Pun Salad

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.