Pun Salad

Via Mr. Lileks' Substack:

James excavates the pop cultural strata: The video is "60 years old, and also 40 years old, and also 12 days old." I won't go into detail on that, have some fun figuring it out if necessary.

I know I've said this before, but how far away are we from that Casablanca sequel with all the original actors?

Also of note:

• Momory-holed? How Orwellian! I don't share Nate Silver's politics, but he has a legitimate bone to pick about the Mickey-Mouse treatment of his past efforts: Disney erased FiveThirtyEight.

  Last Thursday night, I was working late, trying to put some of the finishing touches on our forthcoming World Cup model — and actually looking up an article I’d written for FiveThirtyEight in 2014 about my previous soccer model, SPI. Although the quality of the archive has gradually deteriorated since Disney shut down the site in 2025 (I left two years earlier in 2023), at least our text-based articles were mostly still there, or so I thought. Instead, I was auto-redirected to ABC News’s home page, which looked something like this:

  [ABC News home page]

  Sometimes weird things happen on the internet late at night, so I resisted the temptation to tweet something about it. But one of my former colleagues noticed the same thing on Friday. ABC News hasn’t made any public comment that I’m aware of — they declined to make a statement to the New York Times, which wrote about FiveThirtyEight’s disappearance. It’s possible that they have something up their sleeve, I suppose. But presumably, this was either intentional or willfully neglectful. All of the former FiveThirtyEight site from my nearly decade-long tenure at ESPN/Disney/ABC is gone.1

  Nate's post is long and interesting. I think ABC should have instead dumped Jimmy Kimmel and kept Nate's stuff.

  Deeper point: While the Internet makes a lot of wonderful stuff possible (see above), it also makes stuff pretty easy to vanish forever. And unless some archival site has grabbed it, it's gone.

  Gee, wonder how long Pun Salad will last after my demise? Up to the kids, I guess. I don't plan on demanding they keep sending monthly rent to my (very reliable) hosting provider in perpetuity.

• Betteridge's Law of Headlines applies. Rich Lowry asks the question: Does It Matter What Helen of Troy Looked Like? (NR gifted link)

  It’s the controversy that has launched a thousand X posts.

  Elon Musk, who is a fan of Homer, has kicked up a fuss by objecting to filmmaker Christopher Nolan casting the black actress Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy in his forthcoming movie version of The Odyssey.

  The epic production presumably won’t rise or fall based on its depiction of Helen, the legendary beauty who precipitated the Trojan War. That conflict is depicted in The Iliad, while The Odyssey follows the Greek warrior Odysseus on his return home after the war, a story that doesn’t feature Helen prominently.

  Rich's article is good and thought-provoking, but this is why I could never be an op-ed columnist myself. Because there's no way I could expand my thoughts beyond:

  • Elon shouldn't tell Christopher Nolan how to make movies.
  • Nolan shouldn't tell Elon how to build rockets.
  • And neither one should tell Jeff Bezos how to run an online bookstore.

  I could go on, but you get the point.

  (Never mind that this blog routinely demonstrates my own lack of humility.)

• They're no angels. Veronique de Rugy makes a point about civic morality: The Problem With Government Investors Isn’t Just That They’re Bad at It. It’s That They Shouldn’t Be Doing It.

  When I wrote recently about the growing number of entrepreneurs, investors, and Wall Street veterans entering government to run industrial policy and public investment programs, many readers interpreted my argument as a simple warning: government is bad at investing.

  It is. But the deeper point, which I failed to make explicitly in my syndicated column due to the lack of space, was perfectly summed up on X by Jonathan Hoenig: “government isn’t just inept as an investor—it’s immoral. Government has one role: protect individual rights not “maximize investment returns.”

  He’s right. The problem is not merely that the government makes for a lousy investor. Government investing changes the moral relationship between risk, reward, and accountability.

  Vero attempts a moralistic argument, which is fine. But (I think) she keeps veering into consequentialism, noting (correctly) that the results of the Visible Fist of government investing are bad.

  David Friedman had some thoughts on this distinction in his book The Machinery of Freedom. Read the whole thing!

• Yer darn tootin'. Kevin D. Williamson addresses his Lone Star brethren: It's A Time for Choosin’, Texas. (Dispatch gifted link)

  He discusses the upcoming GOP primary between incumbent Senator John Cornyn and "Texas’s clownish and scandal-plagued attorney general, Ken Paxton."

  Sen. Cornyn has a great big bucket where his principles should be, and, thus equipped, he has been a committed and generally effective water carrier for the Republican Party for many years. All he needed was to see an “R” next to someone’s name: He carried water for Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania when that is what party interests required, and then he carried water for Specter’s Republican opponent after Specter defected to the Democrats. Sen. Cornyn carried water for so-called establishment Republicans when they opposed Donald Trump in 2016 and then carried—and contentedly carries—water for Trump now that Trump has become the establishment.

  (The fact that the story contains names such as “Specter” and “Trump” sometimes makes it sound as if Cornyn’s political biography were being written by Ian Fleming.)

  Donald Trump routinely denounces his critics as “disloyal to the Republican Party” (his verbatim description of Rep. Thomas Massie, the Kentucky libertarian who has sometimes chided Trump over his weakness for profligate spending), but Trump is, in all things, first and foremost a liar, and he does not give a fig about party loyalty: Trump cares about loyalty to Trump, and the more cynical reader here might reasonably substitute “subservience” or “servility” or “slavish boot-licking” for “loyalty.” Far from being a party man, Trump has made a point of defeating Republicans who are inconvenient to him, whether they be obscure Indiana state legislators who declined to follow Texas’ gerrymandering example or state-level election officials who declined to participate in his 2020-2021 attempt at a coup d’état.

  KDW goes on to describe Paxton as "the perfect specimen of a Trump-era Republican—a grotesque amalgam of personal, financial, political, and sexual corruption". In any case, there's an excellent chance that Texas may send a Democrat to the US Senate next year.

• "I learned it by watching you!" So yelled a bratty petulant kid to his bemused parent in a strident anti-drug ad, nearly 40 years ago. And that was brought to mind, via Viking Pundit, by the Manhattan Contrarian, who recounts the recent history of a sordid practice: "Sue And Settle": Two Can Play This Game.

  [L]et me provide some context. In fact prior administrations have regularly used litigation settlements to accomplish goals that they could not get enacted by Congress, including setting up large slush funds to hand out to political allies. Before now this strategy has been almost entirely a phenomenon of Democratic administrations. Conservative critics have dubbed the strategy “sue and settle.” The strategy particularly took off during the Obama presidency, and then exploded under Biden. As far as I am aware, the New York Times has never criticized any of this as long as it was done by their ideological allies in support of causes that they approved.

  The MC's commenters are of two minds. Or more. It's not hard to find distinctions between Obama/Biden cases and Trump's latest.

  For one thing, Trump makes a mockery out of that old chestnut "Not even the President is above the law." Trump's response: "Oh, yeah? Watch this."