Pun Salad

Veronique de Rugy takes what should be a non-controversial stand: New Climate Report Deserves to Be Debated, Not Silenced

Some additional links:

• the report itself;
• the DOE press release;
• Travis Fisher's explanation: Why I Helped Organize the Department of Energy’s Climate Report;
• Roger Pielke's response to reporters' queries about the report.

I also liked Ted Nordhaus's explanation of his evolution on the issue: Why I Stopped Being a Climate Catastrophist.

In case you're wondering, I'm sticking with my crackpot idea: Artificial Photosynthesis!

Also of note:

• And the Tyrant of our Teapot Tempests. Jeff Maurer turns down his usual R-rated whimsiness to make a serious observation: Trump Is the Dictator of Our Dialogue.

  You could pretty much write a “Trump did a bad thing” column every day. I try to dole them out sparingly because: 1) I think that comedians have the “Trump is bad” angle pretty well covered, and 2) If this blog becomes one-note, I would like that note to be “George Clooney’s The Midnight Sky was a self-indulgent pile of dinosaur shit.”

  One of the most frustrating things about Trump is that he does more than just make shockingly bad decisions on the issues of the day; he decides what the issues of the day even are. None of us were talking about the Commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics a month ago; that conversation started when a BLS employee committed the sin of competence, leading Trump to choose a replacement who is to economics what Gob Bluth is to magic. Nobody was talking about federal control of DC until Trump cooked up a policy in response to an imagined crime spike; if Fox News had aired Ferris Bueller's Day Off instead of their usual fare, Trump surely would have deployed troops to Chicago to crack down on delinquent teens. Reacting to the Trump outrage du jour engages Trump on a battlefield of his choosing.

  But a universe of important issues are being ignored while Trump pursues a Fox-News-and-petty-revenge-fueled agenda. In the end, the most damaging impacts of his presidency might come not from issues he bungled, but from issues he simply ignored. Here are some issues that are non-entities in our dialogue while Trump feuds with the Smithsonian and seeks to build a Lavish, Grand, And Totally Heterosexual Ballroom at the White House.

  Now Jeff, bless his heart, is what passes for a moderate liberal Democrat in this day and age. You and I might make some edits to his "issues" list, and we'd certainly disagree with his recommended "solutions".

  And griping about the arcane complexity of the tax code? Please. That's an easy target, but Jimmy Carter called the tax code "a disgrace to the human race" fifty years ago. Like a number of things on the list, it's hardly Trump's fault that little progress has been made on that front.

  But overall, Jeff's right: Trump has made it All About Him. We should do better.

• And, oh, by the way… David Hebert notes a milestone. The National Debt Just Eclipsed $37 Trillion: Here’s What We Should Do About That. (NR gifted link)

  Eliminating USAID was a good start, but this only saved $44.2 billion. The government would have to eliminate USAID 41 times to bring the budget back into balance. Other areas of cuts could include the Department of Education, the Department of Commerce, and the Department of Housing and Urban Development. There is no provision within the Constitution for the federal government to have a role in education or housing and urban development, and most of what Commerce does is cronyism. These departments have a total budget for this year of $585.8 billion.

  To make real budgetary progress, though, the U.S. must tackle entitlement reform. In 2024, Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid alone constituted 44 percent of all federal spending, or just under $3 trillion. The problem here is not that there are (supposedly) millions of people over 100 years old receiving Social Security payments. The federal government is not set up as an investment firm, capable of managing finances for millions of people, nor is it an insurance agency. These are promises that Washington bureaucrats have no business making and no ability to keep. The problem here is not that the government insufficiently funds these programs. For example, when health care is paid for by reaching into the pockets of other Americans, costs skyrocket.

  David's got more good ideas, and if you need a free link, there's one up there.

• The answer may surprise (and also depress) you! Scott Lincicome asks: How Much of Your Life (and Money) Have Dumb Rules Wasted?

  Given the (ahem) tumultuous U.S. trade and economic situation and various personal obligations, I’ve been doing a lot of air travel this summer—a lot. While these trips have been physically and mentally taxing, they came with a silver lining: They’ve allowed me to conduct an informal field test of the effects of the July 8 change to the Transportation Security Administration requirement that most U.S. air travelers remove their shoes when transiting through airport security checkpoints nationwide. As anyone who has flown in the last two decades can attest, the simple “shoe rule” is highly annoying, but did it have a meaningful effect on wait times at airport security? The TSA seems to think so, with DHS Secretary Kristi Noem stating on the day of the announcement that the agency expects the rule change to “drastically decrease passenger wait times at our TSA checkpoints.”

  And you know what? She’s probably right.

  Scott does the math, and finds that over the nineteen years the shoe policy was in place, it's cost us tens of billions of dollars in lost time.

  And yet, nobody's gone to jail.

• Jeff Jacoby is cursed with a decent memory. Displayed by remembering a simple truth: When Israel left Gaza, everything got worse.

  There is no way to know yet how this will turn out. But as Israel prepares to push still deeper into Gaza in what may be the cataclysmic final phase of its war to eliminate Hamas, it is worth looking back to reflect on another fateful, anguish-filled Israeli decision in Gaza — one that began the descent into the nightmare the Jewish state now faces.

  It was exactly 20 years ago this week — Aug. 15, 2005 — that the Israeli government, led by then-prime minister Ariel Sharon, destroyed 21 Jewish communities in the Gaza Strip, evicting 9,000 Israelis and demolishing the homes where some of them had lived for decades. All of Gaza, denuded of its Jews, was then unilaterally surrendered to the Palestinian Authority. There was no quid pro quo. Israel relinquished the territory it had occupied in the 1967 Six Day War without requiring anything in return. Sharon labeled the operation "disengagement" — a term meant to suggest that by handing Gaza to the Palestinians, Israel could finally sever its ties to the troubled territory and its population.

  What Israel got instead was, … well, you know.

I remember Salon once absurdly contending that Americans live in “the Koch brothers’ libertarian utopia.” _A libertarian utopia!_ We can’t even get a Republican president to stop telling corporate boards what to do.https://t.co/ZgDN0Pvmde pic.twitter.com/JYnAmjJdMp

— Jim Geraghty (@jimgeraghty) August 13, 2025

Jim's link will take you to his examples of Another Dollop of Light Communism from the Trump Administration (NR gifted link).

And he doesn't even mention this recent example of that:

The WSJ's Greg Ip also notes that The U.S. Marches Toward State Capitalism With American Characteristics. (WSJ gifted link)

As a free market fan myself, I'm dismayed. But then I check my investment portfolio, and I'm slightly mollified; the gurus at Fidelity seem to be adjusting it well to the new reality.

But, speaking of reality, Don Boudreaux notes that Even Trump Can't Escape Logic and Reality. Specifically, about him trying to push Goldman Sachs around:

Don notes there are only three groups that might be a source of all that tariff revenue:

1. American consumers;
2. American businesses;
3. foreign producers.

Trump wants to deny the first two. Understandable that he wants to.

But (here's the logic and reality): if "foreign producers" are eating the tariff costs to keep the net cost of their products to Americans the same, that destroys Trump's argument that his tariffs will spur domestic production.

I recently read the late Martin Cruz Smith's last novel, in which his Russian detective hero, Arkady Renko, mused that the best book to read in order to understand Russia was Alice in Wonderland. I'm beginning to think it might be a gateway to understanding America under Trump.

Also of note:

• Of course he does. Dominic Pino notes that Trump Wants a Bureau of MAGA Statistics. After the defenestration of Bureau of Labor Statistics commissioner Erika McEntarfer:

  What Trump would like is a BLS that is biased in his favor. The latest proof of that is his nominee to be the next commissioner, E. J. Antoni.

  Antoni is the chief economist at the Heritage Foundation. He has been a relentless booster of Trump’s policies on social media. And he has demonstrated time and again that he does not understand economic statistics.

  Dominic has examples of Antoni's past whoppers.

• A nation turns its lonely eyes to … Zohran Mamdani? George Will looks for the pony in a room filled with you-know-what: Why Mamdani’s socialism-on-the-Hudson would be useful for America. (WaPo gifted link)

  Donald Trump and Zohran Mamdani are similar symptoms, and similarly reasons for guarded optimism. The president and the self-described “democratic socialist” who is the Democratic nominee to be New York’s next mayor have risen on tides of resentments, and are inadvertent educators.

  Trump is teaching a daily seminar on the founders’ wisdom, especially the separation of powers, which Congress, by its self-marginalization, has weakened, thereby emancipating presidents from law and other restraints. Mamdani, if elected, will be similarly instructive regarding elementary economics and the limits of government’s competence.

  Here's hoping we can learn our lessons without much further damage.

• One electron looks pretty much like another. But (unfortunately) it costs money to shove them into my house. At NH Journal, Kevin Avard explains Why Granite Staters Pay Too Much for Electricity—and How to Fix It.

  If you’ve opened your electric bill recently, you’ve probably felt the same thing I have—frustration. Granite Staters are paying some of the highest electricity rates in the country, and it’s getting worse. Eversource just announced a hike in its default supply rate, increasing it from 8.9 cents to 11.2 cents per kilowatt-hour. This rate covers the actual electricity we use. Other utilities and suppliers are seeing similar increases because these rates are tied to regional energy market costs.

  And to make matters worse, the fixed monthly customer charge is also rising by 43 percent, from about $13.81 to nearly $20 a month—before you even turn on the lights.

  Kevin's not wrong. This site reports how electricity cost varies state-to-state. New Hampshire's average (residential/commercial) rate is 20.50¢ per kWh. That's in comparison to the US average of 13.17¢ per kWh.

  Other New England states, though, show that it's a regional malady: MA: 24.67¢ per kWh; ME: 22.84¢ per kWh; VT 19.42¢ per kWh; CT: 26.16¢ per kWh; RI: 25.66¢ per kWh.

  Kevin is a state senator, and his ideas on "how to fix it" seem OK.

  I have to say that I think electricity is a huge bargain, even at 20.50¢ per kWh.

Recently on the movie blog:

James Freeman offers us A New York Times Column Every Politician Should Read. (WSJ gifted link) It seems more voters are playing that old Who song, "Won't Get Fooled Again".

There's more dissection of Edsall's ire, and it's pretty amusing. I'd bet that Edsall has, in the past, contemptuously deemed some Republican proposals as "trickle-down". What he fails to recognize is that dumping Federal dollars on a town like Texarkana goes first to the politically-connected. Does it proceed to "trickle down" upon the general citizenry? Doesn't sound as if it does.

[Eye Candy du Jour note: I confess I did not know that "boondoggle" had an original meaning thanks to the Boy Scouts!]

Also of note:

• Speaking of boondoggles… You know, in addition to going after Washington DC criminals, Trump should also crack down on this robbery that is (apparently) still legal: DC’s $4.4B RFK Stadium Boondoggle: A Gift to Interest Groups, a Burden on Taxpayers.

  Washington, DC’s subsidization of the renovation of RFK Stadium — the once and future home of the Washington Commanders — “is a BFD,” Mayor Muriel Bowser said, verging on an expletive to convey her enthusiasm for the proposal, to which the DC Council assented on August 1 by a vote of 9 to 3. Another, final vote to approve the stadium will occur in September.

  “Big” is, indeed, an apt adjective for the affaire d’RFK. The public funds to be spent — $1.7 billion in direct subsidies and $2.7 billion in indirect subsidies — are prodigious. The scope of the development plan transcends the mere renovation of an old sports venue. The stadium campus is set to include (besides the stadium) multiple parking structures, bars and restaurants, retail stores, an $89 million indoor sportsplex, a planned grocery store, a pharmacy, daycare facilities, a hotel, 6,000 or more housing units, and a “30-acre stretch of riverfront community commons.” An extension of Washington’s metro system also may be undertaken. In Bowser’s phrase: “180 acres of vacant land, activated.” In short, the deal amounts to a wholesale bid to transform a languishing portion of eastern Washington DC into a vital and bustling hub. An ambitious central-planning gambit, if not a hubristic one.

  But will all this cash "trickle down" to, y'know, normal people? By the time we discover the answer ("nope"), the boons will have been doggled.

• And we're still speaking of boondoggles… Beth Brelje follows the money at the Federalist, and I give her two thumbs up for using the adjective "cushy" in her headline: PBS Parent Company Sent Tax Dollars To Cushy Lobbying Firm. The recently-defunded Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) was sending cash to the "nonprofit" Association of Public Television Stations (APTS). And…

  APTS is a $4.5 million nonprofit membership organization that promotes public television. Its finances are closely connected to APTS Action Inc., the lobbying arm of APTS, which is also funded by membership fees and shares the same leadership team. APTS Action had nearly $2 million in gross receipts in 2023. APTS Action advocates for policy issues related to education, health care, and telecommunications, and it “brings public television’s message to Capitol Hill.” It lobbies for “federal funding for America’s public television stations” and “expanding” public TV “outreach in education, public safety and civic leadership,” according to its tax-exempt papers.

  APTS received $25,000 from CPB in 2022, and it charges public television stations a membership service fee. For an added fee, members can buy access to a grant-seeking database.

  In 2023 APTS earned $3.8 million in “program service revenue,” which includes fees from public TV stations, and spent most of it on employee compensation ($3.3 million).

  The path of money — from taxpayers to the federal government to CPB to public television stations to APTS, (or direct from CPB to APTS) — shows that ultimately taxpayers fund APTS, which appears to be primarily a fat salary and lobbying machine.

  And how much of that cash "trickled down" to something you might want to watch on TV?

• Exercise for the reader. Count the different terms Jeff Maurer uses for "breasts" in his announcement: “I Might Be Wrong” Will Exclusively Cover Sydney Sweeney’s Breasts Until This National Crisis Passes. To help you, I've bolded two in his second paragraph:

  On July 23, our nation was rocked by a once-in-a-century event: A jeans company put a pretty lady in their commercial. Much like 9/11 or the JFK assassination, no one who lived through this calamity will forget where they were when they heard the news. In the future, “Anno Domini” may be replaced by “Post-Sydney Sweeney American Eagle Commercial”, as the latter will surely be a more salient divider between “before” and “after”.

  I Might Be Wrong has, regrettably, been derelict in our coverage of this event. It is to our great shame that not a single word on this blog/podcast has been devoted to the cataclysm. But as the national dialogue around Sydney Sweeney’s possibly-fascist breasts approaches its fourth week, I Might Be Wrong is determined to correct the error. From this point forward, we will not only exclusively cover Ms. Sweeney’s heaving boobage: We will cover it with a rigor and zeal unprecedented in the history of news. Kiss our asses, Woodward and Bernstein; go eat a dick, Ghost of Walter Cronkite — nothing in the annals of journalism will hold a candle to our immersive, round-the-clock coverage of Ms. Sweeney’s thought-provoking, arguably eugenicist sweater cannons.

  I'm sure there's a web page somewhere that helped him out with this.

• And an article I stopped reading. On the front page of today's WSJ: Meet the Parents Raising ‘Carnivore Babies,’ Swapping Puréed Fruit for Rib-Eye. (WSJ gifted link) It begins:

  When Dariya Quenneville’s infant daughter was ready for solid food, she skipped the mushed up avocado and banana. On the menu instead? Raw egg yolk and puréed chicken liver.

  The child, named Schizandra, […]

  I stopped reading there, although I think my eye may have seen "sardines" without meaning to.

  I wish young Schizandra a happy and healthy life. And perhaps a new name.

From an AP story:

I smell a sellout. I hope I'm wrong.

Also of note:

• "Novel theory" is a polite way to say "totally made up excuse". Dominic Pino looks at recent developments in Fantasyland, aka the White House: Trump’s Sweeping Tariff Powers Face Court Scrutiny under Unprecedented IEEPA Claim. (NR gifted link)

  The Trump administration has invented a novel theory of trade law whereby the president has unilateral authority to declare unlimited tariffs on any country for any length of time and modify them at will, based on a law that never once uses the word “tariff” and was passed by Congress to limit the president’s trade powers. The International Economic Emergency Powers Act (IEEPA) has been on the books since 1977 and has never been used to impose tariffs before Trump’s second term. Understandably, courts have been skeptical of Trump’s assumption of an enumerated power of Congress, the tariff power. One federal court has already ruled Trump’s tariffs under IEEPA illegal, and the appeals court judges seemed skeptical during oral arguments on July 31.

  Solicitor General D. John Sauer, the government’s attorney in the case before the appeals court, submitted a letter on Monday to the court requesting that the president’s tariff authority under IEEPA be maintained, not because it is lawful, but because overturning it would “have catastrophic consequences for our national security, foreign policy, and economy.”

  If that sounds a little dramatic to you, that’s only scratching the surface of the hysterics in this letter.

  Dominic's not wrong. That letter is really "dogs and cats living together" doomsaying:

  This is a letter signed by the US government's top lawyer and submitted today in federal court (in VOS Selections v Trump). I'm honestly struggling to believe it's real, but here we are. pic.twitter.com/Hb5L8bMeL5

  — Scott Lincicome (@scottlincicome) August 11, 2025

  "We've screwed things up so badly, it would be a catastrophe if you tried to undo it."

• Don't let the door hit you on the way out, Glenn. James Taranto marks the end of an error: The ‘Fact Checker’ Checks Out. (WSJ gifted link)

  Glenn Kessler has left the Washington Post, taking a voluntary buyout and decamping to Substack. I’d say he’s moving up in the world, but Mr. Kessler, who had written the Post’s “Fact Checker” column since 2011, is sore about his departure.

  He is proud of the work he did at the paper, although for reasons that are oddly grubby. In his Substack debut, he boasts of having been a commercial success, in the sense of giving the people what they want: “I built and maintained one of the marquee brands of The Post. . . . My articles were often among the most read on the Post website. Readers flocked to read my fact checks, even if they vehemently disagreed with my findings.”

  It’s possible that Mr. Kessler’s talents, such as they are, were wasted on the Post, which doesn’t seem to have had a business model capable of consistently converting his popularity into profit. Perhaps his flock will migrate with him to Substack and help him feather his bed in the manner he deserves.

  Glenn was only one contributing factor in the erosion of "journalistic integrity". Fun fact from James: Between February and September 2016 the WaPo ran at least six op-eds (WSJ gifted link) comparing Trump to Hitler.

• The Little Engine That Could… could not be reached for comment. The AntiPlanner reviews Senator Joni Ernst's report on (mostly) choo-choos: Off the Rails 2.

  Rail transit is finally getting the attention it deserves in Washington, DC. Early this month, Senator Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) released a report describing billion-dollar boondoggles. While the star is California’s high-speed rail, many of the projects criticized by the report involve rail transit, including Honolulu’s rail project and Maryland’s Purple Line. The projects are not only billions of dollars over budget, many of them are years behind schedule.

  As a starting point, Ernst used a one-page Department of Transportation “annual report” of federally funded projects that the Biden administration had refused to release, but which was recently released by the Trump administration. The list included five Federal Aviation Administration-funded projects that had no cost overruns, three Federal Highway Administration-funded projects whose cost overruns averaged 75 percent, three transit projects whose cost overruns averaged 80 percent, and three Federal Railroad Administration-funded projects whose cost overruns averaged 395 percent.

  Don't get Joni started on Ethanol, though.

• 

  Warning: many F-bombs dropped ahead. This blog used to shy away from this sort of thing, but as David Mamet points out, that was Back When We Gave a Fuck. A charming anecdote:

  I was filming Heist with Gene Hackman; my wife, Rebecca Pidgeon; and Danny DeVito. Danny’s line to Gene, his rival, is, “Are you fucking with me, are you fucking with me, or are you done fucking with me?”

  This occurred in an early scene—one of my first with Danny. I was concerned that he would (incorrectly) accentuate the word done at the end of the phrase, which would have branded him, sadly, with a merely academic understanding of actual American idiom. But I need not have worried, as he accentuated the final fucking and all was well.

  Per contra, Becca was raised in Edinburgh, and educated at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. In the early days of our association she flatteringly strove to adopt my Chicagoan vocabulary. Our great friend, Shel Silverstein, corrected her: “Becca, when you say motherfucker, it’s like someone is trying to fuck your mother.”

  I'm currently reading David's recent book, Everywhere an Oink Oink. Amazon link at your right. I don't recall seeing Heist, but now…

• I foresee a dramatic increase in lawsuits and takedown demands. That prediction is prompted by a viewing of…

  Forget about Skynet et al.; we're quickly moving to a future where people can create movies starring anyone they like, doing and saying whatever they want them to do and say, on a relative shoestring budget.

  I'd watch anything with an AI-generated Bogie as Marlowe.

Emma Camp explains: Capitalism isn't why you're unhappy.

A fair summary of Emma's advice to the capitalism-blamers: Grow up.

(Or, plan B: Wake up, sheeple! Learn about the Great Reptilian Conspiracy!)

Also of note:

• So don't believe deniers of the Reptilian Conspiracy! And, while you're disbelieving, Fareed Zakaria suggests that you also Don’t believe the MAGA doomers on trade. (WaPo gifted link)

  The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s measure of median disposable household income in America was higher than in all but one advanced industrial economy as of 2021 — higher than Switzerland, Germany, Britain and Japan. The exception is tiny Luxembourg. In fact, America’s median disposable household income is about double that of Japan.

  And as Noah Smith points out in an excellent essay, America’s median income has not been stagnant, as conventional wisdom tells us; it has been growing briskly over the decades. Smith notes that real median personal income has risen by 50 percent since the 1970s. Hourly wages, adjusted for inflation, are up substantially since the 1990s. And the hourly wages of the bottom third of Americans are up by even more: over 40 percent.

  We are not, of course, without problems. For example, a major problem is demagogic politicians peddling tales of misery, fueling resentment and envy.

  That, and fiscal insanity. But you knew that.

• Also disbelieve "media outlets". Jonathan Turley notes Vance Derangement Syndrome, getting an early start on the 2028 campaign. Up the Creek: Media Outlets Criticized for False Story on Vance.

  The media and various liberal pundits are again shrugging this week after the exposure of another false story targeting a conservative or Republican. In this case, Vice President JD Vance was criticized for ordering the raising of the river near his Ohio home to improve his family’s canoeing experience. First appearing in The Guardian, the story took off in the media and was featured on shows like The Colbert Show when Stephen Colbert mocked “insane spoiled baby emperor move.” The problem is that it was entirely untrue. The Secret Service raised the river for security reasons with no contact with the Vice President or his family.

  The hit piece was curious because The Guardian admitted that it could not confirm the allegation. Nevertheless, it breathlessly reported  on “Canoe-Gate” with the headline, “JD Vance’s team had water level of the river raised for family’s boating trip.”In the article by Guardian writers Stephanie Kirchgaessner and David Smith, the outlet’s writers suggested that the water-raising was done for recreational reasons, stating “one source with knowledge of the matter who communicated with the Guardian anonymously alleged that the outflow request for the Caesar Creek Lake was not just to support the vice-president’s Secret Service detail, but also to create ‘ideal kayaking conditions.’” They then added, “The Guardian could not independently confirm this specific claim.”

  They could have more honestly written: "This is too good to check."

• A libertarian win. Andy Kessler notes an excellent provision in that mixed bag of legislation. the One Big Beautiful Bill Act: it could Make Cars Beautiful Again. (WSJ gifted link)

  Tired of ugly cars and SUVs that all look the same? Check out crossovers like the Honda CR-V, the Ford Escape and the BMW XM—the last with a staggering $160,000 price tag. The three vehicles look almost identical—an unintended consequence, believe it or not, of 50-year-old Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards. But gasoline-mileage rules were effectively tossed in July’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which could usher in a new era of big, beautiful auto design.

  Most didn’t notice CAFE’s demise. It turns out that you can’t kill mileage standards in a reconciliation bill, so Congress quietly zeroed out its penalties via Section 40006, which “eliminates the civil penalty for a violation by a manufacturer of the Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards.” Clever.

  Fuel-economy standards were enacted in 1975 after the oil embargo. The auto industry immediately complained that future fuel-efficient trucks and buses would be underpowered and never make it up hills. So in June 1976, Congress provided exemptions by defining “a non-passenger automobile” via Title 49 of the Code of Federal Regulations.

  What exactly is a “non-passenger automobile”? The first test is if it can “transport more than 10 persons.” Yes, only our government can classify buses and vans as “non-passenger.” In addition to RVs, cargo vans and trucks, an exemption was also provided for vehicles “capable of off-highway operation”—a loophole big enough to drive through.

  I love my Impreza, but it's sometimes hard to pick it out in a parking lot filled with Civics, Corollas, Elantras, …

My lame headline joke explained here.

Also of note:

• What are they worried about? I can't help but notice that the most strident attacks on school choice programs seem to come from people employed in the government school system. (I've given particular attention to local educrat John Shea over the past year: here here, and here.)

  At the Josiah Bartlett Center, Drew Cline helpfully points out: Competition in education is an opportunity, not a crisis.

  There’s been a bit of a media freakout this week about the growing popularity of school choice programs nationwide.

  The Children’s Scholarship Fund-NH confirmed this week that the Education Freedom Account program hit its 2025-26 enrollment cap of 10,000 students in early August.

  “Record number of students matched with their preferred form of education,” headlines could have read. Instead, the tone of coverage was mostly one of alarm and concern.

  Then The New York Times published a fascinating story Aug. 5 on public school districts’ (predicted) response to the growing popularity of school choice.

  “Public schools try to sell themselves as more students use vouchers,” announced the headline.

  In any other industry dominated by a single provider, the introduction of competition would be treated with cheer. In education, it’s treated as a crisis.

  For another example of the "freakout" generated by the threat of competition, this NHJournal article from May is pretty good: NH House Dem: EFAs Are Plot to 'Recruit' Libertarian Families, 'Destroy' New Hampshire. Eek!

• I'm pretty relaxed about it too. Over on the Geekery blog, I waxed semi-ecstatically about how the AI Claude wrote a Google Chrome extension to replace a broken piece of my blog infrastructure.

  Just recently, I requested ChatGPT's advice on learning General Relativity. Its response was detailed and helpful, suggesting a six-month course of study with recommended textbooks. (As a side effect, I also learned that physics textbooks are super expensive!)

  So I'm primed to agree with philosopher Michael Huemer's recent paper, titled "I, for one, welcome our robot overlords".

  (Man, that Simpsons quote has really lasted, hasn't it?)

  Michael's opening paragraph:

  Will artificial intelligence spell the end of humanity? Some experts believe so. Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk advises us that “we should be very careful about artificial intelligence. If I had to guess at what our biggest existential threat is, it’s probably that.” Physicist Stephen Hawking warns, “The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race.” AI safety researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky writes, “the most likely result of building a superhumanly smart AI, under anything remotely like the current circumstances, is that literally everyone on Earth will die,” and “we have a shred of a chance that humanity survives.” Some worry that, even if AI does not kill everyone, it may nevertheless do something to permanently curtail human potential, such as enslaving all humans.

  Well, that's something to worry about.

• Moondoggle. I recently read Challenger, Andrew Higgenbotham's book about the disastrous NASA decision in early 1986 that destroyed a spaceship and killed seven astronauts. (Not to be confused with the disastrous decisions killing three astronauts in 1967, nor with the ones killing seven more astronauts in 2003.) It had me thinking Deep Thoughts about the rationale of US space policy.

  Well, actually a pretty shallow thought, specifically: Why are we doing this?

  The primary motive, shorn of sentiment, seems to be keeping taxpayer money flowing to NASA and its favored contractors. This requires at least some feeble justifications. A recent example of that in an April press release from Senator Ted Cruz, pushing for the Artemis/SLS boondoggle: The Next Space Race is Already Here.

  The Artemis missions and the entire Moon-to-Mars program, which have enjoyed consistent bipartisan support, serve as the stepping stone to landing American astronauts on Mars. In fact, this stepping stone approach is the law as enacted by Congress. We must stay the course. An extreme shift in priorities at this stage would almost certainly mean a Red Moon—ceding ground to China for generations to come. I am hard pressed to think of a more catastrophic mistake we could make in space than saying to Communist China, ‘The moon is yours. America will not lead.’

  I'm old enough to remember the last moon race, against the USSR.

  We won.

  And after we won, we… never went back.

  And NASA found different ways to spend taxpayer money.

• Just a note. Thomas Sowell seems to have a website: tsfreemind.com.

  The purpose of this website is to enable people who want to think for themselves to readily find many sources of information and analysis on many subjects— whether in the form of brief commentaries or hour-long interviews of knowledgeable people in electronic media. Written material is also available, ranging in size from essays to books written for either a general audience or for others seeking scholarly studies in great depth.

  It's worth checking out.

Another instance of what I've called the "DC Shuffle"

Step 1: Make stuff more expensive via taxes/tariffs.
Step 2: Offer 'rebates,' paid for with borrowed money that will need to be repaid in the future.
Step 3: Act like what you're doing is a sign of patriotic fervor, rather than economic illiteracy. https://t.co/fbUGEj8qcL pic.twitter.com/5uZyR2aIK3

— Nick Gillespie (@nickgillespie) August 8, 2025

None dare call it "trickle down economics."

In related news, George Will offers us Five ways to stop the onrushing debt disaster. All long shots, alas.. (WaPo gifted link)

However, I note from reading that lecture (link above) that Mankiw considers "large tax increases" to be the "most likely outcome."

Also of note:

• 

  Never enough. Way back in 2012 I reported on reading Never Enough by William Voegeli, Amazon link at your right. Voegeli concentrated on welfare-state programs, but his argument is easily (and unfortunately) generalizable, especially when I read this from Jonathan Turley: Massachusetts Teachers Demand New Wealth Tax.

  I have long opposed wealth taxes based on both constitutional and practical grounds. When Elizabeth Warren pushed her own wealth tax, I noted that the high starting income or wealth levels would likely be lowered with time if Congress were ever allowed to cross this constitutional Rubicon. The Massachusetts Teachers Association (MTA) is now demanding an amendment to the state constitution to tax the “wealth of the richest 1%” to pay for free public college. Previously, the state passed a constitutional amendment to place a 4 % tax on income above $1 million. This would add a new wealth tax to that earlier “Fair Share Amendment.”

  As I (tirelessly) say: when Progressives use the phrase "fair share", it always simply means "more". And, as Voegeli noted, there's usually an implicit "never enough".

• I mostly admire the headline. Robby Soave explains Why Trump Can't Make the Epstein Story Kill Itself.

  […] it's worth keeping in mind two things. First, Trump has actually been remarkably consistent on the Epstein issue. During the 2024 presidential campaign,  Trump maintained that releasing the files was not a particularly high priority and that he was worried about maligning innocent individuals whose names happened to be associated with the disgraced financier and sexual predator. It was Trump's prominent surrogates—Patel, Vance, Dan Bongino, and others—who made rigid commitments to release information on Epstein's alleged clients. And it was Bondi who claimed, after taking office as A.G., that she was in possession of a client list and would be releasing it. It's those people who are being hypocritical about this, not Trump.

  Moreover, Trump is not exactly wrong! As independent journalist Michael Tracey has exhaustively documented on his Substack, hyperbolic claims about Epstein's supposed clients are routinely exposed as false: Many of the alleged victims lacked credibility and recanted their accusations. People who are obsessed with the Epstein story don't like hearing this, but while Epstein was undoubtedly a sexual abuser and a creep—and Ghislaine Maxwell facilitated his predatory behavior—there simply isn't compelling evidence of a larger conspiracy involving many other powerful people whose names have been hidden from the public. By some measures, the Epstein story resembles other recent sex-based moral panics, like campus sexual assault and sex-trafficking, in which a kernel of a true idea (i.e., more could be done to stop sexual assault at elite colleges, or poor immigrant women are sometimes forced into compromising sexual situations), is embellished and overdramatized (i.e., campuses are literal hunting grounds, children are constantly being kidnapped and sex-trafficked at airports).

  I love a good yarn about the moral depravity of politicians, but I think it's unlikely that we will see any credible scandals out of this.

• Amtrak delenda est (a continuing series). Cameron W Ewine writes on Amtrak's Free Pass: Why "Value" Isn't an Excuse for Endless Subsidy.

  When it comes to federal subsidies, few programs enjoy the kind of persistent political immunity that protects Amtrak. As the new administration aims to implement spending cuts and create entire departments focused on government efficiency, such as the aptly named Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), it’s worth turning attention to long-standing drains on taxpayer dollars.

  Advocates for Amtrak insist that America's passenger rail service should be judged not by profitability, but by its purported "value." Jim Mathews of the Rail Passengers Association recently authored an article and an op-ed arguing that Amtrak should not be viewed as a transportation company but rather as a public utility. He contends that just as we don’t ask the Air Force or the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to turn a profit, we shouldn’t demand it from Amtrak either.

  But this argument rests on selective legal interpretations, fuzzy math, and a dangerous disregard for market discipline.

  "Other than that, though, it's fine."

• Dave's Review of Modern Thought. His recent essay on Mankeeping is a gem.

  Recently the New York Times published an article headlined:

  Men: Why Are They Such Idiots?

  Not really! Although that is the gist of the article. The actual headline is:

  Why Women Are Weary of the Emotional Labor of ‘Mankeeping’

  "Mankeeping" is a word invented by Angelica Puzio Ferrara, a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University, who co-authored a research paper titled "Theorizing Mankeeping: The Male Friendship Recession and Women’s Associated Labor as a Structural Component of Gender Inequality."

  Basically what this paper says, if I understand it correctly as both a man and an English major, is that heterosexual males these days don't have enough male friends (the "male friendship recession") and as a result they have to rely on women to tend to their emotional and relationship needs, and this "mankeeping" is A LOT OF WORK for women, and they are TIRED OF IT.

  Well, I've already quoted too much. And since you are an intelligent and curious reader, I'm sure you've already clicked over to Read The Whole Thing, and you didn't make it to this paragraph.

Recently on the book blog:

So this guy is running for the US Senate in my state:

That's an animated GIF, and the F-words preceding "FIGHTER" are "FATHER" and "FARMER". And apparently he's hitching his wagon to President Trump's star. At least until the primary next year, probably.

I suppose that could work, but I can't help but point out that Trump lost the state in 2016, 2020, and 2024. (It was close, though.)

Dan's campaign website is here. Interestingly, there's no mention that he's a professor (and onetime dean) at the University Near Here's business school. He's a FARMER! See the barn?

There's an "Issues" section on his site's page, but it's pretty anodyne. Looking for his ideas on how to handle the imminent Social Security shortfall? Good luck.

At least for now, Dan is running against Scott Brown for the GOP nomination. Scott's campaign website is here. He doesn't have an "Issues" section, not even an inoffensive one. But there's a video:

Another big Trump fan, there. Nothing about Social Security, though.

But is Scott a fighter, like Dan? You betcha:

This campaign is about fighting for working families, protecting American strength, and putting New Hampshire first. With this kind of support behind us, we are ready to win.

— Scott P. Brown (@SenScottBrown) August 6, 2025

So Dan and Scott will be fighting, and (probably) next November, one of them will be going up against my current CongressCritter, Chris Pappas. Whose campaign website is here, and (guess what) he's "Grounded in Granite – A Fighter for New Hampshire". Also no "Issues" section.

But so much fighting!

My opponents are fighting for Trump’s endorsement. I’m fighting for Granite Staters. pic.twitter.com/rVALUnZdVM

— Chris Pappas (@ChrisPappasNH) August 6, 2025

I guess it must work in the focus groups.

Also of note:

• I don't even know who Myrna is… Oh wait. That NR editorialists advise: Don’t Abandon mRNA.

  Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced this week that HHS is terminating about $500 million in investments in developing mRNA vaccines.

  The technology instructs the body to produce a protein that is part of a virus, triggering an immune response. Famously — or, notoriously, as far as RFK Jr. is concerned — mRNA was used to develop Covid vaccines on a rapid basis during the pandemic.

  The editors politely disagree with Junior's disinvestment. The Ars Technica folks are less polite in their headline summary: RFK Jr. defends $500M cut for mRNA vaccines with pseudoscience gobbledygook.

  Kennedy is generally opposed to vaccines, but he is particularly hostile to mRNA-based vaccines. Since the remarkably successful debut of mRNA COVID-19 vaccines during the COVID-19 pandemic—which were developed and mass-produced with unprecedented speed—Kennedy has continually disparaged and spread misinformation about them.

  In the video on Tuesday, Kennedy continued that trend, erroneously saying that, "as the pandemic showed us, mRNA vaccines don't perform well against viruses that infect the upper respiratory tract." In reality, COVID-19 vaccines are estimated to have saved more than 3 million lives in the US in just the first two years of the pandemic and additionally prevented more than 18 million hospitalizations in the US in that time. Nearly all COVID-19 vaccines used in the US are mRNA-based.

  The article goes on to use words like "nonsensical", "muddle", and "egregiously false".

• What part of "interstate commerce" is puzzling you? Damon Root describes How protectionist wine and liquor laws violate the Constitution.

  The U.S. Supreme Court has struck down protectionist state wine and liquor laws on the grounds that they illegally discriminated against out-of-state wineries and out-of-state alcohol retailers. Yet earlier this week, a federal appellate court upheld an Indiana law that forbids out-of-state retailers from shipping wine directly to Indiana consumers.

  What's going on?

  What indeed? Damon looks at the decision and finds it wanting.

• Who am I to disagree? Veronique de Rugy takes apart an apologist for US sugar policy: Sweet Deals, Bitter Costs.

  When sugar lobbyist Rob Johansson published a defense of U.S. sugar policy in the Wall Street Journal, he offered a masterclass in protectionist spin. He was responding to Cato Institute scholar Colin Grabow’s clear-eyed explanation of how government barriers inflate sugar prices for American consumers. Johansson invokes food security, labor standards, and patriotic platitudes to justify a policy that exists primarily to enrich a handful of politically connected producers while imposing higher costs on everyone else.

  Start with the claim that the U.S. sugar program ensures supply stability. What it actually ensures is artificially high prices, courtesy of government-imposed marketing allotments and tariff and import quotas. These policies deliberately restrict both domestic output and imports. This isn’t a market; it’s a cartel created and policed by the federal government.

  It's a mess. A sweet one, but still.

Recently on the book blog:

Believe it or don't, I saw that Michael Ramirez cartoon only a few minutes after I read this Ars Technica article: Coding error blamed after parts of Constitution disappear from US website.

And (sure enough) the "disappeared" bits included "part of" Article I, Section 8. Also "the section on habeas corpus".

But I'm sure that's just a coincidence.

Also of note:

• Vlad, when you've lost Trump… George Will notes that The epically blundering Putin is alienating even Trump. (WaPo gifted link)

  President Donald Trump has announced himself “disappointed.” He had such high hopes for Vladimir Putin.

  Putin’s response to Trump’s 50-day ultimatum — to agree to “a deal” by Sept. 3 or face severe economic consequences — was intensified attacks on Ukraine’s population centers. Trump’s subsequent 10-day ultimatum, expiring Friday, seems to have been equally unavailing. Putin aims to get not to negotiations but to Kyiv, because only extinguishing Ukraine’s nationhood can redeem his epochal blunder.

  Although Putin has been certified a “genius” (by Trump; Putin has not reciprocated), not since Adolf Hitler invaded the Soviet Union 84 summers ago has a military undertaking been as comprehensively counterproductive for its initiator as Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.

  As GFW notes, Trump's "deadline" expires tomorrow, and here's hoping it won't be another TACO Friday.

• A big dose of reality. Kevin D. Williamson is (as usual) out of patience with the folks trying to resuscitate a long-dead horse: Moving Beyond the Two-State Solution.

  About two years ago, I had a conversation with a gentleman who has served at the highest levels of the U.S. defense and intelligence apparatus. He spoke of the necessity of a continued U.S. commitment to the so-called two-state solution in Israel and the Palestinian territories—“so-called,” I write, because there are not two states, and because there are not going to be two states, and because it is not a solution. (Other than that … ) I asked him what seemed and seems to me to be the obvious question: How do we expect to have two states when the undeniable and repeatedly demonstrated fact of the matter is that Palestinian sovereignty and Israeli security are incompatible?

  “We can’t let that be the case,” he non-answered. “There is no alternative.”

  The two-state solution calls to mind many similar regional phantoms, the will-o’-the-wisps of Middle Eastern discourse, e.g., a nuclear deal that the Iranians will honor. Why have an Iranian nuclear deal? Because the alternative is not having an Iranian nuclear deal, which apparently is unthinkable. (Or was, until somebody thought of something better.) Why commit ourselves to a two-state solution for the Palestinians? Because we must, because TINA says so. You know TINA: “There Is No Alternative,” a declaration that seems to be invested with magical powers in the minds of people who cannot accept that some problems are practically irresolvable. 

  But there is an alternative, the one nobody likes but the one we are likely to have for a long time: the status quo.

  KDW's Dispatch article is a "counterpoint" to John Aziz's "point" article: Palestinian Statehood Is the Only Answer. I find (unsurprisingly) KDW to be more attached to reality, but (as I know I don't need to tell you) see what you think.

• "The answer may surprise you." Yes, that's the subhed on David R. Henderson's EconLog post: Who Got the Biggest Percentage Tax Cuts?

  In so much of the discussion of tax cuts, whether of the recent one or previous tax cuts, we hear that the highest-income people got the biggest tax cuts. Of course, they did. They pay a disproportionately high percent of overall federal taxes. So it shouldn’t be surprising that they get the biggest tax cuts in absolute terms.

  But that doesn’t mean that the highest-income people got the highest percentage tax cut. Reporters have generally not done a good job of making that point.

  For the answer, David turns to a recent WSJ article, which reveals (ta da!): ​Here Are the Winners From Trump’s Tax Law (WSJ gifted link)

  And in those percentage terms:

  The average change in federal taxes paid in 2026, due to the new tax law will be:

  -15.1% for the lowest quintile

  -14.9% for the second quintile

  -12.6% for the middle quintile

  -11.1% for the fourth quintile

  -9.2% for the 80-90 percentile

  -9.5% for the 90-95 percentile

  -11.2% for the 95-99 percentile

  -7.1% for the top 1%.

  Which causes me to embed this silly (but catchy) (and also relevant) SNL snippet:

NHJournal's Damien Fisher shows that some Nashua (NH) pols seem to lack LFOD understanding: Free Speech Advocates Push Back on Nashua Display Ban. I've swiped the photo illustration from his article, at your right. The caption is…

"Apparently". Misspelling aside, I think Damien could have safely omitted that word.

But Derek T (Thibeault) is not the sole asshat among the aldermen:

Damien quotes from a letter sent to Nashua's Personnel and Administrative Affairs Committee from the New England First Amendment Coalition, which you can read here; it also includes the text of the proposed, clearly unconstitutional, ordinance.

Laurie Ortolano, by the way, is an occasional contributor to Granite Grok, and her author page is here.

Also of note:

• Of course, balls don't "drop" in space. But Alexander William Salter uses that metaphor anyway: Trump’s first-term space policy was great, but the White House is dropping the ball.

  The first Trump administration was the best for space policy in decades. From the creation of the Space Force to pathbreaking international agreements such as the Artemis Accords to stronger protections for outer space property rights, America reasserted itself as the world’s premier space power. None of this would have been possible without a team of space policy experts and political leaders in key roles.

  But this time is different. Many important space policy and leadership positions remain vacant. Qualified personnel have been nominated, but the Senate has yet to act. Nor has President Trump chosen to force the issue.

  Reading between the lines, apparently at least some of the ball-dropping is fallout from the Trump-Musk split. Sad!

  One obvious problem is the continuing existence of Artemis/SLS.

• "Hey, BLS! Working hard, or hardly working?" Dominic Pino has an explainer about job-counting: Why Counting Jobs Is Really, Really Hard.

  On its face, it sounds like the Bureau of Labor Statistics has an easy task: Just count the jobs. A lot of people have jobs, some people don’t, they’re all out there, just count them up.

  Of course, it can’t literally go and count every person each month, so it uses statistical methods to survey employees and employers. But people have been doing surveys forever. Just send them out and run it through a computer and write the report. Easy.

  No. Not at all. Not even close.

  Click over for the gory details. But I found this detail telling:

  The original estimate for the number of jobs in the month of June was 159,724,000. Then, after the revision with better data, it was 159,466,000. That’s a 0.161 percent correction, based on higher-quality information that didn’t exist at the time of the original estimate.

  Don't worry, once Trump gets his new BLS commissioner, the numbers will be perfectly accurate, and will come festooned with rainbows, unicorns, and Hello Kitty stickers.

• Or not. Assuming the Trumpification of future BLS press releases, what to use instead? Jeff Maurer sketches out Five Economic Metrics to Track Now That BLS Data is Compromised. Let's go with… yeah, this one:

  3. Time spent behind unbelievably old ladies searching for exact change in small, floral change purses

  In a normal week, a typical American spends 4-6 hours in line behind feeble nonagenarians rummaging through tiny, flower-covered change purses as they attempt to pay for miniscule transactions with exact change. Economists sometimes count the number of people lined up behind these antediluvian crones and multiply that by the number of times in an hour that they hear someone mutter “Come the fuck on, Betty White” to compile a number they call “the granny grocery store metric”.

  When times are tough, Americans can spend 10, 12, even 15 hours a week as dust-covered biddies who look like they probably remember the Hapsburg Empire search for the precise amount of money to buy a book of matches, or a single Tic-Tac. This happens because senior citizens worry that they might not be able to make ends meet if they don’t bring an entire fucking Albertsons to a stand-still while they rummage for a ha’penny that Grover Cleveland tossed from a carriage in 1885. When the economy is hot, these four-foot-tall Wives Of Yoda might produce paper money, or even a bank card that they have no clue how to use. But there’s a well-proven inverse relationship between the time that World War I surplus grannies spend literally blocking commerce and overall economic health.

  God bless the old folks, but yeah: when you see the van from the local assisted living facility pulled up outside the supermarket, you might want to hit the self-checkout scanners.