TWO AMERICAS: “On Saturday in New York City you needed a vaccine passport to eat in a restaurant or grab a drink in a bar, work out in a gym, go to a movie, or attend any sporting event. Just four hours to the west nearly 110,000 maskless Penn State Nittany Lion fans who had to provide no health records to anyone to attend the game reveled in their school’s biggest football game in two years, packed as close together as possible all clad in white in one of the great football cathedrals of this country. Watch this video and tell me which America you want to live in, the one where you have freedom and embrace life or the one where you either bow down to the authoritarian whims of a group of leaders who don’t even follow their own rules or have no ability to do anything.”

Related: A Defense of ‘Barstool’ Conservatives. “At college football games across the country the past two weekends, student sections erupted in ‘F— Joe Biden’ chants. Thousands of unruly fans expressing their discontent with the president packed Alabama, Tennessee, Indiana, and dozens of other football stadiums. Many conservatives I know found it impossibly crude. Others found it amusing. They all missed the point: The chanting did more to break the progressive narrative on campus than God and Man at Yale ever did.”

Like Jimmy Carter, Joe Biden is proving to be a brilliant salesman for limited government.

Update: Video: More ‘F*ck’ Joe Biden Chants Rings Out at College Football Games.

I WON’T BE HAPPY UNTIL THESE JOBS ARE 1/2 WOMEN: The risk of death for loggers is more than 30 times higher than for all U.S. workers. Tree care workers also encounter hazards at rates far higher than a typical worker.

PIVOT: Now the Lancet U-turns over Covid lab leak theory and publishes ‘alternative view’ calling for a ‘transparent debate’ on the origins of the virus.

FRUITS OF DISTRUST: Study: Rising number of parents refuse HPV vaccine for adolescent children.

“UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES:” As NYC builds out green infrastructure, some brace for unintended consequences. “Their concern isn’t the clean energy, but how it will be conveyed and what that might mean to neighborhoods that for years have absorbed projects sold as being for the greater good, but have hurt residents.” They are right to be concerned.

And are consequences that are usually foreseeable really “unintended?”

SPLASHDOWN! All-Amateur Space Crew Returns Safely to Earth.

PEOPLE ARE STILL HAVING FUN WITH THAT PHOTO OF HARDCORE MAGA QANON INSURRECTIONISTS AT THE #JUSTICEFORJ6 RALLY:

I had no idea that “Hardcore MAGA Qanon Insurrectionists” were such aficionados of Vinyard Vines!

Related: Now it all makes sense:

UPDATE:

More: “Justice for J6” Entrapment Rally was a Bust. Police, media and “fedboi” infiltrators outnumber ‘Justice for J6’ protesters. As expected.

Plus:

ROGER KIMBALL: The Wit and Wisdom of Mark Milley.

Milley, like Sun Tzu, goes beyond strictly military themes into realms sociological, psychological, and political. “You cannot betray the one to which you were never loyal.” This obviously is an insight that has wide application, as pertinent in business as in warfare proper. Ditto Milley’s postmodern revision of JFK’s famous saying: “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for China.”

Finally, General Milley’s art of war has a pragmatic commercial side, as can be seen in such observations as “He who turns on a bad orange man gets a big book deal.” Has any fortune cookie ever contained greater wisdom?

“But that’s all satire, parody!” you object. “It’s from the Babylon Bee, not any real book written by Mark Milley.”

You’re right about that and I apologize for the imposition.

I also note that it is effective satire. Why? What makes it effective? Its close proximity to the truth. Mark Milley would never advise a military leader to “pick up the phone” and call one’s enemy to alert him to a forthcoming attack. No, no. General Milley is a man of action. He does not write about such things. He actually does them. He actually called his counterpart in China, twice, to assure him that, should the United States be planning an attack, he, Mark Milley, would be sure to let him know in advance. What a guy!

Related: Fire the military and intelligence bigs who bungled Afghanistan — now.

OTHER THAN THAT, HOW DID YOU ENJOY THE PLAY, MRS. LINCOLN?

Flashback: Lincoln’s New Assassins.

Now the mob takes the role of John Wilkes Booth in removing perhaps the greatest of all Lincoln sculptures, the Emancipation Memorial in Lincoln Park, located in northeast Washington, D.C. The preeminent Lincoln scholar of our or any other time, Harry V. Jaffa, said many times that this sculpture, originally referred to as the Freedman’s Memorial, rivaled Daniel French’s Lincoln Memorial creation. The statue was dedicated to honor Lincoln on the 100th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.

Yet the furious mob blindly objects that the statue shows a kneeling slave before a standing Lincoln. The mob is even more blinkered in its art appreciation than it is in its historical understanding, as I will show in close-up views of the muscular freedman—no longer a slave!—and other details.

* * * * * * * *

If we don’t believe our own eyes, we have the testimony of Frederick Douglass, who delivered the dedication address, honoring his friend Abraham Lincoln. The escaped slave Douglass is famous for his criticisms of Lincoln’s policies, including what he then regarded as his slowness to accede to plans for using black soldiers. But he also conceded the correctness of Lincoln’s measured policies. Douglass’s speech is among his best, his most complex, for its unsparing, many-sided views of Lincoln: it smashes all clichés about both men. His audience, we should note, included President Grant.

Related: Do we erase black history when we take down statues?

More: Why the Right Foresaw the Statues Coming Down. “When Donald Trump wondered whether it would be ‘George Washington next week’ and ‘Thomas Jefferson the week after,’ he was treated to haughty and dismissive dispatches in the mainstream press explaining why these Founders were more than just their proximity to slavery. These were valuable missives, but Trump wasn’t the right audience. They should have been directed at the activists who have taken their campus-based maximalism with them into the workforce. The failure on the part of polite liberal opinion makers to anticipate this attack on America’s foundations is a failure of imagination and an act of hubris. They assumed they spoke for the mob when it was the mob that spoke for them.”

It’s not surprising that Democrats are toppling statues of Lincoln — but this time, the calls are coming from inside the theater!

A VICTORY OVER HIGHER EDUCATION SEGREGATION: University shuts down anti-racism training that separated students by race.

DISPATCHES  FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Rewriting The History of 9/11? Some Schools Are Trying.

Related: On NPR, A Different Kind Of 9/11 Revisionism Blames Israel For Palestinian Terrorism.

Earlier: Emory newspaper edits 20-year-old article written by Biden nominee.

RULES ARE FOR THE LITTLE PEOPLE: Brown exempts its official functions from new indefinite COVID restrictions.

What, you thought Covid rules were going to be different?

FALL GUY? Feds to indict ex-Boeing test pilot over 737 Max crashes: report. He may have done wrong, but I very much doubt he’s the primary offender.

EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY: Weekly Biden Report Card: Border bungle and Afghanistan attack spoil Newsom win news.

FIRE GENERAL MILLEY: Oops: Biden’s ‘Righteous Strike’ in Kabul Now a ‘Tragic Mistake’.

Related:

One of the chief roles of the Covid response is to distract the world’s populace from what else is being done to them.

JOHN GILL SHOULD HAVE NEVER LEFT THE ACADEMY: Staffers Trying to Build ‘Wall’ to Stop People From Seeing What a Mess Biden Is.

(Classical reference in headline.)

WORLD HEALTH ORGANIZATION BUREAUCRATS: No, we won’t tell you how many of us are vaccinated.

The World Health Organization, a subsidiary of the United Nations, has been trying to lead the way on global vaccination policy during the COVID pandemic. They are keen to see as many people as possible be vaccinated and they keep close track of the progress in nations across the world. They are also quick to note how many vaccinations take place and scold more economically prosperous nations for taking care of their own people before sending more doses to less developed countries. But when it comes to vaccination rates and vaccine hesitancy, how well are the people at the WHO doing themselves? How many of them and their staffers have rolled up their sleeves to set a good example for the rest of the planet? We don’t know because they are refusing to tell us. That sort of medical information is “private,” you see. . . .

Far more likely is the possibility that the WHO just doesn’t want the public snooping around regarding their own vaccination rates. If their own hesitancy rate is higher than that of some of the countries they are barking at, their position as the world’s hall monitor is severely undermined. That’s the same thing we see in governments and organizations everywhere these days, though. They are the first to preach to you about the importance of getting vaccinated, tracking vaccination rates, and scolding areas where the numbers are too low. (Unless we’re talking about an area with a lot of minority residents, in which case it’s simply “unfortunate.”) But when you ask them how they are doing in getting everyone vaccinated in their own offices, it’s suddenly personal information.

Isn’t it curious how this all seems to keep playing out the same way? Normally, people’s private medical information is just that… private. People or institutions peering too closely at anyone’s medical situation can be called out for potential discrimination and all manner of other things. In certain cases, you can be charged with violations of the law for doing so. But now, when it comes to a specific vaccination, everyone is supposed to voluntarily make that information very public.

Well, not everyone, exactly. Bureaucrats everywhere: Privacy for me, but not for thee, but hypocrisy for me by the truckload. It’s a clown show all the way down.

And, of course, it’s certain that the reason they’re not releasing the numbers isn’t “privacy,” but because the vaccination rate is low enough to make the W.H.O. look bad and to undercut its message.

COLLUSION: Chinese Major-General worked with fired scientist at Canada’s top infectious disease lab. “The joint research conducted by Major-General Chen Wei and former Canadian government lab scientist Xiangguo Qiu indicates that co-operation between the Chinese military and scientists at the National Microbiology Laboratory (NML) went much higher than was previously known. The People’s Liberation Army is the military wing of China’s ruling Communist Party.”

I suspect that one reason we’re hearing such muted criticism of the Chinese over the Covid debacle is that so much of the western “public health” community was in bed with them. I also suspect that this isn’t by accident, but by design.

HOW THE DEMOCRATS’ DIRTY-TRICKS MACHINE WORKS: Clinton lawyer’s indictment reveals ‘bag of tricks.’

The 26-page indictment of former cybersecurity attorney and Hillary Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann by special counsel John Durham is as detailed as it is damning on the alleged effort to push a false Russia collusion claim before the 2016 presidential campaign. One line, however, seems to reverberate for those of us who have followed this scandal for years now: “You do realize that we will have to expose every trick we have in our bag.”

That warning from an unnamed “university researcher” captures the most fascinating aspect of the indictment in describing a type of Nixonian dirty tricks operation run by — or at least billed to — the Clinton campaign. With Nixon, his personal attorney and the Committee to Re-Elect the President (CREEP) paid for operatives to engage in disruptive and ultimately criminal conduct targeting his opponents. With Clinton, the indictment and prior disclosures suggest that Clinton campaign lawyers at the law firm of Perkins Coie helped organize an effort to spread Russia collusion stories and trigger an investigation. . . .

The big trick in 2016 was the general effort to create a Russia collusion scandal with the help of Justice Department insiders and an eager, enabling media.

It was only last October, for instance, that we learned that then-President Obama was briefed by his CIA director, John Brennan, on an intelligence report that Clinton planned to tie then-candidate Trump to Russia as “a means of distracting the public from her use of a private email server.” That was on July 28, 2016 — three days before the Russia investigation was initiated.

The problem was that both the Steele dossier and the Alpha [sic: it’s Alfa] Bank allegations fell apart soon after being fed to the FBI. A key source for dossier compiler and former British spy Christopher Steele was viewed by American intelligence as a Russian agent, and it was believed that the Clinton campaign and the dossier were being used by Russian intelligence to spread disinformation.

According to Durham, the Alpha Bank allegation fell apart even before Sussmann delivered it to the FBI. The indictment details how an unnamed “tech executive” allegedly used his authority at multiple internet companies to help develop the ridiculous claim. (The executive reportedly later claimed that he was promised a top cyber security job in the Clinton administration). Notably, there were many who expressed misgivings not only within the companies working on the secret project but also among unnamed “university researchers” who repeatedly said the argument was bogus.

The researchers were told they should not be looking for proof but just enough to “give the base of a very useful narrative.” The researchers argued, according to the indictment, that anyone familiar with analyzing internet traffic “would poke several holes” in that narrative, noting that what they saw likely “was not a secret communications channel with Russian Bank-1, but ‘a red herring,’” according to the indictment. “Researcher-1” repeated these doubts, the indictment says, and asked, “How do we plan to defend against the criticism that this is not spoofed traffic we are observing? There is no answer to that. Let’s assume again that they are not smart enough to refute our ‘best case scenario.’ You do realize that we will have to expose every trick we have in our bag to even make a very weak association.”

People need to be punished sufficiently to ensure this isn’t done again.

Plus: “The Clinton team denied involvement in the creation of the Steele dossier throughout the 2016 campaign despite direct media inquiries. It was only after the election that mysterious expenses for its legal counsel led reporters to discover the truth.”

Also: “Durham’s final report, meanwhile, could answer even more questions, but will Washington ever allow it to see the light of day without massive redactions?”

If it made Republicans look bad, the full text would be leaked, and published by “courageous” journalists.

IT’S NOT EXACTLY PENTHOUSE: Brian Frye: Letter To The Yale Law Journal Forum.

MY COUNTY MAYOR, Glenn Jacobs.

#Resist!

Also:

Direct link to the interview here.

THE AMERICA THAT WORKS: SpaceX’s private Inspiration4 crew returns to Earth with historic splashdown off Florida coast.

THE POWER OF NONCOMPLIANCE:

Your regular reminder that there is no such thing as government power.

When even 3-5% of the population simply says "no", government is hopelessly outnumbered.

This was a protest of lockdowns in Australia. Police told them to go home.

They said "no".pic.twitter.com/WFffzehyL7

— Spike Cohen (@RealSpikeCohen) September 18, 2021