Steve Bannon’s Useful Idiots – Addendum

Posted on by Cheryl Rofer

The story of the alleged laboratory escape (“lab leak”) from the Wuhan Institute of Virology has been shopped by the Trumpies, mostly Mike Pompeo, since early in the pandemic. Its form has varied, sometimes a bioweapon, sometimes not, but there has been a concerted effort to get the story into the media. Thanks to the useful idiot bros, Pompeo and his minions, using Bannon’s tactics, may have finally succeeded.

On Twitter, John Culver (@JohnCulver689), whose bio says he is a retired intelligence officer, pointed out a Daily Beast article from June 2020, debunking a report by a Pentagon contractor. When I read it, I vaguely recalled the claims of changing car traffic around the Institute indicating that a leak had occurred. The claim was ridiculous enough that I didn’t pay much attention to it.

Peter Jacobs (@past_is_future), whose bio says he is a climate researcher, offered a longer set of analyses. He points out four attempts to shop the story this year.

That whole thread is worth reading. It covers some of the material I’ve covered recently and points out that it’s Murdoch media in the US and Australia that have helped launder the story. He also mentions David Asher, who turns up in Christopher Ford’s open letter (also here) and the Vanity Fair article that depends on him and other unreliable sources.

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Steve Bannon’s Useful Idiots

Posted on by Cheryl Rofer

Scientific opinion on how the SARS-CoV-2 virus got into human beings has not changed much over the past year. The greatest probability is that a human caught it from an animal; a long ways down in probability is that the virus escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Nonexistent probability is that it is a biological weapon.

Most human diseases have come to us from animals. We know the origins of some of them. Studies of this kind take years and even decades. We have known about SARS-CoV-2 for a year and a half. Many similar viruses are known to exist in bats.

Those studies now can call on genome analysis. A number of virologists and epidemiologists make this their career. A professional who spends all their time on this has a wealth of knowledge that is never published – their last conversation with a colleague, the ways that ideas have gone wrong in the past, and much else that goes into their judgments. A professional in a given field also has a sense of how to evaluate new developments. Without this background, it’s easy to cherrypick data and publications, even without realizing it.

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Two News Stories – Free To Reporters

Posted on by Cheryl Rofer

Covering government is boring, until it isn’t. Trouble is, you need to know something about the boring parts to see when it isn’t. I’ve seen two of those – potentially big stories – today.

Trump’s Assistant Secretary of State for International Security and Non-Proliferation Spills The Beans

Chris Ford has been in government a long time in positions relating to arms control and nonproliferation. I don’t agree with his policy positions, but I was relieved when Trump appointed someone who actually knew about the field to this position. He is a quiet and professional man.

He published a tell-all open letter on Medium today. My jaw is still dropped.

There’s a lot to the letter, and I don’t have time to go into it in detail, but basically a couple of Trumpian bozos in one of his bureaus were ginning up a conspiracy theory about China and the coronavirus. And they did everything they could to keep it from him! This is the backstory to every “lab leak” story out there, oh useful idiots like Nate Silver, Jonathan Chait, Matt Yglesias, and others.

Los Alamos Can’t Make 80 Pits A Year

Dan Leone covers the nuclear weapons bureaucracy for EM Publications. He tweets Congressional hearings, which is a great service to people like me who usually don’t listen to the whole thing. The House Armed Services Committee Subcommittee on Strategic Forces held a hearing today on the FY22 budget request. Charles Verdon, the nominated Administrator for the NNSA, the part of the Department of Energy that is responsible for nuclear weapons, testified. The nuclear arsenal is getting old, and there has been a plan to remake the plutonium cores (pits) for some nuclear weapons. That would be done at the Los Alamos Plutonium Facility, PF-4, and at a repurposed plant at Savannah River, Georgia.

Verdon said that the Savanna River plant won’t be ready for several years and will cost a lot more than has been projected. He also said that PF-4 won’t ever be able to produce 80 pits a year. Here’s Leone’s summary of a long thread:

This is the first time that the NNSA administrator has admitted that the big talk about pit production is just that – talk. It’s significant that the Biden administration is saying this; it may pave the way for a different sort of talks between the US and Russia. And maybe China, if they ever become willing to talk.

I find both of these stories amazing. I’ll be interested to see which news media pick them up. You read them here first.

Cross-posted to Balloon Juice

Trying To Head Off The Next Antiscience Freakout

Posted on by Cheryl Rofer

The rotifer world has exciting news!

A rotifer that was frozen in the permafrost for 24,000 years has been thawed out, and it has reproduced asexually. It is of the commonest kind, a bdelloid rotifer. We have bdelloid rotifers around us everywhere, even in desert dust. They are hardy little guys and form spores, much as the cuddlier tardigrades do, but not quite as durable.

I “discovered” rotifers with my first microscope, when I put a handful of leaves in water and let the jar sit in a warm place for a few days. The little “mixmasters” on their heads intrigued me.

I didn’t know what they were and couldn’t find them in a book. My biology teacher was unhelpful. I’m not sure when I learned their name. Later, I met Professor Robert Lee Wallace, who is one of the world’s experts on rotifers. He told me this morning that the rotifer world is very excited. They knew the little beasts were durable, but this is more than they expected. They will compare the old ones’ genome with the genome of bdelloid rotifers found in the same area today.

Here’s the Reuters article. The embedded video is too sensationalistic for my taste.

In related freakouts, Margaret Sullivan looks at the attacks on Anthony Fauci.

In a right-wing culture so often opposed to verifiable reality, who better to target than a person who stands for science and facts?

Lindsay Beyerstein and Jeffrey Lewis simultaneously ask who uses the term “lab leak.” Turns out it’s not the scientists who are driving that freakout.

Cross-posted to Balloon Juice

Rolling The Credulous

Posted on by Cheryl Rofer

There’s a lot of shouting right now about whether SARS-CoV-2 leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Some of the more partisan shouting is that Donald Trump and his minions were right last year to “consider” a lab leak. They were right last year in the sense that a stopped clock is right twice a day. Yes, they mentioned that possibility, embedded in claims that the virus was a bioweapon and the overwhelming motivation to blame China to take the focus off Trump’s inability to deal with the pandemic.

The virologists I follow have kept a lab leak as a possibility all along. I haven’t followed this story closely until now because

  1. The most important story has been dealing with the spread of the pandemic and
  2. We are not likely to know how the virus got into humans for a long time.

The probability that most scientists (including me) assigned to the possible origins was bioweapon 0%, once the genome was analyzed and showed no telltale signs of human-caused rearrangements; transmission from animals to humans, most likely because that’s how we’ve gotten most of our diseases; and lab leak possible but unlikely because accidents happen but people handling viruses take precautions against leaks.

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Elon Musk Is Wrecking The Sky

Posted on by Cheryl Rofer

To be fair, it’s not just him. Other countries and gazillionaires are planning to send their space junk into orbit too. But Musk is ahead of the pack, and it would be a good idea to do something about it before things get too crowded up there.

“Constellations” of thousands of satellites promise internet everywhere, with profits for the owners of the constellations. It makes sense for enormous countries like Russia and China to consider this, and they are doing that.

But there are a number of problems. Musk’s Skylink is ruining optical astronomy.

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President Biden Restores Strategy To Politics

Posted on by Cheryl Rofer

President Joe Biden was a senator for 36 years. He has seen horse-trading. He has seen comity with segregationists. He has seen deadlock and filibusters. He has seen bipartisanship. He has seen Newt Gingrich’s power grab. He has seen Mitch McConnell’s obstructionism.

He knows how the Senate and the House work.

One of the things he learned is that nothing happens quickly in the Senate, particularly when the margin is as close as it is now. But there are ways. Those ways are not played out in the public eye. They involve quiet talks and promises, agreement and respect. Some of these things may even be feigned. But feigning respect, for example, is itself a way of showing respect.

None of these tactics was useful in an administration devoted to one man’s whims. The old ways decayed even before that, under Gingrich’s and his successors’ scorched-earth politics. Reporters who grew up since Gingrich do not recognize that other tactics exist. They do not recognize that relationships are built and doubts sowed behind the scenes. They are accustomed to tantrums and sudden shows of power. They do not have the tools to describe the wide array of tactics Biden brings with him.

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Where Is The Weapon?

Posted on by Cheryl Rofer

State Department and intelligence personnel have reported neurological symptoms since 2016 that have been attributed to a “directed microwave” weapon. The first reports were from State Department personnel in Havana, Cuba, and the symptoms have been named the Havana Syndrome.

No cause of this syndrome has been identified, but it has been attributed to the effects of a directed microwave weapon. But nobody has shown 1) that microwaves cause such symptoms or 2) that such a weapon exists, or what it might look like.

At one point in my career, I did some research that bears some similarities to the discussions that have been going on. So I wrote about that.

Cross-posted to Balloon Juice