Pun Salad

Everything old is new again, as James Lileks says: People Want to Move Where There’s More Opportunity? How Dare They.

James looks at other various proposals (Canada, Washington State, California) to discourage outmigration, aimed mostly at the well-off, for revenue-raising reasons.

Not to beat you over the head with it or anything, but: Today's headline (and accompanying Getty image) reminisces about the good old days of East Germany's "Anti-Fascist Protection Rampart".

Also of note:

• Who am I to disagree? Gee, it seems like it's only been a few days … er, because it has only been a few days … since I defended Clarence Thomas against the charge of "making an unhinged rant about 'intellectuals'". Not guilty, your honor.

  Reader, a real rant awaits you: Via Sarah Hoyt at Instapundit: Mark Manson says Intellectuals are F*cking Idiots. It's (indeed) a rant, but make your own call about how well its door is attached to its frame. Excerpt:

  Idiots don’t update their views about the world when new information comes in. Idiots try to shut down discourse rather than engage with it. Idiots will argue over the definitions of words like “the” and “it.” Idiots will look at something plain and obvious and claim that it’s actually complicated, you see, because if you factor the binomial of quantum rate of the social construct and divide by zero, you’ll discover, like Nietzsche once said, that what is right is right if only what is right is left and what’s left alleviates the burden of the proletariat to the liberation of all peoples, under god, whatever and ever, amen.

  Look, the world is a scary and unpredictable place. It is human nature to crave some model to give it some sense of predictability. But, the real problem is that our models of reality also give us an identity and a sense of belonging and fighting for them gives our empty lives a sense of meaning.

  

  Mark's article is full of examples supporting his thesis, and advice on how to avoid being a bleeping idiot. I've added his substack to my reading list, so we'll see how that goes. I might even check out his best-selling book. (Amazon link at your right.)

• Coming soon to a university near you. Andrew Stuttaford previews Vape Wars.

  Over the years, the campaign against smoking degenerated from a much needed educational effort into an assertion of state power, a means of moneygrubbing (both by governments and various anti-smoking activist groups), and an opportunity for moral preening by the fiercer anti-smokers. There are few better examples of this than the way that EU regulators prohibit the sale of Swedish (noncarcinogenic) snus anywhere in the bloc other than in Sweden — a decision, given the close association between snus and low rates of smoking in that country, that will come with a heavy toll.

  Another example comes from efforts on both sides of the Atlantic to stigmatize, heavily tax, and restrict access to vapes (for adults), much of which (purportedly) rests on the dangers of nicotine, an addictive substance, to be sure, but one that carries few health risks and far, far fewer than smoking, an argument that this administration understands much better than its predecessor.

  Andrew links to a recent WSJ article that details (yet another) intra-Administration kerfuffle: White House Pushes for Flavored Vapes Blocked By FDA Head (WSJ gifted link)

  The White House is pushing to allow more vape flavors on the market for the first time in years, but Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Marty Makary opposes the move and is blocking the plan, people familiar with the matter said.

  A memo from Makary’s office prevented the authorization of several flavors including menthol, mango and blueberry from Los Angeles-based vape maker Glas, according to agency documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, after FDA scientific reviewers had OK’d the flavors.

  “The White House and FDA are completely aligned on expanding the availability of flavored vape products for adults, and adults only,” said White House spokesman Kush Desai. “The Biden administration completely disregarded evidence finding these products are beneficial for adults trying to quit smoking, and the Trump administration remains committed to rectifying this poor policymaking.”

  All this led me to check out the University Near Here, and it didn't take long to find a dire warning from Nancy Bushinsky ("MSW, LICSW, the Alcohol, Nicotine and Other Drug (ANOD) Educator/Counselor at UNH Health & Wellness."): Nicotine Pouches on Campus: A Hidden Threat to Health & Sustainability.

  Ask students about nicotine, and you’ll quickly notice trends have shifted based on which products they mention. Cigarettes and vapes remain, but more students are turning to nicotine pouches—tiny packets sold in round plastic containers under names like Zyn or Velo. Marketed as “tobacco-free”, “smokeless,” and even eco-friendly, pouches are framed as cleaner less risky alternatives. But are they really harmless? And how do they fit—or clash—with campus sustainability goals?

  I bet you can guess Nancy's answer to those questions!

  UNH has a very broad "Tobacco-, Smoke-, & Nicotine-Free Policy" that prohibits using … well, a lot of stuff. Including snuff. And also vapes and pouches.

  Nancy recognizes the problem with prohibiting those pouches, though.

  Accountability Matters

  While nicotine pouches can be used without detection, undetectable doesn’t mean harmless. Students have a responsibility to hold themselves and each other accountable to the policy, not only out of respect for the rules, but also to protect the well-being of our community, and to contribute to a campus culture that prioritizes health and sustainability.

  Short version: Students should nag pouch users.

Recently on the book blog:

I seem to have been on a SCOTUS kick of late. Bookwise, over the past few months I've read books by Amy Coney Barrett and the late Antonin Scalia. And just a couple days ago I watched Clarence Thomas's lecture at the University of Texas in Austin.

And now here's SCOTUS justice Neil Gorsuch, with co-author Janie Nitze. (Janie's had an interesting life: a physics major who has clerked for both Gorsuch and Sonia Sotomayor.)

It's been fashionable for critics of SCOTUS's conservative/libertarian wing to accuse them of being in the pocket of "big business", consistently ruling against the "little guy". That would be a difficult accusation to make stick after reading this book: the major theme here involves numerous accounts of "little guys" getting battered by government at all levels. And often that battering is performed for the benefit of entrenched business interests. The book is very anecdotal, and I probably risked my blood pressure spiking in many of the cases the authors relate. Example: the case of hacker/activist Aaron Swartz, who committed suicide in 2013 at age 26, facing decades in prison at the hands of (Obama-era!) DOJ prosecutors.

I was reading Hayek's The Constitution of Libery concurrently with reading this. Hayek was aghast at the increase of "administrative" rules, often applied by arbitrary and inconsistent whim, in contrast to what he called the "rule of law" or Rechtsstaat. Reader, things were bad enough when Hayek's book came out in 1960; Gorsuch and Nitze may convince you that they're much worse now.

The book is very readable, although the prose dips over to clichés at times. (E.g.: "As we write, our nation is rapidly approaching the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence." Rapidly? I'm pretty sure we're approaching it at the same rate we always do: one second per second.)

I'm sure Justice Gorsuch had to steer clear of commenting specifically about any issue that's likely to come before SCOTUS. I'm pretty sure (however) that lawyers who had to argue in favor of actions taken by an unaccountable "independent" federal agency would have their work cut out for them.

I couldn't help but notice an interesting thing about the maze pictured on the book's cover: it has no solution. That third ring out from the center is solid. I wouldn't blame that little guy standing at the outer entrance for feeling frustrated!

Jeff Maurer has a relatively serious look at "AI job losses". And his conclusion is: “AI Job Losses” So Far Largely Means “Call Center Jobs”.

I usually rely on sites like Cafe Hayek and Marginal Revolution to critique bullshit economic research, but non-economist Jeff does a pretty good job too.

Also of note:

• Ackshually, we've figured out a lot of other stuff too. But David Harsanyi has a specific bone to pick, and who to pick it with: Hey, Socialists, We've Already Figured Out the Supermarket.

  There are at least 76,000 supermarkets in the United States. Most of us probably have a dozen within 10 miles of home.

  Nevertheless, leftists are constantly trying to convince us that we need government-run grocery stores. The latest person is New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who has promised to open five city-run markets to combat "out-of-control" prices by getting rid of the "profit motive," passing on the savings to consumers.

  David describes a number of reasons to be skeptical about the Zohran's schemes. Example:

  The Mamdani Mart in Harlem, for instance, will be built on land already owned by the city, and it's still going to cost $30 million according to the mayor, if government estimates are right, a rarity.

  In the real world, these exorbitant costs would be passed on to consumers. In the Mamdani world, the cost is tacked on to an already $5.4 billion budget deficit.

  To put the cost into context, a new Aldi costs around $1.5 million to $3 million on average to construct, not including the cost of the land. Other chains might cost around $3 million to $5 million. Aldi keeps costs as low as possible because they are governed by the profit motive.

  An Aldi can be built as quickly as six weeks. Mamdani's supermarket won't be open until 2029. Maybe.

  If I'm still around in 2029, I'll try to remember to check up on the Mamdani Marts.

• I was worried. But Space.com reporter Mike Wall has some good news: Artemis 2's heat shield seems to have aced its trial by fire.

  Artemis 2's return to Earth went a lot more smoothly than some folks had feared.

  The heat shield on Artemis 2's Orion capsule, which the crew named "Integrity," was the topic of considerable discussion in the lead-up to the mission's April 10 splashdown — for several years before that, in fact.

  For a more negative take on Artemis II, skip over to Behind the Black's post-splashdown summary:

  The Artemis-2 mission is now over, though the final condition of that heat shield still needs to be analyzed. In addition, engineers need figure out how to fix a bunch of other issues that took place during the mission:

  • A leak in an internal helium tank on Europe’s service module
  • Communication drop-outs several times
  • the endless issues with Orion’s toilet

  There were other minor issues that cropped up repeatedly, none significant but all of which should be fixed. And though it will be helpful to determine how this heat shield performed, it should be noted that the data is essentially irrelevant to future missions. The next mission, Artemis-3, will use a completely different design, and test it for the first time on a manned flight. That flight however will be in Earth orbit, so the stress on the shield will be far less than this return, even with the changed re-entry path.

  Though many will call this lunar fly-by “historic,” it will likely be little remembered by future generations. It did little to move the settlement of the solar system forward. No truly useful engineering was tested. The rocket and capsule are engineering dead-ends. Neither will be of much use for establishing colonies on the Moon or Mars, as SLS is still too expensive and too difficult to stack and launch and Orion is too small for any interplanetary missions, being nothing more than an overweight and very expensive ascent/descent capsule.

  Kind of a downer. But not an inaccurate one.

At the WSJ, Peter Robinson asks the big questions (maybe the biggest ones there are), about God, Creation and ‘The Story of Everything’. (WSJ gifted link)

The movie treads some well-known ground on questions of basic existence that don't currently have any good scientific answers.

We know about the Big Bang. What (or, um, who) caused it?

We know that if physical constants were just slightly different from the values they have in our universe, atoms, stars, galaxies, and planets would not exist. Were they set to those values, or were they simply the result of extremely improbable dice-tossing?

Our planet and solar system seem improbably suited to the existence of life. More coincidence?

And even the simplest living things, when you take them apart and study them, turn out to be extrenely complicated, and put together via strands of DNA. I know the "blind watchmaker" argument, but … come on.

And I would add: not just complex machines, but machines that seem to be self-aware, self-directed, capable of discovery and wonder about all this. So, again: just more very improbable accidents?

See the headline: Pull the other one, What kind of sucker do you take me for?

Not that I totally buy the "It wuz God" hypothesis either.

But… still.

Also of note:

• But would a merciful God have allowed this? Jeffrey Blehar says the obituaries for Commie Radio were premature: NPR Survives and Thrives After Fedeeral Funding Cuts.

  Good news for all those worried that the Trump-era GOP’s defunding of National Public Radio in the most recent federal budget might lead to the spontaneous combustion of human civilization: They’re doing just fine! In fact, better than that: As it turns out, the natural American spirit of charity — to be specific, donations from two billionaires — has bailed them out and then some.

  Connie Ballmer (wife of Clippers owner and professional dancer Steve Ballmer) has decided to use her considerable bride-price to donate $80 million to the theoretically beleaguered radio network. Another, anonymous, donor has chipped in a further $33 million (penny stakes, relatively speaking). That totals a smooth $113 million haul in one fishing trawl, and all for the goal of “ensuring NPR transforms its technology to meet the needs and serve the interests of public media audiences on whatever platforms or devices they may seek it.” Why, with such specifically contoured goals as that, you can rest assured it won’t be used as a general-purpose slush fund. (But then again these people knew what they were wading into: I hope both donors got something slightly better than the branded coffee mug I got when I foolishly chipped in $40 back in the day.)

  Bottom line for taxpayers, as Jeffrey says: they don't need your money now, and never did.

• Big news: the word "Trump" does not appear in this Kevin D. Williamson column! He could have opened with a Monty Python soundbite, And now for something completely different." How American Rock ’n’ Roll Changed the World. (archive.today link)

  “We are Motörhead, and we play rock ’n’ roll.”

  But there was a lot of American in Lemmy—it wasn’t just the cavalry Stetson. In one famous interview—one that I assume inspired his introduction—he was asked about his life fronting a “heavy-metal band.” Lemmy heaped scorn on the premise of the question: “We have long hair, so you call us a heavy-metal band,” he said. “If we had short hair, you’d call us a punk-rock band. As a matter of fact, we play rock ’n’ roll.” The singer and writer Henry Rollins, a longtime friend of Lemmy’s, makes it clear that Lemmy’s hell-bent-for-leather stage persona was no persona at all: “He did not own sweatpants, nor did he own sandals. That look wasn’t a stage get-up. He was in the hat and boots all the time. Those were the only kind of clothes he owned.”

  If you wanted to meet Lemmy, it wasn’t hard to do. He loved the Rainbow Bar & Grill in Hollywood—he lived most of his life in a tiny, memorabilia-crowded apartment just around the corner from it—where he would drink Jack-and-Coke and smoke and play video poker and, if it came to that, shake hands and take pictures with those who sought him out there. It wasn’t hard to spot the people who were there to see Lemmy. His gruffness wasn’t a put-on, either—but he knew his people.

  Rollins relates another telling conversation with Lemmy: “He said, ‘I remember a time before there was rock ’n’ roll, when you only had your mother’s Rosemary Clooney records.’” Before rock—that blew Rollins’s mind. “I asked him, ‘What happened?’”

  Lemmy’s answer:

  “We all heard Elvis Presley. And we never looked back.”

  Before you read the whole thing, and you should, try to fill in the blank here:

  The Gibson Custom Shop will sell you a nanometer-by-nanometer copy of Greeny, the famous 1959 Les Paul Standard owned by Peter Green, Gary Moore, and currently by Kirk Hammett, a guitar that has been played on everything from Fleetwood Mac records to Metallica anthems. It’s great. And it’s        

• It's one of those parties to which you don't want to be invited. One of the items in Nellie Bowles' "TGIF" column refers to The Luddite Party. (archive.today link)

  → The war on Waymo: The Luddite-ification of the Democratic Party continues. Here’s the group More Perfect Union arguing that Waymo is a scourge on workers: “If Waymo gets its way, 2 million workers will be out of work. When Waymo gets a firm hold on a city, wages go down. Some drivers now have to work 12 hours [a] day, 7 days a week just to get by. This isn’t inevitable—but Big Tech is spending millions to make you think it is.” The group profiled a bunch of Uber drivers who want to keep being drivers. First of all, I find it kind of funny that Uber is now the thing we have to protect. Dems are literally just against change. There’s no cohesive logic to it. Second, we have data now on what Waymo does in a city, and it makes driving a heck of a lot safer. As an Anthropic researcher posted: “A full-scale U.S. Waymo rollout would cost ~700 full-time jobs in the funeral care industry (by saving around 35 thousand young American lives per year).” Think of the trauma surgeons! Do they not need to pay the bills too? You spent so much time trying to cure cancer, you never considered how many people cancer employs.

  That is an excellent point. Frédéric Bastiat would approve.

Recently on the book blog:

I first read Hayek's The Constitution of Liberty back sometime in the 1970s, a $3.95 doorstop paperback published by Henry Regnery Co. I noticed recently that the University of Chicago Press released this "Definitive Edition" back in 2011, with (apparently) some minor fixes to the footnoting and other references. And the Kindle version was on sale for a "mere" $18.99! (It's more now.) So I snapped it up and it eventually worked its way to the top of my non-fiction to-be-read cyberpile.

Reader beware: Hayek was not the most sparkling prose stylist; he's truly an Austrian economist/philosopher. And this means long paragraphs full of long, meandering, convoluted sentences. I had Google pick out an example concerning the "rule of law":

It is because the law-maker does not know the particular cases to which his rule will be applied, and it is because the judge who applies it has no choice in drawing the conclusions that follow from his existing premises and the particular facts of the case, that it can be said that in such a system it is the law and not the will of particular men which prevails.

Yes, you can untwist and dig out some meaning from that, but it's pretty abstract. After page after page, and at my age, … well, I didn't get as much out of the book as I should have. I think I did a better job in my first reading half a century ago.

But Hayek's main points are easy to summarize: his desired polity is one in which "coercion" (carefully defined) is minimized. This is accomplished by that "rule of law": clearly stated, generally applicable rules and not subject to the whims or interpretations of government bureaucrats.

He goes on to criticize how this should (but mostly doesn't) play out in the "welfare states" of the real world: labor unions, social security, "progressive" taxation, monetary policy, housing, agriculture, education, and research. Some of his observations are prescient, others not. (For example, he thought private-sector unionization was likely a permanent feature; he didn't foresee its long-term decline in the US.)

But he clearly saw the menace of "progressive" taxation, and he attacked it on its underlying sin against democracy:

That a majority, merely because it is a majority, should be entitled to apply to a minority a rule which does not apply to itself is an infringement of a principle much more fundamental than democracy itself, a principle on which the justification of democracy rests.

Our tax system has long since allowed the infringement of that fundamental principle, and in fact has gone past merely allowing the infringement, but eagerly embracing it.

So I'm posting a long video I haven't (yet) watched:

But if you'd like a text preview, the WSJ has you covered for one of Justice Thomas's main points: Progressives vs. the Declaration. (WSJ gifted link) Excerpt of that excerpt:

Seems pretty clear. But I couldn't help but notice the headline at the Daily Beast: SCOTUS Justice Clarence Thomas, 77, Goes on Unhinged Rant About ‘Intellectuals’.

Unhinged rant, huh? I have my doubts. The relevant C-SPAN page has a search function for their closed-caption transcript of the speech and the word "intellectuals" doesn't show up there. Let me know if you can find anything that would remotely support the Daily Beast allegation. From what I've seen and read so far, Thomas's talk seems completely hinged. [UPDATE 2026-04-18: I watched Justice Thomas's speech and I did notice one (and only one) occurence of the "I" word:

Intellectuals want you to believe that our founding principles are matters of esoteric philosophy or sophisticated debate.

I may have missed something, but I don't think so. This doesn't sound unhinged to me. I don't think the context supports that, either.

To be fair to "intellectuals": characterizing just about everything as "matters of esoteric philosophy or sophisticated debate" is what they do. Otherwise they would have to investigate other fields, like HVAC installation or insurance underwriting.

Seriously: Thomas's speech was a standard defense of the natural rights asserted in the Declaration of Independence against "Progressives" like Woodrow Wilson (and a host of modern racists and eugenicists). He brings out the big guns: Jefferson (of course), Lincoln, Coolidge, Locke, de Tocqueville, etc. You can disagree, fine, but labelling it as an "unhinged rant" is delusional.]

But coincidentally I read Bryan Garner's article in the May issue of National Review, and I'll spend one of my free links for this month to share it with you: Defending Against the Demagogue. What stood out was his leadoff sentence:

Congratulations to the Daily Beast for providing such a perfect illustration of that!

Also of note:

• I know Tax Day is in the rear view mirror for a while, but… Vero de Rugy is Debunking Five Tax Day Myths, and attention should be paid. To #3, specifically: "If You Can't Tax the Rich, Tax Corporations":

  Corporations are the next most likely target for those who want large government without the middle class paying for it. The problem is that corporations don't actually pay taxes. Once you understand why, this starts to look like one of the worst ideas in America's tax code.

  Corporations write checks to the IRS, but they don't bear the tax burden. Every dollar collected for corporate tax comes from a human: the worker who's paid a lower wage, the shareholder who earns less, and the consumer who pays higher prices at checkout. Research shows that workers bear somewhere between one-third and two-thirds of the corporate tax burden through lower wages. If you have a 401(k), you're paying it too, quietly, through lower returns on every stock in the fund.

  Further, corporate profits are returns on investment. Tax them and you get less investment. Less investment means lower productivity, which leads to lower wages over time. Decades ago, economists Robert Hall and Alvin Rabushka showed a better way: Replace the corporate income tax with a consumption-based system under which businesses deduct all wages and capital investment immediately. No double taxation, no penalty on investment, and revenue without unintended economic damage.

  The corporate tax survives because voters mistakenly believe someone else pays it. This belief is expensive.

  I recently visited the website of NH gubernatorial candidate Jon Kiper. He knows general income and sales taxes are off the table in this state, but I noted his desire to resurrect the Interest&Dividends tax. I didn't mention his other "Taxes" pledges to "Reset [i.e.: raise] the Business Profits Tax to 2015 rates" and "Establish a minimum corporate tax".

  He needs to read Vero's column.

• Food for thought, via David R. Henderson, from American Thinker Peter C. Earle: The Anarchy Pose.

  What makes the extremes of the libertarian impulse so attractive to some individuals is precisely what makes it dangerous to shallow ones. At the latter edge of the spectrum, it offers the emotional satisfactions of radicalism without demanding the intellectual burdens of institutional thought. To say “down with the state” (or “end the Fed”) is, in many circles, less the culmination of rigorous reasoning than a substitute for it. It can function as an elegant refusal to descend into the messy terrain where actual societies live: enforcement, coordination, collective risk, externalities, public goods, and the always uncomfortable problem of what happens when private incentives do not align with social stability.

  The cynical truth is that “anarchism” often flatters the ego. Whether of the Left or Right variety, it permits one to occupy the moral high ground against every visible failure of government while avoiding responsibility for specifying durable alternatives against the likely tradeoffs. It is much easier to sneer at the DMV, zoning boards, central banks, tax authorities, or city councils than to explain operationally how millions of strangers are to resolve disputes, define property rights, manage contagion, deter predation, or provide credible rules of the game across time. Sloganeering is edgy; weighing institutions against competing and conflicting aims is hard.

  I take his point, and if you note me self-flattering my ego, please talk me down.

  But: I'm not an anarchist, at least not this week. And the late, great, Brian Doherty put forth an eminently reasonable case for ending the Fed in the eminently reasonable Reason last year.

Recently on the book blog:

I've read and enjoyed a number of Ruth Ware's novels in the past. (Specifically, that number is "two": my reports here and here.) And this one got a good review from Tom Nolan in the WSJ!

The narrator, Lyla, is an aspiring virologist whose research is going poorly. Her longtime boyfriend, Nico, is an aspiring actor whose entire career is going poorly, and he grabs at an opportunity to be one of the participants in "One Perfect Couple", a reality show where five couples are to be subjected to all kinds of stresses and strains on a remote resort island near Indonesia. And contestants are eliminated, one by one, until the promised "Perfect Couple" remains. Lyla semi-relulctantly agrees to go along if she can take a dive and get eliminated quickly.

The whole thing sounds dodgy, and (worse) things don't go as planned, as foreshadowed by radio and diary transcripts interspersed in Lyla's narration.

Eventually, a big storm causes death and destruction, and the survivors are subjected to plenty of physical and mental torment. Kind of the thing I'd tune in to watch! There are notes of Lost and Lord of the Flies aplenty.

It's a page-turner, until… well, I was underwhelmed by the ending, and I can't really say why without further spoilers. Your mileage, etc.

I Last week, I defended JD Vance against the frivolous gripes about his new book's cover. This week, however, I've got no problem with Jessica Reidl calling him out on his implicit support for Putin's thuggery:

JD Vance's reaction to Russia & Ukraine does little to alleviate the suspicion that he would have supported Nazi Germany's invasions across European in World War II. After all, it's the same moral calculus. He'd likely offer some half-baked reason why Poland had it coming.

— Jessica Riedl 🧀 🇺🇦 (@JessicaBRiedl) April 15, 2026

If Putin somehow wins Ukraine, I'm guessing it will be Poland's turn to "have it coming" a short while afterwards.

Also of note:

• Can you stand one more Trump-as-Jesus meme reaction? Too bad, you're getting one anyway. Specifically, Jacob Sullum's: Trump reaction to Jesus meme backlash raises mental acuity concerns. First, a reminder of what was involved:

  Early Monday morning, President Donald Trump posted an image of himself as a robed, Jesus-like healer laying hands on a prone hospital patient. A bright golden light emanates from Trump's left hand and from the point of contact between his right hand and the patient's forehead. Several witnesses, including a nurse, a soldier, and a woman whose hands are tented in prayer, observe the scene with a combination of hope and awe.

  And two bald eagles observing from above! (In case you missed it, here you go.)

  After Christians objected to the blatant blasphemy, Trump insisted that he did not understand what all the fuss was about. "I thought it was me as a doctor," he told reporters, averring that complaints about the picture were based on an interpretation that "only the fake news could come up with." The picture made sense to him, he explained, because "it's supposed to be as a doctor making people better," and "I do make people better. I make people a lot better."

  As is often the case with Trump, it is not clear whether he was lying or actually believed what he said—or which would be worse. Either way, the decision to post the picture, which Trump presented on Truth Social without commentary, seems like an egregious lapse of political judgment, as Trump implicitly acknowledged by deleting it—a striking retreat for a president who rarely acknowledges error or apologizes for anything. And if we charitably attribute that mistake to honest obliviousness rather than a narcissistic disregard for Americans' religious sensibilities, that explanation raises a familiar question: If Trump were senile, how would we know?

  Keeping to our religious mode: We can only hope that attributed-to-Bismarck quote holds up for another few years: "God has a special providence for fools, drunkards, and the United States of America".

• Your usual reminder that the FDA kills. Coming from the WSJ editorialists: Dr. Makary and Mr. Hyde at the FDA. (WSJ gifted link)

  Food and Drug Administration biologics chief Vinay Prasad is stepping down at the end of this month after torpedoing breakthrough rare disease treatments. The grim reaper can’t leave soon enough, but he’s not leaving without kicking patients with late-stage melanoma on his way out.

  The FDA on Friday for the second time rejected a promising melanoma immunotherapy by the biotech firm Replimune. Some 8,500 Americans die every year of melanoma, many of whom could be saved by Replimune’s RP1. But Dr. Prasad and Commissioner Marty Makary have decided that for whatever reason they aren’t worth saving.

  My previous post advocating abolishing the FDA was only a few weeks ago. Not that I'm impatient or anything.

• Speaking of abolition … Michael Graham notices that some Democrats are sobering up. Blue State Dems Are Abandoning 'Net Zero' Policies. Will Warmington Be Next?

  When Cinde Warmington ran for governor in 2024, she released her CLEAN Energy Economy Plan, calling for New Hampshire to reach net zero emissions by 2040.

  “It’s going to take bold action to tackle the threat of climate change, but with the right leadership we can protect our environment and grow our economy,” Warmington said at the time.

  Today, as Democrats across the Northeast abandon their net-zero policies and embrace “all of the above” energy strategies, Warmington is refusing to answer questions about her net-zero proposal. Asked if it is part of her 2026 campaign, Warmington declined to answer.

  Cinde's website is also silent on bringing commuter rail up to Nashua, Manchester, and maybe even Concord, something she was enthusiastic for in her previous (failed) campaign. She is (however) appealing to the Democrat activists' desire for pugilistic rhetoric.

  FIGHTING FOR A MORE AFFORDABLE FUTURE FOR NEW HAMPSHIRE’S WORKING FAMILIES

  […]

  Kelly Ayotte refuses to fight for Granite Staters.

  Cinde will take on Kelly Ayotte, stand up to Donald Trump, and fight for the people of New Hampshire.

  [… and again, she's …]

  FIGHTING FOR NEW HAMPSHIRE’S WORKING FAMILIES

  "I remember throwing punches around and preaching from my chair…"

• I thought it was the love of money, but no. Jim Geraghty describes How the Left Convinced Americans That AI Data Centers Are the Root of All Evil.

  We should have known that eventually the progressive wing of the Democratic Party would wake up and galvanize opposition; now an increasingly loud swath of Americans, mostly on the left, seem to hate data centers the way they used to hate your SUV, your Big Mac, and, well, you.

  Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders and New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez want a federal ban on the construction of new data centers, because “data centers will deepen our reliance on fossil fuels during a climate crisis.” (Note that nuclear power is not a fossil fuel and does not produce carbon dioxide.)

  AOC, fresh off botching a yes-or-no question on whether the U.S. should commit U.S. troops to defend Taiwan if China were to invade, said in a written statement, “Congress has a moral obligation to stand with the American people and stop the expansion of these data centers until we have a framework to adequately address the existential harm AI poses to our society. We must choose humanity over profit.”

  Bernie and AOC just want us to keep meandering down that road to serfdom…

At issue is …

I'm not one to gratuitously take the Lord's name in vain, but… Jesus.

Jim Geraghty has some textual thoughts on President Trump’s Self-Inflicted Divine Mess.

In case you missed the ensuing kerfuffle, Jim has more.

Also of note:

• When he's not healing the sick… Josh Barro points out that Trump Is Failing the 'Big-Ass Truck' Test.

  The average voter wants to live an abundant lifestyle that entails a lot of energy consumption. When Abundance came out last year, I had a warning for Democratic politicians: if you make energy expensive, voters will not believe you have delivered abundance. This is the “big-ass truck” Sen. Ruben Gallego has talked about: a lot of men would like to own one, and they’ll need to buy a lot of gasoline to fill it up. Democrats face an electoral penalty because of their commitment to climate policies that make the big-ass truck less available and the gas to drive it less affordable.

  Unfortunately, the party has shown little interest in reckoning with this. In Abundance itself, Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson tried to finesse the energy question in a way that was unconvincing, and in elected politics, Democrats have continued to vote for unpopular climate policies, including when every Senate Democrat except Elissa Slotkin stood with the party’s climate-obsessed donors and voted to uphold California’s highly unpopular electric vehicle mandate. It’s a huge drag for a Democratic Party that is supposedly trying to win back working-class voters who had shifted toward the Republicans in recent years.

  And then Donald Trump decided to fritter away one of the Republican Party’s biggest political advantages.

  In case it's unclear: foreseeable consequences from the Iran War make those big-ass trucks a lot more expensive to drive.

  Non-Disclaimer: I do not own a big-ass truck. And I would have to hold my nose to vote for Republicans, but I probably will be doing that in November.

  Making things slightly easier: Trump won't be on the ballot.

  Making things slightly harder: the GOP's candidates will still probably bend the knee to Trump.

• Ackshually, if you count the LPNH, it will be a fourth party. NHJournal looks at a dark horse: Former Dem Kiper Forming Third Party, Staying in Gov's Race.

  For months, Newmarket small business owner and former town councilor Jon Kiper has been campaigning in the New Hampshire Democratic gubernatorial primary, telling voters they need a new governor.

  On Monday, Kiper announced New Hampshire needs a new political party.

  “My relationship with the Democratic establishment was clearly frayed, but seeing Chris Pappas at an AIPAC event doubling down on sending billions more dollars to the Middle East to support another endless war was more than I could bear,” Kiper said in a statement Monday.

  “If the Democrats would like to be the party of war, the party of Purdue Pharma lobbyists, that’s their choice, but I want no part of that,” Kiper added. “And neither should the people of New Hampshire — I will be giving voters a third choice in November, the Community First Party.”

  You can examine Kiper's election pitch here. It's pretty standard "progressive" stuff, including a Constitutional amendment that would (somehow) say "corporations are not people and money is not speech." I.e., partial undoing of the First Amendment, by opening up a wide path for government censorship of speech. He also wants to reinstate NH's Interest&Dividends Tax.

• Luddites across the river. The WSJ reports: Maine Lawmakers Pass Ban on Large Data Centers.

  Maine lawmakers on Tuesday passed a ban on large data-center construction, making it the first state to enact such a measure as communities around the U.S. deal with fallout from the artificial-intelligence boom.

  Greg Lukianoff and Adam Thierer, on the other hand, encourage AI, free speech, and America’s real advantage over China.

  Cameron Berg, founder and director of the AI cognition nonprofit Reciprocal Research, published a smart essay in The Wall Street Journal yesterday called “AI Is Bound to Subvert Communism.” In it, Berg gets at something many Americans still seem reluctant to admit: China wants world-class AI, but it also wants to control what people can say, know, and ask — and those goals do not sit comfortably together.

  Berg’s point is that advanced AI systems are hard to contain inside a regime built on censorship, ideological discipline, and fear of open inquiry. The better these systems get, in fact, the more they encourage the very habits authoritarian governments hate most: asking questions, testing claims, following arguments, and noticing contradictions.

• And wannabe terrorists in California and probably elsewhere. Maya Sulkin dives into a sewer: ‘This Should Be a Nightly Occurrence’: How Social Media Users Cheered the Attacks on Sam Altman.

  “Sam Altman is, like, evil as shit.”

  “This should be a nightly occurrence.”

  “All I can say is I’m disappointed that they didn’t train their aim.”

  “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.”

  These were just some of the messages on Reddit and social media in the hours after OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was attacked. The point, in all of them, was the same: Altman had it coming.

  On Friday, April 10, at 3:45 a.m., Daniel Alejandro Moreno-Gama allegedly threw a Molotov cocktail at Altman’s San Francisco home while Altman, his husband, and his baby were asleep. It set the exterior gate on fire.

  Things aren't as bad as they were in the 1970s, but we seem to be on that path.

The WaPo Editorial Board persists in making its local readers irate: America’s income tax is progressive. Illustrated with a simple chart, based on the latest IRS Statistics of Income report:

As always, entertainment can be had in looking at the AI-generated summary of the comments. It's early in the day, but there are already significant denunciations of one of the left's current Emmanuel Goldsteins:

The discussion also touches on the influence of wealthy individuals on politics and media, with several comments criticizing the perceived bias of the editorial board and its owner.

But, really, back to my headline above: Is it really "progressive" to have a tax system advocated 178 years ago by a couple of discredited cranks? Come up with a better word!

Also of note:

• How very litigious! A New Hampshire State Rep from nearby Newmarket has been in the news lately:

  Dem State Rep. Read Threatens Lawsuit Over Handicap Parking Post — But Questions Remain https://t.co/LZx9nuEAzR @NHDems @NHGOP

  — NH Journal (@NewHampJournal) April 14, 2026

  Story here: Read Threatens Lawsuit Over Handicap Parking Post, featuring a wider view of Rep. Ellen's Yaris with its glorious display of (uh) "progressive" attitudes.

  The latest dispute began when Concord City Councilor Jennifer Kretovic posted a photo of Read’s car parked in a handicap space at a Concord CVS on Good Friday, April 3. The image, posted to Facebook, did not show a visible handicap placard.

  “This is unacceptable,” Kretovic wrote. “These spaces exist for those who truly need them, not for convenience.”

  Read quickly fired back.

  In a voicemail left for Kretovic, Read insisted a valid placard was displayed and demanded the post be taken down.

  “If you want to take down that post with apologies, I won’t have to post anything,” Read said. “Not very cool of you to falsely accuse me.”

  Read followed up with an email to Kretovic’s official city account, escalating the dispute, demanding an apology, and threatening legal action.

  “I insist that you remove, WITH EXPLICIT APOLOGIES, the false and libelous post immediately, or face legal action, in both your personal capacity and official capacity,” Read wrote.

  The NHJournal story points out that the handicap placard was (apparently) issued to Rep. Ellen's husband. But (also apparently) she was the one who parked the car and dashed into the CVS. Tsk!

  I've mentioned Rep. Ellen occasionally over the past few years, but my favorite was inspired by her foulmouthed tweet:

  Let us cook for each other. Share resources. Make our gifts, or gift used items. Show these fuckers the People, the community that they've spent decades trying to isolate us from, will ALWAYS have the actual power.
  
  Shut. Them. Down. #blackoutthesystem

  — Rep. Ellen Read 🍉 (@Ellen4NH) November 11, 2025

  … in support of the Blackout The System post-Thanksgiving 2025 event, which encouraged people to stay home and not spend money. That'll show 'em!

  But, no, it did not.

  The "Blackout the System" folks are, however trying again. Did you know that they have called for a "GENERAL STRIKE" for… well, as it turns out, we're in the middle of it. It runs from April 5 to May 5.

  Did you notice?

  Neither did I. And Rep. Ellen seems to have other things on her mind these days.

• A useful distinction. In yesterday's "Best of the Web" column, James Freeman discusses a number of things, including whether Kamala Harris might run for California Governor, following "the implosion of the gubernatorial campaign of Rep. Eric Swalwell."

  Hey, why not? She did so well the last time she stepped up after a different campaign's implosion.

  But I found James' discussion of "Trump Derangement Syndrome" to be more interesting:

  Sometimes news stories pop up on social media and seem so bizarre that one wonders if perhaps some naughty youngster has used technology to create a misleading video. But New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman really did say on CNN that he was “torn” between wanting the terrible Iranian regime defeated and not wanting a political benefit for the duly elected leaders of the U.S. and Israel.

  [Transcript excerpted at the link.]

  One could argue that it’s even worse on video as Mr. Friedman appears to become more angry and animated discussing the elected leaders of the U.S. and Israel than he is when discussing the barbarous tyrants of Tehran. Surely he’s aware that the Iranian regime has been murdering protesters by the thousand and his own comment demonstrates that he’s aware that the mullahs have been oppressing people around the entire region.

  “Trump Derangement Syndrome” is a longstanding gag about people who cannot control their seething hatred of the American president and as far as this column is aware it is not an actual medical diagnosis. But if Mr. Friedman cannot cite a legitimate medical reason for his inability to comprehend that the defeat of the planet’s chief exporter of terrorism would be infinitely superior for the world than the defeat of Mr. Friedman’s political opponents in the U.S. and Israel, what excuse could he possibly have?

  Goodneess knows (and so do you, if you've been reading this blog for a while) that I'm no Trump fan. But I think I've avoided full-blown TDS.

• But back to California… Jeffrey Blehar and I agree on this: Everybody Knew About Eric Swalwell. Except You and Me.

  Freshman Representative Eric Swalwell arrived in Washington, D.C., in 2013, having just knocked off an incumbent Democrat (ancient snapping turtle Pete Stark) in the first election cycle after California adopted its “top two” primary system. By 2019, the Northern California representative was known to national political observers as a highly visible (and gaseously self-righteous) opponent of Donald Trump’s presidency, a headline-seeking fixture of the cable news “rubber chicken” circuit of endless moral preening during five-minute TV hits. By 2024, Swalwell stood among the vanguard of the Democratic “resistance,” as one of its most aggressively public, square-jawed, elected faces.

  And in November 2025 he announced his candidacy for California governor, eventually picking up the endorsements of many of the state’s biggest powerbrokers, including Senator Adam Schiff. With the all-party primary set for June, and the hopelessly split Democratic field all clawing haplessly at one another in the polling like crabs in a bucket, Swalwell was beginning to look like the one who would separate himself from the rest of the pack, the one Democrat who would make it to the general election ballot in November — and thus inevitably to Sacramento in January.

  Until Friday morning, that is. Now? It’s all over. Swalwell suddenly suspended his race for governor on Sunday night. And unless you were vacationing somewhere without Wi-Fi until this morning, you already know the reason why: because Swalwell — married with three children — has not only been credibly accused of being an insatiable lecher who preys upon Capitol Hill women like a one-man plague of locusts; he is also accused of raping one of his former staffers. Yes, the man who once tweeted #BelieveSurvivors — in direct response to the outrageously false Julie Swetnick gang-rape allegations during the Kavanaugh hearings, no less — turns out to have allegedly left behind an angry mob of survivors himself. (Many of the accusers have come forward under their own names.)

  Jeffrey is a fine writer, and is devastating when he bottom-line observes:

  You’re only finding out about Eric Swalwell now because he is in the way of other Democrats — and easily wounded. It has nothing to do with morality or accountability, only the interests of political campaigns. And it makes one wonder who else out there might still be shielded from accountability — as long as they remain useful.

  So don't be a know-it-all. You probably are a know-about-50%-of-it.

Well, at least the WaPo editorialists are noticing Maine’s race to the top on taxes. (WaPo gifted link)

Leading off with a loaded question:

Gov. Janet was wary in the past about boosting Maine's tax burden further. (As pointed out yesterday: by one measure, it was already fifth-highest among the states.)

But that was then. She signed the "Millionaire's Tax" into law on Friday. And:

The AI summary of comments on the editorial contains the expected demonization: "Many comments criticize the Washington Post's editorial stance, suggesting it aligns with the interests of billionaires like Jeff Bezos, who allegedly oppose higher taxes on the wealthy."

Also of note:

• The long-awaited sequel to Cats? Well, probably not. Kevin D. Williamson provides advice to a has-been grifter: Beware the Stranger, Professor Kendi. (archive.today link)

  

  It's a sort-of take-no-prisoners review of Ibram X. Kendi's latest book, Chain of Ideas: The Origins of Our Authoritarian Age, Amazon link at your right.

  Americans could use someone to do what it is Prof. Kendi seems to want to do, but doing it in a constructive way is going to require a more open, more genuinely liberal, and more humane approach to the tangle of human affairs than what is on offer in this book. Prof. Kendi often seems not to have so much an idea as an enemies list, and, even though some of his enemies deserve to be all of our enemies, that is not enough. The job at hand will require someone who can answer T. S. Eliot’s question:

  When the Stranger says: “What is the meaning of this city ?
  Do you huddle close together because you love each other?”
  What will you answer? “We all dwell together
  To make money from each other”? or “This is a community”?
  Oh my soul, be prepared for the coming of the Stranger.
  Be prepared for him who knows how to ask questions.

  (The Portsmouth (NH) Public Library has a copy of Kendi's book, of course, and I might give it a try.)

• You'll get tired of all the booming. David Harsanyi takes the Milei-haters to school: Argentina Is Booming.

  In 2023, over 100 leading economists from around the world, including progressive darling Thomas Piketty, signed a letter warning that "far-right" Argentine presidential candidate Javier Milei's policies, which were "rooted in laissez-faire economics," would cause "devastation," spike inflation, expand poverty and worsen unemployment.

  Celebrated economists never penned any open letters warning that the preceding Peronists' or Kirchnerists' perverse blend of fascism, socialism and unionism would drive Argentina — once one of the world's wealthiest nations — into destitution, unemployment, soaring inflation and bankruptcy.

  But that's how it always goes.

  And you'll never believe what happened next!

• They're over there, behind the fat guy buying Coca-Cola with his EBT card. Nick Gillespie asks the musical question: Why Is It So Damn Hard To Find Sympathetic Student Loan 'Victims'?

  Is any subgenre of journalism more debased and alienating than the student-loan sob story? If paying for college with heavily subsidized, federally backed loans was in fact the cause of the new, universal serfdom we hear so much about, you'd think that places like The New York Times would be able to scare up highly sympathetic young adults who tug at readers' heartstrings like orphans in a Dickens novel.

  Instead, in stories like last week's "Student Debt Burdened Them, So They Moved Abroad and Stopped Paying," you get characters like 37-year-old Amanda Lynn Tully, who "graduated in 2017 with a master's degree in historic preservation from the University of Oregon, $65,000 in federal student loans and no job offers in the conservation field." Tully, reports the Times, "felt misled" and so "made a drastic decision: She moved to Prague, where she had completed an internship, and defaulted on her loans. She hasn't made a payment in over seven years."

  Right off the bat, something seems off. Tully, the Times tells us, grew up in Colorado and "spent her teenage years as a ward of the State of Colorado and believed a college degree was her ticket to a better life." That sounds like an incredibly rough way to start out, but how did we get to Oregon and graduate school so quickly? And then there's this:

  Ms. Tully was on an income-based repayment plan, which allows many borrowers to have their remaining debt forgiven after 20 years of making qualifying payments. She was paying $60 per month when she defaulted. This amount, to many, may seem manageable. But for her, it remained psychologically burdensome.

  Click through, but if your opinion of Ms. Tully dropped below zero right when you read "psychologically burdensome", join the club.

• Good advice to Mamas, and also Papas. From Robert Graboyes: Mammas Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Disgruntled, Underemployed PhDs.

  A year or so ago, a friend wrote to ask advice, saying that her son, a 16-year old rising high school senior, was “obsessed with being an economist” and whose dream was to work for the Bank of England. In response, I sent a bullet-list of grumpy warnings whose overriding message was that such a goal is fine, as long as he treats it as merely one possibility on a sizable list of wildly divergent career paths. This echoed advice I’ve offered for decades to young proteges. (See my earlier essays, “Overcoming College: Getting a Job In Spite of Your Education” and “20 Job Tips for 2020s 20-Somethings: Plus, with sheep comes optimism.”)

  I have a PhD in economics from Columbia University and have enjoyed a long and interesting career. For over 25 years, one part of that career has been teaching and mentoring grad students working on their PhDs. So, why did I offer my friend caveats regarding her son’s deeply admirable, highly focused ambition?

  Robert asks ChatGPT for less risky career paths, and it's quite interesting.

  As someone whose higher-ed path terminated with an ABD (all but dissertation) degree in physics, I wish a 1970 version of Robert's advice was provided to me. Things worked out OK, eventually, but there was a lot of angst along the way.

So I'm currently reading an old (© 1960) book, Friedrich Hayek's The Constitution of Liberty, Amazon link at your right. My report will be upcoming on the book blog eventually. Consider this a preview, a sentence from Chapter 20:

That a majority, merely because it is a majority, should be entitled to apply to a minority a rule which does not apply to itself is an infringement of a principle much more fundamental than democracy itself, a principle on which the justification of democracy rests.

Obvious, when you think about it.

Spoiler: Chapter 20 is titled "Taxation and Redistribution". And the quoted sentence is in the course of Hayek's argument against tax "progressivity".

Unfortunately, the Washington Post has yet to change its motto to "Democracy Dies in the Imposition of a Progressive Income Tax."

Coincidentally, that state across the Salmon Falls River just thumbed its nose at Hayek. News report: Gov. Mills signs budget featuring millionaire's tax, free community college & more.

And as predictable as the tides off Short Sands Beach, the local op-ed writer Douglas Rooks confirmed (in my awful local paper, Foster's Daily Democrat) that the true "progressive" motto is "Never Enough": 'Millionaire's tax' just the start of needed tax reform in Maine. (archive.today link)

Rooks is all in favor, in other words. Not going after the millionaires for more money means you have "failed to act". No argument necessary!

I keep going back to that recent WalletHub study, detailing the Tax Burden by State in 2026. Reader, as a percentage of total personal income, Maine was already taking the fifth-highest fraction. Behind only Hawaii, New York, Vermont, and New Mexico. Where, I wonder, will they be next year?

The Tax Foundation argued (futilely) against the move on pragmatic grounds: Maine’s Proposed Millionaire’s Tax Would Harm the State’s Economy.

A note to those "2,631 filers": Should you get tired of yet another "infringement of a principle much more fundamental than democracy itself", a reasonable facsimile of Galt's Gulch is conveniently located on the other side of the bridge between South Berwick and Rollinsford.

Also of note:

• Claude, could you summarize this article for me? Never mind, I'll do it myself. Jack Nicastro writes in the May issue of Reason: Both parties in Congress want to regulate AI. Here's where they differ.

  At the federal level, Republican-written AI bills tend to be less concerned with policing how individuals use the technology than with regulating the development and deployment of the underlying technology—large language models (LLMs). Democrat-written bills tend to focus on individual malfeasance rather than the tech itself.

  Accordingly, Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D–Minn.) was so outraged last year by a (hilarious) deepfake of herself that she called on Congress to affirm "the right to demand that social media companies remove deepfakes of their voice and likeness." In California, Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom signed three bills in 2024 that restricted the use of AI to create political content deemed deceptive in advance of elections.

  On the other side of the aisle, Sen. Josh Hawley (R–Mo.) doesn't just want to ban driverless cars to protect unionized truck drivers from automation or ban minors from accessing AI companion chatbots; he wants frontier AI developers to submit their models to the Energy Department for potential nationalization before they're granted permission to deploy their models commercially.

  But it's not like there's no overlap. Each of these bills is co-sponsored by at least one senator from the other party.

  I'd imagine things will eventually result in a "bipartisan comprimise", featuring the worst ideas from both sides.

  But since Jack pointed it out, here's that deepfake of Senator Amy:

  Check it out before it's censored!

• It's far from supercalifragilisticexpialidocious. Nellie Bowles had a brief note in her weekly "TGIF" column at the Free Press concerning the latest Acronym of Oppression: MMIWG2SLGBTQQIA+

  On my last Canadian note—it’s a 20! I’ll be here all week!—New Democratic Party MP Leah Gazan expressed her frustration at budget cuts by saying: “They provided $0 to deal with the ongoing genocide of MMIWG2SLGBTQQIA+.” Them’s a lot of letters. I thought that surely had to be a joke. So I googled the phrase and sure enough, it’s real. I really try not to make too much fun of the alphabet soup stuff. It’s too easy. It’s played out. I’m better than it. But then a member of parliament drops MMIWG2SLGBTQQIA+ on us. What are we supposed to do here, guys? When will the letters end? Is there pi of letters? Why two Q’s?

  Indeed. And is the Bablylon Bee simply being funny or prescient in their take: Here's What Each Of The 73 Letters In Canada's New LGBT Acronym Stands For.

  If you haven't heard, Canada has officially dropped a new acronym for the LGBT movement with many, many new additions. The LGBT community in Canada is now:

  MMBJOUQTJLAYAWD40ROOMDCF+SVPWIZ¯\_(ツ)_/¯BFJTWLEGOBLT£LADBOSUBDDBLAGF+>:-(

  It's quite the mouthful, so to get you up to speed, here are what each of the 73 characters in the acronym stand for:

  No spoilers. Click over.

Take it away, Remy!

Want to sing along? Lyrics are here.

If you want a crackpot solution to gerrymandering, I proposed one nine years ago. Which was greeted with a total lack of interest, but I still like it.

Also of note:

• Kevin D. Williamson is anything but merciful. Especially when he observes President Bone Spurs: Trump Is Anything but Unpredictable. (archive.today link)

  The Iranians do not have very many advantages in the war the United States has launched on them, but they do have a few. One is a willingness to suffer and die and to pay economic costs that evidently exceeds the present American capacity for such sacrifice; the second, unexpected though the fact may be, is a critical edge in the matter of political intelligence: Washington has consistently misunderstood the nature of the ayatollahs’ regime in Tehran for going on 50 years now, but the Iranians seem to have a reasonably good handle on the character of the current U.S. administration.

  For lo these many years, I have been advising observers not to make the mistake of overcomplicating Donald Trump. The ayatollahs, of all people, seem to have got to the core of the issue before most American political commentators.

  Trump describes himself (and his admirers describe him) as pragmatic, a man of common sense, which is the nice way of saying that he is a man without principles or fixed moral commitments, and even the single limited virtue to which he occasionally pays tribute is a one-way street: Loyalty to Trump is all-important, but loyalty from Trump—ask Mrs. Trump or Mrs. Trump or Mrs. Trump about that. Some simple men are saints and may be most easily understood in terms of their saintly virtues: St. Francis was good and gentle because he was good and gentle. Trump is the mirror image of the simple saint: He’s a simple man whose actions are most directly and accurately described as the ordinary daily application of his vices: laziness, vindictiveness, greed, vanity, arrogance, cowardice, and, above all, stupidity. He is a rage-addled dimwit with a savantic gift for manipulating lesser fools and a vulnerability to manipulation by men who are similarly vicious but more capable: Vladimir Putin, J.D. Vance, Stephen Miller, even one or two of his idiot children. Stronger men can push him around, and weaker men succeed by flattering him. His enemies can manipulate him at least as easily as his allies.

  I suppose it's possible that we could get good results out of our Iran escapades, but that's not the way I'd bet.

• Who will be our Pun Hero today? George Will! His column is headlined: An unpardonable abuse of presidential power with only one solution. (WaPo gifted link)

  Unpardonable, get it?

  

  Oh, well. GFW reports on a recent book by Saikrishna Bangalore Prakash, The Presidential Pardon: The Short Clause with a Long, Troubled History, Amazon link at your right. Some recent history:

  Bill Clinton greased the downward slide. He pardoned his half brother (Secret Service code name: “Headache”), who then made a fortune lobbying his sibling, the president, to pardon, among others, a Gambino mob associate. As Hillary Clinton began seeking a U.S. Senate seat, her husband commuted the sentences of 16 members of a Puerto Rican group that had detonated more than a hundred bombs in the United States. He pardoned Marc Rich, a fugitive who owed $48 million in taxes. Rich’s ex-wife made a $450,000 contribution to Clinton’s presidential library, gave $100,000 to Hillary’s Senate campaign, and $1 million to the Democratic Party.

  This was unseemly enough, but Prakash says, “Something has qualitatively changed over the past two presidencies.” Leaving office, Biden gave preemptive pardons to a slew of family members. Prakash: “For many years, Joseph Biden had been involved in a sordid business, where he was the product.” Family members charged for access to him. He gave preemptive pardons to two brothers, his sister and her husband, and a sister-in-law. Before the 2024 election, he said, regarding his egregiously corrupt son Hunter, “I will not pardon him.” After the election, he did.

  In Trump’s first term, he pardoned his daughter’s father-in-law, who, for vengeance against his brother-in-law who had testified against him, hired a prostitute, filmed her encounter with the brother-in-law, and mailed the tape to his sister. Having, consecutively, the two seediest families in presidential history has besmirched the practice of pardoning.

  So what's the "solution" promised in the headline? Alas:

  So, the remedy for tawdry pardoning is not this or that institutional gambit. The only feasible solution is the election of presidents who are not louts. This, however, becomes less likely as voters are made ever more cynical by loutish pardons.

  Cynical? Moi?

• "I'll take 'Speculating on stuff that won't happen' for $1000, Ken." Still, I appreciate that Eric Boehm is asking something close to the right question: What if Social Security was capped at $100,000 annually?

  Capping annual Social Security payments at $100,000 per household (or $50,000 per individual) would help extend the program's solvency without raising taxes on workers or cutting benefits to retirees who actually depend on the program to make ends meet, according to a report published last month by the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB). The so-called "Six-Figure Limit" on Social Security payments would save an estimated $190 billion over ten years and would close nearly half of Social Security's long-term fiscal shortfall.

  Eric notes the pluses and minuses. A big minus is that it only fixes "nearly half" of the problem. And an even bigger problem: try to find any pol running for election that supports the idea.

• Counterpoint. Back last week, I linked to a different Eric Boehm article/video, which described Total Boomer Luxury Communism. One of his big bugaboos was "Medicare Advantage" plans, which involved Uncle Stupid paying for pickleball fees and Kitty Litter. Honest!

  The WSJ editorialists have leapt to the defense: The Truth About Medicare Advantage (WSJ gifted link). They don't mention pickleball, but here's their bottom line:

  Insurers are a bipartisan scapegoat for rising Medicare spending. But it’s notable that overall Medicare spending last decade totalled $431 billion less than the Congressional Budget Office projected in 2010, even as the share of beneficiaries in Advantage increased by half.

  Democrats dislike Advantage because they prefer government-run healthcare, though the latter has higher costs. The opposition to Advantage is ideological, no matter the facts.

  Not a Disclaimer: I have "supplemental" Medicare coverage, not Advantage.

• "Um." That's probably the intended reaction to the headline on Wesley J. Smith's NR Corner post: Allow Euthanasia for the Mentally Ill or They Will Commit Suicide. That turns out to be the assertion of a "Canadian activist" advocating "Medical Assistance in Dying" (MAID).

  The idea here is that a “suicide” will be potentially messier and/or perhaps less successful than a doctor or nurse administering a lethal jab. Or that a person will take his own life earlier than he might otherwise if he knew a doctor would do the deed for him.

  Well, this much is true. Being MAIDed is not suicide. Euthanasia is a homicide, and doctors or nurse practitioners are the killers.

  Hey, here’s an absurd notion: How about trying to prevent these deaths instead of facilitating them? Crazy, right?

  I've thought for a long time that medical personnel shouldn't be killing patients. (Shocking, I know.) Instead, suitably gowned specialists—call them "Reapers"—should do the deed.

• And congratulations are in order. For NASA's successful Artemis II mission, which didn't kill its astronauts. I haven't heard anything about how well the capsule's heat shield held up.

  Artemis is still a waste of taxpayer money, and an unscalable, unsustainable approach to manned spaceflight.

And now on to the daily hodgepodge:

• I really hesitated to post this. At the Free Press, Frannie Block is asking "out loud" about what a lot of people are probably thinking: Could Artemis II Burn Up on Reentry?

  The two most dangerous moments in space flight are the launch and the reentry. The launch of Artemis II went smoothly, but on Friday, when the four-person crew reenters the earth’s atmosphere, significant danger lurks.

  As it begins its reentry, the spacecraft Orion will enter what’s called the thermosphere, where they will travel through heat that can reach 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit. “You’re in the middle of a fireball for about 15 minutes,” Charlie Camarda, a retired astronaut and senior engineer at NASA, told me.

  Artemis I had some pretty nasty erosion on its heat shield on its reentry. Camarada has been out of NASA since 2019, but "he doesn’t trust NASA’s engineers to have fully understood, and rectified, the heat shield’s problems." And

  Even if the heat shield holds this time, Carmada thinks disaster at NASA is inevitable. “We’re just playing with the odds, and the odds are going to get us, because we’re not fixing the real problem,” he said, “and that’s the culture.”

  Complaints about NASA's "culture" are mandatory after astronaut-killing disasters (Apollo 1 in 1967; Challeger in 1986; Columbia in 2003). Recommended reading: Richard Feynman's "Appendix F" to the Rogers Commission report on the Challenger accident, which contains the bottom line:

  For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.

  We've seen a lot of "public relations" over the past few days.

  My (admittedly cynical) view: socialism doesn't work in space any better than it does on Earth. I'll be watching the coverage on TV tonight, with all my hopes and fears turned up to 11.

• Speaking of socialism on Earth… The CBS News show with a "long-standing tradition of existence", 60 Minutes, devoted about 13 minutes on Sunday to…

  The AntiPlanner, Randal O'Toole, watched and concluded: 60 Minutes Misses the Point.

  Californians are fed up with high-speed rail. And no wonder: the state has spent $18 billion so far and hasn’t laid a single mile of track; the whole project is approximately four times over budget; it is expected to be done 20 years late; and all the state has to brag about is the jobs that have been created doing nothing. If you don’t believe people are fed up, just read all of the responses made to the jobs tweet.

  Unfortunately, when 60 Minutes asked why the U.S. doesn’t have high-speed passenger trains when so many other countries do, it completely missed the point. It’s answers were things like the Eisenhower administration building the Interstate Highway System, thus “fueling the world’s proudest car culture”; farmers objecting to having their farms cut up for a high-speed rail line; and “California’s exacting environmental regulations.”

  But those aren’t the reasons we don’t have high-speed rail. The real reason is that high-speed rail is a high-cost solution to a problem that doesn’t exist. That problem is how to get people from one urban area to another and we already have two solutions to that: airlines that can move people faster and at a lower cost than trains; and highways that give people more flexibility to reach more destinations at a lower cost than trains. Between those two answers, there really isn’t a need for high-speed trains.

  For the record, Elon Musk is tweeting his solution:

  The @BoringCompany could build a Hyperloop tunnel from downtown SF to downtown LA for <5% of this cost and it would be a technological marvel exceeding any high speed rail on Earth https://t.co/2WwQuDVIAV

  — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 9, 2026

  True? We'll probably never know.

  2026-04-16 UPDATE: David R. Henderson provides some annotations to the 60 Minutes video:

  4:22: It’s arguable. Seriously? Just arguable?

  5:27: “Failure is always an option.” Exactly. I use that line a lot in many situations.

  10:17: $125 billion to complete what I call the “medium speed rail.”

  11:59: Notice how the guy goes off the rails, pun intended, in claiming as public benefits various items that are private benefits: comfort, safety, and reliability.

  Puns, intended or not, are always welcome at Pun Salad.

• Hey, kids, what time is it? Vero de Rugy says It's Time to Take Unserious Presidential Budgets Seriously.

  The president's fiscal 2027 budget is out, and I have two reactions. The first will sound familiar: Like so many budgets before it, this is not a serious effort to put America's government on a sustainable path. The second is more important: It would be a mistake to dismiss it as just another unserious document. That is exactly how we got here.

  Start with what the new budget does and does not do. It's not a comprehensive fiscal plan. It covers only about one-third of federal spending, focusing heavily on discretionary choices and largely ignoring the autopilot spending that drives our long-term debt.

  The headline item is defense spending. The administration proposes a jump of $445 billion to reach $1.5 trillion. That's a 42% increase in one year, the largest since the Korean War, raising defense spending to roughly 4.4% of GDP.

  Well, that's a lot. In Trump's defense (heh), he's been blowing up a lot of stuff over the past year or so.

• Disappontment! Usually the Josiah Bartlett Center is a reliable and moderately sensible conservative/libertarian voice. So I was a little shocked at the headline on a recent article: SNAP candy & soft drink ban would hurt retailers.

  Um. May I suggest a fix: "SNAP candy & soft drink ban would help taxpayers."

  The article summarizes a study by Zachary Cady, which you can read here. Like the article, the study doesn't consider taxpayer benefits.

• On the LFOD watch. Whitney Curry Wimbish's American Prospect article has a pretty dire headline: Live Tax-Free and Die. Eek!

  Late last year, the godfather of supply-side economics dropped in on a Georgia state Senate special committee hearing. He spoke of the urgent need to dump their income tax, a “killer, killer, killer,” akin to “a nuclear weapon,” that has destroyed the 11 states that have instituted it as of 1960: Connecticut, Illinois, Indiana, Maine, Michigan, Nebraska, New Jersey, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and West Virginia.

  “Each and every one of those states in population has had a cataclysmic decline relative to the rest of the nation. It’s just amazing,” said Arthur Laffer, inventor of the “Laffer curve,” the discredited theory that claims lowering taxes raises tax revenue. Georgia could avoid the same fate if they got rid of their income tax, which funds nearly 60 percent of the state’s entire $34.8 billion budget.

  This was a familiar refrain from a conservative anti-tax champion. But before Laffer left, he asked to make one more point, something that staked out new territory for his movement.

  “I know I’m pushing on my time on you, but I got one thing else I’d like to mention, and it’s very important in Georgia, and in all the states except for one,” he said. “You have a big, big, big … big property tax problem.” That’s the real policy holding the state back from prospering. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Freezing those property taxes would bring Georgia all the way back, Laffer counseled.

  According to Whitney, things get apocalyptic really fast:

  THIS IS MAGA’S NEW FRONT in the war on working people, falsely packaged as a boon to the poor and an answer to the affordability crisis. It expands the GOP’s half-century-long project to reduce taxes of all kinds to deprive governments of raising money to pay for services, saddling citizens with unsafe roads, traffic congestion, canceled traffic projects, lower teacher pay, higher teacher turnover, larger class sizes, ruined parks, and people losing their health insurance. Twenty-six states have cut their personal and/or corporate income taxes since 2021, and four intend to reduce them to zero: Kentucky, Mississippi, Oklahoma, and West Virginia.

  I was reminded of those classic Ghostbusters lines: A "disaster of biblical proportions!" "Real wrath of God type stuff!" "Fire and brimstone coming down from the skies! Rivers and seas boiling!" "Forty years of darkness! Earthquakes, volcanoes..." " Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together... MASS HYSTERIA!"

  I boogied on over to the WalletHub study to find out where Georgia ranked tax-burden wise. It turns out they're … mediocre: in position #30 overall, with the state grabbing 8.15% of its taxpayer's personal incomes. Pretty far away from both New Hampshire (5.38%) and Hawaii (13.30%). Still, plenty of room for improvement, but also plenty of room for plunder!

Bryan Caplan has an interesting approach to some thorny questions: The Philosophy of Bah. And I'll boldface the one I'm most interested in:

What does he recommend?

It's interesting that the most steadfast free-will deniers ("determinists") don't seem to also buy into those other beliefs: solipsism, radical skepticism, memory skepticism, self-dissolution, eliminative materialism, moral nihilism.

Is the reality of free will somehow different from the other things Bryan lists that we can't "prove"? Something to think about when I'm having difficulty falling asleep, I guess.

Also of note:

• Fortunately, I'm not in the market yet. George Will sometimes can't resist tweaking the statists: A casket cartel tries to bury the competition.

  “You’re doin’ fine, Oklahoma!” — Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein (1943)

  No, you’re not. The waving wheat might sure smell sweet when the wind comes right behind the rain, but there is an unpleasantly pungent aroma surrounding the rent-seeking you allow. Would that Oklahoma’s legislators took the U.S. Constitution as seriously as they take caskets.

  In the town of Calvin, the married couple Candi Mentink and Todd Collard conceived an entrepreneurial idea that their state’s law says is forbidden. They sell inexpensive caskets wrapped in vinyl graphic designs depicting hunting, fishing, religious motifs, sports teams’ logos, perhaps even the likeness of famous Oklahomans. Imagine whiling away eternity in a Mickey Mantle casket. Heavenly.

  I have no idea what New Hampshire's casket regulations are. I hope I won't need to find out.

• No Queens? That would seem to be an issue over in Maine, as Jonathan Turley narrates The Maine Event: Shenna Bellows Runs for Governor on Unconstitutional Effort to Bar Trump from Ballot.

  Maine’s Secretary of State Shenna Bellows is actually running for governor on her willingness to take flagrantly unconstitutional action. Bellows is touting her removal of Trump from the ballot, an effort that led to a unanimous Supreme Court swatting down Colorado and Maine. Bellows is virtually giddy recounting her efforts to stymie democracy and prevent voters from casting their ballots for the man who ultimately won the election.

  Democrats have been running this year on the pledges to launch a virtual roundup of Trump officials and supporters for investigations and impeachments. New York congressional candidate George Conway is pledging to change impeachment rules to secure the removal of President Donald Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance. However, Bellows, the former ACLU executive director in Maine, is parading her willingness to do things barred by the Constitution.

  Campaigning on an unconstitutional act rejected 9-0 by the Supreme Court (including three liberal justices) truly captures this age of rage. It is the equivalent to how mobsters “make their bones” by whacking someone. Bellows is effectively saying that she was willing to do what other Democrats were unwilling to do: violate the Constitution.

  The spittle-flecked folks outraged (with reason) about Trump's various efforts to skirt the Constitution seem to be pretty quiet about Shenna.

• Sorry for the repetition, but: No Queens! At Cato, Norbert Michel and Nicholas Anthony offer some advice to Fauxcahontas: Leave MrBeast Alone, Senator Warren!

  Jimmy “MrBeast” Donaldson is the latest target in Senator Elizabeth Warren’s (D‑MA) crosshairs.

  For anyone who might be unfamiliar, MrBeast has built an empire on YouTube. He got his start with gaming videos and silly stunts like counting to 100,000, but he has since changed the lives of countless people for the better. In addition to giving away hundreds of millions of dollars, MrBeast has built 100 wells in Africa, paid for thousands of people with disabilities to receive medical treatment, and much more.

  Yet, it’s his latest venture that has caught Senator Warren’s attention. Senator Warren is concerned that MrBeast is expanding to financial services after purchasing the banking app Step. MrBeast said he started the venture because he wanted “to give millions of young people the financial foundation I never had.” Senator Warren wants to know how the North Carolinian entrepreneur plans to make that work—asking for answers about how the company markets to younger audiences, its approach to cryptocurrency, and its banking partners.

  Is there any innovative venture out there that she won't look to shut down?

Our Amazon Eye Candy du Jour is the cover of JD Vance's forthcoming book about his spiritual journey. Intrepid WaPo reporter Danielle Paquette smelled a rat, and traveled 331 miles southwest of DC, to Elk Creek, Virginia to un"cover" (heh) a scurrilous scandal: JD Vance’s new book has a photo of their church. They don’t know Vance. (WaPo gifted link)

They don't know him! Cue ominous music! Perhaps dink the lyrics to that old Lesley Gore song!

Danielle apparently attended a potluck dinner at the pictured Mount Zion United Methodist Church and brings the shocking news about it, and the local bumpkins:

Gasp! Just what are you trying to pull here, JD?

That link in the paragraph above goes to a Daily Beast article with the rather florid "gotcha" headline: Embarrassing Blunder on JD Vance’s Catholic Book Cover Exposed. Also see the even more deranged report at MSN: JD Vance humiliated after botching cover of new book on faith conversion with bizarre picture.

Egads. This is why words like "nothingburger" were coined. Even though the WaPo story claims that "Vance chose" the cover picture, there's no evidence provided for that, and I doubt it's true: I'd bet it was the publisher's pick. There is no reason to be embarrassed about putting a picture of a bucolic, albeit generic, Christian church on a book about the author's Christian faith.

Disclaimer: Goodness knows, I'm no JD fanboy. Although I thought his first book was pretty good, and I have no gripes with his religion, certain features of his political odyssey have been problematic at best.

But, in the spirit of Christian charity, he deserves better than this. So do, especially, the readers of the Washington Post.

Also of note:

• Speaking of Christian charity… Christian Britschgi looks at Zoning's war on cuddly animals, cute kids, and Christian charity. Click through for the story on kids and animals, but here's the scoop on charity:

  This past week, an Ohio judge dismissed a civil lawsuit brought by the fire chief of Bryon, Ohio, against a local church that had been letting people stay on its property during its overnight ministry.

  Fire Chief Douglas Pool's suit argued that local church Dad's Place had converted its property to a residential use by allowing nightly stays without getting the proper zoning approvals or adopting all the fire safety measures required of residential properties.

  His lawsuit demanded that Dad's Place stop its nighttime ministry until it installed a sprinkler system.

  Dad's Place, and its pastor, Chris Avell, contended that the expense of installing a sprinkler system was cost-prohibitive for the church. The requirement to install one was thus an effective demand to shut down their nighttime ministry, which the church argued violated their Free Exercise rights.

  The case only got as far as that Ohio county judge, but Byron city officials are also warring with Dad's Place on non-zoning grounds.

• "We didn't mean to" is not a good defense. Jacob Sullum has a story about applications of the Constitution's "Takings" clause in Indiana and California:

  In 2022, police caused extensive damage to Amy Hadley's home in South Bend, Indiana, because they mistakenly believed a fugitive was inside the house. That same year, a Los Angeles SWAT team wrecked Carlos Pena's print shop while trying to arrest a fugitive who had barricaded himself inside.

  Through no fault of their own, Hadley and Pena were stuck with the tab for the havoc wrought by police operations — a plainly unfair but increasingly common situation that could be rectified by the "just compensation" that the Fifth Amendment requires when property is "taken for public use." In petitions filed this week, Hadley and Pena are asking the Supreme Court to recognize that remedy.

  Hope that works out for them. (Click through for the horrific stories.)

Noah Smith succumbs to a temptation we all feel at times: I told you this would end badly.

Noah posts a couple recent Truth Social Trump rants, and I'll do them from authoritative sources at Twitter:

pic.twitter.com/hjaounz3yh

— Rapid Response 47 (@RapidResponse47) April 5, 2026

“All of those countries that can’t get jet fuel because of the Strait of Hormuz, like the United Kingdom, which refused to get involved in the decapitation of Iran, I have a suggestion for you…” - President Donald J. Trump pic.twitter.com/aPYmL0qspa

— The White House (@WhiteHouse) March 31, 2026

Yeah, that's awful. We'll see what happens.

Noah's "I told you so" includes the fact that he encouraged people to vote for Kamala back in 2024. I didn't go that far; Kamala would have been awful, just in a different (and probably incommensurable) way.

But I continue to think that we would have been in better shape if Nikki Haley had prevailed over Trump during primary season.

Also of note:

• So long, Blondie. Er, sorry, "Bondi". Kevin D. Williamson bids farewell to Pam Bondi who delivered Justice, Upside Down. (archive.today link)

  What should a self-respecting republic do with a figure such as Pam Bondi, assuming that horse-whipping is, for whatever strange reason, off the table?

  Bondi, lately the attorney general of these United States, is an exemplary specimen of the sort of people who thrive in Donald Trump’s orbit: She is in a profound moral sense a criminal, but we lack an appropriate law under which to prosecute her.

  Bondi’s 14-month career at the Department of Justice was, as a matter of her official duties, a crime spree. Her legacy is that she used the DOJ to launch a series of pretextual criminal investigations and prosecutions targeting the president’s political enemies, even when there was not the hint of an actual legal case to be made against them. Those targeted by Bondi’s DOJ as a matter of political vendetta include: Gov. Tim Walz, Attorney General Keith Ellison, and Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty, all of Minnesota; Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey; St. Paul Mayor Kaohly Her; Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell; Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook; Sen. Elissa Slotkin of Michigan; Rep. Jason Crow of Colorado; Rep. Maggie Goodlander of New Hampshire; Reps. Chrissy Houlahan and Chris Deluzio of Pennsylvania; Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona; Sen. Adam Schiff of California; former FBI Director James Comey; former CIA Director John Brennan; Attorney General Letitia James of New York. (The prosecution of former National Security Adviser John Bolton, no less political and pretextual where Bondi was concerned, is more complicated in that it is not solely the work of the Trump administration.)

  That is quite a list—other than printing up a bunch of fake “Epstein files” binders, Bondi seems to have done very little with her time in office other than abuse the awesome powers of the DOJ to abuse, harass, and conduct retribution against the president’s political enemies.

  Pam probably made the next round of Donkey-on-Elephant lawfare inevitable.

• Who, exactly, are they serving? The Antiplanner, Randal O'Toole, says we are Destroying the Forest Service. (And the Forest Service seems to be taking it out on the trees.)

  In the two decades I spent critiquing the Forest Service on behalf of environmental groups, I learned several things. I learned that the people who run the national forests were good people who truly loved the land and wanted to do the right thing for the American people. I learned that the managers of each of those national forests believed that their forests were particularly special and unique. And I learned that these good people managing unique resources somehow all decided to do exactly the same thing: clearcut as much of the timber as they could get away with each year.

  Randal notes the latest budgetary efforts by the Trump Administration to make things worse.

• Nearly the entire story is in the headline. Brittany Bernstein's latest "Forgotten Fact Checks" column at National Review says NPR Ran Multiple Stories on the Michigan Synagogue Attack — but Couldn’t Be Bothered to Interview One Victim. But there's one more telling detail:

  The outlet did, however, air a soft feature radio segment in which NPR reporter Hadeel al-Shalchi traveled to the small village in Lebanon where the attacker, Ayman Ghazali, was born.

  I'm not sure who listens to NPR any more, but I can't imagine it's good for anything except confirming the priors of its progressive donors.

Recently on the book blog:

I (somehow) heard good things about this bio of James Madison by Jay Cost. And, indeed, it carries back-cover praise from people I like: George Will, Yuval Levin, Keith Whittington, and Randy Barnett. As with most founding-father biographies, it serves double duty as a history of the early USA.

One of Cost's purposes here is to rescue Madison from the charge of inconsistency, perhaps borderline hypocrisy, over the course of his career. His main defense is expressed in the book's subtitle: unlike (say) Washington or Jefferson, Madison was first and foremost a politician: pragmatic, looking to effect compromises by offering different factions significant benefits, not burdening others too much. And also, recognizing when a past position needed adjustment in the face of changing circumstance.

Madison was a little young to be involved in very early national politics, but he worked his way up in Virginia. By the time the flaws of the Articles of Confederation were manifest, he was ready to attend the Constitutional Convention, with his "Virginia Plan" in hand. He was bitterly disappointed when what he considered one of its main features was nixed: allowing the US Congress to veto any legislation passed by state legislatures. And he wound up being skeptical about the final document. But that didn't stop him from cooperating with Alexander Hamilton on the Federalist Papers, which helped push the Constitution over the ratification finish line.

Cost goes over Madison's efforts in the new republic: one of Virginia's representatives in the very first US Congress; Jefferson's Secretary of State; and finally the country's fourth President.

He was not without bungles and flaws. He arguably miscalculated us into the War of 1812. His focus on pragmatics rather than principles caused him to favor the Second Bank of the United States, while he was steadfast in his opposition to the first one. He was against a "standing Army"… until the War of 1812 demonstrated the woeful inadequacy of state militias.

And his enduring stain was his failure to do anything to wean the South off its evil dependence on enslaved labor. That would have to await a much bloodier resolution.

But that's not bad news. Scott Lincicome plugs a WSJ story:

"More Americans Are Breaking Into the Upper Middle Class: Research shows that ranks of higher earners have grown markedly over last 50 years, while lower rungs of middle class have shrunk" 😲 https://t.co/XSDJbAgPI3 pic.twitter.com/k5X3QK7UjJ

— Scott Lincicome (@scottlincicome) April 5, 2026

… and so will I: More Americans Are Breaking Into the Upper Middle Class (WSJ gifted link). After some human-interest anecdotal stuff:

For all the moaning about a "hollowed out middle class", most honest observers realize that the big changes are caused by people moving up.

That "right-leaning American Enterprise Institute" report is here: The Middle Class Is Shrinking Because of a Booming Upper-Middle Class. The abstract:

The authors point out this marginally coherent 2023 Joe Biden speech, given to the "North America's Building Trades Unions Legislative Conference", containing the usual populist bullshit, which the union guys eagerly consumed:

Instead, the AEI report indicates pretty steady, inexorable improvement since 1979, no matter who's "in charge" of the economy. (Sorry, partisans.)

We aren't without problems, of course, but a "hollowed out middle class" ain't one of them.

Also of note:

• As noted above, we got some problems. At the WSJ, Chris Jacobs points out a biggie: The Democrats’ ObamaCare Quagmire. (WSJ gifted link)

  One has to admire Democrats’ chutzpah. In a recent letter, Ron Wyden, ranking Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, and 11 of his Democratic colleagues outlined a series of healthcare principles, so the Senate is ready “to take action on these issues the next time” Democrats are governing. The letter amounts to a simultaneous admission of ObamaCare’s failures and promise to go even further the next time Democrats have power.

  To “make health care simpler for families,” the lawmakers would “make sure people can get the insurance they are eligible for through a one-stop shop,” and “simplify and standardize plans and benefits.” ObamaCare already created government-run exchanges to shop for coverage—years after private companies had created comparison-shopping tools online. The law also standardized benefits, imposing new coverage requirements that more than doubled individual insurance premiums in ObamaCare’s first four years. Why are Democrats suggesting policies they enacted in 2010?

  The letter’s vow to “get rid of junk insurance plans” hints at the senators’ true motivation. Democratic lawmakers appear to want to regulate ObamaCare off-ramps like short-term limited-duration plans and catastrophic insurance out of existence. Much as the East German government created the Berlin Wall—officially known as the Anti-Fascist Protection Rampart—to “protect” people by preventing them from leaving, Democrats want to enact stronger so-called consumer protections that eliminate any exit from the ObamaCare morass.

  So that's something to look forward to in 2027: ObamaCare 2.0, designed by Bernie Sanders and Graham Platner.

• No Wizards!

  Tornado, balloon, … gotta be a Wizard of Oz reference, right? And isn't it appropriate to have Trump in a hot air balloon?

  

  But that's the cover story on the May issue of Reason, by Gene Healy, expert on the Imperial Presidency: Trump Realized He Can Just Do Things. Who Can Stop Him? His intro:

  Karl Marx said that when history repeats itself, we're supposed to get tragedy first, then farce. But Donald J. Trump has spent his life flouting all the rules. Why should we expect him to obey the historical dialectic?

  In Trump's two presidencies, farce came first. From the jump, his first turn at the helm was a head-spinning spectacle. He talked like a caudillo crossbred with an insult comic and seemed like a strongman auditioning for the part. In practice, however, Trump proved something of a "low energy" authoritarian. Very few of 45's autocratic fancies—from unilaterally revoking birthright citizenship to"hereby order[ing]" American companies out of China—ever made the transition from tweet to law of the land.

  Trump 1.0 arguably ended up a less imperial president than George W. Bush, Barack Obama, or Joe Biden. Even on COVID-19—a workable excuse for an executive power grab if ever there was one—45 proved the rare president willing to let a good crisis go to waste.

  Midway through Trump's shambolic first term,I warned in these pages that we should count ourselves lucky things hadn't gone worse, and should "set about reimposing limits on the office's powers before a competent authoritarian comes along."

  I never imagined it would be the same guy. And yet it's Trump's second presidency that's delivered a mix of tragedy and genuine peril. Somehow, during the interregnum, Trump discovered you can just do things. In the process, he's revealed just how few meaningful constraints remain against one-man rule.

  It's a long article, and worth your attention. So: "Thank you for your attention to this matter!"

Recently on the book blog:

I wish I had more insightful things to say about this book by Cass Sunstein. I was inspired to get it via Interlibrary Loan (thanks, UMass-Amherst!) by David Friedman's brief discussion of Sunstein's newfound fondness for classical liberals and outright libertarians.

Alas, I didn't get much out of reading the book. It's pretty short, ten chapters and 140 pages of main text. There's not much of a coherent discussion, each chapter seems to be unrelated to the others. And some of those chapters are kind of weak.

Sunstein starts out bold in Chapter One: "On Being a Liberal". It's a collection of 85 numbered propositions about liberalism; he pitches it as a "wide tent". There's room for fans of Ronald Reagan and Maggie Thatcher, as well as fans of FDR and LBJ. At a certain point, his discussion seems to devolve into "liberals like good things, but not bad things." E.g., #75: "Liberals believe in kindness, humility, and considerateness." Or #34: "Liberals like laughter. They are anti-anti-laughter." I wished for #86: "Liberals are partial to self-flattery."

And from there on, it's a hodgepodge: a paean to J.S. Mill's "different experiments of living"; a discussion of Hayek's look at Mills' relationship with his (eventual) wife, Harriet Taylor; looks at liberal attitudes toward the rule of law, freedom of speech, free markets, and "opportunity". In most cases, he gives short shrift to libertarian views.

But let me dive a bit deeper into that "opportunity" thing: Sunstein does something kind of neat in that discussion, telling us about the famous singer/songwriter Connie Converse, who inspired countless musicians in the 1950s and 60s.

If you're saying "who, now?", that's the point. Connie was a real person and a real musician, but never famous. She vanished in 1974, driving a VW Beetle to nobody knows where.

A haunting story, no matter how you feel about Sunstein's take on liberal "opportunity."

What I've left out is Sunstein's Chapter Seven, "The Second Bill of Rights". It's a look back at FDR's 1944 State of the Union address, which he gave via "Fireside Chat" radio. Sunstein doesn't just like the speech: he deems it "the greatest of the twentieth century."

What goes into that "Second Bill of Rights"? Oh, geez, so many rights:

The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the Nation;

The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation;

The right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family a decent living;

The right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad;

The right of every family to a decent home;

The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health;

The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment;

The right to a good education.

A vague, and probably expensive, laundry list. (Eleanor probably helped write it.) And note that this speech was made at the time we weren't doing so hot on the original Bill of Rights, what with Japanese internment and FDR's other attacks on American liberties.

But what really bugged me about Sunstein's discussion was his effort to obliterate the distinction between "negative" and "positive" rights, and to trample on the "myth" of laissez faire. (So much for the "wide tent" he talked about earlier in the book.) He relies overmuch on the views of "legal realists" like Robert Hale; they observe that since "people are able to have rights, and to enjoy them, only because law and government are present."

This becomes, essentially, a blank check for "law and government" to enact arbitrary schemes of what Frédéric Bastiat deemed plunder. His brief rejoinder in The Law is worth excerpting:

Mr. de Lamartine once wrote to me thusly: "Your doctrine is only the half of my program. You have stopped at liberty; I go on to fraternity." I answered him: "The second half of your program will destroy the first."

In fact, it is impossible for me to separate the word fraternity from the word voluntary. I cannot possibly understand how fraternity can be legally enforced without liberty being legally destroyed, and thus justice being legally trampled underfoot

So: sorry Cass: I'm on Team Bastiat.

Specifically, for this:

A correction will appear in tomorrow's print edition:
"A headline with an article on Friday about President Trump’s threats to leave NATO misstated the full name of the body. It is the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, not the North American Treaty Organization."

— NYTimes Communications (@NYTimesPR) April 3, 2026

"Some say" that the Times editors got too caught up in the headline's "American"/"America" cutesiness, bypassing their critical faculties. I buy that.

Also of note:

• Sinister, or just stupid? Well, let George Will explain why he thinks The verdict against Meta and Google carries sinister implications. (WaPo gifted link)

  The most sinister idea in modern politics has received a California jury’s endorsement, and much applause. It contradicts democracy’s foundational belief in individual agency.

  This concept presupposes that individuals can, in common parlance, “make up their minds.” They can assemble and edit their beliefs and convictions. When this idea is diluted, government expands its ambition to curate the public’s consciousness.

  As Congress did when banning Chinese-owned TikTok, ostensibly for “national security” reasons. For the first time, Congress targeted a specific speech forum because of conjectural harms that might result from what a congressional committee called “divisive narratives.”

  Hey, maybe the WaPo could change its motto from "Democracy Dies in Darkness" to "Democracy Dies in an Ambitious Government Curating the Public's Consciousness".

  (I realize that doesn't exactly sing.)

• But in case you didn't know… David Harsanyi thinks Everyone Knows What the Democrats' AIPAC Obsession Is Really About. Starting off with failed presidential candidate Tom Steyer's claim that the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) "is a dark money organization that should have no place in our politics." And it's not just Steyer.

  The Democrats' new AIPAC obsession is just a convenient way to tap into some ugly conspiracies and fearmongering about Jewish money and its alleged control over our politics. Democrats are increasingly, as The New York Times might put it, "J-pilled."

  There are, of course, wholly legitimate criticisms of American foreign policy. But Jew-baiting progressives such as Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) don't merely argue that AIPAC sits on the wrong side of a foreign policy issue but that it wants to steal constituents' health care and child care to enrich war profiteers and genocidal maniacs.

  Data point for Granite Staters: Democrat Senate candidate Chris Pappas and Democrat Congressional candidate Maggie Goodlander have accepted AIPAC donations, and the "Jew-baiting progressives" running against them have made it a campaign issue. As have the "Jew-baiting progressives" at the anti-Israel Track AIPAC site.

• Delusional or demented? Javier Milei has changed his mind about that:

  Javier Milei: “I thought being on the left was a mental problem. The empirical evidence is so overwhelming that it never worked anywhere, and they refused to accept it.”
  
  “But what I discovered is that being on the left is a disease of the soul. The left is built on envy, hatred,… pic.twitter.com/e7NzxNinSM

  — Javier Milei Quotes (Fan) (@MileiSays) April 3, 2026

  

  Coincidently weighing in on that topic is Jonah Goldberg, who sermonizes insightfully on this Easter Sunday: Man, Sin, and the Modern Lens. He plugs a recent essay in National Affairs by Steven F. Hayward & Linda L. Denno: Envy and Social Justice. Which (in turn) plugs  Helmut Schoeck's 1966 book Envy: A Theory of Social Behaviour. (Amazon link at your right)

  In these days of modern times, these authors point out that envy is an unappreciated sin. And there's a reason for that. Jonah:

  [Envy] stopped being a serious subject of study because the progressive “social agenda” depends heavily on envy. I’m willing to concede that the obsession with income inequality and the desire to “ban” billionaires is about more than envy. But if you’re not willing to concede that envy plays a major part in the rhetoric and politics of these programs, you’re either lying or in denial. Conceding that a political project is grounded in one of the seven deadly sins is problematic. As Schoeck writes:

  The aversion of the radical left-wing writer to any consideration of the problem of envy is comprehensible. This is a sphere that must be made taboo, and he must do all in his power to repress cognition of envy in his contemporaries. Otherwise he might lose the support of serious-minded people, who, while sharing his views for sentimental reasons, and even following him in his demands for a policy and a political ethic dependent upon common envy's being regarded as an absolute, yet are aware how little esteemed envy is and how little it is capable of legitimizing itself openly in most Western societies even today.

  Jonah goes on to mull on the other Deadly Sins, and I agree it's time to (heh) resurrect them as underlying your modern progressive's "disease of the soul."

Recently on the book blog:

A word I've been using in my reports on Peter Swanson novels: "gimmicky". That's not (necessarily) an insult, he makes his gimmicks work for me. This one was picked by the WSJ's Tom Nolan as one of the 25 best works of mystery and suspense of the 21st century (wsj gifted link), so it apparently works for him too.

Consumer note: Amazon deems this to be the third book in Swanson's "Henry Kimball" series. I read the second one back in 2023, and I haven't gotten around to reading the first one yet. I think it's fair to say Henry doesn't play a major role here until the end.

Anyway: the book opens with a murder in the first six pages: Josie, a teacher attending an "Art Educator Conference" gets tossed, naked, off her hotel room balcony by her anonymous, malfunctioning partner in a one-night stand. It's easy for the cops to dismiss as a suicide, though, and it's later revealed that's what happened.

Then we're into the main part of the book, where librarian Martha is developing a strong suspicion that her husband, Alan, is some kind of serial killer. His profession puts him on the road a lot, hawking cute shirts and tchotchkes to teachers at conferences … like the one Josie got killed at. And, indeed, Alan was at that conference! Martha starts doing some amateur detective work, connecting up Alan's sales trips to mysterious deaths. Eventually she contacts her old school friend, Lily, for assistance. Lily's had experience with this sort of thing too. (Again, described in those first two "Henry Kimball" books, I guess.)

Without further spoilers, the book has a number of everything-you-knew-was-wrong plot twists, along with a suspenseful climax. It's a real roller coaster ride. As a bonus for local readers, Martha and Alan live in Portsmouth, NH, and she works at the Kittery Public Library, just across the river in Maine.

Andrew Heaton brings his usual video mixture of hilarity and wisdom to a persistent myth, pointing out America still makes stuff!

There's no accompanying text at the Reason website to go with that, so instead I'll offer Jason Furman's recent NYT op-ed: Every President Tries It. It Never Works. (NYT gifted link) Want to guess what "it" is?

Jason was chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers from 2013 to 2017. Appointed by one of the guys he's implicitly criticizing in that last paragraph.

Also of note:

• Yum! John R. Puri says this like it was a bad thing: Seniors Are Devouring the Federal Budget. (NR gifted link)

  The excellent Penn Wharton Budget Model has a new report on how federal spending is distributed by age. It shows you where the government’s priorities lie: seniors front of the line, everyone else a distant second.

  In 2025, the federal government spent $7.1 trillion overall, of which only $2.6 trillion went to broad public goods such as national defense and transportation (as well as interest on the debt). The remaining $4.4 trillion was attributable to benefits for individuals: entitlements, income security, health-care and education subsidies, and veterans’ programs. That amount was broken down to see how much in outlays each age group in America receives.

  Children and adults under 26 received what seems like a fair chunk of change: $449 billion, concentrated in family welfare programs like Medicaid, food stamps, and education funding. But that amount was just 10 percent of age-assignable spending last year. “Working-age adults,” ages 26 to 64, received a lot more: $1.2 trillion. Much of that came from means-tested welfare programs, too, but also health and income benefits for disabled workers and veterans. In total, working-age adults claimed 28 percent of age-assignable spending.

  Where did all the other money go? To the last age group — seniors 65 and older — who took home $2.7 trillion, or 62 percent of federal spending on individuals. That’s nearly 40 percent of the entire federal budget. Like working-age adults, seniors receive a good amount in means-tested welfare and veterans’ benefits. The vast majority of the spending they receive, however, is in entitlement programs tailored to retirees: Social Security and Medicare.

  Depending on your own age, read it and feel irate. Or (as in my case) slightly ashamed.

  John plugs the proposal from the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB). Which, in a nutshell, caps Social Security benefits for a couple at a nice round $100,000 per year. (Single recipients: $50K) Economist Scott Sumner also likes it; in fact his headline describing the proposal is Too good to be true.

  Unfortunately, he quickly adds:

  The plan is so good that I see almost no prospect for it ever being enacted by our Congress, an institution that has fallen to a sadly dysfunctional state.

  So something much worse will probably happen.

• If I had known, I would have scheduled a party. At the WSJ, Joshua Jamerson notes the confetti and piñatas: Drivers Celebrate the Demise of the Most Hated Feature in Their Cars. (WSJ gifted link)

  The hated feature is "stop-start", which automatically shuts off your engine when you stop at (say) a red light or stop sign. Unsurprisingly, it got help from the nanny-statists under you-know-who:

  Drivers have long wanted to put a permanent stopper on stop-start. Designed to lower auto emissions by temporarily shutting off the engine while the brake is engaged, it also makes driving feel unnatural, jerky and unenjoyable, Donio and his fellow stop-start haters argue.

  The technology was developed decades ago, but federal incentives during the Obama administration kicked U.S. adoption into high gear. The Environmental Protection Agency began tracking stop-start technology in 2012 car models, less than 1% of which had the feature. By 2024, roughly 58% of new gasoline non-hybrid cars had the systems installed.

  I have stop-start on my Impreza. I don't hate it enough to turn it off.

• I knew they were out there somewhere. Kevin D. Williamson writes on an (apparently) endangered species: The Last Conservatives.

  Like most other numbskulls, Donald Trump is a profoundly incurious man, and so it probably is the case that he wandered down to the Supreme Court as another halfhearted attempt at bullying the justices, who, thanks in part to their individual characters and in part to constitutional design, are very hard to bully. But maybe he really did simply want to know what the hell is going on with the Supreme Court, which has left the president both perplexed and irritated by doing the one thing Donald Trump never has and never will do: its job.

  Ideological progressives and partisan Democrats have been engaged in a shameful yearslong smear campaign against the Supreme Court, an intellectually dishonest attack on the institution’s legitimacy. I have written from time to time about the “Supreme Court legitimacy watch,” i.e. the habit our friends on the left have of declaring that the high court’s legitimacy is at stake every time it looks like it might not give them their way on a policy question. The runup to Dobbs may have been the high-water mark of “legitimacy” hysteria, but the habit endures.

  That a policy question is not the same thing as a legal or constitutional question is something that vexes and confuses progressives from both directions: How could the arch-conservative Antonin Scalia be on the ACLU’s side of a flag-burning case? How is it possible that most of the court’s liberal justices sided with the conservatives in an 8-1 ruling in the recent “conversion therapy” case? The answer is the same in both cases: The First Amendment protects speech, including—especially!—speech that powerful people do not like.

  Even though I'm a fan of that checks-and-balances thing, I was not panic-stricken by Trump's visit to SCOTUS during the argument about birthright citizenship. Just call me Pollyanna: I thought there was a chance that he might have been impressed, if not convinced, by the arguments on the opposing side.

• You're GO for article deployment, Dave. Mr. Barry writes on The Moon Mission.

  Yay! We’re going back to the Moon! And we’re taking a Canadian!

  It has been a long time coming, but finally, on Wednesday evening, after years of preparation and a brief launch delay caused by a long line at the TSA checkpoint, NASA’s Artemis II spacecraft — named for Artemis II, the Greek goddess of large federal contracts — blasted off, with a crew of four, from what is currently named the Kennedy Space Center, although that could change if the president finds out about it.

  And for my followup comment… oh, you've already clicked over to Dave's article, haven't you?

Yes, that's Mr. Ramirez, doing a very good Charles Schulz takeoff. If you need explanation, the New York Post has the story: AOC broke law by spending $19k in campaign cash on ketamine-therapy shrink for ‘personal use’: complaint

This site claims: "Low doses of ketamine may result in problems with attention, learning ability, and memory." Which might explain some things.

Also of note:

• For all who celebrate: Happy Passover. Jeff Jacoby celebrates in his own way, by recounting A libel as old as the Pyramids.

  JEWS THE world over will gather around the Seder table this week to recount again the great narrative of their ancestors' redemption from slavery in Egypt. In retelling the story, they will quote the passage from Exodus in which Pharaoh justified the unspeakable repression he intended to inflict on the Hebrews.

  "Come, let us deal wisely with them," he exhorted his nation. "Otherwise they may become so numerous that if there is a war they will join our enemies, fight against us, and leave the land." Though the tyrant's idea of dealing wisely with the Hebrews began with slave labor, it wasn't long before he advanced to murder. "Then Pharaoh commanded all his people, saying: 'Every boy that is born you shall throw into the Nile.'"

  Pharaoh's false accusation set the pattern for one of history's most durable antisemitic libels. Through the millennia, Jews have been portrayed as a fifth column, malevolently disposed to betray the nations in which they live. Again and again the slander resurfaces: When war comes, it will be the Jews who caused it, or who had the most to gain from its outcome, or who manipulated others into fighting and dying. The libel is as old as the Pyramids — and as current as today's news.

  I don't advise kicking the next antisemite you see in the shins, but I would understand if you did that.

• It's not just steel and aluminum. Scott Lincicome looks at Trump’s Other Tariff. (archive.today link)

  Last September, the Trump administration imposed a staggering $100,000 fee for new H-1B visas via presidential proclamation—up from just a couple hundred dollars previously. Subsequent guidance from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services clarified that the $100,000 charge applies only to new H-1B petitions filed on or after September 21, 2025, for workers outside the United States and lacking a valid H-1B visa (so-called “initial employment” petitions). The fee does not apply to renewals, extensions, amendments, or visa holders already here and switching over to an H-1B—a significant carve-out that limits the fees’ damage but certainly doesn’t eliminate it. The fee also must be paid before a petition is filed, with no guarantee of a refund even if the application is denied. (This hints at a broader problem with many immigration-related fees today, as my Cato colleague David Bier just documented.)

  Scott goes on to document why this was such a lousy idea, like nearly all government-imposed barriers to free trade.

• "Hey, let's take that road! The one to Serfdom!" Veronique de Rugy is as disappointed as Julius Caesar was: Et Tu, World Bank? Industrial Policy on the International Scene.

  The World Bank recently published a 276-page report supporting the idea that industrial policy belongs "in the national policy toolkit of all countries." This is a significant reversal for an institution that spent decades pushing developing nations toward fiscal discipline, open trade and market liberalization. When the World Bank seems more interested in engaging with right- and left-wing populism than in promoting good economics, it tells you a lot about the era in which we live.

  Industrial policy refers to government officials channeling resources to particular industries that the market would not. Arguments like national security or protecting "strategic" industries from competitors are often used to justify the policy. Whatever one thinks of these excuses, industrial policy is funded by taxpayers when the chosen instrument is subsidies, funded by consumers when the tool is tariffs, and always funded by the other domestic firms quietly crowded out as capital flows toward their politically favored competitors.

  Nobody seems to consider "New Hampshire Blogging" to be a strategic industry, but we can always hope.

• Like a snowball rolling downhill, it is. Kevin D. Williamson has a sad prediction: Post-Truth Won’t End With Trump. (archive.today link)

  One of the ironies of the low-trust society—and that is the kind of society we are building, to our detriment—is that its deficit of trust is mirrored by a surplus of gullibility.

  What Umberto Eco wrote (describing the view of G.K. Chesterton) about God is true about lesser authorities as well: that when men stop believing, “it isn’t that they then believe in nothing: they believe in everything.”

  You know what I am talking about: The same people who go on and on (and they do) about how they don’t trust “Big Pharma” are ready to believe anything they see on the internet about ivermectin or raw milk or drinking water with borax dissolved in it. (Please do not drink borax.) Certain people who believe that climate change is a hoax accept at face value wild claims about Satanic pedophile rings operating out of Washington pizzerias, people who reject evolution as a fanciful hypothesis believe that aliens from distant planets secretly walk among us, etc. You can read essays calling for “evidence-based government” or “science-based” health tips in the Washington Post and then check the horoscopes.

  And, no spoilers here, but the very next paragraph is especially funny, and also true.

• Free advice for Team Blue. Frank J. Fleming uses AI to illustrate How the Dems Can Find a White Man They Can Pass as Normal. I won't grab his art, but Step One is:

  1. Find a hobo who has been living under a bridge.

  You’re probably going, “Why a hobo living under a bridge?” Well, one of the biggest problems Dems have is that anyone they want to portray as normal probably wrote on social media during peak woke something like, “I love Latinx trans kids because they’re not white!” So you need someone who wasn’t on social media if you want to get away with saying someone is normal. So, the best solution: a hobo living under a bridge. Sure, he constantly yells obscenities at random passersby, but that’s not online, so it’s like it never happened.

  And then… well, you're probably not a Democrat, so you don't need to know.

Recently on the book blog:

Recently on the movie blog:

So it's Hulk vs. Thor! Also, Storm!

(Respectively: Mark Ruffalo, Chris Hemsworth, Halle Berry.)

This movie was based on a Don Winslow novella, included in his collection of shorter works, Broken (which I liked). On the outer surface it's pretty clichéd: Davis, a very talented thief (Hemsworth), is looking to make One Final Score, but Lou, a diligent cop (Ruffalo), has picked up on his modus operandi: no harm done to his victims, targeting sites with easy access to California Highway 101. Complications ensue for everyone: Davis acquires a sorta-girlfriend who's unaware of his profession; he enlists the aid of an insurance broker (Berry) who's bitter about being passed over for promotion; he gets betrayed by his longtime mentor (whoa, Nick Nolte has seen better days) and tormented, as a result, by a violent psycho. Meanwhile, Lou is getting a lot of pushback from his corrupt cop superiors and cop co-workers.

The cinematography is very splashy. Very Michael Mann-ish. It has to be very splashy for me to notice. I'm surprised it didn't get an Oscar nomination for that, at least.

And it's kind of long: 2⅓ hours. Still, I stayed awake, which is unusual for me at home on the sofa.

This is Anthony Horowitz's second shot at James Bond novelizing, and it's pretty good. It opens (Chapter One, Line One) with a shocking declaration from M:

"So, 007 is dead."

What!?

That might be the reaction from the reader who managed to start right in without reading the back cover or book flap. Or this report, for that matter. The events in this book take place in 1950, pre-Casino Royale and it's Horowitz's story of James Bond's first case as the new 007, replacing his murdered predecessor. And also carrying on that predecessor's investigation, the one that got him killed in Marseilles.

It is the usual mixture of spycraft, suspense, danger, violence, sex, detective work, food, drink, cigarettes, and scenic locations. Bond is up against some very colorful/disgusting villains. And, unfortunately, even though Bond's supposed to be undercover, the bad guys seem to know exactly who he is, and why he's there. He goes through a lot of physical and mental torture. And also narrow escapes, of course.

I'm a little proud to say that I figured out what the eventual climactic plot twist would be pretty early on. However, so does Bond.

Rand Simberg tweets:

I've come to realize today, on the dawn of our first return to the Moon in over half a century, how wrong I've been about space policy for the past decades. Seeing the majestic Space Launch System with its mighty SRBs sitting on the pad now, poised to once again take men to the…

— Not-So-OK Boomer (@Rand_Simberg) April 1, 2026

Unfortunately clipped. Here's the Whole Thing:

You should note the date, if necessary.

I watched the launch, because I like to watch launches, and I wish the Artemis II crew well.

Not that it matters but: I thought NASA's official video feed was mediocre. We used to have better coverage of Space Shuttle launches. I wanted to see the SRB separation, but instead NASA cut to a crowd picture at that point.

Also of note:

• Irony can be pretty ironic sometimes. Jacob Siegel gripes at the Free Press: I Wrote a Book About Censorship. Then People Tried to Censor It.

  Last week, I published a book called The Information State: Politics in the Age of Total Control. It describes how, as technology has advanced, American politics and government have been transformed by the shift in societal power from visible laws and institutions to opaque forms of digital and informational control.

  As I explain in the book, one of the consequences of this shift has been the ability of the government-tech alliance—what I call “the information state”—to carry out mass censorship online over the past decade. This point was noted in a generally positive review of the book that ran on March 24 in a left-wing magazine called The Baffler. The information state, noted academic Richard Greenwald in his review, rests on “twin pillars—censorship and propaganda.”

  So I could only savor the irony when, less than a day later, the magazine purged the review from its website.

  I should also point out that one of the villainesses in Jacob's book is Renée DiResta, and she's pushed back on his narrative pretty strongly on Twitter.

  Meanwhile, Nina Jankowicz's American Sunlight Project remains moribund, with the most recent posting on their "Research" page from August of last year.

• It's tough out there for a Sex Ed teacher. Also at the Free Press Logan Levkof also has a complaint: I Was Fired from My Sex Ed Job for Reposting a Trans Woman.

  Two weeks ago, after 21 years teaching sex education at Stephen Gaynor School, a private K–8 school for students with language-based learning differences in New York City, I was fired.

  Why? Because, according to the school, I had violated the administration’s values about LGBT inclusion—by reposting Brianna Wu, a trans woman, on X.

  Brianna has been flying way under Pun Salad's radar since her last appearance back in 2017, where we cited her lunar tune at Slashdot: Congressional Candidate Brianna Wu Claims Moon-Colonizing Companies Could Destroy Cities By Dropping Rocks. (Brianna lost that race.)

  But if Brianna's now promulgating heterodox views on trans issues that make the woke crowd mad, more power to her. Too bad Logan Levkof's career was collateral damage.

• Shocker: SCOTUS justice claims that free people might do what they want, instead of what they're told! Jonathan Turley doesn't know whether to be amused or horrified: “No One Knows What Will Happen Now”: Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson Warns Against Unbridled Free Speech.

  Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson is again warning of a growing threat to the nation. In her lone dissent in Chiles v. Salazar, Jackson observed that “to be completely frank, no one knows what will happen now.” The ominous tone stemmed from the fact that free speech had prevailed over state-imposed orthodoxy in a Colorado case. Eight justices, including her two liberal colleagues, ruled that Colorado could not prevent licensed counselors from “any practice or treatment” that “attempts or purports to change” a minor’s sexual orientation or gender identity.

  Justice Ketanji's argument was so bad, she couldn't even persuade Elena and Sonia to go along with it.

• It seems that most problems boil down to tax problems. Veronique de Rugy points out: The Abundance Agenda Has a Tax Problem.

  … the current debate over abundance focuses almost entirely on regulation. It says very little about the tax code, which often works in the same direction, quietly undermining supply, investment, and mobility. Our latest piece focuses on housing, but the problem extends more broadly to infrastructure and industrial construction.

  The tax code works against "abundance" in two ways, Vero says. First:

  The combination of demand-side subsidies and capital gains taxes discourages turnover. Policies like the mortgage interest deduction push prices up without increasing supply. At the same time, capital gains taxes create a lock-in effect that discourages people from selling homes that no longer fit their needs.

  But also:

  While policymakers have improved the treatment of equipment, most structures are still penalized through long depreciation schedules. That applies not just to apartment buildings, but to office space, energy infrastructure, and industrial facilities.

  It's a mess, in other words.

So am I excepted from Eric Boehm's damnation?

Well, if you prefer text, Eric's article is headlined: You are paying for retirees' lavish lifestyles.

I'll admit to a slight mea culpa: Although I don't live a "lavish lifestyle", and I don't play golf or pickleball, my retirement fund is pretty healthy. And I'm pretty sure I won't be taking it with me, so it will end up in the grubby hands of my non-boomer kids.

Still, Eric makes some solid points against "Total Boomer Luxury Communism". The day of reckoning for entitlements is drawing closer day by day, so it will be interesting to see if push-grandma-off-the-cliff demagoguery will make a reappearance.

Also of note:

• Or they could pick my pocket this way. Mitch Daniels (slightly older than I) sees a Consumption Tax on the Horizon.

  At some point, a much broader segment of society will now, unfairly, have to start paying for the irresponsibility of the previous generation of national leadership. This could have been avoided or limited by action over the years. But by now the refusal to reform entitlements means that saving the safety-net programs as they go broke will require major new taxes on millions who are paying little or none today.

  Those socially conscious Europeans, whatever fiscal messes they have created for themselves, have had no qualms about taxing their whole populations. The primary vehicle is sales taxation, in the form of value-added taxes, which accumulate along a product’s value chain and are ultimately paid by the consumer. VATs extract roughly 9 percent to 10 percent of middle-class incomes across the euro zone and can result in middle-income citizens paying for nearly half of all VAT revenue. Every country in the 38-member Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development except the United States has one.

  That’s a major reason the US, frequent misrepresentations to the contrary, has the most progressive tax system among the most developed countries. Here, the top 10 percent pay about 70 percent of US income taxes, and more than half the total US taxes even when payroll taxes are included. The dreaded 1 percent pick up more than a quarter of the entire federal tab.

  The funny thing (for suitably small values of "funny") is: when I first started squirrelling money into my IRA, the sales pitch at the time was: "the money you take out will be taxable, but you'll probably be in a lower tax bracket".

  Guess what? I'm not!

  And if they add a consumption tax on top… Eek!

• This is why the kids invented the "SMH" acronym. Jacob Sullum points out some delusional language: Trump habitually warns 'we won’t have a country' without him.

  If Iran's leaders continue to resist U.S. demands, President Donald Trump warned on Sunday night, "they're not going to have a country." That remark was ominous in the context of a war that has included a huge military deployment, attacks on thousands of targets, threats to destroy civilian infrastructure, and the possibility of a ground invasion. But Trump frequently has deployed similar language much less credibly, warning Americans that they "won't have a country anymore" if certain things are allowed to happen.

  Much like his notion of what constitutes a "national emergency," Trump's perception of existential threats to the republic is highly idiosyncratic. It includes concerns, such as crime and terrorism, that are plausible but fall far short of threatening to destroy the country. It includes illegal immigration, which Trump has long portrayed as inherently dangerous, regardless of whether unauthorized residents are committing crimes or making an honest, peaceful living. It includes Democratic electoral victories. It even includes constitutionally protected criticism of Trump.

  If we don't "get tough and smart" on Islamic terrorism, Trump warned on Twitter in January 2016, "we won't have a country anymore!"

  Jacob's link-heavy bottom line:

  The unifying theme in Trump's warnings about the nation's imminent demise is that America's continued existence depends on supporting him: electing him, praising him, and backing his policies. Americans who oppose Trump therefore are betraying their country, which helps explain his habitual accusation that his critics are guilty of treason.

  Both rhetorical tics reflect the narcissistic authoritarianism that underlies much of what Trump says and does, whether it is declaring nonexistent crises, waging war without congressional approval, summarily executing suspected cocaine smugglers, asserting unlimited tariff authority, attempting to rewrite statutes or the Constitution by presidential decree, demanding impeachment of judges who rule against him, using the criminal justice system to punish his foes, or threatening people who say things he does not like with deportation, regulatory penalties, grant revocations, or other unpleasant consequences. As Trump sees it, extreme measures are necessary when the fate of the nation is at stake, which it always seems to be.

  I'm not a fan of armchair psychoanalysis, but how do you explain this behavior without resorting to terms like "narcissistic authoritarianis"?

• Doomed to repeat it. Jeffrey Blehar sees only bleakness ahead: ‘No Kings’ Anti-Trump Protests Have No Future.

  Saturday’s nationwide “No Kings” rally descended on Chicago like a long-anticipated cicada bloom that I have no excuse for not planning around. I ignored all the warning signs: the regular public service announcements on NPR that week encouraging my attendance; the sudden disappearance of lunch and dinner reservations at pricey restaurants in the West Loop; the chittering din of septuagenarian Trotskyists and blue-haired grandmothers as they scuttled from their hidey-holes in the North Shore to gather agitatedly in Grant Park.

  Yes, “Brood Boomer” reassembled downtown for a reprise of last October’s similarly senior-heavy affair, a “No Kings” protest against — well, what? Deportations of illegals? The potential quagmire of an Iran war? Our cynically mercantilist adventure in Venezuela? That tacky White House ballroom? They were opposed to all of these things, and more — they were opposed to the simple existence of the Trump administration, in all its unanswerable egregiousness.

  And why not? Were I a Democrat right now, I’d be pretty miffed about the course of national politics. (I’m a Republican, and I’m not exactly thrilled myself.) It’s America, and everyone has a right to gripe. But all of the observations I made about the demography of the “No Kings” rally-goers back last year applied in redoubled measure to this year’s attending class: These people were overwhelmingly old, white, deeply elite progressives, and vastly fewer in number this second time around.

  Well, I'm old and white. I'd fit right in, except for the "deeply elite progressive" part.

• But when he's right… Attention should be paid to Randy Barnett, who claims, in the WSJ that Trump Is Right on Birthright Citizenship. (WSJ gifted link)

  President Trump’s executive order denying birthright citizenship to U.S.-born children of nonresident aliens goes before the Supreme Court Wednesday, and conventional wisdom has it that the president will lose in Trump v. Barbara. If the court stays true to the original meaning of the 14th Amendment’s Citizenship Clause, however, the conventional wisdom will prove wrong.

  The clause grants citizenship to persons who meet two conditions: birth in the U.S. and being “subject to the jurisdiction” of the U.S. The dispute is over the meaning of the latter term. Everyone agrees that it excludes at least three classes: children of diplomats, of soldiers from an invading army, and of American Indians maintaining tribal relations. In each of these categories, the status of the child depended on the status of the parent.

  The constitutional debate is about the original concept embodied in the text that explains these exclusions and whether that concept embraces or excludes children born on U.S. soil to parents who are unlawfully or temporarily in the U.S. The court has never squarely addressed this question.

  Randy could be right. He's a pretty sharp guy.