OPEN THREAD: Try hittin’ the note. Politicians have some hobbies. And although I hung out with the Colonel a few times, I wish I’d done it more. But damn, there were so many good bands back then.

Related: Col. Bruce Hampton: “The music of today is horrifying.” Plus, “1962 was the worst year of music ever . . . when it gets bad, everything changes.”

“You know what music is — bring joy to the room, man.”

Related: The search for the southern sound. “Never move to your left man, you may be in trouble.”

SPACE: Space Force says upcoming meeting with industry won’t be business as usual.

THANKS BIDEN! DHS Preps For Massive Surge Of Up To 400,000 Illegals In October.

I wouldn’t sweat it though — Jen Psaki assures me that they won’t be sticking around long: “Pressed on the Biden administration’s decision not to require coronavirus vaccines or negative COVID-19 tests for people illegally crossing the southern border, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki insisted Monday the refugees are ‘not intending to stay here for a lengthy period of time.’”

AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: Infographic: How To Tell A Prison From A Public School.

GOOD NEWS FOR TERRAFORMERS: A New Paper Claims Photosynthesis Could Be Possible in The Clouds of Venus.

Recommended: My friend Martyn Fogg’s Terraforming: Engineering Planetary Environments.

I’M EXPECTING AN EARTH-SHATTERING KABOOM: Researchers are using gassy, explosive bacteria to destroy cancer cells.

K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: ‘White Supremacist’ Who Scrawled Racist Graffiti on Walls in Missouri High Schools Turns Out to Be Black Student.

Related: “Again and again, we see the same response to fake hate from America’s hyper-progressive enclaves. This attack or abuse might not have been actually real, they say, but the incident speaks to a deeper, almost religious belief that racism lurks everywhere and itches to get out. It’s a form of moral theater in which participants must willingly suspend their disbelief. The awkward truth is that in modern America, as in other parts of the developed world, the demand for ‘acts of racism’ greatly exceeds the supply. So people have to manufacture their own.”

FROM BAUHAUS TO BIDEN: Making Architecture Awful Again. How woke modernists use politics to keep producing buildings the public hates.

EPIDEMICS OF FEAR: Unlearned AIDS Lessons for Covid. In the 1980s, Fauci, Redfield, the CDC and the media needlessly terrified American heterosexuals about the risk of AIDS. The merchants of fear paid no price for their mistakes — and went on to make even worse ones during the Covid pandemic.

HAHA: California Homeschooling Inquiries Skyrocket After Gov. Newsom Announces Statewide Student Vaccination Mandate.

Related: Flawed COVID mandates are speeding up the flight out of public schools.

WALTER DURANTY SMILES: Trump wants Pulitzers awarded for Russia collusion reporting revoked.

Former President Donald Trump called on the Pulitzer Board to rescind the prizes given to the New York Times and the Washington Post for their coverage of the Russian collusion story, saying they were based on “false reporting.”

Trump, in a statement released Sunday morning about the letter addressed to Bud Kliment, the interim administrator of the awards, said he wants the board to rescind the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting presented to the New York Times and the Washington Post because the reporting was based on “false reporting of a non-existent link between the Kremlin and the Trump Campaign.”

“As has been widely publicized, the coverage was no more than a politically motivated farce which attempted to spin a false narrative that my campaign supposedly colluded with Russia despite a complete lack of evidence underpinning this allegation,” he said in the letter.

The former president, who also called for the prizes to be revoked in March 2019,  pointed to the indictment last month of Michael Sussmann, a former rep for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, by special counsel John Durham.

Good luck with that — the Pultizer Board never revoked Duranty’s award.

PANDORA PAPERS: An offshore data tsunami.

A 2.94 terabyte data trove exposes the offshore secrets of wealthy elites from more than 200 countries and territories. These are people who use tax and secrecy havens to buy property and hide assets; many avoid taxes and worse. They include more than 330 politicians and 130 Forbes billionaires, as well as celebrities, fraudsters, drug dealers, royal family members and leaders of religious groups around the world.

The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists spent more than a year structuring, researching and analyzing the more than 11.9 million records in the Pandora Papers leak. The task involved three main elements: journalists, technology and time.

Read the whole thing.

YOU SURE ABOUT THAT? Opinion: When it Comes to EV Range, 520 Miles Are Too Many. That’s barely enough to let me drive to the beach or to Washington, DC with a reasonable margin.

I’VE SEEN THE LOCKDOWNS AND THE DAMAGE DONE: ‘Zoom dysmorphia’ is here to stay despite a return to the office. “I’ve always thought I was attractive, and people would always compliment my looks in person. But on video, nobody was saying how nice it was to see my pretty face.”

ROGER SIMON: To Save America, Durham Must Reveal the Whole Russiagate Story and Punish the Guilty.

So what do we do? Do we sit back passively, maybe adding a few snipes here and there, and let Durham do his job, hoping for the best?

I say no. We all have a role to play. Durham is a man like the rest of us. Consciously or unconsciously, if he knows we’re watching, he’s going to behave in a different manner than if he thinks we’re lulled to sleep.

Be as active as possible in talking and lobbying about this. You don’t have to be a so-called “elite” to do this or be an anchorman on ABC. You just have to be a concerned citizen, an honest man or woman. Keep talking about it to friend and foe. Show up with a sign at an inconvenient (for them) place. Put it on the internet, text to everyone you know or can think of. Discuss it on Signal and Telegraph. Never let Russiagate be forgotten. Put it out there in the zeitgeist and keep it there.

The mainstream/legacy media isn’t going to do it. They will obfuscate as much as possible. We have to do it. It’s up to us. If we don’t, we have no grounds for complaint when it goes down the memory hole—and with it our country.

Two things are of paramount importance to us going forward if we want to save our republic, this full explication of what happened during the Trump-Russia affair, including everyone responsible being properly punished, so we are sure as we can be it will never happen again, and genuine integrity for our broken elections.

Work on that too. Many already are. The two go hand in hand.

Faster, please.

EVERGREEN HEADLINE: Biden’s approval rating might be higher if he stopped shooting himself in the foot.

Most chief executives offer a mix of good and bad. They might be weak on foreign affairs but strong on domestic policy. Great on the economy but lousy on social issues.

In contrast, it’s hard to think of a single area in which Biden is succeeding. Well, other than the main reason he was elected: not being Donald Trump.

* * * * * * * *

China has stepped up its threats to Taiwan, North Korea is back to firing missiles, and Iran is rattling a uranium-tipped saber across the Middle East. Putin is cozying up to the Taliban and trying to peel off NATO-member Turkey.

With everything going so wrong, Biden could have taken a modest victory lap on COVID-19. More than 95% of Americans aged 65 to 74 received at least one vaccination dose; 85% had two.

Instead of heralding this success, the president recast it as a failure, bashing the unvaccinated minority and suggesting they should be fired from their jobs.

Entering office, Biden promised to resolve the “cascading crises of our era.” At this point, Americans just want him to stop creating new ones.

Exit question:

THEY KEEP MAKING ME FEEL GOOD ABOUT LEAVING THEM: USA Today Uses Bloomberg-Paid Anti-Gun Activist to Interview David Chipman. “For USA TODAY, this is nothing new. It’s all part of an incestuous partnership the newspaper has with the Trace – the propaganda arm of billionaire Michael Bloomberg’s anti-gun empire. . . . Reporters at the Trace are activists, not journalists. They advocate for more gun control. That’s their job.”

Plus: “The story was written by USA TODAY reporter Nick Penzenstadler and Brian Freskos, a staff writer for the Trace who’s based in Chicago. According to his bio, Freskos’ reporting at the Trace ‘has primarily focused on gun trafficking and community-based violence prevention.’ To be clear, even though he shares a byline on the story with an actual newspaper reporter, Freskos is paid by Bloomberg as an activist, a position he’s held since 2016, when he graduated from Columbia University.”

STILL #1 IN STRETCHING EXERCISE & FITNESS: Built from Broken: A Science-Based Guide to Healing Painful Joints, Preventing Injuries, and Rebuilding Your Body.

GREAT MOMENTS IN FAMILY ENTERTAINMENT: Super Bowl 2022 halftime show: Snoop Dogg, Eminem, Dr. Dre, Mary J. Blige, Kendrick Lamar will headline.

As Victor Davis Hanson noted in January of 2016, Obama met with Lamar before delivering his last State of the Union address:

Obama announced that Lamar’s hit “How Much a Dollar Cost” was his favorite song of 2015. Obama announced that Lamar’s hit “How Much a Dollar Cost” was his favorite song of 2015. The song comes from the album To Pimp a Butterfly; the album cover shows a crowd of young African-American men massed in front of the White House. In celebratory fashion, all are gripping champagne bottles and hundred-dollar bills; in front of them lies the corpse of a white judge, with two Xs drawn over his closed eyes. So why wouldn’t the president’s advisors at least have advised him that such a gratuitous White House sanction might be incongruous with a visual message of racial hatred? Was Obama seeking cultural authenticity, of the sort he seeks by wearing a T-shirt, with his baseball cap on backwards and thumb up?

To play the old “what if” game that is necessary in the bewildering age of Obama: what if President George W. Bush had invited to the White House a controversial country Western singer, known for using the f- and n- words liberally in his music and celebrating attacks on Bureau of Land Management officers?

Last year, Niall Ferguson wrote “‘Weimar America?’ The Trump Show Is No Cabaret. Detractors have been equating the U.S. with 1920s Germany for 85 years, and they are still wrong.” As far as the notion that the US is about to be partying like it’s 1939, I agree. Or as Tom Wolfe famously wrote, “The dark night of fascism is always descending in the United States and yet lands only in Europe.” But in terms of pop culture, and its intersection with politics, it’s been Weimar America for quite some time. The Super Bowl halftime show in February will fit that theme of cultural dissipation perfectly.

WHY IS THE LEFT SUCH A CESSPIT OF RACISM? Democrat Georgia Rep would rather see a Confederate statue than one of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.

IT WAS ALWAYS BS: Whatever Happened to the Population Bomb?

CARGO SHIPS ANCHORED OFF NY AND LA FACE 4-WEEK WAIT TO BERTH AND TRAINS IN CHICAGO ARE BACKED UP 25 MILES WITH GLOBAL SUPPLY CHAIN ON THE BRINK OF COLLAPSE: Americans face shortages of cars, shoes and exercise gear as holiday season looms.

Earlier: Workers Who Maintain Supply Chains Warn of Worldwide ‘System Collapse.’

More: Black Swans, Butterflies And Supply Chains: Predicting The Unpredictable.

WAIT, I WAS TOLD POT WAS HARMLESS AND A CURE FOR MOST ILLS: Cannabis users at ‘much higher’ risk of developing mental health issues. Though cause and effect are hard to sort out here.

ROLLING STONE LEFTY LOSES IT, SHRIEKS ‘JOE MANCHIN JUST COOKED THE PLANET.’

“Joe Manchin Just Cooked the Planet” is your latest, totally-not-at-all-panicking-like-a-little-girl headline from Rolling Stone writer Jeff Goodell.

“Manchin is f***ing it all up,” Goodell gently persuades readers with his calm and reason. “To him, climate is a tomorrow problem.”

Goodell repeats the usual lefty talking points about how little time we have to save the planet, about imaginary “subsidies” received by the oil and coal industries, and calls Manchin a “tool” who is “determined to take everyone down with him.”

That’s a lot of big talk from a writer who in the very same column admits that the “policy specifics of the reconciliation bill are not yet clear.”

But it’s going to save the planet for sure, you see. The one Joe Manchin just “cooked.”

Rolling Stone, you say?

[Jann] Wenner’s Gulfstream II jet seated ten people and featured a dining table, four overstuffed couches, and a foldout bed. It cost $6 million. Wenner loved it so much he put the factory-issued model in his office on Fifth Avenue and dreamed of ways to take his Rolling Stone salon of celebrities and suitors to the air. “Then it became ‘What can we do to fly this thing? Where can we go? How can I take it in the air?’  ” recalled Wenner. “I would just circle over LaGuardia to have lunch.”

* * * * * * * *

[Wenner’s attorney Ben] Needell put the plane under a business subsidiary called Straight Arrow Transportation to write it off as a business expense, but Wenner said it was “90 percent personal.”

—Joe Hagan in the 2016 biography, Sticky Fingers: The Life and Times of Jann Wenner and Rolling Stone Magazine.