Pun Salad

• Goodness knows I'm not a Trump fan, don't plan to vote for him unless the Libertarian is an utter goofball (and maybe not even then), but I laughed out loud when I saw his campaign website's 404 page.

  

  Could I be persuaded to vote for a guy just because his web designer has a wicked sense of humor? Stay tuned…

  ---

• Andrew C. McCarthy is at a high level of ire, and if your name is Andrew McCabe, that ire is well-deserved.

  The FBI’s former deputy director is in the Justice Department’s crosshairs. His lawyers are reportedly pleading with top officials not to indict him for lying to FBI agents who were probing a leak of investigative information, orchestrated by none other than McCabe.

  McCabe is feeling the heat because the evidence that he made false statements is daunting. So daunting, in fact, that even he concedes he did not tell the truth to investigators. Listen carefully to what he says about the case — there being no shortage of public commentary on it from the newly minted CNN analyst. He never “deliberately misled anyone,” he insists. Sure, he grudgingly admits, some of his statements “were not fully accurate,” or perhaps were “misunderstood” by his interrogators. But “at worst,” you see, “I was not clear in my responses, and because of what was going on around me may well have been confused and distracted.”

  Uh-huh.

  I'm sure there are a lot of decent and honorable FBI employees. That number did not decrease, however, when McCabe was fired.

  McCarthy will make you feel, and share, his anger.

  ---

• OK, so that's enough being nice to President Trump for the day. Veronique de Rugy's column this week offers Some Clarity on President Trump's Economic Policies. Sample:

  Some aspects of the 2017 tax reform were great. The cut in the corporate income tax rate from 35% to 21% and the reform of state and local tax deductions are important pro-market reforms. The results speak for themselves. High-income taxpayers in high-tax states can no longer shift their state tax burden onto the rest of us through a generous deduction. Capital investments have increased, fueling a growing economy and rising wages. The administration also deserves credit for bringing about some reduction in regulations, an area which Trump has spoken about quite eloquently.

  Now, the bad. The administration's self-destructive protectionist trade policies are well documented. These resulted in higher tariffs on both imports and exports from many countries, higher prices shouldered by American consumers, nonstop uncertainty, bailouts for affected farmers and the first manufacturing output contraction since 2009, all with little tangible progress — in terms of trade deals with our partners — to show for it.

  The fact that potential Democrat replacements will be worse doesn't detract from Veronique's criticisms.

  ---

• David Harsanyi writes truthfully at the Daily Signal: The Left Can't Stop Lying About the Tea Party.

  “In the late summer of 2009, as the recession-ravaged economy bled half a million jobs a month, the country seemed to lose its mind,” The New York Times says, kicking off its 10th anniversary retrospective of the tea party movement. As you can imagine, the rest of the article continues in this vein, portraying conservatives who organized against Obamacare as a bunch of vulgar radicals.

  Yet even this kind revisionism wasn’t enough for most contemporary leftists, who see everything through the prism of race.

  “A fundamental flaw in this analysis is there is no mention of race and how much racism drove the tea party movement,” ABC’s Matthew Dowd claimed. “You can’t talk about the rage politics and leave out race.”

  I was there. People, sure enough, were mad because of Obama's proposal to bail out irresponsible borrowers and their even less responsbile lenders with Other People's Money. This is what triggered Rick Santelli's rant on CNBC, which kind of set off the whole TP thing.

  But—trust me—we were equally pissed off at Dubya's auto bailout. Race had nothing to do with that.

  ---

• 

  Don Boudreaux of Cafe Hayek provides a pithy Quotation of the Day from George F. Will's new book, The Conservative Sensibility.
  America’s problem, [economist John] Cochrane believes, is not that wealth is the primary determinant of political power, but that political power is much too often the determinant of wealth. So the way to reduce the role of money in politics is to reduce the role of politics in the distribution of money, thereby lowering the stakes of politics and the incentive for investing in it.

  Don considers your level of agreement with this quote to be an accurate test of your intellectual maturity. I can't disagree.

  I'm waiting for the current borrower of The Conservative Sensibility to return it to Portsmouth Public Library, and hope that I'm nimble enough to grab it off the shelf before someone else does. (I know I could put a hold on it, but I've always considered that to be cheating.)

  But if Don keeps posting quotes from it, I may well read the entire book that way.

  ---

• And finally, an early bit of advice from Andrew Cline at the Josiah Bartlett Center: This Labor Day, celebrate economic growth. In fact, people in our fine state might treat it as an early Thanksgiving:
  • New Hampshire in July boasted the largest labor force in its history, at 770,000 people. That month, 751,150 New Hampshire residents had jobs. There are more Granite Staters with jobs than there are Vermonters — in total. New Hampshire has a larger labor force than Maine, though the states have similar populations. 
  • Business boomed, and wage increases followed. New Hampshire posted the largest year-over-year wage gains of any New England state in 2018 (though that growth rate has slowed so far this year). Among New England states, only Massachusetts has had a higher rate of growth in personal income since the recession, according to Pew Charitable Trusts research.
  • New Hampshire scored a No. 1 ranking in U.S. News & World Report’s list of best states for opportunity, helping it land the No. 2 Best State ranking overall. It ranked best in New England for economic growth.  
  • There’s so much opportunity in New Hampshire that thousands of millennials are moving here instead of to Brooklyn. A study of Census data by Smart Asset put New Hampshire in the top ten for millennial in-migration. 

  And (best of all) the Gov said it was OK for that Gonic lady to keep her "PB4WEGO" vanity license plate. We really are the LFOD state.

• We lead off today with Mr. Ramirez, sketching one of the folks Blaming Big Pharma for the opioid crisis.

  

  … so let's sue 'em.

  ---

• At National Review, Michael Tanner writes on the National Debt: Moral and Fiscal Consequences.

  How did we get here? Contrary to conventional wisdom, it wasn’t the Republican tax cut. In fact, when compared to 2018, tax revenues went up 3 percent in the first nine months of fiscal year 2019. Would they be even higher in the absence of those cuts? Maybe. But the real problem, as usual, is out-of-control spending.

  The CBO estimates that federal outlays in 2019 will total $4.4 trillion, a $300 billion increase in nominal spending since 2018. Discretionary spending is up. Defense spending is up. Entitlement spending is up. There is no effort to prioritize or make the difficult choices of governing, there is only . . . more.

  Vote against incumbents unless they can convince you they're going to press for spending cuts. And be very hard to convince.

  ---

• The WSJ has a perhaps paywalled editorial describing Jim Comey’s Higher Virtue.

  Beware the righteous man with power. That’s the great lesson of James Comey, as the 79-page report released Thursday by the Justice Department Inspector General makes clear. The former FBI director willfully violated multiple rules as he sought revenge against Donald Trump while pursuing his own self-interest in the name of higher virtue.

  The report focuses on how Mr. Comey handled seven memos he wrote in 2017 about his interactions with Mr. Trump. IG Michael Horowitz finds that in treating his memos as personal documents rather than official FBI records, improperly storing them at home, failing to inform the bureau he had them, or leaking them to the press, Mr. Comey ignored FBI and Justice protocols and broke his employment agreement.

  If you want to read a weak defense of Comey, there's one at the Bulwark. But I warn you: it ignores and excuses a lot of bad behavior; I assume the reason is: that bad behavior was used against Trump.

  ---

• At the Federalist John Daniel Davidson describes how Paranoid Attacks On The Koch Brothers Turned Into Mainstream Tactics. A particular fact-ignoring attack from earlier this summer from (who else) the New York Times:

  As for the Kochs, the left isn’t done with them. As recently as June, The New York Timesran a breathless piece explaining how “the Koch brothers are fueling a fight against public transit, an offshoot of their longstanding national crusade for lower taxes and smaller government.” Why would the Kochs oppose public transit? Because “One of the mainstay companies of Koch Industries, the Kochs’ conglomerate, is a major producer of gasoline and asphalt, and also makes seat belts, tires and other automotive parts.” See the connection?

  Americans for Prosperity, that shadowy Koch-funded cabal, was implicated in the Times’ coverage of a failed $5.4 billion transit plan in Nashville. In an effort to educate voters on the cost of this transit boondoggle, AFP went knocking on doors and making phone calls, as grassroots groups are wont to do. But as Kyle Smith noted, AFP only spent a measly $10,000—a fraction of the $1.2 million spent by all opponents of the plan, which was far less than the its $2.9 million its proponents spent. In the end, Nashville voters overwhelmingly rejected the plan, 64 to 36 percent.

  Plenty other examples of double standards, obvious bias, and simple bad reporting at the link.

  ---

• Finally, Scientific American, asks the big question:: Can We Rely on Our Intuition?.

  My gut initially says no way! But then I realized that was unreliable.

  But:

  Although researchers have been debating the value of intuition in decision-making for decades, they continue to disagree.

  Ah. What would we do without researchers?

• Let's begin with a fine video from Tim Carney: Victims of government financing. It's well made.

  Good, right? Now if only more politicians would pay attention…

  Tim Carney's recent book, Alienated America, was one of my favorite recent reads. Check it out if you get the chance.

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• Kevin D. Williamson was on Bill Maher's HBO show, and has observations as a result: Bill Maher & New York Times -- Mob Politics: A Double-Edged Sword. It's good all the way through, and is kinder to Maher than Maher deserves; here's the ending:

  I stopped Maher at one point during the show and scolded him a little for having delivered what I rightly described as “a stupid, cheap applause line.” The subject was abortion and my view that abortion should be prohibited as a homicide. (If it is not a homicide, then it is nothing of any importance; it is not tax evasion, or littering, or failing to use the right font size in an OSHA poster.) “What about the men who get women pregnant” Maher demanded. “Do you want to punish them, too? Huh?” I’ve heard 10,000 variations on that line, and every one of them was stupid.

  That line of argument in fact represents exactly what it is we pro-lifers always are accused of by the pro-abortion camp: proposing to punish people for having sex. As a political matter, meaning as a matter of regulation, I do not care who has sex with whom, even a little bit. If we are talking about consenting adults, I am perfectly content that the law remain silent on the question of who and whom and how many and in what combination or combinations — and even, contra my friend Madeleine Kearns, whether money changes hands. Nor do I believe that the law should take any note of contraception. I only insist that, if the sex should result in a pregnancy, we do not legally permit the willful killing of individual living human organisms. I don’t care about the sex — I care about the violence, about the killing.

  It is strange that so many so-called liberals cannot quite make out the difference between consensual sex and premeditated homicide, and that they are so eager to punish people for engaging in consensual sex. Not that they really believe it. They only believe that people will nod approvingly or, in the case of a television audience, applaud like trained seals at the concluding harrumph. No self-respecting person could take Maher’s argument seriously — and that is true irrespective of anyone’s belief about the question of abortion as such.

  It is difficult to resist the urge to deliver vapid applause lines, to please a crowd when one is in front of one. But we ought not allow that temptation to cause us to say things that are, beyond question, stupid. Living in abject need of the mob’s applause is no different from living in abject fear of the mob’s criticism — it is to be a creature of the mob in either case. The only freedom and independence are in learning to be equally indifferent to both praise and obloquy.

  (I’ll let you know when I’ve managed to achieve that.)

  (I've achieved that by nobody asking me to say things in front of a crowd. Not an option for KDW.)

  ---

• At Reason, Jacob Sullum describes The False Premises of the Ruling Against Johnson & Johnson.

  This week an Oklahoma judge ruled that Johnson & Johnson should pay $572 million to "abate" a "public nuisance" the company created in that state by minimizing the hazards and overselling the benefits of prescription opioids. A few months ago, a North Dakota judge rejected a very similar claim against Purdue Pharma under a nearly identical "public nuisance" statute.

  The difference between those two decisions partly reflects the difference between broad and narrow understandings of "public nuisance." But the diametrically opposed rulings also pit a simple narrative of the "opioid crisis" with a clear set of villains against a more complicated story that's closer to the truth.

  Click through for the details, but I think (cynically, as usual) that the litigants imagined huge piles of cash in the J&J money vaults, and decided to "legally" get as much of it as possible.

  ---

• At the American Conservative, Rod Dreher writes about Yale & The Crisis Of American Elites. Long, worth reading, but what really got my attention was this abstract of a peer-reviewed article by Donna Riley, head of the Purdue University department of engineering education.
  Rigor is the aspirational quality academics apply to disciplinary standards of quality. Rigor’s particular role in engineering created conditions for its transfer and adaptation in the recently emergent discipline of engineering education research. ‘Rigorous engineering education research’ and the related ‘evidence-based’ research and practice movement in STEM education have resulted in a proliferation of boundary drawing exercises that mimic those in engineering disciplines, shaping the development of new knowledge and ‘improved’ practice in engineering education. Rigor accomplishes dirty deeds, however, serving three primary ends across engineering, engineering education, and engineering education research: disciplining, demarcating boundaries, and demonstrating white male heterosexual privilege. Understanding how rigor reproduces inequality, we cannot reinvent it but rather must relinquish it, looking to alternative conceptualizations for evaluating knowledge, welcoming diverse ways of knowing, doing, and being, and moving from compliance to engagement, from rigor to vigor.

  Yes, that's where we are today, kids. Department chairs arguing against "rigor" in teaching engineering.

  My advice: over the next few decades, try to avoid driving over any bridge, using any product, flying on any plane, etc. which has had Purdue-trained engineers in its development cycle. You can't be too careful.

  ---

• And the Google LFOD News Alert rang for an essay at Splice Today from one Tom DiVenti: Gun Crazy.
  When you’re stuck, keep moving. A moving object is harder to hit. The road is long, time is short and death is patiently waiting. The key is to travel light at breakneck speed to the end. Pushed and pulled willy-nilly like a rag doll on a carnival ride. Shot like a bullet into the air. Hot lead spinning like a demon dervish gyroscope in the stratosphere of total emptiness. A crowded void filled with dead weight and fear among the vast wasteland of crumbling cities. Small arms fire crackles in the night.

  And (check for yourself) it goes on like that for a while. The crack Google lords of worthiness apparently thought this deranged rant crossed the line into "news".

  But LFOD? Ah, there, last paragraph:

  To live free or die by the gun is an easy choice. Nothing good has ever come out of a gun. There’s no protection against ignorance. It’s a loaded question. Do guns save lives? I don’t think the innocent victims murdered by guns would agree. Life is cheap. The price of an average 9mm bullet costs 14 cents per round.

  I have to admit that Tom did his research for that single fact.

James Lee Burke is, as I type, 82 years young. His Louisiana cop hero, Dave Robicheaux, is at best only a few years younger than that. But he's still working. And as long as that goes on, I'm on board to watch. So I snapped up this one when the hardcover price dropped to $11.84 at Amazon. (Right now, it's down to $10.26, even better.)

I can't say that it isn't more of the same, but for JLB, "the same" means "pretty darn good". Dave is confronted with an array of corpses, dispatched with few clues other than deranged references to Tarot cards. Also, an array of suspects, lowlifes, corrupt cops, a weirdo hitman operating under his own twisted moral code, decadent Hollywood types, and … well, there's an attractive new lady cop who's way too young for Dave, but seems to show some inklings of romantic interest in him. Too good to be true? It doesn't help that she's got dark secrets in her past. Also not helping: Dave's daughter Alafair is involved with the Hollywood folks. Gee, I wonder if that will work out well.

And the ghosts that appear in these books also show up. Bad news: they tend to show up for people who are about to kick the bucket.

• Our lead story is brought to our attention by my local newspaper, Foster's Daily Democrat: NH recalls mom's 'PB4WEGO' license plate.

  A common parental phrase has landed a Gonic mother in warm water with the state Department of Motor Vehicles over her vanity license plate.

  The state has asked Lilac City Grille bartender Wendy Auger to turn in her 15-year-old plate reading “PB4WEGO,” which stands for “pee before we go,” because phrases related to excretory acts aren’t permitted.

  Auger is fighting it, filing an appeal for the recall because she believes it’s a free speech issue and that the phrase isn’t offensive.

  And of course:

  Auger questioned why her plate was targeted, as she said she’s never received or heard any complaints. Since Auger recently posted about the plate on Facebook, many have voiced support for her while pointing out the recall seems incongruent with the state “Live Free Or Die” motto printed just below her plate’s banned phrase.

  A number of observations and comments come to mind.

  • I do not have a vanity license plate, and have no plans to get one. But if I did, I think it would be "UPTOME". To outward appearances, a straightforward acceptance of personal responsibility.

    But I (and also you, now) would know the truth. It would actually stand for "Urinate Prior To Our Mobile Excursion".

  • What is it with Rochester anyway? It was also the breeding ground for Chaplinsky v. State of New Hampshire, the Supreme Court case giving rise to the infamous "fighting words" exception to the First Amendment. (It's currently doubtful whether that's established precedent.)

  • And our license plates were also at issue in another famous Supreme case, Wooley v. Maynard, where the ruling judged it acceptable to obscure the "Live Free or Die" motto on your tags, if that was the way you felt about it. (Like Chaplinsky, the LFOD-obscurer Maynard was a Jehovah's Witness. But he didn't live in Rochester.)

  • At Granite Grok, Christopher Maidment has more on the fraught legal history of NH license plates.

  • I for one am (puts on sunglasses) ... pissed.

  ---

• Power Line's Steven Hayward bids farewell to an admirable conservative/libertarian moneybags: David Koch, RIP. And (almost an aside) provides how deeply in the partisan tank the New York Times has sunk. Because their obit contained:

  Three decades after David Koch’s public steps into politics, analysts say, the Koch brothers’ money-fueled brand of libertarianism helped give rise to the Tea Party movement, strengthened the far-right wing of a resurgent Republican Party and played a significant role in the election of Donald J. Trump as president in 2016.

  No need to match that up with reality! The NYT's new motto: All the news that fits… the statist narrative.

  Steven:

  Typical. The Kochs hated Trump in 2016, opposed him vigorously throughout the entire nomination process (Vanity Fair ran a story in February 2016 entitled “Can the Koch Brothers Stop Trump?“), and have said more recently they are open to supporting Democrats in part because of their continuing dislike of Trump. But never mind: for the Times, everything has to come back to Trump (and racism).

  The obit has since been corrected, but its clear the NYT prioritizes sliming its political enemies over fact-checking.

  ---

• At Reason, Peter Suderman tallies up The Price of an Erratic President.

  Perhaps the strangest thing about the story that President Donald Trump has expressed interest in using nuclear bombs to stop hurricanes was that it didn't seem all that strange. Almost no one thought to ask "Can you believe it?" because almost everyone automatically did, while simultaneously acknowledging that in reality, no such intervention would be tried.

  So instead of sustained incredulity, there were jokes, and a few #WellActuallys, and eventually Trump himself declared that the story was fake news. But for the most part, the story, first reported by Axios, came and went with the daily tides of Twitter conversation. Trump wants to deploy nuclear weapons to stop summer storms? Wild stuff! 2019, right? Moving on.

  One way to understand this is as a basically healthy reaction to the brainfarts of a particularly brainfart-prone president, one who thinks out loud—or online—and who indulges a variety of odd obsessions that rarely become actual policy. Both in public and in private, Trump has a habit of floating half-baked bad ideas that are unlikely to ever be implemented. For many people, constantly worrying about the small chance that they one day might happen is simply too exhausting to keep up.

  Attention pundits: a pretty good way to get a Pun Salad link to your content is to use the word "brainfart" as much as possible.

  ---

• OK, we had our first LFOD article right up top today, but there's a couple I bet you missed. For example, this one from KPCW, the Commie Radio station in Park City, Utah: Show And Tell: On 'Lover,' Taylor Swift Lets Listeners In On Her Own Terms.

  For people who don't care about this stuff: "Lover" is the title of Taylor Swift's new album.

  For people who care even less about this stuff: Taylor Swift is an immensely popular American musician.

  The narrators of Lover sound like they've done a lot of thinking; some even have a self-accepting sense of humor. On the first verse of the album's title track, Swift, who likely sees herself as planned and deliberate to a fault, is going to live free or die (we all contain multitudes), hilariously insisting she and her romantic interest "can leave the Christmas lights up 'til January" (holiday cheer for an extra couple weeks at most in this lawless home). This song did not grab me on first listen. But its gentle snare slap (possibly my favorite sound on the entire record) called me back again and again, until I realized it has now become one of my favorites in her catalog of perfect pop romance. That bridge! Those girl group harmonies! Swift's songs are "relatable," but not about realism. "Lover" sounds like the fantasy happily-ever-after many of her songs' narrators have always wanted to inhabit.

  The war on drugs has been lost when all indications point to highly potent marijuana being easily available to NPR writers in Park City Utah.

  ---

• In more local news, Manchester Ink Link reports There's a new Porcupine in town: Libertarian National Committee chair moves to Manchester from Arizona. The Chair is Nicholas Sarwark, accompanied by his wife and four kids.
  “New Hampshire really is the Live Free or Die state. The love of liberty and of neighbor-helping-neighbor goes back to our foundations. We’re proud to welcome the Chairman of the National Libertarian Party, the party of principle and liberty, to the Granite State. We’re looking forward to working together with Nick to keep New Hampshire an inspiration of freedom for the rest of the country,” said [Chair of the Libertarian Party of New Hampshire Brian] Sheilds.

  Welcome, Nick! I hope the DMV's no-excretory-references vanity plate policy doesn't persuade you that you made a bad mistake.

Ah, Clint's still got it, as an actor and director.

He actually plays someone older in this movie. Specifically, Earl Stone, once a successful breeder and grower of daylilies. An opening scene sets up his character: he's a charming curmudgeon, beloved in the commercial flower-growing community (yes, that apparently exists). But at the price of neglecting his family, who are understandably pissed.

Jump forward about twelve years; Earl is still around, but he's neglected to adapt his business to modern ways, and it's in foreclosure. By a fortuitous coincidence, an attendee at his granddaughter's wedding hooks him up with local drug dealers, and before you know it, Earl's transporting cocaine around the USA for the cartel.

This relieves his monetary woes. And he helps various worthy causes after that. Being a mule is lucrative. But also (as you might guess) dangerous. His interactions with his superiors are initially fractious. But he charms most of them. Still, his cantankerous ways make him sort of a loose cannon, which a successful criminal organization cannot abide.

Also, his growing reputation within the cartel brings him to the attention of the DEA. Through informants, wiretaps, and surveillance, their net draws tighter.

It seems being in a Clint Eastwood movie appeals to a lot of people. Bradley Cooper (a seven-time Oscar nominee) plays a supporting role as a hotshot DEA agent. Also Michael Peña, Laurence Fishburne, Andy Garcia, Dianne Wiest, ….

Turns out (spoiler) the man who kills Don Quixote is also the guy who killed Han Solo. Did not see that coming.

On occasion, I have to say: the Netflix prediction algorithm thought I would like this a lot better than I did. IMDB deems the genres to be "Adventure, Comedy, Drama". Fine, I guess, but I have a genre of my own: "Apparently Made Under the Influence of Substances, Probably Most of Them Illicit".

Adam Driver plays Toby, a once-renowned movie director, recently relegated to doing commercial hackwork. But (somehow) he's gotten a green light to shoot his epic flick about Don Quixote, a project he had to abandon a decade previous.

Alas, things are not going well. Toby needs to recruit a wizened local shoemaker (hey, underneath the grime and scruffiness, that's Jonathan Pryce) to appear as his star. Who rapidly gets into his role by imagining Toby to be Sancho Panza. And they proceed to leave the moviemaking behind ("or do they?) as they traipse into rural Spanish hinterlands where they still remember the old movie… Things become surreal and nightmarish (sometimes disgustingly so) for poor Toby.

A consumer-note downside: the DVD has subtitles available only in Spanish. That's a real downer for a movie where people talk fast in various heavy accents.

You might like it better than I did. Because it's Terry Gilliam; Adam Driver and Jonathan Pryce are great actors; and a lot of stuff may have gone (insert high-pitched whizzing noise here) right over my head.

Well, this got decent reviews. (Unlike, say, Justice League.) And it's not bad, and actually good in spots.

An opening scene develops in an unexpected way: a car accident leads a kid to be transported to a mystical cavern where he meets a mystical wizard, who spouts mystical mumbo-jumbo at him, … and then, disappointed, transports him back to the scene of the car wreck, where his father is in bad shape, and blaming him for the crash.

Hey, that's not the way I remember the comic books going…

Ah, but then we leap a number of years into the future, where young Billy Batson gets separated from his mom at a carnival, turns into a very rebellious foster child, takes a mystical subway ride to that wizard's lair we saw before, where the wizard (apparently very desperate to transfer his mystical powers) bestows the magic word…

OK, that's pretty complicated. But the bottom line is that young Billy can transform himself into a (nameless, due to copyright hassles) superhero. But his adult heavily-muscled superhero bod is still operated by his adolescent boy brain. The movie turns into a laff riot, as he discovers exactly which superpowers he has.

But that kid from the opening scene has matured into everyone's favorite Bad Guy, Mark Strong. And he wangles his way back to the wizard's lair himself, and gains powers too. Conflict ahead!

The movie is wonderfully funny in spots. But it has a split personality, because there's considerable darkness too. For one thing: remember that I said Billy got lost at the carnival? Well, the details revealed later about that are a little disturbing…

Something a bit different today. One of the folks in the "NRPLUS" National Review group put out the following query:

For those of you who are not religious, what is the “genealogy” of your morals and what is your argument they should be universal?

My thumbnail response, at a length appropriate for Facebook:

As I type, it has a few likes. So, win.

Note that there's nothing in there about "universal". My guess is that human morality wouldn't apply to Klingons.

And if I had it to do over again, I'd add in "environment" to the "basic facts" that constrain and determine human survival and flourishing.

I'm also pretty sure that this approach isn't unique to me, it's just my distillation of arguments I've found compelling from other (deeper) thinkers.

• We open today with Mr. Ramirez on Donald Trump and China:

  

  If any of you youngsters haven't seen Patton, by the way, just do that. I'll wait here.

  ---

• A few days ago, I made the fearless prediction that one of the essayists involved with the NYT's "1619" project might "become this year's recipient of the Michael Bellesiles award for crap scholarship." At the College Fix, Christian Schneider notes that might be happening a little faster than I expected: Cornell scholar cited in NYT’s ‘1619’ series charged with fabricating quotes, evidence.

  A Cornell University scholar cited in a recent New York Times piece tying slavery to capitalism was previously found to have inflated statistics, invented facts, and altered quotes, according to fellow academics in his field.

  In an October 2016 paper, scholars Alan Olmstead of the University of California Davis and Paul Rhode of the University of Michigan harshly criticized the research of Cornell’s Edward Baptist presented in Baptist’s 2014 book “The Half Has Never Been Told.” In the book, Baptist argues that modern capitalism still contains many of the remnants of slavery and America’s current economy is still influenced by the exploitation of slaves.

  Note: Baptist was "quoted approvingly" by the NYT author, Matthew Desmond. So it's not a direct debunking. But… chip, chip.

  ---

• Andrew Cline, at the Josiah Bartlett Center, claims: Eliminating coal is a gas, gas, gas.

  On Tuesday, a few protesters dumped a few buckets of coal at the State House. It was, they said, a bold act of civil disobedience because they stole the coal from the Merrimack Station power plant in Bow. Yes, they admitted this. They even helpfully provided the Bow Police with evidence by posting an incriminating photo on their own website.

  Activists organized by the Climate Disobedience Center routinely commit crimes against fossil fuel infrastructure. They theorize that a rapidly arriving climate catastrophe justifies the criminality. The Tuesday publicity stunt was orchestrated to pressure the state to shut down the coal-burning Merrimack Station.

  The problem? The reason the Merrimack Station is fired up on occasion is that NH isn't supplied with adequate (much cleaner-burning) natural gas.

  And the reason we don't have adequate supplies of natural gas is lack of pipelines.

  And the reason we don't have enough pipelines… you guessed it: environmental activists, no doubt the same that dumped coal at the State House.

  ---

• David French, writing at National Review, explains eloquently Why Victimhood and Fear Won’t Preserve Liberty. A chilling story:

  Thirteen years ago, I filed a lawsuit on behalf of two brave young women — Ruth Malhotra and Orit Sklar. They were students at the Georgia Tech, they’d faced unconstitutional censorship at their school, and they sued to challenge four blatantly unconstitutional policies, the school’s speech code, its speech zone, its student-fee-funding policy, and a “safe space” training program that explicitly condemned traditional Christianity.

  If you think outrage mobs are new, consider what happened next. Ruth and Orit faced a torrent of campus hate. Ruth (an American of Indian descent), was called a “Twinkie” (yellow on the outside, white on the inside), and online posts photoshopped swastikas on her face. She faced rape threats and death threats. One emailer threatened to throw acid on her face at graduation. We sought police protection on her behalf, simply so she could attend class in peace.

  I’ve told this story before, but here’s a part I haven’t fully told. In spite of the fact that there was a vibrant Christian and conservative presence on campus, Ruth and Orit fought largely alone. In fact, one large campus ministry was angry at them for defending the Constitution, claiming it was making their life more difficult on campus. I had to fly to meet the general counsel of a major campus ministry to justify my decision to fight for the Constitution. I met with tenured Christian faculty and urged them to stand with Ruth and Orit, and while some offered (appreciated) private support, the public silence was deafening . . . and shameful.

  This is not surprising. The university is supposed to be an environment where ideas can be discussed without fear. In practice, you need to be exceedingly brave to go against the dominant paradigm.

  Still, it wasn't that long ago that Christians were being fed to the lions. You don't have to be that brave.

  ---

• Taking a break from tedious leftism and climate alarmism, Wired covers the important news in biomechanics: Why the NFL's Field Goal Record Is Waiting to Be Smashed.

  Based on his data, [researcher Chase] Pfeifer says that a record-breaking 70-yard field goal kicked at sea level, with no wind, would require a foot speed of around 49 miles per hour delivered right to the ball’s sweet spot, while an 80-yarder would take a foot speed of about 56 mph. And while the latter is outside the range typical of elite kickers, it's well within the realm of human ability: The foot speeds of elite soccer players have been clocked at more than 60 miles per hour (27 m/s), which, in theory, is good enough for a field goal from 90 yards.

  Also of note:

  He also built a field-goal-kicking robot named Herbie Junior, after the mascot of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Pfeifer's alma mater.

  I for one, welcome our new field-goal-kicking robot overlords.

  ---

• Whoa, space crime! NASA Astronaut Anne McClain Refutes Space Crime Claim by Spouse as Divorce Details Emerge.

  NASA astronaut Anne McClain on Saturday (Aug. 24) refuted claims that she inappropriately accessed the bank account of her estranged spouse after details of their divorce were made public in the New York Times this week. 

  This is from Space.com, which I don't think is using the word "refutes" correctly here. In fact, Anne admits to getting into her estranged spouse's bank account (from space!), not due to some secret NASA hacking tool, but because she knew the unchanged password. Whether that's a crime… who knows. Because she was in space.

"Ladies and gentlemen, the Remmies. Let's bring them on."

I'm in awe. More than usual.

OK, back to our usual Sunday programming. We have the same candidate slate as last week. The probability of a second Trump term continues to slide; at the end of July, the Betfair punters actually had him over 50%!

You'll note the bettors have essentially four-tiered the Democratic candidates: (1) front-runners Joe and Liz; (2) laggards Bernie and Kamala; (3) longshots Yang and Mayor Pete; and (4) everyone else (Tulsi, Kirsten, Cory, Beto!, Tom, Amy, …) who should stop wasting (a) their money and (b) our time.

In the phony standings, however, Bernie's making it interesting between him and Trump! Yang continues his hold on "least phony". See what good that does him.

"WinProb" calculation described here. Google result counts are bogus.

But we have a lot to cover this week:

• At City Journal, Steven Malanga examines The Role of Apology In Recent Politics and American Culture. (That's the HTML title element; the page itself has a punchier headline: "I Apologize For This Article")

  Senator Elizabeth Warren has apologized—again—to Native Americans for the DNA tests she took to determine if she’s really part Cherokee. Speaking at a forum in Sioux City, Iowa, earlier this week, she said, “Like anyone who has been honest with themselves, I know I have made mistakes.” Warren apologized back in January, but only after initially refusing in October to say she was sorry, until the backlash grew so strong that she relented. With her second apology, Warren has set a new standard in the Democratic presidential primary, which some wags have dubbed the “I’m Sorry Primary.”

  Former vice president Joe Biden has already apologized for his fond memories of working with segregationists in the Senate. Senator Kamala Harris, meantime, has apologized for the “unintended consequences” of a truancy law she promoted in California. Hawaii representative Tulsi Gabbard is sorry for having once opposed gay marriage, while Senator Kirsten Gillibrand has apologized for her formerly tough-on-immigration positions. Beto O’Rourke has apologized for joking about how his wife is the one raising their kids, while Marianne Williamson has asked white people to apologize to African-Americans. Finally, South Bend’s mayor, Pete Buttigieg, has apologized for saying, “All Lives Matter.” It’s not that they don’t—you’re just not allowed to say that they do. And to think that the voting doesn’t even begin for another six months!

  But, as Steven points out eventually, you know who never apologizes? Trump. Also, the people who voted for him.

  ---

• In related news, Megan McArdle wonders at the WaPo: When will Trump supporters finally say, ‘Okay, this is not normal’?.

  The left had an easy time settling on its attitude toward President Trump’s supporters: a mixture of horrified outrage and sneering contempt. For many of us on the right, though, it hasn’t been so easy. The president’s boosters aren’t our natural enemies; they’re former and hopefully future allies. For three years, we’ve been struggling to find some way to discuss Trump.

  We don’t want to destroy Trump supporters but to convince them — that Trump’s main life achievements before the presidency lay in the fields of getting publicity, cheating people less powerful than himself and having a rich, politically connected father who could grease his way into the real estate business, rather than negotiating, managing or building; that impulsive, thin-skinned and belligerent people might be a great deal of fun to watch on television or Twitter but are rarely much good at their jobs; that Trump’s inexperience and lack of interest in policy have made him remarkably ineffective at pursuing even his stated political goals; and that the cost of his inexperience, his indifference to the day-to-day work of the presidency and his bitterly divisive rhetoric are not worth the transient joy of watching liberals have conniptions.

  For the record, I was tired of the conniptions on November 9, 2016.

  ---

• But let's look at the opposition. At the WSJ, James Freeman fact checks something Liz said up in Franconia, and finds that she's Still Pretending.

  “When I was a girl, a full-time minimum wage job in America would support a family of three,” said Warren. “It would cover a mortgage, utilities, and put food on the table. Today, a full-time minimum wage job in America will not keep a momma and a baby out of poverty. That is wrong and that is why I am in this fight.”

  Fact check from John McClaughry of the Ethan Allen Institute:

  Warren was born in 1949 and let’s assume her girlhood ended at age 18 in 1967.

  In 1967 the Federal minimum wage was $1.40. Assume the breadwinner worked full time 40 hours a week for 52 weeks of the year. That’s 2,080 hours, and it would have produced an earned gross income of $2,912. Diminish that by 4.8% - the family’s share of Social Security and Medicare payroll taxes, and let’s assume they paid no income taxes. That reduces their net income to $2,772.

  In 1967 the poverty level for a nonfarm family of four was $3,335. For a family of three it would have been slightly lower, around $3,000.

  So Warren’s three-person family’s minimum wage level income of $2,772 would have put them $228 under the poverty line.

  Could a three-person minimum wage family in 1967 have been out of poverty, paying on a mortgage, utilities, and food? Not likely.

  

  Maybe Andrew Yang could send Liz some of his "Math" buttons.

  ---

• But maybe also send some to Kamala. Because, as WaPo Fact Checker Glenn Kessler details: Kamala Harris uses fuzzy math to suggest her tax cut is paid for. Specifically, the "Lift" tax credit, "$6,000 fully refundable tax credit for couples filing a joint tax return ($3,000 for singles)." Which phases out at higher incomes, but still…

  Of course, handing out $500 a month to many American families is not inexpensive. In the ad, Harris says she will pay for this by repealing the corporate tax cut (which cut the top rate from 35 percent to 21 percent) and “tax breaks for the top 1 percent” in the Trump tax bill.

  We did the numbers, and there is no way that comes close to paying the full bill. The Tax Policy Center estimated the loss of revenue for fiscal 2020 to be about $291 billion. Using the Joint Tax Committee score for the tax bill for 2020, we find that the business tax cut reduces revenue by $114 billion, the estate tax cut amounted to $9 billion and the share going to the top 1 percent is about $50 billion.

  That adds up to almost $175 billion, leaving Harris about $100 billion short.

  This would be a good point to go back to the top of this post and watch that Remy video again.

  ---

• At Hot Air, John Sexton quotes the Washington Post: Kamala Harris has shifted positions on health care at least three times. "At least", because the shiftiness is so quick things get blurry.

  Anyway, if you’re looking for an explanation of why Harris is once again looking like a back-bencher in this race, I think her shifting, confused, and seemingly dishonest positions on health care reform is a more likely cause than Tulsi Gabbard’s repeated hits on her record.

  Good news, she's losing. Unfortunately, this game really is zero-sum. That means someone else is winning.

  ---

• Ah but what's with Joe? Michael Tracey at Spectator USA spectates and speculates: Joe Biden isn’t ‘gaffe-prone’, he’s losing his mind.

  ‘Gaffe?’ Who invented this nonsensical term? Its only common usage seems to be among political journalists and pundits, as a euphemistic cliché for politicians’ discrediting behavior. Do normal people, over the course of normal life, ever call it a ‘gaffe’ when somebody screws up? I’ve never heard a waiter accused of committing a gaffe for misstating a lunch special, or heard a corporate CEO who omits key earnings figures described as ‘gaffe-prone’. The word is reserved only for faltering politicians, to place their verbal embarrassments in a special category.

  Pundits demonstrate their limited vocabulary and laziness when they characterize Joe Biden’s recent struggles in terms of ‘gaffes.’ Biden’s inability to formulate coherent sentences and recall basic facts are not ‘gaffes’ in the traditional clichéd sense, as any reasonable person observing his performance on the campaign trail could acknowledge. They are mounting evidence of cognitive decline. Yes: unless you’re some miraculous orator, everyone engaged in unprepared speech occasionally flubs a word or mangles a phrase. Barack Obama once said he had visited 57 states in the 2008 primaries, but he obviously meant 47. Nobody really thought Obama believed there are 57 states in the US (although that didn’t stop right-wing trolls from pretending otherwise.)

  But that's not the only approach to understanding Joe's unique approach to reality. Liz Mair of the Bulwark offers a different strategy: Joe Biden Is a Gaffe Machine (And His Campaign Should Embrace It).

  You couldn’t have a real beer with Biden (or Trump, for that matter), but the fact that these big, powerful, rich, and very important men flub their words with some regularity probably helps convey that they are guys you could bond with over an ice cream cone, or a Filet O Fish, or a cheeseburger pizza.

  Biden’s team should understand that this fact is actually the core of their candidate’s appeal—and he should lean into it, not away from it.

  Precious few people in 2020 are voting for the “best professor” or “best aligner of management and shareholder value” or even “candidate most in line with me philosophically.” Presidential politics has always been a personality contest. And personality is what Joe Biden has in spades.

  He and his team should embrace it. Gaffes and all.

  OK. But they keep coming. Just yesterday, as reported in the Hill: Biden mistakes New Hampshire for Vermont during campaign stop.

  Former Vice President Joe Biden mistakenly praised the state of Vermont on Saturday when asked about his impression of Keene, N.H., by reporters during a press gaggle.

  Video of the exchange shows Biden remarking about Vermont's "beauty" after an unseen reporter asks him for his "impression" of the town, which is located in southwestern New Hampshire, close to the state's border with Vermont.

  "I love this place. Look, what’s not to like about Vermont in terms of the beauty of it? And what a neat town. This is like a scenic, beautiful town. The mayor's been a good guy. Everybody has been really friendly. I like Keene a lot," Biden said.

  Well, as the reporter noted, Keene is close to Vermont. You can see it from Sarah Palin's house, I understand, if Sarah lived in Keene.

  But it's not just weakness on knowing where he is, what decade things happened in, the difference between his own words and those of a British politician, etc. Also at the Bulwark: Why Biden’s ACA Exaggerations Are Problematic. And this was not an off-the-cuff exaggeration, this was a TV ad produced for his campaign:

  The ad, for which the campaign did a  “high six-figure buy,” claims that, “Together, [President Obama and Vice President Biden] worked to… pass the historic Affordable Care Act, protecting over 100 million Americans with preexisting conditions.”

  Over 100 million? In a country of 327 million? This, after President Obama claimed there were only 46 million uninsured Americans in 2009? Seems like a stretch. This isn’t just another malapropism or slip-of-the-tongue from Uncle Joe. Dozens of campaign staff must have signed off on the 60-second ad.

  Quick, Andrew! Ship the Biden campaign a few dozen "Math" buttons.

  ---

• And finally, a candidate who has yet to crack into Betfair finds his advocate at the Washington Free Beacon in the person of Andrew Stiles. Who reports: America Aches for Lincoln Chafee.

  The American people may finally get a presidential candidate worthy of the Oval Office. Lincoln Chafee, the former governor and U.S. senator from Rhode Island, is reportedly open to running for president in 2020 on the Libertarian Party ticket.

  Chafee, a Republican-turned-Democrat-turned-independent, announced in July that he had joined the Libertarian Party upon moving to Wyoming to pursue his family's love of the outdoors. "If you are a restless Democrat or Republican fatigued by partisan gridlock and the resulting politicization of even the Supreme Court, look up the Libertarian Party’s platform and score yourself," Chafee wrote in an op-ed published in the Boston Globe. "I happily registered as a Libertarian earlier this year. I’m proud to stand with the party of peace and freedom."

  Fun fact: Back in 2016, Chafee's presidential campaign (as a Democrat) lasted from June 3, 2015 until October 23, 2015.

  Hey, if he's on the November 2020 ballot, I'll vote for him. Probably.

• Cranky old Ken White is a lawyer, and he's got a bone to pick with you: Don’t Use These Free-Speech Arguments Ever Again. Something I've been dealing with on Facebook lately:

  It’s common, in free-speech debates, to find people arguing that America must balance free speech and safety, or free speech and the right to be free of abuse. A related rhetorical trope is “line drawing”: the idea that we must draw lines between free speech and abusive speech.

  In point of fact, however, American courts don’t balance the benefits and harms of speech to decide whether it is protected—they look to whether that speech falls into the First Amendment exceptions noted above. As the Supreme Court recently explained, the “First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech does not extend only to categories of speech that survive an ad hoc balancing of relative social costs and benefits. The First Amendment itself reflects a judgment by the American people that the benefits of its restrictions on the Government outweigh the costs. Our Constitution forecloses any attempt to revise that judgment simply on the basis that some speech is not worth it.”

  A related trope is “This isn’t free speech; it’s [x],” where x is bullying, or abuse, or some other social evil. But many social evils are protected by the First Amendment. “This isn’t free speech; it’s [x]” is empty rhetoric unless x is one of the established First Amendment exceptions.

  Is your favorite anti-speech argument one of the bad ones? Click over to find out.

  ---

• As I look at the smoldering ruin of the DJIA today, I shake my fist at the sky and yell "Damn you, Donald Trump!". But to compound my old-man ire, Michael D. Tanner points out: Trump’s Trade Critics Don’t Offer Better Options.

  But what exactly are the Democratic presidential candidates proposing as an alternative? Their policies — as opposed to their words — don’t seem all that different. In fact, some of the Democratic plans may be even more restrictive.

  For example, many experts believe that the best way to restrain China would be to join with our regional allies in some sort of block, similar to the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). And there is reason to believe that our allies would be happy to have us join the pact. But with the exception of extreme long-shot Representative John Delaney, every major Democratic candidate either joins Trump in opposing the TPP or is highly critical of the current negotiation. Even former vice president Joe Biden won’t commit to the treaty his administration negotiated.

  Well, I see there's a Libertarian candidate… oh, good Lord, no.

  The 2016 presidential election was not kind to Lincoln Chafee: the former Rhode Island governor, U.S. senator, and metric system enthusiast flopped when he mounted a long-shot campaign for the Democratic Party’s nomination, becoming a punchline for the pundit class and a footnote in that year’s brutal primary.

  I can't wait for a Libertarian candidate to advocate forcing a switch to metric. That would be the perfect capper to the first two decades of the twenty-first century.

• Oh, right. I was talking about free trade. At National Review, Kevin D. Williamson gives thumbs up to Unilateral Free Trade: An Old Idea Reappears.

  Protectionists often describe reciprocity as if it were a cover charge for admission to American markets, but that gets the issue exactly backward: The question isn’t whether Washington may properly interfere with foreign sellers but whether it ought to interfere with American buyers. The case for allowing Senator Sanders to interpose his political interests between buyers and sellers is non-obvious, on either moral or economic grounds. It takes a special kind of stupid to believe that a voluntary exchange — willing seller, willing buyer — is transmuted into a form of hideous predation simply because some of the parties to the transaction may hold different passports. To accept the premise that a voluntary exchange — which by definition is held to be beneficial by all involved parties — becomes a matter for federal police powers when the magical phrase “national interest” is uttered is to reject the intellectual basis of free enterprise per se and to accept in its place the operating assumptions of managerial progressivism: that you are to be permitted as much liberty as the bosses think useful.

  And, yup, Lincoln Chaffee has a pretty good record on free trade. As long as you're weighing your goods in grams.

  ---

• The Google LFOD news alert rang for Eugene Volokh's analysis of a recent Eighth Circuit decision: Videographers Have First Amendment Right Not to Make Same-Sex Wedding Videos. The "nice" state of Minnesota argued otherwise, and lost.

  Minnesota also suggests that a lesser form of scrutiny is appropriate because the Larsens can say that they disapprove of same-sex marriage in some other way. But just like New Hampshire could not "require [drivers] to display the state motto" Live Free or Die on their license plates, even if they could disavow the motto through "a conspicuous bumper sticker," so too would a disclaimer here be inadequate. The reason is that the constitutional "protection of a speaker's freedom would be empty" if "the government could require speakers to affirm in one breath that which they deny in the next." …

  So there, Minnesota.

  ---

• But LFOD (and, specifically, the same legal precedent) is cited by Dyer Oxley at the KIRO radio site. KIRO is in Seattle, but the issue discussed is in Norfolk, Virginia, where the city is trying to take down a Confederate monument, currently thwarted by state law.

  Norfolk's argument: that's compelled speech! But: Newest Confederate monument argument likely won't work.

  The compelled speech concept is the same reason that people are not forced to say the pledge of allegiance if they don’t want to. Or in New Hampshire, people have the right to not have a license plate that states “live free or die.” But statues and memorials may be a bit different. McKenna notes that the Supreme Court has upheld in the past that permanent memorials are government speech and cannot be associated with compelled speech.

  “Let’s say that you are really a big believer in dictatorship and autocracy and you really resent the Statue of Liberty in New York because it’s all about that terrible idea of freedom and liberty, so by gosh, you want to have a giant statue erected as a monument of autocracy and dictatorship. And if you don’t get to do that you would argue that your First Amendment rights are being violated.

  “Well, that case would go nowhere, because the Supreme Court has held that an individual’s free speech rights, or even a group’s free speech rights, are not violated when a government refuses to put up a statue in a public place.”

  It's complicated!

• At Quillette, Michael Hannon asks the provocative (but musical) question: Are Political Disagreements Real Disagreements?. Yes, I'm singing "Let's Call The Whole Thing Off" in my head.

  In Democracy for Realists, Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels argue that Americans vote largely on the basis of loyalty to their “team,” not sincere policy preferences. Although many citizens will describe themselves as “liberal” or “conservative,” they actually lack stable beliefs fitting these ideological self-descriptions. Thus, what seems like deep political disagreement is actually superficial and inauthentic. We know this because a small payment of $0.30 will motivate people to give more accurate (and less partisan) answers to politically charged questions. By incentivizing people for accuracy, the gap between Democrats and Republicans in response to factual questions sharply decreases, and sometimes disappears entirely.

  Being a "team player" can tend to make you deny obvious facts. That sounds like a bad idea. So good advice: don't be one of them. And don't trust any of them to give you the straight scoop.

  ---

• With reference to the above item, the first two headlines presented this morn by Real Clear Politics, provided here without excerpt.
  • From American Greatness: Trump's Enemies Are the Masters of Unreality.

  • Eugene Robinson's syndicated column in the Salt Lake Tribune President Trump Is Increasingly Untethered to Reality.

  The links are there if you want them. I suspect you don't want them.

  ---

• And (very) related, from Nick Gillespie at Reason: The 2020 Race Is Completely Unpredictable Because Politicians Are Awful.

  It's unlikely that either major party will see a surge of new members as they get increasingly shrill, bitter, and partisan leading up to Election Day. President Trump is already floating policies that are geared to fire up his base. He wants to end birthright citizenship and double down on trade war with China, and in anticipation of a recession, he's already lambasting the Federal Reserve for not doing his bidding. The Democrats have their own reflexive responses, including amping up charges of racism against any and all voters who disagree with them on just about anything.

  The end result of such ugliness is not likely to be a great awakening of civic engagement but something like The Great Tuneout, with weaker-than-expected voter turnout and even less faith and confidence in whoever manages to squeak into office. Which, if past is prologue, will lead not to less government but more.

  Well, Nick is optimistic today, right? Well, maybe tomorrow.

  ---

• Just to add to my air of unremitting gloom, Jim Geraghty points out at National Review: Anti-President Trump Conservatives Have No Good 2020 Options.

  If you’re a conservative who subscribes to the old Reaganite mix of free-market economics, a strong national defense, and traditional values, it’s understandable that you might be less than fully satisfied with a Republican presidency that features $555 billion in new tariffs, $8.4 billion in new taxpayer-funded assistance to farmers to offset the effect of those tariffs, talk of a full withdrawal from Afghanistan, persistent presidential desire to withdraw from NATO, increasingly warm public praise of Kim Jong-un, a perpetually furious presidential Twitter feed full of personal insults, and six-figure payoffs to porn stars.

  Unfortunately, the alternatives for traditional conservatives are not great, and the odds of another Republican winning the GOP nomination in 2020 are infinitesimal.

  And the Libertarians stand a good chance of nominating an inexperienced wacko, for whom I will probably vote.

  ---

• The WSJ Editorial Board makes a plea that will fall on two deaf ears, because they are the only ears that matter: Cut the Trump Uncertainty Tax.

  President Trump isn’t famous for consistency, but his reversal on a new round of tax cuts may be a record. On Tuesday he said he was considering a cut in the payroll tax and indexing capital gains for inflation, but on Wednesday he took it all back.

  “I’m not looking at a tax cut now,” Mr. Trump told reporters. “We don’t need it. We have a strong economy.” He added that indexing capital gains might be seen as “somewhat elitist” and would benefit the wealthy, thus aligning himself ideologically (and bizarrely) with his many media opponents who still denounce his 2017 tax reform.

  Mr. Trump is also confused about whether the economy is strong or weak, whether more economic stimulus is needed, and even whether his trade brawls with the rest of the world are weakening the economy. No wonder business investment is falling amid this climate of policy uncertainty. Mr. Trump’s payroll-tax cut wouldn’t pass Congress in any case, and indexing capital gains for inflation, while economically useful, would be challenged in court if he implemented it by executive order.

  With the vast powers stupidly vested by Congress in the hands of a whimsical President, it's surprising that the economy has done as well as it has. Although, as I type, the DJIA is down 400 points or so…

  ---

• And the Google LFOD alert rang for an Above the Law story: New Hampshire Shows Its Baby Love (And Practical Side) By Passing Fertility Access Law.

  As of August 1, 2019, hopeful parents in New Hampshire have reason to celebrate. That’s because Governor Chris Sununu signed into law SB279, a law expanding insurance coverage for fertility-related diagnosis, treatment, and preservation. Now not everyone has to work at Starbucks to get in vitro fertilization (IVF) benefits! Or at least not after the law’s effective date of January 1, 2020.

  But LFOD is… ah, there:

  Since When Did The “Live Free Or Die” State Go For Insurance Mandates?

  [Assisted reproductive technology law specialist and attorney Catherine] Tucker explained that while perhaps counterintuitive, there is considerable evidence that a fertility mandate will save insurance companies, the state, and taxpayers money in the long run. Without the help of insurance, IVF can commonly run around $15,000 a round. That’s all out of pocket to a patient lacking coverage. Aside from being cost prohibitive for many, it has also been shown to lead infertility patients to make poor choices.

  Insurance companies are too stupid to figure this out for themselves, I guess.

  [Sarcasm, in case it wasn't obvious.]

• At Reason, Tim Sandefur criticizes the New York Times' "1619" project, its effort to revive discussion of the legacy of American slavery: The Founders Were Flawed. The Nation Is Imperfect. The Constitution Is Still a ‘Glorious Liberty Document.’.

  Where the 1619 articles go wrong is in a persistent and off-key theme: an effort to prove that slavery "is the country's very origin," that slavery is the source of "nearly everything that has truly made America exceptional," and that, in Hannah-Jones's [one of the "1619" essayists] words, the founders "used" "racist ideology" "at the nation's founding." In this, the Times steps beyond history and into political polemic—one based on a falsehood and that in an essential way, repudiates the work of countless people of all races, including those Hannah-Jones celebrates, who have believed that what makes America "exceptional" is the proposition that all men are created equal. 

  For one thing, the idea that, in Hannah-Jones' words, the "white men" who wrote the Declaration of Independence "did not believe" its words applied to black people is simply false. John Adams, James Madison, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and others said at the time that the doctrine of equality rendered slavery anathema. True, Jefferson also wrote the infamous passages suggesting that "the blacks…are inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind," but he thought even that was irrelevant to the question of slavery's immorality. "Whatever be their degree of talent," Jefferson wrote, "it is no measure of their rights. Because Sir Isaac Newton was superior to others in understanding, he was not therefore lord of the person or property of others." 

  Ironically, the thrust of the "1619" thesis echoes the insistence of actual white supremacists of the 1800s: the myth that America's founding was inherently racist.

  I find the Amazon Product du Jour amusing, but I wonder if anyone outside a Certain Age Range will get it. Here is an explanation, sorry.

  ---

• At the Hoover Institution, David Henderson opines that A Carbon Tax Is Not A Slam Dunk. Specifically, it may not be the best way to combat climate change. For example…

  […] one important technological development over the last decade has been “geo-engineering.” The idea here is to change other things in the atmosphere that are easier to change than the amount of carbon used. Consider what we learned from the June 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo, in the Philippines. That eruption poured 20 million tons of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere. Over the next two years, the effect of that one eruption was to reduce the earth’s temperature by about 1 degree Fahrenheit. That might not sound like much but it’s actually over half the 1.4 degree warming that has happened over the last century. What if every year we could put sulfur dioxide in the atmosphere so as to permanently prevent the earth from warming? In their 2009 book Superfreakonomics, University of Chicago economist Steven D. Levitt and writer Stephen J. Dubner point out that if we could get just 34 gallons per minute of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere (which translates to about 100,000 tons per year), that would reverse warming in the high Arctic and reduce it in much of the Northern Hemisphere. Why focus on such high latitude areas? Because, note Levitt and Dubner, “high-latitude areas are four times more sensitive to climate change than the equator.” How would you get the SO₂ into the atmosphere. Levitt and Dubner cite the thinking of Nathan Myhrvold, at one time the chief technology officer for Microsoft. Mrhrvold argues that if we had a big enough hose, we could do it.

  As I've said before: the problem isn't figuring out how to adjust the global thermostat; we're only going to get better at doing that over the coming decades.

  The problem is: once we have that power in hand, who decides where to set it? You think arguments over your house's thermostat setting are bad? Just multiply the arguers by billions, and give some of them nuclear weapons.

  ---

• Kevin D. Williamson, writing at National Review asks about Patriotism: Is It Possible?.

  Is it possible for, say, Robert Francis O’Rourke? The Dave Matthews Band of Democratic presidential candidates put this into writing: “This country was founded on racism, has persisted through racism, and is racist today.” If by patriotism we mean simply to indicate love of country, would it be unfair to ask: How could a man of conscience love such a country? O’Rourke here is neither writing about the state nor any particular administration nor any of our nation’s many episodic failures to live up to its own ideals, but about the nation per se.

  One cannot love a hateful country the way one might love a racist uncle in spite of his shortcomings, because the love of country cannot survive the contempt and condescension one unavoidably feels toward doddering old men who should have learned better by now but are too old to be taught. You might cut your dotty uncle some slack, but love of country assumes a certain minimum of respect for it and confidence in it that are precluded by the kind of eye-rolling indulgence that in the South is accompanied by the exclamation “Bless your heart!”

  Among KDW's further observations is a drive-by hit on the term Latinx: a "neuter neologism" used "to refer to people descended from speakers of a language that is unintelligible without gender specificity."

  ---

• In her column, Veronique de Rugy proposes A Truly Populist Social Security Reform. Specifically, how to deal with the whole "going broke" thing, which pols in both parties are diligently trying to ignore?

  We must rethink the system entirely, root and branch. The current universal age-based system requires relatively high taxes and spreads the benefits thinly across everyone. Considering that much of the support for Social Security comes from people who incorrectly assume it's mostly helping poor Americans — economists have shown that Social Security is a regressive system that mostly benefits higher-income Americans — we need reform that truly targets people who can't help themselves. Such a reformed program would provide better and larger benefits to fewer recipients and, in turn, require less revenue and lower taxes.

  To be sure, such a reform would be sweeping. Yet, so are the problems faced by the program.

  I buy Veronique's premise: it would be a sensible matter to cut benefits for people [gulp, like me] who have a comfortable nest egg to fall back on. I don't know how the politics will work out, though.

By coincidence, I found myself concurrently reading two books about dysfunctional America. The other one, The Inclusive Economy, focused on poverty, and I didn't care for it much. This one, however, by Tim Carney, exceeded my expectations. When I get around to composing a "top 10" nonfiction list, this will definitely be on it.

Carney's goal is daunting, to explain various symptoms of social dysfunction among some areas of America. There are increased "deaths of despair" caused by drugs, suicide, and alcohol. People report feelings of loneliness, depression, and free-floating anger. People perceive that the "American Dream" is deader than the dodo. And we alreadly know about the murderous wackos.

Arguably worse: Donald Trump got elected by tapping into all this angst.

So what's going on? Carney convincingly ties things to the breakdown of healthy communities. Much is due to the decline of church attendance. (For example, those Trump voters? They report being "religious" at a higher than average rate. But their church attendance is actually lower than average. Hm.)

Yes, economic dislocation, in terms of good old "creative destruction" has its part. When a factory shutters, a significant fraction of "good decent" people move away, leaving behind a population without good prospects. But its more than that. (Carney visits a North Dakota fracking boom town, which is pretty dysfunctional on its own terms.)

Carney does a fantastic job of slicing and dicing demographic data, exit polling, and plain old shoe-leather reporting on communities that work and communities that don't. He doesn't have any grand top-down solutions, and explains why he doesn't. "Solutions" are something that have to be bottom-up; the best thing he can recommend is that governments stop some of the trends we're on: restore religious liberty, stop discouraging private charity, decentralize, deregulate.

You know, the kind of things that no major politician is advocating.

Personal note: one of Carney's Bad Example locations is Pottawattamie County, Iowa. Where I lived for the first ten years of my life. Guess it was a good idea for Mom and Dad to move us out back in 1961. The big city in the county is Council Bluffs, across the Missouri from Omaha. I guess it's where Omahans go to sin these days. And the current nickname for the place is "Counciltucky". Ouch.

One of Mrs. Salad's picks. And then (could I confide in you here) she decided she didn't want to see it. And I didn't particularly want to see it either, but how can one in good conscience send a DVD back to Netflix unplayed? So after a few months, she's off to lunch with her ex-coworkers, and…

IMDB classifies this in the "Crime, Drama" genres. Sure. Maybe a bit of Film Noir. And some very, very dark comedy, but you probably shouldn't laugh at these poor folks. Although I eventually did.

This was the late Philip Seymour Hoffman's last movie, and I hope it didn't send him over the edge. He plays Mickey, small-time crook, full-time loser. He's married to hot chick Jeanie (Christina Hendricks), though. But she doesn't seem very happy about that, or anything else.

Mickey is saddled with a pill-popping semi-psychotic stepson, Leon. At least for awhile. Because while he's at work, he threatens an old black guy, who promptly knocks his lights out, permanently, with a piece of pipe.

Problem: Mickey can't afford a decent funeral from the local ghoul/mortician, "Smilin' Jack". Mickey just pulled off a minor league heist with some buddies (including John Turturro), but that went very wrong, and the cash is not forthcoming. Maybe a hot tip on the ponies will come through.

Meanwhile, a "neighborhood" column-writer for the local newspaper (Richard Jenkins) decides to write about Leon's death. Which means interviewing Jeanie, with whom he's immediately smitten. And then…

Well it was based on a novel. Maybe it all came together in the book. Onscreen, it's kind of a mess. Sort of watchable, if you like watching pathetic people wreck their lives.

Acting is first-rate though. Too bad they weren't acting in a better movie.

• At Reason, Billy Binion blasts Beto: Beto O’Rourke Proposes Plan to Punish Tech Companies for Failing to Censor Hate Speech.

  Democratic presidential hopeful and former congressman Beto O'Rourke announced on Friday that he would like to remove legal protections from tech companies if they fail to police hate speech online. As with previous attempts to interfere with internet speech, the move would be an assault on the First Amendment.

  O'Rourke joins a growing chorus of lawmakers and political activists who would like to amend Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which protects Facebook, Twitter, and other social media platforms from facing lawsuits over potentially defamatory statements posted to those platforms by users.

  Given that all Senate Democrats have signed on to "partially" repeal the First Amendment, I guess Beto! thinks he has to do something in that same direction.

  ---

• Politico talked to "experts on aging" about the septugenarians running for President. One expert claimed that Wheezy Joe, Bernie, Liz, and President Bonespurs were "superagers". Somehow immune to the bodily deteriorations besetting the rest of us who are Getting Up There.

  But what I really noticed was this bit from the doctor who performed surgery on Biden twice to fix brain aneurysms.

  Kassell, who performed brain surgery on Biden, went a step further: “I am going to vote for the candidate who I am absolutely certain has a brain that is functioning. And that narrows it down exactly to one.”

  One can almost hear Joe in the background: "And that's me, right, Doc? Maybe you should say it's me."

  Because (thanks to Viking Pundit for pointing out) here are Six times Biden described major events in his life that never happened noted by the Washington Examiner.

  And, unfortunately too late to make the Examiner list, a report from the Washington Free Beacon, Biden claiming that MLK, RFK Were Assassinated in 'the Late '70s'.

  But he's fine, really.

  ---

• The WSJ editorializes today on The Great Student-Loan Scam.

  Some economists are predicting a recession in the next year, but the New York Federal Reserve’s quarterly household debt survey last week showed few portents. What it did show is that more Americans are defaulting on their student loans, and that government budget gnomes have vastly underestimated the future taxpayer charge.

  Defaults have fallen for most forms of consumer debt as the economic expansion continues. Mortgage delinquencies last quarter hit a historic low. But severely delinquent student loans have soared since 2012 and are now 35% of “severe derogatories”—more than credit cards (23%), auto loans (21%) and mortgages (11%).

  It's funny (but not really funny) how Uncle Stupid never pays for his own mistakes. James Freeman has more, noting that the student loan system is the scam that helped make Liz rich.

  Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s past claims of minority status may not be the most embarrassing fraud she’ll have to explain as she continues to seek the Democratic presidential nomination. A Journal editorial outlines the scale of a Warren-backed disaster that is goring taxpayers even as it has helped the Massachusetts lawmaker accumulate a small fortune.

  Sen. Warren has done as much as anyone in Washington to support the taxpayer-financed bubble in higher education by serially demanding expansions in student loans and pretending the government would make money off the program. But now the cost to taxpayers—including those who never went to college— is getting too big to ignore. A report from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York notes the disturbingly high delinquency rates on student loans compared to other types of debt.

  If I win the "Have a Beer with Liz" contest, I'll try to bring this up.

• George F. Will spells it out for you: ‘National conservatism’ is ‘Elizabeth Warren conservatism’.

  Regimes, however intellectually disreputable, rarely are unable to attract intellectuals eager to rationalize the regimes’ behavior. America’s current administration has “national conservatives.” They advocate unprecedented expansion of government in order to purge America of excessive respect for market forces, and to affirm robust confidence in government as a social engineer allocating wealth and opportunity. They call themselves conservatives, perhaps because they loathe progressives, although they seem not to remember why.

  The Manhattan Institute’s Oren Cass advocates “industrial policy” — what other socialists call “economic planning” — because “market economies do not automatically allocate resources well across sectors.” So, government, he says, must create the proper “composition” of the economy by rescuing “vital sectors” from “underinvestment.” By allocating resources “well,” Cass does not mean efficiently — to their most economically productive uses. He especially means subsidizing manufacturing, which he says is the “primary” form of production because innovation and manufacturing production are not easily “disaggregated.”

  Also in Mr. Will's crosshairs: Tucker Carlson ("who, like the president he reveres, is a talented entertainer"). What should be done, besides perhaps sending copies of The Road to Serfdom to anyone claiming to be a "national conservative"?

  ---

• At National Review, Mairead McArdle covered another recent big lie. Specifically, Kamala Harris to Big Donors: 'I Believe in Capitalism'. This was a "fundraiser in the Hamptons", meaning that probably everyone there was a person to which capitalism had been very, very good.

  But also interesting is her attempt to weasel out of positions she once firmly held, specifically on Bernie's Medicare for All scheme:

  “I have not been comfortable with Bernie’s plan,” Harris said in the Hamptons, referring to Senator Bernie Sanders’s Medicare for All plan, which she cosponsored and which would eliminate private health-insurance plans. She originally said she was on board with eliminating private plans should she become president, but she has since backtracked, saying that while she is “committed to reining in the private insurance companies,” it “has to happen over a period of time.”

  Amusingly, Mairead also reported on the blowback: Bernie Sanders Attacks Kamala Harris after she Criticizes Medicare for All. Via this tweet:

  I don't go to the Hamptons to raise money from billionaires. If I ever visited there, I would tell them the same thing I have said for the last 30 years: We must pass a Medicare for All system to guarantee affordable health care for all, not just for those who can afford it.

  — Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) August 19, 2019

  Don't worry, Bernie. Kamala will be back again into your arms on this issue if and when she gets appropriate polling.

  ---

• Everyone's favorite New Age Loon has a vow. Specifically (according to Paul Bois, Daily Wire): Marianne Williamson Vows To Remove Andrew Jackson’s Portrait As ‘Atonement’ For Native American Treatment.

  Keeping in line with her spiritualist approach to politics, 2020 longshot Marianne Williamson has vowed to remove the portrait of President Andrew Jackson from the Oval Office as part of her "atonement" plan for the U.S. treatment of Native Americans.

  I only mention this because it's so progressive-typical: "I plan to make a meaningless symbolic gesture that will do absolutely nothing to relieve the woes of Native Americans."

  ---

• At the Free Beacon, Stephen Gutowski and Charles Fain Lehman perform the unenviable task of digging through the horse manure: Democrats’ Gun-Policy Plans, Explained.

  Jockeying for attention in a packed primary, Democrats running for their party's 2020 nomination have rolled out expansive gun-control proposals. The Washington Free Beacon tallied which candidates support which plans and examined the evidence for and against the measures supported by the most candidates.

  Gun control has been a major feature of the 2020 primary discussion. Rep. Eric Swalwell (D., Calif.) ran his failed campaign on his proposal to ban and confiscate certain guns. Other contenders, like Sen. Cory Booker (D., N.J.), released comprehensive proposals months ago. The conversation has only gotten more heated since the mass shootings in El Paso, Tex., and Dayton, Ohio, with major candidates like senators Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) and Kamala Harris (D., Calif.) dropping new proposals.

  But who's advocated what, as of late August 2019? Stephen and Charles do their best to nail that jelly to the tree.

  Quibble: they use the term "buyback" for government compensation for turned-in guns. Dudes, it's not "buyback" unless you sold the gun in the first place. Eschew euphemism.

  ---

• And the Google LFOD News Alert sent us to the [Kenya!] Standard. With the happy news: Devolution should bring community pride. A puzzling beginning:

  The aftermath of devolution was supposed to be community pride. With each county making economic strides, leading to higher standards of living, citizens in the regions should be as proud of their counties and communities as Nairobians, who are treated as better citizens.

  Nairobians are very proud of themselves, perhaps because they are treated with awe by rural folk who do not know enough of the reality of living in the city. To the rural folk, Nairobi is full of fun and money is plenty. The truth is that only a few make enough money in the city and the skyscrapers do not signify money.

  Wha?… OK, "devolution" is explained, sort of, here. (By the World Bank, so allegedly kosher.) It's (more or less) decentralization.

  But LFOD? Ah, there it is. The author looks to the US for inspiration on pride-instilling.

  Whether in the Deep South of vibrant California or dynamic New York, every community has some pride. They will talk of something they have that others do not have. They take pride in firms started by their sons and their economic mainstay, whether industrial or service. Kentucky and Illinois haggle over where Abraham Lincoln was born because of the pride that goes with that.

  The mottos of the States espouse this pride. New Hampshire is “live free or die”, California is “Eureka”, Florida has “In God We Trus”t, just like the national motto. Check other state mottos and see the trend in pride.

  OK. Glad to be of help. Hope that devolution thing works out for you. But you might also want to work on improving your Economic Freedom score.

• Arnold Kling has Pushback against race-mindedness. He excerpts a couple WSJ columns, but I like his subsequent insight:

  I find it striking to contemplate how much easier race relations seem to be in the blue-collar sectors of America. There certainly was a time when many whites did not want to work next to blacks in factories, retail stores, or construction sites. But today racially-mixed work forces seem to operate in those industries with little apparent discord.

  Instead, the need for diversity and inclusion programs seems to be concentrated in academia, with some spillover into journalism and other fields that attract recent graduates in humanities and social sciences. Fifty years ago, one would not have predicted that academia would be the industry where race relations would require the most attention.

  Academia is probably the place where claiming to be a member of an offical oppressed victim class will provide one with the most benefit. Right, Liz?

  ---

• Speaking of Liz, and also Kamala, Paul Mirengoff of Power Line comments: Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren lie about the Michael Brown case. The details are well known, but I'm in agreement with Paul's conclusion:

  One last point. It’s one thing to make false statements about, say, taxes or crowd size. It’s another falsely to accuse someone of murder and to use the false accusation to peddle the notion that policing in America systematically puts innocent black lives in jeopardy.

  Such a claim is divisive and incendiary — far more so than anything President Trump has said about race.

  Harris has stated that “we need a president who doesn’t fan the flames of race and division.” But with her false claim about the Brown shooting — a claim so at odds with the facts that the Washington Post awarded it four Pinocchios — Harris is doing just that. So is Warren.

  One of these two candidates may be our next president. Neither should relish having to govern in a racial environment as toxic as the one they are promoting through false statements like the one about Michael Brown’s case. Americans should fear being governed in that environment.

  “I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”

  ---

• So the leader in the funniest-name category, John Hickenlooper, dropped out of the presidential race last week. It's up to you now, Mayor Buttigieg! Could I maybe ask for a Buttigieg/Hickenlooper ticket?

  Sigh. All right, enough with the third-grade giggles. I apologize.

  At the Federalist, Tristan Justice (whoa, cool name!) waves bye-bye:

  Former Colorado governor John Hickenlooper officially ended his presidential campaign Thursday, possibly pivoting to a run for U.S. Senate against one of the nation’s most vulnerable Republican incumbents, Sen. Cory Gardner (R-Colo.).

  That's the first paragraph. Tristan saves the punchline for the last paragraph:

  Hickenlooper said earlier this year he is not “cut out to be a senator.”

  Senator Gardner, there's your TV ad for next fall right there, if you want to use it.

  ---

• Don Boudreaux opens our eyes to an everyday minor miracle: I, Asparagus.

  This morning in the Whole Foods Market at Fair Lakes (in northern Virginia) I noticed that asparagus are selling for $3.99 per pound – asparagus grown in Peru!

  What a spectacular world! A production or nonsupervisory worker in the United States today who is paid the average wage for such workers must spend a mere 17 percent of one-hour’s wage to purchase a pound of fresh asparagus grown on another continent.

  Further observation: that's at upscale Whole Foods. So that $3.99 almost certainly is after a hefty markup.

  Even further observation: I don't much care for asparagus, but the market provides it nonetheless.

  ---

• As a good baby boomer, I'm getting inundated with 50-years reunions, anniversaries, reminisces, etc. For example, 'twas 50 years ago that the Beatles came out with the only album of theirs I currently listen to, "Abbey Road". Mark Steyn concentrates on George Harrison's song, "Something." And I guarantee that you'll learn "something" you didn't know about it. (See what I did there?)

  The tune was so good that Harrison initially assumed it must be something he'd heard before, somewhere or other, and put it aside. (He would have been better advised to do that a few years later with "My Sweet Lord", which was to prove a rather expensive mistake.) He wrote it on a piano at the Abbey Road studios while Paul McCartney was in the adjoining studio laying down overdubs for the White Album, so there was a lot of music around the building and one can understand his momentary fear that "Something" might have been something else. It took him a few months to accept the melody was actually his, and a few more to work out the middle-eight in contrasting key. Although not exactly conventional in one important respect, it was an AABA song, with what Harrison's biographer Simon Leng calls "harmonic interest" throughout "almost every line".

  Mark drops approximately 149 names of other musicians throughout the essay. I don't know how he has all this insight/data/gossip on hand, but there you go.

I regret to say that this book (obtained via Interlibrary Loan by the University Near Here from Wesleyan University) goes in the "Wish I'd Liked It Better" category. I had high hopes, as it emanates from the Cato Institute. I've noticed the author, Michael D. Tanner, writing a lot of good stuff in the past. But…

That's not to say it's bad, it's merely "not awful", could have been better. Poverty is not a burning issue in America, causing pols to me more vocal about what they'll do for (or, more likely, to) you. Still, if you walk around with open eyes, it's hard not to be concerned.

What causes American poverty? Guess what? It's complicated. Tanner discusses (some of) the usual culprits: racism, sexism, changing social attitudes, economic dislocation, etc. And his proposed reforms are conveniently listed:

1. Reform the criminal justice system, end the war on drugs.
2. Reform education system and stop the slide of the U.S. in education outcomes.
3. Bring down the cost of housing.
4. Make it easier for the poor to bank, save, borrow and invest–and start businesses.
5. Increase economic growth and make it more inclusive.

All worthy endeavours, and the sub-reforms (e.g., reform of regulations, occupational licensing, zoning, etc.) are congenial to liberty-minded folks who are also compassionate toward the less well-off.

So what was not so good about the book?

• You'd think that Charles Murray would have made a more frequent appearance in a libertarian-oriented book about poverty. But as far as Tanner seems to be concerned, Murray's contribution started and ended with 1984's Losing Ground. But The Bell Curve (1994) described a significant correlation between intelligence and poverty. And Coming Apart (2012) went into more detail on "assortive mating"; to the extent that IQ is heritable, the haves and the have-nots tend to procreate with each other, and the correlation propagates into the likely future.

  But it's not just (specifically) Murray, the issue of intelligence is, as near as I can tell, entirely absent from Tanner's book. OK, so maybe Tanner thinks it's unimportant. But (still) we're owed at least a cursory dismissal of why he thinks it's unimportant.

• Also largely absent is Thomas Sowell. His insight that statistical disparities between groups need not, and often are not the result of invidious discrimination goes unmentioned. And Tanner usually assumes the worst, especially in his discussion of criminal justice. (Yes, African-Americans are jailed out of proportion to their presence in the popultion. But they also commit more crime,)

• Similarly, the issue of immigration is (as near as I can tell) MIA in Tanner's book. Specifically, low-skilled immigration. Tanner is eloquent on the damage that minimum wage laws do to the poor: they literally make it illegal to hire someone whose value to the employer might not make economic sense.

  So, what about an increased supply of low-skill labor? What does that do to the poor job-seeker?

  Again, Tanner might not find this important. But (again) not mentioning it at all is difficult to excuse.

• Finally, a quibble: in a mostly-good discussion of the need to provide financial/banking services to the poor, Tanner includes this bit of evidence:

  For instance, according to the Federal Reserve, 46 percent of adults say they either could not cover an emergency expense costing $400, or would cover it by selling something or borrowing money.

  It's not that simple, and (guess what) I found a more nuanced discussion on the Cato blog (because this was also a talking point of presidential ex-candidate John Hickenlooper): Is it True that 40% of Americans Can't Handle a $400 Emergency Expense? Asked and answered by Alan Reynolds:

  The question was about how people would choose to pay a $400 “emergency expense” — not whether or not they could pay it out of savings (or checking) if they wanted to.  Respondents were also free to choose more than one way of paying the extra $400 (“please selects [sic] all that apply”), so the answers add up [to] 143% rather than 100%.  Even if 100% said they could pay an extra $400 with cash, there could still be more than 40% who would choose a different method.

  It turns out that 86% would pay cash or charge it and then pay off the bill at the next statement (many consumers autopay credit card bills from checking accounts). Some (11%) said they might borrow some or all of it from a friend or family member, but that probably means a spouse or parent in most cases (respondents included full-time students).

  I.e., Tanner either should have reported this more carefully, or left it out. This sloppiness says that there may be problems in some of those other footnotes and citations as well.

Bottom line: not awful. Could have, and should have, been much better.

No changes in our phony lineup this week, but the Betfair wagerers continue to be disenchanted with Kamala, sending her back to pre-debate lows. But Liz's odds continue to improve, as she's now the favorite candidate among those not named Donald.

And it's been a relatively quiet week on the phony front, with our leaders, Trump and Bernie, shedding over 3 million phony hits. (Which, see below, were probably not there in the first place.) But in these times, "relatively quiet" means it's gone from "aircraft carrier deck" to "unlubricated chain saw".

Case in point, Ellie Bufkin of the Washington Examiner is seemingly tasked with amplifying every lie, gaffe, stumble, or stutter of the Democratic candidates, and the best she could do this week is: Kamala Harris marks Muslim holiday: ‘Finally got my pork chop!’. Kamala was at the Iowa State Fair.

Also at the fair was Cory Booker, vegan. He went for a fried peanut butter and jelly sandwich. But fried in what, Ellie? Come on, do some reporting!

"WinProb" calculation described here. Google result counts are bogus.

• So it's been kind of a tough week for candidate phoniness, but fortunately the New York Times is on the case, publishing an exposé by Kevin Roose on The Phony Patriots of Silicon Valley.

  Not long ago, many leading technologists considered themselves too lofty and idealistic to concern themselves with the petty affairs of government. John Perry Barlow, a lion of the early internet, addressed his “Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace” to the “governments of the industrial world,” saying that for him and his fellow netizens, these creaky institutions had “no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear.”

  But that was before privacy scandals, antitrust investigations, congressional hearings, Chinese tariffs, presidential tweets and Senator Elizabeth Warren.

  Targets of Roose's scorn: Peter Thiel, Facebook, Google, Amazon, Apple. Apparently they are… well, it's hard to pull a coherent thesis out of Roose's words. He's long on snarky descriptions of Big Tech government interactions, short on demonstrating that they exhibit even nominal patriotism, let alone the phoniness thereof.

  But: "Not long ago"? Barlow's famed declaration was initially published in 1996, 23 years ago.

  ---

• The Fox News website describes a Fox News show segment ("Fox & Friends"): Dan Bongino on Bernie Sanders calling Trump 'an idiot': Biggest phony I've ever seen in politics. Among other things:

  Bongino argued Sanders and others on the left show hypocrisy on the issue of climate change by using private jets to travel.

  "He is the biggest fake I've ever seen in politics and I can't believe people are getting suckered by this guy every day," he added.

  In addition, Don called Sanders a "fraud". No wonder this was near the top of the Google results.

  Hey, why don't I get paid for going on cable TV and shouting insults and namecalling? Better, I could do it on either CNN, MSNBC, or Fox! Just tell me who to hate!

  ---

• At National Review,  Alexandra DeSanctis profiles Pete Buttigieg: Christian Moralist of the Left.

  Pete Buttigieg isn’t always sure that he knows what it means to be a moral Christian. But he’s pretty certain you aren’t one.

  […]

  “The left is rightly committed to a separation of church and state,” he told USA Today columnist Kirsten Powers in an April interview, “but we need to not be afraid to invoke arguments that are convincing on why Christian faith is going to point you in a progressive direction.”

  Did you catch that? Underneath the McKinseyesque jargon, Buttigieg is asserting that being a good Christian means you must embrace progressive ideology. This is how he’s spoken about religion for the entirety of his campaign, wielding it like a cudgel against anyone who hesitates to champion his policy prescriptions.

  Mayor Pete is a strident moralist right up to… you guessed it, when the discussion turns to abortion.

  ---

• The Washington Times reports: Bernie Sanders' 'Medicare for All' sputters as Kamala Harris, 2020 Democrats flee.

  When Sen. Bernard Sanders reintroduced his “Medicare for All” bill in the Senate in April, four of his fellow Democratic presidential hopefuls signed on with him, thrilling liberal activists who believed the universal health care proposal was becoming unstoppable.

  Four months later, Mr. Sanders is looking more and more like a lonely holdout after watching his allies slink away as politics of the plan shift.

  I think the Washington Times overstates the back-off. Even though Kamala is a famous waffler on this sticky point, Elizabeth Warren is still on board. Good luck on getting a straight answer from anyone, though.

  ---

• Finally, at National Review, Kevin D. Williamson on the eighth dwarf, Wheezy: Joe Biden, Designated White Guy. KDW is especially keen in his analysis of Barack Obama's pickle in finding himself the 2008 Democratic nominee:

  And so Obama’s balancing act: a Wilsonian-Johnsonian commitment to expanding the welfare state and regimenting critical sectors of the economy under Washington’s direction; all that dopey, content-free “hope and change” stuff that worked so well for Bill Clinton; and, in both international relations and sensitive domestic cultural affairs, a politics of respectability, which was often enough in practice a politics of condescension — and insincerity. Senator Obama, you’ll recall, was too much of a social conservative to stand a chance in today’s Democratic party — he opposed homosexual marriage and cited his religious beliefs in service of that position, meaning that 2008’s great progressive hope is 2019’s irredeemable hate monster. Not many people thought that he actually believed any of that, but they admired the calculation and the so-called realism of his self-conscious positioning. Democrats do not mind being lied to if they are skillfully lied to — Bill Clinton left the White House a hero.

  Barack Obama is famously unsentimental, including on racial questions, for instance in shaping his romantic life in a way that would comport better with his political ambitions. When it came time for him to choose a running mate, his short list consisted exclusively of white, moderate, establishment Democratic figures, mostly with Catholic backgrounds: a governor of Kansas, a governor and senator from Indiana, a governor of Virginia, and Joe Biden, an eternal Senate fixture who had chaired two committees important to the Obama campaign: Foreign Relations, which might help provide some heft on international relations that Obama’s own résumé wanted, and Judiciary, which would make the vice president a potential asset in high-court confirmation hearings. It was put out that Mrs. Clinton was under consideration, but Obama himself apparently never took that idea seriously.

  So Biden's "Obama likes me!" schtick sounds a lot better than "Obama made a cynical political calculation and picked me!"

The new Elvis Cole/Joe Pike novel from Robert Crais. Mr. Crais is on my short "buy" list for novelists.

Young Isabel is a bank teller, but (thanks to the opening scene) we know that she comes from a family with a deep dark secret. Unfortunately, this means that she's a target of bad guys: a couple of minions grab her on her way out of the bank, shove her into their car, and drive off!

Terrible, right? Unfortunately for the minions, Isabel is a teller at Joe Pike's bank. And Joe's a witness to the abduction. So the abductors are subdued in short order (in gratifying Joe Pike fashion), and Isabel is rescued.

But (as it turns out) it doesn't end there. Because Isabel has no idea why she was kidnapped. And she remains in peril, because those guys were just minions. So Joe, and his partner, the World's Greatest Detective, Elvis Cole, must uncover the secrets in Isabel's past, and protect her from future violence.

That last bit is a bit difficult, because Isabel isn't that smart about following Pike's advice about avoiding peril.

Series writers invariably go into "maintenance" mode, and this book is an example of that. Cliffhangers are neither resolved nor introduced. The protagonists' characters do not develop. It's pretty much a generic outing for Joe and Elvis. But enjoyable nonetheless.

I do have a gripelet: like Jack Reacher, Elvis and Joe seem to attract trouble like a black hole attracts matter; the whole plot here hangs on the mere coincidence of Joe being in the right place at the right time. Maybe they inhabit an alternate universe where evil plots are developing all around, just stand around for a bit, keep your eyes open, and one will happen right in front of you!

• Slashdot says: A New Species of Leech Is Discovered Near Washington, D.C.. Specifically, in "slow-moving swamp water."

  In the summer of 2015, when Smithsonian research zoologist Anna Phillips and other scientists were standing in slow-moving swamp water, letting leeches latch onto their bare legs or gathering them up in nets from muddy pond bottoms, they didn't realize that some of the bloodsuckers they'd collected belonged to an entirely new species. But in a just-published paper in the Journal of Parasitology, Phillips and her colleagues from the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico and the Royal Ontario Museum report that a previously unknown leech species, Macrobdella mimicus, is the first to be discovered on the continent in more than 40 years.

  I know, I promised to cut down on the blood-sucking metaphors. It's dehumanizing. But I am a weak person.

  ---

• We need as much optimism as we can get these days, and Jonah Goldberg provides some in his column: Maybe Liberty Isn’t a Lost Cause in China.

  Whether it was a young political scientist named Woodrow Wilson hailing Otto von Bismarck’s authoritarian Prussia as the most “admirable system . . . and most nearly perfected” in the world, or Lincoln Steffens claiming upon his return from Soviet Russia that he’d “seen the future, and it works,” or New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman wishing that America could learn from China’s “one party authoritarianism,” virtually every time nationalist and authoritarian regimes seized the reins, countless Western intellectuals became convinced that a better, more “efficient” model of government had been created.

  As George Orwell observed, this sort of thinking amounts to power-worship, and this mindset leads people to think that current trends will only continue in a straight line into the future.

  But that’s not how the last three centuries have gone. Power-hungry experts love to tell us that freedom has had its day, yet liberty keeps winning. The freedom fighters in 2019 Hong Kong may meet the same fate that the protesters in Tiananmen Square did in 1989. But that doesn’t mean they’ll be remembered as victims of a lost cause. Rather, they might be remembered as proof that liberty can win in the long run, when people fight for it.

  But you do have to fight for it. As Jonah (and many others) have noted: the natural state of mankind is miserable poverty and subjugation to tribal leaders.

  ---

• At Law & Liberty, Titus Techera remembers Orson Welles Unlikely Prophecy. As seen in Citizen Kane:

  Now, the brilliant insight of the story is this: the only way America could produce a true populist, a home-grown demagogue that could rise to the top of national politics, would be through the media. The use of media in American politics is as old as the Founders and printing pamphlets, but the arrival of radio introduced a change that suddenly made people realize the potential to move politics away from political offices and into the ether. Politics became more populist, but more virtual at the same time. And subsequent technological innovations—most notably TV and the internet—have culminated in the celebrity presidency of Donald Trump.

  If I'm remembering it correctly, Kane lost his election when his infidelity was revealed by his opponents. Trump was luckier.

  ---

• 

  At Libertarianism.org Arnold Kling explores How We Polarize Ourselves.

  Why do we demonize those with whom we disagree?  The basic reason is that it helps to protect us from having to question or doubt our own beliefs.  If we see others as decent human beings, then we have to consider how they arrived at a point of view that differs from our own, and even consider the possibility that they could be at least partly correct.  But instead, if we regard them as driven by evil motives, then we feel no need to give their actual arguments any sort of fair hearing.  Demonizing them saves us the hard work of listening and the emotional challenge of self-doubt.

  Our polarization is reinforced by another psychological defense mechanism, called confirmation bias.  Researchers have undertaken experiments in which people with different positions on an issue were shown an identical set of facts on the issue, and each side reported that the facts strengthened its position! 

  Fortunately, everything I've read about confirmation bias strengthens my certitude that I do not suffer from it. Whew!

  But for those of us not so lucky (or deluded), Arnold's book, The Three Languages of Politics (Amazon link at right) is highly recommended.

  ---

• Hot Air excerpts a Vanity Fair interview with "New York financier" Anthony Scaramucci, who was Donald Trump’s communications director in the White House for a few days in 2017: "Oh my god, this jackass. You know, it’s all good.".

  The red line was the racism—full-blown racism. He can say that he’s not a racist, and I agree with him, okay? And let me explain to you why he’s not a racist, ’cause this is very important. He’s actually worse than a racist. He is so narcissistic, he doesn’t see people as people. He sees them as objects in his field of vision. And so therefore, that’s why he has no empathy. That’s why he’s got his thumb up in the air when he’s taking a picture with an orphan. That’s why when someone’s leaning over the desk and asks [Nobel Prize–winning human rights activist Nadia Murad], “Well, what happened to your family members?”—they were murdered—he just looks at her and says, “Okay, when are we getting coffee here?”

  Narcissism worse than racism? Debatable. But the Mooch is onto something.

  ---

• At the Library of Economics and Liberty, David Henderson reveals a simple truth: The New York Times Is Truly Messed Up. He draws attention to their latest anti-capitalist slander, from a Princeton sociology prof, one Matthew Desmond: In order to understand the brutality of American capitalism, you have to start on the plantation.

  The prof is part of a new movement in historical writing, dubbed the “New History of Capitalism” (NHC). As genres go, NHC is kind of a dumpster fire, as revealed by an article David links to by Phillip W. Magness, The Anti-Capitalist Ideology of Slavery. Sample:

  Many leading examples of NHC scholarship in the academy today are plagued by shoddy economic analysis and documented misuse of historical evidence. These works often present historically implausible arguments, such as the notion that modern double-entry accounting emerged from plantation ledger books (the practice actually traces to the banking economies of Renaissance Italy), or that its use by slave owners is distinctively capitalistic (even the Soviets employed modern accounting practices, despite attempting to centrally plan their entire economy). Indeed, it was NHC historian Ed Baptist who produced an unambiguously false statistic purporting to show that cotton production accounted for a full half of the antebellum American economy (it actually comprised about 5 percent of GDP).

  Much more at the links. Matthew Desmond bids fair to become this year's recipient of the Michael Bellesiles award for crap scholarship. (2017 winner: Nancy MacLean.)

  ---

• And finally our Google LFOD alert rang for a report from Maine TV station WMTW on President Trump's recent New Hampshire visit: President Trump blasts Democratic ‘socialists, communists,’ touts US economy in NH.
  Showing affection for the state where he won his first election – the 2016 New Hampshire Republican primary – Trump said, “Our hearts beat to the words of the New Hampshire state motto, ‘Live Free or Die.’”

  So then did he apologize for kissing up to dictators? Imposing tariffs? Failing to get control of Federal spending? Nope, he just got back into the copter.

Pun Salad value-added: the Cyrillic footnote on page 60, систематическая, translates to "systematic". You're welcome.

If you're used to Kevin D. Williamson's writings at National Review and (occasionally) elsewhere, the first thing you'll notice is that, wow, this book has a lot of profanity. That's OK with me. I do watch Tarantino movies now and then. But unexpected from (specifically) KDW and (generally) the kind of "serious" non-fiction books I usually read.

KDW, semi-famously, was hired away from National Review by the Atlantic magazine. His ostensible gig was to do the kind of reporting he was occasionally known for at NR: a tour of White Working-Class Dysfunctional America, land of alienation, opiates, poverty, and pro-Trump voters.

But after a few days, KDW was fired. The proximate cause being the outrage his almost-coworkers expressed that an opinion writer for a conservative magazine actually had conservative opinions. Specifically, KDW refused to bow to sentimentality about anti-abortion laws; they should target both the (ex-)mother and the doctor. Otherwise, you're not treating the (ex-)mother as a responsible individual with free will.

But the genesis of the book (KDW says) was actually considerably before that, as he observed the public shaming of convenient individuals in social media. Typical example: Justine Sacco, who tweeted out an unfortunate, unfunny "joke" about AIDS as she was going to South Africa, and returned to America to find herself fired, a victim of the Twitter mob. Many examples since then, of course.

KDW is unsparing in his contempt for such mobs and their constituents, comparing them to poo-flinging monkeys. (And when they're not poo-flinging, they're masturbating.) But he takes the discussion in unexpected directions. Although, unlike the profanity, I probably should expected some of those unexpected directions: excursions into literature, sociology, economics, and more.

KDW's insights deserve to be described fully and evaluated carefully. If you expect that from me, ha, sorry. But let me give you a few cheap examples from the index: following the entry for Moby-Dick is … Mojo Burrito. Just before Dante Alighieri is Daniels, Stormy. Between Jefferson and Jesus? Jeong, Sarah. (Who managed to survive an attack of a social media mob.)

So: not what I expected, but still good. I remain a KDW fan, at the highest level, the one with the label: "If he says something I disagree with, I'm probably wrong."

It won the Oscar for 2018's Best Picture! So what if I liked Black Panther better? This is still pretty good. And the IMDB raters have it at number 123 on their list of best movies of all time.

But approximately 1942 naysayers started their reviews with "It's like Driving Miss Daisy, except that…".

It's also kind of like The Odd Couple.

Viggo Mortensen plays "Tony Lip", maitre'd/bouncer at the Copacabana. While the club is being renovated, he's out of a job. Fortuitously, an offer comes in: famed pianist Don Shirley is going on a tour in the Deep South, and needs a driver/gofer. A deal is struck.

Complicating things: (1) it's the early sixties; (2) Don is an African-American; (3) as it develops, he's also gay; (4) Tony's the kind of guy who'll throw away perfectly good glasses because his wife let a couple of black plumbers drink from them.

It's based on a true story, but I can imagine the script nearly wrote itself. There's gonna be continuing culture/race-based clashes between Tony and Don. Each will Learn Things, Grudging Respect will be earned, eventually Steadfast Friendship will be established. So, no real surprises.

But the acting is first rate. (Viggo Mortenson plays Tony, Mahershala Ali plays Don.) Peter Farrelly co-wrote, co-produced, and directed; that's quite a change for a guy whose previous movie was Dumb and Dumber To.

Bottom line: very watchable.

• As I type, ElectionBettingOdds has Beto! with a 1.4% chance of winning the Democratic nomination for President. This puts him in a solid tenth place, behind Liz, Wheezy Joe, Kamala, Bernie, Mayor Pete, Yang, Tulsi, Spartacus, and (whoa!) Hillary Clinton.

  (He is, however, ahead of Michelle Obama, Julian Castro, Amy Klobuchar, Andrew Cuomo, Oprah Winfrey, Kirsten Gillibrand, Sherrod Brown, Jay Inslee, and Hickenlooper. There are some actually-running candidates in that list.)

  Apparently his campaign advisors have convinced him that fear-based demagogy on guns is a good way to improve his numbers. The HuffPo reports: Beto O’Rourke Calls For Mandatory Assault Weapon Buyback, Returns To Campaign Trail. Subhed: "'If at this moment we do not wake up to this threat, then we as a country will die in our sleep,' he said."

  Die. In our sleep.

  At the NR Corner, Charles C. W. Cooke disapproves of the euphemism: ‘Mandatory Buy-Back’ Means ‘Confiscation’.

  One more time, with feeling: “Mandatory buy-back” is a cowardly and cynical euphemism, and members of the press should not be using it outside of quotation marks. What O’Rourke is proposing here is gun confiscation, coupled with limited compensation. Every time somebody in the media uses the term “buy-back,” they are laundering O’Rourke’s extremism.

  Even on its own, “buy-back” makes no sense as a term: Were O’Rourke to get his way, the government would not be “buying back” the guns on his list because the government did not own, or sell, any of the guns on his list in the first instance. When coupled with the word “mandatory,” the pretense becomes farcical.

  CCWC goes on to observe that you expect politicians to use weaselly language, but journalists shouldn't.

  ---

• At Reason, Jacob Sullum notes that it's apparently now the Current Wisdom that the Supreme Court should be more politicized: SCOTUS Should Drop This Second Amendment Case, a New York Times Columnist Argues, Because Mass Shootings.

  During the term that begins this fall, the Supreme Court is expected to consider its first potentially important Second Amendment case since 2010. The case involves New York City's tight restrictions on transportation of legally owned guns, which the city modified in the hope of rendering the case moot after the Court agreed to hear a challenge to them. New York Times columnist Linda Greenhouse, who was the paper's Supreme Court reporter for three decades, is hoping the justices will decide not to hear the case after all. Her argument is not legal but political, which is puzzling in light of the Supreme Court's responsibility to enforce constitutional guarantees.

  I think Jacob is being slightly disingenuous about this being "puzzling". Clearly, Greenhouse does not think it's the Court's responsibility to enforce constitutional guarantees, instead it's there to enforce current leftist political dogma when possible, otherwise to do nothing.

  ---

• Mark J. Perry has composed a wicked Venn Diagram:

  Venn diagram of the day on the gobbledygook that is Tariff Man’s trade ‘policy’ and the gullibility of his supporters https://t.co/0mR5BItVwE

  — Mark J. Perry (@Mark_J_Perry) August 15, 2019

  Or as Mr. Ramirez would put it:

  

  Orange Man Bad! Alternatives probably worse! We are screwed!

  ---

• At American Consequences, P. J. O'Rourke, apparently no close relation to Beto!, provides something we all need: A Brief History of How Communication Devolved.

  The computer is a handy device. It’s terrific for looking up who played Wally Cleaver on Leave It to Beaver. But the computer is essentially meaningless to wisdom, learning, and sense.

  My laptop may be a great technological improvement on my old IBM Selectric. (Wally was played Tony Dow – I just Googled it.) But there is no historical indication that technological improvements in the way we inscribe our ideas lead to improvement in the wisdom, learning, and sense of the ideas themselves.

  The opposite case can be made. When words had to be carved in stone, we got the Ten Commandments.

  When we needed to make our own ink and chase a goose around the yard to obtain a quill, we got William Shakespeare.

  When the fountain pen was invented, we got Henry James.

  When the typewriter came along, we got Jack Kerouac.

  And with the advent of the smartphone keypad we get… Donald Trump on Twitter.

  Yeah, I see what you mean. Click through for the first word to ever appear on the Internet, which I did not know.

• Kevin D. Williamson's recent NR Corner post is Decisions, Decisions.

  The polls at the moment have it Biden, Warren, Sanders, and Harris, or the nincompoop, the nag, the nut, and the nark. I feel like the Democrats are not really giving Marianne Williamson a fair look.

  "Indeed." I'd tell you to Read The Whole Thing, but you just did.

  Instead of an Amazon Product today, I've resurrected an old comic page, originally grabbed from the Jack Kirby Museum. Click for a big version.

  If it's President Warren on January 20, 2021, you can't say you weren't warned. (I believe that's Marianne Williamson in black on the right.)

  ---

• So I'm moaning over the wreckage of my investment portfolio and pricing out cat food. And at Cafe Hayek Don Boudreaux points out: Trump Seems Intent on Destroying the Global Economy....

  … and, to the extent that he succeeds in this madness, he will inflict incalculable damage, not just on non-Americans, but on – and perhaps especially on – Americans as well.

  Trump’s belief that his trade policies will enrich Americans and makes us more secure, both economically and militarily, is a figment only of his economic ignorance and naiveté. His trade policies will eventually more than eliminate any of the economic benefits that other of his policies are generating. Trump and his advisors – both those, such as Peter Navarro, who actively encourage Trump’s trade madness, and others who, despite knowing better, cravenly abide it because of their wish to remain near The Prince – are fast becoming a greater threat to Americans’ prosperity and peace than are any foreign governments.

  Prof Don points out a new Foreign Affairs article by Chad P. Bown And Douglas A. Irwin, Trump’s Assault on the Global Trading System. You need to register to read the full article, but even the part you get for free is pretty damning.

  ---

• Or you could just read free stuff, like the latest from Pun Salad fave, Veronique de Rugy: You Can't Have Your Tariff Cake and Eat It Too.

  When it comes to trade policy, President Donald Trump and his adviser Peter Navarro provide endless examples of incoherent economic thinking. They regularly claim that X is true, and then in the next breath, they assert that not-X is also correct. Let's consider two recent examples.

  The first involves Navarro. Following an announcement that the administration was again ready to hit Chinese imports with a new round of tariffs, Navarro made the rounds on TV to argue that consumers should not worry because this will not affect them at all. Talking to Fox Business Network's Gerry Baker, Navarro said, "There's a lot of people who are saying, incorrectly, that somehow the American consumer is bearing the burden of these China tariffs. And it's just false." In other interviews, he went on to praise the billions of dollars raised by Uncle Sam from the tariffs.

  These claims make no sense. The whole point of Trump's tariffs is to raise the prices of foreign goods to make them so unappealing to U.S. consumers that these consumers will instead buy more domestically made goods. Some of the Chinese producers of the goods could, in theory, eat the full cost of the tariffs and suffer reduced profit margins. However, in reality, importers pass a large portion of the costs of tariffs on to customers — manufacturers and households in the United States — by raising their prices. In fact, many academic studies have found that most or all of the burden of these tariffs is borne by U.S. consumers.

  So we're damaging ourselves, throwing a lot of capricious policy around, mangling relationships with trading partners, … what's not to like?

  ---

• So the Washington Post Fact Checker gave Liz and Kamala "Four Pinocchios" (Harris, Warren ignore DOJ report to claim Michael Brown was ‘murdered’). Factcheck.org don't have a cute scale for lies, but nevertheless found Harris, Warren Wrong About Brown Shooting.

  And yesterday Politifact weighed in with…

  NEW: Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren called Michael Brown's killing in Ferguson a "murder." Legally, it wasn't. How much should this word choice matter? https://t.co/Gnv0ZBFCZs pic.twitter.com/H3usKiPyCy

  — PolitiFact (@PolitiFact) August 14, 2019

  "How much should this word choice matter?" Well, if you're deciding whether the word is true or false, they matter quite a bit.

  If you're guessing that Politifact is going to weasel out of its ostensible mission, congratulations. From the linked article:

  Because the significance of Harris’ and Warrens’ [sic] use of the word is open to some dispute, we won’t be rating their tweets on the Truth-O-Meter.

  Here's my "word choice": Politifact exemplifies cowardice and dishonesty.

  Let's go to JVW at Patterico for an alternate take:

  So there you have it, helpfully distilled by the deep musings of three more academics: words, even those from famous politicians who are vying for the highest office in the land, should be taken colloquially, not literally; when speaking about race we have to understand that grievances from the past allow for narrative liberties to be taken in the present; and getting hung up on words, even when they are used irresponsibly, keeps us from achieving our perfect woke selves.

  What an utter load of horse manure.

  I think he's being kind. Horse manure, unlike Politifact, can be useful.

  ---

• We try to Keep It Clean here at Pun Salad, but when P. J. O'Rourke headlines his article Shut the F%$K Up, what are ya gonna do? (Subhed: "Whose Bright Idea Was It To Make Sure That Every Idiot In the World Was in Touch With Every Other Idiot?")

  The big corporations who operate social media platforms have the ethics of an opioid-addicted Oxycontin pharmaceutical sales rep.

  User privacy equates to getting a prostate exam in the middle of Times Square on New Year’s Eve while dropping trou’ between Christina Aguilera and Ryan Seacrest.

  Social media makes us easy victims of fraud and financial manipulation. (Darn it! Of all the Nigerian government officials, I spam-blocked the one who actually had $100 million to wire to my bank account.)

  Peej continues. You know what to do.

• I'll just copy Charles C. W. Cooke's Corner observation in its entirety: Poetic License.
  The angry reaction to the news that the executive branch intends [to] enforce the longstanding “public charge” rules that have been a part of American law since 1882 suggests to me that progressives are simultaneously of the view that we should read the Constitution as a living, breathing document and that we should read Emma Lazarus’s poem on the base of the Statue of Liberty as an unalterable, legally enforceable contract.

  Supplementary reading: She Was Never About Those Huddled Masses, WaPo op-ed by Roberto Suro, on the Lazurus verse.

  It took a long time for Lady Liberty and the huddled masses to become completely intertwined. Most of the early mythologizing of the statue played on its patriotic appeal. The poem, written for a charity auction that raised money for the statue's pedestal, was never commercially published and got no mention at the statue's grand opening in 1886. Lazarus died a year later at age 38. In 1903, her friend from New York high society, Georgina Schuyler, had the plaque made to honor Lazarus. There was no ceremony when it was placed on a stairway landing inside the pedestal. For decades it went largely unnoticed, a memorial to a writer and reformer who died young rather than a defining inscription for the statue.

  Immigrants arriving in New York Harbor celebrated the statue, but as John Higham, the great historian of American immigration, tells it, the poem and the image of the Statue of Liberty as a symbol of welcome gained broad currency only after the immigrant ships stopped coming. The "golden door" was slammed shut by highly restrictive national quotas enacted in 1924. Then, during the Great Depression and World War II, it became popular to herald immigrants' contributions in the interests of national unity, and the statue became part of the lore. The poem was rediscovered and popularized as part of unsuccessful campaigns to open the United States as a refuge for Jews fleeing Nazi Germany, a new version of Lazarus's cause. In 1945, with that point moot, Schuyler's plaque was moved to a prominent spot near the pedestal's entrance.

  Monty Python once observed: "Strange women lyin’ in ponds distributin’ swords is no basis for a system of government." Maybe we could also say: Activist socialite women writin' so-so poetry is no basis for immigration law.

  ---

• If you need a reason to vote against every Democrat in the Senate, should they come up for re-election in your state, Jacob Sullum (at Reason) has a biggie: Every Democrat in the Senate Supports a Constitutional Amendment That Would Radically Curtail Freedom of Speech.

  Every Democrat in the Senate is backing a constitutional amendment that aims to overturn Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the 2010 decision in which the Supreme Court lifted legal restrictions on what corporations and unions are allowed to say about politics at election time. That would be troubling enough, since Citizens United, which involved a film that was banned from TV because it was too critical of Hillary Clinton, simply recognized that Americans do not lose their First Amendment rights when they organize themselves in a disfavored way. But the so-called Democracy for All Amendment goes much further than nullifying one Supreme Court decision. It would radically rewrite the constitutional treatment of political speech, allowing Congress and state legislatures to impose any restrictions on election-related spending they consider reasonable.

  Yes, my fellow New Hampshirites: that includes our state's senators, Jeanne Shaheen and Maggie Hassan.

  ---

• Of course, it's not just Democrats who want to chip away at that whole free speech thing. James Pethokoukis suggests not going along with the latest stupidity out of the White House: Let's not censor and ruin the internet over dodgy bias issues.

  I hope this is #FakeNews, but I fear it isn’t. CNN reports that the Trump White House has drafted an executive order that “could put the Federal Communications Commission in charge of shaping how Facebook, Twitter, and other large tech companies curate what appears on their websites,” according to sources. Specifically, the draft order attempts to limit Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, a part of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, that gives internet companies broad immunity from lawsuits over third-party content. 

  CNN: “Under the draft proposal, the FCC will be asked to find that social media sites do not qualify for the good-faith immunity if they remove or suppress content without notifying the user who posted the material, or if the decision is proven to be evidence of anticompetitive, unfair or deceptive practices.” 

  I was cheered up when the FCC dumped Net Neutrality; so now they're going to go for something even worse? Hope Ajit Pai lives up to his previous defense of Internet laissez-faire.

  ---

• And the Google LFOD News Alert rang for… a WaPo op-ed from Jon Meacham: We’re in the middle of a revolution on death.

  Tuesday was to be the day — in the morning, because everything was taken care of. The goodbyes had been said, the tears shed, the coffin handmade. In the spring of 2018, Dick Shannon, a former Silicon Valley engineer with untreatable cancer, took advantage of California’s “death with dignity” law to end his own life once all other medical possibilities had been exhausted.

  “My observation about the way people die, at least in America, is they . . . are not allowed the opportunity to be part of the process,” Shannon explained. “For my way of thinking, the part that bothers me just immensely is not being allowed to be part of that process. It’s my death. Go with what you believe, but don’t tell me what I have to do.” Discussing the ultimate decision with his doctor, Shannon remarked, “It’s hard to fathom. I go to sleep and that’s the end of it. I’ll never know anything different.” He paused, then said simply: “Okay.”

  OK, Dick. Sorry to see you go. But LFOD? Ah, here it is:

  America is becoming ever more like itself when it comes to death. From Walden Pond to Huck Finn’s lighting out for the territory, we’re a nation of individualists, shaped and suffused by self-reliance and a stubborn allegiance to the live-free-or-die motto of the Revolutionary era. With this twist: Baby boomers and their successor generations are insisting on being free to take control of death itself. Innovation, creativity and customization — the hallmarks of our time, an age in which we can run much of our lives from our mobile phones — are now transforming both how we die and the mechanics of remembrance that come afterward.

  Well, fine. I for one, plan on not going gentle into that good night, if at all possible. I've managed to live my whole life without dignity so far; why should the end be any different?

  ---

• And finally:

  I'm particularly fond of Harry Potter and the Constitution of Liberty.

• If I had to pick a favorite Democrat it would probably be Andrew Yang. Because (as noted by Christian Britschgi at Reason) Andrew Yang Hates Zoning Laws. After noting the hatred, Christian says:

  That is all pretty encouraging stuff to hear from a presidential candidate. It's part of a growing consensus among politicians at the federal level that state and local restrictions on development are driving up the costs of housing for everyone.

  Indeed, Yang's criticism of zoning is pretty close to what other Democratic primary candidates have said on the subject.

  Sens. Cory Booker (D–N.J.), Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.), and Amy Klobuchar (D–Minn.), and former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julian Castro have all targeted restrictive local land use regulations as a cause of high housing costs.

  Yang's plan differs from his primary opponents by offering almost no details on how he'd actually get rid of these rules. His website includes only a brief mention that he would "work with localities to relax zoning ordinances" and encourage new types of housing like micro-apartments and communal living arrangements.

  Oh well. And here's another thing: the United States Presidency has zero Constitutional power to do away with restrictive zoning; it's entirely a local matter. Geez, Andrew, maybe you should run for San Francisco City Council instead?

  And, since (see our Amazon Product du Jour) one of your slogans is "Math", could I see your work on how (or if) you plan on reducing the Federal deficit? I looked for it on your issues page. I found your proposal to get rid of the penny but not on how to get rid of the deficit.

  ---

• Via Granite Grok, this Boston Globe article in which James Pindell profiles Seth Moulton, US CongressCritter from Massachusetts's 6th congressional district and currently—honest—a candidate for the presidency. Seth Moulton wants New Hampshire’s vote — and for the state to change its ways.

  Basically, Seth hates (1) our continued pot prohibition; (2) our state liquor stores on the Interstates; (3) our lack of broad-based sales and income taxes; (4) no mandates for motorcycle helmets or (5) seat belt use.

  But were I a laugh-out-loud type, I would have laughed out loud at this:

  The decades-long (and often fraught) project of expanding the number of lanes on Interstate 93 from the Massachusetts border to Manchester, Moulton said, “makes no sense” because it just feeds the congested traffic farther into Boston.

  Moulton said he would prefer high-speed rail, such as that being built in China, adding that transportation solutions “cannot be investing in 1950s infrastructure like you are doing in New Hampshire.”

  Yes. Why invest in 1950s infrastructure when you could be investing in 1850s infrastructure? (Also left as a comment at Granite Grok.)

  ---

• At some point last week, Wheezy Joe Biden babbled on gun control: “It violates no one’s Second Amendment rights to say you can’t own certain weapons. You’re not allowed to own a bazooka; you can’t own a flamethrower.”

  At the Federalist, Rich Cromwell points out: Actually, Joe Biden, Flamethrowers Are Legal In All 50 States.

  […I]t’s totally legal to own flamethrowers in every state in the union, with only a license required in Maryland and a modified nozzle for California purchases. Elon Musk’s Boring Company even sold 20,000 of them back in 2018.

  The thing is, flamethrowers are not considered firearms and have legitimate uses, like clearing ice and snow, adding a bit of flair to live performances, attempting to catch nemeses, and stopping alien invasions. Also, they’re just awesome. So maybe it’s time for Biden to issue one of those corrections for which he’s becoming internet-famous.

  Or not. Back in April, Ben Shapiro noted Biden's invocation of the long-debunked myth that the term "rule of thumb" referred to the maximum size of a rod you could legally use to beat your wife.

  And he's been doing this for a long time. In fact, back in 2011, I attended his speech at UNH (introducing the notorious "Dear Colleague" letter) where he made the same claim.

  If you look up the term "invincible ignorance", there's an accompanying picture of Biden.

  ---

• More on the previously discussed xdisciplinary “Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum”. From Adam Kredo at the Washington Free Beacon: California Introduces Radical Anti-Semitic High School Curriculum.

  The state of California has introduced "blatantly anti-Semitic and anti-Israel" lessons into its official high school curriculum, drawing outrage and concern in the state's Jewish and pro-Israel communities, according to multiple sources involved in the controversy.

  The California Department of Education is facing backlash after permitting a host of anti-Israel activists to build a statewide educational curriculum that demonizes the Jewish state and is said to be fostering hatred of Jewish and Israeli-American students, sources said.

  So it's not just anti-capitalist jargon-filled garbage. It's also antisemitic jargon-filled garbage. (I noticed that their "Sample Course Modules" does mention antisemitism once, amidst countless invocation of anti-Arab/Palestinian/Muslim prejudice.)

  ---

• James Lileks pays tribute to a midwest restaurant chain: Perkins may not be 'us,' but we are Perkins. The mother company is in financial woes, entering its second bankruptcy. Among the observations:
  The company’s actual name is Perkins & Marie Callender’s Inc., because they also own another chain. If you’re curious: There was a real Marie Callender, who made pies. She lived in a California trailer park with her husband, Cal. (Yes, Cal Callender. You wonder if he considered selling pasta strainers that told you the date. It’s the Cal Callender Colander Calendar.)

  Also noted: the familial implications of Perkins' famous "Twinberry" syrup.

• At the WSJ (possible paywall) Williamson M. Evers reports in an op-ed: California Wants to Teach Your Kids That Capitalism Is Racist. Well, not my kids. But:

  California’s Education Department has issued an “Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum” and is soliciting public comments on it until Aug. 15. The legislatively mandated guide is a resource for teachers who want to instruct their students in the field of “ethnic studies,” and was written by an advisory board of teachers, academics and bureaucrats. It’s as bad as you imagine.

  Ethnic studies is described in the document as “the interdisciplinary study of race, ethnicity, and indigeneity with an emphasis on experiences of people of color in the United States.” But that’s not all it is. “It is the study of intersectional and ancestral roots, coloniality, hegemony, and a dignified world where many worlds fit, for present and future generations.” It is the “xdisciplinary [sic], loving, and critical praxis of holistic humanity.”

  The document is filled with fashionable academic jargon like “positionalities,” “hybridities,” “nepantlas” and “misogynoir.” It includes faddish social-science lingo like “cis-heteropatriarchy” that may make sense to radical university professors and activists but doesn’t mean much to the regular folks who send their children to California’s public schools. It is difficult to comprehend the depth and breadth of the ideological bias and misrepresentations without reading the whole curriculum—something few will want to do.

  "Xdisciplinary" is explained in a (Microsoft Word) doc at the link above:

  Ethnic Studies is xdisciplinary, in that it variously takes the forms of being interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary, transdisciplinary, undisciplinary, and intradisciplinary. As such, it can grow its original language to serve these needs with purposeful respellings of terms, including history as herstory and women as womxn, connecting with a gender and sexuality lens, along with a socioeconomic class lens at three of its intersections. Terms utilized throughout this document, which may be unfamiliar to new practitioners of the field, are defined in the glossary.

  Oh, good. I recommend our Amazon Product du Jour for any student unfortunate enough to be in an xdisciplinary Ethnic Studies class. Wear it to the first session; with any luck, you'll be asked to leave, and maybe you can take something useful instead, like wood shop.

  ---

• At National Review, Kevin D. Williamson has discomforting news: Job Security Is Not Coming Back. His upfront example is from an unexpected class:

  Shed a single tear, if you haven’t gone entirely dry, for America’s beleaguered, struggling, and anxiety-ridden law-firm partners.

  Sara Randazzo, writing in the Wall Street Journal, chronicles the lamentations of the lawyers: “Being named a partner once meant joining a band of lawyers who jointly tended to longtime clients and took home comfortable, and roughly equal, paychecks. Job security was virtually guaranteed and partners rarely jumped ship. That model, and the culture that grew up around it, is all but dead. Law firms are now often partnerships in name only.” Equity-owning partners still share in the profits of the firm, but the second-class “partners” — nominal partners — are unpropertied salarymen, taking home a mere few hundred thousand dollars a year or so in comparison to the millions paid out to the real partners.

  You can practically hear that awful Sarah McLachlan song wailing in the background, and one begins to glance around for Sally Struthers. I’ll give you a second to regain your composure.

  Well, I kinda like Sarah's song, Kevin, so nyaah. I know the commercial to which you refer, though, and you're right that it's hard to watch. (Are they trying to say those puppies are drug addicts?)

  But seriously, folks: Kevin's point is that capitalism has always involved dynamic economic and social shifts, painful for many involved. And the pace of that dynamism is picking up. He encourages us to face it with open eyes.

  ---

• We posted the other day about AOC musing that she had a "lot of common ground with many libertarian viewpoints". Brad Polumbo, at the Washington Examiner, begs to differ:

  If only this were true. While yes, the far-left socialist does hold somewhat libertarian positions on issues such as military spending, immigration, and criminal justice, her overall political philosophy is the very antithesis of libertarianism. Ocasio-Cortez’s worldview is collectivist and statist, putting her in opposition to libertarian pro-freedom principles.

  Take Ocasio-Cortez’s economic worldview [please — your blogger], for instance. She’s a proud member of the Democratic Socialists of America, who unabashedly oppose capitalism, free markets, and private profit. Libertarians, on the other hand, understand that profit is what makes society work, and the only thing that can make society work. It induces us all, from the junior janitor in your building to the nearest small business owner to the wealthiest CEO on Wall Street. It implores us to spend our time, energy, and resources serving others and providing them with something they find useful enough to pay for.

  Yes, sorry AOC, this is a deal-breaker.

  ---

• The American Council on Science and Health provides an article by Christopher J. Ferguson debunking Four Myths About Mass Shootings. For example, saying either that "mental illness definitely is, or is not, to blame" is going way beyond the evidence.

  Some people suggest mental illness is completely unrelated to crime, but that claim tends to rely on mangled statistics. For instance, I’ve seen the suggestion that individuals with mental illness account for just 5% of violent crimes. However, that assertion is based on research like one Swedish study that limited mental illness to psychosis only, which is experienced by about 1% or less of the population. If 1% of people commit 5% of crimes, that suggests psychosis elevates risk of crime.

  It’s also important to point out that the vast majority of people with mental illness do not commit violent crimes. For instance, in one study, about 15% of people with schizophrenia had committed violent crimes, as compared to 4% of a group of people without schizophrenia. Although this clearly identifies the increase in risk, it also highlights that the majority of people with schizophrenia had not committed violent crimes. It’s important not to stigmatize the mentally ill, which may reduce their incentive to seek treatment.

  As "solutions" go, "lock up the psychos" is as bad as "let the psychos loose."

  ---

• And our Google LFOD alert rang for a Voice of America article: Hong Kong Demonstrators Turn to Flash Mob-Style Protests. Reporting on the weekend action:
  It didn’t seem to matter that police barred several protest marches Saturday, citing the fear of violence. Thousands of residents, furious with government indifference and harsh policing, fought battles throughout the city as they tried frenzied, urban guerrilla tactics to block roads, occupy the airport terminal, march en masse, participants shrugging off rounds of tear gas.

  And Granite Staters can't help but feel affinity for "Jack", who's apparently noticed our license plates:

  “Even if the government won’t let us legally protest, we’ll come out,” said Jack, a 25-year-old auditor standing near the front line in Tai Po. “For us, it’s like, ‘live free or die.’ We don’t want to live in a world like China now.”

  Here at home we deploy LFOD reflexively, and often mindlessly, to argue for or against practically any political issue. Jack knows what it really means.

The IMDB raters (as I type) have Toy Story 4 ranked #177 on the best movie list of all time.

Hey, maybe. I certainly liked it a lot. Mrs. Salad and I went to BarnZ's in Barrington, and—hey!—since we were there last, they installed reclining seats! Gotta keep up with the times, I guess.

We may also have been the only people there without kids in tow. We are no longer ashamed of this.

Plot: Woody and the gang have settled in with new owner Bonnie. And Woody's super-protective, even to the extent of tagging along to Bonnie's Kindergarten orientation. Where Bonnie is initially miserable, but a little deft interference gets her started on a craft project: a spork, pipe cleaners, tongue depressor, googly eyes, etc.… et voilà! Forky is alive!

Really, those are the rules of the Toy Story universe. Unfortunately, as we've seen before, those rules don't guarantee that the toys will be smart or well-adjusted. Remember, years back, when Buzz Lightyear thought he was an actual astronaut? Well, Forky considers himself to be … trash. And, true to that nature, he keeps trying to throw himself away. Suicidal! Woody decides this must not be allowed!

And some wonderful high jinks ensue. Those Pixar folks can still tell a story, simultaneously hilarious, suspenseful, and heartstring-tugging. New characters are introduced while we're under way, and old characters are rediscovered.

Particularly good: Keanu Reeves as "Duke Caboom", Canadian motorcycle daredevil. Doomed to not quite live up to his TV commercial hype. That's a crisis.

Only complaint: the aliens are mostly MIA. I love those guys.

Well, Tulsi had her moment. But the punters at Betfair have kicked her winning probability back down below 2%, our cutoff, so she's absent from our table again.

Also with a bad week: Kamala Harris. Her probability dropped by nearly two percentage points. It's hard to remember that just last month she was at 25%. An impressive swoon.

In the phony standings, Google reports that—remember, these numbers are totally bogus—Trump's phony hits more than doubled, and Bernie's hits more than tripled. But Trump maintains his strong lead.

"WinProb" calculation described here. Google result counts are bogus.

• Ann Althouse finds an insightful article at the WaPo by Tara Isabella Burton: "For Marianne Williamson and Donald Trump, religion is all about themselves/The conviction that you can shape the world with your mind is an American tradition.". From Ann's excerpt:

  But Williamson has more in common with President Trump than she — and indeed many voters — might admit, and it’s not just that both have used personal celebrity as a springboard into politics. At their core, both are also prime representatives of one of the most important and formative spiritual trends in American life: the notion that we can transform our material circumstances through faith in our personal willpower. Trump’s authoritarian cult of personality and Williamson’s woo-inflected belief in the power of “self-actualization” both come from the quintessentially American conviction that the quickest and surest route to Ultimate Reality can be found within ourselves....

  I believe "woo-inflected" is meant to indicate that Williamson's schtick is basically pseudo-scientific crap.

  And if you want more of that, check our Amazon Product du Jour! A mere eight bucks for the Kindle version! The author, Ursula Wania ("TAROT READER · ASTROLOGER · NUMEROLOGIST / Often copied … never equalled") is from South Africa. Which makes her, unfortunately ineligible to be either Marianne's or Donald's running mate.

  ---

• At the Rolling Stone, Tim Dickinson reports on what I consider to be good news: Trump’s Background Check Pitch Is as Phony as He Is.

  We’ve all been watching the Trump Show for four years now. But a lot of folks, and a shocking number of journalists, still haven’t caught onto the rules.

  Trump will promise any policy he thinks works to his political advantage in the moment. He loves generating headlines for those proposals that break with GOP orthodoxy, but he will eventually revert to the Republican norm.

  Trump has no regard for truth or consistency. Yet the media unaccountably fail to report the essential context: That that the president is often full of shit. So people come away believing the Trump is open to universal healthcare, wants to protect the Dreamers, would raise taxes on hedge fund billionaires, or — in the wake of mass shootings — is open to expanding background checks.

  It’s no mystery why Trump seeks the political benefits of sidling up to these policies — they’re extremely popular. (Universal background checks poll at close to 90 percent.) And because bullshiting is so on brand for our presidential pitchman, Trump never pays a real political price when he later reverses himself. All evidence suggests these flip flops work for the president — low information voters hear what they want to hear (Trump is for what I’m for) and disregard the rest. 

  Dickinson is right that "universal background checks" poll well. But (as Jacob Sullum pointed out back in 2015) they are also ineffective, unjust, and unenforceable.

  Sure, I'd prefer that Trump say that instead. But that's expecting way too much.

  ---

• Something you probably won't see reported in the Rolling Stone, which is why you should read the Washington Free Beacon: CNN Fact Check: Sanders Has Been Repeating False Claim About Health Care Spending For a Decade.

  CNN published a fact check on Friday against Democratic presidential candidate Senator Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.), saying he has repeated the same "false claim" about health care spending since at least 2009.

  Fact checker Daniel Dale said Sanders has falsely claimed multiple times over the last decade that the United States spends "twice as much per capita on health care as any other nation on Earth." Politifact rated the claim "false" in 2009 and 2015, according to CNN.

  Dale said the claim is still false in 2019. While he argued the United States spends more than any "health care per capita of any Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development country," he said they don't spend twice as much as any other single country.

  Well, it's Bernie. Way too old to give up on cherished beliefs. They're "his truth". Which reminds me of a recent Ramirez cartoon about a different aged Democrat…

  ---

• 

  Oh, shoot, you need a reference for that? Well, here.

  Joe Biden, the 2020 Democratic front-runner crowd, left some in the crowd at the Iowa State Fair mystified when he told them: We choose truth over facts."

  The 76-year-old former vice president, who loquacious style and propensity for flubbing his lines endears him to some and draws mockery from others, was ending his speech at the state fairground in Des Moines when he attempted a rousing finish.

  “There is nothing we’ve ever decided to do we’ve been unable to do, he said. "Period. That’s not hyperbole. We have never, never, never failed when we’re together. And ladies and gentlemen, it’s time to get up.

  "Everybody knows who Donald Trump is. Even his supporters know who he is. We got to let him know who we are. We choose unity over division. We choose science over fiction. We choose truth over facts."

  Or if the Washington Examiner is too rightwing for you, how about Slate: Joe Biden gaffes his way through Iowa..

  So maybe that didn’t come out right. (He would get the line—“We choose truth over lies”—correct later in the evening.) But at least, shortly thereafter, he successfully told off a Breitbart reporter who was trying to promote the conspiracy theory that the media had misrepresented President Donald Trump’s remarks after the lethal violence in Charlottesville, Virginia.

  Oh, right, it's Slate. Goodness knows, I'm not a Trump fan, but it's not a "conspiracy theory" that the media misrepresented Trump's "very fine people" post-Charlottesville remarks, it's the simple truth.

  I'm also not a PragerU devoteee, but they do a pretty good job with this:

  ---

• And finally, we have: Elizabeth Warren’s Ferguson Lie. (Christopher Tremoglie at National Review) Specifically:

  5 years ago Michael Brown was murdered by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri. Michael was unarmed yet he was shot 6 times. I stand with activists and organizers who continue the fight for justice for Michael. We must confront systemic racism and police violence head on.

  — Elizabeth Warren (@ewarren) August 9, 2019

  This is an outright lie, one day after Warren complained of the dangers of rhetoric.

  Michael Brown was not murdered. Michael Brown was shot by officer Darren Wilson in an act of self-defense. This is why the grand jury declined to indict Wilson for murder or manslaughter, and it was also the conclusion of the Obama administration’s Department of Justice.

  Not what we need right now, Liz.

  ---

• Kevin D. Williamson speaks utter truth in National Review: Gun-Control Advocacy: Mostly Demagoguery.

  The Second Amendment isn’t about shooting ducks. It’s about shooting people.

  Once you really get your head around that, you can begin to appreciate the political architecture of the gun-control debate and the fundamental problem at the heart of it: The purpose of the Second Amendment is to ensure the right of Americans to keep and bear arms designed to kill people in armed confrontations, and everything that makes firearms unsuitable for that purpose is at odds with the Second Amendment.

  The usual response to that goes something like this: “Oh, sure, that may have been true, one upon a time, but we no longer have a lawless frontier, and the idea of a bunch of Bubbas getting together with their AR-15s and strapping on their tactical Underoos to take on a tyrannical U.S. government in some hypothetical dystopia is an absurd and adolescent fantasy.” If that’s your argument, then, fine: But that is not an argument for banning 50-round magazines or prohibiting semiautomatic rifles — that’s an argument for repealing the Second Amendment, at which point you have constitutional license to pass whatever gun-control legislation suits your fancy.

  Give it a shot.

  I added, in a comment, something I've said before: "Gun control" isn't about controlling guns. It's about controlling people.

  ---

• At Reason, Billy Binion noticed someone saying something. Specifically, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: ‘I Have a Lot of Common Ground With Many Libertarian Viewpoints’.

  "I actually think I have a lot of common ground with many libertarian viewpoints in [the Republican] party," Ocasio-Cortez said, emphasizing her stances on immigration, the military, and privacy rights. Her admission comes not long after she and Sen. Ted Cruz (R–Texas) publicly agreed on the need to prohibit former congresspeople from becoming lobbyists, as well as to make hormonal birth control available over the counter.

  "True libertarians, which many happen to be in the Republican Party, true libertarian viewpoints are pro-immigration," she explained on Instagram. Advocates of smaller government do indeed acknowledge that immigrants help the economy, and many dismiss the notion that the federal government is capable of determining optimal migration levels.

  Yeah, well, maybe. I'm slightly sympathetic to libertarian immigration arguments. But I waver away at times, too.

  It's all that other totalitarian crap in the Green New Deal that kinda turns me off, AOC. You can't give that a libertarian spin.

  ---

• Drew Cline at the Josiah Bartlett Center offers an idea: How N.H. could save millions in drug costs with an online auction. Specifically, it could put a better process in place for choosing its pharmacy benefits manager (PBM) using a reverse auction.

  Corporations and the federal government have for years employed an online reverse auction to force contractors to bid aggressively to win their business. It works sort of like eBay, but in reverse. The buyer starts the auction, and contractors place their bids. The auction then cycles through multiple rounds, with contractors having the chance in each new round to outbid each other.

  Drew notes that this would be a welcome introduction of market forces into state multi-million dollar outlays.

  ---

• Steven Landsburg distinguishes between the Slips and Lies of politicians. Specifically:

  I was not present at Joe Biden’s recent speech, and I have not seen the video, but I am essentially certain that the phrase “Poor kids are just as bright as white kids” — which Biden, like Mrs. Reagan, instantly corrected — was an equally innocent slip of the tongue. I have little patience for those who are attempting to profit by suggesting otherwise. What Mr. Biden meant to say was that “poor kids are just as bright as wealthy kids”. And therein lies the true outrage. Because that statement is a lie.

  Poor kids are not just as bright as wealthy kids. The sources for this empirical fact are easy to find, so I won’t review them here. There are several plausible explanations. First, IQ is highly correlated with wealth and IQ is heritable. Next, poverty is stressful, and stress impedes cognitive development. Et cetera.

  And, yes, 'tis a lie told with good intentions. But it's one of those which the "fact checkers" will not bother to check.

  [Hasten to say: it's a lie in the context of averages. Pick a poor kid, pick a rich kid, it's certainly possible that the poor kid will be brighter. But do that multiple times, and over the long run, it's not the way to bet.

  ---

• And the Google LFOD alert rang for Jeff Jacoby at the good old Boston Globe: For good reason, statehood for D.C. has always been a nonstarter.

  Most state license plates bear mottos that are uplifting (“The Spirit of America,” “Live Free or Die,”), descriptive (“10,000 Lakes,” “America’s Dairyland”), or welcoming (“Aloha State,” “Great Faces, Great Places”). Only the District of Columbia’s is bad-tempered. Emblazoned on its license plate is a complaint: “Taxation Without Representation.”

  Jeff goes into the sensible (and Constitutional) reasons why D. C. ain't a state, and shouldn't be one.

  D. C. is bigger than even the bloated Federal Government needs. Maybe cede the residential areas to Maryland, and restrict the District to government offices and supporting service businesses. But nothing fancier than a Wendy's! Well, maybe a Shake Shack.

  ---

• And, praise be, I have been liked and (in a sense) edited by Virgina Postrel. Well, at Facebook. It wasn't hard. Nevertheless, I can scratch that off my bucket list.

So back in 2017 I read The Unlikely Spy, a World War II thriller by Daniel Silva. I enjoyed it quite a bit, but was reluctant to commit to reading Silva's oeuvre. (Because once I start down that road, it's hard to stop.)

But I picked this, his second novel, at Portsmouth Public Library. See how it goes. Written in 1998, it's a globe-hopping tale of violence and intrigue, but mainly violence. The hero, Michael Osbourne, is a CIA employee whose career as a covert agent was terminated when a KGB assassin (we learn his code name is "October") brutally murders his girlfriend, implying his cover is seriously blown.

Years later, Michael's married and works as a staid analyst. But another murder comes to light bearing October's trademark (three bullets in the face), accompanied by a jetliner shot down by a Sidewinder fired from the waters off Long Island. So he's drawn back to the game, and finds himself finding out way too much about a nefarious plot involving … well, that would be telling. Let's just leave it at "nefarious".

Silva's a successful writer, but I didn't like the book much. Way too much unlikely dialogue, high amounts of coincidence, pointless descriptions. It's written from a tedious liberal perspective (no spoilers). And the ending is unsatisfying (slight spoiler) sequel-bait.

So I don't know if I'll continue with Silva. There are other books in the library.

If you've been paying attention to my reading history (and, don't worry, there's not the slightest reason why you should), one recurring topic is the controversy over whether "free will" exists. This latest book—you may have inferred from the title—is pro-existence. The author, Christian List, is professor of political science and philosophy at the London School of Economics.

With the typical philosopher's care, he dissects "free will" into three components:

1. People are "intentional agents", whose intentions support actions;

2. In relevant cases, people face multiple alternative actions, and each is a genuine possibility;

3. And the resulting action is the result of appropriate mental states, reflecting the actual intention of the agent.

Anti-free willers object to at least one of these components. Respectively:

1. There's no room in neurophysiology (let alone in the underlying physics) for "intention"—it's just atoms and their electrons flying around synapses, firing off hormone releases and causing muscle proteins to contract. I oversimplify, but no amount of further detail will get to "intention".

2. The universe is essentially deterministic. You might think you have alternate choices, but that's an illusion; only one action will actually happen, governed by the biochemical processes described above.

   (But what about quantum uncertainty? Well, yeah: some of the dice-throwing wackiness described by the inherently probabalistic Copenhagen interpretation of nanoscopic processes might get manifested in macroscopic outcomes. But that coin-flipping doesn't put you in control.)

3. The last objection is subtle: "you" might think "you" are in control of your actions, but in fact your consciousness is merely a helpless observer along for the ride. The famous "Libet experiments" are invoked: the ones that allegedly show that your body has already made its "decision" to do something milliseconds before you "think" you're deciding yourself.

List discusses each objection, hoping to refute each one. And to my mind, he's successful. He argues that "free will" is an emergent property of our complex nervous systems interacting with the rest of our body. It is no less "real" than (say) life itself, or consciousness. His argument is language-heavy, and (frankly) difficult for a dilettante like me to grok in fullness, but I think I got the high points.

But (for me) the knock-down argument for free will is one adapted from Caltech physicist Sean Carroll: tomorrow morning when you want to get dressed, go stand in front of your closet and try saying: "Well, I'll just stand here and let the atoms in my body do whatever they were deterministically going to do anyway." Wait as long as you need to before you're convinced that that the atoms in your body aren't gonna get that clothes-picking job done for you. Or go to work in your jammies. Your call.

• Via Slashdot, a report in the Verge: Trump calls for social media companies to ‘detect mass shooters before they strike’.

  After two recent mass shootings in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, President Trump said his administration would ask social media companies to develop tools that could detect potential mass shooters.

  While delivering a speech on the recent violence, Trump said “we must do a better job of identifying and acting on early warning signs,” and he suggested social media companies could develop new ways of catching “red flags.”

  “I am directing the Department of Justice to work in partnership with local state and federal agencies, as well as social media companies, to develop tools that can detect mass shooters before they strike,” Trump said in the speech.

  Well, I guess it's time to pick up a DVD of Minority Report. Who knew it would be so prescient?

  I am (sigh) old enough to remember the post-9/11 atmosphere, with the Patriot Act quickly penned in full "do something" response. Among other things, civil libertarians were clutching their pearls about government watchdogs being able to get access to library patron records.

  Yes, like that was the most worrisome infringement on the privacy of innocent people.

  Good times.

  ---

• One of the more common "do something" responses to the latest horrors: expanded background checks. Often "universal". As if Klingons were a major threat.

  Anyway, Jeff Jacoby dares to be contrarian: No, expanded background checks wouldn't prevent mass shootings.

  In reality, the overwhelming majority of gun sales already require a background check. Anyone who buys a gun from a licensed dealer — whether in person or online, in a store or at a gun show — must be cleared by the FBI before the weapon is delivered. Every year the federal government conducts more than 25 million such background checks — more than 320 million since the system was put in place. The only time the requirement doesn't apply is when someone acquires a gun locally from a private individual, such as a friend or relative. That's the so-called "gun show loophole," which has nothing to do with gun shows and isn't a loophole, since it doesn't apply to anyone in the business of selling guns.

  Enacting "universal" background checks would mean forcing private citizens, people who aren't gun dealers, to go through the FBI before they can sell a gun to their next-door neighbor or their sister-in-law. That would impose a considerable burden on the personal affairs of private individuals. But would it "do something" about mass shootings?

  Nope. But in the midst of a moral panic, facts do not matter. Only "do something" rules.

  ---

• At Reason, Christian Britschgi notes: Rep. Joaquin Castro’s Doxxing of Trump Donors in His District Has Flipped the Campaign Finance Discourse on Its Head. Rep Castro tweeted out a list of his deplorable constituents who had committed the sin of donating maximum bucks to Donald Trump's re-election effort.

  Transparency advocates argue that by allowing the public to see who donates how much to which campaign committees and ballot initiatives, voters can better understand the motivations and incentives of officeholders and the relationships between special interests and the government. The stated justification of campaign finance transparency, in other words, is not to publicly shame private individuals for their political preferences.

  And yet this isn't the first time that campaign contribution data has been used to punish private individuals for their political donations. Former Mozilla Firefox CEO Brendan Eich was forced to resign in 2014 after it was revealed that he gave $1,000 in support of a 2008 ballot initiative to ban gay marriage in California.

  The ability to punish people for supporting or opposing particular political campaigns is one reason a lot of libertarians oppose making political donations public.

  Because they foresaw that demagogic politicians would weaponize the information against their opponents. Duh.

  ---

• At the Free Beacon, Alex Griswold notes the viral nature of a fake quote: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez OBLITERATES Teenagers, Fake Mitch McConnell Quote #slay. Some young Mitch supporters posed inappropriately with an AOC cutout; AOC objected; Mitch responded; and that response was paraphrased (inaccurately) by the Daily Beast as "boys will be boys".

  And—voilà!—that "boys will be boys" phrase was quickly transmogrified into something Mitch actually said. Alex's bottom line:

  So now "boys will be boys" is something like two or three times removed from the original source, namely the opinion of a single journalist at Newsweek's competitor. To a reader coming late to the story, "McConnell campaign's ‘boys will be boys' defense" is simply a fact, a fact they'll tweet and retweet and will take on a life of its own, etc. All thanks to journalists and politicians acting in bad faith at every step.

  Another example of why it's difficult to grant the MSM a smodgen of respect.

  ---

• But let me immediately contradict myself, because this New York Times interactive interview asks you a few questions and then guesses your Political Party. It's very neat, and it was enoyable to see my answers swing the polarization arrows one way and the other.

  Oh yeah: they got me right, at least technically. And I murmured "in name only" as the final answer appeared.

• And as long as I was visiting the NYT, the challenge offered here was irresistible: Can You Answer the Hardest Citizenship Test Questions?.

  And not to brag, but I got 10/10.

  OK, to brag.

  ---

• And as I was blogging this morn, I was playing my new Bruce Springsteen album "Western Stars". (Got it for Father's Day—thanks, kids!)

  After a few decades of Bruce-fandom, I just gave up and declined to purchase his most recent studio albums. I gave up after "Devils & Dust". But the unmissible talking point about "Western Stars" was Bruce was explicitly naming Glen Campbell and Jimmy Webb as his major influences in making it.

  Reader, I am a serious devotee of both those artists. So I had to see what was going on with "Western Stars".

  Bottom line: it's pretty good,

  But for most of the songs, I'm thinking: "Glen Campbell would have done this so much better" Sorry, Bruce. I know you did your best.

• David Henderson takes off on The Deep-seated Authoritarian Impulse. Spurred by an article that begins "If I were a state education minister I would endeavour to make it a compulsory part of a high school curriculum for …"

  And it doesn't really matter what comes next, no matter how praiseworthy. David:

  I’ve noticed that many people who have a good idea jump pretty quickly to a proposal to make it compulsory. That’s what [the quoted author] does and I’ve seen it a lot. When I was the health economist with President Reagan’s Council of Economic Advisers, I went to a lot of lunches where a health care expert would give a talk on a health care issue. I remember one time when a speaker said he learned a lot about how disabled people must feel when he had to be in a wheel chair for a week or so. Someone in the audience then spoke up to say she thought it would be a good idea if doctors, as part of their training, were required to be in wheel chairs for a day or two.

  Or consider how many people, when they start to understand an academic discipline (I’ve seen it a lot with economics), advocate that everyone be forced to study that discipline.

  The authoritarian impulse seems to come easily to many people.

  Pun Salad Fact Check: True. [If I were appointed grand dictator, I'd resign. Although first I'd ban radio ads with sirens. Those panic me.]

  When I first espied the Amazon Product du Jour, I thought it was an obviously bogus quote, too good to be true, like so many ascribed to Jefferson, Lincoln, et. al.. But guess what? It's real.

  ---

• Speaking of that authoritarianism thing… Kevin D. Williamson writes at National Review on Democrats & Illiberal Democracy: Short Road to Tyranny.

  There are two rules for illiberal democracy.

  The first rule is that during an emergency certain illiberal and anti-democratic measures are necessary to ensure public safety, national security, and the practice of democracy itself.

  The second rule is that there is always an emergency.

  Which reminds me…

  ---

• The Kevin D. Williamson article I linked to yesterday had an intriguing aside:

  Those old war propaganda posters had it right: “I am Public Opinion! All men fear me.”

  That set me to Googling. I was able to find plenty of war propaganda posters, but I was only able to find that particular phrasing in newspaper ads hectoring the citizenry to buy war bonds. Here's an example from the November 1917 edition of the Texaco Star, an employee newsletter:

  

  Scary, because you know she's about to punch you out with that balled right fist. And … yet, she's kinda hot, amirite?

  Yup, they did propaganda right back in those days. When they pass compulsory confiscation of those nasty-looking "military-style weapons" in 2021, perhaps they could recycle Lady Public Opinion.

  ---

• Veronique de Rugy's column discusses Passing Laws, Passing Taxes and Passing the Buck.

  What do the French digital services tax, the employers' share of payroll taxes and the corporate income tax all have in common? They are rarely shouldered by those entities and individuals targeted by legislators. In fact, one of the most important things to know about taxes is that the people who actually write the checks to the Internal Revenue Service (or to its French equivalent) are seldom the ones who actually shoulder its burden.

  In 2004, economist Stephen Entin wrote, "The economic burden of a tax frequently does not rest with the person or business who has the statutory liability for paying the tax to the government." That's because taxes are paid only by flesh-and-blood individuals. The actual incidence of any tax is not determined by the formalities of the tax code but, rather, by the realities of markets — specifically, by how sensitive buyers are to price changes, relative to sellers. It makes it difficult to fully predict the full impact of taxes, but as a general rule, it is rarely what politicians think.

  Take, for example, the employer's statutorily stipulated share of the payroll tax. On paper, workers and employers each pay 7.65% of the employee's salary and wages. Employers send their portion of the tax as well as the one collected from their employees to the government. But this fact doesn't tell us anything about the tax's true burden. Economic research shows that employers shift the burden of the payroll to their employees by decreasing workers' wages by almost 7.65%.

  Veronique grants the good intentions of the pols who pass such taxes. I'm not as charitable as she.

  ---

• At Reason, J.D. Tuccille tells those of us who need to be reminded: White Supremacy Is Alien to Liberal and Libertarian Ideals.

  Amidst a grab-bag of authoritarian ideas, including xenophobia, anti-capitalism, and radical environmentalism, the El Paso mass murderer was primarily motivated by a bigoted hatred for immigrants from south of the border. His manifesto is full of denunciations of "race mixers," "Hispanic invasion," and "cultural and ethnic replacement"—buzz phrases for racists and white supremacists who elevate an illusory collective racial and cultural heritage over respect for people as individuals.

  He couldn't have more thoroughly distanced himself from the liberal/libertarian ideas of the pro-liberty movement if he'd gone through a checklist of shitty notions.

  The liberal tradition that libertarianism inherits and extends doesn't treat people as members of some sort of Borg collective or as any other representation of a group identity. While we're all humans and sometimes fail to live up to our aspirations, libertarians at least aspire to treat with people on their own merits—or lack thereof, as in the case of people who mouth the sort of nonsense espoused by Patrick Wood Crusius in El Paso.

  Certainly we've seen this point before: the nature of politics is to appeal to your "demographic", telling them what you think they want to hear. (And, of course, not saying anything that might offend.)

  Our current overpoliticized environment has no room for speaking to people as individuals.

  ---

• So let's move off politics for the rest of the post. Five Thirty Eight has a clever headline that makes me want to throw my computer against the wall: The Red Sox Were The Toast Of Baseball Last Year. Now They’re Just Toast.. ("It's infuriating because it's true.")

  If the Boston Red Sox harbored any hopes of returning to the playoffs after last year’s magical World Series run, they knew they’d need to make a very strong push over the regular season’s last couple of months. Boston entered the final week of July running eight games behind in the American League East race, though it had just taken five of six games against the division-rival Tampa Bay Rays and New York Yankees and were scheduled to play 25 of their final 56 contests against AL East opponents. The Red Sox would have plenty of chances, and the FiveThirtyEight model gave them essentially a coin flip’s probability of making the postseason as at least a wild card.

  But a weekend massacre at the hands of the Yankees has all but destroyed Boston’s playoff hopes. After New York swept the four-game series (which included a pair of losses in a double-header Saturday), the Red Sox are down to a mere 8 percent chance of getting back to the postseason, with basically no hope of winning the division. As the recriminations begin to fly for Boston’s lifeless title defense, we ask: What has happened to leave a team so good on paper sitting on the outside of the playoffs looking in?

  What follows is a stat-filled geekout, so if that's your thing…

  I was surprised (somewhat) to learn that the Red Sox were not (at least as I type) leading the MLB in blown saves this season. They "only" have 20, behind the Mets (22), Padres (also 22), Athletics (21), and the Cubs (21).

  But it seems I've seen every one of those blown saves.

  ---

• And there's terrifying news from space: Tardigrades Are Now On the Moon Thanks To a Crashed Israeli Spacecraft.
  Tardigrades, the microsopic water-dwelling animals that can survive almost any environment, may be on the moon thanks to an Israeli spacecraft called Beresheet. The spacecraft was carrying thousands of dehydrated tardigrades (among other cargo) when it crashed due to glitches with the landing process.

  At Transterrestrial Musings, Rand Simberg comments: "Yeah, it’s all fun and games until they mutate and become our giant lunar tardigrade overlords."

  I, for one, welcome…

• Jack Miller and I are in the same intersectional pigeonhole. And I am in broad concurrence with his thesis at the Daily Wire: We Old White Men Are Not The Source Of Every Societal Ill.

  Last week, 2020 Democratic Party presidential candidate Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) said she wanted to explain “white privilege” to suburban white women. I would be happy to sit in on the lecture (assuming men are allowed) because, apparently, nobody is more privileged — nor more disliked for it — than old white men. Like me.

  In fact, I recently did a quick Google search (yes, I know how to do that) for “old white men,” which turned up a horrifying list of angry screeds against people like me. There’s “No Country for Old White Men and Good Riddance,” a T-shirt that tells everyone you’ve “heard enough from old white men,” and The New York Times wondering whether “a white man be the face of the Democratic party in 2020?” — which, for the Times, is an improvement over hiring editorial board members who tweet about “how much joy I get out of being cruel to old white men.”

  This barrage of vitriol speaks to the recent cultural milieu in which, at best, there is something suspect about the decisions, the motives, and even the very existence of old white men. At worst, there is a presumption that we are malevolent, parasitic oppressors of those who are not like us.

  Well, speaking as an old, white man — I beg to differ.

  Our Amazon Product du Jour is Jack's second example. It is the perfect storm of ageism, racism, and sexism. Unfortunately missing: "heterosexual", "cisgender", etc. But you can only fit so much on a t-shirt.

  Excercise: How fast would a product be taken down if it featured some other combination of groupings, singling out people that current theology considers to be victimized and oppressed?

  But, yeah, I have heard enough from some old white men. Named Donald, Bernie, Joe,…

  ---

• How can the FDA save lives? At the Competitive Enterprise Institute, Michelle Minton has a suggestion for that: FDA Can Save Lives by Rejecting Scott Gottlieb's Lies. Rejecting all of them would be nice, but Michelle will settle for…

  E-cigarettes have proven effective at helping people quit smoking, a massive potential public health gain, considering nearly half a million people die every year from smoking-related illnesses. The big question is: How can we help smokers quit and at the same time discourage young people from taking up either smoking or vaping?

  Former Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Scott Gottlieb has paid some lip service to “preserv[ing] e-cigarettes as a tool to help adult smokers while snuffing out the teen smoking epidemic,” but it’s difficult to believe Gottlieb or the FDA when they’ve been lying to us so far.

  Teen smoking remains a concern, but let’s be honest about the size and scope of the problem: There is no teen smoking epidemic.

  When the current moral megapanic about guns abates, as I hope it will, there will still be numerous residual moral panicoids about people who, for one reason or another, prefer to go through the day with an occasional nicotine buzz.

  ---

• The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) notes and comments on a recent (paywalled) WSJ op-ed by Christian Schneider: Bias teams welcome the Class of 1984. The topic is so-called "bias reporting systems".

  While defenders of bias reporting systems often point to their supposedly non-punitive nature, both FIRE and Schneider warned of the chilling effect they can have on student speech. As FIRE wrote in 2017, “Bias Response Teams create—indeed, they are intended to create—a chilling effect on campus expression. Even if a Bias Response Team does not have the power to take punitive action, the prospect of an official investigation may make students and faculty more cautious about what opinions they dare to express.” Schneider expresses similar concerns, adding that “Complaints go down in permanent, often public, records, which can affect future employment prospects. Most bias-response systems don’t offer any process by which the accused can clear their names.”

  The University Near Here contributes to the general panopticon with its reportit! system. Which may be used by anyone who is subject to, or witnesses, the varieties of bad behavior described in the relevant sections of the USNH policy manual.

  Could someone be reported for wearing our Amazon Product du Jour? Sure.

  The USNH manual assures that "all members of the University of New Hampshire community have the right to hold and vigorously defend and promote their opinions." Would that be enough to allow you to escape the Star Chamber?

  Reader, you may be missing the point. You don't want to go into the Star Chamber at all. So leave the shirt at home, in the drawer.

  ---

• At National Review, Kevin D. Williamson has literature in mind, specifically the Faust legend: Faust Government & Political Power -- Infernal Art of the Deal.

  You know the legend of Faust. He was a man of great learning who wanted to be a man of great power, who made a deal with the devil, exchanging his soul for perfect worldly knowledge and the commanding position that goes with it. The story has been treated most famously by Marlowe and Goethe, but also has held the imagination of everyone from Paul Valéry to Václav Havel.

  It should be performed weekly in Washington, because what Faust ultimately sought was not only knowledge and magical abilities but political power — the ultimate end to which he meant to put his ill-gotten capacities. Faust envisioned a new kind of government, above and separate from the vanities and schemes of mere kings and emperors, one that would be universal and based on science, which at the time was so closely related to magic as to be nearly indistinguishable in the popular mind.

  Kevin knows his stuff, literature-wise, and is unafraid to apply it to our present situation.

  ---

• 

  And, finally, a Boing Boing amusement from Cory Doctorow: Author hid funny messages on the copyright page of his book.

  When my first couple novels came out, I lobbied to add some kind of notation about "fair use" and "limitations and exceptions to copyright" on the copyright notice page and was told not even to try because legal would never allow even the slightest variance from the boilerplate; apparently Steve Stack is better connected than I am, because his book 21st Century Dodos, has a copyright notice that is full of whimsy and gags, as Rebecca discovered and documented.

  I won't reproduce it here. Click through, or (hey!) buy the book! Link over there on your right!

• At the WSJ (which I'm told may be paywalled), Joseph Epstein wonders: What Would We Do Without the Word ‘Racism’?.

  If the country had a National Language Commission, and I were appointed commissioner, the first word I would put in cold storage—filed permanently away beside the N-word, the C-word, the K-word and other prohibited words—would be “racism.” In our day the word has been used imprecisely, promiscuously, perniciously and well beyond abundantly. If you are politically on the left, racism is what you accuse people of who don’t agree with you. If you are on the right, you can accuse them, I suppose, of socialism, but it doesn’t carry anything like the same resonance in moral opprobrium or self-awarded virtue as does racism.

  The racist, if we can use the dictionary definition, believes that all members of a particular race possess characteristics or abilities specific to that race, which distinguish it as superior or inferior to other races. The true racist of course feels his own race is superior, and thereby he hasn’t any difficulty in discriminating or otherwise ill-treating members of other races, sometimes through government policy—as formerly under apartheid in South Africa or during the strict segregation once pervasive in the American South—or sometimes through ugly personal actions.

  Our Amazon Product du Jour can help, although if you wear it I'm afraid you'll get lectured about "panda privilege".

  ---

• I suppose someday we'll stop slagging Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) for his stupid ideas. But today is not that day. David French writes at National Review Against the Republican Daddy State.

  On Tuesday, Senator Josh Hawley introduced his second proposed regulation of social media in as many months. In June, he introduced a bill to regulate political speech on large social-media platforms. In July, he followed it up with the “SMART Act,” a bill designed to curb allegedly addictive features contained in popular applications such as Twitter, Snapchat, and YouTube.

  I fully agree that social-media platforms should reform their speech policies. I also agree that too many Americans spend too much time on their phones. But there is a dramatic difference between declaring that something is a problem and believing that government should act to solve that problem. In fact, the very determination that government should act — rather than relying on a free citizenry to exercise its liberty responsibly — can be harmful to a nation and to a culture.

  The SMART Act is a remarkable attempt at micromanaging the design of popular online products. It would ban, for example, “infinite scroll” (the feature that allows you to thumb rapidly through a Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter feed), the “autoplay” of a new video after the user finishes the one he initially selected (on sites like YouTube, but not on the ultimate autoplay device in American homes, your television), and certain gaming features on social-media apps, such as Snapchat’s “streaks” (which record how many consecutive days you’ve communicated with friends).

  Welcome to the Republican Daddy state. It responds to a social challenge with a blunt instrument that hurts responsible users of popular applications — which is to say, the overwhelming majority of all users — while not providing any concrete evidence that it will cure the extraordinarily complicated underlying problem it’s attempting to address: the rise of anxiety, depression, and polarization that correlates with the rise of social media and the smartphone but is caused by a multiplicity of factors.

  Hawley, I suppose, is better than the senator he replaced. (Claire McCaskill, right?) But still disappointing for those who think that government is doing a lousy enough job on its core tasks that it really shouldn't go into back-seat website design.

  ---

• Jacob Sullum, at Reason wonders: Does 'Common Sense Gun Safety Legislation' Make Sense As a Response to the El Paso and Dayton Shootings?. Hint: Betteridge's law of headlines is fully armed and operational.

  Hours after a gunman killed 22 people at a Walmart in El Paso on Sunday, Rep. Veronica Escobar (D–Texas), whose district includes that city, implored "all of us who have the power to end this horror" to "come together" and "once and for all address the gun violence epidemic that plagues our nation." Other prominent Democrats, including several presidential contenders, likewise reacted to the attack in El Paso and a mass shooting that killed nine people in Dayton, Ohio, early the following morning by calling for "urgent action" to approve "common sense gun safety legislation."

  The elements of that legislation are mostly window dressing that would do little or nothing to prevent attacks like these. The most frequently mentioned policy, "universal background checks," is plainly irrelevant to these particular crimes, since both the El Paso shooter and the Dayton shooter purchased their weapons legally, meaning they did not have disqualifying criminal or psychiatric records. Nor do the vast majority of mass shooters, who either passed background checks or could have. Neither requiring background checks for private transfers nor creating "strong background checks," as President Donald Trump has proposed (perhaps referring to the same policy), would make a difference in such cases.

  It's tedious to endure the onslaught of gun-grabbers saying the exact same things after every horror. As well as the "thoughts and prayers" folks, although I don't find them as offensive.

  ---

• At the Federalist, Jonathan S. Tobin dares to criticize the earnest Swedish teenager who some of my lefty Facebook friends adore: Greta Thunberg Has No Patience For Democracy Or Your Lifestyle.

  The heroine of the environmental movement is on her way. Greta Thunberg, the 16-year-old Swedish celebrity protester, has finally figured out a way to bring her extremist message to the New World.

  Thunberg, who has been the focus of adulatory coverage throughout Europe and in mainstream American outlets such as CNN, the New York Times, and a cover story in Time magazine, is a teenage sensation leading a movement of angry European children. Thunberg and her fans are demanding that their country’s governments act to stop global warming. What’s more, they are denouncing as sellouts even those who agree with their goal but are reluctant to adopt the extremist measures such as those Thunberg’s ally Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) put forward in the Green New Deal.

  This bit of Tobin's article rang a bell:

  Thunberg and her movement operate with some clear advantages. Since they are a children’s crusade, they are credited with the best possible motives and not asked to fully or coherently explain their goals or how they might be achieved without doing more harm than good. […] As for journalists who point out the flaws in these young people’s arguments, the inconsistency in their behavior, or ponder whether children should be skipping school to pursue a political agenda, progressives denounce them as bullies picking on nice kids.

  This (at least sometimes) works at the other end of the spectrum, too. A few years back we had Doris "Granny D" Haddock, also fond of publicity stunts. At age 88, she walked across the country in support of "campaign finance reform" (i.e.: increased government regulation of political advocacy). She approached secular sainthood in our local media.

  [Comment also left on the Federalist article.]

  ---

• And at the Atlantic, straight shooter Sally Satel provides The Truth About Painkiller Addiction. She references a HuffPost article from Brooke Feldman, a onetime pill addict. Some facts:

  Among people who are prescribed opioids, addiction is relatively uncommon. The percentage of patients who become addicted after taking opioids for chronic pain is measured in the single digits; studies show an incidence from less than 1 percent to 8 percent. Most of the estimates are skewed toward the low end of this range, when those at risk (due to a history of substance abuse or, to a lesser but meaningful extent, a concurrent mental illness) are removed from the sample. In Feldman’s case, the nature of the risk was constant anguish. When she was 4 years old, her heroin-addicted mother left the family and died of an overdose before she was 12. “For so much of my childhood, I felt abandoned, worthless, unlovable, and confused,” she told me. Her first Percocet came from a girlfriend. “Being numb helped,” she said. Before Percocet, though, she had achieved “escape” with marijuana, alcohol, PCP, benzodiazepines, and cocaine.

  Sally's article is a good debunking of a lot of drug-warrior hype, especially the "blame the eeevil drug companies" sort.

• At the (possibly paywalled) WSJ Peggy Noonan wonders: What Were Robespierre’s Pronouns?

  [The French Revolution was] largely run by sociopaths. One, Robespierre, the “messianic schoolmaster,” saw it as an opportunity for the moral instruction of the nation. Everything would be politicized, no part of the citizen’s life left untouched. As man was governed by an “empire of images,” in the words of a Jacobin intellectual, the new régime would provide new images to shape new thoughts. There would be pageants, and new names for things. They would change time itself! The first year of the new Republic was no longer 1792, it was Year One. To detach farmers from their superstitions, their Gregorian calendar and its saints’ days, they would rename the months. The first month would be in the fall, named for the harvest. There would be no more weeks, just three 10-day periods each month.

  So here is our parallel, our hiccup. I thought of all this this week because I’ve been thinking about the language and behavioral directives that have been coming at us from the social and sexual justice warriors who are renaming things and attempting to control the language in America.

  There is the latest speech guide from the academy, the Inclusive Communications Task Force at Colorado State University. Don’t call people “American,” it directs: “This erases other cultures.” Don’t say a person is mad or a lunatic, call him “surprising/wild” or “sad.” “Eskimo,” “freshman” and “illegal alien” are out. “You guys” should be replaced by “all/folks.” Don’t say “male” or “female”; say “man,” “woman” or “gender non-binary.”

  More on CSU's Inclusive Speech Guide at the College Fix. I thought things were getting more sensible at the University level, and they may be, but I suspect we'll have to wait until the last Robespierre retires to be sure.

  ---

• David L. Bahnsen, on the other hand, has an eminently sensible take at National Review. Sometimes Trump: Now More Than Ever.

  Few things have occupied more of my energy and frankly my anxiety over the last two and a half years than trying to see conservatism hold itself together through the Trump era. This transcends any impact of Trumpism on the ideology or movement of conservatism, and actually speaks to the personalities involved: the thought leaders, the people. It is inadequate to merely state that divisions have formed around the response of conservatism to Donald J. Trump. In some tragic cases friendships have been destroyed. Nastiness has frequently ruled the day. My dream a couple years ago of everyone taking a breath and finding it in themselves to understand where the other side was coming from was revealed to be naïve gibberish. And as we prepare for President Trump’s reelection effort, I suspect we are about to discover that these intra-squad disputes have only been in the early innings.

  I hold out no hope for persuading other leading advocates of a particular school of thought on Trump how they ought to think, how they ought to behave, or how they ought to be. I can only affirmatively suggest what my modus operandi will be for the next year and three months, and if it strikes a chord within any of you, so be it. My objectives at this point are not to be a grand mediator of divided forces, but rather to be a faithful witness and effective movement conservative in a time where it is desperately needed.

  I can't find a single thing about which to quibble in David's article.

  ---

• 

  An article on the "Bad News" side of Reason's latest issue by Katrina Gulliver: What If Man Is a Killer Ape Beset by Original Sin?.

  Today, self-help books and relationship gurus invoke evolution to explain everything from marital infidelity to the paleo diet. Our early ancestors' survival needs echo through our ideas today. But this is not the first time our hominid ancestry's role in our culture and character has played a major role in Western popular culture.

  Following the nightmare of the Second World War, the idea of a universal humanity had great appeal. The Holocaust and the atom bomb had proven that human beings have not only destructive impulses but a devastating ability to carry them out. But were these impulses something we were born with, or were they created by our culture? Answering this question became a driving focus of popular anthropology. With Creatures of Cain, the Princeton historian Erika Lorraine Milam explores this period of intellectual debate.

  Cool! Creatures of Cain has been plopped right onto the to-read list.

  ---

• At Cato, Chris Edwards has a rundown on Elizabeth Warren's plan to extract more money from the "rich": Taxing Wealth and Capital Income. Let's skip down to the conclusions:

  Nations around the world have cut taxes on capital in recent decades, and most nations that had annual wealth taxes have repealed them. Recent U.S. proposals to increase taxes on wealth and capital income run counter to the lessons learned about efficient taxation in the global economy.

  The Europeans discovered that imposing punitive taxes on the wealthy undermined economic growth. They found that wealth taxes encouraged tax avoidance and generated capital flight. European wealth taxes raised little money and became riddled with exemptions.

  Wealth is accumulated savings, which is needed for investment. The fortunes of the richest Americans are mainly socially beneficial business assets that create jobs and income, not private consumption assets. Raising taxes on wealth would boomerang against average workers by undermining their productivity and wage growth.

  Senator Warren says that she wants rich people to “pay a fair share, so the next kid has a chance to build something great and the kid after that and the kid after that.” But encouraging the wealthy to invest in new and expanding businesses is what creates opportunities for those young people, not redistributing more income through the tax code.

  Creating a fair and efficient method of taxing capital is a challenge, but experts are widely agreed that wealth taxes are an inefficient way to do so. Rather than sin taxes, wealth taxes are virtue taxes that penalize the wealthy for being frugal and for reinvesting their earnings.

  Rather than imposing a wealth tax or raising tax rates on capital income, policymakers should rethink the overall federal approach to taxing capital. A better way is through consumption-based taxation, which would tax wealth but in a simpler way that does not stifle savings, investment, and growth.

  It must have been tempting for Chris to say: "Elizabeth Warren probably knows her proposal is garbage; her goal is simply to woo the left-wing bubbas that hate the rich."

  ---

• Reader, you may be familiar with/amazed by Gmail's helpful guesswork on what you're going to type when composing your correspondence. And, for that subset of readers who are also current or ex-coders, you may have wondered whether this would happen: This AI-powered autocompletion software is Gmail’s Smart Compose for coders.

  Over the past year, AI has seriously improved its ability to generate the written word. By scanning huge datasets of text, machine learning software can produce convincing samples of everything from short stories to song lyrics. Now, those same techniques are being applied to the world of coding with a new program called Deep TabNine.

  Deep TabNine is what’s known as a coding autocompleter. Programmers can install it as an add-on in their editor of choice, and when they start writing, it’ll suggest how to continue each line, offering small chunks at a time. Think of it as Gmail’s Smart Compose feature but for code.

  Oooh, there's a version for vim, and it supports Perl! I may not be posting for a few weeks…

This is why Pun Salad tries to stay away from making predictions. ("Especially about the future" — not Yogi Berra.) Andrew Yang has popped back into a slight amount of favor at Betfair, putting him above our 2% WinProb threshold. Also reappearing in our list: Tulsi Gabbard, for the first time since February!

I did not see that coming. Good for them, even though their odds remain slim.

Most hurt, probably by her lackluster performance in the recent debate: Queen Kamala I. And (with, I imagine, an air of resignation) Joe Biden failed to babble incoherently enough in his debate, so he has retaken "favorite Democrat" position away from Elizabeth.

In the phony standings, Trump maintains a solid lead overall, but Mayor Pete edges out Bernie for second place this week:

"WinProb" calculation described here. Google result counts are bogus.

• Ann Althouse notes a Democrat trend: "We cannot keep with the Republican talking points on this. You got to stop.". A long excerpt, but she has a lot to observe and something good to say:

  I […] want to talk about the rhetoric "Republican talking point." It wasn't just Kamala Harris. It was Joe Biden: "This is not a Republican talking point." And Julian Castro: "Open borders is a right-wing talking point."

  And (to go back to the Tuesday night debate), Elizabeth Warren said it twice: "We should stop using Republican talking points in order to talk with each other...." And "What you want to do instead is find the Republican talking point of a made-up piece of some other part and say, Oh, we don't really have to do anything."

  There was Bernie Sanders: "And, Jake, your question is a Republican talking point."

  Marianne Williamson used the phrase, but warily: "And I do have concern about what the Republicans would say. And that's not just a Republican talking point."

  It's such a cliché already that its usefulness may already be gone, but let me do my part to try to kill it. I assume — and I am a moderate voter in Wisconsin, capable of going for either party's candidate — that the Republicans' talking points are their best arguments on all the various issues. A Democratic Party candidate, to be any good, better demonstrate skill at countering these arguments, these talking points!

  It's especially bad to use the line against the debate moderator, as Bernie did — "Jake, your question is a Republican talking point." It sounds as though he's implying that Jake Tapper should go easy on him and not challenge him with the very arguments he'll have to deal with if he's the Democratic Party candidate.

  And it's terrible to use the phrase as a way to refuse to deal with a problem with your position. Julian Castro said "open borders is a right-wing talking point, and frankly I'm disappointed that some folks, including some folks on this stage, have taken the bait." His whole argument was Shut up, you sound like a Republican. And he wasn't even talking to the other candidates. He was talking to one of the moderators (Don Lemon), who had quoted President Obama's homeland security secretary, Jeh Johnson. Your immigration policy sounds like open borders! If it's not open borders, you'd better explain why!

  And look at that Kamala Harris quote I put in the title: "We cannot keep with the Republican talking points on this. You got to stop." You've got the slang "We cannot keep with" and the (intentionally?) bad grammar "You got to stop." Is that supposed to be sassy and cute? To me, it sounds tired and unprepared. Or worse... it sounds like you know your policy is bad and vulnerable to attack but you're going to bull forward with it anyway. It's the best you got... the best you've got.

  "Republican talking point" is a Democratic talking point.

  Well, ouch.

  ---

• At Reason, Ira Stoll notes another irritating Democrat usage: Sanders, Warren Compare Capitalists to Vampires, but Socialism Is What Really Sucks (published pre-debate).

  At the Democratic presidential debates this week and as the campaign heats up in the months ahead, listen for the word "suck."

  Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.) has been using it frequently in connection with health care. In the first round of debates she said, "the insurance companies last year alone sucked $23 billion in profits out of the health care system."

  She also uses the term for those in the financial sector more broadly, beyond health insurance. Recently, Warren issued a plan to "rein in the financial industry so it stops sucking money out of the rest of the economy."

  Ira notes the unsavory history of othering hated groups as "vampires", "vultures", and "ticks".

  And Ira also notes the hypocrisy of folks who (1) want to be in charge of an organization that already demands 15-20% of GDP out of the private economy and (2) want to increase that fraction even more to fund their wacky schemes. So, for those who indulge in that sort of metaphor, who are the bloodsuckers again?

  ---

• As Jane Austen never got around to observing: It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a newspaper writer in possession of a good word processor, must be in want of a writing hook. Because otherwise that writer will not be paid. And sometimes that want can reflect utter desperation, as pointed out by the Free Beacon: the WaPo's Deena Prichep discovering that Even Trump's Favorite Food Has a 'Hidden Russian Connection'.

  American hamburgers unquestionably predate Russian versions, but Prichep's "Russia connection" is that in 1936, Soviet food commissar Anastas Mikoyan introduced the hamburger to his country after a fact-finding mission in the States.

  "Mikoyan shared Trump's opinion of fast food. He was a great admirer," University of Helsinki sociologist Jukka Gronow told the Post. "If the war hadn't broken out in 1941, we would have a chain of McMikoyan's."

  The jab that even Trump's food has Russian ties ironically mirrors an administration talking point back in 2017. "If the President puts Russian salad dressing on his salad tonight, somehow that's a Russia connection," complained White House press secretary Sean Spicer. (In response, a CNN fact-check noted "Russian dressing is actually from Nashua, New Hampshire.")

  Wow, I didn't know that about Nashua. What would we do without CNN fact checkers tracking this stuff down?

  ---

• Pre-debates, Megan McArdle attempted to help CNN clarify something important: What debate moderators should ask Kamala Harris about her Medicare-for-all plan.

  Sen. Harris, like Bernie Sanders, you envision your Medicare-for-all plan covering many services that Medicare currently doesn’t, such as dental, vision and hearing aids. Will it eliminate co-pays and out-of-pocket expenses, as the Sanders plan does? Exactly how much do you estimate this plan will cost?

  Your plan will make private insurance illegal for covered services. Will clinics and physicians be able to provide covered services for cash, or will there be no way to obtain those treatments outside the public system?

  And many more. I don't know if Kamala was asked any of that. Because even if she was, her answers tend to have a half-life of hours, as she struggles to explain what she really meant. (I'm reminded of the phrase: "trying to nail jelly to a tree.")

  ---

• At the Washington Examiner, Philip Klein deals directly with the phony issue: Elizabeth Warren is a policy fraud.

  When Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren speaks, liberals swoon over her supposed mastery of policy. She markets T-shirts emblazoned with her refrain that she “has a plan for that.” Even those political journalists who question her chances of capturing the Democratic nomination accept this basic premise, and their skepticism is often framed as: Can somebody so wonky appeal to a broader electorate? The truth is that when it comes to policy, Warren is a fraud.

  Whatever reputation Warren may have had as an academic, as a presidential candidate, she has churned out or endorsed one half-baked policy after another.

  True policy innovation requires creativity and grappling with genuine challenges to achieving one’s vision. Rather than seriously working through issues, Warren’s simple solution for everything involves giving away lots of free stuff and insisting that only major corporations and the ultra-wealthy will pay more. Any legitimate questions about her policies are waved away with triumphant lines about the need to think more boldly.

  Phil's number one example is health care, where Warren has not submitted a plan of her own, instead leeching off Bernie's M4A scheme. (See, this bloodsucking metaphor is catching. I'll have to remember to avoid that.)

  ---

• And those crazy libertarians at Reason are similarly unimpressed with Warren's trade policy. Because, as Eric Boehm notes: Warren’s Trade Policy Dresses Up Trumpism with Progressive Rhetoric.

  The Warren campaign's trade policy plan attempts to draw a distinction between the progressive senator and President Donald Trump, who has spent a good deal of his time in office threatening to terminate existing trade deals without getting very much in return. Warren says her administration "will engage in international trade—but on our terms and only when it benefits American families."

  It's a classic example of a sentence where nothing that comes before the "but" really matters. Warren's policy is aiming, essentially, for a more competent version of the protectionism that Trump has brought to the forefront of American politics in the past two years. Warren's plan calls for "establishing a set of standards countries must meet as a precondition for any trade agreement with America." Those standards include enforcement of collective bargaining, elimination of domestic fossil fuel subsidies, and a long-term plan to reduce carbon emissions—rules so strict that they effectively disqualify any developing country from reaching a trade deal with the United States.

  Off the table for both parties, at least for now: dropping tariffs, subsidies, and regulations hampering free trade, and let Americans decide what they want to buy from and sell to those nasty furriners without either Trump or Warren looking over their shoulders.

  ---

• David Henderson has Reflections on the Democratic Debate too. One bit centers on the John "Mr. Peterson" Delaney/Elizabeth Warren imbroglio:

  In criticizing Senator Elizabeth Warren’s and Senator Bernie Sanders’s call for “Medicare for All,” Delaney said, “we don’t have to go around and be the party of subtraction, and telling half the country, who has private health insurance, that their health insurance is illegal.”

  A lot of people on the web made fun of Delaney. I thought he did a good job. It’s too bad that he also has the worst proposal of any of the candidates: compulsory national service for every American at age 18. [Note: If you go to the above link, you’ll see that author Rebecca Klar writes, “Every American over the age of 18 would be required to serve the country for at least one year under a plan proposed by presidential candidate former Rep. John Delaney (D-Md.). ” There are over 200 million Americans over age 18. I’m pretty sure that Delaney plans to go after “only” the vulnerable 18-year olds, not 68-year olds like me.]

  Senator Warren seems to be getting kudos for this comeback to Delaney:

  I don’t understand why anybody goes to all the trouble of running for president of the United States to talk about what we really can’t do and shouldn’t fight for.

  Really? That gets kudos? Delaney talks about what’s politically and economically feasible and that’s bad? In fact, the contribution of someone who talks about what we really can’t do is enormously valuable.

  Trying to dig some liberty-friendly content out of Democrat debates is… well you know the joke Reagan used to tell about the kid digging around merrily in the room full of horseshit: "There has to be a pony in here somewhere!"

  No there doesn't, kid.

  ---

• And let's give Andrew Yang a big welcome back by pointing to an article by Reason intern Alex Muresianu: Andrew Yang Is Wrong About Shopping Malls and Amazon.

  At the second round of Democratic debates, entrepreneur Andrew Yang criticized Amazon, accusing the online retail giant of "closing 30 percent of American malls and stores." Yang has a plan to protect dying malls, proposing to direct $6 billion to prop up struggling shopping centers.

  But one company is already repurposing many of those suburban behemoths: Amazon. 

  Yang, bless him, thinks $6 billion is the precise amount of Federal cash needed to prop up the "right" number of malls, as determined by the propeller-beanied wizards that will take over the government in the Yang Administration. No doubt these bright boys and girls will be unswayed by pleadings from local pols and mall owners, relying instead on cold hard algorithms!

  And that $6 billion extracted from the private economy. What would that have done, if left in private hands? Well, that's the thing. Yang doesn't care about that "unseen" use.

Presidential candidate John Delaney vs. the late John Fielder. Who had a long, distinguished acting career, but (for me) mostly memorable as Mr. Peterson on "The Bob Newhart Show".

This is obviously unfair to … one of these guys. Not sure which. Maybe both.

Personal note: my daughter is getting married today to a wonderful young man. So my thoughts are on their likely future. And I'm trying not to be depressed or angry about what current political trends imply for that future. It's not a pretty picture, Emily.

• At National Review, Kevin D. Williamson has thoughts on Poverty and Capitalism. It is in response to a column by Noah Smith that urges us to "stop blaming America's poor for their poverty." And you know who does that, right? Conservatives, specifically Kevin D. Williamson! Who rebuts:

  The thing about moral truths is that they are truths. Take the example of a problem drinker. We can be reasonably sure that his life will improve if he stops drinking two liters of bourbon a day, or at least that it is much less likely to improve if he does not stop drinking two liters of bourbon a day. Some people see drunkenness and understand it as a character defect; others see alcoholism and understand it as a disease — in either case, the diagnosis is the same: Stop drinking two liters of bourbon a day. Perhaps it is the case that the world has been cruel and unfair to him. What now? Stop drinking. Maybe his parents abused him, he was discriminated against because of his race or sexual orientation, and wrongly convicted of a crime. What now? Stop drinking. It is not that those other factors do not matter — of course they do, especially if they can help us to understand the source of the problem. But the remedy is going to be the same.

  To argue that the problem is “the capitalist system” is to retreat into generality and to refuse to consider the facts of the case, each on its own merits. To insist that the problem is capitalism also is to assert that phenomena such as homelessness are fundamentally economic problems, which does not seem to be the case. In New York, Los Angeles, and other big cities, it is common for people to sleep on the streets even as beds in shelters go unoccupied. There are many reasons for that, but the main one almost certainly is mental illness (and substance abuse as a subset of that). That is the nearly universal opinion of the professionals who work with the urban homeless.

  KDW has been pilloried for his accurate reporting on the various social dysfunctions behind American poverty. And we deal with poverty in the worst possible way: building huge government bureaucracies whose continued existence and funding depend on not solving the problem.

  ---

• Drew Cline, at the Josiah Bartlett Center, has a fever! And the only prescription is… more Milton! To fix health care, look to Milton Friedman, not Bernie Sanders. After a depressing recitation of debating Democrats deriding—eek!—those demonic companies daring to profit from offering health care:

  The Democratic Party is following the wrong Brooklyn-born Jewish immigrant.

  Tooting “The Internationale” on his pipe, Bernie Sanders is leading the Democratic Party down the dark path toward state control of the economy. His anti-capitalism rantings have shifted the party’s base far to the left. He led the health care debate on Tuesday, and on Wednesday Elizabeth Warren and others danced to his seductive tune.

  Wednesday, as it happened, was the birthday of Milton Friedman, “the 20th century’s most prominent advocate of free markets.” Born in Brooklyn 29 years before Bernie Sanders, the Nobel laureate economist became famous for explaining to popular audiences how free markets combat poverty and empower the powerless, as he did here on Phil Donahue’s show.

  Sanders’ progressive push for a government-run health care system is based entirely on the notion that health care and health insurance in the United States are controlled by for-profit companies preying upon citizens in an unrestrained free market. It’s an interesting theory, considering that exactly the opposite is not only true but demonstrably true.

  The United States does not have a free-market health care system. In a free market, a seller cannot raise prices with impunity. The existence of price signals and competition would allow consumers to choose alternatives, keeping prices down and service quality high.

  Only quibble: Milton was not, and Bernie is not, an "immigrant". (A comment I've subitted to the article.)

  ---

• I've referred indirectly to a new hot Democrat debate tactic, and (at the Bulwark) Andrew Egger has noticed it too: "Republican Talking Points".

  The race to the left among the Democrats currently running for president reached a tipping point at the Detroit debate Tuesday night. The progressives and socialists of the field, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, didn’t just behave as though their policy proposals totally blowing up and overhauling everything from healthcare to finance were three-foot putts that moderate Democrats were just too weak-kneed to attempt. They actually dismiss the moderates’ objections as “Republican talking points.”

  When former congressman John Delaney, objecting to progressive proposals of single-payer “Medicare for All,” argued that many Americans were leery of the idea of losing their private insurance, Warren dismissed him out of hand, saying that “We should stop using Republican talking points” when discussing how to provide adequate health care for Americans. When moderator Jake Tapper mentioned that M4A would increase taxes on the middle class, Sanders laid into him with an accusation of bad faith: “Jake, your question is a Republican talking point . . . The health care industry will be advertising tonight on this program; they will be advertising with that talking point.”

  This sort of thing is silly on its face: Just because Republicans have made an argument doesn’t mean a candidate is absolved from addressing it. Whoever wins the 2020 nomination will be forced to defend these same policies in conversation with a very pushy Republican; you’d think the least they could do is get some practice in now. 

  It would also be nice if they could respond substantively to arithmetic-based criticism; otherwise people might get the impression that they're just dodging reality.

  And that impression would be totally accurate. Because…

  ---

• … as Steven Greenhut points out at Reason: There’s No Such Thing as ‘Free Money’ or Meaningless Deficits.

  Most people probably have seen those TV advertisements featuring an obnoxious pitchman wearing a brightly colored suit covered in question marks. He jumps around frenetically, waving his hands, and announcing that the government is giving away lots of "free money." Matthew Lesko's websites help people tap into a sea of federal grants and loans. You can even talk to a "free money coach" to show you how to do it.

  That's probably a good business opportunity in a country where the government spends $4.7 trillion a year. That's trillion with a dozen zeroes. It's 1,000 times a billion, which is starting to approach real money. It could take thousands of years to simply count to 1 trillion. The Lesko approach—free cash for everyone—has long been the strategy of Democratic politicians, but now it's the official fiscal policy of Republican politicians, too.

  When there's "broad bipartisan agreement" that a problem will be ignored, the modern-day media go along because they can't fit the issue into their usual partisan-spat model, and voters can't get that excited about it either … well, that's trouble, right here in River City.

  Trouble with a capital "T".

  And that rhymes with "D".

  And that stands for "Deficit".

  ---

• But at least our representatives are concentrating on the important problems. At AEI, James Pethokoukis looks at Senator Josh Hawley's SMART ("Social Media Addiction Reduction Technology") Act: We’re from the government, and we’re here to redesign your website. Example:

  The bill also delves into minutiae such as the look of consent boxes. For example: If a website operator “requests that a user accept or consent to terms, anything similar, by clicking an icon, the operator shall present the user with an option to decline by clicking an icon that is identical to the other  icon in terms of size, shape, font, and other visual or auditory design, except that the options need not be identical in color as long as the option to decline is conspicuously shaded differently than the immediate background color, and such option to decline shall be placed before the option to consent as measured by the direction the language in which the option is written is conventionally read.”

  I’m not making this up. The specificity here almost defies parody. It turns out that in America, as opposed to say Soviet Russia, government central planning is really more super, super annoying and inconvenient than truly oppressive. Or as TechDirt’s Mike Masnick puts it, “It basically seems to be Congress (via Hawley) appointing itself as the new product manager for all internet services. It’s taking what is a potentially reasonable concern that certain activities on various internet platforms may lead to addictive behaviors and then assuming that Congress must ban them outright.”

  Hawley's bill has no cosponsors yet. As I type. To maintain the pessimistic attitude for the day: I'm not hopeful that will last.

• Adam Thierer, writing at the Technology Liberation Front, describes Sen. Hawley’s Radical, Paternalistic Plan to Remake the Internet.

  More insultingly, [Hawley] has argued that the entire digital economy was basically one giant mistake. He says that America’s recent focus on growing the Internet and information technology sectors has “encouraged a generation of our brightest engineers to enter a field of little productive value,” which he regards as “an opportunity missed for the nation.” “What marvels might these bright minds have produced,” Hawley asks, “had they been oriented toward the common good?”

  Again, this isn’t the sort of rhetoric that conservatives are usually known for. This is elitist, paternalistic tripe that we usually hear from market-hating neo-Marxists. It takes a lot of hubris for Sen. Hawley to suggest that he knows best which professions or sectors are in “the common good.” As I responded in one of my essays:

  Had some benevolent philosopher kings in Washington stopped the digital economy from developing over the past quarter century, would all those tech workers really have chosen more noble-minded and worthwhile professions? Could he or others in Congress really have had the foresight to steer us in a better direction?

  We live in stupid times. Hope they will pass soon.

  But our Amazon Product du Jour is "Destroy The Justified Hard Paternalism" by FUKAFUTA, a Japanese composer/performer of electronic music. The sample provided of the title track sounds like it could have been on the Lord of the Rings soundtrack during the Isengard orc-factory scene. So not my cup of tea, but could be yours for a mere $0.99. [Update, October 2022. Sigh. No longer available. Replaced with Thierer's book.]

  ---

• At Reason, Eric Boehm notes another stupidity symptom: The Senate Will Vote on a $2.7 Trillion Budget Deal That Adds to the National Debt. The Democrats’ Debates Ignored It..

  Maybe CNN should take most of the blame for this. Its debate moderators spent more than four hours over two nights grilling 20 presidential hopefuls, yet they did not see fit to ask a single question about the $22 trillion (and growing) national debt—and the candidates, unsurprisingly, did not bring it up on their own.

  Considering that several of the candidates on the state are current members of the U.S. Senate, the very legislative body that will vote on the budget deal Thursday, CNN missed an important and obvious opportunity for voters to draw distinctions among the 20-member debate field.

  Would any of the candidates have offered even the slightest suggestion that adding trillions more to the $22 trillion national debt might be an error we'll regret later? Maybe we'll find out at the next debate in September, but don't hold your breath.

  I don't blame CNN especially. Except I wish they'd stop pretending to be the "adults in the room", bringing the public's attention to serious issues. A more honest network would say: "We attempt to satisfy your craving for spectacle and partisan animosity."

  ---

• I suppose you're wondering: are white cops are more likely to kill black suspects? Heather MacDonald has your answer at National Review: White Cops Are Not More Likely to Kill Black Suspects.

  A new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences demolishes the Democratic narrative regarding race and police shootings, which holds that white officers are engaged in an epidemic of racially biased shootings of black men. It turns out that white officers are no more likely than black or Hispanic officers to shoot black civilians. It is a racial group’s rate of violent crime that determines police shootings, not the race of the officer. The more frequently officers encounter violent suspects from any given racial group, the greater the chance that members of that racial group will be shot by a police officer. In fact, if there is a bias in police shootings after crime rates are taken into account, it is against white civilians, the study found.

  The authors, faculty at Michigan State University and the University of Maryland at College Park, created a database of 917 officer-involved fatal shootings in 2015 from more than 650 police departments. Fifty-five percent of the victims were white, 27 percent were black, and 19 percent were Hispanic. Between 90 and 95 percent of the civilians shot by officers in 2015 were attacking police or other citizens; 90 percent were armed with a weapon. So-called threat-misperception shootings, in which an officer shoots an unarmed civilian after mistaking a cellphone, say, for a gun, were rare.

  These facts will be soon dismissed (if they haven't been already) as "Republican talking points" by Democratic presidential candidates.

  ---

• And, via GeekPress, Ancient Roman 'Pen' Was a Joke Souvenir.

  The tradition of buying cheap, joke souvenirs for your loved ones while traveling dates back at least two millennia.

  During an archaeological excavation at a Roman-era site in London, researchers found around 200 iron styluses used for writing on wax-filled wooden tablets. One of those styluses, which just debuted in its first public exhibition, holds a message written in tiny lettering along its sides. The inscription's sentiment, according to the researchers who translated it, is essentially, "I went to Rome and all I got you was this pen."

  So the next time you see a "I went to X and all I got you was Y" trinket, you can recognize it for what it is: a sign of the decline and fall of America.

Happy August, everyone! Won't be too long 'fore snow be flyin'!

• I read this WSJ story yesterday with a growing sense of disbelief: Capital One Hacking Suspect Showed Strange Online Behavior.

  The 33-year-old woman accused of executing one of the largest-ever data thefts at a bank showed strange behavior online in recent months, at times bragging about her exploits and discussing deep struggles in her personal life.

  Paige Adele Thompson was arrested in her home city of Seattle on Monday, charged with stealing data from Capital One Financial involving more than 100 million credit-card customers and applicants.

  Skipping to page 6 showed a pic of Paige. When I began to suspect… yup, there it is:

  Ms. Thompson changed her name in 2009 from Trevor Allen Thompson, according to a legal document filed in King County District Court in Seattle.

  Capital One asks: "What's in your wallet?" Turns out it's Paige.

  ---

• Veronique de Rugy makes a point that will seem obvious to people who know the way the world works: Colorado's Paid Leave Proposal Ignores Trade-Offs.

  There are no valid free market arguments for a nationwide, one-size-fits-all federal plan to provide paid leave. But should experimentation with this policy be off-limits to states? The beauty of a federalist system is that states can experiment and innovate with their own policies. This diversity can teach us what works and what doesn't. In this sense, Colorado's commitment to implement a new state-level, paid leave entitlement program — the Family and Medical Leave Insurance (FAMLI) Act — is consistent with federalism.

  The FAMLI Act would provide paid leave benefits to workers who have family events, such as the birth or adoption of a child or the need to care for a loved one, but the hefty price tag would be paid for by collecting a "premium" from employers and employees. So, while it's ill-advised for the state government to intrude in this way, depending on what the plan ends up looking like, the rest of the country will learn a valuable lesson at Colorado's expense.

  Veronique goes on to explain that the people that such policies are meant to "help" are actually the ones most likely to be penalized, in this case via regressive payroll-taxation, or by reductions in employment and promotion opportunities (disproportionately falling on women).

  ---

• At the Federalist, David Harsanyi observes: Compared To The Democrats, Donald Trump Is Moderate.

  Once you strip away all the hysteria and madness surrounding the Donald Trump presidency, you’re left with a policy agenda of a populist, big-government Republican. Whether or not you have a moral or personal case against Trump himself, the president’s stated policy positions fall well within the contours of traditional right-left politics.

  Can the same be said of Democrats? I’m sorry, but across-the-board tax cuts, notwithstanding the panic-stricken reaction, aren’t particularly radical. Every Republican president going back to Warren Harding has passed some kind of rate reduction. Nor is Trump’s stated position on constrained foreign entanglement, which is popular with large factions of both parties. Trump’s anti-Iran and pro-Israel posture are long-standing GOP positions — and before President Barack Obama, bipartisan consensus.

  David's got a point. Still not gonna vote for Trump, though.

  ---

• Max C. Eden, writing at National Review notes: Lack of Funding Is Not What Ails American Schools.

  Last month, researchers from Johns Hopkins University published a heartbreaking study describing the conditions of public schools in Providence, R.I. The report contained a laundry list of problems that plague America’s public schools, such as the inability to fire bad teachers and discipline unruly students, and the need for massive reams of bureaucratic paperwork to get anything done at all.

  Here’s what wasn’t a problem: lack of funding. Providence spends $17,192 per pupil every year.

  But to hear progressive politicians and advocates tell of it, insufficient spending is the only problem with public education. For example, in his “Thurgood Marshall Plan,” presidential candidate Bernie Sanders declared that schools have seen “savage” budget cuts, teachers are paid “starvation wages,” and schoolhouses are “crumbling.”

  This could not be further from the truth. The fact is that America spends more on education than any other major developed nation. In 2015, the latest year for which Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development data is available, the United States spent a combined $12,800 on primary and secondary education, significantly higher than Germany ($11,100), France ($10,000), Italy ($9,100), and Spain ($8,300).

  Don't confuse Bernie with facts. (Now known, apparently as "Republican Talking Points".)

  ---

• In case it's not painfully obvious to the reader (and maybe even if it is), David Henderson tells us, at the Library of Economics and Liberty, Why Libertarians Distrust Political Power.

  In mid-July, Hillbilly Elegy author J. D. Vance delivered a talk at the National Conservatism Conference in Washington entitled “Beyond Libertarianism.” The talk is interesting and important for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that it was one of several talks at that coming out party for “nationalist conservatism” that saw in classical liberalism the source of the social problems they hoped their new vision of conservatism could address. Vance’s talk took this point head-on, arguing that conservatives have to break away from libertarianism’s commitment to individual choice and be willing to exercise political power to fix the ills that he sees libertarian attitudes and policies as having caused. At one point, he says of libertarians:

  Libertarians are not heartless, and I don’t mean to suggest that they are. I think they often recognize many of the same problems that we recognize, but they are so uncomfortable with political power, or so skeptical of whether political power can accomplish anything, that they don’t want to actually use it to solve or even address some of these problems.

  But to me, ignoring the fact that we have political choices, or pretending that there aren’t political choices to be made, is itself a political choice. The failure to use political power that the public has given is a choice, and it’s a choice that has increasingly had, and I think increasingly will have, incredibly dire consequences for ourselves and our families.

  This argument treats libertarian criticisms of political power as either psychological “discomfort” or unexplained “skepticism.” If not that, then the refusal to use political power is the result of ignoring that we have political choices or pretending none are to be made. All of these claims deeply misunderstand the libertarian aversion to the use of political power and ignore the role that such power can often play in causing the very problems further use of such power is hoping to solve.

  I like J. D.'s book a lot, and his life story displays an admirable character. I just wish that he'd spend a little time perusing that old (origin unknown) chestnut: "Government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take everything you have."

  But David's response is longer, and deserves your attention.