Pun Salad

That's my answer anyway. But you'll probably be more entertained by Andrew Heaton's video for the Foundation for Economic Education:

That's via Daniel J. Mitchell, who uses it to illustrate The Predictable Folly of Government Grocery Stores. He quotes many sources, good for him. For example, a WSJ editorial from a few months ago: Grocery Socialism in New York City (WSJ gifted link)

I've added "Zohran" and "Mamdani" to my spellchecker's dictionary. Looks as if he'll be providing lots of bad examples for a while.

Also of note:

• Imagine a boot stamping on a human face— forever. Jeff Maurer wonders: What Would a Serious "Medicare for All" Pitch Sound Like?

  Calls for “Medicare for All” are often vapid. A phrase alone isn’t policy; it’s words that signal membership in a group, like when people say “have a blessed day” (Christians) or “the book was so much better than the movie” (assholes). And things get less serious still when people suggest that we could pay for Medicare for All with a wealth tax or by ending aid to Israel, which is like imagining that you could buy a Ferrari by selling framed needlepoints of your witticisms.

  That being said, single-payer health insurance is not a crazy idea. Many countries have some version of single-payer, so much so that the “OMG LITERALLY EVERY ADVANCED COUNTRY DOES THIS!!!!” pleas from online lunatics are about 60 percent true. In a sane world, we’d be having a serious discussion about the pros and cons of changing systems. Of course, in our world, we’re having an unserious shouting match over a slogan that could mean 100 different things and that is about as likely to happen in the near term as Snuggle Bear being voted Sexiest Man Alive.

  Jeff's a lot more friendly to the idea than I am. I could go on at length, but I'll just leave it at this: if they couldn't make it work in Vermont, why would they have any better luck in the whole country?

• Flourish this. Matt Ridley has a suggestion for the noodges: Don't tell other people how to flourish. But what I want to excerpt is this bit, another example of why you shouldn't trust Wikipedia, let alone give them money:

  The paragraph deleted from Wikipedia this week described a document called the DEFUSE proposal. This was a grant application from scientists in Wuhan and America in 2018, which requested $14 million from the Pentagon to put a genetic sequence called a furin cleavage site into a virus 20% different from SARS for the first time. A year and a half later a virus 20% different from SARS with a furin cleavage site—the only one ever found in several hundred sarbecoviruses—started infecting people with a nasty new disease called COVID—in the very same city where they had proposed to do the experiment.

  This week some Wikipedia editor called “SilkTork” called the DEFUSE proposal an “unnecessary detail”, and minutes later another editor called “Tarnished Path” removed all mention of it. He left in a verbose and bizarre paragraph about the “parallel between the Wuhan lab leak narrative, and the machinations of fictional supervillain Fu Manchu”, giving the lie to the claim that the cut was made to save words—and perhaps giving a clue as to his own nationality.

  This is the reality of Wikipedia these days. A handful of powerful editors decide what you will read. They have banned 1.6 million people from contributing and spend their days shutting down anything that does not fit their prejudices. As Wikipedia’s co-founder Larry Sanger complained last year: “It is a basic principle of sound governance that we know who our leaders are so why are the 62 Wikipedia users with the most authority—’CheckUsers,’ ‘Bureaucrats,’ and Arbitration Committee members—mostly anonymous? Only 14.5% of such users reveal a full, real name.”

  And of course that leads to our next item…

• Maybe we should name a flower after him. Jack Butler writes on Anthony Fauci, Modern Narcissus. (WSJ gifted link)

  The best coaches give advice that transcends sports.

  “Don’t collect your press clippings,” a high school cross country coach told me after a race. It’s one thing to feel good when things are going well. Basking in adulation is dangerous.

  Like me, Anthony Fauci attended an all-male Jesuit high school. But if anyone ever gave him this advice, the recently released “Fauci diaries” make clear he ignored it. Dr. Fauci, former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, maintained a granular daily record of his tenure during the Covid-19 pandemic. Sen. Rand Paul (R., Ky.), who has doggedly scrutinized Dr. Fauci over his role in the government’s pandemic response, made this record public.

  Dr. Fauci doesn’t come out looking good. A Journal editorial recounts the more embarrassing entries. “Amazing profile of me today on Nightline,” he fawned. There were so many “editorials (print news Washington Post, etc.) and opinion pieces (Newsweek)” about him than he “cannot keep up or even read all of them.” A Journal news story reports on his delight at achieving what he called the “Fauci 5”—appearing on all the Sunday news shows. He collected his press clippings, all right, even saving “copies of glowing profiles.”

  If you're up for it, revel in Miranda Devine's NYPost excerpts from Fauci's diaries: Anthony Fauci was the ‘big head’ of COVID response. No excerpts, sorry.

  Neither will I excerpt the WaPo editorial: The sad takeaway from Fauci's refusal to testify. (WaPo gifted link) Instead, here's their AI summary of the (as I type) 3139 comments

  The conversation explores the contentious Senate hearing involving Dr. Anthony Fauci, with many participants expressing strong support for Fauci and criticizing the motives behind the hearing. Several comments suggest that the hearing was a politically motivated "witch hunt" aimed at discrediting Fauci rather than uncovering the truth about COVID-19. Commenters highlight Fauci's long-standing service and integrity, contrasting it with the perceived political grandstanding of figures like Rand Paul. There is a recurring theme of frustration with the editorial stance of the piece, with many feeling it unfairly targeted Fauci while failing to address the broader political context and the actions of the Trump administration during the pandemic.

  My observation: I would assume that those Fauci fans mostly consider Donald Trump, correctly, to be a major-league narcissist. But they have no problem in waving away Fauci's equally obvious character flaws. In that, they are the mirror image of people they probably despise.

• Speaking of mirror images… Erick Erickson observes another example: The Bullying. Apparently J.D. Vance is on the outs with Rod Dreher because Dreher thought it would be a good idea for Vance to "distance himself from the antisemites and white nationalists" in his fan base.

  The Vice President has, in fact, surrounded himself with what some call the woke right, but what can best be understood as the identitarian right. They are progressives economically, but socially conservative. Many of them view whiteness as a core identity. Many of them hate Jews. The Vice President, himself, has rarely missed an opportunity to criticize Israel, which, in and of itself, is not a problem, but by pattern most who do and tie themselves to these other characters tend to share their antisemitism.

  The progressives on the Left and Right are bullies. They dominate by making others shut up. On the Left and now, with this group on the Right, there is fear in text messaging. They use Signal and disappearing chats so that their friends on the groupchat can not later use their chats to destroy each other. Just as you can never be too progressive on the Left and some get run out because they haven’t gone hard enough Left, the same is happening with this group. To reiterate, more than one person has told me they don’t text anymore because they’re afraid their friends will later turn on them and use the texts against them. Both sides have a Stasi.

  It's getting pretty ugly out there.