Bats Level 2 Quotes

What does a research witch do?’ Tiffany asked. ‘Oh, it’s a very ancient craft. She tries to find new spells by learning how old ones were really done. You know all that stuff about “ear of bat and toe of frog”? They never work, but Miss Level thinks it’s because we don’t know exactly what kind of frog, or which toe—’ ‘I’m sorry, but I’m not going to help anyone chop up innocent frogs and bats,’ said Tiffany firmly. ‘Oh, no, she never kills any!’ said Miss Tick hurriedly. ‘She only uses creatures that have died naturally or been run over or committed suicide. Frogs can get quite depressed at times.

The president and Colson were in the middle of their conversation about Henry Kissinger when assistant Steve Bull entered the Oval Office to report that Coach Allen of the Redskins had finally arrived. Bull also informed the president of the news, just filtering in, that baseball star Roberto Clemente was on a plane that had crashed after taking off from the San Juan International Airport late the night before. “Was he killed?” Nixon asked. “They don’t have confirmation yet,” Bull replied.1 Clemente, the popular outfielder for the Pittsburgh Pirates, had boarded a rickety four-engine DC-7 plane that was overloaded with relief supplies for the victims of a massive earthquake in Nicaragua. The earthquake was believed to have resulted in the deaths of more than seven thousand people. Most of the deaths had occurred in the capital city of Managua, which had taken the brunt of the 6.2 magnitude shock at midday on Saturday, December 23.2 The city was leveled. The lumbering plane that Clemente was on nose-dived into heavy seas shortly after takeoff from San Juan. Clemente was thirty-eight years old and had been a perennial All-Star, four-time winner of the National League batting championship, defensive genius, and MVP in 1966. He led the Pirates to two world championships, one in 1960 and the other a decade later in 1971. “Mr. Clemente was the leader of Puerto Rican efforts to aid the Nicaraguan victims and was aboard the plane because he suspected that relief supplies were falling into the hands of profiteers,” the New York Times reported after his death was presumed.3 Clemente was scheduled to meet Anastasio Somoza, the military dictator of Nicaragua, at the airport, one of the very grafters he was attempting to circumvent with his personal mission. Clemente’s body was never recovered. It was a bad omen for the start of 1973.

It turned out that when Miss Level had asked Tiffany if she was scared of heights, it had been the wrong question. Tiffany was not afraid of heights at all. She could walk past tall trees without batting an eyelid. Looking up at huge towering mountains didn’t bother her a bit.

We know that the backbone virus in SARS-CoV-2 is a horseshoe bat coronavirus,” he explains. “Those horseshoe bats live in southern China. Wuhan is well beyond their range. Wuhan doesn’t have horseshoe bats. This pandemic began in the middle of winter. But what Wuhan does have is China’s only level-4 virology institute, with the world’s largest collection of bat coronaviruses, that was doing aggressive gain-of-function research, including to make those highly pathogenic viruses more transmissible to human cells. We know that when the outbreak began, the SARS-CoV-2 virus was almost perfectly adapted for transmission to humans.

Notably, we now know that Daszak, Baric, and Wuhan Institute of Virology director Shi Zhengli collaborated on a 2018 proposal to the Defense Department’s research and development agency, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), “to collect SARS-like bat coronaviruses and insert a genetic component,” the furin cleavage site, to “enable them to more easily infect human cells.”68 The grant application was called “Project Defuse: Defusing the Threat of Bat-Borne Coronaviruses.” Emails subsequently obtained by U.S. Right to Know reveal that Daszak downplayed the Wuhan Institute’s role likely so as to avoid triggering concerns about biosafety, though “a lot of these assays can be done in Wuhan” and that doing them under the Wuhan Institute’s relatively lax biosafety level 2 conditions “makes our system highly cost-effective relative to other bat-virus systems.” Baric, whose University of North Carolina lab would conduct such research at a much more demanding biosecurity level 4, pointed out that in the United States, such research required at least level 3, especially when the viruses are able “to bind and replicate in primary human cells.” Noting China’s lax safety standards, Baric’s marginal comment in the draft grant application was: “US researchers will likely freak out.”69