Pun Salad

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.