All Quarked Up

      Stephen Lathrop says: "All the major internet, “platforms,” are in fact publishers" Correct "Unless the laws of publishing are alike for all publishers—and do not excessively burden the constitutional liberties of some publishers—there is a First Amendment problem which cannot be wished away." Correct. Section 230 protects the "internet platform" publishers, like Twitter, Facebook, and Google, from libel law.  All other publishers are subject to libel law. This is clearly a violation the First Amendment, and therefore must be ended. I'm so glad we're in agreement. Tweets on Twitter are functionally equivalent to letters to the editor to a paper.  And you can most certainly be sued and lose for publishing those . If that means that Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube go out of business, so what?  Napster went out of business when copyright law was properly enforced against them. Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube have chosen a business model that depen

In response to this dreck from Reason There's two ways to address any issue:  From a political perspective From a principled perspective The problem with the political perspective is that your arguments only work with people who are more or less on your side The problem with the principled perspective is that it imposes boundaries and limits on you and your future behavior, and your past behavior imposes further limits When the issue of big tech censorship came up, Reason / Volokh could have gone with the political argument: Look the people being censored are "not our sort", our social circles don't like them, we find them embarrassing, therefore screw them, let Twitter / FB / Google censor them, we don't care This would have been an honest argument on their part, but it would have harmed their self image of being righteous and principled people So they went for the "principled" argument: Look, it's their company, you have no right to be on their pla

 Here's what we know: 1: Viruses need cell and species directed cleavage sites in their spike proteins in order to infect cells 2: Having a cleavage site that can be targeted by multiple proteins found in multiple different cell types gives a virus more targets, making it more infectious 3: Sars-Cov-2 has a nicely accessible cleavage site, targetible by multiple different human cell types surface proteins 4: The DNA sequence of this cleavage site is not found in any naturally known coronavirus species related to Sar-Cov-2 5: The cleavage site sequence looks like the exact kind of thing that researchers splice into a virus that they're playing with 6: In particular, the DNA/RNA coding for the double Arginine (key to making it infectious in humans), CGGCGG, is the exact sequence human researchers use when adding a furin-like cleavage site.  7: There are 6 different 3 letter codes for Arginine.  Which means there's 36 different ways to get double Arginine.  Which means that, b

Working off of this , and replying to Captain Ed : Arginine is coded for by CG*, and by AGA and AGG. So, 6 potential options, and there's absolutely no competitive advantage for the * to be a G vs an A, C, or T. You don't need peer review to establish this, or to establish the math. You also don't need peer review to establish that CGGCGG is the lab preferred triplet pair for a double arginine, you'll find that in any published paper on the subject. So we have: 1: An arginine pair, which makes viruses much nastier to humans, is in Covid 19 2: It's coded for in the way that researchers commonly use to add an arginine pair (and once people get a way that works, pretty much everyone uses it. Because doing this is actually much harder than it looks) 3: That particular coding has a 1 in 36 likelihood by random chance 4: That particular coding has yet to be found anywhere in any genome from Covid19's family of coronaviruses 5: So no recombination event could have mad