Pun Salad

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.