Pun Salad

I believe the Amazon Product du Jour is borderline idolatry, and I only recommend it as a bad example.

The WSJ editorialists bemoan a recent legislative success: Elizabeth Warren’s Housing Coup. (WSJ gifted link)

I don't think they're making an obscure reference to the Native American ritual of counting coup. But maybe.

After Your Federal Government has made great progress in making medical care, public education, and childcare "affordable", it's about time it worked its magic on housing.

In case you need it: the headline reference.

Also of note:

• Or maybe just change their name to "Complete Ninny Network". John Hinderaker goes for the jugular: CNN Must Go. He follows up the failures mentioned here yesterday. The latest is a grudging apology for being "inaccurate", but one that still manages to be inaccurate:

  I want to correct something I said last night. The bombs thrown in New York City over the weekend by ISIS inspired attackers was thrown into a crowd of anti-Muslim protestors and not specifically targeted at Mayor Mamdani. That wording was inaccurate and I didn’t catch it ahead…

  — Abby D. Phillip (@abbydphillip) March 11, 2026

  Nevertheless, they persisted:

  Astonishingly, after Phillips’ gaffe, another CNN host repeated the same falsehood:

  Later in the program, CNN’s Ana Navarro said the attack was “against Mayor Mandani in New York, who was raised Muslim.”

  Let's see if Nina Jankowicz and her "American Sunlight Project" are covering this misinformation pandemic… uh, nope.

• The latest instantiation of "Horseshoe Theory". Dennis Saffran is not happy about it: The New Right Takes Up the Left’s War on Merit.

  In June 2023, the Supreme Court handed down its landmark decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard (SFFA), striking down racial preferences that discriminated against whites but most blatantly against Asian-Americans in college admissions. It was one of the signal conservative judicial victories made possible by Donald Trump’s Court appointments. And, while colleges and universities have continued to resist it, it is clear that it marked, if not the beginning of the end of the “plot against merit” that has caught high-achieving Asian-American kids in its crosshairs, at least “the end of the beginning” of the effort to restore something resembling colorblind equality.

  So, of course, there’s a certain kind of right-winger who just can’t stand it.

  New Right writer Helen Andrews went on a Yellow Peril tweetstorm tear on X last month, bemoaning Asian “cheating” and “grind culture” and the “death spiral” of “unchecked meritocracy” seen in China, speculating that “the boom in Southern colleges is white flight from Asian educational norms,” criticizing high-skilled immigration, and fretting that, in the wake of the SFFA decision, the Harvard freshman class is now “over 40% Asian,” and “Asians outnumber whites” at many other top schools. She followed this up with a piece in Compact reiterating these themes and lamenting that the SFFA ruling had allegedly allowed affirmative action “to continue as long as it only harms whites and not Asians.”

  As an "I'm old enough to remember" item: it used to be Jews.

• Might even be worse than his phoniness problem. George Will translates auribus teneo lupum for us clods: Gavin Newsom has a hold-a-wolf-by-the-ears problem. (WaPo gifted link). It's all good, of course, so just a couple paragraphs at random:

  Vogue has just published an adoring profile of Newsom. Its 5,317 words begin with these: “He is embarrassingly handsome, his hair seasoned with silver, at ease with his own eminence.” Then Vogue shifts into high-gear gush: “lithe, ardent, energetic, a glimmer of optimism in his eye; Kennedy-esque.”

  This is the most beyond-satire puff piece since Vanity Fair’s April 2019 cover story on a Texas congressman who was the flavor of the month for about a month among the tiny sliver of voters who think Vanity Fair is a profound guide to U.S. politics. Remember Beto O’Rourke? Few do.

  As I type, Governor Gav is the favored 2028 Democrat presidential nominee at the Stossel/Lott Election Betting Odds site, but with only a 26.8% probability. What's that mean?

• This inspires some dark fantasies here. James Piereson calls for truth in labelling: Socialism is a hate crime.

  It is remarkable that, despite its long record of failure, socialism is now more popular than ever among college students and in progressive precincts of the Democratic Party, at least judging by the cult status of figures such as Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Now an avowed socialist has been elected mayor of New York, the commercial capital of the United States and home to that great capitalist institution, the stock market. Even more recently, socialists here and around the world have spoken out in unison against the arrest of Nicolás Maduro, the socialist dictator of Venezuela.

  It is ironic that these socialists, along with their supporters and fellow travelers, like to censor conservatives for, allegedly, promoting “hate” and “division.” On that basis, they have banned conservative speakers from appearing on college campuses, and just a few years ago urged Twitter and Facebook to close the accounts of conservatives who spoke out against socialism.

  This raises the question: given the historical record, why don’t we label socialism as a hate crime?

  I try to avoid amateur psychoanalysis, but socialists do seem to be motivated by unhealthy and dysfunctional instincts. Just sayin'.

• Maybe not three cheers, but can we have two? Or even one? Jeff Maurer has a contrarian take: Regime Change is Good Sometimes.

  Left-wing views on regime change are largely informed by two bees that are still buzzing around in the leftist bonnet: The CIA’s work to install the Shah in Iran and Pinochet in Chile. When the 1952 election in Iran produced a Prime Minister who threatened Western oil interests, the CIA and MI6 backed a coup by the Shah that made him an absolute ruler. And when a Marxist won the 1970 election in Chile, the CIA backed a coup a few years later by Augusto Pinochet. If you know leftists — and oh I have known some leftists in my time — these are events they talk about a lot. And they have a point: The US basically supported democracy unless democracy produced leaders we didn’t like, which is kind of like being monogamous unless a really juicy opportunity to cheat comes along.

  But the big problem in both cases is that we toppled governments that had democratic legitimacy. Those governments won elections, and we didn’t even wait for the leftist leader to disband the constitution and declare himself Dictator For Life And Beyond (which probably would have happened if the CIA had just kept its pants on). We ignored the people’s will in both countries, which is why folks like me — who don’t care about Marxist claptrap but do care about democracy — look at those choices and think “bad stuff”.

  Good points.

Recently on the book blog:

I own the hardcover, which I purchased back in 1980 for (I think) the full retail price at the time, $11.95. And it has sat, unread, on my bookshelf since then. About time I got to it.

Reader, I mean no disrespect to the late Philip José Farmer, but the word that kept popping into my head while reading this was "interminable". Things go on for many, many pages.

And, not that it matters, but: that's a neat cover picture, but nothing like that shows up in the book.

And, to add to my kvetching, my edition has a back-cover quote from Farmer that states:

Now ends the Riverworld series, all loose ends tied together in a sword-resisting Gordian knot, all the human mysteries revealed, the millions of miles of The River and the many years of quests and The Quest completed.

And then just a few years later, his actual last novel, Gods of Riverworld, was published. I'm sure there was a good reason for that besides squeezing out a few bucks from readers with more money than sense. Like me.

Riverworld is falling apart here. The once-reliable "resurrection" feature that rebooted dead humans into a new life along the River has stopped working: when you're dead, you're dead. And the semi-magical grailstones that provided periodic food, drink, and other consumables to humanity stop working entirely on one bank of the River. Which causes that bank's inhabitants to go to war against the other, resulting in the death of half of Riverworld's billions of souls. (Easy come, easy go.) A lot of these troubles are brought about by "X", a mysterious (and murderous) renegade from the race that created Riverworld, the "Ethicals".

Worse: there are two competing riverboats racing upriver, aimed at finding the "Tower" at the River's source: one helmed by King John, the other by Samuel Clemens. They go to all-out war, too, because why not. This involves an interminable dogfight between each boat's airplanes, closely followed by an interminable battle between the boats themselves, fought out on the river's surface.

Leaving a ragtag group of survivors to proceed to the Tower. Their (also interminable) trek is perilous and deadly, but they still have time to engage in discussions (reminiscent of college dorm rooms) of wathans, a soul-like psychic gadget that acts as a backup device for humans.

Eventually, things wind up, and it turns out to be fortunate that one of the survivors of all the carnage is Alice Liddell, Lewis Carroll's inspiration. Spoiler: She saves the day.