As the evidence continues to build that SARS-CoV-2 jumped from animals to humans at the Wuhan market, expect the remaining arguments about its origin to become increasingly stupid. There are two reasons for this, both products of typical human behavior. First, there are people who argued very publicly in favor of a lab leak despite the lack of evidence for it, but are now recognizing that they were probably wrong. A lot of them are going to feel the need to justify their earlier arguments...

This has been making me nervous for months, so I’m going to do you all a favor and share it:

The Supreme Court’s new standard for determining whether teaching creationism is constitutional says we should examine the state of the law when everyone was a creationist. To explain: Kitzmiller v. Dover, which ruled teaching intelligent design unconstitutional, was decided in part on a precedent called the Lemon test, which informed judges of how to determine if a law or policy’s primary effect was fostering religion.

The press has (rightfully) received lots of criticism for normalizing the Trump era. Of holding he-said-she-said debates on whether the latest Trump statement was a sign of him becoming "presidential" instead of focusing on the evidence of severe personality disorders. But it's now doing similar things with the "stop the steal" narrative - presenting it as false while gasping at its high polling, which makes it seem like a normal part of political dialog.

So, some unsolicited advice: it's time to start abnormalizing the behavior behind it.

My obit for Freeman Dyson has gotten more push back than perhaps anything else i've written, entirely because i included his late-career dabbling in climate misinformation.

I have some thoughts on this push back so, in the interest of getting them all in one place, a thread: This wasn't just a one-off oddity. Dyson returned to the subject multiple times, joined up with the Global Warming Policy Foundation, and contributed a foreword to one of its reports.

If an obit is intended to give a full picture of someone's life...