Links - 16th June 2022 (1 - Abortion)

Meme - Cole Sullivan: "Breaking news: Knoxville's Planned Parenthood clinic is on fire."
Sandi Bachom @sandibachom: "Christofascist bastards"
John A. Douglas @JOhnADouglas: "It's just a clump of bricks, it's not a building"

Stephen L. Miller on Twitter - "AOC on how babies in the womb are not a life: “‘Oh…you’re harming a life, I believe this a life.’ Well, some religions don’t. How about that?""
"Huh.. she starts talking about religious beliefs instead of science."

Jo Luehmann says she would prefer having abortion to having kid that gets 'adopted by white evangelicals' - ""I would rather get an abortion than have a Brown child who ends up being adopted by white evangelicals. It is not a kindness to children of the global majority to give them to people who’ll traumatize them with self and ancestral hatred. An abortion is an act of love," Jo Luehmann tweeted... "I have 4 children. The last one was an unwanted pregnancy. Do not speak about how I feel about my children just because I would chose abortion over letting my offspring be raised by bigots who subconsciously (and sometimes consciously) hate them," Luehmann replied... Over on Instagram Luehmann wrote, "White and Christian supremacy kill people of the global majority. They kill LGBTQ+ people. They kill religious minorities. Why would I give a Brown child who could (and likely will) be queer and may have no interest in Christianity to people who’ll teach them they are inadequate in most all of their identities?"  "People who think not coming to this world is the worst that can happen to a zygote have never had to experience the excruciating realities of systemic oppression. Not existing isn’t the worst that can happen for MANY Black, Brown, queer, non-Christian folks. In this oppressive dumpster fire it absolutely is love to choose an abortion for marginalized folks (and since women, non-binary folks, trans men and poor folks are all oppressed in this society, abortion is love, love that can hurt for some, but love nonetheless," Luehmann wrote."
Racial and religious discrimination is only good against a few types of people

Axios on Twitter - "SCOOP: The U.S. government is bracing for a potential surge in political violence once the Supreme Court hands down the ruling that's expected to overturn Roe v. Wade, according to a Department of Homeland Security memo obtained by Axios."
Damn pro-lifers inciting violence! But of course the pro-choicers will just be having "mostly peaceful protests"

‘Unrelenting Daily Confrontation’: After Roe Leak, Yale Law Students Call for Ostracizing Conservative Classmates and Tossing Out Constitution - "Contacted for comment, the students decried "leaks" of their social media posts and said the Washington Free Beacon was not "authorized" to publish them...   The replies may have been a tacit invocation of copyright laws that ban the dissemination of photos without their owner’s consent. Publishing private Instagram posts, a lawyer might argue, violates intellectual property rights, though Adam Candeub, an intellectual property expert at Michigan State University College of Law, called that argument "bullshit."  "It’s not clear copyright would even apply," Candeub said. "I wonder what they’re teaching at Yale Law School."  Eugene Volokh, a professor of First Amendment law at UCLA School of Law, said the copyright argument was a stretch... The reactions at Yale Law School, long ranked the top school in the country, reflect the radicalism of a younger generation of law students—and, some have speculated, of the leaker himself—who believe that long-standing legal norms perpetuate oppression... Such sentiments are widespread at Yale Law School. In March, nearly two-thirds of the student body signed an open letter condemning the Federalist Society for hosting a bipartisan panel on free speech. The letter—which Fessler, Olgun, and Ramakrishna signed—also condemned the law school for calling "armed police" on "peaceful student protesters," who caused so much chaos at the panel that the speakers had to be escorted to a squad car outside. Similar scenes have unfolded outside the homes of Supreme Court justices in the wake of the leak. Though it is illegal to picket a judge’s home "with the intent of influencing" a case, hundreds of protesters did just that to Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh, raising concerns about their safety. The Biden Administration does not appear to share those concerns: then-White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Tuesday that "we certainly continue to encourage [peaceful protests] outside of judges' homes." Congress has likewise taken a page from the Yale Law playbook. Days after a pro-life advocacy office was firebombed in Madison, Wis., House Democrats tried to kill a bipartisan bill that would beef up security for Supreme Court justices...   As the law school’s student body has radicalized, some judges are hoping to hem in its prestige. In March, D.C. Circuit judge Laurence Silberman warned his colleagues against hiring Yale students."
It's only okay to leak things that help liberal ends

The Chicago Thinker on Twitter - "Jen Psaki brazenly lies to @UChicago student journalist, @RealDSchmidt, denying she encouraged anti-lifers to illegally protest outside Supreme Court justices’ homes to influence SCOTUS abortion decision"

The End of Roe v. Wade - WSJ - "The recent leak of a draft Supreme Court opinion overruling Roe v. Wade has prompted many commentators to charge that a hyper-politicized, conservative Court is on the verge of losing its legitimacy and plunging America into a constitutional abyss. Should the draft become the Court’s ruling, they argue, it would threaten a wide range of basic rights and perhaps the rule of law itself.  These are dire assessments, reflecting the country’s intense, long-standing divide over the issue of abortion. But they don’t stand up to scrutiny... Nor is there anything unusual in the leaked draft’s treatment of precedent. Supreme Court precedents strictly bind lower courts, but they do not bind the Supreme Court itself. Indeed, an essential function of the Court is to revise incorrect or outdated prior rulings. Over the last century, the Court has overruled itself about twice a year—roughly the same rate at which the Court has overturned acts of Congress. Precedents fall for many reasons. Sometimes the world changes in ways that mock the logic and expectations of the old ruling. Sometimes opposing lines of cases evolve and clash, and something must give. Most fundamentally, sometimes the Court comes to believe that an old case egregiously misinterpreted the Constitution, so the old case must go. In 1954, in Brown v. Board of Education, the justices rightly buried their predecessors’ 1896 ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson, which had proclaimed the dubious doctrine of “separate but equal.”... the New Deal Court properly repudiated dozens of earlier Gilded Age cases that read property and contract rights far too broadly and in the process invalidated minimum-wage, maximum-hour, worker-safety and consumer-protection laws of various sorts—laws that are now seen, quite rightly, as perfectly proper. The liberal Warren Court also overruled a staggering number of precedents, introducing now familiar terms to our constitutional lexicon. Mapp v. Ohio (1961) dramatically expanded the “exclusionary rule,” Reynolds v. Sims (1964) sweepingly mandated “one person, one vote,” and Miranda v. Arizona (1966) required the now iconic “Miranda warning.” These cases and dozens like them jettisoned earlier settled precedents that, in the minds of the justices, mangled the Constitution. As law professor Philip Kurland once wryly observed, “the list of opinions destroyed by the Warren Court reads like a table of contents from an old constitutional casebook.” Today, the Supreme Court’s 1973 opinion in Roe v. Wade, written by Justice Harry Blackmun, is similarly ripe for reversal. In the eyes of many constitutional experts across the ideological spectrum, it too lacks solid grounding in the Constitution itself... In Roe, the Court did not even quote the constitutional language it purported to interpret in handing down its ruling—the Due Process Clause of the 14th Amendment. That clause holds that the government may not deprive any person of “life, liberty or property, without due process of law”... The Texas abortion law at issue in Roe in fact provided for fair courtroom procedures, which made the decision’s “due process” argument textual gibberish. Constitutional history also cut hard against Roe. When Americans adopted the 14th Amendment in the 1860s, almost no one thought it barred laws against abortion. Virtually every state back then prohibited abortions. Roe likewise ran counter to state laws still on the books almost everywhere in the 1970s. The opinion clumsily cited various earlier precedents involving “privacy” rights related to contraception and erotic expression, but in a devastating concession, the Roe Court admitted that the presence of a living fetus in abortion scenarios made the matter “inherently different” from all previous privacy cases. And Roe said nothing, amazingly, about the relationship of abortion rights to women’s equality. Does Justice Alito’s draft, as many are now claiming, inflict collateral damage on other areas of constitutional case law, such as the Warren Court’s precedents on contraception and interracial marriage? It does not. In fact, the Dobbs draft reinforces these iconic opinions by explaining why they were right—namely, because the freedoms recognized in these cases were “deeply rooted in the Nation’s history and tradition.”... As a constitutional scholar at Yale and later as an unsuccessful nominee to the Supreme Court, Bork denounced a landmark contraception case, Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), in which the Court declared unconstitutional a Connecticut law criminalizing the use of contraception, even inside the marital bedroom. Bork considered the law “nutty” but argued that there was no broad constitutional “right to privacy,” as the Court had declared... Whereas the Court in Griswold sided with 49 states against the outlier Connecticut, the Court in Roe invalidated the laws of at least 49—perhaps all 50—states. The Dobbs draft takes pains to cite this stunning fact. In keeping with a long line of cases and the spirit of the written Constitution, Justice Alito notes that rights which are neither explicit nor implicit in the Constitution’s text and history generally need strong roots in the mores and practices of the American people. One way to measure these mores and practices is to count state laws: How many states recognize a putative right and how many try to abridge it? How often and how strictly are laws on the books in fact enforced?... Roe v. Wade... has been under fierce and relentless attack for decades in most states... Perhaps surprisingly, the draft’s logic also buttresses certain important LGBT rights. As the Court emphasized in its landmark ruling in Lawrence v. Texas (2003), which invalidated anti-sodomy laws, such laws were almost never enforced in America against private consensual conduct, but rather only in cases of rape or public indecency. Justice Anthony Kennedy’s majority opinion reported that only 13 states at the time still had laws prohibiting consensual adult sodomy and only four states singled out same-sex sodomy. Even in these outlier states, there was “a pattern of nonenforcement with respect to adults acting in private.”... “Americans generally and with good reason view today’s Court more favorably than today’s Congress and Presidency. The current justices are outstanding lawyers who do loads of close reading, careful writing, and deep thinking; try hard to see other points of view; spend lots of time pondering constitutional law; and spend little time posturing for cameras, dialing for dollars, tweeting snark, or pandering to uninformed extremists or arrogant donors. Can today’s President and Congress say the same?” In short, I am a Democrat who supports abortion rights but opposes Roe."

I Was Told I'm Pregnant. Then I Found Out It's Likely Cancer — And I'm Actually Relieved. - ""With cancer, disease or dysfunction, there is no government intervention or regulation restricting care. ... No one claims cancer cells have a right to thrive.""

Our daughter lied to us and went to a pro-life rally. - "I seriously thought she was a feminist... Yesterday, my 17-year-old daughter, a junior in high school, told us she was going to her boyfriend’s house. It turns out she lied.   I only found out because today, I casually mentioned Roe v. Wade may be overturned, and she replied, “I can’t wait. So many innocent lives will be spared.” We got into an argument in which she ended up confessing her actual whereabouts—she went to a “pro-life” rally with her boyfriend.  We’ve grounded her and taken away her phone for going behind our backs, but she’s showing no remorse. I just can’t believe it. This is the girl who dressed up as Ruth Bader Ginsburg for Halloween when she was 10. She’s heading to law school in a couple years. I seriously thought she was pro-choice and a feminist. I’ve been taking her to rallies and protests since she was a baby. We’ve been educating her about safe sex and consent. We donate to Planned Parenthood every year for Christmas. I’m fine with her disagreeing with us on other topics, but I had an abortion years ago. We live in a conservative state. I don’t want her right to choose to be taken away. And I’m furious at her for going behind our backs. I’m suspicious of her boyfriend—I know he’s a conservative-leaning Christian and I don’t want to have raised a daughter who votes for whomever her boyfriend does. How do I convince her being pro-life isn’t helping her in the long run?
— Just Trying to Raise a Feminist...
Luckily, she’s still in your house and still subject to both your influence and rules. Inundate her with pro-choice content. Require her to read articles and books that explain why it is important for women to have control of their bodies. Remind her that a person can choose for themselves to never have an abortion—or at least intend not to have one—while respecting the rights of others to choose otherwise...   Don’t allow her to go to with him to any conservative events or any other environment where she’s likely to face some attempts at indoctrination, especially without telling you. You may want to limit the amount of time she spends around his family"
Nothing more feminist than not allowing women to have their own opinions, trying to coerce and brainwash them into agreeing with you and limiting their freedom of movement

Secular Pro-Life on Twitter - "PC: You just want to punish women for having sex.
Me: Do you think men should have to pay child support?
PC: Child support isn't about punishing men! It's about taking care of children.
Me: Man, that's a really good point."

Meme - Stefan Molyneux: "It's interesting that if you don't have a uterus, you can't have an opinion on women's issues, but you can compete in women's sports."
Women who've had hysterectomies don't get to have opinions on abortion! Anyway this common liberal line is a lie, since when a pro-life woman is cited, the claim suddenly morphs to "only the person getting an abortion has any say"

Meme - David Leavitt @David_Leavitt: "Enough is enough. Make vaccines mandatory. #ThursdayThoughts"
David Leavitt @David_Leavitt: "The only person who should have control over your personal medical decisions is you. Not politicians. You. #BansOffOurBodies #RoeVsWade"

Coleman M. Ford on Twitter - "Every church I’ve been a member of has regularly taught on the sanctity of life, supported crisis pregnancy centers, welcomed single mothers, helped families in financial need, & advocated for adoption & foster care. Don’t believe the lie that Christians only care about births."
Liberals don't understand Conservatives after

all

Nathan Alexander on Twitter - "Abortion bans disproportionately harm: Black, Indigenous & other people of color
the LGBTQ community
immigrants
young people
those working to make ends meet
people with disabilities
Protecting abortion access is an urgent matter of racial and economic justice."
"What about women?"
"It's such weird framing. Are there really ppl out there who think, "abortion bans only affect wealthy white women, so what do I care if Roe v. Wade is overturned?" and then upon seeing this tweet from the ACLU, think, "wait a sec, now I DO care!!" ??"

Mary Katharine Ham on Twitter - "MANCHIN: "Make no mistake. It is not Roe v. Wade codification. It's an expansion. It wipes 500 state laws off the books. It expands abortion.""
"This Manchin guy is one of the few reporters I’ve seen be clear about the contents of this bill."
I checked some media reports and of course none of them were honest about what the failed abortion bill really entailed, naturally

Stephen L. Miller on Twitter - ".@SenWarren : "I believe in democracy, and I don't believe the minority should have the ability to block things that the majority wants to do. That's not in the Constitution. [...] It's time to get rid of the filibuster.""
"The bill only received 49 votes. That's a minority. Raju stands there and lets her get away with this."
RNC Research on Twitter/a> - "In 2017, Democrat Senator Elizabeth Warren expressed her support of the filibuster for Supreme Court nominees: “If the nominee can’t get 60 votes, you don’t change the rule – you change the nominee.”"
Americans are bad at maths after all

Bill To Legalize Nearly 100% Of Abortions Through Birth Failed In The Senate 49-51, Elizabeth Warren Says She Doesn't Think A “Minority” Should Be Able To Block A “Majority” 🤔 - "Joe Manchin is literally the only Democrat in the United States Senate that supports having ANY restriction on abortion.  Read that again: EVERY Democrat, except one, voted in favor of removing EVERY limit on abortion.  So much for the moderate left."
Liberals claim the system is broken because politicians don't reflect their constituents' views. This is a good example of that.

RNC Research on Twitter - "“Do you think there should be any limitation on abortions?”
NYC MAYOR ADAMS: “No, I do not.”
“None? Day of birth, totally fine?”
NYC MAYOR ADAMS: “No, I do not. Women should have a right to choose”"

Bungie, Microsoft, others react to Roe v. Wade repeal - The Washington Post (also headlined "As Roe v. Wade repeal looms, video game industry stays mostly silent")
Not just is no dissent tolerated, neither is silence

Meme - "DESPITE MAKING UP LESS THAN 1% OF REASONS FOR ABORTION
RAPE AND INCEST MAKE UP 80% OF SHITTY PRO CHOICE ARGUMENTS."

Meme - "IF YOU PRAISE A WOMAN WHO ABORTED HER CHILD BC 'SHE DID WHAT WAS BEST FOR HERSELF' THEN I HOPE YOU PRAISE MEN FOR ABANDONING THEIR CHILDREN BC THEY DID WHAT WAS BEST FOR THEMSELVES."

Meme - "LET US HAVE ABORTIONS OR WE WILL WITHOLD PROMISCUOUS SEX"
"if you were capable of doing that you wouldn't need abortions"

Opinion | Watch out, Democrats, abortion ruling may energize Republicans - The Washington Post - "Yes, polls show that most Americans say they don’t want the high court to overturn Roe. But polls also show that most Americans don’t know what overturning Roe actually means. A 2019 study reported that 65.7 percent of Americans incorrectly believe that if Roe were overturned, abortion would be illegal everywhere in the United States. It would not. But a Fox News poll released this week finds most Americans agree with the Mississippi abortion law at the heart of the Supreme Court case. The survey found that 54 percent favor state laws banning abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy, except in the case of a medical emergency — exactly what the Mississippi law does — while just 41 percent oppose such a law. This is consistent with the results of a 2018 Gallup poll that found most Americans want abortion restricted to the first trimester (the first 12 weeks of pregnancy), while only 28 percent support allowing abortions in the second trimester and just 13 percent in the third trimester. So, if Roe is overturned, Americans will wake up the next morning and discover that the justices have not in fact banned abortion nationwide but have simply upheld the right of states to impose restrictions — including restrictions that most of them support. That is unlikely to spark the kind of popular outrage Democrats are hoping for. If the Supreme Court does send abortion decisions back to the states, Democrats will have to own their abortion radicalism. Democrats used to argue that, in Bill Clinton’s famous phrase, abortion should be “safe, legal and rare.” No longer. In 2012, they formally expunged “rare” from their party platform, declaring their support for “safe and legal abortion, regardless of ability to pay.” Polls show that a majority of Americans oppose taxpayer funding of abortion. Yet in 2016 Democrats approved a platform that called for repeal of the Hyde Amendment, which bars federal funding for abortions. To secure the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020, Joe Biden had to surrender to the pro-abortion radicals and renounce his more-than-40-year support for the Hyde Amendment. And in recent years, Democrats have increasingly embraced unfettered abortion access far beyond what the majority of Americans support. In 2019, Democrats in New York lit up the Freedom Tower to celebrate the passage of a new state law that removed almost all restrictions on abortion, even in the third trimester, while in Illinois, Democrats repealed the state’s Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act. The new Democratic orthodoxy is taxpayer-funded abortion-on-demand up to the moment of birth — a position supported by a tiny minority of Americans. So, if the battle over abortion moves from the Supreme Court to the states, Democrats will have to fight 15-week abortion bans (which most Americans support) and defend second- and third-trimester abortion (which most Americans oppose). If Democrats focus on defending abortion this November, it will backfire. An April Economist-YouGov poll finds that abortion is the most important issue for just 4 percent of voters — trailing jobs, the economy, immigration, climate change, national security, health care, taxes and civil rights. This should come as little surprise. We are experiencing the worst inflation in 40 years, the worst crime wave since the 1990s and the worst border crisis in American history. Focusing on abortion amid these crises will make Democrats seem hopelessly out of touch. Every minute they spending talk about abortion is a minute they don’t spend talking about the issues Americans say they care more about. Will it energize the Democratic base? Democrats face a massive 17-point enthusiasm gap going into the midterm elections. The last time Republicans demonstrated so much more zeal was in 2010, when Democrats lost more than 60 seats in the House. But abortion might not close that enthusiasm gap in the way Democrats hope. If anything, conservatives might be more galvanized by a Supreme Court decision striking down Roe than liberals — because victory is energizing, while defeat is dispiriting"

Protesters in 'Handmaid's Tale' outfits disrupt Mass at downtown L.A. cathedral - "The protester yells, "I have a right," as she is escorted toward the staircase and out of the nave."
Anti-abortion activists should go protest at the homes of pro-abortion rights activists, since they have a right

Roman Orthodoxy on Twitter - "A thread of Catholic churches that have been vandalized, attacked, and their members harassed by pro-abortion extremists:"
Imagine if it were mosques under attack

Meme - Kate Manne @kate manne: "Can philosophers stop pretending now that abortion is an ethical issue, rather than a political one? Start teaching it (if you must teach it) by grounding it in historical context. Greenhouse and Siegel are a good place to start, and I discuss their work in both DG and Entitled."
Meme - Kate Manne @kate manne: "Bear in mind that by teaching this in the traditional, both-sides, manner, rubbing your hands in glee at an ethical controversy, you are feeding into right-wing hands and singling out many of your students' bodies-- especially female ones--as the site of moral problems."
Even philosophy has fallen to liberals

Jude "Pre-Order MAW in Paperback" Doyle on Twitter - "It is important to remember that, in the entire history of the anti-abortion movement, violence has ALWAYS come from the anti-abortion side. Denying someone an abortion IS violent."
Violence is anything a liberal doesn't like

Nevin Climenhaga on Twitter - "Whatever flaws there are with Roe, it doesn’t cite 17th century English law from a jurist who burnt at least two women as witches—to use @d_a_swafford's example."
"If this is Matthew Hale, he is cited in Roe v Wade as well."
The first is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Cognitive Science at Rutgers University - and misses such a basic fact

Reporter calls for violence against pro-lifers, says they shouldn't have 'peace or safety' until they're dead - "A reporter for Rewire News Group called for "more" violence against pro-life Americans over the weekend as she appeared to celebrate reports of vandalism against the headquarters of a pro-life group in Wisconsin.  "More of this. May these people never know a moment of peace or safety until they rot in the ground," Caroline Reilly wrote... Wisconsin Family Action, a group staunchly opposed to abortion, was attacked Sunday morning when someone tossed a Molotov cocktail into its Madison office and spray-painted a message outside reading, "if abortions aren’t safe then you aren’t either.""

Auron MacIntyre on Twitter - "Leftwing terrorism is always committed by inanimate objects Cars run into crowds, fires brake out on their own"

Auron MacIntyre on Twitter - "How do you think Democrats and legacy media would respond if there were mobs screaming in front of the homes of Justices Sotomayor and Kagan?"
"The left doesn’t go to jail for this stuff and they are proud of that The left doesn’t get fired for this stuff and they know that The double standard IS the selling point"

It’s shocking how little the left understands the pro-life movement - "The left's working knowledge of the pro-life position appears to be the caricature of the pro-life position concocted by the left's own media allies. As science and technology have gradually undermined the moral, philosophical, legal, and constitutional ground upon which the pro-legal abortion crowd has chosen to stand, they have become increasingly reductive in the formal presentation of their position.  The left has developed a two-pronged approach for abortion advocacy. First, rely heavily on euphemistic and oblique terminology (see, "reproductive justice") that sounds consequential but conveys no meaning. Second, engage only strawmen representations of the opposition.  This understanding of the left's abortion dynamic would explain why conservatives have complained for years that they can't get progressives to actually debate the merits of Roe, or the morality of feticide. The consequence was always easy to predict: an entire pro-abortion movement utterly oblivious to the realities of what conservatives actually believe."

Are the Unborn a Convenient Group to Advocate For? - "“The unborn” are a convenient group of people to advocate for. They never make demands of you; they are morally uncomplicated, unlike the incarcerated, addicted, or the chronically poor; they don’t resent your condescension or complain that you are not politically correct; unlike widows, they don’t ask you to question patriarchy; unlike orphans, they don’t need money, education, or childcare; unlike aliens, they don’t bring all that racial, cultural, and religious baggage that you dislike; they allow you to feel good about yourself without any work at creating or maintaining relationships; and when they are born, you can forget about them, because they cease to be unborn. It’s almost as if, by being born, they have died to you. You can love the unborn and advocate for them without substantially challenging your own wealth, power, or privilege, without re-imagining social structures, apologizing, or making reparations to anyone. They are, in short, the perfect people to love if you want to claim you love Jesus but actually dislike people who breathe.      Prisoners? Immigrants? The sick? The poor? Widows? Orphans? All the groups that are specifically mentioned in the Bible? They all get thrown under the bus for the unborn.  — Pastor Dave Barnhart"...
First, the challenge makes all kinds of ungracious assumptions. For example, it claims that pro-life Christians choose to care for the unborn so we can “claim to love Jesus,” but we “actually dislike people who breathe. Prisoners? Immigrants? The sick? The poor? Widows? Orphans?” That’s an incredibly uncharitable take on pro-lifers and wrongly assumes their focus on the killing of innocent human beings is misguided. How can he know who people like or dislike? In my near-twenty years of traveling the country and working with pro-life ministries, I’ve never come across pro-life people who dislike orphans, widows, etc. In fact, I experience the opposite. Pro-life people typically have a robust understanding that God made all human beings valuable and that we’re to care for those who are vulnerable. I see their compassion for the unborn pour over into compassion for others who are marginalized.Second, the challenge wrongly accuses pro-life Christians of throwing prisoners, immigrants, widows, etc. “under the bus for the unborn.” Even if it were true that pro-life groups didn’t spend their resources caring for prisoners, so what? Why is that a problem? Not every Christian is called to do everything for everyone. Ministries typically focus on specific areas of need, but they shouldn’t be faulted for failing to address every need of every person.I know ministries that help women and children who are trafficked. They don’t do anything about abortion, though, and they seem deaf to the pleas of prisoners. That’s not wrong. It’s just not their focus. I know men who serve in prison ministry but do nothing to serve those who are sick. We shouldn’t fault them either. They’re doing what they can in their sphere of influence. If pro-life groups only care for the unborn and their mothers, they should not be faulted for doing so. That’s a valid ministry regardless of whether they don’t or can’t help others.Third, the challenge’s overall claim is arguably false. He claims the unborn are convenient to advocate for because they never make demands of us, but that prisoners, immigrants, and the sick challenge our wealth, power, and privilege, making it inconvenient for people to care for them. It seems like serving anyone can be inconvenient, though. Putting others’ interests and desires above your own is precisely why it’s called “serving.” You make sacrifices of time, money, energy, and many other things in order to care for those in need. The set of inconveniences will be unique depending on whom you serve.For example, this pastor claims it’s convenient to advocate for the unborn. In reality, however, it’s convenient to ignore the unborn. Why? The unborn are silent. They can’t pester you. You can’t hear their screams when they’re torn apart. It’s easy to ignore them since you almost never see them. If you looked away from their plight, you’d never be troubled by them.To advocate for the unborn is complex and difficult. These children are residing inside their mothers, who have total control over their destiny. Convincing women to make decisions about what they believe to be their own bodies is hardly easy. The media, law, courts, schools, and Hollywood are largely supportive of a woman’s right to kill her unborn child. Pro-lifers are routinely mocked, harassed, and deplatformed. It’s inconvenient. This isn’t a complaint. It’s simply a correction to the original challenge. Though advocating for the life of the unborn may not present with the same kinds of inconveniences as caring for prisoners, widows, and orphans, it’s still not convenient and no less legitimate of a ministry."
This is a silly comparison. There is a difference between positive and negative rights. And pro-life people pay a huge price for advocating for the unborn - they get so much hatred from the left for one, and they are unable to advance other causes they care about (e.g. the religious privileges that liberals keep fearmongering about). Of course pro-choice people get very upset when what they imagine is a solid argument gets refuted

Links - 2nd June 2022 (2)

Meme - "And of course today was a Wal-Mart day in court. Literally all but one of my clients on today was for a larcenous charge from WalMart. Maybe it is time to hold the company accountable."
Hot Takes Nobody Asked For - Posts | Facebook - "Hold Walmart accountable for making people commit crimes? Were they asking for it because of their merchandising? Maybe they shouldn't be showing their goods at those hours?"Shoplifting means you are a victim

Ida Bae Wells on Twitter - "Why do “school choice” advocates never advocate eliminating school district boundaries/funding schools by local property tax and allowing poor, Black students to attend white, wealthy schools in neighboring municipalities? They don’t really want choice, just privatization."
Weird. What world is she living in? That's exactly what they want

Covid and the “Birthday Effect” - Freakonomics - "We did not find that the link between birthdays and Covid-19 changed if the majority of the people in the county voted for Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton in 2016.  It also didn’t seem to matter if there was a shelter-in-place policy in effect, which makes sense, since these policies were kind of toothless to police smaller, private social gatherings.  And, for good measure, we even looked at the weather. We thought that rainy days might drive people indoors more. But turns out there was no relationship between rainfall during the week of a birthday and a Covid-19 diagnosis afterwards...
PRASAD: If your goal is to have sort of a sustained and reasonable pandemic response, to some degree, you have to count on the fact that not everyone’s going to do everything you say, not everyone’s going to do everything you wish they did. People are people... I think appreciating that people are primates and primates have needs has to be a part of any sort of public health response. That might’ve been a missed opportunity of the pandemic. When it comes to important life events, like a child’s birthday, people want to celebrate those events. And so, the strict thing is to say, “You can’t do that.” Another strategy might’ve been to say, “Maybe there are ways you can do that more safely.”"
Understanding means you can't mock and hate other people

Do As Docs Say, Not As They Do - Freakonomics - "my colleagues Michael Frakes, Jon Gruber and I evaluated a very similar question using data from the U.S.  We used military health records. And we found only trivial differences between how much doctors and non-doctors did things like get vaccinations or go in for an M.R.I. to help diagnose back pain.  Another 2013 study in the Netherlands estimated the effects of attending medical school on health outcomes of doctors vs. non-doctors. The results showed only modest impacts of becoming a doctor on health outcomes. Doctors drank a little less alcohol. But the study also found that they exercised less. And being a doctor had no significant impact on smoking or obesity rates.  And in 2019, Dr. Hannah Wunsch and her colleagues did an interesting analysis of doctors in Canada. They found that the care doctors receive at the end of their lives is actually not that different from the care that non-doctors receive.  I thought my fellow doctors would actually tend to choose less aggressive end-of-life care. But Wunsch and her team showed that just wasn’t true. In their study, doctors and non-doctors were equally likely to spend their last days in the hospital. All of this is to say that what doctors may advise their patients may not, really, fully square with the decisions they make for themselves when they’re faced with the same incredibly difficult choices...
Doctors and their families were 3.8 percent less likely to follow the guidelines about prescriptions...
Driving down costs may help. But even in settings like Sweden where people don’t have large out-of-pocket medical costs, people only take their prescribed medications about half the time...
PERSSON: I think trust is important here. It’s easy for us to sit in our ivory tower and think everyone ought to know that you should stick to taking prescribed medications. But out there in the real world, there are many competing sources of information. So in that cloud of information, sometimes misinformation, we found it plausible that access to an expert, but not just an expert but a trusted expert, a family member who’s a nurse or a doctor, can make a difference for health behaviors. But if the trusted expert has to be a family member, then that’s a little bit of bad news if we’re trying to design policy."

How to Solve a Medical Mystery - Freakonomics - "I did a study a few years back that showed that the older a doctor was, the worse the outcomes were for their patients. That may seem a bit disheartening, but we did find that doctors who treated a lot of patients as they got older— these are doctors who were still in the thick of it, learning— those doctors didn’t see the mortality of their patients affected by their age in the same way...   Where I work, Mass General in Boston, many doctors actually wear short white coats. Normally, you only see those coats on medical students. But the purpose for wearing them is for us all to remember that we should always be learning."

The Mystery of the Man with Confusion and Back Pain - Freakonomics - "cognitive biases.   For example, my colleague Dan Ly showed that doctors who recently treated a patient with a pulmonary embolism – which is a clot in the blood vessels that supply the lung – those doctors increased their rates of pulmonary embolism testing in subsequent patients, some of whom were unlikely to actually have that condition.   This is just one example of how diagnostic decisions of doctors can be affected by cognitive biases, in this case something that Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman termed the “availability heuristic.”  For doctors who’ve recently treated a patient with a pulmonary embolism, the diagnosis may just be more front of mind or mentally available, leading them to prioritize testing for that condition over other more likely diagnoses in future patients."

Why Fridays May Be Dangerous for Your Health - Freakonomics - "companies and even governments take advantage of our inattention and release reports and news on Fridays that they’d rather we didn’t pay much attention to. The goal is to avoid unflattering media coverage. For example, any story that might impact a company’s stock price...
Luis and his research partners found that alerts were more likely to be communicated on a Friday than any other day of the week. They also found that alerts released on a Friday were shared 34 percent less on social media, and they were 12-51 percent less likely to receive news coverage."

Where Do All the Bad Ideas Go? - Freakonomics - "JENA: We looked at people who worked in a Veterans Affairs hospital. And often V.A. researchers, they write about health care issues and quality-of-care issues in the V.A. system. And I thought “Hm, I bet that V.A. researchers, when they write studies about the V.A., are going to be finding things that are positive.” Like, “The V.A. does this good, the V.A. does that good, etc.” And we didn’t find that.  We actually wrote that up because I thought this question of ideological bias no matter what you found would be interesting. And we got it published...
LEVITT: Somebody approached me and they asked me if I could study texting and driving and what the effect was. And I had never thought about the problem and I didn’t have any great ideas. So almost on a lark, I called up a friend I had at a big insurer and I said, “Hey, if I could link the data you have on driving to data on texting, would you be interested?” And he said, sure. And then I called up a really big telecom company, a friend I had there, and I said, “Hey, if I could link your data to this insurance data, would you be happy to do it?” And amazingly, they said, yes. And we developed this partnership where we were the trusted third party of these data that they wouldn’t give to the other company, but they would give to us. And we went to a lot of trouble to put it together and it wasn’t perfect, but it was pretty good. Now, part of the problem was the insurance company didn’t actually know when people crashed. They just knew when they slammed on the brakes. But it turned out that when people were texting, they just slowed way down. They hardly ever slammed on their brakes because I think they were driving so slow and were so far away from other cars that they probably weren’t driving very well, and they weren’t doing anything that was discernible that was dangerous. And in the end, we found that there was no impact of texting on any bad driving outcomes. And it could have been a good paper, but I think nobody would have believed it. And the companies we were working with weren’t very excited about it. And then my R.A. went off to grad school and the project never died, it just didn’t happen. It was one of those cases where this bias that arises in publication, which is we had a perfectly good result. We had a draft of a paper, but everybody just ran out of steam because we knew it’d be such a war to try and get it published because it would go so much against people’s priors, but not in a way that will make people excited, just in a way that will make them angry and frustrated"
So much for conflict of interest

Should introverts act more extraverted? - "extraverted behaviour and social situations can promote pleasant emotions. There may be limits, but acting extraverted seems beneficial for most people, at least in some circumstances. We have no interest in forcing extraverted behaviour on anyone, but introverts might think of it as a helpful tool to boost moods or get certain tasks accomplished"

Did Cold Weather Cause the Salem Witch Trials? - "the most active era of witchcraft trials in Europe coincided with a 400- year period of lower-than-average temperature known to climatologists as the "little ice age."Oster, now an associate professor of economics at the University of Chicago, showed that as the climate varied from year to year during this cold period, lower temperatures correlated with higher numbers of witchcraft accusations... Weather patterns continue to trigger witchcraft accusations in many parts of Africa, where witch killings persist. According to a 2003 analysis by the Berkeley economist Edward Miguel, extreme rainfall — either too much or too little — coincides with a significant increase in the number of witch killings in Tanzania. The victim is typically the oldest woman in a household, killed by her own family."

Do Checklists Make People Stupid? (NSQ Ep. 26) - Freakonomics Freakonomics - "‘There are many things that I love about New York. And I think many of those fall within the parameters of one word, which is propinquity… it's kind of an active form of density, it means that there's a certain amount of density that lends itself to collaboration or collisions, some of which are intentional, and some of which are unintentional. And that generally produces a greater output than you might have elsewhere. That's how I define propinquity’...
‘What about the argument that things have changed… and with Zoom, and with WiFi, you don't need to live in New York to discover your tribe, that you could do it virtually?’
‘They said that when the telegraph happened, they said that when the telephone happened, they said that when the fax machine happened. You know, I was a young writer, when the fax machine was coming out and the personal computer was getting really popular. And the conventional wisdom across the board was, oh, nobody, especially a writer, will ever have to live in a city. Why on earth would you want to live in a city? Because you can do what you do from anywhere. And I can tell you, I could give probably 1000 examples in my life, where an idea or a story or a way of thinking about something was informed by the result of propinquity’
‘I think you're right, this all comes down to propinquity. And whether human beings from millennia of evolution, get the same rewards from real propinquity and virtual propinquity. And being on a Zoom call with 10 people is different than being in a park with 10 people’...
‘My friend James altucher wrote a piece about his having left New York and he says forever, although I don't believe him, and that New York City is over forever... And then others attacked him including Jerry Seinfeld in the New York Times writing an op ed. And basically Seinfeld's take was like this guy James Altucher is a putz who is not loyal and I certainly wouldn't want him on any team of mine. But the irony of that is that Jerry Seinfeld is writing this piece defending New York City from his house in the Hamptons because he too left’"

How Should You Ask for Forgiveness? (NSQ Ep. 27) - Freakonomics Freakonomics - "‘It is interesting though, in medicine, for instance, for years, there was essentially a prohibition for doctors to apologize to patients if things went wrong, because that might lead to malpractice.’
‘Right, because it's an admission of responsibility.
‘And then a bunch of states passed what came to be called I'm sorry laws that allowed doctors to apologize without having any liability accrued to them. And they found that that actually cut down on malpractice lawsuits.’...
‘Recently, the director of the CDC, Dr. Robert Redfield said that if you just got everyone to wear masks, it would be even more effective than there being a vaccine. Masks are extremely effective, you know, they’re primitive technology and vaccines are great, but vaccines tend to not be 100% effective for all people’...
‘Kurt Lewin was this amazing scientist, you know, you've really made it when your name becomes an adjective. So you know, it's Lewinian. If you read these old articles that he wrote, he has all these like force diagrams, just like we learned in physics, like the arrows pointing different ways. And he really thought of behavior change as essentially a problem where you have promoting forces, like I could be healthier if I started exercising, maybe it would be a way to meet other people. But then you have restraining forces, like I don't have any of the stuff to exercise. I get out of breath very quickly. I feel kind of silly, doing things that I don't know how to do. So Lewin had the insight that when we tried to change our own behavior, and especially when we try to change somebody else's behavior, our romantic partner or colleague, what we tend to do is we try to pile on more promoting forces. We tell people all the reasons why they should exercise, we try to make it sound better’
‘Which can come off as preaching and scolding, by the way’
‘It tends not to work for various reasons, including that one. And then the further insight was that you can actually get more leverage in many cases by removing the restraining forces, by identifying the reasons why the person isn't yet exercising, and then taking them out of the way.’"
Mask fetishism strikes again. Why even bother with a vaccine then, since we are told that vaccines will end the epidemic, and masks are even better? Those who won't get the vaccine won't wear masks anyway

Which Incentives Are Best at Boosting Vaccination, and Why? - Freakonomics - "Stephen says that blood-pressure readings in a doctor’s office tend to be much higher than elsewhere. Among patients who exhibit high blood pressure at a doctor’s office, 15 to 30 percent of them may have what’s called “white-coat hypertension” — or high blood pressure that occurs during an appointment with a physician, but not in other settings. But the reverse effect is also true — “masked hypertension” occurs when patients display normal blood pressure at their doctor’s office but a higher range in other settings. According to the National Center of Biotechnology Information, the prevalence of masked hypertension lies between 8% and 20% of untreated adults, and up to 61% of treated adults!"

Why Do So Many Donated Kidneys End Up in the Trash? - Freakonomics - "Alvin ROTH: Transplant centers are measured in a way that penalizes them for unsuccessful transplants, but doesn’t penalize them for transplants that they decide not to... If you have a kidney that has an 85% chance of success, that might look like a life-saving opportunity to a patient, but it might look to a transplant center like risking censure you can’t have a 15% failure rate in the United States...
Transplant centers are kept under watch by the Scientific Registry of Transplant Recipients and also the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. And according to their criteria, hospitals get dinged when their one-year survival rate after transplant surgery falls below 98 percent — in other words, they get penalized when fewer than 98 percent of the patients who received new kidneys at the hospital survive 12 months after the surgery., Sumit Mohan again.
MOHAN: Those centers that fall about a percent and a half below that? So about 96, 97 percent get flagged as underperforming transplant centers. And that’s important because patients who are on the transplant waitlist, who are on dialysis, have a 20 percent annualized mortality rate. So the survival rate for patients who are on dialysis compared to patients who have received a transplant is not really comparable. And that one and a half percent difference between an as expected performing transplant center versus an underperforming transplant center? While it may be statistically significant, it’s not clinically, meaningfully different. And that becomes part of the problem. Transplant centers are not incentivized to transplant their patients...
And there’s a strange thing that’s missing from the criteria in this system. The powers that be … don’t seem to care about wasted kidneys. That’s not a thing that they even look at... the national standards don’t necessarily represent what patients may want. A person facing death might be happier living five years with an imperfect kidney than living only five months on dialysis. And measuring quality by a one-year survival rate is also questionable."

Why Does the Richest Country in the World Have So Many Poor Kids? (Ep. 475) - Freakonomics Freakonomics - "ROMNEY: There are substantial penalties in our safety-net system for individuals who might get married. So a single person with a couple of children at home is going to do better off not married than he or she would do if they did become married. And guess what? Incentives have an impact. And so people don’t get married. And we know that one of the keys to being able to help people get out of poverty is being married and having two people in the home that can invest their time and talents raising a child."

Introducing a New “Freakonomics of Medicine” Podcast (Ep. 465) - Freakonomics Freakonomics - "For patients in areas near marathon routes, the percentage who died within 30 days of being hospitalized — the 30-day mortality rate — was 13 percent higher if they had a heart attack or cardiac arrest on race day than if they had either one of those conditions on a non-race day.  We didn’t find any increase in mortality on marathon days in those people who lived in nearby ZIP codes that were unaffected by the race route, which makes a lot of sense. Their trip to the hospital shouldn’t have been affected by blocked roads.  You might be thinking — correlation isn’t causation.  When we do a study like this, we have to be sure to eliminate all the other possible reasons for the effect that we’re seeing. So what are some of those other possible explanations?  What if the people having heart attacks were actually running in the race? Well, we studied patients aged 65 years and older — and, okay, there are lots of runners who are over 65. So we looked at people with multiple medical conditions — people who were chronically ill and therefore were really unlikely to be running a marathon.  Or what if, for some reason, the patients having heart attacks on marathon days were just different from patients on any other day? It doesn’t seem plausible, at least not to me, but to double-check, we compared patient characteristics — like their age, or other cardiac problems. And we found that those characteristics were about the same on race days vs. non-race days.  What if hospitals are short-staffed on marathon day? That didn’t explain it either, because hospitals were performing all of their typical cardiac procedures on marathon days. Which suggests that there were plenty of people on hand to care for heart attack patients. It occurs to me that those folks must have gotten an early start on their commute so they didn’t get stuck in traffic!  What if ambulances took patients to hospitals that were further away to avoid roadblocks. We found that the hospitals that patients were taken to were actually the exact same on marathon days and non-marathon days. It just took patients longer to get there.  All we were left with to explain the difference in mortality was a delay in treatment.  So what kind of delays are we talking about here? On a typical, non-marathon day, the average travel time in an ambulance for patients with a heart attack or cardiac arrest was 13.7 minutes. On a race day? That went up to 18.1 minutes.   That means, on average, it took about four and a half minutes longer — 32 percent longer — for patients to get treatment on the day of a marathon. That may not seem like a long delay for your average commuter, but even small delays in care can lead to significant heart damage — which, by the way, is why we say in medicine that when it comes to heart attacks, “time is tissue.”"

How to Stop Worrying and Love the Robot Apocalypse (Ep. 461) - Freakonomics Freakonomics - "In the spring of 2018, David Autor was asked to co-chair an M.I.T. task force called The Work of the Future. It included researchers from a variety of disciplines — economics, engineering, political science, anthropology even. The mission was to explore how new technologies like robotics and automation will affect labor markets, especially whether certain groups of workers would be left behind. Keep in mind that this sort of prediction is really hard — as evidenced by the predictions that economists made about globalization. They predicted that when the U.S. offshored manufacturing jobs to China, that Americans who worked in manufacturing would be made better off, since they’d theoretically be “reallocated” into better jobs. But as David Autor told us in that earlier episode, this didn’t happen.
AUTOR: Some people are leaving the labor market, some people are going into unemployment, some people are going on to disability, and so the reallocation process seems to be slow, frictional, and scarring. The real differentiator is the skill level of the worker. So, higher-paid and more highly educated workers, they seemed to reallocate successfully out of manufacturing into other jobs.
DUBNER: So, the H.R. person at a big textile firm gets an H.R. job elsewhere and the manufacturers on the line are probably not."

The Future of New York City Is in Question. Could Andrew Yang Be the Answer? (Ep. 462) - Freakonomics Freakonomics - "Andrew Yang has parlayed his quixotic presidential campaign into front-runner status in the race to become the next mayor of New York City. As such, he’s being attacked from a variety of angles. A group called Asians Against Yang, for instance, opposes him in part because he has taken some pro-police stances...
We’re going to make outdoor dining permanent in part because it is shown to drive small-business revenue up for adjacent businesses by something like 45 or 50 percent."
Given that Asians are generally pro-police, this is ironic

Facebook - "Chris Pratt follows fascists on twitter. He is NOT our Mario. I just checked and he's still following these accounts. This is not made up. It's his verified account."
The tolerant left at it again - cancelling someone because of who he follows on Twitter and what church he goes to

Women are less likely to date men posing with cats, study finds - "Men who like cats are less likely to get a date... "Men holding cats were viewed as less masculine; more neurotic, agreeable, and open; and less dateable""

zay🗿 on Twitter -  "Our Founding Fathers wouldn't recognize the America we live in today.   They would be horrified, and rightfully so."
"founding fathers: you freed the WHAT"

Max Adams On The Dark Ages | HistoryExtra Podcast - HistoryExtra - "'Britain in 400, looks very, very different from Britain in 600. So you've got this black hole into which our history tumbles. And this is the period when archaeology has to deliver. Unfortunately, the tools that we normally have at our disposal are either missing for this period, or we're not sure how to use them. And by that, I mean, first of all, we rely on things we can date. So that means wet pieces of wood, which have tree rings in them. Roman coins don't arrive here after about 390, 400. So are, we can say when things happened after a certain time, but not when. Pottery, which we also use to date sites, is not really being made in industrial quantities anymore. And the other sort of help me get out of jail free card for archaeologists is radiocarbon dating, which can normally supply dates within sort of 50 years, or even 50 years is not much cop for those 200 years. But in particular, for those 200 years, we have this frustration that radiocarbon dating relies on the amount of carbon in the atmosphere being absorbed by living things being not absolutely constant, but being on a sort of gentle curve. For those two centuries, it just so happens that the carbon atmospheric content goes haywire. So so even radiocarbon dating is not helping us... People eat McDonald's and drive Japanese cars and use and use German technology. But we're not actually subject to military conquest by those people. So the artifacts that archaeologists find are not biographies of the people with whom we find them...
If you, if as I do, you spend a lot of time walking through the British Isles, you actually see some of those regional identities change really quite, quite quickly. I mean, for example, you know, the north south divide, which is always jokingly said to begin at the Watford gap, a really interesting place. It really is the divide because no Viking ever settled southwest of the Watford gap on Watling Street. Why? Because Watling Street is the line between all the rivers that flow north and east and all the rivers that flow south and west. It's a real, it's a real internal frontier in Britain's landscape. And, right into the Viking period, people are sensitive to those very small geographical niceties, if you like’
‘Of course, this this period is traditionally referred to as the Dark Ages. But in recent years, a lot of historians have pushed back against that title saying that they they find it a bit, a bit too negative about the kind of cultural, the culture of the time. What's your opinion on that debate? Do you think we should still call it the Dark Ages?’
‘I suppose, first of all, I don't care. Second of all, if Bede has only got 19 lines to say about it, that's dark. I mean, dark as in obscure. I mean, in terms of cultural exuberance, and poetry and art, and culture and sophistication. No, no, not dark at all. But in terms of obscurity, I mean, if, you know, I, I use the term early medieval to my academic colleagues. And they know exactly what I mean. You know, we talk, we talk an internal language between us, you know, just the way archaeologists talk about an archaeological site in a way that, you know, an archaeologist would never call it an excavation a dig. Dig is a public word for an excavation, but it's an excavation. So you know, we all use different terms, I'm very happy to, I get told off all the time for calling it the Dark Ages. I don't really care because, because it's, it's like calling the Roman period, the Roman period. It’s not really the Roman period, it's a useful tag. And for a period that is so, it's the most obscure period in our history. It's dark in the sense that you have to hold up a candle to get the merest glimpse of what's going on, but you, you, it's no more than candlelit. So for me, it can stay the Dark Ages, but I can call it the early medieval. I can be, you know, I can call it the period 425 to 585 if you really, you know if we want to get that nerdy about it, but I don't really. Dark Ages is, you know, we've gonna call it something. We call it the Arthurian period, and it drives us mad as well.’"

Hungary's fertility rate returns to pre-1995 levels - "the rate was 1.59 in the January-November period this year, up from 1.57 in 1995, before austerity measures introduced by Lajos Bokros, the then finance minister. The fertility rate had been declining since 1979, when Hungary’s fertility rate was above 2.0. It declined to 1.8 at the time of the 1989-90 change in political system before dropping even further, to an all-time low of 1.2 after the 2008 “crisis management” of the previous Gyurcsány-Bajnai left-wing government, Rétvári said. Rétvári, a lawmaker of the co-ruling Christian Democrats, said their government “strongly believes in families”, which is why, he added, it had introduced a multitude of schemes to help couples wanting to raise children."

Women patients at greater risk when male surgeon operates, study finds
Men treated by women also had better outcomes, supposedly. Strangely, the usual "correlation is not causation" crowd will be awfully silent, since they like the results. Yet, the paper itself mentions that: "female surgeons in both relevant dyads were younger and had lower annual surgical volumes than male surgeons" and "female surgeons treated younger patients with less comorbidity than male surgeons." This suggests that XY surgeons get the harder cases; though they claim that "there is not an underlying rationale to support that male surgeons are more likely to perform a more complex subset of each procedure", earlier research tells us that there is "sexism" because female surgeons perform less complex procedures than male ones.

Gender may not be the biggest factor in women doctors’ lower patient mortality - "The mortality rate among patients cared for by female physicians was 0.47% lower than for male physicians, tracking closely the results of a large American study published in 2017 that showed a 0.43% lower 30-day mortality for the patients of female doctors. This gap held when the Canadian researchers adjusted for patient characteristics such as age, gender, and disease acuity, and for hospital differences. But when they accounted for physician characteristics such as years of experience, the difference between male and female doctors’ patient mortality rates wasn’t statistically significant, except marginally so in cases where the “most responsible physician” was also the attending and discharging physician... The researchers also compared differences in processes of care, such as prescribing medications and ordering diagnostic imaging and bloodwork. They found that women physicians requested more diagnostic tests than men but that didn’t have any bearing on patient mortality."

Medieval manuscript makers

Medieval manuscript makers | History Extra

""‘How uncommon is Margery Kempe?’

‘Well, I suppose it, it depends how you want to measure common or uncommon, right? If you take the fact that she's a female writer, that is surprisingly common, I think, is one of the great misconceptions that there were very few female writers from the Middle Ages. In fact, in the book, I talk about women, and women's role in the production of manuscripts, as scribes, as authors, as patrons, as artists. I talk about them in every chapter, except for one, the chapter that I talked about, disasters where manuscripts were very nearly lost. Because I want to make clear that actually, we have this rather kind of narrow vision of the past, where we, it's in our vision of the past is kind of infused by our own patriarchal prejudices. And actually, the past is often richer and more interesting than we give it credit for. The question of, is, is Margery Kempe common in the sense that she's a woman of a kind of lower social status? And how frequently do we hear from those people? Well, there's another example in the book, these amazing letters from the 15th century called the Paston Letters, which is kind of cache of letters between several generations of one family, who also lived in East Anglia where Margery Kempe was from… the women in the family seemed to have been able to read, but many of them couldn't write. And so they dictated their letters to scribes, who, who had their words and wrote them down. And some of them actually developed relationships with those scribes’...

‘I think scribes felt that they had the license to play with a text in a way that perhaps we wouldn't today,’

‘How much influence did an author have in the production of a manuscript of their work? Obviously, if they're in different centuries, or it's been copied several centuries later, it's not going to obviously really have that direct influence on that. But what about if they were a bit closer in time?’

‘I think a lot of authors showed a keen awareness of how once the text was out of their hands, they really had very little control over it. There's a famous little poem that Chaucer, supposedly by Chaucer, but some scholars disagree with them. In which also addresses a scribe called Adam who copies his work. And, you know, he complains about, and he says, Adam, please really just copy this correctly. And that is true in the 15th century, but also, there's a writer from the early medieval period, called Alfritsche [sp?], a 10th century writer who writes something very similar in his, in his collection of, of saints’ lives. He says, you know, scribes, please make sure you copy this correctly. He knows full well. So I think authors probably were aware of that. 

There's a very interesting writer, called Hugerberg [sp?], who was a missionary nun in the eighth century who, who wrote these two saints’ lives. And at the end of one, in the beginning of another one, she wrote this little section in code, which explained what her name was. And in the main text itself, the author announces themselves as little more than a indignous saxonica [sp?], so a lowly Saxon woman. So we know that the author is a woman, but nobody knew what the author's name was, until the 1930s, when a scholar was able to untangle this little code that was sort of stitched into the end of the text. And I, I often think about that, because I sometimes wonder whether she knew the way that her text would be copied and recopied over time, and the process of transmission would mangle it. And perhaps she knew that in the process of transmission, so often, authors’ names were lost, because if an author's name was ever attached to a text in the first place, it probably appeared, you know, in what we might call a rubric, meaning literally written in red. But not necessarily written in red, but essentially a title at the beginning of a text. And that rubric could just fail to be copied, or it might be lost. And so an author's name might be erased, especially if that author's name was female. And so I sometimes wonder whether she was fully aware of how her name might be erased, and, which is why she chose to record it in a little code. 

There's another lovely example, which is Marie de France, who wrote an Anglo Norman, which was the language of the kind of educated elite in England after the Norman Conquest. And she embedded her name. She described herself as called Marie, and she said that she was from France. Although she probably actually was from England. But what's interesting is that she embedded her name within the verse of her text. So she used as it were the kind of controlling mechanism of rhyme, which ensured that, that name had to be copied and recopied correctly in order to make the rhyme work, right. And again, I often think about that. I often think, was that a strategic decision? Did she know how her name would most often, most likely be erased from a text over time if it was female?’...

‘Most manuscripts, particularly in the early medieval period, were were made from parchment. And parchment is the prepared skin of a domestic animal, so a sheep or a calf, and it's an unbelievably elaborate process to make parchment. I actually went to William Cowley’s, which is the last parchment maker in the UK and watched this process. And it's, it's an incredible experience. It's very, very smelly. It's also very labor intensive, but it begins with these hides being soaked in quicklime. And then they get thrown over a sink called a stump, and they have their hair removed, and then they get soaked again. And then they get hung up and stretched over a kind of frame that looks like a sort of rustic trampoline, and then they get scraped again, and then they get put in an oven. It's am it takes a long time. And at the end of this, lengthy process, what you get is this, a fantastic writing material, it's it's it's flexible, it's milky smooth, it's, it has lots of advantages as a writing service, because you can rub out, if you write out, if you make a mistake you can rub it out. And what's great about it is it's durable. It's it's so so durable. There are manuscripts like for example, the Codex Sinaiticus, which was made in about around 325 to 375. It's an important partial copy of the New Testament. And that manuscript, given its age is in pretty mint condition. And that's a real testament to the durability of parchment. It's a great irony that cheap 20th century paperbacks with glued spines often present kind of more of a headache for library conservation department than medieval manuscripts, because they just, they just aren't built to last. And modern paper is made from wood pulp. Whereas medieval paper was made from, from rags that were basically boiled down in a kind of big vat and then sort of sieved out and pressed between layers of felt. And so, actually medieval paper is a lot more durable than modern paper.’"

Links - 2nd June 2022 (1 - Covid-19: Lab Leak)

HANSON: How COVID prompted politics of disinformation | Toronto Sun - "Political frenzy was inevitable since the SARS-CoV-2 virus likely escaped from a level-4 security virology lab in Wuhan, China. The rapid fire spread soon threatened to indict the communist Chinese government for nearly destroying the world economy and killing millions.  Western elites, in response, feared their own lucrative investments in China would be jeopardized by such disclosures — and so acted accordingly in defending Beijing.   Nonetheless, the most likely scenario remains that the escaped virus was birthed by gain-of-function research scientists — overseen by elements of the Chinese communist military. Worse, the lab was given subsidies by U.S. health authorities, routed through third parties. Hiding all of that damaging information warped government policy and media coverage...   From the outset, the World Health Organization simply spread false talking points about the outbreak from the Chinese government, delaying a robust global response... Trump’s Operation Warp Speed project to develop vaccinations was also pilloried. Candidates Kamala Harris and Joe Biden did their best to talk down the safety of the impending inoculations. But once in power, they projected their own prior harmful rhetoric onto so-called “anti-vaxxers.”  Then they claimed credit for the initial success of the Trump vaccinations.  The Pfizer corporation had promised a major pre-election announcement about its likely rollout of a vaccine in October, just days before the 2020 election.  Then, mysteriously, Pfizer claimed the vaccine, in fact, would not be ready before Nov. 3. A few days after the election of Joe Biden, the company reversed course and announced the vaccinations would soon be available. Then-New York Governor Andrew Cuomo obstructed almost all federal help with Trump’s fingerprints on it. That way Cuomo became a media, Emmy-winning darling, before resigning in disgrace.  Cuomo’s policies of steering infected patients into long-term-care facilities doomed over 10,000 of the elderly. New York is now illegally using race to grant preferences in the allotments of tests and new drugs. In the waning days of the 2022 campaign, Biden went so far as to blame Trump personally for all the deaths from the virus.   Once the vaccinations had seemed to work in early 2021, an upbeat Joe Biden boasted that he would end the virus by summer 2021, by following “the science.” He went so far as to claim that no one had been vaccinated prior to his inauguration even though 17 million, including Joe Biden himself, had been... the left now calls for realism, emphasis on treatments and acknowledgment of the value of natural immunities. It is even newly curious about the origins of the virus and the need to “get back to normal.”  We are suddenly told that thousands had died “with” rather than “because” of COVID — the exact opposite of what we heard in the Trump era.  A skeptic might suggest terror over the impending midterms finally made the left face reality."

Science has become a cartel - "the “consensus” that Covid must have an entirely natural origin was established by two early pronouncements, one in The Lancet in February 2020 and the other in Nature Medicine in March 2020. These were op-eds, not scientific papers. Both spoke with certainty about matters which it was impossible to be certain about. Wade writes: “It later turned out that the Lancet letter had been organized and drafted by Peter Daszak, president of the EcoHealth Alliance of New York. Dr Daszak’s organisation funded coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. If the SARS2 virus had indeed escaped from research he funded, Dr. Daszak would be potentially culpable. This acute conflict of interest was not declared to the Lancet’s readers. To the contrary, the letter concluded, “We declare no competing interests.” In other words, the guy who was orchestrating research on bat coronaviruses at the lab in Wuhan corralled other scientists, with similar professional interests, into making a declaration to the effect that anyone who mentions the (obvious) possibility that the pandemic (which started in Wuhan) might have a connection to this research could only be doing so with bad intentions... The yawning gap between the actual state of knowledge at the time and the confidence displayed in the two letters should have been obvious to anyone in the field of virology. And indeed, there were scientists from outside the guild, but in fields adjacent enough to speak competently, who said as much. The Lancet  and Nature Medicine letters were in fact anti-scientific in spirit and intent. Yet the pronouncements had the effect of shutting down inquiry that was not only legitimate, but urgently needed... “in today’s universities speech can be very costly. Careers can be destroyed for stepping out of line. Any virologist who challenges the community’s declared view risks having his next grant application turned down by the panel of fellow virologists that advises the government grant distribution agency.”   This is consistent with everything we know from the sociology of science. With the centralisation and bureaucratisation of scientific funding, defection from a well-institutionalised consensus is even more costly now than it was when Thomas Kuhn wrote The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. He showed that it is almost always from outside a research community that challenges arise. Progress happens when a prevailing scientific consensus is revealed to rest on the loyalties and intellectual affinities of an established research milieu, and not simply on correspondence with reality.   Something is left unexplained in the consensus view, and to focus on this lacuna is to be an outsider. Reliably, such challenges are fought tooth and nail by the research empire built on the encrusted consensus. The scientific paradigm they are invested in is typically superseded only when the scientists sitting atop the institutional hierarchy literally die, or retire. It is not “anti-science” to acknowledge this. Rather, the point is that one has to keep in mind that scientists are human beings first.  That much is old news. But in the catastrophe of the Covid pandemic, something novel and disturbing comes into view. A peculiar form of intellectual intimidation has become prominent in public life in general, and science has not been spared... The invocation of “conspiracy theory” has become a reflex by which incumbents in many domains seek to arrest criticism. They have had to do a lot of this over the last 10 years, as the internet has broken the knowledge monopolies by which institutional credibility is maintained... policy challenges from outsiders presented through fact and argument, offering some picture of what is going on in the world that is rival to the prevailing one, are not answered in kind, but are met rather with denunciation that is highly moralised. Epistemic threats to institutional authority are resolved into moral conflicts between good people and bad people. What is significant is how effective the early, pre-emptive declarations of scientific consensus in The Lancet and Nature Medicine were in garnering media enforcement of public opinion on the matter. The “fact checkers” of PolitiFact used these statements to shut down any discussion of the lab leak hypothesis. In effect, it appears the scientists who were signatories to the two letters may have been acting as a classic research cartel. Such behaviour is common enough in science. But because of the political environment, they were able to use the magic words “conspiracy theory” to trigger a wider epistemic immune reaction in high-prestige opinion...   As the evolutionary biologist turned cultural critic Bret Weinstein (who specialises in bats, as it happens) has pointed out, the resulting moratorium on pursuing the lab leak hypothesis may have been quite consequential, as an engineered virus behaves differently from a naturally evolved one, and this has implications for how it can best be fought... Nicholas Wade’s powerful and widely circulated article appeared, not in any national outlet, but on the blog site Medium. (It has since been republished by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, not an organisation within the orbit of virology or public health.) Only now has “the nation’s newspaper of record” and other organs of acceptable opinion been dragged into acknowledging what may be the most important story of the pandemic.  The logic of the surrounding political frame for these events is painfully simple. 1. Donald Trump publicly floated the idea that Covid may have had its origin in a Chinese lab. 2. It was therefore a point of conviction for all those who believe in science that such a hypothesis could only be a conspiracy theory, probably rooted in “Sinophobia”... When the lab leak hypothesis has been mentioned at all in the legacy press, the “conspiracy theory” has often been juxtaposed with reporting on anti-Asian hate crimes, thereby subsuming an urgent scientific question to the Trump-era morality play.   Journalism suffered a general intellectual collapse during the Trump administration, as many have noted on the Left and Right alike. The moral grandeur of #Resistance appears to have been so intoxicating to those who felt the mantle of Saving Democracy settle on their shoulders that the workaday demands of journalistic diligence and sceptical curiosity seemed paltry. The great imperative was to keep underlining the divide between good people and bad people. What we have learned is that a Manichaean atmosphere of moral sorting is intimidating, and therefore provides the perfect cover for “informal pacts of mutual protection,” to borrow a phrase from Martin Gurri. Liberalism began as a doctrine of political scepticism directed at rulers, based on the truism that power corrupts, and always adopts a virtuous pose. In time, this gave rise to a complementary form of journalism that was basically adversarial towards the politicians it reported on"

'Damning' science shows COVID-19 likely engineered in lab - "“Damning” science strongly suggests that COVID-19 is a man-made monster, optimized in a lab for maximum infectivity before hitting the outside to catastrophic effect, two experts said Sunday.  Writing in an opinion piece for the Wall Street Journal, Dr. Steven Quay and Richard Muller pointed to two key pieces of evidence to support the claim, which has increasingly gained steam after long being derided as little more than speculation."

Wuhan clan: the price I paid for my lab leak exposé - The Spectator World - "On March 12 last year, I texted a trusted source connected to Australia’s foreign intelligence agency. “What do you think about the theory that the virus came from a virology lab in China? Does that have credibility? I know it’s officially a conspiracy theory but China is not exactly a picture of transparency so I thought it’s possible.”  He replied to say he knew someone “very involved in the observation of that lab and its activities” and it was a definite possibility the virus leaked from the facility. It was a surprising response because, at the time, this view contradicted every utterance by scientists and world leaders, who insisted the virus had a natural origin. Most media outlets dismissed the lab-leak theory as a conspiracy.   A month after this exchange, I confirmed and reported on a global scoop for my paper in Australia, that the Five Eyes intelligence network of the US, the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand were seriously examining the possibility of a leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The story went global. For the following year, as I developed new sources around the world and unravelled the complexities of the Chinese Communist party’s suppression of the theory, I wrote a book on the topic and my reporting made me a target of the CCP...   There have been hacking and malware attempts as well. My Wikipedia page is subject to constant trolling from IP addresses registered in China. The night after my first Wuhan scoop, I received anti-Semitic death threats that also targeted my family.  It wasn’t until I spoke with officials who had led intelligence agencies that I properly understood the motivation behind such a concerted campaign against me in the Chinese media. The former secretary of state and CIA director Mike Pompeo told me that the CCP was desperate to control the narrative about how the virus began and to deflect any attention from the Wuhan lab... Sir Richard Dearlove, the former head of MI6. He told me that China was leading a “bloody outrageous global disinformation operation… You can bet your bottom dollar that the ministry of state security has been in control of the narrative from day one.”  “This is what the CCP have spent decades since Tiananmen preparing for,” says Matt Turpin, the White House’s former director for China on the staff of the National Security Council. “They’ve got the influence and the media and propaganda apparatus to be able to control the story.”  As someone who became fodder for the Chinese propaganda machine, I certainly discovered this to be the case. But what I found most remarkable in the past 18 months was the number of western scientists, government officials and tech giants who willingly accepted the CCP line. In doing so, they not only helped push China’s narrative, but shamefully aided and abetted the CCP’s vituperative attacks on people like me who dared question that narrative."
If you don't "trust the science" you are a dangerous, ignorant, far right conspiracy theorist
One cope I got was that since the consensus that covid was natural was not published as a scientific research paper but as a statement in the Lancet, it didn't mean "science" was politically influenced - despite what we had been told earlier about what "science" claimed.y

Adam Housley on Twitter - "Also...US intelligence believes China is trying to produce variants that suggest it came from bats to cover up that it originally came from a lab. The belief is still that it escaped accidentally, but was allowed to spread."

Scientists believed Covid leaked from Wuhan lab - but feared debate could hurt ‘international harmony’ - "Leading British and US scientists thought it was likely that Covid accidentally leaked from a laboratory but were concerned that further debate would harm science in China...   An email from Sir Jeremy Farrar, director of the Wellcome Trust, on February 2 2020 said that “a likely explanation” was that Covid had rapidly evolved from a Sars-like virus inside human tissue in a low-security lab.  The email, to Dr Anthony Fauci and Dr Francis Collins of the US National Institutes of Health, went on to say that such evolution may have “accidentally created a virus primed for rapid transmission between humans”... Viscount Ridley, co-author of Viral: the search for the origin of Covid, said: “These emails show a lamentable lack of openness and transparency among Western scientists who appear to have been more interested in shutting down a hypothesis they thought was very plausible, for political reasons.”  In the emails, Sir Jeremy said that other scientists also believed the virus could not have evolved naturally. One such scientist was Professor Mike Farzan, of Scripps Research, the expert who discovered how the original Sars virus binds to human cells. Scientists were particularly concerned by a part of Covid-19 called the furin cleavage site, a section of the spike protein which helps it enter cells and makes it so infectious to humans.  Summarising Professor Farzan’s concerns in an email, Sir Jeremy said: “He is bothered by the furin site and has a hard time (to) explain that as an event outside the lab, though there are possible ways in nature but highly unlikely.   “I think this becomes a question of how do you put all this together, whether you believe in this series of coincidences, what you know of the lab in Wuhan, how much could be in nature - accidental release or natural event? I am 70:30 or 60:40.”  Later emails showed that by February 4, Sir Jeremy had revised his estimate of a laboratory leak to 50:50, while Professor Eddie Holmes, of the University of Sydney, gave a 60:40 estimate in favour of an accidental release.  The emails also show that Bob Garry, of the University of Texas, was unconvinced that Covid-19 emerged naturally...   Professor Andrew Rambaut, from the University of Edinburgh, also said that furin cleavage site “strikes me as unusual”.   He added: “I think the only people with sufficient information or access to samples to address it would be the teams working in Wuhan.”... by February 2 2020, scientists were already trying to shut down the debate into the laboratory leak theory...   Institutions which held the emails have repeatedly resisted efforts to publish their content.   The University of Edinburgh recently turned down an Freedom of Information request from The Telegraph asking to see Prof Rambaut’s replies, claiming “disclosure would be likely to endanger the physical or mental health and safety of individuals”.  James Comer, the Republican congressman who secured the unredacted emails, said it showed that experts like Dr Fauci had taken the Wuhan lab leak theory “much more seriously” than they had let on."

COVID 'more likely lab leak than weapon,' U.S. spies find - "Some US spy agencies had believed the virus originated in nature. But there has been little corroboration.  The ODNI report said four US spy agencies and a multi-agency body have “low confidence” that COVID-19 originated with an infected animal or a related virus."

The Lab-Leak Debate Just Got Even Messier - The Atlantic - "According to a “critical review” co-authored by 21 experts on viruses and viral evolution that was posted as a preprint in July, “simple evolutionary mechanisms can readily explain” the site’s presence in SARS-CoV-2, and “there is no logical reason” why it would look the way it does if it had been engineered inside a lab. “Further,” the authors wrote, “there is no evidence of prior research at the [Wuhan Institute of Virology] involving the artificial insertion of complete furin cleavage sites into coronaviruses.”  But the apparent DARPA grant proposal complicates these arguments, at the very least. The engineering work that it describes would indeed involve such an artificial insertion. We don’t know whether that work was ever carried out—remember, DARPA rejected this proposal. Even if it had been, several experts told us, the genetic engineering would have happened at Ralph Baric’s lab in Chapel Hill, about 8,000 miles away from where the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak started. Yet now we know that the idea of inserting these sites was very much of interest to these research groups in the lead-up to the pandemic. “This is the first time they reveal that they are looking for these sites”... Vaughn Cooper, who studies pathogen evolution at the University of Pittsburgh, told us that he hasn’t changed his view that SARS-CoV-2 is extremely unlikely to have been created in a lab—but the lack of candor is “really concerning.” The DARPA proposal doesn’t “mean that much for our understanding of the origins of the pandemic,” he said, “but it does diminish the trustworthiness of the research groups involved.”"

The Covid lab leak theory just got even stronger | The Spectator - "a bunch of emails, uncovered by a lawsuit from the so-called White Coat Waste Project, returned the ball right back over the net. They comprised an exchange between the American virus--hunting foundation, the EcoHealth Alliance and its funders in the US government. The scientists discussed collecting viruses from bats in eight countries including Burma, Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos between 2016 and 2019. But to avoid the complication of signing up local subcontractors to their grants in those countries, they promised to send the samples to a laboratory they already funded. And where was this lab? Wuhan... As for that missing furin cleavage site, another leaked document revealed in September by Drastic, a confederation of open-source analysts like Demaneuf, sent shock- waves through the scientific community. Dr Peter Daszak, head of the EcoHealth Alliance, spelled out plans to work with his collaborators in Wuhan and elsewhere to artificially insert novel, rare cleavage sites into novel Sars-like coronaviruses collected in the field, so as to better understand the biological function of cleavage sites. His 2018 request for $14.2 million from the Pentagon to do this was turned down amid uneasiness that it was too risky; but the very fact that he was proposing it was alarming.  Most of the funding for the Wuhan Institute of Virology comes from the Chinese not the American government, after all; so the failure to win the US grant may not have prevented the work being done. More-over, exactly such an experiment had already been done with a different kind of coronavirus by — guess who? — the Wuhan Institute of Virology. It is almost beyond belief that Dr Daszak had not volunteered this critical information. He played a leading role in trying to dismiss the lab-leak idea as a ‘conspiracy theory’, using his membership of the WHO-China investigation to support the far-fetched theory that the virus reached Wuhan on frozen food. If the trail to the source of the pandemic leads through Laos, it is possible western countries can find out more. The Chinese government has blocked anybody who tries to get near to the mineshaft in Yunnan where RaTG13 was found. But now that we know the US government was funding virus sampling in Laos, the EcoHealth Alliance should be required to report in full on exactly what was found. Saying ‘Oh, that data belongs to the Chinese now’ is not good enough. American taxpayers funded the work. Belatedly, the US National Institutes of Health has requested more information... But even finding relevant viruses in Laos still won’t answer the question of how they got loose in Wuhan. And with the continuing failure to find any evidence of infected animals for sale in Chinese markets, the astonishing truth remains this: the outbreak happened in a city with the world’s largest research programme on bat-borne corona-viruses, whose scientists had gone to at least two places where these Sars-CoV-2-like viruses live, and brought them back to Wuhan — and to nowhere else."

China's mishandling of the early stages of Covid-19 pandemic revealed by leaked documents - "In a report marked "internal document, please keep confidential," local health authorities in the province of Hubei, where the virus was first detected, list a total of 5,918 newly detected cases on February 10, more than double the official public number of confirmed cases, breaking down the total into a variety of subcategories. This larger figure was never fully revealed at that time, as China's accounting system seemed, in the tumult of the early weeks of the pandemic, to downplay the severity of the outbreak. The previously undisclosed figure is among a string of revelations contained within 117 pages of leaked documents from the Hubei Provincial Center for Disease Control and Prevention... The Chinese government has steadfastly rejected accusations made by the United States and other Western governments that it deliberately concealed information relating to the virus, maintaining that it has been upfront since the beginning of the outbreak... The Chinese government has previously pointed to the Huanan seafood market in Wuhan as the likely initial epicenter of the outbreak in mid-December, where meat of exotic wild animals was sold. Yet that claim has been at least partially challenged by a Lancet study of the first December patients, which determined one third of the 41 infected that month had no direct connection to that market. Yichang, 320 kilometers (198 miles) west of Wuhan, was hit hardest by the influenza outbreak -- almost three times as many as Wuhan in the same week beginning December 2... During the last 30 years, analysts say, many in China have appeared willing to relinquish political freedoms in return for increased material wealth, social stability and greater opportunities. The virus fundamentally threatened that social contract -- putting hundreds of millions at risk while damaging an economy already weakened by an ongoing US-China trade war."
Damn CIA, fabricating documents again!

Question the ‘lab leak’ theory. But don’t call it a conspiracy. - "If there’s one thing the pandemic has taught us, labels get in the way of facts and make the truth that much harder to find... like everyone else involved in the discussions about the lab leak theory, scientists have something at stake: If SARS-CoV-2 did escape from a lab, it could further shake trust in research, and threaten funding. In the search for truth, it is good to ask questions, and it is good to doubt, as colleagues and I have noted elsewhere. It is also good to try to understand the motivations of those who ask questions. A lack of obvious financial incentives doesn’t mean someone isn’t biased or making other gains.  But just because your intellectual opponent has particular motivations, it doesn’t mean that they are wrong — or, on the flip side, that they are right if their motivations align with yours... kneejerk dismissal — from both “sides” — has played out time and time again during the pandemic.  In the last 18 months, for example, practically no one could have a dispassionate discussion of the evidence — or the lack thereof — for using various older drugs, usually approved to treat parasites, against Covid-19. Such discussions frequently escalated into screaming matches between polarized opposites. If you had ever made a comment that could be interpreted as saying that Donald Trump was not wrong about absolutely everything — including his boosting one such drug, hydroxychloroquine — you were clearly promoting the drug because you were partisan. If you dismissed the drugs, surely you were partisan on the other side. And if you gained any following thanks to media mentions, or had ever been paid to write anything for a media outlet, clearly you were opposed to ivermectin, another of these drugs, only to make a name for yourself. And so on.  A similar dynamic played out in discussions about vaccines. Public health officials, mindful of vaccine hesitancy in some quarters, made the vaccines sound 100 percent safe, when no such thing exists. They opted for clear messaging over nuance, dismissing safety concerns. But when a small number of reports of blood clots surfaced and they paused one vaccine’s rollout, that only led to even more distrust (and accusations of a conspiracy). Peter Sandman, a longtime communications strategist, argued that a better approach would have been to provide what’s called “anticipatory guidance,” which involves advising people about rare side effects that may happen. It takes away the reactive “but you told us X, so now I don’t trust you” argument that can further muddle a complex situation. Just as with the nuances about vaccine safety, too many people were too quick to dismiss the lab-leak theory as a conspiracy. But once they took a careful look at some of the evidence, they sometimes had to update stories and statements to acknowledge the possibility, however remote, of a lab leak. (One correction by the Washington Post  specifically removes the term “conspiracy theory.”)... Some may argue that, in the middle of a health crisis like Covid, it’s justifiable to shut down an idea that lacks evidence of certainty by labeling it a “conspiracy theory,” particularly if it distracts from the main goal of preventing more illness and death.  But there is at least some evidence that the approach doesn’t work. According to a 2016 study, people are no less likely to believe something just because it’s dubbed a “conspiracy”; in fact, that label may even prompt them to give the idea extra consideration or credibility. That makes intuitive sense: If you hear something referred to as a conspiracy theory and then you learn that one of the arguments supporting this theory, however minor, is factual, that revelation may bolster the idea that there really is a cover-up. Or perhaps you learn that a vocal critic of the lab-leak conspiracy theory had a significant but undisclosed conflict of interest — namely that his organization had collaborated with the Wuhan lab that would have been the site of the leak. Along these lines, evidence of stonewalling by the Chinese government also reinforces the suggestion of a cover-up. It is human nature to want a definitive answer to questions. But science is not about certainty"
Science is not about certainty. But the same people who scream "trust the science" are very quick to claim that "the science changed". So we are supposed to treat as gospel truth something that changes

Addendum: Wuhan Lab Publishes Study Manipulating H7N9 Virus To Be More Lethal.