Pun Salad

My brilliant idea to rename 'Lake Erie' as 'Lake Inferior' doesn't seem to be going anywhere.

Also of note:

• Well-deserved but futile and stupid. Social Security is going broke, the overall economy is shaky due to massive deficit spending, but instead it appears we're in for (according to Jim Geraghty) The Inevitable Impeachment Rerun.

  Democrats are quite likely to win back control of the U.S. House of Representatives and appear to have a decent shot at winning the Senate. And then, apparently some Democrats fervently believe that finally, this time, for real, they’re going to get him.

  The “him,” of course, is Donald Trump, a man who has already survived two impeachments the way a cockroach survives a nuclear test, and who has almost cheerfully dared Democrats to try a third. As the president put it to Will Cain back in January, his Democratic foes will “find something,” because that’s simply what “very nasty people” with “bad policy” do.

  As far as more pressing problems go, I didn't mention "health care is unaffordable" and "our roads and bridges are crumbling" above, because Jim notes as an aside:

  (Hey, remember the Affordable Care Act? Remember when the Obama administration insisted, “President Obama promised that he would make quality, affordable health care not a privilege, but a right. After nearly 100 years of talk and decades of trying by presidents of both parties, that’s exactly what he did.” Here we are, 16 years after its passage, and ten years after that declaration of a promise kept, and Democrats are still running for office saying that health care is unaffordable. It’s like “crumbling roads and bridges.” No matter how many massive, big-spending infrastructure bills get passed, lawmakers come back a short while later and argue we need to pass another one, because of our “crumbling roads and bridges.” Whatever the U.S. government has spent in recent years, some candidate out there will insist this vital priority is desperately underfunded.)

  I think that the infrastructure spending is likely to deliver roads and bridges pre-crumbled.

• I'm still trying to figure out why that darned caged bird is singing. Kevin D. Williamson says he knows Why Everybody Hates Capitalism. (Dispatch gifted link)

  I have written many versions of this sentence, and I’ll repeat myself here: Pretty much everybody in the rich world would be enthusiastically pro-capitalism if not for their experiences with a handful of firms concentrated in financial services and telecommunications: insurance companies (especially health), banks and credit card issuers, collections firms, streaming and (especially) cable services (there is a reason that fewer than 1 in 3 U.S households subscribes to cable today, down from a peak of 90 percent or so), mobile providers, things like that. The problem seems to be nearly exclusive to providers of intangibles, whereas providers of physical goods have a relatively good reputation. However overpriced their goods may seem, nobody hates Gucci or Cartier the way some people hate their banks or insurance companies—UnitedHealth’s profit margins run around 3 percent vs. 22 percent for luxury-goods giant LVMH, but you will not win any votes calling for the nationalization of Louis Vuitton or Moët & Chandon. It is true that luxury goods occupy a special cultural position, but you could make much the same case about Adidas or Dell or Black & Decker.

  But don't worry: KDW is a capitalism fan, like me.

  Two Cheers for Capitalism, Irving Kristol advised in his famous book of that title. Two, two and a half, maybe two and three quarters.

  Or: Capitalism is the worst economic system, except for all the others.

• 

  Slade, you magnificent writer, I read your book! Specifically, I finished Fusionism yesterday. I will report on it over on the book blog Real Soon Now. But until then you should read Stephanie Slade: J.D. Vance and the post-liberal right’s politics of victimhood, adapted from the book.

  In September 2021, when he was still a long-shot candidate for the Republican Senate nomination in Ohio, J.D. Vance made an appearance on Fox News' Tucker Carlson Tonight. At the time, it was widely understood that Vance's chances were limited in the bright-red state by his earlier refusal to support Donald Trump for president.

  "My god what an idiot," he had tweeted of Trump in 2016. "I find him reprehensible. God wants better of us," he posted the same month. In the wake of Trump's infamous "grab 'em by the pussy" Access Hollywood tape, Vance implored his "fellow Christians" to realize that "everyone is watching us when we apologize for this man."

  By the time of his Senate race, those comments had become a political liability. He deleted them and began an apology tour. "I've been very open that I did say those critical things and I regret them," he told Fox News. "I regret being wrong about the guy."

  Slade (I call her Slade, apparently that's how she's known around the Reason offices) calls Vance's transformation "a head-spinning reversal in tone and policy alike." I didn't fully appreciate that before.

• But for more Slade… Freedom Conservatism is also cheering the book's appearance, calling it a Lit fuse. Their article is a compendium of well-deserved praise, full of links. If you're on the fence about getting a copy, it should push you over.

• Thinking long-term. At Ars Technica, Eric Berger has a jaw-dropper: Private group wants to launch "cheapest possible" mission to Alpha Centauri.

  There are, by various estimates, several trillion planets within what is known as the Local Group of galaxies—our closest galaxy neighbors, including our own Milky Way. Many of these planets are within the habitable zone of their stars. So if life finds a way, where are the alien civilizations?

  This is the crux of what is known as the Fermi paradox, which posits that if life is fairly common in the Universe, humans should have collected credible evidence for the existence of extraterrestrial civilizations by now. People who think about this paradox believe there may be some “filter” that limits or entirely prevents an advanced civilization from sending out probes or even life-bearing spacecraft to nearby stars.

  But what about that mission?

  On Tuesday, [entrepreneur Philip Johnston and a handful of other entrepreneurs announced the “Fermi Explorer” mission. In concept, it is simple. They seek to raise $15 million to build a small spacecraft, carrying a 1 kg payload, and launch it to Alpha Centauri such that it reaches that system in fewer than 80,000 years. Why? In conversations about the Fermi paradox, Johnston realized such a mission would knock two “filters” off the list: Species won’t want to send spacecraft beyond their home star, or species will find that interstellar transit is too difficult.

  When they say "fewer than 80,000 years", unfortunately they don't mean five or six.

  There's a website, of course.

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