UH, NO. Iowa State professor: Trigger warnings are more needed now than ever before.

DISPATCHES FROM THE HOUSE OF STEPHANOPOULOS: ABC Just Did Something Unthinkable to Commander of Marine Company Hit by Kabul Suicide Attack.

Apparently, ABC thought it was a very touching Facebook post as well. So, they did something unthinkable, according to Paul Szoldra, the editor in chief of Task and Purpose, and Duffel Blog. They stole the post, used Capt. Ball’s name and published it as an op-ed by him, titled “My fallen Marines will always be my heroes: Opinion.” They even created an “author” profile for him on their website. All without his permission.

Layers and layers of fact checkers and plagiarizers.

EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY: As Afghanistan Fell, Taliban Gave the U.S. the Option to Secure Kabul. The U.S. Refused.

WHAT SYSTEMIC RACISM LOOKS LIKE: Oregon State University’s College of Education hosts seminar on ‘Confronting Systemic Whiteness.’

FINALLY, SOME GOOD NEWS: Gun Control Advocates Frustrated With Biden. “Biden has done all he could possibly do to pass gun control, but the people who control its fate aren’t interested in letting it happen.”

Biden doesn’t have the clout to get much done on Capitol Hill, his sole saving grace.

CLAIM: THE U.S. NEWS LAW SCHOOL RANKINGS ARE RACIST. “The only schools enrolling black students at the same level as their representation in the general population are the schools U.S. News ranks so poorly that they are not even assigned a numerical ranking.”

ALSO SADLY PLAUSIBLE:

SADLY PLAUSIBLE: In Response To Afghanistan Disaster, Pelosi Begins Impeachment Proceedings Against President Trump.

EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY IN THE BIDEN ERA: European Union To Remove The U.S. From Its ‘Safe Travel’ List.

NEVER. NEXT QUESTION? No, the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally Wasn’t a Superspreader Event. So When Does Gov. Noem Get Her Apology From the Media?

AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: Scandal As Newsom Campaign Produces Old Yearbook Photo Showing Larry Elder In Blackface.

OH: No biggie, just bin Laden’s security chief triumphantly returning to Afghanistan — with Taliban protection.

TO BE FAIR, BIDEN HAS ABANDONED AMERICANS: Nation abandons Biden on Afghanistan, fears 500-plus will be left behind.

NO LIBERTY? NO PROBLEM: Australians shrug at their government’s draconian pandemic response.

A powerful coalition of those with the most to lose and those who have not lost anything is driving the official “zero Covid” fantasy. The media has piled on, helping the government to terrify the population. The Fauci Syndrome is strong in Australia, too: health experts and bureaucrats have tasted unprecedented fame, power, and influence, and continue to be among the main drivers of the most ridiculous restrictions. The ever-growing section of society directly or indirectly dependent on taxpayers for its livelihood has been well care for during Covid-related upheavals. Those most at risk of death or serious complications remain strongly supportive of government “protecting” them from the virus. And the so-called laptop class also hasn’t had a bad pandemic, with many enjoying being able to work from home.

This leaves a minority of Australians driven to despair by isolation, lockdowns, travel restrictions, and the disappearance of their livelihoods. Service industries, particularly hospitality, have been hardest hit by forced closures and other restrictions. The economy continues to chug along, as the money printer in Canberra churns out tens of billions in handouts. The open federal money tap has allowed state governments, mostly in the hands of the opposition center-Left, to go to extremes; in any case, the center-Right small-business constituency is suffering the most. This is not a sustainable strategy, even if the governing center-Right has largely given up on fiscal responsibility.

The success in suppressing Covid comes with other price tags. The single-minded obsession that no one get sick and die from Covid is being paid for by a slowly unfolding mental-health crisis. Social isolation and dislocation are taking their toll in terms of rising suicide, depression, substance abuse, and domestic violence. Physical health suffers, too, as treatable conditions don’t get treated in the health system that now seems to have only one goal.

How long can this last? If it was up to the drunk-on-power politicians and bureaucrats who have found a winning electoral formula, health experts who have found relevance, and the deathly scared who have found a sense of safety (and, for some at least, the frisson of being a part of something big and important), the answer is “forever.” Which is why the federal government—belatedly trying to orchestrate a return to some normalcy once certain vaccination levels are reached—finds its efforts contradicted by state governments and health experts arguing that the vaccination target actually needs to be (the unreachable and unrealistic) 90 percent or 95 percent, that lockdowns should continue even with a highly vaccinated population, and that international borders should stay closed indefinitely. That this is not great marketing—get vaccinated, but you still won’t be able to do anything!—needs no genius to recognize. Sadly, little evidence has materialized of any major shift in public sentiment. The powers that be still find it easy to taint the opposition to their “zero Covid” policies as callous, anti-science, anti-vax, right-wing extremists.

The “Zero Covid” policy has to playing quite badly with many Australians: Australia to end ‘covid zero’ policy: ‘Not a sustainable way to live.’ But sustainable enough that they’re not dropping the policy anytime soon: “The government will drop most restrictions once 80% of adults are vaccinated, which the government believes could happen by the end of the year, The Economist reported. Any further action would occur only after hospitals reached a point at which they could no longer cope with new cases, but will otherwise handle what they can.”

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEF: Biden Weaponizes Dept. of Education to Become the COVID Mask Gestapo. “The mask fetishists have really been letting their freak flags fly under the cover that Biden’s Afghanistan cock-up has been giving them. They get creepier by the hour. Seriously, these people need to be rounded up and put in some sort of leper colony for fascists. They will be free to keep the masks on their rage faces all they want.”

APPLE SPENT BIG BUCKS lobbying against bill to ban U.S. companies from using Chinese slave labor.

CRISIS BY DESIGN: Last US flights slip out of Afghanistan 24 hours before deadline: Up to 200 citizens and thousands of allies are left facing nightmare under Taliban, who celebrate America’s retreat from 20-year war with gunfire and by inspecting their new Chinooks.

When they’re not hanging people with them.

I HAVE A QUESTION, ONE FUNDAMENTAL QUESTION: Is the US government, aka “the swamp” for short good at anything, anything at all, beyond collecting taxes, making our lives difficult and killing Americans?  Pentagon: Quit Asking About Americans Left In Afghanistan.

I won’t even ask why they hate us so much. You know. I know too. Compared to them we’re genius of competence. We undermine their cozy feelings of would-be superiority. And they can’t stand it.

NEWSBUSTERS: Nets Ignore ‘Terrified’ University Students Abandoned in Afghanistan to Taliban.

WHERE HAVE ALL THE BIDEN VOTERS GONE? “I remember last year my feed was full of people who proudly supported Biden/Harris, because Orange Man Bad, and a Return To Norms, and No More Mean Tweets. Where are you now?”

Well, they should be wearing sackcloth and ashes.

DON’T WORRY, IT’S PROBABLY NOTHING: Legendary investor John Paulson, who made billions by predicting the 2008 housing crash, says all crypto is inherently “worthless” and “will go to zero.”

JOEL KOTKIN: Jim Crow Returns to California: The Golden State’s climate policies have enforced racial segregation.

California’s leaders might see themselves as a vanguard of progressive and eco-friendly values. But in reality, their draconian climate policies have created a racially segregated state more akin to the pre-Civil Rights era South. As Attorney Jennifer Hernandez puts in a startling new report for the environmentalist Breakthrough Institute, California has been plunged into “a new Green Jim Crow era”.

The “soaring environmental rhetoric of the state’s affluent, largely white technocratic leadership”, she concludes, is “deepening the state’s shameful legacy of racial injustice”. Certainly, the impact is stark. California now suffers the nation’s worst cost-adjusted poverty rate; and according to the United Way of California, more than 30% of California residents lack sufficient income to meet basic costs of living, even after accounting for public assistance programmes. Those struggling families include half of Latino and 40% of black residents.

There are two main factors driving this “new Green Jim Crow era”. The first, and most obvious, is California’s energy policy, which has made the state’s electricity and gas prices the highest on the mainland, with electricity prices 50% above the national average and gasoline costs that exceed even import-reliant Hawaii in the centre of the Pacific Ocean.

This surge in prices derives from the state’s obsession — shared by the ruling tech oligarchs — with renewable energy and the elimination of fossil fuels. Yet as a recent Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) report has shown, over-reliance on renewables is costly, because it requires the production of massive (and environmentally unfriendly) battery-storage capacity — the price of which is invariably passed on to the taxpayer.

This is not bad news for the tech oligarchs, who have been prominent among those profiting from “clean energy” investments. But many other Californians, primarily those in the less temperate interior, find themselves falling into energy poverty or are dependent on state subsidies that raise electricity prices for businesses and the middle class. Black and Latino households are already forced to pay from 20 to 43% more of their household incomes on energy than white households. Last year, more than 4 million households in California (30% of the total) experienced energy poverty.

California needs to build big nuclear plants. They could solve their water issues with big desalination plants, too.

PJ MEDIA VIP ROUNDUP: Don’t forget that VODKAPUNDIT promo code if you’ve been thinking of joining us.

Megan Fox: Here’s What to Do if the FBI’s ‘Sedition Hunters’ Show Up at Your Door. “If the FBI can turn ‘unlawful entry’ and ‘disorderly conduct’ into a threat of a twenty-year sentence, they can do that to anyone for any infraction.”

Matt Margolis: Mitt Romney Is Still a Useless RINO, Even After Biden’s Botched Withdrawal. “ While I guess it’s a good thing Romney found it in him to partially blame Biden, Romney seems to be ignoring the facts to justify criticizing Trump.”

Yours Truly: What if Biden Believes His Own Lies? “ In Biden’s younger days, he wasn’t shy about telling whoppers. The difference today is, he seems to believe it. Or, maybe more accurately, Biden doesn’t seem to be aware that he’s repeating a false narrative crafted for him by others.”

SHOCKER: