Not As Offensive As Maplethorpe's Piss Christ...

Still amazingly clear evidence that modern art is stupid.

Amazing: Guilty Plea in COVID Records Case

 8/18/26 CBS News:

Washington — A former senior adviser at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases has pleaded guilty to a charge stemming from a scheme to hide federal records during the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Under a deal reached with federal prosecutors in Maryland, David Morens, 78, agreed to plead guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit offenses and to defraud the United States. He faces up to five years in prison.

Morens, a senior adviser at NIAID's Office of the Director from 2006 to 2022, was indicted in April and charged with five counts for what prosecutors said at the time was his role in a scheme to defraud the U.S. by shielding federal records related to the COVID-19 pandemic from the public. 

Tim Belevetz, a lawyer for Morens, said, "By pleading guilty today, Dr. Morens has taken responsibility for what he did and will continue to do so."

Prosecutors said Morens worked with two co-conspirators. The first, "co-conspirator 1," served as the president and CEO of a New York-based nonprofit that received a grant in 2014 titled "Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence." The Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan, China, received a subaward from the New York group on the coronavirus grant, prosecutors said, though the National Institutes of Health terminated the award in April 2020 following allegations that COVID-19 emerged from the lab. The NIAID is part of the NIH.

The second co-conspirator was described in charging documents as a physician, scientist and professor who worked for an academic institute that received federal grants.

Emails made public by the GOP-led Select Committee on the Coronavirus Pandemic indicate that the New York-based nonprofit is the EcoHealth Alliance and co-conspirator 1 is its president, Peter Daszak....

According to the guilty plea, Morens and the two co-conspirators agreed to exchange emails about COVID-19 and its origins, as well as the terminated coronavirus grant, through Morens' personal Gmail account, rather than his official NIH account, to hide federal records and evade public records laws.

Morens and his co-conspirators also used his Gmail account to share nonpublic information from the NIH about COVID-19 and "back-channel" information to an unidentified senior NIAID official, who appears to be Anthony Fauci, the institute's former director, according to court filings.

Nothing says integrity like hiding records.

Let Me Bang the Drum for an Amazing Mexican Restaurant in Kingsport

I was a bit concerned that we might have difficulty find good Mexican food so far from the Southwest. Santa Fe Mexican Grill has now far exceeded our expectations both with Carne Asada Tacos and Chicken Fajitas. I notice many dishes on the menu that I have never seen before. I am aware that many Mexican restaurants in the Southwest reflect Sonoran traditions. I wonder if we may be seeing more dishes from other states?

My Wife's Comments on Cultural Change

Sitting at the Foot of the Mountain:

Thank you, dear readers, for your patience. I like to be consistent in my postings, but having moved cross country from Idaho to Tennessee, it's been a challenge!

It's interesting to move to a place where the evidence of Christianity is everywhere. Just like in Idaho, there are numerous churches. In Idaho, it was the LDS church that made its presence greatly felt; here in Tennessee, you find a plethora of Baptist churches.

People are polite here. They smile, call you "honey" and have a friendliness that is very endearing. Idaho used to be like that. When we first moved there 25 years ago from northern California, it was refreshingly nice. People looked you in the eye, smiled and said, "hello." I felt we had died and gone to heaven.

Change is inevitable, to be sure, but it's the kind of change that can be discouraging. Idaho experienced a boom in population that I have never seen before. After Covid, our state was flooded by people who were disgusted with how their governments handled the epidemic. For some, it was the final straw.

We came to Idaho after 9/11 caused my husband to lose his job in telecommunications. HP in Boise offered him a job and we are forever grateful to God for opening up that door to us.

Around 2020, we saw a shift. People no longer looked you in the eye or smiled; they didn't say, "hello" and seemed almost offended if you did. The drivers became more aggressive, bullying you by tailgating and some used the interstate to race other like-minded individuals.

Thank George Soros

8/22/26 The Hill reports on scromiting, a cute expression formed from screaming and vomiting. Isn't that adorable? The formal description is:

Cannabis (or cannabinoid) hyperemesis syndrome (CHS) is as serious as it sounds. The condition, which can cause excessive vomiting with recurring bouts of severe stomach pain and nausea, was first detected in Australia two decades ago. Some have referred to a combination of CHS symptoms – screaming, due to the intense pain, and vomiting – as “scromiting.”

 Heavy marijuana use. It does wonders. 

Wolfettes Beserk

 The wolfettes went mad, barking. I looked out the front window and there was a majestic doe on the front lawn. Lillie was saying, "Please let me out! You won't need to feed me for a week!"

Andrew Ross Sorkin 1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History--and How It Shattered a Nation

I confess that because this was a Christmas gift from a progressive relative, I had some misgivings. It does seem to take a traditional view of what happened: too many people who could not afford to buy stocks using margin accounts, which when prices fell caused widespread margin calls, which caused immediate selling pressure, which caused a feedback loop of margin calls and more panic selling.  While catastrophic for ordinary people in over their heads (like Winston Churchill) and some speculators who lost millions more than they had, what really sank the economy was the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930.

Where the book is weak is money supply discussion. The Austrian school argument about N.Y. Fed Chair Strong inflating the money supply 1920-28 to bail out the Bank of England is not examined although he acknowledges that inflation in the 1920s played a part in creating the bubble.

Where it is strong is describing the people involved in the disaster: their quirks, their weaknesses, their greed and sometimes their well-intentioned efforts to prevent the disaster and then to alleviate it. That many of the speculators and political figures who created the Federal Reserve System were Democrats who tried to blame Hoover as a distraction from their roles in this is not subtly mentioned. Hoover comes across as a well-meaning person who got stuck with a mess properly blamed on Coolidge, Harding, and a lot of greedy, shortsighted speculators.

I am about halfway through.

On p. 321, he quotes FDR that the gold standard would be "unflinching maintained."