Monthly Archives: January 2023
January 31, 2023 — John Hinderaker
I won’t say that vegans are the most annoying people in our society, but I will say this: they rank ahead of cross-fit enthusiasts. So this video should bring a smile to your face. It is several years old, but just popped up on Twitter on a large scale this week. A group of vegan terrorists–perhaps not a fair characterization, since they couldn’t scare anyone–tries to stop a truckload of
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January 31, 2023 — Steven Hayward
Power Line University will be back in the seminar room again tomorrow (Wednesday) afternoon at 5 pm Pacific time/8 pm Eastern, to resume our leisurely stroll through The Federalist Papers. We’ll begin this week’s session with a detour into why and how the Progressives attacked the separation of powers along with rejecting the natural rights philosophy of the Founding, both of which were necessary for their project of creating the
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January 31, 2023 — John Hinderaker
…all the time. But you can fool most of them some of the time, e.g. last November. Still, if Gallup has it right, quite a few people have caught on. Americans now say that our biggest problem is our government, up six points from last November and December: That our government is indeed our biggest problem is reinforced by the fact that most of our other major problems are caused
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January 31, 2023 — Steven Hayward
From C.S. Lewis’s essay “The Poison of Subjectivism”: One cause of misery and vice is always present with us in the greed and pride of men, but at certain periods in history this is greatly increased by the temporary prevalence of some false philosophy. Correct thinking will not make good men of bad ones; but a purely theoretical error may remove ordinary checks to evil and deprive good intentions of
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January 31, 2023 — John Hinderaker
Liberals want to electrify everything, from your car to your stove. But they also don’t want to mine copper. Like so many things liberals do, this makes no sense. You might as well believe in fairy dust as in “green” energy. Over the weekend, the Wall Street Journal editorialized on this: The Biden Administration is heavily subsidizing electric vehicles, but at the same time it is blocking mineral projects needed
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January 31, 2023 — Steven Hayward
I’ve wondered for a long time why westerns declined so precipitously in film, along with musicals (though both have their occasional breakthrough exceptions), and it seems that they have been replaced by horror and thriller films. It is also apparent that comedy has been the most durable genre for almost a full century. I wonder if fantasy films will begin a slow decline. The latest Marvel-style superhero movies don’t seem to
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January 31, 2023 — Steven Hayward
As a follow up to our previous item asking questions about our grand strategy toward Russia, Iran, and the Ukranian war (such as whether the Biden Administration has a grand strategy at all), this item from today’s Wall Street Journal jumps out: Yet the largest ground war in Europe since World War II isn’t translating into boom times for U.S. defense contractors. Hobbled by supply chain disruptions, a tight labor
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January 31, 2023 — Scott Johnson
I take it there is no news advancing the Biden classified documents matter today. Assuming our readers were intimately familiar with the works of Edgar Allan Poe, I may have mystified some by adapting the title of Edgar Allan Poe’s fantastic story “MS. Found In a Bottle” for several of my posts on the Biden matter. (“MS.” is an abbreviation of “manuscript.”) Published by Baltimore’s Saturday Visiter newspaper on October
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January 30, 2023 — Steven Hayward
Sometime back around 1990, I was privileged to get to spend some time with Jaime Escalante (d. 2010), the Bolivian-born high school math teacher whose compelling story was made into a feature film, Stand and Deliver, which featured Edward James Olmos playing Escalante. Escalante had become nationally famous in the 1980s when 18 of his hispanic students from a low-income east Los Angeles neighborhood scored highly on the AP calculus
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January 30, 2023 — John Hinderaker
The Dobbs decision upended last November’s election. Democrats successfully rallied their pro-abortion core and apparently convinced a lot of swing voters to turn out in favor of abortion. In Minnesota, where I live, abortion was the decisive issue that allowed the Democrats to sweep the Minnesota House, the Minnesota Senate (by a single vote) and the governorship. Democrats apparently think there are more victories to be won by promoting unrestricted
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January 30, 2023 — Scott Johnson
I can’t stop laughing at Taylor Sirianni’s imitation of her dad as Eagles coach Nick Sirianni held court after the NFC championship game yesterday. To entertain herself as the coach droned on, she performed a formidable Nick Sirianni impression. Something tells me a star is born. Taylor could step right into the old Bob & Ray routine featuring the nonidentical twin band leaders Claude and Clyde — the McBeeBee Twins.
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January 30, 2023 — Steven Hayward
Hating Bill Clinton was thought to have been an obsession of the right, but as I have been tracking for a while, the left has been turning against him for a long time now. And over the transom from Princeton University Press comes the galleys to a forthcoming book, A Fabulous Failure: The Clinton Presidency and the Transformation of American Capitalism, written by two professors who lean to the left (is
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January 30, 2023 — Steven Hayward
Our last two Daily Charts have noted that liberals are intolerant. Let’s keep going with this theme, and note that liberals are generally unhappy people (with liberal women being the most unhappy cohort), which is one reason leftists are determined to make your life less pleasant.
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January 30, 2023 — Scott Johnson
Miranda Devine buries revelations extracted from Hunter Biden’s laptop inside today’s New York Post column ostensibly devoted to public opinion on the Biden classified documents matter. Devine observes that “[t]here are several clues on the laptop that Hunter may have been selling classified information to his foreign paymasters” and cites the “uncharacteristically cogent email about Ukraine written by Hunter Biden in 2014…” I wrote about Devine’s discovery of the “uncharacteristically
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January 30, 2023 — Scott Johnson
Matt Taibbi has renamed his TK News site Racket. On Saturday he posted “Responding to Hamilton 68” — his analysis of the Alliance for Securing Democracy’s “fact sheet” on the Hamilton 68 “dashboard” that he exposed as a fraud in the fifteenth installment of the Twitter Files (the link is to my notes on it). Taibbi summarized his response to the fact sheet in the subhead: “After refusing to answer
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January 29, 2023 — Steven Hayward
This week’s geopolitical news should raise a lot of questions about what is going on, and whether the “strategists” in the Biden Administration have any clue what they are doing. So we’re going to send 31 Abrams tanks to Ukraine—eventually (because it will take months to get them deployed). This decision is apparently thought necessary to get Germany to send 200 of its smaller and simpler Leopard tanks. Abrams are
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January 29, 2023 — John Hinderaker
Robert Bryce identifies the culprits behind the war on natural gas: According to the latest report from Guidestar, [Climate Imperative] took in $221 million in its first full year of operation. … That means that Climate Imperative, which is less than three years old, is already taking in more cash than the Sierra Club… *** [T]he effort to “electrify everything” and ban the use of natural gas in homes and
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