September 17, 2019 — Steven Hayward
Last week I gave a talk at the California Club in Los Angeles that I’ll post as a podcast this week if the recording turned out decently (I haven’t had a chance to listen yet), but I opened with the old line attributed to Edna St. Vincent-Millay that “history isn’t one damn thing after another—it’s the same damn thing over and over again.” It is not a new theme here
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September 16, 2019 — Steven Hayward
The “First Law of Holes” (“If you’re in one—stop digging”) is usually attributed to the late British politician Denis Healey, but whatever. One thing is certain: California never heard of the First Law of Holes. • Item, from the Washington Post a while back: The One Issue Every Economist Can Agree Is Bad: Rent Control By Megan McArdle There aren’t that many things you can get economists to agree on.
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September 16, 2019 — Steven Hayward
The great people at the Washington Free Beacon, which as of today is under the leadership of a suspiciously familiar name, produced this supercut of liberals saying they don’t want to take away anyone’s guns—until of course Beto let the mask slip because of course liberals want to take away everyone’s guns. Totally worth the two minutes of, um, rapid-fire delivery:
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September 16, 2019 — Steven Hayward
Assuming Iran is indeed behind the attack on Saudi Arabia’s major oil refining facility, it represents a step-increase in Iranian-backed aggression in the region. The Wall Street Journal‘s Spencer Jakab says this attack is “the big one“: Saturday’s attack on a critical Saudi oil facility will almost certainly rock the world energy market in the short term, but it also carries disturbing long-term implications. Ever since the dual 1970s oil
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September 15, 2019 — Steven Hayward
Now here is someone who takes no chances when it comes to ensuring sufficient meat consumption: Here’s a stomach-churning feat: A woman from Arizona devoured not one, but two 72-ounce steak dinners in about an hour at the Big Texan Steak Ranch in Amarillo. The woman, identified as professional competitive eater Miki Sudo, posted a short video on Instagram of her polishing off that second steak. She’s won the women’s
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September 15, 2019 — Steven Hayward
It is increasingly clear that the real problem with the country is not “white privilege,” but the woke privilege of the New York Times. Further to John’s item immediately below about the Times‘s newest attack on Justice Kavanaugh, and my item last week on how Times seems to have decided to operate without editors, behold this Tweet the Times issued in support of their latest hit piece: Apparently the night
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September 14, 2019 — Steven Hayward
Another week, another Democratic presidential debate that seems to last a week. I think I’ve figured it out. While it may seem like they are pandering to the progressive base with progressively more extravagant promises of free stuff, they are really planning to wear us down, Chinese water-torture style, until we say no mas!, and hand the keys to the White House to one of them to make it stop.
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September 13, 2019 — Steven Hayward
“Lucretia,” Power Line’s international woman of mystery, is back with me again this week with the third installment in our special series confronting the pernicious New York Times “1619 Project,” this time taking on the argument that slavery is the central factor in the rise of modern industrial capitalism—a proposal so laughable that we actually spend a lot of our time talking about entirely tangential subjects. (For listeners interested in a serious compilation
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September 11, 2019 — Steven Hayward
The lefty Center for American Progress has shuttered its ThinkProgress media arm, and laid off the entire ThinkProgress “news”room staff. Now on the surface, this is astonishing. Most lefty “resistance” groups are thriving right now, because raising money with Donald Trump is really easy. Lefty groups typically thrive when there’s a Republican president, because we all know that conservatives are paranoi. . . oh, wait. . . Where was I?
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September 11, 2019 — Steven Hayward
The sharp-eyed Prof. Joshua Dunn of the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs spots this early morning tweet from the New York Times: “Airplanes took aim”?? Josh comments: “Got to get those airplanes under control, keep them from hijacking hapless terrorists.” Maybe Ilhan Omar can go with this: “Some planes did something.” Apparently the Times still employs at least one editor. They’ve deleted the tweet. But I doubt they have
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September 9, 2019 — Steven Hayward
• Feel Good Story of the Week (and it’s only Monday): NYT Columnist Discloses “Insomnia” She’s Had Since “Cursed Night” of Trump’s Election New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg indicated on Friday that President Trump’s election was so upsetting that it gave her years of insomnia. That tidbit came in a column about Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg making what she calls a “thrilling prediction” that 2020 will see a “blue wave” that
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September 8, 2019 — Steven Hayward
• My money is still on Elizabeth Warren to be the Democratic nominee. I didn’t think so six months ago, but I think she is showing some versatility, and she has a broader range than Bernie. (The Daily Beast—discount the source appropriately—reports that the Trump team thinks so too.) Still, she has made her first significant blunder with her pledge to stop all new oil and gas production on public
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September 7, 2019 — Steven Hayward
Everyone says that Trump uses Twitter like a laser pointer, herding the media and his hysterical opponents like cats. This week Trump proved you don’t need electrons—all you need is a Sharpie, and a sharp sense of humor. (Next to the dullards of the media, it’s not hard to seem sharp.) Trump drew a semi-circle on a hurricane map, and you’ll never guess what happened next! Of course, I think
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September 6, 2019 — Steven Hayward
This special double-length episode features a wide-ranging conversation with best-selling author and iconoclast Heather Mac Donald of the Manhattan Institute, with special focus on her new book, The Diversity Delusion: How Race and Gender Pandering Corrupt the University and Undermine Our Culture. I hosted Heather this week at . . . UC Berkeley (!!), and we decided that rather than going with a set-piece speech, I’d interview her about the
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September 3, 2019 — Steven Hayward
We have a new theory about the mainstream media: they have decided to work without editors any more. How else to explain how the Washington Post slandered J.D. Vance with the claim that he decried the “falling white birth rate” (he said no such thing, and the Posthad to correct the story), or MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell going to air with a completely uncorroborated story about Trump’s supposed Russian financial connections? Or
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September 2, 2019 — Steven Hayward
By special request, my long review (almost 4,000 words) of George Will’s big new book, The Conservative Sensibility, is out from behind the paywall at the Claremont Review of Books. Everyone should buy this book and actually read it: it is built to last, and, as I say early in the review, it “deserves to take its place with such classics as Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom (1944) and
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September 1, 2019 — Steven Hayward
For our Bay Area readers, the fourth year of my sentence as an inmate at UC Berkeley has started as of last week, and I’m teaching an undergraduate course on conservative perspectives on public policy issues that meets at 8:30 am on Tuesdays and Thursdays. I have plenty of empty seats in the classroom (room 250 at the Goldman School of Public Policy on Hearst Street on the north side
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