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at does the independent sleuth gilles demaneuf find in baric s own notes for a talk he gave at a conference in harbin in china in january 2019 creating a virus that is super adapted to a particular host can actually result in an attenuation of virulence if the virus interacts overly strongly with a cellular receptor whoops it looks like he did coach the chinese researchers on this step after all it is a weird experience reading the messages these scientists exchanged during the pandemic they sent up to 50 messages a day to each other during busy periods did they have time to do er science they use the f word repeatedly i am no prude but who needs to do that in exchanges with colleagues and they are obsessed with discrediting rather than rebutting anybody who even toyed with a theory they themselves thought friggin likely they call me a complete idiot and say of my brilliant young co author alina chan we need to push hard to discredit people like alina as conspiracy theorists far more serious however is the way they try to prevent information coming out british scientist peter daszak was the intermediary whose ecohealth alliance shovelled american taxpayer funds to the chinese laboratory that did the dangerous experiments here he is coaching his chinese colleagues on how to be non transparent warning shi zhengli of the wuhan institute of virology not to respond to very polite and reasonable requests from a very distinguished american scientist jesse bloom for detailed information about certain experiments dear zhengli i strongly recommend you don t answer more questions from jesse bloom the questions may seem harmless like he is trying to find out more about basic information but his goals are to continue attacking you the wiv and our collaboration he has already asked me about the ratg13 information separately and i responded with a single sentence to tell him the sequence is incomplete at the end of the genome in other words he already knew the answer but wrote to you separately anyway i believe he is trying to see if one of us says a different response so he can accuse us of lying with someone like this if you give home sic more than a short response he will use the information against you he has done this with us in the past by making public statements about things we ve said in emails to him and criticising us think about this for a second millions of people are dying finding out why should be a priority but a british grantrepreneur who has done very nicely out of supporting very risky and foolish experiments wants a citizen of a communist country not to help a scientist find out more the likes of daszak and especially anthony fauci still have serious questions to answer matt ridley is a science writer and co author of viral the search for the origin of covid 19 with alina chan posted by desertmoon at 1 54 pm email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest sunday july 26 2026 odysseus visits the smithsonian odysseus visits the smithsonian the national museum of american history like so many aspects of the smithsonian has strayed far from its original purpose roger kimball american greatness it seems that everyone is talking about two things these days the odyssey or to be more strictly accurate the odyssey as reimagined by christopher nolan and the smithsonian institution specifically the national museum of american history nmah one of the roughly 20 museums that huddle under the taxpayer funded umbrella of the smithsonian i have not seen the film version of homer s epic but i feel confident in reporting that for sheer entertainment the televised cross examination of nmah s longtime director anthea hartig easily beat out the cinematic version of the odyssey how can i say this not having seen matt damon emoting around in his beard and shiny armor well sydney smith 1771 1845 said that he never read a book before reviewing it because he found that the exercise prejudiced him so it is with me i shall endeavor to escape prejudice bias both intentional and the other kind as well as parti pris altogether by boldly commenting on some aspects of the nolanized version of the story without having seen it and seeing it is work dear reader a look at the screening schedule tells me that it runs nearly three hours 172 173 minutes by the clock though no one has been able to tell me why in this homogenizing age of atomic clocks we can t get a more precise reckoning of the time by all accounts nolan s odysseus unlike odysseus in homer s telling is a troubled guilt ridden specimen forever agonizing over his aggressive behavior and mistreatment of others he has not to put too fine a point on it anger issues unlike homer s odysseus who experienced anger but no anger issues in homer s version odysseus is a hero he is clever yes both cunning πολύμητις and complicated πολύτροπος but even more often than achilles odysseus is described as πτολιπόρθιος sacker of cities he was a warrior he didn t anguish about those to whom he caused anguish it was part of who he was he gloried in it given the length of the movie and the many liberties taken with the script i am surprised that no one suggested having matt damon pay a visit to the smithsonian or at least the congressional hearing about the smithsonian we know that anthea hartig is keen on beginning meetings with a land acknowledgment it s all a little masquerade of course a rancid bit of virtue signaling that costs its performer exactly nothing but i suspect that behind the theater by which i mean the hypocrisy is a timid bid for expiation or absolution there is a lot of unearned guilt sloshing around the national museum of american history these days and the ritual of land acknowledgment though ever so specious might be seen as a moral or existential hedge drawn from the same sort of calculation pascal conjured with in his famous wager about how individuals ought to think about the odds when it came to the existence of god what i want to know however is what odysseus the homeric hero not the movie mannequin would have thought about the practice of land acknowledgments let me put cards on the table and say that i believe he would have treated the people insisting on them as he treated the cyclops polyphemus or come to that the suitors pestering the patient penelope his wife i said that the best entertainment i enjoyed last week was the cross examination not to say the thorough exposure and humiliation of anthea hartig and the best of the best i thought was the brilliant surgical evisceration conducted by freshman representative brandon gill r tx in under 5 minutes he performed an elegant posterior sagittal anorectoplasty on hartig s long tenure at the national museum of american history and he did it by the simple revelatory expedient of confronting her with the smithsonian s own public educational materials are you a white supremacist he asked oh no no replied hartig smiling weakly do you think we all have implicit biases asked gill if so what are yours oh dear do you think it is important to be polite gill wondered oh yes quoth hartig perhaps thinking that if she said she approved of politeness gill would be polite to her no such luck politeness you see is one of the many bourgeois virtues that literature distributed by the smithsonian has identified as a symptom of white supremacy other behaviors and attitudes that raise the alarm about lurking white supremacist tendencies are hard work rational thinking respect for private property delayed gratification and rugged individualism you think that i am making this up but i am not it s all there in an official nmah brochure called aspects and assumptions of whiteness and white culture in the united states file it under things are always worse than you think here s a thought experiment what if these habits and behaviors really were signs of whiteness or white supremacy what then or to put it another way how much of a racist would you have to be to promulgate a brochure like aspects and assumptions of whiteness and white culture in the united states it would be interesting to know whether most of the authors of that odious document were themselves white i d wager most of them were liberal white women the point is this the smithsonian institution was created to preserve and celebrate the american heritage by the same process of moral entropy that has undermined american educational institutions transforming them from unapologetic repositories of our storied past into tenebrous havens for those men without chests that c s lewis delineated the smithsonian institution has abandoned its original mandate no longer is it about celebrating america s past where by celebrate i do not mean exonerate past evils and failures the sort of deficiencies that are part of every nation no matter how great the smithsonian should not be about covering up america s failings it should be about putting those failings in the more capacious context of america s stupendous achievements this the smithsonian under its current leadership has conspicuously failed to do some observers are puzzled that president trump should lavish so much attention on what is after all merely a cultural institution he does so i believe because he understands that the ulterior motive of the smithsonian institution in its current incarnation is to rob us of our heroes as i have put it elsewhere trump s attention to institutions like the smithsonian is part of his ambition to give america back its heroes that is why he has overseen such meticulous criticism of the smithsonian admonition montaigne observed is one of the highest offices of friendship criticism takes time and effort to formulate and dispense if he didn t care president trump could like presidents before him just pass by cultural institutions like the smithsonian and our educational apparat but he does care which is why he devotes serious attention to improving them above all the odyssey is a story about νόστος homecoming the national museum of american history like so many aspects of the smithsonian has strayed far from its original purpose it is wandering amongst monsters enchanted by sirens lost in its fatuous puerile disillusionment it is time to bring it home perhaps donald trump is the athena like guide who can pull it off roger kimball is editor and publisher of the new criterion and the president and publisher of encounter books he is the author and editor of many books including the fortunes of permanence culture and anarchy in an age of amnesia st augustine s press the rape of the masters encounter lives of the mind the use and abuse of intelligence from hegel to wodehouse ivan r dee and art s prospect the challenge of tradition in an age of celebrity ivan r dee most recently he edited and contributed to where next western civilization at the crossroads encounter and contributed to against the great reset eighteen theses contra the new world order bombardier posted by desertmoon at 11 49 am email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest saturday july 25 2026 california s road to serfdom california s road to serfdom property rights are an essential liberty violating them is the very definition of tyranny marc wheat mitchell bahnsen essay law liberty several years ago california brothers arron and arthur benedetti inherited 267 acres of farmland from their father a turkey farmer who spent his life working that land they were not asking for a subsidy tax break or any government benefit they simply wanted to build a home on property they had lawfully inherited the government of marin county however took it upon itself to say that the brothers could have their permit but only if they signed a covenant permanently committing the land to commercial agricultural use farming it themselves or contracting it out in perpetuity the result is a trap with three exits none of them acceptable sell the land farm it commercially or sit on it and do nothing even though the brothers have a strong incentive to take good care of the land they own building a home and living on what their father built is apparently not among the options marin county is prepared to allow now with a petition before the supreme court the benedetti brothers two plumbers who have resided in california their entire lives are asking the nation s highest court to affirm a freedom the rest of the western world has long held dear their case is not merely about a building permit or a zoning dispute but whether the government may use its regulatory leverage to conscript private citizens into occupations of its choosing and whether property rights in america retain any real meaning at all friedrich hayek warned in the road to serfdom that the path to tyranny is rarely dramatic it does not typically announce itself with jackboots and seizures but arrives quietly incrementally through the accumulated weight of regulatory conditions that strip individuals of the freedom to direct their own lives and labor it may start as small as a permit denial and before long the citizen finds himself not the master of his property but its captive working it as the state commands or not at all marin county california has offered a case study in exactly this dynamic and the supreme court now can say clearly and finally that this is not how american property law works when americans want to modify their property they must first ask permission from the state that requirement may sound innocuous but it gives local government the power to withhold the permit until the owner surrenders something the government wants but cannot legally demand outright marin county pulled that lever here in direct defiance of controlling precedent in nollan v california coastal commission 1987 the supreme court struck down a california agency s demand that homeowners grant public beach access as the price of a building permit the condition the court held lacked any essential nexus to a legitimate government interest making it not a regulation at all but what the court bluntly called an out and out plan of extortion building on this dolan v city of tigard 1994 held that even where a nexus exists the burden imposed on the property owner must be roughly proportional to the government s actual interest marin county s demand satisfies neither test there is no meaningful correlation between arthur benedetti s desire to build a home and the county s interest in preserving agricultural land especially since agricultural land already accounts for over half of the us land base even worse permanently conscripting a family s property into commercial farming is wildly disproportionate to any legitimate regulatory goal as the court made clear in koontz v st johns river water management district 2013 this framework applies regardless of how the government structures its demand it is a foundational truth in constitutional law that the state cannot do indirectly what it is forbidden to do di...