IT’S COME TO THIS: Now NBA Players Sound More Rational Than Gov’t Officials on COVID-19.

How is it that an NBA player is making more sense about the pandemic than every single government official we’re somehow supposed to trust?

Jonathan Isaac of the Orlando Magic is one of the players quoted in a recent Rolling Stone article about anti-vaxxers in the NBA, and he had some problems with how he was depicted in the story:

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“I am not anti-vax. I’m not anti-medicine. I’m not anti-science. I didn’t come to my current vaccination status by studying black history or watching Donald Trump press conferences. I have nothing but the utmost respect for every health care worker and person in Orlando, and all across the world, that have worked tirelessly to keep us safe. My mom has worked in health care for a really long time. I thank God, I’m grateful that I live in a society where vaccines are possible, and we can protect ourselves and have the means to protect ourselves in the first place.

“But with that being said, it is my belief that the vaccine status of every person should be their own choice and completely up to them, without bullying, without being pressured, or without being forced to do so. I’m not ashamed to say that I’m uncomfortable with taking the vaccine at this time. I think that we’re all different, we all come from different places, we’ve had different experiences, and hold dear to different beliefs. And what it is that you do with your body, when it comes to putting medicine in there, should be your choice, free of the ridicule and the opinion of others.”

Is Isaac right? I don’t know. But if he’s not, I need someone to explain why, not just dismiss him as some wild-eyed loon. He’s obviously given it a lot of thought, and he’s able to express his opinion succinctly and cogently. He’s not ranting and raving about conspiracies. He’s just not convinced about this vaccine, because the people in charge of convincing him have failed.

And I’m assuming he’s not a Trump voter. He doesn’t fit the profile of anti-vaxxers that our friends on the left keep trying to draw up. He’s not the caricature.

Isaac certainly sounds more rational than his elders[.]

QED: NBA legend Kareem Abdul-Jabbar calls for unvaccinated players to be removed from teams.

FROM LAWRENCE PERSON, your supply-chain update.

MARTIN CENTER:  Critical Race Theory is even taught in the music schools:  Arizona State hires its first CRT music professor.

DIRTY TRICKS: In Virginia governor’s race, Dem group ‘posing’ as Republicans to try driving wedge into GOP.

During the past week, some voters in Virginia have been targeted with ads on Facebook, Instagram, Google and Snapchat questioning Youngkin’s commitment to the Second Amendment, Axios reports.

“While the NRA backs Donald Trump, they REFUSED to endorse Glenn Youngkin. We can’t trust Glenn Youngkin on guns,” one of the ads says.

The ads come from a group called Accountability Virginia PAC, which on its website doesn’t give details about who’s behind the organization. But the group’s online donation page is accessed through ActBlue, the main Democratic fundraising platform; its bank account sits with Amalgamated Bank, a financial institution owned by labor unions and frequently used by pro-Democratic political groups; and consultants at a firm that works with Democrats helped incorporate Accountability Virginia, according to Axios.

Have any Instapundit readers seen these ads?

EVEN THE BEARS WANT OUT OF CHICAGO: Bears move closer to leaving Soldier Field for the suburbs.

ABC MEMORY HOLES BHO: Fox’s Jacqui Heinrich Spotlights ABC News for Omitting Obama Calling Open Borders ‘Unsustainable’ in Interview.

Evergreen:

OF COURSE: Fauci Revises the Definition of ‘Fully Vaccinated.’

YOU MAY NOT BE INTERESTED IN THE GLEICHSCHALTUNG, BUT THE GLEICHSCHALTUNG IS INTERESTED IN YOU: YouTube Purges Accounts, Videos Casting Any Doubt On COVID Vaccines.

FAST: DARPA Reveals Successful Hypersonic Cruise Missile Flight Test Has Occurred.

VIDEO: Victoria Police try to BAN media from filming their violent conduct.

COME SEE THE ANTISEMITISM INHERENT IN THE LEFTISM: Kamala Harris Tacitly Endorses George Mason Student’s Antisemitic Rant.

ANOTHER DAMN THING: Power crisis deepens in Asia and Europe: What it means to shipping.

According to Bloomberg, power use is now being curbed by tight supply and emissions restrictions in the Chinese provinces of Jiangsu, Zhejiang and Guangdong.

Bloomberg quoted Nomura analyst Ting Lu as stating, “The power curbs will ripple through and impact global markets. Very soon the global markets will feel the pinch of a shortage of supply from textiles and toys to machine parts.”

Nikkei reported that an affiliate of Foxconn, the world’s biggest iPhone assembler and a key supplier of Apple and Tesla, halted production at its facility in Kunshan in Jiangsu Province on Sunday due to lack of electricity supply. Another Apple supplier, Unimicron Technologies, also halted production in Kunshan on Sunday, said Nikkei, citing regulatory filings.

The New York Times reported on power outages in the heart of China’s southern manufacturing belt, in Guandong. Factories in the city of Dongguan have not had electricity since last Wednesday. The Times interviewed a general manager of a Dongguan factory that produces leather shoes for the U.S. market who has kept his operation running with a diesel generator and who said that power outages began this summer.

Stoppages of Chinese factories would further delay deliveries of U.S. imports, which have already been waylaid by extreme congestion at ports in Southern California and, more recently, ports in China.

Get your Christmas shopping done early this year.

BUMPER STICKER: Since the shirts seem to be selling out, there is always the Think While it is Still Legal Decals. Or here is another Think while its still legal t-shirt.

MORE LIKE THIS, PLEASE: Japan to lift all COVID restrictions.

SHANGHAI LIL NEVER ATE LAB-GROWN MEAT — SHE SAID THAT IT JUST WEREN’T NATURAL: Lab-grown meat is supposed to be inevitable. The science tells a different story. “As of this writing, Open Philanthropy has not referenced its groundbreaking findings on social media or its website, not even on its pages devoted to animal agriculture. Open Philanthropy declined to be interviewed for this story.”

The problem here isn’t that it’s not natural, it’s that the expense and difficulties involved are being wildly understated, presumably in an effort to hoover up grant money and investors.

Related: Scale-up economics for cultured meat.

BELIEVE IN EVOLUTION? HELL, I’VE SEEN IT DONE: Plasmodium falciparum evolving to escape malaria rapid diagnostics in Africa.

A major tool against malaria in Africa has been the use of rapid diagnostic tests, which have been part of the “test-treat-track” strategy in Ethiopia, the second most-populated country in Africa. But researchers studying blood samples from more than 12,000 individuals in Ethiopia now estimate these tests missed nearly 10% of malaria cases caused by the parasite Plasmodium falciparum, the most common cause of malaria cases and deaths.

The research, published in Nature Microbiology, showed that two genetic mutations to the parasite allow it to escape detection.

So if malaria can evolve to defeat a test, I have a thought: Could widespread vaccination be a mistake with Covid?

We know that the vaccine is imperfect, and lets people who have been vaccinated get infected. By definition, those are infections that are able to avoid the effect of the vaccine. If most people are vaccinated, then shouldn’t it be the case that after a bit, most cases of the virus everywhere will be vaccine resistant? And wouldn’t that leave people who are most vulnerable, like the old, the sick, and the obese, more vulnerable to the virus than if only the vulnerable people had been vaccinated all along?

Am I missing something here?

UPDATE: Via the comments, this from Derek Lowe: Vaccines Will Not Produce Worse Variants. However, I wasn’t suggesting that the vaccine will produce mutations. Rather, I was suggesting that widespread vaccination would apply selection pressure in favor of variants that are not blocked by the vaccine. Lots of interesting stuff in this piece, though. Excerpt, but you should read the whole thing:

It’s easy to see the rise of the Delta variant this year and jump to the “after, therefore because” fallacy. But it wasn’t even “after” to start with: the Delta variant was first detected in India back in October of last year. This is before anyone was getting vaccinated. The Delta variant is by far the dominant one in the world, crowding out all the others, and it did not come as a result of vaccination.

But that said, the idea of vaccines affecting coronavirus evolution is not a ridiculous question, and it’s worth thinking about to understand more about viral evolution and the effect of our own immune systems. It’s certainly true that if you want to induce resistant variations to some antiviral drug in the lab, you let them infect cells in culture while treating them with not-quite-adequate amounts of your proposed drug. You “passage” these into fresh cell cultures, often increasing the amount of the antiviral along the way as you do so, with the idea being that the viral particles that are infecting each new population of cells are the ones that have made it past the effects of the drug. This can go on for weeks or even months, depending on the organism, the drug, and how easy or hard it might be to stumble on effective resistance mutations, but at the end of it, you can produce a form of the virus that will laugh off what would be a killing dose against the original wild-type. . . .

That’s not so easy, because (for one thing) there are an enormous number of different antibodies involved (and an enormous number of T-cell recognition proteins). There are any number of ways to bind to a given protein target, and the adaptive immune system’s whole function is to be ready for all kinds of targets and to hit them in all kinds of ways. And there’s that constraint mentioned above: the virus still has to be able to function! Losing the entire Spike protein or mutating it completely beyond recognition would definitely evade vaccine-induced immunity, but it would also definitely produce a coronavirus that couldn’t infect human cells in the way it’s completely evolved to do. Coming up with a completely new infection route is (mutationally) extremely costly and complex, and not something that can be done “on the fly”. Various coronaviruses use different human cell surface proteins to do their attack, but these have gradually developed and diverged over evolutionary time (hundreds of thousands, or millions of years) through untold numbers of tiny steps.

But it can be done, in principle. And as with everything in evolution, if it gets done at all, it’ll get done by similarly untold numbers of individual mutants, and mutants on top of those mutants, until something appears that can both avoid being inactivated by the immune response and still infect cells and reproduce. There is no guarantee that such a virus can exist, and there is no guarantee that it can’t. Evaluating the number of possibilies is frankly beyond computation – we didn’t, for example, see the details of the Delta variant coming, and if you’d given someone that exact sequence last year, there’s no guarantee that they would have been able to predict how much more infectious it would be.

The more chances you give the coronavirus to reproduce, the more mutations it will explore. Its proofreading system for reproduction is pretty good but not perfect, and that’s where the mutations come from. It’s a numbers game all the way. The virus is not thinking about how to evade vaccine-induced immunity; it’s throwing stuff randomly against every available wall in every available direction, and whatever sticks gets a chance to go on throwing some more. Remember, an unvaccinated person is still mounting an antibody defense against the virus – they’re just having to do it from scratch, rather than having a pre-primed leg up like someone who’s been vaccinated. The longer these infections go on inside human bodies, the more bets the virus gets to put down on the table. The good news is that so far, there is not much evidence that the virus is doing much evasion inside a given person during the course of normal infection.

So one key way to cut down on the odds of a nasty mutant popping up is to just keep the virus from reproducing so much. Cut down on the number of people it infects. When it does infect people, cut down on the amount of time it spends reproducing inside the body. These countermeasures are exactly what a mass vaccination program does.

So there’s the argument that my concerns are overstated.

DISPATCHES FROM THE MINISTRY OF TRUTH: ACLU Issues Weak Apology for Erasing ‘Women’ From RBG Abortion Quote. “It was a mistake among the digital team,” says executive director Anthony Romero.

Regardless of one’s position on trans issues and the rapidly evolving demands of progressive activists with respect to conscious language choices, it is wrong to go back in time and pretend that people used different words. Demands for greater sensitivity should not prompt a literal rewriting of history. Progressive thought leaders of the very, very recent past recognized fundamental differences between men and women—it’s absurd to pretend otherwise, and to obscure this fact by changing the speech they used.

Someone should inform the L.A. Times as well that this is wrong:

SHUT UP, THEY EXPLAINED: YouTube Announces It Will Ban All ‘Anti-Vaccine’ Content.

GOOD NEWS FOR SPACE COLONIZATION: Oxygen and water for lunar explorers can be extracted from moon rocks.

BEIJING WON’T LIKE THIS BUT THEY HAVE ONLY THEMSELVES TO BLAME: Fumio Kishida to Become Japan’s Next Prime Minister. “Fumio Kishida, a former foreign minister who has called for Japan’s missile defenses to be beefed up, was elected ruling party leader on Wednesday, assuring him of becoming the nation’s next prime minister. Mr. Kishida, 64 years old, is an establishment choice who, like his predecessors, supports a strong U.S.-Japan alliance and is concerned about China’s military expansion.”

WELCOME BACK, CARTER: Biden’s Inflation Scapegoat Is ‘Profiteering.’

When July’s all-item Consumer Price Index (CPI) registered 5.4 percent year-over-year growth—a level of inflation which essentially takes away a year’s income growth for low-wage earners—it was all but assured that the White House would offer comment, if not action. President Joe Biden was quick to call attention to accelerating meat prices and, looking for someone to blame, called out the country’s three largest meatpackers for “profiteering.”

Shortly after that, with August’s CPI showing “just” 5.3 percent annualized growth, the president focused his ire on gasoline prices and again suggested that all was not well. Again, profiteering was the scapegoat: “There’s lots of evidence that gas prices should be going down—but they haven’t. We’re taking a close look at that.” Maybe he should look inside the halls of the West Wing.

I blame the spies, hoarders and wreckers.

HMM: Antidepressants inhibit cancer growth in mice.

KYLE SMITH: The Permanent War for Culture.

The late and much-feared New York Times art critic Hilton Kramer was once seated next to Woody Allen at a dinner. Allen asked whether Kramer ever felt embarrassed when he encountered in social settings artists whose work he had disparaged in print. No, said Kramer. Why should he be embarrassed? They made the bad art. He merely described it. It occurred to the critic after the party had concluded that he had once published an adverse review of a Allen movie, The Front.

Forty years ago, Kramer founded The New Criterion, which was taken over in his declining years by Roger Kimball, who supplies the anecdote above in a marvelous chrestomathy, The Critical Temper: Interventions from The New Criterion at 40, a volume that brings together some of the funniest, most cutting, most perceptive, and most appreciative pieces published in that august, sometimes Augustan, journal over the past decade. Kramer and Kimball’s monthly magazine of arts, culture, and media has far outlasted its honored ancestor The Criterion, T. S. Eliot’s publication, which dissolved on the eve of World War II after 17 years of contrarian and conservative rebuke to its era’s prevailing cultural dogmas.

With his dry wit, his sesquipedalian playfulness, his deep learning, and his dapper sangfroid, Kimball is perhaps our closest living heir to his friend William F. Buckley Jr. As Bill did, Roger retains a certain boyish (or even impish) aspect well into middle age, along with a never-slackening thirst to charge back into the fray, no matter how outnumbered his side. Roger enjoys quoting Hamlet’s injunction “to find quarrel in a straw when honor’s at the stake.”

Read the whole thing.

WHAT IS IT ABOUT CNN HOSTS? CNN’s Don Lemon May End up in Court Next Year Over Sexual Assault Charge.

ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY: BLM NY: We need some George Floyd-style protests against vaccine mandates.