Pun Salad

Reason's latest entry in their continuing series: Great moments in unintended consequences.

Remember: birds are flammable, pickpockets are sneaky, balloons eventually pop, taxation is theft.

Also of note:

• Future unintended consequences: unnecessary flu deaths. That's what leaps to mind from reading the WSJ headline: FDA Refuses to Consider Approving Use of Moderna’s New Flu Vaccine.

  The U.S. Food and Drug Administration refused to review Moderna’s application to sell a new seasonal flu vaccine.

  The FDA sent Moderna a “refusal-to-file” letter earlier this month, saying the company’s study testing the vaccine wasn’t sufficient, and the agency wouldn’t take up the company’s request for approval to sell the shot, Moderna said Tuesday.

  In the letter, the FDA said Moderna failed during testing to compare its experimental flu vaccine with the best available vaccine on the market.

  Moderna said the FDA didn’t identify any concerns about the safety or effectiveness of the company’s experimental vaccine. The company said it was asking the agency for a meeting to discuss the matter.

  Moderna was surprised by the rejection. “It does feel like the rules of the game are being changed after it’s been played,” Moderna President Stephen Hoge said in an interview.

  With RFKJr calling the "shots" (heh), pharmaceutical companies had best prepare for unpredictable Calvinball rule changes from the FDA.

• So I'm not debating it. But… Isn't Jeff Blehar's headline a tad self-contradictory: Bad Bunny Super Bowl Halftime Show Is Not an ‘Issue’ Worth Debating.

  Worse:

  I switched off the game early because it was so boring, so I didn’t watch the halftime show when it was on. Instead, I “Twitter-watched” it — watched the reactions of others online. And what I saw spill forth was a Rorschach inkblot spreading out in real time: Was it political? Was it mild and inoffensive? Was it an entertaining hoot or a bizarre failure? All I know is that everybody was fighting bitterly about the cultural import of a guy who self-identifies as a vicious hare — which I assume is about as seriously as we should take him — and the angles were almost entirely predictable based on partisan priors. (Notable exception: Commentary’s John Podhoretz, who delightfully zagged where others zigged.)

  When I finally checked the thing out myself, I had three takeaways: (1) My conversational Spanish is way rustier than I thought. (2) Golly, Puerto Rican women sure are lovely. (3) Whoever choreographed this should work on the next major stage production of Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Seriously, hundreds of humans dressed as tall reeds and sugarcane stalks? Watching them exit the field afterward was its own kind of surreal joy. Birnam Wood came to Dunsinane on Sunday night, so if you’re the sort to put stock in witch’s curses, best start contemplating the end of your reign.

  Jeffrey gets more content out of the halftime show by not watching it real time. I will have to remember this for next year.

• And that tune is "Misty Mountain Hop" by Led Zep. Jim Geraghty notes the Gray Lady having second thoughts about America getting its herb on: The New York Times Changes Its Tune on Marijuana, at Last.

  It’s always a good day when the New York Times editorial board catches up to our Charlie Cooke.

  Back in November, Charlie wrote a typically insightful and well-thought-out magazine piece lamenting that “marijuana legalization is a good idea with bad consequences”:

  The United States has some of the greatest and most interesting cities in the world — New York, Chicago, San Francisco — and, over the last five or so years, almost all of them have become unpleasant to walk around in thanks to the ubiquitous smell of weed. Truly, it is everywhere — including, most distressingly, wafting through open-air restaurants and sidewalk cafés. There is a reason that the colloquial name for marijuana is “skunk,” and there is a reason that one tries to avoid skunks: They are not, in any circumstance, nice to be around. . . .

  Nobody seems to believe that the omnipresent smell of weed is the inevitable consequence of their viewpoint. And they’re right: It’s not. Toleration of the public consumption of marijuana — whether explicit or implicit — is a choice that exists wholly independently of the underlying legal status of the drug. Indeed, when one stops to think about it for a moment, it’s rather peculiar that we have ended up in this position in the first instance. The go-to comparison for cannabis is alcohol. And, in almost every major city in the United States, it is illegal to drink alcohol on the street. How can it possibly be the case that we are more permissive toward a drug that has just been legalized than toward the one that has been a mainstay of our culture (including during Prohibition!) since the beginning of the republic?

  We could have just put piles of burning tires interspersed throughout the downtowns of major U.S. cities and achieved the same olfactory effect.

  Charlie also pointed out the absurdity that a culture that has effectively banned tobacco smoking in every public space is now completely fine with smoking marijuana in those same public spaces. A major argument that drove the ban on tobacco smoking in public places was the danger of secondhand smoke. Apparently, both the broader public and most lawmakers have decided that when it comes to marijuana smoking, we’re just not going to worry about that sort of thing.

  I lost my sense of smell a few years ago, so someone would have to tell me if that's an issue in the LFOD state.

• His competition is fierce, unfortunately. George Will notes an unofficial Olympic event: JD Vance vies for the gold medal in coarseness and flippancy. (WaPo gifted link)

  Spurning the rich subtleties of the English language, JD Vance has a penchant for words that he perhaps thinks display manly vigor, and express a populist’s rejection of refinement. In a recent social media post, he called someone whose posts annoyed him a “dipshit.” He recently told an interviewer that anyone who criticizes his wife can “eat shit.”

  Now, Vance might reasonably believe that many Americans enjoy potty-mouthed high officials. The “Access Hollywood” tape became public 32 days before the 2016 election in which the star of the tape, who mused about grabbing women’s genitals, was elected president. At a minimum, it would be reasonable for Vance to suppose that, after five years of a president who talks about “shithole countries,” Americans are inured to such pungent language.

  I will admit that I've grown inordinately fond of using "bullshit" when talking about Trump or Vance. In my defense, George, I'm not sure there's a better word available.

• I will try to keep this in mind. Kat Rosenfield advises us: Stop Asking Olympians How They Feel About America.

  The most salacious Winter Olympics drama of the week was, for me, an emotional roller coaster. A high-speed journey from dismay to horror to nauseated recognition, culminating in a sense of having fallen out of space and time as déjà vu collided with clairvoyance. The thing that was happening had happened before; it would happen again, and again.

  I am referring, of course, to the incident wherein American Olympic skier Hunter Hess said he had “mixed emotions” about certain U.S. domestic policies, and President Donald Trump called Hess a “real loser” who “shouldn’t have tried out for the team, and it’s too bad he’s on it.”

  Hess’s comments appear to have been made in response to a question from the press about how it felt to be representing the United States at this present moment of political turmoil (as opposed to, you know, any prior moment of the near-continuous turmoil of the past 15-odd years). That Trump responded by calling Hess a “loser” is best categorized, like so many Trumpian shenanigans, under “disappointment” rather than “surprise.” I’m not saying the 79-year-old president of the United States shouldn’t indulge in petty middle school–style beefing with an athlete one-third his age; I’m saying, if he’s going to do it, can’t he steal Hess’s girlfriend, put rotten eggs in his locker, and challenge him to a dance-off like a normal person?

  Fine, Kat. I just hope Gertie Burper does OK in (or at least, survives) the luge.

Recently on the book blog:

I put this book by Stephen Witt on my get-at-library list after reading the WSJ review last year. (WSJ gifted link). I seem to be doing that a lot lately. I was somewhat surprised by how much I enjoyed reading the book. Witt has a real knack for combining personal anecdotes, pungent observations, and layman-level technical detail into an interesting whole.

Part of the book is a biography of Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang. I think it's fair to say that he's flown under the radar for most of his career. There are businessfolk who can't/couldn't seem to stay out of the headlines: Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, … But (shame on me, perhaps) I couldn't have told you who helmed Nvidia before reading this book. And, guess what, Jensen Huang might go down in history as having a bigger impact on the 21st century than any of those guys.

If you believe some of the AI pessimists, though, Huang might be known as "the guy who caused mankind's doom." (Except, small detail, there might be nobody left to make that claim.)

Huang's biography takes up the early part of the book. His unlikely origin story: born in Taiwan, raised in Thailand, sent by his parents (at age 10) to a dinky Baptist-run school in rural Kentucky. But (eventually) rejoined his parents in Oregon, worked at Denny's, became an expert ping-pong player, attended Oregon State, got a job at AMD in semiconductor design, and eventually…

He still likes to go to Denny's for a big breakfast. And, according to Witt, who tagged along one morning, he left a $1000 tip for the waitress. I don't think it's revealed whether that's his usual behavior.

What is, apparently Huang's usual behavior: angrily dressing down his employees in front of their co-workers. You wouldn't think that would be a successful business strategy, but it worked for Nvidia. Huang almost never fired those targets of his wrath. And they seemed to remain fiercely loyal toward the company and Huang himself.

It doesn't hurt, I suppose, that he made them all pretty rich along the way.

The book is also a biography of Nvidia; it is perhaps unappreciated how many near-death experiences the company had on its way to its current dizzying success. (As I type: a $4.58 trillion market cap, stock price up 1160% over the past five years.) But before that, they had their share of dud products, false starts, takeover attempts, etc.

The company in its early days was aimed at gamers who lusted after ever-higher performance video. But some curious coders noted that the Nvidia hardware could also do arithmetic incredibly quickly. Which allowed scientists to "smuggle demanding mathematical payloads—say, simulating the formation of a galaxy, or modeling the ignition process of a nuclear bomb—into hardware meant to render carjackings and disembowelments." (One of Witt's "pungent observations" I mentioned above.)

The third part of the book is a layperson's history of AI, a field full of hype, broken promises, and dead-end research. Huang's, and Nvidia's, success was in resurrecting and combining two scorned, out-of-fashion subfields: one in AI (neural networks), the other in computer architecture (parallel processing). This (eventually) turned out to work surprisingly well for the company, to put it mildly.

The penultimate chapter in the book is a look at the possibility that AI will kill us all. In the cheerful language of the theorists: p(doom), the probability of doom. I've always been an optimist about that, thinking that capitalist innovation and technical progress has always been an easy net win for mankind in the past. But it's hard to deny that a lot of smart people think differently.

Huang is not one of those people. In the book's final chapter, Witt describes his final interview with Huang, where he tries to elicit commentary about those dire predictions. This does not work out well: Witt finds himself at the receiving end of one of Huang's harangues. Witt is hurt and somewhat surprised, and has deep thoughts; it's almost as if Huang doesn't want to think about possible downsides.

So: we find ourselves fulfilling that (fake) Chinese curse: "May you live in interesting times." Thanks to Huang (and others).

I put this book by SCOTUS Justice Amy Coney Barrett on my get-at-library list thanks to a good review from Barton Swaim last year in the WSJ.

Some of the book is autobiography, although she avoids being overly personal, or (heaven forbid) critical of her political/judicial adversaries. She tells feelgood stories about her career, colleagues, and family; outlines her career (SCOTUS clerk, lawprof, lower court judge, …). There's next to nothing, for example, about the overtly partisan confirmation process, where all Senate Democrats voted against her. In this area, she's all sweetness and light, with a lot of emphasis about how collegial SCOTUS is, with (sometimes bitter) legal disagreements never intruding on the Justices' mutual respect and affection.

Apart from autobiography, the book goes into detail about how SCOTUS works: what clerks do (she was at one time a clerk for Antonin Scalia); the mysteries of standing, certiorari, amicus briefs, and the like. Something I didn't previously appreciate: the Constitution restricts SCOTUS to Cases and [specific] Controversies; they can't just make up decisions on issues they find interesting or important.

Another portion of the book goes into methods of judicial interpretation. Justice Barrett lays out her case for Scalia-like originalism/textualism. (She's pushing on an open door in my case.) But there are also a couple of interesting chapters on how justices have to deal with sloppily-worded statutes, or some with outright mistakes. ("I think they meant to say 'illegal', instead of 'legal' there.") Laws are written (mostly) in English, and English is notoriously ambiguous! One of her examples: a lime-green gas-guzzler parked in front of a sign saying "Green Vehicles Only". Does the owner get ticketed?)

I was interested by the book, at the "aspiring dilettante" level. It occurred to me that it would make an excellent high-school graduation gift to a bright student contemplating a career in law. If they pore over the pages in rapt fascination, I'd encourage them to go for it!