Jts5665

I’m buried over my ears in work and “other work”, but let me just share with you a few graphs about a recent Rasmussen poll (via Instapundit):

When I still lived in the heart of Europe, I used to think the Eurocrat elites were wildly out of touch, paternalistic, and imperious. But their American counterparts take it to another level.

This is a level of out-of-touchness worthy of late 18th-century France, or the nomenklatura in the Brezhnev-era USSR.

And then you wonder why people turn to (sometimes shady) populists — because people are feeling so un-represented that they will vote for anyone who at least pretends to give a Shiite and stand up to the velvet tyranny of this Brahmandarin neo-nomenklatura.

Related: Sherelle Jacobs in the Daily Telegraph on how the UK — despite having a nominally Conservative (fauxservative?) govenment — has become a lawless country where thugs and criminals (even literal murderers) are coddled while the law-abiding get punished. My “emmerdization thesis” is looking ever less funny and more realistic.

Cold grey morning without sunlight
Ghostly mist on the horizon
Empty visions of a world gone mad
Paints a picture so revealing
Through my window dark tomorrow
I can hear the sirens wailing
For the future we are holding on
As the ship of fools is sailing

Such a long time
Such a long time
We are waiting for a peace that’s lasting
Reaching upward
Sliding downward
Looks like just another
Cold grey morning

Today, the state of Alabama will try again to kill Kenneth Eugene Smith. In one of the most bizarre capital punishment cases in the country, the state previously botched an execution of Smith. Everything about the case has been legally irregular in the effort to execute this convicted assassin.

Smith, 58, was convicted in a murder-for-hire case involving the brutal beating and stabbing of Elizabeth Sennett, 45, in 1988. Yet, the jury decided to give him life in prison rather than the death penalty. That was then overruled by the judge who sentenced him to death.

He has remained on death row since 1996. His appeals finally ran out in November 2022 and Alabama attempted to execute him. However, the staff could not find a good vein to use for the intravenous lines. It took so much time that the warrant period expired.

Smith then added a new wrinkle. He demanded death by nitrogen gas, the first such execution in history. That required years of approval of an new regimen and authority. When it was finally approved, Smith then objected to the use of nitrogen gas.  The district court rejected the effort.

In that order, U.S. District Judge Austin Huffaker found that Smith was gaming the system through bait-and-switches:

“Now that Alabama is prepared to carry out his sentence using the method of execution he has consistently declared he prefers, the circumstances have changed. And what was once highly unlikely is now a certainty. With that change, Smith now seeks to enjoin the Defendants from carrying out his death sentence using the Protocol, arguing it unconstitutionally superadds pain such that the court should order the Defendants to amend it or execute him by firing squad, a ‘relatively uncommon and archaic’ method.”

In his denied petition to the U.S. Supreme Court, Smith focused on the cruel aspects of successive execution attempts — a process that was even more uncertain and stressful with the use of “a novel method of execution that has never been attempted by any state or the federal government.”

It failed after a petition to Justice Clarence Thomas. Kenneth Smith is now scheduled for execution today by his previously chosen method of execution.

I SUSPECT THERE WILL BE LESS DUMB STUDENT (AND FACULTY) POLITICS: ABA Seeks Comments On Proposal To Allow Accreditation Of Fully Online Law Schools.

Almost exactly one year ago, I wrote a column about a coordinated effort to impose class-warfare tax increases in seven left-wing states.

Fortunately, that effort fizzled.

Meanwhile, there was continued progress in other states to lower tax rates. The net effect was “the feel-good map of 2023.”

And we have more and more evidence that taxpayers are “voting with their feet” by moving to the lower-tax states.

So it would seem that the issue is settled, right?

Not exactly. Our friends on the left have not given up.

David Chen of the New York Times reports that there’s now an effort to impose class-warfare taxes in 10 states.

Here are some excerpts from his story.

Lawmakers in Vermont are introducing legislation this week that would impose new taxes on the state’s wealthiest residents, joining a growing national campaign… One proposal in Vermont would tax people with more than $10 million in net worth on their capital gains, even if the gains have not yet been realized. Another would add a 3 percent marginal tax on individual incomes exceeding $500,000 a year… The package of bills is part of a broader push across the country by progressive groups… the campaign began in earnest a year ago, when legislators in seven states…coordinated the introduction of bills… None of those proposals got out of committee. But this year, with Vermont, Pennsylvania and possibly other states joining the fold, organizers are redoubling their efforts… Some of the ultrawealthy agree: More than 250 billionaires and millionaires, including heirs to the Rockefeller and Disney fortunes, recently signed an open letter, coinciding with the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, that urged world leaders to tax them more.

With regards to the rich people who claim to want higher taxes, I invite them to follow these instructions on how to voluntarily pay extra money to Washington.

But since none of them ever go for that option, we can safely assume that they are virtue-signalling hypocrites.

So let’s instead consider what will happen if politicians succeed in raising taxes in any of the 10 states mentioned in the article. And we’ll use Vermont as an example.

The top tax rate in Vermont is currently 8.75 percent and some politicians want to push that rate to 11.75 percent. If they are successful, Vermont will have the nation’s second-highest top tax rate, with only California being worse.

That’s economic suicide, especially since Vermont is right next to zero-tax New Hampshire.

And if Vermont politicians also impose a tax on unrealized capital gains (an idea so crazy that no other government has ever imposed such a levy), then the state’s suicide timetable will get even more compressed.

For what it’s worth, part of me perversely hopes Vermont goes down this path.

Just like it is helpful to have good examples, it’s also helpful to have bad examples. New Hampshire vs. Vermont could be the domestic version of Switzerland vs Greece.

Without fossil fuels,” we wouldn’t be able to feed the world”, distinguished scientist warns. We’ll be wrecking our lives the next decades.” 

British professor Angus Dalgleish, a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences, and of the Royal College of Physicians, the Royal College of Pathologists and the Royal Australasian College of Physicians in an interview with Dr. John Campbell slams climate science and the media who distribute its fallacies.

Professor Angus Dalgleish, physician, oncologist, pathologist, medical researcher: Back to the climate change, it's the same…BBC do not report things that are not in agreement with the CO2. We know that climate change has gone on forever…They manipulated all that data for… pic.twitter.com/gq2BIsJtZv

— Camus (@newstart_2024) January 24, 2024

Dagleish says that CO2 is a greening gas, and so offers many advantages, and that if we stopped using fossil fuels, we wouldn’t be able to feed the world.

Absolutely madness

“Nobody has thought this through,” Dagleish says, comparing NetZero to the pandemic lockdowns. “It’s absolutely madness if we constantly go to this.”

“The unintended consequences will be wrecking our lives, and those of our children and grandchildren, the next decades.”

LEARN TO CODE: They Created This Term to Smear Average Americans. Now It’s Come Back to Haunt Them.

Liberal media outlets are starting to get pinched. While it’s sad when anyone gets fired, these folks were at the forefront of shaming those whose employment they determined was less-than, archaic, or not in keeping with the ways of the new world, whatever that means. In other words, if it required manual labor, the media, Democrats, and the coastal elite viewed it as a state of serfdom. Coal miners were a popular target. Whole communities that dot Appalachia were subjected to what some would call a regional genocide under the Obama presidency. His agenda took a hatchet to coal jobs, and most of these towns seldom recovered.

That’s when the “learn to code” smear was tossed into the mix by liberal reporters to coal miners and other workers who lost their livelihoods. The labor was viewed as inferior if it didn’t require a college education. Even worse, reporters mocked these newly unemployed workers, blaming them for being uneducated. The job retraining programs were a publicity stunt. Even labor unions knew this was a ruse. So, it was delicious revenge to see LA Times employees essentially saying that “learn to code” is heartless and unoriginal amid the layoffs. No, you don’t get to play that game. You created it. Now, sit there like good children, be wrong, and shut up. You lost your job—you don’t have a right to say anything.

Related: Ex CNNer Chris Cillizza Community Noted AND Ratioed After Denying Biden Ever Said This.

Flashback: Then-Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey Defends Twitter’s #LearntoCode Purges. As Steve noted in 2019, “Dorsey claims that #LearnToCode is coded language for some kind of threat, when in fact it originated with asshole members of the press who somehow didn’t get purged when they used it against ordinary Americans who had lost their jobs to Obama’s anti-coal regulations.”

UPDATE:

And Frank J. Fleming’s irony is going right over the heads of the many Twitter users who would love to use journalistic tools to destroy someone for having different political beliefs:

LOL'ing at all the replies that didn't get it. https://t.co/QFa5OuojuF

— jimtreacher.substack.com (@jtLOL) January 24, 2024

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Flashback: The Coming ‘Symbolic Analyst’ Meltdown.

Let's check in with my state of Michigan, shall we?

The legislation cites a study from the London School of Economics that found the mere presence of a smartphone by a neighboring student, lowers the test for a non-phone student in test scores by about 16%.

DON’T LET THE CCP GOONS BULLY A FREE MAN:  British pianist who was accosted by CCP agents who called the police on him for filming them in public. They are now trying to pressure YouTube into removing the video with their faces on it.

QUESTION ASKED AND ANSWERED: Why Isn’t Lenin As Condemned As Hitler?

It is a curious phenomenon that Lenin is acceptable and even approved of whereas Hitler is beyond the pale. It is not exactly a secret that Lenin started off seventy years of communist rule in Russia which included two major famines, the Red Terror, the Great Terror and continuing poverty. The death toll of Soviet communism was in the order of twenty million. So how do people manage to think favorably of him?

I discovered from our SOAS conversations that the first thing admirers of Lenin do is kid themselves that he led a popular revolution removing a corrupt, tyrannical Tsarist regime. This is just not true. The February revolution could indeed be considered a popular revolution and the Tsar was indeed removed from power. But Lenin took no part in it. He was in Zurich and had to read about it in the Swiss newspapers. He did lead the so-called October Revolution, later the same year, but that was not a revolution. The fact that it is referred to as that in Britain is one of several ways in which Soviet propaganda has entered British textbooks. In reality it was a coup. In a rather chaotic series of events, some 10,000 Red Guards took control of Petrograd (now St. Petersburg) and arrested the provisional government.

Then there is the idea that the coup somehow represented the “will of the people.” We have clear proof that it did not.

The Bolsheviks got only 24 percent of the vote in the elections to the constituent assembly. The more moderate socialist revolutionaries received 39 percent. To put it bluntly, the Bolsheviks lost. But Lenin did not care. Rather like Hitler, whose party incidentally got a higher percentage of the vote in Germany than the Bolsheviks did in Russia, he closed the constituent assembly and deployed armed soldiers to prevent anyone reopening it. The lie Lenin fans choose to believe is that if only Lenin had lived, communist rule would have succeeded. Lenin’s replacement by Stalin ruined it all.

But Lenin did all the things that Stalin did. Lenin began government control of agriculture, setting a fixed price that the government would pay for corn and other grains. The price was absurdly low because of the high rate of inflation. A shortage of food ensued. Lenin then requisitioned grain from peasants at gunpoint. These disastrous policies contributed heavily to death by starvation of at least three million people in 1920-21. Lenin implicitly recognized the part his policies had played by reversing them in 1921.

Meanwhile, he took advantage of the famine to steal from the church, seizing half a ton of gold along with a vast quantity of silver and precious stones in November 1921 alone. He stated that this was an opportunity to kill members of the bourgeoisie who resisted this expropriation. “The confiscations must be conducted with merciless determination… the greater the number of clergy and reactionary bourgeoisie we succeed in executing for this reason… [i.e. resisting church looting], the better.’ In two years, more than thirty bishops and 1,200 priests were killed.

Lenin created the Cheka, the Soviet secret police. His on-the-record instructions to kill include this written order following a revolt in Penza province: “Hang (absolutely hang, in full view of the people) no fewer than 100 known kulaks [peasants owning a little land], filthy rich men, bloodsuckers.” Lenin did not engage in class war. He engaged in class murder.

Lenin set up the concentration camps which eventually became the Gulag. He issued a decree in 1918 stating that it was “imperative to safeguard the Soviet Republic from class enemies by isolating them in concentration camps.” Every provincial city was ordered to create one and by the end of 1920 there were 107 of them. Lenin authorized the use of poison gas in 1921 to kill peasants in the Tambov uprising. Vyacheslav Molotov, a senior Soviet politician under both Lenin and Stalin, remarked that both leaders were “hard men… harsh and stern. But without a doubt Lenin was harsher.”

But Lenin was lucky in one sense — because Stalin was just as bloodthirsty, historians, the media, and the entertainment industry have been thrilled to use him as an aberrant scapegoat rather than admit that the Soviet Union was poisoned right from the start, all the way to 2017’s otherwise brilliant satire, The Death of Stalin.

In his 1976 article, “The Intelligent Co-Ed’s Guide to America,” Tom Wolfe wrote:

The publication of The Gulag Archipelago in 1973, however, was a wholly unexpected blow. No one was ready for the obscene horror and grotesque scale of what Solzhenitsyn called “Our Sewage Disposal System”—in which tens of millions were shipped in boxcars to con­centration camps all over the country, in which tens of millions died, in which entire races and national groups were liquidated, insofar as they had existed in the Soviet Union. Moreover, said Solzhenitsyn, the system had not begun with Stalin but with Lenin, who had im­mediately exterminated non-Bolshevik opponents of the old regime and especially the student factions. It was impossible any longer to distinguish the Communist liquidation apparatus from the Nazi.

Yet Solzhenitsyn went still further. He said that not only Stalinism, not only Leninism, not only Communism — but socialism itself led to the concentration camps; and not only socialism, but Marxism; and not only Marxism but any ideology that sought to reorganize morality on an a priori basis. Sadder still, it was impossible to say that Soviet socialism was not “real socialism.” On the contrary — it was socialism done by experts!

Intellectuals in Europe and America were willing to forgive Solzhe­nitsyn a great deal. After all, he had been born and raised in the Soviet Union as a Marxist, he had fought in combat for his country, he was a great novelist, he had been in the camps for eight years, he had suf­fered. But for his insistence that the isms themselves led to the death camps — for this he was not likely to be forgiven soon. And in fact the campaign of antisepsis began soon after he was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1974. (“He suffered too much — he’s crazy.” “He’s a Christian zealot with a Christ complex.” “He’s an agrarian reaction­ary.” “He’s an egotist and a publicity junkie.”)

Solzhenitsyn’s tour of the United States in 1975 was like an enormous funeral procession that no one wanted to see. The White House wanted no part of him. The New York Times sought to bury his two major’ speeches, and only the moral pressure of a lone Times writer, Hilton Kramer, brought them any appreciable coverage at all. The major tele­vision networks declined to run the Solzhenitsyn interview that created such a stir in England earlier this year (it ran on some of the educa­tional channels).

And the literary world in general ignored him completely. In the huge unseen coffin that Solzhenitsyn towed behind him were not only the souls of the zeks who died in the Archipelago. No, the heartless bastard had also chucked in one of the last great visions: the intellec­tual as the Stainless Steel Socialist glistening against the bone heap of capitalism in its final, brutal, fascist phase. There was a bone heap, all right, and it was grisly beyond belief, but socialism, had created it.

As Tony Rennell asks in the London Daily Mail today, “Why does the gullible Left still lionize Lenin as a benign intellectual and the acceptable face of Communism when he ruthlessly murdered his opponents in their thousands, starved two million Russians to death and wrote the playbook for Stalin?” “There are those who will point to [Lenin’s] successor, Stalin, as the real devil in Russia’s 20th Century history, and there is no doubt that the repression, the violence, show trials, gulags and butchery of that monster’s 30 years as the dictator of the Soviet Union far exceeded Lenin’s – nastier, more brutal, insanely contemptuous of human life, totally beyond rational understanding. In his paranoia, he murdered friend and foe alike. And yet the truth – however much it may offend those who regard Lenin’s as the acceptable face of Communism – is that Stalin was Lenin’s protege and took his lead from him.”

UPDATE: The Young Communist League of Britain “fondly” remembers one of history’s great monsters:

Now why in the world do you think they'd do something like this?

For years, we have been following the bizarre murder-for-hire case involving the fatal shooting of Florida State University law professor Daniel Markel. All of the evidence pointed toward the family of Markel’s estranged wife Wendi Adelson. Now, her mother, Donna Adelson, 73, has been arrested trying to get on a one-way flight to Vietnam, a country without an extradition treaty with the United States.

Adelson took the stand in the murder trial of one of the alleged accomplices just two weeks after the arrest of her brother, Charlie Adelson (right) for the murder. Wendi previously seemed to implicate her brother in her initial interview with police while maintaining that she knew nothing about a murder plot of her estranged husband. The trial involved Katherine Magbanua who was found guilty of first-degree murder, conspiracy to commit murder and solicitation of murder.

First a recap to bring you back up to speed.

Adelson and Markel married in 2006 when she was a third-year law student at the University of Miami and he was a criminal law professor at FSU. News accounts say that Markel (left) returned from a business trip to find the kids and his wife gone with divorce papers left on the bed — the start of a highly acrimonious divorce.

Magbanua is the mother of two children with Sigfredo Garcia, one of the two accused hit men (with Luis Rivera). Police say that Garcia and Rivera were “enlisted” to kill Markel in connection with his divorce from Adelson. Police traced a rental to the scene of the crime. The police have made little secret of their suspicion of Charles Adelson and his mother Donna Adelson. The family wanted Wendi Adelson to move with the children near them. The Adelsons are a wealthy family with businesses around the state.

Police became suspicious after learning that Magbanua is connected to Garcia and that she spoke more than 2,000 times to Garcia in the weeks leading up to the slaying. Prosecutors now say Charlie Adelson paid for half of a $6,000 to $7,000 breast implant surgery done by Dr. Leonard Roudner, also known as “Dr. Boobner.” That surgery occurred notably in October 2014, roughly three months after Markel’s killing. Police sought the medical records despite the insistence of Charlie Adelson’s lawyer that it was “a fishing expedition.” The court did not see it that way and granted the subpoena to confirm the surgery and payments.

Magbanua’s warrant said that Wendi’s mother was particularly upset after Markel had filed a motion to require that the children’s visitation with Wendi’s mother be supervised. He cited allegations by the children that she had called Markel “stupid” and asserted he was “taking her sunshines away from her.” Moreover, the cellphone records show that after Magbanua spoke with Charlie Adelson, he would often call his mother, Donna. For her part, Magbanua would call Garcia. Indeed, police cite “a flurry of communications between the alleged conspirators.”

Police also suggest that Magbanua was given a “significant increase” in cash bank deposits after the murder and she received paychecks from the family dental business. The thrust of the warrant is clearly more about the Adelson family than Magbanua.

Rivera has stated that he and Garcia (who reportedly pulled the trigger) saw Wendi Adelson, eyeing their car. When Garcia asked why the woman with the children was staring at them, he says that Garcia told him “Oh, that’s the lady. That’s Wendi.”

We previously discussed the police station interview of Adelson. The videotape is very emotional and at times bizarre.

In the 2014 interview, the detective tells her “That’s what this is about. There was a shooting at your home, or your ex-husband’s home. [He] has been taken to the hospital. He’s not going to survive.”  Adelson bursts into tears and exclaims  “Oh, my God,” Adelson says, sobbing throughout. “What happened. …I just don’t understand? How could this happen?”

Wendi tells the detective “I’m scared. I don’t know why this would happen . . .  It really scares me because, I mean, if there’s someone out there that’s willing to do this to him. … I’m scared for the kids.”

Given the focus on her brother, a couple of statements stand out.  She says that she is “scared someone maybe did this – not because they hate Danny but because they thought this was good somehow.”  She then admits that her brother joked with her earlier that day about how a television might be cheaper than a hit man to deal with the problems in her life.

“And I was talking to him about whether it made sense to pay to fix it or I should get a new one,” she said. “And it was always his joke that, like, he knew that Danny treated me badly, and it was always his joke, he said, I looked into hiring a hit man but it was cheaper to get you this TV.”

Adelson maintained the same line on the stand in the trial this week of Magbanua.

Donna was arrested at Miami International Airport as she and her husband were attempting to board a one-way flight to Vietnam.  She is heard saying “I didn’t know there was a warrant.”

She is now charged with first-degree murder and solicitation of murder.

Notably, Wendi Adelson is not charged and may have not been told of the alleged plot. The same could be true about her father.

This case rocked the legal academic community. Markel was a well-known blogger.  Wendi opposed his demands for the kids to remain in joint custody near him rather than move out of state.

We still do not know what was stated over the phone to the prison. Something clearly seemed to spook Donna Adelson. If it was not the warrant, it may have been the realization that the call could be viewed as incriminating. Otherwise, it is not clear why she would purchase a one-way ticket to a country where prosecutors could not secure her extradition.

There is one new wrinkle. Since Donna’s husband was with her on this flight, prosecutors could threaten charges against him to push Donna to accepting a plea with full disclosure of alleged conspiracy. If he purchased the ticket and facilitated what is being described as an attempted flight from justice (literally), it could give prosecutors leverage to use on Donna Adelson.  Donna’s insistence that she did not know of any warrant could be a key defense against such allegations against her or her husband.

However, even if there were a basis for charging the harboring of a fugitive or being an accessory after the fact under Florida Statute 777.03, there are defenses for family members. For example, Section 777.03 has the “related person exemption.” It exempts wives, husbands, parents, grandparents, and siblings.

Of the principal characters in the criminal saga, only Wendi and her father remain unindicated.

THE ENTIRE CLIMATE SCAM IS BASED ON INSUFFICIENT AND CRAZILY SPUN DATA:  Climate chiefs admitted net zero plan based on insufficient data, leading physicist says.

Raising rent to keep up with inflation isn’t what most people would consider “rent gouging,” even when the landlord has to increase rent by more than 7%. For example, Washington, DC’s rent control board allowed landlords to raise rents on most tenants 8.9% in 2023, to compensate for the 6.9% inflation in Washington, DC that […]

The post Virginia legislation would define raising rent to keep pace with inflation as ‘rent gouging’ appeared first on Liberty Unyielding.

YET ANOTHER REASON THEY SHOULD BE TARRED AND FEATHERED AFTER BEING REMOVED FROM POWER: Survey: America’s Elites Say There’s Too Much Freedom. “Know your place, peasants!”

But there are too many for tarring and feathering. At the very least, though, they need to be put in their place, socially and politically.

By James Lynch Dr. David Morens, right-hand man for former Director of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) Dr. Anthony Fauci, said he never considered the possibility COVID-19 came from a lab, even though the Energy Department and the FBI concluded last year that COVID-19 likely leaked from a Chinese laboratory. Morens […]

The post Fauci’s Top Adviser Admits He’s Done Zero Research On Possible Lab-Leak Despite Claiming It Definitely Didn’t Happen appeared first on Liberty Unyielding.

A China-based researcher had mapped the COVID-19 genetic sequence and uploaded it to an American database by December 28th 2019, it has emerged, raising fresh questions about the virus's origins.

The post Chinese Lab Sequenced COVID-19 and Uploaded it to American Database on December 28th 2019 appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.

By James Lynch Hunter Biden’s friend and financial benefactor Kevin Morris got “access” to the Biden White House after financially supporting Hunter, House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer said Thursday. Morris has spoken to President Joe Biden and received “access” to the Biden White House after keeping Hunter Biden afloat financially with at least $5 […]

The post Kevin Morris Got ‘Access’ To Biden White House After Giving Hunter Financial Support, Comer Says appeared first on Liberty Unyielding.

FANI WILLIS UPDATE: Fulton DA accuses special prosecutor’s wife of ‘interfering’ with Trump probe. An Atlanta lawyer friend writes: “I just wonder if a male DA could get away with saying ‘my girlfriend’s husband is conspiring against me for screwing his wife.'”

Heh. Nope, but I don’t think Fani will get away with this, either.

THEIRS IS A PHILOSOPHY SO HEINOUS THAT THEIR ONLY HOPE OF STAYING ON TOP IS TO CONTROL WHAT PEOPLE SEE AND HEAR. AND THIS WE MUST BREAK THROUGH EVERY HOUR OF EVERY DAY:  MSNBC Refuses to Air Trump’s Victory Speech; CNN Cuts Away When Trump Mentions the Border Crisis.

THIS MAKES PERFECT SENSE WHEN YOU UNDERSTAND THAT BY “DEMOCRACY” THEY MEAN “RULE BY DEMOCRATS”:  Elections : Dangerous for “our” democracy.

JAMES MIEGS: The Likely Lab Leak and the Covid Cassandra.

I thought I was done with writing about Covid-19. But Covid-19 isn’t done with me—or with any of us.

I’m writing this precisely four years after Chinese health officials first announced the emergence of a mysterious new form of pneumonia in the city of Wuhan. “No obvious human-to-human transmission has been observed,” the officials added in that December 30, 2019, release. (Already, the Chinese were lying.) Today, Covid cases are ticking up for the umpteenth time. And documents keep coming to light that expose how American officials and scientists similarly suppressed unsettling facts about the pandemic’s origins.

While the death rate from each new wave of Covid keeps dropping, the disturbing revelations about our public health leaders keep getting worse. In December 2023, a new disclosure revealed how leading U.S. virus experts lobbied to conduct dangerous gain-of-function research at the substandard Wuhan Institute of Virology laboratory. The latest leak provides yet more evidence that the pandemic likely emerged from a lab experiment gone awry, and that U.S. scientists actively covered up their possible role in that world-historical catastrophe.

After both the 1986 Challenger explosion and the 9/11 attacks, bipartisan commissions were convened to investigate the disasters. Covid has killed more than a million Americans and has cost our economy at least $14 trillion. And yet we see no great urgency to investigate the pandemic’s murky origins or prevent a recurrence. Republicans in Congress continue to hold productive hearings. But, according to the New York Times, the Biden administration is “privately resisting” pressure to create a 9/11-style commission on the pandemic. The press has largely moved on. And the public health officials most deeply involved in the debacle—including Anthony Fauci and his National Institutes of Health (NIH) colleague Francis Collins—continue to tap-dance around the truth, even after leaving their posts.

It’s as if “just about everything has been corrupted by the left” or something.

UPDATE: Head of the NIH, and Anthony Fauci’s Superior, Francis Collins: Now That You Have Me Here Under Oath and Pain of Perjury, I Guess Maybe the Lab Leak Wasn’t a “Conspiracy Theory” Like I Repeatedly Claimed When I Wasn’t Under Oath.

LARRY NIVEN, CALL YOUR OFFICE: Ultra-Large Structure Discovered in Distant Space Defies Our Current Understanding of the Universe. “The Big Ring on the Sky is 9.2 billion light-years from Earth.”

Okay, a bit large for Niven, but that’s what the illustration made me think of. Anyway, I’m not saying it’s aliens but, well, you know.