Pun Salad

Yes, the Visible Fist. And I was gratified to note that when you search Getty Images for "spirit of socialism", today's eye candy is one of the front-page results. (It's a mixed bag, though. Other pics could be construed as complimentary.)

But what sent me on the Getty quest was the original headline on the WaPo editorial: The Spirit of socialism.

But their current online headline is pretty good too: America doesn’t need an Amtrak of the skies. (WaPo gifted link)

The AI-generated comment summary is somewhat muted. Commenters seem to mostly criticize the editorial's accurate characterization of government-owned/controlled enterprises as "socialism". Or: "It can't be socialism if Trump's doing it!"

Also of note:

• Serfin' Safari. (Someday I will run out of surf/serf wordplay, but today is not that day.) At National Review, Andrew Stuttaford looks at Warren’s Wealth Tax and the Return of Feudalism. (archive.today link)

  Under the “classic” feudalism introduced in England by the Normans after their hostile takeover in 1066, ownership of land and anything built upon it ultimately belonged to the crown. Movable property was a different matter. What was yours was essentially yours, if subject to levies at awkward moments. That probably means that Senator Elizabeth Warren thinks of Willian [sic] the Conqueror as having been a soft touch. Should her Ultra-Millionaire Tax Act pass (and be found to be constitutional), everything, however contingently, will become property of the state. As of late March, ten senators and 39 congresspeople had co-sponsored Warren’s bill.

  The extent to which such a tax would downgrade American citizens to American subjects is only underlined by the measures proposed to ensure that the “ultra millionaires” cannot escape its grip. One reason many similar taxes elsewhere have been abandoned is that they have led to exoduses of wealth and talent. But American federal taxes follow citizenship, not residence, a principle followed by no other country other than, to an extremely limited extent, Eritrea. And renouncing U.S. citizenship can be expensive (primarily a tax on all unrealized capital gains for those with a net worth above $2,000,000), although that is not enough for Warren, whose proposed Reichsfluchtsteuer (to use a pre-war German term) would be stiffer than that.

  And, yes, the Reichsfluchtsteuer was just as bad as it sounds: as the linked Wikipedia article says: the "Reich Flight Tax" was "instrumentalized" by the Nazis "for the purpose of plundering Jews and political prisoners."

  Or, if you're Liz Warren, just plain old plunder.

• Fill in the blank: "The Left Is Lying to Itself About           ". Jeffrey Blehar does it this way: The Left Is Lying to Itself About the Cost of Its Rhetoric.

  It is desperately tiresome to watch the left disown the shooter while it refuses to acknowledge how freely insults and claims like “Trump may be a pedophile rapist” have flowed from leftists’ mouths. It has gotten to the point where that specific line — as a phrase of casual abuse — has simply dissolved into the ocean of political rhetoric in which we float nowadays. I don’t want to rehash the “stochastic terrorism” debate here: I am a First Amendment supporter, after all, and find any attempt to criminalize speech (and politics) to be abhorrent.

  But there is little to say in favor of a wild, reckless lie intended to inflame. There are many out there who, because of the E. Jean Carroll case, consider it acceptable to call Trump a “rapist.” (I think that case was a pile of lies, but I’m giving leftists the benefit of the doubt here.) By contrast, there is not one responsible commentator in America who believes that Trump is a pedophile. It is simply a term that, when employed by those who should know better, is done as a nasty little splash of rhetorical tar, a jab with a sharp stick to bait the bear. Most people who hate Trump know it isn’t true — it just feels good to hurl such a nasty accusation.

  But fringe types — and the nature of online discourse tends to select for fringe types — take such charges absolutely seriously. And now we see where that line of rhetoric can lead. It might have seemed like an easy play to make hay out of the Trump administration’s cack-handed fumbling of the Epstein files and squeeze whatever possible marginal electoral advantage out of it — as they say, politics ain’t beanbag. But we should have known that in the modern era, madmen can be easily stirred with fantasy narratives: How quickly some have forgotten about Pizzagate.

  The thing that grated me about Allen's "manifesto" was his habit of beginning sentences with "Like, …"

  Count 'em yourself. I see four in a short (the NYPost says 1,052-word) text.

  Reader, not all Caltech grads start sentences with "Like,"

• Instead, they flounce. James Freemean wishes for some better behavior: America Needs Democrats to Pounce.

  Despite a horrifying pattern of violence among so-called progressives, the reaction of too much of the establishment left to yet another such horror is to blame gun rights or security protocols or to obscure the motivation of the alleged shooter. Even after the news of the anti-Trump rant written by alleged shooter Cole Allen, former President Barack Obama claimed on X on Sunday that “we don’t yet have the details about the motives behind last night’s shooting at the White House Correspondents Dinner.”

  Then there is the “Republicans pounce” angle, at Politico for example, by which journalists move on quickly from the shooting itself to frame the story as one of alleged GOP partisan exploitation of the event. But Democrats should be the ones pouncing, and seeking to drive out of their movement anyone who thinks shooting is an acceptable form of political activity.

  Violence from any quarter should be rejected entirely. It takes a willful effort to ignore that for years there has been a particular problem on the political left. Long before conservative activist Charlie Kirk was killed by an alleged assassin with ideological motivations, Kirk’s visits to college campuses were routinely met with violent reactions of varying degrees.

  Obligatory University Near Here data point (with video).

• Jeff Maurer posts an article from beyond the fictional grave. Jean Valjean is très contrariée about the microlooters at your local upscale supermarket: I’m Not Like These Brats Stealing Lemons From Whole Foods.

  Most people hate haute-radical talks about the ethics of stealing — like the recent one from the New York Times — because they’re a sub-kindergarten-level of “debate”. I hate them for a different reason: I know that at some point, my name is going to come up. And sure enough, ten minutes in, that New Yorker writer — who must be the most dunkable public figure since Shawn Bradley — mentioned me. It happens every fucking time — I’m the ur-example of justifiable theft, to be cited forever by trust fund kids who want to steal daydrift pants from Lululemon.

  But here’s the thing: I am nothing like those bratty, cosplaying rich kids. For starters: I’m fictional. That’s actually why my situation is ethically justifiable — I’m less of a character and more of a thought experiment. But if I had lived, I lived during a time that is so dramatically different from present-day America that the story might as well be sci-fi. Rationalizing theft because of my tale is like rationalizing animal abuse because Fred Flintstone used a bird as a record player.

  I want to know his opinion about Wolverine depicting him in the movie.

• Nice guys finish in fifth place. The WSJ interviews Jamie Ding: The Nicest ‘Jeopardy!’ Champ Dissects His Losing Game. (WSJ gifted link)

  Ding won over “Jeopardy!” fans with quirky charisma and a penchant for wearing his favorite color, orange. His 31-game streak landed him at No. 5 in the show’s all-time rankings for consecutive wins (host Ken Jennings is still No. 1 with 74). He is also No. 5 in highest regular-season winnings with $882,605 (Jennings tops that list, too, with $2.5 million).

  You will read nothing in that article to disturb the "nice guy" image. I liked this from the intereview:

  Did you do anything to prepare your mental state as a contestant?

  There is a little mantra that I learned when I trained on public speaking at the New Jersey Leadership Collective back in 2020. You close your eyes and say to yourself, “May you be happy. May you be healthy. May you be safe from internal and external harm. May you speak truthfully.” And then you open your eyes. I would recite that to myself before every game right before the lights came on.

  The guy who edged out Jamie on Monday's game was pretty good, but he got pretty lucky at (1) finding Daily Doubles; (2) betting big; and (3) getting them right. We'll see what happens.

  (I watch Jeopardy! on a next-day delay, which allows me to TiVo-skip commercials. That's pretty much the only reason I have a TiVo now.)