WHEN WOKE CULTURE IS DEFEATED: The statue of Hans Christian Heg, restored to its place of honor at the Wisconsin Capitol.

It helps that wokies are idiots, of course.

HOWIE CARR: Abolish the FBI: You heard it here first.

I saw a headline this week in The Wall Street Journal that made my day: “Abolish the FBI.”

The reason I was so pleased was because above my column in this newspaper on Jan. 24, 2018, was this headline: “Scandal-ridden FBI must be abolished.”

Is there an echo in here?

All I can say is, what took everybody else so long to realize how rotten to the core the Famous But Incompetent G-men have become, and actually have been for more than half a century now?

As the Journal noted, the FBI’s last sustained good “run of publicity … came more than 50 years ago thanks to Efrem Zimbalist Jr. and his weekly show on ABC, “The FBI,” which went off the air in 1974.

Even by dismal modern FBI standards, though, the news just keeps getting worse and worse.

Last week, one of Hillary Clinton’s lawyers was indicted by Russian collusion hoax Special Counsel John Durham. The Democrat operative was charged with lying to a James Comey briefer about one of the largely forgotten lies in the Russian hoax — Alfa Bank’s “secret servers,” which of course didn’t exist except in the fevered imaginations of far-left Democrats and their stenographers in the media.

Durham has been taking his own sweet time bringing these corrupt Deep State bad actors to justice, but better late than never. He knows a lot about how deep the corruption runs. He first brought down Whitey’s FBI hitman, Zip Connolly.

This latest indictment came only days before the five-year statute of limitations ran out.

Five years! It took that long to bring a single one of these bent Democrats before the bar of justice. But then, in this case, as in so many others involving the FBI, the cops are the actual criminals.

The joke in this latest bust is that obviously the FBI knew that Hillary’s lawyer was lying when he told the agent that he was peddling his ludicrously false stories.

Maybe not, though. They’re not making special agents like Inspector Lew Erskine anymore.

Durham’s indictment happened the same week that a newly declassified court rulings showed that the FBI had 100% lied during its illegal investigation into Trump aide Carter Page.

In the FBI’s botched frame-up of Page, one FBI lawyer has already been convicted of obstructing justice, although his punishment scarcely rose to the level of a slap on the wrist.

Accountability is for the little people. The bigshots, and their henchmen, get off light, when they suffer any consequences at all.

OPEN THREAD: “This is where the music school was. It’s the College of Law now.”

I VOLUNTEER AS TRIBUTE: Love and rockets: We need to figure out how to have sex in space for human survival and well-being. Though the Insta-Wife gets seasick easily, so I don’t know how she’d handle space.

I ALREADY LINKED THE VIDEO, BUT HERE’S MORE: Fans Chant ‘F**k Joe Biden’ During The Wisconsin/Notre Dame Game.

JUSTIN TUCKER’S NFL-RECORD 66-YARD FIELD GOAL IN FINAL SECONDS LIFTS BALTIMORE RAVENS, STUNS DETROIT LIONS.

Fan and announcer reactions here: ‘doinks Off the Crossbar:’ Justin Tucker hits NFL record 66-yard field goal to defeat the Lions at the buzzer.

GETTING AHEAD OF OURSELVES: There’s a Pretty Glaring Issue With Tesla’s Autopilot, Says New Study. “The study highlights the awkward in-between phase that we’re now in: Self-driving tech has become good enough to handle many aspects of staying on the road, but can’t be relied upon to take over everything, all of the time. That is potentially more dangerous than both fully human driving and fully automated driving, because when people get behind the wheel they assume they don’t have to give their full attention to every part of the driving experience – as this study shows.”

But, this glaring caveat: “The latest study doesn’t make any link between attention span and safety, so there are no conclusions to be drawn here about whether or not Autopilot is more or less safe than manual driving. What is clear is that it makes drivers pay less attention to the road.”

YOU BETTER LAVA ME NOW, OR LAVA ME NOT: Lava from La Palma eruption has burned almost 400 structures so far.

DON’T MESS WITH TEXAS: Gov. Abbott extends generous offer to Border Patrol agents who could be punished by Biden administration. “Abbott announced Sunday that he would hire any Border Patrol agent punished by the Biden administration over the controversy involving mounted agents and Haitian migrants last week.”

In other Texas news: Texas sues EEOC over transgender guidance.

THE INESCAPABLE ALFRED HITCHCOCK:

Along with suspense, horror, and romance, Hitchcock movies depict cinematically another basic human sentiment, and do so better than any other filmmaker has done: anxiety. Donat in The 39 Steps, Grant in North by Northwest, James Stewart and Doris Day in the remake of The Man Who Knew Too Much, and other characters in Hitchcock movies find themselves in a world whose physical features are familiar but in which they are buffeted by sinister forces that they do not understand and cannot control. Their world has suddenly and unexpectedly become both baffling and frightening. They have, somehow, to navigate their way to safety in a threatening environment.

This is the stuff of nightmares, and Hitchcock evokes them vividly. Truffaut observes at the end of their series of interviews:

It might be said that the texture of your films is made up of three elements: fear, sex, and death. These are not daytime preoccupations, like in films that deal with unemployment, racism, poverty, or in the many pictures on everyday love conflicts between men and women. These are night time anxieties, therefore, metaphysical anxieties.Hitchcock’s fundamental subjects are the distressing feelings that human beings, no matter how successfully they repress them when awake, cannot escape in their sleep. That is why, one hundred years after he began and forty years after he died, Alfred Hitchcock’s films remain, in their way, inescapable.

Hitchcock’s best films were built with bravura editing, such as the classic symphony orchestra scene in the remake of The Man Who Knew Too Much:

No wonder François Truffaut was so eager to interview him — these sorts of scenes became the textbook for future Hollywood editors. And as James Lileks would note, there’s an obligatory Star Trek connection as well in the above scene, courtesy of actor Reggie Nalder, the film’s sinister assassin.

UNEXPECTEDLY: FBI Narrative About the Jan. 6th Capitol ‘Insurrection’ Is Imploding.

KURT SCHLICHTER: Let Them Destroy Each Other.

This means Joe Biden is at grave risk of seeing his entire agenda go down at flames. This does not mean that he is at grave risk of realizing that what he is seeing is his entire agenda going down in flames because he is manifestly senile, but that’s another column.

Just watching Manchin and Sinema mock Schumer, who (as Hugh Hewitt noted) is desperate to ward off a primary challenge from up-talking, irony-free socialista AOC, restores one’s faith in cosmic justice. The libs are furious that Joe Manchin is ruining their party – it’s awesome. And their fussy threats are even more precious. Yeah, someone’s going to successfully primary Manchin from the left in West Virginia, right after the Boy Scouts let the Lincoln Project be honorary jamboree co-sponsors.

That Schumer and Pelosi are not feared like they should be by their own caucus is delightful. Mitch McConnell is feared by his caucus, and rightly so. And he’s playing this masterfully. Yeah, we have our own fights – including Trump’s silly campaign against McConnell, who is indisputably the most effective legislative knife fighter in generations. The guy drives me nuts too – his insurrection whining was stupid and lame – but no one wrecks the Dems’ dreams like the Murder Turtle. He just threw a Baby Ruth bar in the Capitol Hill pool by refusing to help raise the debt ceiling – the Dems have a majority, so it’s their problem. Of course, the Dems don’t want to do it because it looks bad – they want GOP cover. Mitch refuses to provide it, which is chum in the water to another Dem feeding frenzy.

It’s glorious.

I hope that Kurt is indeed correct that “Biden is at grave risk of seeing his entire agenda go down at flames.” Because otherwise: Biden Plan’s $3.5 Trillion Price Tag is Actually a Huge Underestimate.

FASTER, PLEASE: Reprogramming heart muscle cells to repair damage from heart attacks.

SOCIAL MEDIA ASTROTURF: Biden-boosting influencer ‘Brooklyn Dad’ slammed for taking PAC money. “Majid Padellan, who runs the nearly 900,000-follower-strong Twitter account — and has been slammed previously for urging Bernie Sanders to drop out of the 2020 presidential race — allegedly accepted more than $57,000 from a pro-Biden PAC, Really American, last year, according to Refinery29.com, which cited tweets circulating Tuesday.”

KEVIN WILLIAMSON: The Gangs of L.A. — A shocking new report suggests that in Los Angeles County, sheriff’s deputies make up some of the most dangerous crime syndicates of all.

This sort of thing appears to be endemic to law enforcement in Los Angeles. For years in the 1990s, the single most dangerous crime syndicate in Southern California was the LAPD, where members of the Rampart Division created a blue crime wave involving everything from falsifying evidence to bank robbery to selling huge quantities of cocaine stolen from evidence rooms to murder.

On one end of California, you have politicos such as San Francisco mayor London Breed and Governor Gavin Newsom blowing off COVID-19 rules as obligatory for the little people but optional for the high and mighty. On the other end of the state, you have a sheriff’s department acting as the goon squad for the elected official at the head of the agency, while deputies mob up like Crips and Bloods. Political enlightenment comes when you begin to understand that, in spite of the superficial differences between Nancy Pelosi’s beauty-parlor antics and the deeds of the East Los Angeles Banditos, they are two manifestations of the same phenomenon.

To the extent that this sort of thing is tolerated — and it is a considerable extent — the people of California have ceased to be citizens and have become subjects. And California is a national bellwether: What happens in Los Angeles today will happen in Tulsa tomorrow.

Also from Kevin as a follow-up: A Few Bad Apples in Uniform.

TALIBAN, WHO THE BIDEN ADMIN HAILED AS ‘BUSINESSLIKE,’ HANG BODY FROM CRANE, PUT OTHER CORPSES OUT FOR PUBLIC DISPLAY AS ‘LESSON.’

Last week, one of the founders of the Taliban declared that executions and hand amputations would return in Afghanistan. Mullah Nooruddin Turabi — who was justice minister and head of the Ministry of Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice during the Taliban’s previous reign — told the Associated Press, “Cutting off of hands is very necessary for security.”

“Everyone criticized us for the punishments in the stadium, but we have never said anything about their laws and their punishments,” Turabi said. “No one will tell us what our laws should be. We will follow Islam and we will make our laws on the Quran.”

Earlier: Reporter Discovers ‘Thousands’ in Kabul Still Attempting to Flee, Including US Citizens and Green Card Holders.

No wonder the Biden Administration was so eager to promote the phony “Border agents whipping migrants” narrative to generate some stray voltage.

JAMES PINKERTON: The Mask Comes Off in a Two-Tier Society Where There’s One Rule for Elites and Another for the Rest of Us.

Which side of the velvet rope are you on? Are you one of the cool kids? Were you born on the right side of the tracks? Did your ancestors come over on the Mayflower? Are you on the Forbes 400 list of the richest Americans? And now another question to test your social standing: Do you have a high enough status so that you don’t have to wear a face mask?

That last question comes to mind as we think about last weekend’s Emmy Awards in Los Angeles, which were staged on a strictly two-tier basis: The Hollywood glitterati performers and guests did not wear masks, while the help did.

Read the whole thing.

BEATLES ON THE BRINK: How Peter Jackson pieced together the Fab Four’s last days.

In the end, there was a compromise. Having begun working at Twickenham, the Beatles relocated to a makeshift studio in the basement of 3 Savile Row, the central London address that was the home of their company Apple. The plan for a televised concert was abandoned, and it was agreed – just about – that the group were now being filmed for a feature-length documentary. And on Thursday 30 January, the four of them – joined by the American keyboard player and singer Billy Preston – played, with a mixture of panache and joyous energy, on the Apple building’s roof. No one knew it was their last public performance, but, in retrospect, they ensured that such a significant moment passed off almost perfectly.
Such was the finale of four weeks of filming and recording that eventually resulted in an 80-minute feature-length film titled Let It Be, and the album of the same name. What remained in the Beatles’ vaults – although some of it subsequently fell into the hands of bootleggers – was 50 additional hours of rushes and more than twice as much audio, brimming with an immersive sense of who they were and how they worked.

Eventually, in preparation for Let It Be’s 50th anniversary, most of this material was collected together. In 2017, Apple recruited the New Zealand-based director Peter Jackson – the creator of the six film versions of The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, as well as the documentary They Shall Not Grow Old, built from restored footage of the first world war – to cut a new feature-length film. As it eventually turned out, the pandemic made a normal theatrical release impossible, and opened up the possibility of something even more ambitious. Jackson ended up creating three two-hour documentaries, which will premiere at the end of November on the streaming platform Disney+.

As Jackson puts it, his new films tell the story of the Beatles “planning for a concert that never takes place”, and “a concert that does take place, which wasn’t planned”. Thanks to his and his team’s restoration work, everything is pin-sharp, and unbelievably evocative of time and place: the tale unfolds in a London of trilby hats, Austin Powers-esque fashions and copious cigarette smoke. But the films’ key attribute is their intimacy, and the light they shine on the Beatles’ instinctive creativity, their deep personal bonds and, as they neared their final split, their thoughts about their future.

To be fair, they had one more album in them before the split, which was written to be their finale, after the Get Back/Let It Be debacle: Solid State: New Book Provides In-Depth Look at the Making of the Beatles’ Swan Song, Abbey Road.

Related: George Harrison’s Great Song That Doesn’t Get Talked About. An appreciation of “It’s All Too Much.” As one of the commenters notes, “The once heavily bootlegged long version of the recording is the one to hear, actually.” Well, here you go!

ANALYSIS: TRUE. Scientific American Says Jedi Are Problematic White Saviors, Practice Toxic Masculinity.

Scientific American, founded in 1845, has published such brilliant minds as Albert Einstein, Linus Pauling, and J. Robert Oppenheimer, and explored subjects as diverse as perpetual motion and solar neutrinos.

These days, however, the magazine is concerning itself with somewhat different topics — like how “problematic” the fictional space warriors known as Jedi are.

In a story published Thursday, titled “Why the Term ‘JEDI’ Is Problematic for Describing Programs That Promote Justice, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion,” a group of five authors argue, “The Jedi are inappropriate mascots for social justice.”

They say the scientific world should jettison the Jedi, including naming anything after them or displaying any Star Wars memorabilia in common work spaces, because the space knights are “emblems for a host of dangerously reactionary values and assumptions.”

It’s good to see the staid reactionaries at Scientific American finally reaching consensus with Jonathan Last from 19 years ago in the Weekly Standard: “The Case for the Empire,” and Sonny Bunch in the Washington Post in 2015: “The destruction of Alderaan was completely justified.” Not to mention Last that same year, who pointed out that the Rebels kept slaves.

THE GUN YOU HAVE WITH YOU IS THE BEST GUN: Is the .357 Magnum the Best Option for Personal Defense?

ROGER KIMBALL: How It Might End, Act I.

As we look around at the many assaults on free discussion today, the prospects for the continuation of our regime of liberty seems up for grabs in a more fundamental way than at any time since World War II. It was only a few years ago that the United Nations pondered an international law against blasphemy—against blasphemy!—to defend Islam against its detractors. A bit later, representatives of the United States met in London with the Organization of Islamic Cooperation to discuss whether speaking about religion can violate international law. Yes, that’s right. Around the same time, Egypt convicted eight Americans in absentia for blasphemy; if apprehended, they could face the death penalty. Meanwhile in Afghanistan, the Taliban has just announced that it is reintroducing barbaric punishments like stoning and amputation for offices against the faith.

I think Bagehot was right: free discussion is an integral ingredient, a veritable pillar of liberty. But that freedom is under serious threat today by religious fanatics, overweening government bureaucrats, and a complacent populace. David Hume once observed: “It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once.” It seems to be that we have alarm bells going off all around us. The oddity is that so few people seem to hear them. No wonder secession is once again in the air.

Read the whole thing.

MELLOW BLACK HOLES ARE THE BEST BLACK HOLES: Gamma rays and neutrinos from mellow supermassive black holes.

XI’S GOTTA HAVE IT! China Detains Business Chiefs as Its Corporate Crusade Expands:

SKYNET SMILES: How the U.S. Army Is Turning Robots Into Team Players.

MEDIA MYTH ALERT: No, Politico — Viewer-listener disagreement is a myth of JFK-Nixon debate. 61 years ago tonight, “John F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon met in the first-ever televised debate between major party presidential candidates.”