peter daszak: more battiness?

failing up, up, and away.

the ability of those in government to relentlessly “fail up” has long been a topic of comment. you break things, blame someone else, claim you need more power and money in order set them right, and then trot right out and break twice as much stuff the next time. repeat until you have your boss’s boss’s boss’s job.

in some fields, this is merely odious. you wind up running a particularly surly DMV.

in others, it’s deeply pernicious. you wind up running a school district into the ground.

but for the truly select few, it can be world shaking. and once it is, there is just no stopping you from heading onto the next one.

look who’s back with a shiny new grant handed out by team “teflon tony” just before the grand exodus scheduled for year end!

i guess when your wife is the head of NIH ethics, this sort of thing gets a fast track. after all, what’s $650k between friends?

leaving aside the absolute madness of trusting peter with MORE bat research, especially after the way it looks to have gone last time

peter daszak: supervillain origin story

or the extraordinary lengths to which the cover up was taken

closing ranks against the truth

it’s hard not to be just plain old galled here.

can literally any outrage or fact pattern stop the flow of funding?

(don’t answer that, it was rhetorical)

for those who want to really dig into this rabbithole, US RTK has an extensive timeline and compilation HERE.

i’m just not coming with with any great reason to fund more daszak delving in to disaster. i’m not even sure it’s that interesting a question.

perhaps a more interesting question is: how could anyone do this right now?

even if you’re sufficiently on team gain of function to want to keep doing work like this because you think it’s important, really? you’re doing it with daszak? now? right before you retire and before a likely flip in the house has you crawling with congresscritters looking to get to the bottom of the wuhan whodunnit?

this seems an odd choice, especially from old political hand like tony.

this is also not really enough money to do much research. i’m struggling to see what could really come of it.

call me “me cynical paws” but it makes me suspect another possible motive.

anyone need to buy a vowel here?

after all, part of the path to ever upward failure is knowing where the bodies are buried, and if you have dirt on powerful people, well, silence is golden, so start demanding gold.

bags of it.

i claim no special knowledge here. i’m merely following incentives and i just cannot believe that anyone is thinking “what we need is more bat studies from the same guys who did the last ones!” right now.

mightn’t “we need to be sure our friends are fat like geese so they don’t sing like frightened canaries?” be a more apt frame of mind?

is this the daszak legal defense fund?

the “buenos aires bungalow bonus”?

some kind of cunning false flag?

because something here smells funny. this is SUCH an obvious thread to pull if an investigation begins to the point where i can only assume that it’s either a move that requires no subtlety, a magician’s flourish to distract the audience, or just plain old desperation.

daszak too must know this will invite scrutiny. so unless this is

“grab the money and run”

or

“i’m not paying these lawyers, so you’d better unless you wanna hear the words “state’s evidence””

i sort of struggle to see his angle here which is how i’m landing at the theories i am.

other ideas?

what else (aside from just brain eating levels of hubris all around) explains this fact pattern?

i’m just not seeing it.