We’re joined by the Pod Yourself a Gun boys (Matt Lieb and Vince Mancini) to discuss the new film The Many Saints of Newark: A Sopranos Story.

Jon Gruden's ugly emails and uglier defense of them. The Saudi royal family's purchase of Newcastle United to hide their crimes. Kyrie Irving's abstruse "the personal is political" defense of jobs over lives. Is there any thread linking these sad actors? Matthew and Jonah look for one in a wide-ranging conversation that probably raises more questions than answers.

Follow the Jacobin Sports Show on Twitter: @JacobinSports

Email us: jacobinsports@gmail.com

Democracy Now! 2021-10-19 Tuesday

• Headlines for October 19, 2021
• A Reluctant Warrior? An Examination of Gen. Colin Powell's Bloody Legacy from Iraq to Latin America
• "Second Chance": Deported to Haiti, Immigrant Activist Jean Montrevil Returns to U.S. on Special Parole

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“By the time Biden won the presidency, I was struggling to square what I was learning about the family's business dealings with the folksy image I had of him and his family. I just wanted to tell the story in full.”

Author Ben Schreckinger dug up the history of a family dynasty and put it into his book The Bidens, which explores the Biden family, Joe’s childhood, weird Delaware loyalty politics, the shady business dealings of Joe’s brother Jim, his son Hunter and, of course, the 2020 laptop story.

But what makes this book truly interesting? This tell-all book is inconvenient to both sides of the aisle because it’s just as critical of Trump, the Republicans, and even some Fox members (looking at you, Tucker).

Schreckinger is an equal-opportunity offender, and that’s part of what makes The Bidens such a great book.

As Matt Taibbi puts it: “This is reporting. This is what it looks like. I kinda forgot what it felt like. It’s a great book. And incriminating.”

Watch for yourself. Can you get a handle on what’s actually going on in the family?

Plus, drunk Kamala in space, Laura Ingraham’s kryptonite, and we take the Washington Post conspiracy quiz.

It’s all this, and more, on this week’s episode of Useful Idiots. Check it out.

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Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the republic that emerged from the union of the Kingdom of Poland and Grand Duchy of Lithuania in the 14th Century. At first this was a personal union, similar to that of James I and VI in Britain, but this was formalised in 1569 into a vast republic, stretching from the Baltic to the Black Sea. Kings and princes from across Europe would compete for parliament to elect them King and Grand Duke, and the greatest power lay with the parliaments. When the system worked well, the Commonwealth was a powerhouse, and it was their leader Jan Sobieski who relieved the siege of Vienna in 1683, defeating the Ottomans. Its neighbours exploited its parliament's need for unanimity, though, and this contributed to its downfall. Austria, Russia and Prussia divided its territory between them from 1772, before the new, smaller states only emerged in the 20th Century.

The image above is Jan III Sobieski (1629-1696), King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania, at the Battle of Vienna 1683, by Marcello Bacciarelli (1731-1818)

With

Robert Frost The Burnett Fletcher Chair of History at the University of Aberdeen

Katarzyna Kosior Lecturer in Early Modern History at Northumbria University

And

Norman Davies Professor Emeritus in History and Honorary Fellow of St Antony’s College, University of Oxford

Producer: Simon Tillotson

This week: Isaac spends 30 minutes unpacking the 400+ page ramblings of a cranky retiree who died about 200 years ago, but whose polemics against his own society have a remarkable amount to teach us about one of the most important moments in Japanese history.

Show notes here.

We all do it. But is there anything philosophically interesting about complaining? Agnes Callard thinks there is. In this episode of the Philosophy Bites podcast she discusses complaint with Nigel Warburton.

Max Blumenthal and Ben Norton speak with economist Michael Hudson about his book "Super Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire."

Professor Hudson just published a 3rd edition that updates his analysis for the 21st century, discussing the new cold war on China and Russia and the ongoing transition from a US dollar-dominated financialized system to a "multipolar de-dollarized economy."

VIDEO: https://youtube.com/watch?v=Uiz934HVZjY

Michael Hudson's website: michael-hudson.com

Because there is no way to deny that Israel refuses to grant basic civil rights to millions of Palestinians in the territories it has occupied since 1967, the Israeli government and its supporters in the West reflexively smear anyone who refuses to ignore or excuse this injustice using a familiar set of lies.

That’s why the attacks on Sally Rooney this week, for refusing an Israeli publishing firm’s request to produce a Hebrew translation of her new novel, “Beautiful World, Where Are You,” to honor the Palestinian-led cultural boycott of Israel, were so predictable.

Rooney explained in a written statement that she was convinced that Israel’s unequal treatment of the Palestinians in the occupied territories was akin to the former apartheid regime in South Africa, justifying an international campaign of boycott, divestment, and sanctions like the successful one against that state.

“Earlier this year, the international campaign group Human Rights Watch published a report entitled ‘A Threshold Crossed: Israeli Authorities and the Crimes of Apartheid and Persecution’. That report, coming on the heels of a similarly damning report by Israel’s most prominent human rights organization B’Tselem, confirmed what Palestinian human rights groups have long been saying: Israel’s system of racial domination and segregation against Palestinians meets the definition of apartheid under international law,” Rooney wrote.

“Of course, many states other than Israel are guilty of grievous human rights abuses,” she continued, preempting one of the most common objections to the boycott campaign raised by supporters of Israel. “This was also true of South Africa during the campaign against apartheid there. In this particular case, I am responding to the call from Palestinian civil society, including all major Palestinian trade unions and writers’ unions.”

But before Rooney released the statement explaining her reasons for joining the boycott, she was accused of being either an antisemite, for singling out the world’s only Jewish state for criticism, or a hypocrite, for not taking similar actions to prevent translation of her work into the languages used in authoritarian nations.

“Sally Rooney’s novels are available in Chinese and Russian,” the literary critic Ruth Franklin tweeted. “Doesn’t she care about the Uighurs? Or Putin-defying journalists? To judge Israel by a different standard than the rest of the world is antisemitism.”

A London correspondent for i24 News, an outlet based in Tel Aviv, Israel, chimed in, asking, “Will she refuse Russian, Arabic and Chinese publishers, too?”

The next day, an app used by Israel’s government to coordinate the outrage of its supporters on social networks directed them to like a Facebook comment “saying that her decision reflects her antisemitic behaviour!”

Israel's anti-BDS app is directing users to post comments on social media accusing novelist Sally Rooney of antisemitism for boycotting an Israeli publisher. #SallyRooney #BDS @Telegraph pic.twitter.com/izx3Dw4hJr

— Behind Israel's Troll Army (@AntiBDSApp) October 12, 2021

The self-described Zionist music journalist Eve Barlow tweeted, despite a lack of evidence that Rooney had ever expressed any anti-Jewish sentiment: “I fully expect people like Sally Rooney to be antisemitic. It’s not a surprise. I’d be surprised if she wasn’t.”

Judea Pearl, an Israeli American computer science professor whose son Daniel was murdered by Islamist extremists in Pakistan in 2002, responded to Barlow by baselessly accusing Rooney — who was an international debate champion before she turned to fiction — of having adopted an anti-Israel position without having given the matter any thought at all.

As one stunned Irish observer noted, Pearl added that he might have expected Rooney to be antisemitic based on his offensive, and shockingly inaccurate, caricature of what her background must have been as a typical Irish person: “alcoholic parents, fanatic teachers, bad neighborhood etc.”

Sally Rooney, like anyone who grows up in the “bad neighbourhood” that is *rural Mayo*, with “alcoholic parents” who *run a regional arts centre* and “fanatic teachers” at *Trinity College Dublin* can’t help being an antisemite.

But opposing genocide in Palestine?

Unthinkable! pic.twitter.com/20LefJeNZR

— Pádraig Mac Oscair ?? (@PMacoscair) October 15, 2021

Ignorance about the Irish was a factor of much of the criticism of Rooney’s decision on social networks. The thought that something other than antisemitism — like the sympathy of one formerly colonized nation for another — might explain widespread Irish support for the Palestinians seemed to be utterly lost on most of those dismissing Rooney’s stance.

More knowledge of Irish history might have made Rooney’s decision less shocking to her critics. None of them, for instance, seem aware that the battle of an indigenous population to regain control of its land from settlers who seized it as part of a violent process of colonization is far from abstract to the Irish. Just last month, Ireland’s president, Michael D. Higgins, turned down an invitation to join the British queen at an event to commemorate the creation of Northern Ireland through the partition of Ireland along ethnic lines 100 years ago.

Omar Barghouti, the Palestinian co-founder of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions, or BDS, movement, observed in an email interview that the “first significant instance of cultural boycott against apartheid South Africa was a 1964 declaration signed by twenty-eight Irish playwrights who committed not to permit their work to be performed before segregated audiences in South Africa.”

Barghouti also observed that the demand for Rooney to make her work available in Hebrew, or be branded an antisemite, “attempts to center the oppressor community and its privileged entitlement to read world literary works in its language intentionally de-center the oppressed, the Indigenous Palestinians, and our fundamental entitlement to freedom, justice and basic human rights.” (He might have added that the outrage at Rooney’s decision to not license a Hebrew translation is particularly odd given that just 8 percent of Jewish Israelis do not speak English.)

Then there’s the fact that Rooney is from Mayo, the Irish county where the term boycott was invented in 1880, during a popular struggle to regain control of the land from the descendants of English settlers.

It is also absurd to claim that Rooney somehow arrived at her decision on a whim. In 2019, she added her name to an open letter deploring a decision by the city of Dortmund to rescind a literature prize from the writer Kamila Shamsie “because of her stated commitment to the non-violent Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement for Palestinian rights.”

Earlier this year, she signed a “Letter Against Apartheid” that called on artists “to exercise their agency within their institutions and localities to support the Palestinian struggle for decolonization to the best of their ability. Israeli apartheid is sustained by international complicity, it is our collective responsibility to redress this harm.”

As the writer and activist Omar Robert Hamilton observed, Rooney was simply “following through” on those principles when she announced that she would stop working with the Israeli publishing house Modan, which published Hebrew translations of her two previous novels but also prints books for Israel’s Ministry of Defense, including an ethics guide for soldiers by the moral philosopher Asa Kasher, who helped craft the Israeli army doctrine that killing civilians in Gaza is acceptable to protect Israeli soldiers.

There was also support for Rooney. The novelist Michael Chabon told The Associated Press that “as a proudly Jewish writer who wants Israel to survive and thrive, and (and therefore) supports the Palestinian people in their struggle for equality, justice and human rights, I say yasher koach (Hebrew for ‘Good job’ or ‘More power to you’) to Rooney.” Chabon added that he might consider joining the boycott of Israeli publishers in the future.

On Twitter, Chabon responded to a defender of Israel who called Rooney’s boycott “silly” and ineffective by writing: “I commend her experimental spirit; intractable evils demand no less. Who knows what effect it will or won’t have? Not us.”

Mohammed El-Kurd, a Palestinian from the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah, mocked a claim from a spokesperson for Israel’s foreign ministry, who said that Rooney’s stance “impedes peace, dialogue, or any meaningful change.”

Because Rooney achieved fame in her 20s and has been marketed in ways that draw attention to her youth, such as “Salinger for the Snapchat generation,” supporters of Israel have also attacked her as a self-obsessed millennial, a young woman too naive to understand the conflict.

Jake Wallis Simons, deputy editor of London’s Jewish Chronicle, accused Rooney of “making a statement against Jews” in an opinion piece for the Daily Telegraph headlined “Sally Rooney’s Israeli boycott is nothing but a futile millennial gesture.” On Twitter, he added: “if Sally Rooney really cared about human rights and the values of democracy, free speech, and the rights of women and minorities, she would *support* Israel and prevent her books from being translated into Arabic or Chinese.”

But Simons has been making exactly the same argument since at least 2014, when he was celebrated by pro-Israel activists for describing calls to boycott Israel but not China or Saudi Arabia as “ridiculously naive and even hypocritical.”

Because these same arguments have been made since the BDS movement was created by Palestinian activists in 2005, the late historian Tony Judt had time to debunk them thoroughly before his death. In 2010, Judt told the London Review of Books:

If Zionism is to succeed as a representation of the original ideas of the Zionist founders, Israel has to become a normal state. That was the idea. Israel should not be special because it is Jewish. Jews are to have a state just like everyone else has a state. It should have no more rights than Slovenia and no fewer. Therefore, it also has to behave like a state. It has to declare its frontiers, recognise international law, sign international treaties and agreements. Furthermore, other countries have to behave towards it the way they would towards any other state that broke those laws. Otherwise it is treated as special and Zionism as a project has failed. People will say: ‘Why are we picking on Israel? What about Libya? Yemen? Burma? China? All of which are much worse.’ Fine. But we are missing two things: first, Israel describes itself as a democracy and so it should be compared with democracies not with dictatorships; second, if Burma came to the EU and said, ‘It would be a huge advantage for us if we could have privileged trading rights with you,’ Europe would say: ‘First you have to release political prisoners, hold elections, open up your borders.’ We have to say the same things to Israel. Otherwise we are acknowledging that a Jewish state is an unusual thing – a weird, different thing that is not to be treated like every other state.

In the same interview, Judt explained that economic and cultural ties to European nations were very important to Israelis. “The joke is that Jews spent a hundred years desperately trying to have a state in the Middle East,” Judt said. “Now they spend all their time trying to get out of the Middle East. They don’t want to be there economically, culturally or politically – they don’t feel part of it and don’t want to be part of it. They want to be part of Europe.”

In 2006, Judt, who had been an idealistic supporter of Zionism in his youth, had warned in the pages of Haaretz that decades of occupation and military rule over millions of Palestinians had been “a moral and political catastrophe” for Israel.

“Israel’s actions in the West Bank and Gaza have magnified and publicized the country’s shortcomings and displayed them to a watching world,” Judt wrote. “Curfews, checkpoints, bulldozers, public humiliations, home destructions, land seizures, shootings, ‘targeted assassinations,’ the separation fence: All of these routines of occupation and repression were once familiar only to an informed minority of specialists and activists. Today they can be watched, in real time, by anyone with a computer or a satellite dish – which means that Israel’s behavior is under daily scrutiny by hundreds of millions of people worldwide. The result has been a complete transformation in the international view of Israel.”

“The habit of tarring any foreign criticism with the brush of anti-Semitism is deeply engrained in Israeli political instincts,” Judt added, while warning that such accusations, when made baselessly, would only erode Israel’s moral credibility.

Judt, who taught at New York University, also sensed that Israel’s brutal occupation was alienating younger generations. “Thanks to the passage of time, most Western European states have now come to terms with their part in the Holocaust,” Judt observed. “Today, now that the history of World War II is retreating from the public square into the classroom and from the classroom into the history books, a growing majority of voters in Europe and elsewhere (young voters above all) simply cannot understand how the horrors of the last European war can be invoked to license or condone unacceptable behavior in another time and place. In the eyes of a watching world, the fact that the great-grandmother of an Israeli soldier died in Treblinka is no excuse for his own abusive treatment of a Palestinian woman waiting to cross a checkpoint.”

Fifteen years later, Rooney, who was born in 1991, argued this week that the most relevant historical frame for understanding the Israeli occupation is apartheid-era South Africa.

Barghouti points out that Jews in Israel and abroad who support the BDS movement “play a significant role in exposing Israel’s regime of oppression and advocating for isolating it.”

“Younger Jewish activists there and elsewhere are increasingly abandoning Zionism and supporting Palestinian liberation,” Barghouti added. “They understand that there is nothing Jewish about Israel’s siege, ethnic cleansing, massacres, land theft and apartheid, and therefore there is nothing anti-Jewish per se in supporting BDS to end these crimes.”

One of the most prominent Jewish writers to endorse the BDS movement is Intercept contributor Naomi Klein. Klein explained in 2009 that in order to respect the boycott, her book “The Shock Doctrine” was published in Hebrew by a now-defunct publisher called Andalus which she found with the help of BDS activists. Andalus, as Klein explained, was “an activist press, deeply involved in the anti-occupation movement and the only Israeli publisher devoted exclusively to translating Arabic writing into Hebrew.” In that way she was “boycotting the Israeli economy but not Israelis.”

Barghouti also notes that the boycott of apartheid South Africa was “a key reference” for Palestinians who first called for cultural boycotts against in 2004. “This reference is neither coincidental nor rhetorical,” Barghouti says. “It stems from the many similarities between the two cases of colonial oppression, and it aims to highlight the effectiveness and moral unassailability of using the boycott in the cultural sphere to resist a persistent oppressive order that enjoys impunity and ample complicity from the powers that be around the world and to increase the isolation of oppressive regimes, like apartheid Israel.”

Rooney’s use of the word apartheid to describe Israel’s treatment of the captive Palestinian populations in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza, which was repeated on news sites worldwide this week, comes five years after the South African novelist J. M. Coetzee defined that term on the closing night of the 2016 Palestinian Festival of Literature in Ramallah.

Coetzee, who had just completed an intense weeklong fact-finding mission across the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, began by saying that he had always been reluctant to use the word apartheid to describe what was happening in Palestine. “Like using the word genocide to describe what happened in Turkey in the 1920s, using the word apartheid diverts one into an enflamed semantic wrangle which cuts short opportunities of analysis,” Coetzee explained.

“Apartheid was a system of enforced segregation based on race or ethnicity put in place by an exclusive self-defined group in order to consolidate colonial conquest, in particular, to cement its hold on the land and on natural resources,” Coetzee said next. “In Jerusalem and the West Bank, to speak only of Jerusalem and the West Bank, we’ve seen a system of enforced segregation based on religion and ethnicity put in place by an exclusive self-defined group to consolidate a colonial conquest, in particular to maintain, and indeed extend, its hold on the land and its natural resources. Draw your own conclusions.”

The post Lies Are Being Told About Sally Rooney Because She Refuses to Ignore Israeli Apartheid appeared first on The Intercept.

REEES faculty profile of Attila Kenyeres on his research into media manipulation and "fake news."

The post REEES Faculty Spotlight: Attila Kenyeres appeared first on SRB Podcast.

Democracy Now! 2021-10-13 Wednesday

• Headlines for October 13, 2021
• Family Searching for Migrant Father Who Went Missing in Texas Desert as Border Deaths Hit Record
• "Missing in Brooks County": Thousands of Migrants Denied Due Process at Border Have Died in Desert

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Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the race to build an atom bomb in the USA during World War Two. Before the war, scientists in Germany had discovered the potential of nuclear fission and scientists in Britain soon argued that this could be used to make an atom bomb, against which there could be no defence other than to own one. The fear among the Allies was that, with its head start, Germany might develop the bomb first and, unmatched, use it on its enemies. The USA took up the challenge in a huge engineering project led by General Groves and Robert Oppenheimer and, once the first bomb had been exploded at Los Alamos in July 1945, it appeared inevitable that the next ones would be used against Japan with devastating results.

The image above is of Robert Oppenheimer and General Groves examining the remains of one the bases of the steel test tower, at the atomic bomb Trinity Test site, in September 1945.

With

Bruce Cameron Reed The Charles A. Dana Professor of Physics Emeritus at Alma College, Michigan

Cynthia Kelly Founder and President of the Atomic Heritage Foundation

And

Frank Close Emeritus Professor of Theoretical Physics at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Exeter College, Oxford

Producer: Simon Tillotson

Legendary socialist scholar Tariq Ali on the long history of Afghanistan: the 19th and early 20th-century wars against the British Empire; the communist coup, Soviet invasion, and US-backed mujahideen war; the rise of the Taliban; and the 2001 US-led NATO invasion through the recent US defeat and withdrawal. Plus, a lot about Pakistan. 

Pre-order Ali's forthcoming book The Forty-Year War in Afghanistan: A Chronicle Foretold versobooks.com/books/3939-the-forty-year-war-in-afghanistan

Support this podcast at Patreon.com/TheDig and receive our weekly newsletter

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Guest: Dr. Isa Blumi. This is a wide-ranging discussion about the political realignments in the Gulf states, new partnerships in the Middle East and Africa, Qatar’s involvement in the withdrawal from Afghanistan, developments in Yemen, quiet military repurposing of strategic island of Socotra, the long and complicated exploitation of East Africa, the Red Sea region and Horn of Africa, the mass of military bases in Djbouti, the Turkey-Russia relationship and more.

For those listening to the audio version of this podcast, we have added many maps and other visual enhancements to the video version that you might find helpful during some of this discussion so if you are interested you can find those versions on Youtube and Rokfin right now and other video platforms in the not too distant future. 

Dr. Isa Blumi is an historian, an author and Professor of Global History, Islamic World, Ottoman Empire, Yemen, Albania. His most recent Destroying Yemen: What Chaos in Arabia Tells Us about the World tells the story of the wars in Yemen but also “ultimately tells an even larger story of today’s political economy of global capitalism, development, and the war on terror as disparate actors intersect in Arabia.”  He also authored the book Ottoman Refugees, 1878-1939: Migration in a Post-Imperial World

FOLLOW Isa Blumi @IsaBlumi and find his work at Google Scholar and his latest book at UCPress.edu. 

Around the Empire aroundtheempire.com is listener supported, independent media.

SUBSCRIBE/FOLLOW on Rokfin rokfin.com/aroundtheempire, Patreon patreon.com/aroundtheempire, Paypal paypal.me/aroundtheempirepod, YouTube youtube.com/aroundtheempire, Spotify, iTunes, iHeart, Google Podcasts

FOLLOW @aroundtheempire and @joanneleon.  Join us on TELEGRAM https://t.me/AroundtheEmpire

Find everything on http://aroundtheempire.com  and linktr.ee/aroundtheempire

Recorded on October 6, 2021. Music by Fluorescent Grey.

Reference Links:

1. Book: Destroying Yemen: What Chaos in Arabia Tells Us about the World

We have discussed many bad films on this podcast, but now we finally turn our attention to The Worst Movie Ever Made™. We analyze how Ed Wood's PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE (1957) turns the movie industry's flotsam and detritus into a Hollywood dreamscape. PLUS: The Sopranos, Necromania, and Justin Trudeau's recent vacation.

Michael and Us is a podcast about political cinema and our crumbling world hosted by Will Sloan and Luke Savage. To hear weekly bonus episodes, subscribe to the Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/michaelandus/

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Sean Larson, historian of the German Revolution and the Weimar Republic, joins Long Reads for a discussion about party politics and worker struggles during Germany's inter-war period. Long Reads is a Jacobin podcast looking in-depth at political topics and thinkers, both contemporary and historical, with the magazine’s longform writers. Hosted by Features Editor Daniel Finn.

You can find Sean's work on Jacobin, including his piece "When Germany's Social Democrats Made a Revolution by Half" here: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2021/01/german-revolution-1918-review

Produced by Conor Gillies, music by Knxwledge.

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*We did Idiots Live this week instead of the Four Food Groups. Check it out here*

“We're at the beginning of the fourth quarter.”

This is what The Intercept’s D.C. Bureau Chief Ryan Grim predicts for the play unfolding in Washington: Will Biden get his bill passed?

He analyzes the major players.

1. The Dems. 48 of them want a bill that has free college and a whole bunch of other Sandersian provisions. This really confuses us after they spent the last two elections trying to bury Bernie and his ideas. Grim explains:

'“Hugo Chavez had this funny quote, ‘I saw a revolution coming and it was either going to wipe me out or I was going to carry out a revolution. So I figured I'd rather carry out a revolution.’” Maybe the Dems realized they were falling behind, so they (conveniently) changed their principles.

2. The Villains. Manchin and Sinema. Do they really oppose the bill or are they just cast as the foils for the Dems who don’t really want to pass their own bill?

3. The Republicans. Or are the Villains serious? Could Sinema switch to the Republican party? Will Manchin really defy Biden’s angry tirade:

“Joe, you're going to take my fucking bill down. You're going to destroy my fucking presidency.”

We’re closing in on the end of the infrastructure and spending bill saga. Maybe we’ll finally get some answers (and get to talk about something else.)

Plus, Ryan talks the two Useful Idiots unfairly stuck in prison, Assange and Donziger.

It’s all this, and more, on this week’s episode of Useful Idiots. Check it out now.

Subscribe now

elfeed is awesome!

I blogged about how I use elfeed to manage all my RSS feeds and read them in the distractionless Emacs window.

This post is about setting up elfeed.

In Doom Emacs. You just enable/uncomment the rss app in init.el, and configure the RSS sources either with the (setq elfeed-feeds ...) directly, or with +org and configure in ~/org/elfeed.org (I preferred the latter).

If you are not in Doom Emacs, follow elfeed doc to set it up. Their README is straight forward.

The usage is simple:

You can do instant search by pressing the s key, read a feed by pressing enter, or mark a feed as read, and press g to refresh the list.

One quirk I learned is that, elfeed don’t really delete your feed. If you don’t want to see them as again, just mark the feed as read, and refresh.

Happy reading!

A quick note that I thought might be interesting to document.

As befits a shell written in elisp, eshell is extremely easy to modify to your use. There are a few packages floating around that add autojump/fasd/z type functionality to eshell. These let you jump quickly to any previously visited directory. As it turns out it’s very easy to implement a more powerful version of this by piggybacking off of consult-dir.

Here’s a z command that lets you jump to any previously visited directory, as well as any bookmark, project or emacs-wide recent directory:

It’s a single function:

(defun eshell/z (&optional regexp)
    "Navigate to a previously visited directory in eshell, or to
any directory proferred by `consult-dir'."
    (let ((eshell-dirs (delete-dups
                        (mapcar 'abbreviate-file-name
                                (ring-elements eshell-last-dir-ring)))))
      (cond
       ((and (not regexp) (featurep 'consult-dir))
        (let* ((consult-dir--source-eshell `(:name "Eshell"
                                             :narrow ?e
                                             :category file
                                             :face consult-file
                                             :items ,eshell-dirs))
               (consult-dir-sources (cons consult-dir--source-eshell
                                          consult-dir-sources)))
          (eshell/cd (substring-no-properties
                      (consult-dir--pick "Switch directory: ")))))
       (t (eshell/cd (if regexp (eshell-find-previous-directory regexp)
                            (completing-read "cd: " eshell-dirs)))))))

Plus consult-dir, of course.

Note that if you provide input to the command instead, e.g. z doc, it will jump directly to the last matching directory you visited in eshell, i.e. ~/Documents/ or something like it.

The idea is simple, and it should be trivial to write something similar if you’re a Helm or Ivy user, as well as to write one for the comint mode M-x shell.

Just added to my radio archive (click on date for link):

September 30, 2021 Patrick Wyman, author of this article (and this earlier Substack version) on provincial elites • Duc Hien Nguyen on queerness, social reproduction, and capitalism

Doug speaks with Patrick Wyman, author of this article (and this earlier Substack version) on provincial elites. Plus: Duc Hien Nguyen on queerness, social reproduction, and capitalism.

Behind the News, hosted by Doug Henwood, covers the worlds of economics and politics and their complex interactions, from the local to the global. Find the archive here: https://www.leftbusinessobserver.com/Radio.html

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Democracy Now! 2021-10-08 Friday

• Headlines for October 08, 2021
• Filipina Journalist Maria Ressa Wins Nobel Peace Prize After Facing Years of Threats & Arrests
• Family of Henrietta Lacks Files Lawsuit over Use of Stolen Cells, Lambasts Racist Medical System
• "Until I Am Free": Keisha Blain on the Enduring Legacy of Voting Rights Pioneer Fannie Lou Hamer

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Panelists: Peter Castagno, Gumby, Joanne Leon, Dan Wright. A panel discussion about the questions that are still unanswered 20 years after 9/11. This is part one of a series. There is an “after hours” bonus segment where we talk about turning this into a series, the fact that dissent from the official 9/11 story is (finally) being discussed more openly and there is strong pressure to make it less taboo, and more. 

Joanne Leon and Dan Wright are co-founders of Around the Empire. Peter Castagno is the co-owner of the Citizen Truth independent media website covering international politics. He is an independent writer & researcher with an MA in International Conflict Resolution.

Gumby is an independent researcher, well known for his research threads on Twitter and podcast appearances under the pseudonym @gumby4christ (a handle that he chose years ago in jest but then became a brand). 

FOLLOW @JoanneLeon, @DanSWright, @gumby4christ, @petercastagno_

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Reference Links:

1. 9/11 Independent Commission (Family Steering Committee) - Unanswered Questions
2. Book: Unanswered Questions: What the September Eleventh Families Asked and the 9/11 Commission Ignored
3. History Commons: BBC Reports WTC 7 Collapse Before It Happens
4. BBC Response re: reporting WTC 7 collapse before it happened
5. ClandesTime 114 – An Alternative History of Al Qaeda: Ali Mohamed
6. Porkins Policy Review: Ali Mohamed: The CIA’s Favorite Terrorist (Guest article by Tom Secker)
7. History Commons: Ali Mohamed
8. Covert Action Magazine: The Twenty Year Shadow of 9/11 (Part 1): U.S. Complicity in the Terror Spectacle and the Urgent Need to End It, Aaron Good, Ben Howard and Peter Dale Scott
9. Covert Action Magazine: The Twenty Year Shadow of 9/11 (Part 2): Why Did Key U.S. Officials Protect the Alleged 9/11 Plotters?, Aaron Good, Ben Howard and Peter Dale Scott
10. Covert Action Magazine: Stepping out of the Shadow of 9/11 (Part 3): Start by Ending the Post-9/11 States of Emergency, Aaron Good, Ben Howard and Peter Dale Scott
11. Gumby’s Twitter thread on Pentagon’s special unit DO5 and Pentagon whistleblower codenamed Iron Man
12. Truthout (2011): New Documents Suggest DoD Watchdog Covered Up Intelligence Unit’s Work Tracking 9/11 Terrorists, Jason Leopold, Jeffrey Kaye
13. Truthout (2011): Report: Intelligence Unit Told Before 9/11 to Stop Tracking Bin Laden, Jeffrey Kaye
14. Covert Action Magazine: Anthrax Attacks Directed Against Public Officials Following 9/11 Had all the Markings of a False Flag Operation, Graeme McQueen
15. Slate: How Did I Get Iraq Wrong?, Richard Cohen
16. ProPublica: Colleague Says Anthrax Numbers Add Up to Unsolved Case
17. Washington Post: Justice Dept. takes on itself in probe of 2001 anthrax attacks, Jerry Markon
18. Book: The Watchdogs Didn't Bark: The CIA, NSA, and the Crimes of the War on Terror, Ray Nowosielski, John Duffy
19. Epistemic Vice: A Critique of Quassim Cassam’s “Conspiracy Theories”, Peter Castagno
20. Book: Logical Investigative Methods: Critical Thinking and Reasoning for Successful Investigations, Robert J. Girod
21. Book: Psychology of Intelligence Analysis, Richards J. Heuer Jr.
22. Book: The Commission: The Uncensored History of the 9/11 Investigation, Philip Shenon
23. A Very Heavy Agenda (documentary series), Robbie Martin
24. Book: Another Nineteen: Investigating Legitimate 9/11 Suspects, Kevin Ryan
25. Guns and Butter: Another Nineteen, Part One thru Five - Kevin Ryan, #287-291
26. Max Keiser interviews Jim Rickards on 9/11 Stock Irregularities on The Keiser Report (RT 2014)
27. Unusual Option Market Activity and the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001, Allen M. Poteshman, University of Chicago Press
28. Was There Abnormal Trading in the S&P 500 Index Options Prior to the September 11 Attacks?, Wing-Keung Wong, Asia University, Department of Finance
29. Detecting Abnormal Trading Activities in Option Markets, Marc Chesney (University of Zurich - Department of Banking and Finance), Remo Crameri (University of Zurich - Swiss Banking Institute ISB), Loriano Mancini (USI Lugano - Institute of Finance; Swiss Finance Institute)

In late September, the World Health Organization announced that it had assembled a new team of scientists to revive its investigation into the origins of the virus that causes Covid-19. The new group will be tasked with examining whether the virus could have originated in a lab, months after its predecessor deemed the possibility too unlikely for serious consideration.

This week on Intercepted: Intercept investigative reporters Sharon Lerner and Mara Hvistendahl join editor Maia Hibbett to discuss the competing theories on the origins of Covid-19. The Intercept obtained documents that shed new light on controversial lab experiments, raising questions about the origins of the coronavirus pandemic. With neither of the main theories — natural spillover versus a lab leak — yet proved true, the Intercept is seeking answers as to how much officials knew about proposed behind-the-scenes experiments. As the University of Saskatchewan and Georgetown virologist Angela Rasmussen, a staunch critic of the lab-leak theory, said after the first WHO investigation, “There are still major stones that need to be unturned.”

[Intro music.]

Jeremy Scahill: This is Intercepted.

Maia Hibbett: I’m Maia Hibbett, editor with The Intercept.

It’s been a year and a half since the World Health Organization labeled Covid-19 a pandemic.

Harris Faulkner: Alright, we have breaking news now. Let’s get to it. It has to do with Covid-19 and the World Health Organization has just declared a global coronavirus. It is a pandemic at this point.

WHO Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus: And we’re deeply concerned both by the alarming levels of spread and severity, and by the alarming levels of inaction. We have therefore made the assessment that Covid-19 can be characterized as a pandemic. 

MH: But when the novel coronavirus started spreading across the world, most people were more concerned with whether they were going to catch it than where it came from. But there was one unhinged executive who quickly found a culprit.

President Donald J. Trump: But you don’t hear them talking about Covid. Covid — to be specific, Covid-19. That name gets further and further away from China as opposed to calling it “the Chinese virus.” [Audience boos.]

MH: Like so many of his comments, Trump’s claims were not only racist, xenophobic, and stupid, but they were also an unfortunate flattening force. The former president’s supporters and subscribers in the government and media spread this rhetoric — and the notion that the pandemic-causing disease was cooked up in a Chinese lab spread on the right, almost as quickly as the virus itself did.

Tucker Carlson: China, the same country that controls 96 percent of antibiotics we use in this nation, the same country that is wanting to cut off drug exports to the U.S. to kill Americans, is now trying to hide the reality of where coronavirus came from.

MH: And on the left, the notion’s dismissal as a conspiracy theory happened just as quickly, with just as little scrutiny from the majority of people who peddled it.

Peter Daszak: Well, I’m a scientist, and what I do is I look at the evidence around a hypothesis. There is a huge amount of evidence that these viruses repeatedly emerge into people from wild animals in rural areas through things like hunting and eating wildlife. There is zero evidence that this virus came out of a lab in China.

MH: The partisan divide had done it again: There was almost no room for serious inquiry or debate.

But what Trump didn’t realize — or maybe just didn’t care about — was that if the coronavirus did emerge from a lab in Wuhan, China, there were members of his government in Washington, D.C., who could arguably be complicit.

The National Institutes of Health had provided funding to the Wuhan Institute of Virology and the nearby Wuhan University Center for Animal Experiment — two institutions that wound up uncomfortably close to the presumed genesis of the pandemic. The money had often come through the EcoHealth Alliance, a New York-based nonprofit that administers federal grants for a variety of scientific projects.

But what’s striking is the scientific community’s swift and complete dismissal in the mainstream of the possibility that the virus could’ve originated from a lab. 

In science, you’re not really supposed to eliminate a possibility until you’ve proven that it doesn’t work. But so many of the world’s top virologists seemed not at all interested in asking the question.

Recent reporting has revealed that not only was the type of work happening that could, hypothetically, have taught a bat coronavirus to infect people, but there were some pretty specific plans that laid out just the type of experiment that could’ve done it.

In the past month, The Intercept has gotten a hold of some of those plans — and we don’t know how much more there might be.

Mara Hvistendahl, an investigative reporter with The Intercept, spent eight years as a science reporter in China, three of those as the China bureau chief for Science.

Mara Hvistendahl: One of the things I learned during that time is that there’s been this expectation and fear, for many years, that a pandemic could arise in Asia.

MH: And Sharon Lerner, also an investigative reporter with The Intercept, agrees:

Sharon Lerner: Yeah. And there was this early presumption, right, because we’d seen with SARS, that outbreak in 2003, traced directly to that natural spillover from a bat.

MH: “Natural spillover from a bat.” That’s what we knew — or thought we knew — about the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic. But it’s messier than that. Much messier.

SL: Well, we have these two opposing theories. The natural spillover theory, and the lab leak theory, which is shorthand. But basically, what they’re both trying to answer is: How did this virus get from bats to people? There’s an agreement there.

MH: I recently sat down with Mara and Sharon to discuss their latest reporting on documents they’ve obtained, raising more questions about the origins of the coronavirus than we previously thought.

Mara Hvistendahl: So, I think, early on, there was not much surprise that a virus like this could have come out of China, because there had been this expectation for so many years that something like this could happen. And previous outbreaks have largely had a natural origin. That was the case with the first SARS virus in the early 2000s. So there was, I think, a presumption among many scientists that that can be the case here.

As time went on, it became clear that this is not a typical outbreak of infectious diseases. We haven’t had a pandemic on this scale.

SL: There was also, I think, pretty early on a recognition that as — Jon Stewart has famously called attention to — that there was a lab in Wuhan, the very city that was the place where the pandemic began, that was looking into the very viruses that were similar to the one that had caused the pandemic. And just that geographic coincidence — or not coincidence — I think, alone, had some people thinking from the very beginning, people who were aware that labs like this sometimes have a history of having incidents that can cause disease; that that could be a question: Was there a role for the Wuhan Institute of Virology in this pandemic? And I think that also was a question that arose early.

Mara Hvistendahl: Right, and that while there was this expectation, or fear, for many years, that you could have an outbreak of natural origin in China, the focus was really on Southern China. So one of the closest known ancestors of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes the pandemic, was found in southwestern China, in Yunnan Province; scientists also recently identified other close ancestors in Southeast Asia. And Wuhan is in central China, there is a wildlife trade there, but it’s not the region where people were really looking at, closely, as a hotspot for the emergence of new infectious diseases of this sort.

MH: And so what is the idea behind the so-called lab-leak theory, centered on that lab in Wuhan?

SL: Well, with the natural spillover folks, the idea is that it did spillover naturally from it; that there was no intervention basically, that it went from from a bat and from maybe a bat biting a human into becoming a human pathogen. And, on the other side, you have this idea that that the virus enters humans through some of the work that was going on in the lab, and it isn’t necessarily that it was an accident, which you often hear a lab accident, though it certainly could be that — that someone working in the lab didn’t follow proper procedures, or there was some sort of an accident, a spill or something like that. There’s also been lots of attention to the fact that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was involved in the collection of bat viruses, sampling thousands of viruses going to these remote locations, and actually bringing them back with them to Wuhan, to the lab. And the process of collecting them, and storing them, and gathering them in itself is a risky thing. 

And then there’s kind of the third part of this which is so called gain-of-function research of concern, which is something that we have written about. And this is research that was going on in the Wuhan Institute of Virology that takes viruses and does experiments with them in which they alter how they are and behave.

MH: Let’s back up a little bit, because you mentioned gain-of-function research of concern. And gain-of-function is this very broad term that has been misused in many cases. So let’s define what gain-of-function research is, and what makes it so-called “of concern” to the U.S. government.

SL: Yeah. So gain-of-function, I think the term basically means that you’re changing how a virus functions. And the “gain” is that you make it more, perhaps, transmissible, or virulent, or pathogenic, right? And so these are experiments where you change a virus, and perhaps it ends up having more of one of these functions. And that’s gain of function. 

When you have gain-of-function research of concern, this is a particular subset of gain-of-function research. And the concern is that it involves a potential pandemic pathogen — or something that’s likely to become a potential pandemic pathogen — so something that could start in a pandemic and we know that SARS-CoV-2 is not just a potential pandemic pathogen, but a pandemic pathogen. 

So when you start dealing with viruses that could impact humans the way we have seen SARS-CoV-2 impact humans, then that’s a concern.

Mara Hvistendahl: And it’s important to note that there was a huge controversy surrounding this research before the start of the pandemic. That controversy was mainly within the scientific community — it wasn’t an issue that most Americans or most people in the world had thought about in any way — but there was an enormous debate around the topic. And there U.S. government committees that were convened to consider what the appropriate protocols surrounding this research should be. 

It went all the way back to 2011, when there were these studies published involving research on flu viruses to make them potentially more transmissible to humans. And essentially, the scientific community divided into two camps. There were, and there still are today, virologists who maintain that it’s important to do these experiments, because by understanding how viruses can be more easily transmitted, we can prevent a pandemic; we can prevent a major outbreak. 

But then there’s another camp, which tends to be more filled with biosafety experts, with people who are kind of tasked with monitoring science who say: Hold on, these experiments could also start a pandemic. 

And so you have these two very different worldviews that were there before the pandemic. And I think this is one of the things that many have not understood in the context of the debate surrounding the origins of the pandemic, that this was a very political issue before 2020 and that many scientists had a stake in the outcome of the origins of the pandemic.

MH: For this 2011 study that Mara mentioned, these experiments had to do with passaging the avian flu within ferrets, so that was having mammals be able to transmit a bird flu, just through the air. It was the kind of enhanced transmissibility that those experiments demonstrated that raised alarms for all these people in the scientific community and actually led to a temporary pause on funding gain-of-function research, especially when it involves these potential pandemic pathogens. 

So since that pause, let’s discuss how the government regulates this research and how it decides whether or not something is worth funding?

SL: So it’s interesting because the pause was lifted in 2017. And the grant that Mara and I got through the FOIA was ongoing during that period: It started in 2014 and went through 2019. And in the documents we got there is this description of a particular experiment. Many of the experts we spoke with said that they believe this experiment qualified as gain-of-function research of concern — and, in particular, I should say, have met the National Institutes of Health’s definition of gain-of-function research of concern. 

And basically in this experiment, what they did is that they took bat coronaviruses, and they put together different parts of other viruses to make chimeric viruses, these sort of hybrids. And they injected those viruses into mouse cells that had been genetically engineered to respond like human cells. And when they did that, they saw that the viruses reproduced far more quickly within the humanized mice. 

The experts we spoke with said that even when you kind of take away the question of whether it was gain of function research of concern, which is a much-contested term — overwhelmingly, they said, whether or not it was gaining function research, it was dangerous. 

So when the pause was lifted in 2017, what they did was they said that they were going to institute these guidelines that would govern and oversee any kind of gain-of-function research. And yet, when we reached out to NIH about this experiment, it turned out that they said that they just decided that it did not need to be regulated under those guidelines. I was pretty amazed by that. Because what that means is that we have these policymakers who spent years putting together these guidelines that are designed to very carefully protect us from dangerous research of this kind. And what the NIH was saying, essentially, is like: Well, we decided we didn’t have those guidelines didn’t apply here. What we’re really not clear about is why. 

One of the things we learned, though, is that these guidelines, again, that took years to come up with, only three experiments actually wound up being considered under them and regulated under them. So it’s a pretty big loophole, I would say — which is, it’s not even really a loophole. But what they’ve said [is] that: We have all these great minds that came up with these ways to safeguard against disaster. And basically what happened, it looks like, in this case, is that they drove right around it and they just bypassed the guidelines altogether. 

So moving forward, the question is: How are we going to oversee this research if it’s going to continue at all?

Mara Hvistendahl: Before we obtained these documents from NIH through a FOIA lawsuit, there was this prominent critique among people who advocated for better biosafety, that the very comprehensive protocol that had been developed to try to ensure that research was safe was just not being applied; that in some cases, you had the fox guarding the henhouse. And that you had these robust guidelines that just weren’t being implemented. And the grant documents, after we did obtain them, just sort of underscores that point.

MH: Some scientists in the virology community, and people who are proponents of gain-of-function research, have argued that the inquiry into whether the pandemic could have originated in a lab is just totally off-base, because the people who are inquiring don’t have the base of knowledge to understand what they’re talking about to kind of like interpret and analyze the evidence effectively. 

So I think we should define a few things before we proceed: Sharon, you mentioned the humanized mice used in the experiment. What that term means is that there are mice that have been genetically engineered to express an enzyme in their lungs called ACE2. And that enzyme is what a lot of respiratory coronaviruses, including SARS-CoV-2, use in order to bind to human lung cells. 

The SARS-CoV-2 virus also has something called a furin cleavage site, which is on the spike protein and essentially helps the virus break into the cell. 

We already discussed the types of experiments outlined in the NIH proposal you obtained through the FOIA lawsuit. But then we also reported on another grant proposal to the Defense Agency known as DARPA, which DARPA rejected. Could you talk a little about what the project proposed to do?

SL: So that proposal, as you mentioned, was not funded. And it was a proposal that was first released by the online group DRASTIC, which is this kind of group of — some anonymous, some not — researchers who have been looking into the origins of the virus. 

So they released this proposal, which was from the EcoHealth Alliance with many sub-awardees, to DARPA, and there are a number of interesting things in this proposal, which basically laid out a plan to vaccinate bats. But as part — there are a number of different sections and different plans they had that were outlined in this proposal and one of the things described inserting this furin cleavage site we’ve been talking about into chimeric viruses. This really caught a lot of people’s attention because this furin cleavage site has for a long time now been a focal point in this debate over the origins of the pandemic. And that’s because it’s a very rare thing in this type of bat coronavirus. And so people were speculating: Where did this come from? How did this furin cleavage site get into this virus?

So there was the question of like: Well, could it perhaps have been inserted there? Could it have been engineered? And many on the natural spillover side of things dismissed this idea as — well — crazy, and also sort of a conspiracy theory. And the gist was: Why would anyone ever do that? And what was notable, one of the notable things about this proposal was that it outlined this exact thing, the insertion of the furin cleavage site into a bat coronavirus. And so you know, there are a lot of questions about it. We still don’t know what — if any — of the work that was outlined in the proposal was done, because again, it wasn’t funded. Many people told us that when researchers put together this kind of proposal, often some of the work that they’re describing has already been done. And, of course, they don’t just have one funding source. So even though DARPA didn’t fund them, it doesn’t mean that they didn’t have money from elsewhere to do this work. 

Here is this question: Could someone have done it? Well, certainly someone considered doing it. And the folks who were on this grant, among them Peter Daszak, who is the head of the EcoHealth Alliance, and another researcher named Linfa Wang, who is a subawardee on the proposal, it really struck a lot of the people who we spoke to, their silence on this issue. So even though it’s been a really focal point in the debate, and many people on the spillover side were saying this would never happen, the two of these guys knew that there was a proposal that described this very experiment, and didn’t mention it. 

Again, the DARPA proposal was not funded. But it raised really important questions about not only what do we not know, but what some people know and refuse to share. And I think, in some ways, [it] sort of deepened the divide among some of the scientific community about this, and deepened some of the mistrust. Because people said to me: OK, well, how is it that they could have been embarking — or at least thinking about embarking on this research — and not disclosed it when it’s so central to the questions that we’re all trying to answer right now.

Mara Hvistendahl: And just to give you a sense of the politics around the furin cleavage site, earlier this year, the Nobel laureate, the eminent virologist David Baltimore, told the science writer Nicholas Wade that when he saw the furin cleavage site, learned about it, he told his wife that it was the smoking gun for the origin of the pandemic. And that caused a huge controversy within the scientific community, to the point where Dr. Baltimore eventually said that he overstated the importance of the furin cleavage site and somewhat walked back to his quote. 

And it was at the point where it was so controversial for someone to say something like that. And yet there was this plan for this experiment that several people knew about that they did not mention at that time.

MH: So Peter Daszak, the president of the EcoHealth Alliance and his silence on the issue, for those who are not aware of his position and the amount of influence he’s had over inquiries into the origins of the pandemic, what’s his role and kind of what has he done in the past year and a half?

Mara Hvistendahl: So very early in the pandemic, in January and February 2020, Peter Daszak became a leading voice in the media and elsewhere on the coronavirus. He had, of course, a big conflict of interest for people who thought that there was a possible lab origin, because he had led the team that oversaw work at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. But he organized a group of scientists to publish a letter in The Lancet decrying the idea of lab origin as a conspiracy theory. And he went on “60 Minutes” in the spring of 2020, to talk about how he was being attacked, how his research was actually critical to preventing outbreaks and to preventing the pandemic. And he was able to very deftly get himself portrayed as being unfairly attacked by the Trump administration — which there was an element of truth to it, because Trump, and Pompeo, and several others, of course, went completely overboard in their critiques of the Wuhan Institute of Virology and of people associated with it. So he very quickly won sympathy from the left and from the scientific community, and managed to emerge as a supposed voice of reason in the debate.

SL: And not only that, so he’s the voice of reason, but he’s also portraying everyone else who disagrees with him as completely nuts.

PD: They’re coming at this with a belief system that there is a cabal of mysterious international folks who are trying to kill people, design a vaccine to make money, or it’s a nefarious government who’s working to release a virus for their own political purposes, to subjugate the West, etc. So they’re coming at it with a belief system to start off with, so logic drops out of the window at that level.

SL: But I mean, partly, to be fair, this quote is from 2020. And I think partly what it shows is how much has changed since then. Because it was pretty easy in a sentence or two to dismiss anyone who thought differently from him as a conspiracy theorist back then, and it’s not so easy now. Much harder.

Mara Hvistendahl: Peter Daszak was aided, and has made an effort to become the voice of reason in the pandemic by the politics at the time. You had Trump and Pompeo accusing China of making a bioweapon, which is something that very few scientists believe is a possible origin of the pandemic. And so you had genuine conspiracy theories out there in the ecosystem that unfortunately got conflated with a possible lab accident or with research that we know commonly happens at labs. And that was happening at the Wuhan Institute of Virology — all of that got mixed together. And Trump was just spouting so many crazy ideas at the point that I think there was this reflex among the left and among people who felt like they are rational believers in science to immediately kind of veer in the other direction.

MH: The crazy and partisan narrative, we didn’t leave it in 2020 entirely. There’s that infamous moment this summer, when Rand Paul accused Anthony Fauci of lying about whether or not the U.S. had funded gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Sen. Rand Paul: Dr. Fauci knowing that it is a crime to lie to Congress, do you wish to retract your statement of May 11, where you claimed that the NIH never funded gain-of-function research in Wuhan?

Dr. Anthony Fauci: Sen. Paul, I have never lied before the Congress, and I do not retract that statement. This paper that you’re referring to, was judged by qualified staff up and down the chain as not being gain-of-function — let me finish. 

RP: You pick an animal virus, and you increase its transmissibility to humans, you’re saying that’s not gain-of-function? 

AF: Yeah, that is correct. And Sen. Paul, you do not know what you are talking about, quite frankly. And I want to say that officially. You do not know what you are talking about.

MH: This is still largely an issue of the right and in many circles, and I wanted to bring that up because we haven’t really addressed the question of Fauci and the NIH and the NIAID, National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which Fauci directs and heads. And in that moment when Rand Paul accused Fauci of lying, was Fauci lying, and what do the NIH documents that you two obtained, how do they inform that conversation?

SL: I don’t know he has a leg to stand on the question of whether it was not gain-of-function research. But I think there are real questions about what he knew, as an individual, as opposed to what his staff knew. But that, again, speaks to me to this real lack of transparency. It’s been very hard to figure out who knew what exactly. Who was doing the reviewing; who signed off on these things; who again decided that it didn’t have to go through and meet the guidelines. We don’t know if Fauci was involved with that. We just don’t know.

MH: As we’ve been talking about some of these proposals, it’s important to note that the actual genetic manipulation of the viruses, the experiment to insert the furin cleavage site into the spike protein, was supposed to occur first at the University of North Carolina, not in Wuhan. This doesn’t mean that if it was done, that they couldn’t essentially print out the genome sequence, or send the instructions to do that to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. But we have to remember that these experiments weren’t just happening in Wuhan. There were also prominent U.S.-based virologists potentially working on this project.

Mara Hvistendahl: Yeah, in 2020, the debate around the origin of the pandemic was often: Did work in a Chinese lab lead to the pandemic, or was it of natural origin? And the Trump administration did everything they could to blame China for the outbreak. There was, of course, a huge uptick in hate crimes against Asian Americans. And it’s been a very unfortunate outgrowth of this entire controversy. 

And what we see is, in fact, a much more complicated picture; it’s that if there is a connection to a lab, it would be a project that was potentially funded by the United States, by the U.S. government, that involves U.S. researchers working in collaboration with Chinese researchers and researchers from elsewhere. And so it’s not such a clear-cut issue of blame.

MH: And just to further complicate things even a little more, in the NIH grant documents that you obtained via FOIA, I understand that there was a date on one of the annual progress reports that was inconsistent with what it was supposed to be. So could you tell us a little bit about, first of all, what an annual progress report is, and what it’s supposed to tell us, and then what the potential significance of the changed date is?

Mara Hvistendahl: I mean, this would be unusual with any project, but the fact that it happened with this grant, and that there was an is this controversy surrounding equal Health Alliance at the time that the progress report was submitted, means that it is worth understanding what happened in that case. And we went to NIH and EcoHealth Alliance several times with questions about this progress report; they did not get back to us. So we then went to scientists who have knowledge of the NIH grant process, who, you know, confirmed to us that this is unusual. 

So the context is that this is just the latest in a string of examples of missing or incomplete or deleted data from the early days of the pandemic. You know, there have been genetic sequences taken from people in Wuhan in 2019 that were found to be mysteriously deleted, and then later recovered. The WHO had to recently revise data on early patients from Wuhan following a report in the Washington Post that pointed out discrepancies. So this is not something that they did on their own. They did it only following critical journalism, and that pattern has played out again and again. And so it does raise questions about what happened with this report. Is there a benign explanation, or what’s going on?

SL: From my end, the more I think about this, and the more I write about it, the more questions I have. I don’t know how many questions we’re answering here, but we’re sort of in the business of collecting questions right now, and there are so many of them, and there are so many good minds thinking about this. And a lot of people have said: There’s no way to answer this question of how the pandemic began. And that may be true. But we’re definitely not done amassing and asking questions. 

And I think the politics have made it really uncomfortable for many journalists to try to get to the bottom of it. I’m really glad to be part of a group that’s asking these questions. Whether or not we’re going to get them answered in a definitive way they should be asked in the best way possible.

Mara Hvistendahl: We’ve spent the past few months talking to a wide variety of sources. And there are scientists who tilt toward a natural origin, who think that the pandemic likely grew out of close contact between people and animals in the wild or at a market, who nonetheless think that these experiments raise very important questions about biosafety and that EcoHealth Alliance’s work deserves scrutiny, whether or not it led to the pandemic. And I think that’s an important point. And so the question for me is not just: Did EcoHealth Alliance cause a pandemic? But it’s a larger question of how can we ensure that laboratories are safe going forward; we know that there have been lab accidents, we know that this sort of research has been highly contentious — how can we address that issue going forward and prevent a possible pandemic arising from that research in the future, regardless of the origin of the current pandemic?

SL: Maia, you and I have talked to people, scientists who work very closely on these issues, whose opinions have shifted as a result of seeing these documents. It’s not just the political landscape that’s shifting; I think that some scientific opinion is shifting to, because they’re learning about details about what has occurred that they did not know or understand before.

MH: Yeah, I agree that that’s significant. 

And I also think it’s worth noting that, for all the scientists who believe that lab origin is technically possible, even if it’s not the most plausible explanation, in their view, for the most part, people do at least concede that it’s a possible explanation. And it’s doubly concerning when a scientist who’s supposed to kind of make a living asking questions and never be satisfied until they’ve come up with a concrete answer decides to just rule out one set of possibilities entirely and shuts themselves off to an entire line of inquiry, just because it’s either politically inconvenient or professionally inconvenient, perhaps.

SL: Yeah. And I keep coming back to when the consequences of that sort of irresponsible shift, I mean, we’re talking about a pandemic that’s caused four and a half million deaths; you want to be really sure when you roll something out. The stakes are high.

Mara Hvistendahl: At this point, President Biden convened the intelligence community to investigate the origin of the pandemic for three months. In August, they came back with inconclusive results, and were split on what could have happened and did not have high confidence in any possible origin. So it’s not something the intelligence community has been able to solve. The WHO committee, the Lancet Committee, have clear problems and there’s a recognition even at the WHO that that tactic is not working. 

But there are a lot of people who said: Well China’s not going to let in another committee to investigate in any serious way. We may never know the origin of the pandemic. So what’s the point? What can we do? 

And what these documents show is that we can uncover useful information by looking at what U.S. federal agencies have funded. There’s a lot of information available in the United States, using just the Freedom of Information Act. Or if Congress were to subpoena documents, they would be able to obtain a lot more. And that information is freely available and deserves to be examined. 

In the end, it may point toward a natural origin. Who knows, as more information comes out. But the documents that we’ve already obtained have pushed the discussion already much further than it was.

MH: Sharon, Mara, thanks for joining us.

Mara Hvistendahl: Thank you for having us.

SL: Yeah, thank you.

[Credits music.]

MH: And that does it for this episode of Intercepted. Follow us on Twitter @Intercepted and on Instagram @InterceptedPodcast.

Intercepted is a production of First Look Media and The Intercept. Lead producer is José Olivares. Supervising producer is Laura Flynn. Betsy Reed is editor in chief of The Intercept. And Rick Kwan mixed our show. Our theme music, as always, was composed by DJ Spooky.

Until next time, I’m Maia Hibbett.

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