Pun Salad

You might have noticed paeans to the recently-deceased Assata Olugbala Shakur. Example, from the Democratic Socialists of America:

Rest in Power, Assata Shakur. The American state brutally oppressed Assata and her Black Panther Party Comrades. The Cubans welcomed her and other Black Revolutionaries with asylum, and their solidarity and loyalty allowed Assata to live out her days in Havana. pic.twitter.com/h6qJS6vhHL

— DSA (@DemSocialists) September 26, 2025

Many responses at the link, but I got a chuckle out of the one from Reason's Liz Wolfe:

You're not in chains, you went to fucking Oberlin https://t.co/xh1uoR8zy0

— Liz Wolfe (@LizWolfeReason) September 29, 2025

As Wikipedia notes, three current CongressCritters are DSA members: Greg Casar, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Rashida Tlaib. Google can't find any indication that they've either endorsed or denounced the DSA's lionization of a convicted cop-killer.

Also of note:

• Yes, we have no … soybeans? Kevin D. Williamson has a very long Wanderland column this week, where he takes a Democrat candidate for Congress to task for The Wrong Way to Fight Trump’s Tariffs

  I am forbidden by the terms of my employment and by professional ethics from giving paid advice to political candidates—but, for pity’s sake: Could somebody, somewhere, teach Democrats how to talk about trade?

  Case in point: Rebecca Cooke, the Democrat challenging Republican incumbent Derrick Van Orden in Wisconsin’s 3^rd Congressional District, wants to pick a fight with the Trump administration over trade policy. Good idea: The Trump administration’s trade policy is a gigantic slop bucket of amateurish buffoonery into which congressional Republicans have dived headlong, and the district Cooke would like to represent includes a bunch of soybean farmers who are getting absolutely hosed—for the second time—by Donald Trump’s incompetence. Most informed observers would likely agree that a team of monkeys who graduated at the very bottom of their monkey community college class would probably produce a more intelligent and coherent policy.

  Small problem: Cooke doesn’t know a damned thing about trade. Or at least that is the impression her campaign literature gives.

  KDW isn't gentle on Van Orden either ("a Trump-stroking, self-abasing sycophant").

• In case you thought they had hit bottom… Becket Adams observes The Media’s Sins of Omission Are Getting Worse. And his example is New Hampshire-related:

  Consider, for example, NBC News’ tortured handling (archive.today link) last week of a deadly shooting at a wedding reception in New Hampshire.

  The relevant facts, which were known at the time of NBC’s coverage, are that the alleged gunman, 23-year-old Hunter Nadeau, shot and killed one wedding-goer, 59-year-old Robert Steven DeCesare, and injured two others.

  Just before opening fire on the wedding party, Nadeau reportedly said, “The children were safe,” and then shouted, “Free Palestine!”

  Yet, as was first brought to my attention by Charlie Cooke, NBC practically had to be bullied into acknowledging accounts of the gunman’s reported words.

  Google's AI tells me that "As of late 2023, NBC News has been using the slogan "This is who we are".

  My obvious response: Could you try being someone else for a change?

• Longest article ever? Mani Basharzad tells us What Zohran Mamdani Doesn’t Understand about Wealth.

  Zohran Mamdani, the person who defeated Cuomo in the primaries and is now seen as a mayoral contender for New York—the beating heart of capitalism—recently declared in an interview: “I don’t think we should have billionaires.”

  Mamdani is not alone in this view. The visible edge of economic populism—the slogans, the soundbites—often conceals an intellectual iceberg beneath: ideas inherited from defunct economists, or sometimes living ones. One such idea with deep roots is limitarianism: the belief that there should be a cap on personal wealth.

  Thomas Piketty defines it as “the idea that we should set a maximum on how much resources one individual can appropriate.” Its most articulate modern advocate is Ingrid Robeyns, whose recent book, Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth, calls for a global wealth cap, which she suggests could be set around $10 million per person.

  But limitarianism rests on an old intellectual error. An error common not only on the Left but even among some classical liberals too: the mistaken division between “production” and “distribution.” The assumption is that production happens through economic forces and that distribution is purely political, so policymakers can reshape who gets what without damaging how much is created.

  Mani's a pretty sharp cookie, explaining that "mistaken division".

It doesn't get much more hatey than the last sentence of this screed:

That's quoted in yesterday's NH Journal article from Michael Graham: Timberlane Teacher Who Celebrated Kirk's Murder Has Resigned.

This is somewhat personal for me.

"Mr. Tinney" taught both my son and daughter when he was at St. Thomas Aquinas High School in Dover (NH). That being the school from which he was (as he puts it) "fired after 23 years for being gay."

My kids liked him. And so we liked him. We even took care of his sweet little pug dog, Chiclet, for a few days while he was out of town. (My daughter volunteered us.) Tinney was vague about where he was going, but he left a contact address up in Maine, and a little bit of idle Googling revealed he was attending a "bear" gathering. That is, I learned, a term for hairy gay guys.

I was kind of shocked at the time. But even back then, I was mostly a "so long as they don’t do it in the street and frighten the horses" kind of guy. Shared my discovery with my wife, didn't mention it to the kids.

That was about 20 years ago. Was he fired from St. Thomas "for being gay", or (as this guy says) "for pushing a LGBTQ agenda"? Kind of a dicey thing to do while teaching at a Catholic school. The Boston Globe had a story about it back in 2023, predictably slanted.

I'm also a "free speech" kind of guy. And I recognize that (legally) there's no "hate speech" exception to that.

But I can imagine that there were a whole bunch of Timberlane parents telling Timberlane administrators they didn't want that hate-filled guy teaching their kids. If I were in their position, I could very well imagine being one of them.

So there's only one thing I'm relatively sure about, based on my 2019 recollection of Charlie Kirk at a TPUSA event: If Charlie Kirk's spirit could speak to Ed Tinney in response to his "I'm glad he's dead" comment, it would be: "I'm glad you're alive."

Also of note:

• "Got Wrong" seems overly charitable. Did I just mention I was a free speech fan? Apparently a more steadfast one than Christopher Eisgruber! Bill Hewitt pre-reviews a book: What Princeton’s President Got Wrong About Free Speech and Defamation. A lot, as it turns out.

  September 30 marks the publication of a new book by Princeton University president Christopher Eisgruber, Terms of Respect: How Colleges Get Free Speech Right. For those who plan to read the book that ostensibly defends the culture of free speech on campuses, it is worth reviewing the author’s abysmal record on protecting free expression. The cruel irony for Princeton is that Eisgruber himself created and enforced a wicked doctrine. A threat to all on campus, this “Eisgruber Doctrine” allows his administrators to defame those they disfavor, yet evade university discipline. Rather tellingly, Eisgruber and the Board of Trustees have turned deaf ears to calls to disclose a secret report underlying the Eisgruber Doctrine.

  Princeton’s Board of Trustees should fire President Eisgruber. Indeed, they should have done so months ago. Here’s why. In 2022, Eisgruber wrongly dismissed a formal complaint by eight Princeton faculty members regarding the university’s mistreatment of an outspoken classics professor, Joshua Katz. Eisgruber’s administrators had defamed Katz in the notorious (and now memory-holed) 2021 presentation for students, “To Be Known and Heard: Systemic Racism and Princeton University.” Princeton later stripped Katz of tenure and fired him, a decision drawing widespread condemnation because it appeared to be motivated by animus against Katz for his protected speech.

  Eisgruber used a still-secret “additional review” to justify blocking the faculty complaint, asserting that the report established that Princeton’s free-expression policies protected the authors of the presentation. Eisgruber never offered much explanation. Nor could he, as the free-expression rule he cited explicitly excludes defamation from protected speech.

  It's an impressively bad record, and Eisgruber seems to be relying on everyone's short memories. We wrote on l'affaire Katz here, here, and here.

• We're (still) Number … Five?! The US is only behind Hong Kong, Singapore, New Zealand, and Switzerland in the most recent rankings: Economic Freedom of the World: 2025 Annual Report. And for a reminder of why that matters:

  The standard of living in the most economically free nations is far higher than in the least free. In comparing the economically freest 25 percent of countries with the least free, we find:

  • Average incomes are 6.2 times greater;
  • The bottom 10% of incomes are 7.8 times greater;
  • People tend to work seven fewer hours each week;
  • People live about 17 years longer;
  • Far fewer children die in infancy;
  • People are more satisfied with their lives;
  • Governments are less corrupt; and
  • Environments are cleaner.

  Here's the bad news: the data is of 2023, so doesn't include Trumpian tariffs. And:

  [Robert Lawson and Matthew Mitchell] y estimate that Trump’s tariffs drop the US from 56th to 76th place in the world in terms of freedom to trade and nearly knock the US out of the top 10 in terms of total economic freedom.

  So if we are still in business in a couple years, we can see how that prediction bears out.

• I'm not optimistic, but this is nice to know. At Cato, Jeremy Horpedahl says Economic Stagnation May Be Over (If We Can Avoid a Recession Soon). There are lots of charts, but this is pretty nice without graphical accompaniment: Using a generous definition of "middle-class" families,

  Where the breaks between groups should be isn’t an exact science, but I use about $50,000 above and below the median family income as reasonable cutoffs for the middle-income group. As we can see, the middle-income group was over half of the total in 1967, but this group’s size gradually shrank by about 10 percentage points over the next almost six decades. But notice that the lower-income groups shrank too. That’s because this chart shows one astonishing fact: the number of rich American families has skyrocketed, with over one-third now having at least $150,000 in income.

  These trends are not sensitive to choosing different income cutoffs: if we use $200,000 as our definition of rich, the number has grown from 2 percent of families in 1967 to 21 percent in 2024. It also is not a trick of using families instead of households, as Mark Perry’s similar chart using households (and different income cutoffs than my chart) shows the same general trends.

  I still reserve my right to be a Gloomy Gus, given Uncle Stupid's fiscal profligacy.

• You don't have to pick a side, when both sides are awful. That's an attitude I'm assuming more and more these days, and J.D. Tuccille reinforces it today, with: In Trump’s tussle with James Comey, you should hope everybody loses.

  Two things can be simultaneously true. One is that President Donald Trump and his aides are petty, vindictive people who, like other members of the political class, misuse power to punish opponents. The other is that some of their targets currently or recently within government are abusive, untrustworthy, and should be held to account. That brings us to former director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) James Comey and the law enforcement agency he once led. Comey's indictment is undoubtedly an act of political payback. But Comey and his agency really are dangerous and worthy of scrutiny and deprivation of power to prevent future harm.

  Comey faces charges under 18 U.S.C. § 1505, obstruction of a federal proceeding, and 18 U.S.C. § 1001(a)(2), involving false statements to a branch of the federal government. He could be penalized with a fine and up to five years in prison.

  As Sen. Ted Cruz (R–Texas) points out, the issue is whether Comey or former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe lied when McCabe claimed his boss authorized him to leak details of investigations to the press and Comey, under oath, denied doing anything of the sort.

  I know it's fun to be a cheerleader for "our side", but doesn't it get a little tired after a while?

At Instapundit, Ed Driscoll has a long, amusing/appalling array of people looking for, and invariably finding, signs of the "dark night of fascism" descending upon us. Ed links to, and quotes, Aubrey Harris in the American Spectator: Now Even Stay-At-Home Moms are Fascist. About this Guardian article:

From Nazi Germany to Trump’s America: why strongmen rely on women at home

Fascist regimes pushed narratives of domestic bliss, yet relied on women’s unpaid labor. In the US today, ‘womanosphere’ influencers promote the same fantasies.

By Adrienne Matei
The Guardian
Sep 21, 2025 pic.twitter.com/UomCt268nx

— Therefore (@Canreadsome) September 24, 2025

And that's just one example among many. (Going to the gym, epic poetry,…) But Aubrey, quoted by Ed:

Calling Just About Everything Fascist Obfuscates Its Definition

That was a trigger for me to leave a comment, pointing out:

Kind of snarky, but 8 Instapundit comment-readers seemed to like it.

Also of note:

• The process is the punishment. Andrew C. McCarthy says, convincingly: The Indictment Against Comey Should Be Dismissed. (NR gifted link)

  Jim Comey has a dilemma.

  The vindictive indictment the Trump Justice Department barely managed to get a grand jury to approve on Thursday is so ill-conceived and incompetently drafted, he should be able to get it thrown out on a pretrial motion to dismiss. Legally, he’ll be entitled to that, and it would short-circuit the very expensive and punitive litigation process.

  Yet, the case has been randomly assigned to a Biden-appointee in the Eastern District of Virginia, Judge Michael Nachmanoff. If Judge Nachmanoff throws the case out pretrial, President Trump and his supporters will rail that the fix was in. So as pointless as a trial would be, Comey and the court may want the vindication of a swift jury acquittal.

  It’s a hard call. But it’s not a hard case. It’s a mess.

  Use the gifted link above, my last one of the month, if necessary, to read just how messy.

• And way too smug, but that's not a crime. Holman W. Jenkins, Jr. has an additional observation in the WSJ: Worse Than a Criminal, Comey Is a Blunderer (WSJ gifted link).

  James Comey’s real crime was bad judgment. Find anyone who thinks his 2016 interventions were wise, justified or proper. You can’t. Not his FBI colleagues. Not the Obama-appointed inspector general of the Justice Department. Not Loretta Lynch, the Obama attorney general whose reputation he was supposedly saving with his gallantry.

  The great unmentionable is that the only beneficiary was Donald Trump, who likely wouldn’t have won in 2016 without Mr. Comey’s serial interventions, culminating in his chaotic reopening of the Hillary Clinton email investigation before Election Day.

  Mr. Comey’s criminal indictment this week, hustled past a grand jury by a Trump factotum as the statute of limitations was about to expire, accuses the former FBI supremo of misleading statements to Congress in 2020. Yawn.

  It goes without saying Mr. Comey engaged in spinning, word-parsing and leaks about decisions he now realized were a disaster. In fact, the truest thing Mr. Comey has said about his actions is that he expected Mrs. Clinton to win and therefore his actions would never be closely examined.

  Holman's bottom line:

  Unfortunately, the law offers no obvious remedy for intelligence officials who misuse their powers as he did. An honest airing in the public square might at least discourage the use of criminal prosecutions as an alternative to political redress. But for that, we’d need an honest and forthright press and we don’t have one.

• Counterpoint. Yesterday I linked to, and quoted, Kevin D. Williamson's Dispatch article that disparaged (putting it mildly) Trump's new Ukraine attitude. Also posting at the Dispatch, however, is Michael Warren, considerably more charitable, explaining Why Trump’s Latest Surprise Could Benefit Ukraine For Once.

  One of the most remarkable developments in the decade-plus of Russian military aggression against Ukraine happened this week in one of the unlikeliest places: Donald Trump’s proprietary social media service, Truth Social. On his account there, Trump went further than any sitting American president since Russia occupied and annexed Crimea in 2014 to express the simple idea that Ukraine can and should win the war.

  “I think Ukraine, with the support of the European Union, is in a position to fight and WIN all of Ukraine back in its original form,” Trump posted Tuesday afternoon. “With time, patience, and the financial support of Europe and, in particular, NATO, the original Borders from where this War started, is very much an option. Why not?” 

  Trump’s statement went on to denigrate Russia as a “paper tiger,” called its military efforts “aimless,” and even suggested a victorious Ukraine might expand its territory, a goal the Ukrainians have never sought. (But points for enthusiasm!)

  In case you haven't seen me say this dozens of times: I don't know nothin' 'bout no foreign policy. Although way too much here seems to depend on the deeply irrational and chaotic mental processes of Putin and Trump.

• Magic 8-Ball says… In response to Jeff Maurer's question, What Would Political Realignment Look Like?, I think it's "Ask again later".

  But Jeff (while filling his usual quota of dirty words) is pretty thoughtful:

  I watched Trump’s Tylenol press conference and thought “I remember when dumbass anti-empiricist paranoia was a left-wing thing.” At EPA, I would frequently field calls from “independent filmmakers” (that is: trust fund kids who got a camcorder for Christmas) pursuing some crackpot theory built on a combination of anecdote, suspicion, and one lonely paper in the Journal of Publishing Any Ol’ Shit For $200. It’s no accident that RFK Jr. started out as an environmental lawyer; he’s a buoy bobbing in a sea of conspiratorial nonsense, and as those currents shifted to the right, he went with them.

  Of course, medicine is far from the only area where Trump agrees with lefty know-nothings. Trump has gotten the government so involved in the economy that Adam Smith is probably spinning in his grave while Karl Marx is totally erect in his. Trump’s post-Charlie Kirk attacks on speech mirror what parts of the left did after George Floyd, and Trump parrots the radical leftist view that any talk of principles in foreign policy is a smokescreen for self-interest. The cross-pollination of bad, extremist ideas goes the other way, too: The far left is dabbling in anti-semitism and extolling the virtues of political violence, and left-wing race essentialists use language that would be at home in a 19th century book about the cranial capacity of the various races.

  We’ve developed new words to describe the re-shaping of the political spectrum. “MAGA” and “woke” basically mean “cult members”. “Conservative” has faded from the lexicon as The Dispatch types continue to be a Republican Party In Exile that will probably never re-conquer the GOP and hoist the banner of the House of Reagan. “Liberal” used to mean basically any Democrat, but now “progressive” replaces “liberal” once the amount of BlueSky/MSNBC poisoning in the subject’s bloodstream surpasses a certain level. And then there are “leftists” and the “alt-right”, i.e. weirdos who would have channeled their antisocialism into Ren Fests and Civil War reenactments in years past, but who now cosplay in the political sphere instead of in the woods.

  It's a really good essay.

• No foolin'. The College Fix notes verification of what you've suspected: Large-scale syllabi study finds professors only teach left-wing side of controversial issues.

  Contentious topics are often taught in college classrooms from a uniformly one-sided perspective, according to newly published research that used the Open Syllabus Project, which hosts over 27 million syllabi, to develop its findings.

  The research focused on three topics — “racial bias in the American criminal justice system, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the ethics of abortion” — to determine how controversial issues are presented.

  The research primarily looked at assigned reading materials to conclude that “professors generally insulate their students from the wider intellectual disagreement that shape these important controversies.”

  I recently read a book which advocated… see below.

Recently on the book blog:

To his credit, Richard K. Vedder puts his provocative thesis right in his three-word title: Let Colleges Fail. And, as hinted by his subtitle, he's referring to Joseph Schumpeter's concept of capitalism's "creative destruction", the notion that economic health isn't only driven by positive innovation of new goods, but also getting rid of the old, stale, less utile products, services, and methods. That's often painfully brutal, we might discuss how to ameliorate the agony, but it's often simply necessary for progress and improvement.

Vedder points to a telling fact: America's dynamic economy churns the top firms from year to year. (See Mark J. Perry: Only 52 US Companies Have Been on the Fortune 500 Since 1955, Thanks to the ‘creative Destruction’ That Fuels Economic Prosperity.) While the "top" US universities are pretty much the same bunch, year after year.

Even more indicative, as Macalester College's ex-President pointed out recently: the "sage on a stage" lecture model has been solidly in place for at least six centuries, back to when barbers performed surgery. Really?

It's not just simple lack of innovation. Vedder notes that although American higher ed is usually considered the best in the world, it has multiple problems that indicate its underlying malaise: falling enrollments; decreased public confidence; a censorious ideological climate; a (resulting) lack of intellectual diversity; ever-increasing cost; a manifest failure (in many cases) to teach students much; administrative bloat; increased inaccessibility to the poor; an overall poor "return on investment"; and (finally) inefficient and wasteful use of human and physical resources.

Vedder backs up all ten of these problems pretty convincingly. And points his finger at a number of underlying causes. Number one, of course, is the money spigot flowing from taxpayers, via federal and state governments, to higher ed. And there are more subtle government goodies, like tax treatment. (The university dining hall doesn't charge its customers sales tax; the pizza place a few hundred yards down Main Street is required to.) Accreditation is a woke racket. Athletics: an expensive distraction. Current governance is designed to maintain the cozy status quo.

So Vedder's overall recommendations are to reduce the role of government. Or at least make government efforts more effective. For example, if you must subsidize something with taxpayer cash, subsidize students, instead of throwing money at institutions. As private companies do, universities should "spin off" functions irrelevant to their educational purpose: e.g. housing, dining, sports, …

I've only scratched the surface; Vedder is full of good ideas. I'm not sure how many are feasible, even in the current crisis atmosphere; you'd think higher ed would be ripe for "creative destruction", but the forces dedicated to stasis are pretty powerful.

I subscribed to Techdirt's RSS feed awhile back for its smart takes on the relationship between civil liberties and the Internet. But these days it posts way too many articles like this one, titled: Trump Declares Everyone Who Doesn’t Kiss His Ass Is A Terrorist.

And (worse) it's by Mike Masnick, who, at one point, I thought of as "the relatively sane one." It begins:

Mike links to the "National Security Presidential Memorandum", good for him, so you can read it yourself.

Goodness knows, I'm no Trump fan. He's a vindictive, narcissistic bullshitter, steering the country according to his dangerous, uninformed whims. I couldn't bring myself to vote for him (or anyone else) for President last year.

But Mike's (very lengthy) "analysis", designed to justify the preordained conclusion in his headline, seems strained and weak to me.

And (worse), as near as I can tell, there's not a scintilla of "tech" content in the Techdirt article.

So: maybe start a second tech-free site, Mike. Use an AI to direct tech-free articles there. MTRA: Make Techdirt readable again.

Also of note:

• Speaking of my non-fanhood… I was slightly encouraged but skeptical about Trump's recent Truth Social post on Ukraine. But Kevin D. Williamson unloads upon it, especially the tagline: ‘Good Luck To All!’.

  Back when Trump was just a Page Six grotesque and social climber, Spy magazine famously described him as a “short-fingered vulgarian.” It turns out that his fingers aren’t the problem, but his short little attention span—not his grip, but his grip on the issues and, from time to time, on reality.

  Trump has had enough of the Russia-Ukraine war. And so he says that the U.S. role will now be to sell weapons to NATO “to do what they want with them.” He added: “Good luck to all!”

  Trump being Trump, he is all over the map (the map upon which I suspect he could not identify Ukraine with one of those short fingers). Not long ago, he was sure that Ukraine couldn’t win—he also claimed that Ukraine had started the war—and that the Ukrainians needed to get to a negotiated settlement as soon as possible. Now he says he thinks the Ukrainians may be able to take back all of the territory occupied (and annexed in some cases) by Russia, a proposition that is, unhappily, at least as implausible as any other dumb thing that has come out of Trump’s mouth. He writes (on social media, of course) that he came to this conclusion “after getting to know and fully understand the Ukraine/Russia Military and Economic situation.” (As always, the illiterate capitalization is in the original.)

  Donald Trump has served a full term as president of these United States and then spent most of Joe Biden’s term getting ready to run for another term of his own, which he is now well into—and he’s just now “getting to know and fully understand the Ukraine/Russia” situation?

  Jeez, Kevin. Can't you give the guy some credit for improvement?

• Beware the superfluous adjectives. Paul Schwennesen spots one at (no surprise) NPR, which still exists, and lets us know: 'Surveillance Pricing' Is Just Pricing.

  National Public Radio recently aired a segment on the evils of “Surveillance Pricing” — the practice of employing customer data and AI to tailor prices for individual consumers. The coverage, predictably, is overwhelmingly negative: an interviewee warned that it would let corporations prey on people’s vulnerabilities, as the Federal Trade Commission frets about “privacy, competition, and consumer protection.”

  On air, NPR concluded with the dire prediction that feckless private companies will, if left unchecked, ultimately “decide what you will pay.”

  Considering the emotional charge of topics like privacy and commerce, congressional intervention was practically inevitable. And sure enough, Representative Greg Casar, leader of the Progressive Caucus, has introduced legislation that would ban the practice wholesale. “AI is a developing part of our lives” he says, “but we need to make sure that it’s used for good and not being exploited. We’re already starting to see that, and if we don’t intervene now and ban these sorts of price gouging and wage suppression right now, then I think it’s just going to spread all over the economy.”

  But the standard Econ-101 insight doesn't go away: a transaction won't happen unless both sides, buyer and seller, perceive they'll be better off. Win-win. Positive sum. Etc. AI (potentially) puts another set of tools into the hands of both sides. But it's the same game.

• We can't say this enough. Jeff Jacoby urges Uncle Stupid to Pull the plug on the FCC.

  LIKE 99.5 percent of American adults, I wasn't watching Jimmy Kimmel's show on ABC last week when he made his unfunny comment suggesting that the man charged with the murder of conservative activist Charlie Kirk was part of "the MAGA gang" now trying "desperately" to distance itself from the accused killer. It was a cheap shot, and Kimmel was rightly criticized for his tastelessness. Then again, tasteless jokes are hardly a rarity in late-night television. If every comic who crossed the line into mean-spiritedness or bad judgment were sent packing, there would be no one left on network TV after 11:30 p.m.

  Yet as disgraceful as Kimmel's crack was, what happened next was far worse. Within a day and a half, Federal Communications Commission chairman Brendan Carr was publicly urging licensed broadcasters to declare that "we're not going to run Kimmel anymore." He emphasized his demand with an unsubtle warning: "Broadcasters ... have a license granted by us at the FCC, and that comes with an obligation to operate in the public interest. When we see stuff like this, look, we can do this the easy way or the hard way." Nice TV operation you have here. Be a shame if something were to happen to it.

  Fun Fact: Brendan Carr wrote the chapter on the FCC for the famous (or infamous) "Project 2025" for the Heritage Foundation. Unfortunately, he didn't advocate simply "pulling the plug" on it.

• A good question. Asked by David Harsanyi: How Can We Expect Immigrants To Embrace American Values if We Don't?

  In addition to demonstrating a basic handling of speaking, reading and writing in English, federal immigration law requires prospective citizens to understand "the fundamentals of the history, and of the principles and form of government, of the United States."

  Do they? According to studies, over 40% of new immigrants aren't proficient in even the most basic English, and many can't speak it at all.

  For years, the citizenship exam consisted of 100 questions, given to the applicants in advance, most of which were extraordinarily basic. An immigrant is only required to answer six of 10 questions to pass. The test entails queries such as: "We elect a U.S. Representative for how many years?" "Who vetoes bills?" "There were 13 original states. Name three." "The words 'Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness' are in what founding document?"

  I didn't know that!

  David also reports a sad, not-at-all-fun fact: "only about 36% of Americans were able to pass a multiple-choice version of the naturalization exam" And (worse): "The younger you are, the less likely it is that you'd pass."

• We made the WSJ! I was unaware of the legislation that impresses Travis Fisher and Glen Lyons: New Hampshire Sparks a Revolution in Electricity Supply.

  The global race for artificial intelligence and the inability of the U.S. electricity sector to keep pace have state policymakers scratching their heads. Some respond by restricting data centers’ use of local grids; others put existing customers and taxpayers on the hook for investments to accommodate the new demand. The electricity sector is in a state of crisis.

  New Hampshire recently approved an elegant solution: Let anyone build. In August Gov. Kelly Ayotte signed HB 672, which minimizes red tape for electricity providers that don’t connect to the existing grid, thus bringing more competition, speed and innovation to the state. In the spirit of reducing bureaucracy, the bill itself fits neatly on one page.

  Well, I'll be darned.

Jeff Maurer accepts an article contribution from President Donald J. Trump, who confesses: Tylenol Is Why I’m Like This.

I'm not sure about the article's authenticity. There's no Random Capitalization, and it doesn't end with "Thank You for Your Attention to This Matter!" But otherwise, it kinda sounds like him.

Also of note:

• Just a reminder that we dodged a bullet last year. Billy Binion notes that, in her just-released campaign post-mortem: Kamala Harris slams Trump for 'fentanyl dealer Ross Ulbricht' pardon.

  I confess I haven't read 107 Days, Kamala Harris' new memoir about her short-lived presidential campaign, cover to cover. But I did read at least one sentence, and it was a doozy.

  "The Justice Department is going after Trump's enemies list," the former vice president writes, "while Trump supporters have been pardoned and released: January 6 rioters who attacked police, the fentanyl dealer Ross Ulbricht, numerous tax cheats."

  Ah, Ross Ulbricht, the fentanyl dealer who was not convicted of actually dealing fentanyl—or any drug—himself.

  Ulbricht was sentenced to life in prison for his role in operating the Silk Road, an online marketplace where people could buy and sell illicit drugs. "By punishing Ulbricht as if he personally distributed narcotics, the government set a dangerous precedent for internet platforms and personal liability in the digital age," wrote Editor in Chief Katherine Mangu-Ward in the April issue of Reason. "Pressure to hold platform operators liable for everything from misinformation to sex work has grown in the past decade as Ulbricht and his supporters—especially those in the libertarian and cryptocurrency communities—fought for his freedom."

  It's one of the good things Trump has done. If only…

• I heard you wondering: Can Trump fix the deficit by attacking the Federal Reserve? Well, Jessica Riedl has the answer for you, Bunkie: Trump Can’t Fix the Deficit by Attacking the Federal Reserve. (And, really, were you seriously wondering about that?)

  President Trump has declared war on the prized independence of the Federal Reserve in an attempt to essentially run monetary policy out of the White House. He has attempted—illegally and on dubious grounds— to fire Fed Gov. Lisa Cook, threatened to fire Chairman Jerome Powell, and installed a top White House economist into a key Federal Reserve position. This White House pressure surely drove the Fed’s decision to reduce rates by 0.25 points on September 17.

  Going to war against the Federal Reserve seems baseless when current interest rates—while above the anomalous 2010s levels—are not high by historical standards. Moreover, rates are not holding back the current economy, and they may even be too low to combat the recent inflation uptick. However, President Trump has offered an additional argument: Lower interest rates would reduce Washington’s interest on the national debt, “saving us $1 Trillion per year” in reduced budget deficits. This sacrificing of Federal Reserve independence to help the Treasury sell cheaper debt is known to economists as “fiscal dominance.”

  Setting aside legitimate concerns over central bank independence and the illegal firing of Fed officials, would fiscal dominance really provide substantial budget deficit savings? The clear answer is no.

  Jessica points out that it's the buyers of US government bonds that determine the interest Uncle Stupid has to pay to fund his past and present deficit spending. Trump must know this, right? I mean, … right?

• Speaking of promulgators of bullshit… Samuel J. Abrams detects one at the helm: When the American Association of University Professors President Pretends There’s No Evidence, Academia Loses Credibility.

  The president of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), Todd Wolfson, was recently asked a straightforward question by the Chronicle of Higher Education: Why are there so few conservatives in the professoriate? His response should trouble anyone who cares about the future of higher education. “It depends on the field,” Wolfson said, before adding, “I would love to see the data on that. If there is actually data, I’d really love to see it.”

  This wasn’t curiosity. It was evasion. The evidence Wolfson pretended not to know about has been gathered for decades, replicated across methodologies, and published in countless outlets. To act as though it may not exist is either willful ignorance or deliberate denial. In either case, it’s unacceptable for the leader of an organization whose very historic mission has been to safeguard academic freedom and integrity.

  My only gripe with Samuel's headline is that it seems to presume that adcademia has any credibility left to lose.

• "Occasionally he stumbled over the truth but he always picked himself up and hurried on as if nothing had happened." A quote often attributed to Churchill, and it's what comes to mind reading Art Carden's Daily Economy article: 'Abundance' of Contradiction: Progressives Discover Public Choice.

  Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson is not a book for libertarians or conservatives, and I had to remind myself of that frequently. Its implied reader is a member of the left in good standing who parks a Subaru Outback or Toyota Prius with a fading “Biden/Harris” bumper sticker on it in front of a house with one of those “In This House We Believe” signs in the front yard. Abundance is a book for those for whom the important word in “public transportation” and “public education” is not “transportation” or “education,” but “public.” It is a message from people who love government to people who love government.

  And while it’s a pretty good message, on the whole, I read it with mixed feelings. I would have welcomed a much more full-throated defense of classical liberal institutions, but Klein and Thompson are progressive liberals, not classical liberals, and so I’m left to take what I can get. I therefore welcome their effort to put “market progressivism” on the political map. Could the left have picked a better book of the moment? Yes. Could they have done much worse? Also, yes.

  I still have my eye out for the Klein/Thompson book at the Portsmouth (NH) Public Library. I left my ideological comfort zone in my last library pick (see below), and felt I should read something less contentious. Maybe in a couple weeks…

Recently on the book blog:

This fat tome was on the New Non-Fiction table at Portsmouth (NH) Public Library. I could tell it would be out of my ideological comfort zone, but I promised myself that I'd venture there every so often. It's very long, 518 pages of main text. And it turned out to be packed with dull-but-earnest prose with plenty of details in which I can't imagine anyone would be interested. [Page 240, picked at random, about the early USSR: "NKFin [the People's Commissariat of Finance] was headed by Grigory Sokolnikov, a veteran Bolshevik who had been an early associate of Nikolai Bukharin, a Marxist theorist who was a prominent party figure." If you made it to the end of that sentence without wishing you were doing something else, good for you.]

But I worked my way through it, admittedly in "looked at every page" mode at some points.

To be fair, the author, John Cassidy, demonstrates a wide range of meticulous research into economic and social history, spanning centuries, across the globe. Although his sympathies are clearly with capitalism's critics, his basic theme can't help but admit that various flavors of "capitalism" have been the dominant force pulling billions of people out of poverty in a historical eye-blink. (He doesn't do a lot of graphs, but he provides a "hockey stick" one early on that's simple but revealing.

The book cover lists many of the "critics" he discusses: William Bolts, the Luddites, Adam Smith, William Thompson, Anna Wheeler, Flora Tristan, Karl Marx, Thomas Carlyle, Friedrich Engels, Henry George, John Hobson, Thorstein Veblen, Rosa Luxemburg, Nikolai Kondratiev, Vladimir Lenin, Karl Polanyi, John Maynard Keynes, Michal Kalecki, Joan Robinson, J.C. Kumarappa, Eric Williams, Raul Frebisch, Milton Friedman, Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, Silvia Frederici, Stuart Hall, Samir Amin, and Thomas Piketty.

You may have not heard of all those people.

So, you'll note: Cassidy discusses a few capitalist champions (Adam Smith and Milton Friedman) not just critics. (Hayek gets some discussion as well, mostly as an inspiration to Maggie Thatcher.)

That's not to say that Cassidy is even-handed. He refers (p. 392) to the "cult of [Milton] Friedman", and it's hard to avoid detecting a note of disparagement there. I didn't notice (for example) any reference to the "cult of Marx", and I think that's probably more apt.

Some of the "critics" launched movements that sputtered out pretty quickly. Chapter 24 is titled "Silvia Frederici and Wages for Housework". A movement "demanding payment from the government for domestic labor." Presumably this wouldn't involve periodic surprise inspections to ensure that dishes were being washed promptly, laundry carefully dried and folded, and mantels being diligently dusted.

Later in that chapter, "Italian leftist" Mariarosa Della Costa is quoted: "In the same way as women are robbed of the possibility of developing their creative capacity, they are robbed of their sexual life which has been transformed into a function for reproducing labour power. […] Either the vagina is primarily the passage to the reproduction of labour power sold as a commodity, the capitalist function of the uterus, or it is part of our natural powers, our social equipment."

It was the 70s, man.

I tend to be attuned to University of New Hampshire connections when reading. I found three: (1) Marxist Paul Sweezy gets an extended discussion, but not his SCOTUS case, Sweezy v. New Hampshire, which turned on his refusal to answer the NH Attorney General's questions about a lecture he gave at UNH in 1954. (2) UNH Econ prof Dennis Meadows gets some ink as one of the contributors to the predictions of ecological doom in the book The Limits to Growth. And (3) "wages-for-housework" activist Margaret Prescod gets a brief mention; for some reason I knew that she is the mother of UNH Physics prof Chanda Prescod-Weinstein.

So, even though there's lots of capitalism-criticism here, what shines through is a mutation of that old oft-mangled Churchill quote: capitalism is the worst economic system, except for all the others.

George Will writes wisely on Trump, Kimmel and the upside of ignoring big-government coercion. (WaPo gifted link)

That coercion, of course, didn't start last week. GFW discusses the sordid record of "liberal" icons FDR, JFK, and Sleepy Joe in that regard.

But here's his bottom line:

I was reminded of this Truman quote:

I only wish this would happen to Trump more often. About some things. Not others. See below.

But for one more accurate observation about recent events, let's go to Dan McLaughlin who suggests a new title for ABC's late-night show: Jimmy Kimmel, Unrepentant Liar.

So Dan unloads on Kimmel, fine. But also on the non-innocent bystander NPR, which still exists, and is up to its usual spin: Why was Kirk killed? Evidence paints complicated picture of alleged assassin.

Yes, it's complicated! Nuanced! Don't worry your pretty little heads about it, NPR listeners! From their story, emphasis added:

Dan's response:

Really? Did we ask Timothy McVeigh to tell us his views on the capital gains tax before classifying him? Did we care what Osama bin Laden’s opinions were on unions before figuring out his motive?

I'm no fan of ideological pigeonholing, but … come on. Some things just aren't that complicated, unless you want them to be.

Or we could mandate that alleged murderers be subjected to the the Pew Research Center's Political Typology Quiz. (I got "Ambivalent Right", but I hated the phrasing of a number of Pew's questions.)

Also of note:

• Better late than never, but… The WSJ editorialists put a well-deserved question mark on their headline: A New Start for Trump on Ukraine? (WSJ gifted link) They are prompted by the Truth Social post:

  After getting to know and fully understand the Ukraine/Russia Military and Economic situation and, after seeing the Economic trouble it is causing Russia, I think Ukraine, with the support of the European Union, is in a position to fight and WIN all of Ukraine back in its original form. With time, patience, and the financial support of Europe and, in particular, NATO, the original Borders from where this War started, is very much an option. Why not? Russia has been fighting aimlessly for three and a half years a War that should have taken a Real Military Power less than a week to win. This is not distinguishing Russia. In fact, it is very much making them look like “a paper tiger.” When the people living in Moscow, and all of the Great Cities, Towns, and Districts all throughout Russia, find out what is really going on with this War, the fact that it’s almost impossible for them to get Gasoline through the long lines that are being formed, and all of the other things that are taking place in their War Economy, where most of their money is being spent on fighting Ukraine, which has Great Spirit, and only getting better, Ukraine would be able to take back their Country in its original form and, who knows, maybe even go further than that! Putin and Russia are in BIG Economic trouble, and this is the time for Ukraine to act. In any event, I wish both Countries well. We will continue to supply weapons to NATO for NATO to do what they want with them. Good luck to all!

  Among the WSJ observations:

  For the first time, Mr. Trump is articulating that a Ukrainian victory is in the West’s interests and refuting those in his circle who say Ukraine’s capitulation is inevitable. He’s right that Mr. Putin is economically vulnerable. Mr. Trump is also issuing a warning amid Mr. Putin’s drone and fighter jet incursions into Poland and Estonia—which have so far gone unanswered.

  Yet for eight months Mr. Putin has watched Mr. Trump do nothing, and the Russian seems to have concluded that he could escalate against Ukraine and test NATO. Mr. Trump’s Alaska summit with Mr. Putin was in retrospect a mistake, not unlike John F. Kennedy’s 1961 Vienna summit with Nikita Khrushchev that convinced the Russian he could get away with deploying missiles in Cuba.

  Fingers crossed, I guess.

• Klingons, too? That's my usual reflex thought whenever I read headlines like Michael F. Cannon's at Cato: What's the Key to Universal Health Care? He starts out with his own truth bomb:

  Many critiques of US health care begin with the assumption that, as The Economist put it, the United States is “one of the only developed countries where health care is mostly left to the free market.” In truth, among wealthy nations, the United States may have one of the least-free health care markets—and it’s making health care less universal.

  In a free market, the government would control 0 percent of health spending. Yet the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) reports that in the United States, the government controls 84 percent of health spending. That’s a larger share than in 27 out of 38 OECD-member nations, including the United Kingdom (83 percent) and Canada (73 percent), each of which has an explicitly socialized health care system. When it comes to government control of health spending, the United States is closer to communist Cuba (89 percent) than the average OECD nation (75 percent).

  We're looking at another government shutdown threat from Democrats who want to get us even closer to Cuba in that regard. So we'll see how that goes.

• Worst Disneyland ride ever. Tyler Cowen issues an alert to readers: Brace Yourself: Here Comes Stagflation!

  It seems increasingly likely that the American economy is sleepwalking toward stagflation. In case you’re wondering, that is not a good thing.

  Stagflation means that an economy experiences excess inflation and excess unemployment at the same time. This was once thought to be impossible, but the OPEC oil price shocks of the 1970s triggered both high inflation and high unemployment, and voilà, we suddenly had a new, unhappy economic phenomenon.

  If I had to guess, I think there’s a decent chance that 18 months from now, America could well have an inflation rate of 4 percent (up from last year’s 2.5 percent) and an unemployment rate of 7 percent, well above the current 4.3 percent.

  Eighteen months from now... we're talking March 20-something, 2027. If I'm still around (fingers crossed), I'll check out how clear Tyler's crystal ball was.

• New Hampshire's Satanic Princess in the news. NH Journal notes: NHDems' Read First US Elected Official to Join Anti-Israel Flotilla Heading to Gaza.

  As Jews in New Hampshire began their celebration of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, on Monday, state Rep. Ellen Read (D-Newmarket) had her own announcement.

  She will be the “first ever elected official in the US” to join an anti-Israel flotilla to break the Jewish state’s military blockade of Gaza.

  Read announced via social media, sharing a post from the anti-Israel group Thousand Madleens, which teamed up with the Freedom Flotilla Coalition “to challenge the colony (sic) of Israel’s illegal and inhumane blockade of Gaza.”

  Read also threw a “#FreePalestine” into her tweet.

  Rep. Read previously made news last Christmas by demanding that a statue of goat-headed pagan deity Baphomet, borrowed from the Satanic Temple, be placed next to the nativity scene at the New Hampshire Statehouse.

• Nobody's granted me permission to post this, but… I'm gonna do it anyway: Kevin D. Williamson's article on Permissionless Journalism.

  The recent all-out assault on free speech by the Trump administration and its allies has some of my friends in the business grumbling about the fact that the United States has no national “shield law” giving journalists certain kinds of legal protections, mainly having to do with being compelled to disclose sources or being subjected to various kinds of electronic surveillance. But shield laws are the wrong policy.

  The most recent attempt to pass such a law failed in the Senate last year, not because Senate Republicans thought through the issue carefully but because Donald Trump demanded it be killed. Trump probably does not understand the law, but he knows he hates journalists. Even the doggie-vitamin salesmen who play journalists on Fox News annoy him from time to time—a true-blue Trump sycophant can never be abject enough.

  But a federal shield law (there are many state-level versions) was a bad idea before Donald Trump and it is a bad idea now—not because of the proposed shield or shields per se, but because it raises the question of who is to be protected by such a law and implies a government power to make that decision.

  It's pretty simple: given that anyone with a few dollars of disposable income can compose content that can, in theory, be viewed by the teeming masses, "free press" rules should apply to everyone.

Mr. Ramirez was a little too early in claiming success, but it's still a cool cartoon:

And his point about the Trump Administration concerning itself with late-night American TV hosts in the face of more serious threats is well-taken.

But Jimmy Kimmel was baack on the air last night, apparently. I continued my 22-year tradition of not watching. But I noticed this tweet from Don Winslow, which revealed a major continuing problem:

Jimmy Kimmel: “Our president celebrates Americans losing their livelihoods because he cannot take a joke.”pic.twitter.com/zjFd8XRy1T

— Don Winslow (@donwinslow) September 24, 2025

And that problem is: Jimmy Kimmel does not know what a "joke" is any more. What got him into trouble was:

“We had some new lows over the weekend with the Maga gang desperately trying to characterise this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and with everything they can to score political points from it."

Can you detect even a trace of humor there?

I mean, Kate McKinnon singing “Hallelujah” on Saturday Night Live back in 2016 was funnier.

Fortunately, Jonathan Turley pulls some amusement out of the rhetoric: The Funniest Joke Jimmy Kimmel Never Told.

More examples from the pols and pundits at the link. But what's the joke, Jonathan? Oh, here 'tis:

So Kimmel is now a hero of democracy — all he had to do was spread disinformation. That makes this the funniest joke that Kimmel never told.

Also on the hypocrisy watch, James Freeman excerpts a letter sent by Alphabet's (Google/YouTube) law firm to CongressCritter Jim Jordan, recalling some recent history:

Ah, the good old days, when it was Democrats threatening free-speakers.

Let's click over to the American Sunlight Project to check what Ms. Information herself, Nina Jankowicz, has to say about all this:

Yes, that's right: nothing.

Finally, at Reason, J.D. Tuccille ably diagnoses the real problem: America's Free Speech Culture Is Under Attack From Within.

J.D. is on target, and it's sad.

Also of note:

• Just after you take the Road to Serfdom, keep an eye out for A Short Route to Chaos. Kevin D. Williamson takes a look:

  We like to quote from A Man for All Seasons around here—you know: “Give the Devil the benefit of law,” “but for Wales?” etc. There is much that is wonderfully wise in Robert Bolt’s play and the beloved film adapted from it. But one of his maxims is at best incomplete, with Thomas More making this brief case against Thomas Cromwell’s cynical realpolitik and amoral pragmatism: “When statesmen forsake their own private conscience for the sake of their public duties, they lead their country by a short route to chaos.”

  Chaos is where we are.

  By what short route did we arrive here? In no small part, through the private conscience—one that is extraordinarily deformed—of Donald Trump, the Mammon-worshiping imbecile who is, if not exactly a statesman, nonetheless president of these United States. More’s advice assumes two things: 1) a more or less princely executive 2) who is in possession of a functioning and educated “private conscience.” (A note to consider at another time: The most significant error of our romantic friends is the belief that the conscience does not need educating.) Our Founding Fathers, having had the benefit of learning a good deal from the two and a half centuries that had passed between More’s martyrdom and the framing of our constitutional order, chose not to rely on the private conscience of a monarch or an elected executive with monarchical powers: They set limits on the overall national government and made the executive answerable to the legislature rather than the other way around.

  On that point: We do have a separation of powers, but we do not have three “coequal” branches of government. Congress can override a presidential veto, but the president must accept the final judgment of Congress; Congress exercises oversight of the executive, which has no reciprocal power over the legislative branch; Congress has a say in senior executive appointments, while the president has no say in congressional staffing; the major powers of the state—laying taxes, appropriating funds, declaring war, ratifying treaties—are invested in Congress, not in the president. What the executive has is not equality but independence across a narrowly defined scope of action, powers that are intended as a check on what turns out to be, in our time, the least dangerous “threat” in American public life: excessive legislative ambition from such gormless castrati as Ted Cruz, Mike Johnson, John Thune, Bill Cassidy, and the rest of the knee-walking sycophants of the so-called Republican Party, who cannot muster the patriotism, self-respect, or manliness (a strange obsession among these perfect exemplars of impotence) to stand up for their country (to say nothing of Congress as an institution) in the face of the abuses, usurpations, corruption, stupidity, quackery, incompetence, buffoonery, servility, tyranny, cowardice, and Putinist water-carrying—I could go on—of the Trump administration and its fellow travelers.

  That's a long excerpt, but I encourage you to do whatever you need to do to read the whole thing. If only to get to the bit about "the love child of Augustus Gloop and Veruca Salt."

  (I wonder if Roald Dahl ever fantasized about that, maybe in a sequel.)

• Something I've tried to say myself. But I wasn't as eloquent as Noah Rothman: Determining Motives Not Always Easy.

  It’s not always easy to determine the motives of those who are deranged enough to think exhibitions of wanton violence will beget a better world. It’s often harder to establish, even presumptively, the sources of inspiration that encourage them to act on their delusions. Anibal Hernandez Santana’s alleged attack on a Sacramento-based ABC affiliate could be the exception that proves the rule.

  Santana's brain processes might be "disordered and chaotic". Or, Noah notes, he could have been making the bold, rational decision to help save the country from the "dark night of fascism" predicted by a host of Democrats. His mistake might have been to take what they were saying seriously.

• 

  The nation that controls… OK, maybe we won't get a Dick Tracy/Chester Gould Space Coupe out of it, but Noah Smith explains: Why every country needs to master the Electric Tech Stack.

  The other day I gave a talk at a conference in Canada about industrial policy. When we came to the inevitable question of which specific industries Canada should target, I had an answer ready: “the Electric Tech Stack”.

  The fact that I had an answer ready surprised some people in the audience. The traditional criticism of industrial policy is that it’s all about “picking winners”, and that winners are very hard for even the smartest person to pick. But in some cases it’s actually very easy to pick winners. In the 19th century, every country knew they needed railroads, both for national defense and for transporting goods. In the 20th century, many countries knew they needed an auto industry, because those same assembly lines and supply chains could be quickly repurposed to make tanks and other military vehicles in case of a war. In the early 20th century, countries knew that having a steel industry was crucial for creating most of the important military equipment, while in the later century, the U.S. correctly guessed that having a powerful semiconductor industry was crucial for dominance in precision weaponry.

  In all four of these cases, there were arguments about the economic benefits of promoting the industries in question, but in the end it was military necessity that tipped the balance decisively in favor of industrial policy. As I told the folks in Canada, a similar thing is true in the 2020s.

  Noah makes a pretty good case for making some unglamorous, but necessary, investments in every technology that's critical to cranking out cheap-but-deadly drones.

Recently on the book blog:

This 2018 book was recently honored as one of The 25 Best Mystery Novels of the Past 25 Years (WSJ gifted link) by WSJ reviewer Tom Nolan. It received other numerous accolades when it was published. And, to make it even more tempting for me, there's a lot of associations with my alma mater, Caltech. So I put it on my get-at-library list, and…

Well, it turned out not to be my cup of tea. I hasten to say that's on me, not the author, Nova Jacobs. Your mileage may, etc. It's very "literary", and my patience for that sort of thing is thin.

There are many characters, most are various members of the Severy family, headed up by the titular Isaac. Isaac's death is self-predicted in the book's two-page prologue, where he prepares two breakfasts, one for him, one for his executioner.

And then we jump to his funeral and memorial service, as experienced by his granddaughter, Hazel. She's the owner of a failing Seattle bookstore, and doesn't fit in too well with the rest of the family. In fact, nobody fits in that well, all seem to be in various states of dysfunction. But (it seems) Hazel is the one Isaac has chosen to carry out his last wishes; she receives a cryptic last letter from Isaac, requesting her assistance in handling his "last equation". But unearthing that work turns out to be difficult.

I said there were a lot of characters, and they all appear pretty much concurrently during the funeral. (At my age, difficult to keep 'em all straight.) Their various foibles get revealed as the book proceeds. But you'll notice there are holes in the family tree, too, and those need revealing.

A final big problem for me: I never came close to believing in the dangerous powers of the "equation", which is manifestly more powerful than E=mc². Nope, not even at Caltech could they work that out.

New Hampshire had its own Intifada Incident at Sky Meadow Country Club down in Nashua, where a Saturday night wedding reception was in progress. One person, 59-year-old Robert Steven DeCesare, was murdered while shielding his family from the perpetrator. Two others were shot and four more reported non-gunshot injuries.

The "suspect", one Hunter Nadeau, shouted "Free Palestine" at some point in his rampage. According to witnesses, but who could make something like that up?

News reports (like this one) invariably hasten to add:

Jim Geraghty seems a tad incredulous about that:

The guy’s tearing through a country club, murdered one person, is attempting to murder others, and you’re telling me he was also simultaneously attempting to create confusion about what his actual views on the Middle East were? What, he was a really clever Zionist?

Two More…

— Jim Geraghty (@jimgeraghty) September 22, 2025

Ah, well. Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow, of course. But also John Formella.

But on that whole "Free Palestine" thing, Noah Rothman points out what should be, but isn't, obvious: Palestinian Statehood Declarations Are an Insult to Palestinians. About the recent declarations of "Australia, Canada, Portugal, and the U.K" (and probably soon France):

It's a quid where nobody's expecting, let alone demanding, pro quo. A reward for barbaric atrocities which will only result, eventually, in continued barbaric atrocities.

Also of note:

• Down the rabbit hole. So Ann Althouse asked Elon's Grok AI: Where in traditional/social media is alarm being raised about "Christian nationalism"? Included in Grok's response was "a concise, well-formatted chart". And the sources cited were the usual litany of lefty sources: the Nation, the Guardian, the LA Times, the WaPo, the NYT, CNN, NPR, MSNBC, LGBTQ Nation, and … whoa, the Concord Monitor?

  Or, as we like to say: Pravda on the Merrimack?

  Yes. You can read Grok's entire response here. And here's the bit referencing a PotM op-ed from September 16, which

  Links Kirk's Christian nationalism to Hitler's church co-optation, alarming over Trump's mourning as prophetic and its anti-democratic implications.

  Well, that's enough to track down the column in question. It's from "Rev. Dr. Stephanie Rutt", identified as "founding minister of the Tree of Life Interfaith Temple in Amherst." And, sure enough, she does not shrink from making the argumentum ad Hitlerum:

  Those who study history will recognize the parallels of Trump and the rise of Christian Nationalism in this country to the rise of Hitler in Germany before World War II. Primarily, Hitler was masterful at building loyalty and support within the German churches, eventually making his government and religion one. And we all know the result.

  Still, even as I watch out my window and see ICE agents gathering up all the undesirables and see Trump targeting only Democratic cities with military control, all in support of this Christian Nationalist agenda, I remember Anne Frank and I refuse to allow my spirit to be broken.

  Fascinating! She's Anne Frank! And, finally, that led me to Rev. Dr. Stephanie's very own personal website and (yes) her blog. And, if you are intrigued, don't miss Rev. Dr. Stephanie's Tree of Life Interfaith Temple. Where you can sign up for the Spiritual Mentoring Certificate Program. The nine-month program (offered "primarily online via video conferencing") will set you back $2500 for tuition and about $50 for books.

  Something Anne Frank missed out on doing.

I occasionally refer to Sabine Hossenfelder's science-popularizing videos. (Examples here. here. here. here. here. here. here. here. here. here. here. here. here. and here.) I've also read her books, reports here and here.

But things get a little (well, actually, a lot) more personal here:

A brief transcript at Science and Culture Today: For Criticizing Her Field, Sabine Hossenfelder Gets Canceled.

Her ex-institution is the "Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy".

One of her detractors, Dan Kagan-Kans, had an essay at the WSJ a few days back where she's briefly mentioned: The Rise of ‘Conspiracy Physics’ (WSJ gifted link).

I like Sabine a lot (even as I disagree with her about free will). She'll probably be OK with her popularizing videos, but I don't know what's going to happen with her research interests.

I don't have the physics chops to judge whether she's on target about the field's corruption. My guess: she's taking flak, so I bet she is.

Also of note:

• Who could imagine that bias might be involved? David Harsanyi warns us: Surveys on Political Violence Are Criminally Misleading.

  In the wake of Charlie Kirk's assassination, Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) posted an Anti-Defamation League chart that purports to prove that right-wingers perpetrate the majority of politically motivated murders in the United States.

  "Data isn't vibes," she wrote. "If you need vibes, check out the hate filled comments the rightwing will leave on this post and all my posts."

  The ADL graph has been very popular among left-wingers. The problem is that it's based on one of the most dishonest reports ever.

  Rep. Omar's tweet:

  Data isn’t vibes. If you need vibes, check out the hate filled comments the rightwing will leave on this post and all my posts. pic.twitter.com/m1DNl5ageT

  — Ilhan Omar (@IlhanMN) September 15, 2025

  David goes into detail on the bogosity. I'll simply note the obvious: murderers will have a lot of dysfunctional and chaotic mental processes; even if it doesn't rise to what shrinks might deem "mental illness", confidently pigeonholing those thoughts as "left-wing", "domestic Islamist", or "right-wing" is an exercise in hubris.

• Oh, I bet they can go below that. George Will unloads on our non-functioning system of checks and balances: As Trump blasts boats, Congress hits rock bottom. (WaPo gifted link)

  The Supreme Court will soon consider Trump’s claim that a statute that does not mention tariffs gives him the power to impose tariffs as high as he chooses, on any country he chooses, for any reason he chooses, for as long as he chooses. About this claim, congressional Republicans are supine, because of fear or adoration. Congressional Democrats are dumbfounded by the president’s exercise of powers their party was complicit in Congress forfeiting.

  So, unsurprisingly, there is tepid congressional questioning of the president’s actions as judge, jury and executioner in the waters off Venezuela. His behavior is predictable.

  Given his capacious notion of presidential powers, in domestic and foreign affairs. And given Vance’s disdain for Americans “weeping over the lack of due process” for people swept from U.S. streets and workplaces into Alligator Alcatraz and similar confinements because they are suspected members of criminal gangs. And given the president’s penchant for declaring this and that (e.g., a trade deficit) to be an “emergency.” And given that he learned opportunistic verbal extravagance (e.g., an “invasion” at the southern border) from progressives who tried to disqualify him from the 2024 election because the afternoon riot of Jan. 6, 2021, supposedly qualified as an “insurrection” under the 14th Amendment. Given all this, expect more of this.

  See, I thought that headline was misleading: we got a lot of time before we find "rock bottom".

• Off their meds, maybe? Jonathan Turley is unimpressed with a couple of Democrat ladies: The Three Rs: Clinton and Weingarten Return to Republicans, Rage, and Recrimination.

  Many people are calling out former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for a posting supporting American Federation of Teachers (AFT) chief Randi Weingarten’s new book in which she paints her political opponents as “fascists.” The timing was flagged as, at best, tone deaf in the wake of the assassination of Charlie Kirk by a shooter who wrote fascist references on his bullets and was clearly radicalized by such rage rhetoric. For me, the timing was most notable in how Weingarten and Clinton are again pushing their extreme rhetoric as a new report emerged showing the utter failure of our schools to actually educate our children. Weingarten and Clinton cannot be bothered by the long-standing declines in education. They are returning to the three Rs: Republicans, Rage, and Recrimination.

  Weingarten is “credited” with turning the teacher’s union into an extension of the Democratic Party, often appearing at political rallies with her signature high-volume screeds:

  Clinton pushed the use of education to paint opponents as fascists: “Congratulations to my friend [Weingarten] on ‘Why Fascists Fear Teachers.’ From banning books to controlling curriculum, authoritarians go after public education because it’s a cornerstone of democracy.”

  It should not be surprising that Hillary/Randi-approved "public education" is resulting in headlines like this: Student acceptance of violence in response to speech hits a record high

• I'll take "Least Surprising Headlines" for 200, Ken. Dominic Pino is unshocked by recent news: Of Course the FCC Is Abusing Its Power over Broadcasting. (NR gifted link)

  ‘We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr said on a podcast on Wednesday in an attempt to bully Jimmy Kimmel off the air for his false statements about Charlie Kirk’s murderer. “These companies can find ways to change conduct and take actions on Kimmel, or there’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.”

  There are no doubt other reasons for Kimmel’s suspension from ABC’s late-night show. As Noah Rothman has noted, the genre doesn’t really work anymore, and Kimmel’s show is a money-loser with more unamusing political commentary than genuine humor. But that doesn’t change the fact that Carr is a bully who at least attempted to use real government power to punish speech he did not like.

  Why does Carr have this power in the first place? It would be nice if his tough-guy impersonation for a right-wing podcast could be dismissed as merely talk, but the FCC is in fact able to exert pressure over broadcasters by threatening to revoke their licenses.

  Dominic does a great job looking at the FCC's history of bullying broadcasters who irk the current in-charge pols in D.C. Abolish.

• But wait a minute… David R. Henderson says: I've Changed My Mind on Carr's Role in Kimmel's Suspension.

  My favorite line from John Maynard Keynes (but I’m not sure he even said it) is: “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?”

  In this case, it’s not so much that the facts changed as that I became aware of facts.

  Sean Malone, a friend on Facebook, challenged my claim that Jimmy Kimmel was fired because of FCC chairman Brendan Carr’s threat.

  Sean's point is that the timing between Carr's thuggish "We can do this the easy way or the hard way" remarks and ABC's decision to of Kimmel's suspension is iffy. I haven't checked this myself, and Sean could have missed something, but…

  In one sense, it doesn't much matter. Carr has too much power, and his statements show that he wouldn't be shy about invoking it against companies that don't bend to his will.

This post's headline was inspired by: (1) a recent column in my lousy local paper from Douglas Rooks, headlined: Here's an idea for the US Postal Service: Deliver the mail!; and (2) the all-too-typical mailpiece pictured below.

Most days, my entire mail delivery consists of solicitations, either straight ads or (as above) begging charities. Bzzzzt! Into the shredder, unopened. Would it be asking too much for the USPS to cut out the middleman (me) and just shred these items instead? Just an idea.

And where did NH-PBS ever get the idea that I would be likely to give them one red cent, anyway?

But that put me in the semi-cranky mood to break out the fisking template for Rooks' op-ed. Haven't done this in a while, but the rules are: Rooks' column is on your left, with a lovely #EEFFFF background color; my remarks are on your right.

I previously dumped (non-fiskingly) on a Rooks USPS column here.

And earlier this year, I blogged a Cato article by Chris Edwards, Postal Reforms Abroad. It compares the US with other countries and finds that we are increasingly on the socialist end of the mail-delivery spectrum. And has a lot more links to sensible reforms you won't get from Douglas Rooks.

Well, that's off my chest. Now to shred that NH-PBS envelope…

This is an update to a post originally made in April 2017, triggered by my (then) recent read of a Quanta article How to Quantify (and Fight) Gerrymandering. Also influencing me since then was a book by Lawrence Lessig, They Don't Represent Us.

Of course, gerrymandering has been in the news in recent weeks. In fact, just yesterday, I noticed a network news story that showed some Texas Democrats living near Austin literally in tears about being shuffled to a new probable-GOP Congressional voting district.

One of those things you have to have a heart of stone not to laugh at.

Briefly: the problem is winner-take-all elections.

I came up with a simple solution back in 2017. The "crackpot" notion, which would require some Constitutional tinkering: Any candidate for the US House of Representatives who receives greater than 1% of the popular vote in the general election shall be entitled to a vote in the House equal to the fraction of the vote he or she receives. More details available at the articles linked above and below.

This is a variety of proportional representation, although (I think) different (and, ahem, better) than the schemes described in the relevant Wikipedia article.

The natural question: how would that have worked out in an actual election? Well, we don't know, and there's no way to tell, because the voting incentives would be totally different under this scheme. That won't stop us from speculating anyway. The MIT Election Data + Science Lab recently updated their data to include the 2024 elections, and I wrote a simple script to show the results for party breakdown, assuming this crackpot scheme was in place.

The results:

The grand total: 1061 reps with a total of 430.39 votes.

I should add that the MIT data is pretty messy once you get away from the Rs and Ds, and I'm not confident that it reflects reality. In some states a single candidate can appear on the ballot for multiple parties. For example, AOC got 61.53% of the vote in her district (NY-14) as a Democrat, but she picked up another 7.39% under the "Working Families" party.

But in this fictitious scenario, the Republicans "win". Barely.

If you're interested: the results from 2022 and 2020; these posts also have additional comments on the scheme.

For the second day in a row, let's lead off with an Iowahawk tweet:

Initially it was set up to regulate bandwidth through licenses for radio & TV stations, so that some dick wouldn't set up his own more powerful transmitter at 670 AM. And then of course conditions came with those licenses: call letters on the hour. No smut! And then of course a…

— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) September 18, 2025

I strongly recommend reading Dave's whole tweet-thread. He's not alone. Just picking some links at random:

• Nick Gillespie: Abolish the FCC.
• The National Review editorialists: Abolish the FCC.
• Ilya Somin: Abolish the FCC.
• Thomas W. Hazlett: Abolish the FCC.
• And finally, Pun Salad, in a post from eighteen frickin' years ago: The FCC: Kill It!

Quoting from that last one:

Hard to believe, I know, but Americans don't need the FCC for anything, not even protection from … what's his name, again?

Oh, yeah: Jimmy Kimmel! I used to watch him on The Man Show every now and then. Being a man.

But it turns out that he had a more recent gig where he babbled a bunch of lefty disinformation. And he got his hat handed to him by ABC, his employer, arguably caused by pressure from the Trump Administration's FCC.

Which brings us to Jeff Maurer, whose joke-to-outrage ratio is unusually low here: The Kimmel Cancelation Is a Million Times Worse Than Colbert.

No, sorry, it ain't cool. Should be grounds for impeachment.

But, finally, Andrew C. McCarthy at NR, with a headline I can't help but imagine being read with a heavy Jewish accent: So Now the Left Is Against Government Extortion to Suppress Speech?. (NR gifted link)

Yeah. So I was prompted to check out Nina Jankowicz's "American Sunlight Project" to see if she had anything interesting to say. Alas, the most recent "update" is from September 10, and its headline is:

Report: Nudifying Apps on Meta Platforms are Violating EU Transparency Rules

I'd like to think they intended that wordplay, but I'm pretty sure not.

Also of note:

• Are you mything him yet? Via Power Line, a First Things article from Matthew Schmitz on The Epstein Myth.

  In March 2005, the Palm Beach police began to investigate whether a fourteen-year-old girl had been molested by a wealthy man named Jeffrey Epstein. When police interviewed the girl, she said that Epstein had paid her to give him a massage and masturbated in her presence. Before long, the police found twelve other girls with remarkably similar stories.

  The girls’ stories were consistent not only in what they described, but in what they did not. Not one of ­Epstein’s initial accusers described being trafficked to other men. ­Marie Villafaña, the prosecutor who led the charge against Epstein in Florida, later recalled: “None of . . . the victims that we spoke with ever talked about any other men being involved in abusing them. It was only Jeffrey Epstein.”

  It is now widely accepted that Jeffrey Epstein ran a pedophilic blackmail ring that implicated some of the world’s most powerful men, most likely on behalf of the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad. Commentators who agree on little else are united in this belief. If such a ring existed, it must have been up and running in 2005—well into his career, and immediately before his downfall began.

  But Epstein’s accusers in Palm Beach apparently had no knowledge of any blackmail ring. Nor has reliable evidence of one emerged in the years since. Ghislaine ­Maxwell, ­Epstein’s long-time associate, was convicted of sex trafficking in 2021, but she was charged with and convicted of trafficking minors to exactly one person: Jeffrey Epstein. Where did the idea that Epstein ran a blackmail ring come from? Answering this question requires separating Epstein the man from the Epstein myth, which has put a respectable face on once-fringe ideas.

  I admit that I am pretty far out of the loop on Epstein, other than amusement at Pam Bondi's on-again off-again statements on the "Epstein client list". But after reading the article, I'm pretty firmly in the Gertrude Stein Memorial "there's no there there" camp.

• After you take the exit for the Road to Serfdom, hang your second right for … America's Turn Toward Ad Hoc State Capitalism. Veronique de Rugy writes:

  The question of whether President Donald Trump has turned the United States toward a new "state capitalism" — one in which the government is not just economic referee but active player — has been answered. His second term brings policies that go well beyond traditional Republican pro-market orthodoxies, such as tax cuts and deregulation, and into direct involvement with production and capital. Yet this doctrine is less a coherent grand strategy than a set of ad hoc deals, sometimes pro-market and sometimes interventionist.

  Some Trump policies — tax cuts, deregulating, talk of budget-deficit reductions — retain a traditional Republican tone. On the other hand, this administration's protectionism and tariffs would have been inconceivable a decade ago. Republicans would also traditionally label the government's acquisition of a 10% stake in Intel as socialism if proposed by anyone other than Trump. And other policies have the feel of mafia tactics made possible by the exercise of leverage, like letting Nvidia and AMD sell their chips to China in exchange for a 15% cut back to the U.S. government.

  Vero notes that Trump's record so far "isn't part of any coherent vision." It's just what his gut tells him to do on any given day. Good luck to corporations trying to make informed long-term decisions in that environment.

Apparently the local statists are up to something:

"Live Free Or Die" my ass https://t.co/BYQ0cdbiRA

— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) September 17, 2025

Soon we will have no rights left at all! (But seriously, this is merely at the Legislative Service Request stage.)

Googling reveals a cute story from 2016: Animal rights protest scrapped after "greased pig" dust-up

… but maybe not so good for that guy in the pig costume.

Also of note:

• He seems seamy to me, but… George Will looks at recent antics from A seamlessly unserious president. (WaPo gifted link)

  Whirlpool, the U.S. appliance maker, still is not happy. Vladimir Putin, however, seems to be. The U.S. president is floundering on several fronts.

  In 2006, Whirlpool paid $1.7 billion to buy its largest competitor (Maytag) and said competition from foreign producers would prevent it from wielding unseemly market power. But U.S. consumers continued to like imported machines’ prices and qualities. So, early in his first term, President Donald Trump imposed tariffs on washing machines to protect Whirlpool from the competition it had said it welcomed. In August 2020, Trump visited a Whirlpool factory where, strangely, he bragged about imposing tariffs on Canadian aluminum, raising Whirlpool’s manufacturing costs.

  Now, the Wall Street Journal reports, Whirlpool says perfidious foreigners are fibbing, paying lower tariffs by claiming low values on appliance imports, valuations not reflected in prices charged to U.S. consumers. Presumably, the government will deftly untangle the mess its protectionism has produced.

  Google points out that Whirlpool stock is down nearly 25% year-to-date.

  GFW's bottom line:

  From Benton Harbor, Michigan (Whirlpool), to Moline, Illinois (John Deere), to the skies where NATO aircraft downed some but not all Russian drones, the world becomes more serious as the president becomes less so. There is an eerie disconnect between events and his flippant “Here we go!”

• And we still have over three years to go. Plenty of time to get crazier. Joe Lancaster observes that Trump's $15 billion lawsuit against 'The New York Times' is his craziest one yet.

  President Donald Trump is no stranger to filing defamation lawsuits against media companies, with varying degrees of merit. This week, he added to that list, filing a lawsuit more ridiculous and meritless than any of the others so far.

  "Today, I have the Great Honor of bringing a $15 Billion Dollar Defamation and Libel Lawsuit against The New York Times, one of the worst and most degenerate newspapers in the History of our Country," Trump wrote Tuesday on Truth Social. "The 'Times' has engaged in a decades long method of lying about your Favorite President (ME!), my family, business, the America First Movement, MAGA, and our Nation as a whole. I am PROUD to hold this once respected 'rag' responsible."

  The complaint nominally lists claims about Trump, made during the 2024 campaign in Times articles and the book Lucky Loser, that have caused him "reputational and economic harm"—for example, that he inherited and squandered his father's fortune, and that he only rehabilitated his image as a successful businessman by hosting the reality show The Apprentice.

  But rather than straightforwardly listing the facts of the case, the complaint spends dozens of pages histrionically detailing how great Trump is and how terrible The New York Times is. It reads less like a formal legal document than one of Trump's social media posts, calling the Times a "full-throated mouthpiece of the Democrat Party" engaging in "wrong and partisan criticism."

  Someone needs to tell Trump, using their best Jack Nicholson impression: "Sell crazy someplace else. We're all stocked up here."

• The science is settled. Barbara Oakley reports the latest news: Censorship Hurts Our Brains—Literally. (WSJ gifted link)

  The assassination of Charlie Kirk on the campus of Utah Valley University is a human tragedy first: Two young children lost their father; a wife lost her husband. But it is also a cultural tragedy, revealing corrosion at the heart of our civic life. Violence against speech is the final symptom of a disease that begins much earlier—in our failure to teach the value of hearing other voices early on, in schools.

  Our brains are built to form habits. The basal ganglia—deep learning circuits that automate whatever we repeat—don’t absorb only tennis serves or piano scales. They also wire in patterns of thought. If the only messages we hear are one-sided, the brain’s habit circuits carve them into grooves of thought that resist change.

  So do your basal ganglia a favor and consume some media outside your comfort zone every so often.

• And on the artificial photosynthesis watch… There's good news for people who want to turn down the global thermostat, as reported at Ars Technica: New pathway engineered into plants lets them suck up more CO₂.

  Lots of people are excited about the idea of using plants to help us draw down some of the excess carbon dioxide we've been pumping into the atmosphere. It would be nice to think that we could reforest our way out of the mess we're creating, but recent studies have indicated there's simply not enough productive land for this to work out.

  One alternative might be to get plants to take up carbon dioxide more efficiently. Unfortunately, the enzyme that incorporates carbon dioxide into photosynthesis, called RUBISCO, is remarkably inefficient. So, a team of researchers in Taiwan decided to try something new—literally. They put together a set of enzymes that added a new-to-nature biochemical cycle to plants that let it incorporate carbon far more efficiently. The resulting plants grew larger and incorporated more carbon.

  This is great news! But the report is unnecessarily negative. If smart people figure out the chemistry involved, why would we need actual plants embedded in "productive land" to carry out enhanced super-photosynthetic reactions?

Recently on the book blog:

Another book down on my "reread Crais" reading project. This is entry #17 in his Elvis Cole/Joe Pike series, and it's very good. I stand by my previous report from 2017, which you may read here.

Apparently, Tyler Robinson murdered Charlie Kirk because he "had enough of his hatred."

Um.

At the City Journal, Heather MacDonald takes a hard look at An Ideology Whose Logic Leads to Murder.

C. Bradley Thompson has a different take: Nihilism and the Crisis of the West.

And Jonathan Turley has another explanation: When Words No Longer Matter: Nancy Pelosi and Politics of Violence.

It's not exactly a new observation: If were not for double standards, the left would have no standards at all.

Finally, Jeff Maurer RSVPs: I Regret to Inform You That I Will Not Be Attending Your Dumb Little Civil War for Dorks.

Consider me also a non-participant, at least while MeTV is showing "Harry O" reruns.

Also of note:

• TACO… Wednesday? Our President is awesomely tough against Venezuelan speedboats, but otherwise, um, well: Michael Warren looks at Trump’s Empty Sanction Threats Against Russia.

  As Russia grows bolder with its acts of aggression, the American president continues to react like a detached observer with limited agency instead of the leader of a global superpower.

  The incursion of Russian military drones into Polish airspace during an assault on neighboring Ukraine last week has all the signs of another escalation of Vladimir Putin’s expansionist activity. Poland, with the assistance of multiple allied nations, shot down the drones and invoked Article 4 of the North Atlantic Treaty in order to prompt consultation with allies. The North Atlantic Council met to discuss the situation last week, and NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte has said the allies “will closely monitor the situation along our eastern flank, our air defences continually at the ready.”

  Michael details Trump's occasional bluster against Russia, but:

  However, the administration has imposed almost none of these threatened sanctions and tariffs, ostensibly to preserve the opportunity for negotiations. In the interim, there’s been no lasting cessation of hostilities between Russia and Ukraine, and after the fruitless Alaska meeting, no further negotiations. So even if Trump gets what he says he wants—more pressure on Russia from our European NATO allies—nothing in this fact pattern suggests Trump will execute his umpteenth sanctions threat.

  Again, inducing those allies to act may be part of the plan to leave the Russia-Ukraine conflict for the Europeans to sort out. But if that’s the case, why make the threats at all? Trump appears to want all of the glory of brokering a conclusion to the war without doing any of the work to place pressure on the aggressor. Good luck with that.

  Trump clearly enjoys suing the New York Times (and blowing up speedboats) much more than seriously confronting Russia.

• Raisin' Kaine. Jeff Jacoby rebuts a recent Veep nominee, who does not believe that Americans' rights are 'Endowed by their Creator'.

  AMONG THE most audacious philosophical assertions in Western history, one memorized by innumerable American schoolchildren, is the preamble to Thomas Jefferson's Declaration of Independence: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights..."

  Accustomed as we are to the poetry and music of Jefferson's words, too many Americans are apt to forget — or perhaps never to have learned in the first place — just how revolutionary their message was.

  Consider some remarks made by Senator Tim Kaine, a Virginia Democrat, during a hearing on Capitol Hill last week.

  On Thursday, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee took up the nomination of Riley Barnes, President Trump's choice for assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights, and labor. In his prepared testimony, Barnes quoted something Secretary of State Marco Rubio told State Department employees earlier this year: that America is founded on the powerful principle "that all men are created equal, because our rights come from God our Creator – not from our laws, not from our governments."

  When it was Kaine's turn to question Riley, he vigorously disputed the nominee's words.

  "It's a theocratic regime that bases its rule on Sharia law ... and they do it because they believe that they understand what natural rights are from their Creator. So the statement that our rights do not come from our laws or our governments is extremely troubling."

  Jeff details the philosophy behind the Declaration's assertion. If you're not a believer in explicitly divine origin, fine. I've got doubts there myself. But you can still think that our rights are natural; that is, deeply rooted in our nature as thinking, acting beings.

Hayek titled Chapter 10 of his classic The Road to Serfdom "Why the Worst Get on Top". And over the past few days, there's been a lot of examples, but I'll try to concentrate on….

• Our Nitwit AG. Charles C.W. Cooke reviews Pam Bondi's Ridiculous 24 Hours. (NR gifted link)

  It has not been a good 24 hours for Pam Bondi, the attorney general of the United States. Yesterday, on the Katie Miller Podcast, Bondi said:

  We will absolutely target you, go after you, if you are targeting anyone with hate speech.

  Actually, she won’t. She won’t “target” or “go after” anyone for “hate speech,” because, legally, there is no such thing as “hate speech” in the United States, and because, as a government employee, she is bound by the First Amendment. And if she tries it anyway? The Supreme Court will side against her, 9-0.

  Charlie has more examples of BondiBabble. Ignorance of the law is no excuse, I've heard. And it's especially inexcusable from the attorney general of the United States.

• The Free Press editors also pile on: Pam Bondi vs. the First Amendment.

  At last, something we can all agree on: Pam Bondi has no idea what she’s talking about.

  In an interview that aired on Monday, our attorney general said that the federal government would crack down on “hate speech” in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination last week.

  Hate speech is not illegal. It is not even a legal category in the U.S. Yes, we have laws against incitement, defamation, and libel, but nothing so broad and amorphous as “hate speech.” As Kirk himself once put it: “Hate speech does not exist legally in America. There’s ugly speech. There’s gross speech. There’s evil speech. And ALL of it is protected by the First Amendment. Keep America free.”

• At Patterico's Pontifications, Dana observes There Is No Charitable Read: Pam Bondi Is Just Very Wrong On This. But what can you expect when the guy who hired her…

  Reporter: What do you make of Bondi saying she is going after hate speech, a lot of allies say hate speech is free speech.
  
  Trump: Probably go after people like you, you treat me unfairly, you have hate in your heart. ABC paid me $16 million for a form of hate speech, your… pic.twitter.com/MCMDjhQoMh

  — Acyn (@Acyn) September 16, 2025

  Yup, wrong on free speech and free press. From someone who twice took an oath to "preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States."

  That's the whole Constitution, Donnie. Including the First Amendment.

• I'd also like to quote Ann Althouse's post in full. She quotes President Trump's Truth Social post :

  Today, I have the Great Honor of bringing a $15 Billion Dollar Defamation and Libel Lawsuit against The New York Times, one of the worst and most degenerate newspapers in the History of our Country, becoming a virtual “mouthpiece” for the Radical Left Democrat Party. I view it as the single largest illegal Campaign contribution, EVER. Their Endorsement of Kamala Harris was actually put dead center on the front page of The New York Times, something heretofore UNHEARD OF! The “Times” has engaged in a decades long method of lying about your Favorite President (ME!), my family, business, the America First Movement, MAGA, and our Nation as a whole. I am PROUD to hold this once respected “rag” responsible, as we are doing with the Fake News Networks such as our successful litigation against George Slopadopoulos/ABC/Disney, and 60 Minutes/CBS/Paramount, who knew that they were falsely “smearing” me through a highly sophisticated system of document and visual alteration, which was, in effect, a malicious form of defamation, and thus, settled for record amounts. They practiced this longterm INTENT and pattern of abuse, which is both unacceptable and illegal. The New York Times has been allowed to freely lie, smear, and defame me for far too long, and that stops, NOW! The suit is being brought in the Great State of Florida. Thank you for your attention to this matter. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!

  Her comments are brief but on target:

  If your idea of America greatness doesn't include freedom of speech, it's not worth much.

  And if you think the NYT is making an "illegal Campaign contribution" when it speaks about political candidates, you must want Citizens United overruled.

• In Pam's defense, she got things slightly less wrong here:

  Hate speech that crosses the line into threats of violence is NOT protected by the First Amendment. It’s a crime. For far too long, we’ve watched the radical left normalize threats, call for assassinations, and cheer on political violence. That era is over.
  
  Under 18 U.S.C. §…

  — Attorney General Pamela Bondi (@AGPamBondi) September 16, 2025

  Er, Pam? "True threats" are not protected by the First Amendment, period. It doesn't matter what motives the threateners have, "hate" or something else.

• Robby Soave is also piling on: Pam Bondi is really wrong about hate speech. And he makes the ultimate insult:

  Bondi sounds like Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, Kamala Harris' pick to be vice president, who made similar claims during the 2024 campaign—and that's a very bad thing. Both are appallingly wrong. The Supreme Court has repeatedly affirmed that so-called hate speech falls under First Amendment protection, most recently in the 2017 case Matal v. Tam, which was decided unanimously.

  After numerous commentators—including many fellow conservatives—called out Bondi, she clarified that she was referring to "hate speech that crosses the line into threats of violence." She's correct that true threats of violence against specific individuals or institutions lose First Amendment protection if they are specific enough, though general advocacy of violence is usually still protected. This kind of speech isn't called hate speech though; it's called incitement. Hate speech, on its own, is simply not a separate category of unprotected speech, from the standpoint of the Supreme Court.

  She's a nitwit.

• Jim Geraghty has some relevant observations: ‘Consequence Culture’ Comes for the Angry Left.

  As discussed on Friday’s Three Martini Lunch podcast, if somebody posts something abominable, stupid, or hateful on social media after a tragedy, his employer doesn’t necessarily need to fire that employee. But the employer really should have some sort of intervention, some sort of action that says to the employee, “Don’t do this. It’s not good for the company, it makes all of us look bad, and it’s really not good for you, either. You look and sound like a cruel maniac. We really don’t want a cruel maniac in our workplace. You really shouldn’t be taking pleasure in the suffering of others. If this is what brings joy and meaning into your life, you have serious emotional issues and should be seeing a mental health professional.”

  (It is more than fair to wonder if someone who reacts to shocking violence with glee or celebration will someday feel tempted to commit their own act of shocking violence.)

  The appropriate response could be one of those long uncomfortable meetings with HR, a temporary suspension, a chewing out by the boss — mutatis mutandis. An employer is justified in treating a well-liked, productive, otherwise good employee who had an uncharacteristic intemperate outburst differently than an employee with a history of troubling behavior or other work problems.

  And in many cases, the employer will be perfectly justified in cutting ties. If you’re a teacher, and you post something horrific, many parents will not want you teaching their children. (Another argument for school choice!) If you are a doctor or nurse, many patients will wonder if you give them the best care if you disagree with their politics.

Administrative note: One more day of light posting. Also, <voice imitation="professor_farnsworth">Good news, everyone!</voice>: Futurama is back, baby.

Just a bit of timeless wisdom from Bryan Caplan today, about The Everyday Miracle: Value Is Not Cost. (And, sorry Marxists, it ain't Labor either.)

I think Bryan's not particularly religious, but that doesn't mean he can't appreciate "a world so full of miracles".

Administrative note: Another day of light posting. Try to keep it together.

Every so often when visiting Wikipedia, I'll get a plea for money. I started resisting a few years back, and I recommend you do too. For a recent update, Ashley Rindsberg writes at Tablet about the Wiki Wars.

In even more recent news, Ashley Rindsberg writes at the Free Press: A Woman Was Stabbed to Death on a Train. Wikipedia Might Pretend It Never Happened. After briefly relating the recent horror in Charlotte, North Carolina:

Since then, the decision was to retain the article. But I haven't looked to see how much of it is in the "Republicans pounce" vein.

I use, and link to, Wikipedia articles that are, more or less, apolitical and fact-based. And I'll continue to do that. But the more a topic can veer into controversy, Wikipedia is a dumpster fire by design and inclination.

Past Salad rants on Wiki(P|M)edia here, here, and here.

To repeat my advice: Not. One. Thin. Dime.

Administrative note: Posting will be light for a few days. Back to full strength Salad soon.

Diligent Pun Salad readers may know that I've got kind of a bee in my bonnet about artificial photosynthesis. My overall summary ("A Crackpot Idea That Will Save, Or Destroy, Humanity") is here. And (of course) Wikipedia has a very deep dive into the topic here. I think it would be a great carbon-capturing solution for global warming. Unfortunately, the Wikipedia article claims, the catalysts used so far "cannot perform" efficiently with atmospheric concentrations of CO₂. Bummer!

But I was slightly encouraged by this report from Jeff Bluse in Reason: This Protein Powder Is Made Out of Air and Uses 600 Times Less Water Than Beef.

OK, don't freak out about "Frankenfoods" on me.

Not exactly what I was looking for: if the carbon that goes into the "slurry" goes into food, it will (eventually) return to the atmosphere, right? But maybe, given some biochemical tweaking, it doesn't need to. And that "20 times more efficient than photosynthesis" really grabbed my eye.

The slick website for Solar Foods is here; their constructed protein is called Solein®, and it has a website all its own here.

I just hope "Solar Foods" and "Solein" aren't just new ways to spell "Theranos" and "Edison".

Administrative note: Posting will be light for a few days. Back to full strength Salad soon.

Kevin D. Williamson explains: Why Wages Go Up. (That's the article's HTML title; actual headline: "Investment, Not Regulation, Raises Wages".)

That simple fact causes a lot of resentment and outrage, doesn't it?

I'd add in: wages, like all prices, can be set arbitrarily and unfairly. Eventually, the market may get around to correcting that. But not before a whole lot more resentment and outrage.

About six years ago, Charlie Kirk brought a Turning Point USA event to the University Near Here. I attended and blogged about it here. I'll excerpt the bit I wrote about Charlie:

And now I'm wondering where that earnest young lady is now, and how she's thinking about what she said, and what Charlie said.

But that's my personal reaction. I've browsed through dozens of others, and I'll just excerpt a couple. First, the WSJ editorialists on The Murder of Charlie Kirk. (WSJ gifted link)

Second, there are wise words from Jonathan Turley. “Prove me Wrong”: Charlie Kirk’s Final Challenge on Free Speech.

And that's all I have to say about that for now, but maybe next week…

In other news:

• I don't care for the President, or the precedent. Jacob Sullum seems worried, too: Trump calls his drone strike on an alleged drug boat 'self-defense.' It looks more like murder.

  Last week, President Donald Trump ordered a drone strike that sank a speedboat in the Caribbean Sea, killing all 11 people on board. Trump described the targets as members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua who were "at sea in International waters transporting illegal narcotics, heading to the United States." Although the men could have been intercepted and arrested, Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters, the president decided their summary execution was appropriate as a deterrent to drug trafficking.

  On Wednesday, The New York Times, citing unnamed "American officials familiar with the matter," reported that the boat "appeared to have turned around before the attack started because the people onboard had apparently spotted a military aircraft stalking it." That detail further complicates the already dubious legal and moral rationales for this unprecedented use of the U.S. military to kill criminal suspects.

  The attack "crossed a fundamental line the Department of Defense has been resolutely committed to upholding for many decades—namely, that (except in rare and extreme circumstances not present here) the military must not use lethal force against civilians, even if they are alleged, or even known, to be violating the law," Georgetown law professor Marty Lederman notes in a Just Security essay. Lederman adds that the September 2 drone strike "appears to have violated" the executive order prohibiting assassination and arguably qualifies as murder under federal law and the Uniform Code of Criminal Justice.

  Speaking of precedent, the ACLU was pretty upset 15 years ago, as the Obama Administration Claims Unchecked Authority To Kill Americans Outside Combat Zones

  But Obama had a Nobel Peace Prize already. What does this do to Trump's chances at one?

• An aspiration for us all, I'm sure. But Scott Sumner notes the darned oddness of how we think: Less wrong.

  When driving 5 mph over the 65mph speed limit on Orange County freeways, I notice many motorists passing me. This occurs so often I’ve concluded that most people are “speeders”, that is, in technical violation of the traffic laws. Not surprisingly, society has felt it necessary to create a separate term for people going far over the speed limit—say 125mph. Those are often labeled “reckless drivers”. You might say that speeding 5mph over the limit is less wrong that going 60mph over the limit. The financial penalty is certainly much lower.

  There are many areas, however, where society has decided to extend the same pejorative term over a wider set of infractions. This is usually done to impress upon the public that the relatively milder infraction is also really, really bad. […]

  Here are some terms that have been extended over an increasingly wide range of situations:

  Genocide: Most people believe that genocide in the sense of destroying a culture is less wrong than genocide in the sense of mass murder.

  Segregation: Most people believe that de facto segregation is less wrong than de jure segregation.

  Slave Labor: Most people believe that slave labor in the sense of exploitation of migrant workers is less wrong than chattel slavery.

  And some more examples at the link. Language, when deployed as a rhetorical weapon, is often an imperfect mirror to reality.

• As American as bitching about the New England Patriots. George Will points out that Moaning about foreign competition is a great American tradition. (WaPo gifted link)

  Having seen New England, Kentucky’s Henry Clay (1777-1852) was aghast. The senator’s rhetorical flair, however, failed him. He should have described what nowadays would be called the “carnage” caused by the “Britain shock”:

  “In passing along the highway, one frequently sees large and spacious buildings, with the glass broken out of the windows, the shutters hanging in ruinous disorder, without any appearance of activity, and enveloped in solitary gloom. Upon inquiring what they are, you are almost always informed that they were some cotton or other factory, which their proprietors could no longer keep in motion against the overwhelming pressure of foreign competition.”

  Somehow New England thrived despite the end of whaling, the southward migration of the textile industry, the departure of many shoemakers, and other supposed setbacks. Protectionists, however, persist in imagining recent calamities that they think validate government curtailments of economic freedom. Hence their lingering preoccupation with the “China shock,” the alleged damage done to American industries and communities by imports from China.

  Clay also opined that it was time for the Pats to fire Mike Vrabel.

• I am relatively sure that I've never uttered the word 'decommodify'. Jeff Maurer suggests a certain candidate should avoid it too: Mamdani Won’t Decommodify Housing, and Neither Will Anyone Else. It's a response to an old tweet:

  People often ask what socialists mean when we say we want to "decommodify" housing.
  
  Basically, we want to move away from a situation where most people access housing by purchasing it on the market & toward a situation where the state guarantees high-quality housing to all. (1/8)

  — Zohran Kwame Mamdani (@ZohranKMamdani) December 3, 2020

  I don’t know if this is still Mamdani’s view, but it wouldn’t surprise me if it is. Socialists often talk about “decommodifying” housing; AOC uses the word in headlines of press releases, it pops up all the time in Jacobin, and far left think tanks use it in their research. The basic idea is that housing being a “commodity” — a thing that can be bought and sold — is a problem, because everyone needs housing but not everyone can afford it. The solution, some argue, is to remove housing from market pressures by having the government control the housing market. That would ideally happen through large-scale public housing, though measures like rent control and eviction moratoriums will do until the Glorious Revolution arrives, which it should any day now despite being 177 years behind schedule.

  If I drink a bottle of absinthe, ride a roller coaster, and then immediately stand on my head, I can see what the “decommodify” people are getting at. Housing isn’t like most goods; if a person can’t afford, say, a $100,000 a bottle of wine salvaged from the wreck of a 15th century Spanish galleon, I’m comfortable saying “tough shit”. But that isn’t true with housing. Everyone needs a place to live, so it’s tempting to think that housing should be in a special category removed from the pressures of market forces.

  But when the absinthe wears off and blood starts returning to my brain, I know that you can never remove housing — or any other good — from the pressures of market forces. You can ignore market forces, which inevitably produces outcomes that not many people would call “just”. But the market forces are always there, no matter what, because market forces are not a feature of capitalism; they’re a feature of existence.

  I'm sure Jeff will have something to say about Charlie Kirk, but I won't blog about it for a few days.

In the text version, Jessica Riedl outlines the likely outcome: Here's what would happen if we seized all wealth from America's 800 billionaires.

Jessica counts "about 800" American billionaires, and if Uncle Stupid simply expropriated all their wealth at full market value, it would pay for about 9 months of federal expenditures.

I recently linked to the WSJ article on billionaires; they count 1,135 of them, with a total worth of $5.7 trillion. That's a little higher than Jessica's numbers, but note that (as I type) FY2025 federal expenditures are $5,975,153,096,082.

On a related "tax the rich" note, I note that the probable next Mayor of NYC is a lying weasel:

Zohran Mamdani says he would try to convince NYC's top earners to stay "in part by showing them that asking them to pay more in taxes would increase even their quality of life." pic.twitter.com/X29smKvV1u

— The Post Millennial (@TPostMillennial) September 7, 2025

Did you spot the lie? It's that word "asking". If Mamdani gets his way, the city won't be politely "asking" its "top earners" for more money; it will be demanding it, with guns.

Also of note:

• Shut up, they explained. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) has issued its 2026 College Free Speech Rankings.

  Free speech is under continuous threat at many of America's colleges, pushed aside in favor of politics, comfort, or simply a desire to avoid controversy. As a result, speech codes dictating what may or may not be said, "free speech zones" confining speech to tiny areas of campus, and administrative attempts to punish or repress campus free speech on a case-by-case basis have become all too common.

  So you can check out how your favorite institution of higher education is doing in that regard.

  I (of course) looked at the University Near Here. Although it got a good "green light" rating for its printed speech policies, its overall grade was a dismal D.

  FIRE is a tough grader. UNH is actually ranked #38 among the 257 schools surveyed. It's been up-and-down for them. Last year they were ranked #59, and the year before that, #3.

• And on the other side of the Salmon Falls River… The Federalist reports lawfare: RNC Asks DOJ To Investigate Maine's Trump-Hating Election Chief.

  The Republican National Committee is asking the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows, days after video showed the Trump-hating leftist acknowledging that there are surely “some” noncitizens on the state’s dirty voter rolls.

  According to documents exclusively obtained by The Federalist, RNC legal staff has sent a formal complaint to Attorney General Pam Bondi and Deputy Assistant Attorney General, Civil Rights Division, Michael Gates, alleging Bellows has violated the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA).

  The Democrat who attempted to boot then-Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump off Maine’s 2024 GOP primary ballot has effectively extended her middle finger to the RNC’s requests to make public “all records” pertaining to Maine’s voter list maintenance system, the complaint says. Bellows has apparently done the same to the DOJ when they requested voter data, telling the Trump administration to “jump into the Gulf of Maine.”

  Not that it matters, but President Trump's renaming of the Gulf of Mexico set off a round of suggestions for remaning the Gulf of Maine. Google shows:

  • Gulf of Wabanaki;
  • Gulf of Massachusetts;
  • Gulf of Lobster;
  • Gulf of Massholes.

  … and probably others I've missed.

  But those surviving the Gulf plunge will be electing a US Senator from Maine, either Susie Collins, or someone far worse, like this guy: Democratic Senate Candidate in Maine Claims 'Genocide' Perpetrated 'in Palestine'. That's Graham Platner previously mentioned here, raving Bernie-style about Theo Ligarchy and Geno Cide. From his Facebook ad:

  Nothing pisses me off more than getting a fundraising text from Democrats talking about how they're fighting fascism… Because it's such B.S. We're not idiots. Everyone knows most of them aren't doing jack right now to fight back.

  People are being kidnapped into unmarked vans by masked police. There is a genocide happening in Palestine. Literal billionaires have taken over our government. And all Democratic leadership can do is send us another fundraising text?

  Yes (eye roll) Graham is a "fighting fighter who fights".

  And, for poll-watchers, Nate Silver's site (but not Nate himself) wonders: Is Susan Collins toast?

  I probably don’t have to sell you on the stakes of Collins’s race. Why? Because it’ll be pretty much impossible for Democrats to take back the Senate next year — and difficult in 2028 — without defeating Collins. She’s the only Republican incumbent up for reelection in a state that Kamala Harris won in 2024, which automatically puts her in the “most vulnerable Republican seats” category — a lonely group that also includes North Carolina’s open seat and Senator Jon Husted’s seat in Ohio.

  There are a lot of declared Democrat candidates besides Platner. And Governor Janet Mills might run too, although she hasn't said.

• Some wise words from Kat Rosenfield. She writes at the Free Press on The Taboo That Killed Iryna Zarutska. After reviewing the horrific video, that one you've either already seen, or decided you won't:

  Zarutska’s murder has received a striking lack of coverage from most mainstream media outlets, and while on one hand this is hardly surprising—there are tens of thousands of homicides in this country every year, and only a handful of these ever become national news—it’s hard not to see the silence of the press on this matter as representative of a certain bias in what kinds of American crime stories are deemed worthy of public attention. It’s hard not to compare, for instance, the media response to the death of Iryna Zarutska last month with its coverage of the May 2023 encounter on the New York City subway between Daniel Penny and Jordan Neely—who, like Brown, was black, homeless, mentally ill, and prone to violent outbursts on public transit.

  Then, as now, there was a sense that it was in bad taste—if not outright racist—to acknowledge that men like Brown and Neely are a familiar presence in American urban public spaces, and that this presence is not a good thing. Then, as now, the progressive party line was that it’s “real corny” and “a mark of low moral character” to admit that you are discomfited by encountering people on public transit who behave in ways that telegraph the imminent possibility of violence, or confrontation, or the lower-grade-but-still-unpleasant spectacle of seeing someone evacuate his bowels onto the seat where, but for your instinctive choice to herd your family down the car, your 3-year-old toddler would still have been sitting.

  The problem with this taboo around certain uncomfortable truths about public disorder is that when you make discussing those truths a thing that is Simply Not Done by decent progressive people, you leave the field of discourse wide open to the kind of person who cares about neither progressive politics nor decency. That is where we are now.

  And there's more at the link.

We have a diversity of opinion on that issue today! Mr. Ramirez seems to be leaning toward "quack."

On the other hand, Kevin D. Williamson examines Kennedy's Junkie Thinking:

Jeff Maurer is, on the third hand, wistful. Things could have worked out better If Only There Had Been Signs That RFK Jr. Is Nuts.

If only … um, maybe the quacking duck, or a loon, had been early enough to get that worm… no, sorry, I can't make that work.

Also of note:

• We need 'em more than ever. At Cato, Chris Edwards looks at Billionaires. He is inspired by a graphic-heavy WSJ story: America Has 1,135 Billionaires. Here’s What We Know About Them. (WSJ gifted link)

  What Chris would like you to know up front:

  The Journal finds that two-thirds of US billionaires have self-made wealth, while just one-third inherited much, or all, of it. Ryan Bourne and I came to similar conclusions in our study on wealth. Generally, American billionaires build their wealth by succeeding in finance, technology, real estate, manufacturing, retail, and other competitive industries. Most of America’s wealthiest people are entrepreneurs who built their fortunes.

  More good news is that the share of America’s wealthiest people who are self-made has risen. Figure 1 shows that the self-made share of the Forbes 400 wealthiest Americans increased from 40 percent in 1982 to 67 percent by 2024. That increase reflects beneficial dynamism in our economy. There has also been a large turnover in the top 400 over time as new business innovations and fortunes supplant past ones. 

  Whether you're driven by mere curiosity or base envy, both worth reading.

  Fun fact: there's only one Rockefeller among the 1135 billionaires.

• You're not seriously claiming that ideological bias could be in play here, are you? Becket Adams wonders: Where’s the Critical Coverage of Left-Wing Conspiracy Theorists? And the latest example: "the Donald death-watch hysteria."

  A family member remarked last weekend that she heard President Trump had died. Neither my sister-in-law nor I had any idea what this was about, but we soon found our answer. The more deranged and self-harming corners of left-wing social media evidently decided that the president had died and that the public was being kept in the dark. The conspiracy theory went viral, escaping the echo chambers of X etc. and landing in the laps of nonpolitical types such as my family member.

  Trump is not dead, by the way.

  By any objective standard, this trending topic was completely batty. It’s ridiculous that anyone believed the president had quietly died and that “influencers” somehow knew about it, in spite of the White House’s supposed efforts to hide “the truth.” It’s crazier that these rantings crossed over into civil discourse.

  It’s also deeply annoying that the left’s obviously alarming behavior will once again escape the scrutiny that the media traditionally apply to similarly alarming delusions from the far right.

  As I type, deep thinkers at MSM strongholds are probably wondering how they can talk about QAnon some more.

• Come on, it's not that hard. But nevertheless, Sean Malone's report is titled The Hard Truth About the Abolition of Slavery.

  British satirist and cultural commentator Konstantin Kisin — author of An Immigrant’s Love Letter to the West (2022) — recently shared a debate clip from Doha, Qatar, in which he made a simple observation: Slavery has existed in every human society and across the whole of human history. 

  It’s a statement so uncontroversial it should have, at most, drawn some polite nods. Instead, it provoked gasps, giggles, boos, and tut-tuts from the hostile audience (see below).

  Understanding history means confronting uncomfortable truths, not rewriting them. pic.twitter.com/sLkVuPgxTZ

  — Konstantin Kisin (@KonstantinKisin) August 1, 2025

  

  This runs against all sorts of woke narratives, and Sean mentions a few.

  That includes a book I'm currently reading, Capitalism and its Critics by John Cassidy (Amazon link at your right). At 624 pages, it's a slog, but I'll put up a report on the book blog at some point. I'll be watching to see if Cassidy (eventually) recognizes that two capitalist nations, Britain and the US, took the lead in stomping out slavery worldwide.

• A mind is a terrible thing to change. But President Trump seems to have managed it, as Jeff Luse notes: Trump called Biden's $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill 'terrible.' Now he's pretending he signed it.

  When Democrats pushed the $1.2 trillion Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL) through Congress in 2021—with hardly any bipartisan support—Donald Trump warned Republicans not to vote for it. "Patriots will never forget!" said Trump, who described the bill as "a loser for the USA, a terrible deal, and makes the Republicans look weak, foolish, and dumb."

  Patriots may never forget, but it appears that Trump—who is now taking credit for projects funded by the bill—has.

  Under the Biden administration, many project sites sponsored by the BIL displayed signs crediting former President Joe Biden and his infrastructure law for funding the job. In recent months, these signs have been changed to predominantly credit Trump for making these projects happen, reports The New York Times.

  Which reminds me of this sign I snapped last year:

  

  I was pretty nasty about it back then, and I'd like to think I'd be equally nasty about Trump.

YouTube sez the video is "produced with Claude, ChatGPT, Suno AI, VEO, Photoshop's generative AI capabilities, Premiere Pro, and one human in the loop." Impressive! [The human is Greg Beato.]

And it comes to Pun Salad via Virginia Postrel's embedding it in her substack article: AI Slop and Human Play. She is, as usual, insightful about a topic that is surrounded by the Three Horsemen of Stagnation: Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt.

More fun and insight at the link, of course.

Also of note:

• Cinephiles, prepare to salivate. Instapundit links to an IndieWire story from Brian Welk: The Lost Ending of 'The Magnificent Ambersons' Is Being Remade with AI

  The lost 43 minutes of Orson Welles‘ “The Magnificent Ambersons” is the holy grail of cinema. The legend goes that after a bad test screening, RKO tacked on a happy ending and chopped the film from 131 minutes to 88. The missing minutes were melted for their silver nitrate, but cinephiles have spent years seeking a print that retained the the footage; TCM even sponsored a trip to Brazil in pursuit of a complete print.

  Like other efforts, Brazil didn’t pan out. Welles believed that the studio butchered a movie that would be seen as greater than his debut, “Citizen Kane,” but would he have used generative AI if it offered the possibility of recreating what he lost?

  This is much better than my imagined idea of a Casablanca sequel, with AI-resurrected Bogie, Bergman, Rains, …

• The real news is all the pouncing MAGAs. Glenn "Blogfather" Reynolds takes to his substack to chronicle another example of MSM malpractice: From Rabble-Rousing to Rabble Snoozing. After noting how the media pumped up the stories around Nicholas Sandmann and George Floyd, he notes the relative "rabble-snoozing" silence for…

  Iryna Zarutska, a Ukrainian refugee, was killed on a Charlotte commuter rail train by a crazed black man, Decarlos Brown, Jr. He sat down behind her, and then, for no obvious reason, pulled out a knife and began stabbing her in the throat. There was blood everywhere.

  And there’s video, which the Charlotte town officials tried and failed to keep secret. But the national press is, as noted above, not simply downplaying it, but ignoring it.

  They’re not even making excuses. They might say that violence on commuter trains isn’t news — though I don’t know if that’s true when you’re talking Charlotte instead of the Bronx. They might say that black on white violence isn’t news, though that’s kind of an iffy position. Everyone knows, and DOJ statistics demonstrate, that’s it’s much more common than white on black, but do they want to invoke that as a justification? Maybe they don’t want to encourage random violence by crazy people? But they cover that all the time.

  What we're beginning to see instead are stories like this from Axios: Grisly Charlotte stabbing of Iryna Zrutska fuels MAGA's crime message.

  Yes, as noted above: "MAGAs Pounce" is the real story.

• Off with their heads! Jonathan Turley notes the upswing in execution porn. The New Jacobins: Guillotines Return as Form of Political Expression. (Pardon his shameless book plug.)

  “We got the guillotine, you better run.”

  Those words could have easily been expressed at the turn of the nineteenth century as French Jacobins and other groups called for the heads of the wealthy and privileged classes.

  Indeed, for some of us, it was a bizarre sense of déjà vu. As the scene unfolded with this chant and a full-sized guillotine in Portland, I was putting final touches on my forthcoming book, Rage and the Republic: The Unfinished Story of the American Revolution. The book, published by Simon & Schuster, will be released in 2026 as part of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. It explores the American and French Revolutions and why one became the most stable democracy in the world and the other became the blood-soaked “Terror.”

  The appearance of guillotines is becoming commonplace in protests by the left. From protests against Trump to those against Israel, the symbol of the Terror is being rolled out as a warning to those with opposing views: “We got the guillotine, you better run.”

  As another data point, Jacobin magazine bills itself as "a leading voice of the American left."

• Clear skies ahead? Steven E. Koonin hails a positive output from the Trump Administration (to which he contributed), and it's hard to disagree: At Long Last, Clarity on Climate. (WSJ gifted link)

  A recent Energy Department report challenged the widespread belief that greenhouse-gas emissions pose a serious threat to the nation. It likely soothed Americans irked by forced energy transitions, but you would be wrong to assume it reassured many alarmed by hypothetical climate catastrophes.

  There is a disconnect between public perceptions of climate change and climate science—and between past government reports and the science itself. Energy Secretary Chris Wright understands this. It’s why he commissioned an independent assessment by a team of five senior scientists, including me, to provide clearer insights into what’s known and not about the changing climate.

  Collectively, our team brought to the task more than 200 years of research experience, almost all directly relevant to climate studies. The resulting peer-reviewed report is entirely our work, free from political influence—a departure from previous assessments. It draws from United Nations and U.S. climate reports, peer-reviewed research, and primary observations to focus on important aspects of climate science that have been misrepresented to nonexperts.

  Steven goes on to summarize some of the report's key findings. Worth a look!

Recently on the book blog:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Also of note:

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

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

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

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

  Oops.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  But it's really about…

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

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

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

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

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

I suggest we pare down the federal deficit by firing these folks, who clearly have too much free time on their hands. Jack Nicastro chronicles: Donald Trump's Antitrust Enforcers Continue Their Harassment Campaign Against Google.

It's my (relatively recent) experience that giving money to any GOP candidate via WinRed opens you up to unremitting text and email spam from random other candidates. (Disclaimer: Maybe there was a way to avoid this, and I just missed it.)

But, yes, Ferguson should proceed from facts, not some sloppy newspaper report.

Also of note:

• CSI: Washington DC. Ars Technica's Eric Berger notes that Ted Cruz reminds us why NASA’s rocket is called the “Senate Launch System”.

  All of the original US senators who created and sustained NASA's Space Launch System rocket over the last 15 years—Bill Nelson, Kay Bailey Hutchison, and Richard Shelby—have either retired or failed to win reelection. However, a new champion has emerged to continue the fight: Texas Republican Ted Cruz.

  He seems an unlikely hero for NASA's large rocket, which costs the federal government more than $2 billion to launch. Cruz, after all, is a self-described pro-capitalist, fiscal conservative. SpaceX and Blue Origin, which are building large and significantly lower-cost alternatives to the SLS rocket, have large operations in Texas. In previous legislative sessions, Cruz has often carried legislation important to the commercial space industry, such as the American Space Commerce Act and the Space Frontier Act.

  But now that he chairs the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee, Cruz has made a significant shift toward supporting the SLS rocket and its chief contractor, Boeing.

  You might say the Artemis Project is on…

      (•_•)
      ( •_•)>⌐■-■
      (⌐■_■)
      

  … Cruz Control.

  YEEEEEAAAAHHHHH.

  Also commenting acerbically on Congressional meddling in space policy is Robert Zimmerman, not to be confused with Bob Dylan: It’s all a game!

  The Senate hearing that was held yesterday, entitled “There’s a Bad Moon on the Rise: Why Congress and NASA Must Thwart China in the Space Race”, was clearly organized by Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) to promote a continuation of the SLS, Orion, and Lunar Gateway parts of NASA’s Artemis program. And he was able to do so because senators from both parties felt the same way. They all want to continue this pork, and don’t really care whether those expensive assets can really accomplish what they promise.

  Furthermore, the hearing was also structured to allow these politicians to loudly proclaim their desire to beat China back to the Moon, using this pork. They want the U.S. first, but they are almost all want to do this through a government-run program.

  As such, the choice of witnesses and the questions put to them were carefully orchestrated to push this narrative. To paraphrase: “We have to beat China to the Moon! And we have make sure a NASA program runs the effort! And above all, we mustn’t let Donald Trump cut any of NASA’s funding, anywhere!”

  I like manned space exploration just fine, but I'd like to see some justification for Artemis besides "Beating China".

• A forlorn hope. George Will nevertheless holds out the option: A fearful congressional GOP could still do something, if it dares. (WaPo gifted link)

  Tanned, rested and ready, Congress has returned from the August recess. It is unclear why.

  The Democrats’ House and Senate minorities have no power — the ability to achieve intended effects. The Republican majorities have no power because they are not permitted intention independent of this president’s preferences.

  He refuses to enforce the law that strictly required the TikTok app to be sold or banned, at the latest, by April. He believes Congress’s spending power is merely the power to suggest spending ceilings. Try to cite a long-standing tenet of conservatism he has not traduced. Federalism? To end voting by mail and impose voter identification requirements, he would truncate, by executive order, the states’ constitutionally enumerated power to conduct elections. He would commandeer state and local governments with an executive order banning no-cash bail. Free markets? See “state capitalism,” below.

  GFW has nice things to say about one guy's proposal:

  Half a century ago, Congress adopted budgeting rules it rarely obeys. They stipulate a timetable for presenting budget resolutions, and passing 12 appropriations bills by Sept. 30.

  Sen. James Lankford (R-Oklahoma) proposes the Prevent Government Shutdown Act. When government funding lapses because Congress ignores its rules, a renewable 14-day continuing resolution would fund critical operations, but:

  During the continuing resolution, members’ office funds cannot be used for travel other than a one-way trip back to Washington. No campaign funds can pay travel expenses. Neither the House nor the Senate can be adjourned for more than 23 hours, and mandatory midday quorum calls, seven days a week, will confirm members’ attendance.

  Might make watching C-SPAN2 great again.

• James Pethokoukis deems AI to be An Engine of Human Progress. And I think he's right.

  Why would we default to the negative notion that the latest step forward in the digital revolution is surely a terrible misstep? To quote Thomas Babington Macaulay, the 19^th-century English historian and Whig politician, “On what principle is it that with nothing but improvement behind us, we are to expect nothing but deterioration before us?” While past performance may not guarantee future success, it’s not a bad starting point for analysis.

  Yes, some argue that society is worse off thanks to computers and the internet—always “on call” for work, privacy eroded by algorithm tracking, and children glued to screens. These may be real downsides, but hardly proof that cyberprogress diminishes human experience. The massive upsides deserve more weight: Digital technologies have powered tremendous growth. America’s “digital economy” added $2.6 trillion to the GDP in 2022, with e-commerce sales alone expected to hit nearly $1.5 trillion in the U.S. and $6.4 trillion globally in 2025, supporting millions of jobs. App developers, data scientists, and cloud engineers are just a few of the occupations that did not exist a generation ago, while real wages for typical U.S. workers are 40 percent higher than before the internet. We’re not living in a dystopia for workers.

  It's the Dispatch, probably paywalled, but it's yet another excellent reason you should subscribe.

• It ain't me, babe. Jeff Maurer wonders, R-ratedly: Who is Trump's Beta Moron?

  Chimpanzee society is structured thusly: The alpha male has first dibs on all food and chimp booty.1 Beneath him are several beta males, who support the alpha and seek his favor. We often take “beta” to mean “supplicant” or “NPR host”, but that’s not quite accurate: Betas are high in the dominance hierarchy. But the alpha gives them their status, so they spend most of their time trying to curry his favor.

  I don’t imagine that the Trump administration is as sophisticated as chimp society, but there’s still a clear alpha/beta dynamic between Trump and his subordinates. That was obvious during Trump’s televised cabinet meeting, in which Trump’s underlings were so groveling that it made the Glenn Greenwald sex tape look like a profile in quiet dignity. To stay in Trump’s good graces, you need to be fawning, obedient, but most of all: You need to go in public and say shit so dumb that a normal person will experience physical pain when they hear it.

  This week, three Trump betas made moves to gain Most Favored Nincompoop status. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Energy Secretary Chris Wright, and Living Embodiment Of The Dangers Of Nepotism Robert F. Kennedy, Junior said things so dumb that a memorial should probably be built on the site of each statement, similar to monuments at Pearl Harbor and Ground Zero that allow people to reflect on the horrible things that occurred there. Judge for yourself which statement is the dumbest — I’ll give my two cents at the end, when we’ve traveled all the way down this river into the Heart Of Dumbass.

  So check that out.

  In a weak defense of Scott Bessent, his op-ed in the weekend WSJ is actually pretty good. No embarrassing ass-kissing of the Great Leader. I'll probably blog it tomorrow, but here is a preview.

Recently on the book blog:

If you're a Boomer like me, you may have noticed that "our" music often plays in the background of supermarkets, dentist offices, hotel atria, …

And you may notice people humming, sometimes singing, along to the tunes.

And you will often observe that many of those people were definitely not born when those songs came out.

So I wonder if there wasn't something timelessly special about that music. If people will be listening to it, humming/singing along, decades and centuries hence, long after Taylor Swift, Morgan Wallen, and Huntr/X have faded into obscurity.

Let me note that's not the theme of this book by British music journalist David Hepworth. He makes clear the primary reason "rock stars never retire" is economic: if they want to maintain their profligate lifestyles, it requires more income that can be generated via nest-egg investments.

(He also alleges that "oldies" radio stations never play songs made before 1980. Is that true? That would pretty much contradict the thesis I outlined above.)

I really enjoyed the book. Hepworth is insightful and witty, his knowledge of music, business, and personalities is wide and deep. His chapters are usually short, each concentrating on a music icon (e.g. Paul McCartney) or event (e.g. Live Aid) or combination thereof (e.g., Elton John dinking his song "Candle in the Wind" for Princess Diana's funeral). In his last-chapter musings, he wonders (as I have done) whether AI will eventually resurrect dead artists to not-exactly-live performances of their old songs. Or new AI-written songs that ape the style of their greatest hits.

As a bonus, Hepworth provides a 30-song playlist, "Songs of Innocence and Experience". And the first song in the list is Southside Johnny's version of "All the Way Home". One of my own favorites! A song written by Bruce Springsteen, but Hepworth claims (correctly) that Bruce's rendition "can't touch" Johnny's.

Ironically, Southside Johnny actually did retire recently.

An interesting tweet from Paul Graham:

People who think they no longer depend on trusting experts only survive because they're mistaken. Every time you get on a plane you trust experts implicitly about a million questions you're not even aware of.

— Paul Graham (@paulg) September 2, 2025

I don't exactly disagree. And it's more general than trusting experts; we tend to take the wonders of everyday modern life for granted. As wiser people than I have pointed out: for most of homo sapiens timespan, we lived lives that were nasty, brutish and short.

But using "expert" as a bullying thought-terminating cudgel has been on the upswing for a few decades, hasn't it? It can be amusing though: Bill Murray in Ghostbusters: "Back off. man; I'm a scientist."

For another example, David Harsanyi has his tongue embedded deeply in his cheek when he pens An Open Letter to My Esteemed Colleagues at the International Association of Genocide Scholars.

Also on the IAGS beat is Jeff Maurer, a little (OK, a lot) more R-rated than David: Constant Lying About Gaza Makes It Hard to Know What’s Happening in Gaza.

Assume a humanitarian tragedy — this is a pure hypothetical, I’ll talk about how much it applies to Gaza in a minute. Your goal is to alert people to the tragedy. Should you:

A) Relate the facts as you know them, holding yourself to the highest possible standards of honesty and objectivity so that your account is credible. Or…

B) Constantly lie, exaggerate, and misrepresent the situation until no thinking person believes anything you say.

When it comes to Gaza, many people have chosen “B”. Their latest Highly Visible, Credibility-Incinerating Fuckup involves the International Association of Genocide Scholars. If you’re thinking “I’ve never heard of the International Association of Genocide Scholars,” don’t worry — that’s the correct answer. Nobody had heard of the group before Monday, at which point their declaration that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza got reported in The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, PBS, NPR, Reuters, the AP, the BBC, The Guardian, ABC News, CBS News, NBC News, and countless other publications. But it seems that not one single person at any of those news organizations bothered to google “What in heavenly fuck is the International Association of Genocide Scholars?”

But someone at The Free Press DID google it, and now there’s a major scandal. Because it turns out that for the very reasonable price of $30, any dickweed can join the International Association of Genocide Scholars. And many-a-dickweed has now done exactly that; in the wake of the Free Press story, people signed up their dog, Cookie Monster, Emperor Palpatine, and Hitler — all of those figures were, for a brief time, International Genocide Scholars. And some of the non-joke scholars were kind of a joke, like activist Nidal Jboor, who recently called the “freedom fighters” of Gaza “heroes”. The Free Press says that 80 of the group’s 500 members are listed as being based in Iraq, which is odd, since nobody has ever called Baghdad “Boston on the Tigris”. The group seems to basically be a bunch of randos who gave themselves a distinguished-sounding name, which reminds me of this Clickhole headline:

So, go ahead and hop on that plane to Chicago, but you might want to make sure your skepticism filters are in place when venturing into the MSM swamp.

Also of note:

• As Tom Wolfe said long ago… "The "dark night of fascism is always descending in the United States and yet lands only in Europe." And assuming England is at least geographically near Europe, as Charles C.W. Cooke notes, Wolfe's observation remains true: England’s Arrest of Graham Linehan Was an Act of Calculated Tyranny.

  Here is the first line of a story in today’s Guardian, a British newspaper:

  The writer of TV’s Father Ted has been arrested at Heathrow over three social media posts on transgender issues.

  If you click the link and scroll down, you’ll see that there is more to the piece than that one sentence. But there doesn’t need to be. The whole tale is contained within those 19 words. If you read on, you will find no complicating factors or exculpatory details or sins of omission. The news is exactly as it appears: In England, yesterday afternoon, the police deliberately arrested a man who was flying in from the United States because he had expressed views on Twitter that the British government does not like. England — not North Korea, or Russia, or China. England — the land of John Stuart Mill and Thomas Paine and Monty Python. For tweets on transgender issues. Tweets — not threats of imminent violence, or a credible vow to blow up the airport upon arrival. Tweets — on issues about which people profoundly disagree.

  Also dismayed are Greg Lukianoff and Adam Goldstein: Yes, the UK really is that bad for free speech. Greg and Adam have the tweet (apparently) in question, from back in April:

  

  As should be obvious, this wouldn’t meet the standard for incitement within the U.S.. In the U.S., for something to be incitement, it must be “directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action.” Linehan is talking about a hypothetical future person in a conditional set of circumstances. It’s hard for something to be imminent when we don’t know where, when, or if it will ever occur.

  And we should be skeptical about whether this tweet is “likely to produce” the outcome it suggests. It’s hard to envision a gatekeeping woman in a female-only space saying, “I was going to ignore this person, but then I remembered what the co-creator of Black Books said, so I gave them the Van Damme special.”

  I gotta admit I'd never heard of Graham Linehan before.

Recently on the book blog:

This book, by Byrne Hobart and Tobias Huber, was one of the recent nominees for the Manhattan Institute's annual Hayek Book Prize. Its Amazon page has blurbs from Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen. So I did the University Near Here's Interlibrary Loan service, and—whoa, this is not really what I expected.

It's about bubbles. I had a superficial understanding (and my impression was that it was the standard understanding): bubbles are "irrational exuberance", where investments in a certain good/service skyrocket. Early investors, if they're adroit, get out near the peak and make out like (sometimes literal) bandits. Everyone else sees their positions become worthless, and need to start wearing those barrels held up by suspender straps. Bubbles richly deserve their bad reputation.

Hobart and Huber have a broader concept: bubbles aren't necessarily bad. Sometimes they are world-changers, innovative remedies for stagnation. And we desperately need to break out of our post-1970 stagnation. They note the changeover from a gold standard to fiat money as the prime mover of that, introducing the era of excessive risk aversion, artificially-set interest rates, endless bailouts, etc.

They consider a number of examples of the kind of thing they're talking about: the Manhattan Project; Apollo; Moore's Law; Corporate R&D; fracking; and, finally, Bitcoin. (As in: "Gee, if I'd bought Bitcoins when I first heard about it…") Notable: the co-dependence of various bits of a boom. For example, continuing improvement in computer/networking hardware makes possible to newly-practical applications. Those new applications then drive further hardware innovation. And…

The authors make some dubious historical analysis. Was the "main purpose" of the Manhattan Project (and the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki) to "subdue the Russians" (page 105)? I'm far from an expert, but what I've read suggests that's a fringe view; we mainly wanted to avoid a bloody invasion of Japan by American troops.

Do ICBMs deliver their payloads "halfway across the globe in fifteen minutes" (page 117)? No, it's more like 45. (That's pretty fast, of course, but it's also pretty easy to get this right.)

Do "doped" semiconductors have "a surplus or deficit of electrons" (page 141)? Not exactly; that would give them a net electric charge. The doping atoms introduced into the semiconductor crystal have a "surplus or deficit" of valence electrons, which allows electrons (or "holes") to meander through the lattice easily and controllably.

Things get kinda weird at the end, with explicit religious allegory. Page 236: "In sum, markets collectivize contagious mimetic desires and suppress their violent discharge. The market achieves a quasi-sacred status in our desacralized culture; it represents a transcendent absolute, irreducible and beyond human understanding and control." Uh, yeah, maybe.

And don't miss the explanation (page 257) how "Bitcoin's founding narrative manages to nod toward every major branch of religion."

I was enticed into checking out Leif Enger's 2001 novel, Peace Like a River, by an article in the September issue of National Review, "What It Means to Be a Man" by Christopher J. Scalia (probably paywalled). It's serious literary fiction, which I usually avoid, but I can't deny the author's skill and the book's power. The pages definitely get turned.

It opens in rural Minnesota of the early 1960s. The narrator is 11-year-old Reuben Land, a good, very observant, kid with a nasty case of asthma. The family is headed by father Jeremiah, a janitor at the local school. (Mom has taken a powder.) There's an older brother, Davy, and a younger sister, the very precocious Swede.

And (oh yeah) Jeremiah performs Jesus-style miracles now and again.

But conflict begins when Jeremiah rescues a young girl from getting raped by a couple of local goons. No miracles necessary, just his broom handle, used to pummel the miscreants. This (unfortunately) leads to the Land family becoming the target of retribution, which (in turn) leads to even more violence, and some serious legal trouble for Davy. Who goes on the lam off to the Badlands of North Dakota. And soon after, Jeremiah, Reuben, and Swede set off after him.

The novel is very dense, filled with (um) "colorful" characters, and (very) unexpected plot twists. And there's also some genuinely funny bits, amidst all the grimness of the main plot.

I've been a Google fanboy for a long time, thanks to their supplying me with insanely functional services for free. What's not to like?

Yes, I sometimes quibble about the search results. But … free!

So I was concerned about the recent efforts to use a 19th-century law as a hammer to "break up Google". And so I view this (from Jack Nicastro) as pretty good news: Trump and Biden tried to break up Google. Now, they’ve both failed.

Bottom line:

In his decision, Mehta rightly recognized that Google's domination of the search engine market was not solely due to unlawful, anticompetitive behavior but in large part to its "best-in-class search quality, consistent innovations, investment in human capital, strategic foresight, and brand recognition." Mehta's refusal to break up Google has been called "a green light for monopolization to every big business" by some antitrust crusaders. [Geoffrey Manne, president of the International Center for Law and Economics] has another take; he says Mehta's decision is "definitely a win for consumer welfare over the vision of antitrust espoused by the [Justice Department's] proposed remedies."

"Consumer welfare": that's you and I, reader.

Also of note:

• When the demand is "DO SOMETHING!", we shouldn't be surprised when "SOMETHING" turns out to be bad. We recently linked to Jonathan Turley's litany of ChatGPT horrors: "suicide, defamation, and even murder." Over at TechDirt, Mike Masnick notes OpenAI’s Answer To ChatGPT-Related Suicide Lawsuit: Spy On Users, Report To Cops.

  When you read about Adam Raine’s suicide and ChatGPT’s role in helping him plan his death, the immediate reaction is obvious and understandable: something must be done. OpenAI should be held responsible. This cannot happen again.

  Those instincts are human and reasonable. The horrifying details in the NY Times and the family’s lawsuit paint a picture of a company that failed to protect a vulnerable young man when its AI offered help with specific suicide methods and encouragement.

  But here’s what happens when those entirely reasonable demands for accountability get translated into corporate policy: OpenAI didn’t just improve their safety protocols—they announced plans to spy on user conversations and report them to law enforcement. It’s a perfect example of how demands for liability from AI companies can backfire spectacularly, creating exactly the kind of surveillance dystopia that plenty of people have long warned about.

  I think of Mike as the "usually sane" one at TechDirt.

• Betteridge's law of headlines doesn't apply. Walter Block asks: End the Fed?

  Some 500 economists work for the Federal Reserve System. This is probably more than the entire dismal science faculty at all eight Ivy League Universities, perhaps with Chicago and Berkeley thrown in for good measure. If the Fed were disbanded, they would all have to seek other work, perhaps leading to prosperity. Under the present institutional arrangements, they undermine the economy. On the other hand, this is an empirical issue. Presumably, many of them would obtain faculty positions, on the basis of which they would be inculcating their charges with the same voodoo economics with which they ruin the economy.

  Why? How so? That is because one of their present roles is to determine, among other things, the interest rate. Thus, this job of theirs is “beneath contempt.” From whence did this phrase spring? It comes to us courtesy of an economist who has been accurately characterized as a “national treasure.” Here is the quote from Thomas Sowell (from Sowell’s textbook, Basic Economics) to which he refers:

  “Another reason for public support for protectionism is that many economists do not bother to answer either the special interests or those who oppose free trade for ideological reasons. The arguments of both have essentially been refuted centuries ago and are now regarded by the economics profession as beneath contempt.”

  Well, so it is for price controls, and, as interest rates are a price, just like that of imports, so too is controlling them via the Fed’s central planning “beneath contempt.”

  Here's a bonus video where Thomas Sowell deems the Fed to be a "cancer":

• How about if I leave out the bacon? Robert Graboyes provides a mouth-watering metaphor: Tariffs are to Economic Growth What a Bacon-Cheeseburger Is to Weight Loss. He's been asked a lot of questions about them. And…

  The questions have generally fallen into two categories:

  • FROM TRUMP SUPPORTERS: Given the positive economic numbers of recent months, are you finally ready to admit that Trump’s tariffs have been a net positive for economic growth?

  • FROM TRUMP OPPONENTS: Can you please explain the logic of how Trump’s tariffs will be a net positive for economic growth?

  Here’s my answer to both groups: Tariffs are to economic growth what a bacon-cheeseburger is to weight loss. You can lose weight in spite of a mega-cheeseburger-a-day habit, but, realistically, you'll never lose weight because of that habit. Equivalently, economies can experience economic growth in spite of tariffs, but they never experience growth because of tariffs. Various happy factors are currently boosting the U.S. economy sufficiently to overcome the damage done by President Trump’s shambolic tariffs. And lest I be accused of Trump Derangement Syndrome, I’ll offer that one can certainly argue that today’s robust growth is to some extent attributable to non-protectionist aspects of the Trump Administration’s economic policies.

  Robert includes a Dave Chappelle video in his post, so stick around for that.

• That depends on what you think the mark is. Jeffrey A. Singer brings a libertarian view to National Review when he suggests Ban the Fear, Not the Freedom: Massachusetts Bill Misses the Mark on Nicotine.

  Massachusetts State Senator Jason Lewis appears to suffer from nicotinophobia, the irrational fear of nicotine. He wants to add nicotine, which public health experts consider “relatively harmless,” to the list of drugs against which our country has been waging war — with dismal success — since the 1970s.

  Lewis introduced a bill in the Massachusetts legislature that would ban the sale of nicotine products to anyone born after 2005, aiming to create a “nicotine-free generation.” Strangely, Senator Lewis’s bill does not prohibit people from consuming nicotine gum and nicotine patches — two forms of nicotine marketed exclusively as tobacco cessation products, which people often use indefinitely. It only bans individuals from consuming nicotine if they derive a personal benefit from it.

  The University System Near Here) has also taken the prohibitionist stand. But, I think like the Massachusetts proposal, arbitrarily allows "Products that have been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for tobacco cessation or other medical purposes".

  I'm not a nicotine user, never have been, but haven't we had enough futile nannyism?

An egregious copyright violation on my part, probably. You can get the book containing that cartoon and many more at Amazon.

Also of note:

• The difference between "radical left" and "fundamentally conservative"? It's the difference between the worldviews of Donald Trump and Jacob Sullum. Here's Jacob: The federal circuit's 'radical left' tariff decision is fundamentally conservative.

  After the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit ruled against his tariffs last week, President Donald Trump repeatedly condemned the decision, which he preposterously warned will ruin the country unless it is overturned by the Supreme Court. "It would be a total disaster for the Country," Trump wrote in a Truth Social post on Friday. "If allowed to stand, this Decision would literally destroy the United States of America." He reiterated that claim on Sunday: "Our Country would be completely destroyed, and our military power would be instantly obliterated," he said, adding that "we would become a Third World Nation, with no hope of GREATNESS again."

  Trump's prophecies of doom were not the only implausible aspect of his comments. He described the appeals court as "Highly Partisan," implying that its reasoning was driven by political affiliation, and said the majority was "a Radical Left group of judges," implying that the result was dictated by ideology rather than a careful consideration of the facts and the law. Trump reflexively criticizes judges who rule against him in language like this, to the point that he has stripped ideological labels of all meaning. In this case, his complaints are especially hard to take seriously.

  Not for the first time, probably not the last, here's a summary of Harry Frankfurt's theory of bullshit:

  Frankfurt determines that bullshit is speech intended to persuade without regard for truth. The liar cares about the truth and attempts to hide it; the bullshitter doesn't care whether what they say is true or false.

  If you look up "bullshitter" in the dictionary, it's illustrated with a picture of… oh, gosh, you can guess, can't you?

• We gotta find this guy, Theo Ligarchy, and lock him up! Noah Rothman detects False Bravery (NR gifted link) in a Senate candidate just across the river:

  On paper, Maine Democrat Graham Platner is the answer to all that ails his party.

  His gruff demeanor and everyman vestiary convey easy and authentic masculinity — a plus in a party that has struggled with that and is shedding male voters as a result. He’s an oyster farmer and a Marine Corps veteran, which could help court the working-class voters who have abandoned the Democrats in the Trump years. And with his pledge not to support Chuck Schumer’s Senate leadership and the liberty with which he criticizes Democrats as well as Republicans, he’s sufficiently anti-establishment in a populist age. It’s no wonder he’s already raised a boatload of cash in his bid to unseat Republican Senator Susan Collins in the fall.

  Beyond the aesthetic trappings that thrill the Democratic consultant class, however, Platner also clearly wants to be recognized for his bravery. He postures as a dauntless truth-teller, one of the few willing to name the forces of domestic subversion standing in the way of progress. “I am not afraid to name the enemy,” Platner said to a packed auditorium over the weekend while campaigning alongside self-described socialist Senator Bernie Sanders. “The enemy is the oligarchy.”

  What are the chances Graham and Bernie (et al) are copying their rhetoric from last century's "liquidation of the kulaks as a class?"

• Beware: level-headed calm sanity ahead. I mean, that's the impression I get from Marty Makary's (U.S. commissioner of food and drugs) WSJ op-ed: Why the FDA Doesn’t Support Covid Boosters Forever. (WSJ gifted link)

  The Food and Drug Administration last week approved Covid-19 vaccines for adults over 65 and for people 6 months and older who have one or more risk factors that put them at high risk of severe Covid. This regulatory framework brings the U.S. in line with peer nations—in France such vaccines are recommended for people over 80 and in the U.K, for people over 75. Although the world has moved on to a risk-tiered approach, some in the American medical establishment are maintaining their blind faith in a strategy of boosters for all in perpetuity. They should consider these six points:

  First, the FDA can approve products only if we believe there is substantial certainty that the benefits outweigh the risks. Currently, we don’t have that confidence for, say, a seventh Covid shot for healthy 12-year-old girl who recently recovered from Covid.

  You'll have to click over for the remaining five points. Marty's argument could be flawed, but his opponents seem to resort to hyperventilating fearmongering pretty quickly.

  Disclaimer: I'm (well) over 65, so I'll voluntarily get vaxed at some point soon.

• You would need a heart of stone not to laugh. TechDirt is degenerating pretty quickly into a reflexive Trump-bashing site, even for issues that seem not remotely tech-involved. But every so often, there's a ray of sunshine, and here's one from Karl Bode: Wired, Business Insider Editors Duped By Completely Bogus ‘AI’ Using ‘Journalist’ Who Made Up Towns, People That Don’t Exist.

  The rushed integration of half-cooked automation into the already broken U.S. journalism industry simply isn’t going very well. There have been just countless examples where affluent media owners rushed to embrace automation and LLMs (usually to cut corners and undermine labor) with disastrous impact, resulting in lots of plagiarism, completely false headlines, and a giant, completely avoidable mess.

  As U.S. news outlets fire staffers and editors, cut corners, and endlessly compromise integrity and standards, they’re also apparently being increasingly duped by people using AI to generate bogus stories and reporting. Like this freelancer for Business Insider and Wired, who apparently tricked editors at both publications into publishing several completely fabricated stories written mostly by LLMs.

  Karl bemoans journalists "being duped by AI", but … geez … it's been over twenty years since a "respected" news organization was completely duped by a Microsoft Word forgery.

• Good advice. And it's from Jeff Maurer, whose "Komedy Klass" suggests to the wannabe-funny: Let the Universe Do the Hard Work. Specifically, to write accessible funny stuff, work from the likely shared experience of your audience, and tweak it just a tad. His example is "Please Complete This Brief Survey About Your Recent Elevator Ride" from Rob Black:

  What was the main purpose of your elevator trip?

  ⚪ Business
  ⚪ Pleasure
  ⚪ Just taking a test drive
  ⚪ Get away from my spouse/roommate

  Which answer best describes your experience riding this and other elevators?

  ⚪ This was my first time riding any elevator.
  ⚪ I have ridden elevators in the past, but this was my first ride in this elevator.
  ⚪ I have ridden this elevator a few times before.
  ⚪ I live or work in the building and have a season subscription to the elevator.
  ⚪ I live in this elevator.

  Rob also parodies something that irritates me no end:

  How likely are you to recommend this elevator to a friend or coworker?

  ⚪ Very unlikely
  ⚪ Unlikely
  ⚪ Whatever
  ⚪ Likely
  ⚪ Very likely

  I always answer "very unlikely". Who recommends stuff to friends and coworkers? Let them find out on their own!

Recently on the book blog:

This is the third book in Mick Herron's "Slow Horses" series, detailing the continuing misadventures of the disgraced-but-still-technically-MI5 spies headquartered at Slough House. Headed up by the semi-dissolute (and also disgraced) Jackson Lamb. I got a chuckle out of this description:

It's said of Churchill that he'd catnap in an armchair with a teacup in his hand, and when he dropped off the noise of the cup hitting the floor would wake him. He claimed this was all the rest he needed. Jackson Lamb was much the same, the difference being he used a shot glass rather than a teacup, and didn't wake when it fell.

Season Three of the TV show was based on this book, and there were some differences, but they got pretty close. The main plot driver: one of the Slow Horses, probably the one with the fewest character flaws, Catherine, gets kidnapped off a London street. Why? Her kidnappers demand that River Cartwright (another S.H.) invade MI5 headquarters and filch a revealing file from their archives.

Things don't go well for River, but as it turns out, that file is not what the bad guys wanted anyway. Nothing is quite what it seems at first. Or even second.

I plan to keep reading the book series in order, even it it means that I'll read the books before they make shows out of them. As a consumer note, I recommend reading books one and two before this one.

I'd like to think that Trump really wants to blow it up, but (probably unfortunately) not. I like Mr. Ramirez's cartoon, though.

In text, Allysia Finley chortles, noting a quick U-turn in Blue Country: Suddenly the Democrats Want an Independent Fed. (WSJ gifted link)

It is, was, and always will be, utter folly to imagine the Fed as "independent" from politics and politicians.

CongressCritter Thomas Massie introduced legislation to abolish the Fed earlier this year. The bill's text is a mere four pages with large margins, so it's short on details. Like what happens to all these "Federal Reserve Notes" in my wallet?

Also of note:

• We're not doing the Genesis 1:28 thing any more. Kevin D. Williamson has thoughts about the media dynamics; it's based on Divide and Be Conquered.

  This is old stuff, I know, but it is worth revisiting: In the old days of three television networks (yeah, yeah, I’m a Generation Xer raised on hose water), towns with two or three cinemas and one or two bookshops, relatively expensive travel, limited venues for live performances, entertainment products (and most other products) had to be crafted to appeal to relatively large audiences—large both in absolute terms and large as a population share. You know the numbers: Nearly half of Americans watched the final episode of M*A*S*H*, many more people watched Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show on a given Tuesday night than all of the contemporary major-network late shows combined, etc.

  Mario Puzo’s The Godfather (1969) spent 67 weeks on the New York Times bestsellers list, while M. Scott Peck’s self-help book The Road Less Traveled (1978) spent an astounding 694 weeks on the list. And you still get some of that in the world of books—Diary of a Wimpy Kid was on the list for 600 weeks, and the Harry Potter books were so dominant that the Times created a new children’s list just to give everybody else a chance at the main one. I suspect that this has something to do with the physicality of books. (Ask Adam Bellow.) Digital books are a thing, but the enduring popularity of physical books means that the book market of today looks a lot more like the book market of 1980 than the newspaper (“paper”) market of today looks like the newspaper market of 1980.

  I suppose there is a neo-Marxist point hiding in there somewhere about how society is shaped by the means of production—and, in the case of film, television, and news media, by the means of distribution. Economically, it is in our time often much more effective to discover and then strip-mine an energetic and underserved niche than to create (if it is even possible) a product with the kind of mass appeal that Johnny Carson or network sitcoms had. The old model was based on addition. (“How do we add one-tenth of a point to our audience? Cute dogs? An obviously stereotypically gay character who is never acknowledged to be gay? Maybe Fonzie could do a motorcycle jump over a shark?”) But the new model is based on division. “Division” is a word that has a bad odor among some people, but the old model produced a lot of very bland pabulum while it was creating that common popular culture so often lamented—go back and watch some Ozzie and Harriet or My Three Sons or the Andy Griffith Show, and I think you will see that none of it is as good as you remembered. As it was on television, so it was at the movies: The 1970s may have been a golden age of American cinema, but there was a lot of uninteresting dreck on the silver screens on Saturday nights.

  KDW goes on to note that the fractured media landscape is funhouse-mirrored in our political landscape.

• Quibble: economic fallacies never die, so can't be "resurrected". But that aside, Scott Burns and Caleb Fuller take to the Hill to note that Trump has resurrected one of economics’ oldest fallacies.

  Four months after Liberation Day, President Trump is poised to declare victory in his trade war. In July, he trumpeted his latest agreement with the E.U. as “the biggest deal ever made.”

  With the reigniting of Trump’s trade war in early August, the last month has delivered a raft of trade headlines as foreign emissaries have scurried to the White House to make deals. Even if these makeshift agreements result in marked reduction from Trump’s Liberation Day tariffs, all indications point to the U.S. entering a far more protectionist era.

  Ever the showman, Trump loves touting his trade war’s “success” by pointing to reopened factories and re-shored jobs. Strategically speaking, it’s brilliant retail politics. Ribbon-cutting at revived plants, flanked by dozens of smiling workers, make for great publicity.

  Alas, Trump’s cunning marketing ploy has resurrected one of the oldest and most notorious myths in economics: Frédéric Bastiat’s “broken window fallacy.”

  You thought they were gonna talk about comparative advantage, didn't you?

• Douglas Rooks does a pretty good "Grumpy Old Man" routine. In my lousy local paper, he's down on the modern age and its newfangled gadgets. Specifically, he claims: AI is the latest false god making phony promises. His op-ed is full of dubious history and misty watercolor memories of the way we were, but I'll just comment on this snippet, which reviles the 1996 Telecommunications Act:

  Within a few years the damage was obvious, but widely ignored amid gush over the wonderful things tech barons would do for us. Until then, the U.S. Postal Service carried most private communications privately, and even fast-growing email services – this was before “social media” – could have been granted similar protections, but were not.

  Then G Mail [sic] was launched in 2004. As tech historian Nicholas Carr puts it, “When Google introduced its G Mail service, it announced, with an almost imperial air of entitlement, that it would scan the contents of all messages and use the resulting data for any purpose it wanted. Our new mailman would read all our mail.”

  For the record, Google stopped "reading all our mail" (which they used to target ads) back in 2017. (That practice used to bother some privacy activists, fine, but just about everyone else using Gmail was OK with it.)

  I will also briefly dig out my e-mail sysadmin beanie, and point out that if you need "true privacy" in your e-mail, you need to do end-to-end encryption. (You know, like Hillary Clinton didn't.) That's inconvenient, and easy to screw up. But it's there.

  [Disclaimer: I've been a Gmail user since 2014.]

• For those with rosy memories of the USPS. Some amusing reading from the Department of Justice: Former U.S. Postal Inspector Charged with Stealing Over $330,000 in Cash from Elderly Victims.

  BOSTON – A former U.S. Postal Inspector was arrested and charged today for allegedly stealing over $330,000 in cash from packages mailed by elderly victims and then laundering the cash and failing to report it to the Internal Revenue Service. The defendant allegedly used the stolen cash to pay for a pool patio and lighting, granite countertop for his outdoor bar, Caribbean cruise expenses and escorts. He also is alleged to have stolen cash from an evidence locker and then blamed a direct report for the missing cash.

  Scott Kelley, 51, of Pembroke, Mass. was charged in a 45-count indictment returned by a federal grand jury in Boston. Specifically, Kelley was indicted on five counts of wire fraud; five counts of mail fraud; five counts of mail theft by a postal officer; one count of theft of government money; 23 counts of money laundering; one count of structuring to evade reporting requirements; and five counts of filing false tax returns. Kelley is expected to make an initial appearance in federal court in Boston this afternoon.

  Kelley was a Postal Inspector at the Boston Division headquarters of the U.S. Postal Inspection Service, the law enforcement arm of the Postal Service. From 2015 until June 2022, he was the Team Leader of the Mail Fraud Unit, which, among other things, investigated lottery and other scams that targeted senior citizens and other vulnerable populations. In June 2022, Kelley was transferred to serve as the Team Leader of the Mail Theft Unit, a position he held until August 2023.

  For your prurient interest: the escorts were paid $15,400 "with whom he texted using a burner phone and whom he met during workdays." Workdays!

• That's not to say that AI is just swell. Jonathan Turley surveys AI and the New Frontier of Torts: ChatGPT Faces Claims of Suicide, Defamation, and Even Murder.

  “I know what you’re asking, and I won’t look away from it.”

  Those final words to a California teenager about to commit suicide were not from some manipulative friend in high school or sadistic voyeur on the Internet. Adam Raine, 16, was speaking to ChatGPT, an AI system that has replaced human contacts in fields ranging from academia to business to media.

  The exchange between Raine and the AI is part of the court record in a potentially groundbreaking case against OpenAI, the company that operates ChatGPT. It is only the latest lawsuit against the corporate giant run by billionaire Sam Altman.

  Jonathan has a personal story to tell as well:

  When the system is not allegedly fueling suicides, it seems to be spreading defamation. Previously, I was one of those defamed by ChatGPT when it reported that I was accused of sexually assaulting a law student on a field trip to Alaska as a Georgetown faculty member. It did not matter that I had never taught at Georgetown, never taken law students on field trips, and had never been accused of any sexual harassment or assault. ChatGPT hallucinated and reported the false story about me as fact.

  Reader if you notice anything scurrilous on the Intertubes about "Paul Sand", please assume it's this other guy. And don't believe it in any case.

Our Eye Candy du Jour certainly seems pessimistic, doesn't it? It's from Ted Gioia's "Honest Broker" substack, and his headline isn't Pollyannish either: Our Shared Reality Will Self-Destruct in the Next 12 Months.

Ted seems kind of down on skepticism, but an appropriate level of it really sounds like a good idea to me. As long as you don't slip into nihilism, solipsism, or one of those other dysfunctional isms.

Also of note:

• It's helpful to find trustworthy sources. One of those is Jessica Reidl, and she was doubly helpful yesterday, pointing out a source you should never trust about anything, anytime:

  Today alone, the White House has claimed:
  -$8 trillion in new tariff revenue.
  -$4 trillion in net deficit reduction.
  -$5 trillion in new business investment.
  -Hundreds of thousands of jobs from these investments.
  -Record low gas prices.
  
  Each claim is completely, 100%, made-up. https://t.co/NlwUbz5bIp

  — Jessica Riedl 🧀 🇺🇦 (@JessicaBRiedl) September 1, 2025

  Another source not in thrall to any party is Tyler Cowen, who cuts right to the credibility issue: Markets Say Relax. Trump Critics Say Panic. Who’s Right? Yes, the S&P500 index is doing quite well. Some reasons for concern:

  First, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, passed earlier this year, slashed corporate taxes. Before Trump’s first term, the corporate tax rate was 35 percent; in his first term Trump cut it to 21 percent, and this year he and the Republican Congress extended aspects of that first-term tax bill. Factors such as 100 percent bonus depreciation and expanded interest deductions give many companies the ability to lower their tax bill further, though not in a way that can be expressed readily by any single number.

  With these lower tax burdens, companies should be worth much more. At the same time, the American taxpayer now owes more than $37 trillion in debt. So someone has to pay higher taxes over time, to satisfy those obligations. That someone probably is you, so you might want to take that into account in your overall assessment. But you should feel good about the companies, and somewhat less good about yourself and your children, given the tax hikes in the offing, sooner or later. You are paying for some of those higher stock market values.

  Another relevant fact is that Trump is engaging in some amount of corporate statism. For instance, he announced that the federal government is taking a 10 percent share in Intel. The Intel share price rose on that news, as the market took this as a signal that the federal government is committed to the success of the company. Overall, it could be that the Trump policies help large, easily identifiable, incumbent companies with which Trump can make highly visible deals. That same favoritism may be less positive for the long-run economy and for companies that have not yet been created.

  Here's Tyler's bottom line:

  I return here to the same logic: If you think the market is being naive and foolish, why aren’t you placing your bets in the opposite direction? At the very least you could be wealthier under the forthcoming fascism you predict, and you might even be able to donate your winnings to antifascist causes.

  The wiser thing to do, however, is to pay some heed to these market prices and let go of some of your more exaggerated notions of how the world is likely to evolve.

  If I had to sum this all up in a single sentence, it would be this: Things are neither as good as President Trump and his supporters claim, nor are they as dire as his critics assert.

  And that is our economic wisdom for the day. Prices change all the time, so that judgment should be subject to ongoing revision. But don’t just consult your feelings; look at what the actual markets are telling us.

  Thanks to Fidelity, my investment strategy is to close my eyes, cross my fingers, and hope I won't be kicking myself next month for not liquidating everything, and buying gold to bury in the back yard.

• Katherine Mangu-Ward says "Relax". She's another person I trust (except for SF book reviews). And she advises: Don't Fear 'Frankenfood.' We're Already Living in the Lab-Grown Future.

  Things didn't go well the first time Rebecca Torbruegge took a turn at the go-kart track. She ended up with a burn on her leg that refused to heal and eventually—skip the next bit if you're squeamish—"started bubbling." Doctors in Sydney quickly determined she'd need a graft. But instead of following the usual procedure of scraping a patch from the 22-year-old's backside, slapping it over the wound, and hoping for the best, researchers wondered if she'd like to try something new: custom-printed skin, laid down layer by layer by a machine, built from her own cells.

  Asked about her decision to become the first human recipient of bedside 3D bioprinting in May, Torbruegge offered this delightfully Australian understatement to a local news station: "I thought about it for a bit, and then thought, 'Yeah, why not?'"

  Torbruegge might be garbage at go-karting, but she's right about how we should approach our lab-grown future. A new era of printed, cultured, grown, and engineered stuff is coming fast around the bend, and we should greet it with a shrug.

  KMW (and Rebecca Torbruegge) are a needed chaser of optimism after (say) Ted Gioia's shot of 80-proof doomsaying.

• Trust Deirdre McCloskey on matters economic. She provides a short column from Brazil on Marginalism.

  “Marginalism” is the essence of good economics.

  But until the 1870s, economists, even very great ones like the Blessed Adam Smith, and certainly his follower Karl Marx, didn’t understand it. Marx, and his followers such as Mariana Mazzucato, who advises Lula on innovation, never did get it.

  Marginalism says that in making a decision today about the future we should look forward. Pretty obvious, eh? Think about deciding today how many engineers to work on artificial intelligence in your innovative factory in São Paulo. Obviously, the correct way to decide is to imagine what would be the contribution of the next engineer you hire, in addition to what you already do and know. It’s called her “marginal product.” Then compare it with her wage. If the marginal product is greater than her wage, hire her. Then do the same for the next one, and the next. Stop when another would be stupid. That way you hire in the correct, efficient amount—by looking forward “marginally,” step by step.

  It’s common sense, right? It’s like your decision in consuming beer. Does the next beer give you more “marginal utility” than its cost you in money? If so, buy. Keep doing it until you’re full. . . or are so drunk you can’t find your wallet.

  Speaking of beer, I saw that my local Hannaford has switched over from Sam Adams' Summer Ale to Oktoberfest. Sigh.