lawfare | But how the impeachment inquiry itself was conducted had an effect as
well. Undoubtedly, the process suffered in part from the inherently
political nature of the House. As political scientists are wont to
emphasize, Congress is a they, not an it.
Democratic leaders were cross-pressured by factions within their
coalition who were eager to rush ahead with an impeachment and by those
who were uncertain and reluctant about the political desirability of an
impeachment. The House stumbled through a messy process in part because
the majority was uncertain where it was going.
The House also seemed to struggle to contain the egos and ambitions
of its own members. When the Ukraine story broke and it became obvious
that an impeachment inquiry was on the horizon, Democrats proved unable to make the choices necessary
to put the best case forward. Rather than entrusting the inquiry to a
single permanent committee or appointing a select committee for this
particular task, the Democrats allowed the inquiry to be divided across
multiple committees with no clear leadership. Rather than keeping the
focus on the administration’s misconduct, the House catered to the
political needs of individual members looking to get their own share of
the national spotlight. Rather than systematically exposing the
available facts and constructing a coherent narrative of events, the
House generated a confusion of soundbites and political posturing.
Having begun the investigation without any clear plan for proceeding,
the impeachment inquiry lacked both transparency and organization and
generated needless procedural puzzles and oppositional talking points.
The president’s defense team has made a great deal out of the House
conducting depositions in a “basement bunker” closed to the public. Yet
not only is there nothing wrong with a congressional process for
investigating diplomatic conduct that includes a phase in executive
session behind closed doors, but it is the only sensible approach.
However, the Republicans were given more of a talking point by the
Democrats’ inability to outline a comprehensive plan for how the
investigation would proceed. Members of the Democratic leadership themselves struggled to get on the same page
on whether and when an impeachment inquiry had been launched, and even
when Pelosi was willing to declare that a formal impeachment inquiry had
begun, she was unwilling to provide a blueprint for how such an inquiry
would proceed.
off-guardian | After dragging the country through three years of Russiagate which
never panned out, the Democrats appear to be scoring yet another own
goal. Even a near brush with war against Iran does not seem to have
impacted Trump’s favorability, which could have been seen as a reversal
of his campaign pledges to end America’s forever wars that were arguably
a significant factor in his unlikely victory.
It was Trump’s rhetoric as a peace candidate suggesting rapprochement
with Russia which made him a target of the political establishment and
intelligence community, who subsequently blamed his shocking win on
still-unproven allegations of election interference by the Kremlin.
Since he took office, Trump has done nearly everything short of
declaring war on Moscow to appease the bipartisan anti-Russia consensus
in Washington but to no avail. One such step was the decision to provide
military aid to Ukraine amid its ongoing war in the eastern Donbass
region against Russian-speaking separatists, a move the Obama
administration decided against because of Kiev’s rampant corruption.
Trump’s predecessor tapped his Vice President, Joe Biden, to head up
an anti-corruption drive in Ukraine who instead used the opportunity to
personally enrich his family by landing his son, Hunter, a job on the
executive board of the country’s largest private gas company, Burisma
Holdings.
Biden led the U.S. role in the 2014 coup d’etat in Ukraine which
overthrew the democratically-elected government of Viktor Yanukovych
after he turned down a European Union Association Agreement for an
economic bail-out from Russia that was the flashpoint for the subsequent
Donbass war.
Contrary to the Trump-Russia ‘collusion’ narrative, one figure who
tried to lobby Yanukovych into signing the pro-austerity treaty was none
other than Paul Manafort, the future Trump campaign manager indicted
during the Russia probe for failing to register as a foreign agent while
consulting for the deposed Ukrainian president.
Manafort’s influence went against Russian interests in favor of the
EU and was years before Trump was ever a candidate, but this did not
stop the Democrats from later misconstruing it as evidence he was a
backchannel to the Kremlin. Meanwhile, Biden’s hand in the junta was
revealed in an infamous leaked phone call
between Victoria Nuland, Obama’s Assistant Secretary of State for
European and Eurasian Affairs, and Geoffrey Pyatt, then-U.S. Ambassador
to Ukraine.
Nuland, who is the wife of leading neoconservative figure Robert Kagan, also spilled the beans
that the U.S. invested as much as $5 billion dollars on regime change
in Kiev when we were led to believe the Maidan was a spontaneous,
popular revolt.
Shortly after the putsch, Hunter Biden joined the board of directors
at Burisma despite having no experience in Ukraine or the energy sector.
The embattled fracking company was founded by a notorious oligarch
and corrupt minister from the Yanukovych era, Mykola Zlochevsky, yet who
unlike the former did not have to flee to Russia and curiously escaped
prosecution in a money laundering case under the new Western-friendly
regime — did he obtain immunity with Hunter Biden’s appointment?
When the Prosecutor General of Ukraine, Viktor Shokin, reportedly
began to investigate the energy firm, the elder Biden did not just
blackmail the post-Maidan government of Petro Poroshenko into sacking
him by threatening to withhold $1 billion in loan guarantees but openly bragged about it on camera:
Told you about this station a couple weeks ago, and the McCarthy-ite mess being stirred up locally by the MSM to censure and censor its programming. Anyway, not only is the station a broadcaster non grata, anyone with the audacity to listen to it and like it may be subject to persona non grata status on these interwebs with a quickness. This cancel culture is desperately in need of some rough disciplining.
Today he owns two, plus a small fleet of radio transmitters across the Kansas City metro.
But
money remains tight, he laid off his staff years ago and the stations
sell airtime to local residents and religious organizations at cut-rate
prices. He hasn’t given himself a paycheck in months.
So Pete
Schartel’s ears perked up a while back when he heard that Radio Sputnik
pays $30,000 a month to broadcast its programming in Washington, D.C.
“I’m
going, ‘Oh my Lord, that’s twice what my whole budget is,’” he told
KCUR in a two-hour interview at his flagship station, KCXL, last week.
“They must have some money. Let’s investigate this.”
Schartel
found Arnold Ferolito, the broker who negotiated the 2017 deal to
broadcast Russian programming 24 hours a day in Washington, and made his
pitch: “We’re right in the middle of the country. This would be a good
test market.”
Ferolito agreed. Late last year, Schartel began
broadcasting Radio Sputnik for a couple of hours each morning on KCXL,
an AM radio station based in Liberty, Missouri.
The
English-language broadcast is produced by the U.S.-based branch of
Rossiya Segodnya (“Russia Today”), an organization created in 2013 by
Russian President Vladimir Putin to promote Russian interests abroad.
Schartel’s
listeners — accustomed to eclectic programming that ranges from music
to Bible study to far-right conspiracy theorist and talk show host Alex
Jones — seemed to react positively.
“And I’m going, ‘Hmm, I
think we’ve got something that some people like here,’” he said. “And if
they’ll pay me for it, that’s even better.”
In January, Schartel
and his wife, Jonne, agreed to broadcast Radio Sputnik for six hours a
day for three years on three frequencies: 1140 AM, 102.9 FM and 104.7
FM.
jonathanturley | We have previously discussed the alarming rollback on free speech rights in the West, particularly in France (here and here and here and here and here and here and here). A
teenager has sparked a national debate about blasphemy in France after
an Instagram post calling Islam a “religion of hate”.
vox | Thank you very much, everybody. We’ve all been through a
lot together, and we probably deserve that hand for all of us because
it’s been a very unfair situation. I invited some of our very good
friends, and we have limited room, but everybody wanted to come. We kept
it down to a minimum, and believe it or not, this is a minimum.
But a tremendous thing was done over the last number of
months, but really, if you go back to it, over the last number of years.
We had the witch hunt. It started from the day we came down the
elevator, myself and our future first lady, who is with us right now.
Thank you, Melania. [Cheers and applause]
And it never really stopped. We’ve been going through
this now for over three years. It was evil, it was corrupt, it was dirty
cops, it was leakers and liars, and this should never, ever happen to
another president, ever. I don’t know that other presidents would have
been able to take it. Some people said, no, they wouldn’t have.
But I can tell you, at a minimum, you have to focus on
this because it can get away very quickly no matter who you have with
you. It can get away very quickly. It was a disgrace. Had I not fired
James Comey, who was a disaster, by the way, it’s possible I wouldn’t
even be standing here right now. We caught him in the act. Dirty cops.
Bad people. If this happened to President Obama, a lot of people would
have been in jail for a long time already. Many, many years.
I want to start by thanking — I call them friends
because, you know, you develop friendships and relationships when you’re
in battle and war much more so than in a normal situation.
We’ve gone through more than any president or
administration, and really, I say for the most part, Republican
congressmen, congresswomen and Republican senators, we’ve done more than
any administration in the first few years. You look at all of the
things we’ve done. I watched this morning as they tried to take credit
for the stock market from — let me tell you, if we didn’t win, the stock
market would have crashed.
publicpool.kinja | But this morning, we come together as one
nation, blessed to live in freedom and grateful to worship in peace. As
everybody knows, my family, our great country, and your President, have
been put through a terrible ordeal by some very dishonest and corrupt
people. They have done everything possible to destroy us, and by so
doing, very badly hurt our nation. They know what they are doing is
wrong, but they put themselves far ahead of our great country.
Weeks
ago, and again yesterday, courageous Republican politicians and leaders
had the wisdom, the fortitude, and strength to do what everyone knows
was right. I don’t like people who use their faith as justification for
doing what they know is wrong. Nor do I like people who say, "I pray
for you," when they know that that's not so.
So many people have been hurt, and we can't let that go on. And I'll be discussing that a little bit later at the White House.
airforcemag | President Donald Trump honored Tuskegee Airman Charles McGee during
his State of the Union address on Feb. 4, hours after pinning stars on
McGee’s shoulders in the Oval Office.
McGee, who turned 100 on Dec. 7, was honorarily promoted from colonel
to brigadier general in the 2020 defense policy bill.
The Air Force
legend served three decades in uniform, launching his career in the U.S.
Army Air Corps. McGee escorted bombers over Germany, Austria, and the
Balkans in the P-39Q Airacobra, P-47D Thunderbolt, and the P-51 Mustang
during World War II. During the Korean War, McGee flew the F-51 on 100
interdiction missions from Japan, and he flew an additional 173
reconnaissance missions in the RF-4C during Vietnam.
Throughout his career, McGee flew a record 409 combat
missions, more than any other pilot in the three wars.
“Incredible story. After more than 130 combat missions in
World War II, he came back home to a country still struggling for civil rights
and went on to serve America in Korea and Vietnam,” Trump said. He added, “Gen.
McGee, our nation salutes you. Thank you, sir.”
Trump also offered a glimpse of future
generations of airmen, touting the U.S. Space Force—the nation’s newest
military service—and honoring McGee’s grandson, Iain Lanphier, an eighth grader
in Arizona, who “aspires to go to the Air Force Academy” and one day work for
the Space Force.
“Most people look up at space. Ian says, ‘I want to look down on the world.’”
I've
never seen a more blatant example of concentrated money rigging an
election than Iowa Dems releasing a random percentage of the vote after
self-dealing grifters tied to Buttigieg fucked up an election, followed
by the NYT, WaPost, CNN, and MSNBC announcing 'partial
results.'
theintercept | David Plouffe, a former campaign manager to Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential bid who joined Acronym’s board, also distanced himself from the company during an MSNBC panel last night. “I have no knowledge of Shadow,” said Plouffe. “It was news to me.”
But previous statements and internal Acronym documents suggest that
the two companies, which share office space in Denver, Colorado, are
deeply intertwined.
Last year, McGowan, a co-founder of Acronym, wrote on Twitterthat
she was “so excited to announce @anotheracronym has acquired
Groundbase,” a firm that included “their incredible team led by [Gerard
Niemira] + are launching Shadow, a new tech company to build smarter
infrastructure for campaigns.” McGowan also noted that “With Shadow,
we’re building a new model incentivized by adoption over growth.” The
acquisition was announced in mid-January of last year.
In an interview on a related podcast last month, McGowan described Niemira as “the CEO of Shadow, which is the technology company that Acronym is the sole investor in now.”
What’s more, internal documents from Acronym show a close
relationship with Shadow. An internal organizational chart shows digital
strategy firm Lockwood Strategy, FWIW Media, and Shadow as part of a
unified structure, with Acronym staff involved in the trio’s operations.
In an all-staff email sent last Friday, an official with Lockwood
Strategy reminded team members about “COOL THINGS HAPPENING AROUND
ACRONYM.” The list included bullets points such as, “The Iowa caucus is
on Monday, and the Shadow team is hard at work,” and “Shadow is working
on scaling up VAN integration with Shadow Messaging for some Iowa caucus
clients.” (VAN refers to the widely used Democratic voter file
technology firm.) Acronym staffers also attended the Shadow staff
retreat.
A person with knowledge of the company’s culture, who asked to
remain anonymous for fear of reprisal, shared communications showing
that top officials at the company regularly expressed hostility to Sen.
Bernie Sanders’s supporters. McGowan is married to Michael Halle, a
senior strategist with the Buttigieg campaign. There is no evidence any
preference of candidates had any effect on the coding issue that is
stalling the Iowa results.
npr | Right now we're going to hear from the campaign of former Vice President
Joe Biden. Symone Sanders is a senior adviser to Biden, and she joins
me now from New Hampshire.
KELLY: Glad to have you with us. So you have been sharing some of
your campaign's projections on Twitter today. I've been following along.
You said you're thrilled with Joe Biden's performance in Iowa. The
other candidates are citing different projections, ones that make them
look good, that don't look so good for Biden. So are you confident that
when the numbers eventually come out, Joe Biden will be a front-runner
in Iowa?
SANDERS: Look - we are very confident about our internal data.
But I'd also like to caution folks to understand that any data any
campaign is sharing is based on internal data. These are not the final
numbers.
SANDERS: The reality is, we don't know the final numbers, which is
why our campaign sent a letter to the Iowa Democratic Party last night
urging and imploring that they check the data, check again and
triple-check the data before releasing anything. So I know that there
are reports that there is some type of data coming today, shortly, soon,
in the coming hour.
KELLY: Right.
SANDERS: But the reality is, we need total numbers from precincts
all across the state. There was a real breakdown in the process last
night, from what was happening at precincts on the ground in Iowa to the
app that the Iowa Democratic Party was using to the backup phone system
and even with the collecting and recording and filling out a
presidential preference card.
KELLY: Right. To your point...
SANDERS: So we really need to make sure we get this right.
KELLY: ...They're telling us that when they do put out results
about an hour or so from now, we still won't get all of them. These will
be partial results. So we still won't have full clarity about what
exactly happened in Iowa and what it means going forward in the race.
SANDERS: And I think that's unfortunate. I think the voters are
owed clarity, frankly, but - and the caucusgoers in Iowa. But, you know,
we left Iowa last night, again, as I've said on Twitter and all day
today, proud of our organization. We're in New Hampshire today. We have a
full day of campaign events. We will be campaigning here aggressively
over the next week. And we're looking forward to the primary on Tuesday.
We've always thought...
KELLY: May I just press you on this for a minute...
SANDERS: I would just say, we've always thought...
KELLY: If I may, may I just press you on this? Because you said
this is a shame for the voters. What about for candidates? Does the
delay in results steal momentum from whoever ultimately comes out on top
in Iowa?
SANDERS: I mean, I think that's a hypothetical. The reality is,
this process has never just been about Iowa. It's not just about New
Hampshire. And it's not just about Nevada or South Carolina. These first
four nominating contests, we have always said, should be viewed as
individual parts of one whole. They should be viewed as a package. And
you don't get the full depth and breadth of anyone's strength or the
lack thereof with just the Iowa results or just the New Hampshire
results, frankly.
Since 1992, the Democratic nominee - no Democratic nominee has
been the nominee without a substantial amount of votes from the African
American community. You don't get that coming out of Iowa or New
Hampshire.
nakedcapitalism | On one level, this is an illustration of America’s descent into
banana republic status. Pundits and the media keep reinforcing American
exceptionalist fantasies, our brand fumes of vaunted democracy, yet we
can’t even run elections competently. Is is just the grifting, that
introducing more tech creates more opportunities for vendor enrichment?
Or is it yet more proof that a lot of people in charge really hate
democracy and are at best indifferent to doing things right?
It’s not hard to see the Iowa fiasco as an illustration of an even
more deeply-seated pathology: elite incompetence. Too many people with
the right resumes get to fail upwards or at worst sideways. And
remember, unlike our older WASP-y leaders who were a combination of
people from the right clubs and self-made men, our current crop of
people in charge pride themselves on being the end products of a
meritocratic system, as in their claim to legitimacy stems from the
claim that they are more talented (gah) than mere mortals and therefore
obviously should be in the top slots because they’ll do oh so much
better than everyone else.
And it’s the Democratic party, as the representative of the 10%
professional managerial classes, that really owns this disease. Recall
in Thomas Frank’s Listen Liberal how he set forth, without irony, a
conference that was treacly with the self-regard, with the way every
participant was lavished with embarrassing exaggerations of their
accomplishments. No one had the slightest sense of how narcissistic and
pampered they seemed. And it wasn’t hard to imagine they’d all collapse
in a heap if presented with a real challenge, like suddenly becoming
destitute or being dumped in a remote area with neither a water bottle
nor GPS.
And we keep seeing this leadership class succeed in rent extraction
and not much else. Go down the list: The post-crisis failure to reform
the banks or even go through the motions by incarcerating a few execs
and turfing out some board members. Our grossly over-priced,
underperforming health care system. Our student-impoverishing higher
education system. The F-35. The botched Obamacare rollout. Our
Middle-East nation-breaking, which has scored geopolitical own goals
like destabilizing Europe, facilitating Russia asserting itself a
geopolitical power despite having an economy the size of South Korea and
in the face of our economic sanctions, and making us deservedly
disliked around the world. Hillary Clinton losing to of all people
Donald Trump despite spending twice as much as his campaign spend
because her team was enamored of Robby Mook’s models and somehow forgot
about the Electoral College.
And if you believe, as Team Dem does, that every problem can be
solved with better PR, the corollary is you never admit to failure, you
never do post mortems, and you keep incompetents around who you allow to
fail and fail again.
PNAS | Seven studies using experimental and naturalistic methods reveal that
upper-class individuals behave more unethically than lower-class
individuals. In studies 1 and 2, upper-class individuals were more
likely to break the law while driving, relative to lower-class
individuals. In follow-up laboratory studies, upper-class individuals
were more likely to exhibit unethical decision-making tendencies (study
3), take valued goods from others (study 4), lie in a negotiation (study
5), cheat to increase their chances of winning a prize (study 6), and
endorse unethical behavior at work (study 7) than were lower-class
individuals. Mediator and moderator data demonstrated that upper-class
individuals’ unethical tendencies are accounted for, in part, by their
more favorable attitudes toward greed.
Which social class is the more likely provenance of
unethical behavior, the upper class or the lower class? Examining how
social class is associated with unethical behavior, or actions that harm
others and are illegal or morally objectionable to one's community (1),
would shed light on behaviors such as cheating, deception, or breaking
the law that have important consequences for society. On the one hand,
lower-class individuals live in environments defined by fewer resources,
greater threat, and more uncertainty (2, 3).
It stands to reason, therefore, that lower-class individuals may be
more motivated to behave unethically to increase their resources or
overcome their disadvantage.
A second line of reasoning,
however, suggests the opposite prediction: namely, that the upper class
may be more disposed to the unethical. Greater resources, freedom, and
independence from others among the upper class give rise to self-focused
social-cognitive tendencies (3⇓⇓⇓–7),
which we predict will facilitate unethical behavior. Historical
observation lends credence to this idea. For example, the recent
economic crisis has been attributed in part to the unethical actions of
the wealthy (8).
Religious teachings extol the poor and admonish the rich with claims
like, “It will be hard for a rich person to enter the kingdom of heaven”
(9).
Building upon past findings, in the present investigation we tested
whether upper-class individuals—relative to lower-class individuals—are
more likely to engage in unethical behavior, and whether their attitudes
toward greed might help explain this tendency.
Social
class, or socioeconomic status (SES), refers to an individual's rank
vis-à-vis others in society in terms of wealth, occupational prestige,
and education (2, 3). Abundant resources and elevated rank allow upper-class individuals increased freedom and independence (4), giving rise to self-focused patterns of social cognition and behavior (3). Relative to lower-class individuals, upper-class individuals have been shown to be less cognizant of others (4) and worse at identifying the emotions that others feel (5).
Furthermore, upper-class individuals are more disengaged during social
interactions—for example, checking their cell phones or doodling on a
questionnaire—compared with their lower-class peers (6).
thegrayzone | Behind the app that delayed Iowa’s voting results is a dark money operation funded by anti-Bernie Sanders billionaires. Its top donor Seth Klarman is a Buttigieg backer who has dumped money into pro-settler Israel lobby groups.
At the time of publication, 12 hours after voting in the Democratic
Party’s Iowa caucuses ended, the results have not been announced. The
delay in reporting is the result of a failed app developed by a company
appropriately named Shadow Inc.
The delay in the vote reporting denied a victory speech to Senator
Bernie Sanders, the presumptive winner of the opening contest in the
Democratic presidential primary. Though not one exit poll indicated that
Buttigieg would have won, the South Bend, Indiana mayor took to Twitter
to confidently proclaim himself the victor.
Though a dark money Democratic operation turned out to be the source
of the disastrous app, suspicion initially centered on former Hillary
Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook and his Russiagate-related elections
integrity initiative.
LATimes | On a tense, chaotic night, with the eyes of the nation trained on the
Iowa caucuses, that state’s Democratic Party was counting on a slick
new smartphone app to make everything go smoothly.
The app was
coded by a tech firm run by veterans of Hillary Clinton’s 2016
presidential campaign, one of them a former Google engineer. It was
designed to meet new requirements instituted after that year’s
contentious Iowa caucuses, in which Clinton narrowly edged out Bernie
Sanders. To provide more transparency this time around, the state party
promised to report not just the final results but voters’ initial and
second choices as well.
With so much more data to tabulate than in
previous years, party leaders feared that the established system of
reporting numbers by phone would be too slow. A proposal for a
“tele-caucus” system enabling virtual voting was rejected
as too vulnerable to hacking. An app that could instantaneously relay
the numbers as soon as precinct chairs input them, developed by
Democratic Party loyalists, looked like the perfect solution.
It turned out to be a crushing failure.
The firm behind the app is Shadow, an affiliate of ACRONYM, a Democratic nonprofit founded in 2017 “to educate, inspire, register, and mobilize voters,” according to its website. Shadow started out as Groundbase, a tech developer co-founded by Gerard Niemira and Krista Davis, who worked for the tech team on Clinton’s campaign for the 2016 Democratic nomination.
Niemira had previously worked at kiva.org,
a nonprofit that makes loans to entrepreneurs and others in the
developing world, and Davis had spent eight years as an engineer at
Google. ACRONYM’s founder and CEO is Tara McGowan, a former journalist
and digital producer with President Obama’s 2012 presidential campaign.
In the days leading up to caucus night, Shadow’s app was seen as “a potential target for early election interference,” according to the Des Moines Register.
The
study came under the scanner as two of the 12 researchers belonged to
the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s Department of Emerging Infectious
Diseases, and it was funded by the United States Department of Defense’s
Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA). They would have required
special permissions as foreign entities.
The study, conducted by scientists of the Tata Institute of
Fundamental Research, the National Centre for Biological Sciences
(NCBS), the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the Uniformed Services
University of the Health Sciences in the U.S. and the Duke-National
University in Singapore, is now being investigated for how the
scientists were allowed to access live samples of bats and bat hunters
(humans) without due permissions. The results of the study were
published in October last in the PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases journal, originally established by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
“The
Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) sent a five-member committee
to investigate. The inquiry is complete, and a report has been submitted
to the Health Ministry,” a senior government official told The Hindu.
The U.S. Embassy and the Union Health Ministry declined to comment on the inquiry. In a written reply to questions from The Hindu,
the U.S. Centre for Disease Control (CDC) in Atlanta said it “did not
commission this study and had not received any enquiries [from the
Indian government] on it.” An American official, however, suggested that
the U.S. Department of Defense might not have coordinated the study
through the CDC.
The study, ‘Filovirus-reactive antibodies in humans and bats in Northeast India imply Zoonotic spillover’, published in PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases
states the researchers found “the presence of filovirus (e.g.
ebolavirus, marburgvirus and dianlovirus) reactive antibodies in both
human (e.g. bat hunters) and bat populations in Northeast India, a
region with no historical record of Ebola virus disease.”
Bats often carry ebola, rabies, marburg and the SARS coronavirus.
Reuters | Beijing on Monday accused the United States of spreading fear over a
coronavirus outbreak by pulling nationals out and restricting travel
instead of offering significant aid.
The United States was the first nation to begin evacuations, issued a
travel warning against going to China, and from Sunday barred entry to
foreigners recently in China.
Washington has “unceasingly manufactured and spread panic”, Chinese
foreign ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying told reporters, noting that
the World Health Organization (WHO) had advised against trade and travel
curbs.
“It is precisely developed countries like the United States with strong
epidemic prevention capabilities and facilities that have taken the lead
in imposing excessive restrictions contrary to WHO recommendations,”
she added, saying countries should make reasonable, calm and
science-based judgements.
In China, 361 people have died with more than 17,000 infected from
the virus, which originated in the central city of Wuhan. At least
another 171 cases have been reported in more than two dozen other
countries and regions, from the United States to Japan.
Conducting
her daily news briefing via the WeChat app rather than in person, Hua
also chided the United States for lack of help. “So far, the U.S.
government has yet to provide any substantial assistance to China,” she
said.
theautomaticearth | If the Party is allowed to get away with this behavior aimed at
self-preservation above anything else, including human lives of both
Chinese and foreigners, something bad is sure to happen. Maybe not this
time, maybe this one will fizzle out. But the next one, or the one after
that, will not.
It is obvious how dangerous this is, putting the interests of the
Party, or the economy, above the risk of spreading global pandemic. But
is is also obvious why it happens. And it wouldn’t or couldn’t happen
only in China. Though the country in its present state is a ideal
breeding ground.
Flights are halted. Hundreds of millions will soon be in lockdown.
Exports will plunge, because production will. Which will hit the west as
much as China. Just so the Party can say it did what had to be done,
and so it will stay in power. Xi Jinping knows his power depends on the
economy, but he thinks he has what it takes to hold on to power even
when the economy tanks.
He can simply declare force majeure, he can tell his people how much
worse things would have been had he not decided to lock down everything.
We’ve been following the numbers of infections and fatalities now for
2 weeks or so, even as we know they don’t mean much, they’re just Party
propaganda. The Party will release what it thinks it must, but no more.
Perhaps we need other sources; these will come if and when things get
out of hand. Not that we know they will.
Xi can claim today that he has control. He can say things are not too
bad, but we don’t really know, he’s issuing the numbers. What we do
know, and there’s the crux, is that he was 6 weeks late in starting to
acknowledge the epidemic, in contacting the outside world, in
acknowledging his mistakes, and in acknowledging that such mistakes are
baked into the model that keeps him in power.
Phase 1 is complete denial, not a word. Phase 2 is damage control,
massaging the numbers downward. Phase 3 is “close all the doors, not to
worry, nothing to see here, we got this, no you can’t come in, too
risky!”
nakedcapitalism | At least one finance-adjacent blog (not this one) promoted a bioRxiv
pre-print entitled “Uncanny similarity of unique inserts in the
2019-nCoV spike protein to HIV-1 gp120 and Gag”, containing the
inflammatory passage “The finding of 4 unique inserts in the 2019-nCoV,
all of which have identity/similarity to amino acid residues in key
structural proteins of HIV-1 is unlikely to be fortuitous in nature.”
That paper has now been withdrawn. From Richard Sever, Assistant
Director of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, Editor of CSH
Perspectives, bioRxiv Co-Founder:
Authors of
disputed “uncanny” 2019-nCoV preprint to voluntarily withdraw
preprint: "It was not our intention to feed into the
conspiracy theories...we appreciate the criticisms...and will get back
with a revised version” https://t.co/zGcT1440D0
The 2019-nCoV genome does not contain remarkable genomic properties
which need explaining, and for which we’d look to some kind of
bioengineering as a cause.
The virus has a close 96% sequence overlap to a naturally occurring
bat coronavirus, and coronaviruses have been known to jump from bats to
humans by way of intermediates before, like the SARS coronavirus. The
differences between the genome sequences, including the ones identified
by the Indian study, are in variable regions of the genome that we’d
expect to differ, and the 4% difference in the genomes is hard to call
as “high” or “low,” given that we don’t know exactly which bats the
2019-nCoV strain came from or when it diverged from its closest known
ancestor.
Nor is it surprising that the known 2019-nCoV sequences all contain
the same genomic changes relative to a known relative. They all came
from the same outbreak from the same animal reservoir, i.e. they only
diverged from each other a few months ago at most. It’s not surprising
that they haven’t evolved very much away from each other.
Nor does the clinical presentation of 2019-nCoV have novel features
which need explaining. Its symptom profile, degree of transmissibility,
severity, mortality rate, duration, incubation and latent period,
ability to jump from animals to humans, and ability to transmit
asymptomatically and by skin contact are all within the precedents
established by other human coronaviruses.
That is, the 2019-nCoV genome and the way it affects humans have, by themselves, no special anomaly which needs explaining.
The levels of genetic similarity between the 2019-nCoV
and [BatCoV] RaTG13 suggest that the latter does not provide the exact
variant that caused the outbreak in humans, but the hypothesis that
2019-nCoV has originated from bats is very likely. We show evidence that
the novel coronavirus (2019-nCov) is not-mosaic consisting in almost
half of its genome of a distinct lineage within the betacoronavirus.
zerohedge | So did we have a right to ask the question if there is an alternative
version for the emergence of the Coronavirus pandemic, especially with
hundreds if not thousands of lives at stake? Absolutely.
As for Broderick's statement that Peng was "accused falsely" we
wonder how he knows this: did he speak to Peng? Did he get any comments?
Did he get an official denial? No, he did not: as
he writes, "BuzzFeed News has reached out to the scientist, whom it is
declining to name." So, it actually turns out that it is Buzzfeed that
is once again presenting a false statement as fact, something Buzzfeed
has been accused of doing over and over and over.
Meanwhile, those who wonder if Dr. Zhou has any link to the possible
emergence of the Coronavirus following years of experimenting with bats,
we urge you to read our full article instead of relying on the hearsay of ideologically biased journalists.
Second, and contrary to the claims presented by Buzzfeed, we did not release any "personal information": Peng Zhou (周鹏) is a public figure, and all the contact information that we presented was pulled from his publicly posted bio found on a website at the Wuhan Institute of Virology which anyone with access to the internet can pull from the following URL: http://sourcedb.whiov.cas.cn/zw/rck/201705/t20170505_4783973.html, which is also the information we used.
So about Buzzfeed's allegation, which was adopted by Twitter, that somehow we incited "targeted abuse", here is what we said:
Something tells us, if anyone wants to find out what really
caused the coronavirus pandemic that has infected thousands of people in
China and around the globe, they should probably pay Dr. Peng a visit.
To which we then added the information obtained from his own bio page on the Institute's website:
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