Pun Salad

My thoughts on Mr. Ramirez's cartoon: Trusting government to "help" us raise our kids is inherently crazy.

Also of note:

• Fascism: Is there nothing it can't do? Ann Althouse embeds:

  Hollywood actress Hannah Einbinder blames “fascism” for women wanting to be slim.
  
  “As we see a rise in fascism, there is a direct correlation with thinness to make women take up less space.” pic.twitter.com/0VTlRFqe2e

  — Oli London (@OliLondonTV) August 30, 2026

  Ann headlines Hannah Einbinder's "fashion hot take": "As we see a rise in fascism, there is a direct correlation with thinness to make women take up less space."

  Of course, she's getting trashed on X. She's "trending." That's why I saw it. I don't really know her, but I see she's highly praised for her role in "Hacks," and also that she's the daughter of Laraine Newman.

  Anyway, it's cheap and easy to go after an actress who expresses any opinion that seems to require intelligence and background knowledge. I would prefer to isolate what she said and explore the various issues there: […]

  My disjointed reactions:

  • Ann has (as always) hangs some worthwhile thoughts on Ms. Einbinder's slight allegation. The commenters there are pretty good too.
  • But Ann misses Ms. Einbinder's hand motion when she asserts a direct correlation, lending it a further faux profundity.
  • Longtime readers (if there are any out there) will be unsurprised by my usual quote from George Orwell's 1950 essay, "Politics and the English Language":

    The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable’.

  • I did not know that Ms. Einbinder was Laraine Newman's daughter.
  • She's talking with the star of the HBO "comedy" series Hacks, Jean Smart. I watched a number of episodes of that show… until I realized that I'd watched three episodes in a row without laughing once.

• But what about Total Boomer Luxury Communism? Andrew G. Biggs goes to the WaPo to freak out my fellow Boomers: The rich don’t need that retirement check.

  Federal spending on retirement benefits is running riot. Social Security swallows nearly a quarter of the federal budget and is less than a decade away from insolvency. The government loses hundreds of billions per year on tax breaks for retirement savings.

  And who gets most of this money? It isn’t the most vulnerable seniors. It’s the richest.

  The wealthiest fifth of households receives 38 percent of taxpayer dollars spent on Social Security and retirement tax preferences, more than the bottom 60 percent. But Congress can solve the problem by capping federal retirement benefits at middle-class levels. The change would eliminate most of Social Security’s funding gap, reduce federal deficits and improve economic growth — all without threatening low- and middle-income seniors.

  Biggs proposes a $24K per-person yearly cap on Social Security benefits. The AI summary of the (as I type) 2419 comments says this recommendation "has sparked significant backlash among readers."

  Even though I'd be OK with it, I doubt it will happen. Remember the freakout over the (comparatively minor) cutback in the state and local tax (SALT) deduction? This would be a much bigger freakout.

• The old aphorism applies: "If it weren't for double standards, [fill in your political opponents] would have no standards at all." But John Tierney explores The Political Violence Double Standard.

  

  When a leftist turns violent, Democratic politicians and their media allies offer a familiar response: yes, this is terrible, but right-wing violence is the greater threat. They have made that claim for decades, and it has always rested on a dubious premise.

  The premise depends on statistics compiled by advocacy groups that exclude a vast catalog of left-wing violence—from the George Floyd riots to murders committed by pro-Palestinian activists and attacks on synagogues, Catholic churches, Tesla dealerships, and ICE facilities. Meanwhile, conservatives are routinely held responsible for the actions of violent loners, drug dealers, and conspiracy theorists with no coherent political program. Deranged anti-Semites, racists, incels, and antigovernment extremists get classified as right-wing, even when their targets span both parties.

  John quotes Hayek extensively, and also refers to Sean McMeekin’s To Overthrow the World: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Communism. Which I've grabbed via Interlibrary Loan via the University Near Here. And you, reader, should feel free to use the Amazon link at your right. My report is coming at some point! Stay tuned!

• Speaking of Hayek, what road are we on again? The WSJ editorialists note some full-speed-ahead socialism: Trump Takes the Oil in Venezuela. (WSJ gifted link)

  President Trump has long said he favors “taking the oil” when the U.S. intervenes overseas, and now he is doing so in extraordinary fashion. His deal announced late Friday with unelected President Delcy Rodríguez for rights to 65 billion barrels of Venezuelan oil reserves looks less like a normal commercial transaction than it does the famous scene of U.S. businessmen meeting with the Cuban strongman in “The Godfather Part II.”

  “This Historic Transaction MORE THAN DOUBLES American Oil Reserves, greatly increases our Oil Supply, and will substantially lower Gas Prices for all Americans, long into the future,” Mr. Trump wrote on Truth Social. He said he’ll use Venezuelan oil to refill the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve that has been extensively tapped by him and Joe Biden.

  Okay, so it's more like The Godfather than it is The Road to Serfdom? Okay, fine I guess.

I can't say that I haven't walked into a room like this:

Who broke Farnsworth? pic.twitter.com/uEtDd7ursC

— Futurama on Hulu (@futurama_hulu) August 19, 2026

The new season of Futurama is in full swing. It's about average for the series. Which makes it better than just about anything else on the tube these days.

And, in a stunning show of unwarranted optimism, I've already received my 2027 Futurama Calendar from Amazon. Fingers crossed!

Don't even get me started on Star Trek: Strange New Worlds!

Oh, wait, you did. Well the first episode of the new season was good, everything else has been a horrible embarrassment.

Also of note:

• When are they going to stop calling it the New Republic? Virginia Heffernan takes to its virtual pages to take a look at our oddball state: New Hampshire’s Senate Race Leans Dem, but the State Is—Well, You Know.

  Of all the American political traditions we’ve lost in Trump times, one of them never got its moment of silence: “As New Hampshire goes, so goes the nation.”

  That chestnut rested on New Hampshire’s status as host of the first presidential primary election. When I was growing up there, we earnestly believed our parents were a solid-gold prediction market. Whoever they picked would land on the national ticket. New Hampshire was the belle of the primary season ball then, and many rural kids got their first taste of politics when they spotted George W. Bush or Barack Obama campaigning in a local Grange hall.

  Heck, I shook Ronald Reagan's hand at UNH's Snively Arena in 1976! And Jack Kemp's at the Dover Shop 'n Save (now Hannaford) in 1988! Things are different now.

  Anyway, Virginia does a decent job of analyzing this year's Senate race. And waits for her final paragaph for …

  That impulse might point to Pappas, who defends trans rights, for example, because “I’m from a state that cherishes liberty and freedom, [and I] want to make sure that the government is not interfering with how you live your life.” Those words, more than any other, are music to the ears of the Granite State. New Hampshire may give up its first primary but never, ever its awesomely incendiary slogan, “Live free or die.”

  … the inevitable LFOD reference.

• We're also known for our loons. I've been shamefully lax in looking at the candidates on my ballot for the upcoming primary. My excuse: even for the contested races, there are candidates who are considered prohibitive favorites (Ayotte, Sununu, DiLorenzo).

  But New Hampshire's ballot-access rules for candidates are very light. If you have $100, or 200 signatures on a petition, you too can run for US Senate!

  So we have eight candidates to choose from. Among them are some perennials. For example, Tom Alciere. The Laconia Daily Sun wrote him up a few days ago: Alciere makes bid for Senate with non-traditional platform. The opening sounds promising…

  LACONIA — Tom Alciere has run as a Republican, Democrat, and an independent in previous races. This time, he's running as the “anti-Trump” Republican, vying for the open U.S. Senate seat.

  Alciere is running on a number of non-traditional views, with ideas to open borders entirely, legalize all drugs, abolish public school, abolish zoning, and repeal “all other unjust laws.” He also voiced opposition to rights for the LGBTQ+ community.

  Well, except for that LGBTQ+ thing. From further in the article:

  He was elected to the Statehouse in 2000, representing Hillsborough’s 29th district. He resigned after only about a month, after publicly supporting violence, including murder, against police.

  […]

  Alciere has run for office unsuccessfully on numerous occasions, including U.S. Senate Republican Primary in 2004; the 2006 state Senate Republican Primary; the 2008 U.S. Senate Republican Primary; the 2010 U.S. Senate Republican Primary; the 2016 U.S. Senate Republican Primary; the 2018 Libertarian Primary for Congressional District 2; the U.S. Senate Democratic Primary in 2020; and the 2022 Republican Primary for Congressional District 1.

  His campaign website has more.

  Back in 2018 , I linked to Brian Doherty's Reason article about Alciere's troubles with NH's Libertarian Party: Candidate Kicked Out of New Hampshire Libertarian Party Nonetheless on House Primary Ballot as a Libertarian.

• Tom's not alone on Loon Lake. Also on the ballot is Mary Maxwell. According to her website, she's "run in several elections". She was on my Presidential Primary ballot back in 2020 and also in 2024.

  Mary also has a substack, where she seems reasonably active.

  I think it's fair to say that Mary's never met a conspiracy theory that she didn't embrace. The devastating 2003 fires on Maui? Caused by directed energy weapons!

  And I still have fond memories of our back-and-forth in the comment section of her Granite Grok article about the Boston Marathon bombers: It Is Completely Impossible To NOT Acquit Tsarnaev.

  Reader, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was not acquitted; he's currently on death row at the SuperMax prison in Colorado.

EFFECTIVE IMMEDIATELY: Lake Ontario is renamed to LAKE AMERICA! 🇺🇸 pic.twitter.com/ZFww8PexiW

— The White House (@WhiteHouse) August 27, 2026

I'm just gonna quote Jeffrey Blehar: Lake America? Spare Us.

I concur. If he doesn't want to do President-stuff, then he should quit and toss the Air Force One keys over to JD. Who wouldn't be great, or even good, but he might take the job more seriously.

Also of note:

• Nice try on that Constitution-trashing thing, Steve. Back in 2024, I noted the effort of the Bow (New Hampshire) School District to ban pink armbands emblazoned with "XX" from the spectator stands at a soccer match. My headline: They're Not Really Getting the LFOD Thing in Bow, New Hampshire.

  I speculated that "the most probable outcome will be some expensive litigation paid for by Bow taxpayers, which Bow will lose."

  Ah, but I did not foresee that the litigation would first go before United States District Court Judge Steven McAuliffe (Christa's husband). NH Journal:

  [Judge McAulliffe] ruled Bow High School has the right to ban parents from wearing pink XX wristbands to girls’ soccer games to show their opposition to allowing biological males to compete against females. The judge said the protests weren’t protected speech, and he accused the parents of “harassing” individual trans-identifying athletes.

  … and I noted his decision appeared to be 1A-problematic.

  So now I get to say "toldya so". In the College Fix: First Circuit rebukes judge who ruled parents can’t wear ‘XX’ wristbands to protest boys in girls’ sports.

  The First Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously ruled against the judge who sided with a school district in forbidding parents from wearing “XX” wristbands to protest males playing in female sports.

  The case has been remanded back to Judge Steve, so we'll see what happens there.

• "Insane Circumcision Analogy" would be a good name for a rock band. But instead it's in the headline of a David Harsanyi column: El-Sayed's Insane Circumcision Analogy.

  "Sex changes for minors. Do you support that?" Fox News host Jesse Watters recently asked Michigan Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed.

  "So you think it's OK for a parent to slash his kid's ding-a-ling off?" Watters finally interjects.

  "Are you circumcised?" El-Sayed asked.

  "Circumcision's different than castration," Watters shot back.

  "It's a problem that you think you get to decide what happens between a parent, a doctor, and a patient," El-Sayed argued. "I'm just saying that, yes, circumcision is surgery on a kid's ding-a-ling."

  Fun fact: "My Ding-a-Ling" was Chuck Berry's only number one single.

• Those pesky jets. Nellie Bowles' TGIF, among other things, notes some Orwellian doings up north:

  Anyway, another reason to invade Canada: the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) has issued new guidelines for how to report on September 11th. Here’s from the internal memo:

  “Do not refer to the Sept. 11 attacks as terrorist attacks. The hijackings led to passenger jet crashes in Washington, D.C., Pennsylvania, and Manhattan. The World Trade Center (WTC in second reference) was destroyed.” The memo was reportedly authored by Basem Boshra, senior director of journalistic standards and public trust at CBC News.

  “The hijackings led to passenger jet crashes.” By next year it’ll be that it was just a total accident, a setback for passenger plane safety. After that, it’ll have never happened.

  If you want a picture of the future, imagine a snowshoe stamping on a human face— forever.

The latest xkcd:

Mouseover: "You legs may have a comparative advantage at running, but we arms have a competitive advantage at swinging hammers, so unless you accept that we're the dominant limbs and stop hogging the oxygen, that running advantage won't be around for long."

I'm very sure President Trump would not get the metaphor.

Also of note:

• A safe assertion from Don Boudreaux. He posts a letter he sent to the WSJ: Bill Gates's Imagination Is Not Reality.

  Background: Gates wrote a longish article on his "Gates Notes" website: The choices we make about AI now are critical. The WSJ summarized: Bill Gates Issues Warning on AI Rollout’s Impact. Three Takeaways From His 5,784-Word Essay (WSJ gifted link)

  Here's Don's LTE, making sense:

  You report that Bill Gates “issued a stark warning about AI’s risks to employment and the human condition” (“Three Takeaways From Bill Gates’s 5,784-Word Warning on AI: ‘There Is No Plan’,” August 26). He complains about AI that “we are not preparing for it,” for he doesn’t “see evidence that leaders, experts and communities are confronting the challenges adequately.” And to slow the adoption of AI, Mr. Gates wants to tax AI tokens and bots.

  A far more appropriate warning is against the hubris of Mr. Gates. Because he personally cannot imagine how people free of government coercion will creatively experiment and discover ways of dealing with economic change brought on by AI, he arrogantly presumes that such experimentation and discovery won’t occur. His poor imagination combines with his apparent ignorance of economic history – a history replete with examples of individuals in free societies anticipating challenges and meeting these in ways that politicians and bureaucrats could not possibly match – to cause him to embrace the ‘solution’ beloved by autocrats and tyrants: collective manipulation and management of the economy.

  Almost all of what the late Nobel laureate Oliver Williamson called “the economic institutions of capitalism”* emerged through decentralized processes of trial and error in competitive markets – venues in which free individuals, with local knowledge, cooperate with each other to confront problems with nuance, fullness, and creativity that are utterly unattainable by the heavy hand of the state.

  I have a considerable amount of respect for Bill Gates. He's not your usual politician that thinks he can make better business decisions than people with skin in the game. But unfortunately he makes up for it with a gigabyte of hubris.

• Clowns to the right of him, and also to the left. James Freeman diagnoses Chuck Schumer’s New Headache. (WSJ gifted link) And my little state is involved! And LFOD is invoked!

  Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) has been sounding increasingly optimistic about seizing a majority in the upper chamber after the November elections, and not without cause. The party of a second-term president routinely takes a shellacking in the midterms, and polls in various Senate races suggest Republicans could surrender a number of seats. But now there’s an open Democratic seat that is looking more vulnerable.

  Mr. Schumer wants to play offense against incumbent Republicans, but he’s going to have to spend more time and money playing defense in New Hampshire, where Democrat Sen. Jeanne Shaheen is retiring and her expected replacement, Rep. Chris Pappas, suddenly appears to be struggling.

  “Live Free or Die” is New Hampshire’s stirring motto, and consistent with this ultimate respect for liberty, the state tends toward a live-and-let-live culture. Therefore this column has been wondering for a while if Mr. Pappas will pay a price for enlisting in the Democratic culture war to deny biological reality and force girls to accept boys on their sports teams.

  But now it seems Mr. Pappas also has a problem on his left flank, where his support appears to be imploding just before the September Democratic primary. The University of New Hampshire’s Granite State Poll reports that as recently as April Mr. Pappas led Democratic socialist Krishma Manzur by a commanding 61% to 18%. Yet in its recent polling UNH now finds that Rep. Pappas leads by just 47% to 34%. With a significant number of Democrats still undecided, the poll also finds that Ms. Manzur now enjoys a higher net favorability rating (the percentage with a favorable view minus the percentage with an unfavorable view) among likely Democratic primary voters.

  Manzur is a self-admitted member of the Democratic Socialists of America. I would be mildly surprised if she beats Pappas; I'd be clinically depressed if she went on to win in November.

• Reasons to moan and cheer. Jim Geraghty was thinking big recently at the Morning Jolt. Headlines:

  • Five Non-Debt Problems That the U.S. Government Is Largely Ignoring
  • Five More Non-Debt Problems the U.S. Is Ignoring
  • Five Problems America Has Largely Solved
  • Five More Problems America Has Largely Solved

  Check 'em out, and decide for yourself whether we're doomed, or destined for greatness.

• Or just wallow in bitter humor. Nick Gillespie looks back on a 20-year-old movie: Idiocracy predicted our world, but not in the way you think.

  September 1 marks the 20th anniversary of the release of Mike Judge's cult classic Idiocracy, a time-travel comedy in which a dimwitted and lazy Army librarian named Joe Bauers wakes up 500 years in the future to find himself the smartest man alive in a world gone horribly wrong. As a voiceover intones at the start of the move, smart people increasingly put off having kids, resulting in a precipitous, uninterrupted, and compounded "dumbing down" of the population. Combined with an emphasis on physical comfort—everyone wears some version of athleisure and then-unknown Crocs for footwear—"the intelligent" became "an endangered species." But Joe eventually saves America by replacing the ubiquitous use of a salty sports drink called Brawndo ("the thirst mutilator!") with water in industrial agriculture.

  Despite a tiny budget of around $2.4 million, a rushed production schedule and mixed reviews, the movie, cowritten by Judge and frequent collaborator Etan Cohen, quickly became a shorthand for an America that seemed to be getting dumber and dumber at an accelerating rate, especially in the political arena. By as early as 2008, people on message boards were asking, "Who here thinks we're well on our way to Idiocracy becoming reality?" The November 2008 issue of Reason features a review of the utterly forgotten film Swing Vote titled "Idiocracy Now!", and in 2015 Matt Welch dubbed Donald Trump "the Idiocracy candidate." No explanation in either case was offered, or necessary, a sign of the film's cultural relevance.

  Back in 2007 when I watched the DVD, my brief take on Idiocracy was (at best) so-so. I think I'd have a higher opinion of it now.

Oh, heck you know where it goes, don't you? So does Mr. Ramirez:

Also of note:

• Reader, don't hate me, but… For the past couple years I've been in the top tier of the tweeted chart:

  A staggering chart from the @washingtonpost.
  
  We can (and should) make big cuts to Social Security spending without slashing the "safety net" for poorer seniors. Welfare for the wealthy is a bad reason to keep adding to the national debt. pic.twitter.com/aqrbRRcDQ9

  — Eric Boehm (@EricBoehm87) August 25, 2026

  For what it's worth, I've been socking it away at Fidelity, eventually going to the Pun Kids. I try not to be a doomsayer, but they'll probably need it.

  The chart is from the sainted WaPo editorialists, who advise: To get the national debt under control, start with the retirement state. The ABCs:

  The insolvency dates for the Social Security and Medicare trust funds used to be far-off events. Politicians did little to forestall them when they felt like abstract possibilities. Now, they’re right around the corner.

  The main Social Security trust fund will go insolvent in 2032, during the next president’s term in office, according to this year’s trustees report. The Medicare hospital fund will follow in 2033. If Congress does nothing, insolvency would mean cuts of about one-tenth across the board for Medicare and about one-quarter for Social Security.

  Judging by the issue pages of the various candidates longing to be my next Senator or CongressCritter (see below), "Congress does nothing" seems to be the likeliest path.

• My choices for CongressCritter are not great. NHJoural summarizes: Ships, Pipelines and Trump Divide NH-01 GOP Field in NHJournal Debate.

  If you had “the Jones Act” on your bingo card as a hot topic in the NHJournal NH-01 GOP primary debate—you win.

  The union-backed restriction on foreign ships operating between U.S. ports was one of the few areas of disagreement among Manchester state Rep. Brian Cole, businessman Anthony DiLorenzo, and veteran and nurse Hollie Noveletsky at Wednesday night’s forum at the New Hampshire Institute of Politics.

  Hollie was an ardent defender of the Jones Act. Which, sorry Hollie, is a red flag for me. (It should be one for you too: check the Cato study: The Jones Act: A Burden America Can No Longer Bear.)

  Hollie is also in favor of protectionist tariffs generally, especially those on steel. (Hollie's not only a nurse, she's also CEO of Novel Iron Works, based in Greenland NH.) Her Issues page does not mention Social Security.

  So, no.

  DiLorenzo has his minuses too: he's been endorsed by President Trump, for one thing. His Issues page does mention Social Security. In the worst way, item #4 on his 21-point "Plan To Protect The American Dream":

  Fully support Social Security and Medicare for our citizens.

  Our lovely backup singer, Jane Wickline, comments:

  Brian Cole seems way behind in the polls. His Issues page is, if anything, worse that DiLorenzo's on Social Security:

  At the same time, fiscal responsibility does not mean turning our backs on the commitments we have made. I am committed to protecting programs like Social Security Administration, which millions of Americans rely on after a lifetime of work. These are promises that must be honored, and we can protect them by cutting waste, eliminating duplication, and reforming how government spends, not by putting seniors at risk.

  Reader, imagine my eyes rolling clean out of my head. "Rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic" is the phrase that springs to mind.

  So I'll probably hold my nose real hard, and vote for DiLorenzo. At least he doesn't like the Jones Act.

• Not really that terrible a map.

  Dolly Parton approval ratings by state pic.twitter.com/lsalw34EuJ

  — Terrible Maps (@TerribleMaps) August 26, 2026

  Everyone, it seems, has something to say about Dolly. I will (as usual) steal a comment I found most appropriate, from Erick Erickson: Dolly Parton and the Two Commandments.

  What I know is that when our Lord was asked what the greatest of the commandments was, Jesus summed up the ten commandments thusly:

  “The most important one,” answered Jesus, “is this: ‘Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no commandment greater than these.” Mark 12:29-31 (ESV)

  I cannot speak to Dolly Parton and the first of these. That is between her and God. We can all speak to the second commandment.

  Dolly Parton, for years, has donated band uniforms to poor, majority-black schools across the South with no public credit or recognition. She has provided books for children because her father was illiterate. She rebuilt homes and she rebuilt churches. She built and upgraded hospitals in poor communities. She provided jobs and opportunities for the poor.

  She did not demand that the government do it. She used her wealth to do it.

  Dolly Parton did not care if you were gay or trans or straight or white or black or Republican or Democrat. She loved her neighbor as herself.

  Erick-inspired, I will blasphemously adapt John 21:25: Dolly did many other things as well. If every one of them were written down, I suppose that even the whole world would not have room for the books that would be written.

Our Getty Image du Jour is a wacky stunt from MoveOn, which (back in April) projected it on the FCC's building in D.C. I don't think they did anything similar when the Biden Administration tried "censorship by proxy" measures against social media sites. But I could have missed it.

The FCC's efforts are still in full swing, as described by Jacob Sullum: Brendan Carr's Vendetta Against ABC Conflates the 'Public Interest' With Trump's Personal Grievances: The FCC Chairman Is Punishing the Network for News Coverage and Programming Decisions That Offend the President.

I think I've already mentioned … maybe dozens of times … that this should be an impeachable offense for President Bone Spurs. But before my blogging license is revoked for failure to abide by the Internet Fairness Doctrine, let's try to find a defense… ah, here's one from Tim Graham: ABC News Is a Bubble, Not a Free-Speech Paragon.

Just kidding: there's no "Internet Fairness Doctrine". Tim Graham is a partisan hack, and his bottom line is still the same nonsense "public airwaves" justification used by all wannabe censors:

The central irony of this whole struggle is that ABC doesn't believe in conservative speech. They want the FCC to leave them alone as they use the public airwaves to only broadcast one point of view — one view on "Jimmy Kimmel Live," one view on "The View" and one view most of the time on the "news" programs.

Disclaimer: Tim Graham has provided Pun Salad ammo a few times over the years: here; here (where he wasn't as complimentary to Terry Moran); and here.

But the underlying problem is nailed by Dominc Pino at the WaPo: The FCC’s power over broadcasters was a mistake from the start. (WaPo gifted link)

Dominic relates the history of the FCC's censorship, all based on that long-ago "public interest" mistake. Unlike MoveOn, I'll put it in G-rated language: Abolish the FCC.

Also of note:

• With interest. Erick Erickson notes past profligacy: They Spent Our Trust. Now the Bill Is Due.

  In April of 2020, San Clemente, California, dumped 37 tons of sand into a skate park to keep teenagers out of it. Other California cities followed suit. Down the coast, sheriff’s deputies arrested a man for paddleboarding by himself in the Pacific Ocean. Cities unbolted basketball rims. The mayor of Los Angeles told people that snitches get rewards, and, God help us, people snitched, calling the tip lines on the neighbors whose grandkids came over. While that was happening, Gavin Newsom enjoyed a dinner at The French Laundry.

  The sand, the paddleboard, the missing basketball rims, the rewarded snitches, and the elite hypocrisy explain a lot about where we are as a nation, including things that look like they have nothing to do with COVID, like data centers and Flock cameras.

  In March 2020, Americans did as they were told. People closed businesses, local governments closed schools, and families canceled funerals. They waited for instructions from their elected leaders and public health officials because those officials said we needed two weeks to stop the spread. People generally trusted their institutions. Civic trust is a limited resource in a free nation. The press, politicians, bureaucrats, experts, and elite violated that trust until it was gone.

  Unfortunately, a lot of that distrust seems to be reflected in utter cynicism: "Yeah, I know I'm voting for a lying scoundrel. But he's my team's lying scoundrel."

• Not rich enough for my blood. Jim Geraghty debunks: Trump says he’s ‘the affordability president.’ That’s rich.. (WaPo gifted link)

  Don’t worry, America. As you lament the high cost of living, the president is here to protect you from the menace of … imported goods from Canada that he has decided are too cheap.

  After U.S. trade talks with Canada broke down on Friday, a new tariff of 50 percent is going into effect on Crown Royal whisky, Canadian milk, ice hockey equipment, cement, furniture, lighting fixtures, various tools, fence components, lumber, wood moldings, and a variety of plywood, fiberboard and veneered panels, among other goods. This is separate from the existing U.S. tariffs on steel, lumber and automobiles.

  Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney says his country will initiate retaliatory tariffs against U.S. imports starting Sept. 8. Hey, Canada is only the United States’ second-largest trading partner, so no big deal.

  Our whimsical president. Whatever ABC says about him is almost certainly too lenient.

• So let me be fair. The National Review editorialists mildly chide the know-nothing inducers of moral panic: Opposition to Data Centers Is Self-Destructive. But there's a stopped-clock admission buried a few paragraphs down:

  As has occasionally been his wont, President Trump seems to be the only politician in the United States who is wholly unmoved by these broader trends. Asked recently about the issue, Trump said, “If I were the mayor of a town or the governor of a state, and I had a chance to get a big plant in, an AI plant or a data center, I would absolutely want it because the jobs are enormous, and the money paid, the taxes paid, are just enormous.” Trump added, “It’s going to create success. It’s going to create tremendous innovation medically.”

  On PBS, James Henson, the director of the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin, described these words as “tone-deaf.” And perhaps they are. But politics is about more than merely following the crowd, and when Trump insists that “if you don’t take it, you’re going to be left behind because there are plenty of places that want it,” he is undoubtedly correct. The internet — and, more specifically, artificial intelligence — are here to stay. As such, the question is not whether more data centers will be built, but where. The answer to that question can be, “In America, by Americans.” It can be, “In China, by the Chinese.” It can even be, “In space.” But make no mistake, there will be an answer. At the risk of also being “tone-deaf,” we believe that the answer ought to be, “In America, built by Americans, for Americans, with the jobs, economic benefits, and tax revenues benefiting Americans.”

  Yes, I don't say it enough. Because it is so rarely true: Trump is right about this.

Recently on the movie blog:

Back in 2019, I watched Eddie Murphy host an episode of Saturday Night Live. I was impressed at how well he resurrected his old iconic characters and made me laugh at what could have been by-the-numbers rehashing. I wasn't alone, I guess: he got an Emmy for his performance that evening.

(He also showed up on SNL's 50th anniversary special. And gave a hilarious, dead-on, impression of Tracy Morgan…

… while standing next to Tracy Morgan.)

Anyway, back in 2019, he plugged this movie. And I finally got around to watching it, seven years later. It's pretty good! It got shut out at the Oscars, but got plenty of other nods.

It's the story of Rudy Ray Moore in the 1970s, as he works his way up from (roughly) nowhere, to stand-up comic, to R-rated musician, to (eventually) starring in Dolemite, his dream blaxploitation flick. An inspiring story!

Sensitive souls might want to shy away, see the IMDB parental guides; somebody actually counted all the f-bomb varieties!

As a final bonus, an uncredited cameo from … hey, that voice, is that … yes, Bob Odenkirk!

And now, sometime in the next seven years, I gotta watch Dolemite.

Jim Geraghty reminds us: that cat has been out of the bag for a long time:

That list of Americans' most common fears included, "government tracking of personal data."

Every year, every American sends in a document detailing his or her name, date of birth, home address, telephone number, Social Security number, marital status, and number of dependent…

— Jim Geraghty (@jimgeraghty) August 24, 2026

Continuing:

That all is a lead-in to his other stuff we probably should be more worried about: Five Non-Debt Problems That the U.S. Government Is Largely Ignoring.

A lot (but not all) has to do with birthin' babies. We're not doing that like we used to.

Also of note:

• Still craaazy after all these years. Well, seven or so years. In the WSJ, Allysia Finley notes that AOC’s Craaazy Economic Theory Lives On. (WSJ gifted link)

  Remember modern monetary theory? This was the craaaazy economic view that Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez helped popularize during Woke 1. It held that the U.S. needn’t worry about deficits because the government could print money. Politicians could spend with abandon, and if inflation rose, Congress could subdue it by raising taxes.

  Stephanie Kelton, an economist who provided the intellectual imprimatur for modern monetary theory, thanked Ms. Ocasio-Cortez for bringing this radical idea into the mainstream: “People immediately probably started googling ‘modern monetary theory’ to find out what she was referring to.”

  “The national debt is nothing to fear,” Ms. Kelton told CNN in 2019. “What should scare Americans is allowing misunderstandings and fear-mongering about the national debt to prevent us from taking bold action to deal with the urgent threat of climate change.”

  This theory was central to the left’s pitch for financing the Green New Deal, Medicare for All and other costly ambitions. Modern monetary theory must be “a larger part of our conversation,” Ms. Ocasio-Cortez said. And so it was during the pandemic, until runaway inflation came and the Federal Reserve had to raise interest rates.

  But there are worse ideas out there…

• Longing for a simpler, stupider time. Jeff Maurer looks at a resurgence of technophobia: Who Knew Americans Secretly Yearn to be Amish? But for the really dumb idea…

  Fear of electricity ignores a few hundred years of human experience, but other people seem determined to ignore a few thousand years. Yesterday, author Paul Vigna argued in The New York Times that America might solve its debt problem by following the lead of Enmetena, a Mesopotamian king from 2400 B.C., who issued an edict that cancelled virtually all debt. Which is a hell of an argument: The Mesopotamians did it, so, logically, it must be good! Vigna is boldly moving the Overton window by floating the idea of rebooting ancient Mesopotamian policies, which, I’ll point out, included human sacrifice, slavery, arranged marriage, witch dunking, child abandonment, and the practice of trying to divine the future by examining the organs of dissected animals. But maybe defaulting on their debt was their one good idea! Though, honestly: I think the practice of looking at your debt and thinking “I’m not paying that shit” is more than 4,400 years old.

  One can only shake one's head.

• But, you know, the debt. Kevin D. Williamson meanders a bit, but promises to discuss The Restoration of Albert II. But let's skip down to…

  “We inherited this debt bomb from the Biden administration,” J.D. Vance, vice president and knee-walking sycophant, insisted during an appearance on a Newsmax program where someone called Carl Higbie pretends to be a journalist. “American taxpayers are getting fleeced because of the very high debt charges … very high debt charges that started under the Biden administration. This is a crisis that we inherited. … The issue that we’ve had under the Biden administration and what we’re still kind of dealing with is that the debt was growing faster than American GDP.”

  Mockery has followed, though neither Vance nor Higbie has been mocked quite as much as he deserves.

  Vance, who apparently has a taste for inversion, gets it exactly upside down. The economy in fact grew more quickly than the debt did during Biden’s term in office: When Joe Biden entered office (Q1 2021), debt was 124 percent of GDP; when Biden left office (Q1 2025), debt was down to 121 percent of GDP. Joe Biden had more cause than Donald Trump has to make Vance’s kind of complaint about his successor: When Donald Trump first entered office (Q1 2017), debt was only 103 percent of GDP; by Q2 2020, debt was 133 percent of GDP, and while debt pressure eased somewhat in the COVID recovery, it was 124 percent of GDP when Trump left office. But even before the dramatic COVID spike, debt-to-GDP was headed the wrong way during the first Trump administration. And it is headed the wrong way now: Debt was 121 percent of GDP when Trump took office the second time around and is about 126 percent today according to the latest estimates. Some of those numbers can be blamed on COVID, but much of it is just the usual stupid spending and cowardly tax policy.

  Vance’s argument is, of course, dishonest: This is J.D. Vance we are talking about—of course it is dishonest. Vance is a man without integrity who serves men who hold honesty and honor in contempt, and he is nothing if not servile when it comes to his masters. But Vance’s argument is also a stupid one, which maybe also should go without saying. American pundits’ and partisans’ favorite party game is pin-the-debt-on-the-president, but the power to collect taxes, appropriate spending, and borrow money belongs to Congress, not to the president. Republican members of Congress voted for a great deal of spending while Biden was president. They had voted for a great deal of spending, and for tax cuts, during the first Trump administration, too. And then Republicans put together a gigantic—and gigantically irresponsible—spending package in the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill, for which not one single solitary Democrat in Congress cast a vote. The Trump bill added as much as $4.7 trillion to the debt through spending, through tax cuts, and, according to analysts at the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, by contributing to higher interest rates on U.S. government debt—i.e., it is one cause of those “very high debt changes” that Vance is caterwauling about.

  A long excerpt from a long, but also wonderful article. I regret to say that I've hit my gifting-link quota for the month, so let me just encourage you to subscribe. You'll want to read his transcript of a discussion had with Mojo, his 4-year-old son, which starts with Mojo asking "Do you know any Normans?"

• She was against it before she was for it. NHJournal invites us to Meet Stefany Shaheen 2.0: 'Etch-A-Sketch' Barbie. (Ms. Shaheen is Senator Jeanne Shaheen's daughter, and she's running for the NH-01 CongressCritter seat currently occupied by Chris Pappas.)

  One month ago, Stefany Shaheen’s position on banning aid to Israel — the “Massie Amendment” — was “no comment.” While progressives like Carleigh Beriont and Christian Urrutia were declaring their support for the ban, Shaheen was pulling a Pappas. (He voted “present” on the legislation.) The standard establishment Democrat position.

  One month ago, Stefany Shaheen’s website had no mention of Medicare for All. The only mention of U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders was her support for “legislation introduced by Senator Bernie Sanders to expand Medicare to cover dental, vision, and hearing – essential care that two-thirds of seniors need.” Avoid the extremism, embrace the middle ground.

  Oh, and one month ago, Stefany Shaheen was the presumed front-runner in the Democratic primary.

  Not anymore.

  Which may explain why Shaheen is an unapologetic supporter of socialized medicine today. “I’m with Bernie Sanders and support Medicare for All,” her website now reads.

  And on Sunday’s edition of “Close Up,” she told Adam Sexton that not only does she support a ban on all military aid to Israel, but she’s always supported it.

  “I’ve been very clear from the beginning. I do not support the Massie amendment or a blank check to Netanyahu for these endless wars,” Shaheen said.

  Wait a minute. She said she was against the Massie amendment?

  Yes, she did. I checked the video. But at some point on Sunday, she realized…

  I want to be clear about where I stand: I oppose a blank check for Netanyahu and would have voted for the Massie Amendment to stop sending endless weapons to Israel. Maura Sullivan opposes that amendment and is refusing to return the hundreds of thousands of dollars AIPAC…

  — Stefany Shaheen (@Stefany4NH) August 23, 2026

  "I want to be clear about…" is Stefanese for "I totally flubbed talking about…"

• It says a lot about the WNBA, when… what's going on in the stands is more interesting than the game. Power Line describes the latest example: Enes Gets Tossed.

  Last [Sunday] night, Enes Kanter Freedom attended a WNBA game between the Indiana Fever and the Chicago Sky. (The WNBA doesn’t use the traditional fierce animal names.) A Sky player named Natasha Cloud confronted Kanter, who was sitting near courtside:

  Kanter, who didn’t seem to do anything other than stand up, was then ejected from the game by security. It wasn’t clear whether his ejection was demanded by someone, or if so, who.

  The final score was Fever 113, Sky 90. You have to go pretty far down on the Google search results to see that, though.

Michael Shermer's latest book, Truth, is pretty good. If you missed it, my overall report on it is here. I found his chapter on "free will" especially interesting.

Shermer is a skeptic, and he's no fan of mind-body dualism, the idea that there's a little "mind" agent inside your body somewhere who makes decisions, causing the rest of your "body" to follow. That is, indeed, a supernatural concept.

Anyway: Shermer makes a big deal out of experiments that look at brain activity when certain kinds of decisions are made. His chapter begins (footnotes elided, emphasis, exclamation points, and sneer quotes in the original):

To be fair, Shermer goes on in his chapter to criticize the conclusions anti-free willers like Robert Sapolsky and Sam Harris draw from such experiments. But I have further major quibbles! (Is "major quibbles" an oxymoron? Oh well.) Taking them one at a time:

I'm unsure Shermer is accurately reporting the Fried experiment. No biggie, but a 2011 Scientific American article (How Free Is Your Will?) reports that Fried's research found those neurons activating "as long as a second and a half before the decision, and as early as seven tenths of a second before it." That's pretty far off from Shermer's claim of "a full 15 seconds" (or, later, "a full seven seconds").

And, um, 80% accuracy? If you are a fan of Sapolsky/Harris determinism, that has to be disappointing. At best, that's a good bet, but not something to wager your life savings on.

There are recent claims that fMRI brain scans are routinely misinterpreted. Sabine Hossenfelder has a brief video about it:

I have no idea, however, whether this applies to the results reported by John-Dylan Haynes.

So what? If you read about brain stuff even a bit, you know that it's easy, and far from unusual, for humans to misperceive their own mental processes, even those processes that are outside the realm of free will. It's interesting that people might not get the timing of their finger-moving decisions exactly right. But does that somehow imply that people aren't making those decisions? I don't see how it does.

Baseball. I happened to be reading Shermer's book while concurrently watching the Boston Red Sox beat the Arizona Diamondbacks at Fenway on WSBK. And it occurred to me that what I was watching on the TV kind of demonstrated that the finger-moving experiments that so impressed Shermer don't really tell a complete story, and the application to the free will debate is problematic at best.

According to Google's AI: Major League fastballs average around 97 mph between the pitching mound and the strike zone, taking around 400 milliseconds for the trip. So in that 400 milliseconds: (1) the batter's optic nerves send what they detect about the ball's trajectory to the brain; (2) the brain "decides" whether to swing the bat, take the pitch, or sometimes (aieee! duck!) get out of harm's way; (3) if the brain decides to swing at the pitch, that command has to go down the nervous system to appropriate sets of muscles, sequenced in just the right order; and (4) those muscles must swing that two-pound bat into the desired path, with the desired velocity.

And (to repeat) all that has to happen in approximately 400 milliseconds. step (2) is probably the least time-consuming.

And so the typical batter's swing/take/duck decision takes far less time than what the brain-scanners are reporting in their finger-moving experiments. They may be right for the kind of the decisions their subjects are making. But that's not the whole story, as demonstrated hundreds of times every summer night in ballparks across America.

And speaking of robots… Oh, wait, I wasn't speaking of robots. But here you go: Could some smart folks build a batting robot with a couple video cameras, mechanical limbs, and a decently-trained AI?

Almost certainly. They have (specifically Sony has) already done it for ping-pong, as reported last year by Reuters: Ping-pong robot Ace makes history by beating top-level human players.

There's video too:

There are also "baseball-playing" robots (Baseball-playing robot swings, hits and catches with pinpoint accuracy) but (reading the article) they aren't ready for the Big Show quite yet.

I'm not sure whether this is a point on the determinists' side, or the free will side.

So I'm not sure it matters. A brain's decision to swing at a fastball (or a ping-pong ball) need look nothing like that same brain's decision to go to college, solve a crossword puzzle, get married, or pick out a different color shirt from the L.L. Bean catalog.

The late psychologist Daniel Kahneman got semi-famous for writing a book Thinking, Fast and Slow which popularized dual process theory: two different modes of decision-making (usually called, unimaginatively, "System 1" and "System 2".) The important thing for the "free will" discussion: the brain "decides" things differently depending on circumstances. Specifically, the finger-moving experiments seem heavily "System 1", and they tell us next to nothing about the free will involved in "System 2"-style decision-making.

Disclaimer: I am not even a dilettante when it comes to psychology, neuroscience and sports physiology, so you might want to ignore everything I've said here.

Mr Ramirez pictures the issue well (note the elephant in the pilot seat, the donkey going along for the ride). And remember: Congress has, in its feeble hands, the constitutional "power of the purse.

Not pictured, unfortunately: the voters who put them in the plane. They deserve some blame too.

But this sort of thing gets my goat:

REMINDER: The single biggest driver of our national debt for the last 25 YEARS have been Republican-led tax cuts.

— Senator Patty Murray (@PattyMurray) August 21, 2026

That's Senator Patty Murray from Washington State, but I assume you could find other Democrats making approximately the same charge. Let's take a look at the actual record (going back 96 years). Via the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis's FRED:

In words, hopefully small enough words for Patty to understand: government receipts (blue line) have been remarkably stable post-WWII, between 15 and 20 percent of GDP, averaging about 17%. The last year shown was (according to FRED): 17.02%. What has drastically increased over the past 25 years: federal spending, the dashed green line. Last year shown: 22.8% of GDP.

Questions you and I should be asking Patty and every other candidate for federal office: what do you propose those numbers should be instead?

Also of note:

• Gosh, it's almost as if tariffs are making things less affordable. The WSJ editorialists note: Trump Has a Beef With Tariffs. (WSJ gifted link)

  One of the (many) problems with tariffs is that they lead to countless and arbitrary exceptions for political purposes. President Trump’s latest came Friday as he announced plans to lift tariffs on beef imports for 90 days. You may notice that this covers the three months through the November midterm elections.

  In a social-media post, Mr. Trump blamed Joe Biden for high beef prices and added: “As we work to rebuild this herd and help our ranchers, for the next 90 days, the United States will allow up to 300,000 metric tons of product for ground beef to be imported with no out of quota tariff.” He pledged that the imports will be sold at 25% below “current market prices,” which was about $6.89 a pound in July, up substantially in the last two years.

  The editorial goes on to note: "Despite his claims that tariffs are a miracle economic cure, Mr. Trump has allowed exceptions for imported consumer electronics, smartphones, coffee, bananas, copper, chemicals, flat-panel TVs, memory chips, fertilizer, and hundreds of other products."

• Doing their bit to make things less affordable in New York City… At Reason, C. Jarrett Dieterle AND Adam Lehodey note: This Mamdani-backed bill would kill jobs, boost unions, and make deliveries more expensive.

  As if New York City weren't already an expensive enough place to live, legislation introduced to the City Council could soon make delivering packages in the five boroughs far costlier. Cloaked in the language of improving safety, the bill—recently endorsed by Mayor Zohran Mamdani—is little more than a thinly veiled attempt to strengthen the power of unions.

  Always nice to see one party advocating bad ideas that the other party hasn't had yet.

• I needed five guesses at today's Wordle. Roger Pielke provides me an excuse: Climate Change is Making Us Stupid.

  I take the title of today’s post from the closing line of a fantastic 2014 article by Dan Sarewitz in Slate. Sarewitz wrote:

  “Climate change, added on top of all the other causes of these problems, will often make things worse. But for the most part there will be no way to tell which ones are worse than they would have been anyway, or how much worse they have become. So it’s not that apocalyptic fears about climate change are utterly fantastic—climate change may well exacerbate a range of serious and potentially even disastrous problems—it’s that the monomaniacal, apocalyptic version of climate change gives us a picture of the world that is so incomplete that it’s much worse than simply wrong. Worse because, just like religious and political orthodoxy, it cannot be falsified. On the contrary, everything that goes wrong simply reinforces the conviction that there is just one explanation for all our problems—climate change—and that there is only one thing we can do to keep the world from collapsing—stop burning fossil fuels. And thus, worse because the climate-change-as-apocalypse orthodoxy thereby radically narrows the range of viewpoints we are willing to tolerate and the range of options we are willing to consider for dealing with complex challenges to our well-being like natural disasters and infectious disease and poverty and civil strife.”

  The notion of climate change has collapsed our discussions of complex environmental-social-political issues into a cartoonish characterization of “climate change” as an all-purpose causal agent responsible for just about everything that people don’t like — Wildfires? Climate change. Immigration? Climate change. Jellyfish? Climate change.

  Roger argues, very convincingly, that it's a fundamental mistake to attribute causality to "climate change"; it's a symptom, not a cause.

• As I prepare to go to my local farmstand to buy an ear of corn for tonight's dinner… David Friedman shakes his head at Local Patriotism.

  

  The sign, from an Eat ‘n Park that we sometimes eat at on our Pennsic trip, expresses a common sentiment, that it is virtuous to buy from someone who lives close to you instead of from someone farther away, support the economy of your town instead of that of some other town, that it is “just the right thing to do.”

  Why?

  David proposes possible explanations: "Evolutionary Psychology","Commitment Strategy", and "Defective Moral Vision".

  Me, I just like the increased probability that the farm stand corn is fresher than I can get at Hannaford.

Today, I will replay one of my previous AI efforts:

ChatGPT original created exactly one year ago today!

So how's the trip going? Scott Lincicome tells us: The government’s Intel bet was even worse than expected. (WaPo gifted link)

And Scott's just beginning. (Full disclosure: a couple Fidelity funds I'm in have relatively small positions in Intel (INTC); the stock was down 2.24% yesterday, but up 263.19% from one year ago. So corruption is working out for me pretty well!)

Also of note:

• A reminder from the Indispensable One.

  I wish I had something more optimistic to write than the fact that our president is a doddering octogenarian who just blurts out the first thing that pops into his head, and who ardently believes that dictators of hostile states are not so threatening to the U.S. and its allies…

  — Jim Geraghty (@jimgeraghty) August 20, 2026

  Continuation: "… because they personally flatter him. But that is where we are."

  Jim (I call him Jim) expands on that theme in his "Morning Jolt" newsletter: Punishing South Korea Does Not Make Sense on Any Level.

  President Trump, speaking to reporters yesterday:

  Now, I didn’t like the fact that we’re doing these massive military exercises really against North Korea. It was, you know, an exercise against North Korea. When I’m friendly with him, when we have — I don’t see anything happening for certainly two and a half years, it’s not going to happen with me, but I don’t see anything happening.

  And I was not happy when South Korea said, no, they’re not interested in helping us with the Hormuz Strait, and yet they get 60 percent of their oil from the Hormuz Strait. I said would you like to help us. He said, no, thank you. I said that’s nice, please, thank you. He made us a lot of money; I didn’t like that.

  So, I felt that to do a massive — we were doing a massive war exercise. I thought that was very insulting to somebody that frankly has been, during my term at least, very well-behaved yeah.

  Got that? Joint U.S.–South Korean military exercises, which have occurred in some form or fashion every year since the end of the Korean War in 1953, are “very insulting” to North Korean Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un.

  Oh, no! Heaven forbid that the U.S. ever insult a man who boasted a couple of years ago, “The whole of [the United States] mainland is within the range of our nuclear strike and the nuclear button is on my office desk all the time.”

  I try to blog under the Elvis Guideline: "I used to be disgusted And now I try to be amused." But this sort of thing makes it difficult.

• But surely George Will has a more cheerful take? Let's look!

  Um, well, … the headline is not encouraging: Amid an August of mounting danger, a frivolous, oblivious president. (WaPo gifted link)

  The president sees nothing threatening about North Korea’s development of ballistic missiles capable of delivering its nuclear warheads to California. He is consistent. On June 13, 2018, the president said, “There is no longer a nuclear threat from North Korea.” On Sept. 29, 2018, he explained to some perhaps perplexed West Virginians in Wheeling that he and North Korea’s dictator, Kim Jong Un, “fell in love” after exchanging letters.

  The presidential patience with Iran is exhausted, so he has unleashed a one-two punch. He has threatened to “bomb the shit out of” a U.S. ally, Oman, if it “gets in the way” of negotiations with Iran. And he has proclaimed the Strait of Hormuz a “NEW U.S. territory,” perhaps like the Straits of Mackinac that separate Michigan’s Upper Peninsula from the Lower. This should make Iran think.

  Dabbling in naval architecture, the polymathic president has got the Navy thinking about what The Washington Post calls his “preferred aesthetic” for aircraft carriers. His taste favors the World War II look, when carriers’ command centers, called “islands,” were farther forward, nearer the middle than, as today, the back of the ships. He also wants to return to steam-powered catapults to launch jets off the carriers, replacing the newer electromagnetic catapults the Navy thinks serve launching efficiency.

  "I got your steam-powered catapult right here, Mr. President."

• Wealth Tax 1.0 was craaaazy, I guess. But the Grumpy Economist doesn't have a better opinion of Wealth Tax 2.0. Doing the math on the latest scheme:

  Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Ro Khanna just introduced a bill proposing a permanent national 5% wealth tax on billionaires, along with an ambitious spending program for the results. (Press release, bill, summary.) It’s permanent. The fig leaf of California’s “just this once” tax is off.

  What are the effects of a wealth tax? Is it possible for the government to spend billionaires’ wealth without destroying the companies and jobs that produce their, and our wealth? To think about that we need to understand incentives, budget constraints, and equilibrium.

  Incentives: If you invest an extra dollar today, how much extra do you get in a year? A 5% wealth tax drags down the rate of return by 5 percentage points. If you earn 10% on your investments, but then pay a 5% wealth tax, you only get a 5% after-tax rate of return. Starting from a 10% return, a 5% wealth tax is the same as a 50% tax on interest, dividends, and capital gains.

  Click through and look at the other likely effects.

  Analysis is fine, but we should also consider the psychology involved. For the second time in three days, I want to quote Bastiat:

  When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.

• To be fair, it's a problem with zealots of all stripes. But Charles C.W. Cooke notes the sinister version: Leftist Zealots Can’t Admit When Their Schemes Don’t Work. (And here's my last NR gifted link for this month.)

  In California, Representative Ro Khanna is determined to tax the state’s billionaires, the consequences be damned. In New York City, Mayor Zohran Mamdani is fixated upon the establishment of government-run grocery stores, even as the absurdity of his plan becomes clearer by the week. Both men are impervious to reason. Objections are dismissed, criticisms are deliquesced, contemplation is a skill not yet learned.

  Informed that a series of government-run grocery stores would be a burden to the taxpayer, Mamdani merely pounded the Exchequer. Told that this policy might have a deleterious effect on the city’s existing outlets, an aide glibly proposed a subsidy. That subsidy, in turn, will have consequences, and, when those consequences are adumbrated, yet another mitigation will undoubtedly be contrived on the fly. Rube Goldberg, please call your office.

  Ro Khanna’s penchant for instantaneous patchwork is more alarming still. Upon hearing that his coveted wealth tax does not intersect with reality, Khanna spontaneously invented an invasive new program: “Allow illiquid founders to pledge shares with a loan from the government to pay tax,” he wrote on X. “The loan period is long but not infinite (e.g. 10 years). The loan is non-resource: at the end of the period, the loan is either paid back in cash, or the government assumes the shares.” That, as it happens, is a preposterous idea. But the instinct is more instructive than the detail. Khanna has his agenda, and he is trying to bend the world around it. Welcome back, Mr. Caligula, we trust you will enjoy your stay.

  I'm not seeing a lot of room for optimism today, am I?

• Certainly Nellie Bowles will have something to cheer me up! Usually her latest TGIF column has something…

  → The singularity: Stripe leadership wrote, in a letter to investors this week, that they believe the AI “singularity” is here. The singularity is a hypothetical point where AI will be able to redesign and rewrite versions of itself, outpacing human intelligence and human control. Stripe says we crossed this threshold nearly eight months ago. Well, hello, I would’ve gotten my hair cut if I knew the singularity was happening? Typical men, springing stuff on you at the last minute.

  “It’s a fuzzy and perhaps already overworked term, but we decided that January 1st marked the beginning of the singularity, and we have since been operating on that basis,” Stripe corporate leaders wrote. “The singularity is often invoked alongside millenarian forecasts, but, in our case, we simply saw a large inflection in long-run trends (for example, a huge increase in the rate of new firm creation), and we decided that we ought to take the phase change seriously.”

  Stripe isn’t the first tech leader to declare AI has surpassed human intelligence. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in July that the singularity is upon us. “I’ve been waiting for this my whole life, and I think it’s going to be incredible, hugely positive, awesome for the world,” he said. In January, Tesla CEO Elon Musk wrote on X, “We have entered the Singularity.” Okay, so guys, what happens next? Does a computer come and consume me? Do I stand outside so it happens faster? Are they going to hand out those special glasses so that we can look right at it?

  It's the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine.

Illustrated by Mr. Ramirez:

The further story, if you need it: Massachusetts Law Legalizes Abortion Throughout Pregnancy

Google assures me that infanticide is still illegal in Massachusetts, prosecutable as a homicide or manslaughter. Apparently the Massachusetts government (and probably a good fraction of the citizenry) believes that the event of "birth" is a bit of biological magic that transforms a legal "medical procedure" into a heinous crime.

Also of note:

• An interesting solution. Jeffrey Miron suggests an endgame: Let the Social Security Trust Fund Go to Zero.

  Congress has three ways to restore Trust Fund solvency: increase SS taxes, cut SS benefits, or transfer non-SS revenues. Any of these would require amending current law. Congress presumably has no appetite for such policies, since they would be wildly unpopular across the political spectrum.

  […]

  To be sure, the specific benefit cut that will occur if Congress does nothing is probably not the ideal. A better approach might exempt those already receiving benefits, and phase in the cuts over time. The ideal cut would also increase the age of eligibility (again, over time).

  Thus, in a perfect world, Congress would enact a substantial but compassionate cut in benefits. Yet this seems unlikely. The good news is that doing nothing – letting the 22 percent reduction in scheduled OASI benefits happen – is roughly in the right direction.

  Let me introduce, once again, my lovely backup singer, Jane Wickline:

  I really suspect Congress will go for one of the worse alternatives, though.

• Prices convey information. But some don't want you to get that information. The WaPo editorialists aren't having it: Better to fear price controls than ‘dynamic pricing’. (WaPo gifted link)

  “We should all be worried about ‘dynamic pricing,’” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) announced online this week. That would be a waste of Americans’ collective anxiety.

  Warren said dynamic pricing is “when companies change their prices in real time,” but that’s hardly a helpful definition. What counts as “in real time”? It isn’t that prices should be set once and forever frozen (like the ice cream she cited), or that consumers would be better off if bureaucrats get to decide how often a price is allowed to change.

  Businesses use all sorts of time-based factors for pricing. Air travel usually costs more when booked the day before a flight than when booked months in advance. Restaurants have promotions, such as lunch specials or happy hours, with prices changing based on the time of day (though happy hours are banned in Warren’s home state — something Massachusetts legislators are trying to change with a “fun agenda”). Finding yourself on the wrong side of price changes can be annoying, of course, but price controls would create much greater annoyances.

  Wouldn't it be nice if Senators were concerned with making the cost of government go down?

• 

  They've gone to graveyards every one. At the Daily Economy Nikolai G. Wenzel wonders: Where Have All the Conservatives Gone?

  Fusionism, a new book by Stephanie Slade, a Senior Editor at Reason, attempts to make sense of the seemingly incoherent New Right. Although Slade proposes a renewal of fusionism as a remedy to conservatism’s drift and the challenges facing a divided Republic, the book’s greatest strength lies in its analysis of the trends to date.

  The Republican Party, for all its faults, was supposed to understand (instinctively, if not always intellectually) limited government, rule of law, and the basics of economics. From its elected leaders, though, we have gotten tariffs, increased public debt, dodgy respect for habeas corpus in immigration enforcement, and the Saturday Night Live tragicomedy of DOGE (a virtue-signaling, clumsy, and cruel flash in the pan destined to die on the vine when it removed entitlements from the chopping block). The coalition that constitutes the New Right has abandoned conservatism, and instead sells its own form of populist interventionism.

  Amazon tells me my copy of Fusionism will arrive on September 1. Looking forward to it. (Amazon link at your right.)

• I, for one, want to see Amazon drone me. But not everyone's a fan. Christian Britschgi notes the conflict we could have expected: Unionized delivery drivers vs. deliveries.

  One would think that delivery drivers would be natural supporters of delivery services. Not if you're the International Brotherhood of Teamsters.

  Through lobbying efforts and lawsuits, the union has made itself the primary enemy of any business or industry that might ship goods or drop off packages without employing unionized drivers (or any drivers, for that matter).

  The Teamsters have come out in force to support New York City's Delivery Protection Act (DPA), which would require companies like Amazon to hire delivery drivers as full-time employees—an effective ban on the company's current practice of hiring out deliveries to smaller subcontracting firms.

  I would guess that Democrats crying loudest about "affordability" are silent about union efforts to pump up companies' delivery costs.

• Indispensible. I quoted Jim Geraghty, five years ago, about Wheezy Joe:

  Something is wrong with President Biden, and we are all being asked to pretend we don’t notice.

  Note that this was about three years before the "respectable" media reluctantly came to the same conclusion, and it became OK to "notice".

  Jim was also an early proponent of the lab leak hypothesis.

Recently on the book blog:

I had to "nudge" the Portsmouth (NH) Public Library (PPL) to get this book; fortunately, they are amazingly good at taking even my wackiest suggestions. (Although this one wasn't particularly wacky; they have a number of other books by the author, Michael Shermer, on the shelves.)

It's an interesting title, though. When I picked it up, I wisecracked to the PPL librarian at the desk: "Once I read this book, I won't need to read any of the others here," handwaving at the non-fiction stacks. She laughed. But maybe librarians are trained to laugh at customers' dumb attempts at wit.

Shermer has made a long career of "skeptically" examining factual claims, both orthodox and heterodox. (He's the Executive Director of the "Skeptic Society" and Editor-in-Chief of Skeptic magazine.) And he's written over a dozen books on various truth-related topics. My take on his 2022 book, Conspiracy, is here.

Back then, I wrote that Shermer's prose "seems to set my teeth on edge, and my brain to go into nit-picking mode." I'm happy to report that my teeth remained unedged for this one, and I have a lot fewer nits to pick.

As you might surmise from the title, this book is very wide ranging. The first few chapters engage the tools of the truth-seeker: humility, good faith, Bayesian reasoning, fallacy avoidance, and so on. He quotes liberally and admiringly from authors I admire too: Steven Pinker, Julia Galef, Richard Feynman, etc.

He then turns his skeptical eye to particular areas: religion/myth, holocaust denial, rational morality, aliens. His arguments are fairly made, and take some unexpected turns. (For example, he takes more than a few pages relating the stomach-turning behavior of Japan's invading troops in World War II (including the "Rape of Nanking"), and it's hard to deny that Japan successfully dodged the level of postwar condemnation aimed at Nazi Germany for its atrocities.

And then Shermer moves in to even more contestable territory (he admits he's dealing with "known unknowns"): consciousness, free will, the existence of God, and (yes) the thorny problems of "why is there something, rather than nothing" and "why does the universe seem to be fine-tuned to allow our very existence."

I was particularly interested in Shermer's take on free will. He summarizes (always fairly) the various camps: determinism, compatabilism, libertarianism, etc. He quotes the arguments of determinists Robert Sapolsky and Sam Harris extensively. (My own takes on Sapolsky's and Harris's anti-free will books were less sympathetic: here and here.)

But in one of those surprising turns, Shermer turns out to disagree strongly with Sapolsky/Harris determinism. Instead he advocates "self-determinism", pointing to our capacity to make decisions that can be fairly called ours. And he claims this capacity is a "self-organized emergent property": although the components of our free will (neurons, hormones, etc.) are themselves totally governed by laws of physics and biochemistry, the resulting complex interactions give rise to the ability to make rational, conscious choices for our actions.

Shermer winds up dismissing Harris and Sapolsky as having "physics envy." (Interestingly, Sapolsky provided an approving blurb on the book's back cover. Making me wonder if he read the free will stuff.)

I've blogged my "further thoughts" on the opening paragraphs of Shermer's free will chapter here: Free Will is More Than Button-Pushing.

Otherwise, I have only a few nits to pick. Shermer misuses (in the usual way) "begs the question" on page 301. On page 305, he claims "physicists Barrow and John Walsh … have demonstrated how the speed of light, gravitation, and the mass of the electron have in fact been inconstant over time"; I am pretty sure this has not been "demonstrated", and it's far from established fact.

At least in the edition PPL got, there's a weird typo on page 309: "… one part in ₁₀10¹²³ at least." (If you're reading this at Goodreads: Goodreads doesn't understand <sub> and <sup> HTML tags, sorry. It looks OK on my blog.)

And on page 317, he analogizes the progress of scientific knowledge to an expanding sphere: as the sphere grows in volume, the boundary layer between the "known" and the "unknown" grows too. Since the sphere's volume increases as the cube of the sphere's radius, its surface area only goes up as the square of the radius. And so "the volume of the known increases by a ratio of 3:2 over the surface area of the unknown.

As Wolfgang Pauli said (albeit in German): "That is not only not right; it is not even wrong!"

Still, a lot of good stuff here. Might be an especially good book to give to a bright high school or college kid. Although maybe not if you want to keep him or her a church-goer; Shermer's pretty hard on the God stuff.

Steven Pinker quotes Matthew Yglesias:

"There’s a common view in left-wing and right-wing populisms that solving problems is very easy intellectually and you just need to defeat and disempower the bad people. This is not a view that would survive serious learning about the history of basically any policy topic.
It’s…

— Steven Pinker (@sapinker) August 17, 2026

Finishing up the excerpt:

That's from Yglesias's substack essay, titled Woke 1 is dead. We’ve learned nothing.

For some reason, I'm reminded of what Adam Smith called the "Man of System". Maybe we've learned nothing since his Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759)?

Or for that matter, Hayek? Or Sowell?

Also of note:

• Okay, so even if we learned nothing from Woke One, perhaps we can find out… What Slaughtered Pigs Can Teach Us About Europe’s Wine Policy. From Jon Miltimore at the Daily Economy:

  In the spring of 1933, American farmers pleaded for help from their newly elected president, Franklin Roosevelt. Hog prices were at record lows, and the farmers wanted the government to do something.

  Not one to let a crisis go to waste, FDR took action. Agriculture Secretary Henry Wallace was tasked with arranging the slaughter of millions of pigs in an effort to raise hog prices. Farmers who participated in the federal government’s hog program — later dubbed by economists “the porcine slaughter of the innocents” — were compensated. Their animals were turned into “inedible meat and bone meal,” courtesy of US taxpayers, even as hunger in America hit record highs.

  And in modern-day France, they are paying farmers to rip out their grapevines.

  It's almost as if they read Bastiat's parable of the broken window, and took it as a recommendation to go on a window-smashing spree.

• This had me running to Fidelity. Ron Bailey brings the good news: Breakthrough personalized mRNA vaccines are highly effective against melanoma skin cancers.

  Pharmaceutical companies Moderna and Merck announced today the highly promising results of their anti-cancer mRNA vaccine Phase 3 clinical trial targeting later-stage melanoma skin cancers.

  Researchers sequenced the DNA from each patient's tumors to create personalized vaccines that, when injected, rev up the immune system to destroy the cancer cells while leaving healthy tissues alone. The versatile mRNA platform enables researchers to manufacture bespoke vaccines for each patient in just six weeks.

  Moderna stock (symbol MRNA, of course) was up 176.97% yesterday! And… well, nuts, Fidelity hasn't bought me any.

  I do have a relatively small position with Merck (MRK), and that was up yesterday, but "only" by a lousy 12.6%.

  Well, I can live with that. And someday maybe I'll live after a cancer diagnosis.

• Biden forgot to pardon this guy. The WSJ's James Freeman notes: Former Fauci Aide Pleads Guilty in Covid Origins Coverup.

  How much taxpayer money from Anthony Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases ended up in Wuhan, China, before the Covid pandemic, and what exactly did it fund? Years too late, federal investigators are finally getting closer to the answers that Americans deserve. Not that Dr. Fauci is willing to disclose anything, but a former aide has decided to come clean.

  The AP story is quoted:

  GREENBELT, Md. (AP) — A former senior adviser to infectious disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci pleaded guilty Tuesday to plotting to conceal federal records related to research on the origins of the deadly COVID-19 pandemic.

  Dr. David Morens is scheduled to be sentenced Nov. 12 by U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis in Greenbelt, Maryland. Morens pleaded guilty to conspiring to defraud the U.S. government, a felony punishable by a maximum prison sentence of five years.

  The story refers to Morens' partners in crime as "Co-Conspirator 1" and "Co-Conspirator 2".

  So, yes, as Matt Ridley says:

  So there was no conspiracy theory.
  
  There was a conspiracy. https://t.co/TMDiuFJVnR

  — Matt Ridley (@mattwridley) August 19, 2026

• It really is a tragedy, not just "a bad thing that happened." Kevin D. Williamson writes with holy furor about The Tragedy of U.S. Debt. (Dispatch gifted link)

  Americans, who like to talk about their Christian faith more than study it (“The wicked person borrows and does not repay, but the righteous one is gracious and giving”) have twice elected the self-proclaimed “king of debt,” an infamous deadbeat and serial bankrupt, as president of the United States, while entrusting the national purse strings to the control of his self-abasing toadies in Congress.

  That’s going about as well as you would imagine.

  In 1941, the United States was drafting men into the military and preparing for World War II, spending billions of dollars to help build the “arsenal of democracy” around the world through Lend-Lease, and the federal deficit was ... 3.82 percent of GDP. Today, the United States is trying to punt on all that “arsenal of democracy stuff,” complaining mightily about how that heavy lifting should be done by the Belgians or someone, and foundering while trying—unsuccessfully—to beat into submission the third-rate power that is Iran. And the federal deficit in 2026 is going to be something on the order of ... 5.8 percent of GDP, as the Congressional Budget Office runs the numbers. It was 5.8 percent of GDP in 2025, too.

  Republican president, Republican Congress, Republican policies—all important factors, sure, but let us not shortchange the influence of Republican stupidity and Republican cowardice.

  And (also) let us not shortchange the influence of the irresponsible, ignorant, and irrational American voting public.

• Back in my high school days… That was long ago, but I remember reading Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, and finding it a tad overstated. But after reading Veronique de Rugy's latest column (Those Who Build and the Politicians Who Take), I'm thinking Ayn had it pretty much right, just a few decades early.

  There's an old saying: Those who can, do; those who can't, teach. A similar idea underscores the debate over wealth taxes in California and elsewhere: Those who can, build companies. Those who can't, devise ways for the government to take shares in what others have built.

  This new version might sound unfair until you listen to Rep. Ro Khanna's (D-Calif.) pitch for an allegedly onetime, 5% wealth tax on California billionaires, tied to November's vote on Proposition 40.

  Space constraints prevent us from surveying all that's wrong with wealth taxes here. But as a reminder, they raise very little income for the government, are an administrative nightmare, could be unconstitutional and create enormous disincentives to build the kind of wealth that creates jobs and funds government services through other taxes in the first place.

  Or we could go back to (once again) Monsieur Bastiat, who preceded Miss Rand by about a century:

  When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.

  Reader, tell me we ain't there.

Robert F. Graboyes loves AI enough to get ChatGPT to produce this:

But it's the illustration to his recent substack post: Why I Hate Artificial Intelligence Platforms. Caption:

The Seven Deadly Sins of Artificial Intelligence. Illustration by Graboyes+ChatGPT. (Modeled after Hieronymus Bosch’s The Seven Deadly Sins and the Four Last Things.

Classy! To get the full story, readers should read (and I probably should have linked to) Robert's previous post: Why I Love Artificial Intelligence Platforms (Which has another wonderful illustration.)

Those Seven Deadly Sins, if you can't squint enough to read them: Unemployment, Pollution, Ideology, Mediocrity, Snooping, Plagiarism, and Disinformation. Here's the "Ideology" sin:

(Click over, if you want, to see ChatGPTs pic of Trump-as-Golden-Calf, and its refusal to do the same for Kamala.)

Also of note:

• I wouldn't join any cult that would accept someone like me as an adherent. Jerusalem Demsas declines an invitation: No, Senator Murphy, I don't want to join your cult.

  U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy’s new book Crisis of the Common Good: The Fight for Meaning and Connection in a Broken America subverts the norms of its genre. Politicians who seemingly aspire to higher office tend to focus on sharing their biography and bland, poll-tested policy prescriptions.

  Murphy, to his credit, did not bore me.

  In the prose of an AI that has been trained on religious texts but is itself not an embodied soul, Murphy calls for a “cult of the common good” that we can worship instead of “false idols” like technology or profit. In his chapter outlining what his “cult of the common good” would look like, Murphy favorably recounts the following anecdote from Puritan Massachusetts:

  Geez, isn't that what we need today? More strident religious fervor, determined to smash the worshippers of "false idols"—and anyone else who won't join your cult?

  I sometimes think I'm in a cult with one member: me. No, you can't join.

• An idea that would have to be in the oven for a few more years before it could be called "half baked". The WaPo editorialists call a TKO: Mark Cuban bests Ro Khanna on wealth taxes. (WaPo gifted link)

  Rep. Ro Khanna (D-California) supports his state’s billionaire tax proposal on the ballot in November. Texas businessman Mark Cuban had a question: What about founders of promising start-ups who are billionaires only on paper?

  Khanna’s solution was revealing. Hint: It would create another tool for government control.

  On Saturday, Cuban noted on X that California has more and more “deca unicorns” — start-ups with valuations of $10 billion. If a founder owns even 10 percent of such a company, he or she could be considered a billionaire despite not having much wealth aside from the paper value of a yet-unproven firm. It’s not clear how such a person would pay the supposedly one-time 5 percent tax Khanna wants to impose.

  Khanna replied to Cuban that the paper-billionaire founders could, essentially, get loans from the government using their companies as collateral. “Allow illiquid founders to pledge shares with a loan from the government to pay tax,” Khanna posted. “At the end of the period, the loan is either paid back in cash, or the government assumes the shares.”

  The editorialists work out the implications. So can you. And certainly Mark Cuban can, and did:

  Ro, “in your scenario, the founder could sell to pay a one time 5 percent tax or the state could sell it if he defaults on the loan”
  
  Ro, this is the biggest fuck you in the history of entrepreneurship. Ever.
  
  Creating jobs but don’t have cash. Fuck you
  
  Can’t sell shares,… https://t.co/IYhoXVTSty

  — Mark Cuban (@mcuban) August 16, 2026

• It's only a matter of time before "War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength." John Puri notes a precursor: Properties Aren’t Property in New York City.

  New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has made no secret of what he thinks about his city’s housing supply: He should be in charge. For the benefit of all New Yorkers, of course.

  Though just 7 percent of rental units are public housing (still too many), Mamdani speaks of the entire market as a public utility to be managed and allocated from Gracie Mansion. He decides how much rents should rise — by zero. He decides which residents owe more in property taxes than the rest. He decides what kinds of developments are built and in what quantities.

  Seldom mentioned, except as cartoonish scoundrels, are those who ostensibly own the housing stock. To Mamdani, landlords’ preferences for their buildings’ use are simply nefarious plots to be trumped by the will of tenants, embodied by their mayor. His five-year plan for housing occasionally refers to rent-controlled landlords as “property owners.” Neither of those words is an accurate descriptor.

  I don't see this working any way but painfully.

• After all the hoopla… A sober assessment from Sigrid Bratlie (at Roger Pielke's substack): The Fauci Case is About More than One Man.

  In 2001, the United States was shaken by terror. First the September 11 attacks, then letters containing anthrax spores sent to journalists and politicians . President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney laid out an ambitious strategy against biological threats and appointed Fauci to lead the effort. He worked in the health administration, but in practice had responsibility for both the civilian and military sectors.

  In his recently published diary, we see what that entailed. He produced white papers that would give the US cover to circumvent the Biological Weapons Convention in order to conduct research in the legal gray area. He was planning to go to Iraq with the CIA to search for Saddam Hussein’s bioweapons, weapons that the US administration used as a main justification for the war, but which were never found. Fauci led and funded US research into dangerous viruses both at home and abroad over many decades – which provided ample opportunities for collecting intelligence in countries that were otherwise inaccessible.

  There was no shortage of warnings, especially when the research Fauci funded took a turn toward so-called gain-of-function research to make natural viruses more dangerous in the laboratory. Experts heatedly debated whether this created an unacceptable risk of a pandemic. Fauci believed the risk was acceptable and sent money to research on genetically modified SARS-like viruses in Wuhan, among other things. Warnings from State department diplomats about poor security at the laboratory and that the research could be misused by China for military purposes (dual use) were ignored.

  The US strategy was a response to a world that Americans perceived as more dangerous after 9/11. The question is whether it also contributed to making the world more dangerous. The subsequent question would be: How would the people who were partly responsible for this strategy react to information that the strategy they had contributed to might have led to a catastrophe?

  I've got no desire to see Fauci prosecuted for anything, but he should own up honestly, without bureaucratese, to his role in the pandemic. Until he does, he deserves nothing but contempt.

• Capitalism needs to apologize for lifting billions of people out of poverty. Phillip W. Magness is a little peeved with recent doings at a prestigious publication: Capitalism, as Told by Its Enemies.

  The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP) is widely known as a reputable and accessible compendium of articles on complex scholarly subjects, offered free of charge to the public since 1995. Think of it as Wikipedia for philosophy, but with authors who are known experts in their subjects and peer review to maintain quality control.

  That quality control broke down last week when the SEP published a new entry for “capitalism,” its first-ever foray into the subject. The concept of “capitalism” is an admittedly complex topic, and one might reasonably expect that an encyclopedia article on it would include not only its theoretical underpinnings dating back to Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, but also its critics such as Karl Marx.

  Instead of attempting some semblance of balance, the new SEP entry author Chiara Cordelli, a professor of political philosophy at the University of Chicago, used this platform to air her own personal grievances with capitalism as an economic system. The resulting product gives scant attention to proponents of free-market economics. By contrast, Cordelli’s article is loaded with content from the Marxist or socialist far left. Space devoted to critics of capitalism far outpaces even basic descriptions of the economic concept, and proponents of capitalism are reduced to shallow parodies.

  Not a good look for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, right? Are there any free-market enthusiasts still around at the University of Chicago? Maybe Professor Cordelli could have found them.

"All the cool kids are doing it, so I thought I'd try." Something I haven't said since high school.

You can click for a full-size version if desired. Grok prompt: "create a random image based on my account". And then I had to tell it my account ID.

I like it! Although:

• I don't think I look like that. Do I?
• Nice view out the window! Every New Hampshire house has a view like that!
• It correctly tagged me as a Feynman fangeezer, although I don't have a multitude of quotes buzzing around my environment.
• I've never read Gödel, Escher, Bach, although it's on my bookshelf. It's been on one bookshelf or another since I bought it in 1980. Maybe this is a sign.
• "Comedy = Tragedy + Time" is just an aphorism. It's not really a "New Hampshire Axiom".

Kevin D. Williamson writes a long and moving essay on, among other things, the occasional dread that hits any parent. The Shadow. And to remove any possible excuse you might have for not reading it, here's a Dispatch gifted link, my penultimate one for the month. Don't let it go to waste!

But let me skip way, way down to the usual incandescent political take:

Indeed. And, oh: "Don't be Toad."

Also of note:

• The Underminer: He's always beneath us, but nothing is beneath him. Jacob Sullum looks at our real-life caricature of a movie villain: Trump's Assault on Judicial Review Undermines a Crucial Safeguard Against Tyranny.

  "This was an Obama judge," President Donald Trump remarked in November 2018, referring to a decision temporarily blocking his restrictions on asylum applications. "And I'll tell you what, it's not going to happen like this anymore."

  The ruling that irked Trump involved a provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act that says "any alien" may "apply for asylum" if he is "physically present in the United States" or "arrives in the United States…whether or not at a designated port of arrival." Contrary to the plain language of that statute, Trump had issued a proclamation barring asylum applications by people who cross the southern border between ports of entry. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) had implemented that restriction with rules that made such aliens categorically ineligible for asylum.

  In response to a lawsuit by an immigrant rights group, Jon Tigar, a federal judge in Oakland, California, issued a temporary restraining order against the new asylum policy, noting that it contradicted federal law. But as Trump told it, Tigar had ruled against him for purely partisan reasons.

  Although Trump's comment about Tigar was mild compared to his subsequent attacks on judges who dared to disagree with him, it prompted a rare public rebuke by Chief Justice John Roberts, a George W. Bush appointee. "We do not have Obama judges or Trump judges, Bush judges or Clinton judges," Roberts said in a statement released by the Supreme Court. "What we have is an extraordinary group of dedicated judges doing their level best to do equal right to those appearing before them. That independent judiciary is something we should all be thankful for."

  Jacob's lengthy article goes into the other areas where Trump has defied, or tried to defy, the judicial branch. If you had that on your Articles of Impeachment bingo card, you can cross it off.

• Hint: it doesn't look good. John R. Puri wonders: What Would Protectionist ‘Success’ Look Like?.

  One year, four months, and 15 days after Liberation Day, it is difficult to judge Trump’s expansive tariffs because the administration never settled on a standard for success or failure. Instead, it vacillated wildly between competing explanations. On every metric one can remember, however, tariffs are not accomplishing what the president claimed they would.

  Are tariffs simply a tax to raise federal revenue? If so, Trump should have made sure he was on firmer legal footing before he imposed them. July was the third consecutive month that refunds for the previous round of tariffs, which the Supreme Court ruled invalid, exceeded revenue from replacement duties. Are tariffs intended to reduce the trade deficit, a harmless accounting figure that Trump nonetheless loathes? That was never going to happen, as the trade deficit necessarily mirrors the United States’ investment surplus. The balance of trade has seen no significant change since before the tariffs. Tariffs are certainly not a negotiating tool to get partners to agree to freer trade across the board, as some defenders argued. Of the handful of deals Trump has signed, all of them left most U.S. tariffs in place, and most have been vitiated by subsequent presidential decrees.

  John looks at the another justification that has been offered: to "grow the U.S. industrial base; that hasn't happened either.

• And also cowbell. At Cato, Scott Lincicome, Chad Smitson, and Eli DeLuca take a focused look at a specific area. And: Fifteen Years of Solar Tariff Fever and the Only Prescription Is More Solar Tariffs.

  In the seventh major solar trade action under the fourth legal authority in 15 years, the Trump administration has announced Section 232 “national security” tariffs and price floors for polysilicon and its downstream “derivatives,” including solar panels (modules) and the cells that go into them. It is the latest entry in the unfortunate and unsurprising saga of US solar protectionism, which has now spanned two decades with little to show for it.

  The authors go through the sad recent history of presidential decrees aimed at accomplishing one solar-related goal or another. Instead, I'd guess, the net effect is to drive investors to something safer, like a nice heavily-leveraged cryptocurrency ETF.

  Dropping mandates, tariffs, subsidies, onerous regulation, … it's crazy, but it just might work.

Recently on the book blog:

This is the second book in Adam Plantinga's (so far) three book series featuring protagonist Kurt Argento. It went on my get-at-library list thanks to its Best Novel Edgar Award nomination. (There are scattered references to the series' first book in this one, but I didn't find that I was missing any vital information by not having read it.)

After that first book, though, Argento is in Arizona, house-sitting for a friend. He's trying to adapt to his new life, without a job, and missing his dead wife, caring for his loyal dog, Hudson. That life is disrupted when Kristin, accompanied by her toddler son Ethan, tracks him down and begs him to investigate the disappearance of her missing husband, last seen in the town of Fenton.

Argento is very reluctant to get involved, but soon enough Kristin and Ethan also go missing. Which causes him to snoop around Fenton and discover some very shady and secretive dealings involving the local police force. Pulling the strings is a silver-haired genius, who is also (we quickly learn) a murderous sociopath. After harrowing and tragic events, Argento embarks on an audacious, high-risk scheme to take down Silver Hair's operation.

It's very violent. And we could quibble about the plausibility of the plot. But, for me, it was also a page-turner. I was reminded of Lee Child's Reacher series, turned up a few notches on the hard-boiled scale.

Our Amazon Eye Candy du Jour is a lovely "Past Master Euclid's 47th Proposition Masonic Coffee Mug".

Background: Euclid's 47th proposition is more popularly known as the Pythagorean Theorem. From the Google AI:

So I didn't know any of that before this morning. But I had already read Christian Britschgi's article in the latest issue of Reason, so I knew the answer to his headline question: Why is it called Euclidean zoning?

And so our country's sad slide into statism continued…

Christian goes on to explain that Euclid, Ohio, was named by the team of surveyors who laid out the town boundaries; they were Euclid fanboys, having been trained in mathematics. I couldn't find anything that said they were Freemasons, but I didn't look very hard.

Also of note:

• Woke One was craaazy! Five years ago, I was pretty cheesed off at NASDAQ's announced DEIsm: NASDAQ wants to kill my retirement. I quoted a Jeff Jacoby article that revealed their announced requirement that index-listed companies have “one director who self-identifies as a female” and a second who “self-identifies” as “Black or African American, Hispanic or Latinx, Asian, Native American or Alaska Native, Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander, or . . . as any of the following: lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or as a member of the queer community.”

  The Biden-era SEC approved this, but the courts did not. Quoting Google's AI:

  The Nasdaq board diversity rules were officially vacated and eliminated in late 2024 and early 2025. Companies listed on the exchange are no longer required to meet board diversity targets or publicly disclose demographic diversity matrices.

  And, as I type, the NASDAQ composite index is up 23.58% over the past calendar year. My investment portfolio thanks you, NASDAQ.

  For more on the Woke One Walkback, see Dace Potas at USA Today: Hong, AOC admit woke went too far. So why trust them now?

• "Idiot", or "vaiglorious fool"? Luther Ray Abel can't seem to make up his mind: President Trump Reduces Military Exercises with South Korea. Reacting to this tweet:

  pic.twitter.com/NUAq7SrFVW

  — Rapid Response 47 (@RapidResponse47) August 16, 2026

  I suppose both could be true. Is there any US alliance that Trump won't needlessly endanger?

• Pandering to the Antisemites. Looking at the Democrats fighting to replace my current CongressCritter, Chris Pappas (who's running to replace retiring Momma Senator Jeanne Shaheen), NHJournal notices Stefany Shaheen's Closing Message: 'I Hate Israel, Too!'

  Silverstein. Rosenfield. Brownstein.

  Those were some of the names on the front page of the Union Leader this weekend in a hit piece pushed by the Stefany Shaheen campaign targeting Maura Sullivan.

  Shaheen calls Sullivan politically suspect for taking money bundled from supporters of AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.

  And we all know who gives money to pro-Israel groups, right?

  As Eric Cartman puts it so delicately on South Park, “the J-O-O-S.”

  The hits didn’t stop at the Union Leader.

  Shaheen had two of her allies, former state Sens. Jon Morgan and Tom Sherman, hit Sullivan in an op-ed for the Portsmouth Herald. “Sullivan has raised about 10% of her total campaign funds through out-of-state AIPAC donors. That’s a lot!” they wrote.

  Both those newspaper links above are paywalled. But the Union Leader article can be read at Yahoo. Fun fact from that: Stefany Shaheen "has full access to [Jeanne] Shaheen's extensive campaign fundraising rolodex, which helps explain how she has more than $122,000 from D.C. lobbyists compared to Sullivan's $10,000."

• A dismal veep, part II. Erick Erickson looks at the economic musings of JD Vance: The Vice President Thinks Low Prices Are Bad.

  Two weeks ago the online right spent an entire week fighting about a twenty dollar burrito. Some of the loudest voices in that fight were people who spend their days defending Vice President Vance, and their complaint was affordability. Things cost too much. Working people cannot get ahead. The burrito, they said, was indicative of the burden on the young. The Vice President himself got into it, going after Washington Post columnist Marc Thiessen’s weight because Thiessen would not buy the argument. It is “quite obvious the man has never missed a burrito,” Vance posted on August 5.

  Then, someone found this video of the Vice President in 2023, at an American Moment event, when he was in the Senate, arguing that things are too cheap for Americans. In his own words:

  “This is like, maybe super heterodox. I am not sure that I think the reserve currency is actually good for the United States of America. I think there is a good argument that reserve currency status is akin to coal in Appalachia, it’s a resource curse, right? It allows your consumers to consume very cheaply, right? That’s been the story of the American economy for the last 15 or so years, uh, even before that, is we can just borrow basically in an unlimited way because we have the reserve currency.”

  Read that a second time, because he tells you his whole theory and I do not think he heard himself say it.

  JD is gonna run on making prices higher? Hoo boy.

• Artificial photosynthesis update? At the Rational Optimists Society, Stephen McBride looks at The Rockefeller of solar.

  NASA has reprimanded Casey Handmer more than once. His crime? Solving problems too quickly.

  So he quit to work on something much harder.

  Today Casey makes natural gas out of sunlight and air, identical to the stuff that heats your house and cooks your dinner.

  Casey's company is "Terraform Industries". More detail:

  Petrol, diesel and natural gas are all hydrocarbons. Carbon is floating in the air around you. Hydrogen is in every drop of water. Turning these abundant natural elements into fuel is simply a matter of rearranging their atoms.

  What makes this practical? The price drop on solar panels.

  I left a comment on the article alluding to my crackpot idea: Artificial Photosynthesis. Instead of using the process for fuel (which, eventually, just returns the carbon to the atmosphere), you could "rearrange" the atoms into hydrocarbons that could be sequestered. Carbon capture! Climate change solved!

  But before they could say "we thought of that already", I looked at the Terraform Industries' blog. As it turns out, they are working on that too.

I'm sure no Pun Salad reader would themselves need Mr. Ramirez's advice…

… but you may know someone who does.

Also of note:

• Did he fall, or was he pushed? I'd say, and I think Jeffrey Blehar might agree, that he was pushed on the way up, and then, sadly, fell on his own. Here's Jeffrey: Jason Arday Should Never Have Been Allowed High Enough to Fall as He Did. (NR gifted link)

  Those who noticed that Jason Arday was an academic fraud are not to blame for his death. Those who insisted Cambridge live up to its scholarly standards and investigate the legitimacy of Arday’s work are not the ones who should feel shame. The most obvious person to blame for Jason Arday’s suicide is Jason Arday himself — and yet he is no longer around to account for this sin, or any other.

  But I can think of some people who are.

  I think, for example, that Arday’s professional colleagues — the men and women who passed him up through the scholarly ranks at warp speed — ought to account for putting him in the position to fail, despite such obvious lack of merit and so many strange red flags. We don’t have to speculate about whether they doubted his credentials, scholarship, or intellectual capacities: In The Guardian, Afua Hirsch reveals that black studies academics in the U.K. had quietly pegged him as a fraud long ago:

  The fact is that many of Arday’s black peers in academic sociology have been voicing concerns about him for a while. He seemed, to them, to have come out of nowhere. His performance at high-profile academic events did not match the credentials that were being touted. I have had various conversations with sociology professors in which this has been the main topic of conversation, and their questions began to mount into a list. They did not voice them publicly because we all know that whatever the truth or the outcome, he would be unlikely to be treated fairly and we would all be damaged in the process.

  What a damning confession — and published in a national newspaper, no less. Did any of Arday’s “black peers” ever think to quietly go to their department heads for a frank discussion? Maybe if one of Arday’s “peers” had taken him aside, man-to-man, and called BS on his impossible tales (“no way did you run 600 miles in six days, friend”) he wouldn’t have felt emboldened to make up so many spectacular lies about his life — and put them in a memoir, no less. After all, he’d gotten away with the entire grand fable until then! Arday wouldn’t have been able to bring such a truly catastrophic amount of shame crashing down upon his head had he not been coddled, excused, and even encouraged at times.

  For what it's worth, the HTML title on the article is "Jason Arday Was the Author of His Own Downfall".

• They ain't actual sciences. That would be my answer. But check out what James Lileks has to say: The Trouble with the Soft Sciences. (NR gifted link)

  In the middle of one of those broad-spectrum, wide-ranging arguments with a liberal recently, I was hit with this: “You know, conservatives don’t believe in sociology.” I had two immediate thoughts:

  1. I don’t know that one believes in a social science; you can accept or not accept its theories and conclusions. Hard sciences are different. I believe in rocket science inasmuch as the ships belch fire and takeoff and come back to Earth. Even if they blow up, I believe in rocket science, because there were facts, processes, and unarguable results. The tower is a smoking ruin: I believe they screwed up.

  2. If you look at the replication crisis, a term for the inconvenient inability to reproduce the results and conclusions of sociological studies, it would seem that not even sociologists believe in sociology. Or at least all of it.

  The unmasking of Jason Arday, Cambridge professor of sociology of education, was portrayed by some as a skirmish in this culture war — as if it wasn’t the academic culture that’s to blame, but the war against the academic culture. This is intended to discredit the criticism: calumny from bad-faith culture warriors. But again and again, dogged believers in academic integrity run the disputed work through Mr. Peabody’s Plagiarism Machine, and it turns out that respected academics lifted great chunks of their impenetrable texts from another academic whose work no one ever read. It always sounds like this:

  Structural biases, discerned most readily in interstitial interstices, can play into preconceived narratives aligned with colonialist readings of white-enforced hierarchical variances, questioning the ontological experiences of dispossessed bodies experiencing marginalizing forces that historically align with queerphobic and capitalistic narratives, derived in part from systemically enforced settler-colonial suppression of non-quiescent voices.

  The plagiarized version is the same, except a few boilerplate buzzwords are swapped out. Next, the tepid defense: “Well, the original piece said ‘Capitalistic narratives,’ but our valiant beleaguered academic referred to ‘Narrative capitalism,’ which is completely different.” And I suppose it is, if you’re a regular consumer of thin broth bobbing with wads of gristly twaddle. A teacher who specializes in Capitalistic Narratives is probably having a bitter war in the department with the fellow who teaches Narrative Capitalism. (But both hate they who teaches Anti-Capitalist Approaches to Deconstructing Narrative; total fraud, that one.)

  James can be funny, but also pretty devastating when he's not.

• Short answer: narcissism. Billy Binion wonders: Why is the Kennedy Center board trying to add Trump's name—again?

  The board of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts approved a plan on Thursday to enshrine President Donald Trump's name on the building, setting off a new battle in the war over what mark he should be able to leave on the institution.

  We have been down this road before. The Kennedy Center's board of trustees "overstepped its statutory bounds by unilaterally renaming the Kennedy Center after President Trump," U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper wrote in May. "In 1964, Congress deliberately rechristened the 'National Cultural Center' the 'John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.' The text, structure, and evolution of the organic statute makes the institution's name abundantly clear."

  The center, as a result, was forced to remove Trump's name, which had been affixed to the facade as: THE DONALD J. TRUMP AND THE JOHN F. KENNEDY MEMORIAL CENTER FOR THE PERFORMING ARTS. That addition came after the president took control of the Kennedy Center last year—a grab, he maintained, that was necessary to combat alleged wokeness at the institution. "We don't need woke at the Kennedy Center," he said in February 2025 aboard Air Force One. "Some of the shows were terrible. They were a disgrace that they were even put on. So I'll be there until such time as it gets to be running right."

  The renewed effort to add Trump's name seeks to creatively circumvent Cooper's ruling by adding it a different way: "Restored and Renovated by President Donald J. Trump," it would read, under the main signage. The persistence here raises a few questions. The most glaring: Why?

  As I think I've said before: the building is an ugly shoebox. Just knocking it down would be an improvement.

• The sequel is rarely more successful. Abe Greenwald comments on AOC's disclaimer on "Woke One": Welcome to Woke 2.

  As I wrote in the summer of 2020, wokeness wasn’t just an isolated convulsion that would leave the stage with the pandemic; it was a revolution. And revolutions, I noted, are notoriously prone to internal power struggles. Many who were alarmed by the revolution, therefore, hoped that it would be undone from within. I warned at the time, however, that we shouldn’t be reassured by the prospect of the revolution’s self-destruction but concerned about who might take its reins. Six years later, I’d like nothing more than to have been embarrassingly wrong.
  

  I wrote:
  

  Those of us who stand opposed to the revolution and its aims harbor the hope that the revolutionaries will “eat each other alive” or that their mixed motivations, outlandish ideas, and repellent actions will ultimately blow up the movement from within. But such internal dynamics can serve to refine, not kill off, revolutions. Revolutionary France was a perpetual and bloody power struggle between parties such as the Hébertists, Thermidoreans, and Jacobins. Such competition ensured that, in the long run, the fiercest elements came out on top. The same can be said of the battles between the Mensheviks, the Left SR, and the Bolsheviks of Russia. The Cultural Revolution was itself a sustained effort to wrench and secure control of the Chinese Communist Party. And in all these cases, important nonrevolutionary fellow travelers found reason to make common cause and go along with the winners at any given moment. Judging from history (and the present), it is unlikely that the revolution will self-destruct.
  

  It’s now clear that the fiercest elements have indeed come out on top. The revolution is no longer dominated by the ideas of featherweight academics such as Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo. All that redemptive white fragility and anti-racism and intersectionality was sundered in a flash after October 7, 2023. A few bestselling authors didn’t stand a chance against the Marxist-jihadist alliance that swooped in with its genocidal chants and terrorist regalia. Woke 2, if we’re going to call it that, is in the hands of Communists and Islamists.
  

  Also see (my periodic reminder) Chapter 10 in Hayek's The Road to Serfdom: "Why the Worst Get On Top".

• A twenty-year retrospective. I made fun of this Baltimore Sun article on August 15, 2006: Cardin promises cancer cure. Ben Cardin was running for the US Senate in Maryland back then, and…

  With a month to go before primary voters head to the polls to choose Senate nominees, Rep. Benjamin L. Cardin kicked off yesterday a weeklong effort to highlight his congressional record and vision on health care by making the mother of all campaign promises – to cure cancer.

  Well, (1) Ben won, was (2) re-elected twice more in 2012 and 2018, is (3) now retired, sadly without (4) curing cancer.

  On the other hand, I found this chart on an NIH site:

  

  Good news, we're not dying as much. But do you see an effect of Cardin being elected in 2006? No, neither do I.

Recently on the book blog:

Recently on the movie blog:

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This is one of those "let's see what this is about" movies: it showed up "free-to-me" on HBO Max, and since I liked Bob Odenkirk, and his previous two action movies, and that's him with a big gun on the movie poster… hey, why not?

Executive summary: this one is more violent, more morally ambiguous, and less family-valued than the Nobody movies. The dark-comedy dial is turned up to 11. I'm pretty sure Mrs. Salad would have not liked it.

Odenkirk plays Ulysses Richardson, who is trying to make a career of substitute-policing. His current gig is in wintry Normal, Minnesota, where the town's police chief has passed away under mysterious circumstances: frozen, naked, with a fly rod in one hand and an ice auger in the other. (But as someone eventually points out: you don't use a fly rod for ice fishing.)

But Ulysses is content to ride out his tenure in Normal without making waves about the suspicious death of his predecessor. And everyone in town is friendly enough to him … until a couple of bozos try to hold up the local bank. Gee, could that be related (somehow) to the opening Yakusa scene, where grisly punishments were exacted, and an unenthusiastic underling was sent to Normal? You betcha.

Anyway, Ulysses finds himself the target of (approximately) all 1,890 residents of Normal. Can he figure out an exit strategy? He does, but…

Another page-turner—oops, "screen-swiper"—from Michael Connelly. It's his second book in his "Catalina" series. (I reported on the first one here.) The hero is Stilwell, a detective on Catalina's skeletal branch of the LA county sheriff's office. Cop-wise, Catalina is (at least in these books) very much the analogue of Mick Herron's "Slough House": it's an assignment for police who have messed up, but not badly enough to be fired. Or, in Stilwell's case, ran afoul of a superior by his insistence on doing the right thing.

The book opens with a literal bang. Well, actually, two. Acting on a tip from a confidential informant, Stilwell has hastily assembled a team to intercept a cartel's drug delivery via plane at a Catalina airstrip. Unfortunately, things go very wrong: one officer dead, another gravely wounded, all the bad guys escaped, and Stilwell's taken off the case.

But don't worry: he'll eventually piece things together.

There's other stuff going on too. A backpack in the island's lost and found turns out to have been owned by a hiker who vanished four years previous. An island winemaker has had a row of his precious grapevines hacked up. And a vandal has been defacing famed island landmarks with spray-paint graffiti.

One of these cases causes Stilwell to connect with another Connelly heroine, Renée Ballard, and she plays a major role here. (There's even a non-speaking cameo from Harry Bosch!)

No spoilers, but the ending is kind of a cliff-hanger, with Stilwell's future in law enforcement in peril. I will, of course, be checking Amazon for future developments.

My current CongressCritter, Chris Pappas, is running for US Senate this year, and his probable opponent in November is former Senator John E. Sununu. Yesterday, I noticed a tweeted article from Pappas: My Commitment to New Hampshire Seniors. Since I am (full disclosure) a New Hampshire Senior, I Read the Whole Thing! And so can you. It's short, simple, and stupid:

The grain of truth in Pappas's article: when Sununu was in the Senate, he and Paul Ryan authored the "Social Security Personal Savings and Prosperity Act of 2004". It would have allowed (not forced) younger workers to divert a small fraction of their income to their own private retirement accounts.

After a fierce and demagogic debate, it went nowhere. Back in 2005, I quoted James Glassman about the controversy:

One side likes the government to take care of people, whether they need it or not. The other side -- which I'm on -- likes people to make their own choices and take responsibility for their own lives.

And the government fans won. The WaPo's Brad Plumer offered a 2012 post-mortem on the plan here. (WaPo gifted link) And, if you are a real propeller-head, you can read the analysis of the Social Security Administration's Chief Actuary: Estimated Financial Effects of the "Social Security Personal Savings and Prosperity Act of 2004,"

But the bottom line, over 20 years later: the Ryan-Sununu plan was an attempt to deal with the problem that was completely obvious back then: the fundamental insolvency of the Social Security "trust fund". And (so) nothing was done.

Well, not nothing: As Pappas notes, he helped pass the "Social Security Fairness Act".

Which moved the insolvency date about six months earlier than before.

So what does Pappas propose to deal with the upcoming insolvency? The one that, by law, will impose an approximate 22% cut in benefits across the board? Let me introduce my lovely backup singer, Jane Wickline:

(Apologies if you have to sit through an ad first.)

Coincidentally, I came across Veronique de Rugy's advice: What you should be worried about when politicians tell you they won't touch entitlements.

Vero's skeptical about that, and so am I.

What I'm not skeptical about: Pappas's "commitment" to seniors will at best screw everyone else.

This is the second appearance of JD Vance's book, Communion, as the Amazon Eye Candy du Jour; the first was back in April, when I defended its cover (picturing a rural Virginia church) against some truly nothingburger media slurs.

But the book came out in June, people are actually reading it instead of staring at the cover, and there's a particularly problematic chapter near the end…

Our first critic is Ryan Bourne, who squeezed out two rebuttal posts at Cato about it. Number one: JD Vance’s Feared "Cult of Growth" Has Never Run America.

Ryan followed up with an even more devastating charge: JD Vance’s Problem Is with Your Choices, Not GDP.

Also piling on is Phil Magness at the Argument, playing off the title of JD's first book, Hillbilly Elegy: Hillbilly economics.

Phil goes on to discuss JD's "eccentric lesson" involving Japanese strawberries.

I've put JD's book on my get-at-library list. Might as well see if he's right about anything.

Also of note:

• I'm afraid Betteridge's Law of Headlines applies. Joseph C. Sternberg asks: Is Congress About to Reform Social Security? (WSJ gifted link)

  You may be surprised to hear that Congress is getting serious, after a fashion, about Social Security reform. You won’t be at all surprised to learn that this is taking the form of an attempt to pass the responsibility to someone else.

  As we know, current law calls for an approximate 22% cut in Social Security checks when its "trust fund" empties out, estimated to occur in 2032 or so. What to do? Trump is (of course) MIA. So some CongressCritters are reluctantly moving into "we gotta do something" mode.

  Cue the latest flurry of activity on Capitol Hill. The emerging consensus appears to be that lawmakers doubt their capacity to reach a consensus. They propose instead to form a study committee of some sort to tell them what to do.

  The Senate version would deputize the existing Social Security Advisory Board—a panel of technocratic experts that normally labors in obscurity producing reports on how to manage the programs more efficiently—to craft a wholesale reform of the entitlement. That panel would write a reform bill that Congress would have to consider on an expedited basis, although lawmakers would be free to amend it at will.

  The House iteration of the idea would involve the creation of a new, more overtly political panel with 13 members appointed by the president and House and Senate leaders. If at least nine of this board’s members could agree on a reform package, it would be fast-tracked to an up-or-down vote in Congress with no opportunities for amendments.

  But as foretold by the Law of Headlines:

  Alas for them, their plans are unlikely to work. The challenge confronting Social Security has been obvious for several decades. The program has become an unsustainable drag on public finances as lifespans extend, the demographic balance of the population tilts toward the elderly, baby boomers retire, and the design of the retirement program ratchets up benefit payouts.

  A quick check of the campaign websites for my local wannabe CongressCritters does not show anyone with a smidgen of interest in dealing with the issue. Vaguely reassuring platitudes are the norm.

• Just don't call them late for dinner. David Harsanyi also has a question, but it's not yes/no: If 'Woke 1' Was 'Crazy,' What Does AOC Call the DSA?

  Hey, remember that unhinged cultural revolution we launched a few years back? That was insane — amirite?

  That's essentially what Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) told ABC News host Jonathan Karl recently, quoting a New York City Council member who describes socialist Wisconsin gubernatorial candidate Francesca Hong's past tweets about defunding the police and shuttering prisons.

  "Woke 1 was crazyyyy," she said with a laugh.\

  The revolution will be sanitized. But as I remember it, "Woke 1" was a high-tech progressive jihad that relied on intimidation, public shaming and economic ruin to dictate what words and ideas were permissible in the public square.

  For one thing, you were reviled for saying in public what Anthony Fauci admitted to his diary in private.

• You say "profoundly corrupt" as if it was a bad thing. Tosin Akintola covers the latest development in an ongoing scam: Trump Media is selling early access to the president's Truth Social posts for $100,000 a month.

  Trump Media & Technology Group—the company owned by President Donald Trump that operates Truth Social—is facing a lawsuit alleging that its plan to monetize access to the social media posts of the president and his closest advisers through its Truth API tool is unconstitutional.

  Announced in July and rolled out at the start of August, Trump Media describes its API as a data feed that "provides licensed, real-time access to posts from the highest-ranking Truth Social accounts." It does so at prices ranging from $60,000 to $100,000 per month, according to Trump Media CEO Kevin McGurn. Under the terms of the licensing agreement, Truth API subscribers will receive posts from the Trump administration delivered directly to their devices in "milliseconds," giving them an edge over regular users scrolling through their social feeds.

  Filed by The Intercept and the Freedom of the Press Foundation, the lawsuit states that the president's monetization of government information is "profoundly corrupt" and violates the First and Fifth Amendments. The groups argue they have a "right to access President Trump's public comments on equal terms with other members of the press and public," which is burdened by the president's Truth API "scheme." They say the plan to sell access to the posts burdens their First Amendment right "not to associate with Truth Social or subsidize its expressive activity" by conditioning "faster access" to government information on "subsidizing" government officials' activity on Truth Social.

  Given Trump's spotty attachment to economic reality, I'm not sure what financial advantage could be gleaned from early access to his Truth Social emissions. I assume the $60K-$100K bite per month is just simple bribery.

• History lesson du jour. John Fund reminds us: America Has Tried Socialism Before — and Quickly Abandoned It.

  The rise of the Democratic Socialists of America is nothing new, says historian Michael Barone, who for 40 years was the principal author of the magnificent Almanac of American Politics. Nor will he be surprised if the DSA suddenly declines.

  Barone acknowledges that key policies of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal — especially Social Security — are entrenched in American life. Our future challenge will be to build private-sector alternatives that allow people to save enough for their retirement and create jobs that reduce dependency on benefits.

  But before FDR, Barone notes that the Woodrow Wilson administration took maximum control of the private-sector economy, including the dissemination of news and opinion.

  … and also put Eugene Debs, presidential candidate of the Socialist Party of America in jail for a time. I guess Woody didn't care for the competition.

The Indispensable One mostly writes about Francesca Hong’s Bad Night. But I liked his lead-in anecdote:

Ladies and gentlemen, the New Hampshire Secretary of State has provided sample ballots for the state's primary election next month. In my case:

… the only contested races are for the big offices: Governor, US Senator, US House.

Let's take the easy one first. There are only three GOP candidates for Governor (with links to each campaign website): Kelly Ayotte, Shaun Fife, and Bob Wayne McClory.

Who's the craziest son of a bitch? Bob has a strong argument with his 6 Point Patriot page. He is not a fan of the 5-pointed stars on Old Glory. Instead, the "Timeline we should be on":

But Shaun counters with his "Free Energy Solutions":

[Yes, I pointed this out two years ago, Shaun's previous run for Guv. As in 2024, I can't find anything comparable on Kelly's website.]

I might look at the other contested races at some point. Stay tuned!

Also of note:

• Elon Musk can't make me buy a Tesla. David R. Henderson summarizes a recent lecture he gave at the Naval Postgraduate School, with a cogent observation: Hayek on Power.

  I noted Hayek’s statement that the government’s power “is a power which is newly created and which in a competitive society nobody possesses.” This is one of his most important insights and it’s often lost sight of, even by some libertarians. When government takes over, it’s not simply a redistribution of existing power. It’s a creation of power where it had not existed.

  Hayek makes another important point. The power a multimillionaire “who may be my neighbor and perhaps my employer” has over him “is very much less than that which the smallest fonctionnaire possesses who wields the coercive power of the state and on whose discretion it depends whether and how I am to be allowed to live or to work.”

  If only one candidate for governor was crazy enough to quote Hayek!

• All things considered, I too would rather be in Hawaii. James Freeman's "Best of the Web" WSJ column is mostly about Minnesota’s Referendum on Woke 1. But he squeezes in this tidbit, quoted from a Los Angeles Times story:

  As public spending on homelessness has come under increasing scrutiny, a nonprofit that runs domestic violence shelters in Southern California has paid its CEO, who lives in Hawaii, more than $1.6 million in salary, vacation pay and other compensation for the last two years of tax filings, a sum that is several times larger than the compensation of executives running similar organizations.

  Not too shabby! But she has a way to go to catch up with the CEO of ("nonprofit") AARP Jo Ann Jenkins. The AARP's Form 990 filings report her compensation of

  • $2,746,855 in 2024
  • $2,384,335 in 2023
  • $1,444,575 in 2022
  • $2,575,415 in 2021
  • $1,335,714 in 2020
  • … and I'm tired of typing.

Mr. Ramirez knows:

"Interstate 0". Heh!

With the understanding that the Republicans are awful in their own stupid way, let's look at the amusing rhetorical gymnastics of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who's attempting to downplay past idiocy. Charles C.W. Cooke wonders: Will AOC Own Up to the Lunacy of Woke?.

At Reason, Robby Soave has advice for us all: Don't let AOC retcon her starring role in 'Woke 1'.

And at the NYPost, Karol Markowicz has a non-negotiable demand: Lefties like AOC need to answer some questions before we move on from 'Woke 1'.

We eagerly await those answers, anticipating more scrumptious servings of word salad.

Also of note:

• A trillion here, a trillion there, and pretty soon you're talking real money. At Cato, Adam N. Michel has a related question: Who Will Pay for Democratic Socialism’s $200 Trillion Cost?

  The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) propose new spending that could more than triple federal outlays. They propose the government pay for health care, housing, higher education, and electricity. Jobs are government-guaranteed, retirement benefits are expanded, paid family leave is universal, fossil fuels are eliminated, and reparations are paid.

  The DSA platform claims that the bill for all this will be sent to “the richest individuals and corporations.” Tally up that bill, and it ballparks between $71 trillion and $212 trillion in new spending over the next decade. Confiscating every dollar of high-end wealth and corporate profits would cover only a fraction of those costs. The DSA agenda necessitates high taxes on middle-class Americans.

  Totaling up nine of the largest proposals in the DSA platform would mean new federal spending equivalent to between 18 percent and 53 percent of GDP.

  Adam has a table that prices out the goodies on the DSA shopping list, citing sources for "low" and "high" cost estimates.

  And we should not forget that that's money extracted from the private economy, which reflects what people actually want to buy and sell. That money instead goes to the government, which "gives" you what it thinks you should have. After skimming a hefty fraction off the top.

  Fun fact: This item's headline is based on a thousand-fold expansion of Senator Everett Dirksen's famous adage, "A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you're talking real money". Only problem: he apparently never said that.

• Let's not even talk about "Grape Nuts". At the Daily Economy, Jacob Smith looks at truth in labeling. Maybe (for example) it shouldn't be called "Consumer Protection" When 'Consumer Protection' Protects Producers from Competition.

  Since 2024, seven states have made it a crime to sell lab-grown meat. Florida went first, in May of that year. Texas became the seventh to do so, with fines that can reach $25,000 a day. The meat in question is grown from cells in a bioreactor tank, and most of these states banned it before a single package reached a store. Meanwhile, in Washington, a bill called the DAIRY PRIDE Act would strip the word “milk” from the almond and oat cartons in your grocery cooler. Each measure comes wrapped in the same promise: it is here to protect you from confusion. And in each case, the people who asked for it are the ranchers and dairy farmers who sell the older product.

  This is the usual shape of a consumer-protection law. On the label it is a shield for you. In practice, though, it is a weapon for whoever already holds the market. I study how industries capture the rules meant to bind them, and the tell is almost always the same: the law does less to inform the buyer than to disarm a rival. It is also an old trick. A little over a century ago, a President of the United States had to sit down and rule on what the word “whiskey” means, because a fortune rode on the answer.

  I'm not a whiskey drinker, but … I've wondered how many adjectives you can legally stick in front of "beer" on your 12-pack. I'm looking at you, Coors Pure, you "organic light beer", you.

• Great minds think alike. And so do Jonah Goldberg's and mine: Vote, Just Not for Kooks. Skipping down to his advice (probably paywalled):

  Which brings me to my advice. I think that voters should be more interested in rewarding good behavior and good character than in ideological or partisan purity tests. That doesn’t mean ideology and partisanship are irrelevant. I think these things can be balanced.

  Take the Senate race in Texas. Democrat James Talarico is ideologically not my cup of tea, and he is quite far to the left for Texas. But his Republican opponent, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, is in my view a corrupt gargoyle simply unfit for any office. I’m not here to debate that opinion, because the people seeking my advice generally share it.

  So, if you’re a conservative who thinks Talarico is too left-wing and Paxton is bat-winged, don’t vote for either of them.

  But you should still vote.

  You can leave the Senate line blank while voting for other Republicans on the ballot (you can also select Libertarian candidate Ted Brown). Sending the message that your problem is Paxton, not Republicans, is one that Republicans and conservatives need to hear.

  As I (tediously) have pointed out: In 2024, given the choice between Trump, Kamala, Chad Oliver, and Jill Stein, I … blanked.

John McWharter looks at Jason Arday and Academia’s Self-Seeking Pursuit of Virtue for City Journal:

Fun fact from further on in the article: Arday's resignation letter "seems likely to have been generated by AI."

Also of note:

• Want Pun Salad to link to your content? Try using "bonkers" in your headline. Ars Technica has the latest: Trump signs bonkers order that cuts vaccines, promotes ones that don't exist.

  President Trump signed an executive order Monday that makes sweeping, unilateral changes to federal vaccine recommendations. The order aims to reduce the number of lifesaving vaccines all children are recommended to get—from 18 to 11—while also splitting them up and spacing them out over more time and more medical visits.

  The vaccine changes are not backed by evidence or spurred by new findings. Rather, they are based on false anti-vaccine fearmongering about harms, including the debunked claim that they cause autism, and misinformation that multiple vaccinations can “overwhelm” children’s immune systems. This false claim has also been repeatedly debunked and explained.

  The vaccines that "don't exist"? Trump recommends the "MMR" (measles, mumps, rubella) vaccine (which he thinks is "quite lethal") be replaced by three different single-disease shots. Only problem is: such vaccines aren't available in the US, and would require the time-consuming and expensive FDA approval process.

  So, yeah, bonkers. I wonder if this was previewed to those early "Truth Social" providers so they could phone their brokers?

• Muh roads! What about muh roads?! Well, let's ask Cato's David Ditch (appaarently his real name). It appears that the New Highway Bill Has More Spending, Taxes, and Deficits.

  Congress is preparing to bail out the federal highway program once again without paying for it. According to a July 9 score by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), the House Transportation Committee’s BUILD America 250 Act (BUILD) would add more than $147 billion (about $1,100 per household) to the already unsustainable national debt over five years, while violating the user-pays principle.

  BUILD is a five-year highway bill that authorizes $474 billion for roads, mass transit, and other surface transportation programs from the Highway Trust Fund (HTF) for fiscal years (FYs) 2027 through 2031.

  The highway fund was created as a “user pays, user benefits” system, with drivers paying a user fee (the federal gas tax) to finance building and improving the interstate highway system. Congress broke this model by expanding the trust fund far beyond interstate highways, adding diversions to fund transit systems and boondoggles such as streetcars.

  My own CongressCritter, Chris Pappas, is one of the members of the House Transportation Committee. Which passed the bill with a 62-2 vote. I doubt he was one of the two votes against.

• Podcast note. Jay Nordlinger has Kevin D. Williamson as his interviewee: And the ‘D’ Is for ‘Damn Right’. I listened to the Whole Thing (about an hour), and KDW made it through with not a single dirty word.

A clever Amazon Product du Jour: a mug that "disappears" certain sections of the Bill of Rights when you fill it with a hot beverage.

Not so amusing when you consider that a lot of candidates favor amending the Constitution to (partially, for now) erase the First Amendment. Usually phrased as "overturn Citizens United". Local examples: US Senate candidate (and my current CongressCritter) Chris Pappas; current NH2 Congresscriter Maggie Goodlander; NH1 congressional candidates Stefany Shaheen, Heath Howard, Christian Urrutia.

I try to be a "reasonable people can differ" kind of guy, but this is an issue that puts me more on the "what the hell is wrong with these people" side.

All that to introduce Bradley A. Smith's article: Campaign Speech Lies at Heart of First Amendment. (NR gifted link) A strong opening:

Shouldn't be, anyway. Bradley is currently litigating against a Maine law limiting contributions to super PACs.

Candidates who want to "overturn Citizens United" have lost my vote, and they should lose yours too.

Also of note:

• Usually including the one discussed above. J.D. Tuccille points out that The socialist surge revives failed and hateful ideas. Including one of the oldest and most dangerous:

  Michigan's El-Sayed says he believes the Israeli government is as evil as the terrorist group Hamas, which launched the October 7 attacks, and calls it guilty of "apartheid" and "genocide." The DSA last year adopted a resolution denouncing Zionism (the belief that Jews have the right to establish and maintain Israel) as "a racist, imperialist, settler-colonial project" and made belief that "Israel has a right to defend itself" an offense punishable by expulsion from the organization. Hasan Piker* claimed and repeated that Hamas is "a thousand times better" than Israel. Colorado congressional candidate Melat Kiros declined to label as antisemitic a deadly firebombing attack on a Jewish rally in Boulder.

  "As a Democratic member of Congress, I can attest that for a growing number of my colleagues, being anti-Israel has now become a nonnegotiable moral litmus test," warns Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D–N.J.) "History teaches us that antisemitism is never the endpoint of hatred."

  It's as if the rising tide of modern radicals set out to revive some of the worst ideas of the past—socialism, totalitarianism, and bigotry—and combine them in the burnished turd of a modern political program for those disappointed with their lot in life. The ideas the movement peddles are ridiculous, hateful, and have proven themselves dangerous time and again. Yet they continue to find an audience.

  I still see "Hate Has No Home Here" lawn signs in my local travels. I await the amended version, "exceptions made for billionaires and Jews".

• The last few shreds of their respectability? Megan McArdle describes What the professors lost by winning with El-Sayed. (WaPo gifted link)

  Was it a win for the American Association of University Professors? On July 30, the organization announced that it was endorsing a political candidate for the first time in its 110-year history. Abdul El-Sayed, a left-wing Michigan Democrat running for the Senate, got the nod a few days before the Democratic primary. Last Tuesday, El-Sayed eked out a win over moderate Rep. Haley Stevens.

  So was it also a win for the AAUP?

  Any number of critics have sprung up to say no, it was an own goal. They make the point that I’ve offered repeatedly in recent columns: The perceived politicization of academia has eroded public trust, making universities vulnerable to unprecedented Republican attacks on higher education. Universities desperately need to regain their credibility as neutral institutions, not publicly position themselves on the Democratic Party’s leftmost flank.

  I've commented on AAUPniks now and then over the years. Example: The AAUP regrets to inform you that you're a fascist. With my conclusion: "The AAUP tends to attract faculty who aspire to union thuggery." Their current leader, Todd Wolfson, seems to be taking that path.

• Fine. Do that, and then abolish yourself. The WSJ editorialists look at the latest antics from a department that should not exist: The FCC Tries to Save Broadcast TV. (WSJ gifted link)

  The Federal Communications Commission is trying to get with the digital times and on Thursday moved to scrap its antiquated nationwide broadcast ownership cap. This much-needed regulatory modernization could help save broadcast TV, though a better solution would be eliminating the FCC.

  The FCC ownership cap dates to the bunny-ears era when there was little competition in the airwaves. Congress in 1996 formally codified a 35% limit on the share of U.S. households that a broadcast owner’s stations could collectively reach, which lawmakers in 2004 raised to 39%. Imagine if Amazon couldn’t deliver to more than 39% of U.S. households.

  I wonder how many WSJ readers these days have even seen bunny ears?

JUST IN: WNBA Commissioner announces the league is meeting to review what a woman is, after multiple former NBA stars announced plans to join the league.

— Polymarket (@Polymarket) August 8, 2026

It turns out that ex-Celtic Enes Kanter Freedom has officially declared himself a WNBA "prospect" for their draft next year. Here's the Facebook Reel of his announcement.

Back in 2021, I endorsed Enes for President. I stand by that.

(OK, so he is technically ineligible, having been born in Switzerland.)

Also of note:

• With an earth-shattering kaboom. Noah Smith points out one little problem with an increasingly popular policy stance: Banning data centers would blow up the U.S. economy.

  So far, there has been no strong move toward a federal data center pause, and the bills that have been introduced in Congress are pretty mild stuff. That’s why as long as the movement to stop data centers stayed confined to blue states, it didn’t really matter much. It was just another instance of a very traditional story that we’ve all come to expect — states like New York basically ban new physical industries, so those industries go to places like Texas. The red states get the economic activity they want, the blue states get the stasis they want, and everyone is happy.

  Nor would a few state-level bans affect the progress of AI. AI is a creature of bits and bytes; it lives in the cloud, and it doesn’t care about the physical location of the data centers that represent the lobes of its vast, alien brain. Data centers in Texas would sustain AI progress and AI applications just as well as data centers in New York.

  Except now Texas is pausing data centers too. If almost all states ban data centers — or if the federal government gets involved in a major way — there could be major consequences for the U.S. economy. In the long run, I think limiting the physical resources devoted to AI would be a good thing; in the short run, it will simply clobber the already-wobbly U.S. economy. A movement against data centers has the seeds of something good and useful, but it has huge risks that most Americans seem not to realize yet.

  Noah actually thinks "data center limitations make sense in the long run". Unfortunately, his paywall kicks in before he describes where the line between "limitations" and "banning" should be drawn.

• They got worse. Greg Lukianoff describes What happened to the AAUP — and why viewpoint diversity matters.

  On July 30, the American Association of University Professors did something it has never done in its 111-year history: It endorsed a candidate for political office.

  And this was not a general-election endorsement against some uniquely terrible enemy of academic freedom. No, the national AAUP waded into a contested Democratic primary for Michigan’s U.S. Senate seat and backed Abdul El-Sayed, the unmistakable candidate of the party’s left. He had the backing of Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, ran on Medicare for All, rejected corporate PAC money, and called for ending U.S. military aid to Israel.

  He was also the more controversial choice, especially because of his position that Israel’s war in Gaza constitutes genocide and his appearances with Hasan Piker. Academic freedom, by contrast, was not a defining issue of his campaign, although El-Sayed had been an AAUP member and was strongly backed by organized labor. The AAUP proudly advertised the decision as its “First-Ever National Political Endorsement.” Todd Wolfson, the AAUP’s president, said roughly 80 percent of the Michigan members who voted supported making an endorsement and 97 percent favored El-Sayed.

  Greg is pretty convincing that this is a bad look for the AAUP. It's easy to be disgusted, but Pun Salad tries to follow the Costello Guidance and search for amusement. Greg provides Todd Wolfson's "now-deleted tweet" responding to his critics:

  

  Did Prof Tod delete this because it was too ill-tempered, or was he embarrassed by misspelling "Chamberlain"?

• Yum! River Page tried it so you don't have to: I Made RFK Jr.’s Salmon Cakes. They Were Bad.

  Wednesday, 3 p.m. I was wandering aimlessly around a dingy South Bronx grocery store, desperately trying to find “nutritional yeast,” whatever that is. I looked down at the YouTube video that had been playing on my phone since I got here.

  “And there had been a war on saturated fats for almost 70 years,” Health and Human Services (HHS) secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. croaked through my AirPods. “The government had been lying to us and telling us that protein caused heart attacks.”

  Emblazoned onto Kennedy’s apron—and the apron of the man awkwardly standing beside him, celebrity chef Andrew Gruel—was the title of our government’s new cooking series, The Real Food Show. This was the inaugural episode, which came out last week.

  The aim of The Real Food Show, according to the HHS website, is “to make healthy eating practical, approachable, and affordable.” Every recipe is based on the new Dietary Guidelines for Americans, which were released last year, turning the food pyramid upside down. HHS says these recipes are meant to be “easy,” and “budget friendly” at less than $5 per serving “whenever possible.”

  The debut recipe? Crispy salmon cakes with an apple, white bean, and greens salad. All that for less than $5 a serving? In this economy?

  River wound up spending $98 for the ingredients. There are a lot of ingredients: not only that nutritional yeast, but avocado mayo, thyme, panko breadcrumbs, … (Recipe here)

  And the result: "It looked like cat vomit."

• Weekly Feature. Your TGIF excerpt from Nellie Bowles:

  → He’s gilding everything: The aging and patinated statues of D.C. are getting regilded. This pair of statues hadn’t been touched since the 1970s, and now they glow, which my Gen-Z translators tell me means shine. Seeing the results here, I’m actually surprised this wasn’t a term-one priority for Trump. By the time the man leaves office the Lincoln Memorial is going to be bedazzled. He is President Liberace, the first gay leader of this nation.

  And in the scam of the week, we have the team at Truth Social selling early access to market-moving White House announcements, calling it Truth API. See, Trump often makes presidential announcements on Truth Social, his social media platform, and now you can buy government announcements a tiny bit early to trade on it. If this sounds at all sketchy, then you probably don’t get what an API is, and that’s fine. This is what real men do for work, and you shouldn’t worry your little head about it, kitten.

  The statement from Trump Media and Technology Group interim CEO Kevin McGurn: “Markets already move on Truth Social posts. Truth API delivers a direct, licensed, real-time feed of the platform’s most market-moving Truths while advancing our strategy to monetize proprietary assets through a high-margin, recurring revenue stream.” The idea is to give algorithmic trading tools a few milliseconds of advantage to trade on whatever the latest Trump announcement is. And they’re spelling that out! Martha Stewart went to jail for a minor trade based on some tidbit her broker had allegedly gleaned (the original James Comey villain story), but anyway. Here we are. Explicitly selling presidential trading tips. Major banks are hesitant to subscribe right now, which means a new type of man is about to get really rich. Men who aren’t scared of a little political crime. I think they’ll have ponytails.

  "Market-moving Truths"! What a concept!

Americans now pay more in taxes than they spend on food, clothing, and shelter combined.

Think about that.

Government has become so big and bloated that taxes cost more than life's basic necessities. Every American taxpayer should be outraged. pic.twitter.com/c6HRMbJH9t

— Stephen Moore (@StephenMoore) August 5, 2026

And of course, it's not enough. Never is, never will be. The latest tactic is the pretense of fighting wealth inequality. At Cato, Paul Meany notes the actual motive: Redistributing Wealth Means Redistributing Power to the State.

I've been trotting out this quote ever since I reread Hayek's The Constitution of Liberty:

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

David R. Henderson chimes in from the Hoover Institution: The Deadly Focus On Income And Wealth Inequality.

For DSA types, that's a secondary issue to plundering rich people, and ensuring that government has the power to expropriate anyone's wealth if the 'democratic socialists' find them unsatisfactory for some reason.

Also of note:

• Harsh. But fair and accurate. George Will lets loose: DSA socialism is Peter Pan politics for sandbox revolutionaries. (WaPo gifted link)

  Zohran Mamdani’s election helped to ignite 21st-century interest in socialism, a 19th-century doctrine that had a deflating 20th century. Socialism, New York’s mayor says, prioritizes the “working class.” But what is that? “I think,” he told the New York Times, “if you have to work to pay your bills, I think that that is one definition of being a part of the working class.” But if everyone with bills to pay — essentially, everyone — is socialism’s priority, what is not socialism?

  The Democratic Socialists of America, a political party, sort of, recently issued its “program,” which begins by urging readers to imagine “a future without capitalism.” You “control your own labor and see it going to good use. It’s not just a job to pay the bills”:

  “Speaking of bills: you don’t really have them anymore. You have no debt. You don’t need health insurance. You don’t pay a mortgage or have a landlord, because comfortable housing is a human right. Your retirement is publicly funded. Food, education, energy, medicine, and transportation aren’t for-profit businesses; they are common goods and utilities … what if you were free to spend your time how you like without worrying about cost or dreading going back to work? What if you didn’t have to think about paying rent or loans at the end of the month, or saving for college, or affording groceries?”

  It's how they're selling it, but (honestly) if it were really about that, then they could do it without government: just set up a super-kibbutz, as they had in Israel's early days. A socialist Eden! And leave the rest of us be.

  That won't happen, of course. And not just because of their virulent anti-semitism.

• Maybe we just need a better label? James Freeman excerpts an anonymous reader's mail: ‘Abolish Capitalism. Viva Free Enterprise!’. (WSJ gifted link)

  In Reagan’s autobiography, he uses the word capitalism exactly zero times. Milton Friedman talked and wrote for decades about free enterprise. Meanwhile, in 2026, “freedom” polls exceptionally well across the political spectrum.

  When Louis Blanc used le capitalisme in 1850, it was to describe “the appropriation of capital by some to the exclusion of others.” When Karl Marx later railed against capitalists in Das Kapital, it was the label he gave to those he derided as corrupt and exploitative. Marxists have never meant this label as a neutral descriptor, let alone as a compliment.

  Free enterprise, in contrast, is plainly descriptive. With its French cognate entrepreneur, it connotes not a system but individual initiative. Those who would defend capitalism ought to be talking about “free enterprise” instead.

  I'm not convinced, but hey, maybe.

• And on the LFOD watch. It rang for the Detroit News report: Foo Fighters draw on 31 years of history for 35,000 fans at Ford Field. But stealing the show for us Granite Staters was…

  Queens of the Stone Age opened with an hour-long set of boogie metal, and frontman Josh Homme was in a mood. He alluded to someone backstage telling him he wasn't allowed to smoke in the building, which led him to rail against the tyranny of $60 parking and $45 beers throughout the band's set. (There was definitely $60 parking outside the stadium, but no signs of $45 beers.)

  "Don't let these corporate a--holes tell you what to do. Do whatever the f--- you want," Homme spat. "This is your f---ing night. Live free or die, motherf---ers." He then played a raging version of "Song for the Dead," the darkest, meanest and most beautiful song in the band's catalog. It was a perfect scene-setter for the night.

  I would not recommend editing your license plate to Josh's version. But (on the other hand) the Supreme Court long ago recognized the free speech issue for the motto.

Recently on the book blog:

I've had bad luck with self-help books lately. (I'm not sure why I keep checking them out! It's not like I need help!) But good news, readers: although Goodreads sticks a "self help" genre tag on this book, it's much more, and better. (Other Goodreads tags: Philosophy, Psychology, Sociology, Science. All accurate.)

It's very good, well deserving the praise you can read on the book's Amazon page and elsewhere. I regularly blog my "top 10" nonfiction reads for the year. If I make it to 2027, I can guarantee this will be on that list.

The author, Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, writes superbly on this topic she clearly cares so much about. She does not talk down to her readers, she doesn't avoid fancy lingo, like "ontological". I think she assumes you're gonna catch up via Google.

(Example, page 86: "It was a trompe l'oeil at an ontological level, a trompe l'ontologie." Well, shoot. There's two things I have to look up.)

She is, however, not above a bit of wordplay. Page 64, the bit that made me smile is bolded:

There are exceptions to the constancy of self-attention. You might have sometimes experienced extraordinary intervals when your attention was drawn so fixedly toward something outside of you, perhaps as you concentrated on a task that so entirely absorbed your attention that you lost all sense of yourself—together, most tellingly, with the psychological sense of time's passage. That is how fundamental to us our self-attention is: Escape it temporarily, and you temporally escape temporality. These extraordinary episodes have come to be called flow and they are so psychologically distinct precisely because they are so anomalous.

The book is also full of I-didn't-know-that items. Example: back in the early 20th century, pretty and rare feathers were worth (ounce for ounce) four times more than gold. And so: "The costliest loss of valuables aboard the Titanic lay in the boxes of feathers that went down with the ship."

All this, and I haven't really talked about the book's subject: mattering. It's a near-universal human instinct, coming into play when you have won the basic struggle against entropy, and assured your self-preservation. Then you start wondering: what was the point of all that. Isn't there more? Shouldn't I (somehow) matter?

There are a number of tactics people use to scratch this itchy instinct. The author has composed a "mattering map" showing the four basic varieties (if you don't want to track down the book, it's reproduced in the WSJ review). Each has its advantages and disadvantages, but you will almost certainly recognize your neighborhood.

Finally, the author tells fascinating stories of the famous and not-so-famous, and how they worked out their mattering instincts. (That bit about the feathers above? It's about this cat burglar…)

In short: this book has my highest recommendation.

Recommended by Ronald Bailey at Reason! So I asked the Portsmouth (NH) Public Library to get a copy on that. And (sigh) I didn't like it as much as Ron did. But (hey) you might.

But it leaves you wondering right off the bat: how many babies did Dr. Benjamin Spock (indirectly) kill when diligent parents followed his "expert" advice to have their infants sleep on their tummies? That turned out to have a significant risk of SIDS, Sudden Infant Death Syndrome.

Good news: My sister and I survived our 1950s infancy, even given the occasional misguidance promulgated by that era's authorities. And our kids made it through the 80s OK, too, even though that tummy-sleeping advice persisted after that. Whew!

But mostly Helen Pearson's book is about "evidence-based" practices. Their earliest adoption was in medicine, and its use of Randomized Control Trials (RCTs) to determine the efficacy of medicines, procedures, and general advice. If there are no RCTs, or the existing ones are problematic (low sample sizes, etc.), a backup technique is "systematic review", where the literature is scoured for relevant studies, which are combined via statistical magic to give a reliable result.

Pearson goes on to show how the "evidence-based" technique has been applied in other areas: "social policies", policing, conservation, education, and management. The results there are more of a mixed bag. And Pearson's descriptions can get a little tedious at some points. I found the section on management to be extremely boring, with my eyes often wandering off the page, checking out what the cat is doing, or maybe looking at my phone… (She did, however, seem to imply that managers get taken in by fads promoted by charismatic hucksters. That matches my experience!)

At times, Pearson lets her ideology fly.

In discussing social policy, she claims Ronald Reagan, in his 1980 campaign, "told derogatory stories of the notional 'welfare queen,' referring to women who were supposedly claiming welfare fraudulently or even deliberating having children outside marriage in order to milk the system."

Reader, I researched this back in 2014. As far as anyone can tell, Reagan uttered the phrase once, in a 1976 radio address. And even then, he clearly attributed the phrase to someone else ("as she's now called"). He was referring to an actual (non-"notional") woman, known most commonly as "Linda Taylor". And his source was not the KKK, but Jet magazine.

Pearson also does a considerable amount of Trump-bashing, and a slightly less amount of RFKJr-bashing. This is to be expected, I suppose, from an editor of Nature, which dropped its usual neutrality to endorse Wheezy Joe in 2020 and Kamala in 2024. And (of course) she explicitly drops her "evidence-based" demands when it comes to climate change. The practice of "spewing greenhouse gases" simply "need[s] to stop". Period. Just shut up and do whatever the "experts" say.

I read a different book on RCTs back in 2012: Uncontrolled. I liked it better, and you might too.

Truly, writing about this is definitely picking the low-hanging piñata; everyone seems to be talking about $20 burritos. But I like Jack Butler at the WSJ's "Free Expression" newsletter; he writes of A Burrito Brouhaha. (WSJ gifted link)

My contribution is the Amazon Eye Candy above. It is, as I type, $18.23 for a half-dozen shelf-stable burrito bowls, a little over $3 each. Pick up some nice flour tortillas, maybe some queso or sour cream… Detailed instructions and suggestions are available (of course) on the web.

I must admit, I'm tempted to try it myself. But instead I'm splurging on a Taste of Inspirations Five Cheese Pizza, on which I'm putting an immoderate amount of Hormel Pepperoni with Jalapeno.

Also of note:

• I think Betteridge's Law of Headlines wins again. Noah Smith wonders Are the Democrats going to save us this time? After he recounts (accurately) the many ways the GOP has turned into a "bizarre Trump cult"…

  Let’s look at the type of candidates who are winning Democratic primaries. Francesca Hong, a DSA member who is all but certain to be the Democratic nominee for governor of Wisconsin, tweeted in 2020 that we should “cancel Thanksgiving”. When asked in a recent interview if she had recanted that position, Hong refused, talking about how Thanksgiving was “incredibly painful” for many people:

  As if that weren’t tone-deaf enough, she appeared to criticize herself for marrying a white man (saying “assimilation…took over”), and talked about having a half-white son as “proximity to whiteness”:

  Hong backtracked a couple of days later, declaring that Thanksgiving is her “favorite holiday”, but the damage appears to have been done — Bernie Sanders said he didn’t think he would endorse her, and prediction markets immediately began to discount Hong’s chances of beating her Republican opponent in the fall:

  (Tweets and graphic elided.)

  I'm not sure what I'll do if my November choices are between Trump idolaters and leftist moonbats. Leave the ballot unmarked, I suppose.

• Say it ain't so, Bryan! Ah, don't fret by Bryan Caplan's headline: I Stopped Being a Libertarian Because I Realized the Sky is Blue.

  When a thinker publicly changes his mind on major questions, neutral observers normally interpret it as a sign of courage and maturity. Almost no one enjoys admitting they were wrong — and “I changed my mind” is tantamount to “I was wrong.”

  On reflection, however, this favorable interpretation is premature. Yes, changing your mind because you discover surprising new evidence or arguments is courageous and mature. But what if you change your mind for purely emotional reasons, like “The idea that murderers shouldn’t be punished started to disgust me”? Or because you have a falling out with friends who share your views? “My girlfriend dumped me, so I left the church.”

  Neither of these intellectual paths even hints at courage or maturity.

  As I've mentioned (probably over-mentioned), my come-to-libertarian-Jesus moment was reading Milton Friedman's Capitalism and Freedom as a youngster in the early 1960s.

• Yes, that makes me a boomer. So is Dave Barry, and his essay today is about us: Boomers. After some slapstick humor (which you should check out, it's hilarious):

  But enough slapstick humor. It’s time for today’s topic, which is an article I came across in the distinguished British publication The Economist. The headline is:

  Why people over the age of 55 are the new problem generation

  My immediate assumption when I saw this headline, was: Oh, great, yet another article about how we Baby Boomers are terrible because we’re hoarding all the wealth, and we’re draining the Social Security trust fund, and we refuse to vacate our houses so younger people can live in them, and we think that all popular music has sucked since roughly the Eagles, and we drone on and on about how back in our day we didn’t have mobile phones or GPS, as if that makes us courageous hardy pioneers instead of just old farts, and WHY DON’T WE JUST GO AHEAD AND DIE ALREADY.

  That’s what I assumed the article was going to say. But I was wrong. The article says that the problem with us Boomers is... We’re partying too hard. Seriously. The article states that our generation was too wild and crazy back in the day, and we’re STILL too wild and crazy, so that compared to younger generations we’re drinking more and using drugs more, and we’re going to wild retirement-community parties where sometimes we’re even — if you can imagine — having sex.

  Dave goes on to note that the Economist doesn't approve of all this canoodling, which … well, I can see their point. Old people are disgusting.

  And not that it matters, but I find my old Eagles CDs to be … not as good as I once thought they were.

• LFOD Appears in unexpected places. I don't read SCOTUSblog, and even if I did, their headline isn't that grabby: Tariff refunds reach $100 billion mark. Zzzz.

  Ah, but at the end of the article, they excerpt the oral argument transcript in United States v. Jones, a 2011 case dealing with the thorny issue of whether it was Constitutionally OK to attach a GPS tracker to a suspect's car without a warant.

  JUSTICE ALITO: “And what if it was put on the license place? Would that be a technical trespass? Is that the property of the driver?”

  MR. LECKAR: “Well, a license plate, as I understand it, is the property of the State, and driving is a privilege. But it's not a technical trespass in this particular case. Mr. Jones had the –”

  JUSTICE SCALIA: “Is that right? I don't own my license plate? I didn't know that. How do you know that?”

  (Laughter.)

  JUSTICE SCALIA: “How do you know that? I paid for my license plate.”

  (Laughter.)

  JUSTICE KENNEDY: “We don't need to get into it, but ‘Live Free or Die’ was spelled on the license plate.”

  Those crazy cutups! FWIW, I'm pretty sure Justice Scalia did not have a car registered in New Hampshire.

(Illustrated once again by my ChatGPT effort from last year.)

Veronique de Rugy notes Socialism in the Open and on the Right.

Meanwhile Chris Freiman is in compliance with Betteridge's Law of Headlines at his substack: Does Funding Research Give Government a Claim to Tech Firms?

Christopher goes on to demonstrate the fallacious thinking involved. It's almost as if Mazzucato worked backward from her desired conclusion, trying hard to find a semi-plausible argument to support it.

Also of note:

• With a hefty dose of Calvinball rules. Kevin D. Williamson notes the Democrat Primary electorate Playing for Twits and Giggles. (Dispatch gifted link)

  The left-wing goofball Democrats have nominated as their Senate candidate in Michigan has a bevy of enthusiastic cheerleaders, and it should surprise absolutely no one to learn that a great many of those cheerleaders are wearing stupid red hats.

  Republicans ought to be running scared, but Democrats are running Abdul El-Sayed, who has bested normie Democrat Haley Stevens in the Michigan primary.

  Michigan has lost more than 8,000 manufacturing jobs since Donald Trump announced his imbecilic “Liberation Day” tariffs. But many of the Michigan families that escaped the direct and intense economic pain of a lost paycheck are experiencing the pain of a diminished paycheck, a persistent if less intense economic discomfort resulting from continued high inflation, with high and rising fuel and food costs eating into family budgets. You’d think that Democrats would have chosen a candidate well positioned to keep that issue and similar “kitchen table” issues, if you’ll forgive the tedious cliché, front and center.

  On top of the tariff misadventures, Republicans in Congress are studiously gazing at their Florsheims and pretending that the United States is not currently engaged in an illegal—and losing—war in Iran, one that is playing hell with the economy here at home and abroad. The president wanders around talking like an untreated stroke victim while even such utterly supine and slavering sycophants as Jeanine Pirro are walking sideways away from the hypertensive, sneering face of the Republican Party. That’s a lot to work with. Trump and the economic failures associated with him are “like an anchor around Republicans,” says Michigan pollster Bernie Porn, whose name you should definitely never, ever Google.

  It's shaping up to be a real hold-my-nose-in-the-voting-booth election come November.

• Who had this on their "Articles of Impeachment" bingo card? Charles C.W. Cooke points out: Truth Social’s Early-Access Scheme Is Indefensible. (NR gifted link)

  On Saturday, the Trump Media & Technology Group launched a new commercial offering: A real-time feed on the Truth Social website that will give paying institutions early access to certain high-profile posts for between $60,000 and $100,000 per month.

  There is no credible defense of this. The only reason that anyone would want priority access to Truth Social is to gain priority access to President Trump’s pronouncements on that platform. And the only reason that anyone would want priority access to President Trump’s pronouncements on that platform is to act on them for pecuniary gain. Trump often uses Truth Social as the primary forum for his announcements — announcements that include changes to personnel, the imposition or rescission of tariffs, key foreign policy decisions, and more. These announcements are extremely useful to financial institutions, and, in the age of high-speed trading, the faster those financial institutions can obtain them, the more money those financial institutions can make. Facilitating this access is not a byproduct of Truth Social’s API offering; it is its core — perhaps its sole — purpose. Simply put: President Trump is charging Americans a fee — a fee that, in part, goes into his family’s pockets — for the privilege of receiving news about his official actions earlier than those who do not pay.

  I can't imagine that early access to Trump's unhinged diatribes on Truth Social would be a reliable way to guide your investment strategy. I would guess you would have better luck with perusing sheep entrails spread across a Ouija board.

  More credible explanation: simple bribery.

• Yeah, that'll be good. That'll work. At Reason, Tosin Akintola is skeptical: Senators Want To Claw Back Trump's Spending Power. They Should Just Pass a Real Budget Instead.

  You'd have an easier time hitting a fastball off Milwaukee Brewers phenom Jacob Misiorowski than getting Congress to take back wasteful spending it has appropriated, as the Trump administration is finding out.

  On Monday, the Senate passed a continuing resolution to fund parts of the federal government through December 11. The bill includes a provision that temporarily blocks the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) from implementing a rule change that would have given executive branch political appointees greater control over the disbursement of federal grants.

  Proposed by the OMB in May, the rule has garnered over 62,123 public comments, most of which are in opposition. It would require "senior appointees" to review grant proposals for consistency with "applicable law, federal agency priorities, and the national interest." It also says agencies must ensure that funding proposals "advance the president's policy priorities."

  The ban's inclusion in the funding bill appears to be a direct response from Sens. Patty Murray (D–Wash.) and Susan Collins (R–Maine), who didn't take kindly to the Trump administration's use of pocket rescissions last year. In her statement on the resolution, Collins said she was "pleased" that the bill "prevents" the OMB from implementing its proposed rule, which would "politicize grants" and "harm small, rural communities, families, and biomedical research." Murray was more direct, calling the rule a "corrupt policy that would allow [President Donald] Trump to hold even more federal grants hostage."

  Tosin's article links to the 2026 Congressional Pig Book issued by the Citizens Against Government Waste. Senator Susan Collins of that state just across the Salmon Falls River got a special mention for wangling "159 earmarks costing $431,571,000".

  Susie's campaign ads are rife on the streaming services I frequent. She is damned proud to let you know that she's steered a lot of taxpayer money to Maine.

• I'm pretty sure my patience would wear thin after just one. George Will recommends: Now the midterms begin in earnest. Ask candidates three questions. (WaPo gifted link)

  Political candidates greedy for power are often parsimonious with information about what they would do with it. And voters currently being exhorted to participate in electing a new Congress might reasonably wonder: Why bother? Presidents govern, Congress spectates. Nevertheless, here are three commitments voters might seek from those currently seeking House or Senate seats.

  First: When the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974 was passed, the national debt was less than $500 billion. It is almost certain to reach 80 times that sum — $40 trillion — next month. It has become normal for the federal government to run nearly $2 trillion budget deficits even during full employment and steady economic growth.

  So, ask candidates about Warren Buffett’s five-minute solution: “I could end the deficit in five minutes. You just pass a law that says that anytime there’s a deficit of more than 3 percent of GDP, all sitting members of Congress are ineligible for reelection.”

  It's fun to think about. But (as GFW admits) it would probably require a Constitutional Amendment. And those are tough to push through the ratification process.

  And if you had enough votes in Congress to pass an amendment, you would have way more than enough votes to just… pass a balanced budget. Why not just do that instead?

Recently on the book blog:

Like his previous book in the series, Mick Herron ends this one with a … well, it's not exactly a cliffhanger, let's just call it "a stunning plot development that leaves you wondering about its resolution."

But (spoiler alert) the previous book's SPDTLYWAIR was Roddy Ho's discovery that Slough House's personnel records had been wiped from the Agency's internal database. Disturbing! As in previous books, we are dropped into the middle of an ongoing battle, and its dimensions are only clarified as Jackson Lamb and the rest of the group muddle through, hoping to survive. It develops that "First Desk" Diana Travener launched an assassination scheme aimed at a Russian agent misbehaving in England. Much worse, that scheme was bankrolled privately, by a corrupt media star in a corrupt relationship with a (previously) disgraced politician.

The upshot is that the Slow Horses may be in mortal danger as a result, (relatively) innocent victims of this rekindled cold war.

Other things of interest (may contain more spoilers): a character we haven't seen since the first book in the series gets resurrected here. On page 201, Jackson Lamb reveals that he's a believer in the Steele Dossier Russians-elected-Trump conspiracy theory. Lady Di actually seems to be more sympathetic here than in previous books; however, that may be only because her antagonists are truly slimy.

And don't go whining: "I was told there would be no math." Because I am telling you upfront: there's gonna be math.

So on to the burning question: Did Elon Musk sentence millions of people to death by dismantling USAID?. Going to the video, from Aaron Brown at Reason:

Fortunately, there's Reason.

Also of note:

• Hey, but what about the Reflecting Pool? Jim Geraghty is unhappy with two-thirds of Uncle Stupid's branches of government: The Semi-Retired President and the GOP Congress. Three paragraphs from a long article:

  Trump and his administration have no discernible interest in reducing this year’s deficit, currently at $1.36 trillion, $29 billion higher than at this point last year. The national debt is $39.7 trillion. (It was just under $20 trillion when Trump took office in his first term in 2017.)

  Social Security runs out of money in 2032, six years from now. Medicare Part A runs out of money one year later. Nobody’s interested in doing anything about that.

  Trump’s policy on Iran continues to bounce between hyperbolic threats and naïve credulity, as he fumes that the “Iranian Leadership is unbelievably duplicitous!” (If only someone had warned him.) U.S. Central Command has sent a message to military analysts “looking for new creative and unconventional ways to pressure and punish Iran.” (Nothing wrong with soliciting new ideas, but it’s a little unnerving to hear that five months into what was supposed to be a five-week war, we’re looking around for other options.) The war begun by the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which Trump repeatedly pledged he could resolve in one day, has been raging for all 561 days of Trump’s presidency.

  "I alone can fix it." Remember? Good times.

• And as for that other branch… Romina Boccia describes How Congress Turned Budget Reconciliation Into a Tool for More Spending.

  Congress is pursuing another reconciliation bill before the midterm elections. It should demonstrate to Americans that their elected representatives are willing to make the difficult choices needed to put the nation’s finances on a sustainable path. Instead, it risks becoming yet another reminder that Congress continues to rely on shortcuts and shiny objects to distract from the structural entitlement reforms the budget requires.

  America’s debt crisis is a fiscal problem, and it is also a political one. Washington doesn’t lack ideas for reducing deficits. It lacks the political courage to enact them.

  I'm not a huge fan of mindless voting strategies, but "vote against incumbents" is … not a bad one!

• Geraghty again. I'm sorry, I try not to overfollow a single author, but this is pretty interesting: If You Want to Hurt Russia's Economy, the Graham Bill Is the Best Option on the Table.

  Last week, former Senator Lindsey Graham’s sanctions bill won overwhelming support in the U.S. Senate, with 84 senators voting in favor of a motion to proceed and just twelve voting against it.

  The opposition consisted of Republican Senator Rand Paul and ten Democrats: Lisa Blunt Rochester of Delaware, Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire, Mazie Hirono of Hawaii, Andy Kim of New Jersey, Ed Markey of Massachusetts, Jon Ossoff of Georgia, Alex Padilla of California, Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, Peter Welch of Vermont, Ron Wyden of Oregon, and “independent” Bernie Sanders (insert eye roll here) of Vermont who caucuses with the Democrats.

  Maggie tweeted her lame excuse:

  I stand with Ukraine – and against Russia – in its fight for freedom and have long supported increasing sanctions on Vladimir Putin and his oligarch enablers.
  
  But today's bill gives the President new authority to impose tariffs, even on our allies. I do not think tariffs, which…

  — Sen. Maggie Hassan (@SenatorHassan) July 29, 2026

  Well, it's not like I was going to vote for her anyway.

• It's not as if we're doing a great job with regulating the present… Veronique de Rugy points out The Problem With Regulating the Future. She's in favor of "permissionless innovation".

  History is full of technologies that looked dangerous before they transformed the world for the better. Automobiles, airplanes, the internet, smartphones, even electricity all generated fear. Had regulators insisted on solving every conceivable problem before allowing widespread adoption, many of these innovations would have been delayed by years, perhaps decades. Instead, we discovered the real problems – as opposed to the many imagined ones – through experience and developed solutions along the way.

  AI is the latest example. And as always, many people are worried and would like to limit future harm that could come from it. I take it to be the spirit of a recent public letter called We Must Act Now. The signers warn that AI could transform the economy over the next decade and, therefore, argues that “economists, policymakers and technology leaders must act now... to build the incentives, guardrails, and institutions needed to steer AI in a direction that complements humans and benefits society.”

  This is precisely where the letter loses me. It’s not that I believe that AI poses no risks. I am sure it does. But the extremely vague statement opens the door to the precautionary principal approach to regulating AI. It doesn’t come out and say it but I think that left in the hands of politicians and bureaucrats what we will get is an approach to acting now that treats the whole exercise as if we already know enough about those risks to begin designing the institutions and regulations that will govern them.

  I'm currently reading a book that favors "evidence-based" policies in numerous fields. And here, Vero advocates for "evidence-based governance."

Recently on the book blog:

Recently on the movie blog:

Another book in my Simak reading project, finally getting to the books I bought and never got around to reading. This one is from 1970.

It is, more or less, pure fantasy. No spaceships or robots. It is first-person narrated by Horton Smith, a radio/TV newsman who's looking to return to his childhood home of Pilot Knob to write a book. He gets sort of lost on a lonely road in poor repair, and then, somewhat surprisingly, gets attacked by a triceratops. This is on page 10.

He evades the dinosaur, but his car gets hung up in a ditch, so he treks to a nearby farmhouse, where he meets its hospitable owner, who invites him to share his moonshine, and … eventually, Horton realizes that his host is Snuffy Smith. Yes, from the comic pages.

And it goes on in the same vein from there. Horton is the kind of guy that things happen to, and he stays remarkably calm for someone who is essentially trapped in a nightmare he cannot seem to wake from. He acquires a love interest, Kathy, the local schoolmarm. He gets accused of murder, and takes off downriver, and…

A lot of stuff happens. It eventually winds up, as Horton discovers the rules of the universe he's been transported to. Unfortunately, I didn't find Horton likeable or interesting, and his nightmarish odyssey did not grab me. It's as if Mr. Simak had blank pages to fill, and he just kept typing with whatever popped into his head. Maybe that was the inspiration for the book title.

">

Pun Son and I actually went to BarnZ's movie theater in Barrington to see this a few months back. Alas, I fell asleep at some critical point, and I didn't feel right about reporting it at the time. But it showed up free-to-me on Netflix, and I got an early start (after watching a new Futurama episode on Hulu), and …

Well, I'm not sure I stayed awake for the whole thing this time either, but what I saw was good.

As the movie opens, young Spike has been abducted by the "Jimmies", a deranged group of youngsters that see their task in the zombified world of the future as torturing and killing the innocent. Why? I think the movie blames an overdose of Teletubbies-watching at an impressionable age. Spike manages to survive his initial trial, through sheer, horrible, luck.

Meanwhile Dr. Kerson (from the previous movie) has gone slightly insane in his own way, constructing the "temple" of the title out of salvaged human skeletons. Impressive! But he still has a good heart, and manages to befriend "Samson", an infected, hairy zombie; the Doctor tries to resurrect Samson's human side using anti-psychotic meds. He doesn't say "He's crazy, so this might just work," but he could.

Eventually, the Jimmies and Dr. Kerson meet up, and there is a thrilling climax. And also a setup for the next movie.

Iran will never follow through on ending nuclear production nor giving up its new found leverage in the Strait of Hormuz. They are attempting to play us….again. The only way to stop them is to eliminate their avenues of funding. Period. https://t.co/lGmcp0TJkv

— Nikki Haley (@NikkiHaley) August 2, 2026

Clarity of purpose, clear-eyed vision, … alas, it was not to be.

A somewhat longer description from Erick Erickson describing The mess I have returned to.

Unfortunately, being bad at the job is probably not a valid Article of Impeachment. That's OK, there are already plenty to spare.

Also of note:

• As Elaine told Frank Constanza: "It means whatever you want it to mean." A couple NR articles (among many) dealing with their contributors' ongoing debate. First up: Dan McLaughlin, who asks, provocatively: What Exactly Is the 'Common Good'?

  One of the problems with the common good as a standard is its vagueness. Does it mean that laws should have a moral basis? If so, that just restates reality: virtually all law is grounded in moral judgments about what is right, wrong, fair, unfair, just, unjust, etc. Does it mean that laws should aim to improve the morals of the people? That’s a very different question, and one that raises serious questions about the limits of the competence of government: government can do a lot to degrade the morals of the governed but has only limited power to improve them. That’s to say nothing of the difficulty of defining what kinds of morality are supported by a sufficient consensus to justify backing them with governmental force.

  I also liked David L. Bahnsen, who provided Five Takeaways About the Common Good. Let's skip down to numbers 4 and 5:

  

  (4) Fusionism was, is, and will be the best framework for reconciling and holding the tension between the moral order we want and need and the liberty and freedom an individual is granted by his or her Creator.

  (5) Those attempting to answer these questions by relying on the wisdom and autonomy of man, or the pagan philosophy of the ancient Greeks, are spitting in the wind. It behooves those of us who believe in a moral order to not only ask the question “By what standard?” but to have an answer. And it behooves those of us who want to fuse that moral order to freedom and economic liberty to root these beliefs in a coherent understanding of the human person. Statist inclinations regarding the marketplace fail because they do not have the right anthropology. Aristotle doesn’t have it either. But there is a way that transcends the wisdom of the world.

  To quote Austin Powers: "Yeah, baby!" As I've previously, and tiresomely, pointed out: I have Stephanie Slade's new book, Fusionism, on order from Amazon, due four weeks from today. And so can you, link at your right.

• Heard in the WSJ offices: "How can we get Pun Salad to link to Matthew Continetti's column?" "Boss, I have just the headline!" And here it is: Milton Friedman Was Right. (WSJ gifted link)

  Milton Friedman died two decades ago, but it seems like he’s been in the news every day. Inflation, tariffs, rent controls, price controls—the issues that dominated his age have returned in ours. Prominent Democrats and Republicans attack Friedman’s record while proving his case. They’re busy exorcising Friedman’s ghost when they ought to be reviving his spirit.

  Friedman stood 5 feet tall. Yet he looms menacingly in the imagination of anyone who would use government power to plan, control, regulate and redistribute. For example, as a candidate for president in 2020, Joe Biden told Politico, “I think there’s going to be a willingness to fix some of the institutional inequities that have existed for a long time. Milton Friedman isn’t running the show anymore.”

  Instead, Mr. Biden ran the show—and delivered the worst inflation in 40 years.

  For what it's worth, here's what I wrote (last item) back in 2006 when he died, reminiscing about my shock at reading his Capitalism and Freedom.

• Liquidating the Kulaks as a class, step one. J.D. Tuccille notes: Mamdani's tax database doxed wealthy New Yorkers.

  Making an enemies list is creepy. Publishing the names of people you dislike to fuel political supporters' prejudices is even creepier and potentially dangerous. That's what New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani's administration has done with the introduction of a property tax surcharge on relatively high-value second homes linked to a searchable online database of those who could be affected. The socialist mayor's defenders point out that tax and property information is a matter of public record in New York, but the packaged publication of surcharge targets and Mamdani's history of calling out opponents by name suggests something nastier is going on.

  It sounds like it could be a premise for a crime novel: high-end burglars use the Mamdani list to target wealthy victims' second homes. "There's a good chance they won't be there, and we know they're rich, so…" But then it goes horribly wrong…

• "It's a travesty of a mockery of a sham of a mockery of a travesty of two mockeries of a sham." Allysia Finley takes on Socialist Chic and the ‘Medicare for All’ Sham. (WSJ gifted link)

  Consider Abdul El-Sayed, the left-wing front-runner in Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary this Tuesday. Mr. El-Sayed has surged to the lead against Rep. Haley Stevens by presenting himself as a man of the people. He has called for free child care, “Medicare for all” and an 8% wealth tax on billionaires.

  “I don’t think that our system should be in the business of creating billionaires,” he said during a March debate. “I think our system should be in the business of empowering everyday folks to be able to live a life with access to the basic dignities that they need and deserve, good housing, good healthcare, affordable food.”

  Nobody can disagree with the latter goals. But Mr. El-Sayed’s prescriptions to achieve them would expand government control of healthcare and the private economy and exacerbate the socioeconomic inequalities he inveighs against.

  I wish the DSA types would just be more straightforward about saying: "I want government to have a lot more money and power over peoples' lives."

  (This item's headline is from a very old Woody Allen movie.)

Jacob Sullum explains: Trump Re-Ups the Anti-Weaponization Fund, Reinforcing the Demand That Todd Blanche Kill It for Good.

Jacob is tougher on Tillis and Cornyn than is Mr. Ramirez:

… it is puzzling that Cornyn and Tillis seem satisfied to haggle over the details of the huge favors Blanche approved for his boss, as opposed to asking how anyone fit to run the Justice Department could have signed off on such a brazenly corrupt product of self-dealing. That act alone is enough to disqualify Blanche from this job, since it shows he is so eager to please Trump that he is willing to abandon legal ethics, shirk his official duties, and make a joke of the civil justice system while pretending all of this is business as usual at the Justice Department.

As Murray Slaughter said about Ted Baxter's admirable, but brief, bit of solidarity in the last episode of The Mary Tyler Moore Show: "When a donkey flies, you don't blame it for not staying up very long."

Also applicable to elephants.

Also of note:

• Let's see your EBT card, Hunter. Jonathan Turley takes a look at the swelling poverty ranks in Trump's America. Specifically, the entire Biden family: From Influence Peddler to Starving Artist: Hunter Biden Claims Family is Broke in Defaulting on $17 Million Bill.

  Hunter Biden is no Van Gogh. In addition to having both ears, Hunter’s work has generally been panned beyond an enabling media following. However, he claims he is also a starving artist. The problem appears to be that, as predicted years ago, his sales dried up with the influence-peddling market once his father left office. Now, his lawyers want him to cough up $17 million that he owes them. Hunter says that not only is he broke, but so is his family.

  In a deposition in ongoing litigation with the law firm Winston Taylor, Hunter claimed an inability to pay the $17 million he owes his lawyers for representing him in criminal prosecutions, congressional investigations, and civil lawsuits.

  Hunter claimed under oath that “I don’t own anything of any value other than — and I don’t know the value of it — my paintings which I painted myself. So that’s it. And I don’t even have any other assets at all, stocks, bonds, anything like that, savings accounts.” He also added, “My family doesn’t have any money, and it’s not their debt anyway.”

  Maybe Hunter could write a tell-all book. I'm sure he could get a pretty big advance. Probably not $17 million, though.

There's a big discussion about the concept of "Common Good" over at National Review. If you want to jump right into the middle of it, check out Charles C.W. Cooke's post: Okay, But What Do You Want to Actually Do. His key point, made to both sides:

One of the observations I made while looking for today's eye candy: there are a lot of books that contain "common good" right in their titles. Two examples: The Common Good by Robert Reich; Common Good Constitutionalism by Adrian Vermeule.

Reader, I'm pretty sure the Venn diagram between those two works has very little intersection, if any. I'm also pretty sure that I wouldn't find either one satisfactory. I think V. Vader's book, pictured above, might have a better shot at my favor.

I've mentioned that I have a News Alert set for occurrences of my state's motto, "Live Free or Die", in the Google's news sources. What I've observed is that people, bless their hearts, use LFOD in their advocacy. (Example from a few days ago, if you missed it.) I suspect the same goes for "common good".

For the record: Article 1. of my state's constitution: "All men are born equally free and independent; Therefore, all government of right originates from the people, is founded in consent, and instituted for the general good." Which is pretty close to "common good", but rings better to my ear.

From those scamps at Reason: Caveman NIMBY.

Also of note:

• It's never too late. Pretend Nellie's saying "Thank God It's the First [of August]": TGIF. And she's all over Doctor Tony, who's typing without a spellchecker:

  → HRH Fauci!: Anthony Fauci, former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, kept a journal. A diary filled with love notes to himself. Which I’ve literally never heard of a man doing, but that’s beside the point. I guess he also did it on his work computer, because Senator Rand Paul obtained and released it. I’m not sure where to begin. First, let’s get a sense of the tone. He carefully documents all the glitzy celebrations of himself, lists all the “movie stars and athletes” he has a Zoom call with, and carefully logs all the celebratory news stories about himself. It’s like an Excel spreadsheet of compliments. For a sense, here’s Anthony Fauci on Anthony Fauci:

  Big front page article abut me appeared in the Washington Post. Very flattering. The situation with my national and international fame is explosive and really unimaginable. It is not hyoperbole [sic] to say that today I am the most famous and talked about person in the country and one of the most recognizable peson [sic] in the world. (Countless profiles on me in multiple media. I cannot even read all the things that are written abuyt [sic] me since I am so busy . . . seriously. POTUS seems to be enamored of me even though I am taking the spotlight away from him. We are developing a very unique and interesting relationship. The entire secret service corps is coming over to me and chatting. They let me into the first gate without even checking ID. Everyone is worried about my health and welfare, probably because it is all over the place that I am almost 80 years old.

  He loved being a celebrity. The thing about it is, he really was being worshipped! There was a cult of Fauci. People were getting Fauci tattoos and dancing with images of Fauci. He really was on the cover of every magazine, which, if you think about it, was weird! If millions of Americans suddenly made me their cult leader, and I had previously just been an unknown short man in the back of an HIV press conference, I would go insane with power too. So would you. And when you see lockdowns in the context of a power-drunk elf getting turned on by the idea of canceling Easter—he’s typing so fast he can barely keep up—you can understand better what we all lived through. For him, the pleasure was canceling things, especially things he felt gave power to the right (sports, family gatherings, religious events). We can never forget the freaks who gain power in a centrally controlled system. Also: no diaries, ever, certainly none in Google Docs. I write my grocery lists on Signal, and you should too. Love letters via email have been forbidden until further notice. I will be dragged up in front of Congress one of these days, but so help me God, they aren’t going to know about one brunch I attended. Next up, the lab leak:

  … and then she gets to the lab leak thing. But Nellie's TGIF post is wide-ranging, as usual, so even if you're Faucied out, keep scrolling.

• I have to admit it's getting better. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) has published its yearly survey: Spotlight on Speech Codes 2026. Here are the "major findings":

  1. The percentage of colleges and universities earning an overall “red light” rating in FIRE’s Spotlight database has hit an all-time low — this year to 13.2%. This is an approximately one-and-a-half percentage point drop from last year, and is more than 55 percentage points lower than the percentage of red light institutions in FIRE’s first, 2006 report in which 68.6% of all institutions earned a red light rating.
  2. 69.4% of institutions now earn an overall “yellow light” rating. Though less restrictive than red light policies, yellow light policies still restrict expression that is protected under First Amendment standards and invite administrative abuse.
  3. A total of 76 colleges and universities now earn an overall “green light” rating, up from 73 schools as of last year’s report. Policies earn a green light rating when they do not seriously threaten protected expression. For the second year in a row, more institutions earn a green light rating (76) than a red light rating (66). This gulf widens at public schools, where the number of public schools earning a green light rating (68) eclipses the number of private schools earning a red light rating (37) by over 30.
  4. One hundred and twenty university administrations or faculty bodies have now adopted policy statements in support of free speech modeled after the “Report of the Committee on Freedom of Expression” at the University of Chicago (the “Chicago Statement”), released in January 2015.
  5. Forty-seven institutions have adopted an official position of institutional neutrality substantially similar to the principles set forth in the University of Chicago’s “Report on the University’s Role in Political and Social Action” (the “Kalven Report”).

  No changes reported for the University Near Here: it still maintains a "green light" for its speech code, it hasn't officially adopted a policy of neutrality. Informally, they seem to have dialed their past in-your-face woke ideology way down.

• Just your usual reminder that Trump is a crook. Kevin D. Williamson reminisces about The Gentlemen of Antwerp. (Dispatch gifted link)

  Donald Trump is cheap in every sense of the word: cheap in that he is an infamous deadbeat who cheated his creditors; cheap in the sense of tacky; cheap in that he is the sort of man whose virtue, such as it is, can be overcome at no great expense—a cheap date.

  Trump is a $40 fake Rolex made copious flesh.

  Trump is so cheaply bribed that the bribes almost do not look like bribes, and they aren’t bribes in the conventional sense, notwithstanding only the fact that no court of law has found them to be such. They are moral bribes—trinkets—rather than economic bribes.

  And you do not have to spend very much on that sort of thing. One need not be overboard. The pimped-out airplane from the Arab despot was a bit much, maybe. But the CEO of Rolex, Jean-Frédéric Dufour, bought the whole Swiss watch industry a better deal on tariffs with a desk clock that was not even solid gold but merely gold plated, along with a 1-kg bar of gold engraved with the word “PRESIDENT”—in case Trump, who seems to believe that there is something called the Islamic Republic of Japan and who conflates Vladimir Putin with Volodymyr Zelensky, finally forgets which office it is he holds.

  The gemstone cartel known as the Antwerp World Diamond Center got its diamonds an exemption from Trump’s tariffs after offering up the merest of baubles, a hideously tacky ring with diamonds arranged in two big capital Ts and the numbers 45 and 47, references to Trump’s two terms as president. Trump in the pocket of a bunch of European diamond merchants: The antisemitic stereotypes thereby invoked must have been almost too much to bear for the Jew-hating cretins in Trump’s coalition, who surely would be muttering about some yarmulke-wearing malefactor

  spawned in some estaminet of Antwerp

  Blistered in Palm Beach

  Patched and peeled in Washington

  if any of them had ever read a book that did not have pictures in it.

  A long excerpt, but I did want to get to his Antwerpian reference.

  And, oh yeah, T.S. Eliot was kind of an anti-semite.