Pun Salad

I read a previous book by the author, David T. Beito, The New Deal’s War on the Bill of Rights a couple years back; it detailed FDR's (and his Democrat co-conspirators) lousy record on civil liberties, concentrating on Japanese internment during WW2; warrantless snooping on political opponents; trumped-up "investigations" of critical newspaper and radio outlets. I enjoyed it … if "enjoyed" is the right word.

This book covers a lot of the same ground, but covers more of FDR's pre-presidential behavior, and also to his problematic behavior outside the civil liberty arena. As I said about the previous book: it's not a "warts and all" book: it's mostly just the warts. Beito's only unreserved praise is Roosevelt's brave handling of his polio affliction.

Beito finds that FDR's handling of the Depression was poor; although his policies were politically popular, they were ineffective in restoring the private economy. (And, as Milton Friedman taught us, the Federal Reserve also had a knack of making just the wrong monetary moves at the wrong time.) He was inexcusably indifferent to the ongoing abuse of Black America, not wanting to damage his political prospects in with white Southerners. He continued damaging protectionist policies, which probably caused ongoing economic misery in Europe, encouraging the rise of you-know-who. He thought he was good buddies with Stalin during the war, and encouraged see-no-evil policies toward the Soviet Union. Beito criticizes FDR's insistence on "unconditional surrender" of Germany and Japan, which (arguably) prolonged the war and caused additional American deaths, in addition to enemy soldiers and civilians.

And he was indifferent to the plight of European Jewry, passing up numerous opportunities to decrease their death toll.

So: a welcome addition to FDR bios, countering a lot of the usual hagiography.

This book was on the WSJ list of Best Mysteries of 2024. (WSJ gifted link). The author, Nova Jacobs, previously wrote The Last Equation of Isaac Severy, which I dismissed as "not my cup of tea" last year. Good news: I liked this one a lot better!

It is set mostly at CERN, site of much high-energy physics research. Most notable is its Large Hadron Collider (LHC), most famous for proving the existence of the long-theorized Higgs Boson back in 2012.

Ms. Jacobs adds some fictional interest, starting with a different kind of LHC discovery: the tunnel contains the corpse of physicist Howard Anderby, who seems to have been fatally irradiated in the LHC tunnel. Except nobody can figure out how he got in there, bypassing security. And nobody can figure out why the LHC got turned on at that time. It's sort of a double locked-room mystery.

CERN is located on the France-Switzerland border, in a kind of law enforcement limbo. To minimize bad publicity, CERN research group director Chloé Grimaud and Yvonne Faye, head of CERN, ask their erstwhile companion, private investigator Sabine Leroux, to see if she can track down the facts behind Howard's death.

Complicating things: the apparent cybertheft of CERN data by the competing supercollider group in China. And also another corpse found drowned in CERN's (fictional) water tank housing liquid xenon dark matter detection experiment.

The book alternates its timeline between events that happened before Howard's death and Sabine's investigation. The "before" timeline follows postdoc Eve, who becomes infatuated with Howard, and eventually discovers things about him that are … well … kind of Out There. By the time that's revealed, I was having too much fun to mind.

I guess this movie is suffering at the box office (ScreenRant: "The Mandalorian And Grogu Box Office Suffers With Star Wars' Worst-Ever Week 2 Drop"). Some of the reviews have been mediocre. Well, let me tell you: my mileage varied. Pun Son and I attended a Saturday evening show, and I found my face hurting from smiling so much.

It probably helped that I watched the streaming series, and got accustomed to the Mandalorian's reluctant heroism, and even more reluctant surrogate parenthood of Baby Yoda.

And maybe also helping is the presence of Sigourney Weaver, whom I've kind of adored since watching her in Alien 47 years ago. (She looks great!)

Here, the movie opens up with a slam-bang action sequence, as Mando is on the trail of a leftover thug from the not-quite-defunct Empire. After much violence (it appears that Mando has taken lessons from John Wick) he returns to meet with Ward (Sigourney) for his next assignment. Which turns out to be even more dangerous. More explosions, betrayals, monsters (including Hutts!), escapes, scares, … It's a lot of fun.

The WSJ brings the latest AI triumph: A Famous Math Problem Stumped Humans for 80 Years. AI Just Cracked It.. (WSJ gifted link) Specifically, when fed this

After thinking a bit, the response:

The article explains in slightly less geeky terms: famous math guy Paul Erdős proposed the "unit distance" problem 80 years ago, offering $500 for a solution. And:

Why could AI (specifically: OpenAI) solve this when even human brains failed? The article offers three reasons:

• "… this particular solution happens to be highly counterintuitive."
• "… humans specialize while AI synthesizes."
• "… AI has time, attention, patience, focus and the persistence to stick with methods that humans might abandon."

Draw your own conclusions and implications. I got nothin'.

Also of note:

• Please release me, let me go. The Boston Globe reports: Libertarians cut the N.H. party loose. Now what?

  The Libertarian Party of New Hampshire, which has frequently wielded combative rhetoric to inflame political tensions in recent years, is officially on the outs with the national party’s leadership team.

  The newly elected Libertarian National Committee voted 15-2 this week to sever ties with LPNH, citing the New Hampshire affiliate’s “numerous anti-libertarian positions” and its 2024 endorsement of Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump.

  The National LP had a tweet containing:

  Statement on the Disaffiliation of LPNH

  “The resolution to disaffiliate the Libertarian party of New Hampshire was the unfortunate culmination of years of behavior in violation of the Libertarian Party’s platform,” said new LNC Chair Evan McMahon. “These violations reached an impasse, and the previous Libertarian National Committee was unable to reach an armistice with the LPNH. One of my top priorities coming into office was to make it clear that the LNC will adhere to the platform and determine who we will associate with based on those grounds.”

  And:

  Language from the Motion to Disaffiliate LPNH

  The bylaws are clear that affiliate Parties shall not endorse the candidate of another Party. Despite this, the Libertarian Party of New Hampshire openly and publicly endorsed President Trump during the election in 2024.

  Furthermore, they have crudely and repeatedly undermined our own candidates and have espoused numerous anti-libertarian positions on a National level.

  Be it Resolved that because of these reasons and more, the Libertarian National Committee moves to disaffiliate the Libertarian Party of New Hampshire, mandating that they cease and desist the use of the Party name and logo, until such a time as the LNC recognizes a new affiliate in New Hampshire that shares our Party’s foundational values.

  So there.

  For the record: both the national party and the LPNH seem to be going out of their way to lose my vote in recent years. This didn't help.

• I'll take 125 $2 bills instead. Collin Levy writes in the WSJ's "Free Expression" newsletter: It’s All About the Donalds.

  The Trump administration says it wants the president’s face on a $250 bill, and the big question is: What took so long?

  What else to say about the ridiculous news that administration officials are pushing the Bureau of Engraving and Printing to mock up a new banknote featuring a portrait of Donald Trump. His signature has already been added alongside the Treasury secretary’s on U.S. bills, and the U.S. Mint has approved a limited-production commemorative 24-karat gold coin with his likeness.

  Don’t forget the Trump Accounts for our wee ones, the TrumpRx prescription drug portal and the Trump Gold Card visas for immigrants who want to buy their way in with a “contribution” to the government. No one in Washington can go for a jog without seeing Mr. Trump’s mug hanging on the Mall or outside the Justice Department. And whatever happened to “Trump Gaza”?

  This sort of leader-worship is common among autocrats. In Cuba, Vietnam and China, images of Fidel Castro, Ho Chi Minh and Mao Zedong have long been present in government buildings, schools and private businesses. (Not to mention T-shirts and key chains for despot tourist kitsch.) In North Korea, citizens are expected to hang pictures of Kim Jong Un in their homes.

  I've heard that Canada has images of a loon on their dollar coins. Why do we have to have a loon on a $250 bill?

Our Eye Candy du Jour is described thusly at Getty Images:

US Secretary of Treasury Scott Bessent shows a proposed $250 bill featuring President Donald Trump during a press briefing in the Brady Briefing Room of the White House in Washington, DC, on May 28, 2026. President Donald Trump could soon appear on a new $250 bill, in the Republican's latest move to shatter US traditions by putting his personal stamp on national institutions. A proposal for the new bill, featuring a glaring Trump, was first reported Thursday by the Washington Post.

Here's that WaPo story: Trump appointees push $250 banknote with his portrait. (WaPo gifted link)

Further fun fact:

No living person has appeared on U.S. currency since 1866, when it was outlawed after the image of a mid-level Treasury bureaucrat showed up on a 5-cent note. Legislation that would allow Trump to appear on a $250 bill was introduced in Congress last year to commemorate the nation’s 250th anniversary but has languished.

And a further not-at-all-fun fact: The director of the printing bureau, Patricia “Patty” Solimene "repeatedly explained to Beach and Brown that there were legal and procedural obstacles to producing the note and that it would take years longer than they envisioned[.]" For her troubles, she was "abruptly reassigned" to a position where she would be less annoying.

Google's AI provides more background on that 5¢ note and names that self-immortalizing bureaucrat:

During the Civil War, coins were heavily hoarded for their metal value. To solve the coin shortage, the Treasury printed paper "fractional currency." Congress intended to feature William Clark (of Lewis and Clark fame) on a 5-cent bill. However, Spencer Clark, the Superintendent of the National Currency Bureau, used the vague wording of the authorization to put his own face on the note.

Over at Reason, Billy Binion is not amused: Trump's Proposed $250 Bill Is Everything the Founders Despised.

Unlike Billy, I will try to stay amused. Although Trump and his cronies make that increasingly difficult.

Also of note:

• Suppose you don't have an extra $250 bill in your wallet? Well, Scott Lincicome has advice for you at the Dispatch: How to Eat Well on the Cheap. And further good news for those on a strict budget: Scott's article doesn't seem to be paywalled!

  Scott's article is long on stats, too. (For example, I learned to my shame that by going to Hannaford instead of (say) Walmart, I'm probably paying an additional 13.2% for groceries! But eventually he gets to the kitchen:

  The final stage is cooking and prep. In general, you can divide weekly cooking into two categories: advance and immediate. Back in the day, I’d do my big weekly shopping on a Saturday after lunch and then head home to bag and store most of the day’s haul. The rest I’d cook Sunday evening for dinner and a few lunches for the coming workweek, cleaning up along the way. A few of my staples were 1) grilled chicken breasts (bone-in, skin-on) marinated in lemon juice, olive oil, garlic salt, basil or savory, Dijon, and red pepper flake (teriyaki or soy/honey is also good); 2) slow-cooker pork loin with garlic and a chipotle pepper or two (look for the small can); 3) baked “value pack” salmon cut into single servings, marinated in honey, soy, and garlic; 4) one-pot Mexican soup with olive oil, boneless chicken, onion, canned black beans, chili powder, cumin, garlic salt and chicken broth (from the dried bouillon cubes, of course); or 5) spicy chili with ground beef and canned kidney beans (and lots of cumin, chili powder, and cayenne—plus the obligatory can of beer). I’d combine these entrees with a frozen veggie and rice, potatoes, or couscous—all microwaved with just a little salt and butter—and would be all set for several good, inexpensive workweek lunches.

  Hm, my spell checker thinks "chipotle" is a mistake!

• Spoiler: it's "Give Uncle Stupid more money and power." The wonderful WaPo editorialists observe: Elizabeth Warren’s AI plan is the same as her plan for everything else. (WaPo gifted link)

  President Ronald Reagan said in 1986, “Government’s view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it.”

  Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) is quickly speeding through steps one and two on artificial intelligence.

  Her new idea is to tax AI. By that she means raising the corporate tax and instituting a wealth tax — both old ideas she has supported for years — along with an excise tax on energy used by data centers. She is more of a moderate on the issue compared to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont), who wants a moratorium on data centers.

  The WaPo goes on to observe: "Warren has never been one to let the data inhibit her demagoguery."

• No, it's not your imagination. The WSJ tells us A Day on Earth Is Getting Longer as the Planet’s Rotation Slows.

  Ever feel like the days are dragging on longer? Turns out you’re right.

  We think of a day as 24 hours, but recent research indicates that days are lengthening—ever so slightly. Over the past two decades, day length grew by a rate of about 1.33 milliseconds per century, according to a study published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth.

  The change is happening because the Earth’s rotation is slowing down. The culprit? Melting ice.

  I assume (however) that one of Pun Salad's crackpot ideas, Artificial Photosynthesis, will be up and running at scale within the near future. That will allow us to adjust the climate, and refreeze enough ice, so that Earth's rotational day is exactly 86400.00000000 seconds long (where a "second" has been defined to equal precision.)

Recently on the book blog:

I wanted to read this thanks to its inclusion on the WSJ's best mysteries of 2025 list. The Portsmouth (NH) Public Library didn't have a hard copy, but it was available via Kindle "Overdrive" download.

I didn't care for it much. It's the third book in the author's "Shona Sandison Mysteries" series, and it might have helped to have read the first two.

Shona is an investigative reporter, and here she is on the track of the mysterious "Grendel" project, a very hush-hush scheme that the schemers would prefer to keep under wraps … until it's revealed on their terms. They are (apparently) willing to murder anyone who gets too curious, including Shona. So she has a lot of close calls; a few of the other characters are not as fortunate. There is a subplot with an old spy seeking vengeance for a dead son.

I didn't care for the author's writing style. Goodreads reviewers tell me I'm not alone: "ponderous and overly ornate" … "too slow" … "disjointed" … I snipped out a couple bits:

The rattling tube ride from Notting Hill had been straightforward. The deeper into the city she delved, the more she thought of her last tentative connection with the gallery. A few years previously, she had written a story about a painting which had been given to the people of Scotland by an aristocratic family—Olivia Farquharson’s family. The painting was not what it seemed: instead of being a forgotten masterpiece by Charles Rennie Mackintosh, the noted Scottish architect and artist, it was discovered to have been painted by his wife, Margaret.

Zzzzz. And:

It was warm in the car, but she knew it was cold outside.

I used to gripe about the late Sue Grafton adding ponderous, pointless detail to her prose. Reader, this author makes Sue look like Ernest Hemingway.

From Reason's Bragg/Heaton comedic team:

Also of note:

• To use an old punchline: "Her lips moved." Jim Geraghty is not buying Jill Biden’s Unbelievable Debate ‘Stroke’ Story.

  … [O]ur problem is that a significant chunk of our governing class is nowhere near as smart as they think they are, and in many cases, they’re quite dumb. And they think the American people, collectively, are dumb as well, and are easily fooled. This morning, we find that former first lady Jill Biden, who had the option of just enjoying a quiet retirement with her elderly husband, has instead chosen to emerge from private life to relitigate the notion that Joe Biden was going senile, and/or too old to serve another term.

  Former first lady Jill Biden said she was “frightened” by her husband Joe Biden’s 2024 debate performance and thought he was having a stroke.

  “I was frightened, because I had never ever seen Joe like that before or since. Never,” Jill Biden told CBS News Sunday Morning’s Rita Braver in an interview airing Sunday on CBS.

  “I don’t know what happened,” she said. “As I watched it, I thought, ‘Oh, my God, he’s having a stroke.’ And it scared me to death.”

  Bullcrap.

  If you are genuinely concerned that the president of the United States is having a stroke or other medical emergency, you interrupt the debate. If the First Lady of the United States says, “stop the debate, I think my husband is having a stroke,” the debate will stop. Jake Tapper and Dana Bash were not going to insist that the president finish. The president travels with a top-tier medical team. They will check him out thoroughly. (Note that for the first time in history, the 90-minute debate featured two commercial breaks.)

  And of course, Dr. Jill made sure that Joe got a thorough checkout at…

  If you ever are worried your husband is having a stroke take him to Waffle House.
  
  Dr. Jill Biden pic.twitter.com/Lwljsetxo1

  — Big Fish (@BigFish3000) May 28, 2026

  Well, I'm not a medical doctor either, but that would not have been my first choice.

  At least she didn't take him to a Tim Hortons. (See below.)

  Ann Althouse was similarly disbelieving: "As the president walked off the stage, he whispered to his wife, 'I really f**ked up, didn’t I?' she writes. '"Yes, you did,"’ I whispered back.'"

  I don't believe any of it. She said that during the debate, as she watched it on TV, she thought he might be having a stroke and that he'd never acted like that before or since. Sorry. Not believed. I think the new book exists to be sold — to make money — and to try to escape responsibility for depriving the American people of the power to participate in the selection of the Democratic Party's 2024 presidential candidate.

  Where is Disinformation Czarina Nina Jankowicz when we need her? Let's check her American Sunlight Project… Nope, the most recent report is from August of last year.

• Even when he's wrong, he's right. Jeff Maurer tries to reason his way out of The Platner Dilemma. Excerpt:

  The thing that ultimately pushes me into Platner’s camp is the simple mechanics of what being Senator entails. Suppose that instead of giving the seat to either Platner or Collins, we gave it to the SenateBot 5000, and we can program the robot with either the votes Platner would cast of the votes Collins would cast. In that case, I think Platner is the clear choice. Trump is the main factor that leads me to that conclusion, and I’m comforted by the fact that Platner’s ideas are so goofy that no bill he writes will ever get within a billion light years of becoming law.

  But my hypothetical Platner vote comes with an addendum, which is this statement: The guy is clearly a nut with terrible decision making skills, and his ascension is a warning that the Democratic Party will become every bit as useless and extreme as the Republican Party if we don’t get our shit together.

  Jeff goes on to make some mild criticism of Platner's published platform: "vague lefty tripe that reads like discarded Rage Against The Machine lyrics."

• Politicians have noticed that senior citizens often vote. True enough, but to be fair, we oldsters often have nothing better to do than vote. Young person Eric Boehm opposes the latest resulting pandering: No, senior citizens shouldn’t be exempt from paying property taxes.

  "Our seniors should not pay property taxes," says Rep. Nancy Mace (R–S.C.).

  Normally, I'd advise against paying much attention to what Mace says and even less to what she posts on Twitter. Mace is one of the most performative and vapid members of Congress—a tall task, if you're familiar with her competition. She's most well-known for having meltdowns in airports, engaging in weird bits of performance art, and terrorizing staffers, all apparently guided by the old axiom that there's no such thing as bad publicity.

  But there is such a thing as bad policy, and Mace's endorsement of expanding property tax breaks for senior citizens is exactly that.

  Mace is not alone. As a "senior citizen" myself, it's really embarrassing to get targeted as a cheap date by politicians.

  But it made me look up my little town's Elderly Exemption for property taxes and … nope, I'm nowhere near poor enough.

• Worst Tim Hortons ad ever. But a great Liberty Unyielding headline: Canadian Man Put To Death After Fast Food Parking Lot Bowel Assessment.

  A doctor in Ontario, Canada, evaluated a man for assisted death outside a Tim Hortons and, months later, drove him to the building where he died.

  Ah, well: months later.

  Nick Gillespie is guest-writing Nellie Bowles' TGIF column this week, and he has further comments:

  → Tim Hortons with a side of death: A Canadian doctor, James MacLean, approved medical aid in dying (MAID) for a 45-year-old man after briefly assessing him outside the popular coffee-and-donuts chain Tim Hortons, named for a beloved hockey player whose death in a car crash shocked fans. After determining that the man had inflammatory bowel disease and depression, Dr. MacLean then personally drove the man to a morgue where the MAID was administered in an industrial unit filled with other human cadavers. In another case, reports The National Post, “MacLean failed to administer one of three drugs used in assisted deaths—one that paralyzes the body’s muscles, including the muscles involved in breathing. The patient resumed spontaneously breathing again after initially being pronounced dead, and after MacLean had already left the home.”

  Two observations:

  1. The closest Tim Hortons to me are either up in Bangor, Maine; or down in Fall River, Massachusetts. I think I'd be fine as long as I stay out of Canada.
  2. Why is it that many of the same people who are enthusiastic supporters of "medical aid in dying" are steadfast opponents of capital punishment for murderers?

Compare and contrast their July 2026 print issue covers:

Katherine Mangu-Ward's lead editorial lead editorial may not be out from behind the paywall yet, but I'll quote from it anyway:

Frankly, I was expecting something a little more semiquincentennial from National Review. What are they waiting for, 300?

Also of note:

• Just when you thought they couldn't be any more spineless. Jacob Sullum seems slightly surprised: Even Republicans are rebelling at Trump's blatantly corrupt 'Anti-Weaponization Fund'

  Last week, Republican senators grilled Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche about the $1.8 billion "Anti-Weaponization Fund" created by President Donald Trump's settlement of his lawsuit against the IRS. About 45 senators attended the meeting, and "at least half of them were blasting the attorney general," Sen. Ted Cruz (R–Texas) reported. "They were pissed."

  It is not hard to see why. The lawsuit that provided the pretext for using taxpayer money to compensate purported victims of "lawfare and weaponization" was legally dubious, the fund has nothing to do with Trump's claims against the IRS, and the main beneficiaries are apt to be the president's allies and supporters.

  I've said this before, and probably will again: Grounds. For. Impeachment.

• Did they do something to hurt his wittle feelings? Matthew Petti asks: Why has Trump stopped selling weapons to Taiwan?

  Before he became the Trump administration's chief military planner, Elbridge Colby had a single-minded mission: to muster the resources of the United States in defense of Taiwan. "Taiwan would not be the end of Beijing's ambitions. So the question is, how do we deter China from attacking Taiwan and not just in some distant future, but as early as the coming years?" he said in a 2023 debate, arguing that U.S. commitments in other parts of the world (such as Ukraine and the Middle East) were a dangerous waste of military resources.

  More than a year into Donald Trump's second presidency, it's safe to say that the administration is doing the opposite of what Colby recommended. In a congressional hearing last week, acting Secretary of the Navy Hung Cao said that the U.S. is "doing a pause" on weapons sales to Taiwan "in order to make sure we have the munitions we need for Epic Fury," the name of the U.S. operation against Iran.

  I don't see this ending well, do you?

• Not to go all conspiracy-theorizing on you, but… Jim Geraghty could not help but notice The Well-Funded Online Influence Network Pushing Graham Platner. (archive.today link)

  The phrase “it’s an op” – meaning an influence operation – is often, though not always, a marker of paranoia, a tendency towards conspiracy theories, or a belief in forces that are unseen and cannot yet be proven to exist.

  Still, from the very start of SS-tattooed Democrat Graham Platner’s campaign for Senate, something seemed odd. The New York Times is not in the habit of writing a largely glowing profile of every long-shot, little-known Democrat who announces a bid for Senate. Platner was the harbormaster of Sullivan, Maine, population 1,246.

  Yet the Times wrote its profile of Platner before he officially announced his campaign, in August.

  Jim goes on to note that the Times tonguebath was followed by equal obsequious treatments in the New Yorker … and GQ … and Bon Appetit (!). It turns out to (indeed) be a successful, "well-funded" campaign, selling Prooduct Platner like a new burger from McDonald's.

• And I helped. Marian L. Tupy rebuts AOC: Jeff Bezos Earned His Fortune.

  Amazon founder Jeff Bezos recently made a point that every critic of billionaire wealth should confront: “If I do my job right, the value to society and civilization from my for-profit companies will be much, much larger than the good that I do with my charitable giving.”

  To see if he is correct, consider the one resource that is truly finite: time. Modern debates about wealth start in the wrong place. They begin with the fortune. They should begin with customers and their time. Mr. Bezos is worth roughly $275 billion. That number offends many people because they assume wealth must have been taken from someone else. But Amazon didn’t become valuable by force. It became valuable because hundreds of millions of people chose to use it.

  Consumers weren’t forced to buy books, batteries, diapers, cables, razors, tools, groceries or printer ink from Amazon. They did so because Amazon saved them time, money, effort or uncertainty. Sellers weren’t forced to use Amazon’s marketplace. They did so because it gave them access to demand. Firms weren’t forced to use Amazon Web Services. They did so because renting computing power was cheaper than building and maintaining their own information-technology infrastructure. That is capitalism: People get rich by creating something others value enough to buy.

  Not hard to understand, frankly. Unless you have a political motive for not understanding it.

• More gun news from the University Near Here. The College Fix notes some cherry-picking down Durham way: School president cites study finding guns don’t increase crime to oppose campus carry.

  New Hampshire lawmakers should vote down campus carry because some people might feel less safe, according to a university president.

  Legislators were considering House Bill 1793, which would prohibit public universities from regulating guns on campus and establish a commission to study campus carry. The bill officially died last Thursday, however.

  According to a student government survey cited by The New Hampshire, a majority of respondents said they would be less likely to attend UNH if campus carry were allowed. In response to the perceived campus climate, the student senate passed a resolution opposing the bill.

  The cited "studies" failed to detect any increase in actual criminal behavior on campuses allowing carry. Instead, it was all about the feelz.

Recently on the movie blog:

I was in the mood for a big dumb violent movie, and this fit the bill. Even though the script is just a semi-redo of Predator. I liked the star, Alan Ritchson, for his portrayal of Reacher over on Amazon Prime; this one's on Netflix. And I stayed awake, something I haven't managed to do while trying to watch Season One of The Expanse.

Ritchson plays "81", his number at the Army's "Ranger Assessment and Selection Program", a brutal winnowing-out process to ensure that only the toughest make it into the Rangers. He's there thanks to a promise made to his (doomed) brother in an opening scene set in Afghanistan, just before a devastating Taliban attack that leaves everyone else dead or dying.

So 81's got some psychological problems, he's looking to prove something, and so he makes it to the very final test, and… that's when the War Machine shows up, a malicious killer robot dropped in from outer space, by coincidence landing only a hop skip and jump from the Ranger exercise.

Now, if you haven't seen Predator, go and watch it, it's a much better movie. But if you have seen Predator, you can probably guess at what happens: being hopelessly out-teched by the alien device, 81's team gets slaughtered in variously painful and gory ways. But (not really a spoiler) 81 survives for a final desperate showdown. And if you recall some otherwise superfluous dialog from the opening scene, you'll know how that develops.

And, oh yeah, just like Predator, there's a sequel setup.

And finally: is that Dennis Quaid? Yes it is, and he looks even older than his actual 72 years. And he doesn't smile once.

Jim Geraghty X-plugs his latest WaPo article:

America’s enemies collectively spend billions of dollars attempting to shape perceptions around the world. They don’t spend that kind of money on a whim; they spend it because they’re convinced it’s worth it.

Apparently, to the Trump administration, things like the U.S. State… pic.twitter.com/UvsV5kl8eR

— Jim Geraghty (@jimgeraghty) May 26, 2026

Continuing the snipped tweet:

Jim's article: In the disinformation war, the U.S. unilaterally disarmed. (WaPo gifted link) On that first point about what the bad guys are doing:

A sample of what Iran's been generating:

… it's pretty grim.

Also of note:

• And for more from the indispensable Jim Geraghty… He's just full of bad news, predicting The Coming AOC Presidential Campaign.

  Axios reports that New York Democratic Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is “making new moves toward a possible White House bid. Ocasio-Cortez launched a national tour in recent weeks — without calling it one. Democratic operatives expect she would easily raise $100 million just from small-dollar donors, mobilize many supporters of Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders’ past campaigns, and command attention as few other candidates could.”

  When lots of people tell a party’s rising star that he should run for president, he often ends up running for president. (AOC was elected in 2018, so she’s probably not a “rising star” in Democratic politics anymore; she’s a full-on star.) There’s no guarantee that four to eight years from now, Democrats will be as enamored with her. Every incentive is to strike when the iron is hot, and if you’re a Democrat, you probably feel pretty good about your odds in 2028 in a national electorate likely to be absolutely exhausted from the Trump era.

  This is not good news for the U.S., which faces a dangerous world now and is likely to face a comparably dangerous world when the next president takes the oath of office on January 20, 2029. In February, when AOC went to the Munich Security Conference, she was asked a very basic yes-or-no question of “would and should the U.S. actually commit U.S. troops to defend Taiwan if China were to [invade]” and answered with incoherent word salad. If the congresswoman had ever put any thought into what the U.S. ought to do in that scenario, she hid it exceptionally well.

  Hilary in 2016, Joe in 2020, Kamala in 2024, AOC in 2028, … Constitutional and fictional issues aside, will we be looking at a Philomena Cunk candidacy in 2032? I would not rule it out!

• I had already answered "No" after reading the first four words. Jeffrey Blehar asks us: Do You Trust Trump to Make a Deal?

  For those unaware, President Donald Trump kicked off the long weekend by announcing on Friday that he was in advanced negotiations with the Iranian regime about a 60-day cease-fire that would lead to the end of the war:

  I am in the Oval Office at the White House where we just had a very good call with President Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud, of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, of The United Arab Emirates, Emir Tamim bin Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, Prime Minister Mohammed bin Abdulrahman bin Jassim bin Jaber Al Thani, and Minister Ali al-Thawadi, of Qatar, Field Marshal Syed Asim Munir Ahmed Shah, of Pakistan, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, of Türkiye, President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi, of Egypt, King Abdullah II, of Jordan, and King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa, of Bahrain, concerning the Islamic Republic of Iran, and all things related to a Memorandum of Understanding pertaining to PEACE. An Agreement has been largely negotiated, subject to finalization between the United States of America, the Islamic Republic of Iran, and the various other Countries, as listed. Separately, I had a call with Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu, of Israel, which, likewise, went very well. Final aspects and details of the Deal are currently being discussed, and will be announced shortly. In addition to many other elements of the Agreement, the Strait of Hormuz will be opened. Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DONALD J. TRUMP

  Nobody (outside the named parties, perhaps) knows what this means. And I mean nobody. Almost immediately after the post was made, Iranian regime sources hotly contested every word of it, saying the regime would be assuming full sovereignty over the Strait of Hormuz and would never forfeit their weapons-grade nuclear material or forgo the goal of building a nuclear program. Then, as details of the purported deal emerged — including the potential unfreezing of billions of confiscated Iranian assets as a payoff — Trump took to Truth Social to back and fill, saying he wouldn’t “rush” a deal, or that he might make no deal at all, or that he might agree to a five-day delay to negotiate a 60-day truce to negotiate a final settlement, etc.

  Jeffrey posted that yesterday morning (May 26), and it may have been overtaken by events since. Or not. Basically, the usual "fog of war" has combined with "clouds of Trumpian bullshit" and "offensive Iranian Lego videos" to make we wonder if I can believe anything anyone is saying.

• Another triumph for Betteridge's Law of Headlines. Jack Salmon questions a "progressive" claim: Did High Taxes Build the Middle Class? Specifically:

  For decades, the top tax rate on the wealthiest Americans — like @JeffBezos — was much higher than it is today.
  
  What did we do with that money? We built roads and bridges, expanded healthcare, and invested in education. We grew the middle class.
  
  Care about economic growth? Tax… https://t.co/2QwS0ksFkT

  — Tom Steyer (@TomSteyer) May 20, 2026

  Since he is a raging demagogue, Steyer's solution was, of course, "Tax billionaires." Jack rebuts:

  Yes, top tax rates were significantly higher in the past than they are today. This is about the only part of Steyer’s post that is accurate.

  Today, in several states, the top earners pay combined federal and state marginal tax rates north of 50%, but for the sake of simplicity, let’s focus on federal income taxes over time. Then we can address Steyer’s other points that lead on from this one.

  Let’s take 1952 for example, when the top income tax rate was 92 percent (compared to 37 percent today). Steyer asks what did we do with all that money? Well, first we need to observe how much “all that money” amounts to with a 92 percent top rate.

  In 1952, the federal government raised 18 percent of GDP in tax revenues. This compares with federal revenues of 17 percent of GDP today. So, relative to today, “all that money” amounted to only about 1 percent of GDP in federal revenue, roughly $300 billion in today’s economy, or about 2 weeks of current government spending.

  Jack goes on to carefully document the fact that Uncle Stupid spends vastly more on transportation, healthcare, and education than he did in the days of high marginal income tax rates.

• 

  Like rock and roll. Matthew Hennessey assures us dads: Dad Books Will Never Die. (WSJ gifted link) It's in response to a WSJ article mentioned here a couple days ago: Dad Books Are a Dying Breed. (WSJ gifted link)

  I’m a dad who reads dad books. I have plowed through many 700-page Ron Chernow books in my day. On my nightstand currently are David Herbert Donald’s “Lincoln,” Rick Atkinson’s “The British Are Coming” and “The Daily Telegraph Book of Obituaries,” edited by Hugh Massingberd. Great books all. Dad books all.

  This dad disputes the podcast thesis. Most of us don’t listen to podcasts instead of reading. We listen while driving to Costco, walking to work or doing the dishes. Some dads listen to podcasts while working out. I didn’t put that on the main list of things that dads do while listening to podcasts because plenty of people who know me would have read that and laughed. But I’m reliably informed that some dads do work out, and listen to podcasts at the same time.

  My list differs from Matthew's, which is fine. But let me recommend one I'm currently reading: the new book Peak Human by Johan Norberg (Amazon link at your right.) It's just about the perfect dad book! Report coming in a few more days.

Like Sherlock Holmes, National Review's Marc Oestreich makes deductions from a curious absence: The Empty Desks Are Telling Us Something. (archive.today link) The basic facts aren't in dispute: "chronic absenteeism" rates in the public schools spiked during the pandemic, and have not returned to pre-pandemic levels in years since.

There's quite a bit of finger-pointing going on. Educrats (of course) blame everyone (except themselves): parents, stingy governments, the kids themselves. But:

One of my hopelessly radical crackpot stands: Compulsory attendance laws should be repealed. (See here and here.) I'm reminded of what Yogi Berra was endlessly quoted as saying: "If people don’t want to come out to the ballpark, nobody’s going to stop them."

Explanation of Holmes reference above is here.

Also of note:

• I suppose someday I'll stop blogging about this. But Kevin D. Williamson is (as usual) eloquent, biting, and honest: Donald Trump Is Attempting To Pardon Himself. (archive.today link)

  President Donald Trump’s abuse of the pardon power has been consistently corrupt, of course, but it also has been expensive: While the president made headlines last week by proposing to hijack around $1.8 billion from the Treasury to hand out to his political supporters, he already had come close to equalling that sum by means of the pardon power, depriving federal coffers—and crime victims—of some $1.5 billion in fines, restitution, and other obligations owed by—let’s remember this part—criminals. For comparison, President Joe Biden’s pardons, also frequently corrupt, molested the fisc to the tune of only a relatively measly $680,000—not even enough money to buy a (really) good used Ford. Dan Greenberg writes for Cato:

  Trump’s pardon pen was a boon to ex-criminals like Trevor Milton (who no longer must repay the investors he defrauded $660 million) and Lawrence Duran (who no longer must repay the government he defrauded $87 million). It was also a boon to HDR Global Trading Ltd., which owed the nation a $100 million fine; in this case, Trump also made history by granting the nation’s very first pardon to a corporation.

  HDR Global, no one will be surprised to learn, is one of those shady crypto firms for which the Trump clan has evident enthusiasm. It is reasonable to expect that Trump will attempt to find some way to use his traditional pardon powers to protect himself and his allies from future criminal prosecution—he is better positioned than almost anyone else to appreciate the extent and depth of his criminality and that of his circle—but there is a limitation there: The presidential pardon power applies only to criminal proceedings, not civil suits, to which Trump may find himself vulnerable when he is an ex-president. (This assumes that he does become an ex-president, i.e., that he does not execute a more effective coup d’état than his failed 2021 attempt. Trump himself may be incapable of learning, but there are those around him who are not.) And so there is the “addendum” to his bulls–t payola “settlement” with the IRS—an “addendum” that probably ought to be understood as the main point of the entire exercise. The document amounts to something the law does not give the president even in the context of his very broad pardon power: the power to grant himself, his family, and his business associates federal civil immunity for a lifetime’s (so far) worth of misdeeds—“FOREVER,” all-caps in original.

  Kids, ask your local CongressCritters where they stand on impeachment.

• Erwin Schrödinger pets his cat and smiles. Ars Technica points out a possible speedbump on Trump's Road to Serfdom: US's big bet on quantum computing may not be entirely legal.

  Last week, the US government announced $2 billion in investments in quantum computing companies, allocating $100 million each to a range of startups in exchange for equity in the companies. Those could be make-or-break investments for many companies that are likely years away from a product that could see widespread use. But a member of the US Congress is now arguing that those deals are illegal, as Congress did not allocate the money for this purpose—instead, it was meant to support public research in semiconductors.

  Yes, it's a bad, stupid, fascistic idea. But what guaranteed a link from Pun Salad was the article's subhed:

  SIMULTANEOUSLY LEGAL AND NOT LEGAL?

  Reader, I looked in the box, and that wave function collapsed to "not legal".

• "Sherman, set the Wayback Machine to 2006." Twenty years ago today I blogged about Tim Grahham's observation that the N.Y. Times Can't Seem To Find A 'Fiscal Liberal' Anywhere in Washington.

  New York Times reporter Robert Pear tapped out another article for Thursday’s editions highlighting "conservatives" versus opponents who are merely "Democrats." In fact, Pear used "fiscal conservative" today more times than the New York Times has used the term "fiscal liberal" in 25 years.

  By Tim's count, "fiscal conservative" appeared four (4) times in Pear's single article. In comparison, the term "fiscal liberal" only appeared three times in the NYT between 1980 and the (then) present.

  I did my own search: back then, Google claimed 344,000 hits for "fiscal conservative" and a mere 10,500 for "fiscal liberal". About a 33-to-1 ratio!

  Clearly, with all those fiscal conservatives, we must have had a balanced budget back then, right? But …

  Today's Googling reports 218,000 results for "fiscal conservative" and 11,000 for "fiscal liberal". A mere 20-to-1 advantage! And yet…

• LFOD Alert! The WSJ reports: How Business Casual Blew Up the Libertarian National Convention. (WSJ gifted link)

  Live free or die, but would it kill you to wear a tie?

  That was the essence of Ben Weir’s plea ahead of the biennial Libertarian National Convention in Grand Rapids, Mich.

  In a May 15 post on X, Weir, 36, declared that he’d had it with the wacky costumes, which have long been a staple of political party conventions but seem particularly popular among do-what-thou-wilt libertarians.

  No more using a boot for headwear, as one convention mainstay named Vermin Supreme did. No more see-through clothing to promote government transparency.

  Ben's tweet is linked above, and as you might expect, the replies are entertaining. He is running for Merrimack County sheriff here in the LFOD state. I wish him properly-attired luck.

  The "see-through clothing" link is disappointing, and I'd say "don't bother", but (1) that wouldn't be very libertarian of me and (2) you've probably already clicked it.

Our yearly reminder: with whatever fun we're having today, let's all not forget to remember.

Story about the picture here.

Also of note:

• I've been tired of it since January 21, 2017. Noah Smith asks his readers: Are you tired of the Trump era yet?

  I get a lot of flak from progressives for being a “both sides” kind of commentator. I spend a fair amount of time criticizing leftist ideology and expounding on the very real failures of progressive governance, both of which have gotten much worse over the last decade. Yes, I support the Democrats, but that support is contingent — if their ideology and competence deteriorate to the point where the Republicans are less bad, I’ll switch to supporting the GOP. So it’s worth it to fight to halt and reverse the deterioration; in the long term, the cost of ignoring extremists and policy failures in order to have “no enemies on the left” is very high.

  And yet right now, despite all of the negative trends on the left, the choice of which party Americans should support has never been clearer. The second Trump administration has unleashed a dizzying array of measures seemingly tailor-made to weaken the United States of America — sometimes at the behest of rightist extremists, sometimes due to Trump’s own mercurial whims, and sometimes in order to enrich Trump and his clique.

  Noah notes Trump's bad policies on tech and Iran. Also there's plenty of obvious corruption. He excerpts a long quote from a Rolling Stone article ("IT’S THE CORRUPTION, STUPID") which claims "There has never been a president as corrupt as Donald Trump. There is no close second in our history." Worth your attention despite the source. Noah summarizes:

  So basically, Trump:

  1. Uses the government to interfere with specific companies,

  2. Trades those companies’ stocks in advance, knowing how his own government interference will affect their prices,

  3. Sues his own government for billions and then orders his government to settle the lawsuit,

  4. Gives the billions of dollars of taxpayer money to his own activist thugs and cronies, and

  5. Has the government promise never to prosecute the Trump family.

  Rolling Stone is absolutely right: Nothing in U.S. history even comes close to this level of corruption. Trump is simply using the powers of the presidency to extract billions of dollars from stock owners and taxpayers — i.e., from you and me — and to put that money into his own pocket. Compared to this, the famous Teapot Dome land scandal in the 1920s was nothing. The total amount of money involved in Teapot Dome — just a few million of today’s dollars after adjusting for inflation — was tiny compared to the billions Trump is looting.

  Noah's article is long and essentially correct on the facts. I draw the line, however, when he recommends Democrats as the "party Americans should support." Sorry, Noah, I can't go that far. The Ds haven't said or done anything to appeal to me. Sure, "I'm not Trump" worked for Biden, and we know what happened there. I'm not seeing any better arguments this time around.

  But Noah's headline question caused me to look back on what I wrote on January 21, 2017. Here it is.

• And not one of the funny ones? At the Dispatch, Frederic J. Frommer makes a less dire query: Is Trump 2.0 Really a Woody Allen Flick?

  Was Woody Allen onto something when he imagined a society 200 years in the future in which scientists have discovered that junk food was actually good for you? President Donald Trump seems to think so.

  In an example of life(style) imitating art, Trump recently appeared to embrace that topsy-turvy notion that Allen brilliantly parodied in his 1973 movie, Sleeper.

  At a White House event this month, the president claimed he feels the same as he did 50 years ago (coincidentally, around the time that Sleeper came out).

  “I don’t know why,” he said. “It’s not because I eat the best foods. Maybe though they are the best foods. Who knows what the best foods are? Maybe junk food is good and the other food is no good.”

  The article goes on to quote Woody himself, somewhat surprisingly, on Trump as a "very good actor." (Trump cameoed in Woody's 1997 movie Celebrity.)

• And now for some non-Trump content… Liz Wolfe's Reason Roundup asks the burning question: Who Abuses Food Delivery? Spurred by:

  This is bc they do not have the time or capacity to create home cooked meals. It’s an issue countless ppl have tried to raise w leftists but big leftists online continue to shame/abuse poor ppl for being forced to rely on these services for meals, which act as a tax on the poor https://t.co/F3azUiucBJ

  — Taylor Lorenz (@TaylorLorenz) May 20, 2026

  Liz does an excellent job of debunking and correcting. (And embeds a lot more tweets along the way.) Her bottom line:

  I don't think aggressively relying on food delivery if you're making under $50,000 a year is a correct choice, but it is a cultural phenomenon worth understanding for the ways it might galvanize political support for more handouts down the road.

  For the record: I have never gotten food delivered.

• Oh no! Well, anyway… The WSJ has some bad news for us dads: Dad Books Are a Dying Breed. (WSJ gifted link)

  They were the go-to gifts for Father’s Day: a book about some little-known chapter of World War II, the sweeping narrative of a shipwreck, perhaps the latest presidential biography.

  These days, dad books are a dying breed.

  Nonfiction book sales have been in decline for the past four years, and are now the most challenged segment of the print book market. Publishers say certain types of books still fare well—including celebrity memoirs and religious titles. But in recent years, print sales in such categories as biography, current affairs and business and economics—what publishers refer to as “serious nonfiction” and which tend to resonate especially with men—have fallen considerably.

  Fortunately, I have a very deep pile of non-fiction books waiting to be read. And there's always the Portsmouth (NH) Public Library…

  Well, speaking of the PPL, here's their Staff Directory. Although I love and respect them all very much, of the 30 folks pictured, I count two male faces and 28 female. And at least 29 seem to be People of Pallor. (One is iffy.) Is this diversity? Anyway, it somewhat explains the lack of testosterone-infused books there.

• Item One on Nellie Bowles' TGIF column does some election post-mortem:

  → Massie lost but don’t worry, the party continues: The great all-our-problems-are-Israel coalition unifier, Kentucky Republican congressman Thomas Massie, lost his primary race this week. The far left and far right are very upset. Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna of California cried out that “He lost because he had the guts to take on the Epstein class.” It’s always fun to hear new dog whistles for Jews. Last week it was globalists, this week Epstein class, maybe next week we’ll get “Spielberg’s ilk.” A girl can dream. Or here’s Senator Chris Murphy, a Democrat from Connecticut: “So there you have it. If you lead a campaign against powerful pedophiles, you get drummed out of the Republican Party.” Anyway, Massie lost the race to be a congressman, which is a little like losing a race to become, I don’t know, a septic tank cleaner. What I’m saying is it’s not all it’s cracked up to be. A lot more paperwork than you thought, and still, it’s mostly shit. And now I’m sure he’ll get rich on the new hard-right populist podcast circuit. It’s booming. Did you know that the new coalition of “Questions Regarding the Holocaust” is having a conference? Sorry, that’s not fair, they are just Men Who Perceive All Problems Jewishly. Yes, they’re gathering at a convention center in Dallas. The speakers have lots of beliefs that really appall people, like that women shouldn’t be allowed to vote in elections anymore. But let’s not focus on that, they say, not today. That’s not important. What’s important is the Epstein Class controlling everything. And lo, Americans are into it. It’s relaxing to think that there’s just this one skeleton key that makes everything magic and good. Any niche political ideologies that you want to get through fast, just attach it to being anti-Epstein. Women voting is vaguely Zionist, did you know that? Suffrage kind of sounds like Pentateuch, if you squint a little.

  Egad, I went down that "convention center in Dallas" link, and … whoa! No shortage of testosterone there!

Bob Dylan turns 85 today. Can anything new be said about the guy? Maybe, and maybe someone out there has done so, but that would be beyond my talents.

So I won't even try, but instead recycle a Mark Steyn article originally written in 2001. Yes, math wizards, a quarter of a century ago: How Does It Feeeeeeeelllll?.

Mr. Dylan has scheduled a New Hampshire concert on July 18. I've never seen him live. Tempting!

Also of note:

• Maria, I suggest careful study of Matthew 7:3-5. The College Fix reports on a Nobel prizewinner who is not Bob Dylan: Nobel laureate who compared Israel to Nazi Germany: State of free expression in U.S. is ‘horrific’.

  The Filipino 2021 Nobel Peace Prize recipient who once compared Israel to Nazi Germany told the Dartmouth College student paper this past week the state of free expression in the U.S. is “horrific.”

  Maria Ressa, who was in town to give the keynote speech at Dartmouth’s Division of Institutional Diversity and Equity Social Justice Awards, told The Dartmouth “I think we are living through the Filipinization of America. America has long been the beacon of freedom and democracy that you aspire to.

  “It’s horrific to see that change and to see the country that anchored the post-World War II world begin to destroy it. I’m shocked to see Americans afraid to speak out.”

  Jonathan Turley, like Jesus did, points out Maria's hypocritical bullshit: Ressa at Dartmouth : Anti-Free Speech Figure Calls the State of Free Speech in the U.S. “Horrific”.

  In the global anti-free speech movement, Maria Ressa stands apart. The 2021 Nobel Peace Prize winner and Columbia professor has used her celebrated position to call for censorship in the name of tolerance and diversity. She is showered with accolades as she calls for curtailing speech with a highly sophisticated, though at times Orwellian, pitch. In the cause of tolerance, she calls for viewpoint intolerance, particularly in the regulation of speech on the Internet.

  That was evident this week as she spoke at Dartmouth’s Division of Institutional Diversity and Equity Social Justice Awards. The most insidious aspect of this campaign is how academic and other groups regularly portray Ressa as a free speech advocate.

  A couple of years ago, I spoke at the World Forum in Berlin on free speech. It would be my first in-person exposure to Maria Ressa, the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize laureate, who also spoke about free speech. However, as I wrote at the time, rather than an ally on free speech, I found a diehard advocate for censorship. Ressa has been embraced by Europeans as a champion of speech regulations, using her status to call for limiting speech around the world.

  And, of course, it's shocking that Dartmouth still hands out something called the "Division of Institutional Diversity and Equity Social Justice Awards".

• Speaking of hypocritical bullshit… Eric Boehm says J.D. Vance might need to brush up on those Jesus words. Trump's corruption is brazen, obvious, and costly. Will enough Republicans try to stop him?

  While addressing a crowd of manufacturing workers in Missouri this week, Vice President J.D. Vance detailed how his staff is tirelessly working to root out fraud in the federal government.

  "There is a simple principle that I have, which is: If you are committing fraud against the American people, you should go to prison," Vance said.

  After waiting for the cheers to die down, he continued, "If you are a public official, and you are not fighting against fraud, you ought to have your money taken away, because [officials] should not be able to steal from all of you."

  Eric details how the $1.776 Billion "Anti-Weaponization Fund" "should be one of the biggest scandals in presidential history" and is "brazenly corrupt". And he doesn't even mention the IRS audit immunity that went along with it.

  So, if you need reminding about that, check it out. And we'll skip to the bottom line:

  Outright public corruption is a problem on its own terms, of course. It means fewer tax dollars are available for public services, and causes capital investments to be misallocated because of cronyist considerations.

  It also undermines the norms and institutions that are supposed to prevent corruption—and, thus, encourages more of it. Sure, roll your eyes at the "norms" all you want, but there doesn't appear to be any law or rules that prevent a president from suing his own Justice Department and then settling the lawsuit and pocketing a ton of taxpayers' money. Dozens of other men have held the presidency without doing that. Now that one has, it becomes easier for the next to do it too.

  This is a slide that must be stopped before it gets worse. Conservatives who hand-wave Trump's corruption with whataboutism, focused on Biden or Hillary Clinton or anyone else, are doing the opposite of that. Ignoring Trump's corruption will invite more and worse from him and others.

  And the next time Vance talks about how this administration is focused on reducing fraud in government, he should be booed and laughed off stage.

Alleged "Berkeley professor, former Secretary of Labor" Robert Reich's midweek tweet is drawing some attention:

Effective tax rate paid by Jeff Bezos from 2014 to 2018: 0.98%

Effective 2025 federal tax rate paid by Amazon: 1.4%

Typical tax rate paid by the average American: 14.5%

Just thought I should point that out.

— Robert Reich (@RBReich) May 20, 2026

Verified X user @amuse wrote a lengthy article in rebuttal: Coming Up Short: Robert Reich Doesn't Know What an Effective Tax Rate Is.

More at the link, and it's recommended for anyone who might be interested in how dishonest a "Berkeley professor" can blithely be.

He's been doing this sort of thing for a long time. See a couple of 2006(!) posts by Harvard econ prof Greg Mankiw: Reich on Taxes and Reich on Taxes, Again.

And all the way back in 1997(!), Jonathan Rauch wrote at Slate about Reich's memoir of his days as Clinton's Secretary of Labor, and found many of his tales excessively, albeit conveniently, fabricated: Robert Reich, Quote Doctor. Example:

Bottom line: if Reich claims water is wet, you would be wise to get a couple other opinions.

Also of note:

• Want to hear the most annoying sound in the world?" Certainly, some GOP fans might find George Will's latest column to be vexing: Dumb and dumber, Republican-style. (WaPo gifted link)

  This week, the Republican Party has accomplished something difficult: It made itself stupider. It subtracted from its already shallow reservoir of intelligence by moving to purge two fine senators. And its embodiment authored a novel grift.

  If what is probably predictable does happen, the two senators will be replaced on this autumn’s ballots by persons who, if elected (the one in Louisiana almost certainly will be), can be counted on to be exactly what no senator should be: another of the president’s congressional sock puppets, promising, as a high principle, not to think independently.

  To make another movie reference: Republicans seem to want to play an agreeable Thelma as Trump (playing Louise) steps on the Thunderbird's gas …

• … zipping down the Road to Serfdom. Tad DeHaven notes the latest signposts on that highway: Trump’s Presidential Portfolio Goes Quantum.

  The Commerce Department announced today that it has signed letters of intent to provide roughly $2 billion in federal incentives under the CHIPS and Science Act to nine quantum-computing companies. In return, the federal government will receive minority equity stakes in each company. 

  The largest recipient is IBM, which is slated to receive $1 billion to establish a new quantum foundry subsidiary. GlobalFoundries is to get $375 million. The rest would receive $100 million each, with Diraq receiving up to $38 million. 

  Ah, yes, IBM: that plucky little startup that I've heard so much about lately.

• But at least the dogs are barking. Kevin D. Williamson says it's difficult to know who to root for in The Curious Case of Trump vs. Trump vs. Trump. (archive.today link)

  Bonus movie reference in our excerpt:

  To recap: Donald Trump has sued the Donald Trump administration over alleged wrongdoing by the Donald Trump administration, and an out-of-court settlement between Donald Trump and the Donald Trump administration will have Donald Trump’s DOJ ponying up the better part of $2 billion to be put into a fund controlled by Donald Trump and used for the benefit of—let’s check in here with dead-eyed White House trash panda J.D. Vance—“people who voted for Donald Trump and participated in the January 6th protests.”

  We are going to need a whole brigade of additional tally-men to tally the bananas in this bananas republic.

  One group of Trump sycophants negotiating with another group of Trump sycophants for the benefit of Trump sycophants and Trump himself: surely the toughest negotiation since Harry S. Stamper told the powers that be that none of his crew wanted to pay taxes again—“EVER”—in Armageddon. Trump did not demand immunity from taxes—only immunity from being investigated or prosecuted for not paying his taxes, for tax fraud, or for other tax-related shenanigans: immunity for himself, for his business associates, for Uday and Qusay and the rest of his ghastly cretinous spawn.

  Almost certainly we'll be talking about this for a while.

• The University Near Here got a Reason mention. Whether it's good or bad is up to you: In New Hampshire, a Setback for Second Amendment Rights on Campus. Ari Shtein reports:

  On Thursday, an effort to eliminate gun-free zones on New Hampshire college campuses fizzled out in the state Legislature, when the Senate voted against a committee of conference to renegotiate the bill with House leaders. Despite the setback, proponents of the legislation say they're not done.

  "We'll be pursuing this with a legal challenge," says state Rep. Sam Farrington (R–Rochester), who sponsored the bill, which would have also allowed students to carry nonlethal weapons such as pepper spray and mace. Farrington, who graduated from the University of New Hampshire (UNH) last Saturday, says the challenge will be under New Hampshire's "pre-emption statute," which prohibits any "political subdivision" other than the state Legislature from regulating firearms. He thinks that policies that ban guns from campus, imposed by "unelected administrators at public universities," fall into that category.

  UNH says that its restrictions were "adopted under authority granted by the Legislature to the Board of Trustees and campus presidents to govern university property."

  The article (and Rep. Farrington) make the obvious point that gun-banning makes universities a very soft target for wannabe mass murderers.

Christian Schneider proposes a warning label to be slapped on AI innovation: "Caution: May Cause Billionaires." (archive.today link)

Multiply this single well-documented example by the ones we don't know about yet.

At the WSJ, James Freeman notes another voice raised against "digital doomsayers": Bezos, Billionaires and the Age of AI Abundance. He quotes extensively from Bezos's recent CNBC interview with Andrew Ross Sorkin, and here's a small excerpt:

It seems that, beyond the transitory headlines, the real story these days is whether America will continue to be innovative, or let fear, uncertainty, and doubt prevail.

Also of note:

• Good advice. I've mentioned the feeble protests made at New York University against their commencement speaker, Jon Haidt. He's put the text of his address up at After Babel: Treasure Your Attention. I like the opening:

  NYU began holding commencement ceremonies here in Yankee Stadium in 2009. Since then, graduates have heard from prime ministers, presidents, Supreme Court justices, movie stars, civil-rights crusaders, and Taylor Swift. So I know what you’re all thinking: Finally, they brought in a social psychologist!

  Perhaps that’s why over the past few weeks, as I’ve thought about what I might say to all of you, I’ve felt grateful. I’ve felt excited. But most of all, I’ve felt a strong sense of responsibility. Because I am part of NYU. I love this university, and I love the students that I have the privilege to teach. That’s why I feel a strong responsibility to do my small part to make this the great and memorable day that all of you, and your families, deserve.

  I think it's pretty good! Check it out.

• I suspect I know at least one reason. At the Daily Economy, Matt Zwolinski purports to explain Why Libertarianism Keeps Splintering.

  Is libertarianism cracking up? Pick almost any contested political issue of the moment, and you’ll find prominent self-identified libertarians on opposite sides of it. On immigration, the Cato Institute’s Ilya Somin has spent the last several years arguing that libertarian principles require something close to open borders. Lew Rockwell, founder of the Mises Institute, has spent the same years arguing that they require the opposite. On Israel and Gaza, Walter Block has been an unabashed defender of Israel’s military operations on libertarian grounds; Dave Smith, working from what he takes to be the same principles, has been an equally vocal critic.

  On the larger question of whether libertarianism should renew its old fusionist alliance with cultural conservatism, Reason‘s Stephanie Slade has made a careful and sympathetic case for fusionism — including in a forthcoming book of that name; her colleague Elizabeth Nolan Brown has been a consistent voice for the more “libertine,” socially liberal version of the tradition. None of these disputes is between a “real” libertarian and an impostor. Each is between recognized, self-identified libertarians who reach opposite conclusions about what libertarian principles require. Are these still the same movement?

  Matt was one of the contributors to the "Bleeding Heart Libertarians" website a few years back. He makes a pretty solid point about what kind of a beast "libertarianism" is (or should be):

  … [L]ess as conclusions deduced from a single axiom, more as provisional positions arrived at through careful thinking about particular issues, with libertarian principles as one important input among others. On some questions that thinking will yield confident conclusions. On many it will yield humility. That, I’ve come to believe, is the stance that actually follows from taking libertarian principles seriously, once you see that they were never powerful enough to do the work that ideological certainty requires of them.

  Not for the first time, I'll mention that all the political parties, including the Libertarian Party, seem dedicated to not following this advice.

• And also relying on DoorDash-delivered takeout. At Reason, Ari Shtein describes another outrage: America's Highway Fund Is Running Out of Money. Congress Wants To Spend New Funds on Not Fixing Highways.

  As the national debt rises ever higher, Congress is gearing up to pass an enormous infrastructure spending bill.

  Earlier this week, the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee released the BUILD America 250 Act. The sprawling 1000-page bill combines some hits—including provisions to streamline environmental reviews of infrastructure projects—with some obvious misses.

  Lawmakers claim that the bill would strengthen the Highway Trust Fund, which pays for both road maintenance and mass transit investments, by levying a new registration fee on electric vehicles (E.V.) and plug-in hybrids. But Marc Scribner, senior transportation policy analyst at Reason Foundation (the nonprofit that publishes this site), tells Reason that it "won't come close to eliminating the revenue-outlay gap," since the bill fails to rein in the "irresponsible spending" that has doomed the fund to insolvency by 2028. Scribner's assessment seems to be shared by the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, which finds that although the E.V. fee could raise around $30 billion in the next decade, "the Highway Trust Fund will remain severely out of balance."

  My own CongressCritter, Chris Pappas, is a proud member of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee. Which means he probably bears an above-average responsibility for this lousy outcome.

• RIP, RCP8.5. Roger Pielke Jr. notes the MSM's misguided coverage of the demise of climate-change doomsday scenarios, and thinks the "experts" are trying out a Jedi mind trick: These are Not the Droids You are Looking For.

  Two weeks ago I wrote about the most significant development in climate science in decades: the international committee responsible for producing the scenarios adopted by the IPCC formally retired RCP8.5, SSP5-8.5, and SSP3-7.0 — labeling them “implausible.” Last week I documented the near-total silence that greeted the announcement from the English-language mainstream press.

  Then President Trump posted about RCP8.5 on social media, calling it “WRONG! WRONG! WRONG!” (just about the only accurate part of his post!).

  Within 48 hours, the New York Times, Washington Post, Bloomberg, AP, and Carbon Brief and others published on the scenarios. The main motivation for the coverage centered on Trump, not the new scenarios.

  Today, as a follow up to my post noting that there was almost no English language coverage of RCP8.5 RIP, I take a closer look at this first wave of mainstream English language media reports.

  In a nutshell: The overwhelming framing of the “climate beat” is that there is really nothing to see here, and to the extent that there is, what we are witnessing reflects the incredible success of climate policy. Right wing media has focused more on the politics, emphasizing the scenario evolution as a “win” for President Trump.

  Roger does an admirable job of documenting the lazy and irresponsible job the MSM performed in covering this story accurately and fairly.

Via Mr. Lileks' Substack:

James excavates the pop cultural strata: The video is "60 years old, and also 40 years old, and also 12 days old." I won't go into detail on that, have some fun figuring it out if necessary.

I know I've said this before, but how far away are we from that Casablanca sequel with all the original actors?

Also of note:

• Momory-holed? How Orwellian! I don't share Nate Silver's politics, but he has a legitimate bone to pick about the Mickey-Mouse treatment of his past efforts: Disney erased FiveThirtyEight.

  Last Thursday night, I was working late, trying to put some of the finishing touches on our forthcoming World Cup model — and actually looking up an article I’d written for FiveThirtyEight in 2014 about my previous soccer model, SPI. Although the quality of the archive has gradually deteriorated since Disney shut down the site in 2025 (I left two years earlier in 2023), at least our text-based articles were mostly still there, or so I thought. Instead, I was auto-redirected to ABC News’s home page, which looked something like this:

  [ABC News home page]

  Sometimes weird things happen on the internet late at night, so I resisted the temptation to tweet something about it. But one of my former colleagues noticed the same thing on Friday. ABC News hasn’t made any public comment that I’m aware of — they declined to make a statement to the New York Times, which wrote about FiveThirtyEight’s disappearance. It’s possible that they have something up their sleeve, I suppose. But presumably, this was either intentional or willfully neglectful. All of the former FiveThirtyEight site from my nearly decade-long tenure at ESPN/Disney/ABC is gone.1

  Nate's post is long and interesting. I think ABC should have instead dumped Jimmy Kimmel and kept Nate's stuff.

  Deeper point: While the Internet makes a lot of wonderful stuff possible (see above), it also makes stuff pretty easy to vanish forever. And unless some archival site has grabbed it, it's gone.

  Gee, wonder how long Pun Salad will last after my demise? Up to the kids, I guess. I don't plan on demanding they keep sending monthly rent to my (very reliable) hosting provider in perpetuity.

• Betteridge's Law of Headlines applies. Rich Lowry asks the question: Does It Matter What Helen of Troy Looked Like? (NR gifted link)

  It’s the controversy that has launched a thousand X posts.

  Elon Musk, who is a fan of Homer, has kicked up a fuss by objecting to filmmaker Christopher Nolan casting the black actress Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy in his forthcoming movie version of The Odyssey.

  The epic production presumably won’t rise or fall based on its depiction of Helen, the legendary beauty who precipitated the Trojan War. That conflict is depicted in The Iliad, while The Odyssey follows the Greek warrior Odysseus on his return home after the war, a story that doesn’t feature Helen prominently.

  Rich's article is good and thought-provoking, but this is why I could never be an op-ed columnist myself. Because there's no way I could expand my thoughts beyond:

  • Elon shouldn't tell Christopher Nolan how to make movies.
  • Nolan shouldn't tell Elon how to build rockets.
  • And neither one should tell Jeff Bezos how to run an online bookstore.

  I could go on, but you get the point.

  (Never mind that this blog routinely demonstrates my own lack of humility.)

• They're no angels. Veronique de Rugy makes a point about civic morality: The Problem With Government Investors Isn’t Just That They’re Bad at It. It’s That They Shouldn’t Be Doing It.

  When I wrote recently about the growing number of entrepreneurs, investors, and Wall Street veterans entering government to run industrial policy and public investment programs, many readers interpreted my argument as a simple warning: government is bad at investing.

  It is. But the deeper point, which I failed to make explicitly in my syndicated column due to the lack of space, was perfectly summed up on X by Jonathan Hoenig: “government isn’t just inept as an investor—it’s immoral. Government has one role: protect individual rights not “maximize investment returns.”

  He’s right. The problem is not merely that the government makes for a lousy investor. Government investing changes the moral relationship between risk, reward, and accountability.

  Vero attempts a moralistic argument, which is fine. But (I think) she keeps veering into consequentialism, noting (correctly) that the results of the Visible Fist of government investing are bad.

  David Friedman had some thoughts on this distinction in his book The Machinery of Freedom. Read the whole thing!

• Yer darn tootin'. Kevin D. Williamson addresses his Lone Star brethren: It's A Time for Choosin’, Texas. (Dispatch gifted link)

  He discusses the upcoming GOP primary between incumbent Senator John Cornyn and "Texas’s clownish and scandal-plagued attorney general, Ken Paxton."

  Sen. Cornyn has a great big bucket where his principles should be, and, thus equipped, he has been a committed and generally effective water carrier for the Republican Party for many years. All he needed was to see an “R” next to someone’s name: He carried water for Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania when that is what party interests required, and then he carried water for Specter’s Republican opponent after Specter defected to the Democrats. Sen. Cornyn carried water for so-called establishment Republicans when they opposed Donald Trump in 2016 and then carried—and contentedly carries—water for Trump now that Trump has become the establishment.

  (The fact that the story contains names such as “Specter” and “Trump” sometimes makes it sound as if Cornyn’s political biography were being written by Ian Fleming.)

  Donald Trump routinely denounces his critics as “disloyal to the Republican Party” (his verbatim description of Rep. Thomas Massie, the Kentucky libertarian who has sometimes chided Trump over his weakness for profligate spending), but Trump is, in all things, first and foremost a liar, and he does not give a fig about party loyalty: Trump cares about loyalty to Trump, and the more cynical reader here might reasonably substitute “subservience” or “servility” or “slavish boot-licking” for “loyalty.” Far from being a party man, Trump has made a point of defeating Republicans who are inconvenient to him, whether they be obscure Indiana state legislators who declined to follow Texas’ gerrymandering example or state-level election officials who declined to participate in his 2020-2021 attempt at a coup d’état.

  KDW goes on to describe Paxton as "the perfect specimen of a Trump-era Republican—a grotesque amalgam of personal, financial, political, and sexual corruption". In any case, there's an excellent chance that Texas may send a Democrat to the US Senate next year.

• "I learned it by watching you!" So yelled a bratty petulant kid to his bemused parent in a strident anti-drug ad, nearly 40 years ago. And that was brought to mind, via Viking Pundit, by the Manhattan Contrarian, who recounts the recent history of a sordid practice: "Sue And Settle": Two Can Play This Game.

  [L]et me provide some context. In fact prior administrations have regularly used litigation settlements to accomplish goals that they could not get enacted by Congress, including setting up large slush funds to hand out to political allies. Before now this strategy has been almost entirely a phenomenon of Democratic administrations. Conservative critics have dubbed the strategy “sue and settle.” The strategy particularly took off during the Obama presidency, and then exploded under Biden. As far as I am aware, the New York Times has never criticized any of this as long as it was done by their ideological allies in support of causes that they approved.

  The MC's commenters are of two minds. Or more. It's not hard to find distinctions between Obama/Biden cases and Trump's latest.

  For one thing, Trump makes a mockery out of that old chestnut "Not even the President is above the law." Trump's response: "Oh, yeah? Watch this."

Right here:

The Industrial Revolution would probably not have been approved by a public vote

— Jeremy Horpedahl 🥚📉 (@jmhorp) May 17, 2026

Some commenters point out that the Industrial Revolution was no bed of roses. True enough. But it did lift a lot of people out of miserable poverty, disease, and general oppression.

And I think the Tweeter was making a point relevant to today's AI revolution. (Is that what they'll be calling it in the coming centuries? In whatever language they'll be speaking then?)

Without mentioning AI at all, Andy Kessler notes how it could all go wrong, by handing political power to Our Champagne Socialists.

I recently reread Orwell's Animal Farm (link to my report below). A modern retelling might feature analogs of Bernie, AOC, Katie Wilson, and the Zohran as oinkers.

Also of note:

• Also reminding me of Animal Farm … Jonah Goldberg detects a flaw in the Constitution: The Founders Never Conceived of a President Like Trump. (Dispatch gifted link)

  Something I missed in the discussion yesterday:

  On Tuesday, the DOJ announced that Trump, his family and business will be functionally exempt from IRS audits or prosecutions from any past tax returns, literally placing him above the law.

  Jonah argues that's grounds for impeachment. He's right, and that only adds to the list.

• More like "Betrayal". But Federal judge Roy K. Altman goes with a different, slightly milder characterization: A Miscarriage of Journalism at ‘The New York Times’.

  Nicholas Kristof’s recent essay about supposed Israeli sex crimes against Palestinian detainees is a travesty—not simply because it’s wrong as a matter of fact, or because it regurgitates long-debunked blood libels against the Jewish state at a time of rising antisemitism around the world.

  It’s a travesty because it embraces the erosion of democratic norms at an inflection point in our history. Since our founding, the American political experiment has entrusted everyday citizens with the revolutionary power to choose. We choose the men and women who represent us. We choose how to balance the intimate relationship between a free people and its government. We choose whether to send a member of our community to prison.

  But we entrust our fellow Americans with the power to make these choices because we believe that a virtuous people will be equipped to make the right choices—principally because we assume that our citizens will be prepared to discern truth from fiction. And we feel comfortable in that assumption because we’ve devised a system of laws—based on evidence, burdens of proof, and a time-tested set of rules—to help us assess the veracity of contested claims. In this way, the jury system isn’t simply a means of ensuring fair trials. Rather, it’s a way of training free citizens to make difficult decisions for themselves.

  Can the Times be shamed enough for this? Hard to imagine.

• Setting the record straight. Co-author Greg Lukianoff does that, in spades: What Jonathan Haidt actually said at NYU — and what The Coddling of the American Mind actually argued.

  In case you hadn’t heard, my Coddling of the American Mind co-author Jon Haidt was invited to give a commencement speech at New York University last week, and it led to an uproar from students.

  This was, in one sense, ordinary university life: students objected to a speaker, people argued about it, some booed during the speech, and others defended him. It didn’t lead to a sustained disruption of Jon’s remarks, so great. I’ve defended the right to protest on campus more than practically anybody in the United States, and this was well within the bounds of what you’d expect to see.

  The more troubling part was why NYU’s student government leaders called on the university to disinvite Jon in the run-up to commencement. “Students are astonished by the university’s inability to leverage its vast network and unique connections to secure a speaker whose scholarship and global contributions more accurately reflect the values and diversity of its graduates,” their statement read.

  I bolded the most telling bit. And Greg points out, ungently: "A university is not a mirror. It is not supposed to show students an image of themselves with better lighting."

  But there are many more wise observations at the link.

• And getting longer by the day. At the WSJ's Free Expression newsletter, Kyle Smith recounts Al Gore’s Long and Persistent Record of Miserable Failure. (WSJ gifted link)

  In his 1992 book “Earth in the Balance,” Al Gore wrote, with what would become his customary hyperbole, “the evidence of an ecological Kristallnacht is as clear as the sound of the glass shattering in Berlin.” The then-senator claimed that “according to some predictions”—no specifics were offered—“in the next few decades,” “up to 60 percent of the present population of Florida may have to be relocated.”

  It’s been a “few decades.” How is Mr. Gore’s prophecy working out? Did he even get the direction right?

  Florida’s population in 1992 was around 13 million. Mr. Gore’s notional Flexodus would have reduced that figure below six million. Today, the state’s population has nearly doubled instead of more than halved. More than 23 million souls now call Florida home.

  Well, we'll try to fit in one last ride on Space Mountain before it vanishes 'neath the waves.

Recently on the book blog:

Somehow, a very old hardcover edition of Animal Farm wound up on my bookshelf. Published by Harcourt Brace, compyright 1946. Five years before I was born. No idea how I wound up with it.

Gee, I wonder if it's worth anything to collectors? Checking Google's AI…

Well, it's not going to send anyone to college, but my heirs probably won't want to throw it in the dumpster either.

Anyway, I first read Animal Farm as a kid, probably 60 or so years ago. (Not this edition. The edition I read back then was illustrated.) I was inspired to reread it, ironically, by Nicholas Clairmont's pan of the recent movie adaptation, which was characterized "the exact opposite of what the author intended." Orwellian!

But back to the book: it is an unsubtle allegory of the early history of the Soviet Union, starting with the oppressed beasts of Mr. Jones' "Manor Farm", inspired by the harangues of the old boar, Major, chasing off Jones and taking over themselves. Major's ideology drives them to rename their conquest "Animal Farm", they establish commandments, sing inspirational songs, and bleat the famous slogan: "Four legs good, two legs bad."

The parallels are many, and readers will pick up more of them the more they know about early 20th-century Russian history. (Or they can just peruse the Wikipedia page.)

Although Orwell's original subtitle of this work was "A Fairy Story", it's also horror-filled. Probably not the best bedtime reading to your toddlers, because things get explicitly violent. It is pretty much a fictionalization of Chapter 10 of Hayek's The Road to Serfdom, "Why the Worst Get on Top".

I scanned through the Declaration, and nowhere in its list of royal offenses did I see George III trying anything like this. The denunciations are many, but let's look at the WaPo's editorial take: The precedent of Trump’s ‘weaponization’ fund. (WaPo gifted link)

Over at NR, Dan McLaughlin delivers the ultimate insult: Trump’s Collusive ‘Anti-Weaponization Fund’ Takes a Page from the Left’s Playbook. (NR gifted link)

The good news is that Trump is dropping his stupid, hopelessly corrupt, lawsuit against the IRS. But…

Dan goes on to observe that similar sue-and-settle tactics have been used on the left for years. Doesn't meana it's not totally corrupt.

Also of note:

• Yawn. Another kraken about to be released "soon". I'm seeing an uptick in headlines like this one at PJ Media: Multiple 2020 Election Fraud Investigations in Georgia and Arizona Are Underway.

  In recent weeks, Trump officials have been promising that bombshell evidence regarding 2020 election fraud would be coming. Both FBI Director Kash Patel and Monica Crowley, the U.S. government's chief of protocol, have said as much. On Sunday, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche sat down with Maria Bartiromo and confirmed that the Department of Justice has multiple active investigations into election fraud, specifically targeting Arizona and Georgia's Fulton County.

  Blanche didn't hedge. He didn't offer the usual bureaucratic non-answer. He said it directly: "Well, there's a ton of evidence that the election was rigged. That's not something the DOJ needs to tell you about. There's been evidence about that for many, many years. What I can tell you is that we have multiple investigations going on in Arizona, in Georgia, in Fulton County, Georgia.”

  A "ton" of evidence over "many, many years" … that never managed to impress anyone who wasn't a total Trump sycophant.

  Hey, maybe. I have no way of knowing for sure, I'm only going by the dismal history of massive conspiracies necessarily involving hundreds of people that never manage to get off the corkboards filled with newspaper clippings, pushpins, and yards of dot-connecting red yarn.

  And perhaps Blanche will say and do whatever is necessary to stay in Trump's good graces.

  Note that, taken together, Arizona and Georgia controlled a total of 27 electoral votes. Moving them into Trump's column… and Biden still wins the 2020 election with 279 EVs to Trump's 259.

• Not to wade into a thorny topic, but… I noticed a gold nugget of wisdom in a recent NHJournal article: On Housing, Local vs. State Control Is the Wrong Question made by Anthony Conte, about what level of government should have how much say over zoning:

  “Local control” is a rhetorical distraction. Dressing up “control” with the friendly modifier “local” shouldn’t make us forget we are being controlled in the first place, or make us feel better about it.

  Reminiscent of that classic Thomas Szasz quote about drugs: "There are no 'controlled substances,' there are only controlled citizens."

• All share a long tradition of … existence. Alex J. Pollock & Edward J. Pinto look at Fannie, Freddie, and the National Debt. Their argument:

  Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are huge, with $7.8 trillion in assets and $7.6 trillion in liabilities. They are an essential part of the finances of the US government. But we do not find them as part of the government’s consolidated financial statements. We should.

  How would that affect … oh, wait, here it is: "With Fannie and Freddie correctly consolidated, the total government debt would be $46.1 trillion."

  This would be honest accounting, which means it probably ain't gonna happen.

• And not a funny one. Jeff Maurer notes an absurd turn of events that more people should mull over: Mail Has Become a Twisted Joke.

  Expressed in his subhed: "I'm paying for trees to be turned into garbage and sent to me"

  I recently had a run-in with the authorities: I owed $60 in tax to a state where I no longer live. I was fine with paying the tax, which was on my truck, even though I was surprised to learn that anything was due on a ‘97 Nissan whose value is surely just the combined value of the wiper blades and tires. The sand up my gearbox came from the fact that the state’s only effort to inform me of this tax came from a bill that they claim to have sent via physical mail. And to be clear: This happened this year, not 1873. Saying “we sent it to you in the mail” these days is a bit like saying “we sent you a telegram” or “we put it in the barrel around a St. Bernard’s neck and threw a stick in the direction of your house.”

  Mail has changed. You’re not wrong if you’ve sensed that mail is now mostly catalogues, credit card offers, and solicitations from charities who seek to punish you for giving $20 one time in 2009. More than half of all mail these days — 52 percent — is “marketing mail”, aka “junk”. Another large percentage is a category I’ll dub “unimportant bullshit”, i.e. my health plan informing me of minute changes, crap from my neighborhood, and my union keeping me up to date on their efforts to end capitalism except for the type of capitalism on which my livelihood depends. Mixed into that pile of spam is shit that I’ll go to jail if I ignore — what a fun little game! Not only am I paying for trees to be cut down, sent to my house in the form of chores, and then hauled away again, but I’ll also get in trouble if I miss the oh-so-important needles that are mixed into the haystack. I am enrolled against my will in a system that feels like some shit The Riddler dreamed up.

  I assume I didn't get that birthday card from Kansas I was expecting because it got lost between the weekly ads from Hannaford, Shaws, and Market Basket.

It may not be the last refuge of scoundrels, but it's certainly a rhetorical hiding place along the way. Today's example provided by Greg Lukianoff:

Apparently there’s a NYU commencement dust-up over my dear friend and co-author @JonHaidt.

Student government reportedly called to disinvite him, calling his campus critiques too divisive, which rather proves "The Coddling of the American Mind” had a point.

And for the record,… https://t.co/hEzIZIZM5h

— Greg Lukianoff (@glukianoff) May 14, 2026

Twitter's embed snips Greg's revelation about The Coddling of the American Mind: "… we never liked the title." (My 2019 report on the book is here.)

More, more, more:

• And certainly not one of those mysteries with talking cats. Holman W. Jenkins, Jr. checks the polls, and concludes: For the Public, Covid Is No Longer a Mystery.

  In a sense the debate is over. Since 2023, an American majority has believed Covid came from a Chinese lab.

  In 2004, 27 years after the fact, a Chinese virologist confided to an American counterpart that 1977’s flu pandemic began with the accidental release in China of a stored pathogen. Imagination isn’t strained to picture a similar confirmation eventually about Wuhan. The alternative, that the virus passed naturally from an animal population to the human population, will have its fans but is unlikely ever to be proved in such a way that would derail the lab-leak origin story the U.S. now believes.

  This means coming to terms with another fact—the U.S. governing establishment’s urgent smoke screen around Covid’s possible origins to allay pressure from voters, the media and political entrepreneurs to confront China over its role in sparking the pandemic.

  This week’s Senate testimony by career CIA official James Erdman III, largely ignored in the media, describes the background. Recall the press’s eagerness at the time to help stigmatize the lab-leak possibility. Ditto the CIA, on the alleged advice and active guidance of Dr. Anthony Fauci. Dealings with Beijing must not be complicated by unproductive Covid recriminations. Such was the broad consensus. This self-interest, I suspect, would have prevailed even in the absence of an additional wrinkle—the U.S. government’s and Dr. Fauci’s role in sponsoring research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

  To be fair, the relevant Wikipedia entry still presents Covid's zoonotic origins as a slam-dunk fact. (But note the Wikidisclaimer at the top, beginning "This article needs more reliable medical references for verification…".

• "We have to protect our phoney baloney jobs here!" The Josiah Bartlett Center notes that some local educrats aren't even trying to pretend that it's about the children: Manchester school board elevates educator staffing above all other priorities.

  With Manchester’s school district looking to trim its proposed 2027 budget to stay within the city’s tax cap, the Board of School Committee took the extraordinary step of forbidding the district from achieving a balanced budget by laying off educators.

  The move effectively elevates raw educator staffing numbers over all other district priorities, even though district enrollment has fallen by thousands in the last two decades.

  The most recent indicators of how well Manchester School District is doing its job:

  In 2025, Manchester students tested below state English language arts averages in every participating grade. This actually marked improvement for some grades, with grade 3 rising six percentage points from their 19 percent proficiency score among students that took the assessment in 2021.

  Within mathematics results, Manchester student results were even lower, coming in with scores less than half of state averages in every grade assessed, with grades 3 and 4 reporting the only results above 20 percent (26 and 28 percent, respectively).

  Good luck, Manchester kids. You'll need it.

• Next thing you know, they'll be coming out against guillotines. Alex Tabarrok is shocked, stunned, and surprised to see: Hayek in Jacobin.

  Here’s something I never expected to write: Jacobin, the magazine of the DSA-aligned left, has a good article on central planning. In an interview, Vivek Chibber lays out essentially the Mises–Hayek–Kornai critique of central planning. Information problems, incentive problems and the consequent failures are laid bare. Moreover, Chibber refuses to lay the blame at the feet of Stalin, poverty, or the Russians. Nor does he wave hopefully at supercomputers and AI, as is fashionable today on the planning-curious left:

  The dilemma is this. There is a problem of information. Supercomputers will in fact help process information better. But if the information coming in is junk, and if that junk is built into the system because of the incentives that operators have in workplaces to lie, you will not have a planning system that can be put on its feet through the advent of computers or artificial intelligence or anything like that. I don’t see any reason to think that that strategic misalignment of incentives is simply there because of Russian backwardness or poverty.

  I suppose it's only a matter of time before the magazine will be j'accused of being JINO: Jacobin in name only. (Somewhat surprisingly, that's a thing.)

• You don't despise them enough. I don't often link to RedState, and I'm not much of a Kash Patel fan, but Brad Slager does a pretty good job of dissecting a recent MSM smear effort: Now the Press Claims Kash Patel Desecrated a Historic War Site, and Disprove Themselves In the Process.

  There is a desperate pattern emerging in the press regarding FBI Director Kash Patel. There is a growing tendency to see/hear a claim of outlandish behavior involving Patel and then rush to publication without maybe committing a modicum of research or striving to apply calm, rational thought to the matter. But then again, if they commit to researching the story, they run the risk of discovering information that would completely derail their hit piece. Best to just allude to these items in a minimalist fashion and bury them under waves of outrage.

  At issue was Patel's "VIP Snorkel" tour of the USS Arizona memorial in Pearl Harbor, where 900 sailors are entombed. The original AP story tries hard to cast this as unseemly at best, but such tours have apparently been conducted for years without anyone making a fuss.

• Send me my cash, Kash! I will share this mail with you, inexplicably routed to my spam folder. It is

  From: MR KASH PAETL <mdenis@hauswagen.com.arl>
  	    

  I have no explanation as to why Kash can't spell his own name, or why he's sending from someone else's account at a VW dealer in Argentina. I don't care, though, because we are talking big bucks. Original formatting preserved as much as possible:

  COMPENSATION FUNDS
  
  Compliment of the Season
  
  HOW are you doing today this is FBI AUTHORITY DIRECTOR Mr, KASH PATEL,  
   From  FBI headquarter
  Washington DC , during our investigation work we find out that you
  
  have funds that stop on the way, and return back to the bank of AMERICA 
  , and you have lost a lot too.
  
  scammers, all I need from you now is to sincerely tell me what happen
  
  and the year it happen,
  
  you have the sum of $10.5 million here right now, I will conclude
  
  everything if I received a tangible reason from you thank you
  
  contact information , please remember to reconfirm your information ,
  
  we might surprise you
  
  Contact the FBI director Email address
  mrkashpatelfbiauthority@gmail.com
  
  i will be waiting
  for your responds so that all this can be finalized
  
  information to send
  
  NAME: ==================
  
  COUNTRY===
  
  state====
  
  email address====
  
  ADDRESS: ===============
  
  MOBILE NO of your text or call
  message.:=============
  
  NAME OF YOUR NEAREST AIRPORT:====
  ID CARD/DRIVER LICENSE:======
  
  BEST REGARD
  MR. KASH PATEL FBI AUTHORITY DIRECTOR!!
  	    

  10.5 million. But those two exclamation points at the end kinda make me suspicious; is this actually Trump, posing as Kash?

Cato's latest Human Freedom Index rates Taiwan in fourteenth place. Ahead of (ahem) the US (#15). That's pretty good, but Mr Ramirez thinks it's on the menu, and the WSJ editorialists seem to think the island's fate is iffy (WSJ gifted link)

It would be a shame to see the US get higher in the Human Freedom Index via the destruction of one of the freer countries above it.

And for your further amusement (or disgust):

• Also, we could make liquor purchases mandatory. The Josiah Bartlett Center describes How NH can stop subsidizing out-of-state drivers.

  The New Hampshire Turnpike System facilitates tourism and commuting in the Granite State. The three toll roads slash travel times in key corridors, which improves quality of life and helps the state’s economy grow.

  Turnpike users pay a small fee for the convenience of using these roads vs. more congested and slower local roads, essentially trading cash for time.

  Time, however, gets its revenge. Over the years, inflation eats away at the value of the toll. New Hampshire’s tolls, low by regional standards, haven’t been increased since 2007.

  That sounds unrealistic on its face. The JBC notes that other states in the area (NY and MA) manage to ding out-of-state drivers using their tollways significantly higher rates than in-state drivers.

• 

  I never went full hippie in the 1970s. But I did own a copy of Steward Brand's Whole Earth Catalog and subscribed to his Coevolution Quarterly magazine. Occasionally offending my conservatarian sensibilities, but (nevertheless) full of interesting stuff.

  Stewart Brand is 87 years old (as I type), and recently gave a great interview to Nick Gillespie.

  Reason: Your new book argues that maintenance is the hidden foundation of everything. What do we miss when we focus on innovation, creative destruction, and disruption and forget about checking that everything is tied down the right way on a daily basis?

  Brand: I don't think they're opposed. A lot of innovation comes out of maintenance. People who figure out how to improve a thing are often the ones who are stuck with keeping it going and realizing how difficult that is. "Gee, we could make it easier this way or that way. Or what if we just throw this stupid thing away and get something better?" Which is all part of the process of keeping something going.

  We often think of maintenance in terms of preventive maintenance. Repair is such a big hassle when something breaks. It's a trauma to you and to the system that the thing is part of. We spend some of our time doing the very unrewarding thing of changing the oil and brushing your teeth so that your teeth don't fall out and your car doesn't blow up. But really maintenance is the whole complete process of keeping the thing going. For example, right now, I'm writing on the history of agriculture, because if you're an animal, you've got to keep it fed. We are animals and we have to keep ourselves fed. The process of doing that has been one innovation after another.

  Amazon link for Brand's latest book at your right. I'll probably get it at the library, because I'm cheap.

• That would be a shame. David Harsanyi is (probably) correct, though: The Left's Attack on Courts Is Meant To Destroy the Constitution.

  The story plays out the same way virtually every time.

  Democrats, egged on by the increasingly powerful progressive base, push some obviously unconstitutional scheme that they contend is needed to preserve "democracy."

  The courts inevitably knock down the ploy.

  Frustrated, Democrats ratchet up the anger, promising to "reform" the judiciary that stands in their way.

  Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) recently argued on the House floor that the next Democratic White House "does not need a court reform commission like some college seminar. We need action. We need term limits for Justices. We need to expand this morally bankrupt Court from 9 to 13."

  Do we? Great, let's do it today.

  David makes the interesting point that today, the GOP controls the House, Senate, and White House, so…

  But Khanna sees this as a game he can (eventually) win.

• This is why we can't have nice things. That kill bad guys. Finally, a TechDirt article that doesn't make me roll my eyes. It's from Glyn Moody, who explains Why The US Can’t Adopt Ukraine’s Innovative Approach To Unmanned Warfare Systems.

  It is widely accepted that drones have changed the conduct of modern war dramatically. The war in Ukraine, in particular, is driving the rapid evolution of drone technology. Evidence of how far things have come was provided recently by the following claim from Ukraine, reported here on The Next Web (TNW):

  In April, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky announced that his forces had, for the first time in the history of warfare, seized an enemy position using only unmanned systems. No infantry. No human soldiers entering the contested ground. Drones and ground robots identified the target, suppressed defensive fire, and captured the position without a single Ukrainian casualty. The claim has not been independently verified in detail, and Ukraine’s military has declined to provide specifics.

  Well, it goes on from there. But why can't Uncle Stupid do that?

  legal, contractual, and technical restrictions often prevent units from modifying or repairing their own equipment. In the United States, for example, defense contractors frequently retain control over maintenance data, software, and diagnostics, limiting what military personnel can do independently. The debate around the “right to repair” reflects this tension. While intended to protect intellectual property and safety standards, such restrictions can slow adaptation cycles and reduce operational flexibility—precisely the opposite of what high-intensity, technology-driven warfare now demands.

  Ah. Well, I hope Taiwan is paying attention.

Recently on the book blog:

Gearing up for Amaerica's 250th birthday, I guess, I've been reading a decent number of books about the Founders, the Constitution, the Revolution, etc. I'm also kind of a fan of Jonathan Turley, whose conservative/libertarian take on current events at his website closely matches my own. And I read and enjoyed his previous book, The Indispensible Right last year. So…

This one is a veritable pinball machine of topics. I find it difficult to summarize, but a major theme is "democratic despotism", the tendency of factions who knit together enough people-power to rule over, oppress, and even kill their opponents. Turley takes a close look at Thomas Paine, whose Common Sense pamphlet was one of the major drivers of the American Revolution. Great! But Paine's overall political philosophy rightfully worried founders like Madison, who (correctly) speculated about how it would quickly lead to violent mobocracy. It's pretty clear that America dodged a bullet despotism-wise, although it was a close shave. (One of Turley's anecdotes involves Declaration-signer/Constitution-writer James Wilson, whose patriotic bona fides were beyond question, but nevertheless nearly became a victim of a Philadelphia drunken mob in 1779.)

And Paine eventually absconded to France, where (despite not knowing French) he became a moving force behind their revolution. And, well, we all know what happened. In the words of Jacques Mallet du Pan: "Like Saturn, the Revolution devours its children." (That quote is the book's epigraph.) Turley does a fine job of describing why the result was known as the Terror. (And might make the reader look askance at Jacobin magazine, influential on America's left wing.) Paine escaped with his life, but it was a (another) close shave. Returning to America, he never regained the respectability or influence he had in 1776, and died largely unmourned.

But there's a lot of other stuff going on in the book, too: a look back at the origins of democracy in ancient Greece (it didn't work well). And a look at the current state of affairs in America, where the enthusiasm for "democracy" seems to to invariably nudge people toward oppression of opponents and violence.

Turley views our AI/robotic future with some trepidation, worrying that we're headed quickly toward an era of mass unemployment. Could be! But America has had massive economic sector-shifts in the past, accompanied by similar predictions of doom, but that's been handled pretty well, albeit not painlessly. But (of course) this time could be different; see what you think.

This book made the WSJ's best mysteries of 2025 list. Not my cup of cocoa, unfortunately. I speculate (mean-spiritedly) that its inclusion was a sort of diversity initiative: "We gotta include something from the "cozy" subgenre!" So my mediocre Goodreads rating is just my personal reaction: you might find it swell!

It is set in post-WWII Britain. The protagonist, Nora Breen, is an ex-nun who is trying to determine the fate of another nun gone astray from her convent, Frieda. Frieda's letters to Nora back at the nunnery suddenly stopped without notice. So Nora decides to check into Frieda's last known location, Gulls Nest, a semi-seedy lodge full of offbeat characters, either suspects or potential victims. Nora begins her surreptitious investigation, takes up a cigarette habit, builds an uneasy relationship with the local police detective, befriends a local seagull, … and pretty soon the body count starts to increase.

Maybe I should rethink my habit of simply picking up those WSJ best-of books at the local library? Naw, I might miss something good that's outside my comfort zone.

Reading to my kids was fun, and good books were easy to find. But nowadays? WSJ writer Meghan Cox Gurdon looks at the sea of woke that you might find at your local Barnes&Noble, and describes what happened to the author of the Eye Candy du Jour when he pointed it out: Mac Barnett, Come on Down. (WSJ gifted link)

(Subhed: "You’re the next contestant on ‘Cancel the Straight White Male.’")

But before Meghan tells Mac's story:

Mac Barnett's crime was, well, writing the book pictured on your right. His response to his accusers was kind of craven, read Meghan's article for that, but you can't expect everyone to be J.K. Rowling.

And today's hodgepodge:

• Mental illness or power lust? Billy Binion wonders at the motivations: These Politicians Want To Tax the Rich. But Why Do They Seem To Despise Them?

  Our politics have been analogized to Veep. A more apt comparison some days is that we are living in a cartoon. Every good cartoon needs a supervillain or three. Our supervillains created millions of jobs, made goods cheaper and far easier to obtain, and revolutionized access to information, among other terrible, terrible things.

  I am referring to billionaires. Reasonable people will debate, and disagree on, the best way to sketch out the tax code. Protestations to "tax the rich" have long been central to progressive politics. But last week's Met Gala was a reminder that there is something else undergirding those calls: what seems like legitimate hatred or, at a minimum, disgust. Why?

  The Met Gala, of course, is a convenient backdrop for this kind of criticism: a ludicrous event where many of the ultrarich gather together, hobnob in opulent costume, and, at least in one case, protest their own existence. This year, however, was even more convenient, because the gala was sponsored by our main cartoon villain: Jeff Bezos.

  Being a cynic this month, I strongly suspect that AOC, Bernie, Liz, and the Zohran are operating on cold-hearted calculation rather than working out their twisted psychological quirks.

  Specifically, following #13 in Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals: "Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it."

  But it's also useful to follow Big Brother's tactic in 1984: Set up Two Minutes Hate sessions directed at any semi-plausible instantiation of Emmanuel Goldstein.

• A useful digest. Jerry Coyne surveys some reactions to the vile slanders the NYT saw fit to print: More criticism of Kristof’s allegations about Israel.

  By now the whole world–at least the world that reads the news–knows about Nicholas Kristof’s long NYT op-ed column accusing Israel of systemic, institutional sexual violence against Palestinian prisoners. For those who already hate Israel, his unsubstantiated allegations will serve only to reinforce their hatred and antisemitism. For those who are open-minded or sympathetic to Israel, well, they do have to admit that the allegations are unsubstantiated. But, as the saying goes, “A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.” Kristof is no dummy, and surely he knew that his claims would be snapped up by Israel haters and antisemites.

  That is a good reason for Kristof to have verified all his sources and ensure that they had no history of bias (or at least the bias should have been made explicit)—something he did not do. This is in contrast to the Civil Commission on the October 7 Crimes Against Women and Children report, documenting Hamas’s sexual abuse during its invasion of Israel. The Commission has verification of all of its sources, including forensic evidence like photographs and bodies.

  As most of Kristof’s critics have said, it is impossible to affirm that there was never any abuse of Palestinians by the IDF. But if you make an accusation that the abuse was both widespread and systemic, you’d better be able to back it up with evidence. Unfortunately, the NYT sees no need for that. relying on Kristof’s two Pulitzer Prizes and his claim that he interviewed witnesses brought forth by groups or people who can hardly be said to be unbiased. But yes, his claims should be investigated, but he would have to help the investigators by providing identities and documentation. I wouldn’t hold my breath until he does that.

  Jerry excerpts five responses to Kristof, and they're pretty brutal. It should be career-ending for him.

• Let's not go off half cocked. David R. Henderson reviews The Unseen Costs Of A Universal Basic Income.

  Elon Musk, Sam Altman of OpenAI, and some other major executives of artificial intelligence (AI) firms are sure that AI will destroy millions of American jobs and that many of those who lose work will not find gainful employment. Musk, Altman, and Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce, advocate a universal basic income (UBI) for those who they think will never find work. I’ve written elsewhere about the fact that a UBI, even one that replaced means-tested welfare programs, would enormously increase both government spending and our federal budget deficit.

  There’s another problem, and it’s the one I focus on here. A large UBI would assure that millions of people will never work. As a result, we would miss the products and services that those people would have produced. One way to see that is to imagine that at various times in our history the federal government had implemented a UBI.

  David looks at the non-catastrophes caused by (1) the mechanization of farm labor and (2) the shift from the manufacturing sector to the service sector. Insight:

  [I]f at any time in our history, you had predicted that new jobs wouldn’t replace old jobs, you would have always been wrong. If you predict that AI will be the exception, you will probably be wrong.

  I realize that "probably" carries a lot of weight there. But I think we can afford to work on actual problems as they occur, not the most dire ones that we can imagine.

• Something to take to your next appointment. Dave Barry looks at Modern Medical Care. Hilarious as expected. And he provides something that will no doubt cause your doctor to …

  IMPORTANT: If you ever, somehow, get to see an actual doctor in person, remember to ask him or her about the prescription drugs advertised on TV. I’m talking about those commercials alerting you to the many, MANY alarming medical conditions that you never heard of before but that you might very well be suffering from, which is why the announcer always instructs you, in an authoritative voice, to “Ask your doctor about (name of drug)!” There are a LOT of these drugs, so to make sure you ask about all of them, you should print out the boldface question below and read it to the doctor verbatim. (All of these are actual TV-ad drug names, which I got from a list maintained by my wife.)

  QUESTION TO ASK YOUR DOCTOR:

  “Doctor, what about (deep breath) Apretude, Arexvy, Austedo, Biktarvy, Bimzelx, Breztri, Cabenuva, Caplyta, Comirnaty, Cosentyx, Dovato, Dupixent, Emgality, Eucrisa, Farxiga, Fasenra, Humira, Ibrance, Ingrezza, Jardiance, Kerendia, Kesimpta, Keytruda, Kisqali, Latuda, Linzess, Lo Loestrin Fe, Mounjaro, Myfembree, Nubeqa, Nucala, Nurtec ODT, Ocrevus, Opdivo & Yervoy, Opdivo Qvantig, Opzelura, Ozempic, Pluvicto, Qulipta, Quviviq, Reblozyl, Repatha, Rexulti, Rinvoq, Rybelsus, Saxenda, Skyrizi, Sotyktu, Stelara, Taltz, Tepezza, Trelegy, Tremfya, Tresiba, Trulicity, Ubrelvy, Ultomiris, Vabysmo, Veozah, Verzenio, Vraylar, Xeljanz, Xifaxan, Zepbound and Zeposia?”

  Unfortunately, your doctor will be unable to answer this question, because he or she is running behind schedule and thus will have exited the examination room somewhere around Pluvicto. This is probably just as well, because for the majority of these drugs the side effects include death.

  So good luck with that.

From the Heaton/Bragg team at Reason: If doctors acted like politicians....

I'm pretty sure I pissed off one of my doctors by showing him my recent discussion with Claude about my prostate. I thought he'd be amused!

Also of note:

• Betting on anything is risky, but this? Stephanie Slade asks and advises: Are Democrats Now the Party of Free Markets? Don't Bet on It.

  Here's a fact about partisanship and public opinion that may surprise you: According to Gallup, Democrats have been warming toward foreign trade since 2008, and they have been more positive about it than Republicans have been since 2012. With all the talk of political realignment in recent years, data points like these have led some to wonder whether Democrats are becoming the major party that better aligns with libertarian commitments to free markets and limited government.

  That's Slade's first paragraph, but (after making many valid insights) here's her bottom line:

  Democrats frequently discover a strange new respect for limited-government ideals when they're not in power, but it doesn't last. The moment they're back in the White House, expect progressives to experience sudden-onset amnesia about the lessons they weren't really learning during the Trump years.

  As the Bonzo Dog Band observed long ago: No Matter Who You Vote For The Government Always Gets In.

• Lotta cynicism out there today… On that score, Veronique de Rugy observes: When Businessmen Enter the Beltway, It's Business as Usual.

  Something strange is happening in Washington. A generation of investors and entrepreneurs who built careers championing private capital and intuitively understood the power of market discipline and limited government have joined the Trump administration, taking charge of hundreds of billions of dollars of other people's money. They assure us that they are deploying it strategically, with accountability and a businessperson's rigor.

  From Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick (who is apparently convinced he can rearrange the American economy through tariffs and industrial policy as if it were a trading desk) to former Commerce official Michael Grimes (who led the IPOs of Meta, Uber and Airbnb and reportedly spearheaded a federal "venture arm" last year) to President Donald Trump and his proposed U.S. sovereign wealth fund, the rejection of markets is real. And as with all such schemes, these too will damage the economy.

  At least the stock market is doing well.

• Insightful, with dirty words. Jeff Maurer is shaking his head: How Did the New York Times Wave Through "Israel Trains Rape Dogs"?

  On Monday, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof wrote an article alleging that sexual abuse of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails is widespread. The claims are extremely serious — so serious, in fact, that it makes me wish that it was possible for our society to talk about Israel/Palestine without our brains melting down and dribbling out of our ears in a trickle of neon pink goo.

  Personally, I find the general narrative sadly plausible. Prisoner abuse happens everywhere, societies in violent conflicts often see their moral standards erode, and my own country engaged in a prisoner abuse scandal in the aftermath of a horrific attack. Of course, I have no real way to assess the veracity of the claims in the article — I am, after all, just some dickweed with a laptop. The New York Times, however, is a 175 year-old newspaper that basically won the Squid Game-style deathmatch that American publications have been forced to endure. They do have resources to vet, fact-check, and otherwise verify the news stories that fill the dead space in between their lucrative puzzle games.

  Since I know the name "Walter Duranty", I don't have any expectation that the NYT will let journalistic integrity get in the way of publishing narratives it prefers.

  Jeff's conclusions, after looking at the "evidence" cited for the dog-rape fantasies: "the level of scrutiny for claims about Israel at the Times is absolute zero." If they didn't balk at publishing that, then they probably didn't bother checking anything else.

• And for once, I'm blogging Nellie Bowles' TGIF column on Friday. Concerning another different garbage NYT story:

  → One last note on antisemitism and the media: Check out this weird 2,500-word New York Times investigation into Israel and Eurovision, a music contest.

  

  That headline sure looks scary. I’ll bet most people stopped reading after “Israel’s efforts to influence. . . ” The reporters “traveled around Europe, interviewed more than 50 people, and reviewed internal Eurovision documents.” Well, what did they find? The article ultimately admits there were no bots, no hacking, no vote-rigging, and no evidence any rules were broken. The “scandal” amounts to Israel encouraging supporters to use the voting system as designed, something virtually every Eurovision participant has done for decades. The only huge dark arts political effort is to ban Israel from performing. The whole article is basically: Did you know that the Jooos are still allowed in the singing contest? Isn’t that odd? Is Adam Levine spinning his throne around on The Voice also a “soft power tool”?

  Well, I'll still keep my NYT Games subscription. But…

Recently on the book blog:

Another book down on my Clifford D. Simak reading project. This one is from 1978, and my Science Fiction Book Club edition has sat, unread, on one bookshelf or another since then. This was Mr. Simak's first foray into Lord of the Rings-style fantasy, and contains no robots or spaceships.

There are, however, aliens. And it's set in a magic-enabled alternate version of Earth. The primary hero, Duncan, has been picked for an unlikely task. A manuscript, written in ancient Aramaic, has been discovered, purporting to be a complete journal of the life and times of Jesus. It promises to be a game-changer in the strucggle against the evil desolation visited on Britain by the Horde. But the manuscript requires verification, and that can only be accomplished via a pilgrimage through the Desolated Land to visit an elderly bishop in Oxenford.

It's a journey that few have attempted, and nobody has succeeded in completing. Dancan starts out with his friend and protector, the burly Conrad, faithful "war horse" Daniel. Along the way, he accumulates a diverse crew: a wannabe holy hermit, Andrew; an enchained demon, Scratch; a woman warrior, Diane (with her griffin, Hugo); a ghost; a goblin, Snoopy; and many others.

There's plenty of fighting, deception, disappointment, despair, and general peril. And occasional humor. I was slightly disappointed in the ending, but (on the whole) thought it was an OK effort.

… when I read this headline at Ars Technica: Solar drone with jumbo jet wingspan broke a flight record—then it crashed.

To be fair, it had a good run, longer than the Titanic's:

Keep trying, guys.

Also of note:

• Could they all please just crawl back under their rocks? Barton Swaim looks at Antisemites Right and Left. (WSJ gifted link)

  An “antisemitism problem” exists on both the left and the right, according to the latest political cliché. Like most clichés, this one contains truth, but its expression sounds like an excuse to keep quiet and do nothing.

  Jew-hatred thrives in some precincts more than others, and for reasons nobody fully understands it does so more among the credentialed and allegedly better-educated Americans than it does among the rest. What makes antisemitism in the 2020s so menacing isn’t its ugliness or brutality but its subtlety and intellectual appeal, its expression by gullible journalists and kaffiyeh-wearing postgraduates using big terms they don’t understand: “Zionism,” “genocide,” “occupation.”

  The zeal with which a sizable part of the Democratic primary-voting electorate fixates on the Jewish state—a sliver of a country on the other side of the world—defies explanation. Even granting some of the cockamamie claims about Israeli actions in Gaza and the West Bank, lots of countries around the world commit ill deeds. Why the obsession with Israel but not Myanmar or Sudan? Why such expressive pity for the Palestinians but none for the Uyghurs?

  Barton notes a right/left disparity though: numerous voices on the right call out and condemn antisemitic slurs made by "our side"; on the left, not so much.

  Also at the WSJ, the editorialists summarize a new report containing The Truth About Hamas (WSJ gifted link).

  Reading “Silenced No More,” the new report by the Civil Commission on October 7th Crimes by Hamas Against Women and Children, we were transported back to Oct. 27, 2023, and a screening of the raw footage of Hamas’s atrocities. The mouths of journalists were agape, but time dulls horrific reality.

  "Horrific" is, if anything, an understatement. Read if you think your stomach can stand it.

• From the newspaper that published the rape dog fantasies … The New York Times has a softball interview with University Near Here's Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, who is headlined-described as A Physicist Who Thinks in Poetry from the Cosmic Edge. This stood out (interviewer in bold):

  How do you want readers to approach this book?

  There is this feeling that you’re supposed to read a book like this and walk away an expert. That’s actually not the point of this book at all. The point is to wander through physics. Even if math terrifies you, you are entitled to spend some time with it.

  And so here, I have made you a book with a bunch of tidbits on the oddities of the universe. The universe is stranger and more queer and more wonderful and more full of possibility than whatever limitations you might be experiencing right now. Physics challenges what we are told are social norms. For example, non-trinary neutrinos are fundamental to our standard model of physics.

  “Non-trinary,” as in they shift between three different forms.

  Non-trinary is natural. It’s such a challenge to the current anti-trans rhetoric that says people can only ever be one thing.

  A short physics tutorial: there are three "flavors" of neutrinos: electron, muon, and tau. They are almost massless, rarely interact with any matter they encounter, and travel nearly the speed of light. And their extra-special "queerness" is that they oscillate between flavors as they zip through space.

  And of course this implies that guys can oscillate into girls while travelling through ladies' locker rooms! Take that, J.K. Rowling!

  CPW has a new book out, and I have requested a hold for it at the Portsmouth (NH) Public Library. Should be a fun read!

I composed today's headline while reading William A. Galston's WSJ column. He wonders: Are There Five Parties in America’s Future?. (WSJ gifted link)

(And Betteridge's Law of Headlines might not apply!)

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Never mind the Limeys! What about us?

I would guess that candidates from the "Traditional Conservative Party" and the "Market-Oriented Socially Liberal Party" might say things that would appeal to me. They would also say things that would make me grit my teeth, hold my nose, and roll my eyes.

The Quote Investigator discusses the various ways Groucho Marx worded his version of today's anti-social headline, and its possible precursor.

Also of note:

• Look out below! Deirdre Nansen McCloksey has demographic thoughts: World Population Will Fall.

  Have you noticed that we keep finding new social problems? Every year. Before the second half of the 19th century, people didn’t use the phrase or have the idea.

  The problem with problem-talk is that it results in more intervention by the state. So the state gets bigger. In Brazil, insult comedians are viewed as a social problem. Bring in our brilliant masters in the US Congress or the Brazilian Parliament. Make a law. Put the comedians in jail.

  My fear is that we will repeat the terrible damage to humanity from our earlier great fear of over-population. An unscientific article in Science magazine in 1968 by Garrett Hardin, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” recommended compulsory sterilization of women. An even more unscientific book in 1968 by Paul R. Ehrlich, The Population Bomb, then panicked the entire world, leading, for example, to the Chinese one-child policy. The science of both men was biology, not history or economics or demography or political science.

  Deirdre is apparently in favor of government treating people as responsible adults, capable of making their own decisions. Unfortunately, I fear that would make a relatively tiny political party.

• Paying off the kidnappers. Does that sound like a good idea to you? Inside Higher Ed has the latest example: Instructure Pays Ransom to Canvas Hackers.

  Instructure has paid a ransom to a gang of cybercriminals that have twice hacked the company’s learning management system, Canvas, over the past week and a half.

  According to an update published by the education-technology company Monday night, the deal means that the hackers have returned the compromised data of some 275 million users across more than 8,800 institutions.

  The company—whose LMS ["Learning Management System"] is used to deliver courses by 41 percent of higher education institutions in North America—said it “received digital confirmation of data destruction (shred logs)” and assurance “that no Instructure customers will be extorted as a result of this incident, publicly or otherwise.” It added that the agreement “covers all impacted Instructure customers” and that individual customers have “no need” to engage with ShinyHunters, the extortionist group that has breached and temporarily disabled Canvas twice so far this month.

  Among the higher education institutions using Canvas: the University Near Here. No indication of whether Instructure will pass through the ransom costs to institutions, but I wouldn't expect them to publicize that.

• I'm pretty sure George Orwell did not see this specific thing coming. National Review's language columnist, Bryan A. Garner, reviews Trash Talk from the Oval Office. (NR gifted link)

  There was a time, not so long ago, when the president of the United States could be counted on to embarrass the republic only through inept decisions or lofty platitudes. Now, presidential disgrace is also linguistic, rhetorical, even psychological. With Donald Trump, the vulgar torrent became the message. The method was bluster, the attitude an amoral indifference to truth, the idiom a kind of gutter demotic that dragged every exchange down to the level of the pro-wrestling ring or the casino floor. For a people once taught to regard the presidency as a moral tribune, this wasn’t just a comedown. It was a national intoxication in which intoxication itself became the new sobriety.

  The first and most obvious mark of this coarse dispensation lies in its diction. Political language once at least gestured toward civility of tone. Though its meanings could be evasive, its grammar was usually correct. Trump’s breakthrough was to treat coarseness not as a liability but as a credential of authenticity. The profanity, the name-calling, the brawling with “losers” and “morons,” the yells about “animals” and “vermin” became ritual displays of his supposed proximity to the national id. What would have been a gaffe for any other politician he turned into a virtue by claiming persecution from the “politically correct.” The man who bragged of his genius for “the best words” could rarely manage a paragraph without syntactic collapse. Yet this triumphant incoherence passed as sincerity, the errors and misspellings paraded as badges of manly candor against effete literati who couldn’t “connect with real people.”

  From Orwell's famous 1946 essay, Politics and the English Language:

  [I]t is clear that the decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes: it is not due simply to the bad influence of this or that individual writer. But an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely. A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.

  Orwell thought (or hoped) that the trend was "reversible". Well, maybe, but to quote a different famous writer: "Isn't it pretty to think so?"

Today Pun Salad features a double play brought off via Jess to Goldberg to Lukianoff:

Famous tells:

“It’s not you, it’s me.”
“This isn’t about the money.”
“We have nothing to hide.”
“I’m just asking questions.”
“This is not a golden calf.” https://t.co/YYl7Hb7l9K

— Jonah Goldberg (@JonahDispatch) May 9, 2026

Ah, but wait, there's a play at the plate! Jeffrey Blehar posts his punchline at his Carnival of Fools newsletter:

And in case you need a hint about that last bit, Jeffrey's link goes to…

I assume that if Pastor Mark found it necessary to repudiate the golden calf parallel, it was only because he had been hearing it a lot from people familiar with Exodus 32 (or at least the movie).

Also of note:

• Kevin D. Williamson made me realize that I've been using the word "Orwellian" a lot over the past year or so. And even more so with his recent Wanderland newsletter, summarizing The Empire of Baloney. (Dispatch gifted link)

  An item from NBC News: “U.S. and Iran exchange fire near the Strait of Hormuz; Trump says ceasefire still holds.” Wha? “The attacks highlighted the fragility of the ceasefire in the area around the Strait of Hormuz ....”

  An item from the Wall Street Journal: “Muted U.S. Response to Iranian Attacks Deepens Gulf Fears About Cease-Fire.” Fears about what? More WSJ:“The efforts to play down the attacks came as the Trump administration tried to protect a fragile cease-fire and keep peace talks moving forward.”

  In the words of that great philosopher Jules Winnfield: “English, m----------r! Do you speak it?”

  And in case you need a hint about that movie reference (or help with de-expurgating that word), here you go.

• Explain it to me like I'm five, or a US Senator from Massachusetts. Christian Britschgi tries to do that: Why the Bipartisan War on Housing Investors Won't Make Housing More Affordable.

  In March, the U.S. Senate passed a bill full of tweaks to federal grant programs and regulations. Although nearly all of the bill's provisions are aimed at increasing the housing supply, one would undermine that goal.

  That provision, inserted at the last minute, bans investors from owning more than 350 single-family rental homes. Investors could still acquire homes built as rentals, but they would have to be sold off within seven years. Because of these restrictions, the Senate bill, which otherwise could be expected to have a modest positive impact on the housing supply, probably would reduce yearly home construction.

  Proponents of the large-investor ban argue that it's necessary to preserve owner-occupied homes. "An overwhelming majority of Americans across party lines want to stop private equity from snapping up single-family homes," Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.) said on the Senate floor after the bill's passage. "This bill does exactly that."

  It should go without saying that prohibiting people from buying homes necessarily bans the current owners from selling those homes.

  But Christian does a good job of pointing out the other junk economics involved.

• It's tough out there for a barista. George Will looks at one possible explanation for youngsters that take Elizabeth Warren seriously: It’s graduation time for disappointed little Lenins. (WaPo gifted link)

  There is a growing subset of graduates who, propelled by the applause of grade inflation, emerge from the political monoculture of campuses with high grades, low learning and a talent for blaming. They blame capitalism, markets, society, something for their frustrations and disappointments. Their vast sense of entitlement includes an assumed exemption from common life experiences.

  Many supposedly underemployed graduates are casualties of the siren call of “college for all.” This gave the political class something more to subsidize, and gave the academic industry opportunities to raise tuition, siphoning up the subsidies to fund expansions. Thus were millions of young people lured onto an expensive — in time and money — path away from well-paid and satisfying trades, and into a curdled adulthood nursing vague grievances about foregone status.

  The predictable result of market saturation resulted in a 2024 report that 45 percent of graduates held, 10 years after graduation, jobs that do not “require” a college degree. But the meaning of this is murky.

  As usual, the AI summary of the (as I type) 1,222 comments is a hoot. Excerpt: "The conversation explores a wide range of criticisms directed at George Will's opinion piece, with many participants expressing dissatisfaction with his portrayal of young college graduates and his perceived condescension."

  Translation: the "little Lenins", and their enablers, got their feelings hurt.

• In case you were wondering who to blame… The WSJ editorialists note 535 (or so) possible culprits for the the fact that The U.S. Postal Service Is Going Bust. Blame Congress. (WSJ gifted link)

  The U.S. Postal Service is again barreling toward insolvency, and on Friday it reported a $2 billion quarterly loss. “We are in a cash crisis,” Postmaster General David Steiner said. “We require urgent Congressional action to expand our borrowing authority and to address outdated constraints on the organization.” The important part for lawmakers to hear is that last part.

  The USPS has been raising prices and trimming costs, but it keeps falling short in trying to make ends meet. The reality is that its business model is an anachronism in a digital world, yet Congress has refused to recognize that. As paper correspondence—letters, bills, party invites—shifted online, total mail volume fell off a cliff. Last year the USPS handled 108.7 billion pieces, down 49% from a peak of 213.1 billion in 2006. A majority of what’s left is euphemistically categorized as “marketing mail.”

  Providing a data point on that, a little Googling shows my state's senators are firmly stuck on the unsustainable status quo: Shaheen, Hassan Join Colleagues to Urge Postal Service to Pause Planned Changes to Mail Delivery Network

  And so is my current CongressCritter: Rep. Pappas' bill to stop USPS downsizing passes House committee.

  And now I'll head out to the mailbox to pick up today's "marketing mail".

If I remember correctly, it did eventually work out for Odysseus. Not so much for his fellow-travellers.

Andrew C. McCarthy brings up another feature of the ongoing onslaught against constitutionality, one not explicitly mentioned in Mr. Ramirez's cartoon: The Latest Lethal U.S. Caribbean Strikes Fit a Troubling Pattern (NR gifted link).

Well, at least we got those UFO pics released. Literal bright shiny objects to distract your attention!

Also of note:

• Don't we all? Matthew Hennessey has a suggestion for Sandy: AOC Needs New Friends. (WSJ gifted link).

  It helps to have friends who are willing to call you out, to bring you down to earth. Something tells me Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has no such friends. Something tells me she surrounds herself with people who love to hear her pontificate.

  “There’s a certain level of wealth and accumulation that is unearned,” AOC told podcaster Ilana Glazer last week. “You can’t earn a billion dollars.”

  “You just can’t earn that.”

  “That’s exactly correct,” agreed a nodding Ms. Glazer.

  “You can get market power. You can break rules. You can do all sorts of things. You can abuse labor laws.”

  “Yup,” agreed Ms. Glazer with gusto.

  “You can pay people less than what they’re worth.”

  “Yup,” agreed Ms. Glazer, who looked like she was falling in love a little bit.

  “But you can’t earn that, right?”

  “That’s right,” agreed Ms. Glazer.

  “And so you have to create a myth that—since you didn’t earn that—you have to create a myth of earning it.”

  At this, Ms. Glazer was so profoundly in agreement that all she could do was exhale through her nose in a sigh of satisfied concurrence.

  That isn’t the kind of friend Ms. Ocasio-Cortez needs. She needs someone to say, “Yeah, OK, I hear you, some people are really rich, and that’s hard for most of us to comprehend, but, you know, I’m just thinking, what about Tom Steyer?”

  Tu quoque isn't the best rhetorical comeback, but (sheesh) it's better than making nose-noises in agreement.

  Also looking askance at AOC's theories of moral desert is Jonathan Turley. Looking at Sandy's "you can't earn that" assertion:

  

  In other words, you can only make a billion dollars through theft and exploitation rather than actual entrepreneurial enterprise. This statement comes as support builds for the California billionaires’ tax which, even before it has a chance to pass in November, has already cost the state trillions due to an exodus of these billionaires.

  In my book, “Rage and the Republic,” I discuss common myths spread by the left to fuel economic factionalism. One common myth is that the “wealthy do not pay their fair share of taxes.” In truth, the top ten percent of taxpayers pay the vast majority of taxes in the U.S. In the book, I also dispel the claim that most millionaires inherited their wealth or came from privileged backgrounds.

  These myths are designed to make redistribution schemes more palatable. And Democrats are ramping up the “eat-the-rich” rhetoric ahead of the midterms in pushing both millionaire and billionaire taxes. Democrats from Washington to Virginia are pushing millionaire taxes, and the mere conversation has already set off a stampede of high-earning taxpayers to red states like Texas and Florida, which have no state income tax.

  I'm reading Rage and the Republic right now. It's very good! Report coming sometime, Amazon link at your right.

• I knew there was something I didn't like about DS9. It took Alan Jacobs to put it into words for both of us: enough is enough?

  One season into ST:DS9 and am trying to decide whether to continue. The season concluded with the straightforward message that (a) Science is Good, (b) Traditional Religion is Evil (not merely intolerant but murderous), and (c) Revisionist Religion is … Not Great But Acceptable, Whatever, We Can Sorta Work With It.

  And the show seems to promise more of the same. Also: it’s not exactly subtle to have your representative of Traditional Religion played by an actor (Louise Fletcher) known only for playing one of the most monstrous characters in the history of cinema.

  I once wrote that Philip Pullman created an imaginary world so that people he hated would have a place to be evil in — I could also have said as much about The Handmaid’s Tale — and I suspect that this will be the old familiar story.

  I’m just so tired of it: the same beats over and over and over again. After half a century of this crap I just want a different critique of religion. I’m not asking for friends, just for more interesting and reflective haters.

  I liked The Handmaid's Tale slightly better than ayjay did; I thought Pullman's The Golden Compass was pretty bad though.

• We should emulate Joe Rogan in all things. I don't listen to podcasts any more, not even Joe Rogan's, but I was impressed by the transcript Ann Althouse posted of his session with Julia Mossbridge ("a cognitive neuroscientist"). Skipping down to the bit I really wanna emulate:

  And I'm not a person that needs to be taken seriously. It's not my job. I'm literally a comedian. You can make fun of me. I'll make fun of me. It's fine. My future doesn't rely on people taking me seriously. So I think having that ability to have conversations about all kinds of different things has really changed the way the entire world is discussing reality—everything about reality, from quantum computing to alien life to international politics to the way human beings misrepresent each other purposefully for their own gains.

  If I seem whimsical at times… that's why.

  And, not that it matters, but: I see that Joe's net worth is estimated at $200 million, and I wonder if AOC thinks he "earned" that?

From five years ago, an image grabbed from Daniel J. Mitchell's Statism in Five Images; scroll down enough so you see the punchline.

Back in 2021 we were doing that Covid thing, so some of those items were arguably more relevant then. But, to be fair, some seem even more applicable now.

Also of note:

• As far as "Control what you read, watch, and say" goes… Roger Pielke Jr looks at Media Coverage (or not) of RCP8.5 RIP.

  Last week here at [his "Honest Broker" substack], I published a post announcing the most significant development in climate science in decades. It is truly huge news.

  The international committee responsible for official IPCC scenarios had declared the high-end scenarios — RCP8.5, SSP5-8.5, and SSP3-7.0 — to be implausible. These scenarios have dominated climate research, headlines, and policy for the better part of two decades.

  Today I review who in the “mainstream” media has covered this major story and who has so far ignored it.

  Bottom line: although the death of the doomsday scenarios has gotten some play in Danish and German-language media, "there has not been a peep from the major U.S. or international news outlets that publish in English."

  But (good news) I found something in the WSJ. Albeit, in an op-ed: You Can’t Trust ‘Climate Economics’ (WSJ gifted link) Excerpt:

  For more than a decade, researchers built many of their climate projections on the back of a hypothetical standardized scenario called Representative Concentration Pathway 8.5—a vision of the future which required coal consumption to quintuple by 2100 based on assumptions about future energy use. Those assumptions have already diverged sharply from actual energy trends, and we know today that the scenario is implausibly extreme. That conclusion isn’t fringe or even controversial. Yet many scientists continue to emphasize RCP8.5 in climate research, with new studies published daily. The outdated scenario likely persists because of the slow schedule for updating scenario assumptions, the incentive researchers face to publish headline-grabbing results, and a climate advocacy ecosystem built on apocalyptic warnings.

  Thousands of studies use it. Projections of flood damage, heat mortality, agricultural disruption and wildfire risk have rested on an implausible baseline that describes an imaginary, modeled future. Governments and financial institutions have treated these projections as the accurate scientific picture of the climate future.

  The author of that op-ed: Roger Pielke Jr.

• Worst new dance craze ever. Jonathan Turley observes the latest ugly steps in the partisan pas de deux: The Gerrymander Debacle in Virginia Leaves the Democratic Party with a Dangerous Agenda.

  “Eff around and find out”: That taunt from Hakeem Jeffries celebrating Virginia’s gerrymander did not age well.

  On Friday, the House minority leader found out that Virginia’s Supreme Court was not quite as gleeful as he about Democrats’ attempt to virtually eliminate Republican representation in the purple state.

  The court just cooked the party’s infamous lobster, a district over 100 miles long that was designed to help devour the GOP’s slender majority in the House of Representatives.

  Jonathan's column is from the NYPost, and adheres to that paper's one-sentence-per-paragraph style.

I've really grown to like Nellie Bowles' weekly "TGIF" column at the Free Press, her acerbic look at news stories that catch her fancy. This week, she discusses FBI Director Kash Patel's habit of distributing personalized bottles of Woodford Reserve bourbon (pictured at your right). (A 750mL non-customized bottle of the stuff will set you back $31.95 at our state's booze stores this month.)

But Nellie's headline for this edition is "Too Crazy and Not Crazy Enough", and we will excerpt the relevant item:

More at the link, reader. Some funnier than this.

Also of note:

• Look out below! You may have seen dire news stories in the MSM about SNAP ("food stamps") changes causing mass starvation. Here's an antidote from Jack Salmon: SNAP Enrollment Is Finally Falling.

  For the first time since the pandemic-era expansion of the welfare state, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) is beginning to shrink back toward normalcy.

  Between January 2025 and January 2026, the number of individuals receiving SNAP benefits declined by nearly 4.3 million. Roughly 3.5 million of that decline occurred after the passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) in July 2025.

  However:

  Even after the recent drop in enrollment, SNAP participation remains approximately 1.7 million individuals above pre-pandemic levels. Meanwhile, the average cost per household (adjusting for inflation) is still about 18 percent higher than before the pandemic.

  Jack provides context you may not have seen elsewhere, and recommends further changes, including:

  [C]urrent reporting rules only require disclosure of payment errors exceeding $57 per individual. That threshold should be eliminated entirely so that all payment errors are disclosed and tracked. Since states will now bear part of the financial burden of erroneous payments, greater transparency would strengthen incentives to identify and prevent errors.

  SNAP is a prime example of Milton Friedman's observation:

  People who spend Other Peoples' Money on Other People simply lack incentive to do it efficiently or even wisely.

• Magic 8-Ball Says: Oh, Probably. Jeff Maurer wonders: Are We Blaming Phones for Our Bullshit?

  A new study about the effects of phone bans in schools is out, and if you’re thinking “I’d like to have the study summarized by a comedian who browsed some articles about the study after a few beers,” you’re in luck. The study said that bans have a minimal impact on student behavior and test scores. That doesn’t mean that the bans are a bad idea — the solution isn’t to un-ban phones and have teachers try to teach sine and cosine to a classroom full of students browsing Pornhub. But phone bans aren’t a magic bullet; there remains no easy solution to our nation’s Dull Child Epidemic.

  Becoming a parent has made me familiar with the discourse around phones (and screens, generally). In some circles, saying “I let my child have a phone” is like saying “I let my child have a machete,” or “My child runs an adorable li’l meth lab in his room.” My boy is three, the big decisions around phones are well in the future, but it’s practically received wisdom among my peers that the culprit for everything from anxiety to depression to restless leg syndrome has been found, and it’s smartphones.

  But I wonder if the story is not so simple. As much as I take the points of those who worry a lot about phones — and I’ll address some of those points in a minute — I’m becoming something of a skeptic. Already, by the standards of the ultra-blue place where I live, I’m practically the “let the kid have a BB gun” dad. I agree that kids are subject to some bad, new pressures, and that phones are part of the story, but I think we often often misunderstand and misrepresent phones’ role in that story.

  I'm also well out of the demographic that has to worry about this. But if you're not…

• Just do it, Trump. Listen toe Erick Erickson: Finish Him.

  It is time for the President of the United States to finish the job in Iran. Yesterday, the President engaged in what he called a “love tap.” He needs to love the Iranian leadership to death.

  If we’re going to pay high gas prices, at least make it worth it. Allowing Iran’s Islamic revolutionary leadership to fester will cost more lives long term. The Saudis, Kuwaitis, Emiraties, and others are furious that the President has pulled punches, even after Iran bombed an oil export facility in the United Arab Emirates.

  The President and his team seem desperate for a deal. In the process, Iran is learning that if it holds the United States’s economy hostage, they can have their way with us. The only way to show them otherwise is for us to finish them.

  I think Congress should quickly authorize that, too. Constitution, y'all.

My eyebrows got raised by this tweet:

This table shows the 15 most expensive metropolitan areas in the United States, where the real value of $100 is the lowest.

See the value of $100 in your area: https://t.co/tag06IIWDk pic.twitter.com/k0nSQFixan

— Tax Foundation (@TaxFoundation) May 6, 2026

All those California locales rank pretty high on the unaffordable scale. But down there in twelfth place:

Boston-Cambridge-Newton, MA-NH (Metropolitan Statistical Area)

See that "NH" at the end? The Census Bureau includes New Hampshire's Rockingham and Strafford counties in this "Metropolitan Statistical Area". And Strafford County contains the town of Rollinsford (estimated population 2,626). Where I live. The most populous towns in the county are Dover (about 33K), Rochester (33K), Durham (15K), and Somersworth (12K).

None of these places are to be confused with Boston. Cambridge, or Newton.

And yet, the Census Bureau does confuse them.

This sometimes causes outright deception. See this Antiplanner post from last month: Where Americans Ride Transit. The Antiplanner posts a US map that purports to show "where more than 5 percent of Americans take transit to work." And yes, although the transit-using blobs on the map are tiny compared to the rest of the country, the "Boston" blob does extend up here.

And, of course, there's no way that more than 5% of the populace here take transit to work.

Who do I write at the Census Bureau to get us taken out of the Boston MSA?

Also of note:

• Apparently there's been some firing during the cease-fire. Very Orwellian. But Andy McCarthy strikes a blow for clarity and constitutionality: Congress Should Authorize Military Force Against Iran. (NR gifted link)

  President Trump’s dereliction in failing to prepare the nation for war with Iran, and his inconstancy about the war’s objectives — and even regarding whether it is, in fact, a war and whether it is, in fact, ongoing — have predictably had harmful effects. It’s past time for Congress to assert its constitutional power and authorize force, at least to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. No matter what one thinks of how we got here, Iran cannot be allowed to annex a vital global trade route whose closure is hurting Americans.

  Because of the administration’s poor messaging, the real good done by American combat operations has been obscured: the significant setbacks to Iran’s nuclear weapons ambitions and ballistic missile capabilities, the virtual destruction of its navy and air defenses, and the infliction of economic distress that undermines its capacity to abet its jihadist proxies. To repeat what I’ve said before, politically speaking, a security win can look and feel like a loss if Iran appears to hold the whip hand.

  The Strait of Hormuz was open to free international trade on February 28 and, as a result of the war, Iran has closed it. Because Trump failed the basic duty of communicating the national security risks, the American people did not feel a threat from Iran. Now, however, they now feel financial pain inflicted by Iran in what they perceive as a war Trump gratuitously started. The most visible, tangible outcome of the war, as far as most Americans are concerned, is that Iran now dominates the strait. That’s politically catastrophic.

  You would think that Trump might realize he's being played.

• 

  An even more pointless and illegal war. And, as Kevin D. Williamson points out, an expensive one: The Cost of Forever Trade Wars. (Dispatch gifted link) (The Reason mag cover for June 2026 over there on your right refers to Iran, but it's applicable here too. Maybe more so.)

  Donald Trump campaigned against open-ended wars but as president has launched at least two of them so far: his unconstitutional war on Iran and his unconstitutional war—possibly more consequential in the long term—on the U.S. economy.

  Trump may have lost his tariffs case in front of the Supreme Court, but his destructive, costly, and idiotic campaign against low prices continues.

  The administration is seeking novel legal authority—much of it implausible—to keep up some version of the import taxes Trump had imposed under the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) until the 6-3 ruling in Learning Resources Inc. v. Trump clarified for the administration the question, supposedly tricky, of whether a law that does not so much as mention tariffs gives the president the unilateral power to effectively rewrite the U.S. tax code on the fly according to his own liking. And so tariff rates were adjusted in response to such world-shaking events as a few words of criticism from the prime minister of Switzerland, a person who does not—I am still convinced this part matters, at least a little bit—actually exist.

  Worse, the trade war doesn't actually blow up any bad guys, and we are all collateral damage.

• Among the many things you can expect to get worse… Christian Britschgi adds to the list: Expect the data center backlash to get worse. With an opening paragraph that will bring a smirk to the face of any Simpsons fan:

  In a recent meeting of the Box Elder County Commission in Tremonton, Utah, a man yelled at the cloud.

  "It's false. This is not real information," shouted an attendee at the assembled commissioners, who were considering a massive new data center project backed by celebrity billionaire Kevin O'Leary, in a video posted to X by progressive group More Perfect Union.

  Kevin O'Leary's massive data center was approved by a county commission in Utah last night.
  
  At 40,000 acres, it would be 2.5x the size of Manhattan.
  
  The commission approved the proposal despite opposition from hundreds of locals. pic.twitter.com/1pF9JZD30w

  — More Perfect Union (@MorePerfectUS) May 5, 2026

  Needless to say, there's a lot of populist anti-tech panic involved. That never works out well.

• You might not have expected the WSJ to weigh in on this topic. Nevertheless, Rob Henderson's column in their Free Expression newsletter gloats: Free Will Is Undefeated.

  A fashionable view of human behavior holds that because everything has a cause, no one is truly responsible for their actions.

  In his 2023 bestseller “Determined,” Stanford neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky argues that free will is an illusion. “We are nothing more or less than the cumulative biological and environmental luck, over which we had no control, that has brought us to any moment,” he writes. Author and podcaster Sam Harris has spent 15 years making the same case to a popular audience. “Our wills are simply not of our own making,” he writes in “Free Will” (2012). “Thoughts and intentions emerge from background causes of which we are unaware and over which we exert no conscious control. We do not have the freedom we think we have.”

  Common sense pushes back. Consider an example from the psychologist Paul Bloom. Imagine a man who thrashes violently in his sleep and accidentally strikes his wife, breaking her nose. They both wake up, and he is horrified and ashamed. Now imagine a second man who resents his wife and wants to hurt her. He waits until she is asleep then hits her in the face. When she wakes up, he pretends it was an accident. The difference between these two men is obvious. Any legal or moral system that doesn’t recognize that would collapse.

  True enough. Rob hits many of the points I've made myself over the years. (See my take on the Sapolsky book here, and my report on the Harris book here.)

  Unfortunately, Rob's column goes astray:

  Stuart Doyle offers a useful analogy that challenges this claim. Suppose we ask whether an apple is red. The determinist looks closer. He realizes the apple is nothing but atoms. Because no individual atom is red, he concludes the apple can’t really be red. The error is obvious. Color exists at the scale of the apple, not at the scale of an atom.

  Ackshually, apples are red down to nearly the atomic scale. Their color occurs thanks to idaein molecules, which preferentially reflect red light, thanks to their tasteful arrangement of elecrons. (Which is purely accidental, and in no way caused by Intelligent Design, don't even think of such a thing!)

  A better analogy (I don't know if Stuart Doyle makes it) is life itself. Living organisms are made of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, phosphorus, and sulfur; none of those elements are alive.

  Even when you start combining them into proteins and nucleic acids: those aren't alive either.

  But eventually, keep building, and somewhere along the line, you get to something sufficiently complex and functional enough to be deemed "living".

  I think free will is something like that. Determinists like Sapolsky and Harris look at neurons synapses, etc., and because they don't see free will there, they assume it doesn't and can't exist. There should be a word for that kind of fallacy.

Jonathan Turley cheers for the Colorblind Constitution: The Roberts Court Ends a ‘Sordid Business’.

It is indeed.

At the WSJ, Jason Riley urges the Gerrymander to not let the screen door hit it on its way out: Good Riddance to Racial Gerrymandering. (WSJ gifted link)

To repeat: It's a nasty business indeed, and you have to be a Democrat cheerleader to like it. But as to today's headline: all this aggravation could have been obviated if we had implemented the crackpot scheme I proposed back in 2017. Essentially: the problem with the current system is that it's "winner take all".

To take an egregious example from the 2024 election: In California's 13th congressional district Adam Gray (D) defeated John Duarte (R) by 187 votes out of over 200,000 cast. A statisical 50/50 tie, but Gray goes to Washington, casting one whole vote there. The 105,367 voters who favored Duarte get nothing, no representation at all.

Pun Salad solution: send both Gray and Duarte to DC, with a half-vote each. (And repeat for the other 434 Congressional districts.)

Also of note:

• Me too. Erick Erickson comments on the (apparently very fluid) situation in and around Iran: I Hope I Was Not Wrong.

  I have to admit it. I hope I was not wrong, but I’m starting to wonder if I was wrong.

  I support bombing Iran and destroying the regime. I presumed there had to be a plan, and I have had friends with deep roots inside the Trump Administration tell me this was all very much an impulse play by the President flying by the seat of his pants.

  I did not believe it. But as I see it playing out now, I am wondering if they really were right. There never really was a plan. There was a hope to bomb them into submission. The President saw Venezuela and was on top of the world.

  So he decided to use the American military against Iran. Until he decided otherwise.

  I sympathize. And kind of feel the same way. Things could still work out, but that's what you get when the Commander-in-Chief operates on narcissistic whim.

• Can we call them RINOs yet? Eric Boehm describes some fiscal shenanigans: Republicans Want To Borrow Every Single Dollar of the $72 Billion Bill To Fund ICE and Trump's Ballroom.

  Senate Republicans have unveiled their plan to fund immigration enforcement and President Donald Trump's ballroom, and the proposal might take fiscal irresponsibility to a new record high.

  The two bills included in the package call for spending nearly $72 billion. Remarkably, every single dollar would be borrowed.

  That's according to the Congressional Budget Office's (CBO) analysis of the bill, which was released on Wednesday morning. According to the CBO, the bill would direct $38 billion to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and spend $26 billion on various programs run by Customs and Border Protection (CBP).

  And they want to do this via "reconciliation", hoping to bypass a Democrat filibuster. Some see that as a problem:

  That process was "originally designed to make deficit reduction easier. Republicans are using it to make deficit expansion easier," wrote Dominik Lett, a fiscal policy analyst for the Cato Institute, in an email to Reason.

  After reviewing the CBO's assessment, Lett confirmed that every single dollar in the spending bill will be borrowed. "They don't even attempt to include offsets," he wrote.

  I have never been more ashamed to be a registered Republican.

• Of course, the other side is worse. Jack Butler notes the latest from a totalitarian fanboy: Bernie the Dupe.

  Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders is worried about artificial intelligence. He wrote last month in the Journal—we publish a variety of viewpoints—that AI could “displace tens of millions of workers,” “threatens our privacy” and is “reshaping how we as human beings relate to one another.”

  Mr. Sanders’s economic concerns are consistent with the consistently wrong antiprogress socialism that has arisen before almost every wave of ultimately beneficial technological transformation. AI is currently propping up our tariff-addled economy. But the noneconomic potential of AI to drive further atomization, increase distrust and drown everything—politics, art, relationships—in a sea of slop is something worth at least discussing.

  None of these anxieties, however, are sufficient reason to trust the Chinese Communist Party. Yet that’s exactly what Mr. Sanders advocates. Recently he brought U.S. and Chinese AI experts to Capitol Hill to discuss the new technology. His rationale is that the “existential threat” it poses ought to get the two rival powers to lay down their arms and figure out how best to confront it. “We need to cooperate. We need dialogue,” he said.

  Jack provides a brief history of fellow-travelling. Bernie's just the latest.

At Reason, Jacob Sullum explains Why the Courts Will 86 the Flagrantly Unconstitutional Charges Against James Comey.

Even the most charitable interpretation would score this as a waste of time, government resources, and taxpayer money.

But I'm in no mood to be charitable this morning, and I'll kick it up a notch: it's an obvious (and yet another) violation of the presidential oath of office, which is pretty simple: a pledge to "preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States." Impeachable.

Also of note:

• And also impeachable… Jeffrey Blehar observes the obvious: Trump’s ‘Terminated’ Iran War Doesn’t Look It.

  Heads up folks, did you know that the Iran war is apparently over? Yes, on May 1 Trump sent a letter to Congress officially declaring the war “terminated.” On what grounds? Why the cease-fire, old chap, that’s what ended the war! More to the point, the war is now being declared “terminated” because time ran out for Donald Trump under the War Powers Resolution of 1973, which requires the president to terminate any military action within 60 days of beginning it, absent congressional approval.

  Perhaps Trump thought it wouldn’t take more than two months to remake the Middle East in his own image via aerial bombing campaign. So now the administration is arguing that the clock either paused on April 7 (when the cease-fire was nominally put into effect) or has stopped altogether, and it can simply be reset to zero if bombings resume. Lawmakers — Republicans as well as Democrats — are obviously displeased about this, but then again, it’s not as if lawmakers can force the Pentagon to withdraw the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln carrier group from the Arabian Sea right now, either. So the war is (1) already over; (2) liable to resume at any moment.

  Let’s set aside the twist — there might be a winning argument to be made at SCOTUS that the War Powers Act is an unconstitutional restriction of executive warmaking powers under Article II of the Constitution — because Trump isn’t making that argument right now either. He is instead claiming to be acting in accordance with the statute, by recourse to insultingly obvious semantic tricks.

  I'm a fan of blowing up Iranian bad guys, but I'm also a fan of the Constitution. And I'm not a fan of "insultingly obvious semantic tricks."

• A surprisingly poor article in the WSJ. I occasionally make the totally obvious points about my g-g-g-generation:

  1. People try to put us down.
  2. Just because we get around.

  But according to a WSJ news article, we are disappointing some by failing to die before we get old: The Great $110 Trillion Wealth Transfer Won’t Happen Any Time Soon. (WSJ gifted link)

  Older Americans are sitting on $110 trillion of wealth. Their heirs might not get it anytime soon.

  Financial advisory firms like to talk about a looming event called “the great wealth transfer,” where the huge and very wealthy baby-boomer generation dies off and their children inherit their money.

  But the process may be more of a slow drip than a sudden windfall. The two generations that hold the most wealth are baby boomers, who are between age 61 and 80, and Gen X, who are between 45 and 61.

  Executive summary: We boomers have a lot of investments that have done well lately; We spend money on longevity treatments; Some of us are getting "windfalls" from our parents; Some of us just leave our wealth to our spouses when we finally kick the bucket; And…

  But the article quotes an "expert" making a point you don't need to be an expert to make:

  “There’s no world in which a great wealth transfer does not happen. It’s just math,” said John Sabelhaus, a Brookings Institution economist and former Federal Reserve official who studies wealth. But, he adds, “There is a world in which it’s misunderstood.”

  The misunderstanding is never made exactly clear, but it seems to boil down to: the Boomers aren't dying as fast as some (unnamed) people expected. "It's just math", but nobody said the kids were that good at math.

  So: sorry, youngsters. You'll have to wait.

• Moral panic, anyone? Or just a power grab? At FIRE, John Coleman looks at The quiet push to control AI speech.

  Recent reports suggest the Trump administration is now considering new oversight for advanced AI models like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini. Few details have been finalized, but officials are reportedly discussing an executive order to create a government–industry working group. Another idea under consideration is a process for reviewing models before or around their release.

  As these talks move forward, they risk setting a troubling precedent for free expression.

  So, who do you trust? Boy, that's a toughie.

  I think the closer question is; who do I distrust more? Right at the top of my list: Republicans, Democrats, and government bureaucrats.

Via a link on Jim Geraghty's Morning Jolt newsletter yesterday:

I was assured that a fascist salute proved someone was a Nazi even if they didn't have the "Totenkopf" chiseled into their chest. pic.twitter.com/YcBUwEhMjx

— GoatFarmer (@S_W_Somerville) May 4, 2026

That's one response to Jon Favreau's efforts to obfuscate and excuse Maine's (probable) Democratic nominee to oppose Senator Susie Collins in November. Jim's response in text:

I'd like to say that New Hampshire successfully keeps the antisemites well out of positions of responsibility, but that's tough to do when The Times of Israel notes: NH lawmaker faces little pushback after Holocaust deniers testify to education commission.

Sabourin dit Choinière is from Seabrook. Here's hoping that voters send him crawling back under a rock in November.

Also of note:

• How can we miss her when she won't go away? I confess that James Freeman's headline surprised me: Kamala Is the Presidential Favorite (WSJ gifted link)

  A new Harvard/Harris poll finds that former Vice President Kamala Harris has opened up a significant lead in the race for the 2028 Democratic presidential nomination. Ms. Harris is the choice of 50% of Democrats surveyed, while her next closest competitor, Gov. Gavin Newsom (D., Calif.), gets the nod from just 22% of the donkeys. Bringing up the rear is a cast of characters each polling in single digits. Oddly, this new presidential polling momentum for Ms. Harris arrives just as some Democrats wonder out loud if she really should be running for governor of California. A Monday announcement makes one wonder if Ms. Harris is among them.

  As a counterpoint, the Lott/Stossel Election Betting Odds agglomeration of betting market data has her in a distant third spot (7.7% probability) to be the Democrat nominee, behind Newsom (27.6%) and AOC (9.9%).

  But "Other" is actually the front-runner, at 30.9%. So I think what the prediction markets are saying is … unclear. Yeah, we'll go with "unclear".

• What would it take to get us out of this fiscal mess? Reader, I know you've been asking. Kevin D. Williamson has your answer: All the Money in the World, and Then Some. (Dispatch gifted link)

  We finally really did it! You maniacs! You blew it up!

  From the numbers-monkeys over in the statistical department comes the news that U.S. government debt has crossed a red line: Debt held by the public now exceeds 100 percent of GDP, those figures being $31.27 trillion and $31.22 trillion, respectively.

  What that means is that if the federal government were somehow able to pass a tax that would confiscate 100 percent of the output of the U.S. economy for a year—if consumption somehow magically fell to $0.00 and Americans were able to do nothing else with their economic efforts except put their fruits toward the national debt—it would not be enough.

  Oh, don’t worry—it gets worse.

  Click on that gifted link, if necessary, to find out just how much worse.

  And in case you're wondering if KDW is telling us how he really feels, well…

  The bosses here at The Dispatch have asked me to keep the profanity to a minimum, so I am not going to write in plain English what it is that we are: Let’s just say that it is a problem we have not ducked.

Recently on the book blog:

This is third entry (and, according to the WSJ reviewer, the final entry) in Tana French's series featuring the protagonist Cal Hooper, a divorced Chicago ex-cop who has moved to the small Irish village of Ardnakelty.

Cal is somewhat less of a out-of-water fish in this book. He has accumulated a sorta-fiancee, Lena. And Trey, the semi-feral teenager in the previous books has become a sorta-daughter. But Cal feels, correctly, that situation is precarious on all counts. Ardnakelty runs on gossip and rumor, it seems. And that goes into full gear when young Rachel Holohan, goes missing; Cal finds her in a local river, an apparent suicide.

Which might have been the end of it, but Rachel was engaged to Eugene, son to Tommy Moynahan, a local rich bigshot. And it turns out that Tommy has a secret scheme in the works to mess with Ardnakelty's bucolic scenery. Did Rachel know too much about it?

Ms. French is one of the few writers that I consider to be auto-buys at Amazon. Here's a paragraph I snipped out of my Kindle version, describing the search for Rachel:

They have about two miles of road to cover, curving between dry stone walls and fields and the occasional farmhouse. They head back the way they came, sweeping the flashlight beams down the verges, over long grass and tangles of dead wildflowers. The dark is windless and silent; small things scuttle away at their approach, and watch from hiding as they pass. The air smells, more powerfully and intricately than by day, of ripe earth, sodden leaves, and manure. Far off, spread out across the fields, other small lights swing and zigzag. A long call comes to them faintly, too distant to hear the name, if they didn’t already know what it is.

I don't know about you, but those little tossed-off details, compactly told, put me there. It's only one example of how Ms. French describes characters and their environment. If you want to see a writer at the top of her game, there you go.

Katherine Mangu-Ward says yes because AI Companies Learn the Word No.

Fine, but that's a lot of organizations that you hope will be responsible, leakproof stewards of potentially dangerous information. But the folks at Anthropic are pretty smart, I assume they've considered that, and I suppose there are safeguards. Right?

Also of note:

• "Hey, sorry we killed your company." I assume none of the perps will be saying that anytime soon. The WSJ editorialists look at Spirit Airlines and the Antitrust Left. (WSJ gifted link)

  The demise of Spirit Airlines is a tragedy for its 15,000 or so employees, though at least taxpayers weren’t forced to pay for a bailout. But the airline’s closure shouldn’t pass without giving dubious credit to the main culprits: The antitrust theorists of the Biden Administration.

  Recall how Timothy Wu, Jonathan Kanter, Lina Khan and others on the left sought to revive long discredited theories of antitrust that view nearly all mergers as anti-competitive. Mr. Kanter tested that view on the airline industry, with disastrous results.

  I still watch Saturday Night Live, and their "Weekend Update" commentary was full of contempt for Spirit Airlines, who dared to offer bare-bones low-cost service to the plebes. You wouldn't have caught Colin Jost flying with the hoi polloi!

• It's Orwellian! Nicholas Clairmont is not a fan of The Inversion of ‘Animal Farm’. (archive.today link)

  George Orwell’s timeless classic Animal Farm, a “fairy story” aimed at young readers, has sold some 11 million copies worldwide since it was first published in 1945. Its allegorical subject, Soviet communism, is not subtle. After all, the book begins with a speech by a pig who stands in for Karl Marx and, after an egalitarian revolution by animals that take over the farm, features a power struggle between a Trotskyist pig and a Stalinist pig and ends with the pigs installed as dictators indistinguishable from the human overlords their revolution originally sought to do away with. According to Orwell's preface, not published until 1972, one of the four publishers who originally rejected the book explained to Orwell that the issue was that Animal Farm took as its subject the evils of a country that was then an ally of both Britain and the U.S. “If the fable were addressed generally to dictators and dictatorships at large then publication would be all right,” the publisher wrote. “But the fable does follow, as I see now, so completely the progress of the Russian Soviets and their two dictators, that it can apply only to Russia, to the exclusion of the other dictatorships.”

  This unnamed publisher may have been a patsy and a discredit to literary freedom, but at least he knew how to read at an eighth-grade level. Sadly, this is more than can be said for the makers of a new version of Animal Farm, directed by Andy Serkis, the actor and motion capture specialist famous for playing Gollum in The Lord of the Rings and Caesar in the Planet of the Apes franchise.

  It's been a long time since I read Animal Farm, and I had not read Orwell's preface linked above. An excerpt from the latter:

  I am well acquainted with all the arguments against freedom of thought and speech — the arguments which claim that it cannot exist, and the arguments which claim that it ought not to. I answer simply that they don’t convince me and that our civilisation over a period of four hundred years has been founded on the opposite notice. For quite a decade past I have believed that the existing Russian régime is a mainly evil thing, and I claim the right to say so, in spite of the fact that we are allies with the USSR in a war which I want to see won. If I had to choose a text to justify myself, I should choose the line from Milton:

  By the known rules of ancient liberty.

  The word ancient emphasises the fact that intellectual freedom is a deep-rooted tradition without which our characteristic western culture could only doubtfully exist. From that tradition many of our intellectuals are visibly turning away. They have accepted the principle that a book should be published or suppressed, praised or damned, not on its merits but according to political expediency. And others who do not actually hold this view assent to it from sheer cowardice. An example of this is the failure of the numerous and vocal English pacifists to raise their voices against the prevalent worship of Russian militarism. According to those pacifists, all violence is evil, and they have urged us at every stage of the war to give in or at least to make a compromise peace. But how many of them have ever suggested that war is also evil when it is waged by the Red Army? Apparently the Russians have a right to defend themselves, whereas for us to do [so] is a deadly sin. One can only explain this contradiction in one way: that is, by a cowardly desire to keep in with the bulk of the intelligentsia, whose patriotism is directed towards the USSR rather than towards Britain. I know that the English intelligentsia have plenty of reason for their timidity and dishonesty, indeed I know by heart the arguments by which they justify themselves. But at least let us have no more nonsense about defending liberty against Fascism. If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear. The common people still vaguely subscribe to that doctrine and act on it. In our country — it is not the same in all countries: it was not so in republican France, and it is not so in the USA today — it is the liberals who fear liberty and the intellectuals who want to do dirt on the intellect: it is to draw attention to that fact that I have written this preface.

  It was nice of Orwell to say that USA "liberals" did not fear liberty back in 1943. I'm pretty sure he couldn't say the same today.

Recently on the book blog:

Not quite what I expected. I was expecting from the title that there would be more stuff about … y'know, engineers. But instead…

The author, Paul M. Kennedy, looks at the specific "problems" that the Allies faced in World War II in order to achieve their eventual victory. Conveniently organized into chapters: "How to Get Convoys Safely Across the Atlantic"; "How to Win Command of the Air"; "How to Stop a Blitzkrieg"; "How to Seize an Enemy-Held Shore"; and "How to Defeat the 'Tyranny of Distance'". Each had its unique challenges, and each (indeed) was "problematic" in the early days of the war. For example, victory against Germany absolutely required that hundreds of thousands of men and massive supplies of food and weaponry be reliably supplied to Britain across the pond. But German U-Boats had dismaying amounts of success at sinking merchant ships, sometimes just off American shores. New anti-submarine warfare tactics had to be developed. And (yes) some technology was involved; for example, the cavity magnetron, invented just in time to make small radar sets practical enough to be installed in sub-hunting airplanes. Within a few years, it was pretty miserable to be a U-Boat crewman.

Kennedy's approach to "engineering" is broad, including more than gadgetry. It's a holistic approach: innovation and flexibility was required in developing new strategies, tactics, and logistics in addition to having workable and effective weaponry in place to defeat the baddies. There are a lot of good stories along the way. For example, Stewart Blacker, inventor of the Hedgehog anti-submarine mortar; he got his start as a "schoolboy in Bedford", designing a mortar that sent a projectile (a croquet ball) 300 yards into a tempting target (his school's headmaster's greenhouse).

Other technical innovations spelled doom for the Germans and Japanese. Putting a Rolls-Royce "Merlin" engine into a P-51 fuselage, replacing the original Allison engine, turned the plane from a dud to a stud. Redesign of the Soviet T-34 tank made it incredibly effective against Germany. The Seabees, whose motto was (and is) "We Build, We Fight." The B-29. And more.

So, a pretty good read, although Kennedy's discussion gets bogged down in plain old history at times.

Five years ago today, I (um) borrowed Mr. Ramirez's cartoon:

Alas, I can't pick on Joe Biden any more. And J. Wellington Wimpy is probably marginally less recognizable to 2026 readers as he was to 2021 readers.

But if you imagine replacing the "Biden" label with "Lisa K Sheldon", you'd have a pretty good illustration of her op-ed appearing in my lousy local newspaper recently, headlined: New Hampshire's family caregivers deserve real support. (You'll probably want to open that incognito.)

You will not be surprised to learn that by "support", Lisa means "money". Specifically, taxpayer money.

Yes, of course. Family members do this voluntarily. Sons and daughters might view it as only fair, remembering a past when parents were supporting them in a similar (often expensive) fashion. Spouses may simply view themselves as fulfilling that "in sickness and in health" vow, made years back, but never forgotten.

I'm as capitalist as the next guy, probably more than the next guy, but doesn't making this about money seem a little tawdry?

Lisa relies on a report from AARP: "Valuing the Invaluable 2026: Family Caregivers’ Contribution Reaches $1 Trillion". The AARP says a mere $4.4 Billion of that occurs in New Hampshire. So she advocates, among other things:

Financial relief. A state reimbursement program for transportation, home modifications, medical supplies, and lost wages would acknowledge what caregivers actually spend - and help keep them financially afloat.

Lisa keeps it vague, but $4.4 Billion would blow a pretty big hole in the state's budget. And (of course) I'm pretty sure that AARPites in other states are making similar pleas for "Financial relief." And (hey) why not make it a Federal program? We're only talking about a trillion! They'll gladly pay you Tuesday…

Also of note:

• Regime uncertainty. Peter Suderman makes an under-appreciated point: Even laws that haven't passed can have unintended consequences.

  If you follow public policy debates, you are probably familiar with the concept of unintended consequences. Laws or regulations implemented with good intentions can, over time, have unexpected, unintended negative effects, sometimes undermining or fully negating the good intention behind the rule.

  But even laws that have not actually passed can have unintended consequences. You can think of them as risk taxes, since they increase the costs of already-high-risk activities.

  Case in point, the Senate's housing bill. The bill is intended to address the nation's housing crisis, making home ownership easier and cheaper for ordinary Americans by increasing housing supply. It's a worthy goal, given that regulations, lawsuits, and price controls have left America with a dramatic housing shortage that has put home ownership out of reach for many. The bill contains a multitude of provisions intended to reduce the time and expense of building homes. A version of it passed the Senate in March with overwhelming support.

  The bill is not yet the law of the land, and it's possible it will change form. But even still, it's already causing developers to nix home-building projects.

  When I was a kiddo, one of the reasons presented for disliking capitalism was that businesses were so short-sighted, concentrating on making the current quarter look good, never planning for long-term sustainability.

  Nowadays, the shoe's on the other foot, and you don't hear that argument made much any more, at least not with a straight face.

• Not a Raymond Chandler title. At the Free Press, Jeff Giesea says hello to The Long Boomer Farewell. Doom is foreseen:

  Boomers, born between 1946 and 1964, are wealthier and healthier than any generation before them, deeply embedded in political, economic, and cultural power, and often understandably reluctant to step aside. They control 52 percent of U.S. household wealth, 40 percent of real estate value, and the majority of top political offices. Social Security and Medicare, which primarily benefit them, consume 40 percent of the federal budget. Twenty-four members of Congress are over 80. Harrison Ford is still carrying franchises.

  More fundamentally, the conditions for achieving closure no longer exist. The Greatest Generation’s departure unfolded inside a still-confident, still-cohesive America with solid institutions and younger leaders waiting in the wings. This farewell is happening inside a more fractured society simultaneously grappling with an AI revolution, geopolitical disorder, and a fiscal structure built for 1930s demographics. There is no Brokaw waiting to write the tribute. There may not even be a shared narrative to write.

  What there will be is enormous, grinding, multi-decade stress. America is just beginning to reckon with it.

  I'm (admittedly) a Boomer. And here's the thing with that "52 percent": we are not taking it with us. Whatever's remaining in our IRAs and bank accounts will be inherited. Our houses will not vanish. Jeff does not seem to have grasped this.

  He proposes "three fixes".

  First, honest entitlement reform. […]

  Excellent idea, probably a couple decades too late to avoid inevitable pain. Next?

  Second, greater support for young families.[…]

  Including "smarter incentives for family formation". Who's not in favor of being smarter?

  Third, political representation for young Americans.[…]

  Jeff bemoans the political power of AARP, and wishes there was a similar advocacy group for the younger generations. I agree with him that AARP is awful, but we don't need yet another group arguing for government goodies.

  Summary: read Jeff's article, pick and choose.

• Nothing to see here, even less to emulate. "RushBabe49" blogs at Calling-all-RushBabes ("Dedicated to the Memory of the Great Rush Limbaugh") and she asks and answers: *What’s going on in Washington State? Yeah, just the usual. She quotes a local news station reporting on high gas/diesel prices there:

  What Olympia reported in 2025: Starting July 1, the gas tax will rise from 49.4 cents to 55.4 cents per gallon. Diesel fuel taxes will also increase by 3 cents this year and another 3 cents in 2027. After mid-2026, both gas and diesel taxes will grow by 2% annually to keep pace with inflation.

  Um, fine, except "to keep pace with inflation" should really be "to cause additional inflation."

And, as a bonus, it's funny!

For the record, I first used the Scrooge McDuck thing back in 2014, and perhaps way too many times since then.

Also of note:

• His mistake was in being too transparent about his lack of transparency. Christian Britschgi's Reason Roundup mentions the catching of a medium-sized fish: Former Fauci aide charged with evading transparency laws during COVID.

  Former Fauci aide charged. Yesterday, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) announced that they'd charged David Morens, a former adviser to Anthony Fauci, with evading federal transparency laws while he worked behind the scenes to reinstate funding for risky coronavirus research in the midst of the pandemic.

  In a number of almost comically blunt emails that involved debates about the origins of COVID-19, Morens instructed his correspondents to communicate with him via his private Gmail account to avoid Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests and said he could provide information to Fauci via private channels.

  I would have deleted the "almost" qualifier to "comically", but I may be more easily amused than Christian.

• The Democrats are a big tent. Unless you support Israel. Nazi Tattoo? Hamas Defender? No Problem, Says Chuck Schumer. David Harsanyi looks at the latest news from the other side of the Salmon Falls:

  Maine Gov. Janet Mills has suspended her Senate campaign after failing to raise enough money to compete with socialist Graham Platner, who will now almost certainly face the perpetual centrist Republican Susan Collins in the general.

  Chuck Schumer and Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee Chairwoman Kirsten Gillibrand immediately backed Platner, proving that there's virtually nothing a leftist can say or do that is disqualifying.

  So, for 20 years, you've had a Totenkopf tattoo, which depicts a skull and crossbones, most famously used by Hitler's Schutzstaffel, the paramilitary organization that led, planned and executed the Holocaust?

  No problem!

  Just sayin': As previously mentioned, some Democrats are planning to enact Reichsfluchtsteuer laws to ensure their local Scrooge McDucks don't successfully escape with their property intact.

• Looking forward to Kristallnacht. Nellie Bowles' TGIF column this week could be a country song title: A New Tux on the Dirty Hilton Floor.

  → White House Correspondents’ Dinner: Is it even big news anymore when people try to assassinate Donald Trump? It’s a blip. Happens so often. I’ll scrape the back pages of America’s newspapers to find tidbits. Okay, so: It appears that the White House Correspondents’ Dinner was derailed after a crazed left-wing gunman allegedly stormed the hotel lobby to try to kill Trump. Shots were fired. Then he was stripped and rolled up in a tinfoil wrap like a little burrito (our copy editor tells me it’s a Mylar blanket). The only times a person gets wrapped in tinfoil are if they try to shoot the president or if they finish a marathon. Quite a delta between those endeavors, but the same outcome. And the dinner was canceled. Nothing to worry about.

  When journalists walked out of the ballroom, they were met by normal, run-of-the-mill protesters who carried signs reading: DEATH TO ALL OF THEM (a Wendy Williams reference). And DEATH TO TYRANT (the singular makes it more aggressive, I think). Everything is good. There is no relation between the protester holding a sign that says DEATH TO ALL OF THEM and the gunman inside trying to bring. . . death to all of them. He’s just mentally ill, I’m sure. There is no popular movement encouraging people to slaughter their political enemies en masse.

  I'm pretty sure this madness is temporary, as it has been in the past. Right?

• I was getting tired of all the nudging, anyway. Richard Morrison delivers a post mortem at the Daily Economy: After Nudging: The Rise and Fall of a Behavioral Economics Fad.

  The zeal of the convert can be a terrifying force to behold. An acolyte convinced of their own prior heresy will often be a more thorough inquisitor than the native-born believer. This dynamic may help explain why It’s on You by Nick Chater and George Loewenstein is so shrill and devoid of self-awareness.

  Having been leading researchers in behavioral psychology and economics who sought to manipulate individuals into ostensibly healthier and smarter choices — the world of “nudge” theory — they are doing a righteous penance by exposing the flaws of their former discipline. They have now decided that only government dictates can be relied upon to improve everything from retirement savings to climate change, and they are on a crusade to expose anyone who believes voluntary action by human beings can be useful for, well, anything.

  As the authors recount, the popularity of luring people into making the decisions that policymakers think best, rather than outright coercing them, really took off with the success of the book Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness (2008) by economist Richard Thaler and legal scholar Cass Sunstein. Sunstein would later hold an influential policy role as President Obama’s Administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, the chief White House overseer of proposed new federal regulations.

  Confession: I never got around to reading the Thaler/Sunstein book. Maybe if I'm in the mood for something "shrill and devoid of self-awareness", I'll try to find It's on You.

• From the archives… As it turns out, five years ago today, I posted a quote from Andrew C. McCarthy: Race Demagogues Poisoning Our Politics) (archive.today link)

  It is is eerily reminiscent of today's "discussions" about racial gerrymandering:

  Senator Tim Scott is entirely right: “America is not a racist country.” But America has a serious racial problem. Not a racism problem, a racial problem.

  We have a party in power whose strategy for remaining in power is to divide the country along racial lines. Democrats calculate that urban-centered racialist tribalism, amplified by media and pop-culture allies and underwritten by cowed corporations, can cast mainstream America as a deplorable bastion of white supremacism.

  The Republicans, the party out of power, generally lack Senator Scott’s confidence and tact in making the counter-case.

  The Department of Justice is a key to the Democrats’ strategy. The Obama-Biden administration politicized the law-enforcement and intelligence apparatus of our government, peddling with relish the progressive portrayal of an indelibly racist America. They’re ba-ack.

  … Indeed they are.

Veronique de Rugy writes her column on Marriage: The Inequality Gap We Should Be Talking About.

Yikes! I'm not a culture warrior either, but we are an outlier on the wrong tail of the distribution.

You can check out the AEI report here: Land of Opportunity: Advancing the American Dream

Also of note:

• Acording to John 8:32 and Caltech, it will also make you free. Erick W. Erickson is a fan: The Truth is Not a Disaster.

  The United States Supreme Court has released its decision in Louisiana v Callais. To listen to Democrats, including Barack Obama who just argued that a wildly drawn partisan redistricting scheme in Virginia was “fair,” is to hear hysterics lying to whip partisans into a frenzy. A few days after a progressive activist, inflamed by leftwing rhetoric attempted a mass assassination of the President and his cabinet in Washington, perhaps Democrats should rein in their lies.

  The Supreme Court said, plainly, that states cannot draw legislative districts based on race. The several states cannot draw districts to be predominantly white to preclude black voters from representation. The several states also cannot draw districts to be predominantly black to preclude white voters from representation. The constitution requires a color-blind society.

  Fifty-eight black men and women serve in the United States House of Representatives. A majority of them represent districts where white voters outnumber black voters. The idea that black Americans cannot get elected to Congress without majority-minority districts is, here in the twenty-first century, nonsense. The same racism that led Democrats to believe black Americans need affirmative action to get ahead, led them to believe black Americans need racially discriminatory congressional districts to get elected. The data shows otherwise.

  What would color-blind Congressional district line-drawing look like? Gee, you might have candidates who would not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

  Obligatory cheap shot: no wonder Democrats are so upset about it.

• And so do I. Jesse Singal debates a game show host: I Completely Disagree With Ken Jennings About Experts. It's in reference to

  Jesse Singal: “I don’t understand why all these experts with degrees keep disagreeing with me. So demoralizing. What could the explanation be??”
  
  [image or embed]

  — Ken Jennings (@kenjennings.bsky.social) March 4, 2026 at 12:14 PM

  (That's my first, and possibly last, embedding a BlueSky post. Hope it works for you.)

  Jesse's disagreement begins:

  I need to engage in an annoying bit of pre-explaining (presplaining), because I deleted the tweet that precipitated all of this. I’ll relegate a fuller explanation to a footnote, but the short version is I did not mean to imply I favored the Ken Paxton policy in question. Rather, my post was a response to Jack Turban’s claim that there is a clear scientific consensus on the subject of youth gender transition — a claim he was not making for the first time.

  Jennings, of course, got famous as a wildly successful contestant on, and then as the host of, a game show where almost every question has a single correct answer. (Well, it’s Jeopardy!, so technically every answer has a single correct question.)

  Unfortunately, a sizable subset of the progressive world, in my experience, believes that extremely complex scientific disputes are more or less like Jeopardy! What’s the answer to a question? If there’s any ambiguity you consult a panel of judges — The Experts. Whatever The Experts say is the truth of the matter, and you can win an argument by citing the existence of an expert, or experts, who agree with whatever claim you’re promoting.

  I think Jesse has the better of this argument, but you (of course) are welcome to make up your own mind.

  I followed Ken Jennings' initial run on Jeopardy! with amazement and admiration. He has turned his quick wit and general inoffensiveness into a successful (reported $4 million/year) second career in hosting the show. I was, in fact, kind of a Jennings fanboy, even getting his signature at a book-signing appearance up in Maine.

  That all turned around back in 2014 when Andrew Breitbard died. See Patterico. It turns out if you encounter Ken "in the wild", as Jesse did, you'll discover he's got kind of a mean streak toward people who disagree with his ideology, and that extends to mocking people who died.

• 

  Which brings me to… Ron Bailey's review of Helen Pearson's recent book, Beyond Belief, Amazon link at your right: The evidence revolution: Why 'take nobody's word for it' really matters.

  "Nullius in verba" is the official motto of the world's oldest national academy of sciences, the Royal Society of London. Usually translated as "Take nobody's word for it," the slogan represents a commitment to empirical evidence and experimental proof over reliance on authority, dogma, or tradition.

  In Beyond Belief, the award-winning science journalist Helen Pearson writes an engrossing history of the modern "evidence revolution." That movement aims to draw on rigorous research to figure out what works in fields ranging from medicine to management to education to policing to conservation. As Pearson makes shockingly clear, many decisions in these fields are still based on anecdotes, the opinions of authority figures, and conventional wisdom.

  Pearson illustrates the dangerous failures of conventional wisdom with a story about Benjamin Spock's vastly influential The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care. Apparently relying on the authority of the eminent pediatrician Paul Woolley, Jr., Spock revised his book in 1958 to say parents should place their infants face down to sleep to avoid choking on their vomit. Incidents of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) increased, even as evidence accumulated that face-down sleeping correlated with a much higher risk of SIDS. It was not until after a 1990 study showed that SIDS infants were nearly nine times more likely to have been sleeping face-down that a public health campaign advised parents to lay their sleeping infants on their backs. SIDS deaths dropped nearly 70 percent.

  I'm really old, so my parents went unadvised by Dr. Spock, and I survived my infancy.

  Going with "Nullius in verba", by the way, is the Feynman quote I've been overusing since encountering it in one of his books: "Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts."

  Sounds as if Ken Jennings could profit from reading the Pearson book.

• But the position has a long tradition of existence! At Cato, Jeffrey A. Singer notes The Endless Search for a Surgeon General We Don’t Need. Jeffrey notes that the Trump Administration is withdrawing its second nominee for the position, now going with number three, Dr. Nicole Saphier.

  At the beginning of this month, I wrote. “America Has Gone More Than a Year Without a Surgeon General—Has Anyone Noticed?” With Dr. Saphier’s credentials requiring Senate scrutiny and confirmation, it might be two years before America finally gets to find out who will be “the nation’s doctor.” But as the 70s rock group Humble Pie famously said, we “don’t need no doctor.”

  As I’ve written before, this exercise is unnecessary. My colleagues and I explained in a Cato policy analysis nearly a year ago that the Office of the Surgeon General and the Public Health Service Commissioned Corps, which the office oversees, are unnecessary relics. The surgeon general has drifted from an apolitical public health role into a politicized platform, weighing in on issues far beyond its proper scope—from gun control to social policy—thereby undermining trust in legitimate health functions.

  The Surgeon General and his retinue was apparently also responsible for the GOVERNMENT WARNING you and I have been ignoring on our beer, wine, and liquor packaging for the last 36 or so years.

  I had some fun with that here and here.