Festus Just Stick To Grain Elevators: The Man Is Not Concerned About Your Little Walmart Drones...,

dronedj |  On a related note, the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) just deployed its first system to detect drones at the Y-12 Complex in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. The facility stores uranium and assembles and disassembles nuclear weapons. It’s not surprising drones are prohibited from the complex’s airspace.

In a press release, Teresa Robbins of the NNSA Production Office says the new system will mitigate the threat posed by potential drone incursions.

The National Nuclear Security Administration Production Office is announcing this deployment and the airspace restriction to the public to minimize the threat of unauthorized UAS flights over Y-12. This will enhance our ability to effectively protect this vital national security facility.

It’s unclear exactly what that system consists of, but it’s described as able to “detect, identify, and track potentially malicious drone threats.” 

So, just to be clear: Avoid nuclear facilities and grain elevators when flying around the US.

"It's People" Who Can't Release This Knowledge And Technology Into The World...,

medium  |  Anyhow, I got a call from one of the Directors who said, “I happen to be out here for something — you’re not going home yet, you’re going to meet me at the Air Force station tomorrow for lunch over by the Aerospace Corporation on Sepulveda. Maybe you’ll make it home by Monday — we’ll see.”

So I show up for lunch over at the Air Force station, and Harold Ostroff was sitting down at this table with a big group of military & civilian guys in business suits, and as I walked up to the table, he turns to the other guys sitting there and says, “I’d like to introduce you all to the new head of McDonnell’s Advanced Aerospace Program.” Anyhow, I didn’t know anything about this beforehand, and when he said it I looked around a bit for the person he was talking about — and after a second I guess that it finally sunk in that he was talking about me.

So that was how I found out about it — I had a deputy program manager from Huntington Beach, and there was a group there from Aerojet — Don Kissinger, Mike Hamel, and Ron Samborski — that were there to talk about the air-turbo ramjet work that they’d patented back in 1946.

I went out to Aerojet the next couple of days for briefings on their engine designs, and when I came back home, we did a proposal for the Air Force TAV program, but the main thrust was a proposal that we put together with the people from Huntington Beach on a 2-stage to orbit vehicle. The first stage would fly with air-turbo ramjets to about Mach 6 or 7, and then it would stage with a scramjet vehicle a rocket that would deploy up into orbit.

We had several different concepts for this, depending on how soon we wanted we wanted the thing to fly. One of the people out at Huntington Beach named Joe Shergi had a concept for what he called a “toss-back booster”, that looked like an Apollo capsule with engines mounted in what looked like the heat-shield. After you separated the upper-stage, this thing would turn around and retrofire to toss back to the launch site, making everything recoverable.

We had 2 or 3 concepts that we were briefing as 2-stage to orbit vehicles. The first one that we could build quickly, based on all the hardware that was available, was a hypersonic FDL-7C glider on top of a toss-back booster. Then we went to an air-turbo ramjet first stage which went to about Mach 7 to 8, and later we went to a scramjet first stage that went to about Mach 12.

We hired a guy named Larry Fogel from the Titan Corporation, and he actually toured all of the SAC bases that had operational B-52 squadrons and asked them what they would do if they had one of these NASP vehicles — how they use it, maintain it, and stuff like that. We built an entire database on what the Strategic Air Command estimated these vehicles would cost to operate. We’d given them all the numbers that we had at the outset — how much thrust we had, how much propellant we needed, how many times the engines could be re-used, etc — and they gave us back operational cost estimates compared to a traditional B-52 squadron. It was quite interesting…

We took this information and used it for briefings in Washington DC, which is where I met Scotty Crossfield, who was working with Dan Glickman — and what we ended up with was the first stage vehicle, which was a large, Mach-6 vehicle. This led to the development of a prototype that we created as a demonstrator to validate the technology.

So the prototype was built to show how the NASP vehicle could fulfill 3 primary mission roles. The first was simply as a Mach-6 transport for passengers, the second was a Mach-8 strategic strike-aircraft for the Air Force, and the third involved combining the vehicle with an upper-stage rocket to go into Low-Earth Orbit.

It sounds like this technology really blurs the line between an aircraft and the Space-Shuttle or maybe even a true spacecraft…

Well the shuttle’s not an aircraft — it’s an abortion trying to figure out how to fly. You never want to build a vehicle that looks like that. The best vehicles ever designed came out of the Air Force Flight-Dynamics Lab, and Draper made one huge effort to try and get NASA to listen, and they absolutely refused to take his advice.

From the beginning, NASA had their own ideas about bluntness and all sorts of crazy design ideas that ended up in the Shuttle. The real hypersonic vehicles that were inherently stable — from Mach 22 all the way down to zero, and had thermal protection systems already worked out — were simply discarded.

These weren’t new ideas, even when the Shuttle was being designed. The Department of Defense was involved with this between ’58 and ’68, and they were discarded because the President at that time decided that no military systems would enter orbit. The administration was deathly afraid back then of militarizing space, which meant that everything going into space had to be civilian, so NASA took over everything.

The Air Force has something called the XLR-129 — it’s in a book that one of the Pratt & Whitney guys wrote that you can buy from the Society of Automotive Engineers library. The XLR-129 had about 580,000 pounds of thrust from a LOX-hydrogen engine and 3,500 psi chamber pressure.

It was fired 40 times without any overhaul, and it was brought up to full-power in about 3.5 months — whereas the Space Shuttle Main Engine (SSME) took about 38 months to come up to full-power.

This very same XLR-129 engine was donated to NASA when the Air Force got out of the space-race. The plans, the engine, and everything related to it were destroyed, and the last sentence in that chapter in Pratt’s book says, “NASA destroyed all of this because they didn’t want to embarrass their present engine contractor.”

Given the issues that NASA’s having with the Shuttle Program at the moment, do you think that they may someday return to this type of hardware for a next-generation Shuttle design?

One of Reagan’s assistant secretaries of commerce — for innovation, technology, and productivity — was named D. Bruce Merrifield, and he was very Russian in his thinking. The Russians have prototype factories that take laboratory ideas, and translate them into something that can be used in a functional, operational piece of hardware.

Merrifield’s concept was that the deficiency in the United States is that it uses projects to prepare technologies for application, which doesn’t give the new technologies adequate time to properly mature. He always advocated that just like with baseball players, technology needs a “farm team” to develop it so that it can later be used functionally. The Japanese do this, the Russians used to do this, and they do it because it produces great results.

What we were doing when I was at McDonnell-Douglas — because “Old-Man Mac” was a hardware guy — was looking at how you could take these big ideas and build samples & prototypes out of them, to see if we could come out of this with an operational concept.

When we designed a Mach-6 aircraft, we didn’t follow NASA’s strategy of building a research and develop vehicle that could only be flown 3 times a year. What we developed were vehicles that were operationally functional as much as a B-52 is.

Our resupply vehicle in 1964 for the manned orbiting laboratory had 11 operational vehicles and 3 spares — and those 11 vehicles flew 100 times a year for 15 years. That’s 1964 industrial capability — no magic at all. I don’t need magic. Now compare that to the Shuttle.

 

Meathead Lue Elizondo Is The Elite Establishment's Family Dollar Facsimile Of Joe Rogan...,

WaPo  |  MR. ELIZONDO: Well, Jackie, that’s really the question, isn’t it? The bottom line is, up until very recently there were really only three possibilities of what this could be. And the first possibility is that it is some sort of secret U.S. tech that somehow, we have managed to keep secret even from ourselves for a long period of time. The second option is that it is some sort of foreign adversarial technology that has somehow managed to technology leapfrog ahead of our country despite having a fairly robust and comprehensive intelligence apparatus. And of course, the third option is something quite entirely different. It’s a different paradigm completely.

Now as of this week we now know through some of the discussions at senior-level leadership that this report has definitively stated once and for all that it’s not our technology. And that’s hugely important. For 30 years there has always been this undercurrent, if you will, these conspiracies that there was some sort of TR-3B program and some sort of a super special technology that has been implemented and we’ve been--just been very careless about it. And I think that argument was finally put to bed this week. So that really only leaves two other options, and that’s--again, it’s foreign adversarial or it’s something quite different. And I think we’re now beginning to learn, as we’ve heard from the director of national intelligence--and I can certainly tell you from my experience--that we’re pretty confident that it’s not Russian or Chinese technology, and there’s several reason for that that, if you like, I’m more than happy to go into.

MS. ALEMANY: Yeah, actually, could you go into that. I know you’ve explained it in previous interviews, but these sightings have happened for the past 70 years, and I know you’ve said before that you didn’t think it was possible for one of our foreign adversaries who have been helpful actually in providing information on this issue, would be capable of keeping something a secret for so long. Is that accurate?

MR. ELIZONDO: That’s precisely one of the counterarguments. In fact, if I’m not mistaken, as of today, we had an announcement by former Director of National Intelligence Ratcliffe who said this isn’t Russian technology. And as we know during Glasnost and the fall of the Berlin Wall, there was this five-year romance period, if you will, between the United States and Russia where we began really sharing a lot of information. And a lot of their--ironically enough, a lot of their UFO information wound up in our hands, and it turns out that they were experiencing the exact same issues from a UFO or a UAP perspective that we were. So, if you look at really the timelines here, you know, it’s looking increasingly less likely that this is some sort of Russian technology.

So that really leaves China. And some of these reports, you’re absolutely correct, Jackie, they go back into the early 1950s, and even earlier. And so, what that says is that you have pilots, whether we’re describing what we call a white flying tic-tac or a white flying butane tank in the 1950s or a white flying lozenge, if you will--they’re all describing the exact same vehicle, craft, if you will, doing exactly the same thing, performing in ways well beyond our current capabilities.

And if you look at that from a--from a temporal perspective, from a time perspective, it simply doesn’t make sense that China back in 1950 would have this beyond next generation technology, mastered it, is able to fly at will anywhere it wants on the face of the planet, and the last 70 years, despite the billions of dollars we’ve put into our intelligence community infrastructure and architecture, it has--it has managed to evade us. In fact, China is a country that has stolen quite a bit--spends a lot of time stealing technology from us. And so, one has to ask the question that if really a country had this technology, would it be necessary to steal, you know, much more basic technology from another country. Furthermore, if you had this type of technology, you probably wouldn’t need to invest so much in military because you had this, if you will, checkmate type technology or capability where everything else now becomes obsolete.

And so, this goes to your last part of your question. So, I feel or do I believe this is, quote, “extraterrestrial”? Let me be very careful before I answer that by saying at the end of the day, Jackie, it doesn’t matter what I think or what I believe. What matters is what the data and the facts tell us. And from that perspective, it’s very important that--I’ve always--I had a very simple job, and that is to collect the truth and speak the truth. That’s it. Very much as an investigator, which I used to be. We applied the same level of rigor and methodologies we did at hunting terrorists and spies as we did in hunting UFOs. So, we really didn’t care what these were. We were just trying to get to the bottom of what they were. And so therein lies, if you will, a little bit of our approach. We were--we were very agnostic, if you will, or objective about this topic and tried to allow the facts to lead us down a certain path. And that is really what we’re doing today. What we’re realizing is that the facts are painting a far more compelling picture than what we thought. In this case, you, your audience, they’re the jury. So what matters is really what you think about this. And so, the hope here is that the U.S. government can provide the data and the evidence and information and then allow the American people to decide what we think this is about.

Poor Caitlin Johnstone - All The Physicists Were Human - And One Of Them DID Have A Secret

caitlinjohnstone  |  In the summer of 1950, four nuclear physicists were walking to lunch from the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. Their names were Emil Konopinski, Herbert York, Edward Teller, and Enrico Fermi.

One of them was not human.

On the walk the four discussed science, because science is what they always discussed. It's what they lived, it's what they thought about, it's what they ate, slept and breathed. On this particular occasion they discussed the recent spate of reports about flying saucers, and whether or not an alien civilization could hypothetically have discovered how to travel faster than the speed of light.

Once they arrived at the Fuller Lodge for their meal their intense conversation was interrupted by the mundane activities of finding seats and ordering their food. After a brief pause, Fermi's thick Italian accent broke the silence with a question that would later become famous.

"But where is everybody?" he asked loudly.

The way he phrased it caused the other three to burst out laughing; they immediately understood that he was asking, in his own inimitable way, why no signs of extraterrestrial life had been discovered.

They listened with rapt attention as Fermi's luminous mind rapidly dissected the sheer mathematical improbability of humanity being the only intelligent life in this galaxy, let alone the entire universe, given the sheer number of stars and the likelihood that at least a small percentage of them would have habitable planets capable of giving rise to life. This question, and the peculiar exclamation with which it was first expressed, would go on to be known as the Fermi paradox.

The scientists joyfully batted around ideas with the Italian "pope of physics", then finished their meal, returned to the laboratory, and they each went their separate ways.

Fermi worked late, as such rare geniuses often do. Out there in the world with small talk, politics, family and teenaged children, it was difficult to really feel at ease. But in the world of scientific adventure, discoveries and breakthroughs, he always felt in command.

The sunlight had long gone and the lab had gone still, and Fermi was scribbling away in his office, when there was a knock at the door. It gave Fermi a start; nobody ever interrupted him at this hour, that's what he liked about it.

"What is it?" he asked in irritation.

The door opened. It was York.

"Hi," York said.

"York," Fermi replied.

"Can I come in?"

"Yes, yes come in."

York closed the door.

"So," he said. "Do you want to know?"

"Want to know what?"

"Do you want an answer to the question you asked at lunch?"

Fermi just stared.

BeeDee - A Peer Reviewed Publication Asserts: Whiteness Is A Malignant Parasitic Condition

NYPost |  A white New York City psychoanalyst is under fire after publishing a report decrying his skin color as a “malignant, parasitic like condition” without a “permanent cure.”

Dr. Donald Moss — a published author who teaches at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute — published “On Having Whiteness” last month in the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association.

“Whiteness is a condition one first acquires and then one has — a malignant, parasitic-like condition to which ‘white’ people have a particular susceptibility,” an abstract of the article on Sage Journals says.

“The condition is foundational, generating characteristic ways of being in one’s body, in one’s mind, and in one’s world. 

“Parasitic Whiteness renders its hosts’ appetites voracious, insatiable, and perverse,” states the paper, also published on the National Library of Medicine’s PubMed site.

The “deformed appetites particularly target nonwhite peoples,” the abstract says — and “once established, these appetites are nearly impossible to eliminate.”

While “effective treatment consists of a combination of psychic and social-historical interventions,” there is “no guarantee against regression.”

“There is not yet a permanent cure,” the abstract says.

 

The Winners In "Smart" America Are Losing The Nation For All Americans...,

theatlantic  |   All four of the narratives I’ve described emerged from America’s failure to sustain and enlarge the middle-class democracy of the postwar years. They all respond to real problems. Each offers a value that the others need and lacks ones that the others have. Free America celebrates the energy of the unencumbered individual. Smart America respects intelligence and welcomes change. Real America commits itself to a place and has a sense of limits. Just America demands a confrontation with what the others want to avoid. They rise from a single society, and even in one as polarized as ours they continually shape, absorb, and morph into one another. But their tendency is also to divide us, pitting tribe against tribe. These divisions impoverish each narrative into a cramped and ever more extreme version of itself.

All four narratives are also driven by a competition for status that generates fierce anxiety and resentment. They all anoint winners and losers. In Free America, the winners are the makers, and the losers are the takers who want to drag the rest down in perpetual dependency on a smothering government. In Smart America, the winners are the credentialed meritocrats, and the losers are the poorly educated who want to resist inevitable progress. In Real America, the winners are the hardworking folk of the white Christian heartland, and the losers are treacherous elites and contaminating others who want to destroy the country. In Just America, the winners are the marginalized groups, and the losers are the dominant groups that want to go on dominating.

I don’t much want to live in the republic of any of them.

It’s common these days to hear people talk about sick America, dying America, the end of America. The same kinds of things were said in 1861, in 1893, in 1933, and in 1968. The sickness, the death, is always a moral condition. Maybe this comes from our Puritan heritage. If we are dying, it can’t be from natural causes. It must be a prolonged act of suicide, which is a form of murder.

I don’t think we are dying. We have no choice but to live together—we’re quarantined as fellow citizens. Knowing who we are lets us see what kinds of change are possible. Countries are not social-science experiments. They have organic qualities, some positive, some destructive, that can’t be wished away. Our passion for equality, the individualism it produces, the hustle for money, the love of novelty, the attachment to democracy, the distrust of authority and intellect—these won’t disappear. A way forward that tries to evade or crush them on the road to some free, smart, real, or just utopia will never arrive and instead will run into a strong reaction. But a way forward that tries to make us Equal Americans, all with the same rights and opportunities—the only basis for shared citizenship and self-government—is a road that connects our past and our future.

Meanwhile, we remain trapped in two countries. Each one is split by two narratives—Smart and Just on one side, Free and Real on the other. Neither separation nor conquest is a tenable future. The tensions within each country will persist even as the cold civil war between them rages on.

The 1619 Project Bomb: Profit Not Racism Was The Driver Of Slavery

amgreatness |  Despite her previous acclaim, Nikole Hannah-Jones didn’t really come to the attention of many Americans before August 2019, when the New York Times published “The 1619 Project.” This special issue of the New York Times Magazine was devoted to the thesis that America was founded on black oppression and white supremacy. It put Hannah-Jones’ particular genius on display. She edited the collection of articles and wrote the lead essay, under the expansive title, “Our democracy’s founding ideals of liberty and equality were false when they were written. Black Americans fought to make them true. Without this struggle, America would have no democracy at all.” I think it fair to say that as editor she gave the project its particular tone: stylish, in-control, aggressive, laced with a thread of self-pity and a larger weave of self-aggrandizement, thin-skinned, and in a peculiar way, heedless. She was determined to say what she wanted to say, regardless of the facts, but she was also determined to assert that her story was accurate to the bone. 

That was a contradiction, and it was a time bomb. Sooner or later people were going to notice that among those many confident assertions, some were iffy, others very doubtful, and some completely false.

Beyond the three-sentence title of her lead essay, Hannah-Jones took other liberties. Perhaps most famously, she wrote, “One of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery.” This is not true. Indeed it isn’t even a little bit true, and the leading historians of colonial America from around the world quickly pointed this out. They did so politely by writing to the newspaper’s editors; they did so individually, and as joint signers of letters; they published their dissents. But receiving either no answer or only firm rebuffs, they collectively stood back. Not only was the Times determined to keep its fabrication intact, but the great majority of American historians either turned stone silent or capitulated.

Alex Lichtenstein, editor of the American Historical Review, wrote a widely read post in January 2020, “1619 and All That,” in which he dismissed all the historical criticism of “The 1619 Project” as “a public scuffle between journalists and members of our profession.” The “1619 Project,” he said, is an interpretive framework “that many historians probably already accept—namely, that slavery and racism lie at the root of nearly everything that has truly made America exceptional.” Lichtenstein gave a permission slip to historians who didn’t want to be bothered with the inconvenience of maintaining historical accuracy on the matters at hand. 

Why would people who devoted their professional lives to the truth-telling of history go mum when presented with one of the most publicized historical falsehoods in decades? Why especially as that falsehood was being adapted rapidly to school curricula across the country? Plainly this is a matter of racial politics having invaded the history profession. For some, that is a positive development: promoting greater attention to slavery and the oppression of blacks is such a worthy goal that historians should gracefully overlook whatever journalistic lapses may have marred the great work of popularizing the cause. For others, the racialist agenda is something to be feared. To criticize “The 1619 Project” or Nikole Hannah-Jones was and still is to court professional friction or perhaps even ostracism.

But that may be changing. The glare of attention is making it harder for people to avoid the shoddiness of the work.

Dissenters

Originally, it fell mostly to outsiders to draw attention to what the Times had perpetrated. The World Socialist Website was among the publications to take the lead. This Marxist organization had the foresight to invite a collection of prominent historians to be interviewed about “The 1619 Project,” and to publish these in easily accessible form. Thus, we heard early on from James McPherson, James Oakes, Gordon Wood, Victoria Bynum, Richard Carwardine, and Clayborne Carson, among others. The editors of World Socialist Website, David North and Thomas Mackaman, and some of their associates added their own analyses, which, despite being freighted with their Marxist views, were impressively steadfast in separating fact from fiction. North and Mackaman eventually gathered their interviews and analyses into a book, The New York Times’ 1619 Project and the Racialist Falsification of History. 

At bottom, North and Mackaman oppose the idea that the basic conflict in American history is to be found in racial antagonism. They stick to the Marxist thesis that it is really about class. At least this gives them a place to stand outside the racial hysteria of our moment in history, and from that position they soberly take in the parade of historical absurdities that Hannah-Jones and her peers at the Times have served up and that the journalistic and educational establishments continue to celebrate.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Festus And Cooter Are Endangered Pissants - Google IS White Supremacy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Believe The Science: SARS-CoV2 Was Lab Synthesized

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anthony Fauci And Kristian Andersen SMDH....,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

— Alex Paterson (@AlexPattyy) April 27, 2021

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

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

— TODAY (@TODAYshow) April 28, 2021

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

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

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

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

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

 

Liberal Corporatist Groupthink Is The Worst And Most Insidious White Supremacy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Peak Distrust Of The Ruling Professional Managerial Class

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

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

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

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

 

The Fight To Uncover The Origin Of Covid-19

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why The Narrative Shift On The Lab-Leak Hypothesis?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Crucial Quote

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

Key Background 

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

What To Watch For

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

Chief Critic

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