BF2S Forums Presidential Election 2016

An analysis published in Nature Medicine on 17 March discusses several unusual features of the virus, and suggests how they likely arose from natural processes. For starters, when performing experiments that seek to genetically modify a virus, researchers have to use the RNA of an existing coronavirus as a backbone. If scientists had worked on the new coronavirus, it’s likely that they would have used a known backbone. But the study’s authors report that no known viruses recorded in the scientific literature could have served as a backbone to create SARS-CoV-2.

To enter cells, coronaviruses use a ‘receptor binding domain’ (RDB) to latch onto a receptor on the cell’s surface. SARS-CoV-2’s RBD has sections that are unlike those in any other coronavirus. Although experimental evidence — and the sheer size of the pandemic — shows that the virus binds very successfully to human cells, the authors note that computer analyses of its unique RBD parts predict that it shouldn’t bind well. The authors suggest that as a result, no one trying to engineer a virus would design the RBD in this way — which makes it more likely that the feature emerged as a result of natural selection.

The authors also point to another unusual feature of SARS-CoV-2, which is also part of the mechanism that helps the virus to work its way into human cells, known as the furin cleavage site. The authors argue that natural processes can explain how this feature emerged. Indeed, a similar site has been identified in a closely-related coronavirus, supporting the authors claim that the components of SARS-CoV-2 could all have emerged from natural processes.

The analyses show that it is highly unlikely that SARS-CoV-2 was made or manipulated in a lab, says Kristian Andersen, a virologist at Scripps Research in La Jolla, California, and the lead author of the paper. “We have a lot of data showing this is natural, but no data, or evidence, to show that there’s any connection to a lab,” he says.

Last edited by uziq (2020-09-23 03:55:40)

The US offers a disturbing model of what can happen when political and media interests converge. As the investigative journalist Jane Mayer detailed in a piece for the New Yorker last year about the relationship between Fox News and the present White House, Murdoch and Trump found common cause in the creation of eye-catching and lucrative news content. What Murdoch wanted from Trump wasn’t policy favours or ideological conformity – the main fear surrounding Murdoch’s influence in the UK over recent decades – but higher ratings, something that Trump has resoundingly delivered. In return, Fox has given Trump an endlessly supportive platform and sure-fire lines to take.

As America teeters on the edge of authoritarianism, with barely a murmur of protest from the Republican Party, one wonders at what point the seeds of the current disaster were sown. When did the American right first take the path that has led to a third of Republican voters believing the QAnon conspiracy theory that the president is battling a global network of Satanic child sex traffickers that connects Hollywood, the Clintons, Pope Francis and the Rothschilds? What went wrong, to allow a Republican president to claim without fear of censure that his electoral opponent is controlled by people in the ‘dark shadows’, that ‘anarchists’ are now governing major US cities, and that nobody is going to ever know the real result of the election (but that he’ll definitely win)?

Various origin stories could be told, but the middle years of the Clinton presidency – when Newt Gingrich declared a permanent war of attrition against the White House – stand out as a moment when a new madness was unleashed. It was in 1996 that Fox News was launched, feeding the rage of the American right with a daily catalogue of the damage their liberal, atheist, cosmopolitan enemies were seeking to inflict on the traditional American way of life. This rage has been a resource available to every Republican politician since, whether or not they chose to exploit it. The difference with Trump was that he didn’t just exploit it: he amplified it.

Britain may comfort itself that it is a long way from the political abyss that America is now staring into. But elements of the same delirious conservative resentment are nevertheless at large, invigorated by Brexit and accelerated by social media. A British equivalent of Fox News, wherever it may come from, would have its own distinctive character – less evangelism and more Elgar, fewer guns and more poppies – but the commercial and political logic would be the same. The ratings for Fox News’s live coverage in October 2018 of what Trump referred to as the migrant ‘caravan’ travelling from Mexico exceeded the peak pre-election ratings of October 2016. This year in the UK, Nigel Farage, by dint of the zero-budget method of tweeting from the White Cliffs of Dover, managed to lure teams of news reporters out into the English Channel to capture live footage of asylum seekers in dinghies. Think what could be done with a dedicated TV news team.

The conservative press and its online outliers (such as Breitbart and Spiked) have already done the job of establishing the issues that suck in attention: traditions being ‘banned’, identities ‘threatened’, histories ‘rewritten’. The notion of a ‘woke’ conspiracy linking universities, the BBC, the Remain campaign and what the Home Office recently referred to as ‘activist lawyers’ is too popular and too lucrative to be abandoned, no matter what policy reforms may be made to broadcasting, higher education or immigration. If anything, this monster thrives on an absence of effective policy, which nourishes the sense that ‘the people’ are still having their wishes obstructed by unelected elites. The thought that has taken hold among the new generation of conservative gurus, such as Tim Montgomerie and the former May adviser Nick Timothy, is that liberalism (sometimes confusingly equated with Marxism) is so powerful a force in British public life as to be impossible to dislodge, despite Brexit and ten years of Conservative government. Cultural defeats are intoxicating, politically potent and, above all, great for ratings.

Last edited by uziq (2020-09-26 05:28:16)

SuperJail Warden wrote:

I got the NYT alert on my phone

\_/

This won't change any of the minds of his supporters.