Pun Salad

As promised/threatened yesterday in my David Mamet f-bomb anecdote, I dropped a few bucks on Amazon Prime to watch this 2001 movie, which he wrote and directed. A star-studded cast! In addition to the names on the poster to your right, there's also Sam Rockwell, Ricky Jay, Patti LuPone, and Mrs. Mamet, Rebecca Pidgeon. Nearly all on the wrong side of the law, and demonstrating that there is, with few exceptions, no honor among thieves.

It starts with a daring and successful jewelry heist, but kingpin Danny DeVito uses it as leverage to coerce master crook Gene Hackman into going after a bigger score. It is the fabled "one last job": a plane carrying a whole bunch of Swiss gold. (That's kind of a spoiler, sorry; we learn about the job solely from the characters talking obliquely about it. And not until it actually occurs do we realize: Oh, that's what they were talking about.

Mamet's dialog is also gold, of course. Are real-world bad guys clever enough to talk like this? I suppose if anyone would know, it would be Mamet.

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:

This is an impressively researched, detailed look at the 1986 destruction of the Space Shuttle Challenger, which took the lives of its crew: Dick Scobee, Michael Smith, Judy Resnik, Ron McNair, Ellison Onizuka, Greg Jarvis, and New Hampshire's Christa McAuliffe. The author, Adam Higginbotham, examines the lives of the people involved, nut just the astronauts, but relevant NASA personnel, contractors, and (eventually) accident investigators. The (very mistaken) decision to launch Challenger after freezing weather degraded the effectiveness of the O-rings that were supposed to seal the solid rocket booster joints is meticulously described, and how the judgment of the Morton Thiokol engineers was overruled by NASA bureaucrats.

It is a horrifying story all by itself. It is bookended on one end by the story of the Apollo 1 launchpad fire in 1967, which killed Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee. And on the other end, a very brief retelling of the 2003 loss of the shuttle Columbia on re-entry, which killed astronauts Laurel Clark, Ilan Ramon, Michael P. Anderson, Rick Husband, William McCool, Kalpana Chawla, and David Brown.

It is an obvious, trivial fact that manned space travel is risky. But Higginbotham persuasively shows that all these deaths were avoidable. These 17 astronauts were, essentially, victims of the pressures of politics and bureaucracy. A major driver of the shuttle program was the need to "do something" post-Apollo: keep the budgetary money flowing to NASA and contractor facilities and personnel across the country. It's also hard to avoid the obvious PR gimmickry of the "Teacher in Space" effort. (And, although there's no evidence that it killed anyone, NASA's efforts of ensuring a "diverse" crew were pretty blatant.)

I was wondering how (or if) Higgenbotham was going to deal with a particularly nasty rumor: that the White House pressured NASA to launch on January 28, 1986 in order for Reagan to mention it in his State of the Union address scheduled for that evening. He does, briefly, noting that the most prominent advocate of this theory, Senator Ernest Hollings, pushed it with no evidence, and drew an angry rebuttal from William Rogers, head of the investigatory commission. (Higginbotham does occasionally express his contempt for the Reagan Administration, notably for the "star wars" effort. Easy to ignore.)

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:

For some reason, I got hooked on this series, the continuing adventures of Molly Gray, a maid at a posh Manhattan hotel. She's neurodivergent, which has caused her problems in the past, but that seems to have been toned down a bit for this entry. She's worked her way to the top of her department, she's assembled a team of loyal colleagues and friends, and she's about to marry the hotel's gifted pastry chef, Juan. (They're "living in sin", a little surprising, but OK.)

And the hotel is about to host an episode of the "Hidden Treasures" TV series, where a couple of charismatic gay appraisers evaluate objects brought before them. On a lark, Molly contributes some knickknacks she and her late, beloved, grandmother Flora accumulated, including a prominent object from the previous novel. And the revelation of its true provenance shocks everyone, especially Molly. Even more shocking: (book flap spoiler a-coming) a daring and mysterious heist is perpetrated during its auction!

Molly's narrative is interspersed with chapters from Flora's discovered diary, in which her riches-to-rags story is detailed. (The author, Nita Prose, is pretty skilled at giving Flora her own "voice", very flowery, and distinct from Molly's.) It's pretty lurid, with an eventual murder.

Not my usual cup of tea, not even when served up in my favorite china cup. But, as I said, I'm hooked.

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.

James Freeman finds a pony in the BLS stats: Trump’s Best Jobs Number. (WSJ gifted link)

Of course, there's still a long way to go.

Also of note:

• I suppose actual seppuku would be too much. Jonathan Turley notes the lights going out next month at 401 9th Street, NW, Washington DC: After Years of Refusing Reforms, the CPB Accepts Death Over Political Dishonor. Skipping to the bottom line:

  Conversely, CPB is laying off its entire staff in a righteous, indignant huff. None of these people needed to lose their jobs if their leadership served their organization by listening to views beyond their own insular circle of enablers. The demise of the CPB now stands as the most impressive and unnecessary act of self-termination since the appearance of Judean People’s Front Crack Suicide Squad:

  "That showed 'em, huh?"

• It's not just something you do to a flat tire. Kevin D. Williamson asks: Remember Inflation? And brings his usual brutal honesty to bear:

  Trump has inflated many things over the years—his assets on bank statements, his romantic résumé, his book sales—and inflation is the sort of thing that must come naturally to such a gasbag. Prices are already creeping up, with firms such as Adidas, Procter & Gamble, and Stanley Black & Decker announcing tariff-driven price increases. Groceries aren’t getting any cheaper, and neither is housing, the main driver of the late-summer uptick. But prices are getting higher across the marketplace, as the Bureau of Labor Statistics runs the numbers, finding higher prices for “household furnishings and operations, medical care, recreation, apparel, and personal care.” The few bright spots include used cars and airfares, which may indicate that people are simply putting off car purchases and skipping summer vacations under economic pressure.

  Tariffs are a tax—let me emphasize here that Republicans’ key achievement in the Trump years has been the unconstitutional enactment of a national sales tax by the unilateral directive of president, without congressional authorization—and, as a tax, a big tariff should be anti-inflationary: The more money you pay in taxes, the less money you have to spend on cars and vacations and such.

  But tariffs are an especially dumb and destructive kind of tax in that they do not produce a great deal of revenue in proportion to the economic distortion they introduce. Given that the tariffs are being implemented in parallel with what Republicans insist is “the largest tax cut in American history”—the cut-by-not-raising measure in their poorly conceived and idiotically named tax-and-spending bill—whatever counter-inflationary effect the tariffs might have had is likely to be overwhelmed by the inflationary effects of large cuts to other taxes, even if the extension of the 2017 cuts was far from unexpected. And here it is probably worth pointing out that Republicans are cutting taxes while running a deficit that is projected to be the third largest in American history.

  I suppose it's time to liquidate my investments and buy … gold?

Recently on the book blog:

I ordered this book from Amazon back in December. It came auto-delivered to my Kindle on the release date last month, and I noticed that at some point a subtitle had bee added: The Final Arkady Renko Novel.

And a few days later, via the WSJ's book review, I learned that the author, Martin Cruz Smith, had died on July 11.

Well, darn. I still have the $3.95 paperback of Gorky Park I bought and read back in 1982. And I've been a diligent follower of Smith's diligent Russian investigator, Arkady Renko, since then.

As the book opens, Arkady needs to get his adopted computer-whiz son, Zhenya, out of the clutches of the Russian FSB. He was nabbed for protesting Russia's invasion of Ukraine, calling it a "war" instead of the approved term, "special military operation."

I thought this observation was pointful enough to share at Goodreads:

Once more, Arkady thought, you needed only one book to really understand Russia. Not Tolstoy or Pushkin, not Dostoyevsky or Lermontov, but one his mother used to read to him as a child: Through the Looking-Glass, otherwise known as Alice in Wonderland, by Lewis Carroll.

Well… those are two separate books, I think. But otherwise, spot on. Of course, you'd need to add a lot more violence, thuggery, and terror to the Alice books to really get it right.

Soon enough, Arkady is given a murder case: a lower-level defense minister has been brutally murdered at the Hotel Ukraine. Arkady's investigative skills (and a little bit of happenstance luck) draw him to the father/son team of Lev and Ivan Volkov, who run the paramilitary "1812 Group". (Think a barely fictionalized version of the Wagner Group, and its (late) leader Yevgeny Prigozhin, and son Pavel.) Arkady and his longtime lady friend, journalist Tatiana Petrovna, take a dangerous trip to Ukraine, discovering atrocities committed by 1812. (And those are barely fictionalized too.)

Soon enough, both Arkady and Tatiana find themselves in extreme peril from Volkov, the 1812 Group, and their allies in the FSB. Leading to a very cinematic showdown in the sewers and subway tunnels of Moscow.

I will miss Arkady Renko and Martin Cruz Smith a lot. I might do a re-reading project.

Commercial air travel is pretty safe. But Eric Boehm reminds us it could be safer: The Federal Aviation Administration should not run air traffic control.

If you prefer words, Jeff Jacoby has plenty: Canada fixed its air traffic control decades ago. Why can't America?

As I said, commercial air travel is pretty safe. But so was the Space Shuttle. Out of 135 launches, it managed to not kill its entire crew 133 times.

Also of note:

• The Presidency is just his side hustle. Matt Welch nails the Grifter-in-Chief: Trump is openly using the presidency to enrich the Trump brand.

  The president of the United States on Tuesday held a ribbon-cutting ceremony in Balmedie, Scotland, to mark the opening of the new Trump International Golf Links, owned by his family (at least until he exits the White House), and designed by his son Eric.

  In his cheery promotional remarks, Donald Trump thanked the media ("today they're not fake news, they're wonderful news"), gave a shout-out to his daughter-in-law ("Lara, I want to thank you, the head of the Republican Party"), and praised various dignitaries on hand.

  "I want to thank, by the way, the prime minister, who was here last night, and who was really very gracious; loves the place," he said, referencing the United Kingdom's Keir Starmer, who also joined Trump at another of his Scottish golf properties before hopping on Air Force One with the Trump clan for a sneak peek at Balmedie. "This will," the commander in chief predicted, "be a tremendously successful place."

  Yeah, I know: he's not Kamala. But that is beginning to wear a little thin.

• Spoiler: Betteridge's Law of Headlines applies. Allysia Finley in the WSJ: Trump Claims the Jobs Report Was Rigged. Was It? (WSJ gifted link) She goes for the cliché, unfortunately:

  Well, that was productive—not. President Trump on Friday fired Bureau of Labor Statistics Commissioner Erika McEntarfer after the July jobs report showed that hiring stalled this spring amid his tariff blitz and deportation crackdown. Shooting the messenger won’t help him or the economy.

  The BLS estimates a mere 73,000 jobs were added last month, almost all in healthcare and social assistance. It also revised down gains for May and June by a combined 258,000, to a total of 33,000 new jobs, one of the biggest downward revisions in years.

  Mr. Trump sniffs a deep-state conspiracy. “Today’s Jobs Numbers were RIGGED in order to make the Republicans, and ME, look bad,” the president huffed on Truth Social. Where’s the evidence? There is none.

  No evidence? Hey, Trump has all the evidence he needs:

  

  Yup, "Biden Appointee". Case closed!

  That's from Nate Silver whose headline may be too optimistic: Trump's jobs data denialism won't fool anyone. He gets into the statistical weeds, demonstrating there's nothing to see here "RIGGED"-wise.

  I’m not sure exactly where firing the BLS commissioner ranks on the list of Trump-related outrages. Even if Congress does its job and McEntarfer is replaced with another competent successor, this could have a chilling effect on BLS and other government agencies to operate independently.

  It’s also not surprising given Trump’s previous incursions on the independence of the Federal Reserve and other government agencies. This is the guy who sued a pollster for publishing results he didn’t like.

  Unlike in some other instances, though, I don’t see how there’s any real political gain for Trump in yet again undermining longstanding norms and institutions.

  NPR reminds us of the good old days: 'I Could ... Shoot Somebody, And I Wouldn't Lose Any Voters'

Our Eye Candy du Jour is from Sabine Hossenfelder, presenting The 10 Biggest Physics Paradoxes and Problems.

She's an actual physicist, so you can take her befuddlement to the bank.

[Headline reference? I'm pretty sure it's here.]

Also of note:

• Lesson unlearned? The WSJ editorialists warn us of the Return of the Housing Monsters. (WSJ gifted link)

  America in the 21st century sometimes seems destined to repeat all of the mistakes of the 20th. The latest is President Trump’s desire to release Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac from government captivity—along with a government guarantee. Didn’t we learn this was a bad idea the first time?

  The President teased on social media recently that “I am working on TAKING THESE AMAZING COMPANIES PUBLIC,” referring to Fannie and Freddie. “I want to be clear, the U.S. Government will keep its implicit GUARANTEES, and I will stay strong in my position on overseeing them as President.” Their share prices surged.

  Investors are elated that Mr. Trump plans to re-privatize these firms—especially because he has now made their government backstop explicit. The President may think the feds can keep the housing monsters on a regulatory leash, but the political and financial incentives mean they will invariably revert to their reckless ways.

  Back in 2008, I quoted Iowahawk's take:

  It's useful to think of our current economic situation as a spirited game of nude Twister, with Fannie Mae as an extremely fat drunk chick.

  Reader, in the intervening 17 years, neither Fannie nor Freddie have gotten any younger, thinner, wiser, or less fond of cheap tequila.

• "Shooting the messenger" is probably overused. So I won't say that, and neither does Megan McArdle. She simply points out: Firing the statistician won’t change the job numbers. (WaPo gifted link)

  Here’s a life hack for readers who are trying to lose weight and are discouraged by the numbers on the scale: Take a hammer to the thing. If that seems too destructive, donate it to the Salvation Army and, if you must keep a scale in the house, buy a new model that tops out at 150 pounds.

  The secret behind this hack is psychology. It’s hard to eat less than your body wants, which is why people who try to lose weight often fail and feel miserable. But if no working scale is available, you can’t fail: Eat as much as you like; the numbers will never climb.

  Sound crazy? It is. But the president has just used a version of this trick to deal with a sagging American jobs market.

  Specifically: Trump fired Erika McEntarfer, the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

  Maybe the next BLS commissioner will be Chico Marx: "Well, who you gonna believe? Me or your own eyes?" .

• 

  Mister, we could use a man like… Matthew Continetti remembers How P.J. O’Rourke Skewered the Swamp. Specifically, in his classic Parliament of Whores. (Amazon link at your right.)

  We need more of O’Rourke’s philosophy, too. In his final decade the “Republican Party Reptile” found himself, like a lot of people, politically homeless. Donald Trump, MAGA populism, and economic nationalism didn’t appeal to him. Bernie Sanders, socialism, and wokeism didn’t either.

  O’Rourke remained an advocate for freedom:

  Conservatism is, at least in its American form, a philosophy that relies upon personal responsibility and promotes private liberty. It is an ideology of individuals. Everyone with any sense and experience in life would rather take his fellows one by one than in a crowd. Crowds are noisy, unreasonable, and impatient. They can trample you easier than a single person can. And a crowd will never buy you lunch.

  This emphasis on dignity, freedom, and responsibility may seem archaic to the critics of so-called “Zombie Reaganism.” But it is fundamental to humane conservative politics. An American conservatism that has no place for freedom neither inspires nor connects to the wellsprings of the American political tradition: constitutional rule of law and a limited government that makes room for family, church, civil society, and individual choice.

  Matthew didn't mention Peej's probably most famous quote:

  Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.

  Ain't it the truth?

If you prefer words, Don Boudreaux supplies them in a tsk-tsk LTE to the WSJ: Trump's Tariffs Are Paid Overwhelmingly By Americans.

If you need it, here's a gifted link to the editorial with the language Don proposes fixing.

Also of note:

• Oh, Happy Day. There's plenty of gloating among the libertarian/conservative sites, but let's not wallow, Ars Technica has the sads: RIP Corporation for Public Broadcasting: 1967–2026.

  Despite the protests of millions of Americans, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) announced it will be winding down its operations after the White House deemed NPR and PBS a "grift" and pushed for a Senate vote that eliminated its entire budget.

  The vote rescinded $1.1 billion that Congress had allocated to CPB to fund public broadcasting for fiscal years 2026 and 2027. In a press release, CPB explained that the cuts "excluded funding for CPB for the first time in more than five decades." CPB president and CEO Patricia Harrison said the corporation had no choice but to prepare to shut down.

  "Despite the extraordinary efforts of millions of Americans who called, wrote, and petitioned Congress to preserve federal funding for CPB, we now face the difficult reality of closing our operations," Harrison said.

  Concerned Americans also rushed to donate to NPR and PBS stations to confront the funding cuts, The New York Times reported. But those donations, estimated at around $20 million, ultimately amounted to too little, too late to cover the funding that CPB lost.

  Translation of that last paragraph into reality: "Concerned Americans" turned out to be not Concerned enough.

• Not to worry, Uncle Stupid still knows how to waste money. Rand Simberg describes Why And How To End SLS Now.

  "SLS" is NASA's "Space Launch System". Rand shares three links:

  • His slick 56-page report for the Reason Foundation: Why commercial space should lead the U.S. return to the moon;
  • Robert Zimmerman's take: The word that best describes our present NASA lunar program is “delusional.”
  • A summary of Rand's report at the "New Space Economy" site.

  Zimmerman has the most withering commentary. Quoting from that:

  Increasingly it appears everyone in Congress, the White House, and NASA, as well as our bankrupt mainstream press, has become utterly divorced from reality in talking about NASA’s Artemis lunar program. The claims are always absurd and never deal with the hard facts on the ground. Instead, it is always “Americans are piorneers! We are great at building things! We are going to beat China to the Moon!”

  An interview of interim NASA administration (and Transportation secretary) Sean Duffy yesterday on the Sean Hannity Show made all these delusions very clear. First Hannity introduced Duffy by stating with bald-faced ignorance that “NASA has a brand-new program. It is called Artemis that aims to get astronauts back on the Moon in the next couple of years.”

  I emphasize “brand-new” because anyone who has done even two seconds of research on the web will know that Artemis has existed now for more than a decade. Hannity illustrates his incompetence right off the bat.

  I've been a space fan for a long time. I watched the Sputnik I upper stage fly over the Oakland, Iowa football field back in 1957. Didn't like the commies even back then, but… pretty cool!

  But it would be nice if US space exploration could be less "delusional".

• I resemble this remark. Jay Nordlinger may be picking up my psychic emanations: A President in Every Pot, &c.

  President Donald Trump is a busy beaver. There are many things a president must do, as a matter of course. But this one also wants the Cleveland Guardians to become the “Cleveland Indians” again. And the Washington Commanders to become the “Washington Redskins” again. And Coca-Cola to use cane sugar instead of whatever it is the company uses. Etc. Trump is very active on these fronts.

  I share his opinion, in some of these cases. (Not sure about “Redskins.”) But, you know? A president ought not to involve himself in every nook and cranny of American life. He is not a national boss or nanny. There should be a private sphere, an apolitical sphere, a non-governmental sphere.

  Conservatives taught me this long ago. They were right, I believe (as about virtually everything.) I cannot unlearn what I learned, and accepted, years ago. That is a big reason I’m out of step with the regnant Right today.

  Yeah, me too.

• Mixed metaphor in Aisle 2. At Reason, Tosin Akintola notes that our fair state is failing to live up to our LFOD motto: New Hampshire’s new booze law will hamstring the state's brewpubs.

  The rationale behind New Hampshire's new brewpub regulation is more headache-inducing than the beer.

  On Friday, New Hampshire Gov. Kelly Ayotte (R) signed House Bill 242 into law. The bill, sponsored by state Rep. John Hunt (R–Rindge), will take effect in August and limits brewpubs in the state to self-distributing their beer to only one additional restaurant or business outside their premises. The bill is a follow-up to H.B. 1380, also sponsored by Hunt in 2024, which limited the amount of beer or cider a brewpub could sell to 2,500 barrels a year and permitted licensed brewpub owners to obtain licenses to sell their product on their premises in bars and at off-premise locations like grocery stores, so long as they didn't have a manufacturing license.

  If the law sounds like it will keep brewpubs small, that's because it's intended to do so. "This is what we call a very inside baseball bill," Hunt told the New Hampshire Bulletin.

  "Inside baseball" means (I think it's fair to say) that insiders wanted to make sure they wouldn't have to deal with upstart competition.

Introduction/Rationale

Some readers may have noticed me griping about my blogging "infrastructure" a few weeks ago. To repeat and summarize: One of the bits of code I relied on was a Google Chrome extension called chromix-too. It did something I found incredibly useful: allowed access to Chrome's "tabs" API from the Linux command line. It was also quite powerful, but I only used it for four relatively simple things:

1. Tell me how many tabs I have open;
2. Tell me the URL of the active tab, and the title of its rendered page;
3. Open a new inactive tab to a specified URL;
4. Open a new active tab to a specified URL.

Granted, the last one is easy without an extension. The others don't seem to be, "as far as I can tell."

Alas, chromix-too used some features that Google deprecated years ago. It had a V2 manifest, and maybe violated other guidelines. And Google promised/warned that it would just stop working eventually.

And, as noted, "eventually" turned out to be "a few weeks ago". An upgraded Google Chrome refused to load chromix-too.

The author of chromix-too seemed uninterested in updating his code. I didn't press him about it.

I toyed with bringing it into compliance myself. Unfortunately, it was in Javascript, and even though it was but a few thousand bytes, I found it totally impenetrable. My efforts were feeble and futile.

But I had heard that AI tools, specifically Claude, could write code for you. A little Googling showed the "right way" to do what I wanted was via Chrome's Native Messaging facility. Which led to my Claude prompt:

I want a Chrome extension using Native Messaging to access the chrome.tabs API from the Linux shell.

And it worked. Kind of. Source is at GitHub.

Caveat

When I say "kind of", I'm not kidding. If you play with this yourself, be aware there's a bug that I haven't fixed. Described, with my workaround, at the end. I'll edit this if I ever fix it. Geeky readers, please let me know if you spot the problem.

The Overall Idea

Command Line ⇔ HTTP Server (7444) ⇔ Native Host ⇔ Chrome Extension ⇔ Chrome APIs

Claude provided the code to go in the middle three boxes.

Code Details

• Command Line: you use an HTTP client (I use curl) to talk to the HTTP server which is listening on localhost port 7444. (That's the port chromix-too used to listen on.)

• HTTP Server: A small (8779 bytes as I type) Python script that interprets the HTTP commands received from the command line and translates them into appropriate API code.

  Its filename is chrome_api_bridge.py, and I installed it in /usr/local/bin

• Native Host: A JSON file that serves as a bit of glue between the HTTP server and the actual extension. It's very small (243 bytes), named com.chrome.api.bridge.json, and in LinuxLand it goes in the directory $HOME/.config/google-chrome/NativeMessagingHosts/.

  Note for those trying this at home: you have to fill in the ID of the chrome extension in this file. Which you won't know until you install the extension, which is…

• Chrome Extension: A group of four files in their own directory:

  • manifest.json The extension's JSON manifest (duh);
  • background.js … and the extension's JavaScript code
  • popup.html and popup,js … I don't use these, but Claude provided them.

Installation Details

I think you should do things in this order. Sometime next month I will be installing Fedore 43 from scratch, and if I get anything wrong here, I'll amend.

Assuming you have Linux running and (specifically) Chrome installed normally…

1. Install the extension. Point your browser at chrome://extensions; turn the "Developer mode" toggle on; click the "Load unpacked" button; in the resulting dialog, highlight the directory containing those four extension files, and click "Select".

   Copy the 32-character ID you should now see in your new extension's box.

2. "Register" the Native Host. Edit the file com.chrome.api.bridge.json, pasting that 32-character ID string into the obvious place under the allowed_origins key. Put this file into the directory $HOME/.config/google-chrome/NativeMessagingHosts/.

3. Install the HTTP server script. As stated above, I used /usr/local/bin/chrome_api_bridge.py. You can probably install it anywhere you want, but you'll have to change the path in the glue file installed in the previous step.

4. Try it. Return to the chrome://extensions tab and turn the extension on. And (assuming nothing obviously bad happened) proceed to…

Examples

How do I count Chrome's open tabs? I give the command:

curl -s http://localhost:7444/chrome/tabs/query

This gives JSON output, which I parse, The "result" key has an array value, and the number of items in the array is the number of open tabs. A complete Perl script:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;
use English qw( -no_match_vars );
use JSON;
use version; our $VERSION = qv('v2025.07.31');

my $curl_cmd = q{curl -s http://localhost:7444/chrome/tabs/query};
open my $CTQ, q{-|}, $curl_cmd or die "Failed to run curl command: $ERRNO\n";
my $ctq_json = <$CTQ>;
my $status   = close $CTQ;
my $decoded  = decode_json($ctq_json);
printf "Chrome open tabs: %d\n", scalar @{ $decoded->{'result'} };

Similarly, the command

curl -s http://localhost:7444/chrome/tabs/getCurrent

… just gives a one-element "result" and the current tab's URL and title are easily parsed out.

Opening a tab uses a POST:

curl -s -X POST http://localhost:7444/chrome/tabs/create -H "Content-Type: application/json" -d '{"url": "https://reason.com/latest", "active": true}'

That brings up the specified URL as an active window. Bringing it up as an inactive window… is left as an exercise for the reader.

That Darn Bug

Things should "just work" after starting Chrome. They do not. My extension throws an error:

Unchecked runtime.lastError: Native host has exited.

The workaround, which I arrived at after a few hours of trying everything else, is (I am not kidding):

From the chrome://extensions page:

1. Turn the extension off.
2. Turn it back on.

And then things seem to work fine.

This is puzzling.

When I Google that error message, all the "fixes" seem to assume a persistent error, that things aren't working at all. Nothing about problems fixed by "turn it off, then back on." So I'm stumped for now. Again, let me know if you happen to spot the problem.

I haven't tried asking Claude.

(Headline adapted from a classic movie.)

Over a couple weeks of blogging hiatus, I totally missed commenting on the irony of people who claim to be concerned about American "inequality", showering hatred on "the 1%", also getting steamed about CBS's decision to cancel Stephen Colbert's The Late Show.

Um. Colbert's net worth is reported to be around $75 million, with a yearly salary of $15 million.

According to Forbes, Colbert's net worth puts him solidly in the 1%. Ditto for his yearly salary, according to Investopedia.

So you might think the egalitarians would be cheering at this minor decrease in the Gini coefficient! But no.

And now, American outrage has apparently moved on from Colbert to Sydney Sweeney. Who's apparently gonna be starring in a remake of Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS or something.

But never mind that. What I'd really like to lead off with today is something that's been bugging me for years, and I may have alluded to it now and again, but not as eloquently as Jeff Jacoby did recently: The problem with 'Are you proud to be an American?'. After looking at (among other things) Gallup's polling on that very question:

What Jeff doesn't mention is the small problem alluded to by our Amazon Product du Jour, up there on your right: As someone who has been Catholic-adjacent for decades, I can tell you: pride is a sin. And not one of the minor ones: it's a deadly sin, right up there with Lust, Gluttony, Greed, Sloth, Wrath, and Envy!

So if Gallup, or anyone, asks if you're proud to be an American, please feel free to explain this to them.

Also of note:

• Something I won't be doing. The latest print issue of Reason has an article by Bekah Congdon, who discusses her recent travels: Losing My Religion and Finding My Humanity on a Peruvian Ayahuasca Retreat. And it includes the following experience, after a couple doses of the "viscous substance" which is "dark brown and opaque and tastes like a tragic combination of Vegemite and prune juice, with an earthy aftertaste that lingers."

  Another 30 minutes later, our main facilitator, Rosie, checked on me. I reported feeling miserable but unable to vomit. Rosie said something I couldn't hear through the fog of my own discomfort. When I looked at her indignantly, she simply said, "Bekah: Focus."

  With this instruction, I picked up my bucket, placed it in front of me, and got on all fours. Staring into the bucket, I commanded myself: "Puke." Whether it was my instruction that did it or just the effect of jostling myself around, I did begin to vomit, immediately and a lot. It was intense, but it passed quickly enough. The nausea gave way not simply to the expected after-puking relief but to such a feeling of comfort and peace that I lay back down and reveled for a while in gratitude that I no longer felt ill.

  There's something I won't be putting on my bucket list: barfing into a bucket in Peru.

• 

  Not even Ketanji Brown Jackson thought it meant that. In a recent article in print-National Review, Bryan A. Garner shares some anecdotes about his friend and co-author Antonin Scalia: ‘Nobody Ever Thought It Meant That’. (NR gifted link)

  In my kitchen in January 2013, I suggested to [Scalia] that attacking something called the living Constitution was a mistake: “Find another name for it,” I said.

  “But everyone calls it the living Constitution.”

  “You’re losing the debate in the minds of the American people. They don’t want the opposite of a living Constitution.”

  “Are you saying I’ve made a mistake over the past 30 years by using the other side’s terminology?”

  “I think so. If you instead asked the American people whether they’d rather have a stable Constitution or a highly volatile one that morphs without amending it, what would they say?”

  “Stable, no doubt,” he said. “I can’t believe I’ve never thought of this before.”

  That evening, Scalia and I made a presentation to a large audience at Southern Methodist University. Midway through our talk, he said: “I used to say that the Constitution is not a living document. It’s dead, dead, dead. But I’ve gotten better. I no longer say that. The truth is that the Constitution is not one that morphs. It’s an enduring Constitution, not a changing Constitution.” I was keenly aware of his words, and I made a note of them the next morning.

  I encourage you to click through to find out how the Dallas Morning News misreported that speech.

  I was tempted to check out the book Scalia and Garner wrote from the Portsmouth (NH) Public Library, but alas, it was more of a reference work for lawyers. But… Amazon link at your right!

• I'd say: "Mom". Mom decides. But that's me. Ryne Weiss has an article that investigates how people can be led into free-speech enlightenment: ‘Who decides?’: The question that shatters the illusion of censorship as safety. And it leads off with this quote from Christopher Hitchens, who made it at University of Toronto’s Hart House Debating Club.

  Did you hear any speaker in opposition to this motion, eloquent as one of them was, to whom you would delegate the task of deciding for you what you could read? Do you know anyone? Hands up. Do you know anyone to whom you would give this job? Does anyone have a nominee? You mean there’s no one in Canada good enough to decide what I can read or hear? I had no idea.

  But in the US? Nina Jankowicz maybe?

• You could die of a misprint, or… Dave Barry brings the sad news of his demise: Death by AI.

  I found out about my death the way everybody finds out everything: from Google.

  What happened was, I Googled my name ("Dave Barry") and what popped up was something called “Google AI Overview.” This is a summary of the search results created by Artificial Intelligence, the revolutionary world-changing computer tool that has made it possible for college students to cheat more efficiently than ever before.

  Dave's battle with Google's AI is hilarious.

  I sympathize, sort of. I share a name with a semi-famous actor. He is, at last report, still alive and well, and so am I.