Pun Salad

Somehow I missed talking about SpaceX's spectacular Polaris Dawn mission while it was going on, and I was totally unaware of this additional bit of awesome: Astronaut plays John Williams’ ‘Star Wars’ theme in first-ever violin solo in outer space.

And here 'tis. Even my fellow philistines will enjoy:

Also of note:

• Don't be so shy, Mr. Williamson. Tell us what you really think about The Exotic Cat-Eaters of Springfield, Ohio. (Subhed: "A pretty long story about a thing that didn’t happen.")

  SPRINGFIELD, Ohio—They come to Ohio from one of the most desperately poor places in the Western Hemisphere. They have few to no belongings. In many cases, they are uneducated, and most don’t speak English well. They do not understand the local culture where they have settled—and it shows: in their dress, in their speech, in their manners, in their housing arrangements, in the food they eat, and in the music they dance to. 

  Most profess to be Christians, but many maintain superstitious folk magic traditions from their homeland, and many quietly hold to a belief in witchcraft. They blithely violate social taboos. Locals complain that they are stealing their jobs, driving up costs, and consuming too much in the way of social services. And then there are the dietary norms: Though the rumors no doubt exceed the reality, some of them eat animals not generally considered food by the good people of Ohio. Ask the locals, and many of them will quietly say that they wish they would all go back to where they came from.

  But that was a long time ago. And while J.D. Vance’s hillbilly ancestors may not have been the inbred, possum-eating, superstitious bushwhackers of legend and lore, as they descended on Ohio from the hills of Kentucky they had more than a little in common with the Haitian immigrants Sen. Vance now spends his days vilifying in terms that would have been familiar to Fritz Hippler, the filmmaker whose 1941 propaganda film Der ewige Jude comes to its climax with images of leering kosher butchers covered in the blood of animals slaughtered in the service of “the so-called Jewish religion.”

  Lord Acton would have us believe that it takes absolute power to corrupt absolutely. But even the dream of the vice presidency—that “bucket of warm piss” in the immortal words of Vice President John Nance Garner—will do the trick, if you are the right kind of person.

  By which, of course, I mean the wrong sort of person—the wrong sort to wield power. You can send little J.D. to Yale to make him polished, you can send him to Silicon Valley to make him rich, and you can send him to the Senate to make him powerful, but you cannot stop him from being what it is he apparently wants to be: Cleetus [sic] the Gap-Toothed Twitter Troll.

  Equal time for David Strom at Hot Air, who's really … um, hot, I guess, about KDW's story: 'Conservative' Writer Calls J.D. Vance 'Gap-Toothed Cletus'.

  Well, as you can plainly see from the final quoted paragraph above, KDW said J.D. Vance aspires to being gap-toothed Cletus. But onto the steamy stuff:

  We keep on being sold the line that Trump is unfit to be president because he uses hateful rhetoric, and I admit that I wished Trump used less incendiary words often enough.

  But the people who make this complaint are, if anything, much worse. Trump directs his ire at what are in the end serious problems making the lives of everyday Americans worse, and in return his critics call him a Nazi, an existential threat to America, and make the most disparaging remarks about his supporters.

  Um, yeah. I think Strom is badly misunderstanding the point KDW was making in his article. As noted, he actually went to Springfield, talked to people, made keen observations. As is his wont. The article doesn't seem to be paywalled, so I urge you to check for yourself. His bottom line:

  Vance has turned Solzhenitsyn’s maxim on its head: “Let the lie come into the world, but only through me, and only if I get something good out of it.” A man who is not suffering from whatever disease of the soul with which Vance is afflicted would have a hard time even imagining wanting to be vice president—of all petty things!—that bad. A different and better sort of man would understand that bearing false witness against 15,000 poor and vulnerable people in the pursuit of political power is the same as bearing false witness against anybody else. 

  But I’ll give Vance the last word. Here he is on Twitter, back when Twitter was Twitter and J.D. Vance was J.D. Vance: “Trump makes people I care about afraid. Immigrants, Muslims, etc. Because of this, I find him reprehensible. God wants better of us.”

• Also reporting from Springfield… in the imagination of Jeff Maurer anyway, is veteran reporter Jacob Fuzetti, whose headlien reads: I’ve Been Sent to Ohio to Research People Eating Cats, for Some Reason.

  The presidential election may hinge on whether Haitian immigrants in Ohio have eaten cats. Former President Trump repeated the rumor in last week’s debate, and the subsequent days have seen an intense discussion among influencers and journalists about whether there’s any validity to the rumors whatsoever. And now, I’ve been drawn into the kerfuffle; I write to you from a hotel room in Hamilton, Ohio, where I sit confused, defeated, and more than a little depressed about the state of journalism and my life.

  This assignment is partly my fault. I’ve been begging I Might Be Wrong editor Jeff Maurer to let me write about the election; he usually assigns me to pop culture nonsense and Gen Z fluff that makes me wish I didn’t view retirement as a grim prison in which I will await my death. I was excited when Jeff came to me and said “J-Fuzz — you down for some of that in-person reporting that you never shut the fuck up about?” But then I learned that he was going to send me to Ohio to investigate cat-eating, which somehow felt more degrading than the time he assigned me to talk about the news with what appeared to be an AI bot trained on porn.

  “What does cat-eating have to do with who should be president?” I asked.

  “Everyone’s talking about it,” Jeff replied.

  “But isn’t it a red herring?” I said.

  “Cats,” Jeff replied, “not fish.”

  I like Fuzetti, and I hope Maurer keeps humiliating him.

• "Scientific American is neither scientific nor American. Discuss." Wesley J. Smith claims Scientific American Kamala Harris Endorsement Harms Science.

  The science establishment continues to politicize “science” — and that ain’t good for science.

  In July, Nature — supposedly the most respected science journal in the world — endorsed Kamala Harris. Now, following the ideological leader, so has Scientific American.

  And what a sad joke the endorsement is. For example, the editorial repeats the lie that Trump told people to inject bleach to fight Covid. From the editorial:

  Trump touted his pandemic efforts during his first debate with Harris, but in 2020 he encouraged resistance to basic public health measures, spread misinformation about treatments and suggested injections of bleach could cure the disease.

  No. He. Did. Not.

  Goodness knows that I ain't voting for Trump (or Kamala either), but if your go-to argument against him is the bleach lie, you just aren't working very hard.

  But the self-immolation of Scientific American is old news. Jerry Coyne has been on their case for a long time (here is what his search engine provides); back in 2022, he called it "a woke joke of a rag."

• Praising with faint damns. Harvard Econ Prof Jason Furman took to the op-ed pages of the WSJ to argue that Kamala Harris Is the Safer Economic Choice.

  The first modern presidential race between two candidates with undergraduate degrees in economics hasn’t thrilled economists. Both Donald Trump and Kamala Harris have floated bad ideas, including that Nippon Steel’s proposed acquisition of U.S. Steel is a national-security risk, that tip income shouldn’t be taxed, and that grocery prices are currently elevated because of price gouging.

  Yet economists are obliged to compare and quantify. In this race, the evaluation is clear: Mr. Trump’s ideas on tariffs, the budget and the Federal Reserve pose a much greater risk to the economy than Ms. Harris’s.

  Furman was chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers during Obama's second term, and he's a pretty solid Democrat. He gives Kamala a lot of slack that he doesn't provide to Trump. And he suggests we don't worry: a couple of her worst ideas "would require legislative approval, which neither is likely to get."

• Lileks on cybesecurity. I subscribe to his substack, so should you, but if you don't, I don't know he much you'll be able to read of his latest: Username: Mattress / PW: Under. Inspired by his run-in with home budgeting software:

  The budget program I chose was slick and attractive. Step one: It needed to know how much lucre I had in the bank, of course, so it could warn me that I was running on fumes when I put down the card for a big-ticket item like a TV or a pound of lean ground beef. It asked for my bank password and account numbers.

  I stared at the window on the screen, the cursor blinking expectantly in the text field.

  I closed the program, uninstalled it, zero’d out my hard drive, removed the hard drive, smashed with a hammer, ran it through a bandsaw a few times, then buried the pieces in six locations ten miles apart.

  Then I changed my bank passwords from 123456 to 1234567. Can’t be too safe.

  Yes, I am so paranoid about banking account numbers and passwords that the mere act of asking for them made me back out. Once I had to send bank account and routing information to daughter, and I put it in an encrypted pdf, with instructions about the password:

  “Original name of second dog with first syllable in Latin + number of windows in your bedroom + number of city blocks to high school + first hamster name + birthday (month, day) X # of hamsters owned

  Lileks' column in his dead-trees Minneapolis newspaper was cancelled, so this is what he's doing now. I was happy to subscribe.