Pun Salad

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.