THE ATLANTIC: ‘Post-Vax COVID’ Is a New Disease.

The measles virus is ultra-infectious, much more so than SARS-CoV-2, and kills many of the uninoculated children it afflicts. But for those who have gotten all their shots, it’s a less formidable foe, which we’ve learned to live with long-term. That’s the direction that many experts hope we’re headed in with SARS-CoV-2 as it becomes endemic, as my colleague Sarah Zhang has written.

We’re not yet at the point where we can officially label post-vaccination COVID-19 cases as “modified”; maybe we never will be. Some immunized people are still getting dangerously sick. But the shots are softening COVID-19’s sharp edges: On average, breakthrough infections seem to be briefer, milder, and less contagious. Among the fully immunized, catching the coronavirus doesn’t mean the same thing it did last year. “It’s a very different kind of infection than in people who are immunologically naive,” Lindsey Baden, an infectious-disease physician and COVID-19 vaccine researcher at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, told me.

If this virus becomes as inescapable as the culprits behind the colds and flus that trouble us most years, we could all have to grapple with one of these infections, and learn that lesson on a personal level. That’s the social tax of a forever virus: Nearly everyone may eventually know what it is to get COVID-19—but a tamer, more domesticated version of its pre-inoculation self.

Politicians and social media panicmongers don’t see it that way — they won’t follow the science — and keep pushing the same social and economic controls.

I GOT TOOK, SORT OF: My apologies to InstaReaders who pointed out that the photo of Steven Colbert’s house in Montclair, NJ I posted yesterday is not accurate, and was instead a picture of the house in Caldwell, NJ used to film “The Sopranos.” My bad.
Drenched in shame, I researched it more fully, and here’s a pic of Colbert’s house: still pretty swank, a massive carbon footprint, and guess what? No solar panels.
So I’m still calling bullsh*t on this nonsense.

HOW’S THAT SPACE PROGRAM COMING ALONG? Asteroid Spotting.

DON’T MESS WITH TEXAS: ‘Steel barrier’ of HUNDREDS of state trooper SUVs line the border in ‘unprecedented’ move to stem the tide of Haitian migrants after Biden made mockery of pledge to send them home by RELEASING thousands into America.

MAKE THEM PAY: University falsely accused softball players of racism: lawsuit.

PJ MEDIA VIP ROUNDUP: Don’t forget that VODKAPUNDIT promo code if you’ve been thinking of joining us.

AJ Kaufman: Manchin and Sinema Aren’t the Only Democrats Concerned With the Direction of the Party. “It’s unclear exactly how many Democrats are siding with prominent House and Senate moderates. One centrist Democrat up for reelection next year, Sen. Maggie Hassan (D-N.H.), declined to say whether she’s comfortable with the $3.5 trillion spending number on Monday, or whether she agrees with pausing the legislation.”

Matt Margolis: The Hypocrisy of Those Complaining About ‘Missing White Woman Syndrome.’ “The thing is, she’d have a point if the same people who complain about ‘Missing White Woman Syndrome’ or otherwise inject race into this story weren’t also the same people who show little to no outrage over black-on-black crime—particularly the plague of black kids being victims of gun violence.”

Yours Truly: Ho-Ho-NO! Supply Chain Disruptions Could Be This Year’s Grinch. “Seroka said that all that spending has shipping traffic there up 50% from pre-pandemic levels, and that the infrastructure simply doesn’t exist to get all those goods off the ships and on the trucks.”

I DEMAND AN END TO LEFTIST CAMPUS IDIOCY: Leftist TX students continue to demand police off campus.

Related: Thirty-eight percent crime drop seen around University of Minnesota after police increase presence.

CURRENTLY #1 IN “POLITICAL FREEDOM:” The Ruling Class: How They Corrupted America and What We Can Do About It. By the late Angelo Codevilla, with an introduction by the late Rush Limbaugh. Both represent huge losses, but those of us who remain will just have to do our best to pick up the load.

ONCE LOST, TRUST IS DIFFICULT TO REGAIN: Biden Falls into the Trust Trap. “In the United States, government and health authorities must admit fault, take full responsibility, and tell the truth. The vaccinated must not harshly condemn the unvaccinated. Research on social norms suggests that shaming people can boost compliance with important social norms, but it can backfire when we shame those who believe they have done nothing wrong. Enforcing norms works when people accept them. Blaming people for violating norms they reject creates resentment, antagonistic behavior, and ongoing cycles of blame. Since the unvaccinated believe their mistrust of authorities is justified, they often respond to sanction with outrage. And the truth is, their mistrust is not entirely mistaken.”

Well, our health and political authorities lied a lot, got a lot wrong, never apologized for their mistakes, and kept getting caught flaunting their own rules.

DON’T GET COCKY: It’s All Falling Apart for Biden and Democratic Leadership in D.C.

BY AMAZING COINCIDENCE, BOTCHED MEDIA NARRATIVES ARE ALWAYS FAVORABLE TO THE DEMOCRATS: New York Times Botches the History of Budget Conflicts and Government Shutdowns.

THE ANSWER IS NO: Jeffrey Rendall at CHQ asks “Do Democrats Truly Understand What Their Problem is with the Budget?” As Rendall observes: “There haven’t been any reports of book throwing or intra-caucus knife fights, but it’s getting down to crunch time and the liberals aren’t close to finalizing their grand slush fund in its full form.”

CREATIVITY IN THE HELP-WANTED SECTION: Help Wanted signs are in every storefront window these days and employers are seeking out creative new ways of getting the word to the right people about the right job.

Now along comes direct-mail czar Richard Viguerie channeling Steve Jobs and asking if you’re tired of selling sugar water. Well, are you?

WOEING: Boeing still studying Starliner valve issues, with no launch date in sight.

Since returning Starliner to Boeing’s Commercial Crew and Cargo Processing Facility in Florida, engineers have been able to gather data about the “dry” side of the valves, but they may need to remove the valves from the spacecraft to assess the “wet” side, Lueders said. This would be a cumbersome process.

Boeing and NASA will reach a decision point in the “next few weeks,” she said, when they will decide whether to remove the valves from the service module for additional study. If this is the case, Boeing would likely pull forward a service module intended for a future crewed flight and use it for the uncrewed Orbital Flight Test-2 mission.

A new date for this OFT-2 mission has yet to be set, and Lueders indicated one may not be set any time soon. She suggested the mission probably will slip to 2022. “My gut is that it would probably be more likely to be next year, but we’re still working through that timeline,” she said.

Plus this from the comments: “Sticking valves not identified until flight hardware is on the pad is bad but what is worse is the kind of processes that woudl allow that to happen. What else is wrong that they just don’t know about yet? They may not know regardless but at least another uncrewed flight gives Boeing and NASA more real world data (not Boeing’s cost saving simulations which showed everything good to go).”

MEN AND COLLEGE RADIO SHOW: You can listen to a segment I did with News Talk 590 WVLK in Lexington about why only 40% of college students are men.

NEW LOW SO FAR: New Gallup low for Biden, even below Harris. I guess that’s why they’re keeping her in witness protection.

Related: Failures: Most hit Biden, media for border disaster.

Maybe someone should ask the FCC if we’re going to have to shoot the media to reclaim our democracy.

REALCLEARINVESTIGATIONS: Biden Security Adviser Jake Sullivan Tied to Alleged 2016 Clinton Scheme to Co-Opt CIA and FBI to Tar Trump. “White House National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan figures prominently in a grand jury investigation run by Special Counsel John Durham into an alleged 2016 Hillary Clinton campaign scheme to use both the FBI and CIA to tar Donald Trump as a colluder with Russia, according to people familiar with the criminal probe, which they say has broadened into a conspiracy case.”

CAN THE FTC BE BOUGHT? A group of Facebook shareholders think the answer to that question is yes and they have filed suit in Delaware. Their key claim is that members of the Facebook board of directors paid fines totaling $5 billion with the understanding the FTC would then spare Mark Zuckerberg from personal liability for the Cambridge Analytic data debacle. This could be litigation to watch.

NO WONDER OUR KIDS ARE SCREWED UP: Our schools and media keep telling them we’re all doomed, thanks to Climate Change, and they believe it.

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: We Might Be Spared the Burden of Biden’s Infrastructure Boondoggle. “I can remember a time when ‘trillion’ didn’t routinely come up in proposed legislation. It really wasn’t even that long ago. Now it often seems like a default starting point. We’re playing with Monopoly money now and the D.C. folk spend like drunken sailors on leave in Thailand.”

Sailors in Thailand get some value for their dollar.

BUT OF COURSE: Liberal Group Includes Call to ‘Shoot Republicans’ in Letter to FCC. A left-wing group funded by the Center for American Progress and George Soros’s Open Society Foundations submitted a letter to the government that advocated for murdering Republicans. Free Press, a well-funded liberal group that aims to “reshape media” in the United States, sent a letter to the Federal Communications Commission that included the question: ‘Are we going to have to shoot Republican[s] to reclaim our democracy?'”

“Our democracy” is a leftist code phrase that means “untrammeled power for the left.” So the answer is yes, but be careful — they may shoot back.

‘SCIENCE UPRISING’ AND THE ELITES: Just as there is a gathering revolt against the political elites in this country, so there are a growing number of smart folks with lots of PhDs on their walls who have had it with being blackballed, denied tenure, kicked out of research granting because they dissent from the current secular materialist orthodoxy.

The Discovery Institute’s latest episode of the “Science Uprising” provides an introductory summary of Intelligent Design evidence, but more importantly, it also makes clear that this debate isn’t going away any time soon. If anything, like the Flat Earthers of the past, the secular materialists could be in for some surprises. And don’t miss those ‘Chicken and Egg’ dilemmas, either.

CHRISTIAN TOTO: Was Monica Lewinsky the First Cancel Culture victim? “’15 Minutes of Shame’ suggests that without understanding the true nature behind it.”

FLASHBACK: “Nothing says, ‘This was a perfectly normal election, and now it’s time to come together as a united nation,’ like having your swearing-in behind 12-foot-high razor wire surrounded by 25,000 troops whose loyalty you doubt. That’s what we witnessed at President Biden’s inauguration on Wednesday: a grim testament to the fundamental insecurity and fragility of the re-ascendant liberal elite.”

#JOURNALISM: Glenn Greenwald: ‘There are no editorial standards as long as you feed liberals what they want.’