April 14, 2021 — Steven Hayward
If you have the misfortune to follow the dreary climate change business, you’ll know that one of the fine points is which long-term emissions forecast to plug into your model. Never mind the accuracy of the models for now—even a good model is vulnerable to the age-old GIGO problem—”garbage in, garbage out.” In climate model forecasting, if you have an absurd emissions forecast, you’ll get absurd (but headline-grabbing) results. People
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April 13, 2021 — Steven Hayward
If you need proof that Democrats are really on the side of the plutocracy, look no further than New York’s Democratic House members, who today wrote to Speaker Pelosi threatening to vote against any of (P)resident Biden’s tax increase proposals unless the bill includes full repeal of the state and local tax (SALT) deduction limitations that were part of Trump’s 2017 tax reform. The SALT limitation was the single most
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April 13, 2021 — Steven Hayward
It is hard to tell sometimes whether the climatistas actually believe their apocalyptic catechism about “settled science,” how we can meet all of our energy needs with wind, solar, and processed banana peels, or whether it is just an excuse to centralize more political power over people and resources, preferably at the international level. (Of course, the two hypotheses are not mutually exclusive.) Or maybe, as we suggested Sunday in
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April 12, 2021 — Steven Hayward
When we look out on the world scene and how the Biden Administration is positioning itself, everyone should keep in mind the summary statement of former Defense Secretary and CIA director Robert Gates (no one’s idea of a partisan firebrand, as he’s been serving presidents of both parties since the Carter Administration): Joe Biden, Gates said, “has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the
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April 11, 2021 — Steven Hayward
I know, it is a silly question. But seriously, some news items over the weekend really make me wonder. First up, the New York Times—a former newspaper, as Andrew Klavan likes to remind us—has run an “explainer” about the growing universe of potential personal pronouns. The first expansion took us up to something like 60 or so, but now we have moved on to “neopronouns” (seriously), which takes us way
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April 10, 2021 — Steven Hayward
Liberals have long believed that economics is a zero-sum process (think back to Lester Thurow’s old book, The Zero-Sum Society): people only get rich by taking from the poor. You see this in liberals’ long-used rhetoric about how income tax cuts, which allow people to keep more of what they earn, are described as “redistributing” wealth. The idea of positive wealth creation seems beyond the grasp of most liberals. Now
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April 10, 2021 — Steven Hayward
First, an announcement: there won’t be an episode of the 3WHH podcast this week. Both Lucretia and I are traveling, and we just don’t have the infrastructure to pull it off. What?—you say! Are we the only two Americans left out of Biden’s “infrastructure” bill? Apparently so. (Meanwhile, if you’re still jonesing for a podcast fix, I did another guest turn on the Ricochet podcast last night. Drinks were had.
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April 8, 2021 — Steven Hayward
What are the biggest risks out there right now? Listen to what the “experts” are saying, and then ignore it, because “expert” predictions are wrong most of the time. This first chart about major risks over the last decade, as estimated by people in the financial community, is very hard to make out (though you may be able to embiggen it), but the point of the chart is not the
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April 6, 2021 — Steven Hayward
I thought surely this comic book cover that came to me over the transom was a joke or satire of some kind, but no—it’s real! Here is some of the description from the publisher: Dr. Jill Biden is the First Lady of the United States of America, and she’s defining that role in a way no other First Lady has before her. A mother, grandmother, and lifelong educator, Dr. Biden
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April 6, 2021 — Steven Hayward
• If you have a Wall Street Journal subscription, don’t miss today’s Gerard Baker column, “The C-Suite Converts to the New Political Religion.” If you don’t have a subscription, here’s the key part: The modern secularists who deride the hagridden mysticism of traditional religion are now the most devoted congregants in the First Church of Antiracism. Penitents line up to be shriven for their white privilege, bending the knee before
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April 4, 2021 — Steven Hayward
I don’t know the whole story here, but this two-minute video is rocketing around social media today, reportedly showing a clergyman in Canada telling the police and a public health bureaucrat to leave his church immediately. I’ll update as I find more details (here’s one early news account), but for the moment, this is the sound of someone asserting their liberty. The clergyman speaking is reportedly Polish, and from the
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April 4, 2021 — Steven Hayward
“The Great Liberal Death Wish” is Malcolm Muggeridge’s famous theme, which appeared in various iterations over the years. Here’s one version, from which we can extract the essence: I began to get the feeling that a liberal view of life was not what I’d supposed it to be—a creative movement which would shape the future—but rather a sort of death wish. . . It’s difficult to convey to you what
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April 3, 2021 — Steven Hayward
Winston Churchill wrote that “No two cities have counted more with mankind than Athens and Jerusalem. Their messages in religion, philosophy, and art have been the main guiding lights of modern faith and culture.” For Easter and Passover Lucretia and I decided to take up the Jerusalem side of this theme with the help of a forgotten figure who was a major influence on the young Churchill—the American politician Bourke
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April 3, 2021 — Steven Hayward
That shipping container stuck in the Suez Canal for six days has to be some kind of metaphor for the Biden Administration and contemporary liberalism generally. It’s not much of a stretch to go from liberalism’s cargo cult mentality that the government is the provider of all good things by just spending money to having the flow of cargo stop because of incompetence, stormy weather, whatever. Here’s an idea: why
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April 1, 2021 — Steven Hayward
I’ve had a theory for a while now, for which there is some suggestive empirical survey data, that the left began to go nuts a couple years before Trump rode down the escalator in 2015 and caused full-blown leftist insanity. The theory, first suggested to me by Charles Murray actually, is that the activist left was frustrated and angry by around 2014 that President Obama was such a huge disappointment.
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April 1, 2021 — Steven Hayward
• Up first: Anti-Semitism. Everyone knows the great historical riddle: how could Germany, the most educated nation in Europe, fall into such a vicious anti-Semitic frenzy? Thank goodness it could never happen here. Oh, wait—turns out the more education you have in the U.S., the more likely you are to support authoritarian measures against faithful Jews. But BLM? Riot on, man! Pretty sure we should be closing down graduate schools
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March 31, 2021 — Steven Hayward
Last night we had one of our special live Zoom events for Power Line VIP subscribers, but a gremlin seems to have prevented many VIPs from getting timely notice of the link to the event. So we decided to post up the audio of the event for VIPs who didn’t get a link or who were unable to join us for whatever reason–and for any curious listeners who want to hear
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