WARTHOGS LIGHT IT UP: A-10s drop flares during a combat patrol over “an undisclosed location in Southwest Asia, Sept. 21, 2019.”

HONG KONG’S PROTESTS SHAME RED CHINA’S PARADE: “Does this mean war?”

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: How China ‘Woke’ America.

First, the Chinese overreached and systematically began militarizing neutral islands in the South China Sea. They derided international commercial treaties.

In racist fashion, they treated Asian and African countries as if they were 19th-century colonies. And they unapologetically lifted technology from America’s biggest and most powerful corporations to turn China into something akin to George Orwell’s “1984.”

Meanwhile, Beijing began rounding up dissidents, cracking down in Hong Kong and “re-educating” millions of Muslims in detention camps. All that brazenness finally drove the left to drop its multicultural blinders and accept the truth of renegade Chinese oppression.

Second, Donald Trump got elected president, all the while screaming that the Chinese emperor had no clothes. The cheerleaders finally listened and admitted that China had been buck naked after all.

Now we will learn whether America woke up just in time or too late. Either way, no one will credit the loud Trump for warning that China was threatening not just the U.S. but the world as we have known it.

Read the whole thing — it’s VDH, after all.

THEY’VE GOT TO PROTECT THEIR PHONY-BALONEY JOBS: CNN rejects Trump ad that slams ‘media lapdogs’ Don Lemon, Chris Cuomo.

STUDENTS FIGHTING RACISM: Harvard student SLAMS Ivy League school’s race-based admission system.

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KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEF: #FullOfSchiff Friday Edition. “Last night, the Democrats released transcripts of administration officials’ text messages the Ukraine situation. Here is a synopsis from The Hill that also includes all of the transcripts. I read through several pages of them until I felt as if I’d been placed in a medically induced coma and no longer cared.”

IMPEACHMENT QUOTES DEMOCRATS WANT YOU TO IGNORE: Joe Biden quoting Brett Kavanaugh on why a partisan impeachment is wrong? Jerrold Nadler explaining why impeachment is a substitute for assassination? Chuck Schumer defending censure instead of impeachment for presidential wrong-doing? I’m not making these up and neither did the editorial board at Issues & Insights, which helpfully compiled these gems and many more.

WHY IS HARVARD SO RACIST? Harvard’s Preferences For Athletes, Legacies, Dean’s Interest, And Children Of Faculty/Staff Overwhelmingly Benefit Whites At Expense Of African-American, Asian-American, And Hispanic Applicants.

HEH: There Is Absolutely Nothing Suspicious And Criminal-Like About Hunter Biden’s Ukrainian Director’s Salary. “You can pretend, if you want, that there was a purpose in hiring Hunter Biden beyond currying favor with his father. You can pretend, as did John Kerry’s State Department, that there was no conflict of interest or quid pro quo involved that involved pressure being removed from Ukraine in return for employing Joe Biden’s kid. You can pretend that Joe Bidens’ interest in firing that prosecutor was some high minded expression of unity with the EU. Just don’t expect anyone else to go along with that sick fantasy.”

Members of the MSN-DNC excluded, of course.

HMM: Trump Report Card: Zogby says Trump’s no Nixon, removal impossible with good approvals.. Well, the whole impeachment thing is about distracting people from news of Democratic misdeeds, not about removing Trump.

CONNECTING THE DOTS: Jean-Claude Van Damme was in a movie with Volodymyr Zelensky and Jean-Claude Van Damme stars in Trump’s favorite movie “Bloodsport.” Coincidence? Soon to occupy an entire episode of the Rachel Maddow show.

NOT YET, BUT MAYBE: Is This The End Of The Lithium-Ion Battery?

Aluminum-based batteries would be cheaper to make, because aluminum is the third most abundant element in the Earth’s crust after oxygen and silicon. Aluminum is also light-weight and could be ideal for use in batteries.

Yet, for years scientists have stumbled in the research about aluminum batteries because they have yet to crack the code of what materials to use for the anode and cathode of the battery so that it could enable efficient energy storage with enough energy content.

Now scientists from Sweden and Slovenia say they have found a way to have efficient aluminum batteries with lower environmental impact and lower production costs.

Researchers from Sweden’s Chalmers University of Technology and the National Institute of Chemistry in Slovenia came up with a new concept for an aluminum battery design that promises twice the energy density compared to previous aluminum battery versions.

Compared to the lithium-ion batteries today, the new concept could lead to “markedly lower production costs” of aluminum batteries, the scientists say.

Faster, please. And more power, too.

WELL, THAT IS THEIR MAIN PRODUCT: Defending San Francisco’s Anti-NRA Resolution, City Officials Say It Was Nothing but Meaningless Bluster. Although San Francisco’s supervisors urged city officials to punish contractors with ties to this “domestic terrorist organization,” they say they did not really mean it. Of course, they also lie a lot, and they’re doing that here too.

OPEN THREAD: Enjoy.

A MODEST PROPOSAL: Woman At AOC Town Hall Insists “We Must Eat The Babies” To Stop Climate Change.

Is it satire? Parody? Rightwing performance art? I don’t know, but we need more like it.

NOW OUT FROM MARK HERRMANN: The Curmudgeon’s Guide To Practicing Law, Second Edition. A super-useful guide for law students and recent law grads on how to become a real lawyer.

HERE’S THE TRAILER FOR CLINT EASTWOOD’S NEW RICHARD JEWELL MOVIE.

BYRON YORK: Joe Biden is no longer a front-runner.

Back in May of this year, Biden had an enormous 26.8 percentage point lead over the second-place Democrat, Sen. Bernie Sanders, in the RealClearPolitics average of national polls. By late June, that lead had shrunk to 15.6 points. By Sept. 1, it was 13.5 points. By mid-September, it was 9.7 points.

Now, Biden’s lead is 2.2 points, which is essentially no lead at all. He is just ahead of Sen. Elizabeth Warren, with Sanders having fallen farther back and the rest of the field in the mid-to-low single digits.

Certainly Biden has not been helped by Trump, locked in an impeachment battle with House Democrats, characterizing Biden and son Hunter Biden as corrupt. “Look, Biden and his son are stone-cold crooked,” the president said at the White House Wednesday. Even if the public knows virtually nothing about the Bidens’ case, it’s not good to be called corrupt 24/7.

That could account for a decline in Biden’s support in the last week or so. But Biden’s numbers have been trending downward for months.

I don’t think Democrat primary voters care if he’s crooked; they care if he looks like a loser.

VIRGINIA POSTREL: Homelessness Isn’t Just a Humanitarian Problem: California activists are undermining their cause by ignoring and stigmatizing legitimate concerns about social disorder.

California has a homelessness crisis, but Californians don’t agree about what it is.

To homeless advocates, social service providers, many politicians and most journalists, it’s a humanitarian problem — a social tragedy of rapidly increasing numbers of men, women and families living without shelter, vulnerable to crime, disease and degradation. This state of affairs, they believe, is a “moral disaster.”

For pedestrians pushed into the street by blocked sidewalks, women afraid of unruly men screaming obscenities, patio diners beset by panhandlers and homeowners discovering human feces in their yards, it’s an environmental catastrophe — the neighborhood equivalent of an oil spill. They want someone to clean it up and prevent it from happening again.

Both are correct. Any serious attempt to address the crisis must take both problems seriously. Activists who ignore, downplay or stigmatize the threat to public order are hurting their own cause.

The compassionate view overwhelmingly dominates press coverage and official statements. It defines the problem and the acceptable ways of discussing it.

Perhaps we should stop deferring to “activists,” who are neither morally nor intellectually serious and are often self-interested.

Most Californians in cities beset by homelessness would never vote for Trump, but he’s voicing their disgust and unease. People who pay their taxes, keep up their homes and consider themselves law-abiding feel besieged and unheard. Whatever empathy they may have had melts away.

“This is about people yelling and screaming at three in the morning and openly flashing weapons,” a woman told the San Francisco Chronicle after neighbors pooled money for large boulders to keep homeless settlements off their sidewalks. “I’m not rich. I’m having a hard enough time making it myself.”

Placed in the “furniture zone” next to the street, the boulders left room for pedestrians and complied with local codes. The public works department said they could stay. But pressure from enraged activists, who began rolling them into the streets at night, led residents to ask the city to haul the boulders away. “We traded criminals for activists and the media,” one told the Chronicle. “We don’t want to feel the fire anymore.”

Ignoring the public-order side of the issue has an ironic side effect. The chaos associated with homeless encampments appears to be fortifying a growing opposition to new housing intended to get people off the streets.

And hey, maybe some of these people will wind up voting for Trump after all. As Trump said to black voters last time, what have the Democrats done for you?

JOEL KOTKIN: Elites Against Western Civilization: Teaching youth that there is nothing good about our democratic cultural inheritance, the intellectual class is working to discredit our past and demolish our future.

The intellectual class across the West—encompassing its universities, media, and arts—is striving to dismantle the values that paced its ascendancy. Europe, the source of Western civilization, now faces a campaign, in academia and elite media, to replace its cultural and religious traditions with what one author describes as a “multicultural and post-racial republic” supportive of separate identities. “The European ‘we’ does not exist,” writes French philosopher Pierre Manent, assessing the damage. “European culture is in hiding, disappearing, without a soul.”

The increasingly “woke” values of the educated upper classes reflect, as Alvin Toffler predicted almost half a century ago, the inevitable consequence of mass affluence, corporate concentration, and the shift to a service economy. The new elite, Toffler foresaw, would abandon traditional bourgeois values of hard work and family for “more aesthetic goals, self-fulfillment as well as unbridled hedonism.” Affluence, he observed, “serves as a base from which men begin to strive for post economic goals.”

The driving force for these changes has been the ascendant clerisy, which, reprising the role that the Church played in medieval times, sees itself as anointed to direct human society, a modern version of the “oligarchy of priests and monks whose task it was to propitiate heaven,” in the words of the great French historian of the Middle Ages, Marc Bloch. Traditional clerics remained part of this class but were joined by others—university professors, scientists, public intellectuals, and heads of charitable foundations. This secular portion of society has now essentially replaced the clergy, serving as what German sociologist Max Weber once called society’s “new legitimizers.” The clerisy spans an ever-growing section of the workforce that largely works outside the market economy—teachers, consultants, lawyers, government workers, and medical professionals. Meantime, positions common among the traditional middle class—small-business owners, workers in basic industries and construction—have dwindled as a share of the job market.

The educated, affluent class detests President Trump, whom many in the Third Estate support, and has rallied to its preferred candidate, Elizabeth Warren, who emerges from the legal and university communities and voices the progressive rhetoric common to this class. (Warren’s less brainy left-wing rival, Bernie Sanders, fares better among struggling, often younger workers.) Warren’s clerisy supporters represent what French Marxist author Christophe Guilluy calls the “privileged stratum,” which operates from an assumption of moral superiority that justifies its right to rule.

The elites are not just wrong, they’re evil.

JOHN HINDERAKER ON JUDICIAL WATCH’S LATEST: Rod Rosenstein, Exposed. Remember how the press told us he was a solid Republican and a straight shooter. Yeah, that was just another lie.