, The Plot. Which I reported on back in 2022.

At my age, I find myself starting sentences with "At my age…" more often. And this is no exception:

At my age, I don't retain memories of book plots all that well. But The Plot was kind of an exception, because its twists seemed unique, nasty, and (hence) memorable. I suppose I should recommend you read The Plot before you read this one, but I found myself wondering if that was really necessary.

Anyway, this book follows Anna, the widow of the first book's protagonist, best-selling author Jake. Who (spoiler, sorry) met his demise in that book. Anna is tempted into the writing game by Jake's agent and publisher; how hard could it be? So she writes The Aftermath, a seeming roman à clef based on Jake's sad end, inaccurately described. And, while not a blockbuster, her novel's respectable ghoulishness brings her immodest success.

Anna finds the writer's life pleasant enough, but an unexpected "gift" on her book tour threatens to ruin her career, and perhaps her cushy life. Anna turns detective in order to find the person or persons behind this anonymous danger; she's got to find the truth without revealing the truth, if that makes sense.

It's, yes, a page turner. And the plot is even darker and twistier than The Plot. I liked it a lot.

For some reason, this popped up in my Twitter:

Finland knows that Socialism works.

They house all the homeless people, and have the least in the world.

They closed all paid Education in 1976 and now have the best education system in the world.

They are the happiest country in the world.

Be like Finland.

— BladeoftheSun (@BladeoftheS) November 2, 2025

I almost replied… and then noticed that there were already 1.5K replies. (It's since added hundreds more, and who knows how many there will be by the time you read this.)

So, I'll make my reply here:

How "Socialist" is Finland? The go-to source is the Fraser Institute's most recent annual report, Economic Freedom of the World. They put Finland in 15th place among the 165 jurisdictions ranked, tied with Germany, slightly ahead of Japan, slightly behind Costa Rica and the UK. (The US is #5.)

In a solid last place (#165): Venezuela. (For some reason, no socialism fans point to Venezuela as their Edenic utopia.)

It's true that Finns self-report a very high life satisfaction: 7.74 on a 0-10 scale. (Americans are slightly more sourpussed: 6.72.)

We could slice-and-dice more stats, but you can probably do that yourself. A good place to start is Daniel J. Mitchell's International Liberty site.

But… OK, just one more: Wikipedia puts Finland's per-capita GDP at (according to the IMF) at $56,084. Compared to the US's $89,599.

If Finland were a US state, that would put it worse off than every other state, save for Mississippi ($53,061).

So: don't be like Finland: be like (um…) Switzerland!

[Headline explanation: as reported back in July: "Wolverines are making a comeback in southern Finland, where they were wiped out in the 19th century."]

Also of note:

• It's not a pretty picture, Emily. But Jon A. Shields, Yuval Avnur, and Stephanie Muravchik have a suggestion at the Free Press: Want to See Campus Bias? Open the Syllabus.

  We just completed a study that draws on a database of millions of college syllabi to explore how professors teach three of the nation’s most contentious topics—racial bias in the criminal justice system, the Israel-Palestine conflict, and the ethics of abortion. Since all these issues sharply divide scholars, we wanted to know whether students were expected to read a wide or narrow range of perspectives on them. We wondered how well professors are introducing students to the moral and political controversies that divide intellectuals and roil our democracy.

  Not well, as it turns out. Across each issue we found that the academic norm is to shield students from some of our most important disagreements.

  Their first example:

  Consider, for example, Michelle Alexander’s important 2010 book, The New Jim Crow. Alexander argued that mass incarceration emerged after the collapse of the Jim Crow system in the South, largely as a way to reestablish the subjugation of black Americans. It would be hard to overstate its influence. Ibram X. Kendi called it “the spark that would eventually light the fire of Black Lives Matter.” And on college campuses, it became assigned reading. On the topic of race and the criminal justice system, no other work is more popular in the syllabi database; it appears in more than 4,000 syllabi in U.S. universities and colleges.

  As soon as it was published, The New Jim Crow stirred contention within academia. The most prominent critic was James Forman Jr., a professor at Yale Law School. In a seminal working paper, Forman challenged Alexander’s thesis. Among other shortcomings, Forman wrote that The New Jim Crow “fails to consider black attitudes toward crime and punishment, ignores violent crimes while focusing almost exclusively on drug crimes, obscures class distinctions within the African American community, and overlooks the effects of mass incarceration on other racial groups.” Forman’s work culminated in a book titled Locking Up Our Own, a well-regarded work that won the Pulitzer Prize.

  How often is Forman’s book assigned along with Alexander’s? Less than 4 percent of the time. Other prominent critics—like Michael Fortner, John Pfaff, and Patrick Sharkey—are assigned even less often. Fortner’s important book The Black Silent Majority, for example, is assigned with The New Jim Crow less than 2 percent of the time.

  I don't know how to find syllabi at the University Near Here, but The New Jim Crow is one of the featured books named (twice) on the Racial Justice Resources site maintained by the UNH library. ("Once in a great while a book comes along that changes the way we see the world and helps to fuel a nationwide social movement.…") Nothing by Forman, Fortner, Pfaff, or Sharkey.

• Pop quiz, hot shot. Which President said of his opponents: "They are unanimous in their hate for me—and I welcome their hatred." The answer may surprise you!

  Or maybe not. You're pretty well-read.

  Anyway, that's what came to mind when reading Jonathan Turley: “We’re Coming After You” — How Some on the Left Found Peace Through Hate.

  In Shakespeare’s Richard III, Queen Elizabeth — whose husband King Edward IV was overthrown and her twins taken to the Tower — asks the older Queen Margaret (widow of the murdered King Henry VI) to “teach me how to curse mine enemies.” The Queen responds that it is easy: “Think that thy babes were sweeter than they were, And he that slew them fouler than he is.”

  The lesson: The key to hate is to decouple it entirely from reason and reality. Only then can you hate completely without restraint or regret.

  It seems that the left has learned how to hate. Hateful speech is in vogue as Democratic leaders ramp up violent rhetoric and political violence rises. The key is to get voters to hate your opponent so much that they forget how much they dislike you.

  The irony is crushing. For years, liberals have sought to criminalize hate speech while expanding the range of viewpoints considered to fall within this category. Democratic leaders, from senators to former presidential candidates, have falsely claimed that hate speech is not protected under the First Amendment.

  Jamie Lee Curtis appears later in Jonathan's column, so you'll want to check that out.

• It's time to quit the tribe when… … the WSJ editorialists start writing about some of your tribemates: The New Right’s New Antisemites. (WSJ gifted link)

  An old political poison is growing on the new right, led by podcasters and internet opportunists who are preoccupied with the Jews. It is spreading wider and faster than we thought, and it has even found an apologist in Kevin Roberts, president of the venerable Heritage Foundation.

  On Thursday Mr. Roberts released a startling video to oppose the alleged “cancellation” of Tucker Carlson and even of Hitler fanboy Nick Fuentes, whom Mr. Carlson had hosted for a chummy podcast interview.

  “I want to be clear about one thing: Christians can critique the state of Israel without being antisemitic,” Mr. Roberts began, sounding like what William F. Buckley Jr. used to call “a pyromaniac in a field of straw men.” This is what Hamas supporters on the left say: What do you mean? We were only criticizing Israel. Not exactly.

  On Monday’s Carlson show, Mr. Fuentes assailed “organized Jewry” as the obstacle to American unity and “these Zionist Jews” as the impediment to the right’s success, while calling himself a fan of Joseph Stalin. Even while toning it down for the largest audience he’ll ever have, Mr. Fuentes still came off as an internet mashup of the worst of the 20th century.

  Fuentes is a creep, and I have no idea what worms have taken residence in Tucker Carlson's brain. I was never much of a fan, and started noticing his wheels coming off back when everyone else did.

• Hey, some people are voting today! For her substack headline, Allison Schrager embraces Mencken-style cynicism, the last three words of his famous quote: "Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it Good and hard."

  To outsiders, it may seem strange that the center of capitalism is about to elect a proud, self-described Democratic Socialist. I’m sorry, I just can’t get over the Mamdani plan to apply a flat 2% extra tax to anyone who makes more than $1 million. Not a marginal tax — a flat tax. I know this may seem small compared with everything else at stake in economic policy, including a four-year rent freeze on private property. But the fact that if you earn $1 more than $999,999 you’d owe $20,000 is just amateurish tax design — like something an eighth grader would come up with. It points to outright economic illiteracy — or that no one with even a passing familiarity with tax policy reviewed it.

  And it’s not a small thing — this is how he expects to pay for free bus rides, childcare, food, and whatever else. It suggests a lot hasn’t been thought through. The fact that people are relying on Kathy Hochul to be the adult in the room is some level of cope.

  So we'll see how good and hard NYC's citizenry get it.

And others of us have nothing better to do than to point out that they were wrong then, and still are:

Gee, an oldie from 2015! But not even Politifact was buying it back then. https://t.co/wi9HdUR5Zf

— Paul Sand (@punsalad) November 3, 2025

(I saw this because it was reposted by Don Winslow, whom I follow. He's a talented crime writer, but as a political activist, he's about as brilliantly insightful as your average earnest sophomore majoring in Communications at a local admit-everyone state college.

Also of note:

• The book-banners are at work. Liberty Unyielding reports on their latest efforts: State university to 'audit' its library collections to remove books that are not 'inclusive' or are deemed racist.

  Librarians, who are overwhelmingly progressives, routinely engage in censorship, weeding out factually-accurate books in their collections that offend woke sensibilities or use terminology considered outdated (such as old books that refer to “negroes” or “homosexuals” because that was the term used in the era the book was published).

  The state university at Binghamton furnishes a recent example. “The library system at Binghamton University released an anti-racism statement in which it called itself part of a ‘predominantly White institution,’ or ‘PWI.’ It also announced a plan to ‘audit’ its content for racism,” reports Campus Reform:

  BU Libraries said that the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and others are “the result of a white supremacist society in which violence is both enabled and effaced by structural racism.” The system therefore acknowledges its “institutional responsibility for addressing racism” and need to leverage resources in order to “advance other anti-racist work ongoing at the University and beyond.”

  BU Libraries Assistant Head of Reader Services Timothy Lavis said that the term “PWI” was used to explain the predominant perspectives within the institution.

  “When a PWI simply ignores systemic racism, [its] inaction is not actually a neutral position,” Lavis wrote…“Rather, that inaction serves to support the existing power structures that underpin and enable systemic racism.”

  I note that, at some point in the last few months, the University Near Here memory-holed its "Diversity, Equity, Access & Inclusion" page to "Community, Belonging, Access & Inclusion". And they have always been at war with Eastasia.

• "Blue City Bailout" would be a good name for a rock band. But, alas, it's just one more reason we're headed for fiscal disaster, described by Allysia Finley: The ObamaCare Blue-City Bailout. (WSJ gifted link)

  Mayor Rahm Emanuel of Chicago was scrambling to close a $369 million deficit in 2013. The inception of ObamaCare offered an enticing target for cost shaving: retiree health coverage.

  The city expected to spend $194 million that year subsidizing health insurance for its retirees, many of whom were too young to qualify for Medicare. Such costs were projected to increase to $540 million by 2023 at the same time as pension payments were ballooning. While courts in Illinois and other states have held that public employee pensions are legally protected, governments have more latitude to make changes to medical benefits.

  So Mr. Emanuel dumped his city’s retirees onto the nascent ObamaCare exchanges, where federal subsidies can reduce premium payments. Voilà, Chicago’s $2.1 billion unfunded retiree healthcare liability vanished. Now U.S. taxpayers pick up the tab for Chicago’s retirees in their 50s and early 60s.

  Allysia also mentions a likely scenario: "New York City last year spent $3.7 billion on retiree healthcare, money that a Mayor Zohran Mamdani might want for free child care or government-run grocery stores."

  As Maggie Thatcher once famously said: The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money."

• Speaking about running out of other people's money… Jessica Reidl deflates some wishful thinking from a onetime George Soros employee: Scott Bessent Is Wrong About Deficit Reduction. (archive.today link)

  One hallmark of the presidencies of Donald Trump is surging budget deficits. Another is repeatedly claiming that drastic deficit reduction is just around the corner. During his 2016 presidential campaign, Trump famously promised to pay off the entire $19 trillion national debt within eight years. Instead, the debt jumped by $8 trillion, thus missing his target by a mere $27 trillion.

  A new Trump presidency has brought additional empty deficit reduction boasts. Before the election, he suggested that the budget deficit (and Social Security) could be fixed by selling oil and gas reserves. In a March address to Congress, Trump pledged to eliminate the entire $1.8 trillion budget deficit while offering no path to accomplish such a monumental task. Not to be outdone, DOGE director Elon Musk initially pledged to save $2 trillion from administrative reductions in waste, fraud, and abuse. Over the summer, Trump promised that tariff revenues would leave federal coffers so awash in money that tax rebates would be necessary. And now, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is claiming the budget is on “solid footing” toward his deficit target of 3 percent of GDP, thanks to substantial deficit reduction.

  Unfortunately, Bessent’s deficit reduction boasts continue the trend of propaganda over progress. Tariffs are providing modest fiscal savings, although the deficit remains on track to continue rising steeply.

  Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be any major political incentive to call bullshit on Bessent.

Ann Althouse throws off some good advice for those of us bugged by twice-yearly clock-changing: How to stop fretting about the coming and going of Daylight Savings Time and live by the light not the clock..

OK, first, Ann: it's "Daylight Saving Time", not "Savings". The good people at Time and Date will explain that, if you'd like. (My mom had a bee in her bonnet about this, and I continue the tradition in her memory.)

Ann calls her the basis of her daily regimen "Sun Time", which makes a lot of sense. There's even an app for that!

Unfortunately, I've long been on "Body Time". And my body simply can't believe in 25- and 23-hour days.

Also of note:

• 
  Wisdom, there for the taking. Veronique de Rugy writes on The Market’s “Marvel”: What Hayek Still Teaches Us About the Limits of Power.

  Every few decades a fantasy returns that with enough data, political will, and clever economists, governments can steer an economy better than millions of dispersed, self-interested individuals ever could. The twentieth century’s socialists believed it. Today’s industrial planners and “national capitalists” believe it again.

  Peter Boettke’s recent essay in The Dispatch, “What Hayek Understood About the Unknowable Nature of Markets,” reminds us why this conceit always fails. It also reminds us what makes capitalism—not the caricatured greed of textbooks, but the dynamic process of price discovery and adaptation—the most extraordinary cooperative system human beings have ever built.

  I linked to Boettke's essay a few days ago, but Vero's commentary is worth a read as well.

  Plus, it gives me a chance to recycle another Salma pic.

• Speaking of Fatal Conceits… Andrew Follett describes what I might be looking forward to this winter: Wind and Solar Blackouts Threaten New England. (archive.today link)

  New England’s deep-blue states may become all too familiar with energy rationing and blackouts this winter, courtesy of the region’s overreliance on green energy.

  The Northeastern states face an immense shortfall in conventional electrical generation capacity, leaving the power grid extremely vulnerable at times when wind and solar power are offline. This precarious situation is expected to continue for at least the next decade.

  “We cannot operate the system in the wintertime without a dependable energy source that can balance the system when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow. I think policymakers sometimes lose sight of that fact,” Gordon van Welie, president of Independent System Operator (ISO) New England, which manages the region’s power grid, said at a recent energy conference in Washington, D.C.

  New Hampshire is really not that deep a blue, despite our Congressional delegation. And our nuclear reactor down in Seabrook should help out. Still, we are on the ISO-New England grid (at least for now), so we could be dragged down the Road to Energy Serfdom by our delusional neighbors.

• And is there anyone more fatally conceited than Liz Warren? Joe Lancaster brings the evidence: iRobot faces bankruptcy after Elizabeth Warren helped kill Amazon merger.

  A robotic murder mystery worthy of Isaac Asimov. Joe's bottom line: "Instead, iRobot was forced to die a slow and painful death because government regulators thought they knew better than consumers."

• Not just fatally conceited, but also unconstitutional. George Will reveals the stakes facing SCOTUS: Presidential power and the Supreme Court’s own stature ride on this case. (WaPo gifted link)

  Decorum might dissolve during oral arguments on Wednesday in the Supreme Court. The justices might guffaw when Trump administration lawyers say: The president’s tariffs should be exempt from judicial review because they respond to an “emergency,” emergencies, like beauty, are in the eye of the beholder, and presidents alone are our designated beholders.

  This momentous case must either undermine or buttress the Constitution’s architecture: the separation of powers. Six amicus briefs explain why.

  The conservative Goldwater Institute and the liberal Brennan Center separately argue that the statute the president says gives him unreviewable power to impose taxes (which tariffs are) of whatever amount, and for as long as he chooses (the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977), does no such thing. (Neither does the National Emergencies Act of 1976, which also is invoked by his defenders.)

  GFW also looks at briefs from other folks, including Cato scholars. Interesting, and I hope the resulting decision winds up with Congress putting on its big boy pants, growing a spine, biting the bullet, and doing whatever other clichés might apply.

As Scott Lincicome says, it's not as if they're doing such a hot job of it:

It's a divisive issue. On the one side, there's science, economics, family, and common sense. On the other, there's golf/candy lobbyists, big government, and immature night-owls. Really tough call for the political class! https://t.co/j3KJCPXvKq

— Scott Lincicome (@scottlincicome) October 31, 2025

I mean, what would we do without government telling us when to get up, go to work, go to bed, …

Also of note:

• Attention should be paid. The WSJ editorialists provide us with The Truth About ObamaCare Costs. (WSJ gifted link)

  Every day come warnings that Americans will be priced out of ObamaCare next year if Republicans in Congress don’t renew pandemic subsidies. The media coverage reads like dispatches from an AI chatbot trained on Sen. Chuck Schumer’s press releases, and maybe readers would appreciate some non-hallucinations.

  The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) this week released a fact sheet on ObamaCare’s pricing next year, and here’s the most important line: “The average Marketplace premium after tax credits is projected to be $50 per month for the lowest cost plan in 2026 for eligible enrollees.” Nearly 60% of “eligible re-enrollees will have access to a plan in their chosen health plan category at or below $50 after tax credits.”

  You read that right: The majority of enrollees will continue to have a plan at $50 a month or cheaper, even without the extra pandemic-era subsidy that is expiring. That’s a pittance compared to what many Americans shell out if they’re insured through their employer, even accounting for the fact that employer plans tend to be superior in their choices and coverage. Taxpayers on average are “projected to cover 91% of the lowest cost plan premium in 2026 for eligible enrollees” in ObamaCare, CMS reports.

  I follow my CongressCritter and my state's Senators on Twitter, and it's getting pretty tiresome to see them consistently work "skyrocket" into their doomsaying posts on expiration of the extra super-duper-premium tax credits.

• Room for improvement, then. The Josiah Bartlett Center brings a little bit of good news: Killing the I&D Tax leaps N.H. to No. 3 on national tax competitiveness index.

  Killing New Hampshire’s Interest & Dividends Tax has breathed new life into the New Hampshire Advantage. That’s the conclusion from reading the Tax Foundation’s 2026 State Tax Competitiveness Index, released on Oct. 30.

  Last year, New Hampshire slipped past Texas to claim the No. 6 spot on the index. Passing the famously conservative and economically booming Lone Star state was newsworthy, but the three-point jump in this year’s index is more so.

  Decades’ worth of research—from academic studies and government data to moving company records—show that states with lower individual and corporate tax burdens tend to be more attractive to individuals, businesses and investors. Entering the top three states in tax competitiveness puts New Hampshire squarely in the conversation for millions of Americans looking for a good place to live, invest or locate a business.

  We're getting beat by Wyoming and South Dakota. We are dragged down by our property taxes (#44!) and corporate taxes (#37).

• Newsflash: Kevin D. Williamson is still not a Trump fan. His latest on That Head of Gold. (archive.today link)

  A century and some before the American Revolution, the English republican Henry Haggar had argued: “If the God of heaven did in that age take away the Kingdom and Dominion of the whole earth from Nebuchadnezzar, that head of gold, and turn him out a-grazing among the Oxen, and give his kingdom to whomsoever he pleased; then let not men in this generation think it strange, though God Almighty hath taken away the kingdoms of England, Scotland, and Ireland (which are but a small part of the earth) from Charles Stuart, and given them to the honorable Parliament.” That argument appeared in a pamphlet titled No King but Jesus. (It bore the wonderfully cumbrous subtitle: “Or, The Walls of tyrannie razed and the foundations of unjust monarchy discovered to the view of all that desire to see it wherein is undeniably proved that no king is the Lords anointed but Jesus.”) Looking back to such spiritual forebears, Americans have held crowns in contempt since before we were Americans.

  Not so Donald Trump, who enjoys portraying himself wearing a crown and encourages others to do the same. He has for years tried to associate himself and his family with the British royal family, and it is not for nothing that his youngest son bears the name “Barron,” a pseudo-title of nobility borrowed from “John Barron,” the imaginary friend Donald Trump invented to lie to the New York Post about his sex life.

  Visiting South Korea, Trump was presented with a gold medal announcing him as a newly minted member of the Grand Order of Mugunghwa, which sounds like something out of a half-assed parody but is a real thing. Mugunghwa in English is the common hibiscus, which, like Trump’s parasitic brand of politics, is native to some parts of Asia but considered an invasive species in the United States. He also was presented with a golden crown, which clearly delighted him. I am surprised he is not wearing it, though I suppose it is possible that the scaffolding that keeps his hair in place might create complications.

  "Mugunghwa" is a pretty close approximation to what I say to my cat when she wakes me up at 3am, demanding breakfast.

• Jeff Maurer's right, Sirota is a douche. He has a confession, too: I Just Realised That the NIMBY Douche on My Twitter Timeline Also Wrote “Don’t Look Up”. Worse and worse!

  In the haunted carnival of freaks that populates my Twitter timeline, one weirdo who always catches my eye is a guy named David Sirota. Sirota’s malformity is that he is an adult human who does not seem capable of understanding the concept of supply and demand. His operating theory of housing prices is that high prices are caused mostly by corporate oligarchs creating an artificial shortage, but he also sees the influence of corporate oligarchs behind the so-called “abundance agenda”. So, which is it, David: Do oligarchs profit from constricting supply or from expanding it? Sirota rejects the NIMBY label but also thinks that loosening zoning laws would cause a housing bubble, and he recently attempted to deflect alleged slander of him as a NIMBY by trumpeting his support for a proposal that is, in fact, restrictionist. He’s also a “greedflation” guy and a defender of rent control, he’s one of the most illogical people I’ve ever encountered, and that includes my two year-old son, who likes to put orange slices in his sock drawer and say “For the duckies!”

  The other day, I finally decided to google this asshat (Sirota, not my son). It turns out that he was an adviser to Bernie Sanders (that tracks), is an editor-at-large at Jacobin (I should have guessed), but there was a bullet on his résumé that I didn’t expect: He co-wrote the 2021 climate-change-allegory movie Don’t Look Up. Maybe you knew that — I didn’t. Don’t Look Up was a tough watch for me: It’s about a topic I care about, stars several people I like, and Sirota’s co-writer (Adam McKay) has written several funny things. But watching this movie was like getting a lecture about appropriate office attire from a guy wearing a crotchless gimp suit. It worked for me on zero levels — as comedy, as allegory, or as a minimally coherent piece of storytelling — and now that I know that Sirota was involved, that all makes sense. So — four years too late — here’s my review of Don’t Look Up.

  I liked Don't Look Up slightly better than Jeff did; my report from 2022 is here. (I am easily amused.)

  But Sirota otherwise escaped my notice until a few days ago, with his worthless, dishonest take on that old excuse for gutting the First Amendment, "campaign finance reform".

Recently on the book blog:

I've been a Charles Murray fan for quite awhile. He's well-known for his takes on controversial issues, like IQ, race, welfare, etc. He presses a lot of hot buttons. I really liked his In Pursuit: Of Happiness and Good Government, a succinct description of the "proper" role of the state. Specifically, limited and laissez-faire, enabling people to chart their own courses in life, bearing responsibility for their own choices, good and bad.

This book is somewhat of a surprise topic, and very personal. Murray details his spiritual odyssey over the past years, how he became interested in, and finally persuaded by, evidence that we are more than just bags of molecules interacting according to the dictates of physics and biochemistry. And how he came around to a more-or-less Christian belief in God, Jesus, and miracles, including the resurrection.

So, yeah, that's a lot for a relatively short book. But Murray's argument is well-presented, not didactic at all. He lays out his research, all the while inviting his readers to make up their own minds. His initial discussion is very similar to that of Ross Douthat in his recent book Believe: the "fine-tuning" of a universe that makes stars, planets, life, and (most unlikely of all) human intelligence possible. Murray makes the additional point about trying to "understand" God: we are likely in the same relationship between my dog and calculus. We not only don't understand, we don't even understand what there is to understand.

Murray is impressed, as Douthat was, with the uniformity of "near death experiences", where people who have been brought back from the brink report uncannily similar observations of what it's like. Murray adds in the phenomenon of "terminal lucidity", where dying people thought to be irretrievably comatose have recovered briefly, but inexplicably, to communicate with people at their bedside. This, after their brains have stopped working!

In the book's second part, Murray looks specifically at Christianity, with an appreciation of the arguments made by C.S. Lewis in Mere Christianity. He notes the effort made over the years to debunk the history depicted in the New Testament; he counters with his own scholars and their arguments. (If you are refuting a debunker are you ‥ a bunker?)

Bottom line: Murray makes good arguments. I'm not planning to become a churchgoer (again), though. That's on me, not him.

If you're interested. Murray's book has generated some pushback from people I also like. Jerry Coyne, bless his heart, seems to take any religiosity as a personal insult, and argued against his views here and here.

Steven Pinker, peace be unto him, also dislikes Murray's "terminal lucidity" explanation, and wrote a letter to the WSJ about it. Murray responded here. (I think those are both free links.)