Pun Salad

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.