Already the deep-makings of another hot one this mid-day Tuesday here in California’s Central Valley. Heat is all over the place.

Back east in DC another heated dust-up between prime asshole Rand Paul and Anthony Fauci, which again leads to the question of whether Paul is an idiot or just a way-abnormal shit — he and Peter Doocy seem to enjoy getting their asses handed to them in public.
Paul is, however, just the face of the right’s war on reality and manners as Gym Jordan, named yesterday to the House Select Committee to investigate the January insurrection/riot at the US Capitol, and as Paul did today, will no doubt pulled the same lying, dumb-ass stunts next week when the committee meets for the first time.

During the hearing this morning, however, Fauci popped Paul hard upside the mental cavity:

Thread ? https://t.co/kMA31LV6CE

— Pat Bagley (@Patbagley) July 20, 2021

Gist of the encounter per Raw Story:

The confrontation occurred during a Senate Health Committee after Paul said that Fauci could be punished with jail time for allegedly false testimony to Congress about the funding of a lab in Wuhan, China.

“Senator Paul, I have never lied before the Congress,” Fauci said.
“And I do not retract [my previous] statement.”

“You take an animal virus and you increase its transmissibility to humans,” Paul interrupted.
“You’re saying that’s not gain of function?”

“That is correct,” Fauci continued.
“And Senator Paul, you do not know what you are talking about, quite frankly. And I want to say that officially. You do not know what you are talking about.”

Paul interrupted again: “They took animal viruses that only occur in animals and they increased their transmissibility to humans. How you can say that is not gain of function.”

“It is not,” Fauci insisted.

“It’s a dance and you’re dancing around this,” Paul argued, “because you’re trying to obscure responsibility for four million people dying around the world from a pandemic.”

“Now you’re getting into something,” Fauci complained. “If the point you are making is that the grant that was funded as a sub-award from EcoHealth to Wuhan created Sars-CoV-2, that’s where you are getting. Let me finish.”

“We don’t know,” Paul remarked.
“All of the evidence is pointing that it came from the lab and there will be responsible for those who funded the lab including yourself.”

“I resent the lie that you are now propagating,” Fauci replied.
“Because if you look at the viruses that were used in the experiments that were given in the annual reports that were published in the literature, it is molecularly impossible.”

“No one is saying those viruses caused the pandemic!” Paul shouted.
“What we’re alleging is gain of function research was going on in that lab and NIH funded it. It meets your definition and you are obfuscating the truth.”

“I’m not obfuscating the truth!” Fauci shot back.
“Are you are implying that what we did was responsible for the deaths of individuals. I totally resent that and if anybody is lying here, Senator, it is you.”

Rand Paul is a major-major asshole. What he’s doing is just noise, sounding an alarm for alarm’s sake, a bit of T-Rump’s chaos theory — origin of COVID-19 most-likely comes off Occam’s razor ( simplest reason for something is most-of-the-time, the reason), and even with science — background via NPR yesterday afternoon:

Back in May, a group of scientists — many at the top of the virology field — shifted the debate about the origins of COVID-19. They published a letter in the journal Science saying the lab-leak theory needs to be taken more seriously by the scientific community.
…
Now one of the scientists who signed that letter says new data has come to light. And that information, summarized in an online review, has changed his thinking.

“I do think transmission from another species, without a lab escape, is the most likely scenario by a long shot,” says evolutionary biologist Michael Worobey at the University of Arizona.

In fact, Worobey thinks, the most likely scenario, given the current information, is that the coronavirus pandemic began at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, even though the World Health Organization says it’s unlikely to have started there.
“The data are very consistent with it starting at the market — very consistent,” Worobey says.

Over the past decade, Worobey has become a bit like the Sherlock Holmes of pandemic origins. His work has helped explain how the 1918 flu emerged and how HIV came to the U.S. earlier than people thought.
“It got to New York City pretty darn early, probably around 1970, 1971, somewhere in there,” Worobey told NPR in 2016.
…
A few months ago, Worobey says, his models couldn’t differentiate between the lab-leak theory and the alternative theory — that the virus jumped directly from an animal into people.
Both theories were consistent with the data.
“So I was on that Science letter,” he says, “asserting that more investigation is needed of both possibilities.”

Then two new pieces of information came to light.
First, Worobey started to look more closely at the geography of early known COVID-19 cases — cases that occurred in December 2019. His colleague Robert Garry, a microbiologist at Tulane University, took data from the World Health Organization’s report from March and plotted the data on a map of where people with confirmed cases lived in Wuhan.

Then Garry did something that the WHO didn’t: He added to the map the locations of the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market and the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where scientists study bat coronaviruses.
“It’s a very simple thing to do,” Worobey says.
“But it really paints a pretty clear picture, right?”
The dots show the cases starting right near the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market and then radiating out from there.
“The Huanan market seems like the bull’s-eye of this outbreak. It’s pretty extraordinary.”

In May, The Washington Post‘s Fact Checker checked-out Rand Paul’s take on the ‘gain of function’ bullshit, and found it wanting — conclusion:

There is some smoke here, but we do not yet perceive the fire claimed by Paul … We wavered between Two and Three Pinocchios, but decided on Two, because there still are enough questions about the work at the Wuhan lab to warrant further scrutiny, even if the NIH connection to possible gain-of-function research appears so far to be elusive.

And also today, a way-weird-ass dig-hype to the current history of victory:

NEW: Tom Brady at the White House on the Bucs' Super Bowl run:

"Not a lot of people think that we could have won. In fact, I think about 40% of the people still don't think we won."

Biden: "I understand that."

Brady: "You understand that, Mr. President?" pic.twitter.com/wfFMx0Powi

— Yahoo News (@YahooNews) July 20, 2021

Brady, adding insult to way-needed injury: ‘Brady also joked that people labeled him “Sleepy Tom” for losing track of downs during a game in October, a play on Trump’s derisive nickname for Biden: “Sleepy Joe.”‘

Startlingly frightful such a horrible, incompetent piece-of-shit like the T-Rump (and his Gym Jordans and Rand Pauls) could create such a dangerous, agonizing shitstorm/clusterfuck.
Yet here we be…

(Illustration out front: Edvard Munch‘s ‘The Scream,’ lithograph version, found here).