TWO-THIRDS IN SURVEY SAY MAKE CHINA PAY: A new TIPP survey conducted for the Center for Security Policy finds majorities of Democrats and Republicans think China should be made to pay reparations for the Coronavirus pandemic.

Notes the center’s J. Michael Waller, a senior analyst:

“While southerners and Midwesterners are most likely to think that the Chinese government created the virus and is responsible for unleashing the pandemic, people in the more liberal Northeast are the toughest when it comes to making China pay reparations if an investigation reveals an accidental release from a government lab.

“These are astonishing numbers. They reveal a powerful narrowing of the gap since the pandemic began a year and a half ago. The American people are taking an increasingly hard line toward the Chinese regime.”

MICHAEL WALSH: What Is to Be Done? See the Adversary Clearly.

Operation Barn Door began on the morning of Nov. 5, 2020, when the Trump “campaign” suddenly realized it should have been paying attention—over the previous two years!—to what the Democrats were up to via the George Soros-funded secretaries of state project. It involved an entirely futile and doomed last stand to somehow overturn the certified (a better word would be “rubber-stamped,” which is all the legislatures and the Congress actually do) results according to the timetables laid down by law. At that point, there simply wasn’t enough time for the Trump team to do what it should’ve been doing from the 2018 congressional elections onward.

This doesn’t speak to whether the election was “stolen.” Democrats have cheated since the first Democratic vice-president, Aaron Burr, killed one of the Founding Fathers while he was the sitting vice president, and later attempted to sell out his country. (Naturally, he got away with both crimes.) As I often say, they’re a criminal organization masquerading as a political party. But by the afternoon of Jan. 20, Trump was an ex-president, and there’s nothing anyone can, or could have done, to change that.

The sore-loser Texas Democrats who have recently fled the state rather than lose a vote on election reform in the Lone Star State will eventually admit defeat, as they’ve done throughout their history—most notably in Wisconsin in 2011. But it should be clear by now to everyone that they’re no respecter of traditions or persons or laws or ethics or anything other than the aggrandizement of political power by any means necessary.

Read the whole thing.

GOVERNMENTS GOING AFTER JOURNO TWEETS: Reuters reports that Twitter has received 26 percent more government requests to take down tweets by journalists in the last half of 2020. Bet you’re not surprised to hear that bureaucrats go to Twitter with such requests. India was the top requester, beating the U.S. for the first time in the Twitter compilation.

FOLLOW THE SCIENCE KARENS: Fauci Says Kids as Young as 3 Years Old Should Wear Masks.

JOEL KOTKIN: California Fleeing: Some deny the Golden State’s demographic decline, but data make it hard to ignore.

Some longtime Californians view the continued net outmigration from their state as a worrisome sign, but most others in the Golden State’s media, academic, and political establishment dismiss this demographic decline as a “myth.” The Sacramento Bee suggests that it largely represents the “hate” felt toward the state by conservatives eager to undermine California’s progressive model. Local media and think tanks generally concede the migration losses but comfort themselves with the thought that California continues to attract top-tier talent and will remain an irrepressible superpower that boasts innovation, creativity, and massive capital accumulation.

Reality reveals a different picture. California may be a great state in many ways, but it also is clearly breaking bad. Since 2000, 2.6 million net domestic migrants, a population larger than the cities of San Francisco, San Diego, and Anaheim combined, have moved from California to other parts of the United States. (See Figure 1.) California has lost more people in each of the last two decades than any state except New York—and they’re not just those struggling to compete in the high-tech “new economy.” During the 2010s, the state’s growth in college-educated residents 25 and over did not keep up with the national rate of increase, putting California a mere 34th on this measure, behind such key competitors as Florida and Texas. California’s demographic woes are real, and they pose long-term challenges that need to be confronted. . . .

California was once seen as a paragon of youthful energy, but it is gradually ditching the surfboard and adopting the walker. From 2010 to 2018, California’s population aged 50 percent more rapidly than the rest of the country, according to data from the American Community Survey. By 2036, seniors will be a larger share of the state’s population than will people under 18.

The Blue Model doesn’t work, except for the politicians and their cronies.

CONGRESSMAN AND THE CHINESE MASSEUSE: No, this is not yet another Rep. Eric Swalwell story. This one is about another Democrat, Rep. Ron Kind of Wisconsin, who, according to The Washington Free Beacon, leased property to a Chinese masseuse with a very spotty record.

THE DEMOCRATS AND THE MEDIA (BUT I REPEAT MYSELF) HAVE DELIBERATELY CREATED THIS CLIMATE OF HATE: Disgusting: Delivery driver tampered with NYPD officer’s food claiming ‘we at war.’

OUT ON A LIMB: Come On, Fact Checkers, Republicans Did Not Defund the Police. “Here’s an easy test to see whether fact-checking websites can make any claim to be ‘independent’ and nonpartisan in tone. Biden staffers claimed Republicans ‘defunded the police.’ That’s a bald-faced lie.”

JUST IN CASE YOU FORGOT DURING THE PANDEMIC HOW MUCH FUN IT IS TO DEAL WITH OUR AIRLINE MONOPSONY: Recently, I booked a last-minute ticket on Delta. I used flight credits from a pre-pandemic flight that was canceled, no new payment required. I rushed to the airport with my family, and tried to check in. No dice. I went to the counter. The man behind the counter told me that I need the credit card used to purchase the ticket. I explained that (a) I did not use a credit card to purchase the ticket, given that there was no charge; and (b) I don’t have the credit card the system is saying that I need to present (which I assume was saved in my Delta profile). Nevertheless, the Delta employee insisted that I needed to show the credit card I used to purchase the ticket. The ultimate resolution was that he had to cancel and then rebook the ticket, a process that required him to call into the Delta call center and which took almost an hour. We would have missed our flight but for a fortuitous weather delay–all because I couldn’t present the card I used to purchase the ticket, which never actually happened. I would have been mollified by an apology by Delta after I alerted them to what happened via their Twitter help handle, but nothing.

OPEN THREAD: It’s a buzz, it’s a gas, it’s a real scream.

GO WOKE, GO BROKE, ATLANTIC: Mark Hemingway of The Federalist says things are not looking good inside The Atlantic. Apparently, running a formerly prestigious magazine like a DNC news release operation is not such a smart formula.

AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: CNN Says Cuban Protests Likely Due To Climate Change.

GREAT! NOW DO PULSED NUCLEAR. NASA, DOE fund three nuclear thermal space propulsion concepts.

“Pulsed nuclear” is the polite way of saying Orion. If the Chinese beat us to this, don’t say you weren’t warned.

ANDREW FERGUSON: Before the Flood.

“In Hollywood during the early 1970s,” [Ronald] Brownstein writes [in his new book, Rock Me on the Water: 1974, The Year Los Angeles Transformed Movies, Music, Television, and Politics], “the boldest statements about America, the most piercing social critiques, came from a large group of other directors who were, like [Robert] Altman, born decades before the boomers.” Aside from Altman, director of M*A*S*H and Nashville, he mentions Arthur Penn (Bonnie and Clyde), Sam Peckinpah (The Wild Bunch), and Hal Ashby (Coming Home), among others. Indeed, the reactionaries of Brownstein’s account, creating much more traditional, resolutely apolitical movies, were most of them boomers, or close to it: George Lucas (American Graffiti), Peter Bogdanovich (Paper Moon), and above all Steven Spielberg (Jaws et seq.). Spielberg didn’t succumb to the infection of relevance until The Color Purple in 1985, and even then he spent the rest of the year producing The Goonies.

By the way, Brownstein’s line about “the most piercing social critiques” and “bold statements about America” is just how liberals talk about other liberals; the rest of us are free to translate “piercing social critiques” as “leftwing cant.” Brownstein isn’t an ideologue, though, and he’s too smart to be completely suckered by boomer nostalgia and self-aggrandizement. He knows what’s hard to ignore: Most of the supposed idealism of the ’60s and ’70s turned to dross. At book’s end he tells the revolting tale of Roman Polanski, director of 1974’s best movie, Chinatown, and his conviction a few years later for raping a child. The arc of 1974 is long, and it bends toward pedophilia, at least in Polanski’s case.

Ouch. Similarly, here’s your exit quote, regarding Jane Fonda: “Any decade that transforms a sex kitten into a Maoist cannot be counted a success.”

Read the whole thing.

CUBA’S AUTHORITARIAN REPRESSION IS A FEATURE OF SOCIALISM, NOT A BUG.

In his 1976 article, “The Intelligent Co-Ed’s Guide to America,” Tom Wolfe wrote:

The publication of The Gulag Archipelago in 1973, however, was a wholly unexpected blow…Yet Solzhenitsyn went still further. He said that not only Stalinism, not only Leninism, not only Communism — but socialism itself led to the concentration camps; and not only socialism, but Marxism; and not only Marxism but any ideology that sought to reorganize morality on an a priori basis. Sadder still, it was impossible to say that Soviet socialism was not “real socialism.” On the contrary — it was socialism done by experts!

As is its Cuban spin-off, which is long overdue for being cancelled.

DON’T TRUST CHINA, OR ITS DEFENDERS: The foreigners in China’s disinformation drive. “Co-ordinated videos have recently been appearing on foreign vloggers’ channels to counter investigative reports from independent media on the treatment of China’s Uyghur community in its north-west Xinjiang region.”

MICROBIOME NEWS: Bacteria are key to vaginal health, researchers say.

[WATCH] PSAKI REFUSES TO CONDEMN COMMUNISM BY NAME.

Unexpectedly:

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Replace her with this kid:

OH, NO! Shep Smith’s Low Ratings Are Causing “Turmoil” at CNBC; Smith Throws “Temper Tantrums.”

ANTONIO GARCÍA MARTÍNEZ: The Real Cuba Isn’t a Potemkin Airbnb.

To live in Cuba is to live in a web of lies. It begins with the media, which is pure propaganda repeated by everyone, chorus-like, or else. As a cope, everyone has a half-dozen make-believe realities in their heads, which they selectively deploy depending on whom they’re addressing. I’d ask person A about person B and they’d warn me they worked for the state and to be careful. Then I’d then speak to person B and they’d tell me the same about person A. Perhaps both were correct. I wasn’t exempt: I’d lie about what I was doing in Cuba since I wasn’t supposed to be there. Everything is a regimented fantasy. Underneath it is an ever-shifting haze of rumor, speculation, and wishful thinking.

The American tourists who visited Cuba during the Obama period saw nothing other than a Potemkin Airbnb reality they inhabited for a few dollar-fueled days. To really feel the brunt of the Cuban state you need to live as Cubans do, or run afoul of the sliver of relative freedom the state affords foreigners. I’ll share two anecdotes where that normally translucent atmosphere of repression revealed itself to me.

The first occurred while I was meeting one of the tiny number of independent journalists who around 2017 were tentatively stepping out of the official channels and launching their own blogs. (He’s in the United States now but I’ll keep his name out of it.) The scene was the Café Mamainé, one of the few trendy hangout spots that had sprung up in the relatively upscale Vedado neighborhood of Havana. The journalist was recounting his independent reporting from the eastern part of the island after Hurricane Irma, when the government (as with COVID) was caught horribly unprepared.

“By showing the reality of the government’s lack of preparation, we hope to increase accountability in our democratic process….”

Me, the idiot American who didn’t quite understand yet how this worked, interrupted him: ”What accountability? What democracy? This is a total dictatorship.”

He stared at me like I’d relieved myself on the cafe’s floor, looked quickly around us, and then proceeded to utterly ignore what I’d just said as if it hadn’t happened. In Cuba, there’s very much a Set of Things You Cannot Say. “Cancellation” is a rather harder proposition there than it is in the U.S.

The second example was at a festive barbecue held in the studio space of one of the small number of Cuban artists who have managed to sell their pieces overseas for hard dollars. The company was friendly, composed of sets of mutual friends with family in tow. The hour was late, rum had flowed, and per usual, the Cubans settled down to a convivial game of double-nine dominoes. One boy, I’d guess his age around nine or ten, was engaged in the age-old ritual of punking his elders by telling salty jokes he’d heard from adults. It was the classic humor format of putting different stock characters in a comedic situation, and joking about how they’d handle it. In this case, the joke was about waiting interminably for a bus, a common Cuban occupation:

Y la divorciada (and the divorced woman)…

Hahaha….

Y el cuentapropista (and the small-business owner)…

Hahaha…

Y el fidelista (and the Fidel supporter)…

Suddenly the warm atmosphere was shattered as everyone, as if on a pre-arranged signal, raised their voices at once. Everyone chastised him loudly, as you would a child about to stick their hand into a fire. One couldn’t joke about Fidel supporters, even in a private social setting among friends: who knew who was an informant? Nobody wanted the knock on the door or the acto de repudio the next day.

And just like that, the domino game went on and the boy stopped with his jokes. The reflex was automatic, as natural as covering your face when sneezing.

That’s the reality of Cuba you don’t see from a tourist hotel.

The Castro regime has long viewed The Lives of Others as a how-to guide for better government.

Read the whole thing, which includes a cameo from then-Governor Reagan in 1967.

OUT: OUR GERMANS ARE BETTER THAN THEIR GERMANS. IN: OUR CHINESE ARE BETTER THAN THEIR CHINESE.

PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE RESULTS: Cuban protests risk exacerbating COVID-19 spike – [Pan American Health Organization].

—Reuters, today.

Flashbacks to last year:

● After telling GOP to downsize convention due to COVID-19, N.C. governor marches in crowded protest.

● NJ governor admits COVID-19 double standard, says recent protests are different from business owners’ complaints.

● De Blasio: Large Group Protests Are Acceptable, Religious Observances Are Not.

● NPR: Dozens of public health and disease experts have signed an open letter in support of the nationwide anti-racism protests. “White supremacy is a lethal public health issue that predates and contributes to COVID-19,” they wrote.

● ‘Did I miss the memo?’: Hospital workers in full PPE applaud George Floyd protesters as they march past.

Related: The Suicide of Expertise.

BIDENFLATION! Another inflation siren sounding: Producer prices post record spike.

FASTER, PLEASE: The U.S. Military Is Testing a Pill That Could Delay Aging. “Breaking Defense says the molecule in question is something called nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide (NAD+). MetroBiotech touts NAD+ as a treatment for mitochondrial diseases in particular. Mitochondria are organelles (cell parts) that we often call the factory or powerhouse of the cell because they produce energy for the cell. This is in the form of a chemical called adenosine triphosphate (ATP).”

Good. I’ve been taking NAD+ supplements for years.

YOU SPELLED “CUOMO-ASS-COVERING APPROACH” WRONG: New York takes conservative approach counting virus deaths. “The federal government’s count of the COVID-19 death toll in New York has 11,000 more victims than the tally publicized by the administration of Gov. Andrew Cuomo, which has stuck with a far more conservative approach to counting virus deaths.”