Jul
13
2026

A Orwellian Blast From the Past

'Twas only five years ago:

For the record, the snitchy URL is now a no-workie. Memory hole!

But imagine the progressive freakout if the Trump Administration/FBI Director Kash Patel posted something similar today.

Just kidding. I have no idea, maybe they have posted something similar, and it's just escaped my notice amidst the usual torrent of wannabe fascism.

But anyhow that was from my five-year-ago post, which also looked at the bad vibes from Cuban dictator Miguel Díaz-Canel, CNN medical analyst Leana Wen, the United States Postal Service, and the Federal Trade Commission. Enjoy!

Also of note:

  • Mass Incompetence. An op-ed authored by one Mindi Messmer appearing in my lousy local newspaper, Foster's Daily Democrat carried the ominous headline: The Merrimack sewage disaster was not an accident.

    On June 27, a severe storm overwhelmed Haverhill's wastewater system, and a 1970s-era 42-inch sewer force main cracked in two places. For days, roughly 8 million gallons of raw sewage poured into the Merrimack River daily. Bacteria counts at some locations reached 40 times the safe level. Forty-one Massachusetts beaches were closed. Shellfishing beds from Gloucester to Salisbury were closed. A temporary bypass stopped the discharge on July 1, but the river remains contaminated. Beaches remained closed through the July 4th holiday weekend, during a record heat wave, as families who just wanted to swim were told to stay out of the water.

    Mindi says "not an accident." So… sabotage?

    Nah. It was an accident, of the "Gee, we were hoping that wouldn't happen" variety. According to Mindi, it's due to …

    This is a funding crisis masquerading as a management crisis. The federal government's combined sewer overflow grant program, intended to serve more than 800 communities nationwide with aging combined sewer systems, has $41 million in funding. When municipalities cannot afford the fixes, the EPA moves the deadline. What should take 5 years takes 20 or 30. The infrastructure failure at the heart of this crisis belongs to both parties, across decades of governance at every level. The consent decree was signed under a Democratic administration. The grant program has been chronically underfunded through Republican and Democratic Congresses alike. The people who coulden't [sic] take their children to Crane Beach this July 4th were not checking which party is in power. They were checking whether it was safe to go into the water and were told no.

    Ah, it's Uncle Stupid's fault for not funnelling more cash to Haverhill!

    Or maybe it was Haverhill's (or the state of Massachusetts') fault for relying on the D.C. Shuffle.

    Look: Massachusetts has the highest per capita income among the 50 states. And the state has an income tax! There is no reason that the state couldn't fund this local infrastructure itself, especially since the eminently foreseeable "disaster" disproportionately affected other Massachusetts locales.

    Federal aid might be justifiable to fund projects in (say) Mississippi or West Virginia, poorer states that arguably need a fiscal handout. Demanding that poorer states, on net, fund Massachusetts repairs should be a non starter.

  • Unfortunately, neither party wants to change its name. Issues & Insights awards dunce caps: Minimum-Wage Bill Shows Yet Again That Congress Is A Refuge For Know-Nothings.

    Democrats have many problems, not the least of which is an inability to understand, and for some the refusal to accept, basic economics. If they did, there wouldn’t be proposals to raise the federal minimum wage to a preposterous $25 an hour.

    House Resolution 8555 would “place the federal minimum wage on a durable path toward a living wage,” requiring “large, highly profitable corporations to lead the transition.” Under its yoke, large employers would have to raise their lowest wage from the current $7.25 an hour to $15 an hour on Jan. 1, 2027, a more-than-double spike that would shock the market.

    You can track H.R.8555's progress here. It shows 30 cosponsors, all Democrats. Amusingly, AOC is not on the cosponsor list. Neither is either NH CongressCritter.

  • But let's sling some insults the other way too. From across the pond, the Daniel Hannan of the Institute for Economic Affairs reports: Donald Trump goes full Third World. That sounds bad! And it is:

    America at 250 has never been wealthier or more powerful. It has grown two thirds faster than Western Europe over the past 20 years. Rival ideologies – Chinese authoritarianism, Islamism – are hideously unappealing.

    Yet, at the same time, the US is starting to behave like a tinpot autocracy. The best way I can describe it is as Third Worldery. The attempt to browbeat the Nobel Peace Prize Committee; the obsession with building big arches; the tariffs; the annexation threats against Canada, Denmark, and Panama; the renaming of public institutions after a living leader; the successful attempt to bully FIFA over a red card. Such things are the hallmark of insecure dictatorships, not of confident democracies.

    Opting for strongman government seems to have opened the way to Third Worldery across the board. Once you build your head of state into a Father of the Nation type, once dissent from his latest whims is portrayed as a form of treachery, other things follow.

    Daniel goes on to look at Trump's kleptocracy. Not a pretty picture, Emily.

  • Attention should be paid. Alex Tabarrok is not one to succumb to Trump Derangement Syndrome, so take his post seriously: The Nationalization of American Science

    OMB, joined by some forty grantmaking agencies—NSF, HHS, DOE, NASA, DOD among them—has proposed a sweeping rewrite of the rules governing all federal grants, the Regulation for Federal Financial Assistance.

    American science has long been state funded but not state directed. Since Vannevar Bush, money has flowed through many agencies to independent universities, allocated largely by peer review. The system has flaws—conformity, gerontocracy, waste—but it had one great virtue, the system was decentralized and not under state control. This rule proposes to bring science funding under top-down, state control.

    Program goals must now be “aligned with administration policies and priorities” (§ 200.202). Merit review is subordinated to politics: “senior appointees must conduct these reviews,” ensuring “that discretionary awards advance the President’s policy priorities,” while “peer review remains advisory and does not replace agency discretion” (§ 200.205). And every grant becomes terminable at will, whenever it “no longer effectuates program goals, Federal agency priorities, or the national interest *as they exist at the time of the termination*” (§ 200.340, emphasis added). Universities must even ensure their subrecipients don’t “significantly damage the reputation of… the Federal Government” (§ 200.332)—a loyalty clause for scientists.

    All this is sold as cutting “burdensome conditions,” a goal I would support, but sadly that is bullshit. The proposed rules add more paperwork and many more layers of bureaucratic review. Payment requests must include written justifications. Every disbursement gets screened through Treasury’s “Do Not Pay” system. Every recipient must run E-Verify. Applicants must disclose any employee who worked at the awarding agency within two years. And on top of the existing review machinery sits a new pre-issuance review committee of “senior appointees” second-guessing the experts. Fixed amount awards—pay for outputs, not inputs—an innovative reward mechanism are *eliminated*, so every award now gets routine cost monitoring and financial reporting.

    Alex has more in a followup post: The Trump Administration's Threat to Scientific Research

  • Maybe reading the Book of Isaiah? Jeff Maurer guests over at the Dispatch, soliciting: Any Advice for the Soon-To-Be Politically Homeless? (Dispatch gifted link) Excerpt:

    I’m a comedian, but I did not find Donald Trump’s political ascendence funny. Funny is a monkey in a tuxedo; funny is a cartoon skunk with pre-MeToo values pursuing a cat. Choosing a president who has all of the qualities of the president in Idiocracy except for the good ones isn’t funny; it’s just a bad idea.

    When Trump became supreme leader of the GOP, I felt schadenfreude watching some conservatives—many of whom are now Dispatch readers—react with revulsion. That was petty on my part, and I don’t defend it, but please remember: I, an Obama liberal, had many erudite, all-caps shouting matches with those folks on Facebook message boards. Remember Mitt Romney’s “binders full of women”? Remember Barack Obama’s tan suit? Oh, we had fun back then! It’s odd to have sepia-toned memories of calling someone “Super Hitler” in a fight about Obama’s mom jeans, but here we are.

    Now, Democrats are going through something a lot like what happened to Republicans a decade ago. The left’s online id has taken corporeal form and scored a few primary wins. Now, the takeover is far from complete; it’s not guaranteed that the 2028 nominee will be either Lenin’s reanimated corpse or someone even worse. But for the first time, I’m contemplating the possibility of a Democratic Party that shares none of my values, which include empiricism, free speech, and being able to say words other than “oligarchy,” “Zionist,” and “don’t judge me by my old tweets.”

    It's free of Jeff's usual smutty vocabulary, so if that's what's been keeping you away from my links to his substack, click away!

Recently on the book blog:
Recently on the movie blog:

I Walk Alone

[3.5 stars] [IMDB Link]

">[Amazon Link]
(paid link)

I found myself in the Noir mood, and this oldie from 1947 was available (free-to-me-with-ads) on the Tubi service, so… It's the real deal, with Burt Lancaster, Kirk Douglas, and Lizabeth Scott providing a lot of black and white chemistry.

Burt plays Frankie Madison, just out of the slammer after 14 years. He didn't squeal on his criminal partner, Noll Turner (Kirk) back then, and he's looking to redeem a promise Noll made to him just before he was nabbed about being 50-50 partners.

After escaping the law, Noll did OK for himself, acquiring a fancy nightclub and a sultry blonde singer/girlfriend, Kay. (That is, of course, Lizabeth Scott.) Only problem is that Noll is kind of a greedy, manipulative weasel; he has no intention of making Frankie his co-partner. If only Frankie had paid attention in Criminal School, where they taught that there's no honor among thieves!

The movie details Frankie's efforts to get what's coming to him, involving shifting alliances with Kay, and also Noll's bookkeeper, Dave (Wendell Corey!). Eventually there's a savage beating (delivered mainly by Mike Mazurki!), a murder, a frame-up, a shootout, …

So, pretty standard fare, but I stayed awake.