(FORTUNE Magazine) – You need not be a weatherperson to know whence the breezes blow, and you do not have to be a neoconservative in order to feel morose these days. But it helps. As the Bush Administration celebrates its first 100 days in office, we find ourselves making little lists of reasons for morosity. To be sure, the Bushies are not to blame for all or even most of the items listed below, as they are by no means the sole proponents of kindism-gentlism and anyway did not cause rampant teenage dopiness. -- The minimum wage. Here we find the Bush Administration to the left of the New York Times. The Times, which began seeing the light on this issue about eight years ago, now correctly points out that the minimum wage causes employers to create fewer jobs and adds that the mandated higher wages typically go to nonpoor kids working at temporary jobs. The Kennedy Democrats are nevertheless determined to push through a whopping increase in the minimum, from the present $3.35 an hour to $4.55 within three years. The Bush Administration is mindlessly supporting a rise but insisting that the figure shouldn't go beyond $4.25. Some call this pragmatism. -- Harvard goes nuts. The arguably greatest university in the world recently held something called AWARE week. Purpose: to further sensitize the already supersensitive Crimsonites about the menace of racism. The keynote speaker at the opening day's event was a Colgate University psychologist named John Dovidio, who said that 85% of white Americans are subtle racists and 15% are overt racists. According to an article about it all in the New Republic, the brainwashed Harvardians raptly ''nodded in agreement.'' -- Teenage dopiness. The National Assessment of Educational Progress tells us that only 6% of American 17-year-olds can solve ''multistep problems.'' NAEP's example of the kind of problem that stops them: ''Christine borrowed $850 for one year from the Friendly Finance Co. If she paid 12% simple interest on the loan, what was the total amount she repaid?'' Correct answer: $952. Policy implication of that 6% success rate: It will take more than an Education President to solve the problems of American schools. -- Angela's return. Angela Davis, a high official of the American Communist Party, who had not been in the news for six months -- not since she was invited to speak at Dartmouth, where they were celebrating the 15th anniversary of going coed -- is back. She got maybe the biggest hand of the day for her speech at the African-American Summit, at which assorted big-name black politicians, including Jesse, were writing an ''agenda for the year 2000.'' -- The CAFE standards. Falling in readily with assorted environmentalists and statists, all of whom think they know better than the market what is the ''right'' amount of fuel economy, the Bushies are now proposing to strictly enforce and ultimately tighten the corporate average fuel economy (CAFE) standards. Nobody in the Administration seems to have noticed the prior presentation here (December 19) demonstrating with ironclad logic that the push to smaller cars, which are less safe in collisions, was already killing Americans at an annual rate of at least 2,200. -- Protecting the alcoholics. It seems actually to be true, as widely contended, that Exxon will be violating the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, which bars discrimination against the handicapped, if it now proceeds as planned to bar rehabilitated alcoholics and drug abusers from jobs involving other people's safety. When the company announced the policy in the wake of the Alaska oil spill, it was instantly denounced by scores of corporate human- resources folks arguing that the new policy would inhibit other employees from turning in alcoholics. United Airlines' medical director enlivened the discussion by loonily getting quoted thusly in the Wall Street Journal: ''You have two choices. You either have practicing alcoholics in the cockpits or you have recovering ones.'' Huh? -- Stanford goes nuts. Already reeling from bomb scares and other forms of violent protest by animal-rights activists, the university has now told faculty members that if their classwork involves animal experiments, they must proclaim that fact in the first week of the course so that any students who might be ''sensitive on this issue'' would get a chance to drop out. -- Defense spending. The Bush Administration is cutting back sharply on numerous weapons systems (e.g., Stealth, the Strategic Defense Initiative) to which George firmly committed himself during the campaign, and is now planning for an inflation-adjusted 1% decline in overall defense spending, which nobody seems bothered about because Russian defense planners are supposed to be broke. Oddly enough, however, the latest joint analysis by the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency shows that Soviet military spending is still rising at an inflation-adjusted 3%. -- Juilliard goes nuts. We learn from the New York Times that the drive against ''Eurocentrism,'' already established as a form of cultural imperialism if not racism, is spreading rapidly throughout academe and has now % reached Juilliard, New York's preeminent music school, where the kids will be studying Japanese, African, and Indian music and learning to nondiscriminatorily enthuse over works for the sitar.