This Week in Notes, May 1 - May 7

Hotez and the "biomedical security state," McClane dies in Die Hard, "textbook virus" denialism, and more

TWIN issue 2: May 1 - May 7, 2023.

Note: Almost all of my posts are “too long for email;” I don’t normally post a warning but for substack notes embeds in particular it may be necessary to click-through the title above to see content load correctly.

New: Notes feed linked in site header

I have discovered and activated substack’s only feature currently integrating notes with the main site. This should make it easy to lurk on my content for those who do not want to spend time in their own notes feed:

Hooray

Hotez ironically affirms DeSantis

This note of mine regarded Peter Hotez’s recent manifesto calling for a war on anti-science conspiracies (linked), saying

Not much daylight between how DeSantis characterizes vaccine mandates and how Peter Hotez, implying misinformation by DeSantis, characterizes childhood vaccination.

“Biomedical Security State” (bad) vs. “American Biomedical Science” (good?)

However, I later made a better visual including more of Hotez’s remarks. I quite like this, but it still probably isn’t worth a stand-alone post:

Larger:

McClane dies in Die Hard

A new theory occurred to me this weekend which required immediate publication to notes.

(This is clearly what you have subscribed to Unglossed for.)

Yes, SARS-CoV-2 is most likely a “textbook” virus

New bat coronavirus with furin cleavage site, nice coronavirus tree

Regarding the new bat cov, it is still in the wrong branch, so it is still true that nothing in the sarbecovirus branch which includes SARS-CoV-2 has been found to have a furin cleavage site. The zoonati are straw-manning a bit when they take this as a refutation of one of the arguments for a synthetic origin; a lot of those arguments have been focused on “sarbecovirus” rather than “bat coronavirus,” at least in my impression. Personally, however, I think the furin cleavage site is mostly notable as a bona fide insert from the last common ancestor between SARS-CoV-2 and related viruses. This doesn’t mean it’s unnatural, however. It is and has always been an ambiguous point of evidence, a bit over-discussed.

A random essay on Yukio Mishima from a Muslim right wing perspective

While exploring the weird, neurotically narcissistic

¹

world of right wing twitter this week, I found the work of one "Bheria," who offers a number of grand theories about humanity from a Muslim perspective. I liked his essay on Yukio Mishima. My admiration of Mishima long pre-dates my random trawl of right-wing twitter in May, 2023.

Cao et al. make another study that over-emphasizes “imprinting”

This study follows up one previously reviewed here. The work is very complex; in both cases I have reviewed the studies just to preemptively address any misinterpretations related to the way the authors verbally fret about “imprinting” so much.

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1. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.