I DON’T SEE SAMUEL L. JACKSON MAKING A MOVIE BASED ON THIS: Reptile wrangler removes snake from toilet at Australian home.

CHINA CLAIMS A LOT OF THINGS: China claims COVID-19 deaths cut in half during Lunar New Year period.

‘THERE’D BE NO CLIMATE CRISIS IF IT WASN’T FOR RACISM,’ JANE FONDA CLAIMS ON TALK SHOW: While wearing Tom Brady’s jersey, promoting her new film, 80 for Brady. So it’s worth exploring: How Much Energy Does The Super Bowl Use?

Overall, the Super Bowl costs almost $25 million in energy every year – quite a bill for one football game. It also requires nearly 75.5 GWh of energy, almost twice the equivalent amount of electricity that the entire country of Morocco can generate over the same five-hour period (given their 6.8 GW of capacity that existed in 2012).

Meanwhile, there’s Jane’s own energy consumption: An Inconvenient Truth: Hollywood’s Huge Carbon Footprint.

The movie industry is huge, complete with its own pollution. But this hasn’t stopped them from lecturing movie-goers on a wide range of issues including income disparity, social injustices, mining, and its new favorite — the environment. And if this sanctimony seems like a new trend, a quick browse through IMDB should set you right.

According to a 2006 two-year study by UCLA, the Hollywood film and television industry produces more air pollution in the five-county Los Angeles region than almost all of the other five sectors studied. In other words, Hollywood creates more pollution than individually produced by aerospace manufacturing, apparel, hotels, and even semiconductor manufacturing. Only the petroleum industry and its fuel refineries contributed more emissions.

The study also found that the industry produced 140,000 tons of ozone and diesel particulate emissions per year.

To coin an Insta-phrase, I’ll believe that global warming is a crisis, when the people who tell me it’s a crisis start to act like it’s a crisis themselves. In the meantime, I don’t want to hear another word about Glenn Reynolds’ carbon footprint.

But given Jane’s contribution to it, hasn’t she just admitted she’s a huge racist? What will she do to make amends?

MINNESOTA LEGISLATURE PASSES BARBARIC BILL TO LEGALIZE ABORTIONS UP UNTIL BIRTH.

GREAT MOMENTS IN SELF-AWARENESS: Rep. Ilhan Omar: “I Wasn’t Aware That There Are Tropes About Jews And Money.”

Related: You’re on Your Own. “Between the serious lapses in judgment, the regular anti-Semitic episodes, and the precedent justifying Republican actions, Omar does not have a serious case to make in her defense. She is not a victim of forces beyond her control. Republicans are amply justified in doing what they can to prevent Omar from having the power to pursue her conspiratorial ambitions. As they should.”

DEAL OF THE DAY: USB Wall Charger Surge Protector 5 Outlet Extender. #CommissionEarned

NEW RELIGION UPDATE: The Climate Faithful Have Developed Religious Dietary Restrictions (and You Guessed It — We’ll All Be Expected to Eat This Way).

TELL ME YOU’RE TOO IMMATURE FOR COLLEGE WITHOUT SAYING YOU’RE TOO IMMATURE FOR COLLEGE: Female student journalist wants apology for engineering school photo featuring two males.

YOU’RE GONNA NEED A MUCH BIGGER BLOG: What other terms need to go after ‘LatinX.’

If other states were to follow Arkansas’ lead, a few more examples of loopy lingo ought to be tossed into the bin. For starters, it’s time to purge the newfangled ‘Q’ from LGBTQ. It stands for “queer,” and aside from being a slur that many gays and lesbians find offensive, queer is neither a sexuality nor gender identity but a fashion statement and cry for attention.  While you’ll find plenty of middle of the road LGBTs and Hispanics, you won’t find many who identify as queer, or Latinx — and that’s a good barometer to determine if a word belongs in representative government, or is merely extremist mumbo jumbo.

The same can be said for the term “cisgender,” which translates to “not trans” and is a sort of a mind-control effort thrusted forth by the gender cult. It’s nice to be respectful of people’s differences—and we ought to try—but we don’t need to marginalize 99.5% of the population by inventing a new classification that no one asked for— or rarely uses.

Read the whole thing.

HE HATES WOMEN: ‘EXTREMELY harmful’: Pro-life student misrepresented in Gavin Newsom pro-abortion ad. . . again.

ROGER KIMBALL: Justice for John Eastman: The fundamental message implicit in the California Bar’s vendetta against Trump’s former lawyer is this: “We’re the government. We’ve defined what is truth. How dare you question us.”

UNEXPECTEDLY! California Activists Say $223,000 In Reparations ‘Not Enough.’

LIGHTNING DEAL: Keppi Adjustable Weight Bench-Foldable Workout Bench Press. #CommissionEarned

THERE ARE OTHER REASONS TO BEAT SOMEONE TO DEATH THAN RACISM, BELIEVE IT OR NOT: Rep. Mondaire Jones (D-NY) was slammed online late this week over a tweet that suggested that the five black police officers who are accused of being involved in the murder of Tyre Nichols were motivated by “anti-blackness.”

MEDIA LOSES IT OVER NEW YORK RANGERS NOT WEARING SPECIAL JERSEYS ON PRIDE NIGHT: “Let’s turn this on its side. If an NHL team held a Faith and Family Night, as part of the event placing an ichthus on the team’s warm-up jerseys, and a player said I’m not wearing that, how would the sports media world respond? The columns would write themselves. ‘How DARE a team push religion!’ Plus a plethora of laudatory prose on behalf of the player’s heroic stance, never mind that the brave atheist cliché grew stale sometime around 1967.”

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): “Wear the ribbon!”

EVERY INSTITUTION HAS BEEN CORRUPTED: Alzheimer’s Association Hides New Partnership With Lobbying Group for Assisted Suicide.

K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: Are kids dumber now? New video from Reason TV with Robert Pondiscio of the American Enterprise Institute:

An excerpt from an hour and a half interview with Pondiscio available here.

LESS THAN JOYFULLY: Memphis Drivers React to Being Stuck in Traffic Due to BLM Protest.

IRAN AMMUNITION FACTORY HIT BY BLAST: Iranian media also report large fire at oil refinery outside the city of Tabriz.

Russia purchased last summer hundreds of Iranian Shahed and Mohajer series drones, which Moscow has used to attack Ukraine’s front-line positions and civilian infrastructure, as the two countries move toward what the U.S. has called a full defense partnership.

The purported attack in Isfahan also comes after months of domestic unrest. Nationwide protests erupted in September following the death in police custody of a young woman arrested for allegedly violating the country’s Islamic dress code. Street protests have abated in recent weeks, but discontent continues to simmer with sporadic rallies erupting.

Tensions also have grown over Iran’s nuclear activities. Talks to revive a 2015 nuclear accord that imposed limits on the country’s nuclear program in return for relief from U.S. sanctions stalled over the summer. They have been further complicated by Iran’s support for Russia in the Ukraine war.

Israel was against the accord, which the U.S. exited under Trump administration in 2018, and it has indicated it would take action against Tehran’s nuclear program if the West doesn’t do enough to curb it.

Key Iranian facilities have been hit by sabotage multiple times in the past, including the Natanz nuclear facility in 2021. Iran has accused Israel of being behind the sabotage.

“Developing,” as they say.

RANDY BARNETT: Originalism after Dobbs, Bruen, and Kennedy.

EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY: Soaring Food Prices Prompt Eurasian Nations To Ban Food Exports.

Related: Looming food shortages is the next ‘slow-moving disaster’ to hit world. Not by accident.

OPEN THREAD: Enjoy each other’s company.

THE NEW SPACE RACE: SpaceX preparing for Super Heavy static-fire test.

20 YEARS AGO, ON INSTAPUNDIT: PESSIMISM ABOUT THE FUTURE: I have to say, this posting by Michael Rogers seems to hit the nail on the head. Most people I know are pessimistic about the future of their professions, too, almost across the board. I wonder if it’s caused by the phenomenon Brad DeLong identifies: better communications technology is creating more competition for people in a wide variety of fields.

DeLong’s prediction for 2023 reminds me of Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, in which we’re told that globalization had smeared things out into a worldwide layer of “what a Pakistani bricklayer would consider prosperity.”

Is that really our future? I’m inclined to doubt it. But I could be wrong.

UPDATE: John Nye emails:

I think the trends you speak of would be at work even if there were no globalization. And Stephenson had it wrong. The greatest wage pressure will be on status and goods. Prosperity should easily increase material welfare (no. of cars, clothes, dinners, etc. you can buy) but will adversely affect prestige goods (like the probability of being accepted to the top ten universities or the chance of buying that prime lot in Menlo Park or even getting tickets to Broadway). So the issue is not that standard of living will be at the Pakistani middle class level.

Rather it will feel like that for some because they will be objectively richer but some of the things they cherish which provide status will be unobtainable. This has already been happening in the US. See my article on Irreducible Inequality.

I think this may be right. Reader George Zachar emails:

BY DEFINITION most professions will vanish/evolve into something unrecognizable as time, technology and expertise advance.

Focus on individual capabilities/skill sets/flexibility, and things look brighter/more realistic.

I’ve lost count of the personal career metamorphisms I’ve gone through.

I think this is right, too.

STANDING UP TO WOKENESS: Faculty calls for Hamline president to resign over religious art controversy.