ENOUGH ALREADY, BRING ME A REAL MENU: Against Restaurant QR Codes.

DON’T BLAME TWITTER FOR CANCEL CULTURE: Our Problems Aren’t Procedural. Attributing responsibility for political discord to social media ignores the events driving dissatisfaction with contemporary American society. Woke ideology existed long before the Internet. It reigns now in institutions because of a generational shift as the baby boomers retire.

HOW THE WOKE CAME TO POWER: Seizing the Means of Knowledge Production. A shrewd chronicle and analysis of the Left’s long march through institutions. It didn’t start in academia, and it’s been going on for more than a century.

NICHOLAS WADE: The Myth of the Wronged Heroine. No, Rosalind Franklin wasn’t robbed of the credit for discovering the structure of DNA. Her contributions were recognized at the time. Building on the work of others, she took a good photo of it but misinterpreted its structure, and she was too arrogant and snobbish to consult with colleagues who could have helped her figure it out.

THE FDA’S DEADLY PROHIBITIONISTS: Warning: This Agency is Hazardous to Your Health. The dramatic decline in smoking among teenagers and adults during the vaping era has been a great public-health success story, but it threatens the activists, academics and bureaucrats who have built careers in the anti-smoking movement. To keep their jobs — and their cut of the $800 million in tobacco user fees that the FDA collects — they need a new enemy, so they’ve declared war on nicotine, which in itself is safe and provides genuine benefits to tens of millions of Americans.

The nicotine prohibitionists want to ban Juul vaping sticks, the most effective technology ever developed for inducing smokers to quit, and mandate lower levels of nicotine in cigarettes. This pointless and hopeless war is a boon for activists and bureaucrats — the FDA’s Center for Tobacco Products has more than doubled its staff — but a disaster for public health.

EVERYTHING IS PROCEEDING AS HAYEK FORETOLD: How the West Accidentally Became Free and Rich — And Why It Might Not Stay That Way.  Joseph Henrich accepts the Manhattan Institute’s $50,000 Hayek Book Prize for 2022 and gives a brief lecture summarizing the book that won the prize, The WEIRDest People in the World.

The lecture, like the book, is a brilliant synthesis of historical analysis and behavioral-science experiments around the world showing how Europeans and Americans became psychologically peculiar and particularly prosperous — what Henrich calls WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic). His research, showing the influence of institutions like the Catholic Church and medieval market towns, guilds and universities, illuminates the economist F.A. Hayek’s long-neglected theory for the rise of the West, which Hayek attributed not to the Enlightenment but rather to a long and unplanned process of cultural evolution.  (Full disclosure: I was the chair of the Hayek Prize jury that selected the book.)

Donald Boudreaux: The PBS Show “This Old House” Testifies to the Marvels of the Market Economy.

OKAY, GROOMERS: A Blight on the Presidency and the Nation. The Biden administration’s executive order encouraging “affirming care” and gender transition is final confirmation that support for procedures deforming and sterilizing children goes to the top of the American power structure.

TITANIA MCGRATH: Laughter is a fascist hate crime.  Titania’s creator, the British comic Andrew Doyle, is in fine form with her latest woke insanity: a proposal for stand-up comedy routines to be pre-approved by a “Humor Protection Squad.” As she writes, “I have always maintained that if you find yourself laughing at stand-up comedy, it probably isn’t sufficiently progressive.”

She explains why Dave Chappelle had it coming: “The fact that Chappelle — a black man — was assaulted on stage is irrefutable proof that his comedy incites violence against minority groups.” 

BUT THERE IS AN EPIDEMIC OF FEAR. There Is No Epidemic of School Shootings. The media and the White House’s fearmonger-in-chief are spouting deceptive numbers to scare people into believing that mass school shootings are commonplace in America. They’re not. The odds of a child dying in a mass school shooting are about the same as the odds of being struck by lightning or dying in an earthquake. Such numbers, of course, are no consolation to the grieving families in Texas, but neither is the frenzy to manipulate these tragedies for ratings and political gain.

RECYCLING IS STILL GARBAGE:  Taking Out the Trash: What We Get Wrong About Recycling. If you haven’t been able to deprogram the recycling religionists in your household, you might show them this video from Kite and Key Media, which uses gentle humor to present the facts. Another of their videos exposes the follies of the war on plastic, which I’ve argued is the modern equivalent of the sumptuary laws formerly used by nobles to keep the peasants and bourgeoisie in their place.

UNEXPECTEDLY: Terror in the Tunnels. Violent crime is surging on New York subways because the justice system switched its focus from enlightened prevention to post-mayhem mop-up.

THE ROOT CAUSE OF CRIME IS CRIMINALS: Poverty and Violent Crime Don’t Go Hand in Hand.

SO MUCH EASIER TO SPEND: Other People’s Money. In his excellent essay on James Buchanan’s lessons on government profligacy, Donald Boudreaux shreds the standard rationale from Keynesian economists for running up the budget deficit — that it’s nothing to worry about because we’re just borrowing the money from ourselves.

The Keynesian argument regarding debt that “we owe to ourselves” is that the losses to the citizen-taxpayers who must pay the bondholders are offset by the gains received by the bondholding citizens. Voila! Debt creates no net burden on future generations! But this argument, whatever its other flaws, ignores the fact that debt financing nevertheless allows some people (namely, today’s citizen-taxpayers) to spend money belonging to other people (namely, tomorrow’s citizen-taxpayers). And thus debt financing encourages excessive government spending.

But no matter. Widespread acceptance of this Keynesian argument conveyed the false impression that debt financing imposes no burden on future generations. Thus today’s citizen-taxpayers are relieved of qualms they once suffered about government spending borrowed funds. The resulting explosion of government’s net indebtedness, both in Canada and in the US, was no surprise to Buchanan, but it was a source of great worry. That worry now seems justified.

Read the whole thing: the Fraser Institute’s Do Budget Deficits Matter? 

THE FDA STRIKES AGAIN: A Formula for Shortages. The FDA has made critical mistakes in regulating the manufacturing of infant formula that it should ameliorate as quickly as possible.

GLENN GREENWALD: The Demented – and Selective – Game of Instantly Blaming Political Opponents for Mass Shootings.

CHRISTOPHER RUFO: “Banging Beyond Binaries.” The School District of Philadelphia encouraged teachers to attend a conference on “kink,” “BDSM,” “trans sex,” and “masturbation sleeves.”

YOUR TAX DOLLARS AT WORK: Elon Musk’s Twitter Detractors Were Subsidized with $10.5 million in Federal Funds.

BROWNSTONE INSTITUTE: Can We Now See that Economics Does Not Diverge from Public Health? They wrecked social and market functioning and cannot fathom why we have a demoralized population, a mental health crisis, falling financials, soaring inflation, and shortages of goods and services that are essential to life.

BBC HARDEST HIT: Weather in the UK has become, if anything, less extreme.

I’M FROM THE GOVERNMENT AND I’M HERE TO FEED YOU: America’s Families Still Revile USDA-Funded School Lunches. The central planning of America’s school lunch menus has been a disaster.

BUT IT MAKES MIKE BLOOMBERG FEEL VIRTUOUS: Anti-Vaping Hysteria Is Deadly.

NOT AN OPTION IN NEW YORK: Execute the Buffalo Shooter.  The highest punishment sends a message to those deranged few who will admire his actions.

THE LONG MARCH CONTINUES: Lawyers for Radical Change. The legal profession, once a guardian of republican government, is now a force for social upheaval.

MONEY TALKS: Woke Capitalism Meets Reality.