October 23, 2020 — Steven Hayward
After a certain point it becomes wanton cruelty to keep dunking on California’s slow motion suicide, but some stories are too good to pass unremarked. Today’s Wall Street Journal reports that rocker Gene Simmons is KISS-ing California goodbye and moving to no-income tax Washington state, and in high KISS-my-ass style: [Simmons] is now putting the property, which they later redeveloped into a sprawling European-style mansion, on the market for $22 million.
»
October 22, 2020 — Steven Hayward
I did not know that the UK government has an official “Equalities Minister,” and that name sounds perfectly sinister and Orwellian. Regardless of whether such a ministry is a good idea, right now the Equalities Minister in Boris Johnson’s government is Kemi Badenoch, and this attack on “critical race theory” is so good that I want to amend the Constitution so she can come to the United States and run for
»
October 21, 2020 — Steven Hayward
As I’ve long joked, I think truth in advertising for college presidencies would require the job qualification clause, “Spinal removal surgery necessary.” And among university presidents I have regarded suspiciously (which is nearly all of them) is Northwestern’s Morton Schapiro. I may need to rethink my attitude about Shapiro. Unsurprisingly there is a critical mass of radical students and leftist hangers-on who are demanding that Northwestern University abolish its campus
»
October 20, 2020 — Steven Hayward
Forget court-packing, abolishing the electoral college, or adding Puerto Rico and DC as states to provide more Democrats in the Senate (which they’d like to abolish in any case if they could): their real target is the Constitution itself. Apparently it isn’t “living” enough for the left, so they want to kill it completely. The New Republic magazine makes this abundantly clear in an article just out called “The Constitution
»
October 20, 2020 — Steven Hayward
Whole lot of news items today worth brief notice. • The most unsurprising headline of the day, from the Times of London: Climate Experts Fly More Often Than Other Scientists Scientists who specialise in climate change fly more than other researchers, according to a study by Cardiff University that has prompted calls for them “to look in the mirror” before demanding that others cut emissions. . . The difference could
»
October 19, 2020 — Steven Hayward
If you thought 2020 couldn’t get any more weird, behold a headline so awesome that even the New York Post couldn’t have made it up: Of course, this story (and headline) understates it, as it merely confirms what every sentient being has long known about Toobin. Zooming in was hardly necessary. Though, eew. (Maybe he was just pining to be cast in the remake of Blazing Saddles. See below.*) UPDATE:
»
October 19, 2020 — Steven Hayward
For those of you who haven’t listened to our latest “Three Whisky Happy Hour” podcast where “Lucretia” and I ponder Bari Weiss’s Tablet article “Stop Being Shocked,” we summarized and extended her case that the post-liberal progressivism now clearly ascendant in the Democratic Party represents an existential threat not just to Jews, but eventually to everyone who dissents from woke-progressive-social justice orthodoxy. This in turn sent me back to Leo
»
October 18, 2020 — Steven Hayward
For this week’s recap of the news I settle in with some Japanese Nikka Coffey Grain Whisky while “Lucretia” abandons her “whisky cougar” ways with a bona fide Glenlivet 18 so we can celebrate Amy Coney Barrett’s star turn driving Democrats to embarrass themselves last week. The hearings illustrate what’s wrong with the “side of history” liberals, as expressed in an especially lazy column from Nick Kristof in the New
»
October 17, 2020 — Steven Hayward
If you aren’t following Mark Perry’s Carpe Diem blog every day you’re missing out on one of the best sources for common sense analysis of current economic and social controversies. Mark, an economist at the University of Michigan and scholar at AEI, specializes in debunking economic fallacies (such as the perennial feminist talking point that women only earn 78 cents for every dollar a man earns), but he also has hit
»
October 17, 2020 — Steven Hayward
The most obvious thing we learned this week is that Judge Amy Coney Barrett’s blank notepad is smarter that all the Senate Democrats put together. Has there ever been a more eloquent and effective smackdown of political posturing than a blank notepad? In future discussions of jurisprudence among law professors, we might well think to observe that “this is the greatest assemblage of legal thinking since Amy Coney Barrett’s blank
»
October 16, 2020 — Steven Hayward
I’ve got a large backlog of interesting charts, graphs, and tables that I haven’t had a chance to offer up with analysis or commentary, so today I’m going to do a Friday Afternoon Chart Dump just for everyone’s edification. Most of these I’ll post without comment, because you can figure them out for yourselves. Or think of this perhaps as “The Geek in Pictures.” I’ll show myself out. Two more
»
October 14, 2020 — Steven Hayward
The first thing to understand about the Democratic Party today is that its shift to the left has occurred chiefly among white Democrats. This may be the hidden weakness that delivers the election to Trump. Let’s start with a new chart from Zach Goldberg, who notes survey data from the spring about Democratic voters in Arizona, California, Colorado, and Texas. What it shows is revealing: white Democrats are the most
»
October 11, 2020 — Steven Hayward
It is worth taking a second look at Bret Stephens’s extensive takedown of the New York Times‘s egregious 1619 Project on Friday. My understanding from a longtime Times person I know is that one of the unwritten rules is that you never criticize a colleague in print—especially on the editorial pages. And yet Stephens names names and takes prisoners: Those concerns came to light last month when a longstanding critic
»
October 11, 2020 — Steven Hayward
The pandemic has been very very good to Joe Biden, as it has allowed him to hide out in his basement for months and avoid much public exposure. He may have found its limits with his refusal to say whether he will support court-packing if he wins. Even our biased and weak-minded media is going to keep pressing the question, because Biden’s answer—that his answer will “become an issue”—is absurd.
»
October 11, 2020 — Steven Hayward
I know you’ve all been anxious to know. I know the suspense has been killing you. Given that Taylor Swift gave her coveted endorsement to Joe Biden weeks ago, what was taking Greta Thunberg, Time magazine’s Person of the Year, so long to make up her mind? Well, the suspense is over: Claiming she never engages in “party politics” teen climate change activist Greta Thunberg nevertheless endorsed Democratic nominee Joe
»
October 10, 2020 — Steven Hayward
This week’s recap starts off with a challenge to find the most unpronounceable scotch whisky you’ve never heard of (like Poit Dhubh, which is unavailable in the U.S.), plus a review of the 10 health benefits of drinking scotch whisky (some of which need a controlled experiment to validate properly, which we’re happy to conduct ourselves). Once suitably lubricated, we take a victory lap for our prescient discussion in last
»
October 10, 2020 — Steven Hayward
So forget the old saying, “Oh to be a fly on the wall.” After this week, we all want to be a fly on Mike Pence’s head. Of course, there are two theories about this. One is, the fly was a Deep State nanobot designed to interfere with Pence’s brain waves and mess him up in the debate. The other theory is that is was a Trump campaign nanobot to
»
