Pun Salad

Dave Barry issued a NOBEL PRIZE ALERT for the Earworm Eraser:

From the (apologies in advance) NPR story: All I want for Christmas is ... help getting this song out of my head.

And, yes, I really did have Linda Ronstadt's "Dreams Of The San Joaquin" stuck in my head for days after it came up on the iPod. (I accept no responsibility if you click on that link and get earwormed.)

Also of note:

• Betteridge's law of headlines seems not to apply. Steven Hayward wonders: Did Biden Make His Anti-Semitism Official? Because our Dotard-in-Chief was photographed…

  … emerging from a Nantucket bookstore holding in plain sight the book he purchased: Rashid Khalidi’s The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonial Conquest and Resistance, 1917-2017. Khalidi is a former spokesperson for the PLO, defender of Hamas terrorism, and a vicious anti-Semite, full stop. He is also an emeritus professor of Middle East studies at Columbia University, naturally.

  As I mentioned recently over on the book blog, I spotted Khalidi's book at the Portsmouth (NH) Public Library. According to the library's online catalog, it's also available at Portsmouth High School's library. Useful for any kiddos who want to apply to Columbia and swing with the serious Hamas cheerleaders.

  But I doubt that Biden reads books. This purchase was mere signalling of hostility to Israel.

  Last year Issues & Insights wondered: Does Anybody Know What Books Biden Reads? Or If He Reads? The media, after years of wondering what tomes were on presidential bedside tables, went strangely silent when Joe got in.

• And as my rear-view mirror warns me, it may be closer than it appears. Kevin D. Williamson admits a mistake: I Thought Happiness Was ‘Idiocracy’ in the Rear-View Mirror.

  I owe Mike Judge an apology.

  When the brilliant satirist behind Beavis and Butt-Head and Office Space came out with his 2006 masterpiece Idiocracy, I enjoyed the film but was critical of it. I thought it was too cynical, too cruel, that it took too low a view of human beings in general and of U.S.A.-American-type human beings in particular.

  Eighteen years later, the Trump administration is plumbing the world of professional wrestling for the next secretary of education.

  So, to the Prophet Mike Judge (peace be upon him), to President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Camacho, to Frito Pendejo, to Beef Supreme and all the rest of the Idiocracy gang, all I can think to say is … Idiocracy was still wrong, damn it, just not in the direction I thought it was. Incredible as the fact may be: Mike Judge took far too generous a view of boobus Americanus.

  It’s like we jumped off the ledge, landed in the world of Idiocracy, and then started digging until we were 20,000 leagues underneath whatever muck it is that is morally and intellectually beneath Idiocracy.

  As an American, I mourn this. As a journalist, well, it’s awesome. I have a vision of the 2028 presidential election, and it is going to be a hoot.

  If I were (somehow) elected to Congress, my first official duty would be to author a bill changing the National Anthem to The Who's "Won't Get Fooled Again".

• Whew, that's a relief, kemo sabe. Do you lie awake nights, tortured by the question Am I on Indigenous land? Fortunately, Noah Smith provides an answer: No, you are not on Indigenous land.

  The United States, like all nations, was created through territorial conquest. Most of its current territory was occupied or frequented by human beings before the U.S. came; the U.S. used force to either displace, subjugate, or kill all of those people. To the extent that land “ownership” existed under the previous inhabitants, the land of the U.S. is stolen land.

  This was also true before the U.S. arrived. The forcible theft of the land upon which the U.S. now exists was not the first such theft; the people who lived there before conquered, displaced, or killed someone else in order to take the land. The land has been stolen and re-stolen again and again. If you somehow destroyed the United States, expelled its current inhabitants, and gave ownership of the land to the last recorded tribe that had occupied it before, you would not be returning it to its original occupants; you would simply be handing it to the next-most-recent conquerors.

  If you go back far enough in time, of course, at some point this is no longer true. Humanity didn’t always exist; therefore for every piece of land, there was a first human to lay eyes on it, and a first human to say “This land is mine.” But by what right did this first human claim exclusive ownership of this land? Why does being the first person to see a natural object make you the rightful owner of that object? And why does being the first human to set foot on a piece of land give your blood descendants the right to dispose of that land as they see fit in perpetuity, and to exclude any and all others from that land? What about all the peoples of the world who were never lucky enough to be the first to lay eyes on any plot of dirt? Are they simply to be dispossessed forever?

  Smith's article is long, funny in spots, thoughtful in others. Glad that his Kamala cheerleading is over.

• Speaking truth to power. It can get you some pretty serious criticism if you're a Massachusetts Democrat. But as James Freeman points out at the WSJ, CongressCritter Seth Moulton is Still Not Cancelled. Freeman excerpts Moulton's WaPo op-ed:

  Two days after Donald Trump’s victory, I gave an example of how Democrats spend too much time trying not to offend anyone, even on issues where most Americans feel the same way. Speaking as a dad, I said I didn’t like the idea of my two girls one day competing against biological boys on a playing field. My main point, though, is what I said next: “As a Democrat, I’m supposed to be afraid to say that.”

  The blowback, which was swift, included the chair of a local Democratic committee calling me a Nazi “cooperator” and about 200 people gathering in front of my office to protest a sentence. My unimpeachable record of standing up for the civil rights of all Americans, including the trans community, was irrelevant.

  What has amazed me, though, is what’s happening behind the scenes. Countless Democrats have reached out, from across the party — to thank me. I’ve heard it again and again, from union leaders to colleagues in the House and Senate; from top people from the Obama, Biden and Harris teams to local Democrats stopping me on the street; from fellow dads to many in the LGBTQ+ community: “Thank you for saying that!”

  I assume Moulton's position will soon be common wisdom, and the unhinged criticism of it will be memory-holed.

• Whoa, what's next? Abolish the Department of Motherhood? Another one of the entries in Reason's "Abolish Everything" issue that won't happen: Jonathan H. Adler says we should Abolish the EPA.

  The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) does not have a typical origin story. Congress did not create it by enacting a statute; President Richard Nixon created it by presidential edict. Perhaps that explains why it's hard to reconcile what the EPA actually does with a robust theory of the federal government's role in environmental protection.

  Nixon created the agency in response to a broad sense of environmental crisis in the nation (and a desire to gain partisan advantage). Apocalyptic tracts and sensationalized events, such as the infamous and poorly understood 1969 fire on the Cuyahoga River, fed fears that environmental problems were getting inexorably worse and federal intervention was necessary. Yet before Nixon reorganized the federal bureaucracy to create the EPA, key environmental trends were already improving.

  Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, as demand for environmental protection increased, state and local governments adopted various protective measures. By 1966, every state had adopted water pollution legislation of some sort—and key water pollution measures were improving well before the EPA got into the game. Similarly, key indicators of urban air quality were improving before the EPA appeared.

  Speaking of Mike Judge (see above), maybe Elon will ask EPA employees: