Pun Salad

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!