I Got a Fever! And the Only Prescription is…

More Brainworm!

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George F. Will sees cause and effect: When trust in government collapses, that’s how you get RFK Jr..

The pandemic has ended, but the malady lingers on in a social disease: generalized distrust of public health officials. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is a price we are still paying for the collapse of confidence in government that accelerated during covid-19.

Donald Trump, ever transactional, has nominated Kennedy to lead the Department of Health and Human Services. This is Kennedy’s reward for his Damascene conversion from Trump despiser (July 2, 2024: “a terrible president”) to Trump endorser (Aug. 23, 2024). HHS has more than 80,000 employees, a budget of more than $1.84 trillion, and responsibilities encompassing matters of life and death: medical and other health policies.

The vaccinations that conquered smallpox were arguably humanity’s most suffering-reducing, life-enhancing technology in three millennia. Kennedy has said, and later denied saying, “No vaccine is safe and effective.” He has said polio vaccinations have caused soft tissue cancers that “kill many, many, many, many, many, many more people than polio ever did.” Ample research refutes this, and his assertions linking vaccines to autism, and many other comparably reckless pronouncements. Presumably, had Kennedy been in the first Trump administration, he would have opposed the administration’s finest achievement: Operation Warp Speed. This produced the coronavirus vaccine, which Kennedy has called “the deadliest vaccine ever made.”

GFW wrote before Junior's hearing, but Ron Bailey wrote afterward, and he discusses Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s contradictory confirmation hearing answers. Skipping down to the New Hampshire connection:

What about Kennedy's longstanding and ardent pro-choice views? "In 2023, you came to New Hampshire and said, 'I'm pro-choice, I don't think the government has any business telling people what they can or cannot do to their body,'" Sen. Maggie Hassan (D–N.H.) pointed. "So, you said that, right?"

"Yes," Kennedy replied.

Hassan continued, "Mr. Kennedy, I'm confused. You clearly stated in the past that bodily autonomy is one of your core values. The question is, do you stand for that value or not? When did you decide to sell out the values you've had your whole life in order to be given power by President Trump?"

Junior's answer may surprise you! Or it may not. Ron doesn't provide it, but you can get it here.

Kimberly A. Strassel invites her readers to Meet RFK Jr.’s MAHA Elite.

“We have to tell people how to lead better lives.” Politicians have a duty to protect citizens from greedy industries, to stop corporations from poisoning our food, to steer us away from bad choices. America has a health crisis, and government must make us healthier.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.?

No, then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg nearly 20 years ago, as he became New York City’s nutritional nag, hectoring and mandating residents, inserting the public-health complex into grocery stores, restaurants and family kitchens. Republicans are now lumbering us with Bloomberg 2.0.

How did we get here? Mr. Kennedy in August bartered his small but potentially consequential vote share to Mr. Trump via endorsement, reportedly for a promise that the former Democratic contender would be given “control” of “public-health agencies.” Unable to justify 90% of Mr. Kennedy’s left-wing ideology or history, Republican senators are seizing on the least-offensive aspect of Mr. Kennedy’s repertoire (“Make America healthy again”) and elevating it to religion. Thus does the party that rails against Democratic paternalism embrace its own digestive elitism.

We're not gonna take it.

Also of note:

  • True disbeliever. We looked at Chris Cillizza's mea culpa about his (um) differential skepticism about the lab-leak origin of COVID-19 a couple days ago. Jonathan Turley detects that there's still one lab leak "denier" out on the Left Coast: L.A. Times Columnist Renews Attacks on the Lab-Leak Theory While Dismissing Criticism of China. While most MSM outlets reported the recent news that the CIA now thinks (with "low confidence") that COVID came from a lab, the Times (specifically its science guy, continued to maintain otherwise, deeming the lab-leak hypothesis "fact-free".

    As it turns out, it's pretty easy to make a "fact-free" claim when you ignore enough facts. Here's Turley:

    Hiltzik criticizes my column and others for highlighting the most recent disclosure. However, he omits that this follows even stronger findings from agencies like the FBI and evidence (as discussed in my column) that government scientists found the theory credible.

    He also omits any mention of the fact that he is widely cited as one of the most aggressive voices seeking to cancel scientists who voiced support for the theory. While arguing that scientific journals have not embraced the theory, he leaves out that he targeted schools that sought to allow academic discussions of the theory.

    Hiltzik decried an event associated with Bhattacharya, writing that “we’re living in an upside-down world” because Stanford University allowed dissenting scientists to speak at a scientific forum. Hiltzik also wrote a column titled The COVID lab leak claim isn’t just an attack on science, but a threat to public health.”

    Democracy dies in darkness, Mr. Hiltzik!

  • A good title for a sequel to The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly? Bryan Caplan muses on The Rich and the Cheap.

    Could raising taxes or regulatory burdens on the rich have negative side effects? Champions of soak-the-rich policies often minimize the fear of such effects by scoffing: “Pshaw. They can totally afford it.”

    Except in the direst circumstances, the champions of taxes and regulation are correct. The rich can totally afford it. While they won’t like further impositions, they have, if need be, plenty of surplus to weather the storm.

    What the champions of soak-the-rich policies miss, however, is that the negative side effects of their favorite taxes and regulations can still be horrible. Why? Because the mere fact that a person can afford a burden does not imply that they will, given a choice, ignore the burden. And in the real world, taxes and regulations almost always come with choices.

    Don’t want to pay the tax? Earn less.

    Don’t want to face the regulation? Do less.

    Bryan points out that there's a considerable overlap in the Venn diagram of "rich" and "cheap" populations. (I don't know if I'm considered "rich" but I am cheap.)


Last Modified 2025-01-31 5:32 PM EST

Among Other Dying Ideologies…

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Barton Swaim explains Why Climate-Change Ideology Is Dying.

Momentous social movements begin to die the moment adherents figure out their leaders don’t believe what they say. Liberal Protestantism’s long decline started in the 1950s, when congregants began to wonder if their ministers still believed the old creeds (they didn’t). Communism dies wherever it’s tried because sooner or later the proletariat realize their self-appointed champions aren’t particularly interested in equality. Many sects and cults dwindle the moment their supposedly ascetic leaders are revealed to be libertines.

Something similar is happening to climate ideology.

For three decades you were labeled a crank, a “climate denier,” someone who pigheadedly rejects “settled science,” if you didn’t embrace the belief that life on earth faces imminent extinction from “global warming” and, later, “climate change.” The possibility that an entire academic discipline, climate science, could have gone badly amiss by groupthink and self-flattery wasn’t thought possible. In many quarters this orthodoxy still reigns unquestioned.

I'm trying to think of a name for the ideology that earnestly believes "You can fix any social problem by lavish spending by the Federal Government. If that doesn't seem to work, then we weren't spending enough."

Also of note:

  • Also searching for an ideological label is… Jeff Maurer, who tosses the question to his readers: What Word Should I Use for a President Who Claims Vast Powers that He Clearly Doesn't Have?

    In the past week, the president has:

    • Tried to unilaterally nullify part of the Fourteenth Amendment;

    • Tried to nullify Congress’ ability to spend money;

    • Ordered the Justice Department to ignore the TikTok ban, which should be in effect right now but isn’t;

    • Dropped all pretense that the tariffs he keeps threatening to unilaterally impose have anything to do with “national security”.

    This seems bad to me. This seems like a president trying to do stuff that he’s clearly not allowed to do and seeing how it goes — if the president was a toddler, we’d call this “boundary testing”. And Republicans are playing the role of wilfully ignorant parent, utterly convinced that their precious little boy — their sweet Donnie Angel, that special little child — could never do anything bad.

    Equally predictably, the left is freaking out. It’s unfortunate that some on the left always reach for the most extreme language available — calling Trump a “fascist” doesn’t mean much once you’ve already used that word to describe Bush, Obama, J.K. Rowling, traffic cameras, and Thomas the Tank Engine. In my opinion, “fascist” has lost all meaning, and it should be put in a locked drawer until we show that we can use it responsibly. And, as I've written before, hyperbole doesn’t really do anything except let your opponents: 1) Portray you as crazy, and 2) Be kind of right about that.

    It's not just Donnie Angel, of course. Obama famously declined to enforce Federal marijuana laws. Biden tried to decree student loan "forgiveness" with no accompanying legislative action. Examples are plentiful, and go back a long way.

    But as Gene Healy wrote an entire book about, this has been going on for a long time. And …

    Unless Americans change what we ask of the office―no longer demanding what we should not want and cannot have―we’ll get what, in a sense, we deserve.

  • Speaking of what we wan't and cannot have… David R. Henderson and Phillip Magness advise: Don’t Substitute Tariffs for Income Taxes: You’ll Get Both. There's some math, but if I can understand it, I assume you can too:

    In his inaugural address, President Trump repeated his call for an External Revenue Service. At other times, he has talked about replacing personal income taxes with high tariffs on imports. Besides the fact that U.S. tariffs on imports are collected from U.S. importers, not external exporters, this idea would not work and would likely result in a higher tax burden for Americans.

    Current income tax revenues are about $2.5 trillion per year. Goods imports are just over $3 trillion per year. So replacing individual income taxes would imply an 83 percent tariff rate. But that’s true only if raising tariff rates by over 2,500 percent (from under 3 percent to 83 percent) would have no effect on the level of imports. Because people would buy fewer imports if they had to pay that tax, the tariff rate would have to be substantially higher or the income tax system would have to be retained.

    Trump businesses declared bankruptcy six times between 1991 and 2009; he could be shooting for his biggest one yet.

  • But maybe before the government goes bankrupt… Trump could write a happy ending to this tale, as told by Sam Kazman: Dishwashers Gone Bad: A Regulatory Soap Opera.

    “Hang on to your old appliances.” These were the parting words of my dishwasher repairman after his last service call. They weren’t reassuring.

    Why did he give this advice? Because the newer models won’t last very long or work very well.

    The sorry state of new home appliances is not just one guy’s personal observation. Complaints about the poor durability of new appliances abound on the web, and they’re backed up by authoritative sources. The “Family Handyman,” for example, finds that “lifespans for most major appliances have decreased significantly over the past 25 years.” And when it comes to performance, the diminished capabilities of new dishwashers and laundry machines have become legendary—and not in a good way. Decades ago, dishwashers took about an hour to clean and dry a load of dishes; today, they take about two and a half hours, and the dishes often turn out neither clean nor dry.

    I'm still hanging onto our 38-year-old dishwasher, which is noisy but works well. It would be blasphemous to pray for it to live forever, but…

  • In layman's language… David Harsanyi is nobody's puppet, and he tells the simple truth in the NYPost: RFK Jr. is a menace.

    The US Senate has the constitutional duty to vet the president’s nominees and ensure that no unfit authoritarians find their way into the White House.

    Which brings me to the appointment of brainworm-ridden dilettante Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as head of the Department of Health and Human Services.

    There has perhaps never been a Republican Cabinet nominee in history less suited for public office.

    RFK’s experience (zero), his temperament (unhinged) and his ideas (extremist) impel the Senate to keep him out of the new presidential administration.

    I know Trump thinks he owes Junior something for his electoral support. But I wonder if he isn't secretly hoping the Senate will reject him, and allow him to appoint someone else. Not as menacing.

  • He doesn't have the cash? Kevin D. Williamson says Vladimir Putin Isn’t Buying Donald Trump’s Shtick.

    One of the problems with Donald Trump is that he doesn’t … know stuff.

    My own theory of the case, following Sherlock Holmes’ advice—“When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth”—is that Trump is exactly what he appears to be: an ignorant buffoon who has been carried to the presidency twice on the winds of resentment, romanticism, and nihilism. Trump is a weird combination of Chauncey Gardiner and the Bizarro World version of Pope Celestine V, the naïve hermit who was dragged out of his hole in the ground and plunked down in the Chair of St. Peter when exasperated cardinals decided that what the sclerotic papacy needed was a political outsider … who could be easily manipulated by insiders. (Fun fact: Celestine was nominated to the papacy by Cardinal Latino Malabranca Orsini, nephew of Pope Nicholas III and one of the reasons we talk about nepotism, or nephew-ism.) Even with years in the wilderness to prepare—not that anybody thought he was going to make profitable use of the time!—Trump walks around malevolently ignorant of the most elementary facts of political and economic life.

    For example, when President Trump recently tried to bully Vladimir Putin (via social media, of course) into accepting a Ukraine “peace deal” (which is not a peace deal at all but another one of those “We have a … concept of a plan” Trump things), Putin did not budge. (The czar is not for budging.) And so Trump broke out his big gun, practically the only weapon in his arsenal: He threatened to impose heavy tariffs on Russian exports to the United States.

    Putin seemed nonplussed. So did a lot of other people.

    Inconveniently for the tariff-loving Trump, Russia exports almost nothing to the United States, which as of 2022 accounted for about 3 percent of Russian trade. Historically, most of the Russian exports to the United States have been exactly what you’d expect them to be: petroleum products. (Russian coal imports to the United States were prohibited in 2022.) Which is to say, Trump’s big idea for putting Putin in his place is a measure that would have had very little effect on Russia (which is already dealing with Western economic sanctions) but might have led to marginally higher energy prices in the United States, where the price of gasoline is even more of an explosive political issue than the price of eggs.

    If you're confused by KDW's used of "nonplussed"… well, so was I, and so I looked it up and found this.

    Nobody, it turns out, is ever "plussed". It only happens when you stick a '+' in front of a number. Then that number is plussed.

Recently on the book blog:

The Cat Who Walks through Walls

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The penultimate book on my "reread Heinlein" project! One to go!

It's from 1985, and my very beat-up copy says I shelled out $16.20 for the hardcover to Barnes & Noble back then. I'm pretty sure I read it once back then, and never again until now. I think it's safe to say it's for Heinlein fans only.

It kicks off with a (literal) bang, as a stranger accosts the narrator, Colonel Colin Campbell, in a restaurant. He wants Campbell to kill a guy. "But Tolliver must die by noon Sunday or we'll all be dead!" And mere seconds later the stranger is shot dead himself by an unknown assassin!

That's on the second page of the book's first chapter.

This sets Campbell off on a wild adventure, accompanied by a lady he knows as "Gwen Novak". For some reason, they find themselves in danger of assassination themselves, as a host of baddies attempt to thwart their mission. A mission that Campbell doesn't know exists until much later.

I said this was for Heinlein fans only. Without spoilers: it turns out to (kinda) rely on knowledge of Heinlein's ouvré.

In addition, readers will have to put up with a lot of Heinlein-style banter, incessant references to boinking, and rambling first-person narration, all turned up to eleven.

I found the ending to be unsatisfying, but … you know, Heinlein paid his dues, and at this stage of his life, was entitled to write what he wanted.

You Don't Distrust MSM Enough

A Continued Tedious Series

But wait, there's more! Ex-CNN, ex-MSNBC, ex-WaPo pundit Chris Cillizza has a mea culpa.

It's a 15-part twitter thread, I recommend you read it, and I think Cillizza deserves some credit for recognizing that he did, in fact, "screw up". Summary: back in the day, he participated in the MSM gang-bang on politicians (Trump, Tom Cotton) and others who thought (accurately, it turned out) that COVID-19 originated in the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Cillizza's "debunking" was based in his selective skepticism: he disliked Trump et. al., thought Fauci and his gang of puppets were credible.

And now he's sorry. But:

As far as I can tell, he hasn't done an "I screwed up" confession about (for example) his 2021 "debunking" of pols and pundits who were raising the alarm about Joe Biden's increasing decrepitude. He deemed that sort of thing "gross, lowest-common-denominator politics".

Cillizza says he's learned his "lesson". I'm not so sure. But I think the lesson we need to learn (or reinforce) is right up there in the headline.

Also of note:

  • On a related matter… C. Bradley Thompson has a long, unpaywalled, retrospective on Covid: The Man-Made Assault on Civilization.

    Covid was not an “act of God,” nor was it an act of Mother Nature. Covid was a man-made disaster. We know that now. It was created in a lab in Wuhan China, which received funding from U.S. taxpayers.

    This man-made plague killed millions of people. This man-made crisis almost broke the world economy. This man-made catastrophe almost broke Western civilization. In a moment of mass hysteria (and that’s exactly what happened), the West lost its mind.

    I have one question for you: if you knew in 2020 what you know now about Covid-19, its source, the effectiveness of masks, the vaccines, alternative medications, the lockdowns and the long-term effects of the lockdowns (including the propaganda and censorship that went with the lockdowns), would you do anything differently? If a similar kind of virus hit the United States again (and there is a likely chance of that happening), would you act as you did in 2020 or would you behave differently?

    CBT has tons of links, check 'em out. Including a number of independent minds attempting to rebut the lab-leak hypothesis.

    But to answer his "one question": I don't think I would have done anything much differently. I think taking the Moderna vaccine mitigated my Covid risk. I masked up at the store, but mostly to keep Mrs. Salad happy.

  • The answer may surprise you! Tyler Cowen plugs his Bloomberg column: Is it a problem if Wall Street buys up homes?

    The simpler point is this: If large financial firms can buy your home, you are better off. You will have more money to retire on, and presumably selling your home will be easier and quicker, removing what for many homeowners is a major source of stress.

    And all of this makes it easier to buy a home in the first place, knowing you will have a straightforward set of exit options. You don’t have to worry about whether your buyer can get a mortgage. Homeowners tend to be forward-looking, and a home’s value as an investment is typically a major consideration in a purchase decision.

    Tyler's entire column is apparently only readable if you create an account, which subscribes you to Bloomberg's newsletter. But the excerpts he posts are good.

  • Skepticism is always warranted. And Dominic Pino supplies Some Reasons for Skepticism about Trump’s Colombia ‘Win’. It's in response to Jeffrey Blehar's favorable take. And (if you weren't paying attention, like me) it was about Trump's threat to place massive tariffs on Colombia's exports to us, in order to "encourage" Colombian president Gustavo Petro to accept the Colombian aliens we were attempting to return. He makes six points, here's number two:

    The U.S. has a trade agreement with Colombia, signed in 2006. This agreement was one in a wave of similar agreements between the U.S. and countries in South and Central America. Since the end of the Bush administration, the U.S. has let its commercial relationships within its own hemisphere languish, and China has taken the opportunity to burnish its trading ties with those countries. The U.S. should be seeking to undo China’s advances and deepen its ties with Latin America, and the appointment of a secretary of state, Marco Rubio, who is fluent in Spanish and prioritized Latin America during his time in the Senate, is an encouraging sign on that front. But if the U.S. is going to treat Colombia this way, despite a long-standing trade agreement and official status as a major non-NATO ally, it could deter other Latin American countries from taking any U.S. commitments seriously.

    But as Jeff Blehar noted, carrying a big stick is kind of an American tradition in dealing with countries to our south.

  • Nine days into Trump II, and eggs are still way expensive! What the hell, Orange Man? Joe Lancaster talks us down from the partisan edge: Like Biden, Trump does not control the price of eggs. (And it's a good thing he doesn't.)

    Just this week, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.), along with 20 other House and Senate Democrats, sent Trump a letter complaining that he had not focused on food prices in his first week in office: "You have tools you can use to lower grocery costs and crack down on corporate profiteering, and we write to ask if you will commit to using those tools to make good on your promises to the American people."

    Republicans, on the other hand, solely blamed Biden for rising costs. Granted, the massive increase in federal spending during the COVID-19 pandemic did contribute to the 2022 spike in inflation—one analysis found that 42 percent of the inflation could be attributed to government spending—but plenty of that spending happened under Trump, as well.

    Collectively, the Trump and Biden stimulus bills "amounted to something like 20% of GDP," Desmond Lachman, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, told USA Today. "That is the largest fiscal stimulus we've had in peacetime. That, I think, is a big part of the story."

    Besides, inflation alone can't explain the price of eggs: According to the Consumer Price Index, the price of food as a whole increased 2.5 percent during 2024 while eggs rose a whopping 36.8 percent. Federal spending alone would not cause the price of eggs to so heavily outstrip all other food.

    Eggsactly right.

    But I couldn't help but grin at Senator Warren's demand that Trump "crack down" to lower egg prices. Unfortunately her letter did not follow that up with "(no pun intended)".

    Senator Liz really likes cracking down. See the relevant Google hits.

Confession: Before Yesterday, I'd Never Heard of DeepSeek

But apparently I was not alone in that:

I only screamed a little when I checked my investment portfolio last night.

But let's look at a different WSJ story about what's probably going to cause further damage to my financial outlook. Andy Kessler points out that Trump Tariffs Are a Wealth Killer. It's a fine look at the unholy history of tariffs, and describes how the US Congress abdicated its Article I, Section 8 responsibility to "lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises". Bottom line:

A 2021 study by Oxford Economics and the U.S.-China Business Council showed the first-term Mr. Trump’s tariffs and trade policies destroyed 245,000 jobs. The Tax Foundation estimates Trump-Biden tariffs reduced long-run gross domestic product by 0.2%—roughly $58 billion annually. On the flip side, the Peterson Institute for International Economics estimates that free trade since 1950 has cumulatively boosted the U.S. economy by $2.6 trillion, or $19,500 a household. Why go backward? Congress should reclaim its tariff power.

Instead, the backroom begging will start for tariff exemptions—machinery, certain pharmaceuticals, school pencils, cobalt for electric-car batteries, Nike Kobe 5 Protro “Year of the Mamba” sneakers—a lobbyist’s paradise. Free trade, not politicians, is best at allocating resources. Protectionism and mercantilism in the form of tariffs and subsidies, like the British Corn Laws, are inefficient, unproductive, corruption-inducing and wealth-destroying. That won’t make America great again.

Is there anyone in TrumpWorld who can get him to read Andy's column? Asking for a friend. And also my eventual heirs.

Also of note:

  • Dementia makes you do demented things, right? John Hinderaker reports one recent example: Biden Commuted Sentence of Child-Murderer.

    On his way out of the White House, Joe Biden pardoned or commuted the sentences of around 2,500 “non-violent drug offenders.” But drug users don’t get incarcerated; the drug offenders in federal prisons are dealers. And anyone who thinks drug dealers who are worth a federal prosecution are “non-violent” is deluded.

    But it came out a few days ago that one of the “non-violent drug offenders” whose sentence Biden commuted was Adrian Peeler, of Connecticut. Adrian Peeler’s brother was being prosecuted for murder, and two of the witnesses on the prosecution’s list were Karen Clarke and Leroy Brown. This is what Adrian Peeler was convicted of:

    According to court documents, Adrian Peeler ambushed Clarke and Brown as they returned to their Bridgeport apartment. Brown was found face-down, shot dead at the top of the stairs. Clarke was found dead in a nearby bedroom, shot while apparently trying to call for help.

    The “Brown” who was found face-down, shot by Adrian Peeler, was Leroy Brown, age 8. Karen Clarke was his mother.

    Well, that's horrible, but something to be expected when you are rushing to do as much damage as possible on your way out the door. Due diligence is so overrated.

    Because I was curious: Googling "Adrian Peeler" shows that this story is mostly being covered by Connecticut local news outlets. (John's link is to a story in the Connecticut Mirror.) On the first page of results, just three are national: the Associated Press, the NY Post, and (of course) Fox News.

    But if you get your news from the NYT, the WaPo, the WSJ, USA Today, ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, MSNBC, NPR,… Well, apparently you won't have heard about it.

  • Also, you can't rollerskate in a buffalo herd. Jesse Singal asserts You Can’t Pseudoscience (Or Even Science) Your Way Out Of A Genuine Trans Rights Debate. He is looking at attempts to discredit the science behind Trump's Executiive Order (and I quote) Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism And Restoring Biological Truth To The Federal Government. Specifically, Jesse analyzes articles from Arwa Mahdawi in the Guardian (After his executive order on sex, is Trump legally the first female president?) and Megan Molteni at STAT News (Trump executive order on only two sexes refuted by scientists). These are, you may be shocked to learn, heavy on the pseudoscience. RTWT for that, but there's apparently just plain old biased reporting too:

    I’m finishing up a freelance piece on that EO that gets at the interesting and dysfunctional game of executive-order ping-pong that has played out since the Obama administration. But the fact of the matter is that it offers a perfectly fine, workable definition of sex. Both these authors should have known that — in Mahdawi’s case, especially, because she reached out to Carole Hooven for comment and Hooven explained to her that, as she put it in an email she later posted to Twitter, “There are two reproductive categories, and Trump is correct that they are based on the kinds of gametes individuals are designed to produce.” Hooven’s comments didn’t make it into Mahdawi’s piece. This isn’t inherently damning, because reporters reach out to people all the time and then don’t use what they get back, but in this case Mahdawi should have leaned on Hooven, because what she ended up writing was very confused and silly.

    What’s going on here, as usual, is that left-of-center thinkers are trying to squeeze a scientific argument into the clothes of a moral one. They have foolishly accepted the framing that we should only treat trans people with dignity and grant them certain rights if they are really the sex they say they are.

    To be fair, Jesse isn't comfortable with aspects of Trump's EO. Do you really care that Deirdre McCloskey's passport says "Female"? I, for one, do not.

  • Price of French Vanilla ice cream to rise in 3…2‥1… Peter C. Earle writes on Eggs: Incredible, Edible, and Increasingly Inaccessible. And he has a lot of Fun Facts:

    Chickens are a remarkably adaptable species, thriving in diverse climates and easily fitting into both small-scale and industrial farming systems. Their ability to consume a wide range of feed, reproduce quickly, and lay eggs consistently has made them an efficient, readily renewable source of protein for mankind. Thus chickens have become a key pillar of agriculture across most continents and levels of economic development. Over the last century, chicken eggs have become not just a global dietary staple but also a critical ingredient in processed foods, baked goods, and sauces. Their versatility in cooking and nutrient density have cemented their role as a cornerstone of global food systems.

    In the United States, eggs are a cultural and economic mainstay. The average American consumed 281.3 eggs in 2023, highlighting their ubiquity in our diets. The US is one of the top egg producers globally, generating approximately 110 billion eggs annually. Economically, the industry contributes over $10 billion to the national economy each year and provides direct employment to more than 500,000 workers. Beyond their economic impact, eggs are valued for their affordability and nutrition, offering 6 grams of high-quality protein alongside essential nutrients like vitamin D, B12, and choline. This combination of dietary value, economic significance, and accessibility underscores the central role of eggs in the American food landscape.

    But egg prices have gone up, a lot. (See the graphs in Earle's article.) "There are a number of factors involved" but:

    The lumber delirium of 2020, the global supply chain collapse of 2021, and scores of other consequences in addition to today’s soaring egg prices, are sending a clear message: where the execution of monetary policy is activist in nature, society must brace for disruptions to goods and services once taken for granted, with both greater frequency and intensity. It is a choice to which, whether by disinterest or inaction, Americans have committed.

  • Another candidate for the chopping block. Veronique de Rugy says it's the perfect time to Abolish the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

    Picture this: a government agency that operates with little accountability, spends taxpayers' money without congressional oversight, and enforces regulations based on flimsy theories about consumer behavior. That's the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), an institution so misguided in both mission and execution that it does not deserve mere reform—it should be abolished outright.

    Heralded as the savior of consumers after the 2008 financial crisis, the CFPB has instead become a regulatory monster that stifles innovation and drives up costs for the very people it claims to protect.

    When the CFPB was created, Congress transferred authority to it for approximately 50 existing rules and orders coming from 20 different statutes. For fiscal year 2024, it has an estimated budget of $762.9 million, a 9.5 percent increase from the previous year. The agency's funding structure allows it to operate independently of the congressional appropriations process: The bureau's budget is funded through transfers from the Federal Reserve System.

    I think Congress could abolish it. Unfortunately unlikely to happen unless and until the Senate gets 60 solid liberty-loving members.

Just My Two Cents

John Fund managed to irritate me with his National Review article headline: Against Common Cents.

John, overused puns are lame. Plus, they are my thing. Stay in your lane.

But his topic is also a sore spot:

The Department of Government Efficiency, the new cost-cutting advisory body run by Elon Musk, is already signaling what kind of reforms it may propose.

Its first suggestion is a small but valuable one: get rid of the penny. There are 240 billion pennies lying around the United States — nearly one out of every two coins minted in the U.S. has a face value of just one cent. They sit in coin jars in homes, slip between couch cushions, and litter our streets. The relentless creep of inflation has made the penny effectively worthless, and it’s time to stop its proliferation. Every penny now costs 3.7 cents to make and distribute. That’s an increase of more than 20 percent from last year, largely due to the rising cost of metals, including zinc and copper.

The suggestion is (indeed) "small", but not particularly "valuable". Yes, the U.S. Mint's latest annual report reports that, by itself, the penny has negative "seigniorage", losing $85.3 million last year. Nickels lost $17.7 million.

Yes, arguably, Uncle Stupid is taking raw materials that are worth something, and producing items that aren't worth that much.

The amounts are trivial, though, even though the optics are bad. In comparison to what the government shells out per year, we are talking maybe a couple dozen minutes worth of spending. And the seigniorage losses are more than made up for in the production of dimes and quarters.

And there's a fundamental contradiction in John's argument; if pennies are "effectively worthless", why does the population keep demanding them?

And what does John's argument say about the proper relationship between a government and its citizens? Are we here to pad the government coffers in its provision of a legally mandated monopoly product?

(I speculate that if penny and nickel "melt values" get significantly over their face value, they will magically vanish from circulation all by themselves. The current melt value of 20 nickels is $1.07; I assume a 7% premium is inadequate to make their melt-and-resell conversion worthwhile. Plus, it's illegal. In contrast, a hundred modern, mostly zinc, pennies have a melt value of about 75¢.)

My previous rant about this was back in 2016, aimed at an op-ed by former Senator Judd Gregg.

Also of note:

  • Has he been checked for brain worms lately? The Trump idolaters will not like the WSJ editorialists take: Why RFK Jr. Is Dangerous to Public Health.

    Mr. Kennedy is scheduled to appear before the Senate Finance Committee on Wednesday. Expect him to obfuscate about his ties to trial lawyers, anti-vaccine views, and support for sundry progressive causes. While presenting himself as a truth-teller and slayer of government corruption, he’s as slippery as Anthony Fauci.

    Most troubling is his long record of anti-vaccine advocacy. In the past he has claimed that the measles vaccine causes autism despite reams of studies that have found no causative link, and that the polio vaccine might have killed many more than the actual virus. Deadly infectious diseases disappeared because of better hygiene, not vaccines, he asserts.

    He has tried to soften his vaccine skepticism since being nominated, and he now says he won’t take away anyone’s vaccines. He says he merely wants to ensure that vaccines are safe and thoroughly studied—who doesn’t?—and that Americans have access to more information. In Mr. Kennedy’s case, this means opening the industry to lawsuits by the trial bar.

    The editorial goes on to point out that (among other things) Junior has gotten millions as his cut for referring clients to lawsuit-happy lawyers. So there's more than a slight financial interest at stake here.

  • But there's some good Trump news too. Jeff Jacoby says maybe we are getting Back, at last, to the color-blind principle.

    A FIERCE commitment to racial color blindness — the principle that every individual should be treated by the law and by society without regard to race or color — was fundamental to the Civil Rights movement. That principle was enshrined in the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which unambiguously prohibited employers and unions from discriminating on the basis of race. Indeed, the legislation was so unambiguous that when critics during the Senate debate on the bill said it would lead to racial quotas in hiring, Senator Hubert Humphrey, the bill's lead sponsor, didn't hesitate to refute the claim

    "If the senator can find ... any language which provides that an employer will have to hire on the basis of percentage or quota related to color, race, religion, or national origin," Humphrey memorably vowed, "I will start eating the pages one after another, because it is not in there."

    But it wasn't long before the law's plain meaning was turned inside out. In 1965 President Lyndon Johnson issued Executive Order 11246, which mandated "affirmative action" in government contracting — a directive that eventually grew into an elaborate skein of racial preferences, quotas, set-asides, and "diversity, equity, and inclusion" (DEI) policies that compelled discrimination for the sake of racial balance. Over time, liberal policy makers and civil rights organizations went from upholding color blindness as the highest aspiration of a racially just society — Martin Luther King's storied dream — to disparaging it as bigotry in disguise.

    Bottom line:

    Trump, who was inaugurated on Martin Luther King Day, has moved quickly and forcefully to reestablish as the law of the land the color-blind principle for which MLK lived and died. If he succeeds, Americans of every color and political stripe will be better off.

    Free at last! And It only took sixty years!

Glad to See Norway's Isn't Lutefisk

That's via James Lileks, whose curiosity was piqued by Iceland's "Hákarl". And he looked up the recipe:

A fascinating country, Iceland. Isolation and extremities and vulcanism have spawned a strange, hardy, peculiar breed of humanity. Exhibit one: HÁKARL. Think lutefisk, but worse. Says the Google AI summary:

Hákarl is Iceland's national dish of fermented shark.

It takes a special breed of man to look at a shark and think “I wonder how it tastes when fermented.” Here’s how it’s made:

The shark is buried in dirt or gravel for months

Bacteria break down poisonous urea and trimethylamine oxide into ammonia

The shark is washed and hung in a drying shack until it's firm and dry

Apparently it tastes like cheese, with a top note of 19th century latrine disinfectant. It is accompanied by a national liquor, brennivín, served ice-cold. It’s basically aquavit. I think you take six shots before you work up the nerve to eat disinterred shark.

… and he proceeds to fantasize.

Also of note:

  • To be fair, Bolton's Secret Service protection was probably even worse than Trump's was in Butler. Jeff Blehar observes, correctly, that Nobody Has a Right to Security Clearances. But…

    As part of his initial flurry of action at the beginning of his second term — truly a shocking contrast to the moribundity of the Biden administration over the last four years — Donald Trump not only canceled security details for John Bolton, Mike Pompeo, and Pompeo’s aide Brian Hook, but also issued an executive order revoking Bolton’s security clearances, as well as those of all 49 signatories of the infamous “Hunter Biden Letter,” all of them former intelligence officials. (There were 51 original signatories; two have since passed away.) And of course, because Trump is Trump, there is both good and bad in this move.

    Removing the three men’s protection is not only an act of petty spite, but actively endangers them, given that they are targets for assassination by Iran. Indeed, they are targets because of their work for Trump during his first administration, which culminated in the droning of Iranian terrorist mastermind Qasem Soleimani in January 2020. I agree completely with the editors of National Review that their protections should be restored, and shudder to think of what will happen to the Trump administration should any harm come to them from a foreign power. (People will neither forget nor forgive Trump’s role in allowing it to happen, should it come to pass.)

    But I cheer the Trump administration stripping all of these men and women of their government security clearances, as is his absolute legal right to do, and am in fact upset it was not done sooner. (We all understand why it was not done sooner.) Bolton’s case is an overdetermined one, in fact. Being Trump’s highest-ranking adviser-turned-critic is in fact perfectly sufficient as explanation for his revocation of access — that is the petty part, perhaps — but Bolton did far worse: He allegedly rushed a book into print about his tenure as Trump’s national security adviser without sufficient government pre-review.

    I've not seen any Trump cheerleaders try to defend unprotecting Bolton, Pompeo, and Hook. It's petty and dangerous.

  • Other than that, though, they're fine. Jacob Sullum says Trump's Orders Feature Nonexistent Emergencies, Illegal Power Grabs, and Blatant Inconsistencies.

    As expected, President Donald Trump's attempt to cancel birthright citizenship by executive fiat ran into immediate legal trouble this week. On Thursday, a federal judge in Seattle granted a temporary restraining order against Trump's decree, which encompasses not only the children of unauthorized immigrants but also anyone born to people lawfully present in the United States unless at least one parent has permanent legal status.

    U.S. District Judge John C. Coughenour, who was appointed to the bench by Ronald Reagan in 1981, was dismayed that any president would try such a thing. "I've been on the bench for over four decades," and "I can't remember another case where the question presented is as clear as this one is," he told the lawyer tasked with arguing that Trump could disregard the clear language of the 14th Amendment and 127 years of judicial precedent. "I have difficulty understanding how a member of the bar could state unequivocally that this is a constitutional order. It just boggles my mind."

    Trump claimed to be addressing a nonexistent "emergency" through legally dubious means. The upshot in this case, it seems likely, is that Trump's order will amount to nothing but a symbolic stand against the "invasion" he perceives when people enter the United States in pursuit of better lives, as his own ancestors did at a time when European immigrants faced no restrictions like the ones the president is keen to enforce. And Trump's reflexive hostility to immigration, which underlies some initiatives that will have much more practical effect, seems inconsistent with his other priorities, such as promoting economic growth and preserving old-age entitlement programs.

    Click over and read on for further problems.

  • "The Freeloader Refutation" would have been a good episode title for The Big Bang Theory. Drew Cline examines an anti-Right-to-Work argument, and finds hole: The right-to-work freeloader fallacy.

    Labor unions negotiate benefits on behalf of all employees of a collective bargaining unit, not just their own members, unions say. Since non-members receive the benefits, they should be compelled to pay the union for negotiating them.

    Because right-to-work laws forbid non-union employees from being compelled as a condition of employment to pay any portion of their wages to a labor union or a union’s third party affiliate, they turn non-members into freeloaders, unions say.

    Drew does a philosopher-level breakdown of the union's arguments, and finds them wanting. One of his good points:

    Far from creating freeloaders, right-to-work laws restore a measure of financial autonomy to workers. Unions in right-to-work states can no longer behave as monopoly providers, but must convince non-members to join. That changes their behavior and makes them more responsive to the needs and preferences of all members of a bargaining unit.

    Personal note: there was an effort to unionize staff at the University Near Here when I worked there. This failed from (my interpretation) lack of interest. Other subsets of employees have unionized.

  • I don't want to fight. But Jonah Goldberg seems to want to: Let’s Fight.

    Actually, he's only speculating that his G-File is going to annoy a lot of readers. I don't find anything to disagree with here:

    They told me that if America elected Donald Trump, the president would pardon fascists—and they were right.

    I’m referring to Joe Biden and his pardon of Marcus Garvey

    [… some history elided; read Liberal Fascism and/or subscribe to the Dispatch]

    Fascism remained popular in some quarters well into the 1930s. Indeed, in 1937, Garvey, the founding father of black nationalism, insisted to the famous black historian J.A. Rogers that, “We were the first fascists.” He continued: “We had disciplined men, women, and children in training for the liberation of Africa. Mussolini copied fascism from me, but the Negro reactionaries sabotaged it.” (This quote is often truncated or slightly modified as it appears—and disappears—in different editions of Rogers’ work.)

    The influential historian C.L.R. James—a Trinidadian Trotskyist (say that 10 times fast!)—wrote in 1938, that “All the things that Hitler was to do so well later, Marcus Garvey was doing in 1920 and 1921. He organized storm troopers, who marched, uniformed, in his parades and kept order and gave color to his meetings.” 

    Garvey was a pretty interesting guy; with your usual skeptical filters in place see Wikipedia.

Can't Really Blame Us Boomers For This

I'll get to talking about that graph in a bit; I was led to it by Robert Tracinski's article at Discourse, The Year of Stasis.

We live in a deeply conservative and anti-progressive era—but it’s a curious kind of conservatism. It is shared almost equally by self-proclaimed conservatives and self-proclaimed progressives. Everyone seems to be fixated on preserving the past in some way, setting up an idealized version of the way things used to be and trying to freeze everything at that point.

For all the differences between conservatives and progressives, they roughly agree on the year that seems to be the hinge point: 1970 is the Year of Stasis at which everything must be fixed in place.

I've noticed that Reagan-blamers tend to move The Year Things Started Going To Shit a little later, but 1970 is (indeed) another pivotal date.

One way of measuring this—which suggests 1970 as the critical date—is the Henry Adams Curve, named after the American writer and historian and created by J. Storrs Hall, which graphs power consumption per capita in the United States since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.

[W]e have had a very long-term trend in history going back at least to the Newcomen and Savery engines of 300 years ago, a steady trend of about 7% per year growth in usable energy available to our civilization. Let us call it the “Henry Adams Curve.” The optimism and constant improvement of life in the 19th and first half of the 20th centuries can quite readily be seen as predicated on it. To a first approximation, it can be factored into a 3% population growth rate, a 2% energy efficiency growth rate, and a 2% growth in actual energy consumed per capita.

But all of this growth stops at about 1970, after which power consumption per capita levels out and even declines slightly.

Clicking the graph will take you too J. Storrs Hall's website, plaintively titled Where is my Flying Car? He also wrote a book with that title (which I read back in 2022; my report here).

Both Tracinski's and Hall's articles are (of course) worth your time. As Tracinski says: "There is nobody obstructing progress but us."

Also of note:

  • Preceded by Big Bullshit, to be quickly followed by Durable Doldrums. Kevin D. Williamson is no fan of Trump's Contrived Chaos.

    Donald Trump, who likes to talk about locking up his political opponents and gleefully shares his repugnant homoerotic fantasies about subjecting uncooperative reporters to prison rape, now has declared some emergencies. A couple of them. One of them is a border emergency, and another is an energy emergency.

    There is, indeed, chaos at our border. It is not an emergency in the formal sense required for the imposition of emergency measures—it is not a natural disaster or a war—but rather a persistent policy failure, one that implicates several prior administrations, including Trump’s 2017-2021 administration. The historically minded among you will remember that Trump enjoyed a governing trifecta at the beginning of his presidency in 2017, and he and his Republican allies in Congress chose to respond to the border crisis by … enacting a very traditional country-club Republican tax cut. Republicans could have enacted any immigration law they wanted in 2017. They chose to do nothing of substance on the issue.

    Republicans today control the White House and both houses of Congress, and the only immigration-related bill headed to Trump’s desk is one that tinkers around the edges of enforcement in criminal cases, adding shoplifting to the list of crimes for which illegals may be detained. Donald Trump occupies the highest office in the land and has a Congress controlled by his allies, and topmost on their agenda is—shoplifting? It is, of course, a matter of symbolism over substance, which is the Trump style and, increasingly, the general Republican style.

    And, unfortunately, his cheerleaders seem to be stuck in Honeymoon Mode. Just picked at random: Victoria Taft at PJ Media, headlines: Trump Gloriously Lays Waste to L.A. Politicians Standing in the Way of Rebuilding

    Gloria in Excelsis Trumpo!

  • Undelivered promises, mostly. At Commentary, Tevi Troy examines What Obamacare Hath Wrought.

    On March 23, 2010, Barack Obama signed the Affordable Care Act, and as he did so, then Vice President Joe Biden whispered loudly that the law was a “big f—ing deal.” He was right, though perhaps not in the way either he or Obama intended. The ACA did not, as promised, transform our health-care system or bend the cost curve down. But it was a big deal because the way it was passed has transformed our political system. A decade and a half on, we are still trying to recover from the partisan mischief and altered norms that its poison has injected into our national political bloodstream.

    Passing Obamacare was the main priority of the Obama administration in its first two years, and the Obamans were confident they could succeed because he had won in a landslide in which his party had strengthened its control of both houses of Congress. Over the course of the year it took to achieve his aim, Obama and his team sold Obamacare with great fanfare and adopted innovative and politically tough-minded tactics—but had little or no realistic understanding about what their policy prescriptions could or would do once the bill became law.

    Instead, he made wild promises based on his stated determination “to finally challenge the special interests and provide universal health care for all.” Obamacare would make access universal, lower costs substantially over time, rein in the pharmaceutical and insurance companies, and do all this while still allowing people who liked their health-care plan to keep their health-care plan. The magical thinking behind all these promises proved to be just that—magical.

    If you don't recall, or just weren't paying attention back then, Tevi's article will bring you up to speed. Obamacare is a mess, sure. But Obama's steamroller tactics to get it passed set us on the hyperpartisan path to where we are on a number of important issues.

  • Not even in Minnesota. Christopher Frieman debunks Tim Walz: Socialism Is Not Neighborly.

    Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, the 2024 Democratic vice presidential nominee, recently urged his supporters to not “shy away from our progressive values. One person’s socialism is another person’s neighborliness.” Socialism is sharing a cup of sugar with the family across the street, and who could object to that?

    Walz’s identification of socialism with neighborliness is reminiscent of Bernie Sanders’s remark that, “to me, socialism doesn’t mean state ownership of everything, by any means, it means creating a nation, and a world, in which all human beings have a decent standard of living.” Here Sanders equates socialism not with any particular set of economic institutions, but rather with the uncontroversial idea that we should create a world in which everyone has a decent standard of living.

    Even socialist philosophers and writers are guilty of this kind of rhetorical sleight of hand. G.A. Cohen once argued that voluntarily sharing food and equipment with one’s friends on a camping trip is an embodiment of socialist principles. And according to George Orwell, socialism is the notion that “everyone does his fair share of the work and gets his fair share of the provisions;” he says that the merits of socialism so defined are “blatantly obvious.”

    Christopher notes that in order for socialism to "work" at all, “capitalist acts between consenting adults” (Robert Nozick's apt phrase) must be banned. And that's not neighborly at all, is it?

  • On the way out the door? It appears that Trump II has done a good job with one Executive Order. Charles C.W. Cooke likes it, anyway, but he points out that DEI’s Die-Hards Still Don’t Get It.

    ‘When does he bring back segregated water fountains?” So asked John Harwood, formerly of the New York Times, NBC, CNN, and elsewhere, when informed that President Trump had decided to shut down the federal government’s sprawling archipelago of DEI initiatives. Through the screen, one could almost feel the self-satisfaction. Tweet sent. Box ticked. Virtuous credentials reacquired for the week.

    That sort of reaction to criticisms of DEI or affirmative action is typical within a certain corner of elite culture. Nevertheless, it is extremely silly — akin in its triteness and naïvety to that of those who believe the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea must be a democratic people’s republic because those words are included in its name. Certainly, in a vacuum, “diversity” is a nice enough word. So, too, “equality” and “inclusion.” But, as in Orwell’s 1984, where the Ministry of Peace deals with war and the Ministry of Truth with lies, what matters more than the labels is what those who wield them ultimately wish to do with the power they seek. And what those people have done, lo these many years, is establish a network of vicious, illiberal, harshly ideological institutions, whose sole purpose has been to bastardize the quotidian language of the American republic and to impress the warped results into the service of a narrow, intolerant, and censorious form of political progressivism. In practice, diversity, equity, and inclusion has not been diverse, equitable, or inclusive, but uniform, prejudiced, and clannish. Worse still, thanks to its unquenchable obsession with immutable characteristics, it has taken America further away from — not closer to — the core ideas adumbrated in the Declaration of Independence. It is, I will grant, unlikely that any of the architects of DEI desire to restore “segregated water fountains.” And yet, as a matter of unlovely habit, they have proved far more likely to defend segregating people by race than have their classically liberal critics. For their apologists to accuse those who wish to dismantle DEI and affirmative action of being obsessed with dividing people into groups is like accusing Carrie Nation of being a lush: It is about as wrong as one can possibly get before one falls off the edge of the map. Segregation? Sorry, buddy, but that’s the other guys’ jam.

    I'm here to chew bubble gum and provide free links to National Review articles. But I'm out of gum, and … I'm also out of NR free links for the month, sorry.

"What Are You Going to Do About It?"

Literally drawing inspiration from a predecessor:

Clicking on the cartoon will take you to Mr. Ramirez's site where you can view the full-size version. Which I recommend.

His source (with just one "Tammany Hall Tiger") is here. Compare and contrast at your leisure.

(Today's headline is from Nast's cartoon, and still appropriate.)

Also of note:

  • Yes, they do. Robby Soave notes the predictable response: Disinformation experts hate Trump's free speech executive order.

    Newly inaugurated President Donald Trump signed a bevy of executive orders earlier this week, including one that seeks to end the federal government's pressure campaign on social media companies.

    The "Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship" executive order reaffirms the free speech rights of social media users and prohibits government agents from engaging in unconstitutional censorship.

    "Under the guise of combatting 'misinformation,' 'disinformation,' and 'malinformation,' the Federal Government infringed on the constitutionally protected speech rights of American citizens across the United States in a manner that advanced the Government's preferred narrative about significant matters of public debate," states the order. "Government censorship of speech is intolerable in a free society."

    But, as Robby's headline says, there was great unhappiness in the land. Among the teeth-gnashers was Nina Jankowicz, and I bet you heard her coming. Robby's article links to a CNN article where she deems the EO as "a direct assault on reality". Her "American Sunlight Project" perch echoes that phrase. And (of course) Jen Rubin's Contrarian site gave Nina free rein to claim that Trump's EO is Making Censorship Real Again.

    On Inauguration Day, amidst a flurry of executive orders adorned with loopy Sharpie signatures, Donald Trump restored free speech in America. Or so he claimed.

    If you hadn’t noticed free speech had been abolished, don’t beat yourself up. Like several other executive actions, the order that aspires to “end federal censorship” is based on a conspiracy theory. Despite its flimsy pretext, it could usher in an era of real censorship the likes of which the United States has never seen.

    Fox News mainstreamed the narrative that conservatives were being unfairly censored by social media companies in the wake of Trump’s 2020 election loss. The lies gained steam across right-wing media and on the same social media sites apparently doing all this censoring—and by 2022, with Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, the conspiracy-minded inmates were running the asylum. Musk granted a few handpicked bloggers and journalists access to select documents about the platform’s relationship with the federal government. With the publication of the so-called “Twitter Files, they alleged that Twitter executives were complicit in acts of censorship against politically disfavored content, allowing the federal government to take it down at-will. They also claimed that private-citizen researchers funneled the content in question to federal agencies for review and removal.

    I link, you decide. But Nina's screed puts me in mind of Chico Marx's classic question to Margaret Dumont in Duck Soup: "Well, who ya gonna believe? Me, or your own eyes?"

  • But didn't he get the EO? It's not all rosy for the First Amendment under Trump II, though: Ars Technica notices that Trump’s FCC chair gets to work on punishing TV news stations accused of bias.

    Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr has revived three complaints against broadcast stations accused of bias against President Donald Trump.

    Outgoing Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel last week directed the FCC to dismiss the complaints against CBS, ABC, and NBC stations, along with a fourth complaint about Fox, in what she called a stand for the First Amendment. Rosenworcel said the "threat to the First Amendment has taken on new forms, as the incoming President has called on the Federal Communications Commission to revoke licenses for broadcast television stations because he disagrees with their content and coverage."

    But in three orders issued yesterday, the FCC Enforcement Bureau reversed the CBS, ABC, and NBC decisions. "We find that the previous order was issued prematurely based on an insufficient investigatory record for the station-specific conduct at issue," each new order said. "We therefore conclude that this complaint requires further consideration."

    The investigation targets three networked-owned broadcast stations, over which the FCC has jurisdiction, thanks to their use of the electromagnetic spectrum.

    Just a reminder: we should just Abolish the FCC.

  • According to the University Near Here… My local newspaper reproduces a Concord Monitor story: UNH likely violated students’ rights in protest arrests.

    The police response to a pro-Palestine protest at the University of New Hampshire last spring that ended in a dozen arrests likely violated students’ free speech rights and should be investigated by an independent body, a university working group concluded this week.

    “For the institution and its members to mutually agree to move forward and begin repairing damaged relationships, there must be accountability and acknowledgment of the harm caused to all who have been impacted,” the group of administrators, faculty, and one student wrote in a report released on Wednesday.

    The deck appears to have been stacked against designated scapegoat Paul Dean, who was chief of the UNH Police Department at the time, and was directly involved in removal of the tent city from the Thompson Hall lawn.

    (Note the Monitor story does some deck-stacking itself in describing the "protest" as "pro-Palestine" instead of a more accurate "anti-Israel".)

    But credit where credit is due: Finding #1 in the report:

    The University should formally adopt institutional neutrality.

    That's an excellent idea. I have the feeling it's been informally adopted already.

  • On the LFOD watch… I seem to remember that Garry Rayno used to be a straight news reporter. He has evolved, as demonstrated by his lead paragraphs at InDepthNH.org: Right-to-Work Would Harm the State’s Moral Fabric, Committee Told.

    CONCORD — Opponents of the latest “right-to-work” bill said it was Ground Hog Day again with the unpopular provision that failed time and time again to become law in New Hampshire.

    The public hearing on House Bill 238, which would make New Hampshire the 27th right-to-work state in the country and the only one in the Northeast north of West Virginia, drew an overflow crowd Wednesday as union members and officials, business organizations, faith groups and other advocates turned out to oppose it, greatly outnumbering those testifying in favor of the bill.

    The arguments are well-known, and (unfortunately) there's only a glancing reference to our state motto:

    Other opponents said right-to-work is not right for New Hampshire and would allow the government to interfere in negotiations between businesses and their workers, something not often supported in the Live Free or Die state.

    I'm pretty sure right-to-work supporters have a different understanding of how LFOD applies here, but if they made that explicit, Rayno doesn't quote them.

    Oh, yeah: what's the deal with "moral fabric" in the headline?

    Lisa Beaudoin, executive director of the New Hampshire Council of Churches, said her group opposes the bill because people of faith uphold the dignity of workers and justice for all.

    “This legislation is not a harm just to individuals,” Beaudoin said, “but to the moral fabric of New Hampshire.”

    Did Jesus belong to the United Brotherhood of Carpenters?

    For an alternate (equally slanted) take, see last month's article in NHJournal: Right To Work Would Boost NH Jobs, Economy, Advocates Say

If It's Really About Power…

I'm a fan of the prolific video blogger Sabine Hossenfelder. I usually prefer text to video, because I can read faster than most people talk; she's a rare exception. She usually posts on physics-related topics. But her recent video gets outside that comfort zone:

Her blurb on the blog post (What Everyone Gets Wrong about AI):

Most politicians totally misunderstand the trouble that artificial intelligence is going to bring. This isn’t a race for profit, it’s a race for power. And that power will be in the hands of a few very rich people. Does that sound like a good future?

Sabine's argument is unconvincing handwaving. I'd need a lot more details on how (exactly) privately-owned AI "frontier" models will inevitably lead to a worldwide dystopia before worrying.

But her solution, "publicly-owned" AI models, almost certainly would be worse than her imagined disease. Governments not only already have "power", they have (say it with me) a monopoly on coercive power.

And, as P.J. O'Rourke memorably quipped: "Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys."

I could be wrong however. Sabine is a very smart lady. Maybe this is an example where the AI-aided state will benevolently save us from those nasty AI barons.

Meanwhile, at Reason, Ron Bailey wonders: will we have Artificial Superintelligence in 4 Years, thanks to "StarGate"?

The $500 billion Stargate artificial intelligence project was officially announced by President Donald Trump at a press conference yesterday. Standing with him were the project's chief backers: Masayoshi Son, CEO of Softbank, the Japanese investment holding company focusing on technology companies; Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, one the world's leading artificial intelligence companies; and Larry Ellison, executive chairman of software giant Oracle.

The announcement came the day after Trump issued an executive order rescinding Joe Biden's October 2023 executive order that would have significantly impeded the development of AI technologies.

So is this the kind of thing Sabine would be OK with? Or…

Also of note:

  • "You see, in this world there's two kinds of people, my friend: Those with loaded guns and those who dig. You dig." The NR editors classify Trump’s Executive Order Blitz into, yes, the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. Or, specifically, "(1) clearly legal; (2) probably legal — but deserving of more attention; and (3) presumptively illegal."

    Since Pun Salad declared Trump's honeymoon over at 12:05 on January 20, let's skip down to…

    And, finally, there is the bad. On Monday, Trump announced that he would decline to enforce Congress’s ban on TikTok for 75 days while he looks for a buyer. By the plain terms of the ban — a ban that was upheld 9–0 at the Supreme Court — he does not enjoy this authority. It is true that Congress gave the executive branch the capacity to delay the implementation of the legislation for up to 90 days. But that grant came with strings — namely, that the delay be invoked only in such case as TikTok had a buyer who was under contract. Despite having been available for 270 days, TikTok is not under contract — or anything close to it. That being so, Donald Trump is obliged to honor his oath of office and faithfully execute the law. By declaring a pause that has no plausible basis in the statute, he has taken the opposite course.

    But he has the loaded guns, so… J.D. Tuccille is also EO-irritated, but probably unsurprised: With executive order avalanche, Trump continues trend toward a monarchical presidency.

    If a president wants to use the power of office to tell federal minions to mind their manners and respect individual rights, nobody should object.

    But other orders seek to exercise power beyond the boundaries of presidential authority—or even the power of the federal government. One executive order purports to redefine birthright citizenship so as to exclude those who are born to parents illegally, or legally but temporarily, in the United States.

    "This is blatantly unconstitutional," argues George Mason University law professor Ilya Somin, since the 14th Amendment "grants citizenship to anyone 'born … in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof.' There is no exception for children of illegal migrants." The issue has also been addressed by the U.S. Supreme Court, which found that the provision applies to anybody subject to American law—basically, all non-diplomats.

    Fortunately, I was born in Iowa, to non-diplomatic parents.

  • So I noticed this in my local paper. It's a plea from two state representatives, David Paige and Ellen Read, both Democrats, who want to Protect renters, stop HB 60.

    Did you know that a recent survey on housing costs found that 87% of rental properties in New Hampshire are unaffordable? […]

    Well… the report actually only reported this number for two-bedroom apartments, not all "rental properties". And compared that to a "median renter household income" (apparently, whether those renters are renting two-bedroom apartments or not). If your rent > 30% of your income, you are living unaffordably. By definition.

    But going on, forgiving the oversimplification:

    The truth is undeniable: affordable housing is the most urgent issue facing our state today. And make no mistake, even if you're not a renter, this statewide crisis is driving up your property taxes. For renters, finding an affordable place to live is nearly impossible. Many are paying more in rent than they would for a mortgage. When the majority of housing is out of reach, and there’s nowhere else to turn, renters are forced into debt and poverty just to secure basic shelter — or worse, face homelessness. This situation is unacceptable. The priority of legislators in Concord should be expanding access to affordable housing, reducing rent costs, and keeping Granite Staters out of poverty. Yet, instead of focusing on this critical issue, Republicans are, for the fourth time in three years, attempting to change the law that has protected tenants from unjust evictions for the past 40 years.

    The bill's text, by the way, is here. Apparently there are current rental restrictions on landlords that the bill would undo.

    Fine. But reader, is there any doubt in your mind that those current restrictions discourage the supply of rental units? And do supply restrictions cause … what to happen to rent levels? Anyone? Bueller?

Recently on the book blog:


Last Modified 2025-01-24 5:32 AM EST

The Alaska Sanders Affair

(paid link)

This was on the Wall Street Journal's list of best 2024 mysteries. So, despite my mediocre impressions of the two previous books I've read by Joël Dicker, I decided to give this one a try. This book is a sequel of sorts to The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair, which I read back in 2014, and (apparently) The Baltimore Boys (which I haven't read).

This book is set mostly in New Hampshire, with side trips to Maine and Massachusetts. Locations are a mixture of the fictional and real: Conway, Wolfeboro, Rochester, etc. (The "dangerous part of Rochester" earns a visit; I didn't even know Rochester had a "dangerous part", but I haven't been everywhere in the city.)

The "affair" is the grisly murder of the titular Alaska Sanders in 1999. She was pretty, a beauty pageant winner, an aspiring model/actress, but things don't work out: our first view of her is being a corpse on a lakeshore, being eaten by a bear.

Things get resolved quickly: one suspect is shot, another confesses and goes to prison for life. Swift New Hampshire justice!

Over a decade later, the book's narrator, author Marcus Goldman, visits the murder scene, and reunites with his cop buddy, Perry Galhalowood. But there's this one little detail unearthed that causes the murder investigation to be reopened, and we are off into a very twisty plot.

So thumbs up for the plot, which (I assume) is hole-free. That's a Dicker trademark. Also (as I've noted in the past): leaden, unrealistic dialog, plastic characters, soap-opera scenarios. As Marcus and Perry proceed, startling revelations pile up, each sending their attention in a different direction, to new suspects. ("Why didn't you tell us this before now?" seems to be said a lot.) I followed along.

I know: it's fiction. However, at a certain point the plot twists seemed too-conveniently contrived. There's a limit. By the end, my page-turning was driven by a mixture of "Sigh, what's gonna happen now?" and "Let's get this over with."

One NH-based plot point struck me: a murder confession is coerced by a threatened death penalty. But (in actual fact) New Hampshire has not executed a murderer since 1939. (Want to know more about Capital punishment in New Hampshire?) I thought this was an obvious botch by Dicker, but guess what? No spoilers, but by the end of the book I realized—maybe not!

The End of Everything

How Wars Descend into Annihilation

(paid link)

The author, historian Victor Davis Hanson, tells the story of how four civilizations were destroyed via wartime destruction of their cities: (1) Thebes, by the Macedonians in 335BC; (2) Carthage, by Romans, 149-146 BC; (3) Byzantine Constantinople, by Ottomans, in 1453; (4) Aztec Tenochtitlán, by the Spaniards, in 1521.

Those were blood-soaked times indeed! Hanson goes into meticulous detail describing each scenario, how the doomed societies were perceived by their conquerors, the tactics used, the resulting death and slavery.

Although widely separated in time and space, these four examples allow Hanson to draw some sobering common themes in his epilogue "How the Unimaginable Becomes the Inevitable". (1) The victims naïvely hoped for outside help, which failed to arrive; (2) They were not simply naïve, but also overconfident in their own defenses; (3) They were weakened somewhat by internal disagreements; (4) They were unrealistic about the capabilities of their opponents; (5) They tried to come to "understandings" with their enemies, which eventually fell apart; (6) Eventually, the losing side resorted to their own savage tactics, fruitlessly (but bloodily) trying to avoid annihilation.

Hanson is no Steven Pinker-style optimist, drawing hope from The Better Angels of our Nature. Also in that epilogue, he runs down a list present-day potential/actual hotspots, some obvious (Ukraine, Taiwan, Korea) and others less so (Turkey vs. Greece?)

I was impressed by VDH's scholarship; since I am not even at a dilettante-level student of history, I'm easily impressed. His style is a little dry. And not getting all hippy-dippy on you, but I was struck by the massive waste of human life and wealth that went into wars, on both sides. Especially that Thebes chapter; what the heck were they fighting about? Can't they all just get along? It's as if Omaha suddenly decided to conquer and destroy Des Moines!

Bad Enough For Government Work

[Amazon Link]
(paid link)

Another day, another reminder of why Trump gets no honeymoon from me. Noah Rothman describes how Trump’s J6 Pardons Are a Prelude to More Political Violence.

Shortly after his election, Trump sought to reassure the public that he would be more discreet with his pardon pen. “I’m going to do case-by-case, and if they were non-violent, I think they’ve been greatly punished,” he insisted. His incoming White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, concurred. Only those “who were denied due process and unfairly persecuted by the weaponized Department of Justice” would receive clemency, she maintained. “If you beat up a cop, of course you deserve to go to prison,” JD Vance assured Americans with the utmost self-confidence. “If you violated the law, you should suffer the consequences.” House Speaker Mike Johnson seconded the notion. “I think what the president said, and vice-president-elect JD Vance has said, is that peaceful protesters should be pardoned, but violent criminals should not,” he observed. “That’s a simple determination.”

It sure is. But these assurances were part of a campaign of misdirection. Trump and company asked us to scrupulously observe an elementary distinction between violent and non-violent offenses – a categorical differentiation anyone with a lick of sense would also make — when they had no intention of respecting it themselves. This line was little more than the nearest rhetorical weapon at hand; a tribute vice pays to virtue, the virtue being the naïve belief that political violence is wrong per se and must be stridently opposed by every upstanding steward of the American civic compact. The vice is — or, rather, should be — self-explanatory.

Noah's bottom line:

Apparently, a consistent revulsion toward political violence in whatever form it takes is a quaint and, indeed, controversial notion. Both edges of the American political spectrum appear to have convinced themselves that the remedy to the problem of lax penalties for the other side’s violent rioters is lax penalties for their side’s violent rioters. This is a recipe for more political violence, not less. We should expect it.

You might want to invest in our Amazon Product du Jour! It's OSHA approved!

Also disgusted by Trump II, Day I, is Jacob Sullum: Trump's blanket clemency for Capitol rioters excuses political violence. Repeating the broken promises and empty rhetoric:

President Donald Trump has called the riot that interrupted congressional ratification of Joe Biden's election four years ago "a heinous attack on the United States Capitol." And even when he began talking about pardoning some of the people who invaded the Capitol that day, he signaled that he would use his clemency power with care. "I am inclined to pardon many of them," he told CNN in 2023. "I can't say for every single one because a couple of them, probably, they got out of control." Just last week, J.D. Vance, now the vice president, elaborated on that point. "If you committed violence on that day," Vance said on Fox News, "obviously you shouldn't be pardoned."

Trump drew no such distinction on Monday, when he granted "a full, complete and unconditional pardon" to nearly 1,600 people who had been charged in connection with the Capitol riot. Trump also commuted the sentences of 14 people who were still serving time for riot-related crimes and instructed the Justice Department to drop pending cases. Those decisions, he claimed, were necessary to correct "a grave national injustice" and begin "a process of national reconciliation."

Maybe Trump should simply modify that thing he used to say: "We'll reconcile so much, you'll get bored with all the reconciliation."

Also of note:

  • But when he's right… Jacob Sullum also describes Why Trump Should Keep His Promise To Free Silk Road Founder Ross Ulbricht. (Obviously written before Trump pardoned Ulbricht.)

    In addition to many other things he has promised to do on his first day in office, Donald Trump has said he will free Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht, who is serving a life sentence in federal prison for connecting drug consumers with drug sellers. From a libertarian perspective, it is obvious that no one should go to prison for facilitating peaceful transactions among consenting adults. But Ulbricht's grossly disproportionate punishment should give pause even to supporters of the war on drugs.

    Jacob goes into great detail about Ulbricht's prosecution/persecution.

  • Jeff Maurer and I have different beliefs. He writes: I Can’t Believe That Free Speech, Color Blindness, and Meritocracy Became Right-Wing Issues. Reserving some quibbles about "right-wing", I actually do believe that. But here's Jeff, who is looking at Trump's Inauguration address:

    In between rhetorical touchdown dances, a few sentences shivved me right in my liberal ribs. It was these sentences:

    “After years and years of illegal and unconstitutional federal efforts to restrict free expression, I will also sign an executive order to immediately stop all government censorship and bring back free speech to America.”

    “This week, I will also end the government policy of trying to socially engineer race and gender into every aspect of public and private life. We will force a society that is colorblind and merit-based.”

    Those sentences hurt not because I disagree, but because I can’t believe that the left has fucked things up so badly that free speech, color blindness, and meritocracy are now issues that the right feels they own. In fact, those issues are so right-coded that they made the list of Things To Throw In Democrats’ Faces At The Inauguration Speech. A little more than a decade ago, those were bedrock liberal ideals. How did we screw this up?

    The answer, of course, is that radical leftists pushed a bunch of shit-for-brains ideas, and liberals were too dickless to say “what you’re saying is dumb and wrong”.

    Jeff doesn't use the word "progressive" in his essay, which is a shame. Progressives haven't been for free speech since Woodrow Wilson threw Eugene Debs in jail.

  • Speaking of believing stuff, though, I have a hard time believing that Democrats actually believe this. Jerry Coyne calls on his fellow Democrats to return to sanity: Elon Musk did NOT give a Hitler salute.

    It’s stuff like this that makes me worry that the Democrats, instead of taking stock of where we went wrong to lose the Presidential election, are simply doubling down on what made us lose. That involved, in part, excessive demonizing of Republicans, including calling them Nazis. The public (save for blockheads and “progressive” Democrats) is not stupid enough, for example, to really think that Elon Musk was making a Hitler salute when he made a gesture from his heart to the world at Trump’s post-inauguration celebration at the Capital One arena. Here it is. It may be awkward, but even I’m not crazy enough to think he’s paying homage to Hitler or Mussolini.

    […]

    Jerry quotes a lot of people who are apparently crazy enough to think that. Including (you might notice) the Public Broadcasting System, whose description of this 39-second video is "Elon Musk appears to give fascist salute during Trump inauguration celebration".

    Trump can't defund PBS fast enough.

    Jerry also (amusingly) compiles a number of pictures of prominent Democrats giving the same gesture.

    Also commenting Is Megan McArdle who supplies The missing context from the Elon Musk salute. RTWT, but here's her wise bottom line:

    It is very satisfying to believe that you are fighting pure evil. Most of the work of politics is somewhat dispiriting: inadequate half-measures, frustrating compromise and incremental change. Pretty boring stuff compared with the exciting work of exorcising the demons in our midst. That’s why Donald Trump campaigned on the promise that America could be fixed by stomping out the treacherous liberal elite and why the #Resistance generated so much energy from the promise to stomp back harder.

    Ten years on, what has any of it gotten us, except more and purer poison? You can’t exorcise your way to a functioning democracy. Because if we insist on believing that our opponents are evil personified, then the necessary work of democratic compromise becomes an unthinkable deal with the devil.

    So: mixed bag today. And probably tomorrow too. And…


Last Modified 2025-01-24 6:21 AM EST

The Pardoner's Tale

Andrew C. McCarthy wrote (presciently as it turned out) on The Preemptive Pardons. From 10:21am yesterday, 2025-01-20:

I don’t believe President Biden is done quite yet with his gross abuse of the pardon power. As this is written, there are still about three hours left in his presidency — plenty of time to pardon key players in the Biden family business of selling Ol’ Joe’s political influence to the Chinese Communist Party, Ukrainian oligarchs, and other agents of corrupt and anti-American regimes. But the preemptive pardons announced this morning for the House January 6 Committee, Dr. Anthony Fauci, and General Milley (see our David Zimmermann’s report) continue the scandal.

To my mind, the interesting question is whether these public officials will accept the grants of clemency.

President Biden — or, I should say, Jill, Hunter, and whoever else on in the White House is actually exercising the powers of the chief executive of our government (another huge scandal) — highlighted the fraught question in today’s announcement, insisting: “The issuance of these pardons should not be mistaken as an acknowledgement that any individual engaged in any wrongdoing, nor should acceptance be misconstrued as an admission of guilt for any offense.”

But of course it will be construed that way, fairly or not. In its 1915 decision in Burdick v. United States, the Supreme Court ruled that a pardon must be accepted in order to have legal effect because of the “confession of guilt implied in the acceptance of a pardon.” The Court elaborated that, in terms of public shame, a pardon can involve “consequences of even greater significance than those from which it purports to relieve.”

Andrew goes on to say that he does not agree with that SCOTUS reasoning, but what are you going to do?

Also of note:

  • Well, gee, a lot of stuff happened yesterday. But Eric Boehm's article from print-Reason looks at a big longer-term issue: Finding Trillions in Federal Cuts Is Easy. But Will Trump and Musk Follow Through?

    Easy? Yes:

    The most obvious question about Musk's promise to rip $2 trillion out of the federal budget is also one of the easiest to answer: Can it be done?

    Yes, absolutely. In 2019, the last full budget year before the COVID-19 pandemic unleashed even higher outlays, the feds spent about $4.4 trillion. Simply cutting the government back to the size it was five years ago accomplishes this seemingly impossible promise.

    A more realistic approach might start with the prepandemic spending baseline. In January 2020, the Congressional Budget Office projected that government spending in FY 2025 would total $5.8 trillion—about $1 trillion less than what the government actually spent in 2024.

    So the first thing a Musk-guided second Trump administration could do is to set an overall spending target. Rolling the government back to a prepandemic budget baseline of $5.8 trillion would accomplish half of the $2 trillion promise, and it would do so without having to target any particular program. Hold firm to that final figure and make Congress sort out the details. That, at a minimum, should be the goal for the first year.

    As I've been saying a lot lately, we'll see what happens. Eric's article indicates there are plenty of good ideas out there. And here's one more…

  • Long past time, if you ask me. Let's fix a perennial toothache: Is it Finally Time to Privatize the United States Postal Service? Peter C. Earle says…

    As with all political campaigns that reignite discussions on reducing government spending and eliminating bureaucratic inefficiency, the US Postal Service (USPS) — which reported a net loss of $9.5 billion in the fiscal year ending September 30, 2024 — is now likely to find itself under renewed scrutiny. The establishment of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), led by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, has intensified speculation about the fate of whole swaths of sclerotic government agencies and departments, which should put the USPS directly in its crosshairs.

    Privatizing the US Postal Service (USPS) would be a significant step toward improving efficiency, encouraging innovation, and ensuring financial sustainability for an institution less exhibiting than wholly characterized by decades upon decades of ossification and financial losses. As a government-backed monopoly, the USPS controls first-class mail delivery and mailboxes while benefiting from advantages like tax exemptions and low-interest Treasury loans. However, its ability to operate effectively is constrained by political interference, including strict limits on pricing and service adjustments. A market-driven alternative — long discussed, but now feasible — would involve eliminating government control, introducing competition, and allowing market forces to create a streamlined, customer-focused postal system.

    Well, apparently Vivek got the heck out of DOGE but I hope Elon is reading.

  • He is large, he contains multitudes. Eric Boehm also provides another story about what promises to be an, um, interesting time: Trump promises to be a 'peacemaker,' threatens Panama.

    In his inauguration address on Monday afternoon, President Donald Trump said his "proudest legacy" would be "that of a peacemaker."

    Moments later, Trump threatened to seize a portion of the sovereign territory of another country—specifically, the Panama Canal, a crucial link for global trade.

    It's a useful reminder of what America will be getting for the next four years: a president who holds a chaotic mix of often contradictory ideas, and one who sees everything as being up for negotiation. Do you want a president who will keep America out of pointless foreign conflicts? Trump promises to be that guy. Do you want a president who projects American power around the world and demands fealty from the leaders of lesser nations? He can be that guy too. Just don't try to reconcile the two visions.

    I think Harry Frankfurt's observations on bullshit will be increasingly relevant: bullshitters don't care what they say is true or false. The corollary: they are unbothered by self-contradiction, even within the same speech.

  • Sunrise doesn't last all morning, A cloudburst doesn't last all day. So, as George Will recommends: Neither euphoric nor despairing be. Trump too shall pass.

    Although few presidential inaugural addresses are remembered, six etched in the nation’s memory felicitous phrases, perfect for the moments: “Every difference of opinion is not a difference of principle” (Jefferson, 1801); “the mystic chords of memory … the better angels of our nature” (Lincoln, 1861); all Lincoln’s 701 words in 1865, carved in his memorial’s marble; “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself” (Roosevelt, 1933); “the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans” (Kennedy, 1961); “In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is our problem” (Reagan, 1981, often quoted without the first four words).

    Donald Trump does not deal in felicities. His second inaugural will be remembered for being worse than 59 others, including his first (about “stealing,” “ravages” and “carnage”). It was memorable for its staggering inappropriateness.

    Inaugurations should be solemn yet celebratory components of America’s civic liturgy. Instead, we heard on Monday that because of “corrupt” and “horrible” “betrayals” by others, “the pillars of our society” are “in complete disrepair.” The challenges will be “annihilated,” not because God blesses America, but because God chose him.

    Yeah, God's not sending us his best.


Last Modified 2025-01-22 4:13 AM EST

Pun Salad Dilemma: MLK or Inauguration Day?

Well, there's no reason we can't do both, but let's start with a preview of the coverage of one of today's events.

And now moving on to the other inspiration for today's Federal Holiday, Jeff Jacoby turns his thoughts to Black patriotism and Martin Luther King Jr..

IT IS often forgotten that Martin Luther King Jr. was a deeply patriotic American.

In King's day, as in ours, there were influential Black Americans — men like Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael, Eldridge Cleaver, and H. Rap Brown — who claimed that the American ideal was always a hypocritical lie. That was the opposite of King's view. Based on everything we know about him, MLK would have recoiled from someone like Jeremiah Wright, Barack Obama's pastor in Chicago for 20 years, who preached "God damn America" and gloated after 9/11 that "America's chickens are coming home to roost." Never would MLK have endorsed the Black Lives Matter activists who called the American flag "a symbol of hatred," still less approved of those who trampled on the flag to show their contempt for it.

Far from reviling America, its Founding Fathers, and the symbols of its high ideals, King revered them. The civil rights movement, he always said, was "standing up for the best in the American dream."

It is not MLK's actual birthday today; that was back on January 15. His actual birthday and the Federal holiday coincided last year; that won't happen again until 2029. For more on the jiggery-pokery Uncle Stupid plays with his calendar, see the Uniform Monday Holiday Act. There are (apparently) no current plans to move Christmas or New Year's Day to Mondays.

But I hear you asking: is the University Near Here doing anything MLKish this year? Yes it is, as it turns out! Sort of. See the page for UNH 2025 MLK Day of Service.


The Aulbani J. Beauregard Center for Equity, Justice, and Freedom, and the Office of Community, Equity, and Diversity have partnered to bring you this year’s University of New Hampshire Annual MLK Day of Service, which will be held on Saturday, February 1, 2025, from 10 am – 3:30 pm in the MUB Strafford Room.

The University of New Hampshire’s annual MLK Day of Service brings together students, faculty, and staff to honor Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s legacy through service to our local communities. The theme for the 2025 UNH MLK Day of Service is to support people's basic needs. Proceeds from this years' service will benefit UNH Basic Needs Support, Community Action Partnership (CAP) of Strafford County, Pope Memorial Humane Society, and local public schools.

Nothing honors Dr. King more than supporting the local pet shelter!

But you can also sign up to volunteer for…

Rice Sorting

Sort basmati rice into smaller portions to be donated to the UNH Cat's Cupboard. Please note - depending on the pace of your group, you may finish this task earlier than the time posted. NO prior experience needed.

That runs from 10am to 11:30am on Saturday. Apparently that's all the rice that needs sorting for the year.

It didn't used to be this lame, although it was often more irritating. If you're interested, Pun Salad's obituary of UNH's old-style MLK "celebrations" is here.

Also of note:

  • Unprotected from bad news: the rest of the country. Jim Geraghty checks the latest from the major newspaper he doesn't work for: Now the New York Times Tells Us: 'Six Key People' Protected Biden from Bad News. Specifically, Dr. Jill, Crackhead Hunter, and … four other people I'd never heard of.

    Here's a tidbit I found interesting from the NYT story, which attempts to excuse Biden's addled performance in his debate against Trump:

    Two people involved in planning the president’s schedule believe that in hindsight, he should not have been traveling so much during this period. He was exhausted from not one but two trips to Europe and a fund-raiser in California in the weeks before his debate with Mr. Trump on June 27.

    "Not one but two". Gee, wonder why they didn't just say "two"?

    But in any case, Jim calls bullshit:

    [Biden] went to the 80th anniversary of D-Day in France from June 5 to 9. The second trip was to the G7 Summit in Italy from June 12 to 14. He flew directly to Los Angeles for a fundraiser with George Clooney. He was back at the White House 9:30 p.m. June 16.

    Biden did not leave the east coast between June 16 and 27, and had no public events on his schedule from June 19 to 27. Those trips had been eleven days earlier! If you can’t recover from jet lag within eleven days, you cannot handle the duties of the president.

    Ah, well. Today, we move on to …

  • And send the drainage to California. Jack Butler has advice for the incoming administration: The Swamp Is Yours Now, MAGA. Drain It.

    When Donald Trump swears at his second inauguration tomorrow to “preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States,” it will be more than a return to the presidency for a man who left office four years ago. It will also be a rebuke to his skeptics. Consider one such skeptic, who early in 2023 called Trump “an obstacle to the achievement” of progress on “the important issues he brought to or revived in the conservative mainstream,” and declared that “the future of conservatism — even (especially) a conservatism influenced by Trump’s presidency — now depends on rejecting Trump.”

    Who could have been so blinkered, even at a time when Ron DeSantis and others were considering or had already announced presidential primary challenges to Trump, about the possibility of his political resurgence? That would be me. As Trump returns triumphantly to Washington, he can further vindicate his supporters and defy doubters by ensuring that he, those in his administration, and others around him make good on his promise to drain the swamp by dismantling the Beltway-centered governing apparatus of which he will soon assume control.

    I'm pretty sure I made some wrong-headed recommendations back in 2023, but I will leave finding them as an exercise for the reader.


Last Modified 2025-01-20 10:32 AM EST

Unlike Nearly All Unsolicited Advice…

[Amazon Link]
(paid link)

John H. Cochrane's Unsolicited Advice is worthwhile reading. It's aimed at Trump's economic team, but even so:

Here’s an agenda. (Mostly, “read the last 10 years of Grumpy Economist,” but I distill.) In big philosophical terms, this is the “growth” “abundance” “efficiency” and “freedom” agenda. That contrasts with some on the right who long for a more protected life, and are willing to accept the stagnation that protected economies suffer, as evident in Europe and Latin America.

But you don’t have to get in a fight. There are so many opportunities in the Trump agenda, that if you spend your time on the bold growth-oriented innovations rather than fighting too much about tariffs, you will get much further.

And excerpt from his "Taxes" section:

The current income tax system is an abomination. Burn it and start over.

The tax code has three functions: Raise revenue for the government, redistribute income, and subsidize this and that. Start by separating the functions.

[…]

To raise revenue for the government with minimal economic cost, the unequivocal answer is to eliminate the personal and corporate income tax, estate tax, all taxes on rates of return (interest, dividends capital gains) and replace them with a consumption tax. The same rate for all goods: don’t transfer income by mucking with prices. No deductions, no exclusions, not even mortgage interest and charitable deductions. Lower the rate, broaden the base. I prefer a VAT for various reasons, but the mechanism doesn’t matter so much. The “fair tax” was already introduced into Congress. Detailed consumption-tax proposals have been around since the 1970s. This could happen.

Could, probably won't. But, hey, I did not think Trump had a shot at the presidency, either.

Also of note:

  • I'm waiting patiently for the Contrarian to be anything other than partisan dreck. Jeffrey Blehar is watching too, and his headline is [sarcasm warning in three, two, one…] Andy Borowitz Inspires over at The Contrarian.

    One of my favorite catty apocryphal media rumors from the recent internet era is that “humorist” (scare-quotes intended) Andy Borowitz was let go by his longtime employer the New Yorker — that high-minded magazine of culture and political commentary — because its editors were secretly mortified that his sub-mediocre assembly-line dad jokes were always the most popular and high-traffic content on their website.

    One of my other favorite catty apocryphal media rumors from the recent internet era is that “columnist” (scare-quotes intended) Jennifer Rubin was unsubtly dared to “quit” a while ago by her longtime employer the Washington Post — that high-minded newspaper of the federal clerisy — because its editors were secretly mortified that her sub-mediocre assembly-line Resistance squawks were always the most popular and high-traffic content on their website.

    Who can know what to believe? All I know is that I myself couldn’t believe my excitement when Rubin announced earlier this week that both she and Borowitz — Batman and Superman — would be teaming up and bringing their Super Friends like Laurence Tribe and Sherrilyn Ifill along to the fortress of solitude known as The Contrarian to band together and resist tyranny. “Laughter is one of the most powerful weapons against autocracy,” wrote team waterboy Norm Eisen as he announced the new arsenal of democracy would be stocked by an unarmed man.

    That link in the first paragraph above goes to Salon, which is honest enough to admit that Andy Borowitz isn't funny. And (surprise) their article manages to be funny itself in elaborating on that assertion.

    But Jeffrey duplicates Borowitz's first effort, and … well, see what you think.

  • Never was a metaphor so accurate. Eric Boehm looks back at the past few weeks and despairs: Regulation, prohibition, and litigation: Joe Biden's busy lame-duck period. Example one hasn't gotten a lot of attention:

    The latest in that string of last-second executive actions was a lawsuit filed by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) on Wednesday against Deere & Company, the manufacturer of John Deere tractors and other farm equipment. The lawsuit alleges that Deere has used proprietary software to ensure that only the company's authorized dealers can conduct repairs on the computer systems that run much of modern farm equipment.

    The lawsuit is a potentially big showdown for the so-called right-to-repair movement, which is seeking laws and court opinions that prevent companies from using those sorts of restrictive software components to force consumers into using certain repair services. Despite much of the FTC's track record over the past four years, this might actually be a useful and consumer-friendly development.

    But the process matters, and rushing this lawsuit out the door in the final days of the Biden administration is likely to harm its chances of succeeding. As Deere noted in a statement, the lawsuit seems to misrepresent some basic facts about what repair services customers can do on their own. In a dissenting statement, FTC Commissioner Andrew Ferguson (who will become chairman of the agency after Donald Trump is sworn in) condemned the effort as "the result of brazen partisanship…taken in haste to beat President Trump into office."

    In other words, this looks more like a performative final flourish by outgoing FTC Chairwoman Lina Khan rather than a serious attempt at improving consumer welfare.

    Equal time for Karl Bode at TechDirt, who predictably cheers this last minute lawfare: FTC Finally Sues John Deere Over Years Of ‘Right To Repair’ Abuses.

  • The Summoner's Tale. Jonathan Turley is less than impressed with Biden's version: Biden Again Summons His “Leading Legal Constitutional Scholars” to Support an Absurd Constitutional Claim. Serious legal analysis has judged that claim anywhere from "ludicrous" to "contemptible". So:

    So Biden made a familiar call. In the film Casablanca, Captain Renault, played by Claude Reins, famously tells his men to “round up the usual suspects” to make things look good to the public. The Biden White House would often do the same thing when contemplating a clearly unconstitutional action.

    The top of that list has always been Harvard Professor Laurence Tribe, who once again was the most cited academic claiming that the 28th amendment was ratified despite the Justice Department, archivists, the courts, and mere logic claiming otherwise.

    Jonathan cites Tribe's history of bad legal advice and easily-debunked conspiracism.

    And on that note, Ann Althouse uncovers a Tribe quote that (I think) is a classic example of saying the quiet part out loud in NYT article: "In a political environment like this, you throw at the wall whatever you can."

    Ann embeds a classic excerpt from The Odd Couple (the Lemmon/Matthau movie), and if you watched that you can probably guess which scene. But anyway, from that article:

    Proponents of the Equal Rights Amendment have long made it clear that their strategy is primarily a political, not a legal one. Their goal is to dare Republicans to challenge the legitimacy of sex equality, and of moving to nullify something as simple as equal rights for women.

    “This is a political rather than a legal struggle,” Laurence Tribe, the constitutional scholar and professor emeritus at Harvard Law School, has said. “It would succeed only in a different environment than we have.”

    Mr. Tribe argued that the import of Mr. Biden’s move was in the signal it would send to the country.

    “The real question is what political message is being sent,” he said. “In a political environment like this, you throw at the wall whatever you can.”

    And… now it's garbage.

Recently on the book blog:

The Big Empty

(paid link)

The latest adventure of private eye Elvis Cole and his partner/force of nature Joe Pike. It has been slightly over two years since the previous book; I hope this means Robert Crais is writing these books as the mood strikes him, and not under pressure from his publisher or agent to grind out schlock. This is schlock-free.

Elvis is hired by Traci Beller to find out what happened to her beloved father, who vanished ten years previous when she was 13. A previous effort by another detective turned up nothing except his last known whereabouts, the small (fictional) town of Rancha, out at the western end of the San Fernando Valley. (I assume that's what the book's title refers to; Google Maps doesn't show much out there.)

Money's no object, because Traci is a bona fide star in the world of Internet muffin-baking ("eight-point-two-million followers across her socials"), with potential to become a superstar. Her muffins are great, and she has a winning personality that translates to video well. But she's kinda obsessed with wanting to know what happened ten years ago. Elvis takes the case, but has to contend with Traci's posse (who don't care what happened to Dad, and want to stay on the gravy train) and Traci's mother, who (seemingly) would prefer Traci just Move On.

Elvis contends with more resistance out in Rancha, where his diligent investigation draws the attention of unsavory types who really don't want the truth about Traci's dad to be revealed. Things escalate to the point where Joe Pike is called to assist, but (unfortunately) too late to protect Elvis from some serious violence.

Bottom line: I can't think of any current writer who does the private-eye genre better than Robert Crais, and this is no exception.

Just When You Thought He Was Done Abusing the Office …

Thanks, Elon, for the "Community Notes" feature. The one on this tweet is brutal. But let's sample other commentary. For example, Dan McLaughlin excerpts his column on Joe Biden's Constitutional Vandalism.

That’s not how any of this works. The Constitution doesn’t give presidents any role in amending it, much less by tweeting. . . . Congress has long been understood to have the power to set a time limit for ratification. There were good reasons for the time limit. In the 1970s, proponents argued that the ERA was needed because it was unclear that the Constitution already banned sex discrimination; today, the Supreme Court routinely rules that it does. Then, proponents reassured sceptics that the ERA had nothing to do with topics such as abortion or gay rights, let alone transgenderism; today’s proponents say that these are exactly why we need the ERA. Many state legislatures are run by very different parties and coalitions than those that were in power in the 1970s.

There's nothing stopping you, ERA fans, from simply trying again, from scratch. You know, like Ruth Bader Ginsburg advocated, and thought necessary.

C.J. Ciaramella, who (according to his blurb) has graced the pages of (among others) Vice, The Weekly Standard, High Times, Salon, The Federalist, Pacific Standard, The Washington Post, The Daily Beast, the San Diego Union-Tribune, and Street Sense, is also dismayed: Biden attempts to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment by blog post. He bends over backwards to be fair …

There is a legitimate argument that deadlines for ratification are inconsistent with Article V of the Constitution, but wishcasting the ERA into the Constitution is bad constitutional process and will further muddy the legal waters. The fact that Biden only announced he believes the ERA is the "law of the land" five years after it allegedly became so—and in the final days of his term—but declined to ever do anything to enforce or publish it, says everything about the seriousness of his position and the seriousness of his presidency.

Similarly, Jonah Goldberg believes that Biden's argument, such as it is, originates from someplace the sun fails to illuminate: Pulling It Out of Uranus. On what Joe has "long believed":

Say what you will about Biden, the man can keep a secret. In his statement, Biden says that it became the 28th Amendment almost exactly five years ago when the Commonwealth of Virginia ratified it on January 27, 2020. 

From that time until now, Biden has said pretty much nothing about this belief. That’s kind of a weird conviction to keep under your hat all this time. 

That is, unless, like almost everybody else, he didn’t think Virginia’s ratification of the ERA was anything other than symbolic until recently. Heck, the New York Times story on Virginia’s symbolic ratification of the ERA uses the word symbolic in the subhead and the first sentence. If the Times thought there was a shot at the ratification being something other than symbolic at the time, it would have flooded the zone with “let’s make this happen” coverage. Again, if they thought this was possible, the newspaper might even have asked Joe Biden what he thought about it, given that he was running for president at the time.

As a bonus, Jonah looks to the scatalogical gigglefest that is the Uranus Fudge Factory website. If President Dotard is looking for a retirement gig, he could, and probably will, do worse than employment as a fudge packer there.

And if you're looking for a sane take on the controversy, here's a Statement on the Equal Rights Amendment Ratification Process from Archivist of the United States Dr. Colleen Shogan and Deputy Archivist William J. Bosanko. (Which is linked by a number of folks cited above.) Excerpt:

In 2020 and again in 2022, the Office of Legal Counsel of the U.S. Department of Justice affirmed that the ratification deadline established by Congress for the ERA is valid and enforceable. The OLC concluded that extending or removing the deadline requires new action by Congress or the courts. Court decisions at both the District and Circuit levels have affirmed that the ratification deadlines established by Congress for the ERA are valid. Therefore, the Archivist of the United States cannot legally publish the Equal Rights Amendment. As the leaders of the National Archives, we will abide by these legal precedents and support the constitutional framework in which we operate.

By the way: my state's Senator Jeanne Shaheen tweeted her agreement with Biden's vandalism. And here's my reply:

Also of note:

  • "Worthwhile Canadian Initiative" That's the boring headline standard; Charles Blahous doesn't quite get there with Brookings’ Constructive Social Security Proposal.

    The U.S. Social Security system has been sinking into deepening trouble of late, its finances heading towards collapse, and with fewer friends in positions of power willing to do anything about it. There was once a time (the 1970s and 1980s) when each party’s leadership cared enough about Social Security to join in making politically difficult decisions to preserve its solvency. Unfortunately, a political schism emerged in the 2000s and 2010s, during which time only fiscal conservatives remained willing to sound the alarm, while progressives took to denying the reality of Social Security’s worsening condition. More recently, even purported conservatives have become increasingly unwilling to step forward and call for solutions.

    But on January 3, the Social Security Administration’s chief actuary released an analysis, requested by Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-Md.), of a comprehensive reform proposal developed by Wendell Primus of the Brookings Institution. Not only is the proposal a constructive one, but it may also have the potential to jump-start a desperately needed discussion of how best to rescue Social Security from impending insolvency.

    So it's interesting. Might even be better than doing nothing! But (bad news): it relies more on tax increases than cost containment. But see what you think. Charles does a fair job in describing and commenting on the proposal.

  • Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. At least in the activity they enjoy most: ruling by decree, without effective checks and balances. George Will observes: Trump doesn’t have a mandate. But, oh, does he have executive orders. Some recent history:

    Donald Trump, reelected, promises a flurry of transformative improvements to the nation, immediately (“on Day 1”), if not sooner. He has perhaps been rereading the Federalist Papers: “To reverse and undo what has been done by a predecessor, is very often considered by a successor as the best proof he can give of his own capacity and desert” (Alexander Hamilton, No. 72).

    Four years ago, Casey Burgat of George Washington University and Matt Glassman of Georgetown University wrote in National Affairs that the presidency “changes more abruptly than other governing institutions.” A “strong disruptive incentive” grows stronger as presidents, impatiently disdaining Congress as an impediment to the flowering of their reputations, increasingly resort to achieving changes unilaterally, by executive orders.

    Barack Obama unilaterally ratified the Paris Agreement on climate change as an “executive agreement” rather than achieving something — e.g., a treaty — affirmed by Congress. Trump unilaterally undid what Obama did.

    On Inauguration Day 2021, Joe Biden’s 11-page enumeration of “Day One Executive Actions” included rejoining the Paris Agreement. And an executive order decreeing “a whole-of-government” initiative “rooting out systemic racism.” Trump’s executive orders can un-rejoin the Paris Agreement, and un-decree permeating government with racial calculations.

    We might change the National Anthem from "The Star-Spangled Banner" to "Call Me Irresponsible".

  • When will they ever learn? Speaking of famous song lyrics, Pete Seeger wrote that one. (He eventually learned that Stalin was not a nice guy and the Soviet Union was a hellhole.) But that's not important right now. When will we learn that a free people should rebel against the FDA? Jacob Sullum notes the latest: FDA proposes a de facto cigarette ban, which would expand the war on drugs.

    On its way out the door, the Biden administration has proposed a rule that would effectively ban cigarettes by requiring a drastic reduction in nicotine content. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which unveiled the proposed rule on Wednesday, says the aim is to make cigarettes unappealing by eliminating their "psychoactive and reinforcing effects."

    Jacob is pessimistic that either Trump or probable HHS Secretary RFK Jr will see the libertarian light on this.

  • Time for a new "Truth in Labeling" Law? After reading James Taranto, I think it might be a good idea: ‘Fact Checkers’ Become Rent Seekers.

    Someone at the New York Times had a little fun writing a headline last week: “Meta Says Fact-Checkers Were the Problem. Fact-Checkers Rule That False.” The allusion was to an Onion story from 1997: “Supreme Court Rules Supreme Court Rules.”

    The Onion headline was funny because it was true. Article III of the Constitution establishes that the Supreme Court rules, as the Supreme Court ruled in Marbury v. Madison (1803). The Times headline was an inside joke. Readers wouldn’t get it unless they were deeply familiar with a baneful 21st-century journalistic convention.

    The term “fact checking” has two distinct meanings in journalism—one venerable, the other recent and corrupt. The former refers to a process of self-correction in which an editorial staffer retraces a writer’s reportorial steps, inspecting and reinterviewing sources to make sure everything in the story is accurate. The New Yorker and Reader’s Digest were renowned in the industry for their rigorous fact-checking departments.

    When you hear the term today, though, it usually refers to something completely different—what the Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler calls “political fact-checking.” This isn’t a behind-the-scenes quality-control practice but a subgenre of news, whose emergence Mr. Kessler dates to the founding of FactCheck.org in 2003. Political fact-checkers don’t seek to ensure that journalists tell the truth but to demonstrate that other people—principally but not only politicians—are liars.

    I keep looking for job openings for epistemologicians, but have so far come up empty. Mainly people on Twitter claiming to be one.

"Cripes, He's Onto Us! Deploy the Tumbrels!"

I'm sure that was Trump's reaction to a Timothy Snyder tweet:

You can click over for Timothy's conspiracy theory; it takes 13 separate tweets to explain. Basically, as I understand it, Pete Hegseth is too dumb to run the Department of Defense, but he is brilliant enough to bring about that "Christian Reconstructionist" decapitation strike.

As the kids ask: srsly? Or, as Charles C.W. Cooke asks: Does This Yale Prof Actually Believe Hegseth Is Part of a ‘Decapitation Strike’ on America? (Probably paywalled. I'm running low on gifted links for this month, sorry.)

Snyder’s claim is that the plan he adumbrates will be executed if Donald Trump’s cabinet picks are confirmed. That, clearly, is going to happen soon — either in the most part, or in full. The supposed villains that Snyder feared on November 14 are probably all going to be elevated into their designated roles, and his chief villain, Pete Hegseth, is probably going to join them. What is Snyder going to do about this? You will forgive me, I hope, for insisting that if the answer is to stay at Yale and keep going about his daily life, then I must remain skeptical that he believes a word of what he is saying. The only concrete suggestion I can find him making amid all the drama is to engage in “simple defiance, joined with a rhetoric of a better America.” But that is not a scheme suited to the engineered downfall of the republic; it is a scheme suited to a stable system of government that relies on biennial election cycles. “A rhetoric of a better America” is a sentence that belongs in a presidential aspirant’s briefing book, not in an existential fight against a dastardly international conspiracy. Other than writing at his Substack, teaching at a university, and doom-posting on a social media platform that is owned by a man he suspects of being a collaborator, what’s the plan?

There are times that call for sprezzatura, and there are times that call for action. The inauguration of a disliked president allows the former; the inauguration of an ineluctable tyrant does not. In the coming months, we will see all manner of public figures casually talking as if America as we have known it is finished and a dark authoritarian nightmare has taken its place. If, having delivered this verdict, its authors then go about their days as if nothing had changed — speaking on panels or on TV, delivering copy to the usual outlets, enjoying dinners in New Haven and Cambridge, and tweeting to great acclaim — one would be forgiven for concluding that, actually, they don’t believe a word of it.

I keep noticing Snyder's latest book On Freedom on the "New Non-Fiction" table at Portsmouth (NH) Public Library. I don't mind reading books outside my ideological comfort zone, so I was tempted, but … nah.

Also of note:

  • In his defense, it's easy to misunderstand tasks when you're demented. Ramesh Ponnuru joins the critics: Biden’s farewell address, like his presidency, misunderstood his task.

    Joe Biden had two messages to send America in his farewell address: His administration has been a historic success, and the country is on the verge of becoming an oligarchic dystopia. Oh, and the chief problem with this oligarchy is that it isn’t active enough in telling the rest of us what’s true and false. With such discordant themes, I can’t fault him for tripping over his message this time.

    Unlike National Review, the WaPo is generous with its gifting links, so click away.

  • It's an Islamic terrorist plot, I tells ya! James Skyles looks at The DOJ's War on Algorithmic AI.

    [Amazon Link]
    (paid link)

    In short, entrepreneurs have developed software algorithms that utilize economic data (both backlogged and current data) to provide their user bases with a better, more comprehensive understanding of how differing consumer trends, seasonal changes, breaking news, and other factors affect the demand for their services and products. These software programs use that information to provide their users with pricing adjustment recommendations that they are free to take or leave.

    To say that this AI technology has taken off would be an understatement. Car rental companies, airlines, and hotels use it to ensure their prices match current marketplace trends. Hospitals and city and state governments use it to help quell congestion and long wait times. Farmers are even using technology to monitor and manage field variability, maximize outputs, reduce costs, and improve sustainability, a practice known as precision farming.

    However, the widespread utilization of algorithmic AI has the DOJ worried that businesses might begin using it for price-fixing, and it has begun throwing the antitrust books at many of these algorithmic software companies. Its actions have included but have not been limited to an October amicus brief filed against hotels and an August suit against one of landlords’ preferred algorithmic AI software. The Western District of Washington’s December 4 action against a different rent algorithmic AI firm has only added further fuel to the fire.

    "In short", it's another front in the War on Prices. With the added feature that it's an easy sell for demagogues who rely on scarifying people with anti-AI dystopianism. You know what else used algorithms? Skynet!.

    (And didja know: the word algorithm references the "Persian Polymath" Al-Khwarizmi, who invented some of the early ones. See this item's headline.)

  • And yet, ye won't be missed. Tyler Cowen bids farewell: Net neutrality, we hardly knew ye.

    One of the longest, most technical and, as it turns out, most inconsequential public-policy debates of the 21st century was about net neutrality. Now that a federal appeals court has effectively ended the debate by striking down the FCC’s net neutrality rules, it’s worth asking what we’ve learned.

    If you have forgotten the sequence of events, here’s a quick recap: In 2015, during President Barack Obama’s presidency and after years of debate, the Federal Communications Commission issued something called the Open Internet Order, guaranteeing net neutrality, which is broadly defined as the principle that internet service providers treat all communications equally, offering both users and content providers consistent service and pricing. Two years later, under President Donald Trump, the FCC rescinded the net neutrality requirement. It was then reinstated under President Joe Biden in 2024, until being struck down earlier this month.

    Tyler notes that "Hardly anyone cares or even notices", and explains why. But:

    Internet experts Tim Wu, Cory Doctorow, Farhad Manjoo and many others were just plain, flat out wrong about this, mostly due to their anti-capitalist mentality.

    An observation that applies well to our previous item.

  • OK, but it might be an answer to my problems. Yascha Mounk debunks one of my favorite panaceas: Proportional Representation Is Not the Answer to America’s Problems. Darn it!

    One of the things that is astonishing to any immigrant to America—even one who grew up in a reasonably affluent society like Germany—is the sheer amount of choice the country offers in just about every realm of life. There is an endless profusion of cable television channels. American grocery stores are incomprehensibly giant, offering a commensurably vast number of different products. Even sports is a notably variegated affair. In most European countries, soccer dwarfs all other sports; but while American football may be dominant in the United States, other sports like baseball, basketball and ice hockey also enjoy massive followings.

    Politics is the one realm which stands out for the poverty of the choices it offers. At every election, Americans trudge to the polls and are presented with the same choices. Unless they want to waste their vote on some third party candidate that has no chance of winning, they dutifully pick between two parties that have existed for over a century and a half: Democrats and Republicans.

    To the layman, this paucity of choice, so out of keeping with other realms of American life, may seem puzzling. But any political scientist knows that there is a simple explanation. The United States has a “majoritarian” electoral system. If you want to be elected to the House of Representatives, you need to win the largest absolute number of votes in your electoral district. In theory, this means that lots of candidates could vie for office. But in practice, a majoritarian political system strongly incentivizes voters to abstain from voting for smaller political parties or to lend their support to outsiders. For if you vote for a candidate who winds up getting ten or 20 percent of the vote, your preference effectively doesn’t count. Your vote is “wasted.”

    Yascha goes on to analyze the latest advocacy piece in the NYT from Jesse Wegman and Lee Drutman (which includes a very splashy presentation, gifted link.) Briefly: Congressional districts should have multiple members, and those members' party affiliations should reflect the popular vote. So, for example, if each district has 5 members, and the vote goes 60-40 for Democrats, three Democrats and two Republicans would be sent to DC.

    Both the Wegman/Drutman proposal and Yascha's rebuttal are long, and if you're in the electoral reform mood, click away.

    I'll just use this opportunity to (once again) plug my own crackpot proposal: Any candidate for the US House of Representatives who receives greater than 1% of the popular vote in the general election shall be entitled to a vote in the House equal to the fraction of the vote he or she receives.

    I'm pretty sure the objections Yascha raises to the Wegman/Drutman scheme might also apply, at least in part, to mine. But you know what? I don't care.


Last Modified 2025-01-18 6:13 AM EST

Sigh. OK, Joe: Let the Door Hit You On Your Way Out.

[Amazon Link]
(paid link)

I didn't watch it, but Jeffrey Blehar did: Joe Biden Farewell Address a Fittingly Deluded End to Biden Era.

Joe Biden just finished addressing the American people from the Oval Office, for the final time in his presidency. And at the end of it all, with this humiliatingly garbled ramble that read like the sort of delusional self-exculpatory fantasy his caretaker wife might whisper consolingly into his ear, Biden concluded his career much as he began it over half a century ago: as a venal, petty-souled fool in denial about his own limitations and failures. (We learned nothing tonight that we didn’t already know. Nothing was revealed.)

In a thick, slack-toned voice, stumbling over his words from beginning to end as he squinted at a teleprompter with vacant eyes, Biden slurred through the single most incoherent speech of his life. He began by taking complete credit for the breaking Israeli hostage deal with Hamas — which was to be expected — and then launched into a sleepy lecture awkwardly framed around the Statue of Liberty and how it was built to sway in the wind, much like America was built to be flexible enough to withstand his presidency. One marble-mouthed cliché after another poured from his half-opened maw, smooth featureless pabulum with all the texture and flavor of Gerber baby food. (Shall America “lead by the example of power or the power of our example?” An imponderable for the ages.)

I would guess the speechwriters have rigorous guidelines for the text they put up on the presidential teleprompter: no big words, no words that can be easily misread or mispronouced, no hetronyms. Maybe someone will write a tell-all at some point in the coming years.

George Will takes a look back and discovers: Biden’s presidency got an early start on its road to ruin. If you can stand reliving that history, click away, it's a WaPo free link. GFW winds up with a relatively recent pothole:

Biden’s revisions of his descriptions of his involvement with his son Hunter’s financial escapades (Biden did not know about them; then he was not involved in them; then he did not benefit from them) culminated in his sweeping pardon for Hunter. This erased Hunter’s criminal convictions and will prevent prosecutions arising from any activities not yet discovered. To the suspicious, this looks like “the big guy” (as Hunter had referred to Biden in one of his undertakings) providing preemptive protection for Hunter and perhaps other members of his family.

A bipartisan chorus of critics said the pardon would damage Biden’s legacy. Damage it? A British historical site once displayed a sign threatening prosecution of anyone who would “damage the ruins.”

Also of note:

  • Deeper than you thought. C. Bradley Thompson writes on The State of the Union. His insights on the "deep state":

    By the Deep State, I mean more than what academics refer to as the “Administrative State” or the fourth branch of the federal government. We know, for instance, that the Administrative Deep State works closely with mission-aligned NGOs, the media, high-tech and social-media companies, white collar unions, etc.

    So, as we enter 2025, here’s the State of our Union a few days before we inaugurate a new President and a new administration. More precisely, here is the state of the Deep State. (The following list does not cover the full range of the Deep State, nor does it describe the size or personnel that make up each component part of the Deep State. I will leave for another day. Instead, I focus on the effects of the various component parts of the Deep State on the American people.)

    First, there is the Regulatory Deep State, which is sapping the energy and creativity out of American entrepreneurship and business.

    Second, there is the Welfare Deep State, which has created a nation of dependents and destroyed the family in many communities.

    Third, there is the Tax & Spend Deep State, which has left America $36 Trillion in debt, and which will enslave our children and grandchildren to our profligacy.

    And, reader, that's just the first three components on a list of twenty. Are you on depression meds? Maybe you don't want to click over.

  • As Mrs. Loopner would say: it's a blessing and a curse. The Truth Fairy, Abigail Shrier, has notes on Trump's 'Cabinet of the Cancelled'.

    Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen recently expressed what many felt at the reelection of Donald Trump: not triumph so much as relief. “I hope this last ten years increasingly is just going to feel like a bad dream,” he told podcast host Joe Rogan. “I can’t believe we tolerated the level of repression . . . and anger and . . . emotional incontinence and . . . cancellation campaigns.” Much of it was orchestrated or encouraged by our government.

    One could say many things about Trump’s cabinet picks. At times, they seem to embody Government by Middle Finger. But they also, undeniably, represent Government by the Canceled: an assemblage that doesn’t need to be reminded of the administrative state’s ability to coerce the American public by calling in favors from Big Tech or pulling the levers of regulation, audit, or investigation. Many have experienced such treatment firsthand.

    Of course that doesn't mean Trump isn't raising his middle finger to…

    Just a reminder of how classy our once-and-future prez is.

  • An ongoing question. Vinay Prasad is a (relatively) famous doctor, a non-quack, and deserves a listen when he answers: What is the truth about alcohol consumption[?]

    Right now, you are someone who drinks 0, 1, 2, 3 or more drinks a day. These drinks might be tequila neat, Mad dog 20-20, an Oakville, Napa cabernet, or Bud Lite. Probably, you are not consistent. You might drink 1, 2 or 4 nights a week. You might drink before meals, or after dinner. You might drink a hazy IPA after a long run, a Corona after mowing your lawn, or sip a gin and tonic on a hot summer day.

    Some of you are wondering if your habits are healthy— or should you drink fewer or perhaps more drinks? And what if you are starting from scratch: say you are a 16 year old who hasn’t yet had a drink, but thinking about it. Should you start?

    His essay is long, scientific, wise, and also funny in spots. Some of his recommendations are expensive, especially #19, but all are worth reading.

  • What they really mean by 'equity'. Noah Rothman looks at the underlying ideology: ‘Equity’ in Misery.

    Occasionally, proponents of the concept of “equity” forget that they are supposed to emphasize the benefits of the discrimination they advocate on behalf of America’s allegedly marginalized minorities. Instead of highlighting their fraught but well-intentioned program of positive discrimination, they sometimes let the mask slip and indulge the bitter avarice that drives their ideological crusade. The San Francisco Chronicle did just that in a recent story on the private, for-profit firefighting teams who helped save some Los Angeles properties from going up in flames — “raising questions about equity” in the process.

    “Critics contend that when wealthy individuals hire their own firefighters, they compete with public teams for precious resources such as water, and could potentially interfere with those teams’ efforts by, for example, blocking or crowding narrow access points,” the Chronicle reports. That is a reasonable objection, although there have been few reports of such conflicts since the fires erupted last week. Rather, what has been reported is that residents suffered unduly from a shortage of LAFD personnel, which private firefighters would help mitigate.

    It’s all a red herring anyway; a smoke screen that distracts from equity advocates’ true objection to this phenomenon, which is their revulsion toward suffering that is not visited equally — perhaps even disproportionately — on those who they believe deserve to suffer.

    From his conclusion: "The desire to see an out-group suffer is about as atavistic as reptilian instincts get." An NR gifted link, go for it.

  • Pun Salad Fact Check: Josh Barro speak truth. And he says: Meta Is Right to Fire the Fact-Checkers.

    Facebook is standing down in its efforts to use fact-checking to suppress “misinformation,” dropping its partnerships with third-party fact-checking organizations and turning to a user-driven “community notes” model similar to the one on X. This was inevitable — a top-down infrastructure to stop false ideas from spreading proved ineffective on several dimensions. Content moderation is a human project, and the fact-checkers (on whom the content moderators have relied to decide what’s true) invariably bring their preferences and biases to the fact-check process, and those biases have overwhelmingly gone leftward. Instead of helping a lot of people see the light (or whatever), this has led much of the population to view moderation efforts with appropriate hostility. Of course, it didn’t help that Facebook was also suppressing a wide variety of ideological views and unpleasant opinions, a practice it will also wind down.

    As Reed Albergotti writes for Semafor, Facebook’s approach to moderation was a “failed experiment,” and now it’s over.

    Of course, the anti-misinformation advocates are losing their shit; Casey Newton writes Meta “has all but declared open season on immigrants, transgender people and whatever other targets that Trump and his allies find useful in their fascist project.” Often, advocates of strong-handed moderation don't seem to know what hit them; ironically, that bewilderment arises from their own entrapment in a filter bubble. They see that they face political opposition. But when you operate in a bubble where all information is filtered by someone who thinks like you do, you’re unlikely to understand exactly why your opponents oppose you. In this instance, anti-misinformation advocates are steeped in years of news coverage and discussion of the issue that takes “misinformation experts” seriously as the exponents of a scientific and objectively correct method for controlling information — and treats opponents of the old moderation regime as people who are misinformed about misinformation and how it should be handled.

    That got me thinking: I bet Nina Jankowicz has something to say about this.

    And she does. And it is utterly predictable: also losing her shit.

Keep Your Moral Superiority to Yourself, Mmmmkay?

[Amazon Link]
(paid link)

I liked Don Boudreaux's Quotation of the Day yesterday. So much that I'm just gonna rip out the whole dang thing. While (of course) encouraging you to make Cafe Hayek a regular stop on your surfing itinerary.

First, the quote, from Thomas Sowell's Wealth, Poverty and Politics: An International Perspective, Amazon link at your right.

[E]ven if every American man, woman and child had equal individual incomes, that would still leave substantial inequalities in household incomes, because households that are in the top 20 percent of income recipients today contain millions more people than households in the bottom 20 percent. These larger households would remain in higher income brackets if incomes were made equal among all individuals. If we restrict income inequality to adult, there would be even more inequality between households, since households consisting of a single mother with multiple children would not have nearly as much income – either total income or income per person – as households consisting of two parents and two children, even if welfare paid the single mother as much as other adults received from working.

Don's accompanying commentary:

DBx: Yes. And it follows that if government or god somehow managed to bring about equality of incomes among households, rather than among individuals, inequality of individual income might rise if the differences between the numbers of persons in different households are sufficiently large.

Most professors, pundits, preachers, and politicians who pound their fists self-righteously in opposition to “inequality” never pause to think about inescapable realities such as these. And these. Emoting and displaying one’s imagined moral superiority are oh so much easier and enjoyable than thinking.

Well, OK. I'll try to stop doing that.

Also of note:

  • But speaking of imagined moral superiority… Jennifer Rubin announces her big news: I Have Resigned from The Washington Post, effective today.

    Corporate and billionaire owners of major media outlets have betrayed their audiences’ loyalty and sabotaged journalism’s sacred mission — defending, protecting and advancing democracy. The Washington Post’s billionaire owner and enlisted management are among the offenders. They have undercut the values central to The Post’s mission and that of all journalism: integrity, courage, and independence. I cannot justify remaining at The Post. Jeff Bezos and his fellow billionaires accommodate and enable the most acute threat to American democracy—Donald Trump—at a time when a vibrant free press is more essential than ever to our democracy’s survival and capacity to thrive.

    I therefore have resigned from The Post, effective today. In doing so, I join a throng of veteran journalists so distressed over The Post’s management they felt compelled to resign.

    The decay and compromised principles of corporate and billionaire-owned media underscore the urgent need for alternatives. Americans are eager for innovative and independent journalism that offers lively, unflinching coverage free from cant, conflicts of interest and moral equivocation.

    Well, fine. Equivocation is bad when you're right about everything, all the time.

    Jen's announcement is for her new substack, The Contrarian. I've put it on my Inoreader subscription list, just to witness all the "innovative and independent journalism that offers lively, unflinching coverage free from cant, conflicts of interest and moral equivocation." For as long as I can stand it.

  • And our first example‥ doesn't seem to be Contrarian at all. Olivia Julianna ("Texas Democratic Strategist and Gen Z firebrand") tells of her journey From the Trailer House to the White House. It helps if you imagine it with background music, some sort of trumpet-heavy fanfare…

    My story is an American story.

    One of the young girl who’s great grandparents came to America from Mexico hoping to give her a better life.

    One of the students who dreamed of something more.

    One of the Americans whose life was changed because of Joe Biden's Presidency.

    I would tell this to the President, tears in my eyes, standing in the middle of the Oval Office. He held my hand and told me that is exactly why Democrats do what they do– to help people. Right before this, President Biden briefly spoke to a small group of my peers in the Roosevelt Room. Behind him as he spoke was a portrait of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The image of them side by side will be etched into my memory forever.

    Yes, Olivia is a partisan Democratic hack. She proclaims, presumably with a straight face: "I firmly believe that in time, this administration will be regarded as one of the greatest in American history."

    Her story is very much "Life of Julia"-esque. And she is "grateful to the boy from Scranton and the girl from Oakland who didn’t forget about those who had too little."

    Uh huh. I can't help but notice that that "boy from Scranton and the girl from Oakland" get her fulsome thanks, but not the taxpayers that actually footed the bill.

  • Can't hear no buzzers and bells. Kevin D. Williamson writes on Foreign Distractions.

    I would be very, very surprised if Donald Trump could point to Greenland or Panama on an unlabeled map, and I’d bet $10,000 he could not lay a finger on Denmark without advice and assistance. But Trump has decided that it is of paramount importance to the United States to wrest control of the Panama Canal away from Panama and to wrest control of Greenland, a territory within the Kingdom of Denmark, from Denmark.

    Why Greenland?

    Greenland is strategically located between the United States and Russia. So, there’s that. Of course, there are a lot of places strategically located between the United States and Russia: Iceland, Norway, Sweden … the United Kingdom, Germany, Spain … Ukraine. Most, but not all, of those countries have something in common with Greenland: There is already a U.S. military base there or formal U.S. access to local military installations. In fact, there are about 31 countries located somewhere roughly between the United States and Russia. Harry S. Truman and Dean Acheson had the good sense to organize a dozen or so of those countries with an interest in the North Atlantic into a treaty organization, which they imaginatively named the North Atlantic Treaty Organization—NATO, the bulwark of the free world against Russia and aligned enemies, which Donald Trump has spent pretty much his entire political career micturating on from a great height. We don’t have to twist any Danish arms into getting them to help us against threats from Moscow—they’ve been doing their part since 1949.

    This is why KDW gets the big bucks: he types "micturating" instead of "peeing".

  • A burning question liberals are asking themselves. Asked by Jeff Maurer: Why Doesn't Hitler McFuckface Like Us Anymore?

    Mark Zuckerberg has announced big changes at Meta. The content moderation policies favored by many on the left are out, and the company is rolling back DEI and cozying up to Trump. Zuckerberg also recently went on Joe Rogan’s podcast to criticize the Biden administration and decry the lack of “masculine energy” in the corporate world.

    Like many liberals, I’m shocked by this pivot. What happened to the Mark Zuckerberg who, after the 2016 election, kowtowed to progressive lawmakers? Where is the guy who backed left-wing causes and clashed with conservatives? What’s causing this? Is it something in his personal life? Craven pandering to the new administration? Or is there any chance that it has something to do with more than a decade of people on the left calling him a corrupt plutocrat who might be the biggest pile of shit in the cosmos?

    It’s hard to trace the roots of Zuckerberg’s falling out with the left. Maybe it started in 2011, when the guy from The West Wing wrote a big, award-winning movie about how Zuckerberg is a total asshole. That doesn’t happen to most people — it’s really just Zuckerberg and former Oakland A’s manager Art Howe. After the 2016 election, some on the left blamed Facebook for Clinton’s loss, and Cambridge Analytica ended up on the Rachel Maddow show more than Rachel Maddow. In 2020, progressives demanded that Biden take down “new oligarchs” like Zuckerberg, which led to Lina Kahn hunting Zuckerberg with the tenacity of Javier Bardem’s character hunting Josh Brolin in No Country for Old Men.

    Read the whole thing of course. There are guest appearances by Dickhead McFarthuffer and Pedo von Shiteater.

  • Maybe if Zuck wasn't a Harvard dropout… OK, but he's been enmeshed in free speech issues for years. You would think he'd be able to avoid being schooled by Emma Camp: Yes, Mark Zuckerberg, you can shout 'fire' in a crowded theater.

    Mark Zuckerberg has joined a dubious list of prominent Americans—including judges, members of Congress, and even a vice presidential nominee—who believe that you can't yell "fire" in a crowded theater. In an interview with Joe Rogan last week, the Meta CEO attempted to justify the company's pandemic-era censorship policies by arguing that "even people who are like the most ardent First Amendment defenders" know that there is a limit to free speech.

    "At the beginning, [COVID-19 was] a legitimate public health crisis," Zuckerberg told Rogan. "The Supreme Court has this clear precedent: It's like, all right, you can't yell 'fire' in a crowded theater. There are times when if there's an emergency, your ability to speak can temporarily be curtailed in order to get an emergency under control. I was sympathetic to that at the beginning of COVID."

    The thing is, Zuckerberg is simply wrong when it comes to how the First Amendment works.

    So let's hope, on his way to remaking Facebook more free speech-friendly, that Zuck will read Emma.

Recently on the book blog:

Poodle Springs

(paid link)

This was the Raymond Chandler estate's first effort at making some money off an author who'd been dead for 30 years. It is (however) an honest co-authorship: Chandler wrote the first four chapters, while Robert B. Parker ably supplied the final 37. I try to ignore the inherent profit-driven ghoulishness, and instead concentrate on the pleasures of finding out what Philip Marlowe is up to.

What he's up to, at first, is settling into marriage with Linda Marlowe, née Loring, out in the tony desert town of Poodle Springs. Linda's daddy is rich, and so is she. Marlowe, on the other hand, is relatively poor, and wants to continue making his honest living doing what he knows: being a private detective, going down those famed mean streets, assuming he can find any of those in Poodle Springs. This is a continuing source of friction in their marriage. Like throughout the book, a continuing bone of contention that seems unresolvable.

Soon enough, Marlowe gets a client: Manny Lipshultz, who operates a gambling den outside the city limits. He has accepted an IOU from a shady photographer, Les Valentine, in the amount of $100,000. But now Valentine has vanished, and Lipshultz is worried that the casino's (anonymous) owner will find out and be irate.

From there on out, the plot gets complicated, and eventually homicidal.

I bought and read this in hardcover when it came out in 1989, being a fan of both Chandler and Parker. I think I liked it better on the re-read, about 35 years later. Parker got Marlowe pretty much right, although there are definite notes of Spenser in the wisecracks. (It may be heresy to say this, but: Parker's Spenser was always funnier than Chandler's Marlowe.)

I notice that HBO made a movie based on the book, with James Caan playing Marlowe. I didn't know that. I'll see if it's streamable!

“The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven..”

Today's headline is a famous quote from Milton's Paradise Lost; today's eye candy is (I think) a PL-inspired etching; our first item is from Allysia Finley at the WSJ, and she describes How the Left Turned California Into a Paradise Lost.

After the November election, California Gov. Gavin Newsom announced his plans to “Trump-proof” the Golden State. How about fire-proofing? Los Angeles’s horrific fires are exposing the costs of its progressive follies, which even wealthy liberals in their Palisades palaces can’t escape.

Start with its environmental obsessions. The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power in 2019 sought to widen a fire-access road and replace old wooden utility poles in the Topanga Canyon abutting the Palisades with steel ones to make power lines fire- and wind-resistant. In the process, crews removed an estimated 182 Braunton’s milkvetch plants, an endangered species.

The utility halted the project as state officials investigated the plant destruction. More than a year later, the California Coastal Commission issued a cease-and-desist order, fined the utility $2 million, and required “mitigation” for the project’s impact on the species. This involved replacing “nonnative” vegetation with plants native to the state. You have to chuckle at the contradiction: California’s progressives want to expel foreign flora and fauna but provide a sanctuary for illegal immigrants.

Allysia is not kidding about that "Trump-proof" effort. The Hill reports that, after apparently having satisfied themselves that all other "burning" priorities have been adequately funded, California Democrats approve $50M budget to help Newsom ‘Trump-proof’ the state.

At Reason, J.D. Tuccille also (1) confirms my priors; and (2) satisfies my (admittedly deplorable) urge to rubberneck at scenes of tragedy and horror: California’s fire catastrophe is largely a result of bad government policies.

In the weeks, months, and years to come, there will be plenty of blame to share for the lapses that let the California wildfires of 2025 get so out of hand, costing lives and tens of billions of dollars. The fact that I wrote "of 2025" to distinguish these fires from other outbreaks should make it clear that these fires are anything but unprecedented, meaning that they should have been anticipated and their causes addressed. That they weren't points to a massive failure in policy.

As I write on Sunday, January 12, Los Angeles Fire Department Chief Kristin Crowley is pointing fingers at Mayor Karen Bass for stripping the department of key resources and funding, California Gov. Gavin Newsom vows to find out the reason fire hydrants went dry during efforts to battle the devastating blazes, and everybody wants to know why a major reservoir in Pacific Palisades was empty and offline for a year. When faced with hard questions, state and local officials including Bass and Newsom are practicing more impressive dodging and weaving than we saw during the Mike Tyson–Jake Paul fight.

But that dodging and weaving can't erase the serious missteps that led to this very predictable moment.

But one more thing about Paradise Lost: a lot of results from the Getty Image search are of Paradise, California. You may remember (as I didn't): that town was a victim of the Camp Fire, which happened in November 2018, killed 85 people, destroyed over 18,000 structures (mostly houses), part of $16.65 billion (2018 USD) in damages.

But by all means, California Democrats: Trump-proof your state.

Also of note:

  • A lone voice of sanity. Dominic Pino begs: Don't Make the Tax Code More Complicated, Republicans.

    One of the biggest wins in the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA), the Republican tax reform law passed at the end of 2017, was the doubling of the standard deduction. That reduced the number of taxpayers for whom it was advantageous to itemize deductions. In 2017, before the TCJA, 46.8 million taxpayers itemized; the next year, only 17.5 million did so. The share of taxpayers who itemize, which was stuck around 30 percent for decades, immediately dropped post-TCJA to around 10 percent, where it has stayed in the years since.

    That means about 20 percent of taxpayers who used to itemize no longer have to waste their time doing so. That’s good news for them, but it’s also good news for future tax reforms. When fewer taxpayers take advantage of carve-outs in the tax code, the carve-outs become easier to repeal entirely. Conservatives should be striving for a flatter income tax with a broader base and lower rates that is easy to pay, and the TCJA was a step in the right direction to getting there.

    Aside from doubling the standard deduction, the TCJA also reduced the cap on the mortgage interest deduction from a principal of $1 million to $750,000 and capped the state and local tax (SALT) deduction at $10,000. Now, with these provisions in need of renewal by the end of 2025, some Republicans, including Donald Trump, have said they want to raise or eliminate the SALT deduction cap.

    It falls to Audrey Fahlberg to report the sad news on that front: New York Republicans Are Optimistic about Lifting the SALT Deduction Cap, after Mar-a-Lago Meeting with Trump.

    Sigh. "New York Republicans". Who knew there were any still out there?

    A group of House Republicans from New York, California, and New Jersey departed a meeting with Donald Trump this weekend feeling optimistic that the president-elect will keep his campaign pledge to lift the state and local tax (SALT) deduction cap — a controversial tax write-off that allows individual and married joint filers in high-tax states to deduct $10,000 from their state and local taxes from their federal income taxes.

    “The president didn’t back away from the commitment that he made on the campaign trail to fix SALT,” Representative Nick LaLota (R., N.Y.) told National Review on Saturday, a few hours after meeting privately with Trump in Mar-a-Lago alongside 15 other House Republicans and two of the president-elect’s political advisers.

    Talk about feeding the caricature of the GOP doing favors for fat-cat millionaires in their McMansions!

  • But at least the incoming FCC chief will be a warrior for free speach, right? Sadly, no. Joe Lancaster reports: The Incoming FCC Chief Is No 'Warrior for Free Speech'

    President-elect Donald Trump is set to take office next week, and his second-term agenda is taking shape as he fills out his administration. One of the first hires announced after the November election was the elevation of Brendan Carr, who sits on the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), to be the agency's new head.

    Trump dubbed Carr "a warrior for free speech," and in response, Carr pledged to "dismantle the censorship cartel and restore free speech rights for everyday Americans." But Carr appears all too willing to wield the federal censorship apparatus on Trump's behalf.

    Over the weekend, Charles Gasparino reported in the New York Post that Carr is unlikely to quickly approve a proposed merger between Paramount Global—the media conglomerate whose assets include the Paramount Pictures film studio as well as the broadcast network CBS and its CBS News division—and Skydance Media, which produced recent hit films like Top Gun: Maverick and entries in the Mission: Impossible series.

    Apparently, the bee in Carr's bonnet (perhaps placed there by his soon-to-be boss) is CBS's creative editing of a 60 Minutes interview, replacing Kamala's word-salad answer to a question with something more coherent and responsive.

    Click through for Joe's use of a portmanteau with which I was unfamiliar: "Sanewashing". Usually an epithet deployed against softball coverage of Republicans, but Joe notes there's room for bothsidesism.

  • Once a grifter… NHJournal reports on local news from our state's capital city: Concord City Councilors Defend 'Cash Cow' DEI Consultant, Approve $40k Contract.

    Complaining about news coverage from the “anti-progressive New Hampshire Journal,” the Concord City Council approved a $40,000 contract for a DEI consultant who previously hosted a “get rich from consulting” event.

    NHJournal first reported on James Bird Guess, now president and CEO of Racial Equity Group, and his background, pitching his “From Broke to Millionaire Consultant” web page on Monday morning.

    NHJournal's previous story about James Bird Guess is here. And you definitely want to check out JBG's website plugging his 2020 Cash Cow Consultant Conference. For some reason, it's still alive. You don't want to miss the pic of him lighting a large cigar while sitting on the hood of his new Bentley.

The Fourth Verse to "Imagine"

Noah Smith encourages us to Learn smart lessons from the L.A. fires, not stupid lessons. And his Smart Lesson Number One is:

Insurance companies are not an infinite pot of money that can make everyone whole.

Noah's article is substack-paywalled but much of his insurance company tutorial shows up.

At the NR Corner, Dominic Pino describes How Price Controls Have Made California Wildfire Recovery Harder.

Insurance price is supposed to be correlated with risk. Higher risk, higher price. Living in an area prone to wildfires is a risk for property insurance. Rather than allowing market prices to take account of that risk, California has heavily regulated the insurance industry for decades.

Proposition 103 is responsible for a lot of California’s insurance regulatory regime. Lars Powell, R. J. Lehmann, and Ian Adams wrote a paper about Prop 103 for the International Center for Law and Economics (ICLE) in 2023. They trace the proposition’s origins to a 1979 California supreme court case that allowed third parties to bring legal action against insurance companies. That decision was a bonanza for trial lawyers, and the proliferation of lawsuits against California insurance companies forced them to raise rates significantly in the 1980s.

The rate hikes were unpopular and voters approved Prop 103 in 1988 by a 51–49 margin. Prop 103 forced an immediate 20 percent rate cut for car and property insurance sold in California, gave the state government power to approve or deny future rate increases, and gave public-interest groups the right to intervene when insurers request rate increases. The regulatory power would be held by the state insurance commissioner, which Prop 103 turned into an elected office.

Perhaps the craziest part of Prop 103 is that it included a provision that makes it extremely hard to amend. Any change to Prop 103 must be approved by a two-thirds majority in both houses of the California Legislature and must “further its purposes,” which is subject to judicial review. “Much has changed in the world, and in California’s insurance industry, since the passage of Prop 103, but the lion’s share of the law remains as it was in 1988,” the ICLE paper says.

I just hope Harry Bosch and Elvis Cole are OK.

Also of note:

  • Yes, 1A even protects the speech of people you wish would just crawl back under their rocks. Jonathan Turley, lawprof at George Washington University, has some local news: New Hampshire Supreme Court Rejects Hate Speech Enforcement.

    The New Hampshire Supreme Court just handed down a victory for free speech in Attorney General v. Hood. As is often the case, defending free speech means supporting viewpoints that most of us find grotesque and hateful. However, the justices rejected the position of the Portsmouth Police Department that it could force the removal of a racist banner from an overpass. Such signs and flags are commonly allowed, but the police and prosecutors insisted that racist messages “interfered with the rights” of other citizens.The controversy began on July 30, 2022, when a group of roughly ten people with NSC-131, a “pro-white, street-oriented fraternity dedicated to raising authentic resistance to the enemies of [its] people in the New England area,” hung banners from the overpass, including one reading “KEEP NEW ENGLAND WHITE.”

    The ADL has more information on NSC-131, sample:

    The Nationalist Social Club (NSC) or 131 Crew (131 is alphanumeric code for ACA, Anti-Communist Action and Anti-Capitalist Action) is a neo-Nazi group with small, autonomous regional chapters around the country. They also claim chapters in France, Hungary and Germany.

    NSC-131 members consider themselves soldiers fighting a war against a hostile, Jewish-controlled system that is deliberately plotting the extinction of the white race. Their goal is to form an underground network of white men who are willing to fight against their perceived enemies through localized direct actions.

    Anti-Communist and Anti-Capitalist? Geez, they really are Nazis.

  • As if we needed another one. Becket Adams notices: USA Today Conducts a Master Class in Subservience.

    Last week, USA Today managed somehow to embarrass itself even more with its “exit interview” of President Joe Biden, a floundering, pointless exercise in awestruck subservience. From lobbing slow-motion, underhanded softballs of no public interest to failing to seek clarification for unintelligible tirades to ignoring or allowing falsehoods and blatant political spin, the interview serves less as a public service and more as a reminder of why USA Today no longer holds the distinction of being the most circulated paper in the United States.

    […]

    Consider, for example, Biden’s sudden pardon of his ne’er-do-well son, Hunter. The president promised he wouldn’t do it. Then he did it, making up weak excuses along the way for this obviously self-serving act and calling down on himself well-deserved, bipartisan scorn.

    Yet in her interview with Biden, Susan Page, USA Today’s Washington bureau chief, set the stage thus: “Every parent can understand why you would want to protect your son. Do you have any concerns that your pardon of Hunter sets a precedent for future presidents? One that might be open to abuse?”

    Notice how she ignores the ethics surrounding the president pardoning his son’s felony convictions. Notice how she avoids acknowledging that the pardon represents a bald-faced reversal for Biden. Observe how she frames the issue as a loving parent swooping in to rescue his wayward child. Grab the tissues. Notice Page doesn’t even take the easy palace-intrigue route, passing on the chance to ask the president to respond to the Democrats’ criticism of his decision. Most importantly, notice how Page’s question focuses on hypothetical abuses rather than the actual abuse staring her right in the face.

    You can read a transcript of the tongue-bath interview here.

    Only one week left to go before this babbling geezer is out the door! Unfortunately, Susan Page will remain.

"And If Symptoms Persist, Increase Your Dosage."

On a related note, Jonah Goldberg writes his G-File on Urban Dismay. On his way to make a point about that:

“The government” and “the state” are often used interchangeably by political scientists, journalists, lawyers, and politicians. And that’s often fine. But philosophically, I think there’s a real difference. Or at least the two words are good stand-ins for two very different things.

For our purposes, government is the legal institution that enforces the laws, provides for the common defense and public welfare and collects taxes for those ends. It doesn’t necessarily collect the garbage and run the sewers, but it’s the thing that makes sure those things happen.

The state is a more mystical concept. It’s like the guiding hand of society. All of those European eggheads—Hegel, Comte, Marx et al—saw it as the replacement for God, the means of shaping and directing society toward some destination. It’s the “vision” thing. What was it Hegel said? “Are you going to eat your fat?” No, I think that was Radar in M*A*S*H. But he did say the “state is the march of God on Earth.” 

Various statist experts, politicians, activists, intellectuals believed they had a gnostic access to this vision and took it upon themselves to use the powers of the state to transform the people, collectively or individually, into an aesthetic or spiritual conception of what society should look like. […]

This kind of statism is a huge problem in national politics, and I reserve the right to continue to criticize it, endlessly, in both its right-wing and left-wing forms (because nationalistic statism and socialistic statism are both forms of statism). But at least it’s understandable at the national level. The psychology makes more sense to me. It’s more human to believe that the leaders of the whole country should have a vision of what the whole country should be like. I disagree with that worldview, passionately. But I get it.

I get it too. So maybe, given the useful distinction between "government" and "the state", Mr. Ramirez shoulda written "Statism" on Murthy's pill bottle instead.

Or we could just keep blurring the distinction, which I've been doing here for about twenty years. Mea Culpa, Jonah.

To be relentlessly topical, the devastating Los Angeles area fires reminded me of Andrew Koppelman's facile book Burning Down the House: How Libertarian Philosophy Was Corrupted by Delusion and Greed; his leading example of "delusion and greed" was a 2010 Tennessee episode where a fire department refused to fight a house fire because the owners had not paid their subscription fee.

Now: This was hardly happening in Libertopia: the fire department was city-owned, following the rules laid down by the city government's democratic processes.

But as we've seen in LA, an even more government-besotted area, the local fully-socialized fire departments do an obviously lousy job of fire prevention and suppression. So much so that people who can afford it are hiring private firefighters to protect their homes.

Which, predictably, caused widespread resentment of "the rich", not the inept response of government.

Also of note:

  • Good question. Answer: meh. Deirdre McCloskey wonders What to Call Liberalism? She'd like a term that doesn't needlessly offend her friends, so…

    So what to call the liberalism of Adam Smith and Mary Wollstonecraft and early J. S, Mill, and then people like Milton Friedman? What is often called “classical” liberalism, or in the U.S. “libertarianism,” both have their own problems. “Classical” makes liberalism sound out of date, which is incorrect. And “libertarianism” has never become clear in the minds of most Americans, even though its policies are in fact what most Americans want. My grandmother, born in the 1890s, had a good classical-libertarian principle: “Do what you want, but don’t scare the horses.” Yet some self-labeled libertarians in the U.S. these days are so coercively against any socialism that they’ve tilted fascist, and support Trump. Amazing. They scare the horses, and certainly me.

    What’s my new label? “Sufficient” liberalism. I mean an equality of permission, not equality of income or opportunity—both of which involve coercion, and anyway are unattainable even roughly. But we can start giving people permission, tomorrow, by taking away the millions of regulations that clot the U.S. and the Brazilian economy. A woman can become an airline pilot, a Black can get a job in South Africa, poor people are allowed to live where they can pay the rent, without the state intervening, as it has, to segregate poor people in favelas.

    No masters, no coercions. It suffices.

    I don't think it's gonna catch on, Deirdre, but my respect for trying.

  • It's not a floor wax either. Jacob Sullum looks at a insidious meme: 'The Constitution Is Not a Suicide Pact'. And we can blame SCOTUS Justice Robert H. Jackson, who started it of in his dissenting opinion in Terminiello v. Chicago:

    "This Court has gone far toward accepting the doctrine that civil liberty means the removal of all restraints from these crowds and that all local attempts to maintain order are impairments of the liberty of the citizen," Jackson complained. "The choice is not between order and liberty. It is between liberty with order and anarchy without either. There is danger that, if the Court does not temper its doctrinaire logic with a little practical wisdom, it will convert the constitutional Bill of Rights into a suicide pact."

    In the decades since, that formulation has taken on a life of its own, cited as a justification for expanding government power and restricting individual freedom in situations far afield from the original case. The continuing influence of the "suicide pact" meme in legal and political debates is remarkable for two reasons. First, Jackson was expressing a view that the Supreme Court has emphatically and repeatedly rejected. Second, his concluding admonition was a rhetorical flourish, not a logical argument. Confusing the two invites shortcuts that sacrifice liberty on the altar of order.

    Nevertheless, it wormed its way into the public discourse as if it were a winning argument. Jacob tells the interesting story.

  • At least the pay is decent. George Will has advice for some of the folks under the dome: Republicans, enjoy ineffectual control of Congress while you have it.

    How are you coping with the stress of life during today’s 43 “emergencies”? That’s how many of the 79 declared by executive orders or proclamations since 1979 are still extant. Several statutes empower the president to declare emergencies, thereby acquiring (by the count of the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University’s law school) more than 130 standby statutory powers. The Cato Institute’s Gene Healy, in 2024 Senate testimony, said a 1934 law empowers the president to seize or close “any facility or station for wire communication” once he proclaims a threat of war. This, Healy said, is “a potential internet ‘kill switch.’”

    The incoming president will be able, on a whim, to unilaterally discombobulate international commerce — and the domestic economy — with tariffs. Congress has lost interest in exercising its constitutionally enumerated power “to regulate commerce with foreign nations.”

    In the meantime, my CongressCritter, Chris Pappas, is being effectual by…

    Taking the brave Post Office-renaming stands, Chris. That's why you get the big bucks.

Recently on the book blog:

In Too Deep

(paid link)

The latest Reacher novel from the Childs. (Children?) And, again, they have succeeded in separating me from $14.99 (Kindle version).

The beginning is pretty gripping: Reacher regains consciousness to find that he's been cuffed to a metal table, hands and feet. Worse, one arm is broken, and he's slightly concussed. Even worse, he has no memory of how he got into this predicament.

Since he's Reacher, he quickly outwits one of his captors and frees himself. But only to be plunged into a devious criminal conspiracy. It turns out he had accepted a car ride from one of the conspirators, only to wind up in a nasty accident on twisty Ozark road, which killed the driver. So now what? Well, of course: pretend to be a willing accomplice in the criminal activities, and…

I admit: I got about halfway through the book and said: Oh oh, I have no idea what's going on here. It may be my age. But, gee, the plot is as twisty as that Ozark road, and new characters keep showing up, all the characters are liars, and… well, I started over from page one, and finally made it through. And it eventually made sense, although I didn't think about it too hard. I even managed to figure out one of the Big Plot Twists before Reacher does. (Or at least, I figured it out before Reacher mentioned it.)

Bottom line: another enjoyable Reacher outing. But you might want to take notes along the way Pay special attention to the activities at the crash scene.

Suggested Attachment to LFOD

"Let's Hope It Doesn't Come To That"

[Amazon Link]
(paid link)

LFOD made it to the WSJ's "Best of the Web" yesterday: Report: Some Massachusetts Residents Haven’t Moved to New Hampshire Yet.

Live Free or Die” is New Hampshire’s inspiring motto and it has long been an appealing invitation to the overregulated and overtaxed residents of Massachusetts. New Hampshire has lately become even more inviting and now the state’s brand-new governor could be making the most compelling case yet for relocation.

Early this week a Journal editorial noted that New Hampshire, which has long avoided taxing wage income, has recently eliminated taxes on interest and dividends, too. On Thursday the Granite State inaugurated new Gov. Kelly Ayotte, and she’s expressing a determination to hold the line on spending as well. Here’s the heart of Ms. Ayotte’s very first executive order:

The Commission on Government Efficiency (“COGE”) be established to develop proposals to streamline government, cut inefficient spending, and find the most efficient ways to serve the people of New Hampshire, especially the most vulnerable citizens.

Fans of limited government will love the DOGE vibes. Truth be told, New Hampshire could teach Washington a lot about limited and efficient government. So it’s exciting to see the new governor is eager to give state taxpayers even more for their money. If Ms. Ayotte, a former U.S. senator and state attorney general, is diligent in rejecting spending proposals, the state should continue to prosper. No surprise, New Hampshire has been growing faster and enjoys a much lower unemployment rate than Massachusetts.

BotW's author, James Freeman, provides the bottom line: "Don’t be surprised if more Massachusetts residents embrace legal migration by scooting over the border into New Hampshire."

Also of note:

  • Among its other flaws… In his continuing series about his least favorite bureau, Kevin D. Williamson point out: The ATF Is an Arbitrary Regulator.

    Consider the saga of the forearm brace, a footlong bit of plastic that might or might not have made you a federal felon, depending on how the ATF is feeling on any given Wednesday morning. Set aside questions about guns and violent crime and think about this as an issue of administrative license being used as a substitute for law made by duly elected lawmakers.

    The first thing you need to know about forearm braces is that they are … nonsense. I know I am going to hear from some disabled veteran writing to tell me that forearm braces made it possible for him to shoot again after suffering some terrible injury, and I am sure that is true. But forearm braces really were never about forearm braces. They were about short-barreled rifles (SBRs).

    As described earlier in the series, putting a shoulder stock on a handgun with a barrel less than 16 inches long—notice the immediate descent into regulatory minutiae—makes it a short-barreled rifle under the National Firearms Act, and making or having or selling one without a special federal permission slip in the form of an ATF-issued tax stamp is a felonious no-no. If you go into a gun shop and look at these “handguns”—and they say “handgun” right there on the side, to prevent any federally felonious misunderstanding—the thing you’ll notice is that a lot of them don’t look like what you’re thinking of when you think of a handgun. They look like AR-15s or other rifles with shoulder stocks removed and short barrels. Because that is what they are. For example, conventional handguns generally have a magazine well within the grip, but many of these “handguns” have magazines in front of the trigger, as in the familiar AR-pattern rifle and most other semiautomatic rifles as well as many bolt-action rifles. The stock is gone, and you can’t put a new one on without a tax stamp. But you can—or could—put a forearm brace on. And if that forearm brace happened to be roughly in the shape of a folding rifle stock, and if it happened to be just the right size and shape to use as a rifle stock—in that case, then you’ve got your SBR in effect without having to go through the rigamarole with the pile of paperwork and the tax stamp and the fingerprinting and becoming a firearms manufacturer.

    And, in case you're wondering if the regulation could get worse: it sure did. The phrase "arbitrary and capricious" appears six times in KDW's short article.

  • RIP, though. Corbin K. Barthold writes an obit at City Journal: Net Neutrality May Finally Be Dead—Good Riddance.

    Not long ago, liberals had a nervous breakdown over the decline (or so they imagined) of the Internet. Democrats predicted that we were about to “get the internet one word at a time.” A senator warned that we were on “a road to digital serfdom.” “The internet is dying,” declared the New York Times. There were street protests and death threats. The fear was that, unless the Federal Communications Commission imposed so-called net neutrality—a euphemism, in practice, for heavy-handed common-carrier regulation—we would soon have to pay to access individual websites.

    Last week, a federal appellate court likely put to rest the argument over FCC-imposed common-carrier rules. It was a quiet death: protesters didn’t mark the occasion, politicians have gone silent, and the media have moved on—for the simple reason that their cause was spurious, both in law and in practice.

    However…

  • Not everyone's happy about its demise. For example, Karl Bode at TechDirt: U.S. Media Once Again Fails To Cover The Corrupt Net Neutrality Ruling With Any Clarity.

    Last week a corrupt court system bought and paid for by corporations effectively made it illegal for the federal government to protect broadband consumers from widely despised regional telecom monopolies.

    That, as we wrote at the time, is at the heart of the death of the several decade net neutrality fight.

    But if you read most U.S. press coverage of the ruling, you’d be hard pressed to walk away with that knowledge. Most of the nap-inducing articles can’t even be bothered to mention that U.S. broadband is a failed market dominated by hugely unpopular regional monopolies, coddled and protected by significant state and federal corruption (kind of an important part of the story).

    The word "corrupt" appears in the body of Karl's article four times; "corruption" appears not once, not twice, but thrice.

    I'm pretty sure the court ruling didn't "effectively ma[k]e it illegal for the federal government to protect broadband consumers". I mean, Congress could pass a law for that.

    Oh, but Karl says they're "corrupt" too. Never mind! The only non-"corrupt" folks in D.C. are the FCC commissioners, and then only when the Democrats have a majority.

Also, Beware of Beer Goggles

[Amazon Link]
(paid link)

Jacob Sullum has an explanation: Why we are still arguing about the health effects of moderate drinking.

Even moderate drinking could give you cancer, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy warned last week. But according to a congressionally commissioned report published last month, moderate drinking is associated with reduced overall mortality.

Although those findings are not as contradictory as they might seem, the dueling glosses reflect the complexities and ambiguities of epidemiology. The evidence on this subject is vast but open to interpretation, leaving ample room for spin, especially when it comes to this year's politically fraught revision of the federal government's dietary advice.

And (as Jacob notes) there's that usual problem with self-reported alcohol consumption: people (perhaps especially Canadians) lie about it.

At National Review, Christian Schneider unleashes his inner libertarian. Alcohol Warning Labels Are Nanny Statism at Its Worst. And also a hefty dose of "This is America, Dammit!" patriotism:

Starting a country can leave one parched, so it’s no surprise that as the drafting of the new U.S. Constitution drew to its close, our Founding Fathers headed down to City Tavern in Philadelphia to get plastered.

There was plenty to celebrate on September 14, 1787: George Washington’s greatness, it was a Friday, and they were finally set free from the sweaty room in which they had labored over the document. And celebrate they did, joined by the Light Horse of Philadelphia, a volunteer cavalry corps. Over 45 gallons of spirits, wine, and beer were served to 55 men in attendance.

And I can't resist another excerpt:

Of course, bottles of alcohol already have government-mandated labels that warn about things like drinking while pregnant and drinking while operating heavy machinery. Most importantly, they warn that drinking alcohol “may cause health problems” — so the fact drinking may be harmful for you is already on the label.

Suppose the government never mandated any labels. Is there anyone in America who needs lawmakers to tell them excessive drinking is bad for them? Has anyone ever woken up pantsless and covered in cold pizza after a heavy night of boozing and thought, “You know, things are really going great for me right now”?

A "gifted" link from me to you. Click away.

Also of note:

  • Another reason to wish its demise. Kevin D. Williamson continues his series on the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives Too: The ATF Is a Tax Collector.

    For about 200 years, the United States of America got along without the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. And, for much of that history, most Americans lived under a firearms-regulation regime that was relaxed or, in many places, effectively nonexistent. It is worth considering that there is a parallel between the Second Amendment and the First Amendment, with early firearms regulations often taking the same form as permissible restrictions on speech and other communication: time, place, and manner regulations. Americans had generally unrestricted rights to acquire firearms but might have been prohibited from carrying them in certain urban areas or restricted places (such as saloons) or while drunk, which was a real consideration in the hard-drinking 19th century.

    The progenitors of the ATF were all fundamentally tax collectors and assistants to tax collectors. The earliest bureaucratic ancestor of the modern ATF was the Revenue Laboratory established within the Treasury by Congress in 1886, whose role was to examine alcoholic products (and suspected alcoholic products) to ensure that all of the necessary duties had been paid and that the products were otherwise in compliance with federal regulations. 

    So it's a big source of government revenues, right? Well…

    Of course, the revenue isn’t the point—ATF collects only about $100 million a year in revenue from taxes authorized by the National Firearms Act but has a budget of $1.4 billion. The point is creating regulatory burdens to keep Americans from doing things certain people in the government don’t want Americans to do without explicitly prohibiting those things, i.e. treating the power to tax as a backdoor to the power to regulate where that regulation might not otherwise pass constitutional muster.

    That's at the Dispatch, which has no gifting links. Tsk!

  • George: That’s specious reasoning, Joe. Joe: Thank you, George. George Will can spot speciousity from a mile away, especially when Biden’s ‘security’ concern about TikTok and U.S. Steel is doubly specious.

    When, on Friday, the Supreme Court hears the Biden administration defend the law that bans TikTok, the justices should remember what the administration said the previous Friday: “National security” justifies the president’s blocking the sale of U.S. Steel to Nippon Steel of Japan. Formulaic uses of that phrase give a patina of respectability to government’s abuses — concentration camps in the past, control of the internet in the future.

    Oscar Wilde was said to have remarked that anyone who could read Charles Dickens on the death of Little Nell (in “The Old Curiosity Shop”) without laughing “must have a heart of stone.” Anyone who can read with a straight face Joe Biden on his “solemn responsibility” to protect U.S. “security” from a privately held corporation, almost a quarter owned by non-Japanese, must be incapable of laughter.

    "Of course, Trump will be better, right?" "No, sorry. Probably worse."

  • GOVERNMENT WARNING: They lie a lot. The other Christian, Britschgi, explains Why building a lot of 'affordable' housing is bad news for affordability.

    On New Year's Eve, the Boston city government issued a press release touting the good work of its newly reorganized Planning Department at approving new development. The city reports that 3,575 net residential units were approved in 2024, of which a little over a third were "income-restricted."

    That top-line number is not necessarily anything to brag about. Despite having some of the highest home prices and rents in the country, Boston is permitting fewer homes than less-expensive peer cities with equivalent populations.

    […]

    Even more concerning than Boston not permitting a lot of new homes is how many of the homes it is permitting are "income-restricted."

    Those are units (often also just called "affordable," "below-market," or "deed-restricted" units) that are reserved for lower-income residents and where rents are capped at steeply discounted below-market rates. Despite the city's celebratory touting of that figure, such a high share of new housing being income-restricted housing is very bad news.

    It is unsurprising that governments use pleasant-sounding, but dishonest labels to describe policies that will have the opposite effect. (Also see: the "Inflation Reduction Act")

  • How well do you know your US history? Robert Graboyes looks at the latest craze: Manifest Destiny 2025.

    Donald Trump has launched the reboot of Manifest Destiny—the 19th-century notion that an expanded United States was the natural order of things. Like his predecessors, he wishes to change the map of North America. The components of his vision range from silly to sublime.

    A hundred and fifty years ago, the goal of Manifest Destiny was to push the nation’s boundaries and the trappings of modernity west to the Pacific. As noted in Wikipedia, the idea was “rooted in American exceptionalism and Romantic nationalism” and believed to be “both obvious (‘manifest’) and certain (‘destiny’).” Some harbored the broader ambition of annexing the entire Western Hemisphere. As my Inauguration Day post this month will discuss, that hemispheric vision still lingered at William McKinley’s 1901 Inauguration, along with some curious and amusing parallels with 2025.

    Click over for Robert's takes on "silly to sublime" components. And his slight modification to:

Recently on the book blog:


Last Modified 2025-01-11 6:13 AM EST

Woodrow Wilson

The Light Withdrawn

(paid link)

The author of this Woodrow Wilson biography, Christopher Cox, went literary with his subtitle; it's from the John Greenleaf Whittier poem "Ichabod", which (it says here) was intended as an attack on Daniel Webster, and his advocacy of the Fugitive Slave Law. And (further) "Ichabod" means "inglorious" in Hebrew. I did not know that!

I would have gone with something more concrete subtitle-wise: maybe "Raging Racist, Sexist Scumbag".

Cox had a long career in politics, including a 17-year stint as a GOP CongressCritter from California. His Wikipedia page goes into the details, mentioning his successful 1980 appearance on the game show Password Plus, but not, as I type, his authorship of this book.

A major theme of the book is Wilson's reluctance to support women's suffrage. He offered a number of excuses for his opposition; later, when that opposition became politically unpopular, he offered excuses for keeping his support merely tepid. But it seems that he was simply disdainful of the ladies intruding on a male bastion of power and privilege.

There are a number of "the more things change…" moments here. For example, there was a massive pro-suffrage demonstration the day before Wilson's 1913 inauguration. Which recalled this and (of course) this.

Another major theme was his undimmed, virulent, apparently lifelong, racism. He was a child of the Confederacy, despised Reconstruction, and was a big fan of the KKK. He was a good buddy of Thomas Dixon, author of (most notably) The Clansman, a novel that formed the basis of the classic pro-Klan silent movie The Birth of a Nation. Which featured Wilson quotes in intertitles. And was the first movie ever screened at the White House.

But the suffrage struggle takes center stage in Cox's telling. Unfortunately, to the exclusion of (in my opinion) matters of equal or greater importance. Cox goes into great detail on the trampling of the suffragists' civil liberties, which (among other things) involved sending off lady protestors to a rural Virginia prison/workhouse/hellhole for daring to unfurl banners in front of the White House.

But this was just one example of Wilson's suppression of dissent. For example, Eugene Debs goes unmentioned here except for being one of the presidential candidates in 1912. Reader, the Wilson Administration had him jailed for making rabble-rousing speeches.

Also unmentioned by Cox (unless I missed something): the infamous Palmer Raids; the mass deportation of left-wingers, including Emma Goldman.

Other topics are mentioned, but woefully unexplored. Wilson's re-election campaign in 1916 pictured him as a peacenik: "He kept us out of war", while his GOP opponent, Charles Evans Hughes, was pictured as a warmonger. This, while Wilson privately acknowledged that, yeah, we were gonna get into the war. And we did; Wilson asked Congress to declare war on Germany only a month after his 1917 inauguration.

World War I was also the excuse for Wilson to assume control of large swaths of the domestic economy. The Federal income tax was barely out of diapers; originally aimed at "the rich", the brackets multiplied, raised, and were unindexed for inflation, which raged. Price controls generated scarcity.

And Wilson demanded, and got, the power to deny any person to depart the US.

So, in short, this book is a very good resource if you want to know (roughly) everything about the campaign for the (eventual) 19th Amendment, and Wilson's interactions with that campaign. Beyond that, you might want to get some supplementary texts.


Last Modified 2025-01-10 8:10 AM EST

For Politifact, "Context" is Ass-Covering

(A followup to yesterday's assertion from Neil Brown, president of the Poynter Institute, a global nonprofit that runs PolitiFact): “I don’t believe we were doing anything, in any form, with bias.” )

Today's example of Politifact "context":

Politifact's article doesn't actually check any facts. It's just a barely-edited press release from Democrats offering their excuses for voting against the Laken Riley Act.

Has Politifact ever offered an equivalent "context"-supplying article on behalf of Republicans? I think not, but let me know if you can dig up any examples.

At NR, Ramesh Ponnuru offers a look at Politifact's Fact-Checking through the Years:

Politifact misrepresents a Republican health-care bill and what the Congressional Budget Office said about it.

Politifact mistakenly fact-checks Kellyanne Conway, too, on health care.

Politifact whitewashes the Democrats’ position on abortions late in pregnancy.

Politifact keeps up the whitewashing, this time getting the New York Times to repeat a false claim.

Even if Politifact had gotten all of these matters right, it would deserve criticism for the selectivity of its targeting of politicians. (When President Biden absurdly claimed in last year’s State of the Union address that he had inherited an economy “on the brink,” it did no fact-check.) But it can’t even be counted on to get the facts right when it does purport to check them.

But about that bill: Ilya Somin is not impressed with it: The Laken Riley Act is Unjust - and a Trojan Horse.

Yesterday, the House of Representatives passed the Laken Riley Act (LRA), in a 264-159 vote. This legislation - named after a student killed by an undocumented immigrant - is often sold by proponents as a tool for combatting murderers and sex offenders. In reality, it focuses on detaining undocumented immigrants charged with theft-related crimes, including minor ones. It also includes a Trojan horse provision making it easier for states to challenge a variety of programs that make legal migration easier. These policies are unjust, and likely to impede genuine crime-fighting efforts more than they help them.

I'm unconvinced by Ilya's argument, but check it out.

Also of note:

  • We can all stand to learn something. So let's follow Jeff Maurer's lead: I Learned Something From That Weird Ass Jacobin Article That Said Blackstone Owns 1/3 of All Houses.

    Yesterday, a social media dunk-fest ensued after a hilariously wrong statistic was published in the socialist magazine Jacobin. And now, I shall stretch my hamstrings and lace up my Karl Malone signature LA Gear high tops, for I would like to participate in that dunk fest. Here’s the offending line, which was corrected after glass began raining down on Jacobin following a series of Darryl Dawkins-esque backboard shattering dunks:

    Take Blackstone, which owns a third of US housing stock: they can create scarcity and set prices.

    Now: If you’re an economist, realtor, banker, teacher, firefighter, dental hygienist, beekeeper, acrobat, sushi chef, pro wrestler, astrophysicist, karate sensei, or porn star, you know that Blackstone does not own one third of US housing stock. The real number appears to be about 0.042%, so Jacobin was off by a factor of 783. Keeping the “factor of 783” error margin constant, here are some statistics that are equivalent to the one that Jacobin saw fit to print:

    • I am 4,698 feet tall and weigh 64 and a half tons

    • The US Constitution is 184,788 years old

    • The MSRP for a 2025 Nissan Sentra is $16.9 million

    • Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis made $10.9 billion at the box office

    • The Baha Men have had 783 #1 hits, making them by far the most successful recording artist of all time

    [Jacobin's quote slightly edited.]

    But Jeff, what did you learn?

    … I actually read the 2,400 words around that hilariously wrong statistic, and — to my surprise — I learned something. I didn’t become a communist, but I think I might have a better understanding of why some people are drawn to communism.

    Ah.

  • Yesterday, Charlotte Amalie; Tomorrow, Nuuk? A few days ago, I linked to Jonathan Turley's takedown of the anti-Constitutional fantasies of Stacey Plaskett, Delegate to the US House of Representatives from the US Virgin Islands. Which got me wondering: how did we latch onto those islands anyway?

    It turns out there's a rich history involved. But the bottom line was: we bought them.

    For $25 million.

    In gold.

    From … Denmark!

    You know, that country that currently owns … Greenland!

    So there's actual historical precedent.

    By the way, the Wikipedia article claims that $25 million in gold would be "$700 million" today. My calculation differs. (And let's hope I'm not messing things up as badly as that Jacobin guy.) Gold was going for $20.67/oz in 1917. So that works out to approximately 1.21 million ounces of gold.

    Today's gold price as I type: $2683/oz.

    So that 1.21 million ounces of gold: now worth over $3.2 billion.

    I don't know what that would translate to for Greenland. But Wikipedia sucks.

Recently on the book blog:

We Solve Murders

(paid link)

This is the start of what looks to be a new series of novels from Richard Osman, author of the wildly successful "Thursday Murder Club" books. You'll note the cover has a cat sitting on a gun barrel? This might be a hint that we're going to cozy-land? Hm. My usual mystery fare tends more to the hard-boiled. Not for me?

Well, I thought the same about the Thursday Murder Club. Wrong then, wrong now. I thoroughly enjoyed this, and I'm on board for any and all future entries.

The book centers around Steve Wheeler and his daughter-in law Amy. Steve is a retired investigator, a widower, content to live a quiet life; his only ambition is to make a good showing at his weekly pub trivia quiz. Amy, on the other hand, is an adrenaline junkie, working for a private security agency. She's currently protecting the best-selling author Rosie D'Antonio. But she can't help but notice that she's been physically nearby to each of a string of murders in widely varying locales. Each with a similar modus operandi: an "influencer" has been shot in the head, and money smuggling seems to be involved.

Lot of fun. Laughed out loud in a number of places. Rosie is especially a hoot.

Liberalism as a Way of Life

(paid link)

I thought I would like this book better. (But as usual, I have forgotten my reason for putting it on my get-via-Interlibrary-Loan list.) But it's not awful. The author, Alexandre Lefebvre, seems to be going out of his way at times to make his argument accessible, with examples from the TV sitcom Parks and Recreation (he holds up Amy Poehler's character, Leslie Knope, as a hero); The Wire; Bird Box; The Good Place; … What's the most popular topic on Pornhub? ("The answer may surprise you!")

And he describes how he uses Legos in his classroom presentations to illustrate how people from different walks of life "fit in" to a social structure.

But (for me) the warning signs come early when Lefebvre lists off the features of liberalism he's championing. Many are unexceptionable, but… "progressive taxation" is one of them? Also: early on, Lefebvre explicitly excludes "neoliberalism" from his Big Liberal Tent; he's also down on Mont Pelerin Society "classical liberals", who (he claims) invented the term as a mere "polemical tactic" to (presumably) bathe in the aura of early liberalism. For some reason.

The book heaps praise on John Rawls. (Which made me look in the index for "Nozick, Robert". Nope.) Lefebvre has done his meticulous research on Rawls, including digging out his unpublished works in dank Harvard archives. He uses what he finds to illustrate and illuminate Rawls' fuller views, beyond those set forth in A Theory of Justice and Political Liberalism. This assists Lefebvre in his advocaccy for adopting liberalism "all the way down", not just in advocating Rawls' well-known recipes for liberal legal and political structures.

In fact, he's generally critical of what he calls "liberaldom", which (my words) seems to be liberalism corrupted in numerous non-Rawlsian ways. This makes it easier for people to claim to be liberals, while in fact cooperating in all sorts of implicit and explicit illiberal ways in order to maintain their livelihood, wealth, and social status. Tsk! He points to a bad example in Australia, their tax-advantaged individually-owned retirement accounts. These are disproportionately used by the already well-off, hence maintaining structures of inequality? Double tsk!

Bottom line: Lefebvre seems like a nice enough bloke, but I didn't get much out of his book. That's on me, but I suspect that he wasn't trying to deal with my Rawls-skepticism.


Last Modified 2025-01-09 5:05 AM EST

Pun Salad Fact Check: True, and Also Funny

(Kyle is editor-in-chief of the Babylon Bee.)

Robby Soave cheers the news: Mark Zuckerberg was right to fire Facebook's rogue fact-checkers.

A new era is dawning at Meta. CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced on Tuesday that third-party fact-checking organizations would no longer have the power to suppress disfavored speech on Facebook—a major, positive step toward restoring free expression and robust debate on the platform.

In his video announcing the changes, Zuckerberg conceded that moderators working at his social media properties—Facebook and Instagram—felt pressured after Donald Trump's 2016 win to address mainstream media concerns about the spread of alleged misinformation online. He now believes that their efforts to fix this supposed issue caused more problems than they solved.

"After Trump first got elected in 2016, the legacy media wrote nonstop about how misinformation was a threat to democracy," said Zuckerberg. "We tried in good faith to address those concerns without becoming the arbiters of truth, but the fact-checkers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they've created, especially in the US."

That amusingly-headlined NYT post quotes two fact-checking folks:

“I don’t believe we were doing anything, in any form, with bias,” said Neil Brown, the president of the Poynter Institute, a global nonprofit that runs PolitiFact, one of Meta’s fact-checking partners. “There’s a mountain of what could be checked, and we were grabbing what we could.”

[…]

“We did not, and could not, remove content,” wrote Lori Robertson, the managing editor of FactCheck.org, which has partnered with Meta since 2016, in a blog post. “Any decisions to do that were Meta’s.”

I won't relitigate the bias charges (which only Neil Brown mildly tries to deny, not Lori Anderson). The facts, as they say, are well-known.

But not everyone is impressed by Zuck's change of heart. For example, Tristan Justice at the Federalist thinks Zuckerberg Owes Restitution To Those He Tried To Destroy.

Zuckerberg deliberately manipulated the 2020 election and irreparably damaged conservative media in the process as outlets were pummeled by a dystopian censorship regime.

I just use FB to follow far-flung friends and family; and I pretty quickly unfollow people who try to babble overmuch about their politics. And I'm much better for it.

Also of note:

  • Please pass the popcorn. Jerry Coyne provides More fallout from the Big KerFFRFle: Freedom from Religion Foundation dissolves its entire Honorary Board (and other news)

    The conclusion, of course, is that the FFRF does not WANT an honorary board at all. Why? The only conclusion I can reach is that other honorary-board members could, in the future, cause “trouble” in the way that the three of us did, publicly criticizing the organization for its mission creep and adherence to woke gender ideology. Ditching the other 15 (I hope they’ve been told!) is an often-seen aspect of wokeness: any index of merit that conflicts with “progressive” ideology must be effaced. (Similarly, many American colleges have dropped requirements for applicants to submit standardized test scores, like those from the SAT and ACT.) It seems that the FFRF doesn’t want to take a chance with people on the honorary board publicly espousing the “wrong ideology.”

    Let me resurrect a Pun Salad post from way back in 2025 where I excerpted an interview of George H.W. Bush with Robert I. Sherman of (I am not kidding) American Atheist Press back in 1987. (My source link from 2025 has rotted.)

    RS:
    "Surely you recognize the equal citizenship and patriotism of Americans who are atheists?"
    GB:
    "No, I don't know that atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered patriots. This is one nation under God."
    RS:
    "Do you support as a sound constitutional principle the separation of state and church?"
    GB:
    "Yes, I support the separation of church and state. I'm just not very high on atheists."
    I didn't care for GHWB's first response, but "not very high on atheists" made me grin back then, and does now.

    I recommend the Google query to Jerry: why do atheists act like jerks all the time?

  • Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly, and nannies gotta nag. Unfortunately, some nannies have political power to do more than nag. Another example of "Gee, we forgot to do this in the past four years, so…", as described by Jeffrey A. Singer at Cato: The Black Market Beckons: Biden’s Last-Minute Move on Nicotine.

    Axios reports that the Biden Administration is planning an 11th-hour move to order cigarette manufacturers to reduce the nicotine content in the tobacco cigarettes they market to consumers—possibly by as much as 95 percent. The FDA proposed the rule in 2022, and the Office of Management and Budget cleared the rule proposal on January 3, 2025.

    The Food and Drug Administration has not yet issued the rule but may do so within the next two weeks.

    Nicotine is the addictive component of tobacco cigarettes, but by itself is relatively harmless. The harm comes from carbon monoxide, a poisonous gas, and tobacco tar that contains carcinogens and other chemicals that harm the lungs and circulatory system. Britain’s Royal Society for Public Health claims nicotine is “no more harmful to health than caffeine.” As I have written here, what differentiates nicotine from caffeine is that it has calming as well as stimulative effects.

    Nicotine and caffeine are also possibly addictive, although it's claimed that nicotine is worse in that regard. Still, this FDA move promises to do more harm than good.

  • Perhaps statists are addicted to statism? Kevin D. Williamson begins a multi-part series on the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives. What the ATF Does—and What It Doesn’t Do. Excerpt, containing a key point:

    Do we need an ATF? There is a reasonable—and strong—case to be made that we do not. At least as far as the question of regulating firearms goes, much of what the ATF does is unnecessary, and its necessary work would be better done by other federal agencies or by states and municipalities. (Other items in the ATF portfolio, such as alcohol and explosives, are beyond my scope here.) The ATF is a hodgepodge agency that has been overseen by different departments over the years ranging from Treasury to Homeland Security—its agents and leaders by their own account really want to spend their energy fighting organized crime, but its main firearms-related activity is the regulation of sporting goods stores. And it is not clear that the agency fighting transnational drug cartels should also be the agency regulating Dick’s Sporting Goods. What is clear from the data is that the activities of licensed firearms retailers are only indirectly and tangentially related to violent crime at all. American gun shops are not a major provider of firearms to American criminals, with more than 90 percent of them getting their firearms from other sources, mainly through theft and black market sales.

    Hope the folks at DOGE have Kevin's articles on their desks.

  • I have mixed feelings about this. Harrison Richlin reports on something we missed, thanks to the Woke Mouse: David Fincher Pushed Back When Disney Didn’t Get His ‘20,000 Leagues Under the Sea’ Vision: ‘You’ve Read Jules Verne, Right?’.

    There have been many potential projects that haven’t come to fruition for David Fincher, from his take on Aaron Sorkin’s “Steve Jobs” starring Christian Bale to his “Black Dahlia” mini-series led by Tom Cruise. But one failed vision people were clamoring for, perhaps above all others, was his adaptation of Jules Verne’s “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.”

    [… alas …]

    Fincher intended on working with Disney, who still own the IP, and screenwriter Scott Z. Burns to make a newer, more modern version in the early 2010s, but faced issues after desired lead Brad Pitt (who would have played harpooner Ned Land) passed on the script. Disney wanted Fincher to cast Chris Hemsworth, hot off his starring roles in “Thor” and “The Avengers,” but Fincher wanted Channing Tatum. In a recent interview with Letterboxd, Fincher also pointed to not being able to get on the same page as Disney when it came to the story they were trying to tell.

    “You can’t make people be excited about the risks that you’re excited about,” said Fincher. “Disney was in a place where they were saying, ‘We need to know that there’s a thing that we know how to exploit snout to tail, and you’re going to have to check these boxes for us.’ And I was like, ‘You’ve read Jules Verne, right?'”

    Given Disney's penchant for taking a PC wrecking ball to its beloved intellectual properties, one can only imagine what "boxes" they demanded that Fincher "check".

  • A bit of good news. TV has followed Sturgeon's Law for a long time. But one show I really enjoyed was David Janssen's "Harry O". It was a private eye series done right, with wit and intelligence.

    But sadly unavailable. Until now!

    <voice imitation="professor_farnsworth">Good news, everyone!</voice>. I stuck "Harry O" on my TiVo's "wishlist" years ago, and this week, it finally paid off, recording Season 1, Episode 1. Future episodes are queued up.

    (My TiVo has been in declining use recently, so I'm happy this worked.)

    Unfortunately, for those without a DVR: it's on "MeTV", Mondays at 4AM.

    But for those with a DVR: check it out, and enjoy. And would some streaming service out there just put up the entire series, plus the pilot/movies?


Last Modified 2025-01-09 5:21 AM EST

A Handy Chart for Kids of All Ages

Speaking for myself, I might move some items in this array, but not far:

[Features of Adulthood]

Mouseover: "I don't dig pit traps and cover them with sticks and a thin layer of leaves nearly as much as I expected; I find a chance to do it barely once a month."

In other news of adulthood, Ron Bailey joins the Vivek Murthy pile-on: Surgeon General claims alcohol is a leading cause of cancer.

Our national health scold, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, issued an advisory on his way out of office, asserting that drinking beer, wine, and liquor is "a leading preventable cause of cancer in the United States." The report warns that for some cancers, "evidence shows that this risk may start to increase around one or fewer drinks per day." It is worth noting that the current U.S. dietary guidelines suggest that alcohol consumption should be limited to two drinks per day for men and one per day for women.

Specifically, Murthy's advisory asserts that drinking is associated with an "increased risk for at least seven different types of cancer, including breast (in women), colorectum, esophagus, liver, mouth (oral cavity), throat (pharynx), and voice box (larynx)."

Inexplicably, Murthy did not address the comprehensive review of evidence on alcohol and health issued two weeks earlier by the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine (NAS).

Ron's bottom line: "The surgeon general is evidently eager to deploy a questionable cancer scare in his campaign to impose stealth prohibition. For your own good, of course."

Also of note:

  • Also on his way out the door… is Merrick "Thank Goodness He's Not on the Supreme Court" Garland. His recent assertions about what took place four years ago causes Andrew McCarthy to ask, rhetorically: Mr. Attorney General, How Many Capitol Riot Murder Charges Did You Bring?

    Illustrating yet again that Democrats haven’t come to grips with why they lost the election and what Americans think of their politicization of law enforcement, here’s Biden attorney general Merrick Garland today, emoting on the fifth anniversary of the Capitol riot:

    On this day, four years ago, police officers were brutally assaulted while bravely defending the United States Capitol. They were punched, tackled, tased, and attacked with chemical agents that burned their eyes and skin. Today, I am thinking of the officers who still bear the scars of that day as well as the loved ones of the five officers who lost their lives in the line of duty as a result of what happened to them on January 6, 2021.

    Let’s stipulate that Garland is quite right to castigate all who punched, tackled, tased, chemically attacked, or otherwise assaulted police officers. There is chatter in the air about pardons of the rioters; I don’t know what President-elect Trump plans to do upon taking office, but it would be a profound mistake — one his administration would come to regret — if he grants clemency to people convicted of assaulting cops (or, for that matter, damaging property). As we’ve covered here extensively for five years, it was ridiculous for the Justice Department to prosecute hundreds of people on misdemeanor charges of parading and the like — the kind of charges DOJ would ordinarily never file but that the Biden Justice Department, under Garland’s leadership, prosecuted in a patently political effort to inflate the Capitol riot (aka “The Insurrection”), condemnable as it was on its own terms, as if it were a 9/11-scale terrorist attack.

    To repeat for the umpteenth time, no police officers died in the line of duty during the Capitol riot. The fact that Garland, federal bureaucrats, and police officials have tried to exaggerate the perils of the riot, and in so doing – and occasionally in grappling with insurance claims involving loved ones of cops who tragically committed suicide after the riot – have claimed police were killed due to the events of that day, does not make it so.

    Pam Bondi might be a bad Attorney General, but it's hard to see how she couldn't be an improvement over Garland.

  • But let's not forget… Kevin D. Williamson notes that, like creepy monsters of literature, The Donald Is at the Door.

    On January 6, 2021, there was a riot at the U.S. Capitol. It was led by people who intended to interrupt the certification of the presidential vote in the hopes of keeping Donald Trump in office. Donald Trump himself egged them on in various ways, and he was, at that time, engaged in a multifaceted attempt to illegally hold on to the office he had lost in a free and fair election to Joe Biden, a senescent near-nonentity who, though a figure of fun, unseated an incumbent president while barely even bothering to campaign against him. We use “January 6” as a shorthand to talk about what Trump did after losing the 2020 election, but it is important to understand—and I think historians will agree about this—that the imbecilic clown show at the Capitol was the least important and least dangerous part of that episode. Trump’s attempt to suborn election fraud—which is what he was up to on that telephone call with the Georgia secretary of state on January 2, 2021—was the more serious part of the attempted coup d’état. Some coup-plotters are generalissimos who just march their troops into the capital and seize power, but many of them—many of the worst of them—take pains to come up with some legal or constitutional pretext for their actions. Often, the pretext is an emergency, as it was with Indira Gandhi, Augusto Pinochet, the coup that brought Francisco Franco to power, etc. You’ll remember that Donald Trump called for the termination of the Constitution as an emergency measure: “A Massive Fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution,” Trump wrote in his trademark kindergartner’s prose. “Our great ‘Founders’ did not want, and would not condone, False & Fraudulent Elections!”

    I fear that we're going to see a lot of KDW commentary in the near future that can be summarized thusly: Told ya so!

  • Uncomfortable questions raised. Jeff Jacoby writes: A woman died in agony as onlookers pressed 'Record'

    HER NAME was Debrina Kawam, though we didn't learn that until nine days after she was burned alive in a New York City subway station. On the morning of Dec. 22 she was murdered in public, in full view of witnesses; it took so long to establish her identity because so little of her was left by the time the flames were extinguished. Eventually police were able to put a name to the victim by analyzing fingerprints, dental information, and DNA evidence.

    […]

    Video of the incident shows several spectators on the platform watching from a few feet away, some using their phones to record the atrocity. Two uniformed cops can be seen walking right past the immolation. One glances at the burning woman but makes no move to help her; the other strides in the other direction, speaking into a walkie-talkie without slowing down. Off-camera, a man can be heard shouting, "This is a person right here!" and "Oh, no!" But of the people visible in the clips posted on social media, none evinces concern or sympathy; none makes a move to intervene; none does anything but watch.

    Jeff wonders what that says about the spectators. And anyone with an ounce of introspection has to wonder: What would I have done in that position?

  • Today's award for "Awesome Headline" goes to… TechDirt's Mike Masnick, for Jeff Bezos’ Latest Gambit To Bring Back Trust In Media: Silence Editorial Cartoonists Who Call Out Your Sniveling Compliance.

    Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos wants you to believe he’s on a noble mission to restore trust in media. His solution? Muzzling his own paper by blocking it from endorsing Kamala Harris in the runup to the election, a decision he defended in a self-serving op-ed claiming that trust in media is at an all-time low.

    Yet, as we noted at the time, the real reason people’s faith in the press is plummeting is that they’re tired of seeing billionaires throw their weight around to silence critics and shape media narratives to suit their interests.

    The latest example? The Post silencing criticism by blocking an editorial cartoon mocking billionaires, Bezos included, for throwing millions at Trump’s inauguration in a pathetic attempt to curry favor. And it’s exactly this kind of behavior that is destroying the public’s trust in media.

    I don't think Mike's causality is correct. I'm more persuaded by this take at Ace of Spades:

    I don't think any of these woke media outlets can ever reclaim the figleaf of nonpartisanship. They will never, never again be considered authoritative or honest.

    Therefore, there is no point in attempting to "re-position" CNN or the Washington Post as "centrist" and "objective." Anyone who wasn't a full on TDS #Resistance leftist stopped going to these sources years and years ago, and they're not coming back. And as these outlets shed audience, they catered harder and harder to the remaining audience of mentally ill leftwing lunatics, which caused even Democrat normies to flee, and left their remaining audience base even more partisan and weird.

    There is no way -- none -- to reverse this, so it's my business advice that they not even try. The only course is to accept that they are permanently diminished and marginalized as fringe outlets of the intensely woke ghetto. They have to downsize until they hit the right, profitable level for a niche conspiracy-theory outlet.

    That said, that editorial cartoon benefits from the Streisand Effect: the block caused a lot more attention to be paid to it than it would have garnered otherwise. And so let me add to that:

  • Lileks rules. He was inspired by a BBC story about (!) US weather that referred to a "private meteorologist". Which caused him to pen the tale of Sam Isobar, Private Weatherman.

    I immediately imagined myself sitting in a slightly shabby office in an old office building, my name painted on frosted glass in the door. There was a large empty green screen behind me. I had my feet up on the desk and was considering a drink from the office bottle when the doorknob rattled. She came in like a low-pressure front - she paused, then turned around counter-clockwise as if to leave, and began to cry.

    “I’m sorry,” she said. She faced me, clouds forming on her face. “It’s my husband. I think there’s a forty percent chance he will cheat on me tomorrow, with his infidelity tapering off to slight expressions of affection by four PM.”

    I was interested. Mostly in her. She wore a necklace of red triangles. She looked like she’d come from a few states away. “What’s that got to do with me?” I said.

    And more. Need a chuckle? Click on over. And subscribe, like I do.


Last Modified 2025-01-07 9:57 AM EST

We Need GOVERNMENT WARNINGS Now More Than Ever!

[government warning]

Another Biden appointee, after being in office for nearly four years, with only a few days left in his reign, suddenly realizes there's something he forgot to do. Noah Rothman describes Vivek Murthy’s Booze Bait and Switch.

On Friday, Joe Biden’s surgeon general, Dr. Vivek Murthy, issued a call to Congress demanding that lawmakers update the warning labels on alcoholic beverages to include among the various negative outcomes that accompany excess drinking an elevated risk of developing certain cancers.

“Many people out there assume that as long as they’re drinking at the limits or below the limits of current guidelines of one a day for women and two for men, that there is no risk to their health or well-being,” Murthy told reporters. The fools.

The "bait and switch" involved?

It seems to be the opinion of the surgeon general that the public needs to be tricked into believing that they’re merely endorsing a salubrious public relations campaign when in fact they’re being gulled into endorsing a burdensome regulation. And all of it is predicated on uncharitable assumptions about how dirt-stupid most Americans are, and how terribly they will mismanage their own lives absent a guiding hand. That is a common misapprehension among aspiring reformers, to say nothing of the accompanying presumption that they are possessed of an above-average capacity for rational thinking.

[Aside: I assumed that would be the first time the word "salubrious" appeared in this blog, but a little grepping revealed it's been here before: specifically here, here, here, and here. Two occurrences from Kevin D. Williamson, one from David Harsanyi, and one I apparently came up with on my own. Congratulations to Noah Rothman for joining this exclusive club.]

At the WSJ, Allysia Finley answers your burning question: No, Moderate Drinking Won’t Give You Cancer.

Surgeon General Vivek Murthy has done more to politicize science and erode trust in public-health leaders than anyone other than Anthony Fauci. Dr. Murthy was at it again on Friday with a headline-grabbing report that recommends alcohol be distributed with cancer warnings.

The report warns that, for some cancers, “evidence shows that this risk may start to increase around one or fewer drinks per day.” Note the operative word, may. The link between heavy drinking and throat and mouth cancer is well-established—but not for moderate consumption.

I've inserted an image of the current GOVERNMENT WARNING up at the top of this post; there's a mouseover with a lame joke, and clicking the image will take you to the current Code of Federal Regulations, Title 27, Part 16, which mandates its presence in meticulous detail. I made some fun of it back in 2012. Where I made the only semi-satirical request that appropriately-worded GOVERNMENT WARNINGS should be attached to government buildings, mailings, projects, and outposts.

Also of note:

  • The bull does a lot of damage on his way out of the china shop. Andrew Follett reports on another departing pol who suddenly realized he forgot to do something for the past four years: Departing Biden Weakens American Energy Production.

    Joe Biden’s last weeks as president will be spent bowing to environmentalists by trying to permanently ban new offshore oil and natural gas.

    The outgoing president is preparing to issue formal designations of “sensitive marines areas,” according to Bloomberg. Biden’s offshore actions would follow a late December formal proposal to block energy development in Nevada for 20 years. Naturally, sources of offshore energy favored by Biden, such as offshore wind turbines (which may be killing whales), would likely be exempted from the designation.

    Fun fact: what can be done by arbitrary lame-duck Presidential decree may actually be difficult for Trump to undo on his own.

  • But that's not all folks. There could be more of these shenanigans in the pipeline, causing Issues & Insights to wonder: Will We Make It Until Jan. 20? They include the above offshore drilling ban, of course, but there's more, including:

    Matthew Petti of Reason suggests that Biden has considered leaving “a very big mess on President-elect Donald Trump’s desk” by bombing Iran’s nuclear sites before his term is over. Not that doing so would be such a terrible idea. A nuclear-armed Islamist regime poses a grave danger.

    But the timing is suspect. Biden could have taken out the mullah’s atomic weapons program at any time during his watch. Instead, he’s thought about dumping a problem on Trump’s shoulders and escaping the responsibility that would come with such an operation. Should Biden follow through, it would not be done in the interest of national security but rather the spiteful act of a wretched man.

    I missed reading Petti's article when it went up on Friday, and I was dubious, but … hm, it seems more solidly sourced than I would have thought.

  • A long strange trip it's been. Brian Doherty charts The Improbable Rise of MAGA-Musk. It's an article in the current print Reason. And for those who weren't paying attention a few years ago:

    Musk used to be publicly apolitical, outside his loud skirmishing with government regulators. (Since he has been a businessman in the payments, rockets, and car spaces, such clashes have been frequent.) "When I got into the company, there was a heavy, heavy focus on batteries," one former high-level Tesla employee recalls. "He never brought up politics in meetings except with regards for regulations."

    Musk had a reputation, Kate Conger and Ryan Mac write in their new book Character Limit, as "a libertarian with liberal tendencies, a business scion who backed Obama." Especially with Tesla, he coded as environmentalist-progressive, positioning his company "to help expedite the move from a mine-and-burn hydrocarbon economy toward a solar electric economy."

    During the 2016 presidential campaign, the entrepreneur lamented to MSNBC that the Republican nominee "doesn't seem to have the sort of character that reflects well on the United States." After Trump won, Musk did join with other tech executives at a meeting with the president-elect, and he later volunteered for a White House business council, even while continuing to say things like (per Walter Isaacson's 2023 biography Elon Musk) "Trump might be one of the best bullshitters ever" and "if you just think of Trump as…a con-man performance, then his behavior sort of makes sense."

    Ah, well. I'm on board for the next Starship launch perhaps on Friday.

  • Specifically, it's a reading comprehension problem. Jonathan Turley headline: “Does the Gentlelady Have a Problem?” : Yes, Delegate Plaskett Most Certainly Has a Problem.

    “This body and this nation has [sic] a territories and a colonies problem.” Those words from Del. Stacey Plaskett echoed in the House chamber this week as the delegate interrupted the election of the House speaker to demand a vote for herself and the representatives of other non-states. The problem, however, is not with the House but with Plaskett and other members in demanding the violation of Article I of the Constitution.

    After her election in 2015, Plaskett has often shown a certain disregard for constitutional principles and protections. Despite being a lawyer, Plaskett has insisted in Congress that hate speech is not constitutionally protected, a demonstrably false assertion. Where there is overwhelming evidence of a censorship system that a court called “Orwellian,” Plaskett has repeatedly denied the evidence presented before her committee. When a journalist testified on the evidence of that censorship system, Plaskett suggested his possible arrest. (Plaskett suggested that respected journalist Matt Taibbi had committed perjury due to an error that he made, not in testimony but in a tweet that he later corrected).

    Plaskett is a delegate to the US House of Representatives from the United States Virgin Islands. (Her official government page falsely calls her a "Congresswoman".)

    Fun fact: the US Virgin Islands' population is 87,146 as of the 2020 Census. This is less than 20% of the 2020 count of the least-populous state, Wyoming.

Today's Etymology Lesson

It's a word you can use: kakistocracy. And the Google will tell you that it derives from the Greek kakistos, meaning "worst", and the English -ocracy suffix, meaning… well, you know. Hence: government by the worst.

Google also seems to indicate the alternate spelling is in less frequent use: cacastocracy. And our inner five-year-olds know what "caca" is.

Which brings us to:

Shameful and corrupt. And business as usual for these last few weeks of the Biden Administration.

Other reactions:

Scott Lincicome writes at Cato on Nippon Steel and the "National Security" Hoax.

Today, President Joe Biden blocked Nippon Steel’s proposed acquisition of US Steel on the grounds that “there is credible evidence” the Japanese steelmaker “might take action that threatens to impair the national security of the United States.” What “credible evidence” might push the president of the United States to block a multi-billion dollar investment in an ailing American steel company by a publicly traded corporation headquartered in one of the United States’ closest allies? Well, Biden never says, perhaps because—as I wrote right before the holiday—there is none

Scott usually doesn't get this hot under the collar. So, yeah, it's bad.

Over at Reason, Eric Boehm finds perfection: Biden blocking the U.S. Steel sale is a perfectly disgraceful end to his career.

By intervening in the private business affairs of the two companies, Biden is demonstrating once again his expansive view of executive power, hubristic sense of government's ability to order economic affairs, and willingness to stretch the definition of "national security" to justify his big government agenda even when there is plainly no national security threat.

Those elements have been central to Biden's political persona for decades. Even as his charisma and mental facilities have failed, they remain. From his earlier support for the drug war, the USA PATRIOT Act, and Obamacare to his administration's attempts at broad student loan forgiveness and inflation-inducing Bidenomics, Biden has rarely been deterred by norms or laws that limit federal power or by economic good sense. If there's something Biden wants to do, he'll simply find a way to do it.

And in case you want more in the same vein, Don Boudreaux has a compliation of these and other reactions at Cafe Hayek. His excerpt from the WSJ editorialists:

President Biden’s order on Friday blocking Nippon Steel’s acquisition of U.S. Steel is an act of economic masochism that will harm U.S. manufacturing and security. It is also a corruption of the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (Cfius) for raw political favoritism that will harm the U.S. reputation as a destination for capital.

…..

None satisfied United Steelworkers boss David McCall, who favors a tie-up with Cleveland-Cliffs, which was outbid by Nippon Steel in 2023. Cleveland-Cliffs CEO Lourenco Goncalves lobbied the White House to block the Nippon deal because he wants to create a steel-making cartel shielded from foreign competition by tariffs and Buy America rules.

A Cleveland-Cliffs-U.S. Steel combo would control 100% of U.S. blast furnace production, 100% of domestic steel used in electric-vehicle motors, and 65% to 90% of other domestic steel used in vehicles. But Cleveland-Cliffs—currently valued at $4.7 billion with $3.8 billion in debt—will struggle to find the money even to buy U.S. Steel, much less to invest enough to revitalize its factories.

Which goes back to our etymology lesson above. As far as I know, Hayek never used the word "kakistocracy" but chapter 10 of his The Road to Serfdom was titled "Why the Worst Get On Top". And (again) our inner five-year-olds know what floats.

And so did Ben Franklin:

In Rivers and bad Governments, the lightest Things swim at top.

Also of note:

  • A supplement to our etymology lesson. Provided by Steven Greenhut, who wonders: Is America entering her kakistocracy era?

    The Economist this year named kakistocracy its word of the year after reflecting on President-elect Donald Trump's selection of Rep. Matt Gaetz (R–Fla.) for attorney general, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for health and human services secretary, and Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence. Those picks are indeed among the most noteworthy events of the year—and a reflection of the sorts of people who probably shouldn't be in power.

    The U.S. House released a report, which alleged "substantial evidence that Gaetz violated House Rules, state and federal laws, and other standards of conduct prohibiting prostitution, statutory rape, illicit drug use, acceptance of impermissible gifts, the provision of special favors and privileges, and obstruction of Congress." Gaetz denies any wrongdoing and has withdrawn from consideration, but please don't expect meritocracy.

    Trump says that he will let anti-vaccine activist and apparent victim of a brain worm, RFK Jr., "go wild" on public health. He presumably will also let Gabbard—the former Democratic representative known for her unusual views about Syria and Russia—go crazy on U.S. intelligence. Whatever their charms, it's odd to see them float to the top.

    Steven also notes the Ben Franklin quote, but not the Hayek chapter title.

  • As the intelligence of our leaders declines… Maybe the computers will save us! Because, as Megan McArdle says, we are On the brink of an unimaginable AI future. Excerpt:

    I won’t speculate about the risk of an emerging artificial superintelligence casually disposing of its inefficient carbon-based architects; I’m not enough of a technician to understand whether this is likely. What’s clear is that things are going to get weird.

    AI will replace a lot of work that humans do now, from writing code to diagnosing illness to analyzing databases to making art. Aesthetes may protest that the computer-generated stuff will lack the crucial human element, but a quick glance over the past 200 years suggests that most people will eagerly substitute cheap, mass-produced anything for a lovingly handcrafted version that’s more expensive.

    And this time around the machines will displace some of the highest-status, highest-paid jobs. This is not entirely a bad prospect, especially as regards the problem of inequality. A whole lot of affluent people are likely to become considerably more equal. But those folks will not give up good jobs quietly. Political and cultural upheaval can be expected as the elites fight to maintain their status.

    Megan is open to apocalyptic speculation. But I'm old enough to remember reading Future Shock by Alvin Toffler, which claimed "the accelerated rate of technological and social change leaves people disconnected and suffering from 'shattering stress and disorientation'".

    And, reader, that was 55 years ago. So I'm not too worried about today's predictions of tech-caused doom: I've heard and read dozens of 'em over the decades. We've gone through a lot of "real soon now" promises and predictions.

    Wake me up when they happen.

  • Dylan on tech. Nate Anderson, writer at Ars Technica tells us that Bob Dylan has some Dylanesque thoughts on the “sorcery” of technology. And digs out a quote from a 2022 interview:

    I’ve binge-watched Coronation Street, Father Brown, and some early Twilight Zones. I know they’re old-fashioned shows, but they make me feel at home. I’m not a fan of packaged programs, or news shows, so I don’t watch them. I never watch anything foul smelling or evil. Nothing disgusting; nothing dog ass. I’m a religious person. I read the scriptures a lot, meditate and pray, light candles in church. I believe in damnation and salvation, as well as predestination. The Five Books of Moses, Pauline Epistles, Invocation of the Saints, all of it.

    Since I have a dog, I'm required to watch some dog ass stuff. But otherwise, Bob's your uncle.

  • Another language lesson, this one short. David R. Henderson takes issue with the NIMBY acronym: It's Not YOUR Backyard.

    Here’s the problem: People who use the term, whether they oppose it or favor it, are using words incorrectly. That matters.

    If you objected to people building something in your backyard, you would be on solid ground (pun intended.) The reason is that, unless you gave them permission, they would be trespassing. Imagine someone tries to build a small cottage in my backyard without my permission. Almost everyone, whatever his or her view of housing development or housing density, would agree that that person should not be allowed to do so.

    What do people really mean when they “Not in my backyard?” They mean that their neighbors shouldn’t be allowed to build in their backyard—or front yards, for that matter. So if they wanted to use words honestly, an acronym that would be much closer to the truth is “NIYBY.” This stands for “Not in your back yard.”

    You can see why they don’t want to use that term: it makes explicit that they favor violating other people’s property rights.

    Belated New Year Resolution: try to avoid that acronym in the future.


Last Modified 2025-01-06 5:18 AM EST

… But Lack of Correlation Implies Lack of Causation

Not to get all creepy on you, but I find Emma Camp's geek chic strangely appealing:

A critic in the comments section says (accurately) that "correlation is not causation". True enough! But I think that misunderstands the myth Emma is disconfirming; see my headline.

Also of note:

  • In our continuing "Good Ideas That Won't Happen" series… OK, maybe I'm way too cynical about this stuff, but that's my reaction to Veronique de Rugy's column: Thinking Big as Trump, Congress Tackle Taxes. Vero, what's the problem at the heart of our tax system?

    At the heart of the problem is the definition of income developed by Robert Haig and Henry Simons in the 1920s and '30s, which provided a theoretical foundation for modern taxation. It defines income as the sum of a person's consumption plus the change in his or her net worth over a given period. Put in practice, Haig-Simons creates a tax bias against saving and investment.

    Decades of trying to correct these flaws have set the tax code on a path to extreme complexity, thanks to a resulting maze of exceptions, special treatments and differential rates — all while lots of double taxation, which undermines both efficiency and fairness, stayed in place.

    How? Imagine someone who earns $100 and saves it. This person first pays tax on the earnings. If the savings generate enough interest, dividends or capital gains, the saver pays again, though at a reduced rate. If the asset is left to heirs, the same income might be taxed a third time through estate taxes. In contrast, someone who earns the same $100 and consumes it immediately only pays the first tax.

    She goes on to advocate a flat 19% rate on wages above a generous deduction for individual taxpayers; something equally simple for businesses.

    But I think it's that classic public choice problem: too many people with political clout benefit from the nooks and crannies of the tax code. (Since I task Fidelity Investments to make my portfolio "tax efficient", I'm probably one of them. Except for the "clout" part.)

  • Hegseth, not Buttigieg. Kevin D. WIlliamson takes on Hollywood Pete. And explains for you and me:

    Being secretary of defense is not like being a television host or even a military-focused television pundit. It is, in terms of budget, responsibilities, and personnel, a lot more like being the chancellor of Germany. The DoD is the largest employer in the United States; it is one of the largest organizations of any kind in the world; its budget allocation, which runs the better part of a trillion dollars, actually understates the total financial resources committed to national defense, which is more like $2 trillion, roughly the size of the German, Japanese, or French national government budgets, with only the U.S. government itself and the Chinese government budget being much larger; in FY2023, DoD reported $3.8 trillion in assets and $4 trillion in liabilities; DoD has nearly 3 million employees, more than 2 million in uniform and nearly 1 million civilians; the Navy has more than 300 ships to keep up with and more than 4,000 aircraft; the Army has nearly 50,000 combat vehicles on its maintenance roster; the Air Force has more than 6,300 aircraft to keep up with and nearly 400 ICBMs. The managerial challenges of running that organization are immensely complex.

    If you read through the U.S. National Defense Strategy documents, you won’t see very much about infantry maneuvers, but you will see a good deal about different approaches to financial management. “Audit remediation is one of the major components of the National Defense Strategy’s line of effort focused on reforming our business processes,” reads one document. Now, go look at that video of Pete Hegseth riding around on the tricycle and tell me that—stone-cold sober or blackout drunk—he is the man to undertake that apparently critical audit-remediation work.

    He isn’t.

    But we'll probably get him anyway. As KDW bottom-lines: "One understands the appeal of a TV-host Cabinet for a game-show-host president."

  • Git along, little DOGE. George F. Will provides advice in a Memo to Musk: Overhauling government isn’t rocket science. It’s harder.

    Elon Musk, a Don Quixote with Vivek Ramaswamy tagging along as Sancho Panza, recently ascended Capitol Hill to warn the windmills of tiltings to come. They have vowed to cut government down to the size they prefer. But when they descended from the Hill, their most specific proposal remained what it was before they ascended: to eliminate … daylight saving time. How this would improve governmental “efficiency” is unclear.

    Musk’s instrument for Washington’s betterment is the new “Department of Government Efficiency,” which might be more plausible if it did not incorporate two fibs in four words. DOGE is not a department; departments are created by Congress, which created pretty much everything Musk’s advisory committee exists to frown about. And his announced, and arithmetically daunting, goal is to slice a third of the federal budget from the less than a third of the budget that does not include Social Security, Medicare, debt service or defense.

    Musk does not just want government to do what it does more efficiently; he wants it to stop doing much of what it does. Bet on the windmills.

    I appreciate the literary metaphor; could have been even better if GFW had somehow worked in the lovely Dulcinea, played by Donald Trump in a wig.

  • Is there anything cheaper than declaring yourself to be against hatred? Tim Cushing writes at TechDirt about the latest news: Federal Judge Strikes Down Unconstitutional Arkansas Book Ban Law.

    Like far too many legislators, Arkansas politicians have decided it’s time to codify irrational hatred. To do this, they pretended they had a sudden and urgent new obligation to protect “the children” harder than they’ve ever been protected before against the encroachment of alternative viewpoints.

    Like far too many other states, the Arkansas government piggy-backed on existing obscenity laws to declare content they personally didn’t like as “obscene.” Then they went further, saddling librarians at public libraries with civil and criminal penalties for not doing enough censorship.

    And, like many similar hateful efforts, this codification of hatred hit a dead end in a federal court. Public library plaintiffs managed to secure a temporary injunction blocking Arkansas’ book ban from being enforced last summer. The catch was this: the law would remain blocked only until the government presented its revised case for expanded censorship. If it could demonstrate it had a legitimate government interest in banning books these legislators felt were harmful to kids, the law could go back into force.

    Wow, that's a whole lotta hate goin' on in three short paragraphs. I suppose when you easily psychoanalyze your targets as haters, it relieves you of any duty to actually deal with the issues they're raising.

    To be clear, I'm a fan of people reading a wide range of books, whatever they like. On their own dime and time. Things get a lot murkier when you're talking about (1) taxpayer funding of state institutions, and (2) a profession that's been credibly accused of pushing an ideological narrative to the exclusion of others.

    One of my more radical libertarian leanings is "separation of school and state". I have pragmatic reasons for that. (See, for one example, that Emma Camp video above; it's not like the state is doing a good job of it.)

    But there are also principles at stake. See any argument for the "separation of church and state"; the same arguments apply when you substitute "school" for church.

    And also when you substitute "libraries". (Although I'd give my main library in Portsmouth NH a solid B- for their halfway decent, albeit only halfway, effort at ideological diversity.)

    [Amazon Link]
    (paid link)

    But since school and state ain't gonna separate soon, that leaves us with the thorny issue of who decides what books to shelve in school libraries, and who gets access to them.

    (For the record, Amazon lists In My Daddy's Belly age-appropriate for "4+". Link at your right.)

    Tim excerpts the recent judicial ruling:

    The vocation of a librarian requires a commitment to freedom of speech and the celebration of diverse viewpoints unlike that found in any other profession. The librarian curates the collection of reading materials for an entire community, and in doing so, he or she reinforces the bedrock principles on which this country was founded. According to the United States Supreme Court, “Public libraries pursue the worthy missions of facilitating learning and cultural enrichment.”

    […]

    The librarian’s only enemy is the censor who judges contrary opinions to be dangerous, immoral, or wrong.

    The public library of the 21st century is funded and overseen by state and local governments, with the assistance of taxpayer dollars. Nonetheless, the public library is not to be mistaken for simply an arm of the state. By virtue of its mission to provide the citizenry with access to a wide array of information, viewpoints, and content, the public library is decidedly not the state’s creature; it is the people’s.

    It gets pretty close to saying: "Shut up and trust the librarians"

    Fine, but that's not an unchecked power we extend to any other government employee, in Arkansas or (I presume) in any other state.

    It could be the Arkansas law went too far in its zeal. I dont' know, and I wouldn't trust Tim Cushing to be the judge of that.

Everything Wrong With Democrats in a 1:41 TikTok Video

Apparently, "Dr Arlene Unfiltered" put this up on Election Day, early evening:

Yes, of course: as "The Best Ball Junkie" says: spectacularly wrong, hilariously awesome. I have additional observations:

  • Like Kamala, she laughs inappropriately. At what? Her imaginary cleverness?

  • If smug condescension could be monetized, she'd be a millionaire.

  • I am skeptical about how accurate and honest her description of her conversation with the poor sap she ran into at the liquor store is. But (assuming it happened at all) this sounds real, when she asks him, rhetorically: "You do realize you wasted your vote, right?"

    Dr Arlene, as a "political scientist/analyst", your criteria for a "wasted" vote are elusive to me. Simply because you imagine he cast his vote for a losing candidate? Where can I read more about this?

  • Dr Arlene's further musings on politics are easily Googleable. She seems to invariably start her TikTok videos with "OK, so…". Irritating tic, or does she perceive it as some kind of endearing trademark?

Also of note:

  • Except how to fix it. Daniel J. Mitchell presents (ta-da): In One Chart, Everything You Need to Know about America’s Fiscal Mess. And here 'tis:

    You won't see a better illustration of Robert Higgs' thesis laid out nearly 40 years ago in his Crisis and Leviathan: Governments use crises as excuses to expand their scope and spending, and that expansion doesn't go away when the crises end.

    Daniel quotes from a recent WSJ op-ed from Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI):

    Federal spending is out of control. In fiscal 2019, which ran from Oct. 1, 2018, to Sept. 30, 2019, federal outlays totaled $4.447 trillion. In fiscal 2020, federal outlays jumped to $6.554 trillion because of the pandemic spending spree. …Even if you think Covid relief spending levels were appropriate (I don’t), there was no justification for maintaining that level of spending once the pandemic was over. Yet we’ve turned pandemic spending into the new baseline, spending $6.6 trillion… In a sane world, Covid spending levels would have been an extreme aberration, and we would have already returned to a more reasonable level of spending. …I think most people would agree that if you were able to grow your family budget based on the increase in your family size plus the rate of inflation… Why not apply that same discipline to the federal budget? …Using 2014 outlays as a base would establish a 2025 budget of $6.2 trillion with a deficit of $700 billion. Using 2019 outlays results in a 2025 budget of $6.5 trillion with a deficit of $1 trillion. …setting baseline spending to one of those budget years isn’t only reasonable but doable.

    Unfortunately… not a dime in that graph above gets spent without Congressional approval. And as this OpenSecrets page discloses, the re-election rate for House CongressCritters in 2024 was a (typical) 98.5%. And 90.9% of incumbent Senators were re-elected.

    So, who killed fiscal sanity? As Mick Jagger observed so long ago: "After all, it was you and me."

    But mostly you.

  • Is a dream a lie if it don't come true? Or is it something worse? Well, it's pretty bad, according to Jeff Jacoby, who disagrees with Politifact about The real 'lie of the year'.

    You may have heard: their choice for LotY was the Trump/Vance yarn about culinary choices of immigrant Haitians in Springfield, Ohio. Didn't happen. But:

    The most consequential lie of the year was the one peddled again and again by the Biden White House and the president's political and media allies: the lie that the 82-year-old president was as intellectually sharp and mentally focused as ever and that claims to the contrary — even video to the contrary — were nothing but "cheap fakes." Everyone with access to Biden knew better, yet most of them brazenly denied it.

    As they say, Jeff has the receipts. Also piling on Politifact is Robby Soave at Reason: Joe Biden's decline was the biggest lie of 2024.

    The lie, peddled at the behest of Biden's aides and advisers, and sold by White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre to a gullible and incurious mainstream media, was that President Biden remained fit for office—and that mounting public concerns about his age-related decline were based on misinformation. Well before Biden's historic collapse at the June presidential debate, a majority of Americans expressed serious reservations about Biden's ability to serve. When reporters pressed Biden's media surrogates about these polls, they insisted that the supposed evidence of the president's decline was being fabricated by his political enemies. Jean-Pierre thunderously attacked conservative media, and Fox News in particular, for circulating what she described as misleading videos that appeared to show Biden out of sorts.

    At the highest levels of the Biden administration, the official word was: Don't believe your lying eyes. And for the most part, the mainstream media bought it.

    I am pretty sure you will scour Politifact in vain for its evaluation of Biden's heartfelt 2021 promise to uncover the origins of COVID-19:

    The world deserves answers, and I will not rest until we get them.

    And there's his heartfelt promise in his 2024 State of the Union address about the American hostages held by Hamas:

    I pledge to all the families that we will not rest until we bring their loved ones home.

    I'm pretty sure that Biden has rested since.

  • Speaking of lies… Bjørn Lomberg dons his "green" (heh) eyeshade, and writes in the WSJ: Green Electricity Costs a Bundle.

    As nations use more and more supposedly cheap solar and wind power, a strange thing happens: Our power bills get more expensive. This exposes the environmentalist lie that renewables have already outmatched fossil fuels and that the “green transition” is irreversible even under a second Trump administration.

    The claim that green energy is cheaper relies on bogus math that measures the cost of electricity only when the sun is shining and the wind is blowing. Modern societies need around-the-clock power, requiring backup, often powered by fossil fuels. That means we’re paying for two power systems: renewables and backup. Moreover, as fossil fuels are used less, those power sources need to earn their capital costs back in fewer hours, leading to even more expensive power.

    I've already shown you one graph today, so I'll ask you to click over to see the striking positive correlation between contries' fraction of solar/wind-produced electrons, and the cost paid by consumers for those electrons.


Last Modified 2025-01-03 12:18 PM EST

I Was Told There Would Be No Economic Math

[Amazon Link]
(paid link)

Bryan Caplan writes E(X)>0: An Open Letter to Elon. He contrasts two Elon tweets: one, from 2023, says "we should greatly increase legal immigration of anyone who is hard-working, honest, and loves America".

The second, from 2024, says "Immigration should be limited to those who will obviously contribute far more than they take."

Bryan, being an open-borders guy, prefers the former take. He has a 15-point numbered list in response, and here are just the first two items:

  1. Imagine an entrepreneur who said, “Investment should be limited to projects that are obviously far above the market rate of return.” This is a prescription for hyper-cautious mediocrity — refusing to try anything unless you’re virtually sure it will be a great success. Which normally leads to trying next to nothing.

  2. Fortunately for the world, you and other top entrepreneurs favor a radically different principle: Strive to make every investment with a positive expected value. E(X)>0. You don’t demand certainty of total triumph before you take action. Instead, you constantly make bets that you believe will work out on average. [Note: Like other economists, I’m counting the opportunity cost of alternative investments as a cost. X is economic profit, not accounting profit.]

Bryan's post is a real tour de force and I strongly recommend it. (I recommend reading everything I link to here, but this is above average.) It includes a couple pages from Open Borders, the comic book he did with Zach Weinersmith.

Also of note:

  • I'm in favor of more imaginary strikes. Sean Higgins tells the tale of The Teamsters’ Imaginary Strike against Amazon.

    There was a historic strike by the International Brotherhood of Teamsters workers at Amazon facilities over the Christmas holiday, yet it didn’t appear to slow Amazon’s deliveries, and actual Amazon employees on picket lines were few.

    That is to say, the strike was more of a publicity stunt by the Teamsters than an actual grassroots revolt by Amazon workers. These holiday season strikes are an old public relations ploy by unions, who are good at creating a narrative and selling it to reporters.

    The unions know that the holidays are a tough period for news outlets. Not a lot is happening, because most people are on vacation. Many of the outlets’ own reporters are angling for time off. A news story that seems serious, like a labor strike, and that comes with all of the details provided by the union’s media team is something news outlets will usually jump on. Following up on the union’s claims can wait until after the holidays . . . by which time the strike is usually over and everyone has moved on.

    The Teamsters announced, just prior to Christmas, the “largest-ever strike against Amazon.” Stories in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Associated Press, National Public Radio, and CNN, among others, reported on the walkout. “If your package is delayed during the holidays, you can blame Amazon’s insatiable greed,” declared Teamsters general president Sean O’Brien. Having gotten the headlines they wanted, the Teamsters officially called it off on Christmas Eve.

    'Twas fake news. Even my sainted Wall Street Journal was taken in, their headline reading "Thousands of Amazon Workers Strike During Pre-Christmas Rush". Article written by Gareth Vipers, whose author page says is based in London. England, I presume.

  • It's a full-time job. Wilfred Reilly is visited by The Three Holiday Ghosts of Taking Responsibility.

    Now that we Westerners know we mostly do have free will, no one seems to like using it. A few days before New Year’s Eve, writing for a — nay, the — conservative magazine, this strikes me as a point worth discussing.

    That "free will" link goes to Scientific American. Which I would be a lot happier about (since I'm a free will fanboy) if Scientific American hadn't befouled itself by publishing a lot of woke claptrap recently. Ah well.

    But Wilfred's three ghosts are exemplified by recent newsmakers: Lily Phillips, Jordan Neely, and…

    On X and Facebook, we are currently seeing a broader example of the same trend of personal responsibility denial — and one which may hit closer to home for tax-paying readers of this article. Monorail salesman, likely genius, and of-late GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy just began a major conversation and attracted an apple-throwing mob by — while defending most recipients of H-1B foreign “talent” visas — pointing out that white and black American youth may not be the hardest working imaginable occupants of the classroom.

    Quoth he: “The reason top tech companies often hire foreign-born & first-generation engineers over ‘native’ Americans isn’t because of an innate American IQ deficit (a lazy & wrong explanation). A key part of it comes down to the c-word: culture. Tough questions demand tough answers & if we’re really serious about fixing the problem, we have to confront the TRUTH: Our American culture has venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long That doesn’t start in college, it starts YOUNG.”

    As you might imagine, that plain-talking spurred a tsunami of Vivek-hatred. It's what happens when you speak some unvarnished truth.

    ("Monorail salesman"? Probably explained here, a post which includes a video of the funniest one minute and fifty-six seconds of The Simpsons.)

    But Wilfred's bottom line is:

    As New Year’s Day approaches, it’s always worth remembering that the person responsible for probably 95 percent of what you do is you. Let us all work on ourselves, each other, and the country.

    Amen.


Last Modified 2025-01-02 9:41 AM EST

Nonfiction Books I Liked in 2024

Explanation plagiarized from last year, which remains accurate:

Just in case you're interested in what I found informative, interesting, thought-provoking, etc. last year. The cover images are Amazon paid links, and clicking on them will take you there, where I get a cut if you purchase, thanks in advance. Clicking on the book's title will whisk you to my blog posting for a fuller discussion.

I am restricting the list to books I rated with five stars at Goodreads. Nota Bene: Goodreads ratings are subjective; they do not necessarily reflect a book's cosmic quality, just my gut reaction. And perhaps also my mood at the time, grumpy or generous. In other words, don't take this too seriously.

The complete list of books I read in 2024, including fiction, is here.

In order read:

[Amazon Link]
(paid link)
Road to Surrender:Three Men and the Countdown to the End of World War II by Evan Thomas. A punchy, accessible story of the thorny negotiations surrounding Japan's defeat. It was a close-run thing. I learned a lot I didn't know.
[Amazon Link]
(paid link)
Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative by Jennifer Burns. The definitive biography of a Pun Salad all-time hero. The author is unafraid to criticize him, and I'm sure he would object to the subtitle. But the lesson remains: one man can make a difference in turning a country toward liberty.
[Amazon Link]
(paid link)
The Individualists: Radicals, Reactionaries, and the Struggle for the Soul of Libertarianism by Matt Zwolinski and John Tomasi. "Bleeding-heart libertarians" tell the story of how this odd ideology (which includes me under its big tent) developed. Never fear, it's fair. And the authors identify broad ranges of agreement, even between folks calling each other nasty names.
[Amazon Link]
(paid link)
The New Deal's War on the Bill of Rights: The Untold Story of FDR's Concentration Camps, Censorship, and Mass Surveillance by David Beito. A mostly-warts history of the underside of FDR's biography, showing his distrespectful, and probably unconstitutional, attitudes toward his political adversaries and (of course) Japanese in California. It's not a commonly-told tale.
[Amazon Link]
(paid link)
Material World: The Six Raw Materials That Shape Modern Civilization by Ed Conway. Spoiler: sand, salt, iron, copper, oil, and lithium. Conway is an enthusiastic and diligent researcher, who unexpectedly caught my interest on topics I didn't expect. Sand?
[Amazon Link]
(paid link)
The Conservative Futurist: How to Create the Sci-Fi World We Were Promised by James Pethokoukis. This is an age of miracles and wonder, but the author argues (convincingly) that we could have done better. Better than the Roomba, anyway. We need to encourage R&D, innovation, skilled immigration, and (generally) optimism. And (frankly) if it doesn't happen in the USA, it ain't happening anywhere on this planet in the foreseeable future.
[Amazon Link]
(paid link)
The Weirdness of the World by Eric Schwitzgebel. He's a philosophy prof who likes to think outside—way outside—the box. Is the United States of America is a conscious entity? Eric thinks so, and see if you don't agree. Tough going in spots, but in most parts wonderfully accessible and insightful.
[Amazon Link]
(paid link)
America's Revolutionary Mind: A Moral History of the American Revolution and the Declaration That Defined It by C. Bradley Thompson. He looks at that intro of the Declaration of Independence—the thing which Woodrow Wilson urged us to get beyond—and teases out the mood and thoughts of the country that caused it to be written that way.
[Amazon Link]
(paid link)
My Planet: Finding Humor in the Oddest Places by Mary Roach. Think Erma Bombeck, except still alive. Ms. Roach is Dave Barry-level funny, a natural humorist. All the columns here made me smile, many drew amused snorts, and (yes) a number of guffaws.
[Amazon Link]
(paid link)
The End of Race Politics: Arguments for a Colorblind America by Coleman Hughes. I found myself in violent agreement with just about everything Hughes says here, in support of his hopeful subtitle. Unfortunate that the dominant ideology these days seems to point the other way, meaning we have more division and animosity to look forward to.
[Amazon Link]
(paid link)
Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void by Mary Roach. Yes, another Mary Roach book. It's a little old (2010) but holds up pretty well. Despite the title, there isn't lot of Mars-specific stuff here. Mary interviews astronauts, scientists, engineers, etc., all dedicated to figuring out how to get people into space and back in one piece, keeping them functional while on the way.
[Amazon Link]
(paid link)
Democracy: A Guided Tour by Jason Brennan. He clearly states his goal: "a guided tour of the best and most important arguments for and against democracy over time." And he doesn't treat "democracy" as a sacred cow, which is refreshing.
[Amazon Link]
(paid link)
The Pursuit of Happiness: How Classical Writers on Virtue Inspired the Lives of the Founders and Defined America by Jeffrey Rosen. I found this book to be complementary to C. Bradley Thompson's (above), and also excellent. Rosen compiles a reading list of philosophers that the Founders considered insightful: a lot of stoics, and also Hume, Locke, and Adam Smith.
[Amazon Link]
(paid link)
The Singularity Is Nearer: When We Merge with AI by Ray Kurzweil. And Kurzweil isn't kidding around when he says "merge". We're gonna plug those machines into our nervous system, and… well, he predicts we'll be uploaded. Did he just blow my mind? Yup.
[Amazon Link]
(paid link)
Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law by Mary Roach. Yes, another Mary Roach book. Here, she looks at human/non-human interactions, mostly violent, gross, and otherwise unpleasant. Not as hilarious as her other books, because Mary (being nice) often takes the side of the non-humans.
[Amazon Link]
(paid link)
Morning After the Revolution: Dispatches from the Wrong Side of History by Nellie Bowles. A collection of essays from a very independent mind, who (as a lesbian feminist) is somewhat put out as being defined as a "non-man attracted to non-men". She tours outposts of woke ideology, coming away amused, disgusted, and outraged, in various proportions.

Last Modified 2025-01-01 5:44 PM EST

"Actual Punches Thrown"

James Freeman highlights some recent violent rhetoric:

Since November various leftists have been considering the lessons of this year’s U.S. election results. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D., R.I.) for his part seems to have concluded that what voters want is for politicians like him to be more belligerent and partisan. Hailey Fuchs reports for Politico:

Rhode Island Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse is calling for DNC delegates to consider how the Democratic Party’s infrastructure can support a “war machine” to lead attacks against Republicans…
“We in Congress customarily say we’re ‘fighting’ for things when we really mean working or toiling,” Whitehouse wrote. “A fight means a defined adversary, a battle strategy, and actual punches thrown. Done well, it involves exposing and degrading your adversary’s machinery of warfare.”

Let’s all hope he’s only torturing metaphors.

I suppose. I'm currently reading Christopher Cox's biography of Woodrow Wilson, which (for some reason) goes into a gory description of Representative Preston Brooks' (D-SC) caning of Senator Charles Sumner (R-MA) in 1856. Republicans, if Whitehouse starts carrying a walking stick into the Senate chambers, I'd be on my guard.

Metaphorically, my CongressCritter, Chris Pappas, is fond of claiming he's fighting. As are my state's senators, Jeanne Shaheen and Maggie Hassan. As far as I can tell, they refrain from "actual punches thrown", and just buy into the lame, overused metaphor. Maybe they could make a new year's resolution to tone it down.

(But, amusingly, one of those Shaheen links brings up a 2020 newsletter article says she's "Fighting to protect domestic violence survivors during the pandemic". That's pretty funny to imagine non-metaphorically.)

Also of note:

  • Incentives matter. James Freeman (yes, again) observes, helpfully: Technology Can Help Drain the Swamp.

    One of the reasons the Biden era will be fondly remembered in Washington is that our 46th president has managed to keep Washingtonians largely immune from the efficiencies of the digital revolution. Forget for a moment the political debates about how much to take from productive citizens and give to this or that special-interest group. What’s astounding—given how much of government involves the automation-ready tasks of collecting and redistributing money and information—is that the federal workforce continues to grow. While technology relentlessly makes things better, faster and cheaper in the private economy, the productivity wave isn’t washing over the turbid, still waters of the swamp.

    Outside of government, workers naturally wonder if their jobs may be replaced by robots or artificial intelligence or some other form of technological innovation. History says the results are wonderful—with new industries, new consumer benefits and new jobs in which highly-productive workers can demand higher pay. But for particular people in particular situations it can feel like an all-out sprint to stay ahead of the technological curve.

    Freeman points to this WSJ news article Where Did All of the Managers Go? It says (among other things):

    In all, U.S. public companies have cut their middle-manager head counts by about 6% since the peak of their pandemic hiring sprees, according to a new analysis of more than 20 million white-collar workers by employment-data provider Live Data Technologies. Senior executives, whose ranks have shrunk nearly 5% since the end of 2021, haven’t fared much better.

    It's way past time to trim the ranks of less-productive government employees.

  • Pun Salad pounces on this report. Ronald Bailey says the science is settled: Moderate drinking linked to lower overall mortality rate.

    "When it comes to alcohol consumption, there is no safe amount that does not affect health," declared the World Health Organization (WHO) in 2022. "No, moderate drinking isn't good for your health," headlined The Washington Post citing a 2023 Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) meta-analysis probing the epidemiological association between mean daily alcohol intake and all-cause mortality. Interestingly, two of the co-authors of the JAMA article have been associated with various neo-prohibitionist organizations.

    In any case, these pronouncements contradict decades of research that identified a U-shaped relationship in which mortality is greater for both non-drinkers and heavy drinkers than it is for moderate drinkers.

    A new report reviewing evidence on moderate alcohol consumption and health outcomes issued earlier this month by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NAS) concludes that the WHO and the JAMA researchers are wrong. Moderate drinking is associated with some health benefits, with one notable exception.

    (The exception: breast cancer in women.)

  • Fashion tips for all you white women out there. Jerry Coyne shares the Time magazine report: Women's March Rebranded, Reorganized, and Is Ready for 2025.

    When activist and organizer Raquel Willis spoke at the inaugural Women’s March on the day of Donald Trump’s inauguration on January 20, 2017, the organization was very different.

    At that time, Willis was a burgeoning leader in social justice and activism, and she says the conversation around trans experiences was limited. “It was a time where there was more visibility than ever before, more trans folks engaged in social justice movement than ever before,” Willis says. “And yet there was a tension between, particularly cis women and trans women, but also women of other experiences too.”

    The first Women’s March was enormous, bringing an estimated 500,000 marchers to Washington, DC and over 4 million throughout the United States. At the time, the protest was the largest single-day protest in the country’s history, and it created indelible protest images of women in pink hats that would define a certain type of opposition to Trump’s presidency. But during the following years, the Women’s March fractured. There were multiple arguments among those within the organization, the group faced allegations of racism and antisemitism, and sponsors fled. There were also strategic questions: Willis says she was skeptical about centering Trump as a singular, isolated political event, and instead wishes there was discussion of him as “reflective of these long standing systems of oppression, white supremacy, cis heteropatriarchy, classism, and capitalism.”

    Capitalism! Oh dear! Gee, wonder why "sponsors fled"?

    But you have to have a heart of stone to read this paragraph without laughing:

    In a further sign that the People’s March is creating some distance with the iconography of the 2017 Women’s March, in the the [sic] Frequently Asked Questions section of its website, the site says marchers should not bring weapons, drugs, or Handmaid’s Tale costumes. "The use of Handmaid's Tale imagery to characterize the controlling of women’s reproduction has proliferated, primarily by white women across the country, since the show has gained popularity,” the site reads. “This message continues to create more fragmentation, often around race and class, because it erases the fact that Black women, undocumented women, incarcerated women, poor women and disabled women have always had their reproduction freedom controlled in this country."

    So keep those bonnets in the closet, white women!

    I'll also take issue with Time's description of the 2017 demonstration as the "first Women's March". Back in 1913, the Woman Suffrage Procession was similarly scheduled just before Woodrow Wilson's inauguration, in support of the (eventual) Nineteenth Amendment. (Yeah, again a bit of trivia from that Wilson bio mentioned above.)