In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

I saw a remark at one of the news aggregators that Francis Collins, the Director of the Natioinal Institutes of Health in uber-elite Bethesda and the boss of Drs Fauci and Walensky, went on the PBS News Hour last night . The main subect of the interview was "vaccine hesitancy", which for Bethesdans translates into finding a way to force the conspiracy theorists to take the shot. But then, certainly by prearrangement, Judy Woodruff brought up the subject that until a week ago had been completely taboo: [D]o you think — I mean, is it the case that, looking back on that time early in the pandemic — this was early in 2020 — that the possibility that this virus came from that lab was just not taken seriously enough? Let's keep in mind that this guy is stratospheric in the deep state, if you can get your head around that -- it's a little like the backward hierarchy in The Screwtape Letters , where the higher up a demon is in hell, the lower down he is. Collins wou...

I've always been drawn to the vocabulary of the gamblers, pimps, thieves, and con artists in Jim Thompson's noir thrillers. In that world, "frammis" has a specific meaning, roughly the structure of the whole nefarious deal, the outline of the con. The Wuhan lab leak story is fast-moving, but I think I'm beginning to see the frammis here. In 2014, the Obama White House announced a "pause" in funding for the type of gain-of-function research that led to the Wuhan lab leak. According to the NIH at that time : The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy announced(link is external) today that the U.S. government will undertake a deliberative process to assess the risks and benefits of certain gain-of-function (GOF) experiments with influenza, SARS, and MERS viruses in order to develop a new Federal policy regarding the funding of this research. . . . “GOF studies” refers to scientific research that increases the ability of any of the...

The most interesting story yesterday was the Washington Post's publication of selections from 866 pages of Dr Fauci's e-mails from March and April 2020 obtained via the Freedom of Information Act. Legacy US media has scrambled to scrub the revelations, doing its best to make them non-controversial or even slightly favorable, but among them are some fascinaing data points. Via RedState: Another email dated April 11, 2020, from Janet Tobias, CEO of Ikana Health Media, was addressed to Fauci with a cc to Patricia Conrad, NIH Special Assistant to the Chief of Staff. This email lets the cat out of the bag that Fauci allowed himself to be filmed in the midst of the pandemic response, because Robert Iger, executive chairman of The Walt Disney Companies and NatGeo, wanted to maintain momentum on an already established documentary on Fauci’s life and work. The e-mail read: “I think we have landed in the right place for the film about your life. Nat Geo, Disney, and Bob Iger him...

Over the past month, the story has gradually been emerging that the COVID virus almost certainly did not jump from bats to humans but instead was developed artificially in the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which according to Wikipedia is a research institute on virology administered by the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), which reports to the State Council of the People's Republic of China. Located in Jiangxia District, Wuhan, Hubei, it opened mainland China's first biosafety level 4 (BSL–4) laboratory. The institute has strong ties to the Galveston National Laboratory in the United States, the Centre International de Recherche en Infectiologie in France, and the National Microbiology Laboratory in Canada. Last week, a peer-reviewed paper was published in the Quarterly Review of Biophysics Discovery that made a number of "explosive" claims about the origin of the virus. According to the UK Daily Mail, Much of the work was centered around controversial...

Last week's plea deal for the jail guards who were asleep while Epstein hanged himself in his cell has revived interest in whether he was murdered or a suicide. I've already weighed in, it was suicide. But if it was a hit, it would be a potentially explosive development, a scandal with wide-ranging repercussions. What would be the benefit of a move with such a huge downside risk? More than a few people wouls have to be involved, and the chances they'd all keep quiet would be slim. So let's say the initiative for such a conspiracy came from someone with so much to lose that the downside if the conspiracy came to light would be less than the downside if some much bigger secret came out -- a secret that only Epstein could know about, and so big that he had to be eliminated to keep it. So who might that person be, and what might the secret be? The best we know of Epstein's scam from the mid-1990s until his 2008 guilty plea was that he ran a blackmail operation tha...

I've been saying all along that we've been in a moral panic, and I think it's just about run its course. That doesn't mean we won't continue to see local outbreaks of one sort or another, but I think the country in general is George Floyded out. A current late-phase local outbreak stems from an old, pre-panic device, the noose, or as some accounts now put it, the "apparent noose". These have kept popping up over the past several decades, but they're all almost immediately discredited as hoaxes or misunderstandings. This latest noose brouhaha is at an Amazon construction site in Windsor, CT. According to the New York Post , Amazon halted construction at a facility in Windsor, Connecticut for the second time in as many weeks on Wednesday — after an apparent noose was found in the building for the eighth time in recent weeks. Workers found a red rope “with a noose tied at the end” entangled in yellow electrical cables on the 5th floor of th...

One of the first academic postmortems onthe COVID response indicates that masking was ineffective: The first ecological study of mask mandates in U.S. states released by the University of Louisville finds mask mandates were not effective at slowing the spread of coronavirus (Covid-19), meaning they did not work. The results challenge the prevailing wisdom of pandemic policy that continues to dominate corporate media narrative and policy-makers. Damian D. Guerra (Biology at University of Louisville) and Daniel J. Guerra (Biochemistry at VerEvMed, Clarkston) hypothesized that statewide mask mandates and mask use would be “associated with lower COVID-19 case growth rates” in the U.S. However, after calculating total COVID-19 case growth and mask use, the authors of the study entitled “Mask mandate and use efficacy in state-level COVID-19 containment” stated “case growth was not significantly different between mandate and non-mandate states at low or high transmission rates, and ...