Sunday, July 31, 2022

Justice You Shall Pursue

I recently came across Justice You Shall Pursue, an interview with Charles Fain Lehman in Time Well Spent, the substack of Sotonye.  Sotonye is a pseudonym.  It's a Nigerian name, and the author claims to be a native West African, who's lived most his life in Los Angeles, and is a recent convert to Judaism.  

Lehman writes for City Journal, primarily on issues of crime justice, along with another City Journal writer, Rafael Mangual, author of the new book, Criminal (In)Justice, who's been recently interviewed by both Tucker Carlson and Trevor Noah, making him part of a very, very small group to be on both shows (I've never watched either).  You can find a summary of Mangual's thesis here). 

Sotonye asks interesting questions and Lehman speaks thoughtfully and avoids overstating his case.  Crime is not the sole focus.  At one point, Sotonye asks Lehman about being a parent, and I like his response:

. . . parenting is existentially satisfying in a way that many things aren't. A lot of what we fill our days with are "experiences," or sensual stimuli—television, social media, vacations, sports games, etc. etc. Those are great, don't get me wrong. I love to cook and eat, which is a primarily sensual experience. But I think many people often feel, in my view rightly, a certain emptiness associated with this lifestyle. "What is this all for?" we might ask, or, “What is the purpose of this?" "Why get out of bed in the morning?" One thing I have discovered as a parent is that this is basically not a question I need to ask anymore. The reason I get out of bed in the morning is because my son needs me to. Being a parent means having a whole other person whose whole world you are.

Of course his child is only two.  Let's ask him again after the teenage years!

Two thoughts prompted by the interview:

The first is whether the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (CRA) was a mistake in not limiting its scope to the problem we were trying to remedy - the exclusion of black Americans from the full scope of legal rights of citizenship, as well as their de facto exclusion from large parts of American life.

During the debates over the 14th Amendment after the Civil War, an alternative was proposed simply stating:

All national and State laws shall be equally applicable to every citizen, and no discrimination shall be made on account of race and color.

It was overwhelmingly defeated in the Senate and instead we ended up with the more complex and legally ambiguous version of the Amendment we have now, in which we are still debating what "due process of law", "privileges and immunities of citizens" and "equal protection" mean 150 years later. 

The one sentence version was doomed to defeat because, at the time, white Americans would not accept social equality for blacks, but in the long-term I think it would have served us much better.  Was the same true of the CRA, which I've always considered one of the two greatest federal legislative achievements of the 20th century (the other being the 1965 Voting Rights Act)?  It is something recent events have led me to question. (1)

Lehman does not make this argument, instead focusing on what he regards as policy changes under the auspices of the Act.  Nonetheless, it prompted me to see the analogy between what happened with the 14th Amendment and the CRA, as well as the repeated refusal of the Supreme Court to follow the literal language of the CRA (see Will Plessy Ever Be Overruled?), as pointing to a more fundamental problem.

Here's his take:

From the late 1940s, mainstream America became increasingly concerned with the status of black people . . . .  it became increasingly apparent to many Americans that black citizens, particularly in the south, were still subject to explicit and horrific discrimination. People were radicalized by concrete displays of this animus . . . To resolve this very particular problem, however, Congress passed an extraordinarily general, sweeping law, prohibiting discrimination on a wide variety of bases. In most parts, this law was formally colorblind. But many of its ambiguities and unintended consequences gave birth to a system that was anything but. 

The first development comes from how courts chose to understand the idea of discrimination. While the authors of the CRA had intended for the law to restrain discriminatory intent (there's Congressional discussion to this effect), judges and regulators (e.g. the EEOC) began to focus on discriminatory outcomes. They adopted explicitly color-conscious approaches, using disparate impact as evidence of discrimination, or seeking to impose quotas in higher education.

The second development is a product of the way that, rather than target blacks specifically, the CRA was written to confer protections—and therefore rights—on the basis of general categories. This was not really seen as a problem at the time, because America was more or less divided between blacks and whites, with only small Hispanic (not even really a discrete group) and almost no Asian population—conferring civil rights protections on the basis of race or ethnicity meant protecting blacks. But once the privilege existed, groups started jockeying for formal recognition as needing protection, which carried with it access to jobs and government resources. This situation was compounded by the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, which dramatically changed immigration law and heralded America's great ethnic transformation.

The second is being struck by how much of an oddball the United States is on free speech because in the rest of the world tribalism still reigns.  While I knew this, I was reminded of just how different we are when it comes to speech, even compared to other democracies.  The question for us is whether the New Racists will succeed in making us more like other countries, with all the enmity, jealousy, and enhanced conflict it would entail.  Lehman's take:

In reality, I think the woke program is pretty straightforward. Society is composed of groups, those groups are in conflict, one of those groups has more power than the other groups for historically contingent reasons, the best way to resolve that conflict is to work toward intergroup equality, and laws and actions should be evaluated in relation to how they resolve that conflict. Not only are these not inexplicable values, many other cultures embrace them. They are often, just as one stark example, the working framework for post-conflict multiethnic states. A favorite example of how these values play out is in hate speech: the idea that we should ban hate speech sounds totally weird in the American context, simply because we think about the right to speak as a fundamental political right, a basic component of citizenship. But hate speech laws exist all over the world! And when Critical Race Theorists (yes, the real Critical Race Theorists, like Richard Delgado) talk about the issue, they often invoke not only those cases, but also the value system that undergirds them.(2)  Hate speech harms target groups, we should be concerned about harm to those groups, therefore we should prohibit hate speech.

There's much more of interest in the full piece which was quite thought-provoking.  I have several disagreements with Lehman; he's a death penalty proponent, I'm opposed; he favors drug prohibition, while I'm undecided, though more inclined his way than twenty years ago (I do think the widespread media and academic normalization of drug use is a tragedy).

---------------------------------

(1)  My point is not whether other groups should have civil rights, but perhaps we would have been better served focusing on the unique circumstances of those involuntary brought to America, held in servitude, and their descendants.  Whatever other groups may have faced, the degree, extent, and duration of discrimination against these people is unparalleled in our history.

(2)  The value system that undergirds CRT in Delgado's own words:

Unlike traditional civil-rights discourse, which stresses incrementalism and step-by-step progress, critical race theory questions the very foundation of the liberal order; including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law.

For the critical race theorist, objective truth, like merit, does not exist, at least in social science and politics.  In these realms, truth is a social construct created to suit the purposes of the dominant group. 

If the vision of Delgado and other New Racists (including those embedded in the Biden Administration) were to triumph, we are looking at a very different country.  As I've noted elsewhere the analytical lenses brought to bear on society by white nationalists and the New Racists is the same; the only difference being who should end up on top at the end.  It is why the many liberals, progressives, and socialists I now read who oppose this movement, and have mostly been expelled from their former circles for their heresy, recognize the danger it poses to democracy; it is a totalitarian ideology.

Saturday, July 30, 2022

Reasonable Creatures

So convenient a thing to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for every thing one has a mind to do.

From the autobiography of Benjamin Franklin which I'm in the midst of reading.  A marvelous piece of work.  This passage is from when, as a young man, Franklin, who had adopted a vegetarian diet, was persuaded to join a fish fry, first explaining to the reader his reasoning for doing so. 

Franklin's autobiography follows his life until 1757, though he died, at age 84, in 1790, and was not published until after his death.

I was inspired to read the autobiography after recently finishing Author-In-Chief: The Untold Story of Our Presidents and the Books They Wrote by Craig Fehrman, the first work on the subject.  Though Franklin never served as president, Fehrman starts with his autobiography as the first memoir of a prominent American.  Author-In-Chief does not just concern itself with memoirs, covering all books by our presidents, several of whom were also prominent authors and/or scholars.  It is also more than just a book about presidential books, weaving in the story of the development of the publishing industry and the growth of readership across time.

Though I only read Fehrman's book recently, it was a reference in either a review or interview with him that led me to read The Autobiography of Calvin Coolidge (see my post Not A Great Man), which he considers the best work of its kind.  I've now added several more presidential works to my reading list while finding, to my surprise, that Ronald Reagan's pre-presidential autobiography, Where's The Rest of Me?, praised by Fehrman, is now out of print.

Friday, July 29, 2022

Song For Sharon

It seems we all live so close to that line

And so far from satisfaction

Joni Mitchell, from a 1983 concert, a much harder rocking version than that on Hejira, the 1977 album on which it first appeared.

Sunday, July 24, 2022

Papi

Today David Ortiz is being inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame.  Next to Willie Mays, my favorite ballplayer.  So many good memories.  An outstanding, clutch, and inspirational ballplayer.  Big Papi changed the nature of Red Sox baseball - from a team that always found a way to lose to a team you expected to win.  He is deservedly the most popular player in Red Sox history.

2004 will always remain the most memorable season of my life, and attending the victory parade an unforgettable moment.  Mrs THC and I were at his last regular season game and retirement ceremony on October 2, 2016 but the 2013 season is hard to top for memorable moments, from Papi's speech in Fenway after the Boston Marathon bombing, through a great season and then came the playoffs.  

Against the Tigers, the Sox and Papi were struggling, until he hit that grand slam to tie Game 2, and after that the Sox were unstoppable.  In the World Series, David hit an unbelievable .625 with an OPS of .760, and I was fortunate to be in the bleachers at Game 6 when the Sox won the series at home for the first time since 1918.  But my favorite moment of that Series was in Game 4, with the Sox down two games to one, in the fifth inning, Ortiz gathered his teammates around him for a pep talk, something very, very rare to see in a baseball game.  In the top of the 6th inning, Johnny Gomes hit a three run homer to put the Sox ahead and they won the game and the next two to become champions.


Saturday, July 23, 2022

The Gladiator Returns

Russell Crowe has one of the most generous-spirited and good-humored twitter feeds, and it's one he manages personally.  Here he is a few days ago with some tourists outside the Colosseum in Rome.

To learn about the model for Maximus Decimus Meridius read this THC post, The Real Maximus.

Wednesday, July 20, 2022

A Fondness For Books

 "I most sincerely commiserate with such a person but I do not know how to help him."

Theodore Roosevelt

From Author In-Chief: The Untold Story of Our Presidents and the Books They Wrote by Craig Fehrman, quoting from an essay written by TR, regarding those, who unlike Teddy, did not read books.

Fehrman later writes of a visit by author Edith Wharton, a friend of Roosevelt, to the White House:

"That day Roosevelt complained that no one in his administration knew Alice's Adventures in Wonderland . . .  He had tried to joke with his secretary of the Navy, telling him, "Mr Secretary, what I say three times is true."  All he got in response was groveling. "Mr President", the secretary replied, "it would never for a moment have occurred to me to impugn your veracity."

Tying back to yesterday's post, as I read the sections in the book on Woodrow Wilson, I realized WW had at least a passing resemblance to Gustavo Fring, owner of the Los Pollos Hermanos fast food chain and successful meth distributor on the side, from Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul.  This is the content you come to THC for!

 Woodrow Wilson - Wikipedia

Gustavo Fring - Breaking Bad Wiki Guide - IGN

Tuesday, July 19, 2022

Paying The Price

Last night was the 9th episode of the final season of Better Call Saul.  Four more shows left.

Unlike the violence of the past two episodes, the show was quieter, but the consequences for those left standing after 7 and 8 were made clear.  For all the clever plotting, distinctive cinematography, and violence, both Better Call Saul and its predecessor are fundamentally about the choices one makes and the ultimate moral accountability and responsibility for the results.

Mike Ehrmantraut paid a visit to Nacho's father.  Nacho sacrificed himself to save his dad from the cartel and, in the process, gained the respect of the often cynical and detached Mike.  Ehrmantraut felt an obligation to Nacho's dad, in part, because Mike thought he had something in common with the father.  When they met, symbolically separated by a chain link fence, and Mike told of his son's death and that it would be avenged and justice served, Nacho's dad scoffed at him, rejecting the notion of "gangster" judgment and his attempt at consolation, a blow to what little was left of Mike's own sense of honor and self-respect.

 

Having killed the lethal and incredibly charismatic Lalo Salamanca, Gustavo Fring is at his favorite restaurant, enjoying a superb wine at the bar, when a younger man from the restaurant (it's never made clear if he is the sommelier, maitre'd, or some other staff) who knows Gus, engages with him in a relaxed and spirited conversation about wine.  It's the first fully human moment we've ever seen from Gus, after so many years on Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul.  Gus is on the verge of inviting the young man to his home when he's called away momentarily.  We see Gus composing himself, retreating into his armor, determined not to be tempted into anything that will deter him from the terrible vengeance he seeks against those who did he and his partner wrong years before.  He leaves before the restaurant guy returns.  Gus is back to being utterly alone with his utterly disciplined life, a path leading to his literal destruction in Breaking Bad.

And then we come to Kim Wexler and Jimmy McGill.  The consequences of the "fun" they were having with Howard (who became a much more sympathetic character this year), resulted in Howard's murder, the destruction of his reputation, a terrifying encounter with Lalo, and Kim's willingness to kill someone she did not know in order to save Jimmy.  It's all too much to bear for Kim, who leaves Jimmy.  As the final scene makes clear, Jimmy now finally disappears and Saul Goodman is there permanently.

Where do we go from here?  I suspect we will see more of Gene Takavic, the identity Saul adopted after fleeing Albuquerque at the end of Breaking Bad, to become an Assistant Manager at a Cinnabon in an Omaha mall.  What role will the mysterious taxi driver play?  Is Kim Wexler gone forever or will we see her again?  Will the Better Call Saul team stick the landing at the end?  I wouldn't bet against them.  It is remarkable how, starting from a flimsy premise centered on the most clownish character in the Breaking Bad universe, Better Call Saul created a world with complex characters we care about, even as we are often horrified at the same time.

Miracle Drug

Freedom has a scent
Like the top of a new born baby's head

I know exactly what they mean.

U2's 2004 album, How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb, displays both the band's excesses (mostly when Bono's lyrics, not infrequently, go 100% bombastic) and its strengths (mostly the atmospheric guitar touches of The Edge, about which I've written previously).

Miracle Drug is one of my favorites from the album.  At 2:45 listen to the guitar pattern solo by The Edge and then his playing during the verse in which he deploys his trademark; distinctive tonal strokes in that gray area between lead and rhythm guitar.


Saturday, July 16, 2022

The Babe Recovers

r/HistoryPorn - Babe Ruth with the New York Yankees knocked out after running into the outfield wall during a game against the Washington Senators at Griffith Stadium in 1924 [4615 × 3726]

Came across the photo above, showing Babe Ruth, laying unconscious on the field in Griffith Stadium, home of the Washington Senators, on July 5, 1924, and decided to find out more about the game and, in particular, how Ruth responded.  Not infrequently, we see players suffering injuries like this and having their performance fall off for a while.  On other occasions, the adrenaline kicks in and they do well for a couple of games and then fall off.  Sometimes it seems to have no impact.

The Yankees were playing the Senators, who were atop the American League standings, in a double header that day.  In the first inning, Ruth smacked a double off Senator starter Walter Johnson and singled off the Big Train in the 3rd.  In the fourth inning, with the Senators having a runner on 3rd and two outs, Joe Judge smoked a Herb Pennock pitch down the right field line.  Ruth sprinted for the ball, and just as it fell foul into the stands, the right fielder ran full tilt into the low concrete pavilion parapet wall.  Babe fell to the ground, unconscious, and the Yankee trainer ran out to him.  The photo is taken after the trainer reached the fallen player.

About the photo:

There are three people tending to Ruth, one of whom is the Yankee trainer.  Who are the other two?

To the right, on the steps, is a basket of what appears to be soda pop.  Could one of those attending to Ruth be a soda vendor?

The crowd overlooking the scene is integrated.  It would not surprise me if in 1924 seating at the stadium in DC was still segregated.  Was it? 

Ruth was reportedly unconscious for five minutes and when revived insisted on staying in the game, over the wishes of Manager Miller Huggins (Ruth defying Huggins' wishes was a consistent theme of their relationship in its first few years).

In the 6th, the Bambino came to the plate again against Johnson and hit another double, this one off the center field wall.  In his final at bat, Johnson walked Babe.

Ruth then played the second game of the double header going 0-3.

Were there longer-term impacts?  

Three days later, Huggins rested Ruth for a game with the New York Times reporting, "Ruth, who is too badly crippled to play, is worried over the condition of his side".

But despite being "crippled" and "worried", from July 6 to August 8, Babe Ruth embarked on one of the longest hot streaks of his career.  After the double header of July 5 he was hitting .351.  Thirty seven games later, Ruth's batting average was .408.

Over those thirty seven games, the Babe hit .507 with 17 home runs, scoring and driving in 46 runs, a slugging percentage of 1.022 and OPS of .595.

I think he did just fine.

 

Thanks to Chad Osbourne of the Society of American Baseball Research for his account of the details of the game and to Baseball-Reference which enabled me to investigate Ruth's daily game log after his injury.


"Basically the 8th"

Possibly the greatest in-game fan interview in baseball history.

The location: Wrigley Field, where the Cubs are playing the Mets 

The subject: How is a "beer cup snake" constructed?

The interviewer: Steve Gelbs of the Mets cable network 

The interviewee: Jake, who evidently has unfilled an impressive number of beer cups.

You gotta like Jake's self assurance, composure, and his shout-out to start the interview.

Highlight:

Jake: "What is it now, 8th inning, ninth?

Steve: "7th". [It is bottom of the 7th; no outs]

Jake: "Basically the 8th, Steve".

Also, don't miss the Red Sox fan on the left.


Friday, July 15, 2022

Lend Me Your Ears

In March I linked to Damian Lewis' fine rendition of Marc Antony's funeral oration speech from William Shakespeare's Julius Caesar.  I came across an even better performance of the speech today, this one by Jake Phillips, about whom I know nothing.  The combination of Jake's acting ability and his Southern accent makes for a memorable rendition.

I don't have a Tik Tok account (and recommend against it) so am linking it via a twitter account I frequently read.

On our recent drive cross-country we listened to many of The Rest Is History podcasts by British historians Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook, which are funny, entertaining, and educational.  Among these were several on Caesar's crossing of the Rubicon and on the life of Cleopatra, in both of which Marc Antony played key roles.

Thursday, July 14, 2022

Have We Learned Anything?

At least in the case of Covid, probably not.

In October 2021, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) (1) announced a $125 million, 5 year grant, to Washington State University and partners to find and collect an estimated 8,000 to 12,000 novel viruses existing in the wild, including coronaviruses, "which researchers will then screen and sequence the genomes of the ones that pose the most risk to animal and human health".

I was alerted to this by a recent post from Richard H Ebright, Board of Governors Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Rutgers, a long time opponent of virus hunting, who only became aware of the grant via a July 5 article in Forbes by Steven Salzberg, Professor of Biomedical Engineering, Computer Science, and Biostatistics at Johns Hopkins, who also opposes such research. 

UPDATE: August 5, 2022  This link takes you to Prof Ebright's Senate testimony on August 3, 2022 in which he explains what gain of function research is, why he opposes it, the failure of NIH to enforce its own guidelines, and how it may be linked to a potential lab leak from the Wuhan lab, the possible origin point for Covid 19.  You can watch the entire hearing with Ebright and two other scientists at this C-Span link.  It is long (1:45) but a very clear and educational discussion by the panelists, making it essential viewing for anyone trying to understand the issue.  It is also very sobering, not just about the potential source of covid-19, but about the larger implications of continued American funding of such research, of which we are the world's leader, and its potential for unleashing an even more deadly pandemic.(2)

Why is this significant?  Because we are still in the midst of a novel-Covid virus pandemic that started in the city which houses the world's largest virology laboratory specializing in finding novel coronaviruses existing in the wild, bringing them back to its lab where it screens and sequences the genomes of the ones that pose the most risk to animal and human health, which it does by, among other things, running them through humanized mice, and where the lab may also have been altering the genomes in unique ways to test their potential human impact.

Two and a half years after the pandemic began there has not been conducted, by China, the U.S., WHO, or by anyone else, a full and transparent investigation into the origins of the pandemic, and key information remains withheld (and possibly destroyed) by China and the United States.

Ebright, Salzberg and others opposed to virus hunting in the wild and gain of function research, believe it highly unlikely that it will provide the benefits its proponents promote, identification, prevention, and development of vaccines in advance; rather that it risks creating the very pandemic it seeks to prevent.  They believe Exhibit 1 is the Covid-19 pandemic, which broke out in the very city where the world's leading research lab on bat viruses is located, yet it was unable to do anything to predict or prevent this very outbreak and, may indeed, have been its very origin.

At a minimum, the U.S. should not be funding any further research of this type until it determines whether the Covid outbreak was of zoonotic origin or via a laboratory leak, and until we have full confidence that such research can be done safely in non-urban locations.  Even with that, I am unpersuaded at this point of the value of such research.

While we desperately need an open investigation into all possibilities, my own views on the origins have changed since early 2020.  At that time, I felt a lab leak was a possible source, but also believed the predominant theory that it was the wet market in Wuhan that was the likely source (including the possibility that a lab tech might have sold an infected animal to someone in the market, which has happened before in China).  Today, my default assumption is the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) was the source via an accidental release.

Back in March 2020, I misunderstood some factual aspects, having heard the WIV was located in Wuhan after the SARS epidemic because it was near the area where infected bats were found, thus facilitating study.  This was incorrect.  The WIV was opened before SARS and the bats it was studying were imported from hundreds of miles away in South China and Southeast Asia.

We also now know that 2 1/2 years after the pandemic began no intermediate host animals, the direct transmittal route to humans, have been identified for the Covid-19 virus.  I was in China just before and just after the SARS outbreak and am well aware that the intermediate host (civets) were identified within two months.(3)

It's also been revealed that U.S. Embassy officials in Beijing who visited the WIV prior to the pandemic were concerned enough about safety issues to prominently raise this in communications.

But there's more, and it goes to the reaction to the outbreak in China and, sadly, in the United States.

In September 2019, the WIV online database went offline.  This database, the largest in the world of coronavirus genomes, had been available to researchers from other countries, including the U.S., which also provided some of WIV's funding.(4)  It has never been restored.  The China government refused to fully cooperate and give open access to the WIV during the WHO investigation in early 2020, and has refused repeated calls to cooperate with any further investigation.  More recently, we've learned that samples taken from early Covid patients in Wuhan, which might shed some light on origins and timing of the outbreak, have been destroyed.  The behavior of the government and associated entities is in marked contrast to what happened with SARS in the early 2000s, and we can make reasonable inferences from this behavior. 

And then there is the role of the United States.

Since 2009, USAID has run an international program called PREDICT, funding projects to identify and analyze wildlife viruses with the potential to cause pandemics, and one of its long-time partners is the EcoHealth Alliance.  Over the years, as virus-hunting has increased under PREDICT,  EcoHealth Alliance has been generously funded to coordinate these efforts internationally.  For the five years prior to the recent announcement of the Washington State grant, EcoHealth had a $62 million contract to undertake similar activities, meaning that the recent grant is not just a continuation but an acceleration of virus-hunting efforts.  EcoHealth Alliance has played a key role because of its advocacy, project leadership and serving as a link between various international organizations, including in the U.S., and the Wuhan Institute of Virology.  In 2016, a parallel international effort, the Global Virome Project (GVP), spearheaded by EcoHealth, was launched to identify all zoonotic viruses with pandemic potential.

In response to FOIA requests since the outbreak of the pandemic, we now have documents showing that the GVP was proceeding quickly and along with funding from NIAID and other sources was also being funded by the Chinese government.  China was also independently funding this research; according to a State Department cable in April 2018:

"Chinese govt funds projects similar to GVP to investigate the background of viruses and bacteria.  This essentially constituted China's own Virome Project . . . The Wuhan Institute of Virology . . . is the forerunner to the Global Virome Project . . . China has expressed interest in building the GVP database.  Other countries . . . are skeptical on whether China could remain transparent as a gatekeeper for this information."

According to the annual PREDICT report in December 2018, the China Virome Project would rollout in 2019-20.

For technical expertise in evaluating projects and contractors, USAID relies on the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), which is housed within NIH and headed since 1984 by Dr Anthony Fauci, who has been a prominent advocate for virus-hunting and gain of function research.  NIH and NIAID also directly fund research regarding bats and coronaviruses, including grants to WIV.  In addition, DoD is also funding research in this area through its Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).  EcoHealth Alliance has received funding from all of these sources.

Further, in early 2018, EcoHealth Alliance submitted a proposal to DARPA for Project DEFUSE, a name taken from the goal of the project to "defuse the potential for spillover of novel bat-origin high zoonotic-risk SARS-related coronaviruses in Asia".  To do this, field teams would identify and sample bats with potential high risk spillover SARSr-CoVs.  The teams would then "sequence their spike proteins, reverse engineer them to conduct binding assays and insert them into SARSr-CoV backbones (. . . exempt from dual use and gain of function concerns) to infect humanized mice and assess capacity to cause SARS-like disease".
 
Included in the proposal was a plan to insert a furin cleavage site into a bat coronavirus.  In early 2020, when the COVID-19 genome was analyzed a key and distinctive feature was it had a furin cleavage site which enabled the virus to more efficiently bind to and release its genetic material into a human cell, triggering a dispute among virologists as to its origin.

In addition to EcoHealth Alliance as the lead organization (with Dr Peter Daszak, President of EcoHealth as the Principal Investigator for the project), the proposal identifies five other "team members", four of which are located in the United States, the fifth being the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

The proposal was rejected by DARPA.  Among the reasons for rejection were:
 
1.  The proposal is considered to potentially involve GoF/DURC research . . . 
2.  . . . the proposal does not mention of assess potential risks of Gain of Function (GoF) research 
3.  Nor does the proposal mention of assess Dual Use Research of Concern (DURC) issues . . . 
4. The proposal hardly addresses or discusses ethical, legal, and social issues.
Meanwhile, during 2018, the Chinese Academy of Sciences was funding projects at WIV, along the same lines as those proposed in project DEFUSE, and Peter Daszak made continued visits and was in frequent communication with WIV.

What we have in the two years leading to the pandemic is an accelerating effort to identify and manipulate potentially threatening bat viruses at a laboratory in the very city where the outbreak started.

[UPDATE 8/3/22: In a recent article, Alina Chan put it this way:

Disturbingly, documents leaked in September 2021 revealed that Wuhan scientists were part of an international research proposal (from early 2018) that described exactly the type of research that could have created the pandemic virus. Put it this way, it is as if these scientists proposed to put horns on horses and 2 years later a unicorn shows up in their town. When they discover this unicorn and describe it to the public, they talk about every other feature on the creature except for the horn.

Her article, The Evidence For A Natural vs Lab Origin of Covid-19, provides a succinct summary of the argument for both, and why further investigation is necessary.]

Even without China cooperation, there should be a lot of additional data in the hands of the U.S. and EcoHealth Alliance which might shed more insight on origins, but EcoHealth and Peter Daszak have refused to release data in its possession or discuss the matter in public and the U.S. has actively obstructed efforts to use FOIA to get relevant documents released.  What little I have related above, is only known because some information has been pried loose and other have come from leaks inside the agency, but what material has been released under FOIA has been heavily redacted.  This September 2021 article from The Atlantic, discusses some of the government obstruction, and its significance, particularly in regard to the furin cleavage site proposal made in 2018 to DARPA.

And that's even before we get to the events of early 2020.  On January 31, 2020 Dr Kristian Andersen of the Scripps Institute (a NIH and NIAID funding recipient) sent an email to Dr Fauci and others in which he wrote:
Some of the features (potentially) look engineered . . . all [referring to Andersen and other scientists] find the genome inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory . . . we have to look at this much more closely and there are still further analyses to be done, so those opinions could still change. 
Over the next four days there was an extensive exchange of emails and a multiparty conference call in which Dr Fauci and Francis Collins (head of NIH) participated.  While we know this occurred, NIH and NIAID have refused to release all but a tiny portion of these conversations.  Then, on February 4 there was a new consensus with Dr Andersen writing an email calling lab origin hypotheses “crackpot theories,” writing, “engineering can mean many things and could be done for basic research or nefarious reasons, but the data conclusively show that neither was done”, followed by a coordinated publicity effort to denounce any proponents of a lab leak as a racist conspiracy theorists, and then a series of articles in prestigious publications like The Lancet proclaiming the virus to clearly be of natural origins.(5)  Many of the virologists signing on to these articles were NIH and/or NIAID grant recipients or had financial ties to EcoHealth Alliance, and it was later revealed Peter Daszak played a key role in coordinating these efforts, though he cleverly avoided having his name attached to them.  For a more detailed explanation of the role of EcoHealth read this Vanity Fair article from March 2022, while this 2021 article in the MIT Technology Review discusses what the WIV may have been up to and the efforts of Dr Fauci to cover any tracks linking his work to the WIV.  For a detailed discussion of the late January/early February 2020 emails see this article in City Journal, by Nicholas Wade.

Peter Daszak has refused all requests to cooperate with congressional inquiries (helped by the fact that the majority party as no interest in such inquiries; for a summary of issues read this letter from House Republican committee members). 

Daszak's evasiveness has been so flagrant that it caused Prof Jeffrey Sachs, the politically progressive scientist from Columbia University, to dissolve the Covid origins panel he was asked to lead by The Lancet. According to Sachs, Daszak, the only American allowed by the China government to participate in the very limited WHO investigation in early 2020, and who was a member of The Lancet panel, refused to cooperate and provide EcoHealth grant documents.  At that point, Sachs recused Daszak from the panel and then, when the EcoHealth documents were leaked and the full extent of Daszak's conflict of interest became apparent, Sachs dissolved the entire panel because he felt its efforts were completely compromised.

These efforts have continued.  In February 2022, the New York Times ran a story on two preprints (non-peer reviewed and yet to be published) articles, one by Dr Andersen, purporting to prove the pandemic started in the Wuhan wet market.  This was part of a media blitz in which, once published by the Times, a paper which combines its own agenda on this with the stunning scientific ignorance of its reporters, it was picked up by many other publications, who went to other virologists primed to give quotes like the preprints had "cracked the case" and "settled" the controversy.  Naturally, the Times article presented no critiques of the preprint, although many soon became available, pointing out the obvious weaknesses in the papers.  I believe the preprints have still never been published in a journal.
 
[UPDATE 8/4/22: The preprints have now passed peer review and been published with much misleading coverage, despite the fact that peer review resulted in the most extreme claims and language in the preprints being modified.  Alina Chan provides a detailed critique in Evidence For A Natural Origin of Covid-19 No Longer Dispositive after Scientific Peer Review, in which she notes:
"After peer review, unscientific language was removed from the Worobey et al. manuscript. However, these strong claims in the preprint had already been widely reported in the media back in February 2022. Needless to say, those journalists likely will not be making corrections or publishing new stories to clarify that these excessive claims have now been eliminated by scientific peer review . . . there are no longer claims of dispositive or incontrovertible evidence in the peer-reviewed paper"
 
"The peer-reviewed paper has an entirely new section on “Study Limitations” which acknowledges that the scientists do not have access to the early Covid-19 case data or locations, lack direct evidence of a market animal infected with the pandemic virus, and lack complete details of how the market had been sampled for the virus."]
In May 2022, Prof Sachs and Prof Neil Harrison (also of Columbia) wrote an article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences calling on:
. . . US government scientific agencies, most notably the NIH, to support a full, independent, and transparent investigation of the origins of SARS-CoV-2. This should take place, for example, within a tightly focused science-based bipartisan Congressional inquiry with full investigative powers, which would be able to ask important questions—but avoid misguided witch-hunts governed more by politics than by science.
They go on to write:
The investigation into the origin of the virus has been made difficult by the lack of key evidence from the earliest days of the outbreak—there’s no doubt that greater transparency on the part of Chinese authorities would be enormously helpful. Nevertheless, we argue here that there is much important information that can be gleaned from US-based research institutions, information not yet made available for independent, transparent, and scientific scrutiny.
 
Blanket denials from the NIH are no longer good enough. Although the NIH and USAID have strenuously resisted full disclosure of the details of the EHA-WIV-UNC work program, several documents leaked to the public or released through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) have raised concerns. These research proposals make clear that the EHA-WIV-UNC collaboration was involved in the collection of a large number of so-far undocumented SARS-like viruses and was engaged in their manipulation within biological safety level (BSL)-2 and BSL-3 laboratory facilities, raising concerns that an airborne virus might have infected a laboratory worker. A variety of scenarios have been discussed by others, including an infection that involved a natural virus collected from the field or perhaps an engineered virus manipulated in one of the laboratories.
The article, which can be found here, goes into great detail on the specific aspects of the Covid-19 genome that raise concerns, and is worth reading in full. 

In an op-ed published a few days later in the Boston Globe, Sachs and Harrison were even more blunt:
The origins of the COVID-19 pandemic remain unknown, but may have had an assist from advanced US biotechnology. We do know this: The National Institutes of Health, which funded a lot of potentially hazardous and under-regulated laboratory manipulation of SARS-like viruses, has been less than transparent. And that’s stating matters politely. The NIH has done its part to throw scientists and the public off track regarding the US-based and funded research.

The fact is that NIH has not told the American people, or the scientific community, what it knows about the origins of SARS-CoV-2. In a conference call call on Feb. 1, 2020, NIH leaders heard top virologists explain why the FCS in SARS-CoV-2 indicated the possibility of laboratory manipulation of the virus. Yet just a few days later, NIH encouraged a team of scientists to prepare a paper declaring a natural origin of the virus. Subsequently, NIH has resisted the release of critical documentation and dragged its feet until forced to make disclosures under Freedom of Information Act lawsuits, often providing only highly redacted materials.
The Biden administration and the scientific community need to do better. What work did NIH, DOD, and other US agencies fund that might have contributed to the emergence of SARS-CoV-2? When did agencies of the USG first learn of the virus? What evidence might there be in the United States in the form of laboratory notes, electronic communications, virus databases, and other troves of information, that can shed light on this matter? Why did some components of the Intelligence Community lean toward a laboratory release as the source of the pandemic?

[UPDATE 8/4/22:  In an interview with Current Affairs (which you should read in its entirety), Professor Sachs elaborates on why an investigation is so needed and his theory as to why it has not yet happened in the United States.  Sachs goes into the details about the controversy over gain of function research and the extensive efforts of American agencies and scientists to block the release of relevant documents and stifle discussion.  

Regarding that research effort:

"The alternative that is the right one to look at is part of a very extensive research program that was underway from 2015 onward, funded by the NIH, by Tony Fauci, in particular NIAID [National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases], and it was to examine the spillover potential of SARS-like viruses. The champions of this research explained in detail their proposals. But after the event, we’d never asked them, “So what were you actually doing? What experiments did you do? What do you know?” We somehow never asked. It was better just to sweep it under the rug, which is what Fauci and the NIH have done up until this point. Maybe they could tell us, “Oh, full exoneration,” but they haven’t told us that at all. They haven’t shown us anything."

"Now, again, let me emphasize, we don’t have definitive evidence of either hypothesis. But what we do have is definitive evidence that officialdom has tried to keep our eyes away from the lab creation hypothesis."

The most interesting things that I got as chair of the Lancet commission came from Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuits and whistleblower leaks from inside the U.S. government. Isn’t that terrible? NIH was actually asked at one point: give us your research program on SARS-like viruses. And you know what they did? They released the cover page and redacted 290 pages. They gave us a cover page and 290 blank pages! [emphasis added] That’s NIH, for heaven’s sake. That’s not some corporation.

He also goes into more detail as to why he disbanded the task force on Covid origins, which he'd put together in his role running The Lancet's pandemic commission:

I appointed him—this was Peter Daszak—I appointed him to chair the task force of the pandemic commission that I was running for the Lancet. And he headed a task force on the origins. I thought, naively at the beginning, “Well, here’s a guy who is so connected, he would know.” And then I realized he was not telling me the truth. And it took me some months, but the more I saw it, the more I resented it. 

And so I told him, “Look, you have to leave.” And then the other scientists in that task force attacked me for being anti-scientific. And I asked them: “What are your connections with all of this?” They didn’t tell me. Then when the Freedom of Information Act released some of these documents that NIH had been hiding from the public, I saw that people that were attacking me were also part of this thing. So I disbanded that whole task force. So my own experience was to witness close up how they’re not talking. And they’re trying to keep our eyes on something else. And away from even asking the questions that we’re talking about. We don’t have the answers. But we have good reasons to ask. And we have good reasons to know that NIH is not doing its job properly right now.] (6)

So, here we sit in July 2022, with key documents still being withheld by the government agencies which supposedly serve us, while a million Americans are dead and perhaps as many as 20 million worldwide, and with our government funding an expanded virus hunting effort.


Which brings me to Dr Anthony Fauci and his role at NIAID.  Dr Fauci is a 21st century version of J Edgar Hoover and his long reign at the FBI.(7)  I wrote in March:

Once Fauci is gone, I am convinced, if anyone investigates, we will find many scandals at NIAID, just as we did at the FBI after Hoover's death.  Dr Fauci's reign is a prime example of letting an executive run a government agency for decades while escaping accountability.  The doctor last treated patients 51 years ago; has been a senior executive at NIAID for 48 years; and run the agency for the past 38 years.  Every manager in that organization owes their job and their future to Dr Fauci.  Nothing is done without his direct approval or approval by his devotees.  NIAID has a $6 billion budget, a large portion of which goes to funding virology research.  Fauci is the largest funder of such research in the U.S. and possibly the world.  Research careers are dependent upon the doctor's favor.  When Josh Rogin [foreign policy correspondent at the Washington Post] wrote Chaos Under Heaven, his book on the Trump's administration's China policy [for more on this excellent book, read my review], he reported that he was unable to get virologists to speak on the record about Fauci and the origins of Covid because of his control of their funding. (8)

And just like Hoover ran the FBI with an iron fist, involved at every level of decision making, Fauci shares with the former FBI Director a skilled sense of public relations and cultivation of the media, along with a dedicated public fan base that will quickly jump to his defense in response to any perceived challenge to his authority, and like Hoover, Fauci greatly enjoys the publicity and adoration he receives. In Fauci's case, he had the added advantage of establishing his credibility by contrasting himself to the eccentric and ignorant musings of President Trump in their joint press conferences during the early days of Covid.

Dr Fauci position has changed over time from ridiculing any notion of a lab leak origin to, when pressed, tepidly endorsing an investigation of Covid origins but, as the skilled bureaucrat he is, doing nothing to enable such investigation knowing that the current Congressional leadership has absolutely no interest in any investigation that might undermine Dr Fauci's reputation.  The doctor's interest is in smothering any thorough and objective look at this possibility.  Why? (9)

How many virologists are truly convinced that a lab origin hypothesis is not worth investigating?

Can their reasons withstand open inquiry?

Is there a fear that the type of research advocated by the virus hunters could have directly or indirectly led to the pandemic?

Is there a fear that if it did happen, that funding for such research could dry up? 

How has Fauci's control over virology funding impacted the willingness of virologists to speak out?

Maybe some day we will find out.

Could I be wrong with my default assumption about causation?  Sure.  But not about the lab leak being a worthwhile avenue of investigation.

The one thing I am certain of is that the out of hand dismissal of a possible lab leak; when the lab in question was the world largest investigator of bat coronaviruses; where it is possible that research involving the specific characteristics found in the Covid-19 genome may have been conducted; located in the very city where the pandemic began; when no other intermediate source has been identified; and when proponents of the lab leak hypothesis are smeared as racist, conspiracy theorists, is a disgrace to those in the virology community who have propounded this nonsense for the past two years, and yet another example of the self-destruction of our institutions.

-------------------------------------------------------------------

(1) Looking at the USAID press release I was surprised to find the current administrator of the agency is none other than Samantha Power, an outstanding example of a person with certain talents that are a complete mismatch to the government positions she has filled.  Ms Power wrote a fine book, A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide (2003), about the complexities of dealing with genocidal incidents like the massacre of the Tutsi in Rwanda during the 1990s.  The problems for Ms Power arose when she turned to doing policy and implementation.  She became one of the leading proponents of Responsibility to Protect, which boiled down to a doctrine under which the United States should actively intervene in other countries to protect human rights, but should not intervene to advance its own interests (I'm sure she would rephrase this as "protecting human rights is in American interests, but intervention to protect other U.S. interests bad").  During the Obama administration she served as Senior Director for Multilateral Affairs and Human Rights on the National Security Council and later as Ambassador to the United Nations, where, along with Hillary Clinton she was among the leading voices for the disastrous Western intervention in Libya, where we deposed a deplorable, but under control, dictator who had surrendered his nuclear program, and ended with the chaotic rule of warlords who have caused a decade of civil war, hosted terrorist groups, and triggered a mass migration of illegal immigrants into Europe.

(2) Since everything seems to have a political aspect now, I'll note that all of the Senators asking questions are Republicans.  I do not know the political affiliations of the other two panelists, but having been reading Dr Ebright's twitter feed for several months, it is evident he is a strong Democrat.

(3) In addition to the public release of information during SARS, my work in the safety and health fields put me in touch with China government officials involved with the outbreak and my conversations with them were consistent with the public explanations.  I'll add this was at a time when I was more optimistic about what China's future might be and its relations with the U.S.  Those days are long over.  I also had interesting discussions with officials at the National Development and Reform Commission (then the country's leading policy organization) about climate change and energy, but that's for another day and another post.

(4) This action has raised suspicion that the WIV may have become aware of something going wrong with its lab activities well-before the first reported Covid-19 cases (depending on the source, in either late November or early December).

(5) Even now, it is not uncommon for some to excuse the propaganda campaign by referencing Trump's supposed rhetoric but this gets the timetable wrong.  As Josh Rogin points out in Chaos Under Heaven, the racist conspiracy theory campaign was launched in early February 2020, at a time when Trump was focused on what he thought would be the triumphant announcement of a trade deal with China and he was doing everything he could to placate Xi Jingping and downplaying the covid threat.  It was only in mid-March, after Trump realized Xi was playing him for a patsy that he first referenced the "Wuhan flu" and it was only in mid-April that the administration first spoke publicly about a possible leak at WIV.  Another "fake news" story from this period was Senator Tom Cotton's statement that "We don’t know where it originated, and we have to get to the bottom of that. We also know that just a few miles away from that food market is China’s only biosafety level 4 super laboratory that researches human infectious diseases.”  This was twisted by the NY Times and WaPo into an assertion that China deliberately engineered and released the virus, allowing reporters to denounce it as a racist conspiracy theory.  By the way, we also now know that much of the work at WIV was being conducted at BSL-2, not at the more rigorous BSL-4.

(6) Sachs is director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University in the US and president of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Solutions Network.  I am very cautious in dealing with anything from Dr Sachs.  In 2005-6, I attended, as my company's representative, meetings of his climate change group at Columbia's Earth Institute, and heard him expound at length as well as having a couple of brief conversations with him.  I find him to be instantly dismissive of alternative viewpoints and incredibly arrogant, with a firm belief that the most complex problems in our world can be easily solved if only he were put in change with full decision-making authority.  That's been a consistent theme in his career whether it's his economic recovery theories for the former Soviet Union and its satellites in the 1990s or in the failure of the UN Millenium Development Goals in which he was instrumental.  

In this case, everything Sachs is saying that can be verified, I have verified.  For instance, I've seen the FOIA materials that have been released, which include huge amounts of redacted material (I've even looked at the 290 redacted pages describing NIH's SARS research workplan) being withheld in what I believe is blatant violation of the law.  However, keep in mind that Sachs is a consistent critic of America and its foreign policy and most of his criticism around covid is directed at America, not China.  This is perhaps not surprising as he is an advocate of closer ties with China.

(7) Hoover began working at what was then called the Bureau of Investigation in 1921, becoming Director in 1924, a position he maintained until his death in 1972.  Fauci has worked at NIAID for 54 years, three years more than Hoover was at the FBI, though Hoover headed the agency for a decade longer than Fauci.  At least, so far.

(8) Rereading this last sentence it is not as clear as I should have been.  Rogin stated he was unable to get any virologist to speak on the record, and most refused to even comment off the record.  The few who spoke off the record limited their comments to pointing out that Fauci controls the funding in the field.

(9) There are aspects of the Covid origin story that remind me of an incident that started in 1979.  In that year an anthrax outbreak occurred in Sverdlovsk, Soviet Union in which 65 people died.  Soviet authorities blamed the outbreak on the consumption of tainted meat.  There were suspicions in the U.S. about the outbreak as Sverdlovsk was a closed city and major production center for the Soviet military-industrial complex.  It also, as it turned out, housed the Scientific-Research Institute of Bacterial Vaccine Preparations, given that name in 1974, a facility which started in the late 1940s as a biological warfare plant.

In 1972, the United States and the Soviet Union, along with 20 other countries, agreed to the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) banning biological and toxic weapons by prohibiting their development, production, acquisition, transfer, stockpiling and use.  There are now 184 signatories to the BWC.

During the 1980s there was a growing controversy over the Sverdlovsk outbreak, with the Reagan Administration taking the position that the likely source was the former bioweapons facility, while other prominent figures in the U.S. accepted the Soviet explanation of tainted meat and I still remember the debate. Among these was Dr Matthew Meselson of Harvard University.  Professor Meselson is a renowned geneticist and molecular biologist, who since the early 1960s played a prominent role in advocating for biological and chemical weapons controls.  His reputation was such that he was brought in to help convince President Nixon to sign the Biological Weapons Convention.

In 1979, Meselson was asked by the CIA to evaluate the Soviet claim and he concurred with the tainted meat explanation.  Seven years later he was allowed by Soviet authorities to visit Sverdlovsk and conduct interviews and again concluded that the tainted meat theory was the most likely explanation.

From everything I saw at the time, and have read, since I believe Dr Meselson is a person of high integrity (I do not hold the same opinion of Dr Fauci, nor were the funding, financial, and career conflict issues present in the Sverdlovsk incident) but there was also a political context to the controversy.  Many opponents of President Reagan were fearful that his confrontation with the Soviet Union would lead to disaster and wanted to defuse any possible triggers to such an outcome and were willing to grant the Soviets more credibility in that regard.  Dr Meselson and others also had a great interest in demonstrating the viability of biological weapons controls.  The result was Reagan was often portrayed as a fearmonger and ideologue, with the result, as in many of the disputes of this type, with everyone aligning with their preferred positions.

For whatever reason, Dr Meselson's conclusions, which carried a great deal of weight, particularly with the opponents of Reagan and the media, were incorrect.  After the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, Meselson returned to Sverdlovsk where he had full access to people and documents and concluded that the 1979 outbreak was due to an accidental release of anthrax from a Soviet biological weapons facility.

It turned out the Soviet Union, in violation of the BWC, had a large biological weapons program, which actually expanded under Gorbachev in the 1980s.  Soviet scientists who expressed misgivings about the program were assured that it was necessary since the U.S. was also violating the BWC.  In reality, the U.S. had shut down its programs after signing the BWC.  Within the Nixon Administration there had been a lot of opposition to signing the convention, but when opponents met with President Nixon, complaining that if the Soviets attacked the U.S. with biological weapons we would be unable to respond in a similar way, Nixon simply said, "Well, we'll just nuke them".

Wednesday, July 13, 2022

Cheat Mode

Over the years, I've come to believe this is very good advice.

Being a relatively flexible glass half full person behaving exceedingly decisively is kind of the cheat mode on a lot of life.

- Loquitur Ponte Sublicio ("Talking about the bridge")

Friday, July 8, 2022

The Stax Playlist

A companion to the Motown Playlist, but with some differences.  The Motown Playlist is exclusively artists who recorded in Motown Studios and were on the Motown label.  For my Stax playlist my criteria were looser.  While several of the artists listed below were exclusively on the Stax label or recorded in the Stax studio in Memphis, not all did so.  In the cases of Wilson Pickett and Sam & Dave, about half the songs below were recorded at Stax.  In the case of Aretha Franklin, all of the featured songs were recorded either at the studio in Muscle Shoals, Alabama or at Atlantic Studios in NYC.  I included Aretha because her style is closer to Stax than Motown (though she was a Detroit native) and Stax and Atlantic had a distribution deal negotiated by Jerry Wexler (for more on that see the post linked below).  I've also thrown in a song by Percy Sledge, recorded in another Alabama studio.  And, as a coda, the playlist (which is arranged chronologically, unlike Motown) ends with tunes from Al Green, all recorded in a Memphis studio about one mile from Stax.  The quality and quantity of music coming out of Memphis from the 1950s into the 1970s is staggering.  Two miles from Stax was Sun Records where Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Carl Perkins got their starts.  Less than three miles away were the Beale Street clubs where many famous blues musicians, like BB King, played.

Motown and Stax are a study in contrasts.  Motown was founded, and run, with an iron-hand, by the brilliant black entrepreneur Berry Gordy.  Like Motown, Stax was founded in the late 1950s, in this case by Jim STewart and his sister, Estelle AXton, who were white, and who, while they were good at spotting talent, proved poor at the business side, unlike the Motown founder.  Gordy was determined to create a unique sound with black artists that would break into the pop market dominated by white teenagers and was immensely successful in achieving his vision.  Stax had a grittier, funkier sound that, in the 60s, limited its wider reach until Otis Redding deliberately composed Sittin' On The Dock Of The Bay to appeal to a pop audience, a single released after his death in December 1967 and reaching the top of the charts.  You could hear the difference on WABC-AM, the New York City radio station I grew up listening to - Motown got a lot of play; Stax not as much until Dock Of The Bay.  It was Redding's death along with two other events in early 1968 that led to the demise of the classic period of Stax Records about which you can read in my post Respect Yourself.

One other note on Stax. Its house band, Booker T and the MGs, consisted of Booker T. Jones, Al Jackson Jr, Steve Cropper and Lewie Steinberg, replaced in 1965 by Donald "Duck" Dunn, the first two black the others white.  It was unusual for the time, and extremely unusual in Memphis, where the band members could play together in the studio but not have lunch together in a restaurant.

1962
Green Onions - Booker T & The MGs
1963
Walking The Dog - Rufus Thomas
1964
That's How Strong My Love Is - Otis Redding
1965
I've Been Loving You Too Long - Otis Redding; watch him live at Monterrey Pop (1)
I Can't Turn You Loose - Otis Redding
Respect - Otis Redding; yes, he composed it
You Don't Miss Your Water - Otis Redding
A Change Is Gonna Come - Otis Redding (cover of the Sam Cooke classic)
Midnight Hour - Wilson Pickett
1966
Fa Fa Fa Fa (Sad Song) - Otis Redding
Satisfaction - Otis Redding
Cigarettes & Coffee - Otis Redding
634-5789 - Wilson Pickett
Land of 1000 Dances - Wilson Pickett
Mustang Sally - Wilson Pickett
99 And A Half - Wilson Pickett
Knock On Wood - Eddie Floyd
Hold On, I'm Coming - Sam & Dave
You Don't Know Like I Know - Sam & Dave
When A Man Loves A Woman - Percy Sledge
1967
Try A Little Tenderness - Otis Redding; perfect in every element.  Peak Stax.
Shake - Otis Redding
Funky Broadway - Wilson Pickett
Born Under A Bad Sign - Albert King
Soul Man - Sam & Dave
I Never Loved A Man - Aretha Franklin.  Simply incredible from start to finish.
Respect - Aretha Franklin
Baby I Love You - Aretha Franklin
Natural Woman - Aretha Franklin
Chain Of Fools - Aretha Franklin; alternate take (2)
Let's stop for a minute.  These five songs were released as singles in this order by Aretha in 1967!  Any one of these singles would have made for a remarkable year; to have five like this . . .
Do Right Woman - Do Right Man - Aretha Franklin
Dr Feelgood - Aretha Franklin
1968
Sitting On The Dock Of The Bay - Otis Redding
Too Hard To Handle - Otis Redding
I Thank You - Sam & Dave
Think - Aretha Franklin
1971
Respect Yourself - Staples Singers
Theme From Shaft - Isaac Hayes
1972
I'll Take You There - Staples Singers
The Al Green Coda
Let's Stay Together (1971)
Call Me (1973)
Here I Am (Come And Take Me) (1973)
Love & Happiness (1977) - Maximum Al

 

(1) At Monterrey Pop, Otis was backed by Booker T and the MGs. 

(2) Although this video and others of the same take say it is unedited, this is incorrect.  Not only is the introduction different but also the background vocals behind the entire song.  This is an alternate take and they may have used Aretha's vocal and matched it with different background vocals.

Tuesday, July 5, 2022

Vandalia

Driving on I-70 today across southern Illinois, we saw a sign announcing the presence of the oldest existing Illinois State House in the little town of Vandalia, so we got off to take a look.

Vandalia became the capital of Illinois in 1819, after the original capital of Kaskaskia was abandoned due to frequent flooding.  The town was specifically founded to be the new capital under an agreement that it would continue that designation for at least twenty years.   The first building constructed for use as a state house was poorly done and, as the mid-1830s approached, the townspeople, worried that in 1839 the capital would move north, built a new state house in an attempt to maintain Vandalia's status beyond the twenty-year deadline.

The building pictured below looked a bit different when inaugurated in 1836.  Built of red brick, it was unpainted, and the portico seen here was a later addition.  Despite the town's efforts, the legislature voted to move the capital to Springfield in 1839.

Young Abraham Lincoln started his political career when elected to the legislature on December 1, 1834 and, from 1836 to 1839 would have appeared frequently in the State House pictured below.  Lincoln had moved to Illinois in 1830, settling in the Sangamon County town of New Salem, the same county in which Springfield is located.

I was surprised to learn that Vandalia's population has grown by 40% since 1980 and now stands around 7,500.



Monday, July 4, 2022

America The Beautiful

And it does not get any more beautiful than Ray Charles singing it.  He makes the unusual choice of singing the seldom heard third verse first:

O beautiful for heroes proved

In liberating strife

Who more than self their country loved

And mercy more than life!

America! America!

May God thy gold refine

Till all success be nobleness

And every gain divine

Originally written as a poem by Katherine Lee Bates in 1893 and put to music by Samuel Ward in 1910.  Charles is performing on the Dick Cavett Show in 1972.

Sunday, July 3, 2022

Those Days Are Gone Forever

Those days are gone forever

Over a long time ago

Oh, yeah

- Steely Dan, "Pretzel Logic"

I think about it more now.  A few days ago, Hershel "Woody" Williams, the last living recipient of the Medal of Honor for conduct in WW2, died at 98.  I'm not a medal recipient, nor combat veteran, and still more than a quarter-century younger than Mr Williams, but I think more about the span of time and the difference between how I perceive it and those a generation or two younger.  My memories are linked to things I experience and no matter how I describe them to someone younger it will never fully convey whatever feelings it invoked or what it was like to go through it at the time.

Here's an exquisite and soulful live version of Pretzel Logic from 2014 by The Dukes of September, featuring Donald Fagen of the Dan, Boz Scaggs, and Michael McDonald, who along with his solo and Doobie Brothers career, endured Fagen and Becker's perfectionist demands in the recording studio, as he laid down background vocals on vocals on many Dan tracks.

I stepped out on the platform

The man gave me the news

He said, "you must be joking son, where did you get those shoes?"


Saturday, July 2, 2022

Roman Wall Blues

 

(Hadrian's Wall)

By WH Auden (1907-73)

Over the heather the wet wind blows,
I've lice in my tunic and a cold in my nose.

The rain comes pattering out of the sky,
I'm a Wall soldier, I don't know why.

The mist creeps over the hard grey stone,
My girl's in Tungria; I sleep alone.

Aulus goes hanging around her place,
I don't like his manners, I don't like his face.

Piso's a Christian, he worships a fish;
There'd be no kissing if he had his wish.

She gave me a ring but I diced it away;
I want my girl and I want my pay.

When I'm a veteran with only one eye
I shall do nothing but look at the sky.

Tungria was located in what is now Belgium and was then part of the Roman Empire.  Tungrians were among the auxiliary troops garrisoning the forts along Hadrian's Wall.