August 4, 2020 — Steven Hayward
Not long ago UC Hastings School of Law, as well-regarded law school in downtown San Francisco, sued the city because local neighborhood conditions had deteriorated to the point that the law school was losing prospective students who took one look at the place and said, “No, thanks!” Hastings is a very liberal law school—I don’t think they have a single conservative on their faculty—but as Robert Conquest reminded us, everyone
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August 4, 2020 — Steven Hayward
With talk of ordering more widespread shutdowns to fight the resurgence of COVID-19 cases, it is worth taking note of a paper released over the weekend on the Social Science Research Network (SSRN) by Prof. Christian Bjørnskov of Aarhus University in Denmark. The paper is “Did Lockdown Work? An Economist’s Cross-Country Comparison.” The abstract is both direct and concise (a rarity in academic writing): I explore the association between the
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August 4, 2020 — Steven Hayward
You know who doesn’t suffer from “white fragility”? J.P. Sears, that’s who. Here in this 5-minute video, J.P. offers his short course in attaining a Ph.D in “White Wokeology,” which you get through Twitter University (though he doesn’t actually say where the program is accredited). I can’t believe J.P. hasn’t been rounded up and sent to a sensitivity training relocation camp in Cambridge or somewhere.
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August 3, 2020 — Steven Hayward
I know there are thousands of crazy Tweets available every minute of the day, but this thread, from a certified blue check marker (a “national correspondent” for The Week), is certifiably demented: Here’s the news story behind it. By the way, only “hundreds” of conservatives buying pickups? Um, I have some news for Mr. Cooper (or is it Ms. Cooper?). Meanwhile, just to brighten your day, watch carefully at about
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August 3, 2020 — Steven Hayward
Everyone is familiar with stories of dumb criminals, like the person who calls an Uber for a bank robbery getaway car, but in fact most criminals are like everyone else: they respond rationally to calculations of risk and reward. And with current attack on policing advancing relentlessly, does it take a rocket scientist to know what message this sends to criminals? As such why is this a front-page headline: Homicide
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August 2, 2020 — Steven Hayward
Watching the literally insane behavior on display in places like Portland and Seattle has prompted a lot of observers to suggest that many of the Antifa mobs suffer from mental illness. This is a thesis we talked about here back in April in “Does Liberalism Cause Mental Illness?“, in which I passed along some of the survey data Zach Goldberg at Georgia State had turned up and analyzed. One of
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August 2, 2020 — Steven Hayward
America’s newspaper of record—which is the Babylon Bee of course—is out with the headline, “Biden Campaign Says He Is So Close to a VP Pick He Can Smell Her.” The Bee really needs to stop scooping the New York Times. In any case, in this episode of the weekend happy hour Lucretia and I survey the box canyon Biden has got himself into by pledging to pick a woman running
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August 1, 2020 — Steven Hayward
I’m starting to come to the view that having K-12 education and colleges and universities shrink because of COVID-19 might be one of the bits of good news arising out of the pandemic. Our universities are the principal source of the noxious ideas that are plaguing the country right now, and decades of conservative attempts to reverse this slide or reform campuses have proven largely unavailing. An article by Arthur Milikh
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August 1, 2020 — Steven Hayward
Sometimes you close down the bar. And sometimes the Barr closes down you! I think Attorney General Barr should volunteer to do as many hearings as Democrats want. There are at least two Democratic ex-senators (McCaskill and Donnelly) who blame their loss in the 2018 election to the Democratic freak show over the Kavanaugh nomination. Here’s a fun idea for our Troller-in-Chief: suggest appointing Barr to the Supreme Court. Headlines
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July 31, 2020 — Steven Hayward
Having spent a lot of time in Portland (I probably acquired a quarter of my rather too large library at Powell’s City of Books, where I’ve been coming out the front door with heavy full bags since 1977), I always regarded the TV show “Portlandia” as a documentary rather than fictional satire. Clearly the show needs a gritty reboot, with an episode that tries to lampoon the “Wall of Moms”
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July 30, 2020 — Steven Hayward
We noted in one of our Crazy Chronicles recently that Trader Joe’s was said to be following Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben in expunging product names (like “Trader Giotto” and “Trader Jose”) that someone—it turned out to be some hopped-up 17 year old kid—found offensive. Trader Joe’s has corrected the record with this announcement: A Note About Our Product Naming In light of recent feedback and attention we’ve received about
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July 29, 2020 — Steven Hayward
We’ve been all over Attorney General Bill Barr’s adventures in congressional “oversight” this week, but as it happens I just received the summer issue of the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy, which is the academic journal of the Federalist Society. And the lead article in this issue is Barr’s Barbara Olson Memorial Lecture from last fall’s annual Federalist Society conference, which has the anodyne title, “The Role of the
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July 29, 2020 — Steven Hayward
Here are two good opportunities for readers to express themselves in meaningful ways against the craziness of the moment. First, for our Seattle area readers, next Monday the Seattle Commissars City Council will vote on defunding the police, which could result in reducing the number of officers by as many as 800. What a great idea!/sarc. There is an online petition you can sign to express your opposition to this madness.
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July 28, 2020 — Steven Hayward
You know how political cartoons and other stylistic portrayals of political corruption often depict the offending office holders as fat? (It’s the only kind of “fat-shaming” still allowed, I think.) Well, some social scientists got to wondering, and came up with the following article—which I swear is for real—published last week in the journal Economics of Transition and Institutional Change: Obesity of politicians and corruption in post‐Soviet countries Pavlo Blavatskyy,
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July 28, 2020 — Steven Hayward
The poor climate campaign has been having a hard time getting its usual media attention amidst the more immediate panic and media freakout over COVID-19 (which is why CNN enlisted Greta Thunberg for a panel on COVID-19), and the economic cost of the virus shutdown is not helping the greens as a demonstration project of what would occur with their preferred policies that would shrink the world economy in the
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July 27, 2020 — Steven Hayward
The headline for this post comes straight from Phil Magness of the American Institute for Economic Research, and a two-time guest on the Power Line Podcast. It refers to the de facto admission today from the impresario of the New York Times‘s egregious “1619 Project,” Nicole Hannah-Jones, that in fact it is a purely political propaganda effort. Here’s Hannah-Jones’s extraordinarily candid Tweet today: “Not a history”!! A “work of journalism”!?
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July 27, 2020 — Steven Hayward
Over the last few days a new social media fad has arisen in the form of “I have a joke about X,” but I can’t tell the punchline for some related reason. My favorite right now comes from the great people at the New York Post, and runs: “The NY Post editorial board has a Gov. Cuomo joke but it requires a food order.” And hence our pal Remy has
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