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Salvini quotes Ezra Pound, “If a man is not ready to fight for his ideas, either his ideas are worthless, or he is,”

Italian ethnonationalist leader Matteo Salvini is to stand trial on charges of illegally detaining migrants at sea after senators voted Wednesday to strip him of his parliamentary immunity.

The Globe Post, 12 Feb 2020:

A court in Sicily recommended that former interior minister Salvini stand trial for blocking migrants from disembarking from a coast guard boat last July.

But ministers cannot be tried for actions taken while in office unless their parliamentary immunity is revoked.

The Senate’s decision sends the chief of the anti-immigrant League party to trial for abuse of power and illegal detention, charges for which he faces up to 15 years in jail.

“I have defended Italy. I have full and total faith in the justice system,” Salvini told ANSA news agency after the vote.

“I am not worried at all, and I’m proud of what I’ve done,” he said, adding he would “do it again when I get back into power.”

Salvini had refused to allow 116 rescued migrants to leave the Gregoretti coast guard boat – where they had been languishing for about a week in insalubrious conditions – until a deal was reached with other European states to host them.

A Catania court accused him of “abuse of power” in blocking them on board from July 27 to July 31 last year, and of illegally detaining them.

Salvini insists the decision had the backing of the government and Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte.

‘Head Held High’

Before the debate began, Salvini took to Facebook to say he had his “head held high, with the calm conscience of those who have defended their land and people.”

“If a man is not ready to fight for his ideas, either his ideas are worthless, or he is,” Salvini wrote, quoting Ezra Pound, a 20th-century American poet known for his fascist sympathies.

The Gregoretti on July 25 took on board 140 migrants who were trying to make the perilous crossing from war-torn Libya to Europe – the same day 110 migrants drowned off the Libyan coast.

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Visegrad24@visegrad24

Yesterday, Hungarian PM Viktor #Orban and Slovak PM Peter #Pellegrini inspected the Hungary’s border fence with Serbia

Orban spoke about a sharp rise in illegal border crossings and told Pellegrini:

“It’s forbidden to say so in Europe, but this is an organised invasion”

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The Corporation – Feature, Documentary

The civet, a mammal in the mongoose family, was a carrier of another coronavirus — SARS. But it turned out in that instance that bats were the original source of the virus.

New Coronavirus ‘Won’t Be The Last’ Outbreak To Move From Animal To Human

NPR, 5 Feb 2020:

The new strain of coronavirus that has killed hundreds of people in China and caused a travel lockdown of some 56 million people has been classified as a “zoonosis” because of the way it spreads from animals to humans.

Science writer David Quammen says the virus, which the World Health Organization last week declared a global health emergency, is just the latest example of how pathogens that start in animals are migrating to humans with increasing frequency — and with deadly consequences.

“When there’s an animal host, then it becomes much, much more difficult to eradicate or even control an infectious virus,” Quammen says. “This novel coronavirus — whether or not it turns out to be a huge catastrophe, or something we can control — one thing we know is that it won’t be the last.”

As China’s Coronavirus Cases Rise, U.S. Agencies Map Out Domestic Containment Plans

Quammen’s 2012 book, Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic, traces the rise of different zoonoses around the world, including AIDS, Ebola and severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS). He says that one of the first questions that arise with any zoonosis pertains to the animal host: How is it being transmitted?

In the case of the new coronavirus, researchers believe that the virus may have originated with horseshoe bats in China and then could have possibly spread to other animals — which people then ate.

In Quarantined Wuhan, Hospital Beds For Coronavirus Patients Are Scarce

Quammen notes that humans are the common link in all zoonoses: “We humans are so abundant and so disruptive on this planet. ... We’re cutting the tropical forests. We’re building work camps in those forests and villages. We’re eating the wildlife,” he says. “You go into a forest and you shake the trees — literally and figuratively — and viruses fall out.”

Quammen says that the new coronavirus should be taken seriously. But he also warns against panic: “Being educated and understanding it and being ready to respond and support government response is very useful. Panicking and putting on your surgical mask every time you go on a subway ride, an airplane, is not nearly as useful.”

Interview highlights

On wild animal “wet” markets where viruses can mix

Spillover

When I was in southern China researching [Spillover], only briefly, I got to see some of these markets where all forms of wild animals were on sale. ... By the time I got there, [these sorts of markets] had gone underground ... suppressed after the SARS outbreak. But then [the markets] gradually came back ... allowed to continue again and proliferate when this new virus began.

If you go into a live market, you see cages containing bats stacked upon cages containing porcupines, stacked upon cages containing palm civets, stacked upon cages containing chickens. And hygiene is not great, and the animals are defecating on one another. It’s just a natural mixing-bowl situation for viruses. It’s a very, very dangerous situation. And one of the things that it allows is ... the occurrence of “amplifying hosts” [a species that rapidly replicates copies of the virus and spreads them].

On the theory that palm civets were “amplifier hosts” for the 2003 SARS outbreak

From Vector To Zoonotic: A Glossary For Infectious Diseases

The civet is a type of mammal that belongs to the family of mongooses. But it’s a medium-sized animal, and it is both captured from the wild for food and captive-bred and raised for food, and it was the first big suspect in the SARS outbreak. It was found that some of the people who got sick very early on had eaten butchered civet. And they tested some civets, and they found evidence of the virus. They found antibodies or fragments of DNA or RNA in these civets, suggesting that they had been infected with the virus. And that didn’t prove they were the reservoir host, but it made them the No. 1 suspect, until a couple of Chinese scientists did further work and they established that, in fact, the virus was not living permanently in the civet population in the wild or in captivity. It [had] a different reservoir host. It was living in bats and had passed, presumably, at a market somewhere. It had passed from a bat into one or more civets, and they became the amplifier host. ...

Thousands of civets in captivity were butchered and electrocuted and smothered and drowned in this first, panicked blind reaction in China to the SARS outbreak.

On why bats are often hosts for viruses

Bats are implicated in what seems to be more than their share [of zoonoses]. There are a lot of different species of bats. One-quarter of all mammal species are bats. But there are other things [special] about them — including aspects of their immune system. There have been some discoveries lately that bat immune systems are “downregulated” in a certain way that allows for the metabolic stresses of being a mammal that flies. And the downregulating of the immune system to avoid overreaction to those stresses seems, perhaps, also to create an environment in which viruses are more tolerated in bats than in other mammals.

On how coronaviruses have evolved through different species

How Hong Kong Beat SARS: Lessons Learned

One of the reasons SARS could adapt from bat to civet to human is the fact that it is a coronavirus, which is a group of viruses that are very readily adaptable. Experts call that intrinsic evolvability. Their rate of mutation is very high when they copy themselves. Their genome contains a lot of mistakes, and that represents mutations that are sort of the random raw material for Darwinian evolution. So viruses that have high mutation rates are able to evolve quickly and adapt quickly. And coronaviruses ... have that characteristic.

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Should take his own advice.

Counter-Currents Radio Podcast No. 258
A Conversation with Laura Towler

Laura, a solid English ethnonationalist

If you insert the word “international” for them, before the term “left”, you do them the favor of undoing their unwitting complicity with Jewish interests; though in Greg’s case, he perhaps cannot help it, as doubling down saves him from the criticism and bad news that he claims his elitism should hear.

Otherwise, some good thoughts in that conversation.

   
    Meanwhile, “I am not an ethnonationalist” - Richard Spencer
.....

Criticisms of Johson’s elitism, for example:

In his conversation with Morgoth just prior to this one with Laura, he calls the Scottish Nationalist Party the “perfect example of left nationalism.”

Is it really so hard for you to do something like put the word international before the term left?, Greg, or do you insist upon an oxymoron like internationalizing nationalism, which is what you are talking about with The SNP?

Also in this discussion, he wants to contrast aesthetics to counter the avarice of sheer mercantile utilitarianism.

I endorse the essence of the project he’s after, that is, countering radical liberalizing effects of mercantile hegemony…

But the concept of usefulness is not the opposite of the importance of aesthetics. Aesthetics play important, useful functions for people.

And paying attention to what is useful is an under utilized, liberating suggestion in service of orienting the popular understanding and deployment of philosophy. Hence, Greg’s superficial suggestion of aesthetics over utilitarianism just to play opposite day with me is a bum steer.

I guess that snooty right wing elitism is a comfy perch for Greg.

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