WashingtonTimes | Thousands of Michiganders protesting Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s stay-at-home executive order drove to Lansing, Michigan, for a mass ‘drive-by’ protest on Wednesday.
The Michigan Conservative Coalition
organized “Operation Gridlock” featuring protesters circling the
Michigan State Capitol in their vehicles and honking their horns to show
their opposition to the Democratic governor’s coronavirus-related
restrictions. The protesters observed social distancing practices by
remaining in their vehicles.
“Our Governor and her allies are infecting ALL of us with their radical, progressive agenda,” the Michigan Conservative Coalition
said on its Facebook page organizing the protest. “Dope stores? Open.
Abortion clinics? Open. Churches? Shut down. Local businesses? Going
broke!”
The group added, “People always say: “Conservatives never protest
because they are too busy working.” Well, guess what. You’re not
working—so it’s time to PROTEST.”
The Operation Gridlock rally was set to begin
at noon but thousands of vehicles arrived beforehand on Wednesday,
according to organizers of the protest.
yasha | Tonite Evgenia and I went went to another “hey, asshole!” honking
protest in front of the official mansion residence of Los Angeles mayor
Eric Garcetti — a home that the Getty oil oligarch family gifted to the
city for “public” use.
The COVID-19 lockdown has been going on for
nearly a month now here in LA. I believe it’s day 29 today. Millions
have lost their jobs and millions can’t make rent, but the city has done
nothing to help. There are no ideas, no plans, and there is no action.
As far as I can tell, politicians here have been hoping things will pass
on their own — that the economic and housing crisis will somehow float
past them. So they’re refusing to make any difficult decisions
— especially because anything they do to positively help people is
guaranteed to piss off their donor class. I mean, the city council voted down something as basic and simple as an eviction moratorium. That’s how regressive the politics are in ultra-liberal, progressive LA.
So a small group of activists,
mostly from the Los Angeles Tenants Union, have been organizing these
honking protests on an ongoing basis in front of the homes of various
city politicians to make demands that they stop evictions, cancel rent
payments, and house the homeless in empty hotel rooms. The central idea
here is to make these politicians uncomfortable — all while observing
social distancing rules. It’s clever and smart and Evgenia and I went to
a couple of these already in the last couple of weeks, including one that ended with an angry Guy Fawkes neighbor trying to drench us with his garden hose.
This one didn’t have the same theatrics.
A
convoy of maybe twenty cars showed up at Mayor Garcetti’s mansion and
started circling the block, honking, and annoying the hell out of
everyone in the neighborhood. As we kept making the loop, some of his
neighbors came out to gawk at us from their fancy Hancock Park lawns
with disapproval. The cops arrived ten minutes after we started and
promptly began warning people that they’d give citations if people kept
honking. When I wouldn’t stop, a cop flashed his light in my face. This
is how this things play out when you’re protesting by car!
Anyway,
it felt great to get out and yell at the window at our shitty
politicians. People don’t do this nearly enough. Let me tell you, it’s
much more satisfying that trolling people on Twitter or getting into a
Facebook flame war. But as good as it felt, the problem is that there is
no larger political organization and there is no real economic or
political leverage. So the protest is really about venting anger and
getting people together in the simplest way possible. But you gotta
start somewhere.
visualskies | The main focus of the programme, the awe inspiring Nan Madol, is
an archaeological wonder adjacent to the eastern shore of Pohnpei. Few
places in the Pacific, indeed on the planet, are as intriguing and
mysterious as Nan Madol. Hardly known outside Micronesia, the lost city
of Nan Madol is a hidden gem of Polynesian history and culture and is an
awe inspiring sight for modern people lucky enough to visit or work
there. The name Nan Madol means ‘within the intervals’ and is a
reference to the canals that criss-cross the ruins. The city,
constructed in a lagoon, consists of myriad artificial islands linked by
this network of canals. The core of the site, with its monumental
basalt block walls and coral filled platforms, encompasses an area of
over 18 square kilometres and is the only extant ancient city built on
top of a coral reef. Nan Madol was the ceremonial and political capital
of the Saudeleur Dynasty until the early part of the 17th century;
although Nan Madol was the scene of human activity since the 1st or 2nd
century AD, the construction of the distinctive basalt block
architecture probably began in the 12th century. The colossal scale of
the beautiful edifices, their technical sophistication and the
extraordinary density of the megalithic structures bear testimony to the
complex social and religious organisations of the island society at
this time. In the north eastern part of the site lies the breathtaking
Nan Doas with walls of impossibly massive basalt blocks, in places over 7
metres tall. These surround a central tomb in an impressive courtyard
that was built for the first Saudeleur. These elaborate ruins represent
the ceremonial centre of the Saudeleur Dynasty; a vibrant period in
Pacific Island culture. According to local legend, the basalt blocks
used in the construction of Nan Madol were flown to the site by twin
sorcerors Olisihpa and Olosohpa using black magic. Although
archaeologists have located several quarry sites for the basalt at the
opposite end of Pohnpei, the method of transportation and construction
of these incredibly heavy stone blocks has still not been adequately
explained. The longer you spend at Nan Madol, the more these legends
indeed seem to be a reasonable explanation as to how the place was
built.
The site is inscribed on the List of World Heritage in Danger due to a
number of threats, notably the silting up of the waterways and the
unchecked, rapid growth of the mangroves and other vegetation that
undermine and otherwise destabilise the remains. The majority of the
megalithic complex at Nan Madol has been rendered almost invisible by
the aggressive invasion of the mangrove forest and other vegetation that
proliferate in the tropical climate on Pohnpei. As a corollary of this
it was impossible to document, digitise and visualise the remains using
any traditional survey techniques. There was simply too much vegetation
to be able to allow more than a tantalising glimpse of disparate parts
of the widescale megalithic structures; so an alternative methodology
had to be utilised. To allow the team to literally find the lost city of
Nan Madol Visualskies used our drone mounted LiDAR technology to
penetrate the vegetation canopy and reveal the remains that, to the
naked eye, remain hidden underneath. Working under intense pressure to
fly multiple sorties every day, in far from ideal weather conditions,
with no power close at hand and then to process and visualise the
results in a matter of days, Visualskies pushed the technology, the
hardware, the software and the team members to their limits and beyond.
For the team from Visualskies, working on Pohnpei was an incredible
journey into the past and a unique professional experience on a tropical
paradise.
sciencealert | There's a small and exclusive list of places where crop cultivation
first got started in the ancient world – and it looks as though that
list might have another entry, according to new research of curious
'islands' in the Amazon basin.
The savannah of the Llanos de Moxos
in northern Bolivia is littered with thousands of patches of forest,
rising a few feet above the surrounding wetlands. Many of these forest
islands, as researchers call them, are thought to be the remnants of
human habitation from the early and mid-Holocene.
Now, thanks to
new analysis of the sediment found in some of these islands, researchers
have unearthed signs that these spots were used to grow cassava (manioc) and squash a little over 10,000 years ago.
That's
impressive, as this timing places them some 8,000 years earlier than
scientists had previously found evidence for, indicating that the people
who lived in this part of the world - the southwestern corner of the
Amazon basin - got a head start on farming practices.
In fact, the
findings suggest that southwestern Amazonia can now join China, the
Middle East, Mesoamerica, and the Andes as one of the areas where
organised plant growing first got going – in the words of the research
team, "one of the most important cultural transitions in human history".
"Archaeologists, geographers, and biologists have argued for many
years that southwestern Amazonia was a probable centre of early plant
domestication because many important cultivars like manioc, squash,
peanuts and some varieties of chili pepper and beans are genetically
very close to wild plants living here," says earth scientist Umberto Lombardo from the University of Bern in Switzerland.
"However,
until this recent study, scientists had neither searched for, nor
excavated, old archaeological sites in this region that might document
the pre-Columbian domestication of these globally important crops."
Around
10,000 years ago (or more), many of the forest islands would have
formed due to how human activity - dumping food waste, for example -
changed the quality of the soil as the ice age receded.
"Anthropic
forest islands are entirely artificial, and do not take advantage of
pre-existing landscape features," the researchers note in the study. "These accumulative middens constituted fertility hotspots amid poor savannah soils."
There
are thousands of forest islands in the region, and the researchers used
remote sensing data to map 6,643 of them. The team also surveyed 82 of
these islands, extracting sediment samples. Further analysis revealed
tiny bits of phytolith – structures made of silica that are known to form inside the cells of plants, and get left behind after they decay.
youtube |Hey guys, today we are going to look at a very strange place called Baksei Chamkrong in the Angkor Wat Complex in Cambodia. This is a very strange site because this is the only stepped pyramid in this temple complex.
This pyramid in Cambodia is almost identical to the pyramid found in Mesoamerica.
There is a pyramid called Tikal. There is a pyramid in a place called Tikal and that pyramid looks not even similar but almost identical.
The Tikal Pyramid is in the country of Guatemala, in central America and this is roughly 10,000 miles from the Baksei Chamkrong Pyramid in Cambodia. But when you look at them side by side, it is mind boggling. There is no doubt, they were both built by the same builders.
Or did these 2 civilizations, separated by 10,000 miles, contacting and communicating with each other using advanced technology, just like what we do today?
How else do you explain these similarities? Look at the construction style in both temples. The masonry is the same, Make rectangular blocks of stone, and place them on top of one other.
Look at the basic design: Not even similar, almost identical. Both of them pyramids, both of them are stepped pyramids, both of them have a staircase laid out in the center. Both of them have a dome like structure built on the top, both have them have a doorway in the center of the dome. It is impossible that all these similarities are a result of mere coincidence.
Think about this, if these 2 structures were constructed within a 10 mile radius or a 100 mile radius, archeologists and historians would swear they were built by the same builders. However, simply because they are separated by 10,000 miles, experts now swear that this is a pure coincidence, built by 2 completely different civilizations which had no contact with each other.
youtube |Hey guys, today, let us explore the ancient statues in Colombia. There are statues here which are more than a thousand years old and they have a strange connection with Indian culture.
For example, take a look at the mysterious SpaceMan at San Agustin Archeological Park in Colombia. This is a remote site in South America, and there are hundreds of statues here, but this one is the eye-catcher. Who is he?
The very first impression is that he is some kind of an ancient astronaut because it is clear that he is wearing a helmet or a visor, he has 2 rectangular eyes, a rectangular mouth, and has no nose. Look at the size of his head and the body, it is very disproportionate, his body is too small for that giant head, and he is definitely wearing shoes.
But the most important detail is that he is holding a cylinder, a long tool which goes into the earth, look how it goes even below his feet.
This is a very interesting detail and archeologists and historians have no explanation for it. The tour guides here, also have no idea and claim this is just a flute, a musical instrument. What kind of a flute goes into the ground, how would it even be able to produce music like that?
Tell me what this is. So what is this all about?
Conversation in Spanish
While there is no explanation for this mysterious Spaceman in Colombia, in Hinduism, there are 2 Gods which are portrayed remarkably similar to this. The first one is called SwarnaAkarshana Bhairava. He is the god of Gold and it is said he could extract gold from the earth directly using his tools.
But there is another important deity known as Vaisravana, he is the half-brother of the demon king Ravana. Who is this Vaisravana, what does he do?. He is the God of wealth, especially gold. He is always shown with a tool that goes into the ground. But remember India and Colombia are about 10,000 miles apart, so how could a Hindu god be carved in Colombia? This is a very valid question, and we need to take a look at this logically.
In India, Vaisravana is portrayed like this. This statue is about 1600 years old, He is shown with a potbelly, a symbol of wealth. The most important detail is this rod in his hand, which usually goes into the ground.
youtube |Even though we can see these lingams vaguely from outside, the real view can be obtained only if we get underwater and for the very first time and this has never been shot before, I am going to go underwater and show you how it feels.
Hey guys, today we are going up a mountain called Phnom Kulen in Cambodia. This place has many ancient lingams constructed underwater. So, let's go take a look and see what this mountain has to offer.
We are at this place called Phnom Kulen Mountain; we are not at the ground level. There is a stream here, but there is something spectacular inside this stream.
Look, do you see what this is? You see a rectangle inside a rectangle, inside a rectangle, inside a rectangle, inside a rectangle. Now you may wonder what this is. This is a lingam. Or at least, there used to be a cylindrical lingam in the center. Now it is gone. But that is not the only remarkable feature. And that is not even the only lingam, look. LOOK. the entire stream is full of lingams.
You see there are lingams of various sizes, here there are smaller lingams and look over there, there is a huge rectangle there. These are all lingams carved underwater here in Cambodia.
And let us go into the water and see how these multiple lingams look. There is a square around another square, and in the center, there is a cylindrical protrusion. There are so many of them. This is a huge lingam, seems like it has some kind of mystical energy to it.
This huge rectangle once must have had a cylindrical lingam inside, it is great to see how it looks underwater. Look we can even see fish swimming alongside the camera.
So even though we call this place Phnom Kulen Today, originally this place was called Sahasralinga, which means one thousand lingas. And this is not a misnomer, and this is not even an exaggeration. This is actually an understatement because we have more than one thousand lingams underwater if you look closely. If you See there, there is one huge rectangle, and you can see here, so many lingams.
If you look all over the stream, we can see a lot of lingams, going all the way on both directions.
The name sahasralinga means one thousand lingas in Sanskrit, which used to be the main language here in Cambodia, more than a thousand years ago.
WaPo | Two years before the novel coronavirus pandemic upended the world, U.S.
Embassy officials visited a Chinese research facility in the city of
Wuhan several times and sent two official warnings back to Washington
about inadequate safety at the lab, which was conducting risky studies
on coronaviruses from bats. The cables have fueled discussions inside
the U.S. government about whether this or another Wuhan lab was the
source of the virus — even though conclusive proof has yet to emerge.
In January 2018, the U.S. Embassy in Beijing took the unusual step of
repeatedly sending U.S. science diplomats to the Wuhan Institute of
Virology (WIV), which had in 2015 become China’s first laboratory to
achieve the highest level of international bioresearch safety (known as
BSL-4). WIV issued a news release in English about the last of these
visits, which occurred on March 27, 2018. The U.S. delegation was led by
Jamison Fouss, the consul general in Wuhan, and Rick Switzer, the
embassy’s counselor of environment, science, technology and health. Last
week, WIV erased that statement from its website, though it remains archived on the Internet.
What the U.S. officials learned during their visits concerned them so
much that they dispatched two diplomatic cables categorized as
Sensitive But Unclassified back to Washington. The cables warned about
safety and management weaknesses at the WIV lab and proposed more
attention and help. The first cable, which I obtained, also warns that
the lab’s work on bat coronaviruses and their potential human
transmission represented a risk of a new SARS-like pandemic.
“During
interactions with scientists at the WIV laboratory, they noted the new
lab has a serious shortage of appropriately trained technicians and
investigators needed to safely operate this high-containment
laboratory,” states the Jan. 19, 2018, cable, which was drafted by two
officials from the embassy’s environment, science and health sections
who met with the WIV scientists. (The State Department declined to
comment on this and other details of the story.)
The
Chinese researchers at WIV were receiving assistance from the Galveston
National Laboratory at the University of Texas Medical Branch and other
U.S. organizations, but the Chinese requested additional help. The
cables argued that the United States should give the Wuhan lab further
support, mainly because its research on bat coronaviruses was important
but also dangerous.
As the cable noted, the U.S. visitors met with Shi Zhengli, the head of
the research project, who had been publishing studies related to bat
coronaviruses for many years. In November 2017, just before the U.S. officials’ visit, Shi’s team had published research
showing that horseshoe bats they had collected from a cave in Yunnan
province were very likely from the same bat population that spawned the
SARS coronavirus in 2003.
SCMP | Even
if Congress is able to return to regular business in the coming months,
attention from legislative matters will quickly be pulled away again –
this time by election season. In the run-up to November 3, not only will
President Trump be seeking re-election, but most members of the House
and around a third of the Senate will also be absorbed in fights to stay
in office.
“In
an election year, really anything after July is not likely to happen,”
said Chris Lu, a former House oversight committee lawyer who later
served as Barack Obama’s White House cabinet secretary.
“This
will be an incredibly short legislating year with the exception of,
obviously, continuing to provide relief and possible stimulus [relating
to the coronavirus outbreak],” said Lu, who also served as a
commissioner on the Congressional-Executive Commission on China, an
influential advisory panel on human rights issues in the country.
Neither
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi – one of Beijing’s most vocal critics – or
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell responded to requests for comment
on whether they anticipated scheduling floor time for any of the
China-related bills that still await votes. One House aide on the
Democratic side, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the chance of
any non-coronavirus legislation moving ahead was “pretty, pretty
limited”.
Yet
despite the narrowing window for China-related legislation to reach
Trump by January, many lawmakers are pressing ahead, both with
intensifying rhetoric and several pieces of legislation about Beijing’s
handling of the outbreak.
“Not
much of what gets proposed or introduced in the upcoming days
[regarding China] will become policy, but everyone wants to message that
they’re on it,” said a senior congressional staffer, who requested
anonymity to discuss lawmakers’ internal deliberations.
In
March alone, lawmakers introduced at least 20 China-related bills,
ranging from demands that China pay for the US pandemic costs to calls
for an international investigation of Beijing’s coronavirus response.
With
criticism intensifying about the US government’s own response,
Republicans’ complaints have become ever louder. On Friday, Senator
Lindsey Graham of South Carolina proclaimed on Twitter that the Chinese
government was “responsible for 16,000 American deaths and 17 million
Americans being unemployed”.
thediplomat | Trust can never be earned; it must be given. This is true in all
relationships, including geopolitical ones. Vietnam and the United
States are commemorating the 25th anniversary of the establishment of
diplomatic relations this year. While sailing has not always been
smooth, both countries have worked hard to enhance trust. Late last
week, both nations took a big step to catapult mutual trust to a new
level – and it had China’s attention.
Vietnam hosted the U.S. Navy aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt
and a ship from its strike group through the weekend at the commercial
port of Da Nang. There can be no more powerful symbol of America’s
commitment to preserve a free and open Indo-Pacific than the presence of
a United States aircraft carrier. The visit comes two years to the day
from the historic first post-war aircraft carrier visit to the country. I
coordinated the first visit and witnessed how such port calls, if
managed correctly, enhance strategic trust.
Hanoi carefully
balances its security relations with both Washington and Beijing. The
presence of a hundred thousand tons of steel can easily tip the balance
and complicate Vietnam’s willingness to welcome future U.S. Navy ship
visits. During the March 2018 port call, the U.S. Navy downplayed the
ship’s obvious “hard power” capabilities. Instead, we emphasized
professional exchanges between cooks and firefighters, and organized
band concerts around town and community events at local schools. The
visit did nothing to provoke Sino-Vietnamese tensions. Rather, it
deepened strategic trust and helped to establish the positive conditions
necessary for this year’s event.
The port call of the Theodore Roosevelt
has already helped to deepen bilateral trust. Six thousand sailors
visiting a nation adjacent to the epicenter of the ongoing coronavirus
health crisis certainly stimulated a debate in both Hanoi and Washington
about proceeding with the visit. Both countries have legitimate health
concerns. For its part, the United States Pacific Fleet has directed
its ships to remain at sea for 14 days following a foreign port call in
Asia to identify any spread of the contagion.
The easiest and safest
choice would be to for one side or the other to have postponed this
significant event. Mutual willingness to proceed with the visit,
however, indicates that the trust between Washington and Hanoi has
reached a new level.
technologyreview | Imagine, a few weeks or months from now, having a covid-19 test kit
sent to your home. It’s small and portable, but pretty easy to figure
out. You prick your finger as in a blood sugar test for diabetics, wait
maybe 15 minutes, and bam—you now know whether or not you’re immune to
coronavirus.
If you are, you can request government-issued
documentation that says so. This is your “immunity passport.” You are
now free to leave your home, go back to work, and take part in all
facets of normal life—many of which are in the process of being booted
back up by “immunes” like yourself.
Pretty enticing, right? Some countries are taking the idea seriously. German researcherswant to send out hundreds of thousands of tests to
citizens over the next few weeks to see who is immune to covid-19 and
who is not, and certify people as being healthy enough to return to
society. The UK, which has stockpiled over 17.5 million home antibody
testing kits, has raised the prospect of doing something similar,
although this has come undermajor scrutiny from scientists who
have raised concerns that the test may not be accurate enough to be
useful. As the pressure builds from a public that has been cooped up for
weeks, more countries are looking for a way out of strict social
distancing measures that doesn’t require waiting 12 to 18 months for a
vaccine (if one even comes).
There are some serious problems with trying to use the tests to
determine immunity status. For example, we still know very little about
what human immunity to the disease looks like, how long it lasts, whether an immune response prevents reinfection,
and whether you might still be contagious even after symptoms have
dissipated and you’ve developed IgG antibodies. Immune responses vary
greatly between patients, and we still don’t know why. Genetics could
play a role.
“We’ve only known about this virus for four
months,” says Donald Thea, a professor of global health at Boston
University. “There’s a real paucity of data out there.”
SARS-CoV-1, the virus that causes SARS and whose genome is about 76% similar to that of SARS-CoV-2, seems to elicit an immunity that lasts up to three years.
Other coronaviruses that cause the common cold seem to elicit a far
shorter immunity, although the data on that is limited—perhaps, says
Thea, because there has been far less urgency to study them in such
detail. It’s too early to tell right now where SARS-CoV-2 will fall in
that time range
state.gov | Last year, I announced that I would give a series of speeches on
China, and this is part of that. It’s the context in which state and
local government officials ought to think about the way they lead with
respect to our relationship. It’s important. China matters.
It’s been part of my mission at the State Department to mobilize all
parts of the United States Government. I was out in Silicon Valley a
couple weeks ago to talk to America’s leading tech companies about this
very set of issues.
And I need your help, too.
What China does in Topeka and Sacramento reverberates in Washington,
in Beijing, and far beyond. Competition with China is happening. It’s
happening in your state.
In fact, I would be surprised if most of you in the audience have not been lobbied by the Chinese Communist Party directly.
Chinese Communist Party friendship organizations like the one that I
referenced earlier are in Richmond; Minneapolis; Portland; Jupiter,
Florida; and many other cities around the country.
But sometimes China’s activities aren’t quite that public, and I want
to talk about some of that today.
Let me read you an excerpt of a
letter from a Chinese diplomat. It was China’s Consul General in New
York sent a letter last month to the speaker of one of your state
legislatures.
Here’s what the letter said in part. It said, quote, “As we all know,
Taiwan is part of China… avoid engaging in any official contact with
Taiwan, including sending congratulatory messages to the electeds,
introducing bills and proclamations for the election, sending officials
and representatives to attend the inauguration ceremony, and inviting
officials in Taiwan to visit the United States.” End of quote from the
letter.
Think about that. You had a diplomat from China assigned here to the
United States, a representative of the Chinese Communist Party in New
York City, sending an official letter urging that an American elected
official shouldn’t exercise his right to freedom of speech.
Let that sink in for just a minute.
And this isn’t a one-off event. It’s happening all across the country.
Chinese consulates in New York, in Illinois, in Texas, and two in
California, bound by the diplomatic responsibilities and rights of the
Vienna Convention, are very politically active at the state level, as is
the embassy right here in Washington, D.C.
Maybe some of you have heard about the time when the Chinese consulate paid the UC-San Diego students to protest the Dalai Lama.
Or last August, when former governor Phil Bryant of Mississippi
received a letter from a diplomat in the consul’s office in Houston,
threatening to cancel a Chinese investment if the governor chose to
travel to Taiwan. Phil went anyway.
mises | As of April 6, forty-one states have statewide "stay-at-home" decrees in place. These orders vary widely from place to place.
In some states, there are long lists of exempted industries including
marijuana dispensaries, liquor stores, hardware stores, and of course,
grocery stores. In some states with these edicts, public lands, state
parks, and beaches remain
open. In some states, city parks are more crowded than ever as local
residents, with little else to do, attempt to recreate. In other
places—such as California—one can be arrested for paddleboarding all alone in the ocean.
Yet in all of these places, the current regime of rule by decree will
have—and already has had—a devastating effect on many small and
medium-sized businesses and their employees. As governments have created
new arbitrary definitions of what constitutes an "essential" business,
some businesses find themselves forced to close. Employees have lost
these jobs. The owners of these enterprises will likely lose far more as
debts mount and business investments are destroyed. As unemployment and
poverty increase, the usual pathologies will arise as well: suicides, child abuse, and stress-induced death.
Yet the politicians—mostly state governors, mayors, and unelected
bureaucrats—remain popular. In New York State, where the lockdown orders
are among the most draconian in the nation, it is now claimed that 87 percent of those polled approve of
Governor Andrew Cuomo's handling of the situation. As Donald Trump's
administration has recommended ever harsher government limits on the
freedom of Americans, his poll numbers have only improved.
Meanwhile, among critics there appears to be a misconception of these
lockdowns (which are very often only partially imposed or enforced) as
being imposed over the howls of the local population, which is being
silenced and cowed by jackbooted local police.
If only that were true. In most places, it appears clear that a great
many residents approve of the lockdowns. We see this support in the
form of all the local scolds who complain on Nextdoor.com about
neighborhood children who don't properly engage in "social distancing."
We see it in the people who call the police to report violators of stay-at-home orders. We see it in those who report local businesses for allowing too many people inside.
Viewed in this way, it may be more likely that state governors and other politicians are afraid of being seen as doing too little, rather than as overstepping their authority to impose public safety measures.
harvardtothebighouse | we have Peter Daszak.
His company, EcoHealth Alliance, which is a non-profit that depends
largely on multi-million dollar government grants to function, has been partnering with Chinese researcher for years
in an attempt to secure funding for more and more research into
coronaviruses. At least they’re not really even pretending to be
philanthropic.
And in one of the more transparent attempts at blatant PR-spin, Daszak was featured alongside one of the researchers who learned how to create hyper-virulent bat coronaviruses
at UNC back in 2015, Zhengli Shi. Their article insists we should take
Zhengli at her word when she claims to have not found a match after she
checked COVID-19’s genome against everything in her lab. As if someone
responsible for releasing the most virulent pathogen to hit humanity in
modern history, one that’s already killed thousands and is projected to
kill millions and millions more all across the globe, would simply
fess-up to it, torpedoing her career and the years of research performed
by her and her colleagues? And possibly opening all of them up to legal
and other repercussions?
If you still aren’t sure whether the scientists involved with kind of
research are being forthright, there’s Dr. Ralph Baric. It was in his lab at UNC
that a hyper-virulent bat Franken-virus was created by splicing a new
protein-spike on an existing coronavirus, creating a monster so vicious
that a virologist with the Louis Pasteur Institute of Paris warned: “If the [new] virus escaped, nobody could predict the trajectory.” It
should also be noted that several years prior to tinkering directly
with bat coronavirus spike-proteins, Baric orchestrated research that
involved isolating a coronavirus from civets and then passing it through mammalian ACE2 receptor cells that
were grown in the lab from kidney and brain samples – serial passage
through host cell lines instead of entire hosts, which imparted a strong
affinity for ACE2, and presumably created an airborne strain of
coronavirus. And if cells derived from kidneys and brains were used for
the serial passage development of COVID-19, that might help explain its
affinity for attacking the kidneysand brains of its human hosts.
So if he was being honest, you might expect him to warn the public
about the lethal potential coronaviruses pose during our current
outbreak. However, when he was asked if the public should be worried
about COVID-19 he said that people should be more worried about the seasonal flu.
Pretty bizarre statement from a scientist who knew full well how
dangerous coronaviruses could be, especially given the fact that not only was Zhengli Shi working in his lab on that project in 2015, but Xing-Yi Ge was too. Both of whom returned to Wuhan where they’ve continued their work for years.
Xing-Yi Ge is especially notable since in 2013 he became the very first scientist to isolate a bat coronavirus from nature that uses the ACE2 receptor,
which is found in human, tree shrew, and ferret lungs and allows
coronaviruses to become airborne. And as you might have learned by now,
that’s the exact receptor used by COVID-19 to enter human cells – if
anyone would know how to finagle that part of the coronavirus genome,
it’d be him. So both Xing-Yi Ge and Zhengli Shi were part of the
research team that created this hybridized hyper-virulent bat
coronavirus under Baric, who’s actively downplayed the risk posed by
COVID-19, and then returned to work in Wuhan, where funding provided in
part by Daszak’s company allowed them to continue their work on
coronaviruses with plenty of research to cut-and-paste into their work
at the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s Disease Engineering Technical
Research Center.
And as Dr. Ian Malcolm puts it in Jurassic Park,
it is never a good idea to futz around with science and research when
you don’t fully understand it, nor its possible implications.
However it wasn’t just Daszak funding their work, Zhengli also
secured millions of dollars in grant money from various American
institutions including our Department of Defense as well as the U.S.
Biological Defense Research Directorate, and millions more from other
foreign governments.
So although the Chinese Communist Party deserves its share of the
blame for attempting to cover the outbreak up, arresting the heroic
scientists trying to warn us and issuing gag-orders and the destruction
of evidence, this research likely wouldn’t have occurred at all if the
NIH hadn’t lifted the ban on gain-of-function research in the first
place. And it was funded directly by American tax dollars, by government
officials willing to let others play god at their behest.
But now that the virus is out of the lab, are the private entities
responsible for its creation going to bear any of the blame at all? Or
will America and China continue to point fingers at each other until the
worst happens?
“Mars will accuse Earth of using a bio-weapon. Earth will claim
it was Mars. The Belt will blame the other two. It’s a good way to start
a war and cover it up.”
One last spoiler warning… okay, so in The Expanse the
central plot device pushing things forward is the discovery of a
mysterious substance dubbed the protomolecule, which seems to have a
mind of its own and seek out radiation as sustenance before then
beginning “the Work,” a mysterious intergalactic goal that isn’t
revealed until later seasons.
And its not individual nations who first attempt to harness the
protomolecule, but their Peter Daszak, the aforementioned scientist and
CEO named Jules-Pierre Mao, who attempts to weave it into the genomes of
immuno-compromised children to create hybridized super-soldiers. Not
for his own private army, but as a game-changing bio-weapon he’ll sell
to whichever government is willing to pay the most for it. So in The Expanse, it
takes amoral scientists as well as the collusion of officials
affiliated with both governments for this research to happen and be
hidden, and when these Hybrids are eventually dropped between both
armies the carnage is immense.
Luckily, we haven’t gotten that far on earth yet, but the rhetoric between America and China has been heading in that direction
– it’s been growing increasingly hostile as each blames the other for
starting the pandemic and covering it up, with China even going so far
as to threaten to cut off our supply of antibiotics and other
life-saving medical goods. Meanwhile Daszak, Baric, Zhengli, and others
sit back counting their lucky stars and their money, since both
governments and the public at large seem to have bought their story that
there’s no way this virus leaked out of one of their labs, and every
government on earth now wants to harness their research to help create
vaccines and treatments.
And these researchers have been assisted by scientifically spurious and journalistically vacuous articles which mindlessly regurgitate claims from the Chinese government, and its scientific propaganda arm,
the WHO, about how bad the outbreak was in the past and how contained
it is now. As the Chinese government arrested whistle-blowers and sent
agents out into the street in bio-hazard gear while carrying automatic
weapons to detain anyone suspected of breaking quarantine, while literally welding apartments buildings shut, the American media fawned over China’s “decisive and heroic” actions.
Please take a moment to consider the fact that almost everyone
reading the news to you on television was selected due to their
connections or how photogenic they are, not because of any actual
journalistic chops or ability to think critically.
So as two superpowers are pushed closer and closer to conflict, the
research that’s almost certainly the source of COVID-19 not only
continues unabated, but if anything talk of more funding to stop this
sort of supposedly natural pandemic from happening again is pouring into
the pockets of the people who, if they weren’t directly responsible,
should certainly have been at the forefront of warning the world about
the risks posed by lab-altered coronaviruses, and been disclosing the
existence of this sort of research in the first place.
Oddly, each and everyone one of them is pretending that viral
dual-use gain-of-function research has never occurred at all. Or not so
oddly, when you stop and think about how much they have to lose if their
role in this pandemic is revealed.
“The hardest part of this game is figuring out who the enemy really is.”
Other than the fact it doesn’t bear the direct marks of genetic
tampering, just like the engineered hyper-virulent H5N1 Bird Flu,
there’s literally nothing natural about COVID-19’s behavior or clinical
presentation. And hauntingly, peer-reviewed research has noted that a
crucial region of its genome “may provide a gain-of-function… for efficient spreading in the human population.”
Not only is it so distant from any other coronavirus that it forms
its own clade, but there isn’t even a natural path for it to have
emerged through – assertions about pangolins have always been dubious at
best, but were even further debunked when analysis of COVID-19’s genome
at the regions that most accurately show heritage made it “very unlikely” that pangolins had ever been involved at all.
Beyond that is the fact that its affinity for the ACE2 receptor is somewhere between 10 and 20 times higher than SARS, and it also creates viral loads thousands of times higher than SARS. These two characteristics point towards COVID-19 using antibody-dependent enhancement,
or ADE, to enter human cells. This is when the virus is able to hijack
white blood cells to more easily enter into the rest of our body’s
cells, allowing it to seep deep into its hosts’ nervous systems,
creating permanent neurological damage in the hosts it doesn’t kill
outright. ADE could also explain why between 5% and 10% of once “recovered” patients in Wuhan
have been showing up with fresh infections, since that phenomenon
allows a virus to hijack the antibodies created by a previous infection
to re-attack an old host. And curiously Zhengli Shi, of UNC and Wuhan
fame, co-authored a 2019 paper
which used inert viral shells to figure out exactly how SARS, with its
affinity to the ACE2 receptor just like COVID-19, was able to harness
ADE to hijack white blood cells for enhanced cell entry. A
gain-of-function extension of this research would be exactly the kind of
experiment that could’ve given birth to COVID-19, especially
considering that 2019 paper managed to fine-tune the exact concentration
of antibodies that would best facilitate ADE.
Both HIV and Dengue Fever use antibody-dependent enhancement to boost
their virulence, however its generally a phenomenon that takes a long
time to occur when it happens in nature. However COVID-19 looks like it may have had its ADE jacked into hyper-drive
as it was passed between a series of animal hosts, since it has the
aforementioned much stronger ability to bind to host cells and creates
viral loads orders of magnitude higher, and also appears to immediately
to be able to enter its hosts nervous systems, killing many of its
victims by attacking the region of the brain that controls breathing,
drastically lowering white blood cell counts early on in infections,
and apparently re-infecting individuals who had already appeared to
clear their infection.
Further increasing the possibility that COVID-19’s unique clinical
presentation may be due to its ADE being juiced by laboratory
engineering are the observations from an ER doctor who’s stated that I have seen things that I have never seen before…
I have witnessed medical phenomenon that just don’t make sense in the
context of treating a disease that is supposed to be viral pneumonia. In
an interview with Medscape, Dr. Cameron Kyle-Sidell went on to say that
the closest thing to the symptoms he was witnessing in his emergency
room.
medium | This isn’t the first time Gillum has been accused of poor behavior as a public official; I recall him being subjected to an ethics inquiry after he accepted tickets to the Broadway show Hamilton
from an undercover FBI agent. Granted, there’s a hell of a gap between
free tickets and whatever this shit with the drugs and escorts is
(allegedly), but a pattern emerges: Even when Gillum has a good thing
going for him, he may do something that could jeopardy his ambition —
ambition he no longer shares just with himself, but with so many others.
That’s
why I continue to struggle. Andrew Gillum already knew what it was like
to have a target on his back. He knew that his professional prospects,
as well as the people in his life — his wife, his children — could all
be jeopardized by something like this. I just don’t understand the carelessness — down to the type of people he allegedly was associating with that night.
As
bad as I feel bad for him, Black men also need to hold a mirror up to
each other when need be. Not to induce shame; not to make them feel
lower as we feign being better; simply to say, you need to look at
yourself and how you move. You need to see how that shit impacts you.
Yes,
as Black men there are a lot of people against us. Yes, there is a
conservative media complex designed to take out politicians like you,
and the mainstream media has enough suckers in it to magnify whatever
those crazy folks on the right dredge up — but why give them material?
People
have their secrets; some just keep them better than others. That’s not
an endorsement of lying — merely speaking to the point that Andrew
Gillum has long been a man of great promise who, like many men of great
promise, fell short out of ego. This man was moving like someone who had
nothing to lose. I don’t hate this man the way they do. I just hope
this man becomes a better one because this has brought pain to people. I
understand the factors why, but patterns must be broken. We all should
do our part.
Gillum says he has voluntarily entered rehab
for what he described as “alcohol abuse” and “depression.”
Additionally, he “will be stepping down from all public facing roles for
the foreseeable future.”
vice |Smith: Why does it seem like we're so ill-prepared?
Snowden:
There is nothing more foreseeable as a public health crisis in a world
where we are just living on top of each other in crowded and polluted
cities, than a pandemic. And every academic, every researcher who's
looked at this knew this was coming. And in fact, even intelligence
agencies, I can tell you firsthand, because they used to read the
reports had been planning for pandemics.
Are autocratic regimes better at dealing with things like this than democratic ones?I
don't think so. I mean, there are arguments being made that China can
do things that the United States can't. That doesn't mean that what
these autocratic countries are doing is actually more effective.
If you're looking at countries like China, where cases seem
to have leveled off, how much can we trust that those numbers are
actually true?
I don't think we can. Particularly, we see the
Chinese government recently working to expel Western journalists at
precisely this moment where we need credible independent warnings in
this region. It seems that [coronavirus] may be the greatest
question of the modern era around civil liberties, around the right to
privacy. Yet no one's asking this question. As authoritarianism
spreads, as emergency laws proliferate, as we sacrifice our rights, we
also sacrifice our capability to arrest the slide into a less liberal
and less free world. Do you truly believe that when the first wave, this
second wave, the 16th wave of the coronavirus is a long-forgotten
memory, that these capabilities will not be kept? That these datasets
will not be kept? No matter how it is being used, what’ is being built
is the architecture of oppression.
NationalReview | To describe as stunning the collapse of a key model the government
has used to alarm the nation about the catastrophic threat of the
coronavirus would not do this development justice.
In a space of just six days starting April 2, two revisions (on April
5 and 8) have utterly discredited the model produced by the University
of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation. I wrote about the IHME’s modeling at National Review on Monday,
the day after the first revision — which was dramatic, but pales in
comparison to Wednesday’s reassessment. This was not immediately
apparent because the latest revision (April 8) did not include a side-by-side comparison, as did the April 5
revision. Perusal of the new data, however, is staggering, as is what
it says about government predictions we were hearing just days ago about
the likelihood of 100,000 deaths, with as many as 240,000 a real
possibility.
As I noted in my last post on this subject, by April 5, the
projection of likely deaths had plunged 12 percent in just three days,
93,531 to 81,766. Understand, this projection is drawn from a range; on
April 2, IHME was telling us cumulative COVID-19 deaths could reach as
high as approximately 178,000. The upper range was also reduced on April
5 to about 136,000.
On April 8, the projected cumulative deaths were slashed to 60,145
(with the upper range again cut, to about 126,000). That is, in less
than a week, the model proved to be off by more than 33 percent.
My use of the term “off” is intentional. There is no shortage of
government spin, regurgitated by media commentators, assuring us that
the drastic reductions in the projections over just a few days
powerfully illustrate how well social distancing and the substantial
shuttering of the economy is working. Nonsense. As Alex Berenson points out on Twitter, with an accompanying screenshot data updated by IHME on April 1, the original April 2 model explicitly “assum[ed] full social distancing through May 2020.”
The model on which the government is relying is simply unreliable. It
is not that social distancing has changed the equation; it is that the
equation’s fundamental assumptions are so dead wrong, they cannot remain
reasonably stable for just 72 hours.
And mind you, when we observe that the government is relying on
the models, we mean reliance for the purpose of making policy,
including the policy of completely closing down American businesses and
attempting to confine people to their homes because, it is said, no
lesser measures will do. That seems worth stressing in light of this
morning’s announcement that unemployment claims spiked another 6.6
million (now well over 16 million in just the past couple of weeks), to
say nothing of the fact that, while the nation reels, the Senate has now
chosen to go on recess, having failed, thanks to Democratic obstinacy, to enact legislation to give more relief to our fast-shrinking small-business sector.
bloomberg | The technology, known as contact-tracing, is designed to curb the
spread of the novel coronavirus by telling users they should quarantine
or isolate themselves after contact with an infected individual.
The Silicon Valley rivals said on Friday
that they are building the technology into their iOS and Android
operating systems in two steps. In mid-May, the companies will add the
ability for iPhones and Android phones to wirelessly exchange anonymous
information via apps run by public health authorities. The companies
will also release frameworks for public health apps to manage the
functionality.
This means that if a user tests positive for Covid-19, and adds that
data to their public health app, users who they came into close
proximity with over the previous several days will be notified of their
contact. This period could be 14 days, but health agencies can set the
time range.
The second step takes longer. In the coming months, both companies
will add the technology directly into their operating systems so this
contact-tracing software works without having to download an app. Users
must opt in, but this approach means many more people can be included.
Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android have about 3 billion users between
them, over a third of the world’s population.
The pandemic has killed more than 100,000 and infected 1.63 million people. Governments have ordered millions to stay home, sending the global economy into a vicious tailspin. Pressure is building to relax these measures
and get the world back to work. Contact-tracing is a key part of this
because it can help authorities contain a potential resurgence of the
virus as people resume regular activities.
SCMP | In
October, the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence noted in the
first line of its report on Russia’s use of social media to meddle in
the 2016 US presidential election, that “information warfare [is]
designed to spread disinformation and societal division”. Zhao’s tweets
accomplished both. The disinformation was obvious. Critical thinking in
abeyance, plenty of people will believe a claim that the US Army
planted Covid-19 in Wuhan; even more will want it to be true.
When
US President Donald Trump, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and others
began fighting back by loudly and repeatedly calling Covid-19 “the
Chinese virus”, social division in the US grew, if that is possible. The
media accused Trump of being racist and xenophobic, and inciting more
of the same towards Chinese-Americans. This only caused Trump to say it
louder and more often.
One
wonders how much longer Washington will continue fighting the
information war against Beijing with one arm tied behind its back.
Chinese media enjoy free run of the US, including on Twitter. The US has
no such freedom in China.
Not
a few pundits in these past few weeks have predicted Covid-19 will end
globalisation, or even “life as we know it”. That seems unlikely, given
the short-term nature of people’s memories and how profitable “life as
we know it” has been for so many. But given the mischief Zhao’s tweets
caused, Beijing’s days on Twitter might be numbered.
Thanks to Eric Weinstein, this year's curriculum kicked-off with an introduction to the concept of "preference falsification". The ongoing and encompassing tsunami of current events make it exceedingly germaine for you to revisit this little-known - but nevertheless determinative concept.
voxeu | We characterise the motivations central to the workings of civil
society by a series of other regarding or ethical values including
reciprocity, fairness, and sustainability. Also included is the term
identity, by which we refer to a bias in favour of those who one calls
“us” over “them.” We draw attention to this aspect of the civil society
dimension to stress that in insisting on the importance of community in
fashioning a response to the pandemic, we recognise the capacity of
these community-based solutions to sustain xenophobic, parochial, and
other repugnant actions.
Figure 2 illustrates the location in “institution-space” of different
responses to the epidemic. At the top left is the government as the
insurer of last resort. Neither market nor household risk-sharing can
handle an economy-wide contraction of activity required by containment
policies; and neither can compel the near-universal participation that
makes risk pooling possible.
Closer to the civil society pole are social distancing policies
implemented through consent. The triangle opens up space for modern-day
analogues of the so-called Dunkirk strategy – small, privately owned
boats took up where the British navy lacked the resources to evacuate
those trapped on the beaches in 1940. An example is the public-spirited
mobilisation by universities and small private labs of efforts to
undertake production and processing of tests and to develop new machines
to substitute for scarce ventilators.
These examples underline an important truth about institutional and
policy design: the poles of the institution space – at least ideally –
are complements not substitutes. Well-designed government policies
enhance the workings of markets and enhance the salience of cooperative
and other socially valuable preferences. Well-designed markets both
empower governments and make them more accountable without crowding out
ethical and other pro-social preferences.
Much of the content that we think is essential to a successful
post-COVID-19 economic vernacular is present in two recent advances in
the field.
The first is the insight – dating back to Hayek – that information is
scarce and local. Neither government officials nor private owners and
managers of firms know enough to write incentive-based enforceable
contracts or governmental fiats to implement optimal social distancing,
surveillance, or deployment of resources to the health sector, including
to vaccine development.
The second big change in economics gives us hope that
non-governmental and non-market solutions may actually contribute to
mitigating problems that are poorly addressed by contract or fiat. The
behavioural economics revolution makes it clear that people – far from
the individualistic and amoral representation in conventional economics –
are capable of extraordinary levels of cooperation based on ethical
values and other regarding preferences.
As was the case with the Great Depression and WWII, we will not be
the same after COVID-19. And neither, we also hope, will be the way
people talk about the economy.
But there is a critical difference between the post-Great Depression
period and today. The pandemic of that era – massive unemployment and
economic insecurity – was beaten new rules of the game that delivered
immediate benefits. Unemployment insurance, a larger role for government
expenditures and, in many countries, trade union engagement in
wage-setting and the introduction of new technology reflected both the
analytics and the ethics of the new economic vernacular. The result was
the decades of performance referred to as the golden age of capitalism,
making both the new rules and the new vernacular difficult to
dislodge.
It is possible, but far from certain, that the mounting costs of
climate change and recurrent pandemic threats will provide an
environment that supports a similar symbiosis between a new economic
vernacular and new rules of the game yielding immediate concrete
benefits.
A Foundation of Joy
-
Two years and I've lost count of how many times my eye has been operated
on, either beating the fuck out of the tumor, or reattaching that slippery
eel ...
April Three
-
4/3
43
When 1 = A and 26 = Z
March = 43
What day?
4 to the power of 3 is 64
64th day is March 5
My birthday
March also has 5 letters.
4 x 3 = 12
...
Return of the Magi
-
Lately, the Holy Spirit is in the air. Emotional energy is swirling out of
the earth.I can feel it bubbling up, effervescing and evaporating around
us, s...
New Travels
-
Haven’t published on the Blog in quite a while. I at least part have been
immersed in the area of writing books. My focus is on Science Fiction an
Historic...
Covid-19 Preys Upon The Elderly And The Obese
-
sciencemag | This spring, after days of flulike symptoms and fever, a man
arrived at the emergency room at the University of Vermont Medical Center.
He ...
