Pun Salad

Mr. Ramirez makes a strong argument for inclusion:

And Megan McArdle observes The gaping hole in the transgender sports case. (WaPo gifted link)

I believe current civil rights legislation forbids racial segregation in school sports, but also demands sexual segregation in school sports. It's a funny old world.

Also of note:

• I will take a pass on the suaasat. Eric Boehm looks at the polls and speculates that Seizing Greenland might be the least popular idea in American political history.

  Is that hyperbole? If so, that's only because reliable and fast public polling is a relatively recent development within our 250-year experiment in self-governance.

  A Reuters/Ipsos poll released Wednesday found a staggering 4 percent of Americans favor the idea of seizing Greenland with military force. Among Republicans, the idea is actually twice as popular: 8 percent say taking the island is a "good idea."

  Even if the Trump administration is using the threat of military force as a bluff, the idea of acquiring Greenland at all remains deeply unpopular. The same poll found that just 17 percent of Americans (and just 40 percent of Republicans) support the effort.

  (Suassat: "a traditional Greenlandic soup. It is traditionally made from seal meat, but can also be made from whale, caribou, or seabirds." Yum!)

• And I'm saying "no thanks" to the muktuk, too. Don Boudreaux writes to the WSJ editors: Trump Continues to Pick Americans' Pockets. Their recent news story, Don says, went too easy on Orange Man:

  Your headline that reads “Trump to Hit European Nations with 10% Tariffs in Bid for Greenland Deal” (January 17) would be more accurate if it instead read “Trump to Hit Americans with 10% Tariffs in Bid for Greenland Deal.”

  Because foreigners pay at most 25 percent of the cost of U.S. tariffs, for every dollar of cost that the president inflicts on Europeans to pressure them into ‘selling’ Greenland, he inflicts at least three dollars of cost on us Americans. Perhaps he believes that this cost is one that we should be willing to pay. If so, though, why doesn’t Mr. Trump come clean with us about the cost that he’s inflicting on us? By asserting that certain European countries “will be charged a 10% Tariff on any and all goods and services sent to the United States of America,” without any mention of the much larger cost inflicted on Americans, he reveals either that he’s unaware that Americans will bear this cost or that he wishes to keep Americans in the dark about this reality. Neither possibility is encouraging about his leadership.

  (Muktuk: "a traditional food of Inuit and other circumpolar peoples, consisting of whale skin and blubber.")

• Whatever it is, she's against it. Speaking of the WSJ, their columnist Kimiberly Strassel is not a fan of Senator Fauxcahontas. She summarizes a recent speech with the headline: Warren Condemns Abundance. (WSJ gifted link) Among the points made:

  We’re all “populists” now: What does Warren want? The same thing she’s always wanted: giant (socialistic) governance. Yet she and Sanders are this year offering a strategic twist: Taking a leaf from Trump, they are pushing the party to stoke class divisions and wrap their standard progressive fare in populist language, presenting it as an agenda for “working people.” Warren laid out an agenda that includes all the top progressive goals, though modified to sound more benign (“universal health care”); more class-warfare (“cracking down on corporate landlords”); and more, er, blue-collar (“guaranteeing the right to repair your own cars, machines and business equipment”). Read through this list, however, and pretty much all her ideas were exactly those pushed or enacted by the Biden team and Democrats—an agenda for which they were tossed from office in 2024.

  Liz is a longtime fan of "cracking down" on whomever and whatever displeases her. In the past I've sent readers to the Google for evidence. (As I type, Google reports "About 96,200 results" of that search. Maybe more tomorrow.)

Recently on the book blog:

This is the third entry in Philip José Farmer's Riverworld series, set 30 years after the events in the second book. As previously noted, 36 billion humans have been resurrected along the banks of the millions-miles-long River, supplied periodically with food, drink, and other substances via their "grails". And instead of settling into quiet lives of Edenic bliss, a significant fraction of the populace have devoted themselves to finding the secrets behind the planet, held (they think) in a near-impregnable tower at the north pole. And (believe it or not) they can't manage to do this peacefully; much of their effort is devoted to violence, betrayal, and subterfuge against their fellow humans.

Over the intervening decades, there's been a lot of technological progress, but mainly in the service of warfare: lasers, sonar, radar, huge blimps, advanced guns, plastic explosives, and more. New characters are introduced, some famous (Tom Mix, Jack London) and some not. Progress is made, some secrets revealed, but (spoiler) the underlying mysteries of Riverworld remain mysterious. (Two more volumes to go!)

One feature of Farmer's prose this time around: he often provides distances in both normal and metric units, to an irritating extent. E.g., page 14 of my $1.25 paperback edition: "Presently, intense blue flames roared upward from the top of the stone to 20 feet or a little over 6 meters." Over and over, throughout the text.

(The book is ©1977, when there was a push for the US to convert to metric. The seventies were crazy, man.)