Bill Barr seems to be ready for a post-election constitutional crisis

 https://edition.cnn.com/2020/09/18/politics/what-matters-september-17/index.html

 Now it is extremely hard not to shake the impression that his vision of justice consistently appears in complete line with what benefits President Donald Trump staying in office.

A really bad analogy. For starters, Barr this week compared coronavirus stay-at-home orders, which Trump has opposed, to slavery. "You know, putting a national lockdown, stay at home orders, is like house arrest. Other than slavery, which was a different kind of restraint, this is the greatest intrusion on civil liberties in American history," Barr said at a Constitution Day celebration put on by Hillsdale College.

 South Carolina Democratic Rep. Jim Clyburn said that Barr's comment was "the most ridiculous, tone-deaf, God-awful thing I've ever heard." CNN's Brandon Tensley went deep on the painful absurdity of drawing any kind of analogy between forced bondage and government recommendations designed to keep Americans safe from a deadly virus, especially during this time of a general re-examination of the country's racist history.

Fact-checking Biden's CNN town hall

 https://edition.cnn.com/2020/09/17/politics/joe-biden-cnn-town-hall-fact-check/index.html

 CNN hosted a drive-in town hall with 2020 Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden in Pennsylvania on Thursday night. It was Biden's first prime time town hall since accepting the nomination.

Over the course of the night, Biden took questions ranging from farming regulations, the military presence in Afghanistan, to how he would approach the coronavirus pandemic.

Biden made a few errors and misleading statements on the drive-in stage. Here's a look at the facts:

Coronating the G-d Inside of Yourself

three drashot for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur 5781

Echoing Decades of Fighting Over U.S. History Classrooms, President Trump Announces a Push for 'Patriotic Education'

 https://time.com/5889907/trump-patriotic-education/

 Speaking on Constitution Day from the National Archives—where original copies of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution of the United States and the Bill of Rights are on display—during a White House conference on American History, President Donald Trump announced that he was signing an executive order to establish the “1776 Commission,” a group that would “promote patriotic education,” and that the National Endowment for the Humanities would be awarding a grant to support the development of a “pro-American curriculum that celebrates the truth about our nation’s great history.”

 In the course of his announcement, Trump claimed that people on the left want to “bully Americans into abandoning their values, their heritage and their very way of life,” and denounced the forces that he blamed for propagating that view in history classes. He called the New York Times’ 1619 Project, which reframes the story of nation’s founding around the arrival of the first enslaved Africans in Virginia, “toxic propaganda,” and he also singled out the late Howard Zinn, author of A People’s History of the United States. Zinn’s book, widely used in schools since it was published in 1980, is credited for helping popularize a bottom-up approach to history, as an alternative to telling the story of the U.S. via the top-down achievements of elite white men.

 

Trump praised China's coronavirus response during pandemic

15 times Trump praised China as coronavirus was spreading across the globe

 https://www.politico.com/news/2020/04/15/trump-china-coronavirus-188736

 President Donald Trump yanked U.S. funding for the World Health Organization on Tuesday, complaining that the United Nations public health agency was overly deferential to China and had put too much faith in Beijing’s assertions that it had the coronavirus outbreak there was under control.

“Had the WHO done its job to get medical experts into China to objectively assess the situation on the ground and to call out China’s lack of transparency, the outbreak could have been contained at its source with very little death,” the president said Tuesday. “Instead, the W.H.O. willingly took China’s assurances to face value.”

 Trump, however, echoed many of those same assurances regarding China and its response to the virus throughout January and February, as the unique coronavirus began to infiltrate countries around the world. Just days before the U.S. recorded its first death from Covid-19, Trump touted China’s government for its transparency and hard work to defeat the coronavirus that causes the illness.

There's Only Weak Evidence For Vitamin-D As a COVID-19 Preventative—But Scientists Are Trying to Learn More

 https://time.com/5889546/vitamin-d-coronavirus/

 To protect himself from COVID-19, Dr. Anthony Fauci has long said he’s skipping hugs and handshakes, wearing a mask, and staying off of planes. Last week, he acknowledged adding another step to protect his health: taking supplements of vitamin-D.

 However, while spurious claims that vitamin-D can prevent or treat COVID-19 have proliferated online, including some recommending potentially dangerous doses, it’s important to point out that Fauci wasn’t talking about vitamin-D helping with COVID-19 in particular. Instead, he was speaking more broadly about vitamin-D’s importance in caring for our immune system. Vitamin-D is important for our musculoskeletal health and immune function, but it’s far from clear whether boosting our intake can ward off or treat COVID-19 in particular. At this point, the National Institutes of Health says there isn’t enough evidence to recommend using vitamin-D to prevent or treat COVID-19, but it also says there isn’t enough evidence to recommend against it, either.

 

Triumph The Insult Comic Dog Hosts A Focus Group With Real Trump Supporte…

Scientific American Endorses Joe Biden

 https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/scientific-american-endorses-joe-biden/

 Scientific American has never endorsed a presidential candidate in its 175-year history. This year we are compelled to do so. We do not do this lightly.

The evidence and the science show that Donald Trump has badly damaged the U.S. and its people—because he rejects evidence and science. The most devastating example is his dishonest and inept response to the COVID-19 pandemic, which cost more than 190,000 Americans their lives by the middle of September. He has also attacked environmental protections, medical care, and the researchers and public science agencies that help this country prepare for its greatest challenges. That is why we urge you to vote for Joe Biden, who is offering fact-based plans to protect our health, our economy and the environment. These and other proposals he has put forth can set the country back on course for a safer, more prosperous and more equitable future.

Scientific American makes presidential endorsement for the very first time

The biggest mystery: what it will take to trace the coronavirus source

 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01541-z

 SARS-CoV-2 came from an animal but finding which one will be tricky, as will laying to rest speculation of a lab escape. 

 Since the pandemic began, the question of where the coronavirus came from has been one of the biggest puzzles. It almost certainly originated in bats, and a new study out this week — the most comprehensive analysis of coronaviruses in China — adds further weight to that theory.

But the lack of clarity around how the virus passed to people has meant that unsubstantiated theories — promoted by US President Donald Trump — that it escaped from a laboratory in China persist.

 By contrast, most researchers say the more likely explanation, given what is known so far about this virus and others like it, is that bats passed it to an intermediate animal, which then spread it to people.

 

The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2

 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0820-9

 It is improbable that SARS-CoV-2 emerged through laboratory manipulation of a related SARS-CoV-like coronavirus. As noted above, the RBD of SARS-CoV-2 is optimized for binding to human ACE2 with an efficient solution different from those previously predicted^7,11. Furthermore, if genetic manipulation had been performed, one of the several reverse-genetic systems available for betacoronaviruses would probably have been used¹⁹. However, the genetic data irrefutably show that SARS-CoV-2 is not derived from any previously used virus backbone²⁰. Instead, we propose two scenarios that can plausibly explain the origin of SARS-CoV-2: (i) natural selection in an animal host before zoonotic transfer; and (ii) natural selection in humans following zoonotic transfer. We also discuss whether selection during passage could have given rise to SARS-CoV-2.

 

 

Tucker Carlson criticizes Facebook for censoring interview with Chinese virologist

 https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/tucker-facebook-censor-chinese-virologist

"Instagram, which Facebook also owns did the same thing. Twitter suspended Dr. Yan's account entirely. It did not explain why. Nor did the tech companies explain how they would know more about disease transmission than an MD, PhD virologist like Dr. Li-Meng Yan. Instead, Facebook and Instagram linked to three so-called fact checks which supposedly proved Yan was lying.

 Carlson also defended Yan and her research. "COVID-19 is not from nature, she said. It was created in a lab in Wuhan, China. The Chinese government intentionally unleashed it on the world. Those are her claims. Are they true? We have no way of verifying them. We do know that Dr. Li-Meng Yan is not a quack," Carlson said.

 "She’s authored peer-reviewed papers on coronavirus transmission in both Nature Magazine and The Lancet. Those are two of the most respected publications in all of science. Her paper on the origin of COVID-19, which she has published online, is not frivolous. In it, she points to specific evidence for the claims that she makes. She identifies so-called cut sites which are frequently used in genomic engineering that would allow scientists to swap in sequences from other viruses to create what she described last night as a Frankenstein bioweapon."