Pun Salad

Jeff Jacoby tells us: Why I'm not voting for president.

Jacoby lays out his rationale, and I concur. Reader, if your candidate loses New Hampshire by one vote, and hence the election, I take full responsibility.

Fun fact: although you can buy our Amazon Product du Jour, or any other similar sign that suits your fancy, it doesn't appear any of them will arrive before Tuesday. It must be a really popular stance!

Also of note:

• DC Shuffle Watch. George Will bemoans it: A mountain of government payments buries the myth of American self-reliance.

  Most Americans’ understanding of their nation’s past is notoriously sketchy. Now, at the end of an election season ostensibly about the nation’s future, most Americans surely are uncomprehending about the present.

  They fancy this a nation of independent, self-reliant strivers, wary of government and disdainful of Europeans contentedly dependent on governments’ providing for their well-being by redistributing wealth. Most Americans probably would recoil from living in a hypothetical country where:

  Payments from government entitlement programs — transfer payments — are the fastest-growing major component of citizens’ personal income. Such transfers are the third-largest source of personal income: In 2022, the average citizen received almost as much from government transfers ($11,500) as from investments ($12,900), and more than one-quarter as much money as was obtained from work. This average citizen received six times more (adjusted for inflation) in government transfer payments than in 1970, during which span income from other sources increased less than half as much. Transfers’ share of total (inflation-adjusted) personal income has more than doubled since 1970, from 8.2 percent to 17.6 percent in 2022.

  GFW plugs a report from the "Economic Innovation Group": The Great Transfer-mation.

  It's incredibly ludicrous to celebrate the Shuffle:

  1. Taxpayers send their dollars to the Federal Government;
  2. After a healthy fraction of those dollars get scraped off at the federal level, some gets returned to "us";
  3. They act like they've done us a huge favor.

  Good luck finding a credible candidate willing to point out this scam. It's unaccountably popular.

• What's that stench? Oh, it's this burning question: Did Joe Biden Call Trump Supporters 'Garbage'? Posed by Christian Britschgi, he finds it's a matter of Presidential Punctuation:

  Last night, President Joe Biden called all of Donald Trump's supporters "garbage." Or did he?

  The much-debated gaffe came during a Zoom call between Biden and the progressive group Voto Latino. The president's alleged insult of all Trump supporters came as he was criticizing comedian Tony Hinchcliffe for calling Puerto Rico a "floating island of garbage" during Trump's Madison Square Garden rally held this past weekend.

  A clip of the president's remarks seems to record a rambling Biden saying "The only garbage I see out there is his supporters…his…his demonization of Latinos is unconscionable, and it's un-American."

  Ah, but did he actually say:

  The only garbage I see out there is his supporter's…his…his demonization of Latinos is unconscionable, and it's un-American.

  That refers to the "demonization" made by a single Trump supporter, that insult comic at Madison Square Garden.

  Needless to say, people rushed to either hear, or not hear, that apostrophe!

• A power so great it can only be used for good or evil. Abigail Anthony's got one of those, and she uses it to analyze Biden's Gaffe: Finding’ Secret’ Apostrophes’.

  At a young age, I realized God had given me a rare and valuable gift: the ability to detect secret apostrophes. I recall the precise moment that others recognized my talent. In my second-grade English class, I raised my small hand and the teacher called on me. “Miss Clark,” I said sheepishly. “You’ve missed the hidden apostrophe.” She stared at me incredulously, believing that no child could be correct about something so advanced. Then the light flickered in her eyes and she professed, “Abigail, you’re right.” From then on, I taught the class, yet the students lacked the aptitude to detect those invisible, floating commas. My ability is innate, not learned.

  My apostrophe radar only improved with age, yet others doubted my skill. Whenever I spoke to reveal instances of secret apostrophes, people insisted defensively that I was wrong. I knew, in our society that so heavily values credentials, I needed a reputable institution to validate my aptitude. During my interview for the Oxford Linguistics program, I explained my passion for hidden punctuation. There wasn’t a professor who specialized in this area, so the admissions officers were hesitant to accept me. They asked, “Are you prepared to study this difficult topic without an instructor to guide you?” I declared without hesitation, “Yes.” I continued, with a lowered gaze and in a delicate whisper, “The republic depends on it.”

  My academic papers on those small, diagonal curves have been largely ignored — until now. Suddenly, my opinion and expertise are in high demand. Joe Biden — who is apparently still the president — said yesterday on a video call, “The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters.” Or was it “supporter’s”? The White House Official Transcriber and esteemed journalists, desperate to detect a secret apostrophe, immediately called me to validate the glint of that subtle punctuation, something that might suggest Biden was talking about one specific Trump supporter who possessed something. “Give me time,” I told them all. I burned sage in my room, hoping an apostrophe might appear in the smoke. My hands rested on an Ouija board, waiting to see if the Punctuation Phantoms would guide my fingertips to that little dash that leans ever so slightly toward the right. I summoned everyone for a Zoom meeting, and their anxious faces waited for my verdict. “No,” I sighed, “there is no hidden apostrophe here.” The White House Official Transcriber gave me a vengeful stare, and the Politico reporter cried hysterically.

  (Yes, dear friends: the snarky intro on this item is from the Firesign Theater's "The Tale of the Giant Rat of Sumatra")

• Don't give them a dime. I link to Wikipedia all the time, and I've even tossed them a few shekels now and then in response to their periodic earnest pleas. But no more, Jimmy, not until you fix this: How Wikipedia’s Pro-Hamas Editors Hijacked the Israel-Palestine Narrative.

  • A coordinated campaign led by around 40 Wikipedia editors has worked to delegitimize Israel, present radical Islamist groups in a favorable light, and position fringe academic views on the Israel-Palestine conflict as mainstream over past years, intensifying after the October 7 attack
  • Six weeks after October 7, one of these editors successfully removed mention of Hamas’ 1988 charter, which calls for the killing of Jews and the destruction of Israel, from the article on Hamas
  • The group also appeared to attempt to promote the interests of the Iranian government across a number of articles, including deleting “huge amounts of documented human rights crimes by [Islamic Republic Party] officials”
  • A group called Tech For Palestine launched a separate but complementary campaign after October 7, which violated Wikipedia policies by coordinating to edit Israel-Palestine articles on the group 8,000 member Discord
  • Tech For Palestine abandoned its efforts and its members went into a panic after a blog discovered what they were doing; the group deleted all its Wiki Talk pages and Sandboxes they had been using to coordinate their editing efforts, and the main editor deleted all her chats from the group’s Discord channel

  Also see Jerry Coyne's post from back in September: Is Wikipedia distorted by ideology and propaganda?.

'We must not publish a study that says we're harming children because people who say we're harming children will use the study as evidence that we're harming children, which might make it difficult for us to continue harming children.' pic.twitter.com/hS4CcswkXg

— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) October 23, 2024

Also of note:

• And we should not have expected her to show up. Freddie deBoer brings the news that should not be surprising: Big Mommy is Not Coming to Save Us.

  There’s this dude, Dan Froomkin. It’s unclear what his job is, exactly, but he’s one soldier in an army of liberals who loudly insist on a plainly false claim about this country and how it works: that Donald Trump endures as a political force because no one will tell the truth about him. This is the “why has the media gone easy on Trump??” narrative, which has somehow flourished for almost a decade now despite the fact that Donald Trump has been covered more critically by our media than any other figure in my lifetime, seemingly to his advantage. The Froomkins of the world are incapable of believing what should be a central political lesson of the past ten years, which is that Donald Trump is a uniquely divisive politician with a lot of baggage who still inspires deep love from vast throngs of people. This election is very tight because Kamala Harris is and has always been a limited politician who has particular difficulty speaking off the cuff, because the Democrats are a feckless center-right party who stand for nothing and thus can’t offer any compelling alternative to the Republicans, and because we live in a country with bozo citizens ruled by a corrupt and evil plutocrat class. But it’s also very tight because Donald Trump is extremely popular with about a third of the population in the United States, a county with an apathetic citizenry and an idiotic presidential election system, such that a guy only a third of the country likes can win the presidency.

  Mr. deBoer is (as near as I can tell, still) a self-admitted Marxist. But apparently not one of the atheist variety. Near the end of his article: "Kamala Harris is running a horrific campaign and, while I pray to God she wins, she does not deserve to."

  Funny. Although I'm not praying, that mirrors my attitude: Donald Trump is also running a horrific campaign, and while I hope he wins, he doesn't deserve to.

  Who will get what they deserve? Voters, baby. And, as Mencken observed, they "deserve to get it good and hard."

• Good advice that will not be taken. Jeff Maurer has a simple request for some of his D-side buddies: Stop Crying "Several Wolves!"

  I would describe the current state of the presidential race this way: There is a wolf. Many people — Democrats, centrist Republicans, and even former members of the Trump administration — are crying “wolf!” And others — namely Resistance Democrats and the more incontinence-challenged members of the media — are crying “several wolves!” Sometimes, these people even cry “several wolves with switchblades and uzis and they’re biting people and giving them AIDS!” Trump’s backers respond by crying “They’re lying about the wolves!” And at that point, the first group is forced to chime back in and say “They are indeed exaggerating the threat posed by wolves but it is factually true that there is one wolf, who presents a serious threat that is, to be fair, probably not existential.” Which is not the type of pithy message that wins elections.

  This dynamic was on display in response to Trump’s rally at Madison Square Garden on Sunday night. Here’s the beginning of a piece that MSNBC ran after the event.

  [Somber video at link, and it's just as awful as Maurer says]

  Jesus woodworking Christ, MSNBC — get a grip. The main linkage seems to be simply “Madison Square Garden”; I guess if the rally had been at the Barclays Center, there would be no story. I once saw Radiohead at Madison Square Garden — I suppose that justifies a story saying “In 2019, scores of mopey 40-somethings packed Madison Square Garden to hear five pale English guys sing about robots. Now, against that backdrop of history, Donald Trump held a rally.”

  Maurer goes on to analyze alleged-comic Tony Hinchcliffe's remark about Puerto Rico.

• His words do jarre. Jacob Sullum notes a very low bar that, nevertheless, is not cleared: Donald Trump Is Not Thoughtful Enough To Be a Fascist.

  John Kelly, the former Marine general who served as Donald Trump's second chief of staff, thinks the former president "falls into the general definition of 'fascist.'" Gen. Mark Milley, whom Trump appointed as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, goes further, describing his ex-boss as "fascist to the core."

  Rebutting those charges, John Bolton, Trump's former national security adviser, says the Republican presidential candidate is not thoughtful enough to be a fascist. Bolton's take seems more accurate: Trump's views, which combine long-standing authoritarian impulses with politically convenient positions of more recent vintage, do not reflect any unifying principle other than self-interest.

  The incoherence of Trump's thinking is reflected in the incoherence of his speech, which in rallies and interviews flits from one topic to another for no apparent reason. His randomly capitalized social media rants resemble wacky email missives destined for the trash bin, written by the sort of unhinged crank you would move away from if you encountered him in public.

  Not for the first time, I feel compelled to break out the Ben Jonson quote:

  Neither can his mind be thought to be in tune, whose words do jarre; nor his reason in frame, whose sentence is preposterous.

I've mentioned before that I regret not having flunked some courses in college so that I could have graduated in 1974 instead of 1973, and had Richard Feynman for a commencement speaker. His speech is available here, or you can read it (an "adapted" version) in Ralph Leighton's first collection of Feynman's yarns, our Amazon Product du Jour.

Feynman's speech pinballed over a number of topics, but is best known for his warnings about "cargo cult science". What's that?

How to avoid that? Well, this is the key bit:

Years later, Feynman described the cargo cultism at NASA leading to the Challenger disaster, where officials fooled themselves into killing seven astronauts.

Anyway, that's what leapt to mind when reading this Slashdot item: Climate Scientists Respond To Attacks on Objectivity. A Guardian article is quoted:

The Guardian (and, implicitly, Slashdot) are sympathetic to the "researchers". Me, not so much.

I noticed that Sabine Hossenfelder weighed in on the issue too:

It almost seems the "researchers" read Feynman's warning about Cargo Cult Science and took it as a how-to.

Also of note:

• And we also have Cargo Cult Politics. Alan Jacobs noticed something about the candidates' articulation.

  To call a person “articulate” is to say something rather complex. One element of articulateness is the quick and easy summoning of words — but if the words summoned are not appropriate, we don’t call the person articulate but rather a chatterer, a windbag, a babbler. We call what comes out of their mouth “word salad.” Appropriate words are precise and also information-rich. The articulate person is able to speak fluently but also to the point.

  I say all this by way of noting something curious: The current Presidential candidates, Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, are surely the least articulate Presidential candidates in American history — the least able to speak in reliably coherent complete sentences, the least likely to summon relevant information in discussing a topic, and most prone to extended and expansive servings of word salad.

  During the 2020 Presidential campaign a meme arose comparing Biden and Trump to Kennedy and Nixon debating in 1960, and sure enough, if you listen to the 1960 debates it’s astonishing how … well, articulate both men are. They navigate their way smoothly from subject to verb to object in every sentence; they have massive amounts of information at their fingertips. The only Presidential candidate of this century who wouldn’t sound foolish in their company is Barack Obama.

  More interesting observations at the link, including Mencken's comments about the rhetorical stylings of Warren Gamaliel Harding.

• And the current betting favorite for Cultist-In-Chief is… Guess who? Hint: He's divorced two wives, and is in an ongoing divorce proceeding against reality. Jacob Sullum notes Trump Thinks News Outlets Should Lose Their Broadcast Licenses, Even When They Have None.

  During his first year as president, Donald Trump suggested that "NBC and the Networks" should lose their "licenses" because their "partisan, distorted and fake" news coverage was "bad for [the] country" and "not fair to [the] public." Ajit Pai, the Republican chair of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), pushed back, saying, "The FCC under my leadership will stand for the First Amendment, and under the law the FCC does not have the authority to revoke a license of a broadcast station based on the content of a particular newscast."

  Undeterred by that rebuke, Trump has repeatedly re-upped the idea that broadcast licenses should be contingent on whether they are used to air content that offends him. Last November, for instance, he complained that MSNBC "uses FREE government approved airwaves" to execute "a 24 hour hit job on Donald J. Trump and the Republican Party for purposes of ELECTION INTERFERENCE." He declared that "our so-called 'government' should come down hard on them and make them pay for their illegal political activity."

  That jeremiad was nonsensical in at least two ways. First, there is nothing "illegal" about MSNBC's anti-Trump content; to the contrary, the criticism to which Trump objects is constitutionally protected speech. Second, MSNBC is a cable channel, so it does not use "government approved airwaves" to transmit its programming and therefore does not need a broadcast license to operate.

  One week before Election Day, and the probability I will leave the "President" line blank on my ballot is approaching 100%.

• And then there's Cargo Cult Education. At FEE, Michael Strong looks at The Opportunity Cost of Compulsory Schooling. And it turns out those costs are high.

  Prior to the rise of compulsory schooling, it was common for young people to take on adult-level responsibilities at puberty. Indeed, in indigenous cultures, a rite of passage around puberty led to a transition to adulthood. Thomas Hine’s The Rise and Fall of the American Teenager documents just how common it was for teens in the US to take on significant responsibilities prior to the rise of compulsory high school. Ben Franklin, Thomas Edison, and Andrew Carnegie are among the many who began their working lives at puberty.

  The terms “teen” and “adolescence” were created in the early 20th century. This wasn’t even a recognized category before then. John Taylor Gatto’s provocative thesis in The 7-Lesson Schoolteacher, that schooling trains us to be passive and dependent, is not even controversial for those who know much about the history of young people. Robert Epstein, former editor-in-chief of Psychology Today, wrote The Case Against Adolescence which makes the case that the infantilization of young people has been tremendously harmful. Human beings should take on significant responsibilities at puberty for healthy, normal development.

  […]

  I have made the case that schooling is a damaging evolutionary mismatch that is a causal factor in much of (most of?) adolescent dysfunction and mental illness. Does anyone believe that paleolithic teens, with young males and females eager to play an adult role in their tribes, exhibited the kinds of behaviors we see today? As behavioral health disorders (functional mental illness and substance abuse) surpass physical disorders as the largest causes of disability, it appears as though the opportunity cost of government schooling is quite high and getting higher. A 2024 study puts the annual cost of mental illness at $280 billion. A 2008 study puts the annual cost of substance abuse at $510 billion, which, with inflation alone, not assuming that the annual cost increased, would be $750 billion. Together we are at roughly $1 trillion.

  I came across Strong's article via Tom Knighton's substack post, where he wonders Is compulsory public education hurting our society as a whole? After quoting Strong at length:

  The truth of the matter is that compulsory public education is framed as an unmitigated good, but every shred of evidence saying that it is also happens to be suspect, especially when you remember what the Prussian system that our public education system was based on was designed to do: Create docile, obedient workers.

  Public education creates a problem because it strives to carve our children into sitting down, shutting up, and doing what they’re told.

  But obedience doesn’t achieve great things. It might be a peaceful life for many—and, to be sure, a peaceful life is a good thing in many ways—but it’s the same kind of peaceful life that a drone would “enjoy.”

  I realize abolishing compulsory attendance laws is probably not going to happen soon, if at all. (Reason's December issue is themed "Abolish Everything"—but I don't see compulsory attendance laws in their wish list.) Still…

Ah, those wacky Democrats. Apparently realizing that their candidate, Joy in an Empty Pantsuit, is a charisma-free tough sell, they've decided to go back to a tried and true tactic, as shown in our Eye Candy du Jour. Call it the Moonbat Signal: the Democratic National Committee arranged for anti-Trump messaging to be beamed up on the outer wall of Madison Square Garden while Trump's rally was going on inside last night.

In case you missed the news: Harris says Trump ‘is a fascist’ after John Kelly says the former president wanted generals like Hitler’s.

Stipulated: Trump says unhinged, untrue, wildly inappropriate, stupid things all the time. But John Kelly apparently waited a couple of years to disclose this one. His last day as chief of staff was January 2, 2019, and (Wikipedia claims) he and Trump were "no longer on speaking terms" by then. The "Hitler did some good things" charge first appeared over two years later, and was promptly denied.

Apparently, Kelly didn't think to reveal Trump's Hitler praise before the 2020 election. Maybe he had good reasons. But it's iffy: if it's important now, why wasn't it just as important then?

Ah, well. What I really want to type about this morning is the F-word, as deployed by Kamala. As the Fox News graphic I retrieved from Power Line claims, it's an old saw from a very rusty toolbox kept in the DNC's attic:

Wow, that's like … all of them?

But it's been going on for even a couple pre-Goldwater decades. FDR in his (election year) 1944 State of the Union address:

One of the great American industrialists of our day—a man who has rendered yeoman service to his country in this crisis-recently emphasized the grave dangers of "rightist reaction" in this Nation. All clear-thinking businessmen share his concern. Indeed, if such reaction should develop—if history were to repeat itself and we were to return to the so-called "normalcy" of the 1920's—then it is certain that even though we shall have conquered our enemies on the battlefields abroad, we shall have yielded to the spirit of Fascism here at home.

Ah, those well-known fascists, Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover!

And four years later, the New York Times headline calmly reported on a Truman campaign speech:

PRESIDENT LIKENS DEWEY TO HITLER AS FASCISTS' TOOL

---

Says When Bigots, Profiteers Get Control of Country They Select 'Front Man' to Rule

---

DICTATORSHIP STRESSED

---

Truman Tells Chicago Audience a Republican Victory Will Threaten U.S. Liberty

So Ecclesiastes 1:9 (RSV) had it right:

What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done; and there is nothing new under the sun.

… or on the walls of Madison Square Garden.

[Semi-irrelevant aside: it would have been sort of weird if the Democrats of the day had tried to pin the "fascist" label on Eisenhower, given his WWII job of Nazi-killing. But, reader, note that he was an admirer of Hitler's Autobahn, which inspired him to push for the Interstate Highway System. So, yeah, Ike thought "Hitler did some good things."]

I've been collecting various bits and pieces of recent ruminations about "fascism" over the past few days. Here, via David R. Henderson (who's interested in Understanding the Anti-Market Ideology of Fascism), a Matt Kibbe video:

… complete with ominous music!

Jonah Goldberg wrote the classic book Liberal Fascism back in 2008, still worth a read, Amazon link at your right. He has put his current thoughts about the current kerfuffle into a couple of articles at the Dispatch. First up: Fascism, Again.

And then he wrote his G-File coming at the topic from a "different angle": The Fascist Lie.

… which of course brings us back to:

Trump’s relationship with the truth is wholly fascistic, but also wholly detached from the intellectual roots of fascism. I have no doubt that he knows absolutely nothing about philosophy and nearly nothing about history. He doesn’t consult books by fascists or about fascism when he talks about “the enemy within.” He didn’t even know who Erwin Rommel was, never mind that “German generals” repeatedly tried to assassinate Hitler. He just believes that Hitler got to do what he wanted without any external or internal restraint, and therefore concluded that his generals must have been not only as ruthless as Hitler but blindly loyal to him. Loyalty to Trump (and the praise that is a prerequisite for loyalty) is all Trump cares about. That’s it. I am sure that he has no idea what the Führerprinzip was, but if you explained it to him he’d say, “Yes! That’s what I’m talking about.” That’s why he fawns over strongmen and autocrats and heaps scorn on restraints on his will.

For the record, Jonah admits that he doesn't "think it’s particularly helpful to call Trump a fascist." We will let Rich Lowry have the last word: Donald Trump Is Not a Fascist.

Agreed. I hope this is the last time you see the f-word at Pun Salad. But my confidence that I can fulfill that hope is low.

But Mr. Ramirez went a different direction:

And our weekly look at how the punters are punting:

So another good week for Bone Spurs. Just as an interesting sidelight, perhaps meaning nothing: Trump's betting-odds lead over Kamala is roughly similar to Biden's lead over Trump at this point in 2020.

And the usual brief reminders of how screwed we are:

• Hope you're wearing your waders. Veronique de Rugy asks the musical question: Will Trump or Harris Drain the Swamp, or Invite You In?

  When Donald Trump campaigned for president in 2016, one of his most memorable and oft-repeated promises was to "drain the swamp" in Washington, D.C. This catchy phrase resonated with millions of Americans who felt alienated from their government and frustrated with political favors. However, eight years later, both the Harris and Trump campaigns are making it clear that their candidate doesn't want to drain the swamp. They'd like more of us to jump in.

  Examples, unfortunately, abound.

• They couldn't be clearer. Christian Britschgi notes the obvious: Trump, Harris Ads Make Clear They Won't Be Cutting Government.

  The 2024 presidential election campaign is mercifully in its final weeks, and the two major party candidates are busy making their closing arguments to voters. Judging by the messaging that their aligned PACs are prioritizing, neither former President Donald Trump nor Vice President Kamala Harris has any interest in winning over small government supporters.

  Britschgi notes that both candidates "are still explicitly presenting an every day 'us' versus an evil 'them.'" Which is pretty tiresome at this point.

• Oh, yeah, there's one more problem. And Dan McLaughlin points it out: Trump and Harris Both Threaten the Constitution. (This month's final "gifted" NR link to you, dear reader.)

  The Constitution is on the ballot November 5, but with more enemies than friends. Worse, as happened dramatically after 2020 and less vividly after 2016, it may be menaced not only by the winners of the election, but by the losers.

  The 235-year rule of the written Constitution is unprecedented in world history. Our constitutional order has bequeathed us the freest and most prosperous society mankind has ever known. It has surmounted every open challenge. Yet many of its great features have been eviscerated — not by bouts of insurrection or spasms of tyranny, but by erosion, innovation, and institutional decay.

  Living constitutionalism, the administrative state, governance by executive order, federal subsidies that control the states, the effective death of impeachment as a remedy for executive-branch wrongdoing, and crisis budgeting that defangs the congressional power of the purse: Each of these has undermined the original design of distinct federal and state power bases, effective checks and balances, popular accountability, and written law.

  And just as a reminder, if you need one:

  Kamala Harris claimed today she is “in favor of the Second Amendment,” but she laughed in Joe Biden’s face in 2019 when he noted that presidents lack the constitutional authority to take executive action to ban “assault weapons.” pic.twitter.com/qoXdDsynnx

  — NRA (@NRA) September 26, 2024

  That's back when Biden was pretending to hew to Constitutional limits. Good times, now long gone.

• Both sides are also increasingly creepy. Liz Wolfe looks at recent remarks from Tucker Carlson: U.S. Is a ‘Bad Little Girl’ and Trump Is Our Daddy Disciplinarian.

  "If you allow people to get away with things that are completely over the top and outrageous…and you do nothing about it…you're going to get more of it," he began, analogizing the Trump-America relationship to that of a father and his misbehaving children.

  "There has to be a point at which Dad comes home," he continued. "Yeah, that's right. Dad comes home, and he's pissed. Dad is pissed. He's not vengeful. He loves his children, disobedient as they may be. He loves them because they're his children."

  "Get to your room right now, and think about what you did! And when Dad gets home, you know what he says? 'You've been a bad girl. You've been a bad little girl, and you're getting a vigorous spanking right now. And no, it's not gonna hurt me more than it hurts you. No, it's not. I'm not gonna lie. It's gonna hurt you a lot more than it hurts me. And you earned this. You're getting a vigorous spanking because you've been a bad girl. And it has to be this way.'"

  And Wolfe is a both-sides lady, observing how cringe-inducing this is:

  Come on, we all know there’s only one VP candidate you would be excited to see at the family gathering — and he’s the one who will actually protect IVF, abortion access, or LGBTQ+ rights.
  
  Voters know who is fighting for them and who is just creeping them out. pic.twitter.com/viWahTwtIk

  — Planned Parenthood Action (@PPact) October 1, 2024

  It needs to be said, and she says it:

  America's not some naughty little girl, J.D. Vance isn't a creepy uncle, Tim Walz isn't a lovable Carhartt dad, Kamala's not mother (or a "baddie"), and Donald Trump isn't daddy, the disciplinarian. America's still the freest, richest, most prosperous place on Earth, not because of politicians who try to convince us they're parental figures but despite them.

• She may have burned a blunt beforehand. Jeffrey Blehar observes the wreckage: Harris Finally Crashes and Burns on CNN.

  The engines have flared out right at the end of the flight. The tank is out of gas. The weather is choppy, the navigation system completely unreliable, and the best guess is that you’re still short of the runway. (Oh, and the captain had a stroke while in the cockpit a few hours ago, leaving only a flight attendant as the pilot. She refuses to read the instruction manual or listen to the passengers.) Yes, it’s easy enough to spin up lovingly bespoke metaphors for how the Harris campaign is handling the late stages of the 2024 race — a race they very much could still win, I must always emphasize — but I’ll conclude this one by saying that if last night’s Kamala Harris CNN town hall (with Anderson Cooper hosting in the Philadelphia suburbs) is any indication, the plane may already be disintegrating in midair, before it even hits the ground.

  You may have noticed that I’ve had a decidedly muted reaction to Harris’s other recent “serious” media interviews, whether Bret Baier at Fox News or Bill Whitaker on 60 Minutes, in the sense that while Harris was predictably awful in both sit-downs (almost relentlessly so), she was boring and unrevelatory in her awfulness. In other words, we learned nothing new about the depths to which she is capable of sinking performatively that we didn’t already know. They were water-treading exercises for the most part.

  Last night’s CNN town hall, on the other hand, was memorably bad. This is the moment her campaign dreaded, the moment when the fundamental emptiness and inadequacy of their candidate was revealed for all the world to see without helpful edits or someone to bail her out. There Harris stood exposed — with an unpersuaded audience and a moderator in Cooper who handled his task without showing any particular solicitude for her electoral fortunes — and she withered in the spotlight. (As Dylan might have said, “Even the vice president of the United States sometimes must have to stand naked.”) There are moments from this event — many moments, oh so terribly many of them — that will haunt Harris in retirement forever should she lose, the sorts of ghastly stammering failures destined to go into YouTube clip reels ten years later explaining “How We Got Here.” (And if she wins? All is not forgiven, merely set aside — until the reality of her as president for four years takes its toll on Democratic fortunes, which will be quickly.)

  That's not a gifted link, so … subscribe, peasant!

• But can she really be… Hayden Daniel answers my question before I finish asking: Yes, Kamala Harris Really Is That Stupid. It is a rebuttal, of sorts, to Jim Geraghty's claim that Kamala's intellect is being misunderestimated.

  She might actually be one of the most intellectually feeble people to seek the presidency. When she tried to claim the nomination on her own, in 2020, she ran one of the most amateurish campaigns in a primary already chocked full of imbeciles. She was so hopelessly inept as the “border czar” that the propaganda press tried to memory-hole the fact that she held the position.

  On the campaign trail in 2024, she has become the queen of word salads and non-answers, only capable of parroting the most vapid talking points. None of her nonsensical words of “wisdom” ring more hollow than the oft-repeated “What can be, unburdened by what has been.” Truly the mantra of mental midgets everywhere.

  Most recently, she’s now accused of multiple instances of plagiarism, including in congressional testimony — truly a signifier of a sharp and adept mind.

  I'm on Team Nitwit myself.

• I believe it's somewhere the sun don't shine. Eric Boehm wonders, idly and fruitlessly: Where Is Trump's Plan To Cut Spending?

  During a town hall event at a barbershop in the Bronx—yes, really—this week, former President Donald Trump was asked about the possibility of eliminating the federal income tax.

  How he answered revealed something about how Trump understands fiscal policy—and something important about what he doesn't, despite having spent nine years either campaigning for the president or sitting in the White House.

  The question is a bit of a random one for a presidential candidate to field, but it's a sensible thing to ask since Trump has spent months promising to exempt various types of income—including tips and Social Security payments—from federal income tax. So why not just eliminate the federal income tax altogether?

  The question is a bit of a random one for a presidential candidate to field, but it's a sensible thing to ask since Trump has spent months promising to exempt various types of income—including tips and Social Security payments—from federal income tax. So why not just eliminate the federal income tax altogether?

  Boehm notes "federal spending in the 1890s averaged around 3 percent of gross domestic product (GDP)."

  And in the recently-completed FY2024, spending was 24.9% of GDP.

  So, yeah, Donald: how you gonna do that?

Eugene Volokh's headline is yawn-inducing: Massive Campaign of Online Insults Can Lead to Intentional Infliction of Emotional Distress Liability. But I found myself reading on and got hooked:

There's more of course, but… "paranormal romance fiction"? Hoo boy.

So never mind the legal shenanigans! From Tera Shanley's "About" page at Amazon:

Tera Shanley writes in sub-genres that stretch from Paranormal Romance, to Historic Western Romance, to Dystopian (zombie) Romance. The common theme? She loves love! A self-proclaimed bookworm, she was raised in small town Texas and could often be found decorating a table at the local library. Any spare time is dedicated to chocolate licking, rifle slinging, friend hugging, and the great outdoors. For more information about Tera and her work, visit www.terashanley.com.

That last address fails to resolve, perhaps due to the issues underlying the lawsuit.

Her pseudonym, T.S. Joyce, also has an "About" page, it's somewhat more lurid:

I strongly suspect there will be zero gents fastening up their girdles. But what do I know? We've made one of her works our Amazon Product du Jour, because … well, holy cow.

Ms. Hutchings' pseudonyms are also currently Amazon-active: Terry Bolryder and Domino Savage.

Many of the ladies' works at Amazon have samples available, in case you want to make sure they hold no interest for you.

Also of note:

• I bet you were wondering whether Hurricane Helene justified giving North Carolina's electoral votes to Trump. Reason's Eric Boehm has your answer, friend: No, Hurricane Helene Does Not Justify Giving North Carolina's Electoral Votes to Trump.

  With recovery efforts from widespread flooding ongoing across much of western North Carolina in the wake of Hurricane Helene, a Republican congressman has suggested that it "makes a lot of sense" to effectively cancel the presidential election in the state and declare Donald Trump the winner.

  It doesn't, and the state Legislature does not actually have that power.

  Politico reports that Rep. Andy Harris (R–Md.) said Thursday that North Carolina state lawmakers should be prepared to override the will of the voters to avoid disenfranchising voters in flood-stricken areas who might have been unable to cast a ballot.

  But there might be D-side partisan shenanigans going on in the Tarheel State as well. Breccan F. Thies at the Federalist reports: Dems In NC's Helene Disaster Area Block Early Voting Locations.

  The havoc wrought by Hurricane Helene in western North Carolina brought disaster to homes and families, but that has not stopped Democrats from blocking the approval of emergency early voting sites in the heavily Republican area. The refusal to act forced the GOP-led state legislature to intervene.

  Democrat-run local elections boards in McDowell and Henderson counties have failed to approve additional early voting sites in the disaster-stricken area, despite increasing calls for more access to voting. Both counties voted for Donald Trump in 2020.

  So it's a mess. And if people do manage to cast their ballot, they'll find: yeesh, Kamala and Trump.

• And for more partisan shenanigans…A the Washington Free Beacon reports: 'Not a Friend to Democracy': Harris Campaign Ramps Up Attacks on Jill Stein Amid Polling Slide.

  The Harris-Walz campaign is circulating opposition research targeting Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein and urging climate-focused voters to support Vice President Kamala Harris as former president Donald Trump gains in the polls, the Washington Free Beacon has learned.

  Speaking on a climate-focused call with supporters and canvassers this week, Harris campaign climate engagement director Camila Thorndike said Harris was a true "climate champion" who would "defend the planet" from "fossil fuel oligarchs" while Stein "pretends to be a progressive advocate."

  Jill's on the ballot here in New Hampshire, and wouldn't it be funny if Trump beat Kamala because too many voters picked Jill instead?

• Or as your average demagogue would ask: what's their fair share? Jeffrey Miron wonders (but not for long): What is the Right Corporate Tax Rate?

  The 2017 Tax and Jobs Cut Act reduced the tax rate on corporate income from 35% to 21%. Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris wants to raise the rate to 28%, arguing it would be “fairer” and help fund public services. In contrast, Republican candidate Donald Trump, who signed the 2017 Act, now advocates for a 15% corporate tax rate for U.S. based manufacturers, calling it “the centerpiece of his plan for a manufacturing renaissance.”

  Both approaches are way off: the right corporate tax rate is 0%.

  Miron points out the negatives of the corporate income tax: (1) it lowers the return to capital "thus reducing economic growth"; (2) it "perpetuates the [mistaken] idea that something other than people can pay taxes"; (3) it "makes it harder for investors to understand corporate accounts"; (4) it requires "governments to distinguish between for-profit (taxable) and non-profit (non-taxable) entities", a distinction loaded with arbitrariness and the potential for corruption.

  Fun fact: as a source of federal government revenue, the corporate income tax is relatively small: 6% of the total. It wouldn't be easy to make up elsewhere, either by raising other taxes or by cutting spending, but given the amount of inefficiency and market distortion involved, it would be well worth abolishing it.

Your ballot, explained. pic.twitter.com/cmsqS3ZoYD

— Jeff Maurer (@JeffMightBWrong) October 24, 2024

Click over for the full-size complete version. I laughed, which means you will too.

Also of note:

• The other F-word. Ann Althouse knows how to grab my attention. Twice this morning, see below. But here's the first grab: Everyone's talking about whether Trump meets "the definition of a fascist," after John Kelly "read aloud a definition of fascism that he had found online."

  I saw that Kamala Harris, doing a town hall on CNN last night, "agreed" that Trump meets "the definition of a fascist," but she did not, herself, define "fascist," so I wondered what she was doing, embracing a conclusion, calling names. I live in a city where you can get called a "fascist" for venturing that Justice Scalia wrote a well-reasoned opinion. Among left-wingers, the definition of "fascist" is: right-wing. It's a shibboleth. To call someone a "fascist" is to identify yourself as on the left.

  That's pretty good, even if you're hazy on exactly what a shibboleth is.

  I will deploy my usual snip from George Orwell's "Politics and the English Language"

  The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable’.

  But the last time I ranted about this, I mentioned another Orwell (very short) essay, "What is Fascism?". (Hosted at 'orwell.ru', so who knows how long that will last?) Some relevant paragraphs:

  It will be seen that, as used, the word ‘Fascism’ is almost entirely meaningless. In conversation, of course, it is used even more wildly than in print. I have heard it applied to farmers, shopkeepers, Social Credit, corporal punishment, fox-hunting, bull-fighting, the 1922 Committee, the 1941 Committee, Kipling, Gandhi, Chiang Kai-Shek, homosexuality, Priestley's broadcasts, Youth Hostels, astrology, women, dogs and I do not know what else.

  Yet underneath all this mess there does lie a kind of buried meaning. To begin with, it is clear that there are very great differences, some of them easy to point out and not easy to explain away, between the régimes called Fascist and those called democratic. Secondly, if ‘Fascist’ means ‘in sympathy with Hitler’, some of the accusations I have listed above are obviously very much more justified than others. Thirdly, even the people who recklessly fling the word ‘Fascist’ in every direction attach at any rate an emotional significance to it. By ‘Fascism’ they mean, roughly speaking, something cruel, unscrupulous, arrogant, obscurantist, anti-liberal and anti-working-class. Except for the relatively small number of Fascist sympathizers, almost any English person would accept ‘bully’ as a synonym for ‘Fascist’. That is about as near to a definition as this much-abused word has come.

  But Fascism is also a political and economic system. Why, then, cannot we have a clear and generally accepted definition of it? Alas! we shall not get one — not yet, anyway. To say why would take too long, but basically it is because it is impossible to define Fascism satisfactorily without making admissions which neither the Fascists themselves, nor the Conservatives, nor Socialists of any colour, are willing to make. All one can do for the moment is to use the word with a certain amount of circumspection and not, as is usually done, degrade it to the level of a swearword.

  You have to admit: there are words there that could apply to Trump.

• You thought the pandering was over? Oh, dear, no. The NR editors consider the latest: The October Bribe.

  If you can’t beat ’em, bribe ’em. With fewer than two weeks to go in the 2024 presidential election, and just three months left of Joe Biden’s presidency, the Biden-Harris administration has announced yet another round of student-loan “forgiveness.” Last week, the White House divulged that $4.5 billion of loans taken out by public-sector workers would be paid for by taxpayers. This week, the White House granted yet another six-month repayment freeze for up to 8 million borrowers. In total, the Biden-Harris administration has now spent $175 billion transferring or delaying student debt. Had the federal courts not stopped their other schemes, that number would have been on course to hit half a trillion.

  That the administration is cramming in one final jubilee is of a piece with how it has approached this project from the start. Understanding that Congress would never have consented to spend that much public money in this manner, the White House has sought at every point to ensure that its conduct was excluded from the customary constitutional processes. It has rewritten unrelated statutes on the fly, declared its actions to be unreviewable in the courts, gamed the rulemaking process to serve its own ends, and, now, attempted to bind its successor to its will. After his initial plan was struck down by the Supreme Court, Biden announced that he would find another way of achieving the same end, whatever it took. He has done so, separation of powers be damned.

  Evading Congress and the courts to arrogate power in the executive? Sounds pretty f**cist!

• None dare call it book-banning. At the Free Press, Francesca Block describes the latest effort to consign a book to the Memory Hole: Ad for Israel Book Canceled Because ‘Customers Might Complain’.

  A prominent trade publication refused to advertise a new book because it feared the word Israel in its title might upset its audience, The Free Press has learned.

  This month Melanie Notkin, an author and communications consultant, tried to place an advertisement for Bernard-Henri Lévy’s new book, Israel Alone, in Shelf Awareness, a trade publication for publishing professionals including booksellers and librarians. The book, published in the U.S. last month by Post Hill Press imprint Wicked Son, is about Lévy’s experiences in Israel post–October 7, 2023.

  On October 9, a representative from Shelf Awareness told Notkin her ad was approved for the price of $2,300, and would run on November 1 in its weekly newsletter, which is sent to more than 600,000 readers.

  But two days later, Matt Baldacci, the publisher for Shelf Awareness, emailed Notkin to tell her the magazine was “canceling” it. When Notkin asked why, Baldacci agreed to speak to her over the phone that same day.

  In audio of that phone call exclusively obtained by The Free Press, Baldacci told Notkin the ad was rejected because the book would cause too much controversy. “Why did we cancel the ad?” Baldacci said to Notkin. “We have a responsibility to our 250 independent bookstore partners, and it’s our feeling that running that ad in their publications, for some of those partners, is going to cause them trouble that they haven’t asked for and don’t wish to have.”

  I think I'll ask the Portsmouth Public Library to get this.

• There's a local angle… in Jonah Goldberg's recent G-File, titled: Down From Libertarianism. Generally, it's about "the narcissism of small differences"; inter-ideological spats can be pretty nasty, no matter if you're talking about conservatives, progressives, liberal, or…

  As I said, there are many, many, rooms in the mansion of libertarianism. This intellectual diversity is uniquely interesting because many libertarians deny this, claiming that libertarianism is a clear and perfectly consistent philosophy. In 2001 I got into a spat with Harry Browne, the 2000 Libertarian Party presidential candidate, on this very point. Browne argued that libertarians are “consistently on one side on every issue,” which is a weird thing to say for someone who spent so much time with libertarians.

  There are left-libertarians and right-libertarians. There are libertarians who call themselves conservatives and there are conservatives who call themselves libertarians. The gang at Reason is not the same kind of libertarian crowd as the one at the Mises Institute. Even among the subgroups there are divisions. I guarantee that the good folks at Cato have arguments in the lunchroom from time to time. Many people think Randians are libertarians, but Ayn Rand emphatically didn’t—and even if many Randians identify as libertarian, their leaders often take after their founding mother and score poorly on “Plays well with others.” And Friedrich Hayek, often considered the patron saint of libertarianism, did not call himself one (he was a lovable “Old Whig”). Meanwhile, the Libertarian Party of New Hampshire is a dumpster fire that, from what I can tell, no decent libertarian wants to be associated with. Its Twitter account recently posted, “Anyone who murders Kamala Harris would be an American hero.” Hell, there’s been a decades-long simmering libertarian civil war over … the Civil War.

  I've bolded the local angle, and I was bold enough to comment:

  As a mostly-libertarian New Hampshire resident, I consider this insulting to dumpster fires. At least dumpster fires eventually go out.

  (I also find myself saying "SMALL L" in front of "libertarian" louder and louder these days.)

  Anyway, Goldberg's essay makes some good points.

• This is Pun Salad, so… Ann Altouse's second attention-calling post: "State media has... suggested the new campaign intends to target even benign-sounding puns". And that state is (surprise!) not California, but China. She points to a Guardian article about it: China cracks down on ‘uncivilised’ online puns used to discuss sensitive topics.

  State media has also suggested the new campaign intends to target even benign-sounding puns, giving as an example the phrase “rainy girl without melons” (yǔ nǚ wú guā) which is often used in place of “it’s none of your business” (yǔ nǐ wú guan).

  The People’s Daily noted the quick turnover for online memes, and urged authorities and social media platforms to not allow “obviously ambiguous” new words to spread quickly without “rectification”.

  “A wave of bad jokes will have disappeared, and a new wave of bad jokes may be on the way,” it wrote.

  "None of your business." Anyone ask Tim Walz for a comment?

Sabine Hossenfelder brings her quirky sense of humor and her German accent to her look at that AI-debunking Apple study we discussed a few days back: AI Can’t Reason. Should It Drive Cars?.

At my age, I am almost sure: (1) an AI could drive safer than I can; (2) I don't want pineapple on my pizza.

Also of note:

• It's like they have forgotten about the boy who cried wolf. Maybe they don't teach that in schools any more. Heather Mac Donald checks out the Prophets of Doom.

  A quiz: Who said the following, and which speaker did the New York Times deem dark and demagogic?

  “We’re not going to have a country” if my opponent wins.

  My opponent is “a threat to our democracy and fundamental freedoms.”

  “There is one existential threat:” my opponent.

  “The only existential threat to humanity is climate change, and [my opponent] didn’t do a damn thing about it.”

  The 2024 presidential election “might carry near-existential stakes.”

  Blacks and Hispanics “have to wake up knowing that they can lose their very life in the course of just living their life. . . . [they] have to worry about whether their sons or daughters will come home after a grocery store run or just walking down the street or driving their car or playing in the park or just sleeping at home.”

  “America must heed this warning”: my opponent is a “fascist.”

  “No one has ever been as dangerous to this country” as my opponent.

  “Folks don’t care if tanks roll by on the way to the store as long as the milk doesn’t cost more than 4 years ago.”

  Answer key: The first quote is from Donald Trump. The rest are from: Kamala Harris, Joe Biden, Joe Biden, the New York Times, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Kamala Harris, and a New York Times reader.

  Yet the Times accuses Trump alone of making “fear an animating force” in his campaigns, of using “fear as a tool” to stir up his base, and of taking “doomsday prophesying to a new extreme.” Trump alone sends the “dark, apocalyptic” message: “Be Afraid!” according to the Times. By contrast, Harris, Biden, and the Times are merely telling the truth about the existential threat that is Trump—and, in the case of Biden’s comments about black parents, about the existential threat that police pose to blacks.

  Joe Biden is old enough to have heard about the boy who cried wolf, but in his dotage he's apparently turned the kid into the hero of the fable.

• Old man rambles incoherently in Concord. That's my alternate headline for James Freeman's WSJ column; instead, he went with Biden Still Speaking in Public.

  Remember the guy whose cognitive challenges were so great that a Justice Department special counsel said he could not be successfully prosecuted despite evidence of willfully violating the law? It’s the same guy the Democratic Party considered so impaired that he was denied the presidential nomination even after winning every party primary and caucus except the one in American Samoa. Believe it or not, he’s still the president of the United States and he continues to accept public speaking invitations, of all things. Joe Biden’s comments in New Hampshire this week neatly encapsulate the abuse of power during his term—abuse that Vice President Kamala Harris still insists on tolerating if not abetting. In an NBC interview on Tuesday, Ms. Harris turned down yet another opportunity to acknowledge Mr. Biden’s cognitive issues and his administration’s abuse of the justice system.

  And there's an additional angle about a couple of his local apparatchik chicks:

  New Hampshire’s two Democratic U.S. senators, Maggie Hassan and Jeanne Shaheen, also don’t seem inclined to put country over party.

  Freeman notes the tweets from Maggie and Jeanne "contain messages welcoming Mr. Biden to the Granite State but no condemnations of his remarks."

• To the extent that anything can be said to be on his mind. Andrew C. McCarthy notes that Locking Up Trump Has Been on Biden’s Mind for a Long Time. (Gifted link!)

  On Noah’s excellent piece about President Biden’s assertion that “we’ve got to lock him up” in reference to Donald Trump, I would simply add that this is not the first time the president has let slip his connection to the Democratic lawfare efforts, led by Biden’s own Justice Department, to get his Republican opponent — now his vice president’s Republican opponent — locked up.

  During Trump’s state criminal trial in Manhattan, I wrote about the various ways in which the president was complicit in the lawfare campaign. In the column, I noted

  this gem buried in a February 10 Politico report: Biden has “grumbled to aides and advisers that had [Attorney General Merrick] Garland moved sooner in his investigation into former President Donald Trump’s election interference, a trial may already be underway or even have concluded.” I believe this is why Smith — who could have pushed hard for a relatively swift trial in Florida on a very strong obstruction case against Trump regarding the Mar-a-Lago documents — brought such a legally dubious case against Trump in Washington: Biden and Democrats have made the Capitol riot central to their 2024 campaign, so Smith was under great pressure to bring whatever related charges he could theorize.

  It was always nonsense for the Biden-Harris administration, Democrats, and their media allies to claim that Biden was sealed off from the Trump prosecutions. At least in their federal iterations (Smith’s two cases), these prosecutions could not proceed unless Biden approved of them. They are brought under executive power, which he holds exclusively.

  Even when he was compos mentis, Joe's been a vengeful, bitter man.

• If you're too poor to buy condoms, you probably can't afford a baby either. Elizabeth Nolan Brown covers the latest D-side pander: Biden and Harris Propose 'Free' Condoms Covered by Insurance.

  A new proposal from the Biden administration would require health insurance companies to fully cover the costs of over-the-counter birth control, including condoms. The proposal represents "the largest expansion of contraception coverage in more than a decade," said Vice President and 2024 presidential candidate Kamala Harris in a statement.

  "This new action would help ensure that millions of women with private health insurance can access the no-cost contraception they need," President Joe Biden said.

  I'm sorry, it's now the woman's job to buy condoms? When did that happen?

• If you have to yell at someone, might as well be him. Jeff Maurer hits on a possible tactic to shore up Kamala: Maybe if I Yell at Nate Silver More, Harris Will Win.

  The news cycle in these critical days before the election tends to follow a pattern. Each day, Nate Silver’s election forecast model updates. Shortly thereafter, partisans for whichever side received bad news get on social media and bombard Nate with so much invective you’d think that he had karate kicked Dolly Parton. This complaining has become an election season tradition, much like election-themed Halloween costumes or giving a campaign your ex’s phone number so that they bug them, not you.

  Personally, I want Harris to win. I think she’s by far the better choice, but Nate’s model doesn’t agree: As I write this, it gives Trump a 53-47 edge. I find that unbelievable – didn’t the model see the debate? Doesn’t it remember January 6? I’ve got some Huffington Post articles that I could send the model if it’s on the fence, because this is just baffling – why doesn’t Nate’s mechanical processor of polling data see the world like I do? And how much do I need to yell at this computer to get it to come around?

  To be clear: I am already yelling at the computer a lot. When the model barely moved after Harris chose Walz as VP, I tweeted “UMMM…HELLLLO??? 👇👇👇” with a link to a SurveyMonkey poll showing Harris up by eight points nationally. I tweet something like that in response to the model pretty much every day – I’ll write “WRONG MUCH??? 😂” or “🙄🙄🙄” or “UN…FREAKING…REAL ¯\_(ツ)_/¯”, because…well, come on. The model feels so wrong! Literally no one I know is voting for Trump – not my neighbors here in DC, not friends from grad school, or any of my colleagues in the late-night comedy writing world! Is that factored into your model, Nate? It must not be, because I just named like 50 people, but your forecast shows almost half the country voting for Trump!

  I'm pretty sure Nate's model fails to take into account cranky retired bloggers with some minor skills in Linux system administration, Perl, and dog-walking.

Walter Block asks the musical question: What Makes Something a Monopoly?

Block's article is insightful, and a remedy to a lot of loose talk from politicians, journalists, and educators.

And—gee—there sure are lots of versions of Monopoly out there. Just search for "Monopoly" at Amazon if you need your eyes opened to the wonders of the free market. Imagine the small army of artists and developers Hasbro employs simply to churn out new editions of their game.

Not a job I'd want, though. ("You need a version based on Wicked by … next week!? OK, boss, just let me call my wife and tell her I won't be home for a few days.")

Also of note:

• The future is … over there? Bryan Caplan is impressed by his recent visit: Reflections on United Arab Emirates. A couple of his observations:

  1. Per-capita, UAE is the most amazing country I’ve ever seen. With a population about the size of Austria’s, they have virtually every consumer product you can imagine (and many you haven’t) in abundance. In cleanliness and crime, UAE rivals Japan. While the official language is Arabic, a local told me that English is far more useful. And while the country’s official religion is Islam, the country looks very secular. I saw not the slightest sign of Islamist fanaticism.

  2. The key ingredient of Emirati success: 88% of UAE’s population is foreign-born. That’s the highest share of any country on Earth. Why is the share so high? Because UAE is closer to open borders than any other country on Earth. They don’t just welcome petroleum engineers and architects. They welcome drivers, maids, janitors, waiters, and clerks. They don’t just welcome Europeans and East Asians. They welcome South Asians, Pacific Islanders, North Africans, and plenty of sub-Saharan Africans, too. I chatted with workers from both Zimbabwe and Sierra Leone. Yes, would-be migrant workers face a government approval process, so the border is not 100% open. But if you want to work hard to make a better life for yourself, your prospects of landing a work visa are decent no matter how humble your credentials.

  And they have the Burj Khalifa, tallest building in the world, Pic at link.

• Noticed that things are getting a little crazy? Noah Rothman explains why: If You’re Not Talking Like a Lunatic, You’re Losing.

  It’s crunch time, America. The days when fundraising totals mattered are behind us. The organizational apparatus that will put one or the other candidate in the White House is in place. The universe of genuinely persuadable voters is negligible. The real work of winning this election is in the campaigns’ hands. All that’s left for average political observers to do is sit back and count the votes on Election Day. Right?

  Wrong! Don’t let anyone tell you that your only contribution to your candidate’s electoral prospects is your own measly vote. Now is the time when you are called upon to become obnoxious. Those who are sufficiently committed to the cause understand that displays of unrelenting bombast and the kind of cynicism reserved primarily for staffers on the campaigns’ payroll can meaningfully alter the trajectory of political events. Your job, from now until Election Day, is to make yourself as off-putting as possible.

  That imperative compels you to take drastic measures. Do your interlocutors on social media seem unenthusiastic to cast their ballot for Donald Trump? The only course available to those who “know what time it is” is to bombard them with shoddy memes until they change their minds. Overwhelm them with the compelling logical power of your certainty that Kamala Harris never worked a day at McDonald’s. If that doesn’t work, demand from them proof that Harris does not owe her political career to her willingness to provide transactional physical favors to the powerful men in her life.

  We are sometimes chided to "get out of your bubble", but if you've chosen your bubble wisely, you can avoid a lot of derangement.

• Who do you trust on crime? I trust Jacob Sullum for unbiased evaluation of the evidence. He looks at the stats here: The FBI's Quiet Revision of Its 2022 Crime Numbers Adds Fuel to an Argument Between Harris and Trump.

  Since the beginning of this year's abbreviated presidential campaign, former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris have told different stories about crime trends during the Biden administration. As the Trump campaign tells it, "homicides are skyrocketing," and violent crime has risen dramatically since Trump left office.

  While the first claim is inconsistent with data from multiple sources, the second claim finds support in the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), which does not cover homicides but tracks other kinds of violent offenses, whether or not they were reported to police. The Harris campaign, by contrast, prefers the FBI's numbers, which reflect only reported crimes. Judging from those numbers, Harris says, "Americans are safer now than when we took office."

  The latter narrative took a hit recently when the FBI quietly revised its 2022 numbers, which initially indicated a 2.1 percent drop in violent crime. Economist John R. Lott Jr., president of the Crime Prevention Research Center, found that the revised numbers indicate a 4.5 percent rise in the reported violent crime rate, which you can see in this FBI Excel file. Last month, the FBI estimated a 3 percent drop in reported violent crime between 2022 and 2023, which Lott says would have been half as large but for the change in the 2022 numbers.

  Sullum digs through the data gathered by multiple sources, and concludes that Trump's "skyrocketing" homicide claim is fact-free. But:

  In addition to the question of what is happening now with homicides (which have fallen substantially since 2020, according to several sources) and violent crime generally (which likewise seems to be falling), there is the question of how much credit or blame any given president should get for these trends. Since crime control is mainly a state and local function, it would be unfair to hold Trump responsible for the 2020 surge in reported violent crime. But by the same token, it is implausible to suggest that the current president (let alone his vice president) is responsible for the 2022 surge in violent victimizations recorded by the NCVS.

  By the way, my own state recently got ranked as the second-safest state in the US. (This, despite being ranked #42 for "Workplace Safety". Everything else is outstanding.)

• Is it even round? Martin Gurri writes on The World According to Kamala Harris. Some predictions for a Harris Administration future:

  The world according to Harris is a fog-bound, incomprehensible place. Any action, any step forward, may lead to danger—or worse, political failure. The logic of such a world elevates paralysis to the highest virtue. Potential threats must be ignored or downplayed. Burning crises will be defused through a Zen-like passivity. Words of great magic power are to be uttered in difficult times: They make inaction appear like action and disaster look like success. Echoed in transnational organizations—NATO, the EU, the U.N.—these incantations, though meaningless in themselves, take on the aspect of a second nature, an agreed-upon reality.

  Ukraine stands for democracy, which is at an inflection point, so there must be no ceasefire—but neither will there be enough military assistance given to defeat Putin’s legions. Should Ukraine go under, Harris will give voice to the outrage of that magical entity, the “international community”—a most satisfying exercise.

  Israel will be supported materially like an ally but attacked rhetorically like an irreconcilable enemy. While the Trump-adjacent Netanyahu clings to office, any controversial incident can trigger a permanent rupture. Magic words like “ceasefire” and “two-state solution,” which change nothing on the ground, will mimic real policy in the region.

  Hey, but at least there will be plenty of abortions here at home.

• Democrats should have listened to him. Kevin D. Williamson tried to warn them: It Didn’t Have to Be Kamala Harris.

  It’s feeling pretty Trumpy out there, isn’t it?

  You can tell that Donald Trump’s campaign thinks he is winning from the fact that his people aren’t doing very much to soften the ground for a fresh round of “We wuz robbed!” horse pucky. They’re not doing precisely nothing, of course—Marjorie Taylor Greene is out there raving about voting machines again. But one gets the feeling Moscow Madge is working to undermine faith in American institutions on Vladimir Putin’s behalf these days rather than for the sake of Donald Trump—even the tines of a snake’s forked tongue ultimately diverge.

  You can tell that the Harris campaign thinks it’s losing from the vice president’s itinerary. When it comes to Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, Kamala Harris is out there working to build the blue wall and find somebody to pay for it. She has a West Coast progressive’s mental picture of the angry white men of the vast American interior, and so she’s been out there hunting where she imagines the ducks are, bragging about her Glock, appearing on the Howard Stern show and Fox News, while seeking to connect with black men via Charlamagne tha God. If she’d name-checked Wilson Combat or Korth rather than Glock, she might have caused some ears to perk up. If she could figure out how to talk about inflation without sticking her fingers in her ears and saying “Lalalalala I’m not listening to you!” she might have a more credible campaign.

  Here’s a reminder—it didn’t have to be Harris. I’m not quite ready to say “I told you so,” but …

  Didn’t I?

  It's difficult for me to imagine Democrats nominating anyone I'd vote for.

  But it's real easy for me to imagine Democrats nominating someone that would beat Donald Trump "like a rented mule."

My D-party CongressCritter, Chris Pappas, looks to be a shoo-in for re-election in a couple weeks, but he's campaigning anyway. His recent brag of bringing home some pork is a "frequent irritation". And it drew my Frequent Response on Twitter:

The DC Shuffle (a periodic observation): (1) take our tax $; (2) send some of it back; (3) act like they've done us a favor.

— Paul Sand (@punsalad) October 21, 2024

Somewhat longer response: even though it's nonsensical, people tend to have a mystical magical belief that dollars dropped in from Your Federal Government are "free money".

Manchester is not a poor community; if it chose to, via whatever democratic government procedures it follows, it could fund those additional firefighter jobs itself. (Twelve of them, according to the Pappas press release.)

(And, of course, it may have to come up with the cash in the future if those 12 additional firefighters are to be retained.)

And do you think that taxpayer cash went though with none of being scraped off at the federal level? Come on.

Also of note:

• A burning question. I found the answers interesting anyway: How Are Reason Staffers Voting in 2024?

  Peruse the varying rationales. I have to admit, my own preferences were ably represented by the venerable Robert Poole:

  Who will get your vote in the 2024 presidential election? Because Florida is not a swing state this year, I am spared the horrible choice between two unsuitable candidates—both protectionists, both with loony tax ideas, and both ignoring out-of-control peacetime federal spending and the looming national debt disaster. In a number of previous presidential elections, I've voted for the Libertarian candidate. Not this time: I cannot vote for a defense-policy isolationist who mimics Neville Chamberlain's response to Hitler's invasion of other countries. I will write in a qualified candidate, Nikki Haley.

  Well, I probably won't write in Nikki. Right now I'm looking at leaving that line on the ballot blank.

• Despite how they act. Or how they're treated. Kevin D. Williamson alleges: Voters Are Not Babies.

  You, American voter, are not a baby.

  The American voter does not have that excuse—not that anybody would know it from observing him, listening to his absurd and incompatible demands, enduring his temper tantrums. You know the classic case: “I want lots of spending, low taxes, and a balanced budget.” Populism is a way of trying to accommodate that infantile mentality by means of dishonesty: “Of course we can have lots of spending and low taxes without ballooning the debt—we’ll just arrange things so that we spend the money on you rather than on those undeserving people and then put the taxes on those undeserving people rather than on you.”

  Donald Trump’s imbecilic views on tariffs are based on the same refusal to accept inevitable trade-offs as is my hungry infant’s demand for his bottle before it is ready. Trump insists that the tariffs will generate tons of revenue and that they will protect domestic industries from foreign competition, but, of course, only one of those things can be true: If the tariffs are being paid, that means the imports are still coming in, because people are still buying them; if the tariffs succeed in keeping imports off the U.S. market, then they aren’t generating any revenue, because you don’t pay taxes on imports that don’t happen. Trump is too much of an ignoramus and too fundamentally stupid to work through that, but my friend Larry Kudlow doesn’t have that excuse. Kamala Harris doesn’t seem to understand basic economics, but surely she has someone around her—I assume Jamie Dimon has her phone number—to explain that while she says she wants house prices to come down the policies she is pushing would cause them to increase: lower mortgage interest rates and easier access to credit, large subsidies for purchasers, etc.

  Well, it goes on from there, but I have to stop someplace. You want to subscribe to the Dispatch, don't you?

• Not me, Ms. India. But, at After Babel, Freya India notes a disturbance in reality: We Live In Imaginary Worlds.

  There are even entirely imaginary worlds now. Metaverse platforms might “solve the loneliness epidemic”, apparently. VR headsets could end loneliness for seniors. But by far the most depressing invention I’ve seen lately is a new app called SocialAI, a “private social network where you receive millions of AI-generated comments offering feedback, advice & reflections on each post you make.” In other words, your own imaginary ‘X’, with infinite “simulated fictional characters”. You, alone, in a vast social network of AI bots.

  I have to admit that I was oh-so-slightly tempted. Even as I was shaking my head in disbelief. Some of my most brilliant tweets have gone out with zero response! Woe!

  But, yeah, I think I can manage without imaginary followers.

• Ironically, "Chronic" is Kamala's brand of weed. But that is not to what Jim Geraghty is referring in his Morning Jolt, headlined The Chronically Underestimated Kamala Harris.

  It is almost required in conservative circles to insist that Kamala Harris is stupid. And Lord knows, speaking off the cuff, she serves up some stinkers. Since she was handed the Democratic Party’s nomination without any competition, even her prepared remarks have been mostly anodyne fluff. She still regularly demonstrates the political instincts of a lawmaker shaped by the far-left environs of San Francisco, oblivious to what constitutes the political center in swing-state America. In just the past week, she skipped the Al Smith Dinner, told a heckler shouting “Jesus is Lord” that he’s at the wrong rally, and responded to another heckler who accused her of “billions of dollars invested in genocide” in Israel that “what he’s talking about, it’s real, and so that’s not the subject I came to discuss today, but it’s real, and I respect his voice.”

  But there’s this nagging complication — if Kamala Harris is as stupid as her critics claim, why does she have the Democratic presidential nomination and a roughly 50–50 shot of being the first female president in U.S. history? Do you know how many ruthlessly ambitious Democratic men and women have desperately yearned to get where she is? How many smart, tough, shrewd, often underhanded and cold-blooded pols have tried to claw their way up the greasy pole and fallen short?

  Geraghty's column contains a mini-biography of Kamala's career. There's a Clint Eastwood connection:

  The first time Kamala Harris’s name appeared in her hometown newspaper, the San Francisco Chronicle, was in March 1994, when legendary Chronicle columnist Herb Caen wrote about a surprise 60th birthday party for then-speaker Brown. “[Clint] Eastwood spilled champagne on the Speaker’s new steady, Kamala Harris, an Alameda [county] deputy D.A. who is something new in Willie’s love life. She’s a woman, not a girl. And she’s black.”

  Well, I'll be darned. What if he hadn't spilled the champagne? What sort of alternate reality would we have?

• Part 956 of "Why I Stopped Watching CBS News." It's supplied by Jeffrey Blehar, who recounts the latest stonewall. 60 Minutes Officially Announces: Yes We Edited the Harris Interview and We’re Proud of It. He recounts the situation, and his bottom line is excellent:

  Let us set aside the fact that it is in fact of great and newsworthy importance if Kamala Harris cannot answer a simple question about her Middle East policy without backfiring like an old gasoline-powered lawn mower. Let us forgive the obvious exercise of “news judgment” in a manner so clearly prejudicial in favor of Harris, concealing her most glaring weakness — her vacuous incoherence. Let us instead ask why CBS News and 60 Minutes still refuse to release an unedited transcript of their interview with Harris, despite having done so when Catherine Herridge interviewed Trump for them back in 2020. Imagine what it must conceal.

Recently on the book blog:

Confession: I used to be an AI skeptic, impressed with works like What Computers Can't Do by Hubert Dreyfus. I've moved quite a bit toward non-skepticism over the years, especially lately. But this book, by famed AI prophet and general futurist Ray Kurzweil, makes me look like an old skeptical fogy again. He's really "out there", essentially predicting a future entirely different from the present, thanks to unstoppable trends that are growing exponentially.

And he could well be right. He's in the trenches, plugged in to what's going on.

His big prediction, as billed in this book's subtitle, may strike you as creepy: he thinks the big game-changer will be direct connections between human brains and computers, allowing information transfer back and forth between our puny, poky, biological minds and the cloud. Essentially, our consciousness will be backed up to the cloud. And our cyberspace versions will never sleep, and out-think us by many orders of magnitude. And this will happen, Kurzweil thinks, within a few years, perhaps in the 2030s.

So the book is more than slightly mind-blowing, especially for a geezer who sometimes can't remember why he walked into a room.

The book also contains a general examination of trends that show how "life is getting exponentially better". (Kurzweil is a big fan of that word "exponentially".) I only glitched a bit when he delved into trends in education: what evidence does he have for exponential improvement in that field? Well, he concentrates on education spending; indeed, the growth is real there. But he avoids looking at education outcomes; I think it's arguable that those have been poor; we (in the aggregate) just aren't getting any smarter very fast. Or, in some cases (checks newsfeed) at all.

There's also a section boldly titled with the claim: "Renewable energy is approaching complete replacement of fossil fuels." I think it's arguable that might happen someday; but I'm skeptical that it's happening now. I recently read an article by Bjørn Lomborg that credibly claims:

In the last 10 years, solar and wind power use has reached unprecedented levels. However, this increase hasn’t led to a reduction in fossil fuel consumption. In fact, fossil fuel use has grown during this period.

I.e., we are not approaching "complete replacement of fossil fuels."

Generally, I don't think Kurzweil deals with climate change at all. Which means he doesn't discuss my AI-assisted crackpot solution: Artificial Photosynthesis: aided by AI-designed catalysts, acres of tiny supercharged "leaves" will use solar power to pull carbon dioxide out of the air, combine with some water, to make oxygen and your hydrocarbons of choice. Reader, if this works scalably, we can set the global thermostat wherever you want.

He does, however, discuss the "gray goo" problem: scenarios where those AI-designed processes and self-replicating nanobots get out of hand and destroy humanity. Something to consider.

I smiled at a number of places where Kurzweil makes some (seemingly) serious observations. One example: what are the likely outcomes of self-driving autonomous vehicles? Well, they will cause unemployment of long-haul truck drivers. And the ripple effects of that are ominous:

As truck drivers lose their jobs to automation, there will be less need for people to do truckers' payroll and for retail workers in roadside convenience stores and motels. There'll be less need for people to clean truck stop bathrooms, and lower demand for sex workers in the places truckers frequent today.

Please, won't someone think of the sex workers?!

I’m gonna have to spend some time contemplating the possibility that this was not a completely organic event featuring a former president taking a side gig at a Pennsylvania McDonald’s while he’s running for president. https://t.co/kjZeZ4eulM

— Mary Katharine Ham (@mkhammer) October 21, 2024

But the "Rabbit Hole" comes in a pretty close second:

Interesting coincidence pic.twitter.com/tMhtK1P3Nq

— The Rabbit Hole (@TheRabbitHole84) October 17, 2024

Your word for the day is testy. As in, "I get more than a little testy when I notice my 'diverse' news media diet is feeding me the exact same stuff."

Also of note:

• None dare call it election meddling. John Fund notes that Democrats Have a New Electoral-Campaign Partner. And that partner is…

  The federal government under Joe Biden and Kamala Harris is slipshod and dilatory, except in one area of activity — mobilizing federal resources to get more people to vote this November and keep Democrats in power.

  In March 2021 — only six weeks after taking office — President Joe Biden issued Executive Order 14019, “Promoting Access to Voting,” which directed every one of the 400 or so federal agencies to register and mobilize voters — particularly “people of color” and others who, the White House says, face “challenges to exercise their fundamental right to vote.” It further directed the agencies to collaborate with ostensibly nonpartisan nonprofits, which in reality are a politicized stew of progressive, labor, and identity-focused groups.

  A recent report by a coalition of such groups concluded that if federal agencies “integrate a high-quality voter registration opportunity for the people they serve, . . . they could collectively generate an additional 3.5 million voter registration applications per year.”

  A gifted link, so (if your blood pressure is under control) check it out.

  If you think this effort will be carried out without partisan leaning, I have a very nice bridge to sell you.

  I am of the opinion that if people need to be cajoled to vote, maybe they shouldn't. We need more lazy, thoughtless, irresponsible voters? I don't think so.

  The go-to publications on this are Bryan Caplan's The Myth of the Rational Voter and Jason Brennan's Against Democracy

• 

  The World Series is set! I can't cheer for the Yankees, obviously. I might have cheered for the Dodgers, if they had stayed in Brooklyn, where God and Betty Smith intended.

  Which brings me to Jay Nordlinger's plug for his podcast featuring George F. Will. Who drops the following fun fact:

  His classic book from 1990, Men at Work: The Craft of Baseball , “has sold more copies than my other 15 books combined,” he tells me, “which is a great sign of national health.”

  I haven't read it. I should. Amazon link at your right.

• Not there yet. I'm about to finish up Ray Kurzweil's very optimistic book on the future of AI. So I've been on the look out for naysayers, and this Ars Technica article casts some cold water on AI enthusiasts' claims: Apple study exposes deep cracks in LLMs’ “reasoning” capabilities.

  For a while now, companies like OpenAI and Google have been touting advanced "reasoning" capabilities as the next big step in their latest artificial intelligence models. Now, though, a new study from six Apple engineers shows that the mathematical "reasoning" displayed by advanced large language models can be extremely brittle and unreliable in the face of seemingly trivial changes to common benchmark problems.

  The fragility highlighted in these new results helps support previous research suggesting that LLMs use of probabilistic pattern matching is missing the formal understanding of underlying concepts needed for truly reliable mathematical reasoning capabilities. "Current LLMs are not capable of genuine logical reasoning," the researchers hypothesize based on these results. "Instead, they attempt to replicate the reasoning steps observed in their training data."

  One example given is this word problem:

  Oliver picks 44 kiwis on Friday. Then he picks 58 kiwis on Saturday. On Sunday, he picks double the number of kiwis he did on Friday. How many kiwis does Oliver have?

  The researchers added some words that drove the AIs into fallacy:

  Oliver picks 44 kiwis on Friday. Then he picks 58 kiwis on Saturday. On Sunday, he picks double the number of kiwis he did on Friday, but five of them were a bit smaller than average. How many kiwis does Oliver have?

  To be fair they should include a sample of actual human fifth-graders to see how they do.

• Sounds like a good sitcom premise. In that same vein, TechDirt reports: Robot Vacuums That Collect Photos, Videos And Audio Of Users To Train AI Models Start Yelling Obscenities And Chasing Dogs. From an Australian news report of nasty doings in America:

  Multiple people, all based in the US, have reported similar hacking incidents within days of each other.

  On May 24, the same day that Mr Swenson's device was hacked, a Deebot X2 went rogue, and chased its owner's dog around their Los Angeles home.

  The robot was being steered from afar, with abusive comments coming through the speakers.

  Five days later, another device was infiltrated.

  Late at night, an Ecovacs robot in El Paso started spewing racial slurs at its owner until he unplugged it.

  It is unclear how many of the company's devices were hacked in total.

  At least they haven't hacked into self-driving Teslas.

  They haven't have they? Elon?

Recently on the book blog:

This is a Reacher-free collection of twenty short stories from Lee Child. I hardly ever read short stories, but seeing "Lee Child" on the cover is a pretty powerful draw. I won't try to summarize each one. A library book, I read one or two stories a day.

Many, but not all, involve crime or violence in some way. Some are first-person narratives, and the narrators are not all upstanding citizens. Sometimes justice is meted out, other times not. Many are done in a gritty, spare, cynical style familiar from the Reacher tales. But there's one story that's just a single eight-page paragraph.

And many of the stories provide O. Henry-style twists at the end, occasionally in the very last paragraph, or even the last sentence. (I hope I'm accurate about that; I haven't read any O. Henry since, I think, sixth grade.)

I found the stories to be interesting and … well, "enjoyable" would be a stretch for the ones where the bad guys win. And that's the thing about short stories: even if you're not captivated, they're short and will be over soon.

I see that back in 2020, I put this Yuval Levin book on my "things to read" list. After four years, I finally got around to getting a copy, via UNH Interlibrary Loan from Brandeis.

Note the publication date: January 21, 2020. So written pre-COVID. Pre-2020 election. Pre-January 6. Levin's book is about decaying American institutions, and it's difficult to believe that things haven't gotten worse.

My procrastination in reading the book may reflect my previous reports on Yuval Levin books. Snips: "Gosh, I wish I'd liked this book better" (The Fractured Republic) and "Yuval's prose is … not sparkly" (The Great Debate). Sad to report this book continues in that vein.

But let's dig out the good: as a self-identified conservative with minimal libertarian instincts, Levin makes the case that a healthy country requires healthy institutions, and all indications are that American ones are becoming ineffective and mistrusted. Those institutions should be transforming their members into subsuming their quirky individualism into reliable defenders of timeless values and virtue.

He runs through some examples of decay: government, in all its levels and branches; professionals (journalists, doctors, lawyers, …); higher education, naturally; social media, also naturally; family, religion, and our local community organizations.

His recipe for mending is in re-recognizing the values of institutions, returning to their traditional values, even if this means sanding off the individualistic tendencies of the people involved. If he recommended any specific tactics for implementing this rebirth, I missed them.

Levin does not entertain the possibility that what we're seeing isn't irrevocable decay and decline into dreary dystopia, but instead a dynamic evolution, shucking off the old, and bumbling and scraping the pieces into something new and different institutions, perhaps better in some ways. We have a long history of pessimism and doomcrying, it's part of our cultural DNA. And so far we have managed to muddle through.

One example of Levin's prose that furrowed my brow came early on, page 16:

Flourishing happens in the joints of society—and this is where the deepest sort of trouble shows itself.

Joints? So society is like a skeleton, and flourishing happens in the parts that … bend?

Or is in "joints" in the sense of "Of all the gin joints, in all the towns, in all the world, she walks into mine"?

I'm stupid, I guess.

But just about anything would be more believable than Mr. Ramirez's Grim Fairy Tales.

Don't worry, little girl! If Trump wins, when you get older, your tip income will be tax-free!

You may have heard that there's been a pretty big shift in election betting odds over the past week. If you are Donald Trump, it's real, and it's spectacular:

But before you bet a bunch of your crypto cash on Team Orange, you might want to check out this article at the WSJ: A Mystery $30 Million Wave of Pro-Trump Bets Has Moved a Popular Prediction Market

I noticed at least one speculation that those bets originated from Elon Musk, because he's mercurial, and probably could dig $30 million out of his sofa cushions.

I, for one, am keeping my money with those cool-headed algorithmic traders at Fidelity Investments. And trying to ignore stories that imply the markets are just more respectable wagering. Like this in the NYT, wondering Is the Trump Trade Back? (Their answer, I think: maybe yes, maybe no.)

Also of note:

• Warning: Gertrude Stein is quoted. Robert F. Graboyes discusses Kamala Harris’s Oakland Problem.

  There are two curious asymmetries to the contest between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. First (at least among people I encounter) Trump supporters know his behemothic shortcomings well, whereas Harris voters seem barely cognizant of her gaping deficiencies. Second, though this is a coin-toss election, Trump supporters are mostly leaving me alone, whereas Harris supporters—friends, readers, total strangers—are hysterically imploring me to see things their way, insisting that I must, MUST!! scurry to the polls and vote for her. Wondering why Harris can’t get her message across, they emit waves of denial, anger, bargaining, and depression (no acceptance, yet). For these reasons, I offer an essay on Harris, not on Trump.

  Perhaps the most fervent Trump supporter [I know] said a few months back:

  “Oh, I know the guy is a complete asshole. I don’t want to be his friend. I don’t want to go drinking with him. I damned sure don’t want him marrying my sister. But I like what he accomplished as president, and I don’t want Democrats in the White House.”

  Agree or not, that is an intellectually coherent reason to vote for Trump. I could offer the highest respect for a Democrat telling me, similarly:

  “Kamala Harris is the most unaccomplished, inconsequential, uninspiring, irresolute major-party nominee of modern times—and perhaps ever. But Donald Trump is the earthly manifestation of Satan, so I’ll vote for Harris.”

  I’d offer that person a fist-bump, a high-five, and wish of Godspeed. But I haven’t heard a single Harris supporter say anything remotely like that. And, as I argue below, Kamala Harris is the most unaccomplished, inconsequential, uninspiring, irresolute major-party nominee of modern times—and perhaps ever. You may hate Trump, but he has accomplishments, he has long been consequential, he inspires a sizable portion of the American public, and he is self-sure in the extreme.

  Gertrude Stein hailed from Oakland, California and famously said of her hometown, “There’s no there there.” Kamala Harris is also from Oakland, and one could as easily apply Stein’s witticism to Harris.

  Graboyes offers a challenge to his readers: write a paragraph about Kamala describing her praiseworthy characteristics and accomplishments. He tried; he failed.

• Probably not written in response to the Graboyes challenge. Dan McLaughlin writes on Kamala Harris, the Sex Candidate. Yes, she's "vacuous and incapable of basic communication" when speaking off the cuff. But!

  And yet, there’s an exception. When Harris talks about abortion, or same-sex relationships, or a few other culture-war issues — typically those with some connection to sex, although occasionally on matters of race as well — she is much more sure-footed. Not well-informed; her arguments are typically still just a collection of clichés that you’d expect to hear from a college sophomore. But at least she’s clear on where she stands and passionate about the issues. Those are the things that engage her interest. It’s the minute you get into topics like international affairs, the economy, or really anything that involves governing that she gets clearly out of her depth.

  Interesting theory! And a case study in "damning with faint praise."

• Imagine you're giving her a job interview, and you ask… Never mind. Adam B. Coleman answers that question for her: Kamala Harris' greatest weakness is her inauthentic self. He listened to her podcast session with Charlamagne Tha God; he was unimpressed.

  What summed up this interview was how she addressed a concern of a caller who questioned the motives behind sending money abroad in abundance when there are many pressing issues that remain here:

  “We can do it all!” she claimed, unconvincingly.

  If the objective of this interview was to stem the noticeable flow of black voters who are disinterested in the Democratic National Committee’s choice for president, it failed massively.

  When we vote for any given candidate, we want to have faith that what they’re claiming to advocate for won’t go by the wayside once they gain power.

  Far too frequently, black voters have watched Democratic politicians of all colors utilize urban media to say the buzzwords and catchphrases that gain our attention and then disappear for four years without keeping their word.

  Because of this phenomenon, black voters have grown skeptical of who stands before them claiming to have their best interest in mind.

  Harris faces an uphill battle to regain black voters who are at minimum skeptical because she exudes inauthenticity and everything about her appears to be performative.

  Also, as mentioned before: she's a nitwit. (And doesn't the New York Post have editors that know the difference between "disinterested" and "uninterested"?)

• Not exactly reminiscent of Daniel in the lions' den, but … James Taranto summarizes a recent interview: Trump Tangles With the Journal’s Editors.

  “What does The Wall Street Journal know?” Donald Trump sneered on Tuesday at the Economic Club of Chicago. “They’ve been wrong about everything.”

  Two days later, the former president is at the Journal’s New York offices for a meeting with its editorial board. “Well,” he starts, “I’ve had some great support, have great respect for the board, for everybody having to do with The Wall Street Journal. Read it all the time. Don’t get treated well by the editorial board. But I will say on the weaponization of justice, I have been treated very well, and I appreciate it.”

  If this sounds familiar, you probably read the previous Weekend Interview with Mr. Trump, written by my late, great colleague Joseph Rago in November 2015. Then as now, the candidate denounced the Journal publicly a few days before his visit, only to open the meeting by singing our praises. For more than 90 minutes he alternated between bullying bluster and ingratiation. This push-pull wasn’t intimidating at all, but it was curiously disarming. Mr. Trump came across as a human being who craved approval, and that neediness made him—to me at least—more likable than the bombastic celebrity we’d seen on television.

  It's a pretty good article, recommended if you're interested in exploring the components of the mixed bag that is Trump. And if you're worried about his geezerhood:

  Lately Mr. Trump’s detractors have been speculating about his “mental decline.” There’s no sign of such slippage in our Thursday meeting. The 2024 Trump seems more confident and is certainly more knowledgeable about policy than he was in 2015. His discursive style of talking can confuse listeners, but that was equally true nine years ago, and he never appears lost in his thoughts the way President Biden repeatedly did in their June debate.

• Let's not go soft on Trump, though. Kevin D. Williamson observes Trump’s Failing ‘Memory’.

  It had to be “Memory.”

  Donald Trump’s most recent Joe-Biden-on-LSD performance was at a town hall meeting—it was supposed to be a town hall meeting, anyway—in Pennsylvania. He took a few questions and, this being a Trump event, a few fans had to be carried out after fainting. And Trump just stopped talking. “Who the hell wants to hear questions, right?” he asked of nobody in particular.

  And then, the weird scene took a turn for the weirder.

  For the next 40 minutes, Trump swayed on stage, bobbing and dancing a bit, with the crowd glumly filing out while the DJ worked his way through Trump’s by-now-familiar personal playlist: “YMCA” for all those totally normal heterosexual alpha males out there fainting in the audience, “Nothing Compares 2 U,” “An American Trilogy,” etc.

  And, of course, “Memory.”

  “Memory” is a song sung by Grizabella, an old, worn-out cat at the end of her life, who had once been beautiful and glamorous before sinking into a life of destitution and (as Eliot alludes to obliquely) prostitution. It would have been the perfect song for Hillary Rodham Clinton—who once had the kind of glamor politicians have before fading. But you also can see the allure to such a man as Donald Trump. Even though he had always been the “short-fingered vulgarian” of Graydon Carter’s biting estimate, he had been a genuine celebrity, too, and a glamorous cat, in his way. Today, he is a felon, back to hawking Bibles and crypto and other low-rent scams, and—even though he very well may be elected president again—he is one of the most despised men in America and in the world.

  His base of support is a personality cult composed of rubes and marks of precisely the kind he always has held in plain contempt, while the sort of people he always has aspired to associate himself with—think of Taylor Swift—are disgusted by him. (I think of William F. Buckley Jr.’s bitter observation that it seemed like half of National Review’s subscribers lived in Arkansas.) Trump remains a kind of pathetic figure with his nose pressed up against the window, looking in on a scene from which he remains excluded, standing there like a sad clown in his $10,000 Brioni suit.

  Ouch!

• Good news, I guess. In a way. Holman W. Jenkins, Jr. looks at the recent campaign verbiage and concludes: The Silly Rhetoric Cancels Out. After looking at the latest allegations of Trump's "fascism" and his "collusion" with Putin…

  The lying propensities of Mr. Trump are now weighed against the lying propensities of the entire establishment. What an election. I have confidence at least in the federal establishment under Jill Biden to contain any MAGA revolt if Mr. Trump loses. But what if Democrats lose? If riots ensue, will James Carville return to MSNBC and eat his recent words claiming, among other things, that a Trump speech planned for Madison Square Garden is a sequel to a pro-Hitler German American Bund rally in 1939 (rather than, say, 150 Billy Joel concerts or the 1992 Democratic convention)?

  We can anticipate Mr. Carville’s likely rejoinder: Professional partisans are entitled to say over-the-top things in the final days of a close election. (An irony of democracy: If a race isn’t close, both sides pay more attention to their dignity.)

  Then there’s this year’s most important issue. Still missing is any cogent argument (apart from attempts to revive the collusion canard) that Kamala Harris would be any more successful at facing down the free world’s global enemies than Mr. Trump would be.

  Ms. Harris has insisted on being a cipher for purposes of the present campaign because she sees no positives in the Trump phenomenon and figures voters don’t either. (She’s wrong about this.) Call it one more maddening aspect of a race whose many maddening aspects can be laid at the feet of Joe Biden for his selfish prioritizing of a second term.

  The "silly rhetoric" might cancel out, but (I confess) it's what keeps me amused.

Our Amazon Product/Eye Candy du Jour, LEGO's "NASA Artemis Space Launch System", will set you back a mere $259.95. The box says it's for ages 18+. And when assembled, stands a mighty 27.5 inches high!

So: expensive and doesn't actually fly. Not unlike…

Well, take it away, Michael Bloomberg: NASA’s $100 Billion Moon Mission Is Going Nowhere.

In the interests of equal time, there's this guy, who has apparently dubbed himself "The Angry Astronaut".

It's 23:19, and I didn't make it past six minutes or so, but you may have more tolerance for Angry Astronaut than I. His YouTube page features other videos with provocative titles. You may like "UFO Propulsion discovered? NASA Engineer unveils Antigravity Drive!!" or "Government Whistleblower: Alien Craft recovered! Pentagon, NASA reveal more spherical UFOs!"

Why bother with SLS when we could just reverse-engineer alien antigrav drives?

Plus: "Shut up" doesn't have the argumentative heft it did in Ring Lardner's day.

Anyway, one more zinger from Daniel Vergano at Scientific American: The Next President Should End NASA’s Space Launch System Rocket.

Yeah, I know: Scientific American is insufferably woke. Read it anyway.

Also of note:

• Efrem Zimbalist Jr. would not have done this. John Lott notes (in Real Clear Investigations, RCI below)a Stealth Edit: FBI Quietly Revises Violent Crime Stats.

  When the FBI originally released the “final” crime data for 2022 in September 2023, it reported that the nation’s violent crime rate fell by 2.1%. This quickly became, and remains, a Democratic Party talking point to counter Donald Trump’s claims of soaring crime.

  But the FBI has quietly revised those numbers, releasing new data that shows violent crime increased in 2022 by 4.5%. The new data includes thousands more murders, rapes, robberies, and aggravated assaults.

  The Bureau – which has been at the center of partisan storms – made no mention of these revisions in its September 2024 press release. 

  RCI discovered the change through a cryptic reference on the FBI website that states: “The 2022 violent crime rate has been updated for inclusion in CIUS, 2023.” But there is no mention that the numbers increased. One only sees the change by downloading the FBI’s new crime data and comparing it to the file released last year.

  That seems pretty damning, and the FBI would seem to have an interest in not revealing statistics that make the current administration look bad. But we'll see if this holds up.

• Oh, oh, oh, Ozempic! J.D. Tuccille throws some cold water on election-year pandering in a specific area: Medicare-Covered Ozempic and Long-Term Care Would Be Very Pricey.

  It's no surprise that campaigning for office is largely a matter of buying votes with unrealistic promises of largesse to be funded—if the promise is ever fulfilled—on the backs of those to be named later. As befits a particularly awful election season, 2024 features some true doozies when it comes to pie-in-the-sky promises. But among them are new schemes to relieve people of covering their own healthcare costs by having Medicare pick up the tab for weight loss drugs and in-home, long-term care.

  With 41.9 percent of Americans adults obese, according to the Centers for Disease Control, Ozempic, Wegovy and other GLP-1 weight loss drugs have soared in popularity. As many as one in eight Americans have tried these drugs, which promise to succeed where dieting, exercise, and willpower often fail. And, in fact, obesity rates do appear to have turned a corner, dipping down after years of the population getting ever more massive. Weight loss drugs may have made the difference.

  But nothing comes without a cost, and the price tag for these drugs is substantial. "A monthly supply of Ozempic costs almost $1,000 before discounts or rebates," Bloomberg reported in May. That said, those discounts and rebates can make a big difference in a medical system where prices are as slippery as those in a Middle Eastern bazaar. A 2023 paper by the American Enterprise Institute found that for weight-loss drugs, "net prices received by drugmakers are 48–78 percent lower than list prices."

  But there turns out to be a local angle too:

  "Should the legislation become law, the implications could extend beyond seniors," claimed the office of Rep. Paul Ruiz (D–Calif.) as he announced the bipartisan Treat and Reduce Obesity Act with other lawmakers, including Rep. Brad Wenstrup, (R–Ohio). "Medicare coverage might prod other health insurers to pay for weight-loss medications, as private health plans tend to follow Medicare's lead."

  Is your CongressCritter a co-sponsor? Mine, Chris Pappas, is. Ironically, his family restaurant, the Puritan Backroom, in Manchester NH, may well be a leading cause of obesity in the Granite State. I haven't been there in a while, but I have to admit: the portions are huge, and also delicious.

  And finally, if you recognized that little jingle at the top of this item, you might be interested in reading the NYT story: How Ozempic Turned a 1970s Hit Into an Inescapable Jingle.

• As we've said in the past: Martin Gurri saw it coming. And now he's taken to the Free Press to confess: I Refused to Vote in the Last Two Elections. Now, I’m Voting for Trump.

  Kamala Harris or Donald Trump—the empty pantsuit of elitism or the eternal master of disaster? We must pick one or the other on November 5.

  For many years, I belonged to the “a plague on both your houses” party. In the last two presidential elections, I abstained: I found both candidates unequal to the task and refused to endorse either with my vote.

  But I feel I can’t refrain this time around—and I want to explain why.

  And, durnit, the rest of the article is paywalled.

She provides some one-minute brilliance for us:

Has the world started to go to shit? Nope, and here's why:pic.twitter.com/KhUgSd4NvG https://t.co/kV4yVAuWI5

— Emma Camp (@emmma_camp_) October 14, 2024

Cheer up!

Also of note:

• Good job doing the thing we tried to stop you from doing. Kamala Harris, yesterday:

  Today, Israel confirmed that Yahya Sinwar, the leader of Hamas, is dead and justice has been served, and the United States, Israel, and the entire world are better off as a result.

  But lest we forget:

  “It would be a huge mistake for Israel to enter Rafah. I've studied the maps”
  
  I will never get over this sound bite. The worst possible combination of ignorant and arrogant. pic.twitter.com/oNVDQVGLLr https://t.co/4wX1bqdldH

  — Matt Whitlock (@mattdizwhitlock) October 17, 2024

  And from back in April, Dementia Joe:

  BIDEN: "I made it clear to the Israelis — don't move on Haifa!"
  
  Haifa is a major city *IN* Israel. pic.twitter.com/BdNgoDlGkM

  — RNC Research (@RNCResearch) April 18, 2024

  Yeah, yeah. We know what you meant, Joe.

• They should have given it to Bryan Caplan. Deirdre McCloskey is unimpressed with the latest recipients of the Econ Nobel Prize: A Statist Nobel.

  The Turkish-American Daron Acemoglu this October received the Nobel Prize in economics. The other two who got it are his co-authors, the economist Simon Johnson and the political scientist James Robinson. Neither were essential. It’s nice of the Swedish Academy to spread the joy around. And it’s nice for Turkey to have a Nobel. Erdogan will be pleased, because Acemoglu’s theme fits the current regime. Top down. Hurrah for the Masters. Bigger government. Ah, glorious.

  Acemoglu was fated to get the prize eventually. He has been writing for twenty years in favor of two claims. One is that the state is all wise. The other is that all we need for the good society are institutions such as a supreme court, an election, and a time clock in the factory. Such institutions will suffice to ensure that good decisions about free speech will be enforced, that the wisest leaders such as Lula and Bolsonaro will come to power, and that workers in every Brazilian factory will always work hard and for eight hours, to the minute.

  But at Reason, Ronald Bailey. says, if I may summarize, "Whatchoo talkin' 'bout, Deirdre?"

  Oddly, fine economic historian Deidre McCloskey in her recent column for the Brazilian publication Folha denounces Acemoglu a "statist Nobel." She claims that Acemoglu believes that "the state is all wise." Contrariwise, Acemoglu and Robinson both flatly assert, "You can't engineer prosperity." In Why Nations Fail, the two write: "What can be done to kick-start or perhaps just facilitate the process of empowerment and thus the development of inclusive political institutions? The honest answer of course is that there is no recipe for building such institutions." These observations are not all that statist. Her tight focus on the cultural roots of liberalism has perhaps led her to misconstrue as somehow "statist" an institutionalist account of how economic liberty produces prosperity.

  I lack a dog in this fight. But also see David R. Henderson's. take in the WSJ, where he points to another reason for libertarian concern:

  You might think that Messrs. Acemoglu and Robinson would be strong believers in economic freedom. Their work is consistent with the findings in the Fraser Institute’s annual Economic Freedom of the World report, which finds a strong positive correlation between economic freedom and real gross domestic product per capita. While the two authors do favor private property rights, Mr. Acemoglu advocates a high minimum wage that adjusts for inflation. He also favors strong antitrust laws.

  You might think that Messrs. Acemoglu and Robinson would be strong believers in economic freedom. Their work is consistent with the findings in the Fraser Institute’s annual Economic Freedom of the World report, which finds a strong positive correlation between economic freedom and real gross domestic product per capita. While the two authors do favor private property rights, Mr. Acemoglu advocates a high minimum wage that adjusts for inflation. He also favors strong antitrust laws.

  It’s good to see a Nobel Prize awarded to economists who understand the importance of private property and the rule of law. Unfortunately, Mr. Acemoglu’s understanding is incomplete. He recently signed a statement supporting the Brazilian government’s move to rein in freedom of speech for Brazilians who want to communicate using X. Only time will tell whether Mr. Acemoglu will favor further undercutting of the rule of law. Let’s hope he doesn’t.

  So, a glass-half-full/empty situation? Maybe 65-35?

  Finally, we have Ryan Young at the CEI blog:

  This year’s economics Nobel Prize winners are Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James Robinson. They are frequent collaborators, often collectively called AJR. Much of their work is about institutions. Institutions are things like the rule of law, a country’s regulatory process, or the way it treats property rights. Think of institutions as the rules of the game, rather than the game itself.

  Those of you familiar with CEI’s work, especially on regulatory reform, know that one of our policy mantras is that institutions matter. Since Nobels often honor a sub-field or a research program more than the individual honorees, from that perspective this is a gratifying prize. In many ways, AJR’s work complements previous institutions-matter economists like Douglass North, Oliver Williamson, Elinor Ostrom, and James Buchanan. And yet, it feels incomplete.

  While AJR are right that institutions matter, they do not explore institutions’ deeper roots. They have also fallen for recent political trends, especially Acemoglu. These trends include populist anti-tech animus, cozying up to illiberal governments, and asking the fashionable questions about inequality instead of the right ones.

  'Twould be a shame if Acemoglu got the Nobel because of his embrace of illiberality.

• A Way to Avoid Social Security Doomsday? Veronique de Rugy thinks that might have been found: We Can't 'Leave Social Security Alone,' But We Can Protect People Who Need It.

  Specifically, Vero notes the thing that (for example) neither Trump nor Kamala want to deal with: when the "Trust Fund" is exhausted, "Social Security benefits will be cut across the board by 21%". And there will be much wailing and gnashing of teeth.

  Democrats would like to keep all the benefits and raise taxes on higher-income people quite dramatically. This is a ridiculous idea. The damage caused by jacking up the payroll tax to the level required to restore solvency isn't worth the benefit.

  There is an alternative that makes far more sense. Today, seniors are generally wealthier than younger workers and are overrepresented in the top income quintile. Keeping every dime of your Social Security whether you are rich or poor means the program effectively redistributes money from younger and poorer people to richer people. That's not right. We should have a system that redistributes money only to those who need it the most.

  Enter Andrew Biggs and Kristin Shapiro. In their new paper, "A Simple Plan to Address Social Security Insolvency," they note that if the scheduled 21% cut is implemented on "an equal percentage basis for every retiree," it would "double the elderly poverty rate and reduce total income for the median senior household by 14 percent."

  Instead, they suggest that when a program becomes insolvent, "the executive branch in fact possesses considerable discretion to allocate those limited funds in a reasonable manner." The idea is that the president at the time of the trust-fund exhaustion would pay full Social Security benefits to those in greatest need first.

  Specifically, starting in 2033, if Congress hasn't reformed Social Security, cap monthly benefits to $2,050. That would cover full benefits for about 50% percent of retirees, arguably those who depend the most on Social Security. The benefits for the other half of retirees, the higher-income ones, would be distributed on a progressive basis. The higher one's income, the larger the necessary cut would be.

  Ah. Well, that would kick me in the nards, assuming I live that long. And (certainly) a lot of the people who get a big SS payment every month would scream bloody murder. Still, it seems like a reasonable option.

• Learning is good, because then, y'know, you learn stuff. And congrats to Jeff Maurer, who says: I Tried to Learn Something From Megolopolis. That being Francis Ford Coppola's recent movie. And… well, don't sugarcoat it, Jeff:

  Megalopolis is the worst movie I’ve ever seen, ever will see, or ever could see. It’s like The Room, but with a $120 million budget. The film is more masturbatory than your typical OnlyFans live stream, and it made me embarrassed not only for the actors, but also for the crew, America, and Thomas Edison for having invented the movie camera in the first place. This movie is the most thorough destruction of a famous person’s reputation that didn’t involve a brutal stabbing at 875 South Bundy Drive, and I have probably (rightly) been placed on an FBI watch list just because I sat through the entire 138 minute run time.

  OK, I guess I'll wait until it comes to one of the streaming services I get.

That's from a Philip Greenspun compilation of video clips, this one showing Kackling Kommie Kamala's response to a question about "reparations" from Al Sharpton. Phil wonders: Why does Kamala Harris laugh so often?

Maybe check her entourage for hash oil vape cartridges? Just a thought.

Also of note:

• 

  Oooh, a scandal! Christopher F. Rufo substacked a few days ago about Kamala Harris’s Plagiarism Problem. What problem? Well:

  At the beginning of Harris’s political career, in the run-up to her campaign to serve as California’s attorney general, she and co-author Joan O’C Hamilton published a small volume, entitled Smart on Crime: A Career Prosecutor’s Plan to Make Us Safer. The book helped to establish her credibility on criminal-justice issues.

  However, according to Stefan Weber, a famed Austrian “plagiarism hunter” who has taken down politicians in the German-speaking world, Harris’s book contains more than a dozen “vicious plagiarism fragments.” Some of the passages he highlighted appear to contain minor transgressions—reproducing small sections of text; insufficient paraphrasing—but others seem to reflect more serious infractions, similar in severity to those found in Harvard president Claudine Gay’s doctoral thesis. (Harris did not respond to a request for comment.)

  What quickly transpired was a New York Times "debunking", with the headline "Conservative Activist Seizes on Passages From Harris Book"

  Seizes!

  The NYT's online subhed contained the "move along, nothing to see here" sentence: "A plagiarism expert said the lapses were not serious."

  Which, in turn, caused the WSJ's James Freeman to wonder: "What Would the New York Times Do Without Experts?" And brought out this fun fact about the NYT's "plagiarism expert" Jonathan Bailey:

  Some news consumers may wonder who elected Mr. Bailey to decide the acceptable amount of plagiarism in a book written by a presidential candidate. Consumers are also free to question the preliminary judgment rendered by the Times-anointed expert. It seems that Mr. Bailey does too, as he writes this week on X:

  For those coming here from the NY Times Article. I want to be clear that I have NOT performed a full analysis of the book. My quotes were based on information provided to me by the reporters and spoke only about those passages.

  In a subsequent post Mr. Bailey notes that he’s been out of the office “and have not been able to follow the coverage. When I’ve had more time, I’ll likely have more thoughts. I’d expect something [Tuesday] or Wednesday on the site depending on client work.”

  And (as of Thursday morn) you can read Mr. Bailey's more complete take here: The Kamala Harris Plagiarism Scandal. Yes, the passages Rufo called a "problem" have been upgraded to "scandal"! By an expert!

  But to my mind, the most insightful commentary on the matter comes from Jeffrey Blehar at the NR Corner: Kamala Harris's 'Plagiarism Scandal' Isn't Her Fault. Why Can't the New York Times Just Admit the Issue?

  In 2009, a district attorney and Willie Brown protégé from San Francisco named Kamala Harris “wrote” a book, Smart on Crime, as part of her preparations for her 2010 bid for state attorney general. You remember it, right? Aside from its remarkable smartness about crime, it was also a literary work of such surpassing majesty and grace that it not only immediately rocked the firmament of English letters but also became part of the syllabi for an entire generation of children, next to King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.” Or perhaps I misremember and it was just another boring campaign book, churned out to give Harris name recognition in advance of a statewide campaign. (Harris, hilariously, only won that race — in California in 2010, mind you — by a miserable 0.8 percent, a historical factoid I’ll happily plop on the table for my progressive readers to ponder in silence.)

  Well, apparently, several sections of Smart on Crime turn out to be have been plagiarized from Wikipedia, which doesn’t seem terribly smart to me at all. The matter is not really up for dispute: Rufo has the goods this time on what is clearly a series of near-verbatim lifts. So it’s tempting to default to plagiarism jokes for the remainder of this Corner hit and call it a day’s work. (After all, we are talking about a woman who was selected for her present job by a man who was bounced from an earlier attempt at his current job for plagiarizing another man’s life story in his stump speeches, like Steve Martin declaring himself the son of poor black sharecroppers.)

  But let’s not kid ourselves, here: The fault lies with Harris’s ghostwriter, not with Harris herself, not this time. All politicians use ghostwriters to draft their useless (and almost always unread) campaign biographies, and this is universally acknowledged, however much people want to feign outrage about it now. (J. D. Vance wrote Hillbilly Elegy all on his own, but you must remember that Vance was an author long before he became a politician.)

  Goodness knows I am not the person to cut VP Harris the slightest amount of slack, but: Yes, let's throw Joan O'C. Hamilton under the bus. I'm sure that 2009 Kamala was equally likely to turn out 248 pages of coherent prose as she is to improvise a few coherent sentences in response to softball interview queries. I.e., not at all. She wasn't the plargiarizing perp.

  But Kamala must be pissed at Joan about this, 15 years later. ("How much did I pay you?")

  Amazon link for Smart on Crime up there on your right. Looks like the Kindle version will set you back $9.99, and the hardcover… whoa, "from $395.00", as I type.

• Break out the tar and feathers. The New Hampshire Business Review hosts some special pleading for fat-cat corporate welfare (seen thanks to my trusty LFOD Google News Alert): Shot on location.

  When the production crew of last year’s blockbuster “The Holdovers” needed a home for their fictional New England boarding school, they scouted out filming locations across many institutions. The film’s interior shots could be mistaken for portraying schoolhouse scenes from 1970s New Hampshire, but “The Holdovers” was not shot here.

  It was shot in Massachusetts.

  Portsmouth-based filmmaker Chris Stinson, owner of Live Free or Die Films, was involved in that production, which he says he wishes could’ve been made locally. But when movie crews look toward the northeast, the Granite State isn’t in their sights.

  “We tried to bring ‘The Holdovers’ to New Hampshire because some of the boarding schools would have been really great locations for it,” Stinson said recently. “Ultimately, the studio wouldn’t allow us to do it, and it’s their money. They get to tell you how they want to spend it.”

  New Hampshire had its "Bureau of Film and Digital Media", with a $264,350 two-year budget, but it was eliminated in the 2021 budget, its duties (such as they were) folded into the "Division of Travel and Tourism Development".

  I'm not one for class warfare, but I'm looking at that and saying "good riddance". A few months back, Reason's Joe Lancaster looked at how that worked for that state that got to warm itself, briefly, in the star power of Leo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence: Netflix's 'Don't Look Up' Got $46 Million From Massachusetts Taxpayers.

  Newly released state revenue data shows that Massachusetts taxpayers played a major role in funding a mid-budget Hollywood movie about climate change.

  The dark comedy Don't Look Up premiered on Netflix in December 2021. In the film, a team of scientists discovers that an asteroid will soon hit the Earth and destroy all human life, but they find that nobody wants to heed their warnings. A blunt allegorical tale, the movie tries to do for climate change what Dr. Strangelove did for nuclear war.

  The film grossed less than $800,000 worldwide against a budget estimated between $75 million and $110 million. (Since the film debuted on a streaming service, box office receipts matter less than viewership numbers: Viewers streamed the film for 111 million hours in its first two days and then for another 152 million hours over the following week.)

  I watched Don't Look Up back in 2022, and found it to be a mixed bag. I'd no doubt have reacted more negatively if I were a Massachusetts taxpayer.

  Lancaster's article takes a look at state film subsidies, and it should cure you of any regret that we didn't get to have Paul Giamatti hang out in some scenic NH prep schoolyard.

Specifically, an apocryphal graduation speech. Opening:

That's Woody Allen, as published in the New York Times on August 10, 1979. If my math is right, over 45 years ago.

I try to keep that in mind when reading the latest crop of doomsayers. We have always had them with us, most more serious than Woody. And they've had a prediction accuracy of 0.00% so far.

Also of note:

• A stinkin' C for the Guv. Cato has issued its yearly Fiscal Policy Report Card on America’s Governors. I was eager to find out whether Governor Chris Sununu would get his usual "A" grade, and … nope, a "C".

  What's going on? There's not a lot of explanation on the widget that pops up when you click on our state:

  Chris Sununu is a former business executive and past member of the New Hampshire Executive Council. With his record of spending restraint and tax cuts, Sununu received A grades on past Cato fiscal reports. He scored lower on this report, but his overall fiscal record has been excellent. Under Sununu, general fund spending increased from $1.51 billion in 2017 to $1.86 billion in 2024, representing an annual average growth of just 3 percent.

  The remainder is equally laudatory.

  Sununu has only a few months remaining in his final term, so it's a sad way to go out. To add to the insult, other New England governors outscored him: Vermont's Phil Scott, and (even) Massachusetts' Maura Healey got Bs. Connecticut's Ned Lamont and Rhode Island's Ned Lamont matched his C.

  But cheer up, Chris: Janet Mills in Maine gets a big fat F.

  Buried deep in the report is the scoring methodology. Dig away.

• My personal answer to the question: "Onward! Ever onward!" That's in response to Kevin D. Williamson's query: Where Do Never Trumpers Go From Here?

  Center-right opponents of Donald Trump are not exactly a tribe of our own—we are more of a tribe of tribes, the Five Nations of the Anti-Trump Confederacy. The confederacy’s constituent tribes, the borders between which are necessarily fuzzy and porous, are:

  1. Neocons: The broken-hearted denizens of The Bulwark substack and likeminded allies keeping alive the flame of vintage Weekly Standard–style neoconservatism.

  2. Frenchmen: Pro-lifers and other social conservatives (the New York Times columnist David French being the exemplary specimen) who could not abide a Mammon-worshiping amoral bigot such as Donald Trump even before the former game-show host attempted to stage a post-election coup d’état in 2020.

  3. Libertarians: Cato Institute-type Republicans who still secretly thrill to Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged” and more or less agree with Reason magazine’s positions on drug legalization.

  4. Snoots: Affluent, Economist-reading (well, Economist-subscribing) members of the urban-to-suburban professional classes who much preferred a Republican Party that prioritized their values and who dislike the fact that Fox News is now on 24/7 at the clubhouse.

  5. Lifers: The long-term committed Republican partisans who have been determined to wait out Trump and Trumpism rather than surrender to the GOP to grifters and ignoramuses, cognizant that dopey right-wing populism has had only very modest political success outside of Republican primaries.

  I am (of course) in pigeonhole #3. Although I haven't read Atlas Shrugged since I was in high school, when a girl I liked recommended it.

  Anyway, you want to read KDW's analysis even if you're not a Never-Trumper.

• Leaving out an important word. The Real Clear Politics link text for Sohrab Ahmari's Newsweek column was "Progressives Pushing for an Economy Built on Serfdom".

  Guaranteed to prick up the ears of a Hayek fanboy!

  But as it turns out, Ahmari's actual headline is "Progressives Are Pushing for an Economy Built on Migrant Serfdom". And it turns out to be, well, not really Hayekian at all:

  Something astounding transpired last week when JD Vance sat down with The New York Times. The interviewer, Lulu Garcia-Navarro, pressed the GOP veep nominee on the alleged contradiction between his desire to boost the U.S. housing supply and his commitment to a tighter border. Given that a "large proportion" of the construction workforce is here illegally, Garcia-Navarro asked, "how do you propose to build all the housing necessary in this country?"

  The organs of the asset-rich usually take more care to disguise their preference for slave-like migrant workers. Yet here was a Times podcaster giving it in unvarnished form: How could America get by without lording over a large underclass of serfs who don't speak the language and lack the power to organize or demand regulatory protection, and who can be used to put downward pressure on the wages of native workers without a college degree?

  There's plenty of stuff to disagree with in Ahmari's article. But it's indisputable that the migrant workers he feigns concern for are not "slave-like". Nor do their working conditions bear any resemblance to serfdom. And they demonstrate this by their own actions of voluntarily showing up for work day by day.

• But speaking of slave-like arrangements… Every year millions of legal citizens are forced, under the threat of fines and (even) imprisonment, to devote hours of unpaid labor to figure out how much of their earnings need to be sent to the Internal Revenue Service.

  Both candidates have looked at this situation, and … have pledged to make it worse. For example, as described by the NR editors: Trump Should Stop Promising to Make Tax Code More Complicated and Burdensome.

  Rather than building on Republicans’ solid record on tax policy from his presidency and earlier, Donald Trump seems hell-bent on undermining it.

  The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which he signed in 2017, greatly improved the tax code. One of the most significant ways it did so was by doubling the standard deduction. About 90 percent of taxpayers now take the standard deduction, saving them time and money by forgoing itemization while still reducing their tax burden.

  The law also capped the state-and-local-tax (SALT) deduction at $10,000, which raised revenue to compensate for some of the revenue lost from the economic-growth-enhancing tax cuts. The SALT deduction is effectively a federal subsidy for high-tax (read: Democratic-run) states, and eliminating it entirely would encourage even more competition between states to reduce their tax burdens than we have already seen since 2017.

  Instead, Trump wants to remove the SALT cap and introduce a variety of other complications into the tax code that he had helped streamline, in ways that would have little to no effect on the economy overall and create new hassles and distortions, all for the purpose of pandering on the campaign trail.

  Trump has said he wants to eliminate taxes on tip income and overtime pay. He frames this as helping workers in lower-wage jobs, but after considering the deductions and credits that already exist, taxpayers in almost the entire bottom half of the income distribution pay no income tax on net, and many actually make money through refundable tax credits.

  Good luck finding a non-pandering politician this year. Not at the top of the ticket, anyway.

Recently on the book blog:

I suggest the streaming miniseries based on this book adapt a verse from Isaac Hayes' "Theme from Shaft":

They say this cat Lazarus Long is a bad mother—
(Shut your mouth)
But I'm talkin' 'bout Lazarus Long!
(Then we can dig it)

Yes, I'm going to do a major spoiler: about three-quarters of the way through the book, our protagonist, the apparently immortal Lazarus, goes back in time a couple millennia, to 1916 Kansas City, the city of his youth. And meets his family of that time. Including his mother, Maureen. And… like Futurama's Philip J. Fry, he winds up doing the nasty in the past-y. (Unlike Fry, though, it doesn't appear that Lazarus is his own offspring. Apparently too fraught for even Mr. Heinlein.)

Anyway: this 1973 book marked the return of Lazarus Long, last seen in his 1958 novel, Methuselah's Children (which itself was based on 1941 stories in John W. Campbell's Astounding Science Fiction magazine). Lazarus is an early success of the genealogical longevity project carried out by the "Howard Foundation".

As this book opens, Lazarus, an actual two thousand year old man, wants to die. He's seen it all, done it all, lost too many friends and lovers along the way. But through a mixture of persuasion and deception, he's brought out of his funk, and rejuvenated. For (approximately) the first three-quarters of the book, he acts as raconteur, telling tall tales about his past, dropping aphorisms and advice. And then finishes up with a (literal) bang, finding himself, against his better judgment, in the World War I European trenches.

Caveat lector: I read this book back in the mid-1970s, but since then my taste for Heinleinian dialog has faded. And this book has a lot of it, page after page of characters yakking. Or doing an inner monologue. Discourses on genetics. Cybernetic personalities transferred into clones. But not a lot actually happening, until that last 25% of the book, which is pretty good, but too late.

When I see the argument that people are too susceptible to misinformation to be trusted with freedom of speech pic.twitter.com/oP8Dd5mnvS

— Chris Freiman (@cafreiman) October 11, 2024

I, for one, refuse to believe that Nina Jankowicz or Tim Walz are made of finer clay.

Also of note:

• I'm still going with "nitwit". But Charles C.W. Cooke goes with the I-word instead: Kamala Harris Is an Idiot.

  Over the last couple of years, as familiarity has bred contempt, and contempt has bred exasperation, I have got into the habit of distilling into uncustomarily blunt terms what I think of our most prominent political aspirants. My modest verdict on the incumbent president, Joe Biden, was that he was “an asshole.” My considered take on his predecessor, Donald Trump, was that he is “a lunatic.” Herewith, to complete the trilogy, I will offer another candid take: Kamala Harris is an idiot.

  Like the little boy staring at the naked emperor in the famous fairy tale of yore, I can scarcely believe what I am seeing before my eyes. Since she replaced Joe Biden on the ticket, reporters have struggled mightily to find kind ways of describing Harris’s ineluctable inability to convey anything comprehensible, complex, or concrete. Harris, the New York Times has variously proposed, has been “strategically vague,” “light on detail,” and “careful.” Alternatively, she has “put her own stamp on the art of the dodge”; learned to respond “to unpleasant questions without answering them”; and shown an ability to “avoid delineating her stance on some issues.” And yet, if one were to search for a single world to sum up her candidacy, that word, apparently, would be “joy.”

  I disagree. I think that word would be “idiot.” Harris isn’t “vague” or “careful” or disinclined to “delineate her stance.” She’s wildly, catastrophically, incontestably out of her depth. She’s not “light”; she’s dull. She’s not a “dodger”; she’s a fool. She’s not “joyful”; she’s imbecilic. As Gertrude Stein once said of Harris’s hometown, Oakland, there’s no “there there.” She’s a nullity, a vacuum, an actress, an empty canvas that is incapable of absorbing paint. Search through Harris’s historical press clippings and you will be astonished by the vastness of space, for, in more than two decades of analysis and reporting, Harris has not once been credited with a single valuable or original idea. What you see on TV is what you get in private: a broken battery-operated toy that can’t talk, that can’t argue, that can’t laugh in the right places, and that badly malfunctions if expected to transcend the superficial. Asked by Stephanie Ruhle what would happen to her plan to “raise corporate taxes” and make “billionaires and the top corporations” pay “their fair share” if the “GOP takes control of the Senate,” Harris seemed unable to process the concept. “But we’re going to have to raise corporate taxes,” she replied. “And we’re going to have to raise — we’re going to have to make sure that the biggest corporations and billionaires pay their fair share. That’s just it.”

  That's probably NR-paywalled, sorry.

• Not letting Bone Spurs off the hook, though. Kevin D. Williamson is The One Who Will Not Give His Consent.

  I have been pretty unsparing, I think, in my criticism of Donald Trump, his enablers, and his partisans since the beginning of this ugly, stupid, embarrassing mess. It’s cost me a fair bit of money, I suppose, and there are a few old friends I don’t hear from anymore. So be it. But I will admit to being a little bit disappointed by the low quality of the criticism I get. One of the dumbest complaints I hear 1,838 times a day goes roughly like this: “You say Trump is a would-be tyrant, a moron, a monster of moral depravity—which means that you’re saying that the people who support him, half the country, are idiots and moral miscreants and fools.”

  Yes, that’s right. That’s exactly what I am saying.

  It doesn’t necessarily follow that I’m saying that, of course—you could make a pretty good case that Trump supporters are just stuck in a corner and that they aren’t all morally culpable and entirely willing participants in a pageant of stupidity and cruelty. But that’s not my case. My case is that these people should be ashamed of themselves, that a self-respecting society wouldn’t allow such a specimen as Lindsey Graham to vote, much less to serve in the Senate. I understand that hurts some feelings out there in the dank, wooly wilds of the “real America.”

  So what?

  Hey, if you're a Trump supporter, that probably stings a bit.

  But, yeah: like KDW, sometimes you gotta say: So what?

• You don't have to be an Einstein to recognize poor thinking. As expressed in Jeff Maurer's article: Trump Didn't Destroy America the First Time, So Logically We Should Let Him Try Again.

  Concern about what Trump might do in a second term is usually met with the same rejoinder: “He was already president, and the worst didn’t happen.” Like all devilish arguments, this one contains an atom of truth — the worst things that people feared might happen didn’t happen. Of course, that’s partly because resistance liberals set the bar for “the worst things people feared” impossibly high; we basically ran a Manhattan Project in which our brightest minds developed exciting new theories about why we should spend morning, noon, and night pissing our pants.

  The “it wasn’t a disaster last time” logic drives me insane. If you dodge a bullet, it doesn’t follow that bullets are therefore not dangerous. Here are some syllogisms that I consider analogous to the logic that Trump supporters deploy to wave away concerns about a second term:

  • Not every kid who ate paint chips died, therefore you should feed your child a steady diet of paint chips.

  • A plane once hit the Empire State Building, but the building didn’t fall, so it is good to fly airplanes into buildings in New York.

  • Germany tried to conquer Europe twice but failed both times, so we should let those loveable goofballs keep trying — it’ll be like Elmer Fudd trying to catch Bugs Bunny!

  Just a note: Maurer claims: "40 of Trump’s 44 cabinet officials don’t support him."

  The problem I noticed was that link goes to a July 2023 NBC News story, so Maurer's use of present tense is problematic.

  A more up to date count was done in August of this year by the WaPo, and they found: Only half of Trump’s former Cabinet want him to win a second term.

  So: still not great, but significantly greater support than Maurer claims.

  [UPDATE: Jeff Maurer, being a classy and decent person, has edited his post to reflect the WaPo's article. Ahem: based on a comment I left there.]

• 

  Where I'll be tomorrow night. Since I am a Bryan Caplan fanboy, I'll be driving up to the University of New England's Biddeford (Maine) campus for their President’s Forum. If you attend, and you notice a bald geezer trying to get Professor Caplan to sign a copy of Build, Baby, Build (Amazon link at your right), say hello.

The metaphors are turning pretty violent:

The scary movie coming this Halloween: Revenge of the Childless Cat Ladies. Eek! They're coming to tread on you, bunkie!

The yard sign rhetoric is escalating, and so is the Sunday TV gabfest rhetoric. Real Clear Politics recounts the talking points made by James Carville on MSNBC:

I had a pretty good idea of what happened at MSG on 2/10/1939, but I looked to make sure: yup, a well-attended Nazi rally organized by the German American Bund.

Now, to be fair, the rants and ravings of Trump and Flynn make it pretty easy for the Carvilles to rant and rave.

Which, in turn, makes this sort of thing (as reported by the Dispatch pretty inevitable:

We'll undoubtedly hear more about this guy, but I can't help but think he had little birds flying around inside his skull, tweeting about "whatever means necessary".

And there's just the normal lawfare, too. A new front opened up, as described by Andrew C. McCarthy: Harris Campaign Revives Logan Act Idiocy (Gifted NR link!):

Perhaps a Harris/Walz Administration will also bring back John Adams' Alien and Sedition Acts.

Also of note:

• Hey, let's have a nationwide rerun of 2000 Florida! Tim Walz recently advocated abolishing the Electoral College, and just elect presidents via the nationwide popular vote. Robert F. Graboyes has an excellent article that pees throws water on that idea: Electoral College as National Firebreaks.

  To those who advocate scrapping the Electoral College and choosing presidents by national popular vote … be very, very careful what you wish for. Among other things, the paragraphs below explain how one highly popular blue-state proposal could force Democratic states to support Republican presidential nominees while leaving Republican states free from such soul-crushing strictures.

  Across the American West, fire wardens create firebreaks—vegetation-free swaths gouged through forests and fields to slow and limit the spread of wildfires. In U.S. presidential elections, the Electoral College serves the same purpose—limiting the spread of one state’s malfeasance, manipulation, ineptitude, and/or operational failure to other states. For all the trauma and bitterness that emerged from Florida in 2000, the catastrophe was limited to one state.

  For years, a choir of voices has demanded that we eliminate the Electoral College and elect presidents via national popular vote (NPV)—an idea that is appealing in theory, but treacherous in execution. NPV is the electoral equivalent of filling firebreaks with pampas grass, scrub oaks, dead brush, bails [sic] of hay, and discarded chemicals. Eliminating the Electoral College could turn virtually every presidential election, every four years, into a 50-state Florida-2000-style conflagration—with a partisan arms race of electoral machinations in the years between elections.

  Graboyes also analyzes, and finds wanting, an alternate proposal that might circumvent the Electoral College, the so-called "National Popular Vote Interstate Comact. He says it's "fraught with constitutional, legal, and practical landmines." And it's hard to disagree.

• I'll give you the TL;DR summary. But you should read the whole thing: Arnold Kling wonders How Much Dissent is Optimal? And, as promised:

  • The authority to police disinformation will inevitably be used to crush dissent.

  • Crushing dissent is bad.

  • Therefore, we should not give anyone the authority to police misinformation.

  No, not even a nice guy like you, Tim Walz. And especially not you, Nina Jankowicz.

• Sounds like a bad idea. Holman W. Jenkins, Jr. has a timely observation: Taxpayers Pay People to Be Hurricane Risk Takers.

  In the wake of devastating storms, the least popular argument is nevertheless an important one. We wouldn’t be asking of people in storm-prone areas anything not asked of every other American. Insurance markets exist—indeed, all markets exist in a sense—to inform people of the cost of their choices so they can make better ones.

  Hardly a point emphasized by climate obsessives, today’s rising storm damage is due mainly to more people putting up more expensive and elaborate structures in places where destructive weather is a predictable hazard.

  They do so not least because of the availability of federal rebuilding money, including federal flood insurance that is underpriced and subsidized by taxpayers who don’t benefit from beachfront charms.

  Jenkins also refers to the news covered in our next item!

• A myth is as good as a mile. Bjørn Lomborg writes for the NHJournal, pointing out the ‘Green Energy Transition’ Is a Myth.

  Despite huge enthusiasm for shifting from fossil fuels to green energy, this transition just isn’t happening. Implementing a significant change in our current trajectory would be prohibitively expensive. A major policy overhaul is needed.

  On a global scale, we are investing nearly $2 trillion annually to create an energy transition. In the last 10 years, solar and wind power use has reached unprecedented levels. However, this increase hasn’t led to a reduction in fossil fuel consumption. In fact, fossil fuel use has grown during this period.

  Numerous studies show that adding renewable energy adds to energy consumption instead of replacing coal, gas or oil. Recent research reveals that for every six units of new green energy, less than one unit displaces fossil fuels.

  Lomborg's point seems pretty irrefutable, but (as sometimes happens) NHJournal makes space available for a counterpoint from Tyson Slocum, a Public Citizen spokesperson, asserting the Future of Energy Is Renewables; Fossil Fuel Exports Feed CEO Greed

  Yes, "CEO greed". I think that Lomborg vs. Slocum is facts vs. demagoguery, but see what you think.

Too bad the fact checkers and misinformation monitors have thrown away their own credibility. Sad!

But there's big news on the betting odds:

That's right, reader: Trump kind of zoomed ahead of Kamala this week, regaining the lead he had … before his disastrous debate. To my eye, it's still coin-flip territory, though. And there's plenty of days left for an October surprise.

Also of note:

• Not the kind of civic literacy you like to see in candidates for high office. Jacob Sullum's column points out that Neither Harris Nor Trump Is a Friend of Free Speech: Both Presidential Candidates (and Their Running Mates) Seem Confused About the First Amendment.

  During last week's vice presidential debate, the Democratic candidate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, asked his Republican opponent, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), whether then-President Donald Trump lost his 2020 bid for reelection. Because Vance did not want to choose between contradicting reality and contradicting his running mate, he dodged that question, instead posing one of his own: "Did Kamala Harris censor Americans from speaking their mind in the wake of the 2020 COVID situation?"

  Although that pivot was puzzling, it rescued Vance from an uncomfortable situation while highlighting the vice president's disregard for freedom of speech and Walz's alarming misconceptions about the First Amendment. Yet Vance himself seems confused about the constraints imposed by that constitutional guarantee, and so does Trump.

  Vance was referring to the Biden administration's persistent pressure on social media platforms to suppress content that federal officials viewed as dangerous to public health. But even before the pandemic, Harris showed she was no friend to freedom of speech.

  "We will hold social media platforms accountable for the hate infiltrating their platforms, because they have a responsibility to help fight against this threat to our democracy," Harris, then a senator, said while seeking the Democratic presidential nomination in 2019. "If you profit off of hate, if you act as a megaphone for misinformation or cyber warfare, if you don't police your platforms, we are going to hold you accountable."

  Sullum also points out the 1A-hostile ravings of Orange Man:

  Trump likewise champions freedom of speech for himself and his allies while attacking it when it protects his critics and political opponents. If Trump had his way, flag burners would be jailed, purveyors of "fake news" would lose their broadcast licenses, and news outlets would have to pay him damages when their coverage strikes him as unfair.

  Harris and Vance have law degrees, but apparently both zoned out during any Constitutional law class they took.

  All four candidates have (at some point) taken an oath to support the US Constitution, so you'd think they'd want to brush up on that.

• Kamala also considers the Second Amendment as a "For me, not for thee" thing. Reason's Billy Binion reveals another hypocrisy: Kamala Harris Says She Owns a Handgun—Despite Fighting To Ban Others From Doing the Same.

  When Vice President Kamala Harris appeared in conversation with Oprah Winfrey last month, she dropped a tidbit that may have come as a surprise. "If somebody breaks in my house," she said, "they're getting shot."

  It was, or at least it should have been, one of the more relatable things she's ever said. Whatever your politics—Democrat, Republican, Libertarian, Jill Stein groupie, etc.—the right to protect your life and your family when threatened with potentially deadly aggression is something so basic as to transcend partisanship.

  It's a bit less relatable, however, when considering Harris' past advocacy against other people accessing the same type of protection she has.

  She provided more specifics during her recent 60 Minutes interview. "I have a Glock, and I've had it for quite some time," she said. "My background is in law enforcement. And, so there you go."

  Binion goes on to point out her "law enforcement" efforts to ban Glocks for the little people.

• Just leave the money on the dresser. Jeff Yass and Stephen Moore point out the obvious: Kamala Harris Is Eyeing Your 401(k)

  Kamala Harris keeps changing her tax plan, but her latest proposal is to raise the corporate tax rate to 28%. She would also raise the top capital-gains tax to roughly 32%, the highest since the 1970s.

  Extracting money from those big and faceless corporations with profits in the tens of billions of dollars has populist appeal. But the more accurate way to think of the corporate income tax is that it puts Uncle Sam first in line to take a share of all the profits an American corporation earns. Only after the government takes its pound of flesh does anyone else get a return on his money.

  At a 28% federal corporate tax and an average of roughly a 5% state and local tax, the government would snatch away roughly 33 cents of every dollar of profit. This leaves 67 cents to the shareholders. Those include the more than 100 million Americans who own stock directly or through pension and other retirement funds. Every percentage point that Congress and Ms. Harris raise the tax would dilute the value of the stock owned by the rest of us.

  As many have said: corporations don't pay taxes; they collect taxes. From (in various degrees) their customers, their employees, and their shareholders.

• But I imagine it's popular. Michael F. Cannon of Cato has some words for Kamala Harris's Irresponsible Proposal to Expand Medicare.

  Vice President and Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris proposes to expand Medicare by having it subsidize in-home long-term care for enrollees—paying for someone to help them with activities of daily living, that sort of thing.

  One report estimates the proposal could cost the federal treasury $40 billion per year—more than double the amount of the Children’s Health Insurance Program. Harris would have to pay for it by squeezing inefficiencies from other parts of Medicare, principally Medicare subsidies for prescription drugs.

  It is difficult to overstate the irresponsibility, corruption, and insanity of this proposal.

  How much more naked vote-buying will we see between now and Election Day?

• Do you feel "strengthened" yet? Well, don't get your hopes up if Kamala pulls out a win. Matt Weidinger finds a mismatch between Kamala's promises and her proposals: Kamala Harris Priority: Expanding Welfare, Not Strengthening Middle Class.

  Last week’s vice-presidential debate was chock-full of references to the middle class and plans to improve conditions for the middle class. That’s also a common refrain to the stump speech of presidential candidate Kamala Harris: She touts that she comes from the middle class, supports the middle class, and values the work ethic that defines the middle class. Her ties to the middle class are the reason, she suggests, that “building up the middle class will be a defining goal of my presidency.” There’s just one problem. Key policies Harris supports are mostly about building up welfare, not the middle class.

  When first unveiling her economic plans in August, Harris noted that she “grew up in a middle-class household” and promised to be “laser-focused on creating opportunities for the middle class.” In September’s debate with Donald Trump, moderators asked Harris, “Do you believe Americans are better off than they were four years ago?” She issued a non sequitur of an answer that began with, “So, I was raised as a middle-class kid.” Asked in an interview to describe “one or two specific things you have in mind” for “bringing down prices and making life more affordable,” she awkwardly began, “Well, I’ll start with this. I grew up in a middle-class family.”

  Weidinger notes that Kamala's proposal to restore the expanded Child Tax Credit, was sold as an emergency measure during Covid. Very expensive, and…

  The biggest individual winners? Parents who don’t work at all, who for the first time received full CTC checks, on top of tens of thousands of dollars in other welfare benefits they can already collect.

  The losers? Reader, if you have to ask, you're probably the proverbial sucker at the poker table.

• Other than that, though, it's fine. Eric Boehm discovers a small problem with a proposed solution for immigration: Trump's Deportation Plan Would Cost Nearly $1 Trillion and Wreck the Economy.

  Former President Donald Trump's promise to carry out "the largest domestic deportation operation in American history" would not only be a moral calamity requiring an enormous expansion of government—it would also be hugely expensive and ruinous to the American economy.

  The governmental infrastructure required to arrest, process, and remove 13 million undocumented immigrants would cost nearly $1 trillion over 10 years and would deal a "devastating" hit to economic growth, according to a report published last week by the American Immigration Council (AIC). The think tank estimates that a mass deportation plan would shrink America's gross domestic product by at least 4.2 percent, due to the loss of workers in industries already struggling to find enough labor.

  I'm a waffler on immigration, but it's only because I can't decide which party's policies are worse.

• Nice party you had there. Kevin D. Williamson looks at The Decimated GOP. (Probably Dispatch-paywalled, sorry.)

  My faith in “We the People” is, you might say, limited. But a significant share of them have shown themselves resistant to Trump’s brand of populist pornography. Trump won less than 50 percent of the vote in the 2016 Republican primary, less than 50 percent of the vote in the 2016 general election, and less than 50 percent of the vote in the 2020 election. During his presidency, Trump never got above 50 percent approval. He only broke the 50-percent approval-rating barrier recently, and then only briefly, when it became clear that Joe Biden simply cannot do the job of president now, much less in four years. As soon as Harris got into the race, Trump was back under 50 percent—and he has stayed there. 

  Trump’s low standing in the polls has been in line with his serial failures at the polling place. In 2016, he edged out Hillary Rodham Clinton—one of the most unlikeable figures in the modern history of the Democratic Party—with a few thousand fortuitously distributed votes putting him on top in the Electoral College despite his smaller overall vote share. Since then, Trump has been ballot-box poison for Republicans in every election in which he has been a factor. Republicans have lost control of both houses of Congress and lost scores of seats at the state and local level. And, in 2020, Trump managed to lose to a witless senescent human eggplant who barely bothered to campaign against him. Kamala Harris was the worst-performing contender in the 2020 Democratic primary, but she is at the moment (caveats, caveats, harrumph, etc.) poised to hand Trump yet another much-deserved electoral beating. 

  The good news is that 1 in 10 Republicans aren’t buying what Trump is selling. The bad news is that 9 in 10 Republicans are chumps. 

  Don't hold back, KDW. Tell us what you really think.

Just thought I'd throw out some red libertarian meat today. I'm pretty sure that Remy isn't going that far out on a limb, but …

HTML-annotated lyrics are here. But since I brought it up, my fellow crazies have thoughtful advocacies for repeal: Aaron Steelman at Chronicles; Jacob G. Hornberger at Mises Wire; Kerry McDonald at FEE (also here). From that last link:

Also revealed by Googling: here in the "Live Free or Die" state, ten half-days of unexcused absence may, and probably will, get you and your kid in trouble.

Also of note:

• Being honest about the real problem. Pun Salad appreciates strong, exact language, especially in expressing an opinion Pun Salad agrees with. At the Federalist, Kylee Griswold goes there: Kamala Harris Is Too Stupid To Be President.

  Univision hosted a “Latinos Ask” town hall with Kamala Harris on Thursday night, and it was about as airheaded and disingenuous as you’d expect. Here was one word salad from the first five minutes — remarkably in response to a question about the two hurricanes that just decimated the southeast of the country:

  Leadership is about understanding the importance of lifting people up, understanding that the character of our country is such that we are a people who have ambitions and aspirations, dreams, goals for ourselves and our families, and are entitled to have a leader who then invests in that. … The two visions [for our country], simply put, are that one is about the future, and the other is about the past and taking us backward. And I do believe that the American people are ambitious and aspirational about an investment in the future in a way that we are optimistic while being clear-eyed.

  That’s a lot of ambitions. After one voter observed that Harris was never elected to be the Democrat nominee but just magically became such when “President Biden was pushed aside,” the vice president naturally drove home the point for the umpteenth time that Donald Trump is the “unprecedented” threat to democracy. Funny she brought up Trump and democracy because the former president actually made an apropos comment about the topic earlier the same day, telling the Economic Club of Detroit: “Our biggest threat to democracy is stupid people.”

  Specifically, stupid voters are the biggest threat to democracy.

  And to be brutally honest, stupid voters are how we got Trump. Ironic that he should bring that up.

  (To be clear, I'm tossing ignorant people into my "stupid" basket of deplorables; technically, that's an oversimplification.)

• Allegedly smart people are no treat either. Robert Shibley, at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) notes a regrettable trend: The AAUP continues to back away from academic freedom.

  This week, the American Association of University Professors gave its blessing to mandatory “diversity statements” in hiring — as long as the faculty votes for them first. FIRE has long argued that such statements can too easily function as ideological litmus tests and has repeatedly warned against them.

  The AAUP’s new statement on “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Criteria for Faculty Evaluation” marks yet another departure from the organization’s roots as a stalwart protector of faculty members’ right to dissent from the orthodoxies of the day, whatever those might be.

  Shibley's rebuttal to the AAUP's denial that DEI statements "require candidates to adopt or act upon a set of moral and political views":

  FIRE is careful to consider each such policy individually, as not every statement requirement is the same. But in general, when employees or job applicants are required to pledge or prove their allegiance to a school’s interpretation of DEI concepts, we object precisely because ensuring that allegiance is the stated goal of the policy. From the perspective of the policy authors, that’s not a bug, it’s the key feature.

  Schools adopting DEI requirements want to filter out people who don’t or can’t agree to act upon the institution’s specific set of views in the classroom and in their service work. If colleges and universities didn’t care whether applicants agreed with their conception of DEI, why would they bother to ask applicants to demonstrate that agreement?

  Can I imagine a happy day when the New Hampshire legislature (a) repeals compulsory attendance laws and (b) requires University System of New Hampshire schools to abolish required "diversity statements" for hiring and promotion? As Han Solo would say: "I don't know. I can imagine quite a bit."

• 

  And you won't guess who those little bastards are. Alan Jacobs has tracked down [Professor Richard] Rorty’s bastard children. Inspired by the Jewish Space Lasers Weather Control crowd:

  In MAGAworld, declarative statements are not meant to convey information about (as Wittgenstein would put it) what is the case. Declarative statements serve as identity markers — they simultaneously include and exclude, they simultaneously (a) consolidate the solidarity of people who believe they have shared interests and (b) totally freak out the libtards. That’s what they are for. They are not for conveying Facts, Truth, Reality — nobody cares about that shit. (People who call themselves Truth Seekers are being as ironic as it is possible to be.) Such statements demarcate Inside from Outside in a way that delivers plenty of lulz, and that is their entire function. In that sense only they articulate a kind of dark gospel. 

  Thus it is pointless to insist that Democrats have not in fact unleashed weather weapons on Florida and the Carolinas; even more pointless to argue that if Democrats had such weather weapons they would have used them when Donald Trump was President in order to discredit him. Whether it is factually true that Democrats have and deploy weather weapons could not be more irrelevant; what matters is that this is the kind of thing we say about Democrats — so if you want to be part of this “we,” you’d better say it too. 

  My informal understanding is that this is very similar to the late Harry Frankfort's thesis in On Bullshit (Amazon link at your right). And of course, it's not solely practiced by inhabitants of "MAGAworld".

• Hm. Should I vote for this guy? The Libertarian Party's presidential candidate will appear on my November ballot. Reason's Nick Gillespie interviewed Chase Oliver on Budget Cuts, War, and Immigration and if you're as disgusted/amused at the major party candidates as I am, you may want to check that out.

  But for me, this is a deal-breaker:

  You've said that what Israel is doing in Gaza is genocide. Is that an accurate description of your view of Israel's actions in Gaza?

  When you look at the definitions that are brought forward by the International Criminal Court, I think much of the standards there have been met by the practices of the Israeli government.

  That's to the detriment of the Israeli people, who would like to see a more peaceful and stable Israel, who would like to see a more peaceful and stable region.

  Given the deep U.S. involvement in the Middle East, do you believe we should completely withdraw, or is there a role for the U.S. in brokering peace in the region?

  We need to be removing our military footprint as quickly and orderly as possible so that it can be done in a way that's responsible, not like what we saw with the Afghanistan withdrawal. But we do need to withdraw ourselves completely from the Middle East.

  The best thing we can do is be a neutral arbiter. What we should not be doing is putting our thumb on the scale. That's what we've been doing and it's not led to better outcomes. In fact, it's led to more turmoil and more tension in the region.

  Stipulated: US foreign policy has been, and is, more inept than it should be. But not "putting our thumb on the scale" when it comes to barbarism vs. civilization would make things much, much worse.

I just can't figure out if it will be a comedy or a tragedy.

This Charles C.W. Cooke Corner post would seem to point to "comedy": Kamala Harris Embarrassed Herself During Hurricane Milton.

Don't the Saturday Night Live skits write themselves?

But Jeffrey Blehar implies more than a little Et tu, Brute?-ism with his headline question: Is Joe Biden Trying to Knife Kamala Harris?.

Reader, as a thought exercise, can't you just imagine everyone involved here wearing togas?

Or (even better) Julius Caesar Costume Designs by Jack Kirby?

Also of note:

• Jeff, please expand this reasoning to pharmaceuticals. Jeff Maurer gets it: Hurricanes Are Showing Why Price Caps Are Bad. Skipping down a bit for our excerpt:

  Let’s focus on toilet paper. It gets bought up before a hurricane because people know that they might be stuck in their house for a few days, and they don’t want their lesser-worn clothing and fur-covered house pets to be “pressed into service”, so to speak. If toilet paper is sold at the normal price, there’s no reason not to stock up — even if you don’t end up needing any extra paper at all, you bought at the normal price, so no harm done. So, the first person to get to Kroger cleans out the store and rides out the hurricane atop a mountain of two-ply luxury, while everyone else ends up having to throw out their socks and sofa cushions after the storm.

  But if toilet paper starts selling for $10 a roll when demand suddenly surges, the first person to get to Kroger will face different math. They’ll ask themselves “How much toilet paper do I actually need?” and then do a quick calculation based on the amount of toilet paper they already have, the number of days they expect to be stuck, and their planned diet over those days. And then they’ll buy only what’s essential. Other people will do the same thing, and folks who don’t really need toilet paper — like bidet owners and divorced women who still have their wedding dresses — will opt out entirely. And that helps prevent shortages.

  The other thing that will happen when TP sells for jacked-up prices is that companies will divert supply to where it’s needed. During a hurricane, most of the country is not experiencing an Ass Emergency, so they won’t notice if five percent of shipments get diverted to the disaster zone. But that five percent will mean the world to disaster victims who are facing rectal 9/11. If TP is at $10 a roll, the Charmin Bears — America’s third-richest family — will move mountains to get their product where it will make the most money. And that will prevent shortages and eventually lower prices.

  All of this is totally counterintuitive. It really does seem like jacking up prices during a crisis should earn you a Nobel Prize in Assholery and be forbidden. But the market forces I’m describing are real, and it does look like Florida’s anti-price gouging law is contributing to shortages. And yet, there’s a bipartisan consensus that the anti-gouging law is good; Ron DeSantis’ government extended the law, and Kamala Harris warned price gougers of “consequences”. Which seems like more evidence that both parties have suddenly decided that even though there are hundreds if not thousands of years of evidence that price caps lead to shortages and hardship, maybe this time they’ll work.

  That's a long snip-out but, I did want to point out that whenever you see "bipartisan consensus", it increases the probability that whatever's attached is a Real Bad Idea.

• Speaking of tragedies, however… Don't throw away those Julius Caesar costumes at the end of hurricane season, kids. Because, as Veronique de Rugy points out: Biden and Harris' Record on Spending and Debt Is a Tragedy of Epic Proportion.

  No matter the result of next month's election, President Joe Biden will soon leave the White House. That makes it a good time for a nearly final assessment of his and Vice President Kamala Harris' first-term legacy on federal spending and debt—a tragedy of epic proportion. Unfortunately, neither Harris nor her rival on the campaign trail has made a priority of fixing this problem.

  As a matter of fact, "her rival on the campaign trail" seems to be making a priority of promising to make the problem worse: Donald Trump tells Detroit he'll make car loan interest tax-deductible

• Speaking of the Donald… Madeleine Kearns is doing the news roundup at the Free Press these days, Lots of small items worth skimming. Example:

  Donald Trump has long complained that China is stealing American jobs. But that didn’t stop him outsourcing the printing of at least 120,000 copies of his “God Bless the USA” Bible to China. The foreign-made Bibles cost less than $3 each and are sold in the States for a minimum price of $59.99, leading to a sales revenue of about $7 million. “The Bible is a reminder that the biggest thing we have to bring back in America, and to make America great again, is our religion,” Trump said in a video urging people to buy his good book.

  From the link. the GBtUSA Bible also includes at no extra charge:

  • Handwritten chorus to “God Bless The USA” by Lee Greenwood
  • The US Constitution
  • The Bill of Rights
  • The Declaration of Independence
  • The Pledge of Allegiance

  Are the Chinese reading what they're printing?

  How about these guys in Oklahoma: State Education Department Seeks Bids for 55,000 Classroom Bibles.

• He's gonna have to take down that "Science is Real" sign on his lawn. NHJournal reports on the deep thoughts of Timothy Horrigan: NH Dem Says There's No 'Accepted Definition' of 'Biological Male'. It's a longish article about the failed (for now) effort to keep restrooms sex-segregated in New Hampshire. Skipping down…

  Rep. Timothy Horrigan (D-Durham) published a letter in the Union Leader criticizing one of the newspaper’s reporters for writing, “a transgender athlete identified in court paperwork as a ‘biological male.’”

  “This reference is a little misleading because the young woman at the center of the controversy is female,” Horrigan wrote, referring to a biological male playing on a girls soccer team. “She is living her life as a woman, and everyone close to her considers her to be female. She’s not male.”

  Besides, added Horrigan, “The term ‘biological male’ has no commonly accepted definition.”

  Actual Scientist Jerry Coyne has been on the warpath for years about this disinformation. Here's something he wrote back in 2020: A defense of the binary in human sex.

  Tim Horrigan can assert that there's no "commonly accepted" definition, but that's mainly because he, and people like him, have (essentially) a theological objection to not accepting the definition.

And MTG's mind was at work on Monday:

Climate change is the new Covid.

Ask your government if the weather is manipulated or controlled.

Did you ever give permission to them to do it?

Are you paying for it?

Of course you are..

— Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene🇺🇸 (@RepMTG) October 7, 2024

In the real world, the actual news is (Ars Technica): NOAA drops scientist’s ashes into the eye of Category 5 Milton.

So, <voice imitation="professor_farnsworth">good news, Floridians!</voice>. NOAA can't manipulate or control your weather, but it can add dead scientist ashes to it. In case you needed another reason to evacuate.

Also of note:

• Toward a new definition of insanity. No, Einstein didn't say "The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result." But if he were still around, he might offer this headline from Eric Boehm as an example of insanity: Budget Deficit Hit $1.8 Trillion After Huge Increase in Borrowing Costs.

  The only good news contained in the Congressional Budget Office's latest revenue report is that the federal budget deficit did not get significantly worse during the most recent fiscal year. The deficit increased by a mere $139 billion when compared to the previous year.

  But the fact that the deficit increased at all in a year when revenue from federal tax collections climbed by 11 percent—from $4.4 trillion to $4.9 trillion—suggests something about the nature of the fiscal problems facing the federal government. Specifically: that it's a spending problem. The federal government spent $6.75 trillion last year.

  More specifically, it's a borrowing problem. While spending increased by about 10 percent from the year before, the interest payments on the national debt ballooned by 34 percent—from $710 billion to $950 billion. That sharp increase reflects both the size of the national debt, which is now roughly as large as the nation's annual economic output for the first time since World War II, and the rising interest rates that have been a feature of the economy for the past few years.

  Add that to the list of things "your government" can't (or won't) control, MTG.

• Not literally. Jeffrey Blehar observes (at least) Category 3 stupidity: Nobody Needs Kamala Harris’s Help with Storm Response, and It’s Killing Her. After he wrote for publication on Sunday that, as VP, Kamala had no role to play in hurricane response. (MTG interrupts: "Other than to point the hurricanes at Republicans!")

  Yes, immediately after I finished trying to patiently explain to readers — conservatives, no less! — that it’s hypocritical to hold someone as powerless as Harris responsible for disaster responses, here comes Kamala to demand that people pretend she is in charge or has any meaningful role to play in this whatsoever. Not only that, but for once she actually deigned to lodge the complaint in person, speaking to reporters about it on the tarmac between campaign stops and whining that she tried to call Governor DeSantis and he “refused to speak to me.”

  Ron DeSantis has utterly no time for any of this nonsense — he has a Category 4 hurricane on his hands — and said as much in the most brutally effective way possible yesterday. I hope everyone gets a chance to watch this excerpt from yesterday’s storm-preparation press conference, where the governor bats away, with visible disgust, the attempt by reporters in the room to insert Harris into a hurricane briefing. It’s a masterfully persuasive performance precisely because DeSantis isn’t trying to make a political argument at all — he goes out of his way several times to emphasize that he’s spoken with the president and received full cooperation from the federal government. You just can tell how insultingly inappropriate he considers it to be talking about anything other than weather predictions and evacuation protocols. (His facial expressions convey disdain eloquently.)

  As a bonus, see the WSJ's Notable & Quotable: Biden vs. Harris on Florida’s Hurricane Response. Compare and contrast the quotes. You would not expect doddering Joe to outclass "joyful" Kamala, but there you go.

• What do hedge funds do? Also at the WSJ, the editorialists point out CNN and Sen. Bob Casey’s Economic Illiteracy.

  You can tell the Pennsylvania Senate race is tightening because CNN on Wednesday rolled out a hit piece on GOP Senate candidate Dave McCormick’s record as former CEO of Bridgewater Associates. The story happens to fit perfectly with Democratic Sen. Bob Casey’s campaign strategy vilifying private business.

  “Senate candidate Dave McCormick led hedge fund that bet against some of Pennsylvania’s most iconic companies,” reads the headline, which Mr. Casey tweeted. The Democratic incumbent and his allies in the press can’t find any wrongdoing during Mr. McCormick’s five years (2017-2022) running Bridgewater, so they’re peddling economic illiteracy disguised as investigative reporting.

  The piece claims that Bridgewater under Mr. McCormick shorted the stocks of roughly four dozen companies headquartered in Pennsylvania, including Hershey Co., U.S. Steel, Comcast and Penn National Gaming. Short-selling is when an investor borrows a security and then sells it with the intent of buying it back at a lower price.

  Well-diversified investors take short positions to hedge risks in their portfolio. As the Biden Securities and Exchange Commission explained last year, “short selling provides the market with important benefits, such as providing market liquidity and pricing efficiency.”

  Short-selling would scare the crap out of me, but there's nothing wrong with it. I don't think CNN is economically that illiterate; they're just trying to exploit the ignorance of Pennsylvania voters.

• NSF delenda est? At the Free Press, Rupa Subramanya highlights some shameful news: DEI Is Transforming the National Science Foundation.

  If you thought the august National Science Foundation focused only on string theory or the origins of life, you haven’t spent much time in a university lab lately. Thanks to a major shift endorsed by the Biden administration, recent grants have gone to researchers seeking to identify “hegemonic narratives” and their effect on “non-normative forms of gender and sexuality,” plus “systematic racism” in the education of math teachers and “sex/gender narratives in undergraduate biology and their impacts on transgender, nonbinary, and gender nonconforming students.”

  A new report from Republican members of the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science & Transportation made available to The Free Press says that DEI considerations now profoundly shape NSF grant decisions.

  “In recent years, we have seen a sharp increase in actual scientists—that is, people with degrees in the hard sciences from major universities who regularly receive money to conduct actual scientific research—using their credentials to parrot the talking points of the woke neo-Marxist left,” Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas), the ranking minority member of the Senate committee, said in the report.

  The report, titled “DEI: Division. Extremism. Ideology,” analyzed all National Science Foundation grants from 2021 through April 2024. More than 10 percent of those grants, totaling over $2 billion, prioritized attributes of the grant proposals other than their scientific quality, according to the report.

  Gee, maybe fund some Alzheimer's research instead? Or work on weather manipulation/control! If you're going to be accused of it anyway, why not?

With under four weeks to go, I went to the New Hampshire Secretary of State website to check out my sample ballot:

At my age, I need to keep my voting algorithm pretty simple:

• Shudder a bit when looking at the choices for President/Vice President, and then leave that line blank.
• Otherwise, vote for the Republicans.
• Unless the same person appears as a Democrat, then skip.

Yes, I'm a RINO. Sue me.

And, as a geezer, I'm leaning "No" on that constitutional amendment.

I like the stoicism behind Chris Stirewalt's general election advice: Don’t Vote Like Your Life Depended on It.

Can't help but mentally add "Or worse" to that last sentence.

Fun fact: Stirewalt self-identifies as a "displaced Appalachian American with a bust of Calvin Coolidge on his bookshelf."

Further fun fact: I couldn't find a bust of Coolidge at Amazon, but they do have a bobblehead for the low, low price of $29.95. And if you really need a bust, here you go.

Also of note:

• Meanwhile, back in the states, Brittney Griner gets back to vaping hash oil. The WSJ had a page one item yesterday: Putin’s ‘Merchant Of Death’ Gets Back To Work.

  Viktor Bout, the Russian arms dealer known as the “Merchant of Death,” walked out of a U.S. prison almost two years ago in a trade with Moscow for U.S. basketball star Brittney Griner. Now he is back in business, trying to broker the sale of small arms to Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi militants.

  The 57-year-old, whose life reportedly inspired the 2005 Hollywood movie, “Lord of War,” starring Nicolas Cage, spent decades selling Soviet-made weapons in Africa, South America and the Middle East before being arrested in 2008 in a U.S. law-enforcement sting operation.

  Since his release, Bout has joined a pro-Kremlin far-right party and won a seat in a local assembly in 2023, seemingly turning the page on his days as an arms broker. But when Houthi emissaries went to Moscow in August to negotiate the purchase of $10 million worth of automatic weapons, they encountered a familiar face: the mustachioed Bout, according to a European security official and other people familiar with the matter.

  Sounds like a fun guy.

• Because of course she does. Elizabeth Nolan Brown updates on the latest "respectable politician" assaulting free speech: Hillary Clinton Wants To Repeal Section 230.

  Hillary Clinton said on CNN this weekend that repealing Section 230 of federal communications law should be a top political priority.

  The former secretary of state's comments are a reminder that this vital protection for free speech is far from safe, even if we seem to be on the other side of peak anti-230 politics.

  Just as a reminder:

  A lot of politicians hate Section 230 precisely because it makes it more difficult for them to censor what is said online, while others hate Section 230 because it allows private companies to avoid hosting speech the politicians like. The bottom line is that both Democrats and Republicans would like to weaken or abolish Section 230, and that doing so would give government authorities more control over the internet.

  During Donald Trump's presidency, he was an enthusiastic advocate for repealing Section 230. This sort of anti-230 sentiment and action from both major parties has continued into Joe Biden's. And while anti-Section 230 sentiment has quieted down a bit in recent years, Clinton's comments serve as a good reminder that a lot of powerful people still have it out for this law.

  So: "Help us Kamala, you're our only hope?" Nope: "Not only does Trump oppose Section 230, but Democratic nominee Kamala Harris has been crusading to weaken Section 230 since her days as attorney general of California."

• All the better to transport us down the Road to Serfdom. Rich Lowry "has the receipts" and concludes that despite her denials: Yes, Kamala Harris Wants You Out of Your Gas-Powered Car.

  Kamala Harris is an automotive libertarian, or so she maintains.

  “Contrary to what my opponent is suggesting, I will never tell you what kind of car you have to drive,” the vice president said at a campaign stop in Michigan the other day.

  She will, however, favor regulations to drastically change the mix of gas-powered and electric cars that are manufactured in the United States, regardless of what consumers want.

  The Biden-Harris administration has been working to regulate the American car market more to its liking. In 2023, the EPA proposed rules to make electric vehicles as much as 67 percent of new light vehicles sold by 2032. The agency then backed off a little, to electric vehicles constituting 56 percent of such cars in 2032 (another 13 percent would be hybrids, leaving purely gas-powered cars at less than 30 percent).

  From the relevant Wikipedia article (translated from its original language): "Plan is law, fulfillment is duty, over-fulfillment is honor!"

One year ago, Hamas launched a horrific attack against Israel, killing over 1,400 Israeli citizens – including defenseless women, children, and the elderly – and kidnapping hundreds more. Today, the prospects of peace seem more distant than ever. But we continue to hope for a…

— Barack Obama (@BarackObama) October 7, 2024

BO's tweet continues:

… return of all the hostages, an end to the violence, a rejection of hate, and a future in which both Israelis and Palestinians can enjoy the security and stability that most of them yearn for.

"… and a pony."

Ah well, I guess his heart is in the right place. Which I also guess was the point of his tweet: to show that his heart was in the right place.

Alas, not everyone is getting the message of peace and love. Jim Geraghty views recent anti-Israel protests and concludes: The Antisemitism Is the Point.

The local TV station, WMUR, notes the local festivities:

Ah, nothing "honors" Palestinan lives more than a "week of rage".

Quibble: the "41,000" number is wrong, of course. It is similar to the number of Gaza fatalities reported by the Gazan "health ministry" since 10/7, according to Forbes. And that doesn't count Israeli dead on 10/7.

As Geraghty notes, there's no indication that Uyghur, Ukrainian, or (of course) Israeli lives were mentioned, let alone honored. And what the "Solidarity Coalition" actually says is…

Join us next week to protest one year of the Palestinian genocide and mourn the loss of life and liberty that has been deemed acceptable by the United States, Israel, and Western medias. We will not stand idly while more massacres unfold!

UNH Divest!
Free Palestine! pic.twitter.com/Nw7WSqV8kv

— Palestine Solidarity Coalition UNH (@psc_unh) October 4, 2024

They're real river-to-the-sea folks. They up the toll to 180,000+. And they don't mention honoring anyone, WMUR. Just raging.

Also of note:

• Noah Smith seems to have a limited notion of "everyone". He asks in his headline: What if everyone is wrong about what AI does?

  There are two basic debates about AI. One is the “AI safety” or “X-risk” debate, which is about whether AI will turn into Skynet and kill us. But the most prominent and common debate is about AI taking jobs away from humans. What’s interesting about this debate is that practically everyone involved, from AI’s biggest boosters to its biggest critics, seems to agree on the basic premise — that the primary function of AI is as a direct replacement for human beings. In general, people only disagree about what our reaction to this basic fact should be. Should we slow down AI’s development intentionally? Should we implement a universal basic income? Should AI engineers and their shackled gods retreat behind towering fortress walls guarded by legions of autonomous drones, letting the rest of humanity suffer and die as GPT-278 sucks up all of the world’s energy for data centers?

  

  Not a big deal, but it's only been a few months since (for example) Reason put out a whole issue dedicated to AI. And the lead article's headline is In the AI Economy, There Will Be Zero Percent Unemployment. Provocative. And in case you missed it, there's The Case of the AI-Generated Giant Rat Penis.

  Noah, I think all the issue's articles are out from behind the paywall. Just sayin'.

• Also out from behind the Reason paywall. … is a review from Jay Bhattacharya of a book by a guy who should have lost his job: Anthony Fauci, the Man Who Thought He Was Science. Just a snippet:

  

  Coercive policy regarding COVID vaccination, recommended by Fauci on the false premise that vaccinated people could not get or spread the virus, collapsed public trust in other vaccines and led the media and public health officials to gaslight individuals who had suffered legitimate vaccine injuries. To pay for the lockdowns recommended by Fauci, the U.S. government spent trillions of dollars, causing high unemployment in the most locked-down states and a hangover of higher prices for consumer goods that continues to this day. Who is to blame?

  Fauci served as a key adviser to both President Donald Trump and President Joe Biden, and was a central figure on Trump's COVID task force that determined federal policy. If Fauci has no responsibility for the outcomes of the pandemic, nobody does. Yet in his memoir's chapters on COVID, he simultaneously takes credit for advising leaders while disclaiming any responsibility for policy failures.

  Fauci implausibly writes that he "was not locking down the country" and "had no power to control anything." These statements are belied by Fauci's own bragging about his influence on a host of policy responses, including convincing Trump to lock the country down in March 2020 and extend the lockdown in April.

  Bhattacharya co-wrote the "Great Barrington Declaration", which Fauci loudly opposed, and still does. I think Bhattacharya has the better argument here.

• As Obama said, "Don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to… Well, you probably know the rest of that quote. (But if not, here you go.) Another example from Andrew McCarthy: Botched Plea Deals with 9/11 Plotters Get Worse for Biden Administration.

  The botched plea deal with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and other 9/11 terrorists is a signature Biden-Harris administration moment: a scheme, apparently double-wrapped in incompetence, to spare the Democrats’ presidential candidate — first the senescent one, then the vacuous one — from an unpopular political decision.

  I say double-wrapped because it appears the deal that the administration made, and since then has desperately tried to renege on, contains an anti-renege clause — one that officials calculated would frustrate Donald Trump but on which, instead, the administration has tripped itself up.

  Back in August, I outlined how the Biden-Harris administration traded a political problem for a legal problem. The political problem is that the 9/11 case, which has lingered for over two decades, probably cannot be ended unless the administration permits the Defense Department to take the death penalty off the table in order to induce a guilty plea from the terrorists; yet, because the terrorists killed nearly 3,000 Americans, removing capital punishment would be extremely unpopular — and thus the administration does not wish to do it, or at least be seen doing it, much less try to explain it.

  As we have seen, the progressive Democrats who run the administration love to make the base swoon by brandishing their anti-death-penalty credentials in the abstract. When it gets down to real cases, though, they hide under their desks: Not only is capital punishment patently constitutional; the majority of Americans approve of it in heinous cases, particularly jihadist mass-murder cases. So, Biden and Harris play a game. They airily proclaim philosophical opposition to capital punishment. In concrete cases — such as that of Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev — they tell the country they are defending the death-penalty sentence ordered by a jury; but in so doing, they quietly assure Democrats not to worry because they have imposed a moratorium on executions, ensuring that no death sentences will actually be carried out.

  Might be amusing to hear Queen Kamala of Word Salad explain that one. But then someone would have to ask her about it, right? Dream on . . .

  "Queen Kamala of Word Salad." Heh.

Recently on the book blog:

I picked up this book from Portsmouth (NH) Public Library mainly due to this review from Brian Doherty at the Reason website. (I don't think it made it into the magazine.) Doherty called it "a solidly educational and entertaining work of political history." Ganz's implicit thesis: the early 1990s were an important part of the story of How We Got Here, thirty years later.

But, really, you can say that about any period in American history, can't you?

Ganz focuses on personalities of the period, mostly ones he finds colorful, outrageous, or dangerous. As Doherty notes, he spends a lot of words on Murry Rothbard, concentrating on his flirtation with paleoconservatives. The book's title is from a Rothbard speech; you can also find it in one of his long-winded articles from the Rothbard-Rockwell Report, reproduced by the Mises Institute. And it's in response to the cliché "You can't turn back the clock."

We shall break the clock of social democracy. We shall break the clock of the Great Society. We shall break the clock of the welfare state. We shall break the clock of the New Deal. We shall break the clock of Woodrow Wilson’s New Freedom and perpetual war. We shall repeal the 20th century.

As Doherty also notes, despite Ganz's title, this did not come close to happening.

Anyway, Ganz's history is wide-ranging and (you might argue) idiosyncratic. In addition to Rothbard, Ganz looks at folks like David Duke, Bo Gritz, John Gotti, David Dinkins, Rudy Giuliani, Rush Limbaugh, Jesse Jackson, … And, naturally enough, the major figures of the 1992 presidential campaign: George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, Ross Perot, Pat Buchanan.

Anyone remember Clinton's "Sister Souljah" moment? Ganz does. Were you aware that a professor named Caroll Quigley had an inordinate influence on Bill Clinton's philosophy? I didn't, but Ganz spends many pages on exploring that.

And Ross Perot was a holy terror back then about the deficit and associated national debt. Why, we were adding "$1 billion in debt every 24 hours"!

Reader, according to these folks, over the past year, the debt averaged a $6 billion increase per day.

One little sentence on page 20 jumped out at me, and I fear it colored my attitude toward the book:

During the presidential campaign of 1980, Ronald Reagan campaigned against "welfare queens."

Uh, reader, no he did not. I blogged about this ten years ago (heavily relying on this Reagan-hostile Slate article). As near as anyone can tell, Reagan used the term "welfare queen" (not "queens") once, in 1976 (not 1980), during one of his radio addresses. And he was quoting the term used in a Chicago Tribune story about Linda Taylor, an actual person.

I noticed a few other drive-by mini-slanders throughout, unsourced. If you're tempted to repeat any of 'em as gospel, caveat lector.

But another unsourced and widely repeated factoid on page 189: Gene Roddenberry was the speechwriter for LAPD chief William Parker in the 1950s, and based Star Trek's Mr. Spock on him. I didn't know that! And it might be true!

I've been a fan of Anthony Horowitz's fictional collaboration with ace detective, ex-cop, Daniel Hawthorne since 2020. I've since learned that this series is a variety of metafiction, where the author inserts himself into the story as a character. As I've said before: it's as if Sherlock's companion was not named "John Watson", but "Arthur Conan Doyle". Works for me! (My previous reports on the Horowitz/Hawthorne mysteries: here, here, here, and here.)

This one's different. Horowitz's publisher is demanding that he write the next book in the series, but Hawthorne hasn't been working on any new cases. What to do? After some difficult negotiations, they decide to do a prequel of sorts: a murder Hawthorne worked on before he joined up with Horowitz. Hawthorne will provide Horowitz with the case documents in chronological order, so the book can be written without knowing how it's going to turn out.

The years-ago murder took place in "Riverside Close", a group of six houses containing people living in decent harmony until a new family moves in and proceeds to irk every one of their new neighbors. Tensions rise until, eventually, the main offender gets a crossbow bolt in the throat.

There are too many suspects, and they all seem to be hiding something. Hawthorne and his then-partner, Dudley, interview them all.

And Horowitz, as he learns about the crime in the present, becomes increasingly dismayed at how the past case developed. Is there really a book in all this?

Well, yes there is. You're reading it. Keep turning those pages, Paul….

There's quite a bit to keep track of, but Horowitz lays out everything clearly; that doesn't mean you'll see the plot twists coming. (Well, I didn't. Maybe you will.)

As I ride this train through the Dutch countryside on October 7, all I can think about is the violence that people are willing to object to and the violence those same people are willing to pro-actively support with material and political aid.

— Chanda Prescod-Weinstein (@IBJIYONGI) October 7, 2024

Professor Prescod-Weinstein has trained her brain well. Even on the one-year anniversary of a vile atrocity, she's only thinking about the stuff she's been thinking about for years, and in the same, predictable way. Deploying the same turgid clichés. She has successfully managed to avoid even a shred of self-doubt intrude on her mental processes.

Congratulations are in order, I suppose.

Also of note:

• Reminder: She's a nitwit.

  JUST IN: Kamala Harris has no clue what to say after her teleprompter appears to stop working, keeps repeating herself.
  
  The Vice President kept repeating “32 days.”
  
  “Remember his number 32 today? We got 32 days until the election.”
  
  “So 32 days… 32 days… Okay. We got some… pic.twitter.com/2fIl1nyEkq

  — Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) October 4, 2024

  I almost sympathize with her. I'm pretty bad at extemporaneous speaking, too.

  But, yeah, the actual problem here is the mental white noise that leaks out through her mouth. There's nothing going on between those ears except cavernous echoes of what she just said.

• But enough about the lady brains. Jerry Coyne looks at a couple of bad XY examples, and wonders: What’s going on with Biden and Israel? (and a coda about Trump’s possible mental problems)

  Although Biden (and now Harris) have proclaimed an ironclad commitment to Israel’s well-being, they’re acting very wonky about Israel’s behavior. First they withheld 2000-pound bombs from Israel (you know, the kind that were used on the targeted strike that killed the leader of Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah), though the U.S. rations some of these bombs to Israel.

  But now the U.S. is trying to tell Israel how to run a war that is an existential thread to Israel’s existence, for the tiny Jewish nation is fighting on seven fronts at once (Gaza, Lebanon, Yemen, Iran, Iraq, Syria, and the West Bank). But the U.S. has been trying to control how Israel responded to Hamas’s October 7 attack from the very beginning. First Biden told Israel not to invade Gaza. When they did, Biden told Israel not to go into Gaza City. When they did, Biden told Israel not to go into Khan Younis. When they did, Biden told Israel in no uncertain terms not to go into Rafah, for that was “crossing a red line.” Kamala Harris backed up Bided then, asserting that she had “studied the maps.” Israel did go into Rafah and got some hostages, along the way destroying much of Hamas’s military capabilities. All the while Secretary of State Anthony Blinken was waffling, especially about negotiations, for he is the lever Biden uses to try to push Israel in his direction. Had the U.S. followed Biden’s wishes, then, Hamas would still be in control of Gaza, and the dangers of another October 7 would remain.

  OK, a sideways Kamala slam there too. 'Twould be funny except when you remember these are the people who are supposed to be in charge. At a certain point, you'd think they'd readjust their priors and admit that Israel (and Bibi) just might have more incentive to come up with effective survival tactics than people sitting safely in DC, thousands of miles away.

  Oh, I should provide the "coda" to which Jerry refers in his headline. In response to a comment from a reader who is (apparently) a Trump fan:

  This made me laugh, because first of all, it seems likely to me that Trump really is mentally ill, at least with a diagnosable pattern of symptoms that fit into narcissistic personality disorder:

  Although Jerry's armchair psychoanalysis is deplorable… yeah, I'd give pretty good odds he's right.

• 

  Speaking of narcissists, though… Jonathan Turley spots the latest from the bullet we dodged back in 2012 and 2016: “We Lose Total Control”: Clinton Continues Her Censorship Campaign on CNN.

  Hillary Clinton is continuing her global efforts to get countries, including the United States, to crackdown on opposing views. Clinton went on CNN to lament the continued resistance to censorship and to call upon Congress to limit free speech. In pushing her latest book, “Something Lost and Something Gained,” Clinton amplified on her warnings about the dangers of free speech. What is clear is that the gain of greater power for leaders like Clinton would be the loss of free speech for ordinary citizens.

  Clinton heralded the growing anti-free speech movement and noted that “there are people who are championing it, but it’s been a long and difficult road to getting anything done.” She is right, of course. As I discuss in my book, the challenge for anti-free speech champions like Clinton is that it is not easy to convince a free people to give up their freedom.

  That is why figures like Clinton are going “old school” and turning to government or corporations to simply crackdown on citizens. One of the lowest moments came after Elon Musk bought Twitter on a pledge to restore free speech protections, Clinton called upon European officials to force Elon Musk to censor American citizens under the infamous Digital Services Act (DSA). This is a former democratic presidential nominee calling upon Europeans to force the censorship of Americans.

  Unsurprisingly, Portsmouth (NH) Public Library has purchased Hillary's book, but has "banned" Turley's.

• Moan. Phillip W. Magness has some bad news: Marxism is back. (Did it leave? Missed that.)

  Karl Marx’s influence among intellectual elites underwent a massive rebound in recent years. In 2018, mainstream publications including the New York Times, the Economist, and the Financial Times ran gushy homages to the communist philosopher to commemorate the bicentennial of his birth. Marx’s Communist Manifesto consistently ranks as the most frequently assigned book on university course syllabi, with the exception of a few widely used textbooks. Bibliometric evidence of Marx’s prevalence abounds in academic works, where he consistently ranks among the most frequently cited authors in human history. The academy erupted with yet another fanfare for Marx last month, when Princeton University Press released a new translation of his magnum opus, Das Kapital.

  The high level of Marx veneration in modern academic life makes for a strange juxtaposition with the track record of Marx’s ideas. The last century’s experiments in Marxist governance left a trail of economic ruination, starvation, and mass murder. When evaluated on a strictly intellectual level, Marx’s theories have not fared much better than their Soviet, Chinese, Cambodian, Cuban, or Venezuelan implementations. Marx constructed his central economic system on the labour theory of value – an obsolete doctrine that was conclusively debunked by the “marginal revolution” in economics in the 1870s. Capital was also riddled with internal circularities throughout, including its inability to reconcile the pricing of labour as an input of production with labour as a priced value onto itself. By the turn of the 20^th century, Marx’s predictive claims about the immiserating forces of capitalism were confronted with the tangible reality of growing and widening levels of prosperity.

  By every measure of its own merit, Marx’s economic system should have been relegated to the dustbin of intellectual history – and for a brief moment it was. Marx’s Capital struggled to find an audience in his own lifetime. He died in 1883 in relative obscurity and with little following outside of a small band of fanatical leftists led by his friend Friedrich Engels. Even among fellow socialists, Marx was a controversial figure. He spent the last decade of his life locked in endless internecine feuds with anarchists, non-revolutionary socialists, and even other competitor revolutionary factions. For decades after his death, he faced credible accusations of plagiarising his theories from other writers. The Manifesto has more than a few arguments that strongly resembled an 1843 pamphlet by French socialist writer Victor Considerant, and Marx’s doctrine of “surplus value” closely follows an earlier work by democratic socialist thinker Johann Karl Rodbertus.
  

  I was able to re-excavate this P.J. O'Rourke quote from his 1983 book, Modern Manners:

  Another distinctive quality of manners is that they have nothing to do with what you do, only how you do it. For example, Karl Marx was always polite in the British Museum. He was courteous to the staff, never read with his hat on, and didn't make lip farts when he came across passages in Hegel with which he disagreed. Despite the fact that his political exhortations have caused the deaths of millions, he is today more revered than not. On the other hand, John W. Hinckley, Jr., was only rude once, to a retired Hollywood movie actor, and Hinckley will be in a mental institution for the rest of his life.

  He was right about everything except for that last bit.

"OK. And the answer is: 'What storm of bullshit occurs every four years in the US?'"

And an acceptable response would be the title of our Amazon Product du Jour. Which is reviewed by Elle Purnell at the Federalist: Book Tells Kids GOP Hates Immigrants, Dems Are Party Of Lunch. She is particularly bemused by…

Odd and even numbers? We're asking kids to read and do math? Good luck with that.

And let me just check the Portsmouth NH website… well, what do you know, yes of course this pile of partisan propaganda is waiting on the shelves of the Portsmouth Middle School Library, the better to indoctrinate impressionable young minds.

Do I advocate "banning" this biased book from that library? Interesting question. Nah. But I'd want to know: Do they have any equivalent pro-Republican books on their shelves?

I bet the answer to that question is no. You don't have to "ban" books that never make it into the library.

So, anyway, what's the haps on the election betting this week? Here you go:

Not to sound like a broken record, but: "The bettors seem to think the outcome is close to a coin-flip. Kamala's still a slight favorite, but Trump did some catching up this past week."

Yes, that's exactly what I said last week.

And even the WSJ's weekly columnist Peggy Noonan seems to be at a loss for words:

Jump ball, deadlock, coin flip, tossup. We’re running out of election metaphors.

As long as we don't go into sudden-death overtime. That would be tedious.

Also of note:

• Wrong answers being provided by both candidates. David R. Henderson's anodyne headline: How To Lower Costs For Consumers.

  Both Donald Trump and Kamala Harris have said during their campaigns for president that they want to bring down costs for consumers. It’s an admirable goal and, if done right, can be achieved.

  Unfortunately, both have been sparse on details about how to do so. In his September 6 speech to the Economic Club of New York, Trump engaged in a lot of exaggeration and bluster, but didn’t give details. In response to a sympathetic Philadelphia reporter’s question about how to do so, Harris started by telling how she was born into a middle-class family. She then segued to a mention of how people in her neighborhood were very proud of their lawns. She did propose a $25,000 subsidy for first buyers of housing, but that would increase, not decrease prices. She never answered his question.

  That’s the bad news. The good news is that economics gives us some tried and true ways of making consumers better off. They mainly have to do with allowing competition and allowing increased supplies. Trump did some of that while president. Harris as vice president showed no signs of moves in that direction. Yet many of the policies that both propose would do the opposite.

  Henderson advocates an obvious policy for lowering costs: free trade. Somewhat less obvious: increased immigration.

• Iron law of bipartisanship: When opposing parties agree on an issue, they're probably both wrong. Christian Britschgi notes a confirming example of that from the veep debate: Contra J.D. Vance and Tim Walz, Housing Should Be a 'Commodity'.

  Tuesday's vice presidential debate included a surprising amount of agreement between the two candidates on stage. Sen. J.D. Vance (R–Ohio) and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D) competed on who would produce more oil, keep the border more secure, and support Israel the most.

  They also were both in alignment on the notion that housing shouldn't be "a commodity."

  "The problem we've had is that we've got a lot of folks that see housing as another commodity," said Walz, criticizing the influence of Wall Street on the housing market.

  "We should get out of this idea of housing as a commodity!" concurred Vance, saying that the way to make it not a commodity would be to crack down on illegal immigration.

  Actually, as Britschgi points out, the best possible thing to happen in housing policy would be ignoring the nostrums peddled by both Walz and Vance. The free market does a very good job of supplying "commodities", bringing together willing buyers and sellers in mutually beneficial transactions.

  But you knew that. Too bad our politicians don't.

• What's the degree of difficulty on her performance so far? Imagine Elizabeth Nolan Brown as a judge at a gymnastic competition as she observes Kamala Harris' Freedom Flip-Flop.

  Kamala Harris' most consistent political trait may be a lack of consistency. Over the course of her long career, first in California and then in Washington, D.C., the Democrats' 2024 presidential nominee has been plagued by plausible allegations that she's hard to pin down and lacks a stable ideological core. She's a flip-flopper—or, if you want to be charitable, she evolves quickly.

  Over the summer, Harris' evolutions kept on coming, with her campaign issuing rapid-fire disavowals of many of her previous positions. Because she ran her failed 2020 presidential primary bid on an ultraprogressive, big-government platform, many of her new positions are noticeably more oriented toward the mainstream—and freedom.

  To slightly adapt what Jonah Goldberg memorably quipped about Mitt Romney: if you hit the mute button on your TV during a Kamala speech, she seems to be saying: What do I have to do to put you in this BMW today?

• I assume the above will be classified as "disinformation" in the Harris/Walz Administration. James Freeman notes that there's one issue they haven't flipped on, and that's their understanding of free speech. So, as James Freeman advocates: Criticize Harris and Walz While You Still Can.

  It’s a curious thing that Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate Gov. Tim Walz (D., Minn.) are enjoying generally friendly media coverage even as they set modern campaign records for avoiding media scrutiny. Odder still is that while avoiding discussion of the policies they will employ to govern us, they’ve clearly expressed contempt for the bedrock liberty that allows all of us to criticize government policies.

  Recently this column noted Ms. Harris’s history of hostility to free expression. Now we know that if voters give her the promotion she seeks, we can’t expect her vice president to serve as a moderating influence.

  Gee, I noticed that myself a few days ago. Freeman doesn't quote Pun Salad, but instead goes with Robby Soave, Jonathan Turley. And this tweet from Todd Zywicki:

  It is ironic that Walz saying there’s no First Amendment protection for “misinformation” is itself misinformation.

  — Todd Zywicki (@ToddZywicki) October 3, 2024

  Yes, irony can be … pretty ironic sometimes.

• I'm feeling a warm glow inside… Because Eric Boehm's headline (in print Reason) references a great little movie from the 1980s: The Brave Little (American) Toaster. But it's about JD Vance's know-nothingism about appliance manufacturing:

  The nationalist conservative obsession with blue-collar manufacturing jobs often ignores the interests of workers and the will of consumers. Sen. J.D. Vance (R–Ohio) provided a perfect illustration in an early August campaign speech in Nevada on "the American dream."

  In it, Donald Trump's protectionist running mate declared that "a million cheap, knockoff toasters aren't worth the price of a single American manufacturing job."

  On its face, that's just rhetorical silliness. Common sense says anyone should be willing to make that trade: Affordable and abundant appliances are part of the reason that 21st century America is the best place to live in the history of the human race. Jobs are abundant too—there were 7.6 million unfilled jobs in August, per the Department of Labor—and the loss of a few should not worry vice presidential candidates.

  But when right-wing populists such as Vance make this argument, they mean something less literal: that America would be better off if the nation manufactured more and imported less, and Americans would be better off working in metaphorical toaster factories than doing whatever job they have now.

  Boehm's article is marvelous. See if you agree with his answer to the question he poses near its end:

  How many Americans living in the year 2024 aspire to work—or see their children and grandchildren work—in a toaster factory?

  "I'll take "Very Small Numbers" for $400, Ken."

OK, admittedly "Me and Bobby McGee" is a very catchy tune and has some good lyrics, but Andrew Cline has a bone to pick with one line:

Good advice for us all.

Not to pile on the recently deceased—OK, I guess I am going to pile on the recently deceased—John Fund notes that Kris Kristofferson Was Great at Singing & Supremely Lousy at Politics. Specifically, he "was fully marinated in the mythology of communist sympathizers."

We got nothing but contempt for Nazi sympathizers, but are inordinately forgiving to fans of Communism, an ideology with a much higher body count.

And don't even get me started on what a shit he was to Rita Coolidge. (Google for yourself if you want.)

Also of note:

• 

  If only Kristofferson were still alive. He might want to use Joseph Stiglitz's new book (Amazon link at your right) as the basis for a new song. Ryan Bourne reviews it and describes Why Joseph Stiglitz Wants to Redefine Freedom

  Given the pervasive existence of negative externalities, misinformation, market imperfections, and the suffering of the poor within “free markets,” Stiglitz thinks we need a more positive conception of liberty — one that considers opportunity-enhancing supports and public goods provided by the government as pro-freedom. In short, he argues that a benevolent state can make us freer, on net, by taxing, spending, and regulating to make the poor richer (“freedom to act”), provide social security (“freedom from want and fear”), and expand opportunity (freedom to live up to one’s potential). This coercion for the greater good will protect us against various market failures and exploitation. It’s the “freedom” that Vice President Kamala Harris promises on the campaign trail.

  Why does Stiglitz try to redefine “freedom” rather than just use other existing words such as, say, “wealth,” or “opportunity,” or even “economic welfare” for these ambitions? Well, because he thinks that “freedom” resonates with people and that the libertarian-conservative conception of it has unfairly dominated our politics since the “neoliberal” revolution of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. To read Stiglitz, in fact, you would think we’d seen minimalist government since the early 1980s, driving economic failure, climate-change destruction, and, ultimately, the economic disappointment that he thinks is fueling populist authoritarianism. Achieving his vision of real freedom requires “progressive capitalism,” Stiglitz concludes, by which he means a much more expansive form of social democracy and the regulatory state.

  The above link is my first of five NR "gifted" links for October. Don't let it go to waste!

• 

  Not a fan of this lady either. James E. Hartley writes on The Religious Idiocy of ‘Limitarianism’. He leads off with a appropriate quote:

  “In one sense, at any rate, it is more valuable to read bad literature than good literature. Good literature may tell us the mind of one man; but bad literature may tell us the mind of many men….The more dishonest a book is as a book the more honest it is as a public document.” ~G.K. Chesterton, Heretics 

  And continues with his review of…

  Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth by Ingrid Robeyns is a very bad book. Writing a review of it thus presents a challenge. Who wants to read a review that is the equivalent of shooting fish in a barrel of dead fish? Yet, while reading Robeyns’ tendentious screed, I was faced with the absolute certainty that quite a few of my colleagues and students would love this book. Chesterton’s observation thus puts the right question forward. The interesting thing about Limitarianism is not why it is so very flawed, but rather why Robeyns and others would think it was good.

  The thesis of the book is simple. Robeyns thinks it is wrong for anyone to have more than a million dollars in wealth, but she will agree to a compromise of a maximum wealth of ten million dollars. Robeyns doesn’t care what currency unit you use (dollars, pounds, or euros) as long as there is an enforced maximum. To the immediate reply that a 100% tax on wealth over that amount might be problematic, Robeyns repeatedly insists that she isn’t necessarily advocating that tax rate. Not that she thinks there is anything wrong with a 100% wealth tax, there are just other ways to get there. For example, you could convince everyone in the world it is bad to have lots of wealth.

  The bulk of the book is Robeyns shouting at the reader about why anyone having high wealth is so incredibly bad. First: “It’s Dirty Money.” Some wealthy people acquired their wealth by stealing it. Obviously, that is an argument against theft, not high wealth, but in a perfect example of how this book works, having established that we all agree stealing is bad, Robeyns then notes that people get wealthy in lots of other similar ways — like only paying whatever they are required to pay in taxes or owning companies that pay wages less than what Robeyns thinks workers should be paid. You see? Stealing wealth and not paying more than you owe in taxes are both “dirty money.” So, high wealth is evil.

  Amazon link at your right, although after reading Hartley's take, I can't imagine why you would want to take advantage of it.

• I'm dubious of the claim. Specifically, David C. Rose's claim that he knows How to Make Social Security Reform a Winning Campaign Issue. But let's take a look:

  The Social Security program was too vulnerable to demographic bubbles from the very beginning and subsequent reforms have increasingly over-promised benefits thereby inviting our present budget insolvency. Voters are frustrated and losing confidence. They are looking for genuine leadership, not the “third rail of politics” policy détente we now have.

  Harris and Trump now have an opportunity to provide such leadership. Each could promise to do one quick and simple thing as president to reduce the unfunded liability gap in Social Security funding. It’s easy to explain to voters, it will appeal to both younger and older voters, and it will especially appeal to those in the political middle who are looking for practical solutions rather than ideologically driven bumper sticker slogans. It would behoove both candidates to jump on this reform proposal first. 

  In 1972, an amendment was passed to protect Social Security beneficiaries from the effects of inflation. A mistake was made in the procedure for implementing the Cost of Living Adjustments indexing of benefits. This had the effect of over-accounting for the effects of inflation, leading to the prospect of benefit levels soaring out of control as inflation worsened in the 70s. In 1976, a Congressional panel led by a Harvard economist, William Hsiao, was convened in part to correct the error. The panel also recommended that the initial benefits calculation employ price indexing rather than wage indexing out of fear that the latter would produce an unsustainable budget. Unfortunately, wage indexing was chosen over price indexing. 

  So Rose's proposed fix is to switch over to price indexing. And he quotes Social Securities trustee's report as claiming that One Simple Fix "wiil remove about 80 percent of the unfunded liability gap over the next 75 years."

  Pretty good, right? The problem being that it's inevitable that this reform would be demagogued as a "benefit cut." (Because it kinda is.) And that demagoguery has proven to be extremely effective.

  Also: someone's sure to point out that if you're going to use a CPI statistic to calculate cost-of-living adjustments for retirees, wouldn't CPI-E (where the E stands for "Elderly") be more appropriate?

  Sure it would. But the problem there: that would almost certainly increase benefits more than the current CPI-W calculation.

  Bottom line: this won't be solved painlessly, I fear.

People interested in this issue, and skeptical of self-described "fairness", should read Cato's analysis: https://t.co/a3K96Mf5ID

— Paul Sand (@punsalad) October 4, 2024

Unfortunately, it's a reply to something he posted back on September 19, so it's unlikely to be seen by anyone except… well, you, I guess. From the linked Cato article by Romina Boccia:

There follows a tutorial about why WEP and GPO were enacted in the first place, it's probably most interesting for the folks who will benefit. And the people who will wind up paying will not pay attention. It's kind of a classic "public choice" story.

Unfortunately, giving away taxpayer money is pretty popular among CongressCritters, including mine.

Also of note:

• Sitting on the dock of the bay. Noah Smith is a Kamala fan, but that doesn't mean he can't see that Make-work is not the future of work. (Whoa, a triple negative. I'm gonna leave it there though.)

  In case you haven’t yet heard, the ILA — the union that controls the dockworkers along the entire East and Gulf Coasts of the United States — has just gone on strike, threatening to paralyze much of the U.S. economy by cutting off a substantial percentage of imports. If a deal isn’t reached soon, inflation could come roaring back, and lots of Americans could lose their jobs at the same time. (UPDATE: The strike appears to have been suspended until early next year.)

  Here’s how [president of the International Longshoremen’s Association Harold J.] Daggett describes the potential impact of his union’s strike in the interview [at the link]:

  When my men hit the streets from Maine to Texas, every single port locked down. You know what's going to happen? I'll tell you. First week, be all over the news every night, boom, boom, second week. Guys who sell cars can't sell cars, because the cars ain't coming in off the ships. They get laid off. Third week, malls are closing down. They can't get the goods from China. They can't sell clothes. They can't do this. Everything in the United States comes on a ship. They go out of business. Construction workers get laid off because the materials aren't coming in. The steel's not coming in. The lumber's not coming in. They lose their job. Everybody's hating the longshoremen now because now they realize how important our jobs are.

  We should all be thinking very hard about whether it’s wise to have a labor system that can allow that sort of thing to happen. Is it right that the livelihoods of millions of Americans should hang on the whims of 50,000 dockworkers? Is it smart to give a single union the power to shut down a large portion of America’s critical infrastructure? Collective bargaining is important, but there should be limits on how destructive we allow that bargaining process to be.

  President Biden doesn’t see it that way. He has refused to use the powers of the Taft-Hartley Act to break the strike on national emergency grounds, declaring that “I don’t believe in Taft-Hartley.” But although the ILA may win their fight in the short term, I don’t think they’re going to come off looking very good as a result of this strike. Belligerently threatening the livelihoods of millions of Americans while proudly declaring that “everyone hates the longshoremen” is not a good look, especially if you’re a guy who makes around $900,000 a year (three times as much as other big union leaders), once owned a giant yacht, and has been indicted (though acquitted) by the U.S. government twice for racketeering.

  Smith goes on to note that it's more about banning automation at the ports than it is wages.

• And for more on that issue… Reason's Eric Boehm is not gonna be on Daggett's Christmas list; he advocates that we go ahead and Automate the Ports.

  The news that the International Longshoreman Association (ILA) agreed to suspend its strike until January is undeniably good news for just about every aspect of America's economy.

  But whether they are open or closed, many American ports rank among the least efficient in the entire world. The ports in New York, Baltimore, and Houston—three of the largest of the 36 ports that could have been shut down by the ILA strike—are ranked no higher than 300th place (out of 348 in total) in the World Bank's most recent report on port efficiency. Not a single U.S. port ranks in the top 50. Slow-moving ports act as bottlenecks to commerce both coming and going, which "reduces the competitiveness of the country…and hinders economic growth and poverty reduction," the World Bank notes.

  Boehm notes later in his article that Daggett also despises E-ZPass. Because all those human toll-takers were unionized! And none of the E-ZPass hardware is!

• And for a lighter look… Jeff Maurer provides Daggett some space at his substack to reiterate what his union really wants: We Demand That Ports Stop Using Automation, Ships Without Sails, Any Containers Whatsoever. (Just to be clear, it's a parody. I think.)

  Let’s start with automation. It’s true that many American ports are some of the least-efficient in the world, but that’s because a port like Oakland (ranked #397) doesn’t have the built-in advantages of a global hub like Luanda, Angola (#389) or Port Sudan (#388). The ILA will not to be dragged into the mid-20th century against our will. Some foreign ports are already automated, using dangerous, untested technology like computers, bar codes, and video cameras. In Mobile, Alabama, the port tried to install something called an “automatic gate” — what in the devil is that?!?!? We will never allow greedy corporations to deny someone the dignity of earning a living by standing next to a gate all day. If we don’t act, it won’t just be the standing-next-to-a-gate-all-day jobs that will go away; jobs like guy-who-carries-an-orange-flag-around-sometimes, guy-who-stands-next-to-a-guy-who-is-loading-things, and guy-who-leans-on-a-forklift-all-day-listening-to-sports-radio will be threatened, too.

  By why should the pro-labor measures be limited to the docks? It’s time to confront the fact that modern, diesel-powered ships destroy jobs. Dock workers would benefit if shipping reverted to wood-built, wind-powered ships that served humanity just fine for thousands of years. That’s true for two reasons: First, today’s steel-and-diesel behemoths slide into port with virtually no help from the docks. In contrast, a three-masted schooner laden with spices from the orient would require at least 20 stout men to pull her ashore. Second, modern ships haul huge amounts of cargo with sparse crew, which reduces demand for hardscrabble chaps from port towns who wear cable-knit sweaters and clinch corn cob pipes in their teeth. Sailors and longshoremen share many things: A love of the sea, a penchant for feeding peanuts to pet monkeys who perch on our shoulders, and a stew of venereal diseases contracted from dockside whores. What’s good for sailors is also good for dock workers, so we must retreat from this post-Monitor/Merrimack hell that has befallen us in the past 160 years.

  Daggett's bottom line:

  President Biden has said that he won’t force us back to work. I applaud his decision to affirm union solidarity as we cause supply chain disruptions that will bring back inflation right before the election — that is true commitment! Vice President Harris and former president Trump have also expressed support, so there seems to be a broad consensus that the ILA will not be forced to accept technological change just because it makes goods cheaper, facilitates commerce, and increases productivity. The future of global commerce will be decided in the coming weeks. And I will do everything in my power to see that that future closely resembles the distant past.

  And I enjoyed the "disclaimer" at the end too:

  For the lawyers and ILA-connected mafia members: This is a bit. So, you can’t sue me or kill me and toss my body in a drainage ditch off the Jersey Turnpike, because satire is protected speech.

  So there. And if this is my last post ever, you'll probably find me in that ditch too.

Recently on the book blog:

A hefty tome, weighing in at 580 pages. But many of those pages are tables with row after row of data, and I hope you'll forgive me for skipping over those. Obtained by the Interlibrary Loan service at the University Near Here, from Wesleyan.

You may remember the 1980 Simon–Ehrlich wager, where techno-optimist Julian Simon bet eco-doomster Paul Ehrlich that the prices of five minerals (copper, chromium, nickel, tin, and tungsten) would go down in real terms over the next decade. Simon won that bet. This book's authors (Marian L. Tupy and Gale L. Pooley) deem Simon their hero, and this book is their effort to expand and generalize his sunny optimism.

Their approach is to calculate the "time price" (TP) of various commodities and services; how long it would take a typical worker to earn enough money to buy them. And to see how those TPs have changed over time. Spoiler: nearly without exception, the TPs have declined over the periods they examine. I.e., the items have become more "abundant". And, in many cases, the growth in abundance has outstripped the growth in population; the authors term this "superabundance".

Reader, did your school teachers chide you to "show your work" in your math classes? And to "cite your sources" in other classes? Tupy and Pooley do so, in mind-numbing detail. Again, a lot of pages skimmed over. I trust them.

Other than those core calculations, the book is an examination of the history and causes of economic prosperity. It is a rebuke to the gloomy followers of Malthus, like Ehrlich. (And also, amusingly, Thanos, the mass Malthusian murderer from the Marvel movies.) Here, they mainly follow the arguments of folks I like too: Deirdre McCloskey, Steven Pinker, Matt Ridley, Michael Shellenberger, and the like.

No surprise, I think the authors are largely correct in their cheerleading for technological optimism and free-market capitalism. And also that the main dangers to continued prosperity are the too-popular advocates for (various flavors of) socialism, economic degrowth, technophobia, and (generally) predictors of doom, unless we stop our sinful ways.

One small nit to pick: the phrase "infinitely bountiful planet" up there in the book's subtitle. I'm more of a fan of (Herbert) Stein's Law: "If something cannot go on forever, it will stop." (Example: Moore's Law: even its originator admitted that would eventually bump into fundamental limits.)

Also, the authors make a decent argument that innovation is driven in areas with large populations. (You want a country where Jobs has a better chance of meeting Woz, for example.) But large doesn't necessarily imply growing indefinitely; I think the authors tend to blur that distinction.

Reader, I recommend you do not search Amazon for "poop emoji". Lot of stuff there you don't want to be tempted to buy. Like our Product du Jour! You're welcome!

Anyway, it's a topical image for this Ars Technica story: AI digests repetitive scatological document into profound “poop” podcast.

I can't imagine what an AI fed on Pun Salad content would produce. Like the Giant Rat of Sumatra, 'twould undoubtedly be a story for which the world is not yet prepared.

But in a slightly more serious look at the AI doomsaying, John H. Cochrane advises: AI, Society, and Democracy: Just Relax.

Among Cochrane's numerous spot-on observations: remember when GMO-based "frankenfood" was gonna kill us all? Well, that didn't happen, but a manipulated virus made with the blessing of (and cash from) a US government agency did manage to kill a bunch of us.

His recommendation:

The government must enforce rule of law, not the tyranny of the regulator. Trust democracy, not paternalistic aristocracy—rule by independent, unaccountable, self-styled technocrats, insulated from the democratic political process. Remain a government of rights, not of permissions. Trust and strengthen our institutions, including all of civil society, media, and academia, not just federal regulatory agencies, to detect and remedy problems as they occur. Relax. It’s going to be great.

Cochrane's substack is titled "The Grumpy Economist", and it looks pretty good.

Also of note:

• On the crack-down watch. Joe Lancaster on yet another triumph for bipartisan agreement: Both Trump and Harris Would Crack Down on Fentanyl.

  Republicans and Democrats alike agree that the U.S. should do something about fentanyl, the synthetic opioid that is significantly more potent than heroin. It is often found mixed into street drugs, but not because addicts are clamoring for it: Rather, fentanyl is cheaper and easier to manufacture and smuggle, making it an attractive alternative when prohibitionist governments crack down on pain pills.

  Unfortunately, neither of the major party seems willing to either admit the government's own role in making the drug so dangerous, or to pursue an alternative to classic war on drugs policies.

  Nothing is more likely to put me into a snit than seeing my local pols pontificate that they're gonna "keep drugs off our streets".

• If it's hard for him, imagine how difficult it is for me. And probably you. George F. Will has a problem: Between Harris and Trump, it’s hard to tell who’s worse on economic matters.

  If cynics are people prematurely disappointed about the future, they might now constitute something recently elusive: an American consensus. With voting well underway a month before Election Day (actually, during election autumn), gaze upon the campaign’s stricken landscape:

  […]

  Harris is parsimonious with interviews, but who cares? They can only reveal today’s batch of her views, which tend to expire in batches. It would, however, be fun to find out if there is any question — e.g., are there enough submarines for the AUKUS partners? — she will not answer by saying, “I was raised a middle-class kid, okay?”

  Former president Donald Trump still resembles the “Bleak House” character about whom Charles Dickens wrote: “When he has nothing else to do, he can always contemplate his own greatness. It is a considerable advantage to a man, to have so inexhaustible a subject.” But Trump’s ongoing choices of colorful companions raise a question: Has a ship’s hull ever become so encrusted with barnacles that the weight of them sank the vessel? The Trump campaign should wonder. He evidently enjoys the company of the dregs of America’s political culture — Holocaust deniers, 9/11 “truthers,” Tucker Carlson, who praises a “historian” who thinks Winston Churchill was beastly to Adolf Hitler.

  I've added that "prematurely disappointed about the future" quip to my blog's subtitle rotation.

• Wax (still) off. Charles Murray takes to Quillette to comment on The Amy Wax Affair.

  Last week, Amy Wax, the Robert Mundheim Professor of Law at the University of Pennsylvania (“Penn”) and three-time recipient of awards for excellence in teaching, was stripped her of her chaired professorship, suspended for a year at half pay, and denied summer pay in perpetuity. Why? As far as I can tell, for telling her students the truth in the classroom and exercising her constitutional right to express her private opinions outside the classroom.

  Penn’s administration doesn’t see it that way. In the words of the official letter sent to Wax, these punishments were justified by her “flagrant unprofessional conduct”:

  That conduct included a history of making sweeping and derogatory generalisations about groups by race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, and immigration status; breaching the requirement that student grades be kept private by publicly speaking about the grades of law students by race and continuing to do so even after cautioned by the dean that it was a violation of university policy; and, on numerous occasions, in and out of the classroom and in public, making discriminatory and disparaging statements targeting specific racial, ethnic, and other groups with which many students identify.

  The specifics of the allegations against Wax can be found in a twelve-page letter written by the Dean of the law school, Theodore Ruger, in June 2022. I am suspicious of some of them, but most of the things she is alleged to have said sound like the Amy Wax I know. In each of our occasional encounters over the years, I have always had the same reactions. She is brilliant, entertaining, disconcertingly frank, and sometimes abrasive. Her style is not my style, but I have never known Wax to use invective or slurs when she is expressing her opinion. She is just really, really, blunt.

  … and, unfortunately, it's paywalled after that. But the upshot is obvious: it's more likely all but the bravest dissenters from the theology that infests American higher ed will avoid being "really, really, blunt".

  And blunt criticism is exactly what higher ed needs. Otherwise we're in for a few more decades of cluelessness and malpractice.

… it's looking real good that I will (eventually) be vindicated, according to Katherine Mangu-Ward: The Coming Vindication of the Double-Haters.

KMW goes on to note that we've entered "the era of total policy nihilism" where the candidates "will literally say anything to get elected." And her bottom line seems designed to cheer me up:

But policy nihilism is only tenable for as long as the campaign lasts. Someone will win, and that person must govern—at which point the double-haters will almost certainly be proven right.

… except what we'll be "proven right" about is the awfulness of whoever wins.

Also of note:

• Fortunately, shouting "What an idiot!" at a TV is still protected by the First Amendment. No, I didn't watch the veep debate last night, but if I had… well, let's go to the transcript, and examine Governor Walz's grasp of Constitutional jurisprudence:

  [Walz:] You can't yell fire in a crowded theater. That's the test. That's the Supreme court test.

  Uh, no it's not. Greg Lukianoff and Nadine Strossen wrote an entire article about this particular cliché, but here's the one-sentence summary:

  Anyone who says “you can’t shout fire! in a crowded theatre” is showing that they don’t know much about the principles of free speech, or free speech law — or history.

  In a saner country, Walz would hang his head in shame, resign from the ticket, go back to mismanaging Minnesota. Alas, we don't live in that country.

  And (also alas) we live in a country where a current SCOTUS justice can make the same claim.

• Doesn't sound like something Calvin Coolidge would have done. Jeff Maurer claims We’re All Too Beat Down to Care That Trump Is Hawking $100,000 Watches and Crypto. And he might be right. He's talking about this:

  K. Trump watches. Roger that — can I go play XBox now? I mean, I know it’s fucked up that a presidential candidate has a merch store in which he sells bibles, sneakers, and other stuff, and I know that an ethical breach like that would sink any other campaign, but I also know that Trump’s fans will hold him to ethical standards the same day that Willie Nelson’s fans demand that he submit to rigorous drug testing. If you’re Jimmy Carter, you have to walk away from your peanut farm, if you’re Richard Nixon, you have to itemize a puppy on your FEC filing, but if you’re Trump, your campaign can be the loss leader for your trashy-rich QVC store, and we’ll all say “whatever” and freak out over a baby hippo.

  Awwww! Baby hippo!

• It ain't Ms. Pac-Man, baby. The National Review editors weigh in on Kamala Harris’s Video-Game Economy.

  After being ridiculed for not having a policy platform, the Kamala Harris campaign released an 82-page document outlining the vice president’s ideas on the economy. No longer suffering from lack of detail, it still suffers from lack of good sense.

  The Harris view of economics is that the United States is a single-player video game, and the federal government is the player. Creating a thriving economy is simply a matter of pressing the right buttons in the right order.

  Harris has replaced her formerly far-left economic views with minutely technocratic ones. Democrats want to use their freshly expanded IRS to micromanage flows of money in the economy through an even more invasive and convoluted system of tax credits than already exists.

  Further fun fact:

  The platform villainizes “Wall Street investors” while also proudly touting that Goldman Sachs estimates higher economic growth from Harris’s plans than from Trump’s. It attacks “big corporations” while noting that nearly 100 business leaders have endorsed Harris for president.

  I have always been an "America will muddle through somehow" guy, But I am not optimistic that this will end well.

Well, who knows? Megan McArdle (nee Jane Galt) takes on an easier issue: AI is an existential threat to colleges. Can they adapt? She is largely concerned at reports that a large fraction of students use AI to "cheat", passing off AI-written content as their own work.

Also of note:

• It's a common enough error. Robert Graboyes misquotes Shakespeare, but that's OK for his purposes: Bubble, Bubble, Toil and Trouble. He presents "Bob's 12 Laws of Bubbles", and here are the first two:

  1. If you can’t comprehend why an intelligent, well-informed, decent person might believe that (1) Donald Trump was a better president than Joe Biden is, or (2) Joe Biden is a better president than Donald Trump was, or (3) Donald Trump and Joe Biden are roughly equivalent on the great-to-horrific spectrum, then you live in a bubble.

  2. If you can’t comprehend why an intelligent, well-informed, decent person would (1) vote for Donald Trump over Kamala Harris, or (2) vote for Kamala Harris over Donald Trump, or (3) decline to vote for either Donald Trump or Kamala Harris, then you live in a bubble and need to stop watching cable news and go take a walk.

  And you will not want to miss the other ten. Plus, as a bonus, a Lawrence Welk clip, unfortunately containing no champagne bubbles.

  I confess that I have unfollowed some Facebook friends because they mostly posted intelligence-insulting political memes. Maybe running afoul of Graboyes' Law #9, and thereby being an asshole? Ah, well.

• But speaking of bubble-dwelling… At the WSJ, James Freeman looks at the NYT's predictable election endorsement: Harris, Patriotism and the New York Times.

  Doing nothing to improve our public discourse or increase understanding across the partisan divide, the New York Times delivers its expected endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris under the intolerant headline “The Only Patriotic Choice for President.”

  This column hesitates to take the Times editorial board seriously, but for those determined to do so, a natural first question might be: How would they know? As the editorial itself acknowledges:

  Many voters have said they want more details about the vice president’s plans, as well as more unscripted encounters in which she explains her vision and policies. They are right to ask. 

  There may be more than ignorance at work here. The Times editorial falsely credits the vice president with an “unwavering commitment to the Constitution” despite her documented rejection of the free speech protections at the heart of the First Amendment, without which none of our other constitutional liberties would be safe.

  The reasonable conclusion is that Timesfolk are free speech absolutists when the Times is smearing Republicans but indifferent to First Amendment abuses if they are to be visited upon people who disagree with the Times. This seems deeply unpatriotic.

  Of course, she's not Trump. That's her major, perhaps only, advantage.

• Kaus for alarm. Mickey Kaus rarely blogs these days, so attention must be paid when he points out The Trouble With Kamala's Nod. And also…

  : Ann Coulter cracked the code of why Kamala' Harris’ cackling laugh can be so annoying. It's not the sound of her voice. The problem is "she laughs when nothing remotely funny has been said." By laughing she’s asking us to become complicit in an emperor's-clothes social conspiracy to pretend it was funny. "If you don’t laugh, you’re rude ..."

  The same, I think, goes for an even more annoying and enduring Harris tic-- the way she nods her head like a bouncing ball after making what she thinks should be considered an important or profound point.** She's in effect asking the audience to join in acknowledging its importance. Reject that and you're rude.

  I confess I'm not that put off by the nodding, but that's me. Kaus has a few examples, most unfortunately requiring "premium" twitter. But here's one that doesn't:

  That would be annoying even in an audio-only form. A text transcript would be too.

• See you in court. NHJournal has the eminently predictable next step in the struggle for free speech rights in Bow, New Hampshire: Bow High School Hit With Lawsuit Over Treatment of 'Pink-Wristband' Parents.

  Bow High School has been hit with a lawsuit on behalf of the pro girls-only sports parents who wore pink wristbands to their daughters’ soccer game earlier this month, a story that has brought national scorn to the affluent, liberal community.

  The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of New Hampshire, alleges that school officials violated the parents’ First Amendment rights by banning them from school grounds and events for wearing the pink wristbands as a form of silent protest during the Sept. 17 match.

  These school officials need some schoolin' themselves.