Pissants Evicted From Shitholes While "Smart America" Prodigal Hunter Biden Keeps It 110%

dailymail |  Hunter Biden addressed his white lawyer as 'n***a' multiple times, used phrases like 'true dat n***a' and bantered 'I only love you because you're black,' in shocking texts unearthed days after Joe's emotional Tulsa speech decrying racism

• Text messages obtained by DailyMail.com reveal Hunter Biden used the n-word multiple times in banter with his lawyer  
• The president's son, 51, flippantly addressed corporate attorney George Mesires, who is white, by the racial slur, with phrases including 'true dat n***a' 
• In a December 2018 conversation, Hunter asked Mesires: 'How much money do I owe you. Becaause (sic) n***a you better not be charging me Hennessy rates.'
• In another chat a month later, Hunter cracked jokes about his penis and then told Mesires 'I only love you because you're black'
• 'It's so annoying when you interject with frivolity,' the Chicago lawyer replied 
• The damning texts have emerged just days after his father, President Joe Biden gave a speech decrying racism on the 100th anniversary of the Tulsa massacre
• Biden has sought to portray racial justice as a top priority for his administration 
• Hunter also saved a meme with a photo of his father hugging Barack Obama with a caption describing a joke conversation
• 'Obama: Gonna miss you, man  Joe: Can I say it? Just this once? Obama: *sigh* go ahead Joe: You my n***a, Barack'
  

Hunter Biden used the n-word multiple times in conversation with his white, $845-per-hour lawyer, his texts messages reveal.

The shocking texts may prove embarrassing for his father President Joe Biden, who just last week gave a speech decrying racism on the 100th anniversary of the Tulsa massacre, and has sought to portray racial justice as a top priority for his administration.

The president's son joked in a January 2019 text to corporate attorney George Mesires about a 'big penis', and said to the lawyer: 'I only love you because you're black' and 'true dat n***a'

Festus And Cooter Are Endangered Pissants - Google IS White Supremacy

wired |  The repercussions of Gebru’s termination quickly radiated out from her team to the rest of Google and, beyond that, to the entire discipline of AI fairness research.

Some Google employees, including David Baker, a director who’d been at the company for 16 years, publicly quit over its treatment of Gebru. Google’s research department was riven by mistrust and rumors about what happened and what might happen next. Even people who believed Gebru had behaved in ways unbecoming of a corporate researcher saw Google’s response as ham-handed. Some researchers feared their work would now be policed more closely. One of them, Nicholas Carlini, sent a long internal email complaining of changes that company lawyers made to another paper involving large language models, published after Gebru was fired, likening the intervention to “Big Brother stepping in.” The changes downplayed the problems the paper reported and removed references to Google’s own technology, the email said.

Soon after, Google rolled out its response to the roiling scandal and sketched out a more locked-down future for in-house research probing AI’s power. Marian Croak, the executive who had shown interest in Gebru’s work, was given the task of consolidating the various teams working on what the company called responsible AI, including Mitchell and Gebru’s. Dean sent around an email announcing that a review of Gebru’s ouster had concluded; he was sorry, he said, that the company had not “handled this situation with more sensitivity.”

Dean also announced that progress on improving workforce diversity would now be considered in top executives’ performance reviews—perhaps quietly conceding Gebru’s assertion that leaders were not held accountable for their poor showing on this count. And he informed researchers that they would be given firmer guidance on “Google’s research goals and priorities.” A Google source later explained that this meant future projects touching on sensitive or commercial topics would require more input from in-house legal experts, product teams, and others within Google who had relevant expertise. The outlook for open-minded, independent research on ethical AI appeared gloomy. Google claimed that it still had hundreds of people working on responsible AI, and that it would expand those teams; the company painted Gebru and Mitchell’s group as a tiny and relatively unimportant cog in a big machine. But others at Google said the Ethical AI leaders and their frank feedback would be missed. “For me, it’s the most critical voices that are the most important and where I have learned the most,” says one person who worked on product changes with Gebru and Mitchell’s input. Bengio, the women’s manager, turned his back on 14 years of working on AI at Google and quit to join Apple.

Outside of Google, nine Democrats in Congress wrote to Pichai questioning his commitment to preventing AI’s harms. Mitchell had at one point tried to save the “Stochastic Parrots” paper by telling executives that publishing it would bolster arguments that the company was capable of self-policing. Quashing it was now undermining those arguments.

Some academics announced that they had backed away from company events or funding. The fairness and technology conference’s organizers stripped Google of its status as a sponsor of the event. Luke Stark, who studies the social impacts of AI at the University of Western Ontario, turned down a $60,000 grant from Google in protest of its treatment of the Ethical AI team. When he applied for the money in December 2020, he had considered the team a “strong example” of how corporate researchers could do powerful work. Now he wanted nothing to do with Google. Tensions built into the field of AI ethics, he saw, were beginning to cause fractures.

“The big tech companies tried to steal a march on regulators and public criticism by embracing the idea of AI ethics,” Stark says. But as the research matured, it raised bigger questions. “Companies became less able to coexist with internal critical research,” he says. One person who runs an ethical AI team at another tech company agrees. “Google and most places did not count on the field becoming what it did.”

To some, the drama at Google suggested that researchers on corporate payrolls should be subject to different rules than those from institutions not seeking to profit from AI. In April, some founding editors of a new journal of AI ethics published a paper calling for industry researchers to disclose who vetted their work and how, and for whistle-blowing mechanisms to be set up inside corporate labs. “We had been trying to poke on this issue already, but when Timnit got fired it catapulted into a more mainstream conversation,” says Savannah Thais, a researcher at Princeton on the journal’s board who contributed to the paper. “Now a lot more people are questioning: Is it possible to do good ethics research in a corporate AI setting?”

If that mindset takes hold, in-house ethical AI research may forever be held in suspicion—much the way industrial research on pollution is viewed by environmental scientists. Jeff Dean admitted in a May interview with CNET that the company had suffered a real “reputational hit” among people interested in AI ethics work. The rest of the interview dealt mainly with promoting Google’s annual developer conference, where it was soon announced that large language models, the subject of Gebru’s fateful critique, would play a more central role in Google search and the company’s voice assistant. Meredith Whittaker, faculty director of New York University’s AI Now Institute, predicts that there will be a clearer split between work done at institutions like her own and work done inside tech companies. “What Google just said to anyone who wants to do this critical research is, ‘We’re not going to tolerate it,’” she says. (Whittaker herself once worked at Google, where she clashed with management over AI ethics and the Maven Pentagon contract before leaving in 2019.)

Any such divide is unlikely to be neat, given how the field of AI ethics sprouted in a tech industry hothouse. The community is still small, and jobs outside big companies are sparser and much less well paid, particularly for candidates without computer science PhDs. That’s in part because AI ethics straddles the established boundaries of academic departments. Government and philanthropic funding is no match for corporate purses, and few institutions can rustle up the data and computing power needed to match work from companies like Google.

For Gebru and her fellow travelers, the past five years have been vertiginous. For a time, the period seemed revolutionary: Tech companies were proactively exploring flaws in AI, their latest moneymaking marvel—a sharp contrast to how they’d faced up to problems like spam and social network moderation only after coming under external pressure. But now it appeared that not much had changed after all, even if many individuals had good intentions.

Inioluwa Deborah Raji, whom Gebru escorted to Black in AI in 2017, and who now works as a fellow at the Mozilla Foundation, says that Google’s treatment of its own researchers demands a permanent shift in perceptions. “There was this hope that some level of self-regulation could have happened at these tech companies,” Raji says. “Everyone’s now aware that the true accountability needs to come from the outside—if you’re on the inside, there’s a limit to how much you can protect people.”

Gebru, who recently returned home after her unexpectedly eventful road trip, has come to a similar conclusion. She’s raising money to launch an independent research institute modeled on her work on Google’s Ethical AI team and her experience in Black in AI. “We need more support for external work so that the choice is not ‘Do I get paid by the DOD or by Google?’” she says.

Gebru has had offers, but she can’t imagine working within the industry anytime in the near future. She’s been thinking back to conversations she’d had with a friend who warned her not to join Google, saying it was harmful to women and impossible to change. Gebru had disagreed, claiming she could nudge things, just a little, toward a more beneficial path. “I kept on arguing with her,” Gebru says. Now, she says, she concedes the point.

Besides "WEF Whydte Woman" - What Are Kate Crawford's Qualifications?!?!?!

Guardian | Kate Crawford studies the social and political implications of artificial intelligence. She is a research professor of communication and science and technology studies at the University of Southern California and a senior principal researcher at Microsoft Research. Her new book, Atlas of AI, looks at what it takes to make AI and what’s at stake as it reshapes our world.

You’ve written a book critical of AI but you work for a company that is among the leaders in its deployment. How do you square that circle?
I work in the research wing of Microsoft, which is a distinct organisation, separate from product development. Unusually, over its 30-year history, it has hired social scientists to look critically at how technologies are being built. Being on the inside, we are often able to see downsides early before systems are widely deployed. My book did not go through any pre-publication review – Microsoft Research does not require that – and my lab leaders support asking hard questions, even if the answers involve a critical assessment of current technological practices.

What’s the aim of the book?
We are commonly presented with this vision of AI that is abstract and immaterial. I wanted to show how AI is made in a wider sense – its natural resource costs, its labour processes, and its classificatory logics. To observe that in action I went to locations including mines to see the extraction necessary from the Earth’s crust and an Amazon fulfilment centre to see the physical and psychological toll on workers of being under an algorithmic management system. My hope is that, by showing how AI systems work – by laying bare the structures of production and the material realities – we will have a more accurate account of the impacts, and it will invite more people into the conversation. These systems are being rolled out across a multitude of sectors without strong regulation, consent or democratic debate.

What should people know about how AI products are made?
We aren’t used to thinking about these systems in terms of the environmental costs. But saying, “Hey, Alexa, order me some toilet rolls,” invokes into being this chain of extraction, which goes all around the planet… We’ve got a long way to go before this is green technology. Also, systems might seem automated but when we pull away the curtain we see large amounts of low paid labour, everything from crowd work categorising data to the never-ending toil of shuffling Amazon boxes. AI is neither artificial nor intelligent. It is made from natural resources and it is people who are performing the tasks to make the systems appear autonomous.

Problems of bias have been well documented in AI technology. Can more data solve that?
Bias is too narrow a term for the sorts of problems we’re talking about. Time and again, we see these systems producing errors – women offered less credit by credit-worthiness algorithms, black faces mislabelled – and the response has been: “We just need more data.” But I’ve tried to look at these deeper logics of classification and you start to see forms of discrimination, not just when systems are applied, but in how they are built and trained to see the world. Training datasets used for machine learning software that casually categorise people into just one of two genders; that label people according to their skin colour into one of five racial categories, and which attempt, based on how people look, to assign moral or ethical character. The idea that you can make these determinations based on appearance has a dark past and unfortunately the politics of classification has become baked into the substrates of AI.

 

Believe The Science: SARS-CoV2 Was Lab Synthesized

WSJ  |  A genome is a blueprint for the factory of a cell to make proteins. The language is made up of three-letter “words,” 64 in total, that represent the 20 different amino acids. For example, there are six different words for the amino acid arginine, the one that is often used in supercharging viruses. Every cell has a different preference for which word it likes to use most.

In the case of the gain-of-function supercharge, other sequences could have been spliced into this same site. Instead of a CGG-CGG (known as “double CGG”) that tells the protein factory to make two arginine amino acids in a row, you’ll obtain equal lethality by splicing any one of 35 of the other two-word combinations for double arginine. If the insertion takes place naturally, say through recombination, then one of those 35 other sequences is far more likely to appear; CGG is rarely used in the class of coronaviruses that can recombine with CoV-2.

In fact, in the entire class of coronaviruses that includes CoV-2, the CGG-CGG combination has never been found naturally. That means the common method of viruses picking up new skills, called recombination, cannot operate here. A virus simply cannot pick up a sequence from another virus if that sequence isn’t present in any other virus.

Although the double CGG is suppressed naturally, the opposite is true in laboratory work. The insertion sequence of choice is the double CGG. That’s because it is readily available and convenient, and scientists have a great deal of experience inserting it. An additional advantage of the double CGG sequence compared with the other 35 possible choices: It creates a useful beacon that permits the scientists to track the insertion in the laboratory.

Now the damning fact. It was this exact sequence that appears in CoV-2. Proponents of zoonotic origin must explain why the novel coronavirus, when it mutated or recombined, happened to pick its least favorite combination, the double CGG. Why did it replicate the choice the lab’s gain-of-function researchers would have made?

Yes, it could have happened randomly, through mutations. But do you believe that? At the minimum, this fact—that the coronavirus, with all its random possibilities, took the rare and unnatural combination used by human researchers—implies that the leading theory for the origin of the coronavirus must be laboratory escape.

When the lab’s Shi Zhengli and colleagues published a paper in February 2020 with the virus’s partial genome, they omitted any mention of the special sequence that supercharges the virus or the rare double CGG section. Yet the fingerprint is easily identified in the data that accompanied the paper. Was it omitted in the hope that nobody would notice this evidence of the gain-of-function origin?

Anthony Fauci And Kristian Andersen SMDH....,

politico |  At the heart of the current broadside against Fauci is reporting around — and the investigation into — the Wuhan lab leak theory, which holds that the virus leaked, accidentally or intentionally, from a virology lab in the city where it was first found. Republicans and right-wing media outlets have circulated such theories since the beginning of the pandemic even as scientists, including Fauci, insisted that problematic coronaviruses, from the SARS and MERS epidemics to Covid-19, were becoming increasingly common.

The pressure to probe Wuhan lab leak theories continued to mount, leading Trump’s White House to demand in April 2020 that the National Institutes of Health abruptly cancel a multimillion-dollar grant to EcoHealth Alliance, a nonprofit studying coronavirus origins that had worked with the Wuhan viral lab in the past. April emails between EcoHealth Alliance CEO Peter Daszak and Fauci, published as part of the recent FOIA, have become a new touchstone for conspiracy theorists, after Daszak thanked the NIAID director for dismissing lab leak theories early in the pandemic.

“I just wanted to say a personal thank you on behalf of our staff and collaborators, for publicly standing up and stating that the scientific evidence supports a natural origin for COVID-19 from a bat-to-human spillover, not a lab release from the Wuhan Institute of Virology,” Daszak wrote to Fauci on April 18, 2020.

“Many thanks for your kind note,” Fauci responded the next day, just over a week before POLITICO first reported that NIH canceled the EcoHealth grant. Daszak did not respond to a POLITICO request for comment.

Theories about a leak from the Wuhan virology lab became a consistent line of questioning for Republican lawmakers by last spring and soon turned into a mainstay of congressional hearings and increasingly contentious exchanges between Fauci and Paul, who sits on the Senate health committee. The longtime NIAID director and Kentucky doctor have exchanged barbs on television after Senate hearings where Paul accused Fauci of moving the goalposts on coronavirus science while the infectious disease scientist has told Paul that “with all due respect,” he was “entirely and completely incorrect.”

Paul was swift to accuse Fauci on Wednesday of knowledge of the Wuhan lab allegedly carrying out controversial “gain-of-function” studies, a field of research that alters viruses in a way that can make them more transmissible or help them hop to new hosts, such as humans.

A senior NIH official insisted to POLITICO that detractors such as Paul are taking Fauci’s emails “out of context.” But the prevailing posture, like that of the White House, was to downplay rather than engage.

“The FOIA articles are discussed like any other issues and then we move on,” the official said. “We're taking it seriously, of course, but it's not changing how we do business or our focus.”

 

 

 

You KNOW You're In A Fascist State When Pure Fantasy Is Official Policy And Ideology

foxnews |  "It was fascinating to watch and track the reaction of the establishment to Donald Trump. He became a figurehead for this populist push back against global capitalist ideology," said Hopkins.

This "global capitalist ideology" he described, or "GloboCap" as he’s taken to calling it in his writings, is an ideologically monolithic global-capitalist societal structure. Essentially, a ruling class made up of globalist oligarchs.

"It was just so clear they set out to destroy him, make an example of him, and demonize everybody who put him in office," said Hopkins. 

He claimed the demonization of Trump during his four years in office was this ruling class "reminding us who's in charge and what happens if we elect unauthorized presidents who haven't been approved by the system."

Admittedly not a fan of Trump, Hopkins couldn’t help but laugh at all of the ways in which the former president was vilified. "First, he was a Russian intelligence asset, then he was literally Hitler and was going to overthrow the U.S. government with some underground White supremacist militia," Hopkins recalled, claiming the accusations were "pure fantasy that was taken seriously." 

According to Hopkins, this push toward a post-COVID "New Normal" society in which people are willing to lockdown in their homes when told, wear masks when asked, and carry around their COVID-19 vaccination cards in order to be allowed into public spaces is a continuation of the invisible ruling class asserting its dominance. 

"One thing that I've been saying to try to get through to people," said Hopkins, "is just the whole idea of lockdowns. ‘Lockdown,’ this is a prison term, right? And when do you lock down the prison? When the prisoners are rioting and getting rebellious. It's a way of reminding everyone, 'Hey, you're in prison and we're in charge.'"

"It isn't really about the vaccines or the tests," he said in regards to newly implemented guidelines. "What it's about is training us, conditioning us to live in a society where we accept this type of control."

Another aspect of this "synchronization of culture," as Hopkins called it, and which he finds particularly terrifying is the ideological uniformity being spread by "big supranational entities and corporate media" on behalf of the establishment. 

"It's tearing societies apart, it's tearing relationships apart, it's tearing families apart, this extreme polarization and intolerance of dissent and differing views," he said. "I feel like if I start questioning or challenging the official COVID narrative, if I start pointing out facts, I'm treated like a suppressive person in the Church of Scientology."

 

What Exactly Was Incorrect About Joe Rogan's Comment On mRNA Jab Policy?

mises |  Recently, Joe Rogan, one of the largest podcast hosts in the United States (10.6 million YouTube subscribers), expressed the following opinion about the vaccination of young adults:

If you are 21 and ask me if you should get the vaccine, I would say "no". If you are a healthy person and exercise all the time, and are young and eat well, I don't think you have to worry about this.

Spotify’s Joe Rogan encourages "healthy" young people not to get a coronavirus vaccine. His show is Spotify's most popular podcast.

“If you're like 21 years old, and you say to me, should I get vaccinated? I'll go no.” pic.twitter.com/5dX98xUaHS

— Alex Paterson (@AlexPattyy) April 27, 2021

This comment created a furor in the United States, where the government's target is vaccination of the entire adult population. For these few sentences he received a sharp reprimand from the White House and Dr. Fauci, who accused Rogan of being selfish and endangering vulnerable members of society. 

“You can get infected, and will get infected, if you put yourself at risk.” -Dr. Anthony Fauci responding to podcast host Joe Rogan’s suggestion that young people not get the COVID-19 vaccine pic.twitter.com/6E02GI31VV

— TODAY (@TODAYshow) April 28, 2021

In reality, the real question is not whether Joe Rogan was right or wrong in saying what he said. Criticism of a citizen by the US government is disturbing regardless of the comments that were made. What about freedom of speech when the state criticizes an individual's speech? 

The protection of freedom of speech and of the press in the USA is among the strongest that exists. The First Amendment to the Constitution in theory offers extremely robust protection with its famous words: "Congress will not make any law curtailing freedom of speech, or of the press."

But this implies that it is not unconstitutional for the authorities to publicly judge the speech of its citizens, such as Rogan. As reported by Glenn Greenwald, this represents in practice a government control of speech. He quotes a Federal Communications Commission (FCC) commissioner who notes that:

Politicians have realized that they can silence the speech of those with different political viewpoints by public bullying.

For politically "sensitive" subjects, authorities do not accept deviations from their official story. This deleterious situation has existed since long before the pandemic. Today, it is about vaccine policy, but yesterday, about the war on terrorism, about Russiagate, about the corruption of Joe Biden, and many other topics.

 

Liberal Corporatist Groupthink Is The Worst And Most Insidious White Supremacy

Nymag  |  As we sift through the lab-leak debacle, the good news is that the healthy antibodies in the system are still strong enough to overcome the groupthink that produced the original error. News media are investigating a hypothesis they once dismissed, and the government has announced an investigation to find the truth.

The bad news is that the problem is turning out to be worse than it initially seemed — and worse still, the source of the failure is not going away. The implications of this episode are much broader than understanding the source of the pandemic. It is a question about whether institutions like the media and government can withstand the pressure of ideological conformity.

A recent Washington Post story, looking back at the government’s response to virus’s origination, reported that many officials refused to explore the lab-leak hypothesis because it was associated with right-wing politics. “For some of the officials who were privately suspicious of the Wuhan lab, Trump’s and Navarro’s comments turned the lab-leak scenario into a fringe conspiracy theory,” the Post found, “It became nearly impossible to generate interest among health experts in a hypothesis that Trump had turned into a political weapon, they said.”

That is an extraordinarily damning admission. Health experts who understood all along that it was entirely possible that the virus emerged from a lab simply refused to examine the hypothesis because it had become associated with the likes of Donald Trump.

Openness to evidence is the historical strength of American liberalism. This is why, for all the errors liberals have committed since the Progressive Era, a capacity for self-correction has given continued vitality to their — our — creed. The lab-leak fiasco ought to be a warning sign of what happens if the urge to not be defeated or manipulated by the right turns into an emulation of its methods. The only thing worse than having a hack gap would be not having one.

Watching The Liberal Corporatist Cult Close Ranks To Protect Its Own...,

FT  |    “There are a lot of questions that must be answered by Dr Fauci,” said Donald Trump, the former president whom Fauci served as an adviser, following the release of the emails. Trump’s supporters, many of whom accuse Fauci of having exaggerated the severity of the pandemic, have gone further. Josh Hawley, the Republican senator from Missouri, on Friday urged Fauci to resign.

Fauci himself admits to being worried. Not about the blowback, however, but about what it says about America. “It worries me about what it says about this country,” he told the Financial Times. “The emails show someone who is always assessing the data as they evolve. But people are selectively pulling emails out to distort what the reality is.” 

The 80-year-old Fauci is one of America’s best-known and most well-respected doctors. Having advised every president since Ronald Reagan, he achieved renown in the scientific world for his work on HIV in the 1980s when he was one of the first public medics to sound the alarm about a strange new disease identified among gay men. He won the respect of gay activists after helping to change the way medical trials were run so that more people could get access to potentially life-saving treatments. 

“Tony revolutionised how clinical trials are done for HIV,” said Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota and a longtime friend of Fauci. 

“He is a great medic, but he is also a natural leader, and knows how to get things done.” Fauci played a prominent role in the American responses to Sars, Mers and the Ebola outbreak of 2014-16, when the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention came under fire over its response. 

“There was a time when CDC was being attacked unfairly,” said Tom Frieden, who was CDC director at the time. “Many people in that situation would have stood by or even quietly piled on, but Tony did exactly the opposite. He stood up for us internally and he stood up for us, publicly. He is a mensch.” 

Fauci has been one of the most prominent faces of the US Covid response. He has become famous for frequent television appearances in which he discusses in plain terms and in his broad New York accent the seriousness of the pandemic.

Peak Distrust Of The Ruling Professional Managerial Class

newsweek  |  The trials and tribulations of COVID-19 in America have dealt an irreparable blow to the credibility of America's ruling class and the ruling class's implicit appeal to its authority as a coterie of highly trained and capable experts. No single person exemplifies this more than Dr. Anthony Fauci, who has attained celebrity status during the pandemic as the nation's leading immunologist and forward-facing spokesman for our public policy response. As Steve Deace and Todd Erzen detail in their new book, Faucian Bargain: The Most Powerful and Dangerous Bureaucrat in American History, Fauci has repeatedly contradicted himself throughout the pandemic, waffling on what the "science" demands at any given moment while still always seeming to err on the side of draconian overreaction.

 Recent Freedom of Information Act, or FOIA, requests by BuzzFeed and The Washington Post only underscore the point. Perhaps most damningly, the FOIA requests revealed a February 2020 email to former Obama-era Secretary of Health and Human Services Sylvia Burwell explaining that store-bought face masks are "really for infected people to prevent them from spreading infection to people who are not infected rather than protecting uninfected people from acquiring infection." He also added that the "typical mask you buy in the drug store is not really effective in keeping out virus, which is small enough to pass through material."

Of course, barely over a month after Fauci's unearthed email to Burwell, Americans were required to wear masks pretty much every time they left their house—and mask-skeptical posts were censored or deleted by the ruling class's preferred private-sector enforcement arm, Big Tech. And none of this is to even broach the separate issue of the extensive COVID-19-era societal lockdowns, which were never justified on the scientific metrics despite being ubiquitously promoted by those excoriating lockdown-skeptical conservatives to just shut up and "trust the science."

In addition to the Fauci FOIA cache, there is also the Democratic Party and the media's inexplicable 180-degree turn on the plausibility of the Wuhan lab leak theory—that is, the idea that the COVID-19 pandemic has as its origins not a zoonotic transmission at a local "wet market" but an escape from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which was conducting dangerous coronavirus research (partially subsidized by the U.S. taxpayer) and happens to be located within the immediate vicinity of the then-novel virus' first confirmed cases. The lab leak theory was always plausible, if not probable, but those who promoted it as a possibility from the onset—such as Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) and then-President Donald Trump—were routinely lambasted as Sinophobic conspiracy theorists.

 

The Fight To Uncover The Origin Of Covid-19

vanityfair |  Since December 1, 2019, the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19 has infected more than 170 million people around the world and killed more than 3.5 million. To this day, we don’t know how or why this novel coronavirus suddenly appeared in the human population. Answering that question is more than an academic pursuit: Without knowing where it came from, we can’t be sure we’re taking the right steps to prevent a recurrence.

And yet, in the wake of the Lancet statement and under the cloud of Donald Trump’s toxic racism, which contributed to an alarming wave of anti-Asian violence in the U.S., one possible answer to this all-important question remained largely off-limits until the spring of 2021.

Behind closed doors, however, national security and public health experts and officials across a range of departments in the executive branch were locked in high-stakes battles over what could and couldn’t be investigated and made public.

A months long Vanity Fair investigation, interviews with more than 40 people, and a review of hundreds of pages of U.S. government documents, including internal memos, meeting minutes, and email correspondence, found that conflicts of interest, stemming in part from large government grants supporting controversial virology research, hampered the U.S. investigation into COVID-19’s origin at every step. In one State Department meeting, officials seeking to demand transparency from the Chinese government say they were explicitly told by colleagues not to explore the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s gain-of-function research, because it would bring unwelcome attention to U.S. government funding of it.

In an internal memo obtained by Vanity Fair, Thomas DiNanno, former acting assistant secretary of the State Department’s Bureau of Arms Control, Verification, and Compliance, wrote that staff from two bureaus, his own and the Bureau of International Security and Nonproliferation, “warned” leaders within his bureau “not to pursue an investigation into the origin of COVID-19” because it would “‘open a can of worms’ if it continued.”

There are reasons to doubt the lab-leak hypothesis. There is a long, well-documented history of natural spillovers leading to outbreaks, even when the initial and intermediate host animals have remained a mystery for months and years, and some expert virologists say the supposed oddities of the SARS-CoV-2 sequence have been found in nature.

But for most of the past year, the lab-leak scenario was treated not simply as unlikely or even inaccurate but as morally out-of-bounds. In late March, former Centers for Disease Control director Robert Redfield received death threats from fellow scientists after telling CNN that he believed COVID-19 had originated in a lab. “I was threatened and ostracized because I proposed another hypothesis,” Redfield told Vanity Fair. “I expected it from politicians. I didn’t expect it from science.”

With President Trump out of office, it should be possible to reject his xenophobic agenda and still ask why, in all places in the world, did the outbreak begin in the city with a laboratory housing one of the world’s most extensive collection of bat viruses, doing some of the most aggressive research?

Why The Narrative Shift On The Lab-Leak Hypothesis?

 CJR |  What changed? There’s still no direct evidence to validate the lab-leak theory. There has been fresh contextual reporting: the Journal recently revealed the existence of a US intelligence document claiming that three researchers at the Wuhan lab were hospitalized in November 2019. (The Trump administration previously issued a fuzzier version of this claim; the Journal’s sources disagreed as to the strength of the intelligence.) Eighteen scientists wrote in Science that an investigation conducted by the World Health Organization and China failed to give “balanced consideration” to the natural-origin and lab-leak hypotheses. Nicholas Wade, a former Times science journalist, wrote in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists that, as things stand, “proponents of lab escape can explain all the available facts about SARS2 considerably more easily than can those who favor natural emergence,” and Donald G. McNeil, Jr., another former Times reporter (who recently left the paper following an allegation of racism), wrote on Medium essentially backing Wade up. Dr. Anthony Fauci suggested that he’s not as confident as he was in the natural-origin theory. President Biden revealed that the intelligence community is split on the question, and ordered a further investigation to report back within ninety days.

Others say that, actually, nothing has really changed—a position that seems to unite observers who think the lab-leak theory was always credible and those who continue to doubt it. “The theory has always been the same,” Josh Rogin, a Post columnist who reported over a year ago on US safety concerns around the Wuhan lab, tweeted. “The people who got it wrong changed their minds.” Striking a different note, Angela Rasmussen, a prominent virologist, argued that “the media has chosen to dress up old speculation as new information and claim that it’s evidence. It’s not. It’s speculative, and all origin hypotheses remain possible.”

There is an awful lot to unpack here. The nub of the media criticism is, in my view, justified. Last April, I wrote, responding to Rogin’s reporting, that the press should “isolate legitimate questions” from conspiratorial noise “and try and report out the answers”; numerous journalists took this approach to the lab-leak theory, but many others did indeed dismiss it as an illegitimate line of inquiry. Such stories channeled familiar broader problems with pandemic coverage—principally, the contriving of scientific certainty in the absence of expert consensus, exacerbated by the urgent political stakes of all the conspiratorial noise. We are now seeing scientists argue in good faith about what the evidence shows—indeed, what the evidence is. This was always desirable; too often, however, argument itself was tarred as a bad-faith act.

Is Covid Is Or Is Covid Ain't Manmade Lil'Fauci?!?!?! Keep That Same Energy

Forbes | During an interview with CNN Thursday, Fauci was asked about an exchange he had with a British disease expert who worked with the lab in question—the Wuhan Institute of Virology—in April 2020.

The email exchange was made public after the Washington Post and Buzzfeed News obtained Fauci’s messages through a FOIA request and published a trove of them this week. 

In the exchange, Fauci thanks the zoologist and head of the controversial virus research nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance, Peter Daszak, for commending him for publicly dismissing the lab-leak theory.

Fauci on Thursday called it “nonsense” that Republicans have latched on to the emails, claiming he was not saying anything then that he would not say now.

“I have always said . . . that I still believe the most likely origin is from an animal species to a human,” Fauci maintained.

Fauci said he was going to keep an “open mind” about the possibility of a lab leak, but still believed animal-to-human transmission was most likely.

Crucial Quote

“From my perspective, your comments are brave, and coming from your trusted voice, will help dispel the myths being spun around the virus’ origins,” Daszak wrote in April 2020, according to emails published by Buzzfeed. “Many thanks for your kind note,” Fauci responds.

Key Background 

Fauci has been accused of shifting his stance on the possibility of a lab leak. Most scientists continue to believe the virus began in the wild, where it was transmitted to a human, but many health experts, including Fauci, are now forcefully calling for a more rigorous investigation into the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic. Last month, a group of 18 prominent scientists published a letter in Science referring to both the lab-leak theory and the zoonotic spillover as “viable” until they collect sufficient data, while the Wall Street Journal reported details of a U.S. intelligence report that found several researchers from the Wuhan Institute of Virology were hospitalized with Covid-like symptoms in November 2019, weeks before the disease was first identified. The WHO’s initial investigation into the origins of the pandemic found it “extremely unlikely” that the virus escaped from a lab, but the origins of the virus are yet to be concluded.

What To Watch For

Last week, President Joe Biden announced intelligence agencies have “coalesced around two likely scenarios” for the origin of Covid-19, including the lab-leak theory and wildlife-to-human spread, and called on officials to “redouble their efforts” to come to a conclusion on the virus’ origin over the next 90 days. 

Chief Critic

Republicans have criticized Fauci over his link to Daszak and EcoHealth. The National Institute of Health previously provided funding to EcoHealth for pandemic research, which worked with the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The grant to EcoHealth was canceled last year by the Trump Administration. “The truth is out,” House Minority Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.) wrote on Twitter Wednesday. “Fauci’s emails show he suspected early last year that Covid-19 possibly leaked from the Wuhan lab—yet he stayed silent. This is a major cover-up. We need a full congressional investigation into the origins of Covid-19.”

Lil'Fauci's 15 Minutes Of Panicdemic Fame And Fortune Should Now Be Over...,

dailymail |  A forthcoming book about Dr. Anthony Fauci has been removed from Amazon and Barnes & Noble after it was accidentally posted for pre-sale prematurely. 

The 80-page tome, titled 'Expect the Unexpected: Ten Lessons on Truth, Service, and the Way Forward', is set to be released by National Geographic Books on November 2. 

On Tuesday, the hardcover book went up for pre-sale online for the sum of $18, before the listing pages mysteriously vanished. 

On Wednesday, JustTheNews reported that the book 'had been scrubbed from online listings... amid criticism that Fauci is profiting from the deadly COVID-19 pandemic'. 

However, National Geographic Books told DailyMail.com that there was a more innocent explanation for the removal.

'The book was prematurely posted for pre-sale, which is why it was taken down,' the company said in a statement. 

They added: 'The book was developed by National Geographic Books in connection with an upcoming National Geographic Documentary Film about Dr. Fauci. He will not earn any royalties from its publication.'  

Fauci's forthcoming book will be compiled of interviews that he has conducted during his 34-year stint as the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.  

An overview of the book states: 'Before becoming the face of the White House Coronavirus Task Force and America's most trusted doctor, Dr. Fauci had already devoted three decades to public service. 

'Those looking to live a more compassionate and purposeful life will find inspiration in his unique perspective on leadership, expecting the unexpected, and finding joy in difficult times.'

The overview further states: 'The earnest reflections in these pages will offer a universal message on how to lead in times of crisis and find resilience in the face of disappointments and obstacles'.

Why Has Ivermectin Been Suppressed?

ivmmeta | •97% of 37 early treatment and prophylaxis studies report positive effects (95% of all 57 studies). 26 studies show statistically significant improvements in isolation.

•Random effects meta-analysis with pooled effects using the most serious outcome reported shows 78% and 85% improvement for early treatment and prophylaxis (RR 0.22 [0.12-0.39] and 0.15 [0.09-0.25]). Results are similar after exclusion based sensitivity analysis: 80% and 87% (RR 0.20 [0.14-0.28] and 0.13 [0.07-0.25]), and after restriction to 32 peer-reviewed studies: 80% and 88% (RR 0.20 [0.12-0.34] and 0.12 [0.05-0.30]).

 

•81% and 96% lower mortality is observed for early treatment and prophylaxis (RR 0.19 [0.07-0.54] and 0.04 [0.00-0.58]). Statistically significant improvements are seen for mortality, ventilation, hospitalization, cases, and viral clearance.

 

•100% of the 17 Randomized Controlled Trials (RCTs) for early treatment and prophylaxis report positive effects, with an estimated improvement of 73% and 83% respectively (RR 0.27 [0.18-0.41] and 0.17 [0.05-0.61]), and 93% of all 29 RCTs. 

 

•The probability that an ineffective treatment generated results as positive as the 57 studies to date is estimated to be 1 in 5 trillion (p = 0.00000000000021). 

 

•Heterogeneity arises from many factors including treatment delay, patient population, the effect measured, variants, and treatment regimens. The consistency of positive results across a wide variety of cases is remarkable. Heterogeneity is low in specific cases, for example early treatment mortality.

 

•While many treatments have some level of efficacy, they do not replace vaccines and other measures to avoid infection. Only 28% of ivermectin studies show zero events in the treatment arm.

 

•Elimination of COVID-19 is a race against viral evolution. No treatment, vaccine, or intervention is 100% available and effective for all current and future variants. All practical, effective, and safe means should be used. Not doing so increases the risk of COVID-19 becoming endemic; and increases mortality, morbidity, and collateral damage.

 

•Many studies do not specify administration, or specify fasting. Administration with food may significantly increase plasma and tissue concentration.

 

•All data to reproduce this paper and the sources are in the appendix. See [Bryant, Hill, Kory, Lawrie, Nardelli] for other meta analyses, all with similar results confirming effectiveness.

Global adoption: 27%

Other meta analyses:
Bryant, Hill, Kory, Lawrie, Nardelli

Resources: FLCCC, BIRD

Analyses: WHO, Merck

Show results for: All studiesExclusionsMortalityVentilationICU admissionHospitalizationCOVID-19 casesViral clearancePeer reviewedRCT mortalityAll RCTs
00.250.50.7511.251.51.752+Kory et al.0.31[0.20-0.47]RRCIHill et al.0.25[0.12-0.52]Bryant et al.0.32[0.14-0.72]Lawrie et al.0.17[0.08-0.35]Nardelli et al.0.21[0.11-0.36]WHO (OR)0.19[0.09-0.36]ivmmeta0.28[0.17-0.46]Ivermectin meta analysis mortality resultsivmmeta.com 6/3/21Lower Risk

	Improvement	Studies	Authors	Patients
Early treatment	78% [61‑88%]	23	236	3,227
Late treatment	45% [27‑59%]	20	165	6,595
Prophylaxis	85% [75‑91%]	14	108	8,789
Mortality	72% [54‑83%]	21	195	7,525
RCTs only	65% [49‑75%]	29	310	5,161
All studies	72% [63‑78%]	57	509	18,611

Evidence base used for other COVID-19 approvals
Medication	Studies	Patients	Improvement
Budesonide (UK)	1	1,779	17%
Remdesivir (USA)	1	1,063	31%
Casiri/imdevimab (USA)	1	799	66%
Ivermectin evidence	57	18,611	72% [63‑78%]

Chris Mellon A Whole Difference Of Kind - Not Degree - In Our Restricted Air Space

caitlinjohnstone |  I’ve been learning as much as I can about the new UFO narrative the political/media class have been pushing in conjunction with the US military to prepare for the Senate report that’s due to be released this month.

One of the disconcerting things I’ve been seeing again and again from all the major players in this new narrative like Lue Elizondo and Christopher Mellon is the absurd assertion that not only is it entirely possible that the unknown phenomena allegedly being regularly witnessed by military personnel are extraterrestrial in origin, but that if they are extraterrestrial they may want to hurt us.

Mellon, the former US Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence who helped get the ball rolling on UFOs entering mainstream attention back in 2017 when he leaked three Pentagon videos to The New York Times, has stated that he sees extraterrestrial origin as an entirely possible explanation for these phenomena.

“We don’t even understand how you could do something like that,” Mellon said in a recent interview with CTV News of the inexplicable maneuvers and features these aircraft supposedly demonstrate. “We don’t even understand the science behind it. Not like somebody’s a couple generations of fighter jet behind us; I mean this is a whole difference of kind, not degree.”

Asked why the pilots of mysterious aircraft with incomprehensible scientific advancement might want to monitor the US military, Mellon said the following:

“Well probably for the same reason we do: to understand what kind of threat we could pose to them. Should a conflict arise they want to be able to engage us effectively, defeat us rapidly, at minimum cost of life and treasure, just as we would on the other side. We do similar kinds of things; we don’t have vehicles quite like this, but we’re certainly very actively monitoring military forces of other countries.”

The notion that UFOs could pose a threat to humans whether their alleged operators are from our own world or from another is being promoted by the main drivers of this strange new plotline, and it is being enthusiastically lapped up by many UFO enthusiasts who see framing these phenomena as a national security threat as the best way to get mainstream power structures to take them seriously and disclose information to the public.

Not Just The DNC Hyperventilating About UFOs/UAP's

foxnews  |  CARLSON:  So one of the main reasons we know as much about UFOs and know as much about what The Pentagon knows about UFOs is because of a man called Lue Elizondo, who used to run the Pentagon's UFO program. He's gone public about this, as you know, if you watch this show. Now, he says The Pentagon is launching a smear campaign against him. 

CARLSON:  One of the main reasons that sane people are now capable of talking about UFOs without being laughed at is because of a man called Lue Elizondo. Thirteen years ago, Elizondo was assigned to lead a Pentagon program that investigated this phenomenon, whatever it is. 

Since leaving employment with the U.S. government, Elizondo has gone public about some of what he knows about UFO sightings. Again, he has made this current conversation possible. 

Now, Elizondo has filed a complaint with The Pentagon's Inspector General, and in that complaint, he says The Pentagon is waging a coordinated disinformation campaign to smear him for talking about this subject. 

Lue Elizondo joins us tonight. Lue, thanks so much for coming on. 

LUE ELIZONDO, FORMER PENTAGON OFFICIAL:  Tucker, always a pleasure. 

CARLSON:  What do you believe the Pentagon -- thank you -- what are they doing to you and why? 

ELIZONDO:  Well, there are certainly pockets of resistance within The Pentagon. And my concern is that they're not being forthcoming with the American people about the reality of the program, the findings of the program, my role in the program, and frankly, the importance of this topic from a national security perspective. 

I think the concern for me is that there's a lot of information that still has to see the light of day, and they are obfuscating the truth. And more importantly, they may be doing it to Congress, which is a whole another level of deception, of course, if that is indeed the case. 

CARLSON:  Yes, and it's also illegal. They're required by law, to release this information to the Congress and to the public. When can we expect that and how convinced are you about withholding critical information from that report? 

ELIZONDO:  Yes, two things with that, Tucker. That report can come out any day, probably anytime between next week and June 25th. Hopefully, the report is what Congress expects, and frankly, what Congress deserves. But I'll tell you something of equal importance that I think our friends in Congress should probably be aware of, and that is the Public Affairs Office right now in the United States Pentagon is obfuscating, and more importantly, interfering with the Freedom of Information Act process that is something that is in law. 

So I think that's something every American should be concerned with. 

CARLSON:  Yes, it's illegal, among other things and wrong. What specifically do you worry they will omit from this report? 

ELIZONDO:  Well, in the program ATIP that I was part of, we looked at a lot of things, primarily as most people know, the UAP or the Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon topic and more importantly, the incursions into us airspace. There's a lot of data, Tucker out there. 

And I mean, there's a lot and I have to be very careful what I say. But I think, if just some of that information comes to light. You know, one thing people look at the Nimitz incident, they look at the Roosevelt, they look at the kid in the Omaha and they say, well, you know, those are anecdotal, those are, you know, events that occurred every so often. 

But I think Americans would be really surprised to know that these events are continuing to literally last week, they're happening all the time.

 

The UFO/UAP Distraction Been Bubbling For A Minute In Democrat Political Circles

insidesources | Conspiracy Theorists Wonder Whether Clinton Lost Because the Deep State Wanted to Stop Her From Releasing Secret Alien Files

No, you’re not in the Twilight Zone: That really was Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign chairman and former White House Chief of Staff John Podesta on Ancient Aliens Friday night.

The long-running History Channel series is a haven for believers in the government/UFO conspiracy, alien abductions, and “The Reptilians.” (Season 8, Episode 5: “Could ancient myths about reptilian creatures provide evidence that they are more than just a pop-culture creation?”). The show has even pondered whether the moon is hollow and houses a secret alien base (Season 11, Episode 11).

This weekend Ancient Aliens kicked off its 13th season with a review of efforts to get the federal government to release its treasure trove of documents and data on what really happened at Roswell, Area 51, etc.

And there—in between artist renditions of flying saucers and interviews with UFO conspiracy theorists like Georgio Tsoukalos and Stephen Bassett—was well-known Democrat politico John Podesta.  Among the conspiracies promoted in this new (ahem) “documentary” is the suggestion that the real reason Hillary lost an impossible-to-lose campaign in 2016 wasn’t the Russians or the FBI.

It was aliens.

As conspiracy-debunker Jason Colavito says in his review of the episode:

“The show speculates that Clinton would have led a UFO disclosure movement had she won the presidency in 2016, and there is a strange implication that ‘the CIA and the Pentagon were worried about Hillary Clinton’ and therefore arranged for her to lose the election.”

John Podesta’s obsession with alien encounters and government disclosure is no secret. The Washington Post and others have written about it in the past. And video of Podesta’s 2002 appearance in a press event urging the government to release all its UFO files has a staple of “The Truth Is Out There” documentary industry.

Podesta’s passion has even made an appearance in the #Russiagate story, as InsideSources has reported. Among the Podesta emails released by Wikileaks during the 2016 campaign were several from Blink-182 front man (and UFO activist) Tom DeLonge referencing “Classified Science,” “DOD topics” and Roswell.

What is unusual about the latest Ancient Aliens episode (“The UFO Conspiracy”) is Podesta’s decision to sit down for an on-camera interview, participating directly in the program.

Any Negroes Silly Enough To Buy Cornpop's Wolf Tickets About To Feel Like Stacey Abrams...,

WaPo  |   President Biden promised Tuesday to "fight like heck" against Republican efforts to restrict voting, using the anniversary of a racist massacre here to respond to Democrats' growing anxiety that his low-key approach was threatening fair elections and their own electoral future.

Biden announced that he was tapping Vice President Harris to marshal an effort against the increasing array of Republican-led state laws that restrict voting in various ways, a campaign Biden condemned as “un-American.”

“This sacred right is under assault with incredible intensity like I’ve never seen,” Biden said, adding that June should be a “month of action” on Capitol Hill and taking what appeared to be a shot at Democratic Sens. Joe Manchin III (W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (Ariz.), suggesting they often side with Republicans.

The president has been under pressure to show more urgency in the face of a GOP push that includes efforts to overturn the last presidential election, former president Donald Trump’s false assertion that he won, and Republican resistance to Democrats’ voting rights proposals in Congress. Democrats in Texas over the weekend blocked a restrictive voting measure, at least temporarily, by walking out of the statehouse.

Biden, the first president to visit Tulsa to commemorate the 1921 massacre, which included numerous atrocities and destroyed a prosperous Black community, delivered a searing speech that recounted the events in great detail and sought to “fill the silence” about the killing.

The massacre, which killed as many as 300 people and destroyed more than 1,250 homes, destroyed what was known as Black Wall Street, a thriving community of African Americans.

“For much too long, the history of what took place here was told in silence, cloaked in darkness,” he said. “But just because history is silent, it doesn’t mean that it did not take place.”

Biden portrayed the effort to come to grips with that spasm of racist killing, and what it revealed about the bigotry and hatred in American life, as critical to a process of healing and rebuilding that is still underway in the country more broadly.

“We can’t just choose what we want to know, and not what we should know,” Biden said. “We should know the good, the bad — everything. That’s what great nations do. They come to terms with their dark sides.”

Gael Monfils: We Need Naomi 100% These Obnoxious Frogs, Not So Much...,

espn  |  The leaders of the four Grand Slam tennis tournaments reacted Tuesday to Naomi Osaka's stunning withdrawal from the French Open by promising to address players' concerns about mental health.

The pledge came in a statement signed by the same four administrators who threatened the possibility of disqualification or suspension for Osaka on Sunday if she continued to skip news conferences.

French tennis federation president Gilles Moretton, All England Club chairman Ian Hewitt, U.S. Tennis Association president Mike McNulty and Tennis Australia president Jayne Hrdlicka pledged to work with players, the tours and media "to improve the player experience at our tournaments" while making sure the athletes all are on a "fair playing field, regardless of ranking or status."

In a separate statement issued Tuesday to the AP via email, International Tennis Federation official Heather Bowler said the sport will "review what needs to evolve" after Osaka "shone a light on mental health issues."

"It's in all our interests to ensure that we continue to provide a respectful and qualitative environment that enables all stakeholders to do their job to their best ability, without impacting their health, and for the good of the sport," Bowler wrote.

Various players, including Serena Williams, offered support for Osaka and praised her for being forthcoming in her statement on social media Monday.

"It's hard. Nobody really knows what anyone is going through, no matter how much they choose to show on the outside. I had no idea about her. But I respect her openness," 20-year-old American Ann Li said after winning her first-round match Tuesday at Roland Garros. "Our generation is becoming more open and open, which can be a good thing and also a bad thing sometimes. I hope she's doing OK."

On Tuesday, when asked how she handled media attention and duties during her career, Venus Williams said each person is different.

"For me, personally, how I deal with it was that I know every single person asking me a question can't play as well as I can and never will, so no matter what you say or what you write, you'll never light a candle to me," Williams said. "So that's how I deal with it. But each person deals with it differently."

Gael Monfils, 34, who also won Tuesday in Paris, said he could relate to Osaka's concerns to an extent.

"It's a very tough situation for her. I feel for her, because I have been struggling quite a lot as well," said Monfils, of France. "What she's dealing is even tough for me to even judge, because I think she has massive pressure from many things. I think she's quite young. She's handling it quite well. Sometime we want maybe too much from her ... so sometime, for sure, she is going to do some mistake."