Why One Nuke Is Never Enough – Myth of the Overkill
We have the best view yet of Covid-19’s origins. What should we do about it?
“In two February preprint papers, first reported by the New York Times, researchers traced the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, the pathogen that causes Covid-19, in 2019 in Wuhan. One study looked at initial infections at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, where the first cases were detected. The other examined the genomes of the earliest strains of the virus. Around the same time, researchers from the Chinese Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published their own findings from virus samples they collected from animals and the environment around the market in early 2020.
In addition to seafood, vendors at the market sold live animals, including those collected from remote wilderness areas.
Together, the studies connect the dots of transmission at the epicenter of the pandemic, observing that the virus likely made the leap from animals to humans more than once. “Once you understand that there were infected animals in the market, then multiple spillovers are not just a possibility, they’re what you would expect at that point,” Robert Garry, a virologist at Tulane University and a co-author on both papers, told Vox.
The studies’ conclusions contradict some early reports that the Huanan market was not the original locus of Covid-19. The results also echo how scientists think the first SARS virus spread to humans in 2002. According to Garry, they make the possibility that the outbreak began with a leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology much less plausible.”
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“while researchers have narrowed down the location in the market where the outbreak likely began and have identified several potential animal hosts, they still haven’t found the specific animals that were infected. And though scientists have found several related viruses in the wild, they haven’t found one yet that they think could have directly spawned SARS-CoV-2.”
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“it may not be possible to find out since the specific infected animals were likely culled. “You’d have to be a time traveler or something like that to go back and see,” Garry said.”
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“The lab leak hypothesis holds that SARS-CoV-2 escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a facility roughly eight miles from the Huanan market. Proponents of the theory point to several factors. Researchers there were known to be studying bat coronaviruses. Specifically, they documented a bat coronavirus called RaTG13. Discovered in 2013, it has a genetic sequence with 96 percent overlap with SARS-CoV-2.
Scientists at the Wuhan Institute were also conducting experiments under lower safety conditions than most scientists would recommend for respiratory viruses. Some researchers argue that the types of experiments they were conducting constitute gain of function, where a virus is engineered to become more infectious.
Circumstantially, pathogens have escaped from Chinese laboratories before. And the Chinese government’s actions have added to the suspicions. They may have covered up the extent of the original outbreak, and international investigators have complained that the Chinese government still has not been fully transparent with what happened during the early days of the outbreak.
However, there appears to be no evidence the Wuhan Institute of Virology had an actual isolated sample of SARS-CoV-2, nor did they have any live ancestor to the virus, including RaTG13. They only recorded the genetic sequence.
The latest studies show also that the earliest clusters of the virus were concentrated in a specific area of the Huanan market. If the virus were introduced by a person from outside the market, environmental samples testing positive for SARS-CoV-2 would likely have been spread out more through the building.
In addition, the fact that two distinct lineages emerged in the early outbreak would require that someone from the lab would have had to introduce two different versions of the virus to the lab on two separate occasions.
“The simplest explanation is that infected animals infected people,” Garry said. “You have to go through quite a bit of mental gymnastics to go ‘it came from the lab to the market,’ and you have to believe that happened twice.””
“My children love being Texans”: A father of a trans teen weighs whether his family can stay
https://www.vox.com/22970762/texas-trans-investigation-child-abuse-abbott
Inheriting bitcoin is harder than it sounds
“The nature of cryptocurrency makes it complicated to pass down. Cryptocurrency is usually stored on the blockchain, a digital ledger that’s formed by a network of computers throughout the world that record transactions, including the exchange of cryptocurrency. People usually make these transactions by using public and private keys. Public keys work like bank account numbers, and serve as an address that you can use to send other people crypto. Private keys work like passwords, and are made of unique, extremely long strings of characters that unlock your crypto. Unlike other types of passwords, however, private crypto keys can’t be recovered once they’re lost or forgotten. That means that without those keys, people who are entitled to inherit their loved one’s crypto won’t be able to get it.”
More States Are Proposing Single-Payer Health Care. Why Aren’t They Succeeding?
“Health care policy researchers Erin C. Fuse Brown and Elizabeth McCuskey tracked the number of unique single-payer bills introduced in state legislatures across the country from 2010 to 2019, finding a sharp uptick in bills introduced since 2017. During each of those three years, at least 10 single-payer proposals were introduced, according to Brown and McCuskey’s research, for the first time since 2013. In total, state legislators proposed more single-payer bills from 2017 to 2019 than in the previous seven years combined. And for 2021, we’ve identified 10 single-payer bills that legislators introduced across the country, from liberal states like California and Massachusetts to more conservative ones including Iowa and Ohio.1
What do all these proposals have in common? They’ve all universally failed. In fact, Vermont, the only state that managed to pass single-payer health care in 2011, ended up shelving its plan three years later.”
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“passing single-payer health care at the state level is next to impossible, as states are particularly limited in how they can allocate federal and private health care funds. There is, however, evidence that Americans may have an appetite for a public option, or government-run health insurance that people can opt into at the state level. Three states (Colorado, Nevada and Washington) have already passed a public option. It’s not single-payer health care reform, but it’s possible that we might see more states adopt their own public-option reforms.
One big reason single-payer proposals haven’t caught on at the state level is because finding a reliable way to pay for such a program is challenging. Single-payer advocates originally envisioned a federal proposal that would cover all Americans under a more generous version of a preexisting program — that is, Medicare, but now for all. Doing this state-by-state would require each state to apply for waivers to divert federal funds used for Medicare, Medicaid and Affordable Care Act exchanges to be used for their own single-payer plans. And that’s tricky because the Department of Health and Human Services has wide discretion to approve or deny states’ requests, which makes any proposal highly dependent on the national political climate.”
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“Employer-sponsored health insurance plans, which cover 54 percent of Americans, are another hurdle for states trying to pass single-payer health care. Federal law largely prevents states from regulating employer-provided health insurance, so states can’t just stop employers from offering their own health care benefits. The exact scope of this law has been litigated for decades, but suffice it to say that it’s successfully put the kibosh on many statewide health care reforms. Single-payer health insurance is particularly tricky as there’s no way to get everyone onto the plan without first changing how private insurance works. States have tried to address this through measures like increasing payroll taxes or restricting providers’ ability to accept reimbursement from private insurance plans. But the more elaborate these mechanisms get, the more complicated it becomes to implement — and the more people that could slip through the cracks.
Finally, another big financial barrier is that state governments have far less leeway than the federal government to increase budgetary spending. That means tax increases, which come with their own political challenges, are often necessary for states to secure the funding they need.”
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“All of this creates a daunting picture for statewide single-payer health care.”
Greg Abbott Has Used Migrants as Political Pawns Again and Again. Now, He Says He’ll Bus Them to Capitol Hill.
“Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has long held that his state is facing an “invasion,” which consists of thousands of migrants crossing into the United States from Mexico over the Rio Grande. Now, in an attempt to resist “the Biden open border policies” he claims are endangering Texans and compromising national security, Abbott is prepared to implement a policy that drew scrutiny as soon as he announced it.
“To help local officials whose communities are being overwhelmed by hordes of illegal immigrants,” said Abbott, “Texas is providing charter buses to send these illegal immigrants who have been dropped off by the Biden administration to Washington, D.C.””
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“immigration advocates and those with a passing respect for individual rights pointed out that Abbott’s proposal, as stated, is both immoral and illegal. Transporting migrants across state lines against their will “sounds dangerously close to federal felony kidnapping,” argued Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, senior policy counsel at the American Immigration Council. Further, Title 8 of U.S. Code Section 1324(a) states that “any person who…knowing or in reckless disregard of the fact that an alien has come to, entered, or remains in the United States in violation of law, transports, or moves or attempts to transport or move such alien within the United States by means of transportation or otherwise…shall be punished.”
Perhaps those snags are why the governor’s office has since softened its tone on busing migrants north. A press release published after the press conference stressed that “a migrant must volunteer to be transported” in order to board a bus or flight to Washington, D.C.”
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“the new busing policy sits atop a heap of misguided, expensive, and dubiously legal initiatives the governor has undertaken in order to keep migrants out of his state—people who have the right under U.S. immigration law to seek asylum in Texas.
This policy comes from the man who proposed building a border wall of his own after former President Donald Trump’s never came to fruition. Abbott’s project, which is ongoing, ran into many of the same issues as Trump’s—exorbitant costs, tension between federal and state jurisdiction, and the need for egregious eminent domain claims in order to get the job done (not to mention a lack of widespread support). “The elected officials in border communities don’t support [Abbott’s] plans,” American Civil Liberties Union of Texas attorney David Donatti told Reason last year.
The governor’s border-securing mission—Operation Lone Star—has been similarly fraught. While Abbott and other state officials bragged about “more than 11,000 criminal arrests, drug seizures that amount to millions of ‘lethal doses,'” and tens of thousands of undocumented immigrant referrals to the federal government for deportation, watchdogs reported “arrests of U.S. citizens hundreds of miles from the border,” “claiming drug busts from across the state,” and changing statistics and metrics of success, according to The Texas Tribune. Several Texas National Guard soldiers stationed at the border committed suicide during the operation, while dozens more criticized the mission’s execution in an internal survey. With its spotty track record, the still-active Operation Lone Star costs taxpayers more than $2.5 million each week.
With that background in mind, it isn’t surprising that Abbott would opt for a blusterous anti-migrant spectacle that comes at the expense of Texas taxpayers and neglects any humanitarian or legal obligations to asylum seekers.”
Conservatives Say They Care About the Constitution. Until They Talk About Criminal Justice.
“GOP senators who are attacking President Joe Biden’s Supreme Court pick seem weirdly unaware of how our justice system works. By focusing in part on Ketanji Brown Jackson’s former role as a criminal defense attorney, they act as if it’s wrong to provide a defense to people accused of a crime—and that if the government levels a charge, it must be right.
Hey, if you haven’t done anything wrong, you have nothing to fear—or something like that. “Like any attorney who has been in any kind of practice, they are going to have to answer for the clients they represented and the arguments they made,” Sen. Josh Hawley (R–Mo.) said in reference to Jackson and other Biden nominees. Apparently, defense attorneys should only defend choirboys.
Yet I guarantee if Hawley—known for his fist pump in support of Jan. 6 protestors at the U.S. Capitol—became the target of an overzealous prosecutor who accused him of inciting an insurrection, he’d be happy to have a competent defense attorney to advocate on his behalf. That attorney shouldn’t be forever stained for defending someone as loathsome as Hawley.”
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“Jackson will be the nation’s first Supreme Court justice to have served as a public defender, with Thurgood Marshall being the last justice to have criminal defense experience.”
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“A study last year by the libertarian Cato Institute found the Trump administration’s judicial appointments tilted in favor of prosecutors over those who represented individuals by a 10-to-one margin. Only 14 percent of the liberal Obama administration’s appointees defended individuals. Most judges strive to be fair, but their backgrounds color their worldview.”
Questionable SWAT Raid Leaves a Toddler Injured and His Father Facing Attempted Murder Charges
“The government insists that its citizens have a Second Amendment right to defend their homes, but it also insists that armed agents of the state may break down one’s door in the middle of the night with little to no warning. So if a groggy, scared citizen, jolted out of bed by the sound of men shouting and the front door coming off its hinges, exercises that right against what he or she could reasonably assume to be violent intruders, the homeowner can be held criminally liable—and that includes capital punishment. In 2006, former Reason writer Radley Balko detailed the case of Cory Maye, a Mississippi man sentenced to death for fatally shooting a police officer during a no-knock drug raid. As Reason has argued continually over the years, these sorts of raids, especially when used for narcotics search warrants and non-violent offenses, put both officers and civilians at needless risk, occasionally with tragic results.”
Texas Classifies Medical Treatment of Trans Minors as Abuse, Threatens Parents, Orders Caregivers To Snitch
“Texas Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton has declared all medical treatment of transgender minors to be child abuse and says that his office could prosecute parents of transgender children, as well as “mandatory reporters” who fail to report medical treatment of transgender children to the state. In tandem, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott has urged state officials to begin investigating any families that may be giving their trans kids puberty-blocking drugs or hormones, or allowing them to undergo surgical treatments.”
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“Paxton’s argues that helping a child transition can cause them physical and psychological damage and that it deprives the child of the “right to procreation.” Essentially, Paxton is borrowing from the argument against forced sterilization, which he references, as an argument against voluntary trans medical treatment.
However, no one believes that any child—or adult—should be exposed to these treatments against their own wishes. To the extent that minors in Texas are receiving medical treatment for trans issues, it is likely because they requested it. Meanwhile, physicians in the U.S. are largely aligned behind the idea that sex reassignment surgery should not take place until a patient is 18.
But Paxton’s policy announcement is not meant to prevent surgeries that mostly are not happening. He’s also going after the use of puberty-blocking drugs and hormone treatments, which do begin when transgender patients are still minors, and the effects are more easily reversed. Drug therapy is not equivalent to surgery, and it appears Paxton has lumped them together in order to confuse the issue and undermine the legitimacy of any kind of transgender health care.”
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“What about the rights of patients? And of parents? Paxton’s memo argues that the Texas “Legislature has not provided any avenue for parental consent, and no judicial avenue exists for the child to proceed with these procedures and treatments without parental consent.”
Apparently, it’s impossible to consent to your child receiving medical care without the Texas Legislature passing a new law. That’s an interesting version of conservatism.”