Why Are The Commercials So White?

My wife and I record the TV programs we like and watch them the following night so we can fast-forward through the commercials. Still, this is an imprecise exercise, and it's still possible to be slow to initiate the fast forward or stop it too soon, so you still see some, which continues to convince me that the commercials alone on TV will lower your IQ by 20 points. (This reminds me that once on a plane, surrounded by a family with screaming kids, I gently reminded the mother that "studies show that if you allow your children to scream, it lowers their IQ by 20 points." She became very flustered and immediately began to shush them.)

Anyhow, trying to fast-forward through the commercials last night, I inadvertently glimpsed several. It suddenly dawned on me that, save the very occasional token African-American, everyone on every commercial was white. And not just sorta-kinda white, uber white, Aryan white, blonde, clear-skinned, trim, prosperous, and smiling with perfect teeth. And it also dawned on me that this is the wokest epoch in US history in the wake of George Floyd, and black lives matter more than ever.

Except commercials -- and make no mistake, advertising is integral to the media monolith -- are whiter than ever. Not only that, but figures like Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben have been purged in this latest surge of wokeness. Where, for instance, is the 2021 version of O J Simpson, a high-profile black spokesman for a major national brand? There are black spokesmen for items like athletic shoes, but those are products heavily favored by blacks.

The most successful US black politicians in history, Barack Obama and Kamala Harris, are of mixed race and trace no descent from US slaves. In effect, they're tokens twice removed. Meghan Markle married into the UK royal family, but again, she's not all that black to start with, and rather than marrying in, she seems more intent on pulling her husband out, despite every indication that the royals were more than happy with her.

And of course, the US president and first lady are also about as white as you can get, indeed, stereotypically if not pathologically obtuse, with Biden rising in politics as a southern-state segregationist. The press secretary is a white woman, but not just white, upper-class white from Greenwich.

I can't offer a whole lot of explanation here, except a lot of this isn't necessarily new. I went to high school in Bethesda, second only to Greenwich as an upper-class enclave, and the schools there were segregated in the 1960s, a decade after Brown v Board of Education. Many of my schoolmates made careers in government, law, and the academy and took their attitudes with them. If anything, the events of 2020 have marked a return of the old elites -- the post-Civil War robber baron elites, if you get down to it -- to power.

The comnmercials are just a strange data point.

The COVID Timeline Expands

The New York Post revives a COVID origin question that had originally come up in May 2020, that COVID may have escaped from the lab earlier than previously assumed. The story from May 2020 reported,

A group of French athletes who competed in Wuhan back in October fear they may have brought the coronavirus back home — meaning that the deadly bug may have been around months earlier than first reported.

The French delegation took part in the seventh edition of the World Military Games in Wuhan from Oct. 18 to 27 last year, just 20 days before the first confirmed case of coronavirus in China, the Sun reported.

Wednesday's Post story says it wasn't just the French:

Members of Congress are calling on the Biden administration to launch an investigation into whether an international competition in Wuhan, China, involving thousands of athletes from around the world in October 2019 was the ​world’s ​first coronavirus “superspreader” event, according to a report on Wednesday. ​

More than 9,000 athletes, including a delegation of 280 athletes and staff from the US, attended the two-week-long Wuhan Military World Games, and many of them said they later fell ill with COVID-like symptoms, a Washington Post columnist reported in an op-ed.

Many of the athletes said ​Wuhan looked like a “ghost town” in October‚ two months before China reported the first case of coronavirus there.

. . . “Given unanswered questions surrounding the origins of the pandemic, information involving the health of service members who participated in the 2019 games could provide key evidence in understanding when COVID-19 first emerged,” Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.) wrote​​ to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Gen. Mark A. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff​, the report said.

. . . The congressman also noted that Robert Redfield, former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said he believes the coronavirus began in Wuhan in September or October 2019 and could have already been in the US by December 2019.

A web search suggests this story has been in the background, resurfacing now and then over the past year. For instance, a story in a Taiwan paper also reported in May 2020,

The RFA report pointed out that former Italian fencing Olympian Matteo Tagliariol also said that when he participated in the Military World Games, he and five roommates all got sick with symptoms often seen in COVID-19 patients and experienced a long recovery time afterward. He said his fever and difficulty breathing continued even a week after returning home.

Antibiotics did not work, and it took three weeks for him to recover. His son and partner also fell ill; then, a couple of months later, the coronavirus outbreak made the news.

The impression I've had from recent reports is that Peter Daszak, CEO of EcoHealth Alliance, was and continues to be closely involved in all gain-of-function research that EcoHealth funded at the Wuhan Institute to the tune of many millions of dollars. I've simply got to assume that Daszak's calendar and travel schedule, if nothing else, woud reveal near-constant interaction with officials at Wuhan and probably in the Chinese government between October and December 2020. '

If you ask me, the issue is not what Daszak knew, but what he told Fauci and Fauci's boss, Francis Collins, the NIH director. By January 31, we know that Kristian Andersen, a California virologist presumably out of the Fauci-Daszak-Collins loop, e-mailed Fauci that COVID looked engineered, something I would guess Fauci had known for months. The result was the February 1 conference call whose object was not so much to ask whether the virus was in fact engineered as to bring the virology establishment into the loop and keep things quiet.

While the agenda and notes of that meeting have so far been blacked out, it's not a stretch to surmise that the word was that if this gets out, all our grants are at risk. Let's keep this entre nous.

Just for starters, it looks more and more to me as though EcoHealth Alliance has a major legal problem if it covered things up between October 2019 and January 2020, as its failure to act in concert with public health authorities led to millions of deaths and many more sick and out of work.

My guess is that EcoHealth Alliance's general counsel has already been trying to explain this to the board. Sooner or later, Fauci, Daszak, and Collins are going to go down for this, though the eventual fallout will probably be much greater.

A Few Data Points

I note several stories that appear as puzzling data points, some or all of which may or may not be related. But if any of several are, something's going on.

• Warren Buffett has resigned as a director of the Gates Foundation. This may simply be because he's 90 and reducing his workload, or it may be in anticipation of what may come out in the Gates divorce case.
• The Lancet has acknowledged that Peter Daszak had a conflict of interest in items he published there. It has recused him from its commission investigating COVID's origins. Eventually EcoHealth Alliance will be forced to remove him as CEO, also due to conflict of interest.
• China is replacing its ambassador to the US with a man closer to Xi who has a harder-line style. This clearly has nothing to do with a rumored high-level defector.
• A new set of juicy stories has suddenly emerged from Hunter Biden's laptop, eight months after a first flurry. This clearly has nothing to do with rumors of a high-level Chinese defector who provided US intelligence with the contents of Hunter's laptop, which of course US intelligence already had.

The Hunter laptop story is especially puzzling. Initially reported in the New York Post, it contains photos and e-mails related to a 2018 stay by Hunter at the $700-a-night Chateau Marmont hotel in Hollywood, in which he engaged the services of an escort, Yanna.

Yanna stays for a couple days and wants to be paid. The problem is Hunter’s debit cards aren’t working and she’s not leaving without the $8,000 he owes her for the extended callout. On the morning of May 24, hung over and out of sorts, Hunter adds a new recipient on the cash transfer app Zelle, a woman named Gulnora, the registered agent for Emerald Fantasy Girls and Yanna’s employer.

He transfers $8,000. It doesn’t work. A few minutes later, Wells Fargo sends him a fraud detection alert. He reaches into his wallet and pulls out a card. Yanna attempts to transfer the $8,000 but it apparently doesn’t go through. He rifles through his wallet again. No luck. He pulls out another card. Bingo.

Yanna leaves and he crashes. But while he sleeps, his bank accounts are being emptied. In receipts he saves on the computer, the transactions he thought had failed have gone through, one after the other. The first $8,000 is recorded leaving his account at 10:22 a.m. At 10:50 a.m., $2,000 leaves a different account. At 10:59 a.m., $3,500 vanishes. At 11 a.m., another $8,000. At 11:03 a.m., another $3,500. About $25,000 moves in under an hour. Another $3,500 is scheduled to transfer out later that afternoon but will be delayed.

Isn't that odd? None of his wallet full of debit cards will pay out, which given Hunter's lifestyle is no surprise. But all of a sudden, bam, within hours, all of the charges that were declined hours before suddently get paid, just like that. Yanna has to scramble to send back the extra money. But given Hunter's history, it's no surprise that there are even more new developments:

What we do know from the laptop is that a few hours after Hunter’s debit-card woes began, text messages start arriving that are labeled as being from Robert Savage III. Savage was once the Secret Service’s special agent in charge of the Los Angeles field office and a contact card for him appears on the laptop, with a photographic avatar, phone number and Secret Service email address.

The Secret Service told The Post that Savage retired from the agency on April 30, 2018 — weeks before the Biden debauchery — and that the agency “did not provide protection to any member of the Biden family in 2018.”

Savage’s lawyer says, “My client has never met or communicated with Hunter Biden and has never been to the Chateau Marmont and had not even heard of the hotel. In fact, my client was retired before the date of these fabricated text messages.”

The activity recorded on Hunter’s devices shows Savage sending Hunter an urgent missive on May 24 at 6:37 p.m.: “H – I’m in the lobby come down. Thanks, Rob.”

Hunter replies: “5 minutes.”

Five minutes later, Savage texts again: “Come on H, this is linked to Celtic’s account. DC is calling me every 10. Let me up or come down. I can’t help if you don’t let me H.”

“Celtic” was Joe Biden’s Secret Service code name when he was vice president.

Did one of the credit cards used to pay Yanna belong to Joe Biden? Was it a shared account?

Hunter replies: “I promise be right down. Sorry.”

Five minutes later, Savage texts Hunter again to say that Dale Pupillo, a retired deputy assistant director of the Secret Service, who used to guard his father, has arrived. Invoices indicate that Pupillo did background checks for Hunter on potential business partners. Pupillo did not return requests for comment.

“He’s going to front desk, call and tell them to give us a key now H.

“As your friend, we need to resolve this in the immediate.

“Call the front desk now H or I will have to assume you are in danger and we will have to make them give us the keys.”

For nine minutes, Hunter does not reply.

“Really, Rob I am coming down right now,” Hunter texts at 6:54 p.m. “I really promise. Was in the bathroom buddy. Coming right this second.”

Thirty seconds later, Savage replies: “We’re at your door. Open it.”

What these apparent minders told Hunter next isn’t recorded on his devices. We know Hunter stays up the rest of that night, logging into an encrypted government site, “secure.login.gov,” a number of times until 4:04 a.m.

The big question for me is how this has become news just now, so long after the stories in October 2020, and even longer after the laptop had gone to the FBI. Indeed, Rudy Giuliani claims to have given a copy of the laptop to the Post last year. And this is the first we hear of this?

Oh, by the way, another recent story says Hunter was blacklisted from Chateau Marmont by July 2018, after the May escapade with Yanna. I wonder who was involved with that -- it came as a big surprise to Hunter.

Another question: who's able toi call retired Secret Service agents to clean up Hunter's mess? How are they able to exert authority on the hotel to give them the key to Hunter's room on their say-so, when none is working for the government?

Another question: Hunter, not at that time a government associate and with his father out of government office in 2018, gets to login to a secure government account. Why?

And clearly these new stories have nothing at all to do with rumors of a defector from Chinese intelligence who had a copy of Hunter's laptop. Not credible at all.

Reflections On Tne US Bishops' Vote

A quick recap, via the AP:

U.S. Catholic bishops overwhelmingly approved the drafting of a “teaching document” that many of them hope will rebuke Catholic politicians, including President Joe Biden, for receiving Communion despite their support for abortion rights.

. . . The result of the vote — 168 in favor and 55 against — was announced Friday near the end of a three-day meeting of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops that was held virtually.

. . . As a result of the vote, the USCCB’s doctrine committee will draft a statement on the meaning of Communion in the life of the church that will be submitted for consideration at a future meeting, probably an in-person gathering in November. To be formally adopted, the document would need support of two-thirds of the bishops.

I brought up my calculator and found that 168 plus 55 is 223, the total number of bishops voting. 168 is 75% of 223, so this is some indication of which way a vote on a completed draft might go. My first, overwhelming reaction is that this is not the caricature of US bishops held by rad-trad media. These are not a bunch of happy-clappy pedophile enablers.

The second thing I've noticed is how obtuse all media --legacy and independent, left, right, and whatever -- has been over this story. It's characterized as a move to "rebuke Biden" for his stand on abortion, when the references I've seen from bishops themselves indicate there's a much broader set of concerns including privileging transgenderism and same-sex activity, as well as issues like unisex restrooms.

A third takeaway is that things are changing. It appears that the USCCB is preparing to act on issues that had been on the agenda since communications from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith from at least 2002. My impression of Abp Gómez both as president of the USCCB and as Archbishop of Los Angeles is that he has been an effective political actor in both church and secular environments, and he apparently feels this was a good time to act. I'm sure he brought the issue to vote knowing the result beforehand.

But the obtuseness in covering this news extends even to commentators who should know better. I found a piece on the Just the News aggregator that interviews Peter Kreeft, a widely published Catholic apologist who in my view gets things all wrong:

Peter Kreeft, a longtime Catholic apologist and a philosophy professor at Boston College, told Just the News that for Catholic authorities and theologians the issue hinges on the fact that the commission of a mortal sin doesn't necessarily determine "whether a person is in the state of mortal sin or not."

"The nature of the act itself is only one of the three requirements for a state of mortal sin, the other two being full knowledge in the mind and full consent in the will," Kreeft said.

"A prudential decision like this is not a matter of dogma alone, and therefore we usually find faithful Catholics on both sides of the debate," he continued, though he argued that "in the last few generations the Church has been much more reluctant than in the past to offer clear public witness to its unalterable doctrines when many people, even those who call themselves Catholic, say they are offended by them."

This is confusing at best. Speaker Pelosi insists that, having borne five children without presumably aborting any of them, she is eligible to receive communion whatever her views or public policy activity enabling it. Kreeft appears to agree.

But the sin in question isn't abortion, it's scandal. The Catechism of the Catholic Church is succinct in this:

2284 Scandal is an attitude or behavior which leads another to do evil. The person who gives scandal becomes his neighbor's tempter. He damages virtue and integrity; he may even draw his brother into spiritual death. Scandal is a grave offense if by deed or omission another is deliberately led into a grave offense.

This article at Catholic Answers expands on the passage:

The person who gives scandal becomes his neighbor’s tempter. He damages virtue and integrity; he may even draw his brother into spiritual death.” Our Lord militates against scandal, and even ties a curse to those who promote it: “Whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him to have a great millstone fastened round his neck and to be drowned in the depth of the sea” (Matt 18:6).

The Catechism explains that scandal is greater according to the authority of the one scandalizing.

While the article concentrates on the responsibility of priests and bishops to speak correctly, there's an equivalent responsibility for Catholic elected officials to do the same. If some of the highest officials, like the president or the speaker, endorse abortion, same-sex activity, transgenderism and the like, they're implicitly saying these things are OK. If a lukewarm Protestant or an atheist endorses them, it's not the same as if a Catholic does.

And this is especially true when Catholic politicians are hitchhiking on the Catholic brand to get votes. If a politician claims to have been a Navy SEAL to get votes but the SEALs say he never was one, voters can make a more informed decision. I see no reason why this shouldn't extend to Catholics.

Peter Kreeft is 84. Perhaps he should finally retire and refrain from giving interviews.

Dr Fauci Says He's Not Hitler

A story from the weekend has Dr Fauci complaining to the New York Times that people call him Hitler. He insists this is not the case, he is not Hitler.

"The more extreme they get, the more obvious how political it is ... ‘Fauci has blood on his hands,’" the infectious diseases expert said of his critics. "Are you kidding me? ... Here’s a guy whose entire life has been devoted to saving lives, and now you’re telling me he’s like Hitler? You know, come on, folks."

This represents an escalation in Fauci's public defense, since earlier in the month he said only, "attacks on me, quite frankly, are attacks on science." And I'm not aware of any public comparisons of Fauci to Hitler -- certainly not along the line of Trump or George Bush. So why bring it up?

Fauci continues to insist that his e-mails reflect only a willingness to evaluate new data as it comes in -- at one point, he believed masks were ineffective, but data suddenly arrived confirming that they were, so he changed his mind with The Science. But the e-mails that were revealed last month draw a more sinister picture. They reflect, for instance, what appears to have been a coordinated coverup with colleagues like Kristian Andersen and Peter Daszak to characterize the lab leak theory as conspiratorial and fringe, when acknowledging it from the start might well have saved time developing vaccines.

In fact, I'm starting to get the impression that the whole US-funded Wuhan project was focused on a particular set of bat viruses, engineered for transmissibility to and among humans in a particular way -- for instancre, via aerosol particles, not big, wet droplets. Fauci understood this as well as Daszak, Andersen, Collins, and other members of the club, and this was the reason for Fauci's early explanation that masks were ineffective.

But the narrative shifted to masks, first, to conceal what the COVID club knew, and also to create a visible impression on the public that something could be, and was being, done. But the public health measures like masks and distancing were window dressing and proved completely ineffective. By taking this course, Fauci concealed the club's complicity and caused much additional suffering and death, both by withholding information from vaccine developers and distracting from the need to find effective public health measures.

Beyond that, Fauci clearly advocated gain-of-function research that other virologists felt -- correctly in hindsight -- was risky and unnecessary. In 2012, he wrote that

the risky research could lead to serious lab accidents but the chance is rare and the work is “important” because it helps the scientific community prepare for naturally occurring pandemics.

Does he now believe a COVID world death toll of up to 5 million and rising was worth the risk? If so, I've got to think his views on scientific research are approaching the Hitler end of the scale. And the estimates of 3.5 to 5 million COVID deaths are also in Holocaust territory.

I tend to agree with the Chinese retort over holding them accountable for the COVID lab leak: hey, this was your research. You funded it. In fact, it looks as if you moved it to China to minimize the risk of a lab accident in the US.

It's likely that the main cause of Fauci's current unhappiness is simply that the media have stopped apotheosizing him. Questions are coming up, he's no longer useful as a foil to Trump, and he's a likely negative for the administration as events develop. On the other hand, it almost sounds as if may be responding now to belated promptings from his own conscience. The Hitler bit -- hey, if the shoe fits, wear it.

Gain Of Function Started In The US

The Fox News segment above from last Friday raises a little-noticed issue that's also been puzzling me: why had a pretty wide spectrum of US actors been funding gain-of-function research at the Wuhan lab? The segment begins with China raising an issue that was bound to come up -- they're saying don't blame us, this is a US funded project. It covers this starting at abouit 2:55. but Laura Logan also makes the point that gain-of-function research had been a Fauci agenda item for a long time, even before it moved to China.

This sent me to searching the web. I found this article from November 2015 in Nature:

An experiment that created a hybrid version of a bat coronavirus — one related to the virus that causes SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) — has triggered renewed debate over whether engineering lab variants of viruses with possible pandemic potential is worth the risks.

. . . The findings reinforce >suspicions that bat coronaviruses capable of directly infecting humans (rather than first needing to evolve in an intermediate animal host) may be more common than previously thought, the researchers say.

But other virologists question whether the information gleaned from the experiment justifies the potential risk. Although the extent of any risk is difficult to assess, Simon Wain-Hobson, a virologist at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, points out that the researchers have created a novel virus that “grows remarkably well” in human cells. “If the virus escaped, nobody could predict the trajectory,” he says.

It appears that the particular study in question here was done at the University of North Carolina -- Chapel Hill, and it may have led in part to the moratorium on such studies between 2014 and 2017 that Fauci was able to bypass.

It's clear that the risks implicit in this research were well known and fully understood, and Laura Logan's point in the Fox segment is partly that it was sent to China to minimize the risk in the US. That sure worked.

I also went looking for the USA Today story cited in the Fox segment. The story by Alison Young was carefully isolated in the opinion section, and it ran on news dump Friday. It focuses on a February 1, 2020 conference call with Fauci and other gain-of-function researchers:

The teleconference on Feb. 1, 2020, appears to have played a pivotal role in shaping the early views of several key scientists whose published papers and public statements contributed to the shutting down of legitimate discussion about whether a laboratory in Wuhan, China, might have ignited the COVID-19 pandemic.

. . . Perhaps that’s because the early concerns among key scientists – like the conference call on Feb. 1, 2020 – were kept private until now. That call likely would have remained secret if not for documents released under the Freedom of Information Act.

That teleconference was urgent enough it was scheduled on a Saturday afternoon.

. . . A day before the teleconference, Kristian Andersen, an expert in infectious disease genomics at the prestigious Scripps Research Translational Institute in California, had told Fauci first by phone and again later by email that the genetic structure of the virus looked like it might have been engineered in a lab.

. . . Andersen did not respond to repeated interview requests since last week. Late Thursday, a spokesperson said Andersen was traveling and unavailable.

Discussion of Andersen’s concerns had begun earlier on that Friday, Jan. 31, 2020, Fauci told me, when he had conferenced Andersen into a three-way call with Jeremy Farrar, director the Wellcome Trust, an influential and wealthy foundation based in London that funds global health research.

. . . “We agreed to convene by phone the next day,” Fauci told me. . . . Emails show the agenda for the one-hour meeting was short. . . . But details of what was said in the meeting, including extensive notes taken by one participant and further thoughts shared by others, were blacked out by the NIH before the emails were made public.

. . . Yet just three days after that Feb. 1 meeting, Andersen’s position on the virus’ potential origin changed dramatically. He had gone from having concerns about possible genetic engineering to telling another group of scientists “the data conclusively show” the virus wasn’t engineered, and calling suggestions of engineering “fringe” and “crackpot” theories.

It's hard to avoid the conclusion that Fauci, once it became clear that COVID was an engineered virus developed in a Chinese lab in a US-funded funded project, engineered a consensus to distract attention from this information and deflect blame from the people behind the project.

More is bound to come out. The USA Today story is potentially explosive, but the aggregators and blogs have so far completely missed it.

Kabuki

Two data points in yesterday's news struck me in the wake of rumored reports of a Chinese defector with the goods on the Wuhan lab leak. The first was this story in The National Pulse, which has been consistently ahead of the game in its reports on COVID's origins and funding.

Google.org, the charity arm of the tech behemoth, has also been funding studies carried out by EcoHealth alliance researchers including Peter Daszak since at least 2010.

The decade-plus relationship is evident in a 2010 study on bat flaviviruses, which lists Daszak and EcoHealth Alliance Vice President Jonathan Epstein as authors, that thanks Google.org for funding. A 2014 study on henipavirus spillover, which was authored by Daszak, similarly declares it was partly “supported by Google.org.”

And a 2015 paper focusing on herpes, which lists EcoHealth’s Daszak and Epstein as authors, reveals it was “supported by funding from the US Agency for International Development’s Emerging Pandemic Threats: PREDICT program, the Skoll Foundation, and Google.org.”

The other data point is a report of White House National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan's interview on Friday’s “CBS This Morning”:

[U]ltimately, we need access and the international community needs access to China to be able to get that initial data that will tell us the most about where this virus came from and how it entered into the world. And you’re right, so far China has said, no, we won’t allow that.

But of course, if Dong Zingwei and two other defectors have actually come over with data on the Wuhan lab, we've already learned far more than we could ever hope to get from China no matter what. And the abrupt change in the Overton window of permissible discussion suggests something like this may have happened.

But even if it hasn't, don't we have a very good source of information at 520 Eighth Avenue, Suite 1200, New York, NY 10018, the headquarters of EcoHealth Alliance? How hard can it be for the funding agencies to ask for a complete audit? Who donated, for what, and where were the funds routed? If nothing else, this is a non-profit, apparently a very big and influential one. I doubt if Peter Daszak flies commercial. Might it be appropriate for the IRS to ask whether it's following all the rules?

All things considered, it's starting to look to me as though EcoHealth's board should already have hired outside counsel for an investigation, with Daszak already announcing he's leaving to pursue the usual. It's puzzling that nothing like this has happened.

It seems to me that somewhere on the list of important issues in the COVID story is the degree to which US agencies and foundations have been complicit for years in creating the conditions that led to Holocaust-level deaths and worldwide disruption. The complicity includes massive conflict of interest -- if Google was funding some of this work via its eleemosynary arm, no wonder its YouTube arm was suppressing stories about a lab leak. And again, I doubt if Daszak flies commercial. He and his colleagues have been living quite well under these arrangements.

What I'm seeing so far, though, is boy, we've got to get to the bottom of this! But WHO is on the case! And Biden has ordered a full report! We and our partners, indeed the entire international community, must press China for greater transparency!

This is kabuki. I'm not sure how long it can last.