Nov
6
2025

It Was More Melodious in the Original Italian

But as my headline suggests, this way of putting it makes it sound slightly less terrifying:

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.