MARK STEYN AT THE MOVIES: Richard Curtis’ 2003 British hit Love Actually, versus Billy Wilder’s 1960 classic, The Apartment. 

A lot of it’s the script, a lot of it’s the chemistry between Lemmon and MacLaine. But, for whatever reason, The Apartment is one of the best, both Yuletide-wise and masterpiece-wise — oh, and uniforms-wise. I’ve never been much of a dress-up fetishist, but I do think Shirley MacLaine’s elevator get-up is awfully cute. If anyone’s minded to send me a specialty strippergram next birthday, that’s my choice. (Last year there was a booking error and I wound up with the open-bathrobed Charlie Rose-alike Chippendale.)

Heh, indeed. Read the whole thing.™

BRIAN LEITER IS CORRECT: It’s a good thing the President of the AALS doesn’t really matter to legal education.

I’ll just note, as an aside, that the idea at the conclusion of Dean Dickerson’s letter that law schools should be “transformed” into “anti-racist institutions” [as distinct from being non-racist ones that comply with equal opportunity laws] would portend a massive violation of the academic freedom of all faculty (for example)– just as transforming law schools into “anti-communist” or “anti-capitalist” institutions would. Law schools exist to train lawyers and produce knowledge about the law, not to promote extraneous social goals, even meritorious ones.

The nice thing about taking on fuzzy missions like “anti-racism” is that there’s no danger of being assessed according to concrete metrics.

THIN BLUE LINE: Italian Police Use Lamborghini Huracan to Transport Kidney 300 Miles in Just Two Hours.

NOT THE BABYLON BEE: Seattle is considering making it legal to steal, as long as you’re poor and plan on selling the items. Wait, what?

DISPATCHES FROM THE SOCIAL MEDIA VIRUS: Google’s YouTube Shuts Down Dilbert Creator Scott Adams.

Abandoning the decentralized Blogosphere for the walled gardens of Facebook, Twitter and YouTube was a huge mistake, particularly for conservatives. Somebody should write a book about the reasons why.

ZODIAC KILLER’S CIPHER FINALLY SOLVED – 51 YEARS LATER:

Oranchak, the Virginia software developer, told CNN that “”It was incredible” to decipher the killer’s code.

“It was a big shock, I never really thought we’d find anything because I had grown so used to failure,” he told the outlet. “When I first started, I used to get excited when I would see some words come through — they were like false positives, phantoms. I had grown used to that. It was a long shot — we didn’t even really know if there was a message.”

Oranchak has been reportedly trying to decode the killer’s ciphers cine 2006.

Has anyone reached out to Ted Cruz for a statement?

UPDATE (FROM GLENN):

RIP: Charley Pride, Country Music’s First Black Superstar, Dies of COVID-19 at 86.

REVIEW: B&T’s 9 mm GHM9 Gen 2.

AT AMAZON, Shop Amazon Warehouse Deals – Deep Discounts on Open-box and Used Products.

Plus, Shop Amazon Outlet – Clearance, Markdowns and Overstock Deals.

RED FLAG: Paul Krugman is optimistic about the economy.

Obligatory flashbacks: PAUL KRUGMAN ON ELECTION NIGHT 2016: “If the question is when markets will recover, a first-pass answer is never.”

From March: GIVEN HIS TRACK RECORD, THIS IS THE BEST NEWS I’VE SEEN IN WEEKS: Paul Krugman: Market signaling a ‘permanent recession.’

And from November: ‘It’s a miracle!’ Paul Krugman spotted doing a quick economic one-eighty with ‘Biden boom’ prediction:

TAKING A SECOND LOOK AT WWII WITH VICTOR DAVIS HANSON’S THE SECOND WORLD WARS.

My review at Ed Driscoll.com. Where else will you see Mussolini’s Italian biplanes fighting in the Battle of Britain?

(Bumped.)

WELL, GOOD: Rectal cancer patients who ‘watch and wait’ may only need few years of stringent follow-up. “An international team of scientists, including doctors from the Champalimaud Clinical Centre, in Lisbon, has just published results in the prestigious journal The Lancet Oncology that suggest that the majority of rectal cancer patients may be able, in the not so distant future, to replace aggressive colorectal surgery with a course of radiochemotherapy and few years of close surveillance. All this with a very low probability of seeing their tumor regrow locally or leading to the development of distant metastases later on if they survived the first years after treatment without signs of reappearance of the tumor.”

OVER TO YOU, ACB: Biden Aide Promises “Big, Bold” Executive Actions On Guns.

THE MODELS HAVE PERFORMED SO VERY WELL UP TO NOW: New online COVID-19 mortality risk calculator could help determine who should get vaccines first.

WOKE: Does Trump have power to pardon himself? It’s complicated.

—AP, Monday.

Bespoke: Could Joe Biden Pardon Himself, His Brother James, and Son Hunter?

—Matt Margolis, PJ Media.com, yesterday.

Matt’s article is just for our VIP members; please use the discount code LOYALTY if you’ve been thinking of becoming a supporter.

OPERATION CHOKE CHICKEN: Visa and Mastercard Submit to Politicians Trying To Put the Squeeze on Pornhub. This business of pressuring companies that are basically utilities into cutting off unpopular clients is a bad one. There was a time when we had a strong enough free-speech consensus in this country to discourage such things, but that’s been quite deliberately undermined.

GOOD: Election losses ‘shook’ Democrats and Pelosi’s taking heat, says Rep. Tim Burchett.

ROLL OVER THOMAS THE TANK: Intelino is the new Smart Train in the Toy World.

Over at the PJ Media Lifestyle section, I have a review of the Intelino Smart Train, which I first observed in action at the start of the year at the giant Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas and wrote about here at Instapundit.

(Bumped.)

GOYA’S EMPLOYEE OF THE MONTH CONTINUES TO PAY DIVIDENDS: Never Trumper Steve Schmidt’s Embarrassing Love Letter to AOC.

Related: On PBS, Hack Schmidt Brags: I Restrained McCain in Campaign With Obama:

Schmidt suggested that it would be racist to tell voters the truth about a Democratic candidate’s ties to radicals, boasting that he restrained McCain’s campaign, as he added: “No one’s going to find examples of racial demagoguery in my career. I’m the guy who wouldn’t allow the McCain campaign to run Jeremiah Wright ads because they were racially — they were racially toxic.”

Martin didn’t point out to Schmidt that, under his leadership, the McCain ticket got just 173 electoral votes and lost the popular vote by 10 million votes.

We all then lost our health insurance, but Schmidt went on to a sweet gig on MSNBC, so job well done from his point of view.

ISRAEL: A tale of two pictures. One of these groups will have a lot of kids. The other will mostly have cats.

OUR “PUBLIC HEALTH” EXPERTS ARE DANGEROUSLY IGNORANT AND DANGEROUSLY ARROGANT: The masks and the experts: America’s Covid problems are bigger than Trump.

By contrast on masks, what happened is that initially we were seeing mask-adoption driven by grassroots decision-making and experts stepped in to intervene and tell people not to wear them. That probably counts as the biggest failure of the expert public health community, and I think it bled into a larger lag among experts to really emphasize the central role of air flow in the spread of the virus.

I will put my cards on the table here. I bought a box of procedure masks sometime in mid-to-late February when the official guidance from the government and in the media was anti-mask. Not because I had any particular insight into the matter, but because the things we were being told about masks were just illogical.

Elizabeth Rosenthal writing in the New York Times opinion section did a January 28 article telling people to wash hands instead of focusing on masks. . . . Then there started to be more buzz that the real issue here was simply that the government was afraid of shortages. On February 29, the Surgeon General just blurted out that masks are simultaneously ineffective but also actually very necessary for health care providers.

Yes, a sane statement from an unexpected quarter, but we’ve descended into such a bizarre hell-world.

TRUNALIMUNUMAPRZURE! Biden in Leaked Audio Says GOP Misused ‘Defund the Police’ to Defeat Democrats in November.

Related: Under Veto Threat and During a Violent Crime Wave, Minneapolis City Council Cuts Police Budget.