News bits: News burnout increases; House witch hunt is failing; A new recyclable plastic; Etc.

A WaPo article discusses poll data showing a new trend in news avoidance. To growing numbers of Americans, the news is too aggravating, discouraging and/or threatening. People feel helpless, except by avoiding news reporting. The WaPo writes:

[S]omething changed during the pandemic. Maybe it was her. Maybe it was the news itself.

“It was so upsetting,” says Claudia Caplan, a retired advertising executive who is now a graduate student of history at New York University. “So frightening, so apocalyptic.”

And so Caplan began to turn away.

The troublesome trend is spelled out in research by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. For years, the Oxford-based think tank has been asking people around the world about their news-consumption habits. In its latest survey, 38 percent of U.S. respondents say they sometimes or often avoid news, including 41 percent of women and 34 percent of men.

At the same time, the proportion of people who are “extremely” or “very interested” in the news continued to sink. In the United States, this group was in the minority (49 percent) for the first time in the survey’s short history, down from 67 percent in 2015. 

And much of it, people say, drives feelings of depression, anger, anxiety or helplessness.  

Carolyn Cohen, a retired school teacher, cites a number of topics that provoke feelings of helplessness: gun violence, climate change and climate-change denial, and President Donald Trump’s efforts to undermine the 2020 election results.

“What can I do about it?” she says. “Nothing you do gives any control,” other than laying the newspaper aside, turning off the TV and going for a walk.

The article mentions the Ukraine war as one topic where there is significant avoidance of news (32% of people) because the situation is so bad. I'm one of those people. I wrote to Biden months ago urging him to make peace talks the highest priority for Ukraine because Russia was going to pulverize the country, which it is now doing. The boilerplate "response" I got back was just propaganda drivel. It inspired a feeling of hopelessness. The letter was OK for recycling but nothing else. But worse than that, even more people, over 40%, avoid national and social justice news.

The bigger issue here cannot be ignored. America's radial right knows full well that the constant stream of demagoguery, lies, slanders, hate and bigotry will lead to a significant number of people to turn away from the unpleasantness. That hate, lies and slanders all the time strategy aims for two seemingly contradictory goals. Whip up the base on your side, while burning everyone else out to get them to disengage out of feelings of hopelessness or discouragement. Some of those who disengage will also disengage from voting. That's how demagogues and tyrants rise to power in a democracy. That's what is going on here.

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From the Biden Witch Hunt Files: The Independent reports:

House Oversight chair admits GOP can’t back up Biden bribery accusations

Republicans still haven’t produced evidence of any illegal behavior by President Joe Biden

The chairman of the House Oversight Committee on Monday said he and his colleagues still lack evidence proving that President Joe Biden took bribes while he was vice president during the Obama administration, despite months of investigation into his son, Hunter Biden.

Representative James Comer made the embarrassing admission during an appearance on Fox News host Sean Hannity’s eponymous nightly programme alongside Representative Jim Jordan, the chair of the House Judiciary Committee.

Asked whether he would be able to prove the outrageous claim about the president, Mr Comer hesitated.

Pressed further by Hannity, he finally replied: “I sure hope so. And I do believe that there’s a lot of smoke and when there’s smoke, there’s fire”.

Remember this rule of law rule of thumb for political witch hunts: When there’s smoke, there’s fire. MAGA!! 

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Recyclable plastic precursor made by bacteria:  Berkeley Lab news reports:

Making Renewable, Infinitely Recyclable Plastics Using Bacteria

Scientists engineered microbes to make the ingredients for recyclable plastics – replacing finite, polluting petrochemicals with sustainable alternatives. The new approach shows that renewable, recyclable plastics are not only possible, but also outperform those from petrochemicals

Unlike traditional plastics, PDK [poly(diketoenamine)] can be repeatedly deconstructed into pristine building blocks and formed into new products with no loss in quality. PDKs initially used building blocks derived from petrochemicals, but those ingredients can be redesigned and produced with microbes instead. Now, after four years of effort, collaborators have manipulated E. coli to turn sugars from plants into some of the starting materials – a molecule known as triacetic acid lactone, or bioTAL – and produced a PDK with roughly 80% bio-content.

[Planned] improvements would include speeding up the rate at which microbes convert sugars to bioTAL, using bacteria that can transform a wider variety of plant-derived sugars and other compounds, and powering the facility with renewable energy.

GIF showing PDK plastic breaking 

down in an acidic solution, leaving the bioTAL

precursor available for reuse

Here, genetically engineered bacteria make bioTAL from sugar and that is used to make PDK plastic. Additional research is needed to decrease the production cost of bioTAL and expand the range of plant sugars that can be used to fuel the bacteria. If the US had a carbon tax in place, this lower-pollution plastic would be significantly more competitive. It will take a couple of years of more research and development before this impact of this can be assessed. 

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Did he commit a crime?: The Hill reports recent poll data:

According to most of that group, he didn't commit serious crimes. 13% are still unsure!!

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Jellyfish!!: The NYT writes:

505-Million-Year-Old Jellyfish Fossils May Be the Oldest Ever Found

[Jean-Bernard Caron, a paleontologist at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto] and other scientists recently described a cache of jellyfish fossils from the Cambrian period that found an improbable pathway to preservation. In a paper published on Wednesday in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, the scientists posit that these 505-million-year-old animals are among the oldest swimming jellyfish known to science.

“These new fossils represent the most compelling evidence of Cambrian jellyfish to date,” said David Gold, a paleobiologist at the University of California, Davis, who was not involved in the new study.

A 505 million year-old jellyfish fossil

A life reconstruction of a group of Burgessomedusa phasmiformis

swimming in the Cambrian sea

Trump indicted for role in Jan. 6. Finally!!

At long last, Donald Trump was criminally indicted today for his role in Jan. 6. A Washington grand jury voted to prosecute him on 4 counts: 1) conspiracy to defraud the government 2) conspiracy against the right to vote, 3) conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding and 4) obstruction of an official proceeding. 

The indictment announced by the Justice Dept  also references six unnamed co-conspirators. Any guesses? It follows an investigation by Special Counsel Jack Smith that stretched an 8 month period, and included interviews of many prominent figures in Trump's sphere at the time, including VP Pence, over Trump's efforts to interfere with the peaceful transfer of power on Jan. 6. 

Predictably, Trump called the indictment "fake" and lashed out at Jack Smith for "election interference," a reference to the 2024 election. "Why did they wait so long?", he asked. He's got a point for once. They should have done this 2 1/2 years ago! Better late than never, though it will doubtless cause chaos during the upcoming the election cycle, as will other pending Trump cases. Indeed, he may soon face yet another criminal prosecution in Georgia over alleged attempts to overturn the 2020 election result there.

The US is in for a bumpy ride in 2024 if Trump, as expected, clinches the Republican nomination. But one thing at a time. For now, I (like many readers here, I'm sure)  plan to fully enjoy the rest of the evening! Cheers!

News bits: The 1 mile rule protects Texas polluters; More Covid cover-up; Cooling a Tortoise in Phoenix

From the Republicans Just Making Shit Up Files: The Texas Tribune reports:

The “1-mile rule”: Texas’ unwritten, arbitrary policy protects 

big polluters from citizen complaints

It’s not found anywhere in state law or the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality’s rules, but for years the agency has denied citizens the ability to challenge air pollution permits because they live more than a mile away

On a rugged stretch of the Gulf Coast in Texas, environmental groups called foul in 2020 when an oil company sought pollution permits to expand its export terminal beside Lavaca Bay.

Led by a coalition of local shrimpers and oystermen, the groups produced an analysis alleging that the company, Max Midstream, underrepresented expected emissions in order to avoid a more rigorous permitting process and stricter pollution control requirements.

In its response, Max Midstream did not respond to those allegations. Instead, it cited what it characterized as the “quintessential one-mile test” by Texas’ environmental regulator, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, to claim that the groups and citizens involved had no right to bring forth a challenge because they lived more than 1 mile from the Seahawk Oil Terminal.

“The well-established Commission precedent has been repeated again and again,” the lawyers wrote. “Based on the quintessential one-mile test relied upon by the Commission for decades, none of the Hearing Requests can be granted.”

The TCEQ agreed, rejecting all hearing requests and issued the permit as initially proposed.  

But the agency says the 1-mile test cited by the company’s lawyers doesn’t exist.

“The Commission has never adopted a one-mile policy,” said TCEQ spokesperson Laura Lopez. “Instead, the Commission applies all factors set out in statute and rules.”

The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality? Wrong name. It's really the Texas Commission on Degrading Environmental Quality and Lying About It. The radicalized corrupt Republican Party, it's America's fun-filled pro-pollution, pro-global warming, pro-deceit, pro-lies, anti-environment party.

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More evidence of a cover-up about the origin of COVID: This 14 minute video comes from an Australian point of view. The Australian scientist who dismissed the possibility that the COVID virus was man-made and leaked from the lab in Wuhan says comments between scientists in the recently released documents (i) are being taken out of context and new information was coming in, (ii) there is no proof of a man-made origin, and (iii) allegations of a man-made origin is a crackpot conspiracy theory, not a valid science theory. The reporter in the video points out that there is no proof of a natural origin, but that is taken as a scientifically valid possibility. Also, the allegation of taking comments out of context strikes me as clearly false. 

Evidence available now make it crystal clear that (i) the leading scientists knew the man-made and lab leak hypothesis was valid, and (ii) they clearly wanted to suppress that possibility in the March 2020 proximal origin paper. We have been and still are being lied to by those anti-lab leak theory scientists. Those are the true conspiracy theory crackpots here. That is true even if it turns out that we can eventually prove that the COVID virus arose naturally. Scientists could neither prove nor disprove either of the two possibilities at that time in 2020. That remains true to this day in 2023. 

Fauci, Collins, Anderson and all the other crackpot anti-lab leak theory scientists should be ashamed and fired. But, odds of that happening in the next 2 years are low, maybe about 0.1%. 

Acknowledgement: Thanks to PD for bringing this video to my attention.

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Phenix has now experienced over 30 straight days of temp at or over 110ᵒ F. At the Phoenix zoo:

But it's not global warming. It's a Chinese hoax. It's Hunter Biden's laptop. Joe Biden should be impeached. Benghazi!! Etc.

Phoenix billboard, July 18th

Meanwhile in the ocean off the Florida coast:

Bleached, dying corals on Looe Key

The NYT writes: Phoenix just logged its hottest month on record — and the hottest month ever observed in a U.S. city. Phoenix’s average temperature for July was a blistering 102.7 degrees, taking into account average daytime highs of 114.7 degrees and overnight lows of 90.8. Phoenix had 17 days that hit 115 degrees or greater. The previous record was 7 days set in August of 2020.

Those darned Chinese hoaxes. They're probably in cahoots with the darned Democrats, darn it.

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A major Christian nationalist (CN) breakthrough: A NYT opinion discusses an impending blow to secular democracy, secular education and church-state separation. This new threat attacks all three with what could be a lethal blow in the long run. The opinion is by Rachel Laser, president and chief executive of Americans United for Separation of Church and State:

Something deeply un-American is underway in the state of Oklahoma.

In June, Oklahoma’s Statewide Virtual Charter School Board approved the nation’s first religious public charter school. The Archdiocese of Oklahoma City and the Diocese of Tulsa were given permission to open St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School in August 2024.

That’s right, a religious public school, funded by the state’s taxpayers. Proponents hope this model will spread to the dozens of other states that allow charter schools. Seven percent of public school students in the country attended charter schools as of the fall of 2021, and that number continues to grow. That’s why Christian nationalist groups see charter schools as fertile ground for their full-on assault on the separation of church and state in public education.

In just the past year, significant progress has been made in infusing Christianity into public schools. Texas, for example, now allows public schools to replace certified school counselors with religious chaplains and came close to requiring every classroom to display the Ten Commandments. New laws in Idaho and Kentucky could allow teachers and other public school employees to pray in front of — and even with — students. Missouri and Louisiana authorized public schools to teach Bible classes. West Virginia nearly passed a bill that would allow public schools to teach intelligent design creationism. Accompanying these laws are increasingly successful efforts to ban books and lessons about race, sexual orientation, gender identity and even menstruation in public schools.  

The establishment of a school that claims to be simultaneously public and religious — what has been a legal oxymoron in the United States since its founding — violates one of the foundational principles of American constitutional tradition: the separation of church and state. It also threatens religious freedom and undermines public education.

The United States Supreme Court has emboldened Christian nationalists by holding twice in the past three years that if a state funds private secular schools, it must also fund private religious schools. But charter schools are taxpayer-financed public schools — not private schools.  

That is why the organization I head, Americans United for Separation of Church and State, together with the A.C.L.U., the Education Law Center and the Freedom From Religion Foundation, filed a lawsuit on Monday in state district court in Oklahoma to prevent the school from operating as a charter school.

To be clear, the CN wealth and power movement wants to get rid of all secular public education and replace it with radical Christian fundamentalist "education." That is core CN dogma. This move in Oklahoma is a critical step necessary in that transformation of secular America into Christian Sharia America run by a wealthy White male Christian Taliban.

No, none of that is not hyperbole. It is fact. The open question is whether the authoritarian CN movement can mostly or completely accomplish the secular democracy to Christian fundamentalist theocracy goal. We can only hope that this critically important lawsuit succeeds. If the Republican CN Supreme Court upholds the forced use of tax dollars to pay for religious education, this cancer will spread nation wide. It could kill secular democracy, but it will kill church-state separation.

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Meanwhile, rank and file Republicans are getting their act together and thinking deeply about things as they prepare their lemming run for edge of the cliff in 2024:

That is a glimpse of the reality that some or most of the radical right rank and file sees and believes is real and rational.

News bits: Biowarfare research is out of control; Deceit by brass knuckles capitalism; Etc.

A local newspaper reports that law enforcement authorities have stumbled across a big, sloppy biowarfare lab in Reedley, CA. This is beyond bizarre. It is as scary as the radicalized corrupt Republican Party and the rabid corrupt Christian nationalism movement. Yourcentralvalley.com reports: 

‘I’ve never seen anything like this’: Illegal medical lab discovered in Reedley

An investigation into a Reedley warehouse uncovered a large-scale illegal medical lab complete with bioengineered mice, infectious agents, nearly 30 refrigerators and freezers some of which were non-operational, incubators, and more leaving officials shocked and the public worried.

Local, state, and federal agencies are all involved and what prompted this investigation was a simple garden hose that was illegally attached and coming out of a wall in the back of the building.

The city then obtained several search warrants to enter the building and once inside they found something they have never seen.

“There was a special room that was built housing about 1000 white lab mice,” Zieba explained.

What they found was absolutely terrifying.

“Through their statements that they were doing some testing on laboratory mice that would help them support, developing the COVID test kits that they had on-site,” Prado said.

Health officials discovered nearly 1,000 lab mice, 200 of which were already dead.

Also found were thousands of vials, many of which contained biohazardous materials including human blood, and other unknown substances.

“A lot of these labels have been removed from bottles so there was only so much testing we could do on those chemicals,” Prado continued.

According to court documents officials with the Centers for Disease Control tested what they could and determined that at least 20 potentially infectious viral, bacterial, and parasitic agents were present including E. Coli, malaria, and even COVID.

NBC News reported:

An investigation found the tenant was Prestige BioTech, a company registered in Nevada and unlicensed for business in California. City officials spoke with Xiuquin Yao, who was identified as the company president, through emails included in the court documents.

Yao told officials that Prestige BioTech moved assets belonging to a defunct company, Universal Meditech Inc., to the Reedley warehouse from Fresno after UMI went under. Prestige Biotech was a creditor to UMI and identified as its successor, according to court documents.  

"The other addresses provided for identified authorized agents were either empty offices or addresses in China that could not be verified," court documents said.

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From the Crooks & Liars Files: A WaPo opinion reports about how pollution for profit companies and the federal government conspire to deceive consumers about what plastics are recyclable and what are not: 

Picture this: You finish a drink from a red Solo cup, and before throwing it out, you check the bottom of the cup to see the iconic recycling symbol. That means it can be tossed in the recycling bin, right?

Wrong. Solo cups are made of polystyrene, a plastic that is very difficult to recycle. No one can fault consumers for not knowing that. The real blame lies with the government, which has failed to properly regulate claims that plastics manufacturers put on their products

The core of the problem is that there is no recycling system in the United States; there are upward of 20,000 of them. As a result, it’s nearly impossible to say which items are actually recyclable. Without stricter standards, consumers will continue to be confused, seriously hampering the effort to divert waste from landfills.

Note: 

0% of plastic cutlery gets recycled

0% of coffee pods get recycled

0% of . . . . you get the idea

Remember: An ignorant, disinformed consumer is a profitable consumer!

Aw, ain't that adorable!

Puggsley and mom sharing a quiet moment of contentment

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Poll data: 

See, crime really does pay!

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The cost of global warming: As time passes, damage will accumulate. Researchers are publishing damage estimates. The NYT reports:

A study published in June on the effects of temperature on productivity concludes that while extreme heat harms agriculture, its impact is greater on industrial and other sectors of the economy, in part because they are more labor-intensive. It finds that heat increases absenteeism and reduces work hours, and concludes that as the planet continues to warm, those losses will increase.

The cost is high. In 2021, more than 2.5 billion hours of labor in the U.S. agriculture, construction, manufacturing, and service sectors were lost to heat exposure, according to data compiled by The Lancet. Another report found that in 2020, the loss of labor as a result of heat exposure cost the economy about $100 billion, a figure projected to grow to $500 billion annually by 2050. 

Other research found that as the mercury reaches 90 degrees Fahrenheit, productivity slumps by about 25 percent and when it goes past 100 degrees, productivity drops off by 70 percent.

Remember: The corrupt, authoritarian radical right Republican Party is anti-labor, pro-global warming and pro-pollution! Texas passed a law to ban water breaks for outdoors workers -- that's real commitment to the anti-labor cause!

Bits: US tax code subsidizes bad behavior; A lapse in science integrity; About Christian nationalism

From the Brass Knuckles Capitalism Files: It is well known that corporations buy tax loopholes from congress and presidents. The practice is called free speech and/or freedom of assembly to petition government. I call it political and corporate corruption. There is even tax break for corporations that break laws and have to pay to settle lawsuits. Truthout writes about a current example:

Though Fox News reached an agreement with Dominion Voting Systems earlier this year to pay one of the largest media settlements in history over the outlet’s repeated lies regarding the 2020 election, the corporation may be able to soften the blow — to the tune of a $200 million tax break, reporters found earlier this year. Now, one Senate Democrat is trying to change that.

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-Rhode Island) filed a bill on Wednesday that would specifically bar large corporations from being able to take an income tax deduction from certain defamation payments. The legislation is seemingly aimed directly at barring Fox from being able to diminish the impact of its settlement payment over actions that likely had a huge impact on eroding American democracy.

The article points out that  Faux can deduct its $787 million settlement with Dominion due to a tax law that allows taxpayers to write off “ordinary and necessary” business expenses. I guess defamation is ordinary and necessary, which in this case it actually was.

However as we all know, the chance of that bill passing in congress is about 0%. Radicalized Republicans in congress are not just arrogant brass knuckles capitalists, they are deeply corrupt (and deeply authoritarian, and incredibly mendacious, and etc.). 

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A NYT opinion by a Stanford student, Theo Baker (a reporter for the Stanford student newspaper), describes data manipulation in several important research papers that Stanford president Marc Tessier-Lavigne was the principle author of. The scandal was broken by Baker based on an allegation in an obscure science site that data had been fabricated in some of the Tessier-Lavigne papers. He won a George Polk Award for investigating the allegations of manipulated experimental data in the science papers. Baker writes:

There are many rabbit holes on the internet not worth going down. But a comment on an online science forum called PubPeer convinced me something might be at the bottom of this one. “This highly cited Science paper is riddled with problematic blot images,” it said. That anonymous 2015 observation helped spark a chain of events that led Stanford’s president, Marc Tessier-Lavigne, to announce his resignation this month.

Dr. Tessier-Lavigne made the announcement after a university investigation found that as a neuroscientist and biotechnology executive, he had fostered an environment that led to “unusual frequency of manipulation of research data and/or substandard scientific practices” across labs at multiple institutions. Stanford opened the investigation in response to reporting I published last autumn in The Stanford Daily, taking a closer look at scientific papers he published from 1999 to 2012.

In retrospect, much of the data manipulation is obvious. Although the report concluded that Dr. Tessier-Lavigne was unaware at the time of the manipulation that occurred in his labs, in papers on which he served as a principal author, images had been improperly copied and pasted or spliced; results had been duplicated and passed off as separate experiments; and in some instances — in which the report found an intention to hide the manipulation — panels had been stretched, flipped and doctored in ways that altered the published experimental data. All of this happened before he became Stanford’s president. Why, then, didn’t it come out sooner?

The answer is that people weren’t looking.

Same data presented twice in one paper, but claimed

to come from two different experiments 

Same data presented twice in one paper

That is science fraud. It might not look like much, but this was an attack on integrity in science. 

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An evangelical Christian comments on the dangers of authoritarian Christian nationalism in an interview the NYT published as an opinion piece:

There are few evangelical Christians who have gotten as much media coverage or criticism in the last decade as Russell Moore. He previously served as the president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, the policy wing of the Southern Baptist Convention, and became a prominent evangelical voice opposing a Trump presidency. Moore is currently the editor in chief of Christianity Today, which The Times’s Jane Coaston called “arguably the most influential Christian publication” in the United States. I asked Moore if he would speak to me about the evangelical movement and his new book, “Losing Our Religion: An Altar Call for Evangelical America.” This interview has been edited and condensed.

Interviewer: Your book delves into Christian nationalism as a component of the evangelical movement. How would you define Christian nationalism? And how has it affected evangelicalism in the United States?

Moore: Christian nationalism is the use of Christian symbols or teachings in order to prop up a nation-state or an ethnic identity. It’s dangerous for the nation because it’s fundamentally anti-democratic. Christian nationalism takes a political claim and seeks to make it ultimate. It says: If a person disagrees with me, that person is disagreeing with God. No democratic nation can survive that, which is why the founders of this country built in all kinds of protections from it.

Christian nationalism is also dangerous for the witness of the church, because Christian nationalism is fundamentally, at its core, anti-evangelical. If what the Gospel means is for people to come before God, person by person, not nation by nation or village by village or tribe by tribe, then Christian nationalism is heretical.

It’s been hard for me to evaluate how widespread this is. Anecdotally, I know a lot of Christians, including a lot of evangelicals, and they would not be considered Christian nationalists. So I often wonder: Is this fringe?

It is affecting almost every sector of American Christianity in varying ways. It’s similar to the Prosperity Gospel of the last generation. Most American Christians wouldn’t identify themselves as Prosperity Gospel adherents. Yet many of them were adopting key pieces of that understanding of the world.

Studies have shown the way that Christian language is being used in Europe and in other places to prop up populist authoritarian movements. You can see this in the way that survey data show how white evangelicals in America are becoming much friendlier to outright authoritarianism — as seen in the Jan. 6 insurrection. I don’t think that it is merely fringe at all. Christian nationalism assumes outward conformity enforced by social or political power. It transforms the way that we see reality with the assumption that the really important things are political and cultural, as opposed to personal and spiritual and theological.

We can’t talk about the rise of Christian nationalism without bringing up Donald Trump. You said that he was morally unfit to be president and received intense backlash — even from Trump himself. Were you surprised by the severe criticism from certain Christians for your denunciation of Trump?

It didn’t surprise me that there would be overwhelming buy-in once Trump became the Republican nominee. One of the things I was worried about is that people would say: I’m not supporting him, I’m just voting for him because I think the alternative is worse. I feared, at the time, that the way that American politics works right now is inherently totalizing .... Trump has transformed evangelicalism far more than evangelism has influenced Trump.

I was surprised by the aftermath of the “Access Hollywood” tape. When the “Access Hollywood” tape was released, I was saying to people around me: “Don’t say ‘I told you so.’ We need to have empathy for Trump-supporting evangelicals who are really hurting at this revelation.” But what ended up happening is that white evangelicals made peace with “Access Hollywood,” if anything, quicker than the rest of America did.

I received a castigating email from a sweet Christian lady who had taught me Sunday school when I was a kid. And none of it argued: “You’re wrong about Trump’s moral character.” The argument was: “Get real. This is what we have to have in order to fight the enemy.” That was surprising to me. And disorienting.

That speaks for itself. Christian nationalism is deeply anti-democratic (compromise is treason to God), staunchly authoritarian and aggressive. Opponents of DJT are the enemy that needs to be fought. 

Q: Who is the enemy here, intolerant authoritarian Christian nationalism or pluralist secular democracy?

Hint - it's a trick question: From the intolerant authoritarian Christian nationalist point of view pluralist secular democracy is the enemy, but from the pluralist secular democracy point of view intolerant authoritarian Christian nationalism is the enemy. And, like it or not, there's just no way around it.

Essay on COVID's origin and video

Reporting on the lab leak hypothesis for COVID's origin are not being reported properly or at all by the MSM. The US government is lying about it. However, a lot of circumstantial evidence suggests the mostly likely possibility is the virus was man made and it leaked from a research lab in Wuhan. 

This is a review of a book that advocates for the virus arising in nature, which is the official US government story. Nicholas Wade (science editor at the New York Times from 1990 to 1996) writes in his review of the book, Breathless: The Scientific Race to Defeat a Deadly Virus, by David Quammen:

Friends in Viral Places

David Quammen fails to ask the necessary questions of his scientific sources, rendering his new book on Covid a work of advocacy, not reporting

In the three years or so since Covid-19 appeared, it has become increasingly clear, despite the protestations of virologists who do this kind of work, that the causative virus was probably the result of genetic manipulation in a lab. In other words, it is not a natural virus that spilled into humans from some wild animal host, but one that escaped from the Chinese laboratory in which it was being souped up as part of a high-risk scheme to predict future epidemics.

The case that Covid originated in a lab is not yet proven, but as circumstantial evidence goes, it’s pretty good. Few people appreciate quite how compelling this case is (see the outline below) because science journalists who work for the mainstream press have, by and large, failed to present it in full to their readers. Virologists, and through them most other researchers dependent on government grants, are not so keen to accept their community’s complicity in creating a pandemic that has caused upward of 6.5 million deaths. Driven by the position of their sources and the political leanings of their proprietors, mainstream science journalists have largely ignored each new piece of evidence pointing toward the lab-leak explanation, while uncritically overplaying the virologists’ self-serving arguments for the virus’s natural origin.

A particularly egregious example of this asymmetry is David Quammen’s Breathless. Quammen is a well-regarded and widely published writer about viruses and natural history, but he has grown too close to his sources, as many science writers do. He fails to consider the possibility that scientists can be swayed by the same monetary or careerist motives that drive lesser mortals. The lab at Wuhan, where researchers were manipulating Covid-type viruses, received funding from the U.S. National Institutes of Health. Could Francis Collins and Anthony Fauci, the NIH’s senior officials, have had any possible motive for suppressing their experts’ initial conclusion that the Covid virus was probably artificial? Could that explain why they apparently told no one else in government about their experts’ findings and excluded from their discussions then-CDC director Robert R. Redfield, who believed from the start that the virus was a lab escapee? Quammen does not think to raise such impolite questions.

The book showers positive epithets onto virologists who argue against the lab-leak scenario. Quammen praises as “highly respected” Edward Holmes, one of the initial group of experts who concluded that the virus was man-made but two days later changed his mind—on the basis of no known evidence but after a teleconference with Fauci and Collins on February 1, 2020. Michael Worobey is “rigorous, smart and judicious,” with a “quietly dauntless streak in him” and “steely attentiveness.” And if that weren’t enough, “his reputation is sterling and his mind is open.” This gusher of praise is Quammen’s attempt to bolster the credibility of a contentious article in which Worobey asserted that the virus must have passed naturally from animals to people in the Wuhan wet market. That argument indeed needs all the boosting it can get because no infected animal was found in the Wuhan market, and it’s impossible to exclude the likeliest explanation for Worobey’s data—namely, that the market just amplified an infection that started earlier and elsewhere, as even Chinese authorities assert.

Quammen goes furthest astray in his treatment of Peter Daszak, a central and still-enigmatic figure in the story of Covid’s origins. Daszak is president of the EcoHealth Alliance of New York. His agency was the intermediary between Fauci and Shi Zhengli, the chief expert on bat coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Fauci could have given money to Shi directly but did so via Daszak, perhaps in part because domestic grants attract less regulatory scrutiny than foreign ones.

As part of the effort to squelch the lab-leak conjecture, Daszak organized a February 19, 2020, letter to the Lancet, a leading medical journal. “We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin,” wrote Daszak. “We declare no competing interests,” he and his co-signatories concluded. Of course, a gross conflict of interest did exist, one not declared to readers: Daszak funded and supervised Shi’s lab and would be held to account if that were the virus’s source.

But Quammen can’t bring himself to condemn even this ethical lapse. The best he can manage to say about the incident is, “Whether that constituted a conflict is another question.” Then comes the remarkable revelation that Quammen has known Daszak for many years and that “he is a friend of mine.” Too bad the reader is given this pertinent information only on page 294 of the book. No wonder almost everything Quammen has written until that point is an attempt to get Daszak off the hook for failing to supervise the ultra-high-risk work he was funding in alarmingly low-level safety conditions at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

“I’m aware that journalists are not supposed to have friends,” Quammen writes plaintively of his relationship with Daszak. Not so—journalists just shouldn’t write about their friends if they cannot do so objectively.

Quammen interviewed many people on the natural origin side of the debate, including Shi, who has been inaccessible to most Western journalists. But he ignored serious critics of virus enhancement, known as gain-of-function research, such as Richard Ebright. Far from addressing the strongest parts of the lab-leak case, Quammen discusses only aspects of it that have never been taken seriously, such as the charge that the Covid virus was engineered from its close bat relative, a virus known as RATG13.

Readers may perceive that Quammen’s book is a work of advocacy, but many will be baffled as to what case he is attacking, because he never states it clearly—an omission his account shares with many others.

Here, briefly, is the case for the lab-leak origin.

Collins and Fauci have advocated since 2011 for the benefits of enhancing natural viruses in the lab with the hope of predicting future epidemics. From their powerful bureaucratic positions—they fund most virology research in the U.S.—they outmaneuvered critics who argued that the risks of creating novel infectious viruses were sky high and the benefits nugatory.

From 2014 onward, Fauci gave money, via Daszak, to researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology to collect bat coronaviruses in the wild and to manipulate the viral genomes in the lab. The goal was to see which held the greatest potential for infecting people.

In 2018, the Wuhan researchers applied to DARPA, a Defense Department agency, for a grant to construct novel, SARS-like viruses. Their plan was to take genetic elements such as the one known as the furin cleavage site and to insert them into a specific position on viral genomes. That position, a single point on the virus’s 30,000-unit long genome, is called the S1/S2 junction of the virus’s spike gene. Many viruses have furin cleavage sites, but none of the 300 known members of the SARS-like family of coronaviruses do. This is important because viruses often swap genetic elements with other viruses of their own family, but they cannot naturally acquire elements that their family does not possess.

In 2019, a novel virus, SARS-CoV-2, emerged in the city of Wuhan, home of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and launched the Covid pandemic. The virus’s most unusual feature and a cause of its infectivity is a furin cleavage site inserted at the S1/S2 junction of its spike protein, just as outlined in the Wuhan virologists’ proposal to DARPA. The genetic coding of the virus’s furin cleavage site is designated in a sequence of units common to human cells and supplied in laboratory kits, but it is very rare in coronaviruses and unknown in the SARS-like coronavirus family.

Though viruses spill over from animal hosts to people quite often, they usually leave a trail of evidence when they do so. In the case of the SARS1 epidemic of 2003, virus researchers were able to trace the host population of wild bats, the mutations in the virus as it adapted from bats to civets and then to people, and the immunological traces it left in the human population. If SARS-CoV-2 has a natural origin, we should expect the same pieces of evidence to emerge. In three years, none has.

All this information, including the critical DARPA grant application, was available before Quammen’s book deadline. In telling only one side of a story that has two, he and many of his fellow science writers have failed their readers.

This video discusses rock solid proof that Fauci, Collins and the scientists that wrote March 2020 Proximal Origins paper, which wound up controlling the coverage of Covid origins for ~2 years, were lying to the public.

Acknowledgment: Thanks to PD for bringing this essay and the video to my attention.