Pun Salad

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.