Pun Salad

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.