Whether lab or market origin, anyone trying to cover for China should remember both scenarios are humiliating for the Chinese government.

The only Covid narrative that doesn’t directly aim to control people has to do with determining the origin of SARS-CoV-2. Discovering the origin of the virus should have been a top priority, but it was not. Why? Perhaps, instead of controlling people, the goal in this case was to cover for complicit behavior.

There are only two plausible competing virus origin hypotheses: “lab leak” and “wet market.” Instead of imploring scientists to work together and discover the truth, then-National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins wrote in an email to presidential medical advisor Anthony Fauci early in the pandemic: “Wondering if there is something NIH can do to help put down this very destructive conspiracy [i.e., ‘lab leak’], with what seems to be growing momentum.”

Knowing that SARS-CoV-1 leaked from a Chinese lab on at least two occasions in the early 2000s, why would Collins and Fauci be so quick to “put down” the lab leak hypothesis? //

Either way, whether lab or market origin, anyone trying to cover for China apparently must be reminded that both scenarios are humiliating for the Chinese government. Both represent extremely careless and unhygienic behavior, especially considering that wet markets are places where endangered animals like pangolins are slaughtered for completely unscientific medicines.

The difference, of course, is that the lab scenario also implicates powerful interests in the United States. Thus, it’s not difficult to understand why stifling the lab leak would be important to those in power.

Covid caused those in power to react to events that they had little to no influence over with narratives designed to give the illusion of taking control of the situation. What makes this pandemic different are the tools available to control the narratives, namely the addition of Big Tech and their willingness to suppress debate.

Still, the truism noted by Aldous Huxley that “facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored” remains. The challenge is to ensure that people in our society are never too intimidated to offer counter-narratives or debate the edicts from those with power. ///

If the origins were not a lab leak, would there not be more interest in confirming that it was not not? The amount of effort out into dismissing the lab leak origin suggests there is something there.

Francis Collins may very well be a believer and a good follower of Christ, but that does not mean that he is not a sinner and a flawed man, just like all of us. It also does not mean that he shares the same morals or morés as other Christians, including oneself. Without knowing someone personally and knowing something of their heart, "Christians" in positions of power should be treated with the same disinterested suspicion as any other politician.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s long history of abusing its power is once again prominent amid the continued expose by Special Counsel John Durham. His prosecution is demonstrating the FBI’s use of its power to deploy federal intelligence assets against political opponents of Democrats.

The FBI routinely intervenes in politics, such as when the FBI assisted the Hillary Clinton campaign in painting former President Donald Trump as a Russian intelligence asset, as Durham’s investigation is emphasizing with more evidence. By getting a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrant on Carter Page, the FBI also likely spied on Trump and his inner circle via something called the two-hop rule.

Stunningly, it appears the FBI’s animus for Trump was rooted in disagreements about the foreign policy that Trump campaigned on. Spygate, however, is only a more recent manifestation of a long history of FBI abuses that Congress must rein in as soon as possible. //

When breaking up the FBI, locate the headquarters of those agencies across America, especially in the Midwest, rustbelt, and southeastern United States. The organized crime agency can be placed in Indiana, the counterterrorism agency in Raleigh, North Carolina, and the anti-human trafficking agency in Kansas City. The heads of all these new, smaller, agencies will still be appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate.

The upside is obvious. The FBI’s roughly $10 billion budget can be apportioned across these agencies, but the creation of separate agencies allows Congress much more control over funding. //

In other words, this new framework would create more direct and less opaque accountability to Congress and the president. This then would allow the public—who are actually smarter than the politicians—to better hold the government accountable.

The public would be stunned to know how little our federal government spends on measures to fight against trafficking and child exploitation. The public would also be stunned to know how much more we are spending on entrapping people in the name of fighting “domestic terrorism,” which the public would rightly judge far less a problem than the human trafficking problem. So let the sunlight in. //

The whole point of America’s founding documents is that too much power concentrated in too few hands is always corrupting, especially when this power is unaccountable to the people. The D.C. bureaucracy and specifically the intelligence agencies have long become powers unto themselves, and a threat to our democracy. The FBI is a poster child for this perversion of our system, and no political movement will save our democratic republic without reforming it.

The flaws of an old hypothetical also illuminate the weakness of contemporary arguments for abortion grounded on claims of bodily autonomy.

Judith Jarvis Thompson’s hypothetical: If you were kidnapped and used as a life-support system for an ailing virtuoso, would you have the right to disconnect him? Nonetheless, its argument from autonomy is, if anything, now more central to the case for abortion.

This emphasis is largely a byproduct of the ultrasound pictures on our fridges and social media feeds. It is difficult to dismiss human lives in utero as worthless clumps of cells when you can count their fingers and look at their faces. So abortion supporters increasingly echo Thompson’s claim that no one should be compelled to sustain another person, whether violinist or fetus. Thus, a woman has an absolute right to violently end the human life developing in her womb. //

The violinist scenario is a hypothetical freak of medicine, whereas pregnancy is the normal reality of human reproduction. This normalcy, in turn, reminds us that we were all once utterly dependent in utero, and that most of us will be dependent again, whether from illness, injury, or old age. In short, we are all the violinist.

Human solidarity recognizes this shared dependence. Ignoring it, or trying to avoid it, has been a great failure of the liberal political tradition. Liberal discourse privileges independent, rational adults (or at least adults who imagine themselves such). But independent, rational adults don’t need solidarity, they need a non-aggression pact and mechanisms for conflict resolution—which is what classical liberal theorists such as John Locke sought to provide. //

Abortion’s dissolution of family solidarity poisons everything. Abortion culture encourages men and women to use each other rather than to love each other. Abortion culture teaches us to treat children as expensive commodities, rather than welcoming them as blessings. //

Family requires solidarity, which abortion destroys, both directly by violently ending unborn lives and indirectly through the culture this enables and encourages. And when solidarity decays within family life, it will not endure socially or politically.

This is why the promises of abortion advocates have proven false. Thompson’s weird hypothetical invites us to disconnect the violinist, but abortion disconnects all of us from the love and solidarity that enable genuine human flourishing.

Last Thursday, something extraordinary happened: A senior HSBC banker, Stuart Kirk, told the world that climate change, though real, is not something financial markets need worry about. “Unsubstantiated, shrill, apocalyptic warnings are ALWAYS wrong,” one of Kirk’s presentation slides read.

The reaction was instantaneous. Christiana Figueres, former head of the United Nations climate secretariat, denounced Kirk’s remarks as “abhorrently outrageous,” words that might well describe Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine — but a banker’s presentation analyzing climate financial risk for what it is?

Four hundred years ago, people were burnt at the stake for believing the wrong things about religion. Today, they get fired for questioning the climate-change catechism.

Figueres demanded HSBC immediately cleanse itself of Kirk’s remarks and fire the climate heretic. “I do not agree — at all — with the remarks made at last week’s FT Moral Money Summit,” bank chief executive Noel Quinn duly declared, avoiding any mention of Kirk by name. “I am determined that our team won’t be distracted by last week’s comments.” On Monday, it emerged HSBC had suspended Kirk.

Kirk’s problem is that he is telling the truth, one contrary to the central tenet of environmental, social and governance (ESG) investing — which holds that it is the duty of finance and business to save the world from a planetary catastrophe. In his presentation, Kirk complained about his team being buried in an avalanche of climate-risk reporting.

Article 2 of the 2015 Paris climate agreement has the objective of “making finance flows consistent with a pathway towards low” emissions. As a result, central banks and financial regulators are using every regulatory weapon in their armories to suppress investment in fossil fuels and direct capital flows toward renewables like wind and solar.

Their weapon of choice is the spurious but plausible-sounding notion of climate-related financial risk. In reality, modern economies are remarkably resilient against extreme weather. “How Bad Are Weather Disasters for Banks?” a November 2021 paper by Federal Reserve Bank of New York staff asked. The answer: “Not very.” Federal Emergency Management Agency-level disasters over the last quarter-century had insignificant or small impact on banks’ performance.

In a rational world, this finding would be welcomed. But that would be to miss the point. It is not the reality of climate resiliency that matters but the use of climate risk to push financing flows in the direction of net zero. “There’s a lot to like about climate stress tests,” Federal Reserve chair Jay Powell exclaimed at a Green Swan conference of central bankers and regulators last year. //

The need to hype up climate alarm to drive investment flows to net zero comes at a bigger cost than Stuart Kirk’s job. Painfully high oil and natural-gas prices are hurting consumers and businesses and pushing up the cost of food. Normally, high prices would trigger more investment and more output that would help bring prices down. Not this time. Wall Street — with the full support of the Fed and bank regulators — is stomping down on investment in oil and gas. That’s not just hurting the little guy. It’s hurting the Biden administration and the Democrats.

Two months ago, Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm was begging oil executives to invest. “I hope your investors are saying these words to you as well: In this moment of crisis, we need more supply,” Granholm told them. “Right now, we need oil and gas production to rise to meet current demand.”

It could well be that woke bankers on Wall Street — backed to the hilt by purveyors of scary climate scenarios in the Fed, financial regulators and the media — help sink Democrats’ election hopes in the November midterms.

here we are some 14 months since all the “Jim Crow” smears about the state that came from the likes of President Joe Biden, 2022 Georgia Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, Sen. Raphael Warnock and others, and the claims have proven to be demonstrably false, seeing as early primary voting numbers are setting records in the state, with increases in the triple digits in comparison to other recent gubernatorial and presidential primaries: //

The Secretary of State’s office says these numbers show a 168% increase in early voting turnout from the last gubernatorial primary in 2018 and 212% increase from the last presidential primary in 2020.

“Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people”. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

– John Adams

“But a Constitution of Government once changed from Freedom, can never be restored. Liberty, once lost, is lost forever.”

– John Adams

“…Cities may be rebuilt, and a People reduced to Poverty, may acquire fresh Property: But a Constitution of Government once changed from Freedom, can never be restored.

– John Adams

The Colonel Rides the Buffer.

Back in 2004, having come back from the desert twenty pounds and one wife lighter, I bought a small little place over in Largo, Florida where I had found post deployment work in the private sector. It was a pretty decent little house. With no spouse and an all-of-the-sudden bit of extra time on my hands, I decided to fix up the place. The first thing that had to go, was that nasty, puke colored carpet. Tearing it out and having it replaced was going to be time consuming and fairly expensive. However, once again I was reminded that God takes care of fools and drunks, and as all my friends, acquaintances and Class-B Dependents know, I am well qualified in both categories. //

cmdr_burr
6 hours ago
Ha ha! Great story, Colonel! Takes me back to my enlisted days, when, as an E-3, I was assigned to buff a passageway (with no prior instruction). I got whacked in the 'nads right off the bat (but only once).

Nos Nevets

Only once! Castrated, huh?

Pointy Haired boss: I hear we need more eunuch programmers.
Dilbert: That's "UNIX".
PHB: Oh. If the company nurse comes by, tell her nevermind.

How can the Biden team claim that they are doing everything they can to bring down gas prices, if they continue on the path they have been on since Joe Biden came in — being anti-energy?

Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-AK), who comes from the oil-rich state of Alaska, blew the whistle on that by listing what the Biden Administration has done, just in the last three weeks that has impeded oil and gas production during his questioning of Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm. //

“There has been a comprehensive hostility to the energy sector by this Administration,” Sullivan declared. “I watch it every day.” Sullivan detailed how prolific Alaska is for oil. But the Biden Administration and Sec. Haaland has taken half the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska (NPRA) designated by Congress for oil and gas drilling “off the table.”

“That is not focused on increasing supply,” Sullivan said. Sullivan’s second example was Cook Inlet Basin. At the last minute, Biden canceled the lease sale,

Sullivan explained. “That is exactly the opposite of getting supply on the market.”

Finally, there was the new Council on Environmental Quality NEPA regulations that Sullivan said were meant “to kill the production of American energy.”

“That’s what you guys just did,” Sullivan concluded. “Do you have a response to any of this?” He said Biden, from day one, wanted to stop everything in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR), but he can’t do that because Congress has decided there should be two lease sales there. He can’t stop it.

Granholm had no real response. She couldn’t, since it was all true. Her response was basically, “It’s not my lane.” //

Sullivan then asked her another, surprising question: why — when so many of our allies want to buy LNG (Liquid Natural Gas) from us — would the climate czar be discouraging our Japanese allies from purchasing from us? //

These exchanges between members of Congress versus Biden team people show a big problem here. If it was just about doing what was best for the environment, they wouldn’t be reaching out to Venezuela; they’d want to produce the oil here because that would be better for the environment. So, it’s not just about the environment; it’s about cutting our production. That’s why they don’t want new leases and that’s why John Kerry would be sabotaging our LNG sales.

The nuclear power industry has been pushing the fantasy of yet another “renaissance” of nuclear power, based on the absurd idea that atomic reactors — which operate at 571 degrees Fahrenheit, produce substantial greenhouse gas emissions and, periodically, explosions — can somehow cool the planet. //

As a green power advocate since 1973, I’ve visited dozens of reactor sites throughout the U.S. and Japan. The industry’s backers portray them as high-tech black boxes that are uniformly safe, efficient and reliable, ready to hum for decades without melt-downs, blow-ups or the constant emissions of heat, radiation, chemical pollution and eco-devastation that plague us all.

In reality, the global reactor fleet is riddled with widely varied and increasingly dangerous defects. These range from inherent design flaws to original construction errors, faulty components, fake replacement parts, stress-damaged (“embrittled”) pressure vessels, cracked piping, inoperable safety systems, crumbling concrete, lethal vulnerabilities to floods, storms and earthquakes, corporate greed and unmanageable radioactive emissions and wastes — to name a few.

Heat, radiation and steam have pounded every reactor’s internal components. They are cracked, warped, morphed and transmuted into rickety fossils virtually certain to shatter in the next meltdown. //

Today, the utility’s two uninsured Diablo Canyon reactors threaten more than ten million people living downwind with potential catastrophes made possible by any of a dozen nearby earthquake faults (including the San Andreas). [All nuclear power plants are insured by the federal government] //

Desperate atomic cultists including Bill Gates are now touting small modular reactors. But they’re unproven, can’t deploy for years to come, can’t be guarded against terrorists and can’t beat renewables in safety, speed to build, climate impacts, price or job creation.

Our energy future should consist of modern solar, wind, battery and LED/efficiency technologies, not nuclear reactors. Let’s work to guarantee that none of them explode before we get there. //

Uneducated article.
The entire preface of the article is predicated around fear, uncertainty, and doubt; evidently motivated by emotions instead of factual information.

Not a single compelling argument against nuclear has been made here - move along.

JOËL LANGLOIS 23 HOURS AGO //

Saying No to Nuclear Power is what brought us the Climate Crisis
It is increasingly apparent that solar, wind, batteries & efficiency cannot provide a complete solution to decarbonise the grid. Anti-nuclear campaigners have promised this for the past 50 years but it is an unattainable goal. Such dogma has simply prolonged the use of fossil fuel, causing millions of avoidable deaths. We could, and should, have decarbonised the grid with nuclear power in the 20th century.

Even if batteries could someday work on the required scale, for the lengthy durations needed, they have a far, far higher environmental footprint than nuclear power. The recent UN report on Life Cycle Assessment of Electricity Generation Options shows (p35 ) that electricity from batteries has a carbon footprint of 175 g CO2/kWh. Whereas nuclear's footprint is only 5g. (p74). The same document shows solar emits 11-37g, and wind 12-14g. Batteries are simply not sustainable as a large-scale alternative to nuclear baseload.

The evidence shows nuclear energy has significantly lower environmental impacts than wind and solar. Lower carbon emissions, lower freshwater pollution (eutrophication), lower carcinogenic effects, lower land use, and lower consumption of metals & minerals.

When it comes to clean energy production nuclear power should really be the first choice for any environmentalist.

https://unece.org/sites/default/files/2021-10/LCA-2.pdf

COLIN GLASGOW 1 DAY AGO

inflation’s causes are to be found in the government increasing the supply of money and credit to fuel general demand for goods and services—to an extent that exceeds the economy's productive capacities. This is the culprit. This is why it feels like we’re paying more for less. //

All of which underscores the all-important point that neither businesses nor the Russian president nor greedy hedge-fund managers nor greedy tech barons nor greedy CEOs nor mean, politically incorrect people who don’t employ the correct hashtags print money. The federal government does that.

So let’s be clear: politicians, who are not very good at much, are supremely good at deflecting blame. And that’s what this is. This shouldn’t come as a surprise. The same people who underreport inflation’s impact on Americans shouldn’t be expected to acknowledge that it was their decisions that landed us in hot water in the first place. Unfortunately, it is those people—the policymaking failures who run the government—who are now charged with getting us out of it.

“When the soul enters the body, when life begins—I don’t have certainty on that,” he said. “And yet, you look around society, people seem to have a lot of certainty about that, and then total confusion as to how to deal with people with psychosis. They’ve got it completely upside down.” It boggled his mind that the other candidates running for governor were 100-percent certain about what they couldn’t know, and weirdly unsure about how to fix things that could be fixed.

“Politics should be a means to an end of a good society,” Shellenberger said. “They’re making it the end.” He was referring to the homeless activists who were his nemesis, but he could have been talking about the environmentalists or the pro-lifers in the desert. “Their real goal is control and moralizing and power. Mine is freedom, care, civilization.”

How long after getting COVID can you be reinfected?
This is another complicated question — especially for sufferers of long COVID, who appear to harbor low, even undetectable levels of the virus for weeks and months. For mild to moderate cases, people who test positive for COVID can expect their infection to clear within five to 10 days after their symptoms arose, or since their confirmed test result.

Nascent research suggests that the average immune system can fend off COVID reinfection for three to five months after the previous bout. That’s why, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, people who had a confirmed infection within the previous 90 days are not expected to quarantine after coming in contact with another infected individual.

But all bets are off about six months later, when antibodies are known to start waning — regardless of vaccination

Click this link to stop your GSuite account from being shut down! We're serious. //

Google finally launched a solution for people with "legacy" GSuite Google accounts. After initially threatening to shut down free GSuite accounts if users didn't start paying for the service, Google has completely backed off. Once users jump through some sign-up hoops, Google will allow their ~16-year-old accounts to continue functioning. You'll even get to keep your email address. //

The deadline to opt out of an account shutdown, which has changed several times now, is June 27, 2022. If you don't complete this opt out by June 27, you will be automatically billed for Workspace. If you don't have a card on file and don't opt out, your account will be suspended on August 1 and shut down.

The automatic enrollment and billing, without explicit user consent, is one of the wilder parts of this story. If you don't closely follow the tech news scene, there's a good chance you won't know this is coming, and you will either suddenly be billed without your consent or find that your Google account has suddenly stopped working.

For a company whose key business pillar is convincing users to store vast amounts of data on its servers, playing games like this is a bizarre decision. At least it came to a reasonable conclusion.

Benny Johnson @bennyjohnson
Elon Musk says he will vote Republican for FIRST time EVER after absolutely SAVAGING Joe Brandon in brutal roast

12:54 PM · May 17, 2022

Musk attacked the “left-wing bias” of Twitter, which Project Veritas confirmed with a damning video they just released. He said that it wasn’t going to be a “right-wing takeover” of Twitter, but a “moderate-wing takeover,” so that all could express themselves in the “digital town square. That’s what the right has been celebrating — just the idea of basic fairness, not being banned for political belief, not having information suppressed because it doesn’t serve the Democratic political narrative. //

But unlike some on the left, Musk even takes people coming back at him and attacking him as a part of the landscape, saying he shouldn’t be able to control everything; he wouldn’t want to be able to stop people from criticizing him. Now, that’s the right attitude to have, and it means he truly gets the concept of free speech that he’s fighting for — that even those who would go after him get to speak. If he can achieve that, then it truly is a “town square.” //

Elon Musk @elonmusk
20% fake/spam accounts, while 4 times what Twitter claims, could be much higher.

My offer was based on Twitter’s SEC filings being accurate.

Yesterday, Twitter’s CEO publicly refused to show proof of <5%.

This deal cannot move forward until he does.
3:32 AM · May 17, 2022

As I’ve mentioned before, my gut feeling is that Putin sees himself as the smartest guy he knows and has unshakable faith in his ability to maneuver. You can easily imagine Putin, rather than Barack Obama, saying, “I think that I’m a better speechwriter than my speechwriters. I know more about policies on any particular issue than my policy directors. And I’ll tell you right now that I’m gonna think I’m a better political director than my political director.” That kind of hubris and a realization that one’s political life, or real life, might depend upon a successful military outcome could easily lure a politician into deciding that he’s a better general than his generals.

The bill exemplifies a liberal mindset, one not confined to California, of vapid virtue signaling over measures genuinely effective in shattering the glass ceiling. Increasing female participation at a high corporate level does not start by demanding inclusion regardless of qualification. Instead, it begins at the grassroots level. The wise business finds and develops talent within itself. An employee well versed in a company’s purpose and methodology is that company’s greatest asset. Gender plays no role in job qualification, pro or con. White knighting while wearing aluminum foil armor on behalf of businesswomen benefits no one. In capitalism, the best companies and accompanying employees are known for their success. The best anti-discriminatory path the government can take is getting out of the way. But, playing the faith healer who met the blind person and sent them away lame is what government does best.

What began as a straightforward U.S. policy of arming the Ukrainians has expanded into a dangerous and rapid escalation. //

Now, instead of simply helping Ukraine stave off invasion and conquest, U.S. policy seems to have shifted into something else entirely: the permanent weakening of Russia at any cost. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said so explicitly after a clandestine visit to Ukraine with Secretary of State Anthony Blinken last month. //

All of this amounts to a major policy shift on the part of the United States, writes Stevenson: “Whereas once the primary Western objective was to defend against the invasion, it has become the permanent strategic attrition of Russia.” This shift, he adds, has “coincided with the abandonment of diplomatic efforts.”

So what possible strategic gain does bleeding Russia in Ukraine hold for the United States? The risks of pursuing such a policy are immense, including the possibility of nuclear war between the world’s top two nuclear powers. If the Biden administration has some overarching goal in mind, it has not bothered to tell the American people. Instead, we are trundling along the road to war as if every decision we make is simply a reaction to Russian aggression.

But in fact, the war itself has shifted dramatically since late February, and conditions now are arguably more favorable to a cease-fire and a negotiated political settlement than they were even a month ago.

Despite machinations attempting to hide the full truth of how Spygate conspiracies to entrap Donald Trump were spun, lots will come out into the open.

Captured Russian soldiers have accused their commanders of killing their own wounded troops rather than recovering them from the battlefield and sending them for treatment.

In a harrowing account to Ukrainian journalist Volodymyr Zolkin, the young intelligence soldiers described how one lieutenant colonel asked a wounded comrade if he could walk, the Mirror reported.

When the badly injured soldier replied that he could not, the high-ranking officer reportedly shot him – as well as several others — dead.

Another soldier told Zolkin, who has reported about Russian prisoners for Open Media Ukraine, that officers have “finished off their wounded.”

When the journalist asked him to elaborate, the soldier answered: “Just like that … a wounded soldier is lying on the ground, and a battalion commander shoots him dead from a gun,” according to the outlet.

“It was a young man, he was wounded,” he added. “He was on the ground. He was asked if he could walk, so he was shot dead with a gun.”

Finland formally declared its intent to join NATO Sunday as the historically neutral nation seeks to bolster its security amid Russia’s ongoing incursion into Ukraine.

The nation of roughly 5 million people shares a long border with Russia and the move is likely to escalate already searing regional tensions. //

Finland has been independent since 1917 and entered neutral status after a 1948 treaty with the Soviet Union.

The Nordic nation has a more than 800-mile border with Russia.