Saturday, February 06, 2021
"I hope the vaccine works."
Nicholson Baker writes in New York Magazine,
Certainty craves detail, and detail requires an investigation. It has been a full year, 80 million people have been infected, and, surprisingly, no public investigation has taken place. We still know very little about the origins of this disease.
A vast treasure was spent by the U.S. on the amplification and aerial delivery of diseases — some well known, others obscure and stealthy. America’s biological-weapons program in the ’50s had A1-priority status, as high as nuclear weapons. In preparation for a total war with a numerically superior communist foe, scientists bred germs to be resistant to antibiotics and other drug therapies, and they infected lab animals with them, using a technique called “serial passaging,” in order to make the germs more virulent and more catching.
...If one of the first thoughts that goes through the head of a lab director at the Wuhan Institute of Virology is that the new coronavirus could have come from her lab, then we are obliged to entertain the scientific possibility that it could indeed have come from her lab. Right then, there should have been a comprehensive, pockets-inside-out, fully public investigation of the Virology Institute, along with the other important virus labs in Wuhan, including the one close by the seafood market, headquarters of the Wuhan CDC. There should have been interviews with scientists, interviews with biosafety teams, close parsings of laboratory notebooks, freezer and plumbing and decontamination systems checks — everything. It didn’t happen. The Wuhan Institute of Virology closed down its databases of viral genomes, and the Chinese Ministry of Education sent out a directive: “Any paper that traces the origin of the virus must be strictly and tightly managed.”
...The zoonoticists say that we shouldn’t find it troubling that virologists have been inserting and deleting furin cleavage sites and ACE2-receptor-binding domains in experimental viral spike proteins for years: The fact that virologists have been doing these things in laboratories, in advance of the pandemic, is to be taken as a sign of their prescience, not of their folly. But I keep returning to the basic, puzzling fact: This patchwork pathogen, which allegedly has evolved without human meddling, first came to notice in the only city in the world with a laboratory that was paid for years by the U.S. government to perform experiments on certain obscure and heretofore unpublicized strains of bat viruses — which bat viruses then turned out to be, out of all the organisms on the planet, the ones that are most closely related to the disease. What are the odds?
So how did we get this disease?
Here’s what I think happened. In April 2012, in a copper mine in Mojiang, China, three men were given an awful job — they were told to shovel bat guano out of a mine shaft. They went to work and shoveled guano for seven hours a day in the confined, insufficiently ventilated space of the mine shaft, and by the end of the week, they were sick with a viral pneumonia of unknown etiology. Three more, younger shovelers were hired to replace the ones who were out sick.
The viral load in their lungs was so huge, because of all the guano dust, that their lungs became a kind of accelerated laboratory passaging experiment, as Jonathan Latham and Allison Wilson have written, forcing the virus to switch its allegiance from bats to humans. SARS experts were consulted, and the disease was judged to be SARS-like but not SARS. It was something new. (Shi Zhengli told Scientific American that the guano shovelers had died of a fungal disease, but, as Monali Rahalkar pointed out, they were treated with antivirals, and their symptoms were consistent with viral pneumonia with attendant secondary fungal infections.)
Although it was a severe disease, and in the end three of the shovelers died, there was no resultant epidemic. It was actually a case of industrial overexposure to an infectious substance — what we might call a massive OSHA violation. The bat disease that the men encountered wasn’t necessarily all that dangerous except in an environment of immunosuppressive overload.
This may be the great scientific meta-experiment of the 21st century. Could a world full of scientists do all kinds of reckless recombinant things with viral diseases for many years and successfully avoid a serious outbreak? The hypothesis was that, yes, it was doable. The risk was worth taking. There would be no pandemic.
I hope the vaccine works.
Who could do such a thing?
New York governor Andrew Cuomo investigates the sudden uptick in senior citizen deaths in the state of New York during 2020. Will he find the culprit?
— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) February 5, 2021
Oh, and one more thing... subscribe! ▶️ https://t.co/vUUZzavSyi pic.twitter.com/HY01GGdLBp
Friday, February 05, 2021
The planet’s most famous living public intellectual
In FrontPage Magazine, Bruce Bawer writes about the latest hit job on Jordan Peterson. Read it here.
Keys to happiness
Sarah Hoyt writes in According to Hoyt,
...Happiness, long term happiness, is a result of living, of doing, of loving.
In a way loving others and paying the price of that love: worry and work, and living for them is the key to happiness. If you don’t do that, if you never risk loving others, you’re forever an emotional infant, excepting happiness to somehow descend on you, and being upset when it doesn’t.
Something that was REALLY hard this last eternity since the lockdown was realizing how little I as an individual can do to keep this country going, to keep it free, to keep the world from hurtling into madness.
Sure it could all go horribly wrong, and we could all die. Everyone dies. Until we do, the only thing we can do is live: live as hard as we can.
And those of us who are religious KNOW we won’t lose in the long run, either. Because Himself is not a dystopic author.
...HOWEVER ninety percent of “I can’t feel the future” isn’t that. It’s more that we’re outside our experience. We’re caught up in really big world events (this shit is worldwide) and when the dice are rolling no one knows how they’ll land.Read more here.
Why are they so scared of him?
Glenn Reynolds asks in his latest New York Post column,
“Donald Trump is washed up. A has-been. Everyone hates him, and he has no future. That’s what the press is constantly telling us. So why are the Democrats still afraid of him? . . . In a nation returning to ‘normalcy,’ does Congress cower behind armed troops and 12-foot fences? Does a party securely in control try to enlist tech firms and media to snuff out voices of opposition? In a normal America, does a defeated presidential incumbent pose such a threat to the party in power that he must be impeached after leaving office, to ensure he doesn’t win back the White House in four years?”Read more here.
Will the Left get a pushback in 2022?
Victor Davis Hanson writes in PJ Media,
On almost every issue — open borders, blanket amnesties, canceling the Keystone XL pipeline, promoting the Green New Deal, and hard-left appointees — Biden is touting positions that likely do not earn 50 percent public support.
When Biden made a Faustian bargain with his party’s hard-left wing of Bernie Sanders, Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to win the election, he took on the commitment to absorb some of their agenda and to appoint their ideologues.
But he also soon became either unwilling or unable to stand up to them.
Had Biden continued his moderate campaign veneer, the current left-wing radicalism might not have prompted a counterreaction.
Instead, Biden is now unapologetically leading the most radical left-wing movement in the nation’s history.
The left is assured that radical changes in voting laws and demography, the fears of COVID-19, the antifa-Black Lives Matter uprising and anger at Trump over the Jan. 6 Capitol riot have all permanently changed the electorate — and pushed it further leftward.
If they are wrong, they have instead alienated and insulted the American people, and will reap the whirlwind in 2022 of the wind they are now sowing.Read more here.
"What we're witnessing the federal government's police power and the corporate world's information power coming together to perform a complete end-run around the United States Constitution."
Andrea Widburg writes in the American Thinker, JJ Sefton and Ace of Spades write in the Ace of Spades blog, and Tucker Carlson explains on t.v. how Bank of America is violating the the U.S. Constitution.
Time Magazine now admits there was a conspiracy in the 2020 election
Time Magazine believes it is now an appropriate time to reveal
the inside story of the conspiracy to save the 2020 election...
That's why the participants want the secret history of the 2020 election told, even though it sounds like a paranoid fever dream--a well-funded cabal of powerful people, ranging across industries and ideologies, working together behind the scenes to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information.Ace of Spades replies,
This is the part of the war where they have shot most of the survivors, and are now engaging in psyops to humiliate and degrade whoever is still alive. They are now admitting they rigged the election so that we understand that there is nothing we can do about it -- we are a defeated people, they want us to know, and they intended to rule us.Read the whole thing here.
Thursday, February 04, 2021
The most important article I have read since the election!
In Tablet, Lee Smith writes,
Americans became prey to an anti-democratic elite that used the coronavirus to demoralize them; lay waste to small businesses; leave them vulnerable to rioters who are free to steal, burn, and kill; keep their children from school and the dying from the last embrace of their loved ones; and desecrate American history, culture, and society; and defame the country as systemically racist in order to furnish the predicate for why ordinary Americans in fact deserved the hell that the elite’s private and public sector proxies had already prepared for them.
For nearly a year, American officials have purposefully laid waste to our economy and society for the sole purpose of arrogating more power to themselves while the Chinese economy has gained on America’s. China’s lockdowns had nothing to do with the difference in outcomes. Lockdowns are not public health measures to reduce the spread of a virus. They are political instruments, which is why Democratic Party officials who put their constituents under repeated lengthy lockdowns, like New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot, are signaling publicly that it is imperative they be allowed to reopen immediately now that Trump is safely gone.
...For my last column I spoke with The New York Times’ Thomas Friedman about an article he wrote more than a decade ago, during the first year of Barack Obama’s presidency. His important piece documents the exact moment when the American elite decided that democracy wasn’t working for them. Blaming the Republican Party for preventing them from running roughshod over the American public, they migrated to the Democratic Party in the hopes of strengthening the relationships that were making them rich.
In the more than 10 years since Friedman’s column was published, the disenchanted elite that the Times columnist identified has further impoverished American workers while enriching themselves. The one-word motto they came to live by was globalism—that is, the freedom to structure commercial relationships and social enterprises without reference to the well-being of the particular society in which they happened to make their livings and raise their children.
...It started with Bill Clinton’s 1994 decision to decouple human rights from trade status. He’d entered the White House promising to focus on human rights, in contrast to the George H.W. Bush administration, and after two years in office made an about face. “We need to place our relationship into a larger and more productive framework,” Clinton said. American human rights groups and labor unions were appalled. Clinton’s decision sent a clear message, said then AFL-CIO President Lane Kirkland, “no matter what America says about democracy and human rights, in the final analysis profits, not people, matter most.” Some Democrats, like then Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell, were opposed, while Republicans like John McCain supported Clinton’s move. The head of Clinton’s National Economic Council, Robert E. Rubin, predicted that China “will become an ever larger and more important trading partner.”
...Apple, Nike, and Coca Cola even lobbied against the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act. On Trump’s penultimate day in office, his Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced that the United States has “determined that the People’s Republic of China is committing genocide and crimes against humanity in Xinjiang, China, targeting Uyghur Muslims and members of other ethnic and religious minority groups.” That makes a number of major American brands that use forced Uyghur labor—including, according to a 2020 Australian study, Nike, Adidas, Gap, Tommy Hilfiger, Apple, Google, Microsoft, and General Motors—complicit in genocide.
...The Central Intelligence Agency openly protected Chinese efforts to undermine American institutions. CIA management bullied intelligence analysts to alter their assessment of Chinese influence and interference in our political process so it wouldn’t be used to support policies they disagreed with—Trump’s policies. It’s no wonder that protecting America is not CIA management’s most urgent equity—the technology that stores the agency’s information is run by Amazon Web Services, owned by China’s No. 1 American distributor, Jeff Bezos.
China had cultivated many friends in the American press, which is why the media relays Chinese government statistics with a straight face—for instance that China, four times the size of the United States, has suffered 1/100th the number of COVID-19 fatalities. But the key fact is this: In legitimizing CCP narratives, the media covers not primarily for China but for the American class that draws its power, wealth, and prestige from China. No, Beijing isn’t the bad guy here—it’s a responsible international stakeholder. In fact, we should follow China’s lead. And by March, with Trump’s initial acquiescence, American officials imposed the same repressive measures on Americans used by dictatorial powers throughout history to silence their own people.
Eventually, the pro-China oligarchy would come to see the full range of benefits the lockdowns afforded. Lockdowns made leading oligarchs richer—$85 billion richer in the case of Bezos alone—while impoverishing Trump’s small-business base. In imposing unconstitutional regulations by fiat, city and state authorities normalized autocracy. And not least, lockdowns gave the American establishment a plausible reason to give its chosen candidate the nomination after barely one-third of the delegates had chosen, and then keep him stashed away in his basement for the duration of the Presidential campaign. And yet in a sense, Joe Biden really did represent a return to normalcy in the decadeslong course of U.S.-China relations.
Yellen says that “China is clearly our most important strategic competitor.” But the pro-China oligarchy is not competing with the country from which it draws its wealth, power, and prestige. Chinese autocracy is their model. Consider the deployment of more than 20,000 U.S. armed forces members throughout Washington, D.C., to provide security for an inauguration of a president who is rarely seen in public in the wake of a sporadically violent protest march that was cast as an insurrection and a coup; the removal of opposition voices from social media, along with the removal of competing social media platforms themselves; the nascent effort to keep the Trump-supporting half of America from access to health care, credit, legal representation, education, and employment, with the ultimate goal of redefining protest against the policies of the current administration as “domestic terrorism.”Read more here.
Will other Republican controlled states join with Florida's Ron DeSantis in standing up to big tech?
In the Epoch Times, Roger Simon tells us,
The Big Tech giants have created the most sophisticated and seductive form of fascist mind control in human history.
They have also, through their dominance, which almost no one predicted, heavily and unfairly influenced elections and become the greatest threat to our democratic republic extant.So far, one Republican governor, Florida's Ron DeSantis, has stepped forward with proposals to thwart Big Tech's efforts to censor citizens. Simon points out that there are 24 states currently under Republican control, and they need to muster the courage to join with DeSantis in standing up to big tech. Read more here.
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