Pun Salad

I've been a fan of Sabine Hossenfelder for a while for her clear, and sometimes provocative, views on physics research. But I admit I did not see this coming:

Note that by "academia", Sabine is specifically referring to taxpayer-funded research carried out by academic institutions. Which, she argues, has the pitfalls and fatal conceits that (yes) Hayek pointed out decades back about all central planning. (She does this without explicitly invoking the man, but come on.)

This doesn't mean I agree with her on everything, but it's nice to see her so eloquent (and, IMHO, correct) on this. If you have a spare 20 minutes or so to watch the video, check it out.

Also of note:

• And is Pravda on the Piscataqua next? The Issues & Insights Editorial Board can't seem to believe its own collective eyes: Did Jeff Bezos Just Kill Karl Marx On K Street?

  Amazon founder and owner of the Washington Post Jeff Bezos announced Wednesday that change is coming to the paper’s opinion pages. Going forward, they will be supporting and defending the “two pillars” that are “right for America,” “personal liberties and free markets.” It was helpful for those who oppose the change to identify themselves as enemies of personal liberties and free markets.

  Bezos also said that “viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others.”

  I got a chuckle from Reason's Robby Soave's reaction:

  Hey, that's our job!

  There's also some commentary from Reason editor Katherine Mangu-Ward. I'm sure that both Robby and Katherine will agree that competition generally works to the benefit of consumers.

  Note: Pravda on the Piscataqua is how I've resolved to refer to our local paper until further notice. Today's online edition features a column from Portsmouth State Rep Gerald W.R. Ward, which muses on the "Sons of Liberty Bowl", currently at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.

  The Sons of Liberty Bowl (often shorted to just Liberty Bowl) commemorates a courageous decision by the Massachusetts House of Representatives, which refused to bend the knee to King George III when he demanded that they retract the letter they had written to the other colonies protesting the Townshend Acts. They voted 92-17 “not to rescind” that letter, and to let it stand. Revere’s bowl is dedicated to the “Glorious 92” members of the House who held their ground and spoke truth to power, declaring that their votes were cast with a “strict regard to Liberty and the Conscience of their Constituents.”

  In 2025, we must speak out against the people who are attempting to do an end-run around those hard-earned rights, roll them back, and replace our Constitution with a monarchy, dictatorship, or even a theocracy. Let’s remember Paul Revere and the Glorious 92 and not let those temporarily in power tarnish the legacy of the Sons of Liberty Bowl in their attempt to re-write and destroy American history, democracy, and democratic institutions. We defeated a monarchy once; we can do it again. Let us remain undaunted and continue to be the beacon of liberty for the world, not the supporters of insolent would-be kings and autocrats.

  I'm not a Trump fan, but this is unhinged. And makes me wonder if, like those Boston patriots he invokes, Gerald W.R. Ward is ready to embrace secession.

  If not, he's just grandstanding.

• Specifically, dangerous to your finances. James Freeman looks at Washington’s Most Dangerous Departments.

  Fans of big government seem to have largely abandoned the effort to argue that U.S. taxpayers ought to be funding transgender operas in Colombia or DEI programs in Serbia. But the Beltway ethos holds that the Trump effort to cut government waste must be countered. Therefore while many media folk criticize the manner in which Trump adviser Elon Musk encourages federal efficiency—or question the accuracy of his posts on his media platform, X—some say his stories of taxpayer abuse are true but already widely known and therefore not news. A new government report illuminates this last phenomenon and underlines perhaps the greatest need for reform. How can Team Trump wring out of the federal budget inexcusable waste that, years after its discovery, has continued to be tolerated by official Washington?

  Recently this column noted the astounding levels of improper federal payments estimated not by Messrs. Trump and Musk, but by Democrats on the House Oversight Committee. Their estimates run up to more than $200 billion a year. Also, months before Mr. Trump’s election last year and long before the creation of DOGE, Congress’s Government Accountability Office estimated that annual federal fraud losses could be north of $500 billion.

  James notes the issuance of the GAO's latest report. Exceprt from that:

  Since 2003, federal agencies have reported about $2.8 trillion in estimated improper payments, including over $150 billion government-wide in each of the last 7 years. These figures do not represent a full accounting of improper payments because agencies have not reported estimates for some programs as required. For example, we found that agencies failed to report fiscal year 2023 improper payment estimates for nine risk-susceptible programs.

  The areas on the High-Risk List include programs that represented about 80 percent of the total government-wide reported improper payment estimate. These include two of the fastest-growing programs—Medicare and Medicaid—as well as the unemployment insurance system and the Earned Income Tax Credit. While agencies and the Department of the Treasury are taking some steps to address this issue, much more needs to be done to control billions of dollars in overpayments and prevent fraud. Implementation of GAO's recommendations by agencies and the Congress would help achieve better program integrity.

  Another thing that one would hope is on Elon's reading list. And moved quickly to his "Holy crap, let's do something about this" list.

• So the kid was sad? Can't blame him, really. Despite his headline, I think Ronald Bailey is actually the sad one: Unvaccinated kid sadly dies of measles in Texas.

  An unvaccinated child died of measles in West Texas, officials said Wednesday, marking the first death in an ongoing outbreak of the highly contagious respiratory illness. The child was one of 124 confirmed cases in this vaccine-preventable outbreak. Eighteen others have been hospitalized. The loss is a tragedy; the measles vaccine is 97 percent effective in preventing disease.

  "It is no coincidence in my mind that [Robert F. Kennedy Jr.] gets confirmed to be secretary of [the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS)], and immediately we have a measles outbreak," said Polly Tommey in an interview with NBC News. Tommey is the programming director of Children's Health Defense, the anti-vaccination advocacy group founded by RFK Jr. Tommey believes that the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine caused her son's autism.

  Indeed, Tommey could be right; it is perhaps no coincidence. After all, the already vaccine-hesitant parents of the infected kids in Texas live in a culture influenced by RFK Jr.'s long and sordid history of kooky and dangerous anti-vaccination agitation.

  We were doing pretty well at wiping out measles but progress seemed to stall about 25 years ago. I imagine that's due to kooks like Junior and Polly Tommey.

• We've pretty much given up on Matthew 7:1 So Jonah Goldberg advises Judge Trump’s Motives, Not Just His Methods. It's long, but convincing, and here's the bottom line:

  This is not normal. Trump’s program isn’t really ideological and certainly not “conservative” in any traditional sense. If Trump were overseeing the imposition of Reaganism, or even some ideological agenda I disagreed with, those arguments would have greater purchase with me. But MAGA at its best is a pretext, and more often it’s not even that. This is the faux-ideology of one person, one person’s vanity, grievances and personal glory. 

  That’s why I think the “why” of it all is much more important than debates about “can.” Sure, he can do a lot of things, because the Founders really didn’t envision someone like Trump as president. They envisioned the man who presided over the Constitutional Convention, George Washington. At CPAC last week, Trump noted that Bill O’Reilly said that Trump was a better president than George Washington. To which Trump responded, “I love beating George Washington.” The audience swooned.

  For heathens out there: Matthew 7:1.

Recently on the book blog:

Personal anecdote: Caught up by the movies in the 1960s, I was buying and reading James Bond novels as a young teen. Well, my mom got hold of this one before I had a chance to read it, and she promptly forbade me from reading any more Bond books.

Well, sorry Mom, but I finally got around to reading it. And I kind of see your point. Even the book's Wikipedia entry says this is "the most sexually explicit" 007 novel.

It's otherwise unusual in that it's first-person narrated by Vivienne Michel, a young Canadian woman. As the book opens, she's working as receptionist in an upstate New York "motor court", just down the road from Lake George. It's the end of the tourist season, and the motel's managers are bugging out a little early, leaving Viv alone to close up for the winter.

Then she relates her biography, centered around two very unfortunate love affairs. That takes a while.

Her solitary evening is interrupted by two thugs demanding entrance, claiming they are scouting out the place for insurance purposes, on the orders of the motel's owner. That turns out to be sorta true, even though their plans also involve rape, murder, and arson.

But then Bond shows up (in an unbelievable coincidence) on page 118 of this 194-page edition. And, of course, thwarts the bad guys and saves Viv, thanks to his quick wits and gunplay. (That takes a while too, but there's time for makin' whoopee.)

So it's a very unusual Bond novel. According to that Wikipedia page, the critics were unkind. But Ian Fleming deserves some credit for breaking with formula, and writing with a woman's voice. Yes, the prose gets purplish, especially near the end, as Viv reflects on her Bond experience. Which made me recall the old Samuel Johnson quote: "It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all."

Also from that Wikipedia page: Fleming sold the movie rights on the condition that only the title be used and none of the plot. A successful demand, except for one of the thugs having steel-capped teeth: that was translated into Richard Kiel's Jaws character.

The University Near Here notes recognition: Vyas Recognized for Fostering Student Engagement and Belonging.

I sense a little confusion. Is Vyas a "leading" professional, or a mere "mid-level" professional?

Which makes me wonder: does the ACPA give awards for low-level professionals?

Anyway: you can click through for further information. What has Vyas done?

Emphasis added. Reader, that is a lot of facilitating. And you are welcome to reread that last paragraph, and reflect on the differences between "demonstrated excellence", "outstanding performance", and "distinguished service". Three different things, or three ways to say the same thing?

I've mentioned Vyas before (in 2023 and 2024), not that I'm obsessed or anything. As headlined above, I am sure he's a nice guy; you don't get accolades like he has without being a nice guy.

But the things I've mentioned before still apply: he's embedded in an environment of DEI word salad, where your "identity" matters much more than your actual accomplishments. Conclaves are held nationwide, where sessions are facilitated, awards are awarded, and a wide array of meatless appetizers are provided.

As stated, Vyas heads up UNH's Aulbani J. Beauregard Center for Equity, Justice, and Freedom which replicates the nationwide infrastructure: awards given, efforts facilitated, etc. And better office furniture is requested.

Other than that, AJBCfEJaF doesn't seem to do that much.

UNH is looking to make drastic budget cuts. It would be nice if they took a hard look at its DEI bureaucracy. I'm sure there are many other institutions that would love to hire a nice guy.

Also of note:

• Good advice! David L. Bahnsen offers three words for our troubled times: Curb Your Hysteria.

  At some point in my adult life, much later than I wish it had been, I learned that a person worth emulating is a person who possesses poise, calm, and sobriety. As fun as it can be to be excitable, or to be around excitable people, I have not often observed unchecked zeal to be the stuff that Super Bowl champions — or good portfolio managers, or good friends, or productive adults — are made of. Sound and fury can be useful, but grown-ups have to be people of sound judgment and judicious restraint if they are to maximize their God-given potential.

  The current political environment brings this reality for individuals into the public realm. The Trump moment generates excitability and, in some cases, outright hysteria. It does so for good reasons (there can be bad things and good things worth being excited about), and it does so for awful reasons (many people are simply unhinged) — but it does so also because we are in a time defined far more by emotional exuberance than rational discourse (online and otherwise).

  It's been put different ways: ignore the cheerleaders; don't feed the trolls; recognize that hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue; know how to recognize, and spell, hyperbole.

• And a keen observation! Charles C. Mann reminds us: We Live Like Royalty and Don’t Know It.

  At the rehearsal dinner I began thinking about Thomas Jefferson’s ink. My wife and I were at a fancy destination wedding on a faraway island in the Pacific Northwest. Around us were musicians, catered food, a full bar, and chandeliers, all set against a superb ocean sunset. Not for the first time, I was thinking about how amazing it is that relatively ordinary middle-class Americans could afford such events — on special occasions, at least.

  My wife and I were at a tableful of smart, well-educated twenty-somethings — friends of the bride and groom. The wedding, with all its hope and aspiration, had put them in mind of the future. As young people should, they wanted to help make that future bright. There was so much to do! They wanted the hungry to be fed, the thirsty to have water, the poor to have light, the sick to be well.

  But when I mentioned how remarkable it was that a hundred-plus people could parachute into a remote, unfamiliar place and eat a gourmet meal untroubled by fears for their health and comfort, they were surprised. The heroic systems required to bring all the elements of their dinner to these tables by the sea were invisible to them. Despite their fine education, they knew little about the mechanisms of today’s food, water, energy, and public-health systems. They wanted a better world, but they didn’t know how this one worked.

  Charles is steeped in history, so he knows how far we've come.

  And Jefferson's ink? Monticello "was so cold in winter that the ink in his pen sometimes froze, making it difficult for him to write to complain about the chill."

  When was the last time your ink froze? If your answer is "Er, never," reflect on that and the other ways you live better than the American aristocracy of 220 years previous. Even without slaves.

• And some advice for a politician! The WSJ editorialists, playing Evita, offer some: Don’t Cry for the CFPB, Elizabeth Warren. You know the tune, so sing along:

  The Senate Banking Committee holds a confirmation hearing Thursday for Jonathan McKernan, President Trump’s nominee to lead the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and expect histrionics from Elizabeth Warren as she loses control of her baby.

  The Massachusetts Democrat devised the CFPB after the 2008-09 financial panic to be independent of political control and normal constitutional checks and balances. Because the bureau obtains its funding on demand from the Federal Reserve, Congress can’t use its power of the purse as a form of oversight.

  Democrats in Congress are suddenly fuming that they can’t stop the Trump Administration’s plans to overhaul the bureau. “Congress built [the CFPB], and no one other than Congress—not Donald Trump, not Elon Musk, no one—can fire the financial cops,” Ms. Warren said this month in a protest at CFPB headquarters.

  Well, no, by her own design Congress can’t force the bureau to spend money, including on employee salaries. She also says no other agency will protect consumers, but plenty of other regulators can do the same job better.

  Trump kept his promise; so keep your distance.

  I'm tempted to see if that hearing will be on C-SPAN, but (alas) I think I'm out of popcorn.

• And you know what they say about idle hands! Jacob Sullum notes a devil's playground in DC: The FTC has no business trying to make sure social media are 'fair'

  Many Americans, including me, have had frustrating experiences with content moderation on social media platforms. Andrew Ferguson, the Trump-appointed chairman of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), wants us to know that such experiences are not just annoying or perplexing; they are "un-American" and "potentially illegal."

  Ferguson, who began soliciting complaints about "Big Tech censorship" last week, touts his initiative as a blow against "the tyranny of Big Tech" and "an important step forward in restoring free speech." But like Brendan Carr, the Trump-appointed chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, Ferguson is flexing his regulatory powers in a way that undermines freedom of speech by meddling in private editorial choices.

  We just sent a bunch of techbiz-meddlers packing, apparently only to get more coming in.

  Ah well, as Jefferson never actually wrote, probably because of frozen ink: "Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty."

  Jacob Sullum is vigilant, good for him.

The first post on this blog was made on February 27, 2005, which makes it (counting on fingers and toes) twenty years old today.

I guess that counts as a milestone. I've dinked that first post over the years to reflect changing circumstances (like moving it off my workstation at the University Near Here to a commercial hosting site). The main tenets still apply:

• The content is whatever strikes my fancy, mostly (sigh) politics-related. Occasionally other interests show up.

• Although there are sub-blogs where I record books I've read, movies I've watched, and geek-related stuff.

• Ads here are simple image-links to Amazon products (as on your right); I get a cut when anyone buys something by clicking thereon. That sometimes happens, thanks. Occasionally, products vanish from Amazon. I try to fix that when I notice.

  Peeve: Even some sites I frequent have uglified themselves with intelligence-insulting clickbait ads. Even (sigh) Instapundit, my inspiration. ("The Video Obama Thought We'd Never Uncover"? I feel soiled by even typing that, Glenn.)

• No comments.

  Another peeve: I continue to think that blog-comments are "Usenet, reinvented poorly". (Apologies for the very dated reference.) People who want to comment on something they see here can and should do so on their own blog. Or how about Twitter/X/BlueSky?

• I used to have a list of blogs I read over there on the right. (No, your right.) I stopped doing that last June. Anybody miss it? No? Good.

• I am kind of geek-proud that the blog is (as near as I can tell) totally HTML5-compliant.

It's probably overoptimistic to think I'll be doing this for another twenty years. But I'll keep chugging along for now.

Reason's Zach Weissmueller attempts to explain Why the internet celebrated Luigi Mangione.

There's a text version at the link. Excerpt:

It's one of those things that explains a lot of disturbing stuff out there. For example: this Power Line post that reports on a recent poll:

Support for Israel over Hamas in the conflict remains high, with 77% of voters supporting Israel.

Power Line points out that means 23% are supporting Hamas. The ones recently shown to have murdered a young mother and her two children in captivity. Something the Palestinian crowd cheered as their coffins were paraded in Gaza.

Which made this LTE from Karina Quintans in my local paper especially perverse:

This makes the Palestinians the very embodiment of our state motto: “Live Free or Die."

I can only imagine how she feels about Luigi Mangione.

Also of note:

• In our continuing exploration of depravity… Richard Hanania takes to the Free Press and looks at the other end of the horseshoe: I Can Explain Why the Nazi Salute Is Back.

  Anyone who spends any time on X today knows that the right has a serious Nazi problem, which those in the broader movement refuse to speak out against for fear of being seen as sympathizing with the enemy. When it turned out that a DOGE engineer was posting “normalize Indian hate” a few months earlier, he ended up resigning but was subsequently defended by Elon Musk and J.D. Vance and then rehired—as if talking like this was appropriate for someone with an important position in the federal government.

  In addition to reflecting the existence of an opposition culture that can’t yet acknowledge it has won, the rise of Nazi salutes reveals a movement that has yet to get serious about policing its own borders, a necessity for expanding its base and effectively wielding power. For those trying to form political coalitions and have an influence on public policy, Nazi salutes are obviously a hindrance to their goals—and they give leftists new life.

  Owning the libs is not a philosophy or a winning political strategy. As someone whose brain has undergone the same process as many on the right, I’ve learned that turning into a caricature of what your political opponents are against is both intellectually and spiritually stifling. One becomes as much a mental slave to the censors of the far left as any of their most devoted foot soldiers. It takes away the ability to engage in a measured consideration of issues or social trends, and introduces an intellectual inflexibility that makes one unable to recognize when circumstances have changed. Becoming an ironic Nazi or feeling the need to defend such posturing is little better. It is a method of communication that was almost certainly never productive but under current conditions has become truly grotesque—and should have no place in public life.

  Richard confesses that he had his own nasty "owning the libs" obsession in his younger days, so he speaks from experience.

  I'd like to think I was never that bad.

• The More Things Change… Do you recall the bad old days, when the Biden Administration and Nina Jankowicz attempted censorship-by-proxy. Well, that horseshoe has curled back on itself, as Jacob Sullum notes: Trump wants a First Amendment exception for 'fake news'

  "Fake News is an UNPARDONABLE SIN!" President Donald Trump declares in a Truth Social rant inspired by the cancellation of Joy Reid's MSNBC show. "This whole corrupt operation is nothing more than an illegal arm of the Democrat Party. They should be forced to pay vast sums of money for the damage they've done to our Country."

  Trump's claim that journalism he does not like is "illegal" and constitutes a tort justifying massive civil damages should be familiar by now. He has made such claims not only in social media posts but also in actual lawsuits against news organizations. As the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) explains in a motion filed last Friday, these chilling attempts to convert Trump's complaints about press coverage into causes of action are legally baseless and blatantly unconstitutional.

  I don't suppose impeachment is an option with the House in GOP hands, but … y'know ‥ this is a pretty clear violation of the Oath of Office just a few weeks ago, the part about "to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States".

• Live not by lies. Jonah notes that it's tough advice to follow When the Truth Is Simple but Being Truthful Is Complicated. But it helps to be a coward! For a recent demonstration:

  On the day before the third anniversary of the brutal, lawless invasion of Ukraine, Fox News Sunday host Shannon Bream pressed Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on whether it’s “fair to say” that Russia’s attack was unprovoked. Hegseth responded that it’s “fair to say it’s a very complicated situation.”

  This is a good illustration of the difference between a complicated question and the complications of answering a simple question honestly. The answer to the question “Does this dress make me look fat?” may be simple enough, but answering it honestly can be quite difficult in some circumstances.

  Hegseth is hardly the only prominent Republican official who has dodged the question since the president outrageously claimed that Ukraine “started” the war. Mike Waltz, Trump’s national security adviser, also repeatedly refused to answer the question.

  Sometimes figuring out who started a war is complicated. But this isn’t World War I or the War of Jenkins’ Ear. Of course Russia started it.

  Given that the answer to the question is so uncomplicated, why is answering it so complicated?

  It’s not because Russia will be offended by an accurate response. The West has provided billions in military aid to Ukraine and heaped sanctions on Vladimir Putin and his regime in response to the criminal invasion. Saying once again that Russia started the war would not change the geopolitical equation in the slightest.

  No, what makes this complicated is that Donald Trump is aping Putin’s talking points about who started the war. Publicly contradicting Trump creates complications for any Republican official who dares to do so. 

  If Trump says basset hounds can fly, they have to say it too. This is the dynamic that has bedeviled the GOP since Trump won the presidential nomination in 2016.

  That's a long excerpt, sorry. But I wanted to get to the bit about flying basset hounds.

• They should just change their name to "Baby Killers ᴙ Us". At NR, Susan Bane writes The Dark Truth About Planned Parenthood Is Now Undeniable.

  Mismanaged abortions, patients receiving expired medication, sewage leaking into recovery rooms.

  These are all incidents described in a bombshell New York Times article on the suffering quality of health care offered by the nation’s largest abortion business, Planned Parenthood.

  According to the report, the abortion giant has been plagued by stories of horrific treatment that patients have endured at its affiliate clinics. One center mismanaged an IUD placement in a patient, leaving her with months of sharp pain and bleeding. To add insult to injury, this woman’s family continued to receive bills from the affiliate long after they had paid their balance for the device that hurt her.

  The NYT story is pretty brutal all by itself, shorn of its pro-abortion bias.

• Attention should be paid to a brave lonely voice. The WSJ's "A-Hed" story often features someone quirky. Yesterday it Mark Weller, a defender of the currency status quo: Everyone Hates Pennies, Except This Guy.

  Whenever the penny is threatened, one man stands up to defend it.

  Mark Weller has been on a roll for three decades, arguing for the one-cent coin’s existence every chance he gets. When the penny is slighted in newspapers, it’s Weller who writes letters to the editor. He’s extolled the coin’s virtues on television and radio shows. The pro-penny group he runs, Americans for Common Cents, spits out facts to lawmakers about the benefits of the smallest unit of U.S. currency. And he’s been to Capitol Hill countless times to convince Congress to keep the penny, which the U.S. Mint has been producing since 1793.

  Here is the "Americans for Common Cents" website, pennies.org.

  I think any decent pro-market, government-skeptical publication should point out that the move to stop producing the penny implicitly contains a shameful unstated admission: despite Uncle Stupid having a legally-enforced monopoly at producing legal-tender currency, it has done a lousy job of providing what should be Job One: making the currency a reliable long-term store of value.

  That's why the penny is relatively "expensive" to produce: inflation has eaten its value away.

  I haven't even seen this point made at (sigh) Reason. Example recent article: To cut government spending, Trump targets pocket change.

Recently on the book blog:

A first for me: I'm reporting on this book because the author, Steven Max Russo, requested that I "take a look". Hey, why not? I gather he's self-publishing, and self-promoting, and I kind of admire that. Steven offered to send an ePub or PDF version, but I bought it. The Kindle version is $5.99 as I type.

I have to admit I was a little put off by this sentence in the book's third paragraph: "She could almost see the ribs in his thin frame." Um, could she see them or not? How do you almost see something? Sorry, a pet peeve. But I think a decent editor would have flagged that.

But (good news) there were no further major stylistic potholes that I noticed. It's a very decent page-turner (or, more accurately screen-swiper).

"She" is Abigail Barnes, who's decided to make her living as a debt collector. She's moving up to New Jersey after some sort of unspecified trouble down in Baltimore. The guy whose ribs she either can, or can't, see is Hector Perez, and he asks her for a lift, encouraging her compliance with a shotgun. She's unruffled, and takes Hector home. Hector is no criminal mastermind, as he forgets his shotgun when he exits the car.

In any case, a relationship is forged. Abigail soon establishes some connections with the low-level criminal element of Bergen County, New Jersey, and starts making some decent money. It turns out she has major skills in fighting dirty (Krav Maga style), a couple of guns, and a nasty pair of brass knuckles (illegal to carry in NJ, tsk!) All useful skills and resources for making deadbeats pay up.

A major career obstacle occurs: after Abigail delivers a successful collection to Benny the bookie, Benny gets his head bashed in. Whodunit? We're pretty sure it's not Abigail, but none of the other denizens of New Jersey crime seem convinced. And they are pretty much of the "kill 'em all, let God sort 'em out" method of justice. So Abigail has to get out from under this, somehow. Cat-and-mouse activity ensues, capped by a very violent showdown.

I detect a certain amount of moral clarity here that's sorely missing … um, elsewhere:

America has always been a pillar of freedom and democracy. We have to have the moral clarity to know the difference between good and evil and right and wrong. We can’t blur those lines. We must choose a side, and it should never be the side of dictators.

— Nikki Haley (@NikkiHaley) February 24, 2025

Hans Bader has the story: U.S., North Korea, Russia vote against UN resolution affirming Ukraine's territorial integrity.

At NR, Noah Rothman wonders: Do We Have to Lie on Russia’s Behalf?

And Jeffrey Blehar piles on with another query: What Are Costs of Lying for Russia?.

For obvious reasons, I dug up Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's 1974 essay, Live Not By Lies. A key, relevant, paragraph:

So that's where we are today, barely over one month into Trump II: Living By Lies.

Also of note:

• Not too smart on the domestic front either. Kevin D. Williamson on Elon and DOGE: Immortal Stupidity, Revisited.

  One of the irritating things about DOGE—something that ought to bother conservative DOGE apologists more than it should—is the comprehensive lack of honesty in the thing. The so-called Department of Government Efficiency is not a department, it is really only quasi-government at most, and its aim is not efficiency. It is the right-wing mirror image of those “diversity” offices whose aim is the enforcement of homogeneity and conformity. George Orwell (I hope he is pleasantly surprised by his position in the afterlife) is somewhere laughing his immortal ass off.

  The dishonesty is compounded by secrecy. For example, we probably should know who is in charge of the project. There is a person calling himself or herself the ”DOGE administrator” who signs off on paperwork, but no one outside of Musk’s little circle knows who this person is. The only thing the White House will say is that it is not Elon Musk—which means, of course, that it is Elon Musk de facto if not Elon Musk de jure. (Trump says Musk is in charge, contradicting his own people.) People who smile admiringly and pronounce that Trump and Musk just don’t “play by the old rules” ought to think a little bit, if they still can, about what it is they are smiling at.

  To slightly adjust KDW's subhed: <voice imitation="linda_richman">"The Department of Government Efficiency is neither a department nor efficient. Discuss."</voice>

• That would make a grand total of one reason, James. James Freeman wonders if there's Another Reason to Move to Florida?

  Florida Man is at it again, with an intriguing message that could make the Sunshine State even more alluring to blue-state residents currently suffering in high-tax locales. Responding to a question on X about the possibility of abolishing property taxes in Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis (R., Fla.) wrote recently:

  Property taxes are local, not state. So we’d need to do a constitutional amendment (requires 60% of voters to approve) to eliminate them (which I would support) or even to reform/lower them… We should put the boldest amendment on the ballot that has a chance of getting that 60%… I agree that taxing land/property is the more oppressive and ineffective form of taxation…

  Florida’s regular legislative session starts next week and state Sen. Jonathan Martin (R., Fort Myers) recently filed a bill to study “a framework to eliminate property taxes… and to replace property tax revenues through budget reductions, sales-based consumption taxes, and locally determined consumption taxes authorized by the Legislature.” The study must include, among other things, an “evaluation of whether a shift to consumption-based taxes would make Florida more attractive to businesses compared to other states.”

  James links to the Tax Foundation's 2025 State Tax Competitiveness Index which (indeed) has Florida in fourth place, slightly ahead of New Hampshire, which is in sixth.

  A quick glance at the study's breakdown shows that Florida does better than New Hampshire, competitiveness-wise, in Corporate Taxes, Individual Taxes, Property Taxes, and Unemployment Insurance Taxes. But New Hampshire beats Florida on Sales Taxes. (They say NH has no sales tax, but try eating in a restaurant, or getting a hotel room.)

• But you look like you need some good news. Megan McArdle has some: Academia is finally learning hard lessons (For some reason, this is a change from yesterday's headline: "Academia finally got schooled.")

  The left, not the right, picked this fight. Too many institutions set themselves up as the “Resistance” to Trump and tried to make a lot of mainstream political opinions anathematic, while expecting to be protected from backlash by principles such as academic freedom that they were no longer honoring. This was politically naive and criminally stupid for institutions that rely so heavily on U.S. taxpayer support.

  Academia at least should have known better, given that it has entire departments devoted to studying how politics works. It has long been clear that cuts to research funding could be the first step if Republicans were so minded. The student loans and Pell grants that subsidize tuition could be slashed, the tax rules that let elite institutions accumulate massive endowments could be changed, and in red states, government aid to public schools could be reduced. The resulting budget holes would be calamitous in many cases and would filter through the ecosystem even to schools that survived: If small schools stop hiring new faculty, that means fewer jobs for graduate students from large research universities.

  Nonetheless, school administrations began issuing left-wing hot takes on news that played to the culture war, and students agitated, often successfully, to de-platform right-wing speakers and punish students or faculty who deviated from progressive orthodoxy. Milquetoast professional opinions and legitimate research were retracted under pressure from activists. Scientists marched against Trump — not as private citizens but as scientists, as if lab work gave them some special moral authority. Public health experts issued a “get out of lockdown free” card to George Floyd protesters, and the American Anthropological Association issued a statement explicitly conceiving its discipline as a form of progressive activism. What was going on in the rest of academia made it clear anthropologists weren’t alone in thinking that way.

  That's my last free WaPo link for February, so enjoy.

An eye-catching headline on an LTE in my dying local paper, Foster's Daily Democrat: NH GOP gave $150M to the rich at property taxpayers' expense. The letter is from Portsmoutn (NH) resident Walter Hamilton. In its entirety:

Dire warnings, indeed. But I just want to focus on Walter's Orwellian logic: Government really owns your money. Letting you keep some is a "gift".

I can't understand that thought process, but I can't help but acknowledge it: this is really how these people think.

Fun fact: According to Official Government Figures, NH's Interest & Dividends Tax only represented 3% of the state's "unrestricted revenue" in FY2025. This leads me to suspect that Walter's dire warnings are more than slightly overblown.

And I should admit a bit of self-interest: I've paid the I&D tax for years. You don't need to be "rich" to pay it; all you need is investment savings that throw off a decent amount of taxable income.

Not that I'm a fan of property tax, by the way. As Walter Block observed: property tax is government charging a person rent to stay on their own property.

Also of note:

• I like this "far more modest" proposal. Robert F. Graboyes has it, under the headline: We Beg Your Pardon, We Never Promised You the Rose Garden.

  The assembly line production of pardons and commutations by Presidents Biden and Trump in recent weeks has made many uncomfortable about the very existence of this uniquely sweeping power—a relic of Seventh Century England’s perception that kings were God’s equivalents on earth. Stripping the presidency of this unfettered privilege has merits, but doing so would require a far-reaching constitutional amendment that would be impossible to enact and ratify in today’s environment.

  But here’s a far more modest proposal that might just make sense to both parties—requiring a 90-day Public Comment Period for any names under consideration for clemency, along with the specific terms of the action being considered. Biden could still have given preemptive pardons for any crimes committed over the previous eleven years to son Hunter and five other Bidens, but he would have to have announced that possibility no later than October 22—over two weeks before the 2024 election. Donald Trump would still be free to pardon those January 6 rioters accused of violent assaults on police officers, but only after enduring 90 days of criticism by enraged Democrats, unnerved Republicans, outraged law officers, families of victims, and a lean and hungry press—all asking what happened to J. D. Vance’s January 12 statement that, “if you committed violence on that day, obviously you shouldn’t be pardoned.”

  This would probably require a constitutional amendment. And the president might not approve, but that's the genius of the amendment process: the president has no role in it whatsoever.

• I rag on the University Near Here a lot, but… at least it's not the University of Colorado Boulder. Roger A. Pielke Jr. takes to his substack to tell of his experiences there: How to Get Rid of a Tenured Professor. It's a long story, but an infuriating one. (Infuriating for me, that is. Roger seems to keep his equanimity.) Sample:

  At CU, everything changed for me in 2015 when Congressman Raul Grijalva (D-AZ) asked my university to investigate me — He alleged that Obama White House criticism of me indicated that I may have been secretly taking money from Exxon in exchange for the substance of my Congressional testimonies, in which I reported consensus scientific findings of the IPCC (but I digress).

  Of course, I was not taking money in exchange for testimony or anything else. What was odd — to me at least — was that after the investigation was announced and conducted, no campus administrator ever spoke to me about it, not even to check in and see how I might be doing. I only heard from university lawyers.

  Not long after, I was told that university support for the science policy center that I had been recruited to CU to found in 2001 could no longer be guaranteed, and the center might be closed. No one linked this explicitly to the Grijalva investigation, but I could not help but think they were related.

  And then things escalated. And escalated.

Trump chose a Musk team that has been both highly disruptive & highly incompetent, thus sabotaging any real savings.
Fiscal conservatives (any left?) should not mistake chaos and "liberal tears" for serious or competent deficit reduction. What a fiasco, as deficits keep rising.

— Jessica Riedl 🧀 🇺🇦 (@JessicaBRiedl) February 23, 2025

Maybe the "Move fast and break things" strategy isn't the greatest motto in the world. (Even Facebook gave up on it, changing to "Move fast with stable infrastructure" in 2014.)

Randal Munroe commented awhile back:

Mouseover: "I was almost fired from a job driving the hearse in funeral processions, but then the funeral home realized how much business I was creating for them."

But do not despair, let Christian Britschgi describe The Sunny Side of Donald Trump's Power Grabs. It's fair, balanced, thoughtful throughout, and his bottom line is:

And that's about as sunny as it gets for this blog.

Also of note:

• Another prediction of "interesting times" ahead. Jeffrey Blehar makes an informed guess at How Elon Musk’s Service to Trump Will Probably, Eventually End. (NR gifted link)

  A week ago Donald Trump went to both Truth Social and the White House’s official social media account to proudly quote what he thought was a line from Napoleon, stating that “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.” (As a stickler I will point out that the quote actually comes from Balzac’s posthumous and sentimentally apocryphal 1838 Maxims and Thoughts of Napoleon — there is no proof Napoleon himself said it — and in any event is a mere epitome of Book III, Ch. 41 of Machiavelli’s Discourses on Livy.) Then, a few days ago, Trump trollingly pronounced himself royalty after rescinding Kathy Hochul’s New York City car congestion tax with an AI-drawn Time magazine cover of himself wearing a crown and the all-caps statement “LONG LIVE THE KING!”

  Okay, that's good. But Elon's fate? The prediction comes many (pretty funny) paragraphs later:

  So as fond as Elon Musk seems to be of visualizing himself amid the ranks of the world-bestriding heroes of history, he would do well to remember one of history’s most instructive lessons, repeated throughout history across all cultures: When the miserable masses would threaten the monarch’s rule by gathering outside the walls of the palace to vent their rage over his failed policies, the monarch would sometimes make a rational calculation. He seized his most notoriously disliked subordinate, designated him the cause of all problems, lopped his head off, and tossed it over the ramparts to slake the bloodthirst of the crowd.

  We live in more civilized times. But when Musk finally runs afoul of Trump — or, more brutally, needs to be sacrificed to deflect anger away from him — he should expect a rhetorically equivalent fate from his new best friend.

  And the Trump cheerleaders will shake their pom-poms every step of the way.

• Just say "Sell". Cato's Chris Edwards and Yasmeen Kallash-Kyler aren't fans of Trump's Post Office plans: Privatize Not Bureaucratize.

  In a seeming reversal, the Trump administration is rumored to be considering ending the US Postal Service’s quasi-independence and absorbing the company into the federal bureaucracy. The Washington Post reported yesterday, “Trump is expected to issue an executive order as soon as this week to fire the members of the Postal Service’s governing board and place the agency under the control of the Commerce Department.”

  That would be a mistake, creating an agency even more distant from the entrepreneurial postal system that America needs. […]

  If you're interested in the details, I've freelinked that WaPo story. Which contains a quote from a Notre Dame prof:

  “The anxiety over the Postal Service is not only three-quarters of a million workers. It’s that this is something that does not belong to the president or the White House. It belongs to the American people.”

  Um. Prof, if it belongs to us, why can't we sell it to some willing buyer?

  And that put me in mind of an LBJ anecdote:

  Mr. Johnson was in California seeing some troops off to Vietnam. He walked toward a long line of helicopters and a young corporal, holding his salute, said, “Mr. President, your helicopter is this way.”

  Mr. Johnson turned to the young man and said, “Son, they're all my helicopters.”

  Arrogance or a joke?

• I agree with a Berkeley Prof? It appears I do. Ed Morrissey quotes a Politico article written by Jerel Ezelli, a Berkeley Prof: Enough With 'People of Color' Already!

  Last month, in the televised moments leading up to President Donald Trump’s arrival at the U.S. Capitol Rotunda to be sworn in, CBS Mornings co-host Gayle King scanned the room and noted, “I do not see many ‘people of color.’” She and her co-host took another 20 seconds or so to point out a few attendees who fit the term.

  The moment, predictably, triggered a backlash from conservative commentators, who accused King, who is Black and a journalist, of being preoccupied with race. But it was also a reminder of the awkward, clunky and frequently backward attempts by the left (or those perceived to be on the left) to, literally and figuratively, read the room. For years Democrats’ understanding of race has not only not evolved, it has arguably been in full-blown retrograde. Nowhere has this been more evident than in the party’s canned usage of the term “people of color.”

  Couldn't help but notice the other day that the University Near Here loves that phrase, People of Color. (Six pages worth of POC links!)

  And to see how totalitarian this pigeonholing can get, check out the Official Government Rules for Collecting Race And Ethnicity Data from Students and Staff. Eight, count 'em, eight "musts" on a short page. And one "may NOT".

  Many years ago, Thomas Sowell recognized, tongue-in-cheek, the fundamental problem with the idea, titling his first collection of essays Pink and Brown People. You don't have to have a spectrum analyzer to observe we're all people of some color.

Liz Wolfe's Reason Roundup leads with a question: Best Executive Order Yet? Tricorner-hat wearing Casey Mattox is a big fan too:

This is an OUTSTANDING Executive Order. It's somewhat nerdy and lawyer-y (which is maybe why I like it so much). But it might be the most significant thing this administration has done to date. https://t.co/GY9c3LPQp5

— Casey Mattox (@CaseyMattox_) February 20, 2025

Liz has the text.

So, just in case you needed a little cheering up today, there you go.

Also of note:

• But there's always bad news around the corner with this guy. I am like Jeff Maurer in that I’m Such a Hopeless Libtard That It Bothers Me When We Side With the Authoritarian Predator State.

  I confess: I’m a walking cliché sometimes. I live in a big East Coast city, I subscribe to The New York Times — I was at the Women’s March in 2016 and I might own a pussy hat if I knew how to knit. When Republicans picture an insufferable Acela corridor shitlib, they’re largely picturing me. And I even laugh at myself sometimes: I once carried a latte into a Volvo dealership while wearing a Weezer t-shirt and thought: “I hope Breitbart doesn’t snap a picture of this.”

  Because I know that I live in a blue bubble, I take my own perceptions with a grain of salt. So, take the Russia/Ukraine war: It seems to me that Ukraine got invaded by a country that is led by a dictator who has been explicit about his expansionist goals. It also seems that America has a clear moral and strategic interest in Ukraine winning this war. Miraculously, Ukraine has fought Russia to a standstill without the deployment of a single American soldier, and our aid to Ukraine might be the best value for money in the entire budget, because it asserts American power in a way that China, Iran, and North Korea can’t fail to notice. And that’s why I also find it shocking that Trump would fumble away that advantage by siding with Russia in what seems like an obvious contradiction of every possible conception of American interest.

  But I probably only feel that way because I’m such an embarrassing libtard! Honestly, just typing that paragraph made me roll my eyes — I sound like I’m auditioning for an MSNBC show called Resistance Roundtable. For Christ’s sake, Nicholas Kristof and Chuck Schumer said basically exactly what I just said; it’s like the Soy Boy Symphony Orchestra is playing “Self-Righteous Umbrage in D”, and I’m angling to be the key soloist. And the more I think about Ukraine, the more I seem like such a cringe-inducing liberal caricature that they’ll probably base a character on me in the next season of White Lotus.

  Just for the record: (1) Yes, I have an online NYT subscription, but only because they offered an insanely good one-year deal to their games-only subscribers. (2) No Women's March for me, past present or future. (3) And no pussy hats. (4) Never been on Acela. (5) I've actually never had a latte. (6) Or been in a Volvo dealer. (My car's a Subaru, though, probably nearly as bad.) (6) No Weezer merch of any kind. Etc.

  And, oh year, I'm an east coast guy too, but New Hampshire. That should count for something.

  Other than that, though, I resemble those remarks.

• A rare schism on the sensible right. Kevin D. Williamson notes: The Perfect Is Not the Only Enemy of the Good.

  There is a cliché about not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good, and it’s a fine piece of wisdom as far as such maxims go, but the perfect is not the only enemy of the good. 

  The bad, for example, is also the enemy of the good. 

  My friends over at National Review have published an editorial that is not good, and not because it is less than perfect but because it is bad. And one of the bad things it does is engage in a bit of intellectual dishonesty—and, not being eager to bruise any feelings, I am sorry the term is needed here—about DOGE, which is that its critics are judging it by unrealistic standards: “One ought not to let the perfect be the enemy of the good,” they write. This is, of course, an example—better than good and almost perfect—of begging the question. It is a bright red flag to mark a sickly argument.

  Fond as Trump is of the word “perfect,” no non-insane person has ever suggested perfection as a standard for the Trump administration. Decency and competency would represent shocking overperformance of all sensible expectations.

  But there’s no danger of such overperformance at the moment.

  KDW notes the "shoot first, ask questions later" approach of DOGE and Musk, with plenty of examples. If Musk ran SpaceX like this, we'd be dodging crashing Falcon 9s on a daily basis.

• I'm a sucker for adjusted Who lyrics in headlines. Jack Nicastro has one, and he's not happy about it: Meet the new FTC—same as the old FTC.

  Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Chair Andrew Ferguson announced Tuesday that the 2023 joint merger guidelines adopted by the Biden administration's FTC and Department of Justice (DOJ) are still in effect. While continuity in merger policy is crucial for economic decision making, the 2023 guidance abandons the consumer welfare standard for an anachronistic approach based on market shares. The Trump administration should not perpetuate the Biden administration's error.

  The FTC and DOJ published their first joint guidelines in 1992. There have only been three revisions since. Ferguson explains that the continuity of these guidelines between administrations avoids "a recriminatory cycle of partisan rescissions" that frustrates the ability of businesses to plan. The deluge of filings submitted to the FTC's Premerger Notification Office in advance of the Commission's updated transaction thresholds and filing fees is evidence of this uncertainty; submitting before the most recent filing change saved firms over $100,000 on multi-billion-dollar mergers. Ferguson's concern about inconstant merger guidelines is well founded, but he ignores that the 2023 guidelines are themselves economically harmful.

  Maybe that Executive Order from our lead item above will save the day. To quote an old Hemingway lyric: Wouldn't it be pretty to think so?

• Common sense in unexpected places. Attention must be paid when that happens, and certainly this is a most unexpected place, the Boston Globe, where (as Jerry Coyne reports): Carole Hooven explains the binary nature of sex (and other stuff)

  Evolutionary biologist Carole Hooven was bullied out of Harvard’s Department of Human Evolutionary Biology for public statements that were true, compassionate and biologically anodyne. As she explains:

  At the end of July 2021, I made my first live TV appearance, on the Fox and Friends show on Fox News. I was invited to comment on an article in The Free Press by Katie Herzog,in which I’d been quoted. She reported that medical school professors were backing away from using clear scientific terms such as male, female, and pregnant woman, largely in response to student complaints. I said I thought this trend was a big mistake.

  In the brief segment on Fox, my troubles began when I described how biologists define male and female, and argued that these are invaluable terms that science educators in particular should not relinquish in response to pressure from ideologues. I emphasized that “understanding the facts about biology doesn’t prevent us from treating people with respect.” We can, I said, “respect their gender identities and use their preferred pronouns.”

  I also mentioned that educators are increasingly self-censoring, for fear that using the “wrong” language can result in being shunned or even fired.

  The ensuing fracas at Harvard, during which Hooven found little support from her colleagues, led to her eventually leaving her department. But she hasn’t lost her cool and, in today’s Boston Globe, explains sex to the layperson, […]

  Jerry links to the article at the Globe website, but also to an unpaywalled version.

  It may be (I haven't checked) the only time the words "Trump is right about" have appeared in that newspaper.

Recently on the book blog:

What can I say? I bought this book by the late David Boaz when it came out back in 1998. And only now did it work its way to the top of my non-fiction to-be-read pile. Kept cyber-piling more recent, more interesting, books ahead of it.

And it's good! At least it was 27 years ago. If you are shopping for a good intro to libertarian philosophy and practice, written by a not-particularly-critical activist, I recommend you buy Boaz's updated version The Libertarian Mind, which came out in 2015.

I must confess: in my case, Boaz was pushing on an open door. And I didn't learn much I hadn't already managed to pick up as a decades-long Reason magazine, and occasional reader of Sowell, Hayek, Rothbard, Rand, Nozick, Caplan, Friedmans (Milton and David), …

Lest anyone doubt that libertarianism has an ancient pedigree, Boaz quotes 1 Samuel 11-18, where Sam relays the word of the Lord to the Israelites demanding a king to rule over them (I'll quote the New Revised Standard Version Updated, verse numbers elided):

… These will be the ways of the king who will reign over you: he will take your sons and appoint them to his chariots and to be his horsemen, and to run before his chariots, and he will appoint for himself commanders of thousands and commanders of fifties and some to plow his ground and to reap his harvest and to make his implements of war and the equipment of his chariots. He will take your daughters to be perfumers and cooks and bakers. He will take the best of your fields and vineyards and olive orchards and give them to his courtiers. He will take one-tenth of your grain and of your vineyards and give it to his officers and his courtiers. He will take your male and female slaves and the best of your cattle and donkeys and put them to his work. He will take one-tenth of your flocks, and you shall be his slaves. And on that day you will cry out because of your king, whom you have chosen for yourselves, but the Lord will not answer you on that day.

Yeah. You can't say you weren't warned about this, by God Himself.

Boaz was optimistic about libertarianism's long-term prospects, and he may have been right, given a term long enough. But our post-1997 road has been rocky, at best. For example, he quotes the recommendations of Jacob Weisberg in a 1996 book, In Defense of Government:

(1) accept that life is risky and stop trying to legislate risk out of existence; (2) stop promising more than government can deliver; (3) be willing to abolish failed, outdated, or low-priority programs; (4) stop delegating Congress's lawmaking authority to the bureaucracy; (5) promise that government won't get any bigger than it is now, in therms of government share of GNP.

Reader, Weisberg was, at one time, editor-in-chief of Slate. Not exactly a hotbed of rabid anarchists, now or even then.

As far as the "promise" in item 5 above: the USA's FY1996 Federal Net Outlays were 19.3% of its GDP. Compared with 23.1% in FY2024. Getting back to 19.3% would require (by my math) a 16.5% cut across-the-board in overall spending.

(But that "across-the-board" figure includes debt service. Adjust my math appropriately.)

All in all, it's a very good primer, and an interesting look at the state of liberty back in 1997 compared to now.

At some point in the past, for reasons that I don't recollect, I stuck this book on my "Things to Check Out" list at WorldCat.org. The Portsmouth (NH) Public Library doesn't own any books at all by the author, Charles Willeford, but the UNH Library had a copy from back in the days it doubled as Durham's town library. And so…

I didn't really know what to expect. Caveat Lector: it's very violent (eventually), one early scene is guaranteed to never, ever, appear in a movie as is. And there are long stretches where not much happens that's relevant to the main plot. It's easy reading though, with a hefty amount of very dark humor.

It's part of Willeford's "Hoke Moseley" series, number 3 of 4. Moseley is a Miami cop, but as the book opens, he's a pants-peeing basket case, burned out, unable to return to work at his current assignment of investigating cold cases. His wife has left him, he's got a rocky relationship with his daughters. He decamps for Singer Island, where his father lives, and as he recovers from his burnout, resolves to spend the rest of his life there, somehow.

In a parallel plot thread, oldster Stanley Sinkiewicz, retired auto worker, gets jailed due to that scene I mentioned above. There he meets Troy Louden, a self-described criminal psychopath. But Stanley's not one to judge. (Although that would have been a good idea.) Troy and Stanley develop a (um) complex relationship, and Stanley gets roped into Troy's next caper, a supermarket heist that will put them on Easy Street. Albeit, in Haiti. But that's the plan, anyway.

Other characters pop up along the way: an ex-stripper/prostitute with a ruined face, an aspiring artist from Barbados, various tenants at the apartment building that Moseley starts managing for his father. Nobody is particularly admirable, not even Moseley. But interesting and colorful; I'll give them that.

Mr. Ramirez might have gone with Bearded Spock, but instead:

Im a similar vein, Jeff Maurer turns his substack over to a guest author, Nicole Brown Simpson, who writes: Ukraine Should Not Have Attacked Russia, Just Like I Should Not Have Murdered O.J. Simpson.

But enough sarcasm for today. Francis Fukuyama is dead serious, and correct, when he calls recent moves The Ultimate Betrayal.

On second thought, maybe "ultimate" is the wrong word here. Trump has plenty of time left in his term to do lots more betrayal.

I assume Trump's post-Presidential memoir will be titled The Art of the Stupid, Cowardly, Evil Deal.

Also of note:

• Or maybe Look What You Made Me Do. Christian Schneider characterizes Trump as An Arsonist Posing as a Firefighter (gifted link).

  ‘The whole aim of practical politics,” wrote H. L. Mencken, “is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.”

  A century later, we have entered the era of government by hobgoblin. The nation looks on as our president creates imaginary crises that — you guessed it — only he can solve. President Donald Trump continues to be the guy in the neighborhood who smashes storefront windows and then begs glass-repair shops to support him because of his economic stimulus plan.

  Of course, in the run-up to the 2024 election, America had genuine issues that needed addressing. Customers at McDonald’s shouldn’t have to pay for their Filet-O-Fish meals using an installment plan. Illegal immigration at the southern border was a humanitarian catastrophe. Grievance culture had run amok.

  Had Donald Trump stuck to these primary concerns, he would be swimming in goodwill. Instead, he has chosen to invent bizarre crises and pretend to fix them, as though his currently decent approval ratings were guaranteed to last.

  Instead, we got the Gulf of America, Greenland, Panama, Canada, a war with the AP, …

  And of course, betrayal,

• Elon Musk: Vampire Hunter. Eric Boehm presents a simple truth, countering wild assertions from DOGE: Social Security's Insolvency Is Driven by Benefits for the Living, Not Fraud by the Dead

  Elon Musk claims that his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has uncovered "the biggest fraud in history" within the Social Security Administration: Payments to millions of Americans who have likely been dead for a long time.

  That claim seems to be based on a faulty understanding of Social Security data on Musk's part. More to the point: Social Security's fiscal problems aren't the result of fraudulent payments to people who are already dead. It is not benefits for the dead, but rather payments to the living that are driving the program toward insolvency.

  "According to the Social Security database, these are the numbers of people in each age bucket with the death field set to FALSE," Musk posted to X earlier this week, along with a chart that purports to show that millions of people over age 100 are still in the program's database. "Maybe Twilight is real and there are a lot of vampires collecting Social Security," Musk suggested.

  Maybe. But other explanations seem more plausible—and none of them involve the government paying Social Security benefits to people well over 100 years old.

  Also urging Elon to stop playing Abraham Van Helsing is Mark J. Warshawsky at AEI: DOGE and Dead People.

  Recently, Elon Musk has made claims while standing with President Trump in the Oval Office that his DOGE associates found that Social Security Administration (SSA) databases contain records of millions of superannuated people, in particular 150 year-olds, not recorded as dead. And he claimed that this finding warrants deep concern that there is rampant retirement benefits fraud at SSA. While the first claim is true, the second is not.

  According to the Inspector General (IG) at SSA, in December 2020, there were about 19 million individuals born in 1920 or earlier who did not have death information on their SSA data record. Only 44 thousand of these individuals, however, are receiving retirement benefits, broadly consistent with Census Bureau data that then there were about 86 thousand people age 100 or older alive in the US. Of the 19 million without death information, about 11 million are recorded with years of birth in 1899 or earlier. In particular, many are apparently coded with the birth year, 1875 (supporting Musk’s claim of 150 year-olds in the SSA database), but this seems to be just a common reference point in the COBOL coding when a birth date is missing or incomplete. Again, though, this is not evidence of fraud – SSA’s own rules and procedures since September 2015 have automatically stopped benefit payments if the beneficiary is age 115, with certain unusual exceptions.

  COBOL! "Now there's a name I've not heard in a long, long time."

  And (continuing our theme) if there ever was a computer language that deserved a stake through the heart…

• There's some good news, even if it's decades delayed. Emma Camp reports: Education Department orders schools to stop all racial discrimination.

  Last Friday, the Department of Education released a "Dear Colleague" letter directing educational institutions to stop all forms of racial discrimination in essentially all aspects of their operations, including "admissions, hiring, promotion, compensation, financial aid, scholarships, prizes, administrative support, discipline, housing, graduation ceremonies, and all other aspects of student, academic, and campus life."

  The letter, from Acting Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Craig Trainor, mostly reiterates existing civil rights prohibitions on racial discrimination, as well as the 2023 Supreme Court decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard that barred race-based affirmative action in college admissions.

  "If an educational institution treats a person of one race differently than it treats another person because of that person's race, the educational institution violates the law," the letter reads. "The Department will no longer tolerate the overt and covert racial discrimination that has become widespread in this Nation's educational institutions. The law is clear: treating students differently on the basis of race to achieve nebulous goals such as diversity, racial balancing, social justice, or equity is illegal under controlling Supreme Court precedent."

  I have no idea whether the upcoming "Audre Lord Summit (formerly known as the MLK Summit) will run afoul of the new order. Unfortunately, it's really hard to dictate that this sort of language be eliminated:

  Through active participation in the Audre Lorde Summit, students will be able to:  

  1. Explore strategies to co-create community norms and shared expectations to foster and engage within a brave space.  
  2. Develop a shared meaning of dialogue through conceptualizing and recognizing different modalities of verbal communication including discussion, debate, speech, and dialogue and how they are used.  
  3. Explore intergroup dialogue as a collaborative tool for engaging differences and developing a shared understanding. 
  4. Identify understanding of how our intersecting identities, social structures, and institutions shape our experiences as foundational to engaging in intergroup dialogue.  
  5. Demonstrate the ability to navigate dialogue on critical issues by exploring and practicing frameworks such as the learning edge, affirming inquiry, and responding to triggers appropriately.  
  6. Develop individual goals relating to personal leadership action planning and alliance building to empower continued personal growth and engagement for inclusive leadership.  

  That is some impressive word salad. Navigate that dialogue, student! Conceptualize and recognize those different modalities!

• Yeah, it's not as if they were doing a good job of that. Jerry Coyne is disappointed: The AAUP abandons its mission to defend academic freedom. He quotes from a Chronicles of Higher Education article by Chicago law professor Tom Ginsburg:

  The first salvo came last summer, when the committee issued a statement legitimating academic boycotts, reversing a prior position from 2006 that had declared systemic boycotts to be incompatible with academic freedom because they limit the capacity of scholars to collaborate with whomever they choose. That had been a sensible position. But the new iteration of Committee A suggested that academic boycotts were a “legitimate tactic” and were acceptable against colleges that had themselves violated academic freedom. A bitter debate about Israel is the barely veiled subtext. Whatever the proponents of the Boycott, Divest, and Sanctions movement say about it being limited to institutions and not individuals, it has led to hundreds of cancellations of collaborations with and invitations to individual Israeli scholars, both Arab and Jewish, at a time when that country’s democracy is in deep trouble. In other words, the AAUP has endorsed a practice that interferes on the ground with the academic freedom of individual scholars — precisely the outcome the prior committee had foreseen — while claiming to be neutral on the specific issue of Israel.

  Next, in October, the AAUP blessed diversity statements as compatible with academic freedom. Mandatory diversity statements are in fact orthogonal to academic freedom, as they do not concern research or teaching. Faculty are divided on their use: Some view them as providing mechanisms to enhance racial diversity among the faculty without running afoul of the law, while others see them as devices to ensure ideological homogeneity. There is significant concern about their legality. The AAUP affirmatively defends them: “Meaningful DEI faculty work,” the organization says, “should be evaluated as part of the core faculty duties of teaching, research, and professional service.” It is hard to imagine that any college receiving federal funds will be able to sustain this posture over the next month, much less the next four years. No leader should have to fight for an already controversial enterprise, one essentially unrelated to academic freedom, when the academic enterprise is under existential threat.

  And more at the link. Sad!

… elected Nikki instead.

These are classic Russian talking points. Exactly what Putin wants. https://t.co/BsbhcKQcNU

— Nikki Haley (@NikkiHaley) February 20, 2025

As I keep mentioning, this blog is guided, as much as possible by Elvis Costello's advice: try to be amused. But certain things deserve disgust, and today is one of those days. Jim Geraghty tells the sad story: The American Betrayal of Ukraine Begins.

Apparently, this is the Art of the Deal.

Over at the Dispatch, Jonah Goldberg is also contemptuous: Realism for a Condo Salesman.

And John Podhoretz can't believe his ears: What Did Trump Just Say About Ukraine? WHAT???

I don't know how things will turn out. With a loose cannon like Trump rolling around the decks of the Ship of State, I am not particularly hopeful.

On to more cheerful topics, I hope:

• Spoiler: the 'Wall Street of Eggs' is Broadway, in Dover, New Hampshire. Page One of the WSJ's Business section yesterday: 'Buyers Flock to ‘Wall Street of Eggs’.

  The nation’s biggest egg marketplace doesn’t own hens, farms or processing plants.

  From an office building in New Hampshire, roughly a dozen people facilitate the trading of billions of eggs a year, a task that shapes what Americans pay per dozen at the supermarket or for omelets at diners.

  The Egg Clearinghouse, or ECI, is little known outside the industry: It operates an online marketplace that allows participants to place bids on eggs listed for sale and see the results of trades. Only ECI members—farmers and egg buyers—are allowed to trade.

  Top comment: "Wow! The Egg Clearinghouse is real - I thought it was a shell company".

  ECI is located at 122 Broadway, and it's not just an office building, it's a dinky office building, easy to miss as you're heading into, or out of, Dover.

  Personal trivia: they used to be in Durham, next to my dentist's offices. I could see it out the window while getting my teeth cleaned!

• In other news: broken clock is occasionally correct. Jacob Sullum is no fan of the Imperial Presidency. So attention should be paid when he claims Trump has reason to complain about limits on his ability to fire executive officers.

  Donald Trump likes to fire people, and he resents congressional constraints on that presidential prerogative. While Trump's opponents may view that attitude as one more manifestation of his autocratic instincts, his complaint is grounded in legitimate concerns about the separation of powers that presidents of both major parties have raised for many years.

  Jacob goes through the history: postmasters, FTC commisioners, the CFPB. Bottom line:

  Under the Constitution, the federal government consists of three distinct branches: legislative, executive, and judicial. In recognizing an amalgam that is independent of presidential control, the [SCOTUS] justices effectively authorized a fourth branch of government that the Framers never imagined.

• Speaking of SCOTUS… George F. Will holds out some hope that The Supreme Court can fix this mess of its own making.

  This week, the Supreme Court can begin cleaning up a predictable mess — it was predicted by a justice at the time — that it made with a misbegotten decision 20 years ago. The justices in conference on Friday are set to begin considering whether to decide a case that gives the court an opportunity to overturn Kelo, a decision so bad it provoked the passage of many beneficial state laws.

  Fingers crossed. GFW notes that the Connecticut property at issue in Kelo is an empty lot "where feral cats now roam."

• And it's Jeff Maurer, so that opening will be filled with dirty words. He thinks that Democrats Have an Opening on Housing.

  What’s the Democrats’ message? “Orange man bad'“? I mean, yes, that’s the honest answer. “That wasn’t me throwing bags of piss at cops in Portland five years ago”? That’s a message we use, too. “I’m sorry that I once supported giving anyone who crosses the border complimentary gender reassignment surgery, a taxpayer-funded job, and $1,000 cash every week for life, I ate some expired yogurt and was hallucinating but I’m all better now”? All of these messages are in the mix, but I’m not sure that any of them are winners.

  Democrats need messages that speak to the challenges in people’s lives. Life, despite being generally easier than it’s ever been, is still really fucking hard. Everything costs too much. Work blows. The Star Wars franchise is shit, last year’s World Series was the goddamned Yankees versus the motherfucking Dodgers, and — I’m just going to say it — your kids are ugly. Voters want a message about removing the barriers that stand between them and their goals, and if that message happens to be true, that’s a nice little bonus.

  I think the opening for Democrats in 2026 is going to be housing costs. The rent is too damn high, folks — that simple message from the 2013 New York mayoral campaign stuck in people’s heads even though the man delivering it was five percent too crazy even for New York politics. It’s likely that two years from now, rent, mortgages, and housing costs, generally, will still be too damn high. And there will be a true story about why that’s Republicans’ fault.

  Jeff is convincing that Trump has no policies that will alleviate housing costs, and a number of policies that will make things worse (like tariffs).

  Left unmentioned: the Democrats are in the same position. With probably the additional bad idea of price controls.

• AI Report A book I recently read was insistent that rich elites in America were geographically concentrated, and leaned heavily toward Democrats. I decided to ask Grok, the AI embedded in Twitter, a question that might provide evidence for that. My admittedly clunky first whack at that:

  What is the party breakdown of the Congress members representing the 20 richest districts in the USA?

  Grok was impressive: it clarified my query (correctly), showed its work, and came up with an answer: 15 Democrats, 5 Republicans.

  I also tried Google's Gemini. Which simply refused to answer.

  Finally, ChatGPT from OpenAI: they found 20 Democrats, 0 Republicans. But their data was not the latest.

  Winner: Grok.

Jeffrey Blehar observes: Europeans Don’t Get Free Speech, and Neither Does CBS News, Apparently. Let's skip down to our Big Eye Network, after his (correct) assertion about German government being deathly afraid of, well, Germans.

Also contemptuous of CBS is Robby Soave at Reason: CBS is wrong about free speech in Germany and the rise of Nazism.

Robby quotes a tweet from Michael Tracey, noting that Margaret's assertion was not just wrong, but "just totally bonkers".

But maybe there's more than just newsgirl craziness? Jonathan Turley says there might be method in the seeming madnes: “Listen Carefully it’s Actually Much Darker”: How the Left is Framing Free Speech as a Front for Fascism.

It was only a couple months ago that we said something nice about Seth Moulton. Sorry, he seems to be reverting to Massachusetts Democrat-norm.

Also of note:

• Apparently it helps to be ensconced at UMass-Amherst. Jon Miltimore wonders: How Did 108 Economists Predict Milei's Results Exactly Wrong?

  In November 2023, the warning came, as clear as an omen.

  A political upstart was seeking office and, if elected, his policies were likely to cause “devastation” in his own country and “severely reduce policy space in the long run.”

  The threat was a chainsaw-wielding disciple of Austrian economics from Argentina who embraced laissez-faire economics. The predictions of doom came not from Old Testament prophets, but 108 economists who signed a public letter saying his anachronistic ideas had long ago been discredited.

  Jon points to David Henderson's critique of the critics: Critics Of Milei’s Policies Strike Out. He does a detailed takedown of their major objections to Milei's positions. Including a man of straw:

  The signers also made a criticism that we often hear from critics of the free market: the idea of market failure. They wrote:

  The laissez-faire model assumes that markets work perfectly if the government does not intervene. But unregulated markets are not benign—they reinforce unequal power relations that worsen inequality and hinder the application of key developmental policies—including industrial, social, and environmental policies.

  Whose laissez-faire model? No economist I know of who believes in laissez-faire or something close to it also believes that “markets work perfectly.” We understand that they work imperfectly. Our argument is more sophisticated: markets work imperfectly and so do governments. Moreover, the imperfections of government, due to bad incentives, poor information, and poor incentives to get information, are typically much worse than the incentives of for-profit providers.

  The 2023 statement is here. I noticed that of the 108 signatories, only 19 are identified as being from the USA. And of those 19, fully 11 are affiliated with University of Massachusetts Amherst. Including the #1 signer, Jayati Ghosh.

  I have no idea what that says about UMass Amherst.

• But… But… Good Will Hunting said… Marx-inspired textbook used by 1 in 4 history classes ‘aims to misinform’: report.

  The textbook, “A People’s History of the United States,” used in as many as one [in] four high school history classrooms, misinforms students and borrows from Karl Marx to present American history as a “conflict between capital and labor,” according to a new report.

  The report by the Goldwater Institute compares “A People’s History” by the late Howard Zinn to Hillsdale College Professor Wilfred McClay’s alternative and less used textbook “Land of Hope: An Invitation to the Great American Story.” The institute is a conservative think tank in Arizona, focused on free market policy and Americans’ constitutional freedoms.

  The "1 in 4" number comes from this New York Times story: Social Studies Teachers Rely on Online and Sometimes Ideological Sources.

  For example, 42 percent of the survey respondents had used materials from Learning for Justice, a project from the Southern Poverty Law Center. About a quarter had used the Zinn Education Project, which was inspired by the work of the historian Howard Zinn and which often celebrates left-leaning activist movements.

  Yeesh, that SPLC figure is even worse.

  I've had a couple takes on this Zinn stuff: here and here.

Recently on the book blog:

I picked this book up at Portsmouth (NH) Public Library, expecting that I'd dislike it. I was pleasantly surprised. The author, Musa al-Gharbi, is an honest, sharp-eyed observer of the self-proclaimed "woke" fractious faction. And he makes a convincing case that their nostrums are ineffective at solving the problems they describe.

Briefly: the "woke" are largely "symbolic capitalists", dealing in services, ideas, and concepts, not concrete products. They are largely white, male, cishet, and extremely well-off. In any honest telling, they are an elite, holding down the commanding heights in academia, media, and (increasingly) at tech businesses. They tend to be located in geographically compact regions: Silicon Valley, New York City, Seattle, …

And, even though they "talk the talk", their walking of the walk leaves much to be desired. Their remedies do not raise up the American downtrodden, even in places, like California and New York, where they seem to have a firm grasp on political power. And (to a certain extent) this is intentional.

(I say: "they". Which is a little misleading. al-Gharbi fully admits that he's in that elite "symbolic capitalist" group. So am I, for that matter. But I've never, ever, claimed to be "woke".)

In certain spots, al-Gharbi seems to echo critiques made by us "right-wingers". He's brutal on folks like Elizabeth Warren, Jussie Smollett, Rachel Dolezal. And he quotes folks like Thomas Sowell and Bryan Caplan approvingly. (There's also a positive blurb from Tyler Cowen on the back.)

Once you get the gist of al-Gharbi's thesis, it's hard to avoid seeing confirming evidence. Do DEI efforts actually work, or are they just noisy virtue-signalling? From the February 7 WSJ: DEI Didn’t Change the Workforce All That Much. A Look at 13 Million Jobs. Subtitle: "For all the controversy that diversity programs stir up, most senior managers are still white men."

How about the notion that the Democrats have become the favored party among the well-off "symbolic capitalists", concentrated in their small-area conclaves? That can't be true, can it? We're always being told that Republicans are the party of the fat cats!

Exercise for the reader: click over to smartasset's 2024 list of America’s Richest Congressional Districts. Go down the list of districts, ranked by affluence, and look for the first one represented by a Republican.

I had to go down to #15: New Jersey's 7th Congressional District sends Thomas Kean Jr. to D.C. He squeaked by Democrat Susan Altman in last year's election 51.8%-46.4%. (Trump also edged Kamala in NJ-7, 49.8%-47.8%.)

On Kean's House page, as I type: "Kean Fighting to Restore SALT Deduction". Is that fighting for the poor and downtrodden? Not exactly. From the Tax Policy Center: Repealing The SALT Cap Would Overwhelmingly Benefit Those With High Incomes. (And, for the record, Sue Altman, Kean's opponent, came out in favor of that too, although that involved a hypocritical flip-flop.)

But if I have to gripe about something: al-Gharbi's analysis of "inequality" unfortunately involves some usual lefty stat-hacking. Without getting into the weeds on that, the book could have used some insights from a recent book by Phil Gramm, Robert Ekelund, and John Early: The Myth of American Inequality.

al-Gharbi is also short on recommending policy prescriptions; he admits this upfront. Which is fine, his goal is to describe, however imperfectly, the state of play.

Mitch Daniels was on a very short list of politicians I liked. Which made his exit from politics to be president of Purdue U kind of a bummer. But he reappears now and again, and his latest wisdom is in the WaPo, and it's about a guy I also liked a lot: America needs its pretension punctured. It needs a P.J. O’Rourke.

That's a free link. Recomended, perhaps doubly so if you are as sour on pols as I am.

Also of note:

• Or in German: Der Münchner Verrat. Kevin D. Williamson notes a certain historical resemblance of recent events: Mnichovská Zrada. And in case your Czech, mate, is a bit rusty…

  “I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or another,” J.D. Vance said in 2022 as he was running for the U.S. Senate. Now the vice president, he has been dispatched to meet with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky at Munich. And it just had to be Munich, didn’t it? Where better to surrender to a tyrant without a fight? Mnichovská zrada, the Czechs call it—the Betrayal at Munich. 

  But Donald Trump is no Neville Chamberlain—Chamberlain was an intelligent, accomplished, self-made man, and a patriot, albeit one who made a terrible error in judgment. He didn’t try to stage a coup when the British people voted him out in disgust.

  Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who was possibly not drunk at the time, also weighed in earlier this week: Ukraine must hand over territory to the Russian invaders, NATO membership is off the table, and Ukraine cannot count on the United States for security guarantees. Zelensky knows what that means. “Security guarantees without America are not real security guarantees,” he told The Guardian in an interview. Hegseth is at the “clarifying” stage of this particular avalanche of baloney.

  All of this is to say that Moscow is being rewarded for its brutality and aggression, while Ukraine is being punished for its petty and mulish insistence on surviving as a nation and a people. Vis-à-vis Moscow, the Trump administration is not even a paper tiger: A paper tiger might at least give you a papercut. Vance is also doing some clarifying and insisting that some of his earlier marks were misrepresented.

  KDW is also pretty rough on Mike Pence. And the proposed GOP budget. And today's poets. So I hope you can either subscribe or evade the Dispatch paywall to RTWT.

• But about that budget. Jessica Riedl isn't impressed with The Republicans’ Underwhelming Budget.

  After much fanfare, the House GOP majority has released its latest 10-year budget blueprint. Up until now, Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) have controlled Washington’s fiscal narrative with high-profile attempts to cancel government contracts, remove federal employees, and shut down the agency in charge of distributing international aid assistance. While DOGE has trumpeted its (unverified) claims of saving a few billion dollars here and there, the new House budget resolution would likely add $3.3 trillion to 10-year deficits. These costs will dwarf the largely symbolic DOGE budget savings and show a Republican government once again dramatically driving budget deficits upward.

  The Congressional Budget Office’s latest baseline projections show Washington running $21 trillion in budget deficits over the 2025-2034 period covered in the Republican budget proposal, pushing the federal debt held by the public from $29 trillion to $50 trillion. That rosy scenario assumes no wars, no recessions, low interest rates on the federal debt, and nearly unprecedented limits on discretionary spending.

  Against that baseline, the House GOP blueprint claims to save $1.1 trillion over the decade. In reality, it will likely add $3.3 trillion in debt. Specifically, tax cut extensions will cost $4.5 trillion but are offset only partially, with $1.2 trillion in mandatory program savings. The blueprint also includes promises of $2.6 trillion in additional tax revenues based on economic growth and $1.8 trillion in future discretionary spending savings, but those should be classified as gimmicks.

  Jessica's final word: "Is this really the best they can do?" Sadly, the answer seems to be yes.

• Kind of sounds like a discarded Indiana Jones movie title. Megan McArdle writes a downer: Elon Musk and his doomed quest to find magic money. (Another gifted link from the WaPo.)

  Elon Musk is the latest in a long series of government reformers to go on the quest for the magic pot of money.

  The magic pot of money is a Washington evergreen. Some politician or policymaker theorizes a fantastically large sum of government spending that can be easily excised from programs without affecting deserving beneficiaries or angering powerful interest groups. The belief in its existence has inspired many a politician to go on the hunt, but thus far, the quarry has proved elusive: The Reagan administration failed to find the “future savings to be identified” that its budget counted on to balance massive tax cuts. The architects of the Affordable Care Act failed to find the fabulous cost savings they believed to be hidden in the byzantine recesses of our health-care system.

  Yet every generation, a new hero sets out to find these mythical riches so that they can be returned to their rightful owner, the American taxpayer. Musk thinks he is that hero, having suggested that with the support of the president, we can find $1 trillion in deficit reduction. And hey, he has certainly performed many epic feats. So perhaps he will finally slay the dragon of government inefficiency and liberate this pot of money from its hoard.

  Note to Elon: don't bother looking in my sofa cushions. I've checked, there's nothing there.

• I'm worried many students and administrators will read this as a how-to. Sean Stevens and Greg Lukianoff team up to describe an "unholy alliance": How college administrators and students unite to silence speakers. (With a really creepy AI pic, so you'll want to check that out.)

  Last month Olivia Krolcyzk, a women’s rights advocate and ambassador with the Riley Gaines Center, was scheduled to give a talk at the University of Washington titled “Protect Women from Men: The Threat of the Trans Agenda,” at an event organized by the campus Turning Point USA chapter.

  The event never happened.

  Just as it was about to begin, some student protesters became disruptive. One of them pulled the fire alarm. Windows were broken and objects, including noisemakers, were thrown into the room. Krolczyk and members of the Turning Point USA chapter barricaded themselves inside until they were escorted out by university police and security.

  This week, Krolcyzk filed a Title IX complaint against the University of Washington with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights as a result of the disruption and cancellation of the event.

  Despite the chaos, University of Washington spokesperson and Assistant Vice President for Communications Victor Balta contends that “the TPUSA organizers made the choice to suspend the event.” In a statement sent to The Center Square, “The Jason Rantz Show,” and other outlets who reached out for comment, Balta said that “[i]nformed discussion and debate are encouraged on our campus, however, it is clear that presenters and disruptors are, in some cases, seeking to antagonize one another in ways that provide dramatic content for their social media feeds,” and that Krolcyzk was “excited” that the event got shut down.

  In other words, according to the University of Washington, the fault lies with Krolcyzk, Turning Point USA, and the individual protesters. “Those seeking to disrupt and shut down speakers are ultimately responsible,” Balta noted, “and will face legal and disciplinary action if they are identified.”

  Hm, the University of Washington. Haven't we seen something about them recently? Oh, right: that's where Stuart Reges works. Which is another lawsuit in the works for UWash.

• I'm doubtful this will work for everyone, but… Via GeekPress: Quanta magazine has an inspiring story for us computer nerds: Undergraduate Upends a 40-Year-Old Data Science Conjecture.

  I won't go into detail on Andrew Krapivin's discovery, it has to do with hash tables, which is a computer science thing. But here's the sentence that leapt out at me:

  Krapivin was not held back by the conventional wisdom for the simple reason that he was unaware of it.

  Hm. I'm unaware of tons of stuff. And yet, I've never managed to upend even one long-held conjecture.

Arnaud Bertrand can't seem to make up his mind, but I will go with "amused". See what you think.

This is absolutely priceless. And probably the most frightening clip you'll ever watch on the people in charge of the US economy.

Jared Bernstein is literally the Chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, the main agency advising Biden on economic policypic.twitter.com/1b31FPFPCQ

— Arnaud Bertrand (@RnaudBertrand) May 3, 2024

Background: this is from last May, when (indeed) Jared Bernstein chaired the Council of Economic Advisers, a position he held for approximately the last year and a half of the Biden Administration. (Before that, he was a member of the council under chair Cecilia Rouse.) His Senate confirmation as chair was kind of a squeaker: 50-49 on a straight party-line vote.

According to Wikipedia, Jared's undergrad degree was a Bachelor of Music from the Manhattan School of Music. His graduate degrees were a Master of Social Work from Hunter College, followed by a Doctor of Social Work in social welfare from Columbia.

The clip, by the way, is from the 2023 movie Finding the Money, which is unabashed advocacy for Modern Monetary Theory. Its IMDB blurb:

But from the Wikipedia blurb (links and footnotes elided):

For even more pointed MMT criticism, see the Foundation for Economic Education: Modern Monetary Theory Isn't Modern. It's Antiquated.

I believe MMT also fails the simple "Show me one country where your daffy theory has been successfully implemented" test.

So, yeah, these people are nuts. Which explains a lot about Biden Administration economic policy.

Also of note:

• One in a series, I'm sure. Mark Antonio Wright writes on Trump’s Indefensible Proclamation. Specifically, this one:

  He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.

  — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 15, 2025

  No — it’s sobering enough that the Chief Magistrate of our Republic would favorably repeat the words of Napoleon Bonaparte (the quote is perhaps apocryphal) on this subject and his excuses for the reality that he deformed his own republic into an empire, with himself as its monarch. Indeed, it should be sobering enough that such a statement from this president is no shocking event in our politics.

  Napoleon, of course, was a genius in several respects. He was a Great Man, in the sense that he changed history and left his enduring mark on it. He was a general of unrivaled brilliance. He could display physical courage. His charisma and personal magnetism had the power to draw men unto himself, to inspire them. And that he did some “good things,” there is no doubt: He reformed France’s system of education, he built canals, he arguably contributed to the founding of the discipline of Egyptology, among other things. But Napoleon was no republican — his 25-year career was one that almost continually served to warp France, and its laws, for the singular purpose of making himself more powerful.

  In certain similar ways to the French emperor, Donald Trump is a Great Man too. He has changed history, and he may very well leave an enduring mark on it. And, I’m sure, he may do some good things while in office. But after everything we have seen of Trump these last ten years, no American ought be surprised by the fact that our duly elected president cares nothing at all for our Constitution, its Madisonian vision of separation of powers and check and balances, or his oath to protect it and defend it.

  It's telling when the most charitable interpretation of Trump's tweet is "Well, he probably said that only to yank peoples' chains."

  He's the Yanker-in-Chief!

• And smug about it, too. Erick-Woods Erickson argues, convincingly, that Margaret Brennan Is Ignorant.

  Every once in a while, a prominent and highly paid member of the elite American press corps says something so ignorant and foolish that one must marvel at the combination of arrogance and stupidity and wonder how anyone can take this person seriously on any topic.

  Margaret Brennan is the host of CBS News’s “Face the Nation” and, for all the problems you or I may have with her, today she exceeded those problems and showed herself incapable of covering any issue, including but not limited to the Trump Administration, fairly, capably, and competently.

  Brennan asserted that Nazi Germany not only had free speech but weaponized free speech against Jews to commit the Holocaust.

  Video at the link. As is Erick's easy rebuttal. As we did with Trump above, we'll try to find a charitable interpretation…

  OK, how about: "Margaret Brennan is a mole planted by … um … Karl Rove into CBS News to further destroy its credibility."

• No. Next question? Ah, well, you should probably read beyond Damon Root's headline anyway: Google Is Big. Does That Make It a Monopoly?

  "This victory against Google is an historic win for the American people." So declared U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland in response to District Judge Amit Mehta's August 5, 2024, ruling in United States v. Google, which found the tech giant guilty of amassing and wielding illegal monopoly power over the online search market.

  What Garland left unsaid was that the ruling was also a win for his boss, President Joe Biden, and for his boss's predecessor, former President Donald Trump. That's because the federal case against Google did not originate with the Biden Justice Department; it originated with the Trump Justice Department. "Two decades ago, Google became the darling of Silicon Valley as a scrappy startup with an innovative way to search the emerging internet," the Trump administration argued in its original 2020 lawsuit. "That Google is long gone. The Google of today is a monopoly gatekeeper for the internet." In an increasingly polarized political climate, the Google ruling was hailed as a rare triumph for bipartisanship. At last, the thinking went, the two parties can finally agree on something.

  Yet the ruling was not uniformly celebrated among legal and policy experts. Mehta's judgment "may not hold up on appeal," argued Alden Abbott, former general counsel at the Federal Trade Commission. Instead of harming consumers, Abbott wrote, Google's search engine "likely raised consumer welfare, which the Supreme Court has deemed the overarching goal of antitrust enforcement."

  Nor did the ruling give much weight to consumer choice, effectively ignoring the actions of the many consumers who have opted to use Google search precisely because they view it as the best product around.

  As I've said before, and will undoubtedly say again: there's nothing wrong with Google that Uncle Stupid can't make worse.

Recently on the book blog:

A sequel to Nita Prose's The Maid, which I read back in 2023 and liked quite a bit. (And if you are wondering if you should read that one before this one: yes, you should.)

Molly Gray narrates from her oddball perspective. She is, as the kids say, neurodivergent. But that didn't prevent her from becoming head maid at New York's swanky Regency Grand Hotel. (And she's also Sherlock-level observant, something that assists her role as amateur sleuth.)

All is going well until the hotel hosts famous mystery writer J.D. Grimthorpe, who has promised a stunning announcement for the press and his many fans. But (tsk!) before he announces anything, he sips some honey-laden tea, and immediately drops dead. Some important clues go missing in the resulting chaos. There's plenty of suspicious behavior, including from Lily, a maid-in-training who is also apparently "on the spectrum".

Also, it turns out (in one of those Dickensian coincidences) that Molly and Grimthorpe have a history: Molly's beloved grandmother was hired as a maid at the Grimthorpe mansion years ago, when Molly was a child. Thanks to a dispute with Molly's grade school, she accompanies Gran on the job, where she meets J.D.'s domineering wife, and notes the bizarre goings-on with the mercurial writer.

Could that have something to do with the present-day murder? Sure does.

So: it's a lot of fun, hilarious in spots, moving in others. Not remotely believable as a mystery, but that's OK.

It has been a couple of months since we mentioned Leavitt's Country Bakery and its spat with Conway NH mural nazis. Emma Camp brings us up to speed: Lawsuit Over New Hampshire Donut Mural Heads to Trial. In case you missed it:

The trial seems to have started last Friday, although no results have been reported as near as I can tell.

And now, stuff about tariffs. But also the housing crisis. But mostly tariffs:

• Also, don't bring me down, Groos. Dominic Pino advises: Don't Let Other Countries Set U.S. Tax Rates. Why would we think that's a good idea? Oh, right:

  “Reciprocal tariffs” are framed to sound like a simple matter of fairness. But there’s nothing fair about letting other countries make U.S. tax policy, and that’s what the Trump administration’s proposal amounts to.

  The basic principle of national sovereignty on taxation was a major flashpoint during the Biden administration, when Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen was trotting around the world trying to create a global corporate-tax cartel. As NR’s editors said of Yellen’s attempt at creating a global minimum corporate tax, “Taxation and sovereignty are inextricably intertwined. Different countries have different taxing and spending priorities.”

  “Reciprocal tariffs” would similarly outsource U.S. tax policy to other countries. The administration’s as-yet-unclear proposal would reportedly include considering non-tariff factors such as other taxes, subsidies, regulations, and exchange rates along with tariffs in setting the “reciprocal” rate for the U.S.

  The key is the framing. If you concentrate on the frame, the framers are hoping you won't notice the lousy picture it holds.

• Also unframed. The WSJ editorialists also consider the proposal, deeming it Trump’s Tariff Stress Test.

  Is President Trump trying to put markets through a stress test? It feels like it. Stocks rallied Thursday after Mr. Trump announced a temporary reprieve from the global reciprocal tariffs he threatened earlier this week. Try to catch your breath before his next blunderbuss tariff shot.

  Mr. Trump earlier in the week teased plans to impose tariffs on other countries that don’t match their duties on American exports with U.S. levies on the same goods. Most countries impose higher tariffs on average than the U.S., so this would mean that duties on most imports would rise, and more so for countries like India with higher trade barriers.

  It almost seems as if Trump is playing chicken with trade. Or just trying to extricate himself, in a face-saving way, from a policy that nearly every reputable economist says is misguided?

• For example, this guy at Dartmouth. Econ prof Douglas A. Irwin pulls no punches: ‘Reciprocal’ Tariffs Make No Sense.

  At an Oval Office press conference Thursday, President Trump confirmed that he’s going ahead with his reciprocal tariff plan. The U.S., he said, will impose the same tariffs on other countries as they impose on the U.S.: “No more, no less.” That sounds fair—we treat them the way they treat us—but it’s actually a terrible idea.

  It amounts to outsourcing U.S. tariff policy to other countries. They would dictate what our tariffs would be. If other countries put high tariffs on American goods, then we would impose high tariffs on their goods. So much for American sovereignty. So much for deciding what’s in our own national interest. The British economist Joan Robinson once said that a country shouldn’t throw rocks into its own harbors just because other countries have rocky coasts. The same principle applies here: The U.S. shouldn’t have stupid tariff policies just because other countries have stupid tariff policies.

  But as Forrest Gump was fond of saying: Stupid is as stupid does.

  That probably applies here, although don't ask for details.

• Willing to extend the benefit of the doubt. David Friedman is (at least) willing to look for a pony among all the horseshit: Retaliatory Tariffs.

  I have finally encountered a kind of tariff that I am not sure I am against. The idea is to impose the same tariff on another country’s exports that they impose on your exports. A tariff makes the country that imposes it worse off, a fact that neither Trump or most of the media appear to understand — Vance may — but it makes the country it is imposed against worse off as well. Imposing a tariff can be in the interest of the politicians who impose it for public choice reasons, as a way of buying support from a concentrated and well organized interest group such as the auto industry at the expense of a dispersed interest group such as their customers. That is one of the two reasons tariffs exist, the other being that the false theory of trade economics is simpler and easier to understand than the true theory.

  But another country’s tariff barriers against your exports make both your country and its politicians worse off. So if imposing tariffs on their imports results in tariffs being imposed on their exports, it might be in the interest of the politicians as well as the country they rule to lower, even abolish, their tariffs — and free trade, zero tariffs, is my first best tariff policy.

  I'm doubtful that can square with Trump's long professed love of tariffs qua tariffs. But I want to be open to optimism.

• Dave figures it out. Where "it" is: The Housing Crisis.

  If you've been keeping up with the news — which I do NOT advise — you're probably aware that we're having a Housing Crisis, caused by the fact that there aren't enough houses. I don't know why there aren't enough houses, although it wouldn't surprise me, as a longtime subscriber to The New York Times, if the culprit turned out to be Global Climate Change, which has been linked to basically every bad thing that happens, including autotuning and reality television.

  But whatever the cause, there aren't enough houses for all the people who want them. The result is that housing prices are insanely high, because of what economists call the Law of Supply and Demand, as illustrated by this graph provided by the distinguished London School of Economics:

  

  The law of Supply and Demand, which was discovered in 1966 by the Bobby Fuller Four Distinguished Economists, states: "I fought the law of supply and demand, and the law of supply and demand won."

  What does this technical "lingo" mean in simple layperson's terms? It means that today's young people cannot afford starter homes. This is a tragedy, because having a starter home has been a cherished American tradition dating back to the frontier days, when young pioneer couples looking for "a place of their own" could simply set off into the wilderness, find a plot of land, whack down some trees and build a rustic log cabin to call home. Granted, the vast majority of these pioneers died within weeks from lethal wilderness hazards such as raccoon bites. But during those weeks they were living the American dream.

  I've subscribed to Dave's substack, because of his own housing crisis, described later in his article. He could use the cash.

Recently on the book blog:

Kat Timpf's second book showed up on the shelves of Portsmouth (NH) Public Library, an impulsive grab for me. My take on her first book, You Can't Joke About That is here. As I said there, I became a Kat fan when she was writing for National Review (where she was bylined "Katherine Timpf") from 2014 to 2020. (Her author archive is here.) She moved on to Fox News, and became sort of famous, I think. She also does stand-up comedy.

Her overall thesis (see subtitle) is unexceptional: you should not judge people as evil, insane, ignorant, or stupid simply because they disagree with you on some political or personal matter. I assume it's OK to judge if they actually are evil, insane, ignorant, or stupid. But, geez, suck it up and move on; you're not perfect either.

The book is a mishmash of personal observations and political opinion. She is a self-described "small-l" libertarian, and when she is defending her small-p positions, she's often on-target and occasionally very funny. From her chapter on religion:

A lot of the stuff from the Bible is beautiful and certainly more insightful than the Marilyn Monroe quotes that wind up plastered all over Instagram. (I mean, I've said this before, but I'll say it again: As soon as I read "It's better to be absolutely ridiculous than absolutely boring!" all I hear is "I'm a reckless sloppy drunk and I might throw up in your car!")

Downsides: her on-screen/stage jobs have made her hone her verbal skills very sharply: she's into, see above, one-liner zings. That style doesn't often translate well to the printed page. (Getting the audiobook might work better.) She says "like" a lot. Example, from her climate-change discussion:

Here's the thing, though: If your go back to the Two Sides of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, there are many reasons to see both sides as right. For example, it would be better, in a perfect, simple world, to just, like, stop emitting greenhouse gases.

Safe to say that Kat will not be competing with George F. Will anytime soon. (And, by the way, an Earth without greenhouse gases would be a very cold Earth, without photosynthesis. And, therefore, also probably without many people.)

Kat's rocky personal life, filled with conflict with family, lovers, friends, nicotine, and ex-fans (see the title) is … sorry, not that interesting.

My apologies for recycling (1) a headline and (2) a Getty image from twelve days past. But additional lessons concerning the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau must be learned. First is provided by Eric Boehm: Elizabeth Warren’s hubris allowed Trump to defund the CFPB.

To adapt an Oscar Wildism: One must have a heart of stone to read the death of the CFPB without laughing.

Also: Veronique de Rugy writes a mean obituary, listing The 5 Worst Things About the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Number One ("Unelected Regulator With a Blank Check") was partially covered by Eric above. So let's skip down to Number Two ("A Duplicative Mission"):

Click over for Worst Things 3-5! If you need more. So long, CFPB; you will not be missed.

And there is further <voice imitation="professor_farnsworth">Good news, everyone!</voice>:

New: the CFPB is laying the groundwork to close its headquarters building in downtown DC, ahead of widespread cuts expected at the bureau.
The CFPB notified the @USOCC, which owns the Brutalist structure, that it plans to terminate its long-term lease. https://t.co/zNwWBzH3ra

— Andrew Ackerman (@amacker) February 14, 2025

OK, it's not utter destruction, followed by earth-salting, but I'll take it.

And not that it matters, but: the "@USOCC" is the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. Which Vero mentioned above. Which, despite its name, seems to have nothing to do with US currency; instead it claims to "[ensure] that national banks and federal savings associations operate in a safe and sound manner, provide fair access to financial services, treat customers fairly, and comply with applicable laws and regulations." They have a $1.2 billion budget which they get, not from Congressional appropriation, but by "assessments levied on national banks and federal savings associations."

And (left unsaid by the OCC) those "assessments" are quietly passed along to the customers of those banks and savings associations.

Also of note:

• In (very) local news… Pun Salad Manor is about 200 yards away from Rollinsford (NH) Grade School. So I couldn't help but notice an op-ed from John Shea, who is (for the current school year) superintendent of the Rollinsford School District: Future of universal public education is under threat. And, geez, John turns out to be kind of a partisan who sees an authoritarian conspiracy hiding in plain sight. Cue ominous music, perhaps the soundtrack from The Parallax View:

  Let me be clear what I think about where we are now. And I am by no means alone. There are powerful forces — elected and unelected, federal, state, and local, inside and outside government — that are deliberately, strategically, and openly working to destroy universal public education. They do not like the system, they see it as a burden (not an investment), and they are indifferent to the ideals of equitable opportunity. In terms of their larger and varied agendas, they simply have no need for it.

  Regardless of your own values, beliefs, and political convictions, what we are witnessing today is undeniable. The current president and his allies are seizing complete control of the federal government. Not just the office of the president, but a president above the law, intent on redefining executive powers, and with loyalists in the most important cabinet posts. Not just majorities in both chambers of the U.S. Congress, but representatives and senators who understand they will be squashed if they step out of line. Not just a majority of appointments in the U.S. Supreme Court, but a court to be utilized as a political instrument of the executive branch.

  Arguably the greatest obstacle to maintaining such an authoritarian takeover and pursuing an ideological agenda without regard for democratic process is an engaged, educated, critical-thinking general public. And foundational to this are (1) a free and independent press and (2) a quality universal public education system. The new administration has, of course, been attacking and undermining the press for well over a decade now — and is establishing its own alternative sources of news and information. And it’s been painting public education, for many years now, as ineffective, expensive, liberal, unionized, godless, etc., and so on. The plan of attack is to undermine public support for our schools, drain the system of funding however possible, undo our commitment to the ideals of universal access, and essentially recast education as a private good better served by the free market (for those who can afford it).

  Well, John's tirade speaks for itself. Because it boils down to Shut up and give me more money.

  I can only imagine what this means for the education of the Rollinsford kiddos.

• Obviously, they are in on the conspiracy. Let's click over to the Josiah Bartlett Center, providing a counterpoint to John's nasty drivel: Gov. Ayotte proposes education freedom for public school students starting in 2026.

  That’s a huge win for school choice supporters and for students who have struggled to succeed in their government-assigned public school.

  New Hampshire’s own state test scores show majorities of students failing to reach proficiency in science and math, and bare majorities performing at a proficient level in English, despite massive increases in school spending in the past quarter century.

  New Hampshire public schools spend about $4 billion a year on K-12 public education, breaking down to an average of $26,320 per student in total spending. In addition, thousands of students experience bullying and other negative social interactions in schools that they don’t choose but are assigned to by their local governments. While most parents report being satisfied with their local public schools, many families want other options.

  Ayotte’s budget would give most public school students the option of spending their state adequate education grant on an alternative education to the one provided by the school district in which they happen to live.

  Unfortunately, I can report no progress on Pun Salad's favorite educational reform: abolition of mandatory attendance laws.

  That's right, John Shea: I'm your worst nightmare: an "authoritarian" who wants to stop forcing parents to submit their kids to your tutelage.

• Yeah. That too. Warning: Christian Schneider's headline is easy to misread: Impeach the Precedent.

  In Federalist No. 70, Alexander Hamilton stressed the need for “energy in the Executive,” arguing it would provide “steady administration of the laws.”

  Hamilton couldn’t have foreseen the energetic Donald Trump, whose steadiness rivals that of a raccoon that found a bottle of cough syrup in the garbage.

  This week, President Trump barred the Associated Press from an Oval Office event after the news service declined to call the Gulf of Mexico by Trump’s executive-ordered new name. The White House said the news organization must refer to it as the Gulf of America or risk being excluded from future press events.

  No need to call 911, as you have not ingested any hallucinogens and you are not imagining that last sentence. It actually happened, the AP says, and in fact the White House press secretary has defended it.

  Yet it is far down on the list of crazy things Trump — by his own account a supporter of free speech — has done this week. Flip open any website and you’ll see something new, from Trump’s idea of reconstructing Gaza — “owned” by the U.S. — as a resort, to his plans to make Canada America’s 51st state. (Canada has the same politics as California and roughly the same population, so annexing our neighbor to the north would guarantee that no Republican ever wins nationwide office again.)

  Christian notes the obvious in his headline: we desperately need to de-imperialize the presidency. Because the next Democrat to occupy the Oval Office will ape Trump's methods, and probably push the envelope further.

• An Econ 101 lesson from Kevin D. Williamson. Channeling his inner George H.W. Bush, KDW says Read My Lips: Tariffs Are Taxes.

  The Trump administration has a plan for inflation: Make it at least a little worse. 

  I didn’t say it was a good plan.

  It is not the case, as one so often hears, that higher prices inflicted on producers or retailers—in the form of higher taxes, regulatory burdens, or, today’s topic, tariffs—are necessarily “passed on to consumers.” That is a myth based on the fiction that sellers in the marketplace have the power to set prices unilaterally, which they do not—buyers have the power to say “no,” which is why sellers in very price-sensitive markets (fast food, many big-box stores) do not just jack up their prices every time there’s an increase in their expenses. A big seller such as Walmart is much more likely to try to pass along expenses to its vendors, its business partners, and (unhappily for them!) its employees than to try to pass them on to customers who have a dozen different places to buy oatmeal or socks. A business that relies on Walmart for 70 percent of its sales, on the other hand, has fewer options. 

  Nevertheless, as KDW details, Trump's tariff's—are they still just "proposed", or have they gone into effect? It's hard to keep track—will certainly "put upward pressure on a lot of things you need to build houses: lumber, steel, aluminum, copper, etc."

  My take: Inflation is not a certainty, but that's the way to bet.

Mr. Ramirez (again, literally) draws inspiration from a nineteenth-century source. Shown in happier moments:

I usually try to find something related to link to here… hm… well, if we got a big egg, there must have been a really big chicken, right?

And in that topic, Craig Richardson wonders: Why Can't Food Stamps be Used for a Rotisserie Chicken?.

Low-income families and individuals can qualify for the Electronic Benefits Card (EBT), which is issued by the federal government and comes from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), formerly known as the Federal Food Stamp Program. The EBT card looks and functions like a bank debit card, and monthly benefits for individuals average around $200. About 12.6% or about 1 in 8 Americans get benefits from an EBT card, according to USDA estimates. That’s about 42 million people.

Upon receiving their EBT card, SNAP recipients are eligible to buy any fresh or frozen food in grocery stores, but also are free to purchase candy, ice cream, soft drinks, donuts, chips, and even birthday cakes. If it’s a consumable food or drink item and non-alcoholic, it’s fine to put it in the grocery cart. Amazon even has EBT-eligible gift baskets overflowing with luscious chocolates, fine nuts, and toffees.

[Amazon link at your right]

Yet these same families can’t use their EBT card to purchase a freshly roasted rotisserie chicken, hot soups, steamed vegetables, warm pasta, or other prepared foods that are available for convenient takeaway at grocery stores. All these items are banned since the early 1970s.

Well, that's Uncle Stupid for you. Craig points out that the number one commodity purchased via SNAP was soft drinks. ("Fluid milk products" comes in a poor second.)

Soft drinks? Yes. For more on that, I refer you to Kevin D. Williamson's classic, albeit controversial, 2013 NR article, The White Ghetto.

Gee, this got kind of meandering. But I hope informative and entertaining. And now…

On to other topics:

• Will economic growth save Social Security? That's the question politicians are desperately wondering about. Because otherwise they will have to make unpopular, painful decisions. But Romina Boccia and Dominik Lett throw some cold water on the idea: Economic Growth Won't Save Social Security.

  Hoping that economic growth will solve Social Security’s financial woes, as some politicians have suggested, is a pipe dream. Because Social Security benefits are indexed to wages, higher economic growth brings both higher revenues and higher benefits, leaving the long-term fiscal problem unresolved. In the best case, faster economic growth would only push back the trust fund insolvency date by a few years at most.

  Take the 1990s, for example. During this decade, the US experienced a boom in productivity and capital investment thanks to technological innovations, favorable demographics, reduced global tensions, and globalization. However, these circumstances barely improved Social Security’s budgetary future, leaving insolvency looming on the horizon. Per the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, even if the US returned to the levels of capital growth, productivity growth, and labor force participation seen in the 1990s, it would fail to fix budget shortfalls driven by growing benefit costs and worsening demographics. In short, growth buys time but not solvency.

  The authors link to their Cato Policy Brief: Congress Can’t Outgrow or Inflate Away the Social Security Financing Problem.

• As Douglas Adams said… "Don't Panic!" (Although it's an understandable reaction if you get your news from the Contrarian, or the like.) Instead, like Jonah Goldberg, take some Comfort in History.

  America has slipped the bounds of constitutionality many times in the past. Andrew Jackson may or may not have actually said “The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.” But that basically captures his attitude. The Republic survived. Woodrow Wilson was an affront to the Constitution on numerous fronts. The Supreme Court pushed back against Wilson on some fronts while he was in office and on others after he left office. But it also let many of his transgressions stand. The Republic survived.

  Then there’s FDR. I’m one of those cranks who thinks FDR—a Wilson administration retread—ruled like an anti-constitutional autocrat. It didn’t seem like it to many at the time—though he did not lack for critics who shared my opinion—because he had so much political capital. He won in back-to-back landslides that delivered massive majorities in Congress. When Congress is a rubber stamp, voters are desperate, and the press is fawning, it’s really easy to act like an autocrat. 

  In other words, when autocracy is popular no one wants to hear that autocracy is bad. Because people have a really annoying tendency to think anything they like must also be good and constitutional.

  I won’t go down a lengthy rabbit hole on this, but I do keep thinking of something FDR’s commerce secretary, Harry Hopkins, told New Deal activists in New York. “I want to assure you,” he said, “that we are not afraid of exploring anything within the law, and we have a lawyer who will declare anything you want to do legal.” That pretty closely tracks the Trump administration’s approach these days.

  Have I said lately that we wouldn't be in this pickle if Nikki Haley were president? No? Well, there you go.

• Always trust content from Veronique de Rugy. In her syndicated column, she outlines The Upside, Risks and Limits of DOGE. Her bottom line: DOGE is fine, but:

  No amount of discretionary cuts or anti-waste initiatives, no matter how worthy they are, will solve our long-term debt crisis. Ultimately, lasting reform must be legislated. President Donald Trump and Musk deserve credit for highlighting the debt crisis and taking action, but pretending that the job ends with them would be dangerous.

  Just think of us as Ralphie on the bus, with Donald Trump at the wheel, pestered by…

• She was DOGE before it was DOGE. Marina Nitze is not as famous as Elon Musk. But attention must be paid when she confesses: I tried to fix government tech for years. I'm fed up.

  When I helped create the United States Digital Service (USDS), it was not on my bingo board that it would become the U.S. DOGE Service a mere decade later. As a lifelong libertarian, the years I spent trying to make government more efficient at the Department of Veterans Affairs (V.A.) and USDS required a lot of patience. Now I'm fresh out.

  We have been making tiny, barely perceptible "improvements," paid for with years of compromise and hand-holding in endless pointless meetings, and then celebrating this as success. I can't get Alana Newhouse's description out of my head: "Half the time our institutions feel like molasses, and the other half like concrete." I'm fed up with a government that can't implement its way out of a paper bag.

  Apparently most of America is fed up, too.

  I care deeply about trans people, immigrants, and others who are targets of so much hate right now. I do not support the harmful actions being taken against them. At the same time, I could not possibly care less that someone plugged in a server to create a new email list without a Privacy Impact Assessment. If no one ever adheres to FIPS 140-2 again—great, it's about time we took that "kick me" sign written in Mandarin off our back. Much of the current system hurts everyone and needs to go.

  It's a rare inside look at how frustrating things inside Uncle Stupid's bureaucracy can be.

• And then there's the party who thinks it can spend your money more wisely than you can. NHJournal says what our local legislators are up to: NHDems Propose Property Tax Hike, Return of I&D Income Tax.

  Rep. Tom Schamberg (D-Wilmot) told the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee he would need 15 minutes to present HB502 to the committee — an unusually long period of time for a body that must consider hundreds of bills.

  But when Schamberg got behind the mic, he barely mentioned his legislation, instead launching into what acting Chairman Rep. Jordon Ulery (R-Hudson) called a “diatribe” against Gov. Kelly Ayotte and her fellow Republicans in the legislature. He denounced what he called “tax cuts for the ultra-wealthy” and claimed GOP tax cuts had “downshifted” costs onto local property taxpayers.

  As Schamberg read his political speech to the committee, the chairman interrupted several times asking him to discuss the specifics of his bill. “What does the bill do? How does it do it? And why should the bill pass?” he asked.

  Schamberg refused to answer but continued to read his speech attacking GOP tax policy. When he was done, the Wilmot Democrat refused to take any questions from the committee.

  Why?

  I'm sure it's something deeply psychological.

(Pun Salad was doing anagrams from Day One, so every once in a while…)

In words, Christopher F. Rufo describes: How Trump Can Dismantle the Department of Education: (1) "spin off" student loans to an independent financial entity; (2) simple block grants to the states for K-12 schooling; and …

I don't know where the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), to which Mr. Ramirez's cartoon refers, fits into CFR's scheme. NAEP seems to do non-ideological, useful, solid reporting. I'd keep it, somewhere. Although calling it "Progress" seems to have been overly optimistic. Their latest report is available here.

Also of note:

• I'll call it a win. The College Fix reports some good news: Dartmouth becomes latest Ivy League institution to adopt ‘institutional restraint’ policy.

  Dartmouth College recently rolled out an “Institutional Restraint Policy,” becoming the latest Ivy League institution to install a guideline that calls on campus leaders to avoid weighing in on the hot-button political and social topics of the day.

  In Dartmouth’s case, its new policy replaced its previous “Institutional Statements vs Individual Statements Policy” that had been active since 2022.

  Of the eight Ivy Leagues, Harvard, Yale, Cornell, University of Pennsylvania, and now Dartmouth have now implemented policies “committing to the principles of institutional neutrality,” according to Heterodox Academy.

  That's progress. What about the University Near Here? I mentioned last month that among a lot of stupid recommendations, UNH's "Working Group" tasked with making recommendations in response to the imbroglio concerning the pro-Hamas "encampment" last May, there was one excellent one: "The University should formally adopt institutional neutrality."

  UNH's new president, Elizabeth Chilton, rejected many of the stupid recommendations, good for her. See the articles in UNH's student newspaper and the local newspaper for details.

  But I don't see any reporting on the institutional neutrality recommendation. If you'd like more information on why that's a good idea, see FIRE recommendation #4 here.

• How many ways can I say "Hell, yeah!" Jeffrey Miron AND Jonah Karafiol ask Should the US Government Privatize the Post Office? It's a short piece, but here's the meat:

  An even better response is to privatize USPS. This would eliminate its uniform price and service mandate and allow it to close unprofitable locations. Privatizing would also eliminate restrictions on private carriers’ activity, enhancing their efficiency.

  A key aspect of this privatization is that it must be complete, or nearly so. Since Britain sold a majority stake in its national postal service, the share price has fallen about 25 percent. But Royal Mail failed to eliminate the barriers that made it unprofitable, such as uniform pricing. Mail services such as FedEx and UPS show that private mail couriers can function effectively.

  Ultimately, the case for privatization is one of efficiency, competition, and fiscal responsibility. By privatizing USPS, the U.S. could foster a competitive, market-driven postal industry that better serves consumers and taxpayers alike.

  Geez, if Britain can privatize the Royal Mail, are you seriously claiming that the Land of the Free can't do the same?

Back nearly four years ago I noticed that Amazon had removed Ryan Anderson's book When Harry Became Sally from its e-shelves. (Well, to be more accurate: someone else noticed, and I blogged about it.)

Since then, I used Amazon as a punching bag over this issue: here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

Whew. I guess it really bugged me.

Well, reader, as you'll notice from the (paid link) over there on your right, it's once again available for purchase at Amazon. At least as I type. (And once again: someone else noticed this, I'm just pointing it out.) I don't know if they've explained this 180° turn anywhere.

But in any case, good on them. Wish they hadn't done it in the first place, though.

Also of note:

• It's too late, baby, now it's too late. George Will channels his inner Carole King. And also provides some history: It’s too late for progressives to be careful what they wish for.

  Progressives have the presidency they have long desired, but a president they abhor. James Madison warned them: “Enlightened statesmen will not always be at the helm” (Federalist No. 10).

  Theodore Roosevelt’s “stewardship” theory of the presidency was that presidents may do anything they are not explicitly forbidden to do. Woodrow Wilson considered the separation of powers a dangerous anachronism impeding enlightened presidents (e.g., him). He postulated a presidential duty of “interpretation”: discovering what the masses would want if they were sensible, like him. Wilson’s former assistant secretary of the Navy, Franklin D. Roosevelt, used radio to enable the presidency to mold opinion. Lyndon B. Johnson, who became an FDR-loyalist in Congress in 1937, commanded a large and obedient congressional majority (1965-1966) as no subsequent president has.

  Donald Trump’s rampant (for the moment) presidency is an institutional consequence of progressivism. Progressives, who spent recent years trying to delegitimize the Supreme Court and other federal courts, suddenly understand that courts stand between Trump and the fulfillment of his least lawful whims. Including his disobeying Congress’s unfortunate, but detailed and lawful, ban of TikTok.

  GFW also notes the futility of cutting the deficit down to size when you've said (a) entitlements are sacrosanct; and (b) you want to increase the defense budget; and (c) you want to enact a bunch of new tax goodies.

  But we'll see what happens.

• Hey kids, what time is it? Brent Leatherwood, president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, checks the clock on the clubhouse door and decides Now is the Time to Defund Planned Parenthood.

  Planned Parenthood Federation of America is responsible for ending nearly 400,000 preborn lives every year. It is the largest abortion provider in America — yet it receives $700 million of your taxpayer dollars annually.

  President Trump and the new, Republican-controlled Congress have the opportunity to finally remove our taxpayer dollars from this pro-abortion organization. It’s what the American people want. In a Marist Poll conducted last month, 57 percent of Americans opposed the use of tax dollars to pay for abortion.

  The argument was, and continues to be, that the government funding doesn't go directly to pay for abortions, but for nice things like "prenatal care and cancer screenings". How about we pay someone else for that?

• Fingers crossed at Pun Salad Manor. Emma Camp wonders: Will Trump try to shut down the Department of Education?

  The Trump administration has begun drawing up an executive order that would aim to radically diminish the Education Department, with the goal of eventually scrapping it entirely, CNN reported last week. According to CNN, the anticipated plan would include an order directing the secretary of education to develop a plan to shrink the department through future executive orders, as well as a drive from Trump for Congress to formally nix the department.

  While it does not look like Trump will attempt to dissolve the Education Department through executive action, he clearly intends to do the next best thing. "I told Linda, 'Linda, I hope you do a great job in putting yourself out of a job,'" Trump said of education secretary nominee Linda McMahon last week. "I want her to put herself out of a job."

  The move comes as part of a broader project to shrink the federal government through executive orders—a plan that's been having mixed results, especially considering that many government functions and departments can only be abolished by Congress. So far, Trump is facing dozens of lawsuits attempting to halt his multitude of recent executive orders.

  Perhaps it could be folded into a new department: "Department of Things For Which There Is No Constitutional Provision". Set it up in one of the vertices of the Pentagon, perhaps a repurposed broom closet.

• We're gonna backlash so much, you may even get tired of backlashing. Kat Rosenfield essays on DOGE and the Backlash to the Backlash.

  Late last week, Elon Musk announced that the initiative he’s heading up, the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, would rehire Marko Elez, the 25-year-old staffer who resigned after a Wall Street Journal story unearthed several offensive X posts that he made under a pseudonym in 2024. “You could not pay me to marry outside of my ethnicity,” he had posted. Also, “Normalize Indian hate” and “Just for the record, I was racist before it was cool.”

  Elez’s reinstatement was nominally a democratic process, conducted via—what else—a poll on X, where 78 percent of respondents agreed that the software developer should get his job back.

  Given the ages (young) and online status (extremely) of the DOGE youths, there’s likely to be more where this came from. Already, the media are abuzz with the news that one of them was formerly a prolific poster under the name “Big Balls.” I, for one, am hoping any further revelations are in the “juvenile scrotal jokes” camp rather than the “weird racist meming” one. Since just because we’re past Peak Woke doesn’t mean we need to throw the doors of the government open to the kind of guy who throws around ethnic slurs for fun.

  But is it possible to respond to the checkered online histories of the DOGE dudes without whipping ourselves into the kind of hysteria that dominated such conversations during the first Trump administration?

  We’re about to find out.

  As noted above, I'm tired of all the backlashing.

Another bit of wishful thinking, this one from the NR editors: Republicans Should Keep Taxes Simple.

The state and local tax deduction is, indeed, pernicious. But there's a serious push to increase or eliminate the cap. I'm sure I've said this before, but I agree with the editors: "Increasing allowances for SALT deductions for a relatively small number of mostly wealthy taxpayers in high-tax states would be appalling."

And, finally, a truth bomb from Kyle Smith, dealing with the spending side:

Um we have that debt because we keep voting for pols who spend more than we raise in taxes https://t.co/mdPw9OZVdI

— Kyle Smith (@rkylesmith) February 8, 2025

I'd have a lot more respect for Trump if he cut back on his obvious blather about "bad deals with everybody".

Also of note:

• Hey, our state made it to a Reason headline! But unfortunately not in a good way. Lenore Skenazy rips the LFOD state a new one: New Hampshire's bad parenting bill is a nightmare.

  The New Hampshire legislature is considering a parenting bill that would make it easier for the government to investigate parents for child abuse or neglect. It accomplishes this by removing the word "safety" from the legal definition of child abuse and replacing it with "physical, emotional or psychological welfare."

  That could be almost anything, of course.

  "I happen to be a tax-and-spend liberal," Richard Wexler, executive director of the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform, tells Reason. "But this bill provides not one iota of additional help. It simply turns the [Division for Children, Youth and Families] into the 'well-being' police."

  I would guess the impetus for the "nightmare" bill is a "do something" response to the murder of 5-year-old Harmony Montgomery by her father. Heartbreaking, but also endlessly hyped by our local news outlets in their quest for eyeballs.

• You say that like it's bad news. The NHJournal headline worries NHIAA Could Lose Federal Funds for Allowing Males in Female Sports. (NHIAA == "New Hampshire Interscholastic Athletic Association".)

  Federal funding for school sports in New Hampshire will be shut off if the state’s interscholastic athletic association continues to allow biological males to compete against girls on the playing field, the federal Department of Education (DOE) confirmed in a statement to NHJournal on Monday.

  That follows the DOE’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) decision to investigate alleged Title IX violations committed by the Massachusetts Interscholastic Athletic Association (MIAA).

  OCR specifically singled out MIAA policy that states “students shall not be excluded from participation on a gender-specific sports team that is consistent with the student’s bona fide gender identity.”

  In the Granite State, the New Hampshire Interscholastic Athletic Association (NHIAA) is the governing body for sports competitions among all public high schools. While the organization declined to respond to repeated requests for comment, the NHIAA policy posted on its website includes similar language to the MIAA.

  My question is: Why is Uncle Stupid shelling out any money whatsoever for local school sports, whether it's New Hampshire, Massachusetts, or any other state?

  Well, I have a couple more questions: how much does NHIAA get from the federal government anyway? What percentage of their budget?

  And an observation, I'm sure I've made before: Why is it that race-segregated sports teams are racist and putatively illegal, while sex-segregated sports teams are mandated by law?

• We can hope. Jim Geraghty sees encouraging signs that Trump won’t abandon Ukraine.

  If you were an American who wanted to ensure that the war in Ukraine ended on terms favorable to Ukraine, you would want the negotiations handled by someone who not only understands the Ukrainians’ position but also feels a deep personal attachment to the consequences of the Russian invasion.

  Someone like a retired Army general whose daughter has been running relief operations in Ukraine since the start of the war.

  Considering the stakes of the war in Ukraine, it’s surprising how little attention President Donald Trump’s special envoy for Ukraine and Russia, retired Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg, has received outside of some foreign-policy wonk circles. The talks that will shape the future of Ukraine have already begun; Trump said in his news conference last week alongside Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu: “We are having very good talks, very constructive talks, on Ukraine. And we are talking to the Russians, we’re talking to the Ukrainian leadership.”

  In the past week, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said his team spoke with Kellogg and Trump’s national security adviser, Michael Waltz, and that they were working to arrange a visit by a U.S. delegation. (Trump’s campaign trail promise to end the war within 24 hours of taking office is a distant memory.)

  I'm glad to see any reasons for optimism.

• Apparently not a movie, as cool as that might be. Kevin D. Williamson calls Trump's trade policies Zombie Dick Gephardt.

  “We will not allow our workers and industries to be displaced by unfair import competition.” If that sounds like Donald Trump, that is because the Republican president and standard-bearer in 2025 is, in essence, a Democrat stuck in the 1980s—and indeed, the line comes from the Democrats’ 1980 platform. The Democrat Trump sounds like is Dick Gephardt, once a very considerable figure in American politics who ran for president twice before retiring to become a bigfoot lobbyist and consultant. He ended up working for DLA Piper and Goldman Sachs—who doesn’t?—but in the 1980s and 1990s, he was the face of center-left trade Luddism, the union goons’ answer to Ross Perot. When the upstart nat-pop right demanded that the GOP abandon “zombie Reaganism,” who knew that what they had in mind was zombie Gephardtism?

  Gephardt had more in common with Trump than just being a child of the 1940s: He very badly wanted to be president, and he was (I don’t write “is”; he may have become a better sort of man in his old age) a complete phony. He privately acknowledged that the U.S. trade deficits were only in a very small part driven by trade policies in our country or others. As one economist told the Washington Post at the time: “What aggravates me about Gephardt is that Dick knows better. He could give you the best anti-protectionist speech of anyone on the Hill. But he wants to be president. The Japan-bashing in his amendment is what appeals to labor, and Dick needs labor support for the Democratic nomination.”

  Hawkish rhetoric about so-called trade deficits (the term itself is misleading) also gave Reagan-era Democrats a tough-sounding talking point to deploy against Republicans who, then as now, liked to talk a mean fight about budget deficits (which, unlike “trade deficits,” are a thing) while generally making them worse by reducing taxes and doing approximately squat about spending. The “trade deficit” is a much more useful political issue than the actual deficit, because reducing the actual budget deficit means that somebody’s pocket gets lighter—either through higher taxes or lower federal spending or both—while bitching about the inscrutable Oriental with his “iron rice bowl” gives Americans a foreign enemy to blame for any economic disappointment at home while offering General Motors executives an excuse for making spectacularly crappy cars. (If you remember GM cars in the ’80s, oh, goodness: the Chevy Citation, the Buick Skylark, the aptly named Oldsmobile Omega, the ironically named Pontiac Phoenix—incompetent designs incompetently welded together by union guys drunk on the job half the time. Not a golden age for the American automobile.) You sure as hell would rather talk to the median voter about that than about why he needs higher taxes or a smaller Social Security check.

  Talk about a blast from the past. In the nearly 20 years this blog has been in operation, Gephardt hasn't been mentioned once, until now.

  As always, I strongly recommend you subscribe to the Dispatch, if only for KDW's appearances.

Our Amazon Product/Eye Candy du Jour was brought to my attention by GeekPress, who seemed unsure whether the marketing was "brilliant or clueless"?

Reader, don't strain your eyes. The product is "St. Joan of Arc French Roast Catholic Coffee".

It's been nearly 600 years, and I'm thinking to myself: too soon? Or perhaps more appropriately: Trop tôt?

In other brilliant/clueless news, the AP reports on the latest savage cuts: Trump says he has directed US Treasury to stop minting new pennies, citing rising cost.

The AP story says it's iffy as to whether Trump's order is actually within his Constitutional power. "Currency specifications -- including the size and metal content of coins -- are dictated by Congress."

Sure. But here's the law, and note the wording: "The Secretary of the Treasury may mint and issue only the following coins:" (Emphasis mine.) Trump isn't (as near as I can tell) eliminating pennies; he's just saying the Mint should stop making them. I think the decision on how much currency of various types to mint or print is a decision made on the Treasury side. Which Trump runs.

I ranted on this topic a few days ago. Executive summary: the money saved by stopping penny production is trivial. Overall, the Mint turns a tidy profit on coin production, thanks to seigniorage. And the apparent demand for pennies exists; they aren't piling up at the Mint, after all.

We are forced by law to use government currency, and only government currency. It seems to me that they should provide that currency in the amounts and denominations we demand.

Also of note:

• Your tax dollars (not) at work. Christian Britschgi notes a small problem with USAID: USAID-Funded Pandemic Research Failed To Spot COVID or Ensure Chinese Transparency.

  President Donald Trump's effort to unilaterally wind down the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) has sparked a heated debate about the agency's role in pandemic response.

  USAID's defenders cite its important role in researching viruses and responding to disease outbreaks. Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) head Elon Musk, on the other hand, accused it of "[funding] bioweapon research, including COVID-19, that killed millions of people."

  Christian carefully sorts through the history and credible evidence, which includes China's refusal to cooperate with investigations about what went on at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. His bottom line:

  Musk can't say definitively that the U.S. was funding bioweapons research there. People should be circumspect about totally dismissing that possibility as well.

• Speaking of dismissing inconvenient possibilities… NHJournal reports on our state's see-no-evil senior senator: Shaheen Emerges As Top Defender of Troubled Foreign Aid Spending.

  The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) has been fighting off allegations of wasteful spending funding a ‘woke’ agenda for years, a record so problematic Congress created an entire website to combat it.

  But despite spending tax dollars on DEI theater and LGBT comic books — not to mention its attempt to hide its funding of bat studies involving coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology — USAID still has solid support from New Hampshire Democrats, most notably senior U.S. Sen. Jeanne Shaheen.

  Shaheen, the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, called the Trump administration’s decision to shut down USAID “an ill-advised and costly move that will only cause further chaos and leave Americans and American interests exposed.”

  Jeanne's current term runs out next year, and she hasn't said she's running. I kind of hope she does, because I'd like to vote against her one last time.

• A myth is as good as a mile, part II. The Josiah Bartlett Center continues the debate on compelled union membership: Right-to-work facts vs. myths. It's a detailed refutation of anti-RTW assertions. Bottom line:

  Right-to-work laws have been studied for decades. Research shows mixed results on some points, clear results on others. What’s become evident over the decades is that right-to-work laws are associated with statistically significant gains in employment, particularly manufacturing employment, job opportunities, population growth and economic growth. If New Hampshire adopts a right-to-work law, we would expect to see improvements in all of those areas, along with an improvement in state business tax revenues resulting from the additional business activity.

  As for freedom vs. coercion, workers have First Amendment rights not to associate with or fund membership organizations that they choose not to join. If workers want to join unions, they should be free to do so. Preferably, they would have the option of joining more than one union (something that current federal law makes difficult). Right-to-work laws create freedom, not freeloaders. And for that reason, they are extremely popular, which is why they have been adopted in a majority of U.S. states. New Hampshire’s economy, and its workers, would benefit if the Granite State becomes the 27th state to protect workers’ First Amendment rights by adopting a right-to-work law.

  I deftly avoided joining a union during my work years.

• Pass the (movie theater) popcorn. Jeffrey Blehar is rapidly becoming one of my favorite writers, and here's one of the reasons for that: The Greatest Hollywood Awards-Season Story Ever Told

  Emilia Pérez was nominated for 13 Oscars this season, falling one short of the all-time record set for a single film. (It would take too much space to list all the major categories; it was pretty much nominated for “Best Everything.”) This was heralded as a surprise by the Hollywood media when the nominations were announced on January 23, but since I am a conservative and not stupid, I recognize that it was in fact comically predictable given the political climate in Hollywood post-November.

  I’m sure I don’t need to explain why to you either, beyond the barest description of the movie: A Spanish-language, French-produced film about a Mexican drug lord who fakes his death to live his life quietly as a woman? And it’s a musical? With both Zoe Saldana and Selena Gomez? Shut up and take my money. (I’m sure you all rushed out to see it when it first hit theaters, right after you took me up on my recommendation of Lars von Trier’s Antichrist as an antidote to last year’s campaign season.) Perez’s success in garnering nominations from outraged, mulish Hollywood elites after Trump’s victory was foreordained, and I almost have to tip my cap: It’s downright athletic how Emilia Pérez presses nearly every single woke button imaginable, almost suspiciously so, as if created in a lab to play to critically fashionable political ephemera.

  One of my NR gifted links for February! Click away!

George F. Will tries to find a pony in all the… well, you know that joke: On the bright side, maybe Democrats and Republicans will be chastened. That's a gifted link, so click away. Skipping down to the tariff stuff:

Samuelson was wrong about some big things (like the economic performance of the USSR), but he was right about Ricardo.

Also of note:

• Oh, right. It's Game Day. Dave Barry answers Frequently Asked Questions About The Super Bowl. And the insights of Dave's two-year-old daughter, Sophie, about a televised football game:

  Sophie watched it for only a few minutes, but in that brief time she was able to grasp the essence of the sport of football, as follows:

  — When the players went to the line of scrimmage, she said: "Ready!"

  — When they ran a play, she said: "Fall down!"

  — When a player got injured, she said: "Boo-boo."

  That's really it. Football has three components: Ready, Fall Down and Boo-boo. In between these components there are team meetings, called "huddles," and timeouts that can last as long as dental school, and — if it's a really important game — Taylor Swift. But these are just fillers; without them the game would be over in ten minutes and there would be no mechanism for showing billions of dollars worth of TV commercials.

  I'd add, for when the zebras throw a flag: "UH-Oh". But, like Samuelson, Sophie had the big things right.

• Four words often preceding a bad decision: "Let's make this interesting." George F. Will (yes, again, so sue me) on gambling: Here comes the betting and fretting. Many sage observations, including:

  In the 1630s, Massachusetts Puritans, who disliked the innate human desire to play, passed a law against gambling. Fourteen decades later, George Washington deplored his soldiers’ rampant gambling at Valley Forge. He liked, however, the lottery that helped finance construction in the city that bears his name. Lotteries also helped fund the Jamestown settlement, the Continental Army, Dartmouth, Harvard and Princeton.

  The pursuit of wealth without work is naughty but not new. And most sports betting probably is done as much in pursuit of amusement as of money.

  I did some betting at DraftKings back in 2021. Came out ahead, and walked away.

• I'd bet against this, though. John McWhorter urges us to keep the baby while tossing the bathwater: DEI Must Change.

  In combating DEI, Donald Trump is doing the right thing. In that sentence I just wrote, I almost choked writing the six final words. But it is what I believe. A stopped clock is right twice a day, and it is high time America engaged in an honest conversation about this business called Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.

  However, the actual substance of Trump’s Executive Order “Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing” reveals—big surprise—a smash of the knout, a coarse, unreflective bleat in the guise of statecraft. Getting DEI right while retaining the moral sophistication our nation is capable of will require actions much more specific—intelligent, even.

  John admits that DEI has strayed down the wrong anti-white, anti-male path. He thinks (however) that is a recently-developed flaw, and the "baby in the bathwater" is Affirmative Action, as imagined by LBJ back in the 1960s.

  I'm not so sure. Ideally, we can all get behind the concept he champions: "People should be given a fair shake regardless of sex or color." But for decades, that goal has been sullied with quotas and unfair social engineering.

  But see what you think. John's pretty smart, and I'm not.

• Words from one in a position to know. Betsy DeVos was Trump's Secretary of Education, 2017-2021. And she takes to the Free Press to argue that we: Shut Down the Department of Education.

  She eloquently describes the dance I have called the "D.C. Shuffle":

  The Department of Education does not run a single school. It does not employ any teachers in a single classroom. It doesn’t set academic standards or curriculum. It isn’t even the primary funder of education—quite the opposite. In most states, the federal government represents less than 10 percent of K–12 public education funding.

  So what does it do? It shuffles money around; adds unnecessary requirements and political agendas via its grants; and then passes the buck when it comes time to assess if any of that adds value.

  Here’s how it works: Congress appropriates funding for education; last year, it totaled nearly $80 billion. The department’s bureaucrats take in those billions, add strings and red tape, peel off a percentage to pay for themselves, and then send it down to state education agencies. Many of them do a version of the same and then send it to our schools. The schools must then pay first for administrators to manage all the requirements that have been added along the way. After all that, the money makes it to the classroom to help a student learn—maybe.

  I don't know how likely it is, but a guy can dream.

Recently on the book blog:

The official title of this book is Robert B. Parker's Hot Property. With those first three words being the largest font on the cover. This is a convention the books have followed ever since other authors took over writing duties after Mr. Parker died fifteen years ago.

So to clarify the title: the property in question was not owned by Mr. Parker. (It is, in fact, not a house either, let alone one on fire.)

So this convention is confusing and lame. But (sigh) I assume it's been focus grouped as an optimal way to squeeze the maximum amount of cash from people (like me) who remember Mr. Parker fondly, designed to take cold advantage of our weird psychological urge to find out what's up with our favorite fictional characters. Like Spenser, Mr. Parker's ageless wisecracking private investigator.

So I e-plunked down $14.99 for the Kindle version.

An opening act has Spenser and (the equally ageless) Hawk visiting a cad who's been hassling Rita Fiore, a beautiful, libidinous defense attorney who's also one of Spenser's longtime friends. But then Rita is near-fatally shot. The cops (Quirk, Belson) are on the case. But Spenser and Hawk are too. And others from the Parker universe soon join in: Susan, Henry Cimoli, Vinnie Morris, even Jesse Stone. It takes a village.

(Which is something Spenser says on page 283.)

Eventually, it becomes evident that there's a tie between Rita's shooting and the drowning, allegedly accidental, of a charismatic politician, one of Rita's (many) ex-lovers. And (finally) there's a connection to the titular Hot Property, down in Southie, on which some shady folks want to build a casino. (Widett Circle, which turns out to be an actual place.)

Plenty of suspects. And more bodies pile up. The bad guys seem to think the easiest way to get what they want is to shoot people who might be problematic.

It's pretty formulaic. Doesn't matter, I've been hooked.

Stylistic note: the largest Boston paper is referred to throughout as "The Globe". "The" italicized with an uppercase T. That looks weird to me! I would have thought it more conventional to say "the Globe": lowercase t, "the" unitialicized. Any editorial mavens want to weigh in on this?

A recycled classic from Remy/Reason:

It goes along perfectly with Jeff Jacoby's recent newsletter article: The intellectual blackmail of 'people will die'.

Jeff provides plenty of further examples. Mostly from the left, some from the right. He's right about "intellectual blackmail." But it's also cheap. And hence, nearly irresistible for demagogues of all stripes.

(Not to be confused with, for example, pointing out FDA delays and blunders really did kill a bunch of people during COVID.)

On a related note: I've been browsing Jen Rubin's Contrarian site now and then. In her introductory article she deemed it an "exciting new venture in defense of democracy." The word "democracy" appears six times in the short piece. Her (alleged) love of democracy is matched only by her disdain for "corporate" media (six references) and "billionaires" (five).

Ah, but an even ten negative references to Trump. And that's really what it's all about. It's Orange Man-hatred turned up to (at least) ten.

Ah, but what if Trump-hate and Democracy-love conflict? I found out when perusing a recent article from Shalise Manza Young, headlined: It's bigotry or bust for the Trump administration. Need you guess what that's about?

And, yes, Shalise thinks all the "demonizing" will cause many of these wannabe ladies to kill themselves. Studies show!

For some counterpoints, see James Freeman's "Best of the Web" column in the WSJ (eek, Jen: "corporate media"): Liberals Lament the Value of Trump.. As far as "democracy" goes, James quotes a CNN host's tweet:

Trump's action to ban transgender women from women’s sports is probably the most popular thing he's ever done.

Most Americans overall (79%), Dems (67%), indies (64%), & GOP (94%) agree with Trump.

Moreover, the share who want the ban is up 17 pts (62% to 79%) since 2021. pic.twitter.com/dbVsZRvDNn

— (((Harry Enten))) (@ForecasterEnten) February 6, 2025

So "democracy" says what, Jen?

There's also J.K. Rowling:

This 'why do you care about a tiny fraction of the population?' line is, and always was, utterly ridiculous.

Gender ideology has undermined freedom of speech, scientific truth, gay rights, and women's and girls' safety, privacy and dignity. It's also caused irreparable physical…

— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) February 6, 2025

[Continues:]

I should add that I don't consider myself "transphobic". I think Deirdre Nansen McCloskey is a pretty good economist, and so is Jessica (formerly Brian) Riedl.

Also of note:

• The war on prices continues, and its victims will not be named "Bernie", "Josh", or "Donald". J.D. Tuccille notes Christmas may come early for some: Hawley-Sanders credit card interest cap is a gift to payday lenders and loan sharks.

  It would be nice if one of our two major political parties was consistent in its advocacy for free markets—for all freedom, for that matter. Instead, we get two senators, a Republican and a socialist who sits with the Democrats, teaming up to condescendingly save Americans from their own desire to borrow money. Their proposal to cap credit card interest at 10 percent is supposed to shield people from "exploitative" borrowing costs. Instead, it's bound to cut off higher-risk borrowers from traditional credit and drive them into the arms of payday lenders and loan sharks.

  […]

  It's said that great minds think alike. So, apparently, do the minds of economic ignoramuses with supposedly competing political brands. Hawley and Sanders peddle salvation from expensive credit, but instead they offer a world of hurt to the people they say they want to help.

  Speaking of economic ignoramuses, the cap was a Trump campaign theme too.

• Hay, kids, what time is it? Jon Miltimore writes at the Daily Economy: Defund NPR? It’s About Time. Excellent, here's a small excerpt:

  As the saying goes, “He who pays the piper calls the tune.” Those who control these tax dollars are in a sense purchasing the allegiance of those who shape the ideas, opinions, and thoughts of the American public. They are in a very real sense the political allies of the DC bureaucracy and political establishment.

  This is what makes government-funded media so sinister. It undermines the independence of media organs. Americans instinctively recognize this. We laugh at the crude propaganda machines of other nations and can tell you about the propaganda efforts of Goebbels; many of us even can remember the ridiculous messaging of Baghdad Bob. Yet far fewer Americans seem able to recall the US government’s long history of using propaganda, which grew more sophisticated over the years and involved planting disinformation at news outlets.

  This is what makes government-funded media so sinister. It undermines the independence of media organs. Americans instinctively recognize this. We laugh at the crude propaganda machines of other nations and can tell you about the propaganda efforts of Goebbels; many of us even can remember the ridiculous messaging of Baghdad Bob. Yet far fewer Americans seem able to recall the US government’s long history of using propaganda, which grew more sophisticated over the years and involved planting disinformation at news outlets.

  You would think maybe Jen Rubin, with all her worries about "corporate media" might recognize there's a problem with media funded by an institution with even more power and much deeper pockets than Jeff Bezos.

I really should straighten up the place, though…

But I appreciate Jeff Maurer's suggestion: Will Elon's Team of Elite Math Twinks Tell Him That You Can't Close a $1.8 Trillion Budget Gap By Eliminating a $0.04 Trillion Agency? He makes light of the young males who are fine-tooth-combing the budget, calling them (in what he admits is a cheap shot) "Seal Team Sexless". Still…

Ah, but if you repeat that trick (approximately) 42 times elsewhere in the budget, you've solved the problem! Good job, twinks!

Just sayin': the Corporation for Public Broadcasting budget is based on a $535 million appropriation. That's even smaller than USAID, but it's low-hanging fruit. Chop it down!

Also of note:

• And here's another $448 million that could go. That's the FY2025 budget request for your Federal Communications Commission, which is apparently not doing much these days except irritating Joe Lancaster. Who explains How the FCC's 'warrior for free speech' became our censor in chief.

  When Donald Trump announced the appointment of Brendan Carr to the top spot at the Federal Communications Commission, he called Carr "a warrior for Free Speech." Carr, in turn, pledged to "dismantle the censorship cartel and restore free speech rights for everyday Americans." But Carr's statements and actions both before and since taking on his new role indicate someone all too comfortable wielding government power against media companies for politically disfavored speech.

  "I think he's the most anti–free speech FCC chair that we've had, as long as I can remember," says Techdirt founder Mike Masnick. "And I think that's a little terrifying, especially as he is presented by himself, Donald Trump, and the media as being a free speech warrior….Yet, over and over again, we see that he's constantly trying to attack and suppress and punish speech."

  Fire him, close his shop, sell the office furniture.

• A reminder of Star Trek's continuing impact on language. This WSJ editorial's headline takes it for granted that its readers are familiar with the concept of a "mind meld": A Josh Hawley-Bernie Sanders Mind Meld. Their target is legislation proposed by Josh and Bernie to "cap" credit-card interest rates at 10%.

  Remember when economists and Republicans criticized Kamala Harris for proposing price controls on groceries? Well, a cap on interest rates is a price control on credit. When you put a price control on something, you are asking for less of it. Apologies for this lesson in Econ 101, but that’s where we are with the political class these days.

  It’s true that credit-card rates have climbed over the last decade. This is what happens when inflation rises and the Federal Reserve raises interest rates in response. The average monthly annual percentage rate on new credit cards is 24.3%—meaning that someone will pay $20.25 in interest a month on a $1,000 unpaid balance.

  For a Republican, Hawley is a fountain of bad ideas. And note that Trump endorsed the cap on the campaign trail.

• Playing the blame game. John Tierney in the NYPost is doing it. That horrible helicopter/jet crash over the Potomac? Blame FAA's woefully outdated air safety.

  The recent rash of near-collisions is the result of chronic mismanagement that has left the system with too few controllers using absurdly antiquated technology.

  The problems were obvious 20 years ago, when I visited control towers in both Canada and the United States.

  The Canadians sat in front of sleek computer screens that instantly handled tasks like transferring the oversight of a plane from one controller to another.

  The Americans were still using pieces of paper called flight strips.

  After a plane took off, the controller in charge of the local airspace had to carry that plane’s flight strip over to the desk of the controller overseeing the regional airspace.

  It felt like going back in time from a modern newsroom into a scene from “The Front Page.”

  It was bad enough to see such outdated technology in 2005.

  But they’re still using those paper flight strips in American towers, and the Federal Aviation Administration’s modernization plans have been delayed so many times that the strips aren’t due to be phased out until 2032.

  Further reading: this two-year-old Cato article referenced a 2005(!) GAO study, which (in turn) noted that flight-control duties had been successfully privatized in "Australia, Canada, Germany, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom" which "had cut costs, boosted investment in new technologies, and either maintained or increased safety".

  Hey, DOGE kids! You should check that out!

• The Blogfather's Rose-Colored Glasses. Glenn Reynolds (at least) puts a question mark on his headline: Donald Trump, the libertarian president? But he is actually serious:

  Trump the libertarian? Yes. And how.

  Since 2016 I’ve had people ask me why I, as a libertarian, support Donald Trump. I think we’re seeing why now.

  It’s true that Trump’s instincts, particularly in his first term, weren’t especially libertarian. Oh, the claims that he was an authoritarian, possibly a Fascist, maybe even a Nazi, were obvious bullshit from the beginning. But he showed no particular enthusiasm for limited government.

  Still, by that point I saw the government apparat as deeply corrupt and dysfunctional, and dangerously close to making its position so entrenched as to be unassailable through ordinary politics. Anyone promising to shake it up looked good to me, and in 2016 Trump had the added advantage of not being Hillary Clinton. I knew what her instincts were.

  Glenn probably makes the best case possible. But (for example) the word "tariff" doesn't appear in his article.

George Will notes how language degrades in uncivilized localities: Only in Washington could this fiscal vandalism be called tax ‘relief’. He's talking about the effort to raise, or eliminate, the limit on the State and Local Tax (SALT) deduction on your federal income tax, which is currently at $10K.

It takes a really outrageous proposal to get GFW to sound like Bernie Sanders inveighing against a giveaway to the well-off, but this makes the grade.

Also of note:

• This sounds like bad news. Brian Reidl thinks, credibly, that Trump Is Poised to Repeat Biden’s Economic Errors. Specifically, setting things up for another inflation spike. After noting the dire fiscal straits we are in:

  A responsible president facing these challenges would pursue an aggressive deficit reduction strategy to rein in borrowing and reassure the bond market (thus lowering interest rates). Instead, Trump has demanded trillions in new tax cuts, pandering to voters with promises to end taxes on tips, overtime, and Social Security benefits, in addition to extending and possibly expanding his 2017 tax cuts. Trump is also widely expected to push for significant defense and border spending expansions, while pledging to do nothing to rein in $124 trillion in projected 30-year shortfalls for Social Security and Medicare.

  There is no mathematical path to make these promises fiscally responsible, no easy trillion-dollar deficit-reducer that had been forgotten or hidden. Economic growth is no panacea. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s target of sustained 3 percent economic growth rates faces the aforementioned barrier of a stagnant (or even declining) workforce, not to mention the lack of a blueprint to achieve such faster growth. And even if 3 percent growth was achieved, most of the tax revenues may be consumed by the higher interest rates on the federal debt that often follow strong economic growth. Lawmakers should aspire to rosy economic scenarios while budgeting for a more typical economic performance.

  For approximately the 284th time: Nikki Haley would have been better.

• But what about the massive cuts to USAID? Tyler Cowen asked ChatGPT about it: good idea, or bad? Deep Research considers the costs and benefits of US AID. It produced a slightly pro-USAID response, but I expect it could have been biased by its sources. Still interesting though. Tyler is skeptical:

  Here is a useful Michael Kremer (with co-authors) paper. Here are some CRS links. Here is a Samo analysis. AID is a major contributor to the Gavi vaccine program, which is of high value. The gains from AID-supported PEPFAR are very high also.

  To be clear, I consider this kind of thing to be scandalous. And I strongly suspect that some of the other outrage anecdotes are true, though they are hard to confirm, or not. It does seem Nina Jankowicz and her work received funding, and that I find hard to justify. It seems to be evidence for something broken in the process. Or how about funds to the BBC? While the “Elonsphere” on Twitter is very much exaggerating the horror anecdotes and the bad news, I do see classic signs of “intermediaries capture” for the agency, a common problem amongst not-for-profit institutions.

  Yes, apparently a Nina Jankowicz organization in the UK got some USAID dough.

• Unfortunately, they are not laughing? At Reason, Jacob Sullum wonders: Why Is Paramount So Keen To Settle Trump's Laughable Lawsuit Against CBS?

  Paramount, which owns CBS, is reportedly trying to settle a laughable lawsuit that Donald Trump filed last October based on a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris, his Democratic opponent in the 2024 presidential election. The New York Times reports that the company started settlement negotiations because it is keen to avoid regulatory obstacles to its planned merger with Skydance Media.

  Paramount's principles get shoved into a dark corner of the executive suite when there's money at stake.

  But CBS coughed up the unedited transcript, and the Trump-friendly Eddie Scarry at the Federalist analyzed it, and concluded: Unedited Kamala Interview Proves '24 Campaign Was A Psyop. Unexpectedly!

  It’s been three months since the election, and there are still so many unanswered questions as to what exactly happened in the very obvious partnership that took place between the dying national news media and the Kamala Harris campaign. But a little more clarity was offered this week when Brendan Carr, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, released the full nearly hour-long interview CBS “60 Minutes” aired with Harris several weeks before Election Day.

  The disclosure of the raw footage came as CBS cooperated with a complaint to the FCC from the Center for American Rights, a right-leaning law firm that accused the network of news distortion. The allegation followed a discrepancy observers noted between the short tease that CBS released in advance of the full “60 Minutes” episode and the final cut that aired and showed Harris offering a different answer to the same question.

  You can read the portions of the transcript that Eddie finds most Psyoptical at the link. For me, it's simply further confirmation that Kamala was a shallow nitwit, forever regurgitating bromines. ("You know, we are a people who have ambition and aspirations and dreams and optimism and hope.”)

  We have only those five things, because she could not think of six.

Recently on the book blog (with an LFOD reference!):

Over the years, I've read a lot of praise for this book. Certainly George Will has plugged it a lot in his WaPo column. And the University Near Here actually owns a couple copies, from back in the days when they bought physical books. Specifically, I checked out a refurbished paperback from them.

That praise continues on the back cover. "One of the funniest American novels in three decades"; "A delight of true understanding"; "Satirical virtuosity like nothing since Oscar Wilde"; "One of the wittiest books of modern times"; and more in that vein.

Maybe I'm going through a cranky patch, but I didn't find a lot of amusement. As usual: it's best to assume that's my fault, not the book's. You can read a long excerpt here; see if you crack a smile.

I noticed a few literary references. This probably means a lot more whizzed by without me noticing.

It's from 1954, which makes it nearly as old as I am. The author, Randall Jarrell, was an honored poet, teacher, and literary critic. Unfortunately, he fell into mental illness, attempted suicide, and died in 1965 when hit by a car. The NYT obituary is ambiguous about whether it was an accident or (successful) suicide.

Nothing much actually happens in the book: it's an exploration of the various characters the anonymous narrator meets while teaching at the fictional Benton College. They are a quirky and fractious bunch, full of self-importance, but also insecurity.

I sat up and took notice when a line of poetry is quoted from one character to another: "We must love one another or die." The response was to suggest instead: "We must love one another and die."

The poem is unidentified in the book, but it's easy to Google: it is Auden's "September 1, 1939". But apparently Auden himself later preferred the "and" replacement.

I doubt that New Hampshire is going to change its motto to "Live Free and Die". I briefly considered vandalizing my car's license plates to read that way, though. More subtle commentary than George Maynard's!

Confession: I did smile at this, the narrator's report from the college's "Art Night":

Miss Rasmussen began to tell Gottfried and me about her statues. Some of what she said was technical and you would have had to be a welder to appreciate it; the rest was aesthetic or generally philosophic, and to appreciate it you would have had to be an imbecile.

Zing! But, to be fair, the narrator adjusts his estimation of Miss Rasmussen at the very end of the book.

I was fascinated by the product title in our Amazon Product/Eye Candy du Jour: "Dream Reality Neon Sign Led Pink White Neon Light School Classroom Decor Sign Larger Hanging Neon Light For Bedroom College Dorm Wedding Propose Graduation Valentine's Day Party Decor".

Classroom? Yeah, just the thing for students to peruse while the instructor is droning on about Bose-Einstein condensates, Abelian group theory, or the Dred Scott decision.

But I wonder how many offices in the White House, the neighboring Executive Office Building, or the Pentagon have purchased them. Because Derek Scissors at AEI is noticing that Trump and Friends Leave Reality Behind.

So maybe there's one of these signs in the Oval Office itself? Someone should check.

But there is probably no demand for such neon on Wall Street. Because, as Jonah Goldberg points out, reality is not optional, and The Markets Can’t Be Bullied.

I haven't checked today's reality yet. There's a pre-beta release of Fedora 42 I want to check out first. If you see this website go dark, you'll know things went … poorly.

Also of note:

• Inquiring minds, both natural and artificial, want to know. Jack Nicastro poses a question: Will Trump Embrace the AI Future or Succumb to His Protectionist Impulses?

  President Donald Trump's deregulatory impulses could be a boon to the AI industry, but his hostility to free trade threatens to undermine its progress. Policies from the first Trump administration and caustic campaign rhetoric caution against unqualified optimism.

  Former President Joe Biden's October 2023 Executive Order on the Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence invoked the Defense Production Act, requiring companies to report their models to the federal government—a move Neil Chilson, head of AI policy at the Abundance Institute, sees as emblematic of the Biden administration's emphasis on AI's potential risks over its benefits. Marc Scribner, senior policy analyst at Reason Foundation (the nonprofit that publishes Reason), predicts Trump will revoke this executive order and move away from Biden's precautionary approach to federal AI regulation.

  This light-touch approach was on display in a February 2019 Trump executive order, which aimed "to sustain and enhance the scientific, technological, and economic leadership position of the United States in AI." In November 2020, the Office of Management and Budget published a memorandum that clarified that "agencies must avoid a precautionary approach that holds AI systems to an impossibly high standard." Chilson says that the previous Trump administration's "orientation towards advanced computing and AI was one of optimism" and celebrated Trump's appointment of David Sacks, partner at the software-focused venture capital firm Craft Ventures, as the White House AI and cryptocurrency czar. Sacks' pro-AI stance is seconded by venture capitalist Sriram Krishnan, who will serve as senior policy adviser for AI at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.

  But Trump's actions during his first term tell another story. His history of aggressive antitrust policy, including lawsuits against Facebook and Google, and his nomination of Gail Slater to head the Justice Department's antitrust division, suggest an animus toward the tech industry, which could stifle AI. Trump's nomination of Mark Meador to the Federal Trade Commission is still worse news for Big Tech.

  And there's protectionism too.

  Bottom line: there are reasons for optimism and pessimism. And, unfortunately, there's no good way to bet on chaos. Except maybe buying precious metals and burying them in your backyard.

• Speaking of precious metals… Hope Trump sets aside some for the strategy advocated by E. Calvin Beisner: How to Drive a Silver Stake Through the Heart of the Paris Climate Accord. We know that Trump started the same process he previously followed in his first term. Which Biden immediately undid. But:

  He should determine that the accord is not an executive agreement — which former President Obama declared to be in the executive order by which he brought America into the accord — but a treaty. As a treaty, it can go into effect if and only if the United States Senate approves of it by a two-thirds majority vote — that is, 67 out of 100 Senators would have to vote for it.

  How hard would that be for supporters of the treaty to get?

  Yeah. As Dan Rather once said: Chances are from slim to none, and Slim just left town.

• There are better things to do. Jonathan Turley (whose excellent book about free speech I just finished, see below) writes In Defense (Gulp) of Chuck Schumer.

  This day had to come. I find myself with the inescapable view that Sen. Chuck Schumer is being treated unfairly. There, I said it. Edward R. Martin, Jr., the Interim D.C. U.S. Attorney, recently announced that he is investigating Schumer. The possible criminal charge is linked to Schumer’s infamous speech on the steps of the Supreme Court in March 2020, threatening justices with retaliation if they voted against abortion rights. I have repeatedly denounced Schumer for his “rage rhetoric” and his pandering to the most extreme elements of the party. However, a criminal investigation into the speech is unwarranted and unwise.

  Turley thinks, and I agree, that Trump could be a yuge improvement over Biden, free speechwise. But this DOJ nonsense cuts the other way.

• Worse than lutefisk. Dave Barry is doing some of the longer-form humor that made him famous at his Substack. For example: The Haggis Menace.

  I have exciting news for gourmet individuals who enjoy -- And who doesn't? -- authentic foreign cuisine that appears to have been barfed up by a diseased Rottweiler.

  That's right, America: You may soon be able to legally obtain haggis.

  Haggis is an ancient Scottish dish that was invented by ancient Scotspersons who clearly intended it as a prank. According to Wikipedia, haggis is "a savoury pudding containing sheep's pluck (heart, liver, and lungs), minced with chopped onion, oatmeal, suet, spices, and salt, mixed with stock, and cooked while traditionally encased in the animal's stomach."

  That's right: They minced up the vital organs of a sheep and then cooked them inside the stomach of a sheep. The ancient Scotspersons probably thought nobody would actually eat this, but it became a beloved traditional dish, because this is Scotland, a place where -- not to indulge in negative stereotypes -- the entire population, including preschool children, is drunk.

  Currently you can't get authentic haggis in the United States. It was banned by the federal government in 1971 because it contains sheep lung. I think we can all agree that this is a good thing, that in fact one of the main reasons we even have a federal government -- this is clearly stated in the Constitution -- is to protect American citizens from encountering sheep lung anywhere outside of an actual sheep.

  Yum!

  Dave does get around to mentioning my peoples' revolting food, lutefisk, later in the essay. I had it once when I was a kid, at my Grandma's house. My reaction: fish-flavored Jell-O. Double yum!

Recently on the book blog:

I've been on an unlucky streak with fiction lately, finding four recently-read novels mediocre or worse, and I'm struggling with a fifth. But I thought this book by Jonathan Turley (lawyer, pundit, lawprof at George Washington U.) was excellent. He makes a powerful argument for a broad, natural-rights interpretation of freedom of speech.

This more or less corresponded to my own view when I started reading the book. But Turley managed to deepen my understanding, and alter my opinions slightly, not just confirm my priors.

It's commonplace to observe that today is not a great time for free speech. But guess what: Turley's history (detailed and interesting) shows that it never has been a time when the right to speak your mind has been without peril, legal and otherwise. There's a quick overview of ancient abuses (too bad, Socrates), an examination of English jurisprudence (also spotty at best), and then we are on to the American experience. He relates various instances of how "rage" has driven harsh words and actions from the citizenry, followed by, all too often, rage-driven overreaction from governmental officials.

Every American schoolkid learns about John Adams' Alien and Sedition Acts. But Turley goes deeper, revealing (for instance) that Thomas Jefferson sometimes succumbed to the temptations of prosecuting and persecuting free-speakers.

Turley shows the problem over the centuries (and continuing today) is the "functionalist" view of free speech, which views it as a tool, just one tool, in producing desirable outcomes. Those who hold to this position unfortunately see it not as an absolute bright red line prohibiting government intrusion, but subject to trade-offs and compromise.

The most common tradeoff is seen in the concept of sedition, when speech challenges the authority of the state. It's one of the classic gotchas: the people whose authority you are calling into question are the same people who get to decide whether to punish your uppityness. James Madison, one of Turley's heroes, called Adams' anti-sedition legislation "a monster that must forever disgrace its parents."

Turley is in favor of "slaying Madison's monster" by putting seditious words on the "protected" side of the First Amendment. This is a bold stand, as the government finds it useful for prosecution even today. PBS story from 2022: Oath Keepers founder guilty of seditious conspiracy in Jan. 6 case.

Speaking of January 6, Turley makes a compelling case that what happened that day was a riot, not an "insurrection". There was plenty of legal room to prosecute the participants for their violent and obstructive acts, without regard to their speech. He's equally horrified by the abortive efforts to prosecute Donald Trump for "incitement", and to disqualify his 2024 candidacy on 14th Amendment grounds. That's an uncommon argument, and he moved my own view quite a ways toward his own.

Nick Gillespie on the Reason Roundtable podcast raved about this book. The inner flap assured me it was "an original and hilarious satire of our political culture and those who rage against it." The back cover blurbs (one from Jim Carrey!) contain words like "exquisitely wicked"; "dangerous sense of humor"; "so funny, so clever, so alive"; "hysterical"; "smart, hilarious, and audacious"; and "Infuriating, perverse, contrarian, scandalous; nihilistic, and very, very funny."

And I'm pretty sure I didn't even crack a smile the entire way through.

It's probably me. Who am I to tell Jim Carrey and those other folks what's funny? Your mileage may vary, and probably will.

The first-person narrator is Anna, a New York writer who's in professional turmoil because her novel about opioid addiction in Appalachia has been reamed by the NYT for being classist. At loose ends, she falls in with an Objectivist walking tour of Ayn Rand-relevant Manhattan locales. And resolves to head out to Los Angeles to write a movie about Rand. Or maybe a sitcom. Or perhaps an animation. When things fall through, she skips back to New York to deal with a family death. But then its off to the isle of Lesbos, where there's communal meditation and lecturing under the eye of the Master. And there's also this hot guy who is obsessed with a YouTube compilation of Tom Cruise running scenes.

At one point Anna witnesses:

I found myself standing at the kitchen island with a group of Big Boy's friends. They all looked about twenty-five and had quiet, doting girlfriends who all looked about nineteen. Within the group, the boys were telling jokes, or rather giving micro-performances in response to verbal stimuli.

I liked that well enough to stick a post-it to the page so I could quote it here. But only because it reminded me of what the author, Lexi Freiman seemed to be doing: telling "jokes", or rather writing a series of prose performances in response to critical stimuli. I looked in vain for humor.

Jeff Maurer reflects on the (apparently) latest news; we're postponing our trade war with Mexico and Canada, in exchange for … most people are saying nothing. So: That Tariff Shit Sure Was Pointless.

He makes an eminently serious proposal:

I would guess that the bill will go nowhere, for the usual reasons. It's a partisan Democrat proposal; somehow they just now realized that delegating the President such powers was probably a bad idea.

You might see Rand Paul voting for it, but otherwise…

Also of note:

• The nothingburger was revealed. Eric Boehm gets a little highfalutin' by calling it a "theory", but otherwise he's on target: Trump's theory of tariffs makes no sense.

  For weeks, President Donald Trump has been telling Americans that his plan to impose high tariffs on the country's top trading partners would usher in an era of prosperity not seen in well over 100 years.

  "The tariffs are going to make us very rich and very strong," Trump said Friday. "They don't cause inflation. They cause success." The president has been using variations on this same argument for months (for years, actually). They are "going to make us rich," he said in December. "In the 1890s, our country was probably the wealthiest it ever was because it was a system of tariffs," he said last year on the campaign trail.

  This is bullshit, by the way. The high tariffs that America imposed during the late 19th century did not make America rich and did not make American manufacturing strong. It's also absurd to claim that the country was at its wealthiest in an era when most people did not have access to indoor plumbing, electricity, or modern medical care—and when the average person was, objectively, much poorer.

  But, Eric notes, if tariffs are so great in themselves, how does Trump justify their "postponement"? Trump fans: trying to explain this will only make your head hurt. Do not attempt.

• Strange indeed. Kevin D. Williamson remarks on the Strange Bedfellows united by, I guess, their general wackiness.

  Ask a Trump guy where the Republicans went wrong, and he’ll tell you that the party was too long dominated by war-mongering neocons in foreign policy and by greed-mongering libertarians in everything else: too many foreign adventures, too enthusiastic about capitalism. One funny thing, beyond the fact that that analysis is utter baloney: The second Trump administration is now living out the political fantasy of one of the crankiest of all the 20^th-century libertarian ideologues—Murray Rothbard.

  Rothbard was a brilliant weirdo who could have been a character in a Woody Allen movie—a neurotic Jewish intellectual in New York, his life was largely confined to the first four floors of Manhattan by his paralyzing terror of bridges, tunnels, and escalators. But he was like many dissidents on the right over the years in that he hated the Republican Party with the special hatred the true believers reserve for heretics (as opposed to the simple infidels on the left) and generally despised the Buckley-Goldwater-Reagan-era conservative movement as weak-kneed and compromising. Your normal cranky midcentury libertarian wanted to see the reinstatement of the gold standard; Rothbard demanded the reinstatement of the Articles of Confederation and bitterly denounced “Generalissimo” Washington for presiding over the conspiracy of usurpers who called themselves a constitutional convention in Philadelphia all those years ago. He was bananas, but also a serious economic and political thinker as well as a top-shelf writer.

  One of Rothbard’s big ideas—and let me emphasize here again that I am writing about a New Yorker who was the son of Jewish immigrants—was to reach out to the right-wing populist movement coalescing around Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke in the 1980s and convince its adherents to link up with the remnants of the anti-Vietnam War movement to build a grand redneck-hippie alliance, uniting the political extremes against the center in a popular front that was anti-war, anti-welfare, and anti-state. It didn’t work.

  At the time.

  But Anno Domini 2025 is a different story. In the Senate, Tom Cotton and John Cornyn are going to bat for Tulsi Gabbard, a former vice chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee with approximately Noam Chomsky’s views on the American intelligence community, which she has been nominated to oversee as director of national intelligence, presumably taking a sabbatical from her tireless efforts on behalf of Bashar al-Assad. Elsewhere in the Senate, Ted Cruz is pumped up about the prospects of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a left-wing trial lawyer, environmental activist, and “radical left lunatic” (in the words of … Donald Trump) who has advocated imprisoning people for expressing skeptical views of climate change. Kash Patel, who is to lead the FBI, sounds like a talking head in a Eugene Jarecki propaganda film. J.D. Vance increasingly talks like an antihero from 1970s conspiracy-thriller cinema, while Tucker Carlson is running out of red string with which to connect the dots on the murder wall in his basement. Poor Michael Brendan Dougherty over at National Review cannot decide if he is now a Code Pink lady or whether he is a beady-eyed defender of coalitional realpolitik.

  I was a Rothbard fan in the 1970s. He lost me in the 1980s.

• Another attempt to alter reality. Jacob Sullum notes: Florida drug deaths surged under Trump A.G. Pam Bondi's watch.

  When President Donald Trump announced his nomination of Pam Bondi as attorney general, he extolled her "incredible job" in "work[ing] to stop the trafficking of deadly drugs and reduc[ing] the tragedy of Fentanyl Overdose Deaths." Yet those deaths exploded on Bondi's watch as Florida's attorney general.

  According to data from the Florida Department of Health, the age-adjusted rate of "deaths from drug poisoning" did fall a bit after Bondi took office, from 13.7 per 100,000 residents in 2011 to 12.1 in 2013. But then it resumed its upward trajectory, reaching 25.1—nearly double the 2011 rate—by the time Bondi left office in 2019. The death rate rose sharply in 2020 (as it did across the country), rose again in 2021, and declined in 2022 and 2023, when it was 30.8 per 100,000.

  In 2019, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Florida ranked 20th on the list of states with the highest drug death rates, down from 15th in 2011. But despite that relative improvement, Florida's rate as reported by the CDC rose by 66 percent during that period. In absolute terms, the annual number of drug deaths rose by more than 80 percent.

  Granite Staters: that link in the last paragraph has us in a solid 21st place in Drug Overdose Death Rate for 2022. One spot "ahead" of Florida, in a competition that you don't really want to win. Slightly above the national average.

• Lefties gotta leftie. Jeff Jacoby describes What MAGA really hated about Bishop Budde's homily.

  In her homily, the Rev. Mariann Budde, the Episcopal bishop of Washington, spoke mostly about the need for unity in our polarized society and for resisting the temptation to "mock, discount, or demonize those with whom we differ." Just before concluding, she addressed Trump directly. Acknowledging that millions of Americans have put their trust in the president, she implored him "to have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now." She spoke in particular of undocumented migrants facing deportation. Most "immigrants are not criminals," she added. "They pay taxes and are good neighbors."

  Budde's tone was respectful, even deferential, but the implied criticism, however brief and gently worded, was more than Trump could abide. He took to social media late that night to slam Budde as a "Radical Left hard line Trump hater" who was "nasty in tone, and not compelling or smart." For good measure he insulted the entire two-and-a-half-hour service, calling it "very boring and uninspiring" and said both Budde and the church "owe the public an apology."

  As they always do, Trump's loyalists rushed to amplify his abuse.

  Todd Starnes, a host on Newsmax, called Budde a "blasphemous bishop" and the National Cathedral a "sanctuary of Satan" that should be stripped of its tax-exempt status. Representative Mike Collins, a Georgia Republican, recommended that Budde (who was born and raised in New Jersey) be "added to the deportation list." Another Republican, Alabama Senator Tommy Tuberville, accused her of spewing hate. In the New York Post, columnist Miranda Devine fumed that "an egomaniacal female Episcopal bishop sabotaged the Inaugural Prayer Service with a left-wing rant from the pulpit." Robert Jeffress, the right-wing pastor of a Dallas megachurch, accused Budde of having "insulted rather than encouraged our great president" and provoked "palpable disgust."

  Classy stuff. And, as Jeff points out: totally hypocritical.

• My political homelessness will apparently continue. We're heavy on the Trump criticism today. But Jonathan Turley notes that the Democrats are not interested in appealing to the Trump-appalled: After Polls Find the Party Out-of-Touch With Voters, the DNC Doubles Down.

  The DNC then elected a chair in Ken Martin, the longtime leader of Minnesota’s far left Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, who demanded for Trump to be tried for treason after the Russian bounty controversy (which was contested by the Trump Administration).

  They then added David Hogg, 24, as Vice Chair, a far left advocate who previously called on the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to be abolished and for the defunding of police. Hogg’s selection is particularly curious after an election where immigration proved a major issue favoring the GOP. Hogg has also called the NRA a “terrorist organization.” His reason for the NRA designation? January 6th: “The NRA needs to be designated a terrorist organization for the role their supporters played in staging an insurrectionist coup.”

  The Democratic Party has become a ship of fools. I previously worked Democratic campaigns from Ted Kennedy to Mo Udall to many Illinois candidates. The party was truly a party of the middle class with centrist values, including support for free speech. It cannot seem to break from identity politics as its primary focus and reason for being. Worse yet, it is “reimagining” the 2024 election in a way to keep reality within a comfort zone.

  Unlike Jonathan, I'm pretty sure I've never, ever, voted for a Democrat. Sounds as if that will not change.

Recently on the book blog:

This book was nominated for a 'Best Novel' Edgar in 2023. And Amazon has it as an "Editors' Pick" in the "Best Mystery, Thriller & Suspense" category. And the back cover has fulsome praise from S.A. Cosby and seven other people.

And yet, I was repulsed. Too much disgusting gore and horror, some supernatural, all evil. If that's your bag, go ahead. Otherwise…

The narrator, Mario, is deep in debt due to his beloved daughter's daunting medical bills. So he does what any of us might do: signs up as a hit man, shooting people in the head for money. Surprisingly, this does not save his marriage, thanks to the "accidental" mayhem he visits on his wife. And (page 22 spoiler) his daughter dies anyway. And I guess life is cheap in Mario's world, because even after killing a bunch of people, he's still getting pestered by his creditors.

Tip: when hiring yourself out as an assassin, find out what the opportunities are for professional advancement.

Salvation beckons when he's asked to join up with a gang looking to rip off a shipment of cash from a Mexican drug cartel. His cut will be $200K, which he imagines will get him out of debt, get his wife back, basically solve all his problems. His teammates are a meth junkie, Brian, and a mysterious Hispanic, Juanca.

Mario does not wonder why such an important role in the scheme is being played by pathetic losers like him. He eventually finds out, though.

I should also mention, as a consumer note, that there's quite a bit of untranslated Spanish in the book. I didn't resort to Google Translate for anything, and … did I miss anything? I guess I will never know.

Hal Scott (Harvard Law School Prof Emeritus) takes to the WSJ to cheer one thing and recommend another: Rohit Chopra Is Out. Now Shutter the CFPB.

That would probably put Senator Warren on the warpath, but that's better than OK. Keep her busy on defense.

Also of note:

• Gee, sounds like a bad idea. Maybe worse than a "folly". The NR editorialists examine Trump’s Tariff Folly. I think I detect some sarcasm in the first paragraph. What do you think?:

  After months of uncertainty, the White House has finally announced tariffs on Mexico, Canada, and China. The uncertainty since the election and especially the lack of clear communication in the past several days have caused apprehension in the stock market, which is likely part of the reason why these measures were announced on a Saturday, when the markets are closed — always a sign of confidence that an economic policy decision is the right one.

  The stated purpose is to reduce the flow of illegal drugs and immigrants to the U.S. Trump has had success using blunt-force threats in the past, but this is a costly, disruptive way to pursue the supposed goals, and Trump may just want the tariffs for their own sake.

  The White House is perpetuating the fiction that foreigners pay tariffs. We know from previous efforts that roughly the entire cost of the tax is passed on to American consumers and businesses. And retaliation from other countries will only make the taxes increase, as the order contains automatic hikes when the other governments respond. It is a downward spiral in which all countries will be made worse off.

  The editorial is just one of the links provided by Don Boudreaux at Cafe Hayek this morn, all relating to Trump's Tariff Tomfoolery. Example, from Commie National Public Radio reporter Brian Mann's Twitter thread, debunking Trump's attempt to connect this to fentanyl:

  Canada’s role in fentanyl smuggling to the U.S. is extremely marginal. PM Trudeau describes it as less than 1%. Last year according to the DEA, 43 lbs of fentanyl was seized at the northern border. That compares with roughly 21,000 lbs seized at the southern border. 5/

  — Brian Mann (@BrianMannADK) February 2, 2025

  As I noted, NPR. So…

• Let's set these guys free too. Jonathan Turley is down on Commie Radio: “This is NPR”: America’s Public Media Faces Reckoning on What it is.

  “This is NPR.” That tagline has long been used for National Public Radio, but what it is remains remarkably in doubt. NPR remains something of a curiosity. It is a state-subsidized media outlet in a country that rejects state media. It is a site that routinely pitches for its sponsors while insisting that it does not have commercials. That confusion may be on the way to a final resolution after the election. NPR is about to have a reckoning with precisely what it is and what it represents.

  While I once appeared regularly on NPR, I grew more critical of the outlet as it became overtly political in its coverage and intolerant of opposing views.

  Even after a respected editor, Uri Berliner, wrote a scathing account of the political bias at NPR, the outlet has doubled down on its one-sided coverage and commentary. Indeed, while tacking aggressively to the left and openly supporting narratives (including some false stories) from Democratic sources, NPR has dismissed the criticism. When many of us called on NPR to pick a more politically neutral CEO, it instead picked NPR CEO Katherine Maher, who was previously criticized for her strident political views.

  Perhaps NPR (actually the entire Corporation for Public Broadcasting) could just become a subsidiary of Viking Cruises.

• Your tax dollars at work… We missed saying anything about Groundhog Day. Sorry. This story comes a day late: NOAA study ranks groundhogs for weather-predicting accuracy.

  The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration released a study analyzing the annual prognostications of weather-predicting groundhogs and found the most famous, Punxsutawney Phil, didn't even crack the top 10.

  NOAA released the study ahead of Groundhog Day, which falls on Sunday, to analyze which groundhogs -- along with one prairie dog statue and a tortoise -- were the most accurate in predicting whether spring would come early or late.

  Perhaps NOAA could be replaced by the winner, Staten Island Chuck.

• It's an idea whose "time" (heh!) has come. Steve Hanke agrees with Pun Salad about time zones. Or I may be agreeing with him, I'm not sure who came first. But here's his WSJ LTE:

  Joseph Epstein’s op-ed “Enough with Changing the Clock” (Jan. 24) argues for eliminating daylight-saving time and adopting standard time throughout the U.S. While Mr. Epstein goes in the right direction, he doesn’t go far enough.

  The U.S. should scrap its current system of time zones and daylight saving in favor of worldwide adoption of Coordinated Universal Time, or UTC. This would mean that everyone’s watches would be set at exactly the same time. The only difference they would notice, depending on where they’re located, would be where the sun is in the sky at a particular hour. Midday would be as it is today, when the sun reaches its highest point in the sky. What would be different under UTC is the time on your watch. In New York, midday would no longer be noon but rather 5 p.m., or 17:00 UTC.

  The adoption of UTC wouldn’t mean people would be going to work in darkness. Business hours would be adjusted. In New York, under UTC, instead of the usual 9 to 5 schedule, businesses would open at 2 p.m. and close eight hours later at 10 p.m.

  Adoption of UTC would allow for a return to “true time,” or solar time. With that, everyone would rise with the sun in the morning and go to sleep when it’s dark at night according to their natural circadian rhythm, not some artificial time constraint.

  Pilots, for the obvious reason of safety, already use UTC. Global markets, including Wall Street, operate with UTC. Virtually all modern technologies, including the internet and GPS, use it too. It’s time for the rest of us to do the same.

  Yes. Separation of time and state. And I'm slightly more libertarian than Steve. Instead of "everyone’s watches would be set at exactly the same time", I'd say: Set your watch however you want. Spring forward, fall back, do the hokey-pokey and turn yourself around. Your call.

For some reason, all our links answer questions you may have had.

First up, Jeff Maurer explains why Whiny Baby Mitch McConnell Might Not Vote for a Man Who Tried to Cripple Him.

I continue to believe that Trump would not shed any tears if Junior wasn't confirmed to be HHS Secretary. Yes, he had to promise him something in exchange for his election support, but if he gets rejected: "Hey, Bob, sorry it didn't work out. Good luck with your lucrative onesie business."

Don't miss, by the way, Junior's response to Senator Bennet's query: "Did you say that lyme disease is a highly likely militarily engineered bioweapon?"

More explations of note:

• Abigail Shrier explains… How the Gender Fever Finally Broke.

  When the history of 21st-century gender mania is written, it should include this signal entry: In 2020, a website called GoFundMe, usually a place to find disaster-relief appeals and charities for starving children, contained more than 30,000 urgent appeals from young women seeking to remove their perfectly healthy breasts.

  Another entry, from June 2020: The New England Journal of Medicine, America’s platinum medical publication, published a piece explaining that biological sex is actually “assigned at birth” by a doctor—and not a verifiable fact, based on our gametes, stamped into every one of our chromosomes. In fact, biological sex ought to be deleted from our birth certificates—the authors claimed—because a person’s biological sex serves “no clinical utility.” Breaking news to gynecologists.

  

  Public schools began asking elementary kids whether they might like to identify as “genderqueer” or “nonbinary.” Any dissent from this gender movement was met with suppression. The American Civil Liberty Union’s most prominent lawyer, Chase Strangio, announced his intention to suppress Irreversible Damage, my book-length investigation into the sudden spike in transgender identification among teen girls. “Stopping the circulation of this book and these ideas is 100% a hill I will die on,” he tweeted. Weeks later, Amazon deleted Ryan Anderson’s book criticizing the transgender medical industry.

  Strangio will be happy to know that Irreversible Damage is (apparently) one of the books Portsmouth (NH) Public Library is more than willing to ban. Amazon link is at your right, though.

• Christian Britschgi explains… How the Fair Housing Act Gave Us Emotional Support Parrots.

  The first two parrots merely annoyed the neighbors. But after the third arrived, the U.S. Department of Justice got involved—on the side of the parrots.

  In 2024, a New York woman teamed up with the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York to squeeze a six-figure settlement out of her former co-op building. The building's transgression? Violating her right to keep not one, not two, but three emotional support parrots in her home.

  It's a colorful case, but it isn't atypical.

  A stampede of emotional support dogs, cats, llamas, peacocks, ducks, miniature horses, and more are showing up in America's airports, businesses, and apartment complexes. This has produced no shortage of conflict, particularly in the housing context.

  It's all fun and games until you're awakened at 2AM by Polly demanding a cracker.

  And don't miss Christian's further observation:

  Call it a game of cat and mouse—either of which could, in theory, count as an emotional support animal in a court of law.

• And finally, Drew Cline explains… Why more money doesn’t equal better schools.

  From local elections to legislative debates to legal challenges, discussion of public education in New Hampshire has been dominated by two persistent myths. The first is that more spending is the primary means of producing better educational outcomes. The second is that our educational outcomes are stunted because funding for K-12 public schools has “been slashed,” as a common talking point asserts.

  Because of these myths, instead of focusing on school leadership and proven, outcome-based measures of success, voters and policymakers have too often devoted their efforts toward improving fiscal inputs.

  In a new policy brief, the Josiah Bartlett Center for Public Policy reviews the last few decades’ worth of public education spending in New Hampshire, along with student performance measures, to help Granite Staters understand that the relationship between spending and outcomes is not as simple as its proponents claim.

  There are numbers, but also pictures:

  

  The Josiah Bartlett Center's 11-page policy brief is here. Read it and… well, don't weep, just support the separation of school and state.

A snip from Junior's confirmation hearing:

A senator yelling that the science can be wrong, but we shouldn’t question it because The Science is settled, perfectly sums up the absurdity of what we dealt with during Covid pic.twitter.com/bEnXt4v3cC

— Ian Miller (@ianmSC) January 30, 2025

Well, that's our state's contribution to shaving points off the national IQ.

Confession: I went through a "philosophy of science" phase in my twenties. Hume, Kuhn, Popper, Feyerabend, Lakatos, … It can really mess up your brain. Didn't help with my scientific career either, which flamed out pretty quickly afterwards. I've gradually come to believe that certain areas are not susceptible to philosophical wisdom: if very smart people have been arguing for centuries about those topics without reaching consensus, it may be that "truth" is simply beyond the grasp of our tiny minds.

I still like to check out the "free will" arguments, though.

Also of note:

• But is it, in some sense, conscious? Kevin D. Williamson writes with his usual insight: The Federal Government Is Not a Startup. Long excerpt:

  People have been saying “We need to run government like a business!”—and trying to do so—for 200 years. The project always fails. The question isn’t whether it is going to fail again this time around, with the Silicon Valley tech mafia leading the way—the question is whether Elon Musk is smart enough to understand why it is going to fail.

  OpenAI, the firm that owns ChatGPT, reportedly loses about $150 … a second. Serious people value the firm at $300 billion. And that comes after DeepSeek, the Chinese open-source competitor, came out blazing. People who follow OpenAI closely argue that the firm’s business model has some pretty steep challenges: For anyone other than hobbyists, its tools are not actually all that cheap to use. So, it is losing money at a relatively high price point while facing competition from an open-source competitor, which is bound to put downward pressure on prices.

  In the frothy days of the 1990s dot-com bubble, companies without a real business model and not much in the way of customers or revenue saw—for a time—sky-high market valuations based solely on the fact that they were positioning themselves to be part of the coming digital revolution. That worked out great for a few firms and not at all for a lot more. The tech sector is a little more buttoned-down these days, but the distance between big idea and big profit remains considerable, and there is a kind of cultural aspect to it as well, as in Silicon Valley’s eternal founder-vs.-manager discourse. And even in today’s more conservative business climate, tech firms are not in the main famous for being beady-eyed stewards of cashflow—they are epic pissers-away of money, but the upsides to startup success are so rich that they can maintain a pretty high burn rate. What’s $150 a second among friends?

  The federal government currently spends a little more than $200,000 a second. And the big idea from Donald Trump and Elon Musk is to lower that number by bringing in the sort of people who are currently overseeing that $150/second loss at OpenAI.

  A few days back, Robert Rubin (a Secretary of the Treasury under Bill Clinton) wrote a WSJ op-ed describing The Limits of ‘Running Government Like a Business’. He makes a number of good points, but I liked even better the point made in Clifford G. Holderness's LTE a few days later:

  Robert Rubin’s op-ed […] misses the key difference between the private and public sectors: The decision-makers in each have different incentives.

  The essence of private property is that decision rights—and the wealth effects of exercising those rights—are vested in the same person. If Mr. Rubin made value-decreasing decisions as head of Goldman Sachs, the value of his holdings would have declined, as would have the wealth of his fellow partners. If his management didn’t improve, he would have been replaced. Owners of private property ultimately have to eat their own cooking.

  Government officials, by contrast, seldom bear the wealth consequences of their actions. Indeed, in many instances this is prohibited by law. Mr. Rubin’s decisions as Treasury secretary doubtless caused greater wealth effects than his decisions at Goldman, but he personally bore few of the consequences. This doesn’t mean one system of incentives is better than the other—but it does mean the incentives are different in each and that what works in the private sector may not work in the public.

  And while we're on that page, a second LTE from Michael H. Way also points out a certain asymmetry:

  A significant difference between the sectors: No matter how incompetent, government keeps expanding.

  The Internal Revenue Service assesses large penalties to those who make honest filing errors but can’t pass the most basic audit. The Environmental Protection Agency fines businesses for pollution infractions but paid no penalty for the 2015 Gold King Mine wastewater spill. California loses more than $20 billion in pandemic relief fraud, wastes billions more on high-speed rail to nowhere, and fails to complete basic fire abatement, but the agencies responsible duck responsibility.

  Every election cycle we throw out some clowns and bring in new ones. Our government circus nevertheless keeps on growing.

  

  True dat.

  But if you want to see an argument that the USA is conscious, Amazon link on your right.

• Pointing the finger at the real culprits… is J.D. Tuccille: Americans who hate inefficiency but love bloated government. Skipping down to the "love":

  A bigger problem, though, is that Americans aren't really comfortable with cutting the expense and bloat of the most expensive and bloated parts of the federal government. When asked by AP-NORC if the government was spending enough, most said they think the government is spending too little in areas including education (65 percent), Social Security (67 percent), Medicare (61 percent), Medicaid (55 percent), assistance to the poor (62 percent), and border security (51 percent).

  The fact is that it's impossible to cut the cost and size of government if all these areas are considered untouchable. According to the U.S. Treasury, as of Fiscal Year 2025, 21 percent of federal spending goes to Social Security, 15 percent to national defense, 14 percent to health, 13 percent to net interest to service the government's massive debt, 13 percent to Medicare, 9 percent to income security, and so on.

  DOGE might be able to squeeze some inefficiency out of these programs, but it's not going to reduce the size and expense of government if people insist that more be spent on these programs. Well, unless national defense is gutted, since only 34 percent of respondents think too little is spent on that category.

  Always popular among the populi: panem et circenses.

  (Yeah, pretentious and gratuitous Latin. Although meant to indicate that it's Always Been With Us.)

• Me too. Jonah Goldberg joins me in confessing: I’m a Sucker for America. From his sickbed:

  A video of Anthony Mackie, the African American actor tapped to take over the role of Captain America, appeared on a panel in Italy to promote Captain America: Brave New World. “To me Captain America represents a lot of different things and I don’t think the term ‘America’ should be one of those representations,” Mackie said.  “It’s about a man who keeps his word, who has honor, dignity and integrity. Someone who is trustworthy and dependable.”

  Much like the influenza in my bloodstream, it went viral. 

  By Tuesday, Mackie tried to clarify. “Let me be clear about this, I’m a proud American and taking on the shield of a hero like CAP is the honor of a lifetime,” he wrote on Instagram. “I have the utmost respect for those who serve and have served our country. CAP has universal characteristics that people all over the world can relate to.”

  I’ll be honest. I don’t think it’s a great mea culpa. The issue wasn’t that he insulted “those who serve and have served our country.” The issue was he insulted America itself.  We’ll return to that in a moment.

  I don't think I've set foot in a movie theater since last April (Civil War). I'm unlikely to make an exception for Captain America: Brave New World, as I assume it will show up on Disney+ quickly enough. (But I'll probably be buying tickets for Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning come May.)

• "Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast." Robert F. Graboyes doubles the Queen's count, and tells us Why Impossible Things Are Everywhere. He gives twelve examples, all too long to excerpt, but here's a snippet, where he quotes someone else.

  “Have you ever witnessed a total solar eclipse? Usually when I give a lecture, only a couple of people in an audience of several hundred people raise their hands when I ask that question. A few others respond tentatively, saying, ‘I think I saw one.’ That’s like a woman saying, ‘I think I once gave birth.’”

  Yes, indeed.

  The "impossible thing" in this case is the fact that eclipse totality occurs so spectacularly. The odds against that happening are (literally) astronomical. And yet…

• Life hack. From Ars Technica: “Just give me the f***ing links!”—Cursing disables Google’s AI overviews.

  If you search Google for a way to turn off the company's AI-powered search results, you may well get an AI Overview telling you that AI Overviews can't be directly disabled in Google Search. But if you instead ask Google how to turn off "fucking Google AI results," you'll get a standard set of useful web suggestions without any AI Overview at the top.

  Funny. But you might want to try it quickly, it sounds like behavior that will be patched.