DAVID STROM: Does Reality Matter? Not in the ‘Mattress Girl’ Case, and Not in Cornell 7 Case Either. It’s all pre-election agitprop for lefty women. “What is striking about these cases, as with the case that Theo Jordan refers to (the hoax of residential school mass graves), is the willingness of the cultural elite institutions, and especially the media, to ignore the evidence and stick with a Narrative™ despite the complete lack of evidence to support it.” Truth-seeking isn’t their job, and they don’t see it as their job.

WHO’S CREDIBILITY STINKS: World Health Organizations says it’s still unsure what caused pneumonia that killed plague-lab worker from Irkutsk Anti-Plague Research Institute in Siberia.

As a reminder, there was substantial evidence of a novel disease outbreak in Wuhan in early 2020. The escalating epidemic emergency of 2020 became unmistakable when authorities quarantined Wuhan and extended restrictions to eight additional cities, while Beijing canceled major Chinese New Year celebrations to curb transmission.

In the age of social media and satellites, it would be difficult to hide a rapidly expanding outbreak of the airborne version of the bubonic plague.

Furthermore, WHO is still investigating and has officially noted that no case of plague had been registered in Russia.

Stay tuned.

But as little as I think of WHO these days, it is hard to hide a plague.

DISPATCHES FROM AL-BRIṬĀNIYĀ:

Madeline Grant adds: “This landed on the same day we learnt a migrant raped a dead homeless woman, before a judge deemed him too low IQ to enter a plea. Tragedies and scandals that would once have attracted days/weeks of national attention are instead memory-holed when the next appalling thing happens.”

THE KIMCHI HAS HIT THE FAN: The South Korean stock market is in free fall, and these are the reasons*.

The Korean stock market is in free fall once again. Fears of cheaper Chinese competition making up ground and criticism leveled at investors in AI stocks by Broadcom’s chief executive combined to wipe more than 5% off its benchmark Kospi index.

After suffering heavy losses on Friday and Monday, the Kospi’s losing streak stretched to five sessions, and the market now languishes more than a third below the all-time high set in June of this year. Korea’s two largest companies by market capitalization, Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix bore the brunt of the selloff with falls of 10% and 7%, respectively, and the pair was responsible for roughly half the market’s decline.

Korea’s stock-market fortunes are often taken as a proxy by investors for the AI trade as a whole. Nasdaq-100 futures fell by 0.5% on Tuesday.

*Additional reasons may apply:

FROM CELIA HAYES:  My Dear Cousin: A Novel In Letters (Adelsverein.)

When Peggy Becker married Englishman Tommy Morehouse in San Antonio in the spring of 1938, her cousin and best friend Venetia “Vennie” Stoneman was her bridesmaid. After the wedding, Peg and Tommy traveled across the Pacific to Malaya, where Tommy managed his family’s rubber plantation. There they expected to raise a family and live a comfortable and rewarding life among the British expatriates in the tropics, while Vennie returned to Galveston to continue training as a nurse.
The start of the Second World War changed those comfortable, settled lives: Tommy Morehouse became a prisoner of war, Peg barely escaped the fall of Singapore with her small son, and Vennie Stoneman was a nurse in the US Army Nurse Corps, tending to battlefield casualties in North Africa, Italy, and France. In Australia, Peg waits out the war, wondering if her husband will survive brutal captivity by the Japanese, and Vennie risks her own life as an air evacuation nurse. Throughout all, the two women write to each other, of their lives, loves, of Vennie’s patients and comrades, and Peg’s children and the woes of running a wartime household among rationing and shortages of shoes for her children.

THE USUAL PRE-ELECTION BS:

I ALSO DON’T BELIEVE THE NOW YOU SEE HIM NOW YOU DON’T HOMUNCULUS WILL CLOSE THE DEAL:  A Blue Ripple in Texas?

It appears that one James Talarico is the present big blue hope for Democrats who have a passionate interest in turning Texas blue by somehow wedging him into a seat in the US Senate. This in spite of being someone which hardly anyone seems to have heard of, six months ago. He’s young, slick-appearing, superficially polished, makes all the right noises and voices all the correct progressive platitudes … I swear, they must order up these candidates by the dozen, from some central Dem Party clone factory/distribution warehouse full of test tubes. They are all youngish, sleek, shallow, did all the right colleges and socially-responsible early jobs, have an appealing but not too exotic background, get fawning national press coverage, do fundraising events outside of Texas, raise the hopes that this time around they will get somewhere with Texas voters as a whole … and then somehow before the big day, it all goes flat. The air goes out of the bubble. It happened with Wendy Whats-her-name in the pink tennis shoes, to Robert Francis the Fake Hispanic O’Rourke, and it looks as if James Talarico is also about to fizzle out in a similar manner.

But Celia and I could be wrong. So kindly all y’all get off your duffs and vote. We don’t want to lose Texas like we lost Colorado.

OPEN THREAD: I disagree with your philosophy. What killed the cat’s not curiosity.