The other commenters have covered some of the points I'd make, so I'll add: After decades of investigation into Patient Zero for AIDS/HIV, there wasn't a single, identifiable transmission event to which the epidemic traced, but rather evidence that the virus was present here and there long before the disease was identified.

Intuitively, I think it's the same with COVID-19, that there wasn't a single, discrete animal-to-human transmission event. Even if my analogy to HIV is faulty, China built the lab in Wuhan to study endemic coronaviruses; that means that anything in the lab had been in the wild for years before researchers collected a sample of it. Therefore, it's overwhelmingly likely that humans had already been exposed to some form of it, and it was present in local populations. At the very least, there would have had to be multiple exposures, because not everybody exposed to the virus got infected, not everybody infected showed symptoms, and not everybody with symptoms transmitted the virus to other people. That, and the fact that it's a respiratory disease, and does not spread by surface contact, makes a lab leak seem exceedingly unlikely.

So, even if the Wuhan lab failed at biocontainment, and people caught a strain of virus it was studying, that wasn't the cause of the pandemic, which could have kicked off any number of ways. I'm not going to dismiss the possibility of a lab leak outright, but on the other hand, even if it's true, there's little practical value to the knowing about it other than improving biocontainment procedures. It certainly doesn't justify the Sinophobia that tends to accompany the lab leak theory, and the Sinophobia is what I think makes people reject the lab leak possibility so vehemently.

(The other "lab leak theory," that it was an engineered bioweapon that escaped, is for drooling morons. Nobody has that technology, not even close.)

Which one is more fantastical, a flying, super-strength, alien humanoid; or a covert, large-scale demolition operation with not a single leak?

I'm long past getting snarky-surprised about it; by now, it's just axiomatic that conservative Christian leaders are whatever it is they spend so much energy on publicly hating..

I have several friends who are having trouble finding employment because the job market has cratered, including one friend who just finished a PhD and had trouble finding even a crappy job because the federal government was firing so many people in her field at the same time. She would've had to leave the U.S., because she's not a citizen yet. Another friend took a job in New Zealand instead of locally, partly because he's also not a citizen. I worry about such friends, whether their visas will get revoked, or worse, ICE will come for them. Also, I worry about LGBT friends, and friends with health concerns who have care only because of the Affordable Care Act.

My own job is secure— for now. The university department that I work for gets a lot of funding from tuition, in addition to research grants. However, several of my grant-funded co-workers (seeing the writing on the wall) have quit, and a number of potential graduate students have had to decline our offer to study here. There's been a wave of faculty retirements, or faculty leaving for endowment-funded universities. The whole campus faces budget cuts, and research getting shut down. I can forget about a raise; and cost-of-living adjustments— who knows?

Meanwhile, groceries (among other things) are noticeably more expensive, and my taxes will be going up, so that's neat.

That's why I keep my eye on Joe Rogan. I mean, folks tell me I'm nuts to think that a charismatic entertainer could make the transition to being President, but I'm not so sure. (/s, to be extra clear) I notice that he's taking care to distance himself from the regime's more-unpopular actions, but not break with it wholly.

Ah, the old Sen. Sumner treatment!

~~Cowards.~~ Nazi collaborators.

FTFY.

I always wondered if female centaurs had horse teats, in addition to their human breasts. Or maybe teats, like, all the way down? If they're not mammals, though, problem solved.

False? We employed that strategy, i.e. voted for Democrats multiple times over decades without demanding that they do better, and now we have fascism. That's not to say that the strategy caused fascism, but self-evidently didn't stop it.

The crux of the issue is that we voted for Democrats "for the time being" multiple times over the past 50 years, and this is still what fucking happened. But, ignoring that, the big idea here to save our hides is that a Democrat has to win every single election from now until the sun goes super-nova? That seems more than a little unrealistic.

The optimal strategy remains to vote for neoliberals when the alternative is fascists because that is how to create time for socialists and progressives to primary neoliberals in the Democratic Party and win general elections.

With all due respect, that strategy got us fascism. The terminology has changed, but I could tell close to 30 years ago that this would be the result. Is three decades not enough time for socialists and progressives to "primary" neoliberals? Apparently not, because socialsts/progressives/leftists are lazy, good-for-nothings who are simultaneously powerful enough to swing elections, but too inconsequential to talk about their issues or court their votes.

In other words, maybe these vaunted "centrists"/liberals should've stepped up to stop fascism. (And, it's not leftists who say that Harris "went too woke" and now want to throw trans people under the bus.)

I'll go further: It wouldn't be enough to simply reform one political party, anyway. The U.S. Constitution is a dead document, and its system of government is obsolete. The black hats have discovered the exploits, and everybody now knows how to game the system. We can't repair the system from inside the system, since it at the bottom line it runs on trust, and that trust in the system is gone. Just like in any relationship, it takes some material change to get people to trust again.