EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY: Captured, Killed or Compromised: C.I.A. Admits to Losing Dozens of Informants. “Counterintelligence officials said in a top secret cable to all stations and bases around the world that too many of the people it recruits from other countries to spy for the U.S. are being lost.”

But at least the FBI will still be able to keep an eye on domestic terrorists attending local schoolboard meetings.

THIS IS CNN: Kirsten Powers Endorses Harassment of Kyrsten Sinema.

I’m so old, I can remember when CNN ran seemingly non-stop anti-bullying campaigns, before CNN became resolutely pro-bully.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON ON ESTABLISHMENT REPUBLICANS: “I thought they would be champions of the middle class, but I don’t think they were. I don’t think they wanted to be.”

DON’T GET COCKY: More Americans Trust GOP to Promote Security, Prosperity, Poll Finds.

MEANWHILE, OVER AT VODKAPUNDIT: Biden Is Already More Dangerous Than Obama in This One Vital Way. “Obama — again, this is damning with the faintest of praise — understood that you could only push people so far before they would break out in open revolt, or something close to it.”

This one is just for our VIPs, so if you’ve been thinking of becoming a member, you can do so here — and don’t forget to use that VODKAPUNDIT discount code.

FAUCI KILLS PUPPIES: Fauci-Funded Experiment Killed Dozens Of Puppies Using Taxpayer Money. “Is this mentioned in the Fauci movie? I assume this isn’t mentioned in the Fauci movie.”

IT TOTALLY CAME FROM A BAT, YOU GUYS: China PCR Purchases Spiked in Months Before First Known Covid Cases, Firm Says.

The Chinese province that was the initial epicenter of the Covid-19 outbreak made significant purchases of equipment used to test for infectious diseases months before Beijing notified international authorities of the emergence of a new coronavirus, according to research by a cybersecurity company.

The province’s purchase of polymerase chain reaction, or PCR, testing equipment, which allows scientists to amplify DNA samples to test for infectious disease or other genetic material, shot upward in 2019, with most of the increase coming in the second half of the year, the Australian-U.S. firm Internet 2.0 found.

Hubei province is home to Wuhan, the large Chinese city where the first known cases of the virus emerged. The World Health Organization reported that its China Country Office was informed on Dec. 31, 2019, that cases of pneumonia from an unknown cause had been detected in the city.

We are informed by the Chinese government that this is merely a coincidence.

XI’S GOTTA HAVE IT: Huawei hopes US decision on Meng Wanzhou heralds new era in relations.

The Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei hopes that the US justice department’s decision to abandon its efforts to extradite Meng Wanzhou may mark the starting point in a new era in relations between the company, China and the US government.

Meng, the firm’s chief financial officer and daughter of its founder, was freed last month after three years of house arrest in Canada following an agreement with the justice department to suspend fraud charges against her.

The case poisoned Beijing’s relations with Washington and Ottawa, and sources closely involved in Huawei’s three-year court battle to block her extradition regard her release as removing a roadblock in relations between the company and the US authorities, and even between China and the US.

Biden knows who his friends are and who are his enemies.

IT’S ALL HYGIENE THEATER: Caught on Video: Rashida Tlaib Admits She Only Wears Mask for Cameras.

WELCOME BACK, CARTER: Inflation is at the highest point since 1991 and it’s growing faster than your paycheck.

COLLUSION: New Bond Can’t Take On Beijing’s Supervillains. “Craig sank his first vodka martini back in 2006 at the height of the so-called war on terror. Now the world is entering an era of great-power competition with a particular focus on China. This second Cold War should be good for Bond, given most of his finest outings took place against the backdrop of the first. Yet Hollywood’s fear of Beijing means Bond has a China problem—and one that should worry cinema fans and the West alike.”

CALL THE FBI’S CRACK WHITE-SUPREMACIST SQUAD! Father arrested and injured after confronting teacher about not letting young son use bathroom.

A father was seriously hurt, he says, for standing up for the rights of his second grade son at school.

The boy was allegedly told he couldn’t go the bathroom and stayed in his soiled pants all day.

The angry dad confronted the teacher and that’s when the trouble started.

Vincent Nemorin was put in handcuffs after questioning the second grader’s teacher at PS 193 Wednesday about why his son was allegedly left sitting in feces for hours.

“We are just demanding basic health needs. Nothing extra. Children should never be restricted going to bathroom,” said Yumi Nemorin, Vincent’s wife.

Yumi says she never imagined a simply discussion would end with her husband in handcuffs.

At one point he slips trying to get in the police vehicle.

Police say the teacher told them she felt threatened.

“Feeling threatened” shouldn’t be an excuse to put angry parents in jail, but it’s clearly used as one. And maybe if you make a kid sit in shit all day, you deserve to feel threatened.

Abolish public schools and give parents vouchers for a pro-rata share of the money. Education will improve, and petty tyrants will be put out of work.

NUCLEAR OPTION: Biden Says Changing Filibuster Rule a ‘Real Possibility.’

SPEAKING OF DESPERATION AND GIMMICKRY: How Elizabeth Holmes’ Abuse Allegations Could Affect Her Fraud Trial. “A jury will have to determine whether she is telling the truth about intimate partner abuse, something that women, statistically speaking, don’t lie about. (Studies show only 2-6% of rape allegations are false.) And if it is true that she was controlled and manipulated, a jury will further have to decide whether that abuse excuses Holmes from defrauding investors and patients.”

A friend comments: “So, she was ‘temporarily insane’ for ten or so years? Got it.”

No similar claims from a male CEO would be entertained, in fact they would be loudly mocked. And the real lesson here is don’t hire female CEOs because they might be temporarily insane for their entire tenure and you won’t know until later. Nice job helping women, Elizabeth.

NOTHING ABOUT THIS SCREAMS DESPERATION AND GIMMICKRY: Trillion-dollar platinum coin could be minted at the last minute. “Voila, we’d have bought ourselves the equivalent of a trillion-dollar increase in the debt limit, without any impact on inflation.”

Sounds legit. And I notice that under President Trump we didn’t have to resort to such bizarre expedients. And I can only imagine the response if Trump had proposed something like this.

OUT ON A LIMB: Social media is nothing like heroin.

I used to call myself a Twitter addict. It’s the first thing I check each morning and the last thing I look at at night. Yet during a family vacation in August I deleted Twitter from my phone for a week and didn’t check it even once. I didn’t vomit or convulse, as drug addicts tend to do when getting clean. I didn’t stop using because I had hit rock bottom. I wanted to be ‘in the moment’, as the kids say, and Twitter is a time-suck.

What I missed most was consuming a lot of news in a very quick manner — not the takes or the arguments, or the likes and retweets which offer that sweet dopamine hit. I was reading newspapers but I still felt out of touch. My addiction turned out to be an entirely correctable habit. If Twitter was having a negative effect on my life, I could have decided never to return to the app. Or I could return to the app in smaller doses. It’s not heroin, after all.

It’s Karol Markowicz, so read the whole thing.

CHINA IS ASSHOLE: Waterboarding, sleep deprivation and hanging from ceilings: ex-policeman details China’s crackdown on Uyghur population. “A Chinese ex-police detective turned whistleblower says Uyghur Muslims were tortured, ordered to be raped by fellow prisoners, and hanged from cell ceilings after being rounded up in a ‘social cleansing’ program.”

BEIJING SEES A STRATEGIC OPPORTUNITY:China Tests Taiwan After Biden’s Afghanistan Debacle.

The withdrawal was a self-inflicted disaster. The world knows it, even if the Washington Beltway media refuses to admit it.

Power abhors a vacuum, and autocratic states and tyrannies like Communist China rush to fill power vacuums.

Read the entire essay.

COME SEE THE RACISM INHERENT IN THE LEFTISM: UCLA Suspends Professor for Refusing to Assign Grades Based on Skin Color.

LEFTIST “HEROES” ARE ALWAYS SYNTHETIC CREATURES OF DEMOCRATIC PR FIRMS AND MEDIA:

WHY ARE OUR UNIVERSITIES COLLUDING WITH FOREIGN POWERS? Emerson College investigates conservative group that handed out anti-Chinese government stickers.

OTHER PEOPLE’S MONEY: LA and Seattle Homeless Will Be Relocated to Taxpayer-Funded Luxury Apartments.

FIGHTING AGAINST BULLIES: Student who exposed pronoun policy responds to campus-wide petition against him.

The names of the students who signed that petition should be preserved and publicized.

ABIGAIL SHRIER: Top Trans Doctors Blow the Whistle on ‘Sloppy’ Care.

They said it was perfectly safe to give children as young as nine puberty blockers and insisted that the effects of those blockers were “fully reversible.” They said that it was the job of medical professionals to help minors to transition. They said it was not their job to question the wisdom of transitioning, and that anyone who did — including parents — was probably transphobic. They said that any worries about a social contagion among teen girls was nonsense. And they never said anything about the distinct possibility that blocking puberty, coupled with cross-sex hormones, could inhibit a normal sex life.

Their allies in the media and Hollywood reported stories and created content that reaffirmed this orthodoxy. Anyone who dared disagree or depart from any of its core tenets, including young women who publicly detransitioned, were inevitably smeared as hateful and accused of harming children.

But that new orthodoxy has gone too far, according to two of the most prominent providers in the field of transgender medicine: Dr. Marci Bowers, a world-renowned vaginoplasty specialist who operated on reality-television star Jazz Jennings; and Erica Anderson, a clinical psychologist at the University of California San Francisco’s Child and Adolescent Gender Clinic.

This is a lengthy essay but well worth your time.

TALK ABOUT MIXED BLESSINGS: The Covid Lockdown led to millions of Americans discovering how great working from home can be. No more hour-long commutes, more time with family and friends, etc. But there is another side to it, according to Ashe Short:

“Potential buyers are sometimes offering hundreds of thousands of dollars above the asking price of a home and offering to waive inspections, only to have their offers declined. Buyers are losing out to cash offers or in insanely competitive bidding wars. Because of demand, 50 percent of the homes sold in July were on the market for 17 days or fewer, the National Association of Realtors (NAR) reported.

“Limited housing supply is due to many reasons, including supply chain disruption, the increased price of lumber, housing regulations, lack of labor, and demand going up as more people realize they can move and work remotely. Another widely reported issue with the market comes from large businesses buying properties to rent and pushing out buyers with more modest budgets.”

Ashe and her husband have a happy ending to their search for a new home they could customize on a lot of their choice, but most others don’t. Like the adage goes, things that can’t continue, won’t.