Pun Salad

A clever Amazon Product du Jour: a mug that "disappears" certain sections of the Bill of Rights when you fill it with a hot beverage.

Not so amusing when you consider that a lot of candidates favor amending the Constitution to (partially, for now) erase the First Amendment. Usually phrased as "overturn Citizens United". Local examples: US Senate candidate (and my current CongressCritter) Chris Pappas; current NH2 Congresscriter Maggie Goodlander; NH1 congressional candidates Stefany Shaheen, Heath Howard, Christian Urrutia.

I try to be a "reasonable people can differ" kind of guy, but this is an issue that puts me more on the "what the hell is wrong with these people" side.

All that to introduce Bradley A. Smith's article: Campaign Speech Lies at Heart of First Amendment. (NR gifted link) A strong opening:

Shouldn't be, anyway. Bradley is currently litigating against a Maine law limiting contributions to super PACs.

Candidates who want to "overturn Citizens United" have lost my vote, and they should lose yours too.

Also of note:

• Usually including the one discussed above. J.D. Tuccille points out that The socialist surge revives failed and hateful ideas. Including one of the oldest and most dangerous:

  Michigan's El-Sayed says he believes the Israeli government is as evil as the terrorist group Hamas, which launched the October 7 attacks, and calls it guilty of "apartheid" and "genocide." The DSA last year adopted a resolution denouncing Zionism (the belief that Jews have the right to establish and maintain Israel) as "a racist, imperialist, settler-colonial project" and made belief that "Israel has a right to defend itself" an offense punishable by expulsion from the organization. Hasan Piker* claimed and repeated that Hamas is "a thousand times better" than Israel. Colorado congressional candidate Melat Kiros declined to label as antisemitic a deadly firebombing attack on a Jewish rally in Boulder.

  "As a Democratic member of Congress, I can attest that for a growing number of my colleagues, being anti-Israel has now become a nonnegotiable moral litmus test," warns Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D–N.J.) "History teaches us that antisemitism is never the endpoint of hatred."

  It's as if the rising tide of modern radicals set out to revive some of the worst ideas of the past—socialism, totalitarianism, and bigotry—and combine them in the burnished turd of a modern political program for those disappointed with their lot in life. The ideas the movement peddles are ridiculous, hateful, and have proven themselves dangerous time and again. Yet they continue to find an audience.

  I still see "Hate Has No Home Here" lawn signs in my local travels. I await the amended version, "exceptions made for billionaires and Jews".

• The last few shreds of their respectability? Megan McArdle describes What the professors lost by winning with El-Sayed. (WaPo gifted link)

  Was it a win for the American Association of University Professors? On July 30, the organization announced that it was endorsing a political candidate for the first time in its 110-year history. Abdul El-Sayed, a left-wing Michigan Democrat running for the Senate, got the nod a few days before the Democratic primary. Last Tuesday, El-Sayed eked out a win over moderate Rep. Haley Stevens.

  So was it also a win for the AAUP?

  Any number of critics have sprung up to say no, it was an own goal. They make the point that I’ve offered repeatedly in recent columns: The perceived politicization of academia has eroded public trust, making universities vulnerable to unprecedented Republican attacks on higher education. Universities desperately need to regain their credibility as neutral institutions, not publicly position themselves on the Democratic Party’s leftmost flank.

  I've commented on AAUPniks now and then over the years. Example: The AAUP regrets to inform you that you're a fascist. With my conclusion: "The AAUP tends to attract faculty who aspire to union thuggery." Their current leader, Todd Wolfson, seems to be taking that path.

• Fine. Do that, and then abolish yourself. The WSJ editorialists look at the latest antics from a department that should not exist: The FCC Tries to Save Broadcast TV. (WSJ gifted link)

  The Federal Communications Commission is trying to get with the digital times and on Thursday moved to scrap its antiquated nationwide broadcast ownership cap. This much-needed regulatory modernization could help save broadcast TV, though a better solution would be eliminating the FCC.

  The FCC ownership cap dates to the bunny-ears era when there was little competition in the airwaves. Congress in 1996 formally codified a 35% limit on the share of U.S. households that a broadcast owner’s stations could collectively reach, which lawmakers in 2004 raised to 39%. Imagine if Amazon couldn’t deliver to more than 39% of U.S. households.

  I wonder how many WSJ readers these days have even seen bunny ears?

JUST IN: WNBA Commissioner announces the league is meeting to review what a woman is, after multiple former NBA stars announced plans to join the league.

— Polymarket (@Polymarket) August 8, 2026

It turns out that ex-Celtic Enes Kanter Freedom has officially declared himself a WNBA "prospect" for their draft next year. Here's the Facebook Reel of his announcement.

Back in 2021, I endorsed Enes for President. I stand by that.

(OK, so he is technically ineligible, having been born in Switzerland.)

Also of note:

• With an earth-shattering kaboom. Noah Smith points out one little problem with an increasingly popular policy stance: Banning data centers would blow up the U.S. economy.

  So far, there has been no strong move toward a federal data center pause, and the bills that have been introduced in Congress are pretty mild stuff. That’s why as long as the movement to stop data centers stayed confined to blue states, it didn’t really matter much. It was just another instance of a very traditional story that we’ve all come to expect — states like New York basically ban new physical industries, so those industries go to places like Texas. The red states get the economic activity they want, the blue states get the stasis they want, and everyone is happy.

  Nor would a few state-level bans affect the progress of AI. AI is a creature of bits and bytes; it lives in the cloud, and it doesn’t care about the physical location of the data centers that represent the lobes of its vast, alien brain. Data centers in Texas would sustain AI progress and AI applications just as well as data centers in New York.

  Except now Texas is pausing data centers too. If almost all states ban data centers — or if the federal government gets involved in a major way — there could be major consequences for the U.S. economy. In the long run, I think limiting the physical resources devoted to AI would be a good thing; in the short run, it will simply clobber the already-wobbly U.S. economy. A movement against data centers has the seeds of something good and useful, but it has huge risks that most Americans seem not to realize yet.

  Noah actually thinks "data center limitations make sense in the long run". Unfortunately, his paywall kicks in before he describes where the line between "limitations" and "banning" should be drawn.

• They got worse. Greg Lukianoff describes What happened to the AAUP — and why viewpoint diversity matters.

  On July 30, the American Association of University Professors did something it has never done in its 111-year history: It endorsed a candidate for political office.

  And this was not a general-election endorsement against some uniquely terrible enemy of academic freedom. No, the national AAUP waded into a contested Democratic primary for Michigan’s U.S. Senate seat and backed Abdul El-Sayed, the unmistakable candidate of the party’s left. He had the backing of Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, ran on Medicare for All, rejected corporate PAC money, and called for ending U.S. military aid to Israel.

  He was also the more controversial choice, especially because of his position that Israel’s war in Gaza constitutes genocide and his appearances with Hasan Piker. Academic freedom, by contrast, was not a defining issue of his campaign, although El-Sayed had been an AAUP member and was strongly backed by organized labor. The AAUP proudly advertised the decision as its “First-Ever National Political Endorsement.” Todd Wolfson, the AAUP’s president, said roughly 80 percent of the Michigan members who voted supported making an endorsement and 97 percent favored El-Sayed.

  Greg is pretty convincing that this is a bad look for the AAUP. It's easy to be disgusted, but Pun Salad tries to follow the Costello Guidance and search for amusement. Greg provides Todd Wolfson's "now-deleted tweet" responding to his critics:

  

  Did Prof Tod delete this because it was too ill-tempered, or was he embarrassed by misspelling "Chamberlain"?

• Yum! River Page tried it so you don't have to: I Made RFK Jr.’s Salmon Cakes. They Were Bad.

  Wednesday, 3 p.m. I was wandering aimlessly around a dingy South Bronx grocery store, desperately trying to find “nutritional yeast,” whatever that is. I looked down at the YouTube video that had been playing on my phone since I got here.

  “And there had been a war on saturated fats for almost 70 years,” Health and Human Services (HHS) secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. croaked through my AirPods. “The government had been lying to us and telling us that protein caused heart attacks.”

  Emblazoned onto Kennedy’s apron—and the apron of the man awkwardly standing beside him, celebrity chef Andrew Gruel—was the title of our government’s new cooking series, The Real Food Show. This was the inaugural episode, which came out last week.

  The aim of The Real Food Show, according to the HHS website, is “to make healthy eating practical, approachable, and affordable.” Every recipe is based on the new Dietary Guidelines for Americans, which were released last year, turning the food pyramid upside down. HHS says these recipes are meant to be “easy,” and “budget friendly” at less than $5 per serving “whenever possible.”

  The debut recipe? Crispy salmon cakes with an apple, white bean, and greens salad. All that for less than $5 a serving? In this economy?

  River wound up spending $98 for the ingredients. There are a lot of ingredients: not only that nutritional yeast, but avocado mayo, thyme, panko breadcrumbs, … (Recipe here)

  And the result: "It looked like cat vomit."

• Weekly Feature. Your TGIF excerpt from Nellie Bowles:

  → He’s gilding everything: The aging and patinated statues of D.C. are getting regilded. This pair of statues hadn’t been touched since the 1970s, and now they glow, which my Gen-Z translators tell me means shine. Seeing the results here, I’m actually surprised this wasn’t a term-one priority for Trump. By the time the man leaves office the Lincoln Memorial is going to be bedazzled. He is President Liberace, the first gay leader of this nation.

  And in the scam of the week, we have the team at Truth Social selling early access to market-moving White House announcements, calling it Truth API. See, Trump often makes presidential announcements on Truth Social, his social media platform, and now you can buy government announcements a tiny bit early to trade on it. If this sounds at all sketchy, then you probably don’t get what an API is, and that’s fine. This is what real men do for work, and you shouldn’t worry your little head about it, kitten.

  The statement from Trump Media and Technology Group interim CEO Kevin McGurn: “Markets already move on Truth Social posts. Truth API delivers a direct, licensed, real-time feed of the platform’s most market-moving Truths while advancing our strategy to monetize proprietary assets through a high-margin, recurring revenue stream.” The idea is to give algorithmic trading tools a few milliseconds of advantage to trade on whatever the latest Trump announcement is. And they’re spelling that out! Martha Stewart went to jail for a minor trade based on some tidbit her broker had allegedly gleaned (the original James Comey villain story), but anyway. Here we are. Explicitly selling presidential trading tips. Major banks are hesitant to subscribe right now, which means a new type of man is about to get really rich. Men who aren’t scared of a little political crime. I think they’ll have ponytails.

  "Market-moving Truths"! What a concept!

Americans now pay more in taxes than they spend on food, clothing, and shelter combined.

Think about that.

Government has become so big and bloated that taxes cost more than life's basic necessities. Every American taxpayer should be outraged. pic.twitter.com/c6HRMbJH9t

— Stephen Moore (@StephenMoore) August 5, 2026

And of course, it's not enough. Never is, never will be. The latest tactic is the pretense of fighting wealth inequality. At Cato, Paul Meany notes the actual motive: Redistributing Wealth Means Redistributing Power to the State.

I've been trotting out this quote ever since I reread Hayek's The Constitution of Liberty:

That a majority, merely because it is a majority, should be entitled to apply to a minority a rule which does not apply to itself is an infringement of a principle much more fundamental than democracy itself, a principle on which the justification of democracy rests.

David R. Henderson chimes in from the Hoover Institution: The Deadly Focus On Income And Wealth Inequality.

For DSA types, that's a secondary issue to plundering rich people, and ensuring that government has the power to expropriate anyone's wealth if the 'democratic socialists' find them unsatisfactory for some reason.

Also of note:

• Harsh. But fair and accurate. George Will lets loose: DSA socialism is Peter Pan politics for sandbox revolutionaries. (WaPo gifted link)

  Zohran Mamdani’s election helped to ignite 21st-century interest in socialism, a 19th-century doctrine that had a deflating 20th century. Socialism, New York’s mayor says, prioritizes the “working class.” But what is that? “I think,” he told the New York Times, “if you have to work to pay your bills, I think that that is one definition of being a part of the working class.” But if everyone with bills to pay — essentially, everyone — is socialism’s priority, what is not socialism?

  The Democratic Socialists of America, a political party, sort of, recently issued its “program,” which begins by urging readers to imagine “a future without capitalism.” You “control your own labor and see it going to good use. It’s not just a job to pay the bills”:

  “Speaking of bills: you don’t really have them anymore. You have no debt. You don’t need health insurance. You don’t pay a mortgage or have a landlord, because comfortable housing is a human right. Your retirement is publicly funded. Food, education, energy, medicine, and transportation aren’t for-profit businesses; they are common goods and utilities … what if you were free to spend your time how you like without worrying about cost or dreading going back to work? What if you didn’t have to think about paying rent or loans at the end of the month, or saving for college, or affording groceries?”

  It's how they're selling it, but (honestly) if it were really about that, then they could do it without government: just set up a super-kibbutz, as they had in Israel's early days. A socialist Eden! And leave the rest of us be.

  That won't happen, of course. And not just because of their virulent anti-semitism.

• Maybe we just need a better label? James Freeman excerpts an anonymous reader's mail: ‘Abolish Capitalism. Viva Free Enterprise!’. (WSJ gifted link)

  In Reagan’s autobiography, he uses the word capitalism exactly zero times. Milton Friedman talked and wrote for decades about free enterprise. Meanwhile, in 2026, “freedom” polls exceptionally well across the political spectrum.

  When Louis Blanc used le capitalisme in 1850, it was to describe “the appropriation of capital by some to the exclusion of others.” When Karl Marx later railed against capitalists in Das Kapital, it was the label he gave to those he derided as corrupt and exploitative. Marxists have never meant this label as a neutral descriptor, let alone as a compliment.

  Free enterprise, in contrast, is plainly descriptive. With its French cognate entrepreneur, it connotes not a system but individual initiative. Those who would defend capitalism ought to be talking about “free enterprise” instead.

  I'm not convinced, but hey, maybe.

• And on the LFOD watch. It rang for the Detroit News report: Foo Fighters draw on 31 years of history for 35,000 fans at Ford Field. But stealing the show for us Granite Staters was…

  Queens of the Stone Age opened with an hour-long set of boogie metal, and frontman Josh Homme was in a mood. He alluded to someone backstage telling him he wasn't allowed to smoke in the building, which led him to rail against the tyranny of $60 parking and $45 beers throughout the band's set. (There was definitely $60 parking outside the stadium, but no signs of $45 beers.)

  "Don't let these corporate a--holes tell you what to do. Do whatever the f--- you want," Homme spat. "This is your f---ing night. Live free or die, motherf---ers." He then played a raging version of "Song for the Dead," the darkest, meanest and most beautiful song in the band's catalog. It was a perfect scene-setter for the night.

  I would not recommend editing your license plate to Josh's version. But (on the other hand) the Supreme Court long ago recognized the free speech issue for the motto.

Recently on the book blog:

I've had bad luck with self-help books lately. (I'm not sure why I keep checking them out! It's not like I need help!) But good news, readers: although Goodreads sticks a "self help" genre tag on this book, it's much more, and better. (Other Goodreads tags: Philosophy, Psychology, Sociology, Science. All accurate.)

It's very good, well deserving the praise you can read on the book's Amazon page and elsewhere. I regularly blog my "top 10" nonfiction reads for the year. If I make it to 2027, I can guarantee this will be on that list.

The author, Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, writes superbly on this topic she clearly cares so much about. She does not talk down to her readers, she doesn't avoid fancy lingo, like "ontological". I think she assumes you're gonna catch up via Google.

(Example, page 86: "It was a trompe l'oeil at an ontological level, a trompe l'ontologie." Well, shoot. There's two things I have to look up.)

She is, however, not above a bit of wordplay. Page 64, the bit that made me smile is bolded:

There are exceptions to the constancy of self-attention. You might have sometimes experienced extraordinary intervals when your attention was drawn so fixedly toward something outside of you, perhaps as you concentrated on a task that so entirely absorbed your attention that you lost all sense of yourself—together, most tellingly, with the psychological sense of time's passage. That is how fundamental to us our self-attention is: Escape it temporarily, and you temporally escape temporality. These extraordinary episodes have come to be called flow and they are so psychologically distinct precisely because they are so anomalous.

The book is also full of I-didn't-know-that items. Example: back in the early 20th century, pretty and rare feathers were worth (ounce for ounce) four times more than gold. And so: "The costliest loss of valuables aboard the Titanic lay in the boxes of feathers that went down with the ship."

All this, and I haven't really talked about the book's subject: mattering. It's a near-universal human instinct, coming into play when you have won the basic struggle against entropy, and assured your self-preservation. Then you start wondering: what was the point of all that. Isn't there more? Shouldn't I (somehow) matter?

There are a number of tactics people use to scratch this itchy instinct. The author has composed a "mattering map" showing the four basic varieties (if you don't want to track down the book, it's reproduced in the WSJ review). Each has its advantages and disadvantages, but you will almost certainly recognize your neighborhood.

Finally, the author tells fascinating stories of the famous and not-so-famous, and how they worked out their mattering instincts. (That bit about the feathers above? It's about this cat burglar…)

In short: this book has my highest recommendation.

Recommended by Ronald Bailey at Reason! So I asked the Portsmouth (NH) Public Library to get a copy on that. And (sigh) I didn't like it as much as Ron did. But (hey) you might.

But it leaves you wondering right off the bat: how many babies did Dr. Benjamin Spock (indirectly) kill when diligent parents followed his "expert" advice to have their infants sleep on their tummies? That turned out to have a significant risk of SIDS, Sudden Infant Death Syndrome.

Good news: My sister and I survived our 1950s infancy, even given the occasional misguidance promulgated by that era's authorities. And our kids made it through the 80s OK, too, even though that tummy-sleeping advice persisted after that. Whew!

But mostly Helen Pearson's book is about "evidence-based" practices. Their earliest adoption was in medicine, and its use of Randomized Control Trials (RCTs) to determine the efficacy of medicines, procedures, and general advice. If there are no RCTs, or the existing ones are problematic (low sample sizes, etc.), a backup technique is "systematic review", where the literature is scoured for relevant studies, which are combined via statistical magic to give a reliable result.

Pearson goes on to show how the "evidence-based" technique has been applied in other areas: "social policies", policing, conservation, education, and management. The results there are more of a mixed bag. And Pearson's descriptions can get a little tedious at some points. I found the section on management to be extremely boring, with my eyes often wandering off the page, checking out what the cat is doing, or maybe looking at my phone… (She did, however, seem to imply that managers get taken in by fads promoted by charismatic hucksters. That matches my experience!)

At times, Pearson lets her ideology fly.

In discussing social policy, she claims Ronald Reagan, in his 1980 campaign, "told derogatory stories of the notional 'welfare queen,' referring to women who were supposedly claiming welfare fraudulently or even deliberating having children outside marriage in order to milk the system."

Reader, I researched this back in 2014. As far as anyone can tell, Reagan uttered the phrase once, in a 1976 radio address. And even then, he clearly attributed the phrase to someone else ("as she's now called"). He was referring to an actual (non-"notional") woman, known most commonly as "Linda Taylor". And his source was not the KKK, but Jet magazine.

Pearson also does a considerable amount of Trump-bashing, and a slightly less amount of RFKJr-bashing. This is to be expected, I suppose, from an editor of Nature, which dropped its usual neutrality to endorse Wheezy Joe in 2020 and Kamala in 2024. And (of course) she explicitly drops her "evidence-based" demands when it comes to climate change. The practice of "spewing greenhouse gases" simply "need[s] to stop". Period. Just shut up and do whatever the "experts" say.

I read a different book on RCTs back in 2012: Uncontrolled. I liked it better, and you might too.

Truly, writing about this is definitely picking the low-hanging piñata; everyone seems to be talking about $20 burritos. But I like Jack Butler at the WSJ's "Free Expression" newsletter; he writes of A Burrito Brouhaha. (WSJ gifted link)

My contribution is the Amazon Eye Candy above. It is, as I type, $18.23 for a half-dozen shelf-stable burrito bowls, a little over $3 each. Pick up some nice flour tortillas, maybe some queso or sour cream… Detailed instructions and suggestions are available (of course) on the web.

I must admit, I'm tempted to try it myself. But instead I'm splurging on a Taste of Inspirations Five Cheese Pizza, on which I'm putting an immoderate amount of Hormel Pepperoni with Jalapeno.

Also of note:

• I think Betteridge's Law of Headlines wins again. Noah Smith wonders Are the Democrats going to save us this time? After he recounts (accurately) the many ways the GOP has turned into a "bizarre Trump cult"…

  Let’s look at the type of candidates who are winning Democratic primaries. Francesca Hong, a DSA member who is all but certain to be the Democratic nominee for governor of Wisconsin, tweeted in 2020 that we should “cancel Thanksgiving”. When asked in a recent interview if she had recanted that position, Hong refused, talking about how Thanksgiving was “incredibly painful” for many people:

  As if that weren’t tone-deaf enough, she appeared to criticize herself for marrying a white man (saying “assimilation…took over”), and talked about having a half-white son as “proximity to whiteness”:

  Hong backtracked a couple of days later, declaring that Thanksgiving is her “favorite holiday”, but the damage appears to have been done — Bernie Sanders said he didn’t think he would endorse her, and prediction markets immediately began to discount Hong’s chances of beating her Republican opponent in the fall:

  (Tweets and graphic elided.)

  I'm not sure what I'll do if my November choices are between Trump idolaters and leftist moonbats. Leave the ballot unmarked, I suppose.

• Say it ain't so, Bryan! Ah, don't fret by Bryan Caplan's headline: I Stopped Being a Libertarian Because I Realized the Sky is Blue.

  When a thinker publicly changes his mind on major questions, neutral observers normally interpret it as a sign of courage and maturity. Almost no one enjoys admitting they were wrong — and “I changed my mind” is tantamount to “I was wrong.”

  On reflection, however, this favorable interpretation is premature. Yes, changing your mind because you discover surprising new evidence or arguments is courageous and mature. But what if you change your mind for purely emotional reasons, like “The idea that murderers shouldn’t be punished started to disgust me”? Or because you have a falling out with friends who share your views? “My girlfriend dumped me, so I left the church.”

  Neither of these intellectual paths even hints at courage or maturity.

  As I've mentioned (probably over-mentioned), my come-to-libertarian-Jesus moment was reading Milton Friedman's Capitalism and Freedom as a youngster in the early 1960s.

• Yes, that makes me a boomer. So is Dave Barry, and his essay today is about us: Boomers. After some slapstick humor (which you should check out, it's hilarious):

  But enough slapstick humor. It’s time for today’s topic, which is an article I came across in the distinguished British publication The Economist. The headline is:

  Why people over the age of 55 are the new problem generation

  My immediate assumption when I saw this headline, was: Oh, great, yet another article about how we Baby Boomers are terrible because we’re hoarding all the wealth, and we’re draining the Social Security trust fund, and we refuse to vacate our houses so younger people can live in them, and we think that all popular music has sucked since roughly the Eagles, and we drone on and on about how back in our day we didn’t have mobile phones or GPS, as if that makes us courageous hardy pioneers instead of just old farts, and WHY DON’T WE JUST GO AHEAD AND DIE ALREADY.

  That’s what I assumed the article was going to say. But I was wrong. The article says that the problem with us Boomers is... We’re partying too hard. Seriously. The article states that our generation was too wild and crazy back in the day, and we’re STILL too wild and crazy, so that compared to younger generations we’re drinking more and using drugs more, and we’re going to wild retirement-community parties where sometimes we’re even — if you can imagine — having sex.

  Dave goes on to note that the Economist doesn't approve of all this canoodling, which … well, I can see their point. Old people are disgusting.

  And not that it matters, but I find my old Eagles CDs to be … not as good as I once thought they were.

• LFOD Appears in unexpected places. I don't read SCOTUSblog, and even if I did, their headline isn't that grabby: Tariff refunds reach $100 billion mark. Zzzz.

  Ah, but at the end of the article, they excerpt the oral argument transcript in United States v. Jones, a 2011 case dealing with the thorny issue of whether it was Constitutionally OK to attach a GPS tracker to a suspect's car without a warant.

  JUSTICE ALITO: “And what if it was put on the license place? Would that be a technical trespass? Is that the property of the driver?”

  MR. LECKAR: “Well, a license plate, as I understand it, is the property of the State, and driving is a privilege. But it's not a technical trespass in this particular case. Mr. Jones had the –”

  JUSTICE SCALIA: “Is that right? I don't own my license plate? I didn't know that. How do you know that?”

  (Laughter.)

  JUSTICE SCALIA: “How do you know that? I paid for my license plate.”

  (Laughter.)

  JUSTICE KENNEDY: “We don't need to get into it, but ‘Live Free or Die’ was spelled on the license plate.”

  Those crazy cutups! FWIW, I'm pretty sure Justice Scalia did not have a car registered in New Hampshire.

(Illustrated once again by my ChatGPT effort from last year.)

Veronique de Rugy notes Socialism in the Open and on the Right.

Meanwhile Chris Freiman is in compliance with Betteridge's Law of Headlines at his substack: Does Funding Research Give Government a Claim to Tech Firms?

Christopher goes on to demonstrate the fallacious thinking involved. It's almost as if Mazzucato worked backward from her desired conclusion, trying hard to find a semi-plausible argument to support it.

Also of note:

• With a hefty dose of Calvinball rules. Kevin D. Williamson notes the Democrat Primary electorate Playing for Twits and Giggles. (Dispatch gifted link)

  The left-wing goofball Democrats have nominated as their Senate candidate in Michigan has a bevy of enthusiastic cheerleaders, and it should surprise absolutely no one to learn that a great many of those cheerleaders are wearing stupid red hats.

  Republicans ought to be running scared, but Democrats are running Abdul El-Sayed, who has bested normie Democrat Haley Stevens in the Michigan primary.

  Michigan has lost more than 8,000 manufacturing jobs since Donald Trump announced his imbecilic “Liberation Day” tariffs. But many of the Michigan families that escaped the direct and intense economic pain of a lost paycheck are experiencing the pain of a diminished paycheck, a persistent if less intense economic discomfort resulting from continued high inflation, with high and rising fuel and food costs eating into family budgets. You’d think that Democrats would have chosen a candidate well positioned to keep that issue and similar “kitchen table” issues, if you’ll forgive the tedious cliché, front and center.

  On top of the tariff misadventures, Republicans in Congress are studiously gazing at their Florsheims and pretending that the United States is not currently engaged in an illegal—and losing—war in Iran, one that is playing hell with the economy here at home and abroad. The president wanders around talking like an untreated stroke victim while even such utterly supine and slavering sycophants as Jeanine Pirro are walking sideways away from the hypertensive, sneering face of the Republican Party. That’s a lot to work with. Trump and the economic failures associated with him are “like an anchor around Republicans,” says Michigan pollster Bernie Porn, whose name you should definitely never, ever Google.

  It's shaping up to be a real hold-my-nose-in-the-voting-booth election come November.

• Who had this on their "Articles of Impeachment" bingo card? Charles C.W. Cooke points out: Truth Social’s Early-Access Scheme Is Indefensible. (NR gifted link)

  On Saturday, the Trump Media & Technology Group launched a new commercial offering: A real-time feed on the Truth Social website that will give paying institutions early access to certain high-profile posts for between $60,000 and $100,000 per month.

  There is no credible defense of this. The only reason that anyone would want priority access to Truth Social is to gain priority access to President Trump’s pronouncements on that platform. And the only reason that anyone would want priority access to President Trump’s pronouncements on that platform is to act on them for pecuniary gain. Trump often uses Truth Social as the primary forum for his announcements — announcements that include changes to personnel, the imposition or rescission of tariffs, key foreign policy decisions, and more. These announcements are extremely useful to financial institutions, and, in the age of high-speed trading, the faster those financial institutions can obtain them, the more money those financial institutions can make. Facilitating this access is not a byproduct of Truth Social’s API offering; it is its core — perhaps its sole — purpose. Simply put: President Trump is charging Americans a fee — a fee that, in part, goes into his family’s pockets — for the privilege of receiving news about his official actions earlier than those who do not pay.

  I can't imagine that early access to Trump's unhinged diatribes on Truth Social would be a reliable way to guide your investment strategy. I would guess you would have better luck with perusing sheep entrails spread across a Ouija board.

  More credible explanation: simple bribery.

• Yeah, that'll be good. That'll work. At Reason, Tosin Akintola is skeptical: Senators Want To Claw Back Trump's Spending Power. They Should Just Pass a Real Budget Instead.

  You'd have an easier time hitting a fastball off Milwaukee Brewers phenom Jacob Misiorowski than getting Congress to take back wasteful spending it has appropriated, as the Trump administration is finding out.

  On Monday, the Senate passed a continuing resolution to fund parts of the federal government through December 11. The bill includes a provision that temporarily blocks the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) from implementing a rule change that would have given executive branch political appointees greater control over the disbursement of federal grants.

  Proposed by the OMB in May, the rule has garnered over 62,123 public comments, most of which are in opposition. It would require "senior appointees" to review grant proposals for consistency with "applicable law, federal agency priorities, and the national interest." It also says agencies must ensure that funding proposals "advance the president's policy priorities."

  The ban's inclusion in the funding bill appears to be a direct response from Sens. Patty Murray (D–Wash.) and Susan Collins (R–Maine), who didn't take kindly to the Trump administration's use of pocket rescissions last year. In her statement on the resolution, Collins said she was "pleased" that the bill "prevents" the OMB from implementing its proposed rule, which would "politicize grants" and "harm small, rural communities, families, and biomedical research." Murray was more direct, calling the rule a "corrupt policy that would allow [President Donald] Trump to hold even more federal grants hostage."

  Tosin's article links to the 2026 Congressional Pig Book issued by the Citizens Against Government Waste. Senator Susan Collins of that state just across the Salmon Falls River got a special mention for wangling "159 earmarks costing $431,571,000".

  Susie's campaign ads are rife on the streaming services I frequent. She is damned proud to let you know that she's steered a lot of taxpayer money to Maine.

• I'm pretty sure my patience would wear thin after just one. George Will recommends: Now the midterms begin in earnest. Ask candidates three questions. (WaPo gifted link)

  Political candidates greedy for power are often parsimonious with information about what they would do with it. And voters currently being exhorted to participate in electing a new Congress might reasonably wonder: Why bother? Presidents govern, Congress spectates. Nevertheless, here are three commitments voters might seek from those currently seeking House or Senate seats.

  First: When the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974 was passed, the national debt was less than $500 billion. It is almost certain to reach 80 times that sum — $40 trillion — next month. It has become normal for the federal government to run nearly $2 trillion budget deficits even during full employment and steady economic growth.

  So, ask candidates about Warren Buffett’s five-minute solution: “I could end the deficit in five minutes. You just pass a law that says that anytime there’s a deficit of more than 3 percent of GDP, all sitting members of Congress are ineligible for reelection.”

  It's fun to think about. But (as GFW admits) it would probably require a Constitutional Amendment. And those are tough to push through the ratification process.

  And if you had enough votes in Congress to pass an amendment, you would have way more than enough votes to just… pass a balanced budget. Why not just do that instead?

Recently on the book blog:

Like his previous book in the series, Mick Herron ends this one with a … well, it's not exactly a cliffhanger, let's just call it "a stunning plot development that leaves you wondering about its resolution."

But (spoiler alert) the previous book's SPDTLYWAIR was Roddy Ho's discovery that Slough House's personnel records had been wiped from the Agency's internal database. Disturbing! As in previous books, we are dropped into the middle of an ongoing battle, and its dimensions are only clarified as Jackson Lamb and the rest of the group muddle through, hoping to survive. It develops that "First Desk" Diana Travener launched an assassination scheme aimed at a Russian agent misbehaving in England. Much worse, that scheme was bankrolled privately, by a corrupt media star in a corrupt relationship with a (previously) disgraced politician.

The upshot is that the Slow Horses may be in mortal danger as a result, (relatively) innocent victims of this rekindled cold war.

Other things of interest (may contain more spoilers): a character we haven't seen since the first book in the series gets resurrected here. On page 201, Jackson Lamb reveals that he's a believer in the Steele Dossier Russians-elected-Trump conspiracy theory. Lady Di actually seems to be more sympathetic here than in previous books; however, that may be only because her antagonists are truly slimy.

And don't go whining: "I was told there would be no math." Because I am telling you upfront: there's gonna be math.

So on to the burning question: Did Elon Musk sentence millions of people to death by dismantling USAID?. Going to the video, from Aaron Brown at Reason:

Fortunately, there's Reason.

Also of note:

• Hey, but what about the Reflecting Pool? Jim Geraghty is unhappy with two-thirds of Uncle Stupid's branches of government: The Semi-Retired President and the GOP Congress. Three paragraphs from a long article:

  Trump and his administration have no discernible interest in reducing this year’s deficit, currently at $1.36 trillion, $29 billion higher than at this point last year. The national debt is $39.7 trillion. (It was just under $20 trillion when Trump took office in his first term in 2017.)

  Social Security runs out of money in 2032, six years from now. Medicare Part A runs out of money one year later. Nobody’s interested in doing anything about that.

  Trump’s policy on Iran continues to bounce between hyperbolic threats and naïve credulity, as he fumes that the “Iranian Leadership is unbelievably duplicitous!” (If only someone had warned him.) U.S. Central Command has sent a message to military analysts “looking for new creative and unconventional ways to pressure and punish Iran.” (Nothing wrong with soliciting new ideas, but it’s a little unnerving to hear that five months into what was supposed to be a five-week war, we’re looking around for other options.) The war begun by the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which Trump repeatedly pledged he could resolve in one day, has been raging for all 561 days of Trump’s presidency.

  "I alone can fix it." Remember? Good times.

• And as for that other branch… Romina Boccia describes How Congress Turned Budget Reconciliation Into a Tool for More Spending.

  Congress is pursuing another reconciliation bill before the midterm elections. It should demonstrate to Americans that their elected representatives are willing to make the difficult choices needed to put the nation’s finances on a sustainable path. Instead, it risks becoming yet another reminder that Congress continues to rely on shortcuts and shiny objects to distract from the structural entitlement reforms the budget requires.

  America’s debt crisis is a fiscal problem, and it is also a political one. Washington doesn’t lack ideas for reducing deficits. It lacks the political courage to enact them.

  I'm not a huge fan of mindless voting strategies, but "vote against incumbents" is … not a bad one!

• Geraghty again. I'm sorry, I try not to overfollow a single author, but this is pretty interesting: If You Want to Hurt Russia's Economy, the Graham Bill Is the Best Option on the Table.

  Last week, former Senator Lindsey Graham’s sanctions bill won overwhelming support in the U.S. Senate, with 84 senators voting in favor of a motion to proceed and just twelve voting against it.

  The opposition consisted of Republican Senator Rand Paul and ten Democrats: Lisa Blunt Rochester of Delaware, Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire, Mazie Hirono of Hawaii, Andy Kim of New Jersey, Ed Markey of Massachusetts, Jon Ossoff of Georgia, Alex Padilla of California, Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, Peter Welch of Vermont, Ron Wyden of Oregon, and “independent” Bernie Sanders (insert eye roll here) of Vermont who caucuses with the Democrats.

  Maggie tweeted her lame excuse:

  I stand with Ukraine – and against Russia – in its fight for freedom and have long supported increasing sanctions on Vladimir Putin and his oligarch enablers.
  
  But today's bill gives the President new authority to impose tariffs, even on our allies. I do not think tariffs, which…

  — Sen. Maggie Hassan (@SenatorHassan) July 29, 2026

  Well, it's not like I was going to vote for her anyway.

• It's not as if we're doing a great job with regulating the present… Veronique de Rugy points out The Problem With Regulating the Future. She's in favor of "permissionless innovation".

  History is full of technologies that looked dangerous before they transformed the world for the better. Automobiles, airplanes, the internet, smartphones, even electricity all generated fear. Had regulators insisted on solving every conceivable problem before allowing widespread adoption, many of these innovations would have been delayed by years, perhaps decades. Instead, we discovered the real problems – as opposed to the many imagined ones – through experience and developed solutions along the way.

  AI is the latest example. And as always, many people are worried and would like to limit future harm that could come from it. I take it to be the spirit of a recent public letter called We Must Act Now. The signers warn that AI could transform the economy over the next decade and, therefore, argues that “economists, policymakers and technology leaders must act now... to build the incentives, guardrails, and institutions needed to steer AI in a direction that complements humans and benefits society.”

  This is precisely where the letter loses me. It’s not that I believe that AI poses no risks. I am sure it does. But the extremely vague statement opens the door to the precautionary principal approach to regulating AI. It doesn’t come out and say it but I think that left in the hands of politicians and bureaucrats what we will get is an approach to acting now that treats the whole exercise as if we already know enough about those risks to begin designing the institutions and regulations that will govern them.

  I'm currently reading a book that favors "evidence-based" policies in numerous fields. And here, Vero advocates for "evidence-based governance."

Recently on the book blog:

Recently on the movie blog:

Another book in my Simak reading project, finally getting to the books I bought and never got around to reading. This one is from 1970.

It is, more or less, pure fantasy. No spaceships or robots. It is first-person narrated by Horton Smith, a radio/TV newsman who's looking to return to his childhood home of Pilot Knob to write a book. He gets sort of lost on a lonely road in poor repair, and then, somewhat surprisingly, gets attacked by a triceratops. This is on page 10.

He evades the dinosaur, but his car gets hung up in a ditch, so he treks to a nearby farmhouse, where he meets its hospitable owner, who invites him to share his moonshine, and … eventually, Horton realizes that his host is Snuffy Smith. Yes, from the comic pages.

And it goes on in the same vein from there. Horton is the kind of guy that things happen to, and he stays remarkably calm for someone who is essentially trapped in a nightmare he cannot seem to wake from. He acquires a love interest, Kathy, the local schoolmarm. He gets accused of murder, and takes off downriver, and…

A lot of stuff happens. It eventually winds up, as Horton discovers the rules of the universe he's been transported to. Unfortunately, I didn't find Horton likeable or interesting, and his nightmarish odyssey did not grab me. It's as if Mr. Simak had blank pages to fill, and he just kept typing with whatever popped into his head. Maybe that was the inspiration for the book title.

">

Pun Son and I actually went to BarnZ's movie theater in Barrington to see this a few months back. Alas, I fell asleep at some critical point, and I didn't feel right about reporting it at the time. But it showed up free-to-me on Netflix, and I got an early start (after watching a new Futurama episode on Hulu), and …

Well, I'm not sure I stayed awake for the whole thing this time either, but what I saw was good.

As the movie opens, young Spike has been abducted by the "Jimmies", a deranged group of youngsters that see their task in the zombified world of the future as torturing and killing the innocent. Why? I think the movie blames an overdose of Teletubbies-watching at an impressionable age. Spike manages to survive his initial trial, through sheer, horrible, luck.

Meanwhile Dr. Kerson (from the previous movie) has gone slightly insane in his own way, constructing the "temple" of the title out of salvaged human skeletons. Impressive! But he still has a good heart, and manages to befriend "Samson", an infected, hairy zombie; the Doctor tries to resurrect Samson's human side using anti-psychotic meds. He doesn't say "He's crazy, so this might just work," but he could.

Eventually, the Jimmies and Dr. Kerson meet up, and there is a thrilling climax. And also a setup for the next movie.

Iran will never follow through on ending nuclear production nor giving up its new found leverage in the Strait of Hormuz. They are attempting to play us….again. The only way to stop them is to eliminate their avenues of funding. Period. https://t.co/lGmcp0TJkv

— Nikki Haley (@NikkiHaley) August 2, 2026

Clarity of purpose, clear-eyed vision, … alas, it was not to be.

A somewhat longer description from Erick Erickson describing The mess I have returned to.

Unfortunately, being bad at the job is probably not a valid Article of Impeachment. That's OK, there are already plenty to spare.

Also of note:

• As Elaine told Frank Constanza: "It means whatever you want it to mean." A couple NR articles (among many) dealing with their contributors' ongoing debate. First up: Dan McLaughlin, who asks, provocatively: What Exactly Is the 'Common Good'?

  One of the problems with the common good as a standard is its vagueness. Does it mean that laws should have a moral basis? If so, that just restates reality: virtually all law is grounded in moral judgments about what is right, wrong, fair, unfair, just, unjust, etc. Does it mean that laws should aim to improve the morals of the people? That’s a very different question, and one that raises serious questions about the limits of the competence of government: government can do a lot to degrade the morals of the governed but has only limited power to improve them. That’s to say nothing of the difficulty of defining what kinds of morality are supported by a sufficient consensus to justify backing them with governmental force.

  I also liked David L. Bahnsen, who provided Five Takeaways About the Common Good. Let's skip down to numbers 4 and 5:

  

  (4) Fusionism was, is, and will be the best framework for reconciling and holding the tension between the moral order we want and need and the liberty and freedom an individual is granted by his or her Creator.

  (5) Those attempting to answer these questions by relying on the wisdom and autonomy of man, or the pagan philosophy of the ancient Greeks, are spitting in the wind. It behooves those of us who believe in a moral order to not only ask the question “By what standard?” but to have an answer. And it behooves those of us who want to fuse that moral order to freedom and economic liberty to root these beliefs in a coherent understanding of the human person. Statist inclinations regarding the marketplace fail because they do not have the right anthropology. Aristotle doesn’t have it either. But there is a way that transcends the wisdom of the world.

  To quote Austin Powers: "Yeah, baby!" As I've previously, and tiresomely, pointed out: I have Stephanie Slade's new book, Fusionism, on order from Amazon, due four weeks from today. And so can you, link at your right.

• Heard in the WSJ offices: "How can we get Pun Salad to link to Matthew Continetti's column?" "Boss, I have just the headline!" And here it is: Milton Friedman Was Right. (WSJ gifted link)

  Milton Friedman died two decades ago, but it seems like he’s been in the news every day. Inflation, tariffs, rent controls, price controls—the issues that dominated his age have returned in ours. Prominent Democrats and Republicans attack Friedman’s record while proving his case. They’re busy exorcising Friedman’s ghost when they ought to be reviving his spirit.

  Friedman stood 5 feet tall. Yet he looms menacingly in the imagination of anyone who would use government power to plan, control, regulate and redistribute. For example, as a candidate for president in 2020, Joe Biden told Politico, “I think there’s going to be a willingness to fix some of the institutional inequities that have existed for a long time. Milton Friedman isn’t running the show anymore.”

  Instead, Mr. Biden ran the show—and delivered the worst inflation in 40 years.

  For what it's worth, here's what I wrote (last item) back in 2006 when he died, reminiscing about my shock at reading his Capitalism and Freedom.

• Liquidating the Kulaks as a class, step one. J.D. Tuccille notes: Mamdani's tax database doxed wealthy New Yorkers.

  Making an enemies list is creepy. Publishing the names of people you dislike to fuel political supporters' prejudices is even creepier and potentially dangerous. That's what New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani's administration has done with the introduction of a property tax surcharge on relatively high-value second homes linked to a searchable online database of those who could be affected. The socialist mayor's defenders point out that tax and property information is a matter of public record in New York, but the packaged publication of surcharge targets and Mamdani's history of calling out opponents by name suggests something nastier is going on.

  It sounds like it could be a premise for a crime novel: high-end burglars use the Mamdani list to target wealthy victims' second homes. "There's a good chance they won't be there, and we know they're rich, so…" But then it goes horribly wrong…

• "It's a travesty of a mockery of a sham of a mockery of a travesty of two mockeries of a sham." Allysia Finley takes on Socialist Chic and the ‘Medicare for All’ Sham. (WSJ gifted link)

  Consider Abdul El-Sayed, the left-wing front-runner in Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary this Tuesday. Mr. El-Sayed has surged to the lead against Rep. Haley Stevens by presenting himself as a man of the people. He has called for free child care, “Medicare for all” and an 8% wealth tax on billionaires.

  “I don’t think that our system should be in the business of creating billionaires,” he said during a March debate. “I think our system should be in the business of empowering everyday folks to be able to live a life with access to the basic dignities that they need and deserve, good housing, good healthcare, affordable food.”

  Nobody can disagree with the latter goals. But Mr. El-Sayed’s prescriptions to achieve them would expand government control of healthcare and the private economy and exacerbate the socioeconomic inequalities he inveighs against.

  I wish the DSA types would just be more straightforward about saying: "I want government to have a lot more money and power over peoples' lives."

  (This item's headline is from a very old Woody Allen movie.)

Jacob Sullum explains: Trump Re-Ups the Anti-Weaponization Fund, Reinforcing the Demand That Todd Blanche Kill It for Good.

Jacob is tougher on Tillis and Cornyn than is Mr. Ramirez:

… it is puzzling that Cornyn and Tillis seem satisfied to haggle over the details of the huge favors Blanche approved for his boss, as opposed to asking how anyone fit to run the Justice Department could have signed off on such a brazenly corrupt product of self-dealing. That act alone is enough to disqualify Blanche from this job, since it shows he is so eager to please Trump that he is willing to abandon legal ethics, shirk his official duties, and make a joke of the civil justice system while pretending all of this is business as usual at the Justice Department.

As Murray Slaughter said about Ted Baxter's admirable, but brief, bit of solidarity in the last episode of The Mary Tyler Moore Show: "When a donkey flies, you don't blame it for not staying up very long."

Also applicable to elephants.

Also of note:

• Let's see your EBT card, Hunter. Jonathan Turley takes a look at the swelling poverty ranks in Trump's America. Specifically, the entire Biden family: From Influence Peddler to Starving Artist: Hunter Biden Claims Family is Broke in Defaulting on $17 Million Bill.

  Hunter Biden is no Van Gogh. In addition to having both ears, Hunter’s work has generally been panned beyond an enabling media following. However, he claims he is also a starving artist. The problem appears to be that, as predicted years ago, his sales dried up with the influence-peddling market once his father left office. Now, his lawyers want him to cough up $17 million that he owes them. Hunter says that not only is he broke, but so is his family.

  In a deposition in ongoing litigation with the law firm Winston Taylor, Hunter claimed an inability to pay the $17 million he owes his lawyers for representing him in criminal prosecutions, congressional investigations, and civil lawsuits.

  Hunter claimed under oath that “I don’t own anything of any value other than — and I don’t know the value of it — my paintings which I painted myself. So that’s it. And I don’t even have any other assets at all, stocks, bonds, anything like that, savings accounts.” He also added, “My family doesn’t have any money, and it’s not their debt anyway.”

  Maybe Hunter could write a tell-all book. I'm sure he could get a pretty big advance. Probably not $17 million, though.

There's a big discussion about the concept of "Common Good" over at National Review. If you want to jump right into the middle of it, check out Charles C.W. Cooke's post: Okay, But What Do You Want to Actually Do. His key point, made to both sides:

One of the observations I made while looking for today's eye candy: there are a lot of books that contain "common good" right in their titles. Two examples: The Common Good by Robert Reich; Common Good Constitutionalism by Adrian Vermeule.

Reader, I'm pretty sure the Venn diagram between those two works has very little intersection, if any. I'm also pretty sure that I wouldn't find either one satisfactory. I think V. Vader's book, pictured above, might have a better shot at my favor.

I've mentioned that I have a News Alert set for occurrences of my state's motto, "Live Free or Die", in the Google's news sources. What I've observed is that people, bless their hearts, use LFOD in their advocacy. (Example from a few days ago, if you missed it.) I suspect the same goes for "common good".

For the record: Article 1. of my state's constitution: "All men are born equally free and independent; Therefore, all government of right originates from the people, is founded in consent, and instituted for the general good." Which is pretty close to "common good", but rings better to my ear.

From those scamps at Reason: Caveman NIMBY.

Also of note:

• It's never too late. Pretend Nellie's saying "Thank God It's the First [of August]": TGIF. And she's all over Doctor Tony, who's typing without a spellchecker:

  → HRH Fauci!: Anthony Fauci, former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, kept a journal. A diary filled with love notes to himself. Which I’ve literally never heard of a man doing, but that’s beside the point. I guess he also did it on his work computer, because Senator Rand Paul obtained and released it. I’m not sure where to begin. First, let’s get a sense of the tone. He carefully documents all the glitzy celebrations of himself, lists all the “movie stars and athletes” he has a Zoom call with, and carefully logs all the celebratory news stories about himself. It’s like an Excel spreadsheet of compliments. For a sense, here’s Anthony Fauci on Anthony Fauci:

  Big front page article abut me appeared in the Washington Post. Very flattering. The situation with my national and international fame is explosive and really unimaginable. It is not hyoperbole [sic] to say that today I am the most famous and talked about person in the country and one of the most recognizable peson [sic] in the world. (Countless profiles on me in multiple media. I cannot even read all the things that are written abuyt [sic] me since I am so busy . . . seriously. POTUS seems to be enamored of me even though I am taking the spotlight away from him. We are developing a very unique and interesting relationship. The entire secret service corps is coming over to me and chatting. They let me into the first gate without even checking ID. Everyone is worried about my health and welfare, probably because it is all over the place that I am almost 80 years old.

  He loved being a celebrity. The thing about it is, he really was being worshipped! There was a cult of Fauci. People were getting Fauci tattoos and dancing with images of Fauci. He really was on the cover of every magazine, which, if you think about it, was weird! If millions of Americans suddenly made me their cult leader, and I had previously just been an unknown short man in the back of an HIV press conference, I would go insane with power too. So would you. And when you see lockdowns in the context of a power-drunk elf getting turned on by the idea of canceling Easter—he’s typing so fast he can barely keep up—you can understand better what we all lived through. For him, the pleasure was canceling things, especially things he felt gave power to the right (sports, family gatherings, religious events). We can never forget the freaks who gain power in a centrally controlled system. Also: no diaries, ever, certainly none in Google Docs. I write my grocery lists on Signal, and you should too. Love letters via email have been forbidden until further notice. I will be dragged up in front of Congress one of these days, but so help me God, they aren’t going to know about one brunch I attended. Next up, the lab leak:

  … and then she gets to the lab leak thing. But Nellie's TGIF post is wide-ranging, as usual, so even if you're Faucied out, keep scrolling.

• I have to admit it's getting better. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) has published its yearly survey: Spotlight on Speech Codes 2026. Here are the "major findings":

  1. The percentage of colleges and universities earning an overall “red light” rating in FIRE’s Spotlight database has hit an all-time low — this year to 13.2%. This is an approximately one-and-a-half percentage point drop from last year, and is more than 55 percentage points lower than the percentage of red light institutions in FIRE’s first, 2006 report in which 68.6% of all institutions earned a red light rating.
  2. 69.4% of institutions now earn an overall “yellow light” rating. Though less restrictive than red light policies, yellow light policies still restrict expression that is protected under First Amendment standards and invite administrative abuse.
  3. A total of 76 colleges and universities now earn an overall “green light” rating, up from 73 schools as of last year’s report. Policies earn a green light rating when they do not seriously threaten protected expression. For the second year in a row, more institutions earn a green light rating (76) than a red light rating (66). This gulf widens at public schools, where the number of public schools earning a green light rating (68) eclipses the number of private schools earning a red light rating (37) by over 30.
  4. One hundred and twenty university administrations or faculty bodies have now adopted policy statements in support of free speech modeled after the “Report of the Committee on Freedom of Expression” at the University of Chicago (the “Chicago Statement”), released in January 2015.
  5. Forty-seven institutions have adopted an official position of institutional neutrality substantially similar to the principles set forth in the University of Chicago’s “Report on the University’s Role in Political and Social Action” (the “Kalven Report”).

  No changes reported for the University Near Here: it still maintains a "green light" for its speech code, it hasn't officially adopted a policy of neutrality. Informally, they seem to have dialed their past in-your-face woke ideology way down.

• Just your usual reminder that Trump is a crook. Kevin D. Williamson reminisces about The Gentlemen of Antwerp. (Dispatch gifted link)

  Donald Trump is cheap in every sense of the word: cheap in that he is an infamous deadbeat who cheated his creditors; cheap in the sense of tacky; cheap in that he is the sort of man whose virtue, such as it is, can be overcome at no great expense—a cheap date.

  Trump is a $40 fake Rolex made copious flesh.

  Trump is so cheaply bribed that the bribes almost do not look like bribes, and they aren’t bribes in the conventional sense, notwithstanding only the fact that no court of law has found them to be such. They are moral bribes—trinkets—rather than economic bribes.

  And you do not have to spend very much on that sort of thing. One need not be overboard. The pimped-out airplane from the Arab despot was a bit much, maybe. But the CEO of Rolex, Jean-Frédéric Dufour, bought the whole Swiss watch industry a better deal on tariffs with a desk clock that was not even solid gold but merely gold plated, along with a 1-kg bar of gold engraved with the word “PRESIDENT”—in case Trump, who seems to believe that there is something called the Islamic Republic of Japan and who conflates Vladimir Putin with Volodymyr Zelensky, finally forgets which office it is he holds.

  The gemstone cartel known as the Antwerp World Diamond Center got its diamonds an exemption from Trump’s tariffs after offering up the merest of baubles, a hideously tacky ring with diamonds arranged in two big capital Ts and the numbers 45 and 47, references to Trump’s two terms as president. Trump in the pocket of a bunch of European diamond merchants: The antisemitic stereotypes thereby invoked must have been almost too much to bear for the Jew-hating cretins in Trump’s coalition, who surely would be muttering about some yarmulke-wearing malefactor

  spawned in some estaminet of Antwerp

  Blistered in Palm Beach

  Patched and peeled in Washington

  if any of them had ever read a book that did not have pictures in it.

  A long excerpt, but I did want to get to his Antwerpian reference.

  And, oh yeah, T.S. Eliot was kind of an anti-semite.