[Bread and Circuses - Politics and other Silliness]

Every few years, some self-proclaimed prophet comes along with the announcement that the world is going to end on some specific date (usually because of mankind’s sins). These religious doomsayer prophets receive less publicity than in times past, only to be replaced by environmental doomsayers. Last week, the good folks at the Competitive Enterprise Institute have done a service by publishing a new paper, “Wrong Again: 50 Years of Failed Eco-pocalyptic Predictions.” Below I have taken a sample of the headlines from among the many articles the CEI staff found (the full list and complete articles can be found on the CEI website, www.CEI.org). “Scientist predicts a new ice age by 21st century” (The Boston Globe, April 16, 1970). “U.S. Scientist Sees New Ice Age Coming” (The Washington Post, July 9, 1971). “Space satellites show new Ice Age coming fast” (The Guardian, January 29, 1974). “The Cooling” (New York Times Book Review, July 18, 1976). “Acid Rain Kills Life in Lake...

By Ben Shapiro @benshapiro September 18, 2019 Last week, Democrats held their first true presidential debate. With the field winnowed down to 10 candidates — three of them actual contenders for the nomination — only one moment truly stood out. That moment came not from Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders but from a candidate desperate for attention: Beto O'Rourke. O'Rourke ran in 2018 for a Senate seat in Texas and lost in shockingly narrow fashion to incumbent Republican Sen. Ted Cruz. But his persona at the time was more Biden than Bernie: He ran as a unifying quasi-moderate, an Obama-esque figure determined to bring Americans together. In the early going of the presidential race, Beto was figured to be a prime contender: An April poll showed him in a solid third place. But he's faded dramatically; now the once-media darling is polling below 3%. So O'Rourke has refashioned himself into a woke warrior. He's declared that he wants to forcibly rem...

WALSH: Media Trumpets Study Claiming That All ‘Unwanted’ Sex Is Rape. That Is Insane And Dangerous. Here's Why. By Matt Walsh @mattwalshblog September 18, 2019 The media this week is trumpeting a study that makes a shocking claim: One in every 16 women say their first sexual experience was rape. As NPR notes, this is just "the tip of the iceberg." The one-in-16 figure — over 6% of all women between the ages of 18 and 44 — could even be an "underestimate," we're assured. News reports on this study have, of course, tied these revelations to the #MeToo movement. We are meant to come away with the impression that America is chock-full of rapists, and millions upon millions of women have fallen victim to the millions upon millions of predators lurking behind every corner. A closer look at the data, however, reveals a drastically different picture. There is no reason to artificially inflate rape statistics — rape is horrible enough, and far too common already — bu...

Gazette (Colorado Springs, Colo.) Posted On 11:35 am September 5, 2019 The life cycle of labor unions is predictable, the late economist Sylvester Petro once wrote. Because they are born not out of mutual exchange, but out of state-backed coercion, American unions inevitably face eventual demise triggered by their own corruption. The aged United Auto Workers union may be approaching that moment of extinction. After a four-year federal investigation into UAW bribes, kickbacks, and crony labor negotiations, the government has secured prison sentences for eight people connected to the union, Fiat Chrysler, and Automobiles NV, according to the Detroit News. The feds raided six locations, including the home of UAW President Gary Jones, and say they have evidence of blatant corruption, including “wads” of cash and files that conf...

I first met Elizabeth Warren when she was a professor at Harvard Law School in 2004. She was fresh off the publication of her bestselling book, "The Two-Income Trap." There was no doubt she was politically liberal — our only face-to-face meeting involved a recruitment visit at the W Hotel in Los Angeles, where she immediately made some sort of disparaging remark about Rush Limbaugh — but at the time, Warren was making waves for her iconoclastic views. She wasn't a doctrinaire leftist, spewing Big Government nostrums. She was a creative thinker.   That creative thinking is obvious in "The Two-Income Trap," which discusses the rising number of bankruptcies among middle-class parents, particularly women with children. The book posits that women entered the workforce figuring that by doing so, they could have double household income. But so many women entered the workforce that they actually inflated prices for basic goods like housi...