Pun Salad

Feeling much better today, thanks. I don't think it was Covid, but I don't know what it was. I'm scared to Google my symptoms.

• Commentary from Mr.Ramirez on the "Inflation Reduction Act".

  

  I moaned last evening over a local TV news report on the "savings" Americans will experience from the IRA. It was basically a two-minute tongue bath for the legislation, specifically the medicine-related measures. A 5-second bit of naysaying was reserved for the end, with the talking head saying "Opponents claim…"

  Pigs don't need to do their own makeup when the MSM will enthusiastically do it for them.

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• In case you were under any illusion otherwise. Ayaan Hirsi Ali informs us There is no "Biden Doctrine".

  I keep thinking of the people falling from the sky. The images are seared into my mind: Our Afghan allies, the people we were callously leaving to their fates after 20 years, clinging to an American plane taking off from Kabul Airport, only to drop to their deaths moments later. Afterwards, Joe Biden had the gall to declare “with all of my heart, I believe this is the right decision, a wise decision, and the best decision for America”.

  A year on, how should we evaluate Biden’s declaration? Well, the Taliban has reinstalled a tyrannical theocratic government under which the precious freedoms gained by Afghan women over the past 20 years have been completely reversed. If the “best decision for America” involves trampling liberty and solidarity underfoot, then I don’t want to imagine what the worst decision would look like.

  She goes on to point out that although "we were told that the Taliban would no longer harbour terrorists", that was contradicted by the harboring of Ayman al-Zawahiri in Kabul.

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• Another Ayaan Hirsi Ali mention. It's from Kevin D. Williamson in his "Tuesday" column: Against Fanaticism.

  Not long after I moved to New York City in 2008, I went to an event at the New York Public Library, a debate between Bernard-Henri Levi and Slavoj Žižek, the subject of which was “Violence and the Left in Dark Times.” As if to personify the dangers to intellectual life presented by the intersection of political radicalism and violence, seated together were Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who had only recently relocated to the United States from the Netherlands, and the novelist Salman Rushdie, who had been living under a death sentence handed down in 1989 by the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini of Iran in response to his novel The Satanic Verses. I thought to myself: “That’s where the bomb will go off.”

  There was no bomb. Not then. Not yet.

  Hirsi Ali these days is a U.S. citizen, a fellow at the Hoover Institution, the wife of British historian Niall Ferguson, and the mother of charming children. Salman Rushdie, for his part, is in a hospital recovering from knife wounds — stabbed in the liver, likely to lose an eye, arm nerves severed, on a ventilator, for a time unable to speak — inflicted by a California-born Tehran-terror fanboy. If it seems that Hirsi Ali has been luckier, don’t envy her: One of the events precipitating her move to the United States was her being forced to vacate a secret secured house in the Netherlands after neighbors complained that her presence put them at serious risk. She remains on a standing al-Qaeda hit list.

  Always nice to be reminded that bravery is rare, and to be prized when it occurs. (You can measure Liz Cheney's bravery, much ballyhooed in the news, in micro-Rushdies.)

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• Good questions… from James Freeman: Merrick Garland, the Washington Post and the Nuclear Story.

  If papers in former President Donald Trump’s home represented such a grave threat to national security, why did the Justice Department take so long to act on it? Among the implausible details of this disturbing story has been that after a Justice official and several FBI agents visited Mar-a-Lago in early June, Justice waited several days before merely requesting that a stronger lock be placed on the door of a storage room and then waited roughly two months before seeking a warrant. Now a new report makes the theory of a significant security threat even harder to credit.

  The Journal’s Sadie Gurman and Aruna Viswanatha report from Washington:

  Attorney General Merrick Garland deliberated for weeks over whether to approve the application for a warrant to search former President Donald Trump’s Florida home, people familiar with the matter said, a sign of his cautious approach that will be tested over the coming months.

  The decision had been the subject of weeks of meetings between senior Justice Department and FBI officials, the people said. The warrant allowed agents last Monday to seize classified information and other presidential material from Mar-a-Lago.

  Weeks of meetings strongly suggest a gray area, not a clear and present danger. Mr. Garland’s long period of pondering is completely incompatible with a news report that has been widely circulated since last week. In a story published on Thursday and updated on Friday, Devlin Barrett, Josh Dawsey, Perry Stein and Shane Harris reported for the Washington Post:

  Classified documents relating to nuclear weapons were among the items FBI agents sought in a search of former president Donald Trump’s Florida residence on Monday, according to people familiar with the investigation.

  Experts in classified information said the unusual search underscores deep concern among government officials about the types of information they thought could be located at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club and potentially in danger of falling into the wrong hands.

  Their concern was so deep that they had to kick the issue around at meetings for much of the summer before trying to do anything about it?

  Trump may have broken their brains. I've been noticing that a lot.

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• Death comes for the Archbishop… And, as Steven Hayward relates, The “Fact Checkers” Come for Hillsdale. Based on this bit of legerdemain:

  

  Hayward comments:

  To be sure, there has been lots of wild and wooly conspiracy talk about [the World Economic Forum] and “The Great Reset,” but not from Hillsdale. Anyone not in the bag for the conventional wisdom would know that Hillsdale is offering a serious critique of the intellectual premises and consequences of the progressive view that “expert” administration can “re-imagine” our economy, our policing, etc. if we just give them more power and bow to their authority. All we need to “reset” the economy is just listen to these good people, and exert our good will.

  A Reason video explains the real reason for concern:

  Executive summary: what's out in the open is bad enough; how much worse could a secret conspiracy be? The real outrage is how few people are outraged.

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• And finally… An excerpt from Part 3 of Russ Roberts' debunking of Benthamite utilitarianism:

  Much of life is more like a dance floor than a dance competition. In a dance competition, it’s about being the best dancer, about attracting attention to yourself and winning prizes or respect for being better than those around you. In a dance competition it would be normal to strive to do as well as possible, to maximize your place in the rankings relative to the other dancers.

  But on a dance floor, there are rules of conduct where you must subdue your own self-interest if you are to be a member in good standing of the culture around you. It can’t be all about you. You must be careful not to bang into the other dancers. To do that, you must observe the moves and positions of the other dancers and find a way for your own self-expression and that of your partner, to mesh with the movements of others. You might choose to sublimate your own status in the name of making your partner shine in his or her gracefulness or expression.

  On the dance floor and in life, there is virtue in perceiving and then following the norms of the environment you are in, even when those norms are not consistent with your own goals or direct well-being. This may mean avoiding some environments and favoring others. Norms emerge and evolve to the extent that they allow for individuals to enjoy themselves and express themselves. But at any one moment, that enjoyment may be imperfect.

  I won't dance. Don't ask me.