COVID scientists: fools or knaves?
For over a year the left promoted the idea that COVID emerged accidentally in the wild, and called every challenge to that notion a debunked and ridiculous conspiracy theory. But recently – for reasons that remain someone obscure but about which we can speculate – the Democrats and the media have acknowledged that COVID’s genesis just might have been in a lab, as has long been considered a possibility by Donald Trump and most of the right.
Now several scientists have described seemingly powerful evidence of COVID’s lab creation, and they also claim that there was an elaborate coverup attempt:
An explosive new study claims that Chinese scientists created COVID-19 in a Wuhan lab, then tried to cover their tracks by reverse-engineering versions of the virus to make it look like it evolved naturally from bats.
The paper’s authors, British Professor Angus Dalgleish and Norwegian scientist Dr. Birger Sørensen, wrote that they have had ‘prima facie evidence of retro-engineering in China’ for a year – but were ignored by academics and major journals.
The shocking allegations in the study include accusations of ‘deliberate destruction, concealment or contamination of data’ at Chinese labs, and it notes the silencing and disappearance of scientists in the communist country who spoke out.
I suppose the allegations are “shocking” – or they would have been a couple of years ago. But I’m not shocked, and I bet most of the readers of this blog aren’t shocked either. After what we’ve seen in the last few years, it’s not difficult to believe that this information was suppressed. What’s far more puzzling is why it’s finally being allowed to come out now.
In the 22-page paper which is set to be published in the scientific journal Quarterly Review of Biophysics Discovery, the scientists describe their months-long ‘forensic analysis’, looking back at experiments done at the Wuhan lab between 2002 and 2019.
Digging through archives of journals and databases, Dalgleish and Sørensen pieced together how Chinese scientists, some working in concert with American universities, allegedly built the tools to create the coronavirus…
Dalgleish and Sørensen claim that scientists working on Gain of Function projects took a natural coronavirus ‘backbone’ found in Chinese cave bats and spliced onto it a new ‘spike’, turning it into the deadly and highly transmissible SARS-Cov-2.
One tell-tale sign of alleged manipulation the two men highlighted was a row of four amino acids they found on the SARS-Cov-2 spike.
In an exclusive interview with DailyMail.com, Sørensen said the amino acids all have a positive charge, which cause the virus to tightly cling to the negatively charged parts of human cells like a magnet, and so become more infectious.
But because, like magnets, the positively charged amino acids repel each other, it is rare to find even three in a row in naturally occurring organisms, while four in a row is ‘extremely unlikely,’ the scientist said.
Apparently they figured this out a year ago.
The authors add:
The implication of our historical reconstruction, we posit now beyond reasonable doubt, of the purposively manipulated chimeric virus SARS-CoV-2 makes it imperative to reconsider what types of Gain of Function experiments it is morally acceptable to undertake.
The idea of “gain of function” experiments – essentially, taking viruses and purposely changing them in ways that make them more likely to infect humans – is so reminiscent of scarey science fiction that one would have thought no such experiments would ever be “morally acceptable to undertake” – although of course not all nations are interested in conforming to what’s morally acceptable.
Question: does this mean we can call it the “China virus” again?
The Daily Mail article is long, and I suggest you read the whole thing.
Covid scientists: scientists or political activists?
Knaves.
Why is it coming out now? Because the rats are deserting the sinking ship. I strongly suspect this particular paper finally reached a critical threshold of visibility a month ago. The rats could see the writing on the wall and decided now was the time to start trying to blame other people.
The next round of stories will all be written with passive voice- mistakes were made, accidents happened, etc.
Expect to see lots of stories about how funding was approved without any knowledge about what it was actually funding.
As is often said on Glenn Reynolds’ Instapundit page, “Embrace the healing power of ‘and’.”
Just add this to another of the list of “Trump was right”. All of last year, anything Trump said HAD to be immediately disputed and trashed and many so-called scientists jumped on board; they are not immune to TDS.
“Why is it coming out now?”
Because the COUP against DJT—and against his supporters (as well as those who remained dubious but having had a good look, and taste, of the alternative voted for him anyway)—HAS SUCCEEDED….
(…At least it appears to have “succeeded”…. OTOH, we may well be about to find out whether the Democratic Party and its MSM cohort can, in fact, get away—long term, that is—with LYING to ALL the people ALL the time…)
IOW, shutting down the country, destroying its middle class and demoralizing its citizenry “had to be done” to achieve the “necessary” end.
And the pandemic and possible ways of dealing with it had to be politicized; and exposing all those weak and elderly to unnecessary pain and death “had to be done”…to achieve the “necessary” end.
And all the brazen lying—differing from the usual Democratic Party and its MSM cohort non-stop prevarications only in non-stop intensity and its massive scale—“had to be done”…(that’s right!) to achieve the “necessary” end.
And the country HAD TO BE—be torn asunder to achieve the “necessary” end.
Its institutions pulverized. Its cities ravaged. Its justice and educational systems destroyed.
Its citizens pitted against one another, as half (or more than half) of those citizens are branded enemies of the state.
The non-stop lying of course continues (“Unity”, anyone? How about “No crisis on the southern border”? Or “Minimal, manageable inflation”, or “For the people”, or “the need for a Just Middle East peace and an empowered Iran to help effect that noble goal”, etc., ad nauseum).
Yes, the COUP is believed to have succeeded; therefore, these “human errors” or “mistaken interpretations of the data” or “overlooking the complexities of the issues” may NOW be admitted. (Think of it as the WHO/CDC equivalent of that Time Magazine article on the Democratic “cabal” that was oh so earnestly “committed” and “inspired” to “win” the presidency for their candidate, etc. ad nauseum—-these days I always type with an airplane bag close at hand).
Oh, and it’s coming out now because it will very soon be impossible to deny (without seeming laughably pathetic). That is (as mentioned above), it is simply another desperate attempt by the usual suspects to maintain control of the “Narrative”(TM)…(with the “Biden” administration no doubt about to announce that “it” will do “its” utmost to “get to the bottom” of it….)
File under: “But how, oh how did we get it so, so wrong….”
Wait a minute. Thyroid releasing hormone has 234 amino acids, and insulin has 51. So amino acids are forced to be buddies? Insulin has two chains of amino acids.
I believe humans qualify as “naturally occurring organisms”, a poor phrase to be used by bacteriologists and virologists with their systemic micro-myopia.
Why is this COVID engineering coming out now? Because the truth will out.
To be sure, almost immediately, it should have been obvious that the virus’s origin was the Wuhan lab.
The only question was whether the leak was done intentionally or whether it was accidental.
An intentional leak never made sense that seeing that Chinese citizens—and especially the Chinese economy—were the first to suffer. The people died in droves (nobody will ever know the true numbers) and the economy was sorely affected (not only because of a decimated work force but because, ultimately, of the economic ramifications of the disease’s spread around the world).
It’s clear, however, that the CCP believed it HAD to cover the virus up, which led to the disease’s international spread. Since China controlled the WHO—and wielded considerable influence over other medical orgs, e.g., “Lancet” (just as the MSM is in cahoots with the Democratic Party), this was not a problem for them. IOW, it was no problem for them to control the “Narrative”.
The covering up and—even more so—thei Chinese government’s attempts to flip responsibility for the virus—AND ITS SPREAD—onto the US (and I believe Australia, at one point) should have made the former’s responsibility for it even clearer (since the blame game is PRECISELY the behavior of paranoid individuals, political entities and governments).
And so here we are, over a year later…
I can’t see how China manipulating the structure of a virus so that it was more infectious or more lethal to humans would help China.
Why wouldn’t they be afraid of its effect on Chinese citizens if it got loose? We have no record of a super-preventative Chinese vaccine being given to millions of Chinese before the fall of 2019 do we?
Why would they want to do gain of function research themselves? Wouldn’t they also not want some fiendish evil lab wizard doing this?
Why would they want to cause large numbers of people in the Chinese world-market to get sick?
Why would a super producer of goods like China want to make its many customers mad at them?
If they were actually making a bioweapon, then this is WWIII isn’t it?…and other actions would be forthcoming, like seizures of Taiwan or invasions of Hawaii or some other military followup…?
If it is a lab leak and they were trying to investigate bioweapon possibilities, then this was a terrible goof and we should be seeing political and management turmoil in the operation of the WVL?….like removal of managers or changing of assignments or hiring new people or cashiering old leaders. Has anyone reported this?
What are we supposed to do differently if it was a lab leak? vs a mutation in a bat virus? or some other animal virus that finally was able to infect humans?
Are we trying to simply be mad at something?
I’m just not figuring out why we are focusing on this so much.
Cicero, SARS-CoV-2 consists of 28 or 29 proteins, each of which will comprise large numbers of amino acids.
The article refers to a subsequence of 4 amino acids in the spike, which appears to have been artificially designed to make the virus more infectious in humans. The argument is that this subsequence is unlikely to have arisen in nature.
Maybe China covered up their responsibility for the pandemic in order to prevent Trump being re-elected. And who knows? Maybe this was with the full knowledge of the DNC.
So strange how helpful Covid has been to the DNC.
Some variation of Hanlon’s Razor seems to best apply here.
There apparently were concerns about the safety protocols at WIV prior to this and there have been countless examples of shoddy practices across many industries in China for years so the most likely scenario is they were doing some experimenting on corona viruses at WIV and somehow it got out in/on some researcher and off it went. Then in typical communist fashion lower level apparatchiks fear displeasing higher ups so they try to cover it up.
dnaxy – China has virtually limitless population. Perhaps I’m cynical but I don’t think they cared at all.
Why was it covered up for a year? Because Trump and their addiction to power.
Why is this coming out now? Because they feel that their power is secure and a “modified limited hangout” is required to limit any mid-term damage.
Bonus is before the 2022 election we will be told that Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia as a kabuki-war unfolds with gushing propaganda reporting in the MSM. <sarc.
I’m still at least mildly skeptical of the purposeful release of the virus by CCP theory (as opposed to an accidental leak by a lab worker) but I’m more than willing to be convinced… and information such as this obviously swaying me towards the idea.
While the CCP purposefully releasing such a dangerous virus would obviously of course put all of the Chinese people at great risk, they may have decided it was worth such a risk for a number of reasons.
First of all, there’s no shortage of irrefutable historical evidence that the CCP is extremely immoral with regards to their own citizens (who, let’s face it, aren’t really citizens at all but are instead essentially “subjects” to a nasty political oligarchy). Also, it’s possible that the CCP may have fully known that the greater risk with regards to this specific virus would be upon the elderly. I mean, losing a bunch of elderly people could even be looked at as a plus for the Communists who would generally look at older people as a burden on their society. They could just let them die.
geoffb,
Yes, this story rollout is akin to the ‘election fortification’ story that suddenly appeared a couple of months ago.
“China has virtually limitless population. Perhaps I’m cynical but I don’t think they cared at all.”
A feature required for the formation of a totalitarian state, as opposed to a mere dictatorship or totalitarian movement, as written about in 1951 by Arendt, is that there needs to be an excess of population that can be exterminated at will. Any internal scapegoat will do, even if one has to be constructed out of whole cloth.
The Chinese war on the US (chemical, i.e. fentanyl; biological, i.e. Wuhan Plague) has now cost more lives than WWI and is now nearly equal to the number of lives lost in WWII.
Why are we even talking to them, much less trading with them?
Now the media is trying to control the narrative of the narrative.
They lie.
And the cover-ups continue…. (The cover-ups of the cover-ups of the cover-ups…).
It can—it should—no longer be denied: these people are evil.
https://spectator.org/russia-hoax-obama/
Should not be forgotten that the destroyers are still at it, as psychopathically as ever:
https://video.foxnews.com/v/6256677049001#sp=show-clips
More than likely it was an accidental release via inappropriate safety protocol.
What is really disturbing is that after China knew this was a serious problem they banned all in-country travel from Wuhan while allowing international travel out of the region. This seems to me the height of cold war style dissembling and is outright evil in it’s nature.
It was a big FU to the world.
The paper’s authors, Birger Sørensen and Angus Dalgleish, are well known and respected, so we can set aside the typical dismissals that label the lab origin model as a crackpot conspiracy theory.
The authors have been working on a vaccine for COVID-19. That’s how they became involved in trying to determine the origin of this particular coronavirus. Their motives were scientific, not political.
Sørensen and Dalgleish have been trying to get their results published for about a year, but their paper was rejected by several major journals. Naturally enough, the authors suspect that the rejections were politically motivated.
In July 2020, the Norwegian online publication “Minerva” published an article describing the problems that Sørensen and Dalgleish have had with getting their research published (tinyurl.com/pum6x39k).
That article, in “Minerva,” also includes a link to an unpublished preprint of Sørensen and Dalgleish’s paper (tinyurl.com/se4mmu4t). I’ve read the paper, but I’m not qualified to evaluate it. Anybody here care to take a look?
And right on cue, with near impeccable timing, here’s the great man humbly recounting the profound impact that “Truth” has had on his life….
https://blazingcatfur.ca/2021/05/31/fauci-set-to-release-book-on-truth/
(Must be a really short book….)
“(Must be a really short book….)”
He should title it “My Struggle.”
That the Wuhanese were given 48 hrs notice of a total clampdown with immediate blockade to travel within China, but 48 hrs to fly anywhere in the world, is a huge tell to me. It was converted into, if not designed as, a bioweapon. Xi et al. are quicker than Rahm and Billy Boy to turn a crisis into an opportunity. The Wuhan airport is one of the busiest in the world!
What can we do in response? Zilch. We are critically dependent on China for many essential products, thanks to our globalists. The Biden Democrats think that is just fine, unlike Trump, who, despite his tweetstorms, was the greatest POTUS since Washington.
The editorial boost for globalism by the WSJ was the reason my longterm subscription was cancelled.
In answer to neo’s question; knaves. As their actions and silence demonstrate that there’s no possibility of simply being fools.
The leadership at the WHO and CDC are guilty of mass murder. They intentionally derailed investigations into the efficacy of the Hydroxychloroquine and the Ivermectin protocols. Very, very few ‘scientists’ protested.
I’m with Yawrate that it was an accidental release, though given the lax, negligent safety precautions, entirely predictable. But not deadly enough to be an intentional release. It’s also indisputable that the CCP intentionally facilitated its spread around the world.
Likely they saw it as a twofer; hurt Trump’s reelection chances by deepsixing the American economy and lessen the West’s ability to resist China’s dreams of global domination.
China has recently announced its plans to create another 100 biological warfare labs… it’s also a safe bet that the sloppy safety protocols will remain.
The CCP is composed of ideological fanatics. Demonstrated by their intention to create a worldwide pandemic.
In the future, a tactic that resulted in 95% of the world’s pop. dying but that left them unchallenged, would be entirely acceptable for them. There is no depravity too extreme for fanatics. It’s a form of sociopathy. There are currently 7,862,576,127 human beings alive.
Mao killed 60 million. What’s another 7.5 billion? After all, its just a statistic.
Edward,
Xiden, Big Business, Academia, the Media and much of the democrat party are in bed with China.
“China has recently announced its plans to create another 100 biological warfare labs… it’s also a safe bet that the sloppy safety protocols will remain.”
Long ago I read a story about how to commit the perfect murder. The premise is that you don’t do it as one action that has a 100% chance of killing the person targeted but do 100 or more, plausibly accidental, actions each with a 1 or 2 % chance of killing the target. Eventually one of them will succeed.
It’s coming out because they know a murderous communist regime deliberately released CV. They’re trying to limit the damage to “accidental”.
And, now that it is coming out, who is the perfect person to be in the U.S. presidency for China? A man who is thoroughly compromised by his family’s business dealings with China.
Isn’t that… convenient?
I’m going to re-post this bit of meta-ness:
The self-licking napalm ice cream cone
“Is science having a stroke?”
https://graymirror.substack.com/p/the-self-licking-napalm-ice-cream
The problems with Science and Technocratic ‘Leadership’ are systemic, complex, emergent, and therefore beyond the pay grades of most to comprehend let alone address. To fix them would have to tear down society as presently constituted. Easier said than done. As a stop gap, could hang a few of the more obvious miscreants like Fauci plus the editorial board of Nature, Lancet, NEJM. No…burning them on pyres of their remainders would be best.
My thoughts on the Chinese Leadership are well-known in this burg. It’s obvious that once it was out in the wild, they decided to let it take its course with the rest of the world and sit back and watch systems being stress-tested whilst making copious measurements and notes. Westerners who think that bleating, remonstrating, or ludicrous talk about ‘Court of Public Opinion’ carries any weight here are morons who don’t grasp the Chinese Mind. This is not about Muh Communism crutch some simple minded folks cling to. It’s about a purely Machiavellian mindset which doesn’t clothe itself in as many faded tired hypocrisies as our elites are wont to use even amongst themselves or in the privacy of their own heads.
The sane thing to do is plan carefully, wait a few years, and hit them hard with some plausibly deniable counter-punch. This, however, is impossible given that the West is almost incapable of doing this today and would immediately be outed by traitors within its own elites.
I think the last time China was Sent a Real Message was during the reign of the despised Clinton who for all his faults did lob a JDAM through precisely the right window of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade where some PLA Electronic Warfare Colonels had set up their kit to data-log what radar returns the Serbs were getting from the F-117 Stealth Fighter. Oops… Sorry!
@Roy Nathanson:
They’ve compromised just about everyone. Buy and sell a man a few times and get him ‘involved’ in 7 easy steps and there’s no wriggling out when push comes to shove.
I’d give a lot to read their DC Scene outline survey and strategic planning notes from the 70s and 80s. How do you write AIPAC in Chinese? 😀
Been done before. The blueprint was clear. The Whores of DC were always up for sale and it was just a matter of going at it with a will and a long-term plan.
I would like to suggest the Mao Dynasty to describe the current Chinese government. We do a disservice to our language by calling that kind of leadership Presidents etc.
I think that Emperor Xi Jinping would be glad to so chaos in the world especially chaos that would negatively affect the west in general and the US in particular. The current government of China certainly has no history of caring about their subjects as several commenters above have stated.
“The sane thing to do is plan carefully, wait a few years, and hit them hard with some plausibly deniable counter-punch.” Zaphod
My issue with that suggestion is that when fanatics back down it’s always temporary, all the while planning to double down.
Instead, I suggest a quiet communique to Xiden. Informing him and the CCP that if ever America is hit with a fatal biological attack, rather than try to identify the responsible party, America will assume that the CCP is responsible and every ICBM capable American submarine will target China and turn the entire country into a glass parking lot with a radioactive half life of 1000 years.
In the event of America’s genocide, China will cease to exist. Permanently.
Détente: attaching to a possible course of action, what for the enemy is the certainty of unthinkable consequence.
@Martin:
A point I’ve made before. Xi is more or less an Emperor, the Shanghai Party Secretary (not the Mayor) is more or less the Duke of Shanghai, etc. These people are Royalty.
It’s not quite Primogeniture though. Think more of the Doges of Venice. You were elected for life and the franchise was very small and within that franchise the number of families who stood a chance of getting their candidate elected was even smaller.
I would add that whilst the Chinese Leadership is quite happy to sacrifice the odd million Chinese here or there… it has to be in a nationalistic cause — they are not immune to public opinion. Nobody can stand against 1.5B irate countrymen. The big difference is that the Chinese Leadership acts in the broad interests of China and therefore the Chinese People. Western Elites do no such thing and no-longer believe in Nations and actively despise their own Native Stocks. You tell me who is more evil?
@GB:
Credibility problem. Paper Tiger. They have no reason to believe anything any Western leader says. Constant back-flipping, self-contradictions, apologising to various what the Chinese consider to be contemptible sub-humans, degenerates, and freaks… they see all this in their daily summaries and in analyses.
How do you convince them that the Boomers are not captained by lily-livered strivers who made their crews parade in red high heels on International Women’s Day? Because you can bet your bottom dollar some of them have had to do this kind of bizarre shit to get promoted to that rank. The rot runs deep. It always does in peacetime in liberal democracies. That’s why you want to be on a deferment for the first year or two of a big war while all the incompetent time-servers are winnowed out as they unnecessarily kill their men in foolish debacles. Problem is that the next Big War won’t last more than 2 weeks. And even if it lasted 5 years, well some Goldman Sachs Assholes and a bunch of Slimy MBAs shipped off the Arsenal of Democracy to Fuzhou and Ningbo and other places they never heard of. Somehow I think the Chinese have thought of that too.
Look… the Chinese are Inscrutable Machiavellian Assholes. Well strike me dead with a giant wok load of pangolins. Who knew?
From their perspective, Americans are a mongrel cluster$^&* of fanatical morons who actually believed that building girls’ schools in Kandahar would make pedophiliac goat @#$^ers love them. It’s kind of pointless to throw brickbats back and forth. You think believing in Universal Values is saner than believing that a totalitarian state which aligns interests of rulers and ruled (roughly.. but at least not orthogonal) and in which rising tide lifts all boats?
It’s like blaming the Joos for everything. Even I, the Infamous Obnoxious Zaphodler don’t do this. The fundamental problem with the West is that Western Civilization itself is sick and Universalism and Liberal Democracy are sick and corrupt. The Chinese hit the West with a Test. Western Elites utterly FAILED to respond sensibly or responsibly and instead used the virus to feather their own nests, increase their own power, and as a club to beat their own subject peoples with.
To speak briefly in the tongue of the @#$%^$: China gonna China. It’s what the West does to fix itself that matters. I don’t hold out much hope given that the medicine and surgery involved would be unpleasant and radical.
China was deliberate in attempts to spread the virus around the world. How else do you explain the fact that they shut down all domestic flights out of Wuhan in January, 2020 but allowed international flights to continue.
How much did the Chinese make selling mask, gloves, face shields etc over the last year?
And lets not forget how the virus took the news coverage off of what China was doing in Hong Kong….
So the legacy media in America are reversing a story they made current and reinforced for more than a year. There are a lot of other stories they have been propping up that they are not correcting: Hunter Biden’s notorious past with drugs and dubious business relationships, the Russia conspiracy hoax, the integrity of the 2020 election — and the list goes on.
So we might congratulate them on what they’re doing with this story, but their partisan dishonesty continues, made all the more believable because of their reversal on the Covid origin story.
Don’t congratulate them for correcting one lie, criticize them for being willing to perpetuate any lie to bring down Trump.
jon baker:
Selling?
Did you mean defective PPE, defective China virus test systems, defective China virus vaccines? And of course defective science: “no evidence of human to human transmission.”
Can Do! Zaphod Can Do!
@Om:
I’m more interested in that thing which doesn’t go away even when you stop believing in it than I am in back-and-forth Name Calling. Refute me or ignore me.
So .. prior to the release of the US report on unidentified aerial phenomena, what odds do you want to give that these observed aerial phenomena will ultimately have something to do with these following reports taken as a class of events recorded within a field of research …
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eS_rEzKdzBA
The Warzone has been covering this issue for a couple years on the Navy side, trying to tease out if it is all disinformation, or hopeful hype, or more.
But it is obvious that the Navy is not the only institution interested in electro-gravametric effects to coin a physics-illiterate term.
One will recall that many “UFO” sightings in the sixties were actually the Oxcart tests.
Given the state of affairs in the US since, that is to say since “national” priorities shifted and social shit became the main focus of the republic, it is not unreasonable to at least consider that we may be behind the curve when it comes to testing physics bending principles.
Now, if these were technologies that were fully developed to a war waging capacity by say the Chinese, it seems unlikely that they would be building aircraft carriers and stealth jet knockoffs.
But you never know …
I’d say it’s 50-50
Zaphod, this ain’t your circus or your rules. Can Do!
dnaxy, it is huge if it was a lab leak and not natural even if originally “accidental”. That would mean they knew a lot more about the virus and what might be needed to contain it. The most charitable interpretation is that they concealed information out of embarrassment, and even that is literally atrocious. Beyond that is the possibility they deliberately let it spread to foment chaos in the West. A favorite aphorism of the left is “never let a crisis go to waste”.
I’m usually on the fence with the fools-or-knaves question but in this case I come down solidly for “knaves.” Too much deliberate suppression of obviously important information, and an any-means-necessary view of defeating Trump.
DNW,
Just offhand, why is it that satellite cameras can read the fine print on a newspaper from orbit hundreds of miles up but gun cameras on $143 million dollar jets look like WWII cameras?
Zaphod,
“Americans are a mongrel cluster$^&* of fanatical morons who actually believed that building girls’ schools in Kandahar would make pedophiliac goat @#$^ers love them.”
The goal of the attempt to graft democracy onto Afghanistan and Iraq was never to get them to love Americans. It was to introduce them to a better form of governance. It failed because Islam’s tenets are antithetical to western precepts. We all laugh and cry but what we laugh and cry about is to a great degree determined by culture.
Yes, I do believe that universal truths are superior to totalitarian ideologies because reason, logic and common sense support that proposition. Totaltarian ideologies are antithetical to human nature. They are inherently sociopathic.
Whitiker Chambers pointed out that Western Civilization was sick in 1952. At base, he laid its cause on the West having replaced inalienable rights as granted by our Creator with secular “human” rights, i.e. the current consensus of the mob.
Our nation is divided between those who “cling” to the Founders vision and those who, as you put it, believe in “Universalism and Liberal Democracy”. The only basis for hope that I see is that the Left’s foundational precepts are unsustainable because they reject both key aspects of human nature and operative principles of the external reality within which we all exist. They are inflicting great harm upon America but in the long run, they can’t sustain it.
Rather curious how the attempt to destroy Donald Trump is part of the same impetus to destroy America.
Actually, not so curious…. Nonetheless, many still don’t “get it”; and their fossilized worldview and piss-poor discernment—which has nothing to do with any innate intelligence and everything to do with unshakeable bias—means that they likely never will.
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/05/media_admits_it_theyve_got_egg_on_their_faces_over_their_cheap_dismissal_of_wuhan_lableak_theory.html
(Funny thing about intelligence, though: One might wish to believe otherwise, but intelligence is no guarantee against believing—and holding fast to—the most absurd and pathetic falsehoods. In fact, it seems as though the opposite is the case; i.e., the more intelligent a person, the greater that person’s ability to uber-rationalize all kinds of garbage—while believing that precisely because of his/her intelligence, there’s no way he/she can be wrong….)
The “intelligence trap”?
I think it’s an illustration of the power of worldview over reason. For people who “believe in Science”, accepting that “Science” may have caused this catastrophe requires a very uncomfortable reevaluation. This is doubly so for those who hold power in our institutions of science.
I see parallels to CRT. For roughly six decades, we’ve been doing the things that the left says we should to fix poverty and racial disparities. None of it has worked and in many measures poverty and racial disparities are worse now than they were in the 1960’s. Considering whether progressive policies actually deliver the results that progressives promise is worldview -challenging. Inventing invisible and unfalsifiable explanations like structural racism and white privilege is much more comfortable.
(I use scare quotes around Science because real science, by its own terms, is not a matter of belief. It is a matter of evidence -based proof.)
Indeed “Follow the science”(TM) has degenerated into “Follow the experts”, i.e., those “experts” all too often being precisely the ones who reinforced (and continue to reinforce) one’s preconceptions (and yes, “worldview”).
Alas, Fauci, the “expert” is best known for flip-flopping on a regular basis—but flip-flopping “authoritatively”—“scientifically”!! With vast expertise and experience!!….
(I just wish he/they had the courage to say, “I don’t know WTF is going on with this VIRUS, I really don’t”—At least that way, myriads of lives COULD HAVE BEEN SAVED by NOT having used “THE SCIENCE to trash HCQ+ and/or Ivermectin for political reasons and political reasons only….ah, but I contradict myself (me bad…), since political reasons ARE PRECISELY WHY HCQ+ and Ivermectin—-and TRUMP—had to be trashed….)
File under: “Let ’em all suffer and die…Gaia will sort it all out later…but TRUMP will be blamed NOW (thanks to the unstinting efforts of OUR MEDIA)!”
@Zaphod
Good point on not being hereditary I was only using Mao dynasty as the founder of the current line of Empowers. While not genetic they are philosophical inheritors. I like your comparison to the Doges for the choosing of succession.
“the more intelligent a person, the greater that person’s ability to uber-rationalize all kinds of garbage—while believing that precisely because of his/her intelligence, there’s no way he/she can be wrong….)
The “intelligence trap”?” Barry Meislin
Very perceptive insight. The “intelligence trap”… I think you’ve got something there.
If a person in a bureaucracy lets something go, doesn’t do what should be done, shies away from a mildly unpleasant result, etc…..it is then required to be more and more energetic in covering up the lapse. And then the coverup of the coverup. And then covering up the unpleasant result and so forth.
And then outsiders are required to believe the unbelievable. As a grad of Michigan State U (The Harvard of Horticulture), I followed the Larry Nasser case with some interest. The numbers are staggering. And we are to believe that absolutely no one failed in Duty to Report. The issue is, if you fail to report the first time, the surprising fact that a second one comes along puts your failure the first time in a bad light, which is to say any light at all. Then a third….
Waving off something you’d rather not bother with can put you in a deep hole. And it would follow from the ways bureaucracies work that a mistaken idea that the Covid wasn’t bad, wouldn’t get loose, that HCQ wasn’t effective (suppose it proved to be effective and you’d said it hadn’t and people died) requires running harder and harder to catch up with the balance you lost. One more lunge and it will be over…. One more.
My point is that it’s not necessary to posit malign intent as a founding principle. Casual negligence and then circumstance leads to desperation which means doubling down.
And it continues:
https://blazingcatfur.ca/2021/06/01/dr-pierre-kory-exposed-whos-suppression-of-ivermectin-youtube-keeps-deleting-this-video/
No, not fools. NOT AT ALL…
But then, “Biden” wants you to know exactly who’s holding the Ring….
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/street-violence-as-a-political-tool?s=09
https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/victoria-taft/2021/05/31/theyre-trying-to-kill-me-a-portland-antifa-death-squad-goes-head-hunting-for-andy-ngo-and-somebody-gets-a-beatdown-n1451079
https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/kevindowneyjr/2021/05/31/kill-everything-white-in-sight-speaker-tells-crowd-at-tulsa-massacre-rally-n1451017
And remember, “antifa is an idea”…oh, and “a myth”…AND DON’T YOU FORGET IT!!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UaWsYjBOXdg
https://nypost.com/2020/07/27/jerry-nadler-calls-violence-from-antifa-in-portland-a-myth/
Related…
The Mainstream Corrupt Media goes into overdrive:
https://www.foxnews.com/media/coverage-portland-violence-draws-criticism-media-dismissed-unrest
Watch this story. Vaccine side effects are slowly being understood. I’m not panicking yet but the story has potential.
https://meaninginhistory.blogspot.com/2021/05/we-made-big-mistake.html
The knaves are the ones that pushed the narrative that the virus occurred naturally and described the idea that the virus was created in a lab as a conspiracy theory. Fauci is chief among them.
““I don’t know WTF is going on with this VIRUS, I really don’t”—”
Just substitute DATA for VIRUS in the above sentence and that could be heard about 10times/week in my lab. It’s about how science really operates. It’s messy, confusing, and one spends about 98% of the time chasing possible mistakes, equipment malfunctions, etc. And even when all those are sorted out, then maybe saying “I don’t know WTF is going on with this DATA, I really don’t”— may actually lead to new knowledge.
“It was a big FU to the world.”
Remember that Chinese culture regards non-Chinese as subhumans, and has for thousands of years. Japanese culture did too, but the US applied the only medicine that worked – a rain of fiery destruction. The question is, can we prevent Chinese racism from destroying us without resorting to it again?
The comment SemiLitHalfWit made about the Chinese travel restrictions had a lot to do with the spread of the virus. China, or southern Asia, has been producing new diseases for centuries. Warm water in rice paddies with wild and domestic animals eating, drinking, and crapping together with a billion plus humans nearby makes a rare, species-jumping mutation pretty likely. Putting a virus research lab there makes sense.
Running a secure facility is tough. In west Africa, the med people treating Ebola patients had vaccinations, protective outfits and at least two helpers for the protective suits and they died like flies. China is as likely to run an effective viral lab as Flint was to provide safe water to its citizens or East Saint Louis is to operate a functional sewer system. Maybe the virus developed naturally or maybe it was a screw up, but the travel restrictions put the icing on that cake. Then the Democrats/Progressives ran with that to destroy the U.S. economy for their own ends. Blaming a Chinese lab is a distraction.
The masks and sanitation used in the U.S. was a joke, but the best we could do at the onset. The Democrats and the poorly educated population did the rest. The risk of death from the virus was known to be concentrated in those with comorbidities (mostly old, fat, and/or lazy). That was ignored while the Democrats pillaged the economy. That is where the focus should have been. The better therapies and tactics would have come eventually. Having an uneducated population, guided by “media” and political rumors and paranoid theories doesn’t help.
The development of the virus is the least of our worries. The plague in Washington is what may kill us.
no such experiments would ever be “morally acceptable to undertake”
“I find nothing wrong with that!!!!”
Dnaxy, in China, if you screw up and cause loss of face, you don’t get fired. You get disappeared.
it’s possible that the CCP may have fully known that the greater risk with regards to this specific virus would be upon the elderly
So this virus has a case fatality rate of about 1% or less in age groups younger than 60. And as the above commenter points out, in totalitarian and socialist/communist regimes, people over that age are a drain on the economy and that’s all they are, no matter what lip service is paid to Venerating Our Elders. In a non-socialist nation, nothing’s stopping the 60+ demographic from continuing to work, invent, create, produce – and many may have, should have in a properly functioning capitalist system, adequate personal savings and investments such that they’re not reliant on public services in retirement. And, non-socialist/communist, non-totalitarian societies tend to share the value that a human life has worth beyond what it can produce for the collective (I’m not saying such societies always live by this value, but they do tend to have it).
IF China was working on the particular gains of function of making a virus both more transmissible generally and more deadly to the elderly than the natural version, then I can’t rule out deliberate release. Look at what China has learned from the past year-plus: their geopolitical opponents will voluntarily shut down their economies on a gigantic scale and for an astonishing long time in order to protect <1% of their productive population.
Of course, they've also learned that those same opponents can muster impressive resources to develop and distribute effective vaccines in remarkably short order – and they're not in lockstep about how long to stay shut down.
And here we gooooo…! (Grab some popcorn and put yer feet up….)
https://www.zerohedge.com/covid-19/fauci-emails-reveal-damage-control-scramble-after-zerohedge-spotlights-man-made-covid-19
(Yes, yes, I know, it’s ZH… But, “Dr. Fauci meets ZH” has got to be something akin to “King Kong vs, Godzilla”…or at the very least “Bambi meets Godzilla”…)
File under: So it’s come to this…
Barry – well, there isn’t enough popcorn for that one.
My big question is – how far up the chain at the White House did all of this go?
Was anyone there reading Zerohedge, or following foreign press?
Who had any access to these emails and “conclaves” that should have blown the whistle?
We know that President Trump and all his advisers were being censored – openly and covertly – but did they even know about all the evidence that they could have been promoting to get more efficacious action against the virus, or were their responses drowned out and inverted just like their statements about hydroxychloroquine etc, and we-the-public never even heard about them?
Inquiring minds want to know.
I have two questions based on the ZH post, assuming that these reports are true (for some value of “truth”):
Have the vaccine makers, who presumably were using the DNA in their research, aware of the HIV connection, and how have they been able to get around the known (for some value of “known”) difficulty in creating vaccines for AIDS?
Why did China allow a study to be released that came anywhere close to suggesting the virus was man-made?
Looking at Durden’s prior posts, I’ll cite the one from May 2020 with those references.
https://www.zerohedge.com/health/coronavirus-uses-same-strategy-hiv-evade-immune-response-chinese-study-finds
There has been much speculation about the abrupt change in the narrative on the Left, to acknowledging that maybe this coronavirus was kind of an oopsie at the Wuhan Lab, and what might have triggered it.
The forced production of the Fauci Emails and knowing what searchers would find there (viral hockey sticks?) might be what done it.
My next two questions:
Why hasn’t the Ruling Oligarchy repealed the FOIA yet?
Why do they all still save their incriminating documentation?
A positive note from another ZH post, which might have implications for the vaccine development questions, since I am quite sure the Pharmas are not telling us everything about their vax.
https://www.zerohedge.com/health/covid-19-man-made-virus-hiv-discoverer-says-could-only-have-been-created-lab
In a sane and just world Fauci would be out right now and facing serious criminal investigations.
But, hey, maybe Morgan Fairchild has more pull than we know.
And the latest “installment”:
https://www.zerohedge.com/covid-19/email-shows-researcher-who-funded-wuhan-lab-admits-manipulating-coronaviruses-thanked
This is shaping up to be impossible for the Narrative(TM) to cover up.
(But it ain’t over till it’s over; and the MSCM, the WHO, the CCP, Twitter, FB and the Democratic party are going to have to work extra hard on this one. Such a combined—and sustained—effort, together with enough subterfuge, clever disinformation, Net censorship, threats and intimidation just might do the trick…especially the Net censorship.)
Woopsie:
Dr. Fauci meets “optics”…
…and it ain’t pretty….
https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/coronavirus/faucis-upcoming-book-scrubbed-amazon-barnes-and-noble-amid-backlash
(Should have asked Andrew Cuomo for advice about timing…)
Twitchy has been on a roll over the whole thing, but here is an Tweet-fest excerpt germane to the book notice – isn’t it nice to see cancellation going Left for a change?
https://twitchy.com/brettt-3136/2021/06/02/buzzfeed-on-what-the-fauci-emails-reveal-the-pressure-that-fell-on-one-man/
https://twitchy.com/brettt-3136/2021/06/02/have-the-links-to-dr-anthony-faucis-upcoming-book-been-wiped-like-with-a-cloth-it-looks-like-it/
https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms13051
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature09929
Genetic engineering is old school. They don’t need to genetic engineer a virus any longer. They could evolve it in vivo instead which is much easier. The links are to papers which describe systems for the continuous directed evolution of proteins. What is remarkable is that with these techniques, you do not even have to know what part of the viral coat protein binds to the receptor. You learn that by looking at the end product; determine what part of the protein has changed in the improved version. It is now a simple matter to take a protein (e.g., toxin or viral coat protein) which does not bind or binds very weakly to a receptor and using a continuous evolution system like described by the two references and evolve it to make it bind tightly to that receptor or even a different receptor.
Theoretically they could evolve an entire novel virus or just the viral coat protein and replace the original with the improved version by homologous recombination. Since the artificial evolutionary process mimics natural evolution, there would be no evidence in its sequence unless you had a complete record of all the closely related viruses in nature. Therefore, you wouldn’t need to reverse engineer it to look like a naturally evolved virus because it would already look like that.
Scientists should take the directed evolution hypothesis more seriously because so far they cannot find the predecessors (evolutionary links) of Covid19 like they found for MERS and SARS. It seemed to come out of nowhere with a high affinity for the ACE receptor, far more infectious than it should have been. They key to solving this mystery is finding or not finding the evolutionary sequence in nature.
An artificial origin is at this point probably a stronger hypothesis for Covid19 than natural origin although both hypothesis should be investigated.