OOF: Joe Biden Refers to Satchel Paige as ‘The Great Negro.’

Previously: Biden Meets Pope, Rambles On About…Satchel Paige.

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEF: Black Lives Matter Is the Real Domestic Terrorist Threat. “While the Department of Justice has been demonizing soccer moms and dads real terror threats have been operating freely in America. One — Black Lives Matter — has been getting away with whatever it wants to, often with the blessing of prominent Democrats.”

KATIE PAVLICH: Biden’s self-inflicted energy crisis. “Just hours after his inauguration, President Biden walked into the Oval Office and issued an executive order stopping construction on the Keystone XL pipeline. One week later, he followed through on promises made to halt new oil and gas leasing on federal land. The White House justified the moves as crucial to combating climate change. Currently, the administration is considering the shutdown of the L5 pipeline that runs from Canada to Michigan, which would further limit energy transport and supply.”

Only in politics can you self-inflict a wound and make everyone else feel the pain.

WELL, THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY, YOU KNOW: The U.S. Army Has Big Plans For Laser Weapons To Kill Everything.

CHINA IS ASSHOLE: Hong Kong’s ‘Captain America’ Sentenced to Six Years in Prison.

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.”

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.

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

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!

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

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.'”

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.

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

EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY: Record Number of Ships Stranded Outside California Ports. “One-hundred-eleven container ships are waiting to unload at ports such as Los Angeles and Long Beach, breaking the previous record of 108 ships set on Oct. 21, according to Business Insider. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, ships almost never waited to dock. A spike in demand combined with a shortage of dock workers and truckers has caused the jam.”

THE DEMOCRAT PLAYBOOK SINCE AT LEAST 1968: The Kyle Rittenhouse Prosecutor’s Case Comes Down To Rioting Good, Self-Defense Bad.

J CHRISTIAN ADAMS: Censoring Claims of Voter Fraud Is More Dangerous Than You Think. “We are all familiar with the big stories of cancel culture. Something more insidious is emerging, where ideas and people are canceled on the margins. Twitter is placing obstacles in front of the spread of conservative ideas.”

STACEY LENNOX: Biden Blames the Country’s Mood on Problems Created By His Administration and Americans Agree. “Biden has a pretty good idea what some of the problems are, but according to registered voters, he is taking all the wrong steps to fix them.”

THAT’S NOT FUNNY! ‘Daily Show’ Ratings Plummet to Shocking New Lows.

Late night comedians appear lost of late.

Their writing staffs don’t have President Donald Trump to kick around anymore, although they keep trying to bring him back into the conversation.

Even worse? They’re reticent to mock the current Commander in Chief, his low-rated Vice President or any of Biden’s foot soldiers.

Maybe there’s just nothing mock-worthy about an incontinent and gaffe-prone archetypal example of the Peter Principle.

FINALLY: Pentagon Ratcheting Up Efforts to Get Americans Out of Afghanistan.

HAVING AN IGNORANT AND MALLEABLE POPULATION IS THE POINT: Grading for equity: What if kids don’t learn?

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEF: Joe Biden Is Too Far Gone To Know That He’s the Problem. “It’s a bit rough when critically dealing with this president. There are cognitive issues that a lot of us deal with in our aging families. We set emotional boundaries of critique that satisfy us. The parameters of criticism change when the subject is the President of the United States, however.”

IT’S A MESS: Supply Chain Update. “Not only is inflation bad, it’s about to get much worse. Unprocessed goods are up 56% from a year ago. ‘At the current rate of increase, regular unleaded gasoline will hit $6/gal (National Average) by Easter.'”

If there’s any good news in all this, it’s that China seems to be getting whacked even harder than we are.

KEVIN DOWNEY JR: FBI Tweets About Hate Crimes Yet Seems to Commit Them. “You’ll notice that the New York FBI has a pinned tweet, the one at the top of their page, which is full of pictures of January 6 protestors, but they don’t have a site dedicated to locating violent, left-wing commies. If that isn’t hateful it’s certainly not fair. Nor is it safe to leave aggressive looters and rioters on the streets to burn our cities.”

MEDIUM: I’m A Twenty Year Truck Driver, I Will Tell You Why America’s “Shipping Crisis” Will Not End.

The ‘experts’ want to say we can do things like open the ports 24/7, and this problem will be over in a couple weeks. They are blowing smoke, and they know it. Getting a container out of the port, as slow and aggravating as it is, is really the easy part, if you can find a truck and chassis to haul it. But every truck driver in America can’t operate 24/7, even if the government suspends Hours Of Service Regulations (federal regulations determining how many hours a week we can work/drive), we still need to sleep sometime. There are also restrictions on which trucks can go into a port. They have to be approved, have RFID tags, port registered, and the drivers have to have at least a TWIC card (Transportation Worker Identification Credential from the federal Transportation Security Administration). Some ports have additional requirements. As I have already said, most trucking companies won’t touch shipping containers with a 100 foot pole. What we have is a system with a limited amount of trucks and qualified drivers, many of whom are already working 14 hours a day (legally, the maximum they can), and now the supposed fix is to have them work 24 hours a day, every day, and not stop until the backlog is cleared. It’s not going to happen. It is not physically possible. There is no “cavalry” coming. No trucking companies are going to pay to register their trucks to haul containers for something that is supposedly so “short term,” because these same companies can get higher rate loads outside the ports. There is no extra capacity to be had, and it makes NO difference anyway, because If you can’t get a container unloaded at a warehouse, having drivers work 24/7/365 solves nothing.

What it will truly take to fix this problem is to run EVERYTHING 24/7: ports (both coastal and domestic),trucks, and warehouses. We need tens of thousands more chassis, and a much greater capacity in trucking.

We’ve over-invested in red tape, under-invested in infrastructure, and taught at least two generations of young people that jobs like trucking are somehow beneath them.