Pun Salad

How about Proverbs 29:3?

A man who loves wisdom brings joy to his father,
    but a companion of prostitutes squanders his wealth.

That's true, I suppose.

• Super Bowl! Nine years ago, I came up with "Top XLII Facts About the Super Bowl"

  The New York Football Giants upset the Pats in SB XLII that year. (And believe me, they were very upset.)

• Sunday is a good day to think about the Big Picture, and a good way to Put Things In Perspective in that Picture is to read Kevin D. Williamson's "Sweet Land of Liberty". Sample:

  Senator Bernie Sanders and Senator Elizabeth Warren want you to believe that the economy and the political system are “rigged” against you, that you have no real hope of prospering, rising, and thriving in what Senator Sanders insists is an “oligarchy.” (He pronounces it “Allah-garchy,” and, sharia hysteria notwithstanding, we aren’t getting one of those, either.) The guys on talk radio want to sell you gold coins and freeze-dried ice cream, and so they need you to believe that we are on the verge of total anarchy, that somebody — the Islamic State, Black Lives Matter, Chicago gangsters, somebody — is coming to get you. Politicos and angst-peddlers left and right want you terrified and anxious, and they want you to believe that these United States comprise a vast impoverished anarchic Eliotic wasteland, a kind of gigantic continental Haiti with lots of shopping malls and a surprisingly large number of Range Rovers.
  
  But if you drive around the country, it doesn’t look like that at all. It looks, for all its very real problems, amazing.

  I am, as usual, in Williamson-awe.

• OK, back to the nitty-gritty: at Reason, Baylen Linnekin lets us know: "Congress Takes Steps to Renew Farm Bill Boondoggle".

  The Farm Bill is perhaps best known for handing billions of dollars of taxpayer money to a small number of the shrinking percentage of Americans who farm. Pres. Franklin Roosevelt's agriculture Henry Wallace pitched payments to farmers during the Great Depression as "a temporary solution to deal with an emergency." The emergency—the Depression—ended around the same year that my grandparents went to prom. But the subsidies remain. In fact, they've only mushroomed in the decades since their adoption.

  In an ideal world, Congress would observe how dairy farmers wean calves, and proceed to get farmers of the Federal tit.

• Power Line asks the musical question: "Anti-Free Speech Riot at NYU: Crazier Than Berkeley?" It's as if there were a competition.

  On Thursday evening, Gavin McInnes, a comic, commentator and co-founder of Vice Media, attempted to give a speech at New York University, at the invitation of the NYU Republican group. A crowd of anti-free speech rioters battled police officers and ultimately succeeded in shutting down McInnes’s speech.

  Accompanying video contains a profanity-filled rant aimed at NYPD cops by a woman claiming to be a "professor". Entertaining, until it gets tedious. The woman is (probably) Rebecca Goyette, and (if so) she's a piece of work. A plug for her recent "film", Ghost Bitch U.S.A. should give you a taste of where her head is at:

  Goyette locates our election woes in the gender dynamics and xenophobia of our puritanical past. With a nightmarish humor, she has adorned the gallery walls of Freight + Volume with genitalia, patriotism, and zealous castration scenes where Puritans and Donald Trump lookalikes are victims. Many of these works are obvious if bold statements against the Republican nominee. The most striking is “T-Rump,” which simply features what Goyette calls a “foam-cast ass mask” wearing a blonde wig and Trump’s patented “Make American Great Again” hat. Oh, and there is a sculpted piece of poop sitting just below the ass mask. Clearly, Goyette’s unrelenting anger does not care for subtlety or gentleness.

  Or rationality. Much more, if you like chuckling at derangement taken seriously, at HuffPo: "Why Porn Is The Perfect Weapon To Fight Hatred, Fear, And Trump".