Bit of a milestone today.

It’s actually a bit more than that, since ACX doesn’t track the couple of books I’ve done for a flat fee rather than a royalty share (including the splendid book by our Ricochet friend Mark J. Boone, Faith, Reason, and Beyond Reason). But it’s nice when the meter clicks over. As it says, my first (awful) Audible book was released in 2013. I can’t recommend it, because it was a self-published vanity title, but it did help me get attention from real publishers. I am now wrapping up my 91st title and have a contract waiting for #92. I need to feel like I’m doing something worthwhile, so what started out as a side hustle is now saving my life post-retirement.

The real battle has begun.  In Does 1-26 v. Musk, Case 8:25-cv-00462-TDC in the District Court of Maryland (text here), a judge has ruled that Elon Musk has no authority to order cuts and that Trump has no authority to close an agency (USAID) created by Congress.  The first point is largely legit and easily fixed—Musk’s status does need to be formalized in some way as an official exercise in Article II executive authority, or else all such orders have to come from POTUS and not DOGE.

The second one is a real issue that will inevitably get to SCOTUS.

There is a character in the Torah named Potiphar (G. 37:36). He purchases Joseph, who ends up running Potiphar’s household before Potiphar’s wife makes her #MeToo claim and gets Joseph imprisoned.

Joseph ends up marrying Potiphar’s daughter. But the text does something strange whenever it mentions her name. Instead of being “Osnot, the daughter of Potiphar” she is consistently (in all three cases – G. 41:45, 41:50, 46:20) referred to as “Osnot, the daughter of Poti Phera, priest of On.” Why create a space in the name “Potiphar?” And why refer to her father’s profession?

Niall Ferguson, preeminent historian and Milbank Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, joins this episode of Uncommon Knowledge with Peter Robinson to discuss the war and ongoing stalemate in Ukraine; the Trump administration’s foreign policy and negotiations with Russia; and the broader geopolitical landscape, including the shift in Europe’s defense posture as the US signals a reduced commitment to NATO.

A half-century ago, moviegoers flocked to see Inspector Harry Callahan (Dirty Harry) and Paul Kersey (Death Wish) fight wrongdoing in a world where sclerotic legal processes were worse than useless. The system had become unduly solicitous to the rights of villains who had nothing but contempt for the rights of others and for the system itself.

Like some smug, obviously guilty killer going free on some evidentiary or procedural issue in the first 30 minutes of a Death Wish or Dirty Harry movie, the current crop of plaintiffs defending waste, fraud, abuse, grift, gangsterism and/or terrorism supporters are strolling out of well-selected federal courthouses with an injunction or order in hand and a big smile on their faces.

Good news for an unnamed pangolin accused of starting the Covid-19 pandemic. It turns out that the CIA, MI6 and Germany’s BND have all revealed that they believe the source of the pandemic was the Wuhan Immunology Laboratory.   Not only that, but they have high confidence and made their conclusions way back in the spring of 2020.

Five years is a long time to wait when you only live 20 years. FYI, a pangolin can eat about 600 pounds of insects with its 16-inch long tongue in five years. The pangolin looks like an armadillo, but it is not related. Pangolin are under threat because their meat is considered a delicacy and its scales (which are like fingernails) are thought to have medicinal properties. But the most threatening feature for this creature is that they can carry coronaviruses, and that made them the perfect scapegoat for whoever was funding gain-of-function research at the biosecurity level 2 lab in Wuhan. It was none other than the recently pardoned Dr. Fauci who put the blame on the innocent pangolin.

As I’ve posted about in the past, I was interested in astronomy in my early years and even was involved in a Boys’ Club in Oregon for building your own telescope.  We worked on making our own mirrors; first grinding and polishing the glass, then sending them out for “silvering.”  Mine was the only one that didn’t come back from that, so I didn’t finish it.  I think the Men in Black took it because it was so good — I would have seen their Lunar Max prison facility on the Moon where they were holding Boris the Animal.

In more recent years, I’ve been accumulating a variety of telescope brands, types, and sizes, mostly from thrift stores, etc.  For these prices, I’ve been able to gather a pretty large variety and enjoy their different advantages versus what I could have afforded to buy at retail.