SHOCKING NEWS FROM THE WORLD OF SCIENCE: Healthy lifestyle linked to better cognition for oldest adults—regardless of genetic risk.

JIM TREACHER: Now WaPo Is Backpedaling About the COVID-19 Lab-Leak Theory. A virus doesn’t care about your ego:

Here’s the text of one such “correction,” appended to a story originally headlined “Tom Cotton keeps repeating a coronavirus conspiracy theory that was already debunked”:

“Earlier versions of this story and its headline inaccurately characterized comments by Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) regarding the origins of the coronavirus. The term ‘debunked’ and The Post’s use of ‘conspiracy theory’ have been removed because, then as now, there was no determination about the origins of the virus.”

Now, I’m fairly good at readin’ and writin’ and such, but I’m not really sure what that last part means. “Then as now, there was no determination about the origins of the virus.” Huh? If they didn’t know one way or another, why did they claim it was debunked? If nothing has changed, if things are the same “then as now,” why are they correcting it 15 months later? Why can’t they just admit they blew it?

Guess they figure if they can’t dazzle us with their brilliance, they’ll baffle us with their bull$#!+.

But it’s okay, because Tom Cotton is a Republican and therefore an enemy of the Washington Post. They’ll grudgingly admit they might not have been 100% accurate or honest about the most important story of our lifetime, but they won’t give those dirty Republicans the satisfaction of a clear and unequivocal retraction. And none of their colleagues will call them out on it, because they all want to work at WaPo someday.

Then they wonder why we don’t trust them.

Read the whole thing.

THIS IS CNN: CNN under ethics scrutiny following Cuomo revelations.

TRUMP’S SPACE DIPLOMACY CONTINUES TO SUCCEED: New Zealand joins NASA’s Artemis Accords.

HMMM: IRAN’S LARGEST WARSHIP MYSTERIOUSLY EXPLODES, SINKS; Update: Large refinery fire erupts near Tehran. “The circumstances for this are also ‘not immediately clear,’ according to the Associated Press. If these are accidents, they’re hellaciously coincidental. If it’s a brush-back pitch, it’s going to get plenty of attention.”

SAY ANYTHING: Joe Biden Makes Racist Comments About Black Entrepreneurs.

ESPECIALLY SINCE IT’S GROWING INCREASINGLY UNCOMMON: U.S. blood supply safe from coronavirus, study says.

I become eligible to donate convalescent plasma again on Friday, but the Medic website doesn’t have a place to schedule it anymore.

SATIRE… OR IS IT? The Official Kamala Harris Guide to Celebrating American Holidays.

THE CORBYNIZATION OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY CONTINUES APACE: Google Diversity Head Said Jews Have ‘Insatiable Appetite for War.’

“Now that’s what I call diversity!”, Jim Treacher adds:

Google’s “head of diversity strategy,” Kamau Bobb, once wrote that Jews have “insatiable appetite for war” and an “insensitivity to the suffering [of] others.” Now that’s what I call diversity! Isn’t it nice to know that our tech overlords, who want to control what we can and can’t say online, are just as bigoted as everybody else? It reminds me of that Ryan Long skit about how the #woke left and the alt-right actually agree on everything.

THE HOLE IN ‘KAMALANOMICS:’ A Glaring Flaw Plagues the Veep’s Plan to Restore the Economy.

Harris has identified real problems. But the glaring flaw plaguing her vision for our post-pandemic economic recovery is that she misdiagnoses the origins of all of these problems. What Harris sees as market failures requiring government overhaul and unprecedented federal spending are actually problems created by overzealous government involvement in the first place.

For example, it wasn’t the free market that forced one in three small businesses to close or millions of women out of the workforce—it was government lockdown orders that literally made it illegal for business owners to open their doors. (While yielding little, if any, COVID mitigation benefits and creating a whole host of life-threatening second-order consequences).

It was the government, not the virus, that was the primary cause of widespread unemployment and small business closures. For proof, just consider the fact that states which took a more laissez-faire approach to COVID restrictions almost universally have much lower unemployment rates than those that implemented and maintained harsh lockdowns.

Of course, Harris isn’t wrong to identify the serious challenges faced by working mothers lacking childcare during the pandemic.

Harris has a lot on her plate right now — wrecking the border, wrecking the post-COVID economic recovery and: Biden: I’m putting Kamala Harris in charge of getting voting rights legislation passed through Congress. “Ah, that’s nice of him. Something new for her to fail at instead of just failing to ease the border crisis.”

THAT ’70S SHOW: Friday’s Jobs Report May Blow Up Biden’s Presidency.

NOTHING TO SEE HERE, MOVE ALONG: Expert Warned Fauci In January 2020 That Coronavirus ‘Potentially’ Looked ‘Engineered,’ Had Some ‘Unusual Features.’

A top scientist warned Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, in January 2020 that SARS-CoV-2 had “unusual features” and looked like it may have “potentially” been “engineered.”

The email was sent by Kristian G. Andersen, Professor, Department of Integrative Structural and Computational Biology at the Scripps Research Institute, on January 31, 2020.

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The Daily Mail reported last week that British Professor Angus Dalgleish and Norwegian scientist Dr. Birger Sørensen write in a soon-to-be-released study that “SARS-Coronavirus-2 has no credible natural ancestor” and that it is “beyond reasonable doubt” that the virus was created through “laboratory manipulation.”

The claim comes as David Asher, who led the Trump administration’s investigation into the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic, told Fox News last week that biostatisticians for the U.S. government calculated that the odds of SARS-CoV-2 evolving in nature were “one in 13 billion.”

Earlier: If the Wuhan lab-leak hypothesis is true, expect a political earthquake.

AS THE PARENT OF A HIGH-SCHOOL FRESHMAN WHO BARELY HAD ANY FRESHMAN-YEAR TEACHING, I HAVE TO ASK: “WHAT PANDEMIC WORK?” Teachers get ‘thank you’ bonuses for pandemic work.

SPOILER: YOU’RE THE TERRORIST. Biden Compares Capitol Riot to the Tulsa Race Massacre to Set Up His ‘Domestic Terror’ Agenda.

COMMUNIST FRONT CORPORATION: Huawei ex-director on trial in Poland on China spying charge. “According to the Gazeta Wyborcza daily, the indictment is partly classified, but its public section alleges that Wang is a Chinese intelligence agent and from 2011-2019 sought high-ranking contracts for Huawei that would give the Chinese company insight into, and influence over, state and local government data systems in Poland.”

Meanwhile: GOP senators oppose Biden intelligence nominee who did legal work for Huawei.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: ACLU intern fails in quest to get Federalist Society chapter canceled at his law school: Student activists wanted Federalist Society chapter derecognized because it would not condemn Ted Cruz.

HEH: Ron DeSantis Thumbs His Nose at Woke Transgender Agenda on First Day of ‘Pride Month.’

SYSTEMIC RACISM: High school program sponsored by several NY colleges does not allow white students to apply. Illegal, immoral, and sadly also typical.

YET ANOTHER PRO-ELECTRIFICATION PIECE THAT IGNORES OUR INABILITY TO POWER ALL THOSE EVS: Why electric cars will take over sooner than you think.

GOOGLE DIVERSITY CHIEF: “Jews have insatiable appetite for war.”

I’m beginning to think that this whole “diversity” thing is a mistake. And maybe Google, too.

YOU’RE GONNA NEED A MUCH BIGGER BLOG: Wuhan Lab Leak Controversy Illuminates Why U.S. Corporate Media Amplify Communist Propaganda.

Some Republicans incorrectly labeled the virus as not serious, while many Democrats turned the virus into a tool to bully conservatives, repress their political opponents, and reward their allies. Equally bad, America initially had less knowledge about the virus because of the cloud of Chinese propaganda — including the media’s unwillingness to question the World Health Organization’s China ties — and there are long-term effects of the virus we still can’t determine.

Obviously, the corporatist media are liars. But the time for complaining about the corporate media, and shooting down every one of their lies (an endless task) is over. The time for action has come.

What’s required is a law — pushed by the next Republican president — that bans corporate conglomerates from owning news media organizations, or bans corporations from owning news media if that company has revenue tied to China or other authoritarian states. The status quo is completely unacceptable. It risks ripping the nation in two while hamstringing America’s ability to respond to future crises.

QED: Time Magazine Takes Chinese Cash To Promote Controversial Drone Business.

As part of a $700,000 advertising campaign, Time magazine published articles from a Chinese state-run media agency touting a controversial Chinese drone maker accused of helping the government surveil Uyghurs and boosting the Chinese Communist Party’s latest five-year economic plan.

Time has published 75 online articles from China Daily as part of the lucrative ad deal, which began late last year. The Time webpage discloses that the company is paid to publish the China Daily articles, though not that they are state-sponsored propaganda.

Henry Luce, who created Time magazine in 1923, the son of Presbyterian missionaries to China, and who sided with Chiang Kai-shek during China’s communist revolution, just rolled over many times in his grave.

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEF: I’m Tired of President Idiot Boy Calling Me a Terrorist. “It’s not big secret that Joe Biden has the IQ of toe cheese. He was a blithering idiot even before this blank-eyed, empty-headed Biden incarnation we’re being subjected to came on the scene. America is now suffering under a lethal combination of Biden’s natural stupidity and the fact that his diminished capacity makes him so easily manipulated by the false narrative pimps. Some of the most awful people in the land can make the President of the United States lie about anything.”

Of course, Biden has always been so willing.

HOSS: DeSantis On NCAA Threat To Pull Events From States That Protect Girl Sports: ‘To Hell’ With Your ‘Events.’ “‘You can’t be cowed by these organizations, or particularly by woke corporations from doing the right thing. And so my view was throughout this whole time, we have to protect our girls, it is discriminatory to force them to compete against biological males,’ DeSantis continued. ‘And so if the price of having a tournament is that I have to deny equal opportunity to hundreds of thousands of young girl and women athletes throughout Florida, I am much more willing to stand with the girls. And to hell with these events.’”

PRIVACY: Amazon US customers have one week to opt out of mass wireless sharing.

Amazon customers have one week to opt out of a plan that would turn every Echo speaker and Ring security camera in the US into a shared wireless network, as part of the company’s plan to fix connection problems for its smart home devices.

The proposal, called Amazon Sidewalk, involves the company’s devices being used as a springboard to build city-wide “mesh networks” that help simplify the process of setting up new devices, keep them online even if they’re out of range of home wifi, and extend the range of tracking devices such as those made by Tile.

But Sidewalk has come under fire for the apparent lack of transparency with which Amazon has rolled out the feature, as well as the limited time available for users to complete the tricky process required to opt out. Other critics have expressed concerns that failing to turn the setting off could leave customers in breach of their internet service provider’s terms and conditions.

The company’s plans have caused alarm among observers. Ashkan Soltani, a former chief technology officer of the US Federal Trade Commission, told the tech site Ars Technica: “In addition to capturing everyone’s shopping habits (from amazon.com) and their internet activity (as AWS is one of the most dominant web hosting services) … now they are also effectively becoming a global ISP with a flick of a switch, all without even having to lay a single foot of fiber.”

When a company makes it difficult for customers to protect their privacy, it’s because the company doesn’t respect its customers’ privacy.