It’s Monday, June 7th, 2021…and here are a few thoughts regarding a rather momentous event which occurred 77 years ago yesterday viewed through the lens of contemporary political correctness:

Here’s the juice:

Along with many more on numerous other less-renowned landings on sandy shores unaccompanied by the strands of ukulele strumming and the gyrations of grass skirts. 

Now, here’s The Gouge!

First up, writing at his Morning Jolt, Jim Geraghty offers a must-read commentary on the dogged refusal of the ChiCom lobby to recognize reality, as he notes…

Even Now, the Usual Suspects Demand We ‘Cooperate with China’

 

Over in the Los Angeles Times, Michael Hiltzik writes an entire column arguing that the lab-leak theory is “garbage,” and the first piece of evidence he cites is a research paper in Nature from February 2020.

Now, has anything happened since February 2020 that might alter one’s perspective on the probable cause of this pandemic? Anything at all?

Hiltzik writes:

There’s an argument for getting more accountability out of China about its handling of the viral outbreak in its earliest stages. But there’s also an argument against pointing fingers at the Chinese regime or its scientific establishment without evidence(Andy McCarthy addresses this demonstrably false assertion in the item which follows): China’s cooperation will be crucial for world health in the future, and it’s less likely to happen if China feels it has been unjustly blamed for COVID-19.

“The lab-leak hypothesis is taking the oxygen out of what’s really needing to be done, which is cooperating with China,” [Robert F. Garry of Tulane Medical School] told his colleagues on the recent webcast.

“Follow the animals,” he said. “That’s where we’re going to find the origin of COVID-19.”

First of all, looking at labs researching novel coronaviruses in bats, in some cases collected in the mine that housed the virus most genetically similar to SARS-CoV-2 identified in nature so far, IS “following the animals.” As noted yesterday, Chinese researchers have been attempting to “follow the animals” to a possible wet market or farm for nearly a year and a half, and they still haven’t found an infected animal. This is not how things shook out with SARS back in 2003.

Suspecting a lab leak is not cheerleading for wet markets. Wet markets are dangerously unsanitary, and a potential outbreak threat, and ought to be cleaned up or banned. But the existence of wet markets doesn’t rule out the possibility of a lab accident, and the potential of lab accidents doesn’t mean that there’s no risk of future infections at wet markets.

“Cooperate with China?” How? This perspective ignores the fact that the Chinese government refuses to cooperate in any significant way with any independent inquiry! The Washington Post summarizes today:

The WHO chief, the Biden administration, other governments and scientists around the world have rebuked China for not making this investigation any easier.

Chinese authorities weren’t much more receptive of the international team commissioned by the WHO. Negotiations over the arrangements delayed the team from getting to Wuhan until more than a year after doctors first raised concerns there. Once on the ground, the international experts were given limited access. They visited the market linked to early coronavirus cases — but it had been shut for a year and its contents long ago removed. Their visit to the Wuhan Institute of Virology lasted three hours. In general, they had to satisfy themselves with data that was in large part collected by Chinese scientists before the trip…

…Wuhan’s two rival teams of exotic bat disease specialists are now under renewed scrutiny. Tian’s team at the Wuhan CDC and Shi Zhengli’s at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) have both drawn criticism for a willingness to compromise safety, as they raced to make discoveries.

The Wuhan CDC and WIV did not reply to requests for comment, nor did Tian or Shi. An unnamed staffer who answered the phone Tuesday at the Wuhan CDC said the center did not accept interviews and directed questions to the National Health Commission. The NHC did not reply to a request for comment.

China’s Foreign Ministry and the Chinese Embassy in Washington declined to answer questions for this article.

Look who’s calling for greater transparency from the Chinese government in the pages of the Financial Times:

Joe Biden’s chief medical adviser has called on China to release the medical records of nine people whose illnesses might provide vital clues into whether Covid-19 first emerged as the result of a lab leak.

Dr Anthony Fauci, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, or NIAID, told the Financial Times that the records could help resolve the debate over the origins of a disease that has killed more than 3.5m people worldwide. The records in question concern three researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology who reportedly became sick in November 2019, and six miners who fell ill after entering a bat cave in 2012. Scientists from the Wuhan Institute of Virology subsequently visited the cave to take samples from the bats. Three of the miners died.

“I would like to see the medical records of the three people who are reported to have got sick in 2019,” Fauci said. “Did they really get sick, and if so, what did they get sick with? “The same with the miners who got ill years ago…What do the medical records of those people say? Was there [a] virus in those people? What was it? It is entirely conceivable that the origins of Sars-Cov-2 was in that cave and either started spreading naturally or went through the lab.”

Those are all good questions. In fact, those seem like good questions that should have been asked before the U.S. National Institutes of Health started sending grant money to EcoHealth Alliance to pass along to the Wuhan Institute of Virology for gain-of-function research on coronaviruses found in bats.

I’ll put it to you, dear reader: What do you think it means that China won’t share any of that information? Why did Chinese authorities refuse to share “raw patient data on 174 cases that China had identified from the early phase of the outbreak” when the WHO team visited? Why did the Wuhan Institute of Virology suddenly cease public access to its database of records of some 22,000 samples and some of their genetic sequences? Why did a second database of virus records, run by China’s National Virus Resource Center, also suddenly become restricted? Why do you think that in April 2020, the Chinese government decreed that any academic papers dealing with the origins of the virus be approved by China’s Ministry of Science and Technology before publication? Why did Xiaobo Tao, a scholar from South China University of Technology, publish a paper theorizing that COVID-19 originated from bats being used for research at either one of the two research laboratories in Wuhan on February 6, 2020, and then withdraw it days later, with a vague explanation that he no longer believed it?

What do some folks need to see before they conclude, “Yeah, this looks like Chinese government is trying to hide something”?

The argument in Hiltzik’s column amounts to, “WE need to cooperate more with those people who are refusing to cooperate with the investigation in any way.

Follow the money, people, follow the money.  It’s goes straight from Beijing into the pockets of anyone and everyone doing business with and/or defending the tyrannical Socialist utopia which is the PRC.

In a related item we referenced earlier, NRO‘s Andy McCarthy offers the facts regarding the mountain of evidence to support the Wuhan virus as having originated in a ChiCom lab:

The Lab-Leak Theory: Evidence Beyond a Reasonable Doubt

Every good prosecutor will tell you that the best case is a strong circumstantial case — and that’s exactly what we have.

 

“‘Of course, it’s only circumstantial evidence. We may never know the truth.”

If I’ve heard this once, over more decades than I care to admit, I’ve heard it a thousand times. It is the rote dismissal of circumstantially based cases, and it is almost always wrong.

We can no longer afford to be wrong when it comes to the origin — the generation by regime-controlled Chinese scientists, almost certainly by accident (an assertion with which we happen to disagree) — of a pandemic that has caused nearly 4 million deaths globally (now closing in on 600,000 in the U.S.), in addition to geometrically more instances of serious illness, trillions of dollars’ worth of economic destruction, and incalculable setbacks in the educational and social development of tens of millions of children.

…Apodictic knowledge eludes us. That’s the human condition. Whether we are in the position of relying on circumstantial evidence, direct evidence, or some combination of the two, we are forever at a deficit. Our knowledge is imperfect and our premises may be flawed (and constantly reminding oneself of that is what separates good intelligence analysts from bad ones). Notice that in the criminal justice system, where we apply the most exacting evidentiary standards, the requirement is proof beyond a reasonable doubt, not proof beyond all possible doubt.

There is no proof beyond all possible doubt.

What NR’s Jim Geraghty has chronicled for months is proof beyond a reasonable doubt that the coronavirus pandemic was generated by an accident — a lab leak, a not-uncommon mishap in medical research conducted by fallible human beings — at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Ditto the important work of Nicholas Wade, Vanity Fair’s Katherine Eban, our own Michael Brendan Dougherty, and a few intrepid others.

Lab accidents are common, and have been known to spawn infectious diseases (including the escape of SARS1 from the Chinese National Virology Institute in Beijing “no less than four times,” according to Wade). WIV scientists were conducting gain-of-function research on bat-based coronaviruses, in particular their capacity to infect humans. The bats in which are found closely related (but, importantly, not identical) viruses do not inhabit the vicinity of Wuhan — they are nearly a thousand miles away from that densely populated city and have limited flight range. The likelihood of naturally occurring interspecies transmission (outside a lab setting) is infinitesimal. The lab conditions in Wuhan were insufficiently safe — grossly so, it appears. Several of the lab’s researchers fell ill (at least three severely enough to be hospitalized) right at the critical time, in autumn of 2019, before the first identified case of infection with SARS-CoV2, the virus that causes COVID-19.

Here, two additional points are salient. First, those implausibly claiming that the circumstantial case is weak always skip past the inconvenient fact that the circumstantial case for their preferred theory of natural transmission (from bat to human, directly or through an intermediary species) is so weak as to be negligible — there being, most tellingly, no known existence of a bat (or pangolin, etc.) in which a virus matching SARS-CoV2 has been found.

Second, we are not in a U.S. prosecution. The presumption of innocence that obtains in U.S. criminal trials does not apply in other contexts, and China is not entitled to it. Nor is China vested with the privilege against self-incrimination. We are fully within our rights to conclude that the monstrous regime in Beijing is not an innocent actor, and that it has sealed records, silenced witnesses, and hidden evidence because it knows both that SARS-CoV2 was generated by an accident in one of its labs and that its sundry deceits in concealing this fact undermined any possibility of containing the damage — to catastrophic effect.

On the same rationale, we can justifiably infer that American officials who zealously maligned sensible, informed efforts to investigate the lab-leak theory were motivated not by some adherence to science but by the awareness that the U.S. government knew about and was supportive of China’s virological research.

China and its abettors have much to account for. Unless and until China comes forward with convincing evidence that the lab-leak theory is wrong, the position of the United States and the world must be that China is culpable. We should stop spouting the untenable and irresponsible drivel that, because the case is “circumstantial,” the truth may never be known. We know plenty.“

As our old friend Tod Hirt, who flew in the S-3 Viking sub hunters used to say, “Knowing where a submarine isn’t is almost as good as knowing where it is.”  Here, however, there’s not even a scintilla of doubt: when it comes to the collective responsibility of Xi Jinping, the CCP and certain parties in America’s dysfunctional federal bureaucracy for the release of the Wuhan virus upon the world…

For more on how we’ve been lied to constantly and repeatedly over the course of the scamdemic, we invite you to view our Video of the Day, accessible through link #2 immediately below our Quote of the Day at the top of the page.

Next up, life-long Rochester, NY resident and friend Joe McQueen sent us ANOTHER must-read column from Front Page Magazine in which Daniel Greenfield correctly concludes…

The Democrat Model for the Future is the Worst City in America

The only things going up are murder rates, STDs and electric car chargers.

 

Rochester has the second highest urban murder rate in New York with killings up 56% and shootings up 90%. Once the 32nd largest city in the country. Rochester is at number 111 and falling. Its population shrank 6.2% since 2000. The poverty rate is at 31% and the only thing going up is STDs with gonorrhea up 77% and chlamydia rates placing second in the state.

So the Democrats are using Rochester as a model for America.

Hardly a week goes by without someone in the media, who has never been to Rochester and wouldn’t go there at gunpoint, describing it as the first city to conduct some socialist experiment. Last month, the media was promoting Mayor Lovely Warren’s push to use drug revenue for racial reparations and basic income even though the last thing a city with open air heroin markets needs is the government handing out free money financed by drug sales.

Last week, the New York Times touted Rochester’s war on highways under the headline, “Can Removing Highways Fix America’s Cities?” If Rochester is the model for fixing anything then the answer is always, “Hell no!”.

But Rochester is always doing something excitingly progressive like defunding the police or being designated by Governor Cuomo as a “model EV city“ and setting up electric car charging stations across a city with few electric cars and a plague of deadly carjackings. The cheapest Tesla costs $35,000. That’s also the average household income in Rochester.

Before Rochester became Cuomo’s model city for charging the electric cars it doesn’t have, it was his pick as a “model city” to fight global warming by building 10 miles of bike routes. Those routes give Rochester’s bike thieves different options for making their getaway after over 100 bikes were stolen from a neighborhood biking program giving away free bikes. “I just want to ensure that the people that did this know I love them and that our program is open to them,” Mayor Lovely Warren assured the thieves. “We’re just extremely sorry that life’s circumstances led them to a place in which they had to make a decision like this to rob a free neighborhood program of bicycles.”

The free bikes program shut down this year.

Fresh off the efforts to make Rochester into a model city for electric cars and bikes, Mayor Lovely Warren embarked on a social justice spree of police defunding and reparations. In 2020, Rochester police tried to restrain Daniel Prude, a career criminal who had been arrested 37 times and convicted 9 times, who had taken PCP and was wandering the streets. Prude shouted, “Give me that gun”. Police tried to restrain him by hooding him and he died.

Morbidly obese white socialists showed up naked in white hoods and sat on the steps of City Hall with “Black Lives Matter” written on their bottoms to protest a black mayor. Not even the most dedicated white supremacist could have come up with anything more racist. After that the Black Lives Matter race riots and arson almost came as something of a relief.

Mayor Lovely Warren and the Rochester City Council defunded the police, cutting millions from law enforcement in a city with hundreds of shootings. Police Chief La’Ron Singletary warned that this would hurt the black community, but the media cheered Warren’s move. A Black Lives Matter organizer insisted that, “police make neighborhoods more dangerous.” Really?

“Murder, Carjackings, Violent Crime Surge in Rochester NY. Why?” a Democrat Chronicle article inquired this year. It was a mystery no one could solve. Especially the police who weren’t allowed to solve crimes.

As murders rose 56% and shootings shot up 90%, Rochester decided to offer iPads in exchange for “working handguns and assault rifles”. No questions asked. A week after the “largest gun buyback in Rochester history”, four people were shot in just one day.

Five months after announcing that she wanted to reimagine the police, Mayor Lovely Warren was indicted on campaign fraud charges. Last month, her husband was busted in the takedown of a drug ring. The cops found a semi-automatic rifle in her home. Warren, who had allied with Bloomberg’s Everytown gun control group, claimed that she knew nothing about the weapon. It couldn’t have been too shocking since her husband had already been convicted of armed robbery.

Mayor Lovely Warren blamed the whole thing on racism. “Things are not that different from the 1860s and 1950s,” she insinuated. It’s just like the 1860s in Rochester under its black female mayor, black female police chief, and 60% black city council with only two white members.

Warren then doubled down on racial reparations and police defunding. It’s important to “invest in the people, in the neighborhoods that suffered from the criminalization of marijuana,” she had claimed earlier.

Rochester isn’t suffering from excessive criminalization, but decriminalization. And the last thing a city overrun with drugs needs is more drugs, or police defunding, EV chargers, demolishing highways, or any of the other “progressive” gimmicks that Democrats keep jumping on.

The media is right. Rochester is a model. And a cautionary tale.

The former booming industrial city is a model for what the Democrats want to do to America, gutting industrial bases, replacing work with welfare, and then using black people as lab rats for radical social experiments like drug legalization and police defunding with deadly results. Being a “model city” now means having every toxic leftist policy idea tested on you.

Democrats have failed at the most basic elements of governance in Rochester. And yet they keep rolling out exciting new ideas to fight global warming or transform society when they can’t even handle their existing responsibilities.

Rochester is the 5th poorest city in the country. It’s also one of the dirtiest, it has the worst schools in the state and some of the lowest literacy rates. The graduation rate hovers between 40 and 50 percent. 75% of Rochester’s children are being raised by single parents. If Mayor Lovely Warren really wants to “close the wealth gap between Black and Brown people and our White neighbors”, then she might want to start there, instead of writing checks for black people from drug money while turning Rochester streets into war zones with police defunding.

But this is the Democrat model that devastated cities and communities. The only thing that they have added to this mix since the seventies is electric car chargers and police defunding.

And then they blame the corrupt, violent, and impoverished hellholes their economic and social policies created on “systemic racism”. Like the naked socialists wearing white hoods to protest racism, they’re right about the racism, but the naked leftist emperors could use a mirror.

Whatever happens to Mayor Lovely Warren, her city will go on chasing every new progressive policy idea (and the cash and publicity that comes with it) even as life keeps getting worse. And Democrats will try to turn every city, town, and village into another Rochester.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is Socialism at its FINEST: Dissemble, dissimulate, distract.

As this graphic from Balls Cotton so accurately observes…

Here’s a second shot of the juice: They’re PROGRESSIVES…aka SOCIALISTS…aka TOTALITARIAN DESPOTS.  In other words, they’re the real-world equivalent of the Terminator:

POWER and its associated PERSONAL PROFIT is their PURPOSE, DIVISION their favored DEVICE, CHAOS their only CREATION and DEVASTATION their sole ENDOWMENT.

We now take you to four carefully selected items certain to stimulate inquiring Conservative minds:

(1). Tom Hanks is urging the entertainment industry to make more films and TV shows about racism.  Great, more films and shows a sizable majority of Americans won’t bother to watch.  Here’s hoping Hanks puts his money where his mouth is…and comes up on the short end of the stick.

(2). Speed forwarded this article from The Blue State Conservative which raises the question how climate alarmists can explain away ancient megadroughts?  SPOILER ALERT: Like so much else about their junk science and theories of anthropogenic global warming, they can’t!

(3). Janet Yellen is getting Libtards ready for rising interest rates, inflation and all the other negative impacts of her boss’s economic policies, as she claims higher interest rates would be a plus for U.S., as they’ve been “too low now for a decade“.  Wow, it’s almost as if Yellen weren’t president and chief executive officer of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco from 2004-2010, vice-chairman of the Federal Reserve from 2010-2014, and chairman of the Federal Reserve from 2014-2018.  So if interest rates had been “too low now for a decade”, it’s not like SHE could have done anything about it.

(4). During a vaccine lottery event Friday, Democratic California governor Gavin Newsom reneged on his promise to lift the state’s emergency declaration after June 15, allowing him to retain the powers to mandate sweeping COVID restrictions. “The one thing I am certain of is: There’s uncertainty in the future. The emergency remains in effect after June 15.” When asked why he’s reneging on his promise, the piece of scum NRO’s Kyle Smith accurately assessed an “ineffectual hypocrite replied, “Because we’re still in a state of emergency. This disease is still in effect. It is not taking the summer off.” Reports Newsom added, “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve gotta be at the French Laundry at noon for a buddy’s birthday bash” remain unconfirmed.

Inquiring minds wonder if this isn’t somehow related to measures Newsom is contemplating in response to the recall referendum he’ll be facing in November, as this meme from the lovely Shannon suggests:

Regardless, it’s life once again imitating art, in this case The Outlaw Josey Wales, with the power-mad Newsom in the role of Captain Redlegs…

…and anyone with a lick of sense playing the part of Fletcher:

Which brings us, appropriately enough, to The Lighter Side:

Then there’s this from Major Jon…

…along with these age-related bon mots from Ed Hickey:

Finally, we’ll call it a wrap with our inaugural Darn the Bad Luck segment, courtesy of Air Force Two’s safe return to Andrews after unnamed “technical difficulties’:

Kamala Harris’ diplomatic trip to Latin America gets off to bumpy start as plane forced to turn around

A Harris spokesperson said ‘there are no major safety concerns‘

 

Darn the bad luck!  At least her demise would have mitigated the inestimable damage her inevitable presidency will inflict upon the country and the world.

Magoo

P.S. Be certain to vote in our updated latest poll, accessible through the link at the top of the page at the right.

Video of the Day

Tucker details we’ve been saying since Trump shut down the country over what’s amounted to no more than an average flu season: we’ve been SCAMMED!!!

Tales of The Darkside

Biden’s giving the lab accident scenario a “second look”: as if he hasn’t been covering for and colluding with the ChiComs since the virus was first released, either accidentally or deliberately.

On the Lighter Side 

As contributor James Nichols noted, it was only a matter of time.