OPEN THREAD: I think we just lost the family audience.

THE NEW SPACE RACE: China’s Zhurong Mars rover returns panorama ahead of planetary blackout.

DREW HOLDEN: “We’ve got to talk about the Rolling Stone ivermectin article. Turns out the story about rural hospitals so flooded with ODs that they couldn’t treat other patients was made up, entirely invented. A lot of people took the bait, and I’ve got the screenshots.”

GOOD: Drug cocktail reduces aging-associated disc degeneration.

WELL, YES: Chinese Professor Saying China “Has People at Top of U.S. Core Inner Circle of Power and Influence.”

SHOCKER:

HOSTAGE NIGHTMARE? Rep. McCaul Says Taliban Is Blocking Americans From Getting Out of Afghanistan.

Related: As Roger Kimball writes: Afghanistan: the Mistake Was Not Going In, It Was How We Left.

WHAT ROCK FANS DON’T WANT TO ADMIT:

The recent death of Rolling Stones drummer Charlie Watts at the age of 80 is just the latest rude reminder of what all of us know in our bones but nonetheless choose to ignore most days: The classic rock era is nearly dead and buried — and so are its greatest icons.

I wrote about this two years ago, and, inevitably, things are looking even bleaker now. Bob Dylan is 80. Paul McCartney and Paul Simon are 79. And not far behind them are a host of rock stars well into their 70s: Brian Wilson, Carole King, Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Joni Mitchell, Jimmy Page, Robert Plant, Ray Davies, Roger Daltrey, Pete Townshend, Roger Waters, David Gilmour, Rod Stewart, Eric Clapton, Debbie Harry, Neil Young, Van Morrison, Bryan Ferry, Elton John, and Don Henley. James Taylor and Jackson Browne just completed a tour together; the former is 73, the latter 72. The baby of the bunch, Bruce Springsteen, currently wrapping up another residency on Broadway, turns 72 next month.

Over the next decade, most of these superstars are going to die, and the remaining holdouts soon after. On one level, this will be a terrible loss. These are people we care about deeply, who write and perform music that means the world to us.

But if we’re honest, we also have to admit that the loss is largely a function of nostalgia, of feelings attached to sounds and sights from long ago. Yes, many of these legends still take to the road to play live. Some produce new music from time to time. But none of these artists — not one — is doing work to rival the quality of what they produced at their peak. And in every case, that high point was decades ago.

And after they’re gone, sadly comes what Kyle Smith dubbed in 2019, The Great Forgetting:

As the Who suit up for what I suppose will be their final tour (“Who’s Left”?), Chuck Klosterman points out in his book But What if We’re Wrong? that whole forms die out. He compares rock to 19th-century marching music: nothing left of the latter except John Philip Sousa. That’s it. And Sousa himself is barely remembered. In 100 years rock might be gone too, Klosterman guesses. Maybe we’ll remember one rock act. Who will it be? Maybe none of the obvious answers. It certainly wasn’t obvious at the time of Fitzgerald’s death that The Great Gatsby would be the best-remembered novel he or anyone else wrote in the first half of the 20th century. As for the novels of the second half of the 20th century, the clock is ticking on them. The Catcher in the Rye is moribund. Generation X was the last to revere that book. Teaching it to young people today would get you ridiculed. To Kill a Mockingbird? It had a good run but it’s now being labeled a “white savior” story by the grandchildren of those who revered it. Soon schools and teachers will be shunning it.

To Kill a Mockingbird? Atticus Finch is literature’s most celebrated rape apologist!

CONDI RICE HITS BASIC FLAWS IN BIDEN WITHDRAWAL: Why Not Wait Until Winter? Why Telegraph ‘Out’ Date.

Joe wanted to have some big optics in time for the 9/11 anniversary. Unfortunately, thanks to the Taliban, he’s going to get them.

Earlier: Rep. Byron Donalds (R-FL): We Have Dead Servicemen in Kabul Because Biden ‘Wanted A Photo Op September 11.’

EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY: Hostage crisis? Taliban blocking departure of six planes carrying Americans, says GOP rep.

SISTERHOOD!

I love how the man who went out into the cold every day to literally watch her back gets no credit, but the woman who told him to do so gets all of it.

Only a few people in the comments noted this mismatch.

Sisterhood!

#METOO STOPPED MATTERING THE DAY GROPEY JOE BIDEN WAS NOMINATED: Eva Longoria, Shonda Rhimes and Jurnee Smollett Exit Time’s Up Board in Mass Exodus.

The nonprofit group, which was created three years ago to protect and support survivors of sexual assault amid the growing #MeToo era, has been besieged over the past month since it was revealed that its leadership had been working with ex-New York Governor Andrew Cuomo to mitigate accusations of sexual misconduct against him. The revelations led to the resignations last month of board chairwoman Roberta Kaplan and CEO Tina Tchen.

Bandele, previously the group’s chief operating officer, has been tasked with building back up the organization, which has been harshly criticized for prioritizing its connections with powerful people rather than the well-being of survivors.

Jurnee Smollett is Jussie’s sister: “‘It’s been f***ing painful,’ she says, choosing her words carefully, ‘one of the most painful things my family’s ever experienced — to love someone as much as we love my brother, and to watch someone who you love that much go through something like this, that is so public, has been devastating. I was already in a very dark space for a number of reasons, and I’ve tried to not let it make me pessimistic. But everyone who knows me knows that I love my brother and I believe my brother,’” she said last year.

JEFF DUNETZ: Rosh HaShanah Is The Anti-Socialism Jewish Holiday.

PUNCH BACK TWICE AS HARD: Virginia Citizens Defense League Files $450,000 Libel Suit Against Coalition to Stop Gun Violence.

ROGER KIMBALL: ‘Adults,’ ‘Progress,’ and Disaster.

Is there anything to add to the avalanche of disparaging commentary on the national humiliation that is the Biden Administration’s handling of our departure from Afghanistan? I’m not sure.

True, the scandals keep coming. As I write, it was only a few days ago that someone leaked and Reuters published the story about Joe Biden’s July call to Ashraf Ghani, then president of Afghanistan, now a multi-multi-millionaire thanks to the $169 million of American taxpayer money which he stuffed into bags before leaving Afghanistan for the United Arab Emirates. During that call, Biden made the president of Afghanistan an offer he couldn’t refuse: military aid in exchange for lies. There is a “perception around the world,” Biden said, that “things aren’t going well in terms of the fight against the Taliban. And there’s a need, whether it is true or not, . . . to project a different picture” (my emphasis).

Opinions differ about whether this conversation constituted an impeachable offense. Were it Donald Trump making the call, you can bet your burqa-wearing seventh wife that Nancy Pelosi would have articles of impeachment drawn up before the cocktail hour. For Biden, not so fast, though it is an occasion for thought that someone—presumably someone in the Pentagon or the State Department—leaked the audio and transcript of the conversation. That’s a felony, but these days only Republicans get charged for that sort of bad behavior. The question is: what does it portend that someone in the deep state apparat excreted that embarrassing tidbit? Was it a warning shot across the bow of Biden’s sinking skiff?

* * * * * * * *

This was almost as delicious as the brief video making the rounds portraying some preposterous female academic trying to introduce “Fountain,” the urinal that Marcel Duchamp guyed the Western art world with back in 1917, to a room full of Afghan men and women. Watch it. As Rod Dreher noted in The American Conservative, it is a “sign of American decadence and stupidity in Afghanistan that cannot be improved on.”

Read the whole thing; the video of an “educator” trying to explain the Duchamp’s urinal to Afghan women is a masterclass in unintended irony:

While I’m tempted to make another joke about Tom Wolfe’s programming of the Matrix working perfectly (especially since the above clip plays like something out of his 1975 book, The Painted Word), as Brendan O’Neill of Spike wrote last month, “The West’s post-9/11 bluster was continually undermined by the West’s broader descent into moral relativism. How can you assert the civilisational authority of Western values when your entire educational and university system is devoted to questioning and demeaning Western civilisation? You cannot partake in a clash of civilisations if you loathe your own civilisation.” And its culture.

I CONTINUE TO THINK THAT THE “VARIANTS” ARE BEING OVERSOLD: Study suggests Delta does not cause more severe childhood COVID.

BATTLEFIELD PREPARATION: Media Setting the Table to Question Outcome of California Recall if Larry Elder Wins.

NOTHING TO SEE HERE, MOVE ALONG: Harris County $11 Million Vaccine Outreach Contract to One-Woman Firm Draws Scrutiny.

Last month tempers flared at Harris County Commissioners Court after County Judge Lina Hidalgo (D) accused Commissioner Jack Cagle (R-Pct. 4) of telling a “bold-faced lie” when he referred to a vendor as a “one-woman company.”
Although the expenditure had been approved months earlier in a 4 to 1 vote, little information had been provided to commissioners about Elevate Strategies, LLC, the winner of a $10.9 million contract to conduct vaccine outreach.

It was not until August that commissioners learned that the company was only founded in 2019, listed a Montrose apartment as its business address, and only consisted of one person: Felicity Pereyra, a former deputy campaign manager for Commissioner Adrian Garcia (D-Pct. 2) and former employee of both the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee.

Now documents from the county indicate that prior to evaluations, members of the contract committee from Hidalgo’s office requested changes to the experience and qualifications required to bid on the project.

For example, a requirement that firms have “a minimum of five years of demonstrated experience conducting quantitative and qualitative evaluations of large as well as small scale public health…media engagement,” was changed to a “minimum of three years preferred.”

Other experience requirements were also shortened by the number of years and changed to “preferred,” and a requirement for experience in market research services was removed entirely.

Other documents obtained by FOX 26 reporter Greg Groogan indicate that Elevate Strategies was not the number-one scoring vendor.

In the initial scoring charts comparing four vendors, the University of Texas (UT) Health Science Center earned a score of 240 to Elevate Strategies’ 204. Texas Tool Belt, owned by Kimberly Olsen of the Left-leaning Texas Organizing Project, came in third with a score of 184.

I suspect this is the case all over the country, with an awful lot of “public health” money really going to graft and political machine-building.

VETERAN ESPN PRODUCER FIRED FOR REFUSING VAX: Beth Faber is a widely respected sports radio producer who put in 29 years with ESPN. She chose not to get the Covid jab. Now she’s out of a job.

MICHAEL BARONE: Joe Biden is making even Jimmy Carter look good.

What Carter brought to the White House was a willingness to adjust to events and change his views. A product of segregationist southern Georgia, he installed a portrait of Martin Luther King in the Georgia Capitol, leaving segregation behind and endorsing the civil-rights revolution.

As a presidential candidate, he took on George Wallace, who was previously unbeatable in the South, and beat him 34 percent to 31 percent in Florida. There’s a lesson there perhaps for Republicans who would like to be president but are hesitating to take on Donald Trump.

On domestic policy, unlike Biden, who already had four years’ Senate seniority when he took the oath of office, Carter refused to endorse his party’s leftmost positions. He signed the tax bill that included former Wisconsin Republican Rep. William Steiger’s cut in the capital gains tax from 49 percent to 25 percent — a growth stimulator in the decades ahead.

Just as important, he supported deregulation, with some considerable support from Ralph Nader and Ted Kennedy. Carter appointee Alfred Kahn pushed through airline deregulation, which transformed flying from luxury transportation to a way for the masses to vacation and stay in touch with far-flung family and friends.

Carter supported the Staggers Act, passed by a solidly Democratic Congress in 1980, which deregulated railroad rates. He backed trucking deregulation as well. Most Americans today don’t realize it, but Carter-era deregulations cut enormous costs from the prices of goods of just about every kind. It’s the main reason prices for private-sector products such as food and clothing have fallen in real terms over the last 40 years, while prices for public sector-affected things such as health care and higher education have soared.

Read the whole thing. P.J. O’Rourke’s 1995 book Age and Guile Beat Youth, Innocence, and a Bad Haircut contains his 1993 American Spectator essay, “100 Reasons Why Jimmy Carter Was a Better President than Bill Clinton,” which concludes with the following:

98. Carter let the Soviets have Angola, Ethiopia, and South Yemen. And, in retrospect, the Soviets deserved no better.

99. Carter wasn’t a throwback to the Carter era.

100. And let us not forget that Jimmy Carter gave us one thing Bill Clinton can never possibly give us—Ronald Reagan.

Hopefully the next GOP president can clean-up Biden’s many disasters as quickly as Reagan made it “Morning in America” again.

TALIBAN TERROR: Pregnant American Woman Stranded in Afghanistan Pleas for Help as the Extremists ‘Hunt’ Door-to-Door.

MICROBIOME NEWS: Study reveals link between microbiome, early brain development.

THIS IS YOUR BRAIN ON IDENTITY POLITICS: Abortion Edition.

Enter Politico, which has a piece up today titled, The Real Origins of the Religious Right, the purpose of which is to suggest that the tens of millions of Americans who care deeply about abortion do not actually care about abortion, but are just good old-fashioned racists:

* * * * * * * *

It would be worth addressing the historical argument being made here at greater length. But, for now, I want to push back against the broader implication of the piece, which was summed up well by the editor-at-large of Newsweek, MSNBC’s Naveed Jamali, who argued this morning that “the pro-life movement has always been about white supremacy.”

This is the sort of nonsense that one begins to spout when one has turned off one’s brain, and, instead of thinking questions through, decided that there can be only two sort of people in America: Good People and White Supremacist People. It is also a ridiculous non sequitur. It is not true that the pro-life movement came out of “white supremacy.” But even if it were — as is true of, say, the gun control movement, which until 1970 really was inextricable from racism — that would in no way imply that modern pro-lifers were motivated by animus toward people who aren’t white.

Wait until Politico discovers Margaret Sanger…

NEWS YOU CAN USE: Hen hazard: Salmonella a threat from backyard chickens.

YOU’RE GONNA NEED A MUCH BIGGER BLOG: Everything wrong with woke culture and the impact on feminism (video).