CHRISTOPHER BUCKLEY: Has Anyone Seen My Toes? Buckley is at the top of his game in his latest comic novel. It’s the story of an aging screenwriter — working on an absurd screenplay about Hitler kidnapping FDR — losing his waistline and his mind during the Covid pandemic. And it’s hilarious.

GALILEO COULDN’T PASS PEER REVIEW AT NATURE TODAY: And Yet It Moves. Once the most respected scientific journal in the world, Nature announces that it now places political correctness above the search for truth. The Left’s war on science proceeds.

STEVEN MALANGA: School Choice Rising. Parental discontent with public education has sparked new momentum  in state legislatures across the country.

DAVY CROCKETT EXPLAINS WHAT’S WRONG WITH BIDEN’S STUDENT LOAN GIVEAWAY: Not Yours to Give. In 1867, Harper’s Magazine published an article recounting a speech by Davy Crockett three decades earlier, when the frontier icon represented Tennessee in Congress. The House of Representatives  was preparing to unanimously pass a bill awarding $20,000 to the widow of a naval hero, but then Crockett rose to oppose it.

Mr. Speaker–I have as much respect for the memory of the deceased, and as much sympathy for the sufferings of the living, if suffering there be, as any man in this House, but we must not permit our respect for the dead or our sympathy for a part of the living to lead us into an act of injustice to the balance of the living. I will not go into an argument to prove that Congress has no power to appropriate this money as an act of charity. Every member upon this floor knows it. We have the right, as individuals, to give away as much of our own money as we please in charity; but as members of Congress we have no right so to appropriate a dollar of the public money. . . .

Mr. Speaker, I have said we have the right to give as much money of our own as we please. I am the poorest man on this floor. I cannot vote for this bill, but I will give one week’s pay to the object, and if every member of Congress will do the same, it will amount to more than the bill asks.”

No one took him on his offer to donate a week’s pay, but he did succeed in getting the bill voted down.

Read the whole thing, including Crockett’s explanation of how his position was inspired by an eloquent farmer in his Tennessee district who convinced him that he’d previously violated the Constitution by voting to give away money that “was not yours to give.”

WORST DOCTOR EVER: Good riddance to Fauci and his calamitous, costly career. Never in the history of the public-health profession has anyone been so richly rewarded for doing so much harm to the public’s health. Fauci violated the fundamental principles of science, but got away it by deploying the skills honed during five decades in Washington: bureaucratic infighting, media manipulation and fearmongering.

STEVEN MALANGA: Trump Derangement Won’t End with Trump. Already, progressives are branding the GOP’s next generation as “a threat to democracy”—sound familiar?

MAN BITES DOG, CALIFORNIA DOES SOMETHING SANE: Diablo Lives! How grassroots activism saved California’s only remaining nuclear power plant.

CHRISTOPHER RUFO: How Gender Radicalism Conquered California Schools.

LOCKDOWNS AND MASKS FOREVER: Fauci and Walensky Double Down on Failed Covid Response. My piece in the WSJ on the plans by the CDC and WHO for a “more stringent” response to the next pandemic.

It was bad enough that Dr. Fauci, the CDC and the WHO ignored the best scientific advice at the start of this pandemic. It’s sociopathic for them to promote a worse catastrophe for future outbreaks. If a drug company behaved this way, ignoring evidence while marketing an ineffective treatment with fatal side effects, its executives would be facing lawsuits, bankruptcy and probably criminal charges. Dr. Fauci and his fellow public officials can’t easily be sued, but they need to be put out of business long before the next pandemic.

Jeffrey Tucker at the Brownstone Institute exposes the details of the CDC’s power grab and proposes a better solution.

Meanwhile, the CDC itself is being reorganized. But don’t be fooled by any appearance of contrition. They still have a legal appeal in process that would put a mask back on your face when traveling. The new agency to which some its pandemic responsibilities will be transferred will have a 1,000-person staff to start, people paid the big bucks to sit around coming up with new ways to whip up disease panic and start another crackdown.

A better solution would be to abolish the CDC. States can handle all its responsibilities. It did not even exist until 1947. Its purpose was mosquito control, spraying a now-banned chemical (DDT) everywhere. These days we handle that by going to Home Depot.

The CDC as an agency grew out of the 1944 Public Health Services Act that permitted nationally ordered quarantines for the first time. The legislative history of that thing remains a mystery to me. Regardless, it is nowhere justified in the US Constitution. This act needs to go too. So too all the federal agencies to which it gave rise. This is the only real solution.

The Spanish Flu of 1918 was a far deadlier virus than Covid-19, but America handled it much better because the CDC didn’t exist.

OFTEN WRONG, NEVER IN DOUBT: Political Experts Aren’t Really Experts. And their track record proves it.

BUT AT LEAST THEY’VE BEEN SPARED THE HORRORS OF FRACKING: Energy Bills in Britain to Double Next Year. 

JEFFREY ANDERSON: Masks Still Don’t Work. More than two years on, the best scientific evidence says that masks don’t stop Covid—and public health officials continue to ignore it as they impose mandates at schools, colleges and military bases.

Masks are physically uncomfortable, make it harder to breathe, and profoundly compromise human social interaction. But none of that matters to the mask zealots, who are convinced that benefits far outweigh any potential costs. So, where is the proof?

Nowhere — not in the data from the pandemic, and not in the scientific literature (including that zealots’ favorite study from Bangladesh). Read the whole thing.

JOHN TAMNY: Air Conditioning Is An Inconvenient Truth for Inequality Nail-Biters.

RAFAEL MANGUAL: What George Soros Gets Wrong. His Wall Street Journal article defending his support for “reform prosecutors” is a shallow, essentially data-free collection of platitudes and misleading assertions that offers nothing to the victims of violent crime — who are disproportionately members of the minority groups he purports to care about.

JOHN STOSSEL: Covid taught 1 million parents there are alternatives to failing public schools.

INCONVENIENT FACTS: Race, Crime and Data. Rafael Mangual of the Manhattan Institute discusses his new book, Criminal (In)Justice: What the Push for Decarceration and Depolicing Gets Wrong and Who It Hurts the Most.

I wrote this book largely because I was tired of reading stories about heinous crimes carried out by offenders who had no business being out on the street—stories the data make clear are not outliers—and I wanted to do something about it.

That desire only grew as I watched 2020 unfold. In the wake of George Floyd’s death and the unrest and political grandstanding that followed, politicians and activists pushed policies aimed at systematically lowering the transaction costs of crime (by making prosecutions and substantial punishments less likely) and raising the transaction costs of law enforcement (by placing new restrictions on police discretion and limiting the resources at their disposal). . . .

I was unsurprised when, in 2020, homicides spiked 30 percent across the U.S. (the largest one-year increase in generations). And I remained unsurprised by the fact that between 2020 and 2021, more than a dozen cities set all-time records for homicides, and more than a dozen more flirted with their 1990s peaks.

Read the whole book.

HE WAS AN ENTERTAINING ONE: Is Penn Jillette Still a Libertarian? The louder half of Penn & Teller talks with Nick Gillespie.

GREENFLATION: An Inconvenient Truth: Woke ESG Policies Are Fueling Inflation Woes. The push for ESG — Environmental, Social, and Governance – policies in the private and public sectors is reducing investment, driving up costs and wasting precious time and money.

FINALLY, A PRODUCTIVE CONVERSATION WITH A DEMOCRAT: Friendly Persuasion. Harry Stein, the witty conservative political writer and novelist, abandoned the Democratic party’s ideas and candidates long ago, but by remaining a registered Democrat in New York State, he gets to enjoy conversations with the party’s get-out-the-vote activists who call him at election time.

They’re always upbeat at first because, hey, we’re on the same team. “Hi, Harry, just calling to remind you to be sure to vote Tuesday for [insert Nancy Pelosi– or Charles Schumer–lite local pol].”

“Uh, sorry, but I don’t think I can.”

Instantly, there’s confusion on the other end, and with deep regret I explain myself: the candidate they’re pushing is simply not up to my hyper-progressive standards. It might be that he/she/they has not expressed him/her/themself with sufficient zeal in support of teaching critical race theory to kindergarteners. Or in support of trans athletes. Or of the green agenda. Or maybe I’m disturbed to have learned that the candidate eats meat. Or maybe I’ve heard that the candidate’s former spouse was in the military. Or—the one I’ve used most—the candidate is a man or straight and refused to step aside for a woman or gay in the primary.

Here’s the thing: the Democratic activist never objects. Because the vital element of the whole business is that my attack comes from the left, and I hold the moral high ground. The caller may halfheartedly go through the motions, but we both understand that no obligatory reading of talking points about guns, voter suppression, or even abortion can change the fact that I am the better person. If anything, it is the caller whose faith in the Democratic candidate has been shaken.

Read the whole thing.

STEVEN MALANGA: Public Pensions’ Lost Decade. The bear market has set government retirement systems back ten years in funding, even as taxpayers ante up ever more to keep them afloat. Illinois and New Jersey are in especially deep trouble.

CALIFORNIA GASLIGHTING: Not a National Model — A National Warning. As Gavin Newsom runs absurd ads inviting Floridians and Texans to come to California for its “freedom,” his bravado is undermined by an inconvenient fact: For the first time in state history, California has begun to shrink. People have been fleeing Newsom’s business lockdowns, school closures, high taxes, and other policies.

California’s outmigrants are bringing lots of income with them. The state shed an average of $270 million of annual income to Florida from 2010 to 2018. The annual loss jumped to $1.2 billion from 2018 to 2019, and then to $2 billion in 2019–2020. California’s losses, and Florida’s gains, have almost certainly accelerated in the intervening years. And Florida is not the only state picking up California exiles. The Golden State’s losses are at or near record levels with other states, too—in particular, states like Texas that Newsom targets with criticism.

Newsom wants Americans to believe that he has it figured out in California, and that the new American model for freedom is a progressive one. Yet his state’s aggressive population pivot has coincided almost precisely with his tenure as governor, making Newsom the first California leader to preside over a shrinking state rather than a growing one.

No amount of political rhetoric can mask California’s reality under Governor Newsom. Low-income students are being left behind, the rule of law is eroding, and residents are leaving in record numbers. The many former Californians watching Newsom’s ads in Texas and in Florida can only marvel at the hubris of the man.

Read the whole thing.

THE THEORY OF THE RULING CLASS: All the Trips to Davos Have Gone to Larry Fink’s Head. The Black Rock CEO and Mike Bloomberg are part of “an agglomeration of billionaires who have decided that they’d quite like the world to be run according to their personal policy preferences – thank you very much – and that they don’t intend to subject themselves to indignities like getting elected in order to achieve that end.”

As Larry and Mike (and Brian Moynihan of Bank of America and David Solomon of Goldman Sachs and the rest of the Davos crowd) “force” American corporations to sign on to political-schedule decarbonization because they’re so personally passionate about it, they’ve also engineered an exemption from the European Union’s new “green” fuel tax for – do you even have to guess? – private jets.

Larry & Co., you see, mean not only to rule like dictators, but to live like dictators.

Come on, you can’t expect Larry and Mike to pay a penalty for flying to Davos for their conferences to save the world with other people’s money. Fuel taxes are for the little people.

CHRISTOPHER RUFO: In Portland, the Sexual Revolution Starts in Kindergarten. The city’s public schools teach K-5 students to subvert the sexuality of “white colonizers” and begin exploring “the infinite gender spectrum.”

NO, DR. FAUCI, NOT YOU: It’s Time to Award the Covid Nobels. The frontrunner  in betting markets for this year’s Nobel Peace Prize is the World Health Association for its handling of the Covid pandemic. Given the WHO’s disastrous performance, this choice makes about as much sense as giving the prize to Vladimir Putin.  The Nobel should go to the true heroes of the pandemic, starting with Anders Tegnell, the state epidemiologist of Sweden.

My City Journal article tells how Tegnell and his mentor fought the lock-downers and mask zealots, allowing Swedes to go on with their lives while enjoying one of the world’s lowest rates of excess mortality over the course of the pandemic.  In locked down America, the mortality rate soared among younger adults, most of whom died from from non-Covid causes. But younger Swedes were spared. If it hadn’t been for Tegnell and a few other heretics in places like Florida, we wouldn’t have the clear evidence to stop the WHO and Anthony Fauci’s disciples from doing even more damage in the next pandemic. Tegnell deserves a Nobel, and do a few others I nominate.

TRUMP’S BIGGEST MISTAKE WAS NOT FIRING HIM AND DEBORAH BIRX: Fauci’s Fanaticism. Don Boudreaux at Cafe Hayek rounds up criticism of Fauci’s latest lunacy — Covid restrictions should have been “much, much more stringent” in 2020 — and diagnoses the cause:

Fauci again proves that he has the heart, soul, and mind of a dangerous fanatic. He focuses obsessively on one goal; all other considerations are ignored or treated with disdain. And he has no qualms about using as much coercion as is necessary to further as much as possible his lone goal. When someone attaches value only to one goal, that someone experiences – and can see – no meaningful costs, for even the tiniest further movement toward the full attainment of that goal is by presumption worth whatever that movement costs. No such fanatic should possess any power or influence.

Fauci’s fanaticism contributed to more than 170,000 excess deaths from non-Covid causes during the pandemic in America, many of them among younger and middle-aged adults. In Sweden, meanwhile, there was no excess mortality among people under 70. That’s one of the reasons I cite in nominating Sweden’s Anders Tegnell for a Nobel prize.