Pun Salad

■ Proverbs 28:13:

Whoever conceals their sins does not prosper, but the one who confesses and renounces them finds mercy.

I regret to inform the Proverbalist that this is no longer applicable:

When Lois Lerner, who headed the tax-exempt division of the IRS, was subpoenaed to appear before congress to explain her agency’s targeting, she exercised her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. She eventually resigned, with the Obama Justice Department exonerating her of any criminal wrongdoing.

Lerner is retired and drawing a comfortable federal pension.

■ My Google Alert for LFOD turned up an article from a site called "Romper" ("a site for a new generation of women figuring out what motherhood means for us". Bold in original.): A Girl Scout Is Trying To End Child Marriage In Her State, But GOP Reps Voted Against Her. Oh no!

Apparently, the motto "Live free or die" doesn't apply to child brides. When Cassandra Levesque, a New Hampshire Girl Scout, learned that child marriage is perfectly legal in her state, she worked to create legislation to change the legal age for marriage to 18. The current law allows for boys to marry at age 14, and girls at 13, provided they have permission from their parents and a judge. Last week, Levesque and her parents watched as state legislators debated, and ultimately rejected her bill. The representatives voted 179 to 168 to indefinitely postpone an actual vote on the bill, meaning it's now "effectively killed for two years," as Democratic Rep. Jackie Cilley, the bill's sponsor, told the Concord Monitor.

I don't have a strong opinion on this, but it would seem that a strict application of LFOD would work the opposite way from the article's implication. But I am not a Girl Scout.

■ At NR, Kevin D. Williamson notes a strange reversal in party philosophy since the 1980s (when KDW "was a Republican for about ten minutes"): Conservatism for Losers. Sample:

In neither party’s case does this recent evolution constitute an improvement: It would be one thing if the Democrats had embraced their inner aristocrats with a decent and forthright spirit of public service rather than their current nastiness and stupidity, or if the newly class-conscious Republicans were proceeding as people who are (as Someone once put it) “poor in spirit,” putting generosity of spirit rather than seething resentment at the center of their new concern for those at the margins of modern life. But that is not the case. The Democrats have become ordinary snobs of a particularly embarrassing variety, and the Republicans have become incontinent rage monkeys, looking for someone — anyone — to blame. They are much more interested in afflicting the comfortable than in comforting the afflicted. But there is another approach to life’s losers, a better one, if only they could remember.

… and conservatives of a Certain Age will immediately recognize the quote that follows.

■ What would President Trump's budget do to American Science? Well, Adam Rogers at Wired is here to tell you, bunkie: Trump’s Budget Would Break American Science, Today and Tomorrow. He notes that budget proposals are never, ever, enacted without change. But:

It’s still worth looking at the budget, though—not as a blueprint for governing but as a map of a government, a philosophy of a state. From that angle it’s a singularly terrifying document, fundamentally nihilistic, that assumes a violent present instead of attempting to build a future of peace, security, and absence of want. By eviscerating federal funding of science, this budget pays for a world where the only infrastructure is megacities connected by Fury Roads.

Ah, don't ever change, Wired. Please continue telling us how the American taxpayer must continue funding studies like "The neural and cognitive correlates of aimed throwing in chimpanzees: a magnetic resonance image and behavioural study on a unique form of social tool use" (aka poop-flinging monkeys). Otherwise researchers in other countries—maybe Russia—might make make vital gains in this area, leading to a primate-shit-throwing gap!

[If you said "WTF are Fury Roads?" to the above quote, go watch this movie.]

■ While not new, this poster seems to be enjoying a resurgence:

At the Federalist, Robert Tracinski points out that it's a pretty good guide: How To Be A ‘Woke’ White Person: Join The Alt-Right.

The first thing that struck me about these rules are that the white people who comply with it most fully are: the resurgent racists of the “alt-right.”

Tracinski points out they're perhaps a little weak on items 3 and 7, but otherwise… scoring 8/10 is pretty good! Keep trying, alt-righters!