I responded to this study previously (bottom of this post). Short version:
And Phyllo points out that Reason noticed the issue in #3 as well.
It’s also since come out that the main researcher’s wife was improperly (though innocently, by all accounts) recruiting candidates for the study, e.g. emailing people promising that participating would clear them to go back to work, which will tend to select for sicker people.
This is just too simple a summary of US-China relations. The countries are trade partners, parties to many treaties, the US has provided aid to China for decades. They cooperate frequently, and haven’t had open military conflict since the end of the Vietnam war. It’s true that there are territorial disputes, but by that standard Canada and Norway are at war over an island off Greenland.
The important point is that we cooperate with them on tons of things, it isn’t at all surprising or suspicious that we cooperate with them on disease research, including by funding their labs located near to the epicenter of a previous potential pandemic outbreak.
When you put it that way, it sounds suspicious. But it sounds down right boring if you point out that those bats were also the source of the last outbreak of a potential pandemic, that the funding began following that outbreak, and the lab is in the part of the world where those bats live and where that outbreak started.
It says “scientists”, not “a lot of scientists”. There are millions of scientists in the world, and for the statement in the article to be true, two of them need to have objected. The article doesn’t link to the mentioned editorial, and I can’t find it online to see if there were cosigners. I did find a short piece in Science that mentions, unsurprisingly, that there is no universal objection to the research or the secrecy.
I agree, but don’t you think it’s relevant? You’ve said you don’t have a hypothesis, you’re just looking at the situation and trying to construct a narrative that connects all the dots. So you see all these dots and think, “well isn’t this odd”. But this this situation, the dots, the narrative, are all very very far outside of our normal life, we don’t know how many labs there are, how much we fund them, how many other doomsday scenarios various branches of the US government are investigating or providing funds to investigate. We don’t have good priors about what we’d expect to see because we don’t have any experience with this. The “international conspiracy to release a super virus” oddness must owe part of its oddness to the “actual super virus currently upending society” oddness, even if they are different in kind.
I don’t immediately conclude that this is particularly unlikely.
The article just explains that China invested significantly in disease labs in response to the 2003 SARS outbreak. That suggests that it is not surprising for a big Chinese city having a disease lab studying viruses related to the one that caused the 2003 SARS outbreak.
I have a very mundane lab connection hypothesis I’d like your thoughts on: we know the lab examined bats, and that those bats were captured and brought to the city. Suppose someone who went to the bat caves caught a virus, traveled to Wuhan, delivered the bats, and then hit the wet market. Would that situation look any different from what we see?
I think you and other Liberal-Lefties, the ones who run this country and “authorize” the Lockdown, and keep it going, have missed the critical points.
The lockdown and reaction to the Covid flu, was based on fear, not on facts, and still is based on fear, not facts. Therefore, facts coming in, don’t matter. Facts be damned. Because the actual facts, is what, 0.03% mortality rate, in explicitly confirmed and proven cases? And that the ‘flu’ numbers don’t matter. Information and data is being severely skewed, to the Left, and the numbers still don’t add up!!!
The deaths caused by economic devastation may far surpass Covid deaths, along with the economic damage to the entire country, and world.
Facts outlined by the actual experts, actual authorities (like the two Doctors on youtube), have been censored and ignored by the Liberal Left Mass Media Mob. However, Fox News, like Tucker Carlson has covered them. And what do actual facts dictate? “We should not have been in lockdown. Because you quarantine the sick, not the healthy”.
Got that??? You quarantine the SICK, not the HEALTHY. And why has the US quarantined the healthy? Again, because fear. Because of being scared. Because of over-reacting. Because of emotion, not logic, not reason, not fact!!!
And they have run large scale naval exercises meant to intimidate each other. Trade relations and being an ally are not the same. The whole Evil Axis, as labeled by the West, they have supported. The Cold War referred to in the articles I linked earlier. Russia and the US had treaties and trade during the much of the Cold War. They were not allies. The fact that China one of the few nations considered a real threat to the US given its nuclear arsenal, China’s allies true allies, political style and the tensions that have been present for awhile, again.
plus articles I linked earlier about the way the countries view each other and where they stand in relation to countries where one can use the term ‘allies’ and ‘enemies’. A few more in that direction…
And China is, of course, North Korea’s biggest ally. Not without tensions, but still. And it is followed by Russia in this. The US is not an ally of NK, not remotely. The Chinese and the Americans run in different circles. Of course countries will trade with almost anyone. There’s rarely anything moral involved in this. Money rules. as I said earlier even in a supposedly clear just war like WW2 a number of corporations, US and allied multinational kept on trading with Hitler’s Germany… harmoniaphilosophica.com/2011/0 … azj6wq-22/ libcom.org/library/allied-multi … orld-war-2
that’s during a war…
We are vastly more globalized now and I am not claiming it is a war, though there are certainly cyberwar skirmishes, aggressive espionage, industrial theft on massive systematic scales.
or try to imagine anyone talking about Norway vs. Canada the way they are here about Japan and China, for example (and what island with millions of people has either Western democracy said it will take by force, if necessary)… csis.org/analysis/resolved- … ion-taiwan
All of this somehow parallels Canada Norway relations??? Your flat statement that they are allies makes the slightest bit of sense? No. There is, in a wide variety areas, hostile behavior, carried out by nations with different very different political ideas, each with political philosophies that have as a goal the elimination of other types of political systems and with the US who have gone to war again and again on the justification of removing the wrong or ‘wrong’ type of government,. I haven’t even gone into what the Chinese view as aggressive US behavior and tactics and practices and how they view the US and how they see the US as a hostile threat in general.
I’m sorry, but there is nothing like this kind of rhetoric, in the articles and authorities I linked above, about Norway and Canada. There is no portion of the military of those two countries working out possible war scenarios. There is no concern about WOMD in these countries. There is no regular criticism of each other’s general foreign policies. Canada and Norway have the same allies and potential enemies. The comparison with cAnada norway is just facile. I don’t have to search hard for these types of articles and opinion pieces, or government positions, they are easily found in major media and governmental agencies.
And further, in contrast, canada and norway have similar values, laws, mixed socialist/capitalist systems, freedom of the press, human rights beliefs and more. China and the US are quite different on all these issues. I could see something like a hockey fight breaking out between Canada and Norway, but I guarantee no one in the equivalents to the Pentagon in those two Western democracies are running simulations to make sure they are not wiped out by the other. What bothers me the most is that his has been a running assumption for a long time in mainstream media (and alternative media for that matter). It’s not even controversial. I can accept that anything not run with regularity in mainstream media is going to require significant back up, but I am repeatedly being put in the position of needing to justify something to someone who follows the mainstream media and uses that as his source of information, but for some reason is treating my sense of China/US relations as a conspiracy theory. It’s not. It’s the primary story in media in general.
I think it is very questionable that we would cooperate with them on easily weaponized research - part of the concerns of both the state dept. official and scientists - when we are concerned about their cyber warfare, nuclear stockpiles and actions in the region. I think it is very odd we were extending and expanding the research after State department officials said they were not meeing safety standards and also were concerned about the nature of the research. And it can easily be weaponized. Perhaps we did do research in labs in Russia during the cold war that could potentially lead to ways to improve nuclear weapons, and this was done in a lab State department officials said was not run well, but I’m a bit skeptical.
And, yes, the guy who approved the monies sent to the lab, predicted that within a very few years the Trump admin would be dealing with a major surprise infectious disease crisis.
I don’t think it was the exact bat species that was the source of the earlier disease, horseshoe or whatever it was this time. The complaining state dept officials were concerned about management and staff weaknesses in one memo and in another that there was a chance the lab would be the source of a SARS like pandemic. washingtonpost.com/opinions … naviruses/
but they got more funding. China is also refusing to allow inspections of the lab now.
Notice also that the head researcher wondered herself if the lab might have leaked the disease, then later recanted this wondering, which kept her up at night.
It was dismissed on a number of poor scientific grounds - they knew the virus is not engineered - but this is a fundamental misunderstanding of how viruses can increase effect in labs, without cut and paste procedures - and it ignores the fact that the lab had many infected animals and tissues - that could also be the source of a leak of a ‘natural’ form of the virus.
The number of people living with chronic and long-term illnesses has risen more than exponentially, well here anyway, with diabetes, cancer, hypertension, heart disease, obesity, autism, OCD, chronic fatigue, chronic pain, asthma, autoimmune diseases, etc etc etc.
It wasn’t so when I was a kid and teen, so overall health has been steadily declining, but we’re being kept alive, so that the conglomerates can make money off our weak and dieing carcasses via the medium of mass-consumerism.
I wouldn’t call what the pharmaceutical industry are churning out these days medicine… my medicine is plants and herbs and homeopathy. Remember when Monsanto wanted the rights to all the plant seeds in the world… now it’s becoming clearer as to why?
The issue has become synthetic, everyone wants to buy in
No one really wants to abate a simulation of well being. Very few nowedays opts for assisted suicide . it may become known as a passing fancy.
Big pharm realizing this, is on charm offensive to sell it. Why not?
It really is invaluable to live off the half hearted cures of the suffering.
[b]'The coronavirus has killed so many people in Iran that the country has resorted to mass burials, but in neighboring Iraq, the body count is fewer than 100.
The Dominican Republic has reported nearly 7,600 cases of the virus. Just across the border, Haiti has recorded about 85.
In Indonesia, thousands are believed to have died of the coronavirus. In nearby Malaysia, a strict lockdown has kept fatalities to about 100.
The coronavirus has touched almost every country on earth, but its impact has seemed capricious. Global metropolises like New York, Paris and London have been devastated, while teeming cities like Bangkok, Baghdad, New Delhi and Lagos have, so far, largely been spared.'[/b]
Then it explores the various faxctors that might be involved:
“the power of youth”
“cultural distance”
“heat and light”
“early and strict lockdowns”
“luck”
But in each context there are many exceptions. No one explanation seems to suffice.
[b]'…most experts agree that there may be no single reason for some countries to be hit and others missed. The answer is likely to be some combination of the above factors, as well as one other mentioned by researchers: sheer luck.
'Countries with the same culture and climate could have vastly different outcomes if one infected person attends a crowded social occasion, turning it into what researchers call a super-spreader event.
'That happened when a passenger infected 634 people on the Diamond Princess cruise ship off the coast of Japan, when an infected guest attended a large funeral in Albany, Ga., and when a 61-year-old woman went to church in Daegu, South Korea, spreading the disease to hundreds of congregants and then to thousands of other Koreans.
'Because an infected person may not experience symptoms for a week or more, if at all, the disease spreads under the radar, exponentially and seemingly at random. Had the woman in Daegu stayed home that Sunday in February, the outbreak in South Korea might have been less than half of what it is.
‘Some countries that should have been inundated are not, leaving researchers scratching their heads.’[/b]
So, isn’t that what those on either side of the political spectrum are really dealing with: the great unknowns. Can those once infected become infected again? Will there be “waves”? Will it mutate?
Not that any of this won’t stop the rabid objectivists among us from just shrugging it off. They already factored that [and every other possible variables there are] into consideration. And if you don’t share their point of view, you’re still an idiotic liberal.
Fitting right in with my own speculation that some of the reactions to the coronavirus here are attached to one or another rabid, dogmatic political agenda in which something like this is merely construed to be part and parcel of one or another rendition of the “deep state”.
So, these folks will use the pandemic merely in order to spread their own reactionary political beliefs about the Jews and the colored people and the foreigners and the homosexuals and the feminists and the globalists and all the people who do not think exactly like they do.
Meaning, in other words, that, in seeing the world around them only as a reflection of what they already believe, it is a complete waste of time trying to actually engage them in intelligent conversation. They spit on that sort of thing. You are either one of us or the enemy.
And, for sure, the last thing they wish to explore is my own take on the objectivist mind. Here for example: viewtopic.php?f=15&t=185296
Wow, even the Trump administration itself is now in on the hoax:
[b]'Headline: The Trump administration projects about 3,000 daily deaths by early June.
As President Trump presses for states to reopen their economies, his administration is privately projecting a steady rise in the number of cases and deaths from the coronavirus over the next several weeks, reaching about 3,000 daily deaths on June 1, according to an internal document obtained by The New York Times, nearly double from the current level of about 1,750.
The projections, based on government modeling pulled together in chart form by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, forecast about 200,000 new cases each day by the end of the month, up from about 25,000 cases now.
The numbers underscore a sobering reality: While the United States has been hunkered down for the past seven weeks, not much has changed. And the reopening to the economy will make matters worse.'[/b]
Yes, yes, yes, as more doctors label any and every death as due to covid 19, the number of deaths will keep rising until they stop lying about the cause of death, ya know, until when the deep state pulls the plug on this hoax and moves back to the end of the world hoax due to climate change or initiates another needless war.
[b]'A research paper from scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory, not yet peer-reviewed, reports that one strain of the novel coronavirus has emerged in Europe and become dominant around the planet, leading the researchers to believe the virus has mutated to become more contagious.
'The mutation affects the structure of a protein, called the spike protein, that is critical to the virus’s ability to infect human cells. The researchers believe this structural change enhances infectivity.
‘“The mutation Spike D614G is of urgent concern; it began spreading in Europe in early February, and when introduced to new regions it rapidly becomes the dominant form,” the authors write. They describe the mutation “increasing in frequency at an alarming rate, indicating a fitness advantage relative to the original Wuhan strain that enables more rapid spread.”’[/b]
For the love of Christ, shut down everything! Before it’s too late!!
[b]'WASHINGTON — As the nation confronts unemployment levels not seen since the Great Depression, Congress and the Trump administration face a pivotal choice: Continue spending trillions trying to shore up businesses and workers, or bet that state reopenings will jump-start the United States economy.
At least 20 million Americans are unemployed and a large share of the nation’s small businesses are shut and facing possible insolvency. Policy errors in the coming weeks could turn the 18 million temporary layoffs recorded in April into permanent job losses that could plunge the United States into a deep and protracted recession unrivaled in recent history.'[/b]
And while 1] some conservatives here aim to convince us the whole thing really is just a liberal plot to create a global government under the thumb of Big Brother and/or the United Nations, while 2] some liberals here aim to convince us this is all just a stepping stone to the Fourth Reich, out in the real world the actual existential tug of war is all too real.
For millions and millions of us. Go too far in the direction of sustaining the lockdown and countless lives will be destroyed economically. Go to far in opening the economy up and the pandemic can explode to even greater heights. And this is all before what is deemed by many to be an inevitable, even bigger wave in the Fall and Winter.
So, in my view, if the objectivists from either end of the political spectrum prevail, it will truly be a calamity of epic proportions. Especially here in America where the overwhelming prepondeance of infections and deaths continue to prevail.
[b]'Are we inherently gullible? Research says no: Most adults have well-functioning machinery for detecting baloney, but there’s a common bug in the machine. Faced with a novel idea or new circumstances, we gravitate to information that fits our already existing beliefs. As Sherlock Holmes put the problem: “Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.” This bug has always been exploited by people seeking money, power — or both. But with the rise of social media, the world’s propagandists, con artists and grifters find their search for suckers easier than ever.
'Witness the grubby exercise known as “#Plandemic.” The risible video is the work of an opportunistic Internet filmmaker whose projects include a clip about his 5-year-old son’s discovery of “the truth” about the wealthy sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. In his latest film, he advances the conspiracy theory that Anthony S. Fauci of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, billionaire Bill Gates and various other malefactors are spreading a manmade novel coronavirus because they enjoy making people sick and hope to profit on an eventual vaccine. Or some similar nonsense along those lines. And there’s more: Beaches were closed to keep Americans away from the “microbes” in seawater that protect against covid-19.
'A coronavirus conspiracy is mild B.S. compared with the great conspiracy theory of 2016, the weapons-grade hooey known as #Pizzagate. In that viral sensation, important political figures supposedly ran a child-abuse ring out of the basement of a pizzeria that, by the way, doesn’t have a basement.
People believe in a “#Plandemic” because it fits into existing convictions. A lot of people already believe — not without reason — that pharmaceutical companies cash in on suffering. Many people have heard that government labs do research on biological weapons. All true. Government has hemorrhaged credibility in recent years — even with regard to veteran public servants such as Fauci. All of these mind-sets are potential vectors for the viral #plandemic.'[/b]
Bottom line [his and for the most part mine]:
‘Some want your money. Some want your mind. Citizenship in the Internet era demands a heightened commitment to mental hygiene and skepticism. We have to learn that the information that fits neatly into our preconceptions is precisely the information we must be wary of. And even in these wild times, we must heed the late Carl Sagan, who preached that “extraordinary claims” — like grand conspiracies and healing microbes — “require extraordinary proof.”’
He just leaves out the part about objectivism and dasein.
It is objectivist to consider it a calamity. That’s a word with a built in negative evaluation. You are saying that if either of these groups manages to win the debates and swing things too far, bad things will happen. That’s an objectivist evaluation of the consequences. Doesn’t mean it’s bad for you to be making an objectivist evaluation, but it’s an implicit objectivist appeal. You’re a part of the club.
On the contrary, I never exclude my own point of view here from my own point of view. Me calling anything a calamity [in the is/ought world] is no less a function of “I” as an existential fabrication/contraption.
After all, that’s where the part about “I” – my own – being “fractured and fragmented” is derived. Meanwhile, your own still incomprehensible rendition of pragmatism [from my point of view] is just not something “I” am able to grasp.
Just as you clearly do not grasp my own perspective yet. Instead, you only insist that you do. And then proceed [in about as close to an objectivist frame of mind as I have come to understand it] to preach the gospel to the choir.
Note to Phyllo:
I’m coming closer and closer to making you Moe here. Alas, KT becomes less challenging with each post.
