December 4, 2021 — Steven Hayward
Good grief. No sooner to do I label last week’s gallery the “new deviant edition” than Fredo Cuomo is put in limbo at CNN for his covering up his brother’s predations, the Ghislane Maxwell trial got under way (speaking of deviants), the Jussie Smollett trial got under way, Alec Baldwin borrows a page from the killer Waukesha SUV and claims the gun went off by itself and it isn’t his
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December 3, 2021 — Steven Hayward
Having yesterday celebrated a 2-cent drop in gasoline prices like it was V-J Day, the Biden circle (this time in the form of Steven Rattner, the Obama Administration’s “car czar”) lit out with this howler about the tiny uptick in today’s jobs report: And while we’re revisiting the topic of gasoline prices again, here’s another look at it: Chaser: Let’s go Brandon! Maybe this will be tomorrow’s message:
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December 3, 2021 — Steven Hayward
As Monty Python used to say, “And now for something completely different.” I taught my last class of the semester today, which means I’ll have a bit more time to turn up for battle here. Feeling in a whimsical mood I decided to do a one-off 20-minute episode about my favorite topic with which to annoy anyone of taste and refinement—a reflection on prog rock, which Jody Bottum once aptly described
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December 2, 2021 — Steven Hayward
Today (P)resident Biden made the extraordinary claim that during the Six Day War, Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir invited him over to be the liaison between Israel and Egypt about the Suez “and so forth.” Watch (just 30 seconds): The Six Day War was in 1967. In 1967, Biden was in his second year of law school at Syracuse University (where he finished 76th in his class of 85, recall,
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December 2, 2021 — Steven Hayward
The Biden Administration is—and ought to be—concerned about high gasoline prices. So desperate is the Biden tribe that someone thought it was a good idea to post this chart on Twitter today: Note the compressed Y-axis, which is necessary to crow about a . . . 2 cents a gallon decline in gas prices! Whoa! Save up! With that much saving, you’ll be able to buy a donut or cup
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December 1, 2021 — Steven Hayward
The Chronicle of Higher Education today reports on the study I flagged here on Monday as a certain hoax and fraud. One of the authors, remaining behind a pseudonym, has come clean: Among the glaring issues with the Higher Education Quarterly paper is that the authors are not affiliated with the University of California at Los Angeles, as they are listed. . . The editors of the journal did not
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November 30, 2021 — Steven Hayward
Yesterday in our “Picks” section we linked to Christopher Caldwell’s terrific CRB essay “France on the Verge of Civil War,” which was a deep dive into the rise of Eric Zemmour on the French political scene. The controversial Zemmour has rocked to the top of the early polls ahead of the presidential election scheduled for next spring, leaping ahead of Marine Le Pen, the previous outsider candidate from the right.
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November 29, 2021 — Steven Hayward
Ever since Alan Sokal hoaxed Social Text more than 20 years ago, and Peter Boghossian and his two compatriots punked several postmodern journals with total gibberish just a couple years back, you’d think academic journal editors and reviewers would be on guard against similar hoaxes. But apparently not Higher Education Quarterly (a Wiley publication) which is just out with a howler entitled “Donor money and the academy: Perceptions of undue donor
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November 29, 2021 — Steven Hayward
I suggested last week that negative stories about Kamala Harris that ran on CNN and over at Politico were surely planted by the Biden political staff at the White House, but I’m not sure whether the same can be said about today’s much more savage story in The Telegraph: “With Kamala Harris looking unelectable, the Democrats are considering the nuclear option.” Unlike the Daily Mail, which sensationalizes news from the
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November 28, 2021 — Steven Hayward
It is hard to say, but likely a lot lower still. I recently came across this excellent description of the problem: All over the United States one finds colleges in trouble. From reading the papers one would think these troubles are purely financial; they are that too, of course, but at times the financial troubles get undue attention simply because they are easier to discuss than that sickness of soul
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November 28, 2021 — Steven Hayward
Cast your mind back to 2014 for a moment, when the St. Louis Post-Dispatch newspaper canceled George Will’s column because of this passage: Colleges and universities are being educated by Washington and are finding the experience excruciating. They are learning that when they say campus victimizations are ubiquitous (“micro-aggressions,” often not discernible to the untutored eye, are everywhere), and that when they make victimhood a coveted status that confers privileges,
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November 27, 2021 — Steven Hayward
Back in the sixties Ronald Reagan liked to quip, “A liberal’s idea of being tough on crime is giving longer suspended sentences.” Today’s liberals don’t even bother with lenient sentences; instead, in our current “defund the police, empty the prisons” mania, they don’t even bother charging many crimes or applying significant bail, as we saw in Wisconsin a few days ago, where an SUV committed murder. This week Lucretia and
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November 27, 2021 — Steven Hayward
Oh that’s just great: a new COVID variant. A new variant is Christmas come early for the deviants in government. And the news broke so late Thursday that the memosphere hasn’t generated much new material yet in time for today’s gallery. We shall have to make do the best we can, with the usual targets. Which brings us to. . . headlines of the week: And finally. . .
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November 26, 2021 — Steven Hayward
I hadn’t been following the succession of COVID variations, which the World Health Organization (WHO?) has been labeling in the sequential order of the Greek alphabet. So the last iteration before yesterday’s news was the “Nu” variant. So next in line should be the “Xi” variant. But no!—We have skipped over the Xi variant for some reason right to the Marvel Superhero “Omicron” variant. (Isn’t “Omnicron” a superhero character in
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November 25, 2021 — Steven Hayward
This pair of Washington Post tweets perfectly conveys why the mainstream news media are a bunch of contemptible twits: So, it was the SUV’s fault? Maybe it was one of them self-driving SUVs from Silicon Valley! We need sensible SUV control! Look what killers they are. No doubt responding to the thousands of sensible people who told the Post what fools they are, the tweet was deleted: As for their
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November 24, 2021 — Steven Hayward
This year we give special thanks for the meme-makers who are delivering a heaping pile of tryptophanic material about the Kyle Rittenhouse acquittal, with no thanks to the Biden Administration for inflation and their inflated excuses. And finally. . . a Turkey Day bonus gallery:
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November 23, 2021 — Steven Hayward
All last week the scuttlebutt in the media and in Washington was that President Biden was leaning toward appointing progressive favorite Lael Brainard to replace the “dangerous” (in Lizzie Warren’s words) Jerome Powell as chair of the Federal Reserve, because Brainard pledged to make the Fed a full partner in pushing the climate and “anti-racist” agenda by pressuring financial institutions not to make loans to any fossil fuel companies. Never
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