May
23
2025

Habeas Corpus This, Harvard!

Kristi may be weak on Constitutional rights, but she can compose a mean (literally mean) letter to the Harvard International Office:

Also on Harvards' case is Johanna Berkman at the Free Press: Attacking Jews at Harvard Doesn’t Just Go Unpunished. It Gets Rewarded..

In the year and a half since the Hamas massacre of October 7, 2023, there have been so many alarming incidents on college campuses aimed at Jews. Many stick out for their grotesque imagery, for their outrageous slanders, and for their Soviet-style tactics. But the incident that I remember most vividly is the one that took place at Harvard University less than two weeks after Hamas invaded Israel, killing 1,200 people and kidnapping 250 more.

No one was physically injured that day. But the fact remained that the incident was wildly beyond the pale: a group of Harvard students surrounding another student, an Israeli named Yoav Segev, repeatedly screaming “Shame!” in his face, blocking his path, and forcing him to leave a part of campus that he was entitled to be in just as much as they were.

Video of the confrontation quickly went viral. You can watch it here.

The incident might have just disappeared from the news, like so many other videos of post-October 7 antisemitism on campus, if not for another shocking fact. The two aggressors who were the easiest to identify, because they were not wearing masks or hoodies and did not have keffiyehs around their faces, were not just Harvard students. They were also Harvard employees.

Well, that's disgusting.

But let me be clear: I was just kidding the other day about wanting to see Steven Pinker perp-walked into a Federal courthouse. I like him! And he takes to the NYT to ask for relief for his employer: Harvard Derangement Syndrome (gifted link).

In my 22 years as a Harvard professor, I have not been afraid to bite the hand that feeds me. My 2014 essay “The Trouble With Harvard” called for a transparent, meritocratic admissions policy to replace the current “eye-of-newt-wing-of-bat mysticism” which “conceals unknown mischief.” My 2023 “five-point plan to save Harvard from itself” urged the university to commit itself to free speech, institutional neutrality, nonviolence, viewpoint diversity and disempowering D.E.I. Last fall, on the anniversary of Oct. 7, 2023, I explained “how I wish Harvard taught students to talk about Israel,” calling on the university to teach our students to grapple with moral and historical complexity. Two years ago I co-founded the Council on Academic Freedom at Harvard, which has since regularly challenged university policies and pressed for changes.

So I’m hardly an apologist for my employer when I say that the invective now being aimed at Harvard has become unhinged. According to its critics, Harvard is a “national disgrace,” a “woke madrasa,” a “Maoist indoctrination camp,” a “ship of fools,” a “bastion of rampant anti-Jewish hatred and harassment,” a “cesspool of extremist riots” and an “Islamist outpost” in which the “dominant view on campus” is “destroy the Jews, and you’ve destroyed the root of Western civilization.”

Steven is a voice of sanity, of course. So is Yascha Mounk, who's also saying the Administration has gone too far: Trump’s Assault on Harvard Is an Astonishing Act of National Self-Sabotage.

Trump’s action would deeply disrupt the lives and the careers of thousands of talented young people, the vast majority of whom have done absolutely nothing to provoke the administration’s ire against their institution. It would have a highly negative impact on important research happening across the university, with some leading labs in fields from medical research to quantum physics effectively ceasing to function. It would lastingly damage America’s hard-earned reputation as the world’s most coveted destination for ambitious researchers. In short, it would lead to the most remarkable—and the most distinguished—exodus of talented students in the history of American higher education.

Well, that's a lot of information on both sides. I'm admittedly torn.

Also of note:

  • It was only yesterday Senator Maggie was lionized for quoting our state's motto! And in fact my Google LFOD news alert still has items about her berating Kristi Noem for not knowing her habeas from her corpus.

    But that LFOD thing only goes so far for Maggie, and for our state's other Senator as well. NHJournal reports: Shaheen, Hassan Vote to Uphold CA's Ban on Gas-Powered Cars.

    Both New Hampshire senators voted against a resolution ending California’s ban on the sale of gas-powered cars, giving the Granite State delegation an 0-4 record on the issue.

    The GOP-controlled Senate passed the resolution Thursday over nearly unanimous Democratic opposition, including Sens. Maggie Hassan and Jeanne Shaheen. (Michigan’s Sen. Elissa Slotkin was the sole Democrat to support the resolution.)

    The same resolution passed the House earlier this month with the support of 35 House Democrats, but Reps. Maggie Goodlander and Chris Pappas were both “no” votes.

    And, yes:

    Critics say banning consumers from buying gas-powered cars violates the Live Free or Die ethos of New Hampshire.

  • Dominic Pino is someone to watch. He has an LTE in the WSJ today: New York, SALT and the ‘Donor State’ Myth (gifted link). It is a masterpiece of concise argumentation. And I'm going to copy-n-paste the whole dang thing for your reading pleasure:

    In his May 17 letter “Why I Won’t Give In on the SALT Deduction,” Rep. Mike Lawler (R., N.Y.) writes that “New York is a donor state, receiving less money back than it sends to the federal government in tax revenue.” That hasn’t been true for the four most recent years for which data are available. Thanks to Covid spending, New York’s comptroller has reported receiving more money from Washington than the state’s taxpayers have given in fiscal years 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2023. As Matthew Schoenfeld wrote in these pages in 2020, the claim that New York is a donor state is based on including such sums as military pay and Social Security retiree benefits while excluding things like the tax exemption for municipal bonds—all of which make blue states look more like “donors” than they really are.

    New York’s state government spends twice as much as Florida’s does, despite the latter having more residents. No state has abused ObamaCare Medicaid expansion to the extent New York has. The healthcare program that is supposed to be for poor children and the disabled covers 44% of New York residents, about half of whom are able-bodied, working-age adults, and about a third of whom are likely ineligible for the program. If anything, New York should be more of a “donor” because the federal government should stop giving it billions of dollars in matching funds for enrolling able-bodied, working-age adults in Medicaid.

    If that’s how New Yorkers want to govern themselves, so be it, but they aren’t entitled to ask taxpayers in the rest of the country to pay for it. Nor are they entitled to an unlimited tax deduction for their state’s profligacy.

    The "big beautiful bill" the House passed yesterday, upped the "SALT cap" from $20K to $40K.

  • Speaking of the BBB… Charles C.W. Cooke looks at it and concludes: Trump Is Not Different.

    The House of Representatives has passed the “big beautiful bill” (BBB). It will now travel down the assembly line to the Senate, where, in all likelihood, it will remain mostly intact.

    This is disappointing news, for the BBB — could we perhaps stop calling omnibus legislation “BBB”? — is not a good law. It undoes much of what was good about the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. It includes a bailout for blue states such as California, New York, and New Jersey. It declines to effect a full repeal of the disastrous and dishonest “Inflation Reduction Act” of 2022. And, above all else, it fails to cut spending. As a result of its changes, the nation’s tax code will become more dysfunctional, our federal deficits will grow yet bigger, and our already-spiraling national debt will continue to mount indefinitely.

    Charles points out that the Trump-led GOP is acting pretty much the same as the "old guard" they contemptuously dismissed as RINOs.

  • A whole lotta "buts". Noah Rothman: A Man of the Left.

    Somewhere between the time when Luigi Mangione’s psychopathy led him to shoot United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson in the back and the point at which artists and musicians lionized him, his visage etched onto prayer candles and his ravings canonized on popular merchandise, too many Democratic politicians admitted that he had a point.

    “But” became the watchword. Yes, “violence is never the answer,” Democrats like Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Chris Murphy, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and others perfunctorily intoned. “But people can only be pushed so far,” Warren said. “But,” AOC added, people “interpret and feel” the banal machinations of the insurance industry “as an act of violence against them.” “But,” Sanders observed, “people are furious” at the health-care system. And the American system is “broken” anyway.

    You know who else had a point, according to the Democratic Party’s luminaries: the vandals, brutes, and criminals who made up the most menacing vanguard of the pro-Palestinian protest movement that erupted, grotesquely enough, within hours of the worst single-day slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust. That movement and the expressions of violence that so regularly accompanied it were subject to a similarly contrived beatification.

    Noah writes this "in the wake of the slaughter of two Israeli Embassy staffers, Sarah Lynn Milgrim, an American, and Yaron Lischinsky, because the time for pleasantries is over."

    Keep your eye out for the "But"ters.

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May
22
2025

Another Impressive Demonstration of Media Diversity

Haley Strack at National Review manages to avoid saying "ambush": Trump Argues With South African President over Country's Treatment of White Farmers.

President Donald Trump laid into South African President Cyril Ramaphosa at the White House on Tuesday, accusing the official of overseeing what Trump described as the mass slaughter of and land seizure from Dutch-descended white Afrikaner farmers.

South Africa’s government discriminates against the country’s white minority, Trump suggested from the Oval Office, where he played a video of clips he said proved South Africa’s racial persecution of whites. Trump also showed Ramaphosa a packet of printed articles that purportedly proved the same.

Haley does (as far as I can tell) a good job of debunking Trump's "mass slaughter" characterization. Although South Africa's homicide rate is yuge (Wikipedia: List of countries by intentional homicide rate), relatively few of them are white farmers.

Also of note:

  • Another press triumph. Noah Rothman looks at Yet Another Gaza Famine That Wasn’t. And yet another black mark on our watchdog press:

    Such was the commitment of the international press to the notion that Israel is deliberately engineering a famine in the Gaza Strip that it accepted at face value a claim so logically deficient that an elementary school student should be able to identify the sophistry in it.

    “Around 14,000 babies could die in the next 48 hours if many more aid trucks do not reach Gaza, the U.N.’s humanitarian chief says,” read the claim promulgated by a variety of news outlets, including a since-deleted social-media post promoted by NBC News.

    The first tell readers of this piece will encounter is that the initial 540 words of the report accompanying the post are devoted not to the imminent humanitarian catastrophe that is about to befall the Palestinian population. Rather, it is replete with quotes from critics of Benjamin Netanyahu insisting that the resumption of Israeli combat operations against Hamas risks consigning the Jewish State to “pariah state” status. Indeed, for the prime minister, “killing babies is a pastime,” one of his domestic critics charged.

    You can't distrust these guys enough.

  • My LFOD News Alert blew up. All describing pretty much the same story. DHS Secretary, and famed dog-shooter, Kristi Noem up against my state's junior senator Maggie Hassan. Let's go with ABC's take: Kristi Noem fumbles habeas corpus, denies DHS will host citizenship TV show.

    Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem incorrectly responded to a lawmaker's question on the definition of habeas corpus during a Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee hearing on the Department of Homeland Security budget for the upcoming year on Tuesday.

    Sen. Maggie Hassan, D-N.H., asked Noem, "What is habeas corpus?"

    The secretary responded, saying, "Habeas corpus is a constitutional right that the president has to be able to remove people from this country."

    "Excuse me, that's -- that's incorrect," Hassan interjected.

    "Habeas corpus is the legal principle that requires, requires that the government provide a public reason for detaining and imprisoning people. If not for that protection, the government could simply arrest people, including American citizens, and hold them indefinitely for no reason," she said.

    "Habeas corpus is the foundational right that separates free societies like America from police states like North Korea," Hassan added. "As a senator from the 'Live Free or Die' state, this matters a lot to me and my constituents and to all Americans."

    To be fair, I'm not sure how your average New Hampshire resident would do if challenged to define habeas corpus.

    But Maggie has a law degree from Northeastern, Kristi a mere BA in Poli Sci from South Dakota State U. Still, you might expect her to be up on her Con Law basics.

  • Another day older, and… … as Veronique de Rugy observes, America's Credit Is Falling—and the Government Is Still Digging Deeper Into Debt.

    America's debt-addicted government just lost its triple-A credit rating from Moody's, as it previously had from fellow rating agencies S&P and Fitch. Many in Washington shrugged the move off as minor or as unfair treatment of the Trump administration. The truth is more sobering: a flashing red signal that the United States is no longer seen as a "perfect" credit risk and that politicians should stop pretending economic growth alone can bail us out.

    Yes, the mess is real, and it's because habitual deficit financing—the very disease fiscally-minded Founding Father Alexander Hamilton warned against—has become business as usual.

    The reckoning comes as House Republicans push to extend the 2017 Trump tax cuts with a "big, beautiful bill." If handled correctly, it's a good idea. But while the legislation aims to avoid tax hikes, it pairs modestly pro-growth provisions with a smorgasbord of costly special interest giveaways. Worse, it assumes we can afford yet another $3 trillion to $5 trillion in debt without serious consequences. That's the kind of magical thinking that spurred the credit downgrade.

    I see that the "big, beautiful bill" passed by a single vote a few hours ago as I type. So: do you believe in magic?

    (Headline reference to this great old song. Saint Peter don't you call us…)

  • It ain't us, babe. Daniel J. Mitchell looks at an international comparison to answer the burning question: Mirror, Mirror, on the Wall, What Nation Has the Most School Choice of All? He links to the 2023 edition of the Freedom of Education Index. The top five "best" countries, ed-freedom-wise: Ireland, Netherlands, Belgium, the UK, Chile.

    The US is in a solid 19th place (as of 2023, when the numbers were collected). That showing, while not as good as it could be, doesn't really support the continued assertion that assertion that school choice efforts are this close to destroying America's K-12 "education system".

    The lowest five countries on educational freedom: Afghanistan, Eritrea, North Korea, North Macedonia, and Saudi Arabia.

  • Have I let Trump off too easy today? I better link to Kevin D. Williamson to fix that. He looks at the President's Low-Energy Leninism.

    Given that Donald Trump is a borderline illiterate, he has chosen a strange strategy as president: being a writer.

    He is a writer of “executive orders,” many of them press releases disguised as diktats. He is a writer of memos and tweets and presidential statements. I mean that he is a writer of these in the same way he is the writer who wrote The Art of the Deal—which is to say, he didn’t write the thing, but it is, in a broader sense, his work.

    And the thing about work is, Trump does not like it.

    Post-election politics and substantive policymaking—distinct but related activities—require a lot of boring, labor-intensive, grinding work. The really hard part of politics starts after Election Day, and there have always been grinders to be found among the great American politicians qua politicians: James Madison, Lyndon Johnson, Sam Rayburn, Arthur Vandenberg. Sen. Vandenberg may be best remembered for a speech—“The Speech Heard ’Round the World”—but his achievement was in putting that speech into effect by remaking the domestic political landscape of American foreign policy, dragging the GOP out of its isolationist bunker in the face of World War II.

    President Trump doesn’t really do politics—because he is, in fact, utterly incompetent at negotiation, which is why he spends so much time insisting that he is a master of the art. Trump mainly does politics only in those areas where he can operate without much, or any, negotiation: in making appointments, of course, and in doing all that writing that has not and will not amount to much of anything.

    Reader, you really should subscribe to the Dispatch, because concepts like "… hitting yourself with a ballpeen hammer in the body parts that are right there in the name of the instrument" are there for the taking.

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Last Modified 2025-05-23 6:46 AM EDT
May
21
2025

Wow, That Was Quick

[Amazon Link]
(paid link)

Amazon has an astounding variety of Biden/Blue Ribbon merch. Just one example on your right. Never underestimate the alacrity of capitalists to try to make some money off someone else's misfortune.

But in the interest of equal time, journalist Taylor Lorenz extends her own best wishes:

Classy!

Jim Geraghty has thoughts on A Spectacularly Ill-Timed Decision to Halt PSA Testing in Joe Biden.

Former President Joe Biden’s office disclosed Tuesday that Biden last received a prostate-specific antigen test to screen for prostate cancer in 2014, when he was age 72. You may recall oncologist Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel shocking the hosts of MSNBC’s Morning Joe Monday by declaring, “Oh, he’s had this for many years, maybe even a decade, growing there and spreading.”

In other words, perhaps as little as a year after Biden’s doctors concluded there was no longer any need to run PSA tests looking for signs of prostate cancer, he developed prostate cancer.

“It’s a complicated picture,” declared Politico’s Playbook newsletter this morning. Eh, it really isn’t. Biden stopped getting PSA tests at age 72. Yes, “Regular PSAs are not recommended for the average man in his 70s or 80s,” but the average man in his 70s or 80s is not the president of the United States. We, the general public, all just sort of assumed that any president would get the best care and best health surveillance possible, and particularly a president in his late 70s and early 80s. Remember, a PSA is a blood test, and the president’s health checkups already included drawing blood.

Jim's post also examines an under-reported story from that Tapper/Thompson book everyone's talking about: the Biden family's (and their doctors') lies and obfuscations about Beau Biden's ultimately fatal brain cancer. Example:

[Neurologist Dr. Wai-Kwan Alfred Yung] told the public that they had removed a “small lesion” from Beau’s brain. In fact, it was a “tumor slightly larger than a golf ball,” Biden later revealed.

This, while Beau was Delaware Attorney General.

Megan McArdle prescribes a course of treatment for the guilty: The Biden cover-up demands deep soul-searching (gifted link). .

Having read [the Tapper/Thompson book] over the weekend, I’m convinced that deep institutional soul-searching is due in many quarters, and that this conversation is too important to delay, even at the risk of adding to the Biden family’s distress. It is impossible to read “Original Sin” — especially in concert with “Fight,” a book released last month by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes — without reaching a horrifying conclusion: The most powerful nation in the world and its nuclear arsenal were left in the hands of a man who could not reliably recognize people he’d known for years, maintain his train of thought or speak in coherent sentences.

All the time we were being assured …

But speaking of dereliction of duty, which I guess we were, James Freeman takes a look at Harris, Biden’s Cabinet and the 25th Amendment.

Here’s wishing former President Joe Biden a complete and speedy recovery from cancer. Let’s also hope that the American people finally get the accounting they deserve on who exactly was running our government during his presidency. The related question is why then-Vice President Kamala Harris and the Biden cabinet failed to exercise their constitutional authority to ensure competent leadership for the United States. A new book seems to confirm that these officials had no excuses for their inaction. But did the authors demand to know why Ms. Harris and the Cabinet secretaries played along with the charade?

Not only did our "public servants" fail to do their due diligence, the self-righteous "Democracy Dies in Darkness" journalists didn't exactly cover themselves in glory either.

And on the legal news front:

  • Anyone else reminded of that Beastie Boys album title? Jonathan Turley writes on The Red Line: Democratic Officials Claim a Dangerous License for Illegality.

    Across the country, a new defense is being heard in state and federal courtrooms. From Democratic members of Congress to judges to city council members, officials claim that their official duties include obstructing the official functions of the federal government. It is a type of liberal license that excuses most any crime in the name of combating what Minn. Gov. Tim Walz called the “modern-day Gestapo” of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

    The latest claimant of this license is Rep. LaMonica McIver (D-NJ), who was charged with assaulting, resisting, and impeding law enforcement officers during a protest at Delaney Hall ICE detention facility in Newark, New Jersey. McIver is shown on video forcing her way into an ICE facility and striking and shoving agents in her path.

    Where was the horn guy when LaMonica needed him?

    (Headline reference if you want it.)

  • She's no RBG. Dan McLaughlin looks at Justice Jackson’s Strange Agnosticism About Precedent and Democracy. She was on the "2" end of a 7-2 SCOTUS ruling in favor of Maine legislator Laurel Libby:

    The Supreme Court has rightly moved to order, in Libby v. Fecteau, that Maine state representative Laurel Libby be restored to her voting rights while the First Circuit considers her appeal. Libby was suspended from speaking or voting in the Maine House because of her public speech on Facebook criticizing the participation of biological males in women’s sports.

    The pretext for the suspension was that Libby’s Facebook post “identified the student’s high school, identified the student by their current name and previous name, and posted photos of the student, embellished with yellow lines encircling them from head to toe.” The Maine House Speaker, Ryan Fecteau, claimed that this was a violation of the student-athlete’s safety. But this is a viewpoint-based rule: the press routinely publishes the names, images, and schools of high school athletes, and Fecteau himself has done so in the past. The entire basis for the demand that Libby apologize or face suspension was that the name and image were presented with a viewpoint about transgender athletes, with which Fecteau and the Maine Democrats disagree. And the images of athletes are very much germane to the question of whether biological males have, in fact, an unfair biological advantage over females and whether it is unsafe for them to compete together. In response to a district court’s buying the Maine Democrats’ claim of legislative immunity from suit — a contention that collides with prior Supreme Court precedent — the attorneys general of West Virginia, Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Montana, Nebraska, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Virginia filed a joint amicus brief debunking the notion that allowing lawsuits simply to vindicate federal First Amendment rights by restoring a legislator’s power to vote would be any sort of infringement on federalism.

    I think Representative Libby would have gotten a lot more sympathetic treatment from Justices Jackson and Sotomayor if she'd tried to deck out some ICE agents.

  • And for another free speech victory… Emma Camp notes the good news from my Live Free or Die state: Judge rules in favor of New Hampshire bakery in fight over donut mural.

    A New Hampshire bakery has won a crucial victory in its fight to preserve a mural of donuts and other baked goods above its storefront. While town officials have attempted to force the bakery to remove the mural, citing zoning regulations, a federal court ruled on Monday that the city cannot enforce its sign rules against the bakery.

    In 2022, Sean Young, the owner of Leavitt's Country Bakery, a popular bakery in Conway, New Hampshire, collaborated with a local high school art class to paint a mural for the bakery's storefront. The students' mural depicted baked goods forming the shape of a mountain range, with a multicolored sunrise in the background. Initially, the mural didn't cause any controversy—and it was even covered positively by local media. However, about a week after being installed, Conway's Code Enforcement Officer Jeremy Gibbs told Young that the mural violated town zoning rules.

    We previously covered the antics of the Conway Roadside Art Police (CRAP) here and here.

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May
20
2025

Welcome to Tapperworld, Where Houses Lie

[Amazon Link]
(paid link)

[I seldom recycle Amazon Eye Candy, but this is the third time around for today's. I'll also recycle my previous Consumer Note: it is described at Amazon as a "George Orwell Quote". It is not. The actual quotee has an amusing article at American Thinker: George Orwell is stealing my work.]

All that for a bit of outrage, exemplified by an excerpt from a National Review editorial on Biden’s Cancer Diagnosis.

Thus far, we have learned that, despite its members’ indignant insistence that all was well, Joe Biden’s inner circle knew full well that the president was unfit for office before his first term was even halfway complete. Among the revelations that have been made since Biden retired are that he frequently forgot the names of his staff and his friends; that his own cabinet was unsure if he would be capable of dealing with a crisis; and that, at one point, his aides privately discussed whether he would need to be put in a wheelchair should he win a second term. Last week, CNN’s Jake Tapper described the administration’s conduct like this:

The White House was lying not only to the press, not only to the public, but they were lying to members of their own cabinet. They were lying to White House staffers. They were lying to Democratic members of Congress, to donors, about how bad things had gotten.

It does not require too great a leap to wonder whether Biden’s prostate cancer was also concealed.

Wait a minute, Jake. The White House was lying? No.

Instead, it's Jake Tapper who's lying. Or at best, intentionally obfuscating the facts. Houses don't lie, people do. What are their names? What exactly did they say? When did they say it?

Ah, well. Let's skip over to Brianna Lyman at the Federalist who nails it: Biden Cancer Diagnosis Makes Jake Tapper’s Anonymous Sourcing Even More Scandalous. About Tapper's book (with co-author Alex Thompson), Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, It’s Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again, out today:

In one excerpt of the book, an anonymous Cabinet member admitted that “For months, we didn’t have access to [Biden]” while another anonymous Cabinet member said there was a “deliberate strategy by the White House to have him met with as few people as necessary.”

If Tapper and Thompson truly intended to confront the cover-up, they wouldn’t have shielded the very people who helped orchestrate it. America already knew there was a cover-up. The only value this book could have offered was naming names — something it fails to do. What good is any “revelation” if it protects the guilty and arrives only after the damage is done?

Ah, the "White House" not only lies, it also strategizes! Deliberately!

I remember Senator Howard Baker's famous drawled query during the Watergate hearings back in 1974: "What did the President know, and when did he know it?"

OK, I realize Biden "knowing stuff" might be an iffy concept. I still want names of the actual liars and conspirators. It doesn't seem that information will be forthcoming from Jake Tapper.

Also of note:

  • Hanna Trudo, all is forgiven! Hanna's thinking about running for US Congress from my district (NH-01), and she recently tweeted:

    The "we are no longer free" thing kinda seemed like an exaggeration.

    But maybe less free, something J.D. Tuccille writes about at Reason: Americans, especially women, feel less free. They're not wrong.

    "For the third year in a row, Americans are less satisfied with their personal freedom than the rest of the world, including their peers in other wealthy, market-based economies," Gallup's Benedict Vigers and Julie Ray reported of survey data on May 14. "While Americans have been less satisfied in recent years, satisfaction with personal freedom has remained higher and steady worldwide. A median of 81% across 142 countries and territories expressed satisfaction with their freedom in 2024."

    Specifically, Americans' satisfaction "with their freedom to choose what they do with their lives" started falling after 2020, when it was 85 percent; this was comparable to the peak 87-percent median recorded in the 38 developed, democratic countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and a bit higher than the 80-percent median recorded globally. U.S. satisfaction peaked several times over the past two decades at 87 percent, making 2020 unremarkable.

    As of 2024, after a brief and mild pandemic-era dip, OECD residents' satisfaction with their freedom stands at 86 percent and the global median is at 81 percent. Satisfaction with freedom among Americans, by contrast, has plunged to 72 percent.

    Note the data J.D. is working from is pre-2025, so not directly related to Hanna's Trump-blaming. Still…

  • But when they get behind closed doors… Jesse Singal blabs an open secret: Of Course Liberal Institutions Are Engaging In Illegal Hiring Practices On The Basis Of Race.

    Harvard University initially received plaudits for its resistance to the Trump administration. After all, the list of demands the administration sent Harvard — apparently accidentally — was insanely onerous. They weren’t the sort of demands Harvard, or any university, could actually accede to while remaining a center of learning in any real sense.

    Last week, though, The New York Times reported that the Trump administration is escalating its conflict with Harvard (or as I call it, Tufts on the Charles), perhaps most menacingly with the potential of a federal civil-rights violation investigation.

    The turnaround has been quick:

    Harvard has basked in acclaim from White House critics for fighting back so far. After Mr. Trump threatened the school’s federal funding, Harvard sued the administration, and legal experts said the university has a strong case.

    But behind closed doors, several senior officials at Harvard and on its top governing board have acknowledged they are in an untenable crisis. Even if Harvard quickly wins in court, they have determined, the school will still face wide-ranging funding problems and continuing investigations by the administration.

    Some university officials even fear that the range of civil investigations could turn into full-blown criminal inquiries.

    "Tufts on the Charles", heh!

    I won't be happy until I see Steven Pinker perp-walked into a Federal courthouse.

  • As opposed to Democrats, who aren't expected to take the national debt seriously at all. Eric Boehm observes: Not Even the Moody's Downgrade Can Make Republicans Take the National Debt Seriously.

    In a world where federal policymakers were treating America's national debt with the seriousness it deserves, Friday might have been a crucial turning point in Washington.

    First, the House Budget Committee voted down President Donald Trump's tax proposal when four Republican members of the committee broke ranks over concerns about how the bill is projected to increase the budget deficit and the debt. "This bill falls profoundly short," said Rep. Chip Roy (R–Texas), one of those four GOP members, during the committee's debate on the bill. "It does not do what we say it does with respect to deficits."

    Hours later, Moody's Ratings seemingly agreed with those objections when the credit rating agency downgraded the federal government's debt—a signal to investors that buying Treasury bonds is a riskier bet than it used to be. In a statement, Moody's said that the downgrade reflected the fact that Congress and the president "have failed to agree on measures to reverse the trend of large annual fiscal deficits and growing interest costs," and noted that "current fiscal proposals under consideration" would not do anything to reduce spending and deficits.

    Also not taking the national debt seriously: American voters, who keep reelecting incumbents anyway.

  • Mister, we could use a man like … Ebenezer Scrooge again. Jeff Maurer speaks wisely: "Some People Are Lazy Dirtbags" is the Magic Phrase that Lets Democrats Talk About Medicaid Work Requirements.

    Republicans in Congress are making work requirements for Medicaid part of their budget bill. This is popular; 62 percent of Americans support work requirements for Medicaid. And, honestly, I’ll bet that number would be higher if a lot people weren’t thinking of Medicare and wondering “how do you force a bunch of 85 year-olds back to work — how many greeters does Walmart need?”

    Many on the left think that Medicaid work requirements are bad policy; their main point is that the cost “savings” come overwhelmingly from eligible Medicaid recipients who fail to navigate bureaucratic hurdles. I agree with those analyses — adding a work requirement to Medicaid is like “family style” dining in that it sounds great but sucks in practice. A lot of deserving people will get hurt by the effort to root out the undeserving, and the government won’t reduce costs so much as move them around.

    Jeff is convinced that implementing a work requirement for the able-bodied moochers wouldn't be worthwhile. I'm open to that argument, but see Cato: Medicaid’s Funding Formula Rewards Overspending and Fuels Fraud

Recently on the book blog:

May
19
2025

I'm Sure Our Diligent Watchdog Press Will Get Right On This

But was Biden's senility the only thing they were hiding?

You'll want to click over to read Benny's tweet in its entirety.

I don't want to either (a) bore you or (b) gross you out, but I can personally attest that if you are a male of a certain age, doctors pay special attention to that particular gland, sometimes in ways that you might just as soon they didn't.

And, as one urologist cheerfully told me: even if they detect prostate cancer, it's usually slow-moving enough so that something else will kill you first.

But it sounds as if Joe might be an exception? Well, I'm sure we'll be reading and hearing more than we want to about that.

Also of note:

  • And then he started singing Lou Christie's "Two Faces Have I". Speaking of Presidential health woes, the WSJ editorialists note an indication of Dissociative Identity Disorder: Donald Trump Plays Walmart CEO (gifted link).

    Which American politician said the following?

    Item one: “Walmart should STOP trying to blame Tariffs as the reason for raising prices throughout the chain. Walmart made BILLIONS OF DOLLARS last year, far more than expected. Between Walmart and China they should . . . EAT THE TARIFFS, and not charge valued customers ANYTHING. I’ll be watching, and so will your customers!!!”

    Item two: “After causing catastrophic inflation, Comrade Kamala announced that she wants to institute socialist price controls . . . Her plan is very dangerous because it may sound good politically . . . This is Communist; this is Marxist; this is fascist.”

    If you guessed that both are statements by Donald Trump, you have broken the code on the bizarro world of the President’s second-term economic policies. Last year he blasted Kamala Harris’s proposal for price controls on groceries. But now he is attacking Walmart for warning that it will have to raises prices in the wake of Mr. Trump’s tariffs.

    The only sour note here is the bottom line:

    Mr. Trump is trying to duck the political fallout for his misguided tariff policy by blaming everyone else. Americans are too smart to fall for it.

    I'm not sure about that.

  • The good news is that the question is posed in the past tense. Noah Smith wonders: So why *did* U.S. wages stagnate for 20 years?

    A week ago I wrote a post arguing that globalization didn’t hollow out the American middle class (as many people believe): [link].

    After I wrote the post, John Lettieri of the Economic Innovation Group wrote a great thread that strongly supports my argument. He showed that the timing of America’s wage stagnation — roughly, 1973 through 1994 — just didn’t line up well with the era of globalization that began with NAFTA in 1994. In fact, American wages started growing again right after NAFTA was passed. Check it out!

    It's a long post that examines various likely and unlikely explanations. But Noah doesn't find any of them particularly believable.

    I'll note that people are still griping about stagnant wages, pretty much ignoring the last thirty years.

  • Don't fight the future. Tyler Cowen observes: Everyone's Using AI To Cheat at School. That's a Good Thing.

    Accurate data is hard to come by, but one estimate suggests that up to 90 percent of college students have used ChatGPT to do their homework. Rather than debating the number, professors and teachers simply ought to assume (and I do) that your students have an invisible, very high-quality helper. As current norms weaken further, more students learn about AI, and the competitive pressures get tougher, I expect the practice to spread to virtually everyone.

    This state of affairs has set off a crisis among educators, parents, and students. There has been a flurry of recent stories capturing how the cheating is done, how hard it is to catch, and how it is wrecking a lot of our educational standards.

    Unlike many people who believe this spells the end of quality American education, I think this crisis is ultimately good news. And not just because I believe American education was already in a profound crisis—the result of ideological capture, political monoculture, and extreme conformism—long before the LLMs.

    That's at the Free Press, and I hope you can figure out a way to read the whole thing. Tyler foresees a radically changed future for higher ed, and he's pretty convincing.

  • Speaking of wretched hives of scum and villainy… The Issues & Insights editorialists say it's time to nuke the site from orbit: Medicaid: End It, Don’t Mend It.

    As soon as Republicans mentioned cutting spending on Medicaid as part of their “reconciliation” bill, the usual suspects started rolling out their standard talking points. They’re cutting health care for the poor to pay for tax cuts for the rich! Millions will lose coverage! The disabled will suffer! Oh, the humanity!

    Well, if the GOP is going to be accused of destroying Medicaid when all they are proposing is a minor haircut, why not go all out and scrap this hopelessly flawed, fraud-riddled, budget-busting disaster of a program and start over from scratch?

    First, let’s dispense with the claim of “devastating” cuts to Medicaid. The House reconciliation bill would reduce Medicaid spending by $625 billion. That might sound like a lot, but it’s stretched out over 10 years, at a time when Medicaid is on track to spend $8.6 trillion. Medicaid spending will still go up every year under the House bill, just a tiny bit more slowly.

    Yes, I know I mixed my SF movie quotes there.

    But I&I is asking this of Republicans. The same party who came into power in 2011 promising to "repeal and replace" Obamacare. With a much larger legislative majority in the House than they do now.

May
18
2025

A Bastiat Unseen: People Dying When Innovation Declines

In words, the NR editorialists find nothing to like either: Prescription Drug Price Controls Are Wrong Approach

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., at a White House event to announce President Trump’s new prescription-drug-pricing executive order, said he had a “couple of kids who are Democrats, big Bernie Sanders fans,” who had “tears in their eyes” when they heard about the plan.

Under the order, the federal government would establish price targets on prescription drugs. Kennedy as secretary of HHS would set a “mechanism” by which Americans would directly purchase drugs from manufacturers at a “Most-Favored-Nation” price for prescription drugs. Effectively, this would force drug manufacturers to charge the U.S. the lowest price of any country.

Kennedy would be tasked with proposing new rules to impose the pricing and to “take other aggressive measures to significantly reduce the cost of prescription drugs to the American consumer and end anticompetitive practices.”

The problems are easy to foresee, and the editors describe them further.

Also of note:

  • It has a long tradition of existence. My local paper's occasional columnist, Douglas Rooks, doesn't adapt that classic Animal House line in his recent column about the USPS, but he comes pretty close, in Reversing the Postal Service’s ‘inevitable’ decline. I won't excerpt the whole thing, but I have a few comments:

    One little-noticed departure was Louis DeJoy, the logistics expert hired during Trump’s first term to oversee the nation’s oldest public service, existing under the Articles of Confederation before the Constitution was ratified.

    See? "A long tradition of existence."

    DeJoy, like his recent predecessors, positioned the post office to compete with UPS and FexEx for the growing package business, while ignoring the only thing it’s constitutionally required to do: deliver the mail.

    Ackshually, the Constitution merely grants Congress (Article I, Section 8, Clause 7) the power to "establish Post Offices". It's not a requirement, any more than granting "Letters of Marque and Reprisal" (a few clauses down) is a requirement.

    But he went to greater extremes, relentlessly increasing the price of a First Class stamp while steadily decreasing service provided, a sure-fire formula for continued decline in mail volume leading to extinction unless halted and reversed.

    Ackshually, first class postage has lately kept pace with overall inflation pretty well. See the graph here, which goes up to 2023.

    But what is to be done?

    First, create several public and consumer slots on the Postal Board of Governors, which generally rubber-stamps whatever the postmaster general wants. The postal unions that have seats seemed all too willing to indulge DeJoy’s shenanigans as long as he didn’t cut their pay.

    More importantly, we have to reverse the trend to fewer and fewer places handling the mail. It’s as if government responded to the first PCs by mandating that everyone had to continue to use IBM mainframes that would get larger and larger as time goes by.

    Decentralized processing – yes, bring back the Augusta and Lewiston [Maine] centers and add local sorting at every sizeable post office, and we’d drive down costs while increasing the speed of delivery. We have smartphones at our fingertips; surely we can phase out giant but ineffective sorting machines.

    The decline in First Class volume has clearly become a self-fulfilling prophecy under DeJoy and likely his successor. Americans still want to mail things, and they should be able to expect they are delivered promptly.

    Rooks provides no evidence for his dubious assertion that adding USPS sorting/routing centers (with no doubt unionized staffing) will "drive down costs". It's likely that will just cause an increase in USPS losses, which will need to be covered by… guess who?

    Also not in evidence: any indication that "Americans still want to mail things." In fact, the decline in moving paper from one point to another is a global phenomenon.

    Most importantly, Rooks never provides good reason for his advocacy other than good-old-days nostalgia.

  • What are the impeachers waiting for? Andrew C. McCarthy is disgusted by The $TRUMP Meme Coin Scheme (gifted link). And I dare say, unless you're a cheerleader for the team, you will be too:

    On January 17, 2025, Donald Trump took to social media with an announcement that was as dumbfounding in its crassness as it was unprecedented in the history of American presidents-elect — to say nothing of presidents-elect less than 72 hours from being inaugurated to hold the most powerful political office in the world.

    In the announcement, Trump urged the public, in the United States and across the world, to buy his new meme coin, $TRUMP. In his four ensuing months in office, the president has made a fortune on these sales. The exact amount is hard to quantify because, as we’ll see, meme coin values fluctuate wildly and Trump has partners in the venture. Still, Forbes has assessed that “it’s safe to assume the president walked away with at least $110 million after tax.” And that was in early April, before some more recent and significant revenue-raising developments.

    Much of this haul has come from foreign sources. Just this week, while the president was spinning as a triumph his face-saving retreat from the trade war he’d started with China, an obscure tech company tied to China announced that it would buy a mind-blowing $300 million of Trump’s meme coin. And although investors in these digital tokens may make or lose money — mostly lose because, as we’ll see, meme coin marketing often operates like a pump-and-dump scheme — the marketing of $TRUMP is structured to earn the Trumps a transaction fee: i.e., they make money every time the tokens change hands. They appear to have cleared between $320 and $350 million in transaction fees so far.

    "Sleazy" is too mild a word.

  • Why wasn't the 25th amendment used on Biden, anyway? Jonathan Turley listens so you don't have to. “For Posterity’s Sake”: Why the Biden-Hur Tapes is a Virtual Racketeering Indictment.

    “For posterity’s sake.” Those words from President Joe Biden sum up the crushing impact of the leaked audiotapes from the interview between then-President Joe Biden and Special Counsel Robert Hur. Not only did they remove any serious doubt over Biden committing the federal crimes charged against President Donald Trump, but they also constituted what is akin to a political racketeering indictment against much of the Washington establishment.

    The interview from Oct. 8-9, 2023, has long been sought by Congress, but was kept under wraps by the government even as Biden campaigned for a second term.

    Many of us balked at Hur’s conclusion that no charges were appropriate despite the fact that the President removed classified material for decades, stored it in grossly negligent ways, and moved it around to unsecure locations, including his garage in Delaware.

    Bottom line:

    The real indictment that comes out of these tapes is a type of political racketeering enterprise by the Washington establishment. It took a total team effort from Democratic politicians to the White House staff to the media to hide the fact that the President of the United States was mentally diminished. If there were a political RICO crime, half of Washington would be frog-marched to the nearest federal courthouse.

    Of course, none of this complicity in the cover-up is an actual crime. It is part of the Washington racket.

    After all, this is Washington, where such duplicity results not in plea deals but book deals.

Recently on the book blog:
Recently on the movie blog:
(Yes, I watched an actual movie! Second one this year!)

May
17
2025

To a Close Approximation, Nothing Except a Nudge Toward Fiscal Sanity

Andrew Heaton asks and answers in a pretty funny, but also insightful, video: What happens to your kids if we abolish the U.S. Department of Education?.

As one of those shoe companies says: just do it, already.

Also of note:

  • I'm pretty sure you've already guessed the answer here. And Betteridge's Law of Headlines doesn't apply.

    Nate Silver's headline asks: Did the media blow it on Biden?

    Beginning in 2023, I repeatedly criticized both the media and Democratic partisans for failing to take former President Biden’s age and fitness for office seriously enough. This was not exactly a popular opinion at the time: the more common complaint, at least until Biden’s disastrous debate, was that the press was covering the story too much.

    So I’ve been pleased to see two new high-profile books on Biden, Fight by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes, and Original Sin by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson, which include extensive reporting on his struggles to hold onto the Democratic nomination and — no less importantly — to manage his presidential duties.1 If you read these books, it’s pretty clear that Biden was not fit for the presidency by the end of his term — it is, after all, the hardest job in the world. With limited uptime and sometimes more severe symptoms like an inability to recall basic names and facts — Original Sin reports that Biden couldn’t even recognize George Clooney at a Hollywood fundraiser — his Cabinet worried about his capacities in a crisis.

    When it comes to criticizing Democrats, you probably can't distrust the mainstream media enough. I've found myself pretty confortable with Democrats like Nate.

  • If KDW was wrong, I was probably wrong too. Kevin D. Williamson is another example of out-of-the-MSM thinking, and he's willing to call a foul on himself: Why I Was Wrong About Head Start.

    One should always be open to reevaluating long-held beliefs—and an especially good time to reevaluate them is when a guy with a Nobel Prize in the relevant subject tells you that you’ve got it wrong. 

    In at least a half a dozen articles and speeches, probably more, I have repeated something that I’ve understood to be a well-established fact for so long that I do not even remember when or where I first learned it: that Head Start does not work, that it provides no meaningful lasting results. Professor James Heckman of the University of Chicago, inconveniently enough for my longstanding belief, not only was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics (that is, the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, as Jay Nordlinger taught me) but was so honored specifically for his work on developing rigorous methods for the evaluation of social programs. I do not immediately knuckle under to appeals to authority, but I am inclined to listen to guys who have equations named after them.

    […]

    Heckman, who does not want for confidence in his convictions, rejects the notion that randomized trials should be understood as the “gold standard” and mocks those who believe otherwise as a “cult.” But, as he tells the story, even if we were to accept the primacy of randomized trials here, we’d want them to be good randomized trials. “This all really comes from one experiment,” he says, referring to the 2005 Head Start Impact Study. “Students were randomized out of Head Start, and the ones randomized out were the control group. But what were they randomized out into?” Head Start, and pre-K education more generally, is a varied and decentralized enterprise, and many of the students randomized out of Head Start in the experiment in question ended up attending other Head Start programs or other kinds of preschool. “Some of them went to Head Start elsewhere. Some of them went to something better.” Better data from a better sample produces different results—results that point to a different outcome about Head Start’s efficacy.

  • But speaking of Jay Nordlinger… He's separated from his longtime perch at National Review, where he was a reliable voice for liberty and decency. And (at least for now) he's started a substack. A recent article shows what he's up to: War and Peace, &c.

    One of the most loaded words I know is “pro-war.” It was used by Peter Szijjártó, Hungary’s foreign minister, yesterday. I have written a fair amount about Szijjártó. As Viktor Orbán’s emissary, he has nurtured relations with Russia, Iran, and China. In late 2021, as Russian troops massed on the Ukrainian border, Szijjártó received the Kremlin’s Order of Friendship from the hand of Putin himself.

    In a tweet, Szijjártó said that Radek Sikorski, Poland’s foreign minister, was “pro-war”—one of “the most pro-war politicians.” Oh?

    A couple of years ago, Senator Mike Lee, the Utah Republican, responded to a critic by saying, “You support this war. I don’t.” He was talking about the Ukraine war.

    Let me quote from a post of mine, please:

    I once wrote a book about war and peace. For a meditation on peace—an essay drawn from that book—go here. The terms “pro-war” and “anti-war” are bizarre. No one supports war, except for psychopaths. (There are more than a few of those, to be sure.) As a rule, debates are between those who think that war is necessary, or just, and those who do not.

    Do the Ukrainians have a right to defend themselves against invasion and subjugation? Should the United States support them? This is what people are talking about.

    Um, bingo. That's why I've liked Jay in the past. And why I like Mike Lee (and others) a lot less than I used to.

  • GFW says the bloom should be off the Rose, and stay off the Rose. We're talking baseball, and specifically Pete Rose (gifted link).

    Our polymath president should concentrate on his fields of intellectual mastery — geopolitics, macroeconomics, renaming mountains and gulfs — and spare a smidgen of American life from his perfectionist interventions. Including baseball.

    Does anyone believe that Major League Baseball would be reinstating Pete Rose if one of the president’s whims had not demanded it? Never mind MLB’s lawyerly rationale that the rule against gambling by baseball people need not protect the game from deceased gamblers. MLB has aligned baseball with the zeitgeist, which is no longer persnickety about lying and contempt for norms. Exhibit A is Rose’s twice-elected rehabilitator.

    Since we're talking about people I trust to tell it to me straight… yeah, George Will is one of those.

May
16
2025

Why, Oh Why, Was I Not Informed?

Neal Stephenson has a substack! He could post his grocery list, and it would be worthwhile reading. His most recent is Remarks on AI from NZ. And here's an excerpt that shows his "bet you didn't think of this that way" approach:

During the panel discussion that followed I don’t think I contributed anything earth-shaking. One remark that seemed to get people’s attention was a little digression into the topic of eyelash mites. You might not be aware of it, but you have little mites living at the base of your eyelashes. They live off of dead skin cells. As such they generally don’t inflict any damage, and might have slightly beneficial effects. Most people don’t even know that they exist—which is part of the point I was trying to make. The mites, for their part, don’t know that humans exist. They just “know” that food, in the form of dead skin, just magically shows up in their environment all the time. All they have to do is eat it and continue living their best lives as eyelash mites. Presumably all of this came about as the end result of millions of years’ natural selection. The ancestors of these eyelash mites must have been independent organisms at some point in the distant past. Now the mites and the humans have found a modus vivendi that works so well for both of them that neither is even aware of the other’s existence. If AIs are all they’re cracked up to be by their most fervent believers, this seems like a possible model for where humans might end up: not just subsisting, but thriving, on byproducts produced and discarded in microscopic quantities as part of the routine operations of infinitely smarter and more powerful AIs.

Today's Eye Candy is one of Getty Images' pictures of eyelash mites. Neal also has one at the link above. In case you hear eight tiny feet tromping around your eyes at night, you'll know who to blame: Neal.

Also of note:

  • Big, if true. David Strom at Hot Air notes the bad news, as reported by the Big Eye network: 60% of Americans Are Poor? CBS Says 'Yes' They even tweeted it:

    They are quoting a report from the "Ludwig Institute for Shared Economic Prosperity". Which says its mission is "to improve the economic well-being of middle-and lower-income Americans through research and education."

    They also claim that 24.3% of the US labor force is "functionally unemployed".

    As you might guess, their methodology is aimed at making things look as economically bad as possible. I'll keep my eyes open for rebuttals. (And when my eyes are closed, I've instructed my eyelash mites to keep their eyes open.)

  • Just to let you know about the coming (literal) dark ages. Marc Oestreich has the latest on the Green New Deal: Spain’s grid collapsed in 5 seconds. The U.S. could be next.

    Across Spain and Portugal, more than 50 million people recently experienced the largest blackout in modern European history. Thousands of commuters stood stranded on the concourses of Spain's transit system. In the span of five seconds, 60 percent of the country's electricity supply vanished. This wasn't caused by a storm or a cyberattack—just bad policy and the most underappreciated force in modern engineering giving way: inertia.

    When a power plant trips offline or demand suddenly spikes, the power grid has no cushion; it must respond instantly or it unravels. That's where inertia comes in. In coal, gas, and nuclear plants, massive turbine rotors spin at thousands of rpm. Even when power is cut, they keep turning, releasing stored energy that slows frequency shifts and buys precious time—seconds to a minute—for backup to kick in. It's not backup power, it's breathing room. Like the flywheel on a Peloton, it keeps things steady even when input falters.

    What's worse: the Iberian grid designers: (1) knew this was a possibility, and decided to live with it; or (2) didn't know about it?

    According to Wikipedia: "At least seven people died as a result of the blackout in Spain. Six deaths were recorded in Galicia, including three members of the same family who died of carbon monoxide poisoning believed to have been caused by a faulty generator in a home in Taboadela. The seventh death was recorded in a fire at a house in Madrid that left 13 others injured."

  • Enshittification. That's the concept widely attributed to Cory Doctorow. And my speculation is that's the answer to Noah Smith's query: Why has American pop culture stagnated?

    In recent years, I’ve read a bunch of people talk about a stagnation in American pop culture. I doubt that this sort of complaint is particularly new. For decades in the mid-20th century, Dwight Macdonald railed against mass culture, which he viewed as polluting and absorbing high culture. In 1980, Pauline Kael wrote an op-ed in the New Yorker entitled “Why Are Movies So Bad? or, The Numbers”, where she argued that the capitalistic incentives of movie studios were causing them to turn out derivative slop.

    So if I try to answer the question “Why has American pop culture stagnated?”, there’s always the danger that I’ll be coming up with an explanation for a problem that doesn’t actually exist — that this is just one of those things that someone is always saying, much like “Kids these days don’t respect their parents anymore” and “Scientists have discovered everything there is to discover.” To make matters worse, there’s no objective definition of cultural stagnation in the first place; it’s a fun topic precisely because what feels new and interesting is purely a matter of opinion.

    I haven't even tried to listen to popular music recently. My movie consumption is also way down. (I plan on going to see the live-action Lilo & Stitch next week. Although that's a remake, another signal of Hollywood failing to come up with anything new and interesting.)

  • Not exactly a riddle wrapped in an enigma, Donald. Veronique de Rugy analyzes: Trump's Tax Plan Is a Leftist Economic Agenda Wrapped in Populist Talking Points.

    If you voted for President Donald Trump last November because you believed he'd increase economic freedom, it's safe to say you were fooled. Following a reckless tariff barrage, the White House and its allies are preparing a new wave of tax code gimmickry that has more in common with progressive social engineering than pro-growth reform. And don't forget a fiscal recklessness that mirrors the mistakes of the left.

    Defend these policies if you like, but let's be clear: The administration shows no coherent commitment to free market principles and is in fact actively undermining them. Its approach is better described as central planning disguised as economic nationalism.

    This week's example is an executive-order attempt at prescription drug price control, similar to Democrats' past proposals. If implemented, it would inevitably reduce pharmaceutical research, development, and innovation.

    Trying to put lipstick on this pig, by the way, is the Federalist, with a reality-optional headline query: Will Trump’s Free-Market Drug Pricing Solution Cut Out Greedy Middlemen?

    "Greedy middlemen" have long been socialist punching bags.

May
15
2025

Somewhere Philip K. Dick is Smiling…

… because he noticed Abigail Adams' headline query at National Review: Do Ballerina Androids Dream of Electric Nutcrackers? Inspired by this post from "gorklon rust":

Tesla recently shared brief footage of its humanoid robot “Optimus” dancing. It is a weirdly entrancing video because there’s something both frightening and awe-inspiring about a physically competent humanesque robot, especially one that can pull off a jazzercise combination. My logic is that a robot capable of line dancing is also capable of strangling me to death, but maybe I’m just an alarmist.

One thing in the video was particularly striking to me: Although most of its dance steps are best suited for a frat party, Optimus apparently had been taught — or, I guess programmed with — some specific ballet moves. Anyone who has taken a ballet class would readily detect that Optimus posed in an arabesque, a passé, and a fifth position. Optimus doesn’t have great technique, but maybe that’s an improvement for a future model, since Elon Musk declared that “Optimus will perform ballet perfectly.” I don’t know whether I should interpret that as a promise or a threat, but I nevertheless think it is cool that something so eerily futuristic and high-tech fused with something so traditional and tech-free.

Being a philistine dance-wise, I was mainly creeped out by Optimus's resemblance to the Empire's killer droids I'd just seen in Andor Season 2, Episode 8. Eek! They're here already!

Also of note:

  • One must have a heart of stone to read of the negation of the earlier election of David Hogg without laughing. Jonathan Turley tells the story while keeping a straight face, though. Circling the Firing Squad: The Democratic Party Moves to Negate Earlier Election of David Hogg.

    The Democratic National Committee (DNC) is about to show the perils of circling a firing squad. In its announcement that it will nullify the election of David Hogg and another Vice Chair, the DNC reminded the public why they have left the Democratic Party. The sudden decision that there were procedural irregularities in the election (after Hogg said that he would target older Democratic incumbents) leaves the DNC looking more like the CCP. However, it gets worse.

    Hogg caused a controversy by announcing that he will work to primary older Democratic incumbents through his group, Leaders We Deserve, to bring young candidates into the party. The leadership ordered him to retract the pledge or resign. He did neither.

    Then, the DNC announced that there were “irregularities” in how he and Pennsylvania state Rep. Malcolm Kenyatta won two of the three vice chair positions.

    The reason? One of the losing candidates, Kalyn Free, filed a complaint during the original election alleging that the DNC failed to follow rules on gender diversity.

    For additional amusement, click over for video of DNC leaders trying to explain those rules.

  • Well, I got mine anyway. I was wondering if we'd have (additional) airport chaos last week as TSA's "deadline" for REAL ID compliance hit. Jim Harper was paying attention, and… REAL ID Day After-Action Report: Stalemate.

    On May 7, 2025, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) was scheduled to attack American air travel. Terrorism works by inducing overreaction from victim states. So, yes, the TSA’s work to restrict travel by law-abiding Americans gives a win to the 9/11 attackers, nearly a quarter-century on. No doing business in other states, no visiting the new grandbaby—unless you have enrolled in the national ID system created by the REAL ID Act.

    But the attack didn’t come. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kristi Noem announced the day before that American travelers would not be turned away. As The Wall Street Journal’s travel columnist reported, lines were shorter at many airports. My experience flying on May 9 without a federally compliant ID was smooth. I decline strip-search machines, so I already get a pat-down (or “freedom massage”) each time I fly, which is probably what travelers with noncompliant IDs got.

    But internal contradictions exist with the policy, Jim thinks, and he predicts "collapse, sooner or later, of the national ID project." So, good.

  • You don't have to be a moron to understand it, but it helps. Jeff Maurer sees a silver lining: The Qatari Plane Scandal is Different Because Morons Understand It.

    Those of us who have spent years stunned by Trump’s flagrant and frankly kind of impressive corruption often ask ourselves: “Why does nothing ever stick to this guy?” Trump is so corrupt that corruption seems to be the only thing he devotes energy to other than sexual harassment and golf. Most of us have forgotten Trump scandals that would have sunk any other president; if George H.W. Bush had run for office while hawking $100,000 watches from a personal merch store, there would be a chapter in every civics textbook titled “Watchgate”. But when Trump does it, we laugh it off as Dennis the Menace-esque hijinks.

    The simplest explanation for why Trump gets away with so much is that most of his scandals are just barely too complex to put the national panties in a twist. Many people seemed to view the Mueller Report as a report on whether or not prostitutes peed on the president, and when the answer was “no”, tales of obstruction of justice felt like a bait-and-switch, a bit like luring people into a porno theatre and then showing My Dinner with Andre. Trump’s first impeachment included the phrase “Ukrainian Prosecutor General”, which must be one of the most brain-numbing three word phrases possible, right up there with “Consumption Tax Study” and “Canadian Sorghum Yields”. January 6 might have sunk Trump had his timing not been perfect; Republicans skipped impeachment because they thought Trump would just go away, and by the time Trump ran again, the public forgot where things left off, like that SNL sketch where no one on The Sopranos can remember what happened on the previous season of The Sopranos.

    In this morning's news: Democratic congressman pushes Trump impeachment but backs down from vote. Come on, you guys!

  • Speaking of morons… Saul Zimet (who is not a moron) notes the ends of the horseshoe keep getting closer: MAGA Adopts One of Karl Marx’s Key Misconceptions.

    “Globalization” has become a pretty notorious buzzword, and this can sometimes obscure the fact that it is largely (although not entirely) reducible to a set of private voluntary exchanges that occur across national borders. To the extent that President Donald Trump’s MAGA movement has consistent policy positions, those positions are predominantly about reducing globalization by preventing Americans from making voluntary transactions with those who lack U.S. citizenship—for example, tariffing imports to hinder U.S. citizens from engaging in international trade and barring commerce between U.S. citizens and many immigrants by detaining or deporting those immigrants or prohibiting their entry into the country.

    When a government deploys mass coercion against peaceful people, as we have seen under Trump’s trade and immigration policies (which is not to say that all illegal immigrants are peaceful), the government’s representatives and apologists tend to roll out a series of moral justifications. These arguments can elucidate the character of the political faction in power, and MAGA has been no exception. Throughout the last few months, one of their defenses of Trump’s trade and immigration policies, contrary to the pre-MAGA Republican Party’s free market rhetoric, has frequently been the allegation that low wages for voluntary labor are exploitative.

    “Globalization” has become a pretty notorious buzzword, and this can sometimes obscure the fact that it is largely (although not entirely) reducible to a set of private voluntary exchanges that occur across national borders. To the extent that President Donald Trump’s MAGA movement has consistent policy positions, those positions are predominantly about reducing globalization by preventing Americans from making voluntary transactions with those who lack U.S. citizenship—for example, tariffing imports to hinder U.S. citizens from engaging in international trade and barring commerce between U.S. citizens and many immigrants by detaining or deporting those immigrants or prohibiting their entry into the country.

    When I was a youngster reading about Marx's ideas, I couldn't help but notice his "exploitation", shorn of moralistic language, essentially meant nothing more or less than "paying people market wages".


Last Modified 2025-05-16 6:22 AM EDT
May
14
2025

Oaf of Office

I assume this is in response to Trump's May 4 interview with Kristen Welker on Meet the Press. From the (slightly reformatted) transcript:

KRISTEN WELKER: Your secretary of state says everyone who's here, citizens and non-citizens, deserve due process. Do you agree, Mr. President?

PRES. DONALD TRUMP: I don't know. I'm not, I’m not a lawyer. I don't know.

KRISTEN WELKER: Well, the Fifth Amendment says as much.

PRES. DONALD TRUMP: I don't know. It seems – it might say that, but if you're talking about that, then we'd have to have a million or 2 million or 3 million trials. We have thousands of people that are some murderers and some drug dealers and some of the worst people on Earth.

KRISTEN WELKER: But is –

PRES. DONALD TRUMP: Some of the worst, most dangerous people on Earth. And I was elected to get them the hell out of here and the courts are holding me from doing it.

KRISTEN WELKER: But even given those numbers that you're talking about, don't you need to uphold the Constitution of the United States as president?

PRES. DONALD TRUMP: I don't know. I have to respond by saying, again, I have brilliant lawyers that work for me, and they are going to obviously follow what the Supreme Court said. What you said is not what I heard the Supreme Court said. They have a different interpretation.

I get what Trump is trying to say: he considers the actual legal issues to be unresolved.

But—geez, Donald: When you are asked whether you need to uphold the Constitution, you simply answer, "Yes, of course."

Also of note:

  • Another mile down the Road to Serfdom. Gee, we didn't have to wait very long to get (as the WSJ editorialists say) Trump’s Worst Idea Since Tariffs (gifted link).

    President Trump and Republicans appear to be shrinking from reforming Medicaid, but that’s not the worst of it. To replace the spending slowdown they won’t get in Medicaid, they may expand drug price controls. For that trade we could have elected Democrats.

    Trump officials are pitching Republicans on a “most-favored nation” drug-pricing regime for Medicaid. While the details are hazy, the idea is for Medicaid to pay drug makers the lowest price charged by other developed countries. Mr. Trump proposed a similar scheme for Medicare Part B drugs at the end of his first term, and it was a bad idea then too.

    That's an older article, but things did not get better, according to Michael F. Connon at Cato more recently: Trump Attempts Price Controls on Prescription Drugs.

    I’m usually the guy reminding everybody, “It is not a ‘price control’ when the government reduces the prices [it] pays for drugs.” I expected that I would be singing that tune again this morning when President Trump released an executive order on drug pricing. To my knowledge, Trump has never taken any steps to impose actual price controls on prescription drugs (read: coercive restraints on pharmaceutical transactions outside of government programs).

    I was wrong. Unlike the Inflation Reduction Act or Trump’s past proposals, Trump’s executive order is an attempt to impose government price controls on pharmaceuticals.

    I'm (I guess) amused at the efforts of Trump cheerleaders to find some way to shake their pom-poms at this. Example at the Federalist: Dems Sworn To Oppose Trump Land Awkwardly On The Side Of Higher Drug Prices.

  • But to be fair… Jacob Sullum, in a Reason post timestamped one minute after midnight today: Trump rightly decries "absurd and unjust" overcriminalization in federal regulations. So yay!

    After mountain runner Michelino Sunseri ascended and descended Grand Teton in record time last fall, his corporate sponsor, The North Face, heralded his achievement as "an impossible dream—come true." Then came the nightmare: Federal prosecutors charged Sunseri with a misdemeanor punishable by up to six months in jail for using a trail that the National Park Service described as closed, although it had never bothered to clearly inform the public of that designation.

    Sunseri unwittingly violated one of the myriad federal regulations that carry criminal penalties—a body of law so vast and obscure that no one knows exactly how many offenses it includes. An executive order that President Donald Trump issued last week aims to ameliorate the injustices caused by the proliferation of such agency-defined crimes, which turn the rule of law into a cruel joke.

    The Code of Federal Regulations "contains over 48,000 sections, stretching over 175,000 pages—far more than any citizen can possibly read, let alone fully understand," Trump's order notes. "Worse, many [regulations] carry potential criminal penalties for violations."

    Good job, Team Orange. But…

  • With Trump, the bad news is never far away. In a post timestamped at 5:50pm yesterday (so just 6 hours and 11 minutes before the one linked above) Jacob Sullum brings it: Since immigration is an 'invasion,' a top Trump adviser says, the president might suspend habeas corpus.

    The writ of habeas corpus, a right deeply rooted in English common law and recognized by the U.S. Constitution, allows people nabbed by the government to challenge their detention in court. That complicates President Donald Trump's immigration crackdown. Last month, for example, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously ruled that foreign nationals who allegedly are subject to immediate deportation as "alien enemies" have a right to contest that designation by filing habeas petitions. And foreign students have used the writ to challenge the claim that they are "subject to removal" because their political opinions undermine U.S. foreign policy interests.

    Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff for policy, has a potential solution to this inconvenience. Last Friday, he told reporters that Trump is "actively looking at" suspending habeas corpus to facilitate the deportation of unwanted foreigners. "The Constitution is clear," Miller said. "The privilege of the writ of habeas corpus can be suspended in a time of invasion."

    I am not a lawyer, but, yeah, that sounds … unconstitional.

  • Not being British, we have no excuse. Kevin D. Williamson attempts to jog our American memories. The Forgotten Word: Sex.

    “There are only two genders!” Up goes the battle cry from certain quarters of the right and from the president whose line they toe with such perfect servility. Over at Facebook, it was 54 genders before it was 72 before it was … whatever it is today.

    In reality, the number of genders is neither two nor 72 nor anything in between: The number of genders, outside of grammar textbooks, is zero. “Gender” is a grammatical term that became, over time, a figure of speech masquerading as an indelible (for purposes of discrimination law) yet infinitely fluid (for other rhetorical purposes) personal trait, one that is conflated—often intentionally, with its less malleable non-synonym, sex.

    As George Orwell observed in his famous essay “Politics and the English Language,” the corruption of language goes hand-in-hand with the corruption of thought. One of the reasons we have such an excruciating time talking our way through sensitive questions about sex and about what we call “gender” is simple linguistic imprecision. The activists on the progressive side of this issue never cease shouting that sex and gender are not the same thing, and, in that much at least, they are correct–and we should start acting like it.

    Headline explanation, if you want it,A here. (And KDW refers to it too, so subscribe, hippie.)

  • Advice about which I have mixed feelings. Robert F. Graboyes offers it to the Democrats: Persuasive Beats Abrasive.

    Here are my dozen suggestions for how Democrats might persuade my hand (and the hands of similarly-minded Americans) to gravitate toward the “D” on the 2028 ballot. Consider this in the vein of a “Chautauqua”—the social movement that encouraged discourse even between those who disagreed with one another and which Theodore Roosevelt referred to, near the movement’s peak, as “typical of America at its best.”

    [1] If your message only works when shouted, you won’t persuade me. “DONALD TRUMP IS A THREAT TO OUR DEMOCRACY!!!!!” is a message that only tends to be delivered loudly and angrily—and shouting almost never persuades. (Say that sentence softly, with a smile, and you’ll sound a bit unhinged.) If you think Donald Trump is a threat to democracy, calmly itemize his behavior on January 6, his unsettling third-term chatter, and his suggestions that the U.S. take Greenland by force. To help you distinguish between these modes of communication: Bernie Sanders, AOC, Chuck Schumer, and Jasmine Crockett always shout. Josh Shapiro, Ro Khanna, Abigail Spanberger, John Fetterman, and Ritchie Torres tend to discuss.

    … and there are eleven more suggestions at the link. All good ideas. It's hard to imagine Democrats taking many of them.