“In 2019, a new coronavirus (2019-nCoV) infecting Humans has emerged in Wuhan, China. Its genome has been sequenced and the genomic information promptly released. Despite a high similarity with the genome sequence of SARS-CoV and SARS-like CoVs, we identified a peculiar furin-like cleavage site in the Spike protein of the 2019-nCoV, lacking in the other SARS-like CoVs. In this article, we discuss the possible functional consequences of this cleavage site in the viral cycle, pathogenicity and its potential implication in the development of antivirals.”
Writing in The Wall Street Journal (https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-science-suggests-a-wuhan-lab-leak-11622995184) on Sunday, June 6, 2021, Dr. Steven Quay and Professor Emeritu Richard Muller, cite the findings in Courtard et al (2021) reporting the gain-of-function “smoking gun: the double CGG sequence never observed in nature.
Here is their paper:
The possibility that the pandemic began with an escape from the Wuhan Institute of Virology is attracting fresh attention. President Biden has asked the national intelligence community to redouble efforts to investigate.
Much of the public discussion has focused on circumstantial evidence: mysterious illnesses in late 2019; the lab’s work intentionally supercharging viruses to increase lethality (known as “gain of function” research). The Chinese Communist Party has been reluctant to release relevant information. Reports based on U.S. intelligence have suggested the lab collaborated on projects with the Chinese military.
But the most compelling reason to favor the lab leak hypothesis is firmly based in science. In particular, consider the genetic fingerprint of CoV-2, the novel coronavirus responsible for the disease Covid-19.
In gain-of-function research, a microbiologist can increase the lethality of a coronavirus enormously by splicing a special sequence into its genome at a prime location. Doing this leaves no trace of manipulation. But it alters the virus spike protein, rendering it easier for the virus to inject genetic material into the victim cell. Since 1992 there have been at least 11 separate experiments adding a special sequence to the same location. The end result has always been supercharged viruses.
A genome is a blueprint for the factory of a cell to make proteins. The language is made up of three-letter “words,” 64 in total, that represent the 20 different amino acids. For example, there are six different words for the amino acid arginine, the one that is often used in supercharging viruses. Every cell has a different preference for which word it likes to use most.
In the case of the gain-of-function supercharge, other sequences could have been spliced into this same site. Instead of a CGG-CGG (known as “double CGG”) that tells the protein factory to make two arginine amino acids in a row, you’ll obtain equal lethality by splicing any one of 35 of the other two-word combinations for double arginine. If the insertion takes place naturally, say through recombination, then one of those 35 other sequences is far more likely to appear; CGG is rarely used in the class of coronaviruses that can recombine with CoV-2.
In fact, in the entire class of coronaviruses that includes CoV-2, the CGG-CGG combination has never been found naturally. That means the common method of viruses picking up new skills, called recombination, cannot operate here. A virus simply cannot pick up a sequence from another virus if that sequence isn’t present in any other virus. [Emphasis added]
Although the double CGG is suppressed naturally, the opposite is true in laboratory work. The insertion sequence of choice is the double CGG. That’s because it is readily available and convenient, and scientists have a great deal of experience inserting it. An additional advantage of the double CGG sequence compared with the other 35 possible choices: It creates a useful beacon that permits the scientists to track the insertion in the laboratory. [Emphasis added]
Now the damning fact. It was this exact sequence that appears in CoV-2. Proponents of zoonotic origin must explain why the novel coronavirus, when it mutated or recombined, happened to pick its least favorite combination, the double CGG. Why did it replicate the choice the lab’s gain-of-function researchers would have made?
Yes, it could have happened randomly, through mutations. But do you believe that? At the minimum, this fact—that the coronavirus, with all its random possibilities, took the rare and unnatural combination used by human researchers—implies that the leading theory for the origin of the coronavirus must be laboratory escape.
When the lab’s Shi Zhengli and colleagues published a paper in February 2020 with the virus’s partial genome, they omitted any mention of the special sequence that supercharges the virus or the rare double CGG section. Yet the fingerprint is easily identified in the data that accompanied the paper. Was it omitted in the hope that nobody would notice this evidence of the gain-of-function origin? [Emphasis added]
But in a matter of weeks virologists Bruno Coutard and colleagues published their discovery of the sequence in CoV-2 and its novel supercharged site. Double CGG is there; you only have to look. They comment in their paper that the protein that held it “may provide a gain-of-function” capability to the virus, “for efficient spreading” to humans.
There is additional scientific evidence that points to CoV-2’s gain-of-function origin. The most compelling is the dramatic differences in the genetic diversity of CoV-2, compared with the coronaviruses responsible for SARS and MERS.
Both of those were confirmed to have a natural origin;the viruses evolved rapidly as they spread through the human population, until the most contagious forms dominated. Covid-19 didn’t work that way. It appeared in humans already adapted into an extremely contagious version. No serious viral “improvement” took place until a minor variation occurred many months later in England. [Emphasis added]
Such early optimization is unprecedented, and it suggests a long period of adaptation that predated its public spread. Science knows of only one way that could be achieved: simulated natural evolution, growing the virus on human cells until the optimum is achieved. That is precisely what is done in gain-of-function research. Mice that are genetically modified to have the same coronavirus receptor as humans, called “humanized mice,” are repeatedly exposed to the virus to encourage adaptation. [Emphasis added]
The presence of the double CGG sequence is strong evidence of gene splicing, and the absence of diversity in the public outbreak suggests gain-of-function acceleration. The scientific evidence points to the conclusion that the virus was developed in a laboratory.
Dr. Quay is founder of Atossa Therapeutics and author of “Stay Safe: A Physician’s Guide to Survive Coronavirus.” Mr. Muller is an emeritus professor of physics at the University of California Berkeley and a former senior scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998)
Hunter Thompson’s epic novel(?) turned into Depp-flick a couple of decades ago. Seems prescient of today’s pseudo-science madness fueled by the Federal money machine and run by civil servants.
Scientists at the Wuhan lab claim they were bitten by bats and spattered with blood.
The Chinese state-run TV broadcast a footage (watch full broadcast below) which showed researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology handling bats while disregarding the use of personal protective equipment.
The footage that first aired in China on Dec. 29, 2017, long before the pandemic began cuts to a clip of a person’s limb badly swollen.
From 4:45 to 4:56, a scientist can be seen holding a bat with his bare hands. Team members from 7:44 to 7:50 can be seen collecting potentially highly infectious bat feces while wearing short sleeves and shorts and with no noticeable personal protective equipment (PPE) other than gloves.
Wuhan Institute of Virology researchers handling bats with nitrile gloves. (CCTV screenshot)
The narrator then states that even though the scientists are wearing gloves, the risk of being injured by a bat bite “still exists.” Meanwhile, virus expert Cui Jie explains (from 8:47 to 8:50) how being bit by a bat was “like being jabbed with a needle.”
Swelling on team member’s limb after bat bite. (CCTV screenshot)
Last yearGreatGameIndiareported how one of the researchers at the WHCDC (Wuhan Hygiene Emergency Response Team)described quarantining himself for two weeksafter a bat’s blood got on his skin. That same man also quarantined himself after a bat urinated on him.
He also mentions discovering a live tick from a bat – parasites known for their ability to pass infections through a host animal’s blood.
The WHCDC was also adjacent to the Union Hospital where the first group of doctors were infected during this epidemic.
The controversial Chinese Wuhan lab was grantedpatent for Bat Cages to conduct secret virus experiments just months before COVID-19 outbreak. The patent also deliberated the transmission methods of SARS-Cov, including cross-species transmission.
The video, which was broadcast in November, 2015, showed how Chinese scientists were conductingbiological experiments on a SARS connected virus believed to be Coronavirus, derived from bats and mice, asking whether it was worth the risk in order to be able to modify the virus for compatibility with human organisms.
China has been for long conducting secret Frankenstein-stylehuman-animal hybrid experimentscreating super viruses, human-monkey hybrids, human head transplants on monkeys and pigs, gene-editing babies, super soldiers etc.
Most of these experiments are exported out of western countries since they were shutdown in the west due to heavy criticism.
– where the Scientific Establishment meets its r/WallStreetBets –
How a rag-tag team of internet researchers and sleuths came together on Twitter as a scientific anarchist collective to fight back against mainstream bamboozlement around the origins of COVID-19, and help spread the word about the dangers posed by unchecked gain-of-function research. Read the Washington Post‘s endorsement of our work here.
(Three peer-reviewed papers later, including the first to argue for the plausibility of a laboratory origin, maybe we’ve been on to something?)
When individuals act like they’re personally able to void peer review and like they’re above the rest of the scientific community, progress does not happen. Without peer review the scientific community loses almost all of its meaning, and it’s almost impossible to imagine anything more damaging to the fabric of scientific progress and trust than statements like this from individuals who believe they alone can overrule entire editorial boards.
“In my more than four decades as a practicing scientist I have never felt this sense of bewilderment and concern over the conduct of other professionals, and especially now in the middle of a pandemic that has no end in sight – to have the scientific community act with such apparent duplicitous intent, in a possible effort to secure their own access to billions of dollars of funding is truly disconcerting, a feeling I would expect to be shared by everyone who considers themselves a part of the wider scientific community…”
Way back in the summer of 2020, a few weeks after their peer reviewed article was published in August, this email group full of strangers first made contact. This would’ve been around the same time as work began on the first mainstream article that pretended that Zero Hedge’s reporting and everything done by DRASTIC had never happened, including the peer reviewed publications which explored the role that gain-of-function research may have played.
An article that can be directly tied to the Broad Institute and their likely pursuit of gain-of-function research on the human genome, just as both Gigi Kwok-Gronvall and Richard Danzig can be directly tied to John Hopkins’ COVID Tracking Project which has pointedly ignored all of the peer reviewed research which suggests a lab origin and in the process disparaged Dr. Sirotkin’s credentials, as well as this massive $10 billion defense contracting proposal which hinges on the idea that COVID-19 has a natural origin.
Real Time with Bill Maher on HBO pushes the discussion about a possible laboratory origin even farther into the mainstream.
2/1: Back under his original handle, the DRASTIC technical guru formerly known as Dr. Flavinkins regains his old Twitter handle, Daoyu, and publishes a large report on the nearly countless episodes of laboratory contamination throughout the WIV compound, which may help explain many of the anomalous findings nominally about COVID-19’s unique genome:
“…a closer examination of these sequences revealed that they were not sequences of actual wild viruses, but were in stead fragments left behind from PCR products and cloning vectors harboring both cDNA clones and infectious clones of such viruses, with evidence of viral sequences being joined directly to DNA sequences of vector and non-human origin within the same short reads.
Sequences associated with Vectors and PCR products from 3 distinct viral species have been obtained: The 3′-end of a Nipah Henipahvirus with fusion to a Hepatitis C virus Ribozyme, a T7 terminator and a Tetracycline resistance gene, the 5′-end of the same Nipah Henipahvirus with fusion to sequences found in diverse vectors, a complete vector genome encoding the HA gene of Influenza A virus subtype H7N9 under a CMV promoter and a bgH polyA terminator, and 221 contiguous sequences corresponding to the Spodoptera frugiperda rhabdovirus reference genome fused to sequences that were homologous to multiple Plastid sequences and Notably Mitochondrial sequences of Rodents.”
2/5: The Washington Post’s Editorial Board becomes the first American paper of record to support the viability of a laboratory origin, crediting DRASTIC’s research twice in an op-ed where they explain: It is known from public documents that Dr. Shi was conducting “gain-of-function” research on bat coronaviruses which involves modifying their genomes to give the viruses new properties, such as the ability to infect a new host species or transmit from one host to another more easily. Such research is controversial — a gain of function experiment can create a danger that didn’t exist before. But the research might also help predict how a virus might evolve toward spillover, enabling the development of effective countermeasures such as a broad coronavirus vaccine.
A section of the database was password-protected and not accessible. This may well have been to protect the materials so that scientists from WIV could be first in writing scientific papers about the viruses and sequences. But except for that private section, the database was accessible until Sept. 12, 2019, when it became unreachable from outside the institute, according to DRASTIC, which has studied the database usage records. Why then? Dr. Shi has said it was taken offline for security reasons. “We have nothing to hide,” she told the BBC.
II. “They didn’t stop to think if they should.”
2/7: DRASTIC researchers and several other closely aligned scientists release a preprint that challenges many of the assertions underpinning the idea that COVID-19 might have had a natural origin, and points out many of the characteristics that indicate a laboratory release:
“Critically, contrary to Andersen et al. 2020 supposition, there is no O-linked glycosylation on the neighboring residues of the S1/S2 junction, or at a significant level anywhere along the spike protein. No interaction of SARS-CoV-2 with a host immune system based on O-linked glycans can be claimed, and hence does not support the argument for natural evolution of SARS-CoV-2.
In addition to providing the citation which demonstrates that the H1N1 Swine Flu which leaked out of a Soviet lab in the late 1970s was almost certainly serially passaged, and so deserves its reputation as the poster virus for the dangers of gain-of-function work, several other important points are made which give further indication that SARS-CoV-2 is the product of serial passage:
– Natural zoonosis means passing the challenges naturally posed by the immune system of a new host species; however, cellular serial passage can bypass these processes and create unique phenomena, possibly like SARS‐CoV‐2’s flat and non‐sunken surface of its sialic acid‐binding domain, which contrasts with the typical canyon observed in every single other ever observed coronavirus, as well as a lack of non‐synonymous substitutions in its RBD, which would be expected to accumulate at some point during a virus’s natural evolution due to challenges from a novel host’s complete immune system, but which would not be selected for and then observed to occur at the same frequency during cellular serial passage or during the few generations of whole host passaging required to establish airborne transmission.
– In the case of SARS‐C0V‐2, serial passage would be one explanation for why, although its original parent host was putatively bats, this novel coronavirus appears to bind very tightly to human ACE2, and is observed by in vitro analysis to bind more weakly to bats than many other mammals, including some used in serial passage work.
2/14: DRASTIC members Mona Rahalkar and Gilles Demaneuf are featured in SKY News Australia’s reporting about the WHO’s pitiful attempt at an investigation!!
2/21: Every wonder about what kind of thing the WHO’s “Investigative” Team should’ve been asking about from the very start? Billy Bostickson, Gilles Demaneuf, and some anonymous assistance compile an extensive list of databases which have been deleted or altered by the WIV starting in the early months of the pandemic and continuing well into 2020:
“On the 12th Sep 2019, the main database of samples and viral sequences of the Wuhan Institute of Virology went offline. Eventually every single of the 16 virus databases managed by the WIV was taken offline. Here we show how these databases may provide essential clues at to the origins of SARS-CoV-2 and review the circumstances in which they were taken offline.”
Or was it a laboratory accident after all? The riddle surrounding the outbreak of the corona pandemic:
Rossana Segreto makes the amazing discovery that the published gene sequence of RaTG13 corresponds exactly to a gene sequence that was already mentioned in an earlier publication – but under a completely different name at the time.
– where the Scientific Establishment meets its r/Superstonk –
How a rag-tag team of internet researchers and sleuths came together on Twitter as a scientific anarchist collective to fight back against mainstream bamboozlement around the origins of COVID-19, and help spread the word about the dangers posed by unchecked gain-of-function research. Read the Washington Post‘s endorsement of our work here.
(Three peer-reviewed papers later, including the first to argue for the plausibility of a laboratory origin, maybe we’ve been on to something?)
12/30/2019: Several weeks before any of us really knew what was coming or the murmurs of horror began to leak from Wuhan, the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) begin the process of heavily editing a viral pathogen database with past research on bat-borne SARS-like coronaviruses and other virus samples collected during the WIV’s myriad trips to Mojiang and elsewhere. It held a password-protected sequence for the WIV’s unpublished viruses, and included information on seasonal epidemics of viruses able to cross the species barrier.
Noticed later in 2020 by DRASTIC’s mysterious associate internetperson, its description was heavily edited on December 30, 2019 – the day its administrator Shi Zhengli was busy at a conference until being told to drop everything and deal with the COVID-19 outbreak. Shi Zhengli said that she found a match to SARS-CoV-2 in her sample database on that day, however it has been taken offline and traces of its existence have been deleted.
The WIV have refused requests to disclose anything further about it. And nearly a year later, Dr. Shi would finally claim that the lab was ready for an inspection – although WHO investigators were not allowed to set foot anywhere near the WIV compound until February 2021.Share
January 1st, 2020: The Year of the Wuhan Strain of Coronavirus.
A few days later this article will get them banned from Twitter, and the first wrench is thrown in an honest and open discussion of the novel coronavirus’s origins. Months later Zero Hedge will be allowed back on, however the damage has already long been done, and the public perception that this is surely a natural virus which by definition would be much less of a big deal than one engineered to have affinity to humans begins to snowball into the worst public health crisis the world has seen in at least a century, and perhaps ever.
One of the only journalists trying to provide critical coverage of the emerging narrative was marginalized, and so stenographers with giant Twitter followings who cosplay as journalists would spend months mindlessly regurgitating whatever they were told by the scientists and researchers most intimately tied to the exact kind of research that could’ve created COVID-19 – the ones with the most to gain keeping this kind of research going, and the most to lose if the moratorium against it is reimposed… Or if their possible role in its creation, and now cover-up, becomes part of the public narrative.
And in the months that would follow, as politicians and other narcissists who masquerade as sources of wisdom like Joe Rogan make masks a matter of masculinity and politics, and lockdowns meant to save lives are turned into attempted autocracy – incalculable lives are preventably lost due to a handful of people who only surround themselves with sycophants and fluffers, who seize the chance to try and direct the public discourse while having almost no idea at all what they’re actually doing while their unmasked constituents waddle calm as Buddhist cows through Big Box stores.
Zero Hedge is kicked off Twitter for doing publicly-sourced journalism, and anyone at all with a blue checkmark is allowed to wantonly spread dangerous public health misinformation for months and months before even the vaguest attempt to do anything occurs at all.Share
1/31: Haravard2TheBigHouse posts the first draft of their Logistical and Technical Explorations into the Wuhan Strain of Coronavirus on his personal blog after corresponding with his father, Dr. Karl Sirotkin – the PhD in Microbiology and designer of dbSNP with nearly 20 years of molecular wet-work who’d previously taught molecular virology at the University of Tennessee and worked within the Theoretical Biology Division of the Los Alamos National Laboratory – about it via text and email for several weeks as their observations from the start of the pandemic became cohesive points. They examine several main factors:
The extremely high rate of all occupational accidents in China, ten-times America’s and twenty-times Europe’s.
Known bioengineering abilities that allow viruses to be constructed from scratch inside labs like the one right next to where the pandemic began.
Serial passage being a form of forced zoonosis that couldn’t be discounted.
The Lancet Letter appearing, and seeming to them like a transparent disinformation campaign coordinated created by scientists who were looking to preserve their gain-of-function research funding by creating the illusion of consensus.
COVID-19’s very early reported ability to bind to human cells some 10 to 20 times more tightly than SARS.
The fact that engineering a virus to make it more transmissible by definition makes it more likely that it’ll leak out of a lab.
A long history of viral lab leaks around the globe
Personnel with the exact academic, technical, and laboratory backgrounds to carry out the precise sort of spike-protein manipulation experience that could explain everything unique about the novel coronavirus’s genome working at the WIV.
The CCP reacting pretty much exactly like the communists did during the Chernobyl disaster.
And determined – without using any points that require any significant scientific background – that COVID-19 is almost certainly an accidental gain-of-function escapee from a lab, likely as part of a vaccine program and possibly part of a Red Team designed to test drugs and therapeutics against. Their article is picked up by the Wayback Machine on February 1st – you can follow its evolution and verify what it got first at that link.
Although not nearly as photogenic as the much less experienced scientists now being endlessly quoted and fawned over regarding the possibility of COVID’s laboratory origin, after joining the team in Los Alamos shortly after its inception, at the time of his retirement Dr. Sirotkin had more years working for GenBank than any other staff member – with his 28 years of service on the world’s premiere DNA sequencing database making him one of the most experienced scientists on the planet when it comes to managing and analyzing genomic sequences.Share
2/1: Zero Hedge is kicked off Twitter, drawing global headlines and making it a centerpiece for reporting about the possible lab origins of the coronavirus.
In the weeks to come, Zero Hedge would feature the Sirotkins’ work multiple times, drawing millions of views to DRASTIC’s early work and providing a template for all the reporting that would come after, almost none of it would credit the work and analysis that had already been done.Share
2/14: Early in the morning Dan is tipped off about the enigmatic Xiao pre-print, which he quickly reports about on his website and takes to tweeting about on Twitter assuming that the mainstream media would be right behind him, since by then a science editor from a major newspaper had already emailed him about the original report.
And after a little confusion, even though at that point Dan had less than 1,000 followers on Twitter and was maybe worse than a nobody in some ways – Zero Hedge credited him with the find, despite already having a massive following and having no reason to uphold journalistic integrity beyond the action itself.Share
2/14: Zero Hedgebreaks the news of the enigmatic pre-print, crediting Dan’s Twitter account, Harvard2TheBigHouse, with bringing it to light. Apparently the reporters all suddenly mentioning it in their 2021 articles managed to independently find it on their own somehow, as opposed to coming across it the first place it was discussed and failing to attribute where they found it: On a website explicitly banned from Twitter for discussing a laboratory origin for COVID-19, where you think maybe reporters looked to as they started to research their story? Share
3. “And if you don’t keep your feet, there’s no telling where you might be swept off to…”
2/16: After contacting Dan a few days prior on Twitter to ask permission to use their article, Professor of Neurobiology at UPitt, JC Couey begins his JC on a Bike coverage of the incipient pandemic, and the collaborative nature of DRASTIC is born, as independent sleuths have now begun helping each other try and put all the pieces together.
2/18: Our now Head Primate In-Charge BillyBostickson begins his first Twitter thread attempting to hold the viral “authorities” to account for their lubricious malfeasance, followed up by a scathing attack on Chinese bat researchers from Wuhan, who were caught abusing bats without proper PPE. Thanks to Dr. Richard Ebright’s tip regarding Tian Junhua and his exploits at WCDC, Billy begins to investigate the activities of “insect man”.
Impressed by the work of the Sirotkins and inspired by the athletic videos of Professor Cuey, our wayward monkey begins his way down a rabbit-hole of deceit, lies, pangolin scales, grant money, low-rent Scooby Doo villains, and a miserably broken Fourth Estate.
Thrilled to have an anonymous internet monkey endorsing and following their work, and fighting back as well, the acronym D.R.A.S.T.I.C. (Decentralized Radical Autonomous Search Team Investigating Covid-19) is born just too late for Valentines Day, from the tormented soul of our beloved experimental lab monkey, after a night on the Twitter tiles.
Strangers from across the globe have by now officially come together to fight back against the wave of disinformation and insanity spewed by once-trusted journalistic and scientific sources – DRASTIC is born!Share
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2/24: Our ornery monkey takes down Trevor Bedford, as Billy makes his first thread challenging the status quo – entirely accurately, it should be noted, as Billy’s research had uncovered definitive proof that the loudest virologists were actively misleading the media and public about the nature of the research that’s been occurring. Over the weeks and months to come, perhaps the most preposterous claim was that all sampling was done in the Mojiang Mines and other caves was performed using the proper PPE, which is demonstrably false.
And so begins the long saga of DRASTIC members confronting renowned virologists with cold hard facts which don’t fit their narratives, and then being summarily ignored. Because these virologists know better and are here to help and educate us – they’d never take part in a disinformation campaign that’s resulted in hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths, RIGHT?!Share
3/16:Rossana Segreto notices that RaTG13 in fact has 100% identity with strain 4991 in a comment on a virology blog, setting the stage for exploring the mines where it was found and the mysterious supposedly fungal pneumonia that killer six miners there in 2012. Share
3/19: The Sirotkins father-and-son team respond to the much ballyhooed but deeply flawed Proximal Origins of SARS-CoV-2 paper with a title that fit Dan’s understanding of the relationship between China and Nature’s publisher based on his time in prison:
3/20: Zero Hedge features the Sirotkins’ takedown of the Proximal Origins paper a day after it’s posted.Share
Swing from thread-to-thread as BillyBostickson bashes the monkey’s paws of irresponsible research practices, journalistic half-truths, and wanton gain-of-function research back into the deepest, darkest, dankest corners of the internet where they belong!!
The threads below highlight the collaborative and multidisciplinary nature of DRASTIC’s work, showing our consultation and work with other groups and independent researchers. These threads also allow you to trace the workflow of how tweets become threads that become pre-prints and other reports.
5. “We modified our science team to remove ethical restraints.”
3/23: After failing to get an initial draft of the academic version of their report past any American scientific magazine, the Sirotkins try and popularize their ideas about gain-of-function research and serial passage by using the popular television show The Expanse to draw parallels to the damage that can occur when scientists, especially those who preen and profiteer between the edge of scientific research and arms dealing, are given free reign to play God.Share
4/14: Josh Rogin reports in the Washington Post that two cables from as far back as 2018 expressed concern among American officials and scientists that the WIV’s BSL-4 lab had systemic management issues and that its technicians lacked anything close to the necessary training, and so due to all this it was already at risk of leaking pathogens.
Speculation increases within DRASTIC that irresponsibly maintained autoclaves, animal incinerators that were improperly maintained, or faulty decontamination showers all may have provided avenues for COVID-19’s escape, mutually unexclusively. Really anything meant to prevent a virus from spreading out of a lab may have failed, or all of them, if the proper procedures and maintenance isn’t’ being followed, which China’s astronomical rate of occupational accidents makes the furthest thing from a conspiracy theory. Share
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4/16: A crowd-sourced investigation into the origins of this novel coronavirus begins on GitHub as Project Evidence starts their own exploration, independent to DRASTIC’s work.Share
6. From Russia with Scrutiny.
4/19:Yuri Deigin, contemplating heavily and working independently at this point and not yet hooked up with what would become the DRASTIC Team, releases his own analysis of COVID-19’s origins in Russian, a few days later it would go viral on Medium in translation: Lab-Made? SARS-CoV-2 Genealogy Through the Lens of Gain-of-Function Research, a dispassionate examination much of the unusual molecular and phylogenetic data that was currently in the literature including a granular look at the pangolin question, RaTG13’s sketchy supposed pedigree, as well as the long history of gain-of-function bespoke coronavirus engineering.
Strangely, Columbia’s Angela Rasmussen, who’s played a central role in the disinformation campaign to convey a lab origin as a conspiracy theory, would later read it and follow the pattern set by just about every scientist in the news discussing a laboratory origin: Make no substantive empirical critique or comment at all, and instead attempt character assassination, in Ms. Rasmussen’s case paralleling Yuri’s report about a virus and the dangerous history of gain-of-function engineering to the Turner Diaries, a racist screed that glorifies an American race-war. Which is all the more disturbing given that this slander is taking place in early January 2021, as America does seem to be teetering perilous near mass internal violence. So the invocation of a book like that becomes especially troublesome, seemingly revealing a deep-seated underlying disdain for the Other within Ms. Rasmussen.
A few weeks later, Yuri would be featured on the DarkHorse podcast, and yet strangely the national press pretty much pretended like none of this happened. Yuri’s work was sparked by two Facebook posts he made back in March, if you’re logged in and know how to use your browser’s translate function you can access them here and here.Share
Quiz
Why do many journalists and scientists believe that Dr. Zhengli Shi, the WIV’s “Batwoman,” did NOT have anything to do with the emergence of SARS-CoV-2?
She was a co-author of the seminal 2015 paper on creating chimeric coronaviruses.
One of her colleagues who she co-authored papers about coronavirus engineering with, including the one mentioned above, discovered the first coronavirus from a bat to use ACE2.
The humanized and transgenic mice known to be at the WIV are consistent with the kind of work that could’ve lead to the novel coronavirus.
Had been doing experiments to test how and why coronaviruses jump into humans for years.
She promised she checked her records, and called people who didn’t believe her liars
The 2015 Baric Lab paper in Nature Medicine titled “A SARS-like cluster of circulating bat coronaviruses shows potential for human emergence” is often at the center of any counterargument against the origin story pushed in the main stream media, the wet market origin of SARS-CoV2. The original manuscript submitted in 2015 had a total of 32 references, of which six are no longer featured, and instead two new references have been added to the current online version of the manuscript.
This trailblazes the way for beginning inquires into questionable technical data that would later be used in papers on pangolins, RaTG13, and other concerning inconsistencies within papers arguing for a natural origin and the databases they rely on.Share
4/22: The Sirotkins initially submit their paper to BioEssays two days late, it would go on to become the first peer reviewed look at a possible laboratory origin for COVID-19. It outlines the history of serially passed viruses escaping from laboratories that goes back to the 1970s as outlined by their previous postings online, and presents a wide framework of possibilities, some or all of which may have played a role in COVID-19’s origins, focusing on serial passage through cell culture, and its nominal cousin, serial passage through whole hosts.
One of their most provocative claims is that the virus’s ability to jump directly into mink farms may be due to past serial passage through ferrets, mirroring the controversial work done circa 2010 which lead to a moratorium against gain-of-function research specifically targeted at flus and coronaviruses. As of early 2021, the verdict is still out as to whether or not mink farms effectively amplify the novel coronavirus’s spread or the threat it poses in any way, however if that does turn out to be the case – no one will be able to say there wasn’t plenty of warning.Share
5/4: The Nemesis of the WIV scrubbers joins the team! DRASTIC’s UacJess has done an absolutely brilliant job but gets little credit for all of her meticulous hardwork as our informational bondswoman, bringing an extraordinary amount of database chicanery to light as those involved with shady research have desperately sought to cover up their tracks. All of their viciously scrubbed web-pages and PDFs can be found in the thread above which starts in May and continues to now, for example you can jump to some very interesting September files here.Share
5/11: More suspicious data-scrubbing manages to catch the scrutiny of Yuri Deigin, who notices that the notoriously elusive Shi Zhengli seems to have absconded with 61.5 Mb of data from a crucial viral database – when you try and download the file, it’s emptier than that last V.I.LE. Hard Drive that got wiped right before your belated ACME raid. Yuri calls for the release of what may well be a crucial piece of the viral puzzle by anyone who may have previously downloaded it, and several news outlets pick up on the story, however the WIV has never formally responded.
And in the weeks and months to come, the name of that elided file would become even more important: Database of pathogens of bat and mouse origins.Share
6/10: DRASTIC’s go-to technical guru Ersa Flavinkins posts his first of many threads exploring the technical limitations and mistakes made in the ongoing science research and media reporting.Share
Quiz
Where has RaTG13 actually been observed?
In nature, infecting lots of bats, and cultured in the lab too.
It is only letters on a screen that have not demonstrated the ability to exist at all.
“Commenting on an attempt to compile a fuller picture of the funding EcoHealth Alliance has received from US government agencies, Ebright noted that it totalled $99.8 million ‘for federal contract awards, contract subawards, grant awards, and grant subawards to EcoHealth.’ Most of this money, he said, came from US defense, homeland security and intelligence agencies.In fact, according to their most recently available financial report, over 90% of EcoHealth Alliance’s funding ultimately derives in this way from US taxpayers. Incidentally, Daszak’s salary and other compensation amounted in that same year to just over $400,000.”Share
8. Stalac-tite, or stalac-might these be the caves?
8/12: BioEssays publishes the Sirotkin’s article, submitted back in April, bringing the idea that COVID-19 was engineered into a lab into the peer reviewed world, and drawing parallels to the ongoing crises in mink farms all over the world with the serial passage work done with ferrets and avian flus which drew so much attention not even 10 years ago due to their inherent danger.
And as COVID-19 does exactly what you’d expect a virus that had been serially passaged through ferrets to do, and begins endemic infections in mink farms across the planet that can spread directly back into humans – the scientists most intimately involved with past serial passage work remain silent about any possible parallel to the work they did passaging avian influenzas through ferrets not even ten years ago.Share
8/18: Scientific American calls the idea that COVID-19 could’ve been engineered in a lab “a conspiracy theory”Share
9. Not just a one-hit wonder
9/2: Yuri Deigin and Rossana Segreto finally celebrate the publication of their paper:“The genetic structure of SARS‐CoV‐2 does not rule out a laboratory origin,” whose submission had originally started back in April. It presents several new perspectives on the origins of this novel coronavirus, directly ties in existing biotechnological approaches to how they may have been used, and builds on the Sirotkins’ paper while presenting much more granular detail and theory while also very directly going after after some of the larger absurdities in the field:
“Nevertheless, while it is true that O‐linked glycans are much more likely to arise under immune selection, they could be added in the lab through site‐directed mutagenesis[56] or arise in the course of in vivo experiments, for example, in BLT-L mice with human lung implants and autologous human immune system[57] or in mice expressing the hACE2 receptor.[31] To overcome problems of bat CoV isolation, experiments based on direct inoculation of bat CoV in suckling rats have been carried out.[58]Humanized mice, ferrets, primates and/or other animals with similar ACE2 conformation could have all been used for serial passage experiments, as described in detail by Sirotkin and Sirotkin.[1]”Share
Quiz
How much genetic identity does the closest coronavirus that also hosts an FCS share with SARS-CoV-2?
90%
80%
70%
60%
Share
Share
9/3: Working independently from DRASTIC, another team independently publishes a peer reviewed letter to the editor questioning COVID-19’s “natural” origins: Questions concerning the proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2 which highlights the novel coronavirus’s violation of the “Canyon Hypothesis,” you can read NoWackyScience‘s thread about it just below!!Share
10. Snowballing even Kevin Smith would be proud of.
9/5: With word of DRASTIC’s peer reviewed credentials and uncanny internet detective abilities accumulating like at least 37 runaway snowballs all in-a-row making their way towards the wide-open unwitting reputations of PR hacks and grant-thirsty scientists alike, NoWackyScience posts a Tweetorial covering the concepts covered in Questions concerning the proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2 which goes viral, he will later join the DRASTIC team. His Tweetorial covers how elements of COVID-19’s genome appear rather unique when compared with other coronaviruses, and may bear the hallmarks of serial passage.Share
9/6: DRASTIC technical analyst Dr. Flavinkins posts a detailed takedown of the pangolin hypothesis, one of many. Besides all of the technical issues, as solitary creatures that only meet to mate, the idea that pangolins could’ve harbored a pandemic virus never should have gotten the traction it did from the start. Pandemic viruses come from gregarious creatures: chickens, ducks, mice, mink, ferrets, bats – for a dangerous virus to evolve, it needs a constant supply of new hosts to infect and try new mutations out inside of.
And so its bizarre that there was so much insistence that pangolins – which are not bred in captivity and are solitary creatures which handle even mating only slightly more socially than Jerry Falwell Jr. – were ever considered such a viable host since they never congregated in the dense numbers needed for a pandemic virus to be able to transfer between multiple hosts as it evolves and mutates.
All highly pathogenic avian influenzas ever found in humans, for instance, all come from either crowded poultry farms or labs, where they’ve been subject to the same sort of serial passage which likely played a role in COVID-19’s emergence.
Maybe someone should ask one of the many esteemed scientists and PR hacks who have been pushing pangolins as an even vaguely viable intermediate host: How that was supposed to happen when their entire way of life is the complete opposite of every other species ever known to host a pandemic virus? What properties of SARS-CoV-2 allowed it to somehow develop this absolutely remarkable affinity for human receptors inside of a species which is not bred and gathered together in large numbers in commercial settings, and is naturally solitary – only meeting to mate?Share
9/9: In the first significant act of wanton plagiarism and academic narcissism, a writer with Boston Magazine publishes an article that pretends like the Sirotkins’ peer reviewed August paper does not exist at all, nonetheless all of their and Zero Hedge’s earlier writings which date back to January 2020, or any of the rest of DRASTIC’s diligent digging. It’s strange, almost as if the publication of a peer reviewed paper back in August arguing that gain-of-function research could have something to do with COVID’s origins all of a sudden made someone nervous enough to concoct the alternate universe this article takes place in.
The article acts like exploring a laboratory origin is somehow a novel act of bravery, when the Sirotkins’ article has already passed peer review and been published a month before, but despite that – this bizarre attempt at self-promotion and PR is pushed out as somehow an accounting of the truth.
The article continually credits a scientist totally uninvolved with DRASTIC’s work, who refuses to acknowledge the primacy and validity of Dr. Sirotkin’s work – when he is the one who designed the databases used to analyze and compare genomic sequences across populations and decipher the meaning of specific mutations decades ago. Perhaps she thinks the fancy letters after her name means she can pretend that Dr. Sirotkin’s legacy holds no weight or meaning, but that’s a bit hard to imagine when you consider his 28 years of experience with GenBank at the time of his retirement probably beats hers by just a little tiny bit.
For whatever reason, Ms. Chan appears to believe her judgement superior to that of the entire editorial board of BioEssays, which approved the publication she has repeated implied in public is not scientifically sound and should never have been published. But considering that the “dual-use” often put before “gain-of-function” technology refers to the swords side of the classic metaphor, perhaps DARPA providing $32 million reasons to her institution to establish The Foundry, a massive pipeline of DNA research which could easily be appropriated for the weapons side of dual-use, has something to do with Ms. Chan suddenly emerging inside of an article that would still be plagiarizing even if it was presented as entirely fictional?Share
9/14: Once again our elusive pathogen sleuth internetperson comes through with a blockbuster report which outlines how a review of SARS-like virus samples – many with very high similarity to the novel coronavirus – at the WIV may have in fact been the event that sparked the entire pandemic.
“11. Dr. Ralph Baric? Great guy, never heard of him.”
9/16: The long process of debunking the idea that RnYN02 has anything resembling a furin cleavage site or even inserts at all is begun by Dr. Flavinkins.
Also on this day, the most notorious coronavirologist on the planet, Dr. Ralph Baric, tells the Italian press that of course this virus could have been engineered in a lab, and the only way we’ll get answers is if the WIV opens up its records. This goes entirely unmentioned in the American press, most of whom go on calling the idea COVID-19 could’ve been made in a lab a conspiracy theory.Share
Quiz
Since zoonosis occurs:
Rarely when a completely wild animal population shares its habitat with humans.
Much more commonly and creating the most virulent strains we know outside of the lab, it also occurs on commercial farms with dense populations of animals constantly interacting with their caretaking humans.
When it’s forced during serial passage protocols in laboratories, most notoriously when avian flus were serially passed through ferrets circa 2012, leaving telltale furin cleavage sites (FCS), and creating viruses so potentially dangerous that a moratorium was imposed on this kind of gain-of-function research, since at the time the scientific community wasn’t’ shy about admitting that of course viruses leak out of labs, and that the more transmissible you make a strain, the more likely it becomes that it manages to slip out.
Considering the above, when a coronavirus emerged right next to a compound of laboratories which included China’s only BSL-4 virological laboratory where the exact sort of spike-protein research which could have led to COVID-19’s distinct genome had been ongoing, and once it was identified to be the very first betacoronavirus with the telltale FCS of possible serial passage found on a lineage of coronavirus where one had never been seen before, and then when it then jumped into the closest farmed relative of the ferret which it can interbreed with – the mink – and began Europe’s very first interspecies pandemic: Why didn’t all of the virologists involved with the ferret serial passage research of 2012 immediately sound the alarm?
What is their rationale for remaining quiet, or in many cases actively dissembling against a “lab origin,” which inherently includes serial passage?
Look at that pangolin over there – see how effin’ sexy it is!!
WAIT LOOK!! This guy who seems ENTIRELY legit and not at all like he’s selling used cars out the back of his foreclosed chop-shop just created an international distraction with no peer reviewed papers whatsoever! And every single media organization on the planet is covering it while completely ignoring the actual peer reviewed research!!
What did you call it? WUHAN Strain?! Omgmybffjill, could you be ANY more RACIST!!
If you think origami is impressive, you should see us fit an entire strawman into this one letter to the Lancet.
Because if they speak up about it, the moratorium that was lifted in 2017 which explicitly banned this sort of gain-of-function research on coronaviruses might be reinstated, and the literal billions and billions more of funding they’re asking for might not appear, and in fact all their gain-of-function funding may dry up all together, and whoa – at this point I bet a lot people might be kinda angry that they – almost transparently now that you look at it – really tried to actively prevent any sort of discussion of serial passage whatsoever, and paint believing in a laboratory origin as a sign of mental illness: A CONSPIRACY THEORY!!
Databases?! No yeah sure, just give us a couple weeks – we’ll get right on that and get back to you, promise!!
Share
9/18: National Geographic calls the idea COVID-19 could’ve been engineered in a lab a conspiracy theory. Maybe someone should show them how Google Translate works.Share
11/7: Preparations kick into high gear for the WHO’s inspection of the WIV.
Share
12. They’d do anything FOIA.
11/9: The USTRK’s dynamic form-filling and BS-sniffing duo, Gary Ruskin and Sainath Suryanarayanan, publish evidence from email exchanges documenting that key elements involved with the natural origin story of COVID-19, especially the pangolin connection, are in doubt after emails are released which shows a lot of rather sideways explanations around key technical details that are expected to be squared away in the sort of peer reviewed publications being discussed.
In the coming weeks, they would also publish information from FOIAs detailing more information about the intentional coordination of strawman arguments in the Lancet Letter, which it now appears was organized by Peter Daszak as part of a coordinated disinformation campaign – leaving out or glossing over obvious possibilities like serial passage, and pushing for compliance when it was far too early to honestly issue an academic conclusion, which is what the Sirotkins had been arguing since the moment the letter was published.
However in the end only more questions are raised, as the USRTK later notes that although it was being tacked onto a peer reviewed article, the addendum was not subject to peer review, without any explanation or clarification, leaving many of the original questions still dangling, but also revealing the existence of eight previously undisclosed betacoronaviruses which for reasons unstated had never been mentioned before.
The truth begins to shine a light through several glorious holes opened up by the USRTK’s dogged-style of sleuthing, as suspicion grows that there may be some Big Trouble in Viral China. Share
Offering up the intel in good faith to the world community, so that journalists, researchers, and detectives alike can compare their own findings – the only question left now: How many journalists will shameless rip off another DRASTIC member without proper attribution?
11/15: Not yet part of the group but reporting independently on their and other findings, Moreno Colaiacovo publishes a summary of where we are to date in the pursuit of this novel coronavirus’s true origins.Share
11/16: DRASTIC’s continental footprint widens as Gilles Demaneuf does a deep-dive into the group’s work looking at leaks of SARS from labs from many parts of the planet, and weaving in his own take to tell us all about:
Inside you’ll find a review of previous and little known SARS leaks such as the 2003 Taipei SARS leak at a military P4 that was built and equipped by France, and the very serious 2004 Beijing SARS leaks at the then top P3 SARS lab in China, where there was likely an attempted cover-up of the first 2 cases.Share
12/1: Building on DRASTIC’s analysis, Yuri and Rossana post a pre-print that fully dissembles the idea that other extant SARS-like coronaviruses such as RmYN02 have anything resembling inserts, and certainly not anything close to COVID-19’s rather peculiar furin cleavage site (FCS).Share
12:22: An early Christmas present for the DRASTIC Team, French paper-of-record Le Monde publishes a wide-ranging expose on the investigation into COVD-19’s possible laboratory origins.Share
Quiz
Why do scientists think RmYN02 has natural insertions that may have formed a FCS?
They’re trying to force a narrative using shady technical practices.
Because they used a faulty alignment to try and create the illusion of inserts.
1/2: DRASTIC begins its petition to the WHO, with a list of reasonable and open-minded questions that should be answered by any investigation into the origins of COVID-19.
The 50 questions have been taken from a database of over 260 questions, individually credited to DRASTIC team members who created and refined them after being scolded by Billy Bostickson over several months.
These often highly technical questions are all related to anomalies in the origin of SARS-COV-2, and were forwarded to scientists at the WHO and Journalists over the past months.
It is indeed surprising that very few of these questions have been answered to date.
The full set of questions for Scientists and the WHO on the origin of SARS-COV-2 is publicly available here in 3 parts:
A petition and open letter have now been sent to the ten members of the WHO investigation team who will visit Wuhan in January 2021, calling on them to answer 50 of the most important questions prepared by this group:
Support our work by signing and sharing this petition on social media!!
DRASTIC TIMES CALL FOR DRASTIC QUESTIONS!!Share
1/2: One of the many anonymouse informational benefactor who’ve assisted DRASTIC’s efforts along the way passes along one possible step-by-step research process involving the humanized mice that might have been involved in COVID-19’s genesis as first proposed in the literature by Sirotkin & Sirotkin. Rumors abound, and no one is sure – but some say the suspiciously murine Dr. Anony Mouse may be a member of an even more secretive research group, waiting for just the right time to squeak out.Share
1/4/2021: NY Mag publishes an article featuring much of DRASTIC’s work along with the work of many others. Oddly, although the author spent around two hours on the phone with the Sirotkins after thanking them for writing what he described as their incredibly clear and accessible paper which he knew off the bat was the first peer reviewed one describing a laboratory origin, he yet never once mentions it, nor their names anywhere in his article.
Supposedly NY Mag spent many weeks fact-checking this article, so the fact that they didn’t mention the seminal peer reviewed paper examining a lab origin… must mean they’re starting up their own peer reviewed science magazine? Because otherwise, why would the NY Mag put their own scientific judgment above that of the editorial board of BioEssays?
Unless their employees don’t actually understand the very simplest basics about the scientific process in which case need to stop pretending like they do, or they do understand – and knowingly and openly plagiarized our work and analysis, and afterwards doubled-down on having done their research.Share
Which of these characteristics of species known to host highly pathogenic viruses also applies to pangolins?
Bred successfully in captivity.
Lives in large social groups
Kept caged in groups with other members of its kind
Has a pulse.
Domesticated by humans.
Share
1/9: Maybe someone can explain to JonathanBucks and the Daily Mail that pretending like you discovered the headline material of an article… is in fact theft.
Their article about the deletion of critical data from the Wuhan Lab was ripped directly from the tweet by DRASTIC’s all-star late acquisition McWLuke as seen above, and at this link, which he sent on January sixth. It’s not the first time a reporter has pretended like they’ve discovered all this on their own.
1/11: Looks like journalists are finding our timeline and realizing that the internet never forgets, as our HPIC BillyBostickson finally gets just a bit of the credit he’s been due in the Taiwan news for spending the last year reaching down wherever he needs to so that he can grab a big handful and smack clueless reporters in the face with a giant load of facts, no matter how stinky they might seem – asserting his dominance when it comes to things accountability:
“[DRASTIC’S HPIC] posted a Twitter thread demanding answers about a state-funded project at the WIV in 2019 that involved infecting transgenic mice with bat coronaviruses. The scientist who headed this project is assistant researcher Hu Ben (胡犇), according to the National Natural Science Foundation of China.
The director of the Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases at WIV, Shi Zhengli (石正麗), also known as “Bat Woman,” since 2007 has been researching how spike proteins in natural and chimeric SARS-like coronaviruses bind to the ACE2 receptors in the cells of humans, bats, and other animals. That year, she created a number of chimeras by inserting different segments of the SARS-CoV-S spike protein into that of a bat virus (SL-CoV-S) which was used as a backbone.”
Will DRASTIC’s use of publicly-available open-source material help mainstream journalism begin the resurgence of accountability and collaborative effort? Instead of finding a PR hack who dismiss the scientific community and insists the peer-reviewed world can be discounted due to their own unique gifts, and as an added bonus looks nice in photos and feeds you good copy?
Only time will tell:
“No information about this research has been released to the public since the start of the pandemic, including data on the eight chimeric viruses the WIV had been infecting the mice with. In fact, all of the institute’s databases have been offline since the start of the pandemic for alleged ‘cybersecurity issues,’ including 100 unpublished sequences of bat betacoronaviruses, which need to be sequenced by international scientists, according to Bostickson.”Share
1/12: After waiting and hoping for nearly a year, Dylan Housman and the Daily Caller come out with the first targeted mainstream look at gain-of-function research, calling for increased scrutiny into the practice and for a free and full investigation into the WIV – helping DRASTIC bring the fight against this dangerous but absurdly well-funded research practice into public light.Share
1/15: Lucky for Iran, the bomb the State Department decided to drop in the waning days of the Trump Administration was instead targeted at the WIV, as it lays waste to several areas of concern all targeted by DRASTIC researchers.
The CCP’s deadly obsession with secrecy and control comes at the expense of public health in China and around the world. The previously undisclosed information in this fact sheet, combined with open-source reporting, highlights… elements about COVID-19’s origin that deserve greater scrutiny:
And with rare panache, the State Department lets the CCP know the fun’s just getting started:
“Today’s revelations just scratch the surface of what is still hidden about COVID-19’s origin in China. Any credible investigation into the origin of COVID-19 demands complete, transparent access to the research labs in Wuhan, including their facilities, samples, personnel, and records.”Share
Few things are as nerve-racking as your first day at a brand-new schools in a brand-new state that’s on the other side of the country.
And so I was beyond relieved when the teacher of my second grade class Mrs. Mongelluzzo – easy to spell with the Mickey Mouse Club cadence – told everyone at the end of a rough first day that to help break the ice, everyone should try and bring a joke back to class the next day as their only homework. Knowing my dad seemed to at least think he was pretty hilarious, I waddled home so fast that I almost started rolling at one point, eager to call my dad at work to get the joke to help me fit in with a class of eight and nine year-olds the next day.
I’m not sure I’ve ever raised my hand faster in my life that next day, when Mrs. Mongelluzzo asked if anyone had remembered their homework and come back with a joke. Brand news class, all eyes on me, time to show I can fit in:
“Alright, so… how do you tell a male chromosome, from a female chromosome?
(At this point I assumed the confused looks meant my classmates were deeply pondering this profound genomic koan.)
“Well… of course – YOU JUST PULL DOWN ITS GENES!!”
And so I learned my first hard lesson in the school of having a Microbiology PhD father trying to help you navigate through novel social situations.
But the good news was that although my dad’s job might not have made fitting in among my peers any easier, he more than made up for it during my first Take-Your-Kid-to-Work Day a few weeks later. Riding the Red Line decades later while living in a halfway house as an ex-con and felon for the rest of my life, I had a hard time imagining myself staring out the window, oblivious to so much of the world that prison would later reveal to me.
But for eight-year-old me, the metro was the first part of the most incredible adventure of my life to that point. After the metro it was just one science-fiction escalator ride towards an impossibly distant windy pinpoint, stopping to ask the friendliest pair of glasses I could find for directions to the right building, and one elevator later – I stepped into a massive slew of cubicles, absolutely terrible haircuts, and pocket-protectors as far as the eye could see – but most importantly for me, a crowd that would appreciate my sense of humor.
After the laughs and smiles it was colorful protein models that spun and danced on screens and the same microscopic structures that I remembered from my dad’s t-shirts blow-up to preposterous proportions and popping up on office walls and projector screens, I felt like I’d walked into a movie set – watching discoveries and knowledge get summoned into existence in real-time, and being able to poke around and find a community that loved the fact I had something of a precious science vocabulary and wasn’t afraid to ask what might be a stupid question… since it just might be a really good one too.
——————
So all of these happy formative memories swirled back to the surface when shortly after our paper was published, a handful of random folks emailed us. My assumption initially and for months afterwards was that at least one of them had been an old colleague of my father’s, since I mean after you have your PhD for about 40 years you tend to build up a fairly long list of contacts.
However once a few months had passed and I thought about it, I wasn’t aware of my dad ever significantly interacting with a former Secretary of the Navy and Obama advisor directly attached to defense work, a federal global technology S&T researcher interested in engaging with China and who it’s hard to imagine hasn’t been extensively involved with defense programs, an MIT artificial intelligence and cyber-security wonk with extensive ties to the defense industry, and a scientist part of another team which denigrated my father’s career and said he never should’ve written a paper like ours also with extensive ties to DARPA and the defense industry.
And so as his email to them below recounts, their contact with has become even stranger considering what’s happened since, and what hasn’t happened. Instead of our ideas being embraced by the wider scientific community like I would’ve expected from my childhood, they’ve been marginalized and our voices largely ignored.
My father wouldn’t even let me take the super-cool U.S. Government pens to use in school since it could technically considered stealing, he’s never sniffed anything resembling defense work or the hundreds of millions of dollars of funding to do it, or sought membership in some sort of international group or organization that’s supposed to somehow give one credibility since you can say you’re a part of it and it allows you to claim expertise you simply do not have. And maybe my dad’s existence as just a simple scientist a good thing.
Because if this pandemic has demonstrated anything, it’s that our international institutions have not only failed us as they’ve enabled the profiteering of public citizens that’s turned what was once a historic wealth gap in human history into one that’s only ever been demonstrated before in science-fiction movies, all the while we die off in the worst ongoing mass casualty event in generations. And these international organizations and their false sense of authority enable charlatans like Peter Daszak to corrupt and defile the scientific process by hiding behind imaginary xenophobia, when all he’s really been doing is running interference for the people providing the funding for his work.
Because if one thing is certain, it’s that he has no interest in anything other than preserving the many hundreds of millions of dollars of funding he collects a six-figure salary to coordinate – as opposed to being worried about saving human life or getting to the bottom of this pandemic. And yet he doesn’t exist in a vacuum, and the “dual-use” side of the gain-of-function methodologies like serial passage refer to their possible uses in the defense industry, and now by those wishing to continue playing God and attempting to directly alter the human genome in at attempt to cheat nature’s basic strictures.
Maybe it’s more than a coincidence that the last point made by the biggest cinematic franchise in history is that playing games with reality and attempting to manipulate the popular media’s perception of it can put an enormous number of lives at risk, and that there’s a lot of money to be made and power to be seized when seemingly benign international groups present themselves with authority they do not have, and with responsibilities they refuse to uphold.
Maybe those movies were on to something.
However, sure, maybe my dad and I are mistaken and there is something wrong with our paper which accounts for so many seeking to exclude it from the discussion at this point and keep our voices out of the media.
On both occasions, scientists reached out to me after a paper I’d written was published, excited about my work, and asked me to present it at conferences.
However, since your group initially contacted us to point out that we hadn’t properly supported one of our assertions, to which we replied with the citation which we had mistakenly left out, we have heard nothing at all from any of you since. Unlike my previous experiences, your group doesn’t seem at all interested in helping what you called “a real contribution” to the discussion around the origins of COVID-19 gain any traction anywhere, either among fellow professionals or the popular press.
Your contact seems different and outside my normal experience as a professional. If Mr. Danzig was simply curious about the 1977 influenza incident, I would have simply expected him to ask, so the rest of the distribution seems a bit mysterious, and frankly we are curious about the motivation especially considering the silence since and where things now stand.
The larger distribution seems odd to me, since the four of you come from such diverse backgrounds. And it was made ever stranger after Dr. Kwik-Gronvall’s team at John Hopkins asserted that I was not qualified to write our paper, as part of a team with extensive ties to DARPA and the defense industry. A characteristic that, to an outsider, would also seem to bind your group together as well?
Unless I am mistaken and the four of you have some other longstanding interest in gain-of-function work outside of DARPA and other defense work that brought you together to email us about the use of serial passage in our paper?
Finally, are you aware of Alina Chan, who is attached to the Broad Institute and MIT as many of you are, actively telling reporters to ignore the peer review process, and presenting herself as some kind of expert after this article which reads like badly-researched fan-fiction from a lovesick writer was published? This article was published nearly a month after our peer reviewed paper was. And long after Zero Hedge made international headlines getting kicked off Twitter for asserting the possibility of a laboratory origin. Events this Boston Magazine article ignores entirely as it attempts to create a parallel universe. Since you were so concerned about an incorrect citation in a peer reviewed paper published from strangers, certainly you’re concerned about someone with ties to the same institutions as many of you denigrated the scientific process, and allowing herself and her research to be misrepresented in the press.
So my question is: Why did the four of you contact me and my son? If it was to make sure the science is presented and communicated correctly, why has there been only silence since? And Dr. Kwik-Gronvall, why did your team assert I was unqualified to write this paper after you were already so familiar with it? I appreciate the fact JHU retracted that statement, but I assume that was only after my son emailed asking very politely for a correction.
With the entire globe in the grips of this pandemic, accurate and honest scientific reporting and research has never ever been more important. It is already looking as if continually updated vaccines might be required to control COVID-19 as it mutates, and with confidence in vaccines already low – aren’t the four of you concerned with the potential damage that can be done when the scientific peer review process is not respected? Such lack of respect causes lowered belief in the entire scientific enterprise.
Alina presented herself as superior to out peer reviewed paper by telling journalists that it would be ok to ignore it, but of which we have yet to see specific criticisms other that Richard’s excellent question. When four scientists as accomplished and connected as you take all that time to reach out about our paper, but then remain silent afterwards which this implied criticism by one with which you seem to have an association?
So maybe you can help us understand your motivations and the larger context of your interest? Since I’m baffled that this even seems to be a question when reviewing a field, in any context, scientific or journalistic: Is it professional and appropriate to ignore or encourage others to ignore a peer reviewed article? The clear answer is, “No,” unless specific criticisms are part of that assertion. And we are happy to discuss this, if there is any question about this being appropriate behavior for a scientist, since Alina is rather young and perhaps hasn’t been properly trained.
And since all of this is so bizarre, and since several articles have already appeared in the popular press which ignore the peer reviewed science, and so many others with backgrounds in finance and politics seem to be coming out of the woodwork writing articles and pretending to have the ability to address the science when all they hold no relevant degrees and have only ever written popular pieces, acting like their research and work should be considered with the same seriousness as ours – this email will be posted to a public forum for open discussion.
In the managerial state, “law is replaced by administrative decree, federalism is replaced by executive autocracy, and a limited government replaced by an unlimited state.” It acts in the name of abstract goals, such as freedom, equality or positive rights, and uses its claim of moral superiority, power of taxation and wealth redistribution to keep itself in power.” (Samuel Francis)
Over time, the managerial state descends into “anarcho-tyranny” where an armed dictatorship without rule of law, tyrannically or oppressively regulates citizens’ lives yet is unable or unwilling to enforce fundamental protective law.
On the morning of September 22, 1993, a law-abiding citizen named B.W. Sanders was driving his car down the street in Raleigh, North Carolina, when all of a sudden he found himself flagged down by a policeman and presented with a ticket for $25. Mr. Sanders, it turned out, had not been wearing his seat belt, and under a new state law, that crime carries the penalty he received. But in this case it was not just a traffic cop who flagged down Mr. Sanders. It was a force of some six dozen police officers as well as the governor of North Carolina himself, James B. Hunt. The governor was searching for a photo-op with which to advertise both the new seat belt law and his own personal devotion to law-and-order. Not only the 70 or more police officers but also an innumerable supply of newspaper reporters and TV newsmen were on the scene to record the governor’s triumph over the forces of lawlessness, and the next day Mr. Sanders’ wicked ways were recorded in the public press for his family, his employers, his neighbors, and indeed posterity to gander at. To make doubly certain that criminals like Mr. Sanders got the message loud and clear, Governor Hunt held a news conference near the state capital and harangued a crowd of some 150 police officers and state troopers, who were able to take time off from the apprehension of public enemies like Mr. Sanders to attend the governor’s words. “I took an oath to protect the people of North Carolina,” intoned the Tar Heel State’s answer to Dirty Harry, “and this is one way we must do it. . . Folks, we’re serious. We mean it. We’re going to do this.” And indeed, serious he is. As part of the war on the unbuckled seat belt crisis, the Raleigh News and Observer reported, “Law officers in all 100 counties [of the state] will intensify their efforts to find and cite motorists not using their seat belts. Agencies will compete against each other, winning cash for turning in the best performance.”
Governor Hunt’s grandstanding might be harmless enough were it not for certain other facts about certain other crimes in North Carolina that also sometimes make the news. Only a week before the apprehension and public humiliation of Mr. Sanders, the same newspaper reported on the state’s prison crisis. It seems that North Carolina has another new law in addition to the one on seat belts. This other law, passed by the General Assembly, imposes a cap on how many inmates can be incarcerated in the state prison, and the crisis is that, under this cap, most of the inmates now eligible for parole were imprisoned for violent and assaultive crimes. Most of the less dangerous criminals have already been turned loose, and now the prison system must release public enemies even more dangerous than drivers who do not buckle their seat belts. Since last June, no less than 14 parolees (including one of the men now charged with the murder of Michael Jordan’s father) have been arrested and charged with murder, and another parolee, a veteran of the state’s death row, murdered his girlfriend and then committed suicide, thereby unfairly depriving Governor Hunt of yet another photo-op. Last August alone, North Carolina paroled 3,700 prison inmates. One might think that if the governor of the state and the 150 police officers and state troopers who took time out of their public jobs to listen to him slap himself on the back for busting poor Mr. Sanders were really interested in upholding their oaths of office, they might turn their attention to the results of releasing hardened and violent criminals who have already been caught, sentenced, and imprisoned.
But the saga of the Napoleon of Crime in the homely person of B.W. Sanders is not an isolated incident. It is a representative tale that illustrates what I take to be an entirely new form of government, one that as far as I can tell is unique in human history and unknown to political theory, ancient or modern. Probably no other society has failed as dismally as the United States in the late 20th century to meet the basic test of any civilization: to enforce simple order and protect the lives and property of its members. History knows of many societies that have succumbed to anarchy when the central government proved unable to control warlords, rebels, and marauding invaders. But anarchy is not quite the problem here.
In the United States today, the government performs many of its functions more or less effectively. The mail is delivered (sometimes); the population, or at least part of it, is counted (sort of); and taxes are collected (you bet). You can accuse the federal leviathan of many things—corruption, incompetence, waste, bureaucratic strangulation—but mere anarchy, the lack of effective government, is not one of them. Yet at the same time, the state does not perform effectively or justly its basic duty of enforcing order and punishing criminals, and in this respect its failures do bring the country, or important parts of it, close to a state of anarchy. But that semblance of anarchy is coupled with many of the characteristics of tyranny, under which innocent and law-abiding citizens are punished by the state or suffer gross violations of their rights and liberty at the hands of the state. The result is what seems to be the first society in history in which elements of both anarchy and tyranny pertain at the same time and seem to be closely connected with each other and to constitute, more or less, opposite sides of the same coin.
This condition, which in some of my columns I have called “anarcho-tyranny,” is essentially a kind of Hegelian synthesis of what appear to be dialectical opposites: the combination of oppressive government power against the innocent and the law-abiding and, simultaneously, a grotesque paralysis of the ability or the will to use that power to carry out basic public duties such as protection or public safety. And, it is characteristic of anarcho-tyranny that it not only fails to punish criminals and enforce legitimate order but also criminalizes the innocent. At the same time the governor of North Carolina grotesquely fails to uphold his famous oath to protect the citizens of his state by keeping convicted felons in prison, he has no problem finding the time to organize a massive waste of his time and the taxpayers’ money to hound and humiliate a perfectly innocent citizen for the infraction of a trivial traffic law.
In fact, we criminalize the innocent all the time in the United States today—through asset seizure laws that confiscate your property even before you’re convicted of possessing illegal drugs; through mandatory brainwashing programs designed to reconstruct your mind with “sensitivity training,” “human relations,” and rehabilitation if you display politically incorrect ideas on certain occasions; through prosecuting people like Bernhard Goetz who use guns to defend themselves; and through gun control laws in general. Under anarcho-tyranny, gun control laws do not usually target criminals who use guns to commit their crimes. The usual suspects are noncriminals who own, carry, or use guns against criminals—like the Korean store owners in Los Angeles or like Mr. Goetz, who spent several months in jail after picking off the three hoodlums who were making ready to liberate him from life and limb.
Indeed, the government response to crime is by far the best illustration of anarcho-tyranny. On the one hand, police forces are better equipped, better trained, and more expensive than ever before in history. Police routinely use computers, have access to nationwide information banks, and carry weapons and communication gadgets that most tyrants of the past would drool over. Yet the police seem utterly baffled by the murder rate. None of their high-tech whiz-bang helps much to catch serious criminals after they have struck, to stop them before they strike, or to keep them off the streets after they are caught. But while the police cannot do much about murderers, rapists, and robbers, they are geniuses at nabbing less serious lawbreakers. They can crack down on tax-dodgers and speeders, jaywalkers and pornography patrons, seat belt nonbucklers and epithet-emitters, gun owners and graffiti-scratchers.
Obviously, such desperate characters are not the reason decent people are scared to walk the streets at night, and no matter how many of them you put in the pokey, civilization and the order it is based on will not survive unless you control the streets. Under anarcho-tyranny, the goal is to avoid performing such basic functions as stopping real crime and to think up purely fictitious functions that will raise revenue, enhance the power of the police or bureaucrats, and foster the illusion that the state is doing its job. The victims of these new functions and laws are precisely, otherwise, law-abiding and innocent citizens. It’s easier and more profitable to enforce the law against the marginal lawbreaker than against those habitually committed to spreading mayhem.
One example of a victim of anarcho-tyranny is a man named Keith Jacobson, an elderly farmer and school bus driver in Nebraska. Mr. Jacobson has a sexual fixation on children, and while that constitutes a sexual perversion, he says he has never satisfied his fixation by having sex with a child, and indeed prior to 1987 he had never been arrested at all. However, he does like to peruse pornography that depicts children engaged in sexual poses and activities, and when in 1987 he received in the mail some solicitations to purchase some of this smut, he ordered it. Eventually, this material arrived and he went to his local post office to pick it up. When he returned to his farm, he found two federal postal inspectors waiting for him. They promptly arrested him and charged him with violating federal statutes forbidding the purchase of child pornography through the mail, and it turned out that the material he had bought had in fact been produced by the postal service, itself, and sent through the mail by the postal service in an undercover sting operation conducted by the postal service. For some years, postal inspectors had devoted their energies to ferreting out Mr. Jacobson’s perverse habits, encouraging them, and then, finally, pouncing on him. As a result, Mr. Jacobson lost his farm to pay for his legal defense, he lost his job as a school bus driver, and he lost all his friends and standing in his small community when his sexual habits came to light. Eventually, the Supreme Court exonerated him, but in the meanwhile his life had been totally ruined.
The rationale for the harassment and entrapment of Keith Jacobson was that child pornography, illegal under federal law, is often produced in foreign countries like Denmark or Mexico and that the law cannot reach those who produce it and who often kidnap or seduce children into taking part in it. Therefore, law enforcement has to concentrate on the consumers of child pornography rather than on its producers, in order to deter the trade. This, of course, is a transparent sophism.
In my view, there is every reason for the federal government to ban the import of child pornography into the United States, to ban interstate traffic in it, and to prohibit sending it through the mail, but the target of the law should be—and originally was supposed to be—those who produce it and distribute it for profit, as well as those who kidnap, trade in, or seduce children. It is those individuals who cause the social evil of child pornography, not casual consumers of it, let alone those who buy it only because the federal government has enticed them into buying it, as Mr. Jacobson did, and if the producers are ordinarily beyond the reach of the law, it does not follow that law-abiding citizens like Jacobson should be targeted, persecuted, and ruined.
The Jacobson case is particularly important because, in a way, it was a kind of prototype for the later cases of David Koresh and Randy Weaver, and it may reflect a deliberate strategy by which admittedly bizarre people are selected for persecution. Few people can be expected to rush to the defense of a religious crackpot like Koresh, a white separatist like Weaver, or a pedophile like Jacobson when their rights are threatened. And, conservatives in particular can be expected to overlook the procedural irregularities in these cases if they disapprove of, or condemn, the substance of what the targets are doing. But, once these cases become precedents, citizens who are considerably less bizarre in their personal habits and beliefs than many conservatives will be safe for the anarcho-tyrants to hit.
Indeed, the entrapment and destruction of Keith Jacobson is typical of anarcho-tyranny. Having passed a law that is virtually unenforceable against those it was ostensibly intended to reach, government turns its efforts against those it was not intended to punish, which means the law-abiding. If you cannot or will not punish the criminal, criminalize and punish the innocent and then boast of how you are being tough on crooks. The same dynamic of anarcho-tyranny is evident in the notorious asset seizure laws. There are a number of cases on record of homeowners or owners of planes or boats who have lost their property because small amounts of drugs, often nothing more than marijuana, were found in or on them, often because an employee, guest, or family member, rather than the actual owner, had possession of the drug. These cases are bad enough in themselves, but the most notorious, which has received virtually no attention in the national press as far as I know except for a column by Paul Craig Roberts, concerns Donald Scott of Malibu. Perhaps the case is better known in California than it is in the rest of the country, but Mr. Scott’s victimization by anarcho-tyranny caused him to pay an even higher price than Randy Weaver or David Koresh or Keith Jacobson.
Mr. Scott was a millionaire who had inherited his fortune and lived in a five million dollar estate in Malibu. One night he was awakened by the sound of his front door crashing in, and, evidently thinking his house was being invaded by robbers, he got up, seized a gun, and went out to protect his life and home. Actually, he was right; his home had been invaded by robbers, in the form of a 30-man raiding party composed of Los Angeles Sheriff’s Office personnel, federal drug agents, and the California National Guard. When Mr. Scott appeared with a gun in his hand, they shot him dead in his own home. The killers claimed to have some reason to think that Mr. Scott’s wife was using drugs, though apparently no drugs were ever found. They also happened to have in their files an appraisal of Mr. Scott’s estate and notes on the value of adjacent property, and one legal expert who has examined the case believes the purpose of the whole raid was simply to seize private property for the U.S. Treasury under federal assets seizure laws on the fabricated pretext of drug use. The murderers of Mr. Scott pled self-defense and were let off.
Again, as with federal child pornography statutes, there should be no problem with laws that include as punishment for drug dealing the confiscation of property or assets. But under some of the asset seizure laws, property can be confiscated prior to conviction and often with little attention to the actual or serious guilt of the property owner, and they are virtual bottomless pits by which law enforcement agencies can essentially steal private property to bolster their own budgets. As with other anarcho-tyrannical measures, real drug dealers, who often contrive to hide their assets, are frequently not affected; the law falls mainly on law-abiding citizens.
Yet probably the most common example of anarcho-tyranny in practice are gun control laws, and as you know there is now a concerted effort across the country to abolish private gun ownership entirely. That goal used to be a kind of hidden agenda of the gun control lobby, and every nutty gun control measure that was introduced was accompanied by sneering denials that it would go any further. But in recent years the agenda has come out of the closet. Congressman Major Owens of New York actually introduced a constitutional amendment last year to repeal the Second Amendment, and before he did so, conservative columnist George Will had already endorsed its repeal; this is perhaps the first time in history that a congressman has proposed repealing part of the Bill of Rights. Mr. Owens says that the Second Amendment is “not needed” in the United States today, and Mr. Will argues that what he calls “police saturation” will provide an adequate substitute for the private security offered by guns. “Police saturation,” or as Mr. Will describes it, “a policeman on every corner,” is, of course, a euphemism for a police state, and it is entirely characteristic of Mr. Will’s brand of Fascism Properly Understood.
The fact is that the police and the criminal justice system do not offer protection, nor can they. We have too many policemen in this country already; to go back to Raleigh for a moment, where the governor is so zealous about his oath to protect the citizens, I recall that when I happened to visit the city some months ago, there had been a serious car accident in the middle of the afternoon that tied up local traffic for hours. I rode by the site of the accident around eight o’clock that night, and even though there was no congestion at all, even though the vehicles involved had long since been removed and whatever people were injured had long since been taken to the hospital, there were five police vehicles and five policemen still on the scene. It is not at all uncommon in this country to see speed traps, sobriety checks, etc., that take up the time of five or six or more policemen for several hours. In Washington, it is a regular feature of the morning rush hour from northern Virginia to see several local policemen wandering around in traffic in the middle of Route 395, just before you reach the 14th Street Bridge, for the purpose of pulling over drivers who were driving on the shoulders of the road. As long as the police can afford to assign personnel to these trivial functions or to such perennial aggravations as parking enforcement at a time when urban crime rates are higher than ever, there is no reason to talk about the need for yet more policemen, nor is there any reason to call in the National Guard, the Special Forces, or Boutros-Boutros and his Blue Helmets to do the job civilian authorities refuse to do.
In any case, the policemen we already have seem to spend an inordinate amount of their time enforcing the law against the marginal lawbreaker and avoiding enforcement against serious criminals. This became a national scandal in the Los Angeles riots when police actually arrested store owners who were carrying weapons to protect themselves against the rioters while carefully avoiding confrontations with rioters and, in at least one case, even passed by a store that was being looted.
In Virginia, we have a recent and outstanding example of anarcho-tyranny at work in Governor Douglas Wilder’s “one gun a month” law. Since last July in Virginia, it has been illegal to buy more than one handgun a month, on the reasoning, offered by the BATF, that more than 40 percent of the guns used in crimes in New York and Washington are imported from Virginia, where gun control laws are lax. The gunrunners, vows a BATF spokesman, just “fill up their trunks” with firepower and “hightail it up Interstate 95.” One hopes they do not drive on the shoulders of the road or leave their seat belts unbuckled.
What never seems to occur to any of these anarcho-tyrants is that Virginians were able to buy guns legally (and as many as they wanted) and still avoid murdering each other as much as New Yorkers and Washingtonians do. Thus, in 1989, there were about 72 murders for every 100,000 people in the District of Columbia but less than 8 per 100,000 in the whole state of Virginia. In the same year, the Big Apple took a bite out of the lives of nearly 26 people per 100,000. The point is that in Virginia people buy guns legally and do not slaughter each other with them the way they do in New York and Washington, even though both cities have strict gun control laws and Virginia had virtually none. Unable or unwilling to punish the criminals who sell guns, buy them, or use them in these metropolises, the anarcho-tyrants must therefore punish law-abiding Virginians by restricting their gun rights. Under anarcho-tyranny, government fails to enforce the laws and perform the functions it has a legitimate duty to enforce and perform, while it invents laws and functions it has no legitimate duty or valid reason to make or carry out.
While one characteristic of anarcho-tyranny is its propensity to criminalize and punish the innocent and the law-abiding while refusing to punish the criminals, another is its refusal to enforce the laws it has already enacted and to enact more laws that have no effect on real crime and that further criminalize the innocent or restrict their rights. Governor Wilder’s law shows this, and it is interesting that barely two months after the law went into effect in Virginia, the BATF announced that 40 percent of the guns now used in Washington crimes come from Maryland, so we must have a similar law there. The logical conclusion, of course, is that there should be a United Nations Convention on Handguns, under which handguns would be outlawed everywhere in the world, with international sanctions and tribunals against the provinces of the New World Order that fail to obey and with contingents of blue berets, presumably armed with handguns themselves, to enforce it. I suggest General Aidid as the commander of the force.
Colorado’s new law forbidding minors from owning guns is also a recent instance of gun control anarcho-tyranny. Passed this summer on the grounds that too many minors are killing each other with guns, the law merely imposes a five-day jail sentence on any minor who possesses a gun (except sometimes). Of course, no minor with a gun who is disposed to commit a crime with it is likely to be deterred by five days in jail; most such teenagers spend a good part of their adolescence in and out of jail. The only people who will be so deterred will be otherwise law-abiding minors who carry guns to protect themselves from their not-so-law-abiding cohorts whom the anarcho-tyrants do nothing to control.
Yet one of my favorite examples of anarcho-tyranny is the crime bill that Congress considered last year. Its most notable feature was the authorization of the death penalty for no less than 51 different crimes, so that senators could boast to their constituents of the Draconian retribution they are itching to visit upon wrongdoers. That sounds really tough, but the new capital crimes included such exotic offenses as genocide, treason, and espionage, and inflicting death for these would protect the average citizen on the street about as much as directing traffic regulates pigeon droppings. The average housewife usually is not too worried that Pol Pot or Julius Rosenberg will jump her when she walks through the supermarket parking lot at night.
Many of the other 48 offenses, for which the law would have executed you, simply protect officeholders. The bill authorized the death penalty for murdering the President, members of Congress, members of the Cabinet and the Supreme Court, court officers, and relatives of a federal official; for the killers of jurors, witnesses, crime victims, informants, foreign officials, state officials assisting federal officials; and, specifically, for the murderers of officials of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, including horse inspectors, poultry inspectors, egg inspectors, nuclear regulatory inspectors, and meat inspectors. Senators who voted for the bill do not have to worry about losing the egg-inspector vote.
It then proceeded to dispatch to the scaffold a whole penal colony of atrocity-doers: aircraft hijackers; those who commit arson on federal property; those who commit murder in the course of a violent crime, murder in the course of depriving someone of his civil rights, murder in the course of depriving someone of his religious rights, murder in the course of a kidnapping or a bank robbery, terrorist murders abroad, hostage-taking, murder for hire, murder in the course of racketeering, and murder while serving a life sentence. The latter is particularly interesting, since about the only person a lifer could murder would be either a prison guard or another prisoner. But there is no reason why a prison guard or a convict (or, for that matter, the President, a federal chicken doctor, or a visiting dogcatcher from Denmark) should enjoy what amounts to more protection of the law than a gas station attendant.
The crime bill also offered a generous serving of gun control chocolate sauce and the usual swag for local and state police as well as some $300 million for “drug emergency areas,” also known as “cities,” that just can’t say “no” to federal boodle. Then it gets back to more meaningless death penalties: death for anybody who commits a crime with a firearm if the weapon has moved across state or national boundaries. Death again for anybody who intentionally kills someone in the District of Columbia in a drug-related crime. And death once more for the much-dreaded “drug kingpins,” laboriously defined in the bill as those who have had at least three prior felony convictions with minimum prison sentences of at least 20 years each and who are operating drug enterprises with at least five employees and grossing $10 million a year. Whether convicts who meet this otiose definition are any more common than spies, traitors, and genocide-committers is not clear, but my guess is that they are virtually a legal fiction never heard of outside of Miami Vice reruns.
Death, death, death, death, cried the senators as they packed the bill off to the House. You would think this was the most bloodthirsty crowd of lawmakers since Madame Defarge knitted socks in front of the guillotine. But before you come to such a conclusion, there is one little secret you ought to know: not since 1963 has the federal government executed anybody, nor does it have any facilities for carrying out an execution. For all the blood poured forth on the Senate floor in and over this bill and its grisly provisions, it was a fair bet that not a single person would ever have gone to the gallows under it. That is because enforcing the death penalty has nothing to do with passing more laws to buck up those already on the books that are not enforced anyway, but instead depends on whether those who pass and execute the laws are serious about justice. In any event, the bill died in conference, though its descendant stalks the Congress today in President Clinton’s “policeman on every corner” bill, this time with no less than 64 new capital offenses. Who knows what they are? Who cares, since the lawmakers who concocted them have no intention of enforcing them anyway. My guess is that the mega-death penalty bill last year was never intended to pass, that it was just grandstanding for the senators, who intended to execute the bill itself before any real murderer was executed under its stupid and redundant provisions.
Yet one interesting thing about the bill is that it shows how conservatives in Congress have totally abandoned the principle of federalism. One congressional staffer in a Republican office told me that the bill’s death penalty provisions were intended to enforce the death penalty in states that “refused” to enact it themselves—in other words, to sneak around the principle of federalism and states’ rights and to force a criminal statute down the throats of unwilling states. I believe strongly in the death penalty for a number of criminal offenses, and I believe every state ought to pass it and enforce it effectively, but under no circumstances should the federal government be able to force or dragoon any state into adopting the death penalty or any other criminal statute it does not want or believe in. Obviously, it was mainly conservatives who were pushing the mega-death bill, so let us endure no more sermons from these Solons about “judicial activism” or other violations of federalism when those violations tread on local interests that are politically important to the lawmakers. Having surrendered the federalist and states’ rights principles, they cannot expect those principles to be respected by others who have more uses for the federal leviathan than turning it into an oversized gas chamber.
There are several reasons why anarcho-tyranny flourishes. In the first place, it is obviously an easy way for government bureaucrats and lawmakers to enhance their own power and the public funds at their disposal by playing on legitimate and wellfounded fears of citizens over crime. It might seem that it would be just as easy for anarcho-tyrants to actually do something about crime instead of rehearsing all the pretenses of doing something about it. But the fact is that there is almost nothing the government today can do about crime. The essential reason for this is that, since the promulgation of the Incorporation Doctrine by the Supreme Court and the ensuing Warren revolution in criminal law, the control of the criminal justice system has been removed from the control of lawmakers and elected officials as well as from law enforcement and is now almost entirely subordinate to the judicial system. Thus, there can be no local politician who wins election by promising and carrying out an effective program of crime-fighting because any effective laws or punishments he might enact will be dependent on the consent of the courts. Since law enforcement remains primarily a local and state function but is effectively under the control of federal courts, local law-and-order leaders can do nothing effective and have to make do with anarcho-tyrannical applesauce.
While crime and public safety remain important and legitimate concerns of voters, the response of politicians and police almost has to be to promise the false and dangerous solutions of anarcho-tyranny; to change subtly the definition of crime by expanding it to include the innocent and the law-abiding, and to avoid any serious challenge to real criminals. And institutionalizing anarcho-tyrannical functions in such agencies as the BATF merely creates incentives for its bureaucrats to pursue the kind of dangerous and useless measures the bureau has become notorious for. Under anarcho-tyranny, the state creates a problem (which sometimes actually has some connection to reality), declares an emergency or crisis—the drug war, drug emergency areas, the carjacking crisis, Islamic fundamentalism—and then exploits that problem as an instrument by which it continues to enhance its power, though neither the fake problem it exploits nor the real problem that exists is affected. The anarchy that anarcho-tyranny breeds thus serves as the rationale for the tyranny it builds, and the dynamic of anarcho-tyranny is essentially the same “ratchet effect” that Robert Higgs identifies as the principal source of Big Government in the 20th century.
But there is also another reason why anarcho-tyranny flourishes. Throughout this century, in tandem with the emergence of the leviathan state, there has occurred a managed pacification and manipulation of the citizens, with the result that Americans are increasingly habituated to an entirely passive role in government, economy, culture, and now even basic social functions such as childrearing and health care. This process of pacification is closely related to the managerial revolution in the United States and the emergence of centralized, technically skilled elites that specialize in the usurpation of previously autonomous social functions. Hence, just as Americans in the mass-managerial regime are dependent on mass corporations, offices, and factories for their livelihoods, just as they are dependent on mass political parties and illusory mass participation in the political process, just as they are dependent on and engulfed by the mass culture that is continuously fed to them in spectator sports, television, film, art, music, and popular literature, and just as in all these dimensions of life Americans increasingly surrender the active and participatory roles that republican government demands, so too in anarcho-tyranny we are habituated to an entirely passive role in securing our protection from criminals. George Will’s “police saturation” is indeed the logical and practical outcome of this kind of mass pacification, as more and more Americans swallow the lie that they are too stupid and too reckless to protect themselves, their homes, and their families and that cops (who could barely make it through high school) and bureaucrats (who cannot support themselves outside a government payroll) must do it for them.
Yet there are signs that some Americans are not buying into the lie of anarcho-tyranny. At least as far as crime and personal safety are concerned, some are awakening to the ancient lesson of republican government, that in order to govern yourself politically you must first be able to govern yourself personally and morally. And, that lesson means assuming responsibility for your own protection. For months in 1987 in Detroit, citizens complained to the police about teenage prostitutes from a crack house in the neighborhood who solicited old men and adolescents on the street, about drug dealers firing guns in the air for fun, and about a shoot-out between drug gangs while neighborhood children played in the street. Not once did the police respond to any of the repeated calls. Then one day after the shoot-out, two local men named Angelo Parisi and Perry Kent walked up the street, set fire to the crack house, and burned it to the ground, and within minutes police arrived to charge them with two counts of arson and assault with a deadly weapon. With community support, both men were acquitted by a jury of all charges, and there are stories similar to theirs in other American cities.
Soon after the Los Angeles riots, the New York Times recounted the story of a 20-year-old janitor, David Penso, who enjoyed the less-than-bracing experience of watching a local discount store being looted and burned by rioters as Los Angeles police cars drove past and did absolutely nothing. Mr. Penso—unlike George Bush, Jack Kemp, Bill Clinton, and George Will—learned something. “The cops were there,” he told the Times, “but they didn’t do anything. The only way people can be protected in Los Angeles is if they protect themselves with guns.” Some months before the Los Angeles riots, the Washington Post carried a story about women and guns, reporting that there are now about 12 million of them across the country, and one of them, a woman named Paxton Quigley in Beverly Hills, a former activist for gun control and now owner of a gun store that offers firearms training to women, told the Post, “We cannot depend on anyone to protect us. We must do it ourselves. And, the only way is to acquire the firepower it takes to dissuade violent criminals.”
Mr. Parisi and Mr. Kent, Miss Quigley and Mr. Penso, have discovered the dirty little secret that can sweep anarcho-tyranny out of office, that anarcho-tyranny flourishes only when citizens surrender their rights and their duties of protecting themselves, assuming responsibility for themselves, and governing themselves, and that when the anarcho-tyrants promise to take over and perform these duties themselves, they are uttering a lie that leads to slavery and the jungle at the same time. When anarcho-tyranny flourishes, it protects no one except the elites who fatten on it, and it encourages only the withering of self-government and responsibility. In the movie The Magnificent Seven, the bandit leader, played by Eli Wallach, says of the Mexican peasants he is robbing and killing, “If God had not wanted them sheared, he would not have made them sheep.” The peasants in the end show that they are not sheep, not by hiring gunfighters and killers to do their fighting for them, which is what we do when we set up the BATF and “police saturation,” but by learning how to fight for themselves. Sheep do not need to fight for themselves; they have shepherds who do it for them, until the day comes when the shepherds lead their sheep to slaughter. Only when more Americans learn the lessons these citizens have learned, the lessons the peasants in The Magnificent Seven had to learn, and only when they are willing to act on those lessons will anarcho-tyranny itself wither away; only when Americans take back their own streets themselves will they have any streets that are safe. In the words of Lord Byron, “Who would be free, themselves must strike the blow.”
ZeroHedge jumped all over JPM’s note calling a tech correction in July:
“The Correlation Is Broken”: JPMorgan Tells Clients To Buy Puts In These Tech Stocks
Last week, ahead of the massive Momentum ETF (MTUM) rebalance, we showed something remarkable: momentum stocks had undergone a complete Dr Jekyll to Mr Hyde transformation, and instead of correlating to growth, momentum was now purely a “risk on”, or value trade…
… which could be best seen in the collapse of growth-to-momentum correlation.
Needless to say, this transformation made life for analysts – who are really just glorified momentum chasers with some sophisticated-sounding narrative overlay – challenging, because after years of pitching momentum growth names, they now had to shift to value stocks as their preferred reco.
Nowhere was this more evident than in a research note from JPMorgan itself, which despite being the most bullish bank on Wall Street (certainly not to be confused with Morgan Stanley, whose chief equity strategist Mike Wilson yesterday said a 10-15% drop is coming in the next few months), is now taking a step back from its WallStreetBets-like enthusiasm for risk, and telling clients to “Buy Puts in Tech Stocks Triggering Negative Momentum Signals“:
In the note, JPM quant strategist Shawn Quigg points to the chart of collapsing growth-to-momentum correlations shown above (andfirst discussed last week), and says that “the correlation of Growth and Momentum is broken, driven by a swift market re-allocation towards Value amid a view the economic reopening will drive inflation and interest rates higher, headwinds for stocks that benefit in deflationary environments such as Technology.”
To be sure, despite the recent rebound in the QQQs, JPM expects these headwinds to persist as the bank’s economists anticipate peak inflation occurring in April (last Friday’s PCE release). However, according to Quigg it will take until late June (e.g., May release), or later, to confirm the peak.
Here things get awkward within JPM itself, because while one quant strategist says to buy tech puts, the bank’s equity strategist is still overweight tech. How does Quigg resolve this apparent contradiction? Here’s how:
“While our U.S. equity strategist remains Overweight Technology, downside risks could remain for those stocks triggering negative momentum signals despite the NASDAQ 100 in a recent upswing.”
In other words, the bank argues that while tech stocks will still keep rising over the long run, they will drop in the short-term, as “momentum is broken”, and so having puts on is a way to capitalize on this drop. Why that is not sufficient to at least prompt a downgrade from Overweight to Neutral remains a very open question.
Anyway, back to Quigg who then says that he screens the NASDAQ 100 for stocks that are breaking, or are poised to break, below key momentum / technical signals that also carry cheap implied volatility for tactical trade ideas. He details the process below:
We use five short to intermediate term momentum and technical signals popular with quantitative investors (i.e., 1M, 2M, 3M momentum signals, and the 50d and 100d moving averages). We include only those option liquid (10M notional option volume over a 20d period) members of the NASDAQ 100 that are breaking, or are within +/-2.5% (beta adj.) of breaking, below three to five of these signals. We additionally screen for those stocks with cheap volatility via 2M implied volatility that ranks within the bottom quartile (i.e., 25th %-ile rank or lower) relative to the QQQ. Broadly, we find that nearly 30% of the QQQ are breaking, or are poised to break, three to five of these key technical levels. Comparatively, we are not witnessing nearly the same degree of technical breakage in the S&P 500 where only 15% are breaking below three to five of these technical levels, of which 42% of those are within the Information Technology and Communication Services sectors.
His advise: purchase July 95% strike puts on BIDU, PDD, SWKS, QCOM, OKTA, XLNX and/or TSLA, and visually:
How many people voted for this corrupt tool just because Orange Man had a Twitter account?
I know – a lot.
Creepy, confused, “bought and paid for”.
And now, accomplice after the fact.
Some 600,000 dead Americans later (more than 3 million globally), “the Science!” which the Tech Oligarchy suppressed last year (and thousands of virologists self-censored for fear of Fauci) is finally coming to light, despite Corrup Joe trying to bury the truth.
According to three unnamed sources, when Biden was briefed on the investigations’ findings in February and March, he pulled the plug – and instead opted to trust the findings of the World Health Organization, which conducted an ‘investigation’ earlier this year which turned out to be nothing more than political theater, the cast of which included the highly conflicted Peter Daszak, the Fauci-funded virologist who was studying bat viruses at the Wuhan lab.
“The way they did their work was suspicious as hell,” said one former State Department official who (we’re guessing was rooting for team Schiff during Trump’s impeachment).
Pompeo, meanwhile, said in May 2020 that there was “enormous evidence” and a “significant amount of evidence” to support the lab-escape theory. And according to former senior State Department official David Feith, “People in the US government were working on the question of where Covid-19 came from but there was no other effort that we knew of that took the lab leak possibility seriously enough to focus on digging into certain aspects, questions and uncertainties.“
The revelation that Biden shut down the inquiry is awkward at best, after theWall Street Journalreported on Sunday that three researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virologywere so sick in November of 2019 that they sought hospitalization, citing the intelligence report that Biden rejected.
The details of the reporting go beyond a State Department fact sheet, issued during the final days of the Trump administration, which said that several researchers at the lab, a center for the study of coronaviruses and other pathogens, became sick in autumn 2019 “with symptoms consistent with both Covid-19 and common seasonal illness.”
The disclosure of the number of researchers, the timing of their illnesses and their hospital visits come on the eve of a meeting of the World Health Organization’s decision-making body, which is expected to discuss the next phase of an investigation into Covid-19’s origins. -WSJ
And of course now we know that the ‘venerable Dr. Fauci’ was involved in funding research in Wuhan via EcoHealth Alliance, and now admits “there’s no way of guaranteeing” that American taxpayer funds didn’t go towards “gain-of-function” research to make bat coronaviruses better-infect humans.
The lab leak theory, floated byZero Hedgeand several other outlets in early 2020, was promoted heavily by former President Trump, who blamed China for unleashing the virus on the world and derailing historic economic growth following three years of ‘America First’ international negotiations, along with generous tax breaks.
“I said it right at the beginning, and that’s where it came from,” Trump told Newsmax Tuesday night, taking somewhat of a victory lab over the MSM’s ‘come to Jesus’ moment over the mounting lab leak hypothesis. “I think it was obvious to smart people. That’s where it came from. I have no doubt about it. I had no doubt about it. I was criticized by the press.”
Trump also said he remains confident that the lab leak theory is correct.
“‘People didn’t want to say China. Usually they blame it on Russia,” he continued. “I said right at the beginning it came out of Wuhan. And that’s where all the deaths were also, by the way, when we first heard about this, there were body bags, dead people laying all over Wuhan province, and that’s where it happened to be located.”
“To me it was very obvious. I said it very strongly and I was criticized and now people are agreeing with me, so that’s okay.“
As the former President said yesterday: “I was criticized by the press because China has a lot of people taken care of — they took care of Hunter, they took care of Joe…”
The House Financial Services’ Subcommittee on Investor Protection, Entrepreneurship and Capital Markets will hold a hearing today on the grossly disfigured initial public offering (IPO) process in the U.S. today, which is allowing the rich to get richer as the small retail investor is being effectively looted. The hearing is titled: “Going Public: SPACs, Direct Listings, Public Offerings, and the Need for Investor Protections.”
Coinbase, the cryptocurrency exchange, went public on Nasdaq via a direct listing on April 14. On its first day of trading it closed at a share price of $328.28, giving it a market capitalization of $85.8 billion. In a traditional IPO, early investors and company executives are not allowed to sell their shares for several months due to a so-called lockup period. There’s no such prohibition in a direct listing. According to an SEC filing, Coinbase’s Chairman and CEO, Brian Armstrong, sold 750,000 shares on April 14 at an average share price of $389.10, raising approximately $291,825,000. Since then, Coinbase has been on a steady descent, closing this past Friday at $224.35, a decline of 32 percent in less than two months.
The month prior to Coinbase going public, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, a federal regulator,levied a paltry $6.5 million fineagainst Coinbase for the following outrageously manipulative conduct spanning more than three years:
“According to the order, between January 2015 and September 2018, Coinbase recklessly delivered false, misleading, or inaccurate reports concerning transactions in digital assets, including Bitcoin, on the GDAX electronic trading platform it operated. During this period, Coinbase operated two automated trading programs, Hedger and Replicator, which generated orders that at times matched with one another. The GDAX Trading Rules specifically disclosed that Coinbase was trading on GDAX, but failed to disclose that Coinbase was operating more than one trading program and trading through multiple accounts.
“In addition, the order finds that while Hedger and Replicator had independent purposes, in practice the programs matched orders with one another in certain trading pairs, resulting in trades between accounts owned by Coinbase. Coinbase included the information for these transactions on its website and provided that information to reporting services, either directly or through access to its website.
“Reporting firms such as Crypto Facilities Ltd., which publishes the CME Bitcoin Real Time Index, and CoinMarketCap OpCo, LLC, which posts such transactional information on its website, received access to Coinbase’s transactional information via Coinbase’s Application Programming Interface, while the NYSE Bitcoin Index, received it directly in transmissions from Coinbase. According to the order, transactional information of this type is used by market participants for price discovery related to trading or owning digital assets, and potentially resulted in a perceived volume and level of liquidity of digital assets, including Bitcoin, that was false, misleading, or inaccurate.
“The order also finds that over a six-week period—August through September 2016—a former Coinbase employee used a manipulative or deceptive device by intentionally placing buy and sell orders in the Litecoin/Bitcoin trading pair on GDAX that matched each other as wash trades. This created the misleading appearance of liquidity and trading interest in Litecoin. Coinbase is therefore found to be vicariously liable as a principal for this employee’s conduct.”
Marc Andreessen is a member of the Board of Directors of Coinbase, according to its website. He is also a cofounder and general partner at the venture capital firm, Andreessen Horowitz. According tothe prospectusfor the direct listing of Coinbase, “Andreessen Horowitz and its affiliates beneficially own more than 5% of our outstanding capital stock. Marc L. Andreessen and Kathryn Haun, members of our board of directors, are both general partners at Andreessen Horowitz.”
Despite the fact that Andreessen Horowitz would seem to have a dog in this fight, today’s House hearing will have as one of its witnesses, Scott Kupor, a Managing Partner at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. You might want to take what he has to say with a grain of salt.
Typically, Democrats, who currently control both houses of Congress, get to pick the majority of witnesses at these hearings. The minority party, currently packed with right-wing Republicans, gets to select at least one witness. We would be inclined to wager that Republicans selected Kupor.
A more unbiased assessment will come from Andrew Park, the Senior Policy Analyst for the Wall Street watchdog, Americans for Financial Reform. According to his written testimony, which has been released by the Subcommittee, Mr. Park will weigh in as follows on the subject of SPACs, those blank-check companies that are also a scheme for the rich to get richer while leaving the retail investor holding the bag:
“Although many people have just started hearing about these SPACs recently, SPACs are far from new. In fact, they date back to the 1980s when they were called blank check companies and often associated with scams, bilking unsuspecting investors out of millions of dollars. Fraud was so pervasive in these blank check companies that Congress passed the Penny Stock Reform Act (PSRA) in 1990 to address some of the problems, which was followed by the SEC putting in place Rule 419 for blank check companies. Blank check company issuers, however devised the modern-day SPAC structure to get around those rules, reminding us that properly regulating new assets requires continuing attention and action.”
As for the rich-getting-richer scheme, Mr. Park reveals the following:
“…retail investors who chase these SPACs with high hopes are losing. A 2012 analysis of 158 SPACs issued between 2003 and 2008 found their average one-year return was -33% while that loss deepened to -54% after three years. Between 2010 and 2018, the average one-year return following a merger was -15.6%.”
The full list of witnesses for today’s hearing is as follows:
Stephen Deane, Senior Director of Legislative and Regulatory Outreach, CFA Institute
Andrew Park, Senior Policy Analyst, Americans for Financial Reform
Usha Rodrigues, Professor & M.E. Kilpatrick Chair of Corporate Finance and Securities Law, University of Georgia School of Law
Scott Kupor, Investing Partner, Andreessen Horowitz
The hearing will begin at 12 noon. You can clickhereto watch the webcast of the hearing.
Econophysics2020 
