Pun Salad

Which I will celebrate by recycling a video from 2023: Halloween on Capitol Hill.

Some of the references don't hold up, but (sadly) many do. And I still hate Halloween. I note my bitter commentary from 2023: "I swear that next year, I'm going to turn off all the lights, and read my Kindle in the dark."

But I didn't. And won't this year either. 2026? Stay tuned.

Also of note:

• How can Republicans claim to oppose socialism, when… As Jeff Luse points out, Republican socialism goes nuclear: Trump bets $80 billion on government-backed energy.

  Since President Donald Trump's return to the Oval Office, the federal government has trademarked its own version of Republican socialism by nationalizing steel production and taking equity stakes in chip manufacturers and mining projects. Now, it's getting involved in the nuclear power sector.

  On Tuesday, Westinghouse Electric Company announced that it had entered "into a strategic partnership" with the federal government, Brookfield Asset Management, and uranium fuel supplier Cameco Corporation to build "at least" $80 billion worth of Westinghouse's AP1000 nuclear reactors across the country. The agreement was made "in accordance" with Trump's May executive order, which called for the deployment of 10 new large nuclear reactors in the U.S. by 2030, according to Westinghouse.

  The prospects for the GOP returning to a decent respect for free-market capitalism in the next few years seem slim as well.

• The outlook for fiscal sanity doesn't look good either. Veronique de Rugy outlines The Forces Fueling America's 45-Year Debt Addiction. There are, she says, three. (And I'm really resisting including a quote from Monty Python and the Holy Grail here…)

  First, and the main cause of the mess we are in, is that the entitlement state became enormous yet untouchable. The Social Security reforms of 1983 are a rare example of bipartisan structural reform of a major entitlement program in U.S. history. Since then, despite economic and societal changes, the program has never been reformed. Never mind that it faces insolvency and the potential for automatic benefit cuts of more than 20% in 2033. The same is true of our other major debt driver: Medicare. And Medicaid is growing far beyond its original intent.

  Democrats, occasionally helped by Republicans, have worked to expand welfare programs meant for lower-income people to those in higher and higher income brackets. The most recent and extreme example is the COVID-19-era expansion of the Obamacare tax credit to wealthier taxpayers, a significant share of whom enjoy early retirement. The fight over its continuation is what the government shutdown is about.

  Second, Republicans discovered that promising tax cuts without offsetting spending cuts was politically painless so long as one claims that they "pay for themselves." There is one rare and recent exception: this year's "One Big Beautiful Bill," which included $1.5 trillion in spending reductions over 10 years to offset some of the tax cuts. It's not enough, but it's something. Meanwhile, the Democrats love to claim that debt wouldn't be a problem if the rich paid their "fair share." They already do pay an enormous amount in taxes. But the numbers still don't add up.

  Finally, the Federal Reserve, starting under then-Chairman Alan Greenspan in 1987, learned how to anesthetize the political pain of budget deficits by keeping interest rates artificially low and monetizing debt. Politicians concluded that they could borrow endlessly without suffering political consequences. The problem is that this only works insofar as investors don't worry that they will be paid back with inflated dollars.

  That illusion has vanished. Interest costs have surged from $372 billion annually just a few years ago to nearly $1 trillion today, surpassing what we spend on defense or Medicaid. Within a decade, yearly interest payments are projected to nearly double, reaching $1.8 trillion. Even without new programs, the built-in deficit would keep rising and outpace economic growth. And Washington keeps adding more deficit spending.

  There's plenty of blame to go around, but I think Vero coulda and shoulda, but didn't, aim some scorn at the voters, (i.e., us), who keep returning the same bozos to Congress, year after year.

• Just to cheer you up, a wee bit of sanity. Roger Pielke Jr. reports on it: Bill Gates Shakes Up the Climate Discussion.

  Yesterday, in his periodic letter to the world, Bill Gates shared three truths about climate change — and shook up the climate discussion. While the longer term implications of his letter are uncertain, early signs are that Gates has injected a welcome dose of climate realism into the discussion.

  Here are his three truths (and I encourage everyone to read his whole letter):

  1. Climate change is a serious problem, but it will not be the end of civilization;

  2. Temperature is not the best way to measure our progress on climate;

  3. Health and prosperity are the best defense against climate change.

  For most [readers of Roger's substack], these truths will be well understood, even common sense, and will seem neither shocking nor scandalous.

  But for some steeped in climate advocacy grounded in visions of “existential threat” or a looming apocalypse, Gates’ truths have rocked their world.

  Roger lists some amusing responses to Gates' truths/heresy.

  My only gripe, but it's a biggy,

  Climate change is a very important problem. It needs to be solved, along with other problems like malaria and malnutrition.

  [Bolded in the original.]

  I think the "problem/solution" mindset is wrongheaded. It needs to be countered, hard, with the Sowellian wisdom:

  There are no solutions. There are only trade-offs.

• Meanwhile, on the other bank of the Salmon Falls River… Jeff Maurer observes: You'd Think the John Fetterman Experience Might Sour Progressives on Graham Platner.

  He’s not your grandma’s progressive Democrat: He’s a muscly, tatted-up dude with rap rock facial hair and a working class vibe. He’s edgy, he’s in your face — you’ve heard the expression “let’s get busy” — well, this is a dog Senate candidate who gets “bizz-ayyy!”…consistently and thoroughly. He’s been endorsed by Bernie Sanders and progressive pundits are absolutely smitten by him despite some details in his biography that one might call “colorful”.

  Am I describing Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman or Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner? I’m describing both (and also Poochie The Dog from The Simpsons a bit). Platner is running to be the Democratic nominee for Senate in Maine, and progressives love him because:

  1) He says the word “billionaire” a lot — there are 110 words on Platner’s campaign home page and four of them are “billionaire” (which is one more appearance than the word “the”).

  2) He fits a wine-track progressive’s image of a working class guy: He’s a veteran, an oyster farmer, and he uses uncouth language of the sort one might overhear while eavesdropping on the help. The fact that he has a history of saying awful shit on Reddit and also has…ahem…a wee bit of Nazi iconography tattooed on his chest almost makes him more authentic. Because the poors do that sort of thing, do they not?

  I confess that I'd like someone better than Susie Collins as a Maine senator. That doesn't seem to be in the cards.

Specifically, I dream of the day she will start being honest in the last few months of her Senate term. But, alas, that day was not yesterday:

Would it kill you to admit that you simply want to shift these "price hikes" to taxpayers?

— Paul Sand (@punsalad) October 29, 2025

At Cato, Michael F. Cannon is similarly impatient, waiting for honesty to break out in the group once identified by Mark Twain as a "distinctly native American criminal class": What Will It Take for Congress to Admit Obamacare Has Failed?

Ah, yes. Those were the good old days, when Obamacare was pushed onto the country, aided by what (even) Politifact called the "Lie of the Year: 'If you like your health care plan, you can keep it'".

And (back then) Senator Jeanne was one of the votes passing Obamacare, despite promising "Emil from Salem" in a town hall: "a requirement that I have for supporting a bill is that if you have health coverage that you like you should be able to keep that." Which inspired me to write her a futile but irate letter back in 2009. Still holds up.

Also of note:

• Et tu, WSJ? Today's print WSJ has a potboiler of a story, headlined: Your Best Homicide Defense: ‘I Feared For My Life, Officer'. (WSJ gifted link)

  The online version's headline is even more provocative: "Six Words Every Killer Should Know: ‘I Feared for My Life, Officer’". And the grabbing lead paragraphs:

  It’s easier than ever to kill someone in America and get away with it.

  In 30 states, it often requires only a claim you killed while protecting yourself or others.

  While Americans have long been free to use deadly force to defend themselves at home, so-called stand-your-ground laws in those 30 states extend legal protections to public places and make it difficult for prosecutors to file homicide charges against anyone who says they killed in self-defense.

  The number of legally sanctioned homicides by civilians in the 30 stand-your-ground states has risen substantially in recent years, The Wall Street Journal found in an analysis of data from the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

  Justifiable homicides by civilians increased 59% from 2019 through 2024 in a large sample of cities and counties in those states, the Journal found, compared with a 16% rise in total homicides for the same locales.

  Good news for murderers, right?

  Well, hold on, partner. Ed Morrissey at Hot Air pokes some holes in the WSJ's story: Six Words? WSJ's Deeply Deceptive Analysis Of 'Stand Your Ground' And Self-Defense.

  The percentages look damning, until one recalls the famous adage popularized by Mark Twain: There are lies, damned lies, and statistics. If those cases increased by 59% over five years, what's the scale involved? How many cases does a 59% increase entail?

  Not many, as it turns out. The entire data set consists of 200 cases or fewer in each of the five years, which isn't exactly a crime spree when it comes to homicides. Take a close look at the Y-axis used by the WSJ to chart this data:

  

  The Y-axis tops out at 200 cases -- not 200 per 100,000, just 200 in each year. They note that overall homicides increased 16% in these same jurisdictions over the same period. What does that look like? Curiously, the WSJ doesn't bother to chart that, so we will have to rely on other data on overall homicides.

  Ed does an impressive job pulling together those stats from other sources, painting a more complete picture that deflates the tendentious WSJ story pretty convincingly. It's the right way to do things.

  (Thanks to the interesting publishing schedule between online and print, Ed actually posted his rebuttal, and I read it, before I got the article in today's paper. Welcome to the future.)

• Phoniness seems to be today's blog theme. George Will weighs in on The choreographed fakery of American politics: East Wing edition. (WaPo gifted link)

  Trump’s ballroom has already served the public good. It has triggered some people who need triggering. They have been blasé about his presidential grandiosity when he spends money for purposes Congress has explicitly refused to authorize (the Big Beautiful Wall), or when he insults local police forces by sending troops to pacify U.S. cities, or when he vaporizes perhaps criminal Venezuelans. Now, however, because of the ballroom, and the East Wing, the blasé are suddenly aghast.

  During the fierce late-1970s opposition to conferring on Panama control of the canal there, a U.S. senator said: My state consists of millions of people of diverse political, social, religious, racial, and ethnic beliefs and backgrounds, but they are united by fervent devotion to a canal that they have not thought about since learning of it in high school. Today there is a similar eruption of devotion to the East Wing, the destruction of which is being called a “desecration.” Well. To desecrate is to disrespect a sacred place. Something is sacred when it is venerated because it is associated with worship and religious purposes. Republics do not have sacerdotal offices.

  For decades, the constitutional, political, social (and, lately, aesthetic) damages done by the ever-more-swollen modern presidency have become increasingly evident. Congress, in its decades-long siesta, has empowered presidents to unilaterally tax (see: tariffs) and wage war (hello, Venezuela) as they please. Congress is now composed almost entirely of two cohorts: those who do nothing but genuflect to their party’s president, and those who do nothing but caterwaul about him.

  Caterwauling and genuflecting will be the latest song and dance moves in the new ballroom.

• Wait, let's hear him out. I hope David Harsanyi has good reasons for this: Why I’m going to stop using the term ‘antisemitism’. (archive.today link)

  The term “antisemitism” is anesthetized, imprecise, and historically obtuse jargon that is meant to obscure evil beliefs. Regrettably, I’ve been using the term to describe hatred toward Jews for decades.

  For one thing, the term was coined by Jew-baiting German journalist Wilhelm Marr in 1879 to give the age-old bigotry a modern pseudoscientific framing. Outbursts of violence and discrimination against Jews were nothing new in Europe, but Marr, an atheist and socialist, wanted a systematic philosophy to sustain the antipathy.

  Well, that's bad. David advocates using the blunt and more accurate "Jew-hatred" instead. I'll try that.

• This is why his middle name is "Indispensible".

  Dude. Dude! Anybody with a tattoo like that, I'm not getting onto any of his trains. https://t.co/Y8dxduuFS4

  — Jim Geraghty (@jimgeraghty) October 28, 2025

  Took me a few seconds to get it. I'm sure you'll do better.

  Apparently, Platner is all misty-eyed about the days when there was passenger train service to Hancock, Maine. Population 2,466 at the 2020 census.

  If you watch the video: he's also apparently a big fan of metric.

At the Dispatch, Peter Boettke outlines What Hayek Understood About Markets. (archive.today link)

Or, as our Eye Candy du Jour says… well, you can read it for yourself. Yes, it is recycled from a few years ago. Nobody sued me then, I'm hoping my luck continues.

[Relevant UPDATE from Jack Nicastro at Reason: This Virginia Company Says Donald Trump's Tariffs Make 'Rational Business Planning Impossible'. As foretold by Salma Friedrich!]

Also of note:

• Gee, let's hope not. Damon Root wonders at Reason: Trump hopes to bully SCOTUS into upholding his tariffs. Will it work?

  President Barack Obama was roundly criticized by conservatives in 2012 after he used the presidential bully pulpit to pressure the U.S. Supreme Court into upholding the federal health care law known as Obamacare. It was April 2, several days after the Court heard oral arguments in National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius, and Obama took the opportunity to publicly lecture the justices against taking the "unprecedented extraordinary step" of overturning his signature policy. Two months later, the Supreme Court narrowly upheld Obamacare.

  Next week, the signature policy of another president will be having its day in court when the justices hear oral arguments in Learning Resources v. Trump and Trump v. V.O.S. Selections, the consolidated cases challenging the legality of President Donald Trump's unilateral trade war. And much like Obama before him, Trump is now using the presidential bully pulpit in a blatant effort to influence the Supreme Court's decision-making process. Will it work?

  A note on usage: back when Teddy Roosevelt referred to the presidency as a "bully pulpit", "bully" was understood as an adjective meaning "superb" or "wonderful".

  Meanings change, I guess. As Damon implies, more recent presidents seem to think "bully pulpit" means "I can bully people from this pulpit."

  [UPDATE: That's the Wikipedia link for "Bully pulpit" above. On a whim, I looked at the corresponding entry at Elon's shiny new Grokipedia. It's very different! And I think it's much better, but you'll want to check that for yourself.]

• Speaking of bullies… The College Fix notes a local tyrant trying to make her fiefdom a First Amendment-free zone: Arizona university bans ‘DEI IS RACISM’ poster wording.

  An Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University administrator has told conservative students that a poster they seek to hang to advertise their upcoming guest speaker cannot include the words “DEI is racism.”

  “The following statements must be removed: DEI IS RACISM,” states an email from Molly Webb, the Student Engagement Advisor at the Arizona-based institution. The school also has a campus in Florida.

  A copy of the email was published by Young America’s Foundation, as its Young Americans For Freedom Embry-Riddle chapter is slated to host Lt. Col. Allen West in early November.

  That email is kind of a hoot. After demanding that the student group (Young Americans for Freedom) remove any hint of what Lt. Col. West will be talking about from, she signs off with

  All the best,
  
  Molly Webb (she/her)

  I don't really think Molly's offering her best.

• Proportional representation, for real. Two recent articles say we should try it. First up, Jack Santucci at City Journal says Republicans Should Consider Electoral Reform.

  Earlier this month, Vice President J. D. Vance posted on X, “New England’s six states vote about 40 percent Republican and have literally zero Republican representatives in Congress.”

  Vance is not the first to identify this problem. But a simple solution exists: elect the House of Representatives by proportional representation (PR). In a PR system, a party with 40 percent of the votes gets 40 percent of seats.

  Conservatives have long been skeptical of PR, and of election reform more generally. But it’s a smart way to ensure that Republicans in blue states get their voices heard.

  What would PR look like in New England? One approach is to combine the six states’ 21 districts into one district, with 21 seats. Then ask voters which party they like more: Democrats, Republicans, or any other party that might be on the ballot. Finally, allocate seats to parties in proportion to their vote shares. Since 40 percent of 21 is 8.4, Republicans would get about eight seats.

  And over at the UnPopulist, Andy Craig takes a small break from that site's otherwise non-stop Trump-bashing and offers: Want to End the Gerrymandering Wars? Embrace Proportional Representation. After noting the flaws in the current system and how "reform" efforts fall short:

  Proportional representation addresses these flaws at the root. Instead of slicing states into single-member districts, proportional representation uses larger, multi-member districts where seats are distributed according to vote share. If Democrats win 45% of the vote in Texas, they earn about 45% of Texas’s seats. If Republicans win a third of the vote in California, they secure about a third of California’s delegation.

  The effect is immediate: the shape of the map no longer determines the outcome. Gerrymandering becomes pointless, because the competition is no longer just to get a plurality of the vote within a district. Instead, vote swings everywhere have the ability to flip seats in equal measure.

  Both articles advocate voting for parties, not people. I'm not a fan.

  I left the same comment at both sites:

  I'd propose a slightly different proportional representation scheme: if a candidate for the House gets over some small share of the vote (like 1%), he or she is entitled to go to DC and cast that fractional vote in Congress. (Maybe also getting a corresponding fractional salary.)

  For example, in my district (NH01) last year, Democrat Chris Pappas beat Republican Russell Prescott 54.00% to 45.93%. So if this scheme was in place, Pappas would get to cast 0.5400 of a vote in DC, Prescott 0.4593 of a vote.

  So: voters get "represented" by the person they voted for. This would expand the House population, but that's not necessarily a bad thing.

  This would almost certainly change voting incentives, I think for the better. Notably, it would encourage voter participation in even lopsided Red or Blue districts. Third-party candidates and Independents would get a better shot. And I think it would make gerrymandering a thing of the past.

  Yes, it's my very own crackpot scheme, first described here back in 2017.

Scott Lincicome provides us with our lead item for the second day in a row. Want to try for three, Scott?

"Ranked: States With the Highest Homelessness Rates" https://t.co/GkDgZMflu1 pic.twitter.com/SPI73eE3G3

— Scott Lincicome (@scottlincicome) October 27, 2025

My natural instinct, and probably yours, is to find my own state in the rankings. Result: New Hampshire is right in the middle, not great, not awful.

And I was going to say: at least we're doing better than those other New England states.

And we are. Except for Connecticut, which is way further down in the list. Good for them, but what's their deal?

I asked the Twitterverse in a comment to Scott's post; I've received a couple of responses, but they look like guesses to me. ("They put them on a bus and send them to NY!" Yeah, well, maybe.) Some rudimentary Googling doesn't show any obvious clues. The Cato Institute's Freedom in the 50 States (from 2023) doesn't reveal any smoking guns either.

I'm currently reading Ezra Klein's and Derek Thompson's much-hyped book Abundance, in which they blame (with some justification) blue-state housing policies for homelessness. But again, that doesn't explain Connecticut, as blue as states can be.

So, it's a mystery to me.

Also of note:

• Still waiting for that Conservatarian utopia. Charles C.W. Cooke writes in the 70th anniversary issue of National Review on The Great Derangement. (archive.today link)

  And Charlie's attitude toward Trump is very, very close to mine:

  There is no doubt that Trump was — is — an aberration. He is disruptive, in ways both salutary and disgraceful. He is incoherent, in ways that attract the disaffected but can wear on the nerves of the politically systematic. He is capricious, in ways that sit uneasily within our Newtonian Constitution and sometimes challenge it outright. Famously, this magazine did not want him to become the Republican nominee in 2016, and, long after he prevailed, it has continued to find fault with many of his actions. At discrete points in time, Trump has made us glad, sad, optimistic, angry, ashamed, frustrated, and amused. At no point, however, has he made us deranged. That, mercifully, has been a fate reserved for others.

  And boy have they leaned into it! Properly understood, one’s feelings about a political candidate ought to become less binary once his election has been confirmed. Prior to the count, the key question for commentators is “Yes or no?” Afterwards, it is “What now?” Like it or not, Donald Trump won the 2024 election, and that he is now the president of the United States is not a preference or an opinion or a willingness of the heart; it is a stone-cold fact of the universe. Under our system of government, Trump took office on January 20, 2025, and, unless he dies or resigns or is impeached, he will remain there until January 20, 2029. As opinion writers, our role is neither to sanctify him nor to chase him to the gates of hell but to push him toward decisions that comport with our conception of virtue. If he does things we like, we ought to praise him. If he does things we dislike, we ought to criticize him. Throughout this work, we ought to strive to stay consistent with our stated convictions and to say only what we believe to be true.

  My report on Charlie's great 2015 book The Conservatarian Manifesto is here. Still holds up.

• What's the matter with Florida? Couldn't the Republicans find someone better to send to Congress than Anna Paulina Luna, deemed by Michael Warren at the Dispatch to be Putin’s Useful Influencer? (archive.today link)

  Call her a useful idiot for the modern age. Rep. Anna Paulina Luna’s Instagram story on Sunday documenting her meeting this weekend with a Vladimir Putin ally had all the familiar hallmarks of social-media-influencer content.

  There was the cloying cover of a popular song—in this case, the Beatles’ “Here Comes the Sun”—playing throughout the video. There were the various flattering shots of Luna wearing a stylish white suit and black heels. And in a voiceover, the Florida Republican affected the disinterested, monotonous tone (with just a hint of vocal fry) that accompanies so many of those “A Day in My Life” posts.

  “Today, I had an incredible opportunity to meet with Kiril Dmitriev, the special envoy to the president of Russia,” Luna said as the camera captured her and Dmitriev walking through corridors at a hotel in Miami Beach, sitting at a conference table, and speaking together to Russian state-owned media during their meeting.

  Luna, Warren points out, has "consistently opposed American aid to Ukraine in its war with Russia."

  Coincidentally, Luna has also been at odds with Jumpin' Jay Nordlinger, confronting him with that most dishonest of queries: ‘You Don’t Want Peace?’. Which was in response to Jay's tweeted response to her Kremlin kowtow:

  I wrote a book called "Peace, They Say" (a history of the Nobel Peace Prize). When people say "peace," try to ascertain what they mean. If you want to know the nature of the Russian government -- ask the Ukrainians, among others. https://t.co/yZnJtmimyg

  — Jay Nordlinger (@jaynordlinger) October 27, 2025

  Jay, at his substack:

  There are many things to say in response to Luna’s tweet. For years, people on the nationalist-populist right have said to me, “Don’t you know the Cold War’s over?’ I often reply, “Does Putin?”

  The old KGB colonel is continuing business as usual.

  But on this question of peace: I do indeed want peace. But “whose peace? Poland’s? Bulgaria’s? The peace of the grave?”

  That was Margaret Thatcher speaking, during her premiership—when such nations as Poland and Bulgaria were under the boot of the Kremlin.

  Nobody's going to confuse CongressCritter Luna with Maggie Thatcher.

• As if we needed further proof. At Reason, Joe Lancaster asserts: Trump's tariff tantrum against Canada proves he shouldn't have that power.

  President Donald Trump imposed tariffs on nearly every other country earlier this year, seemingly based on little more than his own misunderstanding of how trade works. Officials in the U.S. and Canada recently engaged in negotiations aimed at potentially reducing those rates—until Trump, in a fit of pique, terminated the talks and raised rates further.

  As the Supreme Court is set to hear arguments about whether Trump's actions are constitutional, this scenario perfectly illustrates why a president should not have this power.

  The government of Ontario started airing a commercial last week that featured audio from a 1987 radio address by then-President Ronald Reagan. "High tariffs inevitably lead to retaliation by foreign countries and the triggering of fierce trade wars," Reagan said, presciently. "Then the worst happens: Markets shrink and collapse; businesses and industries shut down; and millions of people lose their jobs."

  Trump took such offense at the ad that he cut off talks with Canada. Ontario agreed to pull the ad from the air this week, but when it aired again Friday night during Game 1 of the World Series, Trump said he would raise tariffs on Canada even further.

  We wouldn't have this sort of thing happening if we'd elected Nikki Haley last year.

• And now a palate cleanser… Substacker Christian Schneider presents multiple words of wisdom at Poor Christian's Almanack. Just a snip from the middle that made me chuckle:

  27. If you consider your time in terms of its cash value, the time it takes to extract all the jelly from an almost empty jar is equivalent to the cost of buying a whole new jar.

  My observations:

  1. I knew that.
  2. God help me, I'm going to keep doing it anyway.

Just a suggestion: as long as Congress doesn't seem to want to do much except make sure Your Federal Government isn't giving anyone food stamps, they could implement a more reliable funding source for Air Traffic Control. Scott Lincicome points out an interesting fact:

Your periodic reminder that the United States is one of the only countries in the world that still funds its Air Traffic Control system via general revenues (instead of user fees), thus subjecting it to partisan political nonsense - and potentially worse - every few years. pic.twitter.com/tk4iP0uI7I

— Scott Lincicome (@scottlincicome) October 26, 2025

You hate to see other countries get out of front of the US when it comes to privatization. I wish (for example) that there was more progress on Privatizing the United States Postal Service.

Also of note:

• I didn't even know I was in it. At the Dispatch, Leah Libresco Sargeant has some bad news, I guess: You Can’t Opt Out of Sam Altman’s Erotica. Apparently this was big news:

  We made ChatGPT pretty restrictive to make sure we were being careful with mental health issues. We realize this made it less useful/enjoyable to many users who had no mental health problems, but given the seriousness of the issue we wanted to get this right.
  
  Now that we have…

  — Sam Altman (@sama) October 14, 2025

  Skipping down to the naughty bit, Sam says:

  In December, as we roll out age-gating more fully and as part of our “treat adult users like adults” principle, we will allow even more, like erotica for verified adults.

  Leah's commentary:

  This decision seems to be part of Altman’s larger plan to double down on a chatbot that sounds like an endlessly encouraging companion, rather than a clipped, professional assistant. His choice to allow sexting will have obvious negative consequences for his users—and, just like pornography, it will have serious negative effects on those who never even engage the chatbot directly.

  Altman’s announcement framed the issue as though only the users, not he, are moral actors here. “If you want your ChatGPT to respond in a very human-like way… or act like a friend, ChatGPT should do it (but only if you want it, not because we are usage-maxxing),” he said. He argues chatbots should be responsive to users’ desires, including those for sexual role play, but he disclaims his own role in providing a sexbot.

  It is odd to treat adult spaces as though the marker of maturity is simply abundant pornography. In response to Altman’s post, one user asked: “Why do age-gates always have to lead to erotica? Like, I just want to be able to be treated like an adult and not a toddler, that doesn’t mean I want perv-mode activated.” Altman ducked the question, replying simply, “You won’t get it unless you ask for it.”

  I'm pretty libertarian on this, but Leah points to the riskiness of AI normalizing sex practices that are deviant and often dangerous.

• "Don't send my white boy to Harvard, the dying mother said." Well, that's only a slightly modified varson of the classic lyric. Substituting "Jewish" for "white" is also acceptably good advice.

  Jonathan Turley notes the latest signs of a hostile academic environment down in Cambridge: Harvard’s Unblinking Hypocrisy: Dean Retained After Denouncing ‘Evil’ Police, ‘Whiteness’.

  Gregory Davis is really sorry for the “disruption.” For a Harvard resident dean, one would think that he was referencing a malfunctioning fire alarm, not years of racist, hateful messages.

  It is akin to Virginia Democratic gubernatorial candidate Abigail Spanberger (D) referring to the “poor choice” of words of her endorsed candidate for attorney general, Jay Jones, when he said that he wanted to kill his political opponents and their children.

  These figures reflect the cynical calculation that apologies are just background music in an age of rage — heard but not really registered.

  Jonathan provides examples, including:

  Not long before his appointment [as resident house dean], Davis suggested that “Whiteness is a self-destructive ideology that annihilates everyone around it. By design.” As a professor of critical race theory at UCLA and “gender identity law” at Southwestern Law School, Davis has helped fuel race-based anger against conservatives and police. He has written that everyone “should ask your cop friends to quit since they’re racist and evil.” In another post, he explained how “Rioting and looting are parts of democracy just like voting and marching.”

  Davis encouraged students who are “Black or otherwise of color, queer, neurodivergent (ADHD), first-generation, a public high school graduate, from a low-income background, or from urban areas” to reach out to him for advice.

  Like many radicals exposed for hateful comments, Davis deleted his postings and offered a perfunctory apology. It is the type of “check-the-box” apology that is now so common. Liberals like Zohran Mamdani spent years denouncing the law enforcement and calling for defunding of police, only to offer the same shrugged apologies when he ran for mayor. None of their radical supporters believes the apology any more than their critics. The key is that it was made, and the media can now move on without causing real damage.

  Business as usual, in other words.

• The AAUP regrets to inform you that you're a fascist. The National Review editorialists headline the most unsurprising news of the month: University Professors' Union Backs Ideological Conformity in Higher Education.

  And yet, AAUP’s magazine published an article titled “Seven Theses Against Viewpoint Diversity” by Lisa Siraganian, a professor at Johns Hopkins University and the president of her university’s AAUP chapter. It became the subject of some heated criticism, and a Chronicle reporter wrote a Twitter/X thread that fairly described some flaws in the article, particularly by pointing out that the broader public accurately perceives academia as leaning left. In an attempt to defend the article, the AAUP account responded with the following: “Fascism generally doesn’t do great under peer review, but perhaps it’s the intellectual values of academia, which emphasizes critical inquiry & challenges traditional norms, that may be inherently less appealing to those with a more conservative worldview.”

  It is difficult to identify what is most wrong in the AAUP’s post. By arguing that academia skews left because “fascism” doesn’t survive intellectual scrutiny, the AAUP suggests that anyone who isn’t sufficiently progressive is a Nazi who needs to be ejected from higher education. Could there be a more stark confirmation of the public’s perception of universities as ideological hubs unaware of their own internal hegemony? Still, the AAUP applauds itself, its affiliates, and university culture as practicing “critical inquiry.”

  As I think I mentioned in the past, the AAUP tends to attract faculty who aspire to union thuggery.

Recently on the book blog:

The author, Andrew Heaton, was previously best known to me as a writer/performer in numerous amusing videos at Reason. (Geeky example here, many more here.) So I was expecting a risible explication of why (specifically) politics is so rife with pointless contentiousness and other dysfunction.

I got that risibility. For example, Kindle's search feature reports 17 occurrences of "minotaur", 8 of "Gorn". Each drawing a smile from this reader.

But I also got a lot of surprising insights, for example:

Meanwhile, alt-right trolls perform a variant of virtue signaling called “unvirtue signaling,” where they flout the social norms and manners of pearl-clutching liberals. Saying terms that are offensive to or forbidden by the politically correct displays both contempt for the enemy tribe as well as bravery in combating it. Trolls one-up each other on message boards by seeing who will say the most offensive thing, thereby ratcheting up perceived boldness and status among their peers.

Reader, this book came out last year. I was not expecting Andrew to nail so precisely the headlines from only a couple weeks ago: "‘I love Hitler’: Leaked messages expose Young Republicans’ racist chat". (I commented here.)

I was (generally) not expecting Andrew's relative seriousness in exploring his topic. Yes, there's some jokiness, but it turns out that his research and insight is both wide and deep. Tribalism is rooted in humanity's long-ago cultural evolution in the Horn of Africa. And while it might be "dumb", it's not all bad: it gives us a sense of belonging, allows us to work for common goals, and (eventually) got us to modernity.

Although not without a lot of violence and strife. Still…

I should mention that the book is (um) lightly edited; I caught a number of typos and misspellings (e.g., "the story of Cain and Able" on page 27.) Also some of his wry observations fall flat; I attribute this to his stand-up comic sideline. What works on the stage might not work on the page. And vice versa.

But to repeat: the book is very readable and insightful.

Our Eye Candy du Jour: links to relatively recent books from Thomas Sowell which I've read since the blog opened in 2005. Click, if you wish, to go to my corresponding report.

And (trust me on this) I read a bunch more pre-2005. I've been a Sowell fan ever since reading his Knowledge and Decisions back in the 1980s. I have slightly over 16 inches of shelf space holding his older books.

The Hoover Institution recently held an event entitled "The Sowell Legacy: Ideas, Impact, And Intellectual Freedom" and some participants posted about it. First up: David R. Henderson, with Two Personal Characteristics of Thomas Sowell.

David also remarks on Sowell's talent for "pithy quotes". Here are his favorites:

Another participant, Wilfred Reilly, provided his thoughts at National Review: What Thomas Sowell Sees — and Sees Through. (archive.today link)

Excerpt, reporting on one of Wilfred's favorite Sowell works (and mine), The Vision of the Anointed:

I'll close with Don Boudreaux's Quotation of the Day..., taken from The Thomas Sowell Reader. It's particularly appropriate for these days, when Democrats have shut down the government over their demands for (approximately) $1.5 trillion in additional spending.

Guess who that ghost is gonna visit when the bill comes due?

Also of note:

• Unfortunately, Trump's not shutting down his government. Reason editor Katherine Mangu-Ward on what's ruining what could have been a libertarian vacay: The president has too many 'emergency' powers.

  The emergency is now the default. Most of the knobs and levers a modern president uses to bully companies, police speech, or move bodies around aren't new laws—they're standby powers that switch on with a magic word: emergency. Congress littered the U.S. Code with these shortcuts; the Brennan Center for Justice has cataloged 137 statutory powers that spring to life the moment a president declares one. (Many never fully turn off.) As of mid-2025, there were roughly 50 simultaneous national emergencies still in force; they are renewed annually, spanning everything from sanctions to tariffs. That architecture lets the White House reach for trade controls, financial blockades, and tech blacklists without returning to Congress. If you like your powers separated, this is the opposite.

  I still want Congress to do its job on spending: legislate clearly, spend less, and claw back delegations it never should've handed over to the executive branch. The remedy isn't complicated, but it is hard to execute. Congress must take back its rightful powers, narrow emergency authorities, sunset delegations, and relearn the civic discipline of saying "no" to our own would-be redeemers, even when they're on our own team. Kudos to a few senators, Rand Paul (R–Ky.) among them, who in early October tried to take back the power to declare war after the Trump administration made several unauthorized strikes on alleged Venezuelan drug smugglers. (Alas, the vote failed 48 to 51.)

  If you're curious, it was (mostly) a party-line vote.

• Or see their Nazi tats. Nate Silver has some deep thoughts: Everybody loves “outsider” candidates. Until they find their Reddit posts.

  I don’t personally take offense easily, and I’m not sure that I have any interest in weighing in on precisely which of Platner’s past actions you ought to find unforgivably offensive given his self-description as a “retired shitposter”. Indeed, I find myself with some contradictory impulses.

  On the one hand, I don’t think we should expect people to self-police their social media postings in case they might one day run for political office.

  On the other hand, this isn’t really a matter of cancellation: nobody is saying that, for instance, Platner’s oyster farm should be taken away from him. Rather, Democrats have to choose exactly one from among the roughly 1 million Mainers who are at least 30 years old and U.S. citizens, and therefore eligible to run against Susan Collins in a race that could hardly be more vital to their chances of retaking the U.S. Senate in 2026. (Or more likely, 2028.)

  I’m also not sure what to make of Platner’s redemption arc. He’s been more “authentic”-seeming than your typical politician in interviews, but “authenticity” itself can be performative. Was there a little too much tryhard when Platner told The Advocate that his views of gay people began to change when he “attended showtunes night at JR’s,” a Washington, D.C. gay bar? That itself is a little stereotypical; I’m a gay guy who would be happy enough never to hear another showtune again. Or when Platner wrote in a Reddit AMA that he’d “stand right in the fucking way of anyone who’s going to try to come after the freedoms of the LGBTQIA+ community”, is that authentic, or is that overcompensating?

  Nate cheers for the D team, so take that into account.

• Not getting their rightful share of abuse. Kevin D. Williamson says Congress Owns This Debt Crisis. (archive.today link)

  KDW aims his fire at…

  This week’s meeting of the Committee to Horse-Whip Mike Johnson will now come to order.

  New business?

  I can think of 50 good reasons to flog Mike Johnson, the dishonorable little lickspittle who supposedly serves as speaker of the House but whose main function in this earthly life is being a knee-walking sycophant and self-abasing enabler of Donald Trump—and No. 1 on the list of reasons to have him horse-whipped right now is this: $1 trillion in new debt in just two months, a headlong rush into national financial ruination not matched since the orgy of COVID spending.

  We talk about presidents and deficits all the time, and that is a mistake—although it is worth keeping in mind that Trump, as president, was perfectly contented with that recklessly incontinent COVID spending he and other Republicans signed off on. You’ll recall that Trump insisted that his own name appear on the relief checks, as though he were doing Americans a personal favor by bribing them with their own money. Trump has never lifted one stumpy little pinkie finger to rein in the deficit.

  But the real fiscal malefactor is Congress—and that means, for the moment, Mike Johnson. Our Constitution gives the House of Representatives the sole power of introducing taxing and spending bills, and Johnson leads a Republican majority in that chamber—at least, that is the job he is supposed to be doing when he is not polishing Trump’s wingtips with his tongue.

  Reader, can I get an Eeeyu!

Our Eye Candy du Jour over there on your right is a rerun from way back in 2010, featuring Mark Krikorian's suggested answer to that year's convoluted census question about race. Pun Salad has long despised Uncle Stupid's long and sordid history of classifying citizens by their genetics. I did a longish post on the topic in this blog's Year One, 2005. Still holds up twenty years later, if I do say so myself.

Things haven't improved much since then, but my attention was drawn to John Early's op-ed in yesterday's WSJ Headline: OMB Can Stop Biden’s Race Counting.

It's true! This one simple trick…

It's always been bad, but as the op-ed's headline suggests, not so bad that Biden couldn't make worse.

Needless to say, Pun Salad fully supports Early's proposal. For what that's worth.

Also of note:

• You should read Nellie Bowles' TGIF news wrapup. Nellie is Bari Weiss's wife, and she's got a wicked sense of humor. This week's edition: My Little Totenkopf.

  Graham Platner, the Maine Democrat challenging Susan Collins for her Senate seat, found himself in some trouble this week because of an old tattoo. A tramp stamp? An ex’s name on his bicep? No, it was a large totenkopf on his chest, the Nazi skull symbol worn by guards at concentration camps. Platner claims that he picked the symbol at random from the tattoo parlor’s wall with his Marine buddies (I hate when that happens!) and had no idea that there were any Nazi implications. Which is funny because according to an old acquaintance of his, there was nothing random or secret about it at all, and he would call it his totenkopf: “He said, ‘Oh, this is my totenkopf,’ ” the acquaintance told Jewish Insider. “He said it in a cutesy little way.” Platner, who described himself as “a communist” and an “antifa supersoldier” back in his old Reddit posting days, also apparently spent time in “a socialist paramilitary group.”

  The best part is that the left has now painted itself into a corner with Nazi iconography, because they can no longer quite articulate why it’s bad, since killing Jews is neutral to admirable. Here’s a popular leftist commentator trying to explain why Platner’s Nazi symbol is bad:

  “This isn’t just a Nazi tattoo, this is the symbol of the concentration camp guards, the guys who ran the death camps. The men who murdered socialists, communists, and liberals. They mass-murdered all black men in the French army. This is on par with a swastika.” (The commentator deleted it so I won’t name and shame. But isn’t it interesting?)

  The news of Platner’s previously avowed communism and Nazi tattoo have only strengthened him. A poll that came out this week shows him 34 points ahead of his leading opponent in the Democratic primary. We’re getting to the point where it’s a red flag for Zoomers if you don’t have a Nazi tattoo.

  My favorite thing about Platner, though, has nothing to do with any of this—it’s that he describes himself as a “working-class Mainer” but went to a $75,000-a-year boarding school. Yes, Platner went to Hotchkiss (gorgeous, fabulous). I’m also a boarding-school brat—but I’ve always identified as a debutante, a coastal elite, and a perfect 10. Mr. Platner, don’t run from your people.

  The poll Nellie quotes was performed by the Survey Center at the University Near Here. The polling was done October 14-21, which I think was before all the Nazi/Commie stuff came out. So things could change.

• It's way too easy to convince yourself that your lies are noble. Bryan Caplan is Against the Noble Lies of Democracy.

  Suppose you’re crafting a Noble Lie to motivate people to defend democracy. What will you tell them?

  First, that actually-existing democracy is wonderful.

  Second, that democracy faces an existential threat.

  If you convincingly and charismatically spread your Noble Lie, listeners won’t just be motivated. They’ll be hysterical: “We’re in heaven, yet hell is at our gates.” Sure, a few strange listeners who combine gullibility and cynicism will shrug, “That’s terrible, but my personal ability to sway the outcome is trivial, so I’ll just keep my head down and hope for the best.” But most people who fall for your Noble Lie will live in a state of panic — and unless they’re extremely introverted, they’ll spread their panic to others.

  Don't be gullible, mmmkay?

• They've never adequately explained what a "Hoosier" is, for one thing. Sean Stevens wonders What the hell is going on at Indiana University?

  You know in Dr. Strangelove, when the President yells: "Gentlemen, you can't fight in here! This is the War Room."

  It's kind of like that:

  Indiana University banned its student newspaper from printing just days before homecoming weekend — after firing the paper’s advisor when he refused to censor critical coverage.

  That would be bad enough on its own, but FIRE is taking this one personally, as the Indiana Daily Student reported this hostile campaign was due in part to its coverage of FIRE’s ranking Indiana University as the worst public university for free speech.

  I have no words, except: Go, UCLA!. Unfortunately, as I type, Indiana is walloping UCLA 49-3.

• Best headline ever. And it's from Adam Johnston at the Federalist, saying J'Accuse to … well, I don't know who: If You Care More About Policing The Right Than Fighting The Left, You’re Part Of The Problem.

  I won't quote the article. But I think a better headline would have been: "Our Side Won't Win Unless We Copy the Worst Tactics of the Other Side".

Recently on the book blog:

Not at all what I expected, but if my memory had been working slightly better, I could have adjusted my expectations appropriately. The author, George Dyson, is the son of the late Freeman Dyson, famous physicist. Back in the 1970s, Kenneth Brower wrote a sorta-famous book about them, The Starship and the Canoe, which I read about, but didn't read, back then.

Freeman was one of the prime movers behind "Project Orion", a scheme to propel spaceships with—I am not making this up—exploding atomic bombs. George, for his part, designed, built, and lived in a treehouse in British Columbia, while also—not making this up either—engineering innovative designs and construction for giant ocean-going kayaks.

So this book is sort of a hodgepodge of topics, a combination of memoir and historical research. Both interesting and impressive. It begins with Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz inspiring Peter the Great to finance Bering's audacious "Northern Expeditions", exploring the Northern Pacific between Kamchatka and Alaska. (Audacious, but also disastrous to many of the participants.) Such were the first steps that eventually resulted in the Russkies owning Alaska, only to sell it to us in 1867. So if you were wondering about how Leibniz is connected to Sarah Palin, there you go.

Continuing the hodgepodge, Dyson outlines the development of the first "light speed" communications network, a couple dozen heliographs set up by the US Army in the late 1800s in Arizona/New Mexico territories. Unfortunately used as part of the effort to wage war against the Apaches. He discusses how unexpected behavior of the electrons used in Edison's early lightbulbs gave rise to the vacuum tube and (eventually) early computing devices. And (most fascinating to me) a brief history of Project Orion, which could have been the technology used for manned exploration of the solar system, but (alas) 'twas not to be; done in by political machinations.

And there's much more.

I kept waiting for the computer/AI stuff semi-promised in the book's subtitle. It eventually shows up, but mostly in the last few pages. (Spoiler, I think: analog computation will outthink digital methods, sooner or later. The result will be true intelligence, and it will be beyond humanity's ability to understand or—gulp!—control. See the subtitle.)

The trip to get to that apocalyptic conclusion is pretty interesting though.

In a small bit of good news, the WSJ reported yesterday: U.S. Lifts Key Restriction on Ukraine’s Use of European Long-Range Missiles. (WSJ gifted link)

It appears that the US giving Ukraine Tomahawk missiles is off the table, at least for now. The "concern" is that they have a range of more than 1000 miles, which would put Moscow withing striking distance of a Ukraine launch.

To make the obvious point: Russia has no compunctions about launching missiles to strike Kyiv. Or a Kharkiv kindergarten, for that matter.

Also of note:

• He is large, he contains multitudes. Christian Britschgi reports on the latest skirmish against Ollie Garky: Bernie Sanders Thinks Amazon Warehouse Jobs Are Exploitative. He Still Wants To Save Them From Automation.

  Bernie Sanders thinks that Amazon warehouse jobs are soul-crushing, backbreaking, and exploitative. He is also steadfastly opposed to any automation that would eliminate these undesirable positions.

  "Big Tech oligarchs are coming for your job," said the independent Vermont senator on X in response to a story in The New York Times about internal Amazon plans to automate away up to 75 percent of jobs in their fulfillment centers. "AI & robotics must benefit workers, not the top 1%," he added.

  Christian points out Bernie's previous concern with Amazon workers' complaints about "emotional" and "physical" trauma experienced on the job.

  I assume the relevant Frances McDormand movie is already in the works. Robotland?

• That's not funny, Dave. Sarah McLaughlin reports (among other things) at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE): High-profile comedians paid handsomely to not offend Saudi royals at Riyadh comedy fest. Among the comics who accepted the terms (no making "jokes that degrade, embarrass, or ridicule the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, its leadership and public figures, 'the Saudi royal family and legal system,' and 'any religion' or 'religious figure.'") was a guy I've admired in the past for taking on sacred cows, Dave Chapelle. Alas:

  Chappelle, too, said on stage that “in America, they say that if you talk about Charlie Kirk, that you’ll get canceled,” and that it’s “easier to talk here than it is in America.” Chappelle isn’t wrong that comments about Kirk in the aftermath of his assassination led to a disturbing trend of firings and punishments across the country bolstered by threats and demands from lawmakers, one FIRE is working to combat. And he’s right to be worried about the state of free speech in the United States. I certainly am.

  But I’d encourage Chappelle, who made a significant amount of money directly from the government which he was forbidden to criticize at his show, to speak to the country’s journalists, apostates, women’s rights activists, writers, and teachers about his assertion that Saudi Arabia is a freer place to speak. That might be difficult, though, since so many have been imprisoned or even executed by authorities.

  Well, a man's gotta pay the bills.

• Veronique de Rugy wins today's "Betteridge Law Verification" award. Her column is headlined: Some 'No Kings' Protesters Don't Like Capitalism, but Are Republicans Practicing It?

  When House Speaker Mike Johnson lashed out at last weekend's "No Kings" rallies soon to arrive on Washington's National Mall, he reached for an old conservative refrain: "They hate capitalism. They hate our free enterprise system."

  I am sure he's correct about some of the protesters. But the message rings hollow coming from a party leader that stands by as President Donald Trump does precisely what Johnson rightly decries: substituting political control for market choice and ruling by executive order.

  RTWT. I think I have another disrespectful Mike Johnson item coming up in the next day or two, so stay tuned for that.

• Some days it's hard to be amused. Elvis Costello might be disappointed that I let disgust win while reading Romina Boccia and Tyler Turman at Cato: End Obamacare’s Welfare for the Wealthy COVID Credits.

  Entering week four of the government shutdown, Democrats continue to demand a permanent extension of Obamacare’s enhanced premium tax credits (PTCs) as their price for reopening the government. These subsidies are a fiscal boondoggle that doles out taxpayer-funded health insurance to high-income earners. Congress should let these partisan and poorly targeted subsidies expire.

  Democrats passed the boosted Obamacare COVID-19 subsidies on a partisan basis, and Republicans shouldn’t pick up after them. Democrats leveraged the 2021 American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA), without any Republican support, to temporarily expand Obamacare subsidies for people with earnings beyond 400 percent of the federal poverty line (FPL). That threshold is the equivalent of $62,600 in earnings for an individual or $128,600 for a family of four. And there is no upper limit.

  In obviously related news, Uncle Stupid's still on his drunk-sailor spree, spending money he doesn't have. The AP reports: US hits $38 trillion in debt, after the fastest accumulation of $1 trillion outside of the pandemic.

Recently on the book blog:

A few months back I set up a new reading project, somewhat jokingly (but accurately) dubbed the "Read all these Clifford D. Simak books I bought long ago and never read" project.

This 1972 novel was next in line, and now I'm wondering if this was a good idea at all. We are definitely in "not my cup of tea" area here. And I blame myself for that: A Choice of Gods was nominated for the "Best Novel" Hugo back then (losing to Isaac Asimov's The Gods Themselves; I guess it was a good year for gods).

But I waded through all 176 pages of my $1.25 "Berkeley Medallion" paperback. The language is very (what I call) flowery, it's mostly people (and robots) talking to each other, and not much actually happens.

But the story, as near as I understand it: one day in the 2100s, most of humankind simply vanished from Earth. For unknown reasons, a few hundred people are left behind (including some Native Americans). And a lot of those robots. Over millennia, they discover they've become pretty immortal. They develop telepathic skills (but not the robots). And they can teleport themselves to other worlds, if they so desire. It's a pretty pastoral existence.

But then it develops that humans might return to Earth (from wherever they've been), and there are fears that they'll redo the mistakes of the past, turning Earth (back) into a ecological wasteland, filled with discarded soda bottles or something. There was a sorta-resolution of this conflict at the end, which I read in the final pages yesterday, and have already forgotten.

Reader, the praise for this book at Amazon and elsewhere is fulsome. I'm giving it one lousy star at Goodreads, but (to repeat) that's me.

It's that villain, Ollie Garky:

OMG 😂 pic.twitter.com/CDq60JMizH https://t.co/YPyEuLn7Sx

— MAZE (@mazemoore) October 21, 2025

What's that word for something you're rapidly driving toward, but never seem to get to?

Oh, right: "mirage".

Bernie, by the way, has endorsed his fellow "progressive", Maine Democratic Senate candidate Graham Platner, who's running against (in the D-side primary) current Governor Janet Mills and (if he wins the primary) current Republican Senator Susan Collins. And Platner has provided some comic relief of late, as related by Jeffrey Blehar: ‘I’m Not a Secret Nazi’: Graham Platner’s ‘I’m Not a Witch’ Moment. (NR gifted link)

Jeffrey's article centers on Platner's now-famous Totenkopf tattoo, a onetime favorite design among Hitler’s SS. He quotes from a Guardian article:

Sad to say, I think it's unlikely we will see any comparable video starring either Janet Mills or Susan Collins drunkenly lip-syncing in their underwear.

But Platner has undergone (very painful, hopefully) re-inking as reported in this CNN story:

Yoiks! Pic at the link, which, fair warning, you will not be able to unsee. Think: Cthulhu, run over by an 18-wheeler, on a man boob.

But again, neither Janet nor Susie are likely to do anything comparable.

Also of note:

• Good advice for Republicans. And it comes from J.D. Tuccille: Don’t extend Obamacare subsidies to end the government shutdown.

  The federal government's not-really-a-shutdown lingers on, largely driven by Democrats' insistence on extending pandemic-era subsidies that conceal the real cost of health coverage under the Affordable Care Act (ACA)—better known as Obamacare. It's not enough that the spending bill under consideration is already bloated with unaffordable goodies that Republicans and Democrats alike support. Democrats have to show themselves battling the Trump administration and see advantage in doing so while fighting to preserve the main legislative accomplishment (bad policy though the ACA is) on which they've staked their reputations for over a decade. This is no way to handle spending, let alone to improve health care.

  "Families across America are opening up letters and researching the new rates online and are seeing how their premiums will skyrocket if Republicans refuse to act on the health care crisis they created by refusing to extend the vital ACA tax credits," Sen. Chuck Schumer (D–N.Y.) huffed last week.

  The "vital" tax credits to which Schumer refers are subsidies that reduce the cost of health coverage policies under Obamacare. These subsidies are necessary for political reasons because, as the Cato Institute's Michael F. Cannon puts it, "Obamacare offers junk insurance at outrageous premiums." There's no easy way to hide the low quality of the coverage, but subsidies can take the sting out of the price.

  I follow my Congressional delegation's Twitter accounts, and they say "skyrocketing" a lot. They never, ever, mention that their preferred solution would simply shift these skyrocketing costs to taxpayers.

• As Linda Richman would say: "Discuss". Kevin D. Williamson detects a couple of problems hidden by the hype: Trump's Peace Plan Lacks Both Peace and Plan.

  Like the so-called Abraham Accords, the Israel-Hamas peace plan is a triumph of marketing over substance, packaging over product. Neither of the two central parties to the dispute have, in fact, agreed to any binding terms, and, in fact, neither has signed the 20-point plan. A separate “implementation” document, even more vague than the 20-point plan, was signed by the parties and by their mediators, and that signature commits them to very little beyond a non-enforceable promise “to implement the necessary steps” to end the conflict. A third document, unveiled with great ceremony in the lovely Egyptian resort town of Sharm el-Sheikh, is essentially a celebratory White House press release, and neither of the belligerent parties has signed that one, either.

  Hamas immediately violated the terms of the supposed agreement by failing to return all of the remains of the hostages; the Israelis, to the surprise of no one, immediately resumed airstrikes in Gaza.

  No peace. Also, no plan.

  [Didn't get this item's headline reference, youngster? See here.]

• Similar observations, but with more dirty words. And they are coming from Jeff Maurer: Trump's Gaza Plan is Downright Wilsonian.

  I want peace to take hold in Gaza — I really do. I was thrilled when the hostages came home; being a hostage is a fate so terrible that I wouldn’t wish it on most of my enemies. And the people of Gaza have suffered so much that I won’t even make a cheap joke about how Gaza sounds almost as bad as New Jersey — the suffering is so severe that it transcends a comedian’s impulse to shit on Jersey. I’m hoping for peace, and I mean it when I say that Trump should be given whatever Nobel Prizes, sexual favors, and sugary snack treats he wants if he actually pulls it off.

  But do I think he’ll pull it off? Oh God no, absolutely fucking not. I consider Trump’s 20-point peace plan to be mostly Wilsonian wishcasting mixed with naïveté that supports the quickly-gaining-credence theory that everyone is 12 now. It solves none of the hard problems in the region and demonstrates a deep misunderstanding of who Hamas are and what’s causing the conflict. The plan is basically a prisoner exchange, and that’s great, but those have happened before. Now that the hostages are home, let me explain why I think the wheels are going to fly off this plan like a soapbox derby car built by a kid with an alcoholic father.

  The main problem is that Trump doesn’t know what Hamas wants. They want the destruction of Israel; they have been alarmingly, unequivocally — I’m tempted to say “admirably” — consistent on that point. Hamas is like a horny 17 year-old on prom night: There’s no mistaking what they’re after, and you’d have to be next-level dense to not pick up the signals radiating from every fiber of their being.

  "Wilsonian" isn't a compliment, in other words.

• And with fewer dirty words the NR editorialists are honest enough to point out Hamas Is Already Violating Peace Deal.

  The Middle East peace deal that President Trump brokered earlier this month is reaching a precarious phase, with multiple violations of the agreement by Hamas having triggered a response by Israel.

  On Tuesday, Vice President JD Vance joined negotiators Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner in Israel, urging calm during the delicate phase of implementation.

  Under the terms of the deal, all 48 remaining hostages held in Gaza — both living and dead — were supposed to be returned to Israel within 72 hours of the agreement being accepted by all parties. While Israel did receive the 20 living hostages on time, only 13 of the 28 bodies have been returned.

  But somehow I still prefer Jeff Maurer's accurate metaphor: "There’s more TBD in this deal than there is rat shit in a hot dog."

• And in this hemisphere… Jim Geraghty points out some policy problems closer to home: The U.S. plan to blow up drug boats has some major leaks. (WaPo gifted link)

  Since taking office, President Donald Trump has authorized the U.S. military to strike at least six Venezuelan speedboats the administration suspected of smuggling drugs, killing dozens of people. The first one had 11 people aboard. Would you really need 11 people to smuggle drugs? Or was the number of people an indication that the boat was actually involved in human trafficking? If so, some people on that boat hadn’t yet broken any U.S. laws and didn’t deserve to get blown to kingdom come.

  Then there’s the problem that national security officials told Congress during a closed briefing in September that, as the AP wrote, the boat “had turned around and was heading back to shore” and “was fired on multiple times by the U.S. military after it had changed course.” That doesn’t seem like a serious threat to the United States requiring lethal force.

  And that's just a couple of things. More at the link.

Recently on the book blog:

I think this thriller from Joseph Finder went on my get-at-library list thanks to a review from Tom Nolan in the WSJ. The opening sentence is pretty grabby: "Until that day, Grant had never killed anyone." But by page 9, that's something he can check off his bucket list.

In Grant's defense, it's entirely self-defense. The guy was going to kill him. Sent, apparently, by someone named "Berzin". After disposing of the wannabe assassin's corpse in the shark-infested waters off the New Hampshire seacoast (?!), Grant realizes that his past has (at last) caught up with him, and he needs to bug out from his quiet Granite State life. Fortunately, he's somewhat prepared, and he heads out for the White Mountains to implement his desperate plan.

Then we flash back to six years earlier, back when Grant was "Paul Brightman" (his real name), an analyst for a small financial firm in New York. One evening, attending a charity gala, he does a classic rom-com "meet cute", mistaking a fetching young lady for a server. But it turns out she's an attendee named Tatyana, and instead of wisely apologizing and getting on with his life, Paul makes a life-changing mistake: getting to know her, getting to know all about her. What's the problem? Well, take a good look at the book title.

The book alternates between timelines: In the "present day", Paul is on the run from Berzin and his army of killers, experiencing one near scrape with death after another. And in the past, there's his growing love for Tatyana, which involves both a personal and a professional relationship with her dad, the Russkie oligarch Arkady Galkin We know that somehow Paul is on a path to fall far out of favor with Arkady, the only question is how.

It's, yes, a page turner. It's also pretty long, with a plot that only gets twistier and also less credible. The bad guys are very resourceful, but (like Dr. Evil in the Austin Powers movies) not resourceful enough to just shoot Paul in the head.

I base that prediction on:

Top 20 Steven Pinker Quotes | Compiled by @SteveStuWill https://t.co/pMxqbXROOQ

— Steven Pinker (@sapinker) October 21, 2025

There are probably more than a few disqualifying quotes in that article, but these two would probably be sufficient:

Pinker is (I'm pretty sure) a stalwart Democrat, but there's a lot of woke nonsense up with which he will not put.

Also of note:

• While people were getting big mad about the White House East Wing being knocked down… Something actually important and outrageous was happening too, as Noah Rothman reports: Vladimir Putin’s Endless Reprieve. (archive.today link)

  Late last week, Trump revealed that he and Putin had “agreed that there will be a meeting” as soon as this week, but on Monday, the Kremlin scuttled a preparatory meeting between Secretary of State Marco Rubio and his Russian counterpart, Sergey Lavrov. Moscow subsequently informed the White House that the timing of a potential second Trump-Putin summit would have to remain up in the air for now. The Russians are dragging their feet, and why wouldn’t they? Putin already got what he wanted from Trump: an indefinite pause on the provision of Tomahawk cruise missiles to Ukraine.

  The Putin call amounted to a rushed and, apparently, successful effort to preemptively complicate last Friday’s sit-down meeting between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in which Kyiv’s representatives hoped to secure American Tomahawks.

  A four-bylined item in the Financial Times paints a grim portrait of the proceedings. The meeting reportedly devolved into a “shouting match” in which Trump was described as “cursing all the time” while insisting that Russia would “destroy” Ukraine unless Zelensky surrendered unconquered territory to Moscow.

  I remember being encouraged by reports a few days ago that the US would provide Tomahawk missiles to Ukraine. I should have remembered the TACO acronym: Trump Always Chickens Out. Especially when Putin is involved. Occasional tough talk always seems to be followed by mush.

• "MAMA" doesn't have the same ring, somehow. Alan S. Blinder is not a fan of Trump's "Compact" proposal: Trump’s University ‘Compact’ Would Make America Mediocre. (WSJ gifted link)

  No, our universities aren’t perfect. They’re too expensive. They sometimes provide platforms for silliness, including speech that some people find offensive. Yes, it’s probably true that more faculty members lean left rather than right. But America has had the best universities in the world for decades. These schools have yielded substantial economic and social dividends, especially in science. That’s worth cheering and supporting.

  Yet President Trump, himself an Ivy League graduate, has all but declared war on universities since his second term began. It started with Columbia and Harvard under what many people viewed as the guise of protecting students from antisemitic attacks—a worthy goal, and an area in which both universities needed improvement. But it wasn’t long before it became clear that the president’s actual agenda was to bend Columbia and Harvard to his will.

  Columbia’s leaders mostly caved to Mr. Trump, to the dismay of most of its faculty and students. Harvard’s resisted, to cheers and support from the higher-education community. The school gave the retort that the president often gives: See you in court.

  Blinder is way too defensive about the current state of American higher ed. As discussed in one of my recent book reports, there's very little innovation going on. Other problems: "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."

  That's not to say that the "Compact" is good. You can think that (a) "viewpoint diversity" is a good thing (I'd agree), while also thinking (b) that enforcing that via Federal regulatory ham-fistedness is a very bad thing.

• "Believe nothing you hear, and only one half that you see." And to add to Poe's famous quote: ObamaCare Premiums Are Doubling? Don’t Believe It. (WSJ gifted link) Chris Jacobs writes:

  As the government shutdown drags on, Democrats claim that “premiums will double” if enhanced ObamaCare subsidies expire as scheduled on Dec. 31. That would be shocking if it were true, but it isn’t. The misleading claim is based on research by KFF, formerly the Kaiser Family Foundation. It ignores the sizable subsidy that the federal government will still provide to most exchange enrollees if the enhanced subsidies expire and overstates the expiration’s effect on most households.

  On Aug. 6, KFF published an analysis showing “a median proposed premium increase of 18%” for insurers’ exchange plans. But on Sept. 30, several of the same researchers issued a second report with a headline asserting that “premium payments would more than double” if enhanced subsidies expire. What happened? Did premium estimates for 2026 rise sixfold in one month?

  No. KFF’s second study was misleading. It used cleverly parsed terms—“premium payments” rather than “premiums”—to conflate total premiums with enrollees’ out-of-pocket payments. The two aren’t the same. Focusing on the latter to the exclusion of the former, as the September study did, omits important context.

  I guess my state's junior senator didn't read that before she tweeted:

  Life is already unaffordable for many Granite Staters. The doubling of health insurance premiums will only make things worse.
  
  We need to reopen the government, address this health care crisis, & get back to the important work of lowering costs for families. pic.twitter.com/XIqIcmzy1L

  — Sen. Maggie Hassan (@SenatorHassan) October 21, 2025

  So in addition to the "doubling" lie, she doubles down on the "lowering costs for families" lie. What about the taxpaying families, Maggie?

  But: "Life is already unaffordable for many Granite Staters"?

  If life is unaffordable, doesn't that mean they'll be dead soon?

• But it's not just Maggie. Twitchy reports on a Minnesota pol getting flamed by her constituents: Klobuchar’s Pity Party Flop: Posts Sob Story About Early Retirees Big Bills, Gets Roasted Instead. At issue is…

  Early retirees like Bill & Shelly will see their health insurance premiums increase nearly 300%—from $442 to $1,700 per month if Congressional Republicans refuse to extend the enhanced tax credits.
  
  That's an extra $15K a year families can't afford.https://t.co/Uvo6sYi7YR

  — Senator Amy Klobuchar (@SenAmyKlobuchar) October 20, 2025

  The responses are pretty good. Many point out that "Bill and Shelly" decided to retire in their 50s. And you have to read a pretty long way down in the "sob story" from CNBC to discover:

  The couple had a modified adjusted gross income of about $123,000 in 2023 and $136,000 in 2024, mostly from pensions and some from individual retirement account withdrawals, according to their tax returns. Modified adjusted gross income is an income measure used to calculate eligibility for premium tax credits.

  Kudos to CNBC for that. I don't want to second-guess Bill's and Shelly's life choices, but people are understandably averse to having to finance them.

Everybody (for a sufficiently small value of "everbody") seems to be talking about The Great Feminization, an essay by Helen Andrews in Compact. It's provocative!

Well, that explains Robin DiAngelo. But how about Ibram X. Kendi? He's a dude.

Also of note:

• Our long national nightmare is … just beginning? Noah Smith is pessimistic about the future of political ideology: After Trump, the deluge. And his jumping-off point: the recently-revealed disgusting attitudes expressed by "young republicans".

  The leaks led to a backlash from the GOP, with the New York and Kansas chapters of the Young Republicans getting shut down, a Vermont state senator stepping down, and a handful of other participants losing their jobs. (JD Vance didn’t join in, making excuses for the “kids” in the chat group, even though they were in their late 20s or 30s).

  It’s good to see that the institutions of the Republican Party still have enough power — and enough of a conscience — to crack down on things like this, at least a little bit. But it’s unlikely that official censure or condemnations will stem the trend toward authoritarianism and racial hatred among the party’s younger members. The leaked chats are not even slightly surprising for anyone who has lurked in online right-wing spaces and discussions over the past few years.

  In fact, if anything, what’s surprising is that the mainstream media seems to have been so blindsided by texts that were so tame compared to what gets said on public forums like X and 4chan every day. Do people really not know that this is what young right-wingers are like now? On social media, there is a lot more unabashed Hitlerism than in the Young Republicans’ group chat. Popular right-wing accounts now regularly ridicule the widespread belief that Hitler was evil as a “religion” or a “myth”:

  Noah has more examples, including Tucker Carlson's flirtation with WWII revisionism.

  This could be "nut picking", which is easy enough to do. Or he could be highlighting a dangerous and disgusting trend for the future, where fans of limited government, tolerance, rationality, and general liberty are merely a fuddy-duddy splinter ideological sect.

• Hope this works out. The National Review editorialists weigh in on Trump’s Argentina Gamble.

  For a president who prides himself on putting America first to throw a massive lifeline to Argentina, a country led by Javier Milei, a fierce opponent of bailouts, is doubly jarring, but that is just what has happened.

  The Treasury has finalized a $20 billion swap line with Argentina’s central bank. In practice this means lending Argentina up to 20 billion badly needed greenbacks (without, conveniently, any requirement for congressional approval: The same maneuver was adopted by the Clinton administration as part of the Mexican bailout in 1995). Any such loans are collateralized with Buenos Aires’s unloved pesos. The Treasury has also been buying them in the markets to help prop up the price. All this is intended to head off a broader panic — as it was, the sell-off was not confined to the currency — that might lead to default of Argentina’s dollar-denominated debt and, possibly, set off a panic beyond its borders. To reinforce these efforts, the Treasury wants to round up $20 billion in additional finance from the private sector, sovereign wealth funds, and the like.

  I wish Milei and Argentina well, but I read the whole thing, and I'm not sure what winning this gamble would look like. How will we know?

• Book-burning for me, not for thee. Jonathan Turley is rightly appalled at some late-night antics: Jimmy Kimmel and Making Book Burning Fun Again.

  Jimmy Kimmel is back on television by less than popular demand. Kimmel’s ratings are hardly robust (Kimmel pulls in 1.85 million in comparison to Gutfeld! at 3.2 million). Still, his suspension for spreading disinformation about the killer of Charlie Kirk became a cause celebre on the left. Kimmel continues to air nightly screeds against Trump and conservatives. Of course, he is hardly unique in appealing to an echo-chambered audience. However, this week Kimmel showed children being read Eric Trump’s book by a drag queen. What was most disturbing was not the use of the children to echo talking points on how great drag queens are, but showing them throwing Trump’s book into a wood chipper. It appears that nothing is funnier for the modern left than a good book burning or chipping.

  Maybe someone should write a Fahrenheit 451 followup novel. Here, I'll get you started:

  It was a pleasure to mutilate. It was a special pleasure to see things shredded, to see things mangled and butchered…

• Way to go, France. Jim Geraghty has some big fun with recent news: A Brazen Louvre Heist Embarrasses France.

  Thankfully, most human beings don’t have much appetite for violence and mayhem. They see no pleasure in murder, or brutality, or war crimes. But being a really good thief, who can sneak into any building, outsmart any security system, and outwit any detective? Heck, Cary Grant plays characters like that, as does George Clooney. The suave, daring, not-quite-so-immoral thief is a stock character in detective novels and thrillers and comic books.

  According to the account in the English edition of El Pais, four guys in Paris just executed an astonishingly smooth, fast, and efficient heist of arguably the most famous museum in the world. Whether or not they ever catch these guys, in a matter of minutes, they became legends:

  There were four thieves. Two on high-powered motorcycles, the other two in a four-wheeled vehicle. The museum had just opened. It was between 9:30 and 9:40 on Sunday morning, and there were already people inside. The robbers made their way to the Galerie Apolon façade facing the Seine and accessed a first-floor balcony using a truck-mounted electric ladder similar to those used for moving furniture through apartment windows. The hooded men threatened the officers in the gallery with the grinders, which they then used to break the display cases. They stole nine objects and fled the same way they had arrived: on motorcycles.

  For my southern New England readers, when it says, “The hooded men threatened the officers in the gallery with the grinders,” it does not mean the thieves threatened the guards with sandwiches. They mean an angle grinder, which is a power tool used for cutting, grinding, polishing, and sharpening materials. Unlike the Venus de Milo, these thieves were armed:

  Yeah, I did want to get Jim's "grinder" and "Venus de Milo" jokes in there.

As reported by the NYT: With Truce in Place, Hamas Pursues Bloody Crackdown on Rivals in Gaza (NYT gifted link)

If Hamas can't shoot Jews any more, they'll look around to find others to shoot. It's what they know, it's what they do.

Also of note:

• It's all over now, Baby Blue. Megan McArdle reports that The sweetheart deal is over for academia. (WaPo gifted link)

  As the Trump administration’s war on universities settles into its entrenched phase, it’s given new urgency to a long-simmering debate about whether, and how, academia should pursue viewpoint diversity. This conversation has been happening for decades, mostly between conservatives who want more of it and an academic establishment that wants to leave well enough alone. Now, that conversation has become existential.

  The argument for viewpoint diversity, which this column has made many times, was pithily summarized by physicist Richard Feynman in Caltech’s 1974 commencement address: “The first principle [of science] is that you must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest person to fool.” Humans are experts at seeing what we expect to see, especially when we really really want something to be true, so it takes strenuous effort — and, often, an outsider with a different viewpoint — to keep us from making fools of ourselves.

  I’ve spent less time writing about rebuttals to viewpoint diversity, such as “Seven Theses Against Viewpoint Diversity” just published by Lisa Siraganian in Academe, the magazine of the American Association of University Professors. To sum up those theses very, very briefly, she sees claims of ideological bias in academia as unproven, and arguments for viewpoint diversity as weak, bad-faith, and inimical to the search for truth and academic self-governance.

  Or as the headline of her companion essay for the Chronicle of Higher Education put it: “Viewpoint Diversity Is a MAGA Plot.”

  Viewpoint diversity in academia scares the crap out of some people.

• Who's next, Greta Thunberg? Ted Nordhaus admits: I Thought Climate Change Would End the World. I Was Wrong. Good for him. Let's skip down a bit:

  Why do so many smart people—scientists, engineers, lawyers, and public policy experts, all of whom will tell you that they “believe in science”—get the science of climate risk so badly wrong?

  The first reason is that highly educated people with high levels of science literacy are no less likely to get basic scientific issues wrong than anyone else when the facts conflict with their social identities and ideological commitments. Yale Law professor Dan Kahan has shown that people who are highly concerned about climate change actually have less accurate views about climate change overall than climate skeptics, and that this remains true even among partisans with high levels of education and general science literacy. Elsewhere, Kahan and others have demonstrated that on many issues, highly educated people are often more likely to hold stubbornly onto erroneous beliefs because they are adept at rationalizing their ideological commitments.

  The second reason is that there are strong incentives to overestimate climate risk if you make a living doing left-of-center climate and energy policy. The capture of Democratic and progressive politics by environmentalism over the last generation has been close to total. Meanwhile, the climate movement has effectively conflated consensus science about the reality and anthropogenic origins of climate change with catastrophist claims about climate risk, for which there is no consensus whatsoever.

  Whether you are an academic researcher, a think-tank policy wonk, a program officer at an environmental or liberal philanthropy, or a Democratic congressional staffer, there is simply no incentive to challenge the central notion that climate change is an existential threat to the human future. And so everyone falls in line.

  Finally, there is a widespread belief that one can’t make a strong case for clean energy and technological innovation absent the catastrophic specter of climate change. This view ignores the entire history of modern energy innovation. Over the last two centuries, the world has moved inexorably from dirtier and more carbon-intensive technologies to cleaner ones. Burning coal, despite its significant environmental impacts, is cleaner than burning wood and dung. Burning gas is cleaner than coal. And, of course, producing energy with wind, solar, and nuclear is cleaner than doing so with fossil fuels.

  Your move, Greta.

• Well, here's hoping. The Dispatch headline from David M. Drucker sounds alarming: Lawsuit Could Upend Campaign Finance Law.

  I'd recommend instead: "Lawsuit Could Improve First Amendment Protections for Political Speech". But that's me.

  A lawsuit winding its way through federal courts could upend decades of campaign finance law and candidate fundraising strategy. Tax-exempt issue-advocacy organizations, shielded from publicizing their donors, could be empowered to substantially increase participation in traditional electioneering.

  The plaintiff in Freedom Path Inc. v. Internal Revenue Service is arguing that federal limitations on political activity placed on 501(c)4 organizations are unconstitutional. Under current law, such groups must devote a healthy majority of their efforts to issue-advocacy but are permitted to engage in some electioneering, such as airing campaign-style advertising and canvassing voters. Like super PACs, these groups can accept unlimited contributions and are typically funded by wealthy donors. Unlike super PACs, their donors can be kept secret from the public.

  Yeah, I don't care much about wealthy anonymous donors. They can spend billions on political ads. So what? Will those ads be more convincing to Joe Voter than the ones he already sees? Why would you think so?

🇺🇸 NEW ENGLAND: 40% REPUBLICAN VOTES, 0 REPUBLICAN REPRESENTATIVES

This is one of the strangest political paradoxes in America right now.

New England’s six states - Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut - collectively give around 40% of… https://t.co/bgkWlNLwJy pic.twitter.com/LPsZ2tiqqH

— Mario Nawfal (@MarioNawfal) October 18, 2025

This has been a sore spot for me for a long time, Mario. I proposed my fix back in 2017. In the 8 years since I thought it up, I've only grown fonder of the idea. It is a "proportional representation" scheme where I am not kidding about the proportionality.

What does it mean to be "represented" in (specifically) the US House of Representatives? Since 2017, my CongressCritters have been steadfast Democrats, who (frankly) have shown zero interest in even listening to the (approximately) 45% of voters who voted against them.

The problem is our "winner take all" elections. I found this particularly absurd in 2016, when my district sent Carol Shea-Porter to Washington, where she wielded one entire vote in the House, after only getting 44.3% of the vote in the general election.

My reform would be simple, although requiring 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.

I hasten to add this would also "solve" gerrymandering issues, much in the news of late.

So far the world has failed to embrace my fix, but I keep telling myself: it's only a matter of time.

Also of note:

• Did you go to your local "No Kings" rally yesterday? Yeah, me neither. But Reason's Nick Gillespie did, and reported thusly: What I saw at today's No Kings rally in New York City.

  More surprisingly, the messaging, both through signs and in conversation, was focused on the real and imagined personal failings of Trump and key points of his domestic agenda, especially Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids. The first demonstrations I attended were in college during the 1980s, and I always expect a smorgasbord of barely related causes to be represented at any political event. As an undergrad journalist at Rutgers, I covered tons of rallies that were supposed to be about divesting university endowment funds from companies that did business in apartheid South Africa. Two or three speakers in, the focus would inevitably wander to start talking about the funding of the contras in Nicaragua, or the need for a higher minimum wage in America, or universal health care, or stopping nuclear power, or whatever. At today's No Kings march in New York, there wasn't speechifying, but there was a surprisingly tight focus on Trump as a tyrant who needs to be impeached, stopped, or voted out.

  Yet whenever I asked someone what they hated about Trump, the answer was almost always the same: "Everything!" This was true of men and women, young and old, black and white. When pressed, they would detail a list of personal qualities and moral failings. He was gross, vulgar, a rapist, disgusting, vile, fat, stupid, mentally deficient. No one seemed particularly fazed by tariffs or spending, though some signs denounced ICE as an agency and dispatching National Guard troops to cities.

  The one exception to this general lack of specificity concerned Israel. As I already noted, I was surprised by the relative absence of kaffiyehs and anti-Israel signage. Which isn't to say there were none. There were a number of signs twinning Trump with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and accusing both of genocide. When I talked to several people wearing Palestinian flags or carrying "Jews for Palestinian Freedom" signs, they foregrounded American support for Israel at the top of Trump's sins. "Didn't he end the war, though?" I asked. "It won't last," they said, or it came too late. When I asked if Trump was as bad on Israel as Joe Biden, Barack Obama, and George W. Bush before him, they said yes, but Trump was the president now.

  I think people were encouraged to leave their Hamas cheerleader pom-poms at home.

• How commie can Maine get? I guess we'll find out between now and next November. One of the candidates is getting really pushed by "progressives"; Jim Geraghty invites us to Meet the Real Graham Platner. (archive.today link)

  Barely two months ago, little-known Senate candidate Graham Platner announced his bid to unseat Republican Susan Collins and was immediately celebrated by the New York Times with a largely-glowing profile. But in recent days, other big mainstream media institutions have turned their attention to Platner and found all manner of controversial past statements, starting with CNN:

  Graham Platner, a Marine veteran turned oyster farmer who is now a rising Democratic Senate candidate in Maine, once called himself a “communist,” dismissed “all” police as bastards, and said rural White Americans “actually are” racist and stupid, according to deleted social media posts reviewed by CNN’s KFile.

  In one now-deleted Reddit comment from 2021, Platner responded to a thread about people becoming more conservative as they age by saying: “I got older and became a communist.” The comment was made on a subreddit called r/Antiwork, a far-left forum “for those who want to end work.”

  The defense from Platner is that, “I don’t think any of that is indicative of who I am today, really.” He insists that he is not a communist.

  The posts are from 2021, a whole five years ago. Platner was 37 at the time.

  Yeah, it's pretty tough to claim "young and stupid" as a defense when you're 37. Jim notes revelations from other sources, so this smells like a coordinated opposition-research thing.

  It appears Platner will be running against current governor, Janet Mills in the D-side primary. Jim also reported on her:

  Also in today's Morning Jolt, continuing the Democratic Party’s youth movement, Maine Governor Janet Mills announced she’s running for the U.S. Senate at age 77. Janet Mills is older than the Frisbee, cake mix, the Wurlitzer jukebox, the Polaroid camera, and the credit card.… pic.twitter.com/ugV2dm5Hke

  — Jim Geraghty (@jimgeraghty) October 14, 2025

• Fascists are everywhere! Check under the bed! I imagine that's a nighttime routine in the Todd Wolfson house, based on Jonathan Turley's report: AAUP President Demands Weapons Boycott on Israel and Attacks Trump Supporters as “Fascists”.

  The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) has long been criticized for far-left policies and activism. Some of us have criticized the organization for ignoring academic priorities and the record-low polling on public trust in higher education. Its president, Todd Wolfson, is now taking that activism global with a boycott policy that leaves little room for faculty members who support Israel.

  I previously criticized the selection of Wolfson as the head of the AAUP. Wolfson, a Rutgers University anthropologist and former union leader, is a highly political activist who doubled down on the ideological intolerance that now defines higher education. His election was a defiant statement by faculty members that they will not yield in preserving the current ideological echochamber in our universities and colleges. He promised to keep AAUP as a “fighting organization” for liberal causes.

  And of course he was out there fighting yesterday:

  pic.twitter.com/zOZjj1VK0k

  — Todd Wolfson (@ProfTWolf) October 18, 2025

Recently on the movie blog:

I loved the old Police Squad TV show. It only lasted for six episodes in 1982.

I watched the resulting movie series with Leslie Nielsen, in 1988, 1991, and 1994. My recollection: generally OK, but not as good.

And the latest installment in the resulting movie series was free-to-me on Paramount+, my Saturday night was free, so …

Well, the comedy dropoff continues. There's a lot of mugging for the camera. (One great thing about the TV show: Leslie Nielsen and Alan North were just about always deadpan.) There's a lot of absurdity that seldom manages to be actually funny. The best jokes are the ones stolen from the previous entries.

Anyway: Liam Neeson plays Frank Drebin, Junior, trying to follow in Dad's footsteps. He's a parody of a cop who doesn't play by the rules, shooting first, asking (no) questions later, which puts him constantly at odds with his superiors. His billionaire antagonist, Richard Cane, is hatching a scheme to loose violent anarchy upon the nation, aided by a gadget named "Primitive Online Transmission", or a P.L.O.T device. (That actually got a grin from me.)

Pamela Anderson plays the love interest, who also is seeking revenge for her dead brother, sent to his doom by Cane. She's better than I would have expected!

In a WSJ column related to his new book, Taking Religion Seriously, Charles Murray's headline is: Can Science Reckon With the Human Soul? (WSJ gifted link)

I quibble with the headline. I'm pretty sure it's scientists who would need to "reckon with the human soul."

I'm also pretty sure that many scientists would prefer not to.

Charles reports on a phenomenon of which I hadn't heard: "terminal lucidity", when people without functioning brains seem to temporarily recover their consciousness. And then shortly die. Interesting!

Taking Religion Seriously is on the top of my non-fiction to-be-read pile, and it's relatively short, so I will probably report on it at some point in the coming weeks. (But—egad—at the top of my fiction to-be-read pile is James Joyce's Ulysses, clocking in at >640 pages of very small type. So I may need to do some juggling.)

Also of note:

• How many headlines could begin with the words "Trump Erroneously Thinks…"? A lot, I'm sure, and Jacob Sullum has one: Trump Erroneously Thinks Killing Suspected Smugglers Is the Key to Winning the Drug War.

  During a press conference in the Oval Office this week, a reporter asked President Donald Trump about his new policy of summarily executing suspected drug smugglers in the Caribbean Sea, which so far has included five military strikes on speedboats, killing a total of at least 27 people. "Why not have the Coast Guard stop them," as it is "empowered by law to do?" the reporter wondered. That way, he suggested, "you can confirm who's on the boat" and "ensure that they're doing what you suspect."

  Trump's answer was not that drug smuggling is tantamount to violent aggression, as he has repeatedly claimed, or that it merits the death penalty, as he has long argued. Nor did he aver that blowing up the boats is consistent with the law of war because the United States is engaged in an "armed conflict" with drug cartels, as the White House recently told Congress. Rather, Trump claimed his literalization of the war on drugs was necessary because the usual interdiction methods have been "totally ineffective" for "30 years."

  The latter assessment is accurate; for more than a century, in fact, the government has been trying and failing to prevent politically disfavored intoxicants from reaching American consumers. But Trump is wrong to think that the added deterrent of simply killing people suspected of transporting illegal drugs will finally accomplish that impossible mission, and his overestimation of that policy's benefits is coupled with a disregard for its costs. Ordering the military murder of drug suspects simultaneously corrupts the mission of the armed forces, erasing the traditional distinction between civilians and combatants, and obliterates longstanding principles of criminal justice, dispensing with the need for charges or proof.

  Jacob makes the case that, in addition to being dangerously unlawful, Trump's murderous antics will be totally ineffective. Twofer!

• Soybeans, that is. Kevin D. Williamson talks Trump's trade war, and finds it to be A Hill of Beans to Die On. (archive.today link) He is cursed with a long memory:

  To understand the idiotic trade war with China launched by Donald Trump in his second administration, study the idiotic trade war with China launched by Donald Trump in his first administration.

  When Trump took office in 2017, the negative balance of trade with China—the so-called trade deficit—was about $375 billion. Under Trump’s anti-trade policies, it was soon ... $418 billion in 2018. Back down to $343 billion in 2019, $308 billion in 2020, and back up to $353 billion in 2021, the year Trump reluctantly left office after attempting to stage a coup d’état to remain in power. Biden’s administration coincided with two years of sub-$300 billion trade deficits—not because the U.S. economy was so strong but because it was weak: When Americans are struggling, they consume less than they would have otherwise, which typically means lower imports.

  Trump’s first-term trade war with China produced very little in the way of favorable trade results for U.S. firms. There was no radical and long-lasting change in the balance of trade and very little reform of Chinese trade practices. Trade deficits are essentially meaningless as an economic metric and do not actually tell us very much about trade policy (trade deficits are the flip side of capital surpluses; nations with relatively high savings rates tend to invest more of their earnings from exports and spend less on imported consumer goods) but, on that score, there was no progress: The U.S. trade deficit in 2016 was $502 billion, and in 2021 it was $861 billion, a record high, having hit $677 billion in 2020, Trump’s last full year in office.

  KDW's bottom line: "The Trump administration’s policies are dumb and destructive, and they have shown themselves to be failures even on Trump’s own supposed terms."

• Why, it's almost as if that's what they want. Christian Schneider points out a downside of wokeness: Ethnic Gatekeeping in the Arts Doesn't Remove Barriers, It Builds Them. (archive.today link)

  In late 2023, the San Diego County Library’s Rancho Santa Fe branch invited author and actress Annette Hubbell to perform a few selections from her book Women Warriors, which tells the tales of female heroes throughout history. Weeks before the March 2024 performance, however, Hubbell was informed that she needed to remove two black historical figures, Harriet Tubman and Mary McLeod Bethune, from the show.

  The reason? Hubbell is white.

  “Our administration was uncomfortable with you performing a black character as a white woman,” the branch manager told Hubbell, asking her to replace these women with white historical figures. When Hubbell refused to pay tribute only to white women, the library canceled the performance altogether.

  I would imagine (but haven't checked) that the San Diego County Library’s Rancho Santa Fe branch had the usual self-righteous posturing display for "Banned Books Week".

  Anyway, Ms. Hubbell is suing (see that last link), and Pun Salad wishes her well.

• The candy displays went up back in August. So it's coming, and Dave Barry notes that Halloween has changed since he was a kid.

  The holiday that we know as Halloween began as a Druid religious festival in ancient Britain. Back then, groups of Druid youths would go door-to-door demanding treats, and if you refused to give them one, they would burn down your house. If, however, you gave them a treat, they would still burn down your house. That’s how religious they were. Today we know them as British soccer fans.

  But the point is that from the beginning, Halloween was more fun for young people than for homeowners. This was still the case when I was a young person growing up numerous decades ago in Armonk, N.Y. Back then Halloween was a LOT of fun for us kids. The only bad part was when we had to bob for apples. I don’t know if they still make youngsters bob for apples on Halloween, but I hope not, because for a supposedly fun activity, it sucks. You have to get down on your knees and stick your entire head into a tub of cold water, and for what? An apple. It’s like waterboarding, but with fruit.

  The only other part of Halloween I didn’t like was when you went to the trouble to trick-or-treat a house, and instead of real candy, by which I mean chocolate, they gave you some lame “treat” such as raisins, which are practically a vegetable; or licorice, which tastes like insect repellent; or “Necco wafers,” which are not candy at all but mislabeled sidewalk chalk; or “circus peanuts,” which look like radioactive dog turds.

  I confess that I wanted to excerpt enough to get in the line about radioactive dog turds.

  But it's Dave, and you will want to Read the Whole Thing.

A few months back, I purchased a book by Andrew Heaton, Tribalism is Dumb. And it finally worked its way through my non-fiction to-be-read stack, so I'm reading it now. And to what did my wondering eyes should appear, but this paragraph (pp 65-6):

As the kids say in these modern times: Whoa. Or, as we geezers say, if we're feeling snooty: On the nose, Andrew!

What I'm talking about is how well Andrew captured the mindset behind what was recently reported at Politico: ‘I love Hitler’: Leaked messages expose Young Republicans’ racist chat. The current edition of National Review's The Week (NR gifted link) summarizes:

Also taking Vance to task, even more thoroughly than NR is Jack Butler, in his debut column (I think) on the WSJ editorial pages. Vance’s Bad Excuses for Young Republicans. (WSJ gifted link)

Looking forward to hearing more from Jack.

Finally, a current NR guy, Charles C.W. Cooke has some helpful hints for the young and stupid: How Not to Be Caught Saying Hideous Things: A Primer. (archive.today link)

Charlie goes on to recommend this approach to the Young Republican Nitwits, too.

I've been hitting keyboards with my opinions for a few decades, and I can't say I've never typed things I've regretted, but I think I've minimized that sort of thing. But if you ever find yourself asking: Should I broadcast irrefutable evidence of my bigotry to the world?, go to this website for AI-assisted advice.

Also of note:

• Not uniformly interesting, but Noah Smith posts At least five interesting things, and I liked number one:

  1. Doomerism is so passé

  I don’t see nearly as many pessimistic screeds these days as I did a couple of years ago. But every once in a while, one pops up on my screen, and it’s invariably just as maudlin and overwrought as they all are. The latest example is an essay in the New York Times by Andreas Reckwitz from Berlin, entitled “The West is Lost”.

  Why is the West lost? Well, fairly predictably, he starts out with climate change:

  The most dramatic loss is environmental. Rising temperatures, extreme weather, disappearing habitats and the ruination of entire regions are eroding the conditions of life for humans and nonhumans alike. Even more threatening than present damage is the anticipation of future devastation — what has aptly been termed climate grief. What’s more, mitigation strategies themselves promise losses: a departure from the consumer-oriented lifestyle of the 20th century, once celebrated as the hallmark of modern progress.

  Look, climate change is obviously a bad thing, but let’s not exaggerate. The notion that runaway climate change was going to make the Earth uninhabitable was always highly dubious; in 2021, the author of The Uninhabitable Earth wrote an article entitled “After Climate Alarmism”, in which he embraces more balanced, reasonable forecasts. Thanks to the amazing progress in renewable technology, and China’s gung-ho willingness to scale that technology rapidly, the world will probably be spared the worst. And the idea that climate change is going to be solved — or even meaningfully altered — by pious Europeans eschewing modern consumer lifestyles is just numerically illiterate. Technology is solving the problem while German intellectuals wring their hands.

  Beckwitz also refers to "economic devastation", which Noah rebuts with words and…

  

  Worth a thousand words, if not more.

• Shocker! John Aziz points out that Hamas Doesn’t Believe in Peace.

  Two years of war had left Hamas weaker than it had been in decades. Israeli bombardments had shattered the group’s military capabilities and depleted its arsenals. Many Hamas tunnels had been abandoned or destroyed, and most of its senior leadership killed in battle or assassinated. In many neighborhoods, control had drifted to local clan networks and tribal councils. This fragile, improvised form of governance, formed in the desperation of war, hinted at something that could one day replace Hamas’s iron grip.

  But even cornered and diminished, the Islamist movement that started this disastrous war remains as determined as ever to cling to power. Within a day of the ceasefire taking effect, Hamas’s internal security forces were staging public executions. Palestinians accused of collaborating with Israel were dragged out and shot or hanged from lampposts in Gaza City’s main squares. There were no trials, no evidence, not even a pretense of due process—just a crude display of terror meant to remind everyone who was still in charge. Soon after, Hamas gunmen turned their weapons on powerful clan militias that had filled the vacuum during the war, sparking running battles in Shuja’iyya, Sabra, and beyond.

  These actions exposed a critical truth: Hamas never viewed the Trump deal as a real step toward peace or coexistence, because that is just not how their framework for understanding the world works. Peace is not their aspiration. For their purposes, the ceasefire is a temporary reprieve: a chance to regroup, rearm, and prepare for the next round of fighting, which could start in five days, five years, or 50 years. In Islamist political thought there’s a word for it—hudna—a temporary truce with non-Muslim adversaries that can be discarded as soon as the balance of power shifts. Then the time for jihad against the Jews and other non-Muslims will arrive again.

  </sarcasm>I'm sure this will cause the scales to drop from the eyes of Hamas cheerleaders here.</sarcasm>

Another cheap hit on my current CongressCritter (who's running for senator):

"I’m fighting to lower costs for Granite Staters, while raising them for taxpayers."

There, I fixed it for you.

— Paul Sand (@punsalad) October 16, 2025

(Wish I had specified "Granite State taxpayers", but it's too late now.)

Also note his reminder that he's a fighting fighter who fights. Gotta throw some red meat to the base!

Also of note:

• Some bad news from Katherine. You've probably been deemed a terrorist.

  Everyone is a terrorist now, I guess. pic.twitter.com/t8FKsjJMzg

  — Katherine Mangu-Ward (@kmanguward) October 8, 2025

  Hope I get a cool roommate at Guantanamo.

• 

  I'm willing to listen. And, as a matter of fact, I've purchased Charles Murray's recent book, and it's in my TBR system. (Amazon link at your right.) There's an excerpt at the Free Press, see what you think: I Thought I Didn’t Need God. I Was Wrong.

  The first unmistakable nudge involved the question, “Why is there something rather than nothing?” I first heard it put in those words by the late columnist and commentator Charles Krauthammer during a session of a chess club we started in the early 1990s. That I thought Charles had come up with it himself is proof of how unreflective I had been. Anyone who had taken any interest in theology would have encountered it long since. It’s one of the most famous questions in metaphysics.

  But I hadn’t heard it, and it caught me by surprise. When I had thought about the existence of the universe at all, I had taken it as a given. I am alive, I am surrounded by the world, the fact that I can ask the question presupposes that the universe exists. There’s nothing else to be said. It is a mystery with a lowercase m.

  Hearing the question stated so baldly and so eloquently made me start to take the issue seriously. Why is there anything? Surely things do not exist without having been created. What created all this? If you haven’t thought about it recently, this is a good time to stop and try to come up with your own answer.

  I don't have a good answer.

  One of my other webstops is Why Evolution Is True, run by strident atheist Jerry Coyne. He's always on the lookout for God-fearing people to rebut, and Murray's article is no exception. You can read his response here. And as one of my mottoes says: we link, you decide.

• If you're looking for something new to be troubled by… At the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), Dylynn Lasky and Bobby Ramkissoon have one for you: The trouble with ‘dignity’.

  After the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, universities faced a dilemma that has become grimly familiar in the age of social media: what to do when a member of the campus community says something online that others find intolerable.

  Within days, institutions moved with visible urgency. Some suspended employees. Others terminated them outright. A few launched “investigations” whose conclusions seemed preordained. FIRE has condemned these actions (when taken by public institutions) as violations of the First Amendment and intervened in over a dozen cases.

  Yet the punishments themselves tell only half the story. Equally revealing were the justifications universities offered for them:

  • Clemson University declared that free speech “does not extend to speech that undermines the dignity of others.”
  • The University of Mississippi stated that a fired staff member’s comments about Kirk “run completely counter to our institutional values of civility, fairness, and respecting the dignity of each person.”
  • The president of Austin Peay State University said a faculty member’s social-media post “does not align with our commitment to mutual respect and human dignity” and was therefore grounds for termination.

  The message these colleges sent was unmistakable: offensive speech is not merely offensive, it is an assault on human dignity itself. And that, in the eyes of administrators, makes it punishable.

  It's the new "hate speech"!

  [If you missed it, here's my contribution to the debate from last month. I've always considered myself pretty absolute on free speech, but I totally understand the parents who don't want their kiddos being taught by an outright unhinged hater.]

• Sshh, it's a secret. Rolling Stone commentators David Sirota and Jared Jacang Maher weigh in on some nightmarish scheme: The Right’s Secret Plan to Help Billionaires Buy Elections. J.D. Vance is involved! And oligarchs! (archive.today link)

  On the 20th anniversary of the creation of the Roberts Supreme Court, one point of consensus persists: Most Americans believe money corrupts the political process — and they want to overturn the Citizens United precedent that empowers oligarchs to buy elections.

  And yet, in two little-noticed cases — including one spearheaded by Vice President J.D. Vance — the high court could soon do the opposite, eliminating the last restrictions on campaign donations and obstructing law enforcement’s efforts to halt bribery.

  As we recount in our new book Master Plan, the Citizens United case was the culmination of conservatives’ 50-year master plan to deregulate the campaign finance system and legalize corruption. What started as an incendiary memo from soon-to-be Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell became one ruling equating money with constitutionally protected speech and another extending personhood rights to corporations.

  You can read the whole thing without getting the point of what Citizens United was actually about: the ability of government to ban a movie critical of Hillary Clinton. And (then) Solicitor General Elena Kagan also argued before SCOTUS that Your Federal Government could also use "campaign finance regulation" to ban political pamphlets and even books.

  Sirota and Maher don't seem to realize that restricting "money" in campaigns can be used simply to squelch free expression by whoever the government would prefer be silenced.

• Muppet Newsflash. Jeff Maurer points out that AI Didn't Invent Dumb, False Bullshit. He is rebutting a thoughtless video from a site called Kurzegasagt", predicting AI doom.

  So, what, exactly, is the problem here? Is it that AI produces trite crap that’s full of misinformation? I agree that low-quality and misleading stuff is a problem — I personally consider TikTok to be Khufu’s Pyramid-sized monument to the stupidity of young people, and distortions and lies have made our politics less like a Socratic dialogue and more like two drunk guys trying to pants each other behind a Waffle House. The trite stuff does no good and the false stuff is actively bad, and I agree that society would be better off if there was less of that type of content.

  But we don't live in that universe.

Recently on the movie blog:

Well, I thought I was going to like this better. I read and enjoyed the Parker novels by "Richard Stark" (Donald Westlake pseudonym). The previous Parker movies (with, variously, Lee Marvin, Mel Gibson, Robert Duvall, …) have been uneven, but good enough so I was willing to take a chance on this one. Shane Black wrote and directed, and he's done good stuff in the past.

Mark Wahlberg plays Parker here. For those who don't know: he's a thief, operating under his own not-particularly-moral code of ethics. This requires him, occasionally, to hook up with a crew of fellow thieves. Among which, according to that saying, honor is lacking. The opening heist demonstrates that, as most of the team is betrayed and murdered by … no spoilers here.

But this sets Parker on a quest for revenge and retribution. Which turns into an unlikely, and unlikeable, Ocean's 11-style caper, but with ultraviolence, chase scenes, and a lot more bad words (well, just multiple repetitions of one bad word). It's very formulaic, and I kept dozing off.

Worst of all: the script turns Parker into kind of a wisecracker. That's not faithful to the books. In fact, this has the feel of a previously-existing script that someone demanded be turned into a Parker movie, and that was accomplished grudgingly, in a slapdash fashion.

Evil Transformer waiting for the right time to wreak havoc on the unsuspecting city.

— Paul Sand (@punsalad) October 14, 2025

Really bad, isn't it? Especially when you consider that Barack and Michelle almost certainly had to give it their OK.

Also of note:

• Also piling up in my things-to-blog list.

  So, literally what those who supported defunding NPR said was the correct outcome? https://t.co/5L4JlSBTBr

  — Charles C. W. Cooke (@charlescwcooke) October 1, 2025

  Maybe we should have been using smaller words, so folks like Scott Simon could have figured this out previously.

  As you've certainly heard, the Democrat demands for shutdown-ending focus on the "health care" stuff. But (apparently) they are also demanding about $500 million in cash going to their allies at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (which still exists, see above).

  Just say no.

• And probably too much fun. Kevin D. Williamson explains Why Snobbery Is Cheap. (archive.today link) KDW mentions the multiple botches in a recently-read book which involved a shell casing ejected from "9mm revolver" equipped with a silencer.

  I'm not a gun guy, but even I know that's an unlikely combination. The lesson KDW draws:

  Your average voter out there, walking around with his mushy-brained and half-educated opinions about this and that, doesn’t need to know a great deal about firearms. Democracy insists upon enfranchising the ignoramuses, who also get a vote on any number of other issues about which they know little or nothing. Two cheers for democracy and all that. But if you happen to be writing, translating, editing, or publishing a book about two military conflicts, and if that book from time to time delves into details about the weapons used in those conflicts, then, in that case, you might want to know something about the subject. Intellectual tidiness is desirable in and of itself, of course, but on purely literary grounds, errors of that sort pull the more informed kind of reader out of the story—the analogous case is science-fiction writing that gets the basic science wrong. It doesn’t work as literature.

  It also doesn’t work as argument. 

  There is a whole rhetoric of mockery deployed in the gun-policy debate, and you’ve probably heard examples of it, the idea being that gun-rights advocates who correct people about the difference between a clip and a magazine or a semiautomatic weapon and a fully automatic weapon were just weirdos who are trying to avoid talking about the real issues—as though the technical aspects of firearms design weren’t the actual issue. Ignorance about firearms is taken as a kind of badge of honor, a sign that one is not one of those people—the unwashed.

  The root issue is snobbery. If you know any music snobs or movie snobs, then you may have observed that a snob is not obsessed with his own taste in music or movies—he is obsessed with your taste, with everybody else’s taste, and takes pleasure not from the things he enjoys but from heaping scorn on the things other people enjoy that he judged contemptible. People who actually know things and who have a genuinely cultivated critical sensibility tend to be the opposite of High Fidelity-style ranking-list snobs: My friend Jay Nordlinger, who is a classical music critic when he is not doing one of his four other jobs, is the least snobby person you will ever meet when it comes to music. A critic is interested in music—a snob is interested in what his choice of music says about him.

  So: if you detect snobbery here at Pun Salad, please know that it's unintentional. If scorn is heaped, I'll try to limit it to heaping it on stupidity, lunacy, and evil.

  [Jay Nordlinger acknowledges and comments on Kevin's post here. Among many other things.]

• An idea whose time is gone. The WSJ editorialists look at an issue SCOTUS could knock out of the park soon: A Supreme Court Reckoning for Racial Gerrymanders. (WSJ gifted link)

  Here we go again. The Supreme Court keeps getting dragged into redistricting fights involving race, and this week the Justices will rehear a racial gerrymander challenge to Louisiana’s Congressional map. It could be a landmark that ends the cynical use of race by both major parties to advance their partisan interests.

  In recent years, the Justices have considered challenges to maps in Texas, South Carolina, Alabama and Louisiana. They punted last term on deciding the Louisiana case (Louisiana v. Callais) that they will reconsider Wednesday. They will also take up the question of whether the intentional creation of majority-minority districts violates the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause and the Fifteenth Amendment’s prohibition against abridging a citizen’s right to vote based on race. The right answer is yes.

  I'd say the right answer is "Hell, yes! What's wrong with you?"

  Not that it matters, but the linked article pictures a pro-racial gerrymander demonstration, captioned: "Black Louisiana voters and civil rights advocates call on SCOTUS to uphold a fair and representative congressional map in Louisiana v. Callais at Supreme Court." That's … very interesting wording.

  Apparently, oral arguments on Louisiana v. Callais are happening (literally) as I type.

• Where it's due. George Will ascribes: Primary credit for the Gaza ceasefire goes to the IDF — and Netanyahu. (WaPo gifted link)

  Unminced words are now required lest we flinch from acknowledging the stark — and for many people, unsettling — lesson of Israel’s achievement since Oct. 7, 2023. The lesson is: Often military might does, and often only it can, make room for diplomacy.

  Primary credit for the ceasefire between Israel and those who still aspire to murder it goes to the Israel Defense Forces. So, credit also goes to the prime minister who wielded the IDF with a properly austere regard for the opinions of mankind, Benjamin Netanyahu.

  Is GFW forgetting someone? A couple paragraphs down:

  The U.S. Declaration of Independence acknowledges an obligation to have “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind” (emphasis added). Indecent respect occurs when the opinions of mankind are not respectable, or when respecting them involves indecent consequences. To the Trump administration’s credit, the United States has enabled Israel’s victory by not restraining its self-defense. U.S. policy has too often restrained Ukraine since Russia attacked on Feb. 24, 2022.

  That's his only mention. George isn't a Trump fan, and I'm not either, so…

• Let's go to a Trump fan for balance Victor Davis Hanson in the Free Press lists Trump’s 10 Moves That Changed the Middle East. Just the first couple:

  1. Trump curtailed a considerable amount of Iranian oil income and its dispersal. He stopped, for the near future, the Iranian effort to build a bomb. Trump also allowed Israel to destroy Tehran’s air defenses, humiliate it militarily, and eliminate many of its top military officers and nuclear physicists. Thus, Israel’s half-century-long worries about Iranian nukes were addressed. At the same time, its stature as a military power soared to an all-time high—even if it became more isolated politically. Israel became more confident but also more sensitive to past, current, and future American military and political support—or pressure.
  2. Trump allowed Benjamin Netanyahu to destroy Hamas, cripple Hezbollah, and retaliate at will against the Houthis. That liberation led to general dejection among Israel’s enemies and a resurgence in Netanyahu’s own political fortunes. And that rise of Israel and the collapse of the Iranian terrorist network—the “ring of fire”—explain the greater chances for a ceasefire and possibly a peace. Trump allowed no daylight between Israel and the U.S., which, under the Biden administration, may have sent the wrong signals to Hamas prior to October 7.

  So read the other eight and see what you think.

I can relate:

xkcd: Physics Insight:

Mouseover: "When Galileo dropped two weights from the Leaning Tower of Pisa, they put him in the history books. But when I do it, I get 'detained by security' for 'injuring several tourists.'"

I also proved that electrical charge was quantized by measuring the terminal velocity of microscopic charged oil drops in an electric field, but the Nobel Committee was unimpressed.

Also of note:

• More good Nobel news. And it's in economics, as explained by Jon Murphy at Econlib. 2025 Nobel: Growth Through Technology and Culture.

  One of the big mysteries of human history is the so-called “hockey-stick of prosperity.” That is, the fact that, for much of human history, standards of living were virtually unchanged. Very little separated the Roman citizen in 1AD from the British citizen in 1700. But, starting in the 1700s, standards of living skyrocketed.

  From 1AD to 1700AD, few changes happened: sails and animal-powered transport dominated, medical science hadn’t advanced much, and machinery was unknown. From 1700 to 1800, changes were beginning: mechanical engines were introduced and the Industrial Revolution began. Between 1800 to 1900, the world went from horse and buggy to steam engines. Between 1900 and 1960, humanity went from automobiles to planes to landing on the moon.² Diseases were eradicated, lives were improved. Real poverty fell from around 90% of the global population to less than 10%. Nothing like this had happened before, and it kept happening. Even the most optimistic economists at the time had trouble explaining it.

  Enter Mokyr, Aghion, and Howitt. Collectively, their work helped explain why this growth happened, why it happened where it did, and how it is sustainable.

  

  I recently read a (very long) book titled Capitalism and its Critics; if you missed it, my report is here, Amazon link at your right. Executive summary: even though the author displays an obligatory "hockey-stick" graph, most of the book focuses on the "critics" doing their best to ignore and obstruct the forces involved in pulling billions out of poverty and its associated miseries.

• They gotta protect their phoney-baloney jobs, so… I'm pessimistic about this query posed by Greg Lukianoff, Samuel J. Abrams, and Adam Goldstein: Is Higher Education even interested in reform? They, in their roles at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), are no friends to the various governmental efforts to push institutions of higher ed around.

  But we’ve also been pretty clear, from 25 years of advocacy, that higher education badly needs improvement. And we’ve seen some positive signs. A number of university presidents seem to understand that the moment demands reform: on free speech, institutional neutrality, intellectual pluralism, and transparency.

  Indeed, we’ve been told more times than we can count that a “vibe shift” happened last fall, and that reform is essentially already a done deal. But we think those with the biggest vested interest in campus — professors and administrators — often don’t seem to have gotten the memo. At the faculty level, particularly in the humanities, the reflex too often remains obstructive.

  No institution better embodies that reflex than the American Association of University Professors (AAUP). Under its current leadership — President Todd Wolfson, who frames criticism of academia as part of “right-wing forces… striving to dismantle our institutions” — the AAUP has responded to legitimate calls for reform with a mix of denial and deflection. “Professors are not the enemy,” Wolfson recently declared. “Fascists are.”

  Performing an Orwellian translation on Wolfson's declaration: "Professors are not the enemy. Undesirables are."

  I've noticed that the leftiest faculty members are the ones who tend to gravitate toward unions. Others tend to just want to do their jobs.

• But on the other side… There's good, bad, and ugly in the Trump Administration, and Neal McCluskey finds it in the latest: Higher Ed Compact Is More of the Same, Worse. Skipping to the ugly:

  The compact’s core threat to institutional freedom is the intellectual diversity component, which gets right to what is supposed to be the heart of the academic enterprise: the pursuit of truth. While the ivory tower leans far to the left, the idea of federal authorities being the arbiters of “correct” balance is frightening. Not only could an administration be biased in its judgment of balance, but the evidence in a given field might simply support left-leaning conclusions. If so, balance should not be imposed on it.

  Of course, politics is not a simple left-right binary or even a diamond. For instance, we have numerous flavors of conservatism: neocon, paleocon, and natcon. Should Washington ensure that they are all found in the classroom proportionate to their share of the general population? And what if people hold positions that would put them in different camps on different issues, like a libertarian who favors tight borders or a progressive who defends gun rights? Which pile of beans do they go into during intellectual diversity counting?

  Leave pigeonholing to the Ornithology Department. If you have one.

• AyJay for the win. Alan Jacobs (at Baylor U) was apparently asked to show some solidarity in anti-Compact activism. He says he has one condition.

  Dear Colleague,

  I understand that you wish me to participate in your protests against the Trump administration’s proposed “compact” with American universities. I will do so on one condition: that you openly acknowledge (a) that you were completely comfortable with the Obama and Biden administrations’ use of “Dear Colleague” letters — e.g. — to strongarm universities into supporting their and your preferred political outcomes, and (b) that a chief purpose of your current protests is to ensure that people with my social, religious, and aesthetic views remain unemployable in your universities. 

  Sincerely,

  Your Colleague

  I hope his colleagues are suitably abashed.

I fell in love with Diane Keaton in 1977, while watching her in Annie Hall.

And then I broke up with her while watching Looking for Mr. Goodbar later that same year.

The web is full of remembrances, but this one at the Free Press is kind of special: Woody Allen Remembers Diane Keaton.

Post-1977 I wasn't obsessive about watching her movies, but she really lit up most of the ones I saw.

Also of note:

• Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. If it hadn't been already taken in 1841, that could have been the title of Kamala's campaign memoir, amirite? That's what came to mind when reading Guy Denton's report of the Washington D.C. stop on her book tour: Kamala Harris’s Grand Delusions.

  ‘Some people have said I was the most qualified candidate ever to run for president.”

  This is a real quote from Kamala Harris, though it could easily be mistaken for a line from a Saturday Night Live parody. She delivered it with total earnestness at the Warner Theatre in Washington, D.C., last Thursday night. The crowd replied with boisterous cheers rather than howls of laughter.

  And:

  Interviewer Kara Swisher took the stage first. When she introduced Harris, the crowd exploded into a thunderous roar. Everywhere, audience members held their cellphones aloft, desperate to record a few precious moments of Harris in the flesh. As the cheers grew louder, people pounded their fists in excitement and applauded frantically. Such eruptions were so frequent throughout the night that it would be an understatement to simply label the crowd partisan. For those in attendance, this was a religious experience akin to witnessing a sacred figure descend from the heavens. The hope that their savior could still one day become president was palpable.

  "The Madness of Crowds", indeed.

• Kraken released, at last. Back in 2020-2021, I was more than slightly peeved at conspiracy-theorizing about the election being "stolen" from Donald Trump. A goodly fraction of my peevishness was taken by allegations of fraudulent results being (somehow) generated by voting machines supplied by Dominion Voting Systems. (If you're interested in a sampling: here, here, here, here, here, here, here, … and, well, that's enough.)

  But there is big recent news: Dominion Voting sold to company run by ex-GOP election official. (archive.today link)

  Dominion Voting Systems — the voting machine behemoth that President Trump and his allies baselessly attacked after the 2020 election — has been sold to a Missouri-based company run by a former Republican election official, Axios has learned.

  And (indeed) all my links to Dominion's old content now send you to Liberty Vote. A message from that "former Republican election official", Scott Leiendecker, begins:

  Today, I am proud to announce Liberty Vote — a 100% American‐owned election technology company dedicated to restoring trust in our elections. Our mission is clear: every vote must be secure, fair, and verifiable.

  I'd guess this means, at best, wild accusations of electoral fraud coming from the other side real soon now.

• The revolution will not be televised. And, according to Coleman Hughes, The History of Slavery Should Not Be Partisan.

  If you’ve been following American politics for the past five years, you may have noticed an unhealthy pattern: The left, which controls most cultural institutions, uses soft power to shape them in an ever more progressive direction. The right, which controls few cultural institutions but does possess political power, passes vague and heavy-handed policies intended to undo the left’s handiwork (and then some).

  Core to this pattern is the fact that the left tends to view the institutions it controls as politically neutral when, in fact, they are stamped throughout with their own sacred values. The right, in turn, tends to see their scorched-earth responses as justified by a sense of powerlessness over the leftward direction of American culture.

  Yup. Coleman does a good job finding the good parts and bad parts of President Trump's recent screed against the Smithsonian for daring to suggest that slavery was a bad thing.

• I'm not proud of it, but this headline that made me chuckle: More Marijuana Users Are Crash Dummies. (That's from the WSJ editorial board, usually more staid.) (WSJ gifted link)

  How much social and public-health damage will Americans suffer before doing a U-turn on marijuana promotion? A new study finds that more than 40% of drivers who died in car accidents in one U.S. county over the last six years had elevated levels of the drug in their blood.

  Researchers from Wright State University analyzed driver autopsy results from car crashes in Montgomery County, Ohio, between January 2019 and September 2024. More than four in 10 tested positive for pot’s psychoactive ingredient THC, with an average level of 30.7 nanograms. That’s more than six times the level most states use to define impairment.

  As my stoner friends might say: Whoa.

Recently on the book blog:

This new book from Steven Pinker concerns an area of his cognitive-science research. As sometimes happens, it has the feel of material he's previously tried out in a lecture hall on Harvard students. Down to occasional amusing cartoons, anecdotes, and examples taken from pop culture.

See the subtitle for his topic: "common knowledge". It's a bland descriptive term for something that might seem a little offbeat and specialized. He describes it upfront in his preface, first paragraph:

As a cognitive scientist, I have spent my life thinking about how people think. So the ultimate subject of my fascination would have to be how people think about what other people think, and how they think about what other people think they think, and how they think about what other people think they think they think. As dizzying as this cogitation may seem, we engage in it every day, at least tacitly, and in the limit this state of awareness has a technical name, common knowledge.

Reader, he's not kidding. "Common knowledge" is a real thing, and Pinker shows that once you start looking for it, you see it everywhere, and it explains a lot about our social interactions and thought processes. And note that the recursion implied in his description really is (conceptually) infinite ("turtles all the way down" occurs later in the book). Although our brains tend to peter out when trying to unwind more than a handful of levels.

The book gets into game theory pretty quickly; the famous Prisoner's Dilemma comes out to play as a simple example of thinking about what the other guy is thinking, who's thinking about what you're thinking he's thinking about, and …

Pinker reports on some of his own research, too. And it made me glad that I've never been asked to bend my brain in one of his experiments.

I'll report my slight disagreement on one matter: when discussing how we communicate knowledge non-verbally (and sometimes involutarily), via laughter, crying, blushing, and facial expressions, he states (p. 197): "People seldom laugh when they’re alone."

Wha? Steve, I'm (alas) alone most of the time these days, and I manage to laugh quite a bit!

To be fair, he mentions that solitary laughter will be "usually in the presence of virtual people": on the TV/computer screen or in reading material. OK, you somewhat saved yourself there, Steve.

So, bottom line: an unexpectedly illuminating topic, and Pinker does a fine job of demonstrating its ubiquity and usefulness. Things get slightly repetitive and hand-wavy in the final chapter, but that's OK.

Michael F. Cannon outlines the Only Defensible Obamacare Deal. (archive.today link)

Indeed, so what do you propose, Mike?

Well, there's more at the link. Michael decries the insanity of subsidizing Obamacare for people earning up to $600K/year, but if (temporarily) extending that giveaway is the price to pay for allowing people to choose better, cheaper plans, he says: go for it.

I am doubtful (however) that Dems will not relentlessly demagogue any such proposal, they'll find plenty of support in the media, and we'll wind up where we are.

But it's nice to imagine a better scenario, and it just might work.

Also of note:

• In the wilds of Hollywood, Florida… Dave Barry suffers Pants Anxiety at that town's Hard Rock Hotel & Casino. After mentioning "Hotel Shower Control Anxiety", Dave gets to the real problem.

  Everything went smoothly until, having changed into our evening attire, we were walking to the casino theater. That was when, out of the blue, Michelle said four words to me — four words that I was utterly unprepared for; four words that, if you consider yourself to be a happily married man, you never want to hear your wife say.

  The words were: “Are those new pants?”

  Of course — you veteran married men know this — the reason she was asking if they were new pants was NOT that she wanted to know if they were new pants. She definitely knew that they were new pants. What she was actually asking me, translated from Wifespeak, was: “What the hell are those pants?”

  So I said, “Is there something wrong with these pants?”

  And, after a brief pause, she said, “No, they’re fine.” Which of course meant “Yes, there is something wrong with those pants.”

  So I said, “What’s wrong with these pants?”

  And she said, “They look like sweatpants.”

  Dave's mistake was to shell out $128 (MSRP) for a pair of Vuori's Meta Pant Classic Fit pants. And (sorry, Dave) they really do have that sweatpants look.

  On the bright side, though, his post now makes his entire trip to Hollywood a business expense, and therefore deductible. And the pants too.

But all indications are that it's a good thing.

The Free Press profiles The Woman Who Took on a Dictator—and Won a Nobel Peace Prize. And you can believe I cheered up even more when I read María Corina Machado's [MCM] response to interviewer Jonathan Jakubowicz [JJ]:

I've boldfaced a particularly good bit.

The WSJ editorialists also hail A Nobel for Venezuela’s Iron Lady.

Ian Vásquez at Cato is also a fan: Maria Corina Machado, Venezuelan Champion of Freedom, Wins the Nobel Peace Prize.

Hope this eventually translates into regime change in Caracas.

Also of note:

• It looks like popcorn-passing will continue for the foreseeable future. No sane person wants this to continue, but nevertheless, Jonathan Turley notes, it probably will. Purge Politics: Jeffries Pledges Legal Retaliation When Democrats Take Power.

  On MSNBC’s “All In,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) doubled down on his pledge of legal retaliation against Trump officials and associates if Democrats retake power. He noted that Trump “sycophants” in the Department of Justice do not have immunity and will be pursued. The statement comes after the indictment of Letitia James for mortgage fraud. The statement suggests that the country could be in store for waves of purge politics in which parties fire or prosecute officials from the prior administration.

  The comments come after the charging of Letitia James for mortgage fraud, a move widely viewed as retaliation for her own lawfare record.

  You know where they do this sort of thing? Venezuela, that's where.

• Better (very) late than never, I suppose. Bradley A. Smith and Eric Wang give one small cheer for the possibility of progress: IRS Scandal Makes It to Court. (WSJ gifted link)

  Remember the Internal Revenue Service scandal of 2013, when it came out that the IRS under the Obama administration had targeted conservative nonprofits for harassment? In a little-noticed but immensely consequential First Amendment decision Sept. 30, a federal judge ruled that the IRS regulations on nonprofits’ political activity are unconstitutional.

  It’s a major free-speech victory nearly 15 years in the making. In the case, Freedom Path v. IRS, Judge Jia M. Cobb, a Biden appointee, concluded what the nonprofit community has long known: The IRS rules concerning whether certain nonprofit organizations have engaged in too much political activity are unworkable and unconstitutionally vague.

  And unworkable and vague rules are useful tools for abusive government.

• On the LFOD watch. Just a reminder that Constitutional protections aren't the current administration's strong suit either: AL.com reports Trump gets clowned for apparently thinking basic legal principle is a person: ‘Who?’.

  But our state's junior senator also scores some points against an equally clueless apparatchik, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem:

  Noem was asked about the legal principle when she testified before the Senate Homeland Security & Government Affairs Committee in May.

  Sen. Maggie Hassan, D-N.H., asked Noem, “what is habeas corpus?”

  “Well, habeas corpus is a constitutional right the president has to be able to remove people from this country,” Noem responded.

  Hassan interrupted the secretary to give the correct definition.

  “No, let me stop you ... habeas corpus is the legal principle that requires that the government provide a public reason for detaining and imprisoning people,” the senator said.

  “If not for that protection, the government could simply arrest people, including American citizens, and hold them indefinitely for no reason,” Hassan continued.

  “Habeas corpus is the foundational right that separates free societies like America from police states like North Korea,” she said. “As a senator from the Live Free or Die State, this matters a lot to me and my constituents and to all Americans ...”

  Well, congratulations for a particularly gratuitous quote of our state motto, Maggie.

  Back in 2019, we pointed out that Maggie, like every other Senate Democrat, backed a constitutional amendment that would significantly curtail freedom of speech. Where's your LFOD spirit now, Maggie?

And today's headline is an apocryphal quote often attributed to Dwight Eisenhower. Certainly there's some wisdom to be found there.

Also of note:

• Is there a lonelier voice in the Senate than Rand Paul's? He's kind of a stickler for getting Congressional OK first: The Constitution Does Not Allow the President To Unilaterally Blow Suspected Drug Smugglers to Smithereens.

  Somewhere off the coast of Venezuela, a speedboat with 11 people on board is blown to smithereens. Vice President J.D. Vance announces that "killing cartel members who poison our fellow citizens is the highest and best use of our military."

  When challenged that killing citizens without due process is a war crime, the vice president responded that he "didn't give a shit."

  Sometimes in fits of anger, loud voices will say they don't care about niceties such as due process—they just want to kill bad guys. For a brief moment, all of us may share that anger and may even embrace revenge or retribution.

  But over 20,000 people are murdered in the U.S. each year, and yet somehow we find a way to a dispassionate dispensation of justice that includes legal representation for the accused and jury trial.

  Senator Paul also points out that in the American legal system, drug smugglers do not face the death penalty. (He adds the word "generally", but … when was the last drug smuggler executed?)

  Apparently there's been talk of using Congress's Constitutional power to grant letters of Marque and Reprisal against drug smugglers. That would be kind of cool, but (unfortunately) the actual legislative proposal shuffles this Congressional power over to the President. Turning a Cool Idea into Bad Idea! And probably Constitutionally dubious.

• For those claiming that Bari Weiss's Free Press is just another MAGA site. Tina Brown explains Why America Doesn’t Care About Trump’s Graft. After righteously lambasting the comics going to the murder/torture regime of Saudi Arabia …

  What boggles me is why MAGA adorers, and the American populace in general, seem to care so little about the raging kleptocracy that is business as usual in the Trump circle. The president’s net worth has nearly doubled in the eight months since he returned to the Oval Office.

  In May, the United Arab Emirates’ ruling family deposited $2 billion into the crypto fund co-founded by Eric and Donald Trump Jr. with, among others, the Middle East special envoy Steve Witkoff’s fresh-faced son, Zach, and a fourth musketeer, Zak Folkman, who used to run a company for men called Date Hotter Girls—and lo!—two weeks later, the White House gave the UAE access to a payload of the world’s most advanced and scarce artificial intelligence (AI) computer chips, despite national security concerns that they might be shared with our biggest adversary, China. A New York Times investigation described the transaction as “eviscerating the boundary between private enterprise and government policy in a manner without precedent in modern American history.”

  He's a crook. It was nice that he seems to have helped get Israeli hostages released, though.

• Good ideas that will not be enacted. Veronique de Rugy writes a needed revelation: Dems' Shutdown Demand Won't Lower Health Care Costs. Here's What Will.

  At the heart of the budget standoff that has the government shut down is Democrats' insistence on extracting a laundry list of policy changes, including locking in the supposedly temporary, COVID-19-era expansion of Obamacare premium tax credits (or "Biden COVID-19 credits"). In essence, Democrats think the best way to lower health care costs is to direct more funding to insurance companies. This idea could not be more wrong. The credits are costly, poorly targeted and riddled with fraud, and do nothing to stop rising premiums.

  Start with the price tag. Based on Congressional Budget Office estimates, permanently extending the Biden COVID-19 credits would cost about $410 billion, including interest, over the next decade. Total spending over 10 years would amount to $488 billion. Funds would go straight to insurance companies to mask the real cost of coverage.

  And let's be clear: Those insurance premiums are rising for reasons subsidies can't fix. According to the Economic Policy Innovation Center's Gadai Bulgac, insurers themselves say individual-market premiums are on track to rise by roughly 18% in 2026, driven by the familiar culprits: soaring medical care costs, nurse and physician shortages, expensive specialty drugs like Ozempic, an aging population, wider use of high-end diagnostics, new tariffs on pharmaceuticals and the lingering effects of inflation.

  Vero advocates, instead:

  1. Let the pandemic add-on expire as planned. The original Obamacare subsidies will remain, and taxpayers will still cover most of the premiums for low- and moderate-income enrollees.
  2. Address the root causes of high costs. Expand the supply of care by modernizing scope-of-practice rules to reflect what nurses and physicians' assistants do well. Adopt site-neutral payments to even out billing in different settings. Remove tariffs and trade barriers that raise drug and equipment costs. Speed approval of biosimilar and generic drugs.
  3. Restore the exchanges' integrity. End the auto-enrollments without verification, reconcile advance credits promptly and recover improper payments.
  4. Bring back consumer pressure and patient choice. That means improving price transparency and expanding access to more affordable alternatives such as association health plans and short-term renewable policies.

  I would add: "Require that high school graduates be able to explain the acronym 'TANSTAAFL'".

• Could we just abolish the FCC, already? David Beito writes on its censorious use by FDR and the Quashing of Free Radio.

  Roosevelt was determined to silence dissenting voices on the radio. He adeptly manipulated the revolving door of regulators and industry executives and executed behind-the-scenes intrigue using intermediaries to conceal the appearance of censorship while embracing its effects. 

  By 1933, big broadcasters eagerly aligned themselves with the new administration, and in many cases became regulators themselves. Former FRC commissioner — CBS vice president — Henry A. Bellows was a Democrat and Harvard classmate of FDR’s. In his official role, he promised to reject any broadcast “that in any way was critical of any policy of the Administration,” and announced that all stations were “at the disposal of President Roosevelt and his administration.” Bellows specified that CBS had a duty to support the president, right or wrong, and privately assured presidential press secretary Stephen Early that “the close contact between you and the broadcasters has tremendous possibilities of value to the administration, and as a life-long Democrat, I want to pledge my best efforts in making this cooperation successful.”

  My report on Beito's book, The New Deal’s War on the Bill of Rights, is here.

• A thorny topic. It's that time of year again, and later today I expect to see greater-than-usual self-righteous posturing at my local library. Like me, John Geradi is not a fan of The Anti-Democratic Streak of ‘Banned Books Week’. (archive.today link)

  It’s Banned Books Week, the celebration of blue-haired librarians cosplaying as champions of the First Amendment against evil conservatives who dare question the appropriateness of sexually explicit, pro-trans literature for five-year-olds. To summarize some of the silliness ably highlighted by NR’s Vahaken Mouradian on the subject: No “Banned Book” in America is actually banned; we still have an operative First Amendment, and every book on the American Library Association’s list of the top ten “Challenged Books” of 2024 is readily available on Amazon or at thousands of libraries and bookstores throughout the country. ALA’s “Banned Books” appellation gets applied not merely to books that are actually removed from library shelves, but to books that receive mere complaints or “challenges,” in the ALA’s parlance.

  But there’s an underdiscussed element to “Banned Books Week” and its focus on “challenges”: an anti-democratic streak. In public libraries and schools throughout the country, the argument is being advanced that government-run libraries should be floating fiefdoms with no accountability to anyone: not the taxpayers, not the voters, not the representatives whom they elect to run libraries. The “Banned Books” debate is yet another front in the war between ordinary citizens and the professional managerial class.

  Here in the Granite State, we had our own library brouhaha down in Rye earlier this year. See if you can follow the tortured trail!

Recently on the book blog:

I like books about language, and this one's back-cover blurbs include praise from people I've heard of and like: Matt Ridley and John McWhorter. And yet, I found it kind of a slog. The author, Laura Spinney, occasionally tells some interesting parts of the story, but there are long stretches of dull. (I hasten to say: that's probably on me, not her.)

The ancient language that went global isn't Fortran, surprisingly, it's "Proto-Indo-European", born in the Ukrainian steppes thousands of years ago. No written records exist, and its features and vocabulary are reconstructed via (very) educated guesses from the myriad languages descended from it. In addition to the classic methods of anthropology and linguistics, modern researchers can now work with a powerful new tool: analysis of DNA extracted from tombs and graves show, roughly, who's descended from whom, and patterns of human migration over the centuries.

That's not always an easy collaboration, because according to Spinney, "linguists, archaeologists, and geneticists are barbarians to each other." (The image that generated for me was the opening battle of Gladiator.) The fields are occasionally influenced/polluted by racial/national politics. (And Spinney's concluding chapter discusses the damage done to research by the Russian invasion of Ukraine.)

The book is full of "didja know" snippets. E.g., ancient Hungarians used cow bones for ice skates. The reason major rivers flowing into the Black Sea begin with "D" (Danube, Dniester, Dnieper, Don) is due to an ancient Iranic word for "river", danu. And more. But alas, these nuggets are buried in a lot of stuff I didn't find of interest. (To repeat: me, not Spinney.)

I'm not proud of my lazy reply, but my state's senior senator served up a fat pitch hanging right over the plate:

"... everyday Americans will be forced to foot the bill for skyrocketing health care costs."

Instead, you'd prefer that everyday American taxpayers be forced to foot the bill. Be honest and say that.

— Paul Sand (@punsalad) October 8, 2025

Unfortunately, it appears this morn that, as Noah Rothman says, The GOP Is Letting Democrats Win the Shutdown.

Why couldn't MTG have been satisfied with exposing the Jewish space lasers?

Also of note:

• To be fair, it's pretty easy to lose tiny things. Ed Morrissey points out something Too Fun to Miss: CBS, Progressives Lose Their Minds Over Bari. Triggered by this tweet:

  I mean the amazing thing is that they mentioned Dan rather
  
  There are at least a dozen other reporters they could’ve named. Ffs, they used to have Walter Cronkite. Instead they named the guy who resigned in disgrace after peddling fake documents. https://t.co/4FKvXjk6ST

  — (((Aaron Walker))) (@AaronWorthing) October 7, 2025

  Ahem. Bari Weiss now runs CBS News in large part because of Dan Rather. The decision by CBS News and 60 Minutes II to use fabricated Texas Air National Guard documents was an attempt to throw a presidential election by using a bad campaign smear to impugn George W. Bush's military record -- just a few years after cheering on an admitted draft dodger in Bill Clinton. Dan Rather fronted that segment, and then refused to admit the corruption behind it, even after CBS News repudiated it. 

  Dan was occasionally fun to listen to for his faux-folksy quips. E.g., "Don't taunt the alligator until after you've crossed the creek."

• Not a Gilligan's Island joke. Well, not a direct one, anyway. Thomas W. Hazlett declares Brendan Carr Veers off Course in the Manner of the SS Minow. (WSJ gifted link)

  Brendan Carr wasn’t the first chairman of the Federal Communications Commission to threaten broadcasters with losing their licenses over programming he didn’t like. In the most famous speech ever delivered by a U.S. regulator, Newton Minow stood before the Las Vegas convention of the National Association of Broadcasters on May 9, 1961, complained about the state of television, and demanded that broadcasters shape up.

  Minow declaimed against what he called the “vast wasteland”: “a procession of game shows, formula comedies about totally unbelievable families, blood and thunder, mayhem, violence, sadism, murder, Western bad men, Western good men, private eyes, gangsters, more violence, and cartoons.” He told the broadcasters ominously: “Gentlemen, your trust accounting with your beneficiaries is overdue. . . . There is nothing permanent or sacred about a broadcast license.”

  The next morning, the front page of the New York Times blared: “F.C.C. Head Bids TV Men Reform ‘Vast Wasteland’: Minow Charges Failure in Public Duty—Threatens to Use License Power.” Minow’s attack generated no First Amendment kickback. The only dissent came from “Gilligan’s Island,” the 1964-67 CBS sitcom that depicted the SS Minnow as a vessel gone wildly off-course on its three-hour cruise.

  Instead Minow was treated as a hero, winning the George Peabody Award in 1961 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2016. (He died in 2023 at 97.)

  Ah, the good old days, when government bureaucrats were able to threaten broadcasters, with the implicit approval of other news outlets.

  Not that it matters, but: I'm pretty sure I never watched a single episode of Gilligan's Island all the way through.

• And in more recent abuses… It can now be told (by J.D. Tuccille): TSA watchlists were used as tools of political warfare.

  The Trump administration receives well-justified criticism for using government power to punish political foes such as former FBI director James Comey, funder of left-wing causes George Soros, and law firms linked to the Democratic Party. But don't forget that former President Joe Biden's administration also weaponized the state against its enemies. It just did so quietly, behind the scenes, and with the approval of much of the media. The Biden administration not only leaned on tech companies to muzzle critics of the powers-that-be, but it also turned due-process-free watchlists into means of harassing people it didn't like.

  On September 30, "the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announced the results of an internal investigation uncovering widespread abuses committed by Biden administration officials, who weaponized the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) against innocent American citizens," according to a TSA press release.

  The Biden administration is accused of adding people who "resisted mask mandates on airplanes nearly six months after the CDC relaxed its indoor mask mandate" to watchlists that subjected them to extra security. It also watchlisted not just participants in the January 6, 2021 riot, but also those merely suspected of traveling to the Washington, D.C. area in sympathy with the protesters. "This targeted campaign of harassment continued through June 2021, six months after the events in question, despite no clear or immediate threat to aviation security." (Emphasis in original.)

  Nothing about this, as near as I can tell, at Techdirt. Doesn't fit their narrative, I guess.

• In case you were getting too cheerful… George Will wonders: What if a Russian victory in Ukraine were only the beginning? (WaPo gifted link)

  So, here are 119 pages of wartime reading: “If Russia Wins: A Scenario” by Carlo Masala, professor of international politics at Munich’s Bundeswehr University, which serves Germany’s armed forces. An immediate bestseller in Germany and then the Netherlands, the booklet has been published in London but not yet in America. His scenario is a literary device to frame a question: Suppose Russia’s victory in Ukraine “is only the beginning”?

  Masala’s scenario begins in March 2028, when two Russian brigades surge into Narva, Estonia’s third-largest city (population 57,000), on Russia’s border. Eighty-eight percent of the residents are Russian-speaking, and many have been supplied with smuggled small arms and machine guns.

  Simultaneously, Russian soldiers disguised as tourists take ferries to seize the Estonian coastal island of Hiiumaa. The attack on the three Baltic states, each a NATO member, has begun.

  GFW notes that we're not sending the right signals:

  Putin strolled down Donald Trump’s red carpet in Alaska, then took none of the steps regarding Ukraine that Trump said were necessary for Russia to avoid “very severe consequences.” Instead, Putin intensified Russian attacks.

  A connoisseur of Western dithering, Putin probably anticipated the response his current flurry of contemptuous aggressions has elicited. Trump has said: “I don’t love it.”

  Can you still get a Nobel Peace Prize if your foreign policy "dithering" encourages Putin?

• A heartfelt wish. Martin Gurri says We must resist the moral rot that has the left cheering for the death of its opponents.

  If we gaze down at the bloody ground, there is much to fear and much to regret.

  And it’s hard to tear our eyes away from the carnage and the moral madness around it.

  A young woman, Iryna Zarutska, while riding the light rail in Charlotte, North Carolina, was slashed to death by a multiple repeat offender. Because the perpetrator was black and homeless, and the young woman white, the city’s progressive mayor showered compassion on the killer but said not a word about the victim.

  A young man, Charlie Kirk, was assassinated as he engaged in open debate with students at a college in Orem, Utah. Because Kirk was a conservative MAGA activist, the left side of the web lit up in celebration over the death of a husband and father of two.

  In Dallas, Texas, a sniper targeted an ICE facility, killing one nameless detainee and severely wounding two others. Although the shooter left behind a trail of angry anti-ICE exhortations, the liberal media declared his motives to be a profound mystery.

  I can easily summon additional incidents, additional deaths — children at prayer in a Catholic school in Minneapolis, a health insurance executive going to work in Manhattan, two young persons employed by the Israeli Embassy in Washington, DC.

  In every case, the blood on the ground was that of innocents. Ordinary human beings — people with families, jobs, loves and hates, future dreams — were slaughtered for reasons comprehensible only to the politically deranged.

  Kirk’s murder evoked a standing ovation from the left. Zarutska’s violent death elicited a creepy and contemptible silence. Some lives, it’s clear, are valued less than others.

  Click over for Martin's sensible recommendations.

Recently on the movie blog:

Co-written and directed by Ethan Coen, half of the genius behind The Big Lebowski, Fargo, Blood Simple, etc.! What could go wrong? Especially since it's free-to-me on Peacock?

Well, I liked it OK, but only because I've inured myself to tolerate all the stuff you can read about in the IMDB "Parent's Guide". (Not everyone has the same attitude, the critics at Rotten Tomatoes are pretty brutal.)

Honey O'Donahue (Margaret Qualley) is a private eye out in Bakersfield. Things kick off when a prospective client, Mia Novotny, is found dead from an apparent auto accident, her car busting through the guardrails on a lonely desert road. But Honey had promised to help Mia, so she feels duty calls on her to do at least a perfunctory investigation.

Which opens a can of worms. For example, Honey's led to the "Four-Way Church", run by a charismatic priest (Chris Evans), who's quickly revealed to be sleazy in multiple ways. (A total inversion of Captain America.) She makes the acquaintance of MG Falcone (Aubrey Plaza), a cop who manages the evidence room, and… that relationship develops pretty quickly.

Honey utters some very good lines that made me smile, straight out of the hard-boiled shamus handbook. The plot is twisty. (I had a lot of "I didn't see that coming" moments.) Things get personal when (near the end) Honey's niece goes missing. Given all the other bodies that have piled up at that point (this YouTuber counts eight in all) , Honey's more than slightly concerned.

Now, of course, I have that old Carl Perkins song stuck in my head.

If you want a vision of the future, imagine a commie folk music ukulele Hootenanny Night at the Patrice Lumumba Portlandia Assisted Living Collective crushing a human face, forever

— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) October 7, 2025

(Orwell reference noted and appreciated.)

Also of note:

• "If you think health care is expensive now, just wait until it's free." Prophetic words, indeed, from the late P.J. O'Rourke. My twitter feed (which includes some Democrats) are full of dire warnings that the Obamacare system they designed and passed without a single GOP vote demands more taxpayer cash, fast.

  They also point to a recent poll by the Kaiser Family Foundation, whose news release is headlined "Despite Budget Concerns, Three-Quarters of Public Say Congress Should Extend the Enhanced ACA Tax Credits Set to Expire Next Year, Including Most Republicans and MAGA Supporters".

  The preface about "despite budget concerns" would seem to imply that the pollsters made the taxpayer cost explicit in their polling question.

  Psych! They didn't. Here's the question that got 78% of respondents to agree:

  As you may know, in 2021 Congress increased the financial help provided through tax credits available to some people who purchase health insurance through the Affordable Care Act marketplace to help them afford their premiums. These enhanced tax credits are set to expire at the end of 2025.

  Do you think Congress should extend these enhanced tax credits, or should they let these enhanced tax credits expire?

  Wrapped in gauzy assurances about "help" (twice in a single question), with nothing mentioned about cost, it's a query designed to engender agreement. ("What's wrong with you?! Don't you want to help people?!")

  Ah, well. Over at Cato, Ebenezer Scrooge Adam N. Michel provides no less than Six Reasons to Not Extend the Enhanced Obamacare Subsidies. And here's number one:

  Costs almost half a trillion dollars. The Congressional Budget Office recently estimated that permanently extending the COVID-19 subsidies would increase the deficit by $350 billion over ten years, plus another roughly $60 billion in additional interest costs to finance the spending. Total spending, a better measure of the size of government, would increase by more than $488 billion. Sarah Wagoner at the Economic Policy Innovation Center notes that this extra cost is more than Congress spends on many federal agencies, such as the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) or the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

  And if that's not enough, there are, as promised, five more reasons offered at the link.

• Instead of charades, I'd suggest Twister. But otherwise, Dominic Pino has a good idea: Congress Should Eliminate the ‘Shutdown’ Charade.

  The federal government has been out of money since 1835. That was the last year in which the U.S. had no national debt. So it might seem a little silly to say that the government has to shut down because it ran out of money on October 1. And, well, it is silly.

  Government shutdowns are not a requirement of the Constitution or of common sense. They are the product of the interaction of statutes that Congress can and should change. Government shutdowns don’t improve the quality of governance or the country’s fiscal health, and Congress should end them forever.

  Dominic mentions one proposal that appeals to me:

  Senator Rand Paul (R., Ky.) introduced a bill that would automatically pass funding at 94 percent of the previous year’s level if the appropriations deadline passes. Then, every 90 days, funding would automatically be cut by 1 percent unless Congress passed a new appropriations package.

  To munge a Samuel Johnson quote, that would concentrate their minds wonderfully.

• If you had to pick one… Tyler Cowen reveals Donald Trump’s Worst Idea. After reviewing Trump's fiddling with Intel, MP Materials, Nvdia, Pfizer, …

  The word socialism is overused in political debate, but during his 10 months in office, Trump has certainly put us on the path toward it. And in case you’re wondering, this is a bad thing: American business has been world-beating for a long time now, in large part because we avoid these sorts of public-private arrangements, which are common in faltering European economies. A dose of government ownership and the associated politicization are not what American industry and innovation need.

  There’s a reason we have a private sector to begin with, which is that market realities force companies to efficiently deliver good products at a reasonable price, or else go out of business due to competition.

  Now think of everything you know about the federal government and how it operates. Do you observe our own government being successful in cutting costs? Keeping its debt and finances in line? Enforcing standards of accountability? It is laughable to even pose such questions. So given those realities, why should government ownership of private corporations be such a good idea?

  Unfortunately, this is the road we're on. And it's not as if Democrats are going to save us. But it does give me an excuse to post, once again, the cartoon I had ChatGPT draw me back in August:

  

• Just a reminder. If you're ever tempted to believe the rosy initial cost estimates made by advocates of new choo-choo projects, you might want to bookmark the Antiplanner's latest: Brightline West Cost Overrun Reaches 121%

  Brightline West, which originally estimated that building a high-speed rail line from Los Angeles to Las Vegas would cost $8 billion, is now admitting the cost will be at least $21.5 billion. After adjusting for inflation, that’s a 121 percent cost increase.

  Back in 2020, Brightline tried to sell $3.2 billion in bonds to pay for the project but got no takers. Apparently, investors weren’t interested in funding a project whose projected costs were unrealistically low and whose revenues weren’t likely to ever cover those costs.

  Instead, Brightline managed to convince the Biden administration to give it a $3 billion grant. It also sold $3.5 billion worth of private activity bonds, which are government bonds used to fund private programs. Supposedly the government doesn’t guarantee the bonds but buyers don’t have to pay taxes on the interest they earn from them. That’s not likely to be an issue in Brightline’s case as the company probably won’t ever earn enough revenue to pay back the bonds.

  About the only good thing here is that the western terminus of the proposed line is in Rancho Cucamonga, quite frankly the best city name in the USA.

• You say that as if that's a bad thing, Karl. Techdirt contributor Karl Bode seems upset: Paramount Formally Hires Bari Weiss To Turn What’s Left Of CBS News Into A Soggy Right Wing Propaganda And Troll Farm.

  It’s super curious how the folks most vocal about being cancelled or having their “Conservative viewpoints silenced” now own or control most major U.S. media companies. Almost as if their claims of being silenced have always been a bullshit ploy to dominate the discourse on the back of something other than the quality of their ideas!

  As long predicted, Paramount/CBS owners, the Ellison family, formally announced that they’re hiring “contrarian” engagement troll Bari Weiss to run whatever’s left of CBS News after its disastrous and utterly feckless capitulation to the Trump administration. The $150 million purchase of Weiss’ shoddy blog comes as part of a massive Ellison family acquisition spree aimed at dominating what’s left of U.S. media.

  "Tech" content of this Techdirt article is zero. But it's long on juvenile insults and evidence-free allegations.

  Sample quote Karl found insightful from the Independent:

  “The imminent arrival of anti-woke and stridently pro-Israel “heterodox” pundit Bari Weiss as the editor-in-chief of CBS News has left the newsroom’s staff “literally freaking out,” with sources telling The Independent that the Tiffany Network is “not a good place right now.”

  I hope there's eventual video of the CBS newsroom staff literally freaking out.

Our Eye Candy du Jour is from Our World in Data, which wonders Does the news reflect what we die from?

And, yes, Betteridge's Law of Headlines seems to apply (click to embiggen):

The authors (Hannah Ritchie, Tuna Acisu, and Edouard Mathieu) explain:

Our headline above refers to the classic Mark Twain quote:

Be careful when you’re reading health books. You may die of a misprint.

Except, as Quote Investigator reveals, Twain never actually said that.

Also of note:

• I bring you tidings of great joy. And I do that by linking to Robby Soave, who says: Bari Weiss has won the war on wokeness in media.

  In the resignation letter announcing her departure from the Grey Lady in July 2020, the opinion journalist Bari Weiss memorably lamented that "Twitter is not on the masthead of the New York Times. But Twitter has become its ultimate editor."

  What Weiss meant was that the extremely progressive sensibilities of elite social media users—leftist activists, educators, journalists, Democratic campaign staffers, etc.—held undue sway over the range of views that could be printed in the opinion pages. This was a constant source of frustration for Weiss, a centrist thinker critical of the left whose mission was to bring some measure of ideological diversity to the paper. (In her letter, she bragged about having published independent and contrarian writers such as Jesse Singal, Glenn Loury, Thomas Chatterton Williams, and Reason's own Nick Gillespie.) But in the summer of 2020, the collective set of ideologies, habits, and preferences commonly referred to as wokeness still ruled the roost.

  Much has changed in the last few years, and they are about to change even more noticeably at another large media company. Weiss is set to become the editor in chief of CBS News, and parent company Paramount has also purchased The Free Press—the media company she built from scratch in the years since leaving The New York Times—for an eye-popping $150 million.

  grep tells me I've mentioned Bari 75 times over the past eight years. The earliest one gave a thumbs-up to her NYT column Three Cheers for Cultural Appropriation (archive.today link):

  These days our mongrel culture is at risk of being erased by an increasingly strident left, which is careering us toward a wan existence in which we are all forced to remain in the ethnic and racial lanes assigned to us by accident of our birth. Hoop earrings are verboten, as are certain kinds of button-down shirts. Yoga is dangerous. So are burritos and eyeliner.

  It’s no longer just the online hordes that will string you up for your unintentional sins, though the cost of that public shaming can be devastating. In Portland, Ore., activists recently created a list of “white-owned appropriative restaurants” for residents to boycott on the grounds that white people probably shouldn’t make banh mi or dosas. This summer, the University of Michigan posted a job for a “bias response team” employee to “enact cultural appropriation prevention initiatives.” I wonder if they’ll go after people for using algebra (thanks, Muslims).

  My comment at the time proposed a bargain: "I promise not to use eyeliner if I can still get burritos."

  There's a lot of dismissive snark and sloppy ideolgical pigeonholing going on. For example, this Slashdot story, headlined CBS News Was Just Taken Over By a Substack. Which deems Bari a "conservative-leaning Substack writer".

  Somewhat surprisingly, NPR (which still exists) manages to be more accurate:

  Over the years, she has described herself as a "radical centrist" and a "Jewish, center-left-on-most-things-person." In a 2024 TED Talk, she said she voted for Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney in one election, and Democratic candidates Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden in others.

  She went on to characterize her ideological views as pro-choice, pro-Israel and pro-gay marriage, "so much so that I'm actually in one myself." (Weiss married [Nellie] Bowles, a former Times tech reporter, in 2021 — the same year they cofounded The Free Press — and they have two children together.)

  So: Mazel tov, Bari.

• The WaPo drops a truth bomb. Their Editorial Board makes a long-overdue admission in the middle of The shutdown conversation no one wants.

  The real problem is that the Affordable Care Act was never actually affordable. President Barack Obama’s signature achievement allowed people to buy insurance on marketplaces with subsidies based on their income. The architects of the program assumed that risk pools would be bigger than they turned out to be. As a result, policies cost more than expected.

  Fine, but us right-wing cranks "expected" exactly that at the time.

• Warning: Goldwater quote ahead. Kevin D. Williamson writes on Desirable Things and Their Limits.

  In our political conversation, we have a tendency to lump things together in an unproductive way: vicious things and virtuous things both.

  For example, we hear a good deal about things such as bipartisanship, consensus, moderation, and civility. These are all desirable things, at least in some circumstances, but they are different kinds of desirable things, desirable in different ways for different reasons. Bipartisanship and consensus are not desirable in and of themselves, inasmuch as we can—and often do—see bipartisan consensus supporting very, very bad policies.

  Our national fiscal mess, for example, is the result of a bipartisan consensus, enduring if seldom stated, that it is better to borrow money for the time being in order to put off difficult and unpopular reforms to the entitlement system, the tax code, and legislative procedure. There was a fairly broad bipartisan consensus in favor of abortion rights, once upon a time, if you recall, while the nascent anti-abortion movement also had a bipartisan character in its early days, when Catholics leaned Democrat and Republican-leaning evangelicals were only starting to embrace the cause.

  Moderation is a virtue that is easy to mock, and you don’t have to be Barry Goldwater—“I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice! And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue!”—to find faults with its misapplication. Should a husband vow to be moderately faithful to his wife? Should a soldier show moderate courage and discipline?

  I'm old enough to remember people freaking out about that Goldwater line. I thought it was fine in 1964, at age 13. And I still do.

• No matter how much we might wish otherwise. Andy Kessler points out an Inconvenient (for some) Truth: Idiots Have Free Speech Too. (WSJ gifted link)

  Missed during the “public interest” Jimmy Kimmel canning calamity was the Federal Communications Commission’s Brendan Carr’s statement on CNBC: “I can tell you Jimmy Kimmel is no Johnny Carson.” So true. Carson’s “The Tonight Show” ran so your TV dial would, in New York anyway, be set to channel 4 in the morning—so you’d watch “The Today Show.” Who has a TV dial anymore?

  Now networks are stuck overpaying and overhyping overly political empty suits on late-night TV. ABC hasn’t been funny at night since Dick Cavett. Ratings for “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” have been plummeting—key demographics are down 70% over the past decade. He was probably toast already.

  It was Napoleon who likely said, “Never interrupt your opponent while he is making a mistake.” Instead—free speech be damned—Mr. Carr threatened to revoke ABC broadcasting licenses, and then President Trump piled on to take credit and also hassle NBC. An unnecessary mic drop for sure.

  Andy goes on to note:

  Even Hillary Clinton agrees, sort of. On Sept. 18, she told CNN, “You defend free speech in terrible times. You defend free speech that is used against holding people in power accountable through satire, humor, barbed attacks. You defend it when it is offensive.” You go girl! Except in 2016 she urged Congress to propose a constitutional amendment to nullify Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (2010), a free-speech and campaign-finance decision that protected a movie critical of her.

  Someone should ask her if she changed her mind about that.

• "Don’t send my boy to Harvard," the dying mother said. Minding the Campus notes the latest effort to increase the ideological diversity down in Cambridge: Harvard Hires Illustrious Academic. Quoting a Harvard Salient article:

  In its unending quest to prove that it remains the unrivaled beacon of Western civilization, Harvard University has announced the appointment of Dr. Kareem Khubchandani as a visiting associate professor in Gender and Sexuality Studies. Students, however, may find him better known by his scholarly sobriquet: LaWhore Vagistan.

  Dr. Khubchandani, whose curriculum vitae includes a Ph.D. in performance studies and an extensive body of drag performances, will teach two courses that promise to edify the Harvard undergraduate body. The fall semester offers Queer Ethnography, while the spring will provide RuPaulitics: Drag, Race, and Desire. At last, the Harvard name will be safely tethered to the intellectual heritage of “RuPaul’s Drag Race.”

  (This item's headline reference.)

I'm not proud, but I went for it anyway, with the assistance of straight-man/statemate Jeremy Kauffman:

If it's not a joke, why am I laughing?

— Paul Sand (@punsalad) October 5, 2025

But the WSJ reminds us that "pain" is coming Real Soon Now: Parties Dig In, Await Pain From Shutdown. (WSJ gifted link)

That's the dead-trees headline; the online version is less threatening. Nevertheless, in the text:

The shutdown will likely cause pain, but the early days don’t bring enough acute anguish to make anyone budge.

Do I detect impatience that we're not seeing acute anguish early enough?

Also of note:

• Blast from the past. It doesn't seem that long ago, but Phil Magness recollects his part in Covid dissent: Great Barrington, 5 Years On.

  October 4, 2020, was the date of the Great Barrington Declaration, a statement by medical professionals that presented the first formal argument against the COVID-19 lockdowns to gain a widespread scientific following. As we look back on this event, many of the principles articulated in the GBD are recognized as having been vindicated. We now know lockdowns did little, if anything, to stop the spread of the virus. They represented a sharp deviation from the pre-COVID scientific literature on pandemic mitigation, yet they achieved widespread adoption around the world with almost no scientific debate as to their merits. Despite their lack of efficacy, these policies imposed enormous social and economic harms, many of which still plague us today.

  Back in October 2020 I commended on the GBD here, here, here, here, here, and here.

  That second link notes the quick removal of the GBD from Reddit Covid discussion fora by censors "moderators". And that was just one small example of the anti-GBD effort, encouraged by influential figures in and out of government.

  Ironically, many of the folks griping (often correctly) about the current censoriousness of the Trump administration were silent about this sort of thing back then.

• Worst screenplay ever. The WSJ editorialists warn of the Invasion of the Killer Ikea Sofas. (WSJ gifted link)

  Who knew that Ikea sofas were a national security threat? That’s what President Trump claimed as he unleashed another tariff barrage. Consider this a pre-emptive strike against a possible Supreme Court decision that nixes his worldwide “emergency” tariffs.

  The President on Monday announced 10% tariffs on lumber as well as 25% on upholstered wooden furniture, bathroom vanities and kitchen cabinets. This follows last week’s announcement of tariffs on heavy-duty trucks (25%). All of these tariffs are being imposed under Section 232 of the 1962 Trade Expansion Act to—get this—protect national security.

  They point out that SCOTUS may soon rule against Trump-tariffs imposed under the "it's an EMERGENCY" excuse. It's reminiscent of Biden's effort to forgive student loans using different excuses.

• It's common knowledge. Ann Althouse links to a London Times interview with Pun Salad fave Steven Pinker.

  It’s a busy time for the world’s most famous defender of Enlightenment liberalism. The Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker, a co-founder of his university’s Council on Academic Freedom, has spent much of the past decade fighting threats to academic free speech from cancel culture and the “woke” left.

  Now, American universities find themselves challenged by the Trump administration’s campaign to defund research. “I’m kind of pinned between those two trends,” Pinker tells me when we meet in central London. Which poses the greater threat? There’s no question. “Trump has an army … whereas the Department of Romance Languages — there’s only so much damage they can do.”

  I'm in the middle of his latest book, When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows…. Despite the catchy title, it's more in the vein of science-reporting on a (to me) obscure concept of cognitive science. Not to worry, though: Pinker can make even that seem interesting.

• We're living in Arthur C. Clarke's world. Specifically, the world envisioned in his Third Law: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." Noah Smith has a long and interesting essay on The Third Magic. After a stunning example of AI creativity:

  Anyway, this is thrilling, but at the same time it’s slightly worrying as well. This technology is so powerful that we’re going to have no choice but to rely on it for much of our daily lives. Even Terence Tao, generally regarded as the world’s smartest man, has said that he now asks AI models to do some small pieces of his research. Every scientist must now be, to some degree, a spellcaster.

  But — assuming we don’t make a huge breakthrough in interpreting the models — this power will come at a great cost. Technology will be more powerful, but less reliable — it’ll be like the holodeck computer in Star Trek: The Next Generation, whose responses to the crew’s prompts are often so disastrous that they become the plotlines of whole episodes.

  On top of that, I worry that humanity will become infantilized by this new magic we’ve created. The Industrial Age was an age of rationality for good reason — if people wanted to understand the marvels that were transforming their lives, they only had to take the machines apart and look at the mechanisms. Everything in the world seemed mechanistic and comprehensible.

  I suggest you peruse Noah's content in its entirety. As a bonus, he includes ChatGPT's criticism of his article, and that's worth reading too.

• And there are also the old-fashioned concerns. Never mind being "infantilized", Noah. How about AI being used to kill us all? Slashdot wonders: What's the Best Way to Stop AI From Designing Hazardous Proteins?

  Currently DNA synthesis companies "deploy biosecurity software designed to guard against nefarious activity," reports the Washington Post, "by flagging proteins of concern — for example, known toxins or components of pathogens." But Microsoft researchers discovered "up to 100 percent" of AI-generated ricin-like proteins evaded detection — and worked with a group of leading industry scientists and biosecurity experts to design a patch. Microsoft's chief science officer called it "a Windows update model for the planet.

  Just in case you needed one more thing to worry about! Note that my Artificial Photosynthesis proposal ("A Crackpot Idea That Will Save, Or Destroy, Humanity") involved possibly enlisting AI in designing enzymes to supercharge carbon-capturing infrastructure. Easily solving global warming!

  What could go wrong there?

Recently on the book blog:

This book has a raft of laudatory cover blurbs, including one from Steven King! It was nominated for an Edgar "Best Novel". Its Amazon page also says:

A New York Times Bestseller * A Good Morning America Book Club Pick * An NPR Best Book of the Year * A Washington Post Best Thriller of 2024

Somewhat surprisingly, I liked it anyway.

Five years ago, Lucy was suspected of bashing in the head of her best friend Savvy; she was wandering in the area where Savvy's body was found, covered in Savvy's blood, Savvy's skin under her fingernails. But she remembered nothing about the night of the murder. The murder weapon was never found. Lucy eventually moved from small-town Plumpton, Texas to LA, became a successful young-adult author (under a pen name), got a boyfriend, and…

Her life is quickly upturned when Ben Owens, a popular true-crime podcaster, decides to re-publicize the lurid case. (His podcast is titled "Listen for the Lie".) And (coincidentally) Lucy is semi-coerced into returning to Plumpton to celebrate her feisty grandmother's birthday. And Ben is there, interviewing a bunch of folks who all seem to think Lucy did it.

The book alternates between Lucy's narration and transcripts of Ben's podcast. We are introduced to Lucy's ex-husband, her family, and her friends (mostly ex-friends). She's revealed to have a somewhat tortured inner life, unbidden fantasies of murder permeate her consciousness, encouraged by a seemingly demonic voice in her head.

It's a page-turner for sure. I note the Portsmouth (NH) High School also has a copy, which old-fogy me found a little shocking, given Lucy's fondness for coarse language, violent imagery, and (occasional) explicit sexual encounters. Ah, well, modern times.

Various versions of this are making the rounds, but it's New To Me:

#FiveWordsToRuinAJobInterview "Honesty is my greatest weakness." pic.twitter.com/SAb3q0K8fN

— Michael D. A. Clarke (@MichaelDAClarke) January 19, 2015

Quibble: OK, it's funny, but his actual weakness is probably narcissism, right?

Powers Boothe responds:

(Classic headline reference.)

But on a slightly more serious note, Nick Catoggio analogizes a different movie: Fight Club. He points to this polling result:

66% of Democrats say the party isn't doing enough to fight the Trump administration

That number is 73% among Democratic leaning independents pic.twitter.com/bwH1M8FYtW

— Polling USA (@USA_Polling) September 17, 2025

Yes, they want Democrat pols to be "fighting fighters who fight." Nick:

I watched the latest Superman movie last night (report below). Wasn't great, but didn't suck.

Also of note:

• It doesn't help that there are a lot of spineless Republicans. David Harsanyi, I hope, will encourage any remaining vertebrates: Obamacare Is a Massive Failure. The GOP Shouldn't Bail It Out.

  Since Democrats have shut down the federal government because they want another $1.5 trillion bailout of Obamacare, it's a good time to remind everyone that the law has been a wide-ranging and expensive fiasco.

  Virtually every promise made by Democrats regarding the Affordable Care Act has failed to come true.

  Sure, Barack Obama infamously promised that Americans could keep their preferred insurance if they desired. By the end of his second term, around 7 million people had been booted from their insurance because of the Affordable Care Act. Who knows how many have been dropped since.

  But let's also not forget that Obama pledged that the law would reduce family health insurance premiums by "up to" $2,500 annually by the end of his first term. Premiums not only continued to rise during his presidency, but since 2010, they have spiked from $13,000 to nearly $24,000.

  And let's not forget that much of that $1.5 trillion will be coming from the same people Uncle Stupid wants to give it back to. And pretend he's doing them a favor.

• Shameless plug. George Will recommends a recent book which should disabuse Kindred spirits on the left and right [who] believe in a New Deal fable. (WaPo gifted link)

  Progressives’ retrospective aspiration for a new New Deal is shared by “national conservatives.” They, enthusiastic about the current administration, also believe government should comprehensively intervene in the economy, politically allocating capital (and therefore opportunity) to improve on the rationality of free markets.

  But economist George Selgin’s latest book refutes progressives’ triumphalist nostalgia for the New Deal. It thereby demonstrates that “national conservatives” are oblivious regarding the cautionary lessons of Franklin Roosevelt’s experience. These kindred spirits on the left and right should read “False Dawn: The New Deal and the Promise of Recovery, 1933-1947.”

  Selgin mines a mountain of scholarship to prove this: New Deal measures failed to achieve, and often impeded, recovery from the Depression. Roosevelt’s most constructive achievement, executed on his second day in office, was the national bank holiday, a measure incubated by his predecessor, Herbert Hoover. This week-long banking shutdown in 1933 largely arrested the economy’s contraction. Recovery, however, required a decade, and World War II.

  That's one I want to get, somehow. Not sure how the Portsmouth (NH) Public Library would react to a purchase request.

• Way past time, I'd say. Another entry in my "Abolish the FCC" collection, from Mark Jamison: It’s Time to Disband the Federal Communications Commission.

  America has a short but distinguished list of deregulatory heroes. Alfred Kahn, who led airline deregulation in the late 1970s, is one. As is President Jimmy Carter, who broke down barriers in transportation and natural gas. President Ronald Reagan rolled back rules in energy, broadcasting, cable television, and banking. President Donald Trump, in his first term, makes the list. Federal Communications Commission Chairman (FCC) Brendan Carr now has the chance to join them—by dismantling the agency he leads.

  Why disband the FCC? Because it has become a convenient political tool, it too often abandons its independence, and the very reasons for its creation in 1934 have disappeared. As others and I have noted, the FCC was designed to regulate the old Bell telephone monopoly and to oversee the public airwaves. Independence mattered because regulated businesses needed stability across administrations to make the massive infrastructure investments needed for expanding our networks.

  As Mel Brooks observed in Blazing Saddles: "We've gotta keep our phony baloney jobs, here, gentlemen!"

• Articles for which I couldn't hit control-W fast enough. It's from Ars Technica: Scientists revive old Bulgarian recipe to make yogurt with ants.

  But if that intrigues you: (1) what's the matter with you? And (2) Ann Althouse has more.

Recently on the movie blog:

So a long Friday night stretched ahead of me with a cheap Domino's pizza working its way through my alimentary canal… Hey, why not watch this year's Superman movie?

So I did, and it wasn't bad. It does some violence to the Supercanon I grew up with, but I can live with that.

It begins not with the usual origin story, but the aftermath of Superman getting badly defeated by the "Hammer of Boravia", an enemy motivated by Superman's previous intervention in Boravia's invasion of the poor, defenseless country of Jarhanpur. Luckily, super-dog Krypto saves Superman, dragging him (literally) to the Fortress of Solitude, where a small team of robots brings him back to health.

It's quickly revealed that villainous Lex Luthor is behind the scenes, and all this is merely a small element in his overall scheme to discredit and destroy the Man of Steel. And (as usual) gain enormous wealth and power.

It's fun. Just a few notes.

(1) One of the plot points involves Superman's DNA. Which made me wonder biologically: he's an alien from the doomed planet of Krypton, and he's got DNA?

(2) Pa Kent has a small but pivotal role, and he is played as an extraordinarily decent sort by Pruitt Taylor Vince. Ironically, Vince played one of the more evil bad guys in an episode of Justified, Glen Fogle. (Whose fate was memorably kind of amusing.)

(3) Nathan Filion plays Green Lantern, amusingly, as kind of a jerk. Hey, I've liked him since Two Guys, a Girl and a Pizza Place, a fun TV series that also launched the career of a guy named Ryan Reynolds.

My current CongressCritter, Chris Pappas, is running for the US Senate seat currently held by retiring Jeanne Shaheen. And I've noticed his tweets have switched from earnest can't-we-all-get-along bipartisan slop to … well, a different brand of slop. A recent example:

The system isn’t working.

Billionaires get rich while working families get left behind.

It’s screwing over veterans, small business owners, and parents.

I’m in this fight because Granite Staters deserve a Washington that works for them.

— Chris Pappas (@ChrisPappasNH) October 2, 2025

Yes, he's transformed himself into a brave "fighting fighter who fights". I am unsure to whom he's trying to appeal.

Anyway, once my eyes stopped rolling, I deployed some snark in reply:

How about this? "The elites and career politicians think they’re smarter than you, but they’ve sold out our jobs, our future, and our freedom. They laugh at us while they cash in. But people are waking up, and when we stand shoulder to shoulder, no corrupt system can stop us!"

— Paul Sand (@punsalad) October 3, 2025

That was from ChatGPT, triggered by my initial request for "200 bytes of populist BS", modified to make the result "a little longer and rantier please."

I hope Fightin' Chris isn't spending a lot of money having humans compose his tweets when ChatGPT can do it for free.

Also of note:

• "Strip away the phony tinsel of Hollywood…" The classic quote continues "… and you find the real tinsel underneath."

  That's what came to mind when I read Tyler MacQueen's FIRE headline: Trump’s tinseltown tariffs threaten free speech.

  “The Movie Industry in America is DYING a very fast death,” declared the 47th president in a post earlier this year on Truth Social. To lure more film productions back to America, Trump ordered the Department of Commerce and the U.S. Trade Representative to place a 100% tariff on foreign films.

  Hollywood went into panic mode. But the summer months passed without any update from the White House. Then, on Monday, Trump renewed his calls for a foreign-film tariff.

  Much has been made about the financial implications of Trump’s shocking movie mandate. But beyond the economic concerns, both the industry and elected officials alike have failed to consider the broader constitutional implications of the president’s chaotic posts, should the tariffs actually be implemented.

  Nestled in his posts, declaring offshore film productions a “National Security threat,” Trump further justified the tariffs this year by labeling foreign films as “propaganda.” For any American who cares about free speech, that should be the cue to jump up and holler, “Cut!”

  So: You strip away Trump's phony demagoguery … and you find the real demagoguery underneath.

  But here's the nonsensical thing about Trump's proposed movie tariffs: Hollywood hates Trump. Why would he want to throw them any life preservers?

  And for the rest of us…

• It's not as if American moviemakers deserve protection. Fox News notes that Hollywood is taking its own action against the real Foreign Movie Menace: Emma Stone, Mark Ruffalo among stars boycotting Israeli film institutions.

  Over 1,000 Hollywood stars, directors and other film workers, including Emma Stone and Mark Ruffalo, have signed a pledge to boycott Israeli film institutions, according to the advocacy group Film Workers for Palestine.

  "Inspired by Filmmakers United Against Apartheid who refused to screen their films in apartheid South Africa, we pledge not to screen films, appear at or otherwise work with Israeli film institutions — including festivals, cinemas, broadcasters and production companies — that are implicated in genocide and apartheid against the Palestinian people," the pledge said.

  Yeesh. Well, just as soon as I finish up watching the Task miniseries (which stars Ruffalo), I'll do a boycott of my own.

  Here's hoping Gary Oldman doesn't sign, I'd really miss watching Slow Horses.

• "Manichean Paranoia" would be a good name for a rock band. Roger Pielke Jr. diagnoses Climate Politics as Manichean Paranoia.

  Recently, I had the opportunity to witness a stemwinding sermon by a climate scientist. Scientific authority was invoked, evocative graphs and videos were displayed, and we were warned of the coming end of the world — But not all hope was lost, as salvation through repentance was promised.

  Those who might disagree with his good word were cast not just as wrong, but evil.

  How did public discussion of climate get to a place where the angriest, most intolerant, and deeply partisan have come to represent climate science, journalism, and advocacy?

  Pielke is on my (regrettably short) list of people I can trust on climate issues.

• Speaking of paranoia, though… Noah Rothman has some sage navigational advice for drivers: You Actually Don’t Want to Drive Your Opponents Crazy. (archive.today link)

  Republicans with long memories are experiencing some foreboding déjà vu.

  The Democratic Party’s loudest, if not most representative, voters are spitting mad. They appear to reserve most of their manic hostility not for their Republican opponents but their fellow Democrats. They demand catharsis from their legislators — grand futile gestures that trade tactical soundness for visceral pique. And they are increasingly succumbing to magical thinking.

  Of that, the ongoing government shutdown is illustrative. In the weeks leading up to the present impasse, Democratic lawmakers were positively funereal when describing their unenviable position to reporters. “We may not have the luxury of a victory scenario,” said Democratic Representative Jared Huffman. He was one of many Democrats who could not conceive of what a shutdown could possibly accomplish but who were resigned to one if only because they would be pilloried by the firebrands in their party if they didn’t surrender their better judgment to the mob.

  Maybe that's Chris Pappas's deal? Could be.

Jeff Jacoby wonders: Why won't zombie bad ideas stay buried?.

I mentioned Jeff Maurer's screed about populism yesterday; as a side effect of that, I looked up my past posts on my own "favorite" zombie trope: complaints about greedy multinational corporations "shipping good American jobs overseas". Thanks (usually) to plutocratic "tax breaks".

Back in 2010, I noted it was resurrected as a campaign theme by the Obama Administration. (Obama had previously promised to do something about it back in 2007, but I guess it slipped his mind.) John Kerry tried it out in 2004, running against Dubya. And Bill Clinton in 1992 running against Dubya's dad.

(And Ross Perot in 1992, too. Although most of his targets were sneaky job-stealing Mexicans, so not exactly "overseas".)

In 2012, I noted that (oops) apparently Obama had failed to stop the job shipments overseas, because he promised to do something about that in his campaign against Mitt Romney.

Just last year, Democrat CongressCritters Emilia Sykes (OH-13), Bill Pascrell, Jr. (NJ-09) and Chris Deluzio (PA-17) introduced a bill to (finally!) "close tax loopholes that reward companies shipping jobs overseas." (Their short press release contains six occurrences of the phrase.)

It even recently crossed the aisle, as zombies do. Just last month, Fox News headlined: Ohio senator introduces 25% tax on companies that outsource jobs overseas. That's GOP Senator Bernie Moreno:

"While college grads in America struggle to find work, globalist politicians and C-Suite executives have spent decades shipping good-paying jobs overseas in pursuit of slave wages and immense profits—those days are over," Moreno told Fox News Digital in a statement.

It's really a zombie concept: politicians have promised to slay it for decades, but it's still around.

Here's why: those pols find it more appealing as a campaign issue than as a guide to effective legislation or policy.

Also of note:

• Speaking of the walking dead… James Freeman describes resurrection efforts: Democrats Demand Return of Bidenomics. (WSJ gifted link)

  Most Americans probably remember the years after 2020 as a time of wildly expensive governance and maddeningly ill-considered Covid overreactions that lasted long after the pandemic and will haunt our children with massive federal debt and reduced educational aptitude. But Senate Democrats look back on that period as the good old days. In fact they recall the recklessness of those years with such fondness that they’ve shut down much of the government and vowed not to reopen without an agreement to continue one of the most destructive policies of that disastrous era.

  In the Journal this week Ge Bai writes about the two inflation-inducing Biden spending blowouts that enabled this policy of subsidizing ObamaCare insurance plans for people who are nowhere close to being poor:

  In March 2021, at the height of the pandemic, the American Rescue Plan temporarily extended premium subsidy eligibility to those with incomes above 400% of the federal poverty level, allowing people at any income level to receive subsidies originally intended for those with modest means. In August 2022, the Inflation Reduction Act extended those subsidies through December 2025.

  Note that "subsidies" go to many people who are also taxpayers. So, essentially, they're (1) sending cash to Uncle Stupid, who (2) skims some off the top, and (3) sends it back to them, while (4) claiming to be doing them a favor. It's the venerable trickle-down D.C. Shuffle. And it's designed to turn its dependents into reliable Democrat voters.

• Watch what they do, not so much what they say. Christian Britschgi reports Democrats shut down the government to obscure Obamacare's failures.

  Milton Friedman liked to quip that there's nothing more permanent than a temporary government program.

  We're seeing more evidence for this adage as the government shut downs following Democrats' refusal to vote for a spending bill that did not include an extension of "temporary" Affordable Care Act (ACA), aka Obamacare, subsidies passed during the pandemic.

  Those enhanced subsidies were passed as a temporary measure as part of the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan Act in March 2021, and then extended through the end of 2025 by the so-called Inflation Reduction Act (IRA).

  Obamacare always provided subsidies for individuals to purchase insurance plans on ACA marketplaces set up by the law. The 2021 Act passed enhanced subsidies eliminated the income eligibility caps for those subsidies and also made them more generous for current recipients.

  Making these subsidies permanent would not be cheap. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that it would cost $340 billion a year.

  Need I point out: that's money the government doesn't actually have. Which brings us to…

• Hoping that Betteridge's Law doesn't apply. Veronique de Rugy wonders if Government Shutdowns and Pandemic-Level Spending: The New Normal?

  The federal government just accumulated an additional $2 trillion in debt over the last 12 months. That's the kind of debt surge America usually racks up in wartime or during major national emergencies. But today, as Republicans and Democrats engage in another budget-driven shutdown drama, we are not at war. There is no pandemic. The economy is humming. And another shutdown is happening. Yet it will solve nothing about the fact that the political class is burning through money at a pace that would make Franklin Roosevelt's war cabinet blush.

  The Daily Treasury Statement shows total federal debt rising from $35.5 trillion last September to $37.5 trillion this week. In peacetime, with unemployment low and the stock market booming, that's breathtakingly reckless. Yet in Washington, winning at politics matters more than confronting the cause of the problem: relentless overspending, and especially the explosion of entitlement programs.

  Republicans, despite their fiscal-hawk branding, have presided over much of this surge. They boast $206 billion in Department of Government Efficiency "savings" and $213 billion in tariff receipts — rounding errors when compared with the debt. As the Tax Foundation's Alex Durante and Garrett Watson point out, tariff revenue does almost nothing to change the country's fiscal trajectory.

  Which (in turn) brings us to…

• A likely scenario? Philip Klein detects A Catastrophic Sign That Republicans May Cave and Expand Obamacare. (archive.today link)

  Somewhere, Barack Obama and Joe Biden must be laughing. This morning brings a worrisome report by our own Audrey Fahlberg, from an interview with Senator Ron Johnson, on his efforts to prevent Republicans from caving in to Democratic demands to expand Obamacare:

  “Hopefully we can convince the president and others we can’t do that,” Johnson said, with a hint of resignation about how this will end. “I know people like me are vastly outnumbered here.”

  As a reminder, the raft of regulations created by the national health-care law led premiums to skyrocket. Rather than address the underlying flaws with Obamacare that triggered this problem, Democrats chose to throw tens of billions more dollars at the problem. Two times during the Biden administration, Democrats voted to expand subsidies for the purchase of insurance. But those enhancements were supposed to be temporary and are slated to expire at the end of this year. That should be the end of them. Unfortunately, there are some Republicans who are afraid to be called scary names by Democrats during an election year, and they may succeed in convincing leadership to go along with extending the program. This would be catastrophic.

  I assume my (all-Democrat) Congressional delegation is also chuckling. When they're not pretending to be outraged.

Well, I'm splitting time today between (1) blogging and (2) shoring up Pun Salad Manor's defenses against roving bands of youths prowling the anarchistic streets of Rollinsford NH. (Fortunately, I stocked up on boiling oil at Manor Depot before they ran out.)

But there's a lot of interesting shutdown stuff out there. Let's look at some of it. Over at Reason, J.D. Tuccille wonders: Could this be the best government shutdown ever?. (We hope that Betteridge's Law of Headlines doesn't apply.)

Trump did make some noise along those lines. Unfortunately, for him, every day is potentially TACO Tuesday. So we'll see.

David Harsanyi is optimistic that the Ds are headed for humiliating defeat, as he explains Chuck Schumer’s bad shutdown bet.

Veronique de Rugy is more scornful of both sides; it's a Self-Inflicted Shutdown Mess. (archive.today link)

As long as my Social Security check gets deposited, and I don't run out of boiling oil to dump on those teeming hordes outside the battlements …

Jim Geraghty is also even-handed: Who will win the shutdown fight? Neither side will like the answer.. (WaPo gifted link)

Jim, I concluded that years ago.

And there's apparently some disagreement about whether the Ds want to provide “free healthcare for illegals” in their demands for reopening government. The Rs say yes, and the Ds say that's a despicable lie. Matt Margolis does a pretty good job explaining the R-side argument: Yes, Democrats Shut Down the Government to Give Illegals Free Healthcare.

Apparently, according to that Newsweek link, New Hampshire is the only state in the Northeast to not offer health benefits to illegals.

Also of note:

• Not one nickel to Wikipedia until … they enact at least some of the reforms advocated by Larry Sanger at the Free Press: I Founded Wikipedia. Here’s How to Fix It.

  I launched Wikipedia on January 15, 2001, alongside Jimmy Wales, then the CEO of dot-com company Bomis. It was designed as a freewheeling public successor to the peer-reviewed Nupedia, which we’d founded the year prior.

  For the next 14 months, my task was to transform a completely empty, blank wiki into what would soon become the largest written resource in the history of the world. I oversaw the establishment of several fundamental standards, including rules about neutrality and verifiability.

  I left Wikipedia in 2002. In the 23 years since, and in the last few years in particular, the standards that inspired the company have been sacrificed in favor of ideology. The following nine theses are my Hail Mary proposal to reform Wikipedia. I do this, as Martin Luther said when he posted his famous 95 theses, “out of love for the truth and the desire to elucidate it.”

  Sanger's proposals sound reasonable to me. Fight the power, Larry!

• Other than that, though, it's fine. I swear this guy Jeff Maurer seems to get more reasonable every week. His latest: My Pet Peeve With Populism Is That It’s a Hateful Lie.

  The New York Times is running a series in which “thinkers, upstarts and ideologues” offer ideas for the future of the Democratic Party. The first installment has a hell of a title: “Democrats Are in Crisis. Eat-the-Rich Populism Is the Only Answer.” That’s right: The only answer. Not “part of the answer” or “one possible answer” — the article doesn’t allow that Democrats might nibble on the rich and see how that goes, or eat the rich with a side of cultural moderation. The author argues that Democrats must divour, digest, and — one assumes — shit out the rich in order to win.

  In support of this thesis, the author — historian Timothy Shenk — repeatedly points to one example: Dan Osborn. Osborn ran for Senate in Nebraska as an independent and lost by seven points, which is a good showing in a state that Harris lost by 20 (excuses for which can be found in Harris’ book: Not My Fault: How Everyone but Me Is to Blame for America Not Recognizing My Amazing Leadership Qualities). Osborn has a populist streak, which Shenk argues is responsible for his good showing. But populism wasn’t the only thing that made Osborn unique: He was also culturally conservative (pro “build the wall” and pro-gun) and was conspicuously not a Democrat. That’s huge in a part of the country where the Democratic brand is in Theranos/Enron/Triangle Shirtwaist Company territory. Osborn’s name is also “Osborn”, and I think that some people might have thought that he’s related to legendary Cornhuskers football coach Tom Osborne (he’s not). You may think I’m being silly by thinking that some voters would fixate on a name, but if there was a Senate candidate named Timmy Hitler — no relation! — I doubt that many people would argue that names don’t matter.

  So, how do we know that Osborn’s economic populism was the secret to his…well not success, but: secret to his itty-bitty ass kicking? We don’t. And the other populists Shenk name checks are similarly lame examples. Zohran Mamdani won a Democratic primary in one of the bluest parts of the country against an alleged pervert/confirmed mediocrity; to me, that doesn’t scream “first wave in a sea change”. Similarly, AOC, Bernie Sanders, and Chris Murphy have only shown that left-wing populists can win in places where a pile of thumbtacks with a “D” on it could win. Shenk is so desperate for evidence supporting his theory that he points to the populist rhetoric of a recently-declared Iowa Senate candidate — that guy hasn’t even won anything yet! Only in social science would someone have the balls to say “Having found no solid evidence for my thesis, I point to evidence that will materialize next year and prove me right!”

  The Iowa Senate candidate is Nathan Sage, who says he wants "to tear the Democratic Party down and build it back up from the studs." A decent idea, except for the building it back up part.