I won’t blame anyone if they are confused by the actions of the Biden Administration. To any rational person they beggar belief. If these people are supposed to work for the betterment of all Americans how can they act in such openly hypocritical ways?
The first of many executive orders Biden signed on day one of his Presidency was cancel the Keystone XL pipeline. We can argue all day about whether we need Keystone or not. But the market is telling you that we do.
When Biden signed that EO oil closed at $53.13 per barrel. Natural Gas was $2.49 per million BTU and the national averages for gasoline and diesel fuel were $2.379 and $2.696 per gallon.
Today those numbers are $76.10, $5.109, $3.399 and $3.734. In the case of crude oil and natural gas, those numbers are 20% below their peak at the beginning of the month.
Instead of improving the domestic production environment or working with international leaders to improve the global supply and demand mismatch, Biden and company doubled down trying to get the Enbridge No. 5 pipeline from Canada shut down to starve the Great Lakes region of energy this winter.
Now, having stayed the course on Trump’s ridiculous treatment of Venezuela and further deteriorating our relationship with Russia we are now not only more dependent on foreign oil than we’ve been in years but we’re actually more dependent on Russian oil than we’ve ever been.
I wonder if we pay for that oil with petrorubles. If I were President Putin, I would demand that just for the lulz.
After four years of President Trump’s overly belligerent foreign policy towards China Biden’s team of ‘diplomats’ committed gaffe after gaffe with our biggest trade partner and rival.
First at the summit in Anchorage and then multiple times over handling the sensitive issue of Taiwan.
Now, after a series of terrible phone calls, cables and visits by U.S. officials to the Pacific region we are treated to this:
A U.S. effort to show unity between two of its closest allies backfired, after Japanese and South Korean officials walked out and left the No. 2 American diplomat to face reporters on her own https://t.co/EuAiRu43jM
When the protocol-obsessed Japanese and Koreans, whose safety you are supposed to guarantee, refuse to share a stage with you, you basically suck the sweat off a dead man’s balls (H/T Lt. Garlic!).
On relations with Russia, one day they are sending Arch Neocon to Moscow who then declares for the first time by a U.S. official that the Minsk agreements the only way forward for Ukraine. The next Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin is in Kiev vowing to assist Ukraine in bringing the breakaway republics oft the Donbass back under Kiev’s control.
A position reaffirmed by top brass in NATO and the European Union.
Only to have CIA Director William Burns rush back over to try and smooth the Kremlin’s ruffled feathers, mostly to no avail.
Turning to Afghanistan, Biden ran for the office on ending our involvement there. But he did so stranding thousands behind with hostilities towards them raging out of control, surrendering the important airbase at Bagram to the Chinese and leaving behind tens of billions of dollars in war materiel behind only to be captured by the Taliban, who the administration immediately starved of funds and stymied any resolutions in the U.N.
This was one of the most ignominious moments in American history right up there with the Fall of Saigon in 1975, 9/11 and the sacking of the White House by British forces during the War of 1812.
The Biden Administration’s response? It was Trump’s fault.
I haven’t even gotten started on the patently unconstitutional and abhorrent vaccine mandate this man urged private corporations to ignore court rulings against. This is a clear attempt at usurping the courts, local and state governments and common decency itself.
But, then again, that pretty much describes the whole of Joe Biden’s life: corrupt, incompetent, out of touch (well, not always) and incapable of accepting responsibility for his actions.
We have a governing party so at war with itself it can’t overcome the weakest opposition party ever to pass even a simple debt ceiling extension without resorting to incomprehensible games of brinksmanship that belong more in a Mel Brooks movie than on Capitol Hill.
There’s a pattern here and it is a difficult one for most people to perceive, no less even believe, because it acknowledging would change everything.
This isn’t incompetence.
No, in fact, calling the Biden Administration incompetent would be an insult to incompetent people. Because while the incompetent aren’t good at much they are, in fact, good at being incompetent.
But being incompetent doesn’t mean you don’t mean well, it just means you are incapable of performing the task in front of you.
Trump was mostly incompetent at being President. But it was obvious to anyone remotely objective that he was sincere in his desire to make things better. That he couldn’t is forgivable. I wished many times he wasn’t, but I don’t harbor any ill will for his incompetence.
So, fine, put someone else in there, then, right?
We supposedly did that out of exasperation with Trump’s well-meaning incompetence.
But that’s not what’s going on with the Biden Administration.
Biden’s people, on the other hand, are simply scammers.
Scammers lie. They misdirect. They gain your confidence and then keep you in a bubble of lies and promises they don’t intend to keep. They prey on your good nature and your assumptions of how things work to keep you in their orbit.
They lie to maintain the appearance of being in control. They act like they have the solutions.
But the thing about lies is that they are always inconsistent. There is always a tell. But, you can’t see the tell if you don’t want to. And by the time you do, it’s far too late.
Biden’s folks and the media (and, yes, Davos) can’t tell you the truth about the COVID-9/11 clot shots because the COVID-9/11 pandemic was never about public health.
They can’t tell you the truth about the infrastructure bill they just passed because it was never about rebuilding failing infrastructure.
Similarly, they can’t tell you the truth about the Build Back Better bill because it isn’t about Building anything.
The media refused to cover the Kyle Rittenhouse trial or even the events in question with any honesty because the trial was never about Kyle’s guilt or innocence (and the jury ruled properly). It was an opportunity to grandstand on race relations when none of the men Kyle regrettably had to shoot were black.
And this is the first mistake people make when assessing current events. They believe these people are working with an honest desire to make things better. They refuse to believe malice because incompetence is easier to swallow.
It’s why it’s so easy for them to dismiss the truth as conspiracy.
To believe COVID-9/11 necessitated destroying the social fabric of society.
To make us all poorer with hypocritical energy policy because of Climate Change by destroying the oil industry that literally puts food on everyone’s table.
To eat the same rich people their policies created in the first place.
To divide us into arbitrary groups based on our willingness to get an experimental gene therapy whose only observable real-world effect is to create a whole new strata of autoimmune disorders and possibly short circuit the normal immune response to a coronavirus.
The same people today who would nod their head about my assessment of Trump’s incompetence will immediately say we could say the same thing about Biden. And, that’s true to an extent, but that’s also a cope.
Because the worst thing about scammers is that they make you liars, too. We lie to ourselves that it isn’t their fault, it’s ours. We lie to our family and friends that things can’t be what they are.
Scammers turn the uncomfortable truth into a pacifying lie.
Because with Biden’s team the evidence points to something far different, something far more sinister.
These people are vandals. They are intent on destroying society itself and make us complicit in the lie that there is nothing good or decent left about America or, for that matter, everything that they tell us today (as opposed to yesterday) is unacceptable.
That is the hardest red pill to swallow in the end for too many at this point. The incompetence of the Biden Administration is itself a lie. These people have an agenda and a goal and they have moved with assiduous speed and deftness to implement that agenda.
They are not incompetent, but rather hyper-competent… at being vandals.
This is why COVID-9/11 will never end. This is why when we say no to the clot shot they double down and demand we give it to our kids. This is why when information gets out that proves they are lying they lie even more and suppress the information.
Truth is treason in the empire of lies. The scammer will make the lie bigger and bigger to keep you on the hook. They will never admit they are lying.
This is why I keep saying become #Ungovernable.
So, stop hoping they will find some dignity in the end and admit it so you can feel better. Don’t be afraid of it. Just accept it and the responsibility of it. Only then will you be free.
Mathematicians use AI to identify emerging COVID-19 variants
Scientists at The Universities of Manchester and Oxford have developed an AI framework that can identify and track new and concerning COVID-19 variants…
Scientists at The Universities of Manchester and Oxford have developed an AI framework that can identify and track new and concerning COVID-19 variants and could help with other infections in the future.
Scientists at The Universities of Manchester and Oxford have developed an AI framework that can identify and track new and concerning COVID-19 variants and could help with other infections in the future.
The framework combines dimension reduction techniques and a new explainable clustering algorithm called CLASSIX, developed by mathematicians at The University of Manchester. This enables the quick identification of groups of viral genomes that might present a risk in the future from huge volumes of data.
The study, presented this week in the journal PNAS, could support traditional methods of tracking viral evolution, such as phylogenetic analysis, which currently require extensive manual curation.
Roberto Cahuantzi, a researcher at The University of Manchester and first and corresponding author of the paper, said: “Since the emergence of COVID-19, we have seen multiple waves of new variants, heightened transmissibility, evasion of immune responses, and increased severity of illness.
“Scientists are now intensifying efforts to pinpoint these worrying new variants, such as alpha, delta and omicron, at the earliest stages of their emergence. If we can find a way to do this quickly and efficiently, it will enable us to be more proactive in our response, such as tailored vaccine development and may even enable us to eliminate the variants before they become established.”
Like many other RNA viruses, COVID-19 has a high mutation rate and short time between generations meaning it evolves extremely rapidly. This means identifying new strains that are likely to be problematic in the future requires considerable effort.
Currently, there are almost 16 million sequences available on the GISAID database (the Global Initiative on Sharing All Influenza Data), which provides access to genomic data of influenza viruses.
Mapping the evolution and history of all COVID-19 genomes from this data is currently done using extremely large amounts of computer and human time.
The described method allows automation of such tasks. The researchers processed 5.7 million high-coverage sequences in only one to two days on a standard modern laptop; this would not be possible for existing methods, putting identification of concerning pathogen strains in the hands of more researchers due to reduced resource needs.
Thomas House, Professor of Mathematical Sciences at The University of Manchester, said: “The unprecedented amount of genetic data generated during the pandemic demands improvements to our methods to analyse it thoroughly. The data is continuing to grow rapidly but without showing a benefit to curating this data, there is a risk that it will be removed or deleted.
“We know that human expert time is limited, so our approach should not replace the work of humans all together but work alongside them to enable the job to be done much quicker and free our experts for other vital developments.”
The proposed method works by breaking down genetic sequences of the COVID-19 virus into smaller “words” (called 3-mers) represented as numbers by counting them. Then, it groups similar sequences together based on their word patterns using machine learning techniques.
Stefan Güttel, Professor of Applied Mathematics at the University of Manchester, said: “The clustering algorithm CLASSIX we developed is much less computationally demanding than traditional methods and is fully explainable, meaning that it provides textual and visual explanations of the computed clusters.”
Roberto Cahuantzi added: “Our analysis serves as a proof of concept, demonstrating the potential use of machine learning methods as an alert tool for the early discovery of emerging major variants without relying on the need to generate phylogenies.
“Whilst phylogenetics remains the ‘gold standard’ for understanding the viral ancestry, these machine learning methods can accommodate several orders of magnitude more sequences than the current phylogenetic methods and at a low computational cost.”
Journal
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
DOI
10.1073/pnas.2317284121
Article Title
Unsupervised identification of significant lineages of SARS-CoV-2 through scalable machine learning methods
While the size of the United States makes it hard for it to compete with the inter-city train access available in places like Japan and many European countries, Amtrak trains are a very popular transportation option in certain pockets of the country — so much so that the country’s national railway company is expanding its Northeast Corridor by more than one million seats.
Running from Boston all the way south to Washington, D.C., the route is one of the most popular as it passes through the most densely populated part of the country and serves as a commuter train for those who need to go between East Coast cities such as New York and Philadelphia for business.
Veronika Bondarenko captured this photo of New York’s Moynihan Train Hall.
Veronika Bondarenko
Amtrak launches new routes, promises travelers ‘additional travel options’
Earlier this month, Amtrak announced that it was adding four additional Northeastern routes to its schedule — two more routes between New York’s Penn Station and Union Station in Washington, D.C. on the weekend, a new early-morning weekday route between New York and Philadelphia’s William H. Gray III 30th Street Station and a weekend route between Philadelphia and Boston’s South Station.
According to Amtrak, these additions will increase Northeast Corridor’s service by 20% on the weekdays and 10% on the weekends for a total of one million additional seats when counted by how many will ride the corridor over the year.
“More people are taking the train than ever before and we’re proud to offer our customers additional travel options when they ride with us on the Northeast Regional,” Amtrak Executive Vice President and Chief Commercial Officer Eliot Hamlisch said in a statement on the new routes. “The Northeast Regional gets you where you want to go comfortably, conveniently and sustainably as you breeze past traffic on I-95 for a more enjoyable travel experience.”
Here are some of the other Amtrak changes you can expect to see
Amtrak also said that, in the 2023 financial year, the Northeast Corridor had nearly 9.2 million riders — 8% more than it had pre-pandemic and a 29% increase from 2022. The higher demand, particularly during both off-peak hours and the time when many business travelers use to get to work, is pushing Amtrak to invest into this corridor in particular.
To reach more customers, Amtrak has also made several changes to both its routes and pricing system. In the fall of 2023, it introduced a type of new “Night Owl Fare” — if traveling during very late or very early hours, one can go between cities like New York and Philadelphia or Philadelphia and Washington. D.C. for $5 to $15.
As travel on the same routes during peak hours can reach as much as $300, this was a deliberate move to reach those who have the flexibility of time and might have otherwise preferred more affordable methods of transportation such as the bus. After seeing strong uptake, Amtrak added this type of fare to more Boston routes.
The largest distances, such as the ones between Boston and New York or New York and Washington, are available at the lowest rate for $20.
I am a conservation biologist who studies emerging infectious diseases. When people ask me what I think the next pandemic will be I often say that we are in the midst of one – it’s just afflicting a great many species more than ours.
I am referring to the highly pathogenic strain of avian influenza H5N1 (HPAI H5N1), otherwise known as bird flu, which has killed millions of birds and unknown numbers of mammals, particularly during the past three years.
This is the strain that emerged in domestic geese in China in 1997 and quickly jumped to humans in south-east Asia with a mortality rate of around 40-50%. My research group encountered the virus when it killed a mammal, an endangered Owston’s palm civet, in a captive breeding programme in Cuc Phuong National Park Vietnam in 2005.
How these animals caught bird flu was never confirmed. Their diet is mainly earthworms, so they had not been infected by eating diseased poultry like many captive tigers in the region.
This discovery prompted us to collate all confirmed reports of fatal infection with bird flu to assess just how broad a threat to wildlife this virus might pose.
This is how a newly discovered virus in Chinese poultry came to threaten so much of the world’s biodiversity.
Until December 2005, most confirmed infections had been found in a few zoos and rescue centres in Thailand and Cambodia. Our analysis in 2006 showed that nearly half (48%) of all the different groups of birds (known to taxonomists as “orders”) contained a species in which a fatal infection of bird flu had been reported. These 13 orders comprised 84% of all bird species.
We reasoned 20 years ago that the strains of H5N1 circulating were probably highly pathogenic to all bird orders. We also showed that the list of confirmed infected species included those that were globally threatened and that important habitats, such as Vietnam’s Mekong delta, lay close to reported poultry outbreaks.
Mammals known to be susceptible to bird flu during the early 2000s included primates, rodents, pigs and rabbits. Large carnivores such as Bengal tigers and clouded leopards were reported to have been killed, as well as domestic cats.
Our 2006 paper showed the ease with which this virus crossed species barriers and suggested it might one day produce a pandemic-scale threat to global biodiversity.
In the past couple of years, bird flu has spread rapidly across Europe and infiltrated North and South America, killing millions of poultry and a variety of bird and mammal species. A recent paper found that 26 countries have reported at least 48 mammal species that have died from the virus since 2020, when the latest increase in reported infections started.
Not even the ocean is safe. Since 2020, 13 species of aquatic mammal have succumbed, including American sea lions, porpoises and dolphins, often dying in their thousands in South America. A wide range of scavenging and predatory mammals that live on land are now also confirmed to be susceptible, including mountain lions, lynx, brown, black and polar bears.
The UK alone has lost over 75% of its great skuas and seen a 25% decline in northern gannets. Recent declines in sandwich terns (35%) and common terns (42%) were also largely driven by the virus.
Scientists haven’t managed to completely sequence the virus in all affected species. Research and continuous surveillance could tell us how adaptable it ultimately becomes, and whether it can jump to even more species. We know it can already infect humans – one or more genetic mutations may make it more infectious.
At the crossroads
Between January 1 2003 and December 21 2023, 882 cases of human infection with the H5N1 virus were reported from 23 countries, of which 461 (52%) were fatal.
Of these fatal cases, more than half were in Vietnam, China, Cambodia and Laos. Poultry-to-human infections were first recorded in Cambodia in December 2003. Intermittent cases were reported until 2014, followed by a gap until 2023, yielding 41 deaths from 64 cases. The subtype of H5N1 virus responsible has been detected in poultry in Cambodia since 2014. In the early 2000s, the H5N1 virus circulating had a high human mortality rate, so it is worrying that we are now starting to see people dying after contact with poultry again.
It’s not just H5 subtypes of bird flu that concern humans. The H10N1 virus was originally isolated from wild birds in South Korea, but has also been reported in samples from China and Mongolia.
Recent research found that these particular virus subtypes may be able to jump to humans after they were found to be pathogenic in laboratory mice and ferrets. The first person who was confirmed to be infected with H10N5 died in China on January 27 2024, but this patient was also suffering from seasonal flu (H3N2). They had been exposed to live poultry which also tested positive for H10N5.
Species already threatened with extinction are among those which have died due to bird flu in the past three years. The first deaths from the virus in mainland Antarctica have just been confirmed in skuas, highlighting a looming threat to penguin colonies whose eggs and chicks skuas prey on. Humboldt penguins have already been killed by the virus in Chile.
How can we stem this tsunami of H5N1 and other avian influenzas? Completely overhaul poultry production on a global scale. Make farms self-sufficient in rearing eggs and chicks instead of exporting them internationally. The trend towards megafarms containing over a million birds must be stopped in its tracks.
To prevent the worst outcomes for this virus, we must revisit its primary source: the incubator of intensive poultry farms.
Diana Bell does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
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