PP NewsBrief: 2021-05-19

We need to begin to reclaim control over the institutions which have such oversized roles in our lives. As you read this people work tirelessly to see to it that you are dumb and docile. Let's stop them.

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George W. Bush’s Finest Piece of War

"Bush, the former US president, recently penned an Op-Ed for The Washington Post, and received a round of applause on ‘Jimmy Kimmel Live!’ when the eponymous host complimented him on his painting of American politician Madeleine Albright. He appears on TV to speak about his new book of oil paintings of America’s immigrants, ‘Out of Many, One’, he is not wearing handcuffs, and all rehabilitated. It is all normal.

What is also normal is how the starvation and deprivation of medication that caused the early death of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children because of the severe UN sanctions on the country in the 1990s, have fallen into oblivion. To Albright, speaking in a 1996 TV interview, the political price was “worth it”, though she would later express regret for her wording.

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For their part, the cheering crowd gave the impression that the next rich guy to oversee the annihilation of inferior beings overseas could as well re-emerge from the gutter and be celebrated as a cool, funny grandpa.

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In an interview after a tour of Bush’s Texas ranch, CBS’s Norah O’Donnell told the former president that she thought the paintings in his new book were “beautiful”. And when she asked him about the 6 January storming of the Capitol, Bush said that it made him sick: “This sends a signal to the world, you know, like, we’re no different, and this book says we are different, much different”.

In the words of the great Iraqi poet Saadi Youssef:

“But I am not an American

Is it enough that I am not American for the Phantom pilot to send me back to stone age?”

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Meanwhile, war is ongoing in Iraq. Its signs are unmistakable; walls and road signs riddled with bullet holes, concrete barriers blocking main streets, dead youth staring from faded billboards and military choppers occupying the skies above.

In Baghdad, militiamen nurtured under the lawlessness birthed by the US invasion still fire rockets on the airport and the ‘Green Zone’. They still roam the streets, armed to the teeth, terrorizing the city’s traumatized residents who are left unprotected by empty promises from the Iraqi state.

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George W. Bush is responsible for the destruction of an incalculable number of innocent Iraqi lives. Have the decency to remember his victims."

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Democrats Can’t Quash the ‘Big Lie’

"The news media portray election doubters as conspiracy theorists or QAnon cultists. CNN’s Jake Tapper this week threatened to ban from his show any Republican who peddles the “Big Lie” about election fraud. Speaking on the same network responsible for perpetuating any number of lies related to Donald Trump, from tales of Russian election collusion to disrespectful MAGA-hat-wearing Catholic teenagers, Tapper had a major meltdown.

“The lie about the election on its own is anti-democracy, and it is sowing seeds of ignorance in the populace, and obviously has the potential to incite violence,” Tapper ranted. “But beyond that is, if you’re willing to lie about that, what are you not willing to lie about?”

Tapper insisted that history would harshly judge politicians who “lied” about the election. “History sees you being a coward. They are afraid of Republican voters who have been lied to by a very sophisticated propaganda machine led by President Trump but augmented by plenty of others.”

Projection much?

Beleaguered Representative Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), a martyr to the very same people who just a decade ago wanted her father charged with war crimes, now clings to political relevance based on her nonstop condemnation of the January 6 protest and her election fraud denialism....

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Election integrity remains a top priority for Republican voters. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis just signed a bill preventing the very COVID-justified election rules that benefited Joe Biden and Democrats last year. “We’re making sure we’re enforcing voter ID,” DeSantis, a 2024 presidential frontrunner, said in an interview Thursday morning. “We’re also banning ballot harvesting. We’re not gonna let political operatives go and get satchels of votes to dump them in some dropbox. We’re also prohibiting mass mailing of balloting.”

Similar measures are in the works in several Republican-controlled states. Texas and Arizona have passed several proposals that will tighten election requirements; Georgia Governor Brian Kemp signed a massive election reform bill in March that enraged Democrats across the country including Joe Biden.

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Unfortunately, the “Big Lie” faces more headwinds than just a Jake Tapper tantrum or a Liz Cheney op-ed: Joe Biden’s Justice Department is poised to use its power to halt election reform in advance of the 2022 election. During a congressional hearing this week, Attorney General Merrick Garland made clear he would use the agency’s Civil Rights division to fight Republican-backed election laws in court, especially those requiring photo identification.

“The question on voter ID is what kind of disparate impact it has on voters of different races, colors and language groups, and whether it violates the Constitution by having a disparate impact on people’s ability to vote,” Garland told a House Appropriations Committee on Tuesday. “The Supreme Court has held that voter ID as a concept is constitutional. And the issue is what, in any individual cases [sic], the record shows about whether it deprives certain groups protected by the 14th Amendment right to vote.”"

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Which Lifeboat Will You Choose?

"Consider a scenario in which we're on a ship that's sinking, and the lifeboats have been launched. Being some of the last still on board the doomed vessel, we can scan who's in each lifeboat and choose which one we'll clamber into.

It's a consequential decision because the currents and weather are already separating the lifeboats, and so each lifeboat will be on its own. The seas are increasingly treacherous, and the nearby islands are surrounded by reefs which could shred the lifeboat's hulls in seconds.

While we don't know everyone on board, we've met many of the other passengers and crew and made the acquaintance of a fair number of our fellow castaways.

So who do we choose to join? Our knowledge is imperfect: we only have first impressions and intuitions about the people who will potentially impact our life in a very direct and consequential way.

Do we choose to go in the lifeboat with a friend? This is certainly more appealing than a boat full of strangers.

Do we choose a boat with an experienced sailor whose skills in the open ocean would improve our chances of surviving the ordeal ahead?

Or do we choose a boat which is already under the control of a natural leader? If we understand that dithering and unresolvable conflicts can lead to disaster by default, then having someone in charge might be worth the risk that their leadership will lead to a catastrophically bad decision.

If we feel we have the experience to take charge and bring a lifeboat to safety, then perhaps we look for the disorganized, leaderless boat.

Alternatively, we can weed out those boats we'll avoid as potentially dangerous because of the presence of domineering individuals with traits that have poor survival outcomes.

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The boats I would avoid are those with wealthy, powerful people who confuse their position and wealth with competence, when actually there is no connection to competence beyond whatever specialized niche they used to acquire wealth and power. Their assumption (a form of privilege beneath the surface) that their specialized competence grants them universal competence is disastrously wrong-headed.

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Boats filled with self-important, self-absorbed people I would avoid as death traps. I would also avoid boats with do-gooders / would-be saints whose motivation (above self-preservation, until it's too late) is to defend the rights of the weak as the most important principle, even in life-and-death circumstances. These types are especially dangerous because their life experience is that Somebody Will Rescue Us. They thus conclude we can devote asymmetric resources to the weakest because Somebody Will Rescue Us.

They are incapable of recognizing the difference between making the vulnerable/dependent as comfortable as possible given the resources available and devoting the primary effort to saving everyone but if this can't be done, then saving as many people as possible. They are unable to recognize the need for difficult decisions that may well have asymmetric outcomes for the individuals on the boat. In demanding equal outcomes, they will lose everyone's lives--an outcome that is certainly equal but foolish.

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I would look for a boat with low-key individuals with high situational awareness and experience in responding to crises and danger. Combat veterans come to mind, but there are many others with training and experience (or natural abilities) that aids their situational awareness, risk assessment and responses to rapidly evolving threats. The OODA loop (Observe, Orient, Decide, Act) is an example of this process.

I would also look for a boat with the increasingly rare individuals who do what they say they're going to do, and do it without self-obsessed drama/trauma or childish excuses. These individuals have a healthy awareness of their own limits and the limits of human nature. They don't overpromise to make themselves larger than they really are and they won't burden the rest of the boat with their self-absorbed histrionics or adolescent excuses."

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Origin of Covid — Following the Clues

"In what follows I will sort through the available scientific facts, which hold many clues as to what happened, and provide readers with the evidence to make their own judgments. I will then try to assess the complex issue of blame, which starts with, but extends far beyond, the government of China.

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The virus that caused the pandemic is known officially as SARS-CoV-2, but can be called SARS2 for short. As many people know, there are two main theories about its origin. One is that it jumped naturally from wildlife to people. The other is that the virus was under study in a lab, from which it escaped. It matters a great deal which is the case if we hope to prevent a second such occurrence.

I’ll describe the two theories, explain why each is plausible, and then ask which provides the better explanation of the available facts. It’s important to note that so far there is no direct evidence for either theory. Each depends on a set of reasonable conjectures but so far lacks proof. So I have only clues, not conclusions, to offer. But those clues point in a specific direction. And having inferred that direction, I’m going to delineate some of the strands in this tangled skein of disaster.

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After the pandemic first broke out in December 2019, Chinese authorities reported that many cases had occurred in the wet market — a place selling wild animals for meat — in Wuhan. This reminded experts of the SARS1 epidemic of 2002 in which a bat virus had spread first to civets, an animal sold in wet markets, and from civets to people. A similar bat virus caused a second epidemic, known as MERS, in 2012. This time the intermediary host animal was camels.

The decoding of the virus’s genome showed it belonged a viral family known as beta-coronaviruses, to which the SARS1 and MERS viruses also belong. The relationship supported the idea that, like them, it was a natural virus that had managed to jump from bats, via another animal host, to people. The wet market connection, the only other point of similarity with the SARS1 and MERS epidemics, was soon broken: Chinese researchers found earlier cases in Wuhan with no link to the wet market. But that seemed not to matter when so much further evidence in support of natural emergence was expected shortly.

Wuhan, however, is home of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a leading world center for research on coronaviruses. So the possibility that the SARS2 virus had escaped from the lab could not be ruled out. Two reasonable scenarios of origin were on the table.

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“We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin,” a group of virologists and others wrote in the Lancet on February 19, 2020, when it was really far too soon for anyone to be sure what had happened. Scientists “overwhelmingly conclude that this coronavirus originated in wildlife,” they said, with a stirring rallying call for readers to stand with Chinese colleagues on the frontline of fighting the disease.

Contrary to the letter writers’ assertion, the idea that the virus might have escaped from a lab invoked accident, not conspiracy. It surely needed to be explored, not rejected out of hand. A defining mark of good scientists is that they go to great pains to distinguish between what they know and what they don’t know. By this criterion, the signatories of the Lancet letter were behaving as poor scientists: they were assuring the public of facts they could not know for sure were true.

It later turned out that the Lancet letter had been organized and drafted by Peter Daszak, president of the EcoHealth Alliance of New York. Dr. Daszak’s organization funded coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. If the SARS2 virus had indeed escaped from research he funded, Dr. Daszak would be potentially culpable. This acute conflict of interest was not declared to the Lancet’s readers. To the contrary, the letter concluded, “We declare no competing interests.”

Virologists like Dr. Daszak had much at stake in the assigning of blame for the pandemic. For 20 years, mostly beneath the public’s attention, they had been playing a dangerous game. In their laboratories they routinely created viruses more dangerous than those that exist in nature. They argued they could do so safely, and that by getting ahead of nature they could predict and prevent natural “spillovers,” the cross-over of viruses from an animal host to people. If SARS2 had indeed escaped from such a laboratory experiment, a savage blowback could be expected, and the storm of public indignation would affect virologists everywhere, not just in China. “It would shatter the scientific edifice top to bottom,” an MIT Technology Review editor, Antonio Regalado, said in March 2020.

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...the way that virologists do in fact get spike proteins to bind to chosen targets, which is not by calculation but by splicing in spike protein genes from other viruses or by serial passage. With serial passage, each time the virus’s progeny are transferred to new cell cultures or animals, the more successful are selected until one emerges that makes a really tight bind to human cells. Natural selection has done all the heavy lifting....

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Natural emergence was the media’s preferred theory until around February 2021 and the visit by a World Health Organization commission to China. The commission’s composition and access were heavily controlled by the Chinese authorities. Its members, who included the ubiquitous Dr. Daszak, kept asserting before, during and after their visit that lab escape was extremely unlikely. But this was not quite the propaganda victory the Chinese authorities may have been hoping for. What became clear was that the Chinese had no evidence to offer the commission in support of the natural emergence theory.

This was surprising because both the SARS1 and MERS viruses had left copious traces in the environment. The intermediary host species of SARS1 was identified within four months of the epidemic’s outbreak, and the host of MERS within nine months. Yet some 15 months after the SARS2 pandemic began, and a presumably intensive search, Chinese researchers had failed to find either the original bat population, or the intermediate species to which SARS2 might have jumped, or any serological evidence that any Chinese population, including that of Wuhan, had ever been exposed to the virus prior to December 2019. Natural emergence remained a conjecture which, however plausible to begin with, had gained not a shred of supporting evidence in over a year.

And as long as that remains the case, it’s logical to pay serious attention to the alternative conjecture, that SARS2 escaped from a lab.

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...Ever since virologists gained the tools for manipulating a virus’s genes, they have argued they could get ahead of a potential pandemic by exploring how close a given animal virus might be to making the jump to humans. And that justified lab experiments in enhancing the ability of dangerous animal viruses to infect people, virologists asserted.

With this rationale, they have recreated the 1918 flu virus, shown how the almost extinct polio virus can be synthesized from its published DNA sequence, and introduced a smallpox gene into a related virus.

These enhancements of viral capabilities are known blandly as gain-of-function experiments. With coronaviruses, there was particular interest in the spike proteins, which jut out all around the spherical surface of the virus and pretty much determine which species of animal it will target. In 2000 Dutch researchers, for instance, earned the gratitude of rodents everywhere by genetically engineering the spike protein of a mouse coronavirus so that it would attack only cats.

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Researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, led by China’s leading expert on bat viruses, Dr. Shi Zheng-li or “Bat Lady”, mounted frequent expeditions to the bat-infested caves of Yunnan in southern China and collected around a hundred different bat coronaviruses.

Dr. Shi then teamed up with Ralph S. Baric, an eminent coronavirus researcher at the University of North Carolina. Their work focused on enhancing the ability of bat viruses to attack humans so as to “examine the emergence potential (that is, the potential to infect humans) of circulating bat CoVs [coronaviruses].” In pursuit of this aim, in November 2015 they created a novel virus by taking the backbone of the SARS1 virus and replacing its spike protein with one from a bat virus (known as SHC014-CoV). This manufactured virus was able to infect the cells of the human airway, at least when tested against a lab culture of such cells.

The SHC014-CoV/SARS1 virus is known as a chimera because its genome contains genetic material from two strains of virus. If the SARS2 virus were to have been cooked up in Dr. Shi’s lab, then its direct prototype would have been the SHC014-CoV/SARS1 chimera, the potential danger of which concerned many observers and prompted intense discussion.

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Dr. Baric had developed, and taught Dr. Shi, a general method for engineering bat coronaviruses to attack other species. The specific targets were human cells grown in cultures and humanized mice. These laboratory mice, a cheap and ethical stand-in for human subjects, are genetically engineered to carry the human version of a protein called ACE2 that studs the surface of cells that line the airways.

Dr. Shi returned to her lab at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and resumed the work she had started on genetically engineering coronaviruses to attack human cells.

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...Dr. Shi set out to create novel coronaviruses with the highest possible infectivity for human cells. Her plan was to take genes that coded for spike proteins possessing a variety of measured affinities for human cells, ranging from high to low. She would insert these spike genes one by one into the backbone of a number of viral genomes (“reverse genetics” and “infectious clone technology”), creating a series of chimeric viruses. These chimeric viruses would then be tested for their ability to attack human cell cultures (“in vitro”) and humanized mice (“in vivo”). And this information would help predict the likelihood of “spillover,” the jump of a coronavirus from bats to people.

The methodical approach was designed to find the best combination of coronavirus backbone and spike protein for infecting human cells. The approach could have generated SARS2-like viruses, and indeed may have created the SARS2 virus itself with the right combination of virus backbone and spike protein.

It cannot yet be stated that Dr. Shi did or did not generate SARS2 in her lab because her records have been sealed, but it seems she was certainly on the right track to have done so. “It is clear that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was systematically constructing novel chimeric coronaviruses and was assessing their ability to infect human cells and human-ACE2-expressing mice,” says Richard H. Ebright, a molecular biologist at Rutgers University and leading expert on biosafety.

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...The smallpox virus escaped three times from labs in England in the 1960’s and 1970’s, causing 80 cases and 3 deaths. Dangerous viruses have leaked out of labs almost every year since. Coming to more recent times, the SARS1 virus has proved a true escape artist, leaking from laboratories in Singapore, Taiwan, and no less than four times from the Chinese National Institute of Virology in Beijing.

One reason for SARS1 being so hard to handle is that there were no vaccines available to protect laboratory workers. As Dr. Daszak mentioned in his December 19 interview quoted above, the Wuhan researchers too had been unable to develop vaccines against the coronaviruses they had designed to infect human cells. They would have been as defenseless against the SARS2 virus, if it were generated in their lab, as their Beijing colleagues were against SARS1.

A second reason for the severe danger of novel coronaviruses has to do with the required levels of lab safety. There are four degrees of safety, designated BSL1 to BSL4, with BSL4 being the most restrictive and designed for deadly pathogens like the Ebola virus.

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...virologists worldwide don’t like working in BSL4 conditions. You have to wear a space suit, do operations in closed cabinets and accept that everything will take twice as long. So the rules assigning each kind of virus to a given safety level were laxer than some might think was prudent.

Before 2020, the rules followed by virologists in China and elsewhere required that experiments with the SARS1 and MERS viruses be conducted in BSL3 conditions. But all other bat coronaviruses could be studied in BSL2, the next level down. BSL2 requires taking fairly minimal safety precautions, such as wearing lab coats and gloves, not sucking up liquids in a pipette, and putting up biohazard warning signs. Yet a gain-of-function experiment conducted in BSL2 might produce an agent more infectious than either SARS1 or MERS. And if it did, then lab workers would stand a high chance of infection, especially if unvaccinated.

Much of Dr. Shi’s work on gain-of-function in coronaviruses was performed at the BSL2 safety level, as is stated in her publications and other documents. She has said in an interview with Science magazine that “The coronavirus research in our laboratory is conducted in BSL-2 or BSL-3 laboratories.”

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The evidence above adds up to a serious case that the SARS2 virus could have been created in a lab, from which it then escaped. But the case, however substantial, falls short of proof. Proof would consist of evidence from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, or related labs in Wuhan, that SARS2 or a predecessor virus was under development there. For lack of access to such records, another approach is to take certain salient facts about the SARS2 virus and ask how well each is explained by the two rival scenarios of origin, those of natural emergence and lab escape. Here are four tests of the two hypotheses. A couple have some technical detail, but these are among the most persuasive for those who may care to follow the argument.

1) The place of origin.

Start with geography. The two closest known relatives of the SARS2 virus were collected from bats living in caves in Yunnan, a province of southern China. If the SARS2 virus had first infected people living around the Yunnan caves, that would strongly support the idea that the virus had spilled over to people naturally. But this isn’t what happened. The pandemic broke out 1,500 kilometers away, in Wuhan.

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For the lab escape scenario, a Wuhan origin for the virus is a no-brainer. Wuhan is home to China’s leading center of coronavirus research where, as noted above, researchers were genetically engineering bat coronaviruses to attack human cells. They were doing so under the minimal safety conditions of a BSL2 lab. If a virus with the unexpected infectiousness of SARS2 had been generated there, its escape would be no surprise.

2) Natural history and evolution

The initial location of the pandemic is a small part of a larger problem, that of its natural history. Viruses don’t just make one time jumps from one species to another. The coronavirus spike protein, adapted to attack bat cells, needs repeated jumps to another species, most of which fail, before it gains a lucky mutation. Mutation — a change in one of its RNA units — causes a different amino acid unit to be incorporated into its spike protein and makes the spike protein better able to attack the cells of some other species.

Through several more such mutation-driven adjustments, the virus adapts to its new host, say some animal with which bats are in frequent contact. The whole process then resumes as the virus moves from this intermediate host to people.

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Proponents of natural emergence suggest that SARS2 incubated in a yet-to-be found human population before gaining its special properties. Or that it jumped to a host animal outside China.

All these conjectures are possible, but strained. Proponents of lab leak have a simpler explanation. SARS2 was adapted to human cells from the start because it was grown in humanized mice or in lab cultures of human cells, just as described in Dr. Daszak’s grant proposal. Its genome shows little diversity because the hallmark of lab cultures is uniformity.

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3) The furin cleavage site.

The furin cleavage site is a minute part of the virus’s anatomy but one that exerts great influence on its infectivity. It sits in the middle of the SARS2 spike protein. It also lies at the heart of the puzzle of where the virus came from.

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The virus, a model of economic design, does not carry its own cleaver. It relies on the cell to do the cleaving for it. Human cells have a protein cutting tool on their surface known as furin. Furin will cut any protein chain that carries its signature target cutting site. This is the sequence of amino acid units proline-arginine-arginine-alanine, or PRRA in the code that refers to each amino acid by a letter of the alphabet. PRRA is the amino acid sequence at the core of SARS2’s furin cleavage site.

Viruses have all kinds of clever tricks, so why does the furin cleavage site stand out? Because of all known SARS-related beta-coronaviruses, only SARS2 possesses a furin cleavage site. All the other viruses have their S2 unit cleaved at a different site and by a different mechanism.

How then did SARS2 acquire its furin cleavage site? Either the site evolved naturally, or it was inserted by researchers at the S1/S2 junction in a gain-of-function experiment.

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Proponents of natural emergence say SARS2 could have picked up the site from some as yet unknown beta-coronavirus. But bat SARS-related beta-coronaviruses evidently don’t need a furin cleavage site to infect bat cells, so there’s no great likelihood that any in fact possesses one, and indeed none has been found so far.

The proponents’ next argument is that SARS2 acquired its furin cleavage site from people. A predecessor of SARS2 could have been circulating in the human population for months or years until at some point it acquired a furin cleavage site from human cells. It would then have been ready to break out as a pandemic.

If this is what happened, there should be traces in hospital surveillance records of the people infected by the slowly evolving virus. But none has so far come to light. According to the WHO report on the origins of the virus, the sentinel hospitals in Hubei province, home of Wuhan, routinely monitor influenza-like illnesses and “no evidence to suggest substantial SARSCoV-2 transmission in the months preceding the outbreak in December was observed.”

So it’s hard to explain how the SARS2 virus picked up its furin cleavage site naturally, whether by mutation or recombination.

That leaves a gain-of-function experiment. For those who think SARS2 may have escaped from a lab, explaining the furin cleavage site is no problem at all. “Since 1992 the virology community has known that the one sure way to make a virus deadlier is to give it a furin cleavage site at the S1/S2 junction in the laboratory,” writes Dr. Steven Quay, a biotech entrepreneur interested in the origins of SARS2. “At least eleven gain-of-function experiments, adding a furin site to make a virus more infective, are published in the open literature, including [by] Dr. Zhengli Shi, head of coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.”

4) A Question of Codons

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As everyone knows (or may at least recall from high school), the genetic code uses three units of DNA to specify each amino acid unit of a protein chain. When read in groups of 3, the 4 different kinds of DNA unit can specify 4 x 4 x 4 or 64 different triplets, or codons as they are called. Since there are only 20 kinds of amino acid, there are more than enough codons to go around, allowing some amino acids to be specified by more than one codon. The amino acid arginine, for instance, can be designated by any of the six codons CGU, CGC, CGA, CGG, AGA or AGG, where A, U, G and C stand for the four different kinds of unit in RNA.

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...Only 5% of SARS2’s arginine codons are CGG, and the double codon CGG-CGG has not been found in any other beta-coronavirus. So how did SARS2 acquire a pair of arginine codons that are favored by human cells but not by coronaviruses?

Proponents of natural emergence have an up-hill task to explain all the features of SARS2’s furin cleavage site. They have to postulate a recombination event at a site on the virus’s genome where recombinations are rare, and the insertion of a 12-nucleotide sequence with a double arginine codon unknown in the beta-coronavirus repertoire, at the only site in the genome that would significantly expand the virus’s infectivity.

“Yes, but your wording makes this sound unlikely — viruses are specialists at unusual events,” is the riposte of David L. Robertson, a virologist at the University of Glasgow who regards lab escape as a conspiracy theory. “Recombination is naturally very, very frequent in these viruses, there are recombination breakpoints in the spike protein and these codons appear unusual exactly because we’ve not sampled enough.”

Dr. Robertson is correct that evolution is always producing results that may seem unlikely but in fact are not. Viruses can generate untold numbers of variants but we see only the one-in-a-billion that natural selection picks for survival. But this argument could be pushed too far. For instance any result of a gain-of-function experiment could be explained as one that evolution would have arrived at in time....

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For the lab escape scenario, the double CGG codon is no surprise. The human-preferred codon is routinely used in labs. So anyone who wanted to insert a furin cleavage site into the virus’s genome would synthesize the PRRA-making sequence in the lab and would be likely to use CGG codons to do so.

“When I first saw the furin cleavage site in the viral sequence, with its arginine codons, I said to my wife it was the smoking gun for the origin of the virus,” said David Baltimore, an eminent virologist and former president of CalTech. “These features make a powerful challenge to the idea of a natural origin for SARS2,” he said.

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There’s a variation on the natural emergence scenario that’s worth considering. This is the idea that SARS2 jumped directly from bats to humans, without going through an intermediate host as SARS1 and MERS did. A leading advocate is the virologist David Robertson who notes that SARS2 can attack several other species besides humans. He believes the virus evolved a generalist capability while still in bats. Because the bats it infects are widely distributed in southern and central China, the virus had ample opportunity to jump to people, even though it seems to have done so on only one known occasion. Dr. Robertson’s thesis explains why no one has so far found a trace of SARS2 in any intermediate host or in human populations surveilled before December 2019. It would also explain the puzzling fact that SARS2 has not changed since it first appeared in humans — it didn’t need to because it could already attack human cells efficiently.

One problem with this idea, though, is that if SARS2 jumped from bats to people in a single leap and hasn’t changed much since, it should still be good at infecting bats. And it seems it isn’t.

“Tested bat species are poorly infected by SARS-CoV-2 and they are therefore unlikely to be the direct source for human infection,” write a scientific group skeptical of natural emergence.

Still, Dr. Robertson may be onto something. The bat coronaviruses of the Yunnan caves can infect people directly. In April 2012 six miners clearing bat guano from the Mojiang mine contracted severe pneumonia with Covid-19-like symptoms and three eventually died. A virus isolated from the Mojiang mine, called RaTG13, is still the closest known relative of SARS2....

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So who else, besides miners excavating bat guano, comes into particularly close contact with bat coronaviruses? Well, coronavirus researchers do. Dr. Shi says she and her group collected more than 1,300 bat samples during some 8 visits to the Mojiang cave between 2012 and 2015, and there were doubtless many expeditions to other Yunnan caves.

Imagine the researchers making frequent trips from Wuhan to Yunnan and back, stirring up bat guano in dark caves and mines, and now you begin to see a possible missing link between the two places. Researchers could have gotten infected during their collecting trips, or while working with the new viruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The virus that escaped from the lab would have been a natural virus, not one cooked up by gain of function.

The direct-from-bats thesis is a chimera between the natural emergence and lab escape scenarios. It’s a possibility that can’t be dismissed. But against it are the facts that 1) both SARS2 and RaTG13 seem to have only feeble affinity for bat cells, so one can’t be fully confident that either ever saw the inside of a bat; and 2) the theory is no better than the natural emergence scenario at explaining how SARS2 gained its furin cleavage site, or why the furin cleavage site is determined by human-preferred arginine codons instead of by the bat-preferred codons.

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Neither the natural emergence nor the lab escape hypothesis can yet be ruled out. There is still no direct evidence for either. So no definitive conclusion can be reached.

That said, the available evidence leans more strongly in one direction than the other. Readers will form their own opinion. But it seems to me that proponents of lab escape can explain all the available facts about SARS2 considerably more easily than can those who favor natural emergence.

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...it’s worth trying to assess responsibility for the pandemic, at least in a provisional way, because the paramount goal remains to prevent another one. Even those who aren’t persuaded that lab escape is the more likely origin of the SARS2 virus may see reason for concern about the present state of regulation governing gain-of-function research. There are two obvious levels of responsibility: the first, for allowing virologists to perform gain-of-function experiments, offering minimal gain and vast risk; the second, if indeed SARS2 was generated in a lab, for allowing the virus to escape and unleash a world-wide pandemic. Here are the players who seem most likely to deserve blame.

1. Chinese virologists

First and foremost, Chinese virologists are to blame for performing gain-of-function experiments in mostly BSL2-level safety conditions which were far too lax to contain a virus of unexpected infectiousness like SARS2. If the virus did indeed escape from their lab, they deserve the world’s censure for a foreseeable accident that has already caused the deaths of 3 million people.

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2. Chinese authorities

China’s central authorities did not generate SARS2 but they sure did their utmost to conceal the nature of the tragedy and China’s responsibility for it. They suppressed all records at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and closed down its virus databases. They released a trickle of information, much of which may have been outright false or designed to misdirect and mislead. They did their best to manipulate the WHO’s inquiry into the virus’s origins, and led the commission’s members on a fruitless run-around. So far they have proved far more interested in deflecting blame than in taking the steps necessary to prevent a second pandemic.

3. The worldwide community of virologists

Virologists around the world are a loose-knit professional community. They write articles in the same journals. They attend the same conferences. They have common interests in seeking funds from governments and in not being overburdened with safety regulations.

Virologists knew better than anyone the dangers of gain-of-function research. But the power to create new viruses, and the research funding obtainable by doing so, was too tempting. They pushed ahead with gain-of-function experiments. They lobbied against the moratorium imposed on Federal funding for gain-of-function research in 2014 and it was raised in 2017.

The benefits of the research in preventing future epidemics have so far been nil, the risks vast. If research on the SARS1 and MERS viruses could only be done at the BSL3 safety level, it was surely illogical to allow any work with novel coronaviruses at the lesser level of BSL2. Whether or not SARS2 escaped from a lab, virologists around the world have been playing with fire.

...

You might think the SARS2 pandemic would spur virologists to re-evaluate the benefits of gain-of-function research, even to engage the public in their deliberations. But no. Many virologists deride lab escape as a conspiracy theory and others say nothing. They have barricaded themselves behind a Chinese wall of silence which so far is working well to allay, or at least postpone, journalists’ curiosity and the public’s wrath. Professions that cannot regulate themselves deserve to get regulated by others, and this would seem to be the future that virologists are choosing for themselves.

4. The US Role in Funding the Wuhan Institute of Virology

...

From June 2014 to May 2019 Dr. Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance had a grant from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health, to do gain-of-function research with coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Whether or not SARS2 is the product of that research, it seems a questionable policy to farm out high-risk research to foreign labs using minimal safety precautions. And if the SARS2 virus did indeed escape from the Wuhan institute, then the NIH will find itself in the terrible position of having funded a disastrous experiment that led to the death of more than 3 million worldwide, including more than half a million of its own citizens.

...

The moratorium, referred to officially as a “pause,” specifically barred funding any gain-of-function research that increased the pathogenicity of the flu, MERS or SARS viruses. It defined gain-of-function very simply and broadly as “research that improves the ability of a pathogen to cause disease.”

But then a footnote on p.2 of the moratorium document states that “An exception from the research pause may be obtained if the head of the USG funding agency determines that the research is urgently necessary to protect the public health or national security.”

This seemed to mean that either the director of the NIAID, Dr. Anthony Fauci, or the director of the NIH, Dr. Francis Collins, or maybe both, would have invoked the exemption in order to keep the money flowing to Dr. Shi’s gain-of-function research, and later to avoid notifying the Federal reporting system of her research.

...

But it’s not so clear that the NIH thought it necessary to invoke any loopholes. Dr. Fauci told a Senate hearing on May 11 that “the NIH and NIAID categorically has not funded gain-of-function research to be conducted in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.”

...

The explanation may be one of definition. Dr. Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance, for one, believes that the term gain-of-function applies only to enhancements of viruses that infect humans, not to animal viruses. “So gain-of-function research refers specifically to the manipulation of human viruses so as to be either more easily transmissible or to cause worse infection or be easier to spread,” an Alliance official told The Dispatch Fact Check.

If the NIH shares the EcoHealth Alliance view that the term gain of function applies only to human viruses, that would explain why Dr. Fauci could assure the Senate it had never funded such research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. But the legal basis of such a definition is unclear, and it differs from that of the moratorium language which was presumably applicable."

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The Criminalization of Dissent. “Covid Deniers”and “Anti-Vaxxers” under Surveillance

"One of the hallmarks of totalitarian systems is the criminalization of dissent. Not just the stigmatization of dissent or the demonization of dissent, but the formal criminalization of dissent, and any other type of opposition to the official ideology of the totalitarian system. Global capitalism has been inching its way toward this step for quite some time, and now, apparently, it is ready to take it.

Germany has been leading the way. For over a year, anyone questioning or protesting the “Covid emergency measures” or the official Covid-19 narrative has been demonized by the government and the media, and, sadly, but not completely unexpectedly, the majority of the German public. And now such dissent is officially “extremism.”

Yes, that’s right, in “New Normal” Germany, if you dissent from the official state ideology, you are now officially a dangerous “extremist.” The German Intelligence agency (the “BfV”) has even invented a new category of “extremists” in order to allow themselves to legally monitor anyone suspected of being “anti-democratic and/or delegitimizing the state in a way that endangers security,” like … you know, non-violently protesting, or speaking out against, or criticizing, or satirizing, the so-called “New Normal.”

...

As The New York Times reported last week (German Intelligence Puts Coronavirus Deniers Under Surveillance), “the danger from coronavirus deniers and conspiracy theorists does not fit the mold posed by the usual politically driven groups, including those on the far left and right, or by Islamic extremists.” Still, according to the German Interior Ministry, we diabolical “Covid deniers,” “conspiracy theorists,” and “anti-vaxxers” have “targeted the state itself, its leaders, businesses, the press, and globalism,” and have “attacked police officers” and “defied civil authorities.”

...

According to Al Jazeera, the German Interior Ministry explained that these querdenking “extremists encourage supporters to ignore official orders and challenge the state monopoly on the use of force.” Seriously, can you imagine anything more dangerous? Mindlessly following orders and complying with the state’s monopoly on the use of force are the very cornerstones of modern democracy … or some sort of political system, anyway.

...

These Covid-denying “violent extremists” have apparently joined forces with the “white-supremacist, Russia-backed, Trump-loving “Putin-Nazis” that terrorized “democracy” for the past four years, and almost overthrew the US government by sauntering around inside the US Capitol Building without permission, scuffling with police, attacking furniture, and generally acting rude and unruly. No, they didn’t actually kill anyone, as the corporate media all reported they did, but trespassing in a government building and putting your feet up on politicians’ desks is pretty much exactly the same as “terrorism.”

Or whatever. It’s not like the truth actually matters, not when you are whipping up mass hysteria over imaginary “Russian assets,” “white-supremacist militias,” “Covid-denying extremists,” “anti-vax terrorists,” and “apocalyptic plagues.” When you’re rolling out a new official ideology — a pathologized-totalitarian ideology — and criminalizing all dissent, the point is not to appear to be factual. The point is just to terrorize the sh*t out of people.

As Hermann Goering famously explained regarding how to lead a country to war (and the principle holds true for any big transition, like the one we are experiencing currently):

“[T]he people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger.”

...

...Global capitalist governments and their corporate media mouthpieces are telling us, in no uncertain terms, that “objection to their authority” will no longer be tolerated, nor will dissent from their official narratives. Such dissent will be deemed “dangerous” and above all “false.” It will not be engaged with or rationally debated. It will be erased from public view. There will be an inviolable, official “reality.” Any deviation from official “reality” or defiance of the “civil authorities” will be labelled “extremism,” and dealt with accordingly.

This is the essence of totalitarianism, the establishment of an inviolable official ideology and the criminalization of dissent. And that is what is happening, right now. A new official ideology is being established. Not a state ideology. A global ideology. The “New Normal” is that official ideology. Technically, it is an official post-ideology, an official “reality,” an axiomatic “fact,” which only “criminals” and “psychopaths” would deny."

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More than a quarter of EU adults reluctant to get Covid vaccine, survey finds

"A Eurofound survey investigating vaccine take-up across EU member states flagged concerns about the success of messaging from health officials on Covid jabs, warning that the failure to fully convince the adult population to be inoculated could put the fight against the pandemic at risk.

Some 27% of those surveyed across Europe, including half of French respondents and 67% of those in Bulgaria, said they would be very unlikely or rather unlikely to get a Covid vaccine. There were big variations between states though, with people surveyed in Eastern European nations more likely to be more cautious about taking the jab. Hesitancy figures were above 30% in several states, including Croatia, Latvia, Poland and Slovenia.

...

Looking at the possible root causes of vaccine hesitancy, researchers found a link between people who said they were less likely to get a Covid jab and social media as a main source of information. Among those surveyed who said they primarily relied on social media for their news, vaccine hesitancy was at 40%, compared with 18% who used traditional news outlets."

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Fake Fascism and the Quest for Community

"It’s tempting to apply the ancient adolescent wisdom of “he that smelt it dealt it” to this farrago—to assert that all the left-sympathetic witch hunters who fingered fascist shadows in the White House or among conservatives, in general, were the real fascists. National Review‘s Jonah Goldberg did just that for years, first on his blog, then in a subsequent (and quite informative) book, Liberal Fascism (2008). But simple accusations of hypocrisy obscure a concern that is, so to speak, fascism-adjacent.

Yes, warnings of resurgent fascism from either side of the aisle smack of delusion and historical apophenia, but the social problems which, by most accounts, engendered historical fascism still are very much with us today. The alienation, deterioration of community, breakdown of authority, free-floating anxiety, and economic insecurity that laid open Italy and Germany to fascism are far more advanced now than they were in the 1920s and 1930s—orders of magnitude more advanced. Fascism may not be where we are headed, but the lingering myth of fascism may help drive us into a very bad situation, one yet to earn its name.

...

The transubstantiation of fascism from a historical and concrete noun into a catchall term of evil started almost the instant real fascism imploded. George Orwell wrote in 1944:

“It will be seen that, as used, the word ‘Fascism’ is almost entirely meaningless. In conversation, of course, it is used even more wildly than in print. I have heard it applied to farmers, shopkeepers, Social Credit, corporal punishment, fox-hunting, bull-fighting, the 1922 Committee, the 1941 Committee, Kipling, Gandhi, Chiang Kai-Shek, homosexuality, Priestley’s broadcasts, Youth Hostels, astrology, women, dogs and I do not know what else … almost any English person would accept ‘bully’ as a synonym for ‘Fascist.’ That’s about as near to a definition as this much-abused word has come.”

...

Fascism’s supposedly apodictic place on the far-right of the political spectrum turns out to be a bogus, choice morsel of circular reasoning: “the far-right” is defined as “fascism,” and “fascism” as “the far-right.” But when one knows, as we do, that fascism lacks any definition outside of historical exemplars, the circle fails to connect. Historical fascists persecuted conservatives as well as communists and pandered to progressive as well as reactionary passions depending on time, place, and necessity.

While too straightforward for academic pettifoggery and useless to modern propagandists, Benito Mussolini proffered an early definition of fascism that proved robust in light of subsequent events:

“If relativism signifies contempt for fixed categories and those who claim to be the bearers of objective immortal truth, then there is nothing more relativistic than Fascist attitudes and activity. From the fact that all ideologies are of equal value, we Fascists conclude that we have the right to create our own ideology and to enforce it with all the energy of which we are capable.”

In other words, fascists make it up as they go along. Fascist leaders came up with their policies, mythology, and actions as convenience and advantage dictated, and they revised their positions without consistency or reason (self-contradiction being no obstacle)....

...

The purpose of deconstructing these misconceptions of fascism is not to overburden the reader with historical trivia or semantics. Rather, it’s to demonstrate that fascism has become the mythological obsession of our age—an emotionally fraught, secular Satan used to justify all manner of nonsense. The literature on fascism—and Nazism in particular—overflows the bookstores and grows every year. There may be no subject more riveting to the imaginations of both academics and the general public, on par with sex and sports. It would come as no surprise if, in 100 years, the period from WWII to the present became known as the “post-fascist era,” a time when the west defined itself by its opposition to a dead-and-buried political movement.

...

The infernal genius of historical fascism, for its part, was that it addressed the vacuum of community and purpose of post-Enlightenment individualism identified by Nisbet, as well as the particular alienation many Europeans struggled with after WWI, when so much sense of community and stability was lost to them nationally and internationally. Fascism gave people back a sense of unity, stability, and purpose—an aspect of Fascism and Nazism rarely dramatized in modern movies and literature, which tend to portray Germans and Italians of the period as soulless melodrama villains. “The greatest appeal of the totalitarian party,” Nisbet writes, “lies in its capacity to provide a sense of moral coherence and communal membership to those who have become, to one degree or another, victims of the sense of exclusion from the ordinary [traditional] channels of belonging in society.”

...

None of this is to suggest the present-day American is experiencing some new degeneration of community or sense of alienation analogous to pre-WWII Italy or Germany. The point is rather that the plight of the disconnected and “free” western individual fundamentally hasn’t changed.

Following the Enlightenment, western peoples erected the centralized state and, in the process, deliberately hollowed out the local faith, family, clan, village, and guild that before had defined societies. The advantages of a centralized state could not fill the interpersonal void, resulting in a dearth of belonging and an aching emptiness. Men became “citizens”—undifferentiated members of the unitary central state—not unique neighbors, parishioners, kinsmen, landholders belonging to the environs and its particular people. Our cultural fixation with historical fascism likely traces to its bold attempt–however ill-conceived and disastrous–to solve with a coercive central state the disconnection of whole peoples from one another."

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Hubble telescope team marks 31st birthday with image of rare ultra-bright star on the brink of annihilation

"The Hubble Space Telescope was launched on April 24, 1990, and has dazzled humanity with incredible images of our universe ever since. To mark its 31st anniversary, NASA shared a rare gem in the form of the star AG Carinae.

tAG Carinae, a type of star called a luminous blue variable (LBV), is located some 20,000 light years away. It is just a few million years old, and yet is soon to meet its doom, cosmically speaking.

Estimated to be up to 70 times more massive than our Sun, it burns with the light of up to a million suns and boasts a shroud of gas and dust with a span of five light-years – 100,000,000 times the distance between the Earth and the Moon – that, itself, comprises material roughly 10 times the mass of our sun."

Everything massive once wasn't...

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How to Stop Ransomware Attacks

"Asked why he robbed banks, Willie Sutton famously replied, “Because that’s where the money is.”

Similarly, ransomware attacks happen because there is money to be made. Computer systems are critical to almost every line of business. VPN or Tor communications permit ransom demands to be made fairly anonymously, and cryptocurrency permits anonymous payment. For those with computer savvy, ransomware is an alluring means to make a big score.

While punishing and even attacking ransomware hackers may be part of the solution, there are also options on the incentive side. Like ransomware, bribes are an important, illegal revenue maker in much of the world. Western businesses that want to do business in the Third World have long been shaken down for bribes by officials at every level of government. The goal is not to run off Western investors completely, but to take a piece of the action.

In trying to curtail foreign corruption, there is a strong precedent to strike at those most inclined to play by the rules: the payers.

In 1977, Congress passed the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA). The FCPA makes it illegal for any U.S. company or its employees and agents to pay bribes overseas, even when shaken down. The government can impose large fines for those that do so.

While the FCPA has not eliminated foreign corruption, the point is to reduce it by reducing the payoff to those who seek bribes. The FCPA also gives the target a face-saving way to reject the shakedowns. It also prevents American companies from securing an unfair advantage by paying bribes. A law similar to the FCPA preventing ransomware payments would do a lot to curtail ransomware attacks.

One of the arguments against the FCPA is that it puts American companies at a disadvantage overseas. This may be true, although the United States broadly interprets the law to include a lot of international players, including German giant Siemens, which was hit with a whopping $800 million in fines.

More important, from an America First perspective, wouldn’t we want to encourage more domestic investment in capital, whether for manufacturers or anyone else? Courts do not enforce illegal contracts. Why not mildly discourage American capital flight by requiring American companies to continue to abide by American laws while doing business overseas?

If America strictly enforced a statute forbidding ransomware payment, there would be little point for foreign criminals to seek ransom. After all, these attacks are not mere vandalism, but a money-motivated criminal enterprise. If the victims had no choice but to invest in greater protection or restore their systems from backups, the incentive for foreign hackers to seek ransom would go down considerably.

...

Such a law would also express the most basic political principle: the public interest comes before the immediate, short-term interest of any particular company dealing with a ransomware shakedown. But long-term thinking is in short supply these days."

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Bravery and Risk in the Age of Truth

"Rising-up almost perceptibly now, in an increasing number of individuals, is a powerful urge to give expression to truth at its profoundest level. This is the life-force itself, demanding action and urging all who feel it to step forward into the front lines of a great battle. The battle to overcome the purveyors of gross injustice and stand firm for the global manifestation of truth.

Truth can seem illusive at such times as these, as that which is an expression of Supreme Consciousness does not show its radiant face to those who take no risks and show no bravery. However, each of us are sparks emanating from one great fire, and due to this, are blessed with powers capable of bringing about a total transformation – once we choose to take the risk of living for an ideal that radiates with light.

At a time when ‘the Lie’ has never been more dominant within the corridors of earthly power, it is up to us to unsheathe our swords of truth and cut a swathe of light through the dark backcloth of unprecedented deception. This truth-power brooks no equal – and simmers just under the surface with an increasing intent to explode volcanically outwards. It is, right now, weaving a strong and subtle web right under the noses of the insentient perpetrators of the great lie.

...

There is nobody who cannot exert their free will and make this choice. On making the decision ‘to see’, one has opened one’s account with the Divine. But unfortunately for some – who are accustomed to immediate rewards on the touch of a button – it is not an instant access account to the full wealth of conscious enlightenment. It is instead, more truly expressed in the words of Lao Tzu “The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.”

This single step opens the initiate into the sanctuary of his/her unique truth. From here on one can discern the difference between what is supportive of a further flowering and what is blocking that flowering and keeping one in prison.

On recognising this, one’s entire life becomes directed to the demolition of the prison and the fertilising of the soil for a great flowering. The beauty of being committed to the flowering is that all those in love with the same cosmic melody are drawn together, thus forming an increasingly powerful force for the wider emancipation of all living beings.

This incorporates helping to free fellow human beings from the delusions of Maya and urging them to take action in hastening the uncompromising defeat and eradication of the anti-life forces. Those that are attempting to re-engineer and control every last channel of life on Earth.

Being committed to defeating the forces of darkness means embracing the reality of danger and risk at every turn of the road. This is a battle royal, fought on two plains simultaneously: the one which houses our own inner “demons” and the one in which “the external forces” manifest their ambitions for totalitarian control over us."

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Suppressed Wages and Rural Decline Meet in Mellen, Wisconsin

"Jon Koosmann started working at North Country Lumber two days after graduating high school in 1990. At first, he says, ​“it was just something for me to do to make some money.” After a stint at a nearby veneer plant, he returned to the lumberyard and now serves as the mill’s hardwood grader. It’s a job that in a few years’ time may no longer exist — or, at least, not in its current form.

Wood grading — the process of sorting wood by quality for different uses —is an essential job in any lumber mill. However, as stagnant wages and alternative job options push graders from the industry and more mills begin to automate, this task is increasingly falling to a new type of employee.

Artificially intelligent computers are faster than human labor — if not necessarily more accurate — and are quickly becoming popular with big corporate enterprises that can easily afford cutting-edge equipment. Tech manufacturers are capitalizing on this trend by touting sleek new AI products, creating an economic feedback loop.

...

Early lumbermen worked without much machinery. ​“Technology was oxen and horses and sleighs, an axe and a cross cut saw,” says Jerry Apps, a Wisconsin-based rural sociologist. ​“And yet, it was successful and got the job done.”

Trees were cut by hand, placed into major rivers and floated downstream. Sawmills had to be located along a river in order to harness the water’s power to saw the lumber into usable boards.

The job looks much different today. Apps, who owns a tree farm in Waushara County, has watched automation take root over the last few decades. ​“You would never even recognize it, really. Because the work the loggers do on my farm, my gosh, they sit inside of an air conditioned camp with a computer screen in front of them,” he says.

...

While Mellen’s ebbing population likely accounts for some of the labor shortage, workers point to stagnant wages and the physically demanding nature of the job to explain low entry into the profession.

“It’s slowly dying out. It’s like, you know, Cadillac car owners,” says Rado Gazo, a professor of Wood Processing and Industrial Engineering at Purdue University. ​“It’s a demanding job; you have to really like what you’re doing… It’s just, people have other options.”

Koosmann and his coworkers clock an average of forty-five hours a week. They wake up before the crack of dawn and punch in at 5:30 a.m. most days. It’s not easy work.

“The lumber is coming at you at a pretty good rate of speed,” Koosmann says. Once it reaches the grading station, he has just seconds to flip the board, scan for defects, determine which of four categories it belongs to and give it the mark that will ultimately determine its value. Over the course of nine hours, Koosmann might examine upwards of 3,000 ten-foot-long boards. That adds up to anywhere from 32,000 to 39,000 pounds to lift and turn, equivalent to one and a half school buses sans children.

...

When Delegan graduated from NHLA grading school in 1996, there were sixty-four students in his class. The most recent class graduated five. The decline isn’t just a product of the pandemic; July 2019 saw seven graduates, and by all accounts attendance has been trending downward for years.

In contrast to its human counterparts, wood grading AI uses a laser to scan each piece of wood like a barcode as it zooms down the line, constructing an image pixel by pixel. Then, drawing on a database of hundreds of thousands of pictures, the machine’s algorithm compares the new board against similar specimens. From there it assigns a grade with (in the words of one manufacturer) ​“unparalleled” accuracy....

...

Gazo, who worked with Microtec to develop their grading technology, doesn’t think that artificial intelligence can currently match the human eye. ​“If you look at how many cells and receptors are in your eye, and the connection between the eye and the brain,” he says, ​“even the best supercomputer today still cannot match it.”

But AI is trendy, he says, and neural networks don’t tire out or take sick days. The resulting ​“tech push” has created a sense of urgency around AI upgrades, which is great for companies like Microtec."

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Panic over declining global sperm counts blown out of proportion, says new Harvard study

"Recent studies claim a global decline in sperm counts, but especially in Western males, which can be attributed to certain classes of chemicals in our environment and food supply – in particular, phthalates. Phthalates are a class of chemical used to make plastics more durable and are ubiquitous in many societies around the world.

...

But the Harvard GenderSci Lab researchers offer an alternative explanation of sperm count trends and suggest there is little, if any, cause for concern. They highlight a pre-existing wide variability in sperm count that is not necessarily the result of some outside influence in the human environment but is, instead, quite typical for the human species.

The team contends that a higher sperm count is not necessarily better, nor is it an indicator of better health, or a higher probability of fertility.

They also highlight several apparent logical fallacies and misinterpretations of old data within this particular niche area of research, including that sperm counts taken in Anglophone nations during studies conducted in the 1970s constituted some kind of optimum, when this was simply not the case.

The Harvard scientists also expressed concern about the conflation in some quarters of declining sperm counts with declining fertility, saying there was simply no evidence to support this claim.

...

“Researchers must take care to weigh hypotheses against alternatives, and consider the language and narrative frames in which they present their work. In addition to its explanatory virtues, we argue that biovariability offers a more promising framework than does ‘sperm decline’ for attending to these imperatives,” the researchers conclude."

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Free Speech Inc.: How Democrats Have Found A New But Shaky Faith In Corporate Speech

"Welcome to Free Speech, Inc.: the Democratic incorporation of free speech built around the a presumption of corporate censorship (for some).

Of course, Democrats insist they are not attacking free speech, just combating “disinformation.” After all, they say, private companies have every right to control speech — unless you are, say, a bakery opposed to preparing a cake for a same-sex wedding, or a company contributing to political causes. The current mantra defending Facebook’s corporate speech rights seems strikingly out of sync with years of Democrats and political activists demanding the curtailment of such rights.

...

When free speech concerns are raised over corporate censorship, Democrats often drop references to “free speech” violations and instead address “First Amendment” violations. Indeed, when Trump objected to the ban on Twitter as “banning free speech,” a host of media outlets ran stories like: “Fact Check: Did Twitter Violate President Trump’s First Amendment Rights?” Experts like Wayne State University law professor Jonathan Weinberg chimed in that, under the First Amendment, a company “gets to choose who it does business with and who it doesn’t.”

Likewise, when questioned about the Board’s decision and its impact on free speech, board member and Stanford Law Professor Michael McConnell dismissed such concerns by insisting that the First Amendment does not apply to Facebook and “no judge in the country would rule” in favor of the former president.”

The First Amendment is not the full or exclusive embodiment of free speech, however. It addresses just one of the dangers to free speech posed by government regulation. Many of us view free speech as a human right. Corporate censorship of social media clearly impacts free speech, and replacing Big Brother with a cadre of Little Brothers actually allows for far greater control of free expression.

This is even more concerning when politicians openly pressure companies to increase censorship....

...

Obviously, these politicians would insist that the Masterpiece Cakeshop case is about discrimination while the Facebook controversy is about disinformation. However, some of us have long viewed all of these controversies as about free speech. Indeed, taking a free speech approach avoids the hypocrisy on both sides.

Under a free speech approach, cakeshop owners have a right to refuse to prepare cakes that offend their deep-felt values, including religious, political or social values. Thus, a Jewish cakeshop owner should be able to decline to make a “Mein Kampf” cake for a local skinhead group, a Black owner to decline to make a white supremacist-themed cake, or a gay baker to decline to make a cake with anti-LGBT slogans. While these bakers cannot discriminate in selling prepared cakes, the act of decorating a cake is a form of expression, and requiring such preparation is a form of compelled speech.

...

Free speech also allows the rest of us to oppose these businesses over their policies. We have a right to refuse to subsidize or support companies that engage in racial or content discrimination. Thus, with social media companies, Congress should not afford these companies legal immunity or other protections when they engage in censorship.

These companies once were viewed as neutral platforms for people to exchange views — people who affirmatively “friend” or invite the views of others. If Big Tech wants to be treated like a telephone company, it must act like a telephone company. We wouldn’t tolerate AT&T interrupting calls to object to some misleading conversation, or cutting the line for those who misinform others.

As a neutral platform for communications, telephone companies receive special legal and economic status under our laws. Yet, it sometimes seems Facebook wants to be treated like AT&T but act like the DNC."

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The Online Safety Bill is a major blow to the UK’s already-feeble free speech rights

"The UK government has introduced a draft of its controversial “Online Safety Bill” which aims to block social media websites in the country if they fail to remove “disinformation,” “legal but harmful content” and more.

As with most online censorship laws, the UK government has framed this bill as something that will “keep children safe” while it gives the government and its communications regulator, the Office of Communications (Ofcom), sweeping powers to censor what people say online.

Big Tech-controlled social media websites already remove millions of posts each quarter for breaking their strict rules around disinformation and harmful content but according to the UK government’s press release for this Online Safety Bill, sites hosting user-generated content will have to censor even more aggressively to continue operating in the country.

...

It adds that: “The largest and most popular social media sites (Category 1 services) will need to act on content that is lawful but still harmful such as abuse that falls below the threshold of a criminal offense, encouragement of self-harm and mis/disinformation.”

When it comes to defining harmful content, the scope is wide, vague, and subjective. The bill defines “content that is harmful to adults” as anything where “the provider of the service has reasonable grounds to believe that the nature of the content is such that there is a material risk of the content having, or indirectly having, a significant adverse physical or psychological impact on an adult of ordinary sensibilities.”

Not only will this bill force Big Tech platforms to amp up their censorship but it will also likely give the mainstream media outlets that have been one of the main proponents of this bill further advantages over smaller creators on social media.

...

Other censorship provisions in the bill include a requirement for social media platforms to get their terms of service approved by Ofcom and a requirement for social media platforms to enforce age limits (which would likely mean that people who don’t verify their age will be blocked from accessing these social media sites).

...

While the UK government recognizes the dangers of over-removing content, it fails to acknowledge that its own definition of harmful content is so vague and far-reaching that the bill will likely contribute to the innocuous content removals that it claims to be trying to protect against.

Another so-called “protection” in this Online Safety Bill is “democratically important” content which includes “content promoting or opposing government policy or a political party ahead of a vote in Parliament, election or referendum, or campaigning on a live political issue.”

Under this protection, social media companies will be “forbidden from discriminating against particular political viewpoints and will need to apply protections equally to a range of political opinions, no matter their affiliation.”

Yet the bill fails to acknowledge that pushes to censor harmful content often result in the censorship of political views. For example, the opinions of President Trump were censored because the tech overlords deemed them to be “potentially harmful.”

And if there is a conflict between a company’s obligation to censor harmful content and “the protection of users’ right to freedom of expression within the law,” the obligation to censor harmful content overrules this protection."

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A mainstream outlet accepted my pitch on what media refuses to say about US empire – then refused to let me say it

"This is a story about how the media works. Specifically, it’s about my failed attempt to publish an article with the mainstream media about some of the things that news outlets consistently avoid when they cover US/UK foreign policy.

You’re maybe thinking, “That’s your own fault – why would you ever have thought you could get an article about what the mainstream media refuses to say into the mainstream media?”

Well, because there’s an online network of non-profit outlets called The Conversation whose remit is to give academics like me a platform to convey journalistic versions of their research. The Conversation says it sees universities as “a giant newsroom” and the resultant articles are reprinted for free by newspapers. Operating internationally for about a decade, it has a combined reach of 40 million people.

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The Conversation uses special software that automatically determines the “readability” of an article. For over a week, my associates and I worked until the software ranked us at 85%, which meant we were writing for “high school students” – ie, nice, clear and simple. The editor laid up imagery and even deployed an unusually stark and dramatic headline: “How Western media amplifies and rationalizes state-sanctioned war and violence – while millions die.”

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We began the piece by observing how it was an article of faith across the US media during the Second Indochina War (1955-75) that American troops had been deployed to “defend South Vietnam” against “aggression” by communists from the North. Among public commentators, Noam Chomsky – though without a news platform to host him – was unique in making the simple observation that the US had “attacked South Vietnam” [emphasis added].

Chomsky was right, though – during 1962 alone, the US carried out 2,048 air sorties and stationed over 11,000 boots on the ground in South Vietnam. But this was scarcely even starters. By the end of the war, two-thirds of US bombs – twice the total tonnage detonated in World War II – had been dropped on the South. In this so-called “Vietnam” War, America also pulverized two neighboring countries, Cambodia and Laos.

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Our article for The Conversation was due to be published on the morning of Thursday, 25th April 2019. As the piece was ready to go live, the executive editor intervened as a final check.

An hour later, I was called by the first editor to say there was a delay.

When our draft came back to us, the editor’s headline phrase “While millions die,” had been removed. All references to Vietnam, East Timor, Indonesia, and Venezuela had been removed. In fact, mention of Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman and a reference to our own status as scholars of propaganda had also been removed.

A paragraph we had written about coverage of NATO’s 2011 bombing of Libya was annotated in capital letters: “Needs line in here about nature of [Colonel Muammar] Gaddafi regime. Can’t ignore its atrocities.”

We acknowledged abuse by Gaddafi and offered to include the line. We also pointed out that it was our “rebels” in Libya who had conducted large-scale human rights abuses against black Africans and that NATO intervention magnified the death toll in Libya by at least seven times....

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Our editor seemed to believe the piece would still go ahead, so we continued work on it and maintained regular contact for over a month. Later, they told me to start again from scratch, so I began.

I pointed out the irony that an article on what the media refuses to say about Western foreign policy had been “dropped at the last minute over its political content,” and that “this seems to run counter to The Conversation’s own charter and to its spirit of cooperation with our universities.”

We asked for further comment from the executive editor, but were told he had taken off for a month-long sabbatical. When we chased again, there was no reply.

Ultimately, the editor said to take it elsewhere, which is not so easy these days, incidentally, since newspapers seem less dependent on academic freelancers because they get articles for free from – yes you guessed it – The Conversation, which secures its own funding privately.

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A draft of our rejected piece was picked up by fringe publications and predictably plastered with the Orwellian label “censored.” But what the Conversation did was not really censorship – it was just another standard editorial choice that happened to be, as always, in favor of established political and commercial interests and overriding all other considerations.

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Other examples of under-reporting that stick out to me include:

• --the fate of around 900 islanders unceremoniously booted out by the US/UK to build a military base on Diego Garcia (1968-73);
• --the sanctions committee that stopped Saddam-era Iraq importing a long lost of items – including heart medication, teddy bears, sanitary towel,s and shrouds for the dead – that had no possible offensive utility (1990-2003);
• --and CIA/MI6 support for a secret “rat line” of shipments supplying Syrian opposition groups – a national security scandal mentioned just six times in the British press, among 150,000 articles citing Syria between 2011 and 2020.

In other cases, news outlets obsess over a particular topic with such little context that its significance is warped beyond all reason. Consider the media’s hysteria over Russian activity – in a data sample from 20th February to 31st March 2017, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow spent 640 minutes talking about 15 Russia-related issues, and just 551 minutes covering 43 other topics.

Today, the media is still systematically turning rumors from anonymous officials or CIA agents into front-page news (check my hyperlinks, they’re bonkers) while NATO considers deploying more troops to Russia’s border.

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And millions have died – easily avoidable violent deaths caused by powerful individuals and institutions in the West as a direct consequence of deploying military hardware. Millions of people killed and hundreds of millions of submunitions and bombs dropped – sufficient to lace every street in the world with dozens of hunks of explosive ordnance.

None of this is to factor in the impact of our sanctions, or the disproportionate effect that our military-industrial complex has on climate change, or the bloodslicks silently trailing in the wake of long-coddled industries like tobacco and mining.  

It is ironic that I myself deliberately omitted from my article any comment about some of the most inaccessible, distressing, or controversial areas of foreign policy reportage, which are well evaluated by academics and serious commentators in my field. I did not refer to the historical media blackout in Northern Ireland, including muted suspicions that bombings in Birmingham in 1974 and Omagh in 1998 were allowed to go ahead to protect the identity of Western spies and informants.  

Nor to the feeble coverage of intriguing whistleblower evidence indicating that a bogus chemical attack was staged by Syrian insurgents and covered up by the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW).

I said nothing about how the news by turns ignores and sneers at Julian Assange, Wikileaks’ publisher whose Kafkaesque imprisonment in London is now discreetly acknowledged – though stripped of the heartbreaking details – as psychological torture.

I said nothing about what Chomsky calls the “severe decline” in media coverage of arms control abrogation. Nor did I make any comment about media treatment of Israel-Palestine, where a nation remains literally caged.

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Everybody has their beef with the mainstream. I am not a pacifist, but I certainly do support efforts at conflict resolution. “Team peace” is my “tribe,” so you would naturally expect me to grind my teeth at stories that reject this approach.

However, when it comes to Western power, I think something more fundamental is taking place than normal biases and differences of opinion. Indeed, it is standard – even when it comes to the most vicious applications of British and American foreign policy – that Western mainstream media simply ghosts pivotal critical content that is staring it right in the face."