Linky Friday: Lies, Slander, and Calumny Edition

As always, all the pieces in Linky Friday are for discussion purposes only, and their content and opinions are solely that of the authors themselves.

[LF1] The Lab-Leak Theory: Inside the Fight to Uncover COVID-19’s Origins by Katherine Eban for Vanity Fair

Since December 1, 2019, the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19 has infected more than 170 million people around the world and killed more than 3.5 million. To this day, we don’t know how or why this novel coronavirus suddenly appeared in the human population. Answering that question is more than an academic pursuit: Without knowing where it came from, we can’t be sure we’re taking the right steps to prevent a recurrence.

And yet, in the wake of the Lancet statement and under the cloud of Donald Trump’s toxic racism, which contributed to an alarming wave of anti-Asian violence in the U.S., one possible answer to this all-important question remained largely off-limits until the spring of 2021.

Behind closed doors, however, national security and public health experts and officials across a range of departments in the executive branch were locked in high-stakes battles over what could and couldn’t be investigated and made public.

A months long Vanity Fair investigation, interviews with more than 40 people, and a review of hundreds of pages of U.S. government documents, including internal memos, meeting minutes, and email correspondence, found that conflicts of interest, stemming in part from large government grants supporting controversial virology research, hampered the U.S. investigation into COVID-19’s origin at every step. In one State Department meeting, officials seeking to demand transparency from the Chinese government say they were explicitly told by colleagues not to explore the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s gain-of-function research, because it would bring unwelcome attention to U.S. government funding of it.

In an internal memo obtained by Vanity Fair, Thomas DiNanno, former acting assistant secretary of the State Department’s Bureau of Arms Control, Verification, and Compliance, wrote that staff from two bureaus, his own and the Bureau of International Security and Nonproliferation, “warned” leaders within his bureau “not to pursue an investigation into the origin of COVID-19” because it would “‘open a can of worms’ if it continued.”

There are reasons to doubt the lab-leak hypothesis. There is a long, well-documented history of natural spillovers leading to outbreaks, even when the initial and intermediate host animals have remained a mystery for months and years, and some expert virologists say the supposed oddities of the SARS-CoV-2 sequence have been found in nature.

But for most of the past year, the lab-leak scenario was treated not simply as unlikely or even inaccurate but as morally out-of-bounds. In late March, former Centers for Disease Control director Robert Redfield received death threats from fellow scientists after telling CNN that he believed COVID-19 had originated in a lab. “I was threatened and ostracized because I proposed another hypothesis,” Redfield told Vanity Fair. “I expected it from politicians. I didn’t expect it from science.”

With President Trump out of office, it should be possible to reject his xenophobic agenda and still ask why, in all places in the world, did the outbreak begin in the city with a laboratory housing one of the world’s most extensive collection of bat viruses, doing some of the most aggressive research?

Dr. Richard Ebright, board of governors professor of chemistry and chemical biology at Rutgers University, said that from the very first reports of a novel bat-related coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan, it took him “a nanosecond or a picosecond” to consider a link to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Only two other labs in the world, in Galveston, Texas, and Chapel Hill, North Carolina, were doing similar research. “It’s not a dozen cities,” he said. “It’s three places.”

Then came the revelation that the Lancet statement was not only signed but organized by a zoologist named Peter Daszak, who has repackaged U.S. government grants and allocated them to facilities conducting gain-of-function research—among them the WIV itself. David Asher, now a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, ran the State Department’s day-to-day COVID-19 origins inquiry. He said it soon became clear that “there is a huge gain-of-function bureaucracy” inside the federal government.

As months go by without a host animal that proves the natural theory, the questions from credible doubters have gained in urgency. To one former federal health official, the situation boiled down to this: An institute “funded by American dollars is trying to teach a bat virus to infect human cells, then there is a virus” in the same city as that lab. It is “not being intellectually honest not to consider the hypothesis” of a lab escape.

And given how aggressively China blocked efforts at a transparent investigation, and in light of its government’s own history of lying, obfuscating, and crushing dissent, it’s fair to ask if Shi Zhengli, the Wuhan Institute’s lead coronavirus researcher, would be at liberty to report a leak from her lab even if she’d wanted to.

On May 26, the steady crescendo of questions led President Joe Biden to release a statement acknowledging that the intelligence community had “coalesced around two likely scenarios,” and announce that he had asked for a more definitive conclusion within 90 days. His statement noted, “The failure to get our inspectors on the ground in those early months will always hamper any investigation into the origin of COVID-19.” But that wasn’t the only failure.

In the words of David Feith, former deputy assistant secretary of state in the East Asia bureau, “The story of why parts of the U.S. government were not as curious as many of us think they should have been is a hugely important one.”

[LF2] Behind drug distributors’ efforts to derail WV opioid reporting by Lucas Manfield in Mountain State Spotlight

In 2017 Eric Eyre won a Pulitzer Prize for his investigative reporting on the opioid crisis in West Virginia. Because of the ongoing trial against the drug companies in federal court, now we know the rest of the story…

The drug distributors were on the defensive. West Virginia had filed a lawsuit against the companies, and thanks to that litigation, sales information that the companies had tried desperately to keep secret was leaking out. Between 2007 and 2012, drug distributors shipped over 200 million doses of opioid pain medication to the state, Eric Eyre reported in the Charleston Gazette in May 2015. (Eyre is now a co-founder of Mountain State Spotlight and is reporting on this trial.)

But those numbers weren’t complete. They excluded data from the nation’s two largest distributors at the time, Cardinal Health and McKesson. And the other distributors were refusing to release “confidential” data on the number of pills sent to individual pharmacies.

Eyre was doing everything he could to get that data. And the drug distributors — through their trade group — hatched a plan to distract him.

They turned to GMMB, the powerhouse political consulting firm. The firm has helped the last three Democratic presidents win the White House and was one of the largest recipients of Democratic candidate spending in the last election cycle. But the firm also provides public relations support to large trade associations like the Healthcare Distribution Alliance and the American Beverage Association, which represents Coca Cola and Pepsi — a fact GMMB rarely advertises when promoting its public health advocacy efforts.

In a memo submitted to John Parker, HDA’s head of communications, GMMB noted that keeping the sales data private was making the distributors look bad. To counter the bad press, GMMB recommended offering Eyre a scoop: exclusive access to two “key” speakers at a closed-door summit with U.S. Sen. Joe Manchin where the drug distributors could highlight their efforts to fight opioid abuse.

This, and an “exclusive” first look at a subsequent report, would be a “carrot” to Eyre and “help expand HDMA’s relationship with him,” GMMB wrote, referring to HDA by its former acronym, which stood for Healthcare Distribution Management Association.

GMMB also recommended holding “desk-side” briefings with West Virginia reporters.

“We would include Eric Eyre in this group and would carefully prep any spokesperson in advance of speaking to him,” GMMB said in the memo.

Siobhan Bunaes, a senior vice president at GMMB, said in a statement to Mountain State Spotlight that her company had developed marketing materials for HDA in 2015 and 2016, but “was never contracted by nor did we conduct work for HDA related to opioid use.”

In that same statement, she acknowledged that GMMB had proposed the summit in response to a request from HDA for “a proposal to respond to growing concerns around opioid use.”

The proposed summit outlined in the GMMB memo appears to have never happened, and it is not clear to what extent HDA took the advice outlined by GMMB in the memo. Parker declined to comment on this story, citing the ongoing litigation.

The two organizations’ efforts to sidetrack Eyre did not work.

A little over a year later, Eyre finally obtained the data from the state Attorney General’s Office and published a pair of blockbuster stories that revealed the staggering number of pills distributors delivered to West Virginia — 433 per person over a six-year period — and the fact that both the distributors and the state had long been aware of the problem.

Those stories, coupled with the release of national data by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration to attorneys representing local governments across the country, led to thousands of lawsuits being filed against the distributors. Eyre ultimately won the Pulitzer Prize for his work.

[LF3] Don’t Lock Out China’s Victims by Daniel De Martino in The Bulwark

Less than one year ago, amid the Chinese Communist Party crackdown on Hong Kong freedom activists, former President Trump rightfully moved to impose sanctions on the CCP and ended preferential trade relations that benefitted the Chinese regime. But in the process, we stopped treating Hong Kong as a separate country for immigration purposes. The unintended consequence was that there are fewer visas and green cards available for the same activists that waved the American flag and sang the U.S. national anthem as they defended their city from the Chinese Communist Party.

It is in U.S. national interests to remind young Americans of the terrible consequences of socialism, and the best way to achieve that is to admit immigrants who lived under socialism and can tell Americans what it’s really like.

By treating Hong Kong and China as the same country, the U.S. government is subjecting freedom-seeking Hong Kongers—who are family members of U.S. citizens, high-skilled immigrants, or investors from Hong Kong—to many years of additional wait time before obtaining a green card. We should be able to oppose and counter the Chinese Communist Party without hurting the same people we intend to help.

America should reverse this unfair treatment of Hong Kongers by returning the city to its previous immigration status as a separate country. But we should not stop there: immigration law should put American values in the forefront.

[LF4] It’s Not Just Voter Suppression: Texas Republicans Want to Overturn Elections by John Nichols

Trump was successful in getting gullible Republicans to embrace the Big Lie—53 percent of them now believe the former president actually won the 2020 election and is the legitimate leader of the country. But he and his lawyers were notably unsuccessful in getting judges—at the federal, state, and local levels—to overturn an election that the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency determined to have been “the most secure in American history.”

Dozens of judges rejected cases brought by Trump’s lawyers. Among the jurists who said no to the disgraced former president were Republican appointees to the federal bench and elected Republican judges in the states. Even jurists who it was feared would look for an avenue to support Trump’s claims refused to do so, to the immense frustration of Rudy Giuliani and the other lawyers for the ousted president. The judges followed the law, which has historically set a high bar for challenging election results.

But what if the law made it easier to mount such challenges? What if the law gave judges leeway to overturn elections based on partisan desires as opposed to proven facts?

That’s the prospect Texas Governor Greg Abbott and Republican legislators in the state have put on the table with their sweeping proposal to rewrite election laws in response to Trump’s ranting about voter fraud. The Texas legislation has gained considerable attention for voter suppression elements that are so draconian that US Representative Colin Allred (D-Tex.) says, “This isn’t legislation. It’s discrimination.” But there is more to the Republican agenda in Texas than the usual scheming to erect barriers to voter participation by Blacks, Hispanics, students, and others who might vote Democratic. What is especially jarring is a section of the plan to make it dramatically easier for a Texas judge to overturn an election result to which Republican “poll watchers”—or former presidents—object.

Under existing law in Texas, any move to overturn an election result requires “clear and convincing evidence” that fraud occurred. But under the law that Republican legislators plan to enact—in a special session that will be required after Texas Democratic legislators walked out of the regular session, denying leaders of the Republican-controlled state House a quorum—Texas would dumb down the burden of proof.

The new “evidentiary standard” outlined in the proposed Texas law would allow a partisan who is contesting an election result to “prove” their allegation of fraud “by a preponderance of the evidence.” In addition to this far lower standard, the legislation declares that “if the number of votes illegally cast in the election is equal to or greater than the number of votes necessary to change the outcome of an election, the court may declare the outcome of the election void without attempting to determine how individual voters voted.”

Read that last phrase again: “the court may declare the outcome of the election void without attempting to determine how individual voters voted.” What that means is that, on the basis of claims by partisan poll watchers that they saw what they thought to be wrongdoing, a partisan judge could cancel an election result without conducting the sort of review that is necessary to confirm that the alleged fraud actually influenced the result.

[LF5] As a vet spoke about Memorial Day’s roots in Black history, his mic was cut. It was no accident. By Andrea Salcedo in The Washington Post

Even after invoking the 24-hour rule of not commenting on viral story so the facts shake out, this one is getting worse.

The Hudson, Ohio, native, who was trained as a combat medic and served in the Army from 1965 through 1995, was invited by Suchan as the keynote speaker for the ceremony in his hometown.

Suchan did not give him any writing prompts, he said, and did not say any topics were off-limits. So, the veteran decided to use this year’s speech as an “educational” opportunity to discuss the holiday’s history.

“Throughout history, there has been a lot of claims about who actually performed the first Memorial Day service,” Kemter told The Post. “With this speech, I chose to educate people as to the origin of Memorial Day and why we were celebrating it.”

Kemter’s speech included details about a Memorial Day commemoration in Charleston, S.C., organized by a group of Black people freed from enslavement less than a month after the Confederacy surrendered in 1865.

About three days before his speech, he emailed the text to event organizers. One organizer responded by asking Kemter to revise his speech and “leave out the part of history of it.” The organizer, whom Kemter declined to name, didn’t specify which paragraphs they wanted gone or why they objected, he said.

How much do you know about Memorial Day?

So, after consulting with a Hudson public official, Kemter arrived at Markillie Cemetery on Monday ready to deliver the unedited version of his final draft to the crowd of about 300 people.

Kemter began his speech by discussing how Memorial Day was born after hundreds of thousands of soldiers who died in the American Civil War were in need of a proper burial place. Then, shortly after beginning a discussion of the role that Black Charleston residents played in the holiday, his microphone stopped working.

When his calls for help from a sound engineer didn’t work, he said, “I decided, ‘I don’t need a microphone.’ I just proceeded in my Army command voice.”

Kemter did not think much of it when the audio came back minutes later, just after he had finished discussing the holiday’s Black history.

But after the event, the audio engineer approached to tell him that it was not a malfunction: The event organizers had intentionally muted him, he said.

By then, Kemter said he was surrounded by about 20 people, who congratulated him for a “moving” and “meaningful” speech. He gave out the four printed copies he had brought to the event, he said.

Kemter said he didn’t want a confrontation with organizers, so he left the cemetery without speaking to them.

On Wednesday, Suchan confirmed to the Beacon Journal that either she or Jim Garrison, the adjutant of American Legion Lee-Bishop Post 464, had turned down the audio because the “theme of the day was honoring Hudson veterans.” She declined to confirm who specifically had turned down the volume.

Garrison also refused to say whether he turned down the microphone, telling the Beacon Journal that he had “nothing to add.” He declined to comment when reached by The Post.

Suchan confirmed that event organizers had asked Kemter to revise his speech and said that the two minutes when Kemter’s mic was turned off included some of the paragraphs organizers had objected to.

The Ohio American Legion said it is investigating the incident.

[LF6] What Do We Do with Education Research? by Freddie deBoer

To render things in convenient list form: what are the issues with education research?

Methodological and data issues. Small effects, big variance, lots of endogeneity, lots of confounds, available samples are frequently systematically dissimilar from general population, difficult or impossible to truly randomize in many contexts, bogus randomization in many others…. In sheer analytical terms, this is all quite difficult.

Publication and replication issues. All of the conditions that afflict psychology in its replication/p-value crisis apply to education research, potentially even more damagingly. Very often ed researchers have big ol’ spreadsheets with tons of demographic and school variables that they can then quickly correlate with output variables like test scores or GPA, which makes data snooping tempting – particularly given that you need to publish to get hired and get tenure and you need to get a significant finding to get published. And unlike psychological research, which frequently has limited real-world valence, the now widely-discussed issues with p-value hacking and publication bias can have large (and expensive) consequences in ed research, because policymakers are drawing inferences from research that they then use to make decisions that result in the deployment of a lot of public resources.

Conflicting results facilitate selective reading. Because there is so much conflicting data and contradicting studies, you can always build the narrative you want through choosing the data that supports your work and ignoring that which does not.

Institutional capture and optimism bias. Education research is dominantly funded by institutions that are hungry for positive results – positive effects that are purported to derive from implementable pedagogical or administrative changes which would, supposedly, start to “move the needle.” The increasingly brutal competition in academia for tenure track lines makes the need for access to grant funding only more vital over time, and the people who control the purse strings don’t want to hear negative results. There are committed pessimists within the ed research world but very few of them are pre-tenure or otherwise lacking in institutional security. The Gates Foundation, by sheer size alone, disciplines researchers against speaking plainly about negative findings and subtly influences the entirety of the published research record. In a very real sense the dominant ideology of the educational research world simply is the ideology of the foundations, and this is not healthy.

Accurately measured but controversial conclusions. The relationship between SAT scores and socioeconomic status is a classic example: while usually exaggerated, the correlation between SES and SAT scores is real. This is often used as an argument to dismiss the test as invalid. But in fact there is also an SES effect in GPA, graduation rates, state standardized tests, etc., which tells us that rather than being evidence of a flawed test, the correlation is a reflection of the uncomfortable fact that students from wealthier families actually are more college prepared than students from poorer. The reasons for this are complex, but the idea that the test must be inaccurately measuring the intended construct because the outcomes say unpleasant things is obviously wrongheaded. But this dynamic permeates educational research and policy. Consider research which shows that, when looked at longitudinally using the kind of fixed-effects models that can help adjust for the limitations of purely correlational analyses, we find that suspending students from school has weakly but significantly positive effects on their academic outcomes. It’s fair to say many people would not be welcoming to this research’s conclusions. This is, again, consequence-laden in a way the latest stupid fad in psychology research is not. This kind of finding can prompt the kind of controversy that can, in turn, ruin a young career. Education is a sensitive subject and sensitivity makes clear thinking in research much more difficult.

What do we do about these problems?

[LF7] The Destructive Power of the GOP’s Election Lies by Sarah Quinlan for Arc Digital

Unfortunately, these lies won’t fade away on their own. Just this past Memorial Day weekend, at the QAnon-affiliated “For God & Country Patriot Roundup” conference, an attendee asked Trump’s first national security adviser Michael Flynn, “I want to know why what happened in Myanmar can’t happen here”—in reference to the Myanmar military coup in which the military overthrew democratically elected politicians. Flynn responded, “No reason. I mean, it should happen here. No reason.” Clearly, Trump and his biggest enablers will continue to push the conspiracy theory that he actually won the election, and the lies will get bigger and more desperate—but it is never too late for GOP leaders to do what is right. Yes, they have shamefully abdicated their responsibility for years. Yes, they have preposterously voted down the formation of a January 6 commission. For far too long they have placed their good standing with Trump and their own careers above the interests of the country. But even now they can still do what is right.

They can admit they shouldn’t have objected to certifying election results. They can declare that Joe Biden won in a free, fair, and secure election and that Donald Trump lost. They can tell their voters that some election fraud does occur but not at a significant level—certainly not the level needed to overturn election results in one state, let alone the multiple states Trump would have needed in order to reach 270 electoral votes. They can apologize for having misled Americans. They can tell the truth.

Or they can continue to let lies about the 2020 election downgrade trust in American democracy and further erode American society.

It is more than a little depressing that we can all guess what they will likely choose.

[LF8] Is Glenn Greenwald the New Master of Right-Wing Media? by Lloyd Grove and Justin Baragona for Daily Beast

This past month has occasioned spectacular success, of a sort, for the pugnacious contrarian pundit, an erstwhile leftist journalist-turned-Donald Trump defender who once again is proving his mastery of the right-wing media ecosystem.

Indeed, in a self-perpetuating feedback loop that runs from Twitter to Fox News and back again, Greenwald has managed, like Trump before him, to orchestrate his very own news cycles.

Last year, following his exit from The Intercept, Greenwald admitted to The Daily Beast that Fox News airs its share of “horrific, toxic, damaging, destructive, and bigoted” content. However, he defended his frequent Fox hits, saying, “I have no doubt that some people at the Intercept were upset that I was going on Fox, but I would no sooner allow anyone to dictate to me which shows I can go on than I would allow anyone to censor my opinions.”

And now he is effectively operating as something of a Fox News assignment editor, as indicated by The Daily Beast’s spot check of the frequency with which Greenwald’s online musings on social media and elsewhere, especially his Substack page, have served as the basis for dozens of articles on Fox News’ website.

He’s become a practitioner of manufactured controversy in the service of the hard right in this country.
— Betsy Reed, The Intercept editor-in-chief
For the most part, the FoxNews.com stories have tended to celebrate Greenwald’s slashing critiques of non-Fox media personalities, such as a recent article inspired by his tweet trashing MSNBC anchor Nicolle Wallace for misreporting, along with other media outlets, that Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani was warned by the FBI that he was the target of a Russian disinformation campaign. (MSNBC and other outlets ultimately corrected the error.) A similar piece, written a couple weeks later, highlighted Greenwald’s Substack post in which he blasted “resistance journalism.” Of course, Fox News made sure to identify Greenwald as a “progressive journalist,” apparently to enhance the man-bites-dog credibility of his claims.

Besides obsessively repurposing Greenwald’s complaints about other media personalities—sometimes publishing multiple Greenwald-related pieces in the same day—the network also creates entire outrage cycles from Greenwald tweets, transforming tiny kernels into the media equivalent of a bag of popcorn.

The Week That Was At Ordinary Times

Mini-Throughput: The Hope of Humping Humpback Whales by Michael Siegel
When I was a kid, it was accepted that humpback whales were on their way to extinction. Humpbacks are now listed as “least concern”.

Republicans Are Not Helpless Against Trump by Eric Medlin
Republicans current situation is too easy. Trump has cultivated a base that will remain competitive in every election he participates in.

Wednesday Writs: DNA and Privacy Rights Edition by Em Carpenter
It’s important to safeguard DNA & privacy rights-you want them there for you, if you ever find yourself in the crosshairs of the system

OT Contributor Network: Heard Tell Podcast Elections IRL w/Genya Coulter
The first episode of Heard Tell with Andrew Donaldson features Ordinary Times contributor Genya Coulter discussing elections

OT Contributor Network: Michael Siegel’s Dreams in the Long Dark
From the Ordinary Times Contributor Network, Michael Siegel’s Dreams in the Long Dark, part one of a three part short story.

Planting Trees Whose Shade They’ll Never See: A War and Memorial Day Reflection by Rani Stephens
We are blessed. Not because they went to war far away and sometimes never came home, but as General Patton said, because they lived.

Naomi Osaka vs The French: Read It For Yourself by Andrew Donaldson
Naomi Osaka will have options & support far beyond what an hourly employee in a service job might, but both should be reasonably accommodated

Sunday Morning! Wild Seed by Octavia Butler by Rufus
Wild Seed is often called a science-fiction novel, with the sciences being biology and genetics, and really eugenics, rather than space

$999 Problems, But a Discount If Covid-19 Vaccination Proof Isn’t One by Andrew Donaldson
Leave it to a Florida concert promoter to find an end around to a Ron DeSantis executive order requiring Covid-19 vaccination proof

OT Contributor Network: Spheres of Influence Podcast
From our friend and long-time Ordinary Times contributor Dennis Sanders, his latest Spheres of Influence podcast episodes

Saturday Morning Gaming: Racing Around a Board Game by Jaybird
Formula D is a quick game for two through *TEN* players…and, most importantly, it’s a lot of fun and can handle seven players