ANOTHER TERM FOR PRIME MINISTER ZOOLANDER: Canada election: Trudeau stays in power but Liberals fall short of majority.

UPDATE: Trudeau wanted a strong mandate to take the country on a drastic turn to the left. He didn’t get one. “In the six years of his government, Trudeau has distracted the country with a ludicrously alarmist view of climate change and a preposterously self-important notion of how much difference Canada, with its minuscule carbon footprint and generally high ecological standards, can make. To this end he has persecuted Canada’s greatest industry (oil and gas) unmercifully and driven large sections of Western Canada to contemplate the possible deliverance of separation.”

CULTURE OF CORRUPTION: Tax Lawyers At Top Accounting Firms Cycle In And Out Of Top Treasury Posts And Reap Huge Rewards For Their Clients And Themselves.

CHAIN OF COMMAND: General Milley Often Went Rogue.

A witness from inside the administration has suggested that rogue behavior wasn’t abnormal for Milley.

E. Casey Wardynski, a former assistant secretary of the Army for manpower and reserve affairs, claimed that Milley — who, according to the book, “Peril,” by Bob Woodward and Robert Costa, called his Chinese counterpart twice to tell him that the US would not attack Beijing — routinely violated the bounds of his authority.

Wardynski said Milley and chief of staff of the US Army Gen. James McConville engaged in a “pattern of behavior” to thwart President Donald Trump.

Wardynski also called Milley a bully who had no intention of supporting the president.

Milley’s job is to give advice and follow orders — not behave like the Woke version of a four-star Hollywood heavy.

YOU STAY CLASSY, JEN: Psaki Invokes Biden’s ‘Personal’ Losses After Botched Airstrike Killed Seven Kids.

ON LOSING A BELOVED PET: Twister, RIP, and what it all means.

WELL, HE’S GOT US THERE. “Early this year, when Facebook Inc. and Twitter Inc. took down former U.S. President Donald Trump’s accounts, Mr. Xi saw yet another sign America’s economic system was flawed—it let big business dictate what a political leader should do or say—officials familiar with his views said.” (Sorry it’s from a paywalled Journal story.) I’d call that a flaw in our political system – nobody has yet explained to me how anyone will believe we had a free and fair election if one candidate were to end up locked out of social media during the campaign – but it’s definitely a flaw.

As for the economic policy described here – “‘Xi does think he’s moving to a new kind of system that doesn’t exist anywhere in the world,’ said Barry Naughton, a China economy expert at the University of California, San Diego. ‘I call it a government-steered economy'” – I am pretty sure it did exist, and it was called national socialism. As with all command economies, it will ultimately flop.

THOSE AT THE TOP OF THE HIERARCHY WANT TO MAKE DAMN SURE YOU KNOW IT: The COVID Hierarchy Is A Power Hierarchy And Everyone Knows It. “So confident are they in this power, they flaunt it on national television. They don’t fear the unwashed masses. What are they going to do, stop watching the Emmys? (Done.) Refuse service work in states like New York and California? Elect Republicans where there are none?”

COLLUSION: Does a professor have the right to say ‘China virus’? At UDallas, the answer is no.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: ‘Action could be taken’ against students using wrong pronouns at PPU.

NOW OUT FROM GEORGE WILL: American Happiness and Discontents: The Unruly Torrent, 2008-2020. We had a delightful lunch in Georgetown almost exactly 5 years ago, but his instincts utterly betrayed him regarding the Trump presidency.

FLASHBACK: Angelo Codevilla: America’s Ruling Class. Probably the single most insightful piece on American society written in this century.

A VERY PUBLIC EDUCATION: Students Protesting Severe Bullying, Suicides Hit With Mass Retaliation by New York School District. “Students walked out of class on Friday and held a protest in support of students who are facing cyberbullying and other incidents of bullying in school, including by teachers, they say. The district locked the children out of the school and refused to allow them transportation home, leading parents to scramble to find them safe rides home.”

WE WERE PROMISED BETTER RELATIONS WITH OUR ALLIES: The NATO Glue Has Gone.

THE VACCINE SEEMS TO BE UNDERPERFORMING:

Amid persistent concerns that the protection offered by COVID-19 vaccines may be waning, a report released Friday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention finds that America’s workhorse shot is significantly less effective at preventing severe cases of disease over the long term than many experts had realized.

Data collected from 18 states between March and August suggest the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine reduces the risk of being hospitalized with COVID-19 by 91% in the first four months after receiving the second dose. Beyond 120 days, however, that vaccine efficacy drops to 77%.

Meanwhile, Moderna’s vaccine was 93% effective at reducing the short-term risk of COVID-19 hospitalization and remained 92% effective after 120 days.

Overall, 54% of fully vaccinated Americans have been immunized with the Pfizer shot.

Of course, for most people the risk of being hospitalized with Covid is very small anyway.

DEJA VU ALL OVER AGAIN: To bail out or not to bail out: China’s Evergrande dilemma.

The Evergrande Group, one of China’s biggest real-estate developers, owes more than $300 billion to a number of lenders. Its interest liabilities are rising by an average of $28 million daily. On Thursday, Sep. 23, alone, the company needs to pay around $120 million as interest payments to bondholders.

If Evergrande begins to default, it will present the Chinese government with a dilemma. Should the company be bailed out, or should it be allowed to fail?

The markets are worried about the contagion effect that an Evergrande collapse will have on the economy; comparisons to the 2008 insolvency of Lehman Brothers, and the financial meltdown that ensued, have already been aired. There’s no good time for an economic crisis, but a particularly bad time for one is when the world is already in the grip of a pandemic.

If Evergrande does go into a bankruptcy court and has its debt restructured, its investors will all take significant haircuts on what they’re owed. But according to the so-called “seniority waterfall”—the pecking order in which creditors get paid—the Chinese government itself makes money first, since state-owned banks are among Evergrande’s biggest creditors.

Developing…

IF WE TAXED STUPIDITY, HOGG WOULD BE IN THE POORHOUSE:

OUCH: January 6 Rioters Identify As Pedophiles So FBI Will Cover For Them And Look The Other Way.

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: LOL — Beto O’Rourke Wants to Be Embarrassed Again. “Way back in the day, Beto would have been laughed off of the political stage. The 21st-century mainstream media is so riddled with leftist bias, however, that he’s kept in the national conversation. The MSM hacks actually believe this guy is smart.”

Well, to them he might be.

THE MARTIN CENTER INTERVIEWS WENYUAN WU: Wenyuan is the Executive Director of the Californians for Equal Rights Foundation (I am Executive VP.) CFER Foundation is the organization that grew out of the 2020 campaign to defeat Proposition 16.

COME SEE THE RACISM INHERENT IN THE LEFTISM: Dropping SAT helps whites, hurts Asians. “Asian students outscore whites by 100 points on the SAT, and the gap is growing, writes Jay Caspian Kang in the New York Times. So who benefits when colleges drop the SAT and ACT for admissions? Is it blacks and Hispanics? Or is it white students, who’ll find it easier to compete with high-scoring Asians?”

PROJECT VERITAS EXPOSES insider doubts about the Covid vaccine.

ANALYSIS: TRUE. Only Nine Months In And The Biden Presidency Has Failed Spectacularly.

YEP: Emmys takeaway: ‘Masks are for peasants’. “This is the tale of two emerging societies in America: those who have to obey coronavirus restrictions and those who don’t. And guess which category you fit.”

Related:

MARK JUDGE: Rubin Is Not Good for the Jennifers: The WaPo NeverTrump columnist is a sexist stereotype, come to life. “Jennifer Rubin is not an ideologue. She is an emotive teenager. A Marxist, for instance, is someone with a deadly serious worldview. Rubin, the Washington Post columnist, is a middle-schooler picking her favorite and most hated boy bands.”

Plus: “The irony of Resistance is that Rubin attempts to celebrate women while depicting them as emotive, irrational and dangerous to democracy.”