Jul
6
2026

Our Starting Pitcher, and Probable All-Time MVP

[George as All-Star]

Christian Britschgi continues Reason's look at America's All-Stars: George Washington Was a Model of Restraint.

In the final days of the American Revolution, Continental Army soldiers gathered in Newburgh, New York, to demand that Congress fund their back pay and promised pensions. Anonymous letters circulating among the troops suggested that they might refuse to disband, and might even overthrow Congress, if their benefits weren't forthcoming.

Some of the generals and politicians egging the soldiers on hoped that George Washington would take up his men's cause and in doing so replace a weak Congress with a powerful new federal government. Instead, Washington ended the mutiny with a few words and some brilliant political showmanship.

In the middle of an address to the restive soldiers in which he urged them to respect Congress, the aged general conspicuously reached into his pocket for his glasses.

"Gentlemen, you will permit me to put on my spectacles, for I have not only grown gray but almost blind in the service of my country," he said to the assembled soldiers. There wasn't a dry eye left in the house after that.

We ain't likely to see a guy like him again.

Also of note:

  • I repeat: “Oh GOD no.” James Lileks asks and answers: A DSA America? Not Okay. (NR gifted link)

    When I got off the T in Boston last Sunday, I saw a table near the exit with some fliers and signs. A cheerful young lady handed me a piece of paper, and as I took it, she asked, “Considering voting socialist this November?” The flier had a red rose, the symbol of the Democratic Socialists of America, and I handed it back as if it was a piece of blotter paper soaked with Ebola and said “Oh GOD no.”

    “That’s okay!” she chirped as I walked away. Glad to know. Of course, it won’t be okay if the DSA takes over everything, because then every area of life will be a miserable struggle session to ensure uniform purity. People will be trashing grocery stores and destroying all the eggs because the Chicken-American Community has not expressed the right opinion on Gaza. That will be Monday; Tuesday, they will burn cars to protest inflation-adjusted rent hikes. Wednesday, they will want to throw eggs at a rally of fascists — you know, the people protesting a mandate to install a drag queen in every elementary school to lead everyone in a fierce rendition of The Internationale every morning — except of course the eggs were all destroyed in the prior protest. Thursday, they will occupy the offices of all the grocery store chains to protest Egg Insecurity.

    I have a long-standing aversion to collectivists and socialists and other flavors of Marxism, because A) it’s dreary, boring nonsense cranked out by a hairy fool who probably had the B.O. of a donkey in August; B) it views humans as vast murmuring mobs, devoid of individuality; and C) I’m supposed to follow some 19th century white guy instead of a 20th century black intellectual like Thomas Sowell? Fine, racist.

    At the heart is the hammer and sickle, which terrified me as a child. It was a good symbol of the enemy: They either want to cut your throat or hit you on the head. It’s like a political movement whose symbols are a straight-edge razor and a claw hammer.

    James and I were in Beantown at roughly the same time, but I did not see him.

  • Hayek called it the "Fatal Conceit". And, as Andy Kessler points out, it's a Conceit on both ends: Different Parties, Same Folly. (WSJ gifted link)

    Comedian Adam Carolla has a routine about how the very wealthy and very poor do the same things. Some printable examples: never eat at an Outback steakhouse, take outdoor showers, have lunch with Bono, drive a make of car that no longer exists.

    Annoyingly, it’s the same for politicians. They all end up doing the same things—the horseshoe theory has become reality. The left and right, progressives and MAGA, bend around and almost touch. To me, it’s more like a teething ring, going round and round in a politician’s mouth with government power constantly biting down and inflicting pain on all of us. Or an M.C. Escher drawing with everything confusingly connected. I don’t like it one bit.

    Who said this? “Today I’m announcing new tariffs in key sectors of the economy that are going to ensure that our workers are not held back by unfair trade practices. They include a . . . 25% tariff on Chinese steel and aluminum products . . . a 100% tariff on electric vehicles made in China . . . a 25% tariff on electric vehicle batteries from China and a 25% tariff on the critical minerals that make those batteries.”

    Donald Trump? Nope, Joe Biden in May 2024. Eleven months later, “Tariff Man” Trump declared, “Effective at midnight, we will impose a 25% tariff on all foreign-made automobiles.” Clang goes the horseshoe.

    Horseshoes? You've seen them, right? Never far away from horses' asses.

  • I'm a sucker for AI/George Orwell mashups. Richard Dooling points out the modern parallel to Orwell's most famous essay: AI and the English Language. (WSJ gifted link)

    George Orwell closed his 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language” with six rules for writers, the first of which commands: “Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.” It is the rule against clichés—don’t beat dead horses, cry over spilled milk or freeze like a deer in the headlights.

    “The fight against bad English,” Orwell wrote, “is not frivolous and is not the exclusive concern of professional writers.” Authors and academics are often the worst abusers of ready-made phrases and buzzwords. They put their readers to sleep by deploying trite phrases in the passive voice. Good, honest writing isn’t only hard work; it can get you canceled for being direct about a controversial topic.

    Enter artificial intelligence, which can flag clichés by analyzing the frequency at which figures of speech occur in data sets. But replacing clichés with something vivid and original is a harder task. In Orwell’s parlance, large-language models show us what they are used to seeing in print. These models are like giant looms. They select complementary textual threads from vast data warehouses and weave them together to create tapestries of prose.

    Orwell called this approach “modern writing” and complained that it “does not consist in picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images in order to make the meaning clearer. It consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug.”

    Data point: when I asked the Google for replacements for "Every cloud has a silver lining," one of the (many) suggestions was "At least the worst-case scenario makes for a great story."

    Pun Salad's new motto?