ENTHUSIASM! Some Nevada caucus sites facing volunteer shortages. Plus: “At Rancho High School, a caucus location with 11 precincts just outside of Las Vegas, almost all of the volunteers were high school students, many of whom are unable to vote themselves because of their age. The only adult that NBC News spotted working at the site was the caucus lead — the school’s social studies teacher. The students were only trained Friday night, and officials were actively looking for more adult volunteers to help coach the teens through the process.”

Hmm. I’m sure it would be partisan and inappropriate for a teacher to use his students to provide labor for the GOP, but since it’s the Democrats I guess it’s okay as an educational experience. But this doesn’t bode well for improving things post-Iowa.

Related: “It was my understanding that there would be no math.”

CONFUSION AND CHAOS ON HOW THE HELL THE MATH WORKS pic.twitter.com/LgC2saEH7c

— Comfortably Smug (@ComfortablySmug) February 22, 2020

Classical reference above.

ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY: Bernie Sanders calls out MSNBC over campaign coverage.

Bernie Sanders went ballistic at NBC and MSNBC execs ahead of the Democratic debate this week — jabbing one top TV exec repeatedly in the face with his finger and accusing the networks of offensive negative coverage.

Surging Sanders stormed through the walk-through for the Las Vegas debate, singling out one top producer at the end and aggressively sticking his finger in his face. One shocked witness said, “Bernie marched right up to NBC and MSNBC’s head of creative production and began jabbing his finger right in his face, yelling, ‘Your coverage of my campaign is not fair . . . Your questions tonight are not going to be fair to me.’ ”

Communists take the idea of controlling the media quite literally.

I LOVE HOW MUCH HORSEPOWER EVEN THE LOW-END HOT CARS HAVE TODAY: 2020 Mercedes-AMG GT Is All About That Base.

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

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

WEIRD SCIENCE:

● Microdosed LSD: Finally A Breakthrough For Alzheimer’s Disease?

—Forbes, yesterday.

● This Is What Happens When You Take 550 Doses of LSD At Once. Accidental LSD overdoses are not fun. But for some, they can have a bizarrely beneficial effect.*

—Vice.com (appropriately enough), yesterday.

* Or it could get you sacked from Pink Floyd. Don’t try this at home, kids.

HMM: Don’t buy China’s story: The coronavirus may have leaked from a lab.

UPDATE: The CDC has found no evidence to support the claim that COVID-19 was engineered in a Chinese lab. Instead, the virus is believed to have started in animals, who then spread it to humans. You can read more about the origins of COVID-19 on the CDC’s website.

A LITTLE VODKAPUNDIT SOMETHING FOR OUR PJMEDIA/TOWNHALL VIP MEMBERS: Donks 2020: Your Nevada Caucus Preview. “Tonight’s Nevada caucus is where union-member fear of Medicare-for-All — which would take away their generous health benefits — is supposed to boost Joe Biden at Bernie Sanders’ expense. Biden’s campaign has been in free fall since Iowa but Mini Mike isn’t on the ballot and I understand that write-in votes are not allowed. But even with strong dislike for Sanders in union-heavy Las Vegas, RCP’s latest poll average has Sanders out in front by 2-to-1 over nearest rivals Biden and Pete Buttigieg. So Nevada has an anything goes feel to it.“

If you’ve been thinking of becoming a member, the VODKAPUNDIT promo code is still good for a nice little discount. If not, for non-members this evening I’ll drunkblog the Nevada returns over a cayenne-rubbed ribeye and a pitcher of margaritas.

DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Heather Mac Donald on Yale against Western Art.

Barringer also claims that it was “problematic” to put European art on a pedestal when so many other regions and traditions were “equally deserving of study.” The courses that will replace the surveys will not claim to “be the mainstream with everything else pushed to the margins,” he told the Daily News. Leave aside for the moment whether the European tradition may legitimately form the core of an art history education in an American university. The premise of Barringer’s statement—that previously European art was put on a pedestal and everything else was pushed to the margins—is blatantly false. The department requires art history majors to take two introductory-level one-semester survey courses. Since at least 2012, the department has offered courses in non-Western art that can fulfill that requirement in lieu of the European surveys. Those classes include “Introduction to the History of Art: Buddhist Art and Architecture”; “Introduction to the History of Art: Sacred Art and Architecture”; “Global Decorative Arts”; “The Politics of Representation”; and “The Classical Buddhist World.” No one was forced into the two Western art courses.

Rod Dreher asks:

Are people at Yale paying for an education? Or are they paying for credentialism that allows them access to the American elite? Why would you want to be part of a class and subculture so filled with hatred toward what is beautiful, and what is one’s own? These American educational elites are pathological.

Again, Arendt:

The members of the elite did not object at all to paying a price, the destruction of civilization, for the fun of seeing how those who had been excluded unjustly in the past forced their way into it.

Exit quote: “It was only toward the middle of the twentieth century that the inhabitants of many European countries came, in general unpleasantly, to the realization that their fate could be influenced directly by intricate and abstruse books of philosophy.”

Related: Greek and Latin are hard: Oxford classics faculty proposes dropping Homer and Virgil from required curriculum so female students will do better on the tests.

“SHOCK WAVE:” LA Times troubled by Trump’s “flipping” of the 9th Circuit.

This “shock wave” is just a nonsense comment, an attempt to paint these appointments as some sort of unprecedented makeover just seven years after Reid and Obama did the same damned thing on the other coast. It’s as overblown as the hyperbole over the Ninth Circuit’s rate of reversals.

It does serve one purpose, however — to remind conservatives and moderates about the consequences of the next election. Who do they want to see appointing the next two Supreme Court justices and dozens of appellate judges — Bernie Sanders or Donald Trump? It’s still going to be the judiciary, smartypants.

Read the whole thing.

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): When Democrats dominate the judiciary we’re told — even by Chief Justice Roberts, who certainly knows better — that judges have no party. When Republicans dominate, we’re told the judiciary has become “politicized.”

GRADUALLY, AND THEN SUDDENLY: How Blue Apron Became a Massive $2 Billion Disaster.

After losing another $23.7 million in the last three months of 2019, Blue Apron is laying off 240 workers and shutting down the shop at its Arlington, Texas warehouse location. Blue Apron will keep, for now, its California and New York assembly-and-distribution shops, while leaders ponder peddling what’s left at a paltry $50 million price tag. Meanwhile, customers continue to desert Blue Apron, down to 351,000 in the last quarter of 2019, from 557,000 the year before.

Selling off Blue Apron that low would mean a loss in the neighborhood of $143 million for Blue Apron’s capital investors, including Fidelity and Goldman Sachs. That hurts, but as usual, retail investors took the worst hit. Stock-market playing rubes, who bought in when Blue Apron went public at $11 a share, have lost more than 80% on their investment—and that represents a recovery. Shares were trading for $3.60 at the close on Wednesday, up from 2018 when Blue Apron was worth less than a dollar.

* * * * * * * *

As Marketwatch reported, Blue Apron hopes to get swallowed up by another company, possibly food giants Kraft Heinz, Walmart or even Starbucks. All of those companies have presences in almost every city. They could, in theory, produce ready-to-cook meals at scale and duplicate costs like storage and sourcing items.

We’ve been a big fan of Blue Apron since shortly after its debut in 2012, but as the above New York Observer article notes, “Blue Apron lost even its novelty factor. Instead of having the uncooked-meal-delivery game to itself, Blue Apron signaled a potential opportunity for a horde of far more established competitors, all of whom had lower costs and more diversified revenue streams.” There are now plenty of competitors to experiment with, but we’ll miss the blue box arriving every Tuesday.

Related: Blue Apron is closing its Dallas area meal-kit fulfillment center, cutting 240 jobs.

WITH THIS AND THE RIC GRENELL APPOINTMENT, THE LEFT WILL GO FROM “TRUMP IS HOMOPHOBIC” TO “TRUMP IS SECRETLY GAY” IN 3, 2, 1. . . . ‘Great!’: Donald Trump tweets his approval of gay Bollywood rom-com after India reversed strict same-sex laws – as film is banned in Dubai.

ACTUALLY, THE MUSCLE IS THE POINT, THE “MORALITY” IS JUST THE EXCUSE: For the Left, Morality Needs Muscle Behind It.

ESQUIRE BULLIES ACTOR/DIRECTOR JOHN KRASINSKI: Are you now, or have you ever been a conservative?

I’m so old, I can remember when the left explicitly railed against ideologically-based attacks on Hollywood artists.

IT’S BEEN CAREFULLY NURTURED BY ALL THE BEST PEOPLE: ‘Oikophobia’: Our Western Self-Hatred.

I LIKE THIS SANDERS NICKNAME, SEEN ON FACEBOOK: “Breadline Bernie.”

‘TWAS THE TALK OF THE TOWN: The Pretenders’ Chrissie Hynde ‘threads’ powerful letter to Trump about freeing Assange.

CORONAVIRUS: IMF lowers global growth forecast, warns of ‘more dire scenarios.’

MIRACLE MILESTONE: The U.S. Olympic hockey team staged the upset of the ages 40 years ago.

“Cannot even imagine how hard Bernie took this,” Scott Lincicome of the CATO Institute tweets.

WHY DO NEVERTRUMPERS THINK THEY CAN RUN THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY?

Max Boot, fedora still tipped dramatically to one side, warned Democrats that Trump may exploit Sanders’s history of communist praise, making him an untenable candidate for the general election:

‘Sanders carries decades of ideological baggage, having praised Communist regimes and joined a socialist party that took Iran’s side during the hostage crisis. Sanders’s Democratic opponents haven’t exploited this record. Trump won’t have any such reticence.’

Bill Kristol, who displayed his conservative principles by donating to the campaign of blackface-wearing and late-term abortion-supporting Virginia governor Ralph Northam, lamented that people like him would ‘very much prefer a choice other than Trump or Sanders.’ Kristol also recently insisted that Democrats ‘can do better than socialism,’ a rather charitable assertion from someone who just ‘came out’ as a Democrat a couple of weeks ago.

Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin sarcastically tweeted that it’s ‘just brilliant’ for Democrats to nominate a socialist who just had a heart attack, while former GOP strategist Steve Schmidt declared a Bernie candidacy a ‘death sentence’ for the Dems. Alongside Schmidt, the potty-mouthed Rick Wilson and slovenly George Conway have launched the Lincoln Project, a group dedicated solely to defeating Trump, even if it elevates Democrats.

* * * * * * * *

It is wild to watch the individuals who pilloried the idea of Trump winning in 2016 now offer their unsolicited advice on how to defeat him. The arrogance required to be consistently wrong about the political developments of the past decade and then still insist they know better is really quite something.

Who could have seen this coming? Or as a legendary community advisor warned in 2010, “We don’t mind the Republicans joining us. They can come for the ride, but they gotta sit in back.”

CHANGE: Coronavirus and the ‘Working From Home’ Economy.

We have a contingency plan at the law school — set up during the Avian Flu scare a decade ago, and since updated — for teaching classes online if we have to shut down. Hope we don’t wind up using it.

THE POWER LINE WEEK IN PICTURES: Caucasoid Caucus Edition.

HOTS ON FOR NOWHERE: MSNBC Hopes for ‘Global Financial Crisis’ Helping Dems in 2020.

It’s the return of what Virginia Postrel dubbed “Depression Lust” in the fall of 2008.