Pun Salad

I've been pretty slipshod over the years about Juneteenth. Let me change that with a relevant Coleman Hughes article, describing What American Students Aren’t Taught About Slavery.

Cakewalk?! Well, sure: Wikipedia has an article.

But Coleman provides balance to the story of slavery: it wasn't confined to America, and it wasn't just Blacks. His students were dumbfounded to be told.

Also of note:

• Only safely viewable from a distance, preferably hundreds of miles. Jeffrey Blehar confesses: New York’s Mayoral Race Is a Glorious Dumpster Fire, And I Love It. (NR gifted link)

  Among the choices, Eric Adams; Andrew Cuomo ("Governor Nosferatu"); and…

  Meanwhile, New York City progressives hate Cuomo every bit as much as they hate Adams, and they have chosen to rally — with their typical semireligious fervor — around State Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani. Mamdani, the Indian-Ugandan Muslim son of a filmmaker and a Columbia University poli-sci professor, might as well have been purpose-built by Soros-funded scientists in a lab to activate every fashionably progressive erogenous zone in city politics.

  A handsome and affable public speaker, Mamdani thrills crowds of educated hyper-woke young white women with his visions of a “more equitable” New York: He is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America. He calls for universal health care and the increased use of “social workers” as opposed to police. He promises to eliminate bus fares, open city-run grocery stores, and institute rent freezes. Do you even need to ask whether Zohran embraces the full spectrum of the LGBT rainbow? He’s so woke his own biography is practically the living embodiment of the DEI ideal.

  And on international affairs — something that actually matters for the mayor of New York, the world’s most important city and home of the United Nations — he is unspeakably awful.

  He is a vocal supporter of the boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement that has plagued college campuses and academic institutions over the past 15 years. He openly labels Israel’s war in Gaza a “genocide.” Just yesterday, in an interview with Tim Miller of The Bulwark, Mamdani refused to condemn the phrase “Globalize the intifada,” saying that, when he hears those chants, “What I hear . . . is a desperate desire for equality and equal rights in standing up for Palestinian human rights.” He further embarrassed himself by saying “intifada” was how the Holocaust Museum translates the Warsaw Ghetto “uprising” into Arabic, as if the two were functionally equivalent. (The problem, of course, is that Mamdani sincerely believes they are.)

  Long excerpt, free link. Check it out.

• And has she been fired yet? Jeff Maurer wonders: What, In Theory, Is Tulsi Gabbard's Job? (His subhed: "Tulsi: What would you say ya do here?")

  Yesterday, Trump had this to say about Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard’s assessment of Iran’s nuclear program:

  “I don't care what she said.”

  I think this was a rare shrewd assessment from the president. Trump and I don’t agree often, but we’re definitely on the same page here. Here is a partial list of people I would rather the president listen to than Tulsi Gabbard on foreign policy matters:

  • Jared Kushner

  • The “Son of Sam” dog

  • Chat GPT

  • Laffy Taffy wrappers

  • A pig that makes foreign policy decisions by eating from troughs labeled “bomb” and “do not bomb”

  • The Great Gazoo

  • Beatles records played backwards

  • An infinite number of monkeys at an infinite number of typewriters

  Trump’s comment wasn’t a one-off; Gabbard appears to have been sidelined. Axios reports that Trump’s “entire top foreign policy team” recently met at Camp David to discuss Israel and Iran, but notes that Trump’s top foreign policy team doesn’t include Gabbard. That seems…strange — she’s technically the director of national intelligence. If the president held a summit of Chinese-American cellists and didn’t invite Yo-Yo Ma, I don’t think I’d be nuts to assume that the president might have some beef with Yo-Yo Ma.

  A quick Googling shows she hasn't quit yet. In theory, the DNI might be a useful and important component of a foreign policy structure. Hey, maybe bring back John Bolton!

• Fire away! Noah Smith looks at some poor polemical marksmanship: Progressives take their best shot at Abundance (but it falls short).

  It continues to be the case that almost none of Abundance’s critics seem to have actually read the book. The first wave of critics basically ignored the ideas in it, and talked about their own ideas instead. Later critics became more aggressive, frenetically lobbing insult-words at the authors — “libertarian”, “Republican”, “oligarch-funded”, etc. — that completely ignored the book’s argument that excessive regulation is holding back big government. Occasionally, these shouters would admit that they had not, in fact, read the book they were insulting.

  What explains this frantic, scrambling assault? I have no doubt that many progressives instinctively feel that anyone who criticizes any kind of regulation is a small-government pro-corporate neoliberal. But Marc J. Dunkelman’s book Why Nothing Works — which makes the same exact point as Abundance, with more depth on the history and legal details of anti-government regulation — has provoked no such outpouring of vitriol.

  My best guess is that it’s not the ideas in Abundance that frightened progressives, but the identities of the authors — or, more specifically, one of the authors. Marc J. Dunkelman is a bookish academic, and Derek Thompson is a well-read wonkish opinion writer, but Ezra Klein is a powerful tastemaker and arbiter of opinion within the Democratic party. If Ezra Klein says that it’s time for the Democrats to start concentrating their energies on raising state capacity, then there’s a good chance that five years later, “raising state capacity” is what the party will be all about.

  My best guess is that it’s not the ideas in Abundance that frightened progressives, but the identities of the authors — or, more specifically, one of the authors. Marc J. Dunkelman is a bookish academic, and Derek Thompson is a well-read wonkish opinion writer, but Ezra Klein is a powerful tastemaker and arbiter of opinion within the Democratic party. If Ezra Klein says that it’s time for the Democrats to start concentrating their energies on raising state capacity, then there’s a good chance that five years later, “raising state capacity” is what the party will be all about.

  I recently read the Dunkelman book — my report here — and wasn't too impressed. Although it did a pretty good job of convincing me that Progressivism isn't a very coherent political philosophy.

I could not resist replying:

"Y'know, that 'deplorables' thing worked so well for Hillary... we should double down on that."

— Paul Sand (@punsalad) June 17, 2025

Goodness knows I'm not a Trump fan, but flinging childish insults about his supporters is no way to woo people to your side.

Also of note:

• Fetish (n): an object believed to have magical powers. Recently outing himself as a fetishist is New Hampshire State Representative David Meuse, in the editorial pages of my worthless local newspaper, Foster's Daily Democrat. His headline reveals what he thinks is really to blame for a recent atrocity: Assassinations in Minnesota part of nation's larger plague of gun violence.

  Meuse will not be the first politician, nor the last, to point with horror at the murder weapon, and not the monster wielding it.

  But where is the standard followup, the part where one or more gun control measures are advocated? Meuse is a state legislator, after all. You don't even need to come up with something that would have prevented the horror in Minnesota! Goodness knows, that's never stopped other wannabe gun-controllers!

  Well it gets pretty lame, and I've bolded his proposed "solution":

  Until we do more to protect ALL of us from gun violence, we will continue to live with the consequences of brutal and unnecessary tragedies like the one in Minnesota.

  That's it. "Do more."

  It's just that simple!

• Welcome to Serfdom! Population: Us. Jim Geraghty reports: We Saw ‘Government Motors,’ Now Trump Has Created ‘U.S. Government Steel’. Quoting Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick's tweet:

  President Trump has secured a perpetual Golden Share as part of Nippon Steel’s acquisition of U.S. Steel. This partnership between the United States and Nippon Steel includes historic $14 billion investment in U.S. Steel by Nippon Steel that will revitalize this strategic and…

  — Howard Lutnick (@howardlutnick) June 14, 2025

  That "perpetual Golden Share" essentially makes U.S. Steel a nationalized industry. Click through for the superpowers it awards to "the President of the United States or his designee".

  Jim comments:

  I hope all the Republicans who justifiably objected, loudly and frequently, to the U.S. government purchasing shares of General Motors – earning the company the derisive nickname, “Government Motors” – remember to object to this arrangement. The board of directors of U.S. Steel and those who own the 226 million shares of U.S. Steel stock no longer really make the decisions for the company; now the U.S. government gets to veto the decisions listed above.

  Jim also fondly remembers that "Before, during, and after the taxpayer bailout, GM continued to make millions of vehicles that could kill you if your key chain was too heavy."

  My take on the GM bailout, back in the day, may be viewed here.

• “A government bureau is the nearest thing to eternal life we’ll ever see on this earth.” (Ronald Reagan.)

  At Cato, Nicholas Anthony looks at a program that hasn't been used by anyone since 2022: Postal Banking Continues to Fail.

  For anyone wondering, “What is the postal banking pilot program?” here’s a brief breakdown to get you up to speed. The United States Postal Service (USPS) offered banking services up until 1966. It was largely discontinued because the service wasn’t popular. More recently, however, people have been calling for a return to postal banking. The argument is that having the government provide bank accounts would help the millions of Americans who do not have accounts.

  The USPS needs Congress to sign off on such a radical change, and there’s little sign of that happening. So, the USPS did the next worst thing: it exploited past expansions of its authority to create the postal banking pilot program. Almost overnight, the USPS launched the new program in four cities. People could now bring in their payroll checks and get them loaded onto prepaid gift cards, albeit for a fee of $5.95 and a daily limit of $500.

  Of course, the employees that keep track of postal banking's lack of use go on drawing a salary.

  Pun Salad's previous article on postal banking may be found here. Unsurprisingly, Elizabeth Warren was a fan back then.

• Going out on a limb. The AntiPlanner predicts Amtrak Will Not Be Profitable by 2028.

  “With steady, sustained support from Congress and the administration, Amtrak’s passenger train service will become operationally profitable by FY 28,” says Amtrak in its latest request for subsidies from U.S. taxpayers. This is, at best, deceptive and at worst an outright lie.

  Even as Amtrak promises to be profitable in three years, it admits that it is losing more money now than in 2019 despite carrying record numbers of passengers. It blames this on costs rising faster than revenues, reductions in state support for many trains, and increased costs “treated as operating costs” even though they are supposedly really capital investments. Unless Congress dramatically cuts Amtrak’s capital funding, it isn’t clear how any of these trends will be reversed in the next three years.

  Amtrak or its backers have promised that profitability was just around the corner ever since it began. […]

  Amtrak is asking Congress for a cool $2,427,000,000 in FY2026. What I'd like to see in response is: "How about nothing? Does nothing work for you?"

• Speaking of spending money we don't have… Allison Schrager writes on Fair-weather Hawks.

  I’ve seen some very strong opinions about the Big Beautiful Bill. Everyone suddenly seems to have found debt religion. Welcome to the club! Though I’m wary of these new debt hawk allies—because their objections strike me as more politically convenient than a sudden and sincere concern about the debt. No one is speaking out against anything their political constituency actually favors. I don’t hear Republican debt hawks naming a single tax cut they don’t like. (For the record, I favor extending the TCJA and restoring bonus depreciation—though I’d prefer thoughtful tax reform.) I hate increasing the SALT limit, the tax on tips, and all the other new distortions we’re throwing in that will never go away.

  Meanwhile, Democrats are incensed that ANYONE might lose Medicaid coverage—even able-bodied young men—especially if anyone else is getting a tax cut. We’ve expanded Medicaid a lot over the years. Are they arguing every expansion must be irreversible? Just say you see Medicaid as a backdoor way to create a government option that covers most people—even those who are borderline middle class.

  I wrote for Bloomberg that both Democrats and Republicans need to get real. Republicans must accept that taxes need to go up; Democrats must accept that we can’t afford a welfare state for the middle class. If they did, we could actually make progress. We could broaden the tax base (get rid of all the deductions), lower rates, and implement a VAT. We could also agree that welfare is for the needy and unlucky, make it work better for the people who need it, and remove all the incentives that make work expensive if you live on benefits. That would not only save us lots of money and fix the debt problem—it would also boost growth.

  My memory may be fading, but I still remember that it's a bad idea for Republicans to buy a tax increase now for a pinky-swear promise of spending reductions in the future. Cue up the Who's "Won't Get Fooled Again".

xkcd: Exoplanet System:

Mouseover: "Sure, this exoplanet we discovered may seem hostile to life, but our calculations suggest it's actually in the accretion disc's habitable zone."

I've previously remarked on how some factions of science fandom (and even some scientists) are incredibly hopeful that there are earthlike planets out there somewhere. That's no way to approach a scientific question, is it?

I confess, I have a preference for the Rare Earth hypothesis. Where I interpret "rare" as "probably just us." Based on nothing more than general contrariness, probably with a bit of leftover religion of my youth.

If you want to see the real deal on that last thing, though, head on over to The Institute for Creation Research, for the full It-Wuz-God explanation.

I'd bet against them, but not a lot.

Also of note:

• Here's hoping my dishwasher holds up. Why? Because, according to Jack Nicastro at Reason: Trump is putting a 50 percent tariff on home appliances.

  President Donald Trump has been celebrating in recent weeks as his administration strikes bilateral trade deals following "Liberation Day." Some products, however, will soon be subject to increased duties, not lower ones. Starting June 30, imports derived from aluminum and steel will be subject to a 50 percent ad valorem tariff. These duties will hit imports of common household appliances like refrigerators and dishwashers and increase the cost of living for everyday Americans.

  Trump issued two executive orders on February 10 directing the Commerce Department to subject aluminum and steel imports to the 25 percent ad valorem tariffs imposed during his first administration. The orders cite the January 2018 reports of then-Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross warning that steel and aluminum imports threatened to impair U.S. national security. These reports provided Trump the statutory authority to modify the Harmonized Tariff Schedule of the U.S. (HTSUS) under Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962, which "allows the President to impose restrictions on goods imports…with trading partners if the U.S. Secretary of Commerce determines…that the quantity or other circumstance of those imports 'threaten to impair' U.S. national security."

  As mentioned just yesterday: this kind of thing will hurt the less-well-off much worse than tax changes in the One Big Beautiful Bill.

• As my neighbor advises: if you really want to be exhausted, get your kids a DoubleDoodle puppy. Or if you want to go the other way, you could read Kevin D. Williamson's take: Against Exhaustion.

  For a bonus, KDW leads off with a Bastiat quote:

  We must confess that our adversaries have a marked advantage over us in the discussion. In very few words they can announce a half-truth; and, in order to demonstrate that it is incomplete, we are obliged to have recourse to long and dry dissertations.

  And continues:

  Readers of these pages of course know Jonah Goldberg. Alberto Brandolini is an Italian computer programmer who gave us Brandolini’s Law, which holds: “The amount of energy needed to refute bullsh-t is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it.” According to lore, Brandolini was inspired to put this into succinct form by seeing a television interview with Silvio Berlusconi (in his day, the Luciano Pavarotti of bulls—t) right after reading Thinking, Fast and Slow. (I will here confess some envy at the fact that Brandolini’s Law has caught on, while Williamson’s Ratio—40.44:1, the average number of intelligent English words it takes to refute one word of dishonest and illiterate horsepucky—is gathering dust on a shelf at the Museum of Exanimate Rhetorical Devices.) The same idea has been expressed for centuries in various misattributed adages about fast-moving lies and slowpoke facts lacing up their boots. “Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it,” wrote Jonathan Swift, which seems to be the OG version of the proverb in its most familiar form.

  As always, I'm grateful to the Dispatch editors for saving my delicate eyes from seeing that "i" in "bullshit".

• From all the whining, you would think it was more. I think it's fair to say Jim Geraghty is unimpressed with the DOGEizing results so far: DOGE Takes a Nibble Out of Big Government. (NR gifted link)

  Begin with the upside: President Donald Trump was never much of a fiscal hawk in his first term, but at least for the first stretch of his second term, he established the Department of Government Efficiency and put the world’s most energetic — probably hyperactive — billionaire in charge of it, and made cutting wasteful spending a priority.

  As of this writing, according to DOGE’s data, it has identified an estimated $175 billion in savings — about $1,086 per taxpayer — from a combination of “asset sales, contract/lease cancellations and renegotiations, fraud and improper payment deletion, grant cancellations, interest savings, programmatic changes, regulatory savings, and workforce reductions.”

  That sounds good. But if you paid attention during Trump’s big Madison Square Garden rally on October 27, 2024, you’ll recall that Elon Musk pledged to future Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick that DOGE would save taxpayers “at least $2 trillion.” By March, President Trump was boasting that DOGE was going to save so much money that the savings would be returned to taxpayers in the form of “DOGE checks.”

  And you don't hear much about that any more, do ya?

  Note: that's an article from the August print issue of National Review, so you'll want to hit that gifted link if you're not a subscriber.

  But here's the funny part. In Jim's Morning Jolt newsletter yesterday:

  ADDENDUM: A lot of readers detest the recent magazine piece on the disappointments of Elon Musk and DOGE and argue it is far too negative. Apparently, the article focuses too much on what DOGE actually did and the actual numbers, and not enough on how hard Musk and his team tried, and how good their intentions were. I am informed it is “smug” to expect Musk and DOGE to find $2 trillion in savings, just because Musk stood on stage at a rally for Donald Trump in New York’s Madison Square Garden and said, when asked, “How much do you think we can rip out of this wasted $6.5 trillion Harris Biden budget?” responded, “I think we could do at least 2 trillion.” I regret the error of daring to remember things that happened seven months ago.

  Unfortunately, in those heady days, it was easy to forget that (1) Congress has the power of the purse, and (2) "we" keep electing the same big spenders.

• 

  One for the University Near Here Interlibrary Loan Staff. At the WSJ, Judge Glock looks at George Seldin's latest. False Dawn, an economic history of the Great Depression.

  For those who lived through the Great Depression, the strangeness of it was hard to convey. The nation had suffered no great natural disaster. The farmers were still farming, and the factories were still standing. Yet there lay rotting food that people couldn’t afford to buy and empty factories next to shanty towns filled with the unemployed.

  In 1932 Franklin Delano Roosevelt won the presidency with the promise to restore prosperity. But he and his advisers had no clear explanation for the collapse and his subsequent New Deal would amount to a series of experiments. FDR admitted to the nation that some of his proposals took the nation down “a new and untrod path.” If they failed to “produce the hoped-for results, I shall be the first to acknowledge it.”

  George Selgin’s “False Dawn” asks if the New Deal’s varied experiments produced the promised recovery. In dispassionate, careful and finally devastating detail, “False Dawn” shows that, with a few exceptions, FDR’s experiments did not work. And he did not acknowledge it.

  Hope I get to it. I'm not a young person any more.

From our lousy local newspaper, Foster's Daily Democrat, came the opinions of "The Observer", one Ron McAllister. Apparently Ron gets his picture of rich people from… well, read for yourself: Scrooge McDuck would be a fan of One Big Beautiful Bill.

Yes, he draws important insights about rich Americans by … well, it's unclear whether he's recollecting old comic books, or watching Duck Tales reruns on the Disney Channel. Doesn't matter, I think. His opinions are literally cartoonish.

Ron's arguments, such as they are, heavily rely on insult-flinging, hand-waving, and resentment-mongering. A slice:

You wouldn't know from Ron's description that the OBBB's effect on "rich people" is to leave their marginal income tax rates where they've been since 2018; they were otherwise due to go from 37% back to where they were before that: 39.6%. So, roughly speaking: if Elon, Jeff, or Mark net an additional million bucks, Uncle Stupid would grab $396,000 of that instead of $370,000.

Does that make them "big winners"? Eh: the Tax Foundation estimates that the 2026 tax bill for the "upper 1%" might go down about 4%.

To translate that into a cartoon Ron might understand better: it wouldn't raise the moola level in the money bins of Musk, Bezos, and Zuckerberg by a noticeable amount.

(Not that I'm a Trump fan; I think there will be big economic woes in store for everyone, caused mostly by runaway deficit spending, but also by his stupid tariffs.)

Also of note:

• Unfortunately, students won't automatically get smarter. But Emma Camp describes other salutary effects: What happens if Trump and Congress abolish the Education Department? A slice:

  "Most of the discussion from the administration and in Congress is about moving Department of Education functions to other departments," says Neal McCluskey, director of the Cato Institute's Center for Educational Freedom. "If that is what is done, it will not change what the federal government does in education, only which agencies do those things."

  According to McCluskey, federal funding to K-12 schools and colleges would likely just move to another department, though he notes there are "proposals to consolidate, at least, programs and turn them into block grants to states, which would cut down on bureaucratic compliance costs." The federal student loan program "would likely go to the Treasury Department or possibly the Small Business Administration, both of which have experience with financial instruments, including loans," he adds.

  "Almost everything the Department of Education does is unconstitutional," McCluskey says. "The Constitution gives the federal government only specific, enumerated powers, and authority to govern in education is not among them. So almost all the spending and activities should go away."

  That (a) would be nice; and (b) won't happen. At least not soon.

• A reminder that the CDC wanted to kill you. (Well, statistically speaking.) Megan McArdle recalls How one meeting in 2020 and a GOP senator helped create RFK Jr.’s vaccine wreck. (WaPo gifted link)

  In more than 20 years of covering policy, I have witnessed some crazy stuff. But one episode towers above the rest in sheer lunacy: the November 2020 meeting of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices. Sounds boring? Usually, maybe.

  But that meeting was when the committee’s eminent experts, having considered a range of vaccine rollout strategies, selected the plan that was projected to kill the most people and had the least public support.

  In a survey conducted in August 2020, most Americans said that as soon as health-care workers were inoculated with the coronavirus vaccine, we should have started vaccinating the highest-risk groups in order of their vulnerability: seniors first, then immunocompromised people, then other essential workers. Instead of adopting this sensible plan, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advisory committee decided to inoculate non-medical essential workers ahead of seniors, even though its own modeling suggested this would increase deaths by up to 7 percent.

  Why did they do this? Social justice. The word “equity” came up over and over in the discussion — essential workers, you see, were more likely than seniors to come from “marginalized communities.” Only after a backlash did sanity prevail.

  Yes, that murderous advisory committee is the same one Junior recently fired everyone from. Not that his replacements are better; they're probably gonna be worse.

• 

  I reckon it's a tough road to travel. Daniel Akst reviews What Is It Like To Be an Addict? by Owen Flanagan, Amazon link at your right:

  Addiction is a problem that defenders of liberty need to face, for if citizens cannot control their appetites, the state may be inclined to take over the job for them. Freedom depends on self-command supported by a fragile web of norms and relationships that lets us keep our own lives in order and get along with one another. Addiction is the acute case of the appetites run amok, as they often do when unfettered by such constraints as wealth, religion, and community.

  Owen Flanagan's new book, What Is It Like To Be an Addict?, should be welcomed by anyone concerned with these issues. Despite its modest size, this is a work of large ambition and broad range informed not just by the author's long career as a prominent philosopher but by his many years as a desperately addicted abuser of alcohol and sedatives.

  […]

  Unsurprisingly given his experience, Flanagan stresses that we should pay close attention to what the addicted have to tell us. And among the most important things addicts say is that they are by no means blameless just because they supposedly have a disease. On the contrary, many feel shame (for being an addict) and guilt (for behaviors that are slowly destroying them and harming their loved ones).

  I recently read Freedom Regained by philosopher Julian Baggini that had an entire chapter revolving around how addiction is related to "free will". Baggini actually went out to talk with a few addicts. Eye-opening. It sounds as if Flanagan covers some of the same issues.

How did this happen? pic.twitter.com/vSzXIix2Tb

— Jacob Shell (@JacobAShell) June 11, 2025

Apparently, it's a Rorschach test for leftism, as indicated by Natalie Sandoval at the Daily Caller: ‘It’s Bullsh*t’: Liberals Seethe At Diversity Debunking Study.

I'm not exactly seething, but I left my own comment on the study over at Facebook:

This has been a constant sore point for those of us on the right who hold the correct positions about everything, all the time.

Also of note:

• A sweet story. I don't mean to keep posting about this musical genius, but I can't resist clipping out this anecdote from Bob Greene in yesterday's WSJ: Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys, My Endless Inspiration. (WSJ gifted link)

  I had called my friend Gary Griffin to shoot the breeze, as I’d been doing a couple of times every week. This was in the early 1990s; Gary was the keyboard player for surf rockers Jan and Dean, and I had just started to tour with them singing backup.

  He was at home in Panorama City, Calif., and I was in Chicago. He was out in his recording studio. “My friend Brian’s here,” Gary said.

  “Who’s Brian?” I said.

  “Wilson,” Gary said.

  Oh. That’s all.

  “What a coincidence,” I said. “John Lennon’s over at my house.”

  Gary laughed and handed the phone to Brian, the man whose music had thrilled me from the time I was a boy, the man I had never dared to imagine ever meeting. He said hello and, not knowing what to say to him, I asked: “What are you going to sing in Gary’s studio?”

  “I don’t know,” Brian said. “What do you think I should sing?”

  I could scarcely process this. For some reason I said:

  “ ‘Stupid Cupid.’ ”

  The 1958 Connie Francis Top 40 hit. What a ridiculous thing to say to Brian Wilson. Of all the songs in the world to blurt out.

  “ ‘Stupid Cupid’?” Brian said. “That’s a great song.”

  And then, in one of the wonderful moments life will sometimes hand you, I heard him start to play the piano, and to sing:

  “Stupid Cupid, you’re a real mean guy . . .”

  Across the time zones I listened, entranced.

  “I’d like to clip your wings so you can’t fly . . .”

  He wasn’t doing it sarcastically; he was a man without guile. He had driven to Gary’s house to sing, and “Stupid Cupid” was fine with him. I sat there, an audience of one—well, with Gary, two—and counted my blessings.

  More at the link, of course.

• Theory: Those too crazy to be family therapists wind up teaching wannabe family therapists. Also in the WSJ a few days back: Naomi Epps Best Santa Clara University’s Crazy Idea of Human Sexuality. (WSJ gifted link)

  I’m a graduate student in marriage and family therapy at Santa Clara University, a Jesuit institution. Recently, I walked out of class. Prof. Chongzheng Wei had just played a video of a female “influencer” engaging in sexual bondage activity. When the lights came up, the professor smiled and asked if we wanted to try it ourselves. Maybe it was a crass joke to break the tension, but I didn’t want to find out if a live demonstration was next.

  What began as a simple accommodation request in a required course called Human Sexuality turned into a case study in the reshaping of therapy training—not by science but by critical theory, a worldview that filters human experience through left-wing assumptions about power, oppression and identity, particularly regarding race, “gender” and sexuality.

  More information about Naomi's efforts to avoid the offensive looniness at the link.

  But that's just part one of her story. Part two showed up Thursday:

  Blew the whistle in @WSJopinion on ideological rigidity in therapy training. A week later, I am fired from my internship with the regret of my boss. This field is in crisis. The public needs to know. pic.twitter.com/EldOjq0hOG

  — Naomi Best (@naomieppsbest) June 12, 2025

• Won't get fooled more than five or six times again, tops. J.D. Tuccille points out: Europeans pay exorbitant taxes for their 'free' government services.

  People who want a larger, more active state frequently point to their favorite European country (usually a small Scandinavian nation) and ask why America doesn't provide lots of "free" services like that alleged utopia. The answer is that it could but that wouldn't necessarily make people happier. The U.S. is a large and diverse country where people don't nearly agree with each other on what they want, and it's difficult for government to provide more services without fueling arguments over what and how much should be provided. Importantly, too, those services aren't free—they carry a very high price tag.

  "Governments with higher taxes generally tout that they provide more services, and while this is often true, the cost of these services can be more than half of an average worker's salary, and for most, at least a third of their salary," Cristina Enache wrote last week for the Tax Foundation. "Belgium has the highest tax burden on labor at 52.6 percent (also the highest of all OECD countries), followed by Germany and France at 47.9 percent and 47.2 percent, respectively. Switzerland had the lowest tax burden at 22.9 percent."

  I assume one way they get away with this is envy-based egalitarianism. You can be reassured when sitting in a DMV-style waiting room that millionaires are sitting there with you, not paying more money for better access as they might do in, say, America.

Recently on the movie blog:

Veronique de Rugy advises you to not get your hopes up: Tax Cuts Yes, But Don't Expect 'Big, Beautiful' Growth. Skipping down to the caveats:

And more. I hate to be the turd in the punchbowl, but I fear Vero and the other critics of the One Big Beautiful Bill are right.

On the wasteful, dumb, absurd, and unconstitutional front:

• Who doesn't love a parade? Billy Binion at Reason for one: Trump's military parade is a waste of millions of taxpayer dollars.

  President Donald Trump has described the upcoming military parade using a familiar theme: its size. It will be a "big, beautiful" event, he told NBC's Meet the Press last month.

  Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. The parade will, however, objectively be big, from the contents of the parade itself—25 M1 Abrams main battle tanks! Dozens of other military vehicles! Aircrafts! 6,600 soldiers marching!—to the price tag, which is currently estimated to come out somewhere between $25 million and $45 million for an approximately 90-minute event. That comes out to $277,778–$500,000 per minute.

  A majority of Americans, it turns out, do not think that big cost is beautiful; 60 percent of respondents in a recent poll said the parade is not a good use of taxpayer money. The sample size was 40 percent Republican and 40 percent Democrat, with the remaining 20 percent identifying as "independent/none."

  The millions of dollars the public is paying to fund the parade—which will take place on Saturday, Trump's 79th birthday—are "peanuts," the president said, when "compared to the value." Yet it is difficult to reconcile that position with one of his hallmark campaign promises: reining in wasteful government spending.

  Well, maybe there will be some cool video involved.

• Who doesn't love dumb government grocery stores? As long as the ill effects don't extend up here, I'm in agreement with Jeff Maurer: I Want Zohran Mamdani to Become Mayor of New York So That I Can Watch His Dumb Government Grocery Stores Fail.

  New York is reaching the end of the term of Eric Adams, a Democrat embraced by Trump because he shares Trump’s deep commitment to corruption. The options in the Democratic primary have basically dwindled to a socialist nitwit and a mediocre pervert, where “mediocre” refers to the candidate’s ability as a legislator, not his résumé as a pervert. It’s also not impossible for Adams to win reelection, hence the video above. Other off-the-wall scenarios are also in play, because this election is like hearing something rustle in the bushes in Prospect Park: Any manner of surprising awfulness might emerge.

  If I still lived in New York, I would probably vote for the mediocre pervert. But I don’t live in New York; I left a few years ago for Washington, DC, where civic politics is a sophisticated tête-à-tête between philosopher kings and queens, producing the enlightened utopia that you see before you today. So, my rooting interest here is purely as a shit-stirring outsider — I’m just in it for the LOLs, folks. And that’s why I want Socialist candidate Zohran Mamdani to win so that I can watch his dumb plan for city-owned grocery stores go up in flames like a Waymo in Los Angeles.

  I didn't include the video, but it's somewhat amusing, if you're not a sheep. Mamdani's plan is (incredibly) even worse than you might expect from the general rule that "socialism doesn't work".

• Who doesn't love "campaign finance reform"? George Will doesn't, and he views Peak absurdity on campaign finance reform heads to the Supreme Court. (WaPo gifted link)

  Developments in recent decades reflect diminished respect for the First Amendment. These include campus speech codes, political pressure for censorship on social media platforms, and a society-wide “cancel culture” that inspires self-censorship lest “harmful” speech “trigger” offended hearers.

  The most serious speech-regulation began half a century ago, under the antiseptic rubric of “campaign finance reform.” On Wednesday, the Supreme Court can begin removing another shackle reformers have clamped on political speech. The court will consider taking a case about whether the First Amendment is violated by limits on what political parties can spend in coordination with their candidates’ campaigns.

  The biggest problem I have with political speech is how to avoid it. I'm pretty sure it causes brain rot.

• And who doesn't love government funding of public broadcasting? Jeffrey Miron asks Should Government Fund Public Broadcasting? And guess what Betteridge's Law of Headlines says about that?

  On May 27, NPR, Aspen Public Radio, Colorado Public Radio, and KSUT Public Radio filed a lawsuit challenging President Donald Trump’s executive order that would cancel all federal support for public media.

  The lawsuit argues that the order violates the First Amendment and the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967, which prevents federal agencies from controlling the CPB. The CPB distributes federal funds to local public radio and television stations.

  We set aside whether a president or only Congress can cancel federal funding for CPB and instead address whether such funding is good policy. Our answer is no.

  The main reason is that such funding is inconsistent with the First Amendment. Any government policy or program has a viewpoint, but funding television and radio broadcasting is especially problematic, since government financing inevitably subsidizes some perspectives over others. Even a formally ‘neutral’ grant process cannot escape this effect: public money sustains the editorial judgments of the recipients and leaves rival voices to fend for themselves.

  This should not be hard.

Recently on the book blog:

I have nothing to say about Israel's strikes on Iran except… well, good job, Israel. Hope things work out well.

But we are going for amusement today, for example the video genius of Austin Bragg and Andrew Heaton at Reason, imagining a celebration slightly different from the one scheduled tomorrow: D.C. parade fail.

If I were still living in the area, I might take the Metro downtown to check that out.

Also of note:

• On the LFOD watch. My Google News Alert notified me of the provocative headline at (I am not making this up) Big Think: Why don’t Americans trust experts? Just ask a paranormal investigator.

  Well, of course. The average paranormal investigator is totally qualified to provide insights into the US zeitgeist.

  But things kind of go off the rails and into the New Hampshire wilderness in the interview with Matt Hongoltz-Hetling:

  Big Think: Why do so many people in New Hampshire see ghosts, aliens, and cryptids?

  Hongoltz-Hetling: New Hampshire has a perfect storm of dynamics within its culture. First, New England is much more infused with a sense of history and age than other parts of the country; it was settled first, and there’s a constant homage to the past. 

  New Hampshire is also famously individualistic. This expresses itself in various ways. It’s the country’s libertarian hotspot. It has very high rates of atheism, which is sort of an opting out of an institution. It has its “Live free or die” motto. Those factors have also made New Hampshire the leader in institutional distrust. So all of those things together are a perfect recipe for breeding increased belief in supernatural phenomena.

  Showcasing this, New Hampshire has had some truly seminal moments in paranormal history. It was the site of the first widely popularized UFO abduction story, the Betty and Barney Hill incident.

  I think [that incident] seeded the local and regional communities with a higher awareness of those sorts of things. Instead of just reading about it through an AP story or seeing it talked about on The Tonight Show, you may know somebody who is connected to this big UFO incident. And that was just one of a handful of incidents to have occurred in New Hampshire.

  For all those reasons New Hampshire is in the perfect place at the perfect time to inherit an increased awareness of, and belief in, those “out there” phenomena. 

  Uh, fine. Although that answer does kind of have that uncanny AI LLM feel to it, where random Granite State factoids were pulled up from the web to form a superficially plausible explanation.

  So, history, individualism, LFOD, atheism? Let me throw in another possible factor.

  New Hampshire had the highest consumption of alcohol, with alcohol consumption per capita of 4.76 gallons. `

  Reader, the second-place state, Delaware, is not even close to us, at 3.52 gallons.

  (Matt Hongoltz-Hetling, by the way, authored A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear, on which I opined back in 2020.)

• Gee, it's been days since we insulted Greta Thunberg. So, take it away, David Harsanyi: Greta Thunberg is the embodiment of progressive vapidity.

  Professional leftist Greta Thunberg was brought to Israel this week after the “selfie yacht” she was traveling on attempted to break through a naval blockade of Gaza. The “Madleen” was part of a “flotilla” pretending to deliver aid to alleviate an imaginary famine. The same day, 62 Israeli trucks carrying food entered the Gaza Strip.

  The 22-year-old was given food and shelter and sent home by the Israeli government, which she accused of “kidnapping” her. All the usual suspects went along with this predictable framing.

  If Thunberg really wanted to better understand the concept of an abduction, she might have asked Hamas to visit the Israelis still being tortured in a dank basement somewhere in Rafa. But the “human rights activist,” which is how the media unironically describes her, has never once called for the release of the hostages taken by Islamists. Indeed, the flotilla effort was reportedly organized by a “Hamas operative.”

  That "Hamas operative" is Zaher Birawi, described as a "founding member" of the "Freedom Flotilla Coalition". Unsurprisingly, our local Hamas cheerleader, pastor of the Community Church of Durham, is over there in Israel. Among other things, plugging "Freedom Flotilla Coalition" videos at his blog.

• It's a negative-sum game all the way down. It's another confirmation for Betteridge's Law of Headlines as Scott Sumner asks: Borrow billions for babies?

  The administration has proposed giving newborn babies (whose parents have Social Security numbers) a savings account containing $1,000, which must be saved at least until the child reached the age of 18. Here is Ryan Teague Beckwith at MSNBC:

  If a lower-income family added no money to their Trump account, after 18 years that $1,000 would have grown to around $2,000, if we assume a generous 4% rate of return.

  So…

  Imagine the typical baby were to invest the $1,000 in government bonds yielding 4%. Then at age 18, they would come into possession of two things:

  1. A $2,000 government bond.

  2. An expectation that they’ll have to pay an extra $2,000 in future taxes (in present value terms) in order to service that debt.

  In other words, on average, they will be no better off than if the program had never been created. Under the assumption of Ricardo/Barro equivalence, they should just hold onto the bonds forever.

  In other words, there’s no such thing as a free lunch.

  Might be able to fool 'em though.

• I still like Joni Ernst. And she was a good sport to accept Jeff Maurer's invitation to expand on her recent Iowa town hall remarks at his substack: When I Said "We're All Going To Die", I Meant "Soon"

  Recently, I made waves when, during a town hall meeting, I responded to an audience member’s concern that Medicare cuts will cause people to die by saying “Well, we all are going to die.” I expanded on my comments in a social media post, but that hasn’t lessened the uproar. The liberal media are determined to twist my words and portray my position as something that it’s not.

  So, let me be clear: I was not being flippant about that audience member’s concerns. Nor was I viewing a serious issue through an abstract lens. I was making a key point directly relevant to the conversation: We are all going to die. Not at some distant point in the future — imminently. I’m talking weeks, if not days. Why are we fighting about Medicare when the Reaper is at our doorstep?! We are all going to be worm food tout de suite, folks! And it seems like that really should override some pedantic point about Medicare.

  Liberals are cynically trying to make hay from my remarks. Activists, social media crusaders, and the lamestream media are portraying me as callous and out-of-touch — the progressive spin machine is going full throttle! They want you to think that I don’t care about people losing health insurance; they’re trying to turn this into a “let them eat cake” moment though misrepresentation and deceptive editing.

  It's been nice knowing you all. See you in the afterlife!

Recently on the book blog:

… what my life would have been like without Brian Wilson. It was only a few days ago that I adapted one of his song titles in a headline. A longtime fan, since my days as a pimply teenager in Omaha. Still remember listening to "Pet Sounds" for the first time with Jeff Gross.

Yes, he could be pretentious and silly, sometimes concurrently. That's OK.

Let me stick in an Eye Candy video, one recommended by Dave Barry:

Sweet. But let's do some words too. There are a lot to choose from, but I will go with Brian Doherty's at Reason: Brian Wilson was an exemplary American.

Rest in peace, Brian.

Also of note:

• LFOD, unless you work for a living. The Center Square reports on the latest report from ALEC: Northeast states get low marks for labor freedoms. And things here in the Granite State are pretty mediocre:

  New Hampshire, the "live free or die" state, didn't fare much better than other New England states, with the report's authors ranking it 34th in the nation for overall labor policies. But the Granite State was ranked in a tie for first in the nation for its $7.25 per hour minimum wage, which is tied to the federal level.

  ALEC is the "American Legislative Exchange Council", and they lean conservatarian. Their own page about their report is here.

  New Hampshire got dinged for not having a right-to-work law, and having a relatively large slice of government employees belonging to unions.

  Still, our 34th place showing was better than Maine (43), Rhode Island (45), Connecticut (46), and Massachusetts (49).

  Still, we got beaten by Vermont (30). Vermont! As in, "People's Republic Of". Come on, we can do better than that.

• I told you I was bored by immigration and rioting. And I still am. So let's ignore Jim Geraghty's Morning Jolt headline (Los Angeles Lawmakers Request the LAPD Break the Law on ICE Raids) and skip down to something more interesting:

  I told you Tulsi Gabbard was going to hate the job of Director of National Intelligence.

  Do you remember ever seeing any other director of national intelligence releasing a video weighing in on U.S. foreign policy on his or her still-active personal social media account? I suspect that you barely remember hearing at all from Avril Haines, John Ratcliffe, Dan Coats, Dennis Blair, etc. And that’s the way it’s supposed to be, because the director of national intelligence isn’t a public-facing job, and the person in it isn’t supposed to be a celebrity.

  And yet, Tuesday afternoon, Gabbard felt the need to announce to the American people, “We stand here today closer to the brink of nuclear annihilation than ever before.”

  Really? I was halfway through my research when I found Noah Rothman had beaten me to it:

  Are we really closer to the “brink of nuclear annihilation” today than we were during the Cuban Missile Crisis? Are we closer than we were on November 9, 1979, when a malfunction indicated to NORAD that a massive nuclear attack on the U.S. was underway? Is it worse than June 3, 1980, when a similar false alarm proved so convincing that Zbigniew Brzezinski resolved to not wake his wife so she would be vaporized painlessly in her sleep? Is the geopolitical situation more unstable than it was in September 1983, when the Soviets experienced their own false alarm — a persistent one that continued despite rebooting the system — in which one Soviet missile officer’s discretion alone averted unimaginable disaster?

  Never mind her likely unfamiliarity with the history of the subject, if you’re going to ominously declare that we’re “closer to the brink of nuclear annihilation than ever before,” with an Angelo Badalamenti–esque ominous soundtrack playing in the background, shouldn’t you . . . explain how we’re so close to a nuclear exchange? Was she referring to Russia? India and Pakistan? North Korea?

  Regretably, Tulsi's a show horse, not a workhorse.

• Who wants to go to Oklahoma City, anyway? The AntiPlanner brings the latest success story: Texas Cancels Amtrak Funding.

  The Texas legislature has declined to continue funding a train between Fort Worth and Oklahoma City. Amtrak calls the train a “vital transportation option,” but in fact few people ride it and it is a costly burden to Oklahoma and Texas taxpayers.

  The train, Amtrak says, served “over 80,000 customers in FY24 and reach[ed] $2.2 million in ticket revenue,” which is supposed to somehow sound impressive. Amtrak’s press release fails to mention that the train cost $9.6 million to operate, not counting depreciation, which means it cost taxpayers at least $92 per rider, and probably much more. In short, taxpayers have to pay more than three quarters of the cost, much more than the average Amtrak train, for which taxpayers cover “only” about 59 percent of the cost (which is still too much).

  I took the Amtrak Downeaster down to Boston and back last month, to see Jimmy Webb in concert. It was kinda arduous and time-consuming, but I suppose I needed to be reminded of that.

• Nine? Oh, right. George Will lists Nine reasons for cautious optimism about individual liberty. (WaPo gifted link)

  I did not expect his leadoff word…

  Aristotle’s axiom “one swallow does not make a summer” suggests caution in anticipating large reverberations from a Supreme Court ruling last week. But the court’s unanimous affirmation of a principle that is commonsensical but now controversial might indicate its readiness to temper the racialization of American law and governance, to which the court has contributed.

  In 2019, Marlean Ames, a heterosexual Ohio woman who had worked in a state agency since 2004, was denied a promotion for a job that went to a lesbian colleague with less experience at the agency and lesser academic credentials. Ames was subsequently demoted to a position involving a 40 percent pay cut, and her prior position was filled by a gay man.

  Ames filed a lawsuit saying she was discriminated against, in violation of Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, because of her sexual orientation. She lost in a district court, and in her appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit, which held that she had not demonstrated “background circumstances” (not defined, anywhere) to justify her suspicion of discrimination. This demonstration requires, the 6th Circuit said, a member of a majority to show that her employer is “that unusual employer who discriminates against the majority.”

  GFW is eloquent, as always, and notes that we'll see pretty soon how willing SCOTUS is to apply this "commonsensical" principle in upcoming decisions.

• So long, Abe. David R. Henderson asks if you have Thoughts For Your Penny? (I must admit mine are curmudgeonly.)

  One of the concepts you come across in a well-taught monetary economics course is the idea of seigniorage. An online dictionary does a pretty decent job of defining it: “The profit made by a government by issuing currency, especially the difference between the face value of coins and their production cost.” Although the definition highlights coins, the concept applies to paper money also.

  The US government makes a pretty penny (pun intended) on seigniorage. It’s not as much as it used to be because more and more people use credit cards and even cryptocurrency to buy goods and services. Still, it’s a good amount.

  The biggest gain from seigniorage is on the $100 bill. Printing one costs the federal government just 9.4 cents. So, when the feds spend this $100, they make a nice profit of $99.90. Not bad. Printing a $1 bill costs the feds 3.2 cents. So even on a $1 bill, the feds make 97 cents.

  But minting small coins loses money for the feds. In its 2024 Annual Report, the US Mint reports the cost of producing each coin denomination. The cost of producing a penny was $0.03. In other words, the cost of producing a penny was three times the value of the penny. Interestingly, the feds went underwater even on the nickel, whose cost, at $0.11, was over twice the value of the nickel. That’s why I stated earlier that the federal government should stop producing nickels also. It isn’t until you get to the dime that you find a coin that the feds make money on. Interestingly, the cost of producing a dime, at $0.045, is less than the cost of producing a nickel.

  I have no interest in nickel-and-diming the Mint, but there's no reason to sob over the fact that the seigniorage on two particular types of currency is negative. That simply doesn't matter a hill of beans in this crazy world.

  And it's a useful reminder of how debased our currency is.

Matthew Hennessey bids us Welcome to the Age of Excusability. (WSJ gifted link)

But, as Matthew goes on to note: "The excusability crisis is bipartisan." Use the gifted link, if necessary, to Peruse the Thing in its Entirety.

Also of note:

• 

  I think I agree with Anthony Comegna and (maybe) David Graeber. Writing in the July issue of Reason, Anthony's headline says: The Best Democracy Is Anarchy. He is reviewing David Graeber's The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World . . . and the Amazon link is at your right.

  Long before European governments or their colonies began to embrace "democracy," something far more democratic was widely practiced in the world's vast ungovernable spaces.

  Black Sam Bellamy's 1717 pirate crew was "a collection of people in which there was likely to be at least some firsthand knowledge of a very wide range of directly democratic institutions," wrote David Graeber, the late anarchist and anthropologist, in one of his essays collected posthumously in The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World…. Those institutions ranged "from Swedish things to African village assemblies to Native American councils": a rich assortment of influences as the sailors found themselves "forced to improvise some mode of self-government in the complete absence of any state." The very ungovernability of the Atlantic itself, the vast inland frontiers, the dense forests and swamplands, made it "the perfect intercultural space" of experiment and improvisation.

  For Graeber, it was the occupants of those democratic spaces, and not any politician or political theorist, from whom we should be taking our historical cues. Democracy, he argued, is not representative government, where the people select appointees to make decisions for them. That's Roman nonsense. Democracy is a daily exercise. It is (or can be) practiced in your workplace or family or place of learning, because those units are the most basic and consequential to daily life. It lives in cultural practice and not in states, and states cannot be democratized.

  Could be. I'll see if I can wangle a copy from some library.

• Junior fires the experts. In fact, he announced it in the WSJ yesterday with an anodyne headline: HHS Moves to Restore Public Trust in Vaccines.

  Vaccines have become a divisive issue in American politics, but there is one thing all parties can agree on: The U.S. faces a crisis of public trust. Whether toward health agencies, pharmaceutical companies or vaccines themselves, public confidence is waning.

  Some would try to explain this away by blaming misinformation or antiscience attitudes. To do so, however, ignores a history of conflicts of interest, persecution of dissidents, a lack of curiosity, and skewed science that has plagued the vaccine regulatory apparatus for decades.

  That is why, under my direction, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services is putting the restoration of public trust above any pro- or antivaccine agenda. The public must know that unbiased science guides the recommendations from our health agencies. This will ensure the American people receive the safest vaccines possible.

  Today, we are taking a bold step in restoring public trust by totally reconstituting the Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices (ACIP). We are retiring the 17 current members of the committee, some of whom were last-minute appointees of the Biden administration. Without removing the current members, the current Trump administration would not have been able to appoint a majority of new members until 2028.

  Well, I'm sure those 17 folks have day jobs they can fall back on.

  Roger Pielke Jr. has a simple question: Whose Experts? He has a chart showing where ACIP sits in Uncle Stupid's vaccine approval process. And another chart that shows that public trust in the "people running medicine" has been on the decline for more than 50 years.

  It is certainly problematic that the Biden administration appointed all former members of the ACIP. At the same time, it is also problematic that the Trump administration believes that they should expect to appoint a majority of the committee.

  To the extent that partisan considerations play a central role in ACIP empanelment, we defeat the entire purpose of soliciting expert advice. Cherry picking experts is just as bad as cherry picking scientific studies. It allows the creation of a politically expedient portrayal of reality, but there is no guarantee that reality is real.

  The WSJ editorialists waited until today to comment on the move: RFK Jr. Conducts His Vaccine Purge. (WSJ gifted link)

  The HHS Secretary has broad discretion over the panel’s remit and composition. There might be a constitutional argument for eliminating the committee and other outside advisory panels because they can weaken executive accountability. Agency leaders have sometimes shifted political responsibility for controversial decisions to advisory panels.

  But Mr. Kennedy’s beef seems to be that the committee’s members know something about vaccines and may have been involved in their research and development. “Most of ACIP’s members have received substantial funding from pharmaceutical companies, including those marketing vaccines,” he writes. How does he define “substantial”?

  Some members have been paid by vaccine makers—typically sums less than their salaries—to assist with clinical trials in which they help evaluate the vaccines for safety and efficacy. These trials are double-blinded, meaning doctors don’t know which volunteers receive the vaccine or placebo so there’s no financial incentive to tilt the data in favor of manufacturers.

  Fortunately, I'm all caught up on my shots. I hope Junior's new panel of "experts" don't prevent me from getting my next ones.

Recently on the book blog:

In case you haven't noticed: Pun Salad is a personal blog, where I post on whatever strikes my fancy. And, to adapt that old Wittgensteinism: Whereof one cannot get interested, thereof one's blog must be silent.

But, oh heck, here's some Eye Candy from Mr. Ramirez:

I was slightly amused by the WaPo's AI-written summary of comments

Man, the commenters are a tough crowd.

Also of note:

• Sorry, we didn't actually realize we were in charge. Peter Suderman asks for a do-over: Put the Libertarians Back in Charge.

  A common gripe in American politics is that for too long, libertarians have been in charge, wielding too much power.

  Sometimes this complaint comes from progressives in the mold of Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.), who argue that hands-off economic policy—often derisively cast as "neoliberalism"—has fueled the growth and concentration of corporate power at the expense of small business and labor, resulting in an economy that's rigged against the little guy.

  Sometimes this complaint comes from conservatives, particularly New Right voices who insist that libertarians and classical liberals have ignored the consequences of unfettered free markets for American industrial capacity and rural downscale workers while allowing the left to control major cultural institutions. In this view, libertarianism fails to prioritize the interests of America, American values, and ordinary Americans.

  The charge has always carried a whiff of desperation, given how little power actual self-identified libertarians have in the corridors of government. But after four years of Joe Biden running a White House that was a hotbed of Warrenite progressivism, and the early months of Donald Trump's presidency marked by all manner of New Right paranoia and kookiness, maybe it's time to revise the complaint: Libertarians don't have enough power.

  Given today's political climate, it's unlikely that Peter's demand will be met. As you may be tired of hearing me say: we'll just have to be satisfied with being right about everything, all the time.

• For example, this libertarian insight… Mark Jamison goes out on a limb: Innovation Shouldn’t Be a Liability in the United States.

  America’s antitrust enforcers say they want to protect innovation. But their current cases against Big Tech are only punishing it.

  The Department of Justice (DOJ) and Federal Trade Commission (FTC) have launched aggressive antitrust cases against companies like Alphabet, Amazon, and Meta, arguing that these firms are too dominant and that their success undermines competition. The government’s solution: break them up or force them to share the innovations and resources they created and that made them successful—like data and infrastructure—with rivals. Or even worse, obstructing the companies’ AI innovations, as in the case of Google search.

  Here’s the problem: these firms didn’t become dominant by suppressing competition. They became leaders by out-innovating everyone else.

  I'm just guessing that a President Nikki Haley would have realized this.

• Speaking of the FTC… Elizabeth Nolan Brown notes a strange transformation: FTC Pivots From Competition to Children.

  A Federal Trade Commission (FTC) summit last week on protecting children online previewed an odd pivot. Apparently, the agency wants to be a sort of family values advocacy group.

  "This government-sponsored event was not a good-faith conversation about child safety—it was a strategy session for censorship," said the Free Speech Coalition (FSC), a trade group for the adult industry.

  What stands out most to me about last Wednesday's event—called "The Attention Economy: How Big Tech Firms Exploit Children and Hurt Families"—is the glimpse it provided into how the FTC's anti-tech strategy is evolving and the way Republicans seem intent on turning a bipartisan project like online child protection into a purely conservative one.

  Or could it be they are cynically junking old and tired arguments for ones that will rouse more rabble?

• 

  It's as good as a mile. Mark Pulliam writes on The Myth of Victimization, a review of Jason L. Riley's book, The Affirmative Action Myth. (Amazon link at your right.) A slice:

  As it is practiced today, “civil rights” is an industry in which many activists, scholars, bureaucrats, journalists, and organizations have a vested interest in perpetuating the myth of black victimization and helplessness. Riley argues (with extensive supporting footnotes) that “blacks have made faster progress when color blindness has been the policy objective.” Allowing equal treatment to be replaced by a regime of “oppression pedagogy” and identity politics, Riley suggests, is “one of our greatest tragedies.” Racial preferences “have been a hindrance rather than a boon for blacks,” he contends.

  Riley makes a persuasive case. He reprises the work done by scholars such as Thomas Sowell, Walter Williams, Robert Woodson, Shelby Steele, John McWhorter, and Wilfred Reilly; as he notes, much of the research on this topic by center-right figures tends to be done by black academics, possibly due to white scholars’ well-founded fear of repercussions. (If you doubt this, recall the pariah treatment accorded Charles Murray, Amy Wax, Ilya Shapiro, and others who refused to genuflect to the prevailing orthodoxy.) Riley also draws upon the work of Stephan and Abigal Thernstrom, Richard Sander and Stuart Taylor Jr., and many others. Readers may be familiar with some of this work, but Riley usefully summarizes it and supplements it with census data, lesser-known academic studies, and historical and biographical profiles such as Hidden Figures, the book and movie about pioneering black mathematicians who helped NASA’s space program in the 1960s.

  I strongly suspect I'll have to get this via Interlibrary Loan.

Recently on the book blog: