Jul
5
2026

Cleanup on Aisle Four

I hope you had an enjoyable Fourth of July. I did! And I have some leftovers.

First up is a replay of the Bragg/Heaton Partisan Press Conference.

Lest we forget:

  • Neal Stephenson is not too cool to love America. He has thoughts on The Sting in the National Anthem’s Tail.

    Oh say does that star-spangled banner yet wave
    O’er the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave?

    Our national anthem is unusual in that it ends with a question, which can be read in at least three ways.

    The way in which Francis Scott Key obviously meant it was: “America is the land of the free and the home of the brave; is the flag still waving over it, or did it get destroyed (or did the defenders of Fort McHenry surrender, and haul it down) ?”

    Nowadays, of course, that thing is flying all over the place. So the question is no longer “is it still waving?” The question is “is the place it’s waving over yet the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave?”

    Click over to find the other reading of Key's query. You know, I wouldn't have expected Neal Stephenson to have thoughts and concerns about America and its anthem, but I'm glad he does.

  • Whoa, Nellie! Ms. Bowles' TGIF column for the week is the usual wonderful hodgepodge o' stuff. Excerpt concerning the Zohran's "rent freeze":

    He will freeze the rent, as promised. But will he freeze costs for landlords? Will he freeze the cost of a plumber who comes to service the unit? The cost of a roofer coming to patch? Materials for necessary construction? Noooo, silly. And thus will begin a cycle of disrepair and hostility. It’s irrational. Which, you need to understand, is entirely the point. Mamdani’s people are smart—they know the math doesn’t math, nor does it need to. The goal is to get to a position where government housing is better than private housing. So you must first destroy private housing. Only when your apartment roof has collapsed, the pipes have burst, and your broke landlord’s best financial decision is burning the building down, then. . . a-ha! A-ha! The government will arrive. Look at these Soviet-style blocs we have for you, they will say. How nice is that, they will say, ours comes with a concrete stairwell! Capitalism was terrible, wasn’t it? And you’ll be like, I guess it was. You’ll eat your little climate cube of grasshopper asses (the abdominal segment goes to party leaders) and sit in a sweltering 90-degree dorm room. And you’ll be happy. No matter what suckage the commies incur, the blame will never be on them.

    Much, much more at the link.

  • Only because they had no way to record negative customers. Nicholas Anthony has an obituary at Cato: Postal Banking Has Died With Zero Customers in Years.

    The United States Postal Service has finally laid the postal banking pilot program to rest. However, it’s unlikely anyone noticed. The program didn’t have a single customer from April 2022 to September 2025.

    [Table elided]

    The close of the program is welcome news, but it should never have gotten off the ground to begin with. Postal banking ended in 1966 for a simple reason: it wasn’t popular. There was no reason to think that had changed in 2021 when this program kicked off, and the data confirm this.

    This will come as sad news to nobody except Elizabeth Warren. From back when she ran for president:

    Sure, Liz. The problem was that USPS had no "people committed to the cause."

    And also, of course, Senator Bernie:

    To put it mildly, Sanders, Warren, et al. totally misjudged the 21st-century demand for postal banking. If only other socialist nostrums were so easy to ignore!

  • At least for now, it's pretty good on ideology-free topics. At the Dispatch Jonathan Gibson wonders: What’s Going on With Wikipedia?

    In 2024, the World Jewish Congress (WJC) published a report claiming Wikipedia entries show a consistent anti-Israel bias, pointing to examples such as the “Zionism” page, which reflects a one-sided narrative in its opening two lines alone:

    Zionism is an ethnocultural nationalist movement that emerged in late 19th-century Europe to establish and support a Jewish homeland through colonization in the region of Palestine which roughly corresponds to the Land of Israel in Judaism—itself central to Jewish history. Zionists wanted to create a Jewish state in Palestine with as much land, as many Jews, and as few Palestinian Arabs as possible.

    The same year, an investigation by the Times of London suggested that entries have been systematically edited to downplay Iranian atrocities, with editors reportedly facing bans for minor challenges to the anti-Israel narrative. More recently, both [ex-Wikipedian Larry] Sanger and [Jimmy] Wales have spoken out against the site’s “Gaza genocide” page, arguing that the page presents the information as factual and conclusive, rather than debatable.

    I'd trust Wikipedia to tell me the surface temperature on Venus. Surface temperature in Gaza? Nah, probably not.

  • And just for the LFOD record. When he's right, he's right. From President Trump's July 4 speech on the National Mall:

    From the beginning, we were a nation that lived by the motto, “Victory or death,” and “Live free or die.” One out of every 100 Americans gave their lives in the fight for independence. To remind us of who these heroes were and what they gave us, we are honored to have here tonight, in the heart of our nation’s capital, one of the very first American flags ever to exist.

    Is it a bid to improve his image in New Hampshire, a state he lost by 0.37% in 2016, 7.35% in 2020, and 2.78% in 2024? Unlikely, since he can't run again. Right? I mean, right?


Last Modified 2026-07-05 12:35 PM EDT