This is your regular scheduled reminder that BMI is a population statistic, not a medical prescription for good health! (If you’re 39 weeks pregnant and your BMI is “normal” then you probably need urgent medical care.) https://t.co/5pE9P2W7pL

— Charlie Stross (@cstross) June 5, 2021

Oh, not this shit again. How do smart people’s minds fail so spectacularly? I just can’t understand.

Something I’ve realized, though, is that most people can only really comprehend or be at all competent in 1-2 fields. Sometimes only one. I’m very, very lucky because I can get up to decent speed (not true expertise) in a few dozen fields. Most people can be good at one and ok at one other…and that’s just it. For 99.99% of people, that’s the hard limit.

Excessive BMI is not a predictor or diagnosis, but it’s an indicator in the medical sense. And it’s a population-level statistic in the same way that Covid infection rates are as well — but you still don’t want Covid just as you still shouldn’t want to be obese. That’s because, “Excess BMI is associated with substantially shorter healthy and chronic disease-free life expectancy.”

In the medical community, by the way, this is not controversial in the least. There it’s like saying, “Pain hurts.” It is only outside of that where the food conglomerates and their Fat Acceptance allies have muddied the debate (similar to what Big Tobacco did earlier) where there is any doubt.

Just sad to see someone who should know better spouting propaganda like this.

And by the way, my friend Mary from long ago was 5’9″ and she had a baby while never exceeding normal BMI. The kid was eight pounds something and perfectly healthy. Not advisable for most, but perfectly possible for someone already naturally thin. She went from 120 pounds to 140 pounds during the pregnancy.

The first ten on today’s playlist:

I’ve embedded it previously, but I really like this Cyn song and video because it makes both prudish liberals (all of them, in the US at least) and religious nutters cry.

Double win!

And it’s beautifully lit. Props to the gaffer on that.

I do think a lot of people actually like living in fear. Probably “like” is not the right word. Maybe it’s more accurate to say that living in fear comforts them, or confirms some pre-existing notion, or limits their options in a way that eases the horrible freedom of existing.

But in the end, I don’t care that much about psychoanalyzing them. Those types are my enemy and we must resist them at all times, but now in particular as much more hinges on it.

Textbooks and related materials I’ve used recently on virology. I read all these several years ago (maybe 8?) but with the pandemic, I partially or in some cases wholly read them again:

Fields Virology (6th Edition). It’s dense but good. Standout bit is a thorough overview of how viruses are assembled.

Fundamentals of Molecular Virology (2nd Edition). Does what it says on the tin. A bit repetitive.

How Pathogenic Viruses Think: Making Sense of Virology by Lauren Sompayrac. A great semi-beginner’s overview if you know little about this area. I breezed through it in a few hours since I’d already read it a nearly a decade ago.

Principles and Practice of Clinical Virology (5th Edition). Aimed more at treatment in clinical settings. Don’t read this one until you’ve gone through the others as it requires a whole lot of basal understanding.

To read any of these and make sense of them, you’ll also need a pretty firm grounding in molecular biology, genetics, and general bio.

This is all bullshit.

This person is lying to you. Directly fucking lying to you. The coronaviruses at the WIV were handled at BSL-2 and BSL-3, not BSL-4.

The NSC investigators found ready evidence that China’s labs were not as safe as advertised. Shi Zhengli herself had publicly acknowledged that, until the pandemic, all of her team’s coronavirus research—some involving live SARS-like viruses—had been conducted in less secure BSL-3 and even BSL-2 laboratories.

This is not exactly a secret. Yet this person — who certainly knows better — is seeding these deliberate untruths to obfuscate the possibility of a lab leak. SARS-Cov-2 didn’t escape from a BSL-4 environment because it wasn’t being worked on in a BSL-4 environment.

Again, I stress that this mook must know that.

We have experts who know nothing, and even when they do have some clue they deliberately deceive any mark who is naïve enough to fall for their mendacity.

So I just sent this email to him:

“Thomas,

I saw your Twitter thread today about the lab leak hypothesis. In it, you asserted that any lab leak theory would have to account for a BSL-4 escape. However, the coronavirus research at the WIV was being conducted at BSL-3 and (sometimes) BSL-2 as acknowledged by Shi Zengli herself.

Surely you must have been aware of that to have such strong opinions on the matter? I don’t understand why anyone should have to account for a BSL-4 escape when the work was being conducted at BSL-3 and BSL-2. Perhaps you can explain.

Regards,

Mike”

I expect to get no response but I am getting so tired of these people. They lie, their sycophants who can barely read attack, and nothing useful ever gets done.

The deranged co-leader of the UK Green Party @CarolineLucas, said in an interview a while back, that everyone in the aviation industry should retrain.

The fundamentalist greens are all about curbing your freedoms. When I was a kid I was taught that fascism was right-wing… https://t.co/GIoBl1KHDS

— GuruAnaerobic (@GuruAnaerobic) June 4, 2021

I’d realized this without even reading anything about this or knowing who any of these people are. It’s been clear to me for a while that in many countries the more nutty environmental folks were up to something like this and using Covid as a pretext to make this de facto the case.

They don’t want us traveling and they want to strangle tons of businesses if they can. They really do want us in the pods, eating bugs, not traveling, and they don’t care who it harms or how insane that is.

Does anyone else not see it as absolutely fucking insane that people want to — and think we should — keep places locked down for years and borders closed for years as well?

I know I’ve said it a million times, but it’s really mystifying and shocking how quickly libs went from “open borders, yay!” to “let’s just close the borders forever, cool.” I don’t think I will ever understand it. What a bunch of loser coward crybaby dipshits.