An Insight

"Single parent families are the underlying driver pushing up the poverty rate...At the same time, top earners are not taking broader social responsibility by championing the values and parenting strategies underlying their own success." https://t.co/zrAUlNf7eV

— Rob Henderson (@robkhenderson) April 25, 2021

 

I see wonderful things

This is the oak leaf butterfly hiding in plain sight, mimicking an unappetising dead leaf complete with the appearance of fungus-like or lichenous growths so common on dead leaves, and lines simulating very closely the midrib and lateral veins of a leaf.
pic.twitter.com/PRZyJHnwx0

— Science girl (@gunsnrosesgirl3) April 27, 2021

Offbeat Humor

 

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Data Talks

1/n No, the NYT (and likely other outlets) didn't always do this (i.e., '[Name of person], who is white...') to the same extent that they have over the past decade or so. pic.twitter.com/wHB0hXs3r4

— Zach Goldberg (@ZachG932) April 22, 2021

 

The media's lab leak fiasco - They validated the fake news allegation

 Yesterday I posted The scientific process combined with free speech is a powerful weapon to improve knowledge and overturn authoritarian mistakes.  One more member of the mainstream media, Matt Yglesias has joined the pivot with a critical broadside against the mainstream media narrative.  From this morning, The media's lab leak fiasco.  Even though it covers much of the same ground as yesterday's post, it is short enough to warrant a read due to a few additional insights.

As I believe I have said before, I spent the month of February 2020 intensely focused on covering the seemingly imminent victory of Bernie Sanders in the Democratic Party’s presidential primary. I dedicated approximately 0% of my journalistic energy to covering what was, in retrospect, the clearly more significant story of a novel coronavirus outbreak starting in Wuhan, China and clearly spreading to other parts of the world.

I was aware of the virus in much the way that I am aware of the National Hockey League, but I wasn’t paying attention to it as a journalist. The first piece I published on Covid on March 12 holds up pretty well I think, but it was way too late in terms of the kind of tough travel restrictions that, in retrospect, the country needed.

Yglesias and Taibbi (in yesterday's post) I have respect for as journalists owing to their Classical Liberal viewpoint.  They are willing to make an argument and muster evidence for that argument.  They are not afraid to engage in the marketplace of ideas and are willing to cede points when they are demonstrably wrong.

They are relatively free of the social justice/critical theory cant to which so many shallow minded journalists are subject.  But they still suffer the other evil twin of media - political partisanship and rabid hatred of Republicans in general and Trump in particular.

My view is that both parties are pretty incompetent and corrupt (i.e. subject to special interests rather than the general good of all citizens.  Republicans have the redeeming feature of being much more ideologically diverse which makes them less effective but more representative.  Democrats are venal and seemingly constantly refining their venality.  

Yglesias betrays this in his allusion to his being too late in affirming the importance of tough travel restrictions.  Well . . . perhaps.  But it is readily memorable that Trump was widely mocked and denigrated in the mainstream media for proactively imposing tough travel restrictions before most other countries.  It was only later that they came to the reluctant conclusion that those Trump decision's were well reasoned and to some degree supported by the evidence.

Yglesias' whole article centers around the mainstream media's opposition to Senator Tom Cotton and some early statements he made, and illustrating how the mainstream media constantly distorted his statements to make it seem he was making easily rebuttable arguments which he was not in fact making.

It is an interesting read simply for that detailed postmortem of mainstream media failure.  It was not that they were getting facts wrong.  That happens in a fast news cycle.  It was that they were picking positions based on their politics and ideologies and then sticking with those positions long after there was strong evidence that it was an indefensible position.

It has been a fiasco for the media.  Yglesias asks a good question.  Has the failure been consequential.  He asks three specific questions:

A separate question that’s less clear to me is what follows from this in terms of policy. You can break this down into three questions:

Suppose the media had been more open to Cotton’s point back in February 2020 — what would we have done differently?

Suppose definitive evidence arises this Friday that the virus in some sense came from the Chinese lab — what would we do differently going forward?

Or suppose definitive vindication of the zoonotic origin theory emerges — what difference would that make?

I think in all three of these cases, the answer is basically that nothing would be different. This is not to apologize for the bad coverage but, if anything, to underscore how egregious it was to lean so heavily into the Tom Cotton Is Wrong narrative. The subsidiary premise of that narrative was always that Cotton was doing something extremely nefarious. But while Cotton does indeed have a lot of opinions I disagree with, it’s just not true that this lab leak idea is now or ever was very closely linked to any hot-button policy controversies.

 To some degree I agree "that nothing would be different" in terms of public health policy.

But there is a different question to be asked which Yglesias does not.  

Are there any negative consequences to the media's lab lek fiasco?

Here I think the answer is, Yes!

By restricting himself to the health consequences, Yglesias ignores one of the more important consequences - further erosion of trust in mainstream media.

The media was wrong and critical of Trump and Republicans not because of the facts but because of their political partisanship and ideological sympathies.  Their critical reporting of Tom Cotton's position and deliberate misrepresentation of his argument was not only unprofessional and shameful.  It put the mainstream media in the same narrative camp as the Chinese government.  

The media is now acknowledging that the Chinese argument was insufficient and that Tom Cotton's argument had real merit.  But it is not a good look to be in the same camp as repressive totalitarian regimes and then act repressively (deplatforming) and in an Orwellian and authoritarian fashion ("there is only one truth").

I am not arguing that journalists in the mainstream media are communists seeking to undermine America to benefit the Chines Communist Party.  I am arguing that the loss of economic viability and the rapid decline of journalistic social status is driving journalists to behaviors which make them indistinguishable from CCP supporters and from mindless America critics.  

Or in Yglesias' words:

There’s a question as to why that fake consensus emerged. But I think the more troubling question is: How did people let the original story of what Tom Cotton even said go so badly awry? Essentially Cotton said something that was then transformed into a fake claim of a Chinese bio-attack, then the fake claim was debunked, and then the debunking was applied to the real claim with little attention paid to ongoing disagreement among researchers.

Sure.  But that is a narrow reading.

The broader reading is - Why does the mainstream media keep getting stories dramatically wrong and then defending the wrong narrative when new facts emerge.  They lock themselves into partisan positions regardless of facts and then mindlessly fight their corner.  Instead of providing a stream of facts and evidence to their readers so that readers can form their own opinions.

That is the negative consequence to this incident.  Nothing to do with health policy per se, just an affirmation of partisanship, obliviousness to facts, unprofessionalism and indifference to loss of brand and trust among news consumers.  

Nestled Amongst The Trees by Natasha Newton.

Nestled Amongst The Trees by Natasha Newton

Click to enlarge. 

The scientific process combined with free speech is a powerful weapon to improve knowledge and overturn authoritarian mistakes.

Five pieces in pretty quick order suggest there is a media sea change in their understanding of the quality of their reporting - "Fact-Checking" Takes Another Beating by Matt Taibbi,  The 60-Year-Old Scientific Screwup That Helped Covid Kill by Megan Molteni, Flip Flop Fauci and the Origin of Covid by el gato malo, People Bring the Receipts After Fauci Attempts to Dodge Connections to Wuhan Lab by Katie Pavlich, and Origin of Covid — Following the Clues Did people or nature open Pandora’s box at Wuhan? by Nicholas Wade.  All of them amount to indictment of the mainstream media, mostly by members of the mainstream media. It appears that there are too many facts emerging to warrant the continuation of a false media narrative - i.e. that there is a scientific consensus that Covid-19 emerged as a zoonotic from the wild and did not have a lab origin.  

Also here.

The Great Revealing continues to unfold.  

And part of what it reveals is what independent observers have said all along.  There are powerful elements in academia, the mainstream media, and the Deep State who have sought to suppress free speech and independent individuals in order to carry-out repressive state policies inconsistent with our Constitution as well as protect both corporate and international interests allied with academia, the mainstream media, and the Deep State.

There has been plenty to criticize about the CDC Covid-19 response, much of it related to the fact that the CDC turned its back on its own pre-established pandemic plans and sought to pursue actions long ago repudiated by deep data from around the world.

Among the failings has been 1) a failure to establish reliable and meaningful measures of infection and death at the beginning of the pandemic, 2) a failure to follow well established pandemic procedures, 3) a failure to develop Covid-19 treatments in addition to the focus on vaccination, and 4) a failure to acknowledge or investigate Covid-19 origins.

To me, the first three are among the most serious failings, warranting an entirely new leadership of the CDC.  But the fourth is not insignificant, owing to how it might inform the institutional responses to the first three.

Since the beginning, there has been doubt cast on the theory that Covid-19 was simply a zoonotic which jumped the species barrier in a Wuhan wet market.  That was the messaging from the Chinese Communist Party and it was strongly endorsed by academia, the mainstream media, and the Deep State in the US.  

Very early on there was indicative evidence which has become increasingly compelling that Covid-19 was man-made (more properly, man-refined) and escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology through lax security and safety protocols.

In the first seventeen months of the pandemic, technology social media platforms, academia, the mainstream media, and the Deep State have sought to suppress discussion of the evidence for a laboratory source of Covid-19.  Commenters, experts and academics were deplatformed, derided, shamed and otherwise had their speech suppressed with a full court press by an apparent coalition of authoritarians seeking to dispense with free citizens enjoying free speech.  The response by the State interests was both vitriolic and damaging to individuals.

But, fortunately, it was insufficient.  

Evidence kept mounting for a lab origin, China's ham-fisted efforts to prevent WHO from investigating and the simple courage of real scientists have slowly and slowly undermined the official position.

It is not known yet whether Covid-19 originated in the Wuhan Institute of Virology but it has certainly shifted from an impossibility to a possibility to a probability.  

In the process, other issues have been revealed which further shame academia, the mainstream media, and the Deep State.  The US has a ban on gain of function research on viruses as inherently unsafe.  However, there are military, health, and scientific grounds for continuing that research.  

It has now become clear that the National Institutes of Health, through the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases has contracted gain of function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology which is illegal in the US.  Who heads the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases?  Anthony Fauci.

Who was one of the earliest proponents of a natural Covid-19 emergence rather than a lab escape?  Anthony Fauci.  Who has been the chief advisor to the presidents during the Covid-19 pandemic?  Anthony Fauci.

The potential conflict of interest is staggering.  The man who might have been responsible for the research and development of Covid-19 also in charge of the nation's response?  Why isn't this more of a media scandal?

Partly it is of course pure asymmetric politics on the part of the chattering Mandarin class of academia, the mainstream media, and the Deep State.  Partly it is that we do really simply not yet know.  But the desperate measures to forestall free speech and shutdown speculation argues some sort of self-interest that cannot be ignored.

There is a plausible explanation that let's Fauci at least partially off the hook.  Fauci's National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases pretty clearly has funded gain of function research overseas to get around American safety regulations.  But was Fauci aware?  The primary contract went to an outfit familiar to Fauci, EcoHealth Alliance.  A contract which ran from at least 2014-2019.  EcoHealth Alliance then subcontracted gain of function work to be done by a bat virologist at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, Dr. Shi.  

Was Fauci aware that his NIAID was funding gain of function virus research at Wuhan Institute of Virology?  Possibly not.  NIAID contracted with EcoHealth Alliance and EcoHealth Alliance contracted with Dr. Shi.  There is at least plausible deniability.

But again, actions by Fauci and others since the beginning of the pandemic give pause.  The denials were so vehement, they seemed out of proportion and it is only Congressional hearings which have forced the acknowledgement that NIH via NIAID was indeed providing the funds for virus gain of function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

These past ten days seem to have seen a sea change.  Almost indicative of strategic communications decision.  No longer are the denials of funding so vocal or powerful.  The emphasis has shifted to definitions, complexity and nuance.  Almost always an indication that someone has been caught out in a lie.  

All of the above are indicators of bad culture, institutional corruption and startling Mandarin Class treachery.  They are not looking out for the best interests of the American people.  They are protecting their own interests and sinecures.

But there is one more element in this Great Revealing Story.

Early on, and ever since, I pointed out the poor institutional response in terms of establishing clear measurement mechanism, clear definitions, and a focus on all causes death data.  For long periods it has almost seemed like there has been a deliberate effort to focus on the wrong measures.

And some of this is simply that we never knew how poorly our established measurement practices were, particularly in regard to pneumonia and flu.  We were fairly lackadaisical about definitional differences between the two and across a nation of 330 million, that inexactitude carried over in the the pandemic era.  

It is greatly to be desired that after this is all over, and it will pass, we will refocus on how we measure and distinguish pneumonia deaths, from flu deaths, from Covid deaths and any other lung infections.  Science will get better.

The 60-Year-Old Scientific Screwup That Helped Covid Kill by Megan Moltini reveals another public health knowledge gap.  Read the whole article but it does come down to the fact that the medical and health establishment has accepted for decades some assumptions which were never properly investigated in the first place.  

Again, hopefully, this new knowledge will be investigated and validated post Covid-19 emergency because it is quite consequential.  If correct, it reveals once again that there is no validity to the claim to "follow the science."  Science is a process and a self-correcting one where there is freedom of speech.

Covid-19 has provided the impetus to investigate assumptions and our tradition of free speech has allowed us to recognize that the medical establishment has been operating with incorrect information for more than half a century with potentially catastrophic consequences.

If we can avoid ass-covering and the blame game, we can use the pandemic to significantly upgrade both our knowledge and our preparedness.

History

This is known as one of medicine’s most incredible moments. In 1922, at the University of Toronto, scientists went to a hospital ward with children who were comatose and dying from diabetic keto-acidosis. 1/3 pic.twitter.com/7i6cKF5LwW

— Ciarán Bolger (@cbolgerr) April 17, 2021

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An Insight

Me in the 1990s: “How in the world did Hitler manage to manipulate an entire population?”

Me in the 2020s: “Oh, okay.”

— Alice Smith (@TheAliceSmith) April 24, 2021

 

I see wonderful things

The amazing power of natural selection. https://t.co/iq1H0Fvx2p

— Matthew Cobb (@matthewcobb) April 25, 2021