EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY.

#JOURNALISM:

UPDATE: From the comments: “Questioning authority, resistance and protests were the stuff of our youth. Clapton and Morrison’s response IS what I expect of them. F the fascist authorities and administrative nazi enablers. The UK could use a few million others to stand with them.”

Plus: “I don’t know when this distressing trend of musicians not toeing the establishment line appeared, but it has to be quelled instantly! Popular art and music is all about supporting the dominant narrative!”

I WOULD LIKE TO SEE US AS A TYPE II AT LEAST: The Kardashev scale: Classifying alien civilizations.

CNN TERMINATES CHRIS CUOMO ‘EFFECTIVE IMMEDIATELY:’ And so, as he flies the blue lady of the skies into the sunset, we say aloha, Five O’Clock Fredo, and return to our duties. Let me me remind you that the Weblog is open 24 hours a day for your dancing and dining pleasure.

EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY: Harris faces staff exodus as questions on her leadership style emerge: ‘This is a sinking ship.’

NO, THEY DON’T MEAN 2021: One American Culture Actually Benefited From ‘The Worst Year in Human History’.

EAT DURING THE DAY: Study: Nighttime eating affects body clock, can lead to glucose intolerance.

WHAT SPREADS FASTER THAN COVID-19? VACCINATION.

It deserves a wow. Some 57% of the human population has received at least one dose of the Covid-19 vaccine, and 45% are fully vaccinated, in less than a year.

This means the vaccine has spread approximately twice as fast as the virus, never mind that the virus itself is an exceptionally fast spreader that organizes its own distribution without help from trained administrators and sub-zero storage.

Add that infection also offers a kind of vaccination, so now two kinds of resistance to Covid-19 have been spreading with unprecedented rapidity through the human population.

Numerous were the complaints about how Delta spoiled the summer even for vaccinated people, but it’s not clear why this was so. Vaccination takes away Covid’s deadliest property, its novelty to the human immune system, turning it into the equivalent of a cold or flu. Nobody lets the prospect of a cold or flu spoil their holiday (though perhaps they should for the sake of their elderly in-laws).

The point is not frivolous. It suggests why, rather than a dark new chapter, the Omicron variant may be our last big wallow in hysteria, from which we will awake slightly red-faced in the morning.

Start with numbers and remind yourself that what turned Covid into a global catastrophe wasn’t its unusual deadliness—in unvaccinated people, it appears to be roughly twice as deadly as the flu when unvaccinated apples are compared to unvaccinated apples; in vaccinated people it appears to be significantly less deadly given that our standard flu mortality estimate of 0.1% arises in a U.S. population in which vaccination approaches 70% for the riskiest age brackets.

The big disturber of our equanimity was Covid’s rapid spread—with so many of us getting our high-risk first exposure in a compressed period of time, straining the world’s hospitals.

With flu, the U.S. government estimates that 5% to 20% of us (with or without symptoms) are infected each year; about half of us are vaccinated. With Covid, a government-sponsored study recently estimated that 100 million were infected in 2020, or 30% of the U.S. population, at a time when almost nobody was vaccinated.

This speed of transmission is what keeps throwing the world for a loop; moreover, it seems indisputable in retrospect that we squandered our best point of leverage by failing to focus on protecting the elderly and those at highest risk.

Well, some people proposed that, you know. Others, like Andrew Cuomo, put Covid patients into nursing homes.

Related: The Lancet:

High COVID-19 vaccination rates were expected to reduce transmission of SARS-CoV-2 in populations by reducing the number of possible sources for transmission and thereby to reduce the burden of COVID-19 disease. Recent data, however, indicate that the epidemiological relevance of COVID-19 vaccinated individuals is increasing. In the UK it was described that secondary attack rates among household contacts exposed to fully vaccinated index cases was similar to household contacts exposed to unvaccinated index cases (25% for vaccinated vs 23% for unvaccinated). 12 of 31 infections in fully vaccinated household contacts (39%) arose from fully vaccinated epidemiologically linked index cases. Peak viral load did not differ by vaccination status or variant type [[1]].

In Germany, the rate of symptomatic COVID-19 cases among the fully vaccinated (“breakthrough infections”) is reported weekly since 21. July 2021 and was 16.9% at that time among patients of 60 years and older [[2]]. This proportion is increasing week by week and was 58.9% on 27. October 2021 (Figure 1) providing clear evidence of the increasing relevance of the fully vaccinated as a possible source of transmission. A similar situation was described for the UK. Between week 39 and 42, a total of 100.160 COVID-19 cases were reported among citizens of 60 years or older. 89.821 occurred among the fully vaccinated (89.7%), 3.395 among the unvaccinated (3.4%) [[3]]. One week before, the COVID-19 case rate per 100.000 was higher among the subgroup of the vaccinated compared to the subgroup of the unvaccinated in all age groups of 30 years or more. In Israel a nosocomial outbreak was reported involving 16 healthcare workers, 23 exposed patients and two family members. The source was a fully vaccinated COVID-19 patient. The vaccination rate was 96.2% among all exposed individuals (151 healthcare workers and 97 patients). Fourteen fully vaccinated patients became severely ill or died, the two unvaccinated patients developed mild disease [[4]]. The US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) identifies four of the top five counties with the highest percentage of fully vaccinated population (99.9–84.3%) as “high” transmission counties [[5]]. Many decisionmakers assume that the vaccinated can be excluded as a source of transmission. It appears to be grossly negligent to ignore the vaccinated population as a possible and relevant source of transmission when deciding about public health control measures.

The vaccinations seem to be underperforming. It may be that we should have focused vaccination on the elderly and infirm too.

ADVICE: How To Keep Your Corporation Out of the Culture War.

[W]e believe the main reason Gen Z wields more influence is because a critical mass of their Millennial bosses and managers are sympathetic to them. . . .

Ever since they entered the corporate world in the early 2000s, some members of the Millennial generation (born 1982 to 1996) have pushed for being able to “bring their whole selves to work.” Companies in the creative industries encouraged this shift, erasing boundaries between work life and private life. But as America became ever more politically polarized, the problem with this policy became evident: Some whole selves cannot tolerate working alongside other whole selves that have different political beliefs and voting patterns.

Compartmentalization is essential to civilization.

THEY KILLED FREDO: CNN Terminates Cuomo.

I’ll be interested to see what the “additional information” is.

GREAT MOMENTS IN CHUTZPAH AND/OR AMNESIA: Democrats livid over GOP’s COVID-19 attacks on Biden.

TOP SELLER: TurboTax Deluxe 2021 Tax Software, Federal and State Tax Return with Federal E-file [Amazon Exclusive] [PC/Mac Disc]. #CommissionEarned

RULE OF LAW: Ninth Circuit Ignored the Heller Ruling In Order to Uphold California’s ‘High Capacity’ Magazine Ban.

STILL POPULAR: New Apple AirPods Pro. #CommissionEarned

BIDEN’S CHIEF OF STAFF CAN’T STOP EMBARRASSING HIMSELF ON TWITTER:

The president’s chief of staff is arguably the most demanding job inside any White House. President Joe Biden’s top staffer, Ron Klain, isn’t making things easier for himself lately with the absurd things he’s posting on Twitter.

Klain is what we can only call a Very Online person. He is constantly tweeting and sharing other people’s posts to his half-million followers in an incessant effort to cheerlead for his boss and the Democratic Party more broadly. While this is the role of any outward-facing political staffer, Klain is taking his shilling so far that he’s now just making embarrassing public statements on the regular.

For example, Klain recently tweeted that “America is back at work” alongside this graph, which shows the opposite.

The Biden staffer boosted the graph hoping to show that the labor force participation rate, the percentage of people working or seeking work, is back to normal after the pandemic. Yet it actually shows that it’s still significantly below pre-pandemic levels, even a year and nine months later. Anyone with eyes can clearly see this.

In actuality, we are 8.2 million jobs below the pre-pandemic trend, according to economist Aaron Sojourner. So much for America being “back at work.”

Earlier: The Mark of Klain. “[A]ll in all, things have worked out pretty darn well for Ron Klain. For America? Not so much.”

REPORT: Russia is Planning a Military Offensive Against Ukraine in Early 2022

FORMER PRODUCER HARASSED BY CHRIS CUOMO SAYS INTERNAL INVESTIGATION AT CNN ISN’T ENOUGH:

A former executive producer at ABC when Chris Cuomo worked there accused him of sexually harassing her in September. Her claim of abusive behavior by Chris Cuomo goes back to 2005. Not only did Cuomo grab her backside at a going-away party for a colleague, but he did so in front of her husband.

At the time Cuomo told his former producer, Shelley Ross, that he could do that because she was no longer his boss as the producer of his Primetime Live show on ABC. She objected, telling him that no he could not do so and pushed him away. Ross produced an email from that time that came from Cuomo after the incident. He apologized for his behavior to both her and her husband, thus admitting guilt. The older Cuomo brother isn’t the only one with a problem with controlling his hands around women, apparently. Ross now says that an internal investigation at CNN over Cuomo’s egregious professional behavior that resulted in an indefinite suspension just won’t cut it. An in-house investigation isn’t enough and she suggests that CNN should do as CBS did over the Dan Rather fake reporting of George W. Bush in 2000 and hire independent investigators to do the job.

Good luck with that: CNN’s Brian Stelter speculates Chris Cuomo could return to air by January.

SEEN AT THE MALL: I was walking by a t-shirt store and this caught my eye: “Don’t California My Tennessee” T-Shirt. It is also available in a bumper sticker.

FASTER, PLEASE: Printing technique creates effective skin equivalent, heals wounds.

CANCEL CULTURE FINALLY COMES FOR ANCIENT ROME: Ancient Roman ‘homophobic graffiti’ found in unearthed Pompeii snack bar.

LEE SMITH: Here Comes the Limited Hangout. America’s Nixonian press corps takes a page from the Watergate playbook to try and cover up its active role in the criminal Russiagate hoax:

In other words, all of Russiagate—the initial crime and the criminal cover-up—is based on the dossier. No matter how much reporters now try to sever themselves from it while maintaining Trump really did collude with Russia, there was only ever the dossier.

So should the Pulitzer committee strip the Post and the Times of their 2018 prize, as Trump and many of his supporters are saying? By no means. That would only further obscure the damage the media have done to American citizens, U.S. national security, and government institutions during the past several years. The press sponsored an intelligence operation that, among many other outrages, violated the privacy rights of an American citizen (Page); forced another to flee his adopted home for fear of false imprisonment (Millian); dragged a decorated combat veteran through the mud and cost him his home and millions of dollars in legal fees (Flynn); interfered in an election, and helped spies target the president through leaks of classified information. Demanding they simply return the awards they use to credential themselves obscures the larger truth. Instead, it would be more fitting for the Post and Times to have the prize’s citation emblazoned on their mastheads for posterity to commemorate how they injected poison into the national bloodstream and burned down our free press.

Read the whole thing.

UPDATE: Before Russiagate, There Was Watergate.

TOP SELLER: Marino Mens Genuine Leather Ratchet Dress Belt with Open Linxx Buckle. #CommissionEarned

THAT’S OKAY, THE REPORTING OF NEWS IS ALSO BASED ON FEELINGS: Study: People choose to learn about health, world news based on feelings.

TIM BLAIR ON LET’S GO BRANDON, THE EARLY YEARS: “According to conventional wisdom, the Let’s Go Brandon movement began in Alabama two months ago. That’s the theory, anyway. But reader Kris has discovered evidence that LGB commenced 39 years earlier, during an Ashes Test at the Melbourne Cricket Ground in 1982.”

K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: Chicago Public Schools Making Bathrooms Gender-Neutral.