Pun Salad

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.