Jun
19
2026

The Postrel Challenge

I'm not a plastic-hater, but I feel obligated to point out the "Zero Waste Store", which will sell you (for $4.49 plus shipping) a Bamboo-Handle Toothbrush with "castor bean oil bristles".

Also of note:

  • Think of all the guillotines we could buy with the money taken from billionaires! At City Journal, Stu Smith looks at our local jacobins: The Democratic Socialists of America Just Adopted a Radical New Platform.

    Earlier this month, the Democratic Socialists of America’s top leadership met for an in-person meeting of their National Political Committee (NPC), the DSA’s governing authority. The result of the meeting was “Workers Deserve More!”, a rebooted platform for the organization featuring a host of radical proposals. The document commits DSA to scrapping the U.S. Senate, “abolishing the carceral forces of the capitalist state,” defunding the Department of War, amnesty for all immigrants, and “replac[ing] the President and Supreme Court with an executive and judiciary chosen by and subordinate to Congress.”

    Which sent me to Wikipedia's Graham Platner page. Fun Fact:

    Before running for office, Platner described himself on Reddit as a member of the Democratic Socialists of America who was "pretty radically left" and a "vegetable growing, psychedelics taking socialist" (in 2017) and "rabidly anti-Hillary [Clinton]" (in the 2016 Democratic presidential primaries).

    The office for which Platner is running is (you may have heard) the US Senate. Does he know that his buddies at the DSA want to scrap it?

  • My guess: it has something to do with the Strait of Hormuz. David Harsanyi's headline question: Why Is the Trump Administration Taking Orders from the Iranians?

    Why didn't President Donald Trump initially want to share the full text of the framework agreement between the United States and the Islamic Republic of Iran?

    The first reason is obvious: The memorandum of understanding is a capitulation to the clerics of the regime.

    The second reason is also a scandal.

    "I don't, frankly, fully understand it, but there are sensitivities that exist in the Arab and Muslim world that we're trying to be responsive to," a coy Vice President JD Vance told podcaster Megyn Kelly this week. But Vance, who helped negotiate the framework, added that the "Iranians, Pakistanis and Qataris asked us to sequence this in the right way."

    It's disgraceful that the administration is taking direction from the radical clerics of Iran and the Pakistani military dictatorship on the "right way" to share a "peace agreement" with the people.

    When it comes to Europeans, Vance always gets a thrill out of playing the tough guy, lecturing them on free speech and their cultural decline. No worries about the "sensitives" of the Germans or French, I guess. Bravo. In every way imaginable, however, Western Europeans are still freer and more moral than the Islamic Republics of Iran and Pakistan. Yet, Vance doesn't want to tweak the delicate feelings of Iranian Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei.

    Harsanyi is pretty brutal on Vance and also Trump, who had previously promised Iranian protesters that "help is on the way."

  • We should not have been surprised. Because, as Jonah Goldberg points out: The Iran Peace Deal Is What Trumpism Looks Like. (archive.today link) Longish excerpt:

    You can divide the people who have invested great trust in Donald Trump into two camps: those who are an inclined plane wrapped helically around an axis and those who will become an inclined plane wrapped helically around an axis. Or to put it another way: There are people who have been screwed by Trump, and people who are destined to be screwed by Trump.

    Let’s flash back to March, when the anti-Israel and anti-“forever war” crowd felt “betrayed” by Trump’s Iranian adventure. I wrote, “The idea that Trump’s war on Iran is a betrayal of ‘True Trumpism’ is the last gasp of people who told themselves that Trumpism was an ideology. And it’s embarrassing.”

    The title of the piece was “The Iran War Is What Trumpism Looks Like.”

    Well, guess what? The Iran ‘peace’ deal is what Trumpism looks like, too.

    When a weathervane points north, we don’t confuse it for a compass. When the winds shift and it points south, we don’t say, “We’ve been betrayed!” We just say, “That’s what weathervanes do.” But an amazing number of people think Trump is more like a compass, pointing toward the True North of “America First” or “patriotism” or some other blather.

    Donald Trump has no ideological or moral compass. Or if he does, it doesn’t point outward toward any True North, but inward, toward himself.

    I was more disappointed than I was surprised.

  • For a lighter take, with more dirty words… Jeff Maurer pleads God Have Mercy: Iran is Poised to Become Delaware.

    Trump’s deal with Iran — call it the “JCPOS” — contains an endless parade of humiliations. And it’s not even the final deal: We’re entering a 60-day negotiating period, which will probably end with Iran annexing Texas, being given the recipe to KFC chicken, and renaming the Grand Canyon “The Infidel’s Vagina”. In exchange, Iran will agree to only use their nuclear arsenal against states that didn’t vote for Trump.

    One of the less-reported on parts of the deal is this: After the 60-day negotiating period, Iran currently retains the right to charge fees on ships traveling through the Strait of Hormuz. There were no fees before the war — this would be a major change. And if Iran turns the Strait into a toll gate, and a substantial portion of global shipping has to pay whatever fee Iran decides to impose, then we will enter a dark era: Iran will have become the world’s Delaware.

    For those who don’t live in the mid-Atlantic: Delaware is America’s Bridge Troll, a parasitic leech-state with an economy built on nickel-and-diming its neighbors. Driving virtually anywhere between Washington and New York requires driving on I-95, and the people of Delaware are the ruthless warlords of a 23-mile stretch of that 230-mile route. This is true even though I-95 is barely even in Delaware — the freeway would miss the state if Delaware’s uncircumcised tip wasn’t uncomfortably poking Pennsylvania:

    Jeff points out that Delaware is filching 43¢/mile from people zipping through their tollgates with an EZ-Pass. Compared to Maryland's 11¢/mile and New Jersey's 13¢/mile.

    Which made me look up our state's plunder for through travelers on I-95. Today it's $1.40 for our 16 miles, which works out to a mere 8.75¢/mile! What a deal!

    Ah, but some of our pols are looking to change that.

  • Other providers are finally catching up to Pun Salad. At least on this particular point:

    • John H. Cochrane, yesterday:

      The wealthy do not swim in Scrooge McDuck pools of money that can be handed out. And even if they did, that money, redistributed, would swiftly drive up prices rather than feed everyone. Musk’s trillion is not the ready inventory of a huge grocery store that can be handed out to feed people. And if it were, once the store was empty, the poor would be hungrier again, and there would be no store to buy from.

    • Tom Knighton, Wednesday:

      It’s pretty clear that many [people on the left] picture [Elon Musk] with a vault like Scrooge McDuck, where he dives in and swims in his trillion bucks, hoarding it all to himself, and keeping it away from the people who rightly deserve it or something.

    • Frank J. Fleming, last week:

    • David P. Deavel, last Sunday:

      Democrats like to paint a picture of the “rich” as if they were Donald Duck’s uncle, Scrooge McDuck.

    • Ah, but here's Pun Salad way back in 2014:

      But the image the "[money is the] most valuable [posession] of all" assertion brings to mind is Scrooge McDuck's daily swim in his Money Bin.

    That was in response to an ad for the "Future Leaders Institute" given by the University Near Here that summer. The title of that shindig was "Money, Greed, Corruption". I was kinda rough on their obvious money-is-so-icky slant, but I think it holds up OK.

    For what it's worth, the FLI is still around, although they are doing AI this year.


Last Modified 2026-06-19 11:26 AM EDT