Federal judges on the left are determined to stop Trump

The New Neo Posted on by

These judges apparently consider themselves the firewall against Trump and the troglodytes who elected him:

More nationwide injunctions and restraining orders have been issued against Trump in the past month that were issued against the Biden administration in four years. On Wednesday alone, four different federal judges ordered Elon Musk to reinstate USAID workers (something he and DOGE have no authority to do), ordered President Trump to disclose sensitive operational details about the deportation flights of alleged terrorists, ordered the Department of Defense to admit individuals suffering from gender dysphoria to the military, and ordered the Department of Education to issue $600 million in DEI grants to schools.

On one level, what all this amounts to is an attempted takeover of the Executive Branch by the Judicial Branch — a judicial coup d’état. These judges are usurping President Trump’s valid exercise of his Executive Branch powers through sheer judicial fiat — a raw assertion of power by one branch of the federal government against another.

But on another, deeper level, this is an attempt by the judiciary to prevent the duly elected president from reclaiming control of the Executive Branch from the federal bureaucracy — the deep state, which has long functioned as an unelected and unaccountable fourth branch of the government. This unconstitutional fourth branch has always been controlled by Democrats and leftist ideologues who, under the guise of being nonpartisan experts neutrally administering the functions of government, have effectively supplanted the political branches. Unfortunately, to large extent the political branches have acquiesced in the usurpation of their authority.

So it’s The Left Strikes Back. Problems at the ballot box? Send in the judiciary. What failed to be accomplished through the kangaroo court lawfare to which Trump was subjected prior to his election – the goal being to prevent him from being elected to a second term at all – could possibly be accomplished by tying his hands whenever he tries to do much of anything as president. These are not unbiased decisions for the most part, but these judges consider it their duty to stop the right from changing things in any big way.

It’s somewhat similar to Russiagate during Trump’s first term, which was an attempt by the intelligence community and the FBI, DOJ, and press to hamstring Trump and if possible remove him from office. That didn’t work, either. Will this? It really depends on SCOTUS, and many people are worried about how Roberts will see his role and that of the Supreme Court.

It also reminds me very much of what’s been going on for quite some time in Israel regarding Netanyahu. There’s been a huge conflict between Israel’s extremely powerful Supreme Court (much more powerful, actually, than our own) which is controlled by the left, and Netanyahu. In Israel, the judiciary works like this:

Though Israel is in a state of war on several fronts, the judges presiding in that trial are forcing him to testify three days a week, every week, because, they have argued, it is “in the public interest” to bring the trial to a speedy conclusion. So, determining the exact number of cigars that Mr. Netanyahu received as gifts from friends has come to take precedence over his running of the war.

The judges know, of course, that they will pay no price for their risible definition of “the public interest,” which the public itself would undoubtedly have rejected. Because Israel’s deep state has achieved the dream of bureaucrats since the dawn of bureaucracy: the complete divorce of authority from accountability. The judges know that if their lopsided priorities hinder the war effort, it will be the prime minister, not those who coerced him, who will pay the political price.

At this late stage in the game, one may speculate that this is exactly the point of their whole exercise. Because the Netanyahu trial is not a real criminal procedure. It is a means for doing what elections could not: removing him from power. It is an arena of the struggle for supremacy between democracy on the one hand and the administrative state on the other. …

Under a heavy cloud of judicial-sounding terms, Israel’s Supreme Court judges have removed sovereignty itself—that is, the power of final decision over the whole realm of law and politics—from the elected branches of government and transferred it to themselves.

The Supreme Court completed this move in the course of the war, when it exercised a new power it invented for itself: judicial review over what we have for a constitution. It is now in the position to prescribe the rules of the political game, not just its concrete results.

Much much more at the link.

The JFK files and the conspiracy theories

The New Neo Posted on by

No, I haven’t read the newly-released files. That would be quite a task. But as I already indicated, I am nearly certain that they will reveal little of note, and yet that people wedded to the various and sundry conspiracy theories of the JFK assassination will find all sorts of ways to turn them into something that lends credence to the idea that the killing was the result of a vast conspiracy.

So I find this from the Babylon Bee humorous (hat tip: commenter “AesopFan”):

According to sources, the final unredacted release of the CIA’s JFK Files contains no incriminating information, definitively proving that the CIA destroyed all their incriminating JFK Files.

“It’s the only thing that makes sense,” JFK assassination research enthusiast Edward Dunbar posted on X. “We finally get the files after all these years and there’s nothing in them. That can only mean they destroyed that one file that said ‘We did it’ years ago!”

Where there’s a will, there’s a way – and there has always been a will to make JFK’s assassin into something much bigger than the unimpressive lone Communist gunman Lee Harvey Oswald.

One thing about Oswald that made a deep impression on me is that, when the assassination occurred and I first saw a photo of him, I thought he was at least 35 or so. I was young and he didn’t look like a 24-year-old to me, but that’s indeed what he was. And you know what? He still looks to me like a man in his mid-thirties. This is basically meaningless, but it strikes me when I see photos of him.

Another thing that’s clear is that he was trouble – and troubled – for nearly his entire short life:

[Oswald’s father] 5][6] Robert died of a heart attack two months before Lee was born. …

As a child, Oswald was described as withdrawn and temperamental by several people who knew him. When Oswald was 12 in August 1952, his mother took him to New York City where they lived for a short time with Oswald’s half-brother, John. Oswald and his mother were later asked to leave after an argument in which Oswald allegedly struck his mother and threatened John’s wife with a pocket knife.

Oswald attended seventh grade in the Bronx, New York, but was often truant, which led to a psychiatric assessment at a juvenile reformatory. The reformatory psychiatrist, Dr. Renatus Hartogs, described Oswald as immersed in a “vivid fantasy life, turning around the topics of omnipotence and power, through which [Oswald] tries to compensate for his present shortcomings and frustrations”. Hartogs concluded:

“Lee has to be diagnosed as “personality pattern disturbance with schizoid features and passive-aggressive tendencies”. Lee has to be seen as an emotionally, quite disturbed youngster who suffers under the impact of really existing emotional isolation and deprivation, lack of affection, absence of family life and rejection by a self involved and conflicted mother.”

… Evelyn D. Siegel, a social worker who interviewed both Lee and Marguerite Oswald at Youth Hou”>heese, while describing “a rather pleasant, appealing quality about this emotionally starved, affectionless youngster which grows as one speaks to him”, found that he had detached himself from the world around him because “no one in it ever met any of his needs for love”. Hartogs and Siegel indicated that Marguerite gave him very little affection, with Siegel concluding that Lee “just felt that his mother never gave a damn for him. He always felt like a burden that she simply just had to tolerate.” … Hartogs reported that she did not understand that Lee’s withdrawal was a form of “violent but silent protest against his neglect by her and represents his reaction to a complete absence of any real family life”.

A great deal is known about Oswald; you can find a ton of it in the book I keep recommending for anyone who wishes to learn an enormous amount about both Oswald, the assassination as a whole, and every single conspiracy theory about it and why they don’t hold water: that book is Vincent Bugliosi’s Reclaiming History, which can be found online here.

I also recommend this previous post of mine, as well as the comments there. I’ve written quite a few other posts on the assassination, but if you read just one I’d suggest it be that one.

March wind

The New Neo Posted on by

As a child I recall learning an old rhyme that went something like this: “March wind, April showers, make room for the sweet May flowers.” And doing a search just now, I see that’s pretty close to the lyrics of this 1935 song. I don’t recall ever hearing it before, but someone obviously had quoted it to me:

Why am I writing about this? Well, it’s March, and the month is living up to its name. I’m still in New York and doing a lot of walking, and the wind has been chill and pretty fierce much of the time even though the temperature isn’t all that cold.

So what’s up with this “March wind” thing? I hadn’t a clue, but when I looked it up I discovered this:

… March is a transition month — obviously. We are heading out of the cold short days of winter into the longer and much warmer days of spring and summer. Cold air is situated north while warm air is trying to approach from the south.

Temperatures during the month of March are more extreme over shorter distances PLUS we have the heat of the sun finally at an angle that can actually warm up the surface quicker.

With the sun heating up the Earth’s surface, pockets of warm air form. These pockets of warm air start moving towards the cold dense air that is still hanging out, leftover from the winter months. The difference in the air mass temperatures (between the warm air and cold air) create differing pressures, which in turn create winds.

The greater the difference in the high and low pressures, the stronger the force of the winds. Also, the distance between an area of high pressure and an area of low pressure will also determine the speed of the moving air.

Question asked; question answered.

NOTE: When I was really little – and I mean maybe three or four years old – I thought that wind was generated by the moving trees. After all, I’d noticed that trees and leaves moved a lot on windy days, so it made perfect sense to me.

Tim Walz – one of many dodged bullets in the 2024 election

The New Neo Posted on by

The selection of Tim Walz for her VP pick was one of Harris’ biggest mistakes in her presidential run – and that’s saying something, because she made a lot of big mistakes. But anyone who had ever paid attention to Walz previously knew he had a terrible record during the Minneapolis riots and has no real appeal on a gut level as a politician.

For me, one of his most cringe-worthy poses was his attempt to project a macho “regular guy” vibe. And he’s still trying:

Since faceplanting as Kamala Harris’ running mate, the Minnesota governor has been holding rallies and making the media rounds in a desperate attempt to boost his stock for a 2028 presidential run.

Here’s Tim:

How can a person be that tone deaf? Someone should tell him that what works in Minnesota doesn’t necessarily work on a national level.

Kamala Harris may be running for the governorship of California. One of her problems has been that what works in California doesn’t necessarily work on a national level. So maybe retreating to the state level is a good idea for her. I doubt she’ll run, though, unless pretty much assured she’ll win the Democratic primary, which is tantamount to winning the election in California.

Rubio updated

The New Neo Posted on by

Now that he’s Trump’s Secretary of State, Marco Rubio has been giving a lot of interviews. A few examples can be found here and on many blogs. I’ve noticed a pattern in the comments – which usually seem to be from people on the right – a great many of which say something like, “He’s so much better than I thought he’d be.”

I think Rubio got a bad reputation on the right for a number of reasons, the first (but only among people old enough to remember) being his participation as a new senator in the 2013 “Gang of Eight” attempt to deal with illegal immigration in a bipartisan manner including a path to citizenship for illegal aliens already in the country. A second reason for his problematic reputation was twofold, and occurred during his 2016 run for president: Trump’s “Little Marco” nickname for him (Rubio isn’t tall; he’s officially listed as 5’9″ or so, but having actually stood next to him once during the 2016 campaign, I’d say he’s at least an inch shorter), and Chris Christie’s mocking tactics concerning Rubio’s repeating himself during a Republican primary debate in February of 2016. I did a lengthy analysis of the latter; you can find it here, and I think it shows that Rubio was nowhere near as bad as Christie’s attack made him out to be.

Trump’s “Little Marco” nickname for Rubio drew blood not only because Rubio is relatively short, but because he also has a baby face and looks younger than he is. Plus, he is fairly young even now – 53 – and at the time of that debate he was 44. When he became a senator he was forty, by my calculations. Pretty darn young.

But I’ve always been impressed by Rubio, who is one of the most articulate politicians in stating a case without being pedantic or obscure or affected. That’s what people are responding to now in those YouTube videos featuring him. I was surprised and pleased when Trump chose him for the SOS position, and so far so good.

NOTE: Rubio’s birth name is Marco Antonio Rubio – Mark Antony?

Roundup

The New Neo Posted on by

(1) There’s a fight on for control of Wisconsin’s Supreme Court. In a special election in 2023, the left won control 4-3. Now there’s a chance to get it back, because one of the judges on the left is retiring and there’s a special election looming. Needless to say, tons of money are being spent on the race, which pollsters say is tied.

This race is vitally important for the following reason:

Although Republicans have multiple reasons for prioritizing this race, the most immediate is Crawford’s [the Democratic candidate] stated intention to redraw the state’s congressional maps. If elected, she will ensure the maps are redrawn in a way that favors Democratic candidates in next year’s critical midterm elections.

If Democrats regain control of the House, they will seize every opportunity to block President Donald Trump’s agenda—and will almost certainly impeach him at least once.

Who cares about impeachment? It’s meaningless at this point. But the 2026 election is why Trump is in such a hurry to seize the moment.

(2) The JFK files have been released, and AP’s headline is this: “JFK assassination files released, sending history buffs hunting for new clues.” My prediction is that it is JFK assassination conspiracy buffs who will be reading every word in order to further their pet theories or come up with new ones, and that none of it will hold water although people will continue to believe all sorts of things. No doubt quite a few people here disagree with me. I’ve written tons on this blog about the assassination and why I very strongly believe the Warren Commission got it right and the conspiracy theorists get it wrong. I’m not especially keen on going down that rabbit hole again, but you can always take a look at what I’ve written on the subject previously.

(3) The untimely death of University of Pittsburgh student Sudiksha Konanki in the Dominican Republic is extremely sad, and we may never know what really happened although her parents believe she drowned accidentally:

“Both sides of the authorities have shown us how high the ocean waves were at the time of the incident, and both sides of the authorities have clarified the person of interest was not a suspect from the beginning,” Subbarayudu Konanki, the missing co-ed’s father, said from the family home in Virginia.

“It is with deep sadness and a heavy heart that we are coming to terms with the fact our daughter has drowned,” he said. “This is incredibly difficult for us to process.”

RIP.

(4) Gas prices have been dropping, and some say that it’s only because the economy is bad. You be the judge.

(5) Trump and Putin have a chat:

A call between President Donald Trump and Russian leader Vladimir Putin ended with a limited agreement for Russia and Ukraine to cease attacks on energy infrastructure but stopped short of a U.S. proposal for a temporary truce.

The United States said Russia had agreed to an energy and infrastructure ceasefire. After Moscow and Kyiv agree to stop hitting each other’s power plants and electric grids, negotiators would move on to a potential halt in fighting on the Black Sea ? and then to a full ceasefire and peace agreement in the 3-year-old Ukraine war, a White House statement said.

Will this end up being something good? Time will tell.

How can you hate a guy who rescues stranded astronauts?

The New Neo Posted on by

What a triumph:

The US astronauts stranded on the International Space Station joyfully emerged from their rescue capsule following a dramatic but smooth return to Earth Tuesday — months after their days-long jaunt in orbit turned into a headline-grabbing space odyssey.

Butch Wilmore, 62, and 59-year-old Suni Williams splashed down off the coast of Tallahassee, Fla., aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule just before 6 p.m. EST Tuesday, concluding a nine-month stint in space that was supposed to last just eight days when it launched in June 2024.

“Butch, Suni, on behalf of SpaceX, welcome home,” a mission-control dispatcher radioed the crew moments after the capsule Dragon Freedom splashed down.

Less than an hour later, the duo — along with American astronaut Nick Hague and Russian cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov — were extracted from the capsule onboard a recovery vessel, and each was filmed beaming, waving and pumping their fists as they were helped to their feet and whisked away on wheelchairs. …

Long stretches living in space can result in muscle atrophy and vision impairment upon returning to gravity, each of which and other problems they’ll be monitored for before being cleared to return to their families.

Musk contended that Biden had turned down his offer to rescue them back in September, fearing a disaster prior to the election.

Musk used to be a hero to the left, and Teslas were the virtue-signaling wave of the future. Once he threw in his lot with Trump, he became an enemy.

NPR covers the story by adding the following:

Shortly after taking office in January, President Trump said he asked his close political adviser and SpaceX founder Elon Musk to “go get” Williams and Wilmore, whom Trump said had been “virtually abandoned in space by the Biden Administration.”

In fact, the astronauts’ ride back to Earth had been docked on the ISS since September. The SpaceX Dragon capsule that flew the pair home on Tuesday arrived at the space station in the fall with two empty seats for the duo’s return trip.

NASA said it had decided to integrate Williams and Wilmore into the space station crew for technical and budgetary reasons, and during their time on the station the pair has been conducting experiments and spacewalks.

Musk said in February that he had made an offer to the Biden administration “months ago” for SpaceX to bring the astronauts home early, but that the administration “refused” and delayed the pair’s return for “political reasons.”

Two former NASA officials under the Biden administration, including former NASA Administrator Bill Nelson, said they were unaware of any such offer.

The implication is that Musk and Trump aren’t telling the truth, and that NASA wanted to leave the astronauts up there for almost half a year longer, and that politics had nothing to do with it. To me, the story told by Trump/Musk is more plausible.

Anyway, welcome home.

NOTE: See also this:

TERROR: Democrat activists have taken the attacks on Tesla to an entirely new level publishing a hit list for activists to target the homes of owners, stores, and charging stations. To get removed from the list Tesla owners must prove they sold their cars. It is time for the FBI and DOJ to investigate who is behind these coordinated attacks. In this case multiple laws are likely being violated:

– 18 U.S.C. § 119 – Publishing Restricted Personal Information (Trump could extend this to Tesla owners)
– 18 U.S.C. § 2261A – Interstate Stalking
– 18 U.S.C. § 875 – Interstate Threats
– 18 U.S.C. § 1030 – Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA)
– Doxxing Laws (TX, FL, and CA)
– Incitement to Riot (or Public Disorder)
– Stalking & Harassment Laws
– Trespassing & Criminal Mischief (as Accomplice Liability)

The enormous value of lies as propaganda

The New Neo Posted on by

The other day I was speaking to an old friend who is what I would call a political moderate for the most part. But her hatred for Trump and his supporters – a crowd she lumps together as a large amorphous mass of stupid, selfish, crass, dangerous people (present company excluded?) – means that she hasn’t voted for Republicans in quite a while.

We hadn’t spoken of politics in a long time, and it’s a topic I generally avoid. But during our friendly discussion it came up, and I asked her what is one of the things she dislikes most about Trump. She cited his white supremacism. I asked her on what she based the belief that he’s a white supremacist, and she cited the Charlottesville “good people on both sides” incident.

That’s both fascinating and depressing. This person isn’t ill-informed and she’s quite intelligent, but somehow that original lie, repeated over and over again, has become unassailable truth in her mind. That lie not only got halfway around the world before the truth had a chance to get its boots on, but it burrowed deep into many many minds and then was driven deeper by all the repetition. Correcting it requires a rather lengthy explanatory conversation, supporting documents and videos, and the will on the part of the listener to entertain the idea that such a deeply-entrenched, long-held, and multiply-sourced belief is incorrect. Not only that, but the belief fits in with so many other beliefs about Trump that have been repeated over the years, plus beliefs about Republicans and especially MAGA voters, that the task of getting the revised story across is nearly insurmountable.

This is just another musing of mine on the theme that got me started on blogging: how do minds change? It’s like the lightbulb joke: they have to want to change. Or, they have to have an experience or come across some knowledge that just happens to strike a deep chord that is the start of a mental (and sometimes emotional) journey from which there is usually no turning back.

The New York Times: We were deceived about the Wuhan lab leak theory

The New Neo Posted on by

Who is this “we” who were deceived?

And who was doing the deceiving?

Here’s the article, which doesn’t exactly answer those questions but seems to be saying that the “we” who were deceived included the well-meaning media and everyone else except a few science-hating right wingers, and that those doing the deceiving were some scientists:

Take the case of EcoHealth, that nonprofit organization that many of the scientists leaped to defend. When Wuhan experienced an outbreak of a novel coronavirus related to ones found in bats and researchers soon noticed the pathogen had the same rare genetic feature that the EcoHealth Alliance and the Wuhan researchers had proposed inserting into bat coronaviruses, you would think EcoHealth would sound the alarm far and wide. It did not. Were it not for public records requests, leaks and subpoenas, the world might never have learned about the troubling similarities between what could easily have been going on inside the lab and what was spreading through the city.

a March 2020 paper in the journal Nature Medicine, which was written by five prominent scientists and declared that no “laboratory-based scenario” for the pandemic virus was plausible. But we later learned through congressional subpoenas of their Slack conversations that while the scientists publicly said the scenario was implausible, privately many of its authors considered the scenario to be not just plausible but likely. One of the authors of that paper, the evolutionary biologist Kristian Andersen, wrote in the Slack messages, “The lab escape version of this is so friggin’ likely to have happened because they were already doing this type of work and the molecular data is fully consistent with that scenario.”

Spooked, the authors reached out for advice to Jeremy Farrar, now the chief scientist at the World Health Organization. In his book, Farrar reveals he acquired a burner phone and arranged meetings for them with high-ranking officials, including Francis Collins, then the director of the National Institutes of Health, and Dr. Anthony Fauci. Documents obtained through public records requests by the nonprofit U.S. Right to Know show that the scientists ultimately decided to move ahead with a paper on the topic.

Operating behind the scenes, Farrar reviewed their draft and suggested to the authors that they rule out the lab leak even more directly. They complied.

The author of the Times article, Zeynep Tufekci, seems to have been motivated to write it in order to warn that scientists are engaged in something similar to what started it all in Wuhan, and under conditions of insufficient safety precautions as well:

Researchers, many of whom work or have worked at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (yes, the same institution), describe taking samples of viruses found in bats (yes, the same animal) and experimenting to see if they could infect human cells and pose a pandemic risk.

Here’s another statement in the piece:

And as for that Wuhan laboratory’s research, the details that have since emerged show that safety precautions might have been terrifyingly lax.

I became curious to see what I had written early on about the lab leak theory, and I found this from April 15, 2020. That was actually extremely early, and here’s a quote from Jonathan Turley in that post of mine :

The Washington Post reported that embassy officials in January 2018 alerted U.S. officials of serious problems in the lab which was conducting risky research on bats, the very source of COVID-19.

So, what is this bit about how “the details that have since emerged show that safety precautions might have been terrifyingly lax”? That already was known two years prior to COVID, and known by the WaPo by April of 2020. And yet the lab leak theory continued to be written about as though it was the province of far-right lunatics who hated science and scientists and Chinese people. I don’t think the MSM was duped; I think it was cooperative.

I’m not the least bit anti-science, but as early as April 2020 I knew that the lab leak theory was highly plausible, and so did many people such as Jonathan Turley. I’m now going to reproduce that post I wrote in April of 2020 in its entirety; everything from here on is from that post. It shows how easy it was to not be deceived, even way back then. So journalists have no excuse:

You may have noticed that I haven’t written much if at all about COVID-19’s origins, despite having written a ton about the disease. Was it from a wet market? Was it from a lab? My opinion was that it was 50/50 and that we just didn’t know, so I didn’t want to waste much verbiage on it.

But now I’m leaning towards the lab theory.

Here’s Jonathan Turley on the subject:

When the coronavirus first appeared in Wuhan, China, many people immediately raised the concern that it might have been the result of a lab release from a controversial Chinese the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The lab was working on coronavirus and had raised concerns over its containment protocols. Then there was the fact that China hid the outbreak, arrested top doctors, and buried research on its origins. However, a narrative quickly emerged in countering President Donald Trump’s references to the “China virus.” People, including members of Congress, who referred to the lab were ridiculed on CNN and other outlets as conspiracy theorists like Politifact declared the theory to be utterly baseless. For some of us, the overwhelming media narrative seemed odd and artificial. It would seem obvious that a lab working on viruses in this area would be an obvious possible source. Now, after weeks of chastising those who mentioned the lab theory, another cache of documents and information shows that there are ample reasons to be suspicious and that concerns were raised two years ago within the State Department.

The Washington Post reported that embassy officials in January 2018 alerted U.S. officials of serious problems in the lab which was conducting risky research on bats, the very source of COVIT-19. The United Kingdom has issued a statement that they are seriously considering the lab as a possible source.

Apparently the lab was already flagged as being lax about safety, raising obvious concerns. And if you think about it, China has been lax about safety regarding its manufacture of drugs, as the recurrent recalls of blood pressure medications for contaminants indicate. Please note that in that article, datelined September 2019, it quotes Trump as “calling on US industries to manufacture here at home, instead of outsourcing to China.”

Prescient, that.

More from Turley:

The point is not that this proves that the virus originated in the lab. Rather, my interest is the overwhelming media narrative that emerged to deny that this was a credible potential source. That narrative emerged around the time that the media was hammering Trump for his use of “China virus” and “Wuhan virus.” That criticism was enhanced by the argument that the virus developed naturally. That could still be the case but it never seemed rational to me to discount the lab theory.

What is most amazing is that, if the Chinese allowed this virus to escape and then arrested doctors raising the alarm over the spread, it would be one of the greatest stories of our lifetime: a world pandemic caused by human error. Millions have been infected and thousands have died. If the cause was negligence by a totalitarian nation (that ignored warnings and punished doctors), this would be a story of the century. Suddenly magazines care saying that they are now thinking about the “unthinkable.” Yet, it was never truly unthinkable was it?

It was only “unthinkable” when it served their purposes to brand it that, as part of their “Trump and the right are racist xenophobes and crazy people” narrative. The evidence must be getting very strong for them to begin to abandon that stance now.

I agree with Turley that “it would be one of the greatest stories of our lifetime” if the escaped-from-lab theory turns out to be true. And I don’t mean “great” as in “wonderful” – I mean “great” as in “enormous, compelling, transformative.” I use the latter word because I believe this entire COVID-19 episode is going to change the standing of China in the world, and already has begun to do so. No wonder China was so keen to cover it up from the start.