Pun Salad

I couldn't help but chuckle at the relevance of today's xkcd comic:

Because the WSJ highlighted the recent hijinks of The National Education Association in their "Notable and Quotable" op-ed yesterday (WSJ gifted link):

(Probable unnecessary emphasis added.)

Who knew that "the survival of civilization itself" could be had for a mere $3500?

And (for that matter) who could imagine that it would cost $1625 to not deal with the ADL?

This is via school choice advocate Corey DeAngelis, who also shares the oratorical stylings of Rebecca Pringle:

Stop everything you're doing and watch the president of the nation's largest teachers union screaming at their "Leadership Summit." pic.twitter.com/reQXOFfixP

— Corey A. DeAngelis, school choice evangelist (@DeAngelisCorey) July 8, 2025

Fun fact: Propublica furnishes the NEA's Form 990, which puts Ms. Pringle's 2022 compensation at $433,413 (plus $142,498 "other").

Also of note:

• In other "education" news… Brace yourself for the headlined f-bomb, from Liberty Unyielding: Left-wing professor admits she only works at her university to 'build power' for leftist causes, says 'fuck the University,' 'I don't care about' it.

  A professor at the University of Chicago on Saturday admitted she is using her platform at the school to “build power” and rally support for socialist and pro-Palestinian causes.

  Eman Abdelhadi, an assistant professor and director of graduate studies at the university, told attendees at at an annual socialism conference in Chicago on July 5 that she uses her platform as a professor to mobilize support for socialism and Palestine and “build power” for the movement. Abdelhadi also described the university as “evil” and said it is a “colonial landlord.”

  “I don’t care about this institution, like fuck the University of Chicago,” Abdelhadi said.

  “I work at one of the biggest employers in the city of Chicago,” Abdelhadi continued. “A place where I have access to thousands of people that I could potentially organize … This is where I need to build power. This is my best possible structural leverage.”

  How many people in the audience were thinking: Geez, she shouldn't be saying the quiet part out loud!

  Also devoting some bandwidth to Prof Eman is Jonathan Turley: UChicago Professor Denounces School as an “Evil” and “Colonialist” Institution . . . But Wants to Stay.

  While universities have largely purged their faculty ranks of conservatives, there often seems to be no academic who is too far left for hiring committees. The latest example is University of Chicago Assistant Professor and Director of Graduate Studies Eman Abdelhadi, who used her appearance at the Socialism 2025 conference to denounce UChicago as “evil” and a “colonialist” institution. (For full disclosure, I graduated from UChicago as an undergraduate).

  Since we're doing full disclosure: I was accepted into the graduate physics program at UChicago. No money, though, so I went to the University Near Here instead.

• I'm just happy they will let me keep my shoes on. Kevin D. Williamson sings the Airline Blues.

  U.S. air travel is, of course, a goat rodeo. Like the DMV, it is one of those places in American life where the people who did the at-home reading in high school get held hostage by those who didn’t. From the lazy and stupid and cow-eyed people who work at the airline check-in counters to the lazy and stupid and cow-eyed and thieving miscreants who star in the TSA’s imbecilic security theater, getting on an airplane provides a textbook example of what happens when you combine mediocrity with job security.

  There are few, if any, better examples of corporatism in American public life than air travel, with its heavily regulated cartels, public- and private-sector unions, airport authorities, etc. The point of corporatism—too often misunderstood—is not to maximize corporate profits but to coordinate business and political activity to maximize the political benefits of economic activity, by creating a lot of relatively high-wage, high-benefit, high-security jobs without too much consideration about whether that actually serves the interests of consumers and shareholders. From the politicians’ point of view, people are not assets but liabilities, and one way to take that liability off the books is to put the person into a job with good pay and benefits and very low chances of being laid off—and it does not matter to the politicians if that job actually creates any real value. They would have us use spoons to dig trenches if they could. 

  (You know the story: Milton Friedman was visiting a Chinese public construction project and was flabbergasted that the workers were using picks and shovels and carts instead of modern earth-moving machinery, and asked his hosts what was going on. “We know how to create jobs,” came the answer. Friedman thought about the answer for a moment and then asked: “Then why not use spoons?”)

  I dropped in a comment about that last paragraph:

  Predating Milton Friedman in China: the book The Boys in the Boat has a brief aside about the construction of the 1936 Olympic Stadium in Berlin. By Hitlerian decree, pick-and-shovel labor was preferred to earth-moving machinery.

  Totalitarians gotta totalitarianate, I guess.

• Oh come, oh come, Emmanuel. Oops: It turns out George Will is talking about Rahm, who spells it with one 'm': If Emanuel runs, he’ll bet on candor defeating the ‘culture police’. (WaPo gifted link)

  A good story:

  An avid bicyclist, Emanuel, when he retired from the mayor’s office, took a two-week, 900-mile ride around Lake Michigan with a friend. During the ride, he made a sociological discovery: “The worse the cellphone coverage is, the nicer people are.”

  Niceness is sometimes secondary for Emanuel, whose salty vocabulary expresses the serrated edge of his personality. But his discovery of the inverse relationship between smartphones and congeniality indicates his interest in today’s culture, and his party’s contribution to its strangeness. Although politics is the Democratic Party’s business, it currently has scant aptitude for it.

  Politics is mostly talk. In an interview, Emanuel says, more in anger than in sorrow, that too many Democrats speak as though their words have been “focus-grouped in a faculty lounge.” He has a point.

  I'm probably too set in my electoral ways to vote for any D, but he's not the worst choice out there. (As I type, he doesn't show up at all as a 2028 possibility at the Stossel/Lott Election Betting Odds site.)

• Big stupid Congress won't cancel the big stupid rocket. James B. Meigs is not happy: Congress Crushes Hopes for NASA Reform.

  When Donald Trump returned for his second stint in the White House, advocates for NASA reform were optimistic. In particular, they hoped the president’s team would end the notoriously expensive Space Launch System (SLS) rocket program and allow the space agency to rely instead on the more affordable rockets flown by Elon Musk’s SpaceX and other private companies. That was the policy advised by many space experts, including Jared Isaacman, the administration’s reform-minded nominee to be NASA Administrator. (It was also the approach I recommended in my April 2025 Manhattan Institute report, “U.S. Space Policy: The Next Frontier.”) These observers hoped a more mission-focused NASA—freed from the SLS program’s obscene costs and delays—could finally deliver on long-promised plans to return U.S. astronauts to the moon and ultimately send them to Mars.

  Today, less than six months into Trump’s second term, those hopes are dashed. Tucked among its hundreds of measures, the Big Beautiful Bill signed by President Trump last week includes a kind of poison pill for NASA reform. The bill allocates an extra $10 billion for SLS and related programs and stipulates that the rocket must be used for at least four more missions, a timeline that will take NASA years to achieve. Hopes for a leaner, more effective space agency will have to wait.

  If they ever launch the next SLS mission (currently penciled in for "no earlier than April 2026), and I'm still breathing, I'll watch it, I suppose. And I'll be happy if it works.

• It's crazy, but it just might work. Michael Munger schemes: The Penny Problem Has a Third Option: Buy Them Back (With Interest)

  This may sound ridiculous, but I’m serious: instead of making brand-new pennies, what if the government simply bought back some of the 114 billion pennies already floating around in drawers, jars, and couch cushions across America?

  Think about it. The vast majority of those pennies aren’t being used in everyday transactions, or even every year transactions. They’re collecting dust. But what if the government offered, say, 1.5 cents for every penny returned? That’s “more than the coin is worth” — so people would have an incentive to dig them out — and it’s still far cheaper than making new ones.

  Buying back 3.2 billion pennies at 1.5 cents apiece would cost the government about $48 million. Compare that to the $120 million that it cost us to make the same number of pennies. We would have saved more than $70 million a year, and we’d be “recycling” (actually, reusing) all that copper (and zinc, since pennies are mostly zinc, with a copper coating).

  It probably won't happen. Like most good ideas.