Author: HP McLovincraft

Seeker of rabbit holes. Pessimist. Libertine. Contrarian. Your huckleberry. Possibly true tales of sanity-blasting horror also known as abject reality. Prepare yourself. Veteran of a thousand psychic wars. I have seen the fnords. Deplatformed on Tumblr and Twitter.

The Strange Theory of Coronavirus from Space

The space virus theory has been the work of a group of researchers, notably Edward J. Steele and N. Chandra Wickramasinghe. This group has published ten papers on the topic since the pandemic began, but this paper from July 14th offers the most detailed argument.

Steele et al. suggest that COVID-19 arrived on a meteor which was spotted as a bright fireball over the city of Songyuan in North East China on October 11, 2019.

They propose that the meteor might have been “a fragile and loosely held carbonaceous meteorite carrying a cargo of trillions of viruses/bacteria and other primary source cells.”

The authors admit that the Songyuan meteor was spotted over 2,000 km northeast of Wuhan, where the first cases of COVID-19 were reported, but they deal with this discrepancy with the hypothesis that a different fragment of the meteor arrived in the Wuhan area:

A much larger original meteoroid could easily have been fragmenting and dispersing its contents before the ignition of the fireball event. A reasonable assumption is that the fireball which struck 2,000 km north of Wuhan may have been part of a wide tube of debris the bulk of which was deposited in the stratosphere to fall over Wuhan.

Needless to say, this is not a theory with any evidence for it. There is no evidence that viruses or bacteria (or any other life) exist in space, and Steele et al. provide no direct evidence that the coronavirus arrived from the heavens.

But it turns out that the theory of life (and disease) from space isn’t new. The theory is called panspermiaand a handful of researchers, including Steele and Wickramasinghe, have been advocating it for decades.

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Kamala Harris’ Limited Vision of Religious Liberty

When presumptive Democratic vice presidential nominee Kamala Harris was running for president, she appeared at CNN’s Equality Town Hall, an October event focused on the LGBTQ community. How, one questioner asked, will Harris communicate her “liberal, Californian perspective when reaching out to voters in small, conservative areas?”

Harris said she’d tell the story of a day in 2004 where she arrived at San Francisco’s City Hall to find families of same-sex couples lined up around the block to witness their loved ones’ weddings. “It was a day where people who loved each other had the ability for their love to be recognized by law,” said Harris, who herself officiated gay weddings years before they were legalized statewide in California. “And if anyone has known love, and honors the importance of love and the commitment one person is willing to make to another person in the name of love,” she continued, “they should always recognize and encourage that nobody would be treated differently under the law.”

It’s an evocative story about why gay marriage should be allowed, but it doesn’t address the chief concern you’ll hear from religious conservatives these days: Whether they’ll be compelled to participate in and pay for things, particularly in the workplace, which their creeds and consciences forbid. Unfortunately, this wasn’t a momentary lapse: Harris shows little interest in reaching common ground with voters worried about religious liberty. She even seems unwilling to acknowledge the possibility that their fears could be based in something more substantive than a failure to have “known love.”

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