YES, YOU VOTED FOR THIS WHEN YOU VOTED FOR ELECTRIC CARS: Oil companies used to run this town. Now they’re back—to mine for lithium.

WELL, GOOD: Playing an instrument linked to better brain health in older adults.

21ST CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: Against Polyamory. I’ve been around this stuff since I was a kid in the sixties. I know a few people who make it work. The vast majority crash and burn.

MORE SHOOTING, CHAINSAWS, AND ATVS: Hearing loss more common in rural than urban areas.

RASMUSSEN POLL: “A sizable majority of the public supports Texas’s construction of a wall along its border with Mexico and feels that President Joe Biden’s efforts to stop it are the first step toward civil war.”

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: It’s Cornell Trustees’ Time For Choosing Whether To Rescue The Cornell Brand From The DEI Downward Spiral.

“A CASH COW FOR HOSPITALS:” Hospitals given federal 340B Drug Pricing Program discounts to support their service for low-income populations marked up the cost of outpatient infusion drugs for privately insured patients substantially more than other hospitals, a study showed.. “This analysis shows that a government program meant to provide incentives to serve lower income Americans is actually a cash cow for hospitals with little accountability for whether that extra profit is allocated towards the population 340B is intended to serve.”

Wow, who could have seen that coming?

GOOD: Man who stole and leaked Trump tax records sentenced to 5 years in prison.

He deserved more, but given the shameful coddling by DOJ prosecutors, this is something.

Related: Judge pressures DOJ to explain leniency in Trump tax leaker case.

THIS SOUNDS KIND OF FAMILIAR, ACTUALLY: Section Three and the “First Insurrection” … That Wasn’t. “Their brief is an unsuccessful attempt to place someone who wasn’t there at an insurrection that did not occur. Even more damningly for their side, the brief calls attention to an 1862 statute that actually blows a hole through the already weak originalist case for disqualification.”

Placing someone who wasn’t there at an insurrection that did not occur is the January 6 case against Trump.

NO, IT’S A STRATEGY: Our Open Border Policy Is Not an Accident. There’s a new strategy in town: If American voters don’t like what you are offering, import better voters.

IT’S COME TO THIS: American U. bans protests inside campus buildings in response to antisemitism.

PARTLY BECAUSE OFFLINE COLLEGE LOOKS SO AWFUL NOW: Public Perception of Online College Is Improving.

WE CAN HOPE: First Roe, then Affirmative Action, Will the NLRB Be the Supreme Court’s Next Target?

MICHAEL WALSH: The Cold Civil War Gets Warmer. “For too long the Right, in high dudgeon, shouts ‘don’t they realize that…?’ regarding every new enormity. But actions speak louder than words, and what the Left has been trying to tell us for years is: ‘of course we do.'”

LIKELY TRUE: If Trump Were President Those Soldiers Would Be Alive.

FLASHBACK: Neurosis and the Curley Effect.

Reading all of these pieces I’m seeing a story that goes something like this: Depressed, neurotic people (especially single women) are more likely to support Democrats. Democrats support policies and messaging that produce more depressed, neurotic people, especially single women.

Now maybe this is an accident, but maybe it isn’t. Enter the “Curley Effect.” As this Harvard paper notes, “James Michael Curley, a four-time mayor of Boston, used wasteful redistribution to his poor Irish constituents and incendiary rhetoric to encourage richer citizens to emigrate from Boston, thereby shaping the electorate in his favor. As a consequence, Boston stagnated, but Curley kept winning elections. . . . We call this strategy—increasing the relative size of one’s political base through distortionary, wealth-reducing policies—the Curley effect. But it is hardly unique to Curley.”

Making the populace (especially women) more fearful, depressed, and neurotic is undoubtedly bad for societal wealth and happiness. But does it yield votes for Democrats? Clearly yes. Are they doing it on purpose?

Probably.

THE NEW SPACE RACE: Japan’s SLIM moon lander regains power, resumes operations. Excellent news.

JUSTIN “FIDELITO” TRUDEAU and the rise of the liberal dictator.

Remember the Freedom Convoy? This was the Canadian truckers’ revolt against Covid mandates which began two years ago this week. In January 2022, truckers blockaded major trade routes and rolled into Ottawa, beginning a month-long, often carnivalesque occupation of the Canadian capital. It was sparked by a change in vaccination rules that would have made life intolerable for unvaccinated truckers, even though most people were already jabbed and the threat from Covid was well on the wane. But it soon morphed into a much broader revolt against lockdown authoritarianism and the contempt it showed for blue-collar workers.

Trudeau’s response, you may recall, was enough to make Xi Jinping proud. . . .

Now, a top Canadian judge has decided that this outrageous clampdown was illegal to boot. Trudeau’s invocation of the Emergencies Act has been deemed an infringement on Canada’s charter of rights and freedoms. It was ‘not justified in relation to the relevant factual and legal constraints that were required to be taken into consideration’, the court ruled. All this gives the lie to the government’s absurd demonisation of the peaceful, multiracial truckers’ protests as a ‘dangerous’, ‘far right’ and even ‘insurrectionist’ movement. Indeed, so many of the claims made to justify the clampdown have turned out to be lies. At a separate inquiry in 2022, police had to admit that claims the truckers were ‘armed’ amounted to them having tools and tire irons. Not a single trucker was arrested in Ottawa for illegal possession or storage of a firearm, according to the Toronto Sun. While videos on social media showed a family friendly atmosphere, complete with bouncy castles, Trudeau talked darkly of kids being used as ‘human shields’. It would be funny if it wasn’t so sinister.

Imagine if Donald Trump had done this while he was still in power? There would have been a military coup. He’d probably be locked up right now, in some secretive facility buried miles beneath a mountain – the sort of place where they keep the Bond villains and the UFOs. And yet because the Western commentariat loves Trudeau and loathes the working classes his trucker crackdown was given a free pass. Even avowed left-wingers repeated the government’s absurd smears, dubbing the truckers ‘fascists’, ‘noxious reactionaries’ and ‘far-right populists’. I say ‘even’, but it wasn’t exactly surprising. After all, Western leftists have become so bourgeois, hysterical and historically illiterate that they now see any assertion of working-class power as fascist by definition.

They really are awful people.

HOWIE CARR: ‘This is Your FBI,’ thanks to DEI.

Here in Boston, we know just how corrupt the FBI can be.

For instance, framing innocent men for murders they did not commit, or providing explosives for gangsters to use to kill reporters.

Or taking payoffs to set up informants to be rubbed out by serial-killing cocaine dealers, and then after committing such crimes being promoted to director of the FBI training academy in Quantico, Virginia….

I could go on and on about the Boston FBI office. But you get the picture.

Still, as bad and as overrated as the G-men have always been, they’re worse now.

And the feds’ latest descent into abject incompetence and corruption can be summed up in three letters — DEI. . . .

“The FBI,” the Judiciary committee reports, “has lost its way in a toxic culture of dysfunction unable to find the courage to remedy recruitment and selection processes that have become self-destructive.”

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. Claudine Gay could not be reached for comment.

“The FBI does not appear to be getting experienced, ‘mature’ candidates, such as the former cop, former military person, the professional career person, the lawyer, accountant or engineer.”

Sound familiar? The U.S. Army has the same problem. The brass can’t seem to recruit anybody who can do a push-up. Who in their right mind wants to risk their life by joining an organization run by entitled, shiftless incompetents who despise them?

“The FBI is now a joke among other law enforcement agencies because of its apparent investigative failures, political targeting of certain individuals/groups, and woke adoption… The FBI is considering hiring candidates not accepted by other law enforcement agencies.”

The G-men have Diversity Recruitment Events — “straight white males may not attend.”

In other words, there’s no room for a modern-day Inspector Lew Erskine. But Dylan Mulvaney or Jussie Smollett — come on down!

The FBI denies that they’re having problems recruiting qualified people. But then, the G-men lie about almost everything, as you may have noticed. It’s part of their “sources and methods.”

Here’s a story about the collapse of physical-fitness standards, from an FBI informant identified as SIERRA 72.

Read the whole thing.

Plus: “Failure to adhere to financial responsibilities is no longer a disqualifier. A candidate who was arrested and fought with police officers was not disqualified. People with a documented mental illness are not necessarily disqualified. Lack of candor is no longer a disqualifier.”

UNSURPRISINGLY: Joe Biden’s reversal confirms Donald Trump was right about Houthis.

SPOILER: IT WAS NEVER ACTUALLY ABOUT THE CLIMATE. How Climate Policy Went Wrong: A scientist’s aerosol research hints at why America’s energy suicide isn’t helping.

Another truth may arrive sooner, perhaps even this winter. U.S. natural-gas supply is perfectly ample but activists have prevented the necessary pipelines to meet demand in the Northeast. A recent report by Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and the North American Electric Reliability Corp. indicates that last year New York City came dangerously close to running out of gas to maintain apartment-building heat. Had the gas failed, restoring heat to thousands of buildings would have been a job of months, not hours, as technicians went door-to-door relighting boiler pilot lights.

Between the lines of the government report as well as Mr. Hansen’s, we have a picture of Americans on a path to commit energy suicide in the name of climate change while doing nothing about climate change.

This isn’t sustainable and won’t be, but it may well take something like the posited New York City deep freeze.

Well, they voted for it.

Related: The “Pause” on LNG Permitting: Another Manifestation of “Elite” Hatred of Humanity, and a Monument to Stupidity.

OPEN THREAD: Have fun, kids!

SPACE: Cygnus ready for first launch on Falcon 9.

THIS IS AN AGE OF MIRACLES AND WONDERS: World’s First Partial Heart Transplant Is Growing With a Baby.

BOB GRABOYES: The Hollowness of Holocaust Remembrance: Hitler to Hamas, Eugenics to Equitism.