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MY USA TODAY COLUMN: 2018: What could possibly go right? Five possibilities.

GLOBAL WARMING FILMS FLOP AT BOX OFFICE IN 2017:

Justin Haskins, executive editor at the right-leaning, free-market Heartland Institute, said Hollywood insiders remain fixated on saving the planet.

“They believe climate change will bring people to the movies,” Mr. Haskins said. “That’s wildly out of touch with how moviegoers feel about the issue.”

A Pew Research survey this year found that “the environment” does not rank among the top 10 public policy concerns of most Americans, trailing behind “terrorism,” “the economy,” “education” and “jobs,” among others.

Mr. Haskins said it wasn’t always this way. Hits such as “An Inconvenient Truth” and “The Day After Tomorrow,” the 2004 film that dove directly into climate change fears, touched a nerve. The box office receipts proved it. “Tomorrow” hauled in $186 million despite tepid reviews.

At the time, audiences were genuinely scared about what climate change could mean to the planet, he said. Time passed, though, and many of the frightening predictions made by Mr. Gore and like-minded activists didn’t come to fruition.

“They stopped believing the problem was as serious as what Al Gore was saying,” Mr. Haskins said.

Not surprising as Al Gore has never acted like he took the issue of climate change very seriously himself, what with selling his TV channel to Big Oil and everything. I guess his chakra just wasn’t in it.

SOME GREENHOUSE GOOD NEWS: World’s biggest nuclear plant gets long-awaited OK.

MAKING SENSE OF ‘MINDFULNESS:’ Corporate America’s Strange New Gospel. “Buddhism without Buddha promises to make workers happier and more productive:”

The embrace of mindfulness need not be understood quite so cynically as Purser and other critics do. It may in fact indicate that among reasonably enlightened, good-faith leaders in the business community, there is an understanding that something is wrong with life here in the rich, healthy, peaceful, free, capitalist world, that something is missing. But if there is a hole in the soul of the West, it probably isn’t shaped like a designer meditation cushion ($349.99 from Walmart), and it probably will not be healed by something so vague and diluted as “mindfulness.”

Read the whole thing.

CDC TO DOCS: CDC to Docs: As Flu Spikes, Ready The Antivirals. The day after our Christmas get-together, my stepmother (who was coughing a bit) came down with the flu. Helen and I got our docs to call in Tamiflu and we started taking it right away. So far so good, though some other attendees came down with it.

HMM: Kuwaiti report: US gives Israel go-ahead to kill powerful Iranian general. “US intelligence agencies have given Israel the green light to assassinate the senior Iranian responsible for coordinating military activity on behalf of the Islamic Republic in Lebanon, Syria and Iraq, according to the Kuwaiti newspaper al-Jarida.” Well, that’s possibly true. Possibly not.

But this, if true, seems bigger: “For the past 20 years or so, Qassem Soleimani has commanded the Quds Force — the branch of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards responsible for military and clandestine operations outside of the Islamic Republic. . . . Three years ago, Israel came close to assassinating Soleimani near Damascus, al-Jarida quoted unnamed source as saying, but the Americans tipped off the Iranians against the background of intense disagreement between Washington and Jerusalem. That was during the Obama administration, which, according to reports at the time, was so focused on securing the 2015 Iran nuclear accord that it chose to overlook and even obstruct efforts to clamp down on Iranian-backed terror organizations.”

And sadly plausible. (Emphasis added).

FASTER, PLEASE: FBI Raids Virginia Home of ISIS Supporter.

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THE BEST HANGOVER REMEDY IS THE DRINK YOU SKIP THE NIGHT BEFORE: Nobody really knows what’s a good hangover cure. I know some docs who swear by an IV of saline and glutathione.

THE 21st CENTURY ISN’T WORKING OUT THE WAY I HAD HOPED: NHS Patient Asks for Female Nurse But Gets Tattooed Trans Man With Stubble Instead.

ON THE UPSIDE, THEY WERE WELL-TRAINED ON SEXUAL HARASSMENT: USS John McCain crew rated it ‘below average’ before deadly collision.. “In a 163-page report detailing the results of a mandatory climate survey aboard the Navy destroyer, its 142 crew members rated 17 of 18 major categories ‘below service average.’ The survey, conducted July 21, 2016 — 13 months before the Aug. 21, 2017 crash — included questions on exhaustion, job satisfaction, organizational effectiveness and leadership prowess.”

GOOD: Iranian mullahs caught off guard by scale of protests.

MORE COVERAGE OR IRANIAN PROTESTS AT RADIO FREE EUROPE/RADIO LIBERTY: Note to former President Obama: It’s the regime, stupid.

MY USA TODAY COLUMN: 2018: What could possibly go right? Five possibilities.

IT’S THE REGIME, STUPID: Visual evidence of Iranian ballistic missile proliferation.

VIRGINIA POSTREL: Licensing Makes It Harder to Go Where the Jobs Are: Want to relocate to another state to be a teacher or a plumber? Get ready to go back to school and pass another test.

The U.S. is a continent-wide single market with free movement across state lines. This has driven economic development since the 19th century. It encouraged mass production, national distribution and labor mobility.

That calculus is changing as services, from home repair to hospitality to health care, make up a bigger chunk of personal spending and a higher proportion of jobs. You can still build a successful enterprise that spreads costs over a huge customer base — see Amazon.com Inc. or Alphabet Inc. (Google) — but many of today’s service jobs are done directly for consumers. They’re in-person and inherently local. Physical therapists and personal trainers can’t telecommute. That makes where people live all the more important to their incomes.

Economists worry that Americans are not moving to where their skills are most in demand. Migration rates have been dropping since the 1980s. The states with the highest incomes also used to have the fastest-growing populations, as Americans moved to places with better jobs. That’s no longer the case. Workers seem stuck.

“The interstate migration rate is half of what it was in 1980,” says Janna E. Johnson, an economist at the University of Minnesota’s Humphrey School of Public Affairs. One factor appears to be the high cost of housing in the most productive parts of the country. Another is the spread of occupational licensing.

About one in four Americans work in jobs that require licenses, up from a mere 5 percent in 1950, and the requirements continue to expand to new occupations. Each state determines its own licensing requirements, so a licensed professional in one state may find it hard to move to another.

Under its Commerce and 14th Amendment powers, Congress should place sharp limits on state licensing, and require reciprocity on those fields that are licensed.

DOES ‘EQUAL JUSTICE UNDER LAW’ REALLY APPLY TO THE CLINTONS? Judging by what happened in 2017 to former Rep. Corrine Brown of Florida and Kristian Saucier of the U.S. Navy, and James Comey’s Get Out of Jail card in 2016 for the former Secretary of State, the answer would appear to be no. If that is confirmed in 2018, let’s not hear another word from the Left about equality because they’ve enabled the Clintons for nearly three decades.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Another college that harassed student for passing out Constitutions changes policies after warning.

ISN’T THIS KIND OF “MEDDLING IN AN ELECTION?” Both the New York Times and IBT report that a  long-time friend and financial supporter of Hillary Clinton is reported to have paid $500,000 in an effort to assist the women who were ready to come forward with their allegations of sexual misconduct against President Donald Trump before the 2016 presidential election:

According to a report by the New York Times, Susie Tompkins Buell, founder of the clothing brand Esprit, handed over the money to celebrity lawyer Lisa Bloom, who was handling the cases of women accusing Trump of sexual harassment.

Tounge-in-cheek “meddling” question aside, it’s interesting to compare the reaction (or lack thereof) with Peter Thiel’s funding Hulk Hogan’s privacy suit against Gawker. Wags insisted that Thiel was engaging in champerty or maintenance, but there was never an allegation that Thiel directly paid a litigant, and smarter people explained what Thiel did was perfectly legal:

Funding someone else’s lawsuit for ideological reasons, long perceived as a dangerous stirring up of social conflict that might otherwise have remained at rest, is now applauded as a means of holding powerful institutions accountable, ensuring wronged parties their day in court, and so forth.

After all, few could complain that the sponsorship of the litigation in Brown v. Board of Education was unethical. It would just be nice to see an even-handed approach.

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IRAN: Ten people killed in Iran unrest on Sunday: state television. I suspect this number is quite low.

MY USA TODAY COLUMN: 2018: What could possibly go right? Five possibilities.