It’s Wednesday, June 16th, 2021…but before we begin, Jon Stewart returns to The Late Show to school his successor on the origins of the Wuhan virus. You know, the Wuhan virus…from Wuhan, China…CHINA!
“Shi Zhengli, the top Chinese virologist nicknamed “Bat Woman,” had a brief interview with New York Times reporters when they reached her cell phone, and responded to an emailed list of questions. The Times article about her offers this curious detail:
Dr. Shi, in an emailed response to questions, argued that her experiments differed from gain-of-function work because she did not set out to make a virus more dangerous, but to understand how it might jump across species. “My lab has never conducted or cooperated in conducting GOF experiments that enhance the virulence of viruses,” she said.
But making a bat virus more likely to jump into human beings IS making it more dangerous to human beings.“
Tut, tut: does the benighted Mr. Geraghty not understand the all-knowing, great and powerful Dr. Faux Chi himself declared the potential benefits of the research his own organization funded…but which Dr. Shi assures us (wink, wink!)…
…was worth the risk of a global pandemic and the lives of millions of people who weren’t the highest-paid, poorest-performing bureaucrat in America?!?
Now, here’s The Gouge!
First up, Jim Geraghty is truly on a roll, as we once again turn to his Morning Jolt to learn of…
Meanwhile, the public discussion about COVID-19’s origins continues to get garbled and obscured by allegedly knowledgeable people repeating flatly wrong information. Over on the Guardian, David Robert Grimes writes that:
Alternatively, there is hypothesis two: a lab leak. For this to be viable, we are obliged to add additional assumptions. We’d need to accept that the virus was engineered and subsequently released by accident or design. More damning for this narrative are the implicit temporal conditions it imposes: Wuhan, a city with a population of more than 11 million, with thriving wet markets, has millions of human-animal interactions each day, occasions when a virus could jump to humans. But the city has only a single virology lab where, accidentally or by design, everything would have to go wrong at once to yield the same result.
First, the city has two labs researching novel coronaviruses in bats, not one — the Wuhan Institute of Virology and the Wuhan Centers for Disease Control. Second, an accidentally released virus is not necessarily an engineered one. Third, for “everything to go wrong at once” requires a scratch or bite from a bat, an improperly sealed mask, improperly disposed waste, or other biological material. Lab accidents happen with unnerving regularity — “needle sticks and other through the skin exposures from sharp objects; dropped containers or spills and splashes of liquids containing pathogens; bites or scratches from infected animals; pathogens manipulated outside of a biosafety cabinet or other equipment designed to protect exposures to infectious aerosols; failure to follow safety procedures; failure or problems with personal protective equipment; mechanical or equipment failure; and failure to properly inactivate pathogens before transferring them to a lower biosafety level lab for further research.”
We’re 18 months into this pandemic; how are op-eds in major publications still making these mistakes?
Or, perhaps more accurately, why? We’re gonna go out on a limb and…
…hazard a guess. Follow the money, people, always follow the money.
Besides, it’s NOT like the ChiComs would LIE about something as important as a incredibly dangerous leak which could threaten the lives of millions.
The US government has spent the past week assessing a report of a leak at a Chinese nuclear power plant, after a French company that part owns and helps operate it warned of an “imminent radiological threat,” according to US officials and documents reviewed by CNN.
The warning included an accusation that the Chinese safety authority was raising the acceptable limits for radiation detection outside the Taishan Nuclear Power Plant in Guangdong province in order to avoid having to shut it down, according to a letter from the French company to the US Department of Energy obtained by CNN.
While US officials have deemed the situation does not currently pose a severe safety threat to workers at the plant or Chinese public, it is unusual that a foreign company would unilaterally reach out to the American government for help when its Chinese state-owned partner is yet to acknowledge a problem exists. The scenario could put the US in a complicated situation should the leak continue or become more severe without being fixed.
However, concern was significant enough that the National Security Council held multiple meetings last week as they monitored the situation, including two at the deputy level and another gathering at the assistant secretary level on Friday, which was led by NSC Senior Director for China Laura Rosenberger and Senior Director for Arms Control Mallory Stewart, according to US officials.
The Taishan Nuclear Power Plant in Guangdong Province is right next to Macau, which is right across the Pearl River Delta from Hong Kong. The whole area is effectively one sprawling mega-city that houses an astounding 65 million people, which makes it a particularly terrible place to have any kind of nuclear accident or radiation leak.
…This isn’t picking on China. This is a problem for any regime that turns acknowledging any problem or admitting any mistake into a major threat to careers, which turns those mistakes and problems into major threats to lives. Authoritarian and totalitarian regimes realize that their legitimacy does not stem from popular support, so they rely on an image of being all-knowing and all-powerful. Any screw-up undermines that image of supremacy and all-encompassing hyper-competence.Reporting a problem becomes a dangerous move that could lead to damaging the reputation of everyone involved. Thus, when something goes wrong in an authoritarian regime, the first instinct is always to deny the problem exists, then downplay how severe the consequences could be and hope that somehow, people don’t notice. The Soviet Union covered up failed safety tests before the Chernobyl disaster and then downplayed the seriousness of the crisis for days.“
“I think they were highly compromised. Clearly, they were incapable of compelling China to adhere to the treaty agreements that they have on global health, because they didn’t do that.Clearly, they allowed China to define the group of scientists that could come and investigate.“
The WHO: about as useful as a…
…along with the rest of the U.N.; not to mention every other Socialist on the planet.
“…Deggans complains that Hanks has often portrayed heroic white men on screen. But, as a white man, was he supposed to do the opposite? (And, if he had, what do we think would have been the response?) Deggans complains that, by promoting stories about the heroes of D-Day, the Apollo program, the Maersk Alabama hijacking, and other adventures, Hanks has spent a career “amplifying ideas of white American exceptionalism and heroism.” But the people Hanks has played really were heroes — which means that if Hanks were truly to “dismantle and broaden the ideas [he] helped cement in the American mind,” he would either have to lie about history, ignore it, or condemn his entire life’s work purely on the basis of his race — thereby committing the very sins that, when they are sitting in their Motte, “anti-racists” such as Deggans strenuously deny they are demanding. Perhaps anticipating this objection, Deggans concludes his litany of complaints by submitting that Hanks has failed to use his position to tell other important stories. But, even if this were true, it would still represent a trap. Tom Hanks could announce tomorrow that he intends to spend the rest of his life making films of which Eric Deggans approves, and within hours he would be accused of taking up spaces that belong to black actors, writers, producers, and directors; within days, it would be said that he was undermining important “voices of color”; and within a month, he’d be charged with possession of a “white savior complex.”
In the grand scheme of things, Eric Deggans’s view of Tom Hanks is not going to have a profound effect on the future of the United States. But the degree to which the country adopts the ideology that motivated that view most certainly will. Like Ibram X. Kendi, Deggans has adopted a Manichean worldview in which each and every person is placed on either the wrong or the right side of a set of inchoate and ever-shifting lines. That Tom Hanks, of all people, has been found wanting should tell us all we need to know about the integrity, the efficacy, and the conceivable consequences of this most peculiar and destructive of ideas.“
Here’s the juice: Once you’ve run afoul of the forces of evil, NOTHING you’ll ever do will be NEAR enough to sate their bloodlust.
Speaking of the forces of evil, courtesy of our bestest buddy Chink, Breitbart has reported the…
Sorry, but Gilday’s comments bring to mind the thoughts of Obama sycophant and then-Army Chief-of-Staff George Casey on the occasion of the Fort Hood massacre:
So here, in the words of Josey Wales, is to Michael Gilday, George Casey and the rest of their ilk who’ve put career and personal profit above country and patriotism:
Moving on, Townhall.com‘s Leah Barkoukis recounts how an…
“The Austin American-Statesman, the city’s major daily newspaper, attached an editor’s note to its story about a mass shooting over the weekend that injured at least 14 people and killed one, explaining why they couldn’t release details about the suspect’s identity.
“Police have only released a vague description of the suspected shooter as of Saturday morning,” the note said.“The American-Statesman is not including the description as it is too vague at this time to be useful in identifying the shooter and such publication could be harmful in perpetuating stereotypes. If more detailed information is released, we will update our reporting.”
In its original posting, the city of Austin’s Police Department described one suspect(s) at-large as “a black male, with dread locks, wearing a black shirt and a skinny build.”
…As Townhall‘s sister sitePJ Mediapointed out, there was nothing vague about the police’s description of the suspect, which “in fact, dramatically reduced the suspect pool in the Austin area, narrowing it down to black males wearing dreadlocks—or 50% of the 15% black population in the city, if you’re doing the math.”This would be helpful information to give the public considering the suspect was at-large…”
Not that public safety should take a backseat to perpetuating harmful stereotypes which are based on cold, hard FACTS!!!
Then there’s this septet of specially selected items sure to pique the interest of inquiring Conservative minds:
(1). In a forward from James Nichols, the Catholic News Agency informs us morning Mass was been nixed from 46*’s meeting with Pope Francis, likely over some minor issue…possibly the doddering old fool’s unswerving support for the unrestricted slaughter of the unborn.
“I expected that I was paying this fortune, all this time and energy, to learn how to think. But they are forcing you to think the way they want you to think. I realized, wow, this is insane. I thought America was different…”
“The Republican Party is vastly diminished in numbers, the leadership of the Republican Party is fractured, and the Trump wing of the party is the bulk of the party, but it makes up a significant minority of the American people.”
(6). As Best of the Web records, “to the extent that Mr. Biden is aware of where he is and what’s just happened at the polls, he must be disappointed” with the news, immediately prior to his arrival in Geneva for his smackdown from Putin, Swiss voters rejected the costly climate promises their politicians previously made. This seems to happen each and every time a country’s citizens actually see the checks Progressives are trying to write on their accounts.
(7). If you need a laugh, we suggest reading Kurt Schlichter’s latest at Townhall.com: The Coma Before the Storm. Consider this…
…a spoiler alert.
Which brings us, appropriately enough, to The Lighter Side:
Then there’s these from Balls Cotton…
…Ed Hickey…
…Marcus Aurelius…
…and Speed:Finally, we’ll call it a wrap with the Educated Idiots segment, courtesy today of a forward from James Nichols in which The Daily Wire recounts how a…
P.S. We’ll be playing in a golf tournament starting Thursday, so odds are we’ll be radio silent until Monday. ‘Til then…
Video of the Day
Courtesy of James Nichols, Tucker welcomes urban White Americans, in the words of Morpheus, to the desert of the REAL!!! Note the steps necessary to view the truth.
Tales of The Darkside
We report, YOU decide: But if 46* isn’t MORE than a little slow on the uptake, his successor isn’t a whore. That was a FULL 8-second pause to collect his scattered thoughts.
On the Lighter Side
A funeral the “Palestinians” staged for MSM consumption is interrupted by an air raid siren. Feets don’t fail me now! Hat tip to Geoff Griffith.
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