The Secrets Flynn Was Desperate to Conceal

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/05/secrets-flynn-lied-conceal/611377/

The former national security adviser’s lies protected himself. But they also protected Trump.

Russian intelligence services intervened in the 2016 U.S. election to help elect Donald Trump. They intervened in ways that were illegal, and they intervened in ways that were clandestine. In the context of an election decided by 80,000 votes in three states, they intervened in ways that probably were decisive. Altogether, the Russian action to elect Donald Trump in 2016 ranks among the most successful intelligence operations in world history.

President Trump and his supporters dismiss these facts as “the Russia hoax,” but facts they are—facts beyond rational doubt.

Yet despite three years of investigation, much of the Trump-Russia story remains mysterious. We don’t know why the Russians intervened so aggressively, and we don’t fully know how.

Judge Jeanine: The left's attempted coup d'état exposed

Brian Stelter: This is one of the most heinous things I've ever seen on television

Fact-checking five of Trump's false claims this week

post-modernism - it is true because it feels right

https://www.britannica.com/topic/postmodernism-philosophy

 Postmodernism, also spelled post-modernism, in Western philosophy, a late 20th-century movement characterized by broad skepticism, subjectivism, or relativism; a general suspicion of reason; and an acute sensitivity to the role of ideology in asserting and maintaining political and economic power.

Why aren't editorial boards screaming: Trump has to go?

https://edition.cnn.com/2020/05/10/opinions/why-dont-editorial-boards-call-for-trump-to-resign-lockhart/index.html

 By the height of the Watergate scandal in 1974, virtually every major newspaper in America had called for President Richard Nixon's resignation. During the investigation and impeachment of Bill Clinton in 1998, more than 100 newspapers called for him to resign.

 But President Donald J. Trump? He could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody... and not a single major daily newspaper would call for his resignation. I admit that -- just like the original Trump quote it references -- that Fifth Avenue statement is a bit hyperbolic, but think about it:

 After three years of political and actual carnage under Trump, including Robert Mueller's description of acts that amounted to, he told Congress, obstruction of justice; Trump's "fine people on both sides" reaction to a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville where a counter-protester was killed; his rampant conflicts of interest and credible accusations of his violations of the emoluments clause of the Constitution; his close to 17,000 false statements; a travel ban that primarily targets mostly Muslim-majority countries; impeachment for alleged extortion of a foreign government (he was acquitted in the Republican Senate), and the gross mishandling of a deadly pandemic, you'd think somebody on an editorial board might say it's time for the President to leave.

Did coronavirus accidentally escape from a Wuhan lab? It’s doubtful. | The Fact Checker

'Guilty': Trump DOJ Trying To Reverse Key Mueller Conviction | The Beat With Ari Melber | MSNBC

Pompeo Backtracks About Wuhan Lab: The Latest In The Controversial Coronavirus Origin Theory

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackbrewster/2020/05/06/pompeo-backtracks-about-wuhan-lab-the-latest-in-the-controversial-coronavirus-origin-theory/#4d26a2ad2f72

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo seemed to walk back an explosive allegation Wednesday, that “enormous evidence” linked the coronavirus outbreak to a laboratory in Wuhan, China, now saying “we don’t have certainty”—the latest turn of a controversial theory that started at the very beginning of COVID-19 outbreak:

Report says cellphone data suggests October shutdown at Wuhan lab, but experts are skeptical

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/report-says-cellphone-data-suggests-october-shutdown-wuhan-lab-experts-n1202716

 A private analysis of cellphone location data purports to show that a high-security Wuhan laboratory studying coronaviruses shut down in October, three sources briefed on the matter told NBC News. U.S. spy agencies are reviewing the document, but intelligence analysts examined and couldn't confirm a similar theory previously, two senior officials say.

The report — obtained by the London-based NBC News Verification Unit — says there was no cellphone activity in a high-security portion of the Wuhan Institute of Virology from Oct. 7 through Oct. 24, 2019, and that there may have been a "hazardous event" sometime between Oct. 6 and Oct. 11.

It offers no direct evidence of a shutdown, or any proof for the theory that the virus emerged accidentally from the lab.

How deadly pathogens have escaped the lab — over and over again

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/3/20/18260669/deadly-pathogens-escape-lab-smallpox-bird-flu

Research into dangerous viruses and bacteria is important, but for the deadliest pathogens, it’s not clear the benefits are worth the risks.

 

Virus Researchers Cast Doubt On Theory Of Coronavirus Lab Accident

https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/04/23/841729646/virus-researchers-cast-doubt-on-theory-of-coronavirus-lab-accident

Virus researchers say there is virtually no chance that the new coronavirus was released as result of a laboratory accident in China or anywhere else.

The assessment, made by more than half-a-dozen scientists familiar with lab accidents and how research on coronaviruses is conducted, casts doubt on recent claims that a mistake may have unleashed the coronavirus on the world.

The Coronavirus Conspiracy Theory Doesn't Add Up. It's Also a Self-Defeating Diversion.

https://thewire.in/world/the-coronavirus-conspiracy-theory-doesnt-add-up-its-also-a-self-defeating-diversion

The standard narrative has  been that the virus originated in an animal and seafood market some 30 kms away from the  Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) where the Wuhan National Biosafety Laboratory is housed. Speaking to Fox News on April 15, Pompeo remarked that the wet market and the WIV were a “handful of miles away,” and that the US was “working diligently to figure it out.”

Subsequently, right-wing American publications and some tabloids began to run stories claiming that the outbreak originated in the lab. More extreme ones like the Washington Times even claimed in late January that the coronavirus may have originated in a lab linked to China’a biowarfare programme.

 

A detailed  analysis in NPR has suggested that “there is virtually no chance that the new coronavirus was released as a result of a laboratory accident.” After consulting 10 leading scientists who do the work of collecting samples of viruses from animals and understand how lab accidents happen, the NPR concluded that “an accidental release would have required a remarkable series of coincidences and deviations from well established experimental protocols.”

“The Discussion Is Basically Over”: Why Scientists Believe the Wuhan-Lab Coronavirus Origin Theory Is Highly Unlikely

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/05/why-scientists-believe-the-wuhan-lab-coronavirus-origin-theory-is-highly-unlikely

Over the past couple of weeks, the theory that SARS-CoV-2 might have accidentally leaked from a lab inside the Wuhan Institute of Virology has become a heavily touted casus belli in President Trump’s new cold war with China, as administration officials build their case to blame the whole catastrophe on Xi Jinping’s Communist Party. The lab theory was pushed hard by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, even as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff declared that in all likelihood, the virus did not originate in a lab. American allies, meanwhile, appear to be freaked out by the rumor-mongering. “We can’t repeat the mistakes of the past. The WMDs fiasco was not that long ago,” a former senior Australian security official told the Sydney Morning Herald.

 

The lab-accident scenario seems the stuff of Hollywood thrillers—and perfect as propaganda, which operates on principles similar to those of thrillers—but there are a few facts that give it a surface plausibility. The Wuhan lab happens to conduct bat-coronavirus research, and it also happens to be located not that far from the seafood market where an early cluster of cases first emerged in late 2019. But, appealing and useful as it is in certain kinds of narratives, the lab theory leaves many virology and epidemiology types highly skeptical. To get a sense of scientists’ reservations, I spoke with Kristian Andersen, a professor in the Department of Immunology and Microbiology at Scripps Research. He was the lead author on a March 17 paper, published in the journal Nature Medicine, that is seen as the definitive research supporting a natural virus origin. “We do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible,” Andersen’s team, which compared the available genome sequence data for known coronavirus strains, concluded.