Quick jots: June 2021

Fauci emails and the Wuhan lab theory
#media #covid-19
Remember when anyone who even suggested the virus was lab made were discounted as nutjob conspiracy theorists? Remember when tech giants censored any such discussion? The Cathedral sure hopes you don't. I heard as early as February of 2020, a conspiracy theory that COVID-19 was created in order to unleash it on the people of Hong Kong. That...was unlikely. But a leak was completely believable. Anyone paying a bit of attention to China would know that protocols and quality assurance are not exactly their strong suit. In the past month, more and more evidence emerged to the point where the lab leak theory (not necessarily lab-made) could no longer be ignored. This information sure would have been good to have a year ago. It's almost as if open dialogue and debate are a good thing. Still, it probably wasn't a carefully orchestrated bioattack, but tracing the leak could have helped a great deal. The Fauci email dump indicated that Fauci had been discussing the possibility of such a theory since the early days of the pandemic. So either he was wrong (again) or purposely stated an opinion he knew to be false (again). Neither is a good look. Further, Fauci has admitted that the US government had directed funded the Wuhan lab in question (though not directly for gain of function research, ignoring the fungibility of money), contradicting what he told Senator Rand Paul in an earlier hearing. You think this perhaps this incentivized Fauci to if not lie, be dishonest, to Congress? When do you think Fauci will be indicted for lying to Congress? The Chnese Communist Party continues to obstruct investigations into the origins of COVID-19. Hrm. I wonder why?

Apparently, arson is good
#freespeech
The cancel mob has convened in an emergency meeting among its elected executive committee members and in an overwhelmingly lopsided vote, decided that arson is good. Daniel Elder, previously a BLM supporter, spoke out against committing arson against random businesses that had nothing to do with their grievances. The mob pitchforked him out of his deal with his publishing agency. The Facebook post of his publisher, GIA, denouncing Elder for his obscene act of denouncing violence was met by a hoard of morons praising the denunciation of the denunciation of violence. Since the Reason article was released, there are now denunciations of the denunciation of the original denunciation of violence. Denunciate that, you denunciators.

Biden hikes lumber tariffs
#economics #democrats #taxes
Has Biden taken a look at housing prices lately? No, probably not. He doesn't have to worry about the costs of living, like us lowly peons. If he had, he would have seen soaring housing prices. The president of a housing developer told me this past winter that they've been seeing 1% month over month price increases in the market. The prices of lumber had soared nearly 300% over the past year since the government had all but shut down sawmills. So what does the Department of Commerce do? Double the tariffs on Canadian lumber from 9% to 18%. Way to make things worse.

AUMF on the path to repeal. Maybe.
#war #democrats
The House has voted to repeal the 2002 Authorization for the Use of Military Force, the law that sent us into a disastrous war in Iraq. Notable signatories include the staunchly anti-war stalwarts such as Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton, between them at least party responsible for bombing campaigns in Syria, Libya, Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, and Somalia. It "only" took two decades to get rid of it. Although a step in the right direction, this repeal of the Iraq AUMF is unlikely to curb the American war path like the bill's author, Barbara Lee, claimed. Unsurprisingly, the senate has delayed the repeal vote to mid-July. Meanwhile, Biden has bombed Syria and Iraq. They claim self-defense, just as a robber would claim when shooting a homeowner he said was threatening to chase him out of the house with a knife.

Apple Daily shut down
#media #china
Jimmy Lai, the founder of Apple Daily, has been in jail for months now, for the crime of, well, operating a newspaper that refused to kowtow to the government. Now, Apple Daily has officially been shut down and its final print run executed. People in Hong Kong lined up in queues longer than the most popular rides in Disneyland if admission were free, just to grab the final edition. As the government froze their assets and arrested editors and columnists, many staff pressed on to its final breath. May the spirit of the free people of Hong Kong live forever. 

Yeonmi Park wrecks the wokes
#wokeism
Yeonmi Park, an escapee from North Korea, attended Columbia University and was shocked to find the woke culture on these college campuses, calling it "insane" and similar to what she saw in North Korea. She recently went on interviews on Fox News, Jordan Peterson's podcast, and Steve Bannon's podcast. As she predictably got excoriated by those on the left for interviewing here, she shot back that she would love to be interviewed on the New York Times, but she wouldn't get callbacks for these so-called third rail topics. She slams them for being basically propaganda shrills. She also ridicules the wokesters for being so offended at mistaken pronouns when there is real suffering around the world. As an example, she doesn't even know if her own family had been executed or tortured. The video below was the first video of hers I watched and I was shocked at just how well versed she was in history, economics, and contemporary American culture. She was in North Korea until she was 13 years old when she and her sister escaped. Every one of her Columbia classmates had well over that much time to have a head start, but she just ran circles around them. She suffered the worst kinds of indoctrination known to man, but these Columbia classmates are still willingly indoctrinated while she has broken free of her intellectual shackles. Throughout the video, I'm thinking she sounds like a libertarian. Then halfway through, she made some overtures to having libertarian leanings. People who have been in chains know to run away from them.

CDC's eviction moratoriums based on junk science
#covid-19
What?? No! Political bureaucracies would never base their decisions on shoddy studies, would they? I mean, they did lockdowns because of the Imperial College study... Oh. Well, they impose the minimum wage based on the studies... Oh. It turns out that the studies the CDC and various media outlets cited to impose and extend eviction moratoriums have been laughably poor. They have assigned conclusion certainty higher than the certainty of the raw data they used. They made assumptions that were a leap like assuming one eviction would necessarily cause multiples of more infections. They ignored changing landlord preferences due to the policy such as declining to rent a newly vacated rental due to the drastically increasing risk of being stuck with a non-paying tenant, causing even more housing shortages than we already had, increasing co-living situations. They also failed to inspect states with differing policies, with eviction moratorium states suffering through more COVID-19 deaths than states that never had a moratorium. At best, the studies show a correlative relationship, and not even a good one at that. Superstition is based on correlation. The sun does not rise because the rooster crowed. Science is supposed to show causal relationships, and the studies do no such thing. Suspiciously, the researchers refused to release their specific data and methodology, a breach of ethics when such sweeping policy is based on those studies. The scientific method only works when people are able to audit the studies to find any flaws that may exist. Constant skepticism, questioning, and attempts to disprove conclusions is how sound science is done.

John McAfee dies
#libertarians
John McAfee, who ran for the Libertarian Party presidential ticket two cycles ago (and finished third out of the major three candidates), died by apparent suicide in a Spanish prison, kind of like Epstein. He was a truly bizarre personality, one of the freest spirits out there, and exited this world in an epic troll on everyone, tweeting before he died that he would not commit suicide, saying "If I suicide myself, I didn't. I was whackd," as well as posting "Q" on Instagram as his last post before Instagram removed the account. If that's not peak trolling right there, I don't know what is. At the end of the day, no matter how he died (not likely whack'd), as Dave Smith said in a recent podcast, John McAfee was the victim of the IRS and the oppressive tax system. Even if he did commit murder in Belize (which doesn't seem likely), he still would have killed orders of magnitudes fewer people than other people who would get parades, lowered flags, and comments of sorrow from the political class if they had died, like say...just pulling a random name...Donald Rumsfeld.

Donald Rumsfeld dies
#war #republicans