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Monday roundup — 48 Comments

1. Regarding #2. My thoughts also. What in the world are we doing allowing this sort of potential disaster to be created. It’s like creating new forms of nuclear bombs– only worse.
   Deep in the article I read it’s revealed that while it killed 80% of the mice, it wouldn’t be nearly that lethal in humans. Only slightly comforting.

2. A barrage of “Iranian made drones” flown from Belarus, in many instances. Today I heard a report of a Russian purchase of a large number of shortish range Iranian ballistic missiles, called Fajr I believe. Think V-2, more or less. Russian missile stores are running out.

   The report went on:

   Israel pays attention to the overt IRI entry against Ukraine, says, hmmm, we ought to oppose that. How about Ukraine receive some anti-missile defense capability? We’ve got pretty good tech along those lines, but it’s pricey stuff. Anyone care to step up and help Ukraine out to pay the costs?

3. The senile buffoon is incapable of cogent thought or coherent utterance, but Pakistan is, without question, a dangerous nation and one of the worst in all the world, unstable, corrupt, filled with Islamist fanatics and brutally vicious to its Christian and Hindu minorities. As for academia (truly a lost cause), today’s American university (once the envy of the world) has degenerated into not simply an overpriced credentialing factory, but a combination between “woke” madrassa for turning out fanatical SJWs and leftist zealots and daycare-center for petulant, ignorant, and entitled cry-bullies.

4. Correction: Not “Fajr” as I had wrongly thought, but Fateh-110 and Zolfaghar. Ranges 300 and 700 km, respectively.

5. j e:

   Of course Pakistan is a dangerous nation. But this has to do with what’s wise for a president to say, and what isn’t. We have no special new beef with Pakistan at the moment. Why start one – at a Democratic fundraiser?

6. Alexandria Occasional Cortex graduated cum laude from Boston University with degrees in foreign relations and economics.

   We’re doomed.

7. Ho hum…?
   “Will James Comey and Robert Mueller Be Prosecuted for Lies John Durham Uncovered?”—
   https://archive.ph/Ei9PN

   …as a follow-up to:
   “Kudos to John Durham for exposing the truth of ‘Russiagate’ “—
   https://nypost.com/2022/10/17/kudos-to-john-durham-for-exposing-the-truth-of-russiagate/

8. That’s one way of eliminating one of the objections many people have to affirmative-action admissions: that many such students struggle academically once admitted.

   Woke faculty believe that when you grade a student, you literally make them what you have graded them. If you give a student As in class you have made them an A student and they will perform as an A student in real life, no matter what they know or don’t know. And if you give a student an F you have made them a failure and a failure for life, regardless of what they know or don’t know.

   So this will not bother them a bit. After applying lower standards to admit minorities into (say) Harvard, then you have to apply lower standards to them while they are at Harvard. And so when they get their Harvard degree in engineering or in medicine, that bestowed credential will make them literally equal to any other student who got the same grade but had rigorous standards applied.

   Woke faculty believe that these students will go on to build bridges and diagnose and cure disease with exactly the same success that rigorously graded white students with the same grades do–provided their success is not judged by white people. They reason that white doctors have patients die and white engineers sometimes have bridge collapses, but that doesn’t make them not doctors or engineers…

   Until you recognize this is how woke faculty think, you cannot understand why they are doing what they are doing. They honestly think that grading is just the imposition of power–white people selecting other white people to go on to good schools and jobs while condemning minorities to poverty and prison. They do not think grading has any relation to knowledge or performance and they deny the concept of merit, so all they are doing is redressing an obvious injustice and making the world better, and who could oppose that?

9. CapnRusty (4:46 pm) said: “Alexandria Occasional Cortex graduated cum laude from Boston University . . . .”

   The “graduated” part means that she managed to absorb enough of what her professors spewed, for her to graduate. The “cum laude” part means that she was able to regurgitate enough spew with an acceptable level of fidelity to the original message.

   Now consider the likely quality of what the professors were spewing . . . this is an urban university in the USA northeast . . .

   “We’re doomed,” the Capn concludes. I do agree, save for the fact that (the way the world looks from where I sit) we already were doomed well before the young woman had ever been admitted to Boston University.

10. Pakistan? Say what??
    “Former US Ambassador Grenell says Biden administration funding both sides of Ukraine war”—
    https://justthenews.com/accountability/russia-and-ukraine-scandals/ric-grenell-says-biden-administration-funding-both-sides

    + Bonus:
    Obama speaks…and “Biden” responds…
    “Team Biden does 180 on Iran protests as Obama admits ‘mistake’ not to back 2009 demonstrations”—
    https://justthenews.com/government/diplomacy/team-biden-does-180-iran-protests-obama-admits-mistake-not-back-2009

    File under: “His” master’s voice….

11. Now combine the landscape described by Frederick (4:59 pm) with my own (5:03 pm), and the general picture will be enhanced!

12. Playing with viruses is not unlike becoming a demigod, one mistake and its bye-bye to a large portion of humanity

13. Re: item #2 on Covid, I’m reading the executive summary at the beginning of that BU paper and there is actually some useful food for thought here. I think that quoting the 80% mortality figure by itself is misleading because first of all, the same sentence in which that rate is first mentioned (starting at line 128, bottom of page 6) also pointed out that the mortality in the mice from that group which were given the wild-type SARS-CoV2 was 100%, so this chimeric artificial version may not be even quite as bad as the original strain from two years ago as far as death rates go, anyway.

    Secondly, we have to consider the specific mouse strain used for this experiment, K18-hACE2. I’m no geneticist, but I suspected upon reading the article that this was some kind of genetically engineered mouse type that probably has some knockout modification that is pertinent to some part of the immune response in mammals. Upon a brief internet search, I found this explanation from the creators (which admittedly has a smack of what would pass for advertising boilerplate among the STEM crowd) and this more technical presentation for research professionals in the field.

    According to their paper, the spike protein mutations of Omicron, Delta and so on are what enable Covid-19 variants to get around existing vaccines and therapeutics, but the severity of disease after infection is determined mostly by something about the rest of the virus instead. This is a very interesting outcome, not necessarily obvious.

    If this is a representative example of these gain-of-function studies, then I think the objection to them may be misdirected in some cases, as it looks to me like the question the research team was looking into by creating this combo virus strain is actually of legitimate value in understanding how Omicron and suchlike really work. I certainly learned some things reading through it.

    (In case it wasn’t clear, that means that I think the Daily Mail went into hair-on-fire mode.)

14. When Willie Brown was Speaker of the California Assembly, he tried to pass a bill that would require the U of Cal to graduate all black students admitted. The bill failed but that was back when CA was sane (mostly).

15. Philip Sells:

    I think the point was that the new strain was also far more contagious than the original. It was the worst of both worlds. And yes, there is some benefit to the research. But the risks are enormous, and my guess is that the same questions could be researched in some less dangerous way.

16. Regarding the drones. Roosia used Belarus as a staging area and point of attack back when Vlald started this fiasco, so launching drones from Belarus at Kyiv is in charachter.

    Perun and Military Aviation History discussed the drone warfare topic yesterday.
    https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JfSy_6ihdgI

17. Here is the link from Perun’s presentation:

18. Here’s the link to Perun’s discussion:

    https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xCEzEVwOwS4

    Belarus may need some HIMARS.

19. “Kamikaze” drones are the newest chapter in a years long saga, the most prominent highlight of which has to be “Well, son of a bitch. [Laughter.] He got fired.”

    The drones and accessory munitions are relatively cheap, and can therefore be deployed, if need be, in sufficient numbers to darken the sky. As noted above, defending against them can be pricey, and also risks further escalation – possibly to the ultimate level.

    All of which brings us back to when the most obnoxious person in history brazenly rubbed the world’s nose in his abuse of power, daring anyone to do anything about it. The solution then was simple.

    It’s more complicated now, but at least the laughter has died down.

20. As noted above, defending against them can be pricey, and also risks further escalation – possibly to the ultimate level.

    You mean the Ukrainian military shoots down Russian drones and Putin responds by firing off an SS-20?

21. Whether Biden pissed off the Pakis deliberately or inadvertently, I’m glad he did so. Recall that Bin Laden was living in a Paki military town- and that was merely one example of Paki military/ISI misbehavior. While he’s at it, Biden should drop some rockets on ISI headquarters.

    Disclaimer: I would vote Democrat over my dead body.

22. Neo, I’m not really sure that transmissibility was a topic of the BU study; there is the section treating “infection efficiency” in cultured cells, but I’m not sure that this is the same as “transmissibility”. Granted that the spike protein involved was the Omicron type, and Omicron being more contagious, presumably this combo virus, if it were to get out, would behave in like fashion; then you have a fair point there. But I would say, given my current understanding of what ‘transmissibility’ entails, that the connection is indirect only.

    I thought the research team’s methodology pretty efficient; and assuming one wants the answer to such a question in less than five to ten years’ time, I for one do not and cannot believe in substitutes for animal studies given current technologies.

    As for the Mail article, I am unimpressed:

    (1) It mixes and matches apples and oranges in various ways – for example, where it talks about the human lung cells in culture, mortality or death rates had nothing to do with that part of the study; and yet the article’s authors managed not to realize that the 80% mortality figure came from the results with the mice – that’s just sloppy, and hardly the only such instance.
    (1b) As I mentioned previously, if the reporter(s) had simply read the complete sentence from the study paper, they would have realized that it was saying in plain terms that the artificial combo virus was actually less fatal to the mice than the original Wuhan strain that started all of this. But no, we have to have the scare factor – eighty percent mortality!!!!1!!1!! Bah.

    (2) The Mail article would have us believe that this experiment was done in a biosafety-level 4 lab, but the study authors state right there on page 13 that it was level-3 instead, so apparently not so incredibly dangerous material after all. Now if one wants to make the case that the experiments should have been done in a BSL-4 environment instead, that’s fine, but is it so very much to ask that journalists just read English?

    (3) On the conceptual level, the Mail writers make it pretty clear they didn’t really understand some of the points of the experiment. Maybe they were under a tight deadline that day and didn’t have time to connect the dots properly.

    My verdict remains: on this showing, Daily Mail journalists not to be trusted on scientific matters without a lot of follow-up questioning. That paper has its uses, but this is not one of them.

    Of course, on the other hand, I might never have heard about this study had it not been for the Mail’s work on it, however clumsy; so there is that.

23. According to Wikipedia, all SS-20 launchers were destroyed by treaty.

24. Considering the poor performance of the Russian forces in a non-NBC environment, I doubt they can operate in any NBC environment at all. That is of course if their tactical nukes even work, and they don’t nuke themselves in the process. I really think any nuke will be used against a strategic target (Kyiv).

25. Substitute Ukraine or any of the “endless war” venues past and future for Afghanistan in Assange’s quote:

    Julian Assange speaking in 2011: “The goal is to use Afghanistan to wash money out of the tax bases of the US and Europe through Afghanistan and back into the hands of a transnational security elite. The goal is an endless war, not a successful war.”

    The same principle of perverse incentive applies to the thoroughly discredited Covid vaccines. Follow the money.

26. But Banned is worried, can’t inconvience Vlad.

    The “ultimate” escalation?

    Is that Rooski speak for “Spanish Inquisition?”

    Do Rooski nukes work better than Rooski subs (Kursk) or Rooski cruisers (Moskva) or Rooski ….. Humiliating. You really don’t have to work too well when civilians are receiving.

27. Will the Roosian RS28 Sarmat work, Banned?

    Wouldn’t that be the ultimate escalation?

    Can’t humiliateTsar Vlad, savior of Mother Roosia.

28. Is there a connection between Boston University with the Virus engineering and Boston Children’s Hospital and the mutilation of “ trans” children? How many point of commonality do they have? What is in the water in Boston?

29. @jon baker – Yes. Once again, follow the money (perverse incentive). Eisenhower and JFK saw it operating with the military industrial complex. RFK Jr and Tucker Carlson have pointed it out with the medical establishment’s vaxxes and trans surgeries.

    BTW, an “accidental” leak of an 80% lethal bug would certainly motivate more of us to get the jab. Imagine the Big Pharma windfall!

30. Julian Assange speaking in 2011: “The goal is to use Afghanistan to wash money out of the tax bases of the US and Europe through Afghanistan and back into the hands of a transnational security elite. The goal is an endless war, not a successful war.”

    Mr. Assange needs to examine the level of expenditure contra actual gross domestic product. This is not a credible thesis.

    The Ukraine war has been ongoing for about 8 months. In the ‘mind’ of ‘Banned Lizard’, a war is ‘endless’ if Russia is inconvenienced. Here’s a suggestion: Russia can withdraw it’s troops from the five Ukrainian regions wherein the territory they have seized is located, and the endless war will end.

31. @jon baker – Yes. Once again, follow the money (perverse incentive). Eisenhower and JFK saw it operating with the military industrial complex.

    The ratio of military spending to domestic product fell from 14.5% in 1953 to 5.5% in 1978. It currently stands at 3.8%.

32. Well much of it ended up in the uae where karzai and ghani live little ended up with the afghan people some went to taliban controlled contractors

33. The war has been going on for eighr years off and on

34. Art Deco at 8:58. While Assange may be extreme, I wouldn’t be surprised if there is significant money laundering going on with the funding of Ukraine. After all, Hunter Biden was bringing lots of money home for the Big Guy via his seat on the board of Burisma. Why is it so necessary to send so much money to Ukraine? Who is tracking the spending and how much is coming back to the US? Inquiring minds…

35. Wikileaks showed a lot of dirty laundry they didnt want seen

    General flynn who wrote the tribal mao in afghanistan quickly realized why the counterinsurgency strategy couldnt work

36. Banned Lizard didn’t say the Ukraine War was endless.

37. Zooming in, there’s a swing… and a miss.

    I find baseball boring, but a great way to kill time when visiting lib in-laws. Needless to say, Ukraine metaphors are off-limits.

38. }}} In this case, Boston University’s National Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratories researchers took the very-contagious but relatively mild Omicron strain and wedded it to the original more-lethal strain, and got a COVID virus that killed 80% of the mice it infected.

    Next step: Figuring out how to make it attack only white people. :-/

39. “Anyone care to step up and help Ukraine out to pay the costs?”
    -sdferr yesterday at 4:30 pm

    How ’bout the European Union paying 100% of the cost of the weapons we have shipped to Ukraine? The Europeans are the ones who are potential losers from the expansion of Russian territory. USA national interest is in no way affected by who controls the Ukrainian territory (certain prominent American political families excepted). The European Union population is larger than Russia, and its economy is much larger. Why is Uncle Sam paying?
    Certain American leaders have been warning European leaders that we are growing tired of being Europe’s defense sugar daddy while they bask in the warmth of free healthcare and childcare. Europe does not have nearly the defense industry that we do, and the Ukrainians are welcome to our kit, but we should be sending the European Union the invoices. Once they get 90 days overdue, we stop shipping.

40. USA national interest is in no way affected by who controls the Ukrainian territory

    Thanks for the ex cathedra.

41. Art Deco,

    The fact that military spending is down over a long period of time does not mean Assange is wrong about the purposes of spending on military adventures in Afghanistan. Basic logic matters.

42. West TX Int:

    Bless your heart.

43. The fact that military spending is down over a long period of time does not mean Assange is wrong about the purposes of spending on military adventures in Afghanistan. Basic logic matters.

    Is it really your contention that the purpose of what we do is to place money in the hands of the ‘national security elite’ but the amount of money we’re spending does not matter? That’s ‘basic logic’?

    If he had any direct evidence that this was the ‘purpose’ of our intervention in Afghanistan, he’d give it to you.

    Overseas contingency operations amounted to about 0.9% of GDP ca 2009. Prior to 2001, they were 0% and right now they are 0%. Troop levels in Afghanistan and Iraq were over that time as low as 7,000 and as high as 250,000. Please explain to me absent direct evidence how this flux in deployment and expenditure serves the purpose of placing money in the hands of the ‘national security elite’? Did they need money in 2009 and not in 2000?

44. I wouldn’t be surprised if there is significant money laundering going on with the funding of Ukraine. After all, Hunter Biden was bringing lots of money home for the Big Guy

    Well there might be. How did Hunter Biden get classified as a member of the ‘national security elite’?

45. Banned Lizard didn’t say the Ukraine War was endless.

    Thanks for the lawyerly parsing of…

    “Substitute Ukraine or any of the “endless war” venues past and future for Afghanistan in Assange’s quote: ”

    Always an education.

46. Well, Hunter is the smartest guy Brandon knows, so that must count for something.

47. The only endless war Banned approves of is actually a “special operation.”

48. >Always an education.
    Apparently not, since you still don’t understand what he said.

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