Aug
18
2026

Grok Gets Me

"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".

The Shadow Knows, and So Does Kevin D. Williamson

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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:

Donald Trump likes to sneer at people reduced to “begging, like a dog.” Happily, he has sycophantic factotum J.D. Vance to do his begging for him. The Ukrainians have been targeting oil tankers at an important Russian port with drones in order to choke off the money that Moscow uses to buy missiles to fire at Ukrainian maternity wards and apartment buildings, and given the choice between seeing Ukrainian women and children massacred by Russians and paying uncomfortably high prices for gasoline, Americans will happily see dead Ukrainian women and children stacked up like firewood. From the Telegraph:

In a phone call with Volodymyr Zelensky, the US vice-president warned that the attacks at Novorossiysk were disrupting oil markets and threatening American business interests in the region.

Ukraine had been hitting tankers carrying Kazakh crude to a terminal operated by the Caspian Pipeline Consortium (CPC).

Chevron and ExxonMobil, two of the biggest US energy companies, hold stakes in the CPC and in the western Kazakh oilfields that supply it, with Chevron possessing some 50 per cent of Tengiz, Kazakhstan's largest field, and Exxon 25 per cent.

Since the phone call on July 31, there have been no further strikes on tankers near the CPC terminal.

Kyiv stepped up strikes on shipping and energy infrastructure last month in an effort to choke off the revenue funding Moscow’s war machine. Its efforts knocked out as much as one fifth of CPC oil loadings in July.

I suppose that I am friendlier to the oil majors than the average American journalist is. I like the oil business. Our country is lucky to have the energy industry it does. (As Don Draper says, there is no need to thank them–that’s what the money’s for.) But running a global oil company puts you in business with some rotten people and rotten regimes. If you go to bed with the devil, you can’t complain if you wake up with an acute burning sensation. It is the nature of the business. I wish the Ukrainians would set fire to every tanker plying its trade at Novorossiysk. Chevron is going to be fine.

Oil is a fungible commodity. There is really no such thing as “Russian oil.” There is just oil. And if Ukraine takes some off the market, then that affects energy prices worldwide. The United States is blessed with abundant energy resources and has developed—often in the teeth of political opposition—an enormously sophisticated domestic industry to make the most of it. But Ukraine’s efforts to secure its national survival have cost some American shareholders a few bucks, and high gasoline prices are an inconvenience to Republicans facing a restive midterm electorate. And while Ukraine targets Russian oil processors, the Russians are targeting Ukrainian grain—and, thus, the worldwide food supply.

War is not cheap. But war is not the worst outcome. It may be the second-worst outcome, but the Ukrainians know what the worst outcome is.

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:

Hard Town

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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.