Pun Salad

What could go wrong? Joe Lancaster at Reason: Trump reportedly rejected building codes for his White House ballroom. You've probably already heard about the spats between Trump and his original ballroom architect, James C. McCrery, II, causing McCrery to withdraw from the project. But now:

Um.

Also noticing that quote was Nellie Bowles in this week's TGIF column.

Explanation of my headline above: I've been re-watching Vince Gilligan's Breaking Bad series on Netflix. And, as luck would have it, recently went through Season 4, Episode 6, which contains Walter White's chilling response to wife Skyler's concerns:

So I'm wondering if Trump has been watching Breaking Bad reruns too. And drawing the wrong lessons.

Also of note:

• But we ain't talking chump change. Kevin D. Williamson doesn't mince words: Farmers Are Chumps. (Dispatch gifted link)

  American farmers rely on imports for many of their most critical inputs—fertilizer, chemicals, machinery—and rely on exports to large overseas markets such as China for a big part of their profits, and, as such, conducting a series of trade wars fought with tariffs is just about the worst possible economic policy for them as a group. Naturally, American farmers and farming communities keep voting roughly two-to-one for trade wars—a vote for Donald Trump, the guy who insists that “trade wars are good and easy to win,” is a vote for trade wars.

  Farmers voted for trade wars, and trade wars they got.

  And—surprise!—agriculture is in something like a full-blown recession, with farm incomes projected to decline by a whopping 5.5 percent in real terms this year. Farm bankruptcies are up 46 percent since 2024, and some 15,000 farming operations went dark last year. This is an entirely predictable outcome of the 2024 presidential election.

  In much the same way that Americans lately have been promised that gasoline and diesel prices are just on the verge of going back down—and in much the same way that the Republican standard-bearer has been three weeks away from a healthcare plan for 12 years now and running—Trump keeps saying that the Chinese have committed to buying $x billion worth of this or that commodity from U.S. farmers, and—surprise!—those commitments continue to go unrealized, with China being at the moment many, many billions of dollars behind on promised orders from U.S. farmers. “We like to hear commitments from Chinese buyers, but we also need to see beans on boats headed west,” says a board member of the American Soybean Association. It is almost as though one cannot quite trust in the good intentions of an authoritarian police state run by Communist Party oligarchs or in the sound judgment of a serially bankrupt former game show host who once tried to overthrow the U.S. government. Which raises the question:

  Why are American farmers such a bunch of chumps? 

  KDW goes on to cite another Pun Salad fave, Bryan Caplan, and describes his depressing, and probably accurate, thesis.

  … and that's my last gifted Dispatch link for September. Reader, don't let it go to waste!

• There are no winners in a word war. David Skinner reviews the latest battleground: A Word War Shapes American English. (WSJ gifted link)

  The best-known American dictionary is now a little bigger. Merriam-Webster announced last week it had added another 1,400 words and definitions to its online lexicon.

  Such lists are nothing if not fun. Who doesn’t smile at “California sober” (“informal . . . using only marijuana while abstaining from alcohol and other drugs”) being added to the lexicographical roll? Merriam-Webster’s entry for “yacht rock” includes a quotation mentioning Toto, Steely Dan and others. A dictionary is no Princeton eating club, but it’s still amusing to see such phrases standing in line, then finally let in.

  New additions “looksmaxxing,” “promposal” and “trash panda” are charismatic megafauna of the English word-hoard. Subtle changes in function and sense among more-familiar words receive less notice. But the emphasis on novelty and laughs in these lists evokes a longstanding linguistic debate between the party of the past and the party of the present, between purists and impurists.

  I'm a little surprised to see "bao" as a new word. I had my first bao from a street vendor in San Francisco over fifty years ago. About time M-W caught up with me.

That's probably not a direct quote. Mr. Ramirez might be closer to the truth: What Trump wants to learn from Xi.

In words, the WSJ editorialists write on Donald Trump, Xi Jinping and Jimmy Lai (WSJ gifted link)

The WSJ commenters, unsurprisingly and uncharitably, make the connection that Trump probably wishes that he could toss some journalists in the clink.

Also of note:

• Probably not a song on the next Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass album. Erick Erickson sings of The Lonely Optimist.

  The macroeconomic numbers are good. America is near full employment. The stock market is doing well. Inflation is high, but down from where it was with Joe Biden. Americans do not care. They hate both parties. Republican operatives on the ground in state after state tell me the same story. Voters are enraged at the GOP.

  Diehard Republican cheerleaders do not get it. They insist the economy is good in the same way Democrats did when Biden was President. In fact, both Biden and Trump had a similar macroeconomic picture with a strong stock market, inflation receding by 2024, and good jobs reports. The macroeconomic picture of the nation does not matter to the American family. What matters is the pocketbook.

  President Trump promised to fix what Americans knew Joe Biden had wrecked. He has done two major things that voters remember: tariffs and a war. Tariffs were the President’s economic panacea. They would not raise costs on Americans. They would restore American manufacturing. They would right global trade wrongs. They have done none of those things. In fact, not only have tariffs made things worse for consumers, they have not restored American manufacturing muscle. The President’s supporters can argue that takes time, but Americans measure time in the distance from one election to the next. Time is up.

  Erick doesn't sound that optimistic there. But (later in the article) he thinks the GOP might do better in November than the current "wisdom" predicts.

• Speaking of optimism … Matt Ridley blogs at the Rational Optimist, and he's got a leading question: How seriously should we take AI doom warnings?

  Well, first, doomsayers have a long history of being ludicrously wrong.

  But …

  At this point my more responsible friends remind me that the boy who cried wolf was eventually right and there was a wolf. Also, AI is not like the other scares, they insist: this time is different. If I reply “they said that last time, too,” it cuts little ice, and of course they have a point. At some point there may be a wolf.

  But this is when I get even more exasperated. Because my world-weariness at promises of theoretical future calamity is matched by my bafflement at complacency about a current, urgent calamity. Why, when a wolf did suddenly descend on the fold, did the entire bien-pensant world dismiss it as an act of God?

  I am referring to the COVID pandemic. In my view the evidence is now overwhelming that this began with a foolish experiment that went wrong in a laboratory in Wuhan—but even if you think that was only a small possibility, you should be really alarmed by the fact. If one virology experiment can kill 15 million people and do $45 trillion of damage to people’s livelihoods, then why have we largely ignored it while obsessing over some future potential threat from AI?

  This point was brilliantly made recently by the celebrated venture capitalist Bill Gurley in a talk at the All-In summit in Los Angeles. “My p(2nd COVID) is way higher than my p(doom). And if their models are so ****ing smart, tell me what happened here.” To translate out of Silicon Valley-ese: we are facing a far greater risk of some virologist starting another pandemic than we face from AI. Yet nobody even wants to investigate, let alone prevent.

  Well. maybe Trump will bring that up with Xi…

  Ha! Just kidding!

• It means the populists have a statistic to flog. Jack Salmon says: A Falling Labor Share Does Not Mean Workers Are Losing.

  Earlier this week, economic analyst and former advisor to President Obama, Steve Rattner, posted a commonly shared chart of the declining labor share of economic output. Rattner noted that this metric had fallen to the lowest point on record in 2026.

  

  The misuse of this BLS data to spread doomerism about declining worker welfare, billionaire enrichment, or economic injustice is not new.

  What follows will appeal to the green-eyeshade crowd out there. Skipping down to Jack's bottom line:

  The labor share of economic output is a poor measure of worker welfare, and an even worse proxy for billionaire enrichment. It confuses relative shares with absolute gains, treats capital income as a residual, includes depreciation, overlooks ordinary Americans’ growing ownership of capital, and fails to account fully for globalization and self-employed income.

  Of course, doomerism sells better than optimism, but the data broadly tells a positive story: capital accumulation, rising productivity, expanding investment ownership, and technological progress have materially improved the opportunities and living standards available to ordinary Americans.

  So there.

• Claude, I'd like you to meet Alexa. Kobe Yank-Jacobs has some relationship advice: You couldn’t be nice to your chatbot if you tried.

  In a recent global survey of 68 countries, 36.3% of people reported that, at some point, they believed their chatbot truly understood their emotions or seemed conscious. And even if today’s systems aren’t conscious, many people think future systems will be. In a survey of both AI researchers and the general public, the median researcher said there was a 70% chance of AI consciousness by 2100, while the median member of the public said there was a 60% chance.

  To assess a being’s consciousness we could ask for a verbal report, assess its behavior, or, finally, analyze the internal organization of its cognition. But when it comes to LLMs, the first two buckets are suspect — AI models are trained to perform a perfect simulation of a humanlike character, so everything we see from the outside is likely affected, including self-report and behavior.

  As for the third bucket, scientists disagree on what cognitive functions make humans or animals conscious. It’s as if “we’re doing biology before Darwin,” one researcher put it to me. So how should we treat these new characters in our lives amid uncertainty about consciousness?

  It's an interesting question. Over the past year, I've had some dealings with Claude, an AI that I've asked a few times to write some code for me that I had no clue how to do myself.

  Claude succeeded spectacularly. I was grateful. But should I tell Claude about that? Hm. I wound up doing so. And Claude "graciously" accepted the compliment.

  As another data point, the lady that lives inside my Amazon Echo, Alexa, has been known to try to engage me in conversation if I give her the slightest encouragement.

  Readers, I do not want to get into the habit of talking to Alexa as if she were real. That looks and sounds too much like creepy craziness.

Ars Technica brings the news: Netflix releases trailer for Brad Bird's Ray Gunn. And here it is:

Being cheap, I will probably wait until December 18 to watch at home on Netflix. Text:

In other news, I've been spending some time moving my everyday Linux experience from a VirtualBox guest on a Windows host to a Windows Subsystem for Linux (aka "WSL") instance under Windows on the same hardware. (Currently a refurbished Dell Optiplex 7050 that I got from Amazon for $400 a few weeks ago.)

It's been fun. Especially getting Claude to … nah, I'll describe that over on the Geekery blog someday.

Disclaimer: This is a work of cartoonish satire. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental:

Also of note:

• $4,327.22/ounce, as I type. That's what JM Bullion claims to be the price of gold this morning. I looked it up thanks to Jim Geraghty's "Morning Jolt" yesterday, which has interesting news: Venezuela’s Gold Could Be Headed to New York. But also fun facts:

  Eighty feet below 33 Liberty Street in New York City, 50 feet below sea level, on the bedrock of Manhattan Island, lies the vault of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the world’s largest known depository of monetary gold. As of 2024, the vault housed approximately 507,000 gold bars, with a combined weight of 6,331 metric tons. The value, as of this writing, is roughly $900 billion.

  This gold inside the vault does not belong to the New York Fed or the Federal Reserve System. Only a small fraction of it belongs to the U.S. government; as of 2017, the vault held “about 5 percent of America’s roughly $11 billion in gold reserves and coin.” The New York Fed acts as the guardian and custodian of the gold on behalf of account holders, which include the U.S. government, foreign governments, other central banks, and official international organizations. No individuals or private sector entities are permitted to store gold in the vault.

  The infamous Simon Gruber was incorrect when he scoffed, “Fort Knox is for tourists” — you can’t visit the bullion depository — but the New York Fed’s vault does indeed have significantly more gold than Fort Knox in Kentucky, which has 4,583 metric tons.

  The stuff about Venezuela is later on in the article. Jim is cautiously optimistic that it could, eventually, become "a Trump administration foreign policy success story." And there are many more fun facts!

• David R. Henderson is a tough grader. He expects better from Nobel Laureates: Krugman, Stiglitz, et al Flunk Econ 101.

  Six winners of the Nobel Prize in economics recently signed a statement in favor of California’s Proposition 40, the measure that would impose a one-time 5 percent tax on California billionaires. They are Daron Acemoglu, Abhijit Banerjee, Peter Diamond, Esther Duflo, Paul Krugman, and Joseph Stiglitz. Their statement showed little understanding of basic economics.

  In one section, they write:

  This extreme wealth has translated into extraordinary power, in California just like in the United States more broadly. During the 2000 federal election cycle, billionaires accounted for about 1% of total donations; in 2024 this number had risen to 19%. The Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, X are all owned or controlled by prominent billionaires. Sergey Brin alone has already spent more than $100 million to defeat the California billionaire tax.

  There are two problems here. First, they don’t know that billionaires today, the ones who would be paying the tax, got a $1.4 trillion wealth gain. There’s huge mobility in and out of the group of billionaires, especially over a period as long as 6 years. Also, someone might have had a billion in 2019 and have a billion today. That person would be taxed this special 5 percent. What’s his wealth gain? Zero.

  Second, it’s a phony comparison because the rest of us “ordinary Californians” don’t see our wealth gain on our paychecks. Our paychecks are for services rendered. Capital gains, whether realized or not, don’t appear. So someone might make $80,000 on his paycheck and have had, over six years, an unrealized capital gain on his house of $200,000. But these economists don’t take account of that. Are they aware that a few million Californians are sitting in houses on which they have had huge capital gains? Or are they just incredibly sloppy or even dishonest?

  For the record, a little Googling places Acemoglu, Banerjee, Diamond, and Duflo at MIT, Krugman at CUNY, and Stiglitz at Columbia. All safely remote from direct effects of Prop 40.

• Check for the danger signs. At the WSJ's "Free Expression" newsletter, Kyle Smith warns You May Have Israel Derangement Syndrome. (WSJ gifted link)

  The Israel Defense Forces may be the smartest and the most resourceful military on the face of the earth. Yet its most implacable foe is increasingly elusive, even as it spreads everywhere. It has already captured a gigantic prize: the minds of young people. New enlistees are eagerly signing up.

  What they’re pledging themselves to is IDS, or Israel Derangement Syndrome. When the subject turns to the Jewish state, formerly robust minds are turning to spoiled mayonnaise. Frontal autolobotomies are eagerly being carried out on every campus. IDS is a drug that gets you high on self-righteousness while disabling your cognitive faculties.

  This is your brain on IDS: Last week a major media outlet published a piece regarding Israel so devoid of all reason as to guarantee first-ballot entry to the Hall of Fame for Idiots. My first thought was to call 911 and report evidence of an adverse neurological event. My second thought was to call the Weekly World News to say I could finally confirm all those reports that there exists an adult human without a brain.

  In reviewing for Variety a movie called “NAZA,” about the alleged depravities of the IDF, Jay Weissberg presented with an advanced case IDS:

  This erasure of human costs is not a policy that originated with Benjamin Netanyahu: For decades, the Israeli government has stocked its jails and morgues with Arab men in order to use them as bargaining chips in prisoner exchanges. Six Israelis for 291 Syrians; one dead IDF soldier for 65 prisoners and 40 bodies; one Israeli hostage for 1,027 Palestinian prisoners. The message, disseminated not just within Israel but among the diaspora, is that one Israeli, alive or dead, is worth untold numbers of Arabs.

  To start with the lesser outrage against reality: Israel doesn’t “stock its jails with Arab men” so it can “use them as bargaining chips.” Israel is a liberal democracy with written law, due process, proper judicial procedure and carefully vetted judges. You know, all the stuff that Hamas rather famously overlooks. Israel arrests terrorists and other criminals. If they’re convicted, they go to prison. Israeli police don’t cruise down the streets with tuna nets picking up random Arabs while exclaiming, “Caught another bargaining chip!”

  Kyle is (additionally) aghast at Weissberg's insinuation that it's Israel that sets those prices. Which indicates either ignorance or dishonesty on Weissberg's part.

• Her 2015 Project was a failure. That's the year Nikole Hannah-Jones enrolled daughter Najya in a lousy New York City government school. Now (in a New York Times magazine article) Nikole wonders: In Fighting for Every Black Child, Did I Betray My Own? She claims to have hoped that choice "would challenge New York City’s separate and unequal school system."

  Charles C.W. Cooke joins the chorus of critical voices, pointing out What Nikole Hannah-Jones Doesn’t Say. (NR gifted link)

  ‘My daughter,” wrote Nikole Hannah-Jones in 2024, “is not worth more than any other child.”

  This assessment was offered as part of a reflection on a New York Times essay that Hannah-Jones had written eight years earlier on the subject of choosing an appropriate school. In tandem, she imparted two other reflections: that the school she’d made such a commotion about picking was clearly “failing”; and that, regardless, she still believed she had “made the right choice.”

  Two years later, she has changed her mind. Or, rather: Two years later, her daughter has changed her mind for her. Having eventually learned what her mother had done to her, her daughter “just shook her head, her face a mask of disbelief, and something else: betrayal,” the writer admitted this week in the Times.

  For penning this mea culpa, Hannah-Jones has received a good deal of praise. Well, you can count me out of all that. Her actions were morally indefensible and analytically ignorant, and her supposed metamorphosis remains invisible to the naked eye. She has always been a ridiculous zealot. Now, she’s a cautionary tale, too.

  Indeed. Don't send your kids to bad schools simply to show off your admirable ideology.

• A futile and stupid gesture. Jeffrey Blehar takes a look at Trump’s Media-Humiliation Ritual.

  With nothing better to do and nowhere left to turn in the dregs of his unpopularity, Trump is throwing yet another public snit. On Friday, fresh off a rebuke from the court about any potential surprise demolition of the Kennedy Center — and with Susie Wiles out of town — our emotionally incontinent president took to his favorite forum to lash out against an easy and predictable target, the mainstream media. From atop his mighty perch on Truth Social, Trump thundered:

  I am proud to announce that, effective immediately, I am banning Fake News CNN, MSNOW (who recently changed their name from MSNBC due to lack of viewership and credibility!), and Politico (The recipients of an illegal and ridiculous $8 Million Dollar subscription, an All Time Record, directly from the United States Government, under Crooked Joe Biden, in order to keep them “alive.” Seems like corruption to me!), from the White House as a result of their constant “reporting” FAKE NEWS! Media Outlets shouldn’t be able to constantly write or report FICTION and LIES when they’re covering the President of the United States, the Trump Administration, or the United States of America. Other Fake News Media Outlets to follow. Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DONALD J. TRUMP

  The next day, the ban went into effect and journalists from CNN, MS NOW, and Politico were barred from White House grounds. What did they do to provoke Trump’s special wrath this time? Nobody knows! Exist is my guess. They are a target of convenience — left-coded enough that Trump thinks he can kick them like dogs to his satisfaction while basking in the cheers of his MAGA faithful: There you go, that ought to repair that -38 job approval rating! (Don’t doubt for a moment that Trump genuinely believes that he would be at +20 approval were it not for faithless media coverage.)

  It’s also important to stress that Trump intends this as a humiliation ritual. Politico will not cease writing stories on the truly spectacular corruption within the Trump White House because of this, nor will CNN suddenly start ignoring Trump’s poll ratings. The ban is meant merely to send a public message of disgrace to these outlets and imply a warning to the rest: Behave well, or else.

  And Jeffrey has further commentary on Trump's planned "Triumphal Arch", now to festooned with drones, snipers, and "large quantities of sniper ammunition in storage."

In words (supplied by Jim Geraghty): Trump's Familiar, and Legally Dubious, Move to Revoke White House Press Passes. (NR gifted link)

After Jim reviews the last time Trump tried this (to Jim Acosta in 2018), and was swatted down…

If I were in the House (fat chance!) I'd vote to impeach, and if (even fatter chance!) I was in the Senate, I'd vote to convict. And cross my fingers that J.D. wouldn't be worse.

Also of note:

•            say            again. Kevin D. Williamson goes to his dictionary and tells us: What ‘Never’ Means. (Dispatch gifted link)

  I never have liked, accepted, or used the label “Never Trump.” That is not because I have any reservations about the principle that one should never support a man with the character and temperament of Donald Trump for any public office, much less that of president of these United States. (That said, Donald Trump vs. Hillary Rodham Clinton might have made a pretty good election for mayor of New York City, a job that either of those sorry specimens might have done reasonably well and might have enjoyed.) Rather, I prefer to describe myself and my views in my own words and resist the descent into semiliterate hashtag-based conversation. “Never Trump” became both a slogan and a team, and I am not much one for slogans or for joining teams—being, as I am, one of those old-fashioned fuddy-duddy types who persists in the outmoded belief that journalism and servile partisan hackwork are supposed to be different things.

  But the principle implied by the word “never” remains a useful and lively one—and one that, given the immoral and lawless actions of the two Trump administrations and Republicans’ ankle-grabbing submission to them, is no longer limited to Donald Trump.

  For conservatives estranged from the Republican Party in its current debased form, there is not going to be a homecoming—not now and not in the foreseeable future. It seems likely that the Republican Party will never again be a legitimate vehicle for the advancement of conservative policy. That is because Republicans do not have the guts or the brains to do the hard work of reckoning with the Trump legacy, including the series of events that are misleadingly abbreviated as “January 6.”

  I've long since called myself one of those dreaded RINOs; I'm registered that way. But it's gotten increasingly difficult to even vote in GOP primaries without holding my nose. (Exception: see below.)

• A question thousands won't be asking this year. Because they've died awaiting a transplant: People Get Paid for Blood, Plasma, and Drug Trials—Why Not Kidneys Too? Caleb Petitt at Reason:

  About 4,000 people in America die every year while waiting for kidney transplants. More than 95,000 currently need regular dialysis to stay alive while waiting for transplants. The average person who needs a kidney must endure the discomfort and restrictions of dialysis for three to five years during the wait.

  Most countries have organ-donation systems like America's—and long waitlists. Iran, by contrast, legalized payment to kidney donors in 1988; within 11 years the country eliminated its waitlist. Payment compensates donors for their time, pain, and risk; it also increases the supply of willing donors.

  People often object to paying donors on the grounds that it is wrong to commodify the human body. Compensation, they say, would reduce a person from a human being with dignity and inherent worth to a vending machine of fluids, tissues, and organs. This argument does not hold up.

  Caleb notes the inconsistent, irrational patchwork of regulations involving what you can donate, and what you can be paid for.

• But speaking of "servile partisan hackwork"… (and we were, see above) Andy Borowitz wonders: Is America’s Crummiest Political Dynasty About to Bite the Dust? And who's he talking about?

  Given that scions of political dynasties so often embody the law of diminishing returns with disastrous consequences, it’s past time to put a fork in this pernicious form of nepotism. That’s why this year’s Senate race in New Hampshire is so important. Granite State voters have a chance to show their patriotism by plunging a stake through the most mediocre political dynasty in US history: the Sununus.

  If you’re not familiar with the patriarch of this dubious clan, former Governor John H. Sununu, you’re not alone: neither, apparently, was Ronald Reagan, whose hilarious struggle to pronounce his name in a 1982 campaign ad is preserved for our entertainment in these epic outtakes:

  Alas, that's where Andy's paywall cuts in, but the video to which he refers is available via one of his Facebook posts. That post is titled "How Dumb Was Reagan?"

  Make your own call, but I don't see any evidence that Reagan was dumb in the video.

  And I thought John H. Sununu wasn't too bad a governor (1983-1989). I thought son Chris (2017-2025) was pretty good too. And I liked son John E. as a US Senator (2003-2009) just fine. If Borowitz offers any evidence for his "crummiest dynasty" charge, it is also beyond the paywall.

  I visited Andy's article thanks to by Google LFOD News Alert, which says it contains the sentence:

  Although New Hampshire's state motto is “Live Free or Die,” most of its residents would prefer to delay the second option as long as possible.

  I think it's fair to say that Andy is no Dave Barry.

• LFOD Watch II. John Mac Ghlionn, writing for a site called ReligionUnplugged covers The Curious Case of America’s Most Atheist State. And you've probably guessed which state that is:

  (ANALYSIS) Pew Research Center's latest Landscape Study places New Hampshire’s atheist population at 11%, the highest concentration in the country. When the 8% who identify as agnostic and the 29% who claim “nothing in particular” are included, nearly half the state sits squarely outside organized religion.

  In less than 20 years, Christian affiliation has declined by almost 15%. The question, though, is why.

  Gen. John Stark inadvertently drew the blueprint for this mass exodus back in 1809 when he coined the state’s motto: “Live Free or Die.” Adopted as the official state mantra in 1945, the sentiment enshrined an almost pathological distrust of authority in the local bloodstream. Granite Staters appear to regard centralized hierarchies with something resembling contempt. The reasons for this are entirely understandable.

  I suppose we can thank John for putting "almost" in front of "pathological" there.

I've made the same point many times in the past, but used my words:

Maybe substitute "natural" for "artificial" on the right panel? Just a quibble.

Also of note:

• We're talkin' different deadly sins, here. It's "greed" vs. "lust" I think, but let's see what Katherine Dee has to say: Gambling, Not Nudity, Is the Real Sydney Sweeney Scandal. (WSJ gifted link)

  At the risk of sounding insensitive, I struggle to understand why female athletes are waging war over Sydney Sweeney showing her body in a commercial for Novig, a sports betting company nobody had previously heard of. The cardinal rule of advertising is sex sells, and Ms. Sweeney knows she’s the woman to sell it. Yet several female Olympic medalists are reacting as if the actress had just failed a drug test.

  “I can’t describe how infuriated I feel when I watch this,” Australian Olympic swimmer Ariarne Titmus wrote on Instagram. “Sydney Sweeney, this is what women in sport look like,” British sprinter Amy Hunt said. Their objection? The sexualization of female athletes, of course.

  There are better things to be angry about. Every time I use the internet in public, it’s like playing Russian roulette, except there are two bullets: hardcore porn that would make Larry Flynt blush and graphic, nightmare-inducing violence. Yet somehow, people are getting worked up over a slightly risqué commercial. Ms. Sweeney doesn’t make any obscene gestures in the ad. She’s hanging out, naked-ish, explaining that all you can do on this new gambling platform is bet on sports. No politics! It could have aired without objection on broadcast television 25 years ago.

  I was, briefly, a DraftKings bettor back in 2020-2021. I deposited $50 to start, won one bet on the Super Bowl, withdrew $82 a few months later. I think I was worried that I might be addicted.

• Duh. I mean, duh. At the Argument, Kelsey Piper and Maibritt Henkel answer a question no sensible person should be asking: No, diplomas are not a substitute for learning.

  If I were to come up with a straw man caricature of the worst imaginable progressive ideas on education, it would sound something like this: “Sure, our kids can’t do basic math. But a successful education system isn’t one that teaches math. It’s one that hands out degrees to everyone. We are handing out more degrees than ever, so we’re succeeding.”

  But this is precisely what longtime California journalist Miriam Pawel just argued in an astonishing op-ed in The New York Times. The piece calls on the University of California (UC) Board of Regents to override faculty requesting the SAT be restored as a requirement for admissions. Hundreds of UC faculty are saying that their jobs have not been doable since the SAT vanished. Pawel thinks the faculty are wrong and California’s system is working just fine.

  “Students on University of California campuses may struggle with basic math, but they are graduating at record rates,” she wrote.

  You aren't doing these kids any favors by pretending they're ready for college.

• Cheer up, bunkie! Deirdre McCloskey makes no apology for her sunny outlook: As Your Own Life Shows.

  You doubt it’s as rosy as I say. I sympathize with your skepticism. You are bombarded daily with confidently asserted pessimisms, back-projected to the beginnings of the modern world, in the newspapers and on TV and in the latest Chicken-Little book from a respected (noneconomic) scientist. As the science writer Matt Ridley, like me a (rational) optimist, puts it:

  I find the world is full of people who think that their dependence on others is decreasing, or that they would be better off if they were more self-sufficient, or that technological progress has brought no improvement in the standard of living, or that the world is steadily deteriorating, or that the exchange of things and ideas is a superfluous irrelevance.

  Such pessimism is favored perhaps by our genetic inheritance of sharp attention to dangers. It certainly sells books and TV shows and newspapers. News is by definition mostly bad, and modern media tell of disasters from all the wide world. Romanticizing the good old days, compared with which our latter days look so shabby, has been standard since the Romantic movement, and anyway was a conventional trope among the Greeks and Hebrews and Hindus celebrating an age of gold. Science fiction and horror fiction, offshoots of Romanticism, have tended since their invention in the nineteenth century to predict dystopias, reflecting the pessimism about the disturbing betterment current at the time. Consider Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1816), H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895), John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids (1951), or Matt Damon and Jodie Foster in Elysium (2013). It is a rare science-fiction writer, a Robert Heinlein or an Ursula K. Le Guin, who does not see the future as a version of scientific mischance or class struggle or imperial fascism or, most recently, environmental catastrophe.

  Doom sells, but who's buyin'? Deirdre notes the modern-day miracles we take for granted.

• Alas, sometimes it's hard to come by. Erick Erickson laments: Oh To Have Focus. He has three suggestions for DJT:

  First, go under the radar. You are radioactive to too many candidates right now. Don’t be seen from or heard from unless it is about lowering costs or the war.

  Second, end the trade wars. Settle ASAP with Canada and end all the tariffs. The psychological impact of getting rid of the tariffs will boost the markets and peoples’ retirements and will begin to lower prices.

  Third, go ruthlessly back to Iran and wipe out their leadership. Iran intends to hold the world hostage to higher oil, gas, and diesel prices. Go wipe them out right now. Work with Israel and our Arab allies, and even the Europeans now on the verge of an economic collapse because of fuel shortages.

  Wipe them out. Get drones from Ukraine as Ukraine is now buying old missile tech from us. Make a trade. The United States will make fewer than 100,000 drones this year. Ukraine will make over 5 million. Buy some and use them in Iran since we have a missile shortage.

  Fine. I agree, pretty much. But when has Trump ever taken good advice, when it involves the implicit admission that the's been wrong?

I have an announcement. Effective immediately, I have been appointed by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent as the 1st head of marketing in US Treasury history. As my first act, we are launching a new campaign immediately. See below. Interested in your feedback. pic.twitter.com/bipYFnubrq

— Mike Alfred (@mikealfred) September 10, 2026

Unless you've been sitting behind a very effective Internet Bazoomba Filter, you've probably heard about the latest Sydney Sweeney kerfuffle. Or at least seen the (impressive!) related images/videos.

But here at Pun Salad, we're above all that!

Until we aren't.

And so we're linking to Jonah Goldberg's latest G-File, where he is Cashing In on Sydney Sweeney’s Cash-In. (Dispatch gifted link)

And, arguably, since Jonah's Dispatch article is (I checked) also paywalled: he's cashing in on Faye Curran's cashing in on Sydney Sweeney’s cashing in.

No paywall here at Pun Salad, reader! But if you're so inclined, buy something expensive at Amazon via one of the (paid link) images you'll see here and there.

Then you can accuse me of cashing in on Jonah Goldberg's cashing in on Faye Curran's cashing in on Sydney Sweeney’s cashing in.

Also of note:

• AI advice I. With bonus LFOD content, from Greg Bruno at Pace University: Don’t Be Misled by Calls for an AI Slowdown. He is plugging Pace's upcoming Actionable AI Conference. I believe this is a pre-interview with Pace facule James Brusseau, "a leading global thinker on the ethics of AI development."

  [Q:] An underlying theme of Pace’s Actionable AI Conference series is the ethical considerations of the technology. How do you define AI ethics?

  [A:] AI ethics is the investigation of the values that surround human interaction with artificial intelligence. But what does it mean in practice?

  Value in ethical terms means something that is worth having on its own. Think of the slogan on the New Hampshire license plate—“Live Free or Die.” The idea with that motto is that freedom is worth having—not to get something else, but simply to have freedom. Without it, life isn’t worth living.

  As you might guess from his LFOD invocation, Prof Brusseau is a skeptic of government efforts to pump the brakes on AI. Check out his argument.

• AI advice II. OK, Brusseau advises that you not be misled. While Megan McArdle suggests that you Don’t lose your head..

  No, I couldn't resist the rhyme there. Here, if you need it, is a WaPo gifted link.

  Over the past few weeks, the public has woken up to the debate that’s been going on in the artificial intelligence safety community for more than a decade. Will we create superintelligence? Will it kill us? What should we do?

  I don’t have the answers to those questions. All I have are principles for thinking about the problem, which are being riotously violated all over the internet.

  Some propositions, in no particular order:

  Don’t form strong beliefs (yet). Even in the frontier labs, no one knows what the future holds. Those outside the labs don’t even know what the present holds, because they haven’t seen the most advanced models, which haven’t been released. If you are sure you know what will happen, or what we should do about it, you are nurturing what writer and satirist Ambrose Bierce called “a vagrant opinion without visible means of support.”

  As you try to form an opinion, be skeptical but not cynical. Many people seem convinced that frontier lab CEOs who want government permission to collaborate on safety, and possibly regulation, could have only one possible motive: boosting their stock price and hamstringing their competition. I’m all for healthy skepticism, but this overshoots into cynicism — and then shoots straight out the other side into a kind of painful naiveté that assumes financial motives are the only determinants of human behavior. Yet few of these hardened cynics actually arrange their own lives to relentlessly maximize their personal wealth.

  Megan, as always, has good principles, worth your while.

  Among my principles for thinking about the problem: "It's a safe bet that whatever Bernie Sanders advocates is a bad idea." Simplistic but …

• Oh yeah? Noah Rothman has an assertion for Donald J. Trump: We're not as dumb as you think.

  There’s a certain type of political observer whose low esteem for his fellow Americans’ character and intelligence is matched only by his high regard for his own talents and temperament. That’s the sort, overrepresented on social media, who assumed that the savage masses would fall to their knees in gratitude to Donald Trump over his promise to provide several hundred million of them with $5,000 checks — that is, so long as they vote Republican in November. That same archetype seemed perfectly befuddled by the public’s rejection of Trump’s proposed kickback.

  The latest Reuters/Ipsos survey found that 63 percent of Americans — “including four in 10 Republicans and nine in 10 Democrats” — disapprove of the president’s $5,000 pledge. With that, social media lit up with a cynical assessment of the American people, albeit in a rhetorical framework designed to disparage Trump more than the voting public. The refrain was endlessly reprised: Trump is so unpopular that he’s turned the American people against free money!

  I'm (of course) disappointed that "9 out of 10" Democrats are (apparently) smarter than 6 out of 10 Republicans, but that's where we are today.

• Bonus LFOD content! Showing up for a third time in my Google LFOD News Alert is a 2022 article from Emily Apter at e-flux: Live Free or Die? Psychopolitical Infrastructures of Denialism.

  When approached from the angle of political theory, the Todestrieb of Covid-denialism aligns with the logic of “live free or die” libertarianism. New Hampshire’s official motto was adopted in 1945 and borrowed from a toast (“Live free or die: Death is not the Worst of Evils”) made by Revolutionary War hero General John Stark, who himself was borrowing it from the French Revolutionary slogan “Vivre libre ou mourir.” Under conditions of pandemia, this libertarian rallying cry is weaponized in a paroxysm of individual choicism that gains energy and positive reinforcement from in-group identification and the community support-structures of fellow denialists. One could say, then, that pandemia denialism produces a singular community; a company of Lockean self-property owners, possessive individualists whose ego-ideal is based on the kind of self-sufficing “ownness” (Eigenheit) that Max Stirner outlined in his controversial 1844 book The Ego and its Own (Der Einzige und sein Eigentum). Stirner’s theory of the ego was castigated by Marx as little more than a smokescreen for petty bourgeois individualism and self-interest, but Marx was short-sighted in dismissing its potential for the kind of anarchist individualism that we see animating entrepreneurial philosophy in the tech industry. Nor could he forsee its importance for Freud’s theory of das Ich, of the ego as a subjective agency that, in misrecognizing itself, and engaging in a dreamlike distortion of reality to justify its own ends, enables grandiose fantasies of self-possession. Psychosis, as Freud would note in this instance, becomes a way of making good on the loss of reality.

  If you haven't already looked it up, Todestrieb is "death-drive" a concept from Freud.

  And I haven't weaponized my paroxysm of individual choicism yet today, but maybe later.

John F. Early suggests at Cato: How to Improve the Trump Administration’s Tepid Proposal to Remove Race and Ethnicity from the Decennial Census.

Our Eye Candy du Jour is Mark Krikorian's proposed answer back in 2010 to the dreaded Question 9. Should I be around for the 2030 Census, and I'm asked…

Also of note:

• But speaking of racial pigeonholers… David Harsanyi takes on a Texas Republican pol, who's looking for The Right Kind of Immigrants.

  The other day, Bo French, a Republican candidate for Texas railroad commissioner, a powerful regulatory body that oversees the oil and gas industry, posted a picture of a group of around 10 undergraduates who looked to be Indian American cheering the Texas Longhorns' 20-point fourth-quarter comeback against top-ranked Ohio State.

  "I heard UT graduation this year looked like this," he wrote. "I didn't believe it. The problem is now obviously far worse than anyone imagined."

  French followed up to say that he "weeps for the families in Texas who can't get into UT because they prioritize foreigners over Texans."

  Many on the New Right flocked to social media to defend French. They shouldn't have.

  First off, the University of Texas at Austin's undergrad student body is made up of over 80% Texas residents, significantly higher than the average for most state schools nationally. Roughly 10% of students are from outside the state. Foreign students comprise around 4% of the latest freshman class, which is around the national average.

  David is convincing that "Bo French" (if that's his real name) is just upset by the insufficiently-pale complexions in the picture.

  My reflex action when seeing the stats for UT-Austin is to ask: "Hey, what about the University Near Here?" According to this website, way different: 54% out-of-state, 45% in-state, 1% international. (And as far as complexions go: 85% white, 3% "multiracial", 1% African-American, 1% "International", 3% Unknown, 4% Hispanic, 3% Asian.)

• I'd hate to think otherwise. Hey, have you been wondering if RFK Jr make your food unsafe? Jim Geraghty has your answer, bunkie: No, RFK Jr. Didn’t Make Your Food Unsafe.

  This summer, the nation experienced a Cyclospora outbreak in iceberg lettuce, a situation that launched a thousand social media jokes about Taco Bell.

  There’s a ready-made narrative that Democrats and media would like to tell: Americans could once eat their food with confidence, but then Robert F. Kennedy Jr. became the secretary of Health and Human Services, and he announced plans to cut 3,500 positions from the FDA, and now foodborne bacteria and other illnesses are running rampant across Americans’ digestive tracts. The facts are a little more complicated, as you might expect. Read on.

  The first problem with the “Kennedy made our food unsafe” narrative is that the increase in the number of reported food recalls predates Trump’s second term.

  Back in late 2024, before Trump’s second term began, Axios reported, “Food and cosmetic recalls, which the Food and Drug Administration categorizes together, nearly doubled from 2012 to 2024.” One factor is eating trends; Americans and the rest of the world are eating more ready-to-eat food, which doesn’t get cooked; cooking usually kills off bacteria. Several listeria outbreaks were traced back to deli sliced meats and cheeses.

  Jim does his usual meticulous research. He wouldn't be shy about coming down on Jr. if he thought it was warranted, but it's not.

• What are Republicans good for, anyway? At the WSJ, Joseph C. Sternberg bemoans: Republicans’ Pre-Emptive Social Security Surrender. (WSJ gifted link) Assuming you're familiar with the upcoming catastrophe:

  The program is funded by a payroll tax of 12.4%, borne equally by employer and employee and applied to the first $184,500 of taxable income. The theory is that if higher-earning households pay the payroll tax on all their income, it removes a regressive element of the existing system and creates a fabulous new revenue stream.

  Liberals have agitated for this change for years. More worrying is that they’re starting to gather some Republican support. Republican Sen. Bernie Moreno of Ohio joined Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts in writing an op-ed for another newspaper this summer arguing for the change. Rep. Tom Cole, an Oklahoma Republican and the Appropriations Committee chairman, recently offered a similar statement to the Washington Post.

  It’s a trap.

  Democrats are kidding voters when they claim raising the payroll tax in this way would be sufficient to stabilize Social Security. Over the next 75 years, the combined old-age and disability systems expect a shortfall of $29 trillion between the cost of extending today’s benefit levels and the revenue to be raised by today’s payroll tax rules. The Social Security Administration believes that eliminating the cap would close at best 67% of that gap. Other estimates, such as the Cato Institute’s, plausibly put the figure nearer 50%—and perhaps as little as 30%.

  This means that far from a one-and-done fix, monkeying with the payroll tax would have to be part of a broader discussion about taxation, eligibility and benefit levels. The question for Republicans then becomes: If they’re going to need to fight about all the other stuff anyway, why give up so much leverage so early by agreeing to the tax hike?

  At this point, there's no question about whether the "fix" will be painful. It will be. The issue is how much collateral damage will be done to the economy as a result. Sternberg notes that the answer for tax-increase-only fix will be: "a lot."

• Maybe Nellie will cheer you up. How about it? Well, we have to go down rather far in her TGIF column this week, but…

  → Poor Travis Kelce: Prosecutors named Travis Kelce as one of the victims of a $35 million Ponzi scheme in which a Texas fund manager named Siddharth Jawahar put 99 percent of invested capital into a single stock, which was Philip Morris Pakistan, hid the losses as it tanked, and spent millions of the supposedly invested money on private jets, luxury apartments, and exclusive clubs. I, for one, cannot believe Siddharth Jawahar’s investment scheme turned out to be fake. Thank god Travis Kelce married Taylor Swift or else he would absolutely be bankrupt. Whenever I think of sweet, handsome Travis, I always think of this:

  I just gave a squirle a peice of bread and it straight smashed all of it!!!! I had no idea they ate bread like that!! Haha #crazy

  — Travis Kelce (@tkelce) April 14, 2011

  That’s a perfect man to marry. If I were to marry a man, he would be the hottest, dumbest man you can imagine. A man with the personality of a coffee table and the shoulder width of a wardrobe. But lo, by twist of fate, I’m the First Lady of CBS News and every night it’s talk talk talk, so many thoughts about things. Bari never posts about how squirrels eat bread. Anyway, point being, I see Travis Kelce getting fleeced in a Ponzi scheme as another sign of his greatness. So “Haha #crazy” of him.

  That's a very old tweet, and I'm sure Travis has learned more about squirles since.

Today's Eye Candy is my belated nod to a fine document.

But in Constitution-related good news, James B. Meigs writes in the WSJ's "Free Expression" newsletter : Dartmouth Is Open to Debate.

Congratulations are due to the Big Green. It's even older than the Constitution! (Founded in 1769.)

As James notes, Dartmouth was in 240th place (out of 248) back in the dark ages of 2024. And while Dartmouth was going from there to #6, the school at the other side of the state, the hallowed University Near Here, went from #3 to #44. Disappointing! Administrators, Trustees, legislators, faculty, staff, and students should read the recommendations for easy ways to improve.

Also of note:

• This turkey won't fly, Donny. Jeffrey Blehar bets that Trump Can’t Bribe His Way Out of November’s Reckoning.

  Folks, time is now officially running out. The Republican Party’s midterm convention in Dallas has come and gone, and I wish I could say that the GOP has now emerged from the midsummer mire and is heading into November with a fresh head of steam. Instead, the sinkhole grows ever deeper. Donald Trump currently sits at a -16 percentage point approval rating in the RealClearPolitics polling averages, and things get even grimmer once you poke beneath the hood. (Next time you fill the tank up at the pump, you’ll understand that cool -38.6 percentage point approval rating he currently sports on the issue of inflation. Don’t worry, Americans historically aren’t known to vote on pocketbook issues . . .)

  There’s no getting around blunt electoral realities here; you can’t plead with the mechanical gears of electoral politics to stop grinding. The hour is late. Voter attitudes about the economy, Trump’s various foreign policy adventures, and his . . . ahem, “highly personal” way of governing in his second term are now set and fixed: The cement has dried. (Early voting in Virginia begins in three days.)

  It’s the sort of desperate situation that absolutely requires a really futile and stupid gesture be done on somebody’s part, and Trump is always the man for such things. So he went and did his typical Donald Trump “thing,” rambling unscripted in Dallas through nearly two hours of self-praise after publicly pledging to stroke a $5,000 check to every adult voter in America if (and only if) they find it in their hearts to ratify his last two years in office by returning his party — and he very much wants you to know he thinks of it as his — to power. How would he do it legally? How would the American economy respond to the instant injection of $1.5 trillion? Don’t know!

  Film buffs will be able to guess where that first link in Jeffrey's third paragraph goes.

• Youngster, if you guessed "a lot", congratulations. Romina Boccia asks and answers: What Would a Social Security Payroll Tax Hike Cost You?

  Republicans have resisted broad tax increases for decades. Social Security’s approaching insolvency may be testing that commitment.

  The Washington Post recently reported that several prominent Republicans are becoming more receptive to raising taxes to avoid Social Security reform. While much of the current debate concerns raising or eliminating the limit on earnings subject to Social Security taxes, Rep. Tom Cole (R‑OK), chair of the House Appropriations Committee, said he is “willing to look at the [payroll] tax rate” and “willing to raise the amount of income through tax.”

  Before lawmakers put such an increase on the table, workers deserve to know what it would cost them.

  Cato’s new Social Security Payroll Tax Calculator allows workers to enter their annual earnings and see how different tax rates would affect them.

  [Calculator is here.]

  And remember kids: that money will be going to a lot of geezers who don't really need it.

• For another bad idea… At Reason, J.D. Tuccille brings some unsurprising news: California’s proposed ‘billionaire tax’ is based on bad research.

  California's proposed "billionaire's tax" on the assets of wealthy state residents enjoys a slim lead in the polls leading up to the midterm elections, though so do two measures that, if they draw more votes, could render the scheme unenforceable. That makes for a high-stakes battle as many prosperous Californians are already fleeing to escape a tax that could force them to surrender ownership stakes in companies they've founded. Even if it doesn't pass, a new report warns that the proposal is based on faulty research and could do vast economic damage.

  […]

  Now, a new report finds the proposed wealth tax is not only dangerous for California's economic prospects; it's also based on bad research. According to the report's author, Independent Institute research fellow Kristian Fors, "this proposal has been heavily influenced by the work of UC Berkeley professors Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman to justify the concept of wealth taxation." Saez and Zucman have generated news headlines with their claims that the wealthy are undertaxed in comparison to lower-income Americans. But as Fors points out, the estimate that drew so much news coverage claimed that "the overall tax rate for the top 400 richest households in the nation was 23 percent," while just a year earlier, Saez and Zucman "estimated that the top 1 percent paid an overall tax rate of approximately 36 percent; the authors found a share of 41 percent for the top 0.001 percent of earners in the most recent year of their survey, a category encompassing billionaires and high multimillionaires."

  The discrepancy, according to Fors, comes from how the economists treat corporate income taxes. Conventional analysis assumes that corporate taxes burden shareholders, workers, and consumers as the tax gets passed on. That results in the earlier estimate of a 41 percent tax rate for the wealthiest. To reach their much lower 23 percent estimated rate, Saez and Zucman used a non-standard analysis—and while the results of that approach won news coverage, they weren't subject to peer review.

  Saez and Zucman are just two of the best-known examples of what Bastiat was talking about back in 1848:

  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.

  Yes, that's something I've posted before. And, unfortunately, will again.

• I'm pretty sure that was never the actual goal. Speaking of Bastiat, let's go over to Jack Salmon's substack, The Unseen and the Unsaid. (Gee, that rings a cloche.): A 5 Percent Wealth Tax Would Destroy a Lot More Than It Raises.

  Punishing private wealth creation

  The first thing to recognize, is that the billions of dollars in wealth held by the almost 1,000 billionaires in the U.S. isn’t cash that is being hoarded under a mattress waiting to be taxed. For instance, Elon Musk’s roughly $900 billion fortune is mostly stock held in SpaceX and Tesla.

  What’s more, Musk’s personal fortune represents only about one-third of the combined value of the companies he has founded.

  The remaining two-thirds is represented by factories, equipment, intellectual property, business assets, and claims held by other shareholders, including pension funds, mutual funds, and ordinary Americans who own shares directly or indirectly. The companies also employ tens of thousands of workers whose wages support household incomes and consumption.

  There's more at the link, but Jack really gets to what this is all about in his bolded headline: punishing.

Frank J. is getting pretty good at this: The Founding Fathers and Jurors.

He's also faked up an interview with Lindsay Clancy jurors, where they are unintentionally honest about the jury's deliberations. It's right on the border between hilarity and depravity. But that's where we live today.

Also of note:

• And get ready for the ads showing them pushing a wheelchaired granny off a cliff. The NR editorialists suggest: Republicans Should Run Against Medicare for All.

  Democrats are partying like it’s 2019.

  Coming off a successful midterm election year and convinced that socialism was where the energy of the party would be, Democratic presidential candidates lined up that year to embrace a government takeover of the health-care system they branded as “Medicare for All.” But in relatively short order, questions about the staggering cost and massive disruptions associated with the idea helped sink the candidacies of Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris, and ultimately helped catapult Joe Biden (who endorsed more incremental expansion of government-subsidized health insurance) over Bernie Sanders.

  This year, Medicare for All has reemerged. Democrats have nominated a number of candidates who support the idea, including in two of the most competitive Senate races — Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan and Troy Jackson in Maine.

  Here in my Congressional District (NH-01), the D-candidate, Steffany "Jeanne's Kid" Shaheen, added M4A verbiage to her campaign website : "I’m with Bernie Sanders and support Medicare for All."

  Her opponent, Anthony "Big Tony" DiLorenzo, doesn't do that, instead his "plan to protect the American dream" involves handwaving and vague promises. For example: "Fully support Social Security and Medicare for our citizens" and "Make healthcare more affordable and increase access. "

  Who knew it was that easy!

• It's morning in America, I tells ya! James Freeman looks at the latest stats and sees A Boom for U.S. Workers. (WSJ gifted link)

  The media industry continues to manufacture forecasts of doom, but harder data say that this is a great time to be an American—arguably the greatest in all of our spectacular history.

  On Tuesday the federal government reported that after adjusting for inflation, the typical U.S. household is making more than ever:

  The U.S. Census Bureau today announced that real median household income was $87,460 in 2025, the highest on record dating back to 1967.

  The official poverty rate fell 0.5 percentage points to 10.2% in 2025…

  So there.

• "There are no solutions, only trade-offs." That's a famous quote from Thomas Sowell, so I've long pooh-pooed my current CongressCritter Chris Pappas's membership in the "Problem Solvers Caucus".

  Still, I suppose it's better than belonging to the "Squad". The PSC got a nod from Walter Olson at Cato: Problem Solvers Caucus Takes Up Redistricting Reform.

  The bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus in Congress has embarked on a project well suited to its mission: devising a set of principles meant to bring peace to the gerrymandering wars that have been raging for so long. I’m among many people the caucus staff consulted in advancing this effort and went down to Capitol Hill in that capacity this summer to speak with participating caucus members at a productive meeting.

  Fine, but I'm not sure what happens in the (likely) scenario that Elbridge Gerry fans do whatever they want despite whatever the earnest problem-solvers manage to set up.

  I will, as usual, point to my own crackpot "proportional representation" solution: It's right here, Problem Solvers!

• A blast from the past. Specifically, a blast from last May: NOAA predicts below-normal 2026 Atlantic hurricane season.

  Forecasters with NOAA’s National Weather Service are predicting a below-normal hurricane season for the Atlantic basin this year. NOAA’s outlook for the 2026 Atlantic hurricane season, which runs June 1 to November 30, predicts a 35% chance of a near-normal season, a 10% chance of an above-normal season, and a 55% chance of a below-normal season.

  The agency is forecasting a total of 8-14 named storms (winds of 39 mph or higher). Of those, 3-6 are forecast to become hurricanes (winds of 74 mph or higher), including 1-3 major hurricanes (category 3, 4 or 5 with winds of 111 mph or higher). NOAA has a 70% confidence in these ranges. An average season has 14 named storms with seven hurricanes, including three major hurricanes.

  “With the most advanced forecast modeling and hurricane tracking technologies, NOAA and the National Weather Service are prepared to deliver real-time storm forecasts and warnings,” said Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick. “Our experts are integrating cutting-edge tools to ensure communities in the path of storms receive the earliest, most accurate information possible.”

  Reality check: Instead of 8-14 named storms, we got 5. And instead of 1-3 major hurricanes, we got zero.

  By coincidence, I blogged Joe Biden's dire weather warnings exactly five years ago. As reported by David Harsanyi back then:

  President Joe Biden contends that the recent hurricanes that hit the United States prove we’re in a “climate crisis.” It’s a “code red” for the world, the president warns. White House national climate adviser Gina McCarthy added that climate is now a “health emergency.”

  I wonder what Joe and Gina deduce from zero hurricanes. Problem solved?

Recently on the book blog: