September 27, 2023 — Steven Hayward

The Daily Chart: Academic Skew

Featured image Nature magazine reported yesterday on an effort in Europe to safeguard “academic freedom” from “crackdowns” on said freedom “in eastern and Central Europe.” (“Threats to research freedom have been seen in some countries in the European Union, such as Hungary, Poland and Sweden, over the past decade.”) So the Eurocrats want to have some kind of centralized diktat from Brussels to prevent elected governments from governing their public universities. I’m »
September 27, 2023 — Steven Hayward

No Sex Please—We’re Anthropologists!

Featured imageWith apologies to the old British farce “No Sex Please—We’re British!”, apparently academic anthropology wants to do a humorless remake. (Did I even need to include “humorless” after “academic anthropology”?) I would have thought that case studies in sex lives was a rather integral part of anthropology, at least it seemed that way when Margaret Mead was the hot anthropologist of her day, a forerunner of the over-rated Jared Diamond. »
September 27, 2023 — Lloyd Billingsley

No Manifesto Destiny

Featured imageToday marks six months since Audrey Hale, a woman who thought she was a man, shot her way into the Covenant School in Nashville and gunned down nine-year-olds Hallie Scruggs, William Kinney and Evelyn Dieckhaus, and adults Mike Hill, Katherine Koonce, and Cynthia Peak. Hale, a former student at the school, carefully planned the attack for months. The killer left a manifesto explaining her actions but six months after the »
September 27, 2023 — Scott Johnson

Footsteps gettin’ louder

Featured imageHouse Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer has posted a press release in his continuing investigation of the Biden family business. In the press release Comer announced that, according to subpoenaed bank records he has obtained, in 2019 Hunter Biden received a $10,000 wire from Wang Xin and a $250,000 wire from Jonathan Li and Tan Ling. Both wires originated in Beijing and listed Joe Biden’s Wilmington home as the beneficiary »
September 27, 2023 — Scott Johnson

Only baddie that’ll walk the line

Featured imageThe UAW is striking the Big Three American auto companies. On behalf of its members, the union is fighting the Man for substantially higher pay and substantially less work. One doesn’t read about it much, but one of the big reasons why the UAW is fighting right now is the shift to electric vehicles. See, for example, the Yahoo! Finance backgrounder here explaining “why the shift to EVs is such »
September 26, 2023 — John Hinderaker

Europe: Tangled Up In Green

Featured imageOpinion polls indicate that the vast majority of Europeans have drunk the global warming kool-aid, at least in theory. But things change when they are confronted with “green” realities. The Wall Street Journal reports: For years, Europe has been at the forefront of the global drive to curb carbon emissions and slow climate change, pledging to reach net zero emissions by 2050. Overwhelming numbers of Europeans say they like the »
September 26, 2023 — Lloyd Billingsley

September in the Rage

Featured imageIn his September 21 speech to the Congressional Black Caucus, Joe Biden called rapper LL Cool J a “boy.” That grabbed attention but something of greater significance escaped notice. “Our intelligence people say the greatest threat is domestic,” said Biden. “That’s the greatest terrorist — is domestic.  Because far too often it’s still the case that you can get killed or attacked walking the streets of America just because you’re black »
September 26, 2023 — Scott Johnson

The Menendez miasma

Featured imageSenator Robert Menendez wants to hang on to his Senate seat and who can blame him? It has served him well. The pending indictment against Menendez alleges a mind-boggling level of depravity and corruption. Among other things, he seems to have abused his chairmanship of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in a disgusting manner. The betrayal of trust involved is difficult to fathom. Having dodged the bullet on the corruption »
September 26, 2023 — Steven Hayward

Why Are Liberals Such Hypocrites? Because “The Rules Don’t Apply to Us”

Featured imagePointing out liberal hypocrisy, like the head of Chicago’s teachers union that sends her own child to a private school, or the private jet-hopping lifestyles of climate cultists like John Kerry, has become such a simple pastime that it is by now a bore. But once and a while one of the elite let the mask slip and offer the candid reason why they excuse themselves from the same standards »
September 25, 2023 — John Hinderaker

No Need to Swim the Rio Grande

Featured imageThe Biden administration is doing all it can to maximize the number of illegal immigrants entering the country before a Republican administration can take over and stop the bleeding. The Center for Immigration Studies has used a FOIA request to shed light on an almost unbelievable aspect of the administration’s selling out of America: A little-known part of the Biden administration’s CBP One parole program permits inadmissible [Ed.: Illegal] aliens »
September 25, 2023 — Steven Hayward

The Daily Chart: The Immigration Crisis

Featured imageAs John noted yesterday, recent polls show public approval of the Biden Administration’s handling of immigration and border security is about 23 percent, which means Biden isn’t even holding a majority of Democrats. As to the claim that “the border is secure,” Mark Perry provides, as always, this handy visual refutation: Looking ahead to next year’s campaign, I hope Republicans will have the wit to recreate Pete Wilson’s highly effective »
September 26, 2023 — John Hinderaker

Target: Not So Blue

Featured imageTarget Corporation has been even more woke than most large companies, but there are limits. Target has been vocal about the damage that organized retail theft is doing to its bottom line. Now the other shoe has dropped. The Wall Street Journal reports: Target is closing nine stores across four states because of theft and organized retail crime. The Minneapolis-based retailer said Tuesday stores in the New York City, Seattle, »
September 26, 2023 — Steven Hayward

The Daily Chart: Biased Tests?

Featured imageThe four-minute excerpt on Twitter of Heather Mac Donald’s appearance with me at Berkeley Law three weeks ago has racked up 1.5 million views, and is still spreading. At one point separately in the program I walked through the differences in high SAT scores for math, shown in the first figure below. The BLM crowd heckled that the tests are biased or don’t measure true “merit.” Of course, this objection »
September 26, 2023 — Scott Johnson

Possession obsession

Featured imageAxios has posted a barebones report that Hunter Biden has a new lawsuit. NRO has slightly more on it here. In the new lawsuit Biden accuses Rudy Giuliani and attorney Robert Costello of “hacking into, tampering with, manipulating, copying, disseminating, and generally obsessing over data that they were given that was taken or stolen from Plaintiff’s devices or storage platforms, including what Defendants claim to have obtained from Plaintiff’s alleged »
September 25, 2023 — John Hinderaker

The Twitter Files, Live and In Person

Featured imageThis Real Clear Opinion Research survey has disquieting news about Americans’ tolerance of censorship. Carl Cannon comments on the results, including the partisan breakdown. Suffice it to say that not many Democrats are going to the wall for free speech these days. But I want to comment on just one aspect of that survey: It is remarkable that the number of people who think the government should censor “hateful posts »
September 25, 2023 — John Hinderaker

Those Pagan Democrats

Featured imageIt is generally known that Republicans are more likely to be religious than Democrats; in fact, this may be the most basic fault line in our contemporary politics. But the speed with which Democrats are abandoning religion is remarkable. This chart, from Gallup via Breitbart, shows it graphically. The percentage of Democrats describing themselves as religious has dropped from 60% in 1999 to only 37%–a rather small minority–today: Note that »
September 25, 2023 — Lloyd Billingsley

Authoritarian the Librarian

Featured imageThe onset of Autumn is a good time to recall summer stories that failed to get the attention they deserved. Consider, for example, what happened in Davis, California, back on August 20. The Stephens Davis Branch Library hosted an event by Moms for Liberty (MFL) of Yolo County, featuring speakers formerly with the California Interscholastic Federation (CIF) and NCAA, as well as legal experts in Title IX and women’s rights »