COMPLY OR DIE, THEY EXPLAINED: Unvaxxed Dad Removed From Heart Transplant List, He’s Not The First.

YES: Afghanistan Taught Putin That Biden ‘Is a Guy Who Can Be Pushed Around.’

“I believe that our response in 2014 was too slow and too incremental. And it’s confirmed by the lessons that I learned, and that I believe others in the national security community learned, to better address Russia’s ongoing aggression… I believe one of the lessons I learned is that it would have been appropriate and necessary to provide Ukraine with what it needed to defend its territory.”

That tough appraisal is from Celeste Wallander, President Biden’s nominee to be assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs. From 2013 to 2017, Wallander served on the National Security Council as special assistant to the president and senior director for Russia and Central Asia.

In other words, not even the people who thought up the Obama-era response to Putin thought it was tough or effective, and no one is willing to argue it amounted to an effective deterrent. The Russian dictator likely already thought Biden was all bark and minimal bite. And then he watched the debacle of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan.

Even worse — or better for an opportunistic thug like Putin — Afghanistan showed that Biden will commit the kind of f***-ups that create the situation where he can be pushed around.

SOUNDS LIKE THE PUBLIC UNDERSTANDS WHAT’S GOING ON: Zogby Poll: Biden lied to get elected and life is worse.

Voters are not buying President Joe Biden’s claim that he didn’t overpromise during the 2020 election but has been thwarted by the GOP, and they instead feel he lied just to get elected, according to a new survey.

In the latest Zogby Poll, provided to Secrets, more voters than not said Biden oversold to the point of “lying” in his campaign against former President Donald Trump.

Asked if Biden has “delivered” on campaign promises or “was lying just to get elected,” 45.7% chose lying and 38.2% chose delivering on promises. The rest of the voters were unsure.

The polling analysis cited Biden’s failure to end the COVID-19 crisis, but it also noted inflation and other problems that are driving key support groups into GOP arms.

There are more Democrats abandoning ship and calling for the president not to run in 2024. Things are so bad for the Democrats right now; you are starting to see Bill and Hillary Clinton reappear in public. Imagine, Democrats trotting out Hillary as the change candidate in 2024! That could make Donald Trump look appealing to swing voters!” the poll analysis said.

Zogby Analytics also looked at life under Biden, and the breakdown was similar, with more than not saying that Biden has made their life worse.

Well, that’s because he has, and it’s no accident.

Related: Team Biden seeks to stop yet another pipeline even as gas prices rise.

Flashback: Obama Wants $7-$9 Gas Prices and His Secretary of Energy Steven Chu Admitted it.

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEF: Like a Hobo’s Bad Foot Odor, Pelosi Is Sticking Around. “The real laugher in her statement is that Pelosi thinks that she’s an integral part of the ‘democracy’ that she thinks needs saving. Our Republic is in peril, but people of sound mind know that it’s Nancy and her commie friends who are threatening it.”

SO PRETTY MUCH THE SAME AS THE OLD MEDIA, THEN: New Media Outlet Grid Backed by Progressive Stars, Gulf Money, and Foreign Agents.

I HAD BEEN ASSURED THAT SNOWFALLS WERE A THING OF THE PAST:

WHY ARE BLUE INSTITUTIONS SUCH HOTBEDS OF HATRED FOR EXCELLENCE, AND FOR ASIANS? How It Feels to Be an Asian Student in an Elite Public School.

Tausifa Haque, a 17-year-old daughter of Bangladeshi immigrants, walks in the early morning from her family’s apartment in the Bronx to the elevated subway and rides south to Brooklyn, a journey of one and a half hours.

There she joins a river of teenagers who pour into Brooklyn Technical High School — Bengali and Tibetan, Egyptian and Chinese, Sinhalese and Russian, Dominican and Puerto Rican, West Indian and African American. The cavernous eight-story building holds about 5,850 students, one of the largest and most academically rigorous high schools in the United States.

Her father drives a cab; her mother is a lunchroom attendant. This school is a repository of her dreams and theirs. “This is my great chance,” Tausifa said. “It’s my way out.” . . .

Liberal politicians, school leaders and organizers argue such schools are bastions of elitism and, because of low enrollment of Black and Latino students, functionally racist and segregated. Sixty-three percent of the city’s public school students are Black and Latino yet they account for just 15 percent of Brooklyn Tech’s population.

For Asian students, the percentages are flipped: They make up 61 percent of Brooklyn Tech, although they account for 18 percent of the public school population.

Some critics imply that the presence of so many South and East Asian students, along with the white students, accentuates this injustice. Such charges reached a heated pitch a few years ago when a prominent white liberal council member said such schools were overdue for “a racial reckoning.”

Richard Carranza, who served as New York’s schools chancellor until last year, was more caustic. “I just don’t buy into the narrative,” he said, “that any one ethnic group owns admission to these schools.”

Yes, by all means we must quash the overweening privilege of daughters of Bangladeshi cab drivers and lunch ladies.

And it’s not just New York:

Officials in Fairfax County, Va., replaced the entrance exam at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology with a combination of grades and socioeconomic criteria. The next year the percentage of incoming Black and Latino students jumped and the percentage of Asian students, who skew more middle and upper middle class than in New York, declined. White student enrollment increased.

When Asian parents sued, a federal judge told their lawyer, “Everybody knows the policy is not race-neutral and that it’s designed to affect the racial composition.”

That case is awaiting a decision.

The imbalances are huge but — shockingly — they’re the result of bias on the part of lefty school officials:

Decades ago, when crime and socioeconomic conditions were far graver than they are today, Black and Latino teenagers passed the examination in great numbers. In 1981, nearly two-thirds of Brooklyn Tech’s students were Black and Latino, and that percentage hovered at 50 percent for another decade.

Black and Latino students account for 10 percent of the students at Bronx Science; that percentage was more than twice as high in the 1970s and ’80s.

To understand this decline involves a trek back through decades of policy choices, as city officials, pushed by an anti-tracking movement, rolled back accelerated and honors programs and tried to reform gifted programs, particularly in nonwhite districts.

Black alumni of Brooklyn Tech argue that this progressive-minded movement handicapped precisely those Black and Latino students most likely to pass the test. Some poor, majority Black and Latino districts now lack a single gifted and talented program.

The enemies of excellence — who mostly hate excellence because they themselves are far from excellent — hurt the poorest and worst-connected of the excellent students the most. If you wish, you can try to convince yourself that this is an unintended consequence.

If the money followed students instead of schools, parents could send their kids to the place that best fit their needs. This is the education professionals’ worst nightmare, of course.

Plus:

These students voice a fear that harks back to earlier generations of working-class Jewish students who dealt with antisemitism. If officials toss the test and substitute portfolios, interviews and extracurricular accomplishments, it could be easier to dismiss Asians as faceless “grinds,” the students said.

Well, especially if you’re at an Ivy League admissions office. Related: Asians Get The Ivy League’s Jewish Treatment.

But there’s this hopeful bit from one student:

“I don’t feel like a minority,” he said. “We resist being pitted against each other at this school.”

Good.

WELL, GOOD: NYC Mayor Adams Brings Back Plainclothes Unit That de Blasio Disbanded.

ROUNDUP: More Commentary On The Amy Wax Controversy At Penn.

So far, though, Penn’s admissions office hasn’t weighed in on the “too many Asians” angle.

VIDEO: Karol Markowicz shuts down ‘petty tyrants’ trying to silence parents.

AN ACQUAINTANCE COMMENTS: “Weird how people who spend decades undermining objective truth suddenly miss it when it’s gone.” My Gentle, Intelligent Brother Is Now A Conspiracy Theorist And His Beliefs Are Shocking.

From this defender of science and objective reality: “As a Libra, I pride myself on finding balance.”

NOTHING TO SEE HERE, MOVE ALONG: Woman Who Stopped at Lab Monkey Crash Site Is Now ‘Sick.’ “It sounds like every sci-fi virus film ever made.”

OPEN THREAD: I’m not a robot.

AN EARTH-SHATTERING KABOOM: Tonga undersea volcano eruption released up to 18 megatons of energy.

CROOKS, LIARS, AND PUBLIC HEALTH OFFICIALS — BUT I REPEAT MYSELF: New internal documents reveal COVID origins downplayed.

PUSHBACK: Truckers fighting government vaccine mandate march to Canadian capital.

BUMMER: Underground lakes on Mars may be a mirage.

MARK JUDGE: Journalists Need to Learn How to Lay Bricks. “In order to support my writing I often take seasonal jobs, a lot of them temporary—washing dishes, selling Christmas trees, working in a deli. At each and every one of them it has taken me about five minutes to discover, or reconfirm, that the working class—particularly young male minorities—is essentially conservative. It’s obvious why the elites don’t know what’s going on, but the grifters of Conservatism, Inc., are equally clueless.”

Plus:

In most professions, there are intermittent periods of tutoring required to sharpen skills. Professional athletes practice in the off-season, studying strategy and doing drills to master the fundamentals. Airline pilots have to take tests to make sure their senses stay sharp. Doctors bone up on the latest illness and treatments.

Journalists, on the other hand, are not required to have such training. As a result, they tend to isolate themselves—living among similar types, hanging out at the same New York and Washington parties or network green rooms, never leaving the small radius of their beat. They lose touch with the people they claim to cover. Their coverage becomes a tape-loop, repeating the same talking points for hours on end.

The solution is easy: Journalists should be required to get seasonal jobs working with real people to be taken seriously. They can work manual labor part time, or for a few months over the holidays. A job in a restaurant kitchen, or at a home-improvement retailer or hardware store, or steel mill or a coal mine, or on a construction crew or in nursing home, can reintroduce journalists to the people they claim to cover. It also might reintroduce them to the concept of humility. . . .

If journalists spent any time at all with actual working people, they would realize a couple things very quickly. The first is that most Americans are not race obsessives the way Hollywood and the media are. I worked Christmas season in a large home-improvement store, and my coworkers were from Africa, Ireland, Mexico, the Middle East, everywhere. We were all focused on various tasks and made friends with each other easily, usually bonding in the break room over whatever professional sport was playing on TV. It was, in short, the real world.

Liberals depend on a crisis culture of “breaking news” to give them things to do. They don’t like to hear it, but the American experiment is working fine without their interference and advice. We all tend to respect each other.

If the news is what gives meaning to your life, you’re in trouble. But it is for a fair number of people.

PEOPLE HAVE BEEN TREATED LIKE CRAP FOR TWO YEARS AND THEY’RE AT THE BREAKING POINT? What’s driving the spike in air rage incidents.

THE REAL REASON IS BECAUSE “CONSERVATION” IS A LUXURY OF WEALTHY SOCIETIES: Many Indigenous languages lack a word for ‘conservation.’ Here’s why.

Primitive humans have a long history of promoting extinctions and environmental change.

SHOULD’VE BEEN SHOT ELSEWHERE, OBVIOUSLY: CHICAGO JUSTICE: Armed Home Invasion Nets A Few Weeks In Prison For Perp Who Was Shot In Butt.

THEY ALSO AREN’T NECESSARY: We’re a Physician and Mathematician and a Data Scientist. N95s Won’t Work for Kids.

The Berkeley Unified School District (BUSD) in the SF Bay Area where we live, announced on Tuesday that it was planning on “transitioning all students and staff” to KN95 respirators. If worn properly, such respirators filter 95 percent of particles the size of those that carry the SARS-CoV-2 virus. The BUSD has proposed this measure as a means to slow the spread of COVID-19 and keep schools open. These respirators would be required for the entire school day, including outdoors during gym and recess.

Unfortunately, the effectiveness of respirators is vastly overestimated, and there is scant evidence that they stop community transmission. Moreover, NIOSH-approved respirators are tight, uncomfortable, and can impede breathing. OSHA requires both fit testing and a medical evaluation before workers can wear them. We’ve all seen images of health care workers with bruised faces from properly worn respirators.

This is legally-mandated child abuse.

GREAT MOMENTS IN TROLLING: ‘It’s a dangerous time to tell the truth in America:’ Glenn Greenwald shows ‘solidarity with Peter Doocy’ and libs aren’t on board for some reason (video).

CRISES BY DESIGN:

● How it started: Biden Administration Green Lights Putin’s Pipeline. Nord Stream 2 will boost the Russian president’s influence in Europe.

—The Washington Free Beacon, July 21st, 2021.

● How it’s going: White House seeks energy security plan for Europe amid Russia-Ukraine crisis.

—CNBC, today.

As a wise community organizer reportedly said, “Don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to f**k things up.” Biden’s “energy security plan for Europe” will likely be as effective as Biden’s “energy security plan” for America.

Related: What Does Vladimir Putin Have on Joe Biden? Joe and Hunter Biden’s seedy involvements in Ukraine may have given the Russian leader all the ‘kompromat’ he needs to keep America at bay.

I’M STILL HOLDING OUT FOR THE MAVERICK “GRABBER:” Ford Pausing Reservations on Maverick Hybrid Until Summer.