Hon Prof Colin D Butler BMed, MSc(epi), PhD etc.

Just attended lecture by Prof. Charles Rice. Co-awarded Nobel Prize for HCV work. Asked 2 questions: A. Did he think modern virology can do harm as well as good? B. Does he have any comment on virology ethics & their trend? Acoustics poor. But he did convey concern that AI & 1/2

Speaking of suspicious timing of the COVID outbreak — here is Ralph Baric emailing Peter Daszak, president of EcoHealth Alliance, on January 13, 2020: “Looks like we found our highly variable SARS-like CoV!” “Highly variable” is how they described SARS-like CoVs with spikes 10–25% divergent from SARS1 in a joint grant proposal between EcoHealth Alliance, Baric’s lab, and the Wuhan Institute of Virology, submitted in late 2018. So I wonder — was he remarking on the incredible coincidence that the virus they decided to hunt for only a year prior didn’t just turn up in some bat cave in the mountains of Yunnan, but actually spilled over into humans in Wuhan, home of the very lab that set out to look for it? And I also wonder if by January 13 Baric didn’t yet realize that this “highly variable SARS-like CoV” also had a furin cleavage site — a feature so uncharacteristic of SARS-like CoVs that he proposed engineering one in DEFUSE in 2018.

Targeting Kharazi sure looks like an effort to undermine peace talks and prolong the war. It would be good to know if the attack was American or Israeli, and if Israeli whether the Americans signed off on it.

Crazy that NASA can send people to the moon, yet few are listening to their most prestigious scientists’ dire warnings about climate change. Former NASA Goddard Institute of Space Studies Director Dr James Hansen: youtu.be/hWwJhH-sj0o?si… #Artemis #artemis2 #florida #liftoff

National Press Club copping heavy criticism, again More than a quarter of the NPC’s sponsors are part of the global arms industry or working on its behalf I investigated arms industry infiltration of the NPC in Nov (after it cancelled Chris Hedges) 👇 tinyurl.com/3m27yvyp

When US allies don't condemn Trump's illegality, it encourages more. Being quiet in the face of lawlessness, hoping to somehow mitigate it by other efforts, is naive. Trump will take anything he can get if there’s not an outpouring of opposition to it. trib.al/oIbzT9r

JUST IN: Three thousand ships are anchored in and around the Strait of Hormuz. Twenty thousand seafarers are aboard them. Fresh food ran out two weeks ago. Perishables are rotting in refrigerated holds whose generators are burning through the last reserves of diesel. Water is rationed. Mental health is deteriorating. No mass evacuation plan exists. No humanitarian corridor has been negotiated. No international body has the authority or the means to move twenty thousand people off three thousand ships through a five-nautical-mile channel controlled by the IRGC. These are the people who move the global economy. Every barrel of oil that reaches a refinery was carried by a seafarer. Every container of goods that stocks a shelf was loaded by one. Every tonne of fertiliser that feeds a field was shipped by one. The war has trapped the invisible workforce that makes globalisation function, and the world has not noticed because the world never notices seafarers until the shelves are empty. The ships themselves are worth tens of billions. The cargo aboard them is worth more. Crude oil, liquefied natural gas, urea, ammonia, consumer electronics, automotive parts, and 200 cryogenic containers of helium that are boiling off at a rate that no engineer can reverse. The stranded fleet is a floating warehouse of every molecule the global economy needs, and the molecules are degrading while the crews ration drinking water. The cargo is valued higher than the people guarding it, and neither can move. The IRGC’s Larak corridor clearance system does not only control entry. It controls exit. A vessel that wants to leave the anchorage zone must obtain the same clearance code, submit the same documentation, and receive the same pilot escort as a vessel seeking to transit. The customs border works in both directions. These crews are not stranded by geography alone. They are stranded by bureaucracy, the same bureaucracy Iran wrapped in the language of sovereign maritime governance when the parliamentary committee approved the Hormuz Management Plan. The toll booth charges for passage through. It also charges for passage out. No centralised evacuation exists because evacuation at this scale would require IRGC approval, and requesting approval would legitimise the system the United States refuses to recognise. So the crews wait. The International Transport Workers Federation issues statements. P&I clubs cover individual medical evacuations by helicopter. Flag states, predominantly Panama, Liberia, and the Marshall Islands, register ships but do not operate navies. The system that made global shipping cheap by divorcing flag from nationality has left twenty thousand people without a government willing to retrieve them. The seafarers are from the Philippines, India, Bangladesh, Myanmar, Indonesia. Countries whose workers crew the world’s merchant fleet because the monthly pay of $1,500 to $3,000 exceeds anything available at home. They signed contracts to deliver cargo across oceans. They did not sign contracts to become indefinite residents of a war zone, rationing water on a ship whose cargo of ammonia could feed a million people if it could reach a port that is 40 nautical miles and one IRGC clearance code away. The helium boils off. The fertiliser waits. The crude oil sits. And the people who carry it all drink less water today than yesterday. The supply chain has a human body at the very bottom of it. The body is thirsty. open.substack.com/pub/shanakaans…

Tens of thousands of publications from 2025 might include invalid references generated by AI, a Nature analysis suggests go.nature.com/4dnjvil

We imagine hunter gatherers living in harmony with nature. But just 5 million of them drove more than half the world's large mammals to extinction.

The Nino index (Nino3.4) has just reached Nino-neutral, but global SST (sea surface temperature) has matched the highest level for this date, which was achieved during the last El Nino. Super warming is clear. Look for a global temperature soon of at least +1.7C, even if the "Super" El Nino turns out to be half-baked. The University of Maine Climate Change Institute has a spectacular interactive graphic that they update daily. It is a valuable research and communications tool. Link to graph: climatereanalyzer.org/clim/sst_daily…

Your "moment of doom" for Apr. 1, 2026 ~ The less you know! "A technical meeting of the IPCC in Bangkok last week became tense ... after Saudi Arabia and India insisted that a delay to the next report be formally considered." lemonde.fr/en/climate/art…

In the 2nd episode of 'In Defense of Climate Change,' @RogerPielkeJr reviews the book 'Science Under Siege' by Michael Mann & Peter Hotez (aka “Stick and Jab”), while I can’t get over the fact Roger gets to be a member of an exclusive 'anti-science cabal' and I don’t

""This is a wake-up call," Indonesian president @prabowo said last week, in a call to push for electrification & renewables. Indonesia aims to have 100GW of solar power in "no later than two years", up from its current 11GW, he said, w/ earlier plans including BESS deployments. "We'll convert all motorcycles into electric motorcycles. All cars, all trucks, all tractors must [also] be electric," he added." #alwaysbecharging Jaap Burger shared this earlier.

Major problem

South Korea's President on energy crisis: 'It’s a situation so serious that even I can’t sleep. South Korea needs to transition to renewable energy quickly. If we rely on fossil energy, the future will be extremely risky.' donga.com/news/Politics/…

This is my favorite climate change chart. Japanese monks, aristocrats, and emperors kept meticulous records of cherry blossom festivals for 1,200 years and accidentally built the world's longest climate dataset.

In Jan 2020, Baric was introduced in the Red Dawn emails as the Mt Rushmore of Coronavirus experts. He replied, "I luv humor" 2 months later, Baric lied to high level US Gov officials since SARS2 has 5 restriction sites creating 6 segments, just like he designed it

Israel’s Ambassador to Australia says Palestinians deserve the death penalty because they’re “deranged” and “the usual punishments don’t work”. This is what apartheid and genocide look like when they come together. Disgusting.

For some reason Angie Rasmussen - "It was not a goddamn lab leak" - blocks me on X I spent some time with Claude AI evaluating her summary arguments (L image) why a lab leak is not possible They are ... not good (R image) Cherrypicking, ignoring literature, name calling

Holy shit... Stanford just proved that GPT-5, Gemini, and Claude can't actually see. They removed every image from 6 major vision benchmarks. The models still scored 70-80% accuracy. They were never looking at your photos. Your scans. Your X-rays. Here's what's really going on: ↓ The paper is called MIRAGE. Co-authored by Fei-Fei Li. They tested GPT-5.1, Gemini-3-Pro, Claude Opus 4.5, and Gemini-2.5-Pro across 6 benchmarks -- medical and general. Then silently removed every image. No warning. No prompt change. The models didn't even notice. They kept describing images in detail. Diagnosing conditions. Writing full reasoning traces. From images that were never there. Stanford calls it the "mirage effect." Not hallucination. Something worse. Hallucination = making up wrong details about a real input. Mirage = constructing an entire fake reality and reasoning from it confidently. The models built imaginary X-rays, described fake nodules, and diagnosed conditions -- all from text patterns alone. But that's not the scary part. They trained a "super-guesser" -- a tiny 3B parameter text-only model. Zero vision capability. Fine-tuned it on the largest chest X-ray benchmark (696,000 questions). Images removed. It beat GPT-5. It beat Gemini. It beat Claude. It beat actual radiologists. Ranked #1 on the held-out test set. Without ever seeing a single X-ray. The reasoning traces? Indistinguishable from real visual analysis. Now here's what should terrify you: When the models fake-see medical images, their mirage diagnoses are heavily biased toward the most dangerous conditions. STEMI. Melanoma. Carcinoma. Life-threatening diagnoses -- from images that don't exist. 230 million people ask health questions on ChatGPT every day. They also found something wild: → Tell a model "there's no image, just guess" -- performance drops → Silently remove the image and let it assume it's there -- performance stays high The model enters "mirage mode." It doesn't know it can't see. And it performs BETTER when it doesn't know it's blind. When Stanford applied their cleanup method (B-Clean) to existing benchmarks, it removed 74-77% of all questions. Three-quarters of "vision" benchmarks don't test vision. Every leaderboard. Every "multimodal breakthrough." Every benchmark score you've seen this year. Built on mirages. Code is open-sourced. Paper is live on arXiv. If you're building anything with multimodal AI -- especially in healthcare -- read this paper before you ship. (Link in the comments)

Oh look, Angie wrote her own “Turner Diary-esque [sic] manifesto.” COVID origins must be trending again 🙂 And of course the “proof of natural origin by Eddie Holmes’ 2014 photo” is there (see screenshot). Yes, Eddie photographed raccoon dogs at the Huanan market in 2014. And yet no SARS-CoV-2 emerged back then — nor in any year between then and 2019, nor at any of the thousands of other wet markets operating across China for centuries. In contrast, the main arguments FOR the lab leak case rest not just on the location but also on the TIMING of the SARS2 outbreak — coinciding with WIV coauthoring the DEFUSE proposal and setting out to look for novel SARS-like CoVs with spikes 10-25% divergent from SARS1. This was 2018, just a year before the outbreak. MOREOVER, there is the presence of the FCS in SARS2, so uncharacteristic of SARS-like CoVs, and so suspicious in light of DEFUSE proposing to engineer novel FCSes into exactly this type of viruses. So the fact that Eddie Holmes documented the same wildlife trade at the same market five years earlier with no pandemic only sharpens the core question: out of all the wet markets in China, across all those years, why did a SARS-like CoV carrying an unprecedented FCS emerge specifically in the city housing WIV, and specifically one year after DEFUSE?