Policing, not crime is behind swelling prisons – and it’s costing billions: MP
Facebook used to be a Big Tech giant — now Meta isn’t even in the top 20 most valuable U.S. companies CNBC. That’s a damn shame.
Wile E. Coyote Moment as Tech Goes Off the CliffJohn Authers, Bloomberg
The Trump Tapes: 20 interviews that show why he is an unparalleled danger
Washington Post – Bob Woodward: “…In the “The Trump Tapes,” I share my personal reporting journey through the eight hours of interviews. I provide commentary at more than 200 points in the audiobook, explicitly offering my own reactions, hesitations, conclusions, and explanations of my method of gathering and confirming information. When Trump came on the political scene in 2015, he was immediately a big presence, regularly making outrageous statements. He seized the attention of the media and gave regular interviews before and after he was elected president. But for someone who talked so much, he insulated himself from long and sustained questioning. In our extended conversations, I was able to press him for prolonged periods and with dozens of follow-up questions. Trump agreed that all of our interviews were on the record and could be recorded. “When did it become yes?” I asked about his decision to run for president. On his handling of the coronavirus, “What grade would you give yourself?” And about the presidency, “What have you learned about yourself?” In all, I asked him more than 600 questions.
I am also releasing “The Trump Tapes” for the historical archive. The content of the interviews was comprehensively quoted in my 2020 book, “Rage,” and some of the audio of the most dramatic news released. But the full exchange amplifies an understanding of Trump and the unique concentration of power in the presidency…”
COVID-19 ORIGINS: Investigating a “Complex and Grave Situation” Inside a Wuhan Lab.
Vanity Fair and ProPublica downloaded more than 500 documents from the WIV website, including party branch dispatches from 2017 to the present. To assess Reid’s interpretation, we sent key documents to experts on CCP communications. They told us that the WIV dispatches did indeed signal that the institute faced an acute safety emergency in November 2019; that officials at the highest levels of the Chinese government weighed in; and that urgent action was taken in an effort to address ongoing safety issues. The documents do not make clear who was responsible for the crisis, which laboratory it affected specifically or what the exact nature of the biosafety emergency was….
More on that “Acute Safety Emergency in November 2019” from Jim Geraghty:
Separately, ProPublica and Vanity Fairquestion how Yusen Zhou could have applied for a patent for a SARS-CoV-2 vaccine on February 24, 2020. Yusen Zhou is the director of the State Key Laboratory of Pathogen and Biosecurity at the Academy of Military Medical Sciences Institute of Microbiology and Epidemiology, in Beijing. The top experts in vaccine development conclude that it is impossible to start from scratch and have a vaccine ready in three months. A South China Morning News report said that the Chinese government traced the first case of Covid-19 back to November 17, but other reports said that Chinese doctors only came to realize that they were dealing with a new and serious virus in late December; the first public statement about a “cluster of pneumonia cases with an unknown cause” from Chinese health authorities was dated to December 21, 2019. Yet the evidence suggests that the Chinese military and medical authorities would’ve had to have started the research on their vaccine before the first cases emerged:
Vanity Fair and ProPublica consulted two independent experts and one expert adviser to the interim report to get their assessment of when Zhou’s research was likely to have begun. Two of the three said that he had to have started no later than November 2019, in order to complete the mouse research spelled out in his patent and subsequent papers.
Larry Kerr, who advised on the interim report, called the timeline laid out in Zhou’s patent and research papers “scientifically, technically not possible.” He added, “I don’t think any molecular biology lab in the world, no matter how sophisticated, could pull that off.”
Rick Bright, the former HHS official who helped oversee vaccine development for the U.S. government, told Vanity Fair and ProPublica that even a four-month timetable would be “aggressive,” especially when the virus in question is new. “Things aren’t usually that perfect,” he said.
You wanted a smoking gun? I smell smoke, and that gun barrel feels awfully warm.
As David Strom of Hot Air adds: The COVID coverup begins to unravel. “It was remarkable how quickly the Narrative™ settled on the zoonotic origin of the virus, since warning signs that the virus didn’t originate naturally were everywhere. Even scientists who confidently declared in private their belief that the virus was engineered publicly stated the opposite–after having been directed to by Anthony Fauci, the keeper of the keys to the kingdom’s treasury when it comes to research dollars. Fauci in recent months has been backtracking on whether or not the virus could have been engineered, but he sure expended enormous effort maintaining the fiction that an animal origin was certain.
There is a simple reason for Fauci’s reluctance to consider a lab leak hypothesis–if it came from the Wuhan Institute for Virology, the US government likely funded the research. Obviously nobody wants that on their record, and Fauci has quite the pension to protect, as well as an unearned reputation as The Science™.”
