PARTY OF YOUTH UPDATE: Dianne Feinstein, 89, Announces She Won’t Seek Reelection in 2024. “The contest to replace Feinstein is already underway, with Democratic representatives Katie Porter and Adam B. Schiff announcing their Senate bids in recent weeks. Democratic Representative Barbara Lee is also expected to enter the race.”

UPDATE: Feinstein’s finest moment:

Re-upping my favorite video ever, which happens to be of Dianne Feinstein. We need more legislators willing to crush the dreams of 8 year olds, in my personal opinion pic.twitter.com/PTYygpopoz

— Julia Johnson (@juliaajohnson_) February 14, 2023

(Updated and bumped.)

GREAT MOMENTS IN SANCTUARY CITIES: NYC Mayor, Who Loves Illegal Aliens, Sends His Undocumented Friends on a One-Way Bus Ride to Balmy Canada; Canada, Which Also Just Adores Illegal Aliens, Tells Him to Stop.

CULTURE OF CORRUPTION: Jim Biden admitted he was hired to negotiate with Saudis over a secret $140million deal ‘because of his position and relationship’ to his VP brother Joe — who would be ‘instrumental to the deal,’ bombshell affidavit claims.

KIND OF BLUE: James Lileks on the remarkable consistency of the palette in many of Sunday’s Super Bowl ads. “If you watched the Super Bowl, or at least the compilation of the ads, I hoped you noticed The Color and its companion variants…Well it’s just the cool color du jour, that’s all! The companies and products just want to be cool. Why stand out when you can use a palette that makes everything blur together?”

I suppose it beats the depressing fluorescent green tones of everything inside the Matrix — but not by much.

Speaking of Super Bowl ads, the Critical Drinker on the Super Bowl ad for the new Michael Keaton Batman movie the new, stillborn Ezra Miller Flash movie:

CHANGE: Toyota to build flagship electric Lexus as it backs away from hydrogen dream.

THE WAY THEY WEREN’T, AND HOW IT SAVED A MEMORABLE FILM FROM DISASTER:

Though the actor’s playing hardball frustrated producer Ray Stark (Funny Girl), who wanted to immediately hire Ryan O’Neill rather than negotiate, director Sidney Pollack knew how indispensable Redford would be. And how good he was, having just directed him in the eventual western classic, Jeremiah Johnson. O’Neill, Pollack realized, would have played the part as originally written, tilting the film toward Streisand and Laurents’ vision and to ultimate failure. It was the accommodations he made to secure Redford that salvaged the picture. Pollack brought in two new writers (David Rayfiel, Alvin Sargent) to elevate both Redford’s Hubbell over Streisand’s communist Katie Morosky and the love story above a political one.

Unlike any male character on film today, Hubbell constantly stands up to Katie’s ideological extremism, despite the filmmakers’ sympathy to it, making the film watchable. In their best exchange, Hubbell takes Katie to task for her piqued dismissal of his friends — all the men of whom just fought in World War II, including Hubbell. “You do it, you know. You make yourself feel out of place.… Why don’t you try talking to them?… You don’t talk, you lecture. I mean, what was that speech in there about Yalta? Katie, there isn’t anyone in that room who needs you to explain Yalta.” The Yalta Conference, of course, was the summit meeting between the three main Allied leaders — Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin — at which Katie’s idol, FDR, fundamentally sold out Eastern Europe to the Soviet Union.

What truly saved the picture was the jettisoning of the heavy Blacklist emphasis in its third act. Hubbell forsakes future novel writing to adapt his last book into a Hollywood movie, much to Katie’s disappointment. This throws the couple into the center of the McCarthyite purges. Fifty years later, Hollywood players would initiate a modern blacklist against conservatives, but in the early ’70s, they settled for condemning the original.

Read the whole thing.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: The New York Times would like you to have more sex, please.

Of course, it wouldn’t be a true NYT op-ed without a deeply right-on argument: “Having more sex is both personal guidance — your doctor might well agree — and a political statement. American society is less connected, made up of individuals who seem increasingly willing to isolate themselves. Having more sex can be an act of social solidarity.” To the barricades, fornicators!

Taylor concludes by saying, “So, anyone capable should have sex — as much as they can, as pleasurably as they can, as often as they can.” Cockburn would like to give praise to the Times where it’s due for offering sage wisdom during America’s bonking blight. A true act of public service journalism.

In the lead-up to Valentine’s Day, and in the spirit of the pursuit of happiness our Founders promised us, Cockburn implores you to share this article with your spouse, hook-up, crush or polycule (probably not coworkers, it’s 2023 after all). “Honey look, it’s science, the New York Times says so.” Could there be a more compelling case?

To be honest, I’m not sure I want to be on that intimate a basis with my daily newspaper. It’s not you, it’s me, Gray Lady.

‘HASN’T SAID A WORD:’ Republicans Slam Pete Buttigieg For Silence After Ohio Train Derailment.

To be fair, Buttigieg has far more pressing issues to worry about: Pete Buttigieg Frets That Too Many Construction Crews ‘Don’t Look Like’ The Neighborhoods They Work In.

TOP LAWMAKER REVEALS CHINESE SPY BALLOON ‘DID A LOT OF DAMAGE’ — AND HE CONNECTS THE DOTS OF ITS FLIGHT PATH:

Publicly, the government has said it mitigated the spy balloon’s intelligence gathering capabilities. But [House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Michael McCaul (R-TX) said he is not convinced.

“My assessment — and I can’t get into the detail of the intelligence document — is that if it was still transmitting going over these three very sensitive nuclear sites, I think if you look at the flight pattern of the balloon, it tells a story as to what the Chinese were up to as they controlled this aircraft throughout the United States,” he said.

“Going over those sites, in my judgment, would cause great damage. Remember, a balloon could see a lot more on the ground than a satellite,” he added.

Later in the interview, McCall hypothesized that China sent the spy balloon to assess U.S. military capabilities in the event that China and Taiwan end their cold war.

Earlier: The Balloon Really Was a ‘Sputnik Moment.’

OLD AND BUSTED: The Turing Test.

The New Hotness? The Voight-Kampff Test: ChatGPT is exposed as it squirms over porn.

EVERGREEN HEADLINE: Sy Hersh Swings and Misses Big. Lee Smith writes, “What we know for sure is that Trump was on the mark when he warned the Germans that Nord Stream2 would come back to haunt them. And, thanks to Biden, it has hurt America, too. There is indeed a scandal that involves Biden and Russian pipelines, but it’s not the one Seymour Hersh wrote about. It’s simply this: a venal and careless old man was so obsessed with undoing his predecessor’s work that he greenlighted a war in Europe with consequences that are likely to impact how Americans live for years to come.”

BREAKING: Michigan State Shooter Found Dead. “According to multiple sources, the suspected shooter shot himself in the head as police approached. CPR was being performed but the shooter had no pulse. Sources added that a handgun was recovered.”

CHANGE: Biden Fires Architect of the Capitol Amid Unethical-Behavior Allegations.

[Brett] Blanton’s firing comes after an Office of Inspector General report released in October found that he regularly commandeered government vehicles from the federal agency for personal use, costing taxpayers almost $14,000. Blanton used the cars for trips as far away as Florida and South Carolina, according to the report.

On another occasion, Blanton told Fairfax County police officers that he was a member of law enforcement while trying to pursue a suspect in a hit-and-run crash that took place near his house, according to the report.

Biden has faced mounting pressure to fire Blanton in recent weeks from both sides of the political aisle. “The architect of the Capitol, Brett Blanton, no longer has my confidence to continue in his job. He should resign or President Biden should remove him immediately,” Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy (R., Calif.) tweeted on Monday.

“The Inspector General’s report was highly concerning, which is, in part, why our first hearing was dedicated to providing oversight over the AOC. His refusal to be transparent and truthful has made clear that he can no longer lead the organization and must resign immediately,” House Administration Committee chairman, Bryan Steil (R., Wis.), said in a statement on Monday.

Fellow committee member Joseph Morelle (D., N.Y.) called for Blanton’s resignation last week after hearings during which Blanton adamantly denied any wrongdoing.

More details from AP: “At a House hearing last week, Blanton also came under fire when he testified that he was not at the Capitol during the Jan. 6 attack because it was a ‘telework’ day under COVID-19 protocols. He also faced fierce questions about Capitol tours he allowed and sometimes conducted despite pandemic restrictions.”

DEPESCHEN AUS DER BILDUNGSAPOKALYPSE: Berlin University Tells Students Not to Call Cops on Sex Offender. Can You Guess Why?

THE BALLOON REALLY WAS A ‘SPUTNIK MOMENT:’

We don’t know enough about any of the post-February 4 objects to render a judgment about the threat they pose or who, precisely, is doing the threatening. But the West’s reaction to that balloon is instructive. America’s defense posture shifted almost overnight toward enhanced scrutiny of its airspace. Pivoting from the paralytic reaction to the balloon that started it all, the U.S. apparently has no compunction about neutralizing unknown objects before they’ve had the chance to execute their missions, whatever they may be. These events take place against the backdrop of a genuine, sober, and bipartisan assumption among U.S. lawmakers that China’s rise presents a potentially existential threat to the American-led geopolitical order.

The Cold War began long before the Soviets achieved escape velocity. The threat posed by the Communist Bloc was apparent to all who were willing to see it at least a decade earlier. It did, however, focus American minds. The competition with the USSR wouldn’t be limited to distant theaters where only clandestine operatives and proxy armies would fight. The threat was to the American homeland. Likewise, the threat to America’s core strategic interests posed by resurgent great powers should have been undeniable by 2014, after Russia invaded and annexed sovereign European territory for the first time since 1945. But the naïve could place their hopes in the notion that far-off conflicts would remain far-off. As the wreckage of foreign surveillance devices rains down over the American continent, the hopeful should by now be disabused of their optimism.

One big difference between today’s “Sputnik Moment” and the original is the man in charge at the time. As the late Paul Johnson wrote of Ike in Modern Times:

His first biographer claimed that the ‘unanimous consensus’ of ‘journalists and academics, pundits and prophets, the national community of intellectuals and critics’ had been that Eisenhower’s conduct of the presidency had been ‘unskilful and his definition of it inaccurate …. [he] elected to leave his nation to fly on automatic pilot.’ He was seen as well-meaning, intellectually limited, ignorant, inarticulate, often weak and always lazy.

The reality was quite different. ‘Complex and devious’, was the summing-up of his Vice-President, Richard Nixon (no mean judge of such things); ‘he always applied two, three or four lines of reasoning to a single problem and he usually preferred the indirect approach’. In the late 1970s, the opening up of the secret files kept by his personal secretary, Ann Whitman, phone logs, diaries and other personal documents, revealed that Eisenhower worked very much harder than anyone, including close colleagues, supposed.

Flash-forward to today: Sen. Ron Johnson: Biden Is ‘Detached from Reality — He’s Delusional.’

And our enemies know it.

CHOOSE YOUR NFL ADVENTURE:

Shot:

USA Today was once an influential news organization. While never the New York Times or Washington Post, USAT practiced journalism in its most pressing form.

The paper is now a shell of its former self. Cliches and authors unaware of active voice now fill its newsroom.

Its sports section is perhaps the most humiliating.

A character named Mike Freeman now covers the NFL for the outlet. Freeman’s résumé includes lying about his education on an application for The Indianapolis Star.

He’s a hack, a one-trick pony. Baselessly accusing white individuals of the NFL of racism is the extent of his abilities.

Still, USA Today tasked Freeman to cover the Super Bowl. He responded in glee, not with the assignment but with the “blackness” of it all.

“Super Bowl 57 is the blackest, most woke Super Bowl ever. Sorry haters!” the headline read.

—“USA Today Celebrates Super Bowl For Being ‘Woke’ And Lacking White People,” Bobby Burack, Outkick.com, today.

Chaser:

The whole thing was obviously light-hearted — about getting your arm stuck in an empty Pringles container. But goodness, an image is powerful. And so are the words stating the relationship. This is a baby, not a clump of cells. And while I assume any pro-life message was unintentional, maybe the grandson saying that an unborn baby with a Pringles container in the womb “doesn’t even make sense” also poked a little fun at the fact that we pretend that a baby isn’t a baby in other contexts — such as when a dead baby is the goal in an abortion.

And then, there was the Rihanna baby bump. Yes, I know parts of the performance were raunchy. Yes, I know you probably didn’t want your children watching it. I even frequently use her song “Rude Boy” as an example of the poison young people drink in in our culture — leading them all too often to unintended pregnancies and abortion. But, at the same time, we cannot dismiss the power of images. Here is a near-household name who is pregnant — with a nine-month-old at home — and still doing a Super Bowl half-time show.

Rihanna said at a pre-Super Bowl press conference last week that: “When you become a mom, there’s something that just happens where you feel like you could take on the world. You can do anything.”

—“The 2023 Pro-Life Super Bowl,” Kathryn Jean Lopez, NRO today.

Hangover:

“Something tells me Jesus would *not* spend millions of dollars on Super Bowl ads to make fascism look benign,” Ocasio-Cortez tweeted. Telling people to love one another is now “fascism” to the left.

—“AOC and the Left Flip Out Over Christian Group’s Ads at Super Bowl,” Nick Arama, Red State, today.

AOC complaining about somebody else making “fascism look benign” is a hoot considering her whirlwind “New Socialist ‘It Girl'” first year in Congress, when she wanted to ban and/or regulate everything in the name of the Green Nude Eel: “We set a goal to get to net-zero, rather than zero emissions, in 10 years because we aren’t sure that we’ll be able to fully get rid of farting cows and airplanes that fast.”

Its author, AOC’s then-chief of staff, was criticized for wearing shirt touting Nazi collaborator:

AOC herself praised Evita Peron:

As one wag joked on Twitter at the time, “Look just because she’s favorably comparing herself to the lady that Franco liked a lot who sheltered Mengele doesn’t mean… OK, I forgot where I was doing with this.”

The following year, AOC was praising another fascist group: AOC rocks Black Panthers shirt, touts group’s free food program.

u2 HAS BEEN TAKING THEIR VIRAL MARKETING SERIOUSLY OVER THE PAST WEEK: U2 drops Super Bowl ad about ‘spheres in sky’ amid Chinese spy balloon tensions.

CHIEFS ARE CHAMPS! Kansas City Chiefs win Super Bowl 57 thriller over Philadelphia Eagles in Arizona.

The Chiefs have taken a 38-35 lead on the Eagles with a 27-yard field goal by Harrison Butker with eight seconds left in the game.

The kick capped a 12-play 66-yard drive that took 5:07 off the clock.

On a 3rd-and-8 from the Philadelphia 15, James Bradberry was called for defensive holding after an incomplete pass from Patrick Mahomes, giving the Chiefs a new set of downs.

Or as America’s Newspaper of Record predicted: Super Bowl Refs Hold Pregame Meeting To Decide Which Team Will Win.

UPDATE: Patrick Mahomes named Super Bowl MVP after rallying Chiefs.

I’M NOT SAYING IT’S ALIENS, BUT: How Bad Is It? Biden Team Issuing ‘Private Assurances’ It’s Not Aliens.

Evergreen:

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): A friend comments: “The movies lied about all those force screens and stuff. Turns out a Sidewinder is like a magic death ray to the ETs.”

Well, you know, maybe the aliens are like the Europeans when they first visited Africa: Superior in transportation, but no more than mildly superior (and sometimes inferior) in combat, which is why they bought slaves from Africans instead of capturing them themselves.

ANNOUNCERS IN THE THIRD QUARTER DISCUSSING HOW BAD THE FIELD IS AT THE SUPER BOWL: The grass at Super Bowl LVII has been years in the making. “Be warned: When you’re watching Super Bowl LVII on Sunday, you might get the urge to take out your driver for a few swings. That’s because the grass that the Philadelphia Eagles and Kansas City Chiefswill play on inside State Farm Stadium will be the same turf on which you’d play 18.”

DISPATCHES FROM THE NO FUN LEAGUE: How the NFL tried to use the Super Bowl to assault free speech.

A Phoenix city ordinance, likely lobbied for by the league, would have required local property owners to get the NFL’s approval for any advertisement they wanted to put up on properties in the downtown area. According to the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), the city dubbed this nearly two square mile area a “clean zone” and would’ve required business owners to get permits to display “posters, flyers, banners, pennants, flags, window paintings and even balloons” from January 15 to February 19. As a condition of that permit, they’d need to get permission from the NFL or Arizona’s Super Bowl Host Committee.

The idea was to give the NFL the ability to more closely control advertising in the area while tourism spikes for the event. For example, they could block anyone from displaying Coke ads, since the league formally partners with Pepsi.

FIRE blasted this measure as a “dystopian rule that violates the First Amendment.” Maricopa County Judge Bradley Astrowsky evidently agrees. He just heard a case brought by a local business owner who challenged the ordinance and said, “The city of Phoenix is letting the NFL decide what I can and cannot say on my own property. That’s not right.”

After hearing the case, the judge struck down the city’s ordinance on February 2 and called it “an unconstitutional delegation of government power” to a private entity.

The NFL has been going out of its way since 2016 to make even the most ardent football fan despise it.

THE ONION: Andy Reid Admits He Can Still Taste Last Super Bowl Victory In Mustache.

THE SCIENCE™: High Priests Recommend Ditching Surgical Anesthesia For ‘Climate Change.’

QUESTION ASKED: America Forgot the 1918 Flu. Will We Also Forget Covid?

The poor and immigrants—like my grandparents’ families—were hit hardest. So it stands to reason, doesn’t it, that some of my family got sick, or watched a neighbor or schoolmate get sick or die? But I don’t know for sure. Despite having spent thousands of collective hours with my grandfather and grandmother, with my uncles Gabriel and Sidney and Henry (and the other Henry), my aunts Nettie and Ruth and Ann, and numerous others—not to mention their spouses, all Philadelphians—I never heard any of them mention the Spanish flu. Not once.

That absence has me wondering how Americans will remember Covid-19 once it is finally behind us, or when it has become a manageable nuisance. Right now, it’s hard to imagine it will be regarded as anything less than a generation-defining phenomenon, like the antiwar protests of the late 1960s, the AIDS crisis of the 1980s or the attacks of 9/11. But I think it’s just as likely that it will disappear from our consciousness, as the influenza pandemic of 1918-19 did.

The Spanish flu was deadlier than Covid-19 and was more likely to kill those in the prime of life, yet it has been largely obliterated from historical memory. As Alfred W. Crosby noted in his 1989 book “America’s Forgotten Pandemic,” the Spanish flu was omitted from all the great midcentury American history textbooks, including volumes by Samuel Eliot Morison, Henry Steele Commager, Richard Hofstadter, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and C. Vann Woodward—all men who had lived through the pandemic.

The one major textbook that Crosby could find that mentioned the pandemic, Thomas A. Bailey’s “The American Pageant” (1956), gave it one sentence and, Crosby says, “understates the total number of deaths due to it by at least one half.” Today, a U.S. history student is still unlikely to learn about the 1918-19 pandemic. The latest, 17th edition of “The American Pageant,” by David M. Kennedy and Lizabeth Cohen, mentions the pandemic on two pages.

Popular culture did at least as poor a job in commemorating it. The Spanish flu killed perhaps 50 million people worldwide, the equivalent, as a percentage of the population, of 200 million people today. Yet there is no great film about the Spanish flu pandemic, and the literature is sparse. Katherine Ann Porter’s novel “Pale Horse, Pale Rider” (1939) and William Maxwell’s novel “They Came Like Swallows” (1937) offer the principal treatments by major writers. Then there is John O’Hara’s short story “The Doctor’s Son,” which ran in The New Yorker in 1935, and Willa Cather’s minor 1922 novel, “One of Ours.”

At the time, people remarked upon this gap in the literature. “Novels, one would have thought, would have been devoted to influenza; epic poems to typhoid; odes to pneumonia,” Virginia Woolf wrote in her 1926 essay “On Being Ill.” But she was lamenting the general inattention to illness in literature, which she attributes to the fact that fiction writers concern themselves with affairs of the mind rather than the ordeals of the body. The flu pandemic was less than a decade in the past, yet it did not seem to loom larger in her mind than typhoid or any other malady.

Nobody seems to have a good answer for why the extraordinary, worldwide die-off of 1918-19 imprinted so little on our collective imagination. “The whole issue of how quickly it was forgotten is one that historians have not really grappled with,” said Naomi Rogers, who teaches the history of science at Yale. John Barry concurred: “No satisfactory explanation,” he wrote to me in an email, when I asked about this forgetfulness. “No research that I know of” on its causes, he added.

It seems less likely we’ll forget Covid, given our current obsession with social media, and ubiquitous smart phones documenting everything. Including this classic flip/flop from America’s healthcare professionals in the spring of 2020, which began the next phase of that annus horribilis, the summer of “fiery but mostly peaceful” riots and looting. But given the left’s vaunted ability to pivot on dime on any topic, who knows?

UPDATE: A vintage post from Neo on the tsunami and the forgetting.

(Updated and bumped.)

AND NOW THERE ARE FOUR: U.S. Military Shoots Down Unidentified Airborne Object over Michigan. “The U.S. military on Sunday shot down an unidentified airborne object over Michigan, marking the fourth such incident in a string that began with the Chinese spy balloon shot down off the South Carolina coast last weekend.”

UPDATE: F-16 Shoots Down “Octagonal Object” Over Lake Huron (Updated).