Is it just me, but my impression on watching yesterday's PMQs (via YouTube) is that she is doing an excellent job channeling Boudica (or Boadicea if your a real traditionalist).
Wondering if that great classicist Boris Johnson had the same insight? Even though IMHO he actually had one of his PMQs of recent memory - though of course that ain't saying very much.
The other question which has not been fully answered is who would pay the cost of any settlement, which could easily be millions of pounds. With Andrew’s financial arrangements shrouded in mystery, until now it has been assumed that the Queen is paying her son’s legal fees. Some reports have also suggested that she would stump up for any settlement.
Yet more rubbish from our non Tory republican LD.
The Queen has a private estate worth hundreds of millions which could easily fund any settlement for the minor royal who is now only 9th in the line of succession
It's not so much whether HMtQ can as whether she should. Apparently.
She can do what she wants with her own money
HYUFD's blind loyalty to our UNELECTED head of state is touching.
I’m with HY! You got a better alternative?
President Blair anyone? Rename RAF the Blairforce?
Why would Blair become President? He'd need to be elected first for fuck's sake! I doubt he'd be popular enough to get the job!
Who’s he up against?
I don't think he's standing!
Why is it assumed that if we became a republic we would need a president?
That's a challenge for the obscure knowledge brigade: is there any republic *currently in existence* that does not have a head of state titled 'President'?
North Korea?
Possibly. AIUI the status of the supreme leader is somewhat ambiguous.
Apparently the principles of the Korean Workers Party include loyalty to the specific bloodline of the Kims. Even within the principle that many place put democratic in their name when they are far from it, even republic (as generally considered) is stretching it. Even most places where sons inherit presidencies aren't so blunt.
Pecresse is on record as saying "Brexit must not be allowed to succeed". She hates it just as much as Macron. I doubt she will be much friendlier to us than Macron. This is the French Establishment view of Brexit Britain, it won't change until we either collapse into rubble, or they get over their pique as other, more important EU issues emerge - or they need our help in some fundamental way. Whatever happens, this will take time
However she would probably be an improvement on Macron, simply by being less of a petulant wanker
So Le Pen is the only pro-Brexit candidate in the race?
I would say that Zemmour is by far the most Eurosceptic of the candidates. Unfortunately, the only people he hates more than the EU are the Anglo-Saxons. (In his world view, we are the Little Satan to the US's Big Satan.)
Pecresse is on record as saying "Brexit must not be allowed to succeed". She hates it just as much as Macron. I doubt she will be much friendlier to us than Macron. This is the French Establishment view of Brexit Britain, it won't change until we either collapse into rubble, or they get over their pique as other, more important EU issues emerge - or they need our help in some fundamental way. Whatever happens, this will take time
However she would probably be an improvement on Macron, simply by being less of a petulant wanker
Being asked which French Presidential candidate would be best for Britain, is like asking which is your favourite sexually transmitted disease.
Remember the weird "flamethrowers" they are apparently using in Xi'an, creating various theories? - eg they are exterminating rats and mice, or "this is Chinese theatre" - a fake stunt designed to impress the public with the severity of their counter-Covid measures
One of the first theories was that "this is merely a malfunction" - the foggers can suddenly start shooting out flames. It was greeted skeptically (as it didn't seem to match the behaviour of the users) nonetheless, it turns out, it is almost certainly true. There are several non-suspicious videos of the foggers doing exactly this, malfunctioning and shooting out flame
Twitter solved this problem. Social media is not all bad
You set 'em going, you kill 'em off.
Alternatively, I am curious, and I just want the truth. You're welcome
I think the most plausible theory is that the Winter Olympics start next month in Beijing and the Chinese aren't taking any risks.
I'm not talking about Xi'an per se, I'm referring specifically to their habit of disinfecting entire cities with foggers of all kinds (sometimes enormous tankers doing whole streets in one go)
No other country - as far as I know - has used this technique. Yet the Chinese have done it from the get-go in Wuhan, and then elsewhere
Odd
And they are - if their stats are to be believed - by a distance THE most successful country when it comes to controlling Covid. Perhaps we should all be out with our foggers
Well the Chinese created the virus, they know how to defeat it.
That is the obvious but unspoken implication. Tho you went and spake it
It was a joke.
If the Chinese had really created the virus then their vaccine wouldn't be less effective than the ones the West created.
No. It is quite plausible they bio-engineered the virus, perhaps even as a potential weapon, but it was accidentally leaked before they had an effective vaccine ready
This might sound unlikely, but there are scientific papers by Chinese military scientists - linked with the Wuhan lab - discussing exactly this scenario: the creation of a novel coronavirus to cripple rival economies. They date, IIRC, from around 2015 onwards
With China, who knows
You're saying it's "quite plausible" that those inscrutables over there in the Orient were cooking up a deadly virus to attack us with but their dastardly plan went off half-cock and now they're in a pickle of their own making?
Tempted to go "serve the buggers right" but this would be to ignore the damage wreaked on so many innocent people the whole world over.
I am pretty certain it came from the lab, via an accidental leak. I am less certain - but still think it probable - that the virus was engineered to be nastier. Gain of Function. Because that is exactly what they were doing in the Wuhan lab, they openly boasted about it - see the many pre-pandemic references by Daszak (the co-head of Wuhan). And it was funded in part by the NIH in the USA:
"Two subordinates of Dr. Anthony Fauci raised concerns in May 2016 that taxpayer dollars may be funding gain-of-function experiments on bat coronaviruses at a Wuhan lab, but dropped the issue after nonprofit group EcoHealth Alliance downplayed the concerns, documents show.
"The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases staffers reversed course after requesting EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak submitted a “determination” to the agency that downplayed the risks of his proposed experiments, the records show.
"“The NIH, incredibly, accepted EcoHealth’s belief that this work would not be considered gain of function, and accepted EcoHealth’s rationale for this belief,” Rutgers University professor Richard Ebright told the DCNF."
Was it a bio-weapon in the making? Who the F knows. There is a legitimate reason for this research (if you consider the risk is worth it): create new vaccines for potential future pandemics. The US government does not consider this research worth the risk, which is why it forbids GOF research, even as it was covertly funding the same research abroad.
We do know the Chinese military has speculated about the potential "uses" of a weaponised coronavirus
Why would you create a virus that is going to attack your own population as a coronavirus will do?
Er, because they didn't release it deliberately?
This isn't quantum physics, it puzzles me why PB-ers find the "possible" evolution of this virus so difficult to grasp
In the early noughties the Chinese got very interested into bio-research on viruses. Probably for the very good reason that they have a lot of them, what with SARS and the rest. Many pandemics, historically, have started in China
However they didn't have the tech so they asked the West for help in building bio-research labs. In the case of Wuhan they asked the French, but as soon as the lab was up and running, they kicked the French out, and ran it themselves, securing all their own data
From about 2011 (or maybe earlier) the researchers at Wuhan started focusing on coronaviruses in bats (which harbour lots of nasty bugs). They went to mines in Yunnan and harvested bats, and they went to Laos as well (and SARS-Cov-2's closest relatives seem to be in Yunnan and Laos, far from Wuhan).
They took the bats back to Wuhan. They started engineering them to make them nastier and more likely to infect humans - "killer coronaviruses" in their own words. Around the same time Chinese military expressed speculative interest in what a weaponised coronavirus might do - explicitly how it might crush rivals economically, by shattering their health services. Coincidence? Who knows
By 2018 Wuhan was explicitly fucking around with the Furin Cleavage Site of their coronavirus, and doing it in insecure BSL2 labs (not super-secure BSL4 labs, as is desirable) they asked America for more money to further this research (the Americans finally refused, after funding prior research, because they thought this step was too dangerous and unnecessary). Wuhan went ahead anyway, it seems, and started injecting their killer bug into "humanised mice"
In 2019 a novel bat coronavirus of unusual infectiousness and virulence, with some weird alterations at the Furin Cleavage Site, emerged in the middle of Wuhan
You’ve tried your best. Most people don’t understand the way the world really works because they assume everyone’s behaviours, morals and motivations are the same as theirs. Most have fallen for the lie that all cultures are basically the same but with different food, religious traditions and architecture.
Yeah, I should probably give up as it is pointless. I'm not even saying the above scenario is proof of a lab leak, just that it is all on record, and therefore makes "lab leak" distinctly plausible, and therefore a hypothesis which must be seriously considered
The psychological resistance to the hypothesis is damn peculiar. As other pb-ers have noted (you, perhaps?) some people don't just reject the lab leak hypothesis, it makes them bizarrely angry. I have no idea why
People who get angry at it are the ones who are shit scared about the world not being as cosy as they thought (naive) or the ones fearful of relations with China heating up (prescient).
I have noticed the same reaction in some people to any discussion at all about UAP. Visceral anger. It’s rather interesting.
There is also a subset of lefty anti-lab-leaker who somehow links the theory with Trump, and thus (in the UK) with Brexit, so it conjures the same kind of allergic, hysterical abhorrence. It is all seen as one big horrible thing that is Wrong With The World and caused by Nigel Farage or something
Weird
It upsets some people to realise that the world (and human beings within it) are nuanced. Trump had many of the wrong policy prescriptions but he did identify a lot of legit problems. And because they think him a bigot or a misogynist or whatever else, they can’t stand the idea of being on the same side of an argument as him. I have even heard people say “well X can’t be true because Trump said it”.
Probably because the stories we tell our children are all about goodies and baddies. So Trump (correctly) identifies the threat to the West from China. Everyone then takes the opposite view that the China Communists are misunderstood and have a more desirable system of economics and governance than us.
Goes the other way of course. Trumpites assuming everything the wokesters say must be wrong and everything Trump says right. Crowds booing him for having the vaccine is some interesting psychology on display right there.
Or you and Leon are just a bit nutty seeing conspiracies and woke everywhere.
Lab leak may be right or wrong but it isn't a conspiracy theory, it's a boring industrial accident theory. The conspiracy bit, that scientists would do something as dangerous and evil as take a virus and try to make it more dangerous then it already is, is entirely uncontroversial.
Pecresse is on record as saying "Brexit must not be allowed to succeed". She hates it just as much as Macron. I doubt she will be much friendlier to us than Macron. This is the French Establishment view of Brexit Britain, it won't change until we either collapse into rubble, or they get over their pique as other, more important EU issues emerge - or they need our help in some fundamental way. Whatever happens, this will take time
However she would probably be an improvement on Macron, simply by being less of a petulant wanker
So Le Pen is the only pro-Brexit candidate in the race?
I would say that Zemmour is by far the most Eurosceptic of the candidates. Unfortunately, the only people he hates more than the EU are the Anglo-Saxons. (In his world view, we are the Little Satan to the US's Big Satan.)
Indeed, most Europeans and especially the French view us firmly as part of the Anglosphere now, not the continent.
Is it just me, but my impression on watching yesterday's PMQs (via YouTube) is that she is doing an excellent job channeling Boudica (or Boadicea if your a real traditionalist).
The other question which has not been fully answered is who would pay the cost of any settlement, which could easily be millions of pounds. With Andrew’s financial arrangements shrouded in mystery, until now it has been assumed that the Queen is paying her son’s legal fees. Some reports have also suggested that she would stump up for any settlement.
Yet more rubbish from our non Tory republican LD.
The Queen has a private estate worth hundreds of millions which could easily fund any settlement for the minor royal who is now only 9th in the line of succession
It's not so much whether HMtQ can as whether she should. Apparently.
She can do what she wants with her own money
HYUFD's blind loyalty to our UNELECTED head of state is touching.
I’m with HY! You got a better alternative?
President Blair anyone? Rename RAF the Blairforce?
Why would Blair become President? He'd need to be elected first for fuck's sake! I doubt he'd be popular enough to get the job!
Who’s he up against?
I don't think he's standing!
Why is it assumed that if we became a republic we would need a president?
Okay. What do you suggest then? 🙂
All power corrupts, but someone must govern.....
I'll do Lord Protector
My mission statement - peace for the ages. But first, a wild five minutes....
I suppose if Britain wanted to be contrary it could become a republic with an elected head of state, but call said figurehead the King or Queen anyway?
Worked for the Holy Roman Empire and the Polish Crown . . . sort of . . .
Pecresse is on record as saying "Brexit must not be allowed to succeed". She hates it just as much as Macron. I doubt she will be much friendlier to us than Macron. This is the French Establishment view of Brexit Britain, it won't change until we either collapse into rubble, or they get over their pique as other, more important EU issues emerge - or they need our help in some fundamental way. Whatever happens, this will take time
However she would probably be an improvement on Macron, simply by being less of a petulant wanker
Being asked which French Presidential candidate would be best for Britain, is like asking which is your favourite sexually transmitted disease.
Finally, a topic on which Leon might be able to offer the rest of us some actual expertise?
Pecresse is on record as saying "Brexit must not be allowed to succeed". She hates it just as much as Macron. I doubt she will be much friendlier to us than Macron. This is the French Establishment view of Brexit Britain, it won't change until we either collapse into rubble, or they get over their pique as other, more important EU issues emerge - or they need our help in some fundamental way. Whatever happens, this will take time
However she would probably be an improvement on Macron, simply by being less of a petulant wanker
Yes, from a British point of view it is very hard to know who would be the least hostile. Allies, eh?
France is generally the most anti British of the other G7 powers, whoever is President
France is just annoying though for the sake of being annoying. Catch them unawares and they'll agree with us all the time. I don't think we're quite so annoying in return, but I may be wrong.
Anyway they spend most of their time being very charming to the Germans whilst doing everything they can that won't be spotted to undermine them.
The Frenchman is a complex beast! Lord knows how he manages to do so well with the ladies
(Please feel free to flip genders in all the above, or introduce new ones)
Pecresse is on record as saying "Brexit must not be allowed to succeed". She hates it just as much as Macron. I doubt she will be much friendlier to us than Macron. This is the French Establishment view of Brexit Britain, it won't change until we either collapse into rubble, or they get over their pique as other, more important EU issues emerge - or they need our help in some fundamental way. Whatever happens, this will take time
However she would probably be an improvement on Macron, simply by being less of a petulant wanker
Being asked which French Presidential candidate would be best for Britain, is like asking which is your favourite sexually transmitted disease.
I'm not sure having chosen the suppurating chancre that is Johnson that we can be that sniffy.
The assertion that England is actually England & Wales at cricket always troubles me.
That is indeed officially the case. But we are not called England & Wales and nobody outside of hushed southern British cricket circles thinks of us as such.
Wouldn't it be better for Wales just to have their own team? It would be competitive –probably better than Scotland's.
Meanwhile, I maintain that it remains bonkers that TeamGB exists purely for the Olympics, when Scotland and Wales are our (sometimes bitter) rivals at every major team sport.
Lots of proud Welshmen have played for the England cricket team. Tony Lewis, Steve Watkin, Matthew Maynard, Robert Croft, Simon Jones, etc.
The other question which has not been fully answered is who would pay the cost of any settlement, which could easily be millions of pounds. With Andrew’s financial arrangements shrouded in mystery, until now it has been assumed that the Queen is paying her son’s legal fees. Some reports have also suggested that she would stump up for any settlement.
Yet more rubbish from our non Tory republican LD.
The Queen has a private estate worth hundreds of millions which could easily fund any settlement for the minor royal who is now only 9th in the line of succession
It's not so much whether HMtQ can as whether she should. Apparently.
She can do what she wants with her own money
HYUFD's blind loyalty to our UNELECTED head of state is touching.
I’m with HY! You got a better alternative?
President Blair anyone? Rename RAF the Blairforce?
Why would Blair become President? He'd need to be elected first for fuck's sake! I doubt he'd be popular enough to get the job!
Who’s he up against?
I don't think he's standing!
Why is it assumed that if we became a republic we would need a president?
Okay. What do you suggest then? 🙂
Nothing. Why do we need a PM and President. Let's use some imagination.
The other question which has not been fully answered is who would pay the cost of any settlement, which could easily be millions of pounds. With Andrew’s financial arrangements shrouded in mystery, until now it has been assumed that the Queen is paying her son’s legal fees. Some reports have also suggested that she would stump up for any settlement.
Yet more rubbish from our non Tory republican LD.
The Queen has a private estate worth hundreds of millions which could easily fund any settlement for the minor royal who is now only 9th in the line of succession
It's not so much whether HMtQ can as whether she should. Apparently.
She can do what she wants with her own money
HYUFD's blind loyalty to our UNELECTED head of state is touching.
I’m with HY! You got a better alternative?
President Blair anyone? Rename RAF the Blairforce?
Why would Blair become President? He'd need to be elected first for fuck's sake! I doubt he'd be popular enough to get the job!
Who’s he up against?
I don't think he's standing!
Why is it assumed that if we became a republic we would need a president?
Because every nation needs a Head of State to head the executive branch of government
The other question which has not been fully answered is who would pay the cost of any settlement, which could easily be millions of pounds. With Andrew’s financial arrangements shrouded in mystery, until now it has been assumed that the Queen is paying her son’s legal fees. Some reports have also suggested that she would stump up for any settlement.
Yet more rubbish from our non Tory republican LD.
The Queen has a private estate worth hundreds of millions which could easily fund any settlement for the minor royal who is now only 9th in the line of succession
It's not so much whether HMtQ can as whether she should. Apparently.
She can do what she wants with her own money
HYUFD's blind loyalty to our UNELECTED head of state is touching.
I’m with HY! You got a better alternative?
President Blair anyone? Rename RAF the Blairforce?
Why would Blair become President? He'd need to be elected first for fuck's sake! I doubt he'd be popular enough to get the job!
Who’s he up against?
I don't think he's standing!
Why is it assumed that if we became a republic we would need a president?
Okay. What do you suggest then? 🙂
Nothing. Why do we need a PM and President. Let's use some imagination.
As we need an executive branch to command the armed forces, set policy etc. Parliament alone cannot do that
Remember the weird "flamethrowers" they are apparently using in Xi'an, creating various theories? - eg they are exterminating rats and mice, or "this is Chinese theatre" - a fake stunt designed to impress the public with the severity of their counter-Covid measures
One of the first theories was that "this is merely a malfunction" - the foggers can suddenly start shooting out flames. It was greeted skeptically (as it didn't seem to match the behaviour of the users) nonetheless, it turns out, it is almost certainly true. There are several non-suspicious videos of the foggers doing exactly this, malfunctioning and shooting out flame
Twitter solved this problem. Social media is not all bad
You set 'em going, you kill 'em off.
Alternatively, I am curious, and I just want the truth. You're welcome
I think the most plausible theory is that the Winter Olympics start next month in Beijing and the Chinese aren't taking any risks.
I'm not talking about Xi'an per se, I'm referring specifically to their habit of disinfecting entire cities with foggers of all kinds (sometimes enormous tankers doing whole streets in one go)
No other country - as far as I know - has used this technique. Yet the Chinese have done it from the get-go in Wuhan, and then elsewhere
Odd
And they are - if their stats are to be believed - by a distance THE most successful country when it comes to controlling Covid. Perhaps we should all be out with our foggers
Well the Chinese created the virus, they know how to defeat it.
That is the obvious but unspoken implication. Tho you went and spake it
It was a joke.
If the Chinese had really created the virus then their vaccine wouldn't be less effective than the ones the West created.
No. It is quite plausible they bio-engineered the virus, perhaps even as a potential weapon, but it was accidentally leaked before they had an effective vaccine ready
This might sound unlikely, but there are scientific papers by Chinese military scientists - linked with the Wuhan lab - discussing exactly this scenario: the creation of a novel coronavirus to cripple rival economies. They date, IIRC, from around 2015 onwards
With China, who knows
You're saying it's "quite plausible" that those inscrutables over there in the Orient were cooking up a deadly virus to attack us with but their dastardly plan went off half-cock and now they're in a pickle of their own making?
Tempted to go "serve the buggers right" but this would be to ignore the damage wreaked on so many innocent people the whole world over.
I am pretty certain it came from the lab, via an accidental leak. I am less certain - but still think it probable - that the virus was engineered to be nastier. Gain of Function. Because that is exactly what they were doing in the Wuhan lab, they openly boasted about it - see the many pre-pandemic references by Daszak (the co-head of Wuhan). And it was funded in part by the NIH in the USA:
"Two subordinates of Dr. Anthony Fauci raised concerns in May 2016 that taxpayer dollars may be funding gain-of-function experiments on bat coronaviruses at a Wuhan lab, but dropped the issue after nonprofit group EcoHealth Alliance downplayed the concerns, documents show.
"The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases staffers reversed course after requesting EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak submitted a “determination” to the agency that downplayed the risks of his proposed experiments, the records show.
"“The NIH, incredibly, accepted EcoHealth’s belief that this work would not be considered gain of function, and accepted EcoHealth’s rationale for this belief,” Rutgers University professor Richard Ebright told the DCNF."
Was it a bio-weapon in the making? Who the F knows. There is a legitimate reason for this research (if you consider the risk is worth it): create new vaccines for potential future pandemics. The US government does not consider this research worth the risk, which is why it forbids GOF research, even as it was covertly funding the same research abroad.
We do know the Chinese military has speculated about the potential "uses" of a weaponised coronavirus
Why would you create a virus that is going to attack your own population as a coronavirus will do?
Er, because they didn't release it deliberately?
This isn't quantum physics, it puzzles me why PB-ers find the "possible" evolution of this virus so difficult to grasp
In the early noughties the Chinese got very interested into bio-research on viruses. Probably for the very good reason that they have a lot of them, what with SARS and the rest. Many pandemics, historically, have started in China
However they didn't have the tech so they asked the West for help in building bio-research labs. In the case of Wuhan they asked the French, but as soon as the lab was up and running, they kicked the French out, and ran it themselves, securing all their own data
From about 2011 (or maybe earlier) the researchers at Wuhan started focusing on coronaviruses in bats (which harbour lots of nasty bugs). They went to mines in Yunnan and harvested bats, and they went to Laos as well (and SARS-Cov-2's closest relatives seem to be in Yunnan and Laos, far from Wuhan).
They took the bats back to Wuhan. They started engineering them to make them nastier and more likely to infect humans - "killer coronaviruses" in their own words. Around the same time Chinese military expressed speculative interest in what a weaponised coronavirus might do - explicitly how it might crush rivals economically, by shattering their health services. Coincidence? Who knows
By 2018 Wuhan was explicitly fucking around with the Furin Cleavage Site of their coronavirus, and doing it in insecure BSL2 labs (not super-secure BSL4 labs, as is desirable) they asked America for more money to further this research (the Americans finally refused, after funding prior research, because they thought this step was too dangerous and unnecessary). Wuhan went ahead anyway, it seems, and started injecting their killer bug into "humanised mice"
In 2019 a novel bat coronavirus of unusual infectiousness and virulence, with some weird alterations at the Furin Cleavage Site, emerged in the middle of Wuhan
You’ve tried your best. Most people don’t understand the way the world really works because they assume everyone’s behaviours, morals and motivations are the same as theirs. Most have fallen for the lie that all cultures are basically the same but with different food, religious traditions and architecture.
Yeah, I should probably give up as it is pointless. I'm not even saying the above scenario is proof of a lab leak, just that it is all on record, and therefore makes "lab leak" distinctly plausible, and therefore a hypothesis which must be seriously considered
The psychological resistance to the hypothesis is damn peculiar. As other pb-ers have noted (you, perhaps?) some people don't just reject the lab leak hypothesis, it makes them bizarrely angry. I have no idea why
They may well have been researching COVID and it may have leaked, but you specifically said it may have been a biological weapon so my challenge of why they would have been developing a COVID virus as a weapon stands. as it would attack their own population. The fact that you think it is an accidental release is irrelevant.
JESUS FUCKING CHRIST YOU £&%$ %^ *^£))!!!
IF it was going to be a weapon, and that is an enormous If - which I have repeatedly said - IF IF IF IF IF - then of course they would be developing a vaccine at the same time, so that if - IF IF IF IF IF IF - they ever wanted to release it they would vax their people first, then be seen as the world's saviour as they offered to vax everyone else. But then, oops, shit, it leaks out early? But this is mere and outright conjecture as I have said a trillion times now
You have an IQ of 3 and I refuse to talk to you further
The other question which has not been fully answered is who would pay the cost of any settlement, which could easily be millions of pounds. With Andrew’s financial arrangements shrouded in mystery, until now it has been assumed that the Queen is paying her son’s legal fees. Some reports have also suggested that she would stump up for any settlement.
Yet more rubbish from our non Tory republican LD.
The Queen has a private estate worth hundreds of millions which could easily fund any settlement for the minor royal who is now only 9th in the line of succession
It's not so much whether HMtQ can as whether she should. Apparently.
She can do what she wants with her own money
HYUFD's blind loyalty to our UNELECTED head of state is touching.
I’m with HY! You got a better alternative?
President Blair anyone? Rename RAF the Blairforce?
Why would Blair become President? He'd need to be elected first for fuck's sake! I doubt he'd be popular enough to get the job!
Who’s he up against?
I don't think he's standing!
Why is it assumed that if we became a republic we would need a president?
That's a challenge for the obscure knowledge brigade: is there any republic *currently in existence* that does not have a head of state titled 'President'?
North Korea?
Possibly. AIUI the status of the supreme leader is somewhat ambiguous.
Apparently the principles of the Korean Workers Party include loyalty to the specific bloodline of the Kims. Even within the principle that many place put democratic in their name when they are far from it, even republic (as generally considered) is stretching it. Even most places where sons inherit presidencies aren't so blunt.
North Korea is a MONARCHY run by the House of Kim. Discuss!
The other question which has not been fully answered is who would pay the cost of any settlement, which could easily be millions of pounds. With Andrew’s financial arrangements shrouded in mystery, until now it has been assumed that the Queen is paying her son’s legal fees. Some reports have also suggested that she would stump up for any settlement.
Yet more rubbish from our non Tory republican LD.
The Queen has a private estate worth hundreds of millions which could easily fund any settlement for the minor royal who is now only 9th in the line of succession
It's not so much whether HMtQ can as whether she should. Apparently.
She can do what she wants with her own money
HYUFD's blind loyalty to our UNELECTED head of state is touching.
I’m with HY! You got a better alternative?
President Blair anyone? Rename RAF the Blairforce?
Why would Blair become President? He'd need to be elected first for fuck's sake! I doubt he'd be popular enough to get the job!
Who’s he up against?
I don't think he's standing!
Why is it assumed that if we became a republic we would need a president?
That's a challenge for the obscure knowledge brigade: is there any republic *currently in existence* that does not have a head of state titled 'President'?
North Korea?
Possibly. AIUI the status of the supreme leader is somewhat ambiguous.
Apparently the principles of the Korean Workers Party include loyalty to the specific bloodline of the Kims. Even within the principle that many place put democratic in their name when they are far from it, even republic (as generally considered) is stretching it. Even most places where sons inherit presidencies aren't so blunt.
North Korea is a MONARCHY run by the House of Kim. Discuss!
The other question which has not been fully answered is who would pay the cost of any settlement, which could easily be millions of pounds. With Andrew’s financial arrangements shrouded in mystery, until now it has been assumed that the Queen is paying her son’s legal fees. Some reports have also suggested that she would stump up for any settlement.
Yet more rubbish from our non Tory republican LD.
The Queen has a private estate worth hundreds of millions which could easily fund any settlement for the minor royal who is now only 9th in the line of succession
It's not so much whether HMtQ can as whether she should. Apparently.
She can do what she wants with her own money
HYUFD's blind loyalty to our UNELECTED head of state is touching.
I’m with HY! You got a better alternative?
President Blair anyone? Rename RAF the Blairforce?
Why would Blair become President? He'd need to be elected first for fuck's sake! I doubt he'd be popular enough to get the job!
Who’s he up against?
I don't think he's standing!
Why is it assumed that if we became a republic we would need a president?
Because every nation needs a Head of State to head the executive branch of government
PM?
They run most domestic policy, they do not head the armed forces etc. Otherwise you concentrate too much power in 1 person
Having read the exchange of letters between Geidt and Johnson, I'm left somewhat bewildered that Geidt hasn't resigned. It's clear that Geidt felt that he was badly misled by Johnson (and others in the Cabinet Office), and that there was something akin to a cover-up - although he declines to use that exact phrase. I'm not sure an apology from Johnson suffices - it wouldn't for me.
And on Johnson's phone, and the idea that in changing his number lots of stuff went missing. I'm not the best at technology, and I suspect Boris isn't. But what I'd do is ask a techie friend to do it for me to ensure everything came across. Do people seriously believe that Boris did his phone transfer himself without asking one of the IT bods to do it for him?
The whole thing looks very fishy to me, although the Geidt-Johnson letters don't seem to have attracted that much attention, on here or elsewhere.
I think officials having given up resigning over this stuff. It makes not a jot of difference - Boris's henchmen just smear them anyway - so they may as well stay in post.
Sad but probably true.
The death of integrity in government is possibly the most serious charge that I'd throw at the current bunch of charlatans.
Death of integrity - but was it murder or neglect?
Murder. And yes, I meant death - I didn't mistype dearth.
Remember the weird "flamethrowers" they are apparently using in Xi'an, creating various theories? - eg they are exterminating rats and mice, or "this is Chinese theatre" - a fake stunt designed to impress the public with the severity of their counter-Covid measures
One of the first theories was that "this is merely a malfunction" - the foggers can suddenly start shooting out flames. It was greeted skeptically (as it didn't seem to match the behaviour of the users) nonetheless, it turns out, it is almost certainly true. There are several non-suspicious videos of the foggers doing exactly this, malfunctioning and shooting out flame
Twitter solved this problem. Social media is not all bad
You set 'em going, you kill 'em off.
Alternatively, I am curious, and I just want the truth. You're welcome
I think the most plausible theory is that the Winter Olympics start next month in Beijing and the Chinese aren't taking any risks.
I'm not talking about Xi'an per se, I'm referring specifically to their habit of disinfecting entire cities with foggers of all kinds (sometimes enormous tankers doing whole streets in one go)
No other country - as far as I know - has used this technique. Yet the Chinese have done it from the get-go in Wuhan, and then elsewhere
Odd
And they are - if their stats are to be believed - by a distance THE most successful country when it comes to controlling Covid. Perhaps we should all be out with our foggers
Well the Chinese created the virus, they know how to defeat it.
That is the obvious but unspoken implication. Tho you went and spake it
It was a joke.
If the Chinese had really created the virus then their vaccine wouldn't be less effective than the ones the West created.
No. It is quite plausible they bio-engineered the virus, perhaps even as a potential weapon, but it was accidentally leaked before they had an effective vaccine ready
This might sound unlikely, but there are scientific papers by Chinese military scientists - linked with the Wuhan lab - discussing exactly this scenario: the creation of a novel coronavirus to cripple rival economies. They date, IIRC, from around 2015 onwards
With China, who knows
You're saying it's "quite plausible" that those inscrutables over there in the Orient were cooking up a deadly virus to attack us with but their dastardly plan went off half-cock and now they're in a pickle of their own making?
Tempted to go "serve the buggers right" but this would be to ignore the damage wreaked on so many innocent people the whole world over.
I am pretty certain it came from the lab, via an accidental leak. I am less certain - but still think it probable - that the virus was engineered to be nastier. Gain of Function. Because that is exactly what they were doing in the Wuhan lab, they openly boasted about it - see the many pre-pandemic references by Daszak (the co-head of Wuhan). And it was funded in part by the NIH in the USA:
"Two subordinates of Dr. Anthony Fauci raised concerns in May 2016 that taxpayer dollars may be funding gain-of-function experiments on bat coronaviruses at a Wuhan lab, but dropped the issue after nonprofit group EcoHealth Alliance downplayed the concerns, documents show.
"The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases staffers reversed course after requesting EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak submitted a “determination” to the agency that downplayed the risks of his proposed experiments, the records show.
"“The NIH, incredibly, accepted EcoHealth’s belief that this work would not be considered gain of function, and accepted EcoHealth’s rationale for this belief,” Rutgers University professor Richard Ebright told the DCNF."
Was it a bio-weapon in the making? Who the F knows. There is a legitimate reason for this research (if you consider the risk is worth it): create new vaccines for potential future pandemics. The US government does not consider this research worth the risk, which is why it forbids GOF research, even as it was covertly funding the same research abroad.
We do know the Chinese military has speculated about the potential "uses" of a weaponised coronavirus
Why would you create a virus that is going to attack your own population as a coronavirus will do?
Er, because they didn't release it deliberately?
This isn't quantum physics, it puzzles me why PB-ers find the "possible" evolution of this virus so difficult to grasp
In the early noughties the Chinese got very interested into bio-research on viruses. Probably for the very good reason that they have a lot of them, what with SARS and the rest. Many pandemics, historically, have started in China
However they didn't have the tech so they asked the West for help in building bio-research labs. In the case of Wuhan they asked the French, but as soon as the lab was up and running, they kicked the French out, and ran it themselves, securing all their own data
From about 2011 (or maybe earlier) the researchers at Wuhan started focusing on coronaviruses in bats (which harbour lots of nasty bugs). They went to mines in Yunnan and harvested bats, and they went to Laos as well (and SARS-Cov-2's closest relatives seem to be in Yunnan and Laos, far from Wuhan).
They took the bats back to Wuhan. They started engineering them to make them nastier and more likely to infect humans - "killer coronaviruses" in their own words. Around the same time Chinese military expressed speculative interest in what a weaponised coronavirus might do - explicitly how it might crush rivals economically, by shattering their health services. Coincidence? Who knows
By 2018 Wuhan was explicitly fucking around with the Furin Cleavage Site of their coronavirus, and doing it in insecure BSL2 labs (not super-secure BSL4 labs, as is desirable) they asked America for more money to further this research (the Americans finally refused, after funding prior research, because they thought this step was too dangerous and unnecessary). Wuhan went ahead anyway, it seems, and started injecting their killer bug into "humanised mice"
In 2019 a novel bat coronavirus of unusual infectiousness and virulence, with some weird alterations at the Furin Cleavage Site, emerged in the middle of Wuhan
You’ve tried your best. Most people don’t understand the way the world really works because they assume everyone’s behaviours, morals and motivations are the same as theirs. Most have fallen for the lie that all cultures are basically the same but with different food, religious traditions and architecture.
Yeah, I should probably give up as it is pointless. I'm not even saying the above scenario is proof of a lab leak, just that it is all on record, and therefore makes "lab leak" distinctly plausible, and therefore a hypothesis which must be seriously considered
The psychological resistance to the hypothesis is damn peculiar. As other pb-ers have noted (you, perhaps?) some people don't just reject the lab leak hypothesis, it makes them bizarrely angry. I have no idea why
Nah, not angry, just bemused why you think that your own belief on the probability of it being true is something the rest of us should weight more heavily than the opinions of the people who actually investigated it and understand it, rather than quote bits from twitter and wikipedia.
We will never know the truth, it is unknowable, as there is significant benefit to create misinformation both suggesting it was a lab leak, and it was not a lab leak. Perhaps a few hundred people in China might know the truth, if that, perhaps no-one knows for sure, the rest of us should just accept it as unknowable. If we really want to assign probabilities to it we should go to the investigators and experts.
But in that case we are not allowed to discuss anything, we can only trade links to peer reviewed journals, which is dull.
Why should this truth be unknowable? We only know most things on the balance of probabilities anyway, and I can't see any reason why the evidence on Covid s origin is never going to pass that test
Not Sure Why Canterbury Is Listed, It's pretty pleasant, affluent and in the last year has been relatively free of tourists.
Leicester is ranked lower than Abingdon??
The latter is perfectly pleasant in my experience.
Leicester is the dullest city in the UK, a sort of inherently boring place.
Don't insult Foxy please.
I am pretty thick skinned!
Leicester is almost proud of its reputation for being boring, indeed the city council once ran a marketing campaign of "Boring Leicester".
The city's motto is "Semper Eadem" which translates as "always the same", though probably better translated as "always consistent"
I have been to a fair number of the higher ranking shit places to live and would agree that they are worse. England is full of dull, down at heel cities and towns, but I am rather fond of my adopted city, warts and all.
In the old(er) days, would that have been translated as "Always Constant"?
Note that the official motto of the great State of Washington is "Alki" which Chinook for what is traditionally translated as "By and By" but in more modern parlance would be "Eventually" or (even better) "Mañana".
BTW, the part of (west) Seattle where the original American settlers first landed is the Alki neighborhood. Pronounced "Al (as in Alice) - Kai (as in sky)"
The other question which has not been fully answered is who would pay the cost of any settlement, which could easily be millions of pounds. With Andrew’s financial arrangements shrouded in mystery, until now it has been assumed that the Queen is paying her son’s legal fees. Some reports have also suggested that she would stump up for any settlement.
Yet more rubbish from our non Tory republican LD.
The Queen has a private estate worth hundreds of millions which could easily fund any settlement for the minor royal who is now only 9th in the line of succession
It's not so much whether HMtQ can as whether she should. Apparently.
She can do what she wants with her own money
HYUFD's blind loyalty to our UNELECTED head of state is touching.
I’m with HY! You got a better alternative?
President Blair anyone? Rename RAF the Blairforce?
Why would Blair become President? He'd need to be elected first for fuck's sake! I doubt he'd be popular enough to get the job!
Who’s he up against?
I don't think he's standing!
Why is it assumed that if we became a republic we would need a president?
Okay. What do you suggest then? 🙂
Nothing. Why do we need a PM and President. Let's use some imagination.
As we need an executive branch to command the armed forces, set policy etc. Parliament alone cannot do that
The USA (largest English-speaking nation) only has a Prez, and NOT a PM.
The other question which has not been fully answered is who would pay the cost of any settlement, which could easily be millions of pounds. With Andrew’s financial arrangements shrouded in mystery, until now it has been assumed that the Queen is paying her son’s legal fees. Some reports have also suggested that she would stump up for any settlement.
Yet more rubbish from our non Tory republican LD.
The Queen has a private estate worth hundreds of millions which could easily fund any settlement for the minor royal who is now only 9th in the line of succession
It's not so much whether HMtQ can as whether she should. Apparently.
She can do what she wants with her own money
HYUFD's blind loyalty to our UNELECTED head of state is touching.
I’m with HY! You got a better alternative?
President Blair anyone? Rename RAF the Blairforce?
Why would Blair become President? He'd need to be elected first for fuck's sake! I doubt he'd be popular enough to get the job!
Who’s he up against?
I don't think he's standing!
Why is it assumed that if we became a republic we would need a president?
That's a challenge for the obscure knowledge brigade: is there any republic *currently in existence* that does not have a head of state titled 'President'?
North Korea?
Possibly. AIUI the status of the supreme leader is somewhat ambiguous.
Apparently the principles of the Korean Workers Party include loyalty to the specific bloodline of the Kims. Even within the principle that many place put democratic in their name when they are far from it, even republic (as generally considered) is stretching it. Even most places where sons inherit presidencies aren't so blunt.
North Korea is a MONARCHY run by the House of Kim. Discuss!
Sunil's repeating himself again...
Sunil - your point. Maybe. They'd have an issue in that there is no understanding of quite who it would be. So that'd be a nascent monarchy I guess.
However there's not a chance in hell that the Kim family doesn't get killed in nasty ways well before they can make their dynasty stick.
The other question which has not been fully answered is who would pay the cost of any settlement, which could easily be millions of pounds. With Andrew’s financial arrangements shrouded in mystery, until now it has been assumed that the Queen is paying her son’s legal fees. Some reports have also suggested that she would stump up for any settlement.
Yet more rubbish from our non Tory republican LD.
The Queen has a private estate worth hundreds of millions which could easily fund any settlement for the minor royal who is now only 9th in the line of succession
It's not so much whether HMtQ can as whether she should. Apparently.
She can do what she wants with her own money
HYUFD's blind loyalty to our UNELECTED head of state is touching.
I’m with HY! You got a better alternative?
President Blair anyone? Rename RAF the Blairforce?
Why would Blair become President? He'd need to be elected first for fuck's sake! I doubt he'd be popular enough to get the job!
Who’s he up against?
I don't think he's standing!
Why is it assumed that if we became a republic we would need a president?
Okay. What do you suggest then? 🙂
Nothing. Why do we need a PM and President. Let's use some imagination.
As we need an executive branch to command the armed forces, set policy etc. Parliament alone cannot do that
The USA (largest English-speaking nation) only has a Prez, and NOT a PM.
The Speaker of the House of Representatives is the US PM in all but name and has more control over US domestic policy than the President does
Come on then. For 2022 who tipped First revolution Kazakhstan? First major dilpomatic spat Australia v Serbia about tennis? Quite a double there. Year of the ludicrously long odds?
Remember the weird "flamethrowers" they are apparently using in Xi'an, creating various theories? - eg they are exterminating rats and mice, or "this is Chinese theatre" - a fake stunt designed to impress the public with the severity of their counter-Covid measures
One of the first theories was that "this is merely a malfunction" - the foggers can suddenly start shooting out flames. It was greeted skeptically (as it didn't seem to match the behaviour of the users) nonetheless, it turns out, it is almost certainly true. There are several non-suspicious videos of the foggers doing exactly this, malfunctioning and shooting out flame
Twitter solved this problem. Social media is not all bad
You set 'em going, you kill 'em off.
Alternatively, I am curious, and I just want the truth. You're welcome
I think the most plausible theory is that the Winter Olympics start next month in Beijing and the Chinese aren't taking any risks.
I'm not talking about Xi'an per se, I'm referring specifically to their habit of disinfecting entire cities with foggers of all kinds (sometimes enormous tankers doing whole streets in one go)
No other country - as far as I know - has used this technique. Yet the Chinese have done it from the get-go in Wuhan, and then elsewhere
Odd
And they are - if their stats are to be believed - by a distance THE most successful country when it comes to controlling Covid. Perhaps we should all be out with our foggers
Well the Chinese created the virus, they know how to defeat it.
That is the obvious but unspoken implication. Tho you went and spake it
It was a joke.
If the Chinese had really created the virus then their vaccine wouldn't be less effective than the ones the West created.
No. It is quite plausible they bio-engineered the virus, perhaps even as a potential weapon, but it was accidentally leaked before they had an effective vaccine ready
This might sound unlikely, but there are scientific papers by Chinese military scientists - linked with the Wuhan lab - discussing exactly this scenario: the creation of a novel coronavirus to cripple rival economies. They date, IIRC, from around 2015 onwards
With China, who knows
You're saying it's "quite plausible" that those inscrutables over there in the Orient were cooking up a deadly virus to attack us with but their dastardly plan went off half-cock and now they're in a pickle of their own making?
Tempted to go "serve the buggers right" but this would be to ignore the damage wreaked on so many innocent people the whole world over.
I am pretty certain it came from the lab, via an accidental leak. I am less certain - but still think it probable - that the virus was engineered to be nastier. Gain of Function. Because that is exactly what they were doing in the Wuhan lab, they openly boasted about it - see the many pre-pandemic references by Daszak (the co-head of Wuhan). And it was funded in part by the NIH in the USA:
"Two subordinates of Dr. Anthony Fauci raised concerns in May 2016 that taxpayer dollars may be funding gain-of-function experiments on bat coronaviruses at a Wuhan lab, but dropped the issue after nonprofit group EcoHealth Alliance downplayed the concerns, documents show.
"The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases staffers reversed course after requesting EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak submitted a “determination” to the agency that downplayed the risks of his proposed experiments, the records show.
"“The NIH, incredibly, accepted EcoHealth’s belief that this work would not be considered gain of function, and accepted EcoHealth’s rationale for this belief,” Rutgers University professor Richard Ebright told the DCNF."
Was it a bio-weapon in the making? Who the F knows. There is a legitimate reason for this research (if you consider the risk is worth it): create new vaccines for potential future pandemics. The US government does not consider this research worth the risk, which is why it forbids GOF research, even as it was covertly funding the same research abroad.
We do know the Chinese military has speculated about the potential "uses" of a weaponised coronavirus
Why would you create a virus that is going to attack your own population as a coronavirus will do?
Er, because they didn't release it deliberately?
This isn't quantum physics, it puzzles me why PB-ers find the "possible" evolution of this virus so difficult to grasp
In the early noughties the Chinese got very interested into bio-research on viruses. Probably for the very good reason that they have a lot of them, what with SARS and the rest. Many pandemics, historically, have started in China
However they didn't have the tech so they asked the West for help in building bio-research labs. In the case of Wuhan they asked the French, but as soon as the lab was up and running, they kicked the French out, and ran it themselves, securing all their own data
From about 2011 (or maybe earlier) the researchers at Wuhan started focusing on coronaviruses in bats (which harbour lots of nasty bugs). They went to mines in Yunnan and harvested bats, and they went to Laos as well (and SARS-Cov-2's closest relatives seem to be in Yunnan and Laos, far from Wuhan).
They took the bats back to Wuhan. They started engineering them to make them nastier and more likely to infect humans - "killer coronaviruses" in their own words. Around the same time Chinese military expressed speculative interest in what a weaponised coronavirus might do - explicitly how it might crush rivals economically, by shattering their health services. Coincidence? Who knows
By 2018 Wuhan was explicitly fucking around with the Furin Cleavage Site of their coronavirus, and doing it in insecure BSL2 labs (not super-secure BSL4 labs, as is desirable) they asked America for more money to further this research (the Americans finally refused, after funding prior research, because they thought this step was too dangerous and unnecessary). Wuhan went ahead anyway, it seems, and started injecting their killer bug into "humanised mice"
In 2019 a novel bat coronavirus of unusual infectiousness and virulence, with some weird alterations at the Furin Cleavage Site, emerged in the middle of Wuhan
You’ve tried your best. Most people don’t understand the way the world really works because they assume everyone’s behaviours, morals and motivations are the same as theirs. Most have fallen for the lie that all cultures are basically the same but with different food, religious traditions and architecture.
Yeah, I should probably give up as it is pointless. I'm not even saying the above scenario is proof of a lab leak, just that it is all on record, and therefore makes "lab leak" distinctly plausible, and therefore a hypothesis which must be seriously considered
The psychological resistance to the hypothesis is damn peculiar. As other pb-ers have noted (you, perhaps?) some people don't just reject the lab leak hypothesis, it makes them bizarrely angry. I have no idea why
Nah, not angry, just bemused why you think that your own belief on the probability of it being true is something the rest of us should weight more heavily than the opinions of the people who actually investigated it and understand it, rather than quote bits from twitter and wikipedia.
We will never know the truth, it is unknowable, as there is significant benefit to create misinformation both suggesting it was a lab leak, and it was not a lab leak. Perhaps a few hundred people in China might know the truth, if that, perhaps no-one knows for sure, the rest of us should just accept it as unknowable. If we really want to assign probabilities to it we should go to the investigators and experts.
But in that case we are not allowed to discuss anything, we can only trade links to peer reviewed journals, which is dull.
Why should this truth be unknowable? We only know most things on the balance of probabilities anyway, and I can't see any reason why the evidence on Covid s origin is never going to pass that test
Indeed. And this remark by @noneoftheabove is particularly stupid in another way. He is suggesting we can never find out where Covid came from, so we must not try?
This virus has so far killed ~20 million people and decimated the global economy. It's really quite important that we know where it came from in case it happens again. This is true whether it came from someone stewing a pangolin or from someone dropping a test tube with a nastified virus inside
If the former, we really need to stop arsing about with rare animals - especially eating them - if the latter, we need to get a grip on labs doing "gain of function" virology
Indeed, I'd say there is enough evidence to suggest we should do both, already
And, also, if it was the lab then some people need to pay the price for their "negligence", and the consequent cover-up. The idea this is all too impossible so let's not bother is just another feature of the mad imbecility that surrounds this issue
The other question which has not been fully answered is who would pay the cost of any settlement, which could easily be millions of pounds. With Andrew’s financial arrangements shrouded in mystery, until now it has been assumed that the Queen is paying her son’s legal fees. Some reports have also suggested that she would stump up for any settlement.
Yet more rubbish from our non Tory republican LD.
The Queen has a private estate worth hundreds of millions which could easily fund any settlement for the minor royal who is now only 9th in the line of succession
It's not so much whether HMtQ can as whether she should. Apparently.
She can do what she wants with her own money
HYUFD's blind loyalty to our UNELECTED head of state is touching.
I’m with HY! You got a better alternative?
President Blair anyone? Rename RAF the Blairforce?
Why would Blair become President? He'd need to be elected first for fuck's sake! I doubt he'd be popular enough to get the job!
Who’s he up against?
I don't think he's standing!
Why is it assumed that if we became a republic we would need a president?
That's a challenge for the obscure knowledge brigade: is there any republic *currently in existence* that does not have a head of state titled 'President'?
North Korea?
Possibly. AIUI the status of the supreme leader is somewhat ambiguous.
Apparently the principles of the Korean Workers Party include loyalty to the specific bloodline of the Kims. Even within the principle that many place put democratic in their name when they are far from it, even republic (as generally considered) is stretching it. Even most places where sons inherit presidencies aren't so blunt.
North Korea is a MONARCHY run by the House of Kim. Discuss!
Sunil's repeating himself again...
Sunil - your point. Maybe. They'd have an issue in that there is no understanding of quite who it would be. So that'd be a nascent monarchy I guess.
However there's not a chance in hell that the Kim family doesn't get killed in nasty ways well before they can make their dynasty stick.
The Kims have been around ever since NK became independent in 1948 - 74th year this year! Many English Royal Houses haven't lasted that long!
Remember the weird "flamethrowers" they are apparently using in Xi'an, creating various theories? - eg they are exterminating rats and mice, or "this is Chinese theatre" - a fake stunt designed to impress the public with the severity of their counter-Covid measures
One of the first theories was that "this is merely a malfunction" - the foggers can suddenly start shooting out flames. It was greeted skeptically (as it didn't seem to match the behaviour of the users) nonetheless, it turns out, it is almost certainly true. There are several non-suspicious videos of the foggers doing exactly this, malfunctioning and shooting out flame
Twitter solved this problem. Social media is not all bad
You set 'em going, you kill 'em off.
Alternatively, I am curious, and I just want the truth. You're welcome
I think the most plausible theory is that the Winter Olympics start next month in Beijing and the Chinese aren't taking any risks.
I'm not talking about Xi'an per se, I'm referring specifically to their habit of disinfecting entire cities with foggers of all kinds (sometimes enormous tankers doing whole streets in one go)
No other country - as far as I know - has used this technique. Yet the Chinese have done it from the get-go in Wuhan, and then elsewhere
Odd
And they are - if their stats are to be believed - by a distance THE most successful country when it comes to controlling Covid. Perhaps we should all be out with our foggers
Well the Chinese created the virus, they know how to defeat it.
That is the obvious but unspoken implication. Tho you went and spake it
It was a joke.
If the Chinese had really created the virus then their vaccine wouldn't be less effective than the ones the West created.
No. It is quite plausible they bio-engineered the virus, perhaps even as a potential weapon, but it was accidentally leaked before they had an effective vaccine ready
This might sound unlikely, but there are scientific papers by Chinese military scientists - linked with the Wuhan lab - discussing exactly this scenario: the creation of a novel coronavirus to cripple rival economies. They date, IIRC, from around 2015 onwards
With China, who knows
You're saying it's "quite plausible" that those inscrutables over there in the Orient were cooking up a deadly virus to attack us with but their dastardly plan went off half-cock and now they're in a pickle of their own making?
Tempted to go "serve the buggers right" but this would be to ignore the damage wreaked on so many innocent people the whole world over.
I am pretty certain it came from the lab, via an accidental leak. I am less certain - but still think it probable - that the virus was engineered to be nastier. Gain of Function. Because that is exactly what they were doing in the Wuhan lab, they openly boasted about it - see the many pre-pandemic references by Daszak (the co-head of Wuhan). And it was funded in part by the NIH in the USA:
"Two subordinates of Dr. Anthony Fauci raised concerns in May 2016 that taxpayer dollars may be funding gain-of-function experiments on bat coronaviruses at a Wuhan lab, but dropped the issue after nonprofit group EcoHealth Alliance downplayed the concerns, documents show.
"The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases staffers reversed course after requesting EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak submitted a “determination” to the agency that downplayed the risks of his proposed experiments, the records show.
"“The NIH, incredibly, accepted EcoHealth’s belief that this work would not be considered gain of function, and accepted EcoHealth’s rationale for this belief,” Rutgers University professor Richard Ebright told the DCNF."
Was it a bio-weapon in the making? Who the F knows. There is a legitimate reason for this research (if you consider the risk is worth it): create new vaccines for potential future pandemics. The US government does not consider this research worth the risk, which is why it forbids GOF research, even as it was covertly funding the same research abroad.
We do know the Chinese military has speculated about the potential "uses" of a weaponised coronavirus
Why would you create a virus that is going to attack your own population as a coronavirus will do?
Er, because they didn't release it deliberately?
This isn't quantum physics, it puzzles me why PB-ers find the "possible" evolution of this virus so difficult to grasp
In the early noughties the Chinese got very interested into bio-research on viruses. Probably for the very good reason that they have a lot of them, what with SARS and the rest. Many pandemics, historically, have started in China
However they didn't have the tech so they asked the West for help in building bio-research labs. In the case of Wuhan they asked the French, but as soon as the lab was up and running, they kicked the French out, and ran it themselves, securing all their own data
From about 2011 (or maybe earlier) the researchers at Wuhan started focusing on coronaviruses in bats (which harbour lots of nasty bugs). They went to mines in Yunnan and harvested bats, and they went to Laos as well (and SARS-Cov-2's closest relatives seem to be in Yunnan and Laos, far from Wuhan).
They took the bats back to Wuhan. They started engineering them to make them nastier and more likely to infect humans - "killer coronaviruses" in their own words. Around the same time Chinese military expressed speculative interest in what a weaponised coronavirus might do - explicitly how it might crush rivals economically, by shattering their health services. Coincidence? Who knows
By 2018 Wuhan was explicitly fucking around with the Furin Cleavage Site of their coronavirus, and doing it in insecure BSL2 labs (not super-secure BSL4 labs, as is desirable) they asked America for more money to further this research (the Americans finally refused, after funding prior research, because they thought this step was too dangerous and unnecessary). Wuhan went ahead anyway, it seems, and started injecting their killer bug into "humanised mice"
In 2019 a novel bat coronavirus of unusual infectiousness and virulence, with some weird alterations at the Furin Cleavage Site, emerged in the middle of Wuhan
You’ve tried your best. Most people don’t understand the way the world really works because they assume everyone’s behaviours, morals and motivations are the same as theirs. Most have fallen for the lie that all cultures are basically the same but with different food, religious traditions and architecture.
Yeah, I should probably give up as it is pointless. I'm not even saying the above scenario is proof of a lab leak, just that it is all on record, and therefore makes "lab leak" distinctly plausible, and therefore a hypothesis which must be seriously considered
The psychological resistance to the hypothesis is damn peculiar. As other pb-ers have noted (you, perhaps?) some people don't just reject the lab leak hypothesis, it makes them bizarrely angry. I have no idea why
They may well have been researching COVID and it may have leaked, but you specifically said it may have been a biological weapon so my challenge of why they would have been developing a COVID virus as a weapon stands. as it would attack their own population. The fact that you think it is an accidental release is irrelevant.
JESUS FUCKING CHRIST YOU £&%$ %^ *^£))!!!
IF it was going to be a weapon, and that is an enormous If - which I have repeatedly said - IF IF IF IF IF - then of course they would be developing a vaccine at the same time, so that if - IF IF IF IF IF IF - they ever wanted to release it they would vax their people first, then be seen as the world's saviour as they offered to vax everyone else. But then, oops, shit, it leaks out early? But this is mere and outright conjecture as I have said a trillion times now
You have an IQ of 3 and I refuse to talk to you further
What a twit. COVID as we all know by now mutates readily (unlike you some of us including the Chinese knew that before) and you introduced the IF and I was challenging your IF only. You're the idiot.
PS as usual (as with @kinabalu and @IanB2 and no doubt others) you attack others IQs. I suspect you have some sort of inferiority complex on that front when you are out argued. Seems to touch a nerve.
The other question which has not been fully answered is who would pay the cost of any settlement, which could easily be millions of pounds. With Andrew’s financial arrangements shrouded in mystery, until now it has been assumed that the Queen is paying her son’s legal fees. Some reports have also suggested that she would stump up for any settlement.
Yet more rubbish from our non Tory republican LD.
The Queen has a private estate worth hundreds of millions which could easily fund any settlement for the minor royal who is now only 9th in the line of succession
It's not so much whether HMtQ can as whether she should. Apparently.
She can do what she wants with her own money
HYUFD's blind loyalty to our UNELECTED head of state is touching.
I’m with HY! You got a better alternative?
President Blair anyone? Rename RAF the Blairforce?
Why would Blair become President? He'd need to be elected first for fuck's sake! I doubt he'd be popular enough to get the job!
Who’s he up against?
I don't think he's standing!
Why is it assumed that if we became a republic we would need a president?
Okay. What do you suggest then? 🙂
Nothing. Why do we need a PM and President. Let's use some imagination.
As we need an executive branch to command the armed forces, set policy etc. Parliament alone cannot do that
What's wrong with the PM and cabinet? They do the job currently. The queen doesn't.
Remember the weird "flamethrowers" they are apparently using in Xi'an, creating various theories? - eg they are exterminating rats and mice, or "this is Chinese theatre" - a fake stunt designed to impress the public with the severity of their counter-Covid measures
One of the first theories was that "this is merely a malfunction" - the foggers can suddenly start shooting out flames. It was greeted skeptically (as it didn't seem to match the behaviour of the users) nonetheless, it turns out, it is almost certainly true. There are several non-suspicious videos of the foggers doing exactly this, malfunctioning and shooting out flame
Twitter solved this problem. Social media is not all bad
You set 'em going, you kill 'em off.
Alternatively, I am curious, and I just want the truth. You're welcome
I think the most plausible theory is that the Winter Olympics start next month in Beijing and the Chinese aren't taking any risks.
I'm not talking about Xi'an per se, I'm referring specifically to their habit of disinfecting entire cities with foggers of all kinds (sometimes enormous tankers doing whole streets in one go)
No other country - as far as I know - has used this technique. Yet the Chinese have done it from the get-go in Wuhan, and then elsewhere
Odd
And they are - if their stats are to be believed - by a distance THE most successful country when it comes to controlling Covid. Perhaps we should all be out with our foggers
Well the Chinese created the virus, they know how to defeat it.
That is the obvious but unspoken implication. Tho you went and spake it
It was a joke.
If the Chinese had really created the virus then their vaccine wouldn't be less effective than the ones the West created.
No. It is quite plausible they bio-engineered the virus, perhaps even as a potential weapon, but it was accidentally leaked before they had an effective vaccine ready
This might sound unlikely, but there are scientific papers by Chinese military scientists - linked with the Wuhan lab - discussing exactly this scenario: the creation of a novel coronavirus to cripple rival economies. They date, IIRC, from around 2015 onwards
With China, who knows
You're saying it's "quite plausible" that those inscrutables over there in the Orient were cooking up a deadly virus to attack us with but their dastardly plan went off half-cock and now they're in a pickle of their own making?
Tempted to go "serve the buggers right" but this would be to ignore the damage wreaked on so many innocent people the whole world over.
I am pretty certain it came from the lab, via an accidental leak. I am less certain - but still think it probable - that the virus was engineered to be nastier. Gain of Function. Because that is exactly what they were doing in the Wuhan lab, they openly boasted about it - see the many pre-pandemic references by Daszak (the co-head of Wuhan). And it was funded in part by the NIH in the USA:
"Two subordinates of Dr. Anthony Fauci raised concerns in May 2016 that taxpayer dollars may be funding gain-of-function experiments on bat coronaviruses at a Wuhan lab, but dropped the issue after nonprofit group EcoHealth Alliance downplayed the concerns, documents show.
"The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases staffers reversed course after requesting EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak submitted a “determination” to the agency that downplayed the risks of his proposed experiments, the records show.
"“The NIH, incredibly, accepted EcoHealth’s belief that this work would not be considered gain of function, and accepted EcoHealth’s rationale for this belief,” Rutgers University professor Richard Ebright told the DCNF."
Was it a bio-weapon in the making? Who the F knows. There is a legitimate reason for this research (if you consider the risk is worth it): create new vaccines for potential future pandemics. The US government does not consider this research worth the risk, which is why it forbids GOF research, even as it was covertly funding the same research abroad.
We do know the Chinese military has speculated about the potential "uses" of a weaponised coronavirus
Why would you create a virus that is going to attack your own population as a coronavirus will do?
Er, because they didn't release it deliberately?
This isn't quantum physics, it puzzles me why PB-ers find the "possible" evolution of this virus so difficult to grasp
In the early noughties the Chinese got very interested into bio-research on viruses. Probably for the very good reason that they have a lot of them, what with SARS and the rest. Many pandemics, historically, have started in China
However they didn't have the tech so they asked the West for help in building bio-research labs. In the case of Wuhan they asked the French, but as soon as the lab was up and running, they kicked the French out, and ran it themselves, securing all their own data
From about 2011 (or maybe earlier) the researchers at Wuhan started focusing on coronaviruses in bats (which harbour lots of nasty bugs). They went to mines in Yunnan and harvested bats, and they went to Laos as well (and SARS-Cov-2's closest relatives seem to be in Yunnan and Laos, far from Wuhan).
They took the bats back to Wuhan. They started engineering them to make them nastier and more likely to infect humans - "killer coronaviruses" in their own words. Around the same time Chinese military expressed speculative interest in what a weaponised coronavirus might do - explicitly how it might crush rivals economically, by shattering their health services. Coincidence? Who knows
By 2018 Wuhan was explicitly fucking around with the Furin Cleavage Site of their coronavirus, and doing it in insecure BSL2 labs (not super-secure BSL4 labs, as is desirable) they asked America for more money to further this research (the Americans finally refused, after funding prior research, because they thought this step was too dangerous and unnecessary). Wuhan went ahead anyway, it seems, and started injecting their killer bug into "humanised mice"
In 2019 a novel bat coronavirus of unusual infectiousness and virulence, with some weird alterations at the Furin Cleavage Site, emerged in the middle of Wuhan
You’ve tried your best. Most people don’t understand the way the world really works because they assume everyone’s behaviours, morals and motivations are the same as theirs. Most have fallen for the lie that all cultures are basically the same but with different food, religious traditions and architecture.
Yeah, I should probably give up as it is pointless. I'm not even saying the above scenario is proof of a lab leak, just that it is all on record, and therefore makes "lab leak" distinctly plausible, and therefore a hypothesis which must be seriously considered
The psychological resistance to the hypothesis is damn peculiar. As other pb-ers have noted (you, perhaps?) some people don't just reject the lab leak hypothesis, it makes them bizarrely angry. I have no idea why
They may well have been researching COVID and it may have leaked, but you specifically said it may have been a biological weapon so my challenge of why they would have been developing a COVID virus as a weapon stands. as it would attack their own population. The fact that you think it is an accidental release is irrelevant.
JESUS FUCKING CHRIST YOU £&%$ %^ *^£))!!!
IF it was going to be a weapon, and that is an enormous If - which I have repeatedly said - IF IF IF IF IF - then of course they would be developing a vaccine at the same time, so that if - IF IF IF IF IF IF - they ever wanted to release it they would vax their people first, then be seen as the world's saviour as they offered to vax everyone else. But then, oops, shit, it leaks out early? But this is mere and outright conjecture as I have said a trillion times now
You have an IQ of 3 and I refuse to talk to you further
What a twit. COVID as we all know by now mutates readily (unlike you some of us including the Chinese knew that before) and you introduced the IF and I was challenging your IF only. You're the idiot.
PS as usual (as with @kinabalu and @IanB2 and no doubt others) you attack others IQs. I suspect you have some sort of inferiority complex on that front when you are out argued. Seems to touch a nerve.
You are correct that you have touched a nerve. Trust me, it ain't because I feel "out-argued"
I shall draw a seemly veil over our spat, and move on, for the sake of my own sanity. Have a good day
Remember the weird "flamethrowers" they are apparently using in Xi'an, creating various theories? - eg they are exterminating rats and mice, or "this is Chinese theatre" - a fake stunt designed to impress the public with the severity of their counter-Covid measures
One of the first theories was that "this is merely a malfunction" - the foggers can suddenly start shooting out flames. It was greeted skeptically (as it didn't seem to match the behaviour of the users) nonetheless, it turns out, it is almost certainly true. There are several non-suspicious videos of the foggers doing exactly this, malfunctioning and shooting out flame
Twitter solved this problem. Social media is not all bad
You set 'em going, you kill 'em off.
Alternatively, I am curious, and I just want the truth. You're welcome
I think the most plausible theory is that the Winter Olympics start next month in Beijing and the Chinese aren't taking any risks.
I'm not talking about Xi'an per se, I'm referring specifically to their habit of disinfecting entire cities with foggers of all kinds (sometimes enormous tankers doing whole streets in one go)
No other country - as far as I know - has used this technique. Yet the Chinese have done it from the get-go in Wuhan, and then elsewhere
Odd
And they are - if their stats are to be believed - by a distance THE most successful country when it comes to controlling Covid. Perhaps we should all be out with our foggers
Well the Chinese created the virus, they know how to defeat it.
That is the obvious but unspoken implication. Tho you went and spake it
It was a joke.
If the Chinese had really created the virus then their vaccine wouldn't be less effective than the ones the West created.
No. It is quite plausible they bio-engineered the virus, perhaps even as a potential weapon, but it was accidentally leaked before they had an effective vaccine ready
This might sound unlikely, but there are scientific papers by Chinese military scientists - linked with the Wuhan lab - discussing exactly this scenario: the creation of a novel coronavirus to cripple rival economies. They date, IIRC, from around 2015 onwards
With China, who knows
You're saying it's "quite plausible" that those inscrutables over there in the Orient were cooking up a deadly virus to attack us with but their dastardly plan went off half-cock and now they're in a pickle of their own making?
Tempted to go "serve the buggers right" but this would be to ignore the damage wreaked on so many innocent people the whole world over.
I am pretty certain it came from the lab, via an accidental leak. I am less certain - but still think it probable - that the virus was engineered to be nastier. Gain of Function. Because that is exactly what they were doing in the Wuhan lab, they openly boasted about it - see the many pre-pandemic references by Daszak (the co-head of Wuhan). And it was funded in part by the NIH in the USA:
"Two subordinates of Dr. Anthony Fauci raised concerns in May 2016 that taxpayer dollars may be funding gain-of-function experiments on bat coronaviruses at a Wuhan lab, but dropped the issue after nonprofit group EcoHealth Alliance downplayed the concerns, documents show.
"The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases staffers reversed course after requesting EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak submitted a “determination” to the agency that downplayed the risks of his proposed experiments, the records show.
"“The NIH, incredibly, accepted EcoHealth’s belief that this work would not be considered gain of function, and accepted EcoHealth’s rationale for this belief,” Rutgers University professor Richard Ebright told the DCNF."
Was it a bio-weapon in the making? Who the F knows. There is a legitimate reason for this research (if you consider the risk is worth it): create new vaccines for potential future pandemics. The US government does not consider this research worth the risk, which is why it forbids GOF research, even as it was covertly funding the same research abroad.
We do know the Chinese military has speculated about the potential "uses" of a weaponised coronavirus
Why would you create a virus that is going to attack your own population as a coronavirus will do?
Er, because they didn't release it deliberately?
This isn't quantum physics, it puzzles me why PB-ers find the "possible" evolution of this virus so difficult to grasp
In the early noughties the Chinese got very interested into bio-research on viruses. Probably for the very good reason that they have a lot of them, what with SARS and the rest. Many pandemics, historically, have started in China
However they didn't have the tech so they asked the West for help in building bio-research labs. In the case of Wuhan they asked the French, but as soon as the lab was up and running, they kicked the French out, and ran it themselves, securing all their own data
From about 2011 (or maybe earlier) the researchers at Wuhan started focusing on coronaviruses in bats (which harbour lots of nasty bugs). They went to mines in Yunnan and harvested bats, and they went to Laos as well (and SARS-Cov-2's closest relatives seem to be in Yunnan and Laos, far from Wuhan).
They took the bats back to Wuhan. They started engineering them to make them nastier and more likely to infect humans - "killer coronaviruses" in their own words. Around the same time Chinese military expressed speculative interest in what a weaponised coronavirus might do - explicitly how it might crush rivals economically, by shattering their health services. Coincidence? Who knows
By 2018 Wuhan was explicitly fucking around with the Furin Cleavage Site of their coronavirus, and doing it in insecure BSL2 labs (not super-secure BSL4 labs, as is desirable) they asked America for more money to further this research (the Americans finally refused, after funding prior research, because they thought this step was too dangerous and unnecessary). Wuhan went ahead anyway, it seems, and started injecting their killer bug into "humanised mice"
In 2019 a novel bat coronavirus of unusual infectiousness and virulence, with some weird alterations at the Furin Cleavage Site, emerged in the middle of Wuhan
You’ve tried your best. Most people don’t understand the way the world really works because they assume everyone’s behaviours, morals and motivations are the same as theirs. Most have fallen for the lie that all cultures are basically the same but with different food, religious traditions and architecture.
Yeah, I should probably give up as it is pointless. I'm not even saying the above scenario is proof of a lab leak, just that it is all on record, and therefore makes "lab leak" distinctly plausible, and therefore a hypothesis which must be seriously considered
The psychological resistance to the hypothesis is damn peculiar. As other pb-ers have noted (you, perhaps?) some people don't just reject the lab leak hypothesis, it makes them bizarrely angry. I have no idea why
People who get angry at it are the ones who are shit scared about the world not being as cosy as they thought (naive) or the ones fearful of relations with China heating up (prescient).
I have noticed the same reaction in some people to any discussion at all about UAP. Visceral anger. It’s rather interesting.
There is also a subset of lefty anti-lab-leaker who somehow links the theory with Trump, and thus (in the UK) with Brexit, so it conjures the same kind of allergic, hysterical abhorrence. It is all seen as one big horrible thing that is Wrong With The World and caused by Nigel Farage or something
Weird
It upsets some people to realise that the world (and human beings within it) are nuanced. Trump had many of the wrong policy prescriptions but he did identify a lot of legit problems. And because they think him a bigot or a misogynist or whatever else, they can’t stand the idea of being on the same side of an argument as him. I have even heard people say “well X can’t be true because Trump said it”.
Probably because the stories we tell our children are all about goodies and baddies. So Trump (correctly) identifies the threat to the West from China. Everyone then takes the opposite view that the China Communists are misunderstood and have a more desirable system of economics and governance than us.
Goes the other way of course. Trumpites assuming everything the wokesters say must be wrong and everything Trump says right. Crowds booing him for having the vaccine is some interesting psychology on display right there.
Or you and Leon are just a bit nutty seeing conspiracies and woke everywhere.
Lab leak may be right or wrong but it isn't a conspiracy theory, it's a boring industrial accident theory. The conspiracy bit, that scientists would do something as dangerous and evil as take a virus and try to make it more dangerous then it already is, is entirely uncontroversial.
There's also not just one lab leak possibility, there are hundreds - with differing levels of culpability for the Chinese government and the Wuhan Institute. They range from a worker being infected by a bat while collecting them for study, and completely unknowingly bringing the disease back to Wuhan, all the way up to mass leak of thousands of enhanced pathogens from lab storage, which was hushed up at the highest level.
The other question which has not been fully answered is who would pay the cost of any settlement, which could easily be millions of pounds. With Andrew’s financial arrangements shrouded in mystery, until now it has been assumed that the Queen is paying her son’s legal fees. Some reports have also suggested that she would stump up for any settlement.
Yet more rubbish from our non Tory republican LD.
The Queen has a private estate worth hundreds of millions which could easily fund any settlement for the minor royal who is now only 9th in the line of succession
It's not so much whether HMtQ can as whether she should. Apparently.
She can do what she wants with her own money
HYUFD's blind loyalty to our UNELECTED head of state is touching.
I’m with HY! You got a better alternative?
President Blair anyone? Rename RAF the Blairforce?
Why would Blair become President? He'd need to be elected first for fuck's sake! I doubt he'd be popular enough to get the job!
Who’s he up against?
I don't think he's standing!
Why is it assumed that if we became a republic we would need a president?
That's a challenge for the obscure knowledge brigade: is there any republic *currently in existence* that does not have a head of state titled 'President'?
North Korea?
Possibly. AIUI the status of the supreme leader is somewhat ambiguous.
Apparently the principles of the Korean Workers Party include loyalty to the specific bloodline of the Kims. Even within the principle that many place put democratic in their name when they are far from it, even republic (as generally considered) is stretching it. Even most places where sons inherit presidencies aren't so blunt.
North Korea is a MONARCHY run by the House of Kim. Discuss!
Sunil's repeating himself again...
Sunil - your point. Maybe. They'd have an issue in that there is no understanding of quite who it would be. So that'd be a nascent monarchy I guess.
However there's not a chance in hell that the Kim family doesn't get killed in nasty ways well before they can make their dynasty stick.
The Kims have been around ever since NK became independent in 1948 - 74th year this year! Many English Royal Houses haven't lasted that long!
The other question which has not been fully answered is who would pay the cost of any settlement, which could easily be millions of pounds. With Andrew’s financial arrangements shrouded in mystery, until now it has been assumed that the Queen is paying her son’s legal fees. Some reports have also suggested that she would stump up for any settlement.
Yet more rubbish from our non Tory republican LD.
The Queen has a private estate worth hundreds of millions which could easily fund any settlement for the minor royal who is now only 9th in the line of succession
It's not so much whether HMtQ can as whether she should. Apparently.
She can do what she wants with her own money
HYUFD's blind loyalty to our UNELECTED head of state is touching.
I’m with HY! You got a better alternative?
President Blair anyone? Rename RAF the Blairforce?
Why would Blair become President? He'd need to be elected first for fuck's sake! I doubt he'd be popular enough to get the job!
Who’s he up against?
I don't think he's standing!
Why is it assumed that if we became a republic we would need a president?
Okay. What do you suggest then? 🙂
Nothing. Why do we need a PM and President. Let's use some imagination.
As we need an executive branch to command the armed forces, set policy etc. Parliament alone cannot do that
Remember the weird "flamethrowers" they are apparently using in Xi'an, creating various theories? - eg they are exterminating rats and mice, or "this is Chinese theatre" - a fake stunt designed to impress the public with the severity of their counter-Covid measures
One of the first theories was that "this is merely a malfunction" - the foggers can suddenly start shooting out flames. It was greeted skeptically (as it didn't seem to match the behaviour of the users) nonetheless, it turns out, it is almost certainly true. There are several non-suspicious videos of the foggers doing exactly this, malfunctioning and shooting out flame
Twitter solved this problem. Social media is not all bad
You set 'em going, you kill 'em off.
Alternatively, I am curious, and I just want the truth. You're welcome
I think the most plausible theory is that the Winter Olympics start next month in Beijing and the Chinese aren't taking any risks.
I'm not talking about Xi'an per se, I'm referring specifically to their habit of disinfecting entire cities with foggers of all kinds (sometimes enormous tankers doing whole streets in one go)
No other country - as far as I know - has used this technique. Yet the Chinese have done it from the get-go in Wuhan, and then elsewhere
Odd
And they are - if their stats are to be believed - by a distance THE most successful country when it comes to controlling Covid. Perhaps we should all be out with our foggers
Well the Chinese created the virus, they know how to defeat it.
That is the obvious but unspoken implication. Tho you went and spake it
It was a joke.
If the Chinese had really created the virus then their vaccine wouldn't be less effective than the ones the West created.
No. It is quite plausible they bio-engineered the virus, perhaps even as a potential weapon, but it was accidentally leaked before they had an effective vaccine ready
This might sound unlikely, but there are scientific papers by Chinese military scientists - linked with the Wuhan lab - discussing exactly this scenario: the creation of a novel coronavirus to cripple rival economies. They date, IIRC, from around 2015 onwards
With China, who knows
You're saying it's "quite plausible" that those inscrutables over there in the Orient were cooking up a deadly virus to attack us with but their dastardly plan went off half-cock and now they're in a pickle of their own making?
Tempted to go "serve the buggers right" but this would be to ignore the damage wreaked on so many innocent people the whole world over.
I am pretty certain it came from the lab, via an accidental leak. I am less certain - but still think it probable - that the virus was engineered to be nastier. Gain of Function. Because that is exactly what they were doing in the Wuhan lab, they openly boasted about it - see the many pre-pandemic references by Daszak (the co-head of Wuhan). And it was funded in part by the NIH in the USA:
"Two subordinates of Dr. Anthony Fauci raised concerns in May 2016 that taxpayer dollars may be funding gain-of-function experiments on bat coronaviruses at a Wuhan lab, but dropped the issue after nonprofit group EcoHealth Alliance downplayed the concerns, documents show.
"The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases staffers reversed course after requesting EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak submitted a “determination” to the agency that downplayed the risks of his proposed experiments, the records show.
"“The NIH, incredibly, accepted EcoHealth’s belief that this work would not be considered gain of function, and accepted EcoHealth’s rationale for this belief,” Rutgers University professor Richard Ebright told the DCNF."
Was it a bio-weapon in the making? Who the F knows. There is a legitimate reason for this research (if you consider the risk is worth it): create new vaccines for potential future pandemics. The US government does not consider this research worth the risk, which is why it forbids GOF research, even as it was covertly funding the same research abroad.
We do know the Chinese military has speculated about the potential "uses" of a weaponised coronavirus
Why would you create a virus that is going to attack your own population as a coronavirus will do?
Er, because they didn't release it deliberately?
This isn't quantum physics, it puzzles me why PB-ers find the "possible" evolution of this virus so difficult to grasp
In the early noughties the Chinese got very interested into bio-research on viruses. Probably for the very good reason that they have a lot of them, what with SARS and the rest. Many pandemics, historically, have started in China
However they didn't have the tech so they asked the West for help in building bio-research labs. In the case of Wuhan they asked the French, but as soon as the lab was up and running, they kicked the French out, and ran it themselves, securing all their own data
From about 2011 (or maybe earlier) the researchers at Wuhan started focusing on coronaviruses in bats (which harbour lots of nasty bugs). They went to mines in Yunnan and harvested bats, and they went to Laos as well (and SARS-Cov-2's closest relatives seem to be in Yunnan and Laos, far from Wuhan).
They took the bats back to Wuhan. They started engineering them to make them nastier and more likely to infect humans - "killer coronaviruses" in their own words. Around the same time Chinese military expressed speculative interest in what a weaponised coronavirus might do - explicitly how it might crush rivals economically, by shattering their health services. Coincidence? Who knows
By 2018 Wuhan was explicitly fucking around with the Furin Cleavage Site of their coronavirus, and doing it in insecure BSL2 labs (not super-secure BSL4 labs, as is desirable) they asked America for more money to further this research (the Americans finally refused, after funding prior research, because they thought this step was too dangerous and unnecessary). Wuhan went ahead anyway, it seems, and started injecting their killer bug into "humanised mice"
In 2019 a novel bat coronavirus of unusual infectiousness and virulence, with some weird alterations at the Furin Cleavage Site, emerged in the middle of Wuhan
You’ve tried your best. Most people don’t understand the way the world really works because they assume everyone’s behaviours, morals and motivations are the same as theirs. Most have fallen for the lie that all cultures are basically the same but with different food, religious traditions and architecture.
Yeah, I should probably give up as it is pointless. I'm not even saying the above scenario is proof of a lab leak, just that it is all on record, and therefore makes "lab leak" distinctly plausible, and therefore a hypothesis which must be seriously considered
The psychological resistance to the hypothesis is damn peculiar. As other pb-ers have noted (you, perhaps?) some people don't just reject the lab leak hypothesis, it makes them bizarrely angry. I have no idea why
They may well have been researching COVID and it may have leaked, but you specifically said it may have been a biological weapon so my challenge of why they would have been developing a COVID virus as a weapon stands. as it would attack their own population. The fact that you think it is an accidental release is irrelevant.
JESUS FUCKING CHRIST YOU £&%$ %^ *^£))!!!
IF it was going to be a weapon, and that is an enormous If - which I have repeatedly said - IF IF IF IF IF - then of course they would be developing a vaccine at the same time, so that if - IF IF IF IF IF IF - they ever wanted to release it they would vax their people first, then be seen as the world's saviour as they offered to vax everyone else. But then, oops, shit, it leaks out early? But this is mere and outright conjecture as I have said a trillion times now
You have an IQ of 3 and I refuse to talk to you further
What a twit. COVID as we all know by now mutates readily (unlike you some of us including the Chinese knew that before) and you introduced the IF and I was challenging your IF only. You're the idiot.
PS as usual (as with @kinabalu and @IanB2 and no doubt others) you attack others IQs. I suspect you have some sort of inferiority complex on that front when you are out argued. Seems to touch a nerve.
You are correct that you have touched a nerve. Trust me, it ain't because I feel "out-argued"
Not knowing when you have been out-argued is a very clear sign.
Annoying. Because I like Djokovic and now we have loads of wrong uns taking him up. I'm going to have to drop him and start rooting for somebody else.
Djokovic isn't an eloquent gentleman like Roger Federer.
No, but I like him for his drive and resilience. Busting the Fed Nad nexus was an amazing achievement.
I don’t like him, but I do admire him. Federer is a genius, especially on grass. Nasal the king of clay. Jokovic just relentless. For any of the three to have been playing when one of the other two was around stopped ludicrous amounts of slams won. To have all three at the same time... I also feel for Andy Murray. In other eras he may have won a lot more slams. Of course it’s possible he was driven to greater heights by the big three. Whatever. Men’s tennis is entering a new era, where no one, or small group will dominate. In some ways that will be a refreshing change.
Remember the weird "flamethrowers" they are apparently using in Xi'an, creating various theories? - eg they are exterminating rats and mice, or "this is Chinese theatre" - a fake stunt designed to impress the public with the severity of their counter-Covid measures
One of the first theories was that "this is merely a malfunction" - the foggers can suddenly start shooting out flames. It was greeted skeptically (as it didn't seem to match the behaviour of the users) nonetheless, it turns out, it is almost certainly true. There are several non-suspicious videos of the foggers doing exactly this, malfunctioning and shooting out flame
Twitter solved this problem. Social media is not all bad
You set 'em going, you kill 'em off.
Alternatively, I am curious, and I just want the truth. You're welcome
I think the most plausible theory is that the Winter Olympics start next month in Beijing and the Chinese aren't taking any risks.
I'm not talking about Xi'an per se, I'm referring specifically to their habit of disinfecting entire cities with foggers of all kinds (sometimes enormous tankers doing whole streets in one go)
No other country - as far as I know - has used this technique. Yet the Chinese have done it from the get-go in Wuhan, and then elsewhere
Odd
And they are - if their stats are to be believed - by a distance THE most successful country when it comes to controlling Covid. Perhaps we should all be out with our foggers
Well the Chinese created the virus, they know how to defeat it.
That is the obvious but unspoken implication. Tho you went and spake it
It was a joke.
If the Chinese had really created the virus then their vaccine wouldn't be less effective than the ones the West created.
No. It is quite plausible they bio-engineered the virus, perhaps even as a potential weapon, but it was accidentally leaked before they had an effective vaccine ready
This might sound unlikely, but there are scientific papers by Chinese military scientists - linked with the Wuhan lab - discussing exactly this scenario: the creation of a novel coronavirus to cripple rival economies. They date, IIRC, from around 2015 onwards
With China, who knows
You're saying it's "quite plausible" that those inscrutables over there in the Orient were cooking up a deadly virus to attack us with but their dastardly plan went off half-cock and now they're in a pickle of their own making?
Tempted to go "serve the buggers right" but this would be to ignore the damage wreaked on so many innocent people the whole world over.
I am pretty certain it came from the lab, via an accidental leak. I am less certain - but still think it probable - that the virus was engineered to be nastier. Gain of Function. Because that is exactly what they were doing in the Wuhan lab, they openly boasted about it - see the many pre-pandemic references by Daszak (the co-head of Wuhan). And it was funded in part by the NIH in the USA:
"Two subordinates of Dr. Anthony Fauci raised concerns in May 2016 that taxpayer dollars may be funding gain-of-function experiments on bat coronaviruses at a Wuhan lab, but dropped the issue after nonprofit group EcoHealth Alliance downplayed the concerns, documents show.
"The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases staffers reversed course after requesting EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak submitted a “determination” to the agency that downplayed the risks of his proposed experiments, the records show.
"“The NIH, incredibly, accepted EcoHealth’s belief that this work would not be considered gain of function, and accepted EcoHealth’s rationale for this belief,” Rutgers University professor Richard Ebright told the DCNF."
Was it a bio-weapon in the making? Who the F knows. There is a legitimate reason for this research (if you consider the risk is worth it): create new vaccines for potential future pandemics. The US government does not consider this research worth the risk, which is why it forbids GOF research, even as it was covertly funding the same research abroad.
We do know the Chinese military has speculated about the potential "uses" of a weaponised coronavirus
Why would you create a virus that is going to attack your own population as a coronavirus will do?
Er, because they didn't release it deliberately?
This isn't quantum physics, it puzzles me why PB-ers find the "possible" evolution of this virus so difficult to grasp
In the early noughties the Chinese got very interested into bio-research on viruses. Probably for the very good reason that they have a lot of them, what with SARS and the rest. Many pandemics, historically, have started in China
However they didn't have the tech so they asked the West for help in building bio-research labs. In the case of Wuhan they asked the French, but as soon as the lab was up and running, they kicked the French out, and ran it themselves, securing all their own data
From about 2011 (or maybe earlier) the researchers at Wuhan started focusing on coronaviruses in bats (which harbour lots of nasty bugs). They went to mines in Yunnan and harvested bats, and they went to Laos as well (and SARS-Cov-2's closest relatives seem to be in Yunnan and Laos, far from Wuhan).
They took the bats back to Wuhan. They started engineering them to make them nastier and more likely to infect humans - "killer coronaviruses" in their own words. Around the same time Chinese military expressed speculative interest in what a weaponised coronavirus might do - explicitly how it might crush rivals economically, by shattering their health services. Coincidence? Who knows
By 2018 Wuhan was explicitly fucking around with the Furin Cleavage Site of their coronavirus, and doing it in insecure BSL2 labs (not super-secure BSL4 labs, as is desirable) they asked America for more money to further this research (the Americans finally refused, after funding prior research, because they thought this step was too dangerous and unnecessary). Wuhan went ahead anyway, it seems, and started injecting their killer bug into "humanised mice"
In 2019 a novel bat coronavirus of unusual infectiousness and virulence, with some weird alterations at the Furin Cleavage Site, emerged in the middle of Wuhan
You’ve tried your best. Most people don’t understand the way the world really works because they assume everyone’s behaviours, morals and motivations are the same as theirs. Most have fallen for the lie that all cultures are basically the same but with different food, religious traditions and architecture.
Yeah, I should probably give up as it is pointless. I'm not even saying the above scenario is proof of a lab leak, just that it is all on record, and therefore makes "lab leak" distinctly plausible, and therefore a hypothesis which must be seriously considered
The psychological resistance to the hypothesis is damn peculiar. As other pb-ers have noted (you, perhaps?) some people don't just reject the lab leak hypothesis, it makes them bizarrely angry. I have no idea why
Because it is a colossal disaster. If it was caused by humans, even if accidentally, we have some collective responsibility
The other question which has not been fully answered is who would pay the cost of any settlement, which could easily be millions of pounds. With Andrew’s financial arrangements shrouded in mystery, until now it has been assumed that the Queen is paying her son’s legal fees. Some reports have also suggested that she would stump up for any settlement.
Yet more rubbish from our non Tory republican LD.
The Queen has a private estate worth hundreds of millions which could easily fund any settlement for the minor royal who is now only 9th in the line of succession
It's not so much whether HMtQ can as whether she should. Apparently.
She can do what she wants with her own money
HYUFD's blind loyalty to our UNELECTED head of state is touching.
I’m with HY! You got a better alternative?
President Blair anyone? Rename RAF the Blairforce?
Why would Blair become President? He'd need to be elected first for fuck's sake! I doubt he'd be popular enough to get the job!
Who’s he up against?
I don't think he's standing!
Why is it assumed that if we became a republic we would need a president?
Because every nation needs a Head of State to head the executive branch of government
PM?
They run most domestic policy, they do not head the armed forces etc. Otherwise you concentrate too much power in 1 person
Remember the weird "flamethrowers" they are apparently using in Xi'an, creating various theories? - eg they are exterminating rats and mice, or "this is Chinese theatre" - a fake stunt designed to impress the public with the severity of their counter-Covid measures
One of the first theories was that "this is merely a malfunction" - the foggers can suddenly start shooting out flames. It was greeted skeptically (as it didn't seem to match the behaviour of the users) nonetheless, it turns out, it is almost certainly true. There are several non-suspicious videos of the foggers doing exactly this, malfunctioning and shooting out flame
Twitter solved this problem. Social media is not all bad
You set 'em going, you kill 'em off.
Alternatively, I am curious, and I just want the truth. You're welcome
I think the most plausible theory is that the Winter Olympics start next month in Beijing and the Chinese aren't taking any risks.
I'm not talking about Xi'an per se, I'm referring specifically to their habit of disinfecting entire cities with foggers of all kinds (sometimes enormous tankers doing whole streets in one go)
No other country - as far as I know - has used this technique. Yet the Chinese have done it from the get-go in Wuhan, and then elsewhere
Odd
And they are - if their stats are to be believed - by a distance THE most successful country when it comes to controlling Covid. Perhaps we should all be out with our foggers
Well the Chinese created the virus, they know how to defeat it.
That is the obvious but unspoken implication. Tho you went and spake it
It was a joke.
If the Chinese had really created the virus then their vaccine wouldn't be less effective than the ones the West created.
No. It is quite plausible they bio-engineered the virus, perhaps even as a potential weapon, but it was accidentally leaked before they had an effective vaccine ready
This might sound unlikely, but there are scientific papers by Chinese military scientists - linked with the Wuhan lab - discussing exactly this scenario: the creation of a novel coronavirus to cripple rival economies. They date, IIRC, from around 2015 onwards
With China, who knows
You're saying it's "quite plausible" that those inscrutables over there in the Orient were cooking up a deadly virus to attack us with but their dastardly plan went off half-cock and now they're in a pickle of their own making?
Tempted to go "serve the buggers right" but this would be to ignore the damage wreaked on so many innocent people the whole world over.
I am pretty certain it came from the lab, via an accidental leak. I am less certain - but still think it probable - that the virus was engineered to be nastier. Gain of Function. Because that is exactly what they were doing in the Wuhan lab, they openly boasted about it - see the many pre-pandemic references by Daszak (the co-head of Wuhan). And it was funded in part by the NIH in the USA:
"Two subordinates of Dr. Anthony Fauci raised concerns in May 2016 that taxpayer dollars may be funding gain-of-function experiments on bat coronaviruses at a Wuhan lab, but dropped the issue after nonprofit group EcoHealth Alliance downplayed the concerns, documents show.
"The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases staffers reversed course after requesting EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak submitted a “determination” to the agency that downplayed the risks of his proposed experiments, the records show.
"“The NIH, incredibly, accepted EcoHealth’s belief that this work would not be considered gain of function, and accepted EcoHealth’s rationale for this belief,” Rutgers University professor Richard Ebright told the DCNF."
Was it a bio-weapon in the making? Who the F knows. There is a legitimate reason for this research (if you consider the risk is worth it): create new vaccines for potential future pandemics. The US government does not consider this research worth the risk, which is why it forbids GOF research, even as it was covertly funding the same research abroad.
We do know the Chinese military has speculated about the potential "uses" of a weaponised coronavirus
Why would you create a virus that is going to attack your own population as a coronavirus will do?
Er, because they didn't release it deliberately?
This isn't quantum physics, it puzzles me why PB-ers find the "possible" evolution of this virus so difficult to grasp
In the early noughties the Chinese got very interested into bio-research on viruses. Probably for the very good reason that they have a lot of them, what with SARS and the rest. Many pandemics, historically, have started in China
However they didn't have the tech so they asked the West for help in building bio-research labs. In the case of Wuhan they asked the French, but as soon as the lab was up and running, they kicked the French out, and ran it themselves, securing all their own data
From about 2011 (or maybe earlier) the researchers at Wuhan started focusing on coronaviruses in bats (which harbour lots of nasty bugs). They went to mines in Yunnan and harvested bats, and they went to Laos as well (and SARS-Cov-2's closest relatives seem to be in Yunnan and Laos, far from Wuhan).
They took the bats back to Wuhan. They started engineering them to make them nastier and more likely to infect humans - "killer coronaviruses" in their own words. Around the same time Chinese military expressed speculative interest in what a weaponised coronavirus might do - explicitly how it might crush rivals economically, by shattering their health services. Coincidence? Who knows
By 2018 Wuhan was explicitly fucking around with the Furin Cleavage Site of their coronavirus, and doing it in insecure BSL2 labs (not super-secure BSL4 labs, as is desirable) they asked America for more money to further this research (the Americans finally refused, after funding prior research, because they thought this step was too dangerous and unnecessary). Wuhan went ahead anyway, it seems, and started injecting their killer bug into "humanised mice"
In 2019 a novel bat coronavirus of unusual infectiousness and virulence, with some weird alterations at the Furin Cleavage Site, emerged in the middle of Wuhan
You’ve tried your best. Most people don’t understand the way the world really works because they assume everyone’s behaviours, morals and motivations are the same as theirs. Most have fallen for the lie that all cultures are basically the same but with different food, religious traditions and architecture.
Yeah, I should probably give up as it is pointless. I'm not even saying the above scenario is proof of a lab leak, just that it is all on record, and therefore makes "lab leak" distinctly plausible, and therefore a hypothesis which must be seriously considered
The psychological resistance to the hypothesis is damn peculiar. As other pb-ers have noted (you, perhaps?) some people don't just reject the lab leak hypothesis, it makes them bizarrely angry. I have no idea why
I think it’s probably a lab leek if that helps and supports you 🙂
But then I still think Omicron was bred in mice and deliberately lab leaked, so don’t know if that makes me a creditable supporter.
Here’s a question for you Leon, if it was a lab leak, will we ever know for certain? Unlikely own up from Chinese, but will any government of the world ever have enough evidence to be able to prove it? Would it be sensible for them to do that? If we are both right on this Leon, it’s never going to get confirmed is it?
Yep, that's almost certainly true
Especially as the suspicious research in Wuhan was partly funded by the US government (up to and including Fauci). Both superpowers have a vested interest in Not Finding Out
But just because we can't ever find out for certain doesn't mean - as @IshmaelZ says that we can't find out what is really most likely. And it is pretty important that we at least try, for reasons adduced below
Remember the weird "flamethrowers" they are apparently using in Xi'an, creating various theories? - eg they are exterminating rats and mice, or "this is Chinese theatre" - a fake stunt designed to impress the public with the severity of their counter-Covid measures
One of the first theories was that "this is merely a malfunction" - the foggers can suddenly start shooting out flames. It was greeted skeptically (as it didn't seem to match the behaviour of the users) nonetheless, it turns out, it is almost certainly true. There are several non-suspicious videos of the foggers doing exactly this, malfunctioning and shooting out flame
Twitter solved this problem. Social media is not all bad
You set 'em going, you kill 'em off.
Alternatively, I am curious, and I just want the truth. You're welcome
I think the most plausible theory is that the Winter Olympics start next month in Beijing and the Chinese aren't taking any risks.
I'm not talking about Xi'an per se, I'm referring specifically to their habit of disinfecting entire cities with foggers of all kinds (sometimes enormous tankers doing whole streets in one go)
No other country - as far as I know - has used this technique. Yet the Chinese have done it from the get-go in Wuhan, and then elsewhere
Odd
And they are - if their stats are to be believed - by a distance THE most successful country when it comes to controlling Covid. Perhaps we should all be out with our foggers
Well the Chinese created the virus, they know how to defeat it.
That is the obvious but unspoken implication. Tho you went and spake it
It was a joke.
If the Chinese had really created the virus then their vaccine wouldn't be less effective than the ones the West created.
No. It is quite plausible they bio-engineered the virus, perhaps even as a potential weapon, but it was accidentally leaked before they had an effective vaccine ready
This might sound unlikely, but there are scientific papers by Chinese military scientists - linked with the Wuhan lab - discussing exactly this scenario: the creation of a novel coronavirus to cripple rival economies. They date, IIRC, from around 2015 onwards
With China, who knows
You're saying it's "quite plausible" that those inscrutables over there in the Orient were cooking up a deadly virus to attack us with but their dastardly plan went off half-cock and now they're in a pickle of their own making?
Tempted to go "serve the buggers right" but this would be to ignore the damage wreaked on so many innocent people the whole world over.
I am pretty certain it came from the lab, via an accidental leak. I am less certain - but still think it probable - that the virus was engineered to be nastier. Gain of Function. Because that is exactly what they were doing in the Wuhan lab, they openly boasted about it - see the many pre-pandemic references by Daszak (the co-head of Wuhan). And it was funded in part by the NIH in the USA:
"Two subordinates of Dr. Anthony Fauci raised concerns in May 2016 that taxpayer dollars may be funding gain-of-function experiments on bat coronaviruses at a Wuhan lab, but dropped the issue after nonprofit group EcoHealth Alliance downplayed the concerns, documents show.
"The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases staffers reversed course after requesting EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak submitted a “determination” to the agency that downplayed the risks of his proposed experiments, the records show.
"“The NIH, incredibly, accepted EcoHealth’s belief that this work would not be considered gain of function, and accepted EcoHealth’s rationale for this belief,” Rutgers University professor Richard Ebright told the DCNF."
Was it a bio-weapon in the making? Who the F knows. There is a legitimate reason for this research (if you consider the risk is worth it): create new vaccines for potential future pandemics. The US government does not consider this research worth the risk, which is why it forbids GOF research, even as it was covertly funding the same research abroad.
We do know the Chinese military has speculated about the potential "uses" of a weaponised coronavirus
Why would you create a virus that is going to attack your own population as a coronavirus will do?
Er, because they didn't release it deliberately?
This isn't quantum physics, it puzzles me why PB-ers find the "possible" evolution of this virus so difficult to grasp
In the early noughties the Chinese got very interested into bio-research on viruses. Probably for the very good reason that they have a lot of them, what with SARS and the rest. Many pandemics, historically, have started in China
However they didn't have the tech so they asked the West for help in building bio-research labs. In the case of Wuhan they asked the French, but as soon as the lab was up and running, they kicked the French out, and ran it themselves, securing all their own data
From about 2011 (or maybe earlier) the researchers at Wuhan started focusing on coronaviruses in bats (which harbour lots of nasty bugs). They went to mines in Yunnan and harvested bats, and they went to Laos as well (and SARS-Cov-2's closest relatives seem to be in Yunnan and Laos, far from Wuhan).
They took the bats back to Wuhan. They started engineering them to make them nastier and more likely to infect humans - "killer coronaviruses" in their own words. Around the same time Chinese military expressed speculative interest in what a weaponised coronavirus might do - explicitly how it might crush rivals economically, by shattering their health services. Coincidence? Who knows
By 2018 Wuhan was explicitly fucking around with the Furin Cleavage Site of their coronavirus, and doing it in insecure BSL2 labs (not super-secure BSL4 labs, as is desirable) they asked America for more money to further this research (the Americans finally refused, after funding prior research, because they thought this step was too dangerous and unnecessary). Wuhan went ahead anyway, it seems, and started injecting their killer bug into "humanised mice"
In 2019 a novel bat coronavirus of unusual infectiousness and virulence, with some weird alterations at the Furin Cleavage Site, emerged in the middle of Wuhan
You’ve tried your best. Most people don’t understand the way the world really works because they assume everyone’s behaviours, morals and motivations are the same as theirs. Most have fallen for the lie that all cultures are basically the same but with different food, religious traditions and architecture.
Yeah, I should probably give up as it is pointless. I'm not even saying the above scenario is proof of a lab leak, just that it is all on record, and therefore makes "lab leak" distinctly plausible, and therefore a hypothesis which must be seriously considered
The psychological resistance to the hypothesis is damn peculiar. As other pb-ers have noted (you, perhaps?) some people don't just reject the lab leak hypothesis, it makes them bizarrely angry. I have no idea why
Nah, not angry, just bemused why you think that your own belief on the probability of it being true is something the rest of us should weight more heavily than the opinions of the people who actually investigated it and understand it, rather than quote bits from twitter and wikipedia.
We will never know the truth, it is unknowable, as there is significant benefit to create misinformation both suggesting it was a lab leak, and it was not a lab leak. Perhaps a few hundred people in China might know the truth, if that, perhaps no-one knows for sure, the rest of us should just accept it as unknowable. If we really want to assign probabilities to it we should go to the investigators and experts.
But in that case we are not allowed to discuss anything, we can only trade links to peer reviewed journals, which is dull.
Why should this truth be unknowable? We only know most things on the balance of probabilities anyway, and I can't see any reason why the evidence on Covid s origin is never going to pass that test
If you want to know this unknowable truth, my first suggestion would be it will be a waste of time and energy. My second suggestion would not to give more weight to Leon than the professionals tasked with investigating it. Obviously people are free to discuss whatever they like, and others are free to point out the futility of certain discussions.
Remember the weird "flamethrowers" they are apparently using in Xi'an, creating various theories? - eg they are exterminating rats and mice, or "this is Chinese theatre" - a fake stunt designed to impress the public with the severity of their counter-Covid measures
One of the first theories was that "this is merely a malfunction" - the foggers can suddenly start shooting out flames. It was greeted skeptically (as it didn't seem to match the behaviour of the users) nonetheless, it turns out, it is almost certainly true. There are several non-suspicious videos of the foggers doing exactly this, malfunctioning and shooting out flame
Twitter solved this problem. Social media is not all bad
You set 'em going, you kill 'em off.
Alternatively, I am curious, and I just want the truth. You're welcome
I think the most plausible theory is that the Winter Olympics start next month in Beijing and the Chinese aren't taking any risks.
I'm not talking about Xi'an per se, I'm referring specifically to their habit of disinfecting entire cities with foggers of all kinds (sometimes enormous tankers doing whole streets in one go)
No other country - as far as I know - has used this technique. Yet the Chinese have done it from the get-go in Wuhan, and then elsewhere
Odd
And they are - if their stats are to be believed - by a distance THE most successful country when it comes to controlling Covid. Perhaps we should all be out with our foggers
Well the Chinese created the virus, they know how to defeat it.
That is the obvious but unspoken implication. Tho you went and spake it
It was a joke.
If the Chinese had really created the virus then their vaccine wouldn't be less effective than the ones the West created.
No. It is quite plausible they bio-engineered the virus, perhaps even as a potential weapon, but it was accidentally leaked before they had an effective vaccine ready
This might sound unlikely, but there are scientific papers by Chinese military scientists - linked with the Wuhan lab - discussing exactly this scenario: the creation of a novel coronavirus to cripple rival economies. They date, IIRC, from around 2015 onwards
With China, who knows
You're saying it's "quite plausible" that those inscrutables over there in the Orient were cooking up a deadly virus to attack us with but their dastardly plan went off half-cock and now they're in a pickle of their own making?
Tempted to go "serve the buggers right" but this would be to ignore the damage wreaked on so many innocent people the whole world over.
I am pretty certain it came from the lab, via an accidental leak. I am less certain - but still think it probable - that the virus was engineered to be nastier. Gain of Function. Because that is exactly what they were doing in the Wuhan lab, they openly boasted about it - see the many pre-pandemic references by Daszak (the co-head of Wuhan). And it was funded in part by the NIH in the USA:
"Two subordinates of Dr. Anthony Fauci raised concerns in May 2016 that taxpayer dollars may be funding gain-of-function experiments on bat coronaviruses at a Wuhan lab, but dropped the issue after nonprofit group EcoHealth Alliance downplayed the concerns, documents show.
"The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases staffers reversed course after requesting EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak submitted a “determination” to the agency that downplayed the risks of his proposed experiments, the records show.
"“The NIH, incredibly, accepted EcoHealth’s belief that this work would not be considered gain of function, and accepted EcoHealth’s rationale for this belief,” Rutgers University professor Richard Ebright told the DCNF."
Was it a bio-weapon in the making? Who the F knows. There is a legitimate reason for this research (if you consider the risk is worth it): create new vaccines for potential future pandemics. The US government does not consider this research worth the risk, which is why it forbids GOF research, even as it was covertly funding the same research abroad.
We do know the Chinese military has speculated about the potential "uses" of a weaponised coronavirus
Why would you create a virus that is going to attack your own population as a coronavirus will do?
Er, because they didn't release it deliberately?
This isn't quantum physics, it puzzles me why PB-ers find the "possible" evolution of this virus so difficult to grasp
In the early noughties the Chinese got very interested into bio-research on viruses. Probably for the very good reason that they have a lot of them, what with SARS and the rest. Many pandemics, historically, have started in China
However they didn't have the tech so they asked the West for help in building bio-research labs. In the case of Wuhan they asked the French, but as soon as the lab was up and running, they kicked the French out, and ran it themselves, securing all their own data
From about 2011 (or maybe earlier) the researchers at Wuhan started focusing on coronaviruses in bats (which harbour lots of nasty bugs). They went to mines in Yunnan and harvested bats, and they went to Laos as well (and SARS-Cov-2's closest relatives seem to be in Yunnan and Laos, far from Wuhan).
They took the bats back to Wuhan. They started engineering them to make them nastier and more likely to infect humans - "killer coronaviruses" in their own words. Around the same time Chinese military expressed speculative interest in what a weaponised coronavirus might do - explicitly how it might crush rivals economically, by shattering their health services. Coincidence? Who knows
By 2018 Wuhan was explicitly fucking around with the Furin Cleavage Site of their coronavirus, and doing it in insecure BSL2 labs (not super-secure BSL4 labs, as is desirable) they asked America for more money to further this research (the Americans finally refused, after funding prior research, because they thought this step was too dangerous and unnecessary). Wuhan went ahead anyway, it seems, and started injecting their killer bug into "humanised mice"
In 2019 a novel bat coronavirus of unusual infectiousness and virulence, with some weird alterations at the Furin Cleavage Site, emerged in the middle of Wuhan
You’ve tried your best. Most people don’t understand the way the world really works because they assume everyone’s behaviours, morals and motivations are the same as theirs. Most have fallen for the lie that all cultures are basically the same but with different food, religious traditions and architecture.
Yeah, I should probably give up as it is pointless. I'm not even saying the above scenario is proof of a lab leak, just that it is all on record, and therefore makes "lab leak" distinctly plausible, and therefore a hypothesis which must be seriously considered
The psychological resistance to the hypothesis is damn peculiar. As other pb-ers have noted (you, perhaps?) some people don't just reject the lab leak hypothesis, it makes them bizarrely angry. I have no idea why
Because it is a colossal disaster. If it was caused by humans, even if accidentally, we have some collective responsibility
The other question which has not been fully answered is who would pay the cost of any settlement, which could easily be millions of pounds. With Andrew’s financial arrangements shrouded in mystery, until now it has been assumed that the Queen is paying her son’s legal fees. Some reports have also suggested that she would stump up for any settlement.
Yet more rubbish from our non Tory republican LD.
The Queen has a private estate worth hundreds of millions which could easily fund any settlement for the minor royal who is now only 9th in the line of succession
It's not so much whether HMtQ can as whether she should. Apparently.
She can do what she wants with her own money
HYUFD's blind loyalty to our UNELECTED head of state is touching.
I’m with HY! You got a better alternative?
President Blair anyone? Rename RAF the Blairforce?
Why would Blair become President? He'd need to be elected first for fuck's sake! I doubt he'd be popular enough to get the job!
Who’s he up against?
David Attenborough?
Who is about as old as the Queen.
However if we had an elected president as a P5 permanent UN Security Council power we would have an imperial presidency along US and French lines.
So we would have had President Blair and would now have President Boris.
Well, why do we alreadzy have a HoS as old as SDA?
Royalty should be retired at age 67, like the rest of us.
In which case Charles would never be King as he is already over 70 and William would be King
That's because they didn't bring in a sensible retirement age before.
Remember the weird "flamethrowers" they are apparently using in Xi'an, creating various theories? - eg they are exterminating rats and mice, or "this is Chinese theatre" - a fake stunt designed to impress the public with the severity of their counter-Covid measures
One of the first theories was that "this is merely a malfunction" - the foggers can suddenly start shooting out flames. It was greeted skeptically (as it didn't seem to match the behaviour of the users) nonetheless, it turns out, it is almost certainly true. There are several non-suspicious videos of the foggers doing exactly this, malfunctioning and shooting out flame
Twitter solved this problem. Social media is not all bad
You set 'em going, you kill 'em off.
Alternatively, I am curious, and I just want the truth. You're welcome
I think the most plausible theory is that the Winter Olympics start next month in Beijing and the Chinese aren't taking any risks.
I'm not talking about Xi'an per se, I'm referring specifically to their habit of disinfecting entire cities with foggers of all kinds (sometimes enormous tankers doing whole streets in one go)
No other country - as far as I know - has used this technique. Yet the Chinese have done it from the get-go in Wuhan, and then elsewhere
Odd
And they are - if their stats are to be believed - by a distance THE most successful country when it comes to controlling Covid. Perhaps we should all be out with our foggers
Well the Chinese created the virus, they know how to defeat it.
That is the obvious but unspoken implication. Tho you went and spake it
It was a joke.
If the Chinese had really created the virus then their vaccine wouldn't be less effective than the ones the West created.
No. It is quite plausible they bio-engineered the virus, perhaps even as a potential weapon, but it was accidentally leaked before they had an effective vaccine ready
This might sound unlikely, but there are scientific papers by Chinese military scientists - linked with the Wuhan lab - discussing exactly this scenario: the creation of a novel coronavirus to cripple rival economies. They date, IIRC, from around 2015 onwards
With China, who knows
You're saying it's "quite plausible" that those inscrutables over there in the Orient were cooking up a deadly virus to attack us with but their dastardly plan went off half-cock and now they're in a pickle of their own making?
Tempted to go "serve the buggers right" but this would be to ignore the damage wreaked on so many innocent people the whole world over.
I am pretty certain it came from the lab, via an accidental leak. I am less certain - but still think it probable - that the virus was engineered to be nastier. Gain of Function. Because that is exactly what they were doing in the Wuhan lab, they openly boasted about it - see the many pre-pandemic references by Daszak (the co-head of Wuhan). And it was funded in part by the NIH in the USA:
"Two subordinates of Dr. Anthony Fauci raised concerns in May 2016 that taxpayer dollars may be funding gain-of-function experiments on bat coronaviruses at a Wuhan lab, but dropped the issue after nonprofit group EcoHealth Alliance downplayed the concerns, documents show.
"The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases staffers reversed course after requesting EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak submitted a “determination” to the agency that downplayed the risks of his proposed experiments, the records show.
"“The NIH, incredibly, accepted EcoHealth’s belief that this work would not be considered gain of function, and accepted EcoHealth’s rationale for this belief,” Rutgers University professor Richard Ebright told the DCNF."
Was it a bio-weapon in the making? Who the F knows. There is a legitimate reason for this research (if you consider the risk is worth it): create new vaccines for potential future pandemics. The US government does not consider this research worth the risk, which is why it forbids GOF research, even as it was covertly funding the same research abroad.
We do know the Chinese military has speculated about the potential "uses" of a weaponised coronavirus
Why would you create a virus that is going to attack your own population as a coronavirus will do?
Er, because they didn't release it deliberately?
This isn't quantum physics, it puzzles me why PB-ers find the "possible" evolution of this virus so difficult to grasp
In the early noughties the Chinese got very interested into bio-research on viruses. Probably for the very good reason that they have a lot of them, what with SARS and the rest. Many pandemics, historically, have started in China
However they didn't have the tech so they asked the West for help in building bio-research labs. In the case of Wuhan they asked the French, but as soon as the lab was up and running, they kicked the French out, and ran it themselves, securing all their own data
From about 2011 (or maybe earlier) the researchers at Wuhan started focusing on coronaviruses in bats (which harbour lots of nasty bugs). They went to mines in Yunnan and harvested bats, and they went to Laos as well (and SARS-Cov-2's closest relatives seem to be in Yunnan and Laos, far from Wuhan).
They took the bats back to Wuhan. They started engineering them to make them nastier and more likely to infect humans - "killer coronaviruses" in their own words. Around the same time Chinese military expressed speculative interest in what a weaponised coronavirus might do - explicitly how it might crush rivals economically, by shattering their health services. Coincidence? Who knows
By 2018 Wuhan was explicitly fucking around with the Furin Cleavage Site of their coronavirus, and doing it in insecure BSL2 labs (not super-secure BSL4 labs, as is desirable) they asked America for more money to further this research (the Americans finally refused, after funding prior research, because they thought this step was too dangerous and unnecessary). Wuhan went ahead anyway, it seems, and started injecting their killer bug into "humanised mice"
In 2019 a novel bat coronavirus of unusual infectiousness and virulence, with some weird alterations at the Furin Cleavage Site, emerged in the middle of Wuhan
You’ve tried your best. Most people don’t understand the way the world really works because they assume everyone’s behaviours, morals and motivations are the same as theirs. Most have fallen for the lie that all cultures are basically the same but with different food, religious traditions and architecture.
Yeah, I should probably give up as it is pointless. I'm not even saying the above scenario is proof of a lab leak, just that it is all on record, and therefore makes "lab leak" distinctly plausible, and therefore a hypothesis which must be seriously considered
The psychological resistance to the hypothesis is damn peculiar. As other pb-ers have noted (you, perhaps?) some people don't just reject the lab leak hypothesis, it makes them bizarrely angry. I have no idea why
Because it is a colossal disaster. If it was caused by humans, even if accidentally, we have some collective responsibility
An astute point. Guilt
I fear some of the people who are aghast at the proposal of it leaking from a Chinese lab, would have a rather different mind if it had been an American lab...
Pecresse is on record as saying "Brexit must not be allowed to succeed". She hates it just as much as Macron. I doubt she will be much friendlier to us than Macron. This is the French Establishment view of Brexit Britain, it won't change until we either collapse into rubble, or they get over their pique as other, more important EU issues emerge - or they need our help in some fundamental way. Whatever happens, this will take time
However she would probably be an improvement on Macron, simply by being less of a petulant wanker
Being asked which French Presidential candidate would be best for Britain, is like asking which is your favourite sexually transmitted disease.
Remember the weird "flamethrowers" they are apparently using in Xi'an, creating various theories? - eg they are exterminating rats and mice, or "this is Chinese theatre" - a fake stunt designed to impress the public with the severity of their counter-Covid measures
One of the first theories was that "this is merely a malfunction" - the foggers can suddenly start shooting out flames. It was greeted skeptically (as it didn't seem to match the behaviour of the users) nonetheless, it turns out, it is almost certainly true. There are several non-suspicious videos of the foggers doing exactly this, malfunctioning and shooting out flame
Twitter solved this problem. Social media is not all bad
You set 'em going, you kill 'em off.
Alternatively, I am curious, and I just want the truth. You're welcome
I think the most plausible theory is that the Winter Olympics start next month in Beijing and the Chinese aren't taking any risks.
I'm not talking about Xi'an per se, I'm referring specifically to their habit of disinfecting entire cities with foggers of all kinds (sometimes enormous tankers doing whole streets in one go)
No other country - as far as I know - has used this technique. Yet the Chinese have done it from the get-go in Wuhan, and then elsewhere
Odd
And they are - if their stats are to be believed - by a distance THE most successful country when it comes to controlling Covid. Perhaps we should all be out with our foggers
Well the Chinese created the virus, they know how to defeat it.
That is the obvious but unspoken implication. Tho you went and spake it
It was a joke.
If the Chinese had really created the virus then their vaccine wouldn't be less effective than the ones the West created.
No. It is quite plausible they bio-engineered the virus, perhaps even as a potential weapon, but it was accidentally leaked before they had an effective vaccine ready
This might sound unlikely, but there are scientific papers by Chinese military scientists - linked with the Wuhan lab - discussing exactly this scenario: the creation of a novel coronavirus to cripple rival economies. They date, IIRC, from around 2015 onwards
With China, who knows
You're saying it's "quite plausible" that those inscrutables over there in the Orient were cooking up a deadly virus to attack us with but their dastardly plan went off half-cock and now they're in a pickle of their own making?
Tempted to go "serve the buggers right" but this would be to ignore the damage wreaked on so many innocent people the whole world over.
I am pretty certain it came from the lab, via an accidental leak. I am less certain - but still think it probable - that the virus was engineered to be nastier. Gain of Function. Because that is exactly what they were doing in the Wuhan lab, they openly boasted about it - see the many pre-pandemic references by Daszak (the co-head of Wuhan). And it was funded in part by the NIH in the USA:
"Two subordinates of Dr. Anthony Fauci raised concerns in May 2016 that taxpayer dollars may be funding gain-of-function experiments on bat coronaviruses at a Wuhan lab, but dropped the issue after nonprofit group EcoHealth Alliance downplayed the concerns, documents show.
"The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases staffers reversed course after requesting EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak submitted a “determination” to the agency that downplayed the risks of his proposed experiments, the records show.
"“The NIH, incredibly, accepted EcoHealth’s belief that this work would not be considered gain of function, and accepted EcoHealth’s rationale for this belief,” Rutgers University professor Richard Ebright told the DCNF."
Was it a bio-weapon in the making? Who the F knows. There is a legitimate reason for this research (if you consider the risk is worth it): create new vaccines for potential future pandemics. The US government does not consider this research worth the risk, which is why it forbids GOF research, even as it was covertly funding the same research abroad.
We do know the Chinese military has speculated about the potential "uses" of a weaponised coronavirus
Why would you create a virus that is going to attack your own population as a coronavirus will do?
Er, because they didn't release it deliberately?
This isn't quantum physics, it puzzles me why PB-ers find the "possible" evolution of this virus so difficult to grasp
In the early noughties the Chinese got very interested into bio-research on viruses. Probably for the very good reason that they have a lot of them, what with SARS and the rest. Many pandemics, historically, have started in China
However they didn't have the tech so they asked the West for help in building bio-research labs. In the case of Wuhan they asked the French, but as soon as the lab was up and running, they kicked the French out, and ran it themselves, securing all their own data
From about 2011 (or maybe earlier) the researchers at Wuhan started focusing on coronaviruses in bats (which harbour lots of nasty bugs). They went to mines in Yunnan and harvested bats, and they went to Laos as well (and SARS-Cov-2's closest relatives seem to be in Yunnan and Laos, far from Wuhan).
They took the bats back to Wuhan. They started engineering them to make them nastier and more likely to infect humans - "killer coronaviruses" in their own words. Around the same time Chinese military expressed speculative interest in what a weaponised coronavirus might do - explicitly how it might crush rivals economically, by shattering their health services. Coincidence? Who knows
By 2018 Wuhan was explicitly fucking around with the Furin Cleavage Site of their coronavirus, and doing it in insecure BSL2 labs (not super-secure BSL4 labs, as is desirable) they asked America for more money to further this research (the Americans finally refused, after funding prior research, because they thought this step was too dangerous and unnecessary). Wuhan went ahead anyway, it seems, and started injecting their killer bug into "humanised mice"
In 2019 a novel bat coronavirus of unusual infectiousness and virulence, with some weird alterations at the Furin Cleavage Site, emerged in the middle of Wuhan
You’ve tried your best. Most people don’t understand the way the world really works because they assume everyone’s behaviours, morals and motivations are the same as theirs. Most have fallen for the lie that all cultures are basically the same but with different food, religious traditions and architecture.
Yeah, I should probably give up as it is pointless. I'm not even saying the above scenario is proof of a lab leak, just that it is all on record, and therefore makes "lab leak" distinctly plausible, and therefore a hypothesis which must be seriously considered
The psychological resistance to the hypothesis is damn peculiar. As other pb-ers have noted (you, perhaps?) some people don't just reject the lab leak hypothesis, it makes them bizarrely angry. I have no idea why
Nah, not angry, just bemused why you think that your own belief on the probability of it being true is something the rest of us should weight more heavily than the opinions of the people who actually investigated it and understand it, rather than quote bits from twitter and wikipedia.
We will never know the truth, it is unknowable, as there is significant benefit to create misinformation both suggesting it was a lab leak, and it was not a lab leak. Perhaps a few hundred people in China might know the truth, if that, perhaps no-one knows for sure, the rest of us should just accept it as unknowable. If we really want to assign probabilities to it we should go to the investigators and experts.
But in that case we are not allowed to discuss anything, we can only trade links to peer reviewed journals, which is dull.
Why should this truth be unknowable? We only know most things on the balance of probabilities anyway, and I can't see any reason why the evidence on Covid s origin is never going to pass that test
If you want to know this unknowable truth, my first suggestion would be it will be a waste of time and energy. My second suggestion would not to give more weight to Leon than the professionals tasked with investigating it. Obviously people are free to discuss whatever they like, and others are free to point out the futility of certain discussions.
But I can see the sources Leon can see, and you still haven't justified unknowable
Remember the weird "flamethrowers" they are apparently using in Xi'an, creating various theories? - eg they are exterminating rats and mice, or "this is Chinese theatre" - a fake stunt designed to impress the public with the severity of their counter-Covid measures
One of the first theories was that "this is merely a malfunction" - the foggers can suddenly start shooting out flames. It was greeted skeptically (as it didn't seem to match the behaviour of the users) nonetheless, it turns out, it is almost certainly true. There are several non-suspicious videos of the foggers doing exactly this, malfunctioning and shooting out flame
Twitter solved this problem. Social media is not all bad
You set 'em going, you kill 'em off.
Alternatively, I am curious, and I just want the truth. You're welcome
I think the most plausible theory is that the Winter Olympics start next month in Beijing and the Chinese aren't taking any risks.
I'm not talking about Xi'an per se, I'm referring specifically to their habit of disinfecting entire cities with foggers of all kinds (sometimes enormous tankers doing whole streets in one go)
No other country - as far as I know - has used this technique. Yet the Chinese have done it from the get-go in Wuhan, and then elsewhere
Odd
And they are - if their stats are to be believed - by a distance THE most successful country when it comes to controlling Covid. Perhaps we should all be out with our foggers
Well the Chinese created the virus, they know how to defeat it.
That is the obvious but unspoken implication. Tho you went and spake it
It was a joke.
If the Chinese had really created the virus then their vaccine wouldn't be less effective than the ones the West created.
No. It is quite plausible they bio-engineered the virus, perhaps even as a potential weapon, but it was accidentally leaked before they had an effective vaccine ready
This might sound unlikely, but there are scientific papers by Chinese military scientists - linked with the Wuhan lab - discussing exactly this scenario: the creation of a novel coronavirus to cripple rival economies. They date, IIRC, from around 2015 onwards
With China, who knows
You're saying it's "quite plausible" that those inscrutables over there in the Orient were cooking up a deadly virus to attack us with but their dastardly plan went off half-cock and now they're in a pickle of their own making?
Tempted to go "serve the buggers right" but this would be to ignore the damage wreaked on so many innocent people the whole world over.
I am pretty certain it came from the lab, via an accidental leak. I am less certain - but still think it probable - that the virus was engineered to be nastier. Gain of Function. Because that is exactly what they were doing in the Wuhan lab, they openly boasted about it - see the many pre-pandemic references by Daszak (the co-head of Wuhan). And it was funded in part by the NIH in the USA:
"Two subordinates of Dr. Anthony Fauci raised concerns in May 2016 that taxpayer dollars may be funding gain-of-function experiments on bat coronaviruses at a Wuhan lab, but dropped the issue after nonprofit group EcoHealth Alliance downplayed the concerns, documents show.
"The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases staffers reversed course after requesting EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak submitted a “determination” to the agency that downplayed the risks of his proposed experiments, the records show.
"“The NIH, incredibly, accepted EcoHealth’s belief that this work would not be considered gain of function, and accepted EcoHealth’s rationale for this belief,” Rutgers University professor Richard Ebright told the DCNF."
Was it a bio-weapon in the making? Who the F knows. There is a legitimate reason for this research (if you consider the risk is worth it): create new vaccines for potential future pandemics. The US government does not consider this research worth the risk, which is why it forbids GOF research, even as it was covertly funding the same research abroad.
We do know the Chinese military has speculated about the potential "uses" of a weaponised coronavirus
Why would you create a virus that is going to attack your own population as a coronavirus will do?
Er, because they didn't release it deliberately?
This isn't quantum physics, it puzzles me why PB-ers find the "possible" evolution of this virus so difficult to grasp
In the early noughties the Chinese got very interested into bio-research on viruses. Probably for the very good reason that they have a lot of them, what with SARS and the rest. Many pandemics, historically, have started in China
However they didn't have the tech so they asked the West for help in building bio-research labs. In the case of Wuhan they asked the French, but as soon as the lab was up and running, they kicked the French out, and ran it themselves, securing all their own data
From about 2011 (or maybe earlier) the researchers at Wuhan started focusing on coronaviruses in bats (which harbour lots of nasty bugs). They went to mines in Yunnan and harvested bats, and they went to Laos as well (and SARS-Cov-2's closest relatives seem to be in Yunnan and Laos, far from Wuhan).
They took the bats back to Wuhan. They started engineering them to make them nastier and more likely to infect humans - "killer coronaviruses" in their own words. Around the same time Chinese military expressed speculative interest in what a weaponised coronavirus might do - explicitly how it might crush rivals economically, by shattering their health services. Coincidence? Who knows
By 2018 Wuhan was explicitly fucking around with the Furin Cleavage Site of their coronavirus, and doing it in insecure BSL2 labs (not super-secure BSL4 labs, as is desirable) they asked America for more money to further this research (the Americans finally refused, after funding prior research, because they thought this step was too dangerous and unnecessary). Wuhan went ahead anyway, it seems, and started injecting their killer bug into "humanised mice"
In 2019 a novel bat coronavirus of unusual infectiousness and virulence, with some weird alterations at the Furin Cleavage Site, emerged in the middle of Wuhan
You’ve tried your best. Most people don’t understand the way the world really works because they assume everyone’s behaviours, morals and motivations are the same as theirs. Most have fallen for the lie that all cultures are basically the same but with different food, religious traditions and architecture.
Yeah, I should probably give up as it is pointless. I'm not even saying the above scenario is proof of a lab leak, just that it is all on record, and therefore makes "lab leak" distinctly plausible, and therefore a hypothesis which must be seriously considered
The psychological resistance to the hypothesis is damn peculiar. As other pb-ers have noted (you, perhaps?) some people don't just reject the lab leak hypothesis, it makes them bizarrely angry. I have no idea why
Nah, not angry, just bemused why you think that your own belief on the probability of it being true is something the rest of us should weight more heavily than the opinions of the people who actually investigated it and understand it, rather than quote bits from twitter and wikipedia.
We will never know the truth, it is unknowable, as there is significant benefit to create misinformation both suggesting it was a lab leak, and it was not a lab leak. Perhaps a few hundred people in China might know the truth, if that, perhaps no-one knows for sure, the rest of us should just accept it as unknowable. If we really want to assign probabilities to it we should go to the investigators and experts.
But in that case we are not allowed to discuss anything, we can only trade links to peer reviewed journals, which is dull.
Why should this truth be unknowable? We only know most things on the balance of probabilities anyway, and I can't see any reason why the evidence on Covid s origin is never going to pass that test
Indeed. And this remark by @noneoftheabove is particularly stupid in another way. He is suggesting we can never find out where Covid came from, so we must not try?
This virus has so far killed ~20 million people and decimated the global economy. It's really quite important that we know where it came from in case it happens again. This is true whether it came from someone stewing a pangolin or from someone dropping a test tube with a nastified virus inside
If the former, we really need to stop arsing about with rare animals - especially eating them - if the latter, we need to get a grip on labs doing "gain of function" virology
Indeed, I'd say there is enough evidence to suggest we should do both, already
And, also, if it was the lab then some people need to pay the price for their "negligence", and the consequent cover-up. The idea this is all too impossible so let's not bother is just another feature of the mad imbecility that surrounds this issue
I also agree we should stop doing both. So no need to pretend we know the answer any more.
Tory peer Michelle Mone secretly involved in PPE firm she referred to government Exclusive: Leaked files suggest Mone and her husband were involved in business given £200m contracts
Remember the weird "flamethrowers" they are apparently using in Xi'an, creating various theories? - eg they are exterminating rats and mice, or "this is Chinese theatre" - a fake stunt designed to impress the public with the severity of their counter-Covid measures
One of the first theories was that "this is merely a malfunction" - the foggers can suddenly start shooting out flames. It was greeted skeptically (as it didn't seem to match the behaviour of the users) nonetheless, it turns out, it is almost certainly true. There are several non-suspicious videos of the foggers doing exactly this, malfunctioning and shooting out flame
Twitter solved this problem. Social media is not all bad
You set 'em going, you kill 'em off.
Alternatively, I am curious, and I just want the truth. You're welcome
I think the most plausible theory is that the Winter Olympics start next month in Beijing and the Chinese aren't taking any risks.
I'm not talking about Xi'an per se, I'm referring specifically to their habit of disinfecting entire cities with foggers of all kinds (sometimes enormous tankers doing whole streets in one go)
No other country - as far as I know - has used this technique. Yet the Chinese have done it from the get-go in Wuhan, and then elsewhere
Odd
And they are - if their stats are to be believed - by a distance THE most successful country when it comes to controlling Covid. Perhaps we should all be out with our foggers
Well the Chinese created the virus, they know how to defeat it.
That is the obvious but unspoken implication. Tho you went and spake it
It was a joke.
If the Chinese had really created the virus then their vaccine wouldn't be less effective than the ones the West created.
No. It is quite plausible they bio-engineered the virus, perhaps even as a potential weapon, but it was accidentally leaked before they had an effective vaccine ready
This might sound unlikely, but there are scientific papers by Chinese military scientists - linked with the Wuhan lab - discussing exactly this scenario: the creation of a novel coronavirus to cripple rival economies. They date, IIRC, from around 2015 onwards
With China, who knows
You're saying it's "quite plausible" that those inscrutables over there in the Orient were cooking up a deadly virus to attack us with but their dastardly plan went off half-cock and now they're in a pickle of their own making?
Tempted to go "serve the buggers right" but this would be to ignore the damage wreaked on so many innocent people the whole world over.
I am pretty certain it came from the lab, via an accidental leak. I am less certain - but still think it probable - that the virus was engineered to be nastier. Gain of Function. Because that is exactly what they were doing in the Wuhan lab, they openly boasted about it - see the many pre-pandemic references by Daszak (the co-head of Wuhan). And it was funded in part by the NIH in the USA:
"Two subordinates of Dr. Anthony Fauci raised concerns in May 2016 that taxpayer dollars may be funding gain-of-function experiments on bat coronaviruses at a Wuhan lab, but dropped the issue after nonprofit group EcoHealth Alliance downplayed the concerns, documents show.
"The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases staffers reversed course after requesting EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak submitted a “determination” to the agency that downplayed the risks of his proposed experiments, the records show.
"“The NIH, incredibly, accepted EcoHealth’s belief that this work would not be considered gain of function, and accepted EcoHealth’s rationale for this belief,” Rutgers University professor Richard Ebright told the DCNF."
Was it a bio-weapon in the making? Who the F knows. There is a legitimate reason for this research (if you consider the risk is worth it): create new vaccines for potential future pandemics. The US government does not consider this research worth the risk, which is why it forbids GOF research, even as it was covertly funding the same research abroad.
We do know the Chinese military has speculated about the potential "uses" of a weaponised coronavirus
Why would you create a virus that is going to attack your own population as a coronavirus will do?
Er, because they didn't release it deliberately?
This isn't quantum physics, it puzzles me why PB-ers find the "possible" evolution of this virus so difficult to grasp
In the early noughties the Chinese got very interested into bio-research on viruses. Probably for the very good reason that they have a lot of them, what with SARS and the rest. Many pandemics, historically, have started in China
However they didn't have the tech so they asked the West for help in building bio-research labs. In the case of Wuhan they asked the French, but as soon as the lab was up and running, they kicked the French out, and ran it themselves, securing all their own data
From about 2011 (or maybe earlier) the researchers at Wuhan started focusing on coronaviruses in bats (which harbour lots of nasty bugs). They went to mines in Yunnan and harvested bats, and they went to Laos as well (and SARS-Cov-2's closest relatives seem to be in Yunnan and Laos, far from Wuhan).
They took the bats back to Wuhan. They started engineering them to make them nastier and more likely to infect humans - "killer coronaviruses" in their own words. Around the same time Chinese military expressed speculative interest in what a weaponised coronavirus might do - explicitly how it might crush rivals economically, by shattering their health services. Coincidence? Who knows
By 2018 Wuhan was explicitly fucking around with the Furin Cleavage Site of their coronavirus, and doing it in insecure BSL2 labs (not super-secure BSL4 labs, as is desirable) they asked America for more money to further this research (the Americans finally refused, after funding prior research, because they thought this step was too dangerous and unnecessary). Wuhan went ahead anyway, it seems, and started injecting their killer bug into "humanised mice"
In 2019 a novel bat coronavirus of unusual infectiousness and virulence, with some weird alterations at the Furin Cleavage Site, emerged in the middle of Wuhan
You’ve tried your best. Most people don’t understand the way the world really works because they assume everyone’s behaviours, morals and motivations are the same as theirs. Most have fallen for the lie that all cultures are basically the same but with different food, religious traditions and architecture.
Yeah, I should probably give up as it is pointless. I'm not even saying the above scenario is proof of a lab leak, just that it is all on record, and therefore makes "lab leak" distinctly plausible, and therefore a hypothesis which must be seriously considered
The psychological resistance to the hypothesis is damn peculiar. As other pb-ers have noted (you, perhaps?) some people don't just reject the lab leak hypothesis, it makes them bizarrely angry. I have no idea why
Nah, not angry, just bemused why you think that your own belief on the probability of it being true is something the rest of us should weight more heavily than the opinions of the people who actually investigated it and understand it, rather than quote bits from twitter and wikipedia.
We will never know the truth, it is unknowable, as there is significant benefit to create misinformation both suggesting it was a lab leak, and it was not a lab leak. Perhaps a few hundred people in China might know the truth, if that, perhaps no-one knows for sure, the rest of us should just accept it as unknowable. If we really want to assign probabilities to it we should go to the investigators and experts.
But in that case we are not allowed to discuss anything, we can only trade links to peer reviewed journals, which is dull.
Why should this truth be unknowable? We only know most things on the balance of probabilities anyway, and I can't see any reason why the evidence on Covid s origin is never going to pass that test
Indeed. And this remark by @noneoftheabove is particularly stupid in another way. He is suggesting we can never find out where Covid came from, so we must not try?
This virus has so far killed ~20 million people and decimated the global economy. It's really quite important that we know where it came from in case it happens again. This is true whether it came from someone stewing a pangolin or from someone dropping a test tube with a nastified virus inside
If the former, we really need to stop arsing about with rare animals - especially eating them - if the latter, we need to get a grip on labs doing "gain of function" virology
Indeed, I'd say there is enough evidence to suggest we should do both, already
And, also, if it was the lab then some people need to pay the price for their "negligence", and the consequent cover-up. The idea this is all too impossible so let's not bother is just another feature of the mad imbecility that surrounds this issue
Well there is nothing wrong with that and stuff does escape labs. In the UK we had Smallpox in Birmingham and Foot and Mouth in Pirbright, but it doesn't help when you come out with all this nutty stuff.
It isn't just eating rare animals that is an issue. Our domesticated animals are a risk (although bats do seem to be particular peculiar risk and obviously aren't domesticated.). Swine flu turned out to be mild and bird flu although deadly is difficult to transmit between humans (but if it mutates?)
The other question which has not been fully answered is who would pay the cost of any settlement, which could easily be millions of pounds. With Andrew’s financial arrangements shrouded in mystery, until now it has been assumed that the Queen is paying her son’s legal fees. Some reports have also suggested that she would stump up for any settlement.
Yet more rubbish from our non Tory republican LD.
The Queen has a private estate worth hundreds of millions which could easily fund any settlement for the minor royal who is now only 9th in the line of succession
It's not so much whether HMtQ can as whether she should. Apparently.
She can do what she wants with her own money
HYUFD's blind loyalty to our UNELECTED head of state is touching.
I’m with HY! You got a better alternative?
President Blair anyone? Rename RAF the Blairforce?
Why would Blair become President? He'd need to be elected first for fuck's sake! I doubt he'd be popular enough to get the job!
Who’s he up against?
I don't think he's standing!
Why is it assumed that if we became a republic we would need a president?
Okay. What do you suggest then? 🙂
Nothing. Why do we need a PM and President. Let's use some imagination.
As we need an executive branch to command the armed forces, set policy etc. Parliament alone cannot do that
The USA (largest English-speaking nation) only has a Prez, and NOT a PM.
The Speaker of the House of Representatives is the US PM in all but name and has more control over US domestic policy than the President does
The notion that the "Speaker of the House of Representative is the US PM in all but name" is total BS.
Certainly the Speaker, however powerful, is NOT responsible in any way for the Executive Branch (unless and until see succeeds POTUS as per US Constitution, when she would automatically cease to be Speaker).
Do you think Denny Fucking Hasstert was the Prime Minister of the United States? OR even Nancy Pelosi, when #45 was (actual) President? Somehow I doubt it.
The other question which has not been fully answered is who would pay the cost of any settlement, which could easily be millions of pounds. With Andrew’s financial arrangements shrouded in mystery, until now it has been assumed that the Queen is paying her son’s legal fees. Some reports have also suggested that she would stump up for any settlement.
Yet more rubbish from our non Tory republican LD.
The Queen has a private estate worth hundreds of millions which could easily fund any settlement for the minor royal who is now only 9th in the line of succession
It's not so much whether HMtQ can as whether she should. Apparently.
She can do what she wants with her own money
HYUFD's blind loyalty to our UNELECTED head of state is touching.
I’m with HY! You got a better alternative?
President Blair anyone? Rename RAF the Blairforce?
Why would Blair become President? He'd need to be elected first for fuck's sake! I doubt he'd be popular enough to get the job!
Who’s he up against?
I don't think he's standing!
Why is it assumed that if we became a republic we would need a president?
Its a good job he had a snafu with his change of phone....
This paragraph at the very bottom of Geidt's letter to the PM seems very important. He says that if he'd seen the WhatsApp exchange he likely would have found that the PM didn't follow the rules on declaring his interests.
That’s a bit of a shitty statement to include… if he had done this then he would have broken the rules but o can’t prove that he did do this do I’ll just throw it out there…
Comments
Wondering if that great classicist Boris Johnson had the same insight? Even though IMHO he actually had one of his PMQs of recent memory - though of course that ain't saying very much.
AUUKUS confirmed that
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kP2NRjQ4X7o
Anyway they spend most of their time being very charming to the Germans whilst doing everything they can that won't be spotted to undermine them.
The Frenchman is a complex beast! Lord knows how he manages to do so well with the ladies
(Please feel free to flip genders in all the above, or introduce new ones)
IF it was going to be a weapon, and that is an enormous If - which I have repeatedly said - IF IF IF IF IF - then of course they would be developing a vaccine at the same time, so that if - IF IF IF IF IF IF - they ever wanted to release it they would vax their people first, then be seen as the world's saviour as they offered to vax everyone else. But then, oops, shit, it leaks out early? But this is mere and outright conjecture as I have said a trillion times now
You have an IQ of 3 and I refuse to talk to you further
Why should this truth be unknowable? We only know most things on the balance of probabilities anyway, and I can't see any reason why the evidence on Covid s origin is never going to pass that test
That's a lot of PB time.
Note that the official motto of the great State of Washington is "Alki" which Chinook for what is traditionally translated as "By and By" but in more modern parlance would be "Eventually" or (even better) "Mañana".
BTW, the part of (west) Seattle where the original American settlers first landed is the Alki neighborhood. Pronounced "Al (as in Alice) - Kai (as in sky)"
Sunil - your point. Maybe. They'd have an issue in that there is no understanding of quite who it would be. So that'd be a nascent monarchy I guess.
However there's not a chance in hell that the Kim family doesn't get killed in nasty ways well before they can make their dynasty stick.
https://www2.politicalbetting.com/index.php/archives/2015/04/19/is-2015-the-year-the-uk-becomes-belgium/
First revolution Kazakhstan?
First major dilpomatic spat Australia v Serbia about tennis?
Quite a double there.
Year of the ludicrously long odds?
This virus has so far killed ~20 million people and decimated the global economy. It's really quite important that we know where it came from in case it happens again. This is true whether it came from someone stewing a pangolin or from someone dropping a test tube with a nastified virus inside
If the former, we really need to stop arsing about with rare animals - especially eating them - if the latter, we need to get a grip on labs doing "gain of function" virology
Indeed, I'd say there is enough evidence to suggest we should do both, already
And, also, if it was the lab then some people need to pay the price for their "negligence", and the consequent cover-up. The idea this is all too impossible so let's not bother is just another feature of the mad imbecility that surrounds this issue
PS as usual (as with @kinabalu and @IanB2 and no doubt others) you attack others IQs. I suspect you have some sort of inferiority complex on that front when you are out argued. Seems to touch a nerve.
I shall draw a seemly veil over our spat, and move on, for the sake of my own sanity. Have a good day
January was going ok until the boy got wind of census 1921. Then: 'dad. It kinda blows my mind that you were born in the 1900s.'
https://twitter.com/JayMitchinson/status/1479169229358256128
For any of the three to have been playing when one of the other two was around stopped ludicrous amounts of slams won. To have all three at the same time...
I also feel for Andy Murray. In other eras he may have won a lot more slams. Of course it’s possible he was driven to greater heights by the big three.
Whatever. Men’s tennis is entering a new era, where no one, or small group will dominate. In some ways that will be a refreshing change.
Especially as the suspicious research in Wuhan was partly funded by the US government (up to and including Fauci). Both superpowers have a vested interest in Not Finding Out
But just because we can't ever find out for certain doesn't mean - as @IshmaelZ says that we can't find out what is really most likely. And it is pretty important that we at least try, for reasons adduced below
This thread has been prevented from entering Australia
Next question?
Tory peer Michelle Mone secretly involved in PPE firm she referred to government
Exclusive: Leaked files suggest Mone and her husband were involved in business given £200m contracts
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jan/06/tory-peer-michelle-mone-involved-ppe-medpro-government-contracts
BritNat Mone was “incandescent with rage”. I’ll bet she was.
It isn't just eating rare animals that is an issue. Our domesticated animals are a risk (although bats do seem to be particular peculiar risk and obviously aren't domesticated.). Swine flu turned out to be mild and bird flu although deadly is difficult to transmit between humans (but if it mutates?)
‘Scottish bantamweight Kash Farooq has announced his shock retirement from professional boxing at age 26 because of "unforeseen circumstances"’
https://www.bbc.com/sport/boxing/59899037
Certainly the Speaker, however powerful, is NOT responsible in any way for the Executive Branch (unless and until see succeeds POTUS as per US Constitution, when she would automatically cease to be Speaker).
Do you think Denny Fucking Hasstert was the Prime Minister of the United States? OR even Nancy Pelosi, when #45 was (actual) President? Somehow I doubt it.