REPORTERS UNEARTH ANCIENT DOCUMENT: With Trump, Media Strike a Pose as Sticklers for the Constitution. Tom Kuntz at Real Clear Investigations:

When Barack Obama was president, most members of the media apparently believed in a fluid interpretation of the Constitution. Constitutional sticklers were dismissed as dinosaurs or worse—especially if they identified themselves with the Tea Party movement. Except for Glenn Greenwald and the occasional lonely voice or two, the ladies and gentlemen of the press raised barely a peep about the administration’s drone killings, even of U.S. citizens. Executive-branch rewrites of health, immigration and environmental law were met with a collective yawn in the Fourth Estate.

That attitude certainly changed quickly. Donald Trump has turned the mainstream media into strict constructionists, or so they would have us believe. The Constitution they sternly invoke against the new president’s moves is now one carved in granite with words bearing unimpeachably plain meaning in their favor.

This is happening even as Trump – whom they routinely cast as a Constitution-destroying authoritarian – puts forth a Supreme Court nominee, Neil Gorsuch, who is notably skeptical of expanding presidential power and by most accounts really thinks the document ought to mean what it says.

The media’s new enthusiasm does not require a lot of close reading.  Khizr Khan, the Gold Star father who lost a son in the Iraq War, waved the Constitution at the Democratic convention last summer and invited Trump to read the text, evidently hoping that the mogul would find immigration wisdom within.

I don’t know if Trump ever took him up on the offer, but I did. I didn’t see the words “foreigner” or “non-citizen” or “immigrant” or “refugee” anywhere in the document, nor mention of any right to enter the country.

It may be that policy or legislation or court precedents have created or divined such rights, but those are not what Khan waved at the podium. And, more to my point, that’s not something the media have bothered to explain in their copious sympathetic coverage of Khan – whose law practice includes securing visas for immigrants — and others who pummel Trump as a constitutional transgressor.

If it weren’t for double standards . . . .

DEPLORABLES WITH DIPLOMAS: How could a college-educated woman vote for Donald Trump? In She’s With Him, Jayne Riew shows who they are and why they voted (and why some of them still haven’t told their friends).

BUT THEY TOLD ME IT DOESN’T EXIST: The president of Judicial Watch concludes that voter fraud is “real, widespread, and substantial.”

LOW-HANGING FRUIT FOR TRUMP: Make America’s Airports Great Again. By international standards, airports in the U.S. are terrible, but there’s an easy fix available without spending any federal money. Just follow the example of the rest of the world. From my piece in City Journal:

Outside the United States, in cities such as London, Paris, Madrid, Zurich, Frankfurt, Rome, Istanbul, Mumbai, Sydney, and Buenos Aires, public-private partnerships are transforming the industry, with airports getting sold or leased to private-management companies that focus on pleasing passengers. To make a profit, these managers must hold down costs, while enticing customers with lots of flights, competitive fares, and terminals with appealing stores and restaurants. London’s three airports have improved dramatically since they were privatized—first as a single company, and then divided into three separate firms so as to encourage competition. Heathrow, currently eighth in the international ranking, has been so intent on attracting passengers that it built and runs a nonstop express train linking the terminal to central London. To deal with surging demand, its management company is seeking to add another runway, as is the rival company in London running Gatwick Airport.

In the United States, by contrast, airports are still typically run by politicians in conjunction with the locally dominant airlines, which help finance the terminals in return for long-term leases on the gates and other facilities. Keeping costs down and customers happy are not the highest priorities. The airlines use their control of the gates and landing slots to keep out competitors so that they can charge higher fares; the politicians use their share of the revenue to reward supporters, especially the unionized airport workers who contribute to their campaigns.

The unions and airlines, aided by lots of Democrats and a few Republicans in Congress, have put up barriers to privatization, but these could be eliminated if the Trump administration follows through with its promises to improve infrastructure. Trump could also help his hometown airports, which are horribly managed even by American standards, if he presses Congress to remove a federal exemption allowing the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey to divert revenue from JFK, La Guardia and Newark to its pet projects, like the PATH heavy-rail transit system for New Jersey commuters.

The best hope for those airports, and for the rest of New York, would be to heed the new report by Robert Poole for the Manhattan Institute on the Port Authority, the public agency created by Progressives who believed that expert central planners would run everything so much more wisely. The result, as Poole summarizes, has been “mediocre airports, congested and inadequate bridges and tunnels, money-losing seaports, a pathetic bus terminal, and the worst heavy-rail transit system in the nation.” His solution: dismantle the agency and lease its assets to competent managers.

THE LEFT’S FAVORITE BILLIONAIRE: Connoisseur of Chaos, a profile of George Soros in City Journal. Stefan Kanfer details his efforts to build a world without borders run by philosopher-kings like himself.

As the postpresidential fever abates, Soros’s work carries on. In a New York City luxury hotel, Soros recently huddled with other devastated operatives in the so-called Democratic Alliance, including former House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi, Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren, and Congressional Progressive Caucus cochairman Keith Ellison. According to Politico, they discussed strategies to combat President-elect Trump’s “terrifying assault on President’s Obama’s achievements.” Not all Democrats were pleased with the occasion. “The DA itself should be called into question,” said one attendee. “You can make a very good case it’s nothing more than a social club for a handful of wealthy white donors and labor union officials to drink wine and read memos, as the Democratic Party burns down around them.”

Read the whole thing.

ALL THE PRESIDENT’S CRITICS: Trump vs. Media Is Much More Than Meets the Eye. It’s not just the mainstream media that (for a change) will be battling the White House. Tom Kuntz categorizes the new opponents in the Fourth Estate, including the “Red and New” libertarians already worrying about the Trump administration’s fondness for civil asset forfeiture.

THE LEFT’S WAR ON SCIENCE: Climate activists step up campaign to cut funding to science museums. Today’s target is the American Museum of Natural History in New York, which is being denounced for taking money from Rebekah Mercer and allowing her to serve on its board of trustees. The activists want her removed because she has also donated to the Trump campaign and to think tanks skeptical of climate alarmism.

As the Times article notes, there is absolutely no evidence that Mercer has had any influence on the museum’s climate-change exhibits. Far from downplaying the threat of climate change, the museum has hyped it. I’ve written about the faulty science in its alarmist exhibits, and Edward Rothstein has critiqued its apocalyptic sermonizing. But none of this matters to the green activists determined to shame and intimidate conservative philanthropists even if it means less money for science education:

“To politicize science is shameful; to politicize the institutions that are designed to foster greater learning is even worse,” Michael Brune, executive director of the Sierra Club, said. The museum’s executives “should acknowledge that they have a healthy endowment — a steady stream of funding — and they should thank Ms. Mercer for her service and talk about a reasonable plan for her to resign,” he said.

The chutzpah is astonishing. The only ones politicizing science at the museum are Brune and the other witch-hunters quoted in the Times. One of them is Michael Mann of Penn State, the researcher who produced the infamous hockey-stick graph and has done even more to discredit climate science with his unhinged activism. As usual, the threats to science come from one direction: the left.

MEDIA ETHICS (ASSUMING THEY EXIST): Grand Theft Journalism, as dissected by Tom Kuntz at RealClear Investigations:

If, as is widely alleged, agents of the Russian government performed the hacking of Democrats’ emails to sway the presidential election, the press needs to ask if it can have it both ways. Is it appropriate to publish knowing you may be a tool of a hostile foreign government and only later decry its perfidious intent?

Few questions are harder to answer. A basic journalistic instinct is to verify the information and then publish, even if you can’t establish the source. But is that good enough in an age when authoritarian states like Russia and North Korea are or might be the sources? If Snowden was working for Russia, as some believe, should that change the decision to publish stories based on his leaks of American intelligence secrets?

(Let’s pause here to contemplate the irony of progressives who celebrate Snowden yet bay for Russia’s blood over election-year hacking activities – and those on the right suddenly warming to the previously loathed WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange for denying Russian involvement.)

Actually, the ethics are quite clear: Our side gets leaks from patriots. Their side consorts with thieves and thugs.

HATERS GONNA HATE: A Window Into A Depraved Culture. Heather Mac Donald in City Journal on the Chicago Facebook torturers:

We live in Ta-Nehesi Coates’s America, characterized by the assumption that blacks are the eternal targets of lethal white oppression. Coates’s central thesis in Between the World and Me, his acclaimed phantasmagoria of racial victimology, is that America continuously aspires to the “shackling” and “destruction” of “black bodies.”

Chicago’s four torturers certainly have not read Between the World and Me. But the book’s worldview echoes throughout our society, including in the inner city.

Read the whole thing.

MAKING SCIENCE GREAT AGAIN: Climate researchers hope Trump administration will allow scientific debate instead of enforcing green dogma. James Varney at RealClear Investigations:

Researchers who see global warming as something less than a planet-ending calamity believe the incoming Trump administration may allow their views to be developed and heard. This didn’t happen under the Obama administration, which denied that a debate even existed. Now, some scientists say, a more inclusive approach – and the billions of federal dollars that might support it – could be in the offing.

Of course, the Left’s war on science will continue, because the many scientists-turned-activists and their journalistic allies aren’t going to let up their witch hunts against “deniers,” and there’s too much money at stake. Apocalyptic visions are good for research budgets (and for  green-energy companies dependent on corporate welfare). Varney quotes Richard Lindzen, the MIT atmospheric physicist.

Even if some of the roughly $2.5 billion in taxpayer dollars currently spent on climate research across 13 different federal agencies now shifts to scientists less invested in the calamitous narrative, Lindzen believes groupthink has so corrupted the field that funding should be sharply curtailed rather than redirected.

“They should probably cut the funding by 80 to 90 percent until the field cleans up,” he said. “Climate science has been set back two generations, and they have destroyed its intellectual foundations.”

The field is cluttered with entrenched figures who must toe the established line, he said, pointing to a recent congressional report that found the Obama administration got a top Department of Energy scientist fired and generally intimidated the staff to conform with its politicized position on climate change.

“Remember this was a tiny field, a backwater, and then suddenly you increased the funding to billions and everyone got into it,” Lindzen said. “Even in 1990 no one at MIT called themselves a ‘climate scientist,’ and then all of a sudden everyone was. They only entered it because of the bucks; they realized it was a gravy train. You have to get it back to the people who only care about the science.”

Another swamp to drain.

MY NYT COLUMN: Scientific advice to holiday shoppers: The thought doesn’t really count, so you don’t have to try so hard. 

THE REAL WAR ON SCIENCE: Which side of the political spectrum poses a threat to science? The Left, I argue in City Journal. I’d be glad to argue it on stage, too, but so far I’ve had no luck finding anyone to debate it. Chris Mooney, the author of “The Republican War on Science,” ducked an offer to debate. So did Naomi Oreskes, the co-author of “Merchants of Doubt,” another book that promotes the myth of a right-wing war on science. Leftists have always used science — or pseudo-science — to justify expanding the power of the state, from “scientific socialism” to eugenics to the “population crisis.” To a dedicated leftist, research that contradicts the progressive agenda must be wrong — and must be taboo. Science depends on the continual testing of hypotheses, but the Left is more interested in silencing heretics. Why debate when you already know the truth?

THE PRO-CANCER COALITION: Democrats and FDA protect Big Tobacco and Big Pharma from competition that would save lives but cut their profits. 

Why would public-health officials oppose what may be the most effective tool yet discovered for getting smokers to quit? The campaign against e-cigarettes makes no sense medically, since there’s little to no evidence of harm from these devices and mounting evidence that smokers are using them to quit, as the British Royal College of Surgeons recently concluded. But while the British scientific establishment is encouraging this new industry, the FDA is trying to destroy it with regulations that will outlaw most products and make new ones prohibitively expensive to introduce unless you’ve got the kind of financial resources available to tobacco companies (who market their own e-cigarettes).

You can blame this prohibitionism partly on the American Left’s moral zeal to ban anything it finds offensive (pot okay, nicotine evil). But there’s also money involved, as Monica Showalter of the American Media Institute reports: 

Drug companies favoring the FDA rules—usually big backers of Democrats—have huge sums invested in prescription smoking-cessation drugs, covered in many cases under the Democrat-passed Affordable Care Act, which they helped shape. They now face stiff competition from readily available e-cigarettes. Similarly, tobacco companies, left flat-footed by the growth of the upstart vaping market, also support the FDA rules as they look to shore up market positions in both tobacco and e-cigarettes.

Case Western University law professor Jonathan H. Adler calls this alignment a classic “Baptist-bootlegger” alliance where unlikely parties share an aim and combine forces, similar to the way Baptists and bootleggers once worked in tandem to preserve the prohibition status quo in the 1920s. “When such forces are aligned, they have a particularly powerful influence on policy outcomes,” he writes in an upcoming study for the Yale Journal of Regulation called “Baptists, Bootleggers and E-Cigarettes.”

The alliance puts Democrats at odds with vaping hipsters and others in their political base, including smokers just trying to quit. “As someone who, thanks to vaping, was able to quit the deadly habit after decades of smoking myself, this is a very disturbing development,” wrote Brad Friedman on the Daily Kos, the left-leaning website. “It’s made even more disturbing by the particular big-name Democrats … who support the new regulations.”

The divide on the left has been noted by Bill Godshall, founder of Smokefree Pennsylvania, a Democrat who sees vaping, while not risk-free, as a means of helping smokers quit. “The whole politics of this is decidedly left-wing,” he said.

Showalter notes that the current FDA commissioner, Dr. Robert Califf, formerly worked with nearly every pharmaceutical giant with a smoking-cessation product on the market. The FDA’s chief tobacco regulator, Mitch Zeller, was a consultant for one of those companies, GlaxoSmithKline. And she points to the large campaign contributions from pharmaceutical companies to prominent anti-vaping Democrats, including Frank Lautenberg, Ed Markey, Sherrod Brown and Richard Blumenthal. Meanwhile, Republicans have been fighting the FDA regulations and resisting the junk-science hysteria from the Left:

As the anti-vaping alliance solidified, Republican opponents began to embrace e-cigarettes as a cause. Rep. Duncan D. Hunter of California openly vaped an e-cigarette on the House floor in 2015 to show his support.

Grover Norquist, founder of Americans for Tax Reform, told the American Media Institute that the vaping issue could help swing the 2016 election. E-cigarettes, he said, are not so much a product as “a movement,” a bellwether of a new consumer-driven economy.

THE LONGEST FOUR YEARS IN HISTORY: If you think Americans are unhappy now, Christopher Buckley warns, wait until Hillary becomes president:

Mrs Clinton is many things — intelligent, accomplished, hard-working, quisquis — but she is not herself interesting, except as a historical phenomenon — an American Evita, minus the charisma and the balcony. This is likely to make four years of her feel interminable. One year into her presidency, Stephen Hawking may have to revise his theory of time and posit that it is now slowing down. Or has stopped altogether.

I don’t think I’m going out on a limb when I postulate that Mrs Clinton is not an exciting persona. If she were, it would be her, not a 74-year-old rumpled lefty with Paleo-Marxist cuckoo ideas, attracting massive crowds of young people.

Comrade Sanders’s message may be flawed (rich people bad; government control of the economy good), but it is at least a message. Mrs Clinton has no message other than ‘I am so owed.’

DELIVER US FROM SCHLOCK: Reimagining Times Square, my City Journal proposal for liberating the Crossroads of the World from city bureaucrats, desnudas, costumed characters and rent-seeking vendors of schlock. Then we can liberate the rest of Broadway from cars and create the world’s greatest promenade. (Hear me out, car lovers. As the author of The Autonomist Manifesto, I share your affection for cars – everywhere except Manhattan.)

ACADEMICS AGAINST ACADEMIC FREEDOM: Members of the American Anthropological Association are in the process of voting on a resolution to boycott Israeli academic institutions. Richard A. Shweder of the University of Chicago says many of his colleagues are appalled:

They view the call to avoid contact with Israeli academic institutions as an outrageous violation of academic freedom norms, including the principle that participation in the world-wide academy is open to all regardless of nationality, race or creed. They believe the voting process itself is corrosive of academic values, that a professional scholarly association does not need a foreign policy for the Holy Land or anywhere else and should be committed to free thought and disciplined inquiry, not collective political action. When it comes to contestable political and social issues they do not cede authority to the AAA to make corporate declarations about what is right-minded and true. They prefer to speak for themselves, especially since the AAA is not a homogeneous political bloc. It is a disputatious community of scholars who differ in their causal analyses, assignments of blame, and proposed solutions to any political conflict. Collective political branding is viewed by many boycott opponents as an act of institutional violence committed against the intellectual autonomy of those members of the guild who disagree with the proposed party line. They believe that institutional neutrality on hot button social and political issues enables free thought.

Many opponents of the resolution experience its injunctions as distressingly reminiscent of the Nuremberg laws, when citizenship rights for Jews were degraded in Germany and there was a national boycott against shopping at Jewish stores. If the proposal to shun and stigmatize Israeli academic institutions becomes official policy they, like the Jews of Germany in the 1930s, will not feel at home in their own society. Some will resign from the AAA, pack up and leave. Some already have. Others will just resign themselves to melancholy reflection on the late great discipline of cultural anthropology, recalling how their profession first gave up on positive science and then exchanged its humanistic soul for the soft porn of partisan identity politics.

Read the whole thing. And consider  a couple of other questions: If the AAA votes for the boycott, can it still allow sponsorship at its events from companies that publish Israeli scholars — assuming any publishers still want to spend any money on a group that’s hostile to academic freedom? And should universities keep paying the AAA dues and convention expenses of their professors? Obviously professors are free to join any group they want, but there’s no reason for a university to subsidize professors’ political activism, especially when it involves a group that has abandoned the norms of scholarship.

SCIENTISTS UNITED AGAINST SCIENCE MUSEUMS: Prominent researchers have joined greens and progressives (including MoveOn.org and the Working Families Party) in a campaign to reduce funding for science museums. They’re demanding that museums reject donations and investment dividends from “the fossil fuel industry and funders of climate science obfuscation,” starting of course with David Koch. The activists are hailing Koch’s recent resignation from the board of trustees at the American Museum of Natural History as a triumph for their cause. (He and the museum say the departure was voluntary.)

The activists claim to be worried about museums’ objectivity, but that’s a ruse, I argue in City Journal. If there’s any bias at science museums, it goes the other way, toward eco-alarmism. Showing the wonders of nature is no longer enough; visitors must be hectored to change their lives and save the planet. Edward Rothstein, who has been writing about museums for a decade at the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, has summarized the trend: “Over the last two generations, the science museum has become a place where politics, history and sociology often crowd out physics and the hard sciences. There are museums that believe their mission is to inspire political action.” 

So why worry about conservative donors when they’re having no impact? Because this isn’t really about science or museums. It’s about silencing political opponents. It’s a warning shot to donors and corporations: if you give money to a conservative cause, you will be banished from museums and respectable society.

In this fight, the science museums are just bystanders. If their budgets suffer, if their visitors end up paying higher admission fees or seeing fewer exhibits, that’s just collateral damage. A dedicated leftist can excuse it as a small trade-off to reach our glorious collective future. But the curators and scientists who have signed on to the cause have no excuse for the damage they’re doing. They’re supposed to give science priority over politics—or at least that used to be the professional ethic. 

Several museums, including the Phipps Conservatory in Pittsburgh and the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco, have already caved to the activists. Nearly 150 academics have joined the cause, including George Woodwell,  director emeritus of Woods Hole; James Powell, former president of the science museums of Los Angeles and of the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia; and climate researchers like like James Hansen of NASA, Michael Mann of Penn State, and Kevin Trenberth of NCAR.

STOP FEELING OUR PAIN: Pundits think empathy is crucial for a presidential candidate, but voters actually don’t care that much — and for good reason. Empathy is a highly overrated virtue in a leader (or anyone else) because it’s biased, parochial and innumerate. My New York Times column on the empathy debate in psychology ends with Adam Smith’s advice: Be guided by reason, not by “fellow-feeling.”

CEOs FOR TRUMP: Why is Trump, the candidate who rails against free trade, the GOP candidate with the most support among business execs? Because they have even less affection for the other Republican candidates, as Steven Malanga explains in City Journal. (And forget the Democrats, of course.)

ARE YOU SMARTER THAN KARL ROVE? On Fox News’ The Five, Dana Perino reported that Karl Rove tried out an iPhone quiz app called History Prep and scored 9 of 10 on a quiz about Reconstruction. I urge you to try besting him on that topic — or any other area of history — by downloading the app. It’s free. And — full disclosure — it was created by my 16-year-old son, Luke, one of the growing number of history buffs in high schools. American students may not do well in most international academic competitions, but they rule in history, thanks to the tournaments run by the National History Bee & Bowl. At the International History Olympiad last year, Bruce Lou from California beat out a Thai student to take first place in the varsity division, and Luke won the junior-varsity division. (In the middle-school event, though, Singapore took the top two spots.) The kids in the these competitions displayed an amazing range of knowledge. A few of the answers they got right: the Emperor Qin Shi Huang, the Merovingian dynasty, Wang Mang, the Council of Trent, the White Lotus Buddhist movement, the War of Jenkins’ Ear. Sound unfamiliar? Get the History Prep app!

A TALE OF TWO QUARTERBACKS: The vaunted Cam-Peyton quarterback match-up in the Super Bowl didn’t amount to much on the field (the game was all defense), but the contrast was clear after the game. Cam Newton made headlines by abruptly walking out of a press conference after uttering a total of 18 words. Yes, it’s tough to lose, but Peyton Manning endured a much worse defeat in the Super Bowl two years ago (a 43-8 shellacking by the Seattle Seahawks), and look at how he performed after that game (the press conference starts at 2:24).  Manning put on a suit and tie, looked reporters in the eye, answered questions and graciously gave credit to the victors. Earlier this season, when Newton’s team was winning, he too appeared at post-game press conferences in a coat and tie and happily answered questions, but when the going got tough, he showed up in a hoodie and sulked — a performance that one former fan described as Pig Newton.

NOW THAT POLITICS IS SELF-SATIRIZING: Christopher Buckley has switched from Washington satire to historical fiction in his new novel, The Relic Master. I think it’s his best book yet, a page-turner about a 16th-century dealer in religious relics who joins the painter Albrecht Durer in the ultimate heist — an attempt to make off with the relic known today as the Shroud of Turin. (Full disclosure: I’m a friend and previous co-author.) It opens in 1517, one of those hinges in history. The Catholic elite’s passion for collecting saints’ bones (and using them to market the lucrative sale of indulgences) has become a bubble market that’s about to be burst by the Reformation. Martin Luther makes an appearance along with the the corrupt Pope Leo X and other relic buffs like Frederick the Wise. The novel combines the Buckley wit with a rich historical tableau: Flashman meets The Name of the Rose.

For holiday shoppers, I should note that it’s still possible to buy a relic, as in this assortment of saintly remains on eBay. But The Relic Master seems like a safer gift – and it’s definitely cheaper. Sure, a reliquary with St. Francis of Assisi’s hair would be a good conversation piece, but $680?

CRYBULLIES & NARCISSISTS: The president of Oklahoma Wesleyan blames the current campus tantrums on students who are taught to be “self-absorbed and narcissistic.” He’s on to something, according to Jean Twenge, who has reported an increase in narcissism among young people.  Narcissists have inflated conceptions of themselves and feel entitled to special privileges, while at the same time they’re quite brittle — if anyone questions their wonderfulness, they quickly take offense and turn extremely aggressive. (Remind you of anyone?)

Twenge has found the rise in narcissism to be especially notable in young women, so it may be no coincidence that the crybullies have so often been female. The drama at Yale began with highly dubious claims by women that a fraternity excluded minority women from a party because it was for “white girls only.” (The accusation keeps getting repeated despite the absence of evidence — and a flat denial from the fraternity, which has black members and says there were black women at the party.) As the Yale drama evolved into arguments about Halloween and alleged racism, Yale’s dean said that the complaints were coming mostly from women. Jonathan Haidt also found a striking gender imbalance when he was confronted by crybullies at a high school. After his speech urging schools not to protect students from uncomfortable ideas, he was fiercely attacked by the girls in the audience while the boys sat there quietly (and then went up afterwards to thank him for the speech).

RECYCLING IS STILL GARBAGE: I was curious to see the reaction to my piece in today’s New York Times on the follies of recycling. It’s a sequel to a 1996 article that set a record for hate mail at the New York Times Magazine, and I wondered if green-minded readers would be any more receptive this time. A few of the commenters have offered counter-arguments and raised other issues, like the supposed blight of plastic garbage in our oceans — a myth that was masterfully debunked in Katherine Mangu-Ward’s recent article, “Plastic Bags Are Good For You.” But the typical reaction is nicely summarized by Carl V. Phillips, who posted a reflection on his fellow commenters:

It is quite remarkable how at least 80% of the comments so far consist of someone saying, in effect, “but I just know it is right” (without responding to Tierney’s cogent analysis), picking fights with straw man points, or pontificating about grand ideas that do not change the simple economics of the real world. I have not seen any substantive bit of analysis that finds fault with Tierney’s core points, and yet there are numerous conclusions that he is wrong. I would guess that that recycling enthusiasts fancy themselves to be more open-minded and scientifically literate than average. Apparently such “open mindedness” is reserved for criticisms of other special interests, and they dig in their heals when it is their own rites that are being questioned.

I realize that true believers don’t need rational reasons for their religion, but it would be nice to see a little soul-searching in regard to some stats in the article: To offset the greenhouse impact of one passenger’s round-trip flight between New York and London, you’d have to recycle roughly 40,000 plastic bottles, assuming you fly coach. If you sit in the front of the plane, it’s more like 100,000 bottles — and you have to make sure not to rinse any of them with hot water, because that little extra energy could more than cancel out any greenhouse benefit of your labors.

I presume Al Gore and his fellow preachers are too busy to deal with all those bottles, so will they stay home? Or at least start flying coach?

WE HAVE TO DESTROY THE MALL IN ORDER TO SAVE IT:  As their customers switch to online shopping, suburban malls are hurting. The empty storefronts are multiplying in areas that are now “over-malled,” especially at the older shopping centers that have come to seem sterile and boring. To save them, Michael Hendrix looks back to the pioneering architect, Victor Gruen, who built the Ur-mall in the 1950s. Gruen originally intended that mall, the Southdale Center outside Minneapolis, to be part of a mixed-use development of restaurants, homes, schools and parks. Instead, it became an isolated world of stores surrounded by blank walls and parking lots — nothing but a “shopping machine,” he lamented as it was copied across the country.

To survive, the old shopping centers need to reinvent themselves, and suburban officials need to change the zoning codes that have stifled innovation for so long by making it illegal to build homes near stores and offices. Hendrix writes:

Many of these shopping centers are ideal sites for transit-oriented, mixed-use developments that include housing, retail, office, services, and public space. Infusing malls with new life means following a few basic ideas. Outward-looking shop fronts will need to be carved into malls’ blank faces. Large parking lots will have to be replaced by regularized street patterns that connect with surrounding communities. Mixed-used developments around the mall should sit flush with roads and offer residents and shoppers walkable, public spaces. Non-retail activity, such as office space and housing, will need to be integrated directly into malls.

Innovative policymakers should also consider malls as self-contained zones for experimenting with new ideas. Devens, a 4,400-acre redevelopment of a former military base on the outskirts of Boston, implemented a 75-day, one-stop permitting regime that helped turn the once-derelict space into one of Massachusetts’s most thriving commercial centers. Other cities have turned ghost malls into low-cost co-working and “maker” hubs—a boon in particular for poorer entrepreneurs who can’t afford flashy commercial space. New ideas can be tried out in old malls, trusting that the best ones will trickle out to the rest of the city.

Read the whole thing at City Journal.