Pun Salad

Looking forward to a "wintry mix" later today, with increasing probability of "heart attack while shoveling" after that. So:

• Kevin D. Williamson has a slap in the face to all the whiners about 2016: "It Was the Best of Times ".
  Buck up, you pansies: 2016 was the best year in human history, and 2017 almost certainly will be better.

  Oh, I know, the presidential election was a fiasco, but the republic will endure. And it was a tough year for beloved celebrities: David Bowie became a very handsome corpse at the age of 69 (liver cancer), Prince became a very small one at the age of 57 (fentanyl overdose), and Carrie Fisher checked out at the age of 60 (killed by complications resulting from a terminal case of being Carrie Fisher). And, 2016 being 2016, Americans took to social media to document the flimsiest of connections to these famous figures, raptly engaged in the characteristic pursuit of our time: making everything about us.

  TV viewers of a Certain Age know what to say to that sort of slap in the face: "Thanks, I needed that." Others should Google.

  (Do they still make Mennen Skin Bracer? Ah, yes, they do.)

• Mr. Williamson risks falling afoul of the Carrie Fisher PC cops above. I note they've already claimed two victims, accused and convicted of the crime of Insufficiently Correct tweets: Steve Martin and Cinnabon.

  I can't help but think Ms. Fisher would have been fine with both perpetrators. (Come on: "you'll always have the best buns in the galaxy"? How can you not smile, at the very least?)

• Tom Nichols is a professor of national security affairs at the U.S. Naval War College and an adjunct professor in the Harvard Extension School, and he carries out on a daunting task: "America’s Nuclear Response Procedure Explained, Using GIFs From ‘Friends’"

  Unexcerptable. Just click over. One can only hope that President-Elect Trump pays attention to this lecture.

• The New York Times gets off its usual message, with Deirdre McCloskey's column: "Growth, Not Forced Equality, Saves the Poor"

  We had better focus directly on the equality that we actually want and can achieve, which is equality of social dignity and equality before the law. Liberal equality, as against the socialist equality of enforced redistribution, eliminates the worst of poverty. It has done so spectacularly in Britain and Singapore and Botswana. More needs to be done, yes. Namely, more growth, which is sensitive to environmental limits and will require a proliferation of rich engineers. Let them have their money from devising carbon-fixing techniques and new sources of energy. It will enrich all of us.

  These facts are well-known to anyone who takes the time to notice them. One can only wonder whether the Social Justice Warriors are motivated more by their envy of the rich than their desire to help the poor. I'd like to think charitably of them at this time of year, but …