Uncategorized

by

DNC Superdelegates Warn They Will Block Bernie Sanders at Convention and Spark Civil War Within the Democratic Party | Yahoo & The Independent

3a9343e22e675c07b8f8b4008e5a7ec3By Greg Graziosi

Senator Bernie Sanders’ issues with the Democratic establishment may continue past the nominating races and into the Democratic National Convention, according to a new report.

If Mr Sanders arrives at the convention with any less than a majority of delegates pledged to him, he may find himself with a wave of superdelegates voting against his nomination.

The New York Times reported Thursday that in interviews with 93 superdelegates, only nine said that Mr Sanders arriving at the convention with a plurality was reason enough to support him as nominee.

In the event that Mr Sanders does only win a plurality of pledged delegates, there could be a brokered convention and subsequent fight to choose a nominee.

The Times report was “based on interviews with the 93 superdelegates, out of 771 total, as well as party strategists and aides to senior Democrats about the thinking of party leaders.”

Those leaders apparently told the Times they anticipated a fight at the July nominating convention.

“A vast majority of those superdelegates – whose ranks include federal elected officials, former presidents and vice presidents and DNC members – predicted that no candidate would clinch the nomination during the primaries, and that there would be a brokered convention fight in July to choose a nominee.”

Politico reported similar findings. In interviews with 20 superdelegates, none of them expressed explicitly endorsement of Mr Sanders’ belief that whoever gets the most pledged delegates by the convention should get the nomination.

“No, no I think the rules are set and we ought to follow the rules. Especially when someone says follow the rules who’s not even a Democrat,” Congressman Jaun Vargas said. Mr Vargas has endorsed former New York City mayor Mike Bloomberg for nominee.

Thanks to a rule change limiting the powers of superdelegates – which largely came about due to criticism from Mr Sanders following the 2016 Democratic primary – they are now only allowed to vote if no candidate wins the 1,991 pledged delegates needed to reach a majority.

Congressman Anthony Brown, who has endorsed former South Bend, Indiana mayor Pete Buttigieg, said there is “going to be a fight no matter what the outcome is.”

Should Mr Sanders arrive at the convention with a strong plurality, any attempt by superdelegates to nominate someone else is likely to be seen by Mr Sanders’ supporters as the Democratic establishment gaming the system to nominate their preferred candidate. Such a move would likely damage the already tenuous coalition between establishment Democrats and progressive Democrats.

“It’s going to be pretty tough to take the nomination away from someone who’s got a strong plurality. If it’s neck and neck and close and everybody’s close, that’s one thing. But if there’s a clear winner, it’s hard to overturn,” Congressman John Larson said. “People can fantasize about a brokered convention but it’s going to be awfully hard to overturn the will of the people.”

Source: The Independent

by

Does Voting No Longer Represent Our Power As Citizens To Impact The Actions of Government? | Collective Evolution

voteIN BRIEF

  • The Facts:Our vote no longer represents our power as individual citizens to have an impact on the actions of our government, but rather forces us to participate in a false dichotomy designed to keep us distracted from accessing the true source of our problems.
  • Reflect On:You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.–Buckminster Fuller. If you do, why do you still continue to vote?

I’m about to take on one of great sacred cows that has endured throughout the history of our modern society: the notion that our ability to vote in our political elections symbolizes our freedom, and those unwilling to vote do not deserve a voice in the democratic process.

Indeed, there may be blood.

But if you are the type of reader that holds to the core values of open-mindedness and curiosity, then certainly you will be willing to read through this article to the end and reflect for a moment before casting a stone of harsh rebuke. And with that, let’s begin.

Not A Call For Inaction

First things first. When I exhort all those who believe in freedom to ‘stop voting’, I am not for a minute suggesting that we become apathetic or lazy about our responsibilities to impact the quality and nature of our own governance. Quite on the contrary, this is a call to action. But an action that is purposeful, in that it has the potential to eventually ensure rights and freedoms that are inherent to us as human beings.

I consider people who vote to be ‘people of action’—they believe that they have a role and a responsibility in preserving our democracy, and they are willing to take time and trouble to impact the way our country is run. My argument is that voting no longer serves as an expression of our power. It has been reduced to a tiresome exercise of taking sides in a never-ending struggle born out of a false dichotomy. This false dichotomy has been maintained both as a distraction and to provide us with the illusion of ‘choice.’

Left/Right Dichotomy

The basic mechanism being used by our governing authority has long been some form of the traditional Liberal/Conservative dichotomy. To participate in our democracy, one is prompted to self-identify as leaning towards one or the other polarity, and much of the ‘drive’ and ‘energy’ around political discourse gets reduced to bickering between two fundamental ideologies: one that would have us empower the brightest, richest and most successful among us to help them lead the entire society into prosperity; the other that would focus on empowering the less fortunate of the society so that they can experience a certain level of dignity and equality with all members of the collective.

Admittedly, it’s tempting to choose sides. That’s why this ruse has worked for so long. What should finally be dawning on us, though, is the obvious fact that these two ideologies need to work in balance to create the optimal level of harmony, prosperity, and fulfillment within a society.

House of Horrors

And getting these two ideologies to work in balance is supposed to be what our government legislatures were designed for. Serious, intelligent people coming together to engage in open-minded and open-hearted discourse, equipped with an understanding that there are multiple perspectives on any issue, each imbued with strengths and weaknesses that are to be respected. Their shared goal is to efficiently arrive at solutions to the nation’s most pressing problems in a way that is most beneficial to the common good. And this is exactly what the people in the US House of Representatives and the House of Commons in Canada are doing.

NOT. BIG NOT.

Have you been to a live session of our legislatures lately? An absolute farce and embarrassment of posturing, sarcasm, and petty bickering layered with a nauseating veneer of decorum. It has become a theatre of the absurd, a reality show to legitimize the enslavement of the majority of the citizens within a society.

It also provides a convenient distraction that prevents many of us from engaging in the real battle going on behind the scenes: the struggle between those who want to liberate humanity and those who would enslave them.

No Real Choice

These days, our choice of candidates seeking election is a choice between near and far left-leaning people who will maintain a system of enslavement for their masters, and near and far right-leaning people who will maintain a system of enslavement for their masters.

It’s no wonder that we are dealing with candidates that seem to have little character, that seem to be involved in some scandal or another, and that don’t really stand for anything that we believe in. Most of them have already sold themselves out to elite power just to get into the position they are in, and if not, they are soon co-opted into the fold to play out their mandates as puppets for the real controllers of society.

In our elections coming up here in Ontario, the choice of available candidates is bleak and uninspiring. None of the 3 main party leaders have the trust of more than 30% of residents of Ontario. Things are so bad that a mainstream news article was written entitled, “Ontarians who don’t like their options can decline to vote — here’s how,” wherein the following is explained:

It’s a form of protest that Ontario residents have the right to, according to Section 53 of the Ontario Election Act, which reads: “An elector who has received a ballot and returns it to the deputy returning officer declining to vote, forfeits the right to vote and the deputy returning officer shall immediately write the word ‘declined’ upon the back of the ballot and preserve it to be returned to the returning officer and shall cause an entry to be made in the poll record that the elector declined to vote.

Essentially, this puts on public record the number of people who went to the trouble of lining up at the polling station in order to voice their dissatisfaction with all of the candidates available. A record 29,442 people exercised this option in the 2014 Ontario elections. It’s a pretty good indication of how disgruntled and frustrated we are.

The Perils Of Working From Within

Some might think that this ‘protest vote’ is what I am advocating here. But it is not. To go through the trouble of registering such a protest is, in my mind, a waste of an hour that could have been spent doing something useful, like planting a tree. The problem with this ‘protest vote’ is that it is designed to quell our frustration and thus stop us from taking more purposeful action. Not only that, but by turning the candidates into scapegoats, the system continues to present itself as the arbiter of our grievances rather than the true and actual source from which our grievances originate.

I would say the same thing about the official doctrine of democratic  participation—writing a letter to your minister of parliament, congressperson or senator—as though they have any power at all to sway the massive ship of state, or even care about your concerns to any degree beyond ensuring their own re-election.

Sure, there are a few renegades within the political systems of our societies that are actively fighting with fiery and perhaps even sincere rhetoric to highlight threats to our freedom and other examples of governmental overreach—Nigel Farage in England comes to mind—but there is no getting around the fact that they still work within the system and their livelihood rests in keeping the system intact. They still must wait their turn, politely limit their speeches to the time allotted, and usually appear to be talking to a half-empty room of representatives, most of whom are busy chatting on their computers or about to fall asleep.

Unless and until these renegades are able to get themselves out of the system and continue to have a platform from which to air their grievances, their words and actions will continue to legitimize the very institution they are criticizing.

Waking Up

Freedom–and real democracy for that matter–are in some ways very foreign to us. We were born into this system. So it’s natural that we don’t expect much more than has been presented to us–although it’s becoming obvious that even the little we once had has started to be taken away. What are some of the things we could expect if we created a real democracy, and had true freedom? The end of secrecy and suppression of those inventions and technologies that could truly help us thrive. The implementation of policy on the part of our governing councils that completely made sense to us, and was generally consistent with our wishes and desires. The elimination of all involuntary tax, and a standard of living for ALL citizens of a nation that would rival that currently enjoyed by the upper class.

But in order to get there, we need to become clear about how our government and our ‘democracy’ have essentially been a tool of manipulation and self-interest at the hands of our world’s powerful corporate and financial elite.

And so, I will reiterate that if we truly want freedom the first step is to the wake up to the fact that voting is an endorsement of this current system that helps it maintain power. Making a conscious effort to disengage as ‘voter’ and completely ignore the unending mainstream polarization that characterizes political coverage is necessary. It will free us up to take a serene, clear-minded look at how we want to live as a collective and talk about alternative possibilities to the way we govern ourselves.

You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete. –Buckminster Fuller

It’s not so difficult for many of us to see that our archaic political system has indeed become obsolete. The ‘how’ and ‘what’ of building a new model is difficult and subtle, and I will be writing about this in a companion article that is coming soon. Suffice it to say, though, that I believe the first step is for all of us to ‘exit stage left’ from the tiresome political drama we have been subjected to, so that we can refocus our time, energy, intelligence and creativity into building a system that works for us all.

Source: Collective Evolution

by

The Mysterious Origin of the Wuhan Coronavirus | The Epoch Times

CHINA-HEALTH-VIRUSIt has been two months since the outbreak of the coronavirus in Wuhan and its spread has shown no signs of slowing down in China. More than 35 Chinese cities have been put on lockdown by Chinese authorities in an attempt to isolate confirmed and suspected cases. The lives of millions of people are in danger as the virus shows signs of spreading further in China as well as internationally.

There are significant gaps in the official investigations into the origins of the novel Coronavirus. In order to contain the virus, one first needs to understand how a virus that allegedly originated in animals found its way to humans. For this to happen, the Chinese authorities need to release their animal testing data and samples. Testing results from animal samples collected at epicenters would give important insights into what animals might serve as intermediate hosts for the new coronavirus.

This is critical to the containment of the epidemic. For example, if rats are the intermediate hosts for this virus, it would be futile to shut down the cities to restrict people’s movements while infected rats are still moving freely. Results from animal samples could also guide policy decisions that would reduce the risk of another outbreak.

An Animal Origin of the Virus

Scientific studies based on phylogenetic analysis have researched the sequence of the novel coronavirus, compared it to other coronavirus sequences, and found it likely originated in bats. Researchers from the Wuhan Institute of Virology found the genome in the virus found in patients was 96 percent identical to that of an existing bat coronavirus, according to a study published in the journal Nature. But there have been other theories as well. One Chinese study suggested, for example, that snakes were the source of transmission to humans. However, many scientists believe that reptiles are a less likely source and that mammals like rats and pigs, and some birds, have been the primary reservoir for coronaviruses.

With this in mind, phylogenetic studies of viral genome sequences need to be supported by animal studies to confirm the origin of the infection, as well as to determine whether there is an intermediate host.

It is not an easy task for a virus to establish zoonotic transmission, and coronaviruses rarely leap from animal to human infection with high transmissibility. There is even less chance to see a coronavirus leap directly from bats to humans. To infect new hosts, mutations need to occur with the viral surface proteins and/or envelope and structural genes, so that the mutated viruses can bind and enter the cells of new species, and efficiently complete the replication cycles in the new hosts.

Some scientists have argued that coronaviruses can jump directly to humans, without mutating or passing through an intermediate species. However, an intermediate host was clearly needed to establish zoonotic transmission to humans in the previous outbreaks of coronaviruses. Many studies suggested that the bat coronavirus jumped from its natural host bats to civets and then to humans during the 2003 SARS outbreak, and it jumped from bats to camels and then to humans for the MERS outbreak. So, civets and camels would serve as intermediate hosts for zoonotic transmission.

Because bats were not sold at the Huanan market in Wuhan—the epicenter of the infection—at the time of the outbreak, this suggests the existence of another intermediate animal host that may have transferred the virus to humans.

What is the most puzzling is that there have been no reports on the testing of animal samples collected in any epicenters in Wuhan, especially at the Huanan seafood market, to identify what animals might be the host or intermediate hosts of this novel Wuhan coronavirus.

Chinese scientists published a report in Lancet recently which stated that “the majority of the earliest cases included reported exposure to the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market” and that patients could have been infected through zoonotic or environmental exposures. Another report on Lancet by Chinese CDC scientists claimed that “on the basis of current data, it seems likely that the 2019-nCoV causing the Wuhan outbreak might also be initially hosted by bats, and might have been transmitted to humans via currently unknown wild animal(s) sold at the Huanan seafood market.”

However, so far, no information was released about the amount, and species, of wild animals present at the Huanan seafood market upon closure; nor about how the animals were managed or disposed of when the market was closed on Jan. 1, 2020. And no information was released about how many animal samples were tested for SARS-CoV or Wuhan Coronavirus via viral nucleic acid testing methods.

Official Chinese state news agency Xinhua reported on Jan. 26 that 33 samples out of 585 environmental samples collected at the Huanan Seafood market were positive for nucleic acids from new Coronavirus, suggesting the virus originated from wild animals or stocks sold there. However, these samples were from the environment—not from animals.

It would be an ultimate failure of the Wuhan public health commission and Chinese CDC if no animal samples were collected and tested prior to, or at the time of, the shutting-down of the Huanan seafood market, where many animals were sold at the time of the outbreak. It would be similar to conducting an investigation on a food-borne disease outbreak without taking restaurant food samples related to the outbreak, and instead taking dining table surface swabs to test.

Background of the Huanan Seafood Market Closure

The 2019-nCoV has caused rapid infection in China and spread to other countries outside China, which has led to a global health crisis.

The Huanan seafood market is known to be a major outlet for the collection and distribution of live and dead wild animals. These included live wolves, hedgehogs, deer, birds, snakes, goats, hares, and boars that were sold and available in the east section of the seafood market.

A Wuhan medical and health committee identified multiple pneumonia cases associated with Huanan seafood market, which were announced on Dec. 31, 2019. The seafood market was closedby the Wuhan government on Jan. 1.

Chinese medical reporters visited the market on Dec. 31, 2019, the evening before its closure on Jan.1 where they observed poor hygiene, and wild animal bodies and organs disposed of in an unorganized manner. This suggested that a relatively large quantity of wild animals were still present at the market upon the forced closure.

No Information on Wild Animals at the Seafood Market Was Disclosed

Yet, no information was released about the amount, and species, of animals present upon closure, how many animals were tested for Coronavirus, and how the animals were managed or disposed of upon the closure of the market on Jan. 1. A Chinese media outlet, Yicai, inquired about the outcome of the wild animals sold at the market and confirmed that there was no disclosure from the Wuhan government.

Dr. Guan Yi, the current director (China affairs) of the State Key Laboratory for Emerging Infectious Diseases at the University of Hong Kong, visited Wuhan on Jan. 21 with the goal of identifying the animal source. He mentioned in a media interview that locals refused to cooperate with him. He pointed out that with the market now closed, it would be difficult to investigate the origin of the virus. He said the “Huanan seafood market was cleaned after the closure, ‘the crime scene’ was gone, and how can you solve a case without evidence?”

Gao Fu, director of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention stated, “it is clear that the source of infection was from wild animals, but we don’t know which species due to closure of the seafood market.”

The Huge Risks of Not Identifying the Original or Intermediate Animal Hosts

The U.S. Center for Disease Control (CDC) stated that “much is unknown about how 2019-nCoV, a new coronavirus, spreads.” So far the understanding is that the major pathway of 2019-nCoV infection is respiratory droplet transmission and contact from humans to humans.

Guan Yi and Kwok-yung Yuen of the University of Hong Kong (HKU) et. al. identified severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV) from caged palm civets from live animal markets in China in 2003. Their studies lead to the subsequent ban on selling civets and the closing of all wild animal markets in Guangdong and helped to confine the SARS epidemic.

Typically, if an animal is identified as host or source of spread of disease, authorities and the CDC would initiate prevention and control measures such as an awareness campaign, proper quarantine of sick animals and disposal of carcasses as well as monitoring the potential route for how the disease spread zoonotically.

Rodents are known to infest seafood markets. For example, tens of thousands of rodents are expected to be unleashed in Japan as one big fish market is closed.

Huanan seafood market is also infested by rodents. If rodents were elucidated as being a potential host for coronavirus, the risk of rats infesting beyond the current quarantine zone still persists. Given the fact that coronavirus was detected from feces from patients from Shenzhen and that bat SARS-like virus strains were isolated from bat feces, the possible fecal-oral route of 2019-nCoV transmission in addition to respiratory droplet transmission would lead to a reasonable warning for people to avoid contact with animals like rats. Thus, if rodents are indeed a source or host of the 2019-NCoV infection, then, rodent contamination of food or water is a potential way for the disease to spread, which needs to be brought to the awareness of the international community.

Similarly, if birds or other species were the hosts of 2019-nCoV in the seafood market, the information pertaining to the species, amount, virus type, biological reactions, and potential routes of spreading of the virus also need to be identified or reported to the world so that appropriate prevention measures could be taken.

It would be serious incompetence and malfeasance if Chinese authorities did not attempt to collect nasal, fecal, and blood samples from animals and birds sold at the seafood market. Testing animal samples would reveal very important information regarding the zoonotic transmission routes, the trends of viral mutations in this outbreak, and the loopholes in the current countermeasures.

Were There Other Epicenters Besides the Huanan Seafood Market?

The Chinese CDC did release data from environmental samples from the seafood market and suggested that “it is originated from wild animals with species uncertain.”

A team which included Dr. Feng from the Chinese CDC published a report titled “Early Transmission Dynamics in Wuhan, China, of Novel Coronavirus-Infected Pneumonia,” in the New England Journal of Medicine on Jan. 29, 2020. The paper stated that “Although the majority of the earliest cases were linked to the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market and the patients could have been infected through zoonotic or environmental exposures…the majority of the earliest cases included reported exposure to the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, but there was an exponential increase in the number of nonlinked cases beginning in late December.”

The Possibility 2019-nCoV Originated From Bat SARS-Like Virus (Bat-SL-CoV)

One recent Lancet report on Jan. 29, 2020, titled “Genomic characterisation and epidemiology of 2019 novel coronavirus: implications for virus origins and receptor binding,” stated that “A Blast search of the complete genomes of 2019-nCoV revealed that the most closely related viruses available on GenBank were bat-SL-CoV-ZC45 (sequence identity 87.99%; query coverage 99%) and another SARS-like betacoronavirus of bat origin, bat-SL-CoV-ZXC21 (accession number MG772934;23 87.23%;” “Notably, the 2019-nCoV strains were less genetically similar to SARS-CoV (about 79%) and MERS-CoV (about 50%).”

This message might be interpreted as 2019-nCoV being biologically closer related to SARS-like betacoronavirus of Bat origin and bats may be the original host of this virus. However, the authors did not claim that the only host to 2019-nCoV is a bat.

The paper stated that “However, despite the importance of bats, several facts suggest that another animal is acting as an intermediate host between bats and humans. First, the outbreak was first reported in late December, 2019, when most bat species in Wuhan are hibernating. Second, no bats were sold or found at the Huanan seafood market, whereas various non-aquatic animals (including mammals) were available for purchase. Third, the sequence identity between 2019-nCoV and its close relatives bat-SL-CoVZC45and bat-SL-CoVZXC21 was less than 90%, which is reflected in the relatively long branch between them. Hence, bat-SL-CoVZC45 and bat-SL-CoVZXC21 are not direct ancestors of 2019-nCoV. Fourth, in both SARS-CoV and MERS-CoV, bats acted as the natural reservoir, with another animal (masked palm civet for SARS-CoV35 and dromedary camels for MERS-CoV) acting as an intermediate host, with humans as terminal hosts. Therefore, on the basis of current data, it seems likely that the 2019-nCoV causing the Wuhan outbreak might also be initially hosted by bats, and might have been transmitted to humans via currently unknown wild animal(s) sold at the Huanan seafood market.”

They mentioned that most bats in Wuhan are hibernating and no bats are sold at the Huanan seafood market. Thus, the chance of physical contact from bats to spread the virus to humans or animals at Wuhan is highly unlikely.

Studies From Wuhan Institute of Virology on Bat SARS-Like CoV.

Zheng-Li Shi and several other researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology published an article in Nature in 2013 titled “Isolation and characterization of a bat SARS-like coronavirus that uses the ACE2 receptor.”

In that study, their team harvested from anal swabs or fecal samples from bats and found 2 strains of sequences from Bat SARS-Like CoVthat termed as RsSHC014 and Rs3367. They process 95% nucleotide sequence identity with human SARS-CoV Tor2 strain.

Isolation of a new bat virus in a study published in the Journal of Virology on Dec. 30, 2015, titled “Isolation and Characterization of a Novel Bat Coronavirus Closely Related to the Direct Progenitor of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus,” found that the virus, named SL-CoV-WIV1, was almost identical to Rs3367 with 99.9% genome sequence identity. The researchers identified that WIV1 can use human ACE2 as an entry receptor and has the potential to infect human cells in this study. Subsequently, the same research group isolated another bat virus that can use ACE2 and infect human cell lines in the lab in 2015.

In addition, Dr. Shi’s group conducted another study in 2018 to address the question of whether some bat viruses can infect humans via using human ACE2, without the need of an intermediate host. But to the date of their study, “no direct transmission of SARS-Like CoVs from bats to people has been reported”.

They collected serum from 218 residents who live close to bat caves with bats carrying the viruses. Those caves were the places where the Shi group collected the virus samples. Then ELISA assays were conducted to detect antibodies to bat SARS-CoV, since antibody existence would suggest a prior exposure to the bat coronavirus. They found that only 6 out of 218 (2.7 %) subjects showed seropositivity, which suggested likely infections to bat SARS-CoVs or related viruses. No clinical symptoms have been manifested in the 6 positive persons in the past 12 months. As a control, they collected 240 samples from random blood donors in Wuhan, 1000 km away from Yunnan, none of the Wuhan blood samples showed any positivity to bat SARS-like CoV.

This data suggests that the chance of bat virus infecting humans is very low, <2.9% if possible, and with no obvious symptoms in human beings that live very close to the bat caves. No infection from a bat to a human has been reported in Wuhan as of 2018.

Track Record of Wuhan Institute of Virology on Engineering ‘Gain-of-Function’ Bat SARS-Like CoV.

Zhengli Shi’s group at the Institute of Virology at Wuhan was successful in isolating two infectious clones of bat SARS-Like CoV: SL-CoV-WIV1 and WIV16 from bats. In their further studies, they found out that these SL-CoV Spike protein (S protein) “[were] unable to use any of the three ACE2 molecules as its receptor; Second, the SL-CoV failed to enter cells expressing the bat ACE2; Third, the chimeric S covering the previously defined receptor-binding domain gained its ability to enter cells via human ACE2, albeit with different efficiencies for different constructs; Fourth, a minimal insert region ( Amino acids 310 to 518 ) was found to be sufficient to convert the SL-CoV S from non-ACE2 binding to human ACE2 binding.”

Therefore, Shi’s group found in a study published in the Journal of Virology in February 2008 that the natural bat coronavirus cannot use the human ACE2 receptor to infect humans. However, when inserted with some amino acids from position 310 to 518 for the bat CoV S protein sequence, the chimeric bat CoV can use the human ACE2 receptor.

Meanwhile, another research group led by Dr. Li published their finding in 2013 that 5 amino acid sites on CoV spike proteins are crucial in making the binding to human ACE2 on SARS virus (those positions are Y442, L472, N479, D480, T487). These 5 sites just lie in the region that the Shi group noted to be important above.

Later, Li and Shi jointly conducted a gain-of-function study published in the Journal of Virology in September 2015 on the MERS virus and a bat virus (strain HKU4) in 2015. Since MERS virus can enter human cells but HKU4 can not, they introduced 2 single mutations in the HKU4 spike protein and found that the new mutant S protein can enable HKU4 to enter human cells. If they mutated 2 sites in MERS spike, the resulting MERS pseudovirus (experimental virus) cannot enter human cells anymore.

Furthermore, Shi’s group joined an international group to generate a chimeric virus with the bat virus SHC014 they harvested in Yunnan. Since they know SHC014 is unlikely to bind to human ACE2, they “synthesized the SHC014 spike in the context of the replication competent, mouse-adapted SARS-CoV backbone”. So, that is a lab-engineered virus with SARS-CoV Mouse adapted backbone (MA15) but with SHC014 spike.

To their surprise, the chimeric virus (SHC014-MA15) can use SHC014 spike to bind to human ACE2 receptor and enter human cells. SHC014-MA15 can also cause disease in mice and cause death as well. Existing vaccines to SARS cannot protect animals from SHC014-MA15 infection. Therefore, these chimeric virus studies can lead to the generation of more pathogenic, more deadly CoV strains in mammalian models.

Due to the U.S. government-mandated pause on the gain-of-function (GOF) studies, this international research did not proceed further at that time. However, there is no evidence that Shi’s group in China stopped any further study on the track of introducing GOF mutations on the CoV. And it is clear that Shi’s group already mastered the reverse-engineering technology that is sufficient to introduce mutation in current SARS-CoV or SARS-Like CoV to create mutant infectious coronavirus.

Interestingly, Shi’s group published on bioRxiv on Jan. 23, 2020 that a new bat coronavirus that they detected in Yunnan, named BatCov RaTG13, shares 96.2 percent overall genome sequence identity with 2019-nCoV. However, this virus was never mentioned or published in their research before.

In the sequence information provided by them in the supplemental material and method section, 3 sequences are shared between the 2019-nCoV they collected and the RATG13 virus but not in any of the other SARS or Bat SARS-Like CoV families in the paper listed. The 3 sequences are located close to N terminus of the spike protein, they are GTNGTKR, NNKSWM, RSYLTPGD.

Possibilities of an Animal Host of 2019-nCoV at Huanan Seafood Market 

One recent Lancet paper titled “Genomic characterisation and epidemiology of 2019 novel coronavirus: implications for virus origins and receptor binding,” reported that “as a typical RNA virus, the average evolutionary rate for coronaviruses is roughly 10⁴nucleotide substitutions per site per year, with mutations arising during every replication cycle. It is, therefore, striking that the sequences of 2019-nCoV from different patients described here were almost identical, with greater than 99.9% sequence identity. This finding suggests that 2019-nCoV originated from one source within a very short period and was detected relatively rapidly.”

With mutations in every cycle, it is highly unlikely for different bats to host viruses with the same sequence. If bats alone are not enough for virus transmission, another animal is needed as the intermediate host, and the chance of the virus being identical is even slimmer. Since the seafood market is not the only source for the outbreak, it is reasonable to postulate that if another animal is the intermediate host for the virus, that animal needs to have contact with bats, allow bat coronavirus to proliferate in them, and, eventually, the animal needs to have the capacity to transmit viruses to human beings who may or may not have contact with the Huanan seafood market.

Therefore, there have been serious questions on whether this Wuhan coronavirus outbreak was due to a leak or mishandling of laboratory animals used in coronavirus studies. This is a reasonable public inquiry regarding the source of the outbreak and it warrants a transparent investigation from the Chinese authorities and foreign disease control and laboratory operation experts. This is not just about the accountability of medical ethics or laboratory safety operations, it is directly related to the current endeavors to contain the virus outbreak.

While the animal host of 2019-nCoV is yet to be identified, the data and information from possible animal hosts and potential zoonic infection is imperative for prevention and controlling disease on an international scale.

The Huanan seafood market has a high potential of harboring the animal host. Animal data and profiling results from the Huanan seafood market need to be disclosed immediately by Chinese authorities even if they are negative results. It is imperative for U.S. CDC and WHO officers to demand that Chinese authorities release the information about animal testing data.

If Chinese authorities refuse to disclose testing data for animal samples, it could imply an intentional cover-up of the true origin of the 2019-nCoV outbreak.

Source: The Epoch Times

by

James Woods Gives Interesting Prediction for Who Will Win the 2020 Dem Primary | Trending Politics

5e3f0f6bcbc90james-woodsJohnny Liberty, Editor’s Note: Watching the Democratic candidates wrestle with each other at the numerous debates we’ve come to the conclusion that none of them are qualified to be President. Also we often thought, as James Woods does, that Hillary is still orchestrating the Democratic Party behind the scenes and might just jump into the fray to “save the day” at the Convention. 

Conservative actor James Woods is back on Twitter and has a lot to say. Woods took a break from the social media platform after he was suspended multiple times by the liberal leaders at Twitter.

On Friday, Woods gave an interesting theory for who he thinks will win the Democratic primary race.

“Just for giggles, imagine this: the #IowaCauscuses were not a snafu, but an engineered ‘cluster muck’ to keep the #Democrat field wide open. The #ImpeachmentSham was a way to air Biden’s corruption. The chaos leads to a brokered convention. Guess which drunken hag saves the day?” Woods tweeted.

According to Woods, Hillary Clinton will swoop in and win the election.

“The #Clintons are like nuclear cockroaches. They can survive anything. Remember you read it here: #HillaryClinton has a solid chance at being the 2020 Democratic presidential nominee in a brokered convention. She’s the Terminator of American politics,” Woods tweeted.

Iowa was a disaster to say the least. So much so that the Associated Press couldn’t even declare a winner. “There is evidence the party has not accurately tabulated some of its results, including those released late Thursday that the party reported as complete. The AP’s tabulation of the party’s results are at 99% of precincts reporting, with data missing from one of 1,765 precincts, among other issues,” they reported.

Check out what the Daily Wire reported:

The results as they stand now show a virtual tie between former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pett Buttigieg and Vermont Democratic socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders, 26.2% to 26.1%. Sen. Elizabeth Warren came in third at 18% and former vice president Joe Biden fourth at 15.8%.

Woods’ theory — that Iowa was no accident and intended to keep the field “wide open” — has been voiced by others, especially Sanders’ supporters. They think the entire process is slanted against their candidate, who got aced out of the 2016 nomination by a biased system set up to ensure a Clinton win.

And on Biden, it’s not the first time speculation has swirled that the whole Ukraine-impeachment fiasco was really intended to take out Biden, not President Trump.

After the smoke cleared about Trump’s July 25 phone call to the Ukrainian president asking for a “favor,” it emerged that Biden’s son Hunter made hundreds of thousands of dollars through his employment with Burisma, the largest private gas company in Ukraine — despite having no known qualifications for the job. And when word spread that a prosecutor was looking into the matter, Biden demanded that the prosecutor be fired.

Biden is on tape discussing his push for the Ukrainian government to fire Viktor Shokin, bragging he had threatened to withhold $1 billion until Shokin was canned. “If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money,” he says he told Ukrainian leaders. “Well son of a bitch, he got fired,” Biden says with a smile in the video clip.

Even though Team Trump and GOP lawmakers never called Biden or his son to testify in the Senate trial, their shady business dealings were front and center. And while Trump’s approval rating went up over the course of the trial, Biden’s plummeted, leading to his dismal fourth-place finish in Iowa.

What’s more, Woods’ theory about a brokered convention could well play out. Even though Clinton is not even in the race, there’s no clear front runner and few in the party are jazzed about their choices. Along the path to the nomination, delegates are distributed proportionally, meaning a candidate who wins 14% of the vote gets 14% of the delegates, and so on. With eight candidates still in the race, it may come down to no candidate winning a majority of the delegates, which means no one would be picked until the Democratic National Committee’s convention in July.

So Woods just might really be on to something here.

Source: Trending Politics

by

Nearly 6 in 10 Americans Say They’re Financially Better Off Now Than a Year Ago | Gallup Poll

shoppers-700x420Americans’ levels of optimism about their current and future personal financial situation have reached or are near record highs, according to a recent Gallup poll.

Nearly 6 in 10, or 59 percent, Americans say they are financially better off now than they were a year ago, which is up from 50 percent last year, according to polling data released on Wednesday. The highest prior record for the same question was in January 1999, at 58 percent, during the dot-com boom where economic conditions were similar. Meanwhile, 20 percent of Americans say they are financially worse off now than a year ago, with 21 percent saying they are financially the same.

The pollster also noted that at least half of Americans rated their personal finances better than a year ago from 1998 to 2000 but this number fell under 50 percent from 2001 to 2018, with a low of 23 percent in May 2009, during the Great Recession.

The data also found that Americans have expressed optimism about their future financial situation, with nearly 3 in 4, or 74 percent, of Americans predicting that they will be better off financially a year from now. Gallup noted this is the highest reading for the question since the question has been asked since 1977. The highest previous record was in 1998 at 71 percent.

The findings align with many of President Donald Trump’s assertion that Americans are doing better under his presidency, Gallup notes. During his State of the Union address on Thursday, Trump touted the burgeoning U.S. economy, tax cuts, low unemployment rates for African Americans, Hispanic Americans, and Asian Americans, growing wages, and job creation through a focus on manufacturing.

“Three years ago, we launched the great American comeback. Tonight, I stand before you to share the incredible results,” Trump said. “In just three short years, we have shattered the mentality of American decline and we have rejected the downsizing of America’s destiny” and the United States is “moving forward at a pace that was unimaginable just a short time ago, and we are never going back,” he added.

The polling data also found that there was a partisan divide in the way Republicans and Democrats see their financial situations, with 76 percent of Republicans reporting that they are financially better off now than a year ago, while only 43 percent of Democrats reported the same. Meanwhile, 83 percent of Republicans expressed optimism about their future financial situation, compared to 60 percent of Democrats who said the same. The pollster found that Independents fell in between with 58 percent expressing optimism about their current personal finances, and 76 percent predicting they will be better off next year.

The data came from the recent Mood of the Nation poll, which was conducted by telephone between Jan. 2 and Jan. 15, with a random sample of 1,014 Americans over the age of 18 across the country. The margin of error for the poll is plus or minus 4 percentage points.

Source: The Epoch Times

by

Lessons From Leprosy For Coronavirus: Quarantine And Isolation Can Backfire | NPR

ap_5202240353_custom-411110ad4e887291bb9734e508582927c20cc275-s1400-c85Hundreds of people returning to the U.S. from Wuhan, China face mandatory two-week quarantines. And in China, the government is rounding up those who show signs of the deadly coronavirus, to be confined in massive quarantine centers.

Protecting public health is a delicate balance between the rights and freedom of individuals and the safety of society. But past efforts to isolate disease show that such moves — as well-intentioned as they might be — don’t always go as planned. And perhaps offer a cautionary lesson.

When my husband’s grandfather was diagnosed with leprosy in Connecticut in 1922, the first thing he did was run away. He packed his things that night and left his family and business behind to move to New York. It was the only state at the time that did not require those with this much-feared infectious disease to be sent to a remote hospital in Carville, La., and confined. By hiding from authorities, he could keep his freedom and presumably go on with his life.

He was not the only one to respond this way. When the U.S. government decided to establish a national leprosarium in 1917, it determined that the best way to contain the bacteria that caused leprosy was to segregate those infected. Since there was no cure at the time, that usually meant confinement for life. Patients were torn from their families and friends. They lost their freedom, as well as their livelihoods, civil rights and the respect of their fellow man. Women who gave birth at the hospital had their babies taken away.

Such dire consequences drove many who suspected, or knew, they had leprosy to conceal it from authorities. They avoided seeking medical assistance and failed to take steps to protect the people they loved from the remote possibility that they too might contract what we now know is a barely contagious disease.

When the federal government sought to identify all the leprosy cases in the country in the early 1900s, it found only 278. But public health investigators told Congress there likely were many more in hiding out of fear. The same year that my husband’s grandfather fled to New York, the assistant surgeon general announced that there were “1,200 lepers at large” in the country. He wanted Congress to give him the authority to round them up.

It turns out that the government’s solution was counterproductive. Instead of containing the disease, it only perpetuated it by discouraging treatment and the search for a cure. In the process, thousands of lives were disrupted and destroyed.

The current effort to contain the coronavirus differs in many ways from what happened to leprosy patients in the last century. Americans who might have been exposed to the virus in China will be quarantined for 14 days, not condemned to a lifetime of isolation. Medical treatment is much improved, and the chance for recovery is good. Still, coronavirus is much more contagious than leprosy, from which 95% of humans are naturally immune. Precautions certainly make sense.

But this latest outbreak raises similar questions to those health authorities grappled with decades ago. Are quarantines and isolation the most effective way to contain a disease? Do they make people more reluctant to identify themselves as potential victims?

“It backfires because people head for the hills,” Wendy Parmet, a professor of health law policy at Northeastern University told NPR’s Rob Stein. “People don’t call and seek health care… And health care providers become fearful of treating patients because they don’t want to get caught up in the quarantine.”

There are other questions too.

Will the U.S. decision to shut its borders to foreigners who have recently visited China do more harm than good? The World Health Organization thinks such travel bans might and has warned against any moves that instill panic and fear.

Perhaps more important, how will those believed to be potential carriers of the virus be treated by those around them? NPR’s Maria Godoy reports that some Asian Americans are already feeling some blowback. One student said she was told to leave a coffee shop and “take the coronavirus with her.”

When Americans feared a potential leprosy pandemic in the late 1800s, people of Asian descent were also unjustly stigmatized. A top Louisiana health official warned — falsely — that Chinese laundrymen were spreading the “loathsome” disease by spitting on their customer’s laundry before it was ironed. A racist labor leader, Denis Kearney, paraded a Chinese man with leprosy through the streets of San Francisco to make his case that “moon-eyed lepers” were a threat to the nation.

Throughout history, those believed to have leprosy, now called Hansen’s disease, were among the most reviled members of society, outcasts sometimes believed to be sinners who brought the illness upon themselves. Even today, the threat of leprosy is used to demonize immigrants and people living in homeless encampments as potential carriers of the disease — although there’s no evidence that’s true.

About 200,000 people around the world are diagnosed each year with Hansen’s disease. Many of them still prefer not to make their diagnosis public for fear of how they’ll be treated by the rest of society. Many delay seeking treatment even though the disease can be quickly cured with antibiotics. Those delays can lead to serious, lifelong disabilities, including the loss of limbs. It turns out that the stigma is still much more dangerous than the disease.

My husband’s grandfather was soon joined in New York City by his wife and children. He lived there for thirteen years before he got so sick that he was taken to the Carville leprosy hospital, the only place in the country that treated the disease. He died there three years later, in 1938. But it was decades before the truth came out. His wife and children were so afraid of the stigma of leprosy and how people would react, they kept his illness a secret for more than 60 years.

Source: NPR

by

Scenes from Wuhan’s Makeshift Hospitals for Coronavirus Patients: Like a ‘Death Camp’ | The Epoch Times

TOPSHOT-CHINA-HEALTH-VIRUS

Johnny Liberty, Editor’s Note: We were travelling in the southern island of Thailand when the Wuhan Coronavirus outbreak was first reported and noticed some of the impacts first-hand. This is a serious crisis. To avoid flying home through China, we rerouted our return flights through Australia and New Zealand.

“There is no medicine, no medical staff, no hot water, very limited food, no heating, unstable electricity… Please help us!” said one patient who was being confined at a makeshift hospital in Wuhan, where the coronavirus first broke out. In a Feb. 6 video posted onto social media, the patient can be heard saying, “This in fact is a death camp!”

Since Feb. 5, the Wuhan government began sending coronavirus patients with mild or moderate symptoms to these makeshift hospitals—called “fangcang” facilities in Chinese—which have been set up in over a dozen stadiums, school gyms, and exhibition centers across the city.

Since the policy was put in place, more and more patients published videos capturing the scenes at these facilities, where there is a lack of treatment and unsanitary conditions.

Some are on the edge of a mental breakdown, and began to destroy furniture out of frustration and anger. Some even began fighting with each other.

Manager Tells the Truth

In another widely circulated Feb. 6 video, a man introduces himself as the manager of a makeshift hospital.

“I’m the person in charge of this place,” he says to a group of patients and their relatives. “In fact, I can tell you, this is only a quarantine place, not a hospital. No one will take responsibility if something bad happens.”

A relative asks him, “If my mom needs an injection, who can help her?” The manager replies, “We can’t resolve such needs because we don’t have medical equipment.”

One patient asks, “What will happen after I finish my medicine?” The manager answered,  “You have to tell your relatives and ask them to bring the medicine here and hand it to the medical staff here. They will then bring the medicine to you.”

The manager repeatedly explained the situation thusly: “We have some medical staff, but we don’t have any medical devices. We can’t treat the patients… You need to stay here calmly and be quarantined.”

In the end, the manager told the patients: “The key point is that you can’t leave here after you’ve entered. Sending you here is to prevent infections [to healthy people]… Relatives, please don’t enter.”

Patients Plead for Help

On Feb. 6 early morning, an elderly patient posted a video where she asks for help. She said that around midnight, she was transferred to a makeshift facility set up inside the Hongshan Stadium.

“Here, there is no bathroom, no medicine, no hot water, no place to wash hands. The only restroom is located outside, which is more than 200 meters [656 feet] away from the building. It’s raining heavily right now,” she said.

“I thought I could receive good treatment after entering a hospital. But the result is just the opposite,” she complained. “Here, it’s full of patients like me. Some have more severe symptoms than me. We must have cross-infected each other.”

The lady said hundreds of patients are staying inside the stadium. Some don’t have a bed and are forced to sleep on a mattress placed on the floor.

“Please save us!” the woman cried.

A Wuhan netizen posted photos that her mother took at the Wuhan International Conference and Exhibition Center, which was converted to accommodate hospital beds. The bathrooms strewn with garbage, as no one is cleaning the facility, the netizen wrote in her post.

She added that the exhibition center was very cold; the roughly one thousand patients inside did not have enough clothes and blankets to warm themselves. The electricity also shut down, so patients couldn’t charge their devices.

In another video, patients can be heard coughing heavily, while others could not stand straight. But there were no medical staff who attended to them.

In yet another shared on Feb. 6, an elderly woman is seen kicking chairs and crying for medicine. The video post said the woman became angry because there were no basic supplies and medical staff.

The 2019 Novel Coronavirus (2019-nCov) first broke out in Wuhan, located in central China’s Hubei Province, in early December 2019. Tens of thousands have been infected within China, while dozens of countries are also reporting cases.

Source: The Epoch Times

by

Gems amid garbage: What’s in the Senate Intelligence report on Obama’s response to 2016 ‘Russian meddling’ | RT

5e3cb3cf85f54005c43b17fd

Johnny Liberty, Editor’s Note: Excellent source material on the origins of the Russian interference in the 2016 elections and the presumptions underlying the impeachment of Trump. Turns out the CIA Director was behind the whole affair and the Democrats were his foot soldiers.

By Nebojsa Malic

Much of the new Senate report about ‘Russian meddling’ in the 2016 election consists of Obama administration officials covering their posteriors – but is also unwittingly revealing about its (false) premises, sources and methods.

A day after its members voted along party lines in the impeachment trial of President Donald Trump, Republicans and Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee joined forces to publish yet another fan-fiction in the ‘Russian meddling in 2016 US presidential election’ saga, this time focusing on the Obama administration’s responses.
The problem obvious right from the start is that the committee presupposes the existence of said meddling, citing the intelligence community assessment commissioned by Obama and Mueller indictments as evidence rather than unproven assertions. The “geopolitical context” of events in the report is a perfect example of how rotten assumptions and circular reasoning lead to garbage conclusions.That said, there are a few revelations in the report that deserve attention. First of all, even while the entire section on page 11 is redacted, a footnote left up reveals that the first to raise the alarm about “Russian meddling” was John Brennan, CIA director at the time. In what must be a remarkable coincidence, he has since become an outspoken TV and Twitter pundit, specializing in accusing President Trump and Republican senators of treason.

Brennan is the one that briefed the congressional “Gang of Eight” over the course of August 2016 – starting with House Democrats Nancy Pelosi and Adam Schiff, then Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid. The Republicans were all briefed “individually” on September 6, along with Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-California) who sat on the Intel Committee. No notes about any of the meetings exist, of course.

Three weeks later, on September 22, Feinstein and Schiff issued a statement that they both “concluded that Russian intelligence agencies are making a serious and concerted effort to influence the US election” (p. 33). The report does not record the administration’s reaction to Schiff and Feinstein getting ahead of the White House, which was supposedly still hoping to address the whole thing with a bipartisan statement.

Schiff then went on to become the leading figure in the Democrats’ efforts to impeach Trump – first citing “Russian collusion” then latching on to the Ukraine phone call.

The report also reveals that the Democratic National Committee (DNC) colluded with the Washington Post to publish the story on June 14, 2016 about the “hacking” of their network (p.5). That is supposedly the first time anyone in the Obama administration found out about the DNC “hack.” This DNC behavior – running to the media before informing the government, which was run by Democrats! – ought to raise eyebrows, but the committee just moves on.

Here is another gem: The official ODNI-DHS statement about “Russian interference” was published at 3:30 PM on October 7, 2016 – a Friday, when news tends to get buried. Exactly 33 minutes later, the Post (them again!) publishes the Access Hollywood tape, intended to be the “October surprise” that sinks Trump’s candidacy. About half an hour later, WikiLeaks drops the first batch of emails from Clinton’s campaign manager John Podesta. The rest is history.

Speaking of WikiLeaks, the section pertaining to them is entirely redacted in the Senate report. Earlier, the committee concluded that WikiLeaks was a “Russian cutout” – again, an assertion without evidence.

Keep in mind that this is the same committee whose understanding of “Russia’s social media-predicated attack against our democracy” was “significantly informed” by, among others, New Knowledge – the very outfit that masterminded an entirely fake ‘Russian meddling’ disinformation campaign during the 2017 special election for the US Senate in Alabama.

Another thing that stands out in the report is how the Obama administration perceived the whole affair. Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and UN Ambassador Samantha Power both compared it to secret meetings prior to the raid on Osama bin Laden, while Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates described it as “very cloak and dagger” (p.13).

Secretary of State John Kerry even wrote a memo proposing a sequel to the Warren Commission (which investigated the JFK assassination) to tackle Russian “attempts” at interference (p.42). Instead, Obama chose to create the handpicked working group that would produce the infamous Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA).

Curiously, the report does not mention at all the FBI’s efforts to spy on the Trump campaign, using FISA warrants predicated on the Clinton-commissioned dossier compiled by British spy Christopher Steele. One would think it ought to, given that it’s a very specific “response” to alleged Russian meddling. Perhaps that’s somewhere in the redacted parts? 

In all seriousness, by now it should be intuitively obvious to even the most casual observer that “Russian meddling” has been a lie all along, foisted on the American people by political operatives and hyper-partisan spies, and that its use in an attempt to de-legitimize a presidency may have done more actual harm to US institutions and political system than anything any external actor could have hoped to achieve. 

That the Senate Intel Committee insists on flogging this particular dead horse even after the impeachment hoax fell on its face suggests that the phantom “Russian” menace is still being used to pursue some other sinister political objective.

Source: RT

by

The Game is Rigged | Counterpunch

32917978597_d9f4330dd6_cJohnny Liberty, Editor’s Note: We publish controversial articles to inspire critical thinking. This is written from an eco-marxist perspective and is a cogent analysis of the Democratic Party and power structures in general. We do not agree with their analysis of Trump, the Republican Party or the impeachment trial.

By Paul Street

Let’s not beat around the bush. The game is rigged. The fix is in.

I’m not just talking about Donald Trump, the Republican Party, the Republican-controlled United States Senate and the fake-impeachment trial that body just concluded. I’m talking about their neoliberal enablers, the Democrats too.

Certain Depressing Things Explained

The deeply conservative corporate and imperialist Democratic Party politics and media complex is determined to deny the progressive neo-New Deal Democrat Bernie Sanders the presidential nomination.

So what if Sanders is the Democratic presidential candidate most likely to organize the working- and lower-class the corporate Democrats – the nation’s Inauthentic Opposition Party of Fake Resistance (IOPFR)– have been betraying demobilizing for decades?

So what if this makes Sanders the most electable candidate against an incumbent president and a party that pose existential fascistic and ecocidal threats to what’s left of democracy, the republic, and life itself?

So what if Sanders’ key policy proposals, including Single Payer health insurance (health care as a human right) and a Green New Deal (to put millions to work trying to roll back the soulless capitalist destruction of livable ecology) are urgently required for the common good and human survival?

So what if Sanders’ proposals are conservative in relation to the savage scale of the inequality and environmental destruction neoliberal class rule has been inflicting for several decades on Americans and livable ecology?

So what if nearly half (47%) of Sanders supporters will not commit to voting for the Democratic presidential candidate in November if it isn’t Bernie, making it likely that any other candidate is likely to usher in the tragedy of a second Trump term?

The Democratic establishment is determined to stop Sanders at all costs. As I’ve been saying for years, the corporate Democrats prefer to lose to the ever more viciously right-wing Republicans and the demented fascist oligarch Trump than to the moderately left wing of their own party.

This is why the establishment Democrats and their many media allies (at the New York Times, the Washington Post, Politico, The Hill, CNN, CBS, ABC, MSNBC, and elsewhere) have issued repeated dire warnings over the supposed “radical Leftism” and “extremism” of the mildly social-democratic Sanders.

It’s why Democratic Party-affiliated funders and media opened the campaign season by touting the clownish center-right dementia victim Joe Biden as their “front-runner.”

It’s why those funders and media shifted to the slimy Wall Street plaything Pete Butiggieg after Biden re-exposed himself and pseudo-liberal Kamala Harris proved unable to stand strong in the “pragmatic” center-right Clinton-Obama-Tony Blair-Emanuel Macron lane.

It’s why the establishment “liberal” media harps constantly on Sanders’ supposed un-electability even as polls show him solidly beating Trump.

It’s why former Barack Obama campaign manager Jim Messina, former global derivatives trader and right-wing MSDNC (I mean MSNBC) host Stephanie (class-) Ruhle, and the noxious neoconservative pundit Bill Kristol recently joined forces on MSNBC to viciously denounce Sanders as “the worst candidate” to run against Trump.

It’s why the Democratic National Committee is working to reinstate the authoritarian veto power of unelected establishment “superdelegates” on the first ballot of the Democratic National Convention – a move clearly driven by establishment fears that Sanders could accumulate enough delegates to sweep to a first ballot victory under current rules.

It’s the reason for the Elizabeth Warren-CNN hit job in the last Iowa Democratic presidential debate – the one where Warren and the cable network conspired to falsely smear Sanders as a sexist.

It’s why MSNBC and CNN went into overdrive trying to portray Sanders’ campaign as “divisive” after Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib responded to Hillary Clinton’s malicious personal attacks on Sanders with an ill-timed reaction MSNBC blew up into “the boo heard around the world.”

It’s why MSNBC and CNN have played along with Hillary Clinton’s despicable and false claim thar Sanders didn’t work hard to help Mrs. Clinton’s (horrific and depressing) campaign during the 2016 general election.

It’s why the Democratic Party has changed its presidential debate qualification rules so that mega-billionaire and center-right Republocrat Mike Bloomberg can ascend to the top candidate stage on a magic carpet of money after skipping the campaign process in the early caucus and primary states.

It’s why the insufferable MSNBC bully Chris Matthews (the Ted Baxter of cable news) lost what little composure he has when Sanders’ campaign co-chair Nina Turner accurately called Bloomberg “an oligarch” (more on this amusing and revealing episode below).

It’s why the New York Times has been running deceptive commentaries warning falsely about the supposed “radical extremism,” “fiscal irresponsibility,” “rudeness” and “nonviability” of Sanders and his backers.

It’s why the California Democratic Party’s centrist managers are doing their best to make it difficult for independents to vote for Sanders, the state’s leading presidential candidate.

It’s probably why the Des Moines Register Star (which endorsed Elizabeth “Capitalist in my Bones” Warren) strangely decided not to release its usual “gold standard” Iowa poll of the state’s first-in-the-national caucus-goers prior to the big (and shockingly wrecked) event last Monday.

It’s why the Times, CNN, and MSNBC (the last outfit is broadcast media’s ground-zero for fake-progressive Wall Street centrism ) tout Butiggieg as the winner of Iowa’s spoiled caucus even though Sanders won the same number of state delegates and triumphed decisively in the popular vote (please see and disseminate Fairness and Accuracy in Media’s reflection on “How Corporate Media Makes Pete Look Like He’s Winning”).

It’s why CNN anchors smirkingly opine that Sanders “under-performed” and “failed to meet expectations” even after he won the Caucus.

Iowa Black-Apped

And it’s likely why the Iowa Caucus got app-f*#^ed, with the contest’s results rendered unavailable to the public for days. The deadly Shadow app’s “failure” and the mind-boggling dysfunction and confusion of the error-ridden count that followed (so extreme that we’ll probably never know the real numbers) robbed Sanders of a momentum-building election night victory speech – and gave Trump another reason to gloat about the pathetic nature of the Democratic Party.

It turns out that the Shadow app that crashed the Iowa Caucus and threw Sanders’ Iowa victory down the media memory hole was less than politically neutral. Hardly known for leftist conspiracy theorizing, USA Today offered some chilling reflections the morning after:

‘What’s this about Shadow and where did the app come from? The app was created by a company called Shadow Inc., and issued by Jimmy Hickey of Shadow Inc., metadata of the program that the Des Moines Register analyzed Tuesday shows. A LinkedIn profile for James Hickey lists him as COO of Shadow and an engineering manager for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign. Two other former Clinton campaign workers, former Gerard Niemira and Krista Davis, co-founded Shadow…The New York Times has reported that ACRONYM – a Democratic nonprofit founded in 2017 “to educate, inspire, register, and mobilize voters,” according to its website – supported Shadow. Its founder and CEO is Tara McGowan, a former journalist and digital producer with President Obama’s 2012 presidential campaign, The Los Angeles Times reported….Iowa Democratic Party Chairman Troy Price, who also worked as Clinton’s 2016 Iowa political director, did not immediately respond to requests for comment Tuesday about the relationship between the party and Shadow, which it paid $63,184 for website development and travel expenses…’

It gets worse. According to the Los Angeles Times, in an article titled “Tech Firm Started by Clinton Campaign Veterans Linked to Iowa Caucus Debacle”: “Among Shadow’s clients is Pete Buttegieg’s presidential campaign, which paid $42,500 to the firm in July 2019 for ‘software rights and subscriptions,’ according to disclosures to the FEC.”

So, Shadow, Inc. got money from Wall Street Pete (from the financial sector via Butiggieg, that is), a former consultant with the infamously dark and globalist McKinsey Company and a onetime U.S. Navy Intelligence Officer.

Further feeding the sense of the Iowa Caucus Debacle as a CIA/military intelligence Black Op, Butiggieg proclaimed himself the Iowa victor with zero precincts reporting last Monday night! How Juan Guaido was that?

It worked. The fact that Sanders won Iowa was turned into a public non-fact. The confusion bought Mayor Pete a couple of days to take some undeserved victory laps across the “liberal” media, boosting him in New Hampshire.

The Democrats Did “More to Undermine Faith in Our Elections than Russia Ever Could”

No talking head has captured the evil of it all more effectively and bitingly than The Hill’s Krystal Ball yesterday morning. Her comments merit transcription and lengthy quotation:

“Let [this sink in]: Twitter is doing a better, more accurate job of tabulating the results than the Democratic Party. What else might be wrong through incompetence, malice, or a combination of both, God only knows. But as if that’s not enough, after Pete claimed a fake victory thanks to the complicity of the Iowa Democratic Party and the media, it turns out that, surprise, surprise, they saved the best precincts for Bernie Sanders to be counted and included last, because of course they did. I’m sure it was all just a coincidence, though, guys. And meanwhile, a new tracking poll shows that Pete’s fake win in Iowa has given him a big boost in New Hampshire, lifting him 9 points in 3 days.”

“What is truly criminal to me, though, is this: the people who gave Bernie Sanders this hard-fought and well-deserved win are people like this: immigrant workers at a pork-processing plant, who had to fight to even be able to cast their ballots in a caucus that conflicted with their work schedule. They were the very first to vote and among the last to be counted. For four days, their voice and their vote were completely erased, as were the Latinos who participated in satellite caucuses and went overwhelmingly for Bernie Sanders. It is absolutely outrageous.”

“Do you remember the endless, three-year rant at RussiaGate and over how a foreign power spending a million or two over a month on lousy, ungrammatical Facebook ads inside a billion dollar election was the biggest threat to our constitutional republic and was material to Hillary’s loss in 2016? Let’s be completely clear here. The Democratic Party in Iowa has done more to undermine faith in our elections than Russia ever could. Period. But don’t expect a Democratic House to hold months-long hearings into the Iowa Caucus debacle. Don’t expect any degree of self-reflection on the part of the party bosses and consultant grifters who deserve to be fired en masse. Instead, the same folks who think they should be able to take the nomination from Bernie with their Superdelegates, the same folks who tweak the process so it suits them, the same folks who are now leaking out partial wrong results in a mockery of manipulation masquerading as transparency…these people will continue to run the Democratic Party in Iowa and elsewhere until and unless an anti-establishment candidate like Bernie throws them all out. ….”

“… Single moms arranged babysitters to participate in this caucus. Nurses gave up shifts, lost 12 hours of pay to participate in this caucus. People rolled in with their wheelchairs. They weren’t with their kids or doing their college homework…Volunteers donated hundreds of thousands of hours of time. Banging on doors, hosting house parties, managing selfie lines, and all for what? So that all that time, all that energy could be turned into a giant joke that makes everyone who participated in the process feel like a fool….”

“People that we invite into this process are made a sacred promise that this activity s meaningful and necessary. And then to watch such manifest incompetence, cronyism, obfuscation, and selective disclosure in what is supposed to be the most critical election of our lifetime makes a joke out of democracy and spread cynicism like the Coranavirus of the civic soul…This whole democracy looks like a Potemkin Village farce where the GOP and Democratic Party insiders seem to almost laugh at the rubes who take this whole thing as serious and sacred.”

I’ve never had the same degree of faith n U.S. electoral politics that Ms. Ball (who would likely and wrongly consider me a victim and purveyor of cynicism) seems to have had in the past, but that is an extremely powerful denunciation of what happened to Sanders and his backers – and the democratic ideal – in Iowa this week.

(At least we know for certain that voters are ready to pull the rusty chain on Joe Pool Chain Biden. Too bad for the companies who were gearing up to mass produce record players for the poor in response to Joe “Record Players for the Poor” Biden’s promise of Vinyl New Deal.)

This is Who the Democrats Are

Butiggieg knows he’s never going to be president. “Alfred E. Neuman’s” role is to muddle public perceptions, screwing Warren and Sanders in the early states to help set up “Mini-Mike” Bloomberg (I am borrowing Trump’s frankly clever nicknames for these right-wing candidate), who is Wall Street’s next Great Stop Sanders Hope in the wake of “Sleepy Joe’s” predictable (and widely predicted) collapse.

MSNBC is cable news central for the IOPFR’s Campaign to Stop Sanders and Re-Elect the Neofascist Trump with Yet Another Centrist Neoliberal Creep. Two days ago, the network’s “Morning Joe” hosts used the very Iowa fiasco that their on-the-ground ideological comrades created to promote Bloomberg and Super Tuesday as the alternatives to “radical” Bernie and the early caucus and primaries. The “progressive” Kissingerian network (I’ve heard MSNBC hosts praise the blood-drenched war criminal Henry Kissinger on numerous occasions) didn’t try hide its corporatist agenda to any serious degree.

“Democrats,” a popular Internet meme featuring pictures of Adam Schiff and Nancy Pelosi runs, “are afraid that American voters are going to interfere in the 2020 election.”

Thank you. Exactly right.

Surprised? You shouldn’t be. The Democratic Party isn’t about social justice, democracy, and/or environmental sanity. It isn’t even primarily about winning elections. “History’s second most enthusiastic capitalist party” (as former Nixon strategist Kevin Phillips once accurately described the Democrats) is about serving “elite” corporate and financial sponsors above all, and those sponsors prefer a second fascistic Trump term to a mildly progressive first Sanders one.

Oligarchs “Take Advantage of a Broken and Dysfunctional System”

In an amusing and telling episode on MSNBC prior to the Caucus, Nina Turner told Chris Matthews that voters worry about “the oligarchs” who buy American elections. “Do you think Mike Bloomberg is an oligarch?!” an outraged Matthews asked. “He is,” Turner retorted. “He skipped Iowa. Iowans should be insulted. Buying his way into this race, period. The DNC changed the rules. They didn’t change it for Senator Harris. They didn’t change it for Senator Booker. They didn’t change it for Secretary Castro.”

Thank you. Exactly right.

Matthews then incredulously asked Turner is she really believed Bloomberg purchased his way into the presidential debates – as if there is the slightest hint of a scintilla of an iota of a sliver of a wisp of a rumor of a scent of doubt about.

After Matthews finished idiotically interrogating Turner, MSNBC anchor Brian Williams turned to MSNBC pundit Jason Johnson. Johnson also disapproved of Ms. Turner’s description of the oligarch Bloomberg as an oligarch.

“Oligarchy, in our particular terminology,” Johnson intoned, “makes you think of a rich person who got their money off of oil in Russia, who is taking advantage of a broken and dysfunctional system.”

You can’t make shit like that up! No, Jason Johnson: imperialist, Russophobic, and American Exceptionalist doctrine and bad reporting make you think that way. Merriam-Webster defines “oligarchy” as: “government by the few; a government in which a small group exercises control especially for corrupt and selfish purposes.” There’s an abundance of solid academic research showing that the United States today fits the definition very well. Here are four for Johnson to start with: Benjamin Page and Martin Gilens, Democracy in America? What Has Gone Wrong and What we Can Do About It (University of Chicago, 2018), Ron Formisano, American Oligarchy: The Permanent Political Class (University of Illinois, 2017); Jeffrey Winters, Oligarchy (Cambridge University Press, 2011, with the United States as a leading case study); Paul Street, They Rule: They 1% v. Democracy (Routledge, 2014).

Concerned about rich people “taking advantage of a broken and dysfunctional system”? Look no further than the world’s self-proclaimed “greatest democracy”! No other “democracy” in the so-called developed world remotely matches the United States of Dark Money when it comes to giving big donors unregulated power in their national electoral processes. Along with other and related characteristics of its election and party system — winner-take-all contests with no proportional representation, rampant partisan gerrymandering of election districts, voter registration problems, corporate media bias and the “federalist” decentralization and partisan control of U.S. election process — this plutocratic campaign finance free-for-all is why the Electoral Integrity Project (a research undertaking funded by the Australian Research Council with a team of researchers based at the University of Sydney and Harvard University) ranks the democratic election integrity of U.S. elections below that of all 19 North and Western European democracies and also below that of 10 other nations in the Americas (Costa Rica, Uruguay, Canada, Chile, Brazil, Jamaica, Grenada, Argentina, Barbados and Peru), 10 nations in Central and Eastern Europe, 9 Asian-Pacific countries, 2 countries in the Middle East (Israel and Tunisia) and 6 African nations. The U.S. ranks dead last among “Western democracies.”

Don’t take it from a radical eco-Marxist like me. As the distinguished liberal political scientists Page (Northwestern) and Gilens (Princeton) showed in their expertly researched 2017 book mentioned above:

“the best evidence indicates that the wishes of ordinary Americans actually have had little or no impact on the making of federal government policy.  Wealthy individuals and organized interest groups – especially business corporations – have had much more political clout.  When they are taken into account, it becomes apparent that the general public has been virtually powerless… Majorities of Americans favor…programs to help provide jobs, increase wages, help the unemployed, provide universal medical insurance, ensure decent retirement pensions, and pay for such programs with progressive taxes.  Most Americans also want to cut ‘corporate welfare.’ Yet the wealthy, business groups, and structural gridlock have mostly blocked such new policies [and programs] (emphasis added).”

The Table is Tilted: Beyond the Cynical Brilliance of George Carlin

It was nice of the professors to quantify and document what working-class Americans have always known: money talks, bullshit walks. My old Finish socialist Aunt Mary (a high school graduate who worked for decades as a department store clerk in downtown Elgin, Illinois) understood Page and Gilens’ point very well. In the famous words of George Carlin:

“There’s a reason education sucks and it’s the same reason that it will never, ever, ever be fixed. It’s never going to get any better, don’t look for it, be happy with what you’ve got. Because the owners of this country don’t want that. I’m talking about the REAL owners, now. The real owners, the big wealthy business interests that control things and make all the important decisions — forget the politicians. The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don’t. You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land, they own and control the corporations; they’ve long since bought and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the State houses, the City Halls; they’ve got the judges in their back pockets, and they own all the big media companies so they control just about all the news and information you get to hear.”

“They gotcha by the balls. They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying — lobbying to get what they want. Well, we know what they want — they want more for themselves and less for everybody else. But I’ll tell you what they don’t want. They don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don’t want well-informed, well-educated people capable of critical thinking. They’re not interested in that, that doesn’t help them. That’s against their interests. That’s right. They don’t want people who are smart enough to sit around the kitchen table and figure out how badly they’re getting f***ed by the system that threw them overboard 30 f***ing years ago. They don’t want that.”

“You know what they want? They want obedient workers. Obedient workers. People who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork, and just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shittier jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, the reduced benefits, the end of overtime, and the vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it. …All day long, beating you over the in their media telling you what to believe — what to think — and what to buy. The table is tilted, folks. The game is rigged. And nobody seems to notice. Nobody seems to care.”

“…They don’t give a fuck about you, they don’t…They don’t care about you – at all. At all, At all. At all. At all. And nobody seems to notice, nobody seems to care … that’s what the owners count on, the fact that Americans will probably remain willfully ignorant of the big red, white and blue d**k that’s being jammed up their assholes every day. Because the owners of this country know the truth — it’s called the American Dream … ‘cuz you have to be asleep to believe it.”

The problem with Carlin’s brilliant rant is of course it’s extreme, well, cynicism. Millions upon millions of Americans do notice and do care. They aren’t asleep. They are capable of critical thinking. They very much want to un-rig the game, level the table, and change the system – make a people’s democratic revolution and save humanity. I run into and talk to and try to energize and learn and get energy from these people regularly. They haven’t surrendered to the American authoritarian-sexist-racist-nativist-nationalist-fascist nightmare yet.

I share with many of these people a basic underlying spiritual sense that giving up and letting the owners – our financial and political owners, yes – win is irrational and indeed morally corrupt. Let’s say the chances of collapsing the nation’s un-elected and interrelated dictatorships of money, empire, white-supremacism, and patriarchy are just 3 or 2 or even 1 in 10 (I think the real odds may be much higher). Why bring them down to zero by giving in to fatalism – to “it’s never going to change?” It makes no sense to give up: you lose nothing by believing in the possibility of democratic transformation and revolutionary change; you lose everything by not believing. Try some radical existentialism!

Tactical Support

Should people caucus and vote for Bernie in the rigged Democratic Party nomination process? Sure, for three reasons. First, there’s a(n admittedly slim) chance Sanders could prevail and lead the enactment of changes that would make a very positive difference in peoples’ lives and capacity to fight back against American Oligarchy, which is now taking significant steps towards openly authoritarian rule.

Second, doing some work with the Sanders campaign puts you in contact with masses of people who are changing all the time (like all phenomena), people-in-process who are capable of engaging on the critical topics of how and why we must move beyond the rigged games and systems that capture and depress our energies and how and why we must begin to organize for a real revolution.

Third, even if he doesn’t win, it’s good to make the screwing over of Sanders as transparent and instructive as possible. This could help motivate millions of Americans to break in revolutionary fashion from a “broken and dysfunctional [American] system” of class rule. It could help spark millions to join a people’s movement that works beneath and beyond the rigged elections cycle and system to heroically reclaim the commons and save humanity.

There’s a lot of good and potentially radical energy out there. It needs to go somewhere positive once the “coffin of class consciousness” (in the words of the radical historian Alan Dawley) that is the American ballot box fails to deliver yes…yet once again. The capitalists hardly restrict their political pressure to the electoral process – just wait to see what happens if Sanders (somewhat miraculously) makes it into the White House. We must and can develop an anti-capitalist (and now anti-fascist) politics that fights back in ways that transcend those savagely time-staggered moments when our owners permit us to make marks next to the names of politicians who can generally be trusted to put their own interests above ours and those of the common good.

“Except for the rare few,” Howard Zinn once wrote, “our representatives are politicians, and will surrender their integrity, claiming to be ‘realistic.’ We are not politicians, but citizens. We have no office to hold on to, only our consciences, which insist on telling the truth.”

Source: Counterpunch

by

Chinese Netizens and Expert Suspect Wuhan Bioresearch Lab Is the Source of the Coronavirus | The Epoch Times

Volunteers in protective suits disinfect a railway station as the country is hit by an outbreak of the new coronavirus, in ChangshaWhen virologists and medical experts around the globe discussed the suspicious nature of the novel coronavirus and pointed to Wuhan’s P4 lab as a likely source, netizens inside China were watching. A Chinese scholar recently challenged Wuhan’s P4 lab to explain how the proteins of the novel coronavirus seem to have been precisely engineered to enable the virus to bind onto human cells. He also disclosed unethical and unprofessional practices he previously observed in China’s bioresearch labs.

According to Wuhan-based Yangtze Daily, Shi Zhengli, Deputy Director of Wuhan’s P4 Lab, publicized a statement on Feb. 2 saying: “I pledge with my life that the 2019 novel coronavirus has nothing to do with our lab. This virus is a punishment imposed on mankind from nature, to condemn mankind’s uncivilized way of living. Those of you who believe rumors or so-called scientific analysis by unqualified researchers, I advise you to shut your damn mouths!”

Shi’s statement irritated many Chinese netizens. “For such a huge calamity that may take countless lives, give us facts and evidence, not pretentious statements such as pledging with your life,” one netizen commented.

A social media user named Wu Xiaohua, with a Ph.D. in biological related fields according to his WeChat profile, challenged Shi to answer key questions about the suspicious gene mutations found in the new virus.

Wu pointed out there is no way that these mutations are the outcome of natural recombination.

“Now, many scientists, including Shi herself, believe that this virus must have originated from bats, and would involve one or two virus hosts to explain the gene mutations. Based on current scientific publications, the virus must jump from rats to primates before it can infect humans. Then how is this step—from rats to primates—usually achieved? It can only be done in a research lab by scientists inserting a certain protein from primates into rats,” Wu wrote.

“I have personally performed the same type of genetic engineering experiments. You cannot get away by being cavalier. Do you dare to accept the challenge and give us an explanation?” he asked.

Wu also disclosed that some biolabs in China are very poorly regulated.

“For instance, some researchers in these labs kept the laboratory dogs as pets; some disposed of animal carcasses casually because following the biosafety rules and cremating them costs a lot of money. Some cut up the laboratory pigs and took the meat home to eat. I know this happened at Beijing 301 Hospital’s spine surgery lab. Worst of all, some laboratory animals were sold to wet markets as wild-caught animals for profit,” he wrote.

Xu Bo, a well-known IT magnate and billionaire in China, cited reports and articles to support Wu’s statements.

In his blog, Xu cited a news report about a lawsuit against biologist Li Ning.

Li is an academician of China Engineering Academy, and a former professor at China Agricultural University. The judgment in Li’s case, which came out on Jan. 2 this year, stated that between 2008 and 2012, Li’s lab sold experimental pigs, cows, and milk to local markets. These animal and animal products were bought using research funds; but Li and his fellow colleagues pocketed the money, a total of 10,179,201 yuan ($1,460,304), from the sale of these animals and animal products.

Li was sentenced to 12 years in prison for embezzlement.

According to a 2016 report from the China Experimental Animal Information Network, Chinese researchers use tens of millions of laboratory animals every year. The Experimental Animal Research Center of Hubei Province alone handles about 300,000 animals a year, either for bioresearch experiments inside the center, or to be sold and distributed to other labs in Hubei Province.

Xu and many other Chinese netizens say they suspect that the novel coronavirus is a genetically engineered virus that somehow escaped from Wuhan P4 Biosafety lab.

A P4 lab handles level 4 biosafety pathogens, the highest level and most dangerous, which have high fatality rates and no known treatments, such as, the ebola and SARS viruses. Such a lab must follow the highest microbiological safety standards to ensure the safety of researchers and the public.

The P4 lab in Wuhan is not only the first of its kind in China, but also the first in Asia. When it opened in 2017, U.S. scientists expressed concerns that, considering China’s opaque administrative structure, if one of those killer viruses “escaped” from the lab, it could cause a doomsday disaster.

Source: The Epoch Times