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Wuhan Waltz #4
Those of you who have been reading this blog may remember I’ve written about the virus from Wuhan a number of times. On the basis of earlier evidence, I concluded that Covid‑19 likely originated in the Wuhan Institute of Virology. (Those posts can be found by clicking here, here, and here). As a rule, scientists […]
Fishing in Finland
How many times has this happened to you? Your mind is stuck on a specific thought pattern and then “boom,” up pops a made-to-order complementary object that tops off your thought as neatly as a cherry tops off a sundae. That happened to me yesterday. I was thinking of fishing in Finland with a […]
Joys from a Finnish Smoke Sauna
My friends, Martti and Kaarina, as is common for many Finnish families, own a summer cottage on a lake shore. When I first visited their site a few decades ago, the only building standing was a rough-hewn log cabin, its left side walled off and made into an authentic smoke sauna, the type most prized […]
Casualty Numbers from the Covid-19 Vaccine Battlefield
“Mr. Rauch, a senior fellow at the Brookings institution, argues that human beings have a natural tendency to believe what they wish, irrespective of evidence.” (From a book review in the October 13, 2021, Wall Street Journal) Let’s look at some specific evidence related to our nasty battle over the virus vaccine. According to the […]
Tribute to a Friendship
It began in Illinois decades ago, four young men having no idea they were forming a lifelong friendship. They were just having fun. “Friendship does not arise out of necessity, but out of pleasure,” wrote one of my favorite contemporary writers, Joseph Epstein, in Friendship: An Exposé (Link), a delightful discourse on the subject. The […]
Ben Franklin on inoculation
From time to time, when itching for a snippet of diversion, I’ll head to one of my book cases and scan the spines, searching for something to perk me up. I found myself doing that this afternoon. While skimming along a neglected lower shelf, I zeroed in on a small paperback I hadn’t touched in […]
Political Correctness, continued
As I said when posting my recent quiz on political correctness (see it here), I knew little about the term. At the time of that posting, PC was just a mild annoyance to me, probably because I don’t like others telling me how to talk (I prefer to put my own words in my mouth). […]
Political Correctness: A Quiz
I’m not well-versed in political correctness (see discussion here). In fact, this post is intended to be a learning experience for me, and maybe for readers as well. To this end, I’ve come up with a little beginner’s quiz, an imperfect tool to ease gently into the subject and maybe even discover a few basic […]
Examining “Shrinkflation”
Are you as inattentive when shopping as certain manufacturers think you are? Or have you noticed that many grocery items are appearing in smaller packages these days? It’s a neat trick, this shrinkflation, because even if the price per package doesn’t increase, the food inside a shrunken container obviously costs more. I first spotted this […]
Wuhan Waltz #3
As I indicated in my earlier posts on the Wuhan Institute of Virology ( A and B), I believe evidence suggests that this laboratory was the origin of Covid-19. A recent article in the Wall Street Journal by Dr. Robert Redfield (a virologist, and former director of the CDC) and Dr. Marc Siegel (clinical professor […]
