Pun Salad

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".