Pun Salad

I try to ignore obvious clickbait ads, although they show up on even some of the semi-respectable sites I visit. Hey, a blogger's gotta eat, I suppose.

But the come-on for a recent one caught my eye:

For a small fraction of a second I thought: Really?

Then Kahneman's System 2 took over: Nah, she doesn't. Don't be an idiot.

And then (honestly) a few web pages later…

She's hard to pin down. Probably has one pied-à-terre in every state. At least one.

But seriously: you desperate click-seekers should just give up on using that GeoIP stuff; it just makes you look like the dishonest pandering slimeballs you are.

For the non-geeks:

"Targeted advertising" means: "Making gullible people think Jennifer Aniston has moved in next door and might need help moving some furniture."

In my case, GeoIP has rarely placed me correctly in Rollinsford, NH. More often, I'm thought to be across the Salmon Falls River in South Berwick, Maine. (As above.) Occasionally, it thinks I'm down in Connecticut or Massachusetts.

Also of note:

• What's on Chandra Prescod-Weinstein's mind? I decided to follow her on TheWebsiteFormerlyKnownAsTwitter to find out what the pride of the University Near Here Physics Department is thinking. Wow, she posts a lot. One from yesterday caught my eye:

  "One of the most dangerous places where state violence in the U.S. and Israel converge is in exchange programs that bring together police, ICE, border patrol, and FBI from the US with soldiers, police, border agents, etc. from Israel."https://t.co/sVYHkyuJM1

  — Chanda Prescod-Weinstein (@IBJIYONGI) November 13, 2023

  Well, that's interesting. The website she's touting, Deadly Exchange, is devoted to stopping exchange programs between US and Israeli law enforcement organizations. It's full of the standard phraseology: "racial profiling"; "apartheid"; "occupying army";

  But the site appears moribund, with the last "news" entry from 2019, and its big 57-page PDF report dates to 2018. They had success in 2018, getting Durham, North Carolina to end its exchange program. But (surprisingly) they failed to do so in Seattle in 2021.

  And since then, as near as I can tell, crickets.

  The pro-Israel site "StandWithUs" has a relevant page: Refuting Deadly Exchange

  “End the Deadly Exchange” (“DX”) is an anti-Israel campaign and antisemitic conspiracy theory that falsely blames Jewish groups and Israel for police brutality and racial injustice in America. DX is based on misleading rhetoric and outright lies about US-Israel law enforcement exchanges, which focus on preventing terrorism and saving lives from threats like gun violence. This dangerous campaign is the latest in a long history of Jews being scapegoated and falsely blamed for major societal problems and injustices.

  More, of course, at the link.

  Deadly Exchange is (was) an offshoot of "Jewish Voice for Peace", which is still quite active. They (of course) are demanding "ceasefire". (A demand only aimed at Israel.) They are pro-Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS). Their take on October 7? The Root of Violence Is Oppression. ("The Israeli government may have just declared war, but its war on Palestinians started over 75 years ago.")

  These are the folks Chanda touts.

• Bari Weiss is the Anti-Chanda particle. She provides the transcript of her "Barbara K. Olson Lecture" to the Federalist Society: You Are the Last Line of Defense. Even more than usual, I encourage you to read the entirety. You'll eventually get to the Hamas cheerleading that followed October 7:

  Then, as thunder follows lightning, more dead Jews. An anti-Israel protester in Los Angeles killed a 69-year-old Jewish man for the apparent sin of waving an Israeli flag, though NBC’s initial headline made it hard to know: “Man dies after hitting head during Israel and Palestinian rallies in California, officials say.”

  In lockstep, the social justice crowd—the crowd who has tried to convince us that words are violence—insisted that actual violence was actually a necessity. That the rape was resistance. That it was liberation.

  University presidents—who leapt to issue morally lucid condemnations of George Floyd’s killing or Putin’s war on Ukraine—offered silence or mealy-mouthed pablum about how the situation is tragic and “complex” and how we need to think of “both sides” as if there is some kind of equivalence between innocent civilians and jihadists.

  Really, RTWT.

• And he increasingly isn't. Charles C. W. Cooke notes a disturbing Politico article by Jonathan Martin which explicitly grants the premise that Slow Joe is, indeed, Too Slow to do his job currently. And CCWC is gobsmacked: If Biden Doesn’t Have the ‘Capacity’ to Do the Job, He Shouldn’t.

  Martin writes of Biden: “He simply does not have the capacity to do it, and his staff doesn’t trust him to even try, as they make clear by blocking him from the press.” I would invite you to read that line again: “His staff doesn’t trust him to even try.” In our system of government, the flow of power cannot be configured that way around. Joe Biden is the president of the United States; Joe Biden’s staff works for him. If, because Joe Biden “does not have the capacity” to be president, Joe Biden’s staff is in charge of Joe Biden, then Joe Biden is not the president of the United States, and we have a foundational problem of democratic accountability. Were Biden to win again, the considerable powers laid out in Article II would be granted to Joe Biden, not to his staff. It would be Joe Biden, not his staff, who would take the oath of office. It would be Joe Biden, not his staff, who would be expected to sign or veto legislation, issue pardons, and nominate officers and judges. It would be Joe Biden, not his staff, who would enjoy the position as sole commander in chief of the Army and Navy of the United States. In our partisan era, it can be tempting to think that control of the White House flits between “Republicans” and “Democrats.” But it does not. It moves between people. If, indeed, Joe Biden cannot handle the job, then he is ineligible to be among those people.

  A few years back, I really thought that the 25th Amendment would have been invoked by now, but I didn't count on people looking at Kamala and saying, uh, no.

• Super! A bun dance! Another fine article from print Reason out from behind the paywall, from Christian Britschgi: The Abundance Agenda Promises Everything to Everyone All at Once.

  (You don't need to have seen the movie to understand the article, but you should anyway, it's great.)

  America, and particularly blue America, has consciously wrapped itself in red tape, regulations, and special-interest carve-outs, to the point that it has become nearly impossible to convert either government subsidies or private capital into needed physical things.

  As [California Governor Gavin] Newsom said to [NYT columnist Ezra] Klein, "We're not getting the money because our rules are getting in the way."

  A hodgepodge coalition of legacy publication columnists, traditional think-tankers, upstart Substack writers, and obsessive Twitter posters have rallied around the straightforward idea that what the country needs is more stuff, and it isn't going to get it with that thicket of rules standing in the way. Their call to action is what Atlantic writer Derek Thompson calls the "abundance agenda."

  Britschgi looks at the possible alliance between "left-of-center" pols and intellectuals suddenly realizing that their regulation obsessions are not working to (y'know) actually help people and libertarians (who always thought that). He's hopeful about the results, but skeptical that it will actually shrink big government.

• What you can do if you set your mind to it. Jim Geraghty looks at a minor miracle: San Francisco Cleans Up Its Drug Markets and Encampments. But (spoiler) adds the motive:

  — for Xi Jinping’s Arrival

  But I wanted to excerpt something further down:

  Noncitizens caught on video ripping down American flags from public places ought to be deported immediately. Under U.S. immigration law, a green-card holder can be deported back to their country of origin for a variety of crimes, including “crimes of moral turpitude,” which are generally (but not exclusively) defined as fraud, larceny, or intent to harm persons or things, including “malicious destruction of property.” If you are climbing public flagpoles and tearing down American flags put up there by the local government, that strikes me as an ipso facto “malicious destruction of property.”

  If you’re tearing down American flags, you clearly don’t want to be here. Let us help you by putting you on the first flight back to your country of origin, and permanently barring you from ever returning to the U.S. It’s like they say: What unites us is so much more important than what divides us. You hate being in this country, and we hate you being here, too.

  I'm (apparently) more favorable to immigration than today's conservatives. (So was Reagan.) But I'm also favorably inclined toward Geraghty's proposal.

  Also see his following section: "How Do We Demonstrate That We Outnumber the Antisemitic Cretins?"

  Well, I try to call them out. See the CPW item above.

Recently on the book blog: