AH, FOR THE DAYS when the socialists believed in material progress! That is no longer the case. Now they propose poverty and advocate government regulations to bring it about—and expect us to be grateful for it. Whereas socialism could not actually work to bring about greater productivity, it can do what the “postmaterialist” socialists desire. Socialistic means can work to bring about lower standards of living.

AMERICAN POLITICAL RHETORIC SEEMS to operate on a regular cycle, like a clock, which is why it seems lately like we are reliving the Clinton years.

RECENTLY, I’VE SEEN TWO sets of neighborhoods with ripped-up lawns. The neighborhood in West Texas had destroyed grass caused by the remarkable proliferation of these monstrous black pigs. No one knows for sure where they came from. Some say they walked from Mexico. Some say they are indigenous but just recently out of control. No one doubts that they are a serious problem.

BERNIE MADOFF WILL SPEND the rest of his life in jail. Bernie Madoff stole billions from the customers of his phony investment funds, running a racket rather than a financial service. People who aren’t even his victims are furious, and nearly everyone enjoyed a 10-minute sense of vengeance when the judge threw him behind bars for 150 years.

Let me weigh in with a contrary view: Free Bernie Madoff, I say.

THE 2010 DISNEY ANIMATED feature Tangled tells the story of Rapunzel in a version much better than the original. The original had only one gimmick—the hair of the girl in the tower that the evil pretend mother and also the lover climb up to see her—but was otherwise not very interesting by comparison to the rerelease.

YESTERDAY, INADVERTENTLY SQUANDERED $4,000 plus worth of medical resources during a lunch break. That I could do this, gain no benefit, and not even see the bills, is what’s right and wrong with American medical care.

LUDWIG VON MISES SUMMED UP the essence of government in words that are particularly vivid in wartime:

THANK GOODNESS WE’VE GOT a global marketplace where banned and nearly banned products can be purchased with a click. This is how I obtained a box of Savogran Trisodium Phosphate, which sounds like an explosive but is really just a cleanser that was in every dish-washing soap until last year. It is made of phosphorous, an element from bone ash or urine that was discovered in Germany in the 17th century. It is also the reason that dishwashers once cleaned dishes perfectly, leaving no residue or spots.

I’M OLD ENOUGH TO have a vague memory of clothes so white that they were called bright. This happened despite the absence of additives—the ridiculous varieties of sprays and bottles and packets that festoon our cabinets today and that we throw into the wash to try to boost the cleaning power of our pathetic machines and increasingly useless laundry soap.

ALESSER KNOWN EPISODE OF “The Jetsons” speaks directly to our current plight: the relentless but eternally floundering attempt to militarize a bourgeois society that is more interested in consumption and leisure than serving a mythical national ethos.