Pun Salad

Forth:

Mouseover: "I NOTATION POLISH REVERSE ❤️"

The appeal may be limited, I realize. If you want to know about Forth, here's Wikipedia.

And, yes, my first calculator was an HP-21, a major purchase of $125 on a skimpy grad-student stipend back in 1975.

Also of note:

• Amy gets it. Amy Peikoff, that is, writing at Law & Liberty: The Eleven-Inch Foot.

  On July 14, the House of Representatives passed the Sunshine Protection Act by a vote of 308 to 117. The bill would impose Daylight Saving Time year-round, nationwide, and President Donald Trump has promised to sign it. It now sits in the Senate, where Majority Leader John Thune has voiced misgivings about a federal mandate, and Senator Tom Cotton has asked that it never reach the floor. The ensuing debate has been conducted entirely in terms of policy: circadian health versus evening commerce, school-bus-stop safety versus after-work golf. Those are pertinent questions, and they have a clear answer.

  But there is an antecedent question that no one in Congress appears to have asked: where, exactly, does the federal government get the power to legislate noon away from the sun?

  The question may sound quaint. But asking it exposes what the Sunshine Protection Act actually is—and reveals a limit on federal power that our constitutional tradition once understood clearly but has since forgotten. If the question sounds quaint, that’s itself collateral damage: the “substantial-effects” doctrine has told a century of legislators they needn’t ask which enumerated power a bill actually implements, since almost any activity can be conceived of, especially when considered in the aggregate, as affecting interstate commerce. I will return to that doctrine, because the answer to the present question about clock settings turns out to depend on it.

  I'm on record as favoring the separation of Time and State, since back in 2013: The Right Number of Time Zones is Zero. I'm somewhat ashamed to admit that I never pushed the constitutional issue, as Amy does. A compelling argument, and I'd love to see it before SCOTUS.

• As I type, Fauci's apparently taking the Fifth. Let's look at Robby Soave's take: What Anthony Fauci’s diary reveals about COVID. We got video:

  And also text:

  Sen. Rand Paul (R–Ky.) has released entries from the diary of Dr. Anthony Fauci, and you'll never guess what the ex-coronavirus advisor actually wrote about the origins of COVID-19. Paul has revealed there's a massive gap between what Fauci said in public and what he said in private about the likely start of the pandemic.

  At the start of the pandemic, on January 26th, 2020, Fauci wrote that he did not think the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan, China, was where COVID jumped from animals to humans. He wrote: "Now we know the market was not the source, it was the amplifier." He cited other cases that he thought demonstrated COVID was circulating in the population in China prior to that.

  So maybe Fauci changed his mind later? OK. But here's where things get interesting. Just one week later, Fauci convened a call with a bunch of other virologists. There were 12 scientists on that call. According to Fauci's diary, only two of the scientists were convinced that COVID had arisen naturally from animal spillover. The rest of them "felt that deliberate insertion was possible"—i.e., that the virus was engineered in a lab. That conclusion, however, was inconvenient for Fauci because he had served for decades as the foremost public advocate of gain-of-function research—of experimenting on coronaviruses so that they become more transmissible and more deadly.

  That's really the important bit, with all sorts of implications for health policy, foreign policy, and "trusting the science". Many are focusing instead on Fauci's impressive narcissism. Which is hilarious, of course, but we will leave that to another day.

  Specifically, tomorrow.

• Unclear on the concept. Laura W. Brill's article at the Civics Center rang Google's LFOD news alert! Her headline is a disappointed in-your-face: Live Free or Die: New Hampshire Doesn’t Live Up To Its Motto.

  Oh no! What's the problem? (I will not try to duplicate her formatting.)

  New Hampshire, the Live free or Die state, is a case study in how unnecessary burdens on voting can harm young voters: just 7% of 18-year-olds are registered to vote in the state as of March 31.

  I am sorry to report that as of spring 2026, New Hampshire has the lowest registration rate for 18-year-olds of the 32 states we are tracking. There is not a single county in the state where the rate was at 10% or more as of March.

  By contrast, in Oregon, Michigan, and Colorado 70+% are registered. That’s 7 times as many, and it proves that states have the power to do a better job of consistently welcoming their newest voters.

  New Hampshire, I do not believe that your teens are 7 times less engaged than their counterparts in those states. Living free must include better access to voting.

  Well, that's hilarious. I don't want to get into the weeds on what 18-year-olds need to do in various states to get registered. What is indisputable seems to be that a lot of 18-year-old Granite Staters are choosing not to do that (at least not as of March 2026).

  Laura, please pay attention to that word: choosing. Both the young people who have registered, and those who haven't, are "living free".

  Perhaps the unregistered read Katherine Mangu-Ward's classic editorial from 2018: It's OK Not to Vote.

  Or perhaps they don't consider themselves qualified to cast an informed ballot.

  Or perhaps they just can't be bothered.

  Frankly, it doesn't matter.

  Yes, Laura, a large fraction of them aren't behaving in a way of which you approve. I think you should have said that instead, you insufferable noodge. And not have dragged our state's motto into it.

• In other civics news. Eric Boehm reports on those states where a larger fraction of 18-year-olds are registered. In many cases, they might not have bothered: There are 150 uncompetitive House races in this year's midterms.

  Election Day is still over three months away, but more than one-third of the seats in the House of Representatives have effectively been decided—with no input from voters.

  The list of those uncontested elections includes some high-profile figures, like House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D–N.Y.) and House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R–Ohio). They are among dozens of incumbents who are all but guaranteed another two years in office after running unopposed in their primaries and representing districts where a loss in November is nearly unthinkable.

  I clicked over to check the list. Neither New Hampshire Congressional district is considered "uncompetitive".