OPEN THREAD: Thank you for being a friend.

THE NEW SPACE RACE: Delayed Dreams: NASA’s Artemis Moon Missions Rescheduled.

THE 10,000 STEPS THING WAS LITERALLY JUST A SALES SLOGAN FOR A PEDOMETER COMPANY: Scientists Identify The Optimal Number of Daily Steps For Longevity, And It’s Not 10,000.

THIS IS NICE, BUT I THINK THEY’RE OVERSELLING IT: Sky-High Success: Boeing’s Starliner Nails Parachute Test Before Astronaut Adventure. Then again, it’s news when anything from Boeing works these days.

HMM: Universal coronavirus vaccine may save lives, money in future pandemic. After the shambolic Covid experience, it’s going to be a tough sell.

OPTIMISM: EV Sales Are Just Getting Started.

MEANWHILE, AT SPACEX:

Liftoff! pic.twitter.com/2bBaJvSBTy

— SpaceX (@SpaceX) January 14, 2024

SNOWFALLS ARE NOW JUST A THING OF THE PAST: When magical thinking meets a polar vortex cold, hard reality follows.

QED: A Minnesota Utility Is Swapping Coal for Solar. It’s Like Taking 780,000 Cars Off the Road.

Xcel also announced last year that it was planning to replace another retiring coal plant in Minnesota with some 650 megawatts of new solar capacity, which it says can supply about 130,000 homes with electricity every year. That plant is scheduled to retire in 2028.

It’s a trend that Richardson expects will accelerate in the coming years as utilities and local governments take advantage of generous tax incentives included in the Inflation Reduction Act—President Joe Biden’s cornerstone climate law. Utilities like Xcel can receive upwards of 70 percent of their investments back through tax credits, Richardson said, so long as they meet a number of requirements, including paying employees the prevailing wages. Developers can slash 10 percent off the cost of their clean energy project, he said, just by building it in a city where a coal plant or mine has been closed.

It’s worth noting, however, that the economic trade off isn’t equal, Richardson added. Coal plants and other fossil fuel facilities, by the nature of how they operate, employ far more people than solar and wind farms, he said, meaning many career coal workers will still have to find other work and likely need retraining.

Gosh, whatever career will the DNC-MSM propose for them?

SELF-DEFENSE: The Carjacking Dilemma: Keep yourself safe while you’re in your car.

READER FAVORITE: Alimens & Gentle Mens Solid Oxford Shirt Long Sleeve Button Down. #CommissionEarned

RIP: Tom Shales, Pulitzer-winning TV critic of fine-tuned wit, dies at 79.

Tom Shales, a Pulitzer Prize-winning television critic for The Washington Post who brought incisive and barbed wit to coverage of the small screen and chronicled the medium as an increasingly powerful cultural force, for better and worse, died Jan. 13 at a hospital in Fairfax County, Va. He was 79.

The cause was complications from covid and renal failure, said his caretaker, Victor Herfurth.

TV critics in New York and Los Angeles traditionally had greater show business clout than one in the entertainment backwater of Washington, but Mr. Shales proved a formidable exception for more than three decades.

As The Post’s chief TV critic starting in 1977, he worked at a newspaper still basking in the cachet of its Watergate glory, his column was widely syndicated, and his stiletto-sharp commentary on TV stars, trends and network executives brought him national attention and influence.

* * * * * * * *

“No one believes this when I tell them, but after writing a column that’s been particularly mean to one poor helpless fabulously overpaid filthy-rich celebrity or another, I always ask editors if I’ve been ‘too mean’ and if the column should be ‘toned down,’” he wrote in a 2002 essay for Electronic Media. “Nine times out of 10 over the years the answer has been along the lines of, ‘No, it’s not too mean. If anything, it’s not mean enough.’ I have almost always been encouraged to be meaner. See, it’s really all the fault of editors.”

With some limits: Tom Shales: I’m Shocked To Be Told I Minimized Roman Polanski’s Crime. Here, Let Me Do It Again! “In Hollywood I am not sure a 13-year-old is really a 13-year-old.”

Related: Shales and his NPR interviewer try to make sense of a new movie called Star Wars, this strange new “complete science fiction fantasy with absolutely no redeeming moral values or moralistic values either” that’s “taking the country by proverbial storm.” Are the special effects any good?, Shales is asked at one point. “Gee, it’s kind of hard to describe the whole universe blowing up in your face.”

MY PROJECT TO USE ENVIRONMENTALISTS TO DESTROY THE IRRIGATION NETWORK THAT MAKES CALIFORNIA HABITABLE PROCEEDS APACE: The largest US dam-removal effort to date has begun.

Eventually the only alternative will either be to evacuate California, or to build nuclear-powered desalination plants.

DANIEL GREENFIELD: The Greatest Islamophobia Hoax in America Exposed.

When three Arab Muslim students were shot and wounded in Burlington, Vermont, politicians and the media immediately hyped it as the ‘Islamophobic Crime of the Century’.

President Biden issued a statement declaring that “there is absolutely no place for violence or hate in America.” Vice President Kamala Harris’ statement bemoaned that “far too many people live with the fear that they could be targeted and attacked based on their beliefs or who they are”. The three Muslim men identified as ‘Palestinian’, two of them were wearing keffiyehs and Kamala, like many other leftists, was implying that the shooter was ‘anti-Palestinian’.

“The idea that three young men walking down the street get shot, perhaps because of no other reason than they are Palestinian, is unspeakable,” Sen. Bernie Sanders said. ”But I gotta tell you, this is not just a local phenomenon, this is happening all over the country.”

Then he blasted Israel.

* * * * * * * *

The American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee falsely claimed that “a man shouted and harassed the victims, then proceeded to shoot them. We have reason to believe this shooting occurred because the victims are Arab.”

In reality, they had been shot by a local resident outside his house who did not say a word.

The three Muslim men were returning home from a party on Saturday night when James J. Eaton, a local resident with a history of mental instability, stumbled out of a white clapboard house on the residential street and without a word fired four shots at the three men.

Eaton had been described as “that hippie guy” and “progressive”, an organic farmer who had posted a meme with a definition of “Amerika” that called it “the worst sense of the United States, ie imperialism, corruption and the global exportation of American culture.”

He appeared to be a Biden supporter.

Media outlets, anti-Israel activists and politicians attributed the shootings to the Hamas war. Everyone from Biden and Kamala on down emphasized the “Palestinian” identities of those shot and implied that Eaton had attacked them because he was opposed to the ‘Palestinian’ cause.

In reality, Eaton supported Hamas.

On December 6, Seven Days, a local news outlet known for breaking stories about local politics, revealed that Eaton had tweeted, “the notion that Hamas is ‘evil’ for defending their state from occupation is absurd. They are owed a state. Pay up.”

Responding to an article about a proposed ceasefire, he wrote, “What if someone occupied your country? Wouldn’t you fight them?”

Local politicians were aware of this which is why in December a Burlington City Council resolution from Councilman Ali Dieng, an African Muslim immigrant currently running for mayor, trying to tie the shootings to an attack on Israel failed, and so did a resolution pushing the false claim that the students had been targeted because of their identity.

The latest Islamophobia hoax had fallen apart in Vermont, but still lingered nationally.

Read the whole thing.

ALIENS: Puberty Starts Earlier Than It Used To. No One Knows Why. Some girls are starting to develop breasts as early as age 6 or 7. Researchers are studying the role of obesity, chemicals and stress.

ROGER KIMBALL: Trump’s Resurgence Draws Parallels to Reagan’s 1980 Upset Victory.

Let’s acknowledge once again that, as the English Prime Minister Harold Wilson once observed, a week is a long time in politics. The world is in a yeasty state at the moment. Who knows what will happen with the millions of illegal, mostly hostile, migrants that Biden has let into the country? Who knows what will happen in the Middle East, in Ukraine/Russia, or in Taiwan? With Iran and the Houthis? Maybe Joe Biden will be forced to bow out. He is probably one public fall away from an encounter with the 25th Amendment.  And Trump himself, though apparently robust, is hardly a spring chicken. Could he not also be incapacitated, if not by infirmity, then by the machinations of the battalions of prosecutors baying for his blood?

The answer is “of course” to any one of these contingencies.  But if we are asking about probabilities, not mere possibilities, then I would say Trump is looking more potent now than any candidate since Ronald Reagan in 1980.

I am happy to note that Douglas Schoen, former adviser to Bill Clinton, is thinking along the same lines.

“In many ways,” Schoen noted, “the upcoming presidential election may mirror the 1980 election, when Jimmy Carter suffered a landslide defeat at the hands of Ronald Reagan.”

It’s hard to remember the texture of sentiment back in 1979 and 1980. Today, Ronald Reagan is nearly universally admired.  He won the Cold War without firing a shot.  He jump-started an economic miracle that led to the greatest accumulation of wealth in history. It was “morning in America.”

But during his campaign, he was roundly excoriated as a dunderhead, a mere actor who would involve the country in war, whose Neanderthal views would set back progressive causes by decades, and whose economic illiteracy would bankrupt the country.  It’s hard to recapture the contempt with which Reagan was excoriated by the best and the brightest, but it was just as visceral and widespread as the animus against Trump in 2016 and today.

And it is just this, as Schoen points out, that should worry Democrats.  “What should alarm Democrats is that Carter, like President Biden now, was extremely unpopular, while Reagan, like Donald Trump, was considered almost unelectable.” Indeed, remember what the issues were.  Back then, “inflation was a thorn in Carter’s side, much as it has dogged Biden since the first year of his term. Not for nothing, 2022’s inflationary surge hit the highest levels since … Jimmy Carter was in office.”

Schoen ticks off other similarities: in foreign policy, with Iran and the hostage crisis, and America’s standing in the world. “[I]t is becoming nearly impossible,” Schoen observes, “to argue that the world has been safer, or less chaotic, under Biden than under Trump.” Will Trump manage to capture blue states like New York and Vermont? Will his appeal be as nearly universal as Reagan’s? It seems unlikely at this point, but who knows? I think Schoen is right that the bottom line is this: “The American image of weakness, along with the polarization and division at home and the persistence of inflation, even at a reduced level, makes the 2024 election look eerily similar to what we faced in 1980.”

There are limits to this analogy, as Ed Morissey writes in his link to Schoen’s essay: “No one thought Reagan was ‘unelectable’ in 1980; he’d won two terms as governor in California and nearly defeated Gerald Ford for the nomination in 1976. People thought Reagan was too radical, to be sure, but he clearly wasn’t ‘unelectable.’ Second and more importantly, Reagan was well-liked even by his opponents. Trump is almost universally despised by everyone except his base of supporters. The difference is what created the ‘Reagan Democrats’ crossovers in 1980 and 1984, and is also why 2024 won’t be 1980. It still *could* be 2016, but that’s it.”

WE’RE LEARNING: Doomed US lunar lander’s space odyssey continues… for now.

PROBABLY BECAUSE OF ALL THE ANTI-MALE HATE IN SCHOOLS: Male gender expression in schools is associated with substance abuse later in life.

TAIWAN CASTS ITS LOT WITH FREEDOM:

Taiwan just pushed back against bully China’s threats and elected a pro-Western, pro-sovereignty candidate to be president of the island nation.

William Lai Ching-te, the current Vice President of Taiwan and candidate of the Democratic Progressive Party defeated his rivals from the Kuomintang (KMT) and the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP). He won the election handily, as by 8 p.m. Taipei time, Lai had garnered 40% of the vote. His closest competitor, Hou Yu-ih, candidate of the KMT and mayor of New Taipei, lagged behind with 33%.

Moreover, Lai’s predecessor, current President Tsai Ing-Wen enjoyed eight years as leader of Taiwan, so it appears the Taiwanese strongly approve of the party’s leadership. The DPP has stood for continued independence and firmness against Chinese aggression.

Needless to say, Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party do not approve of the election.

“Unexpectedly,” Xi doesn’t view the Biden administration as much of a threat: Xi warned Biden during summit that Beijing will reunify Taiwan with China. The Chinese leader’s message in San Francisco got the attention of U.S. officials because it was delivered at a meeting that was intended to reduce tensions.

Much like Munich in 1938.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: Tired Of Comparing Your Political Enemies To Hitler? Here Are Some Other Evil Despots Worth Mentioning – Part I.

Ian Kershaw, a distinguished historian widely regarded as one of the foremost experts on Hitler and the Nazi regime, has referred to him as “the embodiment of modern political evil.” The accuracy of that assessment is showcased by the fact that partisans of all political stripes (though it is especially favored by the Left to refer to anything even remotely Right-of-center) use comparisons to Hitler and his ideology as the ultimate slander against their opponents.

In fact, as many have pointed out, the comparison has become so ubiquitous that in many ways it has lost its effectiveness as a political epithet. Additionally, to rely on a single historical reference to embody evil diminishes public awareness of other psychopathic despots (especially Left-wing ones) who have rampaged through history, even in the last century.

So, here is a non-exhaustive list of tyrants of the 20th Century who we can reference besides Hitler.

But as America’s Newspaper of Record notes, in 2024, is comparing a presidential candidate to a monstrous socialist (national or international) really the insult it was once meant to be? New Film Adaptation Of 1984 To Feature Big Brother As The Good Guy.

HOLLYWOOD, CA — At a press conference this week, Sony producers announced the production of a new modern adaptation of George Orwell’s dystopic novel 1984 that will feature the character of Big Brother as the good guy.

“We felt like it was time to update the story to fit a modern audience,” Sony producer Glen Maxwell told reporters. “After seeing how censorship and totalitarianism have grown in popularity over the past few years, we think Big Brother is probably a better protagonist than Winston Smith. Big Brother’s insistence on absolute compliance fits better with current progressive ideals.”

The film will feature a sympathetic Big Brother working with the state to better the lives of millions by implementing strict adherence to DEI policies, CRT teachings in schools, and CDC guidelines throughout society.

That last sentence, in a post that went up on Friday, is a reminder that the gap between the Babylon Bee’s satire and the news cycle is accelerating exponentially in 2024:

Whenever Democrats accuse Trump of doing something, it’s a guarantee that Democrats are planning to do that very thing against Trump.

Which means Democrats are preparing to use the military to steal the 2024 election and prevent their opponents from lawfully taking power. https://t.co/fVOIN9Ebr8

— Sean Davis (@seanmdav) January 14, 2024

THE DOCTOR IS IN: Anthony Daniels, aka Dr. Theodore Dalrymple on Propaganda and Uglification.

As many know, brutalism derives its name from béton brut, the French name for raw concrete, and not from brutality, though it is difficult to think of any architectural style more brutal than the brutalism. If you asked people to design deliberately brutal architecture, brutalism is what you would get.

I have a small library of picture books on the subject, all of them laudatory, though to most people the photographs in them would be sufficient evidence of the aesthetic catastrophe that brutalism inflicted on cities and their inhabitants everywhere it was tried. One is inclined to say, on looking at the photographs, res ipsa loquitur, but evidently this is not so. There is nothing so obvious that it cannot be denied.

My attitude to brutalism is like my attitude to snakes: I am horrified but fascinated. In the case of brutalism, the questions that run through my mind like a refrain are: How was this ever possible? Who allowed it and why? What cultural, social, educational, and psychological pathology accounts for it? When people claim to approve of it, even to love it, what is going through their minds? Do they see with their eyes, or through the lens of some bizarre and gimcrack abstractions?

Recently, like a masochist, I bought two picture books, Brutalist Paris and Brutalist Italy by Nigel Green and Robin Wilson, and Roberto Conte and Stefano Parego, respectively, in part because I could scarcely believe my eyes. The former had a text of some length, the latter only three pages, but, as one has come to expect from the writing of architects or architectural critics (Wilson is an architectural historian at a British school of architecture), length does not equate to greater enlightenment. The words are like a shifting fog though which meaning may occasionally be glimpsed, only to disappear again soon after.

What is particularly painful about these books, but also exceptionally instructive, is that both Paris and Italy are heirs to what may be the greatest architectural heritage in the world. The contrast, then—the complete absence of taste and judgment—that these books illustrate beyond all possible refutation, when just around the corner, so to speak, there is a treasury of architectural genius, is all the more stark and terrible. One feels that this is not just architectural, but civilizational, collapse.

Yet I repeat: these books do not set out to appall but to attract. I think part of the attraction (for those attracted) is the obvious connection of this architecture to totalitarianism, which many intellectuals long for, whether they admit it openly or not. In one of his lucid passages, Wilson tells us of brutalism:

Another vital part of the equation that contributed to the level of endeavour, innovation, and critique within the architecture of the period was the involvement of a potent, leftist politics in the urbanism of the 1960s and ’70s, and, indeed, the monetary power of the French Communist Party. Most importantly, this translated into local governance in the form of communist-led departments and municipalities of outer Paris . . . which reached a peak of communist control in the mid 1970s. . . . Many of the architects employed were themselves communist party members.

Wilson also mentions, without apparent discomfort or embarrassment, that some of the French architects were impressed and influenced by the Atlantic Wall, concrete blockhouses and bunkers constructed by the Nazis to keep the Allies out.

Si monumentum requiris, circumspice—as you take the drive from Charles de Gaulle Airport into the City of Light. There may be uglier townscapes in the world, but not many.

The father of brutalism was the pioneering French modernist architect Le Corbusier, and he would have very good reason for admiring the Atlantic Wall: Le Corbusier was ‘militant fascist’, two new books on French architect claim.

In August 1940, the architect wrote to his mother that “money, Jews (partly responsible), Freemasonry, all will feel just law”. In October that year, he added: “Hitler can crown his life with a great work: the planned layout of Europe.”

Mr Chaslin said he had unearthed “anti-Semite sketches” by Le Corbusier, and ascertained that the French architect had spent 18 months in Vichy, where the Nazis ran a French puppet government, where he kept an office.

JOE BIDEN IS PUTTING THE BAND BACK TOGETHER! John Kerry Lurches from the Biden Administration to Work with the Campaign.

Just like the Paris Accord, the COP28 agreement is a non-binding one. Do you think China is going to stop building coal plants at a record clip in order to appease John Kerry and the climate extremists? Of course not.

Why is Kerry leaving now and moving to the campaign? My guess is that he is trying to avoid more of the scrutiny he has been receiving lately from those who are concerned about Kerry’s lack of transparency and disclosures in his office. House committees are investigating Kerry’s office. Specifically, they are looking into Kerry’s push to eliminate the coal-producing energy sector.

“Documents produced to the Committee reveal that the State Department sought and received feedback from leftist environmental groups on the [PPCA] and enabled those groups to influence U.S. foreign policy,” Comer wrote to Blinken. “These documents raise significant concerns that confidential information related to U.S. foreign policy, energy policy, and national security policy, have been shared with these groups, including in off-the-record meetings with Envoy John Kerry.”

“The PPCA announcement was the latest example of Envoy Kerry and the Biden Administration taking actions under the guise of climate advocacy that undermine our economic health and threaten foreign policy priorities while avoiding congressional scrutiny,” the Oversight chairman continued.

Kerry’s office costs American taxpayers $4.3M a year. There has been a lack of transparency on Kerry’s expenditures or his staff. He flies on private jets and pretends to be a warrior against climate change, just as long as it doesn’t affect his lifestyle.

The Biden team’s environmental policies are identical to Al Gore’s, the administration is allegedly being run by Barack Obama, and now John Kerry has Lurched (nice touch by Karen Townshend) over to its reelection campaign. That’s a quarter century worth of bad ideas in one administration. In addition to Kerry’s radical environmentalism, his Middle East policy is also right on the money – if you happen to the mullahs of Iran:

Breaking News: John Kerry outed as another Iranian spy. Kerry has informed Iran of over 200 Israeli covert military operations.

The same John Kerry that House Republicans just funded his climate hoax department with $27 billion dollars. https://t.co/NH0wuX57ay

— Wendy Patterson (@wendyp4545) October 24, 2023

Oh, and just to really put the band back together: She’s with him: Hillary Clinton steps out as a key player in Biden’s re-election effort.

READER FAVORITE: Yes4All Kettlebell Vinyl Coated Cast Iron – Great for Dumbbell Weights Exercises. #CommissionEarned

FROM THE DEPARTMENT OF EARTH-SHATTERING KABOOMS: New: Iceland Volcano Erupts Near Capital, Tourist Destination Evacuated.

FOLLOW THE “SCIENCE:” Ocean sciences must incorporate DEI, scholars argue.

“Scholars.”

WHY IS THE IVY LEAGUE SUCH A CESSPIT OF HATE? THE SCROLL: Cornell University vows to hold student ‘fully accountable’ for allegedly posting ‘Zionists must die’ on Instagram.