UNEXPECTEDLY! 911 callers in Portland face lengthy hold times amid efforts to defund the police.

According to The Oregonian, starting in the late spring, the riot-gripped city has faced a sharp increase in 911 calls placed on hold for two minutes or longer.

The national standard for 911 hold times is 15 to 20 seconds, but according to data from the Portland Bureau of Emergency Communications obtained by The Oregonian, 574 of the 911 calls in the city had to wait on hold for more than five minutes in July. This number is more than double that of May, in which 221 calls waited that long, and is drastically more than the figure in March, when only eight 911 calls took more than five minutes to answer.

Bob Cozzie, director of Portland’s Bureau of Emergency Communications, said, “I think it’s horrible. There’s no other way to state it,” in regards to the dramatic jump in wait times. “We’re at a tipping point now. It’s become unmanageable,” he said, acknowledging the delay. “The system is broken.”

And not by accident.

SPACE: SpaceX’s Inspiration4 civilian crew hopes mission will inspire world.

NO ONE ELECTED MARK MILLEY:

The larger problem at hand is that no one elected Gen. Milley to anything. It is not the job of the military state, or the intelligence state (James Comey) to override the governing authority granted to the president of the United States. We the people make those choices. If we the people decide to elect a brash gameshow host with a short fuse and no governing experience, then that is the choice we make, yes, even should the republic fall. Unelected bureaucrats and generals holding secret meetings with hostile foreign nations are the things that lead to actual banana republics and military juntas, not mean tweets and yelling at journalists.

Even Trump antagonist and MSNBC regular Alexander Vindman admits as much and is calling for Milley’s immediate resignation. Vindman tweeted, ‘If this is true GEN Milley must resign. He usurped civilian authority, broke Chain of Command, and violated the sacrosanct principle of civilian control over the military. It’s an extremely dangerous precedent. You can’t simply walk away from that.’

Vindman is correct. The United States is ours to keep or lose. That decision is not up to Gen. Milley, no matter how much he squeals he is ‘needed on that wall’.

You have to wonder: if Milley was willing to overstep his authority in January, what’s stopping him from believing that an 80-year-old Joe Biden might be incapacitated to the point of not being able to make clear headed decisions regarding actions in, say, Afghanistan? Media pundits and Milley defenders aren’t looking at the long game. But they should. Milley does not become a patriot by suddenly aligning with the wild fantasies of #Resistance Twitter. If he’s willing to overstep his authority with imagined scenarios in the Trump era, how far would he be willing to go in the real world? How much authority was Milley granted on President Biden’s catastrophic Afghanistan withdrawal? How much say did Milley have in a drone strike that reportedly targeted and killed a US-aligned aide worker and seven children in Kabul?

Read the whole thing.

MACKUBIN OWENS: U.S. military is more focused on ‘diversity’ than effectiveness.

ROBERT SPENCER: As Biden Says Islam is Peaceful, D.C. Imam Calls for Jihad.

A GOOD MOVE FROM KENT SYVERUD: A Good Statement on Faculty Speech from Syracuse. “I’m a believer in positive reinforcement, and when university leaders do the right thing they should get credit for doing so. Kent Syverud, the president of Syracuse University and a former law professor, did the right thing. Other university presidents should take notes.”

I note, though, that it takes criticism of leftist faculty to produce such statements. And so does Keith Whittington here:

Syverud was much less vocal when a professor was targeted by campus activists and denounced by members of his senior administration for calling COVID-19 the “Wuhan Flu or the Chinese Communist Party virus.” On that occasion, FIRE had to remind Syracuse about its obligations when professors say controversial things. Far from vocally defending that professor, Syracuse instead suspended him and launched an investigation over whether he should be further sanctioned and perhaps fired, contributing to FIRE awarding Syracuse a “Lifetime Censorship Award.” That professor’s case dragged on for months before Syracuse finally reinstated him.

One hopes that Syracuse has learned its lesson and will now aggressively defend free speech regardless of whether it is off-campus right-wing activists or on-campus left-wing campus activists attacking it.

If you want free speech on campus, it’s sadly probably necessary to attack leftist professors’ statements. The idea of academic freedom basically originated as a means of protecting leftist faculty from the angry bourgeoisie. For a while leftists thought they’d silenced the angry bourgeoisie and could do without academic freedom. I think it’s necessary to remind them that they’re not as safe as they thought. Hey, I don’t make these rules. They did.

21ST CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: New guidelines urge chlamydia, gonorrhea screening for women 24 and younger.

CALIFORNIA, YOU BLEW IT, AGAIN: That’s the assessment of Issues & Insights, which predicts Gavin Newsom will now double down on his particular brand of progressive authoritarianism:

“It wouldn’t be loco to think that Newsom is now going to seek revenge on those who voted to remove him. A likely place to start is to put California back under a tight and unforgiving pandemic lockdown regime even though it had never fully escaped Newsom’s iron fist over the summer.

“If not for the heat he felt from the recall polls, the life-has-been-handed-to-him governor would have surely reinstated the freedom-robbing policies he had ordered in 2020 after the Delta variant arrived in June.”

My prediction is the Golden State will be losing even more residents in the months ahead as more and more folks throw their hands up in disgust and despair, say to Hades with it, and head to Texas.

ALEX J. POLLOCK: Seven Possible Causes of the Next Financial Crisis. “The great financial historian, Charles Kindleberger, pointed out in the 1970s that over several centuries, history showed there was a financial crisis about once every ten years. His observation still holds. In every decade since his classic Manias, Panics and Crashes of 1978, such crises have indeed continued to erupt in their turn, in the 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, 2010s, and again in 2020. What could cause the next crisis in this long, recurring series?”

WELL, GOOD: Charges Dropped Against NY Radio Talker Arrested for ‘Improper’ Masking at School Board Meeting.

NOW OUT FROM MY FRIEND ANNA DAVID: Party Girl.

CANCEL CULTURE IS ALL IN YOUR MIND: 74% of professors targeted for unpopular speech or research end up punished by administrators. “Attempts to sanction scholars for their speech, research or teaching practices has skyrocketed since 2015, with about three in four campaigns leading to some form of professional sanction — including termination — according to a new report by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education.”

LOCKDOWN CASUALTIES: Student test scores drop as predicted during pandemic year in Missouri. “Students who attended school in person last year significantly outperformed their peers who participated virtually, according to the first look at Missouri test scores during the pandemic. Overall, test scores from this spring dropped across all subjects and grade levels compared with previous years, most steeply in math.”

AJ KAUFMAN: Treason? Resignation Calls Follow Report of General Milley’s Secret Calls to China. “Normally I am not so rash, nor do I toss around words like treason, but as a historian, I realize civilian leadership is paramount.”

WHO IS RESPONSIBLE MR. BLINKEN?: Biden Administration Strategic Errors Led to Afghan Debacle.

Excerpt:

Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., told Blinken that if he were just reading Blinken’s prepared testimony, then he would think the withdrawal “was a smashing success. But I do read the news, as most Americans do, and we realize this is a complete debacle … what concerns me the most … is the detachment from reality … ”

In the Biden administration, political “optics” overrule reality. Blinken repeats, with premeditation, the Biden administration’s most grievous strategic error: focusing on managing political perception instead of executing policy actions that address on-the-ground facts.

And there’s more:

The debacle’s principal component was a Noncombatant Evacuation Operation (NEO). By U.S. doctrine the State Department serves as the lead agency in a NEO. However, withdrawal from a combat zone requires military forces to maintain security, which means the State and Defense Departments must constantly coordinate with allies in planning the evacuation and in all phases of its execution. Moreover, in a complex situation like Afghanistan, the U.S. president must be willing to send military reinforcements to respond to surprises — like unanticipated enemy attacks.

An experienced planner can sketch a basic NEO plan in 10 minutes, one designed to set conditions favorable to a successful evacuation.

So the column includes one. It draws on a sketch plan I made in mid-July after a couple of friends asked me how I’d conduct a withdrawal from Afghanistan. No secret sauce at all. It’s common sense and standard NEO planning guidance. See Joint Publication 3-68 for very detailed guidance. Did Antony Blinken read it? I doubt it.

MALAKAL PASSAGE, REPUBLIC OF PALAU: The littoral combat ship USS Jackson sails through the Malakal Passage with three Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force ships. The task force includes the helicopter destroyer JS Kaga. Destroyer? It’s a jumpjet aircraft carrier. Photo taken September 2 — and it’s a good one, the sea, ships and sky. Here’s a 2017 StrategyPage Naval Air update about Japan’s carrier force. The post mentions the Kaga. The 2017 post is good background but it is a bit dated. Japan is now definitely buying F-35B vertical takeoff and landing aircraft.

COLORADO REDISTRICTING: New Maps Paint Colorado Blue. “More subtly, given the current trends, both Districts 4 and 5 are poised to swing to Democrats in the long run. District 4 will cross its inflection point in 2024 and District 5 will cross its inflection point in 2026. This means that come 2026 this map would most likely result in only one Republican holding Congressional office in Colorado, in CD-3.”

LET’S GO TO THE VIDEO: Blinken Firing Blanks, Day 2. Powerline’s Scott Johnson posts a video summary of Blinken’s very bad day before the Senate Armed Services Committee. I watched a lot of the hearing live on C-SPAN. Scott’s collection captures several of the more salient moments.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: White scholar apologizes for her ‘innate racism,’ asks white students to join her.

Race talk in modern America is mostly a way for one group of white people to assert superiority over other white people.

Related: States are cutting university budgets. Taxpayers aren’t interested in funding campus kooks.

BREAKING: Federal Judge Blocks Forced Vaccination for Medical Personnel in New York.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Profs blame 9/11 on US foreign policy, racism at event featuring speakers with ties to terrorists.

NO. ‘Consume and cover,’ ‘quick sip rule’: Harvard wants students to eat, drink with mask on.

WALL STREET JOURNAL: Where the Covid Origin Inquiry Goes Now:

After the intelligence community submitted its muddled report last month on the origins of Covid-19, President Biden said “the world deserves answers, and I will not rest until we get them.” He won’t get answers from China, but that doesn’t mean the U.S. can’t do more at home.

The more the world has learned, the more plausible the lab-leak theory has become.

The latest evidence is more than 900 pages of National Institutes of Health (NIH) documents outlining collaboration between the U.S. nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance and the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). Obtained by the Intercept, a left-leaning web outlet, the documents show how American taxpayer dollars were spent on risky bat coronavirus research at the opaque Chinese institute. EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak sought to shut down debate about the lab-leak theory, and his organization understood the dangers of what was being done there.

A $3.1 million grant in May 2014 gave the WIV nearly $600,000 for “Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence.” The grant proposal warns about the “risk of exposure to pathogens or physical injury while handling bats” and other wildlife. The document says “fieldwork involves the highest risk of exposure to SARS or other CoVs.” It adds that in the lab “experimental work using infectious material will be conducted under appropriate biosafety standards.” Except American experts reported unsafe conditions after visiting the WIV in 2017 and 2018.

The documents show several examples of the U.S. supporting “gain of function” research, despite repeated denials from top NIH Director Francis Collins and Dr. Anthony Fauci. This controversial practice, which the U.S. banned from 2014-17, can give pathogens the ability to infect a different species. The State Department reported this year that WIV researchers became sick “with symptoms consistent with” Covid-19 in autumn of 2019. The Chinese organization also took virus databases offline and refused to provide critical data to the World Health Organization.

The 2014 grant states that “no funds are provided and no funds can be used to support gain-of-function research.” But Rutgers University molecular biologist Richard Ebright notes that other NIH documents “definitively” show otherwise.

I know what I think.