Pun Salad

Disclaimer: This is a work of cartoonish satire. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental:

Also of note:

• $4,327.22/ounce, as I type. That's what JM Bullion claims to be the price of gold this morning. I looked it up thanks to Jim Geraghty's "Morning Jolt" yesterday, which has interesting news: Venezuela’s Gold Could Be Headed to New York. But also fun facts:

  Eighty feet below 33 Liberty Street in New York City, 50 feet below sea level, on the bedrock of Manhattan Island, lies the vault of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the world’s largest known depository of monetary gold. As of 2024, the vault housed approximately 507,000 gold bars, with a combined weight of 6,331 metric tons. The value, as of this writing, is roughly $900 billion.

  This gold inside the vault does not belong to the New York Fed or the Federal Reserve System. Only a small fraction of it belongs to the U.S. government; as of 2017, the vault held “about 5 percent of America’s roughly $11 billion in gold reserves and coin.” The New York Fed acts as the guardian and custodian of the gold on behalf of account holders, which include the U.S. government, foreign governments, other central banks, and official international organizations. No individuals or private sector entities are permitted to store gold in the vault.

  The infamous Simon Gruber was incorrect when he scoffed, “Fort Knox is for tourists” — you can’t visit the bullion depository — but the New York Fed’s vault does indeed have significantly more gold than Fort Knox in Kentucky, which has 4,583 metric tons.

  The stuff about Venezuela is later on in the article. Jim is cautiously optimistic that it could, eventually, become "a Trump administration foreign policy success story." And there are many more fun facts!

• David R. Henderson is a tough grader. He expects better from Nobel Laureates: Krugman, Stiglitz, et al Flunk Econ 101.

  Six winners of the Nobel Prize in economics recently signed a statement in favor of California’s Proposition 40, the measure that would impose a one-time 5 percent tax on California billionaires. They are Daron Acemoglu, Abhijit Banerjee, Peter Diamond, Esther Duflo, Paul Krugman, and Joseph Stiglitz. Their statement showed little understanding of basic economics.

  In one section, they write:

  This extreme wealth has translated into extraordinary power, in California just like in the United States more broadly. During the 2000 federal election cycle, billionaires accounted for about 1% of total donations; in 2024 this number had risen to 19%. The Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, X are all owned or controlled by prominent billionaires. Sergey Brin alone has already spent more than $100 million to defeat the California billionaire tax.

  There are two problems here. First, they don’t know that billionaires today, the ones who would be paying the tax, got a $1.4 trillion wealth gain. There’s huge mobility in and out of the group of billionaires, especially over a period as long as 6 years. Also, someone might have had a billion in 2019 and have a billion today. That person would be taxed this special 5 percent. What’s his wealth gain? Zero.

  Second, it’s a phony comparison because the rest of us “ordinary Californians” don’t see our wealth gain on our paychecks. Our paychecks are for services rendered. Capital gains, whether realized or not, don’t appear. So someone might make $80,000 on his paycheck and have had, over six years, an unrealized capital gain on his house of $200,000. But these economists don’t take account of that. Are they aware that a few million Californians are sitting in houses on which they have had huge capital gains? Or are they just incredibly sloppy or even dishonest?

  For the record, a little Googling places Acemoglu, Banerjee, Diamond, and Duflo at MIT, Krugman at CUNY, and Stiglitz at Columbia. All safely remote from direct effects of Prop 40.

• Check for the danger signs. At the WSJ's "Free Expression" newsletter, Kyle Smith warns You May Have Israel Derangement Syndrome. (WSJ gifted link)

  The Israel Defense Forces may be the smartest and the most resourceful military on the face of the earth. Yet its most implacable foe is increasingly elusive, even as it spreads everywhere. It has already captured a gigantic prize: the minds of young people. New enlistees are eagerly signing up.

  What they’re pledging themselves to is IDS, or Israel Derangement Syndrome. When the subject turns to the Jewish state, formerly robust minds are turning to spoiled mayonnaise. Frontal autolobotomies are eagerly being carried out on every campus. IDS is a drug that gets you high on self-righteousness while disabling your cognitive faculties.

  This is your brain on IDS: Last week a major media outlet published a piece regarding Israel so devoid of all reason as to guarantee first-ballot entry to the Hall of Fame for Idiots. My first thought was to call 911 and report evidence of an adverse neurological event. My second thought was to call the Weekly World News to say I could finally confirm all those reports that there exists an adult human without a brain.

  In reviewing for Variety a movie called “NAZA,” about the alleged depravities of the IDF, Jay Weissberg presented with an advanced case IDS:

  This erasure of human costs is not a policy that originated with Benjamin Netanyahu: For decades, the Israeli government has stocked its jails and morgues with Arab men in order to use them as bargaining chips in prisoner exchanges. Six Israelis for 291 Syrians; one dead IDF soldier for 65 prisoners and 40 bodies; one Israeli hostage for 1,027 Palestinian prisoners. The message, disseminated not just within Israel but among the diaspora, is that one Israeli, alive or dead, is worth untold numbers of Arabs.

  To start with the lesser outrage against reality: Israel doesn’t “stock its jails with Arab men” so it can “use them as bargaining chips.” Israel is a liberal democracy with written law, due process, proper judicial procedure and carefully vetted judges. You know, all the stuff that Hamas rather famously overlooks. Israel arrests terrorists and other criminals. If they’re convicted, they go to prison. Israeli police don’t cruise down the streets with tuna nets picking up random Arabs while exclaiming, “Caught another bargaining chip!”

  Kyle is (additionally) aghast at Weissberg's insinuation that it's Israel that sets those prices. Which indicates either ignorance or dishonesty on Weissberg's part.

• Her 2015 Project was a failure. That's the year Nikole Hannah-Jones enrolled daughter Najya in a lousy New York City government school. Now (in a New York Times magazine article) Nikole wonders: In Fighting for Every Black Child, Did I Betray My Own? She claims to have hoped that choice "would challenge New York City’s separate and unequal school system."

  Charles C.W. Cooke joins the chorus of critical voices, pointing out What Nikole Hannah-Jones Doesn’t Say. (NR gifted link)

  ‘My daughter,” wrote Nikole Hannah-Jones in 2024, “is not worth more than any other child.”

  This assessment was offered as part of a reflection on a New York Times essay that Hannah-Jones had written eight years earlier on the subject of choosing an appropriate school. In tandem, she imparted two other reflections: that the school she’d made such a commotion about picking was clearly “failing”; and that, regardless, she still believed she had “made the right choice.”

  Two years later, she has changed her mind. Or, rather: Two years later, her daughter has changed her mind for her. Having eventually learned what her mother had done to her, her daughter “just shook her head, her face a mask of disbelief, and something else: betrayal,” the writer admitted this week in the Times.

  For penning this mea culpa, Hannah-Jones has received a good deal of praise. Well, you can count me out of all that. Her actions were morally indefensible and analytically ignorant, and her supposed metamorphosis remains invisible to the naked eye. She has always been a ridiculous zealot. Now, she’s a cautionary tale, too.

  Indeed. Don't send your kids to bad schools simply to show off your admirable ideology.

• A futile and stupid gesture. Jeffrey Blehar takes a look at Trump’s Media-Humiliation Ritual.

  With nothing better to do and nowhere left to turn in the dregs of his unpopularity, Trump is throwing yet another public snit. On Friday, fresh off a rebuke from the court about any potential surprise demolition of the Kennedy Center — and with Susie Wiles out of town — our emotionally incontinent president took to his favorite forum to lash out against an easy and predictable target, the mainstream media. From atop his mighty perch on Truth Social, Trump thundered:

  I am proud to announce that, effective immediately, I am banning Fake News CNN, MSNOW (who recently changed their name from MSNBC due to lack of viewership and credibility!), and Politico (The recipients of an illegal and ridiculous $8 Million Dollar subscription, an All Time Record, directly from the United States Government, under Crooked Joe Biden, in order to keep them “alive.” Seems like corruption to me!), from the White House as a result of their constant “reporting” FAKE NEWS! Media Outlets shouldn’t be able to constantly write or report FICTION and LIES when they’re covering the President of the United States, the Trump Administration, or the United States of America. Other Fake News Media Outlets to follow. Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DONALD J. TRUMP

  The next day, the ban went into effect and journalists from CNN, MS NOW, and Politico were barred from White House grounds. What did they do to provoke Trump’s special wrath this time? Nobody knows! Exist is my guess. They are a target of convenience — left-coded enough that Trump thinks he can kick them like dogs to his satisfaction while basking in the cheers of his MAGA faithful: There you go, that ought to repair that -38 job approval rating! (Don’t doubt for a moment that Trump genuinely believes that he would be at +20 approval were it not for faithless media coverage.)

  It’s also important to stress that Trump intends this as a humiliation ritual. Politico will not cease writing stories on the truly spectacular corruption within the Trump White House because of this, nor will CNN suddenly start ignoring Trump’s poll ratings. The ban is meant merely to send a public message of disgrace to these outlets and imply a warning to the rest: Behave well, or else.

  And Jeffrey has further commentary on Trump's planned "Triumphal Arch", now to festooned with drones, snipers, and "large quantities of sniper ammunition in storage."