Jeffrey Sachs Lays Out Possible Lab Origin of Covid

Still, both the overlap in the amino acid sequence and the fact that experts in the furin cleavage site of the ENaC-alpha and insertion of genetic material into bat coronaviruses work at the same university could be coincidental, as Harrison and Sachs acknowledge. Some virologists, though, say that the coincidence strains credulity.

“Could be,” Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist at Rutgers University, wrote in an email to The Intercept when asked about the possibility that these things are both chance occurrences. “But the list of coincidences is getting verrrrrrrrrrry long.”

Ebright, a proponent of investigating the origin of SARS-CoV-2 and of investigating both natural-spillover and research-related-spillover, whom Harrison and Sachs thank “for helpful commentary on the manuscript,” spelled out some of the other Covid coincidences that he considers questionable, including its initial outbreak in a city that, well before 2019, had already been pegged as a biosafety risk. Ebright also noted Wuhan’s 1,000-mile distance from the nearest wild bats that carry the type of SARS-related coronaviruses that caused the pandemic. And he pointed to the particular coding of the amino acids in the furin cleavage site of SARS-CoV2.

“The sequence encoding the FCS of the pandemic virus contained two consecutive CGG arginine codons,” Ebright explained in his email. (A codon, or a combination of three nucleotides, supplies the genetic code for a single amino acid, though most amino acids can be represented by multiple different codons. Each nucleotide is represented by a letter — for RNA, either A, C, U, or G.) “This codon usage is unusual for a natural bat SARS-related coronaviruses (for which fewer than 1 in 30 arginine codons are CGG) but is optimal for humans (for which most arginine codons are CGG codons).”

Still, Ebright said that at first he didn’t see the identical amino acid sequences as particularly suspicious. “I had known for more than a year that there was a perfect match to an eight-amino acid sequence present in human ENaC. What I had not known was that the sequence was known to be a functional furin cleavage site and that it was a sequence extensively studied at UNC,” he said. “The crucial point that the ENaC sequence was a known functional site, not just that there happens to be a match to a protein that happens to be in humans. … That suddenly turned it from what I thought to be largely irrelevant to being a logical and obvious choice to proceed.”

The fax of life - Vox

“We don’t expect Amazon and Walmart to share background on their customers, but we do expect competing hospital system to do so,” says David Blumenthal, who coordinated health policy for the Obama administration from 2011 to 2013. “Those institutions consider that data proprietary and an important business asset. We should never have expected it to occur naturally, that these organizations would readily adopt information exchange.”

And this is the problem: health care providers are expected to act not in the patients' interests but in the health care providers' interests. What could go wrong?

[Conversation] | Slow Crash, by Andrew Cockburn | Harper's Magazine

At least you have the satisfaction, if that’s the word, of events proving you correct. But we’ve supposedly now recovered from that disaster. Have we?

No, we haven’t at all recovered. That’s why Hillary lost the election. She said, “Look at how much better you are since 2008. Obama has saved you.” Trump said, “Wait a minute. Look at how bad you are. You’re not saved.” Everybody thought, “Who are you going to believe, your eyes or Hillary?” We haven’t recovered at all. Obama saved the banks and Wall Street, not the economy. From 2008 until today, the economy has grown by 2 percent, but the top 5 percent of the economy have got all of that growth. The economy isn’t recovering.

That’s why when the Department of Labor statistics gave the most recent employment figures, everybody commented, “It’s very interesting. Employment is up, but wages are continuing to fall.” It’s all minimum wage work. The debt ratio for most families is rising, not falling, especially for student debt, for mortgage debt, for automobile debt. The default rate is continuing to rise.

Berkeley author George Lakoff says, 'Don't underestimate Trump' — Berkeleyside

But a worldview is exactly what Lakoff is talking about. “Ideas don’t float in the air, they live in your neuro-circuitry,” Lakoff said. Each time ideas in our neural circuits are activated, they get stronger. And over time, complexes of neural circuits create a frame through which we view the world. “The problem is, that frame is unconscious,” Lakoff said. “You aren’t aware of it because you don’t have access to your neural circuits.” So what happens when you hear facts that don’t fit in your worldview is that you can’t process them: you might ignore them, or reject or attack them, or literally not hear them.

This theory explains why even college-educated Trump voters could ignore so many facts about their candidate. And it also explains why progressives have been ignoring Lakoff’s findings for more than two decades. Progressives are still living in the world of Descartes and the Enlightenment, Lakoff said, a neat world governed by the rules of logic. Descartes said, “I think therefore I am,” but Lakoff claims that we are embodied beings and that 98 percent of thought is unconscious.

Our thoughts are chemical in nature, and occur within the confines of a physical body: we are not 100 percent rational beings.

The intolerance of the left: Trump's win as seen from Walt Disney's hometown | US news | The Guardian

This right-to-obnoxiousness raises a fascinating point: these men saw liberals as loudmouthed Pharisees, intolerant moralists who demanded that the rest of the nation snap into line – an exact reverse of the John Ashcroft stereotype liberals used to hold of conservatives.

Everyone I spoke to that morning seemed to take for granted that liberals held some kind of unfair moral- or decibel-based advantage over conservatives. Hillary voters were “the vocal ones”, a man told me. “Conservatives were afraid to speak up because of criticism from liberals,” he continued, “and by God, we showed them.”

Why Obama waited 8 years to take on Netanyahu – Mondoweiss

As Elise Labott said last night on CNN, Obama did not push the settlements/Palestinian state issue before the election out of deference to Hillary Clinton. Labott was saying, without saying it, that Clinton was so dependent on the Jewish establishment and large Jewish donors, that she could not “undermine [the] party’s fundraising capabilities” (as the National Journal says) by saying a word against Israel. Today on NPR Daoud Kuttab said very much the same thing: that presidents take these actions in their last months when they are freed of “domestic, political, lobbying” pressures. This is a central truth of our politics that ought to be explored. But NPR promptly brought on Aaron David Miller to refute it; Miller said it was a “myth” that lobbying affects US policy.

Undernews: Obama considering destruction of a New Deal gem: TVA

The TVA is a corporate agency of the United States, governed by a nine-person board appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate. Its operations have been self-financed since 1999, requiring no taxpayer money. The TVA operates one of the nation’s largest utility systems, accounting for about 3 percent of U.S. electricity capacity. .

Even though electric power generation and transmission is the TVA’s dominant function, it remains integral to and integrated with the TVA’s nonpower responsibilities, including river and land management, environmental stewardship, and economic development.

Another solution to a non-existent problem.

Seymour M. Hersh: The Killing of Osama bin Laden : LRB 21 May 2015

The remains, including his head, which had only a few bullet holes in it, were thrown into a body bag and, during the helicopter flight back to Jalalabad, some body parts were tossed out over the Hindu Kush mountains – or so the Seals claimed. At the time, the retired official said, the Seals did not think their mission would be made public by Obama within a few hours: ‘If the president had gone ahead with the cover story, there would have been no need to have a funeral within hours of the killing. Once the cover story was blown, and the death was made public, the White House had a serious “Where’s the body?” problem. The world knew US forces had killed bin Laden in Abbottabad. Panic city. What to do? We need a “functional body” because we have to be able to say we identified bin Laden via a DNA analysis. It would be navy officers who came up with the “burial at sea” idea. Perfect. No body. Honourable burial following sharia law. Burial is made public in great detail, but Freedom of Information documents confirming the burial are denied for reasons of “national security”. It’s the classic unravelling of a poorly constructed cover story – it solves an immediate problem but, given the slighest inspection, there is no back-up support. There never was a plan, initially, to take the body to sea, and no burial of bin Laden at sea took place.’ The retired official said that if the Seals’ first accounts are to be believed, there wouldn’t have been much left of bin Laden to put into the sea in any case.

I guess ZD30 really IS fiction then. Too bad it will still be treated as a doc by lots of people.

Obamacare Architect Jon Gruber Says Deceiving Americans Necessary to Pass Bill | naked capitalism

"This recently-posted video (hat tip Daily Signal) shows Obamacare architect Jonathan Gruber matter-of-factly stating that an honestly and simply described Obamacare would not have passed Congress. Preying on 'the stupidity of the American voter' was necessary to get the bill passed. Of course, Gruber deems that to be a good thing."

It's a shame we no longer prosecute fraud.

A Void in the History of September 11th

"Thomas Kean remembers finally having the opportunity to read those twenty-eight pages after he became chairman of the 9/11 Commission—'so secret that I had to get all of my security clearances and go into the bowels of Congress with someone looking over my shoulder.' He also remembers thinking at the time that most of what he was reading should never have been kept secret. But the focus on the twenty-eight pages obscures the fact that many important documents are still classified—'a ton of stuff,' Kean told me, including, for instance, the 9/11 Commission’s interviews with George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Bill Clinton. 'I don’t know of a single thing in our report that should not be public after ten years,' Kean said.

Items are classified to protect power.

Obama Says America Tortured, but That's Not Enough - The Atlantic

"There's a moral question: If torture really happened, shouldn't there be some sort of serious attempt to grapple with it? And there's a legal one: As my colleague Conor Friedersdorf and others have pointed out, the U.S. is a signatory to the UN Convention Against Torture, which compels investigation of torture and referral of violators for prosecution."

If that's not an open and shut case for impeachment (at the very least) what is?

Stress Test: The Indictment of Timothy Geithner | Op-Eds & Columns

"The reality is that we had a completely preventable economic disaster hit the country. The result was millions of people losing their homes and/or their jobs, in many cases seeing their lives and the lives of their children ruined. With almost no exceptions the policy makers responsible for the disaster and the bankers who profited from it are doing just fine. And Timothy Geithner can’t understand why everybody isn’t happy."

Strange Silence on Success in Removing Syria’s Chemical Weapons | Common Dreams

"The policy lesson is clear: when the United States has worked through the Security Council and other U.N. agencies, it has succeeded in ridding the region — including in Iraq in the 1990s and Libya in 2003-04 — of most weapons of mass destruction (except, of course, those possessed by Israel.) While the threat of American military force may have played a role in each case, the effectiveness of the U.N.’s inspection and disarmament capabilities is indisputable and will remain essential as the world seeks to remove weapons of mass destruction from areas of likely conflict."

via @DeanBaker13

Undernews: Canada's health insurance bill was 13 pages long; Medicare used index cards to enroll 20 million

"Physician, scholar and advocate, Steffie Woolhandler, co-founder of Physicians for a National Health Program says that 'complexity is baked into Obamacare.' ... Over forty years ago, Canada’s single-payer system was enacted with a 13 page bill that covers everyone for less than half of the cost per capita than the U.S.’s waste-ridden, profiteering, corrupt medical-industrial complex that drives honest practitioners up the wall. And, the Canadian system produces better health outcomes at this reduced cost."

I, Cringely The Google File System makes NSA's hack blatantly illegal and they know it - I, Cringely

"This is a huge point of law missed by the general news reports — a point so significant and obvious that it ought to lead to immediate suspension of the program and destruction of all acquired data… but it probably won’t.

"That probably won’t happen because Congress seems hell-bent on quickly passing an intelligence reform bill that not only doesn’t prohibit these illegal activities, the bill seems to give them a legal basis they didn’t have before.

"Some kind of reform, eh?"

Bleak House by Charles Simic | NYRblog | The New York Review of Books

"Anyone who averts his eyes from the hopeless lives many of our fellow citizens lead and tells himself and others that these men and women only have themselves to blame, is either a fool or a soulless bastard."

Or a human being caught in the myriad built-in brain biases that can make it so easy to believe that *I* am the victim of circumstance but *they* get what they deserve. Which explains the GOP voting base. I don't know how to explain the Democrat's voting base.

NSA collects millions of e-mail address books globally - The Washington Post

"Spam has proven to be a significant problem for the NSA — clogging databases with information that holds no foreign intelligence value. The majority of all e-mails, one NSA document says, 'are SPAM from ‘fake’ addresses and never ‘delivered’ to targets.'”

Lovely spam, wonderful spam!

via @theharryshearer

Seymour Hersh on Obama, NSA and the 'pathetic' American media | Media | theguardian.com

"He is angry about the timidity of journalists in America, their failure to challenge the White House and be an unpopular messenger of truth.

"Don't even get him started on the New York Times which, he says, spends 'so much more time carrying water for Obama than I ever thought they would" – or the death of Osama bin Laden. 'Nothing's been done about that story, it's one big lie, not one word of it is true,' he says of the dramatic US Navy Seals raid in 2011."

Chomsky: Instead of "Illegal" Threat to Syria, U.S. Should Back Chemical Weapons Ban in All Nations | Democracy Now!

"NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, Noam Chomsky, supporters of the U.S. plan say that the only reason that Assad agreed to hand over, relinquish control over chemical weapons was because of the threat of military force, of U.S. military force. And what interest does the U.S. have in striking Syria militarily?

NOAM CHOMSKY: The first comment is correct. The threat and use of force can be effective. So, for example, Russia was able to control Eastern Europe for 50 years with the threat and occasional use of force. Hitler was able to take over Czechoslovakia with the threat of force. Yes, it often works, no doubt. That’s one of the reasons it’s banned under international—under international law.

The reason—the pretexts for imposing—for carrying out a forceful act have generally declined, to the point that even the British government hasn’t accepted them, and the Congress was apparently going to reject them, and the United States, the government, resorted to the—what is usually the last—the last resort, when everything else fails, saying our credibility is at stake. That’s correct. U.S. credibility is at stake. Obama issued an edict, and it has to be enforced. That’s a familiar doctrine. It’s one of the leading doctrines of world affairs. Credibility of powerful, violent states must be maintained. It’s—occasionally called it the Mafia doctrine. It’s essentially the doctrine by which the godfather rules his domains within the Mafia system. That’s one of the leading principles of world order: Credibility has to be maintained."

US Department of Justice wants Bush and senior cabinet members exempt from Iraq War trial — RT USA

"The reason for the decision is connected with the ‘Westfall Act’ certification. The 1988 law gives the Attorney General the power to personally decide whether the United States is actually a defendant in the case. This in turn allows the granting of absolute immunity to politicians for actions carried out while in the government’s employ."

Let's think for a minute: what would be the consequence of enacting a law that allows one government employee to grant absolute immunity to another government employee?