Feb
17
2026

Sorry I Didn't Get You a Card

In fact, I totally spaced on "Presidents Day". Other than noticing the lack of Pun Salad Manor mail delivery.

I am with the National Review editorialists: There Is No Such National Holiday as Presidents Day. Despite what various calendars and people say.

But Jeff Jacoby digs back into history, recalling the good old days When a president clung fiercely to the rule of law.

THE PRESIDENT'S speech had been a triumph.

It was April 25, 1912, five days before the Republican primary in Massachusetts. A massive crowd packed the Boston Arena to see William Howard Taft, who was seeking his party's nomination for a second term, finally strike back at former president Theodore Roosevelt. For months, Taft had remained silent as Roosevelt traveled the country to mock and belittle him, dismissing his presidency as timid and accusing him of being a tool of special interests. Now, for the first time, Taft answered the charges. To cheers from the audience, he rebutted the accusations point by point. Then Taft — a former US Solicitor General and federal appellate court judge — denounced his predecessor's demand that voters be allowed to overturn court decisions they disliked. That would end judicial independence, he warned, and "destroy the keystone of our liberties."

The speech removed any doubt that the nation's 26th and 27th presidents were now bitter political enemies. But Taft felt no exhilaration at the crowd's thunderous applause. He returned to his railroad car shortly after midnight, drained and miserable. "Roosevelt was my closest friend," he told a reporter, his voice breaking. Then he began to weep.

Only a few years earlier, such a scene would have seemed unimaginable.

Jeff details the rocky relationship between Teddy and Bill, and it's interesting to compare it to the feuds of today. Mister, we could use a man like William Howard Taft again.

Later that year, Taft campaigned just down the road in Dover, New Hampshire. That event is the subject of a wall mural at my local (Canadian-owned) bank; I've ogled it many times while waiting for a teller. You can see the photo on which the mural is based at the town's website. With associated anecdote:

Franklin Square was packed with people, vehicles and machines. In the knowledge that President Taft was a man who would not fit into just any chair at all, American House personnel ransacked the hostelry to find a chair of generous proportions, and finally decided on a "Sleepy Hollow", a reclining chair, but in their efforts to please the President, a rare visitor, the chair was bedecked with a U.S. flag, which was tied down and secured.

Upon his arrival on the steps of the American House, where it was expected he would say a few words, Taft was conducted to the flag be-trimmed chair, but naturally, knowing flag etiquette, he refused to sit upon the banner. there was a frantic searching, but finally an armchair was located in the hotel office.

Although Taft was too large for the chair, he never the less wedged himself into it as far as he could.

The hilarity occurred when Taft, in arising to acknowledge an introduction, found the chair rising behind him, until "willing hands came to his aid, and after several vigorous yanks, the President was freed,".

I admire Taft's principled refusal to defile the flag with his ample behind.

Also of note:

  • He's a good Bayesian. Noah Smith has Updated thoughts on AI risk. Background: his "pessimistic" essay of a few days ago You are no longer the smartest type of thing on Earth, standing in contrast to previous sunnier takes (LLMs are not going to destroy the human race and My thoughts on AI safety).

    People wanted to know why my tone had shifted from optimistic to pessimistic.

    Well, the simple answer to that is “I was in a worse mood.” My rabbit was sick, so I was kind of grumpy, and so in my post a few days ago I painted the eventual disempowerment of humanity as more of a negative thing than I usually do. In fact, I’ve always believed that at some point, humanity would be replaced with something posthuman — godlike AIs, a hive mind, modified humans, or whatever. I grew up reading science fiction about that kind of thing — Vernor Vinge, Charles Stross, Arthur C. Clarke, Iain M. Banks, and so on — and it just always seemed impossible that humanity had already attained the theoretical pinnacle of intelligence. I had always simply envisioned that whatever came after us would be in the general human family, and would be more likely to be on our side than against us.

    That’s what my post the other day was about. I painted a more glum picture of humanity’s eventual supersession because I was in a bad mood. But even in that post, at the end, I offered optimism that ASI will save us from things like low fertility, fascist overlords, and the end of human-driven scientific discovery. That optimistic future would be like the Culture novels, by Iain M. Banks, in which AIs take the reins of civilization but in which they respect and help and protect a now-mostly-useless humanity — basically a much nicer, more enlightened version of the way the United States of America treats Native Americans nowadays. It’s a wistful future, and in some ways a sad one, but not particularly terrifying.

    Well, I'm not sure Bayes would approve of adjusting one's p(doom) based on, not new relevant evidence but on rabbit-related mood swings. Still, Noah's take seems as credible here as it was before.

  • I decided Christian Schneider's Substack post needed illustration. So:

    Every generation has its genuinely hilarious politician. Ronald Reagan used to sit at his desk late into the night, jotting down one-liners on 3-by-5 note cards and adding them to his speeches. (Sample: “People who think a tax boost will cure inflation are the same ones who believe another drink will cure a hangover.”) After Reagan was shot in the chest by John Hinkley, Jr., the president looked around at his doctors and famously quipped, “I hope they are all Republicans.”

    Donald Trump clearly sees himself in the mold of the world’s most humorous leaders. His MAGA base has already declared him to be the funniest president ever. One scholarly study (presumably from the University of Our Eyeballs) found that Trump was a popular candidate primarily because he was so entertaining.

    But Trump’s act doesn’t actually rise to the level of recognizable humor. His schoolyard taunts are well-known to any eighth-grader; there are no clever turns of phrase, unique insights, or timely callbacks. Trump’s “jokes,” which can be served up by literally anyone, are simply verbal flatulence—funny only because they are deeply inappropriate to the serious situation in which he finds himself.

    It's the same phenomenon as the clapter-bait late night monologues. Not funny at all, but the audience laughter and applause doesn't mean it's funny, it's just signalling group affiliation.

  • People are out for (academic) blood. Lawrence M. Krauss is, sadly, one of the victims. He writes: Universities Punish Epstein Association Retrospectively.

    America’s Jeffrey Epstein feeding frenzy received renewed sustenance on 30 January when the Trump Justice Department released about 3.5 million documents for public consumption. So far, none of the newly released files has provided new evidence regarding Epstein’s crimes or those supposedly committed by others he knew. The so-called Epstein Files are mostly private correspondence between Epstein and various individuals with whom he associated, from his closest friends to distant acquaintances.

    That includes me. I got to know Epstein in the early 2000s, when he provided some support for a major conference I organised on cosmology. He enjoyed thousands of associations like this, and the press has seized upon them, even when the people involved had nothing to do with Epstein’s alleged criminality nor any knowledge of it. But in 2026, evidence of actual wrongdoing doesn’t really matter. Epstein has become a demonic figure, and anyone associated with him in any way is tainted, if only by association and innuendo.

    Last December, PBS announced that it was dropping Poetry in America, which had been scheduled to air for a fifth season this year. “PBS is no longer distributing the program and it has been removed from our digital platforms,’’ a spokesperson announced. A week later, the Boston Globe reported that Arizona State University would be terminating its relationship with Verse Video Education, a nonprofit organisation that produced the program. Verse Video was run by Elisa New, a poetry professor at ASU and the second wife of former Harvard president, Larry Summers. In 2024, ASU named New as director of its Educational Media Innovation Studio, which was developed to run her poetry program. Not only has the university now severed its relationship with Verse Video, it has also closed the media studio. All information about the studio and any resources it produced have been scrubbed from the ASU website.

    "World Ends, Poetry Lovers Hardest Hit."

  • Garry Tan notes The New War on Asian American Excellence. Exemplified by:

    This is the oldest form of American racism, dressed up in new clothes. And Ankit is right: we should celebrate students being serious about getting smart early regardless of race. Asian kids I grew up with had plenty of passions outside of math and science and still do. We don’t need to dress up discomfort with competition in DEI language.

    So (yet another) tedious personal anecdote: I started 7th grade in Omaha's Lewis and Clark Junior High School in 1963, which had a goodly portion of Jewish kids. (Of which I was unaware until Rosh Hashanah rolled around, and about 60% of the kids in my homeroom were absent.)

    I found out those kids were, on the whole, very smart and hard-working. Which forced me to step up my own academic game. It sounds as if things may be different now.

Recently on the book blog:

You Have No Right to Your Culture

Essays on the Human Condition

(paid link)

This is another self-published collection of old blog posts made by Bryan Caplan at the EconLog group blog years back. (Bryan has since moved over to his own Substack Bet On It.) My reports on previous entries in this series: Labor Econ Versus the World; How Evil Are Politicians?; Don't Be a Feminist; Voters as Mad Scientists; You Will Not Stampede Me). (There are a couple more titles stuck in my to-be-read stacks. Eventually…)

The title on Bryan's lead essay sounds a little in-your-face, doesn't it? Don't I have the right to eat lefse and lutefisk if I want? Can't I mutter "Uff Da!" now and again? Relax! Bryan is making the point that "culture" is often used as a shorthand for "other people". And his ire is aimed at people who want to use government as a coercive tool to ensure that those "other people" are ones of your particular culture. Yeah, don't do that.

The essays here are a mixed bag of philosophy, economics, and travelogue. Specifically, there are a lot of Caplanesque observations made during trips around the US and the world. You might find them more interesting than I did.

I've previously remarked that I'm not a fan of Bryan's chosen format in this series. I view buying the books as a grateful contribution to his life and work, like my Dave Barry substack subscription. But this book seems even more disjointed and less coherent than previous ones.

Here's a gripe: Bryan's 2016 post on AI, "Is It Really Conscious?" is reproduced more or less verbatim here. I think it's well thought-out for a short blog post. He refers to the "Problem of Other Minds", arguably a relevant concept, and says:

In the near future, I’ll offer my solution to the Problem of Other Minds – a solution that strongly suggests AIs are no more conscious than Choose Your Own Adventure Novels.

Reader, I was expecting (perhaps) the next essay in this book would offer his solution. Nope. And not in the remaining chapters, either. (For that matter, a superficial Google search doesn't show up anything either.) How about it, Bryan? Am I missing something?