Pun Salad

Colleges were once eager to impose speech restrictions to keep their denizens "safe". That was an unmitigated disaster. Thanks to organizations like FIRE, things are improving. "Speech" that colors outside the lines of First Amendment jurisprudence is easy to shut down, otherwise it's a glorious anything-goes.

Twitter can, and should, do the same. It's a no-brainer, Elon.

Briefly noted:

• Bad news from Vero de Rugy: Lame-Duck Congress Want To Spend Like We're Still in a Pandemic.

  Congress' lame-duck session is an ideal time for both parties to pass last-minute legislation while voters are busy Christmas shopping and before members who lost their reelection bids surrender their seats in January. Especially this year, real danger lurks in such legislation. Above all, there's the threat that Congress turns the expanded child tax credit into a new and very costly permanent entitlement. But other threats loom. I'll look at a few of them today.

  A lame-duck session is a great opportunity to push for too much spending on irresponsible pet projects, and more will probably be pushed through this year with little accountability. That's partly because Congress yet again failed to do its basic job of passing a budget by September 30. Instead, legislators kicked the deadline down the calendar to December 16. If they fail again, the federal government will partially shut down. That threat alone makes passing a budget, any budget, a must-do task. Unfortunately, these are precisely the situations that give Congress the opportunity to push through a boatload of otherwise unthinkable deals.

  Unfortunately, voters mostly failed to kick these bozos out in November, so they'll be up to the same mischief next year.

• As if we needed more evidence, here's Jerry Coyne providing: More evidence for the decline of rock/pop music.

  I’ll make a short off-the-top-of-my-head list of some of the music I heard in my youth: the Beatles, the Stones, the Doors, the early Gordon Lightfoot, all the great soul music, including that of Motown (e.g., Sam Cooke, Smokey Robinson, James Brown, The Four Tops, Martha and the Vandellas, Aretha Franklin ad infinitum), Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, the Jefferson Airplane, Bob Dylan, The Band, Joni Mitchell, Eric Clapton, Joan Baez, the Allman Brothers, Laura Nyro, the Beach Boys.

  Who do the kids have these days? Lizzo and Taylor Swift. It makes me ill to even say that. Will their songs be played on the “oldies” stations in 25 years? Nope; they’ll be playing the music of my youth, simply because it’s the best. There is nobody making rock music today as good as any one of the names I’ve listed above.

  I agree, and science is on our side. One bit of evidence among many:

  A researcher put 15,000 Billboard Hot 100 song lyrics through the well-known Lev-Zimpel-Vogt (LZV1) data compression algorithm, which is good at finding repetitions in data. He found that songs have steadily become more repetitive over the years, and that song lyrics from today compress 22% better on average than less repetitive song lyrics from the 1960s. The most repetitive year in song lyrics was 2014 in this study.

  And (damn) that means that things have gotten worse since 1968's "Yummy Yummy Yummy" by the Ohio Express.