October 2, 2022 — Steven Hayward
• Last week the California Supreme Court upheld a lower court ruling that bees are “fish” for purposes of the Endangered Species Act and other water regulations. This is what happens when you appoint jurists who are not biologists. • Are we already headed into a worldwide recession/depression? —News item: OPEC+ is set to consider Wednesday its sharpest production cut since the start of the pandemic to help prop up
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October 1, 2022 — Steven Hayward
Normally we’ll just run The Daily Chart on weekdays, but the chart that the Wall Street Journal includes in today’s feature article “Where Democrats’ Grip on Minority Voters Could Slip in Midterm Elections” ought to be giving Democrats nightmares and thus deserves a special notice today. It is happening with Asian voters, too:
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October 1, 2022 — Steven Hayward
This week offers a hybrid car of an episode—almost literally as it turns out—as John Yoo was traveling midweek when Lucretia and I gathered in person with Richard Samuelson to record the first half, reviewing his reflections on the significance of the “Washington Football Team” deciding to name themselves the “Commanders,” which rather fits the administrative state today, no? From there we go on to observe that just when you
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October 1, 2022 — Steven Hayward
So let’s see: Biden wonders where a dead congresswoman is, while Vice President Harris lets slip with where her real political loyalties lie—North Korea. Meanwhile, White House spokestoken Karine Jean-Paul Sartre lamented the damage to the “Nordstrom” pipeline, which can only mean the supply chain for Armani suits is in big trouble. Only a Cat 5 leftist brainstorm can explain all this, but as we know, only Republicans are the
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September 30, 2022 — Steven Hayward
California apparently didn’t get the Biden Administration memo about the good news of falling gasoline prices. Here’s the price chart for my local gas station on Monday: And here’s the same station today: (Fortunately, I drive two diesel cars, which both get better mileage than equivalent gasoline cars.) I asked the station manager about it, and he told me their wholesale supplier has hiked prices *four times* this week. I
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September 30, 2022 — Steven Hayward
With some of the leading National Conservative intellectuals—especially Yoram Hazony—casting shade on the imputed Lockeanism of the American Founding, it is worth recurring to just one of Willmoore Kendall’s fertile provocations about this point from more than 50 years ago: “The emphasis of Locke’s political theory is, ultimately, egalitarian, since if the consent of all is necessary for the ‘compact,’ then each man’s consent is as ‘good’ as any other
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September 30, 2022 — Steven Hayward
Most news accounts of inflation report chiefly on the aggregate “headline” rate, lately above 8 percent. But when you break out price levels by subcategories, you can see that many of the things that consumer spend most of their income for have risen much more than 8 percent over the last year (especially fuel oil, which many households in the northeast use for winter heating), suggesting that real inflation is
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September 29, 2022 — Steven Hayward
William Galston, the liberal columnist for the Wall Street Journal‘s editorial page (they always like to have one around) writing every so gently yesterday on the need for Democrats to pay attention to the legitimate grievances of populism lest they get buried in a populist electoral tide: “Powerful forces in the Democratic coalition oppose crafting the sort of moderate policies that could win back these [working class] voters. But if
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September 29, 2022 — Steven Hayward
What if we applied anti-trust principles against concentration in industry and market collusion to higher education? We might very well conclude that the ivy league should be broken up. The figure below, from Nature magazine, shows that a tiny handful of universities produce the large majority of college professors today. What this means for intellectual diversity, and the competition of ideas and methodologies, is pretty clear, since most academic departments
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September 28, 2022 — Steven Hayward
The speculation about whether the United States might somehow be hurtling toward a second civil war is usually dismissed because there doesn’t exist a clean sectional or geographic split as we had in 1860. But this misses the point. This passage from Harry Jaffa in 1964 would seem to apply very well to our current moment: “The Civil War is the most characteristic phenomenon in American politics, not because it
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September 28, 2022 — Steven Hayward
I borrow today’s chart from a recent presentation from Peter Thiel (who I am having dinner with tonight in Palo Alto, as it happens). A close look reveals that the previously “red hot” housing market in California actually lags the truly dynamic metro areas of the country by a lot. In his full talk at the link, he explains how progressive “tolerance” of California’s homelessness and crime actually serves the
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September 28, 2022 — Steven Hayward
Who blew up the Nord Stream pipelines? Your guess is as good as mine. It does seem peculiar to think Russia would have blown up their own pipeline, but it is not inconceivable that a faction of Russia’s military is trying to sabotage Putin as a prelude for ousting him, or that Putin sees it as a kind of “Cortez burning his ships” moment to indicate that he is all-in
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September 27, 2022 — Steven Hayward
“Racial preferences should now be thought of like chemotherapy, a cure that can cause side effects that should be applied judiciously. We’ve applied the cure long past that point, and have drifted toward an almost liturgical conception of diversity that makes less sense by the year.” —John McWhorter, NY Times
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September 27, 2022 — Steven Hayward
Everyone recall’s Rahm Emanuel revealing the core tactic of progressivism, which is never letting a crisis got to waste in service of extending government power, and as such the global COVID pandemic was the dream crisis for the Davoisie’s dream of “the Great Reset.” We can see the concrete result: a diminution of economic freedom as measured by the Fraser Institute’s fine annual report on Economic Freedom in the World.
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September 26, 2022 — Steven Hayward
If you thought the whole idea of “race science” went out of fashion with eugenics, you’d be wrong. The University of California at Santa Cruz (where Angela Davis remains a tenured professor) is currently looking to hire a professor of “Critical Race Science,” which is no doubt the best kind. Here’s some of the job listing: Critical Race and Ethnic Studies: Assistant or Associate Professor Critical Race Science and Technology
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September 26, 2022 — Steven Hayward
We’re getting another confirmation today of a key definition in Power Line’s Lexicon of Leftist Terms: ‘”Populism” is when the wrong person or cause wins a free election”.’ The corollary is that every Republican candidate for president is Hitler, and now we learn that every Italian conservative is Mussolini. On the other hand, I can see why the authoritarian elites of the European Union, who have made vague threats against
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September 26, 2022 — Steven Hayward
Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, writing at Heterodox Academy last week: Universities can have many goals (such as fiscal health and successful sports teams) and many values (such as social justice, national service, or Christian humility), but they can have only one telos, because a telos is like a North Star. It is the end, purpose, or goal around which the institution is structured. An institution can rotate on one axis
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