Welcome to shabbos for goyische cats; it’s Sunday, March 23, 2025, and National Tamale Day. The comestible has a long history:tamales have been eaten since at least the days of the Maya. Below you can see a vase showing tamales, described in Wikipedia this way:
In the pre-Columbian era, the Mayas ate tamales and often served them at feasts and festivals. The Classic Maya hieroglyph for tamales has been identified on pots and other objects dating back to the Classic Era (200–1000 CE), although they likely were eaten much earlier. Tamales appear often in ceramic ware from the Mayan Classic era (200–1000 CE). The Fenton vase shows a plate of unwrapped tamales being offered as a penance to a powerful Mayan nobleman.
Look at the plate of tamales (the Fenton Vase, a famous piece of Mayan art, dates to about 600-800 A.D.)
It’s also Cuddly Kitten Day (and National Puppy Day), National Chia Day, World Meteorological Day, National Chip and Dip Day, and National Melba Toast Day, a rusk named, like Peach Melba, after the Australian singer Dame Nellie Melba.
Here, because I don’t know where else to put them, are two photos taken on Friday of Mordecai and Esther, our resident mallards at Botany Pond. They are doing well but we’re hoping that facilities will make the pond duck-friendly soon (and turn on the camera). It’s a bit chilly, so they like to soak up the sun while sitting on the eastern edge of the pond. Mordecai is never far away from his mate, and she has the habit of quacking loudly when he’s not near her. (Remember, only female mallards emit the characteristic loud “quack,” while drakes make a very low grunting sound.) And note how camouflaged Esther is:
Shhhh. . . Esther is snoozing:
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the March 23 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
*George Forman, boxer and then entrepreneur (he sold grills) died. at 76.
George Foreman, a heavyweight boxing champion who returned to the sport to regain his title at the improbable age of 45, and who parlayed his fame and his amiable personality into a multimillion-dollar grill business, died on Friday night in Houston. He was 76.
His family announced the death, in a hospital, on his Instagram account. Roy Foreman, George’s brother, said the cause was not known.
When Foreman returned to the ring after 10 years away, there was skepticism that a fighter of his years could beat anyone younger, much less come back to the top of the game. But in 1994, he shocked the world by beating the undefeated Michael Moorer to reclaim the world title.
Foreman’s career spanned generations: He fought Chuck Wepner in the 1960s, Dwight Muhammad Qawi in the ’80s and Evander Holyfield in the ’90s.
With his fellow heavyweights Joe Frazier and Muhammad Ali, Foreman embodied a golden era in the 1970s, when boxing was still a cultural force in America. The three great champions thrilled fans with one classic bout after another. Foreman was the last living member of the trio.
Here’s a three-minute summary of his life. Heavyweight champ at 45!
*Andrew Sullivan takes out after Anthony Fauci (and Francis Collins) in a good piece on the Weekly Dish called, “Why did this man mislead us?” It’s not archived, but I have a subscription, and will give a few excerpts:
I was never a Covid nutter, on either side. I had my paranoid moments early on, but I never expected the government to get everything right. Anyone passingly aware of the history of plagues knows that failure is just par for the course. Misinformation? Always and everywhere, the record shows. But I did have faith in cutting-edge modern science and the expertise at the NIH. I knew NIAID’s Tony Fauci from the AIDS days and remembered him very fondly. Most of the time he was being yelled at by Larry Kramer, I was on Fauci’s side. I trusted him.
I don’t anymore. Over the last five years, we have slowly found out that, on Covid-19, we were all misled and misdirected a lot. And nowhere is this more evident than in the debate over where the virus came from. From the very start, it seemed, every authoritative figure assured us that it came from a “wet market” in Wuhan, China, where many bats, raccoons, and pangolins (mmm) tended to hang out in close proximity.
It was simply a hugely massive coincidence that there was also a laboratory in Wuhan … researching coronaviruses in bats by engineering more dangerous viruses in order to make vaccines for them. In the immortal words of Jon Stewart, appearing on Stephen Colbert’s show: “Oh my God, there’s been an outbreak of chocolaty goodness near Hershey, Pennsylvania. What do you think happened?”
Sullivan discusses how the “lab leak” theory for the origin of the SARS virus is gaining acceptance as the “most likely” theory, but of course we don’t know that with very high confidence. Yes, the Bayesian odds are in its favor as opposed to the “wet market” theory, but Sullivan seems a lot more sure than I am. (I’m agnostic, leaning towards the lab-leak.)
Nonetheless, the paper Andersen and others produced, as he acknowledged privately, focused “on trying to disprove any type of lab theory.” And so it did: “Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus.” Notice the definitive nature of that sentence. (Deeper in the text, where it was unlikely to be found by rushed journalists, there is a less categorical statement.)
Fauci hailed the paper without noting that he had helped generate it and seen drafts of it. For good measure, 27 public health experts then wrote an open letter to The Lancet, backing the paper and asserting, “We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin.” One of them was — tada! — Peter Daszak, who was part of this collective statement: “We declare no competing interests.” The Lancet subsequently disclosed his competing interest, which it didn’t condemn.
Why on earth would panicked scientists believe that Covid was probably a lab leak and then write a landmark paper “trying to disprove” it? It’s the essential question. One obvious answer is that Fauci realized that if his beloved gain-of-function research had led to the death of millions in a plague, he might not go down in history as a medical saint. Instead of helping to save millions of people, he may have inadvertently helped kill them, even though he knew the risks very well. So he let it appear that he was impartial — his schmoozing of media flunkies is legendary — while tilting everything to protect GOF.
Also, the NIH, of which Collins was head, had funded research in Wuhan, and probably wanted to separate itself from any theory involving that lab.
What is certain, from the emails that have been released, is that both Fauci and Collins indeed pressured fellow scientists to impugn the lab-leak theory and then further denigrated scientists on the other side as not having any credibility (that was not true). That alone is enough to severely diminish Fauci’s reputation. And the press went along with Fauci’s views, making the man a hero. Why was the lab-leak considered the wrong theory?:
More persuasive to me is the idea that no Western politician wanted to start a massive fight with China when their cooperation was so essential. The lab leak theory terrified them — because it could mean serious conflict. And so they downplayed it. Appeasement of China is the subtext of all of it. You see this in the scientists’ emails at the very start of the epidemic. They’re worried about “the shit show” if China were accused of deadly incompetence. Andersen’s money quote on the “Proximal Origin” paper in a contemporaneous email is pretty definitive about what happened: “I hate when politics is injected into science — but it’s impossible not to, especially given the circumstances.”
That is indeed what happened, and we have to come to terms with it far more thoroughly than we have. The MSM have never fully copped to their failure. The NYT, as late as October 2023, was publishing sentences like this: “No public evidence indicates that the institute was storing any pathogen that could have become the coronavirus. Still, President Donald J Trump and the Republicans on Capitol Hill amplified the concerns.” Notice that even then, the NYT was casting one view as inherently right-wing and thereby problematic. It reminds me of the way in which the MSM have ducked basic reporting on sex reassignment for children — because Republicans are against it, so of course it must be legit.
. . . . it is always possible for science to spurn political contamination — if scientists have actual integrity.
And without that integrity, science will lose public trust and simply become politics — which is why it now finds itself in such a crisis. When gender scientists refuse to release publicly-funded studies on child sex reassignment because they don’t like the results, and when virologists consciously obscure the scientific truth to protect their own asses and play global politics, we are right not to trust them.
But I want to trust them again. Science matters. We are in an epistemological crisis right now, where left and right have launched a postmodern assault on the search for objective truth to shore up Trump or to enact “social justice.” We actually need scientists right now more than ever to join those of us trying to rescue liberal democracy from its decadent collapse. We need clear, reasoned, rigorous, replicated, open, and transparent science. We need reason, not politics.
When we needed that in a plague, it just wasn’t there. People remember. And scientists have to grasp how hard it will be for some of us to forget.
I might add that we also need scientists to stop telling people that there are more than two sexes in humans and that there’s a “spectrum of sex” in all animal and vascular plant species. They hold the spectrum argument for one reasons, and one reason only: it’s virtue signaling, catering to those people who consider themselves either trans or nonbinary and want nature to conform to what brings them psychological comfort. But it’s simply dumb to think that a biological observation that holds widely somehow demeans trans or nonbinary folks.
*The WSJ describes how Trump is using his power to settle scores–on nearly every front, from colleges to the Secret Service. (And, of course, he’s also rewarding loyalists):
During a visit to the Kennedy Center earlier this week, a reporter asked President Trump whether he was aware that Hunter Biden had taken 18 Secret Service agents with him on a recent trip to South Africa.
“That will be something I’ll look at this afternoon,” Trump said. “I just heard about it for the first time.” Within hours, the president ordered Secret Service protection yanked from Hunter and his sister, Ashley Biden.
The scene played out as Trump was meeting with a new Kennedy Center board he installed to replace officials he terminated because he felt the arts programming didn’t sufficiently reflect his tastes. Also this week, the Trump administration paused $175 million in federal funding to the University of Pennsylvania, criticizing the college for allowing a trans swimmer to participate in women’s competitions, and issued letters to 20 law firms expressing concerns about their diversity programs and employment practices.
Late Friday, Trump revoked the security clearances of a host of political opponents and prominent Democrats, including Hillary Clinton, former Secretary of State Antony Blinken and former national security advisor Jake Sullivan.
The moves this week accelerated the pace of Trump’s efforts to settle scores, which began when he took office. The president is continuing to target his perceived enemies and punish institutions that he believes haven’t adequately aligned themselves with his administration’s values.
In his first two months in office, he used the vast powers of the presidency to sanction three well-known law firms whose attorneys opposed him or worked with others who did in various legal matters, a news outlet whose coverage he objects to and academic institutions he says foster views that conflict with his policies. He dismissed Democratic commissioners at a slew of federal boards that were designed to have bipartisan representation—including this week’s firing two Democratic members of the Federal Trade Commission, saying their service was “inconsistent” with his administration’s priorities.
On Thursday evening, Trump rolled back restrictions placed on Paul Weiss, one of the law firms targeted by executive order. The firm’s chairman, Brad Karp, agreed to spend $40 million in pro bono legal services to support the administration’s initiatives.
. . . . The score settling is occurring at a faster clip now than Trump’s first term because his White House is stocked with advisers who are loyal to him and his mission, rather than a mishmash of Republican aides that were brought into the administration in 2017, Trump allies say. Trump’s team also used its four-year hiatus out of power to come up with more detailed plans to quickly enact the president’s agenda.
Sadly, a lot of this is legal, and it’s going to create a bunch of Trump rump-osculators that will completely distort both society and the government. My way of dealing with this is to wait for the courts to handle it and, since I can do nothing save write my Senators and Representatives (which I do), avoid having it eat me up inside.
*Jennifer Finney Boylan, a trans woman now writing for the Washington Post, has a column in which she seems to assert that she is equivalent to a biological woman. With that I take issue, but I have no beef with her call for empathy for trans people, many of whom have had a hard life rife with psychological turmoil.
Is a butterfly “really” a caterpillar?
These questions matter to me, as a transgender woman, because the Trump administration’s attacks on us are, in some ways, founded on the supposition that women like me are “really” men. Whenever I hear, for instance, the simplistic edict that there should be “no men in women’s sports,” my first instinct is to agree. Because transgender women are not “really” men. We are women. We may have different histories than other women, but then, every woman has her own history.
Donald Trump’s election has released a tide of vitriol against transgender people (and women in particular; most of our nemeses seem oblivious to the existence of trans men). The silence of our alleged allies this last month has been stunning to me, and some of our allies have even volunteered to throw us under the bus in hopes of rebranding themselves as mainstream. Does Gavin Newsom — who came out against trans women in sports last week — really think that the MAGA base will embrace him now? Or is it possible that conservatives will see him as “really” a liberal? Hmm, let’s think.
What I think is that it’s unfair to assert that banning transgender women (I prefer to call them “trans identified men”) from participating in women’s sports is equivalent to “throwing transgender women under the bus.” No, it’s not: [banning transgender women] is refraining from throwing biological women–far more numerous–under the bus…
Boylan goes on:
The current blowback against trans women holds the opposite view — that people like me are “really” men, and no matter what sorts of surgical interventions take place, nothing can alter the fundamental assignment of sex at birth. That’s what’s behind the oddly phrased executive order declaring sex immutable and fixed at conception. “God doesn’t make mistakes,” is a phrase often aimed at people like me, as if to accuse me of being the gender equivalent of old man Withers.
. . . . The challenge for trans people, and our allies, is that many of our antagonists cannot imagine what it might be like to be wired the way we are. I still remember when I came out, 25 years ago, telling a friend that I’d had a lifelong sense of myself as female — that this impulse had dominated my waking life for 40 years — and her response was to dismissively shrug and say, “Well, I can’t imagine that,” as if her inability to imagine the life of someone like me was my problem rather than hers.
In terms of biology, yes, transgender women are biological men, and in that sense are “really men.” But there’s nothing wrong with noting that they are enacting the social role of women. As I once said on the site of the FFRF in a now-removed post, “Biology is not bigotry” (link is archived).
And of course nobody of good will would denigrate trans people or deny them any rights save when those claimed rights class with the rights of other groups, as in sports participation. So yes, I largely agree with Boylan’s last paragraph here:
Our problem is that “No men in women’s sports” or “There are only two sexes” make great bumper stickers. In such simple phrases they seem to capture an inarguable truth. “Common sense” is what the president calls it. But just because arguments against trans people’s right to exist are easy to make, that does not make them any less wrong. What is difficult is that understanding how folks like me experience the world takes time and thoughtfulness. Not to mention decency.
. . . . No, none of these are the greatest obstacles for acceptance. The greatest obstacle for us is a lack of imagination.
By which I mean, only a person without imagination could think that Superman is “really” Clark Kent. Only a person without imagination could think that a butterfly is “really” a caterpillar. Or that a trans woman is “really” a man.
Without imagination, it is easy to believe in things that are simple, and superficial, and wrong.
With it, we can begin to understand the lives of those who are different from ourselves — and respond to their struggles with compassion, and kindness and grace.
Is it “wrong” to say that transgender women are biological men? Or that transgender women should not compete in sports against natal women? I don’t think so, nor do I see those as attempts to “erase” trans people. I’m glad to have them in the world. But yes, Boylan’s last sentence is absolutely right. Stick up for what you believe about debatable issues, but do so with “compassion, kindness, and grace.”
*The AP reports some horrible behavior on the part of a United pilot:
An Orthodox Jewish passenger says a United Airlines pilot forcibly removed him from an airplane bathroom while he was experiencing constipation, exposing his genitalia to other flyers during a flight from Tulum, Mexico, to Houston.
Yisroel Liebb, of New Jersey, described his trip through allegedly unfriendly skies in a federal lawsuit this week against the airline and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, whose officers he said boarded the plane upon landing and took him away in handcuffs.
Liebb and a fellow Orthodox Jewish traveler said they were forced to miss a connecting flight to New York City while U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers paraded them through an airport terminal, placed them in holding cells and searched their luggage.
United Airlines declined to comment. Messages seeking comment were left for the Department of Homeland Security and lawyers for Liebb and the other traveler, Jacob Sebbag.
In the lawsuit, filed Wednesday in Manhattan federal court, Liebb said he was in the bathroom in the back of the plane for about 20 minutes on Jan. 28 when a flight attendant woke Sebbag from a nap and asked Sebbag to check on him.
Liebb said he explained his gastrointestinal predicament and assured Sebbag that he’d be out soon. Sebbag then relayed that to the flight attendant, the lawsuit says.
About 10 minutes later, with Liebb still indisposed, the pilot approached Sebbag and asked him to check on Liebb, the lawsuit says. The pilot then yelled at Liebb to leave the bathroom immediately, the lawsuit says.
Liebb said he told the pilot that he was finishing up and would be out momentarily.
The pilot responded by breaking the lock, forcing the bathroom door open and pulling Liebb out with his pants still around his ankles, exposing his genitalia to Sebbag, flight attendants, and nearby passengers, according to the lawsuit.
Poor guy! United later gave the two hasidim complementary tickets to Houston, but the pair had to spend more than that on a hotel in New York. As for whether it’s realistic to be in the bathroom for half an hour, you tell me. I think I’m the only person I’ve ever met who has never been constipated. Seriously! All I know is that from watching remedies for the condition advertised on television, it looks pretty painful.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili sits among the flowers and uses a literary allusion, but I think she’s really waiting for dinner.
Hili: I’m waiting for Godot.A: And what do you want from him?Hili: I have a long list.
Hili: Czekam na Godota.Ja: A czego od niego chcesz?Hili: Mam długą listę.
*******************
From The Dodo Pet:
From Strange, Stupid, or Silly Signs:
From Animal Antics, a very realistic spot:
From Masih; how could anybody call Masih an “Islamophobe”? She was brought up a Muslim and is simply trying to stop Islam from controlling the lives of women and oppressing them!
Where are @AOC, @IlhanMN, the left-wing activists who called me an Islamophobe, and the campus protesters chanting “I am Hamas”? The killers sent by the Islamic Republic to assassinate a woman on US soil were convicted in federal court, You’re silent. Why?pic.twitter.com/qK4eNtR90w
— Masih Alinejad 🏳️ (@AlinejadMasih) March 22, 2025
From Barry; “a cat with a good uppercut”. Click on the screenshot to go to the video, which I can’t embed:
From Malcolm; marine biologists:
Marine biologists. pic.twitter.com/7wwMjDQSyz
— cats with jobs 🛠 (@CatWorkers) March 7, 2025
From Malgorzata, antisemitism from 1947.
Arabs in 1947.
No, it didn’t start on October 7. pic.twitter.com/d4TzEankNA
— Marina Medvin 🇺🇸 (@MarinaMedvin) March 19, 2025
From my Twitter feed; no the site is not a complete cesspool:
god that cat is stupid and I love him so much pic.twitter.com/LOiyv5yQ18
— Posts Of Cats (@PostsOfCats) March 20, 2025
From the Auschwitz Memorial: one that I reposted:
This Dutch family of four, including a 3-year-old girl born on March 23, were all gassed to death upon arrival at Auschwitz.
— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2025-03-23T10:13:12.114Z
Two tweets from Dr. Cobb. I didn’t get the first till I saw the second photo, and even then had to ask:
Modern technology is awful.
— Michael Legge (@michaellegge.bsky.social) 2025-03-22T10:59:35.044Z
And a lovely DUCK:
Exquisite animal. An icon of weird duck season. 10/10.
— Patrick Vallely (@pjvphotography.bsky.social) 2025-03-22T04:56:20.825Z
A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:
One cannot be deeply responsive to the world without being saddened very often. -Erich Fromm, psychoanalyst and author (23 Mar 1900-1980)
Jennifer Finney Boylan:
“me, as a transgender woman”
Is “T” related to “Q”?
Since Q is so ill-defined, then probably yes. T is not, however, related to L, G, or B,which are sexual orientations.
Precisely what my question was driving at – nothing to do with lesbian or gay.
Yet, we never see “LGB”, or indeed H.
This shows an alchemical thought manipulation.
Aside : Queer Theory, IMHO, is, in fact clear in its literature about what it is but that’s for another time.
The truth is mundane. In many progressive niche movements, the success of LG is something to ride on the coattails of. That’s why the acronym is growing. “Now that people accepted LG, they will have no problem with B, T, Q” and the ever-growing list after that.
“. . . telling a friend that I’d had a lifelong sense of myself as female. . . .”
I struggle with this. How does Boylan know that what he sensed was female? Based purely on my own experience, I would say it is hard enough to know what another person feels on a day-to-day basis (apart from obvious events), let alone what it feels to be another sex. Indeed, I am not sure that I can separate what it feels like to be a man from societal roles. I can describe what it is like to have a penis, but not how that compares to having female reproductive organs. I don’t know, though, that the rest of what I feel is because I am a man or because I am me. I once asked someone what is was like to be a twin, and they replied, sensibly, that they couldn’t describe it, because they had no other experience to compare it to.
Honestly, I think a lot of the blowback against trans women is because some of them have shown willingness to step all over female athletes and some others of them have equated “not letting trans women play against females” with “not letting trans women be women.” That’s why there’s a lot less blowback against trans men.
I wonder if the tendency to believe you are the other sex is related to the tendency to be a selfish jerk, since it is still surprising to me that a man who “becomes a woman” would think it is fair to compete against women athletically.
Wrt selfish jerks, I thought the most important part of the piece was JFB’s anecdote:
“I came out, 25 years ago, telling a friend that I’d had a lifelong sense of myself as female — that this impulse had dominated my waking life for 40 years — and her response was to dismissively shrug and say, “Well, I can’t imagine that,” as if her inability to imagine the life of someone like me was my problem rather than hers.”
This is JFB’s problem to solve, and not the problem of females (including the friend in the anecdote). Genderism stakes a selfish claim on the thoughts and speech of others in order to protect the “trans” person from the overwhelming evidence that his gender identity might not be true.
I’ve yet to see any convincing evidence supporting the lab leak theory for SARS-Cov2.
What seems to be public amounts to basically the Jon Stewart point that there is a virology research institute in the same city so that MUST be the source.
The trouble with this is that the institute is 10 miles from the market and almost all the initial cases seem to be linked in the immediate vicinity of the market and none in the vicinity of the research institute.
There is also one piece of evidence that seems clear to molecular biologists but hard for lay people to grasp, namely that the virus is knlwn to have two lineages present very early, the A and B lineages. Lineage A spread mostly in China and lineage B spread around the world. Both of these were found present in the market linked cases.
High levels of viral contamination were also found in some animal cages in the market.
Now this doesn’t completely rule out the lab leak hypothesis but it poses some interesting questions.
The leak, if it came from the lab must have a pretty direct rounte to the market (someone selling infected lab animals for food there, for example) that would explain why the outbreak has an epidemiological case pattern that indicates the human infections began at the market.
I would line to see some evidence that the specific strain of this virus was being studied in the Institute of Virology prior to the outbreak (no such evidence has been released).
Also, since the pandemic, there have been several studies that show that it is not uncommon for rural individuals living close to bat populations to have antibodies against SARS-Cov2, in samples taken before the pandemic. This indicates that the virus (or a very similar one) is present in the wild and occasionally makes the jump to humans so its not unthinkable that it could, at some point, have picked up enough mutations to make it infectious amongst humans.
The SARS-1 virus did so, just 23 years ago. The Mers virus did so even more recently.
One final thing (sorry for the length), the initial report about lab manipulation of SARS-Cov2 was a preprint from some Indian researchers who claimed it looked like there were cloning sites or manipulated sequence in the virus. This was quickly discounted but it may be why the initial scientific response was about discointing sequence manipulation rather than the lab leak issue.
And the market was closed and cleaned out before testing could be done. That is why the evidence from the market is not as clear as it could have been. But it is still compelling. There were cases from different parts of the market that could be explained by the fact that bathrooms were shared by people in those areas.
That is why we need to ask what new evidence is there of lab leak. So far I just see new articles expressing an opinion or reporting on an intelligence agency low-confidence conclusion.
China is a police state, so I imagine every piece of “evidence” was provided by the Chinese government?
“The leak, if it came from the lab must have a pretty direct rounte to the market (someone selling infected lab animals for food there, for example)”
Consider this;
“The leak, if it came from the lab must have a pretty direct rounte to the market (an infected lab worker shopping there, for example)”
Innuendo. Not as compelling.
That wouldn’t explain the two viral lineages.
Your scenario would fit the current molecular evidence only if two different Institute of Virology workers, each infected with a different strain of the virus, decided to pop into the market a couple of weeks apart. The simpler explanation is that there was an ongoing animal infection in the market, allowing the virus to mutate to 2 lineages and infect different people over the early part of December 2019.
Length is fine by me, Martin. I will only add that I think many of us covered this subject yesterday pretty thoroughly and I stand by what I said then.
Thank you & Mike. Now for the second day in a row, here’s a compendium of reasons that it does not appear to be a leak, including links to all the other times they’ve dealt with this issue with different virologists at TWiV.
Plus, as noted yesterday, it has now been determined that raccoon dogs can harbor the virus without becoming sick, suggesting that they could easily have been in the market and full of virus without appearing to be in a condition that would have gotten them culled.
One of the things I recall is that the mutations in SARS-CoV-2 vs. the closest known relative virus are spread all across the genome. IIRC, the postitional identity is somewhere in the high 90%’s, so we’re talking 100s of mutations. That is not the situation that you would expect if this was a virus engineered in a lab from a known virus.
So in sum, competent, respected virologists have given many reasons that do not point to a lab leak. As far as I can tell, Sullivan has yet to offer anything counter to those.
Thanks Hempenstein for summarizing today and your contributions yesterday. I had just grown weary…the cranks will wear one down until they are tHe last voice standing….plus it is great to have a subject matter expert like you speak.
Some of us who favour lab leak are not cranks but instead are evolutionary geneticists. I think this article explains the reasoning well. Mainly the lack of evidence that would positively confirm lab leak or wet market. Everything else seems weak, indirect and circumstantial. Given the strong prior belief that it really was the chocolate factory (WIV had lots of bat coronaviruses, they planned to do GoF work, the Chinese authorities’ secrecy) I think stronger data will be needed to overcome that prior. And maybe it’s no longer possible to get those data). Not disagreeing with anything you’ve written here (or the TWiV folks), just emphasizing how strong that prior is and how relatively weak the data are compared to that prior.
https://doi.org/10.1128/msphere.00119-23
This article you have linked is hardly a ringing endorsement for the lab leak theory. It lists the different lab origin theories but doesn’t find evidence for any of them and seems to argue that the current evidence points towards the animal origin spread.
Thanks Martin! I agree with you. There are no ringing endorsements for either lab leak or wet market. It may not be possible to rule out either.
“Establishing the lab leak hypothesis would require evidence that the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) was working on a CoV very closely related to the original Wuhan strain, and such evidence would have to come from laboratory records. Had the WIV been working on such a virus, evidence of a laboratory accident and/or that some of the initial cases had come from individuals at the WIV would strongly support the possibility of a lab leak. While the Chinese government has denied that such work was being done by the WIV, transparency is lacking (2). Unless such evidence is forthcoming, the laboratory leak hypothesis cannot be confirmed.”
I’m not endorsing lab leak, I’m trying to express how strong I find the prior on lab leak, and how hard it is for some folks like me to reject lab leak given the strong prior and given the weak evidence for either lab leak or wet market.
And now I’ve overcommented. Cheers!
Also thanks from me, and to those above who reply about this. I do not understand why the lab leak hypothesis continues to inspire leanings in favor of it, when all I’ve seen about that is conspiracy theory while zoonotic origin from the market continues to have positive evidence for it that is never countered with lab leak evidence beyond innuendo.
Like most significant viruses, we will probably never know the origin of Covid-19. Best we can do is say “we don’t know. We probably never will know, but what facts there are are more consistent with a market origin.”
The claim that intelligence agencies know it was definitely a lab leak suggests that they have some critical piece of information that is convincing.
To a virologist this would likely be a viral genome sequence of a sample being worked on in the Wuhan Institute prior to the pandemic, that is almost 100% identical to the original wet market strain.
Even the much touted ”gain of function” experiments would not likely alter the overall percentage identity of the virus much.
Or perhaps the sequence of the infecting virus in a sick Wuhan Institute researcher from a point in time prior to the wet market spread.
As others have said, there are these types of evidences I have suggested that, if revealed, would tip the scales towards a lab leak rather than animal market origin.
I don’t have a horse in this race. If it is a lab leak then we deal with that. Until the data exists that compels us in this direction, however, I find the evidence for the animal market theory far more convincing.
This is the most detailed analysis of the covid source hypotheses that I have seen. Please explain what is wrong with it.
https://zenodo.org/records/4477081
I was in the Philippines a couple years ago and met up with a couple of tourists from China. Our conversation eventually got around to covid so I asked them where they thought it came from. They both laughed out loud and said “everyone in China knows it came from the Wuhan lab”. Whether that is true or not, of course, I don’t know. But as I said yesterday, there are live animal markets all over China but only one virology lab doing gain of function research on bat coronaviruses, and that was in Wuhan.
People in China know less than us. It’s a pretty authoritarian place. Paul Offit on lab leak:
Chan wrote, “It remains unclear whether researchers in the Wuhan Institute of Virology possessed the precursor of the pandemic virus.” It is now quite clear that they did not possess any such precursor. The only remote evidence of a precursor to SARS-CoV-2 was a virus called RATG13, which is 1,200 base pairs different from SARS-CoV-2, far from a precursor. Further, two U.S. intelligence reports in 2020 and 2023, now declassified, showed that the Wuhan laboratory was unaware of the existence of SARS-CoV-2 until the start of the outbreak.
https://pauloffit.substack.com/p/lab-leak-mania
“I once asked someone what is was like to be a twin, and they replied, sensibly, that they couldn’t describe it, because they had no other experience to compare it to.“
This exactly explains my skepticism about a claim that someone can feel like the opposite sex. Every state of my being that I can describe, I can only describe by comparing it, even if implicitly, to a contrasting state.
I can describe what it’s like to be hot because i know what it is to be cold. I can describe what it’s like to be hungry because I’ve felt sated. And I can tell you what it feels like to be happy because I’ve known sadness.
But ask me what it feels like to be a man, and I am at a loss. I can only tell you what it feels like to be me.
I’m not a neuroscientist, but I’ve read just enough about the topic to believe that our internal sensory system is designed to maintain our body’s homeostasis. That’s it. Until someone shows me definitive evidence one exists, I’m going to doubt there’s a neural network meant to alert its owner of missing ladies’ (or men’s) parts.
Agree. I am a man, but what does that feel like? I really can’t explain it. And how would I know that what I feel like is actually a woman? Again, I don’t know how I would know.
I just realized that the “gender identity” is 100% nature, 0% nurture. It seems like a total turnaround from the 100% nurture position of just a few years ago.
The only way that a man can “feel like a woman” is in terms of his own perceptions of how a woman’s feels and how she should look, behave, and what her interests should be. All based on regressive sex stereotypes that we foolishly believed we had left behind.
I’ve yet to see a transwoman who didn’t emulate “girly” stereotypes – head tilts, long hair, makeup, spinny skirts, etc. – rather than choose to copy the very many women (my wife included) who have short hair, and generally wear trousers and no lipstick except for special occasions.
The word “trans” is confusing, we should use the word “psychological” instead. There are no “trans women”, there are biological men who are psychological women.
+1
What is this psychology that is divorced from biology?
There are men who have interests and feelings more in common with an average woman than they do with average men. Fine. They are still men.
Reality has two very distinct realms: the physical world, and consciousness. You can, for example, be very slim, and believe that you’re fat.
“Trans” is very simple if you just substitute the word “pretend” in its place!
A short while ago PCC asked in a post if there is still a use for the word gender (or something along those lines). I think there is and, in my opinion, PCC in the statement below make clear why we do need the word gender:
“In terms of biology, yes, transgender women are biological men, and in that sense are “really men.” But there’s nothing wrong with noting that they are enacting the social role of women.”
Can you define “enacting the social role of women” without invoking Leave-It-To-Beaver-style outdated gender roles?
Sophie Grace Chappell, who is a transwoman, has argued (in “Trans Figured” and elsewhere) that we should think in terms of the analogy, Trans women are to women as adoptive parents are to parents. We shouldn’t think adoptive parents aren’t real parents — so why not equally take trans women to be women? The problem is that there’s a big disanalogy. Adoptive parents take on the role of parents. But exactly as Phillip Helbig notes, the idea of a specific social role for women appears to accept an outdated understanding of women’s social role. The analogy pushed by Chappell has nothing to depend on except some such conception of women’s social role.
I didn’t use the word “gender” in that sentence except for “transgender”, which could be replaced by “trans-identifying men”. And no, I don’t think that there really is a pressing need for a word as ambiguous as “gender.”
There is a lot wrong with that view, says I.
What, pray tell, is the social role of women? The only social roles that women must play, because men can’t play them, is being half of a heterosexual romantic relationship with a small-gamete producer and gestating and nursing the children that result. And those roles are dictated entirely by their sex. A man enacting any of the other social roles that mostly women do, e.g., dental hygienist, harpist, unpaid child care, receptive intercourse, is still entirely a man. He is in no way or sense a woman. Further, a man playing any of those stereotypically female social roles doesn’t necessarily think of himself at all as a woman just because he does them. Conversely Rachel Levine calls himself a woman not because wearing a naval-styled uniform while leading the US Public Health Service is a woman’s social role. He just says he’s a woman and has the makeup and pantyhose to prove it. The only social role at issue here is demanding that other people see him for what he is not. Misgendering is not just being impolite or unkind. It becomes something that those who have power over you can punish you for….and the activists know it.
The other social role that women usually play exclusively is to be exempt from the military combat draft. But this role, too, is dictated by their sex. Even if women socially want to serve, no country thinking biologically will send its young womb-bearers to be cannon fodder.
A man doing any of the purely social roles that women typically do — the sex role stereotypes — is still 100% a man. He doesn’t “become” a woman in any sense simply because the law lets him use women’s changing facilities, compete in women’s sport, or sends him to a women’s prison when he commits a crime. He demands to do these things in order to realize his internal feelings into an external social role. (That’s why, by the way, the trans-rights activists can never accept those “sensible” restrictions the rest of us want to place on their civil rights while treating them with compassion and kindness in all the roles they don’t really care about.)
Yes.
D.A.
NYC
FB: (comment No. 7)…”there are biological men who are psychological women.”
Wow. This is the most accurate description of the trans phenomenon I’ve ever read. One can not change their sex nor is it possible to be born in the wrong body. You have what you have.
Describing what a “psychological” woman is beyond my background. I don’t know if being a “psychological” woman(or man) is a mental state or disorder. I haven’t seen much popular scientific literature on the subject. It appears the field has not reached the maturity to take a predominantly objective, empirical look at the subject. Instead I find rationalization, much like Mr. Boylan’s.
Yes, I mean Mr. Boylan. That I choose to identify him by his biology, as Dr. Coyne puts it, is not bigotry. It’s the truth. If he, or anyone else, chooses to live their life as the the opposite sex, they deserve the same legal rights, protections and and social courtesies as the next person. But choosing to live as the opposite sex doesn’t give them the right to cancel the sex-based rights, protections and social norms for the rest of society just because they say so.
If it helps to at least gain acceptance that trans-identifying individuals really are experiencing gender dysphoria, and are not merely confused or making it up or whatever, then calling them “psychological women”, and “psychological men” is ok by me.
It was not that many decades ago that it was common to dismiss gay people in ways that denied that they were really experiencing what they say they were experiencing. We are strange monkeys, is all I can say.
There is no external cost in accepting that a person who says he is homosexual really is homosexual. Decades ago it was a way to evade the draft but because homosexuality was so severely discriminated against, it was a high-cost strategy to be thus outed in civilian life, especially if you were really straight. Then no one would believe you! With homosexuality now allowed in military service, falsely claiming to be gay gains no advantage, so we believe all gay people and couldn’t care less what makes them that way.
But when the frontiers of homosexual activism move into sex denial, then there is an external cost born entirely by legions of women, who want nothing to do with male homosexuals but now must, on pain of legal penalties, accept them into their midst…as women! There is now a legitimate societal interest in trying to debunk claims of being “trans.” “I’m a fake woman and I demand that you believe me.”
The claims of homosexuals and their transsexual wing are not analogous.
It’s painfully clear that the street named “Stick up for what you believe about debatable issues, but do so with compassion, kindness, and grace” is one-way. IMO hypocrisy isn’t always loathsome, but sometimes is.
To be honest as a woman it is highly offensive to think that being a woman is some psychological condition that can be imposed from within. How dehumanizing and how trivial.
They have zero idea what being a woman is. An obvious example could be the potential social mortification of a period being detectable to others and this then governs our behaviour and actions.
The notion of being kind and compassionate seems to be only directed one way and it is not to woman and children.
A woman is an adult human female. The issue is how to call a man who identify as a woman: woman, trans woman, trans-identifying man, psy-woman, fake woman?
Man.
Hmmm. How about womanman?
Better: wo-man (pronounced wo-MAN).
Calling a man a “psychological woman” is like calling an anorexic “psychologically obese” or a schizophrenic who identifies as Napoleon a “psychological Napoleon”. These are cases where beliefs about identity conflict with physical reality.
Anorexia and schizophrenia are mental conditions that can be treated by psychiatrists. Do you think that we should recommend people with gender dysphoria to seek professional help? It certainly looks that it’s a mental condition that interferes with their lives, how should be treated, changing the body or the mind? I’m open-minded about it.
Gender dysphoria is a mental condition too. However I don’t see a compelling reason to treat it by convincing men who feel they are women that they are not actually women in any real sense, because in most cases they already know that.
Boylen’s take upon hearing that a woman could not imagine Boylen’s lifelong sense as a female, “as if her inability to imagine the life of someone like me was my problem rather than hers.”
Well, yes. Why is it her problem (or a problem at all)? There are plenty of people in the world who I don’t understand, and likely never will, but still treat with decency.
S/he becomes all our problem when given a sinecure at prestigious media outlets.
(See my comment below about his/her position on Islamic terrorism).
D.A.
NYC
George Foreman was married five times and had 12 children – all five of his sons are called George! Apparently, this was so he would “always have something in common with them” – weird!
He also commented that since he had been hit in the head so many times, remembering that all of his sons were named George was easier 🙂
Now THAT makes sense!
Glad you brought up Jennifer Finney Boylan, late of WPo, formerly New Woke Times.
As well as being a trans maximalist (the most extreme I’ve read of)…. .Miss, Mrs or Mx JFB was out front and center in favor of machine gunning French comic writers.
She was part of PEN’s* “Sure free expression but we have to think of Muslim’s feeeelings….” protest, as cartoonist blood was still wet in Paris.
There was a hunk of leftist t*rds taking the Islam side of the Charlie Hebdo massacre and s/he was right out front. Let’s not let her/him live that shame down.
D.A.
NYC
*No idea how she got into PEN.
He also removed his signature from a petition against “cancel culture” because JK Rowling had also signed it: https://www.newsweek.com/author-jennifer-finney-boylan-recants-cancel-cultureletter-jk-rowling-1516235
Bloody idiot!
YES Jez! I’d forgotten that. Unbelievable what can pass as a public intellectual today.
D.A.
NYC
I’m undecided which vowel you intended. Both seem to work well, but with different emphases.
“With it, we can begin to understand the lives of those who are different from ourselves — and respond to their struggles with compassion, and kindness and grace”.
Right, so where is the understanding on the transgender side of understanding the lives of women? Also missing is any compassion, kindness, and grace coming from that side of the debate.
They are SO lovely and understanding: https://archive.is/arDbk
Constipation – the man’s problem may have been very real, but the pilot may also have had a problem since they cannot land with someone in the bathroom.
The time I have seen this problem (warning – a bit graphic):
A friend entered the only bathroom in an area where there were about 25 people. My friend was in the bathroom for well over an hour, as people came by knocking. Fortunately it was an area with plenty of bushes, which I expect were well fertilized that morning. My friend had partially expelled a very hard, dry ‘log’ of feces, but it would not finish exiting. They tried to break it manually but that was excruciating and unsuccessful. They tried to pull it with no success until about an hour later. Glad we were not on a plane.
I know a bit about constipation. I would have thought a plane would be the last place to try and overcome the situation and if one has constipation, holding off for another hour or even day ought be easy as that is the substance of the affliction.
Holding up the functioning of aircraft in flight , especially if it is preparing to land is asking for trouble. Not that I necessarily endorse such extreme measures.
These comments have gone to shit.
https://x.com/Evolutionistrue/status/1903776913169973635 ✨🐱✨
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waiting_for_Godot 🎭
If Godot comes, I’ll charge him a “lateness fine”! 💴😠🤨