COVID may have been spreading in Wuhan in the spring and summer of 2019
Purchases of PCR tests in China’s Hubei Province surged months before the first official reports of a novel coronavirus case there, according to a report by Australia-based cybersecurity company Internet 2.0.
About 67.4 million yuan ($10.5 million at current rates) was spent on PCR tests in Hubei during 2019, nearly double the 2018 total, with the upswing starting in May, according to the report.
More at the link.
A bit of a conflict of interest for Merrick Garland
Hmmm:
AG Garland has weaponized the FBI and other DOJ departments against parents protesting against critical race theory in the schools.
Garland mentioned threats, harassment, and intimidation, but did not cite any examples.
Looks like Garland has a conflict of interest.
His daughter Rebecca married Xan Tanner, co-founder of Panorama, in 2018. The group Parents Defending Education (PDE) found out Panorama has multimillion-dollar contracts with school districts…
The contracts are for, among other things, “social and emotional learning (SEL) monitoring in Fairfax County Public Schools,” “part of a broader, $78.8 million investment of coronavirus relief that FCPS directed towards a ‘welcoming’ and ‘culturally responsive’ environment for students,” and several initiatives related to “equity and inclusion.” The company is involved in 1500 school districts.
While we’re at it, I’ll mention that Legal Insurrection has published a database that’s a guide to CRT and related matters in schools across the nation. Here’s a quote from the website:
We have researched and documented Critical Race Training in close to 400 colleges and universities in the United States. The website explains Critical Race Theory itself and provides resources to learn more. Additionally, it allows users to look up the steps their school has taken to mandate Critical Race Training in different parts of the college experience, from changing academic codes of conduct to funding “equity” projects.
There are also materials relating to K-12.
I’ve said before that the leftist takeover of education has probably been the most important aspect of the Gramscian march through the institutions, and undoing it is key to any hope this country will have for the future.
Update on the treatment of children who identify as transgender
The medical and leftist political establishments have been experimenting with the lives of children who identify as transgender, without knowing much about it at all. It seems ironic to me, on reading this article, that these radical treatments were offered – without adequate research – to vulnerable children, by the very same leftists who demanded that no drug, even those previously considered innocuous such as hydroxychloroquine, be given COVID patients without the drug being subjected to lengthy clinical trials first. And that was at a time when there wasn’t much else to offer COVID patients.
The article I just linked on the treatment of children makes shocking reading, even if you (like me) knew pretty much everything in it already. It’s still outrageous to read how these children and their parents have been exploited. The two doctors who contribute to the article are extremely prominent in the field of transgender surgery and are having serious second thoughts about early treatment (the two doctors happen to be transgender women, as well).
Here’s an excerpt:
Few, if any, other doctors acknowledge as much. The Mayo Clinic, for instance, does not note that permanent sexual dysfunction may be among puberty blockers’ risks. St. Louis Children’s Hospital doesn’t mention it, either. Oregon Health & Science University Children’s Hospital and University of California at San Francisco don’t. Nor was there any mention of sexual dysfunction in a recent New York Times story, “What Are Puberty Blockers?”
Jack Turban, the chief fellow in child and adolescent psychiatry at Stanford University School of Medicine, wrote, in 2018: “The only significant side effect is that the adolescent may fall behind on bone density.”
But lack of bone density is often just the start of the problem. Patients who take puberty blockers almost invariably wind up taking cross-sex hormones — and this combination tends to leave patients infertile and, as Bowers made clear, sexually dysfunctional.
This is a huge and growing problem, and it’s not going away. Due to politics and social media, the number of children identifying as transgender, especially girls identifying as boys, has grown by leaps and bounds. I’ve written several posts about this before, and in my opinion many health practitioners in the field (and I include many therapists here) are abusing these children and/or violating the Hippocratic oath. They are doing harm, and it has become verboten to point that out.
I hope that this article, which quotes two doctors whose previous bona fides in the field were probably impeccable, changes a few minds, although I’m experienced enough and cynical enough to realize that probably the opposite will occur and they and the information they are imparting will be rejected and shunned.
Open thread 10/6/21
Gunfight at the Chicago corral
Is there any sheriff in town?
An escalating number of shootouts is the inescapable implication of the decision of the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office to release all five suspects arrested in a fatal shootout between rival gangs in the city’s Southside Austin neighborhood, not too far from the Obama Monument. The head of that office, Kim Foxx, was elected with considerable financial support from George Soros, who has helped elect many soft-on-crime prosecutors across the US.
The release was partly a consequence of the fact that people were afraid to testify, and therefore it was hard to gather the requisite evidence (although, as the article points out, it was not impossible).
But the report also framed the state’s attorney’s office’s decision to decline charges in a different light: “Mutual combatants was cited as the reason for the rejection.” Mutual combat is a legal term used to define a fight or struggle that two parties willingly engage in.
Chicago mayor Lori Lightfoot, who is a leftist, is nevertheless upset at this decision:
Mayor Lori Lightfoot and some West Side aldermen called on Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx to reverse her decision on the case.
“If they do not feel like the criminal justice system is going to hold them accountable, we’re going to see a level of brazenness that will send the city into chaos and we cannot let that happen,” the mayor said Monday…
Lightfoot, herself a former prosecutor, believes there’s evidence to make a case.
“I think that there’s evidence there. We’ve got videotape, we have a marked squad of uniformed officers who were on the scene observing it,” she said. “At a bare minimum, the individuals who initiated the firefight must be prosecuted.”
This is not an isolated incident, either – Foxx recently refused to prosecute a death that occurred during a knifefight, with plenty of evidence, for the same reason: “mutual combat.”
Abortion, that always-contentious issue
Commenter “OBloody Proofreader Hell” writes:
I think many, if not most, here, tend to be anti-abortion, while I take a much more middling approach, as I do not believe it is possible to defend anti-abortion without a referral to religion, and as such it should not be Law. It is also a reasonable assertion that at least 1/3rd or more of the populace is pro-Choice. And again, with that much opposition, it should not be a matter of Law.
Things which are made Law should match a general agreement of the people, ca. 90% or more supporting, which is one reason for the historical “Jury Nullification” standard, as that produces much the same defacto metric of support.
Abortion is a very heated issue almost guaranteed to spark intense responses. I’ve written on the subject many times, and I’ll add here that although I disagree with some of the arguments that OBloody advances, I find them interesting enough to devote a post and discussion to them.
(1) Is it possible to advance an argument against abortion that isn’t couched in religious terms? I believe it is. For example, now that ultrasound images of a fetus are highly detailed, one can certainly argue on scientific grounds that this is a small human life. Or, one can argue the same on general philosophical grounds without ever invoking religion. The fact that each argument is in league with religion (or some religions) doesn’t mean it’s a religious argument, although of course religious arguments against abortion are also commonly made.
(2) And it is extremely possible to advance an anti-abortion argument that is not religious if the abortion prohibition is only after a date that arguably can be said to constitute viability of the child outside the womb. Over the years, that date has been pushed back and back and back, until now it consists of something like 24 weeks (although younger babies have survived, and I have little doubt that the number of weeks for this metric will further decline over time).
(3) The ideas that laws must be made with the agreement of 90% of the people is certainly not the way law has been regarded traditionally, and it certainly is not mounted for other types of laws. Roe was a SCOTUS decision, which even many of its proponents agree was not based on anything in the Constitution but on extrapolations from some idea of privacy that was never articulated in that document. Prior to Roe and its nationalization of a right to abortion, states had the right to legalize abortion and quite a few already had done so. If it had been left to the states, my sense is that it would probably have been legalized in more of them – through legislative action, which is more responsive to the will of the people in each state – with different laws governing in different states as to the details. If a national prohibition on abortion was passed it should have been done so through an amendment to the Constitution, a process that would have assured pretty high majority approval – although not 90%, an unrealistic standard. And likewise if a national right to abortion was passed, it should have been done in the same way – by constitutional amendment.
The National School Boards Association versus the non-compliant parents
Andrea Widburg (“Bookworm”) has written an article describing the new campaign of the DOJ at the behest of the National School Boards Association:
One of the recurring news stories over the last few months is that parents are speaking out at school board meetings to protest Critical Race Theory, masks, and transgender pressure in their public schools. The schools respond by trying to silence them and there have been a few minor scuffles that local police quickly settled. The National School Boards Association (“NSBA”) responded by demanding help from the FBI—and “moderate” U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland has agreed.
The ostensible reason the feds of the DOJ have been pressed into service is that somehow the local authorities aren’t able to enforce their own local laws, which already prohibit violence and death threats and the like, because of some sort of huge spike in threats that local police can’t handle. But is this the case?:
While the NSBA letter footnotes a number of news stories in support of its request, few of them document actual violence at school board meetings. There is this statement in a report on the famous Loudon County school board encounter: “A third person received a minor injury, officials said, without releasing details.” And in Mendon, Illinois, “school officials attempted to escort Felde out of the meeting when he struck one of them before leaving the school.” It doesn’t sound like a national wave of violence that is too severe for local authorities to handle.
This is most likely just the way for the federal camels to get their noses into the School Board tents, and one of the desired goals is to intimidate the opposition with the fear of being treated as the non-violent (vast majority) of January 6th protestors have been treated.
[NOTE: Here’s the letter the NSBA wrote to the Biden administration. This passage is of special interest, I think:
This propaganda continues despite the fact that critical race theory is not taught in public schools and remains a complex law school and graduate school subject well beyond the scope of a K-12 class.
I’ve heard that sort of argument before: of course we don’t actually teach CRT! That’s like saying they don’t teach genetics or physics or philosophy or economics or almost anything under the sun, which can also be graduate school subjects well beyond the scope of a K-12 class. But of course, those things are taught in rudimentary, more simplistic, and introductory forms. And the anti-racism initiatves (about “white privilege” and the like) are all based on CRT and derive from it, even though that don’t go into the theory of CRT in detail.]
Open thread 10/5/21
I usually don’t like cover bands. But I’ll make an exception for this one. Here’s their story, which started with a musician and his 15-year-old daughter.
This was their first song at their first concert, leading to YouTube fame:
I binged-watched quite a few of their videos.
Sinema stalked and harassed; Biden comments
The left does not allow disagreement with their leftist agenda. So Sinema must be made to suffer:
Sen. Kyrsten Sinema was followed into the bathroom by a group of immigration activists who confronted her in her classroom while she was teaching at Arizona State University.
Video shows the small group follow the senator through an ASU hallway and continue to berate her as she goes into a bathroom stall.
The activists were targeting Sinema (D-Ariz.) for her stance on President Biden’s $3.5 trillion Build Back Better infrastructure bill, which would provide a pathway to citizenship for many illegal immigrants.
…is an illegal immigrant. LUCHA (Living United for Change in Arizona) — the distributor of the video on Twitter — refers to her as “an immigrant youth.”
Reward that lady with citizenship!
I wonder how many Democrat voters are aware of what’s in that bill. Probably very few.
Oh, and this is what Biden had to say about it when asked:
When asked Monday for a response to the incidents, Biden said: “I don’t think they’re appropriate tactics, but it happens to everybody.”
“Everybody”? Hardly.
“The only people it doesn’t happen to are the people who have Secret Service standing around them,” Biden said.
Like Joe Biden, who is completely protected. And of course, most people on the left, because it’s mainly the leftists who do this sort of thing to the right.
He added: “So, it’s part of the process.”
Just regular, normal stuff.
Obesity and COVID death rates
Here’s some recent research on the relation between COVID deaths and obesity:
To identify potential patterns in data, the researchers employed cutting-edge techniques of statistical analyses.
“The main finding from the analysis is a statistically significant positive association between COVID-19 mortality and the proportion of the overweight in adult populations spanning 154 countries,” Beladi said. “This association holds across countries belonging to different income groups and is not sensitive to a population’s median age, proportion of the elderly, and/or proportion of females.”
Beladi added that when the proportion of the overweight people in a country’s adult population is one percentage point higher than the proportion of the overweight in a second country’s adult population, based on this study, it is reasonable to predict that COVID-19 mortality would be 3.5 percentage points higher in the first country than it would be in the second…
They added that on average, the COVID-19 pandemic has been more fatal for adult populations residing in parts of the world characterized by excess body weight.
When I read about this study, something struck me as odd. I once did some research on what the world’s fattest countries are, and the answers surprised me at the time. Those countries are for the most part not places with high COVID tolls. If this research is true, why would that be?
One reason is, of course, that weight is only one factor in COVID deaths and there are many others (including, for example, method of defining and reporting). But still, isn’t it odd that the countries with the fattest populations aren’t the highest in COVID deaths per million? Some of them of course, are small islands such as Tonga and Samoa, which are relatively isolated. But many are Arab countries such as Kuwait, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the UAR, and Qatar, as well as Turkey, Egypt, and Libya.
Then compare that list of obese countries to this list of COVID deaths per million/population (scroll down a bit to find the chart, and then look at the “Deaths/1M pop” column), country by country. Better yet, compare this much longer and more complete list of countries ranked on obesity (scroll down about 2/3 of the way to find it) to that COVID death rate chart. Your should be able to immediately see that it seems far more haphazard than the study might indicate. Just to take a few examples, Peru has the highest COVID death rate in the world, but it’s on the thinner side as countries go. Bosnia and Herzegovina, next on the list in terms of COVID deaths per million, is even thinner. Hungary, Bulgaria, and Czechia have extremely high COVID death rates and are more or less middling in terms of European obesity rates, which are not all that high to begin with. As for those Arab countries that have very high obesity rates, such as Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Qatar, their COVID death rates are very low.
Perhaps there’s something I’m missing, but this seems odd to me.
Going to the report itself, I don’t see much light shed. The number of countries involved in the obesity research was 154, but we don’t know which they are. One hint, though, is here [emphasis mine]:
We observe a statistically significant positive association between COVID-19 mortality and the proportion of the overweight in adult populations spanning 154 countries. This association holds across countries belonging to different income groups and is not sensitive to a population’s median age, proportion of the elderly, and/or proportion of females. The estimated elasticities of COVID-19 mortality, with respect to the proportion of the overweight in adult populations, are consistently higher for sub-samples of countries that belong to a higher income group.
So is this reported effect found only or mostly or most strongly in high-income groups within certain countries? Also, are some of the puzzling anomalies I see the result of other factors such as differing ages of the countries’ populations, differences for which the researchers have corrected? I have no idea, but perhaps there’s something like that involved. I know more than the average person about crunching numbers, but not enough to be able to decipher this. Perhaps some of you can do so.
There’s another clue towards the end of the article, where it says this: “our findings call for immediate and effective regulations (e.g. restrictions on ‘serving’ the market for food and beverages with items, the intake of which can result in the accumulation of excess body weight) that are long overdue.” Aha! So they’re seeking to make it more difficult (or at least more costly) for people to make their own food choices as they see fit, a la Bloomberg’s big gulp order. This fits in with much else that we’ve seen from health authorities regarding the use of COVID statistics to control people “for their own good.”
Making Facebook “safe”
[Hat tip: commenter Barry Meislin, who wrote, “Nothing that we didn’t know, but nice to find out that AT LEAST ONE Facebook employee has a conscience.”]
However, it seems to me that tons of Facebook employees have consciences, as do the people at the helm there who set the policy. In fact, they’re loaded with consciences, positively dripping with them. The question is: conscience about what?
The linked article discusses a Facebook whistleblower named Frances Haugen:
“The version of Facebook that exists today is tearing our societies apart and causing ethnic violence around the world,” Haugen told 60 Minutes Sunday.
Haugen accused the company of placing profit above the good for the public, despite assurances from Facebook leadership that the company was working to make the platform safe.
I certainly agree that Facebook and other social media companies are helping to tear our societies apart. I’m not sure about ethnic violence around the world, though; it seems to me that was rife long before Facebook existed.
But note that word “safe.” To me that’s a warning bell, a tell of leftism. No platform that allows a free exchange of ideas can be “safe” in the way that the word is commonly used today. So in the name of “safety,” speech is limited. But what speech?
More:
“There were conflicts of interest between what was good for the public and what was good for Facebook. And Facebook, over and over again, chose to optimize for its own interests, like making more money,” Haugen said.
In other words, they were acting like capitalists.
Documents revealed that Facebook’s own internal research showed that the company knew some of its products were harming the mental health of some of its users, most notably teen girls.
“Facebook’s own research says, as these young women begin to consume this eating disorder content, they get more and more depressed. And it actually makes them use [Instagram] more,” Haugen said.
So that seems to be about the fairly well-known (at least, it’s well-known to those in the therapy field) fact that when anorectics get to compare notes online or elsewhere (including in person, in hospital treatment centers) they often exchange information on how to be better anorectics and get thinner and thinner, as well as learning more effective ways to evade the authorities.
If Facebook bans such discussions, it does so in order to protect minors. To me, that’s a different thing because children are involved. Protecting adults by banning such discussions is much iffier.
And of course it’s not as though Facebook is a small operation, or a personal blog such as this one that features one person with others commenting on the views of that one person. Facebook is a vast vehicle for the exchange of ideas among people with their own pages, and it has enormous reach and power. Facebook and other such platforms started out very committed to openness but have clamped down more and more as time goes on. It sounds as though Haugen would like them to clamp down more.
And of course, to clamp down on the viewpoints that tend to be on the political right:
Haugen, a data scientist with a computer engineering degree and a Harvard MBA, said she took the job at Facebook in order to combat misinformation after losing a friend to online conspiracy theories. But although she admits that the company took some steps to combat misinformation during the 2020 election, many of those policies were only temporary.
Gotta clamp down on that election “misinformation” more and more, so we’ll be “safe.”
There actually is a dilemma here. Protecting children is one thing, but censoring political views on such a vast scale is another. And when Facebook decides what’s “misinformation,” it certainly isn’t unbiased in its application of the standard. We already know that full well, and we know which side will suffer and which will profit.