For the Record: Lab Leak

Philippine pangolin pup curled up with its mom, via Wikipedia. 

Matt Taibbi, pushing a report by his "Twitter Files" coconspirator Michael Shellenberger (best known for his work in the crusade on behalf of the despised plastic straw in his 2020 book Apocalypse Never)

Michael Shellenberger’s Public today released a blockbuster story, “First Person Sickened By COVID-19 Was Chinese Scientist Who Oversaw “Gain Of Function” Research That Created Virus,” which generously credits Racket. The story cites three government officials in naming scientist Ben Hu, who was in charge of “gain-of-function” research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, as the “patient zero” of the Covid-19 pandemic.

This is a major story, contradicting early official explanations pointing to zoonotic cross-species “spillover” at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan, colloquially known as the Wuhan wet market. The mystery bat or pangolin suspected of transmitting the disease to humans at that market was never found. The Public story for the first time asserts the source of contamination: a Wuhan Institute scientist fell ill after exposure to a virus engineered at his place of work.

Well, engineered or not engineered, according to the same story, since it also suggests (with pix!) Hu didn't use enough protective gear when he was working with naturally occurring bat and pangolin viruses, so he could just as easily have gotten sick, if he did, from a virus his colleagues brought to the lab from the wild.

For the Record: The Twitter Files

There's just so much news flooding in before I can absorb it, I'm thinking maybe I just have to resign myself to being a week or so behind on everything. I don't want to let go of the efforts of Mr. Musk's Kancelculture Kids to expose the woke leftist FBI's brutal censorship efforts at Twitter, where they succeeded in silencing the entire NewsCorp organization for [checks notes] a full day before Twitter changed its mind and its policy, in October 2020, nearly spoiling Rupert's special October Surprise revelations of Shirtless Hunter. 

Installment #7 of "The Twitter Files", by noted plastic straw advocate Michael Shellenberger, showed up on Tuesday to defend the story he, Weiss, and Taibbi have been developing: 

It's not at all clear that it's "wholly accurate" https://t.co/6uLpGTzSMv https://t.co/qEEXqxJzrM

— Yas is at post.news/yastreblyansky but still here (@Yastreblyansky) December 20, 2022

I mean, for one thing, the story of the blind computer repairman John Paul Mac Isaac turning the laptop over to the FBI was dodgy enough, the way Mac Isaac told it:

Narratology: From the #TwitterFiles

 The Republican noise machine, including this putz, a former reporter who got fired from BuzzFeed in 2014 after 41 of his stories were busted for plagiarism, now reinvented aa a podcaster for "God, Family, America", with gigs on NewsMax, Parler, and Charlie Kirk's Turning Point USA (coincidentally I just removed him from my Twitter yesterday in my #ProjectMute program, which is why I know all this at the moment), is shocked! shocked! to learn that Twitter's Trust and Safety officers were meeting regularly with the FBI during the 2020 election campaign. 

This from the #TwitterFiles "investigation" being carried out by famous independent journalists Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss ("investigation" in scare quotes because the investigating seems to consist basically of reading the stuff Mr. Musk gives them and trying to squeeze it into some kind of narrative arc).

Pretty sinister, huh? And Twitter's deputy general counsel at the time, Jim Baker, used to be

Literary Corner: Meat Mountain

 

Revelation

by Donald J. Trump, 45th President of the United States of America

So, with the revelation
of MASSIVE & WIDESPREAD FRAUD
& DECEPTION in working closely
with Big Tech Companies, the DNC, 
& the Democrat Party, do you throw
the Presidential Election Results of 2020
OUT and declare the RIGHTFUL WINNER, or
do you have a NEW ELECTION? A Massive Fraud
of this type and magnitude allows for the
termination of all rules, regulations, and articles,
even those found in the Constitution. Our great
"Founders" did not want, and would not condone,
False & Fraudulent Elections!

Sir, this is an Arby's, and today's Meat Mountain is penis.

Namely, the prodigal penis of presidents' progeny (sing it in rolling hexameters, Muse, and lubriciously!), of which somebody (I assume connected with Rudy Giuliani) posted a photo on Twitter during the 2020 presidential campaign. Intrepid journalist Matt Taibbi has discovered (actually no, he didn't discover anything; the assignment editor, Mr. Musk, gave him the relevant documents) that the Biden campaign asked Twitter to pull the picture, and Twitter obliged, after some earnest in-house debate, on the grounds that Twitter rules forbid the publication of hacked material, which seems like as good a reason as any.

Apparently Retired Emperor Trump believes this was the decisive moment of the whole campaign—deprived of a chance to look at that cockshot, America's voters, or at least the Twitter users, lost their ability to make a decision and stumbled blindly into voting for Biden instead, with the deplorable results we all know (I see he's slipped back into admitting he didn't get as many votes as Biden, that's nice). That's the massive and widespread fraud and deception we're talking about, the collusion between Democrats and Big Tech, violating Giuliani's freedom of speech, invalidating the whole election, and abrogating the Constitution. 

And apparently Taibbi and his assignment editor, Mr. Musk, believe it too, though they don't seem to offer any clear ideas on who would throw out the 2020 election and reinstall Trump in the White House—former Vice President Pence? General Mike Flynn? Maybe the House can elect Trump Speaker in January and then Biden and Harris can resign so Trump becomes president automatically. I'm sure everybody will agree with that, and Biden owes it to us, since it's all his fault. It's what the "Founders" would want, scare quotes and all. Biden's always talking about unifying the country, why doesn't he do something?

Did I just endorse Clinton?

Age becomes her, too. The face of somebody who doesn't stop learning. Via US News.

BooMan and Steve M are both calling our attention to Matt Taibbi's piece in Rolling Stone bemoaning his boss's decision to endorse Hillary Clinton's candidacy for the presidency, in disregard, Taibbi thinks, of the magazine's usual commitment to "championing the 'youth vote'" (Taibbi's interior scare quotes there). BooMan is all

I'd rather walk on glass than write a point-by-point rebuttal.... But that's exactly what's required. It's required not because Taibbi's argument isn't mostly supportable and well made. It's just that his telling of the history is so consistently one-sided that it cumulatively amounts to a bad distortion of the facts. It's a lawyer's case rather than the synthesis of both the prosecution and the defense. A jury really should hear both.

I don't even think it's that well made. It's certainly propaganda, though.

I can't blame Boo for not trying, really. It's horribly dispiriting work. That's partly in the nature of the brief for the defense, that it's intrinsically defensive. You're not making the positive statement ,"My client, ladies and gentlemen, is awesome!" but the negative statement, "However bad it looks, she didn't do it," and there's no way to feel really good about that. And then Boo just hasn't ever really learned to like her much.

Which is not exactly my problem. I've liked her a lot, off and on, over the years, especially when Republicans were attacking her, which was of course ceaselessly. I liked the cookie-baking comment and the health care plan and the Suha Arafat embrace. As a New Yorker, I very much liked her "listening campaign" in the 2000 senatorial campaign (she's doing some of that again this season but the media are refusing to know about it), and the way she set about learning how to be a good senator after the election, with such quiet, keep-your-head-down diligence. I've never confused her with Bill Clinton (they're only related by marriage, you know), who has strengths and weaknesses of his own. I'd have voted for her over Obama in the 2008 contest if she'd only apologized for that AUMF vote (as she now has), because I thought she was generally more progressive than he was, as well as being more progressive than Bill from the start of her Senate career, and less beholden to the bankers than either of them.