HMM: Some COVID-19 patients may develop atrial fibrillation.

A friend of ours recently developed A-Fib out of the blue. Her Apple Watch was warning her for three days before she finally got to a doctor.

GREAT MOMENTS IN GASLIGHTING: Chuck Todd Shocked by Harris Claim That The Border Is Secure. “On Sunday’s Meet the Press, viewers learned that there are indeed Democrat lies so preposterous even Chuck Todd won’t fall for them. During his exclusive interview with Vice President Kamala Harris, Todd appeared flabbergasted by Harris’s claim that the southern border is secure.”

DON’T GET COCKY: Poll: Herschel Walker Increasing Lead In Georgia Senate Race.

QUESTION ASKED: The Forgetting of 9/11: How did this coordinated mass murder become so irrelevant?

Muslim alienation and fear inside the U.S. has become the perennial 9/11 story, not the 3,000 Americans who were murdered and the costs associated with the attacks that have mounted into the trillions of dollars. So breathless are they to tell this tale that they produce news stories in which they have to admit that the lead item was not classified as a hate crime by the FBI. Overlook that fact, we are told, and focus instead on the words of the director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), a radical group which has had demonstrable ties to Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood: “9/11 is always a particularly difficult day.”

In these stories, there is never any effort made to consider how much more difficult the anniversary might be for the many Americans who lost loved ones on that day.

By contrast, look for commemoration of, for example, the heroic deeds of the passengers of United Flight 93, who overwhelmed the terrorists who hijacked their plane and prevented the completion of their dreadful mission. When you do find such stories in the mainstream media, they’ll inevitably be spun in a direction consonant with Woke politics. For example, Mark Bingham, one of the passengers on Flight 93, will appear in a story together with Rev. Mychal Judge, who died at the World Trade Center. Beyond the two of them having died on 9/11 while endeavoring to aid others, what’s the connection?  Both “never missed a Pride parade” and “were grateful that God made [them] gay.”

9/11 has already reached a space of collective oblivion that it took Pearl Harbor many more decades to reach. This is because the force that ultimately pushed both of these hallowed days of  our civil religion into the twisted narratives of the America-hating Woke elite is the same: the fracturing of our culture into two irreconcilable sides, and the vast and rapid increase of the cultural reach of those who want all narratives of traditional American heroism and national identity to disappear.

Read the whole thing.

DEAL OF THE DAY: Fahrenheat FUH Electric Heater for Garage. #CommissionEarned

MIXED FEELINGS, BUT GRIEF AND ANGER REMAIN:  The Dividing Line.

A NEW WESTERN BRINGS LEGENDARY LAWMAN BASS REEVES TO NAVARRO COUNTY:

“Being a Texan, I was so intrigued by what I didn’t know,” [Isaiah] Washington said prior to [Corsicana’s] Dallas premiere in April. “Bass Reeves was probably the guy who created the careers of John Wayne and any tough guy on a horse who could shoot straight.”

After connecting with the screenplay by Robert Johnson, an actor who also happens to be Corsicana’s police chief, Washington immersed himself in research about Reeves and about the city.

Washington didn’t expect, however, to take over behind the camera. But then the original director dropped out just 48 hours before production was set to begin in August 2020.

“People thought I had lost my mind,” Washington said. “It sounds scary, but I had already been envisioning it.”

The ambitious project became a labor of love for the first-time filmmaker. Besides directing a Western period piece on a limited budget while adhering to strict COVID protocols, Washington helped to shape the screenplay even after the cameras started rolling.

Sounds like the end product will be a lot of fun; read the whole thing.

THE DEMAND FOR WHITE SUPREMACY IN TODAY’S AMERICA VASTLY EXCEEDS THE SUPPLY: After exhaustive investigation, BYU declares Duke athlete’s racial slur claim completely fabricated.

CALIFORNIA’S ELECTRIC BOOGALOO TO NOWHERESVILLE:

As it did with emissions standards, California likely thinks it can strong-arm other states or Congress to adopt its electric-car mandate. Texas (among other states) might have something to say about that. And what if car companies and consumers don’t go along with this extravagant target? The New York Times reported a crucial caveat:

To enforce its rule . . . California would fine automakers up to $20,000 for every car that falls short of production targets. The state also could propose new amendments revising the sales targets if the market doesn’t react as state leaders hope, said Jennifer Gress, who leads the California air board’s sustainable transportation division. [Emphasis added.]

That language about “amendments” is the Emily Litella “never mind” clause. It has happened before. In a prequel to the current madness, in the early 1990s California tried to mandate that 5 percent of all new cars sold by the year 2001 be emission-free, which meant electric cars in practice. GM publicized lots of happy talk about its EV-1, a crappy electric car that cost six-figures (though it was “leased” at an implied purchase price of about $35,000), had a pathetically short range (50 miles on a good day), and took several hours to recharge. Not long before the mandate was set to take effect, it was quietly abandoned.

Electric cars have gotten much better in recent years, but in a state where lots of drivers travel well beyond the range of an electric vehicle every day, EVs still won’t meet the needs of a large number of Californians—never mind citizens of rural states that need vehicles that can run all day long. Look for history to repeat itself with the California EV mandate.

Perhaps California should sorted out its “Potemkin environmentalism” and shored up its electrical generation issues before it paid lip service to banning the internal combustion engine.

MOST OF THEM WERE BORN AFTERWARDS: Students On 9/11: ‘We Can’t Obsess Over It; It’s Time To Move On.’

DEAL OF THE DAY: 298 Piece All-Purpose First Aid Emergency Kit. #CommissionEarned

SO NOW IT’S THE 21st ANNIVERSARY OF 9/11. Back then, InstaPundit was shiny and new. Now it’s not (and neither am I!), and for years people have been warning of “blogger burnout.” But I’m still here. On prior 9/11 anniversaries, I’ve given shooting lessons to a Marine, I’ve taken the day off from blogging, and I’ve even gone to a Tea Party with Andrew Breitbart.

At this late date, I don’t have anything new to say on 9/11. Most of my law students don’t even remember it. My worries about the growth of a monstrous and ineffective internal security bureaucracy certainly bore fruit, alas.

The picture above is by my cousin-in-law Brad Rubenstein, taken from his apartment that day. You might also want to read this piece by James Lileks.

And here’s a passage from Lee Harris’s Civilization And Its Enemies.

Forgetfulness occurs when those who have been long inured to civilized order can no longer remember a time in which they had to wonder whether their crops would grow to maturity without being stolen or their children sold into slavery by a victorious foe.
…
They forget that in time of danger, in the face of the Enemy, they must trust and confide in each other, or perish.

They forget, in short, that there has ever been a category of human experience called the Enemy. And that, before 9/11, was what had happened to us. The very concept of the Enemy had been banished from our moral and political vocabulary. An enemy was just a friend we hadn’t done enough for — yet. Or perhaps there had been a misunderstanding, or an oversight on our part — something that we could correct. And this means that that our first task is that we must try to grasp what the concept of the Enemy really means.

The Enemy is someone who is willing to die in order to kill you. And while it is true that the Enemy always hates us for a reason — it is his reason, and not ours.

I’ve mentioned it before, but it bears repeating today.

One thing I guess I didn’t believe 21 years ago is that America would elect such a feckless President in 2008, and stand idly by while he flushed our global position, and security, down a left-wing toilet. But we did — and then we did it again in 2020 — and we’ll be paying the price for a long time.

We said “never forget.” Well, we haven’t forgotten the heroism of people like Rick Rescorla, the Flight 93 passengers, the firefighters who charged up the WTC stairs, or the volunteers who set up the American Dunkirk evacuation of lower Manhattan by boat.

But we have forgotten the criminal negligence of our political leaders and intelligence services that got us to that point. We should have purged the incompetents then. Instead, they’re still running the show. The country is still sound, but the people in charge of it have only gotten worse.

God bless America. We need it.

I don’t mean this to sound gloomy. But Americans consistently shrink from the realities of both international and domestic politics and that’s not good. I think the coming decade will be a dose of reality, for better and for worse.

GOODER AND HARDER: The fall of Los Angeles.

For much of the 20th century, Los Angeles symbolised the future. Over the course of the century, the population grew 40-fold to nearly four million people.

But now, for the first time in its history, the population of Los Angeles is in decline, falling by 204,000 between July 2020 and July 2021. LA was once a magnet for investors. But recently many of the area’s corporate linchpins – including aerospace giant Northrop Grumman, Occidental Petroleum and Hilton Hotels – have left, taking with them high-paying jobs and philanthropic resources.

Worse still, conditions in LA today are bordering on the medieval. Anyone visiting some of the most famous districts of urban Los Angeles – notably downtown, Hollywood and Venice Beach – sees clear signs of destitution, including sprawling homeless encampments, vast numbers of people living in vehicles and rampant crime. Last year, a UN official compared conditions on LA’s Skid Row, a poor downtown neighbourhood, to those of Syrian refugee camps. Smash-and-grab thefts at local 7-Elevens and the persistent theft of goods from railyards suggest this is a city that has lost control to the modern version of lawless highwaymen.

So-called progressives have long dreamed of transforming the famously sprawled Los Angeles into a dense, transit-oriented, sun-kissed version of New York. But despite massive corporate and government investment, attempts to do this have failed. Rather than a vibrant hipster paradise, LA’s urban core is dominated by the homeless, the poor, government workers and a few creative types – making for an odd juxtaposition of homeless camps and low-rent hotels alongside high-end restaurants and artists’ lofts. Meanwhile, newly built luxury apartments have suffered vacancy rates as high as 14 per cent – remarkable in a city so short of housing.

As NRO’s Jay Nordlinger wrote in 2010 wrote in 2010 when the failed city of Detroit was making headlines and photo spreads thanks to its Hiroshima-like bombed out landscape, “If people are voting a certain way — maybe it’s because they want to. Maybe they know full well what they’re doing. Sometimes you have to take no — such as ‘no to Republicanism’ — for an answer.”

QUESTION ASKED: Could Russia’s Sudden Ukraine Retreat Mean a Tactical Nuclear Weapons Strike Is Coming?

DISNEY’S BOB IGER, WHO ALSO BACKED OUT OF BUYING TWITTER, SAYS LOTS OF USERS WERE BOTS:

Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s excuse for trying to back out of his $44 billion deal to buy Twitter—too many bots, he says—is gaining steam. First, it was the Twitter whistleblower’s claims. Then, on Wednesday, Musk received an assist from former Disney CEO Bob Iger, who had wanted to buy Twitter for the House of Mouse years ago but ultimately didn’t. Iger’s revelation: Bots made up “substantial portion” Twitter’s users.

In an interview at the Code Conference, Iger went into detail on why he decided to back out of the potential acquisition in 2016. Many points he touched on were not new. At that time, Disney was looking for a distribution platform to get into streaming, and Twitter seemed like a great fit. However, the level of “nastiness” on Twitter did not mesh well with the entertainment company’s squeaky-clean brand, and acquiring it seemed like more trouble than it was worth.

Iger dropped a new nugget of information he hadn’t spoken about before, one that quickly caught the attention of the richest man in the world: bots.

“Interestingly enough, because I read the news these days, we did look very carefully at all of the Twitter users—I guess they’re called users?—and we at that point estimated with some of Twitter’s help that a substantial portion, not a majority, were not real,” Iger explained. “I don’t remember the number, but we discounted the value heavily. But that was built into our economics. Actually, the deal that we had was pretty cheap.”

Why, it’s like “Twitter sentiment is a Styrofoam iceberg. You may think 9/10 of it is underwater, but actually, 9/10 of it is visible,” to coin an Insta-phrase. Somebody should write a book about this stuff.

JOEL KOTKIN: Progressive Failure: The Fall of Los Angeles.

SOME PARTS OF AMERICA STILL WORK: SpaceX launches 34 more Starlink satellites, AST SpaceMobile satellite.

GERARD VAN DER LEUN: Last Light: The Twin Towers on the evening of September 10, 2001.

HOW IT STARTED:

How it’s going: Karen Bass says two guns stolen from her house during break in.

—L.A.’s Fox 11, yesterday.

TWITTER IS A FRAUD: Disney’s Bob Iger, Who Also Backed Out of Buying Twitter, Says Lots of Users Were Bots. “Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s excuse for trying to back out of his $44 billion deal to buy Twitter—too many bots, he says—is gaining steam. First, it was the Twitter whistleblower’s claims. Then, on Wednesday, Musk received an assist from former Disney CEO Bob Iger, who had wanted to buy Twitter for the House of Mouse years ago but ultimately didn’t. Iger’s revelation: Bots made up ‘substantial portion’ Twitter’s users.”

SOMETHING I WROTE IN 2002: American Dunkirk.

People at Ground Zero, the Manhattan Waterfront, nearby New Jersey, Staten Island and Brooklyn waterfronts, and crews on the numerous vessels repeatedly used the phrases “just amazing,” “everyone cooperated, and “just doing what it took” to describe maritime community responses. Individuals stepped up and took charge of specific functions, and captains and crews from other companies took their direction. . . . Private maritime operators kept their vessels onsite and available until Friday, Day Four, when federal authorities took over.

“Day Four, when federal authorities took over.”

HMM: Ukraine Claims More Ground in Blitz in Northeast. “A day after routing Russian forces in a lightning advance that seized hundreds of square miles and a strategic town in the northeast, Ukraine claimed additional territory on Sunday in an offensive that has swiftly reshaped the battlefield in the nearly 200-day-old war and left Moscow reeling. Ukraine’s rapid advances in the Kharkiv region have significantly weakened Russia’s hold on eastern Ukraine, which it has used as a stronghold to wage its war since February. Ukrainian officials said on Saturday that their troops had retaken the eastern city of Izium, a strategically important railway hub southeast of Kharkiv that Russian forces seized in the spring after a bloody, weekslong battle.”

Related: As Russians Retreat, Putin Is Criticized by Hawks Who Trumpeted His War. “Russian bloggers reporting from the front line provide a uniquely less-censored view of the war. But as Russia’s military flails, these once vocal supporters are exposing its flaws, lies and all.”

UKRAINE: “Ukrainian forces have captured an estimated 2,500 square kilometers in Kharkiv Oblast in the Kharkiv area counteroffensive as of September 9.

Plus: “Ukrainian successes on the Kharkiv City-Izyum line are creating fissures within the Russian information space and eroding confidence in Russian command to a degree not seen since a failed Russian river crossing in mid-May. Ukrainian military officials announced that Ukrainian forces advanced 50km deep into Russian defensive positions north of Izyum on September 8, but the Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) notably did not issue any statement regarding Ukrainian advances in Kharkiv Oblast.[1] Ukrainian successes and the Russian MoD’s silence prompted many Russian milbloggers to criticize and debate Russian failures to retain control over the city of Balakliya, approximately 44km northwest of Izyum. Some milbloggers claimed that Russian forces fully or partially withdrew from Balakliya in good order, while others complained that Ukrainian forces beat Russian forces out of the settlement.[2] Others noted that Rosgvardia units operating in the area did not coordinate their defenses or have sufficient artillery capabilities to prevent Ukrainian counterattacks in the region.[3] Milbloggers warned about an impending Ukrainian counteroffensive northwest of Izyum for days prior to Ukrainian advances, and some milbloggers noted that Russian command failed to prepare for “obvious and predictable” Ukrainian counteroffensives.[4] Others noted that Ukrainian forces have “completely outplayed” the Russian military command in Balakliya, while others encouraged readers to wait to discuss Russian losses and withhold criticism until Russian forces stabilize the frontlines.[5] The current tone and scale of Russian milblogger criticism echo the response to Russia’s loss of a large amount of armor in a failed Russian river crossing in Bilohorivka, Luhansk Oblast, in May.[6] ISW assessed at the time that the catastrophic Russian losses suffered due to incompetence shook the confidence of pro-Russian milbloggers, sparking criticism of the Russian war effort. Russian milbloggers and social media users accessed satellite imagery that showed devastating losses of Russian military equipment, which caused many to comment on the incompetence of the Russian military and analyze the scene on a tactical level. The Russian MoD did not comment on the situation, fueling burgeoning doubts about Russia’s prospects in Ukraine.”

Related: Video of Russian Defense Ministry confirming it is ‘regrouping’ to the south (what will Putin do now?)

OPEN THREAD: Because I love you and want you to be happy.

HOW’S THAT SPACE PROGRAM COMING ALONG? Fiery ancient asteroid impacts turned living things into charcoal.