EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY: How Well Does the Monkeypox Vax Work? No One Knows for Sure: Health officials hang hopes on Jynneos, but vaccine not yet proven to protect against infection.

One number that’s been unquestionably quoted by various media organizations — “85% effective” or “at least 85% effective” — is based entirely on a small study done in Africa in the 1980s that has major limitations. One data expert calls its findings “pretty weak.” Other studies have only been conducted in animals.

Still, “I’ve heard from many folks in the community that they expect almost no risk of becoming infected 2 weeks after their first shot,” said Michael Donnelly, MSc, a New York City data scientist and LGBT health advocate, in an interview with MedPage Today. “Or they think they won’t get any symptoms if they were exposed before their shot.”

The lack of accurate information about the vaccine is “a big problem,” Jay Varma, MD, director of the Cornell Center for Pandemic Prevention and Response in New York, said in an interview. “It is absolutely critical that public health officials work on messaging this uncertainty to people being vaccinated.”

The Covid track record doesn’t inspire confidence, but at least they’re admitting there’s a problem.

Plus:

To make matters more complicated, the new outbreak is quite different from those in the past. This time, the virus appears to largely be transmitted through sexual rather than other kinds of contact, with an overwhelming majority of cases among men who have sex with men. (There’s now a debate in the medical world over whether to refer to monkeypox as a sexually transmitted disease [STD].) Previous outbreaks in Africa appeared to have been spread in households by various routes.

“The vaccine was evaluated on the assumption that most or all exposures would be from skin-to-skin contact,” Varma told MedPage Today. “The head of the penis and interior of the anus may have characteristics that make them more susceptible to infection such as a lower dose of virus needed, less abundant antibodies or other components of the immune system, or concurrent STDs increasing risk. It’s possible that the level of protection may be the same, but we should not assume it’s the same without evaluating it.”

Like I say, at least they’re admitting to uncertainties here.

THE DOCTOR IS OUT: Anthony Fauci reveals when he will retire. “Fauci announced Monday that he will retire at the end of the year.”

Related: Politico Is Shocked that Conservative Criticism of Dr. Anthony Fauci Is Growing ‘More Intense and Personal.’

UPDATE: From America’s Newspaper of Record: World In Panic As Science Announces Retirement.

EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY: A new NBC poll finds 74% of Americans say the country is on the wrong track.

Never underestimate Joe’s ability to f*ck things up, as a famous man once said.

MICHAEL WALSH: ‘Our Democracy’ Needs a Great Reset. “In short, we have to destroy the Constitution in order to save it. But why let the Left have all the fun? If we really want to defend our Republic — and do away with ‘their democracy’ — it’s time to get busy. Institutional capture is something conservatives are terrible at, in part because they don’t realize our institutions of government, faith, and learning are even subject to capture. That’s in part because traditionalists consistently underestimate the satanic maliciousness of the Frankfurt School and because they have not heeded John O’Sullivan’s famous formulation that ‘any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing,’ often incorrectly ascribed to the late Robert Conquest.”

THERE SEEM TO HAVE BEEN A LOT OF SUPERYACHT TRAGEDIES LATELY, with one big boat after another sinking or burning to the waterline. Not sure why.

UPDATE: Sorry, I didn’t realize that this link isn’t public for everyone. It worked for me with no problem.

AI IS PRETTY STUPID: Google AI flagged parents’ accounts for potential abuse over nude photos of their sick kids.

The main incident highlighted by The New York Times took place in February 2021, when some doctor’s offices were still closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. As noted by the Times, Mark (whose last name was not revealed) noticed swelling in his child’s genital region and, at the request of a nurse, sent images of the issue ahead of a video consultation. The doctor wound up prescribing antibiotics that cured the infection.

According to the NYT, Mark received a notification from Google just two days after taking the photos, stating that his accounts had been locked due to “harmful content” that was “a severe violation of Google’s policies and might be illegal.”
…
A Google spokesperson told the Times that Google only scans users’ personal images when a user takes “affirmative action,” which can apparently include backing their pictures up to Google Photos. When Google flags exploitative images, the Times notes that Google’s required by federal law to report the potential offender to the CyberTipLine at the NCMEC. In 2021, Google reported 621,583 cases of CSAM to the NCMEC’s CyberTipLine, while the NCMEC alerted the authorities of 4,260 potential victims, a list that the NYT says includes Mark’s son.

Mark ended up losing access to his emails, contacts, photos, and even his phone number, as he used Google Fi’s mobile service, the Times reports. Mark immediately tried appealing Google’s decision, but Google denied Mark’s request. The San Francisco Police Department, where Mark lives, opened an investigation into Mark in December 2021 and got ahold of all the information he stored with Google. The investigator on the case ultimately found that the incident “did not meet the elements of a crime and that no crime occurred,” the NYT notes.

That determination came after the police had been given access to virtually all of Mark’s digital life — a system ripe for abuse.

HE COULDN’T DO ANY WORSE: Biden Hasn’t Been Able to Free Brittney Griner. Maybe Dennis Rodman Can?

DEAL OF THE DAY: Calphalon Nonstick Frying Pan. #CommissionEarned

LOUISE PERRY: I’m 30. The Sexual Revolution Shackled My Generation.

I used to believe the liberal narrative on the sexual revolution. As a younger woman, I held the same opinions as most other millennial urban graduates in the West. I conformed to the beliefs of my class.

Of course freedom is the goal, I thought. What women need is the freedom to behave as men have always behaved, enjoying all the pleasures of casual sex, porn, BDSM, and indeed any other sexual delight that the human mind can dream up. As long as everyone is consenting, what’s the problem?

I no longer believe any of this.

I’m not a religious conservative. I’m a feminist, and I’ve spent my entire professional life working on the issue of male violence against women—first in a rape crisis center, and later as a journalist and a media relations director for a legal campaign against sexual violence.

It’s precisely because I’m a feminist that I’ve changed my mind on sexual liberalism. It’s an ideology premised on the false belief that the physical and psychological differences between men and women are trivial, and that any restrictions placed on sexual behavior must therefore have been motivated by malice, stupidity or ignorance.

Read the whole thing.

TO BE FAIR, THEY’RE NOT MEANT TO HELP WOMEN: Former Collegiate Athletic Director: Biden’s proposed changes to Title IX will harm women.

FASTER, PLEASE: New CNN CEO Tells Employees, ‘You Might Not Like or Understand’ What’s Coming.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: American Historical Association president apologizes for … citing historical facts.

COLORADO: Edgewater bans open carry of firearms; effort to cite ‘white supremacy’ in ordinance fails. “I would propose the language say, ‘Whereas the city council finds that open carrying of firearms, during the times of civil protest and unrest tends to exacerbate rather than ameliorate the harm of white supremacy and the potential for violence and death.’”

DEAL OF THE DAY: First Alert Powered Alarm SCO5CN Combination Smoke and Carbon Monoxide Detector. #CommissionEarned

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Dem Candidates Don’t Want the Biden Stink Anywhere Near Them. “Imagine sharing a campaign stage with the President of the United States and having the moment where he gets your name wrong and then turns around to shake hands with someone who isn’t there captured and shared on social media. It’s not just the Biden policies that Democrats want to distance themselves from, it’s the crazy demented uncle in the Oval Office who they want to stay far away from them.”

I REMEMBER WHEN THEY TOLD US TRUMP WAS GOING TO BLUSTER HIS WAY INTO A NUCLEAR WAR: White House: Maybe we should provoke a war with North Korea.

WHAT IF THE BIG BANG NEVER BANGED? Those beautiful images of deepest space being sent to Earth by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) are causing a quiet uproar in the scientific community. The reason is the images seem to suggest the Big Bang theory of the origins of the universe simply isn’t correct.

As the Cable Guy might say, I don’t care what you believe, that is big news. Eric Lerner of LPPFusion, a privately supported research group working to develop safe, reliable, affordable fusion energy, explains on the web site of the Institute for Art and Ideas (IAI) why more than a dozen characteristics predicted to be confirmed by JWST capabilities have instead now been shown to be of doubtful accuracy.

Much of Lerner’s explanation is beyond my grasp, but enough of it makes sense that it strikes me as imminently worthy of thoughtful and sustained consideration. But there’s also an additional angle here that points to the Evolution vs Intelligent Design (ID) debate.

Lerner notes the reality that dissent from the Big Bang theory is absolutely verboten in most precincts of the scientific community, especially regarding publication in recognized research journals and in consideration of official funding applications:

“Readers may well be wondering at this point why they have not read of this collapse of the Big Bang hypothesis in major media outlets by now and why the authors of so many recent papers have not pointed to this collapse themselves.

“The answer lies in what I term the ‘Emperor’s New Clothes Effect’— if anyone questions the Big Bang, they are labeled stupid and unfit for their jobs. Unfortunately, funding for cosmology comes from a very few government sources controlled by a handful of committees that are dominated by Big Bang theorists. These theorists have spent their lives building the Big Bang theory. Those who openly question the theory simply don’t get funded.

“Until the past few years, if researchers could self-fund cosmology research as a sideline, as is the case with me, they still could publish ‘heretical’ papers, although those papers were often ignored by the cosmological establishment. As recently as 2018, the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (MNRAS), a leading journal, published one of my papers showing how the sizes of galaxies contradicted the expanding universe idea.

“But as the crisis in cosmology became obvious in 2019, the cosmological establishment has circled the wagons to protect this failed theory with censorship, because it now has no other defense. It has now become almost impossible to publish papers critical of the Big Bang in any astronomical journals …

“Such censorship is now, as always, inimical to the progress of science. Two dozen researchers in astrophysics, astronomy and space science have signed a letter of protest to the arXiv leadership. I have personally called on leading Big Bang theorists to openly debate the new evidence. For cosmology – as for any research area – to advance, this debate must happen openly in both scientific journals and the public media.”

Advocates of ID such as the Discovery Institute know all too well the process Lerner is describing.

RIDICULOUS. IT’S POLITICALLY ESSENTIAL THAT THERE BE AN EMERGENCY, SO THERE IS ONE: Over 1000 Scientists and Professionals Sign Formal Declaration: “There is No Climate Emergency.” “There is no cause for panic and alarm. We strongly oppose the harmful and unrealistic net-zero CO2 policy proposed for 2050.”

PRIORITIES: NYC Grants $6 Million in Aid to Bused-In Economic Migrants. “Meanwhile, the city’s officials also wanted to provide nearly 6,000 luxury hotel rooms to migrants who rode the buses from Texas.”

I REMEMBER WHEN “LOYALTY OATHS” WERE SUPPOSED TO BE BAD: Back to school: Berkeley’s ‘diversity vow’ a depressing token of woke academia.

But that was loyalty to the Constitution. This is loyalty to leftist cant.

EVERY INSTITUTION HAS BEEN CORRUPTED: Minnesota teachers unions defend “fire whites first” policy.

Related: Teachers’ Union “Extremely Proud” of Racism.

ERASING HISTORY: New Jersey Elementary School Ditches Founding Father From Its Name. “Thomas Jefferson Elementary School in South Orange, N.J. will rename itself for Delia Bolden, the first black female high school graduate in the area. The student body chose Bolden’s name from a list that included names of notable people with local connections and generic names not tied to a person.”