Cover-Up

After a two-year investigation, conducted by a largely partisan group of Democrat-leaning investigators and led by the supposedly unimpeachable Robert Mueller, found that there was no collusion between Donald Trump and the Russians, Nancy Pelosi stated: "Just as I have said to the president: With him [Trump], all roads lead to Putin ... I don't know what the Russians have on the president, politically, personally, or financially."

Fair enough. 

But now Joe Biden is president, and in light of breaking media revelations that (after more than a year of disinterest and censorship) there may be merit to the assertion that COVID-19 was mistakenly released from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIoV) after the virus was genetically modified in what is called "gain-of-function" research. The story is even more explosive, but we'll skip the gory details involving Obama-era funding of the Wuhan lab along with Anthony Fauci's now proven obfuscation on that and related subjects.

Rather, there are a few complementary questions that absolutely, positively need to be asked, but like the media blackout that was associated with the WIoV for over a year, those questions have been assiduously avoided by the Democrats and their trained hamsters in the media today. John Kass comments:

When his father was vice president, as then-President Barack Obama's point man in China and Ukraine, future first son Hunter followed the big guy off the planes and made friends in China and Ukraine. Hunter reportedly made millions.

It's important to examine, especially now, even as much of the Democrat-friendly corporate media is strenuously avoiding the Hunter Biden story, which may turn out to be like the Wuhan lab leak story -- one that was ignored by the media for political reasons and then rediscovered for political reasons.

The New York Post is on it, but others step away. The president's son is under federal investigation for tax fraud, his famous laptop is now in the custody of the FBI, and photos are circulating of Joe Biden at dinner with Hunter's business friends. Keep in mind the Biden folks have never forthrightly disputed the material on the laptop. Instead, they have followed the lead of Hunter Biden who has said he "doesn't know" if the laptop is his.

C'mon, man.

And still, the media doesn't seem all that interested in what it could mean. I'm sure China is interested ...

The mainstream media is also quite corporate, and is finally getting around to asking if COVID-19 -- the virus that became a pandemic and has killed more than 3 million people worldwide -- leaked out of a lab in Wuhan and not from the hapless corpse of a pangolin in a nearby wet market, which was the story originally sold and swallowed by most journalists and Democrats.

The questions, of course, are simple: Will the Biden administration avoid investigating the true origin of COVID-19, and even if they trace it to the WIoV, will they bury the report? If they do those things, is it because the Chinese have information that might reflect badly on Biden?—information derived from Hunter Biden's very questionable dealing with the Chinese.

It's important to note that NO ONE has provided evidence that Hunter Biden's interaction with the Chinese was anything but influence peddling; that the money he "earned" was anything but "pay for play," and that the allusion to the "big guy's 10 percent" was anything but a reference to his father (then out of office).

The propaganda media engages in 'investigative disinterest' whenever they encounter a story that somehow threatens to attack their preferred political party or chosen narrative. By doing that, they are actively engaged in a cover-up. And by doing that (to paraphrase Nancy Pelosi), "We don't know what the Chinese have on the president, politically, personally, or financially."

And you know what they say ... the cover-up is often proven to be even worse than the original crime.

Nocebo

I encountered a new word today. But more on that in a moment. 

The United States and many other countries are starting to return to normal after the mass hysteria caused by 15 months of often dishonest and always catastrophist reporting on COVID-19. As a consequence,  serious study of the societal and emotional effects of the resultant mass hysteria has begun. Kelley Williams comments:

The coronavirus panic shows again that computer models say what they are programmed to say.  And that many experts say what they are paid to say.  And that the “news” is mostly narrative and spin and occasionally factual and often politicized.  And that regulators gonna regulate.  And that politicians gonna pontificate.  And that the virus is gonna do what it does naturally regardless of masks, lockdowns, and social distancing.  And that it didn’t notice or care last year when we tried to flatten the curve to conserve hospital capacity.

And that government actions and edicts in response to virus fears may help but can hurt too.  And that less government seems to work better — for both people and politicians (e.g., see Florida vs. California).  The California Governor may be recalled over his extreme virus edicts.  People there are harassed and hurting.  The Florida Governor may be President.  People there are living almost normal lives.  And then there is the Governor of New York.  He’s also known as the “Granny Killer” for his nursing home policies and record deaths.  He’s under investigation because of them.

I read a paper this week on COVID-19 and the Political Economy of Mass Hysteria.  It was written by three credentialed academics from Spain and Peru and published by Juan Carlos University in Madrid.  It was the first such paper I’ve seen.  I expect there will be more.

The paper’s thesis is that politicians and bureaucrats (the state), news media and experts exaggerate the risk of the virus vs. other well-known diseases.  And that pervasive social media and internet interests amplify their message.  And that all this has a nocebo effect (new word for me). Its world-wide effect has produced mass hysteria.

A nocebo effect is the opposite of a placebo effect.  A placebo makes you get well because you think you will.  A nocebo makes you get sick because you think you will.  Both work if you believe authority figures (doctors and experts) who say they work.  The mechanism is imaginary or psychological.  But the effects are real and physiological.

The authors cite several cases.  One was a patient in an experimental drug trial who didn’t know he had been given a placebo.  He tried to commit suicide by overdosing on the drug.  It was harmless.  But his symptoms showed he might die anyway — until the doctor running the trial arrived at the hospital and revealed the drug was a harmless placebo.  The patient quickly recovered.

The authors don’t suggest COVID-19 is harmless.  Just that its risk has been and is being over-hyped.  They say the resulting mass hysteria is contagious.  And its over-reactions are harmful.  They suggest reasons for the over-hyping: “It lies in the interests of a government to emphasize citizens’ vulnerability to external and internal threats, because the state’s legitimacy and power rest on the narrative that it protects its citizens against such dangers.”

The word is "nocebo," and that's exactly what was given to the hundreds of millions of people who had trouble understanding the statistics surrounding COVID-19, who believed a media and many politicians in blue states that were not only dishonest but worked hard to terrify the public. Many, many people had trouble thinking critically about the information and misinformation that they were given. The result was worldwide mass hysteria, catastrophically bad decisions that did far more damage than expected, and a loss of freedom that was abominable.

None of this is meant to minimize the damage done by a virus that was likely modified in gain-of-function work conducted by the Chinese at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and then released by mistake (we think) into the population. None of it is meant to disregard the 3 million who died. But all of it is true, and it's important that we understand what nocebos can do when they are used as a weapon.

And make no mistake, some politicians and much of their media used the COVID-19 nocebo as a weapon. It worked to defeat a politician they hated, and if the side affect was hysteria, lockdowns, school closures, business defaults, and ruined lives ... so be it.
 

 

 

Ellie

The story is a small, but it exemplifies the idiocy of woke cancel culture, examined by someone outside the USA who truly understands the warped mindset of far too many modern leftists. Written by the UK Spectator gossip columnist, "Cockburn," it relates the travails of actress Ellie Kemper who (the horror!) attended a debutante ball in her youth that has precipitated the ire of leftist "activists" who accuse her of racist tendencies because photos taken at the time (it was over 20 years ago) were not sufficiently diverse.

In a justifiably snarky commentary on this small story of woke cancel culture, Cockburn writes:

Kemper is being targeted for being cute, white, cheerful and popular in a period where those four facts in combination cause severe stress to America’s most mentally unbalanced individuals, who inexplicably hold power in direct proportion to how deranged they are. Even worse, Kemper has shunned politics throughout her career. Like so many others, she is being punished for not being a time traveler and not spending her entire life anticipating this particular moment of political fanaticism in America. 

Of course, nobody is vilifying Kemper for attending Princeton University, even though it was segregated until the 1940s and to this day is far more a bastion of privilege than any Midwestern civic organization [where the debutant ball was held] could be. Why? Precisely because Princeton is so bound up with the American elite that it entirely reflects its current values and obsessions. 

But perhaps it’s only a matter of time. Ultimately, what traumatizes the mob most is the simple fact that America existed prior to 2012 — and despite its flaws was quite successful. The best way to eradicate the uncomfortable thoughts that fact creates is to simply obliterate history completely. It’s why statues are coming down and buildings are being renamed. It’s why the Constitution itself is a target ...

... In the long run, the woke mob is a death cult. Their hatred is not a rational response, but a manifestation of internal misery.

Sad ... but true. The woke are humorless, historically illiterate, cognitively inconsistent and—to quote Cockburn—sometimes "mentally unbalanced." Their fixation on identity politics may fill a deep void in their psyches, but the manner in which our supposed government and corporate leaders are following their deranged dictates is dangerous and destructive. 

In recent weeks, Joe Biden has had a penchant for reading cue cards that describe what his handlers characterize as "white supremacy" (i.e., being Caucasian and unwoke) as a form of domestic "terrorism." Using their own playbook, maybe it's time for the rest of us to begin characterizing woke cancel culture and its authoritarian attempts to control thought and action as a much more virulent form of "domestic terrorism." After all, if its good enough for Biden, it has to be good enough for us.

It's Wrong

It's interesting to think back to April and May of 2020, when the previous president suggested that China was culpable for what he called the "China Virus" and further suggested that the virus had its origin in the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The media and the Democratic masters became apoplectic. Their shrill condemnation of those assertions were quickly transformed into the prevailing narrative. For almost a year afterward, not only was any claim supporting Trump's assertion literally censored (e.g., by Facebook), it was also derided as "debunked" or "a ridiculous conspiracy theory" by the propaganda media (e.g., The NYT or WaPo).

But in May of this year, for reasons that are not yet apparent, the purveyors of the false COVID-19 narrative backed off, and all of a sudden, a discussion of Chins'a culpability became acceptable. It's curious, is it not?

It might be that a false narrative (the bread of butter of woke ideology) does not age well, and as a consequence, those who supported the narrative (think: Dr. Fauci) wanted to get out ahead of the the narrative's demise. Maybe they hoped that they wouldn't look like the fools that they are. Or maybe it's a wheels-with-wheels thing—who knows?

But the narrative is falling apart—rapidly. Eileen Connelly reports:

A bombshell new study claims to have proof that Chinese scientists created COVID-19 in a lab and then tried to reverse-engineer versions of the virus to make it look like it evolved naturally from bats.

British professor Angus Dalgleish and Norwegian scientist Dr. Birger Sørensen wrote they’ve had primary evidence “of retro-engineering in China” since last year, but were ignored by academics and major medical journals, the Daily Mail reported Saturday, citing the soon-to-be-published study.

The study concludes: “the likelihood of it being the result of natural processes is very small.” 

... It was during their COVID-19 vaccine research that the pair came across “unique fingerprints” indicating the virus didn’t come from nature, they said. The telltale clue: a rare finding in the COVID-carrying virus of a row of four amino acids, which give off a positive charge and bond to negative human cells.

“The laws of physics mean that you cannot have four positively charged amino acids in a row,” Dalgleish told the Daily Mail. “The only way you can get this is if you artificially manufacture it.”

They also tracked published Chinese research, some done working with American universities, to show how the tools to create the virus were allegedly built. A good part of the work reviewed involved “gain of function” research, which involves manipulating natural viruses in a lab to make them more infectious, allowing scientists to study their potential effect on humans.

Hmmm. This work dovetails nicely with earlier scientific investigations that are now shredding the false COVID origin narrative that was enthusiastically supported because ... Trump. 

And yet, the media is not held accountable for suppressing legitimate inquiry in the case of the virus' originals while they ask the public to ignore analogous evidence in other matters of national consequence using the same gaslighting and smear techniques to suppress inquiry.

It's wrong. It's dangerous. And it makes them—to quote a guy who they truly hate—"... enemies of the American people."