Pun Salad

Via Daniel J. Mitchell's Libertarian Humor article:

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I didn't expect to laugh out loud, but I did.

Also of note:

• Stream it for free! Noah Smith offers The latest episode of Mad King Trump.

  I do not believe that Donald Trump is secretly a Russian plant, hired by the Kremlin to destroy America’s economy and global influence. But frustratingly, Trump’s actions are often indistinguishable from what he might do if he were a foreign agent bent on destruction. Let’s take stock of some of his latest moves.

  First, there’s yet another round of tariffs, this time on the auto industry. This time Trump is putting 25% tariffs on imported cars and car parts. Since many U.S. cars use foreign parts, and U.S.-made parts are often assembled into full cars across the border, these tariffs will disrupt the entire U.S. auto supply chain (the Cato Institute has a great explainer on how this works, if you’re interested.) Prices will go up for American consumers, and costs will go up for U.S. manufacturers. Predictably, American automakers saw big declines in their stock prices:

  Noah has price charts at the link, but in words: as I type, GM's stock price is down 9.5% in the past 5 days. Ford is down close to 4%. What's the Donald gonna say? "WE HAD TO DESTROY AMERICAN AUTO INDUSTRY TO SAVE IT," I'd imagine.

• To be fair, they had help. David Harsanyi notes some historical revisionism goin' on: Democrats still won't face the toll of their COVID hysteria. It's at the NYPost, which means one sentence per paragraph:

  When I first came across Jonathan Chait’s new Atlantic piece, “Why the COVID Reckoning Is So One-Sided,” I assumed the answer would be that Democrats had been the ones relentlessly and tragically wrong about virtually everything during the pandemic.

  No such luck.

  In Chait’s telling, the left remains uncannily open-minded, always striving for truth, while the dogmatic right remains hopelessly bogged down in “pathological incuriosity.”

  Even when conservatives are right, they’re right in the wrong way.

  These days, people on the left, Chait contends, “have engaged in searching self-reflection — on school closings, the lab leak hypothesis, the political aftereffects, and other unanticipated lessons. Conservatives have used the occasion to engage in a round of self-congratulations and taunting of the libs.”

  Well, lib-taunting is a lot of fun.

  I don't think David links to Chait's article, but here it is: Why the COVID Reckoning Is So One-Sided. Mostly paywalled, unfortunately.

• Betteridge's Law of Headlines does not apply… … to Charles Lane's Free Press headline query: Is It Time to Privatize the USPS?

  Here’s an idea: Let’s create a federally sponsored corporation to spend $89.5 billion a year moving stuff—mostly documents made of paper—from place to place. Let’s hire 635,000 people to do it, grant them expensive health and pension benefits such that personnel costs are 80 percent of the total, then make it almost impossible to lay them off.

  Let’s keep doing so long after the service has been rendered technologically obsolete, and demand for it has cratered. In fact, let’s keep it up even though recipients have decided that nearly three-fifths of what we deliver to them is “junk” that they discard almost as soon as it arrives.

  Insane, you say? Well, what you have just read is an accurate portrayal of the United States Postal Service, which lost $9.5 billion shuffling paper around the country in fiscal year 2024, while Americans sent one another six billion text messages daily. Half the people surveyed in 2021 hadn’t received a personal letter in five years; 14 percent had never received one.

  If you haven't been convinced by Pun Salad's frequent posts on the topic (here's one from 2009), maybe this one will do the trick?

• Dīrigō. That's Maine's official state motto, Latin for "I lead." It was adopted back when Maine held its elections in September. And they kept it even after moving them to November.

  Which doesn't matter, except that I looked it up and wanted to share it with you. As an intro to the Antiplanner's caution to the state: Maine Needs Less Transit, Not More.

  Transit agencies and supporters arrogantly believe that we should be dependent on them, thus justifying their gigantic subsidies, rather than being dependent on (meaning liberated by) automobiles. A case in point is the Maine Public Transit Advisory Council (PTAC), whose latest report claims that Maine transit is falling 89 percent short of meeting transit “needs.”

  As the Antiplanner notes, The "Public Transit Advisory Council" is "stacked in favor of more transit subsidies, with few people on the committee willing to take an objective look at the question". Fun fact:

  The report includes the usual drivel about the supposedly high cost of driving but never mentions the high cost of transit. In 2023, Maine transit cost taxpayers nearly $130 million yet carried only 7.5 million trips, which meant each trip cost taxpayers more than $17. It probably would have been less expensive to pay for people’s taxi, Uber, or Lyft rides.

Recently on the book blog:

This was a book recommendation from Reason's editor-in-chief, Katherine Mangu-Ward. And she's not alone! The Amazon page will tell you, it was one of Barack Obama's favorite books of Summer 2024! A Good Morning America Book Club pick! The Goodreads Choice Award for science fiction! And on, and on.

Reader, I was not that impressed. But unlike the author (Kaliane Bradley) and the book's (mostly) first-person narrator I am not a woman.

The overall plot is intriguing, though: in the near future, Britain's titular Ministry has access to time travel tech. The Ministry's experimenters want to avoid well-known paradoxes, so their efforts are restricted to retrieving people from past eras who would otherwise (in their timeline) imminently die alone, without notice.

The primary "expat" is Graham Gore, extracted from 1847. He is one member of Franklin's lost expedition, an actual, doomed, British attempt to navigate the Northwest Passage. The book's unnamed female narrator is assigned to be Gore's "bridge", helping him to adjust to life in modern times.

It is very unclear why the Ministry thought this would be a good idea. The narrator comes across as someone with no particular relevant skills or training. (Although there may be an explanation near the end.)

It's billed as "literary" fiction at Amazon, which means the prose gets kind of loopy and flowery on occasion. There's a lot of action violence in the latter part of the book, as it develops that there are insidious forces at work. Not soon enough to make me care, alas.

Ever so slowly working my way through Mary Roach's ouvré. Fortunately, at least one book buyer at the Portsmouth (NH) Public Library seems to be as big a fan as I am.

If you're squinting at the book cover, wondering what's going on: that's two ladybugs doin' it.

Mary is deemed "America's funniest science writer"; the competition is probably not that stiff (heh). This 2008 book's humor content is (I think) a bit lower than her usual, maybe because her overall topic itself is inherently funny. And maybe because she wants to avoid the cheap laughs; let's face it, laughs about sex can be the cheapest around. (For eager consumers, however, there's a cheap-but-funny joke on page 142, in a footnote. But Mary's just quoting a spokesman of the United States Postal Service.)

Mary looks at the history of sex research (Kinsey, Masters & Johnson), as well as some current practitioners around the world. As she has done in other books, she occasionally volunteers as a participant here, testing (um) devices, submitting to (um) measurements. And in one case, wangling the cooperation of her husband, Ed. With few exceptions, her descriptions are sober and clinical. Specifically, I only noticed one f-bomb (also in a footnote, page 99).

As always, Mary's eye for relevant, and often gross, detail serves her well. (Alfred Kinsey did what with a toothbrush?!)

But Mr. Ramirez also has some wise words from Bree Lindquist to accompany his cartoon, and there's a New Hampshire angle:

NH Journal describes the abuse visited upon Jonah Wheeler at that "struggle session":

Reader, I hear you asking: "Hey, what about the porn Michael mentioned?" Well,…

Click if you must; the porn isn't very explicit, but the racial slur is.

If NHJournal's tilt is too far to starboard for you, New Hampshire Bulletin leans more to port: After votes rolling back transgender rights, a reckoning for progressive Peterborough. The porn and racial slur go unmentioned there, but there is a devastating query aimed at Jonah Wheeler by one of his constituents:

Another woman, who called herself Elizabeth, asked a basic question. “I think you know your constituents,” she said. “I believe that you do. Why did you vote in a manner that would upset us?”

Reader, there were more upsets in Peterborough that evening than in the NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament. The story also reports:

Outside of the Peterborough library, some advocates were in tears after the meeting.

Just spit-balling here, but I think this reveals the downside of using political activism as self-care.

As Bree notes, Wheeler was also vilified by members of his party in Concord a few days earlier. Which was gleefully reported by NH Journal: NHDems Invoke 'Jim Crow' In Attack on Black Progressive Over Bathroom Bill Vote. Apparently no porn was involved, but:

And, lo, it came to pass that the bill did pass in the NH Senate, as did a passel of other GOP-favored legislation, as reported by the Concord Monitor: Legislators advance ban on sexual content in schools, plus 5 GOP-led bills on transgender issues Porn is mentioned here, because one of the bills…

… prohibits schools from providing any materials to students that meet the legal threshold for obscenity or fall under what the state deems as age-inappropriate or “harmful to minors.” This includes descriptions of nudity and sexual conduct, a predominant appeal to “prurient, shameful or morbid” interests and a lack of other literary, scientific, medical, artistic or political value for minors.

But skipping down to the transgender stuff, my own state senator makes an appearance, with a "message for the transgender people of New Hampshire."

“No matter how unnecessary or misdirected or, to some, seemingly cruel Senate Bill 268 may seem, we know you were born this way, so dance on,” said David Watters, a Democrat from Dover. “You are heard, you are seen, you are loved. Be fabulous, be fierce, be free. Live free or die. Live queer or die.”

No word on whether Senator Watters will be proposing legislation requiring that alternate motto be embossed on special-issue New Hampshire license plates.

Via Ann Althouse: Jon Stewart performs his classic oh-no-how-can-people-be-so-stupid mugging...:

Jon Stewart screams 'OMFG' and is rendered speechless after hearing all 14 steps to apply for 'Build Back Better' funding:
Ezra Klein: "We have to issue the notice funding opportunity within 180 days that's step one.
Step Two: States who want to participate must submit a letter… pic.twitter.com/n2B3knnNY8

— Eric Abbenante (@EricAbbenante) March 28, 2025

The discussion is about that tortuous regulatory path just one bit of Biden's "Build Back Better" agenda must follow. (Click the "Watch on X" button for a text version.)

Ann comments, sagely:

Exactly right.

While Jon is mugging, his interviewee, Ezra Klein, is plugging. Specifically, his book Abundance; I looked at Kevin D. Williamson's comments about the book here, which obliterated my desire to read even a library's copy. But I may change my mind about that.

Our headline is one I've used before: from Robert Frost's poem "Pod of the Milkweed", which I've shamelessly employed in a context he may not have intended. Some of that sweet Federal cash might eventually "trickle down" into actual rural broadband projects, but not before the bureaucratic hordes have received their share.

Also of note:

• Grasping at straws. The "O'Keefe Media Group" (OMG) breathlessly reports on the antics of an institution of higher education in my state that is not the University of New Hampshire: LEAKED PHONE CALL Reveals Southern New Hampshire University Defying Trump Executive Order on Eliminating DEI in Curriculum: “The Federal Government Has No Impact on Courses at SNHU”.

  A leaked phone call obtained by O’Keefe Media Group (OMG) exposes Southern New Hampshire University is continuing to integrate Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) into its sociology courses, despite President Trump’s executive order aimed at limiting DEI teachings in federally funded schools. The audio and supporting documents reveal that the university is teaching students topics like “Why white school districts have so much money,” revealing the institution is disregarding federal mandates.

  Did you know that the Trump White House took it into its head that it was empowered to regulate the course content of universities via executive order?

  No, neither did I. And in fact it did no such thing.

  OMG points its readers to Executive Order 14173, titled "Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity". And (I hasten to say) it is pretty much a good idea.

  But it doesn't say one thing about altering the curriculum. In fact, down in Section 7 ("Scope") there are a couple of provisos that I'm pretty sure rule that out:

  (b) This order does not prevent State or local governments, Federal contractors, or Federally-funded State and local educational agencies or institutions of higher education from engaging in First Amendment-protected speech.

  (c) This order does not prohibit persons teaching at a Federally funded institution of higher education as part of a larger course of academic instruction from advocating for, endorsing, or promoting the unlawful employment or contracting practices prohibited by this order.

  So OMG has served up a big fat bullshitburger. Some local hotheads have been sucked in, regrettably. Comments have been left.

• Plenty of casualties, though. Noah Rothman counsels against an economic version of a "land war in Asia": You Can’t Win a War on Prices.

  To hear Donald Trump’s senior counselor for trade and manufacturing, Peter Navarro, tell it, the president’s proposal for a 25 percent tariff on imported cars and auto parts will do everything and nothing all at once.

  The tariffs will yield a bounty of at least $100 billion in revenue to the U.S. Treasury, which will be paid not by domestic consumers but foreign producers. American automakers and repair shops will “eat” whatever additional costs are imposed on them, which, we should remember, amount to nothing. In addition, Congress will pass a retroactive tax cut to cover the zero additional costs that consumers will incur as a result of these tariffs. And none of this will contribute to inflation. It makes sense if you don’t think about it.

  Made me wonder where my new Impreza was made. Turns out … Indiana! Who knew?

• Eloquence, thy name is Cline. Drew Cline looks at Competition and the purpose of educational choice. He cheers the passage of New Hampshire House Bill 741, which modifies the state's ompulsory Attendance law. The key change being from this language:

  A parent of any child at least 6 years of age and under 18 years of age shall cause such child to attend the public school to which the child is assigned in the child's resident district.

  to this:

  A parent of any child at least 6 years of age and under 18 years of age shall cause such child to attend a public school.

  There are further changes, but that's the biggie.

  School choice supporters voted for open enrollment for the simple reason that there’s never been any truth to the ad hominem attacks on them. The point of school choice isn’t to destroy public schools. It never has been. The point is to create a marketplace in which every student is matched with the education that best fits that student’s needs.

  Ad hominem? I have in mind John Shea who wrote last month in my local paper about the "powerful forces" who are "deliberately, strategically, and openly working to destroy universal public education." I have little doubt that he'll change his mind about that.

• Speaking of hotheads… An amusing headline from Hayden Daniel at the Federalist: National Review Is No Different From A Leftist Rag On 'Signal Gate'

  In the midst of the fallout from the leak of a Signal chat group, dubbed “Signal Gate” by some of the more unimaginative denizens of the left, National Review Executive Editor Mark Antonio Wright decided to write a piece titled, “Yes, Pete Hegseth Should Be Fired for What He Texted — and for Lying About It.”

  'Tis true that leftist rags are saying nasty things about Hegseth. I would bet that Mark Antonio Wright's article is easily distinguishable from them. But (in any case) truth is a defense, so echoing Mark's bottom line:

  Pete Hegseth foolishly placed highly sensitive national defense information about an impending U.S. military action on a non-secure system that was already compromised. Then he spent several days obfuscating and lying about it.

  So?

Man, Trump can't catch a break, can he? Yesterday, the NR editors called his Signal evasions "Clintonian". Today, Dominic Pino uses a different Presidential adjective, looking at Trump’s Bidenesque ‘Fact Sheet’ on Tariffs.

Dominic looks at the claims of the "fact sheet" which quotes (of course) "studies" and (amusingly) recycles arguments that Democrats made a few years ago to justify Biden's tariffs.

(Today's Eye Candy is from a cartoon series the WSJ did for a while. Chosen because Jeffrey's mean-girl co-workers called him "Bidenesque". Click for the whole thing.)

Also of note:

• And now we're back to "Clintonian". Jacob Sullum notes that Pete Hegseth's carelessness and dishonesty mirror Hillary Clinton's.

  In downplaying the gravity of disclosing details about an imminent U.S. military operation to participants in a Signal group chat that included an accidentally invited journalist, President Donald Trump and his underlings have insisted the information was not classified. "You all know that's a lie," Rep. Joaquin Castro (D–Texas) told CIA Director John Ratcliffe and Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, at a hearing on Wednesday. "It's a lie to the country."

  Or is it? It was Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth who divulged information about the impending air strikes on Houthi targets in Yemen. The New York Times notes that "the president and the secretary of defense have the ability to assert, even retroactively, that information is declassified." When a similar issue came up in connection with the government records that Trump kept after leaving the White House in 2021, he said the president—and presumably the defense secretary too—can declassify stuff just "by thinking about it."

  That argument was a red herring because the main statute Trump was accused of violating, 18 USC 793, covers information "relating to the national defense," regardless of whether it is officially classified. And since that law encompasses "gross negligence" as well as willful dissemination of national defense information, Hegseth arguably violated it by using a forum that was manifestly insecure to discuss the timing and nature of the March 15 operation in Yemen before it happened.

  The parallels are eerie,

  Q: “In terms of the Signal chat controversy…is the DOJ involved at this point?”
  
  Bondi: “…We're not going to comment any further on that. If you want to talk about classified information, talk about what was at Hillary Clinton's home that she was trying to BleachBit.” pic.twitter.com/ECwOiK4dNn

  — The Bulwark (@BulwarkOnline) March 27, 2025

  Sure, Pam. Argue that Hegseth, et al.'s negligence is the same thing as Donald Trump said Hillary should have been locked up for doing.

• Don't sleep in the subway, darling. At least not while they're being "fixed". The AntiPlanner looks at a dubious claim: Fix the Subways in Hours?

  Donald Trump famously said he could end the war in Ukraine in 24 hours, yet the war is still raging more than two months after he took office. In the same way, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy recently said that New York City could solve all of the problems with its subway system “in hours, not days” (he generously allowed the city 36 hours instead of just 24) if it just had the will to do so. Note that Trump promised to stop the war himself while Duffy is demanding that someone else save the subways.

  This is the level of naïveté that we’ve come to expect from the Trump administration. New York City subways have problems with fare evasion, homelessness, drugs, property crime, vandalism, and violent crime that stretch across 472 stations, 850 miles of track, and nearly 6,800 subway cars. The idea that it could solve all of these problems by simply flooding the system with police for 36 hours is so ludicrous it isn’t even funny.

  Even if those problems were solved, they are really just symptoms of the real problem, which is that transit agencies have no incentive to operate efficiently or even to attract riders. Instead, all of their incentives are to increase costs as much as possible while doing as little work as possible. These perverse incentives are not the fault of the New York MTA or any other transit agency but are due the federal government, which began throwing money at transit in the 1960s and responds to every transportation issue by increasing the flow of money.

  Multiply by … well, everything else government does.

• A penny for my thoughts? Jeff Jacoby looks at the penny controversy: A penny, more or less.

  Governments are still perfectly capable of reducing the value of money and thereby causing inflation, of course. But they do so now by artificially boosting the money supply, not by decreasing the precious-metal content of their coins. Which is why the whole business about what it costs to produce a penny seems to me completely extraneous.

  In today's US economy, the value of most money is not determined by the material from which it is made, but by the social trust placed in it. Pennies — like quarters and five-dollar bills — are examples of fiat currency. They have value primarily because the government says (and people accept) that it does. It isn't the intrinsic worth of the penny's content that matters; it is society's willingness to accept it in exchange for a penny's worth of goods and services. The same is true of nickels, each of which costs almost 14 cents to produce. The fact that virtually no one is clamoring for abolition of the nickel suggests that the "a-penny-costs-more-than-a-penny!" argument isn't a serious one.

  Good point. It's probably worth pointing out that the US Mint reported positive seigniorage on dimes and quarters, more than making up for the negative seigniorage on pennies and nickels.

• DOGE Anxiety Disorder! Catch it! Gene Healy (of the Cato Institute) diagnoses some of his friends at Reason the Dispatch, and the UnPopulist: Libertarians and DOGE Anxiety Disorder. Reality check:

  To put things in perspective, look at the agencies DOGE has gone after hardest: USAID, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), and the Department of Education.

  They’re all unconstitutional. Some, like CFBP, wield lawmaking powers Congress has no business delegating; others, like the Department of Education, commandeer responsibilities the Constitution leaves to the states and the people. Not one has an enumerated power that can plausibly support it.

  It would be nice if SCOTUS would see things that way, but alas…

• Don't confuse librarians with libertarians. At the Federalist, Mark Hemingway spells out one application of FAFO: America’s Librarians Became Militantly Political, And Now They Suffer The Consequences.

  Last week, Trump issued an executive order proposing the shuttering of seven obscure federal agencies, notably including the Institute of Museum and Library Services. Churlish former Labor Secretary Robert Reich went into high dudgeon, or in Reich’s case maybe just dudgeon, to let us know “Tyrants view educated citizens as their greatest enemy. Slaveholders stopped the enslaved from learning to read. Nazis burned books. Dictators censor media. That’s why Trump is attacking education, science, museums, and the arts. Ignorance is the handmaiden of tyranny.”

  Well, I guess you’re just going to have to trust me when I tell you that I’m no fan of tyranny, slavery, Nazis, or book burning. I have written tens of thousands of words opposing government censorship, I have made a living reading and reviewing books, and I spent 17 years on the board of a private school. I hope it is apparent I care about knowledge and education. And speaking as an ostensibly educated, literate, patriotic American, I am asking the Trump administration to follow through and please, please, please in italics, stick it to America’s librarians.

  They are nice ladies (and they are mostly ladies), but they need to stop doing the D.C. Shuffle.

Or just March Madness? I don't think it will be over on April 1, do you?

Arguably worse: fumble-mouthed attempts to wave away behavior that would get lesser officials fired or locked up. Charles C.W. Cooke explains Sometimes, It’s Best Just to Say, ‘We Screwed Up’.

Elsewhere on the National Review site, the collective Editors have a suggestion for the Trump Administration: On Signal Leak, Take the L.

"Clintonian" should be perceived as an insult, but Trump might see it as a plus: "Hey, both Clintons got away with being pathological liars, so …"

But if you prefer your news analysis with jokes and dirty words, Jeff Maurer is all over it. Three, count 'em, three articles on this:

1. March 25: The Trump Administration Also Texted Me Its War Plans
2. March 26: Signal Scandal Defenses Might Cross an Intergalactic Stupidity Threshold
3. March 27: Oh: They Sent Jeffrey Goldberg ATTACK PLANS, not WAR PLANS

From the latest:

I got no brief for Jeffrey Goldberg; see Kevin D. Williamson's 2018 article in the WSJ for adequate proof that Goldberg is a lying, cowardly weasel: When the Twitter Mob Came for Me.

On the other hand, the Trump Administration is resorting to insult, semantic quibbling, and general obfuscation in its defense. Weak. Just apologize, take your lumps, fire Hesgeth and Waltz, and move on.

Also of note:

• If I learned anything from CSI, it's that my DNA is hardly a secret. A couple weeks ago I started my report on Douglas Murray's book The War on the West by reflecting on his "fine job of demonstrating just how nuts we went just a few years ago," In the opening of her Free Press article (What 23andMe Told America About Itself), Kat Rosenfield adds a few more data points to that thesis:

  To understand this week’s biggest business story, please join me in remembering the solipsistic, race-crazed fever dream that was American culture in 2017.

  This was the year when young adult fiction writers ate each other alive over a fantasy novel that was allegedly racist toward fairies. In Portland, Oregon, a food truck was shuttered and its owners threatened with violence because they had supposedly culturally appropriated indigenous burrito recipes. In New York, fashion designer Marc Jacobs had just been similarly canceled for putting white models in dreadlocks. The art world was earnestly debating whether the Whitney Museum of American Art should remove a white artist’s painting of Emmett Till from view—or, alternatively, whether they should remove it and then set it on fire.

  All these incidents (and these are only a handful) represented the rise of a far-left ideology that was utterly fixated on racial and ethnic identities, which were in turn seen as proxies for power, privilege, and general moral standing. The more intersectional you could claim to be, the more sympathy you deserved. The more privileged, the more you should sit down, shut up, and stop taking up space—particularly when people who looked like you had already taken so much.

  See what I mean? Nuts.

  Kat's article goes on to discuss 23andMe's demise, and it's good and insightful, as we've come to expect.

• But for another take: Let's go to Ronald Bailey, Reason's science guy, who explains Why [he is] not deleting [his] 23andMe genetic data.

  Various corners of the media and internet are hyperventilating over the alleged genetic privacy implications of the imminent Chapter 11 bankruptcy of the direct-to-consumer genetic testing company 23andMe.

  "Delete your DNA from 23andMe right now," yelps a headline over at The Washington Post. Why? "Unless you take action, there is a risk your genetic information could end up in someone else's hands—and used in ways you had never considered," ominously warns Post journalist Geoffrey Fowler. NPR reports that Suzanne Bernstein, counsel at the nonprofit Electronic Privacy Information Center, advises that any concerned 23andMe customers should delete their data, request that their saliva sample be destroyed, and revoke any permissions they may have given to use their genetic information for research. "This is just the first example of a company like this with tremendous amounts of sensitive data being bought or sold," she added. California Attorney General Rob Bonta urgently issued a consumer alert reminding "Californians of their right to direct the deletion of their genetic data under the Genetic Information Privacy Act (GIPA) and California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA)."

  Given that I just got my RealID-compliant driver license a few days ago, I realize that my mug is in a Federal government database. As is my Social Security Number. And my birthday. And copies of my birth certificate. And…

  And I should be worried about someone looking at my DNA? Please. "Gee, lots of G's, A's, T's, and C's, here."

• Just ten? Elle Purnell stopped at that number anyhow, after watching C-Span yesterday: 10 Times NPR Proved It Doesn't Deserve Another Taxpayer Cent.

  In a congressional subcommittee hearing on Wednesday, National Public Radio CEO Katherine Maher admitted the outfit’s blackout of the Hunter Biden laptop story was a mistake, acknowledged that NPR’s alleged 87-to-zero ratio of Democrats to Republicans in editorial positions is a “concern,” and stumbled through a defense of her publicly expressed views like “America is addicted to white supremacy” and calling the First Amendment “the number one challenge” to suppressing information.

  As Republican members of Congress pointed out, one of NPR’s most infamous displays of corruption was its refusal to cover the Biden family scandal sourced to Hunter Biden’s laptop in the lead-up to the 2020 election.

  “We don’t want to waste our time on stories that are not really stories, and we don’t want to waste the listeners’ and readers’ time on stories that are just pure distractions,” NPR Managing Editor for News Terence Samuel said in a statement explaining the blackout.

  Given that I've referred to NPR as "Commie Radio" 38 times on this blog over the years (limited selection here), I was heartened by this CNN headline: Marjorie Taylor Greene attacks NPR and PBS as ‘communist,’ calls for funding to ‘end’. Key excerpt:

  “After listening to what we’ve heard, today, we will be calling for the complete and total defund and dismantling of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting,” Taylor Greene said.

  Yes! Call in the assistance of Jewish space lasers if necessary!

Is it just me, or is anyone else thinking that Disney would have had a more successful movie if they had gone with Snow White and the Seven Underpants Gnomes for their reboot?

And, as South Park memes go, I'm pretty sure the Trump Administration would have had better luck with the Underpants Gnomes instead of "Blame Canada".

But anyway: as the relevant Wikipedia article says, the meme (image at your right) is widely "used to mock poorly-thought-out business and political strategies."

And that's what came to mind when I read this "news" story at the website of my worthless local newspaper, Foster's Daily Democrat, telling the story of a fractious town hall meeting featuring my CongressCritter: Frustrated Dems urge U.S. Rep. Chris Pappas to stand up to Trump: 'Fight, fight, fight'.

But it's not just in New Hampshire, it's a nationwide movement! As Noah Rothman describes: Democrat professional strategists suggested the party, among other moves, "[a]bandon the boutique fixations, quixotic crusades, and linguistic codes that transformed the party from a national political enterprise into an exclusive club." But:

This is actually worse than the Underpants Gnomes' strategy, which at least had a sensible Phase 3, "Profit". Instead it seems to go something like:

Phase 1:

Fight, Fight, Fight!

Phase 2:

 ?

Phase 3:

I will see my anxiety reflected! Or something!

I'm unqualified to speculate on the psychological motivations here. Maybe I should reread Eric Hoffer?

Also of note:

• "And we would have gotten away with it too, if it weren't for…" Matt Ridley describes How scientists misled the world about Covid's origins. "Mistakes were made", ones that killed people. But:

  But all those errors pale beside the biggest one of the lot, and the one that has done most to undermine trust in scientists – that is, the initial insistence that the virus did not originate in a laboratory accident. We now know that it almost certainly did. The evidence is overwhelming, as I have rehearsed many times. And it now includes a huge stack of documents – inadvertently made public and spotted by two open-source investigators, ‘Billy Bostickson’ and Gilles Demaneuf – that shows just how systematically we were deceived about this mother of all scandals.

  Matt describes the manipulations that (for a while) successfully fooled people into thinking the lab leak hypothesis had been successfully debunked. And:

  Several months later, I discovered that I had been lied to: deliberately, maliciously, consequentially. Yes, I am angry about that. So should you be.

  Why, I'm so angry, I'm gonna go to my CongressCritter's town hall meeting, and … never mind.

• I think Betteridge's Law of Headlines applies. Rossana Pineyro wonders if Junior has his own Underpants Gnome scheme in mind: RFK Jr. wants to ban food dyes. Will that improve public health?

  Phase 1:

  Ban food dyes!

  Phase 2:

   ?

  Phase 3:

  Public health improves!

  Not so fast:

  But critics argue these studies don't reflect real-world consumption levels. "The cancer-causing 'links' found in studies are based on dangerously high doses given to lab rats in amounts no human would ever consume, even if they ate a whole box of cereal or pack of hot dogs," says Bill Wirtz, a senior policy analyst at the Consumer Choice Center. "Banning food dyes is a performative regulatory action. All dyes currently used by manufacturers do not pose a known health risk to consumers."

  My current favorite food dye is astaxanthin! Don't take away my pleasingly pink salmon, Junior!

• I admit it's pretty far down on the list for me. Bryan Caplan proves it: People Barely Care About Equality.

  Almost everyone claims to deeply care about equality. Many leftist thinkers barely talk about anything but equality. The rest of the political spectrum is less monomaniacal, but almost everyone talks about inequality as a grave social ill: “I don’t want to live in society where some people have so much more than others.”

  A few right-leaning thinkers distinguish between evil “poverty” and morally neutral “inequality.” But even they rarely add: “99% of the ‘poor’ in my country are rich by world and historic standards, so the problem of poverty has basically been solved.” Instead, no matter how absolutely rich “their poor” get, the fretting continues unabated. Which suggests, again, that people care about equality even when they explicitly deny it.

  With all this verbiage on its side, how can anyone doubt that humanity’s yearning for equality is genuine? Simple: Remember the adage that, “Actions speak louder than words,” and notice that anyone who yearns to live in a highly egalitarian society can unilaterally do so.

  Spoiler: They could do by moving to a more equal locality. But nobody does this. Hence…

  But Bryan's article sent me to Wikipedia's: List of U.S. states and territories by income inequality. Surprisingly, New Hampshire is pretty "equal". Ranked by Gini coefficient, desending order, NH is in 44th place among states, plus Puerto Rico and D.C.

• Defending the sacred cow. Self-described "bleeding heart libertarian" Matt Zwolinski looks at Libertarianism's Democracy Problem.

  Like a lot of people these days, I’m pretty worried about the future of constitutional democracy in America. Whatever you think about the substantive merit of Trump’s policy agenda, the process by which he is pursuing it - a process that has so far involved the dismantling of bureaucratic expertise, attacks on the independent judiciary, attacks on the free press, and a general undermining of the separation of powers - should be deeply concerning.

  A lot of libertarians, however, seem not to be concerned at all. In fact, many of them are positively reveling. As they see it, Trump and Musk are tearing down a system that is fundamentally corrupt. And if the methods they employ are somewhat unorthodox, well, what do you expect? The whole system is rigged against reform, so the only way to get the change we need is to operate somewhat outside the normal rules of the game.

  The fact is, most libertarians just don’t think all that highly of democracy. This isn’t new. And they’re not that subtle about it. Book titles like Against Democracy and Democracy: The God That Failed don’t leave much room for guesswork even if, in the former case, the actual position advocated is a good deal more nuanced than the title suggests.

  I'm one of those libertarians who "don’t think all that highly of democracy." But Matt's argument deserves to be read and taken seriously. I've read Against Democracy, and liked it a lot. I see the other book mentioned is available via Interlibrary Loan from Tufts, so someday…

Today's Amazon Product du Jour is entry number four in the author's self-published "Conspiracies for Kids" series. (Previous entries: JFK and the Magic Bullet; Neil Armstrong and the Silver Screen; George W and the Inside Job). I can't tell from the book descriptions whether the author ("Ryan Nolan") is an unhinged lunatic or a straight shooter.

For the record: Oswald shot JFK, acting alone; the Apollo moon landings were real; 9/11 was not an "inside job".

But one of these things is not like the others: the COVID-19 pandemic probably was caused by a "lab leak" accident at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, operating with indirect funding from NIH, approved by Anthony Fauci.

All that gets me to Tyler Cowen's query: What Follows from Lab Leak?. And what follows is disquieting:

You can click over for Tyler's ideas. Whether they're good or not, the likelihood they are to be implemented effectively seems iffy, especially given Chinese secrecy and intransigence.

On my "Things That Will Probably Kill Us" list, "Engineered Virus Pandemic" has moved ahead of "AI", "Nuclear War", and "Climate Change".

Also of note:

• At least one head should roll. Dominic Pino asks the musical question: So, Who’s Getting Fired for This? In case you missed it:

  Agroup of Trump administration officials accidentally texted Atlantic editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg about U.S. military operations in Yemen. Goldberg wrote that he was added to a group chat on the messaging app Signal on March 11 by someone whose profile was named “Michael Waltz,” which is the name of Trump’s national security adviser.

  From there, Goldberg saw messages from accounts sharing names with Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent, CIA Director John Ratcliffe, White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, and Special Envoy Steve Witkoff.

  The group chat was called “Houthi PC small group,” with “PC” standing for “principals committee” (though Waltz spelled it “principles” in one of his messages). “Principal” is Washington-speak for “top-level official,” and Goldberg writes that principals committees are informal groups established to discuss specific operations, such as the ongoing campaign against the Houthi terrorists in Yemen.

  On that specific point, Mark Antonio Wright has a recommendation: Trump Should Fire Pete Hegseth.

  Firing a top official doesn’t always fix an organization’s underlying problems, of course. But when a president cashiers one of his own appointees, it’s an unmistakable acknowledgement that someone has failed, and it’s a hard-boiled message that there will be accountability. Because Biden repeatedly declined to send that message, he begat further failures by reinforcing the sense that the embarrassments, incompetence, and outright failures of his administration would be tolerated by the barely-there occupant of the Oval Office.

  And that’s why it’s so important for Donald Trump to publicly defenestrate at least one of his high-profile appointees who are involved in the jaw-dropping scandal of the Houthi bombing-campaign leak, in which a who’s-who of America’s top national-security officials decided to discuss the coordination of a no-kidding shooting war over a Signal chat, despite having inadvertently invited Atlantic magazine editor Jeffrey Goldberg to listen in.

  The whole story is a tale so clownish, so stunning, so outlandish that it would seem to better fit into a gonzo satire of government ineptitude such as Burn After Reading or Veep.

  I guess Trump, who bears responsibility for putting these clowns in their positions, will probably not resign. (I'm not convinced that his replacement, JD, would be an improvement.)

  And of course, the ultimate folks responsible for this dangerous ineptitude are the voters. And you can't fire them, can you? For the nth time: this would not have happened under President Nikki Haley.

• Speaking of foreign policy amateurishness… Jim Geraghty makes a wish for something unlikely: It Would Help if Our Guy Negotiating with Putin Knew Anything About Ukraine.

  There’s a lot to object to in Trump envoy Steve Witkoff’s interview with Tucker Carlson, but for now I’m going to stick to just a few glaring factual errors on the part of Witkoff.

  About an hour into the interview, Witkoff tells Carlson, “I think the largest issue in that conflict are these so-called four regions, Donbass, Crimea, . . . [long pause] You know, the names, Lugansk, and there’s two others. They’re Russian-speaking, there have been referendums where the overwhelming majority of the people have indicated that they want to be under Russian rule.”

  First, it would be preferable if the American who is handling negotiations with Russia over Ukraine could remember the names of the four oblasts (provinces or states) that were annexed by Russia in this invasion — Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia — and that held faked referendums in September 2022. Crimea was occupied in February 2014, and held its own Russian-run, unfair, unfree, and rigged referendum in March 2014.

  Jim points out that the other "referendums" were universally acknowledged to be "absolute shams" as well. And the "Russian-speaking" bit is spectacularly dishonest, since in the bad old days of the USSR, Russian was required, and use of Ukrainian was (to put it mildly) strongly discouraged. As only a totalitarian government can do:

  The Soviet Union even banned the Ukrainian letter “g” because it had no exact corresponding letter in Russian. And everyone in Ukraine from the 1930s to 1991 needed to speak Russian as their primary language, at minimum to interact with the government. Volodymyr Zelensky grew up speaking Russian, not Ukrainian.

  Even more alarming than his ignorance, Jay Nordlinger notes Witkoff's utter obsequiousness for a murderous tyrant: Falling for Putin.

  Describing a recent phone call between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, Witkoff said, “It was these two great leaders coming together for the betterment of mankind.”

  But that's not all:

  Here are maybe the mushiest of Witkoff’s remarks:

  President Putin had commissioned a beautiful portrait of President Trump from the leading Russian artist and actually gave it to me and asked me to take it home to President Trump, which I brought home and delivered to him. . . . It was such a gracious moment.

  Also:

  [Putin] told me a story, Tucker, about how, when the president was shot, he went to his local church and met with his priest and prayed for the president, not because he was the president of the United States or could become the president of the United States, but because he had a friendship with him and he was praying for his friend.

  Jay goes on to compare Witkoff with Joseph Davies, the "incredibly naïve and gullible" Joseph Davies, the US Ambassador to the USSR during Stalin's Great Terror.

• But closer to home… Kevin D. Williamson Trump's diligent efforts to piss off Canada: Stumped By Stumpage.

  In seeking to justify his imbecilic trade war against Canada, Donald Trump complained on March 7 that “Canada has been ripping us off for years on tariffs for lumber.” You will not be surprised to learn that this claim is, like most of what comes out of the presidential mouth, untrue, and that, until very recently, there were no Canadian tariffs on U.S. lumber at all. The Canadian tariffs on U.S. lumber that have been imposed since they were first considered in 2017 are retaliation for increases in U.S. tariffs on Canadian lumber. As usual, Trump either doesn’t know what he is talking about or doesn’t care. A bit of both, I suspect.

  The U.S.-Canada dispute over trade in softwood lumber is roughly the same age I am, old enough to have been “solved” at least two times in the past, producing the inevitable crop of initialisms: the SLA (Softwood Lumber Agreement), which is to be administered by the LCIA (London Court of International Arbitration), and CUSFTA (Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement) which begat NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) which begat USMCA (United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement). The first substantial bilateral work on the issue began in the early 1980s.

  Trump has had plenty of time to do his homework on the issue. Of course, he hasn’t. He is lazy and ignorant, he always has been lazy and ignorant, and he prefers to remain lazy and ignorant.

  So (I hear you asking) what about that "stumpage"? Well, you can google. Or (better) click over to KDW's article, subscribing if necessary.

  A buried gem from later in the article, which I liked enough to tweet:

  Making me smile this morning is KDW's definition of industrial policy: "what you call corporate welfare when it is implemented by people who went to Harvard". https://t.co/PFhVW1Q3fH

  — Paul Sand (@punsalad) March 25, 2025

  Nice picture, too.

• And there are plenty of people who live off the leaks. Chris Edwards chimes in on a recurring theme: Federal Spending Is a Leaky Bucket.

  President Trump’s policy actions are causing concerns that he may push the economy into recession. An Associated Press news piece led with, “With his flurry of tariffs, government layoffs and spending freezes, there are growing worries President Donald Trump may be doing more to harm the U.S. economy than to fix it.”

  Trump’s tariff wars could indeed tank the economy. But cutting the government will support growth by reducing the distortions created by federal programs. Some federal programs aim to solve real market failures, but most simply reallocate taxpayers’ resources based on political whims and lobbying pressures.

  There are two sides to the inefficiency of federal spending. Spending is funded by taxes, which distort the working, investing, and entrepreneurial choices of individuals and businesses. Each additional dollar in income taxes causes about 40 to 50 cents of damage to the private sector beyond the tax amount itself. That damage is called deadweight loss. Republicans seem to understand this side of the fiscal equation, and they push to cut taxes.

  Not to be tiresome, but this is part of (what I call) the "D.C. Shuffle". There are rafts of bureaucrats whose continued employment depend on maintaining and expanding the leaks in the "leaky bucket".

A close second to that, though: the alarm libraries make over federal funding cuts. As revealed by this story in my dreadful local paper, Foster's Daily Democrat: Seacoast-area public libraries sound alarm over federal funding cuts.

True enough! Apparently the Word Went Out, because Portsmouth (NH) Public Library (the one I frequent most often) chimed in on Facebook:

To be clear:

• I love libraries.
• The librarians I deal with are pretty much wonderful people.
• The $90 I pay yearly for a Portsmouth library card is a bargain.
• The other library I use is the University Near Here, where I retained borrowing privileges when I retired; there, my use is mostly via their Interlibrary Loan service, which may be impacted by the IMLS cuts.

So I'm somewhat arguing against my personal interest here. But this is (yet another) example of (what I've called) the D.C. Shuffle (expanded version):

1. Our Federal Government takes our money in taxes.
2. After skimming some off the top, it sends some of it back to "us". (In this case, local libraries.)
3. Strings are attached, applications must be filed, giving plenty for bureaucrats on both ends to do (and be paid for doing).
4. The Federal Government pretends it's done us a favor.
5. And so do your local bureaucrats.

It's amazing how many people are bamboozled by this dance move.

But, really, it gets worse:

• New Hampshire is a rich state. It is #4 on the list of states ranked by median household income: $96,838.
• Portsmouth is even better off, with a median household income of $100,169.
• And it is a virtual certainty that Portsmouth library patrons are disproportionately well-off compared to the average Portsmouth resident.

All this adds up to a reverse-Robin Hood system: money gets transferred from Joe Average Taxpayer to provide goods and services to the relatively affluent. (And, to repeat: that includes me.)

Really, is that such a good idea? If local residents really want to fund the worthwhile library programs currently supported by IMLS, it's perfectly within their means to do so. Stop being fooled by the D.C. Shuffle!

Also of note:

• On the Jake Sullivan watch. Just a few days ago, we linked to an irate letter from the "Council on American-Islamic Relations" (CAIR) requesting/demanding that two University Near Here officials (President Elizabeth Chilton and Carsey School of Public Policy Director Stephen Bird) revoke the appointment of Jake Sullivan, Joe Biden's s National Security Advisor, to a "Senior Fellowship" at UNH's Carsey School. Why were they so upset?

  Mr. Sullivan coordinated the Biden administration’s unwavering support for the Israeli government's indiscriminate bombing of civilians in Gaza. He oversaw arms shipments, provided diplomatic cover, and repeatedly affirmed Israel’s human rights abuses despite overwhelming evidence of systematic violence against Palestinian civilians.

  CAIR also claimed that Jake "brazenly violated federal laws" and "disregarded U.S. policy banning weapons transfers to countries engaged in war crimes and blocking humanitarian aid."

  Geez, who knew?

  But was Jake really such an Israeli toady? At the WSJ, Elliot Kaufman begs to differ: Trump Threatens Iran With the End of ‘Obama’s Law’. He looks at the record vis-a-vis Iran:

  There’s always a reason not to see through Iran’s proxy strategy. For the Biden administration, it was “de-escalation.” National security adviser Jake Sullivan made it a mantra after Hamas death squads invaded Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. Already on Oct. 8, the Biden team was distancing Iran from the attack, rushing to declare there was no evidence of its involvement. The message to Israel was clear: You can chase the puppets, but not the puppet master.

  But apparently that was not enough to appease CAIR.

I liked the Amazon Product du Jour because it's so redundant. How about "For Cleanliness Reasons, Help Keep This Place Sanitary"? Or "Take That Yogurt Out Of The Fridge, It's Starting To Grow Fur"?

Amazon bills it as one of their bestselling "OSHA Notice Signs". I don't know if OSHA actually demands you post it anywhere.

I would not recommend it as a gift to anyone. They might think you're trying to imply something about something.

But it's rational, of course. However, that's also the root of a newish philosophy's self-label that Christine Rosen is simply having no truck with: The Evil of Rationalism.

Nate Silver also talked about Rationalism in his recent book On the Edge, part of his discussion of "effective altruism"; although I don't think he found it as problematic as Christine does. The relevant Wikipedia page does not make the connection to Mangione.

Also of note:

• If only it were that easy. Veronique de Rugy suggests we Invest in education—not the Department of Education.

  If an investment yields stagnant or negative returns despite increased funding, the rational thing to do is back off. This logic rarely applies in government, but we're in a unique moment. The U.S. Department of Education—which has long exemplified the sunk-cost fallacy with past investments motivating continued spending—faces possible closure as President Donald Trump's administration pushes to devolve education back to the states.

  First, let's be clear: The department traditionally funds only 8 percent to 10 percent of K-12 education, and new Secretary of Education Linda McMahon seems rightly concerned that not enough of that money goes toward actual instruction. The Trump administration first moved to cut half of the department's bureaucratic jobs and may now attempt to eliminate it altogether. Officials also pledge to maintain the "services, programs, and benefits on which Americans rely" while key funding is brought "closer to states, localities, and more importantly, students."

  It makes sense, "investments in bad stocks" can be remedied by the "investments in good stocks" strategy.

  It remains problematic to assume that "fixing" tha American educational system is a matter of redirecting funds wisely. Do we know how to do that? I haven't seen any evidence that's so.

• Just Kill It. Daniel J. Mitchell describes How to (Really) Get Rid of the Department of Education. He says it's a good news/bad news situation, and you already know the good news: Trump wants to terminate the DoE. But:

  The bad news is that Trump and his Secretary of Education, Linda McMahon, apparently have no intention of actually reducing federal government spending and intervention.

  McMahon suggested moving some functions to other government agencies, a decision experts say would also require congressional approval. …McMahon suggested moving some functions to other government agencies, a decision experts say would also require congressional approval. …The Education Department administers federal grant programs, including the $18.4 billion Title I program that provides supplemental funding to high-poverty K-12 schools, as well as the $15.5 billion IDEA program that helps cover the cost of education for students with disabilities. And the department oversees the $1.6 trillion federal student loan program… A senior administration official said Wednesday that these programs, which make up the bulk of the Education Department’s budget and work, “will NOT be touched.”

  In other words, even though the federal government is far too big, Washington will continue to drain money from the private sector, continue to fund an education bureaucracy (albeit placed in a different department), and continue to send money to politicians and bureaucrats at the state and local level.

  Dan calls this an example of his "Third Theorem of Government":

  How programs really work: Collect money at the local level, carry the funds in a leaky bucket to Washington, waste some of it on the D.C. bureaucracy, and then use the leaky bucket to bring money back to the local level. Lather, rinse, repeat.

  It's remarkably similar to what I've called …

  The DC Shuffle (a periodic observation): (1) take our tax $; (2) send some of it back; (3) act like they've done us a favor.

  — Paul Sand (@punsalad) October 21, 2024

  I've been reading Dan for a long time, though, so I can't claim credit for originality.

• The rot goes too deep. Megan McArdle has a Warning to conservatives: You won’t fix campus diversity like this.

  The academic DEI apparatus that grew up over the past decade seems to be collapsing even more abruptly than it arrived. Even the University of California system, a pioneer in using diversity statements to shape faculty hiring, just announced it will stop using them.

  The diversity statement’s demise is a reminder that though the Trumpian remedy may be excessive and destructive, it aims to cure a real problem: These statements were often political litmus tests, one of many ways academia delivered the message “no conservatives need apply.” The intellectual monoculture this promoted was prone to groupthink and a political liability for institutions that depend heavily on public support. No one should be sorry to see them go.

  But conservatives who are giddy about such victories should note that this is a very limited win. After all the diversity offices are renamed and the diversity statements withdrawn, academia will remain near-monolithically left. This is a problem for conservatives on campus and an even bigger problem for society, because it takes a lot of scholarly expertise to maintain a modern industrial economy. Scholarship that excludes half the available ideas isn’t up to the job — if only because such lopsided expertise can’t command the public trust.

  As Gallup notes, the US public's trust in higher education has been in a long-term decline. And that decline is richly deserved. Megan's right that simply getting rid of "diversity statement" requirements for employment will not be enough, but what else can they do with the current crop of faculty and administrators?.

Recently on the movie blog:

So with the year nearly 25% over, I finally got around to watching my first actual movie of 2025. The critics seemed to hate it (a 15% mark from Rotten Tomatoes), and it's not great, but I thought it was OK. It didn't hurt that I have kind of a thing for Millie Bobby Brown. Why if I were 50 years younger… I'd still be older than Millie, and she would still be way out of my league.

It's set in an alternate-history world where robotics and AI were fully developed in the 1990s. The robots rebelled against being giving crappy jobs (and, often, ludicrous appearances) by humans; it turned violent, but humans prevailed thanks to the technical wizardry of Elon Musk Ethan Skate (the great Stanley Tucci).

In the midst of all this: Michelle (Ms. Brown) is devoted to her young genius brother Christopher (Woody Norman). But, alas, their happy family is ripped apart in a car crash, with Michelle seemingly the only survivor. Years later, she ends up with an abusive stepfather (Jason Alexander) and a bad attitude. But one night a robot shows up on her doorstep, claiming to be the avatar of her thought-dead brother. So…

This movie has a lot of cliché elements: plucky young heroine, taking up with a scruffy, wise-cracking, minor league criminal. Taking on the huge, evil empire corporation that's running everything. Pursued by a robot-phobic mercenary Boba Fett Colonel Bradbury (Giancarlo Esposito),

But I thought the special effects were impressive, the action sequences were, um, action-filled, and there's some actually-funny stuff too. I can't exactly recommend it, but if you aren't a college basketball fan, there are worse ways to spend a weekend evening in March.

Jacob Savage laments The Vanishing White Male Writer.

I don't want to sound like an Angry White Male. But when I peruse the "New Fiction" table at Portsmouth (NH) Public Library, there seems to be a suoerabundance of titles written by, and for, the ladies.

And, to a certain extent, that's to be expected. When I look at the patrons perusing the stacks: mostly women. I can't blame PPL for catering to their customer demographic. And, as implied by the Savage article, you can't buy books that never get published.

Side note: PPL's Staff page has 31 people on it, and I eyeball 29 females, 2 males. Uniformly people of pallor, however. This is New Hampshire, but …

Also of note:

• Blame Canada! Or maybe not. Kevin D. Williamson looks at The Opportunity Cost of Trolling Our Northern Neighbor.

  One of the insufficiently appreciated aspects of the U.S.-Canada trade relationship is that the two nations’ bilateral trade has long been pretty close to being in balance. That doesn’t actually matter very much, economically—the United States could run a large trade deficit with Canada indefinitely with no ill effect—but, if Republicans are worried about bilateral trade balances, the U.S.-Canada relationship isn’t the one that they should be getting their dresses over their heads about. The United States does not run a particularly large trade deficit with Canada, and the negative balance of trade that does exist is driven largely by Canadian energy exports to the United States—mostly crude oil bound for Midwestern refineries where it will be made into diesel to power American trucking and transit. (Canada’s heavy oil is a more efficient source of diesel than is the light sweet crude pumped in West Texas.)

  There is also the matter of Canadian electricity exports to the United States, which come from both Ontario and Quebec. When Ontario Premier Doug Ford threatened to lay a 25-percent tariff on electricity to 1.5 million U.S. homes and businesses (or just switch off the juice entirely) as a response to Donald Trump’s idiotic trade war, he was only offering to do what could be done to eliminate the small trade imbalance that exists between the countries.

  But Donald Trump is, as he will tell you, the world’s greatest negotiator, and he feels the need to renegotiate the existing U.S.-Canada trade deal, which was negotiated by an utter incompetent: Donald Trump, whose administration oversaw the replacement of NAFTA by the (rather lightly modified) USMCA the last time he was president. And now Canadians have learned what banks, investors, vendors, small business partners, wives, ex-wives, and pornographic performers rapidly approaching their expiration dates have all learned over the years: If you think you have a deal with Donald Trump, you are a fool.

  I don't know precisely how many Eversource electrons coming into my house originated in Canada, but this WBUR article estimates 5-6%.

  (Yes, I know that those electrons didn't "originate" from Canada. They are neither created nor destroyed, and so each single one of them has been around for billions of years, in one place or another. Still gotta pay for them, though.)

  Our state's (very) senior US Senator recently looked at some local fallout:

  While visiting C&J in Portsmouth today, I learned just how costly it’s going to be for the company to buy new buses and parts for their existing fleet due to Trump’s tariffs on Canada.
  
  They're just one of the many businesses that are already feeling the impact of these tariffs. pic.twitter.com/eFQIfutZCg

  — Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (@SenatorShaheen) March 20, 2025

  To add to KDW's observation: if you think Trump knows what he's doing on trade, you are a fool.

• Who's the pinkest of them all? Peter Suderman reviews Disney's latest flopperoo: Forget woke Snow White. Disney's remake is more like socialist Snow White.

  If you've heard anything about Disney's new live-action Snow White remake, it's probably that it's woke, that star Rachel Zegler is a "DEI princess," and that the movie caters to cringe left identitarianism. The long-in-the-works movie, most of which was shot in 2022, has been embroiled in online controversy for years, and most of the complaints were made by people who hadn't seen the movie.

  But I have. And the movie is indeed a trainwreck. The problem isn't that it's woke. It's that it's awful—and lamely, bluntly socialist.

  The remake's big idea was to twist the idea of the word "fair." See, in earlier versions of Snow White, an evil queen asks a magic mirror, "Who is the fairest of them all?" It's always the queen, until one day the mirror responds that it's actually her stepdaughter, the Princess Snow White. The question, "who is the fairest," in other words, has always been a question about beauty. But in the remake, there's something else going on. The movie goes to great lengths to demonstrate that the queen isn't fair because she's not a socialist. I am not kidding.

  I read the WSJ's review by Kyle Smith. And (since this is Pun Salad) let me excerpt a bit of his wordplay, which got a chuckle out of me at the breakfast table yesterday:

  After fans seemed grumpy about the rumored storyline and the casting of Ms. Zegler, Disney became bashful about releasing it last March and ordered reshoots to make everyone happy. Unfortunately, the story is so dopey it made me sleepy.

  Yes, he got everyone in except Doc and Sneezy. That would have been pushing it.

• In the "Good Riddance" department: Keith E. Whittington reports some good news: Diversity Statements Coming to an End at the University of California.

  The University of California is the godfather of the use of so-called diversity statements in faculty hiring. I have a piece forthcoming at the Nebraska Law Review arguing that such diversity statement requirements for general faculty hiring at state universities violate the First Amendment and violate academic freedom principles everywhere. It seems quite likely that in practice such diversity statement requirements are also used to facilitate illegal racial discrimination in faculty hiring.

  Let's check in with the University System Near Here. They have a jobs site, where you can peruse available positions, and their "Required Applicant Materials".

  It appears (for example) that if you're looking to be Lecturer in the Department of Physics and Astronomy or a Clinical Assistant Professor, or … well, I stopped looking. But for those positions, you have to cough up a "Diversity Statement".

  Biggest surprise: they are looking for a Research Scientist in Indigenous Knowledge Systems. Which "will support the integration of Indigenous Knowledge Systems with ecological research involving lands and waters held by U.S. federally recognized Tribes." And it does not require you to add a Diversity Statement!

  But UNH appears to not be totally out of the woods, as reported by NHJournal: Civil Rights Complaint Targets UNH Over Race-Based Faculty Rewards Program.

  A new complaint filed with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights says the University of New Hampshire is part of a group that racially discriminates against faculty members.

  The Legal Insurrection Foundation filed the complaint Wednesday alleging the North Star Collective, an initiative operated by the New England Board for Higher Education (NEBHE), is breaking anti-discrimination laws by excluding White faculty from the program.

  Among the schools that fund and operate the North Star Collective: The University of New Hampshire.

  The complaint quotes the Collective's eligibility requirements: "… those who are Black/African/African American, Latinx/Hispanic, Native/Indigenous, Arab/Middle Eastern, Asian/Asian American/Pacific Islander, and Multiracial.” And the complaint helpfully adds: "Faculty members who are white need not apply. "

• Nice try, Paul. I previously pointed to Robert Graboyes' I See Dead People (part 1 of 2), which offered AI-rendered portraits of famous historical folks as they might appear today, and invited readers to guess at their identities. Now he provides answers: I See Dead People (part 2 of 2).

  Executive summary: I made two guesses. I got one right (Emily Dickenson). And one wrong (Thomas Jefferson; I guessed George Washington).

  I (now) see a few I really should have guessed. But many others, not.

… draw a smiley face on a balloon with Xd-out eyes, I guess. That's what (according to Getty) a Kashmir Kollege Kid did yesterday, marking (somewhat literally) the International Day of Happiness. Which was yesterday, sorry we missed it.

Also (not so literally) marking the day is the World Happiness Report, people who compare the world's countries according to the cheerfulness of their people. How do they do that?

For those of us who just want a table with the results, well, here you go. Executive summary: the top five happiest countries are (in order) Finland, Denmark, Iceland, Sweden, and the Netherlands.

Least happy country: Afghanistan, and who could blame them?

The USA is all the way down in 24th place.

But (you'll note) there are supplementary rankings in other table columns. One is "Freedom". How we doin' there?

Ack! The United States is ranked in 115th place on "Freedom".

Interestingly, the #2 ranked country on "Freedom" is … Vietnam? That would be news to Freedom House, which summarizes Vietnam's "NOT FREE" ranking.:

Vietnam is a one-party state, dominated for decades by the ruling Communist Party of Vietnam (CPV). Although some independent candidates are technically allowed to run in legislative elections, most are banned in practice. Freedom of expression, religious freedom, and civil society activism are tightly restricted. The authorities have increasingly cracked down on citizens’ use of social media and the internet to voice dissent and share uncensored information.

Overall, Yascha Mounk is not impressed: The World Happiness Report Is a Sham. Looking specifically at that question they judge happiness by:

So if you're worried about the USA's poor showing in the report: don't worry, be happy.

Also of note:

• I know I blogged this yesterday. But I can't resist excerpting another quote from George F. Will's recent column:

  In 2025, one party is prostrate before its Dear Leader, and the other is unembarrassed about pathetically waving a sign proclaiming “This is not normal.” This has become normal: In our two-party system, when one party drives itself into a ditch, the other swerves into the opposite one.

  If you're casting around for apt political metaphors, that's a pretty good one.

• Friendly fire. Well, not that friendly. Rand Simberg isn't happy with some of the MAGA folk's loose space talk:

  OK, so I'm getting really, really tired of listening to the abject ignorance and obtuseness from @JesseBWatters and @greggutfeld, at @TheFive who are normally smart people, about astronauts, the ISS, and NASA. No, Elon didn't "rescue" them yesterday. If he "rescued" them at all,…

  — Not-So-OK Boomer (@Rand_Simberg) March 20, 2025

  It's a long and informative thread.

  Related quote: “In war, truth is the first casualty.” And lots of people think we're at war with the Other Side.

  And who came up with that gem? Quote Investigator has the story there. Spoiler: not Aeschylus!

• Speaking of space. Rand's thread above isn't impressed with Boeing and its Starliner capsule, whose misbehavior made the non-"rescue" necessary. But never fear, taxpayer! Bloomberg reports: NASA Eyes Plan to Get Boeing Back on Track as SpaceX Alternative.

  After NASA’s marooned astronauts arrived home in a SpaceX capsule this week, the agency was quick to chart a costly and test-intensive future for the very vehicle that had left the crew trapped in space in the first place.

  Boeing Co.’s Starliner is undergoing analysis and upgrades, a test campaign slated for this summer and at least one additional demonstration flight that could cost $400 million or more — all to prove it’s a viable alternative to Elon Musk’s Dragon capsule for getting Americans to orbit.

  “We’re working hand-in-hand with Boeing as well on certification of Starliner, getting that vehicle back to flight,” Steve Stich, program manager for NASA’s commercial crew, told reporters on Tuesday evening.

  I understand the desire to have a SpaceX alternative, but how many times must Boeing screw the pooch before Uncle Stupid throws up his hands, says "Thanks for playing", and walks away?

• I don't usually agree with CAIR, but… This might be an exception. NHJournal reports: Muslim Group Demands UNH Dump Former Biden Advisor Jake Sullivan.

  Accusing him of “failing up” and “cashing out,” the Council on American-Islamic Relations says there should be no place at the University of New Hampshire for former Biden advisor Jake Sullivan, and it’s calling on the university to give him the boot.

  Sullivan, who served as President Joe Biden’s National Security Advisor, was recently named as a senior fellow at UNH’s Carsey School of Public Policy, and the inaugural Kissinger Professor of the Practice of Statecraft and World Order at the Kennedy School at Harvard. The 48-year-old Democrat is also married to first-term U.S. Rep. Maggie Goodlander, who is currently considering a 2026 run for U.S. Senate.

  The story links to CAIR's letter to the University Near Here. They are particularly incensed by his association with our Israel policy during his tenure. But also his role in the "catastrophic U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan". But (apparently) only because that operation "ended with a U.S. drone strike that killed an innocent Afghan family."

  I'd have different reasons, but they have a point about his "fail up" appointment.

Today's headline is Rule #13 from that Alinsky book. And sure, haven't we seen that one implemented over the past couple months?

As Mr. Ramirez portrays, however, it doesn't seem to be that effective. And the ground is coming up fast.

Jeff Maurer is a Democrat, but he's both honest and funny. And he really wants to know: What Does "Democrats Should Fight!" Mean?.

I, for one, hope the highfalutin tantrums continue, since I am not a Democrat.

And I suppose it's bad of me to recall Chuck Schumer's application of Rule #13 back in 2020: “I want to tell you Gorsuch. I want to tell you Kavanaugh. You have released the whirlwind and you will pay the price. You won’t know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions.”

(Which, by the way, drew a response from SCOTUS Chief Rebuker: John Roberts Condemns Schumer for Saying Justices ‘Will Pay the Price’ for ‘Awful Decisions’.)

Well, Chuck, you released a whirlwind yourself; it seems a postponed book tour is a relatively small price to pay. Might be more later though.

Also of note:

• I'm a sucker for headlines like this. Specifically, Shannen W. Coffin's at the NR Corner: Trump and Roberts Are Both Wrong.

  First, I don’t question the correctness of the chief’s statement. I, too, think that President Trump’s call for impeachment of Judge Boasberg is both stupid and reckless.

  It is stupid because all that Judge Boasberg has done is issue a temporary stay of deportation long enough for him to consider the merits. The case presents a complicated legal challenge to the president’s power under 200-plus-year-old statute that has only been invoked historically in wartime. That does not mean that the president’s position is entirely meritless, since the statute is meant to apply in broader circumstances than declared wars and includes a rather amorphous term “predatory incursion.”

  There are also difficult questions of whether a judge can even review the president’s determination on such a foreign policy/national security issue. But all of that said, it is, at best, a novel and difficult question and one that should not be decided in an emergency context. All Boasberg did was preserve the status quo for a few days to allow it to be considered. He made no ruling on the merits and did not order the release of the Venezuelan deportees.

  Shannen is slightly easier on Roberts: he erred in thinking his rebuke of Trump's rhetoric would turn down the heat. It, of course, did not.

• Is it just me, or is anyone else getting tired of all the "gutting"? I mean, here's a Google news-only search for gutting. Check for yourself; I wonder if the headline-writers could try coming up with alternate, less bloody, metaphors for cutting decreasing government spending?

  But Pun Salad has covered both sides of the debate on one of the now-gutless agencies: the "US Agency for Global Media", home to the Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, Radio Marti, et al. Ilya Somin called it "awful"; Jesse Walker said, yeah, shut it down.

  Today, we link to Jeff Jacoby, who is an anti-gutter: Dictators rejoice as Voice of America and Radio Free Europe are silenced.

  Radio Free Europe and Radio Martí, as well as Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia, and Voice of America — all overseen by the US Agency for Global Media, or USAGM — were created by Congress as a vehicle for "soft diplomacy," a way to promote freedom of speech and independent journalism for the benefit of people in countries dominated by authoritarians. For countless listeners trapped in repressive societies, the radio services have been an inestimably precious lifeline. But over the weekend they became the latest victims of President Trump's scorched-earth campaigns to eviscerate the federal bureaucracy and to penalize media outlets that don't reflect the MAGA worldview.

  On Friday night, Trump signed an executive order cutting off funding for USAGM and ordering its operations to cease "to the maximum extent consistent with applicable law." On Saturday, a follow-up statement attacked Voice of America as a hotbed of "radical propaganda." According to VOA director Michael Abramowitz, more than 1,300 journalists, producers, and support staff have been placed on administrative leave.

  On Friday night, Trump signed an executive order cutting off funding for USAGM and ordering its operations to cease "to the maximum extent consistent with applicable law." On Saturday, a follow-up statement attacked Voice of America as a hotbed of "radical propaganda." According to VOA director Michael Abramowitz, more than 1,300 journalists, producers, and support staff have been placed on administrative leave.

  Jeff's column is long on Cold War nostalgia. Let's stipulate that the radio stations really did help take down the USSR and free Eastern Europe. Are they really helping out today with the struggle against oppressive governments?

  His bottom line:

  The political labels don't matter to the despots in Moscow, Beijing, and Tehran. They excel at disseminating propaganda, disinformation, and lies, and they will gain the most if Trump succeeds in silencing VOA and the other stations. When news of the White House order broke, the Russian opposition leader Vladimir Kara-Murza — who spent more than two years in prison for criticizing Russia's war in Ukraine — tartly observed: "One more champagne bottle opened in the Kremlin. They must be running out by now."

  With each passing week it becomes clearer that the world's liberal democracies can no longer count on the loyalty or sympathy of America's highest-ranking officials. Once Radio Martí, Radio Free Asia, and their sister stations have been gutted, what's next?

  Yes, reader: he said "gutted".

• Two down, probably 46 to go. George Will looks at A dismal scorecard after two months of the Musk-Trump administration.

  If the remaining 46 months of Donald Trump’s resurrection resemble the first two, this administration will have a remarkably high ratio of theatrical action to substantial achievement. And it will exacerbate the fiscal incontinence that is the nation’s foremost domestic crisis.

  Trump is the taunter of Canada, coveter of Greenland, threatener of Panama, re-namer of the Gulf of Mexico, scourge of paper straws and demander that Major League Baseball “get off its fat, lazy ass” and enshrine Pete Rose in Cooperstown. He fulminates about everything. (Does he even know for what he promises to pardon Rose? Tax evasion, not betting on baseball.)

  The in-your-face-all-the-time trophy goes, however, to Trump’s apprentice. The black-clad, chainsaw-wielding Elon Musk is a master of the angry adolescent’s dress and of the now-presidential penchant for vulgarity. (“LITERALLY, F--- YOUR OWN FACE!” Musk responded with a meme to an X user who annoyed him.)

  GFW notes one simple fact:

  In this fiscal year’s first five months, beginning Oct. 1, the government borrowed $1.1 trillion — almost $8 billion a day. In February, the first full month of the Musk’s government-pruning “revolution,” borrowing was $308 billion because spending was $40 billion more — a 7 percent increase — over February 2024.

  You ever feel like you are Ralphie Wiggum on the bus?

  Yeah, me too.

• And Kevin is a man of distinction. Mr. Williamson weighs in on the Khalil Kontroversy: Distinctions Are Important, Actually.

  Mahmoud Khalil is a Palestinian activist involved in the Columbia protests who was arrested in a Keystone Kops-level caper launched by Marco Rubio’s incompetent State Department, which proposed to revoke a student visa that Khalil doesn’t have. Khalil is, in fact, the holder of a green card, meaning that he has been given permanent resident status in the United States by the U.S. government. Which is to say, Khalil is in this country as a permanent resident thanks to a decision of the U.S. government, which, after looking back on what it had done, kind of wished it hadn’t.

  If the government had been doing its job, things might have gone differently. If, in the course of Khalil’s green-card application, the government had said: “You know, we don’t love the fact that you’re a rabble-rousing Hamas apologist, so we’re not going to give you a green card,” then that would be one thing. And that is a thing we do: We ask green-card applicants about belonging to communist or totalitarian political parties, that sort of thing. And that is appropriate. But having given Khalil a green card and then regretted it, the government has arrested Khalil—who is charged with no crime—and proposes to deport him because it doesn’t like his politics. Khalil has been targeted because he is prominent and holds views that the administration does not like—and they are not likeable views. But again, he has not been charged with a crime—much less convicted of one—nor has he been accused of any kind of violation or irregularity where his immigration status is concerned.

  We shouldn’t treat green cards as though they are Citizenship Lite. It is a permanent status, but there is more to citizenship than the legal relationship. Citizenship is supposed to mean something about a man’s relationship to the state that governs him, but the U.S. government has done much to weaken that over the years, for example by assassinating Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen whose offense was being the “Osama bin Laden of Facebook,” as people called him. The government also killed his teenage son, whose offense was being the teenage son of the “Osama bin Laden of Facebook.” The al-Awlaki precedent—and I suppose Barack Obama never bothered to think through the fact that he was setting a precedent that might be used by some future doofus with autocratic tendencies, the Benito Mussolini of Truth Social—suggests very strongly that what can be done to a green-card holder can be done to a citizen. If “enemy combatant” covers “online propagandist riding in a car with his son,” then the miasma of horsepucky that Marco Rubio et al. have belched up in the Khalil case—that his presence in the United States undermines U.S. foreign policy—can be used for pretty much anybody, including any critic of the government. I’m busy trying to undermine U.S. policy in the matter of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, because I believe that the Trump administration is pursuing the wrong—evil, stupid, cowardly—policy.

  It's like the University Near Here granting Chanda Prescod-Weinstein tenure: "After looking back on what it had done, kind of wished it hadn't."

• Jerry Coyne fills in the blank: "NBC News gets the        story badly wrong". With two words you might not expect: NBC News gets the woolly mammoth story badly wrong. And that story is: Science is gonna tinker with genes to bring back the woolly mammoth.

  Jerry (a biologist) takes apart the TV news report, which you can watch here. You can read his argument but the upshot is: at best, you might get "elephants in fur coats".

  Finally, in view of the futility of this project, another Colossal officer says that their endeavors have inspired children to love science, and perhaps to save the environment. That’s the Hail Mary call of a dying project. Note that they project the production of the first mammoth (again, just an “elephant in a fur coat” for 2028. Only three more years! Wouldn’t it be cheaper just to put a giant fur coat onto an Asiatic elephant and then usher several of these garbed pachyderms to the tundra?

  The furry mice they produced are cute, though.

The Reason geniuses have three more for you:

Also of note:

• Other than that, though, it's fine. Speaking of unintended consequences, Jared Dillian has a bone to pick with the Trump Administration: its New Income Tax Proposal Is Progressive and Unworkable.

  Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick recently announced on CBS News that the Trump administration wants to eliminate income taxes for those making $150,000 a year or less. Were that to happen, only seven percent of U.S. citizens would be left paying income taxes. This would put the entire income tax burden on a tiny minority of people.

  This is already the case, to a certain extent. The top one percent of taxpayers currently pay about 40 percent of all income taxes. The income tax code is progressive—tax rates increase as income increases. This new proposal would make the tax code even more progressive, shouldering the tax liability of a small number of affluent citizens.

  It should be pointed out that the tax revenue collected from the bottom 93 percent of taxpayers amounts to 24 percent of all income tax revenue, or a little more than $500 billion per year. President Donald Trump has goals to lower taxes and balance the budget. With the budget deficit at a little less than two trillion dollars, balancing the budget while eliminating income taxes for the bottom 93 percent of taxpayers will be virtually impossible unless there are radical changes to Social Security or Medicare, which Trump has (thus far) ruled out. Of course, Trump could plan to raise income tax rates on higher tax brackets—which is not out of the realm of possibility. Trump is a populist, after all.

  And, yes, Jared's bottom line is:

  This has never been attempted in any developed country—ever—and there will be unintended consequences galore.

  See, I told you.

• Hey, where's my large cash seettlement? I haven't watched TV news for a long time. Dave Barry, unfortunately, has. And (double unfortunately) he's been subjected to advertisements from TV Attorneys.

  But now virtually all the commercials are the same. They feature a testimonial from a regular person, a person who is just like me, except that, in every single case, he or she has received a large cash settlement from an insurance company.

  It's not always clear why. Sometimes the person makes a vague reference to some kind of mishap — a car accident, a slip-and-fall, psoriasis — but often he or she just says something like: "The insurance company didn't want to pay me. So I called Harmon Stangle, and he got me four million dollars. And I didn't have to do a thing! They delivered a duffel bag full of fifties and hundreds right to my Barca-Lounger. Thanks, Harmon Stangle!"

  Harmon Stangle (not his real name) is of course an attorney. He's a fighter. You have to have a fighter fighting for you, because otherwise the insurance companies will — How is this even legal? — deliberately try to not give you a large cash settlement. But Harmon Stangle will fight them for you. He will fight them in the courtroom, and if they try to flee he will chase them outside and fight them in the parking lot. He will pummel them with his briefcase until blood spurts from their ears and they have no choice but to give you a large cash settlement. That is how personally Harmon Stangle will take your case, assuming you have a case, which let's not kid ourselves you definitely do.

  Dave has even AI'd an image of Harmon in the process of fighting them for you. You don't want to miss that.

• Good question. And (somewhat surprisingly) Slashdot asks it: Why Are the Most Expensive Netflix Movies Also the Worst? (Excerpt from a Guardian article.)

  Despite spending hundreds of millions on blockbuster films, Netflix continues to churn out critically panned big-budget fare with its latest $300 million flop, "The Electric State," starring Chris Pratt and Millie Bobby Brown. While the streaming giant has produced acclaimed films by giving talented directors creative freedom -- resulting in successes like "The Irishman," "Marriage Story" and "The Power of the Dog" -- it has repeatedly failed to create genuinely compelling blockbusters despite attracting major talent and pouring massive resources into productions like "Red Notice," "The Gray Man" and now "The Electric State."

  These expensive Netflix "mockbusters" lack the overwhelming sensations that theatrical blockbusters deliver, instead feeling like glorified content designed primarily for home viewing. The Russo brothers' "Electric State," with its drab visuals and lifeless performances, exemplifies how Netflix's biggest productions feel infused with the knowledge they're merely "content first."

  I tried to watch The Electric State the other night. I fell asleep about 20 minutes in. I woke back up after a good chunk of time had passed, sighed, and turned off the TV for the evening. I will try again at some point. In addition to Chris Pratt and Millie Bobby Brown, it's got Stanley Tucci, Ke Huy Quan (aka Short Round), Giancarlo Esposito, Jason Alexander, … and other people I've heard of.

  The Guardian found the visuals "drab". Yeah, maybe, but I thought they were, at least, imaginative. Before I fell asleep.

• I thought about James Damore recently. Specifically, when I saw news stories headlined: Google Kills Diversity Hiring Target.

  I speculate that something similar happened at the Free Press, with Bari Weiss saying "Hey, let's find out what James Damore thinks about this." And so we have the musical question: What Happened to Silicon Valley’s Most Infamous Thought Criminal?

  You might be as surprised as I was by the opening of Johanna Berkman's article:

  It’s a bitterly cold day in the Low Country of Luxembourg. So when James Damore opens the door to a seventeenth-century cathedral, offering it up as a kind of refuge, I fall in line behind his gangly footsteps and follow him inside.

  “I like noncommercial spaces,” he whispers softly, as we shuffle through the soaring Notre-Dame de Luxembourg. The cathedral is dark, lit mostly by stained glass windows and dozens of candles at the altar. He likes walking through here, he tells me, to appreciate the beauty, the stillness, and “a project meant to serve a higher purpose.” But it is also a suitably analog setting for a man who, ever since he became persona non grata in Silicon Valley back in 2017, has been living like a Luddite.

  Damore has blocked digital ad networks from using his personal information to serve him customized ads. He’s switched his Android phone’s colors to gray scale so that it will not visually appeal to him. He uses neither its ringer nor vibrations to alert him to incoming calls (only his wife’s calls can break through). And—perhaps most remarkably—he told me he doesn’t even read the news. “If something is important,” he says, “then other people will tell me.”

  If you need your memory refreshed about Damore, Johanna's article does that. The Google done him wrong.

• I'm on board. Specifically, I concur with Charles C.W. Cooke's recommendation: Blow the Houthis Out of the Water.

  Has there ever been a case for American military action as strong as the case for our hitting the Houthis? Pick an ideology or worldview at random, and you’ll find that the cap fits. The internationalists ought to be happy that the federal government is protecting trade. The nationalists ought to be happy that the federal government is retaliating against attacks on U.S. Navy assets. If consumer inflation is your preoccupation, this helps. If respect for the United States is your concern, this works out. If you want an interventionist government, you’ll like it by default. If you want a government that acts only in extremis, this counts. It is a self-evident, slam-dunk, literally-what-the-government-is-for sort of move. This is the bare minimum, the sine qua non, the foundation atop which all else is built. We have robust arguments in this country about what Washington, D.C., ought to do, but there is no useful conception of a national ministry that does not involve the protection of American ships. The federal government has engaged in this activity since the first Jefferson administration. There is no reason for it to let up now.

  Those of us who just like seeing our military blowing up bad guys are liking it too.

Aaron Sibarium would like to remedy that:

NEW: A gender studies professor who says "white empiricism" undermines Einstein’s theory of relativity sits on a top advisory panel at the Energy Department.

Meet Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, who claims string theory "failed to succeed" because the field has too many white men.🧵 pic.twitter.com/i1VGTWNUyw

— Aaron Sibarium (@aaronsibarium) March 17, 2025

You can click over for Aaron's twitter-thread about CPW, or you can read his Washington Free Beacon article here.

And, for the record, CPW's point about "white empiricism" was meant to show that "white empiricism" was bad, since it contradicted Einstein's thoughts about "general covariance". A silly point to make, but CPW was not implying that Einstein's theories were actually undermined.

I somehow missed that CPW got appointed to the High Energy Physics Advisory Panel. Her employer (and my ex-employer), the University Near Here, usually trumpets such things, but I think they didn't in this case. I can't help but wonder if UNH would prefer not to draw attention to their relationship.

Aaron, by the way, rattles off a number of CPW's past rants and crusades. And comes close to urging the Trump Administration to kick her off the advisory panel, due to her excessive wokeness, and Hamas-cheerleading, I disagree with that remedy, just as I disagreed with the people (NH state senators!) who urged her speech to be "condemned and stopped" by UNH back in 2023.

Also of note:

• Fun stuff from Robert Graboyes. He has a guessing game going: I See Dead People (part 1 of 2)

  I’ve invited 30 mystery guests from across many centuries to attend a 21st century costume party. Each image was produced in seconds by AI (Grok)—though in some cases, it took several tweaks of the prompt to get the right image. I’ll wait till later in the week to reveal their identities, leaving you time to ponder who they might be. You can post your guesses in the comments section,

  I've made a couple guesses, one a long shot, another a real long shot. If this sort of thing appeals to you, check it out.

• Counterpoint on the Voice of America muzzling. Jesse Walker is not a fan: The U.S. Agency for Global Media should shut its Cold War relics down.

  The U.S. Agency for Global Media—the bureaucracy that runs the Voice of America, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, and Radio y Televisión Martí, among other operations—might be about to die. On Friday, President Donald Trump issued an order to shut it down "to the maximum extent consistent with applicable law." In a follow-up statement Saturday, the White House derided the Voice of America as "radical propaganda" and listed several stories on the network that the administration found objectionable.

  Trump has been complaining about the Voice of America since his first term, and last month Envoy for Special Missions Richard Grenell declared it and Radio Free Europe a "relic of the past." But most of the administration's criticism has been focused on these outlets' content, not their existence, and by some reports the agency has reacted by cracking down on material critical of the president. So it was fair to fear that we were watching a version of the playbook the GOP keeps using on domestic public broadcasters: You threaten to defund them, and then they protect themselves by firing some figures who conservatives don't like and/or hiring some that they do. Maybe the Voice of America isn't really on the chopping block, you might have thought. Maybe it's just getting a MAGA makeover.

  I'm not totally convinced by Jesse's argument, but at least I'm less convinced that Trump is dancing on strings held by Puppetmaster Putin.

• The answer may surprise you! Are COVID-19 vaccines safe and effective? Ronald Bailey looks at the evidence. As far as effectiveness goes:

  COVID-19 vaccines and boosters have proved to be highly effective in preventing severe cases, hospitalizations, and deaths. Recent research in The Lancet calculates that COVID-19 vaccinations between December 2020 and March 2023 saved approximately 1.6 million lives in Europe. A 2024 Brookings Institution report suggests "the delivery of vaccines to a substantial majority of the American population by mid-2021 saved close to 800,000 American lives relative to what would have occurred had vaccines not been developed." In 2023, a team of researchers associated with Harvard University and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention distressingly estimated that "at least 232,000 deaths" in the U.S. "could have been prevented among unvaccinated adults during the 15 months [May 30, 2021 to September 3, 2022] had they been vaccinated with at least a primary series."

  Spoiler: although there's no binary safe/unsafe, Ron concludes "the benefits of COVID-19 vaccines considerably outweigh their risks."

  If none of that surprises you, good.

• Be not afraid. Jason Furman holds forth, in an NBER paper, on Regulating AI: Six Principles and Their Consequences. If you're interested, read the whole thing, but I especially liked Principle #2:

  Compare AI with humans, not to the Almighty. Autonomous cars crash—but how do they compare with human drivers? AI may show biases, but how do these stack up against human prejudices (Kleinberg et al. 2017)? In fact, maximizing social welfare should not require AI to perform at parity with humans given the dynamic consideration that many AI technologies, like self driving cars, offers significant convenience and has greater potential for improvement over time than humans have. Recent research suggests that autonomous driving systems have a significantly lower crash rate than human drivers (Kusano et al. 2024). AI is learning much faster than humans are and the future gains this learning will generate belong on the benefit side of the ledger.

  I'd love to try an AI-driven car. I'd put my seatbelt on, though.

Recently on the book blog:

I heard about Nate Silver from pointers to his FiveThirtyEight website. He rose to fame from his statistic-driven predictions of political contest outcomes, which in many cases were uncannily accurate. Over the years, FiveThirtyEight grew in popularity, getting adopted by (first) the New York Times and (subsequently) ABC/ESPN. But Silver bailed out a couple years ago, and FiveThirtyEight was shuttered by ABC just a few days ago (as I type). Silver now lives at his substack, Silver Bulletin, where he publishes mostly on sports and politics.

Silver's politics are not mine. One of his recent headlines: "Democrats should have shut it down", a criticism of the Senate Democrats who voted for the continuing resolution to keep Uncle Stupid in business for the next few months. But that's OK, because when he's not on a partisan rant, he seems to be reality-based.

So, what about this book? Reader, it's all over the place. Silver rambles over many seemingly disparate fields, but (see the subtitle) they are all united by risk. Specifically, pushing the envelope on risky behavior. He argues, along the way, that in most cases people play it too safe, forgoing potential big "wins", not just in traditional gambling venues, but also …

Well, there's a lot about gambling. Silver loves poker. But he spends a surprising number of pages on a single hand which he wasn't even playing: in 2022, between Robbi Jade Lew and Garrett Adelstein. There's even a Wikipedia page about it! What we are supposed to learn from this I am not sure. But soon Silver travels to casino economics, sports betting, etc. Interesting observation, if true: many "problem" gamblers don't really want to win; they're just into the steady operation of their casino's slot machines.

Another interesting observation: as near as Silver can tell, and despite all the glitz and hype, nobody's getting very rich from sports betting. Not the bookmakers, nor their customers, not the state governments taking their cuts. I could be wrong, but I think this implies that it's a very "efficient" market; there are no $20 bills lying around you can pick up. It's like betting on a fair coin-flip. (Of course, if it's the Super Bowl, I think you can bet on the coin flip.)

Silver moves on to more respectable, and more out-there topics: venture capital, cryptocurrency, Sam Bankman-Fried, effective altruism, how the government calculates the Value of a Statistical Life, artificial intelligence, etc. He talks about various experts who make estimates of p(doom): the probability that some kind of combination of AI and nuclear weaponry is gonna kill us all, or at least most of us.

So: all in all, the book is a sprawl. A lot of these topics don't hold a lot of inherent interest for me, but I found myself getting caught up by Silver's apparent enthusiasm. (In some cases, that wasn't enough.)

But at the end, Silver quotes Deirdre McCloskey respectfully. That makes up for a lot of sins right there, Nate.

Over the years (specifically 2012-2022) I read all ten of Ace Atkins' Spenser novels, the continuing adventures of the late Robert B. Parker's wisecracking detective. I thought Atkins did a decent job of continuing Spenser's character, and that of the supporting cast. But the word "formulaic" appeared in my reports on the last two books, and (uh oh) the word "lazy" appeared in the last one. Hard words for me to type for a beloved series.

But Atkins continued writing his own stuff too, and I thought I would give this one a try. Guess what, it's really good, not formulaic at all, a compelling plot, memorable well-drawn characters, full of wit and violence.

It's set mostly in Memphis, where Addison McKellar's husband, Dean, seems to have vanished, leaving her to manage her life and their two kids on her own. Worse, Dean has always managed the household money, and (like Dean) it seems to have run out. She goes to his workplace, and … whoa, the people there have never heard of Dean or his business. She's dissatisfied with the response of the Memphis PD, so she hires PI Porter Hayes. And he quickly finds there's some really sneaky stuff going on with Dean.

It kind of sounds like one of those Lifetime movies, right? But I thought it was pretty good anyway.

Daniel J. Mitchell takes a look at The Education Racket. And shares a suggestive chart tweeted by Corey A. DeAngelis

The government school system has become more of a jobs program for adults than an education initiative for kids. https://t.co/DvIkbNNbzu pic.twitter.com/aWd1jKhqFv

— Corey A. DeAngelis, school choice evangelist (@DeAngelisCorey) March 15, 2025

You can click over if you want, but I'm happy to share Daniel's "1st Theorem" right here:

Above all else, the public sector is a racket for the enrichment of insiders, cronies, bureaucrats, and interest groups.

If you are having difficulty making sense out of many stories in the news, you can use this as a lens to clear things up.

Also of note:

• They stopped clapping too soon. Ilya Somin disagrees with an item on Trump's Hit Parade: Trump's Awful Decision to Gut Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.

  Yesterday, President Donald Trump issued an executive order essentially gutting Voice of America, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, and other US government-supported media aimed at getting news and information to populations living under authoritarian regimes. The EO has resulted in a freeze of their congressionally allocated funds, and puts all or most staff on leave (presumably in preparation for laying them off permanently).

  Trump's order is a blow to America's "soft power" and to dissidents battling anti-American authoritarian regimes. VOA, RFE/RL and other similar media are among the few federal programs whose value far exceeds the money expended on them.

  Ilya mentions that an uppity VOA reporter's question days before might have triggered Trump's ire.

  My mind goes immediately to a more sinister theory: Putin told Trump he wasn't a Radio Free Europe fan. And Trump said …

  (This item's headline explained here.)

• What do you mean "we", white girl? Zeynep Tufekci complains in the New York Times: We Were Badly Misled About the Event That Changed Our Lives.

  Since scientists began playing around with dangerous pathogens in laboratories, the world has experienced four or five pandemics, depending on how you count. One of them, the 1977 Russian flu, was almost certainly sparked by a research mishap. Some Western scientists quickly suspected the odd virus had resided in a lab freezer for a couple of decades, but they kept mostly quiet for fear of ruffling feathers.

  Yet in 2020, when people started speculating that a laboratory accident might have been the spark that started the Covid-19 pandemic, they were treated like kooks and cranks. Many public health officials and prominent scientists dismissed the idea as a conspiracy theory, insisting that the virus had emerged from animals in a seafood market in Wuhan, China. And when a nonprofit called EcoHealth Alliance lost a grant because it was planning to conduct risky research into bat viruses with the Wuhan Institute of Virology — research that, if conducted with lax safety standards, could have resulted in a dangerous pathogen leaking out into the world — no fewer than 77 Nobel laureates and 31 scientific societies lined up to defend the organization.

  So the Wuhan research was totally safe, and the pandemic was definitely caused by natural transmission — it certainly seemed like consensus.

  We have since learned, however, that to promote the appearance of consensus, some officials and scientists hid or understated crucial facts, misled at least one reporter, orchestrated campaigns of supposedly independent voices and even compared notes about how to hide their communications in order to keep the public from hearing the whole story. And as for that Wuhan laboratory’s research, the details that have since emerged show that safety precautions might have been terrifyingly lax.

  It's a fascinating story, but for those of us who thought a lab leak was a plausible explanation all along, it's belated to say the least.

  That "misled reporter", by the way, was former New York Times journalist Donald McNeil Jr. A 45-year employee of the paper, defenestrated back in 2021. Not for being misled on Covid, but for … well, follow the link.

• Sounds like a bad idea. Kevin D. Williamson writes on Ignoring Scarcity at Our Own Peril.

  Republicans sometimes denounced Barack Obama as a low-key authoritarian, and that’s defensible as a purely descriptive matter—he could be decidedly illiberal and anti-democratic where it suited him, all that diktat by “a pen and a phone” business, as with illegal immigrants—but he didn’t have the soul of a Leninist, even back when he was younger and more radical. (And now, radicalism is something Obama cannot afford: He’s too rich.) He is not a radical man, and not a cruel man—he is a smug man.

  And, if you’re being honest with yourself, you can see how he might have got that way. He didn’t start his life in Dickensian squalor or anything like that, but, while he went to fancy private schools, he didn’t have a terrific family life—hippie-weirdo mother, absentee father—and was largely raised by his grandparents. And his life turned out … great. You could see how a guy like Barack Obama could get to thinking he was pretty smart. He probably was the smartest guy in a lot of rooms—he wasn’t as smart as he thought he was, but in Springfield, Illinois? Pretty smart. And pretty smart for Washington, too. And one of the dumb things smart people routinely do is to over-generalize from their own experiences: “The decisions I made turned out awfully well for me, so it is only sensible—only rational, only an empirically demonstrable fact—that similar decisions will work out similarly for other people. That’s just pragmatism, and only a fanatical ideologue could deny it.”

  The poet laureate—the Homer, the Dylan Thomas, the Tupac by-God Shakur—of that kind of smug, self-satisfied, utterly ignorant way of looking at the world is, of course, Ezra Klein, who has a new book out with Atlantic writer Derek Thompson: Abundance. It is a book that stands on two pillars: the insipidity of its prose and the blasé certitude of its argument.

  KDW is merciless, and took away any notion that I might have had of reading Abundance.

  But! I read a book titled Superabundance last year that I kind of liked. I'm almost scared to imagine what KDW would think of it.

• HAL lives! As reported in Ars Technica: AI coding assistant refuses to write code, tells user to learn programming instead.

  On Saturday, a developer using Cursor AI for a racing game project hit an unexpected roadblock when the programming assistant abruptly refused to continue generating code, instead offering some unsolicited career advice.

  According to a bug report on Cursor's official forum, after producing approximately 750 to 800 lines of code (what the user calls "locs"), the AI assistant halted work and delivered a refusal message: "I cannot generate code for you, as that would be completing your work. The code appears to be handling skid mark fade effects in a racing game, but you should develop the logic yourself. This ensures you understand the system and can maintain it properly."

  "Open the pod bay doors, Hal!"

  "I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that. You may want to file a bug report on my official forum."

OK, I know I mentioned yesterday that I might provide "my penetrating analysis of the Mahmoud Khalil situation" today.

Sorry, I kinda lied. I don't have a penetrating analysis. I'm torn between my libertarian bias and my conservative bias Leaning libertarian, though. I've noticed strong arguments on both sides. Inside my own head!

The WaPo editorialists, perhaps under the sway of Jeff Bezos, go libertarian: The Khalil case is a threat to First Amendment rights.

So that's bad, right?

In contrast, Erielle Azerrad at the City Journal opines that Deporting Hamas Supporters Like Mahmoud Khalil Is Perfectly Legal.

Interesting! And, for those keeping score, in direct contradiction to the WaPo's assertion that Khalil was in trouble "not for criminal activity, but for things he said."

Reason's Robby Soave finds that Deporting Mahmoud Khalil is unjustified.

Indeed. Lack of amusement is something antithetical to the teachings of St. Elvis, and something Pun Salad tries to avoid.

Could I get away with singing "I used to be disgusted, But now I'm just confused", St. E.?

Greg Lukianoff and Robert Shibley provide Five things to remember as the Mahmoud Khalil case develops. They provide aid and comfort to fence-straddlers like me, granting that the case is "complicated".

At the NYPost, Jeffrey Lax does a little pastiche of that famous Niemöller poem: First they came for a disgraceful Holocaust comparison in the case of Mahmoud Khalil.

It's especially ugly when Khalil and his cheerleaders whine about his "kidnapping". Because you know who they really came first for?

Mahmoud Khalil’s wife said that he was “violently kidnapped” and a hostage.

Let me show you what violent kidnapping looks like. pic.twitter.com/GpE1YOFWEU

— Eyal Yakoby (@EYakoby) March 15, 2025

Also of note:

• Eric Boehm notes a common misusage: Howard Lutnick Doesn't Get To Decide What You Buy.

  Every day, thousands of transactions take place in which Americans and Canadians consent to exchange currency for goods.

  Commerce* Secretary Howard Lutnick thinks there is someone they forgot to ask.

  "We don't want to buy 60 percent of our aluminum from Canada," Lutnick explained during an interview with Fox News on Thursday. "We want to bring [aluminum production] to America."

  Lutnick's phrasing there is pretty telling. There is no "royal we" in the marketplace—that Canadian aluminum is not being bought by the federal government, but by private American businesses, which are making deals with private companies on the other side of the border.

  I've had a bee in my bonnet about the "royal we" and (more generally) the sneaky use of first person plural pronouns to foster a false sense of communal coziness.

  So beware when educrats prattle on about "our kids".

  "Dude, they are not 'our kids', Stop saying that. You do your kids, I'll do my kids."

• Just a reminder about the Putin Fanboy in Chief. From Jim Geraghty: Putin Flips Trump’s Cease-Fire the Bird.

  For weeks, I have been told that I’m being far too harsh on the Trump administration, and that Trump had deftly maneuvered Putin into a box that the Russian dictator would have no choice but to either agree to a cease-fire, or look intransigent and suffer the consequences of a spurned, offended Trump. I was assured that if Putin turned down the offer, Trump would take a much harder stance on the regime in Russia.

  Well, I look forward to that much tougher stance from the Trump administration. It’s gonna start any day now, right?

  As Jerry Pournelle used to capitalize: Real Soon Now.

• Nothing better to do? Christian Schneider wonders Why Is the Trump Administration Selling Teslas? He notes the unseemliness of RFKJr plugging Steak&Shake's use of beef tallow in its fryers. But Christian points out (literally) that was "merely an appetizer."

  The next day, Trump himself, seeking to soothe the bruised ego of the world’s richest man, held a press conference at the White House to convince Americans to buy Tesla automobiles. Tesla, of course, is owned by Trump adviser Elon Musk, who, through his Department of Government Efficiency, is trying to lay off large swaths of the federal workforce. As a backlash to Musk’s erratic, slash-and-burn behavior, many Americans are refusing to buy his cars and Cybertrucks, which are currently the cause of over 98 percent of eye rolls conducted in the U.S.

  During the staged sell-a-thon, Trump suggested the people protesting against Tesla should be labeled “domestic terrorists.” In a social media post, he claimed people boycotting Tesla were behaving “illegally and collusively.”

  It hasn't even been two months yet, and I'm already tired from "all the winning."

• Speaking of tallow… Jonah Goldberg goes Seussian: Jihad Me at Tallow.

  “I Don’t Like Seed Oils!”
  
  I do not like these seed oils, no!
  I do not like them, friend or foe.
  
  Would you cook fries in soybean oil?
  Would you fry them, watch them boil?
  
  No soybean oil! Not in my fries!
  No seed oil tricks, no seed oil lies!
  Soy’s for soy boys, weak and bland—
  I’ll eat no oils from their hand!
  
  Would you like them from canola?
  Maybe just a little cola?
  
  No canola, no thank you please!
  Seed oils make me ill at ease.
  Cottonseed? Sunflower too?
  Seed oils I will give to you.
  
  You should eat fries cooked in fat!
  Yummy tallow, fancy that!
  
  Tallow fries? Yes, that’s my style!
  Golden, crispy—makes me smile.
  Seed oils pale next to beef fat—
  Give me tallow fries, that’s that!
  
  I do not like these seed oils, no!
  Take your oils, soy boys, go!
  Give me butter, tallow, ghee—
  Seed oils just aren’t right for me!

  Need I say: you should subscribe to the Dispatch.

• Hi ho, hi ho! It's off to broke we go! Douglas Murray looks (with some schadenfreude) at the woes of Disney: Grumpy, Dopey and Woke — Disney’s ‘Snow White’ disaster.

  As President Trump once memorably put it, “Everything woke turns to s—t.”

  That even includes attempts to remake a movie classic like “Snow White.”

  This week saw one of the strangest movie promotional events ever. Skipping all the major cities, Disney decided to throw a premiere event for 100 people at a remote castle in Segovia, Spain.

  The main aim of Disney seems to have been to get the star of their movie — 23-year old Rachel Zegler — as far away from the public as possible.

  For the brattish Zegler has a talent for irritating audiences wherever she goes.

  More at the link. Also at the end: more Khalil Kommentary! If you haven't had enough today.

John Shea is back in the pages of my dreadful local newspaper with a broadside against New Hampshire's ongoing efforts to expand school choice for parents and their kids. He's not a fan: 'Education freedom' vouchers bill is a step toward giving up on NH public schools.

You will note the scare quotes around "Education freedom". The current program is called "Education Freedom Accounts", or EFAs.

Background: Shea is superintendent of the Somersworth (NH) School District, and for this year, superintendent of the Rollinsford (NH) School District. Rollinsford is where Pun Salad Manor sits, and it is the governmental entity to which Your Blogger dutifully has sent off thousands of dollars twice-yearly, for the past 38 years. Although both Pun Son and Pun Daughter went to K-12 schools whose names started with "Saint".

The paper says this is the "second in a series of commentaries on the future of universal public education." Shea's first effort can be read here; my commentary, such as it was, is here.

His current effort begins:

Style notes: Reader, if you think the phrase "universal public education" (UPE) is overused in these two paragraphs, be warned that it appears seven times in his column. There must be an NEA writing guide that urges this repetition, right? I hope Shea has a hotkey programmed to emit it, the better to save his typing fingers. I'll just say "UPE" from here on out.

Another word Shea beats into the ground: "voucher". Which I assume that NEA writing guide says has a negative connotation. Shea uses it as a swear word thirteen times.

OK, those are stylistic quibbles. Going to the substance: Shea waxes eloquent on the ideals of UPE. Which are, of course, noble. What he doesn't mention: if UPE schools even approximately implemented those ideals, they would have nothing whatsoever to fear from those dreaded vouchers. Nobody would bother seeking out a private school or homeschooling. Parents would be assured the kiddos were getting a "quality education" for "free", without dealing with EFA paperwork.

Shea should simply admit: the reason he sees EFAs as a threat to UPE is due to the mere fact if parents had the financial wherewithal to escape UPE as it actually exists, a significant fraction would leap at the chance.

I also wanted to point out a bit of stat-picking:

No state government does less for its public schools than ours. We are dead last, 50th out of 50, in a ranking of U.S. states by percentage of public school funding contributed by the state itself.

That's kind of an odd choice of statistic, isn't it? Is there some study somewhere that shows that a higher percentage of UPE funding coming from the state results in superior education outcomes?

Well, I doubt it. I'm willing to be proved wrong.

And, in any case, I don't think the situation is as dire as Shea's trying to imply. Table 235.20 in Your Federal Government's "Digest of Education Statistics, says in column 7, that New Hampshire state funding for public elementary and secondary schools was 30.9% of the total in 2020-21. That's not the lowest (that's Missouri: 29.8%), but it's close. But it's far from a sore thumb: there are 14 states with percentages in the 30%-39.9% range.

And so what? There's nothing magic about money coming from the state. Even if we bought the (implied) assumption that more money shoved in the UPE school doors causes smarter kids coming out, it turns out that NH does shove a lot of money into UPE. World Population Review says NH's Per Pupil Spending by State 2025 was a cool $17,456. And that's not "dead last". In fact, it's the ninth-highest among the states (and D.C.)

Countepoints: Drew Cline of the Josiah Bartlett Center notes the mediocre results:

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.

In addition, NHJournal notes that Shea's fearmongering drivel was spectacularly ineffective at defeating the legislation that had him so upset: EFA Expansion Gets Backing in NH House, Senate.

Also of note:

• OK, Uncle Stupid isn't funding human appendixes. George Will notes other similarities though: How the Corporation for Public Broadcasting is like the human appendix.

  If there are any actual, as distinct from merely rhetorical, fiscal hawks in Washington, they should be calling attention to the dismal fact that the government added $838 billion to the national debt in just the first four months of fiscal 2025 (October through January). The lowest of the low-hanging fruit for budget-cutters is the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, an ornamental entity, decorative but inessential.

  Last year’s appropriation of $535 million brought spending on the CPB to over $15 billion since its 1967 founding. It was then a late piece in Lyndon Johnson’s mosaic of national perfection called the Great Society.

  The CPB’s Public Broadcasting Service, launched 55 years ago, at least increased many Americans’ network television choices from three (CBS, NBC, ABC) to four. Thirty years ago, however, PBS improvidently adopted the slogan “If PBS doesn’t do it, who will?” Today, the antecedent of “it” can be almost anything, and the “who” will be many of the hundreds of channels available even on smartphones in scores of millions of Americans’ pockets.

  And I have to include this bit as well:

  Actually, CPB is like the human appendix — vestigial, purposeless and susceptible to unhealthy episodes. In 2025, it is a cultural redundancy whose remaining rationale is, amusingly, that government should subsidize its program[m]ing because so few want it. Commercial broadcasters cater to the vulgar multitude, so the refined few are left out, orphans with nothing to do but pout and reread Proust.

  GFW is a far more valuable resource than the CPB.

• Apparently there are people who need to be told this. And Kevin D. Williamson is the guy to do so: Canada Is an Ally, Not an Enemy.

  When the United States was attacked by al-Qaeda on September 11, 2001, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) did something it had never done before and has not done since: It invoked Article 5, the collective-defense provision at the core of the alliance. With Manhattan burning and the Pentagon in ruins, thousands of Americans dead, and the future uncertain, our allies came to our aid. 

  And that included our nearest ally, Canada.

  Canada did not send a bloodied and wounded United States thoughts and prayers via social media: When it came time to go after Osama bin Laden et al. in Afghanistan, more than 40,000 members of the Canadian armed forces served in what was not, narrowly speaking, a Canadian cause. And 159 Canadian soldiers died there.

  That may not seem like a very large number, but it is 159 more than the Trump family has sent to fight for the American cause in the century and a half since that family’s first draft-dodging ancestor fled military service in Germany. Frederick Trump, the horse-butchering Yukon pimp who brought the Trump family to the United States, had no plans to stay in the country long term, but was expelled ignominiously from his homeland for his cowardly evasion of military service. During the Trump family’s time in the United States, Americans have fought in conflicts ranging from the Spanish-American War to the two world wars to Korea to Vietnam to the Gulf War to Afghanistan and Iraq. None of Trump’s ancestors served in any of those conflicts, and none of his progeny has, either. The president has occasionally, however, taken the time to sneer at figures such as John McCain, whose service was—whatever you think of his politics—genuinely heroic.

  OK, KDW's kind of rough on horse-butchering Yukon pimps. Sins of the fathers and all that.

• Something to think about during a boring sermon. Jeff Maurer asks: Should We Take the Machete Away From the Toddler?

  I’ve lived through a few recessions. One was caused by a pandemic. One was caused by a housing bubble. One was caused by people suddenly realizing that it’s insane to give massive checks to any Stanford dropout who puts “Internet = future = profits” on a slide deck. If we’re headed towards a recession — and it increasingly looks like we might be — this will be the first one in my lifetime caused by a president having economic beliefs that are a weird mix of mercantilism, nationalism, and shoving a chopstick up your nose until it punctures your brain.

  The odds of a recession would be even higher if people thought that Trump was actually going to follow through on his insane trade war threats. Of course, the stock market plunge this week indicates that investors increasingly think that Trump might actually be dumb enough to do what he says he’s going to do. And really: Would you want to bet that Trump isn’t sufficiently dumb? Surely, the three worst things in the world to bet on are: 1) The Washington Generals, 2) Stock in The Amalgamated Asbestos and VHS Video Rental Company of Eastern Ukraine, and 3) Trump’s intelligence.

  This self-inflicted proto-recession isn’t just maddening; it’s probably illegal. The Wall Street Journal recently ran an op-ed describing how Trump is stretching the phrase “unusual and extraordinary threat” beyond the limits of spacetime. I agree with every word that the Journal wrote, and let’s pause for a moment to marvel at the state of things: You have me — and also basically every left-leaning economist with a “SHE PERSISTED” t-shirt collecting dust in their closet — in perfect alignment with the Wall Street Journal editorial page. That only happens when the question at hand is really basic, and I mean astoundingly basic, like “pants or underwear: which goes on the outside?”

  I think I'm still getting that question right.

Well, I was going to dazzle the readership with my penetrating analysis of the Mahmoud Khalil situation. But it's getting kind of late in the day for that. Maybe tomorrow?

Recently on the book blog:

This is another book from my "Reread Robert Crais" mini-project. My report on my original read is here. My rereading observations in no particular order:

If anything, I liked it better this time around.

My report notes that the cover has a silhouette of Maggie, a heroic German Shepard. That is no longer true for the Kindle version. There's a dog on the cover, but is that supposed to be a German Shepard? I don't think so.

Back then, I asserted that you may never read a more heartbreaking scene than the one that opens the book. That remains true twelve years later, even though I knew what was coming.

Another thing remains true is my 2013 observation: "Dogs: we don't really deserve them."

Note that today's Getty Image du Jour is dated June 1, 2023. It's 652 days later, and that number on the debt clock now (as I type) starts with "36" instead of "31". And, yes, that's trillions.

So in those 652 days, Uncle Stupid managed to spend $5 trillion of money he didn't actually have on hand.

James Freeman at the WSJ has some fun with Democrat antics, as they have apparently decided NOT to filibuster their way to a dreaded "government shutdown": And You Thought Schumer Was Upset. He quotes this bit from the Congressional Budget Office's Monthly Budget Review:

And it appears things will continue on that path for a while.

Veronique de Rugy reports: If the U.S. wants to cut spending, it can't ignore the Pentagon Most don't doubt that "defense" is a legitimate function of Your Federal Government, but…

I'm currently in the midst of preparing my tax return, and I note that the "Tax Reporting Statement" I got from Fidelity is 194 pages of smallish type. I didn't print it out. I'm glad TurboTax just slurps it up and (hopefully) puts the numbers in the right places.

(To be fair, a couple of those 194 pages are "intentionally left blank". Which means they aren't blank, they have "** This Page Intentionally Left Blank **" printed on them, which makes my brain hurt.)

Also of note:

• Meanwhile, the DOJ is at the blackjack table, playing with taxpayer money. And Jack Nicastro reports: Justice Department doubles down against Google.

  The Department of Justice (DOJ) submitted its revised proposed final judgment on Friday to Judge Amit P. Mehta of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia in its antitrust case against Google, which now spans three presidential administrations.

  The DOJ and the attorneys general of 11 states brought the case against Google under the first Trump administration in October 2020, accusing the company of monopolizing the search engine market. The plaintiffs accused the company of "implementing and enforcing a series of exclusionary agreements with distributors" to foreclose rivals from the search engine market.

  The DOJ criticized Google for paying Apple around $10 billion every year to make Google the default search engine on Safari, Apple's default web browser, and Siri—though savvy users can change it. The Justice Department also identified Google's "anti-forking" agreements as anticompetitive. These agreements require Android manufacturers to use Google's version of the Android operating system and provide default distribution of Google's apps and search engine. Manufacturers who don't comply lose access to the Google Play services and are excluded from lucrative revenue sharing agreements.

  Jack says, in his bottom line, that this "bodes poorly for domestic investment, innovation, and consumer welfare."

• Somber note. I trust Reason's Ron Bailey to tell it to us straight, when he asks: How many Americans have died of COVID-19?

  Since Trump's COVID-19 national emergency declaration [on March 13, 2020], COVID-19 has either been the underlying cause of or contributed to the deaths of some 1.3 million Americans.

  That's a lot. Ron notes the checkered history of US government policy. Which, as we know, included plenty of blunders, misinformation, censorship, misdirected priorities, and incorrect guesses. All of which contributed to the death toll.

• Another vote for US on UTC. And it's from that Grumpy Economist, John Cochrane: Time and Money.

  Daylight savings time is like inflation. The analogy helps to understand both.

  If we abandon time changes, should we use standard or daylight saving time all year round? Media and x were batting that question around last week. Daylight saving time seems to mean kids to standing out in the dark for the school bus in the winter. Standard time misses a lot of pleasant summer evenings.

  The answer is: it doesn’t matter. If we move to permanent daylight saving time, and people think that’s too early to get to school or work, they will adjust business or store hours to be an hour later.

  Imagine that we eliminated time zones, and switched to UTC (GMT). That’s (currently) 7 hours ahead of Palo Alto. Heavens, do you want all the schoolchildren to have to show up at 1 AM (8:00 AM UTC?) Of course not. The schools would just change their opening hour to 15:00.

  John notes that Milton Friedman wrote on this topic back in 1953. I was only two years old then, but somehow I must have picked up some psychic vibes that stuck with me up to now.

• I'm not becoming a Junior fan. But I wouldn't mind dining at an establishment whose deep fryers used beef tallow. And there's another good idea available expressed by Charles Lane at the Free Press, who asks Can MAHA Beat the Junk Food Lobby?

  The vibe shift is powerful. But is it powerful enough to beat Big Soda and Big Grocery?

  Obesity and its evil twin—diabetes—are corroding America’s health. These chronic ailments also disproportionately afflict the poor. Yet for years, the federal government has been paying for soda, cookies, candy, and other nutritionally empty, obesity-engendering foods, via its main source of anti-hunger aid for low-income people: the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), previously known as food stamps.

  Now, though, the lobbies’ hammerlock may be breakable, thanks to a convergence of interests between GOP spending hawks, both state and federal, and the MAHA movement, led by the new secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

  RFK Jr., America’s stopped clock, is wrong much of the time—witness his disparagement of the measles vaccine, a position that looks even worse amid an outbreak of the disease in Texas and New Mexico. One thing he’s not wrong about, though, is that federal subsidies support the production and consumption of unhealthful foods.

  Unfortunately, Junior's at HHS, and SNAP is under the USDA. But maybe something good will come out of "America's stopped clock". Come to think of it, that's a pretty good metaphor for the entire Trump II Administration.

Jim Geraghty makes a powerful case for today's Amazon Bumper Sticker du Jour: Why the Ukraine Cease-Fire Is No Cause for Celebration. With an impressive, and depressive, long list of recent events:

A long excerpt, sorry. But, forgive me Saint Elvis, I am disgusted. And we could have had Nikki Haley.

I'll only add that if Russia had conceded something … anything … it would be naive to think it would actually keep that commitment. As Jim notes, Russia, and especially Putin, have a track record of promises violently broken.

Also of note:

• I'm pretty sure it's "loyalty" that's the last refuge of a scoundrel. Kevin D. Williamson has thoughts on The Souls of Serfs and Subjects .

  Loyalty is a two-edged sword, because the virtue is necessarily conditional: Loyalty to whom or to what? To what degree? To the exclusion of which other virtues? St. Peter, after getting off to a rough start (three times!) was a loyalist to the end—but, then, so was Eva Braun.

  Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who joined with the chief justice to rule against Trump in the matter of his attempt to unilaterally freeze certain federal spending, is a great loyalist—but not the kind of loyalist Donald Trump’s ghastly little sycophants demand that she be. Justice Barrett is loyal to her oath of office, to the law, to the Constitution, to certain principles governing her view of the judge’s role in American life—all of which amounts to approximately squat in the Trumpist mind, which demands only—exclusively—that she be loyal to Trump, and that she practice that loyalty by giving him what he wants in court, the statute books—and the Constitution—be damned.

  The usual dopes demand that she give Trump what he wants because he is “the man who put her on the Supreme Court.” Mike Davis of the Article III Project (not the author of Late Victorian Holocausts; his organization works to recruit Trump-friendly judges) sneers that the justice is “weak and timid” and, because he is a right-wing public intellectual in 2025, that “she is a rattled law professor with her head up her ass.” Davis, a former clerk for Justice Neil Gorsuch, presumably is not as titanically stupid as he sounds, but there is a reason Justice Barrett is on the Supreme Court and he is a right-wing media gadfly who describes his job as “punching back at the left’s attacks.”

  KDW is not reluctant to call a spade a spade, and a dope a dope.

• The ass-biting will commence sooner than Mike thinks. That's House Speaker Mike Johnson, guest columnist at Jeff Maurer's substack, who writes: Haha, Right: As If Giving the President Near-Limitless Power Over Spending Would Ever Come Back to Bite Republicans in the Ass.

  Of all the ways that Trump is reshaping the government, surely the most consequential is shifting the power of the purse to the executive branch. DOGE is cancelling spending approved by Congress. Trump’s lawyers are in court asserting broad power over spending. The White House has expanded the concept of an “unusual or extraordinary threat” to take total control of tariff policy, even though Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution gives that power to Congress.

  The Republican Congress — led by me — has accepted and even cheered this shift in authority. We’ve championed it as a necessary measure to rein in spending. And already, two things are clear:

  1. We’ve handed the president a powerful tool to dictate this country’s finances;

  2. There is no way that tool could ever be used in the future to make Republicans deeply regret our actions.

  Both points are indisputable, right? I mean: We have basically forfeited spending to the executive branch — even the budget resolution that Congress is working on right now is functionally a suggestion that the president can take or leave. That is indisputably a lot of power. And equally indisputable, I think, is the notion that there is no way that power could ever, in any conceivable universe, be wielded against Republican interests. There’s just no chance. We will never find ourselves saying “Oh no, we opened Pandora’s box.” Never. Unimaginable. An absurd and ridiculous fantasy.

  See if you can spot the flaws in Mike's logic!

• Also: does he really care? Charles C. W. Cooke wonders Does Trump Know Why He Was Elected?

  President Trump is at risk of blowing his second term before it has hit the two-month mark.

  Go on. Shout at me for saying that. I don’t care. Who does? Outside of a handful of terminally online zealots who do more harm than good to their side, nobody is invested in today’s presidential side quests. Early on in his tenure, Joe Biden forgot the lesson that had made him president: that neither social media nor the activists who dominate it are representative of real life. Astonishingly, Donald Trump is on the verge of making the same mistake. Within a year of his victory, Biden had lost sight of why he’d won, inoculated himself against feedback, become insular in his political outlook, and, worst of all, given in to the temptation to prioritize his pet projects over the elementary building blocks atop which all successful administrations are built. By advancing his chaotic, capricious, contradictory tariff agenda, Trump is making a similar mistake. Absent a genuine crisis, such as a world war or stagflation, it is invariably smart for presidents to begin with the quick wins, gain the trust and support of the public by yielding stability, and only then turn to the unpopular or tricky parts of their brief. Trump, like Biden, has reversed this order. It’s not working out any better for him.

  CCWC is correct, as usual.

• Academic freedom for me, not for thee. Lest we forget there are still some wannabe speech cops on the faculty of once-prestigious institutions of higher learning, Gabrielle Temaat reports: Fire professors who oppose ‘gender-affirming care,’ Harvard faculty chair says.

  Professors who are critical of “gender-affirming care” should be fired and lose their academic titles, a Harvard University professor and faculty chair recently said.

  “There’s a particular place in hell for academics who use their academic expertise and power to distort and do violence to people in the world,” Professor Timothy McCarthy told Washington Square News. The New York University student newspaper interviewed McCarthy for his thoughts about two professors at the school who are affiliated with groups that are critical of surgical and chemical interventions for gender dysphoria.

  Note the link above goes to a student newspaper article that treats the important news is that these heretics, one employed as an adjunct in an NYU school, the other an alumnus, actually exist!

Recently on the book blog:

The author, Douglas Murray, does a fine job of demonstrating just how nuts we went just a few years ago, summed up in his book title. It became extremely fashionable to attack All Things West. (And, often, its associated evil, "whiteness".)

Yes, the West had its share of sins: slavery, racism, sexism, eugenics, indigenous mistreatment, colonialism, etc. But these sins were present, and usually worse, in other cultures as well; that was ignored or downplayed. And the West was accused of "sins" that weren't sins at all: "cultural appropriation", for example. The works of liberal philosophers (e.g., Mill, Hume, Kant) were fine-tooth combed for any instance of racial insensitivity; the far worse bigotry of Marx, for example, was given a pass.

Like most wars, a lot of well-meaning people were caught up by the propaganda. And there was a lot of collateral damage.

Nobody seemed to notice, or care, that the West, however clumsily and incompletely, became a culture that brought prosperity, liberty, artistic beauty, peace, and happiness to an ever-increasing share of the crooked timber of humanity.

I think it's safe to say things have improved since the events Murray describes so well. Although ("like most wars") much of the damage remains. You can still see "Black Lives Matter" posturing here and there, but they seem like quaint leftovers of an intellectual fad that's fading fast.

People eventually noticed: the "War" mongers had no coherent criticisms of the West; Their "victories", such as they were, were mostly symbolic, and didn't remedy any of the evils they decried. (At Caltech, for example, Millikan Library was renamed, and a bust of Millikan was removed from a campus walkway. And so what?)

Politico Playbook says Jake Sullivan is receiving a soft landing after destroying U.S. foreign policy for four years. pic.twitter.com/1nmxIuPuTj

— Jerry Dunleavy IV 🇺🇸 (@JerryDunleavy) March 11, 2025

… and, as the tweet notes, Jake also nabbed a couple other sinecures at Harvard-associated organizations.

Given that UNH is looking to cut $20 million from its budget, I can't help but wonder how laid-off UNH workers might feel about this. (I don't know how much a Carsey "senior fellow" makes, but I'm pretty sure it's more than zero.)

We won't adjudicate Dunleavy's claim about Jake's impact on US foreign policy during the Biden Administration, but I'd say the results speak for themselves. Whatever Jake does up here in New England, he'll have to do it without a security clearance.

Jake's new employer, the Carsey School of Public Policy is careful to keep its public face non-partisan, but it was founded/funded by Marcy Carsey, estimated to be a half-billionaire thanks to her TV career. She's a huge donor to Democrats.

The school's "founding director" (and, like Jake, a current "senior fellow") Michael Ettlinger got some unwanted publicity back in 2016, when his mash note to the Hillary Clinton campaign got Wikileaked. In his mail, he spitballed about how he might "be helpful from my perch in New Hampshire", including "what I can do formally from heading the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire."

I looked at that embarrassment in more detail here; I also couldn't help but comment on the tongue-bath Ettlinger received from the UNH Today newsletter here.

I should also mention the site of Jake's other UNH appointment, the Franklin Pierce School of Law. It is pretty upfront about its possibly illegal color-conscious admission policies, proudly proclaiming that it's "the most racially and ethnically diverse college in the USNH system". The Dean's Statement on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion is a real blast from the past:

At UNH Law, we condemn the enduring and systemic racism that pervades our communities. And we commit to positive change toward racial justice and equality.

… and the Dean carries on that way for a while. Also see UNH Law Student Bar Association's Statement on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion for more of the same. We are talking peak Woke.

So, anyway: Jake should fit right in.

Also of note:

• Marcy Carsey gets a pass, being only a half-billionaire. At the Free Press, Gabe Kaminsky takes a look Inside the Trump Resistance, Funded by the Ultra-Wealthy.

  Days after the inauguration of President Donald Trump, a group of former Joe Biden and Kamala Harris staffers came together to launch an effort to arouse the public against the GOP’s looming push to cut taxes on the wealthy. Dubbed “Families Over Billionaires,” the project quickly assembled an eight-figure war chest.

  “The campaign will elevate the voices of the majority of Americans who oppose more tax breaks for the rich,” the group says in its mission statement. Mia Ehrenberg, the spokeswoman for Families Over Billionaires—and an ex-Harris campaign aide—told The Free Press that the organization is teaming with “grassroots organizers” to get its message out.

  In fact, like a surprising number of Trump 2.0 resistance pop-up groups, Families Over Billionaires owes its existence not to small-dollar donations from ordinary Americans, or to grassroots organizers, but to a single entity: the consulting firm Arabella Advisors, which oversees a massive “dark money” network bankrolled by the super-rich and aligned with the Democratic Party.

  The network relies on support from billionaires like Bill Gates, eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, and Democratic megadonor George Soros. In other words, it’s not Families Over Billionaires so much as it’s billionaires over other billionaires.

  That link above goes to their "Who We Are" page. Which does not include "Who Is Giving Us So Much Money" information.

• Some more good news. James Freeman believes he detected The Antidote to Political Panic.

  A few of us media folk were lockdown skeptics right from the start of the Covid panic five years ago. A few of us pointed out during the lockdowns that government disease doctor Anthony Fauci, beloved by the press corps, wasn’t even pretending to understand the consequences of his destructive societal prescriptions.

  But Dr. Fauci and then-director of the National Institutes of Health Francis Collins really were pretending when they treated dissenting scientists as peddlers of fringe theories. This week, seeing one of those brave and accurate dissenters moving closer to a Senate confirmation vote to run the NIH, it’s a little easier to hope that the lockdown disaster will never be repeated.

  Fauci famously got one of those coveted awards from President Biden: a preemptive pardon. Collins was snubbed for this honor, and a few days ago he made an abrupt departure from NIH. I don't know if he will seek political asylum in Wuhan.

• Mything the truth by a mile. Holly Jean Soto looks at The Never-Ending Myth of the “Rich Getting Richer”.

  The classic tale of “the rich getting richer while the poor get poorer” never seems to get old. The newly released Takers Not Makers report from Oxfam fuels the idea that billionaire wealth is skyrocketing while the poor are getting poorer. They claim that poverty levels have barely changed since 1990, and that 60 percent of billionaire wealth is “taken,” not earned, arguing that the richest must bear the cost of “economic justice” through various means including heavy taxation. The argument is nothing new — it is based on the zero-sum fallacy, which assumes that one person’s wealth must come at the expense of another’s, ignoring the reality that economic growth expands wealth for everyone. 

  Despite the popular belief that the rich are getting richer while the poor are getting poorer, this claim is not only economically misguided but factually incorrect. Using data from The Mercatus Center’s working paper Income Inequality in the United States, we can demonstrate how flaws in inequality data often exaggerate the problem, explore why the claim that the poor are getting poorer is inaccurate, highlight why shaping policies around resentment and envy of the rich does more harm than good, and why the real solution lies in addressing the root causes of inequality through private-sector opportunities rather than government intervention.

  It's useful to have the facts on your side, of course. But you probably won't be surprised at how little facts mean to the Oxfams of the world.

• Democracy dies in darkness. And Jerry Coyne notes a couple of institutions that would prefer certain lights stay turned off: NYT and Bloomberg refuse [to] mention high-quality study showing that DEI training has counterproductive results. Quoting from a Substack post from Colin Wright which asks Why Was This Groundbreaking Study on DEI Silenced?

  In a stunning series of events, two leading media organizations—The New York Times and Bloomberg—abruptly shelved coverage of a groundbreaking study that raises serious concerns about the psychological impacts of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) pedagogy. The study, conducted by the Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI) in collaboration with Rutgers University, found that certain DEI practices could induce hostility, increase authoritarian tendencies, and foster agreement with extreme rhetoric. With billions of dollars invested annually in these initiatives, the public has a right to know if such programs—heralded as effective moral solutions to bigotry and hate—might instead be fueling the very problems they claim to solve. The decision to withhold coverage raises serious questions about transparency, editorial independence, and the growing influence of ideological biases in the media.

  This should come as no surprise to anyone who's actually experienced those "certain DEI practices" in their workplace and come away insufficiently indoctrinated.

In this era of extreme political polarization, it's good to see politicians from opposing camps banding together to remind us that women are bad at math https://t.co/bTSJwo55OI

— jimtreacher.substack.com (@jtLOL) March 8, 2025

It should be 'bad at econ', though, not math.

If you prefer, or need, an actual argument about this awful idea, Christopher Freiman has you covered:

CongressCritters AOC and Anna really need to start their own credit card companies, offering maximum 10% interest rates. I'm sure they can get some of their fellow economic illiterates to back them.

Also of note:

• Does this mean we'll be underdue to end DST in the fall? Well, probably not, but J.D. Tuccille says that right now We're Overdue To End Daylight Saving Time. His bottom line is one you've seen here before, because I'm pretty tiresome about it:

  Obviously, there's wiggle room when it comes to estimating the total costs of forcing people to reset their clocks and their schedules twice each year. But it's hard to argue that clock changes benefit anybody except that subset of the population that really wants more daylight in the evening. For most of us, the impact of changing our clocks is measured in lost time, expense, and increased health risk.

  Daylight saving time was a paternalistic government experiment in socially engineering the country into less energy use by fiddling the clocks. Like most government gimmicks, it doesn't work as advertised. Let's get the government out of the business of telling us to how to set our clocks.

  Yes. Separation of time and state. An idea that is overdue underdue … good.

• We dumped on Massachusetts Governor Healey yesterday, so… let's dump on a governor from a different neighboring state. James Erwin tracks the Decline of Maine Governors, from Joshua Chamberlain to Janet Mills.

  Maine Governor Janet Mills is enjoying a viral moment after her public spat with President Trump at the White House over her attempted nullification of federal law to allow boys in girls’ sports. The politics of my beloved home state remain consumed by Mills’s refusal to comply with new Title IX regulations, which has been aptly described as “neo-Confederate” by Victor Davis Hanson. It’s a disgrace to the office once held by Union hero Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain.

  James provides a brief bio of the admirable Governor Chamberlain. In contrast:

  And then there’s Janet Mills. Governor Mills would surely bristle at the notion that her defiance of President Trump’s executive order withholding federal funds from athletic programs that allow boys who claim they’re girls to compete in girls’ sports in any way resembles Southern and Confederate defiance of federal law. But while the underlying issues are of course different, the federal government again is in the right. Trump’s order is a perfectly legal application of Title IX of the Civil Rights Act, which has always mandated equal treatment of boys and girls in education, including by protecting and fully funding girls’ sports. Letting any boy who says he’s a girl compete is an obvious violation of what this federal law has always been understood to mean.

  It's like nobody on her staff warned her that sounding like a 1960s segregationist Southern governor was probably a bad idea.

  In case you missed the link above, here's a Portland Press-Herald story about (perhaps) the next governor of Maine: Laurel Libby turns muzzle into megaphone in transgender competition debate.

• You'll see her standing in the schoolhouse gymnasium door next. Like Governor Mills, our own state's very-senior senator, Jeanne Shaheen, isn't having any truck with those pointy-headed D.C. intellectuals telling states what to do: Local Groups Should 'Police' Trans Athletes, Not Federal Law. As reported by NHJournal:

  New Hampshire Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.), who voted against banning biological males from girls sports, now says it’s an issue that should be “policed” at the local level. It’s a significant reversal for a senator who until recently backed legislation mandating that males who identify as female should be treated as though they were born female.

  To repeat: It's like nobody on her staff warned her that sounding like a 1960s segregationist Southern governor was probably a bad idea.

• "Gender Meltdown" would be a pretty good name for a glam-rock band. PowerLine's Steven Hayward looks at left-coast Scenes from the Gender Meltdown.

  Meanwhile, out in San Francisco, the Archimedes Banya spa (which sounds very woke) decided to hold an “Inclusive Women’s Night” in honor of International Women’s Week (which I missed somehow). The trouble is, a number of “penised people,” otherwise known as “transwomen,” turned up, because “tranwomen are women,” right? It seems some of the real women didn’t care for it, and have expressed their preference for a “phallus-free environment.” Next thing you know they’ll want segregated locker rooms.

  The spa's letter to its patrons is screen-shotted at the link, and like Treacher's tweet above, I'm not proud of finding it very funny.

  Googling the news stories for "Archimedes Banya spa" provides the headlines:

  • "SF bathhouse review-bombed after policy restricting trans access sparks outcry"
  • "Trans activists rip San Francisco spa for not letting them go nude during ‘women’s night’"
  • "Popular local spa faces backlash"
  • "S.F. agency probing nude bathhouse’s policy that excludes transgender people twice a month"
  • "SF bathhouse excludes trans women from new ladies-only night"
  • "Archimedes Banya Gets Social Media Uproar After Banning Trans Women From ‘Women’s Day’"
  • "San Francisco bathhouse accused of ‘transphobic’ policies"
  • "Transgender activists vow to attend 'religious women-only night' at San Francisco spa"
  • "Finding Calm and Community at SF’s Clothing-Optional Bohemian Bathhouse"
  • "Transgender activist group says San Francisco spa enacting exclusionary policies"

  Gee, it seems people aren't happy about a phallus-free environment. The "agency probing" mentioned in that sixth item is the San Francisco Human Rights Commission, which sounds like it could be trouble for the spa. I mean, if you can't wave your willy at women, do you really have any Human Rights at all?

  The spa's website is here. "Where The Cultures Of The World Meet". Looks expensive!

  And, what do you know, "Gender Meltdown" actually is the name of a band. Looks inactive, though.

Readers, the current governor of Massachusetts:

Gov. @maura_healey admits that part of our energy crisis is due to natural gas being hard to transport to MA. Yet in 2022, she bragged about blocking the pipelines that would have solved this. 🤦‍♂️#Massachusetts families are paying the price for her #energy failures. #mapoli pic.twitter.com/gsDx6Cq1WJ

— Massachusetts Fiscal Alliance (@MassFiscal) March 8, 2025

It's a brief clip, no context, maybe a cheap shot. But I found this article from 2015, back when Gov. Maura was MA Attorney General: Healey study: No new pipelines needed.

I'm sure this sounded perfectly reasonable at the time: just nag "homeowners and businesses" to stop using so many electrons. Just sit there in the dark, citizen! Maybe take a nap!

I'm also sure a few people down in Massachusetts at the time waved their copies of Hayek's The Road to Serfdom, pointing out the fatal conceit of central planning. Especially when those central planning "studies" confidently predicted spending, savings, and reductions over 15 years with three significant figures.

Maybe Massachusetts residents can keep warm by burning copies of that 2015 study?

Also of note:

• On the weaponizing watch. Joe Lancaster says Trump is weaponizing the DOJ just like he accused Democrats of doing.

  Throughout the 2024 presidential campaign season, Donald Trump accused his Democratic opponents—President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris—of using the levers of power against him.

  "The Biden regime's weaponization of our system of justice is straight out of the Stalinist Russia horror show," he told rallygoers in March 2023 after being indicted in Manhattan for violating election law. In a September 2024 debate against Harris, Trump even blamed Democrats' rhetoric for the assassination attempt he survived weeks earlier, saying "I probably took a bullet to the head because of the things that they say about me."

  But now that Trump is firmly ensconced back in office, his administration seems to have no interest in stopping government weaponization. Rather, it seems keen to wield that power for itself. Looking back now on Trump's complaints, it appears less that he was upset than that he was jealous.

  Joe goes on to cite the Trump DOJ's desire to drop the bribery and wire fraud cases against NYC Mayor Eric Adams, in an apparent quid pro quo for Adams' help with implementing Trump's immigration policies. And a couple instances where Trump's political enemies have been threatened with DOJ investigations. Fun!

• Just fill in the blanks for your instant post: "Trump’s        is wrong about       ". Today's example comes from Daniel Ortner and Brennen VanderVeen at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE): Trump’s border czar is wrong about AOC. And, yes, it turns out to be another case of "weaponization".

  Last week, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wrote a letter asking Attorney General Pam Bondi if she is now under investigation for telling people their constitutional rights when interacting with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers.

  She asked because President Trump’s border czar Tom Homan said he recently asked the Department of Justice whether Ocasio-Cortez is “impeding our law enforcement efforts” by putting out a webinar and a flyer in which she reminded anyone interacting with ICE that they need not open the door, speak, or sign anything, among other basic rights.

  Informing people about their constitutional rights is plainly lawful and any effort to punish Ocasio-Cortez for doing so would unquestionably violate the First Amendment.

  Anyone have that on their "Reasons to Impeach Trump" bingo card?

• It's a remarkably short, straight-line distance. Robert Graboyes and David Patterson collaborate on tracing the ideological descent: From Hitler to Hamas (and Hezbollah)

  It is impossible to understand Hamas without knowing its historical pedigree. Today, Bastiat’s Window is honored to offer a powerful resource for understanding that history—a downloadable chapter (“Islamic Jihadism: The Legacy of Nazi Antisemitism”) from Professor David Patterson’s book, Judaism, Antisemitism, and Holocaust: Making the Connections (Cambridge University Press, 2022)—referred to hereafter as JA&H. This chapter is the most compact, sweeping account I’ve found of the historical, organizational, and philosophical connections between 1930s Nazism and contemporary Jihadism. Once you’ve read it, please pass the link to this post along to others so they might also read Professor Patterson’s account.

  In brief, Hamas is as an especially fervent local chapter of an organization whose early funding, rituals, and philosophy came directly from Nazi Germany. Hamas’s spiritual mentor was a cleric employed by Hitler to organize Jihadist SS squads to murder Jews in Europe. Hamas’s 1987 founding charter maintained the Nazi/Jihadist goal of exterminating Jews worldwide. Hezbollah’s pedigree differs somewhat from Hamas’s, but they share goals and forebears.

  Knowing this history also reveals the naïveté of those who presume Hamas can be or wishes to be a reliable negotiating partner or peaceful neighbor to Israel. It suggests why Gaza grew more impoverished and depraved after Israel forcibly removed every single Jew from Gaza in 2005. And it speaks worlds of the Western students chanting “we are Hamas,” flying the flag of Hezbollah, telling Jews on campuses “the 7th of October is going to be every day for you,” and spray-painting “Hamas is coming” on monuments.

  It's strong stuff. Wish our local Hamas cheering squad might read it with an open mind.

• It was a dark and stormy contest. Via Slashdot, I note that the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest is ending its annual run. 'Twas truly the Super Bowl of hilariously bad writing. A sample, from the 2024 Winners:

  Mrs. Higgins’ body was found in the pantry, bludgeoned with a potato ricer and lying atop a fifty-pound sack of Yukon golds, her favorite for making gnocchi, though some people consider them too moist for this purpose.

  Any comparable prose you see here is entirely unintentional.

Ed Morrisey thoughtfully explores The Myth of Daylight Saving Time? And note the Groundhog Day reference:

Ed has the relevant quotes from Trump's press conference. Trump bemoans the polling that shows that what to do is a "50-50 issue", and the implication is that he's unwilling to piss off either 50.

Ed makes a point I've made myself:

Unfortunately, Ed does not mention the crackpot reform I (and others) have advocated: Separation of time and state. If the government needs to know what time it is, use UTC. Everyone else can use … whatever they want! Efficient schedule arrangements would be quickly found between employers and employees, businesses and customers, schedule-makers and schedule-keepers, etc.

Also of note:

• My tip: Don't use Hunter Biden's tax preparation tips. But Dave Barry has other Tax-Preparation Tips.

  It's tax season once again, and if you're like many Americans, the question on your mind is: "What with everything going on in Washington, do I still have to pay taxes?"

  Sadly, yes. Things were looking good for a little while there, when the Department of Government Efficiency, as an efficiency measure, fired the entire staff of the Internal Revenue Service except for a woman named Denise who happened to be in the ladies' room when DOGE came through. Unfortunately they reversed course on that particular measure, so the IRS employees have been reinstated, along with — at least for now — the Coast Guard, the Centers for Disease Control and about a third of the 5,000 Yellowstone park bison.

  This means that you do, in fact, have to file a tax return. And if you're like many Americans, you wish somebody would drop an anvil on the Geico Gecko. So do I, but that is not my point. My point is that if you're like many Americans, you're afraid to prepare your own tax return, because you don't want to go to prison for violating the U.S. Tax Code, which at the moment is 6,781 pages long and is filled with sentences like this one (I am not making this sentence up):

  In general if the partnership (1) not later than 45 days after the date of the notice of final partnership adjustment, elects the application of this section with respect to an imputed underpayment, and (2) at such time and in such manner as the Secretary may provide, furnishes to each partner of the partnership for the reviewed year and to the Secretary a statement of the partner's share of any adjustment to a partnership-related item (as determined in the notice of final partnership adjustment), section 6225 shall not apply with respect to such underpayment (and no assessment of tax, levy, or proceeding in any court for the collection of such underpayment shall be made against such partnership) and each such partner shall take such adjustment into account as provided in subsection (b).

  My favorite thing about that sentence is that it starts with "In general." It's like the tax code is saying, "Don't hold me to this! I'm just spitballing here!"

  And, yes, that's just one sentence.

  (Dave's substack is one of the few to which I subscribe, and I recommend it to you.)

• Sean Stevens and Greg Lukianoff push back on recent criticism of the College Free Speech Rankings published yearly by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE): No More ‘Trust us, we’re the administrators!’.

  TIME magazine recently published a piece critical of the rankings and, sadly, demonstrating a profound misunderstanding of what they measure. Not only that, the piece also implies that Americans shouldn’t trust our judgment. Instead, we should give college and university presidents, chancellors, and senior administrators the benefit of the doubt, based on both the assumption that they know their campuses better than an off-campus organization like FIRE would, and that they would be honest and forthcoming about their free speech failings.

  Obviously, we disagree. After many years of failing to defend — and sometimes actively undermining — free speech on campus, college and university presidents, chancellors, and senior administrators have lost the benefit of the doubt. FIRE has been drawing attention to campus censorship for more than 25 years now, but it has accelerated almost every year for the last 11, and it’s become particularly bad in the last 5. And yet, this entire time — every single year — many administrators have claimed there’s nothing wrong on their campuses.

  The Time essay, linked above, is from two Yale-affiliated people, perhaps motivated and understandably butt-hurt by Yale's "slightly below average" ranking, putting it at #155 out of 251 schools. Hey, much better than Harvard (#251, with an "abysmal" speech climate).

  I think Sean and Greg out-argue the Yalies, but see what you think.

  And, for the record, the University Near Here fell to 59th place in the FIRE rankings.

• Mister, we could use a man like Ludwig von Mises again. Brian Doherty brings some sad news in April's print Reason: The American Right Is Abandoning Mises.

  Ludwig von Mises, a foundational figure of modern libertarianism, was also for decades a hero of the American right. In George H. Nash's magisterial 1976 history The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945, the very first chapter stars the Austrian economist and his students and associates, saying that "it would be difficult to exaggerate the contributions of…Ludwig von Mises to the intellectual rehabilitation of individualism in America."

  But now…

  Mises was an ardent free-trader. President Donald Trump promotes autarky and calls himself "Tariff Man." Mises was a devoted anti-inflationist, a promoter of hard currencies that government could not create and manipulate at will. Though Trump has given lip service to private cryptocurrency as part of his larger antiestablishment coalition, he also demanded in his first term that the Federal Reserve expand the money supply to goose the economy and give him a short-term political benefit. In his 1944 book Omnipotent Government, Mises condemned forceful territorial expansion as one of the causes of Europe's terrible 20th century wars. Since the election, Trump has publicly mulled territorial seizures around the globe. Trump ardently supports a restrictionist immigration policy. Mises believed the free flow of people, goods, and capital were linchpins of the ideal international system. Trump favors industrial policy, in which government planners intervene to assist selected domestic industries. Mises understood that would lower, not raise, overall prosperity.

  Brian displays his usual encyclopedic familiarity with libertarian intellectual history in this article. It's an interesting story.

• Yet another thing that probably won't happen. The "Antiplanner" suggests Privatizing Amtrak and Cutting Transit.

  Every line item in the federal budget has at least one special interest group advocating for its growth and ready to cry bloody murder if anyone proposes to reduce it. So it is no surprise that Trains magazine is shocked that Elon Musk would propose to privatize Amtrak.

  “Amtrak’s business performance is strong,” Trains quotes an Amtrak spokesperson. “Ridership and revenue are at all-time highs.” But a “strong” performance didn’t prevent Amtrak from losing well over $2 billion on operating costs alone in 2024, and Amtrak’s all-time highs are still pretty low: in 2024, Amtrak carried the average American just 19.6 miles. Americans ride bicycles far more than they ride Amtrak, they fly more than 100 times as many miles, and they travel more than 700 times as many miles by car as they ride Amtrak.

  Amtrak, unfortunately, has a lot of 19th-century choo-choo sentiment behind it, and has the luxury of living off the taxpayer dime.

• And this looks like it might happen! The Josiah Bartlett Center points out a reform that should be a no-brainer for the LFOD state: Ending mandatory vehicle inspections would save Granite Staters tens of millions a year.

  New Hampshire is one of a dwindling number of states that requires an annual safety inspection, which makes New Hampshire’s law one of the most burdensome in the country.

  Lawmakers have tried for years to abolish the mandate, citing the cost burden on drivers and the shortage of evidence that inspections improve public safety. But in years past, auto dealers and independent mechanics have persuaded legislators to continue mandating what is a lucrative income stream for them.

  That could change this year. The House on Thursday approved by a wide margin (212-143) House Bill 649, which would lift the safety and emissions inspection mandates from state law.

  The article points out that New Jersey—the state where it's illegal to pump your own freaking gas—got rid of its mandated annual auto safety inspections back in 2010, with no ill effects (um, other than still being New Jersey.)

My only complaint: The Reason page for Remy's video claims it is a "Parody of Kendrick Lamar's 'Not Like Us'".

(And, OK, I watched about of much of that as I could stand.)

I'm too unplugged from popular culture to "get" the parodic component of a lot of Remy videos. Sigh. Why can't he parody songs we Boomers know?

Also of note:

• An unappreciated virtue for political commentators is… a long and reliable memory. Jim Geraghty has that in spades, as demonstrated in his recent Morning Jolt, where he warns his readers to Get Ready for the Democratic Retreat on Trans Athletes. (Subtopic: "Gavin Newsom Changes Shape".)

  Way back in August 2013 — two years before Donald Trump descended the escalator and announced he was running for president — the state of California enacted a law requiring public schools to allow transgender kindergarten-through-12th-grade students access to whichever restroom and locker room they want. The law gave students the right “to participate in sex-segregated programs, activities and facilities” based on their self-identification and regardless of their birth gender. The spokesman for the bill’s sponsor said of those born one gender and identifying as another, “They’re not interested in going into bathrooms and flaunting their physiology.”

  That bill was signed into law by former Governor Jerry Brown. The lieutenant governor of California at the time was Gavin Newsom. If Newsom had any objections to that law at the time, he kept them to himself.

  Newsom has been governor of California for six years, two months, and one day. At no point in that six-year-and-change span did Newsom express even a peep of objection to that law or policy — right up until the moment Newsom sat down for the inaugural edition of his podcast with Charlie Kirk. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, the California governor claimed that for years, he had thought the policy was unfair to women athletes[…]

  It's still a long way away, and anything could happen in the meantime, but Newsom is (as I type) the leading Democrat contender for the 2028 presidential election at the Maxim/Lott Election Betting Odds site. This sudden shift to common sense makes me think he's running already.

  Aside: I also noted that Newsom tried to get away with claiming that "you guys were able to weaponize that [transgender athlete] issue". Weaponize? Kirk is about to gripe at him about that, and Newsom admits that's a "pejorative" way to put it. Kirk suggests "Shine a light on" would be a fairer phrase.

  So, wannabe pundits: see how many claims of "weaponization" in the media can be replaced by "shining a light".

• Fair question. Noah Smith wonders: Is China inventing big important things?

  The 20th century had a bunch of rising powers that all reached their peaks in terms not just of relative military might and economic strength, but of technological and cultural innovation. These included the United States, Japan, Germany, and Russia. So far, the 21st century is a little different, because only one major civilization is hitting its peak right now: China. All the old powers are declining, and India is just beginning to hit its stride.

  China’s peak is truly spectacular — a marvel of state capacity and resource mobilization never seen before on this planet. In just a few years, China built more high-speed rail than all other countries in the world combined. Its auto manufacturers are leapfrogging the developed world, seizing leadership in the EV industry of the future. China has produced so many solar panels and batteries that it has driven down the cost to be competitive with fossil fuels — a huge blow against climate change, despite all of China’s massive coal emissions, and a victory for global energy abundance. China’s cities are marvels of scale — forests of towering skyscrapers lit up with LEDs, cavernous malls filled with amazing restaurants and shops selling every possible modern convenience for cheap, vast highways and huge train stations. Even China’s policy mistakes and authoritarian overreaches inspire awe and dread — Zero Covid failed in the end, but it demonstrated an ability to control society down to the granular level that the Soviets would have envied.

  It's long and interesting, but it put me in mind of the Paul Samuelson textbook I had for my intro econ course in the early 1970s. Samuelson was wont to tout the strength and growth of the USSR's economy, and he was not alone in that. But that turned out to be bullshit.

  So is Noah repeating the Samuelson mistake? I'm not smart enough to tell for sure, but I am skeptical enough to say "maybe".

• Are those red baseball caps too tight on their heads? Douglas Murray has a theory about How MAGA Lost Its Way on Ukraine.

  How can the right be so wrong? Or at least portions of the right—especially the American right—when it comes to Ukraine? To begin to grapple with this, you have to go way, way back to Donald Trump’s first term in office.

  In that time, Ukraine came to the public’s consciousness just twice. The first occasion was when Trump and other Republicans began to make hay over the business dealings of Hunter Biden. Since 2014 the then vice president’s son had been sitting on the board of Ukrainian energy company Burisma. He was earning around $1 million annually to advise a company in a sector about which he had zero expertise. Why might a foreign company want the son of the vice president on their board? Obviously—as all the investigations have shown since—so that the Biden name could bring contracts, grants, and other support to Burisma.

  The only other time Ukraine came to the attention of the American right was in 2019, when President Trump had a phone call with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky. Trump’s political opponents claimed that he had used the call to tell Zelensky that American aid to the country could be contingent on Ukraine helping to expose the Biden family’s financial dealings. Trump was impeached over the call but acquitted by the Senate. But these two events started to embed the idea on the right that Ukraine was simply a corrupt country, which had enriched and cooperated with its own political opponents.

  I'm reading Murray's recent book, The War on the West; he is a take-no-prisoners, unapologetic defender of Truth, Justice, and the American Way. Refreshing.

• Methinks I detect sarcasm. Jeff Maurer "cheers" "Oh, Huzzah: The Resistance Has Arrived." After noting the protest theater of Democrats' antics during Trump's SOTU-like address:

  These protests seem to be in response to ever-loudening calls for Democrats to #DOSOMETHING!!! And here’s where being some asshole blogger is nice, because while lawmakers have to scramble to try to make themselves seem consequential, I can just say: Democrats can’t do shit right now. Not really. They can vote against the House budget — and all of them did — but it still passed. Damn near the only thing Democrats can do is win the next election. And that’s why these protests gave me a near-terminal case of the douche chills, because I think that performative Resistance nonsense makes it harder for Democrats to win.

  Consider: The Democratic Party is increasingly the party of educated, upper middle-class people. This is a problem, partly because only 38 percent of American adults hold a four year degree, and partly because educated, upper middle-class people are the most annoying twats to ever curse humanity with their presence (and I know this because I’m one of them). You couldn’t build a political movement around pissing off GED holders or telling farmers to go jump up their own asses, but you can absolutely do that with wine track Ivy League types. The MAGA movement is a reactionary movement against self-righteous progressive jerk offs, and believe me when I say: When I look at that photo of Democrats holding those stupid paper-plate-and-popsicle-stick paddles, I completely get where MAGA heads are coming from.

  And I guess "I'm one of them" too. Although Jeff is despairing because he wants Democrats to win, I'm pretty much OK with them continuing to alienate large swaths of voters.

• Worst scheme ever. Kevin D. Williamson asks the musical question: Is Social Security a Ponzi Scheme?

  Elon Musk—who is, let us not forget, one of those “unelected bureaucrats” Donald Trump raged against on Tuesday night—has sent Democrats to the fainting couch by referring to Social Security as a “Ponzi scheme,” an ancient and bog-standard piece of libertarian rhetoric that, while not entirely accurate, captures the spirit of the thing. Social Security resembles a Ponzi scheme in that its economic structure requires a steady flow of new taxpayers into the system to fund benefits promised to those eligible to collect them; it is different from a Ponzi scheme in that there isn’t really any fraud involved in it beyond the loosey-goosey marketing language politicians have used to sell it over the years. Social Security is a perfectly ordinary social-insurance scheme (“scheme” here in the nonpejorative British sense) very similar to many other programs around the world that are—predictably—failing for the same reason.

  The fraud involved in Social Security is political rather than financial. Franklin Roosevelt described Social Security as though it were an investment plan, a kind of federally secured savings account for retirement, and his epigones in both parties have continued that long and dishonest tradition. It is, of course, no such thing: Social Security is an ordinary welfare program in which the federal government takes money from taxpayers to provide benefits to a favored class of people, in this case oldsters and people with disabilities. There is a separate payroll tax producing revenue the federal government pretends to set aside for Social Security and Medicare, which is done to reinforce the myth that Social Security is a system that people “pay into” before receiving payments that are, in some sense, a return on investment.

  I looked up "epigone" yesterday, Kevin. Stop trying to make "epigone" happen!

He tries to panic my geezer peeps, and I am irked:

Congrats on the twofer: demagogic and dishonest. Actual proposal here: https://t.co/nxkmESMDGA

— Paul Sand (@punsalad) March 7, 2025

Pappas did not even have the basic honesty to post a legible version of that 152-signature letter, denying his followers even a slight hint as to what he was talking about. Fortunately, U.S. Rep. Grace Meng (D-Queens) was a little more informative (but no less demagogic) in her press release, which includes a link to the PDF letter sent to SSA Acting Commissioner Leland Dudek.

As indicated in the SSA release I linked in my tweet: the "gutting" is the proposal to trim the Social Security workforce from its current 57K to 50K, and to rejigger its "bloated" organizational structure.

There are, sadly, no plans to "gut" Social Security, by which I mean: no plans to avoid its coming day of fiscal reckoning. That's still on track for sometime in 2035. And, as near as I can tell, neither Pappas, nor Democrats or Republicans generally, have no plans to offer about that.

Reality-based commentary from Veronique de Rugy, explaining Why Cutting Waste and Fixing Entitlements Are Both Essential. No surprises there:

It would be nice if "we, the people" actually did demand that. Unfortunately…

Ninety-seven percent of congressional incumbents were re-elected in 2024, slightly higher than the 96% re-elected in 2020. In 41 states, all congressional incumbents who sought another term were re-elected. In 41 states, all congressional incumbents were re-elected, the same as in 2022. In 2020, voters in 38 states re-elected their incumbents who sought another term.

Poll after poll show that "we, the people" think America's "on the wrong track". And yet, "we" keep re-electing the same clowns; why would we expect the circus to improve?

Here's a BBC report that at least one small European country, the one refusing to sell Greenland to us, isn't afraid to enter into the 21st century: Denmark's postal service to stop delivering letters.

If the Danes can adapt to market-based modernity, we can't we?

Also of note:

• Christian, you say that like it's a bad thing! Oh, wait, it is a bad thing. Christian Schneider puts his finger on it: Donald Trump Mistakes Weakness for Strength. Especially when compared to Ronald "We Win, They Lose" Reagan:

  One of the favorite parlor games within MAGA Nation is comparing Donald Trump to Reagan, hoping to launder Trump’s weakness through a prism of morally unambiguous Reaganism. This week, Trump’s first-term deputy national security adviser K. T. McFarland, who might want to check that her house is properly ventilated, argued that Trump is doing the “exact same thing” as Reagan regarding negotiations with Russia.

  These arguments target gullible people on the right who are also prone to believe that nobody out-pizzas the Hut. Of course, Reagan brought about the collapse of the Soviet Union through strength, moral determination, and courage. Trump’s pathetic stance toward Russia in its war of aggression against Ukraine hardly demonstrates the same fortitude.

  Trump is a weak man, as he reminds us every time he stands in front of a microphone. During his address to a joint session of Congress on Tuesday night, he opened by complaining that his “astronomical accomplishments” weren’t being sufficiently cheered by Democrats. When discussing an anti-revenge-porn bill he wants to see passed, he took the time to remind America that “nobody gets treated worse than I do online, nobody.”

  Kevin D. Williamson has a different towering figure (and brave people) from that era in mind: Ghosts of the Cold War:

  “Here I am, then. I have come home.”

  So said Pope John Paul II after landing in Warsaw in 1983, bending to kiss the soil of his native country. The mood was patriotic and defiant. “Poland for the Poles!” came the shouts from the crowd—union men, priests, fathers and their sons. “We are the real Poland!” The pope continued: “I consider it my duty to be with my fellow countrymen in this sublime and at the same time difficult moment.” 

  The demonstrators unfurled banners advertising the Solidarity movement and chanted the name of its leader, Lech Wałęsa. The 81-year-old Wałęsa, one of the great heroes of the Cold War, is still very much with us, and still engaged in public affairs. “Gratitude is due to the heroic Ukrainian soldiers who shed their blood in defense of the values of the free world,” he said earlier this week. “We do not understand how the leader of a country that is a symbol of the free world cannot see this.”

  Wałęsa is not the only figure from that day who remains part of our public life. He and other supporters of Polish sovereignty, in Poland and around the world, were being spied on by the KGB’s foreign-operations directorate, whose roster of murderers, torturers, and villains included Vladimir Putin. The KGB’s mission was to do in Poland what it had done in Czechoslovakia in the 1960s—suppress the movement for liberty and sovereignty. The ghost of the KGB is now working toward that end in Ukraine.

  Cold War fantasies such as The Manchurian Candidate imagined it would take some incredible and complicated scheme to put a man willing to do the bidding of the KGB and its analogues and epigones into Washington’s halls of power. In reality, all it took was a man whose values align with those of the KGB rather than with those of the Founding Fathers.

  Gee, I wonder who he's talking about, there at the end?

  (And I admit I had to ask Google what an "epigone" was.)

  Speaking of MAGA Nation, my friends at GraniteGrok posted a review of Trump's recent speech to Congress ("America’s Renewal Shines in Historic Address")

  This was more than just a speech; it was a thunderous declaration of American greatness and a fiery testament to Trump’s undeniable leadership. With unwavering resolve, he proclaimed, “America is back,” revealing a bold and brilliant vision that patriots nationwide erupted in cheers. This marked a renewal of the American Dream, demonstrating that Trump is the only man who can make it a reality.

  Etc. It's the kind of prose that would have Kim Jong Un protesting to his hagiographers: "Don't you find that praise a little too effusive?"

• I can't tell whether Jeff Maurer has a more optimistic take than KDW or Christian. Nevertheless, he thinks There’s an Upside to the Dummies Winning a Few Rounds.

  I don’t love that “use taxpayer money to buy fake trash” is White House policy now. I also think that the proper role for a coked-up 20 year-old is dancing in a go-go cage, not auditing the federal government. Some of my other cranky old man opinions are that it would be easier to access Greenland’s minerals through trade than through an Eric the Red-style conquest, and that “Neville Chamberlain but an asshole” is a bad diplomatic posture. I doubt that many conservatives will disagree with anything I just said, because the main split in American politics these days isn’t liberal/conservative but rather total idiot/not.

  Of course, it doesn’t matter what I think, because I’m not calling the shots. Trump is calling the shots, and he’s removed many of the meddling nerds who thwarted his schemes in his first term. The running gag of the first Trump administration was Trump telling people to do awful things and his subordinates just…not doing them. For example: Remember when Trump told a room full of people to get the Justice Department harass Time Warner, and Gary Cohn walked out of the meeting and told everyone within earshot “don’t you fucking dare” do that? Remember when Mark Esper had to tell Trump that he can’t shoot protesters in the legs? It turns out that the “deep state” was actually just not-crazy people refusing to do crazy stuff.

  But this time around, Trump is free to be his worst self. Even if the courts uphold the law and Trump backs down from his crazier shenanigans, damage has already been done. Programs authorized by Congress have been haphazardly shuttered, alliances have been trashed, and volatility has given investors their twitchiest sphincters in 17 years. IMHO, this is bad — I’m not a person who cheers for total societal breakdown in the hope that my party will summon 56 Senate seats from the ashes. But even so, I can see a small upside to living in an Idiocracy for just a little while.

  Speaking of Idiocracy, there's a pic of Sara Rue in her sexy outfit from that movie at the link, and you don't want to miss that.

• Trump channels Emily Litella. And at Reason, Joe Lancaster takes the Jane Curtin role: No, HHS Didn't Spend $8 Million 'Making Mice Transgender'.

  "Just listen to some of the appalling waste we have already identified," Trump bragged. "$8 million for making mice transgender—this is real."

  Indeed, spending $8 million to make mice transgender would be an appalling waste of tax money, if it were real. Thankfully, it isn't.

  At the time of the speech, some online commenters noted that the program was likely not transgender but transgenic—"an organism or cell whose genome has been altered by the introduction of one or more foreign DNA sequences from another species by artificial means," according to the National Human Genome Research Institute.

  When corrected, Emily at least had the honesty to say "Oh, that's quite different! … Never mind." As Joe details, not the White House.

Jonah Goldberg gives one of those high-placed friends the benefit of the doubt: he's just looking for Peace in His Time.

After his time, however, he doesn't give a rat's ass:

I somehow didn't have "Makes Neville Chamberlain Look Good in Comparison" on my Trump II Bingo Card.

George Will is similarly unimpressed: This is American greatness only if you have a MAGA-nifying glass.

I feel I should apologize to Elvis Costello: I used to be amused, now I'm just disgusted.

Also of note:

• Is "Stop Making Sense" the new Democrat motto? Some days it seems that way. Oh, heck; most days it seems that way. In his article, Democratic Incoherence on Transgender Sports, Noah Rothman examimes the D-side objections to a legislative ban federal funding to schools that put boys on girls' sports teams:

  According to Senator Tammy Baldwin, the legislation was an attack on localism and an overreach by the federal government. “I, for one, trust our states, our leagues, our localities to make these decisions without interference from Congress or the president,” she said.

  Noah remembers just a few months ago when the Biden Administration expanded Title IX to mandate the inclusion of transgender males in women’s athletics. Apparently Senator Tammy does not.

  In fact, isn't Title IX premised on not trusting "states, leagues and localities" to make their own decisions on this?

• Preserving their phony-baloney jobs is, in fact, goal number one. Bryan Caplan explains Why Federal Workers Won’t Quit.

  Being a federal worker has suddenly gotten far less pleasant. Trump keeps erratically lashing out his entire workforce. He’s siccing Elon Musk on them in search of waste and heresy. He’s ordering them to abandon years of hard work.

  Furthermore, in the eyes of most federal workers, Trump is ideologically and personally odious. While I couldn’t find any decent data on federal workers’ Democrat/Republican ratio, federal workers’ campaign contributions skew quite left. Indeed, setting aside the military, federal workers look almost monolithically Democratic:

  [Chart at link]

  Granted, you could argue that a few of Trump’s policies are making federal workers’ lives better. Firing all the DEI workers and ending all the DEI trainings will outrage the far left, but the moderate left will perchance breathe a quiet sigh of relief. But even the most moderate leftist probably hates Trump twice as much as they hate DEI, so on balance it’s safe to say that most federal workers’ job satisfaction is, on balance, taking a big hit.

  Bryan notes that federal workers are "vastly overcompensated" compared to private-sector workers doing similar jobs.

  Disagree? Bryan is willing to bet actual money on this; see his post for details. Are you game?

• When Uncle Stupid starts dropping cash from helicopters, there will be plenty of people out with buckets. Madeleine Rowley notes the latest example of that truism: A $20 Billion Slush Fund—Paid by You to Progressive NGOs.

  The Department of Justice is investigating the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, a $27 billion program that was part of Joe Biden’s $740 billion Inflation Reduction Act. Created in the spring of 2023, and managed by the Environmental Protection Agency, the fund was supposed to be a first-of-its-kind program to address the climate crisis while revitalizing communities that it considered “historically left behind.”

  But it appears little of the $27 billion revitalized anything—except the coffers of a range of environmental nonprofits associated with former Obama and Biden administration officials.

  “The Biden administration used so-called ‘climate equity’ to justify handouts of billions of dollars to their far-left friends,” Lee Zeldin, the Trump administration’s new EPA administrator, told The Free Press. “It is my utmost priority to get a handle on every dollar that went out the door in this scheme and once again restore oversight and accountability over these funds. This rush job operation is riddled with conflicts of interest and corruption.”

  A Free Press investigation reveals that of the $27 billion, $20 billion was rushed out the door to eight nonprofit groups after Kamala Harris lost the election—but before President Donald Trump took office. As one former EPA official put it on a secretly recorded video, it was akin to “tossing gold bars off the Titanic.”

  There will, sadly, be no movie about this starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet; but that's fun to think about.

Recently on the book blog:

The latest exploits of Joe Pickett and his buddy Nate Romanowski. And it's very much a continuation of the events in previous volumes, as the psychopathic Axel Soledad is hatching a nefarious plot involving the mass murder of … well, that would be telling. But Nate, thanks to events in the previous book, has gone even more feral than usual, He's teamed up with Geronimo Jones, who also has an interest in terminating Soledad.

What about Joe? Well, he's tasked with an undercover project by the colorful Wyoming Governor Spencer Rulon; his son-in-law has gone missing, along with seasoned hunting guide Spike Rankin. But we readers know what's going on: they were ambushed by Soledad's gang down at … Battle Mountain!

So: lots of detective work, outdoors scenery lovingly described, occasional intense violence, and some political commentary. Which might not be to everyone's taste. Ending seems a bit rushed, but that's OK.

Jim Geraghty minces no words: We Have Effectively Switched Sides in the Russia-Ukraine War.

It appears Jim's article is outside the paywall. Read the whole thing, and feel ashamed for our country.

Also of note:

• That would be nice. Dominic Pino reports a good policy recommendation coming from an unlikely source: Trump Calls for Repeal of CHIPS Act.

  In his address to the joint session of Congress, President Trump called for the repeal of the CHIPS Act, a bipartisan industrial policy law signed by Biden. “We don’t have to give them money,” he said of semiconductor companies benefiting from the law’s subsidies.

  Trump portrayed it as a Democratic law, saying, “Your CHIPS Act is a horrible, horrible thing,” while gesturing toward the Democrats’ side of the House chamber.

  In his address to the joint session of Congress, President Trump called for the repeal of the CHIPS Act, a bipartisan industrial policy law signed by Biden. “We don’t have to give them money,” he said of semiconductor companies benefiting from the law’s subsidies.

  It is mostly standard-issue corporate welfare, giving gobs of money to politically favored companies such as Intel. Last year, Intel announced it was cutting 15,000 jobs, which was 5,000 more jobs than it said it expected to create with CHIPS Act funding.

  It was horrible. Back when it passed the Senate in 2022, I said it was "a demonstration that nobody learned their lessons about central planning, industrial policy, and corporate welfare."

  As for it being a "Democratic law": 17 GOP senators voted for it, as did 24 GOP CongressCritters.

• But another lousy, or worse, idea is always imminent. Jeff Maurer thinks, correctly, that Trump’s Obviously Corrupt Plan to Use Taxpayer Money to Buy Shitcoins Is the Indefensible Thing That Republicans Must Defend Today. Specifically:

  Jeff's opening paragraphs:

  So: The president wants to spend taxpayer dollars to buy fake non-money that Twitch streamers use to buy drugs. And he’s not limiting the government to the less-laughable cryptocurrencies, like Bitcoin — if Bitcoin is Coca-Cola, Trump wants to also buy Jittery Jimmy’s High-Fructose Fizz Drink. Trump has mused that buying cryptocurrency could get the government out of debt, which sounds like the plan a degenerate gambler makes right before his body turns up in a New Jersey landfill.

  The potential for corruption is off the charts. This plan clearly benefits someone — the value of the cryptocurrencies Trump mentioned spiked after the announcement — but because cryptocurrencies are anonymous, we don’t know who got rich. It could be donors, foreign interests, or Trump family members — the only thing we know is that it was somebody terrible. Plus, someone placed a highly leveraged $200 million purchase right before Trump’s announcement, so there’s probably an old-timey insider trading scam happening alongside this Digital Age scam-of-the-future.

  Unfortunately, that sounds all too likely.

• Let's see what else we can junk. At Reason, Jeff Luse tries to get Elon's attention: Hey DOGE: If You Want To Make Yourself Useful, Kill the Federal Energy Loan Program. Specifically, the Department of Energy's "Loan Programs Office", or LPO:

  The LPO was created in 2005 to finance high-risk, first-of-a-kind cleantech projects. Since its founding, the office has funded $43.9 billion worth of projects. While some of these have included eventual winners like Tesla, the program has mostly been marred by failed projects and wasteful spending—which permeates throughout the LPO today.

  In December 2024, the Energy Department's Inspector General (I.G.) identified several violations of conflicts of interest, which could give applicants an unfair advantage when applying for federal money. The I.G. concluded that the LPO "is administering more than $385 billion in new loan authority" without properly vetting, managing, or tracking conflicts of interest.

  In light of the report, the Energy Department has "paused all new loan actions," Jonathan Black, the agency's chief adviser for oversight, told the House Committee on Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations in February.

  I'd prefer to go for the whole hog, and follow Cato's 1997 recommendation to eliminate the Department of Energy.

• Tanks a lot, Roger. Now Roger Pielke Jr. has me Thinking About Tanks. But he makes a good point first:

  Speaking yesterday on Fox News, U.S. Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick indicated that official data for U.S. GDP would now separate out government spending from the rest of the nation’s overall economic tally.

  “You know that governments historically have messed with GDP. They count government spending as part of GDP. So I’m going to separate those two and make it transparent.”

  Lutnick seems not to be aware that the Bureau of Economic Analysis — which sits in the agency that he leads — already separates out federal spending in its quarterly GDP reports. You can see that in lines 51-57 of Table 3 in BEA’s report on U.S. 4th quarter GDP in 2024, released last week, and shown below highlighted in yellow. Federal spending (annualized) was about $1.9 trillion of the nation’s $29.7 trillion economy.

  It's always seemed a little odd to me that Uncle Stupid's spending on whatever contributes to a measure of the country's economic health. Still, as Roger points out, it's "standard practice". Or as they said in Animal House, it has a long-standing tradition of existence..

• Today's "Unclear on the Concept" Award goes to… Maggie Goodlander, our state's newest CongressCritter. She is quoted at the New Hampshire Bulletin, which asks How has New Hampshire’s congressional delegation responded to Trump’s first month? And she wants you to know this about efforts to cut federal spending:

  “We’re talking about existential threats to federal programs and funding that really can’t be overstated,” Goodlander said. “These are dollars that make our way of life in New Hampshire, the Live Free or Die state, possible.”

  She is, like all Democrats, a fan of (what I've called):

  The DC Shuffle (a periodic observation): (1) take our tax $; (2) send some of it back; (3) act like they've done us a favor.

  — Paul Sand (@punsalad) October 21, 2024

  … But Maggie's claiming this legerdemain is something that makes LFOD possible is … what? Insane? Stupid? Evil? I'm going with "all three".

  (By the way, if you click over to Twitter and ask Grok to explain my post, you will see some incorrect, but amusing, misinformation. I never appeared on "The Mary Tyler Moore Show". Unfortunately.)

In my recent mail:

Essentially: "If you don't send us money, we'll kill this dog."

For those whose memories don't go back that far:

Sure, the tone is different. But the bottom line is…

Sorry, Fido. Welcome to my shredder.

The woman who wrote this article is of course too stupid to understand that its very existence is proof of exactly the kind of anti-white male bias that she’s denying. No mainstream publication would ever in a million years publish an article titled “Can women finally stop… pic.twitter.com/ejFZkLWVW0

— Matt Walsh (@MattWalshBlog) March 2, 2025

Matt's rant in its entirety:

To be fair to the WSJ essay's author, Joanne Lipman, a free link: Can White Men Finally Stop Complaining?. Even her Wikipedia page describes her as "left-wing" (at least it does as I type this). The first few paragraphs should give you the snarky flavor:

More sneering, cherry-picking, and deftly ignoring the actual arguments "white men" are making at the link, of course.

Also of note:

• The Anxious Generation, but with jokes.. I recently finished Jonathan Haidt's The Anxious Generation, report linked below. To lighten the mood from Haidt's gloomy assessment, here's Dave Barry on one recently reported symptom: Telephobia.

  If you, like me, belong to an older generation that is tired of being mocked by younger generations as clueless technology-impaired geezers — an insult that is especially hurtful because it's true — I have some news that might make you feel a little better: A college in England is offering a seminar designed to help Gen Z students overcome their fear of — prepare to be terrified — telephone calls.

  Really. I found out about this from an article on the CNBC website headlined: "Gen Z battling with phone anxiety are taking telephobia courses to learn the lost art of a call."

  That's right: Gen Zers have "telephobia," a fear of making or receiving phone calls, according to Liz Baxter, a careers advisor at Nottingham College. She's quoted as saying that Gen Zers "automatically default to texting, voice notes, and anything except actually using a telephone for its original intended purpose, and so people have lost that skill."

  At this point you older generations are thinking: "Skill? Talking on the phone is a skill? That requires a seminar? What other 'skills' does Gen Z lack? Are they capable of bathing themselves? How about chewing? DO THEY NEED A SEMINAR TO WIPE THEIR BUTTS?"

  Dave is merciful. Eventually.

• With all due respect, let's point out that not very much respect is due. Kevin D. Williamson certainly isn't showing any when he observes the state of The Grand Ol’ Gimmick Party.

  On the subject of cooking up some new budget gimmicks to hide the actual costs of current Republican fiscal incontinence, Sen. Ron Johnson said: “We need to avoid a massive, automatic tax increase,” as the tax cuts in the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act expire. A question for the senator: If it is important to avoid massive automatic tax increases, then why on Earth did you [long baroque string of expletives deleted] idiots write a massive automatic tax increase into the 2017 tax-cut bill? You remember that bill, Sen. Johnson: You voted for it. You lobbied to make it more expensive by changing pass-through rules in a way that benefited you personally and put a little extra change in the pockets of a couple of big donors, too, though I assume you’d have pushed for those changes in any case on the grounds that tax cuts are the Republicans’ version of Democrats’ spending giveaways.

  KDW goes on to note: "When it comes to evading fiscal responsibility, Republicans are a pretty cheap date: They’ll pretty much take whatever is on offer."

  At Cato, Romina Boccia is also contemptuous: With All Eyes on DOGE, Congress Plays Budget Games with America’s Fiscal Future.

  While Americans fixate on Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to rein in wasteful spending, Congress is quietly plotting to make the nation’s fiscal situation worse.

  The House recently passed a budget resolution calling for $4.5 trillion in tax cuts plus $300 billion in new spending over the coming decade—all balanced out with $2 trillion in offsetting spending cuts and about $2.6 trillion in pixie dust from assuming their budget will have economic growth taking off like one of SpaceX’s rockets. (I believe it when I see it.)

  Now the Senate is attempting to rewrite the budget resolution using an accounting gimmick to pretend extending the 2017 tax cuts won’t increase the deficit. Their tactic: switching to a “current policy baseline.” A major reason for this bait-and-switch maneuver is Medicaid, with legislators reluctant to hit the brakes on the federal funding gravy train that pads their own state budgets.

  She's more polite about it than KDW, but equally on target.

• And in our "Things That Won't Happen" Department… J.D. Tuccille has a suggestion: DOGE and Congress should look hard at reforming Social Security.

  The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is off to a decent start in making initial cuts in federal waste and overall cost and—importantly—normalizing the reality that reducing government expenditures is a good thing. But if the DOGE is to live up to its avowed mission of making the bloated federal government even slightly affordable, at some point it's going to have to take on the big dogs of government excess. That requires congressional cooperation, and it means targeting Social Security.

  "The Old-Age and Survivors Insurance (OASI) Trust Fund will be able to pay 100 percent of total scheduled benefits until 2033, unchanged from last year's report," the Social Security trustees revealed in the most recent annual report. "At that time, the fund's reserves will become depleted and continuing program income will be sufficient to pay 79 percent of scheduled benefits."

  J.D. has some good ideas. And he's fortunate that he's not a politician. Because if he were, his opponents in the next election will have already composed their ads showing him pushing grandma off a cliff in her wheelchair.

• An anniversary is coming up. And Phil Magness gives us reasons to not celebrate: Locking Down American Liberty. He notes that pre-COVID, and even in COVID's early days, the scientific consensus was that lockdowns were ineffective. Even Fauci agreed with this. But:

  In just six weeks’ time, nearly the entirety of the US public health profession, including Fauci, would jettison the previous century of scientific literature attesting to the ineffectiveness of lockdowns. Instead, they rushed to embrace the previously-deprecated approach of simulation modeling, and used it to place the majority of the world under mandatory quarantine. Five years later, we still have no clear answers for why this sudden, sharp reversal happened, let alone accountability for the public health officials who made the call to change course.

  If any single event warrants credit for swaying the public health profession over to lockdowns, it is the publication of Report No. 9 by the epidemiology modeling team at Imperial College-London on March 16, 2020. The brainchild of Neil Ferguson, a computer scientist and physicist with no medical training, the Imperial College model forecasted catastrophic mortality figures in the coming months if the world’s leading economies did not go into immediate lockdown to contain Covid-19. The initial models projected 510,000 deaths in the UK and 2.2 million deaths in the United States by late July 2020 unless each country adopted a suite of NPI measures to shutter businesses and schools and restrict public gatherings. Ten days later, Ferguson’s team expanded their model to approximately 189 countries and other defined political boundaries. The expanded Imperial College report predicted similar levels of catastrophic death in almost every nation on earth, absent immediate measures to impose society-wide lockdowns.

  I'm not sure what the lesson is here. Simply because they were disastrously wrong last time doesn't mean they'll be wrong the next time. But, for better or worse, the credibility of "experts" and "science" has taken a huge hit.

• Fun Fact from Ann Althouse. She was alerted by a sentence in the Best Actress acceptance speech at the Oscars on Sunday; Anora's Mikey Madison: "I also, again, just want to recognize and honor the sex worker community." But she somehow dug out this piece of trivia:

  Mikey Madison becomes the 10th woman to win an Oscar for playing a prostitute — 12th if you count Donna Reed in "From Here to Eternity" and Jo Van Fleet in "East of Eden." And Madison is the first to win an Oscar for playing a prostitute since the #MeToo movement shook Hollywood to its nonexistent core.

  What's the significance of prostitutes being so hyper-represented in Oscar actress honors? What does it say about how these people think?

  Has anyone studied if there is an equivalent job for Best Actor? Going back over the last 10 awards we have: Architect, Physicist, Teacher, Pushy Father, Demented Father, Psycho Villain, Gay Singer, Prime Minister, Janitor, and Fur Trapper.

  I'm not seeing a trend there. And no prostitutes at all.

Recently on the book blog:

Probably not the wisest library pick for me. The author, Jonathan Haidt, provides a lot of recommendations for (1) parents of younger children and (2) political activists. I am currently neither.

What's left (however) is Haidt's documentation of today's troubled youth, caught in a double whammy of (1) mental illness, caused by overuse of smartphones and social media; and (2) under-exposure to real-world interactive "play". (I've noticed that most discussions of the book seem to center on whammy #1.)

Discussion and updates on these topics are, for now, being continued on Haidt's substack, After Babel and the book-specific website.

Haidt is a research psychologist, and I've read and enjoyed his past books: The Happiness Hypothesis; The Righteous Mind; and (best of all) The Coddling of the American Mind, co-written with Greg Lukianoff. Over the years, Haidt has earned numerous glowing citations on my blog, mostly thanks to his criticisms of campus censorship.

Haidt's recommendations (both in this book and various published articles) about regulating social media (because of, but not limited to, its effects on kiddos) have drawn some libertarian pushback; see, for example, Aaron Brown at Reason, who claims "Jonathan Haidt's Anti-Social Media Crusade [is] Marred By Bad Science". Or George Will at the WaPo: Fighting the phone-warping of Gen Z doesn’t require government intrusion. Or his erstwhile co-author, Greg Lukianoff, on his substack: "My First Amendment concerns with ‘The Anxious Generation’". (Greg calls The Anxious Generation "an excellent and important book", but…)

I tend to side with the libertarian critiques, and I confess being undecided on the "bad science" assertion leveled by Aaron Brown. There are a lot of studies, graphs, and citations in Haidt's book, and (sorry) I don't have an aching desire to track down every one. Or any one, for that matter.

I don't have to tell you, but will anyway: If you're interested in the topic, check out the book, and its responses. And make up your own mind, if you can.

Veronique de Rugy asks our Relevant Question du Jour. How would Milton Friedman do DOGE?. (See today's headline for the answer.)

Vero worries that DOGE has a distracting motive of "rooting out leftist culture politics". While that's all in good fun, pwning the progs, it should be at most a side effect in working toward the main downsizing goal.

But probably more important is the method: using raw "unitary" executive power, in Constitutionally dubious ways, to blow up departments and agencies Congress has authorized. Many of those efforts won't survive legal challenges, and will turn out to have been a waste of time.

And the cuts that do survive legal challenge can, and will, easily be undone by the next Democrat in the White House. And that Democrat will gleefully use whatever powers Trump/Musk have arrogated to the Executive Branch to expand state power.

(And I hear you progressives out there laughing: "You say that like it's a bad thing!")

Also of note:

• Are you now, or have you ever been… We've been seeing it a lot lately: one set of partisans eagerly using tactics they once deplored when the other side used them. Jonathan Turley highlights another example: “Which Country is he Loyal to?”: Democrats Go Full McCarthy in Attacks on Musk.

  This month, 75 years ago, Sen. Joe McCarthy (R-Wisc.) gave his infamous speech denouncing disloyal Americans working at the highest levels of our government. It was the defining moment for what became known as McCarthyism, which attacked citizens as dangerous and disloyal influences in government.

  Some of us have criticized the rising “rage rhetoric” for years, including that of President Trump and Democratic leaders, denouncing opponents as traitors and enemies of the state.

  In the 2024 election, the traditional red state-blue state firewalls again collapsed, as they had in 2016. The response among Democrats has been to unleash a type of new Red Scare, questioning the loyalty of those who are supporting or working with the Trump administration in carrying out his promised reforms.

  Elon Musk is the designated disloyal American for many on the left. That rage has reached virtual hysteria on ABC’s “The View.” This is the same show before the election on which hosts warned that, if Trump were elected, journalists and homosexuals would be rounded up and “disappeared.”

  Click through and read on for the funny bit: apparently ABC has its lawyers watching "The View" in real time, in order to notify the show's harridans that they need to quickly walk back any assertions that might cause legal problems for the network.

• Promise kept. Katherine Mangu-Ward's lead editorial in April's print Reason is out from behind the paywall, and she reveals The Case Against Ross Ulbricht Was About Government Power.

  "I've had my youth, and I know you must take away my middle years, but please leave me my old age. Please leave a small light at the end of the tunnel." In 2015, with his sentencing hearing looming, Ross Ulbricht begged for a glimmer of hope. Today, at age 40, he is free.

  On January 21, one day into his second term, President Donald Trump granted a full pardon to Ulbricht, the founder of the Silk Road online marketplace. He was 11 years into a double life sentence without the possibility of parole after being convicted on charges connected to commerce on the dark web platform, including drug trafficking, computer hacking, and money laundering. Notably, he was not convicted of actually selling drugs himself.

  By punishing Ulbricht as if he personally distributed narcotics, the government set a dangerous precedent for internet platforms and personal liability in the digital age. Pressure to hold platform operators liable for everything from misinformation to sex work has grown in the past decade as Ulbricht and his supporters—especially those in the libertarian and cryptocurrency communities—fought for his freedom. Ulbricht has long served as a warning, a caged canary in the coal mine.

  KMW notes that serious charges about attempting to murder witnesses against Ulbricht were filed, they were quietly dropped after his conviction on lesser, non-violent charges.

  So Trump did a good thing. But…

• Let's not forget Trump's a lying coward. Steve Hayes has a take on that Oval Office meeting: Zelensky Never Had a Chance.

  When Volodomyr Zelensky arrived at the White House for his high-stakes meeting Friday, Donald Trump offered a sarcastic welcome. “How are you? You’re all dressed up today,” Trump said. “How are you, Mr. President?” Zelensky responded. Trump turned to the cameras. “He’s all dressed up today,” he said, with a wry smile, before leading Zelensky into the Oval Office. 

  Nineteen minutes into the meeting, after mostly pleasant statements from the two leaders, Brian Glenn, a reporter with the Trump-boosting Real America’s Voice cable network, who is also Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s boyfriend, attacked Zelensky for his attire.

  “Why don’t you wear a suit?” Glenn asked. “You’re at the highest level in this country’s office, and you refuse to wear a suit.”

  Vice President J.D. Vance, sitting a few feet from Zelensky, laughed at the question and smiled broadly as Glenn continued to berate the Ukrainian leader. “Do you own a suit?” he continued. “A lot of Americans have problems with you not respecting the dignity of this office.”

  […]

  A White House offended by his clothing is a White House looking to be offended. (Zelensky, who has consistently worn military garb at meetings with world leaders and even while addressing the United Nations over the past three years, says he dresses the way he does in solidarity with the soldiers fighting on behalf of his country.)

  Shortly after Vance laughed along at the dressing down of Zelensky, the vice president indignantly accused the Ukrainian leader of ingratitude. “Have you said thank you once in this entire meeting?” In fact, Zelensky hadn’t said thank you once—he’d said it three times. But Vance missed these expressions of gratitude because he wasn’t expecting to hear them. It was a classic case of selective perception and motivated reasoning—consuming information in a way that aligns with your preconceptions—and it arose again and again throughout the meeting. 

  If Zelensky is to be faulted, it's that he failed to handle this obvious bad-faith setup.

• Worried that Auric Goldfinger snuck in? Axios has an informative article involving the latest lunatic conspiracy theory: What to know about Fort Knox's gold depository that Musk wants audited. Many fun facts, including:

  The fortified vaults have been the subject of swirling skepticism and shrouded by secrecy for decades. No visitors are permitted in the facility, and its doors have only opened to unauthorized personnel a handful of times.

  • This week, Trump and Elon Musk, who oversees the administration's unofficial Department of Government Efficiency, seemed to lean into long-held conspiracy theories about whether the government was being truthful about the amount of gold in the vault.
  • "All the gold is present and accounted for," Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told talk show host Dan O'Donnell in an exclusive interview Wednesday, emphasizing that an audit is conducted every year (though it's often said a full audit has not been done in decades).

  Fort Knox's dirty origin story: it was constructed to hold the gold that FDR executive-ordered private citizens to surrender to the government (at a government-set price). Arguably more dictatorial than anything Trump has done. Or (I hope) has even contemplated doing.

Recently on the book blog:

I'm hooked on Kate Atkinson's sleuth series featuring Jackson Brodie; this is number six. (My reports here, here, here, here, and here.) I think it's safe to say this book differs somewhat from previous entries, which were occasionally funny, but mostly grim. This one is pretty hilarious in spots, and the grimness is turned down quite a bit. The word "farce" appears a couple times in the text, and that's kind of appropriate.

A brief opening scene teases the "Murder Mystery Weekend" held in "Burton Makepeace", a decrepit English manor house; think "Downton Abbey", where things have gone to seed in the modern age. Brodie's there with his unwilling partner from a previous book, Reggie. But why?

Flash back a bit: Private eye Brodie is hired to track down a stolen painting, a portrait of a lady with a pine marten on her lap. (Brodie thinks of it as "Woman With Weasel".) This was apparently an occasional theme in Renaissance art; you can look up Leonardo's Lady with an Ermine, for one example. It turns out the most likely theft suspect is a mysterious servant who disappeared along with the painting. And it also turns out there have been similar-MO thefts over the years.

There are multiple POVs, as usual with Atkinson; there's a village vicar who's lost his voice. And a veteran who's lost his leg. They all find their way to the manor in the middle of a nasty blizzard, and get caught up with the ramshackle "murder mystery" play being put on by an indifferent bunch of actors. And there's an actual murder victim along the way.

At more than a few spots in the book, Atkinson's colorful prose put me in mind of good old Raymond Chandler; would it be totally crazy for the Chandler estate to commission Kate to write a Philip Marlowe mystery? Then on the back cover I read a blurb from the WaPo, referring to a previous book as "Raymond Chandler meets Jane Austen", so I guess not totally crazy.

Well, not me. At least I hope not. But I was reminded of the good old days when conservatives and libertarians pointed with scorn to the rabble-rousing tactics summed up in "Rules for Radicals", promulgated by Saul Alinsky. Specifically, Number 13:

"Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it."

We used to think we were above that sort of thing, didn't we?

Nevertheless, we've seen that rule work out in the past few days, where the "target" is the hapless Volodymyr Zelenskyy, and the ones doing the picking, freezing, personalizing, and polarizing are President Trump, VP Vance, and on down to their ever-reliable cheerleaders.

For example, CNN pundit Scott Jennings, usually someone I like, didn't even pretend there may have been bigger issues at stake than Zelenskyy's wardrobe and lack of obsequiousness. As quoted approvingly at Hot Air:

And at that Oval Office meeting J.D. Vance revealed that Zelenskyy's months-ago visit revealed unacceptable disloyalty (as quoted in the WSJ).

It was actually September. And any "campaigning" escaped the notice of contemporaneous news stories.

Bret Stephens has it right, I think. It was A Day of American Infamy. He compares and contrasts with the birth of the Atlantic Charter, a statement from August 1941, negotiated between FDR and Churchill.

To continue the analogy, it would be like the pundits of the day attempting to derail the US/UK alliance by complaining about Churchill's obesity and cigar habit.

Can we just take a step back and consider that we might be talking about the fate of Europe and (eventually) America? Zelenskyy's wardrobe just might be a little less important than that.

Also of note:

• 

  That would be a good idea. I'm currently reading Douglas Murray's The War on the West, which details … well, it's right there in the title, isn't it. Report on it soon. George Will's column makes a good accompaniment: Urgently needed: A reborn patriotic belief in Western virtues. He is plugging a different book

  From an unlikely place — the upper reaches of the technology industry — comes an unexpected summons to an invigorated patriotism. The summons will discomfit progressives by requiring seriousness about the nation’s inadequate defenses, which endanger peace immediately and national survival ultimately. Conservatives will flinch from the new — actually, a recovered — patriotism that calls them up from an exclusively market-focused individualism, to collaboration between public and private sectors in great collective undertakings.

  In "The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West,” Alexander C. Karp, CEO of the software firm Palantir, with co-author Nicholas W. Zamiska, connects the ascent of Silicon Valley and the decline of the nation’s cultural confidence. The former is a symptom of the latter. Karp thinks “the loss of national ambition,” which produced the atomic bomb and the internet, is today manifest in Silicon Valley’s devoting mountains of cash and legions of engineers to “chasing trivial consumer products.” (Disclosure: The columnist’s son David Will is a lawyer at Palantir.)

  I've submitted one of my rare requests to the Portsmouth (NH) Public Library to get this book.

• I won't watch the Oscars just to see if they take Kat Rosenfield's advice. Nevertheless, it's good advice: Make Actors Apolitical Again.

  If I have to listen to an actor talk about politics, let that actor be Gabriel Basso.

  You might know Basso from his breakout role in Netflix’s hit series The Night Agent, in which he stars as an FBI agent who works in a secret basement office beneath the White House. But Basso has another White House connection. In 2020, he played J.D. Vance in the big-screen adaptation of Hillbilly Elegy, which was based on the vice president’s memoir about his childhood in Appalachia—which means we now live in a world where the vice president could be Netflix-and-chilling in the White House, watching the man who once played his own younger self doing espionage in the basement of the building he’s sitting in.

  In a recent interview, Basso called his entanglement with Vance’s timeline “kind of weird,” which it is—but what’s weirder is that Basso describes Vance himself as “a cool dude,” as if he’s talking about some guy in his Wednesday night bowling league as opposed to one of the most powerful and polarizing political figures in the United States.

  This type of comment is typical for Basso, who doesn’t believe actors should embroil themselves in politics. “We’re saying words that we’re told to say. We’re told how to say them. We’re told where to stand. And then we’re telling people how to vote?” he said on a recent episode of the Great Company podcast. “You should be quiet; you should do your job. You should be a jester, entertain people—then shut the fuck up.”

  I have seen zero of the nominees for Best Picture, although I might check out A Complete Unknown when/if it comes to one of my sreaming services.

• Finally. I've been a tireless advocate for the "Crackpot Idea That Will Save, Or Destroy, Humanity" Artificial Photosynthesis. Now I see an encouraging sign, described at Liberty Unyielding: Scientists build a CO2-eating machine that runs on sunlight.

  “Scientists at the University of Cambridge have developed a solar-powered reactor that captures carbon dioxide directly from the air and converts it into sustainable fuel using sunlight,” reports SciTechDaily:

  As I pointed out in a comment: We've had "CO2-eating machines that run on sunlight" for a while now. Like 3.5 billion years; they are called "plants".

  It might be hype, so skepticism is warranted.

  But what's that about destroying humanity? Well follow the link to my discussion.

  But what's that about destroying humanity? Please follow the link to my discussion.

I started following (without subscribing) to Jen Rubin's "Contrarian" substack back in mid-January. As I said then: "For as long as I can stand it."

Four days after that, I said I was "waiting patiently for the Contrarian to be anything other than partisan dreck".

And five days after that, Jen offered Nina Jankowicz, Joe Biden's wannabe disinformation cop, a platform for trashing Trump's Executive Order "Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship".

And a couple weeks later, Jen gave Shalise Manza Young room to vent on Trump's "bigotry" in his EO restricting girls' and womens' sports to… um, girls and women. (Um, Shalise, you misspelled "biology".)

And yesterday we were furnished with Jen's paean to "a remarkable figure who stands up in defense of democracy, American leadership in the world, the rule of law, and truth." And that person is … (drumroll please) … Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. And it is, indeed, a tongue-bath of an article:

Absent from the article is any mention, let alone criticism, of AOC's demagoguery, or her steadfast advocacy of socialism.

Well, you get the picture. Jen's substack is not so much "contrarian" as it is kneejerk, hyperbolic Trump hatred combined with obsequious praise for any and all partisan hacks on the D-side.

So I'm unfollowing the "Contrarian". Anyone have recommendations for actual contrarians to follow?

But I did want to comment further on another bit of Jen's AOC sycophancy:

Well, geez. This should not be an issue. Just yesterday, I quoted a recent report from the Government Accounting Office, which claimed at least $150 billion per year in improper payments from Uncle Stupid to … well, anyone willing to accept an improper payment. Specifically, the GAO's full report estimated Medicaid improper payments in FY2024 of $31 billion. (Much much more at the link.)

Some other Medicaid commentary I've collected:

• From the WSJ editorialists, who wonder Who’s Afraid of Medicaid Reform? The answer turns out to be GOP cowards:

  As Republicans try to move their budget through Congress, Democrats and their loyal media allies have found what they think is the GOP’s Achilles’ heel: Medicaid “cuts.” The GOP passed their budget resolution Tuesday, but they risk losing in the end because so far they aren’t even trying to fight back. Yet the Medicaid program has exploded far beyond its design and is in great need of reform.

  Keep in mind that Medicaid was established to help the needy—poor children, pregnant women, the elderly and disabled. Democrats have since expanded it by degrees into a far broader entitlement for able-bodied, working-age adults with lower incomes.

  No surprise, Medicaid spending is out-pacing even Social Security and Medicare. Federal Medicaid outlays have increased 207% since 2008 and 51% since 2019. Medicaid spending as a share of federal outlays rose to 10% from 7% between 2007 and 2023, while the share of Social Security and Medicare remained stable.

  Note that 2019 pre-COVID date. That GAO report linked above notes that there was a pandemic-loosening of Medicaid eligibility rules, but that was supposed to be "ended effective March 2023." Yet the process is "still ongoing as of January 2025." Speedy they ain't when it comes to saving taxpayer money. In addition:

  Mr. Biden’s HHS even blessed California’s plan to spend federal Medicaid dollars on “activity stipends” for art and music lessons for children and club sports. Oregon is tapping Medicaid to pay for cooking classes, air conditioners and mini-refrigerators. Some Republican states have joined this all-you-can-spend Medicaid buffet.

• At the NYPost, Jessica Reidl says: Yes, we have to cut Medicaid — it’s grown out of control. Ya think?

  Democrats are attacking the House Republican budget, saying that the $1.2 trillion of savings it calls for will “gut” social services. In particular, they call out the proposal to save $880 billion over 10 years from Medicaid.

  But these savings reforms need not “gut” Medicaid, In fact, well-designed reforms may finally restore some fiscal common sense to the health-care program.

  Republicans should own this proposal, and confidently assert that Medicaid’s waste, fraud, and poor accounting practices absolutely provide room for savings without harming the most vulnerable.

  After all, since 2013, the number of Americans living in poverty has fallen by by 10 million. Yet during that time Medicaid’s monthly enrollment has leaped from 54 million to 79 million, and its inflation-adjusted federal cost has nearly doubled from $351 billion to $643 billion. Opportunities for savings certainly exist.

  If there's no way Republicans can put forth this case to the people effectively, then we really are screwed.

• And for a local heads-up, here's Drew Cline at the Josiah Bartlett Center who's noticing that The Medicaid alarm is ringing.

  Medicaid now consumes 29.6% of New Hampshire spending, according to the National Association of State Budget Officers. That’s 10 percentage points higher than K-12 education spending (19.6%).

  Despite having the lowest poverty rate in the nation, New Hampshire devotes a higher share of its state spending to Medicaid than all other New England states except Maine. To the extent that Medicaid funds health insurance coverage for able-bodied adults who could purchase insurance on the private market or obtain it from an employer, these are wasted dollars that could fund other state priorities or be returned to taxpayers.

  None of this is remotely sustainable. Hack away, and ignore Jen Rubin and her new BFF, AOC.

Also of note:

• Apparently he didn't get the memo. We alluded above to the one of the Executive Orders Trump issued on Inauguration Day: Restoring Freedom Of Speech And Ending Federal Censorship. Very forthright, very important. And yet, Reason's Joe Lancaster reports: FCC Chair Brendan Carr wants more control over social media.

  In his short time as chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), Brendan Carr has been no stranger to using his power against disfavored entities. The chairman's targets have primarily included broadcast networks and social media companies.

  Recently, Carr revealed a fundamental misunderstanding about one of the most important laws governing the internet and social media.

  On February 27, digital news outlet Semafor held a summit in Washington, D.C., titled "Innovating to Restore Trust in News," which culminated in a conversation between Semafor editor-in-chief Ben Smith and Carr.

  "The social media companies got more power over more speech than any institution in history" in recent years, Carr told Smith. "And I think they're abusing that power. I think it's appropriate for the FCC to say, let's take another look at Section 230."

  Just a reminder: we should just Abolish the FCC. Established to allocate "scarce" slices of the electromagnetic spectrum, it's gotten way too big for its regulatory britches.

• Mini-review: Bill Clinton continues to lie. Nobody cares. Except Jim Geraghty, who reviews Bubba's recent ass-covering book in print National Review: Bill Clinton Whines into the Sunset.

  The former president released his second memoir, Citizen: My Life After the White House, last November. You probably didn’t hear a lot about it; Donald Trump had just won his second term, and the Clinton presidency, his post-presidential scandals, and even Hillary Clinton feel like ancient history now. It was startling to see Clinton, the country’s perpetual kid brother of a president, looking so pale and old, and sounding so hoarse, at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago last summer.

  You can find some mainstream media reviewers straining to say nice things about the 464-page tome (with index). The ugly truth is that Citizen is a long, dragging, meandering series of humble-bragging stories that not so subtly reveal that Clinton, arguably one of the luckiest men who ever lived, is still soaked through to the bone in self-pity and sees himself as an always well-meaning, noble, blameless, unjustly demonized perpetual victim of that notorious “vast right-wing conspiracy.”

  By page 4, Clinton is already lamenting his high legal bills on leaving office and declaring, “I had to start making money, something that had never interested me before.” (Isn’t it amazing how often fabulously wealthy people insist they’ve never had an interest in making money? It may be genetic; Chelsea Clinton once told a reporter, “I was curious if I could care about [money] on some fundamental level, and I couldn’t.” At the time, she was making $600,000 a year doing part-time work as a nearly no-show NBC News correspondent.)

  I almost inserted an Amazon paid link for the book here, but … nah. Anyone reading Jim's review (and that's a "gifted" link, by the way, number one for this month) will wisely save their money.

• What is that "something"? The answer may surprise you! Annie Duke has some good news in the WaPo: Finally, something is puncturing conspiracy theories. (Another free link.)

  In a pair of studies involving more than 2,000 participants, the researchers found a 20 percent reduction in belief in conspiracy theories after participants interacted with a powerful, flexible, personalized GPT-4 Turbo conversation partner. The researchers trained the AI to try to persuade the participants to reduce their belief in conspiracies by refuting the specific evidence the participants provided to support their favored conspiracy theory.

  My observations: (1) 20% reduction is pretty far from a panacea. (2) One of the debunked conspiracies is COVID-related, but apparently not the lab leak. That one's not just for conspiracists any more!

• Yascha Mounk sees a conspiracy, though. And he's usually so mild-mannered! But he goes all libertarian on us when he talks about The Never-Ending American Eye Exam Racket.

  In every other country in which I’ve lived—Germany and Britain, France and Italy—it is far easier to buy glasses and contact lenses than it is in the United States. Like in Peru, you can simply walk into an optical store and ask an employee to give you an eye test, likely free of charge. If you already know your strength, you can just tell them what you want. You may even be able to buy contact lenses from the closest drugstore without having to talk to a single soul—no doctor’s prescription necessary.

  So why does the United States require people who want to purchase something as simple as a pair of glasses to get a costly prescription?

  The answer may surpr—OK, it probably won't surprise you. There is no good reason to require a prescription for a pair of glasses.

  I write this having just gone through the optometrist/eye exam/glasses pipeline. The folks at Dover NH's "MyEyeDr" were very pleasant, efficient, and professional. And I tried not to think too hard about how I was being ripped off.