Pun Salad

From the Heaton/Bragg team at Reason: If doctors acted like politicians....

I'm pretty sure I pissed off one of my doctors by showing him my recent discussion with Claude about my prostate. I thought he'd be amused!

Also of note:

• Betting on anything is risky, but this? Stephanie Slade asks and advises: Are Democrats Now the Party of Free Markets? Don't Bet on It.

  Here's a fact about partisanship and public opinion that may surprise you: According to Gallup, Democrats have been warming toward foreign trade since 2008, and they have been more positive about it than Republicans have been since 2012. With all the talk of political realignment in recent years, data points like these have led some to wonder whether Democrats are becoming the major party that better aligns with libertarian commitments to free markets and limited government.

  That's Slade's first paragraph, but (after making many valid insights) here's her bottom line:

  Democrats frequently discover a strange new respect for limited-government ideals when they're not in power, but it doesn't last. The moment they're back in the White House, expect progressives to experience sudden-onset amnesia about the lessons they weren't really learning during the Trump years.

  As the Bonzo Dog Band observed long ago: No Matter Who You Vote For The Government Always Gets In.

• Lotta cynicism out there today… On that score, Veronique de Rugy observes: When Businessmen Enter the Beltway, It's Business as Usual.

  Something strange is happening in Washington. A generation of investors and entrepreneurs who built careers championing private capital and intuitively understood the power of market discipline and limited government have joined the Trump administration, taking charge of hundreds of billions of dollars of other people's money. They assure us that they are deploying it strategically, with accountability and a businessperson's rigor.

  From Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick (who is apparently convinced he can rearrange the American economy through tariffs and industrial policy as if it were a trading desk) to former Commerce official Michael Grimes (who led the IPOs of Meta, Uber and Airbnb and reportedly spearheaded a federal "venture arm" last year) to President Donald Trump and his proposed U.S. sovereign wealth fund, the rejection of markets is real. And as with all such schemes, these too will damage the economy.

  At least the stock market is doing well.

• Insightful, with dirty words. Jeff Maurer is shaking his head: How Did the New York Times Wave Through "Israel Trains Rape Dogs"?

  On Monday, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof wrote an article alleging that sexual abuse of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails is widespread. The claims are extremely serious — so serious, in fact, that it makes me wish that it was possible for our society to talk about Israel/Palestine without our brains melting down and dribbling out of our ears in a trickle of neon pink goo.

  Personally, I find the general narrative sadly plausible. Prisoner abuse happens everywhere, societies in violent conflicts often see their moral standards erode, and my own country engaged in a prisoner abuse scandal in the aftermath of a horrific attack. Of course, I have no real way to assess the veracity of the claims in the article — I am, after all, just some dickweed with a laptop. The New York Times, however, is a 175 year-old newspaper that basically won the Squid Game-style deathmatch that American publications have been forced to endure. They do have resources to vet, fact-check, and otherwise verify the news stories that fill the dead space in between their lucrative puzzle games.

  Since I know the name "Walter Duranty", I don't have any expectation that the NYT will let journalistic integrity get in the way of publishing narratives it prefers.

  Jeff's conclusions, after looking at the "evidence" cited for the dog-rape fantasies: "the level of scrutiny for claims about Israel at the Times is absolute zero." If they didn't balk at publishing that, then they probably didn't bother checking anything else.

• And for once, I'm blogging Nellie Bowles' TGIF column on Friday. Concerning another different garbage NYT story:

  → One last note on antisemitism and the media: Check out this weird 2,500-word New York Times investigation into Israel and Eurovision, a music contest.

  

  That headline sure looks scary. I’ll bet most people stopped reading after “Israel’s efforts to influence. . . ” The reporters “traveled around Europe, interviewed more than 50 people, and reviewed internal Eurovision documents.” Well, what did they find? The article ultimately admits there were no bots, no hacking, no vote-rigging, and no evidence any rules were broken. The “scandal” amounts to Israel encouraging supporters to use the voting system as designed, something virtually every Eurovision participant has done for decades. The only huge dark arts political effort is to ban Israel from performing. The whole article is basically: Did you know that the Jooos are still allowed in the singing contest? Isn’t that odd? Is Adam Levine spinning his throne around on The Voice also a “soft power tool”?

  Well, I'll still keep my NYT Games subscription. But…

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