May Have to Rethink nCOV If This Isht is Human-Human Respiratory AIDS

biorxiv |  We are currently witnessing a major epidemic caused by the 2019 novel coronavirus (2019- nCoV). The evolution of 2019-nCoV remains elusive. We found 4 insertions in the spike glycoprotein (S) which are unique to the 2019-nCoV and are not present in other coronaviruses. Importantly, amino acid residues in all the 4 inserts have identity or similarity to those in the HIV-1 gp120 or HIV-1 Gag. Interestingly, despite the inserts being discontinuous on the primary amino acid sequence, 3D-modelling of the 2019-nCoV suggests that they converge to constitute the receptor binding site. The finding of 4 unique inserts in the 2019-nCoV, all of which have identity /similarity to amino acid residues in key structural proteins of HIV-1 is unlikely to be fortuitous in nature. This work provides yet unknown insights on 2019-nCoV and sheds light on the evolution and pathogenicity of this virus with important implications for diagnosis of this virus. Fist tap Rohan.

biospace |  More than 80 people have died from the coronavirus in China. The Chinese government is turning to a drug developed by AbbVie for HIV patients as a potential treatment for the outbreak that has reached the shores of the United States.

AbbVie said it was donating more than one million dollars’ worth of Aluvia, a combination of lopinavir and ritonavir as an ad-hoc treatment for pneumonia that is associated with the outbreak. The Chinese government suggested last week that taking two lopinavir/ritonavir pills and inhaling a dose of nebulized alpha-interferon twice a day could benefit these patients, Reuters reported. There are more than 2,000 known cases of the coronavirus in China. The illness has caused parts of China to grind to a halt as health officials seek to contain the spread of the virus.

The decision to use AbbVie’s medicine came after a noted respiratory expert at Peking University First Hospital in Beijing said he was given the HIV drugs to fight the virus after he contracted it following a visit to Wuhan, the capital of Hubei province in central China where the virus is thought to have originated. Wan Guangfa came down with the virus after interacting with coronavirus patients. He told China News Week that the HIV treatments worked for him.

The coronavirus family includes the common cold as well as viruses that cause more serious illnesses, such as SARS that spread from China to more than a dozen countries in 2002-03 and killed about 800 people. Also, the virus is similar to Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome (MERS), which developed from camels. The virus infects the lungs, and symptoms start with a fever and cough. It can progress to shortness of breath and breathing difficulties leading to pneumonia.

Need to Remind Myself "The Perfect is the Enemy of the Good!"

counterpunch |  I wrote six articles (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6) about the Bernie Sanders campaign during the 2016 primary. As everyone keeps saying, Bernie is a paragon of consistency, so my understanding of him stands unchanged. The political situation in 2020 is, however, significantly different, and has opened up new possibilities for the Sanders campaign. On the eve of the first primary vote in Iowa, let’s consider what those possibilities are and where this campaign is taking its constituents and the Democratic Party.

Bernie himself is the same as he ever was. A moderate welfare-state Social Democrat, not a socialist or even anti-capitalist; anti-war with an historically anti-imperialist, but now imperialist-accommodating, tinge; nominally independent but functionally an auxiliary Democrat; fiercely critical of Republicans but stubbornly shy about criticizing Democratic colleagues. He is also, I think, honest and trustworthy. You can see that he takes and fights for the positions he does because he believes in them, not because he is opportunistically pandering to a specific audience segment or to the donor class.

To be clear, even though, from my decidedly more leftist, socialist point of view, I have no illusions about Bernie’s faults (and was pretty ruthless about them in those 2016 essays), I hope he wins and will vote for him. Indeed, I changed my registration in New York to vote for him in the Democratic primary, and I would certainly vote for him in the general. He would be the first Democratic presidential candidate I have voted for in decades.

That’s because there is a difference in kind between Bernie and the other Democratic candidates, a difference unlike the differences among them. It’s the difference between a principled Social Democratic program to meet human needs, based on and supported by a mass movement, and a program of neoliberal tinkering to protect profit-making possibilities, based on and supported by capitalist donors/the donor class.

His nomination would be a radical departure and would radically disrupt the Democratic Party and the whole political game, and he would have a great chance to win, opening new and substantively different and left, social-democratic possibilities in the U.S.

Nowhere is this more evident than in his Medicare-for-All program, and nothing has been more revelatory then watching fauxgressives like Warren and Buttigieg moonwalk away from it. Bernie’s universal coverage single-payer program establishes healthcare as a human right, not a commodity. It concretely benefits the lives and enhances the social power of the great majority of citizens by taking public control of an essential service, and eliminating a predatory capitalist industry. That is why all the other Democratic candidates (save perhaps Tulsi, who has been unfairly but effectively rendered moot) reject it: they prefer maintaining health care as a commodity sold to consumers for a profit, just adding a generic version on the supermarket shelf; their “public option” is all about preserving the “profit option.”

Po Folk (98%) Got NMFTG About Party Infighting and Corporatist Bullshit

RollingStone |  No other 2020 candidate for president, including Donald Trump, can come close to matching Bernie Sanders’ level of support among members of the U.S. military, to go by the most recent campaign finance data from the Federal Election Commission.

Soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines have donated a total of $185,625 to Sen. Sanders’ 2020 campaign. By comparison, they have given $113,012 to Trump, $80,250 to Pete Buttigieg, $64,604 to Sen. Elizabeth Warren, and a relatively paltry $33,045 to former Vice President Joe Biden, according to Doug Weber, a senior researcher at the Center for Responsive Politics.

For every candidate in the 2020 race, the CRP maintains a list of the 20 companies or institutions whose employees have given the most money to his or her campaign. Remarkably, the U.S. Army, the U.S. Navy, the U.S. Air Force, the Department of Defense, and the Department of Veterans Affairs all separately appear on Sanders’ list, comprising 5 of his top 20. The largest service branch, the U.S. Army, comes in at number 11, with $65,395 in total donations. That’s just behind Walmart, whose employees gave $69,523.

Sanders’ support from employees of Walmart, Amazon, Microsoft, and the U.S. Postal Service has been reported, but the strength of his appeal to the armed forces has gone largely unnoticed.

If Sanders wins the nomination and his financial support from service members translates into votes, it would represent a significant shift from 2016, when active-duty personnel were twice as likely to choose Trump over Hillary Clinton. In 2016, the Military Times sent a confidential survey to its 59,000 subscribers in the armed forces. The respondents preferred Trump to Hillary Clinton by a “huge margin,” and were nearly three times more likely to identify as Republican than Democrat.

How Has Joe Rogan Effortlessly Mastered What So Confuses This Old Racist Queen?

NYMag |  I do not recommend reading the new books by Ezra Klein and Christopher Caldwell one after the other. Klein’s Why We’re Polarized and Caldwell’s The Age of Entitlement come from very different perspectives, but convey a near-paralyzing and plausible pessimism. Klein’s is a political-science explanation of our intensifying cultural and political tribalism, and its incompatibility with functional liberal democracy (a theme I explored here). Caldwell’s is a deeper, wider cultural and constitutional narrative of the last half-century. If Klein is trying to explain why polarization fucks everything up, Caldwell is intent on telling us how this state of affairs came to be. Both are well worth reading (though Caldwell’s vibrant, mordant prose makes his a more unusual and enjoyable ride).

Some might say that the two are among the best and the brightest of left and right, respectively. On the left, Klein is a near-archetypal member of the new elite class: progressive but still struggling to be fair-minded, a liberal who has tactically deferred to wokeness. On the right, Caldwell swaggers around as the cranky-cool professor articulating the frustrations of the less articulate, throwing barbs here and there, gleefully challenging and scorning the elite orthodoxies that culminated in the election of Barack Obama.

But both books agree on one central thing: Our fate was almost certainly cast as long ago as 1964 and 1965. Those years, in the wake of the Kennedy assassination, saw the Civil Rights Act upend the Constitution of a uniquely liberal country in order to tackle the legacy of slavery and racism, and the Immigration and Nationality Act set in motion the creation of a far more racially and ethnically diverse and integrated society than anyone in human history had previously thought possible. Still, at the time, few believed that either shift would have huge, deep consequences in the long term. They were merely a modernization of American ideals: inclusivity, expansiveness, hope.

As someone who was born just before these two changes were instigated, I regarded those tectonic shifts as simply part of the landscape — something that seemed always to have been here. And what could be questioned about either? One was reversing a profound moral evil; the other was banishing racism from the immigration laws. No-brainers. The strongest resistance to civil rights came from former segregationists or obvious racists, and there was little resistance to the Immigration Act, because most in the congressional debate seemed to think it wouldn’t change anything much at all. (The House sponsor of the Immigration Act, as Caldwell notes, promised that “quota immigration under the bill is likely to be more than 80 percent European,” while Ted Kennedy insisted: “The ethnic mix of this country will not be upset.”) There were a few dissenters to the 1964 Act, such as Robert Bork, who identified a significant erosion in the freedom of association. And there were southern senators who worried about immigrants from the developing world. But the resisters were easily dismissed on both counts, in the wake of LBJ’s 1964 landslide.

Globalization: Make It Plain

thesaker |  Consider the hypothetical case of an economy with annual GDP of 5 trillion US dollars, the broad economic dynamics of which are the subject matter of this exploration.

The hypothetical country whose economy we analyse here is named AB, because its internal economy is composed of two distinct components A and B. The total population of AB is 100 million, but only about 2% of it belongs to B; the rest of it belongs to A. For the ease of dealing with round numbers, we shall say that A and B have populations of 100 million and 2 million respectively.

To a large extent, A and B are geographically separated within AB, but the separation is not total. Intermingling does occur. Main roads and highways, for example, carry cars belonging to members of both A and B. Commercial airlines also carry members of both A and B, whereas private and chartered airplanes carry mostly the members of B. Schools, residences, shops, recreation et cetera are largely segregated, since the members of B see themselves as being a class apart.

From the point of view of governance, the members of B have almost total control over how the country AB is legislated and governed. Any attempt by members of A to have their voice heard is met with hysterical and shrill denunciations by members of B – using terms such as “nationalism”, “populism”, “socialism”, “deplorable” and so on.

From the point of view of economic prosperity, the members of B are doing far, far better than those of A. In fact the total GDP of AB is about equally divided between A and B, which means that an average member of B earns about fifty times more per year than the average member of A.

Who Did 4 Million Jobs Worth of Damage to America?

nakedcapitalism |  A newly released study by the Economic Policy Institute reaches a devastating but not surprising conclusion: globalization has screwed American workers. However, putting numbers on how much sustained trade deficits with China translate into lost American jobs, and those numbers turning out to be large, gives free trade cheerleaders a lot less wriggle room.

EPI estimates that American sacrificed 3.7 million jobs as a result of US-China trade deficits since China joined the WTO in 2001, with 3/4 of the losses taking place in manufacturing positions. They also point out that job losses to China have increased since Trump took office.

The EPI estimates are consistent with earlier studies. From a 2017 Wall Street Journal article, How the China Shock, Deep and Swift, Spurred the Rise of Trump:

What happened with Chinese imports is an example of how much of the conventional wisdom about economics that held sway in the late 1990s, including the role of trade, technology and central banking, has since slowly unraveled….

Both presidential candidates aimed much of their criticism at 1994’s North American Free Trade Agreement, which boosted imports from Mexico. Even then, though, the real culprit was China, economists now say.

Many U.S. factories that moved to Mexico did so to match prices from China. Some of the new Mexican factories helped support U.S. jobs. For example, fabrics made in the U.S. are turned into clothing in Mexico for sale globally by U.S. companies….
A group of economists that includes Messrs. Hanson and Autor estimates that Chinese competition was responsible for 2.4 million jobs lost in the U.S. between 1999 and 2011. Total U.S. employment rose 2.1 million to 132.9 million in the same period.

Recall that the much-touted NAFTA was supposed to deliver one million American jobs, but instead resulted in job destruction, with studies estimating anywhere from nearly 800,000 jobs to over a million.

Now to the executive summary of the EPI report:

U.S. jobs lost are spread throughout the country but are concentrated in manufacturing, including in industries in which the United States has traditionally held a competitive advantage.

Why Doesn't America Protect Its Children From Predators?

rutherford |  “Children are being targeted and sold for sex in America every day.”—John Ryan, National Center for Missing & Exploited Children

There can only be one winner emerging from this year’s Super Bowl LIV showdown between the San Francisco 49ers and the Kansas City Chiefs, but the biggest losers will be the hundreds of young girls and boys—some as young as 9 years old—who will be bought and sold for sex during the course of the big game.

It’s common to refer to this evil practice, which has become the fastest growing business in organized crime and the second most-lucrative commodity traded illegally after drugs and guns as child sex trafficking, but what we’re really talking about is rape.

Adults purchase children for sex at least 2.5 million times a year in the United States.

It’s not just young girls who are vulnerable to these predators, either.

According to a USA Today investigative report, “boys make up about 36% of children caught up in the U.S. sex industry (about 60% are female and less than 5% are transgender males and females).”

Consider this: every two minutes, a child is exploited in the sex industry.

In Georgia alone, it is estimated that 7,200 men (half of them in their 30s) seek to purchase sex with adolescent girls each month, averaging roughly 300 a day.

On average, a child might be raped by 6,000 men during a five-year period.

It is estimated that at least 100,000 children—girls and boys—are bought and sold for sex in the U.S. every year, with as many as 300,000 children in danger of being trafficked each year. Some of these children are forcefully abducted, others are runaways, and still others are sold into the system by relatives and acquaintances.

Child rape has become Big Business in America.

This is an industry that revolves around cheap sex on the fly, with young girls and women who are sold to 50 men each day for $25 apiece, while their handlers make $150,000 to $200,000 per child each year.

Taking a Page Out of Project Blue Book "Move Along Folks, Nothing to See Over Here!"

vice | The Colorado Mystery Drones Weren’t Real\

The mysterious drone sightings that captured national attention were a classic case of mass hysteria. 

On the night of December 30, Sergeant Vince Iovinella of the Morgan County Sheriff's Department in rural Colorado was on patrol when the calls started coming in about drones.

“Residents began calling in reports of drones of unknown origin moving above houses and farms,” Iovinella wrote in a statement obtained by Motherboard via a public records request. “The numbers would range from 4 to 10 drones in an area at a time. Some were reported to be low and at least 6 ft. long.”

Iovinella further reported the drones had white and red flashing lights as he and other deputies made “several attempts” to follow the drones. The drones were moving “very fast at times” but could also “sustain a hover over an area for long periods of time.”

“There were many sighting’s [sic] coming in and at the same time,” Iovinella continued. “It is believed that there could have been up to 30 drones moving around the county if not more and appeared to be working in a search pattern across the county.”

This was yet another night on eastern Colorado’s new drone patrol, following a slate of reports on mysterious fixed-wing drones in the area. They’d come out at night between approximately 7 to 10 p.m. The story, which was first reported by the Denver Post, got international press attention.

Matters kicked into high gear after a medical helicopter reported on January 8 to have flown dangerously close to a drone in the same general area. More than 70 local, state, federal, and military officials jumped into action, convened in a small town called Brush, Colorado, and formed a joint drone task force of 10 to 15 different government agencies to solve the mystery.

“In all of these cases,” Iovinella wrote in this statement, “it is unknown who owns the drone or what their purpose is.”

That’s because the drones never existed.

Is the "Asian" Male an Endangered Species?

biorxiv |  We also noticed that the only Asian donor (male) has a much higher ACE2-expressing cell ratio than white and African American donors (2.50% vs. 0.47% of all cells). This might explain the observation that the new Coronavirus pandemic and previous SARS-Cov pandemic are concentrated in the Asian area.  (damn homie, are you PHUKKED?!?!?!?!)

A novel coronavirus (2019-nCov) was identified in Wuhan, Hubei Province, China in December of 2019. This new coronavirus has resulted in thousands of cases of lethal disease in China, with additional patients being identified in a rapidly growing number internationally. 2019-nCov was reported to share the same receptor, Angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2), with SARS-Cov. Here based on the public database and the state-of-the-art single-cell RNA-Seq technique, we analyzed the ACE2 RNA expression profile in the normal human lungs. The result indicates that the ACE2 virus receptor expression is concentrated in a small population of type II alveolar cells (AT2). Surprisingly, we found that this population of ACE2-expressing AT2 also highly expressed many other genes that positively regulating viral reproduction and transmission. A comparison between eight individual samples demonstrated that the Asian male one has an extremely large number of ACE2-expressing cells in the lung. This study provides a biological background for the epidemic investigation of the 2019-nCov infection disease, and could be informative for future anti-ACE2 therapeutic strategy development.

Severe infection by 2019-nCov could result in acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) and sepsis, causing death in approximately 15% of infected individuals^1,2. Once contacted with the human airway, the spike proteins of this virus can associate with the surface receptors of sensitive cells, which mediated the entrance of the virus into target cells for further replication. Recently, Xu et.al., modeled the spike protein to identify the receptor for 2019-nCov, and indicated that Angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2) could be the receptor for this virus³. ACE2 is previously known as the receptor for SARS-Cov and NL63^4–6. According to their modeling, although the binding strength between 2019-nCov and ACE2 is weaker than that between SARS-Cov and ACE2, it is still much higher than the threshold required for virus infection. Zhou et. al. conducted virus infectivity studies and showed that ACE2 is essential for 2019-nCov to enter HeLa cells⁷. These data indicated that ACE2 is likely to be the receptor for 2019-nCov.

The expression and distribution of the receptor decide the route of virus infection and the route of infection has a major implication for understanding the pathogenesis and designing therapeutic strategies. Previous studies have investigated the RNA expression of ACE2 in 72 human tissues⁸. However, the lung is a complex organ with multiple types of cells, and such real-time PCR RNA profiling is based on bulk tissue analysis with no way to elucidate the ACE2 expression in each type of cell in the human lung. The ACE2 protein level is also investigated by immunostaining in lung and other organs^8,9. These studies showed that in normal human lung, ACE2 is mainly expressed by type II and type I alveolar epithelial cells. Endothelial cells were also reported to be ACE2 positive. However, immunostaining analysis is known for its lack of signal specificity, and accurate quantification is also another challenge for such analysis.

The recently developed single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-Seq) technology enables us to study the ACE2 expression in each cell type and give quantitative information at single-cell resolution. Previous work has built up the online database for scRNA-Seq analysis of 8 normal human lung transplant donors¹⁰. In current work, we used the updated bioinformatics tools to analyze the data. In total, we analyzed 43,134 cells derived from normal lung tissue of 8 adult donors. We performed unsupervised graph-based clustering (Seurat version 2.3.4) and for each individual, we identified 8~11 transcriptionally distinct cell clusters based on their marker gene expression profile. Typically the clusters include type II alveolar cells (AT2), type I alveolar cells (AT1), airway epithelial cells (ciliated cells and Club cells), fibroblasts, endothelial cells and various types of immune cells. The cell cluster map of a representative donor (Asian male, 55-year-old) was visualized using t-distributed stochastic neighbor embedding (tSNE) as shown in Fig. 1b and his major cell type marker expressions were demonstrated in Fig.2.  Fist tap Dale.

Why Are the Globalists Staging This SARS 2.0 Pandemic?

alt-market |  But what do globalists have to gain directly from a coronavirus pandemic beyond simple chaos that can be exploited?

Interestingly, a representative from Johnson and Johnson, one of the companies that may end up designing a "vaccine" for the Cronavirus, suggested during Event 201 that a "centralized" global economic authority in charge of funding and procuring vaccines for various nations in crisis was an option for solving the pandemic.

Gee, that sounds strangely similar to what globalists have been demanding for many years now, and the pandemic just happens to offer a perfect excuse for the creation of such a one-world financial authority.  They might claim that such a system would be temporary according to the life of the pandemic, but this will be a lie.

In terms of the economic effects, even if the virus were to stay primarily in China, the Chinese economy is, in basic terms, the largest in the world; it is the biggest exporter/importer and it is central to the now interdependent global economy. If China's economy goes down, even for a short time, this will send shockwaves through all other national economies and supply lines.

In May of last year I published an article titled 'Globalists Only Need One More Major Event To Finish Sabotaging The Economy'. To summarize the situation:

The globalist establishment has created the largest financial bubble in modern history through central bank stimulus, inflating a highly unstable artificial rally in markets while also creating new highs in national debt, corporate debt and consumer debt. The economic fundamentals have been sending alarms for the past two years, and the 'Everything Bubble' is showing signs of implosion. It is only a matter of time before the farce collapses by itself. The globalists need scapegoats, but they also need an event or wave of events so distracting that people will not be able to discern what really happened.

The reason why globalists want a collapse is simple - They need crisis in order to manipulate the masses into accepting total centralization, a global monetary system and global governance. They are also rabid believers in eugenics and population reduction. At the very least, a global pandemic is a useful happenstance for them; but the timing of the coronavirus event and their highly accurate "simulation" only three months ago also suggests their potential involvement, as it comes right as the implosion of the Everything Bubble was accelerating.

Consider this: Even if a pandemic does not kill a large number of people, it still disrupts international travel, it disrupts exports and imports, it disrupts consumer behavior and retail sales, and it disrupts domestic trade. If it does kill a large number of people, and if the Chinese government's response is any indication, it could result in global martial law. With many economies including the US economy already in a precarious balancing act of historic debt vs. crashing demand and useless central bank repo market intervention, there is little chance that the system can withstand such a tsunami.

Make no mistake, the crash has already begun, whether the virus hits the US hard or not. The only question is, will this be the trigger event that accelerates the collapse process that is already in motion?

What Will Happen If the Senate Votes Trump Guilty?

quora | The problem with this whole impeachment thing is more serious than most people realize. The broader problem we are facing is one of confidence. Governments, at least effective governments, only survive so long as the vast majority of the people living under it have confidence in its competence and fairness, especially fairness. If enough people come to believe their government is unfair/one sided/corrupt, that government will either collapse or the whole country slumps into a sort of 3rd world banana republic.

The right has come to believe this is he case with our government over the last 15 to 20 years, and since the ’16 election, the left is starting to believe this as well. The reasons for both beliefs are varied and I won’t go into them here. It would take too long and it would be pointless. The right can’t be convinced of the left’s point of view, and the left can’t be convinced of the right’s point of view. The important thing is this; if Trump isn’t impeached the left will be utterly convinced it is proof the government has become so corrupt that it is no longer worth supporting. If Trump is impeached they will take it as proof that the deep state has taken over the government, and so the government is no longer legitimate.

Either way, when this whole thing finally comes to an end, there will be around 30% of the population who believe the government lacks legitimacy. That’s more than enough to eventually lead to a civil war or mark the beginning of a slide into banana republic status. Ultimately this isn’t about Trump. The problem pre-dates him. The problem is that the left and the right no longer believe in the same fundamental principles, no longer share a common world view, or even culture. Indeed, the two world views are incompatible. I’m not saying one is better than the other. I’m just observing the two can no longer comfortably co-exist within the same country. Like a married couple that no longer loves each other and now spends all their time angrily arguing with one another, the healthiest thing we could do is recognize we have irreconcilable differences and seek and amicable divorce.

This Transbiological Attack is Stressing the PHUG Out of Xi Jinping

After work, I go to the Y, hit the treadmill, lift some weights, and kick it with my cronies. My main cronies are a retired K.U. Med anatomy professor from Taiwan, a retired bartender from Iraq, a Syrian chiropractor and acupuncturist, and various and sundry retired KC bidnis and legal hoi polloi. 

It's a nice little crew of NMFTG free thinkers.

Today, of course we chatted about SARS 2.0. The consensus is that this will be no worse than the SARS hysteria of several years ago. Of specific interest is the fact that an increasing number of cases cannot be tied in any manner, form, or fashion to Wuhan. (Love having a Chinese language polyglot in the core crew)

I gave voice to my creeping suspicion that this is a nouveau transbiological attack on China by an as yet unidentified cohort of western actors. It is DEFINITELY related to the asymmetrical actions unfolding in Hong Kong, Taiwan, South China Sea, Philippines etc... and it is stressing the whole and entire PHUGG out of  Xi Jinping and the Han ruling elites.

crofsblogs |  Hong Kong: Seven infected cases unrelated to Wuhan outbreaks, government raises infections response level to "serious” 

Via The Standard: Seven infected cases unrelated to Wuhan outbreaks, government raises infections response level to "serious”. Excerpt:

The government has activated a response plan to the outbreak of pneumonia in Wuhan city and raised the response level from “alert” to “serious” this morning as three more people have fallen ill after visiting Wuhan, adding up to a total of 8 suspected cases reported. 

It was confirmed that the first 7 cases reported were not related to the unidentified pneumonia outbreak in wet markets in Wuhan. 

The response mechanism, namely the Preparedness and Response Plan for Novel Infectious Disease of Public Health Significance, was classified as level two of a three-tier scale. 

Speaking on a radio program, the Secretary for Food and Health Sophia Chan Siu-chee said the Hospital Authority has received 2 more reported cases with respiratory and fever after visiting Wuhan yesterday, increasing the total number of suspected cases to 7.

The 3 new cases have either passed by or stayed in Wuhan in the past 14 days, one of which involved a 4-year-old female patient infected with confirmed Rhinovirus, and the other 50-year-old male patient has been confirmed with H1N1 influenza. 

Five of the cases have been discharged from hospital, while the remaining three were in Princess Margaret Hospital, Tseung Kwan O Hospital, and Tuen Mun Hospital. 

Chan said the Hospital Authority would act on infection control procedures, such as reviewing crowd control measures and regulating visiting hours to minimize the flow of people in hospitals. 

A spokesperson of the Hospital Authority announced they have taken new measures in accordance with the government's response mechanism. 

A True Revolution of Values

medium |  This piece argues for how democratic socialism is the only political scheme that centers individual rights within an industrial economy. Now that Sanders is doing well in the polls, you’ll be inundated with negative propaganda about what democratic socialism entails. Let’s settle some confusion.

What you may already know:

1. The nation’s founders fought for political independence from the British monarchy. The colonists wanted to govern themselves and not have their lives or property (including enslaved Africans) directed by some foreign parliament or the capricious desires of King George.
2. Freedom is a matter of making and enacting your own plans. If an alien power effectively makes demands on your actions, you can’t make and enact your own plans. In general, your actions should confirm who you are, not alienate you from who you think you are. If you are always enacting plans you don’t recognize as your own, you aren’t living a self-determining life; you are a living tool of someone else’s will.
3. To be free, any power that controls your actions has to be sanctioned by your own judgment or your fair participation in the process out of which you are acting.
4. Acting out into the world entails interacting with other people. One way we do this is through our recognized roles in civil society. Civil society is the system of mutually enforcing market-based interactions through which have our needs met while meeting other people’s needs. Without this organized system of need satisfaction, we’d all be at the complete mercy of nature and other people’s capricious expressions of power.

Here is what you may not know:

95 percent of the workforce are employees, and the US Founders were not thinking about employees as citizens when they designed our Constitution.

Except for the plantation economy, colonial life was pre-industrial. The US revolutionaries assumed that universal self-employment for citizens was a viable aspiration. When 18th century political economists like Adam Smith write about the virtues of factory life, they are writing about a ten person factory. (Really, Adam Smith’s famous pin factory was ten people.) The cotton gin and the large steam mills hadn’t yet been invented. There was also a functionally infinite amount of land to be stolen from Native Americans for expansion.

Neither our Constitution nor our conception of rights were designed for a nation of employees as citizens. John Locke wasn’t thinking about employees, and Thomas Jefferson wasn’t thinking of employees as citizens. The US Constitution was not designed for a society that is almost entirely based on wage labor any more than it was designed to address vaping.

 

Still Expelling Han-Man Like Hot Cakes - But Not Because of the SARS 2.0 Hoax...,

off-guardian |  The headlines tell this virus is “mutated”, and that China’s “lockdown” is affecting 33 million people.

The Telegraph morbidly warns that it’s “highly likely” coronavirus is already in the UK, whilst CNET tells us the deathtoll is spiking.

 

It all sounds very scary.

The reality is that 26 people have died.

For comparison’s sake, 80,000 people died of flu in 2018 in the United States alone. (at least, according to the CDC).

Coronavirus – or rather, this particular strain of coronavirus, as they are very common and mostly harmless – has had 800 reported cases to go along with those 26 reported deaths. That’s a mortality rate of just over three per cent. 

Further, we don’t even know the details of those 26 unfortunate patients, it’s entirely possible the 26 deaths are accounted for by the very old, the very young, or the immuno-compromised. But even if they’re not…3 per cent mortality is not high.

The death rate of bacterial meningitis, for example, stands at about 10%. Meningitis is an unfortunate fact of life, but it’s not a public health scare.

SARS, of course, was a public health scare – totally unjustifiably, as it turns out. Most of you will remember the SARS outbreak of 2002/2003 being similarly apocalyptically covered in the media.

In the end, over the course of just about a year 9000 cases resulted in 800 people losing their lives. 

These numbers are rough because, as a syndrome rather than a disease, SARS is difficultly to clearly diagnose. Assuming the stats are correct, that’s a mortality rate of about 9%…or three times this “terrifying” coronavirus.

The simple reality is that this new virus strain is currently affecting a group of people the size of a small primary school, and has killed fewer than a bad traffic pile-up or a medium-sized drone strike.

So why the lockdown? Why the fear?

Of Course My Man Duterte Don't Play....,

summit |  The Philippines is to deport 500 Chinese citizens who arrived in the country from Wuhan in an attempt to prevent the spread of coronavirus.

The tourists were heading to Boracay for a holiday but will now be sent straight back.

“Philippine authorities are sending back nearly 500 Chinese tourists who came from Wuhan,” reports CNA.

Four flights were arranged to take the tourists back to Wuhan despite none of them showing symptoms of the virus.

If No Travel Ban and No Compulsory Expulsions - We've Been Targetted for Die-Off

Fist tap Dale

CDC |  Situation Summary

CDC is closely monitoring an outbreak of respiratory illness caused by a novel (new) coronavirus (termed “2019-nCoV”) that was first detected in Wuhan City, Hubei Province, China and which continues to expand. Chinese health officials have reported more than a thousand infections with 2019-nCoV in China, including outside of Hubei Province. Infections with 2019-nCoV also are being reported in a growing number of international locations, including the United States, where 5 cases in travelers from Wuhan have been confirmed in four states (AZ, CA, IL, WA) as of January 26, 2020.

Source and Spread of the Virus

Chinese health authorities were the first to post the full genome of the 2019-nCoV in GenBankexternal icon, the NIH genetic sequence database, and in the Global Initiative on Sharing All Influenza Data (GISAIDexternal icon) portal, an action which has facilitated detection of this virus. On January 24, 2020, CDC posted in GenBank the full genome of the 2019-nCoV virus detected in the first U.S. patient from Washington state. The virus genetic sequence from the patient in Washington is nearly identical to the sequences posted from China. The available sequences suggest a likely single, recent emergence from a virus related to bat coronaviruses and the SARS coronavirus. The available sequence information does not provide any information about severity of associated illness or transmissibility of the virus.

Early on, many of the patients in the outbreak in Wuhan, China reportedly had some link to a large seafood and animal market, suggesting animal-to-person spread. However, a growing number of patients reportedly have not had exposure to animal markets, and there is evidence that person-to-person spread is occurring. At this time, it’s unclear how easily or sustainably this virus is spreading between people. Learn what is known about the spread of newly emerged coronaviruses.

Illness Severity

Both MERS and SARS have been known to cause severe illness in people. The complete clinical picture with regard to 2019-nCoV is still not fully clear. Reported illnesses have ranged from infected people with little to no symptoms to people being severely ill and dying. Learn more about the symptoms associated with 2019-nCoV.

There are ongoing investigations to learn more. This is a rapidly evolving situation and information will be updated as it becomes available.

On This Page

• Situation Summary
• Source and Spread of the Virus
• Illness Severity
• Risk Assessment
• What to Expect
• CDC Response
• CDC Recommends
• Other Available Resources

Confirmed 2019-nCoV Cases Globally

Risk Assessment

Outbreaks of novel virus infections among people are always of public health concern. The risk from these outbreaks depends on characteristics of the virus, including whether and how well it spreads between people, the severity of resulting illness, and the medical or other measures available to control the impact of the virus (for example, vaccine or treatment medications).

Investigations are ongoing to learn more, but person-to-person spread of 2019-nCoV is occurring. Chinese officials report that sustained person-to-person spread in the community is occurring in China. Person-to-person spread in the United States has not yet been detected, but it’s likely to occur to some extent. It’s important to note that person-to-person spread can happen on a continuum. Some viruses are highly contagious (like measles), while other viruses are less so. It’s important to know this in order to better assess the risk posed by this virus. While CDC considers this is a very serious public health threat, based on current information, the immediate health risk from 2019-nCoV to the general American public is considered low at this time. Nevertheless, CDC is taking proactive preparedness precautions.

What to Expect

More cases are likely to be identified in the coming days, including more cases in the United States. Given what has occurred previously with MERS and SARS, it’s likely that person-to-person spread will continue to occur. It would not be surprising if person-to-person spread in the United States were to occur. Cases in healthcare settings, like hospitals, may also occur.

Han Ruling Elite Stuck Between N-1 and N+1 Hardplace - WEE PHUK YU!!!

Quartz |   In the past several weeks, a biting joke has been widely shared on Chinese social media: The new coronavirus is patriotic, so it goes, because it infected only one of China’s 33 provinces and municipalities before venturing outside of the mainland.

Then, people this week woke up to official announcements of a shocking surge of confirmed new infections, and of the virus’s spread to more than a dozen provinces and municipalities. As of Thursday, there are more than 550 confirmed cases, 17 people have died and Wuhan, where the outbreak started, is on lockdown.

Beyond mainland China, Thailand, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, the US and Hong Kong have confirmed cases, and more countries could report cases as China’s biggest travel season gets underway: Chinese Lunar New Year.

People are panicking. When a new disease is discovered, it’s undeniably hard to identify and inform the public about it quickly. Yet China is making the problem harder to solve, even though it should have learned from the SARS outbreak in 2003, when the government admitted to underreporting cases in the initial stages. Nearly 800 people died in that epidemic, which saw desperate people emptying shops for Chinese herbal medicines and vinegar that would turn out to be ineffective.

That frenzy was driven by the lack of accurate information and rumors because of a vacuum in top-down communication. The idea of wei wen, or maintaining stability in China’s political system made “conceal as many as possible and keep it at the local level” a natural immediate response to a crisis like this. That approach to information might work on other kinds of issues, but not when it comes to a potential epidemic. Trying to control information in that case becomes a kind of shackle in the face of something that can progress and change swiftly beyond one’s control.

Of course, there is one thing that’s different than 17 years ago: WeChat. A tool connecting more than a billion users in China should be one the government can use to help keep the public up-to-date, and to debunk false information. Yet it too has become a hotbed for both rumors and information suppression amid China’s broader regime of online censorship honed over the past decade. Already, a focus of social media discussion about the current virus crisis has been on how hard it’s been to get correct information, and whether officials were slow to respond in the early stages, at least in Wuhan. While some international public health experts have commended China’s information sharing as superior to 2003 in the face of a quickly evolving situation, others have expressed doubt that the country is being as transparent as it should be.

 

What Does the Coronavirus Do?

bbc |  The death toll from a newly-discovered coronavirus in China has risen to 41 on the day of the Lunar New Year.

Another 15 deaths in Hubei province, where the outbreak began, were announced on Saturday.

Health officials are struggling to contain the outbreak as millions of people travel for the Chinese new year, one of the most important events. Many festivities have been cancelled.

There are now more than 1,200 confirmed cases in China.

The virus has also spread to Europe, with three cases confirmed in France. The UK is investigating a number of suspected cases, with officials trying to trace around 2,000 people who have recently flown to the UK from Hubei province.

Australia has also confirmed several cases in Melbourne and Sydney, joining a handful of countries treating patients.

The coronavirus, previously unknown to science, causes severe acute respiratory infection with symptoms including a fever and cough. There is no specific cure or vaccine.

Based on an earlier report of the fatalities, when just 17 were dead, most of the victims appeared to be older people, many with pre-existing medical conditions.

But one of the dead in the most recent update was a doctor at a hospital in Hubei, China Global Television Network reported.

• Coronavirus: How worried should we be?
• How can China build a hospital so quickly?
• Coronavirus sparks anxiety among Chinese overseas 

Precarity - Neofeudal Slave Nouveau

nakedcapitalism |  precarity is the result of the shift in the last couple of generations of business revenues away from workers and towards profits, or capital, if you prefer. And that most people are far too complacent about that because they have deeply internalized prevailing market/neoliberal ideology.

Robert Heilbroner identified this tendency in his 1988 book, Behind the Veil of Economics. A major focus was contrasting the source of discipline under feudalism versus under capitalism. Heilbroner argues it was the bailiff and the lash, that lords would incarcerate and beat serfs who didn’t pull their weight. But the lord had obligations to his serfs too, so this relationship was not as one-sided as it might seem. By contrast, Heilbroner argues that the power structure under capitalism is far less obvious:

This negative form of power contrasts sharply with with that of the privileged elites in precapitalist social formations. In these imperial kingdoms or feudal holdings, disciplinary power is exercised by the direct use or display of coercive power. The social power of capital is of a different kind….The capitalist may deny others access to his resources, but he may not force them to work with him. Clearly, such power requires circumstances that make the withholding of access of critical consequence. These circumstances can only arise if the general populace is unable to secure a living unless it can gain access to privately owned resources or wealth…

The organization of production is generally regarded as a wholly “economic” activity, ignoring the political function served by the wage-labor relationships in lieu of bailiffs and senechals. In a like fashion, the discharge of political authority is regarded as essentially separable from the operation of the economic realm, ignoring the provision of the legal, military, and material contributions without which the private sphere could not function properly or even exist. In this way, the presence of the two realms, each responsible for part of the activities necessary for the maintenance of the social formation, not only gives capitalism a structure entirely different from that of any precapitalist society, but also establishes the basis for a problem that uniquely preoccupies capitalism, namely, the appropriate role of the state vis-a-vis the sphere of production and distribution.

The bygone decade is marked by a radical change in relations between employers and employees. According to recent research by the Bank of England, the labour share of income in the last thirty to forty years significantly fell in the USA and in other advanced economies as well. The decline of influence of labour as well as new technologies adopted by big corporations have led to new forms of employment: mostly flexible, low-payed, unstable jobs that are underregulated by labour legislation.

The state of things in capital-labour relations with constant redistribution of wealth and power to capital owners is without exaggeration class warfare (an expression, with a good reason, constantly used by Bernie Sanders). Ideology is ready as a powerful weapon in this class war. Media, internet, books and experts strive to persuade workers that this state of insecurity is necessary, normal or even desirable. And the defenders of flexible and unstable jobs claim that this is objective logic of economy which has nothing to do with political decision-making.

 

Citizen My Ass - You are an Indebted Tenant of the Sovereign

theamericanconservative |  The REAL ID Act has been intensely controversial since its 2005 enactment in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, and fiercely opposed by both conservatives and liberals. Twenty-five  states passed resolutions objecting to the law or signaling that they would not comply. The Electronic Frontier Foundation declared in 2007,  “A federal law that aims to conscript the states into creating a national ID system… is precisely the kind of scheme that the framers expected that federalism would guard against.” 

But the Department of Homeland Security has compelled submission by announcing that the Transportation Security Agency will prohibit Americans from flying unless they have either a REAL ID Act-approved driver’s license or a passport.  The Supreme Court ruled in 1999 that the “‘constitutional right to travel from one State to another’ is firmly embedded in our jurisprudence.” But REAL ID Act policies have routinely scorned both the Bill of Rights and Supreme Court rulings. 

Most Americans do not possess passports, so federally-approved state driver’s licenses are becoming de facto internal passports. Almost a hundred million Americans do not have REAL ID-compliant identification, according to the U.S. Travel Association. In Minnesota, 11 percent of drivers still have licenses that will be rejected at TSA checkpoints starting on October 1. States and individuals are chaotically scrambling to meet the law’s shifting demands. Twitter is echoing with howls of people who spend hours at motor vehicle administration offices only to have their paperwork rejected because of picayune quibbles. 

But the REAL ID law poses perils far beyond the airport entrance. Maryland began issuing REAL ID driver’s licenses in 2009. In 2017, the Department of Homeland Security notified the state that its REAL ID licenses were invalid unless Maryland snared more documents for each driver. More than half a million drivers remain at risk for losing their licenses.  

TheWashington Post reported in August that 8,000 Maryland licenses have been suspended. Three months earlier, MVA announced that 66,300 people were at risk of having their driver’s license or identification cards revoked for failure to comply with MVA demands.  As Maryland ramps up enforcement, the number of suspended licenses is probably far higher now but MVA spokespersons failed to respond to repeated press inquiries seeking the latest number. Maryland police are seizing the license of any driver who they stop whose only offense was failure to hustle to show Maryland bureaucrats their birth certificate, passport, utility bills, Social Security card, or other proof of their identity. 

Since the 2005 enactment of the REAL ID Act, the federal government has helped bankroll the license plate scanner networks  that permit tracking any driver on the roads in many parts of the nation. If Maryland decides to target people who received cancellation notices, there are almost 500 license plate scanners deployed in police cars and elsewhere in the state that compile almost half a billion scans of driver’s per year. If the order is given to use the scanners, a thousand people a day could be stripped of their licenses and potentially arrested. MVA spokespersons failed to respond to inquiries about whether license plate scanners may be used for enforcing REAL ID compliance demands.

U.S. Foreign Policy: Weaponizing Fascism for "Democracy"

yasha.substack |  When I launched Immigrants as a Weapon back in September, I argued that America had done more to promote the far-right around the world than any other country on earth. I wasn’t exaggerating. America really is the biggest and most active player in the field — the biggest by far. 

Even a cursory look at modern American history shows that promoting nationalism and backing far-right emigre groups has been a major plank of American foreign policy going back to the very end of World War II. This mixture of covert and overt programs and initiatives was first deployed to fight the Soviet Union and left-wing political movements but has over the years touched down all over the globe — wherever America has some sort of geopolitical interest, including modern capitalist states like Russia and China. One of these nationalism weaponization initiatives — which targeted the USSR for destabilization in the 70s and 80s — was how a Soviet kid like me ended up in San Francisco as a political refugee.

This history is important. Without it, it’s impossible to understand the mechanics of our reactionary foreign policy today — whether in China or with our “strategic partner” Ukraine, a country that’s at the center of today’s impeachment show.

There are all sorts of possible entry points into this story. I guess I could go all the way back to America’s support for the White Russians against the Bolsheviks in the Russian Civil War. But for now I’d like to start at the very end of World War II — when this approach was just beginning to crystalize as a distinct strategy inside America’s foreign policy apparatus.

Uh.., Vote Counting Isn't Exactly Rocket Science

williammarble |  A surprising fact about the 2016 election is that Trump received fewer votes from whites with the highest levels of racial resentment than Romney did in 2012. This fact is surprising given studies that emphasize “activation” of racial conservatism in 2016—the increased relationship between vote choice and racial attitudes among voters. But this relationship provides almost no information about how many votes candidates receive from individuals with particular attitudes. To understand how many votes a voting bloc contributes to a candidate’s total, we must also consider a bloc’s size and its turnout rate. Taking these into account, we find that Trump’s most significant gains came from whites with moderate attitudes about race and immigration. Trump’s vote totals improved the most among swing voters: low-socioeconomic status whites who are political moderates. Our analysis demonstrates that focusing only on vote choice is insufficient to explain sources of candidate support in the electorate.

A surprising fact about the 2016 election is that Donald Trump received fewer votes from whites with high levels of racial resentment than Mitt Romney did in 2012. We estimate that, nationwide, Romney received 18.3 million votes from whites in the highest quintile of racial resentment (defined using the 2012 distribution of racial resentment), 8.2 percent of the2012 voting eligible population, while Trump received 12.4 million votes from individuals in the highest quintile, 5.4 percent of the 2016 voting eligible population.1This translated into fewer net votes for Trump: his advantage over Clinton among individuals with the highest levels of racial resentment was smaller than Romney’s advantage over Obama by 3.4 million votes.

Trump saw this decrease in support even though whites who turned out to vote and had high levels of racial resentment voted for Trump at higher rates than they chose Romney. But there was also a shift in attitudes: fewer whites had high levels of racial resentment in 2016than in 2012 (Engelhardt, 2019; Hopkins and Washington, 2019; DeSante and Smith, 2019)and there was an overall decline in turnout. As a result, there were fewer racial-conservative whites to cast their vote for Trump in the voting booth. So, even though these voters selected Trump at a higher rate once they turned out to vote, the higher rate of support for Trump was not enough to overcome the change in the distribution of attitudes and the change in turnout rates across elections.

This fact might seem particularly surprising in light of a social science literature that has focused on vote choice, conclusively showing that attitudes about race and ethnicity were the most “activated” in 2016 relative to 2012 (Sides, Tesler and Vavreck, 2019; Mutz, 2018;Reny, Collingwood and Valenzuela, 2019).2

Hegemonic Han N+1 and N-1 Equals PHUK EVERYONE and Must Not be Tolerated...,

nature |  A laboratory in Wuhan is on the cusp of being cleared to work with the world’s most dangerous pathogens. The move is part of a plan to build between five and seven biosafety level-4 (BSL-4) labs across the Chinese mainland by 2025, and has generated much excitement, as well as some concerns.

Some scientists outside China worry about pathogens escaping, and the addition of a biological dimension to geopolitical tensions between China and other nations. But Chinese microbiologists are celebrating their entrance to the elite cadre empowered to wrestle with the world’s greatest biological threats.

“It will offer more opportunities for Chinese researchers, and our contribution on the BSL‑4-level pathogens will benefit the world,” says George Gao, director of the Chinese Academy of Sciences Key Laboratory of Pathogenic Microbiology and Immunology in Beijing. There are already two BSL-4 labs in Taiwan, but the National Bio-safety Laboratory, Wuhan, would be the first on the Chinese mainland.

The lab was certified as meeting the standards and criteria of BSL-4 by the China National Accreditation Service for Conformity Assessment (CNAS) in January. The CNAS examined the lab’s infrastructure, equipment and management, says a CNAS representative, paving the way for the Ministry of Health to give its approval. A representative from the ministry says it will move slowly and cautiously; if the assessment goes smoothly, it could approve the laboratory by the end of June.

BSL-4 is the highest level of biocontainment: its criteria include filtering air and treating water and waste before they leave the laboratory, and stipulating that researchers change clothes and shower before and after using lab facilities. Such labs are often controversial. The first BSL-4 lab in Japan was built in 1981, but operated with lower-risk pathogens until 2015, when safety concerns were finally overcome.

The expansion of BSL-4-lab networks in the United States and Europe over the past 15 years — with more than a dozen now in operation or under construction in each region — also met with resistance, including questions about the need for so many facilities.

The Wuhan lab cost 300 million yuan (US$44 million), and to allay safety concerns it was built far above the flood plain and with the capacity to withstand a magnitude-7 earthquake, although the area has no history of strong earthquakes. It will focus on the control of emerging diseases, store purified viruses and act as a World Health Organization ‘reference laboratory’ linked to similar labs around the world. “It will be a key node in the global biosafety-lab network,” says lab director Yuan Zhiming.