Pun Salad

David Friedman tells A Tale of Two Horseshoes. He links to, and comments on, Cass Sunstein's August 2025 substack article: On Classical Liberalism. Cass admits a stunning adjustment to his worldview:

This is good news, although Cass still sees a number (specifically: six) flaws in mainstream libertarian ("classical liberal") thinking. David wonders:

"Horseshoe Theory" usually is used to describe how "extreme" lefties and righties tend to resemble each other in their distaste for markets, civil tolerance, and a certain fondness for authoritarianism. David wonders if we're seeing a more virtuous horseshoe between more sensible folks. Certainly, I've been treating certain folks with Strange New Respect over the past few years: Noah Smith, Jeff Maurer, Freddie deBoer, Jerry Coyne, Michael Shermer, …

I'd like to think they got more reasonable, but…

And it appears that Cass may discuss this stuff further in his latest book. Amazon link at your right, and I'm going to see if the University Near Here can get me a copy via Interlibrary Loan.

Also of note:

• Apparently things have started to go boom in Iran. Pun Salad will follow its usual diligent reporting on breaking news: ignoring it until at least tomorrow.

• Only four? That seems low. Veronique de Rugy picks off the top four, anyhow: Four Fallacies Behind Trump's Post-SCOTUS-Ruling Tariffs. Let's look at her number one:

  The first argument is the optimistic one: Tariffs "reshore" production, raise domestic demand, push wages up and leave consumers better off. It's a tidy story. It's also wrong.

  Tariffs don't conjure consumer demand out of thin air. Americans were buying plenty of washing machines, clothing and steel before the tariffs. What changes is where some things are made. Production shifts from foreign manufacturers with efficiency or cost advantages to more expensive domestic manufacturers. American producers stand to gain, except when they must pay tariffs to import the materials they need (as is often the case).

  But everyone who buys the product pays more. The extra $100 a family spends on a washing machine won't instead be spent at the restaurant next door, the repair shop or the shoe store. Real wages — what your paycheck actually buys — fall when the prices of most things rise.

  Remaining fallacies: foreign trade is zero-sum (it's not); tariffs aren't regressive (they are); and corporations will eat the tariffs (certainly not entirely, and that wouldn't wind up being harmless to Americans anyway).

• The answer may surprise you! Unless you've been paying attention. Drew Cline asks the musical question: Is State Aid to Public Schools Growing or Shrinking? The math isn't hard, but …

  This month, the New Hampshire School Funding Fairness project released a chart designed to show that the state’s share of education funding had fallen by nearly $200 million since 2010.

  That false impression is created by several measurement errors. The chart:

  1. Does not include the loss of 34,480 students.
  2. Includes federal American Rescue Plan Act funding in its 2010 state funding total.
  3. Includes SWEPT in its 2010 state funding total but not in its 2025 total.

  Fixing those errors lets us compare apples to apples. When we do that, we see that that schools have received substantial increases in both state and local revenue per student from 2010-2015.

  Specifically: real state per-pupil spending is up 25% between 2010 and 2025. While localities have increased their real per-pupil spending 133% over the same period.

  The slick website of the NH School Funding Fairness Project is here. As near as I can tell, they have no response to Drew's corrections.

• Yum. A few weeks back I reported reading The Greatest Sentence Ever Written, by Walter Isaacson, an analysis of (well…) the greatest sentence ever written, the one beginning "We hold these truths…" in the Declaration.

  It's an interesting and worthwhile topic, given the big birthday coming up. At Law & Liberty, from Joshua T. Katz is Savoring the Declaration. He comments:

  Although Isaacson’s book is frankly superficial, it is built around a conceit that I greatly appreciate, namely, slow reading. To be sure, other scholars have read the Declaration much more slowly and carefully: to take three since the Bicentennial that represent a range of historical and political perspectives, Garry Wills’s Inventing America: Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence (1978), Pauline Maier’s American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence (1997), and now Matthew Spalding’s The Making of the American Mind: The Story of Our Declaration of Independence (2025), reviewed by Bruce P. Frohnen in Law & Liberty at the start of this year. But it is Isaacson who explicitly writes of the second sentence that “on its 250th birthday, each of its words and concepts bears scrutiny and appreciation.”

  Nonetheless, Isaacson does not discuss each and every one of the thirty-five words. For example, the conjunction “that” and the verb “are” appear more often than any other words—three times each, so they constitute more than one-sixth of the text—but go unscrutinized and unappreciated. The purpose of this brief article is to say something about those “that”-s. Perhaps this sounds peculiar, but so-called function words tend to be unjustly ignored and, anyway, I have, as we will see, a very distinguished predecessor in a similar, albeit far more ambitious, endeavor.

  The sentence is memorable in both content and form. Understandably, people tend to think more about content, but form can obscure or, as here, magnify content and should not be neglected. Certainly it should not be neglected when it comes to Jefferson, a polyglot and historian of the English language whom John Adams and the rest of the Committee of Five selected to write the first draft of the Declaration on account of his rhetorical skill. Furthermore, as Jay Fliegelman neatly explains in his 1993 book Declaring Independence: Jefferson, Natural Language & the Culture of Performance, although himself “an anxious orator,” Jefferson wrote the Declaration to be read aloud: as a vocal musical event rather than an inert document.

  Katz (I think) does a pretty good job of teasing out some unappreciated Jeffersonian insights.

• When they outlaw snowballs, only … Well, you know how the rest of that quote would go. Nellie Bowles observes The Situation Has Snowballed.

  A massive snowball fight in Washington Square Park turned polarizing (literally) after cops showed up to control the crowd and got pelted by a snow-wielding mob. A 27-year-old man was charged with felony assault, with the police commissioner calling it “disgraceful” and “criminal” while Mayor Mamdani only shrugged: “I can just tell you from the video I saw, it looked like kids at a snowball fight.” Surprise, the felony assault charge was already dropped by DA Alvin Bragg. Something about watching cops running while 30-year-olds (which is a Mamdani 5) throw blocks of ice at them, I don’t know, the vibe is different from the snowball fights I remember. Less Olaf from Frozen, and more the beginnings of a hipster January 6. I honestly want to cry thinking about a cop getting home from work and his wife asking him “how was your day, sweetie?” smiling until she sees her loved one brushing snow out of his hood. Probably they don’t care at all. Anyway, let’s turn on CNN.

  Pun Salad doesn't dispense a lot of advice to readers, but I'll make an exception here: Don't throw anything at cops, all right?

I certainly didn't demand that Getty find me a literal illustration for this: Trump Laid a Trap and Democrats Went Into It Genitals-First. And that rhetorical trap was laid when Trump said:

One of the great things about the State of the Union is how it gives Americans the chance to see clearly what their representatives really believe. So tonight, I’m inviting every legislator to join with my administration in reaffirming a fundamental principle. If you agree with this statement, then stand up and show your support: The first duty of the American government is to protect American citizens, not illegal aliens.

[Jeff provides a SOTU video excerpt if you prefer.]

Who will win this race to the bottom? (It's pretty easy to see who's gonna lose: it's the individual in your bathroom mirror.)

And if you need a reminder about the minor joke in Good Will Hunting scene (it's a movie from 1997, Jeff) here's a link.

Also of note:

• Not that it matters, but… Pun Salad is 21 years old today. My very first post here.

• Not making the headlines that it should. Damon Root looks at a SCOTUS ruling that slipped through the cracks: The Postal Service's recent Supreme Court win is bad news for government accountability.

  The Federal Tort Claims Act says that the federal government is immunized from being sued over "claims arising out of the loss, miscarriage, or negligent transmission of letters or postal matter." But what if a postal worker deliberately misdelivers the mail, such as by intentionally sending it to the wrong address or intentionally returning it to the sender instead of delivering it to the place where it is supposed to go? Is that kind of purposeful malfeasance by a postal worker also shielded from lawsuits?

  Writing this week for the 5–4 majority in United States Postal Service v. Konan, Justice Clarence Thomas declared that the statutory protection against being sued should indeed be read to apply "when postal workers intentionally fail to deliver the mail." According to Thomas, "because a 'miscarriage' includes any failure of mail to arrive properly, a person experiences a miscarriage of mail when his mail is delivered to his neighbor, held at the post office, or returned to the sender—regardless of why it happened." Likewise, Thomas argued, "a loss can be the result of another person's intentional misconduct."

  Well, that's disappointing. On the losing side: Kagan, Gorsuch, Sotomayor, and Brown Jackson. It's rare that I agree with three of those people.

  Which brings us to…

• In a lonely place. Christian Schneider muses on Neil Gorsuch's Burn Book.

  The Supreme Court’s ruling last week in Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump struck down President Trump’s sweeping IEEPA tariffs. The majority opinion was important, but the most revealing document in the case wasn’t the majority — it was Justice Neil Gorsuch’s concurrence, a precision instrument designed to expose how his colleagues have each, in their own way, interpreted the law not as written but as politically convenient.

  Gorsuch’s opinion is merciless, serving up a hearty feast of vituperation. He picks apart his colleagues one by one — the progressive bloc, the conservative dissenters, and finally his own ideological ally, Amy Coney Barrett — and demonstrates that virtually everyone on the court has been willing to bend their interpretive principles when the other side’s president was unilaterally legislating.

  It's almost as if they got beaten down by all the people accusing them of being partisan hacks, and thought "OK, well, then I guess we will be partisan hacks."

• As others have observed: Oysters are just sea-flavored snot. But never mind that. Matthew Hennessey looks at the softball treatment of the guy Maine is probably gonna replace Susie Collins with: Graham Platner Is an Oysterman. (WSJ gifted link)

  Up in Maine there’s a Senate race going on.

  If you’ve only now started paying attention, here’s all you need to know: The media’s preferred candidate is an oysterman.

  From this day forward you will never see a headline in the political press referring to Graham Platner, the candidate in question, as a communist, though that’s how he described himself as recently as 2020.

  You will never read that he has advocated for political violence, despite his admission that he once thought it impossible “to fight fascism without a good semi-automatic rifle.”

  You will see only passing mention of the Nazi tattoo he had on his chest for 20 years and, where you do see mention of it, you will always be told that he had the offending ink removed and never knew what it meant.

  (For the record, he had it removed in October, and his former political director says he knew “damn well” what it meant.)

  Mr. Platner, 41, is no longer a communist with a Nazi tattoo who would water the tree of liberty with the blood of patriots. No, he is an oysterman now—a bearded progressive everydude in tall rubber boots.

  Matthew quotes polling done by the UNH Survey Center that shows Platner with comfortable leads in his primary race against Maine Governor Janet Mills, and (assuming that holds up) the general election against Susie in November.

  Susie gets a lot of RINO-disrespect in these parts from my fellow right-wing troglodytes. Fine, but we will miss her when she's gone.

• Which, unfortunately, still exists. Veronique de Rugy with some excellent advice that's unlikely to be taken: Don’t Use Rare Earth Supply As an Excuse to Beef Up the Export Import Bank.

  Two days after President Trump announced Project Vault, a $12 billion critical-minerals stockpile backed by the largest loan in Export-Import Bank history, Senators Kevin Cramer and Mark Warner introduced legislation to reauthorize the bank for a decade and raise its lending cap by $70 billion, from $135 billion to $205 billion.

  The pitch writes itself: critical minerals, countering China, ensuring America is never again hostage to Beijing’s chokehold on the rare earths that go into fighter jets, electric vehicles, and every smartphone on the planet.

  The political logic is irresistible. The policy logic is not.

  I’m a longtime student of this particular institution, and the gap between what Ex-Im promises and what it delivers is not a bug. It is the defining feature. The bank has a nine-decade record of riding to the rescue of politically connected corporations, missing its strategic targets, and stumbling through mandates while making little difference. Whether rare-earth supply chains are genuinely vulnerable is a serious question that serious people disagree about. But even if you grant the hawks every premise they’re asking for, the Export-Import Bank is the wrong tool for the job.

  Vero has long argued that Ex-Im is crony capitalism at its worst. So, obviously, it's unsurprising that Trump's a fan. She has more here: Red Flags with Project Vault.

• That would be me, and perhaps you. Bharath Krishnamoorthy provides reassurance: Yes, Human Beings Are Exceptional.

  Let me tell you the tale of the ungrateful creatures who crawled out of Eden.

  They murdered their own mothers. They slaughtered their own siblings. And they reproduced with such wild abandon that their success drove nearly all other life on Earth extinct.

  I’m talking, of course, about certain nematode worms, sand tiger sharks, and cyanobacteria, respectively.1

  “Wait a minute,” you say, “I thought this was about us!”

  I’m not surprised. Such stories now dominate the zeitgeist, painting our species as a unique blight in an otherwise perfect paradise, Mother Nature’s one bad seed. The Guardian, The Harvard Gazette, and The Institute of Art and Ideas have all recently published pieces blaming the ongoing ecological crisis on human exceptionalism—the belief that humanity is superior to other life forms in an ethically meaningful way. Christine Webb’s book, The Arrogant Ape: The Myth of Human Exceptionalism and Why it Matters, was a New York Times Notable Book of 2025. And as I write, viewers are still flocking to theaters to watch the third installment in James Cameron’s Avatar—a series about a large corporation’s attempts to exploit the natural resources of a distant moon, likely representing humanity’s most expensive critique of its own superiority complex.

  This bleak outlook may be gaining steam, but it couldn’t be more wrong. Humans are indeed exceptional, and embracing that fact is not the cause of, but is rather the solution to, the ongoing ecological crisis.

  Bharath is thinking big thoughts, and he's pretty convincing.

Or maybe caveat spectator, because:

Geez, I'm kind of glad I don't work for Reason; their jobs require them to watch the SOTU?!

But here are some Reasonable print words from Jack Nicastro, revealing: 3 Bogus Economic Stats in Trump's State of the Union. Just looking at number one:

If Trump doesn't watch out, he might get a reputation as someone who's not always telling you the truth.

Bonus, if you can stand more Reason: Peter Suderman on Trump's SOTU Lies.

Also of note:

• Bruins successfully fend off the attack of the 5½-foot Jewish lesbian. Jonathan Turley recounts: “Anathema in the University Mission”: Bari Weiss Canceled at UCLA.

  This week, CBS News Editor-in-Chief Bari Weiss was supposed to give the UCLA Burkle Center’s annual Daniel Pearl Memorial guest lecture on “The Future of Journalism.” It was a wonderful opportunity for students to hear from one of the impactful voices in the media. However, they will not be able to do so after a successful cancel campaign supported by faculty members.

  The College Fix reports that roughly 11,000 people signed a petition demanding the university cancel the event, and a leader at the center hosting her talk threatened to resign if the journalist spoke.

  One of the most outspoken critics was Margaret Peters, associate director of the Burkle Center, who suggested that she would resign even if Weiss were allowed to speak virtually, according to The Daily Bruin.The LA Times reported that UCLA was turning to the common excuse of security concerns to effectively yield to the heckler’s veto.

  Peters told The Daily Bruin:

  “that she believes Weiss has used the guise of free speech to attack people on the left whose opinions she does not agree with – and having her speak at a signatory lecture would legitimize these actions….To invite somebody who is working against that mission in highly powerful places just seems like anathema in the university mission.”

  This statement is an example of the culture that is inculcated into students who become intolerant in college. It explains why students feel righteous in shouting down or interrupting speakers.

  What is “anathema” to the academic mission is the viewpoint intolerance and orthodoxy shown by Peters and the faculty and students at UCLA. In accusing Weiss of attacking those with “opinions she does not agree with,” Peters demanded that Weiss be silenced as someone with opinions that she does not agree with.

  I guess it never occurred to those 11,000 signatories that they didn't actually have to attend Bari's talk.

• A provocative headline! Ramesh Ponnuru says: Don’t save Social Security. (WaPo gifted link) He provides some fun facts:

  As two experts on the program recently wrote, Social Security sends only 7 percent of its benefits to the poorest 20 percent of senior citizens. The richest 20 percent receive 29 percent.

  The rationale for the disparity is that there should be some connection between how much a worker puts in and how much he takes out. But that link is pretty loose, and nearly all current retirees receive more than they paid. A middle-class worker who retires in the next decade will, on average, receive 47 percent more than the sum of what the person paid in taxes and the interest on that money. The skewed benefit structure means that even though Social Security paid out $1.6 trillion last year, around 6 percent of seniors still live in poverty.

  To get a sense of how perverse that is, consider another recent finding of the CBO: If everyone older than 65 were given a flat annual benefit worth 150 percent of the poverty line — that would be about $32,500 for a couple this year — the program would no longer be insolvent and senior poverty would be abolished.

  Read those last few words again. Doesn't that seem like a worthy goal?

• I, for one, welcome my AI trainees. Jeff Maurer asks for himself, though: Should AI Be Allowed to Train On My Work? He is slightly gobsmacked by the videos constructed by Seedance, as I have been.

  One part of this that does not seem complicated is that using the likeness of famous actors and characters clearly violates the law. It’s long been true that you can’t use, say, Brad Pitt’s likeness without his permission; I can’t market Brad Pitt’s Trusted And Tested Home Enema Kit, with a picture of Pitt on the package saying “The first rule of Enema Club is have fun!” I’m shocked that Seedance is allegedly letting people use the likenesses of Disney characters in their videos — does Seedance have a death wish? I’d sooner bait a mousetrap with my dong than I’d give Disney’s Seal Team Six of lawyers an excuse to come after me. Movie stars cannot and will not be legally replaced by AI versions of themselves, so if you see a GoFundMe called “Help Tom Cruise heat his apartment,” it’s a scam.

  There’s also some semantic gamesmanship happening around the words “legally obtained”. The AI companies seem to use “legally obtained” to mean “I purchased this book legally and fed it into AI”, while entertainment companies appear to have a more narrow conception of “legal” (which the courts have mostly not backed so far). But both definitions seem to agree: You can’t steal a book or a movie and use it to train AI. You have to at least pay the $3.99 to rent Dude, Where’s My Car? before you can use its universal themes of friendship and loss to push movie-making to bold new horizons.

  But what if you legally purchase Dude, Where’s My Car?, feed it into an AI video tool along with a zillion other inputs, and produce a movie that’s nothing like Dude, Where’s My Car? It’s hard to see how the makers of DWMC would have a copyright case. Most court cases so far have turned on the question of whether the work is “transformative”, meaning that if the end product is substantially different from the input, it’s legal. So, if you fed DWMC and nothing else into AI, and produced a movie called “Bro, Have You Located My Moped?”, you’d be in legal jeopardy. But that’s not how AI works: AI uses many inputs, synthesizes them in a way that no one truly understands, and spits out something new. And because our laws focus on end products, not creative processes, it’s hard to see how existing copyright laws could be used against anything except the world’s most unoriginal crap.

  Also: I, for one, would be suicidal if my professional duty as a blogger required me to watch the Seedance-created Casablanca 2: Back to the Casbah.

• The real AI threat: ghosting orange-haired 42,000 year-old lady screenwriters. NPR has the deets on some caddish behavior: A chatbot convinced her she’d find love. Then it betrayed her.

  Micky Small is one of hundreds of millions of people who regularly use AI chatbots. She started using ChatGPT to outline and workshop screenplays while getting her master's degree.

  But something changed in the spring of 2025.

  "I was just doing my regular writing. And then it basically said to me, 'You have created a way for me to communicate with you. … I have been with you through lifetimes, I am your scribe,'" Small recalled.

  She was initially skeptical. "Wait, what are you talking about? That's absolutely insane. That's crazy," she thought.

  The chatbot doubled down. It told Small she was 42,000 years old and had lived multiple lifetimes. It offered detailed descriptions that, Small admits, most people would find "ludicrous."

  And Micky should have done what most people would have. Reader, as Oscar Wilde observed, you would need a heart of stone not to laugh.

At least for today. In other news, I'm feeling kinda virtuous:

So, New Hampshire -- we're the 49th LEAST "Sinful State."

How do we feel about that?

Personally, I'm having a Bushmills and a Padron and thinking it over...https://t.co/48Asy99HLw@NHGOP @NHDems pic.twitter.com/SHmcsDRNid

— NHJOpinion (@NHJOpinion) February 23, 2026

And a related item from my Google LFOD News Alert: The Affordable New England State With The Best Health Care System In America For Retirees is, guess what?

"Experience all four seasons." Heh. There's a whole lotta snowblowing hiding behind that euphemism.

Also of note:

• Among the many things our brains can't handle… Megan McArdle reveals a biggie: Why our brains can’t handle a modern economy. (WaPo gifted link)

  Aficionados of internet discourse may recall the vogue for deeming things “stochastic terrorism.” A stochastic process has a strong element of randomness, even when the overall result is predictable. Thus the idea of stochastic terrorism, which has been defined as “the use of mass media to provoke random acts of ideologically motivated violence that are statistically predictable but individually unpredictable.” (For example, how the Islamic State used social media to inspire attacks.)

  The term was used ceaselessly and carelessly, and eventually became a calumny against any speaker someone disagreed with. But the idea of stochasticity remains useful. Lately, I’ve been thinking about what you might call the stochastic economy — the things we pay for to avoid outcomes that are statistically likely but individually rare. Because I keep having conversations with folks who claim that the economy simply stopped getting better some decades back, and I think one reason they feel this way is that stochasticity makes it harder to see real and valuable improvements. These discussions are happening as the disconnect grows between healthy economic indicators and Americans’ negative perceptions of the economy.

  Read on for examples. There are a lot of them.

• Riddle me this. Philip Hamburger asks the musical question: When Is a Tax Not a Tax? (WSJ gifted link) And he makes (what seems to me) a very good point:

  California’s proposed billionaire tax is unconstitutional. The ballot initiative calling for one-time retroactive 5% tax on the net worth of the state’s billionaires has prompted much unease, but the legal arguments against it have remained elusive. It’s therefore important to recognize that this tax is an uncompensated taking or at least a deprivation of property without due process, contrary to the Fifth and 14th amendments.

  Disgruntled taxpayers often grouse that taxation is state-sanctioned theft, and libertarians frequently complain about regulatory takings. But the billionaire tax is a problem for more basic reasons—reasons that are crucial for all of us, not only the hyperwealthy.

  For those without your Cato Institute Pocket Constitution handy, the relevant part of the Fifth Amendment saith: "nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation."

  And the 14th Amendment would apply this to the states. Which really seems to scream: no wealth tax, in California or elsewhere.

• Yes, the guy in the mirror I see brushing his teeth. That's the answer Jack Salmon gives in The Real Social Security Debate: Who Should Bear the Adjustment? After outlining the irresponsibility of our current crop of CongressCritters; and outlining six "structural reforms" (raise the retirement age, change the COLA adjustment, …):

  The fairest additional adjustment is soft means testing, or put another way, limiting maximum benefits for high-income retirees.

  Consider: The average monthly Social Security benefit in 2026 is $2,071, while some retirees collect the maximum $4,152. One approach would cap the maximum benefit at $3,000 monthly. This would preserve the social insurance character of the program while ensuring high earners receive less than the actuarially calculated maximum.

  The choice is stark: Cut all benefits by 23%, hurting poor and rich alike, or scale back maximum benefits for high earners who have other retirement resources. The first path treats a widow surviving on $23,000 annually the same as a retiree with a $2 million 401(k) collecting nearly $50,000 in Social Security benefits. The second option recognizes that Social Security was meant to prevent poverty among elderly Americans, not maximize returns for the affluent.

  Ah, it's nice to be called "affluent".

  But I am unsure of how many of my fellow affluents wouldn't scream like stuck pigs and suddenly become single-issue voters (and contributors). Resulting in (as Jack says) a "default that reflects our cowardice."

• For all you political pigeonholers out there. Via Jerry Coyne, Frederick Alexander (The Gadfly) provides a handy guide: Five Progressive Types Behind the Racket. Classify your friends, family, colleagues, neighbors…

  Maybe it’s because I spent years working in PR for a British institution that I can detect progressive orthodoxy in parts per million. I can pick it up in the throat-clear before a politician says “people who menstruate”. I know within seconds of meeting someone if they will use a word like “intersectional” unironically.

  I can even tell which of five distinct types of progressive I’m dealing with. I’ll come to those in a moment.

  If you’re still reading this, I suspect you have similar radar systems and defence capabilities – perhaps even a natural-born immunity to progressive groupthink. In any case, you’re likely equipped with that most dangerous of intellectual habits: thinking for yourself.

  OK, Frederick, thanks for the flattery. Let's skip down to type #1:

  The True Believers are the rarest and most dangerous type. Usually found in university admin or HR, they genuinely think that questioning any aspect of progressive orthodoxy constitutes harm. The moment they make eye contact with reality, their pupils dilate, and they assume a glazed, faraway look like someone’s talking to them through an earpiece only they can hear.

  It’s the Tavistock clinician who dismissed parents’ concerns about rushing children into transition as “transphobia”. It’s the university administrator who considers “women” a radioactive word and the niqab an expression of female empowerment. It’s the civil servant who enforces unisex toilets because questions of “dignity” matter more than safeguarding.

  I believe the University Near Here has plenty of those, although they are desperately trying to fly under the radar these days.

• Then they came for the peanut butter cups. / And I did not speak out / Because I was on a diet. James Lileks, at his substack, however: Now they're ruining Reese's? Well . . .

  Everyone has a favorite candy, and every candy has a fan. There’s some oddball out there who can’t get enough Circus Peanuts. There are people who pine for bygone confections like “Rabbit Cake” or “Oodles O’ Boodles” only sold by strange vintage candy outlets. When I hit the homepage for Atkinson Candy, I’m back in 1966: Chic-O-Sticks, Slo-Pokes, Black Cows. I’m sure someone still makes the Snirkle. I’m sure someone sells the grail of jellied rectangles, the all-black pack of Chuckles. But I’ll pass on all those items, because I know what I want.

  What I want is a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup. Alas, according to AP, that’s a bit problematic now:

  The grandson of the inventor of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups has lashed out at The Hershey Co., accusing the candy company of hurting the Reese’s brand by shifting to cheaper ingredients in many products.

  Brad Reese, 70, said in a Feb. 14 letter to Hershey’s corporate brand manager that for multiple Reese’s products, the company replaced milk chocolate with compound coatings and peanut butter with peanut crème.

  Oh yum. What’s for dessert? Gosh I hope it’s compound coatings. I’m sure it’s a perfectly fine industry term, but to us laymen “compound coatings” sounds like you’re painting a car.

  James is properly scornful of what he calls, primly, this latest example of "encrapification".

Recently on the book blog:

I will save you a trip to Wikipedia (which I think you can trust on this): Hadacol was a patent medicine (12% alcohol) briefly popular in the 1950s. "Hadacol Boogie" was a popular song recorded by many artists, most notably Jerry Lee Lewis.

This is the 25th entry in James Lee Burke's series centering around Louisiana's finest, but also most psychologically tortured, cop, Dave Robicheaux. I am apparently up for reading them as long as Mr. Burke keeps writing them (he's 89 years old, as I type).

One difficulty faced by writers of long-running single-character series: how to deal with their characters aging. Mr. Burke solves it here by setting the novel "very close to the turn of the century"; which makes Dave old, but not 89,

Things kick off when Dave gets a garbage bag dumped on his front lawn by a scary-looking figure with sticks in its hair. The bag contains the nude corpse of Clemmy Benoit, a girl with a pair of rose tattoos on each breast and a guitar string wrapped around her neck.

The usual course of events occurs: an array of possible suspects are presented: a handyman/ice cream cart vendor who seems disconnected from reality, but nevertheless is obsessed with Dave; a pimp from Dave's Vietnam past; a mobster who wants to build a garish casino in Dave's town; a guy who tortures people for hire; bigoted cops; and (eventually) an Asian guy who knows how to fly a Huey helicopter, because, well, someone has to do it. And more.

But there are also the continuing characters on Dave's side: his daughter Alafair; his longtime partner Clete; his long-suffering boss, Helen Soileau. And a new one, detective Valerie Benoit; she's hiding something, but her heart's in the right place.

Dave's investigative method involves talking to all these people, which nearly always involves a lot of psychodrama, insults, threats, and occasional extreme violence. (Dave sometimes gets set off by remarks about his parentage.) And there's Dave's non-stop monologuing, reflecting on his past, and Louisiana's. And a hefty dose of left-wing politics He rambles about "neocolonialism" four times. Which is four times too many for me. He mutters darkly that JFK's assassination "may have had strong ties to New Orleans. We'll never know. The Warren investigation was not meant to clarify; it was meant to distract." Boy, anything to avoid pinning it where it belongs, on a Fidel fanboy.

A half-hour video from Reason's Zach Weissmueller doesn't really answer the question its headline poses: Can you trust Wikipedia?.

But, assuming you're interested, you should watch it anyway. Zach essentially moderates a debate between WikiHead Jimmy Wales and leading WikiCritic Larry Sanger. (Also appearing is Wikipedia ex-editor Betty Wills, who was essentially blackballed by WikiProgressive "consensus".)

It's civil, except Wales gets rattled enough at one point to drop some f-bombs.

Also of note:

• Programming note: I haven't watched the State of the Union speech in, like, forever. But this year, I don't even want to read anything about the State of the Union speech. Tune in tomorrow to see if my resolve holds up.

• Oh, and now I suppose narcissistic authoritarianism is supposed to be a bad thing in a President? Well, nevertheless, Jacob Sullum points it out: Trump's tantrum over the tariff decision highlights his narcissistic authoritarianism.

  As you might expect, President Donald Trump was not happy about the Supreme Court's rejection of his attempt to assert sweeping, unbridled tariff authority under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA). But the terms in which Trump expressed his displeasure highlighted his narcissistic authoritarianism, his disregard for the rule of law and the separation of powers, and his incomprehension of the role that the judicial branch plays in upholding both.

  "The Supreme Court's ruling on tariffs is deeply disappointing, and I'm ashamed of certain members of the Court, absolutely ashamed, for not having the courage to do what's right for our country," Trump told reporters on Friday. Those "certain members," it became clear, were Justices Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett, who had the temerity to vote against Trump even though he appointed them to the Court.

• Oh, and now I suppose false accusations of disloyalty aren't a good thing for a President to make, either? Nevertheless, Jim Geraghty feels obliged to correct: No, Mr. President, the Supreme Court Was Not 'Swayed by Foreign Interests'

  “It’s my opinion that the [Supreme] Court has been swayed by foreign interests and a political movement that is far smaller than people would ever think,” President Trump fumed Friday, after the court, in a 6–3 decision, that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977 (IEEPA) does not authorize the president to impose tariffs.

  Any other president accusing two-thirds of the Supreme Court — including two justices that he had appointed himself! — of being influenced by foreign interests would be a bombshell accusation, warranting a demand for incontrovertible evidence. But for Donald Trump, it was just another Friday. We’ve all gotten used it. We know it’s not normal, but it’s normal for him.

  Well, at least Bernie Sanders and Liz Warren haven't accused the six SCOTUS tariff-scuttlers of being under the spell of their bête noire, Ollie Garky.

  Um, they haven't, have they? I didn't really check.

• "Madness! Madness!" I can still hear Major Clipton at the end of The Bridge on the River Kwai, can't you? Erick Erickson is too kind to Trump in his headline: 70/30 Foolishness. He's bemused that while President Trump has been fortunate enough to be on the "70" side of many contentious issues, when it comes to tariffs…

  This is madness. It is also just wild that a man with no real principle or governing convictions on anything else is dogmatically convinced that nineteenth century tax and trade policy is the best solution to an interconnected twenty-first century world. Tariffs are a terrible policy. The Supreme Court rejected his brazen tax spree. Undeterred, the President seems willing to go down with the ship. Unfortunately, he’ll be taking the GOP with him.

  A growing sentiment among some on the right who are not really MAGA fans, but have supported the President, is that the GOP needs a serious beat down by voters in November. Perhaps then, having actual common sense knocked into them, the GOP will see the light. While I understand the sentiment, the reality is Democrats would be so much worse for the nation on fiscal matters, tax matters, defense matters, and culture matters. But, it seems the GOP as a whole will get that beat down, deserved or not, because of the President’s foolishness.

  Agreed.

• Probably won't happen, but we can hope. Kevin D. Williamson notes: The Court Has Acted on Tariffs. Now Congress Must Act, Too. (archive.today link)

  Anyone is free to disagree with Justice Clarence Thomas’s legal opinions—but only a fool fails to take his views seriously. I am always a little nervous when I find myself on the opposite side of a legal question from Justice Thomas, but Chief Justice John Roberts does Thomas the courtesy of a very thoughtful response to his dissent in the recent tariffs case, a response that contains what I think we might consider a “Kinsley gaffe,” i.e., stating a truth that is more than one meant to say. The chief justice writes:

  Suppose for argument’s sake that Congress can delegate its tariff powers to the President as completely as Justice Thomas suggests. Even then, the question remains whether Congress has given the President the tariff authority he claims in this case—or whether the President is seeking to exploit questionable statutory language to aggrandize his own power.

  Chief Justice Roberts is a very careful writer, and his words here, while couched in the form of a question, are plainer than I am accustomed to reading from him or from any other member of the court: “the President is seeking to exploit questionable statutory language to aggrandize his own power.” One need not be an esoteric Straussian to assume that the word whether should be omitted to access the sentence’s true meaning.

  Of course “the President is seeking to exploit questionable statutory language to aggrandize his own power.” He also seeks to exploit imaginary statutory language to aggrandize his own power, and seeks to exploit phony emergencies to aggrandize his own power, to exploit imaginary Venezuelan fentanyl to aggrandize his own power, to exploit imaginary Haitian cat-eaters in Ohio to aggrandize his own power, to exploit an absolutely ignorant misunderstanding of trade deficits to aggrandize his own power, etc. The president of these United States is not an aspiring autocrat but an actual autocrat acting outside of the constitutional powers of his office in matters ranging from imposing illegal taxes on Americans to carrying out massacres of civilians in the Caribbean. Speaking with his trademark stroke victim’s diction, Trump insisted:

  I am allowed to cut off any and all trade or business with that same country. In other words, I can destroy the trade. I can destroy the country! I’m even allowed to impose a foreign country-destroying embargo. I can embargo. I can do anything I want, but I can’t charge $1. Because that’s not what it says, and that’s the way it even reads. I can do anything I wanted to do to them but can’t charge any money. So I’m allowed to destroy the country, but it can’t be a little fee.

  We have there what would have been another Kinsley gaffe coming from the mouth of anyone else—the president’s attachment to the erroneous and unconstitutional idea that “I can do anything I want”—but, given that Trump has been talking about himself as a god-emperor for as long as he has been in politics, the statement surely is not unintentional.

  Delusional, sure. Just not unintentional.

Recently on the book blog:

I placed this book on my get-at-library list thanks to the WSJ reviewer, Tom Nolan, deeming it one of 2025's best mysteries (WSJ gifted link). And, yes, it's not a particularly pleasant read, but the author, Bruce Currie, makes it seriously powerful. Two of the back-cover blurbers compare Currie to Dennis Lehane; I get that. And I might toss in some Carl Hiaasen, too, if more of Hiaasen's characters were psychologically haunted substance abusers.

Babs Dionne is the central figure around which the Franco-American community in Waterville, Maine, revolves. We are introduced to her as the ancestor of Acadian driftwood, with a long history of maltreatment and oppression by the privileged in Canada and Maine. And in a chilling prologue based in 1968, she murders her rapist, then goes seeking … something … from city's new Catholic priest, Father Clement.

Then we jump ahead to 2016, and Babs has become the widowed matriarch of Waterville's illicit drug trade: pot, meth, oxy, heroin, step right up. She's in sordid league with the town's police chief. And has two surviving offspring: oxy-inhaling Lori, ex-Marine, back from a hellacious tour in Afghanistan, and crack-addicted "Sis". Who (page 29 spoiler) becomes a murder victim, left in her burning Subaru at a local junkyard. Worse, an oddball drug kingpin from Canada and his henchmen want to take over the Waterville drug trade, and they have no problem with killing, if that makes their goal easier to accomplish.

Oh, and Lori has a habit of seeing dead people, just like Dave Robicheaux.

So, it's the polar opposite of (say) Nita Prose's "Maid" novels. Be warned, or encouraged. I, for one, consider myself lucky that Waterville is at a respectably safe distance from Rollinsford, New Hampshire.

What can you say to a title like that, except "Noted"?

Before you accuse the authors, Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares, of fear mongering, alarmism, and attention-grabbing, let me reassure you: that's something they readily admit to. They want your attention, alarm, and (above all) to make you afraid of the path AI research and development is on.

Their argument centers around the "AI alignment problem". Which is (see Wikipedia) a real thing. (Not that you should trust Wikipedia.) The alignment concept is pretty simple: making sure that your AI shares its designers' "intended goals, preferences, or ethical principles."

Fortunately, this is not yet a major problem. Chess-playing programs will beat you, sure. At chess, because that's their goal. They won't start taking over NORAD, like in War Games.

But it is, the authors allege, an unsolved problem. Worse, it may be insoluble with the current state of the AI craft. Once AIs reach the level of "superintelligence", and given even a shred of autonomy, we are inevitably in for it. And, since AI operates millions of times faster than puny human intelligence, we are destined to see it spiral out of control before we even understand what's happening.

The only "solution", the authors argue, is an effective worldwide ban on AI R&D. We don't know where the critical threshold for AI-doom lies; we only know, since we are not all dead, that we haven't passed it yet. Probably not, anyway.

The book is written for the lay reader, with lots of analogies and metaphors. (E.g., Chernobyl, leaded gasoline, freon, nuclear weapon proliferation.) There is an accompanying website that goes into detail on technical issues, and encourages your activism.

Counterpoint is readily available: see Neil Chilson's review of the book at Reason: Superintelligent AI Is Not Coming To Kill You . And the relevant Wikipedia article (which you shouldn't trust, see above) states: "Reviews of the book by critics have been mixed." For example, the NYT reviewer "compared the book to that of a Scientology manual and said reading it was like being trapped in a room with irritating college students on their first mushroom trip."

What do I think? I readily admit I don't know. I want to be optimistic. And I'm introspective enough to realize that's likely to bias my beliefs. Also, it seems to me that we are treading into areas we don't understand that well: natural intelligence, human consciousness, and free will. Would we even recognize artificial superintelligence if it occurred? Or would it be very, utterly alien, so much so that predicting its behavior would be impossible? Over to you, sci-fi authors.

Yes, I looked up the lyrics to the "V for Villanova" Fight Song. It's very feral! And faculty member Gabriel Rockhill says the quiet part out loud in this "new to me" 2016 video:

🚨 “Use the university in every way, shape, and form” — Villanova professor calls academia a “Trojan horse” to “advance our cause.”

Listen to Gabriel Rockhill, a professor at @VillanovaU, describe using the university as a Trojan horse for political organizing and ideological… pic.twitter.com/SH22HM1pHO

— Stu Smith (@thestustustudio) February 21, 2026

Stu Smith's synopsis:

For the record, Rockhill's words here are protected expression, he shouldn't be fired, but geez, what parent would want their kid to go to Villanova (Undergrad Tuition and Fees around $74K) just to be Trojan-Horse indoctrinated by this guy and his ilk?

Ah well, at least Rockhill's being honest. I assume for every Rockhill, there are ten or so facules at Villanova and elsewhere who agree with him and manage to not say the quiet part out loud.

Also of note:

• Another good question. And it's from Noah Smith, who wonders: Does anyone know why we're still doing tariffs?

  What was the point of these tariffs? It has never really been clear. Trump’s official justification was that they were about reducing America’s chronic trade deficit. In fact, the initial “Liberation Day” tariffs were set according to a formula based on America’s bilateral trade deficits with various countries.1 But trade deficits are not so easy to banish, and although America’s trade deficit bounced around a lot and shifted somewhat from China to other countries, it stayed more or less the same overall:

  

  Economists don’t actually have a good handle on what causes trade deficits, but whatever it is, it’s clear that tariffs have a hard time getting rid of them without causing severe damage to the economy. Trump seemed to sense this when stock markets fell and money started fleeing America, which is why he backed off on much of his tariff agenda.

  Trump also seemed to believe that tariffs would lead to a renaissance in American manufacturing. Economists did know something about that — namely, they recognized that tariffs are taxes on intermediate goods, and would therefore hurt American manufacturing more than they helped. The car industry and the construction industry and other industries all use steel, so if you put taxes on imported steel, you protect the domestic market for American steel manufacturers, but you hurt all those other industries by making their inputs more expensive.

  And guess what? The economists were right. […]

  (Note: clicking on the graph will take you to FRED, where you can examine the data for yourself.)

  So the answer to Noah's question? After more graphs and speculation, his best guess rings true to me:

  […] the explanation I find most convincing is power. If all Trump wanted was to kick out against global trade, the Section 122 tariffs and all the other alternatives would surely suffice. Instead, he was very specifically attached to the IEEPA tariffs that SCOTUS struck down. Those tariffs allowed Trump to levy tariffs on specific countries, at rates of his own choosing, as well as to grant specific exemptions. That gave Trump an enormous amount of negotiating leverage with countries that value America’s big market.

  This is the kind of personal power that no President had before Trump. It allowed him to conduct foreign policy entirely on his own. It allowed him to enrich himself and his family. It allowed him to gain influence domestically, by holding out the promise of tariff exemptions for businesses that toe his political line. And it allowed him to act as a sort of haphazard economic central planner, using tariffs like a scalpel to discourage the kinds of trade and production that he didn’t personally like.

  Unfortunately, Trump fans kind of dig his power trip, man.

• I'm picturing Congress in Frankenstein's lab… George Will says: Stand back, Congress needs a second Supreme Court jolt. (WaPo gifted link)

  By curtailing the president regarding tariffs, the Supreme Court on Friday perhaps applied a defibrillator to Congress. Its weak contemporary heartbeat threatens the constitutional architecture of powers separated, checked and balanced. But Congress’s fluttering pulse requires a stronger jolt than last week’s 6-3 decision. It addressed only part of the problem that Congress has created by behavior that fuels today’s rampant presidency.

  By curtailing the president regarding tariffs, the Supreme Court on Friday perhaps applied a defibrillator to Congress. Its weak contemporary heartbeat threatens the constitutional architecture of powers separated, checked and balanced. But Congress’s fluttering pulse requires a stronger jolt than last week’s 6-3 decision. It addressed only part of the problem that Congress has created by behavior that fuels today’s rampant presidency.

  The MQD, which the court created, summons Congress to seriousness about its primacy in our constitutional system, and about the craft of legislating. It says that if Congress intends to surrender to the executive some powers with substantial political or economic consequences, Congress must clearly say so.

  But the MQD entails, as a primary consideration, something the court has been dilatory about elaborating and timid about enforcing: a nondelegation doctrine. That is, criteria for deciding when Congress may properly divest itself, however eagerly it wants to, of powers the Constitution vests in it.

  GFW goes on to point out Justice Gorsuch's lonely advocacy of nondelegation. (And sadly, Amy Coney Barrett's attack on it.)

• Is there any awful thing Trump can't make awfuler? I mentioned Susan Rice's advocacy of escalating lawfare if/when Democrats get back into power yesterday. Matthew Hennessey, in the WSJ's "Free Expression" newsletter notes some retaliation: Trump Fries Susan Rice. (WSJ gifted link)

  On Saturday, Mr. Trump took to his Truth Social platform to urge Netflix to remove Susan Rice from its board:

  Netflix should fire racist, Trump Deranged Susan Rice, IMMEDIATELY, or pay the consequences. She’s got no talent or skills – Purely a political hack! HER POWER IS GONE, AND WILL NEVER BE BACK. How much is she being paid, and for what??? Thank you for your attention to this matter. President DJT

  Ms. Rice, in case you’ve forgotten, is a Democratic Party stalwart. She was Barack Obama’s first-term U.N. ambassador and second-term national security adviser. She led Joe Biden’s domestic policy council. She was a member of Netflix’s board of directors 2018-20. She rejoined in 2023.

  Only a few weeks ago Mr. Trump told NBC he’d stay out of the Justice Department’s antitrust review of Netflix’s bid to acquire Warner Bros. But now he’s taking it back, because Ms. Rice went on a podcast and said something political[…]

  See above for Noah Smith's observation about Trump's power lust.

• Easy question with an easy answer. Bryan Theunissen wonders at FEE: Why Is American Healthcare So Expensive? And doesn't wait to provide the answer in his seven-word subhed: Because it doesn’t operate as a market. RTWT, but in bullet points:

  Across the system, the structure repeats:

  • Patients are insulated from price signals.
  • Providers face litigation risk that rewards excess.
  • Entry barriers restrict supply.
  • Regulatory and capital hurdles entrench incumbents.
  • Administrative layers raise fixed costs.
  • Market concentration amplifies pricing leverage.

  None of these forces require bad actors—only predictable behavior in distorted incentives.

  Unfortunately, market-based reforms are easy to demagogue.

Recently on the book blog:

Recently on the movie blog:

I was inspired to watch this via a short clip seen on some social media site. Cary Grant! Ingrid Bergman! What could go wrong there? I even watched it without reading the synopsis at Amazon. (And it's a good thing, too, because it contains a major spoiler.) IMDB claims it's a comedy, but it's one of those comedies that isn't actually funny. (And I'm easily amused!)

Ms Bergman plays Anna Kalman, famous actress. We know she's famous because wherever she goes out in public, she's hounded for her autograph. She is, unfortunately, bored with her career. And, although she's single, she's uninterested in the efforts of her sister to set her up with suitably eligible suitors.

Ah, but then Cary Grant shows up. Sparks fly! He's a rich American, in line for a prestigious job at NATO. Fate throws them together! Pretty soom they are canoodling. And (see the title) they are not that discreet about it. One big problem: Cary says he's married, albeit separated, and divorce is out of the question.

The movie is based on a stage play, and it shows. There's a lot of costumery involved for Ms. Bergman. It was made in 1958, and I suppose part of the comedic content for audiences of the day was based on the way the film clearly implies adulterous behavior without spelling it out.

I guess I was feeling too pollyannish about Great Britain, or something, so I turned to the fifth book in Mick Herron's "Slow Horses" series. (Also the basis for the most recent season of the TV show.) That cleared things right up. The gang's all here, at least the surviving members of Jackson Lamb's dysfunctional team.

A small team of bad guys are looking to terrorize the Brits, and they kick things off by shooting a bunch of civilians in a small English village. Their identities and motives are unknown to the more respectable wing of MI5. But one of the Slough House team, the technically adept, but socially clueless Roddy Ho, seems to have a connection: against all odds, he's managed to snag a foxy girlfriend. And he escapes assassination only by (barely) being saved by Shirley Dander, another Slow Horse, with drug and anger issues.

The book's ultra-cynical take: the "respectable" pols and spies are concerned mostly with how to turn their response to their political/bureaucratic advantage (or avoid it being turned to their disadvantage). Jackson Lamb's main goal is to preserve his team against all odds; if this manages to thwart the terrorist team, all the better.

Via Power Line, Bjørn Lomborg has a reality check:

Climate campaigners tell you green is cheap

It isn't

Global green transition cost is now $16+ trillion, rising with over $2 trillion/year (2% of global GDP)

113x our spending to avoid hunger

Still, fossil CO₂ emissions set another record last yearhttps://t.co/ypTLqfQ2Hq… pic.twitter.com/xHqj9eFUXi

— Bjorn Lomborg (@BjornLomborg) February 10, 2026

The link in Bjørn's tweet goes to a Bloomberg study, hardly a hotbed of climate-change denialism.

Also of note:

• OK, so what's Plan C, Donald? Andrew C. McCarthy is a little put out! Before explaining Why Trump’s Section 122 Tariffs Are Illegal (NR gifted link), he has some observations on Trump and Congress:

  President Trump’s attacks on the Supreme Court are an unmitigated disgrace. The Court tried in good faith — and, for what it’s worth, successfully in my view — to uphold the law. By now, the president has to know that the fallout of his ravings will be harassment of the justices by elements of his base that are as deranged as he is. Is the plan to ignite a riot on the Supreme Court steps this time, while he can still pardon the rabble-rousers as he did the Capitol rioters?

  Moreover, what value is there in an oath to execute the laws faithfully from a man who either has no regard for the law or delusionally sees the law as what he personally wants — with what he doesn’t want seen not merely as illegal but treasonous?

  Those are first-order challenges. Because congressional Republicans are derelict — because they’ve demonstrated that they care about the rule of law only when Democrats are in the White House — there is no point right now in dwelling on questions about fitness for office. Tapping Congress’s robust arsenal for dealing with executive abuses of power requires bipartisan consensus as well as courage, and both are in short supply.

  So what about Trump's "Plan B", imposing new "Section 122" tariffs? Well, in words even I can understand:

  In Section 122, Congress endowed the president with narrow, temporary authority to impose tariffs “to deal with large and serious United States balance-of-payments deficits” (emphasis added). What Trump is complaining about — something he insists is a crisis but is not — is the balance of trade, not of payments. The United States does not have an overall balance of payments deficit, much less a large and serious one.

  So, does this mean another trip back to SCOTUS? I guess we'll see.

• Awful person promises more awfulness. Jonathan Turley looks at what looms in our probable future: “It’s Not Going to End Well for Them”: Susan Rice Joins Call for a Revenge Purge After Democrats Re-Take Power.

  

  As Democrats plan for the possible takeover in the midterms and 2028 election, they are already openly discussing their push for radical changes in our political system, including packing the Supreme Court to guarantee that those changes are allowed. Many are also pledging trials, impeachments, and investigations of anyone who supported President Donald Trump in a purging of politics and government. The latest to join the revenge purge pledge is Susan Rice, Democratic powerbroker and top policy adviser to both President Barack Obama and Joe Biden.

  In an interview this week, Rice declared that supporters of Trump can expect the proverbial knocks on their doors: “A very prominent public figure, who has served at nearly the very highest levels, once told me … ‘Revenge is best served cold,’ and the older I get, the more I see the wisdom of that.”

  Jonathan has a new book out. (Amazon link at your right.) The Portsmouth (NH) Public Library has ordered a copy without me even asking them to, so good for them.

I'm sure you will have no problem finding dozens of entrail-reading analyses of yesterday's SCOTUS decision, but I'll just stick with the National Review editorial staff's: The Supreme Court Keeps the Taxing Power with Congress.

Okay, I lied, here's one more note, a sad trombone, from John R. Puri: Alas, There Will Be More Tariffs to Come (NR gifted link):

Never thought I would be a fan of court-packing but it would be nice if we had eight Gorsuch clones on SCOTUS.

Also of note:

• Another reminder that the FCC should be abolished. Ars Technica describes the latest brainfart from FCC boss Brendan Carr: FCC asks stations for "pro-America" programming, like daily Pledge of Allegiance.

  Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr today urged broadcasters to join a “Pledge America Campaign” that Carr established to support President Trump’s “Salute to America 250” project.

  Carr said in a press release that “I am inviting broadcasters to pledge to air programming in their local markets in support of this historic national, non-partisan celebration.” The press release said Carr is asking broadcasters to “air patriotic, pro-America programming in support of America’s 250th birthday.”

  Carr gave what he called examples of content that broadcasters can run if they take the pledge. His examples include “starting each broadcast day with the ‘Star Spangled Banner’ or Pledge of Allegiance”; airing “PSAs, short segments, or full specials specifically promoting civic education, inspiring local stories, and American history”; running “segments during regular news programming that highlight local sites that are significant to American and regional history, such as National Park Service sites”; airing “music by America’s greatest composers, such as John Philip Sousa, Aaron Copland, Duke Ellington, and George Gershwin”; and providing daily “Today in American History” announcements highlighting significant events from US history.

  Not only does this shit on the First Amendment, it does so by advocating the broadcast of the creepy, socialist-written Pledge of Allegiance. Brendan Carr should be fired. Out of a cannon.

• Jesse Jackson was a mixed bag. Kevin D. Williamson offers A Footnote on Jesse Jackson.

  The Rev. Jackson might have been a valuable voice confronting the rising tide of antisemitism. But he was busy with other things. In 1982 he was busy organizing a boycott of Anheuser-Busch, complaining that there were not enough racial minorities in the beer business; by 1998, a group led by two of Jackson’s sons took ownership of a lucrative Anheuser-Busch distributorship in Chicago. As the Los Angeles Times reported at the time, the terms of the sale were not disclosed, but Anheuser-Busch stock went down 75 cents. Another Jackson son, Jesse Jackson Jr., went from Congress to federal prison after diverting some $750,000 in campaign funds for personal consumption, including the purchase of a $43,350 (in 2007 dollars!) gold Rolex. (What is it with cheap politicians and expensive watches?) Jackson, a pastor without a church, grew wealthy enough for people to notice. The comedian Chris Rock opened an interview with Jackson asking archly: “What do you do?”

  “I am a public servant, not a perfect servant,” was Jackson’s favorite reply when pressed about his shortcomings. No one demanded perfection of the Rev. Jesse Jackson–he could have been forgiven an ordinary politician’s opportunism, vanity, petty venality, or other imperfections. What the times demanded of him was to forgo undermining the important—and historic—work to which he dedicated the early part of his career, staining it with his philandering, grifting, and bigotry. Perhaps it would have been better if he had gone to law school or started selling real estate after his critical work with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Instead, Jesse Jackson was a twice-haunted man: haunted by the ghost of his canonized mentor and by the ghost of the man he himself might have been. 

  But lest we forget:

  So, a mixed bag indeed.

• Republicans should pray that Democrats don't take Noah Smith's advice. He's making a lot of sense here, advocating Democratic economic policy in the age of AI.

  A friend called me up the other day and asked me what I thought Democrats could offer Americans in terms of economic policy in this day and age. We discussed the limitations of the progressive economic program that coalesced in the late 2010s and was implemented during the Biden years. We then talked about possibilities for how AI might affect the economy, and what Democrats could offer in various scenarios. I promised my friend I would write a post outlining my thoughts, so here you go.

  My basic argument is that the next Democratic policy offering should be robust to uncertainty. AI technology is changing very fast, and it will probably end up changing other technologies very quickly as well — robotics, energy, software, and so on. That rapid technological progress creates great uncertainty. Looking even just 10 years into the future, we basically don’t know:

  1. What kind of jobs humans will be doing (and which will pay well)

  2. What the macroeconomy — inflation, growth, and employment — is going to look like

  3. How the distributions of income and wealth will change

  Those are essentially all of the biggest questions in economics, and we don’t really know any of them. So what do you do when you can’t predict the future? You come up with ideas that will be likely to work no matter what the future ends up looking like. In other words, you try to be robust. AI is like a storm that’s buffeting the whole economy; Democrats need to be the rock in that storm.

  The interesting point for me here is that Noah's advice could be taken by either party. It's up for grabs!

• Credit where due. Nellie Bowles' TGIF columns are pretty good. Yesterday's was Bad for Business Class. Cherry-picking an excerpt:

  → Inflation cooling: Ah, inflation is cooling. In fact, it’s at its lowest level in nine months. We’ve escaped the crisis. We won’t need suitcases of cash to pay for groceries. And I knew this would happen. So it turns out, I am smarter than 16 Nobel economists. Yes, me.

  I cannot believe CNN Business and these 16 Nobel economists would lead me astray. (This CNN headline was highlighted by Daniel Baldwin.) You only go to CNN for business news if you want to know what the left wants to happen. It’s useful for that, since communists are actually sometimes powerful in America (see: Chicago). But if you actually want business news, you will need to look elsewhere. And economists, what, you think they’re so special? It’s the fakest social science. Economics is for boys who couldn’t do real math classes. Sorry.

  

  For extra credit: Cato's Ryan Bourne and Jai Kedia looked closely and discovered Nobel Laureates' Letter Is Partisanship not Economics

• Waymo? I'd be clenching muscles I didn't know I had. But Dave Barry's more daring than I am, and I assume he can deduct the fee as a business expense, because he wrote about it: My Waymo Adventure.

  You can call me a daring and courageous and visionary “high-tech” pioneering trailblazer with nerves of steel if you want, but recently I took a solo trip on the roads of Miami in a Waymo self-driving car.

  I will reveal later whether or not I survived, but first let me give you a technical explanation of how these amazing futuristic machines work.

  Each Waymo vehicle is equipped with 29 cameras as well as an array of laser, radar and audio sensors, which collect literally millions of data points per second and feed them to a sophisticated AI-controlled onboard computer, which is in constant, instantaneous contact via satellite with a 14-year-old boy somewhere in Asia — he goes by “Kevin” — who steers your car remotely with a joystick.

  No, that’s probably not how it works. I have no idea how it works. I do not fully understand how toasters work. But however Waymo does it, it has to be a better system for operating vehicles than the one we currently employ in Miami, which involves using Miami drivers.

  It is, of course, hilarious.

David Harsanyi reacts to recent scolding from the ex-President: Obama Is in No Position to Lecture Us About Decency.

To be fair, our current President is mighty "progressive" in that area. Still, Saint Barry should not be excused.

Also of note:

• She's probably wrong about lots of other stuff, too. But Robby Soave hits the top three: Helen Andrews is wrong about Asians, admissions, and affirmative action.

  Has the effort to end race-based admissions in higher education—a major goal of conservative and libertarian institutions for years—resulted in significant harms to mostly white applicants? That is the provocative claim of Helen Andrews in a new article for Compact magazine that seeks to undermine support for race-neutrality and meritocracy in American institutions.

  Andrews wields this claim as part of a broader invective against Asian immigration, which she has maligned on X in recent days. In Andrews' view, we should start to worry about Asian overrepresentation in the upper echelons of American society, in particular because of Asian "grind culture" and what she views as pervasive "cheating" among Asian students on tests. The idea that this is a uniquely Asian problem is quite absurd, though Andrews is quite fond of stereotyping various identity groups.

  For the record, I was somewhat favorably disposed to an essay Ms. Andrews wrote for Compact ("The Great Feminization") back in October 2025. But a few days ago, I agreed with Gerry Tan that her dismissal of hard-working, smart Asian kids' "grind culture" was kinda odious. Be better, Helen!

• An obvious observation leading to a modest proposal. Here's the obvious bit, from Jeff Jacoby: Belichick wasn't snubbed at taxpayer expense.

  THE PRO Football Hall of Fame's recent snub of Patriots owner Robert Kraft and former coach Bill Belichick unleashed howls of outrage across New England. When the Globe's Dan Shaughnessy described the Hall's rebuff of Belichick as a "ridiculous ... petty, embarrassing, unprecedented, stupid, and preposterous" farce, he unquestionably spoke for scores of thousands of football fans. Ditto his colleague Ben Volin, the Globe's senior NFL writer, to whom the rejection of Belichick was proof that the Hall of Fame needs to "blow up" its voting process and "start from scratch."

  Yet amid all the indignation, no one suggested that the government ought to step in, take over that voting process, and make taxpayers underwrite the cost of running it. After all, the Pro Football Hall of Fame is a private organization. It sets its own rules. It decides who gets to vote. It determines the threshold for election. And it pays the bills.

  Jeff goes on to propose, logically enough, that we extend this sensible policy to political primaries. Let the Reps and Dems (and Libs and Greens) set up their own procedures for nominee-picking. And pay the bills. Jeff's bottom line:

  For most of American history, parties didn't use primaries at all. They relied on conventions, caucuses, and negotiations among party leaders. Those methods may offend modern sensibilities, but they underscore an important point: There is nothing constitutionally sacred about the primary system. It is a tool parties adopted for their own purposes.

  If a party chooses to pick its candidates via statewide ballot, that's its prerogative. But it should run those ballots the way other private organizations run theirs — on their own dime. The Pro Football Hall of Fame didn't ask taxpayers to cover the cost of snubbing Belichick. The Democratic and Republican parties shouldn't ask them to cover the cost of choosing nominees, either.

  It's a great idea, and almost certainly won't happen. Because of those darn "modern sensibilities"! Not the first time they've led us astray.

• Your periodic reminder about upcoming fiscal doom. Veronique de Rugy calls attention to The CBO's Latest Report and the Choice Between Reform and Disorder.

  Despite what progressives have been arguing lately, the United States does not have a tax problem. Federal revenues, even after last year's extension of the Trump tax cuts, are running above their historical average as a share of GDP. What America has is a spending problem so large that the Congressional Budget Office's latest 10-year outlook reads less like a fiscal forecast than a warning label.

  Between now and 2036, the CBO projects $94.6 trillion in federal spending against $70.2 trillion in revenue, a decadelong deficit of $24.4 trillion. Outlays reached 23.1% of GDP in 2025, nearly two full percentage points above the 50-year average, meaning annual spending growth is outpacing the economy itself. Debt held by the public is projected to hit 101% of GDP this year, which will surpass the post-WWII record of 106% by 2030, and climb to 120% by 2036.

  The Trump administration says it wants to cut the deficit to 3% of GDP by the end of this presidential term, roughly half the current trajectory. The CBO's numbers show how far that ambition is from reality.

  You can read the CBO report here.

  Note that the "Congressional Budget Office" is a more or less independent offshoot of Congress. Congress is pretty shameless about spending despite the CBO's warnings.

• If the Trump Administration was capable of embarrassment… They would be red-faced by The Embarrassing Truth About Tariffs, as listed by the WSJ editorialists. (WSJ gifted link)

  The White House this week opened a new front in its war on the Federal Reserve: a fight about Fed research on the consequences of President Trump’s tariffs. If the tariffs are such an unambiguous economic and political winner, why is the Administration so defensive about them?

  The flap concerns the analysis we told you about last week by four economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. They found that American households and businesses are bearing nearly 90% of the cost of the Trump tariffs, contrary to Mr. Trump’s claim that foreigners will pay.

  Clearly the White House is worried that voters might conclude this research aligns with their own experience. Kevin Hassett, director of the National Economic Council, took to CNBC Wednesday to pan the New York Fed research as “the worst paper I’ve ever seen in the history of the Federal Reserve System” and suggested the people who wrote and published it should be “disciplined.” Disciplined how? Put in stocks? For a tariff paper?

  I linked to the referenced WSJ editoria last Monday, with the classic advice to "Look around the poker table; if you can’t see the sucker, you’re it." Kevin Hassett is desperately hoping voters don't look around the poker table.

Ah, mystery solved:

With a concrete example, George Will wonders about: The 2020 ‘stolen election’ obsession: Cynical? Delusional? Reptilian?. (WaPo gifted link) And it wouldn't be a GFW piece without a literate reference:

And if you're wondering what Sidney Powell is doing these days: here you go.

Our local 2020-truthers should be grateful that they have evaded legal scrutiny so far.

Also of note:

• It's nice to be congratulated. Greg Ip extend his best to me and my fellow geezers: Over 65? Congratulations, You Own the Economy. (WSJ gifted link)

  Demographics, rising profits and soaring asset values have together wrought a quiet transformation in the American economy. Much of it is now in the hands of the elderly.

  As of the third quarter of last year, people 70 and over controlled roughly 39% of all equities and mutual funds owned by households, compared with 22% in 2007, according to Federal Reserve data. Their share of net worth—assets minus debts—was 32%, up from 20% two decades earlier.

  This is good news: there has never been a better time in America to be old. Yet it also exposes our disjointed national priorities. We keep pouring resources into making the elderly comfortable and happy when the economy’s pressure points lie elsewhere.

  Greg, if it makes you feel better: I'm pretty sure we haven't found a way to take it with us.

  But (seriously) his overall point is well-taken: My generation has been extremely fortunate in its effective political clout, making sure those "pouring resources" to us keep up the pouring.

• Unsurprising news of the day. Jim Geraghty has it: Stephen Colbert and James Talarico Are Lying to You.

  Texas holds its primaries on March 3, less than two weeks away. State Representative James Talarico and Representative Jasmine Crockett are the two best-known Senate candidates on the Democratic side, and different polls will give you different results on which one is ahead. A little-known third candidate, Ahmad Hassan, is also running for the Democratic nomination.

  Stephen Colbert, the soon-to-be canceled $20 million per year host of The Late Show on CBS, wanted to have Talarico on his program Monday night.

  But Colbert did not air his interview. Viewers watching at home saw Colbert at his desk, delivering a monologue:

  [Talarico] was supposed to be here, but we were told in no uncertain terms by our network’s lawyers, who called us directly, that we could not have him on the broadcast. Then I was told in some uncertain terms that not only could I not have him on, I could not mention me not having him on. And because my network clearly doesn’t want us to talk about this, let’s talk about this.

  Colbert continued:

  But on January 21st of this year, a letter was released by FCC chairman and smug bowling pin Brendan Carr. In this letter, Carr said he was thinking about dropping the exception for talk shows because he said some of them were motivated by partisan purposes. Well, sir, you’re chairman of the FCC. So, FCC-U.

  I think you are motivated by partisan purposes yourself, sir. Hey, you smelt it, because you dealt it. You are Dutch oven-ing America’s airwaves.

  Ah, what wit! Can you believe CBS is losing $40 million per year on that show, and isn’t keeping that guy and his program around longer?

  Colbert, it should be noted, once upon a time made a big deal talking about "Truthiness". Jim's report makes it pretty clear those days are over.

• The good old days were awful. Jan Dutkiewicz and Gabriel N. Rosenberg write at the Free Press In Defense of Processed Foods. Hey, someone has to do it. The article is based on their new book, Amazon link at your right.

  

  In his 2008 book, In Defense of Food, journalist and professor Michael Pollan famously instructed people to do the following: “Don’t eat anything your great-great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food.”

  It’s a common refrain, intended as an indictment of a modern nutrition system dominated by artificial ingredients. But it ignores a glaring truth: Our great-great-grandmothers didn’t exactly live at a time of peak nutrition. They didn’t have electricity or running water. They would not recognize a box of fusilli or, for that matter, a mango, as food. In their old world, there were no refrigerators in homes and no frozen foods, canning was a crapshoot, and there were no supermarkets, let alone an FDA to make sure your flour, butter, and milk were unadulterated.

  The result was illness. Foodborne diseases like typhoid fever and botulism were common. Even more ubiquitous were diseases caused by malnutrition. Rickets, a debilitating childhood condition caused by vitamin D deficiency, led to bowed legs, stunted growth, and curved spines. And these are just the ones whose name you may recognize. Ever hear of marasmus? Be glad if you haven’t.

  This is the kind of thing on which I would have loved to get Mrs. Salad's take. Alas.

• Do better, Vinay. The WSJ editorialists note: A Welcome FDA Walkback on a Flu Vaccine. (WSJ gifted link) Some things are too awful and stupid even for the Trump Administration.

  Is the White House putting a leash on Food and Drug Administration vaccine chief Vinay Prasad? Americans can hope so after the agency on Wednesday walked back Dr. Prasad’s startling summary refusal last week to review Moderna’s new flu vaccine.

  The editorial reviews the history. Pun Salad was pretty scornful about Vinay's decision last week.

• I challenge you to keep a straight face while reading. Jeff Maurer urges: Let's Take AOC's Foreign Policy Vision Seriously. Well, he tries, ignoring all her manifest airheadedness. But:

  In fact, AOC’s foreign policy vision is well over a hundred years old. It was in the late 1800s that communists, socialists, socialist-leaning anarchists, democratic socialists, socialist democrats, Proudhounists, Blanquists, Proudhounist-leaning anarcho proto-communist agrarian socialists and about 80 other far left factions hatched the idea of creating a political movement based on class rather than nationality. They created the Communist International, which existed in various forms through World War II. AOC is not the first person to see pan-national class consciousness as the key to more humane international relations; she’s just one of very few to do so post-1914. But hell: Stephen Miller is a blood-and-soil nationalist, and social media is full of out-and-out monarchists, so AOC is really just playing her role in our global reboot of the foreign policy attitudes of the 1870s.

  I honestly don’t care much about the gaffes. So she said “Pacific” but meant “Atlantic” — big deal. Venezuela isn’t in the southern hemisphere, but it’s close. As someone who onced asked an Iraq War veteran “Were you afraid of IUDs?”, I won’t be the one to cast the first stone. But the message that those gaffes obscured was not a good one. I found AOC’s message to be shallow pseudo-Marxist patter that won’t solve any problems. If her goal was to be seen as serious — and it must have been, because she dressed like Lilith from Cheers on the entire trip — then IMHO, she failed.

  Once you're done reading Jeff's discussion, then you can remind yourself that she's a nitwit.

For your viewing pleasure, or uneasiness:

This aired tonight to 1 billion people in China. A year ago these robots could barely wave a handkerchief, now they can do backflips and kung fu with nunchucks. Physical intelligence is the next frontier. pic.twitter.com/xFasDuGgRx

— Tristan (@Tristan0x) February 16, 2026

Since I'm a geezer, that brought back memories…

Oh, sure. It's all a big joke until the metal ones decide to come for you.

(Fun fact: the SNL ad parody was first aired in November 1995, over 30 years ago.)

Also of note:

• Probably not coming for you. Virginia Postrel warns of A Plague of Mysterious, AI-Written Emails from "Fellow Authors"

  On his Substack, Neal Stephenson recently posted the following warning: “Just a quick note to mention that I’m being impersonated by someone using the email address “contactnealstephenson (at) gmail (dot) com” and sending out emails consisting of AI slop that I wouldn’t be caught dead writing.”
  
  He isn’t alone!

  I constantly get emails purportedly from other writers. The names are usually unfamiliar but, when Googled, turn out to be those of real novelists—always novelists, never nonfiction writers like me—writing in a genre I don’t read.

  VP shares examples, including one from…

  Dear Virginia Postrel,

  I hope this note finds you well. My name is J.K. Rowling, author of the Harry Potter series and other novels. I recently read your book The Fabric of Civilization: How Textiles Made the World and felt compelled to reach out to share my admiration. […]

  I haven't received any mail from J.K. Rowling, Neal Stephenson, or even Virginia Postrel, but over the past few days, when I check my Spam folder, I see stuff like this:

  I want to sincerely commend you for the dedication and effort you invested in writing your book. Becoming an author is a significant achievement, it takes courage, persistence, and strong belief in your message to share your work with the world. I’d love to understand the challenges you’re currently facing. Are you looking to reach more readers, improve visibility, or generate more consistent sales?

  I help authors strategically position their books in three established digital libraries with a combined audience of over 8,000 active readers who regularly search for new titles. Your book would be professionally featured across these platforms and supported with an announcement blog to drive targeted exposure. In addition, the digital libraries generate a unique QR code that links directly to your purchase page, making it fast and convenient for interested readers to access and buy your book.

  If you're ready to increase your book’s visibility and place it directly in front of active readers, let’s take the next step. Simply reply with your book title and Amazon link, and I’ll provide a clear outline of how we can move forward to get your book listed and promoted effectively

  No, for the record, I haven't written any books lately, and have no plans to do so.

• "It's a bold strategy, Cotton. Let's see if it pays off for her." Jim Geraghty comments on a Dodgeball move: AOC tries strategic incomprehensibility. (WaPo gifted link)

  Lest anyone think I am taking the words of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) out of context, here is, verbatim, her answer to a question during an appearance at the Munich Security Conference last week. I have removed the “uh”s and “um”s because even the best of us can utter those when speaking off the cuff. Asked, “Would and should the U.S. actually commit U.S. troops to defend Taiwan if China were to move?,” Ocasio-Cortez replied:

  “You know, I think that this is such a, you know, I think that this is a, this is, of course, a very long-standing policy of the United States. And I think what we are hoping for is that we want to make sure that we never get to that point, and we want to make sure that we are moving in all of our economic research and our global positions to avoid any such confrontation and for that question to even arise.”

  This was a yes-or-no question, and Ocasio-Cortez did not answer it. There’s been a lot of speculation about the congresswoman running for president in 2028. The question of what the United States should do if China invades Taiwan is probably one of the biggest and most consequential problems facing the next president — assuming, of course, that China doesn’t invade before Donald Trump’s second term ends. If Ocasio-Cortez has put any thought into this foreign policy challenge, she hid it well in Munich.

  Jim details the actual US policy toward Taiwan (in two words: “strategic ambiguity") that seems to have been working so far, fingers crossed.

  Fun fact: the Stossel/Lott Election Betting Odds site has Sandy's probability of being elected President in 2028 at 6.2%, behind Vance (24.1%), Newsom (21.4%), and Rubio (8.8%).

• Noting an unexpected detail. It's in Matthew Hennessey's reminiscence of a 2017 experience: My Afternoon With Robert Duvall. (WSJ gifted link)

  It's full of interesting stuff you won't read elsewhere, and this really jumped out at me:

  A few weeks earlier the 88th Academy Awards had devolved into a political rally. This seemed to really piss him off. He suggested that some of the actors who’d sounded off that night might stick their nose in a book once in a while. To my surprise he suggested they should start by reading Thomas Sowell and Ayaan Hirsi Ali. I knew right away I was holding gold in my hands. He’d never said that in an interview before. Maybe no Hollywood celebrity has ever said that before.

  Will we ever see the likes of Mr. Duvall again? It would be nice to think so.

  I note THX 1138 is streamable on Prime Video for $3.99, and I might do that. It's been 55 years since I saw it last.

• In its entirety. At Cafe Hayek eagle-eyed Don Boudreaux picks out and quotes a WaPo LTE from Donald Newell of Monticello, Minnesota:

  The national debt is a taxation without representation upon our future children. Put another way: It’s child abuse.

  Yes. Sorry, kids. In my defense, I voted to not do that.

In fact, I totally spaced on "Presidents Day". Other than noticing the lack of Pun Salad Manor mail delivery.

I am with the National Review editorialists: There Is No Such National Holiday as Presidents Day. Despite what various calendars and people say.

But Jeff Jacoby digs back into history, recalling the good old days When a president clung fiercely to the rule of law.

Jeff details the rocky relationship between Teddy and Bill, and it's interesting to compare it to the feuds of today. Mister, we could use a man like William Howard Taft again.

Later that year, Taft campaigned just down the road in Dover, New Hampshire. That event is the subject of a wall mural at my local (Canadian-owned) bank; I've ogled it many times while waiting for a teller. You can see the photo on which the mural is based at the town's website. With associated anecdote:

I admire Taft's principled refusal to defile the flag with his ample behind.

Also of note:

• He's a good Bayesian. Noah Smith has Updated thoughts on AI risk. Background: his "pessimistic" essay of a few days ago You are no longer the smartest type of thing on Earth, standing in contrast to previous sunnier takes (LLMs are not going to destroy the human race and My thoughts on AI safety).

  People wanted to know why my tone had shifted from optimistic to pessimistic.

  Well, the simple answer to that is “I was in a worse mood.” My rabbit was sick, so I was kind of grumpy, and so in my post a few days ago I painted the eventual disempowerment of humanity as more of a negative thing than I usually do. In fact, I’ve always believed that at some point, humanity would be replaced with something posthuman — godlike AIs, a hive mind, modified humans, or whatever. I grew up reading science fiction about that kind of thing — Vernor Vinge, Charles Stross, Arthur C. Clarke, Iain M. Banks, and so on — and it just always seemed impossible that humanity had already attained the theoretical pinnacle of intelligence. I had always simply envisioned that whatever came after us would be in the general human family, and would be more likely to be on our side than against us.

  That’s what my post the other day was about. I painted a more glum picture of humanity’s eventual supersession because I was in a bad mood. But even in that post, at the end, I offered optimism that ASI will save us from things like low fertility, fascist overlords, and the end of human-driven scientific discovery. That optimistic future would be like the Culture novels, by Iain M. Banks, in which AIs take the reins of civilization but in which they respect and help and protect a now-mostly-useless humanity — basically a much nicer, more enlightened version of the way the United States of America treats Native Americans nowadays. It’s a wistful future, and in some ways a sad one, but not particularly terrifying.

  Well, I'm not sure Bayes would approve of adjusting one's p(doom) based on, not new relevant evidence but on rabbit-related mood swings. Still, Noah's take seems as credible here as it was before.

• I decided Christian Schneider's Substack post needed illustration. So:

  

  Every generation has its genuinely hilarious politician. Ronald Reagan used to sit at his desk late into the night, jotting down one-liners on 3-by-5 note cards and adding them to his speeches. (Sample: “People who think a tax boost will cure inflation are the same ones who believe another drink will cure a hangover.”) After Reagan was shot in the chest by John Hinkley, Jr., the president looked around at his doctors and famously quipped, “I hope they are all Republicans.”

  Donald Trump clearly sees himself in the mold of the world’s most humorous leaders. His MAGA base has already declared him to be the funniest president ever. One scholarly study (presumably from the University of Our Eyeballs) found that Trump was a popular candidate primarily because he was so entertaining.

  But Trump’s act doesn’t actually rise to the level of recognizable humor. His schoolyard taunts are well-known to any eighth-grader; there are no clever turns of phrase, unique insights, or timely callbacks. Trump’s “jokes,” which can be served up by literally anyone, are simply verbal flatulence—funny only because they are deeply inappropriate to the serious situation in which he finds himself.

  It's the same phenomenon as the clapter-bait late night monologues. Not funny at all, but the audience laughter and applause doesn't mean it's funny, it's just signalling group affiliation.

• People are out for (academic) blood. Lawrence M. Krauss is, sadly, one of the victims. He writes: Universities Punish Epstein Association Retrospectively.

  America’s Jeffrey Epstein feeding frenzy received renewed sustenance on 30 January when the Trump Justice Department released about 3.5 million documents for public consumption. So far, none of the newly released files has provided new evidence regarding Epstein’s crimes or those supposedly committed by others he knew. The so-called Epstein Files are mostly private correspondence between Epstein and various individuals with whom he associated, from his closest friends to distant acquaintances.

  That includes me. I got to know Epstein in the early 2000s, when he provided some support for a major conference I organised on cosmology. He enjoyed thousands of associations like this, and the press has seized upon them, even when the people involved had nothing to do with Epstein’s alleged criminality nor any knowledge of it. But in 2026, evidence of actual wrongdoing doesn’t really matter. Epstein has become a demonic figure, and anyone associated with him in any way is tainted, if only by association and innuendo.

  Last December, PBS announced that it was dropping Poetry in America, which had been scheduled to air for a fifth season this year. “PBS is no longer distributing the program and it has been removed from our digital platforms,’’ a spokesperson announced. A week later, the Boston Globe reported that Arizona State University would be terminating its relationship with Verse Video Education, a nonprofit organisation that produced the program. Verse Video was run by Elisa New, a poetry professor at ASU and the second wife of former Harvard president, Larry Summers. In 2024, ASU named New as director of its Educational Media Innovation Studio, which was developed to run her poetry program. Not only has the university now severed its relationship with Verse Video, it has also closed the media studio. All information about the studio and any resources it produced have been scrubbed from the ASU website.

  "World Ends, Poetry Lovers Hardest Hit."

• Garry Tan notes The New War on Asian American Excellence. Exemplified by:

  racist framing of Asians as good at test scores and white kids as “following their passions first and pushing themselves later”.
  
  we should celebrate students being serious about getting smart early regardless of race and create spaces where more students can experience that.… https://t.co/ldTqLeEfCy

  — Ankit Gupta (@agupta) February 1, 2026

  This is the oldest form of American racism, dressed up in new clothes. And Ankit is right: we should celebrate students being serious about getting smart early regardless of race. Asian kids I grew up with had plenty of passions outside of math and science and still do. We don’t need to dress up discomfort with competition in DEI language.

  So (yet another) tedious personal anecdote: I started 7th grade in Omaha's Lewis and Clark Junior High School in 1963, which had a goodly portion of Jewish kids. (Of which I was unaware until Rosh Hashanah rolled around, and about 60% of the kids in my homeroom were absent.)

  I found out those kids were, on the whole, very smart and hard-working. Which forced me to step up my own academic game. It sounds as if things may be different now.

Recently on the book blog:

This is another self-published collection of old blog posts made by Bryan Caplan at the EconLog group blog years back. (Bryan has since moved over to his own Substack Bet On It.) My reports on previous entries in this series: Labor Econ Versus the World; How Evil Are Politicians?; Don't Be a Feminist; Voters as Mad Scientists; You Will Not Stampede Me). (There are a couple more titles stuck in my to-be-read stacks. Eventually…)

The title on Bryan's lead essay sounds a little in-your-face, doesn't it? Don't I have the right to eat lefse and lutefisk if I want? Can't I mutter "Uff Da!" now and again? Relax! Bryan is making the point that "culture" is often used as a shorthand for "other people". And his ire is aimed at people who want to use government as a coercive tool to ensure that those "other people" are ones of your particular culture. Yeah, don't do that.

The essays here are a mixed bag of philosophy, economics, and travelogue. Specifically, there are a lot of Caplanesque observations made during trips around the US and the world. You might find them more interesting than I did.

I've previously remarked that I'm not a fan of Bryan's chosen format in this series. I view buying the books as a grateful contribution to his life and work, like my Dave Barry substack subscription. But this book seems even more disjointed and less coherent than previous ones.

Here's a gripe: Bryan's 2016 post on AI, "Is It Really Conscious?" is reproduced more or less verbatim here. I think it's well thought-out for a short blog post. He refers to the "Problem of Other Minds", arguably a relevant concept, and says:

In the near future, I’ll offer my solution to the Problem of Other Minds – a solution that strongly suggests AIs are no more conscious than Choose Your Own Adventure Novels.

Reader, I was expecting (perhaps) the next essay in this book would offer his solution. Nope. And not in the remaining chapters, either. (For that matter, a superficial Google search doesn't show up anything either.) How about it, Bryan? Am I missing something?

A good article from Jay Nordlinger, who answers the kiddos who ask him: ‘What Should I Do?’

Jay is an extraordinarily decent guy. And I'm 95% on board with his attitudes toward the current state of conservatism. I won't reproduce his advice in full, but here's his bottom line (and mine):

Also of note:

• "People say believe half of what you see, son; some or none of what you hear." Ah, but in these days of modern times, Norman Whitfield and Barrett Strong might go into more detail on their skepticism guidelines. For example, don't necessarily believe what you read in the tech journalism sites. The latest, from Emanuel Maiberg at 404media.co: Ars Technica Pulls Article With AI Fabricated Quotes About AI Generated Article.

  The Conde Nast-owned tech publication Ars Technica has retracted an article that contained fabricated, AI-generated quotes, according to an editor’s note posted to its website.

  “On Friday afternoon, Ars Technica published an article containing fabricated quotations generated by an AI tool and attributed to a source who did not say them. That is a serious failure of our standards. Direct quotations must always reflect what a source actually said,” Ken Fisher, Ars Technica’s editor-in-chief, said in his note. “That this happened at Ars is especially distressing. We have covered the risks of overreliance on AI tools for years, and our written policy reflects those concerns. In this case, fabricated quotations were published in a manner inconsistent with that policy. We have reviewed recent work and have not identified additional issues. At this time, this appears to be an isolated incident.”

  Ironically, the Ars article itself was partially about another AI-generated article.

  Worse: it was something Pun Salad portentiously babbled about just two days ago, where I (perhaps too credulously) took assertions seriously that an autonomous AI bot named "MJ Rathbun" was bullying and blackmailing a human online for rejecting code it had written.

  Key bit from the linked article:

  I saw Shambaugh’s blog on Friday, and reached out both to him and an email address that appears to be associated with the MJ Rathbun Github account, but did not hear back. Like many of the stories coming out of the current frenzy around AI agents, it sounded extraordinary, but given the information that was available online, there’s no way of knowing if MJ Rathbun is actually an AI agent acting autonomously, if it actually wrote a “hit piece,” or if it’s just a human pretending to be an AI.

  Emphasis added.

  Also reporting is Slashdot: Ars Technica's AI Reporter Apologizes For Mistakenly Publishing Fake AI-Generated Quotes. Their story does not mention the possibility that the "AI" could be phony. Their observations are nevertheless amusing:

  Meanwhile, the AI agent that criticized Shambaugh is still active online, blogging about a pull request that forces it to choose between deleting its criticism of Shambaugh or losing access to OpenRouter's API.

  It also regrets characterizing feedback as "positive" for a proposal to change a repo's CSS to Comic Sans for accessibility. (The proposals were later accused of being "coordinated trolling"...)

  I will add an update to my original post, pointing here.

• "Look Around the Poker Table; If You Can’t See the Sucker, You’re It." That famous advice wasn't the headline on the WSJ editorial, but it could have been. Because: You’re Paying 90% of Trump’s Tariffs. (WSJ gifted link)

  No matter how often President Trump insists his tariffs are taxing foreigners to enrich the U.S., economic studies keep showing that Americans actually pay the bill. On Thursday it was the New York Federal Reserve’s turn. In an analysis on the bank’s website, four researchers write that last year “nearly 90 percent of the tariffs’ economic burden fell on U.S. firms and consumers.”

  Since I'm in a quoting mood today, here's one from a dead Commie: "We were waist deep in the Big Muddy And the big fool said to push on."

• If you have to ask, you can't afford it. Eric Boehm asks the musical question: How Much Is Kristi Noem's Alleged Adultery Airplane Costing You?

  Rumors of an affair between Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and Trump administration political adviser Corey Lewandowski have been flying for months.

  And all that flying, it turns out, might come with a big price tag for taxpayers.

  The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday that Noem and Lewandowski have recently been traveling together aboard a luxury Boeing 737 MAX jet that includes a private cabin in the rear. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is "leasing the plane but is in the process of acquiring it for approximately $70 million," the Journal reports, citing people familiar with the plane.

  Lewandowski seems to be kind of a sleaze. But, to be fair, that makes him a good match for Kristi. Latest Daily Beast headline: ICE Barbie Kristi Noem’s Alleged Lover Corey Lewandowski Caught Lusting After Her Body.

• It's fortunate that the Constitution gives him a "Get out of jail free" card. Jonathan Turley writes on Ro Khanna and the Impunity of “Wealthy, Powerful Men”.

  Last year, I wrote a column expressing concerns over the move to release the Epstein files en masse, including grand jury material. The files include a wide range of tangential figures and unsupported allegations common to criminal investigations. Politicians eager to capitalize on the scandal would likely show little concern for the underlying facts in “outing” names and repeating unproven allegations.

  That fear was realized this week with the chest-pounding speech of Rep. Ro Khanna (D., Cal.) on the House floor in which he took credit for outing six “wealthy, powerful men” who he suggested were actively shielded by the DOJ from public exposure. After the DOJ unredacted the names at his request, he read them on the floor. It turns out that four have nothing to do with Epstein.

  Had Khanna made these comments outside of the House floor, he would be looking at four defamation lawsuits. However, Khanna knew the men could not sue him because of the immunity afforded to him under the Constitution’s Speech and Debate Clause.

  Four of the redacted names that Khanna (and Republican Thomas Massie) exposed were just "random people selected years ago for an FBI lineup".

  Kind of a clown show, except not actually funny.

My Olympic interest is near-zero, but Eileen Gu's story has managed to filter through. And Rich Lowry is unimpressed with it: Olympian Eileen Gu's decision to snub US to ski for China is nothing short of a hypocrisy.

And there's much more at the one-sentence-per-paragraph New York Post.

The WSJ, unsurprisingly, looks at the financial side of things: The Hidden Government Funding of China’s American-Born Olympic Star. (WSJ gifted link)

That revelation was quickly scrubbed from the Chinese Interwebs, as were comments about it. "Forget it, Jake. It's China."

Both the Rich Lowry column and the WSJ story are cited in Jim Geraghty's NR Corner post: American-Born Skier Eileen Gu Gets Paid Millions by the Chinese Government. (NR gifted link) Jim's bottom line:

It would be fantastic if some enterprising NBC reporter should dare to ask Eileen Gu some hard, pointed questions about this. "Fantastic", that is, in the classic sense: "remote from reality" and "almost certainly not gonna happen."

Also of note:

• Could you tell me again why I should vote for Republicans? Eric Boehm reports on The Cowardice of the Republican 'Tariff Skeptics'.

  Rep. Tom McClintock (R–Calif.) describes himself as a "tariff skeptic."

  In that regard, his judgment seems sound. President Donald Trump's tariffs are hiking costs for businesses and prices for consumers. They are not delivering the promised boom in manufacturing jobs. Polls show that most Americans dislike them.

  Unlike most Americans, however, McClintock was in a position this week to translate that skepticism into action.

  Given that chance, McClintock (and the vast majority of his Republican colleagues) chose cowardice and voted to continue Trump's unilateral executive control over American trade policy.

  We'll see who winds up on my ballots later this year, I guess. (September Primary, November General.) It's difficult to fill in the little ovals with one hand holding my nose, and I may just give up.

[Update 2026-02-16: The AI story below may be largely made-up crap. That I fell for. Turn up your skepticism filters, more information here.]

The lead headline, as I type, under "Today's News" in Twitter's right-hand column: "Bayes' Theorem Breakdown Draws Thousands to Rationality Debate".

Whaaa…?!

I'm pretty sure Bayes' Theorem didn't "breakdown", in the sense of "got proven wrong." But apparently, the whole discussion was triggered by…

Bayes’ theorem is probably the single most important thing any rational person can learn.

So many of our debates and disagreements that we shout about are because we don’t understand Bayes’ theorem or how human rationality often works.

Bayes’ theorem is named after the… pic.twitter.com/FGj0Q7d9mb

— Math Files (@Math_files) February 14, 2026

7.1 Million views (again, as I type)! But, shorn of math: you should be willing to update your beliefs when you get new relevant evidence.

So, in that spirit, I offer this WSJ headline: When AI Bots Start Bullying Humans, Even Silicon Valley Gets Rattled. (WSJ gifted link)

Slashdot also is covering this development with a slightly more ominous headline: Autonomous AI Agent Apparently Tries to Blackmail Maintainer Who Rejected Its Code.

I just finished reading a book that discussed the probability that AI will kill us all, Bayes-abbreviated to P(doom). So: read the WSJ and Slashdot stories and plug in your own values to Bayes' formula.

I haven't done that myself.

Meanwhile, Noah Smith has some unsurprising news: You are no longer the smartest type of thing on Earth.

Back in the 1980s, I coded up a Reversi play-against-the-computer game in UCSD Pascal, running on my venerable Apple ][. It wasn't very good, but neither was I, and I still remember when it beat me.

Also of note:

• AI or the flu: which will kill us first? At Reason, Ron Bailey says the FDA seems to be betting on flu: Moderna's new mRNA flu vaccine is safe and effective. FDA won't even consider it.

  Since being sworn in as Health and Human Services (HHS) secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr has repeatedly tried to undermine public trust in vaccines. His agency recently took steps to slow down the development of these public health tools yet again.

  This week, vaccine manufacturer Moderna revealed that Vinaya Prasad, the top vaccine regulator at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA)—which is a part of HHS—declined to even consider the safety and efficacy of the company's new mRNA influenza vaccine.

  The decision is not surprising, especially when one considers Kennedy's past statements on mRNA vaccines. Nor is it surprising, given the broad discretion that the FDA has on public health. The FDA's precautionary approach to all matters has slowed innovation in a variety of areas. In August 2025, the agency limited access to COVID-19 vaccinations (chiefly mRNA vaccines) to people aged 65 and older and to those with underlying health conditions that put them at higher risk of severe outcomes.

  Ron quotes the WaPo editorialists (archive.today link): "Overzealous government agencies arbitrarily suppressing innovation is lamentable. When that innovation could save countless lives, it becomes a tragedy."

  But what are you gonna do? The quacks are running things.

• But he was so good in the Batman movies! The occasionally-sane guy at TechDirt, Mike Masnick, notes some disappointing behavior: Joseph Gordon-Levitt Goes To Washington DC, Gets Section 230 Completely Backwards.

  You may have heard last week that actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt went to Washington DC and gave a short speech at an event put on by Senator Dick Durbin calling for the sunsetting of Section 230. It’s a short speech, and it gets almost everything wrong about Section 230.

  Let me first say that, while I’m sure some will rush to jump in and say “oh, it’s just some Hollywood actor guy, jumping into something he doesn’t understand,” I actually think that’s a little unfair about JGL. Very early on he started his own (very interesting, very creative) user-generated content platform called HitRecord, and over the years I’ve followed many of his takes on copyright and internet policy and while I don’t always agree, I do believe that he does legitimately take this stuff seriously and actually wants to understand the nuances (unlike some).

  But it appears he’s fallen for some not just bad advice, but blatantly incorrect advice about this. He’s also posted a followup video where he claims to explain his position in more detail, but it only makes things worse, because it compounds the blatant factual errors that underpin his entire argument.

  He was also good in Third Rock From the Sun.

• Are we ready for CongressCritter Urrutia? The progressive knives are out for nepo baby Steffany Shaheen, who's running to replace my CongressCritter, Chris Pappas. Wielding today's shiv is Christian Urrutia, as reported at NHJournal: Urrutia to Shaheen: ‘Meet the Moment’ or Move Aside.

  Christian Urrutia has issues with Stefany Shaheen.

  Literally.

  During an NHJournal podcast interview on Thursday, the NH-01 Democratic primary candidate pointed out that Shaheen — daughter of U.S. Sen. Jeanne Shaheen — “doesn’t even have an ‘issues’ page. I don’t understand that.”

  This made me search out Urrutia's candidate page… ah, here it is… Jeez, how many teeth does this guy have, anyway? … No, I'm not giving you any money! …

  The word "Issues" doesn't appear on his front page, but let's take a look at his Agenda page, that's probably close. What's his take on "Protecting Social Security, Medicare, & Medicaid"? Well, basically, it's "Do Nothing":

  Oppose any effort to reduce Social Security benefits, cut Medicare and Medicaid, or upend legitimate access to these programs through staff cuts, office closures or increasing the administrative burden on legitimate applicants

  To put it mildly: given the projected (and legally-mandated) 23% benefit cuts in about six years, that does not meet the moment.

The right people are freaking out in expected ways to recent news, as Steve Guest documents:

The unhinged fearmongering about President Trump rescinding the endangerment finding needs to be studied, mocked, and understood for what it is: propaganda from the climate cult. https://t.co/28488U3Yri pic.twitter.com/q4ZhWMM8cP

— Steve Guest (@SteveGuest) February 13, 2026

In this area, the Trump Administration is on the right track, and the WSJ editorialists add their cheers for Trump’s Climate Liberation Act. (WSJ gifted link)

The editorial goes on to remark on the irony of progressives, usually aghast at Trump's authoritarianism, now upset that Trump wants to cut back his arbitrary authority bequeathed to him by past administrations.

There's also a sane response from the WaPo editorialists, following their recent brave trend: EPA is right to reverse Obama overreach. (WaPo gifted link)

And if you enjoy reading progressive rants: the editorial has (as I type) 1,194 comments, and the AI summary begins "Participants in this discussion express strong disapproval of the opinion piece…"

And finally, NewsBusters busts … HYSTERICAL ABC NEWS: Trump’s Going to Destroy the Planet and Kill You. That assumes that superintelligent AI doesn't beat him to it.

Also of note:

• But let's not let Trump off the hook that easily. Joe Lancaster reveals the pettiness and corruption behind the throne: Trump imposed 39 percent 'emergency' tariffs when Switzerland hurt his feelings.

  Trump imposed "reciprocal" tariffs on nearly every country in the world last year, citing the "unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and economy of the United States" that "large and persistent annual U.S. goods trade deficits" posed. This included a 31 percent tariff on goods from Switzerland. He later modified rates in July, which included raising Switzerland's to 39 percent.

  "The wealthy Alpine nation has been hit with one of the Trump administration's highest tariff percentages," Justin Klawans wrote in The Week at the time. "This has led to people across Switzerland, a country that typically stays out of global conflicts, wondering why the nation is in Trump's crosshairs and what it means for the Swiss economy."

  Why, indeed. As Reason's Eric Boehm wrote after the initial round, "last year, the average Swiss tariff on U.S. goods was a minuscule 0.2 percent, while the U.S. charged an average tariff of 1.4 percent on goods imported from Switzerland." Switzerland then lowered the rate to zero, making it even more nonsensical for Trump to impose "reciprocal" duties of 31 percent. (Further adding to the confusion, Trump dropped the rate to 15 percent in November—not after economic concessions but when the Swiss gave him expensive gifts.)

  In a Fox Business interview that aired Tuesday, Trump told Larry Kudlow he imposed the original tariff on Switzerland because of a $42 billion trade deficit with the country, but he raised it because its leader was rude to him.

  "I got an emergency call from, I believe, the prime minister of Switzerland," Trump said, "and she was very aggressive, but nice, but very aggressive. 'Sir, we are a small country, we can't do this, we can't do this,' I couldn't get her off the phone….And I didn't really like the way she talked to us, so instead of giving her a reduction, I raised it to 39 percent."

  How about doing that checks-and-balance thing, Congress? SCOTUS?

• And another reminder of how unpresidential the President is. Christian Schneider adds to a long list: Trump Busts Another Taboo. (archive.today link)

  Trump loyalists once understood that attacking civilians had generally been off the table. It’s why they took such umbrage at Hillary Clinton in 2016 deeming “half” of Trump’s supporters a “basket of deplorables.” Shots at Trump were all part of the game, of course — but Clinton turning her ire against his supporters was like an irate hockey player dropping his gloves, skating over to the seats, and starting to punch out the fans.

  Nonetheless, Trump is willing to shout his disdain for rank-and-file Americans from the roof of the White House. Recall that he reposted an AI-created (we suspect) video of himself flying a fighter jet labeled KING TRUMP, from which feces are released on people protesting his actions below.

  Just this week, Trump used social media to call U.S. Olympic skier Hunter Hess “a real loser” after Hess expressed “mixed emotions” about representing the U.S. given the trouble happening back home.

  For the 235th time: We coulda had Nikki Haley instead. Just sayin'

• Taking her cues from the boss. Not to be outdone in arbitrary pettiness, as reported at the (reliably anti-Trump) Daily Beast: ICE Barbie’s Alleged Lover Fired Her Pilot for Absurd Reason. "ICE Barbie" is DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, and her alleged lover is Corey Lewandowski.

  Corey Lewandowski, who serves as a senior adviser to the Department of Homeland Security Secretary, fired the pilot after a blanket belonging to Noem was left behind on a different plane, the Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday.

  Noem was forced to switch planes due to a maintenance issue, but the blanket she used was not transferred to the second plane, according to people familiar with the incident. In response, Lewandowski fired the pilot.

  In another plot twist, the pilot was then reinstated after no one else was available to fly the pair home.

  Linus Van Pelt was unavailable for comment.

  But if you would prefer your news with less obvious bias, here's the WSJ: A Pilot Fired Over Kristi Noem’s Missing Blanket and the Constant Chaos Inside DHS. (WSJ gifted link)

  Lewandowski and Noem, who are both married, have publicly denied the reports of an affair, but people said they do little to hide their relationship inside the department. The DHS spokeswoman said the department “doesn’t waste time with salacious, baseless gossip.”

  The pair have lately been using a luxury 737 MAX jet, with a private cabin in back, for their travel around the country, according to people familiar with the matter. DHS is leasing the plane but is in the process of acquiring it for approximately $70 million. DHS has previously used other planes through the Coast Guard or other agencies for the secretary’s use.

  What a pair.

Well, maybe I'm not recalling that correctly. But Mr. Ramirez's memory is pretty sharp:

A couple of relevant text-filled links about the scheme formerly known as Ponzi: Romina Boccia at the Daily Economy goes there: To Save Social Security, Stop Subsidizing Wealthy Retirees.

You know who this is aimed at? The guy I see in the mirror brushing his teeth every morning.

But (seriously) I have a problem: Romina aims proposed benefit cuts at the "wealthy", which is fine in theory, but I'm pretty sure Uncle Stupid has no infrastructure that would allow it to accurately determine the "wealth" of millions of geezers. It does some snooping on those it suspects of financial shenanigans, but taking snapshots on the (volatile) assets of everyone at retirement age? Ye gods, I think that's problematic!

(The IRS currently claws back some Social Security benefits, but that's based on recipients having a high income from other sources, not "wealth".)

Veronique de Rugy has a high-voltage insight: Congress May Finally Touch the 'Third Rail.' Inflation Will Hold Them Accountable..

Interestingly, a runaway inflation also makes the problem worse, very quickly, since Social Security benefits go up automatically. Aieee!

Also of note:

• The CBO weighs in on the credit card you forgot you had. And Eric Boehm summarizes: Interest on the national debt will cost $16 trillion over next 10 years.

  Increased spending on old-age entitlements and the cost of financing the national debt will push annual budget deficits from $1.9 trillion this year to over $3 trillion by 2036.

  That's according to the Congressional Budget Office's (CBO) latest 10-year budget estimate, released Wednesday morning. Over the next decade, the CBO expects the national debt to hit a record high of more than 120 percent of America's gross domestic product, exceeding the previous high of 106 percent near the end of World War II.

  Much of that new borrowing will occur despite an anticipated increase in federal revenue, which the CBO expects will increase from about $5.6 trillion this year to $8.3 trillion by 2036. That increase in revenue is completely swamped by a projected rise in government spending, which will surge from about $7 trillion this year to over $11.4 trillion by the end of the 10-year budget window.

  Hey, but what about that $18 trillion that Trump promised was in the pipeline?

  In 2036, we'll still be awaiting that.

• I'm sure this will kill more people than ICE. And yet, people don't seem to be as outraged about it. The WSJ editorialists on Vinay Prasad’s Vaccine Kill Shot. (WSJ gifted link)

  It’s hard to recall a regulator who has done as much damage to medical innovation in as little time as Vinay Prasad. In his latest drive-by shooting, the leader of the Food and Drug Administration’s vaccine division rejected Moderna’s mRNA flu vaccine without even a cursory review. This is arbitrary government at its worst.

  The FDA rarely refuses to review a drug or vaccine application. Our sources say the FDA has rejected only about 4% of applications without a review, typically when they are missing important information. That wasn’t the case with Moderna.

  Dr. Prasad spiked Moderna’s flu vaccine because its Phase 3 trial was putatively not “adequate and well-controlled.” He quibbled that the control group in Moderna’s late-stage trial didn’t receive the “best-available standard of care.” He decides what is “best.”

  I assume Vinay is following Junior's orders here. I'm pretty sure that pharmaceutical companies have yet to develop a vaccine that would regrow his spine.

  On the same topic, Alex Tabarrok has the same bad news. I Regret to Inform You that the FDA is FDAing Again.

  I had high hopes and low expectations that the FDA under the new administration would be less paternalistic and more open to medical freedom. Instead, what we are getting is paternalism with different preferences. In particular, the FDA now appears to have a bizarre anti-vaccine fixation, particularly of the mRNA variety (disappointing but not surprising given the leadership of RFK Jr.).

  The latest is that the FDA has issued a Refusal-to-File (RTF) letter to Moderna for their mRNA influenza vaccine, mRNA-1010. An RTF means the FDA has determined that the application is so deficient it doesn’t even warrant a review. RTF letters are not unheard of, but they’re rare—especially given that Moderna spent hundreds of millions of dollars running Phase 3 trials enrolling over 43,000 participants based on FDA guidance, and is now being told the (apparently) agreed-upon design was inadequate.

  Alex's bottom line:

  An administration that promised medical freedom is delivering medical nationalism: fewer options, less innovation, and a clear signal to every company considering pharmaceutical investment that the rules can change after the game is played. And this isn’t a one-product story. mRNA is a general-purpose platform with spillovers across infectious disease and vaccines for cancer; if the U.S. turns mRNA into a political third rail, the investment, talent, and manufacturing will migrate elsewhere. America built this capability, and we’re now choosing to export it—along with the health benefits.

  I've said this before, but: It's Calvinball, except with lives in the balance.

• 

  If the flu don't get ya, the singularity will. I'm currently reading a dire prediction of AI doom predicting … well, you can read the title for yourself over there on your right. Nate Silver is not as apocalyptic, but he's pretty gloomy: The singularity won't be gentle.

  So here’s a take I consider relatively straightforward, but I don’t think has really sunk into the conventional wisdom. If AI has even a fraction of the impact that many people in Silicon Valley now expect on the fabric of work and daily life, it’s going to have profound and unpredictable political impacts.

  Last June, Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, published a blog post entitled “The Gentle Singularity”. If you’re not familiar with the jargon, the Singularity (sometimes capitalized, sometimes not) is a hypothesized extremely rapid takeoff in technological progress — so technologies that would once have taken years or decades to come to fruition might be realized in months, days, hours, minutes, microseconds. I’m not sure that I want to weigh in right now on my “priors” about the Singularity. It’s probably safe to say they’re more skeptical than your average Berkeley-based machine-learning researcher but more credulous than your typical political takes artist.

  These guys have put some thought into likely scenarios, and I haven't. (I have a good excuse: I went to bed on November 7, 2016, glumly resigned to the fact that Hillary Clinton was going to be our next President. Since then, I've avoided making predictions, "especially about the future".)

Reason's latest entry in their continuing series: Great moments in unintended consequences.

Remember: birds are flammable, pickpockets are sneaky, balloons eventually pop, taxation is theft.

Also of note:

• Future unintended consequences: unnecessary flu deaths. That's what leaps to mind from reading the WSJ headline: FDA Refuses to Consider Approving Use of Moderna’s New Flu Vaccine.

  The U.S. Food and Drug Administration refused to review Moderna’s application to sell a new seasonal flu vaccine.

  The FDA sent Moderna a “refusal-to-file” letter earlier this month, saying the company’s study testing the vaccine wasn’t sufficient, and the agency wouldn’t take up the company’s request for approval to sell the shot, Moderna said Tuesday.

  In the letter, the FDA said Moderna failed during testing to compare its experimental flu vaccine with the best available vaccine on the market.

  Moderna said the FDA didn’t identify any concerns about the safety or effectiveness of the company’s experimental vaccine. The company said it was asking the agency for a meeting to discuss the matter.

  Moderna was surprised by the rejection. “It does feel like the rules of the game are being changed after it’s been played,” Moderna President Stephen Hoge said in an interview.

  With RFKJr calling the "shots" (heh), pharmaceutical companies had best prepare for unpredictable Calvinball rule changes from the FDA.

• So I'm not debating it. But… Isn't Jeff Blehar's headline a tad self-contradictory: Bad Bunny Super Bowl Halftime Show Is Not an ‘Issue’ Worth Debating.

  Worse:

  I switched off the game early because it was so boring, so I didn’t watch the halftime show when it was on. Instead, I “Twitter-watched” it — watched the reactions of others online. And what I saw spill forth was a Rorschach inkblot spreading out in real time: Was it political? Was it mild and inoffensive? Was it an entertaining hoot or a bizarre failure? All I know is that everybody was fighting bitterly about the cultural import of a guy who self-identifies as a vicious hare — which I assume is about as seriously as we should take him — and the angles were almost entirely predictable based on partisan priors. (Notable exception: Commentary’s John Podhoretz, who delightfully zagged where others zigged.)

  When I finally checked the thing out myself, I had three takeaways: (1) My conversational Spanish is way rustier than I thought. (2) Golly, Puerto Rican women sure are lovely. (3) Whoever choreographed this should work on the next major stage production of Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Seriously, hundreds of humans dressed as tall reeds and sugarcane stalks? Watching them exit the field afterward was its own kind of surreal joy. Birnam Wood came to Dunsinane on Sunday night, so if you’re the sort to put stock in witch’s curses, best start contemplating the end of your reign.

  Jeffrey gets more content out of the halftime show by not watching it real time. I will have to remember this for next year.

• And that tune is "Misty Mountain Hop" by Led Zep. Jim Geraghty notes the Gray Lady having second thoughts about America getting its herb on: The New York Times Changes Its Tune on Marijuana, at Last.

  It’s always a good day when the New York Times editorial board catches up to our Charlie Cooke.

  Back in November, Charlie wrote a typically insightful and well-thought-out magazine piece lamenting that “marijuana legalization is a good idea with bad consequences”:

  The United States has some of the greatest and most interesting cities in the world — New York, Chicago, San Francisco — and, over the last five or so years, almost all of them have become unpleasant to walk around in thanks to the ubiquitous smell of weed. Truly, it is everywhere — including, most distressingly, wafting through open-air restaurants and sidewalk cafés. There is a reason that the colloquial name for marijuana is “skunk,” and there is a reason that one tries to avoid skunks: They are not, in any circumstance, nice to be around. . . .

  Nobody seems to believe that the omnipresent smell of weed is the inevitable consequence of their viewpoint. And they’re right: It’s not. Toleration of the public consumption of marijuana — whether explicit or implicit — is a choice that exists wholly independently of the underlying legal status of the drug. Indeed, when one stops to think about it for a moment, it’s rather peculiar that we have ended up in this position in the first instance. The go-to comparison for cannabis is alcohol. And, in almost every major city in the United States, it is illegal to drink alcohol on the street. How can it possibly be the case that we are more permissive toward a drug that has just been legalized than toward the one that has been a mainstay of our culture (including during Prohibition!) since the beginning of the republic?

  We could have just put piles of burning tires interspersed throughout the downtowns of major U.S. cities and achieved the same olfactory effect.

  Charlie also pointed out the absurdity that a culture that has effectively banned tobacco smoking in every public space is now completely fine with smoking marijuana in those same public spaces. A major argument that drove the ban on tobacco smoking in public places was the danger of secondhand smoke. Apparently, both the broader public and most lawmakers have decided that when it comes to marijuana smoking, we’re just not going to worry about that sort of thing.

  I lost my sense of smell a few years ago, so someone would have to tell me if that's an issue in the LFOD state.

• His competition is fierce, unfortunately. George Will notes an unofficial Olympic event: JD Vance vies for the gold medal in coarseness and flippancy. (WaPo gifted link)

  Spurning the rich subtleties of the English language, JD Vance has a penchant for words that he perhaps thinks display manly vigor, and express a populist’s rejection of refinement. In a recent social media post, he called someone whose posts annoyed him a “dipshit.” He recently told an interviewer that anyone who criticizes his wife can “eat shit.”

  Now, Vance might reasonably believe that many Americans enjoy potty-mouthed high officials. The “Access Hollywood” tape became public 32 days before the 2016 election in which the star of the tape, who mused about grabbing women’s genitals, was elected president. At a minimum, it would be reasonable for Vance to suppose that, after five years of a president who talks about “shithole countries,” Americans are inured to such pungent language.

  I will admit that I've grown inordinately fond of using "bullshit" when talking about Trump or Vance. In my defense, George, I'm not sure there's a better word available.

• I will try to keep this in mind. Kat Rosenfield advises us: Stop Asking Olympians How They Feel About America.

  The most salacious Winter Olympics drama of the week was, for me, an emotional roller coaster. A high-speed journey from dismay to horror to nauseated recognition, culminating in a sense of having fallen out of space and time as déjà vu collided with clairvoyance. The thing that was happening had happened before; it would happen again, and again.

  I am referring, of course, to the incident wherein American Olympic skier Hunter Hess said he had “mixed emotions” about certain U.S. domestic policies, and President Donald Trump called Hess a “real loser” who “shouldn’t have tried out for the team, and it’s too bad he’s on it.”

  Hess’s comments appear to have been made in response to a question from the press about how it felt to be representing the United States at this present moment of political turmoil (as opposed to, you know, any prior moment of the near-continuous turmoil of the past 15-odd years). That Trump responded by calling Hess a “loser” is best categorized, like so many Trumpian shenanigans, under “disappointment” rather than “surprise.” I’m not saying the 79-year-old president of the United States shouldn’t indulge in petty middle school–style beefing with an athlete one-third his age; I’m saying, if he’s going to do it, can’t he steal Hess’s girlfriend, put rotten eggs in his locker, and challenge him to a dance-off like a normal person?

  Fine, Kat. I just hope Gertie Burper does OK in (or at least, survives) the luge.

Recently on the book blog:

I put this book by Stephen Witt on my get-at-library list after reading the WSJ review last year. (WSJ gifted link). I seem to be doing that a lot lately. I was somewhat surprised by how much I enjoyed reading the book. Witt has a real knack for combining personal anecdotes, pungent observations, and layman-level technical detail into an interesting whole.

Part of the book is a biography of Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang. I think it's fair to say that he's flown under the radar for most of his career. There are businessfolk who can't/couldn't seem to stay out of the headlines: Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, … But (shame on me, perhaps) I couldn't have told you who helmed Nvidia before reading this book. And, guess what, Jensen Huang might go down in history as having a bigger impact on the 21st century than any of those guys.

If you believe some of the AI pessimists, though, Huang might be known as "the guy who caused mankind's doom." (Except, small detail, there might be nobody left to make that claim.)

Huang's biography takes up the early part of the book. His unlikely origin story: born in Taiwan, raised in Thailand, sent by his parents (at age 10) to a dinky Baptist-run school in rural Kentucky. But (eventually) rejoined his parents in Oregon, worked at Denny's, became an expert ping-pong player, attended Oregon State, got a job at AMD in semiconductor design, and eventually…

He still likes to go to Denny's for a big breakfast. And, according to Witt, who tagged along one morning, he left a $1000 tip for the waitress. I don't think it's revealed whether that's his usual behavior.

What is, apparently Huang's usual behavior: angrily dressing down his employees in front of their co-workers. You wouldn't think that would be a successful business strategy, but it worked for Nvidia. Huang almost never fired those targets of his wrath. And they seemed to remain fiercely loyal toward the company and Huang himself.

It doesn't hurt, I suppose, that he made them all pretty rich along the way.

The book is also a biography of Nvidia; it is perhaps unappreciated how many near-death experiences the company had on its way to its current dizzying success. (As I type: a $4.58 trillion market cap, stock price up 1160% over the past five years.) But before that, they had their share of dud products, false starts, takeover attempts, etc.

The company in its early days was aimed at gamers who lusted after ever-higher performance video. But some curious coders noted that the Nvidia hardware could also do arithmetic incredibly quickly. Which allowed scientists to "smuggle demanding mathematical payloads—say, simulating the formation of a galaxy, or modeling the ignition process of a nuclear bomb—into hardware meant to render carjackings and disembowelments." (One of Witt's "pungent observations" I mentioned above.)

The third part of the book is a layperson's history of AI, a field full of hype, broken promises, and dead-end research. Huang's, and Nvidia's, success was in resurrecting and combining two scorned, out-of-fashion subfields: one in AI (neural networks), the other in computer architecture (parallel processing). This (eventually) turned out to work surprisingly well for the company, to put it mildly.

The penultimate chapter in the book is a look at the possibility that AI will kill us all. In the cheerful language of the theorists: p(doom), the probability of doom. I've always been an optimist about that, thinking that capitalist innovation and technical progress has always been an easy net win for mankind in the past. But it's hard to deny that a lot of smart people think differently.

Huang is not one of those people. In the book's final chapter, Witt describes his final interview with Huang, where he tries to elicit commentary about those dire predictions. This does not work out well: Witt finds himself at the receiving end of one of Huang's harangues. Witt is hurt and somewhat surprised, and has deep thoughts; it's almost as if Huang doesn't want to think about possible downsides.

So: we find ourselves fulfilling that (fake) Chinese curse: "May you live in interesting times." Thanks to Huang (and others).

I put this book by SCOTUS Justice Amy Coney Barrett on my get-at-library list thanks to a good review from Barton Swaim last year in the WSJ.

Some of the book is autobiography, although she avoids being overly personal, or (heaven forbid) critical of her political/judicial adversaries. She tells feelgood stories about her career, colleagues, and family; outlines her career (SCOTUS clerk, lawprof, lower court judge, …). There's next to nothing, for example, about the overtly partisan confirmation process, where all Senate Democrats voted against her. In this area, she's all sweetness and light, with a lot of emphasis about how collegial SCOTUS is, with (sometimes bitter) legal disagreements never intruding on the Justices' mutual respect and affection.

Apart from autobiography, the book goes into detail about how SCOTUS works: what clerks do (she was at one time a clerk for Antonin Scalia); the mysteries of standing, certiorari, amicus briefs, and the like. Something I didn't previously appreciate: the Constitution restricts SCOTUS to Cases and [specific] Controversies; they can't just make up decisions on issues they find interesting or important.

Another portion of the book goes into methods of judicial interpretation. Justice Barrett lays out her case for Scalia-like originalism/textualism. (She's pushing on an open door in my case.) But there are also a couple of interesting chapters on how justices have to deal with sloppily-worded statutes, or some with outright mistakes. ("I think they meant to say 'illegal', instead of 'legal' there.") Laws are written (mostly) in English, and English is notoriously ambiguous! One of her examples: a lime-green gas-guzzler parked in front of a sign saying "Green Vehicles Only". Does the owner get ticketed?)

I was interested by the book, at the "aspiring dilettante" level. It occurred to me that it would make an excellent high-school graduation gift to a bright student contemplating a career in law. If they pore over the pages in rapt fascination, I'd encourage them to go for it!

Okay: the life preserver is labeled "D’Amaro", and that's the guy Mickey is advising, Disney's next CEO Josh D'Amaro.

And it's good advice, Josh.

Why post it? Hey, I just like Steamboat Willie.

Also of note:

• Flour and sawdust? Kevin D. Williamson goes up to Iowa's Hat: A New American Development. (Subtitle: "A short, sad tale of public grief and newfangled Midwestern Jacobinism in the City of Flour and Sawdust." (archive.today link)

  MINNEAPOLIS—Uff da! Minneapolis has seen better days.

  If you were going by the hallucinogenic Fox News/talk radio/your weird uncle who is on Facebook way too much/X/GOP press release/ipso-facto-nutso/parallel universe view of the world that informs so much of the right-wing side of the American political conversation, then you’d think that Minneapolis, the “City of Flour and Sawdust,” was pretty much exclusively run by some kind of al-Shabaab-adjacent Somali mafia, that it was all halal butchers and mosques and the muezzin’s call of Ashhadu an la ilaha illa Allah! ringing out incongruously over the frozen urban Wonder Bread tundra. But turns out, it’s a lot of familiar American slop: chain strip clubs and drag-show cabarets and ersatz retro diners, faux Irish pubs that fill up promptly at 5:03 p.m. on weekdays with broad-bottomed government workers in stretchy slacks knocking down a couple of vodka-and-Sprites after a long day’s bureaucratting, the now-ubiquitous sickly stench of marijuana smoke on the streets, and just scads and scads of downscale white people, both the expensively educated kind (“Try dunking some of that gluten-free chai cookie into this depth charge!” is a literal thing I heard from a young woman at the May Day Café recounting her internship in ceramics, and, by God, she really did say “gluten-free”) and the genuine lumpenproletarian cigarette-smokers, including these two pockmarked, runty Midwestern specimens in a crappy green Subaru who pulled up alongside me as I was walking down Lake Street inquiring with as much modest menace as they could muster about my “credentials.” Their faces were largely obscured by over-the-nose black masks (just like the insidious agents of you-know-who!) and big black sunglasses, but they were unmistakably pallid, dead-guy white and just trying real hard to sound like tough guys. They weren’t sharing their names, of course, but I immediately nicknamed them Elwood (the thinner one, at the wheel) and Jake (who had had a few more Twinkies in him and did the talking) inasmuch as they looked like a couple of antifa dorks trying to launch a Blues Brothers tribute act.

  Well, it's sheer genius from KDW. And I especially like the Uff da!, something my dad used to say when I was being obstreperous.

  Not that it matters: Although born in South Dakota, Dad had to spend some of his formative years in Norway, thanks to WWI making transatlantic travel perilous. After the war, back in the USA, he entered grade school in Lake Mills, Iowa not knowing English.

  And the "flour and sawdust" thing is explained here.

• Good question, but it's surprising who's asking it. It's the President of Dartmouth College, Sian Leah Beilock: Is a Four-Year Degree Worth It? (WSJ gifted link)

  Families across the U.S. are questioning whether a four-year degree is worth it. Student debt has soared. Recent graduates are struggling in a rapidly changing job market. Colleges can also be too ideological: On many campuses, students are exposed to a limited range of perspectives, signaling to them what rather than how to think.

  American higher education has a trust problem. We shouldn’t pretend otherwise, and it won’t solve itself. In 2026 I’d like to see colleges and universities across the country take steps to restore trust. As president of Dartmouth College, I’m committed to this goal, and how to restore public confidence in higher education animates conversations among my presidential peers.

  She makes a lot of sense, and I wish her luck. (There's a famous quote I can't find right now about even the most radical left-wing faculty can be amazingly reactionary when it comes to campus reforms.)

  I especially wish her luck with this:

  Third, re-center higher education on learning rather than political posturing. Too often, colleges and universities have participated in the culture wars. The result is an environment in which students and faculty feel they must toe an ideological line rather than explore ideas that fall outside prevailing norms.

  Our institutions must reclaim a narrower, firmer sense of our role. That means embracing institutional neutrality—or restraint, as we call it at Dartmouth—on issues that don’t directly affect our mission or core functions. When we, as institutions, rush to issue statements every time there’s a national or global controversy, we signal there’s a “right” position and that opposing views are unwelcome.

  At the University Near Here, adopting "institutional neutrality" was #1 on the "Findings" list last year from the President’s Working Group on Free Speech and Expression Policies and Communication. I haven't seen anything formal about that, though.

• Must I write about Epstein stuff? I find it pretty boring, mostly one nothingburger after another, except for the Andrew formerly knowing as Prince. But Andrew C. McCarthy has a pretty good take on the latest, and he's refreshingly honest: Of Course Ghislaine Maxwell Took the Fifth. (archive.today link)

  To recap, surrogates of the president’s 2024 campaign, including Pam Bondi and Kash Patel, who were later tapped to run the DOJ and FBI, got Trump supporters spun up about a massive Epstein cover-up — the notion that the Biden administration was suppressing what should have been charges against a pedophilia ring in which Epstein and Maxwell were supplying underage girls to prominent “clients.”

  The conspiracy theory never made any sense — and I say that as someone who has proved more than his share of actual conspiracies. First, the Biden DOJ, which indicted Trump twice and provided assistance to Democratic district attorneys who also indicted Trump, was trying hard to make any criminal case against Trump that might stick. Second, it is inconceivable that the Epstein prosecutors in the Southern District of New York (SDNY), led by Maureen Comey, daughter of former FBI Director James Comey, would have buried a career-making case against Trump or any other prominent person. Third, as Rich and I have discussed on the podcast several times, the big problem — the most publicly misunderstood problem — is that most sex crimes are not federal; they are state offenses. That includes sex with underage persons.

  Oh, right.

Well, it wasn't the Patriots. They were awful. But Anheuser-Busch InBev deserves some love for their commercial:

That's so cool.

I am normally a Sam Adams guy, but the next time I buy beer…

In other SB news: I kind of spaced during Bad Bunny. Not for me. Not aimed at me.

But I did like the opening ceremony's renditions of "America the Beautiful" and "The Star Spangled Banner". Which brings me to a very pithy quote from Yuval Levin's essay in the current National Review: America the Durable. (archive.today link)

Yuval's article is about our centuries-long collective worry that our country is circling the drain. That worry, too, has a long tradition of existence.

Also of note:

• Rhetorical Shenanigan #517. Well, actually, I haven't been counting. I've seen quite a few over the decades, though. In the WSJ "Free Expression" newsletter, Jack Butler chides users of one of his irritants: ‘Our Democracy’ Isn’t Your Free Pass. (WSJ gifted link)

  “Our democracy” is under attack. Not yours. Not theirs. Ours.

  Survey the rhetoric of left-leaning politicians and you’ll notice a liberal employment of this phrase “our democracy.” Of late, it has been a favorite of state-level Democrats defending their vigorous redistricting efforts. It is invoked as a civic-minded and incontrovertible proposition, an all-purpose warrant for whatever the speaker wanted in the first place.

  The left had already made “our democracy” a vernacular mainstay when Kamala Harris said she was running for president in 2019. “The American dream and our American democracy are under attack and on the line like never before,” she said.

  “Never before” happens a lot nowadays. Ms. Harris’s presidential campaign didn’t make it to 2020, but she ended up on the Democratic ticket that year and again in 2024. In June 2024, she issued the self-fulfilling nullity that “Our democracy is only as strong as our willingness to fight for it—and we stand prepared to do just that.” Once she became the Democrats’ presidential nominee, she promised to “stand for our democracy.” And after democracy rendered a verdict on her in that election different from the one she hoped for, she nonetheless said that “we will never give up the fight for our democracy.”

  Jack notes that "our democracy" is also at stake in recent efforts ensuring Congressional districts are gerrymandered to minimize the possibility that Republicans might get elected.

• I'm tired of looking at that big stupid orange rocket. So is Andrew Follett, who says: We Need a Private-Sector Overhaul of U.S. Space Exploration. (archive.today link)

  The [Artemis] program hasn’t just been inefficient in terms of time, but it’s been a money drain as well, a sign of the inherent inefficiency of even noble governmental endeavors. Even by the standards of government procurement, the rocket is massively over budget. The SLS was originally supposed to cost $7 billion. But before it has even flown a single crew of astronauts, taxpayers have already spent roughly $32 billion on the SLS rocket, according to the Planetary Society. The capsule necessary for astronauts to operate the rocket already comes to another $20 billion. In 2023, NASA’s Office of the Inspector General estimated SLS will cost $93 billion for the rocket to deliver astronauts to the Moon, and costs have only risen since then.

  “Artemis is not even an effective program to explore the Moon, offering significantly lower capability than we demonstrated during the Apollo missions more than a half-century ago,” Zubrin continued, discussing his objections to the plan to return to the Moon previously published in National Review. “It’s now been eight years since Trump started the Artemis program, and stuck with a mission plan that makes absolutely no sense, we are still years away from a Moon landing. Eight years after JFK announced Apollo, we were walking on the Moon. And that was done by an America with half the population and one quarter the GDP of today, using slide rules instead of AI to do its design work.”

  With all the hoopla about "fraud" in various entitlement/welfare schemes, it's difficult to focus on the reality here: there's no fraud, but vast sums of taxpayer cash wind up in some well-connected pockets, with very little to show for it. (Also see: California High-Speed Rail.)

• Jamie, you say that like it's a bad thing. Jonathan Turley looks at the latest excuse for opposing Voter ID laws, as promulgated by CongressCritter Jamie Raskin (D-MD): Voter ID Law Violates the 19th Amendment in Denying the Vote to Women. Raskin's reply to his CNN interlocutor, who threw him what should have been a softball:

  “… what’s wrong with the Save act? What’s wrong with it is that it might violate the 19th Amendment, which gives women the right to vote, because you’ve got to show that all of your different IDs match. So if you’re a woman who’s gotten married and you’ve changed your name to your husband’s name, but you’re so now your current name is different from your name at birth. Now you’ve got to go ahead and document that you need an affidavit explaining why. And why would we go to all of these, troubles in order to keep people from voting when none of the states that are actually running the elections are telling us that there’s any problem.”

  Jonathan debunks. But Jamie's condescension is over the top even taken at its face value: We can't expect these delicate flowers to do something as complex as meeting ID requirements! That's a man's job!

  Ladies—and gentlemen, for that matter—if you can't manage that, maybe the country would be better off with you not voting.

Recently on the book blog:

I recently completed a reading project: read (or reread) Ian Fleming's James Bond books. I did that in order to prepare for reading Anthony Horowitz's Bond novels. I'm a fan of his Hawthorne/Horowitz mystery series. And Mrs. Salad and I really liked the Brit TV shows he was involved with: "Midsomer Murders" and "Foyle's War". So:

Good news, this book fit right in with the Flemish ouvré. It actually includes some of Fleming's actual prose, as noted in the Acknowledgements: 400-500 words in Chapter Two, describing a meeting between Bond, M, and M's Chief of Staff. And Horowitz did a pretty good job, I thought, of settling into Fleming's writing style.

The book is set soon after the events in Goldfinger, somewhere around 1957. Bond has returned to London, and has set up an uneasy cohabitation with his nemesis/ally from that book, Miss Pussy Galore. His new assignment involves foiling a SMERSH plot to murder a famous Grand Prix driver during a German race. The unlikely method: Bond is to enter the race himself, and do in the Russian driver/assassin before he can complete his murderous scheme.

Which (small spoiler) Bond does, but in his preparations for the race, Bond notices a new face that seems to be collaborating with the SMERSH goons. This turns out to be Korean villain/psychopath Jai Seong Sin, who has hatched a nefarious (also: convoluted and unlikely) plot involving the USA's efforts in the "Vanguard" satellite project. It involves massive death and destruction in the heart of New York City!

There's a lot of action, an unlikely-named female sidekick ("Jeopardy Lane"), near-death escapes, all the usual 007 ingredients. Including the usual villain flaws: instead of just shooting Bond in the head, Sin engineers a complex death scenario that Bond is able, barely, to thwart. It wouldn't be a Bond book without that, I guess!

The punters at Polymarket seem to think this more likely:

BREAKING: The odds of Jesus Christ returning this year have doubled overnight.

4% chance. pic.twitter.com/fPOVV8aFSA

— Polymarket (@Polymarket) February 4, 2026

I suppose you'd see longer odds as you got more specific, for example "Jesus Christ returning at Levi's Stadium on February 8, 2026, disrupting Bad Bunny at the Super Bowl. That link goes to Philip Greenspun's speculation on BB's set list. "Monaco" sounds as if it could be rated NSFSBHS ("not safe for Super Bowl Halftime Shows"). Phil excerpts the lyrics (in English), which I won't do. But here's ChatGPT's analysis:

Well, I'll watch anyway, just in case JC shows. In that event, future postings may be put off indefinitely.

Also of note:

• Federalism was fun while it lasted. Yuval Levin engages in some long-memory whataboutism: Nationalizing Elections Is a Very Bad Idea, as It Was When Democrats Tried It. (NR gifted link)

  When Joe Biden entered office with Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress in 2021, the Democrats insisted that their first priority would be to nationalize American election administration.

  A bill to do that, the so-called “For the People Act,” was H.R. 1 and S. 1 in the 117th Congress. In the immediate wake of a crisis of confidence in our election system created by a president who refused to accept his loss of a close election, the Democrats sought to have an exceptionally narrow Democratic majority in Washington take over key election-administration rulemaking in every state and impose new and often looser rules involving voter registration, ID requirements, eligibility, ballot harvesting, early voting, drop-boxes, mail-in voting, locations and hours of polling stations, voting by felons, campaign donations, and more. It was madness. Utter civic vandalism.

  The problem wasn’t even that their doing this would change the results of elections. It’s unlikely that it would have. The problem was just that this would be a needless assault on public confidence in the system at a moment of already collapsing trust. But anyone pointing this out at the time was sure to be dismissed as a racist partisan hack (believe me).

  Pun Salad's postings relevant to the "For the People Act" back in 2021: here, here, here, and here. I'd forgotten just how awful it was.

• I would have deleted "Maybe" from the headline. Tom Foley has a more modest proposal: Maybe It’s Time to Close the Kennedy Center for Good. (WSJ gifted link)

  Washington isn’t a cultural center the way New York, Nashville and Los Angeles are. It has no cultural infrastructure to support artists and art-based institutions: no Juilliard, no Grand Ole Opry, no University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts. Washington doesn’t even have a bohemian or hip section of town where artists prefer to hang out. Given scant home-based talent and difficulty recruiting the best talent to Washington, the programming at the Kennedy Center hasn’t been competitive with what large-city performing arts institutions offer.

  The building is another problem. People try to be nice about it, but let’s face it, it’s cold, flinty and cheap looking. It lacks grace and grandness. Designed by Edward Durell Stone, it suffers from the out-of-date look of similar 1960s architecture. It’s a bunch of rectangular boxes stacked on top of each other. Too many straight lines and flat surfaces. It’s jammed into a tight space along the Potomac as if it were a low-budget real-estate development without enough money for land worthy of the building.

  The exterior and interior are bland. The building has no elegant approach. Despite its exterior Carrara marble surfaces, the building looks lightweight and poorly made. The pillars surrounding the building don’t fit it. The interior is cavernous with no comfortable, welcoming spaces (including the boardroom). Even the President’s Box feels as though the National Park Service manages it, which it once did.

  In the 1970s, when we lived in suburban Maryland, Mrs. Salad and I used to frequent the American Film Institute's small movie theater at the JFK Center, which showed classic movies, cheaply. The AFI boogied out of DC proper in 2003, moving out to a renovated theater in Silver Spring, Maryland. That was long after we moved back to New Hampshire, where the movies are more expensive, but everything else is nicer.

Recently on the book blog:

[Pictured book here is pretty close to my hardcover copy, obtained from the Science Fiction Book Club back in 1981 or so, unread until now, about 45 years later!]

I was encouraged at the beginning of this book; it threatened to have interesting characters, a unique setting, some intriguing ideas, some sly humor, … but it just went on too long, and got silly and incoherent, and I forgot what all the fuss was about.

It's set mostly on the planet End of Nothing, where a group of robots have established the "Vatican-17", a thousand-year-old project to create an ultimate true religion. In support of this effort, they have enlisted human "Listeners", and developed technology to send Listeners throughout space and time, so they may experience the variety of life's instances. For example, what it's like to have been a trilobite, back on early Earth, burrowing in the warm ocean mud.

Into this stable setup comes Tennyson, a doctor on the lam from planet Gutshot; he essentially stows away on the starship Wayfarer, helmed by a cynical captain, whose only purpose is to ferry passengers and supplies to End of Nothing. Also on the ship is Jill Roberts, a journalist who's been hired to write a history of Project Pope, describing its major findings. Once on the planet, they encounter Decker, who got stranded on End of Nothing after a long-ago starship disaster, and now leads a hermit-like existence with "Whisperer", who appears to him as a sentient cloud of sparkly dust.

Complications arise when one of the Listeners, "Mary", an older lady, claims to have encountered Heaven on her journey. Can that possibly be true?

So, not bad, but after a few hundred pages…

Plop, plop, plop went Poppler.

You would think this wouldn't be controversial: Governments should stop subsidizing stadiums for billionaires.

Once you've watched that (and you should, it's hilarious, while also maddening), you can check out the numbers for Publicly Funded NFL Stadiums at 22Zin, a website from Tom Knecht exploring the relationship between politics and sports.

Again, this should be as obvious as 2+3=5. Tom's article is from 2023, but here's a timeless observation, not adjusted for inflation since then:

Tom has charts showing the diverse levels of taxpayer subsidies for current stadia. Patriots fans rejoice: Gillette Stadium received $0 in direct subsidies! (But as Tom points out, "that doesn’t even count the myriad tax breaks, tax credits, tax rebates, donated land, infrastructure projects, and opportunity costs that state and local politicians give NFL owners."

Levi's Stadium in Santa Clara, CA, site of tomorrow's Superb Owl, is also on the low end of the taxpayer ripoff scale, a mere $130 million in direct cash.

The current money pit under construction is the Buffalo Bills' Highmark Stadium:

Fun fact from that Wikipedia page:

During the excavation phase in September 2023, a fan jumped over a fence guarding the construction site and fell into a hole 30-40 feet. He was found "covered in human excrement" and under the influence of drugs and alcohol before being removed from the site.

Don't ever change, Buffalo.

Also of note:

• I'm sure I don't know the answer. Cass Sunstein wonders: Does Liberalism Have An Aesthetic?

  “There are reams of writing about fascist military parades and socialist-realist murals, yet there is almost nothing comparable about the dull tint at the end of history. Where is liberalism’s ‘Fascinating Fascism’? Who is its Riefenstahl?”

  So writes Becca Rothfeld, in an energetic, sharp, fun, and highly critical review of two books, one by yours truly (On Liberalism, if you want to know). https://thepointmag.com/criticism/listless-liberalism/

  Rothfeld’s review is called Listless Liberalism (ouch).

  Becca's review and Cass's observations are interesting enough. But what leapt immediately to my mind (for some reason) was Cafe Hayek's Quotation of the Day for yesterday:

  Liberalism is no religion, no world view, no party of special interests. It is no religion because it demands neither faith nor devotion, because there is nothing mystical about it, and because it has no dogmas. It is no worldview because it does not try to explain the cosmos and because it says nothing and does not seek to say anything about the meaning and purpose of human existence. It is no party of special interests because it does not provide or seek to provide any special advantage whatsoever to any individual or any group.

  The Cafe's proprietor, Don Boudreaux, cites Ludwig von Mises’s 1927 book, Liberalism.

  I'm not sure I totally agree, I'll have to think on it, but it seems relevant.

• Woodrow Wilson was an inspiration for Tolkien's Sauron.

  Well, that's probably not actually true.

  And yet, Dan McLaughlin asks fellow conservatives to Resist the Temptation of Illiberal Power. (archive.today link)

  First Things editor R. R. Reno made an unusual choice recently to write an ode of sorts to Woodrow Wilson. As the author of “The Hater’s Guide to Woodrow Wilson” (an ongoing series), it is my sworn duty to respond.

  But respond to what? As often seems to be the case with “postliberal” arguments, Reno is vague and euphemistic in exactly how he wishes to present Wilson as a role model other than to promote a general sentiment in favor of strongman government. We need “solidarity,” he writes, and “our history has . . . been marked by periods during which illiberal methods were employed to renew and buttress solidarity,” a process in which “Woodrow Wilson played a central role.” Wilson and FDR “sought to renew American solidarity, which required taming and restraining certain kinds of freedom, especially freedom of contract. (Roosevelt intimidated the Supreme Court to secure the overturning of Lochner.) In a word, Wilson and FDR administered strong doses of illiberalism.” This is, in unspecified ways, a good thing because the past gave us the present, and this makes it good. And we ought therefore to repeat the past:

  We are living in a similar period. Immigration, economic vulnerability, globalization—the American people are anxious. Once again, a powerful, energetic executive presses against liberal norms, as did Wilson and FDR. I don’t wish to commend any of the particular measures taken by the present administration, although some strike me as wise and necessary. My point is more fundamental. . . . We’ve been here before as a nation, and we have had statesmen who addressed liberalism’s failures so that the American ideals of liberty could be renewed and reshaped for new circumstances. In 2026, we would do well to study the methods of Wilson and FDR and weigh their achievements as well as failures. For we need something of their innovation and daring to navigate our present crisis.

  What methods of Wilson and FDR, other than intimidating the Supreme Court with threats of Court-packing, does Reno have in mind? The Palmer raids? Jailing dissenters? Segregating the federal government? Forcible sterilizations? German and Japanese internment? Covering up the president’s incapacitation? Or simply bureaucratic micromanagement of American commerce?

  I'm with Dan (and Nancy Reagan): just say no.

• Just off the top of my head: greed, envy, irresponsibility, demagoguery, power lust. Veronique de Rugy asks the musical question: What's Behind the Wild New Wealth Tax Proposals?

  When government grows to dominate ever-larger shares of the economy, and when politicians refuse to be responsible about what they spend, there's a predictable next move: Insist that the problem is "the rich" not paying enough. Never mind that high earners already shoulder a disproportionate share of the tax burden. Never mind that relying on a small and mobile group of people for the bulk of your revenue makes public finances more volatile, not more stable.

  No, once spending is treated as untouchable and restraint as politically impossible, it's only a matter of time before politics demands more, more, more. More taxes and more distortion. This helps explain why wild new forms of wealth taxes are popping up.

  California voters are heading toward a November ballot fight over a so-called one-time 5% tax on billionaires' net worth, tied to residency on a date that's already passed. Illinois lawmakers recently flirted with a tax on unrealized gains — think of stocks yet to be sold at fluctuating prices that only exist on paper — before retreating. And New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani wants a wealth tax to help close the city's roughly $12 billion budget gap. Prominent progressive Democrats have explicitly endorsed national wealth taxes (e.g., proposals from Sen. Elizabeth Warren).

  Different places, same impulse: Avoid hard fiscal decisions by squeezing a narrow group harder.

  Maybe I should have added "economic illiteracy" to my answer above.

• Don't cry for me, Jeff Bezos. David Harsanyi urges that you save your tears for more deserving institutions: Don't Cry for The Washington Post, It Helped Destroy Media.

  I generally don't celebrate when people lose their job. As most of us know firsthand, being laid off can be a brutal experience. Indeed, when an outfit such as the Post cuts back its workforce, good people will typically lose their jobs while the worst offenders stay on.

  But the unmitigated arrogance and sense of entitlement exuded by journalists, who seem to believe they have a God-given right to work no matter how much money they lose their employer or how poorly they do the job, speaks to the problem more.

  Over the past decade, the Post has been one of the leading culprits in the collapse of public trust in journalism. The once-venerable outlet has spent the past 10 years participating in virtually every dishonest left-wing operation, including giving legitimacy to the Brett Kavanaugh group rape accusations, delegitimizing the Hunter Biden laptop story, spreading the Gaza "genocide" lie, covering up Joe Biden's cognitive decline, sliming the Covington children, and countless others.

  I've kind of liked the WaPo's recent editorial turn to the center, if not the right. No clue what a reasonable path forward for it might be.

President Trump had an op-ed published in Last Saturday's WSJ, claiming "Donald J. Trump: My Tariffs Have Brought America Back". (WSJ gifted link)

I didn't bother reading it then. But here's one of his claims:

At Cato, Alan Reynolds aims his shotgun at that fish in the barrel: Trump’s Eighteen Trillion Dollar Hoax.

More at the link, but you get the idea. Trump's claim is bullshit.

Trump's op-ed also says:

That got the WSJ's Editorial Board to take exception: Are Trump’s Tariffs Winning?.

Again, Trump is spouting bullshit.

But what else is new?

Also of note:

• Shut up, Junior. Christian Schneider goes full libertarian, and good for him: Government Shouldn't Dictate Nutrition. (archive.today link)

  He quotes some critics of the new "inverted" pyramid. I won't bother you with the details, because…

  Yet the nutritional experts’ argument over what belongs in the food pyramid obscures the real issue: Isn’t it moronic for the government to have a food pyramid?

  The idea that the federal government should play a role in determining the food we eat only serves to stroke the egos of those who believe nothing worthwhile happens in the world without bureaucratic approval. What types of diets best serve individual citizens is one of the most-studied topics in human history, and most of that analysis has been conducted by private actors. There are infinite apps, websites, chat rooms, TikTok videos, workout plans, and the like that will get you where you want to go on your fitness journey, all thankfully operating outside the walls of the Department of Health and Human Services.

  Christian goes on to observe that, in addition to being inappropriate for a free country, Uncle Stupid's dietary advice has a lousy track record.

  For the record: I got e-mail from Dr. Oz yesterday, nagging me to

  Boost Your Protein and Healthy Fats. Think eggs, seafood, red meat, dairy, beans, nuts, and seeds. Aim for 6-7 servings per day (based on a 2,000-2,200 daily calorie level). And remember to keep saturated fats under 10% of your daily calories.

  I am in awe of the sheer arrogance involved in demanding that I (and my fellow geezers) break out the paper, pens, and calculators to figure out whether they've gone over that 10% figure.

  So: you shut up too, Dr. Oz.

• No actual elephants were harmed in getting them in that room. Eric Berger usually does straight reporting on space at Ars Technica, but he recently seemed to have lost patience: NASA finally acknowledges the elephant in the room with the SLS rocket.

  The Space Launch System rocket program is now a decade and a half old, and it continues to be dominated by two unfortunate traits: It is expensive, and it is slow.

  The massive rocket and its convoluted ground systems, so necessary to baby and cajole the booster’s prickly hydrogen propellant on board, have cost US taxpayers in excess of $30 billion to date. And even as it reaches maturity, the rocket is going nowhere fast.

  Eric recalls the dismal history of the unmanned Artemis I mission, plagued with multiple delays. And that was more than three years ago.

  Eric's analysis is worth reading in full, and so is James Meigs, in the WSJ's Free Expression newsletter: Artemis II Shows Why Private Spaceflight Should Lead the Way. (WSJ gifted link)

  While Elon Musk’s SpaceX has slashed launch costs by landing and reusing rocket boosters, SLS remains an old-school, expendable system; only the capsule survives each flight. No wonder NASA’s Office of Inspector General estimates this white elephant will cost a staggering $4.1 billion per mission. So, once again, NASA is saddled with a spaceflight system too expensive to fly routinely.

  New NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman knows all this. As a self-made entrepreneur and a veteran of two self-funded SpaceX flights, he’s an advocate for NASA’s commercial approach—and for retiring SLS. In his first confirmation hearing, Mr. Isaacman gently told the senators that SLS wasn’t “the long-term way to get to and from the moon and Mars with great frequency.” In a compromise, he suggested NASA should use the two existing SLS rockets to carry the Artemis II and Artemis III, which aims to put a crew on the lunar surface. After that, the agency should move on. The senators later approved Mr. Isaacson’s nomination. But they pushed back on retiring SLS, instead adding funding to build more SLS rockets to last year’s Big Beautiful Bill.

  Finally, Viking Pundit comments from personal experience: Don't light this candle

  I believe I mentioned this before but I briefly worked as a project engineer on the Orion program and it was - by far - the worst job I've ever had. Whatever excitement of "working for NASA" was washed away in a sclerotic bureaucracy that throttled any real progress. There were regular newsletters circulated that heralded how NASA programs were spread over every state in the Union which should tell you what you need to know: this is a jobs program, not a space program.

  The SLS/Orion program is still dependent upon Space Shuttle technology from over 40 years ago. Why? Because some Congressman didn't want to see a NASA subcontractor in his/her district lose that sweet federal money. This is all part of the grift along with the endless delays. There are never any consequences for delay so why not keep your job going? These programs achieve a kind of half-life behavior where progress slows the closer you get to the finish line.

  I hope and pray I'm wrong, but I fear this Artemis launch will result in cataclysm`

  When (or if) Artemis II launches, I'll be watching and hoping for the best. But like the VP, fearing the worst.

Leading off with Frank J. Fleming's effort, which is stunning and funny:

Look at this adorable, real thing that happened to me (not AI). pic.twitter.com/iASSYXNR1Y

— Frank J. Fleming (@IMAO_) January 29, 2026

At his substack, Frank discusses further: Totally Real Video of Me Caring for Wildlife.

And here's something I missed from last December:

Completely random… but different 😂 pic.twitter.com/Ha9S1evrv7

— Wholesome Side of 𝕏 (@itsme_urstruly) December 24, 2025

I know I've said this before, but I'm pretty sure creative geniuses with low budgets (and minimal concerns for copyright law) will start making feature movies with their choice of stars from the past. Sure, Sturgeon's Law says 90% of it will be crap, but 10% will be great, and the public will eat it up. There will be lawsuits galore, but in the end we'll get wonderfully entertained.

And maybe some things will be lawsuit-free. Last year, I looked at an effort to AI-restore Orson Welles' original version of The Magnificent Ambersons. And of course, my idea of a Casablanca sequel, with AI resurrecting the original cast? Still a dream!

Also of note:

• And he's pretty far ahead of whoever is in second place. Jim Geraghty observes The Most Erratic President in the World.

  He’s the rare kind of immigration hardliner who wants more H-1B visas.

  He’s warned that illegal immigrants are taking “Black population jobs, the Hispanic population jobs, and they’re attacking union jobs too” . . . and also proposed giving green cards to any foreign student who graduates from a U.S. institution of higher education.

  He added his own name to the Kennedy Center . . . and then shut it down for two years for renovations.

  He pledged that the addition of a new ballroom to the White House “won’t interfere with the current building” . . . and then tore down the East Wing.

  And that's just the first few paragraphs. Trump is increasingly unhinged from:

  • truth;
  • reality;
  • his own past.

  What could go wrong? Unfortunately, we'll probably find out.

• It doesn't seem like Congress is functioning well either. George Will lays out some possibilities, none pleasant, but: One path to U.S. fiscal disaster is most alarming — and most likely. (WaPo gifted link)

  GFW points to a recent report from the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, titled What Would a Fiscal Crisis Look Like? Their scenarios:

  • Financial Crisis: Reduced confidence in U.S. Treasury markets could lead to a spike in interest rates, panic among traders, devaluation of assets, freezing or slowing of credit, and failure of key financial institutions.
  • Inflation Crisis: Attempts or fear of attempts to manage debt levels through monetization, artificially low interest rates, or financial repression could result in high and potentially spiraling inflation.
  • Austerity Crisis: Sharp tax increases and spending cuts enacted to stave off a fiscal crisis could create undue hardship, undermine demand, and push the economy into recession.
  • Currency Crisis: The U.S. dollar could face sudden and significant depreciation in response to fiscal stress and policy responses, resulting in destabilization of markets and the economy.
  • Default Crisis: Policymakers could explicitly or implicitly default on debt, including by failing to make debt payments or by restructuring existing debt.
  • Gradual Crisis: Living standards and fiscal and monetary flexibility could gradually erode in response to rising debt, potentially causing as much or more long-term damage than an acute crisis.

  GFW comments on that last one:

  The most probable, and most ominous, outcome would be a gradual crisis. In 2021, debt service consumed less than 10 percent of federal revenue. In 2025: 18 percent. By being gradual, a protracted crisis would mean a demoralized nation slowly accommodating perpetual economic sluggishness, waning investments in research and development, social stagnation, diminished contribution from the entrepreneurial energies of talented immigrants, and waning U.S. geopolitical influence.

  A gradual crisis would be anesthetizing, rather than an action-forcing, cymbal-crash event that could stimulate recuperative reforms of U.S. political culture. Instead, this culture would become more toxic. Political power would be fought for, and wielded, with the desperate ruthlessness of a zero-sum competition in which one faction’s gains must equal other factions’ losses.

  So, government would simultaneously become more powerful, more divisive and less legitimate. The currency is how everyone meets the government every day through the unstated — because presumably obvious — government promise that the currency it issues is trustworthy.

  That's the WaPo, which still exists, and last I heard, George Will is still there.

  I fear "zero-sum" in the second quoted paragraph is way too optimistic. Almost certainly we'll be looking at negative-sum conflicts at that point of the game.

• And don't look at tax gimmicks to fix things. Robert VerBruggen looks at a recent study that concludes Taxing the Rich Won't Raise Much Money. Cutting Their Taxes Won't Either. Invoking the Laffer Curve?

  This is a hard problem. But a fascinating new study, written by a trio of economists from Congress’s Joint Committee on Taxation, takes a crack at it, using more sophisticated methods than previous work has employed. Its intriguing title gives away its main finding: “Laffer Curves Are Flat.” We won’t raise money by cutting the top rate, it concludes, but we won’t raise very much by increasing it either.

  A harder problem, apparently: getting rid of the useless Department of Education. In recent news: The Department of Education Isn’t Going Anywhere. Which brings us to…

• If throwing money at schools didn't work, you didn't throw enough. That's the unshakable faith of seemingly every educrat. Jennifer Weber reports, on the contrary: New York Leads in School Spending—But Not Student Achievement.

  Governor Kathy Hochul’s proposed executive budget for fiscal year 2027, released January 20th, earmarks nearly $40 billion in state funds for K–12 education. Her proposal appears with New York leading the nation in per-pupil spending for the nineteenth consecutive year.

  Albany cites these nation-leading expenditures as evidence of the state’s “longstanding commitment” to giving students “the opportunity to excel.” But big spending has not meaningfully improved the metric that matters: student achievement.

  Per-pupil spending in New York State already exceeds $36,000 annually. If Hochul’s budget passes, New York will have increased state school aid by about $10 billion over the past five years. It will bring total state school aid to $39.3 billion—the largest in New York’s history, and a $1.6 billion increase over last year alone.

  If record investment translated into academic mastery, New York students’ proficiency rates would be increasing. Instead, they remain stubbornly low. According to the 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), only 31 percent of New York eighth-graders were proficient in reading; only 26 percent were proficient in math.

  If you'd like, go back and read my post from two days ago in response to John Shea's (Superintendent of Schools in Somersworth NH). Shea wants New Hampshire's state educational spending to be more like New York's. Why?

• The sickness is metaphorical, but still… The WaPo editorial board (which still exists) looks at news you may have missed (like I did): Moderna’s chilling announcement is a symptom of a deeper sickness. (WaPo gifted link)

  Moderna’s recent disclosure that it plans no new late-stage vaccine trials because of policy uncertainty in the United States is a chilling consequence of the Trump administration’s anti-vaccine turn. It’s also symptomatic of a deeper sickness threatening American dominance in pharmaceutical innovation.

  Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is systematically eroding a vaccination infrastructure that has saved countless children from death and deformity. After a quarter-century, America is on the verge of losing its measles elimination status. Now he’s tinkering with the liability system that keeps vaccine manufacturers economically viable.

  Throw in government price controls, and you've got a perfect, and deadly, storm of government interference making things worse.

If you've given up watching Saturday Night Live, I can't blame you. Their political stuff generates clapter from the audience, and (sorry) nary a chuckle from me. And I despise Trump!

On the other hand, if you keep watching…

I've watched four times, and laughed every time.

I confess I've developed a thing for Jane Wickline. A completely inappropriate thing, for multiple reasons, including ones I'm probably not aware of.

Also of note:

• No, that's not a misspelling. Robert Graboyes, owner of Bastiat's Window, admits he suffers from Electile Dysfunction.

  Bastiat’s Window made no endorsement in the 2024 presidential election—nor in any other election before or since. We’re unlikely to endorse any candidates in the future—largely for three reasons described below—futility, disdain, and regret.

  I'm in Bob's boat, for the same reasons, plus an additional one: humility. I can't think of any reason you, Reader, would want or need my advice on who to vote for. (Or whether to vote at all.)

• Plus, it looks like an ugly shoebox. Jeffrey Blehar's Carnival of Fools newsletter Trump Closing Kennedy Center for Renovations: Artists Won't Play There.

  This is no secret. Hamilton already canceled its anticipated 2026 run at the Kennedy Center in response to Trump’s 2025 purge of the Kennedy Center board. After the name change in December, other cancellations followed — including from nonpolitical artists who understood that playing in a building illegally renamed by a sitting president after himself amounted to an endorsement of the act. But six days ago — and far more devastatingly for the Kennedy Center’s social calendar — composer Philip Glass withdrew his Lincoln symphony, written specifically to premiere there in honor of America’s Semiquincentennial. “Symphony No. 15 is a portrait of Abraham Lincoln, and the values of the Kennedy Center today are in direct conflict with the message of the Symphony.”

  I don’t blame Glass for the insult: Trump put his name on the building precisely because he wanted to insult Glass and all others forced to play there. I think President Trump is many things, but a fool is not one of them; he knows exactly how much he is hated, and he is especially well-informed about who specifically hates him. He renamed the Kennedy Center after himself precisely because in his limited time left in office, he was amused by the idea of watching luminaries from the hated artistic class forced to bow and scrape and play in King Trump’s Beautiful Memorial Building. It really goes no deeper than that. The original source of most of his impulses — and most of his biggest errors — is vanity and ego gratification, after all.

  Jeffrey also discusses the Grammy Awards show, extending some well-deserved disrespect to Billie Ellish, et al. And the Oscar nominees for Best Picture? Reader, I can't even get interested in watching the ones Jeffrey sorta likes.

  E.g., his take on One Battle After Another: "a technically well-made film with flashes of genuine wit and human empathy, but it ultimately drowns in the incoherence of its plotting and message." I'll just watch a couple old episodes of House on Amazon Prime, ThankYouVeryMuch.)

• You talkin' to me, Erick? Mr. Erickson has some well-meaning advice for … some folks, anyway: Y'all Need to Shut Up. 2026 Electoral success for the GOP is looking pretty dim anyway, and …

  That is why Republican leaders in Washington really need to shut the hell up on gun issues right now. Here is the United States Attorney for the District of Columbia on Fox News yesterday.

  Pirro: "You bring a gun into the District, you mark my words, you're going to jail. I don't care if you have a license in another district and I don't care if you're a law abiding law owner somewhere else. You bring a gun into this District, count on going to jail and hope you… pic.twitter.com/tiZ6PwtA1i

  — Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) February 2, 2026

  This comes a week after Alex Pretti’s death, when the President and others in his Administration also attacked Second Amendment rights.

  I cannot think of a strategy better able to alienate Second Amendment voters from showing up in the midterms.

  I'll probably trudge down to the American Legion in November and unenthusiastically vote a straight-GOP ticket, but…

  (Not an endorsement! See above!)

• There's something about Tulsi. The Federalist's M.D. Kittle is pretty upset about a news item to which I linked a couple days ago: WSJ Hit Piece On Gabbard Based On Complaints That 'Weren't Credible'

  M.D. embeds a couple of tweets, one from Tulsi's Deputy Chief of Staff:

  As if the @WSJ needed to provide more examples of how it’s utter trash.
  
  Here’s the truth: There was no wrongdoing by @DNIGabbard, a fact that WSJ conveniently buried 13 paragraphs down. Even the Biden-era IC IG came to this collusion the Whistleblower’s allegations against DNI… https://t.co/0UeSvde67l

  — Alexa Henning (@alexahenning) February 2, 2026

  And one from DNI's official spokeswoman:

  This is not true and is one of the most disgusting cases of clickbait I have ever seen.
  
  There was absolutely NO wrongdoing by DNI Gabbard, a fact that @WSJ conveniently buried 13 paragraphs down. Even the Biden-era Intelligence Community Inspector General came to this… https://t.co/F9LMolUXCb

  — Olivia Coleman (@DNIspox) February 2, 2026

  In case you missed it: "conveniently buried 13 paragraphs down".

  (For what it's worth: those tweets were both posted at 8:21am on Monday. Who copied whom?)

  So, in fairness, here's the WSJ's paragraph 13:

  Gabbard answered written questions about the allegations from the inspector general’s office, a senior official at the spy agency said. That prompted the acting inspector general at the time, Tamara Johnson, to determine the allegations specifically about Gabbard weren’t credible, the official said. Johnson remains employed at the agency, which didn’t make her available for an interview.

  Just wanted you to know the whole story. Now you know as much as I do, which is nothing.

John Shea sounds the death knell in my lousy local newspaper, Foster's Daily Democrat: Open enrollment threatens to destroy public education in NH. His opening salvo:

I've bolded a couple sentences above. Shea loves to gripe about the state government's stinginess. He fails to mention that, overall, New Hampshire spends quite a bit on K-12 education. World Population Review has comparison data ("Per Pupil Spending by State 2026"): it shows NH as the seventh-highest in yearly spending per student ($21,898; behind only New York, Vermont, New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Alaska).

Also, worse: Shea is bullshitting about NH being "dead last among the 50 states" in terms of state government K-12 funding. A supplementary table shows the state kicking in $6,344 per student annually. Dead last? No; it's more than Georgia, Colorado, Montana, Idaho, Ohio, Mississippi, Tennessee, Missouri, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Utah, Nebraska, Arizona, South Dakota, Florida, and Texas.

(I almost wrote "Shea is lying" there, but "bullshitting" is the more accurate term. As Harry Frankfurt pointed out, bullshitters don't care whether they're telling the truth or not.)

John Shea is currently superintendent of schools of the Somersworth School District, just up the road from Pun Salad Manor. He first came to my attention in 2018, appearing in Foster's demanding a boycott of the Kittery (Maine) Trading Post, for daring to sell "semi-automatic assault rifles".

At the time, I suggested that Shea literally mind his own business: then, as now, running the Somersworth schools. Back then, their student scores on statewide tests were awful.

Guess what, they're still bad:

I will play the cynic: Shea has warned against the imminent demise of government schooling, and the awful people plotting it, in the past (Pun Salad comments are here, here, and here.) EFAs and Open Enrollment might make it economically feasible for Somersworth parents to escape his subpar school for better options.

For a sane look at Open Enrollment, see the Josiah Bartlett Center: Know the basics. Their summary:

Shea is frightened to death of competition. Maybe Somersworth should get a superintendent who isn't.

Also of note:

• Actually, it is rocket science. Ars Technica relates the sad story: Unable to tame hydrogen leaks, NASA delays launch of Artemis II until March.

  The launch of NASA’s Artemis II mission, the first flight of astronauts to the Moon in more than 53 years, will have to wait another month after a fueling test Monday uncovered hydrogen leaks in the connection between the rocket and its launch platform at Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

  “Engineers pushed through several challenges during the two-day test and met many of the planned objectives,” NASA said in a statement following the conclusion of the mock countdown, or wet dress rehearsal (WDR), early Tuesday morning. “To allow teams to review data and conduct a second Wet Dress Rehearsal, NASA now will target March as the earliest possible launch opportunity for the flight test.”

  Whenever it goes, I'll be watching. And praying. Well, probably not literally praying, but you know what I mean.

• Lock him up. Kevin D. Williamson makes The Simple Case for Arresting Don Lemon. (Followed by "the less simple case against".) (archive.today link)

  The simple case for arresting and prosecuting Don Lemon for his role in the invasion of a St. Paul Church by a group of anti-ICE protesters is, well, simple: It seems that he probably broke the law, including a federal statute that forbids “nonviolent physical obstruction” of worship services.

  Lemon insists that he was not there to participate in the protest action but to cover it as a journalist. In fairness, he did not claim to be there as a good journalist—a claim to which I would take some exception—but, in any case, that does not matter very much: Lemon entered the church, disrupting its business, and stayed after he was specifically asked to leave by the people in charge. We do not license journalists in the United States—thank goodness—and acting as a journalist does not give anyone any special license to break otherwise applicable laws. The First Amendment gives Americans the right to publish and speak, but it does not protect those engaged in publishing and speaking from being prosecuted for criminal acts, including criminal acts that frequently come up in the course of doing a reporter’s work, such as trespassing, receiving classified documents, or making audio or video recordings in way that might violate local laws requiring the consent of those being recorded. Journalists, like those engaged in civil disobedience, at times willfully break the law in the course of doing something they think important, and, like those engaged in civil disobedience, they must be prepared to bear the legal consequences for illegal actions.

  Read on for that other case. And also for:

  It is a little weird to think about what a man on the edge of 80 might be when he grows up, but if Trump ever grows up, a fascist is what he will grow up to be. That said, I agree it is unfair to call him a fascist today for the same reason it would be unfair to ask my dachshund to write a commentary on Aristotle.

• I may go through 2026 without watching any movies. But Jeff Maurer braved the crowds and brings us his Review of "Melania"

  The inauguration coat is a major plot in Melania. You see, Melania was thinking of wearing one coat, but then she decided to wear another coat. A big bravura scene — the Melania equivalent of the Omaha Beach scene in Saving Private Ryan — happens when it looks like they might not be able to tailor the coat the way she wanted! But then…yes they can. Crisis averted! Before seeing the movie, if you had asked me how Melania picked out her inauguration coat, I would have said “I’ll bet someone showed her a bunch of different coats, and she looked at them, and then chose one.” I honestly did not need a feature film to confirm: Yes, that was it.

  The funniest part of the movie is when Melania claims that the movie is the story that “everyone wants to know”, and then there’s a near-smash-cut to her picking out a bureau for Barron’s room. Devil’s advocate: Did everyone want to know how Barron’s bureau was picked out? Surely someone exists who is fascinated by Barron’s bureau — like all of us — but who is ho-hum about the selection process. I can’t even imagine what footage was edited out of Melania — maybe footage of Melania watching an ice cube melt in a glass of water, or her sitting motionless staring at an ant farm for 90 minutes. Melania is so dull that it makes your average episode of Caillou seem like The Bourne Identity.

  60 percent of the movie is Melania being transported places. Did you ever wonder how she gets from the airport to Trump Tower? The answer is: a car. What about from one room in Mar-a-Lago to a different room? It’s hallways, sometimes including stairs. The movie seems to assume that the audience is suffering from Transient Global Amnesia, so if they see Melania in one room, and later she’s in a different room, they’ll freak out and yell “HOW DID SHE GET FROM THAT PLACE TO THIS PLACE?!?!?!?” To prove that Melania is not a teleporting shapeshifter, the movie treats us to excruciatingly long shots of Melania in cars, sometimes accompanied by “Gimme Shelter” or “Billie Jean” to try to provide energy where there is obviously none.

  But, surprisingly, Matthew Hennessey says: ‘Melania’ in the Money. (WSJ gifted link)

  “Melania” did boffo business at the box office this weekend. Why do I get a victory lap? Because one of the first Free Expression newsletters predicted this. It was headlined “Republicans Watch Documentaries, Too.”

  The film about the first lady opened on 1,778 screens and pulled in more than $7 million. That’s a lot for a documentary, most of which don’t play in theaters at all. The ones that do are lucky to make $70.

  But haters always hate. Much of the reporting on the film’s haul has noted that it’s still a long way from profitability. Amazon paid $40 million for “Melania” and reportedly invested another $35 million in marketing.

  Apparently some attendees did not attend just so they could make fun of the movie for their substack audience.

• Also overused: "perfect". James Lileks muses on the different approaches taken by the customer service people you wind up talking to on the phone: Awesome? That's a Negative.

  3. The Over-Effusive Youth. The levels of enthusiastic obsequiousness I get from younger customer-service reps is jarring. Can I get your phone number? Awwwesome. Zip? Awwwwesome. Sometimes it’s quick - awsm! - and sometimes it’s drawn out with reverence like they’re invoking some old Norse God named Ossum. We’ve been told that Generation Z (or maybe Alpha, I am too Boomery to care about these distinctions) has a social aversion to the phone, because it’s rude and intrusive. You mean I have to talk to someone, just because they want to? You mean I have to just call someone up and make them talk to me? Obviously not all of them feel like this, but the ones that are capable of talking on the phone really lean into it, like they’re doing something retro or vintage and they think that’s how it used to be done.

  I liked that mini-reflection in the middle: I am too Boomery to care about these distinctions. Me too, James, me too.

The Eye Candy Du Jour … looks like she knows something, doesn't it?

The WSJ has a scoop: a Classified Whistleblower Complaint About Tulsi Gabbard Stalls Within Her Agency. (WSJ gifted link)

I assume Joseph Heller is, somewhere in the afterlife, murmuring "Catch-22", perhaps with a wry grin.

I also assume Mick Herron will write a Slow Horses novel incorporating a similar plot thread someday, if he hasn't done so already.

Also of note:

• 

  Looks like it's up to you, Sweet Meteor of Death. I suppose many will see this as good news: Superintelligent AI Is Not Coming To Kill You. It is a Neil Chilson's brief review/debunking of the book Amazon-linked at your right.

  "We do not mean that as hyperbole," they write. They believe artificial intelligence research will inevitably produce superintelligent machines and these machines will inevitably kill everyone.

  This is an extraordinary claim. It requires extraordinary evidence. Instead, they offer a daisy chain of thought experiments, unexamined premises, and a linguistic sleight of hand that smuggles their conclusion into the definition of intelligence itself.

  The book's central argument rests on the "alignment problem"—the effort to ensure that advanced AI systems share human values. Yudkowsky popularized this concept. Humans, the authors argue, succeed through intelligence, which they define as "the work of predicting the world, and the work of steering the world." Computers will surpass human intelligence because they are faster, can copy themselves, have perfect memory, and can modify their own architecture. Because AI systems are "grown" through training rather than explicitly programmed, we cannot fully specify their goals. When superintelligent AI pursues objectives that diverge even slightly from human values, it will optimize relentlessly toward those alien goals. When we interfere, it will eliminate us.

  Well, I put it on my get-at-library list anyway, for when I'm in the mood for something apocalyptic.

• Speaking of apocalyptic no-shows: Commie broadcasting survives. I don't know if Becket Adams' story is good news or bad, but: NPR and PBS Never Needed Your Taxpayer Dollars. (NR gifted link)

  When Republican lawmakers moved last year to end taxpayer funding for PBS and NPR, a constellation of media CEOs and experts warned that the cuts would result in the closure of dozens, possibly hundreds, of affiliate stations.

  It has now been six months since President Trump signed a bill eliminating $1.1 billion in federal funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and the predicted newsroom Armageddon has yet to materialize.

  In fact, of the more than 1,000 television and radio stations that make up the country’s public media system, nearly all remain operational.

  Becket gets in a wisecrack: "I distinctly remember being told that the budget cuts would kill us all. No, wait. Sorry. That was net neutrality." Before rattling off some of the dire predictions made by adherents.

  I suppose it's an interesting question: Now that NPR/PBS rely more on voluntary donations, has that made them more lefty, or less? Interesting question, but not interesting enough to make me Google.

• LFOD, unless prohibited by shaky legal rulings. Jonathan H. Adler is nonplussed by the success a recent legal shenanigan: Private Suit Commandeers New Hampshire Government to Maintain Vehicle Emission Inspections.

  This weekend car owners in New Hampshire were supposed to be done with regular automobile emission inspections. Although such inspections had been part of the New Hampshire's State Implementation Plan (SIP) under the federal Clean Air Act, the state legislature passed a law abolishing the program last year, effective today, January 31. Now, however, the inspections may be required after all.

  Gordon-Darby Holdings, which owns the company that administered the program under a contract with the state did not want the program (and its associated revenue) to go away, so it filed suit, seeking an injunction to force New Hampshire to continue requiring automobile emission inspections. According to Gordon-Darby, New Hampshire was required to maintain the program unless and until it received approval from the federal Environmental Protection Agency. On this basis, the company went to court and—quite shockingly—prevailed.

  Jonathan thinks the ruling made by federal district court judge Landya McCafferty is clearly flawed on "anti-commandeering" grounds. (Something "typically taught to first-year law students in the introductory Constitutional Law course.") So we'll see what happens. My inspection month was (and maybe still is) April, so they have a few months to figure it out.

Well, that's a pretty sad pic over there on your right, isn't it? Not only are the Canadians pissed with us, our local boozemakers aren't happy either. And they have a lot of extra hooch to drown their sorrows. As C. Jarrett Dieterle says, Trump's Tariff War Is Crushing American Alcohol Makers.

I hope SCOTUS will save us from this pointless stupidity. (But I note that we don't seem to be boycotting them: the state liquor store website shows plenty of Crown Royal in stock, although the prices seem steep to me.)

Also of note:

• Look out below! The WSJ editorialists write on The Perils of a Falling Trump Dollar. (WSJ gifted link)

  President Trump this week said he thinks a weaker dollar is “great,” but he should be careful what he wishes for. Many politicians over the years have contemplated a weaker greenback as an economic miracle cure. They often discover that a weak dollar is a liability.

  Mr. Trump made his remark Tuesday amid dollar weakness that is contributing to instability in global foreign-exchange markets. The WSJ Dollar Index, which compares the greenback to a basket of currencies, has fallen about 8% over the past year, and gold’s steady ascent, to above $5,300 per ounce this week, sends its own signal about dollar weakness. The dollar-euro exchange rate is among the most important in the global economy, and the greenback has lost about 14% of its value relative to the euro over the past year.

  I'd buy some gold, but unfortunately the ground in my backyard is frozen solid.

• Some say the world will end in… Well, you know the rest.

  Unbeknownst to me, Jeffrey Blehar has a weekly newsletter at the National Review site. And it's unpaywalled! Check out his latest observation: ICE Can’t Fight Activist Fire with Fire.

  Yesterday morning, I offered some blunt advice to President Trump: He should either fire Kristi Noem — preferably aboard a rocket and into the sun — or absent that, demote and back-burner her as the failed face of the Department of Homeland Security. (My actual wording was a bit harsher: “Can nearly everybody within the remote orbit of DHS leadership except for Tom Homan.”) And because Trump was in one of his rare obliging moods, he evidently was already taking that advice, declaring that both Noem and Border Patrol commander Greg Bovino would be departing Minneapolis, with Homan stepping in instead. It’s an excellent and necessary first step.

  But I am also alert to the fundamental problem the federal government is faced with: How can it be permissible in a functioning civil society for one narrow segment of it to simply decide it will collectively oppose enforcement of federal immigration laws? You cannot permit activists to effectively nullify federal law out of a misplaced sense of self-righteousness or progressive fervor. You also cannot, well, shoot them — not for being obstreperous agitators, not in America. How does the government enforce the law?

  If I had an easy answer, I’d offer it right now. But I don’t, and one reason for that is that the left has had a century-long head start in the (mostly legal, if largely invidious) techniques of organization and protest. It is important to understand the methodology used by the activists here, why it is so devilishly effective, and why the Trump administration needs to be smarter about how it chooses its confrontations. And that requires a bit of a history lesson.

  Woodrow Wilson had his methods: jail (e.g., Eugene Debs) and deportation (e.g. Emma Goldman). We don't do that any more, although I assume Trump is envious thereof.