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MR. MAUNDER, PLEASE PICK UP THE BLACK COURTESY PHONE: Incredible Photo Shows The ISS in Front of a Strangely Spotless Sun. “For reasons not yet fully understood, the number of sunspots occurring during both the previous and current solar minima have been unusually low.”

MUCH FASTER, PLEASE: Soon There Will Be Unlimited Hair — A “Cure” for Baldness Could Be Around the Corner.

I REMEMBER WHEN HIGHER EDUCATION WAS SUPPOSED TO FOSTER CRITICAL THINKING: College defends punishing student for posing with gun at gun range: It glorifies violence.

The message of today’s left: I’m a crazy person with a lot of insane mental associations, and it’s your responsibility not to set them off by doing perfectly normal things.

AUSTRALIA WARNS DIPLOMATS AFTER CHINA PRAISES ‘PATRIOTIC’ CLASHES WITH PRO-HONG KONG PROTESTERS.

Earlier: China, not Russia, is the biggest threat.

ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY: The New Yorker Seriously Mischaracterized the Story of One of Al Franken’s Accusers.

As libertarian-leaning Twitter user Neontaster tweets, “When get humiliated like this by Jezebel, you know you done goofed.”

AND AGAIN: Another CNN Personality’s Antisemitic Tweets Unearthed: ‘I Love You Hitler.’

Earlier: CNN Photo Editor “Resigns” After Posting Vicious Anti-Semitic Tweets on Deaths of ‘Jewish Pigs.’

Related: Democratic Rep. Hank Johnson: Jewish Settlers Are Like Termites.

Somebody’s angling for a sweet gig as a CNN anchor when he leaves Congress.

THANKS, BARRY! DOJ Invokes Fast And Furious With Refusal To Prosecute Willam Barr For Contempt. “The media and left are constantly surprised and outraged that the right has the gall to remember things that Democrats did and then try to do the same.”

THE POWER LINE WEEK IN PICTURES: Mueller Time Edition.

KRUISER: Kathy Griffin and the Consequences of the Politics of Stupidity. “It is almost certain that Griffin never once pondered that she would get any backlash at all for her photo shoot. Coastal liberals — especially those in the entertainment industry — don’t know any people who disagree with them politically…It turns out that taking a page from ISIS to make a point about the president is a bit too much to stomach for even many of the angriest Americans.”

Read the whole thing.

WATCHING THE FAKE NEWS BEING MADE IN REAL TIME: CBS News picks up Reuters’ spin on ‘mom pleading with border guard to let her enter the US’ photo. “Just weeks after DNC Media lost its collective mind over an economic migrant who got himself and his child killed while crossing a river, it tries to manufacture an outrage storm over a (Mexican) trooper warning a migrant with a child not to attempt a dangerous border crossing.”

KC JOHNSON: A Federal Court Takes on Title IX.

OH, THAT LIBERAL FASCISM: On the Tragedy of Robert Mueller as John Gill.

As I watched Mueller on Wednesday, that Star Trek episode repeatedly came to mind. Mueller was John Gill and, at any moment, I was expecting Andrew Weissmann or one of the other “Mueller Investigation” henchmen to emerge as Melakon. It all seemed finally to make sense: Mueller had been drugged for two years, and Ekos had been hijacked by others. That helped me understand why Mueller could not testify with consistent coherence or command of the “Mueller Report,” how he could not identify the president who had appointed him earlier in his career, how he could not hear or grasp so many questions, could not identify Fusion GPS — for that matter, could not allow any questions to be asked of him at the press conference he had held two months earlier at the end of May. Melakon needed to control the script, obviating the possibility of asking questions.

Mueller had not prepared “to the gills” for his Congressional hearing because he, in fact, was John Gill. In the topsy-turvy world that has been absorbed by more than two years of the Christopher Steele-Fusion GPS Perkins Coie-Peter Strzok-Lisa Page-James Comey-Andrew McCabe-CNN-MSNBC-ABC-CBS-NBC-PBS-NYT-WaPo Universe of Conspiracies, finally a conspiracy theory seemed to make sense: Someone had determined that a debilitated Robert Mueller no longer was what he once had been been and, like John Gill, could be manipulated as a figurehead poster face behind whom a vast alternative conspiracy could be pursued by one or more Melakons to take down the president of the United States.

We just need to find out who was Melakon.

Boldly go and read the whole thing.

HONG KONG: Michael Yon is posting reports and video on his Facebook page.

WOW: Even College Students Agree That Antifa Should Be Labeled A Terrorist Organization.

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ALL COMEDY IS CONSERVATIVE: What if the counterculture becomes the culture? Then anti-woke comics start to sound like the counter-counterculture.

Three years ago, before his ritual public shaming, [Aziz] Ansari was writing pieces like “Why Trump Makes Me Scared for My Family” for the New York Times, foreseeing an outbreak of Islamophobia. As it turns out, the abuse heaped on Ansari in the Trump era came from another direction entirely. He doesn’t mention Trump in the new set, except to make fun of how the president gets blamed every time someone gets triggered. He has a bit about one of those social-media flare-ups, this one involving a pepperoni pizza: Were the pepperonis arranged in the form of a swastika? Was it an accident? Except Ansari made up the story to see if he could get people to opine on a fictitious controversy, to express their mindlessness in the form of applause. This sounds like an excerpt from Kevin Williamson’s new book:

Every night, people clap. First, the first group claps. “Yeah, it’s a swastika. That’s what the country is. Trump probably put those pepperonis on there himself!” Then, the other crew claps. “No way. The country’s way too sensitive. PC police. Snowflakes!” And what these people don’t realize is despite believing completely different things, they’re actually the same person. ’Cause they don’t really care about learning, and exploring, and discussing, they just want to chime in with their little programmed reactions.

The standing ovation Ansari gets at the beginning of his show, and the hearty reaction to his anti-woke new material, are heartening. Ansari was placed in the public stocks and pelted with rotten fruit for a while, and he’s just fine. No, he’s even better. Now let’s hear what Louis C.K. has to say.

Read the whole thing.

(Classical reference in headline.)

CORRECTING THE RECORD: The Soviet Space Program Was Not Woke.

But the NYT editors couldn’t bear to mark an American achievement without some sort of carping.

THE 21st CENTURY IS NOT TURNING OUT AS I HAD HOPED: Will Trump declare war on Sweden over rapper A$AP Rocky?

WHO NEEDS ‘EM? IT’S NOT LIKE THEY’RE A MAJORITY OR ANYTHING: How Democrats Are Shorting White Voters for 2020.

WHAT WERE ROBESPIERRE’S PRONOUNS?, asks Peggy Noonan:

It was a revolution largely run by sociopaths. One, Robespierre, the “messianic schoolmaster,” saw it as an opportunity for the moral instruction of the nation. Everything would be politicized, no part of the citizen’s life left untouched. As man was governed by an “empire of images,” in the words of a Jacobin intellectual, the new régime would provide new images to shape new thoughts. There would be pageants, and new names for things. They would change time itself! The first year of the new Republic was no longer 1792, it was Year One. To detach farmers from their superstitions, their Gregorian calendar and its saints’ days, they would rename the months. The first month would be in the fall, named for the harvest. There would be no more weeks, just three 10-day periods each month.

So here is our parallel, our hiccup. I thought of all this this week because I’ve been thinking about the language and behavioral directives that have been coming at us from the social and sexual justice warriors who are renaming things and attempting to control the language in America.

There is the latest speech guide from the academy, the Inclusive Communications Task Force at Colorado State University. Don’t call people “American,” it directs: “This erases other cultures.” Don’t say a person is mad or a lunatic, call him “surprising/wild” or “sad.” “Eskimo,” “freshman” and “illegal alien” are out. “You guys” should be replaced by “all/folks.” Don’t say “male” or “female”; say “man,” “woman” or “gender non-binary.”

In one way it’s the nonsense we’ve all grown used to, but it should be said that there’s an aspect of self-infatuation, of arrogance, in telling people they must reorder the common language to suit your ideological preferences. There is something mad in thinking you should control the names of things. Or perhaps I mean surprising/wild.

I see in it a spirit similar to that of the Terror. There is a tone of, “I am your moral teacher. Because you are incapable of sensitivity, I will help you, dumb farmer. I will start with the language you speak.”

An odd thing is they always insist they’re doing this in the name of kindness and large-spiritedness. And yet, have you ever met them? They’re not individually kind or large-spirited. They’re more like messianic schoolmasters.

Or to put it another way: Jessica Yaniv: Democratic Party Poster Gal.

TRUMP REACHES ‘LANDMARK’ IMMIGRATION DEAL WITH GUATEMALA.