HMM: Hair, beauty products may interfere with hormones during pregnancy.

THE TRUNALIMUNUMAPRZURE REMAINS THE SAME:

● Shot: Biden warns of ‘winter of severe illness and death’ for the unvaccinated.

President Biden said Thursday that Americans unvaccinated against the coronavirus are facing a winter of “severe illness and death.”

“It’s here now and it’s spreading and it’s going to increase,” the president said about the omicron variant while meeting with his coronavirus response team. “For unvaccinated we are looking at a winter of severe illness and death if you’re unvaccinated for themselves, their families, and the hospitals they will soon overwhelm.”

“But, there’s good news,” Biden added. “If you’re vaccinated and have your booster shot you’re protected from severe illness and death.”

—Fox News, yesterday.

● Chaser: “We’re about to go into a dark winter:” Biden says Trump has no plan for coronavirus.

At the final presidential debate, Democratic nominee Joe Biden warned Americans that it’s going to be a “dark winter” and said President Trump has “no clear plan” to deal with the continuing coronavirus pandemic. COVID-19 has killed more than 220,000 Americans and sickened more than 7 million as some scientists have warned the current wave could be the “biggest wave” of infections.

Debate moderator Kristen Welker of NBC asked Biden about the COVID-19 vaccine, saying “Just 40% of Americans say they would definitely agree to take a vaccine, if it was approved by the government. What steps would you take to give Americans confidence in a vaccine if it were approved?”

Biden answered: “Make sure it’s totally transparent. Have the science and we will see it, know it, look at it. Go through the processes.”

“And by the way, this is the same fellow who told you this was going to end by Easter last time,” Biden said about Mr. Trump. “This is the same fellow who said, ‘Don’t worry, we’re going to end it this by the summer.’ We’re about to go into a dark winter.”

“A dark winter, and he has no clear plan and there’s no prospect that there’s going to be a vaccine available for the majority of the American people before the middle of next year,” Biden continued.

When asked to react, Mr. Trump said, “I don’t think we’re going to have a dark winter at all.”

“We are opening up our country,” Mr. Trump said. “We have learned and studied and understand the disease, which we didn’t at the beginning,” he continued. “When I closed and banned China from coming in – heavily infected – and ultimately Europe, but China was in January, months later, [Biden] was saying I was xenophobic. Now he says, ‘Oh I should have moved quicker.'”

—CBS News, October 23rd, 2020.

● Hangover: Joe Biden: I’m going to ‘shut down the virus’, not the US.

—The Grauniad, October 23rd, 2020.

UPDATE: The D.T.s: White House Christmas message to unvaccinated: You’re looking at a winter of death for yourselves and your families:

Given the severity of his administration’s language, perhaps it’s time for Biden to follow his own advice:

(Updated and bumped.)

QUESTION ASKED: What’s the Deal With All the Perverted Behavior at CNN?

All of this leads a reasonable person to question if the FBI was protecting John Griffin as he is one of their boys, an uber leftist, a member of the Democratic team and good pal of one of their chief propaganda agents. If so, how many underage girls were abused due to the FBI’s unwillingness to prosecute one of their soul mates? Moreover, the timing of this raises additional questions.

Ashley Biden is Joe Biden’s daughter. She kept a diary during a very troubled part of her life where she struggled with drug abuse and had multiple affairs during her crumbling marriage. Reports indicate she detailed her deep resentment for her father due to his control and emotional manipulation. Most damaging, the diary is reported to allege that she believes she was sexually molested as a child and that she took showers with her Dad which she states were “probably inappropriate.” Gee Ashley, ya think? Well somebody got their hands on her diary. A copy made its way to Project Veritas, which chose not to publish the story as it could not verify the source. Project Veritas turned the diary over to law enforcement and expressed its willingness to cooperate with authorities understanding that the diary might have been stolen. Sources indicate that Ashley abandoned the diary at a house in Delray Beach, Florida. Even in Mayberry, Andy and Barney would not investigate a lost diary as it is a non-crime. If Ernest T. Bass stole the diary, Andy and Barney likely would not spend any resources investigating the theft as they have more important things to do. This clearly isn’t a federal matter, yet the FBI showed up at a Project Veritas reporter’s house as well as its publisher, James O’Keefe, with a battering ram and seized all of their computers and devices. These are outrageous Gestapo tactics. Why? Does the diary indicate that our “Sniffer in Chief” sexually abused his daughter? Obviously, the FBI wants to intimidate this news organization, using the brute force of the federal government as Joe Biden’s personal attack militia. Surely, the FBI has sifted through all of Project Veritas’ files to find out what other damaging stories it might print. It wants to find Project Veritas’s sources and intimidate them. If past is prelude, it wants to look for a crime or a hook to fabricate a crime against Project Veritas and its founder, James O’Keefe. Project Veritas just exposed another pedophile scandal at CNN. Did the FBI finally decide to indict John Griffin because they couldn’t keep the lid on the story, knowing that Project Veritas would likely blow it open?

The new alleged CNN pedophile is Rick Saleeby. He is the producer of “The Lead With Jake Tapper.” He too is a sick bastard who deserves painful testicular excision. Saleeby, who is married, confessed to his “sex worker” mistress his desire to have sex with his underage step daughter as well as said sex worker’s underage daughter. He expressed himself in very graphic terms in voice and text messages. There is also video. What is apparent in the sex worker’s story is that Saleeby does not see his paid lover as a real person. He can tell her his sick and perverted fantasies because she in his mind is a worthless nobody and poses no threat to him. Aren’t good progressives supposed to help the down and out?

To quote Lewis Carroll, it gets curiouser and curiouser. Jeff Zucker is the president of CNN. It does not take much work to find pictures of his wife Caryn and Ghislaine Maxwell hanging out, laughing and having a good time in multiple settings in multiple venues. In 2019 when the Epstein story was breaking into the public’s consciousness, CNN seemed to completely ignore the revelations. Why? Flight logs indicate that Bill Clinton took 26 trips on Epstein’s Lolita Express. Why is it that the movers, shakers and glitterati all seem to have connections to perverts? Something is rotten in Denmark folks.

Read the whole thing.

Especially if you’re this “media critic:”

A VERY PUBLIC EDUCATION: Holocaust Re-Enactment for Third-Graders Is the Latest School Outrage.

BIDENFLATION: So friends were making fun of this old recipe:

My comment: “Everybody likes to make fun of these old dishes, but they were cheap, tasty, and filling back when food was a lot more expensive. You know, like it’ll be by the end of next year.” And when people were poorer. You know, like we’ll be by the end of next year.

THE POWER OF THE STATE COMPELS YOU: Fauci Orchestrated ‘Quick and Devastating’ Takedown of Anti-Lockdown Experts.

READER BOOK PLUG: Christmas in Idaho – Christmas Book with Audio CD. #CommissionEarned The hard cover edition of this book is beautiful and comes with an audio CD. It would make a lovely Christmas gift.

THERE WASN’T ONE, AND THERE WON’T BE ONE: Washington Post, Leftist Generals Stoke Hysteria About a 2024 ‘Insurrection.’

GET IN SHAPE: 6-Minute Fitness at 60+: Simple Home Exercises to Reclaim Strength, Balance, and Energy in 15 Days. #CommissionEarned

ROGER SIMON: So You Wanna Move (to a Red State)?

Who wants to sing “New York, New York” or “I Love L. A.” anymore? And can you imagine leaving your heart in San Francisco? What has happened is a true American tragedy—and it’s not just because of COVID, although that helped. The cancer has been growing for a long time.

It could be said you should stay to help resuscitate these cities although I would argue you do more for them by leaving, making those governing the cities—universally Democrats, as everybody knows—and even more those dopey enough to have voted for that governance, wake up.

And yet… and yet… and yet… moving is not easy. And I’m not just talking about the onerous task of packing up years of possessions and trucking them cross country. That’s bad enough, though transitory.

You carry yourself, your quirks and neuroses, with you wherever you go from Knoxville to Kuala Lumpur and you don’t know exactly the extent of that until you are forced, or force yourself, to change years of habit.

Just as much, the places you are going have their own quirks and neuroses, their own patterns, also established for years. Where do you fit in?

Moving from a blue state to a red state is not an instant transformation yielding spiritual and political liberation. There is work to be done—on yourself and on the locale itself.

I can speak most accurately about what it means to move to the Nashville area but I would imagine it’s a paradigm for some other migrations.

In itself Metro Nashville, as they call it, embodies the culture clash we are seeing across America. Nashville the city, contiguous with Davidson County, is decidedly blue, while neighboring Williamson County, really part of the metropolitan area—I described it earlier as “Republican Heaven”—is red, although problems exist there as well, especially in their supposedly vaunted schools. The state is, of course, quite red.

People and businesses are pouring into the area in droves. An article just the other day in the liberal San Francisco Chronicle —‘What Austin felt like 10 years ago’: Is Nashville the next hot spot in the Bay Area exodus?—gives some idea of what is happening.

How’s that Welcome Wagon program coming along?

BECAUSE IT’S HIGHLY INFECTIOUS (AND GENERALLY NOT VERY SERIOUS), ALLOWING POPULATIONS TO ESTABLISH HERD IMMUNITY IN SHORT ORDER. NEXT QUESTION? South Africa’s Omicron Wave Looks Like It’s Already Peaking. Why?

FIGHT THE POWER: Students relaunch conservative paper at Harvard to promote ‘independent and contrarian thought.’

A group of undergraduates at Harvard University recently revived a publication to rectify what they describe as a scarcity of conservative and political thought on campus.

The Salient was originally founded as a “moderate to conservative” paper at Harvard in 1981, according to a report at the time.

Its folding in the early 2010s left a lack of thought challenging the predominant talking points on campus, and the newly returned Salient aims to resolve that.

“The drying up of discourse has been an inevitable effect of the end of the lone opposition paper; in the place of debate and intellectual exchange there is only the continual repetition of political maxims grown stale with the years, of truism and tautologies untested by disagreement,” its November 2021 general introduction reads.

It adds that there is also a “marked dearth, not only of conservative thought, but of political thought in general.”

Harvard student Jacob Cremers, spokesperson for the Salient, said in an email to The College Fix on Nov. 30 that the revival of the paper is meant “to fill the vacuum and to encourage diversity of opinion on Harvard’s campus.”

Well, Harvard could use some of that. Conservative thought, political thought, you know, thought in general.

ZERO IS THE NUMBER THE PRESS WOULD LIKE YOU TO REMEMBER: Allegedly, There Are Only a Few Americans Left in Afghanistan.

EPIC DAILY DEAL: DEWALT 20V Max Cordless Drill Combo Kit. #CommissionEarned

WOKE POLITICS FOSTERS ANTISEMITISM: ANALYSIS: DEI initiatives create environment where ‘inclusion does not apply to Jewish students on campus.’

Like the anti-Asian hate, woke antisemitism stems from the fact that woke ideology is based on a hatred of achievement, which is why it’s so attractive to loser scolds.

ABOUT THOSE ROMAN ROADS: J. Warner Wallace explains how the roads Rome built to connect the far-flung corners of its empire paved the way for the birth of Jesus Christ and the spread of Christianity. Sometimes the unintended consequences of government policy can be positively world-changing.

OPERATION CHOKEPOINT II: John Kerry’s Financial Crusade Against Oil and Gas.

The president’s climate envoy has been pressuring banks and financial institutions to reduce their commitments to U.S. oil and gas companies and join the Net-Zero Banking Alliance, which would hobble the ability of oil and gas companies to increase production. Citi, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase signed on to the alliance this year.

Mr. Kerry’s efforts didn’t go unnoticed. In April, members of the Senate Banking Committee sent him a letter expressing concern that he had “been pressuring banks to make extralegal commitments regarding energy-related lending and investment activities” that would result in “higher energy costs for American consumers.”

In May, 15 state treasurers sent a letter to Mr. Kerry observing that he and other members of the Biden administration are “privately pressuring U.S. banks and financial institutions to refuse to lend to or invest in coal, oil, and natural gas companies, as part of a misguided strategy to eliminate the fossil fuel industry in our country.” They urged banks and financial institutions “not to give in to pressure from the Biden Administration.”

Break up the big banks. Small, local banks would be more aligned with their local customers’ needs — and too many of them for a lone schmuck like Kerry to pressure.

UIC SHOULD LOSE ITS ACCREDITATION OVER THIS: University Of Illinois-Chicago Law School Reassigns Jason Kilborn’s Spring Classes While He Undergoes Mandatory Diversity Training.

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEF: Manchin Exposes Dems’ Ignorance of Flyover America. “Although Manchin is a Democrat, the state he serves is redder than red. Trump won West Virginia last year with 68.62% of the vote. When Manchin decides he can’t go along with the kind of legislative lunacy that progressives want, he is very much representing his constituency. Trust me, he doesn’t have a lot of explaining to do to the folks back home.”

FREDDIE DE BOER: Why the Fuck Do You Trust Harvard? College admissions has, does, and will always serve only the institutions and their incredible greed.

Here is what I want to say to you: at the end of this process, no matter how you change it, no matter how many statements the schools put out about diversity, no matter how many thumbs you put on all the scales to select for a certain kind of student, at the end of this process are self-serving institutions of limitless greed and an army of apparatchiks who are employed only to protect their interests. That’s it. You can’t make college admissions fair by getting rid of the SAT because colleges admissions can’t be “fair.” College admissions exist to serve the schools. Period. End of story. They always have, they always will. College admissions departments functioned as one big anti-Semitic conspiracy for decades because that was in the best interest of the institution. Guys who the schools know will never graduate but who run a 4.5 40 jump the line because admissions serves the institution. Absolute fucking dullards whose parents can pay – and listen, guys, it’s cute that you think legacies are somehow the extent of that dynamic, like they won’t let in the idiot son of a wealthy guy who didn’t go there – get in because admissions serves the institution. Some cornfed doofus from Wyoming with a so-so application gets in over a far more qualified kid from Connecticut because the marketing department gets to say they have students from 44 states in the incoming class instead of 43 that way, because admissions serves the institution. How do you people look at this world and conclude that the problem is the SAT?

And what just drives me crazy, what I find so bizarre, is that all these PMC liberals in media and academia think they’re so endlessly disillusioned and over it and jaded, but they imagine that it was the SAT standing in the way of these schools admitting a bunch of poor Black kids. What the fuck do you think has been happening, exactly? They’re standing around, looking at all these brilliant kids from Harlem and saying “oh God, if only we could let in these kids. We need to save them from the streets! But we can’t get past that dastardly SAT.” They decide who to let in, and they always have! They can let in whoever they want! Why on earth would you put the onus on the test instead of the schools? You think, what, they would prefer to admit kids whose parents can’t possibly donate? The whole selection process for elite schools is to skim a band of truly gifted students from the top, then admit a bunch of kids with identical resumes whose parents will collectively buy the crew team a new boathouse, and then you find a kid whose parents moved to the states from Nigeria two years before he was born and whose family owns a mining company and you call that affirmative action. And if you look at all this, and you take to Twitter to complain about the SAT instead of identifying the root corruption at the schools themselves, you’re a fucking mark, a patsy. You’ve been worked, you’ve been took. . . .

It’s all corrupt. All of it. From the top to the bottom. It is so insane that all of these people who are ostensibly so cynical about institutions, who will tell you that capitalism is inherently a rigged game, who think meritocracy is a joke, who say that they think these hierarchies are all just privilege, will then turn around and say “ah yes, the SAT is gone, now fairness and egalitarianism will reign.” The whole damn thing makes no sense – it is nonsensical to talk about equality in a process that by its most basic nature is designed to select for a tiny elite! How the fuck do you think it’s going to work, exactly, when the SAT is gone? They’re still nominating a tiny elite to enjoy the most outsized rewards human life has to offer. That’s destructive no matter who gets a golden ticket. By its very nature.

I think that Harvard admissions is too important to leave to Harvard. We all know that inequality is the Worst Thing in the World (except maybe for Climate Change) and the only answer for bad things in the world is government control. So I think we should nationalize Harvard admissions. First, each member of Congress and each state governor should be allowed to name one incoming freshman. Second, the balance of seats should be filled by lottery from among the nation’s high school graduates, for fairness.

Amusingly enough, this would probably produce a more diverse, more interesting, and quite possibly more intellectual Harvard student body than we have now. And it would all be for fairness. You’re not against fairness, are you?

Plus: “Elois over Morlocks, and this is the system to which you have lent your faith, the vehicle you expect to deliver us equality. What a world, what a world, what a world.”

Related: To Reduce Inequality, Abolish the Ivy League.

ANDY KESSLER: Back to the Office in 2022: We crave contact with co-workers, but we’ve lost our tolerance for life’s inconveniences.

I hate to break it to you, but with last week’s news that booster shots reduce the severity of the Omicron variant and the success of Paxlovid, Pfizer’s new antiviral pill, it’s back to the office in 2022 for most of us. But are we again vulnerable to a host of diseases, plus many inconveniences we’ve long forgotten? Life moves pretty fast. I don’t know if most folks are ready.

Let’s face it, after more than 20 months of the roll-out-of-bed commute, many have zero tolerance for traffic—remember rubbernecking delays? Or wearing pants, let alone clean clothes. Or drinking industrial-grade office coffee mellowed by nondairy creamers. Your body will reject that like week-old fish.

It’s the broom for Zoom. Welcome back to conference rooms and crowded in-person meetings, including that marketing associate who subtly coughs while you’re talking, and you always fall for it and exhibit common decency and pause only to be interrupted by the cougher and have the meeting hijacked. Yeah, bet you don’t miss that. . . .

Normal life is going to take some adjustment. You’ve probably lost immunity to those loudmouths at gatherings who go on about themselves, their important careers, their gifted children—with the word “gifted” spoken in a slight whisper. And to that guy who replies “indeed” no matter what you say.

What else is coming back that our brains aren’t prepared for? Long lines. Reservations required. Higher prices. Crowded subways. Smelly gyms. Stock-market downturns. Close talkers. Then add “no workers” and “supply-chain disruptions” to the list of excuses for bad service. Sadly, there’s no vaccine for any of these problems. Hopefully just reading about them here helps your mind and body produce enough social antibodies to make re-entry easier.

We built immunity to those nasty things over decades and put up with them for a reason. We work in offices because we need to look people in the eye and gauge their sincerity or conviction. We go to meetings because body language often communicates better than words. We visit clients and build rapport to close deals—always be closing. We put up with oddball co-workers because we crave camaraderie. I’m still friends with folks I worked with decades ago, many who would beat me up in meetings, ripping apart my arguments with what seemed like an ice pick. Still, they made me better.

Working in offices enhances our ability to learn. It isn’t only that serendipitous ideas spark around water coolers or chance encounters; real learning comes through osmosis. Patterns and experiences seep into our brains from working with and watching others over long stretches. Anyone who entered the working world over Zoom or Slack has been robbed of that ability to learn.

I’ve seen the lockdowns and the damage done. A little part of it in everyone.

FOREIGN COLLUSION: Amazon partnered with China propaganda arm.

Amazon.com Inc was marketing a collection of President Xi Jinping’s speeches and writings on its Chinese website about two years ago, when Beijing delivered an edict, according to two people familiar with the incident. The American e-commerce giant must stop allowing any customer ratings and reviews in China.

A negative review of Xi’s book prompted the demand, one of the people said. “I think the issue was anything under five stars,” the highest rating in Amazon’s five-point system, said the other person.

Ratings and reviews are a crucial part of Amazon’s e-commerce business, a major way of engaging shoppers. But Amazon complied, the two people said. Currently, on its Chinese site Amazon.cn, the government-published book has no customer reviews or any ratings. And the comments section is disabled.

Amazon’s compliance with the Chinese government edict, which has not been reported before, is part of a deeper, decade-long effort by the company to win favor in Beijing to protect and grow its business in one of the world’s largest marketplaces.

An internal 2018 Amazon briefing document that describes the company’s China business lays out a number of “Core Issues” the Seattle-based giant has faced in the country. Among them: “Ideological control and propaganda is the core of the toolkit for the communist party to achieve and maintain its success,” the document notes. “We are not making judgement on whether it is right or wrong.”

Hint: It’s wrong.

NEVER UNDERESTIMATE JOES’ ABILITY TO F**CK THINGS UP: Year-end White House Report Card: Biden bottomed out, moving up?

This week’s White House Report Card finds President Joe Biden bouncing off his polling low but being hit hard by the failure to push his Build Back Better $2 trillion spend-and-tax scheme across the finish line.

Democratic pollster John Zogby noted Biden’s approval improvement and said that while he “cannot quite call this a Renaissance yet … he is at least winning back some of his base.”

Dead cat bounce.

I mean, even Fauci’s trying to help the GOP now: Fauci Says Masking on Airplanes Will Never Go Away.

THERE’S MORE ECONOMIC LITERACY OUT THERE THAN THE DEMOCRATS HAD HOPED: “Other data shows that voters generally believe that more government spending leads to higher inflation. Fifty-seven percent (57%) see inflation as a tax on the poor. Just 23% disagree.”

I COULD HAVE SWORN HE PROMISED TO SHUT THIS VIRUS DOWN: Biden Weighs Changing the Messaging as Omicron Spreads Rapidly. “Biden aides are pushing the president to alter the political messaging and highlight the number of severe cases rather than the number of infections. They are also speaking heresy by suggesting that Americans are going to have to learn to live with the coronavirus.”