FLASHBACK: Professor draws rage for telling students to work hard and avoid partying.

DISPATCHES FROM WEIMAR AMERICA: A major corporation just openly mocked Kyle Rittenhouse for breaking down while reliving the worst trauma of his life. This is the society we live in now. “Merriam-Webster’s disgraceful, viciously cruel tweet is a sign of a cultural rot so deep and so comprehensive that it is hard to imagine we can ever come back from it:”

KEVIN DOWNEY JR: The Rittenhouse Testimony From a Gun Owner’s Angle. “The Bozo prosecutor asked Rittenhouse why he didn’t put his rifle down to fight a fire. Simple: you don’t put a loaded weapon down in a riot, you jackpudding. I was hoping this was the attorney’s first day on the job and he couldn’t possibly be this inept, but apparently he’s been there for years.”

BE PREPARED: First Alert SCO7CN Combination Smoke and Carbon Monoxide Detector with Voice and Location, Battery Operated. #CommissionEarned

JIM TREACHER: Voting for Black People Is Racist If They’re Republicans. Responding to the FiveThirtyEight article headlined, “Why White Voters With Racist Views Often Still Support Black Republicans,” Treacher writes:

Back in the old days, the Klan would put on white hoods and burn a cross on a black person’s lawn. In 2021, they put on MAGA hats and show up at the polls to vote for a black person. It’s basically literally the same thing, when you don’t think about it.

Now get it right, you racist:

In any disagreement between a black person and a white person, the white person is always wrong. Except when the black person is a Republican, in which case the black person doesn’t really count as a black person because Republicans are all white people. So the actual white people who oppose the black Republican are really the victims of racism by proxy, because all white people are racists unless they vote Democrat.

See? This isn’t hard, you dumb rednecks. Isn’t it so much better than thinking for yourself?

Franz Kafka had nothing on the 21st century left.

WHAT COULD GO WRONG? MIT scientists taught robots how to sabotage each other.

NOT THE BEE: A major corporation just openly mocked Kyle Rittenhouse for breaking down while reliving the worst trauma of his life. This is the society we live in now.

LIVE AT 3:30PM EASTERN: ‘Five O’Clock Somewhere’ with Kruiser, VodkaPundit, Special Guest.

GET IN SHAPE: RELIFE REBUILD YOUR LIFE Adjustable Weight Bench, Workout Bench for Full Body Workout, Utility Incline/Decline Exercise Bench for Home Gym, Strength Training Bench, Bench Press Bench. #CommissionEarned

WELCOME BACK, CARTER: Group Biden Removed From Terror List Storms U.S. Embassy in Yemen, Takes Hostages.

CAM NEWTON, CAROLINA PANTHERS AGREE TO DEAL. “The Panthers (4-5) began searching for options at quarterback after starter Sam Darnold suffered a shoulder injury Sunday that will sideline him four to six weeks.”

UM, NO: The CDC’s Director Implies That Face Masks Are More Effective Than Vaccines at Preventing COVID-19 Infection.

What is the source of Walensky’s startling claim that masks prevent infection better than vaccines do? I asked the CDC but have not heard back yet.* Judging from the CDC’s summary of the evidence in favor of face masks, however, Walensky is relying on a laboratory study that was reported in the journal Science Advances last September.

The researchers used a camera to record laser-illuminated respiratory droplets emitted by speakers who wore 14 kinds of face coverings, ranging from N95 respirators and surgical masks to bandanas and neck gaiters. The valveless N95 mask was 99.9 percent effective at retaining “droplet sizes larger than 0.5 μm” (the estimated detection limit), while the neck gaiter seemed worse than useless, apparently because it broke larger droplets into smaller ones. In between, three-layer surgical masks and several other kinds of cloth masks reduced the number of droplets detected by more than 80 percent. Based on those results, the CDC’s summary says “upwards of 80% blockage has been achieved in human experiments that have measured blocking of all respiratory droplets.”

While that gloss is a bit misleading given the detection limit noted by the researchers, it is still a far cry from Walensky’s assertion that masks “reduc[e] your chance of infection by more than 80 percent.” It is fair to present this study as evidence that face masks can help reduce the risk of COVID-19 transmission. But Walensky is doing more than that: She is trying to quantify the real-world impact of masks based on a laboratory study that did not measure it.

Science!

GOODBYE, GUILTED AGE:

By “guilted” I mean the knotted, clotted rage of the left against pretty much the entire country. This rage has dominated the mediascape and institutional mood this past half decade. It has become the hobby, the very bad habit, of the elite to hector and browbeat all the little people going about their business in the workaday world, to blame us all for a whole rap sheet of offenses.

Every platform in America became a pulpit in the 2010s for telling the plebs and proles in “Palookaville” (a certain Alinsky acolyte’s favorite term of contempt for the utterly forgettable hometown of Joe Sixpack) that they were knuckle-dragging bigots just looking for some homosexual or Muslim to beat up. “Pin the blame on the whole nation” sells well in the Hamptons. I get it. But it has become a complete joke everywhere else, from the bien-pensant suburbs, to the black neighborhoods which suffer the most from the consequences of the left’s blame obsession.

The left grew intoxicated by this idiotic accuse-everyone exercise, which quickly went from annoying to intolerable to just plain absurd. Los Angeles Times columnist Erika D. Smith, for example, an encyclopedia-entry-worthy representative of the Haranguing Wing of the unhinged left, actually called Larry Elder, who ran for governor of California earlier in 2021, the “Black face of white supremacy.” Black conservative Candace Owens has also been accused of this logically untenable crime. When even black people are “white supremacists,” one would think the air brakes on the leftmobile would kick in and the Democrats would try to circle back around to some common sense. But no.

Naturally of course, the left is still doubling down on this tack: Why White Voters With Racist Views Often Still Support Black Republicans.

VIDEO VIP DRIVE: A Special Message From Your Friendly Neighborhood VodkaPundit.

WHERE’S HUNTER, FAT? Vincent Van Dough: Hunter Biden’s corrupt art show opens in NYC.

HE FIGHTS: DeSantis Threatens to Make Border Crisis Personal for Joe Biden. “Governor Ron DeSantis (R-Fla.) has come up with a brilliant plan to turn the tables on Joe Biden, who reportedly sent illegal immigrants from the southern border to Florida on secret ‘migrant flights.'”

AGE OF DISCOVERY 2.0: Episode 4 of a six-part podcast series I’m co-producing that looks at the past and future of human exploration: How Lessons From U.S. History Will Help Space Colonies Be More Like Star Trek and Less Like Blade Runner.

WELCOME BACK, CARTER: Up, Up And Away. “The Fed is WAY behind the curve in fighting inflation and the ‘transitory’ nonsense is no longer credible. Stop $40 billion a month of bond purchases immediately. Why is the Fed fueling the housing bubble by buying mortgage-backed securities? 2) The Biden administration claim that his $4 trillion debt bomb bill will help solve inflation is laughable and deranged.”

Fighting inflation with debt is like fighting fires with gasoline.

Also, “laughable and deranged” pretty well sums up Biden’s entire (and entirely too long) life in politics.

ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY: Let Them Fight: Steve Schmidt Blasts The Lincoln Project over the tiki torch stunt. “Lincoln Project’s fake-Charlottesville stunt backfired so badly that group co-founder Steve ‘Generational Wealth’ Schmidt is desperately fleeing, hanging his former comrades-in-arms out to dry. Don’t look at me! I have almost nothing to do with those guys!”

FASTER, PLEASE: New compound provides innovative pain relief.

OBAMA ADVISER: Bidenflation is real and it’s spectacular — and directly tied to Biden’s stimulus.

[Larry] Summers predicted that would happen too, although perhaps too subtly for the White House to recognize. Summers had noted that the Biden administration wanted to prioritize social justice in its programs but had left itself no budgetary room for that purpose, thanks to the massive scope of stimulus spending. Not only does Biden lack budgetary capital for that purpose, his massive incompetence has entirely depleted his political capital for that agenda. His job approval hasn’t fallen into the thirties because of a perception that Biden is overly concerned about voter priorities and household issues, after all.

The shift in the media on inflation over the last day or so underscores that risk. For the last few months, the media has been happy to pass along all of the happy talk about “transitory” inflation, scoff at families who stress out over rising food prices, and even paint inflation as a great sign for America’s economy. After yesterday’s CPI numbers hit a 31-year record for inflation and show no sign of slowing down, the fuel for gaslighting has apparently run out, and Biden’s suddenly looking incompetent and lost on the issue that generally matters most to voters — the economy.

And … we told you so.

For many, the pain is immediate: Real Wages Declined 0.5% in October Amid Mounting Inflation.

BIDENFLATION: It’s Official, You’re Worse Off Than You Were Just Ten Months Ago.

WHAT’S STRIKING IS THE DECLINING POWER OF THE PRESS TO PROP HIM UP: More trouble for Dems: Support for Biden’s federal vaccine mandate weakens in new poll.

INFECTION CONTROL HAS BEEN POOR ALL ALONG: COVID-19 pandemic puts spotlight on ‘outdated’ infection control practices.

STAY WARM: Dickies Men’s Dri-tech Moisture Control Crew Socks Multipack, Black (6 Pairs). #CommissionEarned