Pray, how came you to know that men were formerly fools? How did you find that they are now wise? . . .
Now answer me, an’t please you: I dare not adjure you in stronger terms, reverend sirs, lest I make your pious fatherly worships in the least uneasy. Come, pluck up a good heart; speak the truth and shame the devil, that enemy to paradise, that enemy to truth: be cheery, my lads; and if you are for me, take me off three or five bumpers of the best, while I make an halt at the first part of the sermon; then answer my question.
François Rabelais, Gargantua & Pantagruel (from the “Faithfully Translated” Gustave Doré edition), Book V, author’s prologue. The Doré illustration is of “Messire Oudart.”
Despite being outnumbered 16 to one, forces of the Old Swiss Confederacy proved victorious over the Archduchy of Austria in the Battle of Näfels, April 9, 1388.
On this date in 1991, Georgia declared its independence from the Soviet Union.
The coronavirus vaccination passport idea, in place in New York, attempted elsewhere, in development in Britain, and all the rage among policy pushers like Bill Gates, has been nipped in the bud in Florida and Texas.
On Monday, Texas Governor Greg Abbott signed an executive order prohibiting “government-issued vaccine ‘passports’ statewide.” The order prevents state agencies from establishing any requirement for vaccination on the populace. “The ban also extends to any organizations that receive public funds,” according to The Daily Signal, “forbidding those organizations from requiring Texans to prove they received the vaccine.”
After giving a pro-vaccine statement, Abbott went on to reiterate his basic position, that “these vaccines are always [to be] voluntary and never forced. Government should not require any Texan to show proof of vaccination and reveal private health information just to go about their daily lives.”
He also stated that the state will continue to supply vaccines to citizens that want the shot(s).
Abbott followed a similar decree by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis by just a few days. At the beginning of the month, Abbott had lifted statewide mask mandates. Florida, as you have no doubt heard, has been a free state (as opposed to a quarantine state) for several months, to a major media pile-on (and a lot of inaccurate reporting, including from 60 Minutes).
The World Health Organization does not support vaccination passports. Now. But WHO is a feather in the wind, like the Vichy-blown government in the movieCasablanca, so strong opposition to the practice by public officers in the United States is most welcome.
This habit of forming opinions, and acting upon them without evidence, is one of the most immoral habits of the mind. . . . As our opinions are the fathers of our actions, to be indifferent about the evidence of our opinions is to be indifferent about the consequences of our actions. But the consequences of our actions are the good and evil of our fellow-creatures. The habit of the neglect of evidence, therefore, is the habit of disregarding the good and evil of our fellow-creatures.
James Mill, The Westminster Review, Vol. 6 (1826), p. 13.
Ten months ago, I commented on a Newsweekarticle informing that “the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the organization led by Dr. [Anthony] Fauci, funded scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and other institutions for work on gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses.”
A deadly worldwide pandemic along with possibly explosive implications as to its origin, notwithstanding, the story went nowhere.
Last week, I highlighted new evidence that aligns with the lab transmission theory pooh-poohed in the World Health Organization report, which was quickly discredited — including by the WHO Director-General.
Yesterday, I went further into the cover-up, and how the “conspiracy theorist” charge has been used by the confreres of the Wuhan scientists to dissuade anyone from looking in the direction of the dangerous research that had been conducted there.
Josh Rogin’s Washington Postcolumn gives greater context to the need to investigate the theory, expressed by Robert Redfield, former director of the Centers for Disease Control under President Trump, that SARS-CoV-2 was transmitted to humans accidentally through a Wuhan lab:
“Richard H. Ebright, a Rutgers University microbiologist and biosafety expert . . . said the entire genre of research Redfield was referring to, known as gain-of-function research (in which viruses are captured from the wild and developed in lab settings to make them more dangerous), needs to be thoroughly reexamined.”
Worse? “The world’s current plan to respond to the pandemic entails a huge expansion of precisely this type of research,” Rogin explains. “The $200 million program meant to ‘predict’ virus outbreaks is set to grow into a $1.2 billion Global Virome Project . . .”
“The plan is,” Ebright told Rogin, “having failed to predict and preempt and having possibly triggered the current pandemic, to increase the scale six times.”
Emphasis added because, well, can it be emphasized enough?
On April 7, 1933, Prohibition in the United States was repealed for beer of no more than 3.2 percent alcohol by weight — eight months before the ratification of the XXI amendment, which repealed the 18th (or Prohibition) Amendment.
The enabling legislation was the Cullen–Harrison Act, which figured the low alcohol content as the excuse to get around the 18th Amendment’s prohibition of intoxicating beverages. The act passed Congress on March 21, 1933, and was signed into law by Franklin Delano Roosevelt the next day.
“What if Robert Redfield is right about the Wuhan labs?” inquiresWashington Post columnist Josh Rogin.
Redfield is the former director of the Centers for Disease Control under President Trump and a virologist at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, where he co-founded the Institute of Human Virology. He told CNN he thought “the most likely etiology of this pathogen [SARS-CoV-2] in Wuhan was from a laboratory.”
The doctor was clear: this is his educated conjecture, lacking incontrovertible evidence — which all of the other operating theories also lack.
“Before Redfield,” Rogin writes, “the mere discussion of the still-unproven theory that the covid-19 outbreak might have been connected to human error at a research laboratory in the Chinese city of Wuhan was considered taboo.”
Which is not to suggest that Dr. Redfield was not attacked and marginalized for mentioning the quite viable “lab theory” for human transmission of the contagion. “Redfield tosses viral kindling,” The Baltimore Sun’s editorial ridiculously accused, “on anti-Asian fires.”
Last week, I lamented our incurious media and the Chinese cover-up. But Rogin takes the charge much further: “The Chinese government and U.S. scientists who are close associates of the Wuhan scientists doing bat coronavirus research have tarred anyone who uttered it as conspiracy theorists, or worse (in their eyes), as pro-Trump.”
Yet, “the Biden administration has confirmed some of the Trump team’s factual claims about suspicious and still-undisclosed work at the Wuhan Institute of Virology,” added the columnist.
“Conspiracy theorist” is a handy way to deflect attention from bad acts. Conspirators love the term, as do all cover-up artists.
