Pun Salad

• Well, that's a darn shame. Arnold Kling's headline is sad: ...And Everybody Hates the Libertarians. It's his report on the Cato program "New Challenges to the Free Economy". Speaking of hate, an interesting observation here about the company everyone loves to hate:

  [Hal] Varian, the Chief Economist of Google, was on a panel of like-minded speakers called “fighting back against antitrust populism.” Varian fought back with data that said that most searches are not for products or services, and sellers of products and services get most of their traffic from something other than ads. He pretty much said that the reason Google doesn’t have competition in search is that search is a lousy business—you have to respond to lots of queries, few of which generate revenue. Somebody should have asked him whether Google’s shareholders see it that way.

  Well. GOOGL was down 2.7% yesterday, so maybe some shareholders (or ex-shareholders) were seeing it that way. (If I'm doing this right, it's down nearly 35% from its 52-week high.)

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• High Fidelity, Part One. At American Greatness, the Flight-93 guy, Michael Anton asks: What Does Fidelity to Our Founding Principles Require Today?

  Let me begin to answer that question with a quote—perhaps a familiar quote to some or most of you. But it’s apt, and there’s always a chance some of you haven’t heard it, and/or that others can use a refresher.

  The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected. Even when the revolutionist might himself repent of his revolution, the traditionalist is already defending it as part of his tradition. Thus we have two great types—the advanced person who rushes us into ruin, and the retrospective person who admires the ruins. He admires them especially by moonlight, not to say moonshine. Each new blunder of the progressive or prig becomes instantly a legend of immemorial antiquity for the snob. This is called the balance, or mutual check, in our Constitution.

  Those words were spoken by G.K. Chesterton, a Brit, in 1924. He was speaking of the British Constitution, not ours. But the words strike me as especially apt to our situation.

  What have our conservatives conserved? But before we answer that—hint: almost nothing—let’s first ask: what were they supposed to conserve? What do they say they are conserving in all those fundraising letters they send out that have been netting them hundreds of millions per year for most of my lifetime?

  Anton serves up a jeroboam of jeremiads: declining life expectancy, declining birth rates, deaths of despair, the deep state, unaffordable housing, etc. And then slides over into blaming “the weasels, compromisers, mediocrities, and losers of the Republican-conservative-libertarian establishment”?

  And he names names. Specifically, some of my favorite names. Sigh.

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• High Fidelity, Part 2. I probably wouldn't have linked to that article, had it not been for this article in National Review by C. Bradley Thompson, also conveniently titled: What Does Fidelity to Our Founding Principles Require Today? His bottom line isn't gonna make Randi Weingarten happy:

  It is imperative, therefore, that the proponents of a free society support the “Separation of School and State” principle, which means we must be abolitionists.

  So, how do we get from here to there? Here is a back-of-the-envelope, five-step program for abolishing the government-school system. We must:

  1. Delegitimize the government schools not only as failing in practice but as immoral;
  2. Encourage ordinary Americans to JustWalkAway;
  3. Rescind all laws regulating homeschooling and the creation of micro schools and education pods;
  4. Require all Republican politicians to pledge they will support abolishing the federal Department of Education and its 50 state surrogates;
  5. Take whatever steps necessary to “decertify” the so-called “ed” schools.

  This, ladies and gentlemen, is the revolution, and the leaders of the revolution are ordinary Americans. This movement will not be stopped, and the revolution will not be televised. We have achieved critical mass and there is no going back.

  Dusk is approaching and the owl of Minerva will soon spread its wings.

  Interesting takes.

  My take: blame Jonah Goldberg and Kevin D. Williamson all you want. But the real problem is the voters. You can't shove classical liberalism down peoples' throats in a democracy. If the people don't value individual liberty, personal responsibility, and free-market capitalism… well, then, you won't have any of that stuff.

Such are my idiosyncratic reading habits that I often don't become aware of great writers and their fine books until years after everyone else knows about them. I read Derek B. Miller's How to Find Your Way in the Dark only because it appeared on the NYT's list of The Best Mystery Novels of 2021. I liked it a lot, which sent me to Amazon's author page, and snapped up a used copy of this, his first book. Right on the front cover, the NYT review blurb says it "has the brains of a literary novel and the body of a thriller." True.

How to Find Your Way in the Dark told the story of young Sheldon Horowitz, born in the mid-1920s. Norwegian by Night, published in 2012, is (mostly) the story of old Sheldon Horowitz, age 82. He's living in Norway with granddaughter Rhea and her husband Lars. In the first few pages we learn that he's widowed. His son, Saul (Rhea's father) was killed in Vietnam. It takes him "an hour to pee." Rhea suspects dementia. But another theory is: he's haunted by people and events from his past: his own as a Marine in Korea, and his son's in Vietnam.

But the thriller part is kicked off when an abused single mother knocks at his door with her young son, begging for a safe refuge. But she quickly becomes a victim of violence, and Sheldon takes it on himself to shelter the boy. They set off on a perilous journey, chased by the bad guys. Along the way, Sheldon's secrets are gradually revealed to us.

All that sounds like the book is a total downer. Not true! As with How to Find Your Way in the Dark, the book mixes in solid humor along the way. Particularly comic: the Norwegian police investigation, led by Sigrid Ødegård, who's apparently the main character of the next Miller book I'm going to read.