I ACTUALLY FIND IT KIND OF RELAXING: Gun Cleaning For People Who Hate It.

NEW HUNTER BIDEN EMAILS: Hunter Biden emails boast ties to White House and China.

Hunter Biden’s business contacts touted his access to his father, “State, Treasury,” his relationship with then-Secretary of State John Kerry’s stepson, as well as his ties to the “highest level” in China, as they weighed whether to work with him on a potential Libya deal in 2015, newly uncovered emails show.

The two emails — published by Insider on Thursday — date back to 2015, when Joe Biden was vice president, and reference getting Hunter’s help on a deal regarding billions in Libyan assets frozen by the Obama administration.

The emails are unrelated to Hunter’s infamous laptop.

I’m sure journalists will be right on it.

HOW THE HELL IS ANYTHING LIKE THIS WITHIN AN AMERICAN TEACHERS’ UNION’S PURVIEW? San Diego Teachers’ Union Passes Resolution That Rejects Israel’s Legitimacy.

I guess they’ll do anything but teach.

LIVE AT 3:30PM EASTERN: ‘Five O’Clock Somewhere’ with Kruiser, VodkaPundit, Special Guest.

THE DELTA THREAT HAS BEEN SERIOUSLY OVERSOLD: ‘Light at the end of the tunnel’: Researchers predict steady decline in COVID cases through March — without any ‘significant winter surge.

DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: It’s time to end the taxpayer-subsidized vacation for student loan payments.

THIS WORKS FOR PEOPLE, TOO: Social robots may be more persuasive if they project less authority.

THE ACLU MORPHS INTO THE MINISTRY OF TRUTH:

The ACLU did its bizarre impersonation of Nineteen Eighty-Four’s Ministry of Truth on Twitter. Just as that dystopian ministry exists to rewrite history to ensure that it corresponds with the Party’s current view of the world, so the ACLU now seems to think its job is to mangle old quotations so that they don’t offend 21st-century woke sensibilities. This is what the ACLU has Ginsburg saying in its tweet: ‘The decision whether or not to bear a child is central to a [person’s] life, to [their] wellbeing and dignity… When the government controls that decision for [people], [they are] being treated as less than a fully adult human responsible for [their] own choices.’

Person? People? They? Ginsburg didn’t use those words. She said woman, women, she. In two short sentences, the ACLU has carried out five acts of censure. It has corrected what it clearly believes was wrongthink on the part of Ginsburg. Ginsburg, who was a justice of the Supreme Court from 1993 until her death in 2020, may have been a much-honoured warrior for women’s rights, but she is guilty of having used incorrect speech in the eyes of the woke scolds who appear to have taken over the ACLU. She said ‘woman’, when as every good and obedient PC person now knows, we don’t use that word. It is potentially offensive to trans women or men who identify as women or non-binary people or whatever other group we are currently elevating above women and their right to talk about themselves and their lives.

There are many disturbing things about this erasure of past speech, this perverse falsification of RBG’s words. It is such a back-stabbing by the ACLU of a woman – yes, woman – who played a central role in the ACLU in the 1970s. Ginsburg co-founded the ACLU’s Women’s Rights Project in 1972. The project fought hundreds of sex-discrimination cases on behalf of women. The Women’s Rights Project still exists, but imagine if it had been launched in 2021. Would the ACLU even do such a thing today? It can’t even bring itself to say the word ‘woman’. Today it would have to be a Cervix-Havers’ Rights Project. Or perhaps a Non-Male Rights Project. Or a Ciswomen, Transwomen and Non-Binary People’s Rights Project. Anything but a Women’s Rights Project.

Exit quote: “When even an institution whose entire raison d’etre is defending liberty feels the need to take a Year Zero cudgel to a past utterance of the w-word, we know that speech-policing – and its ultimate goal of thoughtpolicing – is out of control.”

Meanwhile, on the non-distaff side of the equation: Marvel Studios May Drop The ‘Men’ From X-Men.

And the answer is none. None more woke.

CRISIS BY DESIGN: Afghan Refugees at Fort McCoy Charged With Sexual Assault of a Minor, Spousal Abuse.

Previously: Just 3 Percent of Afghan Evacuees in U.S. Are Special Immigrant Visa Holders.

Biden evacuated a lot of people he shouldn’t have and left behind a lot of people who should have been evacuated.

COLOR ME UNSURPRISED: Young women with breast cancer who opt for mastectomies report lower quality of life.

#WHIPGATE: Mayorkas Suspends Horseback Border Patrol Agents from Duties Pending Probe. “Department of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas has taken action against horseback Border Patrol agents accused by left-leaning media figures and Democrats of using ‘whips’ and reins to assail Haitian migrants trying to enter the U.S. illegally.”

There were no whips and there was no whipping — background here.

THAT’S SORT OF COOL: Actor Daniel Craig has been made an honorary Commander in the Royal Navy – matching the on-screen rank of James Bond.

SALMAN RUSHDIE: ‘I’m Afraid Cat Stevens Got Off the Peace Train a Long Time Ago.’

In “The Meaning of Yusuf/Cat Stevens,” Howard Fishman, whom the Post describes only as a “writer, composer and performer based in Brooklyn,” states the key elements of the case matter-of-factly: In 1989, “after Rushdie had officially been targeted because of his portrayal of the prophet Muhammad in his novel ‘The Satanic Verses,’ Stevens had matter-of-factly confirmed that the Koran prescribes death as the punishment for blasphemy.” Confronted on a BBC show, “Stevens was asked directly whether Rushdie deserved to die. ‘Yes, yes,’ he replied, without much hesitation. Were Rushdie, a marked man, to come to him for help, how would he respond? With what he subsequently insisted was nothing more than an ill-advised attempt at dry humor, a straight-faced Stevens said: ‘I might ring somebody who might do more damage to him than he would like. I’d try to phone the Ayatollah Khomeini and tell him exactly where this man is.’ When asked whether he would participate in the burning of an effigy of the author, he replied that he would instead hope it were ‘the real thing.’”

Not long after that, I allowed some friends to drag me along to see the alternative rock band 10,000 Maniacs, with which I had been unfamiliar. The 10,000 Maniacs had had a hit with a version of Stevens’s “Peace Train” in 1987. I hadn’t known that until the Maniacs’ Natalie Merchant explained during the concert that the band was not going to play the song, and never would again, because “Cat Stevens has gone insane.” The audience applauded wildly.

It may have been the high-water mark of pop culture support for the freedom of speech.

Fishman details how Stevens/Islam immediately began backtracking amid the furor at the time: He issued a press release “indicating that his comments had been manipulated in the editing room and taken out of context (this, despite the fact that the New York Times reported that Stevens had ‘watched a preview of the program today and said in an interview that he stood by his comments’).”  On his official website, he makes this patently false claim: “I never called for the death of Salman Rushdie; nor backed the Fatwa issued by the Ayatollah Khomeini – and still don’t.” In the very next sentence, he blames Rushdie’s book, not Khomeini’s fatwa, for all the trouble: “The book itself destroyed the harmony between people and nations and created an international crisis.”

Salman Rushdie himself would have none of Stevens’ denials, telling Fishman: “For many years, Yusuf Islam has been pretending he didn’t say the things he said in 1989, when he enthusiastically supported the Iranian terrorist edict against me and others. However, his words are on the record, in print interviews and on television programs.…I’m afraid Cat Stevens got off the peace train a long time ago.”

As Dennis Miller said of radical Islam, “We are starting to bridle at how you treat your women, and I don’t like how you f***ed up Cat Stevens.”

WHERE’S MY FLY SWATTER? Winged microchip is the world’s smallest human-made flying structure.

LONGTERM HEALTH TIME BOMB: Killing Children with Safety: Child Obesity SOARED During COVID Lockdowns.

SOMEBODY ORCHESTRATED THIS: This, as in the growing crisis on our Southern border. Texas Public Policy Foundation’s Joshua Trevino has a lengthy but incredibly revealing and disturbing report from the border. It is quite likely much worse than you imagined.

(Bumped, by Glenn).

I’VE SEEN THE LOCKDOWNS AND THE DAMAGE DONE: Study: Lack of outdoor time likely impacted quality of life, sleep during pandemic.

NOW THAT’S A CORRECTION: “This story has been corrected to show Lake Powell has a 3% chance of reaching a point where hydropower from Glen Canyon Dam would be impacted in 2022, not 90%.”

Also, from the friend who sent this: “Also never mentioned in the article is the increased water draw from those reservoirs because of very large population growth since those dams were built 60 years ago.”

DO I HAVE TO CHOOSE JUST ONE? Evil, crazy, or just plain stupid? Top 10 quotes from Middle East studies professors.

ASKING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: Is college football killing COVID as we know it? “What would happen if hundreds of thousands of screaming, particulate-spewing, laughing, jovial, high-fiving, chest-bumping, embracing fans convened together each week all late-summer, all fall, and all winter, and it didn’t result in mass casualties, uncontrolled death spikes, and the overwhelming of all hospital resources in those forlorn areas? Might that speak louder than even Dr. Fauci’s mainstream media-enhanced voice? Because it’s happening.”

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): And don’t forget the barstool conservatives.

PROSECUTORS FACE LEGAL CHALLENGES OVER OBSTRUCTION CHARGE IN CAPITOL RIOT CASES:

Federal judges are weighing legal challenges to one of the leading felony charges that government lawyers have brought in Capitol riot cases, potentially setting the stage for protracted legal battles over the Justice Department’s prosecutorial strategy in the wake of Jan. 6.

In several cases, defendants have moved to throw out the obstruction of an official proceeding charge, which carries a maximum possible sentence of 20 years in prison, arguing that the statute is unconstitutionally vague and the Jan. 6 certification of the Electoral College results does not qualify under the law as an “official proceeding.”

At least three judges in recent weeks have pressed prosecutors on whether the charge is appropriate in the context of the riot. If courts rule that the felony count cannot be applied to Jan. 6 defendants or that the law is unconstitutional, it would deal a blow to prosecutors’ efforts to crack down on those who overran the Capitol.

Some federal judges overseeing the prosecutions have expressed concerns about the application of the law in the context of the Capitol riot and whether that could potentially prove problematic when applied to other circumstances.

Earlier: Prosecutors Lost A Fight To Keep A Set Of Jan. 6 Capitol Surveillance Videos Under Seal. As John Cardillo tweeted, “Hell they weren’t even trespassers, they were a tour group.”

JOE BIDEN’S RETURN TO CLEAN GOVERNMENT: John Kerry’s Million-Dollar China Conundrum. “Kerry’s latest filing with the Office of Government Ethics shows Teresa Kerry benefits from an investment of at least $1 million in a hedge fund specializing in private partnerships with Chinese government-controlled funds.”

HMM: Latest Durham Indictment May Make Russiagate the Most Corrupt Scandal in U.S. History. “Durham alleges that a tech executive used by the Democrats, and who hoped to work in cyber security for the Clinton White House, used his insider knowledge to conjure up phony internet links between candidate/president Trump and Alfa Bank, based in Russia.”

K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: California Parents Contributing to the Homeschool Boom.

I mean, at this point staying in the public schools is practically child abuse.