Pun Salad

Jonathan Alpert takes up a thorny question in today's WSJ: Is ‘Trump Derangement Syndrome’ Real? (WSJ gifted link)

If you need any additional confirmation of people devoting way too much of their lives obsessing about Orange Man, just follow Don Winslow on Twitter.

(And today's headline was inspired by Sean Carroll's 2011 essay title: Free Will Is as Real as Baseball)

Also of note:

• Paul Schwennesen read it so we don't have to. Specifically, Kamala’s Memoir: Inside the Battle to Control Our Authoritarian Future. Most reports on 107 Days, her story of the election, concentrated on its horserace and finger-pointing aspects. Paul looked at a different aspect:

  But enough ink has been spilled over the book’s pettiness and contradictions. It was intended, after all, to be a work of inside baseball — a political sausage-making retrospective for pundits with scorecards. None of that interests me. What led me through each tedious, over-rendered day was the faint hope that it would shed light on a basic worldview: the animating impulse of the modern progressive Left. In light of the extraordinary autocratic turn of the Trump presidency since the election, I had hoped for some glimpse of a shared political principle — a potential bridge across our bitter divides. No such luck. We are now trapped between two equally joyless visions of centralized authority. Two hundred and fifty years of political experimentation in self-government have left us high-centered between progressive and conservative flavors of authoritarianism.

  Not that you’ll find such introspection in 107 Days. Harris builds her entire persona upon vaguely described, high-flown rhetoric devoted to ever-greater state “assistance” in the private lives of Americans. It never seems to occur to her that such a vision might account for her electoral defeat. Steeped in defensive language, she sees the failure of Americans to fully embrace her platform as the essential problem. “Fight” is her persistent watchword, a shibboleth for action against an ethereal enemy that seeks to thwart her vision of a fully empowered monolithic state.

  Somehow this 45-year-old quote from Woody Allen seems appropriate:

  More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.

  Fingers crossed, I guess.

• Does anybody really know what time it is? Mark Nayler is a little late with his Daylight Saving commentary: Eternal Sunshine of the Changing Time.

  The debate about Daylight Saving Time (DST) has reignited in both Europe and the United States. Spain’s Socialist prime minister Pedro Sánchez is lobbying the EU to put an end to the bi-annual clock change, although he hasn’t stated whether he favors permanent summer (DST) or winter time (also referred to as Standard Time/ST)—which means more light in the evening or morning, respectively. It is a rare point of agreement between the Spanish premier and Donald Trump, who also wants to scrap the clock change, in his case to make summer time permanent.

  Mark makes a common blunder, which is to assume that fiddling with your clock display has some sort of magical effect on "more light in the evening or morning". I took an astronomy course once, and I can assure you: those things are completely unrelated. Any cause-and-effect relationship is only in your mind.

  Unfortunately, it also seems to be firmly embedded in the minds of people who set schedules for schools, stores, and other workplaces.

  To his credit, Mark seems to (eventually) realize this:

  Though there is consensus in both the EU and US that clock-changing is a damaging and outdated practice, the debate about whether to adopt ST or DST permanently continues. Perhaps [Benjamin] Franklin had the right answer two-and-a-half centuries ago: go to bed when it’s dark and rise with the sun, regardless of the arbitrarily-assigned hour. All governments have to do is supply the cannons needed to encourage this.

  Cannonfire at dawn! Cool idea, Ben.

• As Keynes famously pointed out… Jeffrey Blehar asserts, correctly: Donald Trump Has No Answers for the Younger Generation. And the younger generation seems to be increasingly convinced that the traditional American values "aren’t working anymore."

  It is not my point here to agree or disagree with that, merely to note it. The overwhelming sense I get from talking to younger people as 2025 draws to a close — all manner of folks, from the humane and intellectually reserved to the angriest and most voluble — is a bleak and sincere underlying despair. These young men and women don’t know what the future holds for them; they only know that all the old covenants are being broken. Forget about entitlement programs — everyone under the age of 40 has already internalized the assumption that Social Security isn’t going to be there when they retire.

  But it’s far more than that. A hope for “the normal life” is dwindling away as well. A spouse, a house, the comforts of modern domesticity — what their parents’ generation seemed to attain so easily is now priced (and disincentivized) beyond the reach of all but Society’s Winners. And these, whom they inevitably focus on, keep seeming to “win” for the wrong reasons, as the disaffected define them. The blame game is naturally inevitable.

  I don't think I have "Trump Derangement Syndrome", but (as I've said before) I think it's pretty obvious he's got a very short time horizon and poor impulse control. Just what you don't want to see in a President. And the youngsters aren't wrong to pick up on that.

• 

  Another classy dame. Anna Krylov explains: Why I Cut Ties with Science’s Top Publisher. (archive.today link)

  In my more than 30 years working in scientific research, I regarded the publishing group Nature Portfolio as the world’s leading science publisher. I have regularly read their papers as well as reviewed and published papers in their journals. As a chemistry professor at the University of Southern California, my interests have focused on topics related to theoretical and computational quantum chemistry. Publishing a paper in a Nature Portfolio journal was always a significant accomplishment, a matter of pride.

  But in recent years, Nature Portfolio has sacrificed the epistemic standards of scientific publishing in unrelenting pursuit of a social justice agenda centered on diversity, equity, and inclusion. In doing so, it has lost its credibility as a truth-seeking enterprise.

  It is easy to dismiss concerns about DEI as a thing of the past. After all, “peak woke” is supposed to be in the rearview mirror, and diversity, equity, and inclusion priorities seem to have been retreating ever since President Donald Trump took office in January. Academia, in particular, has been rattled by the administration’s broadside of financial penalties imposed on universities that refuse to eliminate their DEI departments. The pressure has forced overdue reforms, including the reemergence of free speech initiatives, the termination of DEI positions and mantras, and more. The pendulum, it seems, has begun to swing back.

  Or has it? This corrective impulse has not been embraced in all corners of the scientific world. Many of the institutions that govern and disseminate scientific knowledge—publishers, professional societies, and even honorary academies—remain ideologically captured. The most glaring case is Nature Portfolio.

  I'm currently reading The War on Science (Amazon link at your right) which does a pretty good job of documenting just how censorious and dogmatic "peak woke" was, just a few years ago. But as Anna describes, that pendulum has still quite a ways to swing back to sanity.