Pun Salad

While I'm in sympathy with Mr. Ramirez's plague-on-both-houses sentiment above, I'm dubious that 2026 will be a throw-the-bums-out election. See the pretty (or ugly, depending on your POV) graphs at OpenSecrets: Reelection Rates Over the Years.

Also mired in the deep muck of partisan politics is William Voegeli at the Claremont Review of Books, who looks at Never Trump After 2024. He notes that there's been some sliding away from "Principled Trump Opposition" to simply cheering for the other side. For example:

I am no Trump fan, but I don't plan on going Full Bulwark anytime soon. Never go Full Bulwark.

Not mentioned in William's article is Jen Rubin, a onetime token "conservative" voice at the "Democracy Dies in Darkness" Washington Post. She's now at her own substack, The Contrarian, and a recent example of her work is… a look at the November election: The Most Exciting Races are Underway. And…

Aw, geez, Jen. How many elections in a row have been "the most important of our lifetimes"?

Also of note:

• A modest proposal. And it's from Jeff Maurer, who has many Thoughts on Megachurches and Taxes.

  A megachurch in Texas is going viral for its “Christmas Spectacular” service. Here’s a clip — prepare to have the holiday spirit enriched to weapons grade, loaded into a sidewinder missile, and fired directly into your face.

  Jeff provides a one-minute clip; I'll go with the 16-minute version at YouTube:

  Holy cow. And "holy" is wholly appropriate. Back to Jeff:

  My first reaction to this is that this church desperately needs more gays. Southern baptism has been famously hostile to homosexuality, and those chickens are coming home to roost in the form of sloppy, poorly-executed choreography. The dancers in the front are sinfully out-of-synch; they need a bitchy queen with a cashmere sweater tied around his neck to fire catty insults at them until they are on 👏 the 👏 rhythm.

  But enough about wretched holiday Holy Day excess in Texas megachurches. Jeff's proposal:

  Churches are ostensibly tax-exempt because they do good. Nonprofit organizations are tax-exempt for the same reason, and in the nonprofit world, an obvious absurdity arises: A group is deemed to be “doing good” no matter what their cause is. You’re “doing good” if you’re trying to feed the homeless, and you’re also “doing good” if you’re trying to skin the homeless and have their pelts sold to Pottery Barn. A pro-abortion group is “doing good”, and an anti-abortion group is “doing good”, too — as long as some manner of a bug is up your ass about abortion, you’re doing God’s work as far as the IRS is concerned. As with churches, the category is vague, bad actors exploit the vagueness, and the IRS takes a light touch because a heavy-handed approach would involve the government making value judgements that we don’t want them making. The problem isn’t that our rules are poorly written or laxly enforced, but rather the very existence of a special category for do-gooders when “good” is impossible to define.

  A logical solution — which would be horrifically unpopular, so I’m not officially proposing it — would be to end tax-exempt status for all churches and nonprofits. But I’d like to widen the aperture even further: Why do we tax any organization at all? The question of whether we should tax churches inevitably brings me to my belief that taxing any organization is inherently weird. We generally tax individuals, which makes sense because individuals are the basic unit of politics and their income is fairly easy to determine. But neither condition is true with organizations. The real reason why we tax organizations is probably simply inertia, and also probably because the tax is a hidden cost, i.e. the type of cost that voters love most.

  An intriguing idea, and I could see myself getting on board. It would get heavy demagogic flak from people who gripe now about corporations not "paying their fair share".

• It's that good old "Fatal Conceit" starting in NYC tomorrow. Peter Suderman makes a good distinction: Zohran Mamdani Didn't Run on 'Affordability.' He Ran Against Prices.

  Zohran Mamdani's campaign for mayor of New York City was defined by a single word: affordability. Mamdani repeated the word, almost robotically, in every imaginable setting, no matter the question or context.

  In a debate with former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, Mamdani contrasted his approach with his opponent's, insisting that Cuomo offered fear, whereas he would deliver affordability. When journalist Jorge Ramos asked Mamdani about whether he'd call Latin American authoritarians dictators, Mamdani demurred, saying he was more focused on affordability for the five boroughs. Mamdani's campaign was bolstered by clever social media, and one of his most memorable and effective videos was a complaint about the high price of takeout meals from halal food carts, which were suffering from "halalflation." On Mamdani's campaign website, the top of the platform page that lists and summarizes his main policy proposals is emblazoned with bold letters that say: "New York is too expensive. Zohran will lower costs and make life easier."

  Don't get your hopes up.

  Mamdani's promise was that, as mayor, he would defeat high prices. But many of Mamdani's signature ideas are variations on price controls. Take a deeper look at his policies, and it becomes clear that he ran against prices, period.

  To quote Rocky the Flying Squirrel: "That trick never works."

• Slashdot is late to the party. They report "news" that you could have read about right here back in March. Specifically, as of midnight tonight: Denmark's Main Postal Carrier Ends Letter Delivery.

  PostNord is ending letter delivery in Denmark after a 90%+ collapse in mail volume. It marks the first known case of a national postal carrier abandoning letters entirely -- a symbolic milestone of a fully digitized society that's sparking nostalgia even among people who stopped sending mail years ago.

  And they still won't sell us Greenland.

Recently on the book blog:

Sneaking in one more small read before the end of the year…

Has it really been more than forty years since I first saw Back to the Future at one of the local theaters? Arithmetic doesn't lie, I guess. It's one of my all-time favorite movies. So even though I've cut way back on reading memoirs from show-biz stars, I picked this slim volume (Amazon counts 176 large-type wide-margin pages) from the Portsmouth (NH) Public Library. It is from Marty McFly himself, Michael J. Fox, co-authored by his longtime business associate, Nelle Fortenberry. It reads (understandably, given his advanced Parkinson's) as a as-told-to memoir.

This is Michael's fifth book, and some of those previous ones are memoirs too, but this one concentrates on the movie. He briefly discusses his early life up in Alberta, his decision to move down to California where he became first a bit-part actor, then a TV sitcom star (Family Ties), and then hitting it big when he replaced Eric Stoltz in BttF. (Eric just wasn't working out.) Many pages are spent detailing the hectic times he was working on Family Ties during the day, then going to the movie locations at night, scratching out naps in the limo in between gigs.

Michael is laudatory to practically everyone involved. (I think one of the more inviolate rules of show-biz memoirs is to not disrespect your co-workers.) Even Crispin Glover's notorious weirdness (a major reason he got dropped from the sequels) is treated kindly. (In contrast, Claudia Wells, who played Marty's girlfriend, and was replaced by Elizabeth Shue in the sequels, is barely mentioned at all.)

Michael provides a lot of anecdotes about the good old days, and—honestly-they were not all of gripping interest to me. He goes into a lot of detail on his (anti-?) climactic guitar performance at the end of the movie.

There are a number of f-bombs along the way. And they all seemed gratuitous to me.

There is not a lot of false modesty here. Michael knows what he brought to the production, and knows (accurately) that his input helped transform the movie into the megahit it became. Good for him.

The book's Amazon page is effusive: "PULITZER PRIZE WINNER • #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER" and "KIRKUS PRIZE WINNER • NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FINALIST • SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE • A Best Book of the Year: The New York Times Book Review, LA Times, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Economist, TIME, and more." And (even) more.

But I liked it anyway.

It's a tale of (mostly) the events in Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, but told in first-person narration by the enslaved Jim. It helps to have read Twain's version first, I think, but not necessary. (I'm pretty sure I read it back sometime in the mid-1960s for school.)

The main change: Jim (or James) is literate, acquainted with works by John Locke and Voltaire. In fact, all that shuck-and-jive language he and the other enslaved people in Hannibal, Missouri use is an act put on to give the slavers a false sense of superiority. Among themselves, conversations happen in Standard English.

Upon learning that his "owner", Miss Watson, plans to sell him off, James flees to Jackson Island in the Mississippi, where he meets up with Huck, who is (in turn) on the run from his "Pap", faking his own death. A merry mixup: James is not only sought as a runaway, but also for murdering Huck. They make a desperate run downriver, somehow hoping that James can be reunited with his wife and daughter. But everything that can go wrong, does.

There's some dark humor, especially when the Duke and Dauphin show up. But the fundamental terror of that evil institution of slavery is never far away.

There are important differences between James and Huckleberry Finn, which I will not spoil.

Pun Salad is admittedly weak on foreign policy, torn between a sensible isolationism on one hand, and not wanting to see bad guys win on the other.

So: I link, you decide. Jim Geraghty, as always, makes a lot of sense: No, Vladimir Putin Does Not Want to See Ukraine ‘Succeed’.

Jim is pretty convincing that Trump's attitude and opinions toward Putin are based (at best) in fantasy. Which makes him the wrong guy to be running the foreign policy shop these days.

Also pretty damning is Peter J. Wallison over at AEI, who explains Why Trump Will Never Be Able to End the War in Ukraine.

Peter's theory, which sounds plausible to me:

Why is it so difficult to make an agreement with Putin to stop the war? The answer is simple. The war is the only thing that is keeping Putin alive. The oligarchs who hold the real power in Russia do not dare to overthrow him, because they’d be blamed for Russia’s surrender, and his death will produce a struggle for power among the oligarchs that will be hellish in its brutality. Moreover, those who overthrow Putin will be blamed for the loss of the war in Ukraine, which will swiftly follow.

But see above. What do I know?

Also of note:

• Just say no. Or have ChatGPT say no for you. Elizabeth Nolan Brown is thumbs-down on the latest stupid acronym: The TRUMP AMERICA AI Act is every bit as bad as you would expect. Maybe worse.

  Sometimes you can tell a bill will be really bad just from its title. So it goes with The Republic Unifying Meritocratic Performance Advancing Machine Intelligence by Eliminating Regulatory Interstate Chaos Across American Industry Act, from Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R–Tenn.). And, boy, does it deliver on that disaster of a name, managing to combine nearly every bad tech policy idea of the past half-decade—including gutting Section 230 and creating new requirements around the suppression of sexuality online—into one massive piece of Trump-branded legislation.

  The bill's title alone is asinine, even if we put the North Korea-ness meets word-salad nature of it aside. Following the normal rules of making acronyms, it would be the TRUMP AMIERICA (or perhaps AMIBERICA) AI act, though Blackburn is throwing rules to the wind and referring to it as the TRUMP AMERICA AI act.

  If only the problems stopped there!

  Narrator: The problems do not stop there.

• If the right one don't getcha, then the left one will. Greg Lukianoff, who keeps his eyes wide open all the time, sees The Worst of Both Worlds for Campus Free Speech. (archive.today link)

  2025 was the worst year for campus censorship in decades, and that’s because it’s coming from every possible direction—especially the MAGAverse.

  For most of my career, the biggest threat to free speech on campus came from inside higher education: the on-campus left (students, yes, but more importantly administrators) using the power of investigation and discipline to punish “wrongthink.” The right pushed, too, but those pushes overwhelmingly originated off campus. This makes sense, given that there simply aren’t that many conservatives in the student body, on the faculty, or—least of all—among administrators in higher education.

  In 2025, what changed was the balance of power and the source of the pressure. The federal government and state governments, using the levers of state power, are now the leading forces behind attempts to punish campus speech. In the data my organization, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, tracks—our Students Under Fire database—incidents involving censorship attempts from politicians or government officials jumped to roughly a third of all cases this year. In 2024, those incidents didn’t crack double digits.

  [Headline inspiration: Tennessee Ernie Ford, Sixteen Tons]

• An inspiration to all pundits. The Free Press invites some of its contributors to confess: What We Got Wrong This Year. First up is Nellie Bowles:

  This year, I really was wrong about why our government wastes money. I always knew the government was a little careless, a little silly. I’ve been following the California high-speed rail debacle for heaven’s sake, with more than $100 billion budgeted since 2015 and no high-speed track laid. I know how much San Francisco spends on “homelessness,” i.e., funding a vast array of nonprofit workers to wander around making sure addicts stay on the sidewalk as long as possible. I know these things. I think of them as absurdities that come from good intentions and silly plans. But then came the Minnesota fraud. It has rattled me to the core.

  There is no way for corruption that deep to happen without massive collusion from regulators, whose salaries are, of course, also paid by taxpayers. So this is the year I realized that the government doesn’t accidentally misspend money—it does it on purpose! Until this year, it really never occurred to me that there could be true corruption like that in America.

  To some extent this revelation is comforting: It reflects competence. It reflects sophistication, foresight, strategy, all of which I thought our elected officials lacked. So really there are pros and cons here. That’s just one thing I was wrong about, but the list is very, very long. Anyway, this is the year I open a Minnesota day care.

  Will Pun Salad carry an end-of-year confession of error? Tune in tomorrow!

Recently on the book blog:

I buy Jack Reacher books when they come out, but I (correctly) felt this one would be stretching that habit a little too far. So I waited a few weeks for the Portsmouth (NH) Public Library's copy to show up on the shelves.

It's short, a mere 221 pages, including a new Reacher 23-page short story. In which Jack manages to help a damsel in distress, beat up a bunch of lowlifes, and solve a minor mystery. Not a major literary milestone, but a decent amount of fun.

The remainder of the book is Lee Child's 24 "introductions" to collector's editions of his Lee-only novels, written between 1997 and 2019. (Novels since then are credited to Lee and brother Andrew.) Those collector's editions were limited to 100 copies, "bound in marbled boards, leather spines stamped in gold", and if you have to ask how much, you probably couldn't afford 'em. But it was nice of Lee Child and his publisher (Otto Penzler of Mysterious Press) to make the intros available.

Whether you find the introductions interesting … depends on what you might find interesting. I found Child's description of the writing process, his inspirations, his brushes with show biz, to be pretty good. Details on where he was living, his book tours? Not so much.

I was a Reacher latecomer, only starting the series with #1, Killing Floor, in 2009. But I quickly caught up, reading only one title out of order, a paperback of A Wanted Man bought in the Kansas City International Airport, because I'm phobic about getting caught on a plane without anything to read. I also report on the books I read (like this one, duh) at my blog and at Goodreads; I found it useful to review my reports in parallel with Child's intros.

Child does not, unfortunately, deal with Reacher's near-settling down with Jodie Garber in the early books. I've always been curious about her getting put in the series' memory hole! No insights on that here. Maybe in one of the future books?

Vice-President Vance tweets:

What's happening in Minnesota is a microcosm of the immigriation fraud in our system. Politicans like it because they get power. Welfare cheats like it because they get rich.

But it's a zero sum game, and they're stealing both money and political power from Minnesotans. https://t.co/AHLc0QuaiP

— JD Vance (@JDVance) December 27, 2025

J.D., I am impressed that you can use the term "zero sum game" in a grammatically correct way. I suppose that's to be expected from a Yale Law graduate.

But pretty clearly the Minnesota story is overall strongly negative sum. Google's AI patiently spells it out for me, and now you: Is fraud a negative sum game? (links elided):

Always happy to help out, J.D.

Also of note:

• Heartbreaking. Ben Sasse recently tweeted:

  Friends-
  
  This is a tough note to write, but since a bunch of you have started to suspect something, I’ll cut to the chase: Last week I was diagnosed with metastasized, stage-four pancreatic cancer, and am gonna die.
  
  Advanced pancreatic is nasty stuff; it’s a death sentence.…

  — Ben Sasse (@BenSasse) December 23, 2025

  Click through and read the whole thing to get a textbook example of class and bravery.

  For another encomium, see Jim Geraghty: Ben Sasse is exiting the stage far too soon. (WaPo gifted link) A snippet from his service as one of Nebraska's senators:

  As a senator, Sasse clearly relished his work — particularly on the Senate Intelligence Committee — but also remained a devoted father to his three children, multitasking whenever possible, including helping his son with homework behind the committee dais. His arrival in the Senate immediately preceded Donald Trump’s emergence in the GOP, and Sasse never altered his bluntly negative assessment of Trump, refusing to endorse him in 2016 and 2020.

  During this service in the Senate, Sasse voted with the Trump administration when he agreed with it, on tax cuts, and all three of Trump’s Supreme Court nominees. He staunchly supported the filibuster, understanding that no GOP Senate majority was eternal.

  Sasse said in a video message to the central committee afterward, “I listen to Nebraskans every day, and very few of them are as angry about life as some of the people on this committee. Not all of you, but a lot. Political addicts don’t represent most Nebraska conservatives. … Politics isn’t about the weird worship of one dude.”

  My first mention of Sasse here at Pun Salad was an appreciation of his apolitical 2017 column in the WSJ: How to Raise an American Adult. (WSJ gifted link). If you're in need of such advice, or even if you're not, check it out.

• Worse even than buying a "fixer upper" house. In the WSJ, Ge Bai and Elizabeth Plummer point out a small problem: ObamaCare Is a Money Pit for Taxpayers. (WSJ gifted link)

  Congress may yet extend ObamaCare “enhanced” premium subsidies. A new study shows why that would be a reckless act toward taxpayers.

  Using health insurers’ mandatory filings, our study, published Friday in JAMA Health Forum, shows that the ObamaCare individual market has become a money pit for taxpayers. In 2024 they paid nearly 80% of the premiums for subsidized plans—compared with only 30% in 2014.

  Taxpayers paid more than $114 billion directly to insurers in 2024—one-third more after inflation than in 2023, more than double the amount in 2020 (before the enhanced subsidies), and more than six times as much as in 2014. According to the Congressional Budget Office, this acceleration continued in 2025.

  Why? Through regulations, ObamaCare banned affordable insurance options and destroyed independent physician practices, damaging the insurance and provider markets. Consolidation, administrative bloat, high prices and soaring premiums followed. Our study shows the correlation between premium growth and subsidy growth is nearly perfect.

  Here's hoping D.C. Republicans find enough backbones to resist throwing more money into that pit.

• Tease MAGAs at your peril. Also at the WSJ, their relatively sane editorial board debunk MAGA’s Latest Stolen 2020 Election Theory.

  The 2026 midterms are coming, and Republicans have work to do if they want to hold Congress. Yet the nation’s MAGA minds are still looking back at 2020 and stretching to justify President Trump’s delusion of a stolen election. The latest involves the embarrassing news that Fulton County, Ga., failed to have its poll workers sign many of the tabulator tapes for early voting.

  “I have not seen the tapes myself, but we do not dispute that the tapes were not signed,” an attorney for Fulton County told the Georgia State Election Board during a December hearing. “It was a violation of the rule. Since 2020, again, we have new leadership, and a new building, and a new board, and new standard operating procedures, and since then the training has been enhanced.”

  The admission rocketed around the MAGA-sphere as a claim that Georgia’s results in 2020 included 315,000 illegally counted votes. Mr. Trump lost the state by 11,779 overall, and Fulton County, which includes much of Atlanta, is a Democratic stronghold, where Joe Biden carried 73%. The refrain on the right is that the unsigned tapes somehow prove Mr. Trump has been correct about the election all along.

  Nope. Not even close:

  Yet Georgia’s ballots in 2020 were counted three times, twice by scanner and once by hand, five million of them. “In 73% of Georgia’s 159 counties, the margin of the hand count varied from the original by 10 voters or fewer,” these pages reported at the time. “In a quarter of counties, the two numbers exactly matched.” In other words, the hand tally validated the machine count.

  Earlier last week, local Granite Grokster Amil Imani did that MAGA thing: DOJ hammers Fulton County Over 315,000 ghost votes.

  Wincing a bit, I commented with a link to this Dispatch article from Stephen Richer No, Fulton County Early 2020 Votes Aren’t Likely To Be Decertified (archive.today link). I called it a "calmer explanation". I suppose I should have expected the level of vituperation I got. I might have been more upset if I were nine years old. But, geez, if you want to see a bunch of people demonstrating confirmation bias, check it out.

Recently on the book blog:

I am pretty sure this is the first Clifford D. Simak book I read back in the 60s. I found a pic of the edition I still own, a 40¢ Ace paperback, purchased while on vacation with my family in Wyoming. (An inner stamp marks it as being from "Brundy's Bookstore" at 139 Cole Shopping Center in Cheyenne. The store and the mall it was in are long gone.)

I didn't remember much of anything about the book. Copyright date is 1951, and Simak's ornate style was on full display:

They climbed the last hundred yards and reached the man-made plateau, then stood and stared across the nightmare landscape, and as he looked, Sutton felt the cold hand of loneliness reach down with icy fingers to take him in its grip. For here was sheer, mad loneliness, such as he had never dreamed. Here was the very negation of life and motion, here was the stark, bald beginning when there was no life, nor even thought of life. Here anything that knew or thought or moved was an alien thing, a disease, a cancer on the face of nothingness.

[Page 99 in my edition, picked at random. It's typical.]

"Sutton" is Asher Sutton, returning to Earth after a couple decades after he went missing on a mission to a mysterious world in the 61 Cygni star system. Unfortunately, his old boss, who has kept Sutton on the payroll in the interim, has been previously visited by his time-travelling successor, who warns him about Sutton's imminent return, and tells him that Sutton must be killed!

Why? Well, it seems that Sutton's experiences have taught him the truth about Destiny. Each living thing is accompanied by Destiny, a kind of spirit being. (Sutton calls his "Johnny".) And Sutton plans to write a book about that. Which (in the future) will cause all kinds of mischief to all kinds of powerful people. Some of those people are homicidal, others just want to co-opt Sutton into writing a less inflammatory treatise.

There are androids, lots of them. And there's something odd about Sutton: as he returns to Earth, he has to remind himself to start breathing again; otherwise people might notice that he's not exactly human any more!

Sutton gets in some time-travelling of his own, meeting up with his centuries-previous ancestor in the fields of Wisconsin. Don't worry, grandpa survives the encounter! And I don't think there was any Futurama-style "nasty in the pasty".

Eric Raymond has been well-known in the hacker/geek/coder community for decades. He let his blog go defunct years ago, but he's started posting bloglike content at Twitter. And his observations here are worth your while:

I was writing some code the new-school way yesterday, prompting gpt-4.1 through aider, and for whatever reason my mind flashed back 50 years and the utter freaking enormity of it all crashed in on me like a tidal wave.

And now I want to make you feel that, too.

In 1975 I ran…

— Eric S. Raymond (@esrtweet) December 27, 2025

It's long, but interesting and insightful all the way through. His bottom line:

I'm just happy to be here to see it, at least the early part thereof.

If you're interested, my jaw-dropping experience with asking AI (specifically Claude) to write code I probably couldn't have written myself is over on my geekery blog.

I still haven't fixed the bug mentioned there. The extension still works "well enough" by (yes) "turning it off, then back on again."

Also of note:

• Are you a libertarian comic book geek? If so, you will definitely want to check out Brian Doherty's The Howard Roark of Comics. Who's that?

  Of all the popular storytelling artists striving to emulate Ayn Rand, the most significant was Steve Ditko.

  Ditko, a comic book artist, is most famous for co-creating Spider-Man and Dr. Strange. Rand, in addition to writing novels that still sell hugely seven decades down the line, developed a philosophy she called Objectivism, the politics of which were highly libertarian and highly controversial.

  Ditko's commitment to Rand's ideas led him down a curious and troubled path, and made him resemble a real-life Rand character. From developing enduring legends for Marvel Comics in the 1960s to Kickstartering in the 2010s with fewer than 150 sponsors his uniquely and often bizarrely abstract stories, Ditko emulated aspects of both of Rand's most prominent fictional protagonists.

  Back in my college days, one of my housemates was a comic collector, and had complete series of most of the Marvel titles going back to issue #1. I consumed 'em all, slowly over months. And (of course) I had read Atlas Shrugged as an (apparently) impressionable youth back in high school.

  So one of the things I remember was one early Spider-Man comic taking a few panels to feature a moody soliloquy by newspaper mogul J. Jonah Jameson, in which he confessed his true reasons for his implacable hostility to the do-gooding web-crawler.

  And of course it can be found with a bit of Googling; from Spider-Man #10:

  

  That's filched from a web page, conveniently titled Why Does J. Jonah Jameson Hate Spider-Man So Much? Alternate theories are also presented there, but this sounds direct from Ditko, so I consider it canon.

  I have to admit that Jonah's noting Spidey's "unselfish" virtue doesn't sound very Randian at first glance.

  But wasn't John Galt pretty unselfish in setting up his Gulch? Strict Objectivists say no, but…

  (Brian's article gets into this issue too.)

• Not to go all Islamophobic on you, but … it ain't a phobia if they really are trying to kill you. Andrew C. McCarthy asks Who Is the Radical?. (NR gifted link)

  I’m writing this amid the Festival of Lights and few days before our annual observance of the Nativity in the Judeo-Christian West. A confession, though: I am far from brimming with Christmas spirit.

  It’s impossible to at the moment. Hopefully things will be better when you read this. Just days ago, we witnessed the unspeakable horror at Bondi Beach, where a father-and-son jihadist team murdered Australian Jews who were doing nothing more provocative than being Jews and celebrating the start of Hanukkah.

  It was bound to happen: The transnational progressives who run the Australian government turned deaf ears to repeated warnings about intensifying Jew hatred — the word “antisemitism” doesn’t do justice to the historical enmity involved. The surge in incidents of intimidation and violence follows surges in Muslim immigration to the country. That’s not just coincidence; sometimes post hoc really is propter hoc.

  Andrew requotes a Muslim Brotherhood "internal memo" (originally found in his book The Grand Jihad):

  The Ikhwan [i.e., the Brotherhood] must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and “sabotaging” its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and Allah’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.

  So don't be surprised when, after years of saying "It can't happen here"… it winds up happening here.

• Not starring Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence. Roger Pielke Jr presents: The Weather Truther Playbook. He has observed "incredible efforts being made to undermine the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and mainstream science". And so:

  The main purpose of this post is to provide me with a concise language to describe this movement and its participants, that I can use going forward. This post characterizes the Weather Truthers and their playbook.

  Longtime [substack] readers will be aware that a parallel universe has developed related to climate change and extreme weather. This parallel universe — science-like but not science — is characterized by:

  • Claims that “climate” is a cause of extreme weather or its intensification;

  • The invention of “extreme event attribution” to counter the IPCC detection and attribution framework;

  • The invention of the concept of novel “climate risk,” which marks a clean break from risks of the past;

  • A cottage industry of research focused on extreme and implausible climate scenarios that projects scary changes in extremes in the distant future, which are then time-traveled back to today to support the most extreme claims of causal attribution;

  • A journalistic climate beat which hypes every extreme event as being made worse by, linked to, fueled by “climate;”

  • A very small group of usual suspects willing to offer quotable quotes on the supposed “climate” causality connections to the event-that-just-happened;

  • The repeated claim that addressing the crisis of escalating extreme weather requires rapidly reducing carbon dioxide emissions.

  So be on the lookout, and you might want to pay attention to Roger's substack too.

• Take my advice, and read this twice. Mike Pesca defends a brave young lady: No One's Nice To Bari Weiss.

  The facts: On Saturday, December 20, CBS News Editor-in-Chief Bari Weiss told the executive producer of 60 Minutes she was holding a segment scheduled to air the next day. The piece concerned CECOT, the maximum-security prison in El Salvador where the Trump administration had sent hundreds of Venezuelan migrants. Weiss cited the need for further interviews and additional reporting.

  Correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi, in an email to colleagues including Anderson Cooper and Lesley Stahl, called the decision political: “Pulling (the story) now, after every rigorous internal check has been met, is not an editorial decision, it is a political one.”

  By Sunday evening, the story had media-tastasized into a national controversy about censorship, oligarchy and authoritarianism. Former Representative Adam Kinzinger declared, “Bari Weiss—now the head of CBS News—clearly a right winger, clearly in line with Donald Trump, has made it clear that 60 Minutes will do the administration’s bidding now.” The Daily Beast ran the headline “CBS Boss Censored 60 Minutes for Not Interviewing Stephen Miller,” which is an inaccurate account of what Weiss had done.

  Mike does an amazingly thorough job of refuting the anti-Bari slurs. Especially amusing is his rebuttal to charges by Adam Serwer in the Atlantic that Bari's Free Press "and other 'so-called free speech advocates' stay silent when the right restricts speech, exposing their commitment as purely partisan." Mike points out multiple examples of the Free Press explicitly calling out right-wingers' censorious words and activities.

  If I were the editor of the Atlantic, I'd check this out, and deeply wish that Kevin D. Williamson was not fired from the mag, and Adam Serwer was.

His end-of-year retrospective: As 2025 slinks offstage, at least that’s something to cheer about. (WaPo gifted link)

Mr. Will is 84, and I wish him many more years of health, wisdom, and puckish humor.

Also of note:

• Year-end suggestion/reminder: Wikipedia doesn't deserve your money. Jerry Coyne describes How Wikipedia distorts Israel and Jews in the interests of the site’s “progressive” ideology. Jerry's triggering event is Wikipedia's Israel article which contains:

  Following the October 7 attacks in 2023, Israel began committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza.

  The next sentence is:

  Israel and several other countries, including the United States, dispute that its actions constitute genocide.

  But (to belabor the obvious) the Wikipedia wording implies that Israel's "genocide" is not a matter for dispute.

  Jerry provides some third-hand testimony about how this slander is apparently not fixable. One of his readers reports:

  As an example, a friend of mine noted that the Wikipedia article on Israel states that Israel started a genocide on Oct 7, 2023. She decided to try and edit it. She jumped through several hoops and I will share a quote from what Wikiedia sent her:

  In short, you are not permitted to edit any page on Wikipedia related to the Arab-Israeli conflict until your account is 30 days old with 500 substantive edits (not edits made simply to reach 500). I will tell you that the current wording of the article was reached after extensive discussion and deliberation amongst Wikipedia contributors; you are free to review that discussion yourself, it may be accessed from Talk:Israel (see the FAQ at the top). 331dot (talk) 19:38, 23 December 2025 (UTC)

  Edit requests are permitted if they are wholly uncontroversial (something that no reasonable person could possibly disagree with) and do not require extensive discussion to reach a consensus. 331dot (talk) 19:48, 23 December 2025 (UTC)

  Jerry adds:

  But this kind of redaction is only the tip of the iceberg. In this discussion you’ll learn about the “Gang of 40”, a group of ideologues who seem to spend nearly all their time as lay editors of Wikipedia articles about Israel, Palestine, and Zionism.  (There is even an article on “Gaza genocide recognition.”) You’ll learn that Wikipedia either has no response to this kind of bigoted malfeasance or doesn’t seem to want to fix it. Yet Wikipedia was, at the outset, dedicated to giving just the facts and documenting them.

  And it’s not just Judaica.  Rindsberg notes that Wikipedia is also determined to ensure that the “lab leak theory” for the origin of covid remains a “conspiracy theory” (I myself am agnostic about the issue), and to the denigration of Trump.

  The lesson is clear. You're pretty safe relying on Wikipedia for (say) the results of the 2020 New Hampshire Democratic presidential primary. Once you venture into any hot-button issues that "progressives" have decided to own, you are in 1984 territory, where dissenting opinions (and inconvenient facts) are memory-holed.

  I've been dodging Wikipedia's donation nags for weeks; are they over yet? Anyway: not one thin dime.

If you can make it through Dave Barry's Year in Review without a guffaw or two, or 46, then congratulations on your igneous ticker. An excerpt, from …

It was a funny old year, and it's not over yet.

Also of note:

• And another retrospective that might amuse you. The Free Press editors reveal their picks: Our Funniest News Items of the Year. Here's Oliver Wiseman:

  It has been a heavy year in news, but 2025 was not without its lighter moments. After all, this was the year someone known as “Big Balls” briefly held a very important government job. And the year that the leader of the free world sprayed an Islamist fighter turned Syrian president with cologne and asked him how many wives he has. And the year that FIFA, an organization charged with running international soccer tournaments, launched its own “Peace Prize” and awarded it to—who else?—Donald Trump.

  But my personal favorite moment of levity this year came in September, with the publication of Kamala Harris’s election memoir, 107 Days. The book is not supposed to be funny, but it is. As I wrote at the time, the former vice president’s day-by-day account of her doomed White House bid is a petty burn book. It is strangely authentic. She roasts assorted senior Democrats (an odd thing to do if you plan on running for president again, as she seems to). When she’s not outwardly aggressive, she’s spectacularly passive-aggressive. And no one is spared, including her poor husband, Doug. The most entertaining entry in the book is for October 20, 16 days before the election and Harris’s birthday. The former vice president gives a detailed rundown of all the ways in which her poor Doug failed to meet the moment that was her 60th. It is amusing. Whether she meant it to be, I’m not so sure.

  Another funny thing: The book tour is still happening. Harris has recently added dates through April next year, featuring a few stops in swing states. How will this work? Will she go straight from plugging 107 Days into the Iowa caucus, where she can start gathering material for the sequel?

  More info on Kamala's ongoing book tour is here. With ticket buying links. Nowhere in, or even near, New Hampshire, which makes me think she's already given up on winning the primary here. (She dropped out of the 2020 race … before 2020.)

  Let's see how much she wants to go see her in, oh, say, Indianapolis. … Whoa, the cheapest seats there are $150?! That is… about $150 more than I'd be willing to pay, Kamala.

• OK, enough levity, let's get serious. A perceptive and sensible take on AI, and proposed AI legislation, from Cameron Berg and Judd Rosenblatt in the WSJ this Boxing Day morn: If AI Becomes Conscious, We Need to Know. (WSJ gifted link)

  An Ohio lawmaker wants to settle one of science’s thorniest questions by legislative fiat. Rep. Thaddeus Claggett’s bill would define all artificial-intelligence systems as “nonsentient entities,” with no testing mechanism and no way to revisit this judgment as systems evolve. While the bill tackles real questions about liability and legal clarity as AI systems become more autonomous, it goes off the rails by declaring all AI nonsentient forever. This closes off the possibility of updating our understanding as evidence accumulates.

  The French Academy of Sciences tried a similar approach in the late 18th century, solemnly declaring that rocks couldn’t fall from the sky because there were no rocks in the sky. They had to issue a correction after the evidence kept hitting people on the head.

  Mr. Claggett doesn’t know whether current systems have properties we should care about or when future systems might cross that threshold. No one does. Yet his bill attempts to settle the question as evidence is emerging that the question deserves serious investigation.

  Berg and Rosenblatt point out that there's no reason to think AI "consciousness" would be anything like human consciousness; would we even recognize it if we saw it? Should we believe AIs who claim to be conscious? Heck, should we believe them when they say they're not? Maybe they just were programmed to say that by some nervous coder in a cubicle.

  And, for that matter, we don't even understand human consciousness that well.

• There are no “controlled substances,” there are only controlled citizens. Steven Greenhut recounts 54 years of failure: From Nixon to Trump, the 'War on Drugs' has been a disaster.

  The United States government first launched a War on Drugs on June 17, 1971, when President Richard Nixon declared: "America's public enemy number one…is drug abuse. In order to fight and defeat this enemy, it is necessary to wage a new all-out offensive…This will be a worldwide offensive dealing with the problems of sources of supply."

  The war has ebbed and flowed over the past 54 years, but the results are clear. Drugs won. But instead of learning the requisite lessons, the Trump administration is ramping up anti-drug-war rhetoric to lunatic levels. The president recently issued an executive order designating fentanyl as a "weapon of mass destruction." He's empowered the military to destroy Venezuelan boats that likely aren't carrying that synthetic opioid or even headed to the United States.

  The administration's rhetoric is mind-numbingly off the rails. For instance, Attorney General Pam Bondi in April claimed during congressional testimony that Donald Trump's policies have saved the lives of 258-million people. It's highly unlikely that 75% of America's population would have died from drug overdoses, just as it's highly unlikely that, per Trump, each boat strike saves 25,000 lives.

  This item's headline is an old Thomas Szasz quote. Also appropriate would have been that one usually (and falsely) attributed to Einstein: “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result."

• The WaPo editorialists continue to amaze and delight. A Christmas Day editorial: Socialized medicine can’t survive the winter. (WaPo gifted link)

  It wouldn’t be Christmas in Britain without an imminent threat of the health care system collapsing. This year, it was the combination of a “flu-nami” and a five-day strike by residents that had U.K. Health Secretary Wes Streeting warning about “the Jenga piece that collapses the tower.” That tower is the National Health Service.

  The circumstances may change, but the sense of crisis is not new. The NHS has existed for years in a perpetual state of emergency. This was the case before the pandemic hit, and it has only gotten worse. Hospital corridors overflow and routine procedures get canceled due to a catastrophic event commonly known as “winter.” It comes around every year, yet the system, despite annual funding increases, still somehow remains unable to cope.

  A campaign to keep people away from hospitals during the holidays is underway, which includes begging the public to seek out other forms of treatment for “less serious” injuries and ailments. The British press compares the messaging to “Covid-era stay-at-home pleas,” which included asking patients who needed care to avoid medical facilities in order to “protect the NHS.”

  Something to bookmark when your local "progressive" starts blathering that what the USA needs is "Medicare for all".

A Very Libertarian Christmas.

But let's not fail to remember the Reason For The Season. I won't beat you over the head with it, but… come on.

Also too easy to forget to appreciate: what makes America's generosity possible. Fortunately, Veronique de Rugy writes In Appreciation of What Makes America's Generosity Possible.

It is, in fact, fantastical. Something to remember as I wolf down my freshly-microwaved InnovAsian Chinese-Style BBQ Pork Fried Rice this evening while watching last night's TiVo'd Jeopardy! I might not even bother to skip over commercials!

Also of note:

• Another year, another reminder that we are in big fiscal trouble. The National Review newshounds bring it: Rand Paul Highlights Wild Government Waste in Annual 'Festivus' Report.

  Senator Rand Paul (R., Ky.) released a report Tuesday detailing $1.6 trillion in government waste, in keeping with his annual “Festivus” tradition of airing grievances against wasteful federal spending.

  A whopping $1.2 trillion of that wasteful spending is interest payments on the ballooning national debt, according to the report, which contains numerous examples of government programs Paul considers to be useless and fiscally irresponsible.

  “Last Festivus, we clamored over the national debt reaching over an astronomical $36 trillion. Shockingly, in one short year, the career politicians and bureaucrats in Washington have managed to reach nearly $40 trillion in debt, without so much as a second thought. When asked who’s to blame for our crushing level of debt, the answer is ‘Everyone.’ This year, Congress voted to raise the debt ceiling by $5 trillion, the most we ever have,” Paul’s report reads.

  Many of Rand's grievances are relative lost-in-the-sofa small change to Uncle Stupid. But to pick one at random from the report:

  Woke U: HHS gave $3.3 million to Northwestern University so they can hire 15 people, erect “scientific neighborhoods,” install “safe space ambassadors,” and form endless committees to “dismantle systemic racism.”

  Whoa. That can't be right, can it? I thought all that woke stuff was over!

  But no. An excerpt from the report's citation of the grant summary:

  NURTURE: NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY RECRUITMENT TO TRANSFORM UNDER-REPRESENTATION AND ACHIEVE EQUITY - MODIFIED PROJECT SUMMARY/ABSTRACT SECTION WE ARE UNYIELDING IN OUR SUPPORT OF THE PRINCIPLES DRIVING THE NIH FIRST PROGRAM IN PROPOSING NURTURE: NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY RECRUITMENT TO TRANSFORM UNDER-REPRESENTATION AND ACHIEVE EQUITY. NURTURE WILL EMPLOY A FACULTY COHORT MODEL, INNOVATIONS IN FACULTY SUPPORT, AND MECHANISMS TO DRIVE INSTITUTIONAL TRANSFORMATION TO SUBSTANTIVELY ADD TO OUR UNIVERSITY’S OWN INITIATIVES TO BUILD A SUSTAINABLE CULTURE OF FACULTY DIVERSITY AND INCLUSIVE EXCELLENCE. CENTERED WITHIN NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY’S WORLD CLASS RESEARCH ENVIRONMENT, NURTURE AIMS TO DISRUPT SYSTEMIC BARRIERS THAT IMPEDE FULL PARTICIPATION OF BIOMEDICAL RESEARCH SCIENTISTS FROM UNDERREPRESENTED GROUPS (URG) BY INVESTING IN INCLUSIVE CULTURAL CHANGE WITHIN OUR INSTITUTION. WE ACKNOWLEDGE THAT SYSTEMIC RACISM HAS PERSISTED IN BIOMEDICAL SCIENCE, INCLUDING AT NORTHWESTERN. WE ARE COMMITTED TO DISMANTLING THE STRUCTURES THAT HAVE ALLOWED RACISM AND BIAS TO PERSIST AND IMPEDED THE SCIENTIFIC CAREERS OF TOO MANY URG SCHOLARS. NURTURE PROPOSES TO TRANSFORM SILOED FIEFDOM STRUCTURES TO TRANSDISCIPLINARY SCIENTIFIC NEIGHBORHOODS THAT WILL FOSTER GROWTH AND ACCOMPLISHMENT IN THE RESEARCH, CAREER, AND PERSONAL TRAJECTORIES OF URG FACULTY. NURTURE IS SUPPORTED BY AN ADMINISTRATIVE CORE, A FACULTY DEVELOPMENT CORE, AND AN EVALUATION CORE THAT WILL WORK SYNERGISTICALLY, AND WITH NIH AND THE FIRST COORDINATION AND EVALUATION CENTER (CEC), TO ACHIEVE PROGRAM GOALS. NURTURE WILL DRIVE SUCCESS THROUGH SEVERAL INNOVATIONS. OUR DIVERSE MPI AND SENIOR LEADERSHIP TEAM HAS A LONGSTANDING COMMITMENT TO DIVERSITY, EQUITY, INCLUSION, COMMUNITY BUILDING, AND FACULTY CAREER DEVELOPMENT. THEY WILL LEVERAGE STRONG INSTITUTIONAL SUPPORT TO IMPLEMENT SYSTEMIC INNOVATIONS TOWARD A MORE INCLUSIVE AND SUSTAINED CULTURE OF EXCELLENCE (AIM 1). NURTURE IS CENTERED ON A SPECTRUM OF RESEARCH FROM CELLS TO COMMUNITY IN EACH OF THREE CROSS-DEPARTMENTAL SCIENTIFIC NEIGHBORHOODS ALIGNED WITH NIH MISSION AREAS: CANCER, CARDIOVASCULAR, AND BRAIN, MIND AND BEHAVIOR. SCIENTIFIC NEIGHBORHOODS WILL WELCOME 15 NEW URG FACULTY (THE NURTURE COHORT) (AIM 2), IN A CULTURE OF SCIENTIFIC EXCELLENCE AND INCLUSION. RUNWAYS TO THESE NEW FACULTY POSITIONS WILL BE BUILT FROM A FOUNDATION OF LONG-STANDING TRAINING PROGRAMS, WELL-ESTABLISHED LOCAL RELATIONSHIPS, AND A NEW INITIATIVE ON POSTDOCTORAL TRAINING. AIM 3 ESTABLISHES EVIDENCE-INFORMED INNOVATIVE ADVANCEMENT PROGRAMS THAT INCLUDE PROFESSIONAL COACHING, A TEAM OF SAFE SPACE AMBASSADORS, AND COMPREHENSIVE MENTORING AND SPONSORSHIP FOR NURTURE COHORT MEMBERS TO EMPOWER SELF-EFFICACY AND COMBAT ISOLATION THROUGHOUT THEIR NORTHWESTERN ONBOARDING AND PROMOTION JOURNEY. AIM 4 IS DRIVEN BY AN EXPERT EVALUATION TEAM THAT WILL EMPLOY STATE-OF-THE-ART APPROACHES TO GUIDE REAL-TIME IMPROVEMENT TOWARD SUCCESS. FINALLY, A ROBUST INSTITUTIONAL TRANSFORMATION AND ACCOUNTABILITY COMMITTEE WILL BOLSTER INSTITUTIONAL CONNECTIVITY AND ACCELERATE SCALED IMPLEMENTATION OF NURTURE FINDINGS BY NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY LEADERS TO SUSTAINABLY TRANSFORM OUR INSTITUTIONAL CULTURE TOWARD INCLUSIVE EXCELLENCE.

  Yikes!

• Scrooge got a bad rap. But John Tierney would like you to know about The Scrooges of 2025. And their names are …

  We still have Scrooges this holiday season, and the wealthiest of them—George Soros, Michael Bloomberg, Bill Gates, and Tom Steyer—have inflicted far more suffering on the poor than Scrooge ever did to Bob Cratchit and the working class of his day. These billionaires may not seem like Scrooges, given their extensive philanthropy, but that’s only because most readers today don’t understand exactly where the original Scrooge went wrong.

  We think him of a greedy miser—a “clutching, covetous, old sinner,” in Dickens’s words—whose wealth came at the expense of the adults and children forced to live in squalid flats and toil at grueling jobs for meager pay. Dickens was inspired to write the story by a government report on child labor in mines and factories, and by the living conditions he had witnessed among workers at textile mills in Manchester and in Lowell, Massachusetts. Like the poet William Blake, who famously lamented the “dark Satanic mills” of the Industrial Revolution, Dickens clearly saw the downside of nineteenth-century capitalism.

  But there was an upside, too, which was why workers kept leaving their farms and other jobs to work in those mills. In the centuries before the Industrial Revolution, illiteracy was widespread in England (especially among women), life expectancy, was less than 40, and per-capita income remained stagnant. But during the nineteenth century, literacy rates, life expectancy, and incomes rose at unprecedented rates.

  Specifically, John calls out Soros for his lawbreaker-leniency; Bloomberg for his nanny-state jihad against vaping; Gates for his keep-the-kiddos-masked COVID policy; Steyer for his "green" energy demands. All with obvious damages inflicted on the most vulnerable.

• Unexpected application of past insights. Via Instapundit, Rachel Lomasky presents Hayek’s Rules for AI. Yes, Hayek's been dead for 33 years. But:

  Hayek's Complexity Theory can provide essential frameworks for understanding the emergent systems we are building with LLMs, enabling us to solve novel, challenging problems that neither humans nor computers could address alone.

  Hayek was famed for emphasizing the brand of knowledge consisting of a "complex, emergent, spontaneous, and functional order that arises from decentralized interactions and vast, unstructured data." I.e., just the kind of thing generated by AI's Large Language Models.

  But I also wanted to steal and share the illustration generated by Instapundit's Ed Driscoll:

  

  Merry Christmas to Salma, and also any reader who made it down this far. ("My eyes are up here!")

I'm OK with anything on Andrew Heaton's…

Also of note:

• Especially if that party's name begins with a "D". Jim Geraghty detects some buyer's remorse on the left coast: California Democrats Belatedly Realize the Consequences of a One-Party State. A link-heavy excerpt:

  Let’s begin by granting that California, as the most populous and richest state, is always going to have some unique and larger-scale problems compared to other states. But its modern political leaders have also inherited some unique advantages — some of the best and most productive farmland on earth, the innovations and the economic engine of Silicon Valley, two of the biggest ports in the country, the glamorous dream machine of Hollywood, and plenty of highly respected universities. Companies can choose to relocate out of California, but some of these features, like farmland, ports, and sunny weather, cannot move to other states.

  Current Governor Gavin Newsom and the heavily Democratic state legislature have squandered all those advantages. As I wrote earlier this year, U.S. News and World Report ranks each state on a wide variety of categories. In the most recent assessment, California ranked dead last in opportunity, dead last in affordability, 47th in employment, 47th in energy infrastructure, 46th in air and water quality, 45th in growth, 42nd in public safety, 42nd in short-term fiscal stability, and 37th in K–12 education. The Tax Foundation ranks California 48th in its most recent State Tax Competitiveness Index. For five straight years, California has ranked highest in people moving out of the state, according to U-Haul’s data. BankRate found California was the 47th-best state for retirement. California ranks fifth-worst in roads and third-worst in drivers, second-highest in accident rate, and second-worst in drunk driving.

  About one of those state rankings: Here's BankRate's America’s Best States To Retire In 2025. Slightly more recent data than Jim quotes: CA moved up to #43. Want to guess which state is #1 before you click over?

• If this blog's name gets changed to "The Donald J. Trump Pun Salad Blog" soon, I'll be pissed. The WSJ editorialists weigh in on the Great Renaming: The Donald J. Trump Center for Everything.

  President Trump’s desire to have his name on everything, preferably in gold, is well-known, and at first we thought the addition of his name to the John F. Kennedy center for the arts in Washington, D.C., was ignorable as familiar Trumpian news. But there is the matter of the law.

  Under 20 U.S.C. § 76i(a), Congress in 1964 established the Kennedy Center as “a building to be designated as the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.” The title of the building isn’t a casual naming of the kind that happens when philanthropists donate to a museum and are honored with a wing named after them. The name is enshrined in statute as a memorial to the assassinated President.

  The Kennedy Center’s board of trustees was also created by statute, in 20 U.S.C. § 76 (j), which enumerates the responsibility of the officers, including to present music, opera, drama and dance, to contribute to performing arts education and to provide “facilities for other civic activities.” The board is also tasked with ensuring the facility received “necessary maintenance” and had “safe and convenient access” for pedestrians.

  So: yet another impeachable offense. Didn't have it on my bingo card, though.

• That explains why I can't get my poetry published. The National Review editorialists have additional commentary on Jacob Savage's "landmark article for Compact" (mentioned at Pun Salad last week): When White’s Not Right. I especially liked this nearly-forgotten anecdote:

  One infamous story from the woke cultural revolution era is the story of Yi-Fen Chou, whose poem “The Bees, the Flowers, Jesus, Ancient Tigers, Poseidon, Adam and Eve” was selected for the Best American Poetry collection in 2015. The editors didn’t know that the same poem had been rejected 40 times by poetry journals when submitted under the name of its real author, Michael Derrick Hudson. The very same work that had been rejected by even obscure publications was suddenly one of the country’s best poems once the author was assumed to be a Chinese woman.

  If you notice at some point in the future that this blog suddenly seems to be written by "Pablo Sanchez" or "Bǎo Shān", you'll know what happened.

• Tsk! Dominic Pino has bad news for St. Nick: How Santa landed on Trump’s naughty list. (WaPo gifted link)

  Millions of American children are looking forward to Santa Claus’s visit and his sleigh full of presents. Timeless tradition? Harmless fun?

  Not anymore. The United States has adopted a new philosophy about foreign trade under President Donald Trump, and jolly old St. Nick is desensitizing American kids to the dangers of trade deficits.

  Here’s how Claus gains an illicit advantage and creates a trade deficit. Claus is not an American, and he brings his gifts from the North Pole (which is suspiciously close to Canada, a country that threatens U.S. national security). The gifts are produced by elves who don’t have the protections of U.S. labor laws in workshops that aren’t subject to U.S. environmental or safety standards. Claus has stolen jobs from American workers with his industrial policy, which uses Yuletide magic to subsidize the manufacturing and transportation of his exports. This unfair competition allows Claus to flood our country with toys priced lower than anyone else can produce them: $0.

  American children have been trained not merely to accept but to celebrate the dumping of foreign goods, directly from Claus’s bottomless sack into their homes, without any government efforts to level the playing field for American producers. Fun as it may be, the Santa Claus tradition damages our national solidarity in the struggle for fair trading relationships. The gleeful acceptance of low-priced imports is only one of many symptoms of the failed neoliberal mindset wrecking this great nation.

  Note the "gifted" link. From me to you.

The Eye Candy du Jour over there on your right is one of the many Getty images covering the "No Kings" march in New York City on October 18. Getty's caption claims that "over one hundred thousand" participated in NYC alone.

And then a couple weeks later, NYC elected Zohran Mamdani as its next mayor, and he'll go into office a few days from now, January 1.

Elizabeth Nolan Brown's article suggests "King Zohran I" might be a better title than Mayor Mamdani: Mamdani Needs a Maximalist Vision of Mayoral Power To Achieve His Goals. Lina Khan Has a Plan. (Yes, in this movie Lina is playing Thomas Cromwell to Zohran's Henry VIII.)

Strangely enough, there have been no 100K-strong protest marches on 7th Avenue in Manhattan about it. Why it's almost as if Gothamites are copacetic about one-man rule as long as the man is on the left.

Also of note:

• Why not? It's not as if Congress will have anything more important to do. We're about a year away from getting some new CongressCritters in DC, and Kevin D. Williamson has an agenda item for them: Yes, Impeach Him Again. (archive.today link)

  At this moment it is just barely possible, as a matter of arithmetic, that Democrats could go into January 2027 with a position in Congress that would enable them to successfully impeach and convict Donald Trump for his latest batch of high crimes and misdemeanors, which range from gross financial corruption to conducting an illegal war—a campaign of mass murder, in short—in the Caribbean. The corruption of the Republican Party is so complete that it is impossible to imagine a single Republican senator siding with the Democrats against Trump—meaning that Democrats would have to sweep the midterms, winning practically every contested seat, to arrive at the 67-vote minimum they would need to convict Trump after the relatively simple matter of impeaching him in a Democrat-controlled House, should that come to pass. I’d bet good money that, in the unlikely scenario in which they had the votes, Democrats would be happy to impeach and convict Trump—and not only Trump, but other members of his administration as well, and that they would go further and exclude them from holding future positions of public trust. I would cheer them on if they did. Hell, I’d check the columnists’ handbook and see if it was okay to send Chuck Schumer a bouquet of roses.

  But the most likely scenario at this time is that Democrats end up with a thin majority in the House while Republicans retain control of the Senate, possibly with a slightly diminished majority. The notion that victorious Democrats will exit the midterms vindicated and in a position to stage a final triumphant humiliation of Donald Trump looks very much like a fantasy at this time.

  In such a case, impeachment would be more a matter of political messaging than the campaign of effective constitutional hygiene that our moment requires. In general, I think Democrats probably should listen more to people like me when it comes to how they talk about certain issues and their vision of the national interest, but they are not going to do that, and, in this particular case, I do not have any Machiavellian advice to give them. Besides, working through that kind of political calculation is not really my role.

  Not that it matters, but (as I type) the Lott/Stossel Election betting Odds site gives the Democrats a 74.5% probability of controlling the House in 2027, and the Republicans a 67.5% probability of controlling the Senate.

  <cliché type="tired"> But a lot could happen between now and then. </cliché>

• Tom Steyer's too, while you're at it. The WSJ editorialists chime in: By All Means Raise Mitt Romney’s Taxes. It is a response to Mitt's NYT dreadful op-ed mentioned here on Sunday.

  The first point to make is that if Mr. Romney wants to pay more taxes, by all means go ahead. Write a check to the Treasury. It’s a writ of attainder to target an individual with legislation, Democrats, but maybe Mitt won’t mind.

  Mr. Romney is especially eager to raise the annual income cap on Social Security payroll taxes. That cap is $184,500 in 2026 and rises each year with inflation. Democrats want to raise the cap much higher or eliminate it. Mr. Romney thinks this should be the trade for entitlement reforms.

  Not likely. Democrats eliminated the income cap for Medicare payroll taxes of 1.45% (2.9% including employer) in 1993, but have you noticed a Democratic desire to reform Medicare? They ran against Mr. Romney in 2012 by saying his modest reform amounted to throwing grandma off a cliff.

  If you don't remember Tom Steyer: he ran for president in 2020. He came in sixth place in the New Hampshire primary, behind even Joe Biden (who came in fifth). But he squeaked by seventh-place Tulsi Gabbard!

  But his relevance here: he's a billionaire fond of (like Mitt) asking Please raise my taxes.

  Oh, and Tom's now running for California governor.

• On the civil liberties front. Jonathan Turley notes the latest tactic in Democratic Despotism: The left Moves from Censored to Compelled Speech.

  More than five years ago, I wrote in these pages of a growing trend on the left toward compelled speech — the forcing of citizens to repeat approved views and values. It is an all-too-familiar pattern. Once a faction assumes power, it will often first seek to censor opposing views and then compel the endorsement of approved views.

  This week, some of those efforts faced setbacks and challenges in blue states like Washington and Illinois.

  In Washington state, many have developed what seems a certain appetite for compelled speech. For example, Democrats recently pushed through legislation that would have compelled priests and other clerics to rat out congregants who confessed to certain criminal acts. Despite objections from many of us that the law was flagrantly unconstitutional, the Democratic-controlled legislature and Democratic governor pushed it through.

  The Catholic Church responded to the enactment by telling priests that any compliance would lead to their excommunication.

  U.S. District Court Judge Iain D. Johnston enjoined the law, and the Trump Administration sued the state over its effort to turn priests into sacramental snitches. Only after losing in court did the state drop its efforts.

  Jonathan also mentions the Stuart Reges imbroglio at the University of Washington, mentioned here yesterday.

• And a small victory here in the LFOD state. Damien Fisher brings the news from a city apparently too close to Massachusetts: Appeals Court Rules Nashua Flag Pole Policy Violates First Amendment.

  In its fight against free speech, it may be time for the city of Nashua to fly the white flag.

  The U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit ruled Monday that Nashua’s Citizens Flagpole policy — used by city officials to block political messages they disliked — amounted to unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination.

  In a unanimous ruling authored by Judge Sandra Lynch, the court held that Nashua could not claim the Citizens Flagpole constituted “government speech,” a designation that would have allowed officials to pick and choose which messages were permitted.

  “Nashua’s attempt to characterize viewpoint-based decisions as to which flags are approved to fly on the Citizen Flag Pole within this short-lived program as government speech is unpersuasive,” Lynch wrote.

  Also (if you're in the mood for some salty language), see Granite Grok's Steve MacDonald on the decision: Nashua Loses, Scaers and Free Speech Win.

  You will be familiar with the numerous instances of the City of Nashua exercising unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination. A commoner with a basic understanding of free speech could see it. But the City of Nashua is suffering from the “leadership” of a Machiavellian Narcissistic Psychopath (just my opinion) whose arrogance just cost the city a hefty sum in legal fees to defend the indefensible.

  It’s their own fault. They keep re-electing him. And he keeps behaving like a Nashole, and the city’s legal team plays along as if they are arrogant pricks like their dear leader or just afraid to give him good advice.

  Sadly, the sensitive citizens of Nashua will have to forego the protections desired by their city censors.

The Free Press adapts Ben Shapiro's recent speech at Turning Point USA's "AmericaFest", where he played Obi-Wan Kenobi to a crowd that may have contained a lot of Anakin Skywalkers: Only Cowards Tolerate Conspiracy Theorists.

It's a well-organized and thoughtful screed against today's know-nothings. Just an excerpt:

Since I am not Richard Hofstadter, I don't believe that "our side" is uniquely susceptible to conspiracism; it's just a misfeature of human psychology. Grifters and charlatans of all political persuasions take advantage of it. Ben deserves credit for calling it out.

Also of note:

• I guess irony can be pretty ironic, sometimes. Jeffrey Blehar notes a recent case: Instead of Draining the Swamp, Trump Starts Renaming It After Himself. (archive.today link)

  On Wednesday Donald Trump unveiled his newest addition to the White House, a series of presidential plaques featuring Trump’s own highly ungrammatical (and wildly undignified) opinions on his predecessors, engraved for posterity’s sake and put on public display. I wrote about it on Thursday morning, thinking I’d said enough about Trump’s attention-seeking and glory-thirsting outbursts for one week.

  Two hours after that piece was published, Trump announced he was renaming the Kennedy Center after himself. It felt like getting slapped with a backhand after having already taken the forehand.

  To be technically accurate, it was the Trump-appointed board of the Kennedy Center Foundation that voted “unanimously” to rename what was once Washington’s fanciest concert venue, but something tells me they may have acted at their dear leader’s behest. Karoline Leavitt’s announcement reads as if it was written by Trump for her — and given how distinctive Trump’s writing style is, that’s not a bad bet:

  I have just been informed that the highly respected Board of the Kennedy Center, some of the most successful people from all parts of the world, have just voted unanimously to rename the Kennedy Center to the Trump-Kennedy Center, because of the unbelievable work President Trump has done over the last year in saving the building. Not only from the standpoint of its reconstruction, but also financially, and its reputation. Congratulations to President Donald J. Trump, and likewise, congratulations to President Kennedy, because this will be a truly great team long into the future! The building will no doubt attain new levels of success and grandeur.

  How long before Karoline starts referring to her boss as "Dear Leader"?

• Sorry, President Rosenberg. Last year, I read “Whatever It Is, I’m Against It” by erstwhile president of Macalester College, Brian Rosenberg. One of the regrettable parts of the book was his cavalier dismissal of free expression among inhabitants of academe as "the right simply to act like a jerk." His footnote-example of jerkiness was Stuart Reges; his sin was to include a mock "land acknowledgement" in his University of Washington computer science course syllabus claiming that "by the labor theory of property the Coast Salish people can claim historical ownership of almost none of the land currently occupied by the University of Washington."

  This was at odds with UW's recommended boilerplate wording. Punishment from higher-ups was swift.

  But the latest development is good news for free expression, bad news for wannabe college-president censors. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression reports: VICTORY: Court vindicates professor investigated for parodying university’s ‘land acknowledgment’ on syllabus

  SEATTLE, Dec. 19, 2025 — The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit today delivered a decisive victory for the First Amendment rights of public university faculty in Reges v. Cauce. Reversing a federal district court’s opinion, the Ninth Circuit held University of Washington officials violated the First Amendment when they punished Professor Stuart Reges for substituting his satirical take on the university’s preferred “land acknowledgment” statement on his syllabus.

  The decision gets remanded to the district court, which (I guess) will decide appropriate penalties for UW. Hope they are steep.

• Yale nearly GOP-free. Jonathan Turley reports on a recent Study: Yale Has Eliminated All Republican Faculty from 27 Departments.

  Yale has finally achieved liberal nirvana. According to a recent report from the Buckley Institute, there is now not a single Republican found across 27 of 43 departments at Yale University. In a nation roughly evenly divided between Republicans and Democrats (with a slight advantage to the GOP), only 3 percent are Republicans across all Yale departments.

  Jonathan doesn't elaborate on the Buckley/Yale connection going back to 1951, when recent graduate William F. Buckley published God and Man at Yale, a searing critique of his collectivist/secular alma mater.

  In the 74 years since, Yale has managed to get worse, ideological monoculture-wise.

• Could be a cool idea. Alex Tabarrok suggests: Bring Back the Privateers!

  Senator Mike Lee has a new bill that encourages the President to authorize letters of marque and reprisal against drug cartels:

  The President of the United States is authorized and requested to commission, under officially issued letters of marque and reprisal, so many of privately armed and equipped persons and entities as, in the judgment of the President, the service may require, with suitable instructions to the leaders thereof, to employ all means reasonably necessary to seize outside the geographic boundaries of the United States and its territories the person and property of any individual who the President determines is a member of a cartel, a member of a cartel-linked organization, or a conspirator associated with a cartel or a cartel-linked organization, who is responsible for an act of aggression against the United States.

  SECURITY BONDS.—No letter of marque and reprisal shall be issued by the President without requiring the posting of a security bond in such amount as the President shall determine is sufficient to ensure that the letter be executed according to the terms and conditions thereof.

  Interested? You'll want to check out Alex's paper: The Rise, Fall, and Rise Again of Privateers

  My major gripe is that the enumerated power to "grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal" is Constitutionally assigned to Congress. Senator Lee's bill seems to simply punt that power over to the Executive. Don't they do enough of that? Isn't that a pretty bad idea?

Specifically, Mitt Romney in 2012. He's 78 now. Slightly younger than Donald Trump, not that it matters. But I suppose that makes him an "elder statesman". And he's now expressing opinions that the New York Times finds fit to print:

We’ve reached a point where any mix of solutions to our nation’s economic problems is going to involve the wealthiest Americans contributing more. https://t.co/m0zXuXeC43

— Mitt Romney (@MittRomney) December 19, 2025

Mitt's NYT article is here, and the folks at (not shut down yet) archive.today have it for non-subscribers here.

He's not wrong about the problem:

Mitt has a one-paragraph nod toward raising the starting age for Social Security payouts, and imposing means-testing (but without "cutting benefits for current or near retirees".) The entire rest of his proposal involves:

And on the tax front, it’s time for rich people like me to pay more.

His tax-increase proposals are varied. They sound impressive! But Dominic Pino, currently with the Washington Post calls foul at Twitter, in a masterful thread, which I am gonna blog in its glorious entirety.

This is framed as a middle-of-the-road reasonable solution to the fiscal problem, but it isn't, because it wouldn't actually solve it.

🧵 https://t.co/oHywJF2b8b

— Dominic Pino (@DominicJPino) December 19, 2025

Romney is correct about this: "On the spending-cut front, only entitlement reform would make a meaningful difference, since programs such as Social Security and Medicare represent the majority of government outlays."

But then he says "current or near retirees" can't get cuts.

— Dominic Pino (@DominicJPino) December 19, 2025

As @JessicaBRiedl has already said, that ship sailed even before Romney ran for president. Current and near retirees will need to see benefit cuts now. Those cuts can and should be targeted at higher earners who don't need the money.https://t.co/Bud8v6Evxw

— Dominic Pino (@DominicJPino) December 19, 2025

Social Security has been growing on autopilot such that the average monthly benefit for retirees in 2023 was 39% higher, in real terms, than for retirees in 2000.

Seniors weren't dying in the streets in 2000, and they won't be now if benefits are returned to a similar level. pic.twitter.com/wKr2aFMYRE

— Dominic Pino (@DominicJPino) December 19, 2025

As a @CatoInstitute report pointed out, 1/3 of Social Security benefits go to seniors with incomes over $100,000.

Paying the wealthiest generation large and ever-growing monthly benefits for 20+ year retirements is crazy and unsustainable. pic.twitter.com/NaN7sEZ7ay

— Dominic Pino (@DominicJPino) December 19, 2025

What about the tax side?

The headline says "Tax the Rich, Like Me," but Romney never says he wants to raise the income tax, likely because he knows that the income tax is highly progressive right now.

— Dominic Pino (@DominicJPino) December 19, 2025

The top 1% of income earners already pay 40% of the income tax, and their share has been gradually increasing over time. pic.twitter.com/mxURYmd3mg

— Dominic Pino (@DominicJPino) December 19, 2025

When you factor in benefits and taxes, overall federal income transfers have become more progressive over time, with the highest quintile paying in larger sums of money and even the middle quintile coming out ahead. pic.twitter.com/XJ74giCc8g

— Dominic Pino (@DominicJPino) December 19, 2025

Romney's ideas for tax increases are:

-removing the FICA income cap
-taxing assets more at death
-ending 1031 exchanges
-ending SALT
-carried interest

— Dominic Pino (@DominicJPino) December 19, 2025

He says he's targeting the rich because that's "where the money is."

But none of these are new ideas, and @USCBO has estimated their effects before.

They don't raise nearly as much money as Romney seems to think.

— Dominic Pino (@DominicJPino) December 19, 2025

Over 10 years, using CBO's high-end estimates for each option:

removing FICA cap: ~$1.5T
+ taxing assets at death: $536B
+ 1031 exchanges: no CBO est., probably ~$20B
+ SALT: $1.6T
+ carried interest: $13B
=
$3.7T

— Dominic Pino (@DominicJPino) December 19, 2025

Which sounds like a lot.

Until you see that CBO also projects that federal deficits over the next 10 years will be ~$22T.

And that's assuming low interest rates, no recessions, no wars, no new spending programs.

For ten years.

— Dominic Pino (@DominicJPino) December 19, 2025

The uncomfortable truth that Romney could have told but didn't is that if you want to have massive middle-class benefits, you also need massive middle-class taxes to pay for them.

That's where the money actually is.

And that's what they do in Europe.

— Dominic Pino (@DominicJPino) December 19, 2025

We shouldn't want to be like Europe, so we should want to cut benefits to a more manageable size while keeping taxes low for most people.

And politicians should stop perpetuating the myth that taxing the rich even more will fix the budget.

— Dominic Pino (@DominicJPino) December 19, 2025

Dominic is a monster. The WaPo is lucky to have him.

Also of note:

• In case you've been wondering if Trump has the authority to categorize fentanyl as a weapon of mass destruction… Andrew C. McCarthy has your answer: Trump Has No Authority to Categorize Fentanyl as a Weapon of Mass Destruction. (NR gifted link)

  Law school is a three-year grind. But 40 years later, while I couldn’t tell you a thing about, say, the “rule against perpetuities,” I did internalize the most valuable lesson, which came in the first three hours. It wasn’t a precedent or a statute, just a bit of folk wisdom you mightn’t think would need teaching. But it does, now more than ever.

  It’s this: If you hang a sign that says “horse” on a cow, that doesn’t make it a horse.

  Get it? If you do, then you’ll quickly grasp that a Latin American dope dealer is not an alien enemy combatant. The Defense Department, a creature of statute, does not become “the Department of War” by a presidential decree that sends Pete Hegseth to the front of the Pentagon with a plaque and a screwdriver. A foreign terrorist organization does not, by the abracadabra of “designation,” become an authorization for the use of military force — even if we generously assume that a drug gang is the same thing as a terrorist organization. Lindsey Halligan is not the United States attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia. Riots are neither patriotic nor mostly peaceful. The congressionally established John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts is not, by dint of wand-waving by a crony committee, the Trump . . . anything.

  And fentanyl is not a weapon of mass destruction, even if the “horse” sign in this instance happens to be an executive order.

  This is probably not, technically, on its own, an impeachable offense. It's just another case of Trump torturing language to put a thin veneer of pretend-legality on his other impeachable offenses.

Groundbreaking New Study Finds Islamophobia May Be Partially Caused By Muslims Killing People All The Time https://t.co/m47fiHMLPA pic.twitter.com/H9Y7hTr2im

— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) December 16, 2025

Just yesterday I made this point in my report on Gad Saad's book The Parasitic Mind. Looks as if the Bee said it first, though.

Also of note:

• You say that as if it was a good thing. More irritating content in my lousy local newspaper, Foster's Daily Democrat; Jeff Thomson opines that Presidents of progressive era offer lessons for today. (archive.today link)

  It is, to be sure, an extremely selective history. I won't go into the whole thing, but here's his paean to Woodrow Wilson:

  Woodrow Wilson (first modern Democrat president) signed the Federal Reserve Act, which forever solidified our nation's central banking system. More antitrust action creating the Federal Trade Commission. Pushed for passage of the 19th Amendment — women's vote. Guided the country through World War I and urged U.S. membership in the League of Nations .... blocked by a Republican Senate.

  Woodrow Wilson was a (literal) racist. He re-established strict segregation in Federal government offices. He showed D.W. Griffith's Klan-glorifying black-demonizing movie, The Birth of a Nation, in the White House, calling it "history with lightning".

  His support of the women's suffrage amendment was (at best) lukewarm, after years of outright opposition. He oversaw the trampling of suffragettes' civil liberties, which (among other things) involved sending off lady protestors to a rural Virginia prison/workhouse/hellhole for daring to unfurl banners in front of the White House.

  But that only went along with Wilson's general contempt for Constitutional liberties. His administration had his (socialist) political opponent, Eugene Debs, jailed for making rabble-rousing speeches against the WW1 draft. The infamous "Palmer Raids" rounded up and deported other dissidents.

  But speaking of WW1: Wilson ran for re-election in 1916 using the peacenik motto "He kept us out of war". While privately acknowledging that, yes, we were going to get into it post-election. And (indeed) after his second inauguration, he took less than a month to ask Congress to declare war on Germany, eventually resulting in over 300,000 casualties of US soldiers.

  All in all, Wilson was a nasty piece of work, making Donald Trump look like a relative flower child.

  Thomson's profiles of other Democrat presidents are similarly hagiographic. JFK is lauded for the Cuban Missile Crisis; but try to find "Vietnam" or "Bay of Pigs" anywhere in the column.

  So: not worth your time. Definitely not worth your subscription.

• I have a nominee for #31. Despite having more than a week to go, John Hawkins has a collection of The 30 Most Obnoxious Quotes of 2025. John's a plague-on-everyone's-house kind of guy. (These days, so am I.) Here's #9, one of three (!) quotes attributed to "Destiny | Steven Bonnell":

  “If you wanted Charlie Kirk to be alive, Donald Trump shouldn’t have been president for the second term.”

  Uh huh. But the quote source is this Yahoo! News article: Elon Musk Says Destiny ‘Should Go to Prison’ For Arguing Trump Election Led to Charlie Kirk Shooting

  So my nominee for #31:

  “Separately, incitement to murder and domestic terrorism is a felony crime. For that, he should go to prison. He can resume streaming when he has served his term.” -- Elon Musk

A profoundly irritating op-ed from Douglas Rooks in my lousy local newspaper, Foster's Daily Democrat, is headlined John Roberts as great a threat to constitutional order as Trump. (archive.today link, but opening in incognito mode works for me.)

John Roberts? Big news, if true. What's his sin?

Well, first you have to get by the mandatory Trump-bashing. Fine, anyone who's read this blog even sporadically since 2011 or so knows how I feel about Trump.

But Rooks eventually gets around to Roberts (and SCOTUS generally):

Now it's time to check Rooks' headline again, about Roberts being "a threat to constitutional order".

Where does the Constitution specify that "independent agencies" can wield regulatory power? Is that in Article VIII of Rooks' copy of the Constitution?

Spoiler alert: there is no Article VIII.

A remedy to Rooks' phony Constitution was provided earlier this month by the National Review editors, pointing out: There Is No Such Thing as an Independent Agency. (archive.today link)

My suggestion for Douglas Rooks: If you think "independent agencies" should be crammed into the "constitutional order", do it the right way: amend the Constitution. Don't try to invent things that aren't there.

Also of note:

• Seventeen is a good start. Ryan Bourne has "affordability" suggestions: 17 ways politicians can make things cheaper, from food to health care and more. I'll just list all 17, you can click over for his explanations (like if you want to know what the "Chicken Tax" is):

  1. End Sugar Quotas
  2. End Tariffs on Food
  3. Expand Agricultural Immigration Visas
  4. Expand the Scope of Independent Practices
  5. Allow More Over-the-Counter Medicines
  6. Recognize Foreign Drug Approvals
  7. Scrap the Tariffs
  8. Relax Licensing Requirements for Repairmen
  9. Release Land for Building
  10. Upzone
  11. More By-Right Permits
  12. Approve More Pipelines, More Quickly
  13. End Tariffs on Goods Needed for Electrical Grids
  14. Repeal the Jones Act
  15. End the 'Chicken Tax'
  16. Allow Direct Sales
  17. End or Ease Buy American Rules

  A little redundant on the tariffs, Ryan.

Recently on the book blog:

I really enjoyed Gad Saad's contribution to Lawrence M. Krauss's collection of essays/articles The War on Science; it was punchy, witty, and powerful. This book, from 2020, expands and extends his worldview. I was fortunate to pick up the Kindle version on sale for $1.99 last month; it's more now.

Gad is a marketing professor up in Canada, at Concordia University. He also has roots in evolutionary psychology, math, and computer science. He grew up in Lebanon, in a Jewish family, at a time when Islamic persecution against Jews was ramping up; his description of his experiences with his family, resulting in their emigration, is harrowing. It's not surprising that one of the main theses in the book is how fundamentally antisemitic Islam is, and was. I would imagine that his critics dismiss him as "Islamophobic", but it's not a phobia if those guys are really trying to kill you.

But it's not just Islam; Gad sets his sights on the usual array of progressive notions. "Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity" (that ordering allows him to use the "DIE" acronym); radical feminism, transgender activism, victimology, postmodernism, … And so on. Filled with anecdotes about how these destructive ideologies have corrupted higher education (especially in the US and Canada). And making inroads on scientific inquiry.

As noted, the book is about five years old. Developments since then have not weakened his thesis. The only bright spot: more people seem to be aware of the issue and are successfully fighting it on numerous fronts.

His criticism is unsparing. My Kindle tells me that "lunacy" appears 21 times in the text. "Nonsense/nonsensical": 30 times. A scattering of "foolish", "imbecilic", etc. He does not suffer fools gladly.

My only real gripe is Gad's brief advocacy (around page 42) of regulating big tech companies as "utilities". His argument is weak, relying on faulty analogies. His cure would be worse than the disease.

Everyone else in the blogosphere seems to be pointing out Jacob Savage's essay: The Lost Generation. It argues persuasively that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act is being widely and openly violated when it comes to male people of pallor. Example data:

More, of course, at the link. I'm glad I'm not a millennial looking for a job.

Also of note:

• In words of one syllable… Jeff Maurer explains: It's Good When Cheap Crap is Cheap.

  It’s the holidays, and no matter your religion, God is commanding you to buy shit. Jesus will smite any Christians who leave their kids Nintendo Switch 2-less, and Jews who don’t buy whichever Lego set their child demands is basically spitting on the Maccabees’ graves. In America, being neither Christian nor Jewish doesn’t get you off the hook; the South Asian families near me buy gifts just to go with the flow, and atheists know that denying their kids gifts is a great way to make them super-duper, weirdly religious. So, we buy stuff, none of it needed but all of it required.

  And that means that this is a good time to talk about affordability. Affordability will probably be the focal point of the next election, and Republicans are vulnerable: Trump’s tariffs have caused prices to tick up, Obamacare premiums are set to rise, and mortgages rates remain high partly because trying to fix the deficit with A.I. and enough ketamine to kill a blue whale somehow didn’t work. Trump also hasn’t helped himself with this Grinch-like promise of fewer gifts for your kids:

  [Meet the Press video]

  It enrages me that the president would blithely place limits on the number of pencils my child can have. My ancestors came to this country so that their descendants could be awash in pencils. My grandfather had a single, stubby golf pencil — “Graphite Gus”, he called it — and it would bring tears to his eyes to know that I have an entire room in my house filled floor-to-ceiling with high-performance, Adirondack redwood pencils. I own a platinum, hand-crafted pencil from Switzerland; I own a pencil that once belonged to Elvis. And my son shall have all the pencils he desires — every morning I wake him up by dumping a laundry basket full of pencils over his head and shouting “This is only possible in America!”

  Jeff goes on to note the weirdness of Trump echoing the same doleful "Americans have too much choice in consumer products" talking point as does Bernie Sanders.

• "I'm from the government, and I'm here to help … destroy your business." Bringing us the latest example of Ronald Reagan's famous quote (which was not original with him) is Jack Nicastro: Antitrust killed Amazon’s iRobot deal. Now a Chinese firm owns Roomba.

  iRobot, the creator of Roomba, filed for bankruptcy on Sunday. If Amazon had been allowed to acquire the company in 2022, consumers likely would have enjoyed improved quality and lower prices. Now, thanks to antitrust regulators, iRobot will be acquired by a massive Chinese robot vacuum manufacturer, Shenzhen Picea Robotics, instead of American-owned Amazon.

  iRobot was founded in 1990 by three roboticists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. After designing robots for space exploration and military use, the company released its first consumer product in 2002: the Roomba floor-vacuuming robot. By 2021, the year its stock value reached its maximum of over $133 per share, iRobot had sold over 40 million household robots. The company's value more than halved by the time Amazon offered to purchase it for $61 per share in August 2022.

  This deal alarmed antitrust regulators in the United States and the European Union.

  Someone should get those antitrust regulators to explain how their actions helped anyone.

• And, as noted above, they will have the robot vacuums on their side. Nikki R. Haley and John P. Walters warn: China’s Stealth War Has Already Begun.

  ention China to a typical foreign-policy “expert” on the left or right, and they’ll describe it as a formidable adversary with a chance to challenge the U.S. But that conventional wisdom is way out-of-date: Communist China’s war on the U.S. has already begun. The trick is that Beijing is trying to make sure Americans never realize they’re under attack.

  The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is working to undermine the U.S. across economic, technological, informational, diplomatic, and gray-zone military domains. Especially since Xi Jinping’s rise, Chinese leaders have committed to diminish American superpower without triggering a U.S. military response. The Chinese don’t want a shooting war today, or ever, if they can help it. Instead, they’ve chosen to erode the foundations of American power by coercing U.S. allies, commandeering global supply chains, and bending international institutions toward Chinese interests. Beijing wants to do all this while keeping the U.S. reactive, fragmented, and unsure about how seriously to take the threat.

  That's Nikki Haley, the person who should be president right now.

• The usual cheerleaders aren't shaking their pom-poms. Kevin D. Williamson notes that Trump finally went too far for erstwhile fans: The Sycophants Draw a Line. (archive.today link)

  Donald J. Trump, the retired game show host and quondam pornographer who serves, incredibly enough, as the current president of these United States of America, is from time to time ungracious on social media. This somehow has come to the attention of Republicans.

  Trump went onto social media to mock the late Rob Reiner and his wife, both of whom had just been brutally stabbed to death by (if investigators are correct) their own son and insisted that the patricide-matricide in question was the result of the fact that Reiner, a television and film producer with the familiar kind of Hollywood politics, was a bitter critic of the incumbent president. It is not easy to embarrass Republicans, who have spent the past decade polishing Trump’s jackboots with their tongues, but Trump found a way. A few “harrumphs” were heard rising from certain Republican quarters.

  Marjorie Taylor Greene, the Facebook troll and QAnon conspiracy kook who lately has decided that Trump is not quite dumb or irresponsible enough for her brand of politics, gently criticized the president, insisting that the bloody stabbing murder of two parents by their son was “a family tragedy, not about politics or political enemies.” Rep. Mike Lawler of New York responded in similarly lily-livered terms: “This statement is wrong,” he said. “Regardless of one’s political views, no one should be subjected to violence, let alone at the hands of their own son. It’s a horrible tragedy that should engender sympathy and compassion from everyone in our country, period.” He couldn’t quite manage to bring himself to use Trump’s name in his criticism of Trump—these people write about Trump’s statements as though they were self-authoring, ex nihilo—but, you know, baby steps.

  KDW is eloquent, as always, in his characterizations. Guess who is "a man so supine that sea slugs dwelling in the lightless depths of the deep ocean wonder why he can’t stand up for himself"?

Recently on the book blog:

I was beginning to worry that Mary Roach had retired from writing; her previous pop-science book was Fuzz, which came out back in 2021. Ah, never fear: she's back, and Portsmouth (NH) Public Library did not even need me to ask them to buy this.

Mary's overall theme here is the history and the current state of the art of (varied) human replacement parts. It's very wide-ranging. She discusses replacement of noses, joints, hair, corneas, skin, … various organ transplants (heart, kidneys, …); from human and non-human donors; altered naughty bits, prosthetics, assisted breathing (via "iron lung"), various ostomies. As kind of a grand finale, she sits in on the (lets be frank) dismemberment of a generous tissue donor.

That "naughty bits" thing goes into what's euphemistically termed "gender affirming care"; although Mary seems supportive, her descriptions sound pretty close to voluntary genital mutilation, and the results seem (um) suboptimal.

Mary writes at a PG-13 level: I noticed a couple occurrences of the F-word, and a few variations of the S-word. (She also mentions realizing that a doctor she considered interviewing was the guy to whom she lost her virginity at a frat party years back, and has a salty observation on his performance back then.)

• Donald J. Boudreaux looks at The Loaded Language of Protectionism. His first unfortunate example is "Trade Deficit":

  The most obvious, commonly used confusing term is “trade deficit.” “Deficit” inherently sounds bad. Everyone instinctively resists being in any kind of “deficit.” But those of us who understand the technical definition of “trade deficit” know that this “deficit” is merely the result of an accounting convention by which inflows into a country of money are counted as “positive” while outflows of money are counted as “negative.”

  Yet as many economists, including the Nobel laureate Vernon Smith, have pointed out, if the convention were instead (as it could be) to count as a positive the monetary value of imports – and as a negative the monetary value of exports – then so-called “trade deficits” would instead be “trade surpluses.”

  The words “trade surpluses,” alas, are more difficult to demagogue than are the words “trade deficits.”

  Alas, indeed! Don also examines "concessions", "dumping", "'Made in' labels"; and also the misleading collectivization of individual economic decisions into a single "America". Something Don has been talking about (at least) since 2013.

• It's time for those retrospectives! In the WSJ, Gerard Baker takes A Look Back at the Words We Redefined in 2025. (WSJ gifted link)

  Number One on Gerard's hit list:

  • Affordability. Insufficient sensitivity to the cost of living proved costly for leaders from Marie Antoinette to Joe Biden. Last year, “affordability” was ignored by Democrats and amplified by Republicans. The Biden administration’s insouciance towards inflation helped elect Donald Trump, who pledged in his inaugural address to “rapidly bring down costs and prices.” Now that prices have continued to increase, “affordability” is a “Democratic con job.” While the word’s meaning might have changed, polling suggests voters’ views about the underlying reality haven’t. Poor Queen Marie could have advised Mr. Trump that when you’re building a new ballroom for the executive mansion it’s unwise to dismiss popular concerns about the cost of everyday staples.

  Also shifting in meaning: "Socialism", "Redistricting", "Pardon", "Famine", and the various terms used to scare us about the "Climate Crisis".

• And then after the Bad, we have the Ugly, as described by Jeff Jacoby: The potty-mouthing of American life doesn't signal 'authenticity.' It signals decay..

  PRESIDENT TRUMP was back in Pennsylvania last week to tout his economic record, but one of the lines that drew attention had nothing to do with jobs or inflation. He revived a crude slur he used in 2018, when he called several poor nations "s**thole countries" during a White House meeting with lawmakers. At the time, the president denied having used such language, but at the rally on Tuesday he boasted of it. The contrast was striking: A vulgarity that dominated the national conversation seven years ago generated little more than a ripple today.

  A day earlier, another elected official's vulgarity was in the news. According to an investigation made public last week, Representative Nancy Mace, a South Carolina Republican now running for governor, erupted in a profanity-laced tirade at TSA officers in Charleston's airport in October. She called them "f***ing idiots" who were "f***ing incompetent," snapped that she was "sick of your s**t," and proclaimed herself a "f***ing representative." The details are tawdry, but what's more telling is how unexceptional the whole episode feels. Members of Congress hurling obscenities at public employees (or at a constituent) used to be unthinkable. In 2025, it's just one more bit of political color.

  Unlike Jeff, Pun Salad does not always bowdlerize quotes. (Why, when it's f***ing obvious what the word is? What's the point?)

  Pun Salad looked at a local potty-mouth, Representative Ellen Read last month. Things seem worse across the Salmon Falls River, as reported by the Bangor Daily News: Swearing is having a moment with Democrats on Maine’s campaign trail. (archive.today link)

• A useful reminder. And it's coming from Jim Geraghty: Trump’s Appalling Reiner Reaction Is a Sign of Something Deeply Wrong. (I quoted the "Trump's appalling Reiner reaction" in full yesterday, so won't repeat it here.) Jim summarizes (accurately):

  The president of the United States is a hateful raging lunatic with all the empathy of Jeffrey Dahmer.

  And goes on to explain:

  I’ll let you decide whether the term psychopath or sociopath better describes the president’s actions. On some level, we always knew the president was a nut of some kind, obsessed with grievances; vindictive and prone to posting late-night tirades on social media; uninterested in details; erratic, impulsive, spiteful. (“But he fights!”) You can run a company that enjoyed a wildly lucrative role conducting financial transactions among criminals, terrorist groups, and hostile states, and this president will pardon you, believing anything he’s told about how Joe Biden prosecuted him because he hated crypto. Or you can run a massive cocaine smuggling operation while being president of a South American country, and this president will pardon you, too, because he’ll believe anything he’s told about how your successful prosecution was a witch hunt.

  This president cannot discern moral right and wrong through a person’s actions, like a normal human being. Donald Trump’s entire worldview of whether someone is a good person or a bad person depends entirely on whether that person offers praise or criticism of Trump. This is the person who runs the executive branch of the U.S. government, and this is a formula for disaster. This is, I suspect, a factor in why the Trump administration is so friendly to the likes of Xi Jinping and endlessly patient with Vladimir Putin, while sneering with contempt about leaders of European democracies. Trump does not see anything inherently morally objectionable about a brutal autocrat with a long history of egregious human-rights abuses, but he will never forget or forgive a European leader who ever uttered a critical word in Le Monde.

  And there's more at the link.

• And my own cynical observation… The WSJ news item is grimly headlined: The War on Poverty Failed This West Virginia County—and They’re No Longer Waiting for Help. (WSJ gifted link)

  Carolyn Owens was 9 years old when her family became one of the first in America to get food stamps.

  Her father could no longer work in the coal mines that pock the mountains here after an injury. He’d wait at the local government office to collect food coupons, part of a program launched by John F. Kennedy in 1961 to help alleviate the shocking poverty he witnessed campaigning across Appalachia.

  Owens would walk home from school to find peanut-butter sandwiches with a sliver of banana waiting for her and her 10 brothers and sisters. “Those sandwiches were like ice cream for us,” said Owens, now 73.

  In the decades since, the federal government has poured more than $3.6 billion into trying to ease the hardship in McDowell County, according to estimates from the Economic Innovation Group, using current dollars. That doesn’t include the roughly $13 billion more in Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid payments.

  It hasn’t worked.

  Here's the cynicism: the "War on Poverty" is being "fought" by bureaucrats up and down the funding chain. As the article notes, for over 60 years.

  And what would happen if the "war" was actually won?

  It would mean those bureaucrats would lose their jobs.

  It's not in their interest to win the "War on Poverty". Instead, their continued employment depends on ensuring poor people remain dependent on them.

  And they've been remarkably successful at that.

Apparently, President Trump has (variously) called the term "affordability" a "hoax", a "con job", and a "scam’". Perpetrated by the Democrats and their allies in the media!

It seems I've been quoting my favorite Chico Marx line quite a bit these days. Here I go again: "Well, who you gonna believe? Me or your own eyes?"

A more trustworthy source, Kevin D. Williamson, provides A Closer Look at ‘Affordability’. (archive.today link)

As always, I encourage you to subscribe to the Dispatch. I'm a $100/year subscriber, but if you're unconcerned with "affordability", there's a $300/year "premium access" option.

Also of note:

• Sorry, Elvis, some days it's impossible to be amused. So I have to admit I'm disgusted. As TechDirt's Mike Masnick (and many others) report: Trump Suggests Rob Reiner Had It Coming For Criticizing Him. Trump's Truth Social post in it's entirety:

  A very sad thing happened last night in Hollywood. Rob Reiner, a tortured and struggling, but once very talented movie director and comedy star, has passed away, together with his wife, Michele, reportedly due to the anger he caused others through his massive, unyielding, and incurable affliction with a mind crippling disease known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME, sometimes referred to as TDS. He was known to have driven people CRAZY by his raging obsession of President Donald J. Trump, with his obvious paranoia reaching new heights as the Trump Administration surpassed all goals and expectations of greatness, and with the Golden Age

  Mike comments:

  Read that again. The President of the United States is claiming—with zero evidence—that Reiner’s murder happened “due to the anger he caused others” through his criticism of Trump. He’s framing political speech against Trump as something that drives people “crazy” and justifies violence.

  This is the same administration that spent months after Charlie Kirk’s death insisting that even quoting Kirk’s own hateful rhetoric was unacceptable and deserving of cancellation. Pam Bondi threatened to prosecute those who criticized Kirk, claiming it incited violence. There was a flood of think pieces demanding we “turn down the rhetoric” even as MAGA immediately ramped up “the war on the left” in Kirk’s name.

  The President is a loose-cannon, narcissistic asshole.

• "Which is why Rand Paul's bill does not stand a chance." That's what flitted into my mind after reading J.D. Tuccille's headline: Obamacare subsidies can’t fix a broken system. Rand Paul’s bill could.

  Last week, the U.S. Senate rejected two health care bills intended to resolve the impasse over COVID-19–era Affordable Care Act (ACA), a.k.a. Obamacare, subsidies and, to one extent or another, concerns over the cost of medical coverage. Both were blocked by the near impossibility of advancing anything in that body without 60 votes in support. The Democrat-sponsored legislation would have kicked the can down the road on Obamacare plans' inherent flaws by extending "temporary" subsidies for another three years. The Republican bill was a more serious effort that would bring some reform to the system by expanding Americans' access to Health Savings Accounts (HSAs). But neither is going anywhere right now.

  Maybe that's for the best. Sen. Rand Paul (R–Ky.) proposes better legislation that expands Americans' access to HSAs and to group health plans offered by all sorts of organizations across state lines.

  I could be too pessimistic, though. See what you think.

I almost missed the latest drama! Democrat CongressCritter Al Green (TX-18) got a vote on his articles of impeachment against Donald Trump!

Fun fact: Al is only slightly younger than Trump, 78 years young. This is not the his first rodeo, impeachment-wise. It seems to be his periodic legislative hobby. A Newsweek article from back in May detailed a different attempt.

His more recent effort had two articles therein: (1) Trump's "Calling for the Execution of Members of Congress; (2) Trump's attempt to "Intimidate Federal Judges in Violation of the Separation of Powers and Independence of the Judiciary". The second one seems kind of weak to me, but …

CongressCritter Al, by the way, identified himself at the top of his article submission:

OK, then.

Al watched his articles get tabled last Thursday. Axios reports: Infuriated Democrats help GOP quash another Trump impeachment vote.

You can see how your CongressCritter voted here. Among the 23 Democrats voting with all Republicans to kill the effort was Maggie Goodlander (NH-02). My own Chris Pappas (NH-01) went with the 47 members voting "Present". Not exactly a profile in courage there, Chris.

Recent analysis from Erica York and Alex Durante of the Tax Foundation: The Economic Impact of the Trump Trade War. With a graphic they invite me to embed:

And a few of their bullet points are, to be honest, kind of infuriating:

A citation on that first point above soberly informs us: "A tax is a mandatory payment or charge collected by local, state, and national governments from individuals or businesses to cover the costs of general government services, goods, and activities." So: a huge tax increase, unpassed by Congress, the way taxes are supposed to work. Under, y'know, the Constitution.

This is an example of what I meant in yesterday's post, about Our Side no longer believing in the Constitutional order. And, unfortunately, not the only example.

I'm currently reading The Parasitic Mind by Gad Saad. (Amazon link at your right.) And happened on this bit of advice:

Trump’s detractors should perhaps be spending more effort engaging their central route of persuasion by evaluating his policy positions in a dispassionate and detached manner.

Fine advice. Difficult for me to follow when I consider the damage he's doing to the Constitution. Sorry, Gad.

David Harsanyi's headline is The Left Doesn't Believe in the Constitutional Order. True dat!

Exactly. Just one more bit of badness from Wilson. Progressives, if it's so important to have "independent" Federal agencies working their will on the citizenry, avoiding checks and balances: write and pass a constutional amendment, and try to get it ratified.

Oh, and the word I would add at the end of David's headline is: "either": making it "The Left Doesn't Believe in the Constitutional Order Either". It's not as if Our Side has been fastidious about that over the past eleven months.

For what it's worth, I have no opinion, pro or con, on Netflix buying Warner. I just hope Trump stays out of it.

Also of note:

• I have concerns. Wesley J. Smith is pretty certain that Robots Should Not Have 'Rights' (archive.today link)

  We live in an era when activists of various stripes argue that, well, everything should have rights. Animals, nature, plants, the moon, rivers, AI/robots, you name it.

  Now, in Newsweek, the transhumanism popularizer and California gubernatorial candidate Zoltan Istvan argues that we should give robots rights so they will show mercy on us. Seriously. From his article, “Why Giving Rights to Robots Might One Day Save Humans”:

  The discussion about giving rights to artificial intelligences and robots has evolved around whether they deserve or are entitled to them. Juxtapositions of this with women’s suffrage and racial injustices are often brought up in philosophy departments like the University of Oxford, where I’m a graduate student.

  This is the problem with all non-human-rights activists. They continually compare their favored supposed rights-bearers with human beings who were denied equality in the past. But those denials were wrong — and in some cases evil — because inherent equals were treated as if they were unequal.

  We live in a time where a lot of people don't think human beings should have the right to life if they have yet to be born. So my concerns will fall on a lot of deaf ears:

  • We have rights thanks to our living consciousness and free will.
  • Living consciousness and free will are (probably) emergent properties of a sufficiently complex nervous system.
  • There's no inherent reason that a "sufficiently complex nervous system" needs to be biology-based.
  • So …

  So I don't think Wesley's argument is a slam dunk. We're not there yet, but someday… maybe.

• Here I am, stuck in the middle with… Josh & Bernie?! Veronique de Rugy takes a look at the latest horseshoe woe: Coming for Your Credit Card From Left and Right.

  Take legislation introduced earlier this year by what would have once been an unlikely duo: Sens. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.). Their "10 Percent Credit Card Interest Rate Cap Act" — also reflecting a Trump idea from the 2024 campaign — sounds compassionate. Who enjoys paying 25% interest?

  In practice, price controls of all sorts are disastrous. Credit card interest rates are high because unsecured consumer lending is very risky. They're the price for the lender taking a chance on a person. If the government artificially caps rates far below the market rate, banks will stop lending to riskier borrowers. That doesn't just mean broke shopaholics. It includes the working single parent using a financial last resort before payday.

  Just as rent controls can create a housing shortage by reducing the attractiveness of supplying those homes, interest-rate caps can create a credit shortage. They put millions of working-class Americans — the people proposals like these are supposed to protect — at risk of being "de-banked." Stripped of their credit cards, some will turn to payday lenders, loan sharks and pawn shops, whose charges are far higher.

  Vero is not saying anything that complicated or controversial. We live in a time when people flaunt their economic ignorance on purpose.

• It doesn't help to have the nickname "the Stupid Party". Yuval Levin explains it, hopefully with small enough words so that Josh Hawley can understand: Why Republicans Lose Every Healthcare Debate.

  Of course, medical care is not like other commodities. It involves life-and-death situations that threaten the people we love, there are enormous knowledge gaps between providers and consumers, and the most urgent and important services are often very expensive. That’s why we want to purchase insurance in advance, rather than directly buying care. And it’s why it makes sense to subsidize coverage for people who can’t afford it. That could be done in line with the economic logic of healthcare by using subsidies to give everyone the resources to enter competitive insurance markets as consumers making choices.

  But this is where politics gums things up. The fact is, most of us don’t actually want a lot of choice when it comes to healthcare. We just want to believe that everything is paid for. That creates an incentive to hide costs by routing most payments through insurers or government, which sustains the illusion that everything is free to the consumer. This has yielded a healthcare system without real prices, and therefore without enough pressure to restrain spending. In turn, that’s led to ever-rising costs paid for by ever-rising subsidies.

  For decades, this has meant that health policy proposals that make economic sense do not make political sense, and vice versa.

  Yuval's bottom line: "You can't beat something with nothing." Which is what the GOP's got.

• 

  Stark's other lesson was "Live Free or Die". But that's not what George Will is talking about when he explains A stark lesson about the president’s war powers. (WaPo gifted link)

  In “The President Who Would Not Be King: Executive Power Under the Constitution,” Michael W. McConnell, Stanford law professor and former federal judge, writes that Article I vests in Congress legislative powers “herein granted” and enumerated. Article II simply assumes the president shall exercise all powers executive in nature. Those powers were negligible in 1789, when the executive bureaucracy was smaller than Congress. Today, executive power is everywhere.

  The Constitutional Convention changed Congress’s power from “to make war” to “to declare war,” thereby expanding presidential war power. The Convention worried that if the power to “make” war belonged to Congress (which often was out of session), the president could not repel sudden attacks. Also, the power to declare war was already almost a nullity: Most wars then (and since) were declared by beginning them — waging war before, or rather than, declaring war. In Federalist 25, Alexander Hamilton noted that “the ceremony” of formally declaring war “has of late fallen into disuse.” Congress has not declared war since 1942 (against German allies Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania), many wars ago. Congress has, however, passed authorizations for uses of military force.

  Citing decisions of self-restraint by presidents Washington (dealing with Native American tribes), John Adams (the Quasi-War with France) and Thomas Jefferson (the Barbary War), McConnell concludes that an originalist understanding of war powers is that “congressional authorization is required before the President may employ the armed forces in offensive military operations that constitute acts of war.”

  McConnell's book sounds good. Amazon link at your right.

• Sounds like the setup for a bad SNL skit. But it's not. Ronald Bailey says NIMBYism is forcing AI into the Final Frontier: Google, SpaceX, and Blue Origin plan to put AI in space.

  The growth of the U.S. economy is being fueled by the hectic quest to build out massive data centers to run increasingly popular generative AI models like ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, and Gemini. The power-hungry AI data centers are driving up electricity costs in some regions and sparking local "not-in-my-backyard" opposition.

  Consequently, some Big Tech players are looking to locate their data centers in space. They think that low earth orbit could mitigate the problem of pesky, annoyed neighbors and offer perpetual sunshine to power constellations of AI satellites.

  In November, Google unveiled Project Suncatcher, "a research moonshot to scale machine learning compute in space." A team of Google researchers is exploring how to deploy and fly fleets of solar-powered AI satellites that would beam down data from orbit.

  I foresee cooling problems. But I assume the big brains have figured that out already.

Recently on the book blog:

The penultimate entry on my "read/reread Ian Fleming's Bond books" project. (Yes, I go out of my way to use the word "penultimate" when I can.) This is Ian Fleming's final Bond novel, published posthumously; the last book is a combination of two novellas.

The critics were not particularly kind, even given the slack often given to dead authors. I can understand, it seemed padded to me. Especially the ending, which extended twenty pages past the ostensible climax.

The previous book, You Only Live Twice, ended with (spoilers ahead) an amnesiac Bond, thought dead by most of the world, about to head off to the Soviet Union to possibly recover his memory. Bad news: when this book opens, Bond's been KGB-brainwashed and turned into an assassin aimed at his old boss, M. That unpleasant situation is resolved by page 22 here. And, as a check to see if 007 is back to his old self, M gives him his assignment: track down the murderous gangster Scaramanga on Jamaica, mon, and terminate him with extreme prejudice.

Along the way, Bond discovers his deep affection for his old secretary, Mary Goodnight. He passes up a sure shot at Scaramanga because it just wouldn't be sporting. He infiltrates Scaramanga's organization, discovers Scaramanga's latest nefarious schecme, gets his cover blown, and becomes the target of Scaramanga's needlessly complex murder scheme.

So, many classic Bond elements are here, but it's kind of a slog. For completists only, I think.

That skit (with Steve Martin, Kevin Nealon, Nora Dunn, Dana Carvey, and Victoria Jackson) was from season 13 of Saturday Night Live, airing October 17, 1987. A little over 38 years ago.

Something to keep in mind when you hear people complaining about how dumb kids are these days.

But if you watch to the end, you'll be able to complete the headline quote above.

Also of note:

• And then he said that the beatings would continue until morale improves. Liz Wolfe's "Reason Roundup" dials up the sarcasm: Trump tells voters to buy less while his tariffs raise prices.

  Trump's affordability tour: "You know, you can give up certain products. You can give up pencils," said President Donald Trump at a speech in Mount Pocono, Pennsylvania, that was supposed to help alleviate people's worries about affordability and help Republicans figure out salient messaging ahead of the midterms.

  What a fascinating tack to take.

  "You always need steel. You don't need 37 dolls for your daughter," he continued. "Two or three is nice, but you don't need 37 dolls. So, we're doing things right. We're running this country right well."

  "I can't say affordability is a hoax because I agree the prices were too high. So I can't go to call it a hoax because they'll misconstrue that," said Trump. "But they use the word affordability. And that's the only word they say. Affordability. And that's their only word. They say, 'Affordability.' And everyone says, 'Oh, that must mean Trump has high prices.' No. Our prices are coming down tremendously from the highest prices in the history of our country."

  Liz goes on to note that Trump A"displays approximately zero self-awareness and shares no admissions of guilt."

  But when was the last time any US President admitted guilt? According to Google's AI: Bill Clinton "who admitted to lying under oath about his affair with Monica Lewinsky during a deposition." (Although the AI does point out that Trump was convicted of 34 felonies connected to Stormy Daniels' hush money payments, he refused to admit guilt there either.)

• Good news, I guess. James Freeman looks at recent polling from the Economist/YouGov: Socialism Still Not That Popular. (WSJ gifted link)

  When asked whether capitalism or socialism is the better economic system, 46% of registered voters say capitalism, 22% say socialism, and 32% say they’re not sure, according to the Economist/YouGov.

  After all the misery that socialism has caused over the last century, it’s amazing that it commands any popularity at all. On the other hand, given that socialist Zohran Mamdani is weeks away from taking office as mayor of the country’s largest city—the traditional world headquarters of capitalism—perhaps it’s nice to be reassured that the New York City electorate remains a weird outlier in the American political scene.

  This may also explain in part why Mr. Mamdani had a surprisingly friendly visit to the White House recently—one can only hope he’s begun to understand how bad his ideas are.

  It looks like 2026 is going to be an (um) interesting year. If, that is, you're interested by politicians and pundits trying to scare the crap out of you pointing out how awful the other side is.

  And worse, they will mostly be correct about that.

• Speaking of trying to scare the crap out of people… Andrew C. McCarthy is not a fan of a recent neologism: ‘Narco-Terrorism’ Is a Legally Meaningless Term. (archive.today link)

  Andrew quotes a dizzying array of administration apologists using the term. Only problem being:

  For the umpty-umpth time, “narco-terrorism” is just political rhetoric. It has no standing as a legal term — no significance in the extensive bodies of federal law defining narcotics trafficking and terrorism. Transparently, the incantations of narco-terrorism by the president’s amen corner are intended to benumb the public into assuming that his administration’s designation of drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations provides a tenable legal basis for lethally striking vessels suspected of transporting narcotics. It doesn’t. On the other hand, as with the president’s alien enemies invocation, and his claims of “rebellion” as a predicate for deploying National Guard troops in American cities, there could be litigation over the extent to which the courts may review the executive branch’s determination that drug trafficking activity warrants a terrorism designation.

  Our law has processes for designating foreign terrorist organizations (FTOs) and global terrorists. There is no designation of narco-terrorists. That is unsurprising, since narcotics trafficking, while a serious crime, is not terrorist activity as that term is extensively and exactingly defined in federal law. (In a previous post, I’ve outlined the conduct covered by that definition, in Section 1182(a)(3)(B)(iii) of federal immigration law.)

  It's fair to say that anyone using the intelligence-insulting term is trying to bamboozle you.

• A less legalistic analysis… is provided by Jonah Goldberg, who points out the facts on the ground: Cocaine Is Not Mustard Gas. (archive.today link)

  In my life I’ve seen many kinds of whores, figuratively speaking: media whores, attention whores, power whores, and so on. I even know, thanks to some poor decisions in my youth, that one can be a coke whore. But as for mustard gas whores, I declare I’ve never encountered one.

  I bring this up because a line of argument on social media caught my attention recently. “Imagine Venezuela was releasing Mustard Gas in cities across the United States and had killed about half a million people in the last 10 years who breathed it in,” writes one X user. “Would ANYONE be against stopping boats bringing Mustard Gas into the US? Now do drug boats.”

  There are more examples of this from some more prominent folks, including a tendentious challenge from MAGA-aligned lawyer Kurt Schlichter, who asks “If you agree that we can destroy boats carrying barrels of mustard gas headed to our country, can you tell me the difference between the drugs and the mustard gas?” Schlichter adds: “I submit that the only meaningful difference is that drugs have killed nearly 100,000 Americans in the last year, and mustard gas has killed zero Americans.”

  Read the whole thing, but if I may summarize: you would have to be a "MAGA-aligned lawyer" to make an analogy so stupid.

Jeff Maurer suggests Democrats Should Make Trump Pay for Selling Pardons.

A long excerpt, but the key phrase seems to be "nobody cares about the president being a crook."

If you care, though, Google is your friend; check out the back stories on Cuellar, Zhao, Santos, and the rest.

For fun, you might also want to check out the CNN segment that asks the musical question: What if the accused pipe bomber claims he’s already been pardoned?

Also of note:

• Not just a crook, but a murderous one. Jacob Sullum claims Trump’s word games can’t disguise his murderous anti-drug strategy. (You would hope not, anyway.)

  I have a riddle for you. If we call a drug smuggler a combatant, how many combatants died when SEAL Team 6 killed 11 men on a cocaine boat near Venezuela on September 2?

  Zero, because calling a drug smuggler a combatant does not make him a combatant. That reality goes to the heart of the morally and legally bankrupt justification for President Donald Trump's bloodthirsty anti-drug campaign in the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific, which began on September 2 and so far has killed 87 people in 22 attacks.

  Jacob goes on to point out a simple truth: "Americans want cocaine." If they didn't, those drug boats would simply not exist.

• And a good man is hard to find. Kevin D. Williamson muses on Good Things and Hard Things. It's long and somewhat (but wonderfully) rambling, but:

  The good news is that our main economic problems can be mitigated through fairly straightforward policy changes. The bad news is that nobody wants those policy changes to be made, because they would mean reduced government benefits, higher taxes on the middle class as well as on the affluent, less access to subsidized credit for higher education or buying houses, and a period of economic adjustment that probably would be at least as painful as the one Americans went through at the end of the Jimmy Carter years and the beginning of the first Ronald Reagan term, when a relatively responsible governing class acting under the leadership of Fed chairman Paul Volcker (who heroically blew smoke from his Antonio y Cleopatra Grenadiers and the occasional Partagas at the elected rabble throughout congressional testimony) screwed its collective political courage to the sticking place and did the needful thing.

  As a matter of pure political calculation, it is worth keeping in mind (should anyone in Washington feel the unaccustomed stirring of political courage) that while Americans in the 1980s sure as heck did not enjoy the process of fixing the inflation problem they really, really enjoyed having fixed it, and President Reagan went from being a basement-dwelling Gallup poll bum in 1982 to winning a 49-state landslide (recount Minnesota!) in 1984, largely on the strength of economic recovery: Real GDP growth topped 7 percent going into the 1984 election season. Average real GDP growth in the Reagan years was more than half-again as much as in the first Trump term or in Obama’s eight years, and more than under Joe Biden, when the economic figures were boosted by the post-COVID recovery.

  With respect to KDW's aside about Minnesota: It was the only state Mondale won in 1984, and that was by the thinnest of margins: 0.18 percentage points, or 3,761 votes out of over 2 million cast.

That Critter, Chris Pappas, is running for the US Senate. And my best guess is that his campaign advisors are telling him he has to pose as a "fighting fighter who fights" and stir up populist resentment. So we get:

Your cheap demagoguery might work to get you into the Senate! Congratulations, I guess.

— Paul Sand (@punsalad) December 8, 2025

I could quibble: that "2,900" number cited by "More Perfect Union" is a worldwide figure. A recent WSJ article breaks it down more accurately: "America Has 1,135 Billionaires. Here’s What We Know About Them." (WSJ gifted link)

Fun fact: that article puts the total net worth of American billionaires at "about $5.7 trillion."

Further fun fact: Uncle Stupid spent $7.01 trillion in FY2025.

So: Even if Chris managed to expropriate US billionaires' entire net worth, it wouldn't even fund federal government for a single year. And after that, it would be gone.

And of course, that's fantasy economics. Any effort to "legally" grab that wealth would quickly destroy that wealth. For example, Warren Buffett owns about $149 billion worth of Berkshire Hathaway stock. If he had to dump that in order to pay his Pappas-decreed tax bill, what would that do to the share price? And what would it do to the company itself?

Multiply that by every one of those billionaires, selling off stock, real estate, artworks, … Imagine how that might affect your IRA, your 401(k), your home value, …

But I mainly object to Pappas's vague implication to the know-nothings that he's trying to get to vote for him next year: You are poor because they are rich. That's actually a dangerous message to send to some people, as we've seen of late.

Also of note:

• He's got 'em on the list / And they'll none of 'em be missed. Andrew C. McCarthy passes along the latest Report: Pete Hegseth Gave Order to Kill Boat Operators Because They Were on a Target List. (NR gifted link)

  Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered the Navy commander of the September 2 missile strikes against a suspected drug boat to kill everyone on board because all eleven of them were on a list of approved military targets, NBC News has reported.

  The report is based on three anonymous sources — “two U.S. officials” and “one person familiar with the congressional briefings” that were provided last week by the commander, Admiral Frank M. Bradley. If the report is accurate, it lends more credence to the original (and much criticized) Washington Post report, which asserted — also according to anonymous sources — that the gist of Hegseth’s order was “to kill everybody” on board.

  Hey, it only took them a couple weeks to come up with this. Imagine Secretary-of-War Pete slapping his forehead over the weekend, shouting: "Oh, right, I forgot! The list! They were on the list!"

  Andrew notes there is (indeed) nothing new about kill-em-all orders over the past few administrations. But there's a "but":

  But here is the difference: The al-Qaeda-related drone strikes by Obama, as well as by Presidents George W. Bush, Trump, and Biden, were all pursuant to the post-9/11 congressional authorization of the use of military force (AUMF), which went into effect with overwhelming bipartisan approval a week after al-Qaeda killed nearly 3,000 Americans in our homeland, destroying the World Trade Center and striking the Pentagon. That is why there was not more scandal attached to the use of lethal force away from the battlefield — or, as I outlined in the piece on Obama’s drone strikes, to the killing of hundreds of civilians and to the 2011 drone strike that killed Anwar al-Awlaki (a dual American and Yemeni citizen) along with several of his companions in Yemen.

  I think it's OK to fill in the "committed war crimes" spot on your impeachment bingo card.

• Probably not an impeachable offense. But, as Eric Boehm relates, Trump's Tariffs Were Supposed To Cut the Trade Deficit and Boost U.S. Manufacturing. They're Not Working.

  How should we assess whether President Donald Trump's tariffs have been effective?

  It's an important question—yet frustratingly difficult to answer. Trump has outlined overlapping, confusing, and sometimes competing goals for the tariffs.

  He's celebrated them as a source of government revenue, for example, but also claimed they are meant as a negotiating tactic. They can't be both. Tariffs used for negotiation are meant to be removed (once negotiations are complete), rendering them useless for long-term revenue. For Trump, tariffs are a solution to every problem, and the trade war is more about the vibes than the economics.

  But, as Eric shows, to the extent administration spokesmodels did provide goals for the tariffs to accomplish, they have failed.

• Not so fast, homeowners. James Freeman puts an asterisk on his headline: California Allowed Someone to Rebuild a Home* (WSJ gifted link). Quoting a news report about 915 Kagawa Street:

  It is the first rebuilt home in the Palisades to receive a certificate of occupancy, according to the mayor’s office, since the deadly fire there ravaged the area nearly a year ago while destroying 6,837 structures.

  I've provided the Google Maps link; the "street view" (from September) shows the house under construction. With no next door neighbors. And no next doors, for that matter.

  But why the asterisk? Nobody's actually moving into the house. James reports it's owned by a developer who plans to use it as a show house.

  James goes on to describe further dysfunction as only California government can provide:

  Nearly a decade ago, Los Angeles County voters overwhelmingly approved Measure M, a half-cent sales tax to fund projects focused on public transportation, street and sidewalk repair, and traffic reduction. The idealistic vote gave park-starved and transit-hungry Angelenos a lot to look forward to, including a $365 million plan for an 8-mile bike path along the Los Angeles River, which would close a crucial gap between existing paths lining LA’s concrete channelized waterway. The expected opening date: 2025.

  But, as the year nears a close, the bike path still isn’t open. In fact, construction hasn’t even started, and the environmental review process is still in the early stages. In the meantime, rising construction costs and other factors have increased the total project cost to approximately $1 billion.

  Bottom line: "One can ask how it’s even possible to spend $1 billion on a bike path, but remember it’s still not clear they’re going to get their bike path."

• Asked and answered. Allysia Finley in the WSJ: Why Is Autism Exploding? Welfare Fraud Is One Reason. (WSJ gifted link)

  Diagnosis rates of autism among children have more than tripled over the past 15 years. One reason, which Minnesota’s welfare scandal lays bare with shocking details, is Medicaid fraud and abuse.

  Medicaid pays healthcare providers big bucks to diagnose and treat children with autism—sometimes tens of thousands of dollars a month for a single child. Yet states rarely verify that kids who are diagnosed actually meet the medical criteria for the disorder or that they get appropriate treatment from qualified specialists.

  The result: Children covered by Medicaid or the government-run Children’s Health Insurance Program are 2.5 times as likely as those with private coverage to be diagnosed with autism. Many lower-income kids are labeled autistic merely because they have behavioral or developmental problems.

  Allysia's explanation is a lot more credible than RFKJr's "It wuz the vaccines" theory.

Recently on the book blog:

Checked out from the Portsmouth (NH) Public Library, I was expecting a leisurely read over 14 days or so. Instead, I gobbled it up in six days. Not exactly "couldn't put it down", but as close as I come these days.

It is the basis for the fourth season of AppleTV's Slow Horses, which I watched earlier this year. It starts off with a (literal) bang as [page 4 spoiler] an apparent terrorist explodes himself, killing dozens of shoppers at a London mall. And in a seemingly unrelated plot thread, one of the Slow Horses, River Cartwright, is concerned about his grandfather's worsening dementia. Which quickly turns into unexpected carnage at Grandpa's house.

There's the usual tension between Jackson Lamb's stable of misfit spies at Slough House and the more "respectable" Secret Service bureaucracy across town at "the Park". Those politics can be nearly as dangerous to our heroes as the plots hatched by evildoers.

As usual, Lamb utters his usual devastatingly funny commentary on the dysfunction and misadventures going on around him. And manages, once again, to stay (mostly) a couple steps ahead of his antagonists, internal and external.

From the WSJ in a recent editorial: The Great Entitlement State Grift. (WSJ gifted link)

That political ecology is also apparent in Democrats' demands to extend those hallowed Obamacare "tax credits", no questions asked.

A straight-news report from Politico has a predictable "Republicans pounce" headline: Obamacare fraud report has Republicans crying foul. But the plain facts are pretty damning:

Exercise for the reader: if you object to the WSJ's allegation that "Democrats won't acknowledge fraud"… please try to find a Democrat acknowledging the GAO report.

Also of note:

• I'm not an Objectivist, but… Robby Soave finds some prescience within it: Ayn Rand denounced FCC censorship 60 years ago.

  In 1962, Rand penned a prophetic warning about the public interest standard, which then–FCC Chair Newton N. Minow was citing to justify pressuring television companies to create more educational programming. Minow famously railed against a supposedly "vast wasteland" of shoddy television shows, and he claimed that the FCC's charter empowered him to push for editorial changes to the medium that would align with his view of the public interest.

  "You must provide a wider range of choices, more diversity, more alternatives," said Minow in his well-remembered 1961 speech. "It is not enough to cater to the nation's whims; you must also serve the nation's needs."

  Minow repeatedly claimed that he was not in favor of government censorship and was not trying to tell broadcasters what they could and could not say. Rather, he charged them to make nebulous and ill-defined improvements to the product that he believed would be better appreciated by the American public—i.e., the public interest.

  In her March 1962 essay "Have Gun, Will Nudge," Rand argued that this was censorship by another name. "It is true, as Mr. Minow assures us, that he does not propose to establish censorship; what he proposes is much worse," she wrote. Unlike explicit bans on speech, Rand warned, the modern method of censorship "neither forbids nor permits anything; it never defines or specifies; it merely delivers men's lives, fortunes, careers, ambitions into the arbitrary power of a bureaucrat who can reward or punish at whim."

  I was only 11 years old in 1962, and had no blog back then anyway, so I was unaware of Ayn's abolishment advocacy. But in 2007, when this blog not quite two years old, I linked approvingly to Jack Shafer's Slate article which advocated killing the FCC. It's an idea whose time has come is long past.

• Clear eyes at the Boston Globe. They belong to Jeff Jacoby, who informs his readers The 'two-state solution' is an article of faith, not a path to peace.

  AFTER Pope Leo XIV met with Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan last month, he reiterated what has become one of the most familiar refrains in international diplomacy: The "only solution" to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, he told reporters, is the creation of a Palestinian state alongside Israel.

  The pope has said as much before, as have other popes before him and an endless array of presidents, secretaries of state, prime ministers, foreign ministries, UN officials, international organizations, think tanks, academic luminaries, and prominent journalists.

  But political doctrines, unlike articles of faith, are supposed to be judged by how they work in the real world. And the doctrine of the "two-state solution" has been tested repeatedly for nearly a century — and it has failed every time.

  Jeff goes through the history and its legacy of continued, deadly, pointlessness.

Recently on the book blog:

Caveat Lector: most of this book report will be about me, not the book.

The "Final Jeopardy!" category on October 31, 2025 was "Famous Trials". And the clue was:

A lawyer in a 1933 trial called this novel "tedious and labyrinthine and bewildering"--& he was arguing on its behalf

None of the actual contestants gave the correct response. (Their guesses: Lolita; The Wizard of Oz; Catch-22.) But—hah!—at that point in my life I was about a week into "reading" Ulysses. And I shouted out my answer immediately. Impressing nobody except my cat.

This was my second attempt at climbing Mount Ulysses. My first was back in college. Professor Jenijoy La Belle (a real person, and that was her actual name) assigned it. And it was as "tedious and labyrinthine and bewildering" back in 1971 as it was in 2025. I remembered nothing about it except (1) the opening few words ("Stately, plump Buck Mulligan") and (2) Leopold Bloom's love of kidneys and their "fine tang of faintly scented urine." [Beginning of Episode 4.]

I do not know how I passed that course.

The reason I tried Ulysses again: back in 2021, it appeared on the New York Times shortlist of candidates for "the best book of the past 125 years." I started a reading project to read the titles I hadn't already read. And the final one on my project list was Ulysses, since I didn't consider to have actually "read" it back then.

I had a small notion that I would email Professor La Belle when I finished the book, thank her for her grading mercy, and report that I finally got more out of the book, fifty years later.

Alas, she passed away earlier this year. And (honestly) I am pretty sure I got nothing more out of the book this time around than I did back then. Again and again, I found myself in "look at every page" mode.

The "Gabler Edition" I used runs to 644 pages of text, which I factored into 46 days of 14 pages each. I assumed (incorrectly) that I could choke down and digest 14 pages easily enough. I cheated on the final Episode though: Molly Bloom's famous stream-of-dirty-consciousness punctuation-free soliloquy; I cued up Caraid O’Brien's audio rendition on YouTube (Part One; Part Two) and followed along in the book.

That didn't help much.

I think I could have had a more successful read by seeking out the various interpreters and annotators of Joyce's work, reading those concurrently with the text.

I could not think of a good enough reason to do that, however.

I acknowledge the praise people have heaped on the book. But Goodreads encourages me to rate according to my reaction, not pretend that I'm scoring on some objective measures of quality. So, one star.

Today's headline is a quote from the widely-reviled "Spock's Brain" episode of good old original Star Trek (Relevant nine-second excerpt here.) And my further inspiration is Dave Barry's recent substacked essay: My Brain.

Dave's brain is accurate, as you can verify here.

He goes on to justify his claim of full-brain syndrome. It's a fine, funny article, and I recommend it to you. Also, subscribing, because Dave deserves your support. Also check out Monty Python's Dennis Moore sketch, if you need further chuckles.

But Dave got me thinking (with my brain). I'm not quite as old, but I'm always alert to signs of brain failure. Which happen far too often these days. ("Why did I walk into this room?")

But the news from my self-reflection is more often good than bad. I do 13 crossword puzzles a week—seven from the New York Times, six from the Wall Street Journal—usually without Google-cheating. I also hit the NYT's daily Wordle and Connection puzzles. And, not to boast, but I've been on a hot streak working out the WSJ's Friday "Crossword Contest" meta-puzzle.

And of course, Jeopardy!. I'm not at contestant-level, if I ever was, but I still can cough up correct responses often enough, shouting them out … to my cat, who has the good manners to ignore me.

So I'm happy about that, but I'm really impressed with something I (and probably you) take for granted too often: my brain's ability to easily dredge up factoids that I haven't thought about in years, or even decades. And to do that within a fraction of a second! (Today's NYT 36-Across clue: "Emmy-winning actor Ray"; ah, that's "LIOTTA"! Spelled correctly, too!)

How does that work? And, even more navel-gazingly: why does it work? As a result, allegedly, of a few billion years of evolution, what is the species-survival value of me remembering Ray's last name, how it's spelled, and (for that matter) most of the plot of GoodFellas?

Which brings me to one more self-reporting anecdote, also movie-related. I watched the 1964 Beatles movie A Hard Day's Night the other evening. I saw it back then, over sixty years ago, but not since. Cute in spots, but (to be honest) doesn't hold up that well.

And I found myself speaking this line, uttered in the movie by George Harrison, about a second before he does:

He's right, you know.

Certainly not in anyone's list of "greatest movie quotes". And yet, it just popped out. How did you do that, brain? And why?

Andrew Heaton tells us: More text here: What America can learn from Japanese housing.

Also of note:

• Tale as old as time. Noah Smith says They need to make you hate some group. "They" being…

  In the 2010s, a bunch of right-wing types suddenly became big fans of Martin Luther King Jr.’s views on race. If you saw someone on Twitter quote MLK’s nostrum that people should “not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character”, it was almost certainly someone on the right — quite a change from the type of person who probably would have cited King’s words half a century earlier. This is from an Associated Press story back in 2013:

  King’s quote has become a staple of conservative belief that “judged by the color of their skin” includes things such as unique appeals to certain voter groups, reserving government contracts for Hispanic-owned businesses, seeking more non-white corporate executives, or admitting black students to college with lower test scores.

  Many progressives railed against the idea of a colorblind society, arguing that statistical disparities between racial groups — income gaps, wealth gaps, incarceration gaps, and so on — couldn’t be remedied without writing race into official policy and becoming much more race-conscious in our daily lives.

  In the policy space, this idea manifested as DEI, which implemented racially discriminatory hiring policies across a broad swath of American business, government, academia, and nonprofits. In the media space, this manifested as a torrent of op-eds collectively criticizing white people as a group — “White men must be stopped: The very future of mankind depends on it”, “It’s Time for White People to Understand Their Whiteness”, “What is Wrong With America is Us White People”, and so on. Reputable institutions brought in speakers who made claims like “Whites are psychopaths,” and so on. Making nasty jokes about white people carried few if any professional consequences.

  In that kind of environment, it’s understandable that lots of people on the right would turn to individualist principles like the ones espoused by MLK in his famous speech. Asking to be judged by the content of your character is a reasonable defense against people who are trying to judge you based on your membership in a racial group.

  Fast-forward a few years, however, and the shoe is on the other foot.[…]

  Noah notes that Donald Trump and Steven Miller are enthusiastically back in the business of judging people, not by the content of their character, but by their color/ethnicity/religion/country of origin/etc.

  I think Noah's misguided in thinking this is something new. Or that the lefties have repented their demagoguery. It's just so cheap and easy to do, when investigating "content of their character" one-by-one is such hard work!

• Well, it should do that, then. George Will notes a case flying under the radar: The Supreme Court can strike another blow against political cynicism. (WaPo gifted link)

  Some of the damage done by “campaign finance reforms” has been reversed. And Tuesday, the Supreme Court will hear arguments in a case that likely will continue the court’s dismantling of measures the political class has enacted to control political speech about itself.

  This case can extinguish an absurdity: a campaign regulation supposedly intended to prevent parties from corrupting their own candidates. The multiplication of, and subsequent unraveling of, reformers’ laws to ration political speech is a decades-long lesson about cynicism in the guise of idealism.

  Here is a simplified history of the reformers’ priorities: beginning in the 1970s, to empower government to regulate “hard” money — that given to particular candidates. Then to limit “soft” money given to parties for organizing and advocacy. Next, to regulate “express advocacy” — speech by independent groups advocating the election or defeat of an identifiable candidate. Inevitably, to solve the “problem” of spending on issue advocacy by such groups, limiting this remnant of civic discourse unregulated by government. Reformers nibbled away at the First Amendment, an artichoke devoured leaf by leaf.

  I guess we can expect the Usual Suspects to wail about "money in politics". But money just sits there; their real hatred is aimed at the political speech that money allows to make it to listeners.

• We hardly knew ye. David Harsanyi says RIP: War Powers Are Dead.

  Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine promises he'll refile a war powers resolution in the Senate demanding President Donald Trump ask for congressional approval before launching any military strikes against Venezuela.

  A similar bill failed by a 49-51 vote in the Senate last month.

  Why does the bill specify "Trump" and "Venezuela"? For the same reason that a similar bill in June specified "Trump" and "Iran." Democrats aren't serious about constitutional war powers. They're grandstanding.

  David notes that recent Presidents, both blue and red, have pretty much done what they wanted war-wise, without involving that pesky Article I of the Constitution.

• Someone should keep score. Jeff Maurer notes, informally, that The So-Called “Experts” Have Been “Right” About “Several Crucial Things” Recently. (I think the reader is supposed to imagine Jeff making air quotes in his headline.)

  The brain-dead right and the brain-damaged left both love railing against experts. Negging expertise is a staple of the Trump administration, and leftists treat the entire field of mainstream economics as a vast, centuries-long capitalist plot. Experts, of course, are wrong about some things sometimes, which has led some people to conclude that the smart thing to do is to listen to whichever deluded rage goblin their social media algorithm shits into their feed.

  But — quietly — the experts are on a bit of a winning streak. Several recent major things have gone pretty much exactly how experts said they would. And I can’t wait for them to get credit for being right…how could they not get that credit? Experts said “If you do A, then B will happen,” and then thing A happened, followed by B, which strongly suggests that they knew what they were talking about. Probably any minute now, “mea culpas” will start rolling in from the drunk shut-ins, shameless clout chasers, and Russian chaos bots who questioned the experts in the first place.

  The first area where the experts deserve some credit is tariffs. Most economists responded to Trump’s tariffs with repulsion-bordering-on-nausea, which seems justified in hindsight: Manufacturing is down and prices are up, with the strongest effects happening in sectors most affected by tariffs. The only good news about Trump’s tariffs is that they’re: 1) Illegal, and 2) A facilitator of graft as much as an economic policy; if not for those factors, things would be worse.1 For a while, we were told that Trump’s tariff strategy was 4D chess, but if this is chess, then Trump's queen has been captured, his knight is stuck up his ass, and the board has caught on fire and is igniting several Picassos that happened to be sitting nearby.

  I'm no expert, but I thought the folks predicting tariff malfunctions were probably right.

  I don't think Jeff mentions this, from a few days ago: Nature Retracts Study Predicting Catastrophic Climate Toll

And so does Don Boudreaux, who tells us What the Economics of Envy Can't Answer.

I guess I'm not surprised by the Pope, but hasn't he heard of the Tenth Commandment?

Anyway: Don proposes a number of "probing questions" to ask folks whose go-to solution to every social woe is "tax the rich". Here's one:

Maybe not a question to pose at the holiday table, but you be you.

Also of note:

• Could be a good title for a Bon Jovi song. Veronique de Rugy thinks the US is Living on Borrowed Credibility.

  New research by Zefeng Chen, Zhengyang Jiang, Hanno Lustig, Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh, and Mindy Xiaolan on three centuries of fiscal history offers a sobering lesson for today’s United States.

  The Dutch Republic, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain, and the modern United States all became dominant safe-asset suppliers in their eras. In each case, investors – both domestic and global – were willing to hold more of the hegemon’s debt than its future primary surpluses could justify. The bonds of a hegemon carry a convenience yield (a premium investors pay for safety and liquidity), making them overvalued relative to their fiscal backing. The hegemon can thus run persistent fiscal gaps without immediate consequences. In fact, the overvaluation itself temporarily functions as an extra source of revenue, meaning that unfunded spending might not generate inflation in the short run. For a time, markets behave as if the government has a larger stream of future surpluses than it actually does. Until it doesn’t.

  … and when it doesn't, the history says things get ugly very quickly.

• I'll stop posting about the drug boat stuff someday. But today is not that day. Not if Jacob Sullum has anything to say about it. And he does: Boat strike commander says he had to kill 2 survivors because they were smuggling cocaine.

  If we call a cocaine smuggler an "unlawful combatant" in an "armed struggle" against the United States, the Trump administration says, it is OK to kill him, even if he is unarmed and poses no immediate threat. And according to Adm. Frank M. Bradley, who commanded the newly controversial September 2 operation that inaugurated President Donald Trump's deadly anti-drug campaign in the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific, it is still OK to kill that cocaine smuggler if he ends up in the water after a missile strike on his boat, clinging to the smoking wreckage, provided you determine that he is still "in the fight."

  Bradley, who answered lawmakers' questions about that attack during closed-door briefings on Thursday that also included Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Dan Caine, knew that the initial missile strike, which killed nine people, left two survivors. But because the survivors had radioed for help from their fellow drug traffickers, The New York Times reports, Bradley ordered a second missile strike, which blew apart both men. That second strike was deemed necessary, according to unnamed "U.S. officials" interviewed by the Times, to prevent recovery of any cocaine that might have remained after the first strike.

  On its face, the second strike was a war crime. "I can't imagine anyone, no matter what the circumstance, believing it is appropriate to kill people who are clinging to a boat in the water," former Air Force lawyer Michael Schmitt, a professor emeritus at the U.S. Naval War College, told the Associated Press. "That is clearly unlawful….You can only use lethal force in circumstances where there is an imminent threat."

• But, hey, what about… Andrew C. McCarthy wonders Is Trump Following the Obama Drone Strike Model? (archive.today link)

  My friend Marc Thiessen makes some excellent points in his Washington Post column today (which I recommended to listeners of our podcast during my discussion with Rich Lowry this morning). He defends the Trump administration against war crime allegations related to the now infamous “double tap” strike that killed two alleged drug traffickers who were shipwrecked (because of the first missile strike) off the coast of Venezuela.

  Relying on David Shedd, formerly of the Defense Intelligence Agency, Marc observes that double taps are not unusual. In combat, initial strikes often do not eliminate the threat and additional strikes are necessary to destroy the targeted enemy asset. This is obviously why, as I noted on Tuesday, the Trump administration has tried to shift the focus of the second strike from the shipwrecked people (the focus of media coverage initially, to which the administration did not effectively respond) to the remnants of the ship and its cargo.

  Marc also points out that, in targeting cartels that it has designated as foreign terrorist organizations, the Trump administration is closely following the playbook of President Barack Obama […]

  Andrew notes one legalistic detail: Obama was operating under a Congressional "authorization of military force" (AUMF). Something that Trump lacks! And, for that matter, …

  You know how you know the cartels are not conducting terrorist activity? As we discussed on the podcast today, if the cartels had conducted terrorist mass-murder attacks against the United States, rather than shipping cocaine to the lucrative American market for that drug, we wouldn’t be talking about double taps and Trump’s lack of congressional authorization. If a terrorist ship was loaded with explosives and guns rather than bags of cocaine, everyone would agree that our armed forces would need to strike the target as many times as it took to destroy it. And Trump would already have congressional authorization because, as was the case after 9/11, lawmakers of both parties would be demanding to vote in favor of military force; they would enact an AUMF even if Trump didn’t ask for it.

  Which brings us to…

• Time to simply declare defeat. At Cato, Jeffrey A. Singer calls it An Incoherent Encore in a Failed Drug War.

  With Secretary of War Pete Hegseth embroiled in controversy over the extrajudicial killings of alleged drug smugglers operating a small, short-range boat off the coast of Venezuela, it’s worth examining how this all began.

  President Trump has repeatedly claimed that “narcoterrorists” are on these boats, transporting large quantities of fentanyl and other illegal drugs into the US to poison Americans, and he wants them obliterated. He asserts that each boat destroyed by the Navy with missiles saves 25,000 lives. As of this writing, 22 boats have been sunk, which amounts to 550,000 lives saved since early September—more than five times the nation’s annual overdose toll.

  First, drug smugglers do not sneak into the US, abduct random Americans, and forcibly inject them with fentanyl. They sell products to willing customers. These are voluntary commercial transactions, not acts of terrorism. If Americans did not want to buy illicit substances, traffickers would not profit from smuggling them and would quickly stop.

  Well, at least it seems to have gotten the Epstein stuff off the front pages. I guess that really did turn out to be a nothingburger.

• A lesson for all bloggers. Jeff Maurer is probably wishing he hadn't: I Have Hired A "Disabled" Columnist Who Will Probably Never Write a Column.

  I Might Be Wrong is pleased to announce a new addition to our staff: Cameron Este is our new columnist covering health and well-being. Cameron will join Ethan Coen, our Junior Assistant Film Critic, Jacob Fuzetti, an award-winning war correspondent who covers Hollywood gossip, and Paula Fox, who writes about tech issues and the naughty MILFs who will be joining her live on webcam to dine on her sopping undercarriage.

  Cameron’s credentials are impeccable: He recently graduated magna cum laude from Stanford with a double major in Journalism and Nutrition Science. Of course, I wish I had hired him after I had read Rose Horowitch’s Atlantic article about disability inflation at top universities. Horowitch’s eye-opening finding is that disability claims have skyrocketed at elite universities: The number of students claiming disability at the University of Chicago has tripled in eight years, and it’s quintupled at UC Berkeley in 15 years. Most of the “disabilities” involve lightly-scrutinized claims of sometimes-blithely-diagnosed conditions like ADHD, anxiety, and depression, and they generally require accommodations like receiving extra time on tests or being allowed to use otherwise-prohibited technology. Astoundingly, 38 percent of Stanford undergraduates this year are registered as having a disability.

  Immediately after being hired, Cameron informed me of the flotilla of maladies he possesses that require accommodation. He has ADHD, anxiety, dyslexia, autism, hypertension, a gluten allergy, shape blindness, and Stage 4 Restless Leg Syndrome. He has something called “Sarcastic Bowel Syndrome”, which is apparently when your digestive system responds to certain foods by flooding your brain with sassy put-downs that shatter your self-esteem. He has a wallet full of cards that say things like “I am having a seizure, please keep me away from sharp objects” and “I am experiencing echolocation hypersensitivity, please strangle any bats or dolphins that come near me”. I don’t know how he’s supposed to quickly find the right card in an emergency, especially since he apparently suffers from Sudden Onset Digital Paralysis, a.k.a. “finger narcolepsy”.

  I, for one, have a severe procrastination disability. You might get my Christmas cards before MLKJr's birthday, if I can manage it.

Veronique de Rugy doesn't care for either end of the horseshoe: The American Experiment Isn't What's Failing.

Politicians on the horseshoe ends are awful. But to a certain extent, they're just responding to the sour and resentful moods of their spoiled-brat voters. (I can say that because I'm not running for office.)

Also of note:

• Unlike a sinking drug boat, it's a moving target. Jim Geraghty has been paying attention to The Trump Team’s Convoluted, Conflicting Accounts of the Drug-Boat Sinking. After liberally quoting what Trump, Rubio, Hesgeth, et al. have been saying over the past few weeks…

  Depending upon which administration official you’re listening to or when, the boat was “headed to Trinidad or some other country in the Caribbean,” and it was also “an immediate threat to the United States.” It remained an “immediate threat” even after it turned around. The president said that Hegseth told him a second strike on survivors “didn’t happen.” Hegseth said he “watched that first strike live” and also said he “did not personally see survivors.” Hegseth is “going to be the one to make the call” and also simultaneously, “Admiral Bradley made the correct decision to ultimately sink the boat and eliminate the threat.” The target of the second strike was the cargo, or the target of the second strike were the survivors, to ensure they did not call anyone to pick them up and retrieve the cargo. Also, President Trump said he wouldn’t have wanted a second strike on survivors.

  And the entire narrative of a second strike is “completely false,” according to the Pentagon spokesman, except for the parts that were later corroborated.

  No doubt, there are plenty of Democrats and members of the media want to create as many headaches as possible for the Trump administration. But the administration creates problems for itself when it does not give a straight story, based upon verifiable facts, from day one. And unsurprisingly, members of Congress — both Democrats and Republicans — get hostile quickly when they feel like their requests for additional information are being ignored or rejected.

  I can't exactly blame people who pick and choose what they want to believe out of this morass of probable lies.

• The "MRGA" hats are probably being made as I type. Jeff Jacoby looks at Putin's number one fanboy: Trump's Ukraine 'peace' plan makes Russia great again.

  RUSTEM UMEROV, the head of Ukraine's security council, did his best to put on a brave face. "US is hearing us," Kyiv's lead negotiator said to reporters in Florida, where Ukrainian and American officials held four hours of talks on Sunday. "US is supporting us. US is working beside us," he said, as if he were willing those words to be true.

  Alas, they aren't true. Under the Trump administration, the United States is not supporting Ukraine as it fights for its survival, and it is certainly not working beside those who have been valiantly defending their sovereignty against a ruthless aggressor.

  There has never been much question where President Trump's sympathies lie. From blaming Ukraine for having "started" the war to fawning endlessly over Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, from insulting President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine as an incompetent and an ingrate to using his bully pulpit to reinforce the Kremlin's talking points, Trump has left little doubt that he is drawn irresistibly to the American enemy who launched this war and indifferent to the pro-Western nation resisting it.

  But now the administration's betrayal of Ukraine has reached a shocking new extreme. The White House is pressing for a "peace" that would amount to Ukrainian surrender and a Russian victory — a Munich for our time.

  Jeff repeats the "old maxim": "It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but fatal to be its friend."

• Thanks of a grateful nation. Bjørn Lomborg speculates in the WSJ: Climate Change Might Have Spared America From Hurricanes. (WSJ gifted link)

  The 2025 Atlantic hurricane season ended on Sunday, and not a single hurricane made landfall in the continental U.S. this year. This is the first such quiet year since 2015; an average of around two hurricanes strike the U.S. mainland annually. You’d think this would be cause for celebration—or at least curiosity about what role, if any, global warming played. Instead there has been resounding silence.

  We heard plenty about Hurricane Melissa, the monster storm that hit Jamaica in late October with 185-mile-an-hour winds and flooding, causing roughly 100 deaths across the Caribbean. Headlines screamed that climate change was to blame. Attribution studies quickly followed, concluding that human-induced warming made Melissa more likely and worse.

  Yes, the narrative must be promoted: Climate change can only make things worse, never better.

Calling it as he sees it: A sickening moral slum of an administration. (WaPo gifted link) After looking at the Venezuelan drug boat survivor-shooting and the handling of Putin's wishlist for Ukraine, he makes a more general point:

I fear he's right. More on the drug boats below.

Also of note:

• We have moved on to the ass-covering phase of the operation. Andrew C. McCarthy has been my go-to guy for honest coverage. Here's his update from last evening: Pete Hegseth Says He Ordered & Observed First Missile Strike, Not Second. (archive.today link) After quoting from Hesgeth's tweet:

  As we’ve said before, vessel strikes on narco-terrorists will continue until their the poisoning of the American people stops.
  
  Today, at the direction of President Trump, the Department of War carried out a lethal kinetic strike on a vessel operated by a Designated Terrorist… pic.twitter.com/gQF9LpSjqD

  — Secretary of War Pete Hegseth (@SecWar) November 7, 2025

  Andrew comments:

  I get it that Hegseth sees his job as pleasing the president, who revels in this style of tough-guy, take-no-prisoners, death-to-all-the-seditionists BS. If you’re going to play that game, however, and especially if you’re going to play it for the ostensible purpose of “defending” yourself from war crimes accusations, you can’t be too surprised if people suspect that you just might have given an order to kill everybody.

  And bigger picture: We are dealing with an activity — cocaine trafficking — that is not an act of war, is not terrorism, is not killing thousands of Americans (that’s fentanyl), and is traditionally handled in the United States by criminal prosecution under an extensive, decades-old set of laws. Yet, President Trump, Secretary Hegseth, and the administration have speciously claimed that cocaine shipments — many of which are not even destined for our country — are the functional equivalent of mass-murder attacks; that, they claim, authorizes them to invoke the laws of armed conflict so they can kill people rather than prosecute them.

  Under the circumstances, it is hardly unreasonable for people to conclude that the administration is not especially fastidious about who is and is not a legitimate target under the laws of war.

  The things the administration is not "fastidious" about seems to grow daily.

• Closed, locked, key thrown away. John McCormack & Michael Warren bemoan The Closing of the Conservative Mind. (archive.today link)

  Last April, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute invited eight college students to what an ISI staffer described in an email as an “exclusive retreat and dinner with Tucker Carlson” in Florida.

  Founded nearly 75 years ago, ISI is a prominent conservative collegiate intellectual institution in the United States. ISI also runs the Collegiate Network, a collection of alternative conservative newspapers on college campuses across the country, and the eight student journalists had been selected by ISI to attend the retreat and dinner because their campus newspapers were top-performing publications. After a Journalism 101 session at the Art Ovation Hotel in Sarasota, the students filed into a shuttle for a 90-minute trip to Carlson’s home on Gasparilla Island, where Carlson dispensed career advice.

  “Thanks to @TuckerCarlson for joining three generations of @amconmag editors/executive directors for a dinner with campus journalists from @ISI’s @collegiatenet,” ISI President Johnny Burtka posted on Twitter alongside a photo of himself, Carlson, then-Collegiate Network Executive Director Dan McCarthy, and The American Conservative editor Curt Mills. “It was an unforgettable evening that our students will cherish for years to come.”

  One person left out of Burtka’s photo was Carlson’s special guest at the dinner that night: Alex Jones, who appeared on Carlson’s podcast that aired the next day, April 9.

  Back in my college days, I was sorta involved with ISI. A long time ago. Sad to see what it's become.

• Sometimes only a Hayek quote will do. And Eric Boehm deploys one early: Trump's deals with Intel and others are a form of socialism.

  One danger of nationalism, Friedrich Hayek warned in 1960, was the "bridge" it provides "from conservatism to collectivism."

  "To think in terms of 'our' industry or resource," he wrote, "is only a short step away from demanding that these national assets be directed in the national interest."

  That's a short step that President Donald Trump has eagerly taken. In the first nine months of his second term in office, the president has overseen a giant government leap into the boardrooms of strategically important businesses.

  In June, Trump demanded (and the federal government received) a so-called golden share in U.S. Steel, which effectively gives the White House veto power over much of the company's future. Two months later, the Trump administration purchased a 10 percent equity stake in Intel, the once-dominant and recently struggling American chipmaker. Similar stakes in at least four other companies followed, including ones that produce nuclear power or mine metals such as lithium and copper that are necessary for building high-tech chips and advanced batteries.

  I must recycle my ChatGPT cartoon from back in August:

• To be fair, most economic doom will be in the future. But Jeff Maurer looks at today's whining and wonders: What Causes Economic Doomerism? And I will steal his impressive graphic:

  Here are some charts that most people probably assume are hallucinated bullshit, like when you ask AI to design a house and it puts the toilet in the middle of the kitchen:

  

  These charts are real…but how can they be? We’re constantly told that we’re living in tough economic times — I hear that the middle class has been “hollowed out”, and that you have to perform sexual favors on your local Albertson’s manager just to buy a dozen eggs. Generation Z — the story goes — is beyond screwed; the only jobs for them will be OnlyFans modeling and gig work delivering bubble tea to robots. These beliefs are so widespread that in a recent conversation between Sam Harris and George Packer — in which they spoke intelligently on many topics — the notion that Gen Z is struggling economically went unchallenged. It was like hearing two physicists discuss the finer points of quantum field theory and then reveal that they think that thunder is caused by a giant farting dragon in the sky.

  Jeff has possible theories aplenty.

• But some (relatively) good news The Fraser Institute has released its report on the Economic Freedom in North America, which analyzes and compares US and Mexican states, Canadian provinces. And…

  In the all-government index—which takes account of federal as well as state/provincial policies—the most economically free jurisdictions in North America are New Hampshire, South Dakota, and Idaho.

  The data Fraser used is from 2023, so I assume the demise of New Hampshire's Interest & Dividends Tax will keep us well in front of South Dakota and Idaho in the near term.

Recently on the book blog:

I put this book on my get-at-library list thanks to its "Best Novel" Edgar Award nomination. I surprised myself by liking it quite a bit. Some of my usual warning signs are here: damaged female characters, rotten male characters, "flowery" writing full of home decor descriptions, multiple POVs, jumping around in time, … What can I say, it turned out to work well for me anyway.

The mystery, such as it is: one day young girl Laika vanishes on her way to school. Leaving her younger sister, Willa, to wonder what happened. Laika's disappearance turns into an obsession for Willa; long after the tabloids have moved on to different lurid crimes, Willa keeps trying to find her. And thinks she keep seeing her, only to be disappointed.

But decades later, at a dinner party thrown by Robyn, Willa's friend and past lover, a stranger is invited, and (yes) Willa thinks it could be… But is it?

Another book for which I can't recall the reason I put on my get-at-library list. Doesn't matter much, I guess. I enjoyed it a lot.

If you plan on reading it, my suggestion would be to go in as cold as possible: don't read reviews, don't look at the cover blurbs, don't let your eyes wander down Amazon's book page. Just start reading.

It is (mostly) narrated by Demeter, an AI in charge of an interstellar spaceship, plying the route between Sol and Alpha Centauri. Her (I think I got the pronoun right) perspective is (literally) inhuman, but she has a strong sense of honor and duty. Which explains why she is more than a little aghast when she discovers that the ship's crew and passengers are all dead. (Don't worry, that is only a page-six spoiler.)

But you may recognize her name (I didn't), and get a small hint as to the identity of the culprit.

As the book progresses, there is much conflict, mostly gory. Unexpected characters show up, some antagonistic, some allies in the fight against murderous evil.

Katherine Mangu-Ward reveals something about the inner workings of the magazine she edits in her latest print-edition editorial: Friedrich Hayek's 'socialists of all parties' quote is apt today.

I'll be pointing out "nearly every essay" as each one emerges from behind the paywall. And I may include a Hayek quote here and there.

But, for today, here's a reasonable article not from Reason, in which Daniel J. Smith explains Why Modern Socialists Dodge Definition.

As Hayek would say: Bingo!

Also of note:

• In the land of obfuscation, finger-pointing, and whataboutism… Andrew C. McCarthy notes there is a New Explanation: Hegseth Did Not Order That All Boat Operators Be Killed. (NR gifted link)

  (Caveat Lector: Andrew's article is (as I type) 24 hours old; by the time you read this, it might be wildly out of date.)

  In a post on Saturday evening, I contended that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s first “defense” of a second U.S. missile strike on September 2, which killed two shipwrecked survivors of an initial missile strike, was more like a guilty plea. With indignation, but without trying to refute any of the factual claims in a Washington Post report about the strikes, Secretary Hegseth asserted, “As we’ve said from the beginning, and in every statement, these highly effective strikes are specifically intended to be ‘lethal, kinetic strikes.’” But the laws of armed conflict prohibit lethal, kinetic strikes against combatants who’ve been rendered hors de combat (i.e., out of the fighting); hence, it is not a defense to say, “But it was our intention all along to kill them.”

  Not surprisingly, the White House figured out that this wasn’t going to fly, so we now have an actual defense. According to President Trump, Hegseth now says he didn’t order what the Washington Post’s unidentified sources say he ordered — to wit, that everyone on the vessel suspected of trafficking illegal drugs on the high seas was to be killed.

  I hope that’s true. Of course, if it is true that he didn’t give the order, how odd was it that Hegseth’s first two responsive posts over the weekend were exactly what you would expect from someone who did give such an order: first, the above unflinching declaration of intention to execute “lethal” strikes, and second, the cruder, “We have only just begun to kill narco-terrorists.”

  I hope that’s true. Of course, if it is true that he didn’t give the order, how odd was it that Hegseth’s first two responsive posts over the weekend were exactly what you would expect from someone who did give such an order: first, the above unflinching declaration of intention to execute “lethal” strikes, and second, the cruder, “We have only just begun to kill narco-terrorists.”

  Almost certainly there will be more to come. Sorry.

• One of the few things I remember from Confirmation classes. The English word "love" is very, very, ambiguous. Translations of the New Testament map four different Greek words into one hunka hunka burnin' "love" in English. Including one I hope Noah Smith isn't using in his headline: I love AI. Why doesn't everyone?

  New technologies almost always create lots of problems and challenges for our society. The invention of farming caused local overpopulation. Industrial technology caused pollution. Nuclear technology enabled superweapons capable of destroying civilization. New media technologies arguably cause social unrest and turmoil whenever they’re introduced.

  And yet how many of these technologies can you honestly say you wish were never invented? Some people romanticize hunter-gatherers and medieval peasants, but I don’t see many of them rushing to go live those lifestyles. I myself buy into the argument that smartphone-enabled social media is largely responsible for a variety of modern social ills, but I’ve always maintained that eventually, our social institutions will evolve in ways that minimize the harms and enhance the benefits. In general, when we look at the past, we understand that technology has almost always made things better for humanity, especially over the long haul.

  There are always those who will proclaim "This time is different." Maybe. But that's not the way to bet, I'm pretty sure.

• I've been wondering about this myself. Arnold Kling notes the funny way people think about one specific service: What's Different about Health Care?

  When it comes to health care policy, you can try to sound sophisticated by citing “asymmetric information” as an explanation for why government intervention is appropriate. But I think that those rationalizations are off base.

  The reason that we have government intervention in health care is that we have an instinct that making an individual pay for health care is immoral. It is taking advantage of the individual’s misfortune.

  When someone is desperately poor and needs to borrow money to keep from starving, charging interest is regarded as immoral. Back in the day, that is what made usury a sin and made Shylock a villain.

  When someone is suffering from illness, making them pay for treatment is analogous to usury. Still, we understand that health care providers deserve to get paid. So we turn payment for treatment into a collective problem, to be dealt with by insurance or, ultimately, by socialism (government).

  I think that the moral intuition that an individual suffering from a health problem should not have to pay for treatment is something that we need to re-think. In the 21st century, the array of medical services is so vast and so varied that it is no longer appropriate to take away the individual’s responsibility for paying. As an individual, you think you have “good” health insurance if it pays for eyeglasses and teeth cleaning and for every precautionary MRI. But for society as a whole, it is not good.

  Arnold goes on to mention the weirdness of the term "health insurance", which, in practice, works totally differently from other types of insurance.

• A palate-cleanser? Not really. But Brian Philips The Olivia Nuzzi and RFK Jr. Affair Is Messier Than We Ever Could Have Imagined. It's pretty R-rated funny the whole way through.

  There’s no way around it. If you read this article, you are going to have to imagine Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the United States secretary of health and human services, having an absolutely eyeball-melting orgasm. You’re going to have to imagine a sweaty, leathery man in his early 70s, the scion of the celebrated Kennedy political dynasty, bellowing like a Spartan as his body yields to the sweet, sweet release. Knees buckling. Sinews straining. What does it sound like when RFK Jr. bellows? I’ll go out on a limb and say it’s gritty. His normal speaking voice is basically a garbage disposal. When the big one hits, it must be like tossing a fork in.

  I’m sorry for this, truly. I would protect you from these images if I could. But in the latest, grossest plot twist in the ongoing saga of RFK’s affair with the acclaimed political journalist Olivia Nuzzi, RFK appears to have written a poem to his lover about—and please remember that I hate my own life as much as you’re about to hate yours—his own ejaculation. He calls it “my harvest.” Lines from the poem were published Saturday on the Substack of Nuzzi’s ex Ryan Lizza, who is also a political journalist and who was engaged to Nuzzi at the time of the alleged affair. Lizza has launched a multipart Substack series chronicling Nuzzi’s infidelities, to counter what he claims are Nuzzi’s misrepresentations in her forthcoming memoir, which was recently excerpted in Vanity Fair, where Nuzzi currently works.

  It's sordid and also hilarious. Except you might choke back some laughter when you remember that Junior's current job requires sound, sober judgement.

I was gonna make a "filled with hot air" joke, but elementary Googling informs me that Macy's balloons are inflated via helium.

No clue about how Marx would have felt about being filled with a noble gas. One that makes you talk funny.

Also of note:

• Apocalyptic Prophecy from the Book of Williamson. Specifically, Kevin D. He warns of The Four Schmucks of the Apocalypse. (archive.today link)

  The Trump administration is always good for a curveball: It put out a peace plan that was originally written in Russian when I was expecting one that was originally written in crayon.

  Talk about “the soft bigotry of low expectations”! You couldn’t see my expectations from the third sub-basement of Challenger Deep right about now.

  “The matter is delicate,” Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said of European engagement with the United States on the Ukraine matter, “because nobody wants to discourage the Americans and President Trump from ensuring that the United States remains on our side.”

  What kind of wild-eyed optimist thinks President Trump is on the Europeans’ side now? He sure as hell is not on the Ukrainians’ side.

  More to the point: What kind of wild-eyed optimist thinks President Trump is on the American side? The conspiracy-theory corner is chock-full of amusing little notions about why it is that Donald Trump so energetically and self-abasingly serves the interests of Vladimir Putin: sex tapes of a nature as to embarrass even such a man as Trump, who has appeared in no fewer than three pornographic films; dirt relating to his Slovenian-born wife’s dodgy family or to his sons’ personal and financial shenanigans; possibly some heavy off-the-books loans from state-controlled Russian banks or the Russian mob. All fun parlor-game stuff, but, as far as I can tell, all of the available hard evidence points toward my pet theory of the case, i.e. that Donald Trump is a punk and a coward who, like most weaklings of his kind, instinctively takes on the subordinate role in relationships with hard men such as Putin. I enjoyed The Manchurian Candidate, but, in a sense, it does not matter whether Donald Trump is some kind of a Russian asset under the influence of kompromat—he would not be doing anything different if he were.

  Russia has launched a war of aggression against a European democracy, and the president of the United States of America is on Moscow’s side: All pretense and political window-dressing to one side, that’s how it is. Trump means to give Putin what Putin wants. Fortunately for the cause of the Free World, Donald Trump does not run U.S. foreign policy. Unfortunately, some combination of Marco Rubio, J.D. Vance, Steve Witkoff, and Jared Kushner does—freedom is in the greasy paws of a quadrumvirate of self-serving grifters, phonies, cowards, and imbeciles.

  KDW sounds pessimistic, right? Am I detecting some pessimism there?

• A question the great minds of science will debate for the next century. Becket Adams wonders How Did Katie Couric Become an Elder Stateswoman of Journalism? (archive.today link)

  You have to hand it to Katie Couric.

  Unlike disgraced former anchor Dan Rather, who was drummed out of the news business in 2006, she has never faced any serious professional consequences for her shoddy, dishonest brand of journalism.

  In fact, despite a thoroughly blemished record, she has managed, late in her career, to reinvent herself as a kind of elder stateswoman of the news media, explaining to her loyal following everything that’s wrong with modern journalism. Leading Democrats, journalists, and pundits are all too eager to do interviews on her podcast or Substack to talk politics and the culture wars.

  This is despite the long list of people Couric has mischaracterized, misreported on, and mistreated. Instead of pariah status, she receives expressions of tribute and respect, all while criticizing those she deems unworthy of the title she has wielded unworthily for more than four decades.

  Becket has the receipts, as the kids say. He is especially hard on Katie's creative editing of her interview with Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

• No fair! Hors de Combat is in a foreign language! Jed Rubenfeld, legal correspondent at the Free Press contends Killing Narco Speedboat Survivors Is a War Crime. (archive.today link)

  On September 10, eight days after the first U.S. bombing of a “narco” speedboat in the Caribbean, The Intercept—a left-wing news site—reported that there were people on board who had survived the initial air strike, but were then killed in a “follow-up attack.” No details were offered, no such second strike was shown in the video of the bombing posted by President Trump, and the allegation seemed to vanish. But yesterday, The Washington Post made the very same accusation, this time filled in with explosive details.

  After the first bomb struck the boat, the Post reported, a drone video feed showed two survivors “clinging to the smoldering wreck” in the open sea. According to the Post, mission commander Admiral Frank Mitchell Bradley then ordered a second strike specifically to kill the two survivors.

  Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has called the Post story “fabricated, inflammatory, and derogatory,” reiterating that the speedboat attacks have been approved “by the best military and civilian lawyers.” But Hegseth did not specifically deny any of the particulars in the Post’s account.

  If the Post is right—and we don’t know yet whether it is—Bradley committed murder. No ifs, ands, or buts about it.

  This is turning otherwise reasonable conservatives into defenders of the indefensible. Sad!

• Tyler Cowen piles on. Specifically, shooting the fish in the barrel: The Myth of the $140,000 Poverty Line. (archive.today link)

  When a flood of people start emailing me the same article, I know something is afoot. That is the case with Michael W. Green’s “The Valley of Death: Why $100,000 is the New Poverty,” which was recently adapted from his Substack and published in The Free Press. Green’s core argument is that participating in the basics of American life costs much more than it used to, and as a result, we should set a new poverty line: up from about $32,000 a year for a family of four with two kids, to $140,000 a year.

  Fortunately for us, this is all wrong. The underlying concepts are wrong, the details are wrong, and the use of evidence is misguided. There are genuine concerns about affordability in the United States, but the analysis in this article is not a good way to understand them.

  Green goes off the rails right away when he defines the poverty line by quoting a statement based on a 1965 research paper by Mollie Orshansky: “The U.S. poverty line is calculated as three times the cost of a minimum food diet in 1963, adjusted for inflation.” He uses this sentence as the foil for his own analysis, noting that rising costs of healthcare, housing, and other factors mean that food is a rapidly decreasing proportion of a household’s overall costs. Orshanksy’s formula, therefore, is outdated.

  The problem is that this mischaracterizes how the poverty line is calculated today.

  I am feeling sorry for Michael W. Green.

Recently on the book blog:

Recently on the movie blog:

Nicholas Wade has had a long career as a science journalist, and in recent years has become a controversial science journalist. For details on the controversial stuff, I recommend his Grokipedia entry, which seems far more even-handed than Wikipedia's, which has an unrebutted anti-Wade bias.

I reported on one of his controversial works, A Troublesome Inheritance, back in 2014. In more recent years, he has written in favor of the lab-leak origin of Covid; my posts on that are here, here, here, and here.

This book looks at how humans have organized themselves into governing groups over their long existence; Wade feels (with much justification) that the role of our underlying genetic code has been given short shrift. To a certain extent this is ideology-driven: the notion that humans are born as "blank slates" and their cultural environment can mold them arbitrarily, shedding ancient ideas of sex roles, opening up a utopian vision of an egalitarian future.

Wade notes that blank-slatism has been thoroughly debunked. He details the experiment with kibbutzim in early Israel, where idealists set up communities based on collective ownership, sexual equality, child-rearing by the community instead of mom and dad, etc.; over the span of a relatively few years, this proved unstable, and the communities mostly reverted to more traditional ways.

Our original social organizations were tribal, similar in many ways to our chimp cousins, and they were a decent evolutionary "solution" to the problems of cooperation, defense, production, and cultural survival. They "worked" for many millennia, after all. And they still persist in some parts of the world. But cultural evolution has molded most of us into citizens of nation-states, a model that has more survival value in the modern world.

Wade argues that humanity is still constrained by the realities of our genetic heritage; ideologies that (for example) deny the fundamental differences between guys and gals are always going to wind up in disappointment, but not before causing a lot of misery along the way.

He also argues that the traditional bonds that hold nation-states together seem to be badly fraying today: common languages, religions, ethnicities. He points out increasing social stratification caused by assortive mating in our meritocracy.

So, Wade provides quite a bit to think about. Progressives aren't going to like his take on a number of contemporary issues. Even I am not convinced of the semi-determinism that his evolution/genetic insights seem to imply. Back in (say) 1750, a Wade-like essayist could have looked at the historic record of chattel slavery and concluded that it was destined to be with us forever as part of our genetic heritage. But it wasn't, thank goodness.

[Blog-only Update, 2026-01-08: Arnold Kling has a more detailed look at Wade's book. With a punny headline: Wading into Controversy. If you're interested.]

This is (duh) a sequel to Nobody, which I watched and liked back in 2023. Bob Odenkirk stars again (spoiler for the first movie: he survives), and he's great. It is billed as a "dark comedy", where the darkness is provided with copious violence, bad language, and threats against the innocent. So, if you're OK with that…

The events of the previous movie have given Hutch (Bob) a promotion of sorts: he's now a professional assassin, working to pay off multi-millions in debt, thanks to his rash (but understandable) decision to burn up a large pile of mob cash. (It made sense at the time. You really should watch that first movie before this one.)

But it's a tiresome life, and Hutch has been neglecting his family. He demands a break for a family vacation, and chooses "Plummerville", a cheesy, decrepit town he remembers from his youth. It's got rides, a water park, an arcade, duck boats, … and (oh yeah) loads of corruption and organized crime; he wasn't aware of that last bit. But Hutch is a Jack Reacher-style character; trouble and (eventually apocalyptic) violence seem to find him wherever he goes.

I had to look over to IMDB to find the name of the actress playing the primary villain here. And said, "Oh. Wow."