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.