May
8
2026

News Flash, Census Bureau: Rollinsford, NH Isn't In Boston

My eyebrows got raised by this tweet:

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.

    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.


Last Modified 2026-05-08 12:16 PM EDT