April 21, 2021 — Steven Hayward
Lots of wailing and gnashing of teeth yesterday at the announcement that Howard University (Vice President Harris’s alma mater) is closing up it Classics department. Cornel West and Jeremy Tate took to the op-ed page of the Washington Post to call the decision “a spiritual catastrophe.” West and Tate remind us: Long after [Frederick] Douglass’s encounters with these ancient thinkers, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. would be similarly galvanized
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April 21, 2021 — Steven Hayward
The Washington Post offers up some especially syrupy fan service today, writing about John “Long Face” Kerry. You have to read it not to believe it (extra funny bits in bold): John F. Kerry was on a 757 government plane in November 2016, en route to Antarctica to observe scientists studying the impact of climate change, when he learned that Donald Trump would be the next president. There, high above
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April 20, 2021 — Steven Hayward
It has been suggested that “cancel culture” won’t end until it comes for enough liberals, though I am doubtful. In any case, it is bemusing to see that the latest victim of cancel culture is the aggressively atheist and hyper-Darwinian Richard Dawkins, who has had his “Humanist of the Year Award” from 1996 rescinded by the American Humanist Association. Why, you ask? Here’s the AHA statement: Regrettably, Richard Dawkins has
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April 20, 2021 — Steven Hayward
It has been a long-running theme of mine that academic social science, which at its birth promised to bring “scientific” research to bear on solving practical human problems, is increasingly detached from the real world and of almost no use to the larger world. Partly this is because of defects or limitations of positivist social science, the overwhelming leftist bias of most academic social scientists, and the deliberate aloofness of
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April 19, 2021 — Steven Hayward
The news that Walter Mondale was in extremis had circulated a few days ago, and blurted out, predictably, by Jimmy Carter, about whom Mondale said on many occasions after 1980, “I never understood how Carter’s political mind worked. Carter’s got the coldest political nose of any politician I ever met.” It is still not well known that Mondale considered resigning as Vice President during Carter’s infamous navel-gazing Camp David retreat in
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April 19, 2021 — Steven Hayward
As the country going through a cycle of leftist madness last seen in the 1960s, we can recall that a number of liberals woke up to the defects of their creed, and became the founding generation of “neoconservatives,” that is, liberals who had been “mugged by reality.” That original generation were mostly academic social scientists of one stripe or another. Will we see a new generation of “neoconservatives” arising out
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April 18, 2021 — Steven Hayward
Nothing so surely signals the essential emptiness of Joe Biden than his rapid flip-flop Friday on raising the cap on the number of asylum seekers the United States will accept. At first the Biden Administration announced that they would not lift the relatively low cap that Trump had adopted, but following “outcry” from “Progressives,” Biden did a pirouette worthy of Bolshie ballerina and said he’d now lift the cap. One reason
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April 17, 2021 — Steven Hayward
It’s been a long while since I inflicted my adolescent interest in progressive rock on Power Line readers, mostly because I know it is a rarified taste that only appeals to a minority of similarly idiosyncratic people like me. That’s why I post these in the middle of the night instead of prime time. In any case, there hasn’t been much “new” lately about this by now very old genre.
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April 17, 2021 — Steven Hayward
Good grief! “Lucretia” and I take a week off, and everything goes to hell. Minneapolis starts rioting again, and Democrats in Washington start their own riot over court-packing. Meanwhile, the officer who mistook her service revolver for a taser and shot Daunte Wright was publicly identified within 48 hours (Kim Potter), lost her job, and now faces criminal charges, while we have passed Day 100 since Ashli Babbit was shot
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April 17, 2021 — Steven Hayward
Prediction: If Derek Chauvin is found guilty by the Minneapolis jury, there will be riots anyway, like we sometimes see in a city that wins the Super Bowl or World Series. Dust off Edward Banfield’s chapter on “Rioting Mostly for Fun and Profit” in The Unheavenly City. Which I may just talk about on our podcast this week. In the meantime. . . Headlines of the week: And finally.
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April 16, 2021 — Steven Hayward
There is something strange about the behavior of Biden and the Democrats that can be best explained by a combination of Progressive mania and panic that their power might well slip away from them unless they lock it down by changing the rules in their favor and whipping up paranoia within key minority groups who are showing signs of slipping away. Hence the relentless charges of racism. Some items: “Democrats
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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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