Pun Salad

I got into reading Dennis Lehane via his private eye novels featuring gritty Boston sleuths Patrick Kenzie and Angie Gennaro. He now seems to have moved away from that series (last entry was Moonlight Mile in 2010). This one is super-gritty, it's set in 1974 Boston, and there's quite a bit of mayhem.

Via the Wikipedia page, he says this might be his final book. Apparently, an AppleTV series is in the works.

The protagonist is a South Boston woman, Mary Pat Fennessey. Southie's dysfunctions have rubbed off on her: one missing/presumed dead husband, she's divorced from another. Only one kid left, her 17-year-old daughter Jules. Mary Pat can't pay her gas bill, but she seems to have enough cash on hand to buy Virginia Slims and beer.

But it's set against actual historical background: Judge Arthur Garrity has ordered black students to be bused into lily-white South Boston High, with a proportion of Southie kids bused down to a black high school in Roxbury. And, as we remember, that worked out great, and accounts for all the racial harmony Boston is experiencing today.

Just kidding. In retrospect, it's tough to see what they were trying to accomplish. In any case, Southie's moms are up in arms, and the overtones of racism are explicit.

One fateful morning, a black kid is found dead at the local subway stop. And (not coincidentally) Jules had not made it home the previous night. As the hours and days go by, Mary Pat grows increasingly concerned, and she can't help but notice that the kids Jules was with have implausible stories about what happened. And eventually, it becomes evident to Mary Pat that the local mob is somehow involved. She's warned not to get too nosy.

That doesn't take. Eventually things get very violent as what happened to Jules gets slowly revealed.

It's a page turner. If this is Lehane's last book, I'll miss him.

… and, as usual, I did not vote for the winner. It's a habit. You can read the results from my little town here. Fun facts:

• Even though Rollinsford reliably votes Democrat in general elections, we had 590-something voters picking up the Republican ballot, only 359 Democrats.

• I say "590-something" because whoever filled out that form overwrote the units digit, illegibly.

• On the Republican ballot, Trump beat Nikki in Rollinsford, 319-267. DeSantis came in third, with three (3) votes, and Joe Biden came in fourth with a couple write-ins. Pence, Christie, and Rachel Swift got one vote each, and everyone else got goose-egged.

• Who's Rachel Smith? Here's her Instragram page. And she was in the state, according to a reporter from the Bulwark:

  Still zero votes for Rachel Swift, who I met in the line for Trumps rally last night. She was super drunk and had a dog shock collar + leash around her neck. Informed me she was also a presidential candidate pic.twitter.com/RQtaVdxyUp

  — Joe Perticone (@JoePerticone) January 24, 2024

  Google reports Rachel got 102 votes statewide, good for twelfth place.

• You probably heard that Biden refused to put his name on the Democrat ballot, but 224 Rollinsford Democrats ignored this disrespect/disinterest and wrote him in anyway. Other Democrat write-ins went for "Cease Fire" (16), Nikki (13), Donald J. Trump (6), RFKJr (6). And one write-in each for Bernie Sanders, Clint Eastwood, and "Tacos".

  Dean Phillips, who did actually campaign, and was not a write-in, got a measly 61 votes. Marianne Williamson got 8. And Vermin Supreme got two.

For more serious commentary, Ann Althouse links to a WaPo story which quotes Trump senior adviser Chris LaCivita: "She was a blank canvas, and we had a bucket of paint.".

Oooh! GLOBALISTS!

Meanwhile, over at National Review, Jim Geraghty considers Nikki Haley at a Crossroads. In a display of fair-mindedness, he lays out five reasons she should quit the race… and a couple reasons she shouldn't.

Meanwhile, he notes that the front-runner is taking his usual serious, carefully-considered, approach to the issues:

Let's check what Charles C. W. Cooke has to say: Nikki Haley Should Stay In.

Don't want to be ghoulish, but … "actually, yeah."

Also of note:

• Catch it! In his (paywalled) newsletter, Kevin D. Williamson has a bone to pick with a guy who used to be skeptical about arbitrary executive power: Autocrat-Immunity Disease.

  As I wrote at the time, I believe Barack Obama should have been impeached and removed from office for—and let’s not polish it up too much—murdering an American for political reasons. The American in question, Anwar al-Awlaki, was an absolute heap of garbage, a jihad apologist who became known as “the Osama bin Laden of Facebook.” And here, I’d like to emphasize the final two words in that epithet: of Facebook. Not the Osama bin Laden of Tora Bora or Nairobi or Dar es Salaam, but the Osama bin Laden … of Facebook. He was an al-Qaeda apologist and recruiter who was no doubt guilty of a whole raft of crimes for which he was never tried on account of his being a smoking cinder. He could have been captured and put on trial, if he hadn’t been blown up. Alternatively, he could have been killed in combat—in Afghanistan or somewhere else—and you wouldn’t have heard any complaints from little ol’ me. My libertarian heart would have been content. 

  But he wasn’t killed in combat, because he was … the Osama bin Laden of Facebook. He didn’t die on some battlefield in Afghanistan. He was killed in Yemen, on his way to breakfast, in an operation that targeted him, specifically, for being the Osama bin Laden of Facebook, i.e., a wretched propagandist and troll and an advocate of evil things. The Obama administration would attempt to ret-con the homicide and insist after the fact that he had gone “operational,” whatever that means in this context, which is approximately squat. Al-Awlaki’s beliefs were reprehensible. But there are lots of people out there with reprehensible political views, and nobody is planning a drone strike on the Claremont Institute or on Steve Bannon’s favorite bar, or whatever cuckold-fetish sex dungeon full of “exceptional, muscular well-hung single men” Roger Stone is swanning around in these days. 

  KDW goes on to note that, at the time, Senator Rand Paul filibustered the nomination of John Brennan to be CIA Director due to this murder. But now…

  A very strange thing has happened to Sen. Paul. When Donald Trump’s lawyers went to court to argue that the president could order SEAL Team 6 (everybody loves writing and saying “SEAL Team 6”!) to assassinate a rival presidential candidate and then remain immune from criminal charges unless impeached and removed from office, Sen. Paul developed an acute case of sudden-onset mushmouth, answering: “It’s a very specific legal argument, and I’m afraid I’m just not up on it enough to be able to comment.” For context, Trump’s current claim is that the president can do literally anything he wants without facing criminal charges. How far we have come from knocking off the Osama bin Laden of Facebook!

• Deathly afraid that someone, somewhere is having fun. Guy Bentley looks at the latest Puritan convert: Chuck Schumer Attacks Lifesaving Zyn Nicotine Pouches.

  In a press release Sunday, Schumer labeled Zyn a "quiet and dangerous" alternative to vaping, claiming that with the decline in smoking, tobacco companies are adapting by focusing on new products like oral nicotine. Zyns are small pouches of nicotine meant to be placed between the lips and gums. Two strengths of the product are available at three and six milligrams of nicotine, and they come in several flavors.

  […]

  But Schumer's framing has the story backward. Zyn is not a dangerous alternative to vaping but a dramatically safer alternative to smoking. One of the reasons smoking has declined substantially over the last decade is because safer nicotine alternatives like vapes and Zyn are switching smokers away from cigarettes. The closest equivalent for which we have decades of data is an oral smokeless tobacco called snus. Snus is most prevalent in Sweden, and not coincidentally, Sweden has the lowest smoking and lung cancer rates in Europe because those interested in using nicotine do so in a much safer form.

  In case you missed it, here is yesterday's rant about efforts at the University Near Here to be a "tobacco, smoke, and nicotine-free campus." Don't get caught with a Zyn in your cheek there!

• Apparently, there are no more famines, so… Johan Norberg and Gonzalo Schwarz write in the WSJ about Oxfam’s Love Affair With ‘Inequality’.

  (Yes, Oxfam's original name was the "Oxford Committee for Famine Relief".)

  Oxfam, which describes itself as “a global organization that fights inequality to end poverty and injustice,” released its annual inequality report this month. The group warns of “widening and extreme inequality,” noting that the world’s five richest men have doubled their wealth since 2020 while “during the same period, almost five billion people globally have become poorer.” As is often the case with Oxfam, the report is misleading.

  According to Oxfam’s main source, the UBS/Credit Suisse Global Wealth Report, annual shifts in inequality have roughly canceled out, returning global wealth inequality to the same level as when the pandemic began. Most inequality indicators are at their lowest levels in a century.

  A cutting remark: "Oxfam seems to dislike wealth more than it dislikes poverty."