Pun Salad

It's Andrew Heaton, so: watch, learn, and laugh.

You'll learn stuff. About data centers, sure. But also how to fill in the blank: "The best thing you can do with an almond is              ."

The answer might surprise you!

Also of note:

• Another reason for Washington State taxpayers to be peeved. The state's university got caught violating one of their instructors' civil rights: Washington professor who parodied university ‘land acknowledgment’ wins $600K settlement. FIRE has the story:

  The University of Washington paid $600,000 after punishing Professor Stuart Reges for parodying a university-approved “land acknowledgment” in his syllabus.

  The payout comes after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit held administrators liable under the First Amendment for retaliation and viewpoint discrimination.

  Today’s settlement concludes the legal battle that began with a 2022 lawsuit by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression on Reges’s behalf. Besides the monetary settlement, the agreement stipulates that the university cannot take any further action against Reges. While Reges’s appeal was pending, UW also rescinded and replaced the vague antiharassment policy used to punish the professor for his speech.

  “I am deeply grateful to FIRE for this legal victory which will remind public universities that they are obligated to respect the First Amendment rights of their students, faculty, and staff,” said Reges. “More importantly, I hope that my protest can help reverse a decade-long trend towards ideological conformity in academia and help to convince them that instead of ‘protecting’ students from controversial ideas, they should be helping them to learn how to cope with disagreement. Only then can we heal the deep divisions that confront us today.”

  So, good for Stuart, and good for FIRE. I first blogged about him back in 2018, when UWash was pissed about an article he wrote at Quillette: Why Women Don't Code.

• 

  Darn. Noah Smith has a long and thoughtful review of Where Is My Flying Car? by J. Storrs Hall. Unfortunately, Noah's headline is discouraging: Why you won’t get a flying car.

  In 2011, Peter Thiel famously said: “We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.” When I first saw that quote, I chuckled, because for my entire life, we’ve had flying buses. And again and again, as I sit on a flying bus and marvel at the thrill of takeoff, and reflect on how amazing it is that man has conquered the air, I look around and see my fellow passengers with their window shades drawn, their noses buried in a book or staring at a phone.

  If we had flying cars, we’d enjoy the thrill for a few weeks, and then we’d be back to tweeting on our phones and wondering when the trip would be over.

  I’ve noticed a loose collection of beliefs and attitudes that I’ve decided to call “engineerism”, because I see it most often among engineers. I coined the term when I was in college, when I noticed that the engineering majors in my physics classes tended to think differently about the world than the physics majors like myself did. Later, I recognized “engineerism” in various sci-fi novels — Lucifer’s Hammer and Footfall by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, The Peace War by Vernor Vinge, and so on.

  When I say “engineerism”, I am not talking about Friedrich Hayek’s “engineering mentality” — the belief that society can be designed and optimized like a machine.2 Nor am I referring to Evgeny Morozov’s “technological solutionism”, which is the idea that social problems can be fixed with technology. If I had to define what I call “engineerism” in succinct, simple terms, it would be something like: “The idea that if a technology can be built, we ought to build it.” Simply put, engineers like to engineer things, and they become disgruntled when society does not give them the resources to do this.

  I reported on Where Is My Flying Car? back in 2022, but Noah's review is better.

• Actual trickle-down economics at work. Our state's outgoing senior senator, Jeanne Shaheen, made Commie Radio New Hampshire Public Radio notice her turn at the pork barrel: Shaheen requests $5M to study 'sailor campus' at old Portsmouth Naval Prison.

  A feasibility study on the future of the former Portsmouth Naval Shipyard building, long ago abandoned by the Navy, may be on the horizon.

  This spring, Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-NH, requested $5 million in federal funding in the fiscal year 2027 appropriations legislation for a planning study. The funds would be used to determine whether “The Alcatraz of the East” could be given new life and reutilized as a “sailor campus" over a phased process, according to Shaheen’s request.

  (Originally an article at the Portsmouth Herald, where it is paywalled.)

  Now $5 million, while it might be a lot of money to you or me, is a very small drop in the very large bucket of federal spending.

  But I can't help but wonder into whose pockets that money will eventually go. Like any good Democrat, Jeanne has long been a foe of "trickle-down economics", which is how they refer to any proposal that lets people keep more of their own money.

  But when it comes to doling out millions for a "study"… well, good luck on tracking down the cui bono there.

• On the LFOD watch. Louis Cannon writes at the Pagosa Daily Post (the "online community magazine for Pagosa Springs, Colorado") and my Google News Alert rang for his recent article, READY, FIRE, AIM: Live Free or… You Know… Like, Die. Yes, it concerns New Hampshire's motto. And it's not awful; he talks about George Maynard's effort in the 1970s to not display it on his car's license plate, which eventually went to SCOTUS.

  I did want to mention where Louis goes badly wrong, in discussing the state quarter released in the year 2000:

  The coin also includes an image of ‘The Old Man of the Mountain’ — a peculiar rock formation which happens to be one of the few tourist attractions in New Hampshire.

  Well, practically anyone coulda told Louis that he shoulda put that in past tense: the Old Man's face fell off Cannon Mountain back in 2003.

  Also: tourism is, in fact, New Hampshires second-largest economic sector. (Mainly we get a lot of folks stopping on US3, wondering "So where's the Old Man?")

  And, for the record: Colorado's official state motto is Nil Sine Numine, which is Latin for "Nothing without Providence" or (perhaps) "Nothing without the Deity". There is no danger of it ever appearing on Colorado license plates.

Recently on the book blog (finally):

I'm pretty old now, but back in the 1960s, as a teenager, I checked out Frank Meyer's book, In Defense of Freedom, from the Omaha Public Library. Even then, I was impressed by his argument. I would occasionally get creeped out by some of the other National Review writers. But it seemed to me back then that Meyer got it pretty much right. And that belief has (more or less) continued for sixty years or so.

Although Meyer didn't care much for the term, the political philosophy he argued for came to be known as "fusionism". What's being fused? The two ideals of liberty and virtue. Meyer argued for a compromise between those conservative factions, noting that neither was a credible standalone position: over-reliance on virtue could easily slide over into state tyranny, and libertarian absolutism could devolve into anarchistic squalor.

Against the virtucrats, Meyer argued that a virtue enforced by state coercion wasn't true virtue; it must be a freely-chosen position. And to the out-there libertarians, his position was remarkably similar to that promulgated by the American founders. (E.g., James Madison: "To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people, is a chimerical idea." You could look it up.)

So I was gratified to hear about Stephanie Slade's book. Fusionism has long been an interest of hers. Here is her article in Reason's March 2021 issue, which asks: Is There a Future for Fusionism?) And more recently, in the July 2026 Reason: What is fusionism? America blends liberalism and religion.

I ordered the book pretty much as soon as I heard about it. It's an impressive combination of history, political philosophy, and shoe-leather journalism. Slade looks at the contentious history of conservatism and libertarianism, concentrating on Meyer's intellectual odyssey. (He started out as an actual Communist. But he got better.) But plenty of other folks are examined, with careful detail and sometimes surprising insights. (I thought I knew the intellectual history relatively well, but Slade kept digging out details of which I was unaware.)

Slade notes, accurately, that fusionism's greatest electoral success was in the 1980s, typified by the landslide victories of Ronald Reagan in 1980 and 1984. He wasn't perfect, but at his best he could be a passionate advocate of fusionist ideas. (Here's Slade again, in the July 2025 Reason: The fusionist politics of Ronald Reagan.)

Slade notes that since then, things have gotten worse (to put it mildly) on the GOP/right-wing side of things. Trump has shown little respect for fusionist ideals of limited government and free-market economics, preferring "pitchfork populism". Trump's heir apparent, J.D. Vance, is even worse. Most of the Republican Party seems to docilely follow along. And, out there on the fringes, there are some really scary folks: "theocons, natcons, and neoreactionaries", all calling for grabbing the reins of government power to impose their frightening visions.

In short, Slade has written an excellent book, and I recommend it to anyone interested in where we've been poltically, and where we might be going.