ALL YOU HAVE TO DO IS DONATE IT ALL TO THE GOVERNMENT: I’m an heiress ‘annoyed’ by my multibillion-dollar inheritance and want nearly all of it taxed away.
Kindly leave other human beings out of your weird fetish, though. We don’t kink shame. You don’t ask them to take our money.
TEH GRAUNIAD IS MAINLINING LSD AGAIN: Guardian: World Close to “Irreversible Climate Breakdown”.
FULL FRONTAL CLOWN WORLD: Whacko attack on Paul Pelosi; mounting evidence that lab leak happened at Wuhan.
INTERESTING: The campaign ad game.
AT THIS RATE MY SHOCKED FACE WON’T BE WORTH PATCHING UP: Ballot harvesting in Florida.
UH. DOES HE OWN A MIRROR? Massachusetts Congressman Warns Republicans About Chickens.
AND THERE IS MY SHOCKED FACE AGAIN: Threat of Nationwide Railroad Strike Grows after 2nd Union Rejects Proposed Deal.
THE KOMISSAR COMMISSIONER SHOULD KEEP HER (?) LIP ZIPPED, OR NEXT TIME THE US WILL STAY HOME WHEN THE GERMANS MARCH THROUGH BELGIUM: ‘In Europe, The Bird Will Fly By Our Rules,’ EU Commissioner Warns Elon Musk.
Oh, who am I kidding. Hopefully we stay home anyway. Let Europe bury Europe. (What? I’m tired.)
BEHOLD MY SHOCKED FACE: Legacy Media (Hilariously) Duped By Actors Pretending To Be Fired Twitter Employees.
ALL OF THIS STINKS TO HIGH HEAVENS. MAKE THEM TELL US THE TRUE STORY: Pelosi attack suspect David DePape was a psychotic homeless addict estranged from his pedophile lover & their children.
LEARN TO JOKE: Twitter employees apparently taking up comedy in open letter to Musk.
So, boss, are we getting our account back? I mean, your call, but I’m curious.
OPEN THREAD: Because I love you, and want you to be happy.
JOHN FETTERMAN POSTS A PHOTO OF HIS CAMPAIGN SIGN STILL BURNING IN DEEP-RED LAWRENCE COUNTY: “When will the political violence from the Right end? The editor’s just about had it … Speaker Nancy Pelosi barely escaped another assassination attempt incited by Donald Trump, and now this. Pennsylvania Senate candidate John Fetterman posted this photo of one of his campaign signs in deep-red Lawrence County burning. Not after it burned, but while it was burning. It wasn’t even halfway gone. Whoever set the fire made a hasty getaway is all we’re saying. ”
I STILL SAY IT WAS THE BLUE HADES FOLKS POKING AROUND: Mysterious ‘Blip’ Detected Near The Titanic Decades Ago Finally Identified.
WEIRD, IT WENT AWAY DURING COVID: Flu season in the US hasn’t been this bad this early in more than a decade.
I got my flu shot, but I have to say it was the worst reaction to any vaccine I’ve ever had. Usually I get no reaction at all, or maybe I’m slightly tired the next day, but this time it was muscle aches for over a week.
DON’T GET COCKY: Democrats Already Blaming Voters for Midterm Loss. ‘I cannot believe anybody would vote for these people.’
RICK McGINNIS AT STEYN ONLINE: Dracula in Sin City: The Night Stalker and Prime Time Horror.
[Darren] McGavin bounced back and forth between TV, theatre and movies (forgettable films like Bullet for a Badman (1964), The Great Sioux Massacre (1965) and Mission Mars (1968)) before being cast by producer/director Dan Curtis as Carl Kolchak in a TV movie based on an unpublished novel. Curtis had just come off the peculiar notoriety of Dark Shadows, a vampire soap opera that ran for five years on ABC, but thought he was done with both television and the movies after directing two Dark Shadows movies for MGM.
Curtis was approached by Barry Diller, the creator of ABC’s Movie of the Week, who told him he had a script by Richard Matheson he wanted him to make. Matheson was something of a legend among writers working in Hollywood, and his scripts for The Twilight Zone (notably “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet”) and Star Trek (“The Enemy Within”) were much admired. Curtis was a huge fan, but after Dark Shadows he wasn’t interested in directing and told Diller he wanted to produce the picture.
Curtis had McGavin in mind from the moment he read Matheson’s screenplay, and it’s hard to imagine anyone else in the role. There’s his voice – smarmy and cocky, a man who’s used to getting away with far more than he should. But McGavin’s Kolchak did a lot to create the picture of the lowly journalist, bouncing from newsroom to newsroom, a few notches below the reputable hacks at a major daily like the New York Times, or earnest young college boys like Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, soon to remake the public image of the reporter.
Kolchak owes more than a bit to misfits with a byline like Hunter S. Thompson, right down to his white sneakers and khakis. McGavin accessorized these with a rumpled seersucker jacket and a straw hat with a wide blue and red band. (You can buy replicas of the Kolchak raffia hat online.) He travels with a manual typewriter in a case and goes everywhere with his Sony TC-40 tape recorder and various cameras – a Pentax Spotmatic and a Nikon in The Night Stalker, a Rollei 16mm subminiature in the movie sequel and the TV show that were spawned by the success of the film. Fun fact: Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas was published in 1971.
Earlier: Mark Judge on What Journalists Can Learn from The Night Stalker. “Carl Kolchak might seem crazy, but as Lucas observes in the audio commentary, ’pause to consider what historians now tell us about what was really going on between the White House and journalists at this particular time.’ It was a paranoid time in the United States, but people were afraid for good reason. Lucas cites Poisoning the Press, Mark Feldstein’s book about Richard Nixon and the media. Nixon planted stories and letters in the press to try and undermine the reporting of Jack Anderson. The President even considered plans to poison Anderson. ‘Ratf**king,’ the precursor to today’s opposition research, was destroying lives.”
I FLEW FROM ATLANTA TO NEW ZEALAND ONCE, BUT THEY DID FEED ME ON THE PLANE: Bird sets nonstop distance record with 8,435-mile flight.
COVID-19 ORIGINS: Investigating a “Complex and Grave Situation” Inside a Wuhan Lab.
Vanity Fair and ProPublica downloaded more than 500 documents from the WIV website, including party branch dispatches from 2017 to the present. To assess Reid’s interpretation, we sent key documents to experts on CCP communications. They told us that the WIV dispatches did indeed signal that the institute faced an acute safety emergency in November 2019; that officials at the highest levels of the Chinese government weighed in; and that urgent action was taken in an effort to address ongoing safety issues. The documents do not make clear who was responsible for the crisis, which laboratory it affected specifically or what the exact nature of the biosafety emergency was.
The interim report also raises questions about how quickly vaccines were developed in China by some teams, including one led by a military virologist named Zhou Yusen. The report called it “unusual” that two military COVID-19 vaccine development teams were able to reach early milestones even faster than the major drug companies who were part of the U.S. government’s Operation Warp Speed program.
Vanity Fair and ProPublica spoke to experts who said that the timeline of Zhou’s vaccine development seemed unrealistic, if not impossible. Two of the three experts said it strongly suggested that his team must have had access to the genomic sequence of the virus no later than in November 2019, weeks before China’s official recognition that the virus was circulating.
The authors of the interim report do not claim to have definitively solved the mystery of COVID-19’s origin. “The lack of transparency from government and public health officials in the [People’s Republic of China] with respect to the origins of SARS-CoV-2 prevents reaching a more definitive conclusion,” the report says, adding that its conclusion could change if more independently verifiable information becomes available.
Throughout the pandemic, the WIV has largely remained a black box, owing to the Chinese government’s refusal to cooperate with international probes. By mining the WIV’s own records, Toy Reid and Senate researchers unearthed new clues that support the interim report’s assessment that a lab accident was “most likely” responsible for the pandemic.
More on that “Acute Safety Emergency in November 2019” from Jim Geraghty:
Separately, ProPublica and Vanity Fair question how Yusen Zhou could have applied for a patent for a SARS-CoV-2 vaccine on February 24, 2020. Yusen Zhou is the director of the State Key Laboratory of Pathogen and Biosecurity at the Academy of Military Medical Sciences Institute of Microbiology and Epidemiology, in Beijing. The top experts in vaccine development conclude that it is impossible to start from scratch and have a vaccine ready in three months. A South China Morning News report said that the Chinese government traced the first case of Covid-19 back to November 17, but other reports said that Chinese doctors only came to realize that they were dealing with a new and serious virus in late December; the first public statement about a “cluster of pneumonia cases with an unknown cause” from Chinese health authorities was dated to December 21, 2019. Yet the evidence suggests that the Chinese military and medical authorities would’ve had to have started the research on their vaccine before the first cases emerged:
Vanity Fair and ProPublica consulted two independent experts and one expert adviser to the interim report to get their assessment of when Zhou’s research was likely to have begun. Two of the three said that he had to have started no later than November 2019, in order to complete the mouse research spelled out in his patent and subsequent papers.
Larry Kerr, who advised on the interim report, called the timeline laid out in Zhou’s patent and research papers “scientifically, technically not possible.” He added, “I don’t think any molecular biology lab in the world, no matter how sophisticated, could pull that off.”
Rick Bright, the former HHS official who helped oversee vaccine development for the U.S. government, told Vanity Fair and ProPublica that even a four-month timetable would be “aggressive,” especially when the virus in question is new. “Things aren’t usually that perfect,” he said.
You wanted a smoking gun? I smell smoke, and that gun barrel feels awfully warm.
As David Strom of Hot Air adds: The COVID coverup begins to unravel. “It was remarkable how quickly the Narrative™ settled on the zoonotic origin of the virus, since warning signs that the virus didn’t originate naturally were everywhere. Even scientists who confidently declared in private their belief that the virus was engineered publicly stated the opposite–after having been directed to by Anthony Fauci, the keeper of the keys to the kingdom’s treasury when it comes to research dollars. Fauci in recent months has been backtracking on whether or not the virus could have been engineered, but he sure expended enormous effort maintaining the fiction that an animal origin was certain. There is a simple reason for Fauci’s reluctance to consider a lab leak hypothesis–if it came from the Wuhan Institute for Virology, the US government likely funded the research. Obviously nobody wants that on their record, and Fauci has quite the pension to protect, as well as an unearned reputation as The Science™.”
QUESTION ASKED AND (POSSIBLY) ANSWERED:
Shot:
Hangover: Report: Paul Pelosi ‘sounded somewhat confused’, referred to attacker as ‘friend’ during 911 call.
—The Post Millenial, today.
OBAMA: Herschel Walker is a ‘celebrity who wants to be a politician’, you know.
David has a fun post up today about Stacey Abrams and her gigantic ego that refuses to accept defeat. You know who else has a huge ego? Barack Obama. That is why it’s so delicious to hear him accuse others of such things. He told the crowd that Herschel Walker is “a celebrity to who wants to be a politician.” The irony in that statement is that Barack Obama is a politician who wants to be a celebrity. He was elevated to celebrity status during his time in the White House and celebrities were regular guests at the Obama White House. Michelle Obama held regular live performances by musicians and singers to entertain the Obamas and their guests. Sports stars stopped by and we were even subjected to Obama’s annual picks during March Madness.
Walker was a brilliant running back in college and the USFL (and alas, a key player in the Dallas Cowboys’ three Super Bowl wins of the 1990s), but I don’t think his goal was to become the Biggest Celebrity in the World.
ASKING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: Who is Rahul Ligma?
It turns out that the purportedly fired Twitter employees featured in the news yesterday were hoaxers with a good sense of humor. CNBC’s story on them now comes with an editor’s note: “After CNBC published details of an interview with people who claimed to be fired employees of Twitter, several reports emerged suggesting it was a hoax. CNBC could not confirm the identities of the individuals.” The New York Post follows up in “Pranksters posing as laid-off Twitter employees trick media outlets: ‘Rahul Ligma.’”
“Rahul” went all the way in the name of authenticity: he “held a copy of Michelle Obama’s book ‘Becoming’ aloft while speaking to reporters.”
Hoaxer “Rahul Ligma” had a good name. Hoaxer “Daniel Johnson” had a good line, reported by CNBC’s Deirdre Bosa: “Daniel tells us he owns a Tesla and doesn’t know how he’s going to make payments.” I’m choking up as I write. The hoaxers can be seen in Bosa’s tweet below.
UPDATE: It’s real, and it’s spectacular:
Self-described “technology columnist” at the Washington Post just knocking it out the park.
Flashback: Are There Any Adults at the Washington Post?
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