Pun Salad

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.)