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.

Oprea Buffa

Update: Hi MBRU readers! Make yourselves at home!

Jean-Léon Gérôme, The Marabout: In the Harem Bath (1889). Via AlonzaKaim.com.

Megan Grace Oprea at The Federalist setting us straight on Orientalism:

Edward Said popularized this term in his 1978 post-colonial work Orientalism. According to many of my colleagues, an orientalist is a person who writes about the Middle East from a “western perspective,” which is when one does not unquestioningly support and affirm Middle Eastern and Islamic culture. This does not mean that westerners are excluded from writing about the Middle East and Islam. A westerner can do so successfully so long as their research is void of criticism. 

Oh, no, dear me, what "colleagues" (at the UT-Austin French department?) told you that? Orientalism does not present itself with a harsh critique but an affectionate smile. Orientalism adores the East, its fragrant and languorous beauty. Orientalism wants to put a harem wall around the whole delicious continent! Orientalists don't criticize the East, for heaven's sake, what for? They're only children, after all, really, though undoubtedly hot-tempered and given to knives and garrotes and poison, and also astonishingly sexy. Orientalists love Orientals the way Donald Trump loves women: he would never say anything unkind about them, unless they did something ugly and disturbed his fantasy about how dreamily acquiescent and mysteriously lovely they are.

Orientalists just think Orientals shouldn't write about anything. Why trouble their lovely, empty little heads? It'll just put frown lines on those sleek complexions.

Anyway, you don't have to worry about anybody calling you an Orientalist, with your record. They'll just call you a racist without the complications.

Orientalism

Thugs strangling a traveler, early 19th century. Via Wikipedia.

You might not think it, but I do get embarrassed sometimes at how little I have to say that's critical about President Obama. It's partly because I'm so continually appalled at the attacks on him and their overtly racist character; as Melissa Harris-Perry was suggesting a few weeks ago, his presidency is in a lot of ways more important than he is himself. And then I'm not seeing a lot of practicable alternatives to his management, in the current situation in the United States, with a paralyzed legislature and a poisoned Supreme Court and a rotten and poorly informed political press and a rogue intelligence community that, I'm convinced, defies him; Obama is so much the least objectionable part of our establishment, and we ought to be trying to strengthen his hand against the rest of it.

Intellectually, though, he can be pretty ordinary or unimaginative (who can't?), and this bit of analysis from Professor Cole on the situation in Iraq and Syria struck me as kind of important: