August 14, 2017 — Steven Hayward
I’m on the road again for a few days, and also have my head down trying to get a big project to the finish line, so I haven’t been keeping a close watch on the news about much of anything (except Bryce Harper’s potentially season-ending injury). So I’m not clear about the sequence of events that went down over the weekend in Charlottesville. My reaction upon seeing the first picture
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August 12, 2017 — Steven Hayward
The Wall Street Journal ran an excerpt from Mark Lilla’s new book, The Once and Future Liberal, coming out on Tuesday that we mentioned here yesterday. Here’s a link to the whole piece if you are a WSJ subscriber, but if not here are two of the better paragraphs in it: As a teacher, I am increasingly struck by a difference between my conservative and progressive students. Contrary to the stereotype,
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August 12, 2017 — Steven Hayward
Last week we noted in “Climate Shark Jumping” the musings of one John Gilkison at the website EV World, which is otherwise a site devoted to electricity technology innovations, but where Gilkison speculated on the death penalties to be handed out at the prospective climate criminal trials of 2029. The list of people to be executed included all of the usual suspects, including the Koch brothers naturally, even though Charles
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August 12, 2017 — Steven Hayward
“Googleplex” used to mean a 10 followed by 100 zeros, but as of this week it is the new analogue to “perplexed.” It will henceforth be used for liberal faceplants in the following way: “Man you must really be Googleplexed by that!” Meanwhile, although Google’s headquarters is also apparently known as the “Googleplex,” when rendered into numerical notation it will have to be 10-100. Headlines of the week: And finally. .
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August 11, 2017 — Steven Hayward
When I see things like the meltdown at Google or any of the various campus disgraces that can be mentioned, I like to ask: “When are liberals going to defend liberalism?” One liberal who is standing up for liberalism is Mark Lilla of Columbia University. As noted here back in November, Lilla wrote an op-ed for the New York Times criticizing the Democratic Party’s reliance on identity politics. For this,
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August 10, 2017 — Steven Hayward
Power Line can announce that it has identified the next Gender Thoughtcrime offender in Silicon Valley, and it is a doozy. First, here are a few samples from the transgressing article (author ID and publication reference at the end): [O]ver the past 15 years or so, there’s been a sea change as new technologies have generated a growing pile of evidence that there are inherent differences in how men’s and
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August 10, 2017 — Steven Hayward
I think it was our pal Charles Kesler who first quipped that “social Darwinism” was the only kind of Darwinism liberals opposed—a line I have deployed to great effect many times. But it appears he may be mistaken about this. It appears that liberals are increasingly upset with evolutionary science as it reveals gender differences, and goodness, some of this science might even show up on a Google search, at
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August 9, 2017 — Steven Hayward
Leave it to Christina Hoff Sommers, in her “Factual Feminist” video series, to bring clarity to the Google-fueled controversy about women in math and science. This video is from three years ago, but it gets right at the heart of the matter. (I wonder if it comes up in a Google search? Well, I’m not going to waste my time finding out.)
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August 9, 2017 — Steven Hayward
Over at PJ Media, Patrick Poole is following the story that broke this morning in Paris of a car that rammed and injured several French military personnel. The driver, who fled the scene, was subsequently arrested, though as of this writing his identity has not been revealed. But French authorities are describing it as a “terror attack,” which means we can expect that CNN will say that “we don’t know
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August 9, 2017 — Steven Hayward
You know what they say about a stopped clock being right twice a day? Tom Friedman, the New York Times‘s second most predictably dismal columnist, had one such moment in yesterday’s column. You knew something was up from the lede, which began with “I was talking the other day to. . .” Already you’re groaning: will it be a taxi driver, a celebrity intellectual, or the Swiss store clerk with
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August 8, 2017 — Steven Hayward
The Simpsons anticipated the gender difference/sameness nonsense at Google in an episode from six years ago (3.40 long):
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August 8, 2017 — Steven Hayward
Last week we noted here how the move to “ban the box” of criminal convictions on employment application forms actually increased discrimination against blacks, and with its decision to fire the author of the infamous “diversity memo,” Google has just done its women employees a huge disservice, likely leading to more discrimination against women. David Bernstein of the Scalia Law School at George Mason University offers this shrewd observation: How
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August 8, 2017 — Steven Hayward
One of my guilty pleasures is the silly Sharknado “movies,” so naturally I had to take in Sharknado 5 (“Make America Bait Again!”) on Saturday night. Seriously, just how did this movie series get green-lit by any movie production company in the first place? I’d love to hear a recording of the original pitch. “Yeah, we’re going to make a movie starring a washed-up lead from Beverly Hills 90210 where he
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August 7, 2017 — Steven Hayward
Just as we predicted, the Google engineer behind the memo dissenting from the orthodoxy of “diversity,” whose name is James Damore, was fired today. Bloomberg reports: Alphabet Inc.’s Google has fired an employee who wrote an internal memo blasting the web company’s diversity policies, creating a firestorm across Silicon Valley. James Damore, the Google engineer who wrote the note, confirmed his dismissal in an email, saying that he had been
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August 7, 2017 — Steven Hayward
Let’s take stock of where we are at the moment. Not long ago some environmentalists were saying that we should have fewer children to fight climate change. I wonder if Al Gore will send back two of his four kids? Then a few days ago it was suggested we should curtail our dogs and cats because—wait for it—they have too large a carbon pawprint: Fido and Fluffy Are Ruining the
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August 6, 2017 — Steven Hayward
Further to our item yesterday on the Google engineer who has circulated a politically incorrect memo about the authoritarian ideology of “gender diversity” at the company, Reuters reports today that two Google company spokespeople have officially condemned the memo: Two Google executives criticized a memo that circulated late last week at the company from an unnamed engineer suggesting that there were “biological causes” for underrepresentation of women in technology and
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August 5, 2017 — Steven Hayward
One of my theories about the hollow and politically-correct liberalism of the tech oligarchs in Silicon Valley is that it is simply the new face of assuaging their own liberal guilt at piling up such huge fortunes so rapidly. I heard a report last year about Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt being challenged about his support for Hillary Clinton, and his reply was that Silicon Valley opposes government control of either
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