Jun
13
2026

Apt, Because It Comes Out Red or Blue

Glenn Reynolds on his substack avers: Elon Musk is a Genius, and a Litmus Test. Among the tweets Glenn surveys:

Glenn:

"There shouldn’t be trillionaires” is junior-high-level stuff. We should have people producing trillions of dollars in value for society. The argument that Elon should be spending his money on “feeding the hungry” is stupid in a country where the federal government spends multi-trillions a year on just that, with dubious results. It also betrays either a notion, or a lie, based on Musk having a Scrooge McDuck style Money Bin with a trillion dollars in it. In fact, of course, he owns assets that are busy producing useful things, not cash just lying around somewhere going to waste. Most of the people pretending otherwise know better, but hope their listeners don’t. The rest are just imponderably stupid.

And, as many people pointed out: The SpaceX IPO made millionaires out of about 4400 employees. Compared to the millionaires created by Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders: One. Each. Themselves.

Also of note:

  • His putative product is progressive-populist rage, and that's boring. David Harsanyi is unimpressed by the man behind the massive character flaws: Even Without His Controversies, Graham Platner Is Just a Lightweight Extremist.

    Set aside, for a moment, that Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner spent years with a Nazi SS Totenkopf tattoo. Set aside that he blamed sexual assault victims for their predicament, that he called rural white Americans stupid racists, that he advocated political violence, that he mocked a wounded Purple Heart recipient, that he joked about the Virgin Mary being a "skank" and that he joined a hookup site while married.

    Who among us is a saint, after all?

    The more interesting question is why Democrats have shown such loyalty to him.

    After hearing so much about Platner's everyman appeal, I went down a rabbit hole, watching his speeches and listening to his interviews. Virtually every one of them is crammed with brain-numbing platitudes and freshman-level socialist sloganeering. His rhetoric makes former Vice President Kamala Harris sound weighty by comparison.

    152,859 Maine Democrat primary voters can't be wrong… Oh, wait, they can definitely be wrong.

    Oh wait…

  • It's (yet another) plague on both houses day. Kevin D. Williamson has A Question for Republicans. (archive.today link)

    The largest factory fuel tank on a Ford Super Duty truck holds 48 gallons. In my neighborhood, the average price of a gallon of diesel over the past month has been $5.60.

    Do the math.

    You see a lot of Trump bumper stickers on those big diesel trucks. And when the total at the pump hits $270 to fill up that truck, I want to ask the gentleman paying the bill:

    “Do you feel smart?”

    I can look at my Nikki Haley campaign memorabilia (one pictured at your right) and maybe feel a little smarter than 176,392 of my fellow GOP primary voters. But not especially happy about that.

  • What's on the menu tomorrow? You, probably. Veronique de Rugy writes bleakly at Civitas Outlook: Eating the Rich, Ending Civilization.

    There’s something that should unsettle anyone who thinks carefully about a free society, and it has nothing to do with tax rates or revenue projections. It’s the cheerful ease with which large numbers of otherwise decent people have concluded that what belongs to someone else really belongs to others and is, in principle, available for redistribution. The only serious question is how much to take.

    I am not primarily troubled by bad tax policy, though there’s plenty of that on offer. I am troubled instead by something deeper: a growing popular instinct that treats the accumulated wealth of others as a kind of commons, a shared resource somehow misallocated to private parties who did nothing to earn it, resulting in a faulty income distribution that needs to be corrected. Watch the polling. Listen to the applause lines. The enthusiasm is real, not reluctant. People are not grimly accepting a necessary evil. They are genuinely excited about the prospect of taking the fruits of what someone else built – what someone else has earned.

    This lust for other people’s money should disturb us.

    Well, it does disturb some of us. And I keep coming back to the sentence I copied out of Hayek's The Constitution of Liberty (1960):

    That a majority, merely because it is a majority, should be entitled to apply to a minority a rule which does not apply to itself is an infringement of a principle much more fundamental than democracy itself, a principle on which the justification of democracy rests.

  • Do you Google, bunkie? Yes? I do too! Robert F. Graboyes has accumulated a trove of useful tricks and techniques for the Googler: 50+ Ways to Stop Using Google Like Truck-Stop Gamblers Use Slot Machines.

    Most of us do Google searches like some truck-stop gambler yanking the arm of a slot machine —find a loose search term in your pocket, drop it in the machine, pull the handle, watch the wheels spin, and hope for three cherries and a cascade of silver dollars. More often, the result is a cherry-lemon-bell list of hits that barely fit your needs (if at all) and which are heavily laden with sponsored content—websites that pay Google to steer your searches in their direction, even if they’re not what you want. With a modest number of tricks—offered in the paragraphs below—your searches can become less one-armed bandit and more world-class poker.

    I was inspired to write this after reading Card Catalog Substacker Hana Lee Goldin (MLIS)’s itemized list of tools in her 4,000-word essay: "Google Has a Secret Reference Desk. Here's How to Use It."

    Some of the tools/tricks/tips I knew, many I did not. For what it's worth, he did not mention one I use a lot: unit conversion.

    For example, do you want to know what 70 miles per hour in billionths of the speed of light is?

    A speed of 70 miles per hour is equal to approximately 104.38 billionths of the speed of light.

    One of my really crackpot ideas is to convert speed limit signs (and of course vehicle speedometers) to "nanocees", shorthand for "billionths of the speed of light." So (rounding a bit): take down that "Speed Limit: 70 mph" sign, and put up "Speed Limit: 104 nc".

    Metric system proponents are always jabbering about how easy the metric system makes calculations; this would make relativistic time-dilation calculations much easier!