Pun Salad

Almost a quarter century ago, Virginia Postrel published The Future and its Enemies. That book advocates for dynamism. But unlike Smith and other smug advocates for active government, Postrel articulated the libertarian view that dynamism comes from decentralized experimentation.

Progressives are misguided about progress. If you want a dynamic society, don’t root for government to lead the way. Instead, root for government to create a background of order that permits progress to proceed.

I have an aphorism that progress comes via the three e’s: experimentation, evaluation, and evolution. It does not come via intelligent design.

While there has been a quietly energetic campaign to memory-hole the fact, some of you will remember that, in the run-up to the 2020 presidential campaign, vaccine skepticism was a Democratic thing, not a Republican thing. Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Andrew Cuomo, and every third progressive nitwit on Twitter cast doubt on the safety and the efficacy of the Covid-19 vaccines that were being developed under Operation Warp Speed, the Trump administration’s program to expedite a vaccine. It was childishly predictable: With Election Day looming, anything that might redound to the credit of the Trump administration had to be cast into doubt or held up for scorn. We are governed by people who have never mentally or morally progressed beyond the politics of the junior-high lunchroom.

After the election, the Democrats and the Republicans settled back into their familiar respective grooves. Republicans who had sympathized with the Trump administration’s early efforts to play down Covid-19 went back to pooh-poohing it, Democrats returned to their peculiar form of technocratic pietism. Democrats sacralized the vaccines, Republicans scorned them and talked up quack cures. And masks became the burqa of the Covid era, with the Subaru-mounted mutaween of suburbia zealously guarding the new public morality.

CNN spends an inordinate amount of time trying to destroy its rivals in the media market — whatever they may pretend they do, this is the role that is actually played by both Brian Stelter and Oliver Darcy — so it should not come as a surprise that the network has been among the most vocal critics of the podcaster Joe Rogan, about whom its staff have grown progressively unhinged as the attempt to cancel him has gained steam.

On Wednesday, CNN’s Alisyn Camerota said that she was “out of ideas for what to do about Joe Rogan.” But, alas, the broader network is not. This morning, John Blake published a piece of “analysis” — this is the word CNN uses for opinion pieces it hopes to launder as something else — that links Rogan’s words with the attack on the Capitol on January 6 and the 1994 Rwandan genocide, and accuses him of helping to reverse the progress that has been made in America since 1945.

Feb. 7 marked the 60th anniversary of President John F. Kennedy’s proclamation imposing an embargo on trade between the United States and Cuba. Other JFK milestones are recalled by media and political elites with esteem or affection. Not this one.

“Cuba has been under US embargo for 60 years. It’s time for that to end,” declared David Adler of Progressive International in The Guardian. Senator Patrick Leahy, a Vermont Democrat, argued in an essay for Univision that “the US embargo is opposed by every other nation in this hemisphere,” so that “in a failed attempt to isolate Cuba, we have isolated ourselves.” Representative Jim McGovern of Massachusetts, long a supporter of normalized ties with Cuba, tweeted that “the Cold War is over” and condemned the embargo as “a policy that has failed for decades, all the while inflicting incalculable suffering on ordinary Cubans.” And The Nation, boasting that it had opposed Kennedy’s trade ban from the outset, ran yet another article denouncing it under the headline: “Cuba: 60 Years of a Brutal, Vindictive, and Pointless Embargo.”

This is par for the course. In the face of the oldest dictatorship in the Western hemisphere and one of the cruelest on the planet, men and women who regard themselves as enlightened aim their outrage not at the regime that tramples human rights, strangles freedom, and violently represses its critics but at America’s longstanding policy of not doing business as usual with that regime. By contrast, many of those same voices rightly call for restricting trade by companies tainted by slave labor in China’s Xinjiang region, just as they earlier endorsed sanctions against South Africa during apartheid. Why, when it comes to Cuba, do they demand not the lifting of the communist oppression but of the trade embargo meant to resist it?

A Republican-backed bill to preserve Columbus Day and have New Hampshire celebrate Indigenous Peoples' Day in August drew opposition at a public hearing this week, in a reprise of a fight last legislative session when Abenaki leaders spoke against the August date.

Rep. Jess Edwards, an Auburn Republican, who is a co-sponsor of House Bill 1173, favored the August date, which would correspond with the United Nations International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples. He presented the August date as a compromise and a way of ending what he called the “intersectional wars.”

The symbols that are part of an anti-vaccine mandate protest in front of the legislature are most often signs touting “freedom” and Canadian and American flags. On Friday, the day the province announced it’s speeding up the plan to lift pandemic restrictions, a new flag appeared.

[Gasp! Mon Dieu!]

The yellow banner with a snake and “Don’t Tread on Me — Live Free or Die” popped up on the Broadway median.