Pun Salad

Well, to quote Pepper Potts from Iron Man 3: "Oh my god... that was really violent...".

This is the second book in Philip José Farmer's Riverworld series, and I read the $1.95 paperback I got back in 1973 or so. I think I read it back then as well, but did not remember anything about it if so.

The main character this time around is Samuel Clemens, aka Mark Twain. He, like most of the the rest of humanity who have ever lived, have been resurrected on Riverworld, for unknown reasons, along the banks of the millions-miles-long River. Supplied daily with food, drink, tobacco products. After twenty-odd years, humanity has settled into their Edenic utopia…

Nah, just kidding. They've reverted to mass bloodshed, and treachery; breaking themselves into little fiefdoms based on race. And (since there are a lot of savvy resurrected engineers) they've developed impressive levels of technology.

Sam is obsessed with finding out who's behind this scheme; but he's even more obsessed with doing it by his (see the title) fabulous riverboat, modeled after the ones he used to pilot on the Mississippi. He plans on driving it upriver to the River's source, where (he's told) the mystery might be revealed. His dream only wants raw material, which is provided via a "Mysterious Stranger" who's powerful enough to divert a metallic meteor to impact near Sam's location.

Sam's allies include "Joe Miller", a giant prehistoric human, Cyrano de Bergerac, Mozart, and (oops) wicked King John, a persistent thorn in Sam's side. There's a lot of conflict, both internal and external. Alliances are formed, most ending in betrayal and (as Pepper notes) violence. And the ending is kind of a cliffhanger. There are, after all, three remaining books in the series.

I know, I was surprised too. But his op-ed in the weekend WSJ made some pretty good points about The Fed’s ‘Gain of Function’ Monetary Policy. (WSJ gifted link)

Unfortunately, Scott doesn't advocate making the Fed "independent" in the same way the Corporation for Public Broadcasting was made "independent".

And it's not as if the pre-2008 Fed had that great a record, either.

Let me link, one more time, to Brian Doherty's tour de force: Abolish the Fed.

Also of note:

• News from that state across the Salmon Falls River: M.D. Kittle notes: Maine’s ‘Reckless’ Secretary Of State Admits ‘Some’ Noncitizens Are On State’s Voter Rolls.

  Just before the 2024 presidential election, Shenna Bellows, Maine’s Trump-hating secretary of state, shrugged off concerns about noncitizens casting ballots as a ploy by Republicans to “decrease trust in our elections and lay the groundwork to challenge results if they don’t win.”

  Last year, the Democrat dismissed a conservative news outlet’s report that at least five foreign nationals have voted in Maine’s elections over the past eight years. She has suggested that the state’s safeguards keep noncitizens from voting.

  But recently Bellows begrudgingly acknowledged that there are “some” noncitizens on the Pine Tree State’s registered voter list.

  Oops.

  Shenna's prior commitment to "democracy" involved attempting to get Trump's name off Maine's 2004 GOP primary ballot, a notion that was slapped down by a 9-0 SCOTUS decision.

• But what if they're driving down the Road to Serfdom? Jennifer Huddleston points out a small problem: Josh Hawley's anti–driverless cars policy would kill a lot of people.

  In a September 4 speech at the National Conservatism Conference, Sen. Joshua Hawley (R–Mo.) bemoaned the rise of artificial intelligence, listing, among other complaints, "Only humans ought to drive cars and trucks." This sentiment isn't only anti-innovation, it's a dangerous line of thinking when it comes to the realities of road safety.

  Each year, more than 40,000 Americans die in auto accidents. State-by-state statistics show that nearly 1,000 Missourians—Hawley's constituents—died in auto accidents in 2023. The vast majority of these accidents are caused by human error. Although the exact number varies, as accidents often have multiple causes, studies over the years have found that human error caused or contributed to between 90 percent and 99 percent of auto accidents. Of course, many people operate vehicles safely, but this significant death toll caused by human drivers ought to make us open to safer solutions.

  Not-very-Fun fact: New Hampshire had 130 motor vehicle crash deaths in 2023 (as opposed to Missouri's 991). That works out to 9.3 deaths per 100K population (Missouri: 16.0) and 0.96 deaths per 100 million vehicle miles traveled (Missouri: 1.23).

  But, embarassingly, and also hard to believe: Massachusetts was far safer than New Hampshire in 2023 driving-wise, with 343 deaths, 4.9 deaths per 100K population, and 0.56 deaths per 100 million vehicle miles traveled. Probably because they have a lot more driverless vehicles?

• "Mommmm! Make him stop!" Kevin D. Williamson recalls the good old days of tormenting siblings and also parents: ‘I’m Not Touching You!’.

  But it's really about…

  Here is a brief and far from exhaustive list of excuses for, minimizations of, and attempts to change the subject from the abuses and misbehavior of the Trump administration that should be retired. 

  1. “What Donald Trump is doing is not unprecedented.” That is true. It also is irrelevant in most cases. There are precedents for bribery and murder in politics, but that doesn’t mean we accept bribery and murder. And if an atomic bomb were about to go off in your backyard, there would be two precedents for that, too. As our happy gang discussed on a recent episode of The Dispatch Podcast, presidents before Donald Trump have tried to radically and unconstitutionally expand executive power, most significantly in the cases of Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt. President Wilson and his administration dispatched gangs of armed hooligans to attack and harass critics of the administration, imprisoned political opponents, and despised the Constitution as a savage relic. President Roosevelt put Americans into concentration camps and violated constitutional norms to become, in effect, president for life, spooking Americans to a sufficient degree that they ratified a constitutional amendment after his death … during his fourth term … to prevent that from happening again. Maybe President Jackbooted Thugs and President-for-Life Put ’Em in Camps should not be, in that regard, raised up as our standards. Most Americans rightly understood the actions of those presidents as violations of our constitutional order and as aberrations—not as precedents to excuse future misbehavior by power-hungry presidents. 

  And there are three more. Check 'em out, if you can. KDW's bottom line (which gets around to his headline:

  Trump is the toddler in the backseat of the Family Truckster who, when told not to touch his brother, holds an index finger an angstrom away from his sibling’s forehead while bleating, “I’m not touching you!” All of us—and Trump’s apologists most of all—know exactly what Trump is doing: He is seeing what he can get away with. He believes that his supporters and sycophants will accept virtually any degree of misbehavior from him—that they will celebrate it—and that our institutions are not equipped to deal with a president who cynically abuses power in this way.

  Trying to connect this up with that driverless-car item above, and … nope, can't figure out how to do it.