THERE’S NOTHING BETWEEN AMARILLO AND THE NORTH POLE BUT A BARBED-WIRE FENCE. AND THE BARBED-WIRE FENCE IS BLOWED DOWN. Justin Michaels Demonstrates Just How Cold it Is in Amarillo, TX.

Two eskimos are crossing the Arctic ice when one falls through. He freezes immediately, but his friend manages to pull him out and chip off the ice. After he’s warmed in an igloo, his first words are “I’ll bet it’s cold in Amarillo today.”

These jokes are decades old, but still work. . . .

PAUL MIRENGOFF: “The Lincoln Project was a fraud from its inception.”

Plus: “Those who founded the Lincoln Project had various motives. George Conway was a disappointed office seeker. He had wanted not just to serve Trump administration, but to be its Solicitor General — the man in charge of defending the administration’s legal positions on behalf of the government in the U.S. Supreme Court. Only after losing out on this bid, and maybe others, did he turn against Trump.”

Also: “I’m fairly confident that the Republican Party will have a reasonably bright post-Trump future. I’m quite confident that this future will not include the frauds and vicious grifters who spearheaded the Lincoln Project.”

CERTAINLY IF KAMALA HAS HER WAY:

Flashback:

I suspect that Trump would regard a 2020 loss as a setback, not a defeat. Grover Cleveland came back to win a second term after losing the White House, Trump might reason. Why not me?

Especially looking at the competition.

JOHN HINDERAKER: Should Republicans Impeach Biden and Harris?

NO PASARAN: The Mote in Thine Own Eye (in the Eye of the Conservative): Why Are Conservatives So Naïve That They Refuse to See the Beam in the Eye of Those Who Hate Their Very Existence?

The day I read Liberal Fascism (and it was really a single day or, rather, a single night; on a flight 13 years ago across the Atlantic, I was supposed to rest, sleep if possible, but I couldn’t put the massively enlightening — and deeply troubling — eye-opener down), I went from simple admirer of Jonah Goldberg to fervent follower of Jonah Goldberg.

His regular NRO articles, which I started reading pretty much religiously, confirmed his insight into all manners of subjects — as well as his refusal to bow before the Left while setting them, and their ideas, straight (see half a dozen examples a couple of paragraphs down that have been linked through the years on this blog).

That is why I have been so dumbfounded by his attitude in the past four or five years.

By all means, eviscerate President Donald Trump all you want (although “a bane of humanity”! — really?!) — in 2016 I too was among those who were suspicious of the New York billionaire’s intentions — and go after the (rare) Republican who shows signs of delusion and/or derangement.

But can it really be that Jonah himself might be among the latter? Doesn’t he realize that the entire left is anti-Jewish (with numerous examples of antisemitism in the past decade(s)) and anti-Christian to boot — not to mention… anti-American?! . . . As I wrote in my book, the attitude (that of a gentleman, whether truly gentlemanly or simply virtue signalling) is akin to refusing to see the beam in your brother’s eye, because of your focus, indeed your obsession, with a mote (real or alleged) in your own eye.

Read the whole thing. No one has disappointed me more over the past four or five years.

OPEN THREAD: Hope you had an excellent Valentine’s Day.

AS A GENERAL RULE, PEOPLE WHO MAKE STRONG CLAIMS OF MORAL SUPERIORITY ARE GARBAGE: Inside the Lincoln Project’s ‘toxic’ workplace.

SPACE: Virgin Orbit considering moves into adjacent markets.

RIP: Rupert Neve 1926-2021.

We are very sad to report the death of Rupert Neve, perhaps the most important and influential designer in recording-studio history. Mr. Neve passed away at the age of 94 in his adoptive home of Wimberley, Texas, but his name will be forever associated with the British company he founded in 1961. He was quick to see the potential of solid-state electronics, designing his first all-transistor console in the mid-’60s, and would go on to create seminal designs such as the 1073 and 1084 preamp/EQ modules. Neve consoles became first choice for recording studios and broadcasters all around the world, and by the time he and wife Evelyn sold Neve Electronics in 1975, the company employed over 500 people.

In the early 1970s, Neve designed the $75,175 mixing console that was the centerpiece of Los Angeles’ famed Sound City studio, where artists as diverse as Barry Manilow, Fleetwood Mac, Pat Benatar, and Nirvana recorded many hits. There’s a hilarious scene 15 minutes into the eponymous 2013 documentary about the studio’s life and death in which the courtly Neve explains in detail to a befuddled Dave Grohl (of Nirvana and the Foo Fighters) the engineering principles behind the studio’s desk. When Sound City closed, Grohl would buy the desk for his own studio.

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): I didn’t know Rupert well, but he and I were friends on Facebook for over a decade, and he was a lovely, well-rounded and generous guy. I had, of course, admired his technical skills for decades before.

STILL WAITING FOR MY ACCOUNT TO BE ACTIVATED: SpaceX plans to boost Starlink network with launch.

DEATH TO ME! The New York Times and the creepy personal and ideological logic of public confessions.

If I were Donald G. McNeil Jr., I would want to tell The New York Times, and its publisher, A.G. Sulzberger, to go jump in a lake. Instead, McNeil chose to declare his love for the paper and proclaim his guilt for having “hurt” many hundreds of people. For McNeil’s professional death to have meaning, the party—or the paper—must be infallible. Death to me!

* * * * * * * *

Reporting for The New York Times about the Moscow Trials of 1936, Walter Duranty commented that “it was unthinkable that Stalin and Voroshilov … could have sentenced their friends to death unless the proofs of guilt were overwhelming.” Other newspapers signed off on Stalin’s executions, too. In fact, the New Statesman (Sept. 5, 1936) argued, the defendants had demanded the death sentence for themselves! Surely they must have been guilty.

Stalin’s most celebrated victims were themselves used to humiliation and self-abasement. As Robert Conquest writes in his indispensable book The Great Terror, “Their surrender was not a single and exceptional act in their careers, but the culmination of a whole series of submissions to the Party that they knew to be ‘objectively’ false.” Conquest tells of a former member of the Soviet Supreme Court who was informed by an interrogator, “Well, the Party demands that you, as a Bolshevik, confess that you are an English spy.” The man responded: “If the Party demands it, I confess.”

These days we repeatedly confess our racism and misogyny, suppressing any sense that we are perhaps not as sinful as we are told. Maybe we haven’t harassed, demeaned, or insulted anyone—but the very impulse to defend ourselves indicates our guilt. After all, we are all part of “the system,” and only a thoroughgoing racist would dispute the idea that the system is guilty.

Of course, America is not Soviet Russia, or, for that matter, Xi’s China. Our new political commissars don’t use torture, prison cells, and executions. Today’s woke ideology can be publicly attacked, unlike communism in the Soviet Union. Its critics are in fact legion: According to polls, most Americans of all genders and ethnicities think political correctness is a problem. But people are afraid for their careers, and so they remain silent—no matter how much “power” or “privilege” they ostensibly have.

And speaking of power and privilege: New York Times Defends Star Journalist Who Doxxed Free Beacon Reporter on Twitter.

Eileen Murphy, a senior vice president of communications for the Times, wrote in an email to National Review that “The inclusion of the phone number was inadvertent and when it was brought to Nikole’s attention, she deleted it.”

However, a Twitter exchange on Saturday – two days before she deleted the tweet – indicates that Hannah-Jones was aware even then that she’d posted Sibarium’s phone number. In the exchange, Uché Blackstock, a Yahoo News medical contributor, replied to Hannah-Jones, “Lol, and he included his phone number and thought you would actually call him,” to which Hannah-Jones replied only “Girl.”

According to the Times’ social media guidelines, “newsroom employees should avoid posting anything on social media that damages our reputation for neutrality and fairness.” According to the guidelines, Times employees are to “always treat others with respect on social media” and avoid making “offensive comments or do anything else that undercuts The Times’s journalistic reputation.” Employees who tweet an error or something inappropriate and wish to delete the tweet are directed to “be sure to quickly acknowledge the deletion in a subsequent tweet.”

Washington Free Beacon Editor in Chief Eliana Johnson told National Review in an email that “The behavior and the Times’s disingenuous response speak for themselves.” Sibarium similarly responded that Hannah-Jones’s “behavior speaks for itself.”

As does this:

In general, the New York Times is really delivering the goods these days:

● What has the New York Times got against Ayaan Hirsi Ali?
● N.Y. Times Doxxes Scott Alexander Because They Hate Free Speech.
● New York Times Turns Vital School Re-Openings Into Cynical Republican ‘Seizure.’
● The New York Times Retracts the Sicknick Story.

One author makes a modest proposal to solve the Times’ myriad woes: Starve the octopus. “The first step to ridding ourselves of the octopus is to stop being afraid of it. Oh my how terrified people are of the octopus. What if it comes down on you? What if it attacks you? What if you are cancelled and your reputation is ruined and your name dragged through the mud and you can never again get a job or a friend or enjoy a meal in peace. That is just another deception. The New York Times does not have guns and tanks to send against you. It cannot really hurt you. The next step of ridding ourselves of the octopus is to stop feeding it. Stop feeding the octopus. Just stop. Stop reading the New York Times. Right now. Never again visit that awful web site or look at that awful paper or that tweet or that awful article. Do not have that conversation. Do not click or press on the link your friend sent you who is trapped in its clutches. It is a boogeyman and if you fear it it will only get stronger and if you ignore it it will go away.”

UPDATE: Half of New York Times employees feel they can’t speak freely: survey.

More:

Hannah-Jones (and Stelter) stumble over Michael Crichton’s Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect.

OLD AND BUSTED: Minneapolis City Council Calls for Defunding the Police.

The New Hotness? Minneapolis to spend $6.4M to recruit more police officers.

But why become a cop for a city whose government doesn’t have your back?

KEVIN WILLIAMSON: Ezra Klein Misapprehends California’s Problems.

A newspaper editor once described journalists as people who have the bad taste to learn in public. Ezra Klein, a rhetorician who poses as a policy analyst, is doing some learning in public, and learning the hard way.

But what would we do without him? Who but Ezra Klein could survey the wreck left-wing Democrats have made of California and conclude that the state’s problem is its excessive conservatism?

* * * * * * * *

Klein and others of his ilk like to present themselves as dispassionate pragmatists, enlightened empiricists who only want to do “what works.” Conservatives have long understood that our choice is not between a bundle of prejudices and enlightened scientific management but between a bundle of prejudices and a different bundle of prejudices. Klein mocks San Francisco for renaming schools (Begone, Abraham Lincoln!) while it has no plan to reopen them, but he cannot quite see that these are two aspects of a single phenomenon.

Klein is a practitioner of what Michael Oakeshott called “rationalism in politics.” What is meant by “rationalism” there is not “reason,” but rather the cultic conviction that all social arrangements and sources of human unhappiness are subject to scientific improvement through (generally) inductive methods. It is a superstition. It is also a cover for ideology and camouflage for bias.

Read the whole thing.

Related: California Exit Interview: Fleeing $17 salads and ‘general lawlessness.’

Kieran Blubaugh dreamed of living in California when he was growing up in Indiana. He played the Tony Hawk Pro Skater video game and envisioned himself skateboarding down San Francisco’s crazy hills.

HMM: Study: Zinc, vitamin C have no effect on COVID-19 infection. This, however, was a study in which already-sick patients were given zinc and vitamin C for ten days. “For this study, Cleveland Clinic researchers treated 214 patients with confirmed COVID-19 infection with either 50 milligrams per day of zinc, 8,000 mg. per day of vitamin C, both or neither for 10 days.”

The buried lede is that everyone in the study, in either the study group or the control group, was better after 6 days.

SHOWING MORE BACKBONE THAN I HAD EXPECTED: White House cites ‘deep concerns’ about WHO COVID report, demands early data from China.

White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan said in a statement that it is imperative that the report be independent and free from “alteration by the Chinese government”, echoing concerns raised by the administration of former President Donald Trump, who also moved to quit the WHO over the issue.

A spokesperson for the Chinese Embassy fired back with a strongly-worded statement, saying the United States had damaged multilateral cooperation and the WHO in recent years, and should not be “pointing fingers” at China and other countries that supported the WHO during the COVID-19 pandemic.

China welcomed the U.S. decision to reengage with the WHO, but Washington should hold itself to the “highest standards” instead of taking aim at other countries, the spokesperson said.

WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus on Friday said all hypotheses were still open about the origins of COVID-19, after Washington said it wanted to review data from a WHO-led mission to China, where the virus first emerged.

A WHO-led mission, which spent four weeks in China probing the origins of the COVID-19 outbreak, said this week that it was not looking further into the question of whether the virus escaped from a lab, which it considered highly unlikely.

The extent to which China had acquired deep influence within the W.H.O. — amounting almost to a takeover — before the coronavirus outbreak is a bit of circumstantial evidence that they were planning something nefarious.

Anyway, I’m delighted to see the Biden Administration making a stink about this, and hope they’ll continue to press the subject.

NOTICE THE DEAFENING SILENCE ON WOMEN LEAVING THE WORKFORCE? Michael Hartman of the Capital Research Center did, and in fact he predicted last summer that it would happen, thanks to the teachers unions.

NO. NEXT QUESTION? If The GOP Wins The House Should They Try For Impeachment Revenge?

ROLLING BLACKOUTS — THEY’RE NOT JUST FOR CALIFORNIA, ANYMORE: With a near record cold spell, Texas power grid warns of rotating outages if electricity demand overwhelms supply.

Related:

THOSE ARE MY PRINCIPLES, AND IF YOU DON’T LIKE THEM… WELL, I HAVE OTHERS:

GLENN LOURY: Unspeakable Truths about Racial Inequality in America.

STACY MCCAIN: N.Y. Times Doxxes Scott Alexander Because They Hate Free Speech.

Liberals once insisted that the First Amendment protected everything from the right of Communists to teach in public schools to the right of pornographers to produce films of women getting gang-raped. If you wanted to burn the flag? Cool — the First Amendment protected that “free speech,” too, according to liberals.

Liberals are still in favor of Communism, flag-burning and pornography (some things never change), but the kind of First Amendment absolutism that once characterized liberalism (e.g., the ACLU insisting Nazis had a right to march through Jewish neighborhoods) is long gone.

Destroying anonymity on the Internet for bloggers who stray outside the prescribed lines of acceptable opinion was a project undertaken last year by Cade Metz of the New York Times when he decided to dox the proprietor of Star Slate Codex (SSC). When Metz contacted the (inarguably brilliant) blogger known as Scott Alexander, the SSC proprietor immediately shuttered the blog and put up a post explaining what the New York Times was doing, i.e., trying to destroy his private life in order to punish him for allowing free discussion on his site.

Why? Because Star Slate Codex had become influential among certain computer geeks and venture capitalists in Silicon Valley.

See, that’s the thing about Internet anonymity — you can create a blog or a Twitter account using a pseudonym to say whatever you want, and this probably won’t get you in trouble unless you are so good at it that you attract a following and having real influence on public opinion, in a way disapproved by the liberal Thought Police. People like Oliver Darcy of CNN work more or less full-time to dox conservatives, and this is to say nothing of the SPLC’s massive research staff, which specializes in what Laird Wilcox called the “links-and-ties” smear method.

Indeed.

SCIENCE! Fauci: Stimulus bill needs to be passed for schools to reopen.

GOOD: Scientists Trick The Immune System Into Healing The Gut of Mice With Inflamed Bowels.

THANKS, NEANDERTHAL GENES! Neanderthal genes are still helping humans today: Anthropologists have found surprising traits in ancient DNA, including one that may trigger immunity against viruses.

PSYCHOLOGY: Women better at reading minds than men, new study finds.