Pun Salad

In my own work, I’ve argued that describing American conservatism as fusionism imported the wrong metaphor from science. To make a long story short, there are three kinds of chemical bonds: ionic, metallic, and covalent. In the first, one or more electrons leave one orbit to enter another, producing positively and negatively charged ions. Both chemistry and your mother have something important to say about the resulting bond, however. Opposites do attract. But such a bond tends to be brittle under stress (the same ceramic cup you can’t tear apart with your bare hands will shatter if dropped on a hard floor). In metallic bonds, by contrast, electrons leave their orbits altogether to form a negatively charged “cloud” flowing around multiple nuclei. Metals can be strong and supple, yes, but only communists, fascists, and other cranks think human psyches can be so easily dissembled and reassembled into an undifferentiated mass.

The best analogy for healthy and sustainable political relationships is covalent bonding, in which atoms arrange themselves in often-complicated patterns so they can share the electrons required to complete their orbits. Alas, this concept also yields no useful label. Covalently Bonded Conservatives? CoBoCon sounds like the name of a nerd convention, or perhaps a shadowy defense contractor out to get Jason Bourne.

"NO ONE should be in jail for possessing marijuana," said President Biden on Oct. 6, as he announced a "full, complete, and unconditional" pardon for any American convicted of marijuana possession, a federal crime under the Controlled Substances Act. The president's pardon will not actually set anyone free, since the number of people serving time in a federal facility for possessing pot is — zero. In recent decades, roughly 6,500 defendants were convicted of simple possession, but all of them have served their sentences or been released. The new pardon will expunge the conviction from their records, which may make it easier for some of them to get hired or be approved for a loan. But anyone now incarcerated on drug charges would have been convicted of a more serious crime, to which this pardon won't apply.

What if it did, though?

According to the Pew Research Center, more than 90 percent of Americans say marijuana use should be legal in at least some cases, with 59 percent saying it should be legal in all cases. So it's a safe bet that Biden's pardon of anyone who was prosecuted for marijuana possession won't prove controversial. I certainly don't want anyone locked up for mere possession of weed.

But I also don't want presidents using the pardon power to invalidate laws they don't like. Under the Constitution, "all legislative power" — that is, the power to make and repeal laws — belongs to Congress, not the chief executive. Yet doesn't Biden's blanket pardon effectively nullify the federal law against possessing marijuana? The law is still on the books — Congress hasn't amended it, repealed it, or set a timetable for its expiration. But with his wholesale pardons to those convicted of violating the law, Biden has rendered it a dead letter.

Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo stirred a hornet’s nest when he released an analysis of state death and vaccine records that showed young men experienced an 84% increased risk of cardiac death within four weeks of receiving an mRNA vaccine. Actually, that’s unfair to hornets. They aren’t as mindless or vicious as the self-anointed experts attacking Dr. Ladapo.

Eric Topol, director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute and one of America’s leading Covid scolds, condemned Dr. Ladapo’s study as “baseless, reckless, and irresponsible” because it seemingly contradicted the expert consensus that myocarditis caused by vaccines is “typically mild and fully resolves in nearly all affected” (emphasis added).

The latter is probably true, but Dr. Ladapo’s study shows that some young men may experience severe effects. And it’s far from clear, as Dr. Ladapo notes, that the benefits of the mRNA vaccines for young, healthy men—who were at low risk to begin with, and the vast majority of whom now have some immunity from prior infection or inoculation—outweigh the risks.

Dish soap maker Procter & Gamble has an odd new ad campaign urging folks to "do it" every night by loading their dishwashers instead of wasting time and water on handwashing.

Persuading people to put crusty dishes in a machine that will clean them seems like it shouldn't require sexual innuendos crafted by Madison Avenue. Yet survey data show that nearly one in five Americans who own a dishwasher don't use it.

[…]

The increase in unused dishwashers is correlated with federal energy efficiency standards that have made newer models less effective. In the last 20 years, the U.S. Department of Energy has twice tightened those standards, which limit the amount of water and electricity that dishwashers use. Manufacturers have met those standards by building machines that recirculate less water over a longer wash cycle.

[O]n his first day in office, no less, President Biden ordered the DOE to reconsider these new classes of dishwashers, along with clothes washers and dryers. Today, DOE finalized that process and decided to revoke these new classes of dishwashers. As Reason.com described it, “the Biden administration has decided to take the side of big business in this conflict between industry and individuals.”