Pun Salad

If I remember correctly, it did eventually work out for Odysseus. Not so much for his fellow-travellers.

Andrew C. McCarthy brings up another feature of the ongoing onslaught against constitutionality, one not explicitly mentioned in Mr. Ramirez's cartoon: The Latest Lethal U.S. Caribbean Strikes Fit a Troubling Pattern (NR gifted link).

Well, at least we got those UFO pics released. Literal bright shiny objects to distract your attention!

Also of note:

• Don't we all? Matthew Hennessey has a suggestion for Sandy: AOC Needs New Friends. (WSJ gifted link).

  It helps to have friends who are willing to call you out, to bring you down to earth. Something tells me Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has no such friends. Something tells me she surrounds herself with people who love to hear her pontificate.

  “There’s a certain level of wealth and accumulation that is unearned,” AOC told podcaster Ilana Glazer last week. “You can’t earn a billion dollars.”

  “You just can’t earn that.”

  “That’s exactly correct,” agreed a nodding Ms. Glazer.

  “You can get market power. You can break rules. You can do all sorts of things. You can abuse labor laws.”

  “Yup,” agreed Ms. Glazer with gusto.

  “You can pay people less than what they’re worth.”

  “Yup,” agreed Ms. Glazer, who looked like she was falling in love a little bit.

  “But you can’t earn that, right?”

  “That’s right,” agreed Ms. Glazer.

  “And so you have to create a myth that—since you didn’t earn that—you have to create a myth of earning it.”

  At this, Ms. Glazer was so profoundly in agreement that all she could do was exhale through her nose in a sigh of satisfied concurrence.

  That isn’t the kind of friend Ms. Ocasio-Cortez needs. She needs someone to say, “Yeah, OK, I hear you, some people are really rich, and that’s hard for most of us to comprehend, but, you know, I’m just thinking, what about Tom Steyer?”

  Tu quoque isn't the best rhetorical comeback, but (sheesh) it's better than making nose-noises in agreement.

  Also looking askance at AOC's theories of moral desert is Jonathan Turley. Looking at Sandy's "you can't earn that" assertion:

  

  In other words, you can only make a billion dollars through theft and exploitation rather than actual entrepreneurial enterprise. This statement comes as support builds for the California billionaires’ tax which, even before it has a chance to pass in November, has already cost the state trillions due to an exodus of these billionaires.

  In my book, “Rage and the Republic,” I discuss common myths spread by the left to fuel economic factionalism. One common myth is that the “wealthy do not pay their fair share of taxes.” In truth, the top ten percent of taxpayers pay the vast majority of taxes in the U.S. In the book, I also dispel the claim that most millionaires inherited their wealth or came from privileged backgrounds.

  These myths are designed to make redistribution schemes more palatable. And Democrats are ramping up the “eat-the-rich” rhetoric ahead of the midterms in pushing both millionaire and billionaire taxes. Democrats from Washington to Virginia are pushing millionaire taxes, and the mere conversation has already set off a stampede of high-earning taxpayers to red states like Texas and Florida, which have no state income tax.

  I'm reading Rage and the Republic right now. It's very good! Report coming sometime, Amazon link at your right.

• I knew there was something I didn't like about DS9. It took Alan Jacobs to put it into words for both of us: enough is enough?

  One season into ST:DS9 and am trying to decide whether to continue. The season concluded with the straightforward message that (a) Science is Good, (b) Traditional Religion is Evil (not merely intolerant but murderous), and (c) Revisionist Religion is … Not Great But Acceptable, Whatever, We Can Sorta Work With It.

  And the show seems to promise more of the same. Also: it’s not exactly subtle to have your representative of Traditional Religion played by an actor (Louise Fletcher) known only for playing one of the most monstrous characters in the history of cinema.

  I once wrote that Philip Pullman created an imaginary world so that people he hated would have a place to be evil in — I could also have said as much about The Handmaid’s Tale — and I suspect that this will be the old familiar story.

  I’m just so tired of it: the same beats over and over and over again. After half a century of this crap I just want a different critique of religion. I’m not asking for friends, just for more interesting and reflective haters.

  I liked The Handmaid's Tale slightly better than ayjay did; I thought Pullman's The Golden Compass was pretty bad though.

• We should emulate Joe Rogan in all things. I don't listen to podcasts any more, not even Joe Rogan's, but I was impressed by the transcript Ann Althouse posted of his session with Julia Mossbridge ("a cognitive neuroscientist"). Skipping down to the bit I really wanna emulate:

  And I'm not a person that needs to be taken seriously. It's not my job. I'm literally a comedian. You can make fun of me. I'll make fun of me. It's fine. My future doesn't rely on people taking me seriously. So I think having that ability to have conversations about all kinds of different things has really changed the way the entire world is discussing reality—everything about reality, from quantum computing to alien life to international politics to the way human beings misrepresent each other purposefully for their own gains.

  If I seem whimsical at times… that's why.

  And, not that it matters, but: I see that Joe's net worth is estimated at $200 million, and I wonder if AOC thinks he "earned" that?

From five years ago, an image grabbed from Daniel J. Mitchell's Statism in Five Images; scroll down enough so you see the punchline.

Back in 2021 we were doing that Covid thing, so some of those items were arguably more relevant then. But, to be fair, some seem even more applicable now.

Also of note:

• As far as "Control what you read, watch, and say" goes… Roger Pielke Jr looks at Media Coverage (or not) of RCP8.5 RIP.

  Last week here at [his "Honest Broker" substack], I published a post announcing the most significant development in climate science in decades. It is truly huge news.

  The international committee responsible for official IPCC scenarios had declared the high-end scenarios — RCP8.5, SSP5-8.5, and SSP3-7.0 — to be implausible. These scenarios have dominated climate research, headlines, and policy for the better part of two decades.

  Today I review who in the “mainstream” media has covered this major story and who has so far ignored it.

  Bottom line: although the death of the doomsday scenarios has gotten some play in Danish and German-language media, "there has not been a peep from the major U.S. or international news outlets that publish in English."

  But (good news) I found something in the WSJ. Albeit, in an op-ed: You Can’t Trust ‘Climate Economics’ (WSJ gifted link) Excerpt:

  For more than a decade, researchers built many of their climate projections on the back of a hypothetical standardized scenario called Representative Concentration Pathway 8.5—a vision of the future which required coal consumption to quintuple by 2100 based on assumptions about future energy use. Those assumptions have already diverged sharply from actual energy trends, and we know today that the scenario is implausibly extreme. That conclusion isn’t fringe or even controversial. Yet many scientists continue to emphasize RCP8.5 in climate research, with new studies published daily. The outdated scenario likely persists because of the slow schedule for updating scenario assumptions, the incentive researchers face to publish headline-grabbing results, and a climate advocacy ecosystem built on apocalyptic warnings.

  Thousands of studies use it. Projections of flood damage, heat mortality, agricultural disruption and wildfire risk have rested on an implausible baseline that describes an imaginary, modeled future. Governments and financial institutions have treated these projections as the accurate scientific picture of the climate future.

  The author of that op-ed: Roger Pielke Jr.

• Worst new dance craze ever. Jonathan Turley observes the latest ugly steps in the partisan pas de deux: The Gerrymander Debacle in Virginia Leaves the Democratic Party with a Dangerous Agenda.

  “Eff around and find out”: That taunt from Hakeem Jeffries celebrating Virginia’s gerrymander did not age well.

  On Friday, the House minority leader found out that Virginia’s Supreme Court was not quite as gleeful as he about Democrats’ attempt to virtually eliminate Republican representation in the purple state.

  The court just cooked the party’s infamous lobster, a district over 100 miles long that was designed to help devour the GOP’s slender majority in the House of Representatives.

  Jonathan's column is from the NYPost, and adheres to that paper's one-sentence-per-paragraph style.

I've really grown to like Nellie Bowles' weekly "TGIF" column at the Free Press, her acerbic look at news stories that catch her fancy. This week, she discusses FBI Director Kash Patel's habit of distributing personalized bottles of Woodford Reserve bourbon (pictured at your right). (A 750mL non-customized bottle of the stuff will set you back $31.95 at our state's booze stores this month.)

But Nellie's headline for this edition is "Too Crazy and Not Crazy Enough", and we will excerpt the relevant item:

More at the link, reader. Some funnier than this.

Also of note:

• Look out below! You may have seen dire news stories in the MSM about SNAP ("food stamps") changes causing mass starvation. Here's an antidote from Jack Salmon: SNAP Enrollment Is Finally Falling.

  For the first time since the pandemic-era expansion of the welfare state, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) is beginning to shrink back toward normalcy.

  Between January 2025 and January 2026, the number of individuals receiving SNAP benefits declined by nearly 4.3 million. Roughly 3.5 million of that decline occurred after the passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) in July 2025.

  However:

  Even after the recent drop in enrollment, SNAP participation remains approximately 1.7 million individuals above pre-pandemic levels. Meanwhile, the average cost per household (adjusting for inflation) is still about 18 percent higher than before the pandemic.

  Jack provides context you may not have seen elsewhere, and recommends further changes, including:

  [C]urrent reporting rules only require disclosure of payment errors exceeding $57 per individual. That threshold should be eliminated entirely so that all payment errors are disclosed and tracked. Since states will now bear part of the financial burden of erroneous payments, greater transparency would strengthen incentives to identify and prevent errors.

  SNAP is a prime example of Milton Friedman's observation:

  People who spend Other Peoples' Money on Other People simply lack incentive to do it efficiently or even wisely.

• Magic 8-Ball Says: Oh, Probably. Jeff Maurer wonders: Are We Blaming Phones for Our Bullshit?

  A new study about the effects of phone bans in schools is out, and if you’re thinking “I’d like to have the study summarized by a comedian who browsed some articles about the study after a few beers,” you’re in luck. The study said that bans have a minimal impact on student behavior and test scores. That doesn’t mean that the bans are a bad idea — the solution isn’t to un-ban phones and have teachers try to teach sine and cosine to a classroom full of students browsing Pornhub. But phone bans aren’t a magic bullet; there remains no easy solution to our nation’s Dull Child Epidemic.

  Becoming a parent has made me familiar with the discourse around phones (and screens, generally). In some circles, saying “I let my child have a phone” is like saying “I let my child have a machete,” or “My child runs an adorable li’l meth lab in his room.” My boy is three, the big decisions around phones are well in the future, but it’s practically received wisdom among my peers that the culprit for everything from anxiety to depression to restless leg syndrome has been found, and it’s smartphones.

  But I wonder if the story is not so simple. As much as I take the points of those who worry a lot about phones — and I’ll address some of those points in a minute — I’m becoming something of a skeptic. Already, by the standards of the ultra-blue place where I live, I’m practically the “let the kid have a BB gun” dad. I agree that kids are subject to some bad, new pressures, and that phones are part of the story, but I think we often often misunderstand and misrepresent phones’ role in that story.

  I'm also well out of the demographic that has to worry about this. But if you're not…

• Just do it, Trump. Listen toe Erick Erickson: Finish Him.

  It is time for the President of the United States to finish the job in Iran. Yesterday, the President engaged in what he called a “love tap.” He needs to love the Iranian leadership to death.

  If we’re going to pay high gas prices, at least make it worth it. Allowing Iran’s Islamic revolutionary leadership to fester will cost more lives long term. The Saudis, Kuwaitis, Emiraties, and others are furious that the President has pulled punches, even after Iran bombed an oil export facility in the United Arab Emirates.

  The President and his team seem desperate for a deal. In the process, Iran is learning that if it holds the United States’s economy hostage, they can have their way with us. The only way to show them otherwise is for us to finish them.

  I think Congress should quickly authorize that, too. Constitution, y'all.

My eyebrows got raised by this tweet:

This table shows the 15 most expensive metropolitan areas in the United States, where the real value of $100 is the lowest.

See the value of $100 in your area: https://t.co/tag06IIWDk pic.twitter.com/k0nSQFixan

— Tax Foundation (@TaxFoundation) May 6, 2026

All those California locales rank pretty high on the unaffordable scale. But down there in twelfth place:

Boston-Cambridge-Newton, MA-NH (Metropolitan Statistical Area)

See that "NH" at the end? The Census Bureau includes New Hampshire's Rockingham and Strafford counties in this "Metropolitan Statistical Area". And Strafford County contains the town of Rollinsford (estimated population 2,626). Where I live. The most populous towns in the county are Dover (about 33K), Rochester (33K), Durham (15K), and Somersworth (12K).

None of these places are to be confused with Boston. Cambridge, or Newton.

And yet, the Census Bureau does confuse them.

This sometimes causes outright deception. See this Antiplanner post from last month: Where Americans Ride Transit. The Antiplanner posts a US map that purports to show "where more than 5 percent of Americans take transit to work." And yes, although the transit-using blobs on the map are tiny compared to the rest of the country, the "Boston" blob does extend up here.

And, of course, there's no way that more than 5% of the populace here take transit to work.

Who do I write at the Census Bureau to get us taken out of the Boston MSA?

Also of note:

• Apparently there's been some firing during the cease-fire. Very Orwellian. But Andy McCarthy strikes a blow for clarity and constitutionality: Congress Should Authorize Military Force Against Iran. (NR gifted link)

  President Trump’s dereliction in failing to prepare the nation for war with Iran, and his inconstancy about the war’s objectives — and even regarding whether it is, in fact, a war and whether it is, in fact, ongoing — have predictably had harmful effects. It’s past time for Congress to assert its constitutional power and authorize force, at least to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. No matter what one thinks of how we got here, Iran cannot be allowed to annex a vital global trade route whose closure is hurting Americans.

  Because of the administration’s poor messaging, the real good done by American combat operations has been obscured: the significant setbacks to Iran’s nuclear weapons ambitions and ballistic missile capabilities, the virtual destruction of its navy and air defenses, and the infliction of economic distress that undermines its capacity to abet its jihadist proxies. To repeat what I’ve said before, politically speaking, a security win can look and feel like a loss if Iran appears to hold the whip hand.

  The Strait of Hormuz was open to free international trade on February 28 and, as a result of the war, Iran has closed it. Because Trump failed the basic duty of communicating the national security risks, the American people did not feel a threat from Iran. Now, however, they now feel financial pain inflicted by Iran in what they perceive as a war Trump gratuitously started. The most visible, tangible outcome of the war, as far as most Americans are concerned, is that Iran now dominates the strait. That’s politically catastrophic.

  You would think that Trump might realize he's being played.

• 

  An even more pointless and illegal war. And, as Kevin D. Williamson points out, an expensive one: The Cost of Forever Trade Wars. (Dispatch gifted link) (The Reason mag cover for June 2026 over there on your right refers to Iran, but it's applicable here too. Maybe more so.)

  Donald Trump campaigned against open-ended wars but as president has launched at least two of them so far: his unconstitutional war on Iran and his unconstitutional war—possibly more consequential in the long term—on the U.S. economy.

  Trump may have lost his tariffs case in front of the Supreme Court, but his destructive, costly, and idiotic campaign against low prices continues.

  The administration is seeking novel legal authority—much of it implausible—to keep up some version of the import taxes Trump had imposed under the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) until the 6-3 ruling in Learning Resources Inc. v. Trump clarified for the administration the question, supposedly tricky, of whether a law that does not so much as mention tariffs gives the president the unilateral power to effectively rewrite the U.S. tax code on the fly according to his own liking. And so tariff rates were adjusted in response to such world-shaking events as a few words of criticism from the prime minister of Switzerland, a person who does not—I am still convinced this part matters, at least a little bit—actually exist.

  Worse, the trade war doesn't actually blow up any bad guys, and we are all collateral damage.

• Among the many things you can expect to get worse… Christian Britschgi adds to the list: Expect the data center backlash to get worse. With an opening paragraph that will bring a smirk to the face of any Simpsons fan:

  In a recent meeting of the Box Elder County Commission in Tremonton, Utah, a man yelled at the cloud.

  "It's false. This is not real information," shouted an attendee at the assembled commissioners, who were considering a massive new data center project backed by celebrity billionaire Kevin O'Leary, in a video posted to X by progressive group More Perfect Union.

  Kevin O'Leary's massive data center was approved by a county commission in Utah last night.
  
  At 40,000 acres, it would be 2.5x the size of Manhattan.
  
  The commission approved the proposal despite opposition from hundreds of locals. pic.twitter.com/1pF9JZD30w

  — More Perfect Union (@MorePerfectUS) May 5, 2026

  Needless to say, there's a lot of populist anti-tech panic involved. That never works out well.

• You might not have expected the WSJ to weigh in on this topic. Nevertheless, Rob Henderson's column in their Free Expression newsletter gloats: Free Will Is Undefeated.

  A fashionable view of human behavior holds that because everything has a cause, no one is truly responsible for their actions.

  In his 2023 bestseller “Determined,” Stanford neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky argues that free will is an illusion. “We are nothing more or less than the cumulative biological and environmental luck, over which we had no control, that has brought us to any moment,” he writes. Author and podcaster Sam Harris has spent 15 years making the same case to a popular audience. “Our wills are simply not of our own making,” he writes in “Free Will” (2012). “Thoughts and intentions emerge from background causes of which we are unaware and over which we exert no conscious control. We do not have the freedom we think we have.”

  Common sense pushes back. Consider an example from the psychologist Paul Bloom. Imagine a man who thrashes violently in his sleep and accidentally strikes his wife, breaking her nose. They both wake up, and he is horrified and ashamed. Now imagine a second man who resents his wife and wants to hurt her. He waits until she is asleep then hits her in the face. When she wakes up, he pretends it was an accident. The difference between these two men is obvious. Any legal or moral system that doesn’t recognize that would collapse.

  True enough. Rob hits many of the points I've made myself over the years. (See my take on the Sapolsky book here, and my report on the Harris book here.)

  Unfortunately, Rob's column goes astray:

  Stuart Doyle offers a useful analogy that challenges this claim. Suppose we ask whether an apple is red. The determinist looks closer. He realizes the apple is nothing but atoms. Because no individual atom is red, he concludes the apple can’t really be red. The error is obvious. Color exists at the scale of the apple, not at the scale of an atom.

  Ackshually, apples are red down to nearly the atomic scale. Their color occurs thanks to idaein molecules, which preferentially reflect red light, thanks to their tasteful arrangement of elecrons. (Which is purely accidental, and in no way caused by Intelligent Design, don't even think of such a thing!)

  A better analogy (I don't know if Stuart Doyle makes it) is life itself. Living organisms are made of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, phosphorus, and sulfur; none of those elements are alive.

  Even when you start combining them into proteins and nucleic acids: those aren't alive either.

  But eventually, keep building, and somewhere along the line, you get to something sufficiently complex and functional enough to be deemed "living".

  I think free will is something like that. Determinists like Sapolsky and Harris look at neurons synapses, etc., and because they don't see free will there, they assume it doesn't and can't exist. There should be a word for that kind of fallacy.

Jonathan Turley cheers for the Colorblind Constitution: The Roberts Court Ends a ‘Sordid Business’.

It is indeed.

At the WSJ, Jason Riley urges the Gerrymander to not let the screen door hit it on its way out: Good Riddance to Racial Gerrymandering. (WSJ gifted link)

To repeat: It's a nasty business indeed, and you have to be a Democrat cheerleader to like it. But as to today's headline: all this aggravation could have been obviated if we had implemented the crackpot scheme I proposed back in 2017. Essentially: the problem with the current system is that it's "winner take all".

To take an egregious example from the 2024 election: In California's 13th congressional district Adam Gray (D) defeated John Duarte (R) by 187 votes out of over 200,000 cast. A statisical 50/50 tie, but Gray goes to Washington, casting one whole vote there. The 105,367 voters who favored Duarte get nothing, no representation at all.

Pun Salad solution: send both Gray and Duarte to DC, with a half-vote each. (And repeat for the other 434 Congressional districts.)

Also of note:

• Me too. Erick Erickson comments on the (apparently very fluid) situation in and around Iran: I Hope I Was Not Wrong.

  I have to admit it. I hope I was not wrong, but I’m starting to wonder if I was wrong.

  I support bombing Iran and destroying the regime. I presumed there had to be a plan, and I have had friends with deep roots inside the Trump Administration tell me this was all very much an impulse play by the President flying by the seat of his pants.

  I did not believe it. But as I see it playing out now, I am wondering if they really were right. There never really was a plan. There was a hope to bomb them into submission. The President saw Venezuela and was on top of the world.

  So he decided to use the American military against Iran. Until he decided otherwise.

  I sympathize. And kind of feel the same way. Things could still work out, but that's what you get when the Commander-in-Chief operates on narcissistic whim.

• Can we call them RINOs yet? Eric Boehm describes some fiscal shenanigans: Republicans Want To Borrow Every Single Dollar of the $72 Billion Bill To Fund ICE and Trump's Ballroom.

  Senate Republicans have unveiled their plan to fund immigration enforcement and President Donald Trump's ballroom, and the proposal might take fiscal irresponsibility to a new record high.

  The two bills included in the package call for spending nearly $72 billion. Remarkably, every single dollar would be borrowed.

  That's according to the Congressional Budget Office's (CBO) analysis of the bill, which was released on Wednesday morning. According to the CBO, the bill would direct $38 billion to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and spend $26 billion on various programs run by Customs and Border Protection (CBP).

  And they want to do this via "reconciliation", hoping to bypass a Democrat filibuster. Some see that as a problem:

  That process was "originally designed to make deficit reduction easier. Republicans are using it to make deficit expansion easier," wrote Dominik Lett, a fiscal policy analyst for the Cato Institute, in an email to Reason.

  After reviewing the CBO's assessment, Lett confirmed that every single dollar in the spending bill will be borrowed. "They don't even attempt to include offsets," he wrote.

  I have never been more ashamed to be a registered Republican.

• Of course, the other side is worse. Jack Butler notes the latest from a totalitarian fanboy: Bernie the Dupe.

  Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders is worried about artificial intelligence. He wrote last month in the Journal—we publish a variety of viewpoints—that AI could “displace tens of millions of workers,” “threatens our privacy” and is “reshaping how we as human beings relate to one another.”

  Mr. Sanders’s economic concerns are consistent with the consistently wrong antiprogress socialism that has arisen before almost every wave of ultimately beneficial technological transformation. AI is currently propping up our tariff-addled economy. But the noneconomic potential of AI to drive further atomization, increase distrust and drown everything—politics, art, relationships—in a sea of slop is something worth at least discussing.

  None of these anxieties, however, are sufficient reason to trust the Chinese Communist Party. Yet that’s exactly what Mr. Sanders advocates. Recently he brought U.S. and Chinese AI experts to Capitol Hill to discuss the new technology. His rationale is that the “existential threat” it poses ought to get the two rival powers to lay down their arms and figure out how best to confront it. “We need to cooperate. We need dialogue,” he said.

  Jack provides a brief history of fellow-travelling. Bernie's just the latest.

At Reason, Jacob Sullum explains Why the Courts Will 86 the Flagrantly Unconstitutional Charges Against James Comey.

Even the most charitable interpretation would score this as a waste of time, government resources, and taxpayer money.

But I'm in no mood to be charitable this morning, and I'll kick it up a notch: it's an obvious (and yet another) violation of the presidential oath of office, which is pretty simple: a pledge to "preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States." Impeachable.

Also of note:

• And also impeachable… Jeffrey Blehar observes the obvious: Trump’s ‘Terminated’ Iran War Doesn’t Look It.

  Heads up folks, did you know that the Iran war is apparently over? Yes, on May 1 Trump sent a letter to Congress officially declaring the war “terminated.” On what grounds? Why the cease-fire, old chap, that’s what ended the war! More to the point, the war is now being declared “terminated” because time ran out for Donald Trump under the War Powers Resolution of 1973, which requires the president to terminate any military action within 60 days of beginning it, absent congressional approval.

  Perhaps Trump thought it wouldn’t take more than two months to remake the Middle East in his own image via aerial bombing campaign. So now the administration is arguing that the clock either paused on April 7 (when the cease-fire was nominally put into effect) or has stopped altogether, and it can simply be reset to zero if bombings resume. Lawmakers — Republicans as well as Democrats — are obviously displeased about this, but then again, it’s not as if lawmakers can force the Pentagon to withdraw the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln carrier group from the Arabian Sea right now, either. So the war is (1) already over; (2) liable to resume at any moment.

  Let’s set aside the twist — there might be a winning argument to be made at SCOTUS that the War Powers Act is an unconstitutional restriction of executive warmaking powers under Article II of the Constitution — because Trump isn’t making that argument right now either. He is instead claiming to be acting in accordance with the statute, by recourse to insultingly obvious semantic tricks.

  I'm a fan of blowing up Iranian bad guys, but I'm also a fan of the Constitution. And I'm not a fan of "insultingly obvious semantic tricks."

• A surprisingly poor article in the WSJ. I occasionally make the totally obvious points about my g-g-g-generation:

  1. People try to put us down.
  2. Just because we get around.

  But according to a WSJ news article, we are disappointing some by failing to die before we get old: The Great $110 Trillion Wealth Transfer Won’t Happen Any Time Soon. (WSJ gifted link)

  Older Americans are sitting on $110 trillion of wealth. Their heirs might not get it anytime soon.

  Financial advisory firms like to talk about a looming event called “the great wealth transfer,” where the huge and very wealthy baby-boomer generation dies off and their children inherit their money.

  But the process may be more of a slow drip than a sudden windfall. The two generations that hold the most wealth are baby boomers, who are between age 61 and 80, and Gen X, who are between 45 and 61.

  Executive summary: We boomers have a lot of investments that have done well lately; We spend money on longevity treatments; Some of us are getting "windfalls" from our parents; Some of us just leave our wealth to our spouses when we finally kick the bucket; And…

  But the article quotes an "expert" making a point you don't need to be an expert to make:

  “There’s no world in which a great wealth transfer does not happen. It’s just math,” said John Sabelhaus, a Brookings Institution economist and former Federal Reserve official who studies wealth. But, he adds, “There is a world in which it’s misunderstood.”

  The misunderstanding is never made exactly clear, but it seems to boil down to: the Boomers aren't dying as fast as some (unnamed) people expected. "It's just math", but nobody said the kids were that good at math.

  So: sorry, youngsters. You'll have to wait.

• Moral panic, anyone? Or just a power grab? At FIRE, John Coleman looks at The quiet push to control AI speech.

  Recent reports suggest the Trump administration is now considering new oversight for advanced AI models like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini. Few details have been finalized, but officials are reportedly discussing an executive order to create a government–industry working group. Another idea under consideration is a process for reviewing models before or around their release.

  As these talks move forward, they risk setting a troubling precedent for free expression.

  So, who do you trust? Boy, that's a toughie.

  I think the closer question is; who do I distrust more? Right at the top of my list: Republicans, Democrats, and government bureaucrats.

Via a link on Jim Geraghty's Morning Jolt newsletter yesterday:

I was assured that a fascist salute proved someone was a Nazi even if they didn't have the "Totenkopf" chiseled into their chest. pic.twitter.com/YcBUwEhMjx

— GoatFarmer (@S_W_Somerville) May 4, 2026

That's one response to Jon Favreau's efforts to obfuscate and excuse Maine's (probable) Democratic nominee to oppose Senator Susie Collins in November. Jim's response in text:

I'd like to say that New Hampshire successfully keeps the antisemites well out of positions of responsibility, but that's tough to do when The Times of Israel notes: NH lawmaker faces little pushback after Holocaust deniers testify to education commission.

Sabourin dit Choinière is from Seabrook. Here's hoping that voters send him crawling back under a rock in November.

Also of note:

• How can we miss her when she won't go away? I confess that James Freeman's headline surprised me: Kamala Is the Presidential Favorite (WSJ gifted link)

  A new Harvard/Harris poll finds that former Vice President Kamala Harris has opened up a significant lead in the race for the 2028 Democratic presidential nomination. Ms. Harris is the choice of 50% of Democrats surveyed, while her next closest competitor, Gov. Gavin Newsom (D., Calif.), gets the nod from just 22% of the donkeys. Bringing up the rear is a cast of characters each polling in single digits. Oddly, this new presidential polling momentum for Ms. Harris arrives just as some Democrats wonder out loud if she really should be running for governor of California. A Monday announcement makes one wonder if Ms. Harris is among them.

  As a counterpoint, the Lott/Stossel Election Betting Odds agglomeration of betting market data has her in a distant third spot (7.7% probability) to be the Democrat nominee, behind Newsom (27.6%) and AOC (9.9%).

  But "Other" is actually the front-runner, at 30.9%. So I think what the prediction markets are saying is … unclear. Yeah, we'll go with "unclear".

• What would it take to get us out of this fiscal mess? Reader, I know you've been asking. Kevin D. Williamson has your answer: All the Money in the World, and Then Some. (Dispatch gifted link)

  We finally really did it! You maniacs! You blew it up!

  From the numbers-monkeys over in the statistical department comes the news that U.S. government debt has crossed a red line: Debt held by the public now exceeds 100 percent of GDP, those figures being $31.27 trillion and $31.22 trillion, respectively.

  What that means is that if the federal government were somehow able to pass a tax that would confiscate 100 percent of the output of the U.S. economy for a year—if consumption somehow magically fell to $0.00 and Americans were able to do nothing else with their economic efforts except put their fruits toward the national debt—it would not be enough.

  Oh, don’t worry—it gets worse.

  Click on that gifted link, if necessary, to find out just how much worse.

  And in case you're wondering if KDW is telling us how he really feels, well…

  The bosses here at The Dispatch have asked me to keep the profanity to a minimum, so I am not going to write in plain English what it is that we are: Let’s just say that it is a problem we have not ducked.

Recently on the book blog:

This is third entry (and, according to the WSJ reviewer, the final entry) in Tana French's series featuring the protagonist Cal Hooper, a divorced Chicago ex-cop who has moved to the small Irish village of Ardnakelty.

Cal is somewhat less of a out-of-water fish in this book. He has accumulated a sorta-fiancee, Lena. And Trey, the semi-feral teenager in the previous books has become a sorta-daughter. But Cal feels, correctly, that situation is precarious on all counts. Ardnakelty runs on gossip and rumor, it seems. And that goes into full gear when young Rachel Holohan, goes missing; Cal finds her in a local river, an apparent suicide.

Which might have been the end of it, but Rachel was engaged to Eugene, son to Tommy Moynahan, a local rich bigshot. And it turns out that Tommy has a secret scheme in the works to mess with Ardnakelty's bucolic scenery. Did Rachel know too much about it?

Ms. French is one of the few writers that I consider to be auto-buys at Amazon. Here's a paragraph I snipped out of my Kindle version, describing the search for Rachel:

They have about two miles of road to cover, curving between dry stone walls and fields and the occasional farmhouse. They head back the way they came, sweeping the flashlight beams down the verges, over long grass and tangles of dead wildflowers. The dark is windless and silent; small things scuttle away at their approach, and watch from hiding as they pass. The air smells, more powerfully and intricately than by day, of ripe earth, sodden leaves, and manure. Far off, spread out across the fields, other small lights swing and zigzag. A long call comes to them faintly, too distant to hear the name, if they didn’t already know what it is.

I don't know about you, but those little tossed-off details, compactly told, put me there. It's only one example of how Ms. French describes characters and their environment. If you want to see a writer at the top of her game, there you go.

Katherine Mangu-Ward says yes because AI Companies Learn the Word No.

Fine, but that's a lot of organizations that you hope will be responsible, leakproof stewards of potentially dangerous information. But the folks at Anthropic are pretty smart, I assume they've considered that, and I suppose there are safeguards. Right?

Also of note:

• "Hey, sorry we killed your company." I assume none of the perps will be saying that anytime soon. The WSJ editorialists look at Spirit Airlines and the Antitrust Left. (WSJ gifted link)

  The demise of Spirit Airlines is a tragedy for its 15,000 or so employees, though at least taxpayers weren’t forced to pay for a bailout. But the airline’s closure shouldn’t pass without giving dubious credit to the main culprits: The antitrust theorists of the Biden Administration.

  Recall how Timothy Wu, Jonathan Kanter, Lina Khan and others on the left sought to revive long discredited theories of antitrust that view nearly all mergers as anti-competitive. Mr. Kanter tested that view on the airline industry, with disastrous results.

  I still watch Saturday Night Live, and their "Weekend Update" commentary was full of contempt for Spirit Airlines, who dared to offer bare-bones low-cost service to the plebes. You wouldn't have caught Colin Jost flying with the hoi polloi!

• It's Orwellian! Nicholas Clairmont is not a fan of The Inversion of ‘Animal Farm’. (archive.today link)

  George Orwell’s timeless classic Animal Farm, a “fairy story” aimed at young readers, has sold some 11 million copies worldwide since it was first published in 1945. Its allegorical subject, Soviet communism, is not subtle. After all, the book begins with a speech by a pig who stands in for Karl Marx and, after an egalitarian revolution by animals that take over the farm, features a power struggle between a Trotskyist pig and a Stalinist pig and ends with the pigs installed as dictators indistinguishable from the human overlords their revolution originally sought to do away with. According to Orwell's preface, not published until 1972, one of the four publishers who originally rejected the book explained to Orwell that the issue was that Animal Farm took as its subject the evils of a country that was then an ally of both Britain and the U.S. “If the fable were addressed generally to dictators and dictatorships at large then publication would be all right,” the publisher wrote. “But the fable does follow, as I see now, so completely the progress of the Russian Soviets and their two dictators, that it can apply only to Russia, to the exclusion of the other dictatorships.”

  This unnamed publisher may have been a patsy and a discredit to literary freedom, but at least he knew how to read at an eighth-grade level. Sadly, this is more than can be said for the makers of a new version of Animal Farm, directed by Andy Serkis, the actor and motion capture specialist famous for playing Gollum in The Lord of the Rings and Caesar in the Planet of the Apes franchise.

  It's been a long time since I read Animal Farm, and I had not read Orwell's preface linked above. An excerpt from the latter:

  I am well acquainted with all the arguments against freedom of thought and speech — the arguments which claim that it cannot exist, and the arguments which claim that it ought not to. I answer simply that they don’t convince me and that our civilisation over a period of four hundred years has been founded on the opposite notice. For quite a decade past I have believed that the existing Russian régime is a mainly evil thing, and I claim the right to say so, in spite of the fact that we are allies with the USSR in a war which I want to see won. If I had to choose a text to justify myself, I should choose the line from Milton:

  By the known rules of ancient liberty.

  The word ancient emphasises the fact that intellectual freedom is a deep-rooted tradition without which our characteristic western culture could only doubtfully exist. From that tradition many of our intellectuals are visibly turning away. They have accepted the principle that a book should be published or suppressed, praised or damned, not on its merits but according to political expediency. And others who do not actually hold this view assent to it from sheer cowardice. An example of this is the failure of the numerous and vocal English pacifists to raise their voices against the prevalent worship of Russian militarism. According to those pacifists, all violence is evil, and they have urged us at every stage of the war to give in or at least to make a compromise peace. But how many of them have ever suggested that war is also evil when it is waged by the Red Army? Apparently the Russians have a right to defend themselves, whereas for us to do [so] is a deadly sin. One can only explain this contradiction in one way: that is, by a cowardly desire to keep in with the bulk of the intelligentsia, whose patriotism is directed towards the USSR rather than towards Britain. I know that the English intelligentsia have plenty of reason for their timidity and dishonesty, indeed I know by heart the arguments by which they justify themselves. But at least let us have no more nonsense about defending liberty against Fascism. If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear. The common people still vaguely subscribe to that doctrine and act on it. In our country — it is not the same in all countries: it was not so in republican France, and it is not so in the USA today — it is the liberals who fear liberty and the intellectuals who want to do dirt on the intellect: it is to draw attention to that fact that I have written this preface.

  It was nice of Orwell to say that USA "liberals" did not fear liberty back in 1943. I'm pretty sure he couldn't say the same today.

Recently on the book blog:

Not quite what I expected. I was expecting from the title that there would be more stuff about … y'know, engineers. But instead…

The author, Paul M. Kennedy, looks at the specific "problems" that the Allies faced in World War II in order to achieve their eventual victory. Conveniently organized into chapters: "How to Get Convoys Safely Across the Atlantic"; "How to Win Command of the Air"; "How to Stop a Blitzkrieg"; "How to Seize an Enemy-Held Shore"; and "How to Defeat the 'Tyranny of Distance'". Each had its unique challenges, and each (indeed) was "problematic" in the early days of the war. For example, victory against Germany absolutely required that hundreds of thousands of men and massive supplies of food and weaponry be reliably supplied to Britain across the pond. But German U-Boats had dismaying amounts of success at sinking merchant ships, sometimes just off American shores. New anti-submarine warfare tactics had to be developed. And (yes) some technology was involved; for example, the cavity magnetron, invented just in time to make small radar sets practical enough to be installed in sub-hunting airplanes. Within a few years, it was pretty miserable to be a U-Boat crewman.

Kennedy's approach to "engineering" is broad, including more than gadgetry. It's a holistic approach: innovation and flexibility was required in developing new strategies, tactics, and logistics in addition to having workable and effective weaponry in place to defeat the baddies. There are a lot of good stories along the way. For example, Stewart Blacker, inventor of the Hedgehog anti-submarine mortar; he got his start as a "schoolboy in Bedford", designing a mortar that sent a projectile (a croquet ball) 300 yards into a tempting target (his school's headmaster's greenhouse).

Other technical innovations spelled doom for the Germans and Japanese. Putting a Rolls-Royce "Merlin" engine into a P-51 fuselage, replacing the original Allison engine, turned the plane from a dud to a stud. Redesign of the Soviet T-34 tank made it incredibly effective against Germany. The Seabees, whose motto was (and is) "We Build, We Fight." The B-29. And more.

So, a pretty good read, although Kennedy's discussion gets bogged down in plain old history at times.

Five years ago today, I (um) borrowed Mr. Ramirez's cartoon:

Alas, I can't pick on Joe Biden any more. And J. Wellington Wimpy is probably marginally less recognizable to 2026 readers as he was to 2021 readers.

But if you imagine replacing the "Biden" label with "Lisa K Sheldon", you'd have a pretty good illustration of her op-ed appearing in my lousy local newspaper recently, headlined: New Hampshire's family caregivers deserve real support. (You'll probably want to open that incognito.)

You will not be surprised to learn that by "support", Lisa means "money". Specifically, taxpayer money.

Yes, of course. Family members do this voluntarily. Sons and daughters might view it as only fair, remembering a past when parents were supporting them in a similar (often expensive) fashion. Spouses may simply view themselves as fulfilling that "in sickness and in health" vow, made years back, but never forgotten.

I'm as capitalist as the next guy, probably more than the next guy, but doesn't making this about money seem a little tawdry?

Lisa relies on a report from AARP: "Valuing the Invaluable 2026: Family Caregivers’ Contribution Reaches $1 Trillion". The AARP says a mere $4.4 Billion of that occurs in New Hampshire. So she advocates, among other things:

Financial relief. A state reimbursement program for transportation, home modifications, medical supplies, and lost wages would acknowledge what caregivers actually spend - and help keep them financially afloat.

Lisa keeps it vague, but $4.4 Billion would blow a pretty big hole in the state's budget. And (of course) I'm pretty sure that AARPites in other states are making similar pleas for "Financial relief." And (hey) why not make it a Federal program? We're only talking about a trillion! They'll gladly pay you Tuesday…

Also of note:

• Regime uncertainty. Peter Suderman makes an under-appreciated point: Even laws that haven't passed can have unintended consequences.

  If you follow public policy debates, you are probably familiar with the concept of unintended consequences. Laws or regulations implemented with good intentions can, over time, have unexpected, unintended negative effects, sometimes undermining or fully negating the good intention behind the rule.

  But even laws that have not actually passed can have unintended consequences. You can think of them as risk taxes, since they increase the costs of already-high-risk activities.

  Case in point, the Senate's housing bill. The bill is intended to address the nation's housing crisis, making home ownership easier and cheaper for ordinary Americans by increasing housing supply. It's a worthy goal, given that regulations, lawsuits, and price controls have left America with a dramatic housing shortage that has put home ownership out of reach for many. The bill contains a multitude of provisions intended to reduce the time and expense of building homes. A version of it passed the Senate in March with overwhelming support.

  The bill is not yet the law of the land, and it's possible it will change form. But even still, it's already causing developers to nix home-building projects.

  When I was a kiddo, one of the reasons presented for disliking capitalism was that businesses were so short-sighted, concentrating on making the current quarter look good, never planning for long-term sustainability.

  Nowadays, the shoe's on the other foot, and you don't hear that argument made much any more, at least not with a straight face.

• Not a Raymond Chandler title. At the Free Press, Jeff Giesea says hello to The Long Boomer Farewell. Doom is foreseen:

  Boomers, born between 1946 and 1964, are wealthier and healthier than any generation before them, deeply embedded in political, economic, and cultural power, and often understandably reluctant to step aside. They control 52 percent of U.S. household wealth, 40 percent of real estate value, and the majority of top political offices. Social Security and Medicare, which primarily benefit them, consume 40 percent of the federal budget. Twenty-four members of Congress are over 80. Harrison Ford is still carrying franchises.

  More fundamentally, the conditions for achieving closure no longer exist. The Greatest Generation’s departure unfolded inside a still-confident, still-cohesive America with solid institutions and younger leaders waiting in the wings. This farewell is happening inside a more fractured society simultaneously grappling with an AI revolution, geopolitical disorder, and a fiscal structure built for 1930s demographics. There is no Brokaw waiting to write the tribute. There may not even be a shared narrative to write.

  What there will be is enormous, grinding, multi-decade stress. America is just beginning to reckon with it.

  I'm (admittedly) a Boomer. And here's the thing with that "52 percent": we are not taking it with us. Whatever's remaining in our IRAs and bank accounts will be inherited. Our houses will not vanish. Jeff does not seem to have grasped this.

  He proposes "three fixes".

  First, honest entitlement reform. […]

  Excellent idea, probably a couple decades too late to avoid inevitable pain. Next?

  Second, greater support for young families.[…]

  Including "smarter incentives for family formation". Who's not in favor of being smarter?

  Third, political representation for young Americans.[…]

  Jeff bemoans the political power of AARP, and wishes there was a similar advocacy group for the younger generations. I agree with him that AARP is awful, but we don't need yet another group arguing for government goodies.

  Summary: read Jeff's article, pick and choose.

• Nothing to see here, even less to emulate. "RushBabe49" blogs at Calling-all-RushBabes ("Dedicated to the Memory of the Great Rush Limbaugh") and she asks and answers: *What’s going on in Washington State? Yeah, just the usual. She quotes a local news station reporting on high gas/diesel prices there:

  What Olympia reported in 2025: Starting July 1, the gas tax will rise from 49.4 cents to 55.4 cents per gallon. Diesel fuel taxes will also increase by 3 cents this year and another 3 cents in 2027. After mid-2026, both gas and diesel taxes will grow by 2% annually to keep pace with inflation.

  Um, fine, except "to keep pace with inflation" should really be "to cause additional inflation."

And, as a bonus, it's funny!

For the record, I first used the Scrooge McDuck thing back in 2014, and perhaps way too many times since then.

Also of note:

• His mistake was in being too transparent about his lack of transparency. Christian Britschgi's Reason Roundup mentions the catching of a medium-sized fish: Former Fauci aide charged with evading transparency laws during COVID.

  Former Fauci aide charged. Yesterday, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) announced that they'd charged David Morens, a former adviser to Anthony Fauci, with evading federal transparency laws while he worked behind the scenes to reinstate funding for risky coronavirus research in the midst of the pandemic.

  In a number of almost comically blunt emails that involved debates about the origins of COVID-19, Morens instructed his correspondents to communicate with him via his private Gmail account to avoid Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests and said he could provide information to Fauci via private channels.

  I would have deleted the "almost" qualifier to "comically", but I may be more easily amused than Christian.

• The Democrats are a big tent. Unless you support Israel. Nazi Tattoo? Hamas Defender? No Problem, Says Chuck Schumer. David Harsanyi looks at the latest news from the other side of the Salmon Falls:

  Maine Gov. Janet Mills has suspended her Senate campaign after failing to raise enough money to compete with socialist Graham Platner, who will now almost certainly face the perpetual centrist Republican Susan Collins in the general.

  Chuck Schumer and Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee Chairwoman Kirsten Gillibrand immediately backed Platner, proving that there's virtually nothing a leftist can say or do that is disqualifying.

  So, for 20 years, you've had a Totenkopf tattoo, which depicts a skull and crossbones, most famously used by Hitler's Schutzstaffel, the paramilitary organization that led, planned and executed the Holocaust?

  No problem!

  Just sayin': As previously mentioned, some Democrats are planning to enact Reichsfluchtsteuer laws to ensure their local Scrooge McDucks don't successfully escape with their property intact.

• Looking forward to Kristallnacht. Nellie Bowles' TGIF column this week could be a country song title: A New Tux on the Dirty Hilton Floor.

  → White House Correspondents’ Dinner: Is it even big news anymore when people try to assassinate Donald Trump? It’s a blip. Happens so often. I’ll scrape the back pages of America’s newspapers to find tidbits. Okay, so: It appears that the White House Correspondents’ Dinner was derailed after a crazed left-wing gunman allegedly stormed the hotel lobby to try to kill Trump. Shots were fired. Then he was stripped and rolled up in a tinfoil wrap like a little burrito (our copy editor tells me it’s a Mylar blanket). The only times a person gets wrapped in tinfoil are if they try to shoot the president or if they finish a marathon. Quite a delta between those endeavors, but the same outcome. And the dinner was canceled. Nothing to worry about.

  When journalists walked out of the ballroom, they were met by normal, run-of-the-mill protesters who carried signs reading: DEATH TO ALL OF THEM (a Wendy Williams reference). And DEATH TO TYRANT (the singular makes it more aggressive, I think). Everything is good. There is no relation between the protester holding a sign that says DEATH TO ALL OF THEM and the gunman inside trying to bring. . . death to all of them. He’s just mentally ill, I’m sure. There is no popular movement encouraging people to slaughter their political enemies en masse.

  I'm pretty sure this madness is temporary, as it has been in the past. Right?

• I was getting tired of all the nudging, anyway. Richard Morrison delivers a post mortem at the Daily Economy: After Nudging: The Rise and Fall of a Behavioral Economics Fad.

  The zeal of the convert can be a terrifying force to behold. An acolyte convinced of their own prior heresy will often be a more thorough inquisitor than the native-born believer. This dynamic may help explain why It’s on You by Nick Chater and George Loewenstein is so shrill and devoid of self-awareness.

  Having been leading researchers in behavioral psychology and economics who sought to manipulate individuals into ostensibly healthier and smarter choices — the world of “nudge” theory — they are doing a righteous penance by exposing the flaws of their former discipline. They have now decided that only government dictates can be relied upon to improve everything from retirement savings to climate change, and they are on a crusade to expose anyone who believes voluntary action by human beings can be useful for, well, anything.

  As the authors recount, the popularity of luring people into making the decisions that policymakers think best, rather than outright coercing them, really took off with the success of the book Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness (2008) by economist Richard Thaler and legal scholar Cass Sunstein. Sunstein would later hold an influential policy role as President Obama’s Administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, the chief White House overseer of proposed new federal regulations.

  Confession: I never got around to reading the Thaler/Sunstein book. Maybe if I'm in the mood for something "shrill and devoid of self-awareness", I'll try to find It's on You.

• From the archives… As it turns out, five years ago today, I posted a quote from Andrew C. McCarthy: Race Demagogues Poisoning Our Politics) (archive.today link)

  It is is eerily reminiscent of today's "discussions" about racial gerrymandering:

  Senator Tim Scott is entirely right: “America is not a racist country.” But America has a serious racial problem. Not a racism problem, a racial problem.

  We have a party in power whose strategy for remaining in power is to divide the country along racial lines. Democrats calculate that urban-centered racialist tribalism, amplified by media and pop-culture allies and underwritten by cowed corporations, can cast mainstream America as a deplorable bastion of white supremacism.

  The Republicans, the party out of power, generally lack Senator Scott’s confidence and tact in making the counter-case.

  The Department of Justice is a key to the Democrats’ strategy. The Obama-Biden administration politicized the law-enforcement and intelligence apparatus of our government, peddling with relish the progressive portrayal of an indelibly racist America. They’re ba-ack.

  … Indeed they are.

Veronique de Rugy writes her column on Marriage: The Inequality Gap We Should Be Talking About.

Yikes! I'm not a culture warrior either, but we are an outlier on the wrong tail of the distribution.

You can check out the AEI report here: Land of Opportunity: Advancing the American Dream

Also of note:

• Acording to John 8:32 and Caltech, it will also make you free. Erick W. Erickson is a fan: The Truth is Not a Disaster.

  The United States Supreme Court has released its decision in Louisiana v Callais. To listen to Democrats, including Barack Obama who just argued that a wildly drawn partisan redistricting scheme in Virginia was “fair,” is to hear hysterics lying to whip partisans into a frenzy. A few days after a progressive activist, inflamed by leftwing rhetoric attempted a mass assassination of the President and his cabinet in Washington, perhaps Democrats should rein in their lies.

  The Supreme Court said, plainly, that states cannot draw legislative districts based on race. The several states cannot draw districts to be predominantly white to preclude black voters from representation. The several states also cannot draw districts to be predominantly black to preclude white voters from representation. The constitution requires a color-blind society.

  Fifty-eight black men and women serve in the United States House of Representatives. A majority of them represent districts where white voters outnumber black voters. The idea that black Americans cannot get elected to Congress without majority-minority districts is, here in the twenty-first century, nonsense. The same racism that led Democrats to believe black Americans need affirmative action to get ahead, led them to believe black Americans need racially discriminatory congressional districts to get elected. The data shows otherwise.

  What would color-blind Congressional district line-drawing look like? Gee, you might have candidates who would not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

  Obligatory cheap shot: no wonder Democrats are so upset about it.

• And so do I. Jesse Singal debates a game show host: I Completely Disagree With Ken Jennings About Experts. It's in reference to

  Jesse Singal: “I don’t understand why all these experts with degrees keep disagreeing with me. So demoralizing. What could the explanation be??”
  
  [image or embed]

  — Ken Jennings (@kenjennings.bsky.social) March 4, 2026 at 12:14 PM

  (That's my first, and possibly last, embedding a BlueSky post. Hope it works for you.)

  Jesse's disagreement begins:

  I need to engage in an annoying bit of pre-explaining (presplaining), because I deleted the tweet that precipitated all of this. I’ll relegate a fuller explanation to a footnote, but the short version is I did not mean to imply I favored the Ken Paxton policy in question. Rather, my post was a response to Jack Turban’s claim that there is a clear scientific consensus on the subject of youth gender transition — a claim he was not making for the first time.

  Jennings, of course, got famous as a wildly successful contestant on, and then as the host of, a game show where almost every question has a single correct answer. (Well, it’s Jeopardy!, so technically every answer has a single correct question.)

  Unfortunately, a sizable subset of the progressive world, in my experience, believes that extremely complex scientific disputes are more or less like Jeopardy! What’s the answer to a question? If there’s any ambiguity you consult a panel of judges — The Experts. Whatever The Experts say is the truth of the matter, and you can win an argument by citing the existence of an expert, or experts, who agree with whatever claim you’re promoting.

  I think Jesse has the better of this argument, but you (of course) are welcome to make up your own mind.

  I followed Ken Jennings' initial run on Jeopardy! with amazement and admiration. He has turned his quick wit and general inoffensiveness into a successful (reported $4 million/year) second career in hosting the show. I was, in fact, kind of a Jennings fanboy, even getting his signature at a book-signing appearance up in Maine.

  That all turned around back in 2014 when Andrew Breitbard died. See Patterico. It turns out if you encounter Ken "in the wild", as Jesse did, you'll discover he's got kind of a mean streak toward people who disagree with his ideology, and that extends to mocking people who died.

• 

  Which brings me to… Ron Bailey's review of Helen Pearson's recent book, Beyond Belief, Amazon link at your right: The evidence revolution: Why 'take nobody's word for it' really matters.

  "Nullius in verba" is the official motto of the world's oldest national academy of sciences, the Royal Society of London. Usually translated as "Take nobody's word for it," the slogan represents a commitment to empirical evidence and experimental proof over reliance on authority, dogma, or tradition.

  In Beyond Belief, the award-winning science journalist Helen Pearson writes an engrossing history of the modern "evidence revolution." That movement aims to draw on rigorous research to figure out what works in fields ranging from medicine to management to education to policing to conservation. As Pearson makes shockingly clear, many decisions in these fields are still based on anecdotes, the opinions of authority figures, and conventional wisdom.

  Pearson illustrates the dangerous failures of conventional wisdom with a story about Benjamin Spock's vastly influential The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care. Apparently relying on the authority of the eminent pediatrician Paul Woolley, Jr., Spock revised his book in 1958 to say parents should place their infants face down to sleep to avoid choking on their vomit. Incidents of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) increased, even as evidence accumulated that face-down sleeping correlated with a much higher risk of SIDS. It was not until after a 1990 study showed that SIDS infants were nearly nine times more likely to have been sleeping face-down that a public health campaign advised parents to lay their sleeping infants on their backs. SIDS deaths dropped nearly 70 percent.

  I'm really old, so my parents went unadvised by Dr. Spock, and I survived my infancy.

  Going with "Nullius in verba", by the way, is the Feynman quote I've been overusing since encountering it in one of his books: "Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts."

  Sounds as if Ken Jennings could profit from reading the Pearson book.

• But the position has a long tradition of existence! At Cato, Jeffrey A. Singer notes The Endless Search for a Surgeon General We Don’t Need. Jeffrey notes that the Trump Administration is withdrawing its second nominee for the position, now going with number three, Dr. Nicole Saphier.

  At the beginning of this month, I wrote. “America Has Gone More Than a Year Without a Surgeon General—Has Anyone Noticed?” With Dr. Saphier’s credentials requiring Senate scrutiny and confirmation, it might be two years before America finally gets to find out who will be “the nation’s doctor.” But as the 70s rock group Humble Pie famously said, we “don’t need no doctor.”

  As I’ve written before, this exercise is unnecessary. My colleagues and I explained in a Cato policy analysis nearly a year ago that the Office of the Surgeon General and the Public Health Service Commissioned Corps, which the office oversees, are unnecessary relics. The surgeon general has drifted from an apolitical public health role into a politicized platform, weighing in on issues far beyond its proper scope—from gun control to social policy—thereby undermining trust in legitimate health functions.

  The Surgeon General and his retinue was apparently also responsible for the GOVERNMENT WARNING you and I have been ignoring on our beer, wine, and liquor packaging for the last 36 or so years.

  I had some fun with that here and here.