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?.