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 …
Two News Stories – Free To Reporters
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 …
Trying To Head Off The Next Antiscience Freakout
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 …
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Excellent Read: Mastodons Among Us
This is one of those multidimensional stories with great photos, but slow to load, on my device anyway. It’s well worth it. An East Bay (California) Municipal Utilities District ranger in the Mokelumne River Watershed discovered a treasure trove of fossils. There are still things to discover in California.
Joe Manchin Defects
I figure that if I post, Cole will bigfoot me with his West by God Virginia take. Or I hope he will. I feel helpless sitting here in a blue as blue state. He actually, really, yes, says he will vote against HR-1/S-1. His reasoning seems to be that bipartisanship is so important that if …
Rolling The Credulous
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 …
What Are You Doing About The Republican Destruction Of Democracy?
Ronald Brownstein has a good article about concerns that I am beginning to have, although I look at things a bit differently. Anxiety is growing among a broad range of civil-rights, democracy-reform, and liberal groups over whether Democrats are responding with enough urgency to the accelerating Republican efforts to both suppress voting and potentially overturn future …
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