EVERYTHING WOKE TURNS TO SH*T:

RAND SIMBERG ON P.J. O’ROURKE: “Little-known fact: He was a big fan of space. He was on the board of The Space Foundation. He never used email, but I sent some stuff to him once via his wife, and he wrote a nice letter thanking me.”

THE SEX LIVES OF GALAXIES: Sublime New Hubble Image Reveals a Thrilling Exchange Between Two Galaxies.

“INVESTMENTS:” DOE makes changes to manage $62B in U.S. clean energy investments.

WHERE’S SAMUEL L. JACKSON WHEN YOU NEED HIM? AirAsia flight in Malaysia rerouted after snake found on board plane.

MICHAEL BARONE: Returning to normalcy on school masks.

Are we returning to normalcy?

The word “normalcy,” as history buffs know, was used — but not invented — by our only journalist president, Warren G. Harding, to sum up his 1920 campaign. Normalcy was political shorthand for returning to normal times after a European war, prosecutions of peaceful protesters, sharp inflation and depression, terrorist bombings at home, totalitarian revolutions abroad and a pandemic influenza that killed, proportionately, more than twice as many Americans as COVID-19.

Normalcy was popular, too. Harding won the popular vote 60% to 34%, the largest percentage margin in history. The fighting ended; the economy grew; political protesters were pardoned; revolutionaries slumbered. Harding ushered in a decade of widespread prosperity, technological progress and Republican victories. The appeal of normalcy transcended even the most rigid of party lines.

Normalcy’s appeal is apparent now on the issue of masks in schools. Last week, the Washington Post ran an opinion article by three Massachusetts academic physicians arguing that masks in schools are no longer needed because the few adults at risk can protect themselves.

Masks at school are “an intervention that provides little discernible benefit,” chimed in an Atlantic article by three blue-state professionals. Mandatory masking “should end when coronavirus rates return to pre-Omicron levels,” wrote Brooklyn-based New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg.

But there’s a huge group of leftist wine moms who will get a serious case of the vapors if and when that happens: “Jill Filipovic is a progressive writer who’s pro-mask but looking for an off-ramp from having to mask forever. She’s learned the hard way what happens when you share that view with a liberal crowd:”

On the other hand, as Bill Clinton’s Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders used to say as a mantra, think of the children! Watch: The Moment One Elementary School Class Learned Their Mask Mandate Was Ending.

UPDATE: Leader Of California Teachers Union Insists On Masking Children, Attends Rams Game Maskless.

AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: Xi Jinping Criticizes Trudeau’s Heavy-Handed Approach.

BETTER THAN TIDE PODS, I GUESS: Emergency calls rise as children mistake pot edibles for treats.

LET’S GO BRANDON: Burger King pulls Whopper off discount menu; parent RBI to hike prices. “Restaurant chains are raising prices because they are paying higher costs for shipping, labor, and commodities including chicken, coffee and cooking oils amid COVID-19 related disruptions. The record inflation levels and staffing disruptions due to the omicron variant dulled profits at McDonald’s Corp (MCD.N) and coffeehouse chain Starbucks Corp (SBUX.O).”

PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE RESULTS: Too weird to check: Attempted assassin in mayoral shooting a gun-control activist?

Frankly, this looks like a young man in the middle of a mental-health breakdown that’s been a long time coming. His last column at the [Louisville Courier Journal] hinted at this too, a few months before he briefly went missing:

I went to school and became exceptional. I beat the odds. My parents allowed me to invest in a bright, comfortable future where I will have earned the benefit of the doubt in a world where my skin color automatically denies me such right.

I’ve earned the right to say I’m not one of the poor, miserable “others” in the streets begging for a handout. I’m America’s bright future. I’ve become another symbol of neoliberal progress where my title and my “recognized” name will give hope to those in desperate need of food, security and shelter.

And thus I’ve become destroyed. No longer myself. But another tool of oppression.

Picking up a gun to force his “revolution” seems inevitable from this long descent. His “revolutionary love letter” all but promised a violent uprising of some sort. And yet, in a media world where honking horns and Spotify contracts are treated like ackshual violence, no one seemed to notice Quintez Brown’s leap off the deep end until he tried to assassinate another local politician. And even then, the same media outlet on which his descent can be chronicled seems less than interested in tying this violence to either Brown’s clear political support for totalitarian systems or his mental health. Don’t expect much more national media coverage of this either, for the same reasons that the LCJ is treading lightly now.

Flashback: Bernie Bro James T. Hodgkinson, Attempted Assassin Of Steve Scalise, Already Being Erased From History. And additional examples of leftist violence and eliminationist rhetoric at the link.

SPACE: SpaceX Reusable Rocket Costs Versus Airplanes.

Related: SpaceX Super Heavy Booster Could Be Flown Every Hour.

Not if Boeing and its bureaucrat friends have their way.

RIP, P.J. O’ROURKE: Multiple sources are reporting the death at age 74 of P.J. O’Rourke — if they’re correct, one of the great satirists and prose stylists of the last 50 years has passed away. (And if they’re wrong, O’Rourke’s next column has just written itself.)

Earlier today, Jim Treacher linked to O’Rourke’s classic 1979 National Lampoon article: “How to Drive Fast on Drugs While Getting Your Wing-Wang Squeezed and Not Spill Your Drink.”

Here’s my 2014 interview with O’Rourke discussing his-then new book,  The Baby Boom: How It Got That Way (And It Wasn’t My Fault) (And I‘ll Never Do It Again). Sadly updates to PJ Media (no relation, as we confirmed during the interview) over the intervening years have obliterated the graphics and links to the MP3s, but at least the the transcript of the interview, and the YouTube version of its audio, are still online.

DISPATCHES FROM THE RETURN TO NORMALCY, PART DEUX: Biden says he put a dead dog on a Republican’s doorstep while serving as a Delaware county official and promises to ‘work like the devil’ to bring down gas prices in National Association of Counties speech.

DISPATCHES FROM THE RETURN TO NORMALCY:  Even With Sold-Out Concerts, No-Shows Are a Big Problem for Venues.

The concert industry was expecting a full-scale recovery in 2022, but persistent fears about COVID-19 have led to high no-show rates that disproportionately impact venues. So while live music may be back across the county, low attendance still has many venues hurting.

Prior to the pandemic, the average no-show rate — meaning the percentage of ticket buyers who don’t attend an event — averaged around 5%. But now, “sagging consumer confidence is causing national no-show rates as high as 50%,” Raeanne Presley, former mayor of Branson, Mo., and co-owner of the city’s Presley’s Theater, told the House of Representatives Small Business Committee during a Jan. 18 hearing. This is having a “devastating” impact, said Presley, who serves on the board of directors for her local chapter of the National Independent Venue Association, “because most of our venue members rely on in-house spending to pay core bills.”

More than any other sector of the touring industry, venues bear the brunt of high no-show rates because of how they make money from concerts. Artists and promoters generate the bulk of their income before the performance from advance ticket sales. After production costs are deducted, the artist and promoter split the ticket revenue; the artist typically receives 85%, and the promoter gets the remaining 15%. Artists also profit from merchandise sales, of which they often must pay a 5% to 20% cut to the venue. On average, an artist will make at least 85% of their concert revenue from tickets and the rest from merch. While high no-show rates do negatively affect merch sales, most artists and promoters go into a concert knowing how much they will make each night. (For smaller shows, the venue typically acts as the promoter as well.)

It’s the opposite for venues, which often make at least 65% of their revenue during the concert from food and beverage sales, parking and their cut of merch sales. The remainder of their income generally comes from fees attached to tickets, rent charged to the promoter or artist and sponsorship money. That reliance on in-person spending leaves venues far more vulnerable. According to Billboard’s own analysis, a 5% drop in attendance equals a 7% drop in revenue for a venue, but only a .4% drop for artists.

Hopefully the massive no-shows at concerts will begin to dwindle, given we spent the fall and winter watching sold-out college and pro football games and other sporting events throughout the US without a comparative spike in COVID numbers, and especially since: The Omicron Wave Subsides.

PUSH BACK: South Dakota Senate Committee Considers Bill to Ban Financial Discrimination by Big Banks. It’s pretty weak sauce, though. It should allow private damage suits with statutory minimum damages in the six figures, and attorney fees.

BREAKING: Ottawa Police Chief resigns.

FEDERAL JUDGE MAKES SURPRISE CHANGE IN SPEECH AT GEORGETOWN LAW: Scheduled to talk about originalism, Judge James C. Ho instead announces “I’m going to spend my time today talking about Ilya Shapiro” and then does so for the entire speech.

“If Ilya Shapiro is deserving of cancellation,” he concluded, “then you should go ahead and cancel me too.”

Georgetown, cut your losses and just let Shapiro go to work. This is passing “embarrassing” and is headed straight for “career-ruining humiliation” territory.

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Georgetown Law Self-Cancels Its Elite Status.

BIDEN’S NEGOTIATING PARTNERS: Iraq’s Security Forces Overrun by Iranian-Backed Militants. “For first time, DOD discloses that Iran controls large portions of Iraqi security forces.”

ROGER SIMON: Durham Reveals Democrats Behaving Like the KGB; Is More Coming?

Electronic spying on the White House at the behest of the Democratic Party? It’s what you would expect from Chinese or Russian intelligence. And we thought the Mueller investigation was bad!

And talk about strange cases of projection. The Democrats were always accusing Trump of colluding with Russia while they were behaving like the KGB.

Trump himself responded that this is worse than Watergate, and he surely is correct. Watergate, it will be recalled, was about a small-time break-in at Democratic National Committee headquarters during an election that Republicans won by a historic landslide. Although not to be excused in the slightest, politically, it couldn’t have been more irrelevant.

All this recent eavesdropping occurred during the tightest of elections (2016) and afterward during an actual presidency. It was clearly aimed at destroying that presidency, sabotaging from within—a genuine insurrection, instead of the phony one we know about. Nothing remotely like that has happened in our history.

And it was all instigated by people close to Hillary Clinton or, quite possibly, by Hillary herself. We don’t know yet. One of those involved we do know was Jake Sullivan, currently our national security adviser, charged with overseeing the conflict on the Ukraine–Russia border. Think about that. What a disgrace to our country that is. If you and I know about it, every nation in the world knows it.

This evolving scandal—atrocity might be a better word—has most probably eliminated Clinton from the Democratic presidential sweepstakes. It may even sweep up President Joe Biden.

Or not, thanks to a media near-blackout: Nets Ignore Explosive Report Showing Clinton Spied on Trump.

Just think of the media as Democratic Party operatives with bylines, and their silence makes perfect sense.

Evergreen:

DEAL OF THE DAY: Kindle – With a Built-in Front Light – Black – Ad-Supported. #CommissionEarned (Bumped)

IF YOU CARE ABOUT THE PLANET, YOU HAVE TO BE PRO-NUKE: Is Europe’s Nuclear Phaseout Starting to Phase Out? France re-ups aggressive fission policy; Poland and Romania expand theirs; EU frameworks will treat some nukes as sustainable.

JEFF DUNETZ: Heritage Foundation: U.S. Economic Freedom At Lowest Point Ever.

In just one year of Joe Biden’s presidency, America’s economic freedom index has fallen to its lowest point ever in the survey’s history.

In its annual survey, the Heritage Foundation reports that the U.S. has fallen 2.7 points to an all-time low score of 72.1 and has hit its lowest rank globally of 25th place among nations with the freest economies. The 25th ranking is down from ranking 20th a year ago. Despite the drop in economic freedom, “the Biden administration is still barreling full steam ahead to implement a socialist agenda that would add trillions to the debt, hike taxes, and centralize more federal power over the economy.”

The survey, launched by the Heritage Foundation in 1995, scores countries based on government size, regulatory efficiency, and open markets.

“This year’s Index of Economic Freedom paints a disturbing picture, both at home and abroad,” Heritage President Kevin Roberts said according to Fox Business,  “The decline of American economic freedom is serious cause for alarm and has real and tangible consequences for all Americans, especially low-income families and the working class.

To be fair though, as institutions that are eager to spread socialism nationally noted over the weekend: Why the word ‘freedom’ is such a useful rallying cry for protesters. The word has become common among far-right groups, experts say.

ROBERT SPENCER: If We Had a Real President, Here’s How He (or She) Would React to Trudeau’s War on Canadians’ Freedom. “He would address Trudeau directly, and remind him that freedom of assembly and freedom of speech are cornerstones of any free society. He would detail how dangerous a precedent the Canadian prime minister is setting by freezing the truckers’ bank accounts and would note that such tyrannical measures could just as easily be used against Trudeau and his allies if the opposition were ever to come to power.”

Joe Biden doesn’t believe in anything other than Joe Biden.

WELL, GOOD: New study reveals potential target for alcohol-associated liver disease. “Cases of alcohol-associated liver disease continue to rise and is one of the leading causes of alcohol-related deaths. The spectrum of the disease includes hepatitis, fibrosis to cirrhosis and liver cancer. Cirrhosis alone causes 1.6 million deaths worldwide and over 50% of cases are due to alcohol abuse. Besides abstinence, there currently are no effective therapies for treating people with the disease.”

IF YOU WANT MORE OF SOMETHING, SUBSIDIZE IT: Denver to spend $3.9M to expand managed homeless campsites.