1. In a previous post I showed that the recent NYT article on the lab leak hypothesis was based on an ignorance of Chinese geography.

Philipp Markolin has a very long piece that is well worth reading. It does an excellent job of debunking the view that the Covid-2 virus looks “suspiciously engineered”. At one point he offers this interesting quote:

“If you gave me a billion dollars to find the origins, I`d probably spent 90% of that outside of China in South East Asia” 

— Bat immunologist Linfa Wang, Duke-NUS Singapore

No, that doesn’t mean the pandemic began in SE Asia, it probably began in China. But the Covid-2 virus was likely created by a sort of natural gain of function research, as SARS virus recombined trillions of times in nature, before hitting on a format that was ideally suited to transmission in humans:

A comprehensive body of scientific evidence has shown us that the immediate bat ancestor to SARS-CoV-2 came from one of the countless natural “gain-of-function labs” spanning the vast biodiverse Karst region from Yunnan in Southern China towards Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, and maybe even Malaysia in Southeast Asia. The lingering and promiscuous endemic viral elements in that enormous geographic region constantly mix and bring forth new chimeric combinations within their socially intricate reservoir hosts; while human activities and encroachment on bat territories stir the genetic cauldron ever faster.

Once a particularly combustible set of genetic elements produced a potential pandemic pathogen with broad host tropism, the legal and illegal mammalian wildlife industry likely became the maturing vessels through which the virus we now know as SARS-CoV-2 reached its final explosive form. From there, it was dragged in front of hundreds of immune-naïve future hosts visiting the largest wet market of one particular Chinese megacity well connected with the entire world. . . .

Maybe after four years of political myth-making and societal inaction, it is time to face scientific reality. I certainly believe we’d be better off fighting for solutions rather than for who is to blame.

2. It seems that QAnon conspiracy theories have also caught on among older women in Japan:

Triggered by the bitter U.S. presidential election and followers of former U.S. President Donald Trump, such conspiracy theories have spread via social media and videos, even in Japan. 

There are widening gaps between people who believe in groundless information and their families and people close to them in Japan as well. 

An expert warns that social anxiety caused by the COVID-19 pandemic has allowed such conspiracy theories to flourish.

The Aichi woman’s mother is believed to have been influenced by videos on QAnon, which she watches for about eight hours in a day.

Presumably this is all because these people lost coal mining jobs due to “neoliberalism”.

3. Jordan was a very good defender, but not DPOY good:

In the six games, the box scores indicated that Jordan’s total steal count was 28. After comparing our notes from the film study, we each counted 12 steals. An astounding difference of 16 excess steals. Almost every excess steal was being allocated to Jordan.

Those were all home games, which seems to be the problem:

Between them, Russell and Chamberlain registered 26 games with 40-plus rebounds. None of the 26 games were tabulated on the road, per Stathead.com tracking.

4. Janan Ganesh says it’s not just greed that is pushing billionaires toward Trump:

It doesn’t explain the pro-Brexit industrialists who had little obvious to gain outside the European single market. It doesn’t explain why I can’t attend a finance dinner without hearing the Kremlin script (“You know, Zelenskyy’s no saint”) from someone who neither profits from the Ukraine invasion nor loses from the retaliatory sanctions.

There is such a thing as sincere wrongness. . . . First, business people struggle to understand fanaticism. In commercial life, all actors are negotiable, even if their price is high. You might pass decades in the private sector without encountering someone who has total commitment to an abstract doctrine (socialism), to an individual (Trump) or to a cause (Russian amour propre). This blind spot for zeal is why corporations were such sitting ducks for “woke”. And why oligarchs a generation ago thought Vladimir Putin was their pliable instrument.

The twitter feed of Elon Musk shows that it’s possible to be a brilliant businessman and still be completely clueless about politics.

5. Will we ever learn?

A group that claims to have hacked CDK Global, the software provider to thousands of car dealerships in North America, has demanded tens of millions of dollars in ransom, according to a person familiar with the matter.

CDK is planning to make the payment, said the person, who asked not to be identified because the information is private. The hacking group behind the attack is believed to be based in eastern Europe . . .

A demand in the tens of millions of dollars comes after hackers sought $50 million from a lab services company at the center of an ongoing ransomware attack that’s caused outages in London hospitals. UnitedHealth Group Inc., the largest medical insurer in the US, acknowledged earlier this year it paid hackers a $22 million extortion fee.

The solution is simple. Pass a law requiring long prison sentences for any US corporate official that pays ransomware. Then the bad guys will start going after foreign firms. This is a classic externality problem—why are we too stupid to see that?

6. Why am I not surprised?

7. On a lighter note, Herman Melville anticipated the concept of “the wisdom of the crowd” in his novel Mardi:

But who has seen these things, Mohi?” said Babbalanja, “have you?”

“Nay.”

“Who then? —Media?—any one of you know?”

“Nay: but the whole [Mardi] Archipelago has.”

“Thus,” exclaimed Babbalanja, “does Mardi, blind it be in many things, collectively behold the marvels, which one pair of eyes sees not.”

From the end of chapter 116. Note that “Mardi” is the name of an island chain.

More By This Author:

The Internal Contradictions Of Nationalism
Ask a stupid question . . .
Nominal GDP As An Indicator