Pun Salad

I suggest we pare down the federal deficit by firing these folks, who clearly have too much free time on their hands. Jack Nicastro chronicles: Donald Trump's Antitrust Enforcers Continue Their Harassment Campaign Against Google.

It's my (relatively recent) experience that giving money to any GOP candidate via WinRed opens you up to unremitting text and email spam from random other candidates. (Disclaimer: Maybe there was a way to avoid this, and I just missed it.)

But, yes, Ferguson should proceed from facts, not some sloppy newspaper report.

Also of note:

• CSI: Washington DC. Ars Technica's Eric Berger notes that Ted Cruz reminds us why NASA’s rocket is called the “Senate Launch System”.

  All of the original US senators who created and sustained NASA's Space Launch System rocket over the last 15 years—Bill Nelson, Kay Bailey Hutchison, and Richard Shelby—have either retired or failed to win reelection. However, a new champion has emerged to continue the fight: Texas Republican Ted Cruz.

  He seems an unlikely hero for NASA's large rocket, which costs the federal government more than $2 billion to launch. Cruz, after all, is a self-described pro-capitalist, fiscal conservative. SpaceX and Blue Origin, which are building large and significantly lower-cost alternatives to the SLS rocket, have large operations in Texas. In previous legislative sessions, Cruz has often carried legislation important to the commercial space industry, such as the American Space Commerce Act and the Space Frontier Act.

  But now that he chairs the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee, Cruz has made a significant shift toward supporting the SLS rocket and its chief contractor, Boeing.

  You might say the Artemis Project is on…

      (•_•)
      ( •_•)>⌐■-■
      (⌐■_■)
      

  … Cruz Control.

  YEEEEEAAAAHHHHH.

  Also commenting acerbically on Congressional meddling in space policy is Robert Zimmerman, not to be confused with Bob Dylan: It’s all a game!

  The Senate hearing that was held yesterday, entitled “There’s a Bad Moon on the Rise: Why Congress and NASA Must Thwart China in the Space Race”, was clearly organized by Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) to promote a continuation of the SLS, Orion, and Lunar Gateway parts of NASA’s Artemis program. And he was able to do so because senators from both parties felt the same way. They all want to continue this pork, and don’t really care whether those expensive assets can really accomplish what they promise.

  Furthermore, the hearing was also structured to allow these politicians to loudly proclaim their desire to beat China back to the Moon, using this pork. They want the U.S. first, but they are almost all want to do this through a government-run program.

  As such, the choice of witnesses and the questions put to them were carefully orchestrated to push this narrative. To paraphrase: “We have to beat China to the Moon! And we have make sure a NASA program runs the effort! And above all, we mustn’t let Donald Trump cut any of NASA’s funding, anywhere!”

  I like manned space exploration just fine, but I'd like to see some justification for Artemis besides "Beating China".

• A forlorn hope. George Will nevertheless holds out the option: A fearful congressional GOP could still do something, if it dares. (WaPo gifted link)

  Tanned, rested and ready, Congress has returned from the August recess. It is unclear why.

  The Democrats’ House and Senate minorities have no power — the ability to achieve intended effects. The Republican majorities have no power because they are not permitted intention independent of this president’s preferences.

  He refuses to enforce the law that strictly required the TikTok app to be sold or banned, at the latest, by April. He believes Congress’s spending power is merely the power to suggest spending ceilings. Try to cite a long-standing tenet of conservatism he has not traduced. Federalism? To end voting by mail and impose voter identification requirements, he would truncate, by executive order, the states’ constitutionally enumerated power to conduct elections. He would commandeer state and local governments with an executive order banning no-cash bail. Free markets? See “state capitalism,” below.

  GFW has nice things to say about one guy's proposal:

  Half a century ago, Congress adopted budgeting rules it rarely obeys. They stipulate a timetable for presenting budget resolutions, and passing 12 appropriations bills by Sept. 30.

  Sen. James Lankford (R-Oklahoma) proposes the Prevent Government Shutdown Act. When government funding lapses because Congress ignores its rules, a renewable 14-day continuing resolution would fund critical operations, but:

  During the continuing resolution, members’ office funds cannot be used for travel other than a one-way trip back to Washington. No campaign funds can pay travel expenses. Neither the House nor the Senate can be adjourned for more than 23 hours, and mandatory midday quorum calls, seven days a week, will confirm members’ attendance.

  Might make watching C-SPAN2 great again.

• James Pethokoukis deems AI to be An Engine of Human Progress. And I think he's right.

  Why would we default to the negative notion that the latest step forward in the digital revolution is surely a terrible misstep? To quote Thomas Babington Macaulay, the 19^th-century English historian and Whig politician, “On what principle is it that with nothing but improvement behind us, we are to expect nothing but deterioration before us?” While past performance may not guarantee future success, it’s not a bad starting point for analysis.

  Yes, some argue that society is worse off thanks to computers and the internet—always “on call” for work, privacy eroded by algorithm tracking, and children glued to screens. These may be real downsides, but hardly proof that cyberprogress diminishes human experience. The massive upsides deserve more weight: Digital technologies have powered tremendous growth. America’s “digital economy” added $2.6 trillion to the GDP in 2022, with e-commerce sales alone expected to hit nearly $1.5 trillion in the U.S. and $6.4 trillion globally in 2025, supporting millions of jobs. App developers, data scientists, and cloud engineers are just a few of the occupations that did not exist a generation ago, while real wages for typical U.S. workers are 40 percent higher than before the internet. We’re not living in a dystopia for workers.

  It's the Dispatch, probably paywalled, but it's yet another excellent reason you should subscribe.

• It ain't me, babe. Jeff Maurer wonders, R-ratedly: Who is Trump's Beta Moron?

  Chimpanzee society is structured thusly: The alpha male has first dibs on all food and chimp booty.1 Beneath him are several beta males, who support the alpha and seek his favor. We often take “beta” to mean “supplicant” or “NPR host”, but that’s not quite accurate: Betas are high in the dominance hierarchy. But the alpha gives them their status, so they spend most of their time trying to curry his favor.

  I don’t imagine that the Trump administration is as sophisticated as chimp society, but there’s still a clear alpha/beta dynamic between Trump and his subordinates. That was obvious during Trump’s televised cabinet meeting, in which Trump’s underlings were so groveling that it made the Glenn Greenwald sex tape look like a profile in quiet dignity. To stay in Trump’s good graces, you need to be fawning, obedient, but most of all: You need to go in public and say shit so dumb that a normal person will experience physical pain when they hear it.

  This week, three Trump betas made moves to gain Most Favored Nincompoop status. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Energy Secretary Chris Wright, and Living Embodiment Of The Dangers Of Nepotism Robert F. Kennedy, Junior said things so dumb that a memorial should probably be built on the site of each statement, similar to monuments at Pearl Harbor and Ground Zero that allow people to reflect on the horrible things that occurred there. Judge for yourself which statement is the dumbest — I’ll give my two cents at the end, when we’ve traveled all the way down this river into the Heart Of Dumbass.

  So check that out.

  In a weak defense of Scott Bessent, his op-ed in the weekend WSJ is actually pretty good. No embarrassing ass-kissing of the Great Leader. I'll probably blog it tomorrow, but here is a preview.

Recently on the book blog:

If you're a Boomer like me, you may have noticed that "our" music often plays in the background of supermarkets, dentist offices, hotel atria, …

And you may notice people humming, sometimes singing, along to the tunes.

And you will often observe that many of those people were definitely not born when those songs came out.

So I wonder if there wasn't something timelessly special about that music. If people will be listening to it, humming/singing along, decades and centuries hence, long after Taylor Swift, Morgan Wallen, and Huntr/X have faded into obscurity.

Let me note that's not the theme of this book by British music journalist David Hepworth. He makes clear the primary reason "rock stars never retire" is economic: if they want to maintain their profligate lifestyles, it requires more income that can be generated via nest-egg investments.

(He also alleges that "oldies" radio stations never play songs made before 1980. Is that true? That would pretty much contradict the thesis I outlined above.)

I really enjoyed the book. Hepworth is insightful and witty, his knowledge of music, business, and personalities is wide and deep. His chapters are usually short, each concentrating on a music icon (e.g. Paul McCartney) or event (e.g. Live Aid) or combination thereof (e.g., Elton John dinking his song "Candle in the Wind" for Princess Diana's funeral). In his last-chapter musings, he wonders (as I have done) whether AI will eventually resurrect dead artists to not-exactly-live performances of their old songs. Or new AI-written songs that ape the style of their greatest hits.

As a bonus, Hepworth provides a 30-song playlist, "Songs of Innocence and Experience". And the first song in the list is Southside Johnny's version of "All the Way Home". One of my own favorites! A song written by Bruce Springsteen, but Hepworth claims (correctly) that Bruce's rendition "can't touch" Johnny's.

Ironically, Southside Johnny actually did retire recently.