WHY DON’T THEY BELIEVE US? You’re struggling to understand where all this vaccine hesitancy comes from. Let me help you.

QUESTION ASKED AND ANSWERED:

Shot: Paul Krugman Whines: ‘Where Have All the Grown-ups Gone?’

Chaser: New York Times reporter fawns over ‘role model’ Brian Williams: ‘You are an icon for journalists.’

GOODER AND HARDER, NEW YORK: Fox Christmas tree arson suspect released without bail.

Meanwhile, evidently arson is CBS approved:

MICHAEL WALSH: It’s Bad Out There and Getting Worse.

Back in the early days of talk radio, the late Bob Grant used to have a tagline: “It’s sick out there and getting sicker.”

The pugnacious New York City host, who ruled the local airwaves on WABC in the ’80s and early ’90s, came to fame during the previous nadir in the city’s fortunes, the David Dinkins administration of 1990–93. Crime was out of control, murder was at record highs (2605 in 1990), and there seemed no way out of the sealed box decades of Democratic administrations had constructed for the city.

Then came the Rudolf Giuliani administration (1994–2001) and things changed almost overnight. New police chief Bill Bratton cracked down on so-called “lifestyle crime,” such as the city’s omnipresent squeegee men—intimidating derelicts who “cleaned” car windshields with filthy rags for a mere quarter—and subway turnstile jumpers. By 1995, murders had fallen to 1,550 and by 2001, they had plummeted to 960. All that was required was political willpower.

* * * * * * * *

The Trump interregnum between eight years of Obama and four (?) years of Brandon gave us full employment, a strong economy, plentiful oil and gas, low inflation, a sturdy stock- and real-estate market, and a stable society that was not always at each other’s throats.

That’s all gone now, replaced by soaring crime rates, domestic totalitarianism, international instability, and a continuing, manufactured and media-whipped hysteria over the “pandemic” as we enter the “dark winter” that candidate Biden promised and is steadily delivering on[.]

In short, it’s bad out there and getting worse. So what are you going to do about it?

Here’s a very simple first step: Want families to fly again? End the mask mandate.

RACHAEL ROLLINS CONFIRMED AS MASSACHUSETTS US ATTORNEY IN NARROW VOTE:

Rollins will be the next U.S. attorney for Massachusetts after the Senate approved the progressive prosecutor by the narrowest of margins.

Rollins, the Suffolk County district attorney, was confirmed by a 51-50 count, with Vice President Kamala Harris stepping in to cast the tie-breaking vote.

The Senate had to go through the process twice on Wednesday, first voting on cloture and then the final tally, with each vote taking about an hour and both ending with the same count.

Republicans including Arkansas U.S. Sen. Tom Cotton tried to make an example out of the progressive Rollins, framing her as the avatar of what Cotton characterized as “pro-criminal Soros prosecutors” hell-bent on “destroying our legal system from the inside.” U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, a Texas Republican, made similar arguments again on Wednesday.

But Democrats, even the more centrist ones, have steadily backed her in a series of very rare roll-call tallies. Every U.S. attorney for the past several decades had been moved along in looser voice votes, but the GOP made Rollins go through an ultimately deadlocked committee hearing, a narrow full-Senate vote to pull her name out of committee after the tie, and then the two votes on Wednesday that required Harris’ input.

Bay State U.S. Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Ed Markey had jointly recommended Rollins to the Biden administration. Along the nomination process, they’d touted her support from local police chiefs and the fact that violence is down in Boston.

What could go wrong?

Meet the new US attorney for Massachusetts @DARollins pic.twitter.com/3pboCuBklr

— Mike Saccone (@mikesacconetv) December 8, 2021

Related: Ted Cruz’s Unbelievable List of Crimes That Biden’s New US Attorney For Mass. Won’t Prosecute:

ROGER SIMON: COVID May Be Waning, but Will They Tell Us?

Of course, things could change, a more dangerous variant could come along or Omicron could morph in some unforeseen manner, but If I am correct, then we are witnessing the beginning of the end of an era when politics overwhelmed science to a degree that it practically destroyed our country and the world.

What a relief. What Happy New Year this could be. Let’s sing that great song from World War I. We all feel as if we’ve been through it.

Not so fast, grasshopper. It’s not over yet, just starting a new phase.

Again, if I am correct, I have two predictions to make that are to some degree related and not entirely optimistic. In fact the second is about as pessimistic as it gets if we don’t watch our steps.

1. Joe Biden, to get a very needed political boost, and with him Dr. Anthony Fauci, one of the great control freaks of American history, willing to change his opinion at any time as long as we follow his opinion, will claim victory and try to take credit for this to the nth degree—an attempt that is as nauseating as it is ludicrous. This will be echoed by much of our media but at least as many, hopefully more, of our citizens will be skeptical. A battle will ensue between the two sides not all that different from what we have now.
2. Much more ominous, until there is a regime change at the presidential level, they will never tell us the pandemic is really over. Instead they will say the situation is slightly better (for now), but we must always maintain our guard with extreme vigilance. Otherwise it can come back at a moment’s notice. That means continued masking (where authorities deem necessary) and booster shots every few months like teeth cleanings, probably intermittent lockdowns as well. (Schools could practice those like fire drills.) We should still maintain social distancing when we can. You never know what your neighbor might be carrying. It’s a good habit. Like flossing. We must do all this into perpetuity.

Am I exaggerating? Not if you ask the prime minister of New Zealand who has already asserted there will never be an endpoint to the vaccination program in her country.

Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates has just informed us he believes the “acute phase” of the pandemic will end in 2022, but evinces “surprise” that so many resist vaccination and masks.

Flashback: Ignoring Them Is the Only Way Out.

We can’t eat enough medium-well steaks to get the CDC to stop recommending that we not eat medium-rare, let alone steak tartare. If you ask epidemiologists whether human conversation is safe, their minds call up computer animations of people projectile-vomiting red and blue blocks of “droplets” on each other. If you asked public-health authorities for permission to be born and live a life, there’s no way they could just, you know, approve of that in an unqualified way. You just have to remember that you’ll never be in less danger to yourself or others until dead.

They’re waiting for us — the people. The people began locking down and shutting in and buying masks last February, when public-health officials were telling you that masks were racist and that you should attend Chinese New Year parades to show you weren’t afraid. The people began traveling out more — based on the Google traffic data — before the lockdowns were eased. When does it end? When we end it.

And it’s ending, despite Biden and Fauci’s dreams of endless lockdowns: “On Saturday in New York City you needed a vaccine passport to eat in a restaurant or grab a drink in a bar, work out in a gym, go to a movie, or attend any sporting event. Just four hours to the west nearly 110,000 maskless Penn State Nittany Lion fans who had to provide no health records to anyone to attend the game reveled in their school’s biggest football game in two years, packed as close together as possible all clad in white in one of the great football cathedrals of this country. Watch this video and tell me which America you want to live in, the one where you have freedom and embrace life or the one where you either bow down to the authoritarian whims of a group of leaders who don’t even follow their own rules or have no ability to do anything.”

GOODER AND HARDER, CALIFORNIA: San Francisco Sees 3,000 Car Break-Ins in 1 Month; ‘It’s Out of Control.’

QUESTIONS ASKED: Curiouser and Curiouser. “Over the past weekend, a strange news feed about possible white supremacists marching at the Lincoln Memorial popped up on one of my YouTube subscriptions; then disappeared within a few hours of being up…what audience was this meant for? Then today I come across this article from POWERLINE. So it would appear that not only are the ‘Patriot Front’ an Astroturf group, but according to the Washington Post headlines, ‘experts say’ a ‘white supremacist march in D.C. was pushed by a fake Twitter account.’ What in the wide world of sports is going on here? Your thoughts?”

EPIC RATIO: Dallas Cops Brag About Civil Forfeiture and Get Owned on Social Media.

BIDEN ORDERS FEDERAL GOVERNMENT TO BE CARBON NEUTRAL BY 2050:

The directive calls for the federal government to establish a carbon-free electricity sector by 2030 and to purchase only zero-emission vehicles by 2035. The government must also cut carbon emissions from federal buildings in half by 2032 and get to zero by 2045.

President Klain throws a symbolic bone to the Green Nude Eel crowd. Not surprisingly, though, he has desire to cut governmental carbon emissions by actually shrinking the government.

THE BANNINGS WILL CONTINUE UNTIL MORALE IMPROVES: So…Twitter just suspended the popular account tracking the Ghislaine Maxwell trial.

The “Ghislaine Maxwell Trial Tracker” is back — at least for now. They also have a backup account — again, at least for now.

AS ALWAYS, THERE IS NO WAY ANY SATIRIST CAN IMPROVE UPON REAL LIFE FOR ITS PURE ABSURDITY: Dozens of Camels Ejected from Saudi Beauty Contest over Botox.

Note that the article is from the AP wire, not the Babylon Bee.

I QUESTION THE PREMISE: The Beatles: Get Back shows that deepfake tech isn’t always evil.

What happened next is quite astonishing. Jackson had the grainy, desaturated film fed through a computer algorithm. Suddenly, the resulting video had bright, vibrant colors, with sharp images that looked like it was filmed yesterday, not in 1969. But even more impressive than the film restoration, which is a technical triumph in and of itself, is what they did with the audio. Per Jackson, in his Variety interview:

“To me, the sound restoration is the most exciting thing. We made some huge breakthroughs in audio. We developed a machine learning system that we taught what a guitar sounds like, what a bass sounds like, what a voice sounds like. In fact, we taught the computer what John sounds like and what Paul sounds like. So we can take these mono tracks and split up all the instruments we can just hear the vocals, the guitars. You see Ringo thumping the drums in the background but you don’t hear the drums at all. That that allows us to remix it really cleanly.”

The machine learning technology used here is very similar (if not identical) to what has been used in the past for deepfakes, making fake video look and sound real. A prime example of this is the Emmy Award-winning demonstration video produced by MIT’s Center for Advanced Virtuality, “In Event of Moon Disaster,” which depicts then-president Nixon reading a prepared statement that the Apollo 11 astronauts had perished in a catastrophe. To create it, MIT used Nixon’s likeness and speech from television appearances and fed it into a machine learning system to synthesize the audio and video and produce the uncanny film.

Uncanny is the right word — the video of deepfake Nixon reading William Safire’s proposed speech has that uncanny valley feel that Admiral Tarkin and Princess Leia had in the 2017 Star Wars prequel, Rogue One. The technology is making remarkable strides, yet you still know you’re watching a “synthespian” — but going forward, this technology is only going to get more and more realistic:

(Granted, simulating the fuzzy “Never Twice the Same Color” look of a live 1969 American TV broadcast helps to hide some of the flaws, unlike seeing Rogue One on a 25 foot tall movie screen.)

However, I’m not sure if the restoration techniques used to restore the audio and 16mm film from the 1969 Let It Be sessions counts as deep fakery. Jackson used even more powerful digital techniques to restore the scratchy, wiped out 1918-era WWI footage for his 2018 documentary, They Shall Not Grow Old. For Get Back, he had well-preserved 16mm color footage to begin with, giving the restoration techniques used on his WWI documentary that much more of a head start.

For the sound, once the band moves into their basement Apple studio, Jackson had a mix of the mono audio the filmmakers were recording of the group between songs, and the band audio was recorded on eight track reel to reel by Glyn Johns, one of rock’s best engineers (and in 1969, one of its wildest dressers).

To remix the mono audio of the band rehearsing in Twickenham Film Studios, Jackson used a version of the remix applet that’s included in several audio restoration programs, such as Izotope’s RX9:

Jackson was lucky that Billy Preston hadn’t arrived yet, since the current platform doesn’t separate keyboards from guitars. Perhaps the most powerful audio restoration was done in the scene where John and Paul discuss George quitting in the Twickenham cafeteria. But even with all of the sound restoration technology available to both Disney, and the director of the Lord of the Rings movies, he still had to subtitle the conversation for the viewer to understand what’s going on:

So it’s all very powerful digital audio and film restoration technology, but nothing in Get Back seems like we’ve entered into deep fake territory. (Unless you were a “Paul is dead” believer in 1969, that is…)

THIS IS CNN: Jeff Zucker Failed To Address Serial Sexual Misconduct At CNN And Should Be Fired Immediately.

SENATE VOTES TO REVERSE BIDEN VACCINE MANDATE FOR PRIVATE COMPANIES: “The effort to block the mandate is likely to end at the Senate chamber doors, however. The measure heads to the House, where Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a vaccine mandate proponent, plans to ignore it. Pelosi has tagged the GOP as ‘anti-vaxxers,’ who do not believe in the science behind the shot. While it won’t become law, the Senate vote sent a strong message that the mandate is unpopular with many people and in particular businesses.”

YOU’RE GONNA NEED A MUCH BIGGER BLOG: Never Forget: All the Libs Who Fell for the Jussie Smollett Hate Crime Hoax.

Of course, there was one notable exception (seriously NSFW language warning, needless to say):

Related: Ashamed: ABC Hosts Wants You to Forget Their Embarrassing Smollett Reporting.

WHY IS WESLEY WHITESPLAINING? Wil Wheaton Calls Dave Chappelle A “Bigot” And “Piece Of S***” After Netflix Announced The Comedian Will Headline ‘Netflix Is A Joke Festival.’

2019’s SOCIALIST “IT GIRL” CONTINUES TO PAY WANT YOUR DIVIDENDS: AOC Says Taxpayers Should Have to Pay Her $17K Student Loan—Even Though She Makes $174K a Year.

To be fair, in terms of wanting ever more amounts of taxpayer money, she’s got that aspect of socialism down cold.

Flashback: “In a famous Soviet joke, then-leader Leonid Brezhnev shows his mother his luxury apartment, his limousine, his fancy country house and his helicopter only to have her object: ‘But what if the communists come back?’”

QUESTION ASKED AND ANSWERED:

Some of its shakier proponents fell in love with fine trouser creases over substance. As did others who knew better, but hated missing out on all the best cocktail parties on both ends of the Northeast Corridor. Not to mention, the green room at MSNBC.

PARTYING LIKE IT’S 1939: Stores in Germany now have signs saying “Unvaccinated Not Welcome” and I really think people need to brush up on their history a bit.

THIS CAN’T POSSIBLY END BADLY: Remy: Raise the Debt Ceiling Rap (Again). New video from Reason TV:

DISPATCHES FROM THE PARTY OF DIVERSITY AND TOLERANCE: Far-left Axios Is Mad Conservatives Are Building Their Own Internet.

What did they think would happen? I’m so old, I can remember when lefties told everybody to “learn to code.”

OH, THAT WAR ON CHRISTMAS: Oakland’s Jack London Square Christmas tree torched.

UPDATE: Christmas tree goes up in flames, volunteers robbed while decorating homes in Chicago.

RACIST LITTLE FREE LIBRARIES:

This piece in the New York Times is really something, and I mean that in the worst possible sense.

Erin Aubry Kaplan lives in Inglewood, “a mostly Black and Latino city in southwestern Los Angeles County,” and she decides to build a Little Free Library, as they are called, in her front yard so neighbors walking by can borrow a book. She builds one because she loves books, but because in our puritanical times nothing can be as simple as that, she writes that she also put one up “to signal to my longtime neighbors that we had our own ideas about improvement, and could carry them out in our own way. There are organizations that help people build these little libraries, but I did mine independently. I envisioned it as a place for my neighbors to stay connected during the pandemic.”

Fine. But then things get a little crazy. A white couple stops and looks at her library and Aubry Kaplan freaks out: “Instantly, I was flooded with emotions — astonishment, and then resentment, and then astonishment at my resentment. It all converged into a silent scream in my head of, Get off my lawn!”

She doesn’t yell “Get off my lawn,” thankfully, and she doesn’t take down the library because a white couple stopped and looked at it without even borrowing a book. But, while embarrassed by her initial reaction, she comes to see it as natural: “What I resented was not this specific couple,” she writes, “It was their whiteness.” Technically, she put the little library out for “everyone,” but it was really for everyone but white people, and when the white couple stopped and looked at the books, they were transgressing on black space, once again pushing black people to the margins, appropriating black expression, and gentrifying the black neighborhood. Aren’t whites the worst?

I’m so old, I can remember when librarians would judge people by the content of their character, not by the color of their skin.

DISPATCHES FROM THE PARTY OF DIVERSITY AND TOLERANCE: The Democrats Have a Hate Problem.

Nearly a quarter of college students wouldn’t be friends with someone who voted for the other presidential candidate — with Democrats far more likely to dismiss people than Republicans — according to new Generation Lab/Axios polling.

Why it matters: Partisan divides — as each side inhabits parallel political, cultural and media universes —make a future of discord and distrust in the U.S. all the more likely.

By the numbers: 5% of Republicans said they wouldn’t be friends with someone from the opposite party, compared to 37% of Democrats.

• 71% of Democrats wouldn’t go on a date with someone with opposing views, versus 31% of Republicans.
• 30% of Democrats — and 7% of Republicans — wouldn’t work for someone who voted differently from them.

Bad things happen when you make politics your substitute religion.