NOAH ROTHMAN: Yes, we really do need a ‘Space Force.’

HIGHER EDUCATION HAS BECOME A CESSPIT OF OPEN RACISM: Male, pale and stale university professors to be given ‘reverse mentors.’

Under the project, white males in senior academic posts will be assigned a junior female colleague from an ethnic minority as a mentor.

Prof John Rowe, who is overseeing the project at Birmingham University, said he hopes the scheme will allow eminent professors to confront their own biases and leave them “feeling quite uncomfortable”.

The moment they feel “uncomfortable,” they should report her for harassment. That’s how it works, right?

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OPEN THREAD: It’s Saturday night!

SPACE FORCE: Pence Makes Hard Sell For Trump’s Space Force by 2020.

UNPERSONING: Online Retail Platform Terminates Cody Wilson Account Without Explanation.

PICTURED: THE ‘WELL-LIKED, QUIET’ SEATTLE BAGGAGE HANDLER WHO STOLE A 76-SEAT PLANE FOR AN HOUR-LONG JOYRIDE, THEN CRASHED IT AFTER VOMITING AND TELLING AIR TRAFFIC CONTROLLERS HE ‘HAD A FEW SCREWS LOOSE.’

The article includes transcripts of the conversation between would-be pilot Richard Russell, 29, and the air traffic controllers. As Stephen Miller tweets, “The tower control guy here is the actual hero in all of this. Every clip so far guy is completely collect and calm.”

ANDREW KLAVAN PROFFERS SOME TIPS FOR THE ACADEMY AWARDS:

In recognition of their dying state, The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has announced it will now add a new award for Best Popular Movie. That’s right. In the desperate hope of saving an award show that has devolved into stultifying irrelevance interspersed with alienating leftist screeds, the Oscars have decided to stoop to celebrating movies people actually watch.

Since I doubt this rear guard action will do much to reverse the decline of the Academy Awards or the movies, I’d like to suggest some other new awards that will at least underscore the state of the industry.

Read the whole thing.

BOOK PLUG FRIDAY: Mackey Chandler interview plus books by Grant, Boykin, Curtis, Tinney & Batten, and Burkhead

TWITTER AFTER DARK: While Conservatives (Alone) Are Banned From Twitter, Porn Stars’ XXX-Rated Photos Make Quite a Splash (“Anyone want to see me get blasted?”).

Note: Most of the photos in No Pasaran’s post are PG-13 rated, but you still might not want to be viewing it on a browser at work.

MARC THIESSEN: Explain the Chinese spy, Sen. Feinstein.

Imagine if it emerged that the Republican chairman of the House or Senate intelligence committee had a Russian spy working on their staff. Think it would cause a political firestorm? Well, this month we learned that Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) had a Chinese spy on her staff who worked for her for about 20 years, was listed as an “office director” on payroll records and served as her driver when she was in San Francisco, all while reporting to China’s Ministry of State Security through China’s San Francisco Consulate. The reaction of the mainstream media? Barely a peep.

Feinstein acknowledged the infiltration but played down its significance. “Five years ago the FBI informed me it had concerns that an administrative member of my California staff was potentially being sought out by the Chinese government to provide information,” Feinstein said in a statement — which means the breach took place while Feinstein was heading the Intelligence Committee. But, Feinstein insisted, “he never had access to classified or sensitive information or legislative matters” and was immediately fired. In other words: junior staffer, no policy role, no access to secrets, quickly fired — no big deal.

But it is a big deal. I asked several former senior intelligence and law enforcement officials how serious this breach might have been. “It’s plenty serious,” one former top Justice Department official told me. “Focusing on his driver function alone, in Mafia families, the boss’s driver was among the most trusted men in the crew, because among other things he heard everything that was discussed in the car.”

A former top CIA clandestine officer explained to me what the agency would do if it had recruited the driver of a senior official such as Feinstein. “We would have the driver record on his phone all conversations that Feinstein would have with passengers and phone calls in her car. If she left her phone, iPad or laptop in the car while she went to meetings, social events, dinners, etc., we would have the driver download all her devices. If the driver drove for her for 20 years, he would probably would have had access to her office and homes. We would have had the source put down an audio device in her office or homes if the opportunity presented itself. Depending on the take from all of what the source reported, we would use the info to target others that were close to her and exhibited some type of vulnerability.”

“In short,” this officer said, “we would have had a field day.”

All the Russian-spying hoopla is just a distraction from the Chinese spying.

SHOCKER: Men Get Postpartum Depression Too. “New fathers may have nausea, heartburn, bloating or appetite changes during pregnancy, and when they’re constantly close to their pregnant partners, may experience hormonal changes. In some cases, men might see a temporary decrease in testosterone after the child is born, or see higher levels of prolactin, the hormone that allows women to produce milk.”

DISPATCHES FROM THE NEWSPEAK DICTIONARY: When Your ‘Gender Revolution’ Needs a Glossary It’s Time to Throw in the Towel.

In Orwell’s Soviet-inspired 1984, each successive edition of the Newspeak dictionary kept shrinking because the high priests of IngSoc believed that “the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought[.] In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.”

But since the 21st century left’s will to power runs through victimhood, having more and more words that, if not used, will generate first “trigger warnings” and then emotional meltdowns, it helps to expand the vocabulary as much as possible.

Related: The Era of the Drama Queens: Every Crisis Is a Triumph.

YOUR DAILY TREACHER: ‘Just Like Catcalling:’ Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Blasts Ben Shapiro for Challenging Her to a Debate.

And the new Socialist “It Girl” continues to be on quite a roll: FFS! Is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez blaming sexism for people calling out her lies now?

As Sean Agnew tweets, “‘Welcome to politics’ — Sarah Palin.”

SHOCKING NEWS FROM THE WORLD OF SCIENCE: When older adults feel in control of their lives and get more exercise, they feel younger — improving their thinking, quality of life and longevity, two new studies say.

FARCE AS TRAGEDY: Jonah Goldberg on They Live! — John Carpenter’s 1988 B-Movie Masterpiece and the Students of Marxism.

Still, it seems rather obvious that Carpenter would have made this movie even if Marx had never been born. The targets of his film weren’t the industrialists of the last 200 years but the yuppies of the 1980s. He detested what he saw as the rank commercialism of the Reagan era. “I began watching TV again. I quickly realized that everything we see is designed to sell us something. . . . It’s all about wanting us to buy something. The only thing they want to do is take our money,” he told Starlog magazine.

So while we cannot rule out the osmosis theory, there is another, more obvious answer: This stuff isn’t that clever. After all, if Carpenter can stumble into making the perfect Marxist film without even trying, how complicated can it be? Carpenter made a fun, left-wing action movie about a construction worker with unnaturally good wrestling skills fighting alien invaders. The fact that a bunch of Marxist eggheads read so much ideological brilliance into the movie doesn’t prove that the movie is ideologically brilliant; it demonstrates that its critical fans aren’t.

Exit quote:

Reading the Frankfurt School Marxists today is a bit like waiting in line at the DMV, an exercise in tedium punctuated — if you’re lucky — by rare moments of absurdity or even hilarity (“Why is that guy wearing a bathrobe?”). When Robert Downey Jr. explains in Back to School that football is nothing more than a “crypto-Fascist metaphor for nuclear war,” he is arguably being more reasonable than cultural Marxists.

Read the whole thing, which is terrific, even if you’ve never seen Carpenter’s movie.

FRIDAY AFTERNOON PURGE: Twitter Deplatforms Gavin McInnes and Proud Boys Accounts.

Related: Thoughts from Stacy McCain on his own earlier banishment by Twitter’s management:

When I was working for The Washington Times, we did not seek to prevent the distribution of The Washington Post, nor during my years as a correspondent for The American Spectator have we ever sought to silence any competing publication. Yet CNN and other so-called “mainstream” media operations are now actively engaged in a smear campaign intended to “de-platform” alternative voices online.

That was a simpler time, before Time-Warner-CNN-HBO and other DNC-MSM outlets got into the business of doxxing and de-plaforming their potential customers.

Update: Online Retail Platform Terminates Cody Wilson’s Defense Distributed Account Without Explanation.

THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY IN TWENTY YEARS? Corbyn’s wreath at Munich terrorists’ graves: Photos show Labour leader at tribute event for Palestine ‘martyrs’… including plotters behind 1972 slaughter of Israeli Olympic athletes

KEEPING THINGS IN PERSPECTIVE: Washington, D.C., Braces for ‘Unite the Right 2’ White Nationalist Rally.

The media is treating this event as if hundreds of thousands of goosestepping Nazis are descending on D.C. In fact, “Permits for Sunday’s ‘Unite the Right 2’ rally indicated that about 400 demonstrators are expected in Lafayette Square, a park adjacent to the White House.” Four hundred is likely optimistic.

Treating these pathetic morons who can’t fill a small high school’s auditorium as if they represent some major national movement is only giving them millions of dollars in undeserved free publicity, albeit in the service of a contrived narrative that the Trump administration has enabled a major neo-Nazi revival. Ignoring them won’t necessarily make them go away, but it will deprive them of the media oxygen that’s making them seem much more significant than they are.

21ST CENTURY PROBLEMS: Electric scooter war rages in Southern California: LA Times tells of vandalism, tourists run amok and creative destruction.

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THE POWER LINE WEEK IN PICTURES: SPACE FORCE EDITION!

FASTER, PLEASE: Nanoparticles Take Solar Desalination to New Heights.

For at least the last decade, “solar thermal” technologies, in which sunlight is used to convert water into steam that runs electric turbines or performs desalination, has been a kind of darling of the investment community. About six years ago, nanoparticles started to get into this solar-thermal game when Rice University researchers added some nanoparticles to cold water and were able to make steam when they exposed the combination to sunlight.

Since then, a lot of work in what is now termed photothermal conversion has turned to the field of plasmonics, which exploits the wave of electrons that is produced when photons strike a metallic surface. However, producing plasmonic nanostructures is certainly not as straightforward as just adding some nanoparticles to water.

Now, researchers in China have combined the ease of adding nanoparticles to water with plasmonics to create a photothermal conversion process that exceeds all plasmonic or all-dielectric nanoparticles previously reported.

Cheap, easy desalination would be huge.

WELL, THAT’S TOUGH LUCK FOR THEM, THEN: Other People Are Having Far Less Sex Than You Think.