Pun Salad

Yes, that's Mr. Ramirez, doing a very good Charles Schulz takeoff. If you need explanation, the New York Post has the story: AOC broke law by spending $19k in campaign cash on ketamine-therapy shrink for ‘personal use’: complaint

This site claims: "Low doses of ketamine may result in problems with attention, learning ability, and memory." Which might explain some things.

Also of note:

• For all who celebrate: Happy Passover. Jeff Jacoby celebrates in his own way, by recounting A libel as old as the Pyramids.

  JEWS THE world over will gather around the Seder table this week to recount again the great narrative of their ancestors' redemption from slavery in Egypt. In retelling the story, they will quote the passage from Exodus in which Pharaoh justified the unspeakable repression he intended to inflict on the Hebrews.

  "Come, let us deal wisely with them," he exhorted his nation. "Otherwise they may become so numerous that if there is a war they will join our enemies, fight against us, and leave the land." Though the tyrant's idea of dealing wisely with the Hebrews began with slave labor, it wasn't long before he advanced to murder. "Then Pharaoh commanded all his people, saying: 'Every boy that is born you shall throw into the Nile.'"

  Pharaoh's false accusation set the pattern for one of history's most durable antisemitic libels. Through the millennia, Jews have been portrayed as a fifth column, malevolently disposed to betray the nations in which they live. Again and again the slander resurfaces: When war comes, it will be the Jews who caused it, or who had the most to gain from its outcome, or who manipulated others into fighting and dying. The libel is as old as the Pyramids — and as current as today's news.

  I don't advise kicking the next antisemite you see in the shins, but I would understand if you did that.

• It's not just steel and aluminum. Scott Lincicome looks at Trump’s Other Tariff. (archive.today link)

  Last September, the Trump administration imposed a staggering $100,000 fee for new H-1B visas via presidential proclamation—up from just a couple hundred dollars previously. Subsequent guidance from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services clarified that the $100,000 charge applies only to new H-1B petitions filed on or after September 21, 2025, for workers outside the United States and lacking a valid H-1B visa (so-called “initial employment” petitions). The fee does not apply to renewals, extensions, amendments, or visa holders already here and switching over to an H-1B—a significant carve-out that limits the fees’ damage but certainly doesn’t eliminate it. The fee also must be paid before a petition is filed, with no guarantee of a refund even if the application is denied. (This hints at a broader problem with many immigration-related fees today, as my Cato colleague David Bier just documented.)

  Scott goes on to document why this was such a lousy idea, like nearly all government-imposed barriers to free trade.

• "Hey, let's take that road! The one to Serfdom!" Veronique de Rugy is as disappointed as Julius Caesar was: Et Tu, World Bank? Industrial Policy on the International Scene.

  The World Bank recently published a 276-page report supporting the idea that industrial policy belongs "in the national policy toolkit of all countries." This is a significant reversal for an institution that spent decades pushing developing nations toward fiscal discipline, open trade and market liberalization. When the World Bank seems more interested in engaging with right- and left-wing populism than in promoting good economics, it tells you a lot about the era in which we live.

  Industrial policy refers to government officials channeling resources to particular industries that the market would not. Arguments like national security or protecting "strategic" industries from competitors are often used to justify the policy. Whatever one thinks of these excuses, industrial policy is funded by taxpayers when the chosen instrument is subsidies, funded by consumers when the tool is tariffs, and always funded by the other domestic firms quietly crowded out as capital flows toward their politically favored competitors.

  Nobody seems to consider "New Hampshire Blogging" to be a strategic industry, but we can always hope.

• Like a snowball rolling downhill, it is. Kevin D. Williamson has a sad prediction: Post-Truth Won’t End With Trump. (archive.today link)

  One of the ironies of the low-trust society—and that is the kind of society we are building, to our detriment—is that its deficit of trust is mirrored by a surplus of gullibility.

  What Umberto Eco wrote (describing the view of G.K. Chesterton) about God is true about lesser authorities as well: that when men stop believing, “it isn’t that they then believe in nothing: they believe in everything.”

  You know what I am talking about: The same people who go on and on (and they do) about how they don’t trust “Big Pharma” are ready to believe anything they see on the internet about ivermectin or raw milk or drinking water with borax dissolved in it. (Please do not drink borax.) Certain people who believe that climate change is a hoax accept at face value wild claims about Satanic pedophile rings operating out of Washington pizzerias, people who reject evolution as a fanciful hypothesis believe that aliens from distant planets secretly walk among us, etc. You can read essays calling for “evidence-based government” or “science-based” health tips in the Washington Post and then check the horoscopes.

  And, no spoilers here, but the very next paragraph is especially funny, and also true.

• Free advice for Team Blue. Frank J. Fleming uses AI to illustrate How the Dems Can Find a White Man They Can Pass as Normal. I won't grab his art, but Step One is:

  1. Find a hobo who has been living under a bridge.

  You’re probably going, “Why a hobo living under a bridge?” Well, one of the biggest problems Dems have is that anyone they want to portray as normal probably wrote on social media during peak woke something like, “I love Latinx trans kids because they’re not white!” So you need someone who wasn’t on social media if you want to get away with saying someone is normal. So, the best solution: a hobo living under a bridge. Sure, he constantly yells obscenities at random passersby, but that’s not online, so it’s like it never happened.

  And then… well, you're probably not a Democrat, so you don't need to know.

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