The Daily Chart
June 18, 2024 — Steven Hayward
The mainstream media, which is trying harder every day to live up to the charge of purveying “fake news,” is full of stories about how there were “massive” protests against the “far right” in France over the weekend. Perhaps this is partly true in the university and socialist union hall neighborhoods in Paris, but what about the rest of the country? Everyone knows the red-blue electoral map of American counties.
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June 17, 2024 — Steven Hayward
Sharp-eyed and knowledgeable readers pointed out that last Friday’s chart showing a huge disparity between high school boys and adult women’s world swim records was based on a faulty comparison, because high school swimming distances and races are measured and conducted differently, making the chart an apple to oranges comparison. So I took it down. Mark Perry has recalculated the chart using just men’s and women’s adult records, and while
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June 13, 2024 — Steven Hayward
CBS News released its latest poll a few days ago, showing—big surprise!—the race between Biden and Trump remains very very close, despite the jury verdict against Trump. But it seems to me that CBS buries the lede. The headline is “Trump and Biden neck and neck nationally and in battlegrounds.” This is news? But scroll down far enough and you find this result: Here’s how CBS explains it: A nearly
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June 12, 2024 — Steven Hayward
Demonstrating leftist bias at the New York Times is hardly a dog-bites-man story, but it is notable when the evidence is offered by The Economist, which is about as mainstream a media outlet as you can find. In a feature entitled “Is the New York Times Bestseller List Politically Biased?,” The Economist concludes with a firm Yes: To determine whether such claims [of ideological bias] are fact or fiction, The
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June 11, 2024 — Steven Hayward
Kansas City Chiefs placekicker Harrison Butker outraged feminists (I know, low-hanging fruit and all that) with his recent suggestion that motherhood was a superior calling for most women, but it does remind us once again that liberals disdain domestic family life and child-bearing, when they don’t in fact outright hate it. Marginalizing the family and nationalizing the children has always been an essential element of any utopian socialist scheme. Hence
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June 10, 2024 — Steven Hayward
There’s a very interesting (but very dense) draft law review article circulating on SSRN right now by Profs.Dana Neacsu of Duquesne Law School and Paul Douglas Callister of the University of Missouri Law School entitled “The Persistent Treatise.” It is a quantification of how legal treatises are still crucial to judicial reasoning, as opposed to just relying on case precedents. As a firm common law man myself (believing that, in
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June 7, 2024 — Steven Hayward
About the only western elected leader who is faring worse in job approval rating polls than Joe Biden or Rishi Sunak is Canada’s Justin Trudeau. This might be one reason why: Probably has something to do with his fondness for Cuban economic and social policy.
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June 6, 2024 — Steven Hayward
It was reported a few weeks ago that Wiley, one of the oldest and most established academic journal publishers, was retracting 11,300 papers, many of which were partly or wholly fabricated. Further, Wiley is shutting down 19 journals. Most of these fabrications were in Wliey’s science journals. But, but—peer review! Why was there apparently none—or at least none that was serious? Part of the Wall Street Journal‘s explanation is worth
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June 5, 2024 — Steven Hayward
The rapidly growing interest on the national debt—now exceeding defense spending—is the biggest intermediate and long-term threat to America’s economic future, even if interest rates come down. Here’s the ominous growth curve: One possible remedy is much much faster economic growth, though I am skeptical growth alone will be sufficient. But in any case, it is not likely to happen because of the regulatory impediments to higher rates of economic
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June 4, 2024 — Steven Hayward
College enrollment is falling fast, and while the demographic cliff—that is, the declining number of college-age Americans right now—has long been anticipated, it is still a crisis for higher education, which depends on steady or rising enrollment for their business model to work. (This is one reason colleges are refusing to expel pro-Hamas foreign students, because they pay full tuition.) But maybe colleges are driving some students away because of
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June 3, 2024 — Steven Hayward
California has a solution for the problem of its highest-in-the-nation gasoline prices (see chart below), and you’ll never guess what it is: Price controls! From Barron’s: The California Energy Commission says it will decide on whether to establish a margin cap [for refineries] and any penalties for exceeding it by the end of this year. The state passed a law last year giving it that authority, but the commission first
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May 31, 2024 — Steven Hayward
Political consultant Bruce Mehlman’s latest weekly update includes this chart, which has got to be adding to Democrats’ panic over Joe Biden: Chaser—it’s not just minorities; young voters are also trending away from the Dems:
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May 30, 2024 — Steven Hayward
Glenn Reynolds has long liked to post the provocation “Abolish the Ivy League” over at Instapundit, and now we have some data to back up the idea (as if we didn’t have plenty of good reason before now). The Washington Monthly notes that most of the pro-Hamas campus protests are happening at our most elite (and most expensive) universities, and it has the receipts: Using data from Harvard’s Crowd Counting
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May 29, 2024 — Steven Hayward
We recently spoke on the podcast with Jeremy Carl, author of The Unprotected Class: How Anti-White Racism Is Tearing America Apart. Please buy a copy if you haven’t already! Anyway, fresh evidence for Jeremy’s thesis that “anti-whiteness” is now the ruling ideology of America is offered this week by, of all sources, Bloomberg news: Corporate America Promised to Hire a Lot More People of Color. It Actually Did. . . . The
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May 28, 2024 — Steven Hayward
As we noted last week, President Biden is appointing a lot of radical judges, which will set up a growing number of sharp splits in rulings between Obama/Biden judges and Bush/Trump judges, especially at the appellate level. This will mean the Supreme Court will need to step in more often to sort out (and most often correct) the mess. It likely means reversing this trend, which apparently Justice Brett Kavanaugh
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May 27, 2024 — Steven Hayward
Evidence continues to accumulate that our rush to legalize marijuana is a major mistake, bot for public and mental health reasons, and for fiscal reasons (it hasn’t been the tax bonanza a lot of governments thought it would be, nor is it a great business, as some people predicted). The Washington Monthly reports that daily pot use has now surpassed daily alcohol use, and from the odor of many streets
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May 26, 2024 — Steven Hayward
News out this week is that Joe Biden is going to raid the Strategic Petroleum Reserve yet again in fear that high gasoline prices will hurt his re-election chances. Here’s the CNBC headline: And here is what Biden has done to the SPR since taking office: This is certainly not how a responsible president safeguards the interests of the nation. But that’s never been Biden’s strong suit for 50 years
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