[Majorityrights News] Trump will ‘arm Ukraine to the teeth’ if Putin won’t negotiate ceasefire Posted by Guessedworker on Tuesday, 12 November 2024 16:20.
[Majorityrights News] Alex Navalny, born 4th June, 1976; died at Yamalo-Nenets penitentiary 16th February, 2024 Posted by Guessedworker on Friday, 16 February 2024 23:43.
[Majorityrights Central] A couple of exchanges on the nature and meaning of Christianity’s origin Posted by Guessedworker on Tuesday, 25 July 2023 22:19.
[Majorityrights News] Is the Ukrainian counter-offensive for Bakhmut the counter-offensive for Ukraine? Posted by Guessedworker on Thursday, 18 May 2023 18:55.
Posted by DanielS on Tuesday, 18 February 2020 07:32.
DAILYKENN.com—Had a 29-year-old black woman been shot to death by her white boyfriend, it would likely be national news. Had the victim been white and the suspect black, the story would be limited to local media and race would not be mentioned.
Cassia Renee Duval, 29, was seven months pregnant when she was found shot to death. Her unborn baby was also killed. Arrested is James Isaac Jones Jr. 33. Jones and Duval lived together, reports say.
Why was she killed? We can only speculate. Is it because she mated with an individual with low impulse control, low intelligence, low affective empathy, and psychopathic tendencies? We can’t say for certain.
Posted by DanielS on Thursday, 06 February 2020 06:22.
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
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.”
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.
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
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
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
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.
Note: This blog is based on my notes for a speech at the Harvard Class of 1957 55th reunion in Cambridge, Mass. on May 22nd.
Armageddon was threatening the financial system on Wednesday, September 17, 2008. The largest bankruptcy in American history, that of investment bank Lehman Brothers on Monday, September 15, had roiled global markets, accelerating the stupendous decline in values of every possible investment vehicle—common stocks, corporate bonds, real estate, commodities like oil, copper and gold, private equity and hedge funds alike. In the midst of the chaos Merrill Lynch, the firm that had brought Wall Street to Main Street, was absorbed in a shotgun marriage by Bank of America BAC +0%.
Only days earlier came the recognition at the New York Federal Reserve Bank and the US Treasury that AIG, the largest insurance company in the world was running out of money. This required an immediate injection of $85 billion in bail-out funds. And later another $100 billion, still not paid back to Uncle Sam.
That day, Sept 17, an even greater crisis was pending. All day long the chairman of General Electric, a company recognized across the globe as a leading industrial giant, was calling the Secretary of the Treasury, Hank Paulson to warn that the next day, Sept. 18, that GE would no longer be able to roll over its short term debt. The American business system was on the cusp of faltering mightily. The US economy was on the brink of a precipice into the unknown.
Messrs Paulson and Bernanke, at the Fed, knew the nation could not suffer the risk of a total breakdown in industry and finance. So, they decided to instantly guarantee the $600 billion commercial paper market, which is widely used to finance day-to-day operations of all major firms. This guarantee became part of the total cost of bailing out Wall Street, which totaled over $7 trillion—when you added guarantees to loans, investments and outright grants. The bailouts were key to raising the Fed’s balance sheet from $1 trillion to $3 trillion—and to upping the nation’s total amount of debt some $5 trillion to a record $15 trillion.
Conversely, the household wealth of the nation, measured by losses in financial markets and the historic drop in residential real estate—was reduced by a sickenly humungus $12-$14 trillion at the very bottom of the whole process in March, 2009. You take that money—$12-14 trillion away from the asset side of the ledger and add another $5 trillion in debt—- and you are bound to experience a decline in the nation’s GDP and a very much slower rate of recovery from such a trauma. A recovery that could take 10 years or more according to Harvard economist Kenneth Rogoff. That brings us to 2018. Need I say more?
How did we reach this very near call on a total systemic breakdown?
Firstly, there were no cops on the beat. Laissez-faire free market economics was the prevailing public policy. Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan spoke of irrational exuberance but took no steps to cool off markets in the late 1990s. In fact, he was asked by Loews chairman Larry Tisch and former Goldman Sachs co-chairman John Whitehead to raise the margins on trading, and refused, claiming falsely that such a move was up to the SEC—and not the Fed. Not true.
In 1999 the Glass-Steagall Act—which had separated commercial banking from investment banking for 66 years, was overturned—a move that opened the door to more speculative trading on the part of Wall Street firms.
Then, in 2000 Messrs. Greenspan, former Treasury Secretary Rubin and his successor Lawrence Summers pressed to pass a bill that would prohibit the regulation of derivatives—the fastest growing and most complicated and murky new financial product. This was an incredible mistake, as derivative contracts like mortgage backed bonds and credit default swaps mushroomed in across the globe without any oversight, strict capital requirements and on an organized exchange where buying and selling were handled daily.
The result of this vacuum; no one anywhere knew who owed what to whom across the world. Despite the danger lurking in the rapid depreciation of these contracts, Bernanke publicly stated the absurd amount of sub-prime mortgages being sold to unsuspecting buyers would not spread to a much wider, deeper crisis. He didn’t know what he was talking about, sadly..
Lastly, in 2004 the major firms convinced the SEC to let them value certain assets on their balance sheet at values they chose—rather than marking them t o market—which would reveal what losses they were carrying. This added another dangerous laxity to financial regulation. The system was falsifying its accounts believing the investments would bounce back.
The entire catastrophe’s underlying theme was summed up later by this admission from former Fed chairman Greenspan . ” I made a mistake,” he admitted in a hearing, “in presuming that the self-interests of organizations, specifically banks and others, were such that they were best capable of protecting their own shareholders and their equity in the firms.” And we made this man into the wise parental guardian of American capitalism for 18 years. We journalists, that is.
Pressed again later on, Greenspan admitted to “shocked disbelief, (because his whole) intellectual edifice had collapsed.” Naive at minimum. At worst, locked into a narrow limited ideological viewpoint that set the stage for the meltdown. Let Goldman Sachs and Citigroup master their own appetite for profits. So much for reining in animals spirits.
Secondly, the banks and investment banks were using reckless amounts of leverage. They borrowed, in many cases, $30 to $40 of debt for every dollar of capital they had. In truth, this was a recipe for disaster, since a decline of only 4% in their capital put them on the road to insolvency. It was as if you bought a million dollar house, put down a payment of $30,000 and borrowed $970,000. What sense of irrational optimism allowed this mad way of doing business.
By the fall of 2008 the decline in the value just of subprime mortgage backed bonds—which lost up to 80% of their value in the market—meant that Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Lehman, Merrill Lynch, Citigroup, Bank of America, Washington Mutual and Wachovia were in a state of peril. The only way to make money in bank stocks was to short them. My favorite day trader told me after it was all over that I should be worth $50 million. With the run on Lehman Bros. both Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs were in danger of experiencing a run on their accounts.
Perhaps AIG is the most extreme example of leverage as financial hari-kari. It had sold protection to banks and insurance companies across the globe by issuing $540 billion of credit default swaps, which meant AIG promised to make good on any losses in value of their mortgage holdings.
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.