This is so refreshingly honest. The Bad People thought the lab leak might be true, therefore as journalists we couldn't be expected to actually evaluate the evidence for it. pic.twitter.com/NueOdLLAol

— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) February 27, 2023

My no-good wife brought COVID home from one of her choral groups and gave it to me. I’ve been sleeping a lot and feeling sorry for myself and took a vacation from blogging. My apologies.

"Let's declare a pandemic amnesty" pic.twitter.com/SFVttNkvkC

— George Alexopoulos (@GPrime85) November 2, 2022

Eugyppius responds to Emily Oster’s Atlantic call for a “Pandemic Amnesty.”

The people who got it right, for whatever reason, may want to gloat. Those who got it wrong, for whatever reason, may feel defensive and retrench into a position that doesn’t accord with the facts. …

We have to put these fights aside and declare a pandemic amnesty. … [W]e need to learn from our mistakes and then let them go. We need to forgive the attacks, too. Because I thought schools should reopen and argued that kids as a group were not at high risk, I was called a “teacher killer” and a “génocidaire.” It wasn’t pleasant, but feelings were high. And I certainly don’t need to dissect and rehash that time for the rest of my days.

Moving on is crucial now, because the pandemic created many problems that we still need to solve.

I’m sorry somebody called you genocidal, Emily Oster. That must’ve been tough for you. You know what’s also tough? Getting your head kicked in by riot police because you had the temerity to protest against indefinite population-wide house arrest.

Or being fired from your university job and banned in perpetuity from the premises because you uploaded a video to social media complaining about the onerous and expensive testing requirements imposed upon unvaccinated staff. Or being confined to your house and threatened with fines because of personal medical decisions that had no chance of impacting the broader course of the pandemic in the first place. But somebody called this woman genocidal in French and she’s ready to move on, so it’s all good.

Emily Oster may have said a few reasonable things in the depths of her pandemic moderation, but she can take her proposal for pandemic amnesty and shove it all the way up her ass. I’m never going to forget what these villains did to me and my friends. It is just hard to put into words how infuriating it is, to read this breezy triviliasation of the absolute hell we’ve been through, penned by some comfortable and clueless Ivy League mommyconomist who is ready to mouth support for basically any pandemic policy that doesn’t directly affect her or her family and then plead that the horrible behaviour and policies supported by her entire social milieu are just down to ignorance about the virus. We knew everything we needed to know about SARS-2 already in February 2020. The pandemicists and their supporters crossed many bright red lines in their eradicationist zeal and ruined untold millions of lives. That doesn’t all just go away now.

Hillsdale.

Jane Kitchen, despite her humble background, got into elite Seven Sisters Bryn Mawr (Kathryn Hepburn’s alma mater) with a scholarship.

It was less fun than she thought it would be, being the poor girl at a rich girl’s school, and then came COVID and a closed down campus, leaving her trapped at home. She transferred to anti-establishment, right-wing Hillsdale and evidently found happiness.

I worked hard in school. I have a single mom and we don’t have a lot of money, so I knew that I would have to score a near-full scholarship.

When I graduated high school at 16, my mom didn’t want to send me so far away so young. I enrolled in my local school, Arizona State University, and we both agreed that I could transfer out after my freshman year.

I arrived on Bryn Mawr’s campus, a Seven Sisters school in Pennsylvania, in the Fall of 2019. I was overjoyed. The campus was gorgeous, and, to this day, it is probably the most beautiful place I’ve ever seen in real life. There were gothic towers and acres of manicured lawns. I was eager to join the other nerdy girls and to find friends I’d have for life.

I’d gone to underfunded, overcrowded public schools my whole life and this was my first experience with small classes and teachers who seemed to love teaching. I took a poetry class where the professor would sing folk songs to us in the hallway as we made our way into class. I learned to write short stories from an Italian instructor who compared writing to preparing homemade pasta. I had been nervous about not being able to keep up academically, but the calculus class I took that first year was easier than the one at ASU.

Socially, it wasn’t entirely what I expected. The people at Bryn Mawr were the wealthiest and most liberal I had ever encountered. During my first week on campus, a girl I met suggested over dinner that 9/11 was justified because the United States had meddled in Middle East politics. She went on to say that the 9/11 memorial should be changed so as to show more respect to Muslims. One of the girls in my hall casually mentioned that Michelle Obama had been in a spin class she had taken in the Hamptons that summer. At first, I thought she was kidding.

I joined a sketch comedy group, which often started meetings by asking members to answer a question. One day, the question was “How is your semester going?” A few people answered directly, and then one girl said “I’m having a great semester, but I totally acknowledge that some students, especially BIPOC students, face a lot of challenges on campus.” Then, every person after her prefaced their answer by saying that students who aren’t white were probably having a worse semester than them.

I didn’t sit around with my friends all night arguing about big questions like I thought I would. It was assumed that we all agreed on the answers. But I made friends, and I loved my classes. I went to parties at nearby colleges, and I was making plans to study abroad in Ireland, which, as someone who had only left my home state twice, was a huge deal for me.

That was supposed to be in the Fall of 2020, but of course it never happened. I remember talking about the coronavirus on the way home from a party with my friend, a self-professed germaphobe, in January of 2020. She asked if I thought we should be worried. I told her that as a campus we should be more worried about binge drinking, and we both laughed. I thought that would be the end of it. Weeks later, Bryn Mawr announced that my spring semester would be held online.

The next few months were the worst of my life. Read the rest of this entry »

Yale’s next residential college should be named for Pawel Morozov, the Soviet Young Pioneer, who reported his father to the Party for hiding food. The father was sentenced to ten years in a labor camp, and ultimately executed. 13-year-old Pavel was killed by his relatives for betraying his father, and then his whole family was executed by firing squad.

The Washington Free Beacon reports that Yale has successfully adopted the Neighborly Surveillance and Reporting System that proved previously so successful in East Germany and Castro’s Cuba.

Since the beginning of the pandemic, Yale University has required all students to mask indoors in public spaces. But it was 9:30 p.m on a Saturday night, and the library was deserted. With no one within at least 150 feet of him, a Yale senior decided to relax with a movie—and without a mask.

It got him reported to the school’s COVID hotline.

According to the Yale senior, another student walked into the library and demanded he mask up. Since he didn’t have one on him, the senior said he would leave. As he was gathering his belongings, the other student pulled out her phone and began filming him. When the senior asked for her name, the student raised her middle finger and stormed off.

Two days later, he received a notice from the Yale administration that he had been reported for violating the school’s “Community Compact,” a set of rules put in place to “promote the health and safety of all community members.” The student was given 24 hours to provide the “Compact Review Committee” with “any relevant information” he would like it to consider during the official “evaluation” of his conduct. He was ultimately found guilty of a violation and threatened with a “public health withdrawal.”

“The [committee] has determined that your conduct posed a risk to the health and safety of yourself or other community members,” the university wrote the student two weeks later. “Should you continue to engage in behavior that violates the Yale Community Compact, you will be placed on Public Health Warning and may face more serious outcomes, including the removal of permission to be on campus.”

According to university documents reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon, the incident in the library took place on December 4, 2021—the same night 1,000 maskless students gathered for Yale’s annual holiday dinner. A ritzy Yale tradition that had been canceled in 2020, the dinner featured lobster-laden ice sculptures and a parade of mostly masked dining hall workers, who marched the decadent culinary spread through a packed crowd of students, according to a video posted of the evening’s festivities.

The episode offers a window into the intrusive and often inconsistent enforcement of Yale’s COVID rules, which, as one student put it, “made campus feel like a surveillance state.” The rules were put in place before the existence of vaccines but have persisted long after, relaxing or tightening as case counts fluctuate and new variants erupt.

You successful hedge fund tycoons, be sure to give Peter Salovey another $100 million, since he’s doing such a fine job.

RTWT

BEST GOVERNOR EVER!!! LOVING THE NEW AD!!! pic.twitter.com/6EuyN06urc

— il Donaldo Trumpo (@PapiTrumpo) January 21, 2022

Gerard van der Leun deserves profound thanks for laboriously copying and pasting this valuable, but enormously long series, of tweets posted fragment after fragment by someone styling himself “Hazard Harrington” on Twitter (not surprisingly since deleted — dead link) and publishing them complete.

“Make your peace with whatever comes after fancy tech. It probably involves something with a firing pin and an extractor.” — Klahn

I work in Big Tech. A name you would know and have probably used before.

Wanted to give a rundown of what it’s like from the inside right now. Obviously insanely radically leftwing. BLM/LGBTQ. Trans flags hanging in the office. Pronouns are stated before meetings. Special affiliation groups for everyone but white men. All that you’d expect.

But COVID/WorkFromHome (WFH) has totally broken people.

They are fundamentally weak, often with no social support outside of work.

They’re the people with no children, no spouse. Only a dog or cat for emotional support.

There’s constant talk, even now, about how hard things are for everyone. Often meetings start with going around the room to ask “How is everyone feeling?”

Literally, everyone else went on sad rants about their lives. “I’m so MAD a white supremacist shot 3 black men in Kenosha!”

It’s toxic. When it got to me, I said “Good.” and then a (((lady engineer))) literally proposed that we should not be allowed to answer the question positively. I shit you not.

I think it hurt her that I wasn’t as miserable as her.

She made some arguments about “vulnerability”. These people not only want you weak, they want you to expose your vulnerabilities to them so they can exploit them.

They may not intend this explicitly, but whatever twisted ideology they worship ends with this result. Read the rest of this entry »

How to Isolate the Virus.

In this outside-his-paywall-excerpt,Eugyppius argues that Coronavirus Containment has evolved into another ideological obsession of what Curtis Yarvin likes to call The Cathedral.

Many are fond of comparing Corona containment to fascism or communism, while others detect, behind the scenes, the agenda of the vapid globalists at the World Economic Forum or the United Nations. The broad phenomenon of Corona containment, it seems, can never be about the virus itself – it’s either a recurrent historical evil, or a Trojan horse for the fever dreams of Klaus Schwab. While I’d never dispute anyone’s polemical use of historical analogies, and I understand how hard it is to believe we have endured all of these absurdities because of a virus, I think it’s worth taking Corona containment seriously, as a developing ideology in its own right.

Containment is indeed overtly authoritarian, and perhaps that’s the only point that analogies to communism or fascism are trying to make. Nevertheless, these policies are not rooted in the hard authoritarianism of a Stalin or a Mussolini. Excepting the special case of China – special because it is where all of this came from – there is a markedly reduced enthusiasm for Corona restrictions beyond those places that proclaim themselves bastions of freedom and democracy. Most of the hardest-line Corona regimes are members in good standing of the liberal West, and they prefer the softer, distributed authoritarianism pioneered by liberal democracies.

The truth is that no other political system could have produced Corona containment, as we’ve experienced it. First-world democracies are anything but systems for channelling the will of the people. Instead, with the rise of mass media and mass society, they have become elaborate consensus-farming operations. Unique in history, they are governing systems that use mass media to call into being the phenomenon of public opinion, which is then shaped by a combination of propaganda and political participation into a tool of governance and consensus in its own right. The majority is thus first acclimated to the agenda of the state, and then deployed to enforce governmental directives and to repress dissidents, the non-compliant and, increasingly, even the disinterested. Corona containment is an obvious product of a system like this, depending as it does on widely distributed consensus policies that are enforced less by the police than by enthusiastic majorities deputised by journalists.

So, there is an authoritarianism here, but if we’re being pedantic, it’s of a different nature than the kind we tend to encounter in history books. It’s highly significant, and a sign of desperation, that Austria is contemplating brief prison terms for those who refuse vaccination. Austria would much prefer the soft authoritarianism it has used until now, and that most of our countries still prefer: ‘Nudge’ behavioural engineering, disingenuous media messaging, regulatory harassment, and directed public opprobrium. Taken together, these things are more insidious than blunter tactics like imprisonment; they take aim at your will and your soul, not merely your body.

What is the purpose of all this enforcement, then? While nothing any of our countries do is ever at any point about just one thing, for me the most parsimonious theory is still that the underlying, originating policies really are, at their core, about suppressing a virus. This doesn’t mean that the odious people running this circus are sincere, or that they have your best interests in mind. It’s very much the opposite.

You do not get to call yourself the party of science when you are this bad at actual science. https://t.co/DhfzP90gRv

— Hannah Cox (@HannahDCox) November 4, 2021

Mary Harrington observes that it is very possible that none other than Ayn Rand recently saved Britain from a system of vaccine passports.

Health secretary Sajid Javid announced [9/12] that the much-debated plan to introduce vaccine passports for nightclubs and other venues at the end of September was not going ahead.

Appearing on the Andrew Marr Show, Javid insisted that while the government ‘was right to look at it’ and the plan would be kept ‘in reserve’ he was pleased to say the passports would not be implemented as previously announced, adding that it was ‘a huge intrusion into people’s lives’ and ‘most people instinctively don’t like the idea’.

Javid is widely known as a fan of Ayn Rand’s brand of radical individualism, reportedly once telling Parliament’s Crossbench Film Society that he wooed his future wife by reading her passages from The Fountainhead. So perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised to find him resistant to implementing as national policy a requirement to show medical paperwork in order to do something as everyday as going clubbing.

This is all the more so when growing evidence indicates that vaccination doesn’t in fact put a stop to infection, or even transmission of the virus — it mainly reduces the severity of symptoms. If the aim is not eliminating Covid but simply ensuring healthcare systems aren’t overloaded, then provided vaccine uptake is good (as is the case in England, where 89% of over-16s have now had at least one dose) there’s no need to constrain anyone’s movement.

So this announcement feels like a breakthrough of common sense amid a slew of countries announcing vaccine passport policies.

RTWT

Fauci perjured himself while arguing with Rand Paul. A ton of documents obtained by the left-wing Intercept site demonstrate that the US Government really and truly had been funding outsourced gain-of-function biological weapons research at the Wuhan Lab in China. But Stephen L. Miller thinks Fauci’s going to get away with it. The Deep State and the Media and Big Tech will protect him.

I want to prepare you for something right off the bat — nothing is going to happen to Anthony Fauci. He’s not going to prison. He’s not going to be brought up on perjury charges. He’s going to be allowed to retire quietly from his post, with presidential honors, and slip into a cast member role on Dancing with the Stars, although The Masked Singer seems more appropriate.

Now that we’ve settled this and tempered any expectations a pitchforked mob might have, let’s examine the latest bombshell reporting from the Intercept. It claims that documents show Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, as well as the American National Institute of Health, outsourced gain-of-function research (the manipulation of protein spikes in natural-born viruses to increase transmissibility in humans) to the Wuhan Institute of Virology through a third party, EcoHealth Alliance.

This has long been suspected, as the role the United States government, and Fauci himself, has come under scrutiny amid a deadly pandemic that researchers now believe has killed around 15 million worldwide.

I want to go back to the transcript of Sen. Rand Paul’s fiery exchange with Fauci on July 20. Paul said, ‘On your last trip to our committee on May 11, you stated that the NIH has not ever and does not now fund gain of function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology. And yet, gain of function research was done entirely in the Wuhan Institute by Dr Shi and was funded by the NIH.’ Sen. Paul was referring to Fauci’s statement in front of Congress on May 11 in which he said, ‘With all due respect, you are entirely, completely incorrect,’ and continued by claiming that NIH ‘has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.’ Fauci also hedged this response by saying that he has no accounting of what the Chinese might be doing in the Wuhan lab.

According to documents obtained and viewed by Intercept reporters, we now know that Fauci’s agency and the NIH both did approve grants to EchoHealth Alliance and Peter Daszak in May 2014. The name of the project was ‘Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence.’ One of the site locations for this grant was the Wuhan Institute of Virology. At the top of the grant document, viewed by me via the Intercept’s reporting, is the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases — Fauci’s agency. Fauci can certainly claim this grant was approved without his knowledge, but that wouldn’t fit with his reputation in the media of being among the most qualified health experts in the country.

Fauci can also claim the money and research granted to EcoHealth Alliance was done without his knowledge, but emails released earlier this year show that he had a relationship with Peter Daszak, the single most mysterious person involved in any of this. (Daszak is not an American citizen so putting him in front of Congress is, needless to say, tricky.) Fauci’s only line of defense is to play on the naiveté of a media that has lionized him and continues to state that the Chinese government simply went rogue and used NIH funding for their own purposes. But that would contradict his own theory, which he stands by in the face of mounting evidence, that a bat simply flew into a bowl of soup, resulting in 15 million deaths.

RTWT

HT: Karen L. Myers.