1 Yup, and some of the reporters, maybe most, are going with O'Keefe.

1 Good luck, good health, and God be with you and them.

2 Sorry to hear about this. I hope he gets well soon.

1 Slight correction..  The mental meltdown only admitted that Pfizer was conduction gain of function research on COVID to develop vaccines against more virulent forms, he never stated they were releasing it.  Of course, Pfizer doesn't have any legal BSL-4 labs and would be doing this in BSL-3 labs or below.  Introducing gain of function to COVID to make it more virulent makes this decision questionable at the least; Musolini treament in a worst case.

2 Not nearly as skeptical as you wish you could be, I think.

I'm not as skeptical as I wish I could be. 

The basic issue is that we do have a massive problem of betrayal by experts. 

However, I have every reason to believe that PhDs can be gross idiots lacking basic competence in their nominal field.  I do not have to believe that a company employing PhDs means that the PhDs can even do what they want to do, and say that they can do.

You would need some sort of cells to culture the virii in, and that is almost certainly a paper trail, and a more risky one if the work is being done in the US. 

Furthermore, there are the questions of inference about 'Covid 19'.  We have anecdotes, but the only real conclusive evidence that it even exists would have to be statistical, and the basis for the stats has clearly been boogered by the information war.

Basic detection hypothesis for anythign has a false alarm rate.  Our folks leaped to declaring that the PRC claims were totally unimpeachable, while ignoring that the PRC had also claimed that it could have come from the US Army bio weapons place. 

There's a bunch of stuff that publicly available information cannot rule out after you try to sort for the lying.  a) US bioweapon b) it doesn't exist, there were only ordinary colds c) naturally occurring, but did not have the claimed properties, which were of the holy grail of respiratory viral bioweapons d) naturally occurring, but for the first time in human history with the claimed properties  e) unnaturally occurring, without claimed properties  f) unnaturally occurring, with claimed properties. 

The ordinary situation with respiratory virii should be a lot of strains infecting various populations, with a fair rate of mutations and cross overs from animal populations. 

Unless you had engineered a new type of virus entirely, a coronavirus based bioweapon should mutate like a coronavirus, IE, rapidly.  Because mutation should be somewhat statistical and tied to structure of the genetics. 

If your engineered bioweapon is initially distributed in a very lethal configuration, a general prediction is that further mutation is going to break stuff, and result in less lethal strains.  The major reason to expect it to grow more lethal would be if you knew that the point on the genetic space that you release is very close to several other much more lethal points.  But, if you know that, why not release one of those instead?

Mutating stuff in the lab is probably going to get strains that are less effective, unless you also have a lot of informed and skilled manpower trying to find the rarer mutations that improve effectiveness as a weapon.  Less effective strains would still be effective at selling vaccines, as long that you had media allies to provide information warfare support. 

I tend to figure that the most dangerous strains probably died out prior to the lcokdown, that the post lockdown strains were probably mostly nothing, and I am not sure that the lunatics have the resources to produce a strain worth worrying over. 

We recently had a Speaker election go for four or five days, and fifteen votes. Federal funding now is not necessarily stable.  The guy's federal program could have gotten cut off, and he could have had a psychotic break just prior to the date. 

The expected peaceful path out of the political mess involves a lot of leftists having psychotic breaks.  They were never really sane, but were stable, but current circumstances will be pretty hard when it comes to a lot of them and their mental health.

1 I've been thinking lately that there are at least three theory sets that stories can be designed off of.

One, traditional notions of good and evil rooted in Judeo-Christian values.

Two, English major literary theory.  Which on the positive side of my view, is useful for writing class papers.  There are writers that seem to get some use of it, but I've maybe been over exposed, and am not a fan.  But, it isn't strictly incompatible with good/evil, and it does help some story tellers reduce design complexity of projects, so...

Three, the modern academic theory symbol magic model. 

One can suppose three cohorts.  People who used theory one and two, people who used theory two and three, and a current group that are using theory three.  Last group can see the theory three stuff in the second cohort's work, but does not see the function inherited by imitating previous story designers, and does not care. 

Their work is basically a combination of the 'stop hitting yourself' bullying game, with mockery of 'you' for 'hitting yourself'.  And, they are not effective enough bullies to really force much of anyone to play along with their games. 

I bite my thumb at these media vandals.

However, I think I'm most seriously enraged at the state of academia.  I have become convinced that the university needs to be destroyed in order to salvage much of tertiary education.

2 Appendix:

I dislike critical theory.

I have two related objections, in general.

One is ancient conspiracy theories, that seem to propose that human nature wrt to conspiracies functions in exactly opposite ways to how it actually seems to work.

Two is that the critical theorists magically speak for the oppressed, and can undo the conspiracies.  They don't speak for the disadvantaged, they cheerlead the destruction by fire of poor neighborhoods.  They are propagandists for the powerful political interests who see arson and riot as a politically useful tactic. 

The third more specific objection with  the theory of critical theory is that it matters who makes certain statemetns.  The wrong people basically cannot make true statements.  In mathematics, the truth or falsehood of statements does not depend on who is making them.  Applying critical theory to mathematics seems to break mathematics in weird and unpredictable ways.  A mathematician may conclude that critical theory has been disproven by contradiction.  The critical theorists seem to be pretty clear that they need to conclude that mathematics is a conspiracy.

Forex, the critical race theorists concluding that mathematics is a racist conspiracy. 

They assert that logic is invalid and that additionally that they are not saying that 'mathematics is not for blacks'. 

I think that a school with a DIE program is /not/ actually attempting to help more blacks learn mathematics.  They may think that they are doing so. 

I find all of this extremely concerning and frustrating.

3 They don't want solved problems. Look at the woke reees about Mr. Beast paying for cataract surgery. Solving mysteries with rational thinking and pooling strengths among friends is not what they want. Mental illness is desired, envied, and evoked.
And it looks like Norville's girlfriend is going to have her brain put into a dog.
Apparently these worst tv series are now produced only to be watched by YT reviewers, because nobody else wants them.

1 Our system is founded on several decades of precedent that was itself based on false premises.  The terrific enlightened masters managing the reputation of the profession of law are making an uncertain situation less predictable by being heavy handed wackaloons.  By that I mean mainly that I think they are in effect working to create the political will to get rid of some of the insanely stupid enabling legislation. 

Twitter and the Twitter files has been an entertaining matter.  Not that I unconditionally trust the current claims there. 

This power substation stuff is concerning.  There are lots of kinds of malicious or apparently malicious acts, and anything that speaks to organized conspiracy looks like a potential serious concern to a lot of people.

One thing you didn't mention was the affair of Kevin McCarthy.  In hindsight, being from California and inserted into the congressional Republicans when he was (IIRC after the 2006 election) is a very suspicious pair of details.  My takeaway is that people are seriously pissed at all the abuse of formal systems for malicious ends, and some of them saw an opportunity to screw some folks over in return.  Very like the Honkening. 

There will be lots more opportunities, for very many people, to get some licks in ways that do not violate the informal unstated norms of American life.  There will be glowies and others encouraging folks to express discontent in ways that are unproductive for your own philosophy.  It is very likely that their political values will not be your own.  Test the ideas presented to you, and feel free to ignore anything that you can not show is sound according to your own understanding.

1 I mentioned the upload issue to Pixy and supposedly it should be fixed by now.

2 Just as a FYI, I'm out of the CCU. I have some massive infections, a surgical procedure on Tursday. Not in any pain, feel pretty good honestly.
According to a doctor, I was close to have serious life-threatening issues, but that's been handled... 6 units of blood  about 12 big bags of saline, and at least a month of antibiotics are in my future.  But I'm alive.
I still can't Pond though.

3 Same same, except that they hired more people at work and some of them have actually managed not to get fired for getting late points. 
(Honestly, most department managers just wipe away all points, because they want to keep people. Our manager apparently can't remember to do this. So we're always hiring, even after we find somebody.)
My boss tried to get me to come into work today, instead of taking my day off.  I declined, partly for logistics reasons, but mostly because I'm freaking tired. 
Right now, it is a balmy 27 degrees F. So much better than Winter Storm BRRRR.

4 Yay! Congrats (on both fronts)!

5 I'm finally (mostly) free of distractions and will start the new year by fixing the aforementioned blog issues.

1 My job isn't physically demanding but the hours and the interruptions and the emergencies at 3AM on a Sunday are all things I could do without.  May your Christmas soon be over!

2 Argh. I feel you.
We were finally full-staffed, and our manager fired one of the new guys for basically BS reasons. It is literally insane.

3 Well, at least the spambots love you.

4 Merry Christmas!

In the meantime, stop by from 5:30PM to 8:30 PM (EST) tonight to witness an act of premeditated Regicide as we deal with GOOD KING MOOGLE-MOG THE 12th! @twitch.tv/brickmuppet

1 I was thinking about getting a Twitch account.
Make sure to use a cute vtuber avatar!

1 Hey, it could be worse.. The Germans could start putting 'SS' labels on their uniforms...

2 The best part was that Polaks were too hasty to publish to evidence of missile chunks and it was obvious to everyone with eyes that it was Ukrainian. And then, get this, Eric S. Raymond came into comments at Instapundit with claims that it likely was Russian, and the most famous armchair expert that is I, told him with confidence that it was Ukrainian. It happened because ESR is an small man who lets his biases to control him, despite being a famous author and inventor of "Open Source Software" (together with Bruce et al). Dang that felt good. I didn't even circle back to rub it.