VODKAPUNDIT PRESENTS YOUR DAILY INSANITY WRAP: Dangerous Biden-Harris Vaccine Hypocrisy Will Cost Lives.

Insanity Wrap needs to know: When is it OK to spread anti-vax paranoia just weeks before taking the vaccine yourself?

Answer: When there’s an election to steal, of course.

Before we get to the sordid details, a quick preview of today’s Wrap.

• Ring in the New Year the antifa way
• See the London man arrested for hugging the willing
• Hello Biden, goodbye border controls

Bonus Sanity: Ohio Governor Mike DeWine actually signs “stand your ground” bill into law.

And so much more at the link, you’d have to be crazy to miss it.

LIES, DAMNED LIES, AND GOVERNMENT STATISTICS: As COVID admissions surge, states conflating patients hospitalized ‘due to’ and ‘with’ virus.

“SOCIAL JUSTICE” IS JUST A POLITE TERM FOR “ANTI-AMERICAN LIES.” ‘Stolen Land’ and Fake Numbers: How SJWs Invented a ‘Genocide’ Myth.

FIGHT THE POWER: Conservative students descend on Georgia en masse to defend Republican Senate majority.

SO VERY WOKE: Alphabet Workers Union launches with hundreds of members demanding change.

Contractors and employees working at Google and other Alphabet-owned companies have banded together to form the Alphabet Workers Union (AWU). More than 50 Google contract employees voted to unionize last year in Pittsburgh, but the AWU now includes more than 200 dues-paying Google employees or contractors, and organizers say it is the first union open to all Alphabet employees in company history. The AWU is launching with support from the Communications Workers of America (CWA) and its Coalition to Organize Digital Employees (CODE) initiative, according to a statement organizers shared with VentureBeat.

Among guiding principles listed on the AWU website are social and economic justice and the prioritization of “society and the environment instead of maximizing profits at all costs. We can make money without doing evil.”

I’d settle for Google just acting as a neutral platform.

SEEN ON FACEBOOK: “Haven’t turned on the TV yet this morning. Has Fox News called the Georgia runoffs yet?” Fox really damaged its brand with that election-night BS.

YOU’RE GONNA NEED A BIGGER BLOG: 5 times anti-Christian sentiment manifested on campus in 2020.

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KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEF: Can the Democrats Start 2021 With Another Stolen Election? “The Peach State was rife with ‘irregularities’ during the general election. My biggest fear is that there hasn’t been enough time to figure it what all of them were yet. And if there is a way to game the system and get a pro-abortion, cop-hater elected to the United States Senate from Georgia, the Democrats will have figured it out.”

ACADEMIA’S ORWELLIAN SELF-ABASEMENT CONTINUES: The “Disappearing” of Joseph Epstein. “As current law-school faculty members at Northwestern, specializing in constitutional law (Koppelman) and professional responsibility (Lubet), we believe that it is a serious violation of academic freedom to penalize a faculty member, including an emeritus one, for expressing unpopular views.”

RIP: Last Documented Civil War Widow Dies At 101.

LAURENCE JARVIK: Trump’s Georgia Rally: Last Hurrah — Or Revival?

Related, from Mark Steyn: “Today, Tuesday, is the long awaited Georgia Senate runoff. The two Democrats are a trustiefundie who makes ChiCom propaganda videos and a Castro suck-up who ran over his wife’s foot and operated a kids’ camp that was rife with child abuse.”

NY MAG: The Lab-Leak Hypothesis:

We need to hear from the people who for years have contended that certain types of virus experimentation might lead to a disastrous pandemic like this one. And we need to stop hunting for new exotic diseases in the wild, shipping them back to laboratories, and hot-wiring their genomes to prove how dangerous to human life they might become.

Over the past few decades, scientists have developed ingenious methods of evolutionary acceleration and recombination, and they’ve learned how to trick viruses, coronaviruses in particular, those spiky hairballs of protein we now know so well, into moving quickly from one species of animal to another or from one type of cell culture to another. They’ve made machines that mix and mingle the viral code for bat diseases with the code for human diseases — diseases like SARS, severe acute respiratory syndrome, for example, which arose in China in 2003, and MERS, Middle East respiratory syndrome, which broke out a decade later and has to do with bats and camels. Some of the experiments — “gain of function” experiments — aimed to create new, more virulent, or more infectious strains of diseases in an effort to predict and therefore defend against threats that might conceivably arise in nature. The term gain of function is itself a euphemism; the Obama White House more accurately described this work as “experiments that may be reasonably anticipated to confer attributes to influenza, MERS, or SARS viruses such that the virus would have enhanced pathogenicity and/or transmissibility in mammals via the respiratory route.” The virologists who carried out these experiments have accomplished amazing feats of genetic transmutation, no question, and there have been very few publicized accidents over the years. But there have been some.

And we were warned, repeatedly.

Related: The Wuhan Lab-Leak Hypothesis Goes Mainstream.

SALENA ZITO: Authenticity can’t be purchased by the foot.

DEMORALIZING COPS AND PROMOTING CRIME WAS NOT AN ACCIDENT: NYT discovers crime wave but goes silent on Black Lives Matter’s role.

CATCH AND RELAUNCH: SpaceX will try to ‘catch’ its Super Heavy rocket using the launch tower.

SpaceX might not rely on legs to land its next-generation booster rockets. Elon Musk has revealed that his company will try to “catch” the future Super Heavy booster using the launch tower arm, with the grid fins (used to help control the descent) shouldering the load. As TechCrunch explained, this process would effectively hook the rocket using the tower arm before it reaches the ground.

This would require very precise positioning, and there’s still a long way to go when Super Heavy flight testing might not start until a few months from now at the earliest. If successful, though, the catch method could save SpaceX from adding bulky legs to its rocket. A truly precise maneuvering system might even reduce turnaround time by letting SpaceX relaunch the rocket without having to move it from its landing position.

That could be crucial to SpaceX’s goals. Musk and company ultimately want a more reusable rocket system than the Falcon series, as that would help Starship launch on the rapid schedules desired for a range of missions, including trips to the Moon and Mars. A booster that doesn’t require much more than refueling could help accomplish that feat.

Needless to say, anything that reduces launch costs and turnaround time makes Moon and Mars colonies more viable.

GOOD: NYSE Purges Chinese Telecom Companies Targeted by Trump.

NOW THIS IS MORE LIKE THE 21ST CENTURY I’D BEEN HOPING FOR: Quadriplegic Man, Using Two Robot Arms, Can Feed Himself Again.

TWO HUNDRED FORTY YEARS AGO TODAY: Gen. Benedict Arnold—whose name, even today, is synonymous with “traitor”—led an army of about 1600, mostly American loyalist “green coats,” up the James River in Virginia. Their mission was to capture the City of Richmond for the British.

Alas, this was not the Old Dominion’s finest hour. Only 200 militiamen showed up to defend the city. Where were the rest? Many were said to have already served their time in the militia. They believed they had discharged whatever duty they owed. It was somebody else’s turn—or that’s how they saw it.

When Arnold’s superior forces confronted them, the tiny band of Virginians quickly broke and ran. Panic ensued. Governor Thomas Jefferson ordered the evacuation of all military supplies. He then fled in his carriage, and so did other government officials and their families—much to the dismay of the Richmond residents who were left behind.

By noon, Gen. Arnold’s troops were marching into the city. Not a shot was fired to prevent them. Arnold sent a message to Jefferson that he would spare the city if Jefferson turned over to him the city’s armaments and tobacco. Jefferson declined and, as a result, Richmond was torched and looted.

Of course, that’s not the end of the story. While no one could have imagined it on January 5, the surrender at Yorktown, which is about 60 miles to Richmond’s southeast, would come in September.  Fortunes can change very quickly in this world of ours.  That should give us reason for optimism (though in fairness I guess it should also give us reason for pessimism when things are going well).

(By the way, here’s a question for you: What motivated Arnold to be a traitor? Some say an important factor was his wife— “the very young, very pretty, very Tory Peggy Shippen.” Maybe.)

ANALYSIS: TRUE. “The ‘woke’ mobs are toppling statues of Washington and Jefferson, and then taking videos of their exploits with phones whose components are produced by slave labor, before binging on snacks produced by child labor, while fiercely denouncing 18^th century slavery in the 21^st century. That’s the hypocrisy of the 2021 Project. The ‘woke’ scrutinize 18^th century slavery while paying little attention to 21^st century slavery. If they want to understand slavery, they don’t need to waste their time with the revisionist history of the 1619 Project, or the ravings of critical race theory, when all they have to do is check their pockets. Literally.”

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UDPATE: Colleges Have Shed 550,000 Employees Since The Pandemic Began.

READINESS: B-1s Can Make it to Finish Line, But Big Repairs Will Be Common Along the Way.

Since September 2019, the Air Force has pushed to reduce the B-1 fleet in order to keep a smaller number of the bombers fully potent and ready for action. In recent years, lack of spare parts and a long list of structural and systematic gripes have driven the fleet’s mission capable numbers to as low as just six aircraft ready for combat.

There will now be enough resources for B-1 repairs and structural modifications to “get us as long as we need for the B-1 to fly,” bomber Program Executive Officer Brig. Gen. John P. Newberry told Air Force Magazine in a December interview.

The B-1 was designed to fly between 8,000-10,000 hours, or about 30 years, depending on the rate of usage, but the fleet is 35 years old.

The B-21 can’t get here too soon.