PROBABLY NOT: Plastic food packaging gets a bad rap, but does it always deserve it?

OREGON HEALTH AUTHORITY IN TALKS TO MAKE MASK MANDATES PERMANENT. Gee whiz, who saw this coming?

They told us “two weeks to slow the spread.” My suggestion: when the 2 year anniversary comes up – that’s 52 times the amount of time they asked – we all agree to just stop wearing them all at once. If they have the power to insist, like on air travel, we all just agree to put up a huge fuss every single time before we put it on. I think that would probably finish off these pointless mandates.

REVERTING TO TYPE: John Kerry Remains Committed to Enabling Evil.

SCIENCE: No clear answer to whether prescribed opioid use in children leads to later drug misuse.

DEAL OF THE DAY: FOXWELL NT301 OBD2 Scanner Professional Mechanic OBDII Diagnostic Code Reader Tool for Check Engine Light. #CommissionEarned

STILL AVAILABLE: New Apple AirPods Pro. #CommissionEarned Glenn has these and loves them.

COLLUSION: China’s Subnational Influence at Work in the New York State Legislature.

The New York State Legislature has a long record of promoting “friendship” with the People’s Republic of China and the Chinese government.

According to data made available by the Asian American Business Development Center (AABDC), which has been organizing trade delegations from New York to China “specifically designed for state legislators and executives of small and mid-size businesses” since the early 2000s, then-State Senator Malcolm A. Smith, in collaboration with AABDC, led the first business mission to China in 2004. In 2006, the first group of New York State Assembly members formed the New Majority Trade Mission and embarked on a similar trip. One legislator recalled, “[E]verywhere we went, gifts, tea, and the red carpet were pulled out and showered upon us.”

For the following five years, AABDC has curated at least one trip annually with support from the Chinese Consulate in New York and Foreign Ministry-affiliated Chinese People’s Institute for Foreign Affairs. The 2007 “New York State Legislators Trade Mission to China” resulted in the decision to establish the state’s first official presence in China, namely, the New York in China Center in Beijing, which opened in 2008. In 2009, the New York State Legislature and Jiangsu Provincial People’s Congress (JPPC) signed a memorandum of understanding to “establish regular communication between Offices of the President Pro Tempore of the New York State Senate, the Speaker of the New York State Assembly, and the Foreign Affairs Committee of the JPPC Standing Committee” to support exchanges and cooperation.

Read the whole thing.

GOOD: GSK says antibody cocktail appears to be effective against Omicron variant.

DAVID SOLWAY: Medical Fascism, or, the Doctrine of Vaccination.

KEVIN DOWNEY JR: Three Teens Who Escaped From Aussie COVID Camp All Have One Thing in Common, and It’s Not the Virus. “Major checkpoints for three teens who don’t have COVID? You’d think mass-murdering cannibals had escaped.”

OCEANIA HAS NEVER BEEN AT WAR WITH EASTASIA: Stacey Abrams tells Rachel Maddow she ‘did not challenge the outcome’ of 2018 election.

JEFF DUNETZ: An Irreverent Look At The Differences Between Christmas And Hanukkah.

IT’S DIFFERENT NOW BECAUSE SHUT UP: Biden Administration to Restart Trump’s ‘Remain in Mexico’ Policy.

NOW OUT: Laptop from Hell: Hunter Biden, Big Tech, and the Dirty Secrets the President Tried to Hide. #CommissionEarned

PEOPLE ARE WISING UP: Fewer Than Half of Americans Say COVID ‘Most Urgent’ Health Problem.

SEGREGATION NOW, SEGREGATION TOMORROW, SEGREGATION FOREVER: White and Asian male applicants largely shunned from investment program at Washington and Lee University.

RELAX: It Seems Omicron Actually Has Been Around for a While. “You may not hear this on CNN or NBC, or from Anthony Fauci, but multiple European countries found earlier omicron cases, too.”

JUNIOR STASI: Columbia University encourages students to report each other for ‘misgendering,’ refusing to use fringe pronouns.

I remember when higher education spending was justified as preventing totalitarianism and promoting tolerance.

UPDATE: Elon Musk warns Starship engines could bankrupt SpaceX. “Responding [to] the leaked email on Twitter, Musk confirmed that – in certain circumstances – bankruptcy is indeed a possibility. ‘If a severe global recession were to dry up capital availability/liquidity while SpaceX was losing billions on Starlink & Starship, then bankruptcy, while still unlikely, is not impossible’ Musk tweeted.”

Starship’s first orbital test flight is still expected in January.

ILYA SHAPIRO: What happened when I ran for school board in Virginia.

MY NEW YORK POST COLUMN: America is behind in the new space race China is determined to win.

EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY: BREAKING: US only adds 210,000 jobs in November. “Economists expected a job-creation boost of 573,000. The BLS reported that the US economy added well below half of that. Only 210,000 jobs got created in November, another in a series of disappointing results in an economy where millions of jobs have yet to be recreated more than a year after most of the pandemic shutdowns ended. . . . That’s the lowest month total in nearly a year, and there’s no particular outside event driving the disappointment.”

Plus: “This will come as a rude shock to the White House, which used better numbers from September and October to promote Joe Biden’s economic policies. Earlier this week, Biden himself claimed to have created 5.6 million jobs this year in a record expansion of the workforce, but that’s simply not true. The jobs being created now are replacements for those destroyed by government-imposed shutdowns last year, mainly in the first and second quarters of 2020. We are now in the fourth quarter of 2021 and we’re still around six million jobs short of where would otherwise be by now, and it looks as though the economy is stalling well short of a jobs recovery.”

Related: Free falling: A quarter of Dems strongly disapprove of Biden performance in new poll.

Also: Voters worried about inflation don’t know why we’re spending trillions on Build Back Better, says … Dem who voted for it.

And: Biden tormented by Republican guerrilla campaign and ‘I did it’ stickers.

Also: 100Pcs I Did That Biden Funny Car Stickers. #Resist #CommissionEarned

DISSOLVE THE PEOPLE AND ELECT ANOTHER: Psaki Blames Americans for Biden’s Broken Promise to ‘Shut Down the Virus.’

FROM LAST NIGHT’S OPEN THREAD: “Alec Baldwin is now the victim. Conveniently, the real victim is unavailable for TV interviews.”

Related: “Look, Alec . . .”

“RULE OF LAW:” “Threatening the Supreme Court has become something of a required public exhibition of faith for Democrats.”