Pun Salad

Via Daniel J. Mitchell's Libertarian Humor article:

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I didn't expect to laugh out loud, but I did.

Also of note:

• Stream it for free! Noah Smith offers The latest episode of Mad King Trump.

  I do not believe that Donald Trump is secretly a Russian plant, hired by the Kremlin to destroy America’s economy and global influence. But frustratingly, Trump’s actions are often indistinguishable from what he might do if he were a foreign agent bent on destruction. Let’s take stock of some of his latest moves.

  First, there’s yet another round of tariffs, this time on the auto industry. This time Trump is putting 25% tariffs on imported cars and car parts. Since many U.S. cars use foreign parts, and U.S.-made parts are often assembled into full cars across the border, these tariffs will disrupt the entire U.S. auto supply chain (the Cato Institute has a great explainer on how this works, if you’re interested.) Prices will go up for American consumers, and costs will go up for U.S. manufacturers. Predictably, American automakers saw big declines in their stock prices:

  Noah has price charts at the link, but in words: as I type, GM's stock price is down 9.5% in the past 5 days. Ford is down close to 4%. What's the Donald gonna say? "WE HAD TO DESTROY AMERICAN AUTO INDUSTRY TO SAVE IT," I'd imagine.

• To be fair, they had help. David Harsanyi notes some historical revisionism goin' on: Democrats still won't face the toll of their COVID hysteria. It's at the NYPost, which means one sentence per paragraph:

  When I first came across Jonathan Chait’s new Atlantic piece, “Why the COVID Reckoning Is So One-Sided,” I assumed the answer would be that Democrats had been the ones relentlessly and tragically wrong about virtually everything during the pandemic.

  No such luck.

  In Chait’s telling, the left remains uncannily open-minded, always striving for truth, while the dogmatic right remains hopelessly bogged down in “pathological incuriosity.”

  Even when conservatives are right, they’re right in the wrong way.

  These days, people on the left, Chait contends, “have engaged in searching self-reflection — on school closings, the lab leak hypothesis, the political aftereffects, and other unanticipated lessons. Conservatives have used the occasion to engage in a round of self-congratulations and taunting of the libs.”

  Well, lib-taunting is a lot of fun.

  I don't think David links to Chait's article, but here it is: Why the COVID Reckoning Is So One-Sided. Mostly paywalled, unfortunately.

• Betteridge's Law of Headlines does not apply… … to Charles Lane's Free Press headline query: Is It Time to Privatize the USPS?

  Here’s an idea: Let’s create a federally sponsored corporation to spend $89.5 billion a year moving stuff—mostly documents made of paper—from place to place. Let’s hire 635,000 people to do it, grant them expensive health and pension benefits such that personnel costs are 80 percent of the total, then make it almost impossible to lay them off.

  Let’s keep doing so long after the service has been rendered technologically obsolete, and demand for it has cratered. In fact, let’s keep it up even though recipients have decided that nearly three-fifths of what we deliver to them is “junk” that they discard almost as soon as it arrives.

  Insane, you say? Well, what you have just read is an accurate portrayal of the United States Postal Service, which lost $9.5 billion shuffling paper around the country in fiscal year 2024, while Americans sent one another six billion text messages daily. Half the people surveyed in 2021 hadn’t received a personal letter in five years; 14 percent had never received one.

  If you haven't been convinced by Pun Salad's frequent posts on the topic (here's one from 2009), maybe this one will do the trick?

• Dīrigō. That's Maine's official state motto, Latin for "I lead." It was adopted back when Maine held its elections in September. And they kept it even after moving them to November.

  Which doesn't matter, except that I looked it up and wanted to share it with you. As an intro to the Antiplanner's caution to the state: Maine Needs Less Transit, Not More.

  Transit agencies and supporters arrogantly believe that we should be dependent on them, thus justifying their gigantic subsidies, rather than being dependent on (meaning liberated by) automobiles. A case in point is the Maine Public Transit Advisory Council (PTAC), whose latest report claims that Maine transit is falling 89 percent short of meeting transit “needs.”

  As the Antiplanner notes, The "Public Transit Advisory Council" is "stacked in favor of more transit subsidies, with few people on the committee willing to take an objective look at the question". Fun fact:

  The report includes the usual drivel about the supposedly high cost of driving but never mentions the high cost of transit. In 2023, Maine transit cost taxpayers nearly $130 million yet carried only 7.5 million trips, which meant each trip cost taxpayers more than $17. It probably would have been less expensive to pay for people’s taxi, Uber, or Lyft rides.

Recently on the book blog:

This was a book recommendation from Reason's editor-in-chief, Katherine Mangu-Ward. And she's not alone! The Amazon page will tell you, it was one of Barack Obama's favorite books of Summer 2024! A Good Morning America Book Club pick! The Goodreads Choice Award for science fiction! And on, and on.

Reader, I was not that impressed. But unlike the author (Kaliane Bradley) and the book's (mostly) first-person narrator I am not a woman.

The overall plot is intriguing, though: in the near future, Britain's titular Ministry has access to time travel tech. The Ministry's experimenters want to avoid well-known paradoxes, so their efforts are restricted to retrieving people from past eras who would otherwise (in their timeline) imminently die alone, without notice.

The primary "expat" is Graham Gore, extracted from 1847. He is one member of Franklin's lost expedition, an actual, doomed, British attempt to navigate the Northwest Passage. The book's unnamed female narrator is assigned to be Gore's "bridge", helping him to adjust to life in modern times.

It is very unclear why the Ministry thought this would be a good idea. The narrator comes across as someone with no particular relevant skills or training. (Although there may be an explanation near the end.)

It's billed as "literary" fiction at Amazon, which means the prose gets kind of loopy and flowery on occasion. There's a lot of action violence in the latter part of the book, as it develops that there are insidious forces at work. Not soon enough to make me care, alas.

Ever so slowly working my way through Mary Roach's ouvré. Fortunately, at least one book buyer at the Portsmouth (NH) Public Library seems to be as big a fan as I am.

If you're squinting at the book cover, wondering what's going on: that's two ladybugs doin' it.

Mary is deemed "America's funniest science writer"; the competition is probably not that stiff (heh). This 2008 book's humor content is (I think) a bit lower than her usual, maybe because her overall topic itself is inherently funny. And maybe because she wants to avoid the cheap laughs; let's face it, laughs about sex can be the cheapest around. (For eager consumers, however, there's a cheap-but-funny joke on page 142, in a footnote. But Mary's just quoting a spokesman of the United States Postal Service.)

Mary looks at the history of sex research (Kinsey, Masters & Johnson), as well as some current practitioners around the world. As she has done in other books, she occasionally volunteers as a participant here, testing (um) devices, submitting to (um) measurements. And in one case, wangling the cooperation of her husband, Ed. With few exceptions, her descriptions are sober and clinical. Specifically, I only noticed one f-bomb (also in a footnote, page 99).

As always, Mary's eye for relevant, and often gross, detail serves her well. (Alfred Kinsey did what with a toothbrush?!)