NO ONE IS COMING, IT’S UP TO US. That’s a First Responder slogan, but I thought of it as I was finishing the latest Andrew Wareham novel. (I guess I should have mentioned earlier that it was out). It’s a WWII RAF novel. There’s a minor character, a superior officer to the protagonist who is a famous WWI ace but who isn’t very good at his job, but the protagonist realizes that his superior knows that he’s not that good at his job but sticks to it anyway because for all his flaws there’s nobody better available. And he feels a bit of reluctant sympathy and admiration for someone he had previously looked down on.

I kind of feel that way about my whole generation. We’re not the best you can imagine, we’re just the best that’s available. And I guess some of us, at least, will keep trying to do our best.

OPEN THREAD: Share your thoughts and feelings and hopes for the future.

SPACE: Space Force finalizing plan to procure broadband from low-orbit satellites.

BECAUSE “WOKE” POLITICS IS INSANITY: Why Did The Dean Of The Most Diverse Law School In America Cancel Herself?

ONE OF AMERICA’S BEST JUDGES:  Judge Ho Tells It Like It Is.

The only downside of “the Honorable James Ho” is that his appointment to the bench makes me feel elderly.  I knew him before he went to law school (but a good 15 years after I had graduated).  I remember I urged him to attend my alma mater–the University of Chicago Law School.  But I don’t think I can even claim partial credit for having influenced his decision; if I am remembering correctly, he was already leaning heavily toward Chicago.  Now he’s a Fifth Circuit judge–one of quite a few great judicial appointments by Donald Trump.

WHY NOT BAN WRITING ALTOGETHER?:  Oxford considers scrapping sheet music for being “too colonial.”

THINK THE TIMES WILL LET HIM PUBLISH ANOTHER OP/ED? From a few days ago, but worth noting: JustTheNews reporting that Arkansas Republican Sen. Tom Cotton introduced legislation to ban critical race theory training in the military and remove what he calls “divisive” and “anti-American” ideas from military training.

Money graf:

“Our military’s strength depends on the unity of our troops and the knowledge that America is a noble nation worth fighting for,” Cotton said. “Critical Race Theory teaches that race is a person’s most important characteristic, and that America is an evil, oppressive place. That idea may be fashionable in left-wing circles and college classrooms, but it has no place in our military.”

Imagine that! “America is a noble nation worth fighting for.” How f**ked are we that this is a controversial statement?

BONUS LINE: “With Democrats in control of both houses of Congress and the White House, Cotton’s bill faces an uphill battle.”

NONSENSE. LAWS ARE FOR THE LITTLE PEOPLE. It’s ‘Common Sense’ to Prosecute Hunter Biden for His Gun Crimes.

See also, David Gregory.

YES. NEXT QUESTION? Is Joe Biden Trying to Buy Joe Manchin’s Loyalty?

I BLAME RON DESANTIS: New York, New Jersey now lead the country in COVID-19 infections.

VIA A FRIEND:

20 MINUTES INTO THE FUTURE:

Shot: Understand That Some People Love the Pandemic.

—Kurt Schlichter, Townhall, this past Monday.

Chaser: The truth is many of us have loved lockdown.

—Alice Thomson, The London Sunday Times, this past Wednesday.

Thomson’s article is behind a paywall, but you can likely get the gist of it from reading Schlichter’s article.

OUTSTANDING: Donald Trump to visit border in next few weeks. Invited by ICE and CBP.

The sense of amnesia leftists will have about Obama and Carter violating the unspoken rule that past presidents don’t comment on their successor will be astonishing to watch.

NO, NICK KRISTOF, MORE PROGRESSIVE CHRISTIANITY IS NOT GOOD FOR AMERICA: The well-known New York Times columnist is just tickled pink that progressive Christianity — aka more recently as the “Woke Church” — is getting more attention these days, thanks to self-proclaimed Catholic Joe Biden in the Oval Office.

Natasha Crain, by contrast, is not a New York Times regular — though her presence there would certainly give both proof that the age of miracles is not done and hope that old grey lady might yet be saved. But Crain lights up Kristof’s column and leaves little more than smoky cinders behind.

Consider just this passage from Crain, which begins with a bolded Kristof quote:

“’Young and middle-aged Americans could be forgiven for thinking that Jesus was a social conservative who denounced gay people and harangued the poor to lift themselves up by the bootstraps, until he was crucified for demanding corporate tax cuts.’

“This is obviously a ridiculous characterization of Christianity and Jesus in particular. If people have this idea of Jesus, they either haven’t read the Bible, or they’ve read too many articles like those of Kristof that repeatedly mischaracterize what those who hold to the historic Christian faith actually believe.

“But more importantly, here is where Kristof begins to blur the lines and equivocate between progressive theology and progressive politics. Notice how he moves from a strictly moral issue (homosexuality) to primarily economic ones (policy decisions on how to help the poor or tax businesses). This is a common move of politically progressive Christians. While they popularly accuse politically conservative Christians of mixing politics and religion, they frequently do the same, bundling progressive politics with what Jesus would ‘really’ want.”

That’s just a taste. Crain ends her lengthy nuking of Kristof by observing that the “oversimplified, assumption-ridden narrative that we find in Kristof’s piece is precisely why people can’t have reasonable conversations today.” Crain should be much better known among political conservative because she has a fine hand for defending the truths of scripture and basic logic against caricatures of both from the Left.

JULIE BURCHILL: Bristol is now a hotbed of ‘ventrification.’

As with Sussex University in my adopted hometown of Brighton, the overprivileged and undercooked spawn of the bourgeoisie moved in and never left. They merely stopped washing their hair and started calling themselves Antifa rather than Annabel. This was a new face of gentrification: ventrification, which is all about peevish posh kids using working-class neighbourhoods as a stage for their temper tantrums.

* * * * * * * *

For people who supposedly hate American influence, this self-righteous rabble seem very keen on turning my hometown into a twin of Portland, Oregon, where all sorts of shady stuff (the defunding of the police, the pushing of trans policies which will impact on female spaces) is being pushed. It’s ironic that I left Bristol to escape the peacefulness which the teenage me was so contemptuous of. Now I see my city in flames and yearn for the good old days.

I’m sure the British police will clamp down hard on this.

Just kidding of course. Why breakup protests and riots when you can arrest people for this? Police ‘are told to fine Covid rule-breakers after just one verbal warning’ as three officers ‘arrest a woman for sitting on a bench’ and another is surrounded for ‘leaving her house more than once.’

BIDEN UNHINGED: Calls Attempts To Stop Election Fraud ‘Sick’ And ‘Un-American.’

DO NOT TRUST CHINA. CHINA IS ASSHOLE: Xi Jinping turned me into a China hawk. “I spent 20 years believing in China’s potential. I feel betrayed.”

FASTER, PLEASE: Salvage firm boss reveals his master plan to clear the huge tanker blocking the Suez Canal using two large tugboats to tow the ship to safety.

Related: Interesting Situation With M/V Ever Given, The Container Ship Stuck In Suez Canal.

FASTER, PLEASE: Progress Toward Antiaging Gene Therapy Treatments.

BOULDER SHOOTER AHMAD ALISSA WILL FACE MORE ATTEMPTED MURDER CHARGES FOR SHOOTOUT WITH COPS — as it emerges he bought the AR-15 style gun used in the attack legally after passing background check.

I’VE ARGUED FOR THIS FOR A LONG TIME: New York City Ends Qualified Immunity for Police Officers. That said, that NYC is doing it now suggests its more a part of the war against the NYPD than of a serious civil rights program.

Oh, also, qualified immunity for all other government employees should be ended. Why give some bureaucrat at the Health Department or Child Welfare immunity that you don’t give to cops?

QUESTION ASKED: Elizabeth Warren: Senator From Massachusetts—or the Roman Empire?

A U.S. senator says she wants to break up Amazon so that it won’t be “powerful enough to heckle senators with snotty tweets.”

That would require a lot of breaking up. Amazon could still heckle Warren at half its size—even at one-100th its size. Jeff Bezos could give away all his shares and open a frozen banana stand and he could still heckle Elizabeth Warren. You see, as Milton Berle never said, size doesn’t matter.

Pretty much anyone can heckle senators on Twitter—and in person! It happens, like, 10,000 times a day. Businesses can heckle them too, and not just big ones. The owners of the Love Muffin Café or Four Seasons Landscaping are welcome to get involved.

The interesting—and disturbing—thing about Warren’s far snottier rejoinder is that she seems to think this shouldn’t be the case. Indeed, she seems to think mere disagreement amounts to heckling. Still worse, she thinks businesses—nay, whole sectors—should be broken up so that they won’t have the temerity to disagree with a bloviating and demagogic senator. I wonder if Warren is offended when NARAL “heckles” Ted Cruz. I’m kidding of course, I don’t wonder about that at all.

I’m sure Warren has lots of reasons for wanting to break up Big Tech, but she didn’t list them here. By her account she thinks insufficient fear of Elizabeth Warren, the Cambridge Slay Queen, is justification alone for swinging her scythe. That disturbs me far more than literally anything Amazon or Jeff Bezos have ever said or done.

I can’t defend Amazon after they censored Ryan T. Anderson, but I think Henry Kissinger had the right idea when it came to the Iran-Iraq War.

THE LONELY LIVES OF SCIENTISTS: Scientists Thrilled to Observe The First Milliseconds of Gold Crystal Formation.

“IS THE NEW YORK TIMES A LIBERAL NEWSPAPER? OF COURSE IT IS.” Check out this super consistent and unbiased reporting from the New York Times:

(Classical reference in headline.)

BORDER TOUR: Senators heckled by ‘coyotes,’ Biden officials tried to block photos.

Republican senators on a two-day whirlwind tour of several border facilities were heckled by Mexican “coyotes” across the Rio Grande and told not to take photos of holding areas crammed with children.

One of the 18 senators on the fact-finding tour to South Texas, Indiana Sen. Mike Braun, told Secrets that a Biden aide involved in the tour asked that he delete his photos. Like others on the trip, he didn’t.

Inside a migrant processing and holding center in Donna, Texas, Braun said, “There was one of Biden’s representatives. I felt sorry for the lady because she actually talked to me about deleting a picture, but by the time she got to me, all those other pictures were taken, and that shows you the hypocrisy,” he said.

“None of us would have gone down there if we were going to be muzzled,” said Braun, who added that Border Patrol also asked that no photos were to be taken, but that “they were telling us that because they had to.”

Those photos showed children as young as 3 years old jammed into the facilities that Braun described as the worst situation for migrants in 20 years. He earlier provided Secrets with a video of migrants being held by the dozens under a bridge.

Related: Ted Cruz tweets, “How far is Joe Biden going to stop the American people from seeing inside the Donna CBP facility? Biden sent a political operative from DC to block our cameras and even threatened another senator to obstruct legitimate congressional oversight.”