On April 8, 1913, the 17th amendment to the Constitution, providing for the popular election of U.S. senators, was ratified.
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17th Amendment
Ten months ago, I commented on a Newsweek article 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 Post column 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?
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Earlier in this Series:
12 Monkeys in Charge
June 18, 2020
Lab Rats
March 31, 2021
Lab Rats II: The Conspiracy
April 6, 2021
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I think this would be a good time for a beer.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 32nd President of the United States, March 22, 1933.
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Prohibition Begins to End
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?” inquires Washington 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.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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William Harvey
I avow myself the partisan of truth alone.
William Harvey, “Dedication to Dr. Argent and Other Learned Physicians,” Exercitatio Anatomica de Motu Cordis et Sanguinis (1628).
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Salt Rebel
On April 6, 1930, Mohandas K. Gandhi raised a lump of mud and salt, declaring, “With this, I am shaking the foundations of the British Empire.”
Thus began the Salt Satyagraha.
“We can do $10 trillion,” declared Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) last week.
“I know that may be an eye-popping figure for some people,” explained the photogenic pop-eyed pol, “but we need to understand that we are in a devastating economic moment, millions of people in the Unites States are unemployed, we have a truly crippled health-care system and a planetary crisis on our hands, and we’re the wealthiest nation in the history of the world.”
In other words, the sky is falling . . . and we still have checks.
The Bronx congresswoman, described as “one of the most influential members” by MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, trumpeted that tidy sum in response to last week’s “go big” proposal by President Joe Biden to spend a special new $2.2 trillion under the loose label of infrastructure, which AOC argued “is not nearly enough.”
This new two-tril spending bill is “a follow-up to the $1.9 trillion stimulus approved in March.” And just Part 1 of a two-package infrastructure and other stuff Biden plan.
“The White House is reportedly willing to spend $4 trillion across the two packages,” Business Insider reports, “a sum that would bring recovery spending under his term to nearly $6 trillion.”
Biden’s term has been only 76 days.
A couple trillion here, a couple trillion there and pretty soon you’re talking real money . . . except under Modern Monetary Theory, which Ocasio-Cortez embraces. The idea being: government can print as much money as politicians want to spend.
While this road to bankruptcy has been paved with the partisan political intentions of big spending politicians of both major parties, right now it is the Democrats hitting the gas.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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oratory
noun : the science of discovering and expressing what ought to be said on political affairs, in language adapted to persuade the people.
Definition of Ariston, disciple of Critolaus, as quoted in Quintilian, The Institutes of Oratory (Rev. John Selby Watson, translator, London: Bell & Daldy, 1873), p. 143.
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Two Washingtons
On April 5, 1792, George Washington exercised the first presidential veto of a congressional bill, a new plan for dividing seats in the House of Representatives, which would have increased the number of seats for northern states. Washington vetoed only one other bill during his two terms in office, an act that would have reduced the number of cavalry units in the army.
On April 5, 1856, Booker T. Washington, American educator, first leader of the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, author of 14 books, including his autobiography, “Up From Slavery,” was born a slave in southwestern Virginia. Though Washington faced criticism from leaders of the new NAACP, especially W. E. B. Du Bois, for not protesting the lack of civil rights more strongly, he secretly funded litigation for civil rights cases, such as challenges to southern constitutions and laws that disfranchised blacks.