Pun Salad

The NR editorialists are a little late to the show, but that is (as they say) better than never: Biden’s Shameful Betrayal of Israel at the United Nations.

She's studied the maps!

Kamala is only a hair's breadth away from channelling Fredo in The Godfather Part II:

I can handle things! I'm smart! Not like everybody says... like dumb... I'm smart and I want respect!

Also of note:

• Via Instapundit, UPI reports Eli Lilly warns of shortage of insulin products.

  Drugmaker Eli Lilly & Co is announcing a temporary shortage of two of its insulin products.

  "The 10 mL [millilter] vials of Humalog® and Insulin Lispro Injection are or will be temporarily out of stock at wholesalers and some pharmacies through the beginning of April," Lilly said in a recent statement.

  Fingers crossed, I'm not in need. But I found this White House boast from last year pretty easily: FACT SHEET: President Biden’s Cap on the Cost of Insulin Could Benefit Millions of Americans in All 50 States.

  This week, Eli Lilly, the largest manufacturer of insulin in the United States is lowering their prices and meeting that call.

  Eli Lilly announced they are lowering the cost of insulin by 70% and capping what patients pay out-of-pocket for insulin at $35. This action, driven by the momentum from the Inflation Reduction Act, could benefit millions of Americans with diabetes in all fifty states and U.S. territories. The President continues to call on Congress to finish the job and cap costs at $35 for all Americans.

  I'm not smart enough to establish causality here. But I am familiar with the usual effect of arbitrary price "caps" decreed by government.

• 

  Orwell! Thou shouldst be living at this hour. At Hot Air, John Sexton reviews the reviews, and they're not good: Judith Butler's New Book Sounds Shallow and Not Very Thoughtful. But the Amazon link for "Judith Butler's new book" is over there at your right, should you want to judge for yourself.

  Sexton quotes extensively from Katha Pollitt's review in the Atlantic. Amusingly, the HTML <title> element for that review is The Phantasms of Judith Butler; the actual headline is "Not Everything is About Gender".

  Also amusingly, Pollitt's review notes, parenthetically:

  Butler identifies as nonbinary and uses they/them pronouns

  Pollitt follows that rule, Sexton doesn't.

  Confusing pronoun usage is relatively new, but Pollitt notes a different language issue that is very, very old:

  Fascism is a word that Butler admits is not perfect but then goes on to use repeatedly. I’m sure I’ve used it myself as a shorthand when I’m writing quickly, but it’s a bit manipulative. As used by Butler and much of the left, it covers way too many different issues and suggests that if you aren’t on board with the Butlerian worldview on every single one of them, a brown shirt must surely be hanging in your closet. As they define it—“fascist passions or political trends are those which seek to strip people of the basic rights they require to live”—most societies for most of history have been fascist, including, for long stretches, our own. That definition is so broad and so vague as to be useless. You might even say that “fascism” functions as a kind of phantasm, frightening people into accepting views wholesale without examining them individually. It’s a kind of guilt by association—like comparing critics of your prose to Nixon.

  Uh huh. I haven't quoted George Orwell's 1946 essay "Politics and the English Language" for over five months, so I guess it's time once more:

  The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable’.

  It's been 78 years. You'd think literate people would know better by now.

• Since we're quoting… I'll second Don Boudreaux's Quotation of the Day... from Social Justice Fallacies by Thomas Sowell:

  Arguing as if some people’s high incomes were deducted from some fixed or predestined total income – leaving less for others – may be clever. But cleverness is not wisdom, and artful insinuations are no substitute for factual evidence, if your goal is knowing the facts. But, if your goals are political or ideological, there is no question that one of the most politically successful messages of the twentieth century was that the rich have gotten rich by taking from the poor.

  This goes back to something I blogged just a couple days ago: We're talking philodoxy (love of opinion) vs. philosophy (love of wisdom). These two disciplines rarely collide, but when they do, the former picks itself up, dusts itself off, and continues on as if nothing had happened.