April 3, 2024 — Steven Hayward
The joke in the Washington Beltway is that it only take a couple of snowflakes falling to cancel public schools and generate a run on bread and milk in the grocery stores. With a substantial early spring storm pounding the left coast a few days ago, and a separate storm pounding the midwest last week, worth noting these data on which parts of the country appear to be more robust
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April 3, 2024 — Steven Hayward
You may have heard of the “Streisand Effect,” which Wikipedia describes as “an unintended consequence of attempts to hide, remove, or censor information, where the effort instead backfires by increasing public awareness of the information. The effect is named for American singer and actress Barbra Streisand, whose attempt in 2003 to suppress a photographer’s publication of a photograph showing her clifftop residence in Malibu, California, taken to document coastal erosion
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April 2, 2024 — Steven Hayward
Randall Kennedy of Harvard Law School is one of the progenitors of Critical Legal Theory (CLT) back in the late 1980s and 1990s. It was an early postmodern expression of the view that language itself—and therefore law expressed in language (because try expressing law through interpretive dance sometime)—is merely a subjective tool of power. It was a precursor to Critical Race Theory (CRT), which is a key component of the
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April 2, 2024 — Steven Hayward
You may recall that back around 1984, when the economy was booming, President Reagan took a victory lap with the comment that “I notice they don’t call it ‘Reaganomics’ any more.” Worth recalling that “Reaganomics” was a term liberals and the media came up with to attack Reagan during the deep recession of 1982. So it is ironic that Joe Biden decided to try to peddle “Bidenomics,” which has been
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April 1, 2024 — Steven Hayward
Now that Easter is safely past (except for the Orthodox!), maybe (checks notes) chocolate prices might start to come back down? You know Bidenflation is bad when it reaches chocolate. (Note that the last time chocolate was this expensive, Jimmy Carter was president. Coincidence? I think not!)
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March 31, 2024 — Steven Hayward
I’m currently working on a long paper I’m presenting at an academic conference on the legacy of the late historian John Patrick Diggins (d. 2009) in New York later this week (poster below, in case any New York area readers might like to drop in), and I can’t resist posting a couple of provocative thoughts from my jumble of notes. Like this from Diggins: Louis Hartz was the first to
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March 30, 2024 — Steven Hayward
Our supposedly devout “Catholic” president at work on this Easter holiday weekend: Can picking Easter Sunday for this proclamation be a mere coincidence? Meanwhile, for Monday’s traditional Easter egg hunt on the White House lawn, we have this: Pretty sure I know the thinking behind this, too, though to be sure around our household we refer to the preposterous Easter Bunny as the “Resurrection Rodent.”
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March 30, 2024 — Steven Hayward
Forget selling the Brooklyn Bridge to some gullible Democrat. How about a bridge in Baltimore? Here’s an idea: offer to name it the Donald Trump Bridge if Trump can get it rebuilt in six months? (With the proviso he doesn’t have to put up with any Baltimore/Buttigieg Bureaucratic nonsense.) Who doubts that he could do it? I suspect the building trades, steelworkers, etc., would work overtime at regular wages to
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March 29, 2024 — Steven Hayward
Watch the president of Guyana, which is developing a huge new oil field (which Venezuela is threatening to invade in order to seize), open up the biggest can of whoop-you-know-what on a smug, supercilious BBC “reporter” (about 2 delicious minutes long): There are few things I enjoy quite as much as watching indoctrinated Western virtue signallers get epically destroyed by people from developing countries who are willing to be honest.
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March 29, 2024 — Steven Hayward
The Wall Street Journal warns today of “The Coming Electricity Crisis,” as “Projections for U.S. electricity demand growth over the next five years have doubled from a year ago. The major culprits: New artificial-intelligence data centers, federally subsidized manufacturing plants, and the government-driven electric-vehicle transition.” Here’s what some of these projections look like: For the climate cult, electricity shortages are a feature, not a bug.
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March 29, 2024 — Steven Hayward
We recorded a day early this week on account of Holy Weekend hard upon us, so we’re posting it up a day early. And this week’s episode has it all, starting with the lamentable fact that when you hear “porn is everywhere these days,” it included even the Power Line website this week (it was tempting to claim, “We’re just trying to keep up with the public schools”), and then
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March 29, 2024 — Steven Hayward
I was looking through an old hard drive for an academic paper of mine from more than 20 years ago, and I happened to stumble across a long book review I wrote for the Acton Institute in 2000 on “Christian ‘leadership’ books,” and I thought it might be suitable on this Good Friday for a Holy Weekend reverie. I can’t believe I actually read all these books. Anyway: The church
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March 28, 2024 — Steven Hayward
Do you suppose there just might be a relationship between student ideology and the increase in anxiety or mental illness among young people? Eric Kaufman has done it again, with a report just out from the new Centre for Heterodox Social Science at the University of Buckingham in the UK on how the mental health crisis does not explain wokery. I recommend looking at the whole thing, but one finding
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March 27, 2024 — Steven Hayward
From MSN: Report Shows Higher Conviction Rates for Muslim Immigrants in Denmark Compared to Natives Recent revelations based on data from Statistics Denmark shed light on a concerning trend: immigrants and their descendants in Denmark were convicted of violent crimes at a significantly higher rate than individuals of Danish origin between 2010 and 2021. The statistics paint a stark picture, particularly for young men from predominantly Muslim nations in the
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March 27, 2024 — Steven Hayward
• I have a vivid recollection of watching the first debate in the 2000 fall election between Vice President Al Gore and Gov. George W. Bush, when Gore made a claim about having visited Texas with the director of FEMA after a major wildfire. I noticed Gov. Bush suddenly had a puzzled look in his face, and I filed a mental note: “Gore just told a fabrication of some kind.” Sure
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March 26, 2024 — Steven Hayward
When I heard NBC News was hiring recently dismissed RNC chair Ronna McDaniel my first thought was, but of course they are! She was a mediocre RNC chair with little rhetorical flair or depth, and NBC News was hiring her because she’d help the cause of making Republicans look bad. (See: Michael Steele, the other former RNC chair that MSNBC hired and who now spouts reliably anti-conservative views on command.)
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March 26, 2024 — Steven Hayward
I once asked a French acquaintance how it was that France managed to build over 5o nuclear power plants over the same time period that the U.S. built virtually none, and his answer was basically that France didn’t pay any attention to Jane Fonda. Actually his explanation was more colorful (and accurate). Read this with a French accent in your mind: “Ah, but it is simple you see: In France,
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