Pun Salad

I've been a minor Van Morrison fan for awhile, own 20 albums of his. (Which barely scratches the surface; he's very prolific and has been doing this for decades.) And I just preordered his new album. (And so can you; Amazon link at your right.)

And he's starting his US tour next month in (of all places) Jimmy's Jazz & Blues Club in Portsmouth, NH! A mere 13.5 miles from Pun Salad Manor.

But I won't be going. I learned about his visit from Drew Cline at the Josiah Bartlett Center for Public Policy, who pleads: Baby, please don't go banning "price gouging" of concert tickets.

But the kicker, as Cline details, is that some of the tickets will only be available via Ticketmaster's "dynamic pricing system". And:

The top seats there went for $2,502.50 and $3,102.50 each, plus more than $500 in fees, according to NHBR.

And, yes, I could do that. But I'm not gonna.

Like Cline, I don't have a problem with this. Or any other lawful free market transactions between consenting adults.

But I'll point out that it would be far cheaper for me to buy a ticket for one of his Los Angeles Orpheum shows, even when you factor in the cost to fly out to LA and back.

Not that I'm not gonna do that either. I'll just crank up the home stereo and pretend.

Also of note:

• It's far from "liberalism", Matt. I really disapprove of Matt Taibbi's headline: Liberalism Removes its Mask. But he's right that a mask is being removed:

  In the Washington Post today, under the headline, “Musk and Durov are facing the revenge of the regulators”:

  While freewheeling internet companies have long clashed with authoritarian regimes — Google in China, Facebook in Russia or pre-Musk Twitter in Turkey — Western governments until recently generally did not regard social media and the vision of free speech they promoted as being fundamentally at odds with democracy… Banning entire social networks or arresting their executives simply wasn’t something liberal democracies did… Now, for better or worse, it is.

  Columnist Will Oremus noted that although the Durov and Musk cases differ, both “involve democratic governments losing patience with cyberlibertarian tech moguls” who “thumbed their noses at authorities.” He highlighted a “vibe shift,” noting that “high-flying tech leaders will have to think a bit more carefully” about “whose soil they’re on when they step off a plane.”

  American liberalism railed against Bush conservatives who said those who didn’t break the law had nothing to hide. Now, once-liberal voices are tripping over each other to make more extreme versions of the same argument. Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich published a guide to how to “rein in” Elon Musk in The Guardian that includes a recommendation that “regulators around the world should threaten Musk with arrest,” adding cheerfully that “global regulators may be on the way to doing this, as evidenced by the 24 August arrest in France of Pavel Durov.” Following up its July article about how “The First Amendment is Out of Control,” the New York Times also has a piece titled, “The Constitution is Sacred. Is it Also Dangerous?”

  To repeat: it ain't "liberalism". The best word I can come up with is "tribalism". Musk is threatening Reich's tribe. And that of those NYT writers.

  And there's always Tim Walz. Someone should ask him (and Kamala) about this.

• Not fitting their narrative, I guess. Becket Adams is disgusted, not amused at all, when the Media Pretend Government Censorship Is a Nothingburger

  Few things in modern news media are as useless as the journalist who insists a legitimate news story is not, in fact, a legitimate news story.

  There’s a lot of this going around these days.

  Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg claimed last week that the federal government “pressured” his company, Meta, into censoring political content during the 2020 election and the Covid-19 pandemic.

  You’d think that journalists would be all over this story — that, of all industries, the press would be the most outraged by Zuckerberg’s allegations, demanding answers and explanations from the relevant government authorities. But you’d be wrong.

  That's my first of five "gifted" NR links this month, so I encourage your clicking.

• But speaking of authoritarians… Yeah, it's not as if the Other Guys wre any better. Here's Stephanie Slade in the current print Reason: J.D. Vance Shares Donald Trump's Authoritarian Instincts.

  In September 2021, Hillbilly Elegy author J.D. Vance—then still a long shot candidate for the Republican Senate nomination in Ohio—made an appearance on Fox News' Tucker Carlson Tonight. In a crisp white button-down and navy blazer, no tie, he laid out a proposal to use the powers of the federal government to punish private universities and nonprofits for promoting "radical left-wing ideology."

  "Why are we allowing the companies that are destroying this country to receive tax preferences?" he asked. "Why don't we seize the assets of the Ford Foundation, tax their assets, and give it to the people who've had their lives destroyed by their radical open-borders agenda?"

  The questions were part of Vance's effort to endear himself to former President Donald Trump in the only way that seemed available to him at the time: by launching a culture-war offensive against progressives, rule of law be damned. His bet paid off this summer when Trump chose Vance—now a first-term senator from Ohio—as his vice presidential running mate.

  I can only assume that these folks on the "left" and "right" got a whiff of authoritarianism during the pandemic (see the Becket Adams item above), and got addicted.

• Trust me, even back in the day, Caltech admitted some non-Nobelists. Charles Murray takes to the WSJ, examining The Roots of STEM Excellence.

  Every advanced nation has a small group of people who have the potential to accelerate scientific progress and foster the advances in living that go with it. People are eligible for that group not because of their personalities or virtues. They are eligible because they have exceptionally high cognitive ability in science, technology, engineering or mathematics—STEM.

  “Exceptionally high cognitive ability” doesn’t mean the top percentile but something far more demanding. Consider the top percentile of basketball ability. A member of the starting lineup of any U.S. men’s college basketball team is almost certainly in the top percentile of basketball ability among American males. So is LeBron James. That’s how wide the top percentile is. Every starter in the National Basketball Association is almost certainly in the top hundredth of the top percentile—the top 10,000th.

  Murray's advice: identify and encourage the tippy-top talents as early as possible.

  Later in the article, he discusses my alma mater's recent boast (as I did last week):

  It should be one of the nation’s highest educational priorities to get its most brilliant STEM students into those elite universities. Until a few years ago, the California Institute of Technology was the model. Caltech admitted from the top down based on evidence of exceptional talent and then put its students through a demanding curriculum that only those with zeal and a capacity for hard labor—the other requirements for great achievement—could survive. The record of achievement among Caltech graduates and faculty speaks for itself—46 Nobel Laureates, 66 awarded National Medals of Science and 75 elected to the National Academy of Sciences, all generated by a school that enrolls only about 1,000 undergraduates and 1,400 graduate students at a time.

  Caltech might have gone wobbly. It suspended standardized-test requirements in undergraduate admission for four years starting in 2020, and its website boasts that “holistic review is the cornerstone of our admissions process” and this month Caltech announced that “in a historic milestone,” its freshman class will be majority female. But we still have the example of the old Caltech that every elite STEM department should emulate: require evidence of exceptional academic ability in the applications, admit those of top ability regardless of race, sex or social skills, holistic review be damned, and then push those students to their limits.

  It does no favors to kiddos who are admitted "holistically". If you're interested, Caltech's slicing-and-dicing of their undergrad class of 2028 is here. Check out the Asians!

  And also check out their Graduation Rates over the past ten years; the ladies have a higher graduation rate in (check my math) seven years out of ten. That's hardly an indication that they've been lowering their standards for women. (Can't say the same for their "Underrepresentated Minority" students, unfortunately.)

  Also, note that they seem to endorse a gender binary on both these pages: it's just "Men" and "Women". Is that even allowed in California?