Monthly Archives: June 2016
June 27, 2016 — Steven Hayward
On Friday morning I happened to have breakfast in the Bay Area with a center-left writer of some prominence who was once a conservative, who, surveying the wreckage of the Brexit vote alongside the decay of liberalism under Hillary and Bernie, sighed that “I’ll probably end up a conservative again.” Since it was a private conversation I won’t say who this person was, but suffice it to say he’s attacked
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June 27, 2016 — John Hinderaker
We have written several times about efforts by Democratic Attorneys General and others to make it a criminal offense to point out deficiencies and errors in the Left’s catastrophic anthropogenic global warming theory. Criminalizing one side of a political debate is, as far as I know, unprecedented in American history. Yet the Democratic Party’s Platform Committee has now made this assault on the First Amendment official party policy: Democratic operatives
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June 27, 2016 — Steven Hayward
• Those madcap travel agents at The Nation have another excursion for you if you’re not interested in seeing the Soviet Union Russia with their unique perspective. This time The Nation wants to take you to Cuba, where “We will spend our days meeting with prominent Cuban professors, government officials, physicians, community activists, farmers, urban planners, business owners, journalists, and artists. Our evenings will be filled with exclusive concerts by
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June 27, 2016 — Scott Johnson
If you’re trying to understand the madness that has overtaken university campuses, Yale presents an important case study. My daughter Eliana takes a look at Yale’s ordeal in the current NR article “This is not a debate.” It’s a reported piece that seems to me to give readers the information necessary to understand the case for themselves. For me the article has a personal component. Eliana takes the story back
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June 26, 2016 — Paul Mirengoff
Eugene Volokh reports on an alarming statement issued by Wendy J. Olson in her capacity as U.S. Attorney for the District of Idaho. Olson stated that “the spread of false information or inflammatory or threatening statements about the perpetrators” of a particular crime or the crime itself “may violate federal law.” Her full statement is here. I’ll discuss the particular crime Olson referred to in a moment. You may have
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June 26, 2016 — John Hinderaker
Yesterday afternoon, Muslim terrorists associated with al-Shabaab attacked a hotel in Mogadishu, Somalia, killing at least 35: The assault, the latest in a series by the Islamist group targeting hotels and restaurants, began when a suicide bomber detonated a car laden with explosives outside the building. Gunmen then stormed Mogadishu’s Naasa Hablood hotel and gunfire rang out for several hours, witnesses said, before the authorities declared the attack over. The
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June 26, 2016 — John Hinderaker
Narratives of human history conventionally say that agriculture “arose” around 13,000 years ago. But why? At Watts Up With That, Susan Corwin suggests a plausible explanation: Because it would work as CO2 became plentiful! All the academic articles say: “and then agriculture happened”. The “accepted wisdom”/consensus is: …here was no single factor, or combination of factors, that led people to take up farming in different parts of the world. But
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June 26, 2016 — Steven Hayward
Well, one more thing, but surely not the last. Anyway, if you think there are parallels between sentiment in Britain and in the U.S., and recall how Margaret Thatcher’s victory in 1979 was a harbinger of Reagan’s victory the following year, consider this: If Boris Johnson is the next prime minister of Britain, and Trump is the next president of the United States, they’ll have something in common beyond ideology.
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June 26, 2016 — Steven Hayward
Ordinarily you wouldn’t expect much accuracy or sense in an article about guns and gun control from the New York Review of Books, but there it is, in David Cole’s review of three new gun books in the current edition. In particular, this: Congress has not passed a gun control law since it sought to ban assault weapons in 1994, and that law proved largely ineffectual. It is remarkably difficult
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June 26, 2016 — Steven Hayward
We’ve already had plenty of coverage here about the elite left’s unhinged whingeing about the Brexit vote, and I predict the Brexit vote will become for Europolitans what the sainted Citizens United decision is for lefties here in the U.S—a source of perpetual rage and blame for everything that bothers them about human existence in the 21st century. I had thought that the scare campaign would succeed, and indeed between
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June 26, 2016 — Scott Johnson
In the course of campaigning in New Hampshire in January 1992 George Bush told an Exeter townhall meeting: “Message: I care.” We all heard about it endlessly at the time. As I recall, the media took it as an illustration of Bush’s supposed cluelessness. Jonah Goldberg classed this episode among his “biggest peeves with Republicans: They read their stage directions, they explain their motives. And it drives me crazy.” He
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June 26, 2016 — Scott Johnson
It’s hard to keep up with the news regarding Hillary’s Clinton’s private email server for her official business as Secretary of State. The facts are on their face are outrageous and disgraceful. The nature of the facts is reflected in the thoroughgoing falsity of everything Clinton has had to say on the subject with great conviction. Speaking of conviction…well, I can dream. The Russian hacking of the DNC obviously bears
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June 26, 2016 — Scott Johnson
I think Al Hirt and Ann-Margaret pioneered the beauty-and-the-beast pairing in popular music. They called their 1964 album Beauty and the Beard. Susanna Hoffs and Matthew Sweet have produced several discs together in a similar sort of pairing. Alison Krauss and Robert Plant followed in their footsteps to great success. Now come Shawn Colvin and Steve Earle. I don’t think the pairing is to Shawn’s advantage, but I hope it
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June 26, 2016 — John Hinderaker
As Brexit reverberates around the Western world, it is fun to observe the almost universal myopia of liberal commentators. This is from Sweden: “Brexit, a sign of anti-elite revolt: analysts.” So the analysts are starting to catch on. But they still have a ways to go: It was Britain’s poorer and less-educated citizens — angry at not having shared in the economic benefits of a new world order — who
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June 25, 2016 — Paul Mirengoff
Here’s the measured response of a British leftist, Laurie Penny, to the Brexit: So, here’s the thing. This was never a referendum on the EU. It was a referendum on the modern world, and yesterday the frightened, parochial lizard-brain of Britain voted out, out, out, and today we’ve all woken up still strapped onto this ghost-train as it hurtles off the tracks. Voting against “the modern world”! Why, that’s almost
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June 25, 2016 — Paul Mirengoff
Nationalism, by which I mean here vigorous push back against excessive internationalism and immigration, scored its second major victory of the year when Britain voted to leave the EU. The first victory came when Donald Trump won the Republican nomination. His closest rival, Ted Cruz, was also nationalistic in the sense described above, though not as vigorously so as Trump. Trump, though, is the underdog in his race against Hillary
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June 25, 2016 — Steven Hayward
This Wall Street Journal story this morning about how the Brexit vote unfolded in the Labour Party stronghold of Sunderland wins Power Line’s Understatement of the Year Award. Keep in mind that it was the Labour government under Tony Blair that pushed for expanded immigration to bolster the ranks of Labour voters, just as Democrats in the U.S. want expanded immigration to swell the ranks of Democratic voters: SUNDERLAND, England—Labour politician
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