Pun Salad

■ Chapter 24 of Proverbs has been at best a mixed bag so far, but Proverbs 24:10-12 is just plain wonderful:

¹⁰ If you falter in a time of trouble,
    how small is your strength!
¹¹ Rescue those being led away to death;
    hold back those staggering toward slaughter.
¹² If you say, “But we knew nothing about this,”
    does not he who weighs the heart perceive it?
    Does not he who guards your life know it?
    Will he not repay everyone according to what they have done?

■ My Google LFOD alert was triggered by a Union Leader LTE from Richard Whitney, who's on the shitlist of the New Hampshire Fish and Game Department. Why? Well, there's a clue in the headline: Feeding Stoddard bears is safe and beneficial.

Most citizens are unaware that Fish and Game officers can walk on to anyone’s property, any time, without notice or a warrant. As long as they are at a distance from your house and grounds, they can film you or watch you anytime without your knowing about it. What happened to the Fourth Amendment? We no longer live in a Live Free or Die state.

Mr. Whitney challenges Fish & Game's mantra "a fed bear is a dead bear", and (although I have zero expertise) it seems he knows whereof he speaks.

■ At NR, David French reminds us: Anti-Free-Speech Radicals Never Give Up.

Lest anyone wonder about the actual definition of “hate speech,” look to campus and liberal activist groups. At Evergreen State College in Washington, a progressive professor’s statement against racial separation and division was deemed so hateful that he couldn’t safely conduct classes on campus. Influential pressure groups such as the Southern Poverty Law Center label the Ku Klux Klan and other genuine racists “hate groups” but also apply the same label to mainstream Christian conservative organizations such as the Family Research Council. The SPLC has branded respected American Enterprise Institute scholar Charles Murray a “white nationalist.” Moreover, it’s far more forgiving of leftist extremism than of moderate speech that is conservative or libertarian.

It's a good fight to make. Although nobody (yet) is literally "staggering toward slaughter" (see above), this is no time to falter.

■ At Bleeding Heart Libertarians, Jason Brennan notes a new book by historian Nancy MacLean, and deems it a "hit piece" on the late James Buchanan (the Nobel Prize-winning scholar, not the lousy President). And asks: Conspire Me This: Is Nancy MacLean a Hired Gun for the Establishment?

Brennan notes that Buchanan's crime was a clear-eyed and unsentimental look at how government actions are corrupted by interest groups to screw over everyone else. And so?

So, along comes Nancy MacLean. The government paid her over $50,000 to smear Buchanan and people like him. Rather than challenge his ideas, she accuses him of this and that. Yet, all the while, Nancy is quite literally a hired gun for the government seeking to rationalize its oppression and abuses.

The National Endowment for the Humanities should be abolished.