Pun Salad

Today's Eye Candy is the first panel of today's Calvin and Hobbes comic, as preserved and resurrected by the Andrews McMeel syndicate. Click over, and you'll see the remainder of young Calvin's complaint about the poisonous zeitgeist generated by "talk show hosts, political candidates, news programs, special interest groups", who vie for attention by reducing discourse to "shouted rage".

Reader, credible sources date Bill Watterson's original to October 2, 1995. In other words, it's thirty years old.

So my (admittedly, fingers-crossed) attitude is expressed in the headline above. I wouldn't blame you for drawing a more pessimistic conclusion, though.

Also of note:

• The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men / Gang aft agley. As do poorly laid anti-capitalist schemes like the one pushed by Democrat State Rep Ellen Read from Newmarket, NH. As expressed in her tweet from a few weeks back:

  No one is coming to save us... it's up to us to take the power back.
  
  Nov 25-Dec 2 (https://t.co/oJCYoCPgHa), don't work if you can at all help it, and definitely don't spend one red cent unless it's life or death.

  — Rep. Ellen Read 🍉 (@Ellen4NH) November 11, 2025

  She is referring to the bold Blackout The System action, demanding that "We The People" "withdraw our labor & spending" from the economy between November 25 and December 2 of this year.

  So how's that going? Well, according to news reports…

  U.S. BLACK FRIDAY SALES HIT RECORD HIGH
  
  U.S. online Black Friday sales reached a record $11.8 billion, up 9.1% from last year, according to Adobe Analytics. Adobe expects Americans to spend $5.5 billion on Saturday and $5.9 billion on Sunday.
  
  Salesforce reported $18 billion in…

  — *Walter Bloomberg (@DeItaone) November 29, 2025

  Yeah, people are doing what they want. Eat it, Marxists.

  Obligatory Disclaimer: this is just one isolated factoid. There are a whole bunch of ways to spin/rebut/disbelieve this. But imagine how Ellen and her "progressive" buddies would gloat if the headlines went the other way.

• Andrew C. McCarthy draws one. He points out that Military Lawfare Is a Red Line. (I'm out of NR gifted links for November, so here is a archive.today link.)

  Mark Kelly and the Seditionist Six sounds like a bad lounge act. That, at any rate, is how I decided to treat it — which is to say, ignore it. After all, it’s Thanksgiving. As we enter the holiday season, it’s time for not just good cheer but introspection: how blessed we are to be alive at a time of such abundance. It shouldn’t be the occasion for the week’s third or tenth or whatever episode of Trump-era sound and fury.

  But it is.

  This one, you’ve no doubt heard, involves a half dozen Democratic lawmakers who starred in a craven but legally unimpeachable video reminding our troops that they shouldn’t obey illegal orders. I have to say “remind” because it has already been drilled into our troops — the best trained fighting force in the world, more thoroughly tutored in their legal and ethical duties than any fighting force in history — that the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ) obliges them to disregard orders that are manifestly unlawful.

  But:

  Now, let’s not get deep into every constitutional patch here. To my mind, members of Congress should not be subject to executive control. The specter of punitively applying the UCMJ to Kelly effectively does that. But that’s an issue for another day. For the moment, the point is that Kelly knows he should stay a million miles away from a stunt like this video.

  That’s not because it was criminal; it wasn’t, the theatrical rage of the president and his apparatchiks notwithstanding. It’s because the video was a politicization of our armed forces at a time when we desperately need them to be kept out of the political fray.

  And as Kelly knows, when Democrats poke another hole in another norm, the president’s MO is to drive a truck through it.

  And, as Andrew shows, that's exactly what Trump has done.

• Free legal advice from Andrew. Specifically, Andrew McCarthy (yes, his second link today): ‘We Intended the Strike to Be Lethal’ Is Not a Defense (and, yes, an archive.today link)

  An explosive Washington Post report, the subject of so much discussion the past two days, says that, in the first missile strike the Trump Defense Department carried out against operatives of a boat suspected of transporting narcotics on the high seas off Venezuela, two survivors were rendered shipwrecked. As they clung to the wreckage, the U.S. commander ordered a second strike, which killed them.

  If this happened as described in the Post report, it was, at best, a war crime under federal law. I say “at best” because, as regular readers know, I believe the attacks on these suspected drug boats — without congressional authorization, under circumstances in which the boat operators pose no military threat to the United States, and given that narcotics trafficking is defined in federal law as a crime rather than as terrorist activity, much less an act of war — are lawless and therefore that the killings are not legitimate under the law or armed conflict. (See my Saturday column, with links to prior posts on this subject.)

  Nevertheless, even if we stipulate arguendo that the administration has a colorable claim that our forces are in an armed conflict with non-state actors (i.e., suspected members of drug cartels that the administration has dubiously designated as foreign terrorist organizations (FTOs)), the laws of war do not permit the killing of combatants who have been rendered hors de combat (out of the fighting) — including by shipwreck.

  Reader, I hope you had "Committed War Crimes" on your Trump Impeachment Bingo Card.

• But if you want to read the other side… John Hinderaker calls it The Democrats’ Latest Faux Scandal. Maybe! His four-point rebuttal:

  1. The story is based on anonymous “sources,” i.e., deep state leakers. Unless and until someone steps forward, identifies himself, tells us what he knows and how he knows it, and takes responsibility for his statements, I assume everything in the story is probably a lie.
  2. Given the lack of regard for the “law of armed conflict” that is consistently shown by our enemies, my reaction is: boo hoo.
  3. Is there really a “law of armed conflict” that says you can only shoot at a target once? And if someone escapes an initial bombing, or burst of fire, or whatever, he is home free and can’t again be targeted? I’d like to see that law. I haven’t seen any news source cite to it.
  4. If such a rule exists and applies in the present context, it is stupid. If it applies, and one were determined to follow it, it would incentivize a massive first strike that would eliminate any chance of survivors. And would also increase the risk of collateral, unintended damage.

  To me, it appears John has caught a bad case of confirmation bias, but I could (as always, of course) be wrong, and Trump, Hesgeth, et. al. have truth and law on their side. But…

• And where, exactly, is this mentioned in the Constitution? This is way more offensive than Drunk Aunt spouting off about toxic masculinity at the dinner table: America's Politicized Holiday Dinner.

  In recent weeks, U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has promised that the forthcoming revised U.S. Dietary Guidelines—spearheaded by his agency alongside the Department of Agriculture—will be released in December. As the deadline approaches, holiday hosts could be feeling understandably queasy about how thoroughly food policy now intrudes on what we serve and how we eat.

  The dietary guidelines are revised every five years, and they've seen their share of controversy. In the past few decades, the federal government scrapped the infamous food pyramid (which allegedly could be making a return) and has notoriously issued poor dietary advice on more than one occasion. In the 1980s, the federal government urged Americans to shift away from saturated fats and meat and toward carbs. Under the food pyramid—unveiled in 1992—Americans were further encouraged to eat less animal fats and consume copious amounts of bread and cereal. Americans did not get healthier, and obesity rates skyrocketed.

  "It's not as if we're suddenly eating a lot of lentils and kale," Yale School of Medicine's David Katz told the Huffington Post back in 2017. "We replaced the fat with low-fat junk food."

  Enter RFK Jr., who argues that America's food system is corrupt and "poisoning" Americans with hyper-processed additives. He advocates for increased saturated fat consumption—even recommending turkey deep-fried in beef tallow.

  Mmmmm... tallow!

And that time is when The Dave Barry 2025 Holiday Gift Guide is published. It is on Dave's substack, and I have not checked how much, if any, of it is behind a paywall. (I am a paid subscriber, and you should be too, sourpuss.)

My Eye Candy du Jour is available at Amazon, but Dave got his from the somewhat more authentic source, Norsland Lefse. They are based in Minnesota (of course), but it appears the fish balls are authentically imported from Norway.

However, they also sell lefse, and they are offering a free joke book if you buy a 3-pack. And lefse is actually good! With enough butter and sugar.

Also of note:

• Us Me too. Via Alex Tabarrok at Marginal Revolution: Hollis Robbins proposes A We-free December.

  I propose a moratorium on the generalized first-person plural for all blog posts, social media posts, opinion writing, headline writers, for all of December. No “we, “us,” or “our,” unless the “we” is made explicit.

  No more “we’re living in a golden age,” “we need to talk about,” “we can’t stop talking about,” “we need to wise up.” They’re endless. “We’ve never seen numbers like this.” “We are not likely to forget.” “We need not mourn for the past.” “What exactly are we trying to fix?” “How are we raising our children?” “I hate that these are our choices.”

  Why am I calling a halt? First, to see if it is possible. Second, because of the excellent new Apple TV show Pluribus, about a virus that turns almost everyone on Earth into one collective “we.” The hero is one of eleven individuals who seem to be immune. The show is all about I versus we. Watch if you can.

  A we-free December would make these New York Times sentences impossible: “We need to change how we build housing.” “We’re not warriors clashing, we’re sojourners exploring.” “Each of us longs to grow, to become better versions of ourselves.” “How far we have fallen!”

  I have been guilty a lot of gussying up my posts with the "royal we", but it's a habit I'm trying to break. (This item's headline is meant to be amusingly ironic.)

  And I've also been watching Plur1bus.

  So I'll see how December goes.

• 

  Happy Anniversary! Just kidding. Because 'twas 96 years (and, um, one month) ago today, October 29, 1929, that common wisdom says the "Black Friday" stock market crash triggered the Great Depression.

  But Amity Shlaes rebuts that common wisdom, specifically that expressed in a recent book (Amazon link at your right): Sorkin Rounds Up the Usual Suspects . (NR gifted link) She notes that Sorkin's book is "an artful reprise" of John Kenneth Galbraith's The Great Crash 1929. And:

  In that 1955 book, Galbraith argued that unregulated speculation, exacerbated by lazy statesmen and the greed of the rich, caused the Great Crash. Galbraith’s choice of a narrow time frame — one short year, 1929 — helped him to capture the drama of the crash.

  According to Galbraith, quoted approvingly as “seminal” by Sorkin, the worst day of the Great Crash — Tuesday, October 29 — was “the most devastating day in the history of the New York stock market,” and “may have been the most devastating day in the history of markets.”

  The stunning story of the market’s plummet, however, also emboldened Galbraith to moot, without seeing any necessity of proving, a second thesis relating to years outside the scope of his title: that the 1930s policy applied by President Roosevelt, the New Deal, somehow made matters better, or could have, had the crash not been so violent.

  Amity does a fine job of debunking both Galbraith and Sorkin. If you need to read a book about the Great Depression, I recommend her 2007 history, The Forgotten Man, on which I reported here.

• Also debunking economic bullshit… is Michael R. Strain: No, the Poverty Threshold Is Not $140,000 (Good Grief). (archive.today link)

  Portfolio manager Michael W. Green begins his much-discussed essay in the Free Press:

  For my whole career in finance, I have distrusted the obvious. And yet, for many years there was one number I assumed was an actuarial fact: the U.S. poverty line. Yes, I saw Americans feeling poorer every year, despite economic growth and low unemployment. But ultimately, I trusted the official statistics. Until I saw a simple statement buried in a research paper.

  And I realized that number—created more than 60 years ago, with good intentions—was a lie.

  Well. Where to start? Herewith, six points of response.

  1. Green engages in a series of calculations that would earn a D in my master’s class. He concludes: “So when I say the real poverty line is $140,000, I’m being conservative.” Of course, poverty thresholds are inherently arbitrary. You’re free to argue that three-quarters of households are living in poverty — but that argument is absurd on its face.

  Why? Because any poverty threshold that finds most households living in poverty is not analytically serious or practicable. The economist Ernie Tedeschi computes that around 75 percent of households earn less than $140,000. Moreover, as Tedeschi shows, if that’s your threshold, then you should be feeling good about the nation’s progress!

  $140,000 is not a useful poverty threshold to be clear, but the long-run story it tells is pretty unambiguously positive.
  [Edited to adjust for household size and to add a slightly clearer methodology] pic.twitter.com/q6mZ4KKw4c

  — Ernie Tedeschi (@ernietedeschi) November 26, 2025

  And Michael, as noted, provides 5 more points of contention.

  If you prefer a more liberal take that Michael's, Noah Smith is also not buying it: The "$140,000 poverty line" is very silly. (archive.today link) He includes a telling graphic from Our World in Data, something like this:

  Note that Norway's food insecurity rate is nearly double the US's. I blame fish balls.

  More at the link, quite a bit before you hit the paywall. I was reminded of my own minor detective work when I read (three Thanksgivings ago) in the student newspaper at the University near here:

  More than half of college students suffer from malnutrition, according to Medical Daily

  Does that sound reasonable to you?

• And debunking literary bullshit… Neal Stephenson couldn't help but respond to A Remarkable Assertion from A16Z.

  A friend made me aware of a reading list from A16Z containing recommendations for books, weighted towards science fiction since that’s mostly what people there read. Some of my books are listed. Since this is the season of Thanksgiving, I’ll start by saying that I genuinely appreciate the plug! However, I was taken aback by the statement highlighted in the screen grab below:

  [… screen grab elided, but the claim is that, of the five books recommended…]

  “…most of these books don’t have endings (they literally stop mid-sentence).”

  I had to read this over a few times to believe that I was seeing it. If it didn’t include the word “literally” I’d assume some poetic license on the part of whoever, or whatever, wrote this. But even then it would be crazy wrong.

  Neal does a bit of detective work, and his best guess is: AI slop. Perhaps he'll work it into his next book.

The WePo editorialists examine Trump’s in-kind contribution to Mark Kelly ’28. (WaPo gifted link)

As long as it was just words—stupid, provocative, risky, Constitution-trashing words—we were fine. Bringing the Fibbies into it should be impeachable.

And, lest there be any doubt about the risk, lawprof Joshua Braver spells it out at the WSJ: Disobeying Military Orders Is Full of Risk. (WSJ gifted link)

And (to repeat) neither Maggie Goodlander, nor any of her five video buddies, will be volunteering to testify in the court martials for any hapless service members that took their legal advice seriously.

Also of note:

• Good question. And Kevin D. Williamson asks it: What About the Poor? (archive.today link)

  The comedian John Mulaney tells a funny—and terrible—story about trying to cure himself of his cocaine addiction by instructing his financial manager to keep cash out of his hands. No cash, no coke—I guess his dealer didn’t take Venmo. What happened next was a predictable series of shenanigans in which the comedian thought up ways to, in effect, embezzle from himself, e.g., buying a $12,000 watch and selling it for $6,000 on the same day. Mulaney’s story of desperate addiction offers a good example of one of the common mistakes we make in our current econo-political debate: trying to use economic means to solve non-economic problems. Mulaney’s problem was not economic: He has been very, very successful and probably could blow $6,000 a day for a very long time without endangering the mortgage payment. His problem was that he loved cocaine.

  There are a great many modern pathologies and problems that often are described as results of capitalism or as aspects of capitalism—of “late capitalism,” as the pseudointellectuals sometimes put it. For example, as formerly poor and hungry countries have become more prosperous and better-fed, they have seen an increase in obesity and diabetes, and, in some cases, they have seen higher levels of alcohol and tobacco use as increased private incomes enable the consumption of what had been unobtainable luxuries. Use of some other drugs has increased, in some places, with wealth: You need a little bit of money to have John Mulaney’s former bad habits. There are increased environmental pressures and externalities associated with increasing wealth, too, as the newly affluent consume more energy, food, and petroleum products (plastics, chemicals, pharmaceuticals—the list is long) than they had. When poor people leave farming villages for higher-paying jobs in urban environments, there are new pressures put on everything from utilities to transportation networks to housing.

  Capitalism becomes a go-to bogeyman, the witch behind every contemporary malady: “Blame capitalism for men’s loneliness,” etc.

  For some reason, discussion at the Thanksgiving table last night turned to potatoes. Which turned to the Irish Potato Famine. Which turned to someone blaming capitalism for it. I refrained from pulling out my phone and digging out the rebutting URL from the Mises Institute: What Caused the Irish Potato Famine? (Didn't stop me from digging it out for you this morning, though.)

• Fun Reason factoid: In her lead editorial in the January issue of Reason, Katherine Mangu-Ward reveals there are some things you can't say in her magazine:

  Reason has a rule against starting essays with quotes from Friedrich Hayek. After all, one could start nearly every essay in this magazine with a bon mot from the Austrian-born economist and classical liberal hero. But sometimes things get bad enough that only a Hayek quote will do.

  I assume that rule also applies to article headlines, for example, J.D. Tuccille's: Mamdani and Trump prove that there are two paths toward socialism. Otherwise those last three words coulda been "roads to serfdom".

  About five years ago, the comedian Ryan Long posted a video in which a woke progressive and an old-fashioned racist meet and, much to their astonishment, discover that rather than being bitterly opposed, they agree on pretty much everything.

  There was a strong echo of that convergence in last week's White House tete-a-tete between Republican President Donald Trump and New York's new socialist Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani. Anticipated to be a grudge match, it instead turned into something of a lovefest. Well, of course it did. As fans of horseshoe theory accurately point out, control freaks from the political extremes might differ on details, but they have more in common with each other than they do with people who respect each other's liberty.

  (And, sure enough, J.D. eventually gets around to citing The Road to Serfdom. Just not early enough in his article to run afoul of KMW's rule.)

• Whew. Noah Smith sets my mind, and maybe yours, at ease: No, You Are Not on Indigenous Land. It involves some brutal honesty:

  The United States, like all nations, was created through territorial conquest. Most of its current territory was occupied or frequented by human beings before the U.S. came into existence; the U.S. used force to displace, subjugate, or kill all of those people. To the extent that land “ownership” existed under the previous inhabitants, the land of the U.S. is stolen land.

  This was also true before the U.S. was born. The forcible theft of the land upon which the U.S. now exists was not the first such theft; the people who lived there before conquered, displaced, or killed someone else in order to take the land. The land has been stolen and re-stolen again and again. If you somehow destroyed the United States, expelled its current inhabitants, and gave ownership of the land to the last recorded tribe that had occupied it before, you would not be returning it to its original occupants; you would simply be handing it to the next-most-recent conquerors.

  If you go back far enough in time, of course, at some point this is no longer true. Humanity didn’t always exist; therefore, for every piece of land, there was a first human to lay eyes on it, and a first human to say, “This land is mine.” But by what right did this first human claim exclusive ownership of this land? Why does being the first person to see a natural object make you the rightful owner of that object? And why does being the first human to set foot on a piece of land give your blood descendants the right to dispose of that land as they see fit in perpetuity, and to exclude any and all others from that land? What about all the peoples of the world who were never lucky enough to be the first to lay eyes on any plot of dirt? Are they simply to be dispossessed forever?

  I have never seen a satisfactory answer to these questions. Nor have I seen a satisfactory explanation of why ownership of land should be allocated collectively, in terms of racial or ethnic groups. In general, the first people who arrived on a piece of land did so in dribs and drabs, in small family units and tiny micro-tribes that met and married and fought and mixed and formed into larger identities and ethnicities and tribes over long periods of time. In most cases, the ethnic groups who now claim pieces of land as their own did not even exist when the first humans discovered or settled that land.

  [Oops! It turns out I blogged Noah's article last year! Well, it still works, and is a good remedy if you were bullied into a Thanksgiving-table "land acknowledgement" yesterday.]

• Embodied inanity is the worst kind of inanity. And David Harsanyi has an example: Marjorie Taylor Greene Embodies the Inanity of Populism.

  During a recent stop on her image rehab tour, Marjorie Taylor Greene told CNN's Dana Bash that she is sorry "for taking part in the toxic politics." It has been, she added, "bad for the country." A week later, Greene finally did something patriotic by announcing her retirement.

  It's fair to say Greene is one of the most well-known GOP House members in the nation. Greene, though, is famous because her nitwittery has been endlessly highlighted by the media and Democrats to cast the Republican Party as one of hayseeds and conspiracists.

  And, in all fairness, Greene might be one of the biggest ignoramuses to ever serve in Congress, which is no small achievement when one considers the "Squad" exists. If I asked you to name a single piece of legislation Greene has sponsored, you would probably be at a loss. If I asked you to name an important policy she has championed, an uplifting speech she has delivered or an area of expertise she has mastered, you would not think of any because there have been none.

  Let's not spare the voters of MTG's congressional district (GA-14), who returned her to her seat, the one she's decided she didn't want after all, giving her 64.4% of their votes.

Kevin D. Williamson has a long, personal essay at the Dispatch and it's highly recommended, reminding us that We Are Pilgrims, Still. You should subscribe! But if not, here is your (archive.today link). Starting from two lines of that hymn they (allegedly) played on the Titanic as it sank.

For the nth time: I am not very religious. But…

Also of note:

• Quitcher bitchin', OK? Megan McArdle also has thoughts on this day: How to pay this great American inheritance forward. (WaPo gifted link)

  This year, however, I’ve been reflecting on another thing we ought to be more grateful for: America herself. We have been taking her too much for granted recently, assuming that she will keep showering her gifts upon us without so much as a thank-you note. We’re like trust-funders who slander capitalism and squander their incomes, secure in the knowledge that the checks will keep coming.

  They will not, unless we once again start treating America as something we have to earn, rather than something we’re entitled to.

  A point well taken, Megan.

• Also thankful is … Veronique de Rugy! She is Giving Thanks for Our Sometimes-Maligned Constitution and Creed.

  Thanksgiving invites us to pause and consider the gifts we often overlook. This year, at a moment of rising political unease and ideological confusion, I am especially grateful for one extraordinary inheritance: a nation and its creed brought into being by the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution.

  Why, in addition to family, friends and a feast, is this on my mind today? In certain circles, especially among "postliberal" thinkers on the right, it's now fashionable to claim that the Constitution has failed. Some argue that the country's founding was overly individualistic or insufficiently moral, that our constitutional structure prevents the pursuit of a unified national purpose, or that what we need instead is a more powerful state headed by a muscular executive and a more cohesive cultural or religious identity enforced from above.

  Vero was born in France, and became an American in 2012. We are lucky to have her.

• On a less thankful note. New Hampshire's own Jason Sorens observes that Thanksgiving traffic shows the Highway Trust Fund is running on empty.

  The American Automobile Association predicts that nearly 82 million Americans will travel more than 50 miles from home over Thanksgiving—a new record if it pans out. Almost all the travel increase, it projects, will be by car.

  Whether you take a train, plane, or automobile to your holiday festivities, your income tax dollars are subsidizing drivers on the road. Most Americans assume that gas taxes and tolls fund highways. That used to be the case, but it's no longer true.

  Gas taxes and user fees haven't fully funded the federal highway system since 2007. In 2021, Congress authorized roughly $181 billion in transfers to the highway account—money paid for by debt and general revenues.

  Even with that added cash, the federal Highway Trust Fund (HTF) will run out of money again in 2027. By 2033, it will need an extra $250 billion from taxpayers. That's nearly $2,000 per American household over the next eight years.

  Jason's libertarian credentials are impeccable, but he realizes that if we're gonna have roads and highways, the more equitable way to fund them would be to raise the gas tax.

• Like I ignore Season Five of Justified… Jeff Maurer thinks The Next President Should Ignore Trump's Ukraine "Peace Plan"

  Neville Chamberlain gets a bad rap: We think of him as the doe-eyed naif who got suckered by a tyrant, but he’s really a doe-eyed naif who got suckered by a tyrant. What happened to him happens all the time – the historical examples of leaders blowing off international agreements are too numerous to count. World War I started when the German Chancellor dismissed the treaty that said “No starting a World War I” as “a scrap of paper”; the treaty that supposedly ended the Vietnam War just let the NVA break for lunch before pushing on to Saigon. Often, international agreements are like traffic rules in Boston: violated so egregiously that you wonder why they exist at all.

  If Trump strong-arms Ukraine into accepting his “peace plan” – which, in its initial form, would really be a surrender – the next president should not consider themselves bound by that agreement. You might be surprised to hear me say that, since LOLing at a treaty is usually the provenance of dictators, not pointy-headed liberals. But I think it’s time for liberals to wake up and acknowledge the way that treaties are and always have been used.

  I think Jeff might be skimming over the difference between a (hypothetical) "agreement" and a full-fledged treaty ratified by Congress, which becomes the Law of the Land. Still, check it out.

• What, again? According to Yuval Levin, the GOP is Limping into Another Health Care Debate. (archive.today link) He notes "two kinds of problems" that Republicans have in the area:

  The first is just the sheer absence of any Republican health care agenda, which has been a persistent problem for more than a decade now. Republicans have honed the habit of starting sentences they can’t finish when it comes to health care, promising all sorts of action if only they could get the leverage to advance it, but then turning out to have no particular policies in mind — or at least none they agree about.

  […]

  The second problem revealed by the Republican fight over health care is one the GOP has been even more eager to obscure this year. It is the great and growing frustration with the Trump administration among congressional Republicans.

  At this point, I'd be happy (and thankful!) if the GOP just managed to avoid making things worse.

• In case you thought cancel culture had run its course. Jonathan Turley notes that its alive and well in one of the its strongholds. “Fight Fiercely Harvard”: Harvard Club of New York Cancels Dershowitz Book Event.

  The Harvard Club of New York is being accused of censorship after abruptly cancelling a book event featuring famed Harvard professor Alan Dershowitz. In a statement, Dershowitz says that invitations were sent out and the event was approaching when he was suddenly told that the Harvard Club would have none of it. He blamed his representation of President Donald Trump for the cancellation.

  For a club that bills itself as offering “unique experiences,” it appears that hearing from opposing or different views is not one of them.

  Dershowitz has been associated with Harvard for over 60 years and remains one of its best known law faculty members.

  Jonathan doesn't mention Dershowitz's connection to Epstein, which might also be a factor.

I tweet-snarked at the NH Democratic Party last night from my sofa:

No parent would bother sending their kid to a private school (or homeschooling) if public schools were doing as good a job for "free". Public schools should try doing that.

— Paul Sand (@punsalad) November 25, 2025

That link in the Dems' tweet goes to a Garry Rayno report at InDepthNH.org: Public School Advocates Decry State’s Education Freedom Account Program. That site claims to provide "unbiased nonprofit watchdog news", but that's very much a Chico-Marxist joke: "Who you gonna believe? Me or your own eyes?"

No big deal: InDepthNH.org is simply the funhouse-mirror image of NH Journal. But at least NH Journal hasn't, as near as I can tell, claimed to be unbiased. And, no surprise, Raymo's article doesn't bother to find one advocate for the state's EFA program. Those "watchdog" eyes aren't watching everything.

Also of note:

• Two words, Michelle: "Nikki Haley". Jeff Jacoby rebuts a former First Lady: Wrong, Michelle Obama. Of course America's ready for a woman president.

  I'VE NEVER had any particular interest in women's fashion trends. Like professional sports, heavy-metal bands, and superhero movie franchises, it's a subject that I know millions of people find fascinating but has never really appealed to me. Under normal circumstances, therefore, the release of former first lady Michelle Obama's new book about the "beauty and intrigue of fashion" and the evolution of her clothing style — a coffee table volume titled "The Look" — wouldn't have registered on my radar.

  But something Obama said while publicizing the book caught even my attention.

  Asked during an on-stage interview last week about first ladies being seen as "an archetype of wifedom and femininity," Obama briskly dismissed the notion, saying it has "no current status in how women actually show up in the world today." But a follow‑up question about how much "room" there is for an American woman to become president triggered a heated response:

  "Well, as we saw in the past election, sadly, we ain't ready," Obama said. "That's why I'm, like, don't even look at me about running, because you all are lying. You're not ready for a woman. You are not! So don't waste my time! You know, we've got a lot of growing up to do, and there's still, sadly, a lot of men who do not feel like they can be led by a woman, and we saw it."

  Then, seeming to catch herself, Obama paused, looked at the interviewer, and asked: "What was the question?"

  I think Kamala lost not because she was a woman, but because she was (accurately) perceived as a phony nitwit:

  Nikki Haley would not have had that problem. In an alternate universe.

• "This anonymous clan of slack-jawed troglodytes has cost me the election, and yet if I were to have them killed, I would be the one to go to jail. That's democracy for you." That was Mr. Burns in a 1990(!) Simpsons episode. Thirty-five years later: Trump’s habitual 'treason' charges reflect his authoritarian impulses.

  President Donald Trump says six members of Congress are "traitors to our Country" who "should be ARRESTED AND PUT ON TRIAL" because they produced a video reminding members of the armed forces that they "can refuse illegal orders." Trump's over-the-top reaction epitomizes his longstanding tendency to portray criticism of him as a crime against the state, which reflects his disregard for freedom of speech as well as his narcissism.

  In the video, which was posted online last week, two senators and four representatives, all Democrats with intelligence or military backgrounds, allude to Trump's controversial uses of U.S. forces, including his domestic military deployments and his summary executions of suspected drug smugglers. "Americans trust their military," they say, "but that trust is at risk."

  Trump is not alone! Granite Grok guy Steve MacDonald takes on one of those videoed Dems, New Hampshire's own Maggie Goodlander: Jake Sullivan's Wife Can Be Tried and Sentenced for Sedition.

  "Can"? Well, anything's possible.

  Not to let the Dems off the hook. Their "just stating the law" defense is just way too cute, similar to the conspiracy theorists' hiding behind a "just asking questions" defense.

  David R. Henderson points to analysis from Ted Galen Carpenter which points out the iffy status of their "refuse illegal orders" diktat:

  Slotkin and other critics contend that enlistees in the military take an oath to obey the Constitution, not the commander-in-chief or any other official.  That point is true to some extent, but the concept of “unlawful orders” is not objective or self-defining.  Even the oath of enlistment itself is somewhat murky.  Personnel taking the oath swear both to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies” and to “obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me.” Military officers swear the oath of commissioned officers, which contains very similar language.

  The oaths do not directly address the problem of how to deal with a situation when an order from the president or another military official might violate the Constitution. The Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ) requires members of the armed services to obey all lawful orders but also obligates them to disobey any unlawful order.  Those twin requirements would seem to create a conceptual mess for anyone not having a law degree and an extensive background in the specifics of military law.

  The language of the UCMJ and other relevant statutes also seems to leave a person in the military adrift about what exactly to do if he or she concludes that an order is indeed unlawful.  If the individual disobeys an order that authorities later determine to be lawful, that person risks being court martialed.  Conversely, if one abides by an unlawful order, that person might be deemed to have violated the oath to protect and defend the Constitution.

  I'm also in agreement with James Freeman of the WSJ, who finds the Dems "reckless" in starting a "poisonous controversy". And also Jim Geraghty of National Review:

  If you’re going to create a video accusing the president of the United States of making unlawful orders, you probably should have at least one or two solid and recent examples in mind before you do so, but apparently that’s just too much to ask from the likes of Colorado Democratic Representative Jason Crow. But that doesn’t get President Trump off the hook for his unhinged raging that Crow and other Democratic lawmakers ought to be tried and executed for sedition. Still, maybe every incumbent in Washington would prefer to be talking about treason and insurrections than the economy.

  It's really tough to follow the path of Elvis these days.

• Your tax dollars not at work. Jeff Luse reads an Inspector General's report so you don't have to: Taxpayers still paying for Hurricane Sandy relief mismanagement 13 years later, new report finds.

  In October 2012, Hurricane Sandy made landfall near Atlantic City, New Jersey. The storm would bring severe flooding to the East Coast—particularly New Jersey and New York City—and go down as the fifth-most-expensive tropical cyclone in U.S. history ($88.5 billion in damages), per a 2024 estimate by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. But the costs of the storm are still being realized, and more than 13 years later, taxpayers are still footing the bill for the federal government's mismanagement, according to a recent report from the Transportation Department's Office of Inspector General (OIG).

  In January 2013, Congress approved over $50 billion in aid for Sandy relief. The bill, which included bailouts for wealthy Connecticut residents, appropriated $10.9 billion to the Federal Transit Administration's (FTA) Public Transportation Emergency Relief Program, $10 billion of which the FTA gave to states for hurricane recovery and resilience projects.

  Portions of this money have, unsurprisingly, been spent wastefully, and the OIG report identifies more than $95 million in questionable costs. One example of wasteful spending comes from an awardee that, in June 2017, was given an $88.9 million grant for "design and construction for replacing commuter and light rail signal, power, and communication systems." The project was originally supposed to end in May 2018, but was granted an extension to operate through December 2021. Even with this extension, the project was not finished when the OIG conducted its audit. As a result, the recipient had incurred "approximately $52.5 million in project activity costs" since its 2021 deadline. And because the project never received an extension from the FTA, these expenditures are "ineligible." However, the recipient is working to extend its grant period with the agency, which would allow the contractor to be reimbursed for these cost overruns.

  Later in the article, Jeff highlights $773.1 million designated for "replacement of a new passenger and freight rail service bridge". Initially scheduled to be finished last year. Now rescheduled with a "deadline" of July 2030.

• Apologies to DOGE. We bemoaned its demise yesterday. But they claim, like the guy in the Monty Python movie…

  As usual, this is fake news from @Reuters. President Trump was given a mandate by the American people to modernize the federal government and reduce waste, fraud and abuse. Just last week, DOGE terminated 78 wasteful contracts and saved taxpayers $335M. We’ll be back in a few… https://t.co/S1pSmx26s0

  — Department of Government Efficiency (@DOGE) November 24, 2025

  I'll believe it when they kill off that $773.1 million replacement bridge project.

Yup:

Unfortunately, as Jim Geraghty points out this morn: Somehow, the Government Shutdown May Become Even More Pointless.

Repeated lesson from this President: he has no principles, just occasional whims.

Also of note:

• Need something to be thankful for? Steven Pinker and Marian L. Tupy have a biggie: The Golden Age of Humanity? We’re Living in It.

  Would we be better off living in the Middle Ages?

  Astonishingly, influential voices on the American intellectual right now seem to think so. Rather than affirming the Enlightenment ideals that inspired this country’s founding—reason, rights, markets, liberal democracy, and church-state separation—they are longing for, of all things, rule from the throne and altar.

  Last month at Yale, the influential political blogger Curtis Yarvin, in a debate against Free Press contributor Jed Rubenfeld, argued that America ought to “end the democratic experiment”—and establish a monarchy. Yarvin has noted that Donald Trump is “biologically suited” to be America’s monarch. The ideas may sound extreme, but they have been influential. J.D. Vance describes Yarvin as “a friend,” and has cited his work. And Yarvin is part of a family of movements, known as the Dark Enlightenment, Techno-authoritarianism, and Neo-Reaction (NRx)—that reject the entire family of enlightenment values.

  It doesn't sound as if Yarvin means the nice kind of monarchy, like a mostly powerless, largely ceremonial, figurehead fond of Corgis.

• They don't care if they get it right. There was a whole lotta twitter-freakout yesterday, caps-lock style. Example:

  BREAKING: Trump just quietly STABBED America’s nurses in the back with his “One Big Beautiful Bill”!
  
  While grinning next to his billionaire Education Secretary, Donald Trump signed a disgusting provision that DEMOTES advanced nursing degrees, social work, physical therapy, and… pic.twitter.com/tz1jzLHr1X

  — Occupy Democrats (@OccupyDemocrats) November 23, 2025

  Don't be taken in. Preston Cooper describes: What the Outrage over Nursing Loan Limits Gets Wrong.

  Student debt often provokes outrage. But the usual complaint is that student debt is too high. Now, nursing associations are angry that nurses’ student debt will be too low.

  The American Association of Colleges of Nursing decried the “devastating” decision by the Education Department to not classify nursing programs as “professional” for the purposes of student loan limits, arguing that it “disregards decades of progress toward parity across the health professions.” Online, many nurses have interpreted it as a “spit in the face.” Nothing could be further from the truth.

  Here’s what actually happened. Earlier this year, Congress passed a law imposing caps on federal lending to graduate students (which was previously unlimited). The law creates two categories of loan limits: standard and professional. Graduate students in standard degree programs may borrow up to $100,000, while those in professional degree programs may borrow up to $200,000. However, Congress legislated only broad guidelines as to how graduate programs should be classified. While degrees like medicine, dentistry, and law explicitly qualify for professional loan limits, the exact line between standard and professional programs was left to the Education Department to draw.

  Of course, the "American Association of Colleges of Nursing" is trying to get their students on the hook for those higher loan limits, which fuel higher tuition fees.

• Geraghty, again. It doesn't seem we would need reminding about this, but: Remember, Vladimir Putin’s Promises Are Worthless.

  My distinguished colleagues Noah Rothman, Andy McCarthy, and Mark Wright — writing from Kyiv! — and The Editors have weighed in on the nebulous, 28-point “peace plan” for the war in Ukraine put together by U.S. special envoy Steve Witkoff and his Russian counterpart Kirill Dmitriev. Secretary of State Marco Rubio insists it was not written by the Russians, and that the text of the proposal is apparently changing day by day. “I’m not going to speculate or go into the details of any of the specific items in the latest version of the proposal because, frankly, by tomorrow or the next day, that may have evolved and changed further,” Rubio said.

  My take is simple: Negotiations with the Russian government are moot, because the Russian government breaks its treaties on a regular basis. It doesn’t matter what Vladimir Putin promises, because he’s either never going to keep that promise or he will break that promise at the first moment of convenience.

  Examples, if you need them, abound at the link.

• On Side B: A Requiem for Rationality. Christian Britschgi sings A Dirge for DOGE.

  Few would disagree with the notion that President Donald Trump is rather malleable on issues of policy and political alliances. Friends and enemies swap places with surprising regularity. Must-pass initiatives become rejected agendas just as quickly.

  As visual evidence of this, consider two scenes.

  Back in February 2025, the president hosted a chummy joint press conference in the Oval Office with the world's richest man, Elon Musk, who outlined his plans to slash the federal government to the bone via his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).

  Then, just last week, Trump hosted another amicable joint press conference where his guest was the self-described socialist mayor of New York City, Zohran Mamdani, who plans on making New York City great again with tax hikes on billionaires like Musk to fund billions in new social spending.

  Later: "The DOGE effort to dismantle, reform, and streamline the entire federal government started with such a bang. It's now sunsetting with barely a whimper."

  With entitlements off the table, there was only so much DOGE could do. Still… alas, we hardly knew ye.

  [UPDATE 2025-11-26: Note that DOGE is claiming that, in fact, it is not dead. It's just pinin' for the fjords.]

Kevin D. Williamson writes Against Nostalgia. (archive.today link)

Double points to KDW for that last link, which goes to one of the funniest SNL sketches ever.

Also of note:

• A myth is as good as a mile. Becket Adams notes the damage When Myths Become Media ‘Facts’. (NR gifted link) A couple examples, among many:

  In 2017, for example, the New York Times claimed that former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin inspired the 2011 mass shooting in Tucson, Ariz. There is no evidence to support this claim. There never has been. Palin later tried to sue the New York Times for defamation. The idea that the former governor incited the shooting originates from the wild speculations of the New York Times’s Paul Krugman, who leveled the accusation just moments after news of the shooting spree first broke. The myth then gradually grew over time until it became a commonly accepted belief in certain social circles. The idea transformed from the unfounded speculation of an angry crank to a generally accepted “truth,” as declared in an official New York Times editorial.

  Another good example of this sort of thing, where a false assertion eventually becomes the accepted prevailing narrative, involves that damned tan suit former President Barack Obama wore in August 2014. It started out as a bit of a joke — the idea that the worst scandal of his presidency was that he wore a tan suit to a press conference. But the joke has since metastasized into something of a sincere talking point. Obama had a scandal-free presidency! He was as clean as a whistle! Why, Republicans were so desperate for a scandal, they pretended as if it was a major crisis that he wore a tan suit! Obama obviously didn’t have a scandal-free presidency. This is a straight falsehood that many now treat as truth.

  I'm old enough to remember Lois Lerner and the IRS.

• I suppose a false choice is better than none, right? Jacob R. Swartz wishes the not-stupid party could be smarter: Democrats offer a false choice between socialism and technocracy.

  The unity that once held the Democratic Party together has given way to ideological meandering, oscillating between "woke" moralistic left-wing populism and technocratic managerialism. These two impulses now define its fractured identity: the former emerging from the Occupy movement and the momentum of Bernie Sanders' presidential campaigns, the latter from the evolution of the Clinton-era "New Democrat" consensus.

  The 2025 elections crystallized the divide through two major victories—socialist outsider Zohran Mamdani in New York City and Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger, who's more in line with the neoliberal wing. Each has been called the party's "future," though their wins more clearly reveal how ideologically hollow the party's core has become.

  Both models come with glaring weaknesses. Mamdani's democratic socialism—state planning, rent control, punitive taxation, and the belief that "no problem is too large for government to solve"—risks collapsing into familiar 20th-century contradictions. Spanberger's approach, while more viable, offers not innovation but a refined status quo: moderation as technique rather than vision.

  To quote Woody Allen once again: "More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly."

• Nevertheless, some will manage to do the impossible. Megan McArdle finds The signs of educational decline are now impossible to ignore. (WaPo gifted link)

  There has been a lot of that going on recently, most notably in education. Instead of rectifying disparities in preparation and achievement, people decided it would be simpler to adjust the measurements. Parents opposed standardized testing, got their kids disability diagnoses that allowed them extra time on tests and lobbied teachers to change bad grades. Exhausted teachers responded with grade inflation, which also helped conceal that low-income and minority kids weren’t doing as well as their richer and White peers. Progressive educators watered down curriculums, gutted gifted and talented programs, and weakened admissions standards for honors classes and magnet schools. Colleges dropped standardized testing requirements, in part because that made it easier to diversify their student body. None of these things happened everywhere, but they happened in many places, and all of them made it harder to see — or rectify — pandemic-era learning loss.

  The results of this thinking can be seen in a recent report from the University of California at San Diego, which like the rest of the UC system stopped accepting standardized test scores in 2020. In 2024 the school had to redesign its remedial math program to create a class that focused entirely on remediating elementary school and middle school math. In 2025, more than 8 percent of entering students needed that class.

  These are college students who chose to enroll in a major with a math requirement yet struggle to round numbers to the nearest hundred, add or divide fractions, or work with negative numbers.

  Students, parents, teachers, administrators, politicians, …: they've all gotten real good at pointing fingers at each other.

• It's a story, but not the whole story. Dan McLaughlin wants a word with you, PBS poster boy: No, Ken Burns, the United States Is Not an Iroquois Nation. The problem is even worse than that, though; it's what Ken left out:

  While there is time to discuss the Haudenosaunee, there’s no mention of Magna Carta or the Glorious Revolution. No time is given to Locke or Montesquieu, or to the ancient Greek democracies or the Roman Republic, the birth and death of which fixated the Founders (hence, the popularity of Joseph Addison’s 1713 play Cato). There’s nothing on the Mayflower Compact or the 1619 founding of the Virginia House of Burgesses, both made by men who had doubtless not yet heard much if anything about Native Americans in upstate New York. The Founding Fathers are extracted entirely from the context of the English political culture, the Scottish Enlightenment, and the classics.

  You can’t make this mistake by accident. Few people in history have left behind a richer record of what they were thinking than the American Founders. They debated, in closed sessions and open newspapers and pamphlets, the drafting and ratification of 13 new state constitutions (14, counting Vermont’s 1777 constitution as an independent republic), the Articles of Confederation, and the ultimate federal Constitution. James Madison took copious notes at Philadelphia in 1787, which were published after the death of everyone involved.

  I know Locke and Montesquieu were white guys, but… come on.

Recently on the book blog:

Recently on the movie blog:

Pun Son wanted to see Nuremburg! (He's kind of into WWII stuff.) So we trundled down to the Regal Cinemaplex in Newington Sunday night for the 8:15 showing, and … we were the only ones in the theater. The parking log was crowded though, thanks to the new Wicked movie.

Cynical observation: When it comes to actual wickedness, I guess there's not so much interest in movies about that.

It is, pretty clearly, Oscar-bait. I'm not sure how the "Best Actor" nomination will play out. Will both Russell Crowe (who plays Hermann Göring) and Rami Malek (who plays his shrink, Douglas Kelley) get nods? Will they then split the vote, allowing some mere mortal to take home the statuette? I'd say Michael Shannon (playing prosecutor Robert H. Jackson) is a lock for Best Supporting Actor, even though he goes through the movie with a single semi-scowl expression.

Also good: John Slattery as Colonel Burton C. Andrus, commandant of the Nuremburg prison and Leo Woodall, an occasional translator between Kelley and Göring, who's hiding a secret past.

It's very long, just a couple minutes short of 2.5 hours. And, if you want to know why I'm concentrating on the actors, most of that time seems to be those actors talking to each other. I may have nodded off for a bit in the middle.

The movie emphasizes how ordinary Germans (like Göring) got enraptured by the charismatic Hitler. At the end, spoiler alert, Kelley is shown as a depressed drunk, given to loudly, but futilely, warning fellow Americans that it would be a mistake to think It Can't Happen Here. Are we supposed to draw parallels between the Adolph and the Donald? I'd guess that wasn't far from the filmmakers' minds.

Declaring that science is under attack by partisans is a fertile field. Searching Amazon for 'war on science' brings up this book, but also a raft of others. I obtained this volume for free from the Reason Foundation earlier this year, which may give you a hint about its ideological positioning. (Full disclosure about my priors: I'm usually in agreement with that positioning.)

The book is a collection of 32 essays; enough are co-written to bring the author count to (see subtitle) 39. Most are written in academic style, with copious citations, footnotes, etc. (References are not included in the book itself, at least not the hardcover; they are available here.)

What makes this version of the "war on science" different is that the aggressors are often on the inside of "science" itself. We're not talking about a rerun of the Scopes trial. A lead essay by Richard Dawkins draws the historical parallel with Lysenkoism in the bad old Soviet Union; opposing Lysenko's batshit ideas about evolution could be at best career-ending, but often enough, life-ending.

This strikes (literally) close to home. One bad example mentioned in a couple places is Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, a (tenured) Associate Professor in the Physics Department of the University Near Here. She is cited for her tendentious argument in her published paper "Making Black Women Scientists under White Empiricism: The Racialization of Epistemology in Physics", which claimed (citations elided):

Yet white empiricism undermines a significant theory of twentieth-century physics: General Relativity. Albert Einstein’s monumental contribution to our empirical understanding of gravity is rooted in the principle of covariance, which is the simple idea that there is no single objective frame of reference that is more objective than any other. All frames of reference, all observers, are equally competent and capable of observing the universal laws that underlie the workings of our physical universe. Yet the number of women in physics remains low, especially those of African descent. The gender imbalance between Black women and Black men is less severe than in many professions, but the disparity remains. Given that Black women must, according to Einstein’s principle of covariance, have an equal claim to objectivity regardless of their simultaneously experiencing intersecting axes of oppression, we can dispense with any suggestion that the low number of Black women in science indicates any lack of validity on their part as observers. It is instead important to examine the way the social forces at work shape Black women’s standpoint as observers—scientists—with a specific interest in how scientific knowledge is dependent on this specific standpoint. As Jarita Holbrook notes, Black students have their capacity for objectivity questioned simply because their standpoint on racism is different from that of white students and scientists who don’t have to experience its consequences.

That article was published in Signs, a publication of the University of Chicago Press. In case you're unconvinced of its absurdity, a lengthy rebuttal came from Alan Sokal, published in the Journal of Controversial Ideas, available here.

The book is wide-ranging, covering issues all over the (campus) map: gender ideology, race-based hiring, diversity statements, "decolonizing" mathematics, and more. And, as sort of a unifying theme, the career-destroying efforts of today's censorious heirs of Lysenko.

A concluding section covers "what is to be done". Pun Salad Hero Steven Pinker is here with some good ideas, and I can also recommend Dorian Abbot, Geophysics prof at the University of Chicago. His article is a hoot, showing that he's retained a healthy sense of humor, despite getting cancelled at MIT back in 2021.

"A journey into a wondrous land whose boundaries are that of imagination. That's the signpost up ahead—your next stop…" The Trump-Mamdani show. (WaPo gifted link) Well, that's how the WaPo editorialists see it anyway.

Well, that's weird. Not only the Trump/Mamdani lovefest, but the WaPo for pointing out, later in the editorial, "their shared affinity for state capitalism and protectionist rackets."

Almost as much fun as reading the new attitude of the WaPo editorial board is noting their commenters' heads explode in indignation. Example, from "Frank in Alexandria":

The EB strikes again with malarkey and balogna. We know that Democratic Socialists are very scary to your Billionaire Puppet Master, but you guys (and yes, I imagine most, if not all of you are men) really need to lighten up. Vermont has had a DS Senator for years and more and more will be elected in the future.

Hey, maybe. But also: maybe not.

Also of note:

• 

  I think I agree with Walter. Isaacson, that is. He has a new book (Amazon link at your right) and I think the Free Press has an excerpt: The Greatest Sentence Ever Written.

  Two hundred and fifty years ago, one sentence became our common creed and mission statement, binding a diverse group of pilgrims and immigrants into one nation.

  We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

  In this era of poisonous and sometimes violent political polarization, when even discussions of our history threaten to divide us, we must find a way to put differences aside and celebrate, with gratitude, who we are. One way to achieve this would be by appreciating anew that sentence, the second of our Declaration of Independence, which may be the greatest ever written by human hand.

  For some reason, the Portsmouth (NH) Public Library doesn't have it. I will poke them.

• A brief legal tutorial. Also at the Free Press, Jed Rubenfeld explains it in words even Trump might be able to follow: No, Democratic Lawmakers Didn’t Commit Sedition.

  Technically, there’s no generally applicable crime of “sedition” in U.S. law. Instead, there’s “seditious conspiracy,” which is committed when two or more people agree to try “to overthrow, put down, or to destroy by force the Government of the United States, or to levy war against them.” The crime also includes conspiring to “oppose by force the authority” of the U.S., or conspiring “by force to prevent, hinder, or delay the execution of any law of the United States.”

  The lawmakers’ video does not come remotely near any of this. For one thing, the video is speech, not “force.”

  That said, U.S. law does makes it a crime for anyone with the “intent to interfere with, impair, or influence the loyalty, morale, or discipline” of the armed forces to “advise,” “urge,” or “attempt to cause” “insubordination, disloyalty, mutiny, or refusal of duty” by any serviceman. This is not a capital offense (neither is seditious conspiracy), but it’s a serious crime, punishable by 10 years in prison. When the nation is at war, the punishment can increase to 20 years.

  Jed goes on to explain: "Nevertheless, while the video is legal, it’s also potentially misleading and dangerous—not least for servicemen who may see it and act on it." Fair warning to any barracks lawyer. And (as I said a couple days ago) those CongressCritters will not be testifying at your subsequent court martial.

• RFK Jr. might want to disagree with this medical advice. Nevertheless, guys, I shall link to this Ars Technica article that purports to explain Why you don’t want to get tuberculosis on your penis.

  A man in Ireland earned the unpleasant distinction of developing an exceedingly rare infection on his penis—one that has a puzzling origin, but may be connected to his work with dead animals.

  What follows might make a good episode of House, if they ever decide to reboot that series. (You know, like they did with Matlock.)

• How many shades of red can a cryptographer blush? Also, Ars Technica: Oops. Cryptographers cancel election results after losing decryption key.

  One of the world’s premier security organizations has canceled the results of its annual leadership election after an official lost an encryption key needed to unlock results stored in a verifiable and privacy-preserving voting system.

  I wonder if the official checked for a Post-it® underneath their keyboard?

Recycling his cartoon from last March:

The WSJ editorialists cover the betrayal: Trump Issues an Ultimatum to Ukraine. (WSJ gifted link)

There are a couple ways this could not be a total disaster, as the WSJ points out: European leaders might "talk Trump off this plan". Or Putin might overestimate his ability to sway Trump, and try for a deal even Trump might balk at.

I'm disgusted and pessimistic. Sorry.

Also of note:

• Moral panics seldom produce good outcomes. David Harsanyi bucks the tide: Release of Epstein Files Sets a Horrible Precedent.

  Former Harvard president Larry Summers has now lost virtually every professional association after a House committee released emails of his exchanges with child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. There are around 20,000 pages of them. Many of the correspondences are embarrassing. There's going to be little, if any, sympathy for a well-known elite who's angered conservatives and progressives and befriends creeps. And perhaps Summers doesn't deserve any.

  Even so, there isn't even a hint of illegality in those emails. There's nothing suggesting that Summers participated in any kind of impropriety or conspiracy. The only purpose of the release was to destroy Summers.

  Congress is about to release the so-called Epstein files, a trove of documents that were amassed during criminal investigations into the sex offender who committed suicide in 2019. The contents are likely brimming with thousands of names of innocent people, many who have provided alibis or were never under any suspicion of sex trafficking or anything else. A significant portion of any criminal investigation consists of uncorroborated accusations that are floated by people on the periphery of the case, third-hand accounts, theories and rumors. This is why grand jury files are almost always sealed.

  David notes that Democrats had every chance to play this game during the Biden Administration, but didn't. Why not? Silence.

• "I've got a fever, and the only prescription is …" Alas, nobody is finishing that sentence with "more cowbell". As Jim Geraghty notes: So Much for Turning Down the Temperature in American Politics.

  The U.S. Uniform Code of Military Justice states, regarding lawful orders:

  “Lawfulness. A general order or regulation is lawful unless it is contrary to the Constitution, the laws of the United States, or lawful superior orders or for some other reason is beyond the authority of the official issuing it. . . . An order requiring the performance of a military duty or act may be inferred to be lawful, and it is disobeyed at the peril of the subordinate. This inference does not apply to a patently illegal order, such as one that directs the commission of a crime. The lawfulness of an order is a question of law to be determined by the military judge.”

  In other words, a military order does not become unlawful simply because it is controversial or unpopular. If you, a citizen outside the military, believe that one of President Trump’s orders to the military is unlawful, we have a whole separate branch of the government called the judiciary to determine if the order violates the law or Constitution.

  For six Democrats in Congress, that just isn’t enough.

  Jim looks at how one of the six (Jason Crow of Colorado) "got rather snippy" when a Fox News interviewer probed to discover just what laws Trump had asked the military to break. Or might, someday.

  But then Jim observes: "We can always count on President Trump to take a bad situation and make it worse." And that's what happened.

• Realistically, though, what are the chances? Avik Roy says: Now Is the Moment to Deregulate Obamacare. Sample: (archive.today link)

  Republicans have long struggled to articulate an alternative to Obamacare, single payer, and other left-oriented approaches to health reform. Republicans usually nibble around the edges, with small-ball ideas that message well, but don’t address America’s structural health-care flaws.

  The biggest structural flaw of them all — the original sin of America’s health-care system — is that we don’t purchase health insurance for ourselves, and instead depend on employers or the government to buy it for us. That policy — an unintentional byproduct of World War II wage controls — is the single biggest reason why American health care is the costliest in the world. Few of us have visibility into how much is being taken out of our paychecks to buy health insurance, and we have little incentive to shop for the lowest-cost, highest-value health-care products and services.

  The only way off the train track to single-payer health care is to repair and rebuild the market for individually purchased private health insurance. Individually purchased health insurance — that is to say, insurance you buy for yourself independent of your employer or the government — is the sine qua non of free-market health reform. Health Savings Accounts are great, but if you get cancer, or get hit by a bus, or have a stroke, and end up with a $100,000 hospital bill, your HSA isn’t going to save you. You still need insurance for those big catastrophic bills.

  Avik outlines a strategy for a package of reforms that might get 60 votes in the Senate. I don't know how plausible it is (health care is so easy to successfully demagogue), but I wish someone would try it.

• Jeffrey Blehar had me at "sordid". He provides The Sordid Olivia Nuzzi Saga, Explained. (archive.today link)

  ‘Bad things happen when you hear my name
  Deny your attraction, but I’ve got no shame.” 

  These are the opening lyrics of a song titled “Jailbait,” recorded by journalist Olivia Nuzzi back when she was a teenager and an aspiring MySpace pop idol, trading under the name of “Livvy.” The track is devoted to the singer’s attraction to older men with money, and, without knowing anything else, I’m inclined to believe Nuzzi wrote the words herself.

  Readers, before I begin, I want to stipulate that I loathe every single person involved in the story I am about to discuss, some of them quite passionately, and all of them for slightly different reasons. That means this is going to be fairly vicious. But I feel required to register, at least in some unformed way, my intense disgust at every aspect of the entire Olivia Nuzzi story. Every last miserable goddamned part of it.

  Appearing in Jeffrey's saga: RFKJr (of course). But also Mark Sanford, Anthony Weiner, … and "wrinkled old rage-prune" Keith Olbermann.

A bunch of CongressCritters (including the one from New Hampshire who isn't Chris Pappas) took it upon themselves...

Which (of course) caused our President to go nuclear, as reported many places, but here's NHJournal: 'Punishable by DEATH!' Trump Blasts Goodlander for Urging Military to Ignore Orders.

At the Federalist, Chris Bray is contemptuous: Theater Kids In Congress Vaguely Urge Military To Disobey POTUS. As a commentary to the above video:

Chris's point is well-taken. They shy away from taking responsibility. Should any service members refuse to carry out what they consider to be "illegal orders", I doubt any of these guys would show up at the subsequent court martial to testify.

In other words, it's awful behavior from both sides, but J.D. Tuccille finds a libertarian pony among all the horseshit: 'Refuse illegal orders' cuts both ways for Democrats.

It's nice to fantasize about hundreds of government bureaucrats turning to their bosses with their Cato Institute Pocket Constitutions and demanding: "Show me where it says this is a proper function of the Federal government!"

Also of note:

• A worthless waste of time and taxpayer money, in other words. You may have missed it, but Jack Nicastro summarizes and analyzes: Meta's victory over the Federal Trade Commission shows the market moves faster than antitrust enforcement.

  The federal government's yearslong case to label Meta a monopoly ended on Tuesday when a federal court ruled in favor of the tech giant. The ruling sets the important precedent that the current market in which a dominant firm competes is the relevant one to consider when determining whether or not it is a monopolist.

  The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) first brought the lawsuit against Meta in December 2020, during the first Trump administration, alleging that the tech giant had run afoul of the Sherman Antitrust Act by monopolizing the personal social networking market through its acquisition of then-nascent Instagram and WhatsApp in 2012 and 2014, respectively. The case was dismissed in 2021, but refiled later that year. In April, Lina Khan, who served as the FTC chair when the case was refiled, said that "there's no expiration date when it comes to the illegality of a transaction."

  On Tuesday, Judge James Boasberg of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia contradicted Khan in his decision, saying the FTC must prove Meta continues to wield monopoly power "whether or not Meta enjoyed [such] power in the past." Citing Heraclitus' philosophy of universal flux, Boasberg says, "while it once might have made sense to partition apps into separate markets of social networking and social media, that wall has since broken down."

  That's right: Heraclitus' philosophy of universal flux. He went there.

• I was always good at giving the answers the test-makers wanted me to give. Alex Tabarrok looks at a recent paper that explains why so many are Confidently Wrong.

  If you’re going to challenge a scientific consensus, you better know the material. Most of us, most of the time, don’t—so deferring to expert consensus is usually the rational strategy. Pushing against the consensus is fine; it’s often how progress happens. But doing it responsibly requires expertise. Yet in my experience the loudest anti-consensus voices—on vaccines, climate, macroeconomics, whatever—tend to be the least informed.

  This isn’t just my anecdotal impression. A paper by Light, Fernbach, Geana, and Sloman shows that opposition to the consensus is positively correlated with knowledge overconfidence. Now you may wonder. Isn’t this circular? If someone claims the consensus view is wrong we can’t just say that proves they don’t know what they are talking about. Indeed. Thus Light, Fernbach, Geana and Sloman do something clever. They ask respondents a series of questions on uncontroversial scientific topics. Questions such as:

  1. True or false? The center of the earth is very hot: True
  2. True or false? The continents have been moving their location for millions of years and will continue to move. True
  3. True or false? The oxygen we breathe comes from plants: True
  4. True or false? Antibiotics kills viruses as well as bacteria: False
  5. True or false? All insects have eight legs: False
  6. True or false? All radioactivity is man made: False
  7. True or false? Men and women normally have the same number of chromosomes: True
  8. True or false? Lasers work by focusing sound waves: False
  9. True or false? Almost all food energy for living organisms comes originally from sunlight: True
  10. True or false? Electrons are smaller than atoms: True

  This got a lot of comments, including a couple from me. Number Ten is the most problematic. An electron is a quantum-behaving object, which makes its "size" tricky to define, and perhaps meaningless. You can go slightly bonkers while thinking about the famous Double-slit experiment which generates an "interference" pattern even when you send one electron at a time through the slits.

• How could it be worse? The Dispatch hosts differing viewpoints on Congressional term limits from Doug Bandow (Fixing a Failed Political System) and Anthony Fowler (The Case Against Congressional Term Limits)

  No excerpts, although I think Bandow has the better argument.

• Explains a lot, actually. Why does Trump stonewall? Jeff Maurer offers a plausible explanation: Sometimes Trump Stonewalls Because He's Just a Moron. I enjoyed this look back into the past, see if you remember:

  Remember how much attention was paid to Trump’s tax returns? Those tax returns were to The Rachel Maddow Show what O.J. was to late night comics in the ‘90s. In 2022, House Democrats forced the release of Trump’s returns from 2015-2020, and we learned…not much. It seems that the main thing Trump was hiding was that he’s not nearly as rich as he claims. Maddow also acquired part of Trump’s 2005 return — which I like to think she pilfered in a Mission Impossible-style heist in which she dropped into Trump Tower suspended by cables — but there wasn’t much there. Maybe the Trump returns we haven’t seen contain damning information, but Trump fought like crazy to prevent the release of stuff that didn’t even fill a full hour on MSNBC.

  That's just one example. Stonewalling just comes naturally to him. Because… well, read Jeff's headline again.

Pun Salad's Eye Candy du Jour is from the gutter-mouthed "Rep. Ellen Read":

Let us cook for each other. Share resources. Make our gifts, or gift used items. Show these fuckers the People, the community that they've spent decades trying to isolate us from, will ALWAYS have the actual power.

Shut. Them. Down. #blackoutthesystem

— Rep. Ellen Read 🍉 (@Ellen4NH) November 11, 2025

Yes, that's "Rep" as in "member of the New Hampshire House of Representatives." Her Twitter bio is slightly less irate:

Yesterday, I linked to Mitch Daniels' WaPo op-ed discussing how "public norms have been warped." Ellen eloquently demonstrates her eager participation in that warp drive.

She is (by the way) writing in support of the "Blackout The System" event, scheduled for eight days starting next Tuesday. They're pretty down on capitalism:

So we'll see how that exercise in voluntary deprivation works out. My guess is "negligibly", but I could be wrong. (I was going to say "Scrooge-like behavior", but then I remembered Steve Landsberg's classic essay "What I Like About Scrooge.")

Also of note:

• Tucker Carlson is a vile loon. But James Meigs' headline is slightly more diplomatic: Tucker Carlson Goes Full Truther.

  Effective conspiracy theorists need to be quick on their feet. To tell a persuasive story, they must focus our attention on the tiny number of facts that seem to support their theory, while ignoring the vast amount of evidence that contradicts it. An agile theorist therefore jumps from point to point like a hiker crossing a stream by leaping from rock to rock. The trick is to get listeners to forget about the river of facts that refute the conspiracy claims. Still, even the seemingly solid points supporting most conspiracy theories generally collapse under honest scrutiny. When that happens, the theorists rarely concede that their elaborate assumptions have been debunked. They simply jump to new, even shakier pieces of “evidence.”

  Tucker Carlson uses this device, and many more, in his slickly deceptive new video series, The 9/11 Files. Carlson is late to the 9/11 conspiracy party. In fact, in the past he employed his considerable rhetorical skills arguing against the so-called 9/11 Truth Movement, once calling its adherents “parasites.” But the former Fox News anchor has made quite an ideological journey in recent years. Today, he embraces the Truther worldview that was originally a hallmark of the anti-American Left. In recent years, such dark conspiratorial fantasies—including anti-Semitic tropes—have found new life on the very-online far Right.

  I'm somewhat surprised even a moonbat like Carlson would try to resurrect Trutherism from the grave. But his desperate anti-semitism explains a lot.

  This caused me to look back at my own debunking of a Truther-sympathetic article that appeared in my lousy local newspaper, Foster's Daily Democrat, back in 2007. I think it still holds up, and reminds me that conspiracy-craziness is always with us.

• On the LFOD watch. Michael C. Dorf has an interesting essay on Freedom of Thought, Compelled Speech, and Expressive Businesses. I had always considered the SCOTUS decision in Wooley v. Maynard to be holy writ, but Michael says not so fast:

  For one thing, we might want to reconsider Wooley v. Maynard, which upheld the right of New Hampshire motorists who disagreed with the state's motto ("Live free or die") to tape over it on their license plates. It's very unlikely that anyone would have attributed that sentiment--which, at the time at least, appeared on all New Hampshire license plates--to the drivers or owners of New Hampshire cars. Thus, misattribution was a low risk in Wooley.

  But so was the risk of internal indoctrination. Just as external observers will not likely attribute the state motto to any particular New Hampshire motorist, so drivers of cars with New Hampshire plates are unlikely to experience getting behind the wheel as an affirmation of the state motto.

  Consider that as I wrote that last sentence, I realized that I wasn't sure what message New York State has placed on my own license plate. I guessed that it was either "Empire State" or "Excelsior" but had to go look to verify that it's the latter. I then looked that up and discovered that Excelsior has been the state motto since 1778 and means "ever upward," which seems like the wrong message to put on a car, which should head upward only when the road goes uphill. Otherwise, cars should head forward, backward, to the right, or to the left. Nonetheless, I won't tape over "Excelsior."

  In the end, however, I don't have a strong view about whether Wooley was correct as an original matter, but if it's wrongly decided, it doesn't seem so wrong as to warrant overruling. In their chapter in my book, Professors Shiffrin and Blasi acknowledge that Wooley is a harder case than Barnette. They also suggest (in footnote 135 at page 445) that the case might divide people based on how important driving is to them, noting that one of them lives in Los Angeles and the other (at the time) in Manhattan.

  This has implications for the legal status of "compelled expression" of "expressive businesses", like that Colorado guy who refused to make a gay wedding cake.

  I'd advocate for going back to a simpler rule for that: capitalism works best when transactions are mutually voluntary. Specifically, one may refuse to do business with anyone for good reasons, bad reasons, or no reason at all.

• You won't miss it when it's gone. Liz Wolfe notes the possible beginning of the end: Department of Education begins major program transfers.

  The Department of Education "has signed interagency agreements to outsource six offices to other agencies, including those that administer $28 billion in grants to K-12 schools and $3.1 billion for programs that help students finish college," reports The Washington Post. It's a step toward dismantling the department, which was created in 1979, by combining offices from a few different federal agencies. (The dismantling is, in a sense, a callback to the creation.)

  […]

  It's not like shuffling departments around necessarily makes them better or more efficient. But there is at least some clarity from the upper echelons on the relative uselessness of a lot of DOE functions. "The U.S. Department of Education is mostly a pass-through for funds that are best managed by the states," wrote the secretary herself.

  "Our nation just experienced the longest government shutdown in its history," she continued. "The 43-day shutdown, which came smack in the middle of the fall semester, showed every family how unnecessary the federal education bureaucracy is to their children's education. Students kept going to class. Teachers continued to get paid. There were no disruptions in sports seasons or bus routes."

  Make sure they turn off the lights and unplug the coffeepots on the way out.

• Veronique de Rugy reminds us. Industrial Policy Isn't Being Done Poorly. It's Just Bad Economics.

  American industry has been getting a lot of hands-on direction from Democrats and Republicans for quite some time now. Every few years, someone looks at the underwhelming results of this economic maneuvering and insists that real "industrial policy" has never been tried. The truth is that the Left's call for a "mission-oriented" state and the right's yearning for a nationalist industrial revival may sound different, but they share the same conceit: that their own intentions can finally succeed where decades of intervention have failed.

  The latest person to revive this evergreen fantasy is Mariana Mazzucato, the Italian-born economist who has made a career out of championing an assertive, big-spending state as the engine of innovation. In a new interview with Politico, she laments that President Donald Trump's industrial policy — which includes tariffs and government equity stakes in private companies — is "an idiosyncratic hodgepodge," not the "holistic" strategy she favors. Mazzucato wants the U.S. to have a "smart, capable" state to guide investment with purpose.

  Back in the days of former President Joe Biden's industrial policy, when subsidies, tax credits and loans were flowing, an emerging Republican faction had a similar refrain, claiming that to revive American manufacturing, restore communities and put men back to work, industrial policy simply had to be done right. We now know that this meant increasingly erratic tariffs, price controls and government taking shares in companies.

  I looked at Deirdre McClosky's and Alberto Mingardi's debunking of Mazzucato here

Recently on the book blog:

I put this book on my get-at-library list last April thanks to Kat Rosenfield's review at the Free Press: "Mel Robbins Has Two Words for America’s Control Freaks". Kat made the book sound more interesting than it actually turned out to be (at least for me). Note the book's official subtitle: "A Life-Changing Tool That Millions of People Can't Stop Talking About". I found myself adding "… Even If You Wish They Would."

Mel Robbins' answer to that wish would be, of course: "Let Them talk about my book."

Mel's Theory is kind of a big deal. Even though her book seems to have dropped off the NYT best-seller list (it was published last December), I noticed that it was prominently featured in a endcap display at my local Barnes & Noble earlier this week.

Anyway: "Let Them" is pretty much (as Mel briefly acknowledges) repackaged-for-today Stoicism. (Marcus Aurelius's Meditations is among the hundreds of entries in the book's bibliography.)

Paired with "Let Them" is "Let Me": which is "taking responsibility for what you do next."

Or more precisely quoting: "Take responsibility for what YOU do next." Mel is a heavy user of the caps lock key.

Mel's style is peppy and personal. Much of it sounds like direct transcriptions of (variously) motivational-speaker arm-waving presentations, one-on-one therapy sessions, and self-help podcasts. She tells (sometimes embarrassing) anecdotes about herself, friends, and family.

To be honest, the book has good advice aplenty. Unfortunately, the good advice is repeated over and over. Much of which I adopted on my own, years ago. The book is padded, roughly the entire last half, with specific advice about dealing with "relationship" problems. Ones, for better or worse, I don't have and don't plan on ever having.

And, probably unfairly, my mind went more than once to that old Monty Python sketch where John Cleese played Anne Elk: "Well, this theory, that I have, that is to say, which is mine,... is mine."

So: I wish I'd left this on the shelves of Portsmouth Public Library for someone who might have found it more useful.

I wasn't enraptured by the first book in this series by Deanna Raybourn, Killers of a Certain Age, but I thought it was OK enough to give this sequel a try.

Result: I was (even) less fond of this one, and I probably won't pick up book #3, if there is one.

The series' gimmick is that four women "of a certain age" form a closely-knit team of professional assassins, working for the "Museum", an organization dedicated to ferreting out villains worldwide, and delivering rough, very rough, justice. This entry has the foursome on the trail of an Eastern European gangster, the son of a previously-dispatched baddie. He is disposed of easily enough (page 92), but unfortunately the team finds itself in subsequent mortal danger from … whom? Well, that's a mystery.

Not to be sexist, but… OK, to be more than a little sexist: The book suffered from over-description of irrelevant details about clothing, food, scenery, architecture, interior decor, … I classify this as "Sue Grafton Disease", and it's just not my cup of tea. A lot of international travel, leading me to wonder if Raybourn was able to deduct her own travel as "research".

In addition, the "lighthearted wisecracks" I (kind of) liked in the previous book, just fell flat for me here, not working at all. The four teammates seem to spend a lot of time mean-spirited sniping at each other. Raybourn also seems to have doubled down on what I characterized as "explicit, sometimes gory, violence" in the first book. Lots of blood and detailed descriptions of rough altercations.

Our Eye Candy du Jour is by Roman Genn, and filched from Charles C.W. Cooke's National Review article: The Great Derangement. (archive.today link) Which I linked to last month, but it's only gotten more relevant in the intervening weeks. I'll go for a different excerpt, Charlie's bottom line:

More examples abound, unfortunately.

Which brings us to Jim Geraghty, who tells us of A Vivid Portrait of a Torrid Affair Between Two Lunatics.

Jim goes on to describe the recently-revealed relationship between Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and journalist Olivia Nuzzi. You'll come away with a deeper appreciation of just how nutty these people are.

Also of note:

• A communiqué from Planet Sanity. Mitch Daniels was one of the people disrespected in the Kurt Schlicter article we linked to yesterday; Schlicter deemed him "the preening Cory Booker of the Midwest". (Schlicter, by the way, might have been the studio model for that guy on the left in the Roman Genn pic above.)

  Anyway, Mitch takes to the WaPo to observe and wonder: Public norms have been warped. Is the damage permanent? (WaPo gifted link)

  Allow me to start at the relatively trivial end of the list. Profanity is suddenly mainstream. Once unacceptable words, specifically the one you know I’m thinking of, are everywhere. From comedians who apparently couldn’t get laughs without them, to politicians who must think it makes them look tough, the grossness has now infected even our formerly proudest and most stately publications. However one might wish, it seems unlikely that once the vulgar becomes commonplace, society will ever re-rule it out of bounds.

  The infantilization of political debate, and personal demonization of opponents, may similarly have ratcheted downward, although on this score one can imagine some recovery. At some point, the public could tire of playground insults and asinine nicknames, and start asking for a little more substance from those elected to serve them. Interminable stalemate, especially when the country enters a stretch of serious economic or national security difficulty, could trigger a collective demand to “Grow up.”

  "Grow up" is fine, but "Get professional help" is another possibility.

• Or for one more possibility… Kevin D. Williamson suggests that Marjorie Taylor Greene perform An Act of Contrition.

  Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia is in a penitent mood. “I would like to say, humbly, I’m sorry for taking part in the toxic politics,” she said in an interview Sunday on CNN, where all normal, spiritually mature Christians such as Rep. Greene go to make their confessions.

  If Rep. Greene is feeling humble, she has a lot to be humble about. She is an embarrassing, self-aggrandizing vulgarian and a cancer on American politics. She is dumb and she is dishonest, if you will forgive my being plain here, and the people of her district in Georgia could get along just fine without her.

  She should let them.

  I mean this sincerely. Rep. Greene professes to put her Christian faith at the center of her life and American flourishing at the center of her politics. She has an opportunity to put those professions into action if she is sincere—as I will assume, arguendo, that she is, though I actually very much doubt it—about her regret over her contributions to “toxic politics.”

  Rep. Greene should resign her office and return to private life.

  Voters should demand it, but they probably won't.

• "You keep using that word…" These days Inigo Montoya might deploy his famous quote against Democrat pols who keep prattling about "affordability". William McGurn points out an inconvenient truth: their vision of ‘Affordability’ Costs a Bundle. (WSJ gifted link)

  In his 1968 book, “The Joys of Yiddish,” Leo Rosten defines chutzpah this way: “that quality enshrined in a man who, having killed his mother and father, throws himself on the mercy of the court because he is an orphan.”

  Today in Washington, we have a new example. It comes in the form of Democrats who have spent years making life more expensive for Americans—and who propose “fixes” that reflect the same government-first thinking that made things unaffordable in the first place. Does anyone really believe that the answer to what ails us is more government spending or yet another government program?

  This should be an opportunity for President Trump and Republicans. They could point out that most of the time Democratic proposals to make things affordable simply shift who gets stuck with the bill. Where were the Democrats now hollering about affordability during the four years when President Biden was spending, regulating and otherwise expanding government in ways that priced the American dream out of reach for millions?

  The problem being (of course) that Trump is not a convincing champion of getting government out of the loop. And most Republicans seem to be following his lead.

• For example… Tony LoSasso and Kosali Simon propose The Real Fix for ObamaCare. (WSJ gifted link)

  Much of the ObamaCare debate focuses on premium subsidies: who should get them and how big they should be. The real problem isn’t the subsidies’ size, but the system’s design.

  The Affordable Care Act’s subsidy formula guarantees that people buying health insurance through the marketplaces pay no more than a fixed percentage of income for a benchmark plan. The government pays the rest. This shields buyers from premium increases but ensures that when premiums rise, taxpayers pay more. Insurers face little pressure to compete on price, and government costs grow faster than enrollment.

  Their fix:

  The coming debate over extending these subsidies is a chance to correct the design, not only the price. A sustainable marketplace would look more like the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program: The government makes a predictable contribution pegged to a lower-cost, benchmark plan; consumers who choose pricier options pay the difference. The system, sometimes called “managed competition,” helps keep public costs in check and rewards insurers that deliver value rather than raise premiums.

  Modest reforms could go a long way, while preserving affordability. Pegging subsidies to a lower-cost, benchmark plan would immediately reduce overspending. Setting the subsidy slightly below the cheapest plan would eliminate zero-premium gaming, which has raised concerns about fraudulent enrollment. With growing bipartisan interest in allowing health savings accounts in the marketplace, regulators could let enrollees keep the savings when they choose lower-cost plans.

  I could be wrong, but I speculate that the combination of spineless Republicans and demagogic Democrats would doom this reform out of the gate. (Gee, I'm kind of a Debbie Downer today, huh?)

Our Amazon Product du Jour is currently priced at $15,495.00; if you buy it by clicking here, I'd get a cut. And I'm pretty sure I wouldn't be indicted in the resulting bribery scandal, so go for it.

Kevin D. Williamson is unlikely to take that offer. He is in rare form in his latest: Rule by Rolex. (archive.today link)

KDW has much else to say, and I heartily recommend you Read The Whole Thing. Using the archive.today link if necessary, but you should subscribe.

(My current watch—yes, I still wear one—is also Amazon-available here, and (as I type) it will set you back $38.25, and I'm pretty sure it would be useless for bribing anyone.)

Also of note:

• Kind of a downer, sorry. Max Roser wonders if we are seeing The end of progress against extreme poverty?

  In the last decades, the world has made fantastic progress against extreme poverty. In 1990, 2.3 billion people lived in extreme poverty. Since then, the number of extremely poor people has declined by 1.5 billion people .

  This means on any average day in the last 35 years, about 115,000 people left extreme poverty behind. Leaving the very worst poverty behind doesn’t mean a life free of want, but it does mean a big change. Additional income matters most for those who have the least. It means having the chance to leave hunger behind, to gain access to clean water, to access better healthcare, and to have at least some electricity — for light at night and perhaps even to cook and heat.

  Can we expect this rapid progress to continue?

  Unfortunately, we cannot. Based on current trends, progress against extreme poverty will come to a halt. As we’ll see, the number of people in extreme poverty is projected to decline, from 831 million people in 2025 to 793 million people in 2030. After 2030, the number of extremely poor people is expected to increase.

  Click over for Our World in Data's cool charts and informative tables. But (if I may summarize) the countries that are failing to make progress against their citizenry's extreme poverty are: Democratic Republic of Congo, Mozambique, Malawi, Burundi, Central African Republic, and Madagascar.

  Cross-checking against the latest Economic Freedom of the World report: among the 165 countries considered there, the Democratic Republic of Congo is in 151st place; Mozambique #105; Malawi #147; Burundi #152; Central African Republic #154; and Madagascar #117.

  Enough said?

  A further sobering aside from Max:

  In richer countries, it is possible to reduce poverty by reducing inequality through redistribution, but a country like Madagascar cannot reduce its share of people in extreme poverty through redistribution. This is because the mean income is lower than the poverty line; if everyone had the same income, everyone would be living in extreme poverty.

• It served its purpose as a campaign stunt. Damien Fisher is (at least pretending to be) impatient: Four Years Ago, Biden and NHDems Promised to Fix This Bridge. It's Still Closed.

  Four years ago this week, Tom Brady was the starting quarterback for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, Cleveland’s baseball team was still called the Indians, and the Green Bridge in Woodstock was a rusted-out, rickety danger.

  Today, Brady is no longer playing ball, the Indians are now the Cleveland Guardians, and the Green Bridge is still a rusted-out, rickety danger.

  On Nov. 16, 2021, President Joe Biden and New Hampshire’s all-Democrat delegation walked out onto that bridge to tout their $1 trillion Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, promising the spending bill would finally fix the 86-year-old span across the Pemigewasset River.

  “America is moving again, and your life is going to change for the better,” Biden said at the time.

  We previously mentioned the Green Bridge back in 2021 and earlier this year.

  Fun fact: The bridge is four years older than Joe Biden. Make up your own comparison on their relative decrepitude.

• Apology unaccepted. Jeffrey Blehar looks at the pol who's being treated with Strange New Respect: Marjorie Taylor Greene Repents of Her Creator. (NR gifted link)

  Marjorie Taylor Greene wants you to know that she’s sorry — sorry for all those god-awful things she said and did back when she was, well, Marjorie Taylor Greene. Speaking to Dana Bash on CNN this weekend, she hit her knees and assumed the supplicant pose: “I would like to say, humbly, I am sorry for taking part in the toxic politics; it’s very bad for our country, and it’s been something I’ve thought about a lot, especially since Charlie Kirk was assassinated. I’m only responsible for myself, and my own words and actions, and I’m going — I am committed, and I’ve been working on this a lot lately — to put down the knives in politics, I really just want to see people be kind to one another.”

  Amazing talk from a lady most known for hanging out with Nick Fuentes, speculating about the existence of Jewish space lasers, posting a picture of herself pointing a gun at the “Squad,” and catfighting with fellow trash hound Jasmine Crockett in a House committee hearing. Who replaced my MTG with this pod person, this Forgery Taylor Greene? Are we really losing our incorrigible bleach-blonde bludgeon to the siren-songs of decency and good manners, after all she’s fought for? It feels inexplicable, like watching Madonna quit showbiz at the peak of her popularity in order to become a Carmelite nun.

  The Google will fill you in, if needed, on "strange new respect".

• I, for one, am experiencing a Strange New Respect for WaPo Editorial Board. They cast a skeptical eye upon Seattle’s coming socialist experiment. (WaPo gifted link)

  Subtitle: "The mayor-elect has little experience but plenty of bad ideas."

  With much of the country fixated on New York’s decision to elect as mayor a socialist with little experience, it was easy to miss the news that Seattle has done the same. Voters from coast to coast will now get to witness two real-time experiments in radical governance.

  Katie Wilson, an activist with even less experience than New York’s Zohran Mamdani, narrowly defeated the incumbent mayor of Seattle earlier this month. The 43-year-old community organizer, a first-time candidate with no meaningful management experience, will soon lead a city of around 800,000 residents with nearly 14,000 municipal employees and an $8.9 billion budget.

  Who is Wilson? She does not own a car. She lives in a rented 600-square-foot apartment with her husband and two-year-old daughter. By her own account, she depends on checks from her parents back east to cover expenses. To let them off the hook, she seeks to force residents of Seattle to pay for “free” child care and other goodies.

  As I type, the editorial has accumulated 1,870 comments, and the AI summary is an understated hoot: "Some participants express skepticism about the new mayor's qualifications and potential impact on the city, while others criticize the opinion piece for its perceived bias and lack of objectivity."

• Hey, kids! What time is it? According to Kurt Schlicter's Rolex, it is Time to Purge the GOP Backstabbers, Sissies, and Narcissists.

  What's your honest kneejerk reaction to that headline? Mine was: Fine, but who's gonna be left?

  The Republican Party should be a big tent, but that big tent shouldn’t include Democrats or Democrat collaborators. Members of our party, from weakness, malice, or delusions of moral superiority, have been betraying us left and right lately, with political mediocrities empowered by the fact that the margins are so close and the issues are so important that even the most ridiculous of these alleged Republicans can seize a moment of outsized power simply by sucking up to the regime media. Much of the focus lately has been on marginal twerps who aren’t even Republicans – that malignant rodent Nick Fuentes makes no bones about hating the GOP, as does the unstable and malicious Candace Owens. They deserve our contempt, but it’s not like they have an (R) after their names. It’s the ones who do who are the real threat. Fortunately, we have leverage over them, and we need to use it ruthlessly to restore the discipline the GOP needs to beat the existential threat that is the left.

  I could be talking about the ridiculous Thomas Massie, a pompous buffoon who embraces the silly ideology that is libertarianism. He only matters temporarily, and not that much, since we always know he won’t be with us when we need him. He’s taking his shot because the GOP majority in the House is so small; otherwise, he would go back to being what he always was before, a fringe crank no one cared about. But he’s using this opportunity to grab the spotlight for a brief, shining moment. We’ve got important things to do in 2026 in fighting the Democrats, but we need to spare a moment to fight him. The President is right to support a primary challenge. We can’t tolerate his shenanigans; when he finally goes away, it will be, appropriately enough, as a result of distracting us from important fights, but distracted we must be.

  Kurt, of course, lost me by calling libertarianism a "silly ideology". His accurate labels for Fuentes and Owens do not make up for that.

  His litmus test for GOP-inclusion seems only to be pure Trump fealty. Paired with being a "fighting fighter who fights." (The word "fight" appears seven times in his short column.)

Christian Schneider tweets:

Or you could just let American consumers keep their own money in the first place instead of running it through your foreign government extort-o-matic machine https://t.co/KjK8UFF5JZ

— Christian Schneider (@Schneider_CM) November 16, 2025

Just a reminder, the D.C. Shuffle is:

1. You send the Federal Government a bunch of money. (In this case, tariffs.)
2. After skimming some off the top, they send some of it back to you.
3. And claim they've done you a big favor.

Another variation on the Shuffle: belatedly undoing the damage you caused in the first place, to wit: U.S. to Cut Tariffs on Bananas, Coffee and Other Goods From Four Countries. (WSJ gifted link)

I'll utter the obvious cliché: "Better late than never." But even better would have been never having tariffs to "water down" in the first place.

Also of note:

• I hope I'm not doing this. Nate Hochman tweets:

  There's a genre of anti-Trump writing that's basically unreadable, because it insists on drowning you in this manic, overwrought idiom. It's not enough to call Trump's rhetoric racist. You have to say he "seethed." His agenda is "nakedly sadistic." His rally was "bloodthirsty." pic.twitter.com/MohYoqKjsy

  — Nate Hochman (@njhochman) November 16, 2025

  It's difficult to know where to draw the line, but I hope to stay on the "not basically unreadable" side of it.

  But Nate's observation is generalizable to topics other than Trump. For example, that article in the Brown Political Review: (Live Libertarian or Die) I linked to yesterday. Which is only readable to the extent that you can wallow in its "manic, overwrought" style: "ultra-libertarians" who "hijacked" a small town meeting, thanks to their "hidden agenda" to "destroy" New Hampshire "from the bottom up". Now the "threat has grown to unprecedented heights", with the libertarians "operating silently" thanks to their "infiltration" into the state legislature…

  It's really a good, by which I mean bad, example of the style Nate is talking about.

  But if you notice me doing that, let me know, OK?

• Might as well face it, you're addicted to… No, not that. Becket Adams points his finger at another dangerous habit: An Addiction to Euphemism Is Corrupting Journalism — and Our Language. (NR gifted link)

  Do you want to know a secret?

  There are special-interest groups that move from newsroom to newsroom, offering style “tips” to enforce favorable coverage of their pet causes.

  Planned Parenthood is one such group. It regularly provides language guidance to major publications, tasking them not-so-subtly to consider using terms such as “near-total abortion ban” and “anti-choice” instead of “heartbeat bill” and “pro-life.” Other pro-abortion groups, including Ipas, also share journalism “resources” on the supposedly correct way to cover abortion — er, sorry, reproductive health.

  George Orwell, call your office.

  "Abortion" is already a euphemism, of course. Related topic: the euphemism treadmill.

• Not sung by Roberta Flack. Power Line's Scott Johnson notes a strategy shift by the genocidal Zionist conspirators. Quoting Daniel Greenfield, they're Killing them softly with obesity.

  After two years of barraging social media with lies about a famine in Gaza, Hamas propaganda channels are now trying to cover up their obesity by claiming that Israel is making them fat.

  One recent Hamas media story clamored that “they’re forcing us to gain weight”, and objected that supermarkets have “shelves overflowing with chocolate, soft drinks, and cigarettes”, along with unhealthy “flour and various types of cheese used in sweets and pizza, in addition to sugar and flour derivatives used in confectionery production.”

  “I am compelled to consume carbohydrates, processed cheese, and manufactured meat,” an Arab Muslim settler in Gaza who had previously justified the Hamas massacres complained.

  I thought cigarettes had a slimming effect. But they just kill you a different way.

• It's time once again to fill in the blank for your instant headline: "Democrats Get        Wrong." Holman W. Jenkins, Jr. submits his entry: Democrats Get the Epstein Wars Wrong. (WSJ gifted link)

  I know nothing beyond what’s in the press, but I somehow doubt Donald Trump was among the needy types who relied on Jeffrey Epstein for access to women they wouldn’t have had access to otherwise. It’s a point we’ll come back to.

  Interesting and perhaps surprising advice has been flowing from the Democratic Party’s loyal handicappers after this month’s gubernatorial wins in New Jersey and Virginia. Don’t make impeachment the calling card in next year’s congressional midterms, they say. Consistent overbetting on the unpopularity of Mr. Trump has been the reciprocal of every blown opportunity till now. This includes the 2024 presidential race, which was winnable even amid the Democratic Party’s world-historical malpractices.

  Unfortunately this advice conflicts with activists who insisted Democrats show “fight” with the thankless government shutdown that finally ended this week. Now they want more “fight” over Epstein. Never mind that this represents the sorriest possible way of building on recent electoral successes and Mr. Trump’s shrinking approval ratings.

  Trump, as usual, gets a lot of favors from his enemies. Holman's bottom line:

  What keeps these Democrats from power are the antics of their national party: the Russia folly, the border folly, the trans folly, the Biden incapacity folly. The Epstein distraction bids to be another piece of foolishness that does more to inhibit Democrats’ return to real influence than advance it.

In Reason, Matt Welch has a small review of a recent biography:

Charitably, Matt doesn't mention King's fondness for left-wing tyrants. Back in 2002, Reason was far less Carole-complimentary: Who Am I?

Disclaimer 1: if Ms. King sang "He Hit Me (And It Felt Like a Kiss)" for Fidel, it doesn't seem to have been reported.

Disclaimer 2: as far as I know, Ms. King did not warble for Milosevic. And she was far from alone among celebs, as National Review pointed out back in 2008:

Disclaimer 3: I was unable to find any evidence that Ms. King crooned for Chávez either. Not that it would have been surprising.

But she brought her enthusiastic, and also obsequious, support up to Rochester, NH during the 2008 election campaign, as slavishly reported in my lousy local paper, Foster's Daily Democrat: Carole King sings praises of Obama in Rochester (archive.today link). The whole article is an embarrassment, but this is especially revealing:

Yeesh!

Also of note:

• Can someone please disable the President's Caps Lock key? Kim Strassel writes on The GOP’s Government Enablers.

  It was once a Republican article of faith—mostly because it is true—that government is the cause of most problems. Donald Trump’s GOP is finding a more politically expedient bogeyman. Welcome to the age of the Bernie Sanders-JD Vance coalition against Big Business. Say goodbye to prosperity.

  A case in point: The president this past weekend floated a solid proposal. Rather than continue to dump government subsidies into the government-created and government-micromanaged system called ObamaCare—which is failing because of, well, government—why not hand that cash to individual Americans, giving them more choice over their care? “Republicans should give money DIRECTLY to your personal HEALTH SAVINGS ACCOUNTS,” Mr. Trump wrote on Truth Social.

  It’s a smart concept, one that moves toward a free-market system in which consumers control dollars in ways that produce more transparent, portable, cost-effective and results-oriented medicine. Only the president in the same post undermined the premise by asserting that the reason to adopt his plan was to get revenge on the Democrats’ buddies in the “insurance industry,” which is “making a ‘killing’ ” while the “little guy” suffers. That is, move toward a free-market system so as to stick it to business. Work through that logic.

  That reflects Trump's demagogic mindset: you can't just have a good idea, you need an enemy to deploy it against.

  Kim goes on to describe this tactic wielded against "big pharma", meatpackers, airlines, … Someone needs to tell Republicans that they can't compete with Democrats on the anti-business tactic; they will always outbid you.

• On the LFOD watch. The Google news alert rang for Joshua Stearns' article in the Brown Political Review: Live Libertarian or Die.

  Warning: that's "Brown" as in "Brown University". The article isn't very good, other than as an example of over-the-top hatred for the Free State Project. Sample:

  Croydon, New Hampshire—a town of about 800 nestled amongst rolling hills and pristine ponds, where an 18th-century one-room schoolhouse still operates—lies just miles from American playwright Thornton Wilder’s fictional Grover’s Corners. Croydon’s idyllic atmosphere was shattered in 2022, however, when a group of ultra-libertarians, members of the Free State Project (FSP), hijacked the annual town meeting and voted to halve the town’s school budget, a cut which would have effectively abolished in-person education for Croydon students. In an amazing rally of unity, the townspeople fought back. After going on what one school board member described as a “witch-hunt” for Free Staters and calling an unprecedented second annual town meeting, the townspeople overwhelmingly voted to restore the school budget.

  Imagine if your neighbors moved to your state with a hidden agenda: to destroy it from the bottom up. It may sound like fiction, but this has been unfolding across New Hampshire for over a decade. Despite less open organizing and increased public awareness of the FSP since the events in Croydon, the project’s threat has grown to unprecedented heights. Now, operating silently through the State Legislature, the movement’s agenda is hidden in complex legislation, allowing its vision to inch ever closer to realization. Alarmingly, few seem to realize.

  Small fact check: Croydon is about 50 miles away from Peterborough, Wilder's "Our Town". I posted on Croydon back in April and July of 2022. Don't have much to add, but read for yourself, explore the links, and decide for yourself how honest Stearns is being.

  And while you're at it, here's the FSP's website. Check it out, too. Feel the "project's threat"!

  Not that it matters, but: I've lived in New Hampshire continuously since 1981, a couple decades before Jason Sorens proposed the Free State Project in 2001. Even then, I had no "hidden agenda" to "destroy" New Hampshire "from the bottom up." To be honest, that hasn't occurred to me.

• Meanwhile on Planet Reality… The Josiah Bartlett Center seems a little disappointed that we won't be first, but they wonder: Will N.H. be the second state to leave RGGI?

  Pennsylvania shocked Northeast energy policy nerds this week by withdrawing from the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI). To get a state budget passed, Gov. Josh Shapiro agreed to remove Pennsylvania from the 11-state carbon cap-and-trade program, making it the first state to exit since RGGI was created in 2005.

  RGGI is supposed to reduce regional carbon emissions by first capping those emissions, then requiring certain power plant operators to buy one credit for each short ton of carbon dioxide emitted. States can use revenues from the sale of those credits to subsidize energy conservation projects or politically favored power generation.

  But of course RGGI applies in only 11 (now 10) Northeastern states, and those states, along with their neighbors, still need energy. In theory, power generation from gas or coal-fired power plants should increase in areas just outside the RGGI region as it decreases within the region.

  There's no shame in being #2, New Hampshire!

Our Eye Candy du Jour is panel three from Zach Weinersmith's Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal. Appropriate, in more ways than one! By which I mean: two.

And in our "Fish Rots From the Head" Department, the WSJ editorialists bemoan An Agenda-Less GOP Congress. (WSJ gifted link)

After a quick review of other current Congressional obsessions, the WSJ sees nothing that "will change government policy in a way that enhances freedom, helps the economy, or improves the social fabric."

Which (I think) pretty much reflects the interests and preferences of the guy in the White House.

Also of note:

• They had to destroy the club in order to save it. If you kept a straight face while reading about the death spiral of the Sierra Club last week, there's another challenge for you at Jerry Coyne's site: Social Justice wrecks the Sierra Club. He has lengthy excerpts from the NYT exposé, but as a bonus he links to the Sierra Club's Equity Language Guide. It's 26 fun-filled pages. For example:

  Use caution with terms that may subtly, yet profoundly, evoke and reinforce racial stereotypes, such as “urban,” “vibrant,” and “hardworking.”

  • Instead, just say what you actually mean—and consider whether what you meant to say has embedded stereotypes that should be removed.

  OK, I get what the "urban" stereotyping might indicate racially, but "vibrant" or "hardworking"? Clueless.

• Because they are yet another check written on the bank accounts of our children and grandchildren? Jack Salmon explains Why Congress Should Let the Enhanced ACA Subsidies Expire.

  This time, there’s no shutdown to hide behind. The question before Congress is simple: Should taxpayers continue footing the bill for a pandemic-era program that primarily benefits upper-income households and insurance companies?

  The debate has been muddied by a deliberate conflation of two very different policies. The Affordable Care Act’s original premium tax credits were targeted to lower-income families—those earning up to 400% of the federal poverty level.

  The enhanced credits, by contrast, eliminated that income cap. Suddenly, households earning half a million dollars or more became eligible for taxpayer-funded subsidies. The idea was to provide temporary pandemic relief. But like most “temporary” benefits, the policy has proven politically addictive.

  Jack's bottom line (after some geeky graphs): "Extending the enhanced subsidies means endorsing a policy that has outlived its purpose, failed the efficiency test and warped the market it was meant to improve."

• Ranks right up there with failure to cast the One Ring into the Cracks of Doom. Gabe Fleisher writes on probably the most important of Wheezy Joe's failures: The Failure to Trump-Proof.

  There were also many pieces of legislation Biden could have championed to implement reforms of the executive branch with Trump’s potential revival in mind. Instead, he ignored — or actively opposed — many of them. Here are two examples: the ARTICLE ONE Act and the Presidential Ethics Reform Act.

  The ARTICLE ONE Act stands for the Assuring Robust, Thorough, and Informed Congressional Leadership is Exercised Over National Emergencies Act. It was a bipartisan bill that would have fundamentally changed national emergency law in this country. As it currently stands, a president can declare a national emergency over anything — there are 48 currently in effect, some dating back to 1979 — and Congress can pass a resolution terminating it… but that resolution is subject to a presidential veto, which means it isn’t exactly a very helpful check on presidential power. (This is precisely what happened in 2019, when Trump declared a national emergency in order to redirect Defense Department funds to build his border wall. Bipartisan majorities in both chambers of Congress approved a termination resolution, but Trump simply vetoed it.)

  The Brennan Center for Justice has catalogued 123 added powers that can be unlocked by the president when he declares a national emergency, several of which Trump has used in both his first and second terms. (He has declared nine national emergencies since January.)

  If you trust President Bone Spurs with those keys to chaos, fine. But just chant the mantra "President Ocasio-Cortez" to yourself until you change your own mind.

• At least to 60. Kevin D. Williamson has some faint praise: A Few Democrats Show They Can Count. Among the arithmetically literate pictured: my state's senators, Maggie and Jeanne. (archive.today link)

  The first thing is learning to count.

  On one level, politics is about principles and values. At another level, it is about math. The Democrats angry about the compromise that resulted in the reopening of the federal government are confused about which level they are operating on. 

  Congressional Democrats shut down the government in an attempt to extort Republicans into backing certain health care subsidies that were set to expire. Our constitutional system contains many chokepoints of different kinds—a feature, not a bug—and exploiting those is what you do, within reason, when the math is against you. Supermajority requirements empower legislative minorities, just as procedural mandates and the Bill of Rights protect minority interests outside of the legislative chamber. We do not follow strictly majoritarian conventions, nor should we: Majorities get things wrong—violently wrong, tragically wrong—all the time. That’s why the Founding Fathers so often used the word “democracy” in a monitory fashion. 

  And rightly so.

Right Here in River City!
Jeopardy with a capital 'J'!
And that rhymes with 'A'
And that stands for 'Affordability'!

I'm sorry, I'm no Meredith Wilson, but everyone seems to be talking about it! Veronique de Rugy, for example: The Answer to Republicans' 'Affordability Problem?' Unleash Supply..

Color me skeptical: I'm pretty sure if they had dropped all those things, it wouldn't have been quiet at all.

But maybe substitute banana cream pie for pecan pie? And some nice hot coffee? Relief may be in sight, say the WSJ editorialists: Yes, We Want No Banana Tariffs. (WSJ gifted link)

So foreign bananas might get a reprieve, but if you're looking for a nice, cheap, but also tasty, Italian dinner, you better stock up now. A WSJ news story warns: Italian Pasta Is Poised to Disappear From American Grocery Shelves. (WSJ gifted link)

Yes, the Trump administration thinks gourmet Italian pasta is too affordable for us peasants.

(I confess I've developed a liking for Barilla thin spagetti, usually a once-a-week thing for me. It's $1.96/lb, about twice as expensive as the Hannaford store brand equivalent. But I agree that's still affordable.)

But it's not just food, as Richard Menger reminds us. Obamacare’s Costly Illusion of Affordability: From Subsidies to Serfdom. We'll jump right to the Hayek content:

"This validates Hayek's thesis" could be a headline on most of the economic news items these days, couldn't it?

Also of note:

• AKA a pitiful helpless giant. George Will paints a sad picture: A great nation is reduced to fanciful hoping.

  Before the South boomed as America’s exemplary region of economic growth, some Southern states with low indices of social progress (concerning poverty, health, education, etc.) used to think: Thank God for Mississippi. It generally ranked lower.

  Until recently, Italy and Greece, Mediterranean polities with grand cultural inheritances but deplorable recent habits, were derided as developed nations exemplifying incorrigible fiscal incontinence. Today, they might think: Thank Zeus for the United States.

  The International Monetary Fund forecasts the U.S. government debt will be above 7 percent of GDP every year until 2029, with the debt reaching 143.4 percent of GDP by the decade’s end. The Congressional Budget Office projects the debt increasing for decades. As a percentage of their GDPs, Italy’s and Greece’s debts are expected to decline, and to be exceeded by the U.S. debt’s percentage in 2030.

  We're in Trouble with a capital 'T'
  And that rhymes with 'E'
  And that stands for 'Entitlements'!

• I will resist making zee risqué joke, mes amis. Dan Mitchell points to A 26-Question Quiz to Determine “Your Political Tribe”. (If you just want to hit the quiz: here.)

  Dan is bemused by the quiz's result, which puts him in the "Hard Right" end of the "Conservative" quadrant.

  Sigh. I got exactly the same result. For the record, these days I consider myself to be (roughly) libertarian/conservative in a 76.8%/23.2% ratio.

Jonathan Alpert takes up a thorny question in today's WSJ: Is ‘Trump Derangement Syndrome’ Real? (WSJ gifted link)

If you need any additional confirmation of people devoting way too much of their lives obsessing about Orange Man, just follow Don Winslow on Twitter.

(And today's headline was inspired by Sean Carroll's 2011 essay title: Free Will Is as Real as Baseball)

Also of note:

• Paul Schwennesen read it so we don't have to. Specifically, Kamala’s Memoir: Inside the Battle to Control Our Authoritarian Future. Most reports on 107 Days, her story of the election, concentrated on its horserace and finger-pointing aspects. Paul looked at a different aspect:

  But enough ink has been spilled over the book’s pettiness and contradictions. It was intended, after all, to be a work of inside baseball — a political sausage-making retrospective for pundits with scorecards. None of that interests me. What led me through each tedious, over-rendered day was the faint hope that it would shed light on a basic worldview: the animating impulse of the modern progressive Left. In light of the extraordinary autocratic turn of the Trump presidency since the election, I had hoped for some glimpse of a shared political principle — a potential bridge across our bitter divides. No such luck. We are now trapped between two equally joyless visions of centralized authority. Two hundred and fifty years of political experimentation in self-government have left us high-centered between progressive and conservative flavors of authoritarianism.

  Not that you’ll find such introspection in 107 Days. Harris builds her entire persona upon vaguely described, high-flown rhetoric devoted to ever-greater state “assistance” in the private lives of Americans. It never seems to occur to her that such a vision might account for her electoral defeat. Steeped in defensive language, she sees the failure of Americans to fully embrace her platform as the essential problem. “Fight” is her persistent watchword, a shibboleth for action against an ethereal enemy that seeks to thwart her vision of a fully empowered monolithic state.

  Somehow this 45-year-old quote from Woody Allen seems appropriate:

  More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.

  Fingers crossed, I guess.

• Does anybody really know what time it is? Mark Nayler is a little late with his Daylight Saving commentary: Eternal Sunshine of the Changing Time.

  The debate about Daylight Saving Time (DST) has reignited in both Europe and the United States. Spain’s Socialist prime minister Pedro Sánchez is lobbying the EU to put an end to the bi-annual clock change, although he hasn’t stated whether he favors permanent summer (DST) or winter time (also referred to as Standard Time/ST)—which means more light in the evening or morning, respectively. It is a rare point of agreement between the Spanish premier and Donald Trump, who also wants to scrap the clock change, in his case to make summer time permanent.

  Mark makes a common blunder, which is to assume that fiddling with your clock display has some sort of magical effect on "more light in the evening or morning". I took an astronomy course once, and I can assure you: those things are completely unrelated. Any cause-and-effect relationship is only in your mind.

  Unfortunately, it also seems to be firmly embedded in the minds of people who set schedules for schools, stores, and other workplaces.

  To his credit, Mark seems to (eventually) realize this:

  Though there is consensus in both the EU and US that clock-changing is a damaging and outdated practice, the debate about whether to adopt ST or DST permanently continues. Perhaps [Benjamin] Franklin had the right answer two-and-a-half centuries ago: go to bed when it’s dark and rise with the sun, regardless of the arbitrarily-assigned hour. All governments have to do is supply the cannons needed to encourage this.

  Cannonfire at dawn! Cool idea, Ben.

• As Keynes famously pointed out… Jeffrey Blehar asserts, correctly: Donald Trump Has No Answers for the Younger Generation. And the younger generation seems to be increasingly convinced that the traditional American values "aren’t working anymore."

  It is not my point here to agree or disagree with that, merely to note it. The overwhelming sense I get from talking to younger people as 2025 draws to a close — all manner of folks, from the humane and intellectually reserved to the angriest and most voluble — is a bleak and sincere underlying despair. These young men and women don’t know what the future holds for them; they only know that all the old covenants are being broken. Forget about entitlement programs — everyone under the age of 40 has already internalized the assumption that Social Security isn’t going to be there when they retire.

  But it’s far more than that. A hope for “the normal life” is dwindling away as well. A spouse, a house, the comforts of modern domesticity — what their parents’ generation seemed to attain so easily is now priced (and disincentivized) beyond the reach of all but Society’s Winners. And these, whom they inevitably focus on, keep seeming to “win” for the wrong reasons, as the disaffected define them. The blame game is naturally inevitable.

  I don't think I have "Trump Derangement Syndrome", but (as I've said before) I think it's pretty obvious he's got a very short time horizon and poor impulse control. Just what you don't want to see in a President. And the youngsters aren't wrong to pick up on that.

• 

  Another classy dame. Anna Krylov explains: Why I Cut Ties with Science’s Top Publisher. (archive.today link)

  In my more than 30 years working in scientific research, I regarded the publishing group Nature Portfolio as the world’s leading science publisher. I have regularly read their papers as well as reviewed and published papers in their journals. As a chemistry professor at the University of Southern California, my interests have focused on topics related to theoretical and computational quantum chemistry. Publishing a paper in a Nature Portfolio journal was always a significant accomplishment, a matter of pride.

  But in recent years, Nature Portfolio has sacrificed the epistemic standards of scientific publishing in unrelenting pursuit of a social justice agenda centered on diversity, equity, and inclusion. In doing so, it has lost its credibility as a truth-seeking enterprise.

  It is easy to dismiss concerns about DEI as a thing of the past. After all, “peak woke” is supposed to be in the rearview mirror, and diversity, equity, and inclusion priorities seem to have been retreating ever since President Donald Trump took office in January. Academia, in particular, has been rattled by the administration’s broadside of financial penalties imposed on universities that refuse to eliminate their DEI departments. The pressure has forced overdue reforms, including the reemergence of free speech initiatives, the termination of DEI positions and mantras, and more. The pendulum, it seems, has begun to swing back.

  Or has it? This corrective impulse has not been embraced in all corners of the scientific world. Many of the institutions that govern and disseminate scientific knowledge—publishers, professional societies, and even honorary academies—remain ideologically captured. The most glaring case is Nature Portfolio.

  I'm currently reading The War on Science (Amazon link at your right) which does a pretty good job of documenting just how censorious and dogmatic "peak woke" was, just a few years ago. But as Anna describes, that pendulum has still quite a ways to swing back to sanity.

But it might be only a matter of time:

(Do you have to be of a Certain Age to get the joke here? Maybe. Hint, if you need one, here.)

Also of note:

• Just one more reminder. From the NR editorialists: Democrats Caved on Shutdown.

  In the short run, this is a win for Trump, who would not be cowed by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer — the government is poised to reopen without any concessions. At the same time, the deal is incredibly divisive among Democrats, with progressive voices infuriated with Democratic senators for buckling. Though they had absorbed the cutting off of food stamp benefits, ultimately the prospect of holiday travel being roiled by delays and cancellations due to the shortage of air traffic controllers seems to have forced a compromise. We are glad that Republicans did not cave on expanding Obamacare, as we urged them to hold the line back in September. And we also applaud them for not using this as an opportunity to nuke the filibuster as Trump had called for, because such action would undermine America’s founding idea that major changes should be difficult to impose. In the long run, getting rid of the obstacle would prove more beneficial to left-wing radicals who have an expansive view of government.

  The flip side of this result is that Democrats will now be able to bring the issue of rising health care premiums into the midterm elections. This was an own goal by Republicans, who over the more than 15 years since the passage of Obamacare have failed to rally around an alternative and have surrendered the issue of affordability to Democrats.

  I actually think it's worse than that. The most effective route to "affordability" is market-based reforms, moving mostly to a fees-for-service model, insurance reserved for catastrophic costs. But that's a very hard sell to people easily scared by "people are gonna die" rhetoric, paired with "health care is a right" demands.

• Betteridge's Law of Headlines says what now? Phillip W. Magness poses the question at the Dispatch: Do Billionaires Really Pay No Taxes? (archive.today link)

  One of the most common economic claims of the modern era holds that the wealthy do not pay their fair share in federal taxes. Some versions of this argument go a step further, asserting that the average billionaire pays a lower federal tax rate than many working-class Americans. 

  Former President Joe Biden made both claims in his 2024 State of the Union address, and politicians such as Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders have used it to justify sweeping proposals for a “wealth tax” on unrealized capital gains. While most legislative efforts to “soak the rich” originate on the political left, some populist Republicans in the circles around Vice President J.D. Vance have quietly warmed to the idea of a “millionaire tax,” aiming to bump the top marginal income tax rate up from 37 percent.

  Philip does an excellent job of debunking progressive "fair share" rhetoric.

• "Unserious" is a euphemism for "boneheaded". But we'll forgive Eric Boehm for being overly polite in his headline: Trump's tariff stimulus checks are an unserious idea.

  President Donald Trump's proposal to deliver huge stimulus checks to many American households is the latest bit of fiscal fantasy to emerge from the White House.

  In a post on Truth Social, Trump promised checks of $2,000 to low- and middle-income Americans, supposedly to be funded out of tariff revenue. It's not the first time Trump has floated the idea of a "tariff dividend," but the latest announcement comes as the administration grasps wildly for a solution to Americans' perceived "affordability" issues.

  After delivering the checks, the remaining tariff revenue would be used to pay down the national debt, Trump wrote in a post on Monday.

  All of this is quite unserious. Let's do the math.

  Well, it turns out the math is simple, so check it out.

• Keynes was wrong about a lot of stuff, it turns out. I have to admit that I might have said "yes" to Jeff Jacoby's question: Did World War I cause World War II?

  AT THE 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month, the guns fell silent. The Great War — the "war to end all wars" — was over. But peace, it turned out, was not secured by the armistice signed in a railway carriage at Compiègne. It awaited the far more contentious negotiations that would culminate in the Treaty of Versailles.

  That treaty, which was negotiated by the victorious allies — Great Britain, France, Italy, and the United States — was signed on June 28, 1919. Under its terms, Germany was required to demilitarize, to surrender territory to Belgium, France, and the newly constituted Czechoslovakia and Poland, to give up its overseas colonies, and to pay the equivalent of $63 billion in reparations. It was also compelled to accept full blame for having caused the war: Article 231 of the treaty affirmed "the responsibility of Germany and her allies for causing all the loss and damage to which the [Allies] and their nationals have been subjected as a consequence of the war imposed upon them by the aggression of Germany and her allies." (The allies also signed separate treaties with Austria, Bulgaria, Hungary, and Turkey.)

  In the years after World War II, it became conventional wisdom that the economic harshness imposed by the Treaty of Versailles — and especially the humiliation of its "war guilt" clause — helped fuel the rise of Adolf Hitler. That interpretation owes much to John Maynard Keynes's 1919 bestseller, "The Economic Consequences of the Peace," which denounced the treaty as a "Carthaginian peace" that was intended to crush Germany and ended by ruining Europe.

  But later scholarship has been far less sympathetic to Keynes's view.

  Jeff makes an interesting case, and I only regret that he didn't go out of his way to blame Woodrow Wilson too.

The WSJ editorialists relax with cigars, single malts, and small smiles, observing as Democrats Throw a Shutdown Tantrum. (WSJ gifted link)

While Jim Geraghty goes for the poker table metaphor: Dems Finally Fold in Pointless Shutdown Fight.

There is, of course, a Granite State angle, since NH Senators Shaheen and Hassan were among the (according to Keith Olbermann) "Quislings" who voted to end the shutdown. At NH Journal, Michael Graham passes the popcorn: No Deal, Mom: Shaheen's Daughter Joins Charge Against Shutdown Compromise.

And I wonder if that Cheap Trick song referenced by Geraghty above will be playing at the Shaheens' Thanksgiving table in a couple weeks. Because, as (again) Michael Graham points out: Sen. Shaheen's 'Surrender' Creates NH-01 Headaches for Stefany.

Maura Sullivan seems to mention her Marine stint at every opportunity. Even when it has zero relevance, as above. But since it is Veterans Day, Pun Salad thanks her for her service.

But left behind in all the shouting is any honest discussion of the actual issue. Jack Salmon calls it, simply: Affluent Aid.

Jack dives into the actual numbers involved, and concludes we're talking about "a temporary pandemic benefit that disproportionately aids upper-income households." The GOP should do a better job of making this clear to taxpayers.

Also of note:

• Goalposts moved. Roger Pielke Jr. says we're living in strange times indeed, When Less Warming Means More Fear.

  Something curious is going on in the world of climate advocacy. As THB readers know, projected future carbon-dioxide emissions from fossil-fuel combustion have been consistently revised downward in recent years, resulting in less projected warming. Yet rather than acknowledge this encouraging development, climate campaigners have shifted the goalposts by lowering the threshold of what they promote as apocalyptic.

  Once projected 4C, 5C, or even 6C global average temperature increases to 2100 were justifications for demands that the world undergo a rapid transition to much lower trajectories. With such large changes in temperature looking increasingly unlikely with every passing year, climate campaigners have simply changed the demarcation of catastrophe from large to smaller projected changes in temperature — while maintaining exactly the same apocalyptic rhetoric.

  Why, it's almost as if the activists are more interested in obtaining political power than maintaining a liveable world.

• Speaking of obtaining political power… Jonathan Turley notices some lefty loose lips. In Vino Veritas: Punch-Drunk Pundits Reveal Plans to Pack the Supreme Court.

  “In vino veritas.” The Roman proverb — “In wine, there is truth” — reflects the fact that people are often at their most honest when they’ve had a few.

  Elections can have the same effect for some to become drunk on even the prospect of power. Partisans can blurt out their inner thoughts with shocking frankness.

  That was the case this week as Democratic luminaries discussed plans to retake power and then fundamentally change the constitutional system to guarantee they will never have to give it up again.

  Dems are salivating over their opportunities to nuke the filibuster, pack the Supreme Court, grant statehood to D.C. and Puerto Rico, and almost certainly more.

• Just fill in the blank for your instant headline: "Trump seems very confused about       ". Eric Boehm does it this way: Trump seems very confused about 'affordability'

  While speaking to reporters in the Oval Office on Friday, President Donald Trump claimed that "every price is down," including those paid at the pump. Gas is now "almost $2," he added.

  Gas is not $2 a gallon. The national average is a little over $3 a gallon, about the same as it was a year ago, according to AAA. Even if you're giving Trump wide leeway for that "almost," this is what would have been called a gaffe in more normal political times. Remember when President George H.W. Bush didn't know the price of a gallon of milk?

  When you zoom out to Trump's larger point, things get even more confused. Despite Trump's claim, prices as a whole continue to rise at politically inconvenient rates. Annualized inflation was 3 percent in September, the most recent month for which data is available. Prices for food and housing are rising faster than overall inflation. Most Americans say they are spending more on groceries now than a year ago.

  Eric goes on, but you get the picture. I assume it's only a matter of time before Trump goes full Chico Marx: "Well, who you gonna believe? Me or your own eyes?"

You might notice the Public Health Service and NOAA emblems in this year's poster. If you, like me, were unaware of (some of) their employees' legal status as veterans (and therefore eligibility for veteran benefits) there's an explanation here.

The rhetoric escalated quickly yesterday. For example:

ANY Democrat thinking of breaking ranks and caving to Trump just know...

I will make you famous.

There is no betraying your country in the shadows.

There are no side deals in darkness.

— Don Winslow (@donwinslow) November 9, 2025

Petulance, thy name is Winslow.

And Old Reliable Keith:

Dear Democratic Senators: if you vote for this selling out of the ACA it will be the end of your careers. Depend upon it. You are there to defend this country against Trump and the fascists, not collude with them. If you become Quislings, you will forever REMAIN Quislings pic.twitter.com/9FYfwEsvkM

— Keith Olbermann (@KeithOlbermann) November 9, 2025

Quislings! Yes, he went there.

Vidkun Quisling was executed by a firing squad in 1945; I'm not entirely sure Keith wants to extend the parallel that far, but maybe.

My state's senators, Jeanne Shaheen and Maggie Hassan, were among the ten votes to break the logjam. And it's fair to point out that Jeanne had previously announced that she wasn't running for re-election next year, so no points for ending her career, Keith.

I would like to think that my mean tweets, examples here and here) helped to push them into Keith's and Don's crosshairs. I also sent them e-mail! You're welcome!

Also of note:

• How hard is it to copy-and-paste? Jesse Singal asks a pretty good question: If You Can’t Accurately Quote Someone, Why Should I Believe Anything You Write?

  For a while, I’ve been concerned about what feels like creeping intellectual rot in left-of-center circles. This rot is by no means ubiquitous, and there are plenty of liberal and leftist writers whose work I still respect, enjoy, and learn from. But in many cases, arguments are published that fail to clear extremely basic, very low bars — the equivalent of pulling a muscle during warm-ups before getting to the actual exercise itself. It’s very common for writers in this space to fail to accurately sum up the views of their opponents, to misstate basic facts of a given case, to quote in deeply disingenuous ways, and to make arguments that simply don’t hold water in a freshmen composition, A-implies-B sense. In many cases, rhetorical Calvinball is replacing sound thinking.

  A couple days ago Literary Hub, a well-regarded lefty arts publication that often publishes political takes, ran an article by Peter Coviello, the former chair of Africana Studies at Bowdoin College and currently a professor at the University of Illinois Chicago. Coviello’s article is about how, after former Bowdoin African Studies major Zohran Mamdani hit the spotlight, Coviello started getting inquiries from journalists asking what he remembered about him. (Coviello writes that he’s not sure he ever had Mamdani as a student, but might have.)

  Former chair of Africana Studies at Bowdoin? A quick skim of Coviello's article, linked above, does not disappoint; Coviello fits every stereotype you might imagine for someone with that title. But Jesse does a slightly more diligent check of Covillo's claim about a David Brooks NYT column, and finds that Coviello either misunderstood it, or is lying about it. Ouch!

• If they're gonna lie about you, you might as well tell the truth about them. I think Ann Althouse approves Greg Gutfeld's ad hominem debating strategy. It's from this NYT interview (NYT gifted link).

  Interviewer's "question" in bold:

  You called Colbert a “smug loser” or something like that. And the one that stood out for me about Kimmel was: “If that man was any more full of [expletive], he’d be a colostomy bag.” I have this thing called the hierarchy of smears, and that means if you call somebody a fascist who’s going to destroy the world, I can call you anything. I made this point in an article by The New York Times on Kat Timpf, but they didn’t include it, which bummed me out. The writer was in the “Gutfeld!” audience, and she said: “During the show, you made all of these fat jokes — there were so many of them. And I’m sitting in your audience and, you know, there’s some overweight people.” And I said, “Yeah, but they didn’t call me Hitler.” That’s the difference. It goes back to that framing: I think you’re wrong; you think I’m evil. And I’m never going to call somebody fat because they’re fat. I’m going to call you fat if you called me Hitler. And the best part about that is it hurts them. It hurts them more than if they were to call me Hitler because they have to look in the mirror every day. I know I’m not Hitler. They know they’re fat.

  I tried watching Gutfeld! a couple times; wasn't my cup of tea. But I think the point he's making here is pretty good.

"So you're just gonna have more problems down the road. Who sold you this lemon, anyhow?"

Also of note:

• A spot of good news. Jacob Sullum looks at a relatively unheralded win for the Fist Amendment: This Ruling Does Not Bode Well for Trump's Attempt To Portray Journalism as Consumer Fraud.

  Last January, Dennis Donnelly, a longtime Des Moines Register subscriber, sued the newspaper and pollster Ann Selzer, alleging that they had committed multiple torts by conducting and publicizing a poll suggesting that the presidential contest between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris in Iowa was much closer than expected. On Thursday, a federal judge in Iowa dismissed that lawsuit with prejudice, deeming it inconsistent with the First Amendment. U.S. District Judge Rebecca Goodgame Ebinger also concluded that Donnelly had failed to properly plead any of his claims.

  That decision in Donnelly v. Des Moines Register and Tribune Co. does not bode well for a similar lawsuit that Trump filed against Selzer and the Register last December. "A party cannot evade First Amendment scrutiny" by "simply labeling an action one for 'fraud,'" Ebinger notes. Yet that is exactly what Trump is trying to do when he portrays "fake news" as a form of consumer fraud.

  So it appears that newspapers like the Des Moines Register will be able to continue meandering down their self-destructive path on their own, without the "assistance" of politically-motivated lawsuits.

• Speaking of politically-motivated lawsuits… Andrew C. McCarthy looks at Trump DOJ’s Vindictive Reply to Comey’s Claim of Vindictive Prosecution. (archive.today link)

  The point of lawfare, we’ve now seen all too often, is to punish and humiliate the target, not vindicate the rule of law. That’s not to say that President Trump and his minions wouldn’t love to convict Jim Comey of a crime. But if that’s not an available option — which appears to be the case in the prosecution the president has goaded his Justice Department into bringing against the former FBI director — the punitive application of the legal process and the stigma of criminal charges will do.

  This week thus produced one of the most bizarre submissions to a court that I’ve seen from the Justice Department (which is saying something after more than 40 years of working in and then closely following the DOJ’s doings).

  Andrew's article is long and meticulously argued. And convincing. Not only that the DOJ's persecution of Comey is vindictive. (It is.) But also that its attempts to argue otherwise are self-refuting.

• It's a dumb idea. David Harsanyi points out what should be obvious: Trump's Filibuster Nuke Would Hand Democrats the Keys To Remake America.

  There are no saviors or happy endings in politics — just a grueling, soul-sucking, forever war of attrition.

  Everyone in power seems to forget this detail. That includes President Donald Trump, who has again decided to exert pressure on Republicans to overturn the legislative filibuster and end the Democrat-generated government shutdown.

  "Get rid of the Filibuster, and get rid of it, NOW," Trump posted on Truth Social.

  "We have to get the country open. And the way we're going to do it this afternoon is to terminate the filibuster," the president reportedly told Republican senators at a breakfast this week.

  Nuking the filibuster is unprincipled, but it also makes little political sense. Trump would be doing Democrats a huge favor by greasing the wheels for exploiting fleeting one-party national majorities in the future, which will allow them to shove through massive generational "reforms" without any national consensus. And they would be able to do it without taking any political heat for nuking the filibuster.

  Trump wants wins "NOW". Like a child with a short time horizon. And poor impulse control.

• Ah, to be young, gifted, and nerdy again. Suzy Weiss reports on The Playboy Mansion of Nerds.

  Down the block from Elon Musk’s old house, about 10 minutes from San Francisco International Airport, there’s an 18,000-square-foot mansion with a pool, a bocce court, and a koi pond that absolutely no one is enjoying. That’s because the property—which is sprawling, lush, and gated—is the home to 10 or so young men and women who rarely step outside, because their worlds are on their monitors.

  They call the place AGI House—as in, artificial general intelligence, a hypothetical point where machines can outdo humans in all mental tasks—and here, wannabe tech titans sweat over their ideas for companies, attend networking events, sit through research summits on agenticism, and decline alcohol at happy hours—they’re there to discuss cybersecurity.

  Essentially, it’s the Playboy Mansion for nerds.

  Interesting! Suzy also goes on to talk about Sydney Sweeney’s new movie (Christy, about a lady boxer) and more on her run-in (discussed yesterday) with the AWFL GQ interviewer.

• A classy dame. Deirdre McCloskey cheers the choices: Nobel 2025.

  Economists once thought that capital accumulation was the cause of the wealth of nations. It’s an ancient and obvious truth that you can be enriched by stealing from your neighbor. That’s the attraction. Even Adam Smith, who fiercely opposed stealing, enslaving, and conquering by you or by the state, believed that what made for national wealth was accumulated capital. After all, he noted, Holland in 1776 was rich and had massive amounts of physical capital, while the Highlands of Scotland was poor and had little.

  It took two and a half centuries for economists to escape from this apparent truth. Marx, a follower of Smith in many ways, believed that “surplus value” extracted from the working class was re-invested by the capitalists, and thereby enriched the nation, and especially the capitalists. The French Marxist, Thomas Piketty, built his sensational book in 2013 about inequality on the belief. Yet not only Marxists continued to believe that capital accumulation—the piling of brick on brick, or university on university degree—is the source of our riches. The orthodoxy of the World Bank for decades after its founding in 1944 was the recipe, “Add capital and stir.” It didn’t work. Ghana received massive foreign aid, but did not become rich. During the 1990s, the Bank therefore shifted to its new recipe: “Add (good) institutions and stir.” It doesn’t work, either.

  What the economists and their followers failed to see is that the bizarre Great Enrichment of the world since 1776 involved innovation. Innovators, I’ve explained to you, think up new ways of doing things. Railways. Electric motors. The modern university. The internet. Letting women work for pay. Ending tariffs on foreign trade. And on and on, in billions of innovations unique to the modern world. Capital was sometimes necessary, of course, especially for example in railways. But so also were necessary all manner of conditions that are not in themselves creative of new ways of doing things, such as having a labor force, or obeying laws. What’s sufficient, the secret sauce in modern economic growth, is human creativity.

  So Deidre is encouraged by the Nobel going to Aghion, Howitt, and Mokyr. I think that the committee could have also thrown McCloskey in too; that would have been a real first for the prize, I think.

• Look out below! I am slightly amazed by this, from the WaPo editorial board: Zohran Mamdani drops the mask. (archive.today link)

  A new era of class warfare has begun in New York, and no one is more excited than Generalissimo Zohran Mamdani. Witness the mayor-elect’s change of character since his Tuesday election victory.

  Mamdani ran an upbeat campaign, with a nice-guy demeanor and perpetual smile papering over a long history of divisive and demagogic statements. New Yorkers periodically checking in on politics could understandably believe that he simply wanted to bring the city together and make it more affordable. That interpretation became much harder after his victory speech.

  Across 23 angry minutes laced with identity politics and seething with resentment, Mamdani abandoned his cool disposition and made clear that his view of politics isn’t about unity. It isn’t about letting people build better lives for themselves. It is about identifying class enemies — from landlords who take advantage of tenants to “the bosses” who exploit workers — and then crushing them. His goal is not to increase wealth but to dole it out to favored groups. The word “growth” didn’t appear in the speech, but President Donald Trump garnered eight mentions.

  Whoa. Whoa! They're right, of course. But this is something that would not have been out of place in National Review.

  The editorial has accumulated (as I type) 5,203 comments. The AI-generated summary notes that "many participants [express] strong disapproval of the piece's tone and language." Because the truth hurts, and they don't like being hurt.

But Andrew Heaton asks the specific question: Is Donald Trump a socialist? Spoiler: his answer is "No, but…"

Semi-accurate (and much less funny) transcript at the link.

Also of note:

• Warning: adult in room. His name is Charles Blahous, and he's leaping onto that third rail with Reforming Social Security: A How-To Guide.

  In early October, the Mercatus Center published my guide to designing comprehensive Social Security reforms. The guide was written in response to interest expressed by federal lawmakers and their staffs about how to best avert Social Security insolvency. Time is rapidly running out to fix this problem. A solution enacted today would already need to generate savings roughly equal to a 27% across-the-board reduction in future benefit claims. By the time Social Security’s combined trust funds are nearing depletion in 2034, even suddenly stopping all new claims would not avert insolvency. Faced with this impending crisis, lawmakers have two choices:

  1. Act responsibly, enacting comprehensive reforms to repair Social Security’s financing shortfall and address other problems facing the program.

  2. Be irresponsible, papering over the financing shortfall with accounting gimmicks and further escalating federal debt.

  What they can’t do is nothing, because then the program would become insolvent and the benefit checks would stop going out. This would be an intolerable situation not only for beneficiaries but for all the politicians who depend on their votes, so one way or the other, legislation will be enacted. My guide is meant to inform lawmakers who wish to take the responsible approach.

  I don't know for sure what's going to happen, but "Be irresponsible" is the way I'd bet. And it will be accompanied by an amount of dishonesty and demagoguery that will make the current shutdown imbroglio look like a Victorian ball.

• Trust me, you don't want to see the video. James Freeman has a verbal description though: Wokesters Gone Wild. (WSJ gifted link)

  New York City notwithstanding, there are signs that Democrats are starting to turn away from the race, gender and climate obsessions of the progressive left. Now along comes a cautionary tale about an outfit that tried to combine all of them under one roof. This bubbling cauldron of “resistance” may have done more harm to those cooking up the foul brew than it ever did to President Donald Trump.

  David A. Fahrenthold and Claire Brown report for the New York Times:

  The Sierra Club calls itself the “largest and most influential grass roots environmental organization in the country.” But it is in the middle of an implosion — left weakened, distracted and divided just as environmental protections are under assault by the Trump administration.

  The group has lost 60 percent of the four million members and supporters it counted in 2019. It has held three rounds of employee layoffs since 2022, trying to climb out of a $40 million projected budget deficit.

  Here's a free link to the NYT article, and if that turns into a pumpkin, here's an archive.today link. (But see below.) As Oscar Wilde might observe: "One must have a heart of stone to read about the death of the Sierra Club without laughing."

• More on the "Wokesters". Charles C.W. Cooke appreciates a good riposte, especially one from a comely lass: Sydney Sweeney Highlights the Wokesters' Fatal Flaw. (NR gifted link)

  Again, Sydney Sweeney shows how it’s done. Per Newsweek:

  Asking Sweeney directly about the backlash, Stoeffel said: “The criticism of the content, which is that maybe, specifically in this political climate, white people shouldn’t joke about genetic superiority, like that was kind of the criticism, broadly speaking, and since you are talking about this I just wanted to give you the opportunity to talk about that, specifically.”

  Sweeney said in response, “I think that when I have an issue that I want to speak about, people will hear.”

  Perfect.

  Newsweek goes on to suggest that this response has caused “backlash.” But this is nonsense. There has never been any backlash against Sweeney or her American Eagle ad. This whole thing has been an obsession of the weirdest people in America. It is true, alas, that a disproportionate number of those weird people work in the media. But, as Sweeney adroitly showed, they don’t actually have any power that isn’t willingly given to them by their targets. There is no reason that Sweeney should have to explain to a journalist that she’s not a white supremacist, because there was never any reason for anyone to have suspected that Sweeney was a white supremacist in the first instance. The idea is stupid from the ground up. And because it’s stupid from the ground up, the only correct response to it is to ignore the line of inquiry completely while staring contemptuously at the person delivering it.

  That's the polite version. At Hot Air, Beege Welborn is less circumspect: Advice for AWFLs: You Come at the Sweeney, You'd Best Not Miss.

  Gracious goodness, didn't this just crack me up.

  The smug, slouching creature with the bad Prince Valiant coif, garbed in a puke-green cotton t reminiscent of a slacker Star Fleet Academy cadet who's graduating at the bottom of her class but will hint broadly to everyone she missed Valedictorian by half a point, is the features director at GQ.

  Her name is Kat 'Rhymes With AWFL' Stoeffel.

  Beege goes downhill from there. It's tough out there for a GQ features director.

  And I looked it up because I had to: AWFL is an acronym for "affluent white female liberal/leftist".

• Advance warning. Recently, I noted a lot of sites were posting "archive.*" URLs that allowed access to some articles on ordinarily paywalled sites. I have a lackadaisical attitude toward copyright violation, so I joined in.

  But Ars Technica notes that there's some pushback from the Feds: FBI orders domain registrar to reveal who runs mysterious Archive.is site.

  The Federal Bureau of Investigation is trying to unmask the operator of Archive.is, also known as Archive.today, a website that saves snapshots of webpages and is commonly used to bypass news paywalls.

  The FBI sent a subpoena to domain registrar Tucows, seeking “subscriber information on [the] customer behind archive.today” in connection with “a federal criminal investigation being conducted by the FBI.” The subpoena tells Tucows that “your company is required to furnish this information.”

  So it's a possibility that this gravy train will come to an end in the future. Sad! Especially for Dispatch articles; unlike (say) the NYT, the WaPo, the WSJ, or NR, they have no means for even subscribers to generate "gifted" links.

  Even more reasonable is (heh) Reason, which frees articles out of paywall jail after a few weeks.

  So, how about it, Dispatch?

Also of note:

• Yes. Next question? Note that David R. Henderson prefers his original headline on his article, and I agree: Should Billionaires Be Allowed to Exist?. An interesting point, aside from the mere fact that billionaires accumulate wealth by being pretty good at producing things that a lot of people want:

  First, consider the argument for respecting billionaires’ rights to their wealth. I could make my argument for rights in a vacuum, but Bernie Sanders has already provided a road map for that argument. After he became a millionaire, Senator Sanders quit attacking millionaires and raised the ante: he shifted to attacking billionaires. Something he said when he became a millionaire is quite relevant here. He had written a book that had sold well and here is how he explained and defended his newfound wealth. He stated, “I wrote a bestselling book. If you write a bestselling book, you can be a millionaire, too.”

  Notice something important that is implicit in his statement. Sanders thinks that he has a right to the $1.06 million that, according to this news story, he made on the book. His implicit moral claim is worth a lot. For many decades, Sanders described himself as a socialist. The term “socialist” can be used to mean many things, all the way from wanting an expanded welfare state to having an all-powerful government that claims ownership of everything and takes people’s wealth. Wherever Sanders is on that spectrum, his statement makes clear that he rejects one important tenet of extreme socialism, namely, that productive people should not be able to keep what they earn. So far, Bernie and I are on the same page.

  But that raises an issue. Does that same thinking apply to billionaires? Bernie made money by selling a book that many people wanted to buy. Billionaires make money by producing many things that people want to buy. Do they deserve to keep what they earned?

  If they don’t deserve to keep what they earned, there must be some numerical dividing line. Where is that line? In Sanders’s case, the dividing line now seems to be above a few million dollars. Although it’s possible that I’ve missed it, I don’t recall his castigating decamillionaires—people with a net worth of $10 million. So, we’ve narrowed it down a bit. The dividing line seems to be somewhere between $10 million and $1 billion. Let’s say it’s $100 million. Having a net worth of $100 million is fine, but if you’re a centi-millionaire who engages in a transaction that makes you an extra $10,000, that’s not fine. But why? Why is it bad to make that extra $10,000?

  Why it's almost as if the Sanderses of the world didn't think about this very hard.

• I love this Slashdot headline. Doesn't it capture the California ethos? Mark Zuckerberg Opened an Illegal School At His Palo Alto Compound. His Neighbor Revolted. It's a simple link to this WIRED story with the same headline.

  One can only imagine the Palo Alto SWAT team descending on the "illegal" school, with a megaphone: "THROW OUT ALL YOUR COLORED CHALK AND COME OUT WITH YOUR HANDS UP."

  The Crescent Park neighborhood of Palo Alto, California, has some of the best real estate in the country, with a charming hodgepodge of homes ranging in style from Tudor revival to modern farmhouse and contemporary Mediterranean. It also has a gigantic compound that is home to Mark Zuckerberg, his wife Priscilla Chan, and their daughters Maxima, August, and Aurelia. Their land has expanded to include 11 previously separate properties, five of which are connected by at least one property line.

  The Zuckerberg compound’s expansion first became a concern for Crescent Park neighbours as early as 2016, due to fears that his purchases were driving up the market. Then, about five years later, neighbors noticed that a school appeared to be operating out of the Zuckerberg compound. This would be illegal under the area’s residential zoning code without a permit. They began a crusade to shut it down that did not end until summer 2025.

  I can imagine Zuck being somewhat amazed that it might be illegal to teach kids stuff on his own property.

• No Kings, either. Jeffrey A. Singer boldly advocates: No Swords, No Subsidies: Let the Market Set Drug Prices.

  On November 6, President Donald Trump announced that the government will refrain from tariffs on Eli Lilly’s and Novo Nordisk’s imported products and active pharmaceutical ingredients and that Medicare and Medicaid will subsidize the use of their drugs. In exchange, the pharmaceutical companies will significantly cut prices for their GLP‑1 weight-loss medications, Zepbound and Wegovy. Medicare and Medicaid will pay approximately $245 per month to the companies for the products, and Medicare Part D beneficiaries will have a $50 co-pay.

  Jeffrey goes on to note that simply making the GLP-1 drugs available OTC would save people a lot more money, and also relieve a hefty burden on taxpayers.

• This shouldn't be controversial, should it? J.D. Tuccille thinks Americans Shouldn't Be Governed by People Who Hate Half of Us.

  At September's televised memorial service for Charlie Kirk, President Donald Trump commented on the conservative commentator's character, saying, "He did not hate his opponents; he wanted the best for them." He then added, "That's where I disagreed with Charlie. I hate my opponents. And I don't want the best for them."

  Like too much of the political class across the ideological spectrum, Trump is prone to despising those he disagrees with. It raises questions about why people should ever submit to the governance of those who hate them—and whether politicians realize they're a big part of what brought us to this unfortunate moment.

  "It's long past time for all Americans and the media to confront the fact that violence and murder are the tragic consequence of demonizing those with whom you disagree," Trump had told the nation on the day of Kirk's assassination, at a perhaps more self-aware moment. "This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we're seeing in our country today."

  It's easy to play the "whataboutism" game here. Let's not.

Recently on the book blog:

This was kind of a frustrating read for me. It's a mixture of very good observations and very poor recommendations. The authors, Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, note that various roadblocks stand in the way of their imagined utopia (visions of plentiful housing, lots of green energy, affordable health care, high-speed rail, etc.) And the good observation is that a lot of those roadblocks have been set up by the Blue Team: endless environmental reviews, restrictive zoning, onerous regulation, nuclear energy phobia, diversity mandates, etc.) Klein and Thompson also steadfastly oppose the "degrowthers" on the left; they are all for increasing the size of the economic pie, spurring innovation, invention, and research, so good for them.

Ah, but Klein and Thompson are huge fans of hands-on good government directing all this. Just not bad government. I am unconvinced they can tell one from another. "Hayek" does not appear in the book's index. Neither does "Solyndra". They don't talk about incentives much. They are frustrated by the escalating costs, endless delays, and shrinking scope of California's high-speed rail project, but they never seem to draw the obvious conclusion that maybe it wasn't a good idea in the first place. They are also True Believers in Climate Change Catastrophe, something that even Bill Gates has moved away from.

There's a certain amount of selective amnesia involved, too. Back in the day, Klein was an enthusiastic cheerleader for ObamaCare. Memorably claiming that Joe Lieberman, a conscientious objector in the original debate, was “willing to cause the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people in order to settle an old electoral score.” Never mind the present-day reality that ObamaCare failed its goal of "bending the cost curve"; we've has moved on to designing the next Big Plan That Will Solve Everything. (And if you don't go along, it's probably because you want to kill hundreds of thousands of people.)

All this is accompanied by a lot of sweet, gauzy rhetoric. Designed (successfully) to appeal to "progressive" readers who push policy books onto the best-seller lists, while only making minor quibbles about their bankrupting philosophies. So: read for the good stuff, ignore the road-to-serfdom cheerleading for big government.

If you're looking for a laff riot, maybe you should look elsewhere. I thought Woody Allen's previous book, his autobiography, was funnier. (Some Amazon reviewers were more amused than I, though, so…)

It's a novel, his first and (so far) only. Like his autobiography, there are no chapters. It's just one page after another. And it kind of reads like a novelization of a movie, one that could be funny. But, alas …

"Baum" of the title is the neurotic Asher Baum, a writer of plays, novels, and non-fiction, all relatively obscure and tepidly received by critics. He is on his third marriage. He (literally) talks to himself, not always in private. (Something that might work better in a movie.) He's haunted by worries about his wife's (imagined) infidelity, and he's continually tempted to engage in infidelities of his own.

The plot driver doesn't show up until about 70% of the way through the book. Up to then it's all character study. And those characters are ones that work words like "egregious" into their most emotional dialogue. (Which is actually kind of funny in itself.)

"We will prove that there is no problem too large for government to solve and no concern too small for it to care about."

Genuinely one of the most horrifying quotes I've ever heard from a politician. pic.twitter.com/2Je148KEvy

— Jason Howerton (@jason_howerton) November 5, 2025

Tutto nello Stato, niente al di fuori dello Stato, nulla contro lo Stato.

Before you try that out at Olive Garden, be aware of the translation:

Everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State.

So, good luck with that, New York City.

Also of note:

• An idea all Americans can embrace. J.D. Tuccille suggests that we Keep the federal government closed.

  That the "government shutdown" is disruptive is an indictment of just how far we've let the federal Leviathan intrude into areas it doesn't belong. Of course, it's not really a shutdown; it's a temporary suspension of nonessential activities while lawmakers posture over budget issues for the edification of their core supporters. But we still see the air traffic control system in chaos and all too many Americans complaining that they won't get full Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits because government officials always inconvenience the public first even as most of the federal behemoth chugs on as always. They want to convince us we need the state and get us begging for it to reopen.

  Instead, we should ween [sic] ourselves from government and relegate the federal apparatus to the irrelevance—or even nonexistence—that it deserves.

  I assume eventually our representatives will tire of the posturing, find some face-saving off-ramp, and life will return to, more or less, the normal level of fiscal insanity. Still, it's nice to imagine the citizenry seeing it as a wakeup call for shrinking Uncle Stupid's role in our everyday lives.

• Defining Deviancy Down. That was Daniel Patrick Moynihan's pithy phrase for the normalization of behavior once considered shocking and unacceptable. Veronique de Rugy notes that, if anything, we've come to think "emergency" is the normal state of affairs: Washington's Use of the 'Emergency' Label Comes to a Head.

  In Washington today, the word "emergency" is a magic key; it unlocks powers Congress never granted, suspends the discipline of regular order and decorates bloated bills with provisions too dubious to pass on their own. What was once meant to be a narrow exception for genuine crises has become a routine pretext for government overreach — a means of inflating executive power and corroding the nation's fiscal credibility.

  Start with the most brazen claim, and one soon to be scrutinized by the Supreme Court: that a president may impose sweeping tariffs under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act merely by declaring that a half-century of trade deficits constitutes an emergency.

  Apparently, this argument didn't fare well at SCOTUS yesterday, but we'll see what happens there.

• Well, good. Jeff Coller notes some serendipity: Operation Warp Speed Aimed at Covid and Hit Cancer.

  A new study has found that patients who received mRNA Covid-19 vaccines while undergoing certain cancer treatments lived significantly longer than unvaccinated patients receiving the same treatments. What began with Operation Warp Speed has the potential to achieve something even more historic: an end to cancer.

  Presidents from both parties have promised to wage a war on cancer, but progress has been slow and the results have fallen short of the rhetoric. With continued investment in mRNA research, Donald Trump could turn the stalemate against cancer into a decisive breakthrough.

  Jeff is identified as "a professor of RNA biology and therapeutics at Johns Hopkins University, founder of the Alliance for mRNA Medicines and a co-founder of Tevard Biosciences." So: very knowledgable, but maybe not disinterested. Still, I'm glad I got my booster.

Hans Bader uses the above image to illustrate what should be good news: America finally stops getting fatter. And his caption, duplicated above, may strike some as—ouch!— uncharitable. But it's accurate. Google Lens tracks down the original, as publicized by Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar:

Today, we heard from Felecia, a single mom of four who works up to three jobs at a time to make ends meet. She counts on SNAP to help put food on the table.

This is who Republicans in Congress are trying to take food away from.

Listen to her story. pic.twitter.com/JpP4Mv4sEd

— Senator Amy Klobuchar (@SenAmyKlobuchar) June 12, 2025

Many comments on Senator Amy's tweet are similarly, um, insensitive.

Amy, you're not addressing the elephant in the room.

— Alt-Middle (@MiddleAlt38607) June 12, 2025

Amy seems to have a knack for "sob stories" that feature people who, sorry, just aren't that sympathetic Just a couple weeks ago. she drew attention to a couple who were saddened by those "skyrocketing" Obamacare premiums; as it turned out, they were early retirees living on a six-figure yearly pension.

It's probably mean of me, but from here on out, when politicians attempt to pluck our heartstrings by highlighting the dire straits of ostensibly sympathetic recipients of government subsidies, I want those stories to be accompanied by an independently-audited review of those recipients' financial situations and spending patterns. Maybe an inventory of their refrigerators, kitchen shelves, and medicine cabinets too. As a mostly-libertarian, I don't begrudge these folks' lifestyle choices, but I'd maybe like to not finance them.

But back to Hans Bader's article, it's actually pretty good news:

If you follow that first link, by the way, it turns out we're barely in the top 10, and only when you look at men. Throw in women, and we're down at #19.

And, whoa, they are really porky in American Samoa! Felecia would fit right in.

Also of note:

• "Immunity Syndrome" would be a pretty good Star Trek episode title. Oh, wait, it was.

  But it's also the headline on Kevin D. Williamson's latest observations (archive.today link) on President Donald J. Trump.

  More or less open corruption in the White House. Pardons for sale. Wanton murder on the high seas. Using the Justice Department as a political hit squad.

  Chief Justice John Roberts’ creation, ex nihilo, of presidential immunity from criminal prosecution looks dumber every day.

  The 2024 immunity case, Trump v. United States, was an attempt to deal with a tricky bit of constitutional engineering: We have a separation of powers among the branches, so that none is subordinate to the others in the performance of its constitutional role. That implies that certain laws passed by Congress directed at the president could be unconstitutional. For example, if Congress passed a law making it a crime for the president to pardon a member of his Cabinet, the president would be able to go to court and have an indictment on the charge thrown out because the law would be plainly unconstitutional: The Constitution gives the president wide pardon powers and does not empower Congress to restrict them. The president would be “immune” from prosecution under that law only in the sense that any other American is immune from prosecution under an unconstitutional law.

  KDW is not a fan. And he's not wrong.

• And worse… Trump has seemingly lit a fire under Democrat voters across the country to turn out in an off-year election. Let's check out what Jeff Maurer has to say: My Hot Election Take Is That We Probably Didn’t Learn Much.

  The most click-worthy headline I could publish right now is probably “NEW YORK SUCCUMBS TO MARXISM!!!” Of course, since there are more Beltway Dweebs in my audience than there are sex criminals at a Roblox tournament, “SPANBERGER, SHERRILL PROVE BENEFITS OF MODERATION” probably would have done well, too. Frankly, any version of “EVENTS VALIDATE YOUR PREFERRED NARRATIVE” would work, because that’s what most modern political commentary is: Shading reality to fit your audience’s worldview so that they subscribe. Which reminds me…

  [Jeff's "subscribe" button elided]

  Commentators of all stripes have an incentive to pretend that election night was a game-changer. Socialists and Trumpists will agree that Mamdani’s win means that the Marxist revolution has arrived, the former so that they can have a parade and the latter so that they can use that parade as a pretext to nullify the Bill of Rights. Moderates will point out that Spanberger and Sherrill won while running campaigns that were moderate, practical, sensible, shrewd, and other words that mean “designed to convince suburbanites that their administration won’t be some goddamned woke freak show.” Cable news will lead with “HUGE NEWS TONIGHT” because it’s bad TV to start a broadcast with “Kind of a boring day today — I’d watch a Malcolm in the Middle rerun if I were you.” As for political scientists, these results will lead to new iterations of the single most common political science paper, which is one that should be called: “Please Don’t Cancel My Funding! I Have a Family and No Other Skills, I Promise to Publish Splashy (And Probably P-Hacked) Results That Might Get Traction on Twitter, Oh God Please Don’t Cut Me off I Don’t Want to Work at the Amazon Store: A Meta-Analysis of the 2025 Elections.”

  Here's my "preferred narrative", Jeff: We'd be in a lot better shape if my fellow GOP primary voters had gone for Nikki Haley last year instead.

• I'd like to hear what my friends at Reason have to say. But for now, we'll go with Bob Zubrin at National Review, who is not a fan of Trump’s Bizarre Pick for Surgeon General: Casey Means and Psychedelic Therapy. (archive.today link)

  President Trump’s nominee for surgeon general, Casey Means, will soon appear before the Senate for confirmation hearings. The nomination, first made on May 7, has come under some question. While Means graduated from the Stanford University School of Medicine, she later dropped out of her residency program. However, the reasons senators should be skeptical of this nomination are more substantial.

  A friend of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has recommended her to Trump as a “fantastic” candidate, Means is an advocate and practitioner of the use of illegal psychedelic drugs, including psilocybin and ecstasy, for medical purposes. Her brother, Calley Means, is a Trump administration health adviser and investor in biopharmaceutical start-up companies. In 2024, the two co-wrote a book titled Good Energy, making the case for “psychedelic therapy.”

  According to the Means, in the book, “Strong scientific evidence suggests that this psychedelic therapy can be one of the most meaningful experiences of life for some people, as they have been for me.” Referring to her use of psychedelics as “plant medicine,” Means says she took magic mushrooms in 2021, after she was inspired by “an internal voice that whispered: it’s time to prepare.” Soon, she says, “I felt myself as part of an infinite and unbroken series of cosmic nesting dolls of millions of mothers and babies before me from the beginning of life. . . . Psilocybin can be a doorway to a different reality that is free from the limiting beliefs of my ego, feelings, and personal history.”

  I'm not quite as anti-psychedelic as Bob, but the "internal voice" and the "infinite and unbroken series of cosmic nesting dolls" might be kind of a deal-breaker for me. (Casey, how did you know that series was actually infinite?) Still, I'll keep my eye open for what Reason has to say. Jacob Sullum, are you listening?

• In a hole, he kept digging. Also at National Review, Rich Lowry is aghast: Tucker Carlson Outdoes Himself. (archive.today link)

  Nick Fuentes hit the jackpot.

  The white-nationalist influencer made it on the Tucker Carlson Show, the nation’s foremost vehicle for laundering noxious ideas into the conservative mainstream.

  Fuentes is a Holocaust denier and self-avowed racist whose goal is to remake the right in his image.

  Carlson, who prides himself on asking the supposedly telling questions when it comes to promoting any number of conspiracy theories, couldn’t really bring himself to ask any of Fuentes. Instead, he gave the 27-year-old Nazi sympathizer a tongue bath and said at one point of the Fuentes ideological project, “I guess you won.”

  It was bad enough when Carlson was shaking his pom-poms for Putin. What's next? "You know, the Khmer Rouge really didn't deserve their bad press back in the Seventies."

Recently on the book blog:

In case you can't see the book cover from where you are sitting: this book by Jean Hanff Korelitz is a sequel to her 2021 thriller, The Plot. Which I reported on back in 2022.

At my age, I find myself starting sentences with "At my age…" more often. And this is no exception:

At my age, I don't retain memories of book plots all that well. But The Plot was kind of an exception, because its twists seemed unique, nasty, and (hence) memorable. I suppose I should recommend you read The Plot before you read this one, but I found myself wondering if that was really necessary.

Anyway, this book follows Anna, the widow of the first book's protagonist, best-selling author Jake. Who (spoiler, sorry) met his demise in that book. Anna is tempted into the writing game by Jake's agent and publisher; how hard could it be? So she writes The Aftermath, a seeming roman à clef based on Jake's sad end, inaccurately described. And, while not a blockbuster, her novel's respectable ghoulishness brings her immodest success.

Anna finds the writer's life pleasant enough, but an unexpected "gift" on her book tour threatens to ruin her career, and perhaps her cushy life. Anna turns detective in order to find the person or persons behind this anonymous danger; she's got to find the truth without revealing the truth, if that makes sense.

It's, yes, a page turner. And the plot is even darker and twistier than The Plot. I liked it a lot.

For some reason, this popped up in my Twitter:

Finland knows that Socialism works.

They house all the homeless people, and have the least in the world.

They closed all paid Education in 1976 and now have the best education system in the world.

They are the happiest country in the world.

Be like Finland.

— BladeoftheSun (@BladeoftheS) November 2, 2025

I almost replied… and then noticed that there were already 1.5K replies. (It's since added hundreds more, and who knows how many there will be by the time you read this.)

So, I'll make my reply here:

How "Socialist" is Finland? The go-to source is the Fraser Institute's most recent annual report, Economic Freedom of the World. They put Finland in 15th place among the 165 jurisdictions ranked, tied with Germany, slightly ahead of Japan, slightly behind Costa Rica and the UK. (The US is #5.)

In a solid last place (#165): Venezuela. (For some reason, no socialism fans point to Venezuela as their Edenic utopia.)

It's true that Finns self-report a very high life satisfaction: 7.74 on a 0-10 scale. (Americans are slightly more sourpussed: 6.72.)

We could slice-and-dice more stats, but you can probably do that yourself. A good place to start is Daniel J. Mitchell's International Liberty site.

But… OK, just one more: Wikipedia puts Finland's per-capita GDP at (according to the IMF) at $56,084. Compared to the US's $89,599.

If Finland were a US state, that would put it worse off than every other state, save for Mississippi ($53,061).

So: don't be like Finland: be like (um…) Switzerland!

[Headline explanation: as reported back in July: "Wolverines are making a comeback in southern Finland, where they were wiped out in the 19th century."]

Also of note:

• It's not a pretty picture, Emily. But Jon A. Shields, Yuval Avnur, and Stephanie Muravchik have a suggestion at the Free Press: Want to See Campus Bias? Open the Syllabus.

  We just completed a study that draws on a database of millions of college syllabi to explore how professors teach three of the nation’s most contentious topics—racial bias in the criminal justice system, the Israel-Palestine conflict, and the ethics of abortion. Since all these issues sharply divide scholars, we wanted to know whether students were expected to read a wide or narrow range of perspectives on them. We wondered how well professors are introducing students to the moral and political controversies that divide intellectuals and roil our democracy.

  Not well, as it turns out. Across each issue we found that the academic norm is to shield students from some of our most important disagreements.

  Their first example:

  Consider, for example, Michelle Alexander’s important 2010 book, The New Jim Crow. Alexander argued that mass incarceration emerged after the collapse of the Jim Crow system in the South, largely as a way to reestablish the subjugation of black Americans. It would be hard to overstate its influence. Ibram X. Kendi called it “the spark that would eventually light the fire of Black Lives Matter.” And on college campuses, it became assigned reading. On the topic of race and the criminal justice system, no other work is more popular in the syllabi database; it appears in more than 4,000 syllabi in U.S. universities and colleges.

  As soon as it was published, The New Jim Crow stirred contention within academia. The most prominent critic was James Forman Jr., a professor at Yale Law School. In a seminal working paper, Forman challenged Alexander’s thesis. Among other shortcomings, Forman wrote that The New Jim Crow “fails to consider black attitudes toward crime and punishment, ignores violent crimes while focusing almost exclusively on drug crimes, obscures class distinctions within the African American community, and overlooks the effects of mass incarceration on other racial groups.” Forman’s work culminated in a book titled Locking Up Our Own, a well-regarded work that won the Pulitzer Prize.

  How often is Forman’s book assigned along with Alexander’s? Less than 4 percent of the time. Other prominent critics—like Michael Fortner, John Pfaff, and Patrick Sharkey—are assigned even less often. Fortner’s important book The Black Silent Majority, for example, is assigned with The New Jim Crow less than 2 percent of the time.

  I don't know how to find syllabi at the University Near Here, but The New Jim Crow is one of the featured books named (twice) on the Racial Justice Resources site maintained by the UNH library. ("Once in a great while a book comes along that changes the way we see the world and helps to fuel a nationwide social movement.…") Nothing by Forman, Fortner, Pfaff, or Sharkey.

• Pop quiz, hot shot. Which President said of his opponents: "They are unanimous in their hate for me—and I welcome their hatred." The answer may surprise you!

  Or maybe not. You're pretty well-read.

  Anyway, that's what came to mind when reading Jonathan Turley: “We’re Coming After You” — How Some on the Left Found Peace Through Hate.

  In Shakespeare’s Richard III, Queen Elizabeth — whose husband King Edward IV was overthrown and her twins taken to the Tower — asks the older Queen Margaret (widow of the murdered King Henry VI) to “teach me how to curse mine enemies.” The Queen responds that it is easy: “Think that thy babes were sweeter than they were, And he that slew them fouler than he is.”

  The lesson: The key to hate is to decouple it entirely from reason and reality. Only then can you hate completely without restraint or regret.

  It seems that the left has learned how to hate. Hateful speech is in vogue as Democratic leaders ramp up violent rhetoric and political violence rises. The key is to get voters to hate your opponent so much that they forget how much they dislike you.

  The irony is crushing. For years, liberals have sought to criminalize hate speech while expanding the range of viewpoints considered to fall within this category. Democratic leaders, from senators to former presidential candidates, have falsely claimed that hate speech is not protected under the First Amendment.

  Jamie Lee Curtis appears later in Jonathan's column, so you'll want to check that out.

• It's time to quit the tribe when… … the WSJ editorialists start writing about some of your tribemates: The New Right’s New Antisemites. (WSJ gifted link)

  An old political poison is growing on the new right, led by podcasters and internet opportunists who are preoccupied with the Jews. It is spreading wider and faster than we thought, and it has even found an apologist in Kevin Roberts, president of the venerable Heritage Foundation.

  On Thursday Mr. Roberts released a startling video to oppose the alleged “cancellation” of Tucker Carlson and even of Hitler fanboy Nick Fuentes, whom Mr. Carlson had hosted for a chummy podcast interview.

  “I want to be clear about one thing: Christians can critique the state of Israel without being antisemitic,” Mr. Roberts began, sounding like what William F. Buckley Jr. used to call “a pyromaniac in a field of straw men.” This is what Hamas supporters on the left say: What do you mean? We were only criticizing Israel. Not exactly.

  On Monday’s Carlson show, Mr. Fuentes assailed “organized Jewry” as the obstacle to American unity and “these Zionist Jews” as the impediment to the right’s success, while calling himself a fan of Joseph Stalin. Even while toning it down for the largest audience he’ll ever have, Mr. Fuentes still came off as an internet mashup of the worst of the 20th century.

  Fuentes is a creep, and I have no idea what worms have taken residence in Tucker Carlson's brain. I was never much of a fan, and started noticing his wheels coming off back when everyone else did.

• Hey, some people are voting today! For her substack headline, Allison Schrager embraces Mencken-style cynicism, the last three words of his famous quote: "Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it Good and hard."

  To outsiders, it may seem strange that the center of capitalism is about to elect a proud, self-described Democratic Socialist. I’m sorry, I just can’t get over the Mamdani plan to apply a flat 2% extra tax to anyone who makes more than $1 million. Not a marginal tax — a flat tax. I know this may seem small compared with everything else at stake in economic policy, including a four-year rent freeze on private property. But the fact that if you earn $1 more than $999,999 you’d owe $20,000 is just amateurish tax design — like something an eighth grader would come up with. It points to outright economic illiteracy — or that no one with even a passing familiarity with tax policy reviewed it.

  And it’s not a small thing — this is how he expects to pay for free bus rides, childcare, food, and whatever else. It suggests a lot hasn’t been thought through. The fact that people are relying on Kathy Hochul to be the adult in the room is some level of cope.

  So we'll see how good and hard NYC's citizenry get it.

And others of us have nothing better to do than to point out that they were wrong then, and still are:

Gee, an oldie from 2015! But not even Politifact was buying it back then. https://t.co/wi9HdUR5Zf

— Paul Sand (@punsalad) November 3, 2025

(I saw this because it was reposted by Don Winslow, whom I follow. He's a talented crime writer, but as a political activist, he's about as brilliantly insightful as your average earnest sophomore majoring in Communications at a local admit-everyone state college.

Also of note:

• The book-banners are at work. Liberty Unyielding reports on their latest efforts: State university to 'audit' its library collections to remove books that are not 'inclusive' or are deemed racist.

  Librarians, who are overwhelmingly progressives, routinely engage in censorship, weeding out factually-accurate books in their collections that offend woke sensibilities or use terminology considered outdated (such as old books that refer to “negroes” or “homosexuals” because that was the term used in the era the book was published).

  The state university at Binghamton furnishes a recent example. “The library system at Binghamton University released an anti-racism statement in which it called itself part of a ‘predominantly White institution,’ or ‘PWI.’ It also announced a plan to ‘audit’ its content for racism,” reports Campus Reform:

  BU Libraries said that the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and others are “the result of a white supremacist society in which violence is both enabled and effaced by structural racism.” The system therefore acknowledges its “institutional responsibility for addressing racism” and need to leverage resources in order to “advance other anti-racist work ongoing at the University and beyond.”

  BU Libraries Assistant Head of Reader Services Timothy Lavis said that the term “PWI” was used to explain the predominant perspectives within the institution.

  “When a PWI simply ignores systemic racism, [its] inaction is not actually a neutral position,” Lavis wrote…“Rather, that inaction serves to support the existing power structures that underpin and enable systemic racism.”

  I note that, at some point in the last few months, the University Near Here memory-holed its "Diversity, Equity, Access & Inclusion" page to "Community, Belonging, Access & Inclusion". And they have always been at war with Eastasia.

• "Blue City Bailout" would be a good name for a rock band. But, alas, it's just one more reason we're headed for fiscal disaster, described by Allysia Finley: The ObamaCare Blue-City Bailout. (WSJ gifted link)

  Mayor Rahm Emanuel of Chicago was scrambling to close a $369 million deficit in 2013. The inception of ObamaCare offered an enticing target for cost shaving: retiree health coverage.

  The city expected to spend $194 million that year subsidizing health insurance for its retirees, many of whom were too young to qualify for Medicare. Such costs were projected to increase to $540 million by 2023 at the same time as pension payments were ballooning. While courts in Illinois and other states have held that public employee pensions are legally protected, governments have more latitude to make changes to medical benefits.

  So Mr. Emanuel dumped his city’s retirees onto the nascent ObamaCare exchanges, where federal subsidies can reduce premium payments. Voilà, Chicago’s $2.1 billion unfunded retiree healthcare liability vanished. Now U.S. taxpayers pick up the tab for Chicago’s retirees in their 50s and early 60s.

  Allysia also mentions a likely scenario: "New York City last year spent $3.7 billion on retiree healthcare, money that a Mayor Zohran Mamdani might want for free child care or government-run grocery stores."

  As Maggie Thatcher once famously said: The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money."

• Speaking about running out of other people's money… Jessica Reidl deflates some wishful thinking from a onetime George Soros employee: Scott Bessent Is Wrong About Deficit Reduction. (archive.today link)

  One hallmark of the presidencies of Donald Trump is surging budget deficits. Another is repeatedly claiming that drastic deficit reduction is just around the corner. During his 2016 presidential campaign, Trump famously promised to pay off the entire $19 trillion national debt within eight years. Instead, the debt jumped by $8 trillion, thus missing his target by a mere $27 trillion.

  A new Trump presidency has brought additional empty deficit reduction boasts. Before the election, he suggested that the budget deficit (and Social Security) could be fixed by selling oil and gas reserves. In a March address to Congress, Trump pledged to eliminate the entire $1.8 trillion budget deficit while offering no path to accomplish such a monumental task. Not to be outdone, DOGE director Elon Musk initially pledged to save $2 trillion from administrative reductions in waste, fraud, and abuse. Over the summer, Trump promised that tariff revenues would leave federal coffers so awash in money that tax rebates would be necessary. And now, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is claiming the budget is on “solid footing” toward his deficit target of 3 percent of GDP, thanks to substantial deficit reduction.

  Unfortunately, Bessent’s deficit reduction boasts continue the trend of propaganda over progress. Tariffs are providing modest fiscal savings, although the deficit remains on track to continue rising steeply.

  Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be any major political incentive to call bullshit on Bessent.

Ann Althouse throws off some good advice for those of us bugged by twice-yearly clock-changing: How to stop fretting about the coming and going of Daylight Savings Time and live by the light not the clock..

OK, first, Ann: it's "Daylight Saving Time", not "Savings". The good people at Time and Date will explain that, if you'd like. (My mom had a bee in her bonnet about this, and I continue the tradition in her memory.)

Ann calls her the basis of her daily regimen "Sun Time", which makes a lot of sense. There's even an app for that!

Unfortunately, I've long been on "Body Time". And my body simply can't believe in 25- and 23-hour days.

Also of note:

• 
  Wisdom, there for the taking. Veronique de Rugy writes on The Market’s “Marvel”: What Hayek Still Teaches Us About the Limits of Power.

  Every few decades a fantasy returns that with enough data, political will, and clever economists, governments can steer an economy better than millions of dispersed, self-interested individuals ever could. The twentieth century’s socialists believed it. Today’s industrial planners and “national capitalists” believe it again.

  Peter Boettke’s recent essay in The Dispatch, “What Hayek Understood About the Unknowable Nature of Markets,” reminds us why this conceit always fails. It also reminds us what makes capitalism—not the caricatured greed of textbooks, but the dynamic process of price discovery and adaptation—the most extraordinary cooperative system human beings have ever built.

  I linked to Boettke's essay a few days ago, but Vero's commentary is worth a read as well.

  Plus, it gives me a chance to recycle another Salma pic.

• Speaking of Fatal Conceits… Andrew Follett describes what I might be looking forward to this winter: Wind and Solar Blackouts Threaten New England. (archive.today link)

  New England’s deep-blue states may become all too familiar with energy rationing and blackouts this winter, courtesy of the region’s overreliance on green energy.

  The Northeastern states face an immense shortfall in conventional electrical generation capacity, leaving the power grid extremely vulnerable at times when wind and solar power are offline. This precarious situation is expected to continue for at least the next decade.

  “We cannot operate the system in the wintertime without a dependable energy source that can balance the system when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow. I think policymakers sometimes lose sight of that fact,” Gordon van Welie, president of Independent System Operator (ISO) New England, which manages the region’s power grid, said at a recent energy conference in Washington, D.C.

  New Hampshire is really not that deep a blue, despite our Congressional delegation. And our nuclear reactor down in Seabrook should help out. Still, we are on the ISO-New England grid (at least for now), so we could be dragged down the Road to Energy Serfdom by our delusional neighbors.

• And is there anyone more fatally conceited than Liz Warren? Joe Lancaster brings the evidence: iRobot faces bankruptcy after Elizabeth Warren helped kill Amazon merger.

  A robotic murder mystery worthy of Isaac Asimov. Joe's bottom line: "Instead, iRobot was forced to die a slow and painful death because government regulators thought they knew better than consumers."

• Not just fatally conceited, but also unconstitutional. George Will reveals the stakes facing SCOTUS: Presidential power and the Supreme Court’s own stature ride on this case. (WaPo gifted link)

  Decorum might dissolve during oral arguments on Wednesday in the Supreme Court. The justices might guffaw when Trump administration lawyers say: The president’s tariffs should be exempt from judicial review because they respond to an “emergency,” emergencies, like beauty, are in the eye of the beholder, and presidents alone are our designated beholders.

  This momentous case must either undermine or buttress the Constitution’s architecture: the separation of powers. Six amicus briefs explain why.

  The conservative Goldwater Institute and the liberal Brennan Center separately argue that the statute the president says gives him unreviewable power to impose taxes (which tariffs are) of whatever amount, and for as long as he chooses (the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977), does no such thing. (Neither does the National Emergencies Act of 1976, which also is invoked by his defenders.)

  GFW also looks at briefs from other folks, including Cato scholars. Interesting, and I hope the resulting decision winds up with Congress putting on its big boy pants, growing a spine, biting the bullet, and doing whatever other clichés might apply.

As Scott Lincicome says, it's not as if they're doing such a hot job of it:

It's a divisive issue. On the one side, there's science, economics, family, and common sense. On the other, there's golf/candy lobbyists, big government, and immature night-owls. Really tough call for the political class! https://t.co/j3KJCPXvKq

— Scott Lincicome (@scottlincicome) October 31, 2025

I mean, what would we do without government telling us when to get up, go to work, go to bed, …

Also of note:

• Attention should be paid. The WSJ editorialists provide us with The Truth About ObamaCare Costs. (WSJ gifted link)

  Every day come warnings that Americans will be priced out of ObamaCare next year if Republicans in Congress don’t renew pandemic subsidies. The media coverage reads like dispatches from an AI chatbot trained on Sen. Chuck Schumer’s press releases, and maybe readers would appreciate some non-hallucinations.

  The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) this week released a fact sheet on ObamaCare’s pricing next year, and here’s the most important line: “The average Marketplace premium after tax credits is projected to be $50 per month for the lowest cost plan in 2026 for eligible enrollees.” Nearly 60% of “eligible re-enrollees will have access to a plan in their chosen health plan category at or below $50 after tax credits.”

  You read that right: The majority of enrollees will continue to have a plan at $50 a month or cheaper, even without the extra pandemic-era subsidy that is expiring. That’s a pittance compared to what many Americans shell out if they’re insured through their employer, even accounting for the fact that employer plans tend to be superior in their choices and coverage. Taxpayers on average are “projected to cover 91% of the lowest cost plan premium in 2026 for eligible enrollees” in ObamaCare, CMS reports.

  I follow my CongressCritter and my state's Senators on Twitter, and it's getting pretty tiresome to see them consistently work "skyrocket" into their doomsaying posts on expiration of the extra super-duper-premium tax credits.

• Room for improvement, then. The Josiah Bartlett Center brings a little bit of good news: Killing the I&D Tax leaps N.H. to No. 3 on national tax competitiveness index.

  Killing New Hampshire’s Interest & Dividends Tax has breathed new life into the New Hampshire Advantage. That’s the conclusion from reading the Tax Foundation’s 2026 State Tax Competitiveness Index, released on Oct. 30.

  Last year, New Hampshire slipped past Texas to claim the No. 6 spot on the index. Passing the famously conservative and economically booming Lone Star state was newsworthy, but the three-point jump in this year’s index is more so.

  Decades’ worth of research—from academic studies and government data to moving company records—show that states with lower individual and corporate tax burdens tend to be more attractive to individuals, businesses and investors. Entering the top three states in tax competitiveness puts New Hampshire squarely in the conversation for millions of Americans looking for a good place to live, invest or locate a business.

  We're getting beat by Wyoming and South Dakota. We are dragged down by our property taxes (#44!) and corporate taxes (#37).

• Newsflash: Kevin D. Williamson is still not a Trump fan. His latest on That Head of Gold. (archive.today link)

  A century and some before the American Revolution, the English republican Henry Haggar had argued: “If the God of heaven did in that age take away the Kingdom and Dominion of the whole earth from Nebuchadnezzar, that head of gold, and turn him out a-grazing among the Oxen, and give his kingdom to whomsoever he pleased; then let not men in this generation think it strange, though God Almighty hath taken away the kingdoms of England, Scotland, and Ireland (which are but a small part of the earth) from Charles Stuart, and given them to the honorable Parliament.” That argument appeared in a pamphlet titled No King but Jesus. (It bore the wonderfully cumbrous subtitle: “Or, The Walls of tyrannie razed and the foundations of unjust monarchy discovered to the view of all that desire to see it wherein is undeniably proved that no king is the Lords anointed but Jesus.”) Looking back to such spiritual forebears, Americans have held crowns in contempt since before we were Americans.

  Not so Donald Trump, who enjoys portraying himself wearing a crown and encourages others to do the same. He has for years tried to associate himself and his family with the British royal family, and it is not for nothing that his youngest son bears the name “Barron,” a pseudo-title of nobility borrowed from “John Barron,” the imaginary friend Donald Trump invented to lie to the New York Post about his sex life.

  Visiting South Korea, Trump was presented with a gold medal announcing him as a newly minted member of the Grand Order of Mugunghwa, which sounds like something out of a half-assed parody but is a real thing. Mugunghwa in English is the common hibiscus, which, like Trump’s parasitic brand of politics, is native to some parts of Asia but considered an invasive species in the United States. He also was presented with a golden crown, which clearly delighted him. I am surprised he is not wearing it, though I suppose it is possible that the scaffolding that keeps his hair in place might create complications.

  "Mugunghwa" is a pretty close approximation to what I say to my cat when she wakes me up at 3am, demanding breakfast.

• Jeff Maurer's right, Sirota is a douche. He has a confession, too: I Just Realised That the NIMBY Douche on My Twitter Timeline Also Wrote “Don’t Look Up”. Worse and worse!

  In the haunted carnival of freaks that populates my Twitter timeline, one weirdo who always catches my eye is a guy named David Sirota. Sirota’s malformity is that he is an adult human who does not seem capable of understanding the concept of supply and demand. His operating theory of housing prices is that high prices are caused mostly by corporate oligarchs creating an artificial shortage, but he also sees the influence of corporate oligarchs behind the so-called “abundance agenda”. So, which is it, David: Do oligarchs profit from constricting supply or from expanding it? Sirota rejects the NIMBY label but also thinks that loosening zoning laws would cause a housing bubble, and he recently attempted to deflect alleged slander of him as a NIMBY by trumpeting his support for a proposal that is, in fact, restrictionist. He’s also a “greedflation” guy and a defender of rent control, he’s one of the most illogical people I’ve ever encountered, and that includes my two year-old son, who likes to put orange slices in his sock drawer and say “For the duckies!”

  The other day, I finally decided to google this asshat (Sirota, not my son). It turns out that he was an adviser to Bernie Sanders (that tracks), is an editor-at-large at Jacobin (I should have guessed), but there was a bullet on his résumé that I didn’t expect: He co-wrote the 2021 climate-change-allegory movie Don’t Look Up. Maybe you knew that — I didn’t. Don’t Look Up was a tough watch for me: It’s about a topic I care about, stars several people I like, and Sirota’s co-writer (Adam McKay) has written several funny things. But watching this movie was like getting a lecture about appropriate office attire from a guy wearing a crotchless gimp suit. It worked for me on zero levels — as comedy, as allegory, or as a minimally coherent piece of storytelling — and now that I know that Sirota was involved, that all makes sense. So — four years too late — here’s my review of Don’t Look Up.

  I liked Don't Look Up slightly better than Jeff did; my report from 2022 is here. (I am easily amused.)

  But Sirota otherwise escaped my notice until a few days ago, with his worthless, dishonest take on that old excuse for gutting the First Amendment, "campaign finance reform".

Recently on the book blog:

I've been a Charles Murray fan for quite awhile. He's well-known for his takes on controversial issues, like IQ, race, welfare, etc. He presses a lot of hot buttons. I really liked his In Pursuit: Of Happiness and Good Government, a succinct description of the "proper" role of the state. Specifically, limited and laissez-faire, enabling people to chart their own courses in life, bearing responsibility for their own choices, good and bad.

This book is somewhat of a surprise topic, and very personal. Murray details his spiritual odyssey over the past years, how he became interested in, and finally persuaded by, evidence that we are more than just bags of molecules interacting according to the dictates of physics and biochemistry. And how he came around to a more-or-less Christian belief in God, Jesus, and miracles, including the resurrection.

So, yeah, that's a lot for a relatively short book. But Murray's argument is well-presented, not didactic at all. He lays out his research, all the while inviting his readers to make up their own minds. His initial discussion is very similar to that of Ross Douthat in his recent book Believe: the "fine-tuning" of a universe that makes stars, planets, life, and (most unlikely of all) human intelligence possible. Murray makes the additional point about trying to "understand" God: we are likely in the same relationship between my dog and calculus. We not only don't understand, we don't even understand what there is to understand.

Murray is impressed, as Douthat was, with the uniformity of "near death experiences", where people who have been brought back from the brink report uncannily similar observations of what it's like. Murray adds in the phenomenon of "terminal lucidity", where dying people thought to be irretrievably comatose have recovered briefly, but inexplicably, to communicate with people at their bedside. This, after their brains have stopped working!

In the book's second part, Murray looks specifically at Christianity, with an appreciation of the arguments made by C.S. Lewis in Mere Christianity. He notes the effort made over the years to debunk the history depicted in the New Testament; he counters with his own scholars and their arguments. (If you are refuting a debunker are you ‥ a bunker?)

Bottom line: Murray makes good arguments. I'm not planning to become a churchgoer (again), though. That's on me, not him.

If you're interested. Murray's book has generated some pushback from people I also like. Jerry Coyne, bless his heart, seems to take any religiosity as a personal insult, and argued against his views here and here.

Steven Pinker, peace be unto him, also dislikes Murray's "terminal lucidity" explanation, and wrote a letter to the WSJ about it. Murray responded here. (I think those are both free links.)