Pun Salad

Everyone remembers that old Blood, Sweat and Tears song, right? Maybe we could implore David Clayton-Thomas to write a new verse about…

Nah, I guess not. Robby Soave dredges up some dreadful history of only a few years back: Fed governor Lisa Cook's record is a reminder of 2020's social justice insanity. Robby links to last year's allegations in City Journal of Lisa's academic sloppiness (to put it charitably). Also:

Yeah, it was a nutty time. Lisa tweeted stuff like this:

I agree with Angela Merkel and @FrankSchlibach that free speech has its limits. It should not be used to spread hatred and violate the dignity of other people. This is how you, Dr. Uhlig, used your words and your power – to spread hate. 8/Nhttps://t.co/PwB72sYLs6

— Dr. Lisa D. Cook (@drlisadcook) June 14, 2020

I.e., asserting a "hate speech" exception to the First Amendment. (And it's pretty clear that whatever Uhlig may have said, blogged, or tweeted didn't even meet loose standards of "hate speech".)

But, speaking of the Constitution, there's a small debate over at National Review about a different, non-First Amendment issue. Charles C.W. Cooke explains: Why I Said the Federal Reserve Is Unconstitutional. You'll want to click over for the full debate between Charlie and Dominic Pino, but Charlie brings out one big gun, James Madison, in a famous 1791 speech in Congress:

It should be noted that Charlie considers the Fed "to be a useful institution". The same can't be said of Reason's Brian Doherty, who contributed to their December 2024 "Abolish Everything" issue: Abolish the Fed.

If it was good enough for Milton, it's good enough for me. And you have to admit, it would obviate every single one of the issues we've been discussing here.

Also of note:

• At least she didn't call for liquidation of the kulaks as a class. I noticed, but didn't blog about, a Concord Monitor op-ed written my one Jean Lewandowski earlier this month, which urged Granite Staters to Root out invasive extremists. Her opening paragraph sets the tone:

  New Hampshire gardeners and outdoor enthusiasts are familiar with highly invasive vines like knotweed and bittersweet. They climb all over power poles and fences, smothering and killing trees and shrubs. These invaders are very much like the plague of outside money and anti-democratic ideology that came to New Hampshire 20 years ago as the Free State Project. It has entwined itself around what once was our Grand Old Party and made alarming progress in pulling down our cherished public institutions.

  Yes, the dreaded Free State Project, part of the grand libertarian conspiracy to take over the world and leave you alone.

  (For the record: I've lived in New Hampshire since 1981, well before Jason Sorens launched the Free State Project in 2001. I'm not sure whether that would be enough for Jean to not consider me to be an invasive weed.)

  But, somewhat to my surprise, the Concord Monitor printed a rebuttal to Jean's screed from the FSP's current Executive Director, Eric Brakey. Eric asks, reasonably enough: Whose ideas are truly “invasive” in the Live Free or Die state?

  Recently in the Concord Monitor, an opinion piece described fellow citizens as “invasive” weeds — but who better fits the bill?

  Picture a veteran who moved to New Hampshire for the “Live Free or Die” spirit. He embraces the 1776 ideals that once animated America and still drive the Granite State. Known as a good neighbor, his community has elected him multiple times to the legislature to protect their freedoms, their paychecks and the New Hampshire Advantage.

  This describes many legislators, but I am thinking of Rep. Tom Mannion (R-Pelham). After serving honorably in the U.S. Marine Corps, Tom left Massachusetts, where the New England spirit of 1776 has been smothered by a one-party nanny state. Figures like Sen. Elizabeth Warren, sneering schoolmarms of the modern era, treat constituents like dependent children, not free adults. Tom came to New Hampshire, where that revolutionary spirit still thrives.

  Now consider Jean Lewandowski. Her columns generally push leftist causes — from gun control to Russiagate — but in her latest piece, she branded good people, like Rep. Mannion, “invasive” weeds to be “rooted out.” Whatever you think of her dehumanizing language against “Free Staters,” Lewandowski’s hypocrisy is glaring when you learn she was born in California, worked in Minnesota, and has only lived in New Hampshire for a decade.

  Beyond details of who's-lived-here-longest, Eric rebuts Jean's article point by point, and it's a textbook example of how to go about that kind of thing.

• And finally, a helpful reminder: don't give Wikipedia a dime. I winced at the seeming redundancy in the headline of Bethany Mandel's NYPost column: Wikipedia bias influences how one's perception of reality is perceived. But things pick up from there:

  This week, I had two separate meetings with people I’d never met before.

  In both, after the polite small talk, each confessed that before sitting down with me they had quickly “studied up” by glancing at my Wikipedia page.

  (Note to readers: Please don’t do the same.)

  My Wikipedia entry is not a neutral profile — it’s a hit job.

  It’s a curated “greatest hits” collection of my worst moments, or more precisely my critics’ worst caricatures of me.

  Note that the link above does not go to Bethany's Wikipedia page. Yes, it's that way in the column.

  If you want to check out Wikipedia's "hit job" (against Bethany's advice) that's here. She's not wrong, it's an unbalanced screed.

We will classify Eric Boehm's headline as "better than none": Federal Appeals Court Says Trump's Tariffs Are Unlawful, Allows Them To Remain in Place.

At the Volokh Conspiracy one of the winning litigants, Ilya Somin, writes about the legalisms: Federal Circuit Rules Against Trump's Massive IEEPA Tariffs in Our Case Challenging Them. The majority opinion is extensively quoted, and this is also interesting:

So, I am not a lawyer, but I will summarize anyway: (1) IEEPA's text does not authorize the President to impose tariffs; (2) there's no evidence that Congress even intended to do that; and (3) even if they intended to do that, it would be an unconstitutional delegation of legislative power to the executive.

Does Trump think that he could (for example) decree different income tax rates?

Also of note:

• Nothing new to say about this. But John R. Lott Jr. and Thomas Massie say something anyway: the Minneapolis atrocity was Another Mass Shooting in a ‘Gun-Free Zone’. (WSJ gifted link)

  Another mass shooter has struck and the media is again refusing to say why he chose his target. Like other killers, he openly admitted that he sought out “gun-free zones.” Yet mainstream outlets refuse to acknowledge it—and thereby ignore a policy solution that could save children’s lives.

  That would interfere with their virtue-signalling narrative.

• Big, if true. Neal B. Freeman asserts Social Security Is No Longer the Third Rail of American Politics.

  We need a new metaphor. We have moved beyond “the third rail.” Given the history of democratic governance, we can predict with confidence that we will not soon see a deliberative process in which the facts are assembled carefully and then assessed soberly by men and women of sagacity and goodwill, after which we will unite behind a disciplined and durable solution to the nation’s retirement crisis. It seems much more likely that a raucous and tendentious scramble will now ensue, producing a last-minute, jerry-built compromise between two of the most powerful of America’s many warring tribes — the political tribe and the financial tribe. It seems more likely, that is to say, that our societal elders will stage a shotgun wedding, hustling an annoyed and anxious bride into holy matrimony (!) with a deeply disappointed bridegroom.

  It would have been a long and expensive transition to personal accounts even back in 1996. Today, it will be hellaciously expensive. But it will not be impossible of achievement if we can get ourselves to the right side of those “glacial forces” of demography.

  I like the "shotgun wedding" metaphor, although I'd guess they'd have to abide by those worse-than-worthless "gun-free zone" laws that Lott and Massie mention.

• Everyone she knew, running scared. Megan McArdle holds two thoughts in her mind: Some mortgage fraud is inevitable. But Lisa Cook needs to come clean. She is a fan of Fed "independence", and worries that the case will erode that.

  But now that [Federal Housing Finance Agency director Bill Pulte has decided to pursue this], can we afford to say, “Well, occupancy fraud is really not a big deal, it happens all the time, and, realistically, almost no one is ever punished”? Because that’s a good way to ensure that occupancy fraud really does happen all the time, or at least more of the time, forcing banks to do whatever the banking equivalent is of putting the Target deodorant aisle on lockdown. And I don’t love that solution, either.

  So unless Cook explains why this really wasn’t occupancy fraud, we’re left with two unpalatable choices: letting a public official get away with something the system can’t afford to publicly condone, or letting Trump get away with something that no one can afford to publicly condone.

  The only way out of that conundrum is for Cook to tell us why what looks like occupancy fraud was actually no such thing. So I sure hope she does, and soon.

  Cool. Not that it matters, but I also kind of hope this issue knocks Ken Paxton out of public life.

Recently on the book blog:

Getting pretty close to the end of my "read/reread Ian Fleming's Bond books" project. Note: I read the recently "censored" version, that (I assume) removed the racial stereotyping, probably about the Japanese, in the original.

I'll try to keep things spoiler-free: As the book opens, Bond's become a bumbling incompetent, thanks to trauma experienced at the end of the previous volume, On Her Majesty's Secret Service. His boss, M, decides to give him One Last Chance, sending him on a mission to Japan. The odds of success are slim: it involves persuading his Japanese counterpart, Tiger Tanaka, to provide Britain access to a device that will decode Soviet encrypted traffic. In turn, Tanaka makes his own deal with Bond: there's a death-dealing madman on a remote island fortress that needs to be eliminated. Do that, Bondo-san, and the magic decoder ring is yours! But this mission seems even more impossible than the original task.

The book takes a real long time getting to the action. But the climax is pretty slam-bang, marred only by the villain's lengthy monologuing to Bond. Instead of just shooting him in the head. (I believe this was ably satirized in Mike Myers' Austin Powers movies.) And the ending is kind of a setup for the next book.

Jeff Maurer announces his own ideological transformation: Trump Held a TV Meeting to Show How Government Works and Now I’m an Anarchist.

I missed it, but I probably wouldn't have been able to watch for more than a few seconds. Blood pressure, gotta keep an eye on it.

The Eye Candy/Amazon Product du Jour above popped up when I searched for "Anarchist Sign". I'm pretty sure it qualifies by demanding "Hands Off! … Our Wallets".

Back in the heady Tea Party days, people made fun of the guy who demanded that his CongressCritter “keep your government hands off my Medicare." It's fair to say that sign raises the bar quite a bit from there.

Also of note:

• Speaking of the Tea Party. Kevin D. Williamson looks back at the 2008 progenitor of Trump's Intel deal: It’s a TARP!

  You’ll remember TARP–the Troubled Asset Relief Program—and the bailouts that were executed during the 2008-09 financial crisis. I don’t think anybody remembers that time fondly except for me and other journalists who had the daily pleasure of writing about it. Bad times, great story.

  I suppose there are some similarities between the Trump administration’s partial nationalization of Intel and the Obama administration’s bailout of GM, in which the U.S. government owned an equity stake. You have two opportunistic presidents who like to talk about economic nationalism jumping into two businesses they don’t understand for purely political reasons and, in both cases, probably doing so illegally. The U.S. government ended up losing billions of dollars on its “investment” in GM, and there is every reason to believe that Uncle Stupid’s stake in Intel—whose Ohio-based chip-foundry is foundering because it has no customers—will end in tears one way or another.

  Citing the bailout policies of the early 21^st century as your model going forward is a real . . . interesting choice. U.S. taxpayers lost billions on GM, and GM is still a piss-poor company that makes inferior products at every price point from $20,500 to $130,000-and-up while pissing away billions of dollars on mismanaged overseas partnerships. It didn’t even make sense from the political baloney “saving jobs” point of view, inasmuch as GM has shed some 80,000 employees since 2008. The heavy-handed government-backed GM restructuring saw the firm kill off Saturn as a sop to the union bosses, who did not like the semi-autonomous division’s independence from rigid work rules. The parallel bailout of Chrysler (not Chrysler’s first) saw the administration essentially rob the bondholders—the secured creditors who had first claim on the firm’s assets—to pay off its union-goon allies.

  I don't watch CNBC, so is Rick Santelli saying anything about this?

• Unfortunately, the production is stuff people aren't that interested in buying. Nevertheless, Tyler Cowen Goes There: Trump Seizes the Means of Production at Intel. The whole thing's great, just a random excerpt:

  Given that this is a blend of socialism and corporate statism, it should come as no surprise that Bernie Sanders has endorsed Trump’s Intel decision. Sanders, at least, is consistent. “Taxpayers should not be providing billions of dollars in corporate welfare to large, profitable corporations like Intel without getting anything in return,” he said.

  Other Democrats refuse to see how they helped make this bed. They had a nonchalant attitude toward the CHIPS Act, which they saw as a sane move in the direction of a sounder industrial policy. But their underlying view of government was naive, as they assumed it would always be “the experts” in charge. The rude awakening has now arrived.

  Milton Friedman’s longstanding insistence that government funding will, sooner or later, mean government control has now come to pass. The Democrats are not so much shocked as catatonic and lacking much of an effective response. But it is they who are responsible for making so much of the economy dependent on federal government funding. And now, they are learning lessons to their distaste when it comes to science funding, DEI in universities, and now, tech companies.

  But I also want to emphasize, and agree with, his bottom line:

  Are you a Republican, conservative, or libertarian? Have you spent most of your life believing that governmental ownership of the means of production brings terrible incentives, politicization, and is a recipe for economic and political disaster? Is that not why you have always opposed socialism?

  If so, now is the time to make your displeasure felt. Loudly.

  Maybe I can get one of those yard signs.

• One-stop ideological shopping. At the Dispatch, Scott Lincicome sums up All the Reasons the Intel Deal Is Bad. Just a snippet:

  The most obvious and immediate problems with the Intel deal rest with the company itself, which—despite all those subsidies—has struggled even more since we dug into its many longstanding problems a year ago and briefly reviewed its current situation in July. As I wrote in the Post, there’s little reason to think this latest move will somehow reinvigorate the company:

  With the U.S. government as its largest shareholder, Intel will face constant pressure to align corporate decisions with the goals of whatever political party is in power. Will Intel locate or continue facilities — such as its long-delayed “megafab” in Ohio — based on economic efficiency or government priorities? Will it hire and fire based on merit or political connections? Will research and development priorities reflect market demands or bureaucratic preferences? Will standard corporate finance decisions that are routinely (and mistakenly) pilloried in Washington, such as dividends or stock buybacks, suddenly become taboo?

  Much more at the link, and I hope you can get through the paywall, by fair means or foul.

I turned to ChatGPT once again:

draw a Dr, Seuss parody book cover titled "If I Ran the Fed" showing Donald Trump as the author

And (once again), ChatGPT told me, nicely, sorry Paul I can't do that.

But it did suggest a compromise, and I think its result wasn't too bad.

I was inspired (of course) by dim memories of Dr. Seuss's If I Ran the Zoo. The relevant Wikipedia article notes that it's one of his books that were withdrawn from publication by "Dr. Seuss Enterprises" for unacceptable "racial stereotypes and caricatures". But this is an example of where John Perry Barlow was right: "The Internet treats censorship as a malfunction and routes around it." You can read the book here.

That Wikipedia article says the Seuss book was written in "anapestic tetrameter". I have no idea whether my parody obeys that scheme, but here you go:

"The Fed's in a slump,"
Said President Trump,
"And the guy who's in charge
Is kind of a chump."

"But if I ran the Fed,"
Said President Trump,
"I'd make a few changes.
Make the stock market jump!"

"Their 'rates' and their 'targets' and that kind of stuff
They have no idea that they're not good enough.
They're disloyal to MAGA and probably Blue.
They're awfully old-fashioned. I want something new!"

"So I'd fire them all, tell them to leave.
Put them out on the street, I'd not even grieve.
Replace them with flunkies I think I could find
Who would to my every whim be aligned!"

And I could go on, but probably shouldn't. I was "inspired" (if that's the right word) by the WSJ editorialists yesterday, who wondered: What if Trump Runs the Federal Reserve? (WSJ gifted link) Skipping to their bottom line:

And I found out that "afflatus" doesn't mean what I thought it meant. So I won't keep using that word.

Also of note:

• Lisa, listen to me. James Freeman writes on the Fed Governor in the midst of the current afflatus kerfuffle: The Markets and Lisa Cook. (one more WSJ gifted link)

  In 2022 a Journal editorial called Ms. Cook unfit for the Fed job after she was nominated by President Joe Biden or whoever was running the U.S. government at the time. The Journal editorial noted:

  Republicans have… raised valid concerns about Ms. Cook’s lack of monetary policy expertise. Her academic scholarship has focused almost entirely on race, and she seems to think systemic racism is the root of all economic ills. No doubt she would fit in well at university faculty lounges with similar views.

  University of Chicago economics professor Harald Uhlig recently detailed in these pages how Ms. Cook called for his removal as editor of the Journal of Political Economy after he criticized the defund police movement.

  Even if one believes that the Fed should be independent despite its manifest failure to provide price stability, one can also believe that Ms. Cook should be replaced.

  I wouldn't be sorry to see her go. I might be sorry to see her replacement.

• Maybe not for lack of trying, but… Veronique de Rugy claims Trump Is Not the Biggest Threat to the Fed's Independence.

  Concerns about the Federal Reserve's independence have grown following repeated attacks by President Donald Trump, including this week's decision to fire Fed Gov. Lisa Cook based on questionable allegations. But this debate is too narrowly focused on the president's political pressure, ignoring a growing danger in our system.

  It is true that since the Treasury-Federal Reserve Accord of 1951, the Fed has had operational independence — the ability to set interest rates day-to-day — without any obligation to make government borrowing cheap. But it never had true economic independence because the bank's monetary policy cannot be insulated from the effect of fiscal policy, and vice versa.

  As public debt grows, the link becomes more visible and fiscal dominance — which occurs when a central bank like the Fed becomes subordinate to the government's fiscal policy — looms larger.

  Vero notes, soberly: "Fed independence, in a narrow political sense, becomes irrelevant when the arithmetic of debt service dictates outcomes."

• They're baaack! The University Near Here is a pretty idyllic place over the summer. But otherwise, as George Will notes, we got way Too many college students.

  Autumn, season of mists and mellow fruitfulness (Keats), is also when too many young Americans head to college, where too many of them will study too little under the undemanding supervision of faculty who teach too little. Colleges illustrate the seepage of rigor from American life.

  Since 1990, college enrollment has increased by 6 million students (29 percent). Reasons for this include government tuition subsidies and “college for everyone” rhetoric. And “degree inflation”: irrational requirements for job applicants.

  Preston Cooper, then of the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity, reported in 2023 that applicants for a $35,600-per-year job driving an Oscar Mayer Wienermobile (a 27-foot-long motorized hot dog) had to have a bachelor’s degree. In 2000, only 16 percent of prime-age workers earning $35,000 (in today’s dollars) had such degrees; by 2022, 24 percent did. In 1990, 9 percent of secretaries and administrative professionals had bachelor’s degrees; today, 33 percent do, and a higher proportion of job listings require applicants to have one. This “paper ceiling” is especially egregious in state and local governments, where 63 percent of those earning between $40,000 and $60,000 have bachelor’s degrees or higher. Only 28 percent of such earners in the private sector do.

  A recent report from the Burning Glass Institute and the Strada Education Foundation says 52 percent of recent college graduates are underemployed: in jobs not using their college learning. Meanwhile there are 750,000 industrial jobs unfilled.

  Keats was no Dr. Seuss, but …

Sabine Hossenfelder takes a GOP CongressCritter, Anna Paulina Luna, as seriously as possible:

I watched the seemingly very successful Starship test flight last night, from liftoff to Indian Ocean splashdown. Cool stuff, but why aren't we just grabbing the interdimensional tech from the aliens?

Also of note:

• In case you hadn't noticed. Back in the 1970s, there was a common saying: "A conservative is a liberal who has been mugged by reality". Dare we hope that could be happening today? Kevin D. Williamson looks at the prospects of The Emerging Liberal Minority. Excerpt:

  Conservatives alienated from the Republican Party (as conservatives must be) may make their peace with the Democratic Party, as some have, but many (I suppose most) cannot muster much more than an “Ugh!” for a party whose moderate wing is characterized by Joe Biden and whose radical camp is rallying behind Zohran Mamdani, the professing socialist who aims to be not only the next mayor of New York City but also the new mascot of the left wing of the party of the left. But while there probably are not many estranged liberals who feel about the Democratic Party precisely the way conservatives are obliged to feel about the current Republican Party—in part because the Democrats are not at this moment led by a man who attempted a coup d’état the last time he lost an election—they are frustrated and disappointed and, at times, full of very reasonable contempt for their ancestral party. Liberals acknowledging painful truths of an uncomfortable ideological origin—whether those be Hayekian or neoconservative in character—have something in common with conservatives reckoning (as we must) with the fact that unsavory constituents such as racism, millenarian religious fanaticism, xenophobia, nihilistic antirationalism, and old-fashioned bumptiousness play a much more prominent role on the right than we had supposed. 

  I'm a little surprised that my Linux spellcheck didn't flag "bumptiousness". I guess it's a word.

• Cognitive dissonance isn't a pretty sight. Is it on the upswing? Jim Geraghty: When Mamdani says it, it’s socialism. When Trump does it, it’s genius.

  Remember, Republicans: It’s important that we stop Zohran Mamdani from becoming the next mayor of New York. The man is a socialist!

  Mamdani talked about “the end goal of seizing the means of production” during a live-streamed conference of the Young Democratic Socialists of America in February 2021, and declared that “we have to continue to elect more socialists, and we have to ensure that we are unapologetic about our socialism.” (As much as one might be tempted to attribute that to youthful naiveté, Mamdani was 29 years old at that time, and he’s 33 now.) Mamdani wants the New York government to open and run its own grocery stores.

  It’s a good thing we have President Donald Trump and his administration to stop the spread of Mamdani’s socialist agenda. Instead of having the government take greater control of private companies the way Mamdani wants, the administration is having the government take greater control of private companies the way Trump wants.

  The AI summary of the 491 (as I type) comments on Jim's article mentions that "Some comments suggest that Trump's actions align more with state capitalism or even fascism rather than socialism."

  Uh, fine. We have a better all-inclusive label. Let me drag out, once again, the Hayekian cartoon I had ChatGPT draw last week:

  

• Need some cheering up? Good news, bunkie, Noah Rothman finds it: At Least You’re Not Ken Martin. (Noah assumes Ken Martin, chairman of the Democratic National Committee, isn't reading National Review.)

  “Democrats, make no mistake, a storm is coming,” Martin said at the outset of the Democratic National Committee’s Minnesota summit on Monday. “In fact, it’s already here.” What we have today is “fascism dressed in a red tie.”

  “Rising inequality, attacks on democracy, voter suppression and a fascist regime that doesn’t play by the rules,” he continued. Today, the Republican Party is “led by the dictator in chief” who has cast American “values into the dustbin of history.” The Democrats, therefore, need to fight fire with fire. “I’m sick and tired of this Democratic Party bringing a pencil to a knife fight,” Martin declared. “We cannot be the only party that plays by the rules anymore. We’ve got to stand up and fight.”

  The DNC chair isn’t the first Democrat to pose as the fighting fighter who fights. The consultant class can read the polling of anxious Democrats as well as anyone, although the Democratic lawmakers who are being asked by constituents to take a bullet for the cause shouldn’t need a public opinion survey to understand their voters’ restlessness. Those Democrats, too, are offering their voters thin gruel: gratuitous profanity, all-caps social-media posts, and anguished self-pity masquerading as sorrow for the state of the country.

  I got a chuckle out of the "fighting fighter who fights" phrase. My CongressCritter, Chris Pappas, seems to work that into a lot of tweets, for example:

  New Hampshire is my home. It’s where I grew up, went to public school, and where I’ve chosen to build my life.
  
  The challenges Granite Staters face aren’t distant to me because I’ve lived them. That’s why I’ve spent my career fighting for the people of this state — and why I’m… pic.twitter.com/BpfqKyOPuB

  — Chris Pappas (@ChrisPappasNH) August 26, 2025

  Nothing says "fighter" than a cheek-to-cheek selfie with a supporter!

• And this is simply wonderful. The WSJ has a front-page "A-Hed" daily column, and it's fun, but I really liked this one from yesterday: Baseball Organists Keep Bringing the Heat, Thanks to Their 78-Year-Old Muse. (WSJ gifted link)

  The Kane County Cougars were trying to rally against the Quad City River Bandits when bees started pouring from behind the visitors’ dugout.

  Umpires halted the game. Players sprinted for the outfield. Ushers hurried to shepherd panicky fans. Perched above the fray in a suite, Nancy Faust sprang into action.

  Placing her fingers on the keys of the ballpark’s organ, she launched into “Flight of the Bumblebee,” the frenetically paced number by Russian composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. From there she segued into Jewel Akens’ “The Birds and the Bees,” Jimmie Rodgers’ “Honeycomb,” the Beatles’ “Let It Be.”

  She's a genius. The story goes on to note that when she was playing the organ at old Comiskey Park for the White Sox, she learned that visiting KC Royal, George Brett, had had recent hemorrhoid surgery. So:

  When he came up to bat, she played the Dovells’ 'You Can’t Sit Down.”

"… and how about decreeing new crimes, like flag burning?"

For more on that:

• This should be off the table. Robby Soave points out an inconvenient truth: Trump's executive order prohibiting flag burning is unconstitutional.

  President Donald Trump issued an executive order prohibiting the burning of the American flag on Monday. There's a big problem with the order, though—one that Trump even acknowledged in his press conference touting the E.O. Flag burning is clearly protected by the First Amendment, and the Supreme Court has twice affirmed that this is so.

  Moreover, any administration that purports to care about freedom of speech should easily reach the conclusion that criminalizing provocative yet nonviolent acts of political expression is a violation of this principle, even if the constitutional issue was not so cut and dry.

• Will the EO cause any prosecutions, or is Trump just baiting his adversaries? Noah Rothman is Betting on the Bait.

  Those who have taken the time to peruse Donald Trump’s executive order on “Prosecuting Burning of the American Flag” know that it does not, in fact, recommend the federal prosecution of those who burn or are otherwise “desecrating” the flag. Instead, it notes that the Justice Department will take actions “consistent with the First Amendment,” which has been found by the Supreme Court to protect activities like flag burning. Indeed, only if acts of flag desecration amount to incitement to violence (which would be a high hurdle to clear in a courtroom) or if the flag-burner is engaged in other criminal behaviors are offenders likely to be prosecuted.

  There is just a lot less to this initiative than the heavy breathing that it has inspired among the executive orders critics and supporters alike would lead observers to believe. Indeed, the reaction to this order seems so divorced from its black-and-white text that we can probably conclude that inspiring impassioned reactions was the whole point of the exercise.

  So there's almost certainly not much going on here other than another display of Trump's deeply flawed character.

• 

  But it gives me a chance to quote SCOTUS Justice Nino. I recently read The Essential Scalia (Amazon link at your right, my report is here), there was a super-relevant quote within and (fortunately) Jonathan Turley dug it out so I don't have to: Running it up the Flagpole: Why the Trump Order on Flag Burning is Unconstitutional. In his SCOTUS votes, Scalia was a consistent libertarian on the issue:

  Scalia continued to defend his votes in public comments. He stressed that “if it were up to me, I would put in jail every sandal-wearing, scruffy-bearded weirdo who burns the American flag. But I am not king.”

  He later added:

  Yes, if I were king, I would not allow people to go about burning the American flag. However, we have a First Amendment, which says that the right of free speech shall not be abridged. And it is addressed, in particular, to speech critical of the government. I mean, that was the main kind of speech that tyrants would seek to suppress.

  Burning the flag is a form of expression. Speech doesn’t just mean written words or oral words. It could be semaphore. And burning a flag is a symbol that expresses an idea – “I hate the government,” “the government is unjust,” whatever.

  If I were king, I would demand that you check out our Eye Candy du Jour from Mr. Ramirez one more time.

• It's not as hard as you might think! Kevin D. Williamson describes How to Murder an Economy With Happy Talk.

  We should have eaten our spinach.

  Nearly 20 years ago, I started writing a column for National Review called “Exchequer,” with a focus on fiscal policy, debt, and deficits. A point I frequently returned to—and frequently return to still—is that dealing with our national debt problem and getting the U.S. government’s finances back onto stable footing is something that will be easier to do the sooner we start and more painful to do the longer we wait, especially if we put off reform until we are in a fiscal crisis of some kind, which is what Washington seems dead set on doing.

  I was—and am—what my friend Larry Kudlow calls an “eat-your-spinach guy.” Kudlow and other sunny optimists, such as Arthur Laffer, are not big on eating spinach. They are big on ordering dessert first, counting on tax cuts and other incentives to goose the economy to such an extent that GDP growth does the hard work for us—what I have referred to at times as “naïve supply-side” economics. When it comes to diet, eating dessert first will indeed tend to make you grow (like it or not), but economic growth is, alas, a little more difficult to goose.

  KDW's spinach recipe seems to (roughly) involve getting Uncle Stupid's revenue and expenditures to where they were at the end of the Clinton era: about 20% of GDP. (FY 2024 revenue: about 17% of GDP; spending: about 23% of GDP.)

  I wouldn't be happy with taxes that high, but it's better than fiscal armageddon.

• But speaking of "happy talk"… Bryan Caplan has a question for you: If You’re So Smart, Why Aren’t You Happy?

  Economists have long scoffed at know-it-all business and financial gurus with the rhetorical question, “If you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich?” And sometimes the gurus use the same question to scoff at know-it-all economists.

  The standard answer, which I’ve occasionally used myself is: “I’m claiming that society is dysfunctional, not that there’s a viable get-rich-quick scheme lying on the sidewalk.” Open borders, for example, holds immense economic promise, but to activate it, you have to persuade a country — or at least a government — that open borders is a good idea. And both persuasive efforts are, alas, exercises in futility.

  On further thought, however, there are also plenty of unilaterally feasible ways to get rich that most of us leave lying on the sidewalk nonetheless. Such as? Work much longer hours. Work on weekends. Take second (and third) jobs. Take the highest-paid job, regardless of your quality of life. Easiest of all: Live way below your means — and invest the money you save. Seriously, have you ever considered how little money you actually need to keep earning money?

  The obvious response to these tactics, of course, is: “It’s not too smart to live in toil and poverty in order to maximize net worth.” A fine objection, but it highlights a much-neglected opportunity to scoff at know-it-alls. Rather than ask, “If you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich?,” we should be asking, “If you’re so smart, why aren’t you happy?”

  So there.

We're seeing competing charges of Calvinball flung back and forth! Here's Jonathan Turley with one I find credible: The Judicial Calvinball of Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson.

In the interests of equal time—I might as well do that every so often— TechDirt's Mike Masnick was more inspired than aghast: Justice Jackson Correctly Defines The John Roberts Supreme Court As The Calvinball Court

For a more balanced take, see SCOTUSblog.

I admit that I'm averse to the notion that a single District judge in Massachusetts can direct that hundreds of millions in taxpayer money must keep flowing to NIH's DEI grantees.

But I am not a lawyer, and, barring supernatural methods, we have no answer to the question: "What would Antonin Scalia do?" Other than emit a chuckle at the Calvinball reference.

And (holy moley) it's coming up on thirty years since Bill Watterson closed up his comic strip. And it's still a cultural icon.

Also of note:

• Imagine me standing in the rain, yelling "Stella!" Stella Artois, that is. Eric Boehm is upset (and so am I) that Trump's new trade 'deal' with the E.U. leaves out beer, wine, booze.

  Americans who enjoy German lagers, Belgian saisons, and Czech pilsners will get no relief from the higher tariffs that President Donald Trump has poured on their favorite brews.

  The framework of a much-anticipated trade deal between the United States and the European Union was made public on Thursday. The deal locks in the 15 percent tariffs that Trump has imposed on most European goods imported into the U.S., but it also serves as a promise from the Trump administration not to target European goods with product-specific tariffs that could be announced in the coming weeks or months—including potentially huge new tariffs on pharmaceuticals, something the White House has been teasing for months. The deal also creates a pathway for the United States to reduce its tariffs on European cars to the 15 percent threshold, once the E.U. reduces some of its own tariffs on American industrial goods.

  The written agreement seems to solidify the handshake deal struck in late July, though it is still "not a legally enforceable pact," but rather a step towards one, as The New York Times noted.

  But for alcohol-related businesses and booze-loving consumers on both sides of the Atlantic, the "deal" seems more like a buzzkill.

  Seriously, I pretty much stick to Sam Adams these days, as American as beer comes.

• Like an iceberg, there's a lot of it you don't see. But it's still dangerous, as Dominic Pino points out: The Hidden Damage from Tariffs.

  Tariffs are a particularly destructive form of taxation that distorts market efficiency, raises prices, and reduces output. As you’ve no doubt heard many times by this point in Donald “Tariff Man” Trump’s presidency, economic theory demonstrates each of these effects clearly.

  But maybe you think economists don’t know what they’re talking about and all those supply-and-demand graphs are witchcraft. What nonmarket reasons are there to oppose tariffs?

  For one, they feed the swamp. Tariffs are a full-employment program for Washington attorneys and lobbyists. Analysis of lobbying disclosure forms by Advancing American Freedom (AAF) found that spending on tariff lobbying surged from $1.3 million in the second quarter of last year to $8.8 million in the second quarter of this year. That’s on top of $4.9 million in spending on tariff lobbying in the first quarter of this year, suggesting that more people are realizing that lobbying can pay off.

  There's more, I hope you can read it, but I'm out of NR gifted links for the month.

• I have at least one big one. Jeff Jacoby says The convictions that count are the ones that sometimes sting.

  JONAH GOLDBERG, the columnist and conservative intellectual, recently published an essay about America's complicated relationship with freedom. Writing in The Dispatch, he argued that most Americans are libertarian only when it comes to freedoms they personally prize and are often content to let government regulate or prohibit freedoms they don't value — or don't want others to have. This selective consistency feeds today's partisan hypocrisy, with both left and right defending liberty or state intrusion depending on who's in power.

  From there he built to a larger point — that beneath the rivalry between red and blue, America's real exceptionalism lies in its culture: a deeply ingrained instinct for individual rights, autonomy, and resistance to government meddling. That common instinct, which Goldberg calls "American groundwater," runs deeper than our politics, and those politics would be healthier if more of us could train ourselves to see fellow Americans — even those with opposing views — as part of the same liberty-valuing culture.

  I bring up Goldberg's essay not only to recommend it but also because I was struck by the question with which he introduced it: "What principle do you hold," he challenged his readers, "that is against your self-interest or political desires?"

  OK, here's mine: We need to get Federal spending in line with revenue. This will require decreases in entitlement spending, mostly Social Security and Medicare. And that, realistically, will involve some means-tested haircuts to the well-off.

  And that would be me.

  How about you, reader? Any response to Jonah's challenge?

• Squandering their credibility. Allysia Finley takes on The Doctors Who Cry ‘Science’. (WSJ gifted link)

  Third Way, an organization that describes itself as championing “moderate” ideas on the “center left,” posted a memo Friday titled “Was It Something I Said?” It advised Democrats to avoid such terms as “housing insecurity,” “triggering,” “pregnant people” and “minoritized communities.” Such language makes Democrats sound “superior, haughty and arrogant.”

  Perhaps because they are. In Third Way’s view, Democrats’ problem isn’t that they think they’re more enlightened than ordinary Americans and want to force their ideology on those who disagree. It’s that they’re too obvious about it. Such condescension isn’t confined to cultural issues. It’s pervasive in the scientific realm.

  Liberals and medical advocacy organization often use such imperious terms as “pro-science,” “science says” or “consensus shows” when the science is murky or conflicted at best. What they are really saying is: We believe this, and therefore it is so.

  Allysia goes on to cite examples of the American Medical Association pushing left-wing ideology under the aegis of, yes, "science".

  That Third Way memo is here. I performed an experiment: asking Google for occurrences of "minoritized communities" at the University Near Here. Seven results! Example, from the heady days of 2022:

  I am in the beginning stages of a research project that will examine inclusion and belonging in public sector workplaces for marginalized and minoritized communities (specifically for black and brown people, LGBTQIA, women, elderly, immigrants, refugees, and lower socio-economic groups). The research seeks to identify and discuss ways to move beyond implicit and explicit conflicts and resistance to foster inclusion and a sense of belonging.

  I really like that "specifically", immediately followed by a totally non-specific laundry list.

Recently on the book blog:

Continuing my "Read all these Clifford D. Simak books I bought long ago and never read" project… This was a 60¢ Ace paperback, purchased in the early 1960s. (It might be good for a couple more readings before it falls apart.)

Wikipedia calls City a "fix-up novel", a collection of eight short stories originally published in Astounding between 1944 and 1951. The tales span thousands of years, and they are linked by learned commentaries from scholarly robot-aided dogs. (The scholars have names like Bounce, Tige, and Rover.) Man has long since vanished from the scene, so long ago that human existence is seen as probably a myth.

The stories tell how technology allowed humanity to abandon cities, and eventually Earth itself. Each details a step in Man's progress, eventually leading to his (near?) demise. Or at least to a location where he's not easily found. A continuing character throughout is the robot "Jenkins", who's responsible for giving dogs the power of speech. (The doggies still need robots for their manual dexterity, though.)

Simak's prose is pretty flowery at spots, very unexpected for a no-nonsense SF mag like Astounding, I would have thought. I was not as captivated as I should have been by some of the later yarns.

Liz Wolfe has a balanced take when Trump instructs lawyers to look into Smithsonian museums.

It's easy to imagine that Trump will go about this in his usual hamfisted, overreaching way. "Omigod, is that a baby in the bathwater? Nooo, don't throw… argh, too late!"

You don't have to look hard to find the usual Trump cheerleaders breaking out their pompoms. Example: (which makes some valid criticisms of Smithsonian content) at the Federalist.

And the usual suspects have been, predictably, losing their shit. MSNBC had a Princeton prof opine that Trump is seeking a history "that’s rooted in a white nationalist project."

Liz, for her part, suggests a "starve the beast" solution:

The Smithsonian, per The Washington Post, "receives about 60 percent of its funding from congressional appropriations and federal grants and contracts, according to fiscal 2023 numbers, but those funds cover operations, infrastructure and maintaining collections. Generally, exhibitions are funded by private donations." Though this isn't really within the purview of the executive, the Trump administration could exert pressure on Congress to stop funding the Smithsonian and make clear that the museums need to shift to being entirely privately funded. Then Bill Ackman and Alex Soros and whoever can duke it out and decide which types of stories about America get told, and taxpayers in Wisconsin who never get to avail themselves of"The Shape of Power: Stories of Race and American Sculpture" can save a buck.

Certainly a goal to look forward to.

Also of note:

• A shameful admission. My CongressCritter, Chris Pappas (D-NH01), is looking to step into the US Senate seat being vacated by Jeanne Shaheen. Which means there's a scramble for Pappas's position. So I should find NHJournal's story, headlined "Elizabeth Girard Creates Campaign Committee for NH-01 GOP Primary" to be interesting, right?

  Elizabeth Girard, whose time as head of the New Hampshire Federation of Women (NHFRW) was plagued by controversy, has filed paperwork with the Federal Election Commission to become a candidate in the 1st Congressional District primary.

  Gee, it doesn't sound as if NHJournal likes her.

  But my shameful admission: I'm pretty sure I've never heard of Elizabeth Girard.

  It gets worse. NHJournal goes on to name three other candidates:

  • Bedford GOP Committee vice chair Melissa Bailey
  • Businessman and veteran Chris Bright
  • Manchester Rep. Brian Cole

  Nope. I'm going 0 for 4: never heard of Melissa, Chris, or Brian either. But, if you're interested:

  • A WMUR story about Melissa Bailey;
  • Chris Bright's campaign website;
  • Brian Cole's campaign website;
  • Elizabeth Girard's Twitter (which has a link to, I assume, her campaign website, which doesn't work as I type).

  Those middle two ask for your info upfront. Suggestion: don't give them any.

• Not politics. Dave Barry on Pets. Opening with sad news:

  Our household is currently dogless. It's been that way since the passing, back in January, at age 17, of Lucy, who it goes without saying was the Best Dog Ever, as well as the Dog Whose Face Whitened The Most Over Time.

  The loss of Lucy means that, petwise, we're down to tropical fish. We have five of them. We've had them for what feels like decades. They are survivors. They are the Keith Richardses of tropical fish.

  But the thing about tropical fish is, not dying is pretty much all they do. They don't provide a lot of companionship. They never rush to the front door, tails wagging, to greet us, the way Lucy used to. Of course the fish also never attacked our Christmas tree, which Lucy did once; our living room looked like it had been hit by a Yule-seeking missile. But we weren't home when that happened, so we'll never know the whole story. Possibly the tree started it.

  Dave rambles, and eventually talks about the latest fad in China: pet yeast. No, not an affliction for your dog, it's yeast, that's a pet.

  Not that you should care, but I am also recently dogless. (Picture of happier days here.) I am down to one cat, petwise. Dave scorns cats, but I'm pretty sure they don't care.

• Advice to writers. No, not from me, from Neal Stephenson: Say it, don't show it.

  I’m generally not very interested in meta-writing, which is to say, writing about how to write. But for the last few years I’ve had a single sentence from Dickens hanging around on my desktop in a tiny text file, which I open up and re-read from time to time. It’s a moment from The Pickwick Papers. The titular character is attempting to board a stagecoach. It’s crowded and so he has to get on the roof, which is a bit of a challenge because he is old and portly. A passing stranger, seeing his predicament, offers to give him a hand. What happens next is described as follows:

  ‘Up with you,’ said the stranger, assisting Mr. Pickwick on to the roof with so much precipitation as to impair the gravity of that gentleman’s deportment very materially.

  If you’re a fluent reader of the Dickensian style of English, these few words will conjure up a whole short film inside of your head. You might actually have to stop reading for a few moments to let that film develop and play out. And while you’re doing that you might savor the arch and clearly self-aware phrasing that Dickens is using here, which unto itself is a way of poking fun at Mr. Pickwick and his social circle.

  It's kind of neat that Neal enjoys "the Dickensian style".

Andrew Heaton suggests a new lyric query: Why do so many jobs require a license? Trust me, it's funny:

And the Headline reference is pretty obscure, but interesting! (I am ashamed to admit my first guess was Dusty Springfield.)

Also of note:

• V is for… The WSJ editorialists are righteously disgusted by Trump’s Vendetta Campaign Targets John Bolton. (WSJ gifted link)

  I assume you've heard the news today (oh boy). So we'll jump down to the bottom line:

  Mr. Bolton has continued to speak candidly about Mr. Trump’s second-term decisions, pro and con, including in these pages this week [gifted link added] . The President may also hope the FBI raid will cause Mr. Bolton to shut up, though knowing him we can’t imagine that working.

  The real offender here is a President who seems to think he can use the powers of his office to run vendettas. We said this was one of the risks of a second Trump term, and it’s turning out to be worse than we imagined.

  Indeed it is.

• Does he, though? Kevin D. Williamson thinks Ted Cruz Knows Better, and he lives in Texas, so I'll defer to his take:

  Competition for the top spot is fierce, but the very worst of Donald Trump’s enablers and sycophants aren’t the rage-addled, rustic, resentment junkies but such polished epitomes of servility as Sen. Ted Cruz, who insists that his highest political calling is the defense and fortification of the Constitution, and who—being one of those anti-elitist sons of the Texas caliche who learned his ABCs at Princeton and Harvard Law—knows full well that the president’s contempt for the Constitution is exceeded only by his ignorance of it. 

  Here is Trump on social media, serving up the baloney pretext for his next attempt to nullify an election: 

  Remember, the States are merely an “agent” for the Federal Government in counting and tabulating the votes. They must do what the Federal Government, as represented by the President of the United States, tells them, FOR THE GOOD OF OUR COUNTRY, to do.

  This is, in the familiar Trump style, a motley bolus of stupidity and dishonesty. The Constitution says, in fact, precisely the opposite: “The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof.” Where there is a federal role, it belongs to the lawmaking branch, not to the president: “[B]ut the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of chusing Senators.” I do like that anachronistic “chusing”—more than I like many of the laws and regulations that Congress has written over the years with regard to voting. 

  Yes, "bolus". He went there.

  KDW eventually gets to his point about Ted Cruz, Harvard law graduate.

• Somewhat resembling the classic definition of "chutzpah". George Will notes an academic version: In a classic cartel move, college sports beg for federal help. (WaPo gifted link)

  Athletic competitions mesmerize because, being unscripted, their outcomes are unpredictable. But as college football season lumbers forward, there is occurring a predictable but nonetheless entertaining event associated with college athletics: Government and large, mostly state-run universities are collaborating to reestablish the cartel that for decades enabled the schools to reap billions from the negligibly compensated labor of “student-athletes.”

  That phrase, which has become risible regarding the best revenue-generating athletes (principally male football and basketball players) central to today’s drama, is clung to by the cartel that coined it. It puts a pretty patina on a business model that until 2021 suppressed what all cartels everywhere exist to minimize: costly competition. The cartels are the NCAA’s Power Four conferences, which generate the lion’s share of college sports’ billions.

  I'm reminded of the guy who observed that Harvard is like Pfizer with a football team.

Recently on the book blog:

Based on Bryan Garner's column in a recent issue of National Review, I was gonna check out the book he wrote with Antonin Scalia, Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts. But when I picked that up off a shelf of the Portsmouth (NH) Public Library, I quickly discovered it was a very dense reference work aimed at lawyers. So I checked out this one instead, an unusual choice for me, but a pretty good one.

I don't often quote book cover blurbs, but this one has an excerpt from SCOTUS Justice Elena Kagan's lovely foreword:

I envy the reader who has picked up this book, as I once picked up [Nino's] opinions, not knowing what he or she will find … In these last few years, I have missed the enjoyment and excitement — even the exasperation — that came from thinking about Nino's latest opinion. I doubt that anyone who turns the final page of this book will wonder why. No one has ever written quite like Nino, and no one ever will … So … learn from the contents of this book. And equally, challenge the contents of this book. (Nino would have wanted you to.) But above all else, enjoy them.

I do not dissent from Kagan's opinion.

The book is a compendium of Scalia's SCOTUS opinions (including dissents), as well as some articles and lectures he gave over the years. It's a great overview of a fine legal mind, who also happened to have a knack for a well-turned phrase. There are no howlers, but his prose is full of sly wit that made me smile. (And, rarely, he will be obviously annoyed with the other side in his dissents, and the resulting zingers are pretty good too.)

I was somewhat surprised at the occasional makeup of the justices concurring with Scalia's opinions. I had not appreciated his strict views on criminal protections. For example, his decision about thermal-imaging a pot grower's house without a warrant, Kyllo vs. United States, was joined by David Souter, Clarence Thomas, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Stephen Breyer. Not the usual lineup.

A final section of the book deals with "administrative law", the regulations promulgated by executive agencies powered by handoffs from Congress. It opens with a 1989 speech, where his first line is "Administrative law is not for sissies." I admit, just about all of the argument in this section flew over my head, so I definitely count myself as a sissy here. Apparently, Scalia's views on "Chevron deference"—a doctrine which SCOTUS "overturned" last year—evolved over time. But I only got a vague notion of the issues involved.

I'll discuss that cartoon below, but right now it's an illustration of Daniel J. Smith's WSJ column: Trump, Intel and the Road to Serfdom. (WSJ gifted link)

Well, that got my fist pumping. Also weighing in, the NR editorialists with a milder criticism: The Government Shouldn’t Get into the Chip Business.

Yes. True dat.

But about the cartoon above: that's my effort at using ChatGPT for image generation, which puts me about three years behind everyone else, AI-usagewise.

My first prompt:

draw an interstate highway with a car labeled "Intel" heading toward a destination labeled "Serfdom"

I got a good result. But after thinking a bit, I decided I could be a little more ambitious and explicit:

Make the car a convertible and show President Trump driving it.

And ChatGPT responded:

Sorry, I can’t help with that.

Sigh. I think I get it: ChatGPT doesn't want to get involved in politics. So, I pared back my request:

make the car a convertible

And you know what? It did that, the result is what you see above, and darned if it didn't slyly make Trump the driver anyway! Funny old world.

Also of note:

• And can they be as bad as we all imagine they are? James Freeman is curious: Will CBS Release its Biden Tapes? (WSJ gifted link)

  The main question about the Biden administration remains unanswered: Who was running the U.S. Government prior to Jan. 20, 2025? There are related questions about who knew what and when regarding Mr. Biden’s cognitive challenges. Now the former controlling shareholder of the parent company of CBS News suggests that in 2023 staff at the network got a damning look at a struggling Mr. Biden that they never shared with viewers.

  James discusses the possibility, raised in an interview with Shari Redstone, that 60 Minutes' Scott Pelley interviewed Joe Biden back in 2023, during which he seemed "drowsy and had to be prodded to answer."

  So, to repeat James' headline: will CBS release its Biden tapes? My guess is that doing so would demonstrate both (1) Biden's cognitive decline; (2) CBS's general reluctance to display Democrat incoherent babbling. Neither would be a surprising revelation.

• Speaking of incoherent babbling… Trump's been doing some of that too, as Andrew C. McCarthy demonstrates his recent constitutional ignorance: Trump Has No Power to Tell States How to Conduct Elections.

  As is reliably the case with President Trump, one can agree with his policy preferences while recoiling at his disregard for the constitutional processes and principles attendant to making such policy. I happen to agree with him that we would be better off without mail-in voting (and related innovations, such as ballot harvesting and drop boxes). But Trump’s notion that he can direct such an outcome, or that the state legislatures should care what he thinks, is not just ill-conceived but alarming coming from a president who has already once abused his powers to try to retain the office.

• An amusing turnabout. As revealed by John R. Puri: Wait, the ‘Washington Post’ No Longer Thinks Elections Should Be Federally Run?

  He compares the WaPo's recent reaction to Trump's screed:

  Everyone loses when the federal government runs elections

  … with their opinion back in 2021 about the "For the People Act":

  Republicans’ rhetoric on H.R. 1 is apocalyptic. Are they that afraid of democracy?

  To the WaPo's (slight) credit, the 2021 was from Congressional Democrats, not a Presidential Decree, so arguably more constitutional.

Recently on the book blog:

I guess I've been on a David Mamet kick over the past few days. I linked his Free Press article (with a title I won't share with the sensitive souls at Goodreads). That caused me to rent Heist, a movie he made back in 2001. All that concurrent with reading this book.

The main takeaway I had from the book: Gee, showbiz folks sure do talk dirty. It is the polar opposite of "polite company".

Mamet discourses on his moviemaking memories, and the colorful characters he's met along the way. (And movies he's seen and, mostly, admired.) It's a series of short chapters, and I'm not sure if there's a coherent theme in any of them. Each has the feel of a transcribed oral stream-of-consciousness monologue. This sounds like a criticism, but it's not; Mamet is interesting even when I can't follow exactly what he's talking about.

Lots of anecdotes, my favorite being the one about Don Rickles and Frank Sinatra. Page 65.

It also contains numerous Mamet-drawn cartoons, all funny, some laugh-out-loud funny.

Mamet may be (see his subtitle) embittered and dyspeptic, but that seems to be directed mainly at anyone in the credits with the word "producer" in the title. For everyone else in the biz, he's mostly complimentary, and sometimes laudatory.

“I have nothing against diversity, equity, and inclusion. But as Voltaire said about the Holy Roman Empire: it was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire.” pic.twitter.com/BDq5zp7fts

— Steven Pinker (@sapinker) August 20, 2025

Smart guy. I've pre-ordered his upcoming book (paid link).

Also of note:

• Here they come, to save the day! James Freeman notes the Mighty Mice swooping in from above: Rich Liberals to the Rescue! (WSJ gifted link)

  Better late than never, wealthy institutional donors seem poised to take a larger role in funding TV and radio shows they like, rather than letting average taxpayers get stuck with the bill. The taxpayer savings will not be enormous given the gargantuan scale of federal spending. Yet it certainly counts as progress to see the un-American phenomenon of state-backed media give way to a healthier model of voluntary support and independent broadcasting.

  James quotes a WaPo story headlined "Foundations step in to offer $37 million lifeline to public media". (WaPo gifted link).

  Freeman does the math, and so can you. Congress cut CPB two-year funding by $1.1 billion, and $37 million is … a lot less than that. (Although the WaPo reports that the "Public Media Company" organization "aims" to raise $100 million over the next couple years.

  And he notes the donors lined up so far are a "dream team of the tax-exempt."

• I don't get the joke, but… I will take Veronique de Rugy's characterization to be correct. Tariffs as the New Tax Base: A Laughable Idea.

  After more deadlines and deals, another round of President Donald Trump's tariffs has arrived. With higher prices again needing to be justified — and on the heels of the "Big Beautiful Bill," which didn't exactly balance the budget — protectionists are positioned to once again play the revenue hawk's card. There are multiple problems with this story.

  The idea is that tariffs — which some believe function like the consumption taxes that economists generally view favorably — can raise money more efficiently than income taxes.

  First, how can tariffs both protect American producers and reliably raise tax revenue? Think about it: Any tariff high enough to keep out lots of foreign products will not be levied on very many. Conversely, any tariff low enough to generate steady revenue would need to let trade continue by skimming off just a small portion in duties, offering only token protectionism.

  I'll just offer my self-interested whine about consumption taxes: while I understand the economic argument in favor, it's a real kick in the teeth for retirees living off their investments. I recall the arguments when I set up my IRA long ago: "You'll have to pay income tax on your withdrawals in retirement, but you'll be in a lower tax bracket then!" A consumption tax would "fix" that.

• But I find this kind of amusing. Andrew C. McCarthy takes a look at The Trump DOJ’s Embarrassing Letter in the Tariff Case.

  I’ve tried to take a break from news coverage over the past few weeks, so I was fortunate to miss (until reading Jason Willick’s always valuable Washington Post column) one of the more embarrassing submissions the Department of Justice has ever made to a federal court. But there it is: an August 11 letter to the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. That is the tribunal now considering the Trump administration’s appeal of a compelling decision by the U.S. Court of International Trade (CIT) that invalidated one of the largest ever tax increases on the American people, President Trump’s unilaterally decreed tariffs.

  The letter was signed off on by Trump DOJ Civil Division Chief Brett Shumate, who is handling the case, in conjunction with Solicitor General D. John Sauer. Both are good lawyers, making their letter all the more indecorous. (Sadly, this is not Sauer’s first episode of masquerading Trump political blather as legal argument — see my discussion of his amicus brief in the TikTok case, which the Supreme Court unsurprisingly ignored . . . after which the president ignored the Court’s ruling and the governing statute.)

  I'm out of NR gifted links for this month, sorry. We looked at that ludicrous letter last week.

• Six days on the road and I'm a-gonna make it home tonight. Jeff Maurer is dismayed: Teamsters Fight Back Against the Horrible Specter of Fewer Traffic Deaths.

  A self-driving car company takes initial steps to introduce its vehicles to a city. Residents — led by the Teamsters Union — push back, arguing that self-driving cars are unsafe. This happens even though the most comprehensive, peer-reviewed study on the impact of that company’s impact found that their cars dramatically reduced all types of crashes, sometimes as much as 96 percent. Despite data suggesting that driverless cars could reduce injuries and fatalities, city council members appear to side with the Teamsters, using the bizarre argument that the safer cars threaten safety.

  Now: What wrinkle could make this already-ridiculous scenario the most absurd, counterfactual bullshit you’ve heard in a good long while? That’s right: This all happened in Boston, a city where the streets are already a Hobbesian hell fight where the maladjusted battle the insane. The statistical and anecdotal evidence suggest that driving in Boston is less safe than slathering yourself with elk’s blood and jumping into the tiger pen at the zoo. Driving in Boston is like Mario Kart, except instead of turtle shells, drivers throw empty Dunkin cups and bespoke Northeastern ethnic slurs. That is the status quo that the Boston City Council seems poised to protect.

  If you're lucky, the Dunkin cups will be empty.

  Headline reference is to a great old song.

Recently on the book blog:

This is the conclusion to Don Winslow's "Danny Ryan Trilogy", so I figured I might as well read it. My reports on the first two entries: City on Fire and City of Dreams.

As the book opens, Danny's unlikely odyssey has brought him to Vegas, and he has translated his ill-gotten gains from the previous book into successful resorts, so he's a multimillionaire. He dotes on his young son, and is making big, ambitious, plans to set up another resort by purchasing an old-school casino further up the Strip. But a different mogul also has his eye on the property. And both Danny and his wannabe competitor have mob ties from previous years. And those ties eventually turn out to be useful, and then destructive. There is also a vengeful FBI agent who wants to bring Danny down, and a courtroom drama as the fate of a murderer in the previous book is decided.

It's a change from the previous books, which (as I seem to recall) had soap operatics and mayhem throughout. This one eventually gets to some imaginative violence, but the body count remains stuck at zero for hundreds of pages. (There's a one-punch fight on page 38, but that's about it.) How interesting do you find spats over Las Vegas real estate? Read this book to find out!

The book flap says "Winslow has announced that City in Ruins will be his final novel." Why? Well, stories at the time indicated that he wanted to get involved in (anti-Trump) political activism.

(I follow him on Twitter. Where he's as interesting and insightful as your average earnest, rage-fueled, Brown University sophomore girl.)

Anyway, he seems to have had second thoughts about his career. The Final Score, containing "six short novels" is coming out next year.

The WSJ editorialists ask if we're really going there: The Nationalization of Intel?. (WSJ gifted link)

They mention air-traffic control, but there are so many things they could have mentioned. Amtrak, the USPS, the Federal Reserve, Fannie and Freddie, the Export-Import Bank, …

Eric Boehm waves what should be the reddest of red flags: Trump's Intel proposal takes a page from Bernie Sanders' playbook.

Jack Salmon is equally aghast, charting the path From Subsidies to Shareholding: America’s Dangerous Turn Toward Industrial Policy.

But I guess there's a chance increased government meddling will turn Intel's fortunes around!

Disclaimer: Fidelity tells me I own (as I type) $537.83 worth of Intel stock. I assume as a tax-loss harvesting strategy.

Also of note:

• Hey, let's push around some nuns! The NR editorialists are rightfully upset about The Persecution of the Little Sisters of the Poor. (And, even though I'm not Catholic, I've been describing myself as Catholic-adjacent for decades.)

  There are times when it is perfectly acceptable to judge a book by its cover, and, in the case of the Democratic Party’s relentless persecution of the Little Sisters of the Poor, observers would be well within their rights to indulge the urge. For twelve years now, the Catholic order of nuns — whose sole purpose is to provide care to destitute elderly people — has been dragged through America’s courts by a series of monomaniacal ideologues. The nuns’ crime? Objecting to a provision in Obamacare that required nonprofits to provide contraceptives — directly or indirectly — as part of their federally approved health insurance plans. The position of the nuns was that any participation in the distribution of contraception represented a grave violation of their religious beliefs and that, under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993, the federal government was obliged to find another means of achieving the same end. The position of the Obama administration was that it had “compelling health and gender equity goals” to achieve, and that it didn’t care who was cast aside in that pursuit. In a country founded by dissenters, this position was jarring in the extreme.

  Ultimately, the Obama administration lost its case — although it took until the end of Donald Trump’s first term for the Little Sisters to prevail. By that point, litigation on the matter had been ongoing since 2013 and, at various points, had been addressed by the Supreme Court — which punted it back down to the lower courts; by the Third and Ninth Circuits — both of which, astonishingly, prevented the Trump administration from providing an exemption; and by a host of states — some of which, disgracefully, chose to channel President Obama’s illiberalism and continue to press the issue. Happily, in July 2020, the Supreme Court finally permitted the Trump administration’s accommodation to take force. The case, Little Sisters v. Pennsylvania, was decided 7–2.

  By rights, this should have been the end of the affair. And yet neither of the states that had lost at the Supreme Court — Pennsylvania and New Jersey — was willing to let it go. Worse still, they were joined in the endeavor by California, New York, Massachusetts, and others. Clinging to a tendentious argument that the Supreme Court did not address on the merits, those states insisted that the Trump administration’s modifications had been “arbitrary and capricious” under the Administrative Procedure Act. This month, a district judge in Pennsylvania concurred and struck down the rule. (Because nationwide injunctions are countenanced by the APA, this decision was not foreclosed by the Court’s Casa opinion earlier this year.) Once again — twelve years after their case was opened — the Little Sisters of the Poor were informed that they must choose between their consciences and the law.

  I have to admit that I do not understand the mental processes at work in the Democrat brains here.

• This Democrat ploy is pretty understandable though. They want to make the District of Columbia a state. Jonathan Turley proposes a solution they will find unacceptable: Want to Restore Voting Rights for D.C. Residents? The Solution is Waiting Just Over the Maryland Border.

  Over the years, I have testified five times in the House and Senate to argue for the restoration of full representation for residents in Washington, D.C. Residents could have a governor, two real U.S. senators, a voting representative in the House, a state legislature, and every other trapping of statehood. It needs only to go back whence it came.

  D.C. needs to return to Maryland through “retrocession.”

  In academic writings, I have advocated for what I called “modified retrocession” where Maryland would take back the land given initially to create what was called “the federal city.”

  It's a pretty good solution to an uncomfortable problem: DC residents really are victims of taxation without representation. (On the other hand, nobody is making them live there.) But what Democrats really want is two more Democrat senators, so retrocession is off the table for them.

• But speaking of taxation without representation… The default D.C. license plate bitches about it in uppercase: "END TAXATION WITHOUT REPRESENTATION". This came up in a recent City Journal podcast and there was a brief discussion of the best license plate motto from Ilya Shapiro.

  he other thing is, know, D.C.’s slogan, right, taxation without representation, which is on the license plates. Although I tested this, right, because of that New Hampshire “Live Free Or Die Case” from the 70s, you don’t have to accept any slogan. So when I moved to D.C. in 2004, as I mentioned, I said, I don’t want that slogan on my license plate. And so the clerk at the DMV was like, fine, I got to go into the back room. I’m like, okay, I’ll wait. And he comes back and I got a license plate. In fact, I’ll be right back with it. I can show it. I have it hanging here.

  Ilya has a vanity plate, shouting out to that classic Federalist Paper: "FED 51".

  But he slightly misstates the "LFOD case": Wooley v. Maynard said that New Hampshire couldn't compel car owners to display the motto, but removing or obscuring it was left as a DIY thing.

• Our very own socialist. At Granite Grok, Steve MacDonald notes a Democrat running against Chris Pappas for the US Senate seat being vacated by Jeanne Shaheen: Progressive Karisham Manzur Challenges Pappas for US Senate.

  New Hampshire’s Democrats, the ones who show up for primaries at least, have a thing for far-left nutjobs. They belong in Vermont, truth be told, where they have political “parties” to the left of the already far-left Democrats. They belong there, because some of them came here from there.

  And when Vermont sends one here to campaign, Bernie Sanders, for example, they love that. And maybe that’s the chance Karishma Manzur is hoping for. Despite the Dems’ dislike for primaries, she is challenging milquetoast Pajama Boy Chris “Norovirus” Pappas for the opportunity to warm the retiring Granny Shaheen’s US Senate seat.

  Karisham apparently wants to start at the top; I don't see any indication that she's been elected, or even been a candidate for, any public office, anywhere. She claims to be a "science writer", but can you find any of her science publications? I can't. (New Hampshire Bulletin has a couple tedious opinion articles she wrote back in 2024.) She has a substack, but the latest post there is from March.

  (I also found references to research papers on which she's listed as an author or co-author, apparently from her academic days going for her Ph.D.)

  But she has a slick campaign website, where you can read her horrible, utterly predictable, positions on the issues.

  Someone should tell her that "Defend First Amendment freedoms" is a very uncomfotable fit with "Overturn Citizens United." Yes, both positions appear on her site.

We have a raft of spicy reactions to recent developments. First up is Kevin D. Williamson who brings us the recipe for Tacos Kiev.

KDW regrettably confuses his culinary cultures by dragging in the Corleones, but I can imagine Putin telling his flunkies to "Leave the gun, take the cannoli. Also, the tacos."

George Will holds out some hope for an alternate path, and … hey, is that a fish TACO? Now it is the Old World’s turn to rescue the United States. (WaPo gifted link)

GFW holds out some hope:

Now it is the Old World’s turn to rescue the United States. It needs to be liberated from the chimera that it has no substantial stake in the outcome of high-intensity, state-on-state violence inflicted by a nuclear power obedient to a man who has actual beliefs: crackpot, but real, and menacing.

Jim Geraghty's headline (Now Is the Time for Trump to Get Tough with Putin) seems to think there's still some hope for that. But what follows seems pessimistic, to put it mildly:

Jim avoids food metaphors until… he recommends that Trump "Use the stick as well as the carrot." I'm not hopeful, but we'll see.

Noah Rothman looks at what "peace" on Putin's terms would involve: Putin’s ‘Peace’ Proposal Would Be a Prelude to More War.

The only food metaphor I can find in Noah's article is a glum one: going along with Putin's demands "would almost invariably serve as a springboard into Ukraine in a future, third effort by the Kremlin to swallow up its neighbor."

Gulp.

Also of note:

• Imagine me reading this article while saying "So what?" Eric Berger at Ars Technica seems to really want to rekindle that old "space race" spirit, against a different competitor: After recent tests, China appears likely to beat the United States back to the Moon.

  In recent weeks, the secretive Chinese space program has reported some significant milestones in developing its program to land astronauts on the lunar surface by the year 2030.

  On August 6, the China Manned Space Agency successfully tested a high-fidelity mockup of its 26-ton "Lanyue" lunar lander. The test, conducted outside of Beijing, used giant tethers to simulate lunar gravity as the vehicle fired main engines and fine control thrusters to land on a cratered surface and take off from there.

  He interviews Dean Cheng, "one of the most respected analysts on China, space policy, and the geopolitical implications of the new space competition." A snippet

  Ars: What would the geopolitical impact be if China beats the United States back to the Moon?

  Cheng: The geopolitical impact of the Chinese beating the US to the Moon (where we are returning) would be enormous.

  Ars: How so?

  Cheng: It means the end of American exceptionalism. One of the hallmarks of the post-1969 era was that only the United States had been able to land someone on the Moon (or any other celestial body). This was bound to end, but the constant American refrain of "We've put a man on the Moon, we can do anything" will certainly no longer resonate.

  Cheng makes the point that US space policy has undergone mood swings over the past years, while China's policy has been steady and consistent. True enough.

Lawrence M. Krauss takes to Reason, describing America's Two-Front War on Science.

I'm not a huge fan of government-funded science, but Krauss does point out some real problems.

Also of note:

• Missing the more important application. The Slashdot story asks Can We Harness Light Like Nature for a New Era of Green Chemistry? Unfortunately, it starts out with an incoherent first sentence:

  Sunlight becomes energy when plants convert four photons of light.

  What? What?

  Well, Slashdot links to a slightly more sensible article: By learning to harness light like nature, we're launching a new era of green chemistry. At least it starts off better:

  Photosynthesis is nature's way of turning sunlight into chemical energy.

  Plants use a green pigment called chlorophyll to absorb sunlight, using this solar energy to convert carbon dioxide from the air and water from the soil into glucose, which they use as a food source. This process also produces oxygen, which is released into the atmosphere.

  This transformation, however, does not happen in a single step. Instead, plants absorb four photons (particles of light) in a carefully choreographed sequence, gradually accumulating the energy required to split water molecules and release oxygen.

  Ah, it's an article describing my favorite mad-scientist scheme, Artificial Photosynthesis! There's, apparently, a new process that shows promise. Unfortunately, the article doesn't seem to hit on the possibility of using it for CO₂ capture, solving global warming!

• And why can't they suffer in silence? Jeff Jacoby asks: Who really suffers from Trump Derangement Syndrome? He traces the original malady back a couple decades, when Charles Krauthammer dubbed Dubya-hatred "Bush Derangement Syndrome". But…

  Two decades on, Krauthammer's coinage has been appropriated, rebranded, and defined down — way down. "Trump Derangement Syndrome" is now flung at anyone who objects to President Trump's conduct or opposes his policies. The term is no longer reserved for over-the-top expressions of revulsion — like actor Robert De Niro using a televised appearance at the Tony Awards to proclaim "F*** Trump" and being rewarded with a standing ovation. Or like Kamala Harris declaring on CNN that Trump was a "fascist" who expected US military leaders to be as blindly loyal to him as "Hitler's generals."

  No — today "Trump Derangement Syndrome" is used as an all-purpose put-down to deride any Trump critics, including those who stick to serious, fact-based analysis. I've lost count of all the times I've been diagnosed with TDS after writing that a given Trump policy is wrong, counterproductive, or unlawful.

  […]

  The real Trump Derangement Syndrome shows up in three telltale symptoms.

  First is the cult-like worship that treats Trump as infallible — his acolytes profess adoration not only for what he does, but for whatever could flow from him.

  Emblematic of that mindset are the "Trump Was Right About Everything!" baseball caps, which the president himself prominently displayed in the Oval Office in February 2025. The caps are intended less as a joke than as a badge of faith. They echo Trump's infamous boast about being able to "stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and [not] lose any voters." For some in his base, there is literally nothing he could do that would shake their devotion. The more outlandish the president's deeds or words, the more his enthusiasts praise his strategic genius and his mastery of four-dimensional chess.

  Other symptoms include cheering for Trump's economically-destructive policies and wallowing in Trump's wacky rhetoric.

  I'm pretty disgusted with—when I'm not amused by—both sides' derangement.

• The ongoing horror at the University Near Here. The Concord Monitor has a tear-jerker: University System addresses major funding cuts, in-state tuition hikes for upcoming school year.

  When the windows in Handler Hall froze solid in the winter of 2023, University of New Hampshire student Aidan Bearor questioned whether his second-floor dorm room was worth the nearly $13,000 annual price tag.

  Bearor earned his undergraduate degree in English at UNH in Durham before enrolling at UNH Law in Concord in the fall of 2024. He described his former housing as “old, dilapidated and didn’t have any sort of air conditioning and inconsistent heat.”

  “It seemed like the housing aspect of UNH was not very accommodating for the money I paid,” he said.

  For the record, Handler Hall was built in 2007. Not really that old.

  But the punchline comes at the end:

  “I left UNH with $136,000 in student debt,” Bearor said. “I know friends who have it a lot worse than I do. If I had this much debt with just an English degree, it would be a lot harder to swallow.”

  Remember: Beror was an undergrad English major.

Recently on the book blog:

The author, Michael Huemer, is a philosophy prof at the University of Colorado in Boulder. I got the relatively cheap paperback edition of this book, it being one of those self-published, printed-on-demand deals. (It's slightly cheaper on Kindle.) I've read a couple of his previous books, Ethical Intuitionism and The Problem of Political Authority. (I found the former kind of daunting, the latter less so.)

Progressive Myths, however, is completely accessible to the lay reader. It is (more or less) a wide-ranging corrective to the worldview promulgated by left-wingers in the media and in positions of political power.

An initial chapter deals with "myths about individuals" that were endlessly reported in the news in past years: allegations that Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, and Jacob Blake were murdered by racists; that Amy Cooper and Kyle Rittenhouse were motivated by racism. Huemer does a good job debunking those cases. And, to his credit, he adds in three "non-myths" where the left's narrative was more factual: George Floyd, Eric Garner, and Breonna Taylor.

Subsequent chapters deal with more general topics. A sampling: the male/female "wage gap"; racist police shootings; transgender ideology; anthropogenic global warming; progressive taxation; government regulation. And more.

Why is this important? Huemer's final chapters discuss how progressive mythologies are particularly corrosive to American society, pushing the oppressors/oppressed binary narrative: whites oppressing blacks, males oppressing females, the rich oppressing the poor, the straight oppressing the not-so-straight. (Yes, we well-off white male heterosexuals are evil, I might as well confess.)

I didn't find much new information in the book; Huemer is mostly repackaging and summarizing progressive-refuting arguments that have previously been made by others at greater length and detail. Still, it's a useful and perceptive overview of an ideology that seems to depend on a largely fanciful view of reality.

Huemer also has a substack, Fake Noûs. Heh!

At the Josiah Bartlett Center, Drew Cline encourages readers to ignore people trying to claim otherwise: State financial inputs aren't the measure of a university system. Skipping to his conclusion:

If I were a state legislator, I would wait until we hear how UNH and USNH handle the recent law demanding an end to its "diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives". Surely that's gotta save some dough.

Also of note:

• A dimly remembered quote. I'm pretty sure it was in the satirical "Letters" column in a very old issue of National Lampoon:

  A piano is a piano is a piano.
  
       — Gertrude Steinway

  I still get a chuckle out of that. And it was brought to mind by an op-ed from Sarah Lehnert in the weekend WSJ: Want a Steinway? The Forest Service Stands in the Way. (WSJ gifted link)

  Steinway pianos have a particular sound. “When one plays a Steinway, there is a warmth and nobility in the sound that is unequalled by any other instrument,” says Ukrainian-born classical pianist Emanuel Ax. The secret to the sound isn’t merely Steinway’s skilled craftsmen—who’ve been using the same methods since 1853—but the specialized wood they use for the soundboards. It comes from the Tongass National Forest in Alaska, and it gives Steinway pianos the highest quality of tone, pitch, clarity and consistency. Unfortunately, a broken promise from the federal government will soon stop the music.

  Apparently, the US Forest Service prefers to keep the wood in the trees, and out of the pianos. Sarah makes a pretty convincing case that the wood can be harvested without overall damage to the forest, and increased musical beauty for worldwide audiences.

• I used to read Playboy for the articles. Well, not exclusively. But I read the WSJ for the editorials. Let me link to an article I also blogged a few days back, from David Henderson at EconLib: Who Got the Biggest Percentage Tax Cuts? Quoting a side issue:

  Surprisingly, reporters for the Wall Street Journal last week pointed out that the lowest income quintile received the largest percentage decrease in taxes. Why do I say surprisingly? Isn’t the Wall Street Journal the kind of newspaper that, of course, would point that out? The editorial page, certainly. But not the news pages. I’ve read the Journal multiple times a week for 52 years and I’ve always noticed the split between the conservative/sometimes libertarian editorial page and the left-of-center news pages. Indeed, the UCLA economist and now George Mason University economist Tim Groseclose established in his 2011 book, Left Turn: How Liberal Media Bias Distorts the American Mind, that WSJ reporters are among the most left-wing of all reporters for the major media. I reviewed his book here and briefly cited his evidence about the Journal.

  I will occasionally notice a leftward slant in WSJ news articles, but overall I think they play it pretty straight. Being oriented toward business and economics (I think) requires them to stay clear of obvious fantasies and fallacies.

• Eulogy for a guy I had never heard of. At the Federalist, Dan Perrin, Brian Darling, Ed Corrigan, Greg Rothman, and Tony Rudy note a passing: Mike Hammond Made Washington And The World A Better Place.

  It’s a story we’ve heard a thousand times: A young, idealistic person comes to Washington, D.C., driven by a deep desire to make the world a better place. For many, that idealism eventually gives way to pragmatism — or worse, to cynicism. What’s rare — extraordinary, even — is someone who can spend over 50 years in the Beltway without ever losing that original sense of purpose. What is even scarcer is finding someone who succeeded in making the world a better place. That person was Michael E. Hammond.

  And there is an LFOD angle:

  Hammond spent his final years working on the causes he loved from his office at Gun Owners of America in Virginia and his home in New Hampshire. There was something about the Granite State that Hammond found special, but we always thought it was perhaps its motto, “Live Free or Die,” because it epitomized his spirit and ethos. He also got to live his version of the Walter Mitty fantasy, writing a play and having it produced.

  Apparently from Dunbarton. RIP.

Recently on the book blog:

I got this book via Interlibrary Loan from the University Near Here. Originally from the University of Wisconsin - Eau Claire. Thanks to all involved.

The author, Matthew Hennessey, is the WSJ's deputy op-ed editor. And occasional columnist. The book was a finalist for the 2023 Hayek Book Prize given by the Manhattan Institute.

Hennessey's style is informal and laced with humor and personal reflections. He takes the reader over the basics, chapter by chapter, showing how (see the subtitle) free markets "miraculously" produce prosperity via the action of billions of individuals that are making choices, responding to incentives, usually just trying to make an honest living. A penultimate chapter looks at the "anti-marketers" (e.g., Senator Bernie) and refutes their arguments.

Particularly charming: the story of how his parents, after years of various jobs, became small-businesspeople after buying a local bar, slowly turning it from a dive into a respectable joint. (I'm reading between the lines a bit here.)

Readers who have read other pro-capitalism books might find this one to be a little basic. Hennessey writes that his initial plan was to write this book for his kids, as an introduction to basic economics. And I can heartily recommend it for bright youngsters (or oldsters, for that matter) who are looking for such a thing.

Today's Eye Candy is from … whoa … fifty years ago, back when you could get an Intel 8080 CPU-powered computer for a few hundred bucks. And then scurry around for some peripherals, and… maybe eventually you could run CP/M on it.

Things are different today, and the onetime dominant CPU company has taken the wrong road, according to John R. Puri: Intel’s Road to Serfdom. (NR gifted link)

Rejoice, NR haters: that's my last gifted link for August. For the next 15 days, you'll just have to use your imaginations.

But (of course) Joe Lancaster at Reason is not a fan, although he doesn't seem to go for a Hayek reference, direct or indirect, at all: Intel is reportedly the latest company Trump wants a piece of.

I'd hurl insults at Republicans who are aiding and abetting this sort of Mussolini-style fascism, but I'm kind of weary of repeating myself. I ask readers to use their imaginations, and think about the wise and witty things I could have typed.

Also of note:

• It's those uncorrected errors from Uzbekistan that always get you. Roger Pielke, Jr. asks if a "groundbreaking" climate science paper is simply Too Big to Fail. His article recounts how the Nature-published paper "The economic commitment of climate change" from last year (abbreviated "KLW24") predicted large economic costs from climate change by end of this century.

  This, in turn, caused the Network for Greening the Financial System (NGFS), a consortium of >100 central banks, to draw up new policies and recommendations for investments and regulation.

  In short, it was a huge deal. But:

  In a response to KLW24 published last week in Nature, Bearpark et al. (BHH25) showed that correcting inaccurate data from Uzbekistan in KLW24 reduces their estimate of projected 2100 damages due to climate change by about two thirds. This correction makes their damage estimates not statistically different from zero throughout the century. Making matters worse, these projections also employ the implausibly extreme RCP8.5 scenario.

  But the scientific malpractice continues, as Roger shows.

• Can he save us? It has been a long time since we've seen him, but he has reappeared at Dave Barry's substack. Yes, it's Ask Mister Language Person. Up first:

  Our first common question is one that we get literally a billion times a day:

  Q. What does "literally" mean?

  A. In grammatical terms, "literally" is an interjunctive superlatory, and as such it is used to denote that something literal has transpired, as in this example:

  Doreen was literally decimated when Roger broke wind during their vows.

  More helpfulness at the link, and your welcome.

• This sounds like a job for Mister Language Person. Well, no it doesn't actually, but David Harsanyi asks us to Save the Little Sisters of the Poor!

  It's enraging.

  More than a decade after the Obama administration tried to force the Little Sisters of the Poor to buy contraception for their employees, including abortifacient drugs, states are still hounding the nuns in court.

  At its heart, Obamacare was a massive welfare program meant to redistribute health care costs to the middle class. But it was also a social engineering project aimed at coercing religious organizations and businesses to adopt progressive values. The Affordable Care Act mandated employers, including not-for-profits like Little Sisters of the Poor, pay for contraceptives in their worker-provided health-insurance as an "essential health benefit" under the euphemistic category of "preventative and wellness services."

  A single judge, Wendy Beetlestone, has now demanded that the nuns start ponying up for a practice they consider to be a matter of grave sin. David notes that Judge Wendy ruled the same way back in 2017, and she was subsquently reversed by a 7-2 SCOTUS decision.

• Journalistic Mythbehavior A recent NYT article is headlined The 6 Social Security Myths That Won’t Go Away (NYT gifted link)

  Dominic Pino counted things up, and… NYT's Six Social Security Myths: Five Are True. With help from the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget:

  1. “Social Security is ‘running out of money.'” It definitely is! The trust fund is projected to run out of money in 2033. The NYT acknowledges this is true but then says Congress can draw on general revenue to keep the program going. The CBO assumes that will happen when the trust fund runs out, but the trust fund definitely will run out.
  2. “Aging boomers are the problem.” The NYT says the aging population “was always anticipated.” CRFB rightly retorts, “The fact that lawmakers have known about this problem for over 40 years and done nothing to solve it does not make its existence a myth.”
  3. “Social Security helps drive the deficit.” The NYT says this is a myth because the program is self-funded, even though it just acknowledged earlier on that in several years it will need to draw from general revenues to keep benefits going. CRFB notes that Social Security costs have exceeded revenues by $1.4 trillion since 2010, and the shortfall this year is $250 billion. That adds to the deficit.
  4. “The trust fund is nothing but a pile of I.O.U.s.” The bonds in the trust fund are not backed by any assets. They are not traded on public markets. They are a promise from the federal government. The federal government has made good on those promises so far, but that’s all it is: a promise, which, in the context of money, can be called an I.O.U.
  5. “We need to cut benefits now to pay them later.” I suppose it could be called a myth to say “need,” but that’s really an opinion question. Cutting benefits now to pay them later is certainly one way to go about fixing the program, and as CRFB says, “acting sooner will literally reduce the necessary size of the adjustment.”

  What did the NYT get right? Click over to find out! The answer may surprise you!

Veronique de Rugy takes what should be a non-controversial stand: New Climate Report Deserves to Be Debated, Not Silenced

Some additional links:

• the report itself;
• the DOE press release;
• Travis Fisher's explanation: Why I Helped Organize the Department of Energy’s Climate Report;
• Roger Pielke's response to reporters' queries about the report.

I also liked Ted Nordhaus's explanation of his evolution on the issue: Why I Stopped Being a Climate Catastrophist.

In case you're wondering, I'm sticking with my crackpot idea: Artificial Photosynthesis!

Also of note:

• And the Tyrant of our Teapot Tempests. Jeff Maurer turns down his usual R-rated whimsiness to make a serious observation: Trump Is the Dictator of Our Dialogue.

  You could pretty much write a “Trump did a bad thing” column every day. I try to dole them out sparingly because: 1) I think that comedians have the “Trump is bad” angle pretty well covered, and 2) If this blog becomes one-note, I would like that note to be “George Clooney’s The Midnight Sky was a self-indulgent pile of dinosaur shit.”

  One of the most frustrating things about Trump is that he does more than just make shockingly bad decisions on the issues of the day; he decides what the issues of the day even are. None of us were talking about the Commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics a month ago; that conversation started when a BLS employee committed the sin of competence, leading Trump to choose a replacement who is to economics what Gob Bluth is to magic. Nobody was talking about federal control of DC until Trump cooked up a policy in response to an imagined crime spike; if Fox News had aired Ferris Bueller's Day Off instead of their usual fare, Trump surely would have deployed troops to Chicago to crack down on delinquent teens. Reacting to the Trump outrage du jour engages Trump on a battlefield of his choosing.

  But a universe of important issues are being ignored while Trump pursues a Fox-News-and-petty-revenge-fueled agenda. In the end, the most damaging impacts of his presidency might come not from issues he bungled, but from issues he simply ignored. Here are some issues that are non-entities in our dialogue while Trump feuds with the Smithsonian and seeks to build a Lavish, Grand, And Totally Heterosexual Ballroom at the White House.

  Now Jeff, bless his heart, is what passes for a moderate liberal Democrat in this day and age. You and I might make some edits to his "issues" list, and we'd certainly disagree with his recommended "solutions".

  And griping about the arcane complexity of the tax code? Please. That's an easy target, but Jimmy Carter called the tax code "a disgrace to the human race" fifty years ago. Like a number of things on the list, it's hardly Trump's fault that little progress has been made on that front.

  But overall, Jeff's right: Trump has made it All About Him. We should do better.

• And, oh, by the way… David Hebert notes a milestone. The National Debt Just Eclipsed $37 Trillion: Here’s What We Should Do About That. (NR gifted link)

  Eliminating USAID was a good start, but this only saved $44.2 billion. The government would have to eliminate USAID 41 times to bring the budget back into balance. Other areas of cuts could include the Department of Education, the Department of Commerce, and the Department of Housing and Urban Development. There is no provision within the Constitution for the federal government to have a role in education or housing and urban development, and most of what Commerce does is cronyism. These departments have a total budget for this year of $585.8 billion.

  To make real budgetary progress, though, the U.S. must tackle entitlement reform. In 2024, Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid alone constituted 44 percent of all federal spending, or just under $3 trillion. The problem here is not that there are (supposedly) millions of people over 100 years old receiving Social Security payments. The federal government is not set up as an investment firm, capable of managing finances for millions of people, nor is it an insurance agency. These are promises that Washington bureaucrats have no business making and no ability to keep. The problem here is not that the government insufficiently funds these programs. For example, when health care is paid for by reaching into the pockets of other Americans, costs skyrocket.

  David's got more good ideas, and if you need a free link, there's one up there.

• The answer may surprise (and also depress) you! Scott Lincicome asks: How Much of Your Life (and Money) Have Dumb Rules Wasted?

  Given the (ahem) tumultuous U.S. trade and economic situation and various personal obligations, I’ve been doing a lot of air travel this summer—a lot. While these trips have been physically and mentally taxing, they came with a silver lining: They’ve allowed me to conduct an informal field test of the effects of the July 8 change to the Transportation Security Administration requirement that most U.S. air travelers remove their shoes when transiting through airport security checkpoints nationwide. As anyone who has flown in the last two decades can attest, the simple “shoe rule” is highly annoying, but did it have a meaningful effect on wait times at airport security? The TSA seems to think so, with DHS Secretary Kristi Noem stating on the day of the announcement that the agency expects the rule change to “drastically decrease passenger wait times at our TSA checkpoints.”

  And you know what? She’s probably right.

  Scott does the math, and finds that over the nineteen years the shoe policy was in place, it's cost us tens of billions of dollars in lost time.

  And yet, nobody's gone to jail.

• Jeff Jacoby is cursed with a decent memory. Displayed by remembering a simple truth: When Israel left Gaza, everything got worse.

  There is no way to know yet how this will turn out. But as Israel prepares to push still deeper into Gaza in what may be the cataclysmic final phase of its war to eliminate Hamas, it is worth looking back to reflect on another fateful, anguish-filled Israeli decision in Gaza — one that began the descent into the nightmare the Jewish state now faces.

  It was exactly 20 years ago this week — Aug. 15, 2005 — that the Israeli government, led by then-prime minister Ariel Sharon, destroyed 21 Jewish communities in the Gaza Strip, evicting 9,000 Israelis and demolishing the homes where some of them had lived for decades. All of Gaza, denuded of its Jews, was then unilaterally surrendered to the Palestinian Authority. There was no quid pro quo. Israel relinquished the territory it had occupied in the 1967 Six Day War without requiring anything in return. Sharon labeled the operation "disengagement" — a term meant to suggest that by handing Gaza to the Palestinians, Israel could finally sever its ties to the troubled territory and its population.

  What Israel got instead was, … well, you know.

I remember Salon once absurdly contending that Americans live in “the Koch brothers’ libertarian utopia.” _A libertarian utopia!_ We can’t even get a Republican president to stop telling corporate boards what to do.https://t.co/ZgDN0Pvmde pic.twitter.com/JYnAmjJdMp

— Jim Geraghty (@jimgeraghty) August 13, 2025

Jim's link will take you to his examples of Another Dollop of Light Communism from the Trump Administration (NR gifted link).

And he doesn't even mention this recent example of that:

The WSJ's Greg Ip also notes that The U.S. Marches Toward State Capitalism With American Characteristics. (WSJ gifted link)

As a free market fan myself, I'm dismayed. But then I check my investment portfolio, and I'm slightly mollified; the gurus at Fidelity seem to be adjusting it well to the new reality.

But, speaking of reality, Don Boudreaux notes that Even Trump Can't Escape Logic and Reality. Specifically, about him trying to push Goldman Sachs around:

Don notes there are only three groups that might be a source of all that tariff revenue:

1. American consumers;
2. American businesses;
3. foreign producers.

Trump wants to deny the first two. Understandable that he wants to.

But (here's the logic and reality): if "foreign producers" are eating the tariff costs to keep the net cost of their products to Americans the same, that destroys Trump's argument that his tariffs will spur domestic production.

I recently read the late Martin Cruz Smith's last novel, in which his Russian detective hero, Arkady Renko, mused that the best book to read in order to understand Russia was Alice in Wonderland. I'm beginning to think it might be a gateway to understanding America under Trump.

Also of note:

• Of course he does. Dominic Pino notes that Trump Wants a Bureau of MAGA Statistics. After the defenestration of Bureau of Labor Statistics commissioner Erika McEntarfer:

  What Trump would like is a BLS that is biased in his favor. The latest proof of that is his nominee to be the next commissioner, E. J. Antoni.

  Antoni is the chief economist at the Heritage Foundation. He has been a relentless booster of Trump’s policies on social media. And he has demonstrated time and again that he does not understand economic statistics.

  Dominic has examples of Antoni's past whoppers.

• A nation turns its lonely eyes to … Zohran Mamdani? George Will looks for the pony in a room filled with you-know-what: Why Mamdani’s socialism-on-the-Hudson would be useful for America. (WaPo gifted link)

  Donald Trump and Zohran Mamdani are similar symptoms, and similarly reasons for guarded optimism. The president and the self-described “democratic socialist” who is the Democratic nominee to be New York’s next mayor have risen on tides of resentments, and are inadvertent educators.

  Trump is teaching a daily seminar on the founders’ wisdom, especially the separation of powers, which Congress, by its self-marginalization, has weakened, thereby emancipating presidents from law and other restraints. Mamdani, if elected, will be similarly instructive regarding elementary economics and the limits of government’s competence.

  Here's hoping we can learn our lessons without much further damage.

• One electron looks pretty much like another. But (unfortunately) it costs money to shove them into my house. At NH Journal, Kevin Avard explains Why Granite Staters Pay Too Much for Electricity—and How to Fix It.

  If you’ve opened your electric bill recently, you’ve probably felt the same thing I have—frustration. Granite Staters are paying some of the highest electricity rates in the country, and it’s getting worse. Eversource just announced a hike in its default supply rate, increasing it from 8.9 cents to 11.2 cents per kilowatt-hour. This rate covers the actual electricity we use. Other utilities and suppliers are seeing similar increases because these rates are tied to regional energy market costs.

  And to make matters worse, the fixed monthly customer charge is also rising by 43 percent, from about $13.81 to nearly $20 a month—before you even turn on the lights.

  Kevin's not wrong. This site reports how electricity cost varies state-to-state. New Hampshire's average (residential/commercial) rate is 20.50¢ per kWh. That's in comparison to the US average of 13.17¢ per kWh.

  Other New England states, though, show that it's a regional malady: MA: 24.67¢ per kWh; ME: 22.84¢ per kWh; VT 19.42¢ per kWh; CT: 26.16¢ per kWh; RI: 25.66¢ per kWh.

  Kevin is a state senator, and his ideas on "how to fix it" seem OK.

  I have to say that I think electricity is a huge bargain, even at 20.50¢ per kWh.

Recently on the movie blog:

As promised/threatened yesterday in my David Mamet f-bomb anecdote, I dropped a few bucks on Amazon Prime to watch this 2001 movie, which he wrote and directed. A star-studded cast! In addition to the names on the poster to your right, there's also Sam Rockwell, Ricky Jay, Patti LuPone, and Mrs. Mamet, Rebecca Pidgeon. Nearly all on the wrong side of the law, and demonstrating that there is, with few exceptions, no honor among thieves.

It starts with a daring and successful jewelry heist, but kingpin Danny DeVito uses it as leverage to coerce master crook Gene Hackman into going after a bigger score. It is the fabled "one last job": a plane carrying a whole bunch of Swiss gold. (That's kind of a spoiler, sorry; we learn about the job solely from the characters talking obliquely about it. And not until it actually occurs do we realize: Oh, that's what they were talking about.

Mamet's dialog is also gold, of course. Are real-world bad guys clever enough to talk like this? I suppose if anyone would know, it would be Mamet.

James Freeman offers us A New York Times Column Every Politician Should Read. (WSJ gifted link) It seems more voters are playing that old Who song, "Won't Get Fooled Again".

There's more dissection of Edsall's ire, and it's pretty amusing. I'd bet that Edsall has, in the past, contemptuously deemed some Republican proposals as "trickle-down". What he fails to recognize is that dumping Federal dollars on a town like Texarkana goes first to the politically-connected. Does it proceed to "trickle down" upon the general citizenry? Doesn't sound as if it does.

[Eye Candy du Jour note: I confess I did not know that "boondoggle" had an original meaning thanks to the Boy Scouts!]

Also of note:

• Speaking of boondoggles… You know, in addition to going after Washington DC criminals, Trump should also crack down on this robbery that is (apparently) still legal: DC’s $4.4B RFK Stadium Boondoggle: A Gift to Interest Groups, a Burden on Taxpayers.

  Washington, DC’s subsidization of the renovation of RFK Stadium — the once and future home of the Washington Commanders — “is a BFD,” Mayor Muriel Bowser said, verging on an expletive to convey her enthusiasm for the proposal, to which the DC Council assented on August 1 by a vote of 9 to 3. Another, final vote to approve the stadium will occur in September.

  “Big” is, indeed, an apt adjective for the affaire d’RFK. The public funds to be spent — $1.7 billion in direct subsidies and $2.7 billion in indirect subsidies — are prodigious. The scope of the development plan transcends the mere renovation of an old sports venue. The stadium campus is set to include (besides the stadium) multiple parking structures, bars and restaurants, retail stores, an $89 million indoor sportsplex, a planned grocery store, a pharmacy, daycare facilities, a hotel, 6,000 or more housing units, and a “30-acre stretch of riverfront community commons.” An extension of Washington’s metro system also may be undertaken. In Bowser’s phrase: “180 acres of vacant land, activated.” In short, the deal amounts to a wholesale bid to transform a languishing portion of eastern Washington DC into a vital and bustling hub. An ambitious central-planning gambit, if not a hubristic one.

  But will all this cash "trickle down" to, y'know, normal people? By the time we discover the answer ("nope"), the boons will have been doggled.

• And we're still speaking of boondoggles… Beth Brelje follows the money at the Federalist, and I give her two thumbs up for using the adjective "cushy" in her headline: PBS Parent Company Sent Tax Dollars To Cushy Lobbying Firm. The recently-defunded Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) was sending cash to the "nonprofit" Association of Public Television Stations (APTS). And…

  APTS is a $4.5 million nonprofit membership organization that promotes public television. Its finances are closely connected to APTS Action Inc., the lobbying arm of APTS, which is also funded by membership fees and shares the same leadership team. APTS Action had nearly $2 million in gross receipts in 2023. APTS Action advocates for policy issues related to education, health care, and telecommunications, and it “brings public television’s message to Capitol Hill.” It lobbies for “federal funding for America’s public television stations” and “expanding” public TV “outreach in education, public safety and civic leadership,” according to its tax-exempt papers.

  APTS received $25,000 from CPB in 2022, and it charges public television stations a membership service fee. For an added fee, members can buy access to a grant-seeking database.

  In 2023 APTS earned $3.8 million in “program service revenue,” which includes fees from public TV stations, and spent most of it on employee compensation ($3.3 million).

  The path of money — from taxpayers to the federal government to CPB to public television stations to APTS, (or direct from CPB to APTS) — shows that ultimately taxpayers fund APTS, which appears to be primarily a fat salary and lobbying machine.

  And how much of that cash "trickled down" to something you might want to watch on TV?

• Exercise for the reader. Count the different terms Jeff Maurer uses for "breasts" in his announcement: “I Might Be Wrong” Will Exclusively Cover Sydney Sweeney’s Breasts Until This National Crisis Passes. To help you, I've bolded two in his second paragraph:

  On July 23, our nation was rocked by a once-in-a-century event: A jeans company put a pretty lady in their commercial. Much like 9/11 or the JFK assassination, no one who lived through this calamity will forget where they were when they heard the news. In the future, “Anno Domini” may be replaced by “Post-Sydney Sweeney American Eagle Commercial”, as the latter will surely be a more salient divider between “before” and “after”.

  I Might Be Wrong has, regrettably, been derelict in our coverage of this event. It is to our great shame that not a single word on this blog/podcast has been devoted to the cataclysm. But as the national dialogue around Sydney Sweeney’s possibly-fascist breasts approaches its fourth week, I Might Be Wrong is determined to correct the error. From this point forward, we will not only exclusively cover Ms. Sweeney’s heaving boobage: We will cover it with a rigor and zeal unprecedented in the history of news. Kiss our asses, Woodward and Bernstein; go eat a dick, Ghost of Walter Cronkite — nothing in the annals of journalism will hold a candle to our immersive, round-the-clock coverage of Ms. Sweeney’s thought-provoking, arguably eugenicist sweater cannons.

  I'm sure there's a web page somewhere that helped him out with this.

• And an article I stopped reading. On the front page of today's WSJ: Meet the Parents Raising ‘Carnivore Babies,’ Swapping Puréed Fruit for Rib-Eye. (WSJ gifted link) It begins:

  When Dariya Quenneville’s infant daughter was ready for solid food, she skipped the mushed up avocado and banana. On the menu instead? Raw egg yolk and puréed chicken liver.

  The child, named Schizandra, […]

  I stopped reading there, although I think my eye may have seen "sardines" without meaning to.

  I wish young Schizandra a happy and healthy life. And perhaps a new name.

From an AP story:

I smell a sellout. I hope I'm wrong.

Also of note:

• "Novel theory" is a polite way to say "totally made up excuse". Dominic Pino looks at recent developments in Fantasyland, aka the White House: Trump’s Sweeping Tariff Powers Face Court Scrutiny under Unprecedented IEEPA Claim. (NR gifted link)

  The Trump administration has invented a novel theory of trade law whereby the president has unilateral authority to declare unlimited tariffs on any country for any length of time and modify them at will, based on a law that never once uses the word “tariff” and was passed by Congress to limit the president’s trade powers. The International Economic Emergency Powers Act (IEEPA) has been on the books since 1977 and has never been used to impose tariffs before Trump’s second term. Understandably, courts have been skeptical of Trump’s assumption of an enumerated power of Congress, the tariff power. One federal court has already ruled Trump’s tariffs under IEEPA illegal, and the appeals court judges seemed skeptical during oral arguments on July 31.

  Solicitor General D. John Sauer, the government’s attorney in the case before the appeals court, submitted a letter on Monday to the court requesting that the president’s tariff authority under IEEPA be maintained, not because it is lawful, but because overturning it would “have catastrophic consequences for our national security, foreign policy, and economy.”

  If that sounds a little dramatic to you, that’s only scratching the surface of the hysterics in this letter.

  Dominic's not wrong. That letter is really "dogs and cats living together" doomsaying:

  This is a letter signed by the US government's top lawyer and submitted today in federal court (in VOS Selections v Trump). I'm honestly struggling to believe it's real, but here we are. pic.twitter.com/Hb5L8bMeL5

  — Scott Lincicome (@scottlincicome) August 11, 2025

  "We've screwed things up so badly, it would be a catastrophe if you tried to undo it."

• Don't let the door hit you on the way out, Glenn. James Taranto marks the end of an error: The ‘Fact Checker’ Checks Out. (WSJ gifted link)

  Glenn Kessler has left the Washington Post, taking a voluntary buyout and decamping to Substack. I’d say he’s moving up in the world, but Mr. Kessler, who had written the Post’s “Fact Checker” column since 2011, is sore about his departure.

  He is proud of the work he did at the paper, although for reasons that are oddly grubby. In his Substack debut, he boasts of having been a commercial success, in the sense of giving the people what they want: “I built and maintained one of the marquee brands of The Post. . . . My articles were often among the most read on the Post website. Readers flocked to read my fact checks, even if they vehemently disagreed with my findings.”

  It’s possible that Mr. Kessler’s talents, such as they are, were wasted on the Post, which doesn’t seem to have had a business model capable of consistently converting his popularity into profit. Perhaps his flock will migrate with him to Substack and help him feather his bed in the manner he deserves.

  Glenn was only one contributing factor in the erosion of "journalistic integrity". Fun fact from James: Between February and September 2016 the WaPo ran at least six op-eds (WSJ gifted link) comparing Trump to Hitler.

• The Little Engine That Could… could not be reached for comment. The AntiPlanner reviews Senator Joni Ernst's report on (mostly) choo-choos: Off the Rails 2.

  Rail transit is finally getting the attention it deserves in Washington, DC. Early this month, Senator Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) released a report describing billion-dollar boondoggles. While the star is California’s high-speed rail, many of the projects criticized by the report involve rail transit, including Honolulu’s rail project and Maryland’s Purple Line. The projects are not only billions of dollars over budget, many of them are years behind schedule.

  As a starting point, Ernst used a one-page Department of Transportation “annual report” of federally funded projects that the Biden administration had refused to release, but which was recently released by the Trump administration. The list included five Federal Aviation Administration-funded projects that had no cost overruns, three Federal Highway Administration-funded projects whose cost overruns averaged 75 percent, three transit projects whose cost overruns averaged 80 percent, and three Federal Railroad Administration-funded projects whose cost overruns averaged 395 percent.

  Don't get Joni started on Ethanol, though.

• 

  Warning: many F-bombs dropped ahead. This blog used to shy away from this sort of thing, but as David Mamet points out, that was Back When We Gave a Fuck. A charming anecdote:

  I was filming Heist with Gene Hackman; my wife, Rebecca Pidgeon; and Danny DeVito. Danny’s line to Gene, his rival, is, “Are you fucking with me, are you fucking with me, or are you done fucking with me?”

  This occurred in an early scene—one of my first with Danny. I was concerned that he would (incorrectly) accentuate the word done at the end of the phrase, which would have branded him, sadly, with a merely academic understanding of actual American idiom. But I need not have worried, as he accentuated the final fucking and all was well.

  Per contra, Becca was raised in Edinburgh, and educated at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. In the early days of our association she flatteringly strove to adopt my Chicagoan vocabulary. Our great friend, Shel Silverstein, corrected her: “Becca, when you say motherfucker, it’s like someone is trying to fuck your mother.”

  I'm currently reading David's recent book, Everywhere an Oink Oink. Amazon link at your right. I don't recall seeing Heist, but now…

• I foresee a dramatic increase in lawsuits and takedown demands. That prediction is prompted by a viewing of…

  Forget about Skynet et al.; we're quickly moving to a future where people can create movies starring anyone they like, doing and saying whatever they want them to do and say, on a relative shoestring budget.

  I'd watch anything with an AI-generated Bogie as Marlowe.

Emma Camp explains: Capitalism isn't why you're unhappy.

A fair summary of Emma's advice to the capitalism-blamers: Grow up.

(Or, plan B: Wake up, sheeple! Learn about the Great Reptilian Conspiracy!)

Also of note:

• So don't believe deniers of the Reptilian Conspiracy! And, while you're disbelieving, Fareed Zakaria suggests that you also Don’t believe the MAGA doomers on trade. (WaPo gifted link)

  The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s measure of median disposable household income in America was higher than in all but one advanced industrial economy as of 2021 — higher than Switzerland, Germany, Britain and Japan. The exception is tiny Luxembourg. In fact, America’s median disposable household income is about double that of Japan.

  And as Noah Smith points out in an excellent essay, America’s median income has not been stagnant, as conventional wisdom tells us; it has been growing briskly over the decades. Smith notes that real median personal income has risen by 50 percent since the 1970s. Hourly wages, adjusted for inflation, are up substantially since the 1990s. And the hourly wages of the bottom third of Americans are up by even more: over 40 percent.

  We are not, of course, without problems. For example, a major problem is demagogic politicians peddling tales of misery, fueling resentment and envy.

  That, and fiscal insanity. But you knew that.

• Also disbelieve "media outlets". Jonathan Turley notes Vance Derangement Syndrome, getting an early start on the 2028 campaign. Up the Creek: Media Outlets Criticized for False Story on Vance.

  The media and various liberal pundits are again shrugging this week after the exposure of another false story targeting a conservative or Republican. In this case, Vice President JD Vance was criticized for ordering the raising of the river near his Ohio home to improve his family’s canoeing experience. First appearing in The Guardian, the story took off in the media and was featured on shows like The Colbert Show when Stephen Colbert mocked “insane spoiled baby emperor move.” The problem is that it was entirely untrue. The Secret Service raised the river for security reasons with no contact with the Vice President or his family.

  The hit piece was curious because The Guardian admitted that it could not confirm the allegation. Nevertheless, it breathlessly reported  on “Canoe-Gate” with the headline, “JD Vance’s team had water level of the river raised for family’s boating trip.”In the article by Guardian writers Stephanie Kirchgaessner and David Smith, the outlet’s writers suggested that the water-raising was done for recreational reasons, stating “one source with knowledge of the matter who communicated with the Guardian anonymously alleged that the outflow request for the Caesar Creek Lake was not just to support the vice-president’s Secret Service detail, but also to create ‘ideal kayaking conditions.’” They then added, “The Guardian could not independently confirm this specific claim.”

  They could have more honestly written: "This is too good to check."

• A libertarian win. Andy Kessler notes an excellent provision in that mixed bag of legislation. the One Big Beautiful Bill Act: it could Make Cars Beautiful Again. (WSJ gifted link)

  Tired of ugly cars and SUVs that all look the same? Check out crossovers like the Honda CR-V, the Ford Escape and the BMW XM—the last with a staggering $160,000 price tag. The three vehicles look almost identical—an unintended consequence, believe it or not, of 50-year-old Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards. But gasoline-mileage rules were effectively tossed in July’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which could usher in a new era of big, beautiful auto design.

  Most didn’t notice CAFE’s demise. It turns out that you can’t kill mileage standards in a reconciliation bill, so Congress quietly zeroed out its penalties via Section 40006, which “eliminates the civil penalty for a violation by a manufacturer of the Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards.” Clever.

  Fuel-economy standards were enacted in 1975 after the oil embargo. The auto industry immediately complained that future fuel-efficient trucks and buses would be underpowered and never make it up hills. So in June 1976, Congress provided exemptions by defining “a non-passenger automobile” via Title 49 of the Code of Federal Regulations.

  What exactly is a “non-passenger automobile”? The first test is if it can “transport more than 10 persons.” Yes, only our government can classify buses and vans as “non-passenger.” In addition to RVs, cargo vans and trucks, an exemption was also provided for vehicles “capable of off-highway operation”—a loophole big enough to drive through.

  I love my Impreza, but it's sometimes hard to pick it out in a parking lot filled with Civics, Corollas, Elantras, …

My lame headline joke explained here.

Also of note:

• What are they worried about? I can't help but notice that the most strident attacks on school choice programs seem to come from people employed in the government school system. (I've given particular attention to local educrat John Shea over the past year: here here, and here.)

  At the Josiah Bartlett Center, Drew Cline helpfully points out: Competition in education is an opportunity, not a crisis.

  There’s been a bit of a media freakout this week about the growing popularity of school choice programs nationwide.

  The Children’s Scholarship Fund-NH confirmed this week that the Education Freedom Account program hit its 2025-26 enrollment cap of 10,000 students in early August.

  “Record number of students matched with their preferred form of education,” headlines could have read. Instead, the tone of coverage was mostly one of alarm and concern.

  Then The New York Times published a fascinating story Aug. 5 on public school districts’ (predicted) response to the growing popularity of school choice.

  “Public schools try to sell themselves as more students use vouchers,” announced the headline.

  In any other industry dominated by a single provider, the introduction of competition would be treated with cheer. In education, it’s treated as a crisis.

  For another example of the "freakout" generated by the threat of competition, this NHJournal article from May is pretty good: NH House Dem: EFAs Are Plot to 'Recruit' Libertarian Families, 'Destroy' New Hampshire. Eek!

• I'm pretty relaxed about it too. Over on the Geekery blog, I waxed semi-ecstatically about how the AI Claude wrote a Google Chrome extension to replace a broken piece of my blog infrastructure.

  Just recently, I requested ChatGPT's advice on learning General Relativity. Its response was detailed and helpful, suggesting a six-month course of study with recommended textbooks. (As a side effect, I also learned that physics textbooks are super expensive!)

  So I'm primed to agree with philosopher Michael Huemer's recent paper, titled "I, for one, welcome our robot overlords".

  (Man, that Simpsons quote has really lasted, hasn't it?)

  Michael's opening paragraph:

  Will artificial intelligence spell the end of humanity? Some experts believe so. Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk advises us that “we should be very careful about artificial intelligence. If I had to guess at what our biggest existential threat is, it’s probably that.” Physicist Stephen Hawking warns, “The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race.” AI safety researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky writes, “the most likely result of building a superhumanly smart AI, under anything remotely like the current circumstances, is that literally everyone on Earth will die,” and “we have a shred of a chance that humanity survives.” Some worry that, even if AI does not kill everyone, it may nevertheless do something to permanently curtail human potential, such as enslaving all humans.

  Well, that's something to worry about.

• Moondoggle. I recently read Challenger, Andrew Higgenbotham's book about the disastrous NASA decision in early 1986 that destroyed a spaceship and killed seven astronauts. (Not to be confused with the disastrous decisions killing three astronauts in 1967, nor with the ones killing seven more astronauts in 2003.) It had me thinking Deep Thoughts about the rationale of US space policy.

  Well, actually a pretty shallow thought, specifically: Why are we doing this?

  The primary motive, shorn of sentiment, seems to be keeping taxpayer money flowing to NASA and its favored contractors. This requires at least some feeble justifications. A recent example of that in an April press release from Senator Ted Cruz, pushing for the Artemis/SLS boondoggle: The Next Space Race is Already Here.

  The Artemis missions and the entire Moon-to-Mars program, which have enjoyed consistent bipartisan support, serve as the stepping stone to landing American astronauts on Mars. In fact, this stepping stone approach is the law as enacted by Congress. We must stay the course. An extreme shift in priorities at this stage would almost certainly mean a Red Moon—ceding ground to China for generations to come. I am hard pressed to think of a more catastrophic mistake we could make in space than saying to Communist China, ‘The moon is yours. America will not lead.’

  I'm old enough to remember the last moon race, against the USSR.

  We won.

  And after we won, we… never went back.

  And NASA found different ways to spend taxpayer money.

• Just a note. Thomas Sowell seems to have a website: tsfreemind.com.

  The purpose of this website is to enable people who want to think for themselves to readily find many sources of information and analysis on many subjects— whether in the form of brief commentaries or hour-long interviews of knowledgeable people in electronic media. Written material is also available, ranging in size from essays to books written for either a general audience or for others seeking scholarly studies in great depth.

  It's worth checking out.

Another instance of what I've called the "DC Shuffle"

Step 1: Make stuff more expensive via taxes/tariffs.
Step 2: Offer 'rebates,' paid for with borrowed money that will need to be repaid in the future.
Step 3: Act like what you're doing is a sign of patriotic fervor, rather than economic illiteracy. https://t.co/fbUGEj8qcL pic.twitter.com/5uZyR2aIK3

— Nick Gillespie (@nickgillespie) August 8, 2025

None dare call it "trickle down economics."

In related news, George Will offers us Five ways to stop the onrushing debt disaster. All long shots, alas.. (WaPo gifted link)

However, I note from reading that lecture (link above) that Mankiw considers "large tax increases" to be the "most likely outcome."

Also of note:

• 

  Never enough. Way back in 2012 I reported on reading Never Enough by William Voegeli, Amazon link at your right. Voegeli concentrated on welfare-state programs, but his argument is easily (and unfortunately) generalizable, especially when I read this from Jonathan Turley: Massachusetts Teachers Demand New Wealth Tax.

  I have long opposed wealth taxes based on both constitutional and practical grounds. When Elizabeth Warren pushed her own wealth tax, I noted that the high starting income or wealth levels would likely be lowered with time if Congress were ever allowed to cross this constitutional Rubicon. The Massachusetts Teachers Association (MTA) is now demanding an amendment to the state constitution to tax the “wealth of the richest 1%” to pay for free public college. Previously, the state passed a constitutional amendment to place a 4 % tax on income above $1 million. This would add a new wealth tax to that earlier “Fair Share Amendment.”

  As I (tirelessly) say: when Progressives use the phrase "fair share", it always simply means "more". And, as Voegeli noted, there's usually an implicit "never enough".

• I mostly admire the headline. Robby Soave explains Why Trump Can't Make the Epstein Story Kill Itself.

  […] it's worth keeping in mind two things. First, Trump has actually been remarkably consistent on the Epstein issue. During the 2024 presidential campaign,  Trump maintained that releasing the files was not a particularly high priority and that he was worried about maligning innocent individuals whose names happened to be associated with the disgraced financier and sexual predator. It was Trump's prominent surrogates—Patel, Vance, Dan Bongino, and others—who made rigid commitments to release information on Epstein's alleged clients. And it was Bondi who claimed, after taking office as A.G., that she was in possession of a client list and would be releasing it. It's those people who are being hypocritical about this, not Trump.

  Moreover, Trump is not exactly wrong! As independent journalist Michael Tracey has exhaustively documented on his Substack, hyperbolic claims about Epstein's supposed clients are routinely exposed as false: Many of the alleged victims lacked credibility and recanted their accusations. People who are obsessed with the Epstein story don't like hearing this, but while Epstein was undoubtedly a sexual abuser and a creep—and Ghislaine Maxwell facilitated his predatory behavior—there simply isn't compelling evidence of a larger conspiracy involving many other powerful people whose names have been hidden from the public. By some measures, the Epstein story resembles other recent sex-based moral panics, like campus sexual assault and sex-trafficking, in which a kernel of a true idea (i.e., more could be done to stop sexual assault at elite colleges, or poor immigrant women are sometimes forced into compromising sexual situations), is embellished and overdramatized (i.e., campuses are literal hunting grounds, children are constantly being kidnapped and sex-trafficked at airports).

  I love a good yarn about the moral depravity of politicians, but I think it's unlikely that we will see any credible scandals out of this.

• Amtrak delenda est (a continuing series). Cameron W Ewine writes on Amtrak's Free Pass: Why "Value" Isn't an Excuse for Endless Subsidy.

  When it comes to federal subsidies, few programs enjoy the kind of persistent political immunity that protects Amtrak. As the new administration aims to implement spending cuts and create entire departments focused on government efficiency, such as the aptly named Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), it’s worth turning attention to long-standing drains on taxpayer dollars.

  Advocates for Amtrak insist that America's passenger rail service should be judged not by profitability, but by its purported "value." Jim Mathews of the Rail Passengers Association recently authored an article and an op-ed arguing that Amtrak should not be viewed as a transportation company but rather as a public utility. He contends that just as we don’t ask the Air Force or the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to turn a profit, we shouldn’t demand it from Amtrak either.

  But this argument rests on selective legal interpretations, fuzzy math, and a dangerous disregard for market discipline.

  "Other than that, though, it's fine."

• Dave's Review of Modern Thought. His recent essay on Mankeeping is a gem.

  Recently the New York Times published an article headlined:

  Men: Why Are They Such Idiots?

  Not really! Although that is the gist of the article. The actual headline is:

  Why Women Are Weary of the Emotional Labor of ‘Mankeeping’

  "Mankeeping" is a word invented by Angelica Puzio Ferrara, a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University, who co-authored a research paper titled "Theorizing Mankeeping: The Male Friendship Recession and Women’s Associated Labor as a Structural Component of Gender Inequality."

  Basically what this paper says, if I understand it correctly as both a man and an English major, is that heterosexual males these days don't have enough male friends (the "male friendship recession") and as a result they have to rely on women to tend to their emotional and relationship needs, and this "mankeeping" is A LOT OF WORK for women, and they are TIRED OF IT.

  Well, I've already quoted too much. And since you are an intelligent and curious reader, I'm sure you've already clicked over to Read The Whole Thing, and you didn't make it to this paragraph.

Recently on the book blog:

This is an impressively researched, detailed look at the 1986 destruction of the Space Shuttle Challenger, which took the lives of its crew: Dick Scobee, Michael Smith, Judy Resnik, Ron McNair, Ellison Onizuka, Greg Jarvis, and New Hampshire's Christa McAuliffe. The author, Adam Higginbotham, examines the lives of the people involved, nut just the astronauts, but relevant NASA personnel, contractors, and (eventually) accident investigators. The (very mistaken) decision to launch Challenger after freezing weather degraded the effectiveness of the O-rings that were supposed to seal the solid rocket booster joints is meticulously described, and how the judgment of the Morton Thiokol engineers was overruled by NASA bureaucrats.

It is a horrifying story all by itself. It is bookended on one end by the story of the Apollo 1 launchpad fire in 1967, which killed Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee. And on the other end, a very brief retelling of the 2003 loss of the shuttle Columbia on re-entry, which killed astronauts Laurel Clark, Ilan Ramon, Michael P. Anderson, Rick Husband, William McCool, Kalpana Chawla, and David Brown.

It is an obvious, trivial fact that manned space travel is risky. But Higginbotham persuasively shows that all these deaths were avoidable. These 17 astronauts were, essentially, victims of the pressures of politics and bureaucracy. A major driver of the shuttle program was the need to "do something" post-Apollo: keep the budgetary money flowing to NASA and contractor facilities and personnel across the country. It's also hard to avoid the obvious PR gimmickry of the "Teacher in Space" effort. (And, although there's no evidence that it killed anyone, NASA's efforts of ensuring a "diverse" crew were pretty blatant.)

I was wondering how (or if) Higgenbotham was going to deal with a particularly nasty rumor: that the White House pressured NASA to launch on January 28, 1986 in order for Reagan to mention it in his State of the Union address scheduled for that evening. He does, briefly, noting that the most prominent advocate of this theory, Senator Ernest Hollings, pushed it with no evidence, and drew an angry rebuttal from William Rogers, head of the investigatory commission. (Higginbotham does occasionally express his contempt for the Reagan Administration, notably for the "star wars" effort. Easy to ignore.)

So this guy is running for the US Senate in my state:

That's an animated GIF, and the F-words preceding "FIGHTER" are "FATHER" and "FARMER". And apparently he's hitching his wagon to President Trump's star. At least until the primary next year, probably.

I suppose that could work, but I can't help but point out that Trump lost the state in 2016, 2020, and 2024. (It was close, though.)

Dan's campaign website is here. Interestingly, there's no mention that he's a professor (and onetime dean) at the University Near Here's business school. He's a FARMER! See the barn?

There's an "Issues" section on his site's page, but it's pretty anodyne. Looking for his ideas on how to handle the imminent Social Security shortfall? Good luck.

At least for now, Dan is running against Scott Brown for the GOP nomination. Scott's campaign website is here. He doesn't have an "Issues" section, not even an inoffensive one. But there's a video:

Another big Trump fan, there. Nothing about Social Security, though.

But is Scott a fighter, like Dan? You betcha:

This campaign is about fighting for working families, protecting American strength, and putting New Hampshire first. With this kind of support behind us, we are ready to win.

— Scott P. Brown (@SenScottBrown) August 6, 2025

So Dan and Scott will be fighting, and (probably) next November, one of them will be going up against my current CongressCritter, Chris Pappas. Whose campaign website is here, and (guess what) he's "Grounded in Granite – A Fighter for New Hampshire". Also no "Issues" section.

But so much fighting!

My opponents are fighting for Trump’s endorsement. I’m fighting for Granite Staters. pic.twitter.com/rVALUnZdVM

— Chris Pappas (@ChrisPappasNH) August 6, 2025

I guess it must work in the focus groups.

Also of note:

• I don't even know who Myrna is… Oh wait. That NR editorialists advise: Don’t Abandon mRNA.

  Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced this week that HHS is terminating about $500 million in investments in developing mRNA vaccines.

  The technology instructs the body to produce a protein that is part of a virus, triggering an immune response. Famously — or, notoriously, as far as RFK Jr. is concerned — mRNA was used to develop Covid vaccines on a rapid basis during the pandemic.

  The editors politely disagree with Junior's disinvestment. The Ars Technica folks are less polite in their headline summary: RFK Jr. defends $500M cut for mRNA vaccines with pseudoscience gobbledygook.

  Kennedy is generally opposed to vaccines, but he is particularly hostile to mRNA-based vaccines. Since the remarkably successful debut of mRNA COVID-19 vaccines during the COVID-19 pandemic—which were developed and mass-produced with unprecedented speed—Kennedy has continually disparaged and spread misinformation about them.

  In the video on Tuesday, Kennedy continued that trend, erroneously saying that, "as the pandemic showed us, mRNA vaccines don't perform well against viruses that infect the upper respiratory tract." In reality, COVID-19 vaccines are estimated to have saved more than 3 million lives in the US in just the first two years of the pandemic and additionally prevented more than 18 million hospitalizations in the US in that time. Nearly all COVID-19 vaccines used in the US are mRNA-based.

  The article goes on to use words like "nonsensical", "muddle", and "egregiously false".

• What part of "interstate commerce" is puzzling you? Damon Root describes How protectionist wine and liquor laws violate the Constitution.

  The U.S. Supreme Court has struck down protectionist state wine and liquor laws on the grounds that they illegally discriminated against out-of-state wineries and out-of-state alcohol retailers. Yet earlier this week, a federal appellate court upheld an Indiana law that forbids out-of-state retailers from shipping wine directly to Indiana consumers.

  What's going on?

  What indeed? Damon looks at the decision and finds it wanting.

• Who am I to disagree? Veronique de Rugy takes apart an apologist for US sugar policy: Sweet Deals, Bitter Costs.

  When sugar lobbyist Rob Johansson published a defense of U.S. sugar policy in the Wall Street Journal, he offered a masterclass in protectionist spin. He was responding to Cato Institute scholar Colin Grabow’s clear-eyed explanation of how government barriers inflate sugar prices for American consumers. Johansson invokes food security, labor standards, and patriotic platitudes to justify a policy that exists primarily to enrich a handful of politically connected producers while imposing higher costs on everyone else.

  Start with the claim that the U.S. sugar program ensures supply stability. What it actually ensures is artificially high prices, courtesy of government-imposed marketing allotments and tariff and import quotas. These policies deliberately restrict both domestic output and imports. This isn’t a market; it’s a cartel created and policed by the federal government.

  It's a mess. A sweet one, but still.

Recently on the book blog:

For some reason, I got hooked on this series, the continuing adventures of Molly Gray, a maid at a posh Manhattan hotel. She's neurodivergent, which has caused her problems in the past, but that seems to have been toned down a bit for this entry. She's worked her way to the top of her department, she's assembled a team of loyal colleagues and friends, and she's about to marry the hotel's gifted pastry chef, Juan. (They're "living in sin", a little surprising, but OK.)

And the hotel is about to host an episode of the "Hidden Treasures" TV series, where a couple of charismatic gay appraisers evaluate objects brought before them. On a lark, Molly contributes some knickknacks she and her late, beloved, grandmother Flora accumulated, including a prominent object from the previous novel. And the revelation of its true provenance shocks everyone, especially Molly. Even more shocking: (book flap spoiler a-coming) a daring and mysterious heist is perpetrated during its auction!

Molly's narrative is interspersed with chapters from Flora's discovered diary, in which her riches-to-rags story is detailed. (The author, Nita Prose, is pretty skilled at giving Flora her own "voice", very flowery, and distinct from Molly's.) It's pretty lurid, with an eventual murder.

Not my usual cup of tea, not even when served up in my favorite china cup. But, as I said, I'm hooked.

Believe it or don't, I saw that Michael Ramirez cartoon only a few minutes after I read this Ars Technica article: Coding error blamed after parts of Constitution disappear from US website.

And (sure enough) the "disappeared" bits included "part of" Article I, Section 8. Also "the section on habeas corpus".

But I'm sure that's just a coincidence.

Also of note:

• Vlad, when you've lost Trump… George Will notes that The epically blundering Putin is alienating even Trump. (WaPo gifted link)

  President Donald Trump has announced himself “disappointed.” He had such high hopes for Vladimir Putin.

  Putin’s response to Trump’s 50-day ultimatum — to agree to “a deal” by Sept. 3 or face severe economic consequences — was intensified attacks on Ukraine’s population centers. Trump’s subsequent 10-day ultimatum, expiring Friday, seems to have been equally unavailing. Putin aims to get not to negotiations but to Kyiv, because only extinguishing Ukraine’s nationhood can redeem his epochal blunder.

  Although Putin has been certified a “genius” (by Trump; Putin has not reciprocated), not since Adolf Hitler invaded the Soviet Union 84 summers ago has a military undertaking been as comprehensively counterproductive for its initiator as Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.

  As GFW notes, Trump's "deadline" expires tomorrow, and here's hoping it won't be another TACO Friday.

• A big dose of reality. Kevin D. Williamson is (as usual) out of patience with the folks trying to resuscitate a long-dead horse: Moving Beyond the Two-State Solution.

  About two years ago, I had a conversation with a gentleman who has served at the highest levels of the U.S. defense and intelligence apparatus. He spoke of the necessity of a continued U.S. commitment to the so-called two-state solution in Israel and the Palestinian territories—“so-called,” I write, because there are not two states, and because there are not going to be two states, and because it is not a solution. (Other than that … ) I asked him what seemed and seems to me to be the obvious question: How do we expect to have two states when the undeniable and repeatedly demonstrated fact of the matter is that Palestinian sovereignty and Israeli security are incompatible?

  “We can’t let that be the case,” he non-answered. “There is no alternative.”

  The two-state solution calls to mind many similar regional phantoms, the will-o’-the-wisps of Middle Eastern discourse, e.g., a nuclear deal that the Iranians will honor. Why have an Iranian nuclear deal? Because the alternative is not having an Iranian nuclear deal, which apparently is unthinkable. (Or was, until somebody thought of something better.) Why commit ourselves to a two-state solution for the Palestinians? Because we must, because TINA says so. You know TINA: “There Is No Alternative,” a declaration that seems to be invested with magical powers in the minds of people who cannot accept that some problems are practically irresolvable. 

  But there is an alternative, the one nobody likes but the one we are likely to have for a long time: the status quo.

  KDW's Dispatch article is a "counterpoint" to John Aziz's "point" article: Palestinian Statehood Is the Only Answer. I find (unsurprisingly) KDW to be more attached to reality, but (as I know I don't need to tell you) see what you think.

• "The answer may surprise you." Yes, that's the subhed on David R. Henderson's EconLog post: Who Got the Biggest Percentage Tax Cuts?

  In so much of the discussion of tax cuts, whether of the recent one or previous tax cuts, we hear that the highest-income people got the biggest tax cuts. Of course, they did. They pay a disproportionately high percent of overall federal taxes. So it shouldn’t be surprising that they get the biggest tax cuts in absolute terms.

  But that doesn’t mean that the highest-income people got the highest percentage tax cut. Reporters have generally not done a good job of making that point.

  For the answer, David turns to a recent WSJ article, which reveals (ta da!): ​Here Are the Winners From Trump’s Tax Law (WSJ gifted link)

  And in those percentage terms:

  The average change in federal taxes paid in 2026, due to the new tax law will be:

  -15.1% for the lowest quintile

  -14.9% for the second quintile

  -12.6% for the middle quintile

  -11.1% for the fourth quintile

  -9.2% for the 80-90 percentile

  -9.5% for the 90-95 percentile

  -11.2% for the 95-99 percentile

  -7.1% for the top 1%.

  Which causes me to embed this silly (but catchy) (and also relevant) SNL snippet:

NHJournal's Damien Fisher shows that some Nashua (NH) pols seem to lack LFOD understanding: Free Speech Advocates Push Back on Nashua Display Ban. I've swiped the photo illustration from his article, at your right. The caption is…

"Apparently". Misspelling aside, I think Damien could have safely omitted that word.

But Derek T (Thibeault) is not the sole asshat among the aldermen:

Damien quotes from a letter sent to Nashua's Personnel and Administrative Affairs Committee from the New England First Amendment Coalition, which you can read here; it also includes the text of the proposed, clearly unconstitutional, ordinance.

Laurie Ortolano, by the way, is an occasional contributor to Granite Grok, and her author page is here.

Also of note:

• Of course, balls don't "drop" in space. But Alexander William Salter uses that metaphor anyway: Trump’s first-term space policy was great, but the White House is dropping the ball.

  The first Trump administration was the best for space policy in decades. From the creation of the Space Force to pathbreaking international agreements such as the Artemis Accords to stronger protections for outer space property rights, America reasserted itself as the world’s premier space power. None of this would have been possible without a team of space policy experts and political leaders in key roles.

  But this time is different. Many important space policy and leadership positions remain vacant. Qualified personnel have been nominated, but the Senate has yet to act. Nor has President Trump chosen to force the issue.

  Reading between the lines, apparently at least some of the ball-dropping is fallout from the Trump-Musk split. Sad!

  One obvious problem is the continuing existence of Artemis/SLS.

• "Hey, BLS! Working hard, or hardly working?" Dominic Pino has an explainer about job-counting: Why Counting Jobs Is Really, Really Hard.

  On its face, it sounds like the Bureau of Labor Statistics has an easy task: Just count the jobs. A lot of people have jobs, some people don’t, they’re all out there, just count them up.

  Of course, it can’t literally go and count every person each month, so it uses statistical methods to survey employees and employers. But people have been doing surveys forever. Just send them out and run it through a computer and write the report. Easy.

  No. Not at all. Not even close.

  Click over for the gory details. But I found this detail telling:

  The original estimate for the number of jobs in the month of June was 159,724,000. Then, after the revision with better data, it was 159,466,000. That’s a 0.161 percent correction, based on higher-quality information that didn’t exist at the time of the original estimate.

  Don't worry, once Trump gets his new BLS commissioner, the numbers will be perfectly accurate, and will come festooned with rainbows, unicorns, and Hello Kitty stickers.

• Or not. Assuming the Trumpification of future BLS press releases, what to use instead? Jeff Maurer sketches out Five Economic Metrics to Track Now That BLS Data is Compromised. Let's go with… yeah, this one:

  3. Time spent behind unbelievably old ladies searching for exact change in small, floral change purses

  In a normal week, a typical American spends 4-6 hours in line behind feeble nonagenarians rummaging through tiny, flower-covered change purses as they attempt to pay for miniscule transactions with exact change. Economists sometimes count the number of people lined up behind these antediluvian crones and multiply that by the number of times in an hour that they hear someone mutter “Come the fuck on, Betty White” to compile a number they call “the granny grocery store metric”.

  When times are tough, Americans can spend 10, 12, even 15 hours a week as dust-covered biddies who look like they probably remember the Hapsburg Empire search for the precise amount of money to buy a book of matches, or a single Tic-Tac. This happens because senior citizens worry that they might not be able to make ends meet if they don’t bring an entire fucking Albertsons to a stand-still while they rummage for a ha’penny that Grover Cleveland tossed from a carriage in 1885. When the economy is hot, these four-foot-tall Wives Of Yoda might produce paper money, or even a bank card that they have no clue how to use. But there’s a well-proven inverse relationship between the time that World War I surplus grannies spend literally blocking commerce and overall economic health.

  God bless the old folks, but yeah: when you see the van from the local assisted living facility pulled up outside the supermarket, you might want to hit the self-checkout scanners.

James Freeman finds a pony in the BLS stats: Trump’s Best Jobs Number. (WSJ gifted link)

Of course, there's still a long way to go.

Also of note:

• I suppose actual seppuku would be too much. Jonathan Turley notes the lights going out next month at 401 9th Street, NW, Washington DC: After Years of Refusing Reforms, the CPB Accepts Death Over Political Dishonor. Skipping to the bottom line:

  Conversely, CPB is laying off its entire staff in a righteous, indignant huff. None of these people needed to lose their jobs if their leadership served their organization by listening to views beyond their own insular circle of enablers. The demise of the CPB now stands as the most impressive and unnecessary act of self-termination since the appearance of Judean People’s Front Crack Suicide Squad:

  "That showed 'em, huh?"

• It's not just something you do to a flat tire. Kevin D. Williamson asks: Remember Inflation? And brings his usual brutal honesty to bear:

  Trump has inflated many things over the years—his assets on bank statements, his romantic résumé, his book sales—and inflation is the sort of thing that must come naturally to such a gasbag. Prices are already creeping up, with firms such as Adidas, Procter & Gamble, and Stanley Black & Decker announcing tariff-driven price increases. Groceries aren’t getting any cheaper, and neither is housing, the main driver of the late-summer uptick. But prices are getting higher across the marketplace, as the Bureau of Labor Statistics runs the numbers, finding higher prices for “household furnishings and operations, medical care, recreation, apparel, and personal care.” The few bright spots include used cars and airfares, which may indicate that people are simply putting off car purchases and skipping summer vacations under economic pressure.

  Tariffs are a tax—let me emphasize here that Republicans’ key achievement in the Trump years has been the unconstitutional enactment of a national sales tax by the unilateral directive of president, without congressional authorization—and, as a tax, a big tariff should be anti-inflationary: The more money you pay in taxes, the less money you have to spend on cars and vacations and such.

  But tariffs are an especially dumb and destructive kind of tax in that they do not produce a great deal of revenue in proportion to the economic distortion they introduce. Given that the tariffs are being implemented in parallel with what Republicans insist is “the largest tax cut in American history”—the cut-by-not-raising measure in their poorly conceived and idiotically named tax-and-spending bill—whatever counter-inflationary effect the tariffs might have had is likely to be overwhelmed by the inflationary effects of large cuts to other taxes, even if the extension of the 2017 cuts was far from unexpected. And here it is probably worth pointing out that Republicans are cutting taxes while running a deficit that is projected to be the third largest in American history.

  I suppose it's time to liquidate my investments and buy … gold?

Recently on the book blog:

I ordered this book from Amazon back in December. It came auto-delivered to my Kindle on the release date last month, and I noticed that at some point a subtitle had been added: The Final Arkady Renko Novel.

And a few days later, via the WSJ's book review, I learned that the author, Martin Cruz Smith, had died on July 11.

Well, darn. I still have the $3.95 paperback of Gorky Park I bought and read back in 1982. And I've been a diligent follower of Smith's diligent Russian investigator, Arkady Renko, since then.

As the book opens, Arkady needs to get his adopted computer-whiz son, Zhenya, out of the clutches of the Russian FSB. He was nabbed for protesting Russia's invasion of Ukraine, calling it a "war" instead of the approved term, "special military operation."

I thought this observation was pointful enough to share at Goodreads:

Once more, Arkady thought, you needed only one book to really understand Russia. Not Tolstoy or Pushkin, not Dostoyevsky or Lermontov, but one his mother used to read to him as a child: Through the Looking-Glass, otherwise known as Alice in Wonderland, by Lewis Carroll.

Well… those are two separate books, I think. But otherwise, spot on. Of course, you'd need to add a lot more violence, thuggery, and terror to the Alice books to really get it right.

Soon enough, Arkady is given a murder case: a lower-level defense minister has been brutally murdered at the Hotel Ukraine. Arkady's investigative skills (and a little bit of happenstance luck) draw him to the father/son team of Lev and Ivan Volkov, who run the paramilitary "1812 Group". (Think a barely fictionalized version of the Wagner Group, and its (late) leader Yevgeny Prigozhin, and son Pavel.) Arkady and his longtime lady friend, journalist Tatiana Petrovna, take a dangerous trip to Ukraine, discovering atrocities committed by 1812. (And those are barely fictionalized too.)

Soon enough, both Arkady and Tatiana find themselves in extreme peril from Volkov, the 1812 Group, and their allies in the FSB. Leading to a very cinematic showdown in the sewers and subway tunnels of Moscow.

I will miss Arkady Renko and Martin Cruz Smith a lot. I might do a re-reading project.

Commercial air travel is pretty safe. But Eric Boehm reminds us it could be safer: The Federal Aviation Administration should not run air traffic control.

If you prefer words, Jeff Jacoby has plenty: Canada fixed its air traffic control decades ago. Why can't America?

As I said, commercial air travel is pretty safe. But so was the Space Shuttle. Out of 135 launches, it managed to not kill its entire crew 133 times.

Also of note:

• The Presidency is just his side hustle. Matt Welch nails the Grifter-in-Chief: Trump is openly using the presidency to enrich the Trump brand.

  The president of the United States on Tuesday held a ribbon-cutting ceremony in Balmedie, Scotland, to mark the opening of the new Trump International Golf Links, owned by his family (at least until he exits the White House), and designed by his son Eric.

  In his cheery promotional remarks, Donald Trump thanked the media ("today they're not fake news, they're wonderful news"), gave a shout-out to his daughter-in-law ("Lara, I want to thank you, the head of the Republican Party"), and praised various dignitaries on hand.

  "I want to thank, by the way, the prime minister, who was here last night, and who was really very gracious; loves the place," he said, referencing the United Kingdom's Keir Starmer, who also joined Trump at another of his Scottish golf properties before hopping on Air Force One with the Trump clan for a sneak peek at Balmedie. "This will," the commander in chief predicted, "be a tremendously successful place."

  Yeah, I know: he's not Kamala. But that is beginning to wear a little thin.

• Spoiler: Betteridge's Law of Headlines applies. Allysia Finley in the WSJ: Trump Claims the Jobs Report Was Rigged. Was It? (WSJ gifted link) She goes for the cliché, unfortunately:

  Well, that was productive—not. President Trump on Friday fired Bureau of Labor Statistics Commissioner Erika McEntarfer after the July jobs report showed that hiring stalled this spring amid his tariff blitz and deportation crackdown. Shooting the messenger won’t help him or the economy.

  The BLS estimates a mere 73,000 jobs were added last month, almost all in healthcare and social assistance. It also revised down gains for May and June by a combined 258,000, to a total of 33,000 new jobs, one of the biggest downward revisions in years.

  Mr. Trump sniffs a deep-state conspiracy. “Today’s Jobs Numbers were RIGGED in order to make the Republicans, and ME, look bad,” the president huffed on Truth Social. Where’s the evidence? There is none.

  No evidence? Hey, Trump has all the evidence he needs:

  

  Yup, "Biden Appointee". Case closed!

  That's from Nate Silver whose headline may be too optimistic: Trump's jobs data denialism won't fool anyone. He gets into the statistical weeds, demonstrating there's nothing to see here "RIGGED"-wise.

  I’m not sure exactly where firing the BLS commissioner ranks on the list of Trump-related outrages. Even if Congress does its job and McEntarfer is replaced with another competent successor, this could have a chilling effect on BLS and other government agencies to operate independently.

  It’s also not surprising given Trump’s previous incursions on the independence of the Federal Reserve and other government agencies. This is the guy who sued a pollster for publishing results he didn’t like.

  Unlike in some other instances, though, I don’t see how there’s any real political gain for Trump in yet again undermining longstanding norms and institutions.

  NPR reminds us of the good old days: 'I Could ... Shoot Somebody, And I Wouldn't Lose Any Voters'

Our Eye Candy du Jour is from Sabine Hossenfelder, presenting The 10 Biggest Physics Paradoxes and Problems.

She's an actual physicist, so you can take her befuddlement to the bank.

[Headline reference? I'm pretty sure it's here.]

Also of note:

• Lesson unlearned? The WSJ editorialists warn us of the Return of the Housing Monsters. (WSJ gifted link)

  America in the 21st century sometimes seems destined to repeat all of the mistakes of the 20th. The latest is President Trump’s desire to release Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac from government captivity—along with a government guarantee. Didn’t we learn this was a bad idea the first time?

  The President teased on social media recently that “I am working on TAKING THESE AMAZING COMPANIES PUBLIC,” referring to Fannie and Freddie. “I want to be clear, the U.S. Government will keep its implicit GUARANTEES, and I will stay strong in my position on overseeing them as President.” Their share prices surged.

  Investors are elated that Mr. Trump plans to re-privatize these firms—especially because he has now made their government backstop explicit. The President may think the feds can keep the housing monsters on a regulatory leash, but the political and financial incentives mean they will invariably revert to their reckless ways.

  Back in 2008, I quoted Iowahawk's take:

  It's useful to think of our current economic situation as a spirited game of nude Twister, with Fannie Mae as an extremely fat drunk chick.

  Reader, in the intervening 17 years, neither Fannie nor Freddie have gotten any younger, thinner, wiser, or less fond of cheap tequila.

• "Shooting the messenger" is probably overused. So I won't say that, and neither does Megan McArdle. She simply points out: Firing the statistician won’t change the job numbers. (WaPo gifted link)

  Here’s a life hack for readers who are trying to lose weight and are discouraged by the numbers on the scale: Take a hammer to the thing. If that seems too destructive, donate it to the Salvation Army and, if you must keep a scale in the house, buy a new model that tops out at 150 pounds.

  The secret behind this hack is psychology. It’s hard to eat less than your body wants, which is why people who try to lose weight often fail and feel miserable. But if no working scale is available, you can’t fail: Eat as much as you like; the numbers will never climb.

  Sound crazy? It is. But the president has just used a version of this trick to deal with a sagging American jobs market.

  Specifically: Trump fired Erika McEntarfer, the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

  Maybe the next BLS commissioner will be Chico Marx: "Well, who you gonna believe? Me or your own eyes?" .

• 

  Mister, we could use a man like… Matthew Continetti remembers How P.J. O’Rourke Skewered the Swamp. Specifically, in his classic Parliament of Whores. (Amazon link at your right.)

  We need more of O’Rourke’s philosophy, too. In his final decade the “Republican Party Reptile” found himself, like a lot of people, politically homeless. Donald Trump, MAGA populism, and economic nationalism didn’t appeal to him. Bernie Sanders, socialism, and wokeism didn’t either.

  O’Rourke remained an advocate for freedom:

  Conservatism is, at least in its American form, a philosophy that relies upon personal responsibility and promotes private liberty. It is an ideology of individuals. Everyone with any sense and experience in life would rather take his fellows one by one than in a crowd. Crowds are noisy, unreasonable, and impatient. They can trample you easier than a single person can. And a crowd will never buy you lunch.

  This emphasis on dignity, freedom, and responsibility may seem archaic to the critics of so-called “Zombie Reaganism.” But it is fundamental to humane conservative politics. An American conservatism that has no place for freedom neither inspires nor connects to the wellsprings of the American political tradition: constitutional rule of law and a limited government that makes room for family, church, civil society, and individual choice.

  Matthew didn't mention Peej's probably most famous quote:

  Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.

  Ain't it the truth?

If you prefer words, Don Boudreaux supplies them in a tsk-tsk LTE to the WSJ: Trump's Tariffs Are Paid Overwhelmingly By Americans.

If you need it, here's a gifted link to the editorial with the language Don proposes fixing.

Also of note:

• Oh, Happy Day. There's plenty of gloating among the libertarian/conservative sites, but let's not wallow, Ars Technica has the sads: RIP Corporation for Public Broadcasting: 1967–2026.

  Despite the protests of millions of Americans, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) announced it will be winding down its operations after the White House deemed NPR and PBS a "grift" and pushed for a Senate vote that eliminated its entire budget.

  The vote rescinded $1.1 billion that Congress had allocated to CPB to fund public broadcasting for fiscal years 2026 and 2027. In a press release, CPB explained that the cuts "excluded funding for CPB for the first time in more than five decades." CPB president and CEO Patricia Harrison said the corporation had no choice but to prepare to shut down.

  "Despite the extraordinary efforts of millions of Americans who called, wrote, and petitioned Congress to preserve federal funding for CPB, we now face the difficult reality of closing our operations," Harrison said.

  Concerned Americans also rushed to donate to NPR and PBS stations to confront the funding cuts, The New York Times reported. But those donations, estimated at around $20 million, ultimately amounted to too little, too late to cover the funding that CPB lost.

  Translation of that last paragraph into reality: "Concerned Americans" turned out to be not Concerned enough.

• Not to worry, Uncle Stupid still knows how to waste money. Rand Simberg describes Why And How To End SLS Now.

  "SLS" is NASA's "Space Launch System". Rand shares three links:

  • His slick 56-page report for the Reason Foundation: Why commercial space should lead the U.S. return to the moon;
  • Robert Zimmerman's take: The word that best describes our present NASA lunar program is “delusional.”
  • A summary of Rand's report at the "New Space Economy" site.

  Zimmerman has the most withering commentary. Quoting from that:

  Increasingly it appears everyone in Congress, the White House, and NASA, as well as our bankrupt mainstream press, has become utterly divorced from reality in talking about NASA’s Artemis lunar program. The claims are always absurd and never deal with the hard facts on the ground. Instead, it is always “Americans are piorneers! We are great at building things! We are going to beat China to the Moon!”

  An interview of interim NASA administration (and Transportation secretary) Sean Duffy yesterday on the Sean Hannity Show made all these delusions very clear. First Hannity introduced Duffy by stating with bald-faced ignorance that “NASA has a brand-new program. It is called Artemis that aims to get astronauts back on the Moon in the next couple of years.”

  I emphasize “brand-new” because anyone who has done even two seconds of research on the web will know that Artemis has existed now for more than a decade. Hannity illustrates his incompetence right off the bat.

  I've been a space fan for a long time. I watched the Sputnik I upper stage fly over the Oakland, Iowa football field back in 1957. Didn't like the commies even back then, but… pretty cool!

  But it would be nice if US space exploration could be less "delusional".

• I resemble this remark. Jay Nordlinger may be picking up my psychic emanations: A President in Every Pot, &c.

  President Donald Trump is a busy beaver. There are many things a president must do, as a matter of course. But this one also wants the Cleveland Guardians to become the “Cleveland Indians” again. And the Washington Commanders to become the “Washington Redskins” again. And Coca-Cola to use cane sugar instead of whatever it is the company uses. Etc. Trump is very active on these fronts.

  I share his opinion, in some of these cases. (Not sure about “Redskins.”) But, you know? A president ought not to involve himself in every nook and cranny of American life. He is not a national boss or nanny. There should be a private sphere, an apolitical sphere, a non-governmental sphere.

  Conservatives taught me this long ago. They were right, I believe (as about virtually everything.) I cannot unlearn what I learned, and accepted, years ago. That is a big reason I’m out of step with the regnant Right today.

  Yeah, me too.

• Mixed metaphor in Aisle 2. At Reason, Tosin Akintola notes that our fair state is failing to live up to our LFOD motto: New Hampshire’s new booze law will hamstring the state's brewpubs.

  The rationale behind New Hampshire's new brewpub regulation is more headache-inducing than the beer.

  On Friday, New Hampshire Gov. Kelly Ayotte (R) signed House Bill 242 into law. The bill, sponsored by state Rep. John Hunt (R–Rindge), will take effect in August and limits brewpubs in the state to self-distributing their beer to only one additional restaurant or business outside their premises. The bill is a follow-up to H.B. 1380, also sponsored by Hunt in 2024, which limited the amount of beer or cider a brewpub could sell to 2,500 barrels a year and permitted licensed brewpub owners to obtain licenses to sell their product on their premises in bars and at off-premise locations like grocery stores, so long as they didn't have a manufacturing license.

  If the law sounds like it will keep brewpubs small, that's because it's intended to do so. "This is what we call a very inside baseball bill," Hunt told the New Hampshire Bulletin.

  "Inside baseball" means (I think it's fair to say) that insiders wanted to make sure they wouldn't have to deal with upstart competition.

Introduction/Rationale

Some readers may have noticed me griping about my blogging "infrastructure" a few weeks ago. To repeat and summarize: One of the bits of code I relied on was a Google Chrome extension called chromix-too. It did something I found incredibly useful: allowed access to Chrome's "tabs" API from the Linux command line. It was also quite powerful, but I only used it for four relatively simple things:

1. Tell me how many tabs I have open;
2. Tell me the URL of the active tab, and the title of its rendered page;
3. Open a new inactive tab to a specified URL;
4. Open a new active tab to a specified URL.

Granted, the last one is easy without an extension. The others don't seem to be, "as far as I can tell."

Alas, chromix-too used some features that Google deprecated years ago. It had a V2 manifest, and maybe violated other guidelines. And Google promised/warned that it would just stop working eventually.

And, as noted, "eventually" turned out to be "a few weeks ago". An upgraded Google Chrome refused to load chromix-too.

The author of chromix-too seemed uninterested in updating his code. I didn't press him about it.

I toyed with bringing it into compliance myself. Unfortunately, it was in Javascript, and even though it was but a few thousand bytes, I found it totally impenetrable. My efforts were feeble and futile.

But I had heard that AI tools, specifically Claude, could write code for you. A little Googling showed the "right way" to do what I wanted was via Chrome's Native Messaging facility. Which led to my Claude prompt:

I want a Chrome extension using Native Messaging to access the chrome.tabs API from the Linux shell.

And it worked. Kind of. Source is at GitHub.

Caveat

When I say "kind of", I'm not kidding. If you play with this yourself, be aware there's a bug that I haven't fixed. Described, with my workaround, at the end. I'll edit this if I ever fix it. Geeky readers, please let me know if you spot the problem.

The Overall Idea

Command Line ⇔ HTTP Server (7444) ⇔ Native Host ⇔ Chrome Extension ⇔ Chrome APIs

Claude provided the code to go in the middle three boxes.

Code Details

• Command Line: you use an HTTP client (I use curl) to talk to the HTTP server which is listening on localhost port 7444. (That's the port chromix-too used to listen on.)

• HTTP Server: A small (8779 bytes as I type) Python script that interprets the HTTP commands received from the command line and translates them into appropriate API code.

  Its filename is chrome_api_bridge.py, and I installed it in /usr/local/bin

• Native Host: A JSON file that serves as a bit of glue between the HTTP server and the actual extension. It's very small (243 bytes), named com.chrome.api.bridge.json, and in LinuxLand it goes in the directory $HOME/.config/google-chrome/NativeMessagingHosts/.

  Note for those trying this at home: you have to fill in the ID of the chrome extension in this file. Which you won't know until you install the extension, which is…

• Chrome Extension: A group of four files in their own directory:

  • manifest.json The extension's JSON manifest (duh);
  • background.js … and the extension's JavaScript code
  • popup.html and popup,js … I don't use these, but Claude provided them.

Installation Details

I think you should do things in this order. Sometime next month I will be installing Fedore 43 from scratch, and if I get anything wrong here, I'll amend.

Assuming you have Linux running and (specifically) Chrome installed normally…

1. Install the extension. Point your browser at chrome://extensions; turn the "Developer mode" toggle on; click the "Load unpacked" button; in the resulting dialog, highlight the directory containing those four extension files, and click "Select".

   Copy the 32-character ID you should now see in your new extension's box.

2. "Register" the Native Host. Edit the file com.chrome.api.bridge.json, pasting that 32-character ID string into the obvious place under the allowed_origins key. Put this file into the directory $HOME/.config/google-chrome/NativeMessagingHosts/.

3. Install the HTTP server script. As stated above, I used /usr/local/bin/chrome_api_bridge.py. You can probably install it anywhere you want, but you'll have to change the path in the glue file installed in the previous step.

4. Try it. Return to the chrome://extensions tab and turn the extension on. And (assuming nothing obviously bad happened) proceed to…

Examples

How do I count Chrome's open tabs? I give the command:

curl -s http://localhost:7444/chrome/tabs/query

This gives JSON output, which I parse, The "result" key has an array value, and the number of items in the array is the number of open tabs. A complete Perl script:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;
use English qw( -no_match_vars );
use JSON;
use version; our $VERSION = qv('v2025.07.31');

my $curl_cmd = q{curl -s http://localhost:7444/chrome/tabs/query};
open my $CTQ, q{-|}, $curl_cmd or die "Failed to run curl command: $ERRNO\n";
my $ctq_json = <$CTQ>;
my $status   = close $CTQ;
my $decoded  = decode_json($ctq_json);
printf "Chrome open tabs: %d\n", scalar @{ $decoded->{'result'} };

Similarly, the command

curl -s http://localhost:7444/chrome/tabs/getCurrent

… just gives a one-element "result" and the current tab's URL and title are easily parsed out.

Opening a tab uses a POST:

curl -s -X POST http://localhost:7444/chrome/tabs/create -H "Content-Type: application/json" -d '{"url": "https://reason.com/latest", "active": true}'

That brings up the specified URL as an active window. Bringing it up as an inactive window… is left as an exercise for the reader.

That Darn Bug

Things should "just work" after starting Chrome. They do not. My extension throws an error:

Unchecked runtime.lastError: Native host has exited.

The workaround, which I arrived at after a few hours of trying everything else, is (I am not kidding):

From the chrome://extensions page:

1. Turn the extension off.
2. Turn it back on.

And then things seem to work fine.

This is puzzling.

When I Google that error message, all the "fixes" seem to assume a persistent error, that things aren't working at all. Nothing about problems fixed by "turn it off, then back on." So I'm stumped for now. Again, let me know if you happen to spot the problem.

I haven't tried asking Claude.

(Headline adapted from a classic movie.)

Over a couple weeks of blogging hiatus, I totally missed commenting on the irony of people who claim to be concerned about American "inequality", showering hatred on "the 1%", also getting steamed about CBS's decision to cancel Stephen Colbert's The Late Show.

Um. Colbert's net worth is reported to be around $75 million, with a yearly salary of $15 million.

According to Forbes, Colbert's net worth puts him solidly in the 1%. Ditto for his yearly salary, according to Investopedia.

So you might think the egalitarians would be cheering at this minor decrease in the Gini coefficient! But no.

And now, American outrage has apparently moved on from Colbert to Sydney Sweeney. Who's apparently gonna be starring in a remake of Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS or something.

But never mind that. What I'd really like to lead off with today is something that's been bugging me for years, and I may have alluded to it now and again, but not as eloquently as Jeff Jacoby did recently: The problem with 'Are you proud to be an American?'. After looking at (among other things) Gallup's polling on that very question:

What Jeff doesn't mention is the small problem alluded to by our Amazon Product du Jour, up there on your right: As someone who has been Catholic-adjacent for decades, I can tell you: pride is a sin. And not one of the minor ones: it's a deadly sin, right up there with Lust, Gluttony, Greed, Sloth, Wrath, and Envy!

So if Gallup, or anyone, asks if you're proud to be an American, please feel free to explain this to them.

Also of note:

• Something I won't be doing. The latest print issue of Reason has an article by Bekah Congdon, who discusses her recent travels: Losing My Religion and Finding My Humanity on a Peruvian Ayahuasca Retreat. And it includes the following experience, after a couple doses of the "viscous substance" which is "dark brown and opaque and tastes like a tragic combination of Vegemite and prune juice, with an earthy aftertaste that lingers."

  Another 30 minutes later, our main facilitator, Rosie, checked on me. I reported feeling miserable but unable to vomit. Rosie said something I couldn't hear through the fog of my own discomfort. When I looked at her indignantly, she simply said, "Bekah: Focus."

  With this instruction, I picked up my bucket, placed it in front of me, and got on all fours. Staring into the bucket, I commanded myself: "Puke." Whether it was my instruction that did it or just the effect of jostling myself around, I did begin to vomit, immediately and a lot. It was intense, but it passed quickly enough. The nausea gave way not simply to the expected after-puking relief but to such a feeling of comfort and peace that I lay back down and reveled for a while in gratitude that I no longer felt ill.

  There's something I won't be putting on my bucket list: barfing into a bucket in Peru.

• 

  Not even Ketanji Brown Jackson thought it meant that. In a recent article in print-National Review, Bryan A. Garner shares some anecdotes about his friend and co-author Antonin Scalia: ‘Nobody Ever Thought It Meant That’. (NR gifted link)

  In my kitchen in January 2013, I suggested to [Scalia] that attacking something called the living Constitution was a mistake: “Find another name for it,” I said.

  “But everyone calls it the living Constitution.”

  “You’re losing the debate in the minds of the American people. They don’t want the opposite of a living Constitution.”

  “Are you saying I’ve made a mistake over the past 30 years by using the other side’s terminology?”

  “I think so. If you instead asked the American people whether they’d rather have a stable Constitution or a highly volatile one that morphs without amending it, what would they say?”

  “Stable, no doubt,” he said. “I can’t believe I’ve never thought of this before.”

  That evening, Scalia and I made a presentation to a large audience at Southern Methodist University. Midway through our talk, he said: “I used to say that the Constitution is not a living document. It’s dead, dead, dead. But I’ve gotten better. I no longer say that. The truth is that the Constitution is not one that morphs. It’s an enduring Constitution, not a changing Constitution.” I was keenly aware of his words, and I made a note of them the next morning.

  I encourage you to click through to find out how the Dallas Morning News misreported that speech.

  I was tempted to check out the book Scalia and Garner wrote from the Portsmouth (NH) Public Library, but alas, it was more of a reference work for lawyers. But… Amazon link at your right!

• I'd say: "Mom". Mom decides. But that's me. Ryne Weiss has an article that investigates how people can be led into free-speech enlightenment: ‘Who decides?’: The question that shatters the illusion of censorship as safety. And it leads off with this quote from Christopher Hitchens, who made it at University of Toronto’s Hart House Debating Club.

  Did you hear any speaker in opposition to this motion, eloquent as one of them was, to whom you would delegate the task of deciding for you what you could read? Do you know anyone? Hands up. Do you know anyone to whom you would give this job? Does anyone have a nominee? You mean there’s no one in Canada good enough to decide what I can read or hear? I had no idea.

  But in the US? Nina Jankowicz maybe?

• You could die of a misprint, or… Dave Barry brings the sad news of his demise: Death by AI.

  I found out about my death the way everybody finds out everything: from Google.

  What happened was, I Googled my name ("Dave Barry") and what popped up was something called “Google AI Overview.” This is a summary of the search results created by Artificial Intelligence, the revolutionary world-changing computer tool that has made it possible for college students to cheat more efficiently than ever before.

  Dave's battle with Google's AI is hilarious.

  I sympathize, sort of. I share a name with a semi-famous actor. He is, at last report, still alive and well, and so am I.