I'm not totally sure what prompted Krishnan Guru-Murthy's c-bomb but I quite admire Steve Baker. I dislike his religious views but I have a respect for them and him. What ever K G-M thinks, Baker does seem to have integrity in there and he was one of those on the right who saw Boris Johnson for the lying sack of shit that he is.
I hope Rishi keeps him on board.
He also seems to be working well as a Minister in Northern Ireland. Like you, I hope he is kept on, ideally in NI where he has made a good start and which is one of the trickier issues the government has to deal with.
Sunak will be a competent if uninspiring centrist, and grim domestic politics will be out-grimmed by even grimmer world politics. The appetite for profound political upheaval will be dulled. The Tories will unite under Sunak as he becomes their only possible chance of survival
Labour will still win in 24, but not by 30 points. Sunak will claw back support. He might even reduce Labour to NOM
When Leondamus speaks you’d better listen. There’s always surprises on the upside.
Poor guy - no millions of dead Brits from covid, no alien takeover, no Russian nuclear strike, Truss surprises hugely on the downside and is gone, Boris wasn't restored, not even any proof that China released covid deliberately....but sooner or later he must get one right!
Don’t forget his ramping of What3Words, who, according to a PBer last week, are losing money hand over fist.
To choose just one of those alleged predictions of mine, I never said “China released covid deliberately” I said “it came from the lab”
Et voila
“Pre-print:
Endonuclease fingerprint indicates a synthetic origin of SARS-CoV-2
Alright, I had a look last night and will quickly do a thread on it. There are many kinds of 'wrong' in science, but this preprint is False. There are many reasons (links at end), but the main one: the “unusual” sites are all *exactly* found in natural bat coronaviruses. 1/n
Sunak will be a competent if uninspiring centrist, and grim domestic politics will be out-grimmed by even grimmer world politics. The appetite for profound political upheaval will be dulled. The Tories will unite under Sunak as he becomes their only possible chance of survival
Labour will still win in 24, but not by 30 points. Sunak will claw back support. He might even reduce Labour to NOM
When Leondamus speaks you’d better listen. There’s always surprises on the upside.
Poor guy - no millions of dead Brits from covid, no alien takeover, no Russian nuclear strike, Truss surprises hugely on the downside and is gone, Boris wasn't restored, not even any proof that China released covid deliberately....but sooner or later he must get one right!
Don’t forget his ramping of What3Words, who, according to a PBer last week, are losing money hand over fist.
To choose just one of those alleged predictions of mine, I never said “China released covid deliberately” I said “it came from the lab”
Et voila
“Pre-print:
Endonuclease fingerprint indicates a synthetic origin of SARS-CoV-2
"Michael Worobey of the University of Arizona, who co-authored both papers, had previously called on the scientific community in a letter to be more open to the idea that the virus was the result of a lab leak.
But the findings moved him "to the point where now I also think it's just not plausible that this virus was introduced any other way than through the wildlife trade at the Wuhan market," he told reporters on a call about the findings.
Though previous investigation had centered on the live animal market, researchers wanted more evidence to determine it was really the progenitor of the outbreak, as opposed to an amplifier.
This required neighborhood-level study within Wuhan to be more certain the virus was "zoonotic" -- that it jumped from animals to people.
The first study's team used mapping tools to determine the location of the first 174 cases identified by the World Health Organization, finding 155 of them were in Wuhan.
Further, these cases clustered tightly around the market -- and some early patients with no recent history of visiting the market lived very close to it.
Mammals now known to be infectable with the virus -- including red foxes, hog badgers and raccoon dogs, were all sold live in the market, the team showed.
Two introductions to humans
They also tied positive samples from patients in early 2020 to the western portion of the market, which sold live or freshly butchered animals in late 2019.
The tightly confined early cases contrasted with how it radiated throughout the rest of the city by January and February, which the researchers confirmed by drilling into social media check-in data from the Weibo app.
"This tells us the virus was not circulating cryptically," Worobey said in a statement. "It really originated at that market and spread out from there."
Sunak will be a competent if uninspiring centrist, and grim domestic politics will be out-grimmed by even grimmer world politics. The appetite for profound political upheaval will be dulled. The Tories will unite under Sunak as he becomes their only possible chance of survival
Labour will still win in 24, but not by 30 points. Sunak will claw back support. He might even reduce Labour to NOM
Predicts the heavy odds-on shot of a 2024 GE and that the Cons will do better in it than their current historic lows.
Sober, unflashy, deeply dull punditry. New leaf and I like it - like it very much.
There is no bandwagon developing for Penny Mordaunt this morning. Or any big names announcing support for her. But she presses on. So far. There is something of the Johnsons about her.
Sunak will be a competent if uninspiring centrist, and grim domestic politics will be out-grimmed by even grimmer world politics. The appetite for profound political upheaval will be dulled. The Tories will unite under Sunak as he becomes their only possible chance of survival
Labour will still win in 24, but not by 30 points. Sunak will claw back support. He might even reduce Labour to NOM
When Leondamus speaks you’d better listen. There’s always surprises on the upside.
Poor guy - no millions of dead Brits from covid, no alien takeover, no Russian nuclear strike, Truss surprises hugely on the downside and is gone, Boris wasn't restored, not even any proof that China released covid deliberately....but sooner or later he must get one right!
Don’t forget his ramping of What3Words, who, according to a PBer last week, are losing money hand over fist.
Not sure it was "a PBer" so much as their published accounts!
And the published accounts were brought to our attention by… ta da… a PBer.
Delicious snippet from PA: Gavin Williamson spotted entering Rishi Sunak's office in Westminster... he's been somewhat under the radar of late.... not today.
Delicious snippet from PA: Gavin Williamson spotted entering Rishi Sunak's office in Westminster... he's been somewhat under the radar of late.... not today.
Delicious snippet from PA: Gavin Williamson spotted entering Rishi Sunak's office in Westminster... he's been somewhat under the radar of late.... not today.
Not convinced. 10% is a non-trivial proportion of the public even allowing for a misunderestimating of the question.
Sure 10% or whatever the true percentage is is too much, but plenty of surveys have shown that the UK is one of the countries with the lowest levels of racism and anti-immigrant sentiment. Is there still racism in the UK? Of course, and sexism, homophobia, misogyny, sectarianism and dozens of other prejudices, but in almost every area things are far better than they used to be even a few decades ago.
Yeah and if everyone says aren't we doing brilliantly what are those idiots doing on one knee in the footie then it won't improve further.
You can feel Labour searching for the right attack lines on Sunak this morning, can't you?
They are worried.
Classic CR. For what it's worth, this Labourite is not worried for Labour's prospects. In the deep abyss of last week, I came to the conclusion that the best thing for the country was the best thing for Labour. If Tories pull themselves together, it might make victory harder, but it will make it more worthwhile. Boris had to go, but Sunak was not great.
I came to the conclusion that the best leader for the Tories was Mordaunt. The last thing this country needs right now is an out of touch gazillionaire technocratic financier that caused much of the mess leading the country. I am worried in that a Sunak premiership that it will fuel right wing nuts and that will make Labour's job to pull the country together harder.
Delicious snippet from PA: Gavin Williamson spotted entering Rishi Sunak's office in Westminster... he's been somewhat under the radar of late.... not today.
Delicious snippet from PA: Gavin Williamson spotted entering Rishi Sunak's office in Westminster... he's been somewhat under the radar of late.... not today.
So we are about to have our first non-white ethnic minority leader and the vast majority of us don't care. I think that is something to be proud of as a nation. The ugly racism of my youth in the 60s is thankfully a distant memory.
It is perhaps inevitable that the Conservative party will provide this, just as they have provided all 3 female PMs. The Guardian will of course maintain their tropes that the Tory party is misogynist and racist as well as out of touch but can they succeed in persuading anyone but themselves?
I also think this is positive. But I would guard against too much optimism or complacency on this front.
Obama was elected in 2008 at a point where race relations were better than ever before. 8 years later Trump was elected and 12 years on America seems to be descending in to civil war.
I think it unlikely that the UK will follow the same path but the one thing that Braverman and Badenoch are absolutely right about are the dangers with critical race theory. My hope is that Sunak is able to find common ground with the 'right' of the party over this, rather than crawling in to the Rwanda rabbit hole.
Rishi is walking into a trap by avoiding a leadership vote. He will struggle with a reputation as a technocrat regardless. Dodging an election will not help that and will dog his premiership. He will be better if is Mordaunt gets her numbers and triggers a vote.
Balls. Complaining that there is a democratic deficit if the ghastly Con membership is cheated of a vote, is like claiming a democratic deficit if the CEO of Geest unilaterally decides on the next president of Guatemala without consulting the board of directors.
Sunak is literally the son-in-law of one of the world's wealthiest CEOs.
Rishi Rich.
Young, handsome and rich! What's not to like?
He’s a Tory toerag.
The handsome designation for Sunak confuses me a bit, I'll admit. Each to their own I suppose.
Delicious snippet from PA: Gavin Williamson spotted entering Rishi Sunak's office in Westminster... he's been somewhat under the radar of late.... not today.
Sunak will be a competent if uninspiring centrist, and grim domestic politics will be out-grimmed by even grimmer world politics. The appetite for profound political upheaval will be dulled. The Tories will unite under Sunak as he becomes their only possible chance of survival
Labour will still win in 24, but not by 30 points. Sunak will claw back support. He might even reduce Labour to NOM
When Leondamus speaks you’d better listen. There’s always surprises on the upside.
Poor guy - no millions of dead Brits from covid, no alien takeover, no Russian nuclear strike, Truss surprises hugely on the downside and is gone, Boris wasn't restored, not even any proof that China released covid deliberately....but sooner or later he must get one right!
Don’t forget his ramping of What3Words, who, according to a PBer last week, are losing money hand over fist.
To choose just one of those alleged predictions of mine, I never said “China released covid deliberately” I said “it came from the lab”
Et voila
“Pre-print:
Endonuclease fingerprint indicates a synthetic origin of SARS-CoV-2
The jury's out on that one, with conflicting conclusions. We may never know.
Stick to the 2024 election prediction, which is probably a solid one; certainly more so than Truss surprising on the upside or Boris being restored!
But I also never said Boris would be restored. That whole riff about the “Boristoration” was a joke. As would be clear to anyone not seven miles down the autistic spectrum. If you insist I can dig up the context, but it’s a chore
I said Sunak would win. He is going to win
On the other hand I did make those mad remarks about Truss “surprising on the upside”, despite disparaging her earlier in her leadership campaign. I’ve realised i was wishcasting. It was clear she was going to win and I was emotionally keen for her to do well and be a new Thatch - I let my feelings cloud my judgement. Lesson learned!
Mark Francois confirms there will be an ERG statement at midday. The ERG like to vote in a bloc, but have split over weekend with some prominent figures - Braverman, Baker - coming out for Sunak. Now Johnson out, will they agree on Sunak or split?
Mark Francois confirms there will be an ERG statement at midday. The ERG like to vote in a bloc, but have split over weekend with some prominent figures - Braverman, Baker - coming out for Sunak. Now Johnson out, will they agree on Sunak or split?
Mark Francois confirms there will be an ERG statement at midday. The ERG like to vote in a bloc, but have split over weekend with some prominent figures - Braverman, Baker - coming out for Sunak. Now Johnson out, will they agree on Sunak or split?
Choice of Home Secretary will be the big pointer as to this administration. We know precious little about what Sunak's aims are aside from the economy. I hope we get someone who focusses on practical solutions rather than grandstanding for the tabloids.
Mark Francois confirms there will be an ERG statement at midday. The ERG like to vote in a bloc, but have split over weekend with some prominent figures - Braverman, Baker - coming out for Sunak. Now Johnson out, will they agree on Sunak or split?
Rishi is walking into a trap by avoiding a leadership vote. He will struggle with a reputation as a technocrat regardless. Dodging an election will not help that and will dog his premiership. He will be better if is Mordaunt gets her numbers and triggers a vote.
Balls. Complaining that there is a democratic deficit if the ghastly Con membership is cheated of a vote, is like claiming a democratic deficit if the CEO of Geest unilaterally decides on the next president of Guatemala without consulting the board of directors.
Sunak is literally the son-in-law of one of the world's wealthiest CEOs.
Rishi Rich.
Young, handsome and rich! What's not to like?
He’s a Tory toerag.
The handsome designation for Sunak confuses me a bit, I'll admit. Each to their own I suppose.
My wife hates his side parting.
Did she prefer the fringe candidates?
Just another ‘hair today gone tomorrow’ politician.
Mark Francois confirms there will be an ERG statement at midday. The ERG like to vote in a bloc, but have split over weekend with some prominent figures - Braverman, Baker - coming out for Sunak. Now Johnson out, will they agree on Sunak or split?
During the peak of their influence the ERG were ahead of events and consequently able to set the terms of debate. Today they are seriously off the pace.
Choice of Home Secretary will be the big pointer as to this administration. We know precious little about what Sunak's aims are aside from the economy. I hope we get someone who focusses on practical solutions rather than grandstanding for the tabloids.
If Sunak is going for a full on technocratic government, it seems like the best thing to do would be to just keep Shapps in the job.
Choice of Home Secretary will be the big pointer as to this administration. We know precious little about what Sunak's aims are aside from the economy. I hope we get someone who focusses on practical solutions rather than grandstanding for the tabloids.
For reasons of party management it would be useful to have either of the previous Home Secretaries - Patel or Braverman - in the Cabinet, but I do hope that neither of them are anywhere near the criminal justice system.
There's quite a few figures looking for Cabinet-level non-jobs though.
Mark Francois confirms there will be an ERG statement at midday. The ERG like to vote in a bloc, but have split over weekend with some prominent figures - Braverman, Baker - coming out for Sunak. Now Johnson out, will they agree on Sunak or split?
Mark Francois confirms there will be an ERG statement at midday. The ERG like to vote in a bloc, but have split over weekend with some prominent figures - Braverman, Baker - coming out for Sunak. Now Johnson out, will they agree on Sunak or split?
During the peak of their influence the ERG were ahead of events and consequently able to set the terms of debate. Today they are seriously off the pace.
They still seem to think they’re running the show!
Sunak will be a competent if uninspiring centrist, and grim domestic politics will be out-grimmed by even grimmer world politics. The appetite for profound political upheaval will be dulled. The Tories will unite under Sunak as he becomes their only possible chance of survival
Labour will still win in 24, but not by 30 points. Sunak will claw back support. He might even reduce Labour to NOM
When Leondamus speaks you’d better listen. There’s always surprises on the upside.
Poor guy - no millions of dead Brits from covid, no alien takeover, no Russian nuclear strike, Truss surprises hugely on the downside and is gone, Boris wasn't restored, not even any proof that China released covid deliberately....but sooner or later he must get one right!
Don’t forget his ramping of What3Words, who, according to a PBer last week, are losing money hand over fist.
What was his ramping of W3W? I must have missed that.
That was a system always doomed to fail – it had a fatal flaw: if you miswrite or misspell a word (e.g. a homophone) you could end up on the other side of the city/world. Why would anyone think it was a workable idea?
Mark Francois confirms there will be an ERG statement at midday. The ERG like to vote in a bloc, but have split over weekend with some prominent figures - Braverman, Baker - coming out for Sunak. Now Johnson out, will they agree on Sunak or split?
Rishi is walking into a trap by avoiding a leadership vote. He will struggle with a reputation as a technocrat regardless. Dodging an election will not help that and will dog his premiership. He will be better if is Mordaunt gets her numbers and triggers a vote.
Balls. Complaining that there is a democratic deficit if the ghastly Con membership is cheated of a vote, is like claiming a democratic deficit if the CEO of Geest unilaterally decides on the next president of Guatemala without consulting the board of directors.
Sunak is literally the son-in-law of one of the world's wealthiest CEOs.
Rishi Rich.
Young, handsome and rich! What's not to like?
He’s a Tory toerag.
The handsome designation for Sunak confuses me a bit, I'll admit. Each to their own I suppose.
My wife hates his side parting.
Did she prefer the fringe candidates?
Just another ‘hair today gone tomorrow’ politician.
Delicious snippet from PA: Gavin Williamson spotted entering Rishi Sunak's office in Westminster... he's been somewhat under the radar of late.... not today.
Sunak will be a competent if uninspiring centrist, and grim domestic politics will be out-grimmed by even grimmer world politics. The appetite for profound political upheaval will be dulled. The Tories will unite under Sunak as he becomes their only possible chance of survival
Labour will still win in 24, but not by 30 points. Sunak will claw back support. He might even reduce Labour to NOM
When Leondamus speaks you’d better listen. There’s always surprises on the upside.
Poor guy - no millions of dead Brits from covid, no alien takeover, no Russian nuclear strike, Truss surprises hugely on the downside and is gone, Boris wasn't restored, not even any proof that China released covid deliberately....but sooner or later he must get one right!
Don’t forget his ramping of What3Words, who, according to a PBer last week, are losing money hand over fist.
To choose just one of those alleged predictions of mine, I never said “China released covid deliberately” I said “it came from the lab”
Et voila
“Pre-print:
Endonuclease fingerprint indicates a synthetic origin of SARS-CoV-2
"Michael Worobey of the University of Arizona, who co-authored both papers, had previously called on the scientific community in a letter to be more open to the idea that the virus was the result of a lab leak.
But the findings moved him "to the point where now I also think it's just not plausible that this virus was introduced any other way than through the wildlife trade at the Wuhan market," he told reporters on a call about the findings.
Though previous investigation had centered on the live animal market, researchers wanted more evidence to determine it was really the progenitor of the outbreak, as opposed to an amplifier.
This required neighborhood-level study within Wuhan to be more certain the virus was "zoonotic" -- that it jumped from animals to people.
The first study's team used mapping tools to determine the location of the first 174 cases identified by the World Health Organization, finding 155 of them were in Wuhan.
Further, these cases clustered tightly around the market -- and some early patients with no recent history of visiting the market lived very close to it.
Mammals now known to be infectable with the virus -- including red foxes, hog badgers and raccoon dogs, were all sold live in the market, the team showed.
Two introductions to humans
They also tied positive samples from patients in early 2020 to the western portion of the market, which sold live or freshly butchered animals in late 2019.
The tightly confined early cases contrasted with how it radiated throughout the rest of the city by January and February, which the researchers confirmed by drilling into social media check-in data from the Weibo app.
"This tells us the virus was not circulating cryptically," Worobey said in a statement. "It really originated at that market and spread out from there."
Worobey has been almost completely debunked by other scientists
“Two recent publications appear to have bolstered the case for a natural origin connected to a “wet market” ….But critics counter that there are so many missing data about the epidemic’s initial days that this portrait may be inaccurate.”
Moreover the CIRCUMSTANTIAL evidence for lab leak just gets bigger
“china began stockpiling PPE months before Covid outbreak’ China also started to buy up global PPE stocks in Europe, Australia and the US around the same time, experts say”
(A new timeline which, by the way, renders the market hypothesis irrelevant)
It came from the lab. There really isn’t a debate any more. Apart from a few diehard virologists who are desperate to defend their science - and not lose their funding
Mark Francois confirms there will be an ERG statement at midday. The ERG like to vote in a bloc, but have split over weekend with some prominent figures - Braverman, Baker - coming out for Sunak. Now Johnson out, will they agree on Sunak or split?
For some reason Bozo duped many into thinking he was a man of the people . Sunak just won’t be able to do that . Don’t get me wrong I’m very relieved that the oaf has been sent packing but that’s it really !
Sunak will be a competent if uninspiring centrist, and grim domestic politics will be out-grimmed by even grimmer world politics. The appetite for profound political upheaval will be dulled. The Tories will unite under Sunak as he becomes their only possible chance of survival
Labour will still win in 24, but not by 30 points. Sunak will claw back support. He might even reduce Labour to NOM
When Leondamus speaks you’d better listen. There’s always surprises on the upside.
Poor guy - no millions of dead Brits from covid, no alien takeover, no Russian nuclear strike, Truss surprises hugely on the downside and is gone, Boris wasn't restored, not even any proof that China released covid deliberately....but sooner or later he must get one right!
Don’t forget his ramping of What3Words, who, according to a PBer last week, are losing money hand over fist.
What was his ramping of W3W? I must have missed that.
That was a system always doomed to fail – it had a fatal flaw: if you miswrite or misspell a word (e.g. a homophone) you could end up on the other side of the city/world. Why would anyone think it was a workable idea?
Are the words totally random or is there error checking built into their structure (or in similar ways that many computer science algorithms have been developed over the years)?
The obvious thing thing would be that the words together can be encoded into a binary form in a manner such that if the word is corrupted i.e. misspelled that an checksum algorithm fails.
Delicious snippet from PA: Gavin Williamson spotted entering Rishi Sunak's office in Westminster... he's been somewhat under the radar of late.... not today.
Sunak will be a competent if uninspiring centrist, and grim domestic politics will be out-grimmed by even grimmer world politics. The appetite for profound political upheaval will be dulled. The Tories will unite under Sunak as he becomes their only possible chance of survival
Labour will still win in 24, but not by 30 points. Sunak will claw back support. He might even reduce Labour to NOM
When Leondamus speaks you’d better listen. There’s always surprises on the upside.
Poor guy - no millions of dead Brits from covid, no alien takeover, no Russian nuclear strike, Truss surprises hugely on the downside and is gone, Boris wasn't restored, not even any proof that China released covid deliberately....but sooner or later he must get one right!
Don’t forget his ramping of What3Words, who, according to a PBer last week, are losing money hand over fist.
What was his ramping of W3W? I must have missed that.
That was a system always doomed to fail – it had a fatal flaw: if you miswrite or misspell a word (e.g. a homophone) you could end up on the other side of the city/world. Why would anyone think it was a workable idea?
The other side of the world isn't really a problem as that's an obvious error that should be easy to correct.
The problem is when a typo gives a location only a few miles away.
Rishi is walking into a trap by avoiding a leadership vote. He will struggle with a reputation as a technocrat regardless. Dodging an election will not help that and will dog his premiership. He will be better if is Mordaunt gets her numbers and triggers a vote.
Balls. Complaining that there is a democratic deficit if the ghastly Con membership is cheated of a vote, is like claiming a democratic deficit if the CEO of Geest unilaterally decides on the next president of Guatemala without consulting the board of directors.
Sunak is literally the son-in-law of one of the world's wealthiest CEOs.
Rishi Rich.
Young, handsome and rich! What's not to like?
He’s a Tory toerag.
The handsome designation for Sunak confuses me a bit, I'll admit. Each to their own I suppose.
My wife hates his side parting.
Did she prefer the fringe candidates?
Just another ‘hair today gone tomorrow’ politician.
ZSU pushed back the invaders by 2km in the eastern suburb of Bakhmut. The 🇷🇺 were ousted from the asphalt plant. It is reported that the Wagnerians took 2 months of fighting to take these 2km, and they lost them in 48h. We are waiting for confirmation from the General Staff https://twitter.com/TheDeadDistrict/status/1584420230708985856
For some reason Bozo duped many into thinking he was a man of the people . Sunak just won’t be able to do that . Don’t get me wrong I’m very relieved that the oaf has been sent packing but that’s it really !
Might go for the Baker line of support for Sunak but gypsy warnings on NI protocol.
Sunak will be a competent if uninspiring centrist, and grim domestic politics will be out-grimmed by even grimmer world politics. The appetite for profound political upheaval will be dulled. The Tories will unite under Sunak as he becomes their only possible chance of survival
Labour will still win in 24, but not by 30 points. Sunak will claw back support. He might even reduce Labour to NOM
Predicts the heavy odds-on shot of a 2024 GE and that the Cons will do better in it than their current historic lows.
Sober, unflashy, deeply dull punditry. New leaf and I like it - like it very much.
I was replying to @Heathener who is adamant there will be a GE in 23. Can’t see it. No reason why it would happen (barring a Black Sean)
*lol - Black Sean is an autocorrect typo. I’ve kept it for fun as it is so bizarrely apt
Sunak will be a competent if uninspiring centrist, and grim domestic politics will be out-grimmed by even grimmer world politics. The appetite for profound political upheaval will be dulled. The Tories will unite under Sunak as he becomes their only possible chance of survival
Labour will still win in 24, but not by 30 points. Sunak will claw back support. He might even reduce Labour to NOM
When Leondamus speaks you’d better listen. There’s always surprises on the upside.
Poor guy - no millions of dead Brits from covid, no alien takeover, no Russian nuclear strike, Truss surprises hugely on the downside and is gone, Boris wasn't restored, not even any proof that China released covid deliberately....but sooner or later he must get one right!
Don’t forget his ramping of What3Words, who, according to a PBer last week, are losing money hand over fist.
To choose just one of those alleged predictions of mine, I never said “China released covid deliberately” I said “it came from the lab”
Et voila
“Pre-print:
Endonuclease fingerprint indicates a synthetic origin of SARS-CoV-2
The jury's out on that one, with conflicting conclusions. We may never know.
Stick to the 2024 election prediction, which is probably a solid one; certainly more so than Truss surprising on the upside or Boris being restored!
But I also never said Boris would be restored. That whole riff about the “Boristoration” was a joke. As would be clear to anyone not seven miles down the autistic spectrum. If you insist I can dig up the context, but it’s a chore
I said Sunak would win. He is going to win
On the other hand I did make those mad remarks about Truss “surprising on the upside”, despite disparaging her earlier in her leadership campaign. I’ve realised i was wishcasting. It was clear she was going to win and I was emotionally keen for her to do well and be a new Thatch - I let my feelings cloud my judgement. Lesson learned!
And Boris would have turned a new leaf...right, yeah.
Delicious snippet from PA: Gavin Williamson spotted entering Rishi Sunak's office in Westminster... he's been somewhat under the radar of late.... not today.
Mark Francois confirms there will be an ERG statement at midday. The ERG like to vote in a bloc, but have split over weekend with some prominent figures - Braverman, Baker - coming out for Sunak. Now Johnson out, will they agree on Sunak or split?
Sunak will be a competent if uninspiring centrist, and grim domestic politics will be out-grimmed by even grimmer world politics. The appetite for profound political upheaval will be dulled. The Tories will unite under Sunak as he becomes their only possible chance of survival
Labour will still win in 24, but not by 30 points. Sunak will claw back support. He might even reduce Labour to NOM
When Leondamus speaks you’d better listen. There’s always surprises on the upside.
Poor guy - no millions of dead Brits from covid, no alien takeover, no Russian nuclear strike, Truss surprises hugely on the downside and is gone, Boris wasn't restored, not even any proof that China released covid deliberately....but sooner or later he must get one right!
Don’t forget his ramping of What3Words, who, according to a PBer last week, are losing money hand over fist.
To choose just one of those alleged predictions of mine, I never said “China released covid deliberately” I said “it came from the lab”
Et voila
“Pre-print:
Endonuclease fingerprint indicates a synthetic origin of SARS-CoV-2
"Michael Worobey of the University of Arizona, who co-authored both papers, had previously called on the scientific community in a letter to be more open to the idea that the virus was the result of a lab leak.
But the findings moved him "to the point where now I also think it's just not plausible that this virus was introduced any other way than through the wildlife trade at the Wuhan market," he told reporters on a call about the findings.
Though previous investigation had centered on the live animal market, researchers wanted more evidence to determine it was really the progenitor of the outbreak, as opposed to an amplifier.
This required neighborhood-level study within Wuhan to be more certain the virus was "zoonotic" -- that it jumped from animals to people.
The first study's team used mapping tools to determine the location of the first 174 cases identified by the World Health Organization, finding 155 of them were in Wuhan.
Further, these cases clustered tightly around the market -- and some early patients with no recent history of visiting the market lived very close to it.
Mammals now known to be infectable with the virus -- including red foxes, hog badgers and raccoon dogs, were all sold live in the market, the team showed.
Two introductions to humans
They also tied positive samples from patients in early 2020 to the western portion of the market, which sold live or freshly butchered animals in late 2019.
The tightly confined early cases contrasted with how it radiated throughout the rest of the city by January and February, which the researchers confirmed by drilling into social media check-in data from the Weibo app.
"This tells us the virus was not circulating cryptically," Worobey said in a statement. "It really originated at that market and spread out from there."
Worobey has been almost completely debunked by other scientists
“Two recent publications appear to have bolstered the case for a natural origin connected to a “wet market” ….But critics counter that there are so many missing data about the epidemic’s initial days that this portrait may be inaccurate.”
Moreover the CIRCUMSTANTIAL evidence for lab leak just gets bigger
“china began stockpiling PPE months before Covid outbreak’ China also started to buy up global PPE stocks in Europe, Australia and the US around the same time, experts say”
(A new timeline which, by the way, renders the market hypothesis irrelevant)
It came from the lab. There really isn’t a debate any more. Apart from a few diehard virologists who are desperate to defend their science - and not lose their funding
I'm just trying to follow the theory behind the hospital gown thing? They develop a virus in the lab and say, "nice, this will kill lots of people". Then they decided to release it *in their own country* later in the year, so they buy up a load of hospital gowns starting in August??? Alternatively, is the thought that it was in the wild back in like May, and they noticed it spreading out of control, didn't do anything to stop it spreading, but instead said, "hmm, let's let everyone get it, but we're gonna need a hell of a lot of hospital gowns"? Then they managed to keep it a secret until December?
Sunak will be a competent if uninspiring centrist, and grim domestic politics will be out-grimmed by even grimmer world politics. The appetite for profound political upheaval will be dulled. The Tories will unite under Sunak as he becomes their only possible chance of survival
Labour will still win in 24, but not by 30 points. Sunak will claw back support. He might even reduce Labour to NOM
When Leondamus speaks you’d better listen. There’s always surprises on the upside.
Poor guy - no millions of dead Brits from covid, no alien takeover, no Russian nuclear strike, Truss surprises hugely on the downside and is gone, Boris wasn't restored, not even any proof that China released covid deliberately....but sooner or later he must get one right!
Don’t forget his ramping of What3Words, who, according to a PBer last week, are losing money hand over fist.
To choose just one of those alleged predictions of mine, I never said “China released covid deliberately” I said “it came from the lab”
Et voila
“Pre-print:
Endonuclease fingerprint indicates a synthetic origin of SARS-CoV-2
"Michael Worobey of the University of Arizona, who co-authored both papers, had previously called on the scientific community in a letter to be more open to the idea that the virus was the result of a lab leak.
But the findings moved him "to the point where now I also think it's just not plausible that this virus was introduced any other way than through the wildlife trade at the Wuhan market," he told reporters on a call about the findings.
Though previous investigation had centered on the live animal market, researchers wanted more evidence to determine it was really the progenitor of the outbreak, as opposed to an amplifier.
This required neighborhood-level study within Wuhan to be more certain the virus was "zoonotic" -- that it jumped from animals to people.
The first study's team used mapping tools to determine the location of the first 174 cases identified by the World Health Organization, finding 155 of them were in Wuhan.
Further, these cases clustered tightly around the market -- and some early patients with no recent history of visiting the market lived very close to it.
Mammals now known to be infectable with the virus -- including red foxes, hog badgers and raccoon dogs, were all sold live in the market, the team showed.
Two introductions to humans
They also tied positive samples from patients in early 2020 to the western portion of the market, which sold live or freshly butchered animals in late 2019.
The tightly confined early cases contrasted with how it radiated throughout the rest of the city by January and February, which the researchers confirmed by drilling into social media check-in data from the Weibo app.
"This tells us the virus was not circulating cryptically," Worobey said in a statement. "It really originated at that market and spread out from there."
Worobey has been almost completely debunked by other scientists
“Two recent publications appear to have bolstered the case for a natural origin connected to a “wet market” ….But critics counter that there are so many missing data about the epidemic’s initial days that this portrait may be inaccurate.”
Moreover the CIRCUMSTANTIAL evidence for lab leak just gets bigger
“china began stockpiling PPE months before Covid outbreak’ China also started to buy up global PPE stocks in Europe, Australia and the US around the same time, experts say”
(A new timeline which, by the way, renders the market hypothesis irrelevant)
It came from the lab. There really isn’t a debate any more. Apart from a few diehard virologists who are desperate to defend their science - and not lose their funding
All you've got "debunked by other scientists" while you happily post away from every conspiracy theorist that takes your fancy on the internet.
Every time someone posts something that says it didn't you come up with "debunked by other scientists", "pay of the Chinese" etc. etc. Just accept you might be mistaken as you so often are. Please. Like you were with Truss, Aliens etc etc. You're often wrong so you must be used to it by now
For some reason Bozo duped many into thinking he was a man of the people . Sunak just won’t be able to do that . Don’t get me wrong I’m very relieved that the oaf has been sent packing but that’s it really !
Might go for the Baker line of support for Sunak but gypsy warnings on NI protocol.
Sunak will be a competent if uninspiring centrist, and grim domestic politics will be out-grimmed by even grimmer world politics. The appetite for profound political upheaval will be dulled. The Tories will unite under Sunak as he becomes their only possible chance of survival
Labour will still win in 24, but not by 30 points. Sunak will claw back support. He might even reduce Labour to NOM
When Leondamus speaks you’d better listen. There’s always surprises on the upside.
Poor guy - no millions of dead Brits from covid, no alien takeover, no Russian nuclear strike, Truss surprises hugely on the downside and is gone, Boris wasn't restored, not even any proof that China released covid deliberately....but sooner or later he must get one right!
Don’t forget his ramping of What3Words, who, according to a PBer last week, are losing money hand over fist.
To choose just one of those alleged predictions of mine, I never said “China released covid deliberately” I said “it came from the lab”
Et voila
“Pre-print:
Endonuclease fingerprint indicates a synthetic origin of SARS-CoV-2
"Michael Worobey of the University of Arizona, who co-authored both papers, had previously called on the scientific community in a letter to be more open to the idea that the virus was the result of a lab leak.
But the findings moved him "to the point where now I also think it's just not plausible that this virus was introduced any other way than through the wildlife trade at the Wuhan market," he told reporters on a call about the findings.
Though previous investigation had centered on the live animal market, researchers wanted more evidence to determine it was really the progenitor of the outbreak, as opposed to an amplifier.
This required neighborhood-level study within Wuhan to be more certain the virus was "zoonotic" -- that it jumped from animals to people.
The first study's team used mapping tools to determine the location of the first 174 cases identified by the World Health Organization, finding 155 of them were in Wuhan.
Further, these cases clustered tightly around the market -- and some early patients with no recent history of visiting the market lived very close to it.
Mammals now known to be infectable with the virus -- including red foxes, hog badgers and raccoon dogs, were all sold live in the market, the team showed.
Two introductions to humans
They also tied positive samples from patients in early 2020 to the western portion of the market, which sold live or freshly butchered animals in late 2019.
The tightly confined early cases contrasted with how it radiated throughout the rest of the city by January and February, which the researchers confirmed by drilling into social media check-in data from the Weibo app.
"This tells us the virus was not circulating cryptically," Worobey said in a statement. "It really originated at that market and spread out from there."
...“China began stockpiling PPE months before Covid outbreak’ China also started to buy up global PPE stocks in Europe, Australia and the US around the same time, experts say”
(A new timeline which, by the way, renders the market hypothesis irrelevant)
It came from the lab. There really isn’t a debate any more. Apart from a few diehard virologists who are desperate to defend their science - and not lose their funding
Such 'circumstantial evidence' would also render your lab leak hypothesis irrelevant.
Sunak will be a competent if uninspiring centrist, and grim domestic politics will be out-grimmed by even grimmer world politics. The appetite for profound political upheaval will be dulled. The Tories will unite under Sunak as he becomes their only possible chance of survival
Labour will still win in 24, but not by 30 points. Sunak will claw back support. He might even reduce Labour to NOM
When Leondamus speaks you’d better listen. There’s always surprises on the upside.
Poor guy - no millions of dead Brits from covid, no alien takeover, no Russian nuclear strike, Truss surprises hugely on the downside and is gone, Boris wasn't restored, not even any proof that China released covid deliberately....but sooner or later he must get one right!
Don’t forget his ramping of What3Words, who, according to a PBer last week, are losing money hand over fist.
What was his ramping of W3W? I must have missed that.
That was a system always doomed to fail – it had a fatal flaw: if you miswrite or misspell a word (e.g. a homophone) you could end up on the other side of the city/world. Why would anyone think it was a workable idea?
Are the words totally random or is there error checking built into their structure (or in similar ways that many computer science algorithms have been developed over the years)?
The obvious thing thing would be that the words together can be encoded into a binary form in a manner such that if the word is corrupted i.e. misspelled that an checksum algorithm fails.
I'm not sure exactly how the algorithm works but as with so many things designed by tech bros who rarely leave their own bedroom, its dangerously flawed to the point where one cannot rely on it. Wiki tells me that Mountain Rescue England & Wales have counselled against using it – a fairly fatal blow I would have thought!
Sunak will be a competent if uninspiring centrist, and grim domestic politics will be out-grimmed by even grimmer world politics. The appetite for profound political upheaval will be dulled. The Tories will unite under Sunak as he becomes their only possible chance of survival
Labour will still win in 24, but not by 30 points. Sunak will claw back support. He might even reduce Labour to NOM
When Leondamus speaks you’d better listen. There’s always surprises on the upside.
Poor guy - no millions of dead Brits from covid, no alien takeover, no Russian nuclear strike, Truss surprises hugely on the downside and is gone, Boris wasn't restored, not even any proof that China released covid deliberately....but sooner or later he must get one right!
Don’t forget his ramping of What3Words, who, according to a PBer last week, are losing money hand over fist.
To choose just one of those alleged predictions of mine, I never said “China released covid deliberately” I said “it came from the lab”
Et voila
“Pre-print:
Endonuclease fingerprint indicates a synthetic origin of SARS-CoV-2
"Michael Worobey of the University of Arizona, who co-authored both papers, had previously called on the scientific community in a letter to be more open to the idea that the virus was the result of a lab leak.
But the findings moved him "to the point where now I also think it's just not plausible that this virus was introduced any other way than through the wildlife trade at the Wuhan market," he told reporters on a call about the findings.
Though previous investigation had centered on the live animal market, researchers wanted more evidence to determine it was really the progenitor of the outbreak, as opposed to an amplifier.
This required neighborhood-level study within Wuhan to be more certain the virus was "zoonotic" -- that it jumped from animals to people.
The first study's team used mapping tools to determine the location of the first 174 cases identified by the World Health Organization, finding 155 of them were in Wuhan.
Further, these cases clustered tightly around the market -- and some early patients with no recent history of visiting the market lived very close to it.
Mammals now known to be infectable with the virus -- including red foxes, hog badgers and raccoon dogs, were all sold live in the market, the team showed.
Two introductions to humans
They also tied positive samples from patients in early 2020 to the western portion of the market, which sold live or freshly butchered animals in late 2019.
The tightly confined early cases contrasted with how it radiated throughout the rest of the city by January and February, which the researchers confirmed by drilling into social media check-in data from the Weibo app.
"This tells us the virus was not circulating cryptically," Worobey said in a statement. "It really originated at that market and spread out from there."
Worobey has been almost completely debunked by other scientists
“Two recent publications appear to have bolstered the case for a natural origin connected to a “wet market” ….But critics counter that there are so many missing data about the epidemic’s initial days that this portrait may be inaccurate.”
Moreover the CIRCUMSTANTIAL evidence for lab leak just gets bigger
“china began stockpiling PPE months before Covid outbreak’ China also started to buy up global PPE stocks in Europe, Australia and the US around the same time, experts say”
(A new timeline which, by the way, renders the market hypothesis irrelevant)
It came from the lab. There really isn’t a debate any more. Apart from a few diehard virologists who are desperate to defend their science - and not lose their funding
All you've got "debunked by other scientists" while you happily post away from every conspiracy theorist that takes your fancy on the internet.
Every time someone posts something that says it didn't you come up with "debunked by other scientists", "pay of the Chinese" etc. etc. Just accept you might be mistaken as you so often are. Please. Like you were with Truss, Aliens etc etc. You're often wrong so you must be used to it by now
Ok, how about Francois Balloux of UCL - who was excellently lucid on covid-the-disease. His response to this paper
“This is an important piece of work. To me, it looks solid both conceptually and methodologically. I was given advance warning and was able to replicate the key findings. To the best of my knowledge, I confirm the reported patterns are genuine”
“The distribution of restriction sites in SARS-CoV-2 is highly atypical when compared to related viruses in circulation, and far more in line with previous lab-engineered coronaviruses. This is a troubling finding, which requires scrutiny.”
“These findings are not 'final and dispositive', but they can't be ignored either. To me, this is by far the strongest piece of evidence to date against a simple scenario of strict zoonotic origin for SARS-CoV-2.””
“I anticipate Covid twitter will combust in an implosion of rage and fury over this preprint. In an ideal world, this is not what should happen.”
Sunak will be a competent if uninspiring centrist, and grim domestic politics will be out-grimmed by even grimmer world politics. The appetite for profound political upheaval will be dulled. The Tories will unite under Sunak as he becomes their only possible chance of survival
Labour will still win in 24, but not by 30 points. Sunak will claw back support. He might even reduce Labour to NOM
When Leondamus speaks you’d better listen. There’s always surprises on the upside.
Poor guy - no millions of dead Brits from covid, no alien takeover, no Russian nuclear strike, Truss surprises hugely on the downside and is gone, Boris wasn't restored, not even any proof that China released covid deliberately....but sooner or later he must get one right!
Don’t forget his ramping of What3Words, who, according to a PBer last week, are losing money hand over fist.
What was his ramping of W3W? I must have missed that.
That was a system always doomed to fail – it had a fatal flaw: if you miswrite or misspell a word (e.g. a homophone) you could end up on the other side of the city/world. Why would anyone think it was a workable idea?
Are the words totally random or is there error checking built into their structure (or in similar ways that many computer science algorithms have been developed over the years)?
The obvious thing thing would be that the words together can be encoded into a binary form in a manner such that if the word is corrupted i.e. misspelled that an checksum algorithm fails.
I'm not sure exactly how the algorithm works but as with so many things designed by tech bros who rarely leave their own bedroom, its dangerously flawed to the point where one cannot rely on it. Wiki tells me that Mountain Rescue England & Wales have counselled against using it – a fairly fatal blow I would have thought!
Well, its a huge flaw if it doesn't have even basic checksum type error checking....a really clever system would not only notice a typo but also self correct even given 1-2 letters being mistyped i.e. still know what the location was you actually meant.
That how huge parts of sending files over the internet work and these error checking algorithms are normally part of any decent undergraduate computer science course. And that is why naively I presumed that would be a fundamental part of any such attempt at simplification of location coordinates....cogs start whirling about a new start-up ;-)
Mark Francois confirms there will be an ERG statement at midday. The ERG like to vote in a bloc, but have split over weekend with some prominent figures - Braverman, Baker - coming out for Sunak. Now Johnson out, will they agree on Sunak or split?
Sunak will be a competent if uninspiring centrist, and grim domestic politics will be out-grimmed by even grimmer world politics. The appetite for profound political upheaval will be dulled. The Tories will unite under Sunak as he becomes their only possible chance of survival
Labour will still win in 24, but not by 30 points. Sunak will claw back support. He might even reduce Labour to NOM
When Leondamus speaks you’d better listen. There’s always surprises on the upside.
Poor guy - no millions of dead Brits from covid, no alien takeover, no Russian nuclear strike, Truss surprises hugely on the downside and is gone, Boris wasn't restored, not even any proof that China released covid deliberately....but sooner or later he must get one right!
Don’t forget his ramping of What3Words, who, according to a PBer last week, are losing money hand over fist.
What was his ramping of W3W? I must have missed that.
That was a system always doomed to fail – it had a fatal flaw: if you miswrite or misspell a word (e.g. a homophone) you could end up on the other side of the city/world. Why would anyone think it was a workable idea?
Are the words totally random or is there error checking built into their structure (or in similar ways that many computer science algorithms have been developed over the years)?
The obvious thing thing would be that the words together can be encoded into a binary form in a manner such that if the word is corrupted i.e. misspelled that an checksum algorithm fails.
I'm not sure exactly how the algorithm works but as with so many things designed by tech bros who rarely leave their own bedroom, its dangerously flawed to the point where one cannot rely on it. Wiki tells me that Mountain Rescue England & Wales have counselled against using it – a fairly fatal blow I would have thought!
Well, its a huge flaw if it doesn't have even basic checksum type error checking....a really clever system would not only notice a typo but also self correct say 1-2 letters being mistyped i.e. still now what the location was you actually meant.
That how huge parts of sending files over the internet work and these error checking algorithms are normally part of any decent undergraduate computer science course. And that is why naively I presumed that would be a fundamental part of any such attempt at simplification of location coordinates.
Oh my god - if you all start that conversation again I might have to leave the site forever.
My house has the W3W location Expect Serene Waters (changed slightly while keeping the meaning) - which was amusing until the divorce.
Sunak will be a competent if uninspiring centrist, and grim domestic politics will be out-grimmed by even grimmer world politics. The appetite for profound political upheaval will be dulled. The Tories will unite under Sunak as he becomes their only possible chance of survival
Labour will still win in 24, but not by 30 points. Sunak will claw back support. He might even reduce Labour to NOM
When Leondamus speaks you’d better listen. There’s always surprises on the upside.
Poor guy - no millions of dead Brits from covid, no alien takeover, no Russian nuclear strike, Truss surprises hugely on the downside and is gone, Boris wasn't restored, not even any proof that China released covid deliberately....but sooner or later he must get one right!
Don’t forget his ramping of What3Words, who, according to a PBer last week, are losing money hand over fist.
What was his ramping of W3W? I must have missed that.
That was a system always doomed to fail – it had a fatal flaw: if you miswrite or misspell a word (e.g. a homophone) you could end up on the other side of the city/world. Why would anyone think it was a workable idea?
Logic is not Sean’s area of strength.
Apart from being a superlative tosser, we’re still trying to identify his USPs
Sunak will be a competent if uninspiring centrist, and grim domestic politics will be out-grimmed by even grimmer world politics. The appetite for profound political upheaval will be dulled. The Tories will unite under Sunak as he becomes their only possible chance of survival
Labour will still win in 24, but not by 30 points. Sunak will claw back support. He might even reduce Labour to NOM
When Leondamus speaks you’d better listen. There’s always surprises on the upside.
Poor guy - no millions of dead Brits from covid, no alien takeover, no Russian nuclear strike, Truss surprises hugely on the downside and is gone, Boris wasn't restored, not even any proof that China released covid deliberately....but sooner or later he must get one right!
Don’t forget his ramping of What3Words, who, according to a PBer last week, are losing money hand over fist.
To choose just one of those alleged predictions of mine, I never said “China released covid deliberately” I said “it came from the lab”
Et voila
“Pre-print:
Endonuclease fingerprint indicates a synthetic origin of SARS-CoV-2
"Michael Worobey of the University of Arizona, who co-authored both papers, had previously called on the scientific community in a letter to be more open to the idea that the virus was the result of a lab leak.
But the findings moved him "to the point where now I also think it's just not plausible that this virus was introduced any other way than through the wildlife trade at the Wuhan market," he told reporters on a call about the findings.
Though previous investigation had centered on the live animal market, researchers wanted more evidence to determine it was really the progenitor of the outbreak, as opposed to an amplifier.
This required neighborhood-level study within Wuhan to be more certain the virus was "zoonotic" -- that it jumped from animals to people.
The first study's team used mapping tools to determine the location of the first 174 cases identified by the World Health Organization, finding 155 of them were in Wuhan.
Further, these cases clustered tightly around the market -- and some early patients with no recent history of visiting the market lived very close to it.
Mammals now known to be infectable with the virus -- including red foxes, hog badgers and raccoon dogs, were all sold live in the market, the team showed.
Two introductions to humans
They also tied positive samples from patients in early 2020 to the western portion of the market, which sold live or freshly butchered animals in late 2019.
The tightly confined early cases contrasted with how it radiated throughout the rest of the city by January and February, which the researchers confirmed by drilling into social media check-in data from the Weibo app.
"This tells us the virus was not circulating cryptically," Worobey said in a statement. "It really originated at that market and spread out from there."
Worobey has been almost completely debunked by other scientists
“Two recent publications appear to have bolstered the case for a natural origin connected to a “wet market” ….But critics counter that there are so many missing data about the epidemic’s initial days that this portrait may be inaccurate.”
Moreover the CIRCUMSTANTIAL evidence for lab leak just gets bigger
“china began stockpiling PPE months before Covid outbreak’ China also started to buy up global PPE stocks in Europe, Australia and the US around the same time, experts say”
(A new timeline which, by the way, renders the market hypothesis irrelevant)
It came from the lab. There really isn’t a debate any more. Apart from a few diehard virologists who are desperate to defend their science - and not lose their funding
All you've got "debunked by other scientists" while you happily post away from every conspiracy theorist that takes your fancy on the internet.
Every time someone posts something that says it didn't you come up with "debunked by other scientists", "pay of the Chinese" etc. etc. Just accept you might be mistaken as you so often are. Please. Like you were with Truss, Aliens etc etc. You're often wrong so you must be used to it by now
Ok, how about Francois Balloux of UCL - who was excellently lucid on covid-the-disease. His response to this paper
“This is an important piece of work. To me, it looks solid both conceptually and methodologically. I was given advance warning and was able to replicate the key findings. To the best of my knowledge, I confirm the reported patterns are genuine”
“The distribution of restriction sites in SARS-CoV-2 is highly atypical when compared to related viruses in circulation, and far more in line with previous lab-engineered coronaviruses. This is a troubling finding, which requires scrutiny.”
“These findings are not 'final and dispositive', but they can't be ignored either. To me, this is by far the strongest piece of evidence to date against a simple scenario of strict zoonotic origin for SARS-CoV-2.””
“I anticipate Covid twitter will combust in an implosion of rage and fury over this preprint. In an ideal world, this is not what should happen.”
Sounds like Team Mordaunt is deeply spilt right now. Dame Andrea Leadsom is urging her to fight on and try and get to 100, but other PM supporters are calling on her to end the contest today - pointing out with so many MPs behind Sunak, any victory would be pyrrhic. https://twitter.com/SebastianEPayne/status/1584492937504702465
ZSU pushed back the invaders by 2km in the eastern suburb of Bakhmut. The 🇷🇺 were ousted from the asphalt plant. It is reported that the Wagnerians took 2 months of fighting to take these 2km, and they lost them in 48h. We are waiting for confirmation from the General Staff https://twitter.com/TheDeadDistrict/status/1584420230708985856
How terrible, if Wagner are going to have to pay back their results-based remuneration....
Sunak will be a competent if uninspiring centrist, and grim domestic politics will be out-grimmed by even grimmer world politics. The appetite for profound political upheaval will be dulled. The Tories will unite under Sunak as he becomes their only possible chance of survival
Labour will still win in 24, but not by 30 points. Sunak will claw back support. He might even reduce Labour to NOM
When Leondamus speaks you’d better listen. There’s always surprises on the upside.
Poor guy - no millions of dead Brits from covid, no alien takeover, no Russian nuclear strike, Truss surprises hugely on the downside and is gone, Boris wasn't restored, not even any proof that China released covid deliberately....but sooner or later he must get one right!
Don’t forget his ramping of What3Words, who, according to a PBer last week, are losing money hand over fist.
What was his ramping of W3W? I must have missed that.
That was a system always doomed to fail – it had a fatal flaw: if you miswrite or misspell a word (e.g. a homophone) you could end up on the other side of the city/world. Why would anyone think it was a workable idea?
Are the words totally random or is there error checking built into their structure (or in similar ways that many computer science algorithms have been developed over the years)?
The obvious thing thing would be that the words together can be encoded into a binary form in a manner such that if the word is corrupted i.e. misspelled that an checksum algorithm fails.
I'm not sure exactly how the algorithm works but as with so many things designed by tech bros who rarely leave their own bedroom, its dangerously flawed to the point where one cannot rely on it. Wiki tells me that Mountain Rescue England & Wales have counselled against using it – a fairly fatal blow I would have thought!
The thing is the basic idea - using a smaller number of words to define a location instead of a large number of numbers - is a really good one. It's only the particular implementation that is bad.
You could construct a word set that didn't include plurals and homophones. You could have error-checking built-in. The algorithm for distributing the words could avoid the issues with similar combinations being near-neighbors, etc.
They have a really poor implementation and hopefully when they go bust the idea will be bought up by someone else who implements it in a better way.
This isn't unusual. The version of Morse code that became most widely used wasn't the first version created. At the moment their continued survival and patent is blocking the innovation that would improve the idea.
My preference was Penny. However, now Rishi has got a majority of Tory MPs supporting him she needs to stand down. Likely there will be an opening for Tory leader in the next 2 years which she will be in prime place for.
Sunak will be a competent if uninspiring centrist, and grim domestic politics will be out-grimmed by even grimmer world politics. The appetite for profound political upheaval will be dulled. The Tories will unite under Sunak as he becomes their only possible chance of survival
Labour will still win in 24, but not by 30 points. Sunak will claw back support. He might even reduce Labour to NOM
When Leondamus speaks you’d better listen. There’s always surprises on the upside.
Poor guy - no millions of dead Brits from covid, no alien takeover, no Russian nuclear strike, Truss surprises hugely on the downside and is gone, Boris wasn't restored, not even any proof that China released covid deliberately....but sooner or later he must get one right!
Don’t forget his ramping of What3Words, who, according to a PBer last week, are losing money hand over fist.
What was his ramping of W3W? I must have missed that.
That was a system always doomed to fail – it had a fatal flaw: if you miswrite or misspell a word (e.g. a homophone) you could end up on the other side of the city/world. Why would anyone think it was a workable idea?
Are the words totally random or is there error checking built into their structure (or in similar ways that many computer science algorithms have been developed over the years)?
The obvious thing thing would be that the words together can be encoded into a binary form in a manner such that if the word is corrupted i.e. misspelled that an checksum algorithm fails.
I'm not sure exactly how the algorithm works but as with so many things designed by tech bros who rarely leave their own bedroom, its dangerously flawed to the point where one cannot rely on it. Wiki tells me that Mountain Rescue England & Wales have counselled against using it – a fairly fatal blow I would have thought!
Well, its a huge flaw if it doesn't have even basic checksum type error checking....a really clever system would not only notice a typo but also self correct say 1-2 letters being mistyped i.e. still now what the location was you actually meant.
That how huge parts of sending files over the internet work and these error checking algorithms are normally part of any decent undergraduate computer science course. And that is why naively I presumed that would be a fundamental part of any such attempt at simplification of location coordinates.
Oh my god - if you all start that conversation again I might have to leave the site forever.
My house has the W3W location Expect Serene Waters (changed slightly while keeping the meaning) - which was amusing until the divorce.
Genuine LOL.
Not the actual divorce. Obviously. My commiserations.
Sunak will be a competent if uninspiring centrist, and grim domestic politics will be out-grimmed by even grimmer world politics. The appetite for profound political upheaval will be dulled. The Tories will unite under Sunak as he becomes their only possible chance of survival
Labour will still win in 24, but not by 30 points. Sunak will claw back support. He might even reduce Labour to NOM
When Leondamus speaks you’d better listen. There’s always surprises on the upside.
Poor guy - no millions of dead Brits from covid, no alien takeover, no Russian nuclear strike, Truss surprises hugely on the downside and is gone, Boris wasn't restored, not even any proof that China released covid deliberately....but sooner or later he must get one right!
Don’t forget his ramping of What3Words, who, according to a PBer last week, are losing money hand over fist.
To choose just one of those alleged predictions of mine, I never said “China released covid deliberately” I said “it came from the lab”
Et voila
“Pre-print:
Endonuclease fingerprint indicates a synthetic origin of SARS-CoV-2
"Michael Worobey of the University of Arizona, who co-authored both papers, had previously called on the scientific community in a letter to be more open to the idea that the virus was the result of a lab leak.
But the findings moved him "to the point where now I also think it's just not plausible that this virus was introduced any other way than through the wildlife trade at the Wuhan market," he told reporters on a call about the findings.
Though previous investigation had centered on the live animal market, researchers wanted more evidence to determine it was really the progenitor of the outbreak, as opposed to an amplifier.
This required neighborhood-level study within Wuhan to be more certain the virus was "zoonotic" -- that it jumped from animals to people.
The first study's team used mapping tools to determine the location of the first 174 cases identified by the World Health Organization, finding 155 of them were in Wuhan.
Further, these cases clustered tightly around the market -- and some early patients with no recent history of visiting the market lived very close to it.
Mammals now known to be infectable with the virus -- including red foxes, hog badgers and raccoon dogs, were all sold live in the market, the team showed.
Two introductions to humans
They also tied positive samples from patients in early 2020 to the western portion of the market, which sold live or freshly butchered animals in late 2019.
The tightly confined early cases contrasted with how it radiated throughout the rest of the city by January and February, which the researchers confirmed by drilling into social media check-in data from the Weibo app.
"This tells us the virus was not circulating cryptically," Worobey said in a statement. "It really originated at that market and spread out from there."
Worobey has been almost completely debunked by other scientists
“Two recent publications appear to have bolstered the case for a natural origin connected to a “wet market” ….But critics counter that there are so many missing data about the epidemic’s initial days that this portrait may be inaccurate.”
Moreover the CIRCUMSTANTIAL evidence for lab leak just gets bigger
“china began stockpiling PPE months before Covid outbreak’ China also started to buy up global PPE stocks in Europe, Australia and the US around the same time, experts say”
(A new timeline which, by the way, renders the market hypothesis irrelevant)
It came from the lab. There really isn’t a debate any more. Apart from a few diehard virologists who are desperate to defend their science - and not lose their funding
I'm just trying to follow the theory behind the hospital gown thing? They develop a virus in the lab and say, "nice, this will kill lots of people". Then they decided to release it *in their own country* later in the year, so they buy up a load of hospital gowns starting in August??? Alternatively, is the thought that it was in the wild back in like May, and they noticed it spreading out of control, didn't do anything to stop it spreading, but instead said, "hmm, let's let everyone get it, but we're gonna need a hell of a lot of hospital gowns"? Then they managed to keep it a secret until December?
You make a good point and I’ve thought about this beforehand
The weird PPE timeline seems to render all the early wet market data nonsensical (so that means Worobey et al have spent months researching irrelevant data)
What does it do to lab leak? It means that IF there was a lab leak it must have happened earlier than we think: the Chinese tried to contain it, they failed. Then it spread via the market (which is 300 yards from the nearest bat lab). In those intervening weeks China took precautions?
My preference was Penny. However, now Rishi has got a majority of Tory MPs supporting him she needs to stand down. Likely there will be an opening for Tory leader in the next 2 years which she will be in prime place for.
My position exactly.
And probably mirrored by a number of her supposed supporting MPs. Suspect she will be losing support from hereon. 100 out of reach.
Sounds like Team Mordaunt is deeply spilt right now. Dame Andrea Leadsom is urging her to fight on and try and get to 100, but other PM supporters are calling on her to end the contest today - pointing out with so many MPs behind Sunak, any victory would be pyrrhic. https://twitter.com/SebastianEPayne/status/1584492937504702465
If she gets 100 (Which I doubt) and wins a members vote (Which I also don't see) the Tories will be utterly wrecked next GE.
Sunak will be a competent if uninspiring centrist, and grim domestic politics will be out-grimmed by even grimmer world politics. The appetite for profound political upheaval will be dulled. The Tories will unite under Sunak as he becomes their only possible chance of survival
Labour will still win in 24, but not by 30 points. Sunak will claw back support. He might even reduce Labour to NOM
When Leondamus speaks you’d better listen. There’s always surprises on the upside.
Poor guy - no millions of dead Brits from covid, no alien takeover, no Russian nuclear strike, Truss surprises hugely on the downside and is gone, Boris wasn't restored, not even any proof that China released covid deliberately....but sooner or later he must get one right!
Don’t forget his ramping of What3Words, who, according to a PBer last week, are losing money hand over fist.
What was his ramping of W3W? I must have missed that.
That was a system always doomed to fail – it had a fatal flaw: if you miswrite or misspell a word (e.g. a homophone) you could end up on the other side of the city/world. Why would anyone think it was a workable idea?
He went on about it for about two days. Solid.
I’m convinced these little episodes of his are squirrel spotting on steroids. I certainly hope so. The alternative explanation is discomforting.
Sunak will be a competent if uninspiring centrist, and grim domestic politics will be out-grimmed by even grimmer world politics. The appetite for profound political upheaval will be dulled. The Tories will unite under Sunak as he becomes their only possible chance of survival
Labour will still win in 24, but not by 30 points. Sunak will claw back support. He might even reduce Labour to NOM
When Leondamus speaks you’d better listen. There’s always surprises on the upside.
Poor guy - no millions of dead Brits from covid, no alien takeover, no Russian nuclear strike, Truss surprises hugely on the downside and is gone, Boris wasn't restored, not even any proof that China released covid deliberately....but sooner or later he must get one right!
Don’t forget his ramping of What3Words, who, according to a PBer last week, are losing money hand over fist.
To choose just one of those alleged predictions of mine, I never said “China released covid deliberately” I said “it came from the lab”
Et voila
“Pre-print:
Endonuclease fingerprint indicates a synthetic origin of SARS-CoV-2
"Michael Worobey of the University of Arizona, who co-authored both papers, had previously called on the scientific community in a letter to be more open to the idea that the virus was the result of a lab leak.
But the findings moved him "to the point where now I also think it's just not plausible that this virus was introduced any other way than through the wildlife trade at the Wuhan market," he told reporters on a call about the findings.
Though previous investigation had centered on the live animal market, researchers wanted more evidence to determine it was really the progenitor of the outbreak, as opposed to an amplifier.
This required neighborhood-level study within Wuhan to be more certain the virus was "zoonotic" -- that it jumped from animals to people.
The first study's team used mapping tools to determine the location of the first 174 cases identified by the World Health Organization, finding 155 of them were in Wuhan.
Further, these cases clustered tightly around the market -- and some early patients with no recent history of visiting the market lived very close to it.
Mammals now known to be infectable with the virus -- including red foxes, hog badgers and raccoon dogs, were all sold live in the market, the team showed.
Two introductions to humans
They also tied positive samples from patients in early 2020 to the western portion of the market, which sold live or freshly butchered animals in late 2019.
The tightly confined early cases contrasted with how it radiated throughout the rest of the city by January and February, which the researchers confirmed by drilling into social media check-in data from the Weibo app.
"This tells us the virus was not circulating cryptically," Worobey said in a statement. "It really originated at that market and spread out from there."
Worobey has been almost completely debunked by other scientists
“Two recent publications appear to have bolstered the case for a natural origin connected to a “wet market” ….But critics counter that there are so many missing data about the epidemic’s initial days that this portrait may be inaccurate.”
Moreover the CIRCUMSTANTIAL evidence for lab leak just gets bigger
“china began stockpiling PPE months before Covid outbreak’ China also started to buy up global PPE stocks in Europe, Australia and the US around the same time, experts say”
(A new timeline which, by the way, renders the market hypothesis irrelevant)
It came from the lab. There really isn’t a debate any more. Apart from a few diehard virologists who are desperate to defend their science - and not lose their funding
I'm just trying to follow the theory behind the hospital gown thing? They develop a virus in the lab and say, "nice, this will kill lots of people". Then they decided to release it *in their own country* later in the year, so they buy up a load of hospital gowns starting in August??? Alternatively, is the thought that it was in the wild back in like May, and they noticed it spreading out of control, didn't do anything to stop it spreading, but instead said, "hmm, let's let everyone get it, but we're gonna need a hell of a lot of hospital gowns"? Then they managed to keep it a secret until December?
You make a good point and I’ve thought about this beforehand
The weird PPE timeline seems to render all the early wet market data nonsensical (so that means Worobey et al have spent months researching irrelevant data)
What does it do to lab leak? It means that IF there was a lab leak it must have happened earlier than we think: the Chinese tried to contain it, they failed. Then it spread via the market (which is 300 yards from the nearest bat lab). In those intervening weeks China took precautions?
The issue with that is also the same issue as those people who claim they had covid in 2019. We know how quickly it spread when it arrived, so why didn't it do so earlier if it was around in May 2019? Or December 2019 in the UK?
Sunak will be a competent if uninspiring centrist, and grim domestic politics will be out-grimmed by even grimmer world politics. The appetite for profound political upheaval will be dulled. The Tories will unite under Sunak as he becomes their only possible chance of survival
Labour will still win in 24, but not by 30 points. Sunak will claw back support. He might even reduce Labour to NOM
When Leondamus speaks you’d better listen. There’s always surprises on the upside.
Poor guy - no millions of dead Brits from covid, no alien takeover, no Russian nuclear strike, Truss surprises hugely on the downside and is gone, Boris wasn't restored, not even any proof that China released covid deliberately....but sooner or later he must get one right!
Don’t forget his ramping of What3Words, who, according to a PBer last week, are losing money hand over fist.
To choose just one of those alleged predictions of mine, I never said “China released covid deliberately” I said “it came from the lab”
Et voila
“Pre-print:
Endonuclease fingerprint indicates a synthetic origin of SARS-CoV-2
"Michael Worobey of the University of Arizona, who co-authored both papers, had previously called on the scientific community in a letter to be more open to the idea that the virus was the result of a lab leak.
But the findings moved him "to the point where now I also think it's just not plausible that this virus was introduced any other way than through the wildlife trade at the Wuhan market," he told reporters on a call about the findings.
Though previous investigation had centered on the live animal market, researchers wanted more evidence to determine it was really the progenitor of the outbreak, as opposed to an amplifier.
This required neighborhood-level study within Wuhan to be more certain the virus was "zoonotic" -- that it jumped from animals to people.
The first study's team used mapping tools to determine the location of the first 174 cases identified by the World Health Organization, finding 155 of them were in Wuhan.
Further, these cases clustered tightly around the market -- and some early patients with no recent history of visiting the market lived very close to it.
Mammals now known to be infectable with the virus -- including red foxes, hog badgers and raccoon dogs, were all sold live in the market, the team showed.
Two introductions to humans
They also tied positive samples from patients in early 2020 to the western portion of the market, which sold live or freshly butchered animals in late 2019.
The tightly confined early cases contrasted with how it radiated throughout the rest of the city by January and February, which the researchers confirmed by drilling into social media check-in data from the Weibo app.
"This tells us the virus was not circulating cryptically," Worobey said in a statement. "It really originated at that market and spread out from there."
Worobey has been almost completely debunked by other scientists
“Two recent publications appear to have bolstered the case for a natural origin connected to a “wet market” ….But critics counter that there are so many missing data about the epidemic’s initial days that this portrait may be inaccurate.”
Moreover the CIRCUMSTANTIAL evidence for lab leak just gets bigger
“china began stockpiling PPE months before Covid outbreak’ China also started to buy up global PPE stocks in Europe, Australia and the US around the same time, experts say”
(A new timeline which, by the way, renders the market hypothesis irrelevant)
It came from the lab. There really isn’t a debate any more. Apart from a few diehard virologists who are desperate to defend their science - and not lose their funding
All you've got "debunked by other scientists" while you happily post away from every conspiracy theorist that takes your fancy on the internet.
Every time someone posts something that says it didn't you come up with "debunked by other scientists", "pay of the Chinese" etc. etc. Just accept you might be mistaken as you so often are. Please. Like you were with Truss, Aliens etc etc. You're often wrong so you must be used to it by now
Ok, how about Francois Balloux of UCL - who was excellently lucid on covid-the-disease. His response to this paper
“This is an important piece of work. To me, it looks solid both conceptually and methodologically. I was given advance warning and was able to replicate the key findings. To the best of my knowledge, I confirm the reported patterns are genuine”
“The distribution of restriction sites in SARS-CoV-2 is highly atypical when compared to related viruses in circulation, and far more in line with previous lab-engineered coronaviruses. This is a troubling finding, which requires scrutiny.”
“These findings are not 'final and dispositive', but they can't be ignored either. To me, this is by far the strongest piece of evidence to date against a simple scenario of strict zoonotic origin for SARS-CoV-2.””
“I anticipate Covid twitter will combust in an implosion of rage and fury over this preprint. In an ideal world, this is not what should happen.”
He later pulled back from this though. I don't think this will ever be resolved.
The paper attracted rather a lot of pushback. For example, see this (lengthy) thread. Oh that preprint suggesting SARS-CoV-2 has fingerprints because someone had fiddled with the genome.
Sunak will be a competent if uninspiring centrist, and grim domestic politics will be out-grimmed by even grimmer world politics. The appetite for profound political upheaval will be dulled. The Tories will unite under Sunak as he becomes their only possible chance of survival
Labour will still win in 24, but not by 30 points. Sunak will claw back support. He might even reduce Labour to NOM
When Leondamus speaks you’d better listen. There’s always surprises on the upside.
Poor guy - no millions of dead Brits from covid, no alien takeover, no Russian nuclear strike, Truss surprises hugely on the downside and is gone, Boris wasn't restored, not even any proof that China released covid deliberately....but sooner or later he must get one right!
Don’t forget his ramping of What3Words, who, according to a PBer last week, are losing money hand over fist.
To choose just one of those alleged predictions of mine, I never said “China released covid deliberately” I said “it came from the lab”
Et voila
“Pre-print:
Endonuclease fingerprint indicates a synthetic origin of SARS-CoV-2
"Michael Worobey of the University of Arizona, who co-authored both papers, had previously called on the scientific community in a letter to be more open to the idea that the virus was the result of a lab leak.
But the findings moved him "to the point where now I also think it's just not plausible that this virus was introduced any other way than through the wildlife trade at the Wuhan market," he told reporters on a call about the findings.
Though previous investigation had centered on the live animal market, researchers wanted more evidence to determine it was really the progenitor of the outbreak, as opposed to an amplifier.
This required neighborhood-level study within Wuhan to be more certain the virus was "zoonotic" -- that it jumped from animals to people.
The first study's team used mapping tools to determine the location of the first 174 cases identified by the World Health Organization, finding 155 of them were in Wuhan.
Further, these cases clustered tightly around the market -- and some early patients with no recent history of visiting the market lived very close to it.
Mammals now known to be infectable with the virus -- including red foxes, hog badgers and raccoon dogs, were all sold live in the market, the team showed.
Two introductions to humans
They also tied positive samples from patients in early 2020 to the western portion of the market, which sold live or freshly butchered animals in late 2019.
The tightly confined early cases contrasted with how it radiated throughout the rest of the city by January and February, which the researchers confirmed by drilling into social media check-in data from the Weibo app.
"This tells us the virus was not circulating cryptically," Worobey said in a statement. "It really originated at that market and spread out from there."
Worobey has been almost completely debunked by other scientists
“Two recent publications appear to have bolstered the case for a natural origin connected to a “wet market” ….But critics counter that there are so many missing data about the epidemic’s initial days that this portrait may be inaccurate.”
Moreover the CIRCUMSTANTIAL evidence for lab leak just gets bigger
“china began stockpiling PPE months before Covid outbreak’ China also started to buy up global PPE stocks in Europe, Australia and the US around the same time, experts say”
(A new timeline which, by the way, renders the market hypothesis irrelevant)
It came from the lab. There really isn’t a debate any more. Apart from a few diehard virologists who are desperate to defend their science - and not lose their funding
All you've got "debunked by other scientists" while you happily post away from every conspiracy theorist that takes your fancy on the internet.
Every time someone posts something that says it didn't you come up with "debunked by other scientists", "pay of the Chinese" etc. etc. Just accept you might be mistaken as you so often are. Please. Like you were with Truss, Aliens etc etc. You're often wrong so you must be used to it by now
Ok, how about Francois Balloux of UCL - who was excellently lucid on covid-the-disease. His response to this paper
“This is an important piece of work. To me, it looks solid both conceptually and methodologically. I was given advance warning and was able to replicate the key findings. To the best of my knowledge, I confirm the reported patterns are genuine”
“The distribution of restriction sites in SARS-CoV-2 is highly atypical when compared to related viruses in circulation, and far more in line with previous lab-engineered coronaviruses. This is a troubling finding, which requires scrutiny.”
“These findings are not 'final and dispositive', but they can't be ignored either. To me, this is by far the strongest piece of evidence to date against a simple scenario of strict zoonotic origin for SARS-CoV-2.””
“I anticipate Covid twitter will combust in an implosion of rage and fury over this preprint. In an ideal world, this is not what should happen.”
He later pulled back from this though. I don't think this will ever be resolved.
Which is where I started!
The real issue isn't the flaws in Sean's research or logic, so much as we all know he simply WANTS any and every fantastical theory or apocalyptic prediction he comes across on twitter to be true - wants it so much, even more than HY wants every opinion poll to point toward the next Tory victory - that it renders argumentation redundant.
Sounds like Team Mordaunt is deeply spilt right now. Dame Andrea Leadsom is urging her to fight on and try and get to 100, but other PM supporters are calling on her to end the contest today - pointing out with so many MPs behind Sunak, any victory would be pyrrhic. https://twitter.com/SebastianEPayne/status/1584492937504702465
If she gets 100 (Which I doubt) and wins a members vote (Which I also don't see) the Tories will be utterly wrecked next GE.
There does seem to be a hard core of irreconcilables. Leadsom clearly one.
Sunak will be a competent if uninspiring centrist, and grim domestic politics will be out-grimmed by even grimmer world politics. The appetite for profound political upheaval will be dulled. The Tories will unite under Sunak as he becomes their only possible chance of survival
Labour will still win in 24, but not by 30 points. Sunak will claw back support. He might even reduce Labour to NOM
When Leondamus speaks you’d better listen. There’s always surprises on the upside.
Poor guy - no millions of dead Brits from covid, no alien takeover, no Russian nuclear strike, Truss surprises hugely on the downside and is gone, Boris wasn't restored, not even any proof that China released covid deliberately....but sooner or later he must get one right!
Don’t forget his ramping of What3Words, who, according to a PBer last week, are losing money hand over fist.
To choose just one of those alleged predictions of mine, I never said “China released covid deliberately” I said “it came from the lab”
Et voila
“Pre-print:
Endonuclease fingerprint indicates a synthetic origin of SARS-CoV-2
"Michael Worobey of the University of Arizona, who co-authored both papers, had previously called on the scientific community in a letter to be more open to the idea that the virus was the result of a lab leak.
But the findings moved him "to the point where now I also think it's just not plausible that this virus was introduced any other way than through the wildlife trade at the Wuhan market," he told reporters on a call about the findings.
Though previous investigation had centered on the live animal market, researchers wanted more evidence to determine it was really the progenitor of the outbreak, as opposed to an amplifier.
This required neighborhood-level study within Wuhan to be more certain the virus was "zoonotic" -- that it jumped from animals to people.
The first study's team used mapping tools to determine the location of the first 174 cases identified by the World Health Organization, finding 155 of them were in Wuhan.
Further, these cases clustered tightly around the market -- and some early patients with no recent history of visiting the market lived very close to it.
Mammals now known to be infectable with the virus -- including red foxes, hog badgers and raccoon dogs, were all sold live in the market, the team showed.
Two introductions to humans
They also tied positive samples from patients in early 2020 to the western portion of the market, which sold live or freshly butchered animals in late 2019.
The tightly confined early cases contrasted with how it radiated throughout the rest of the city by January and February, which the researchers confirmed by drilling into social media check-in data from the Weibo app.
"This tells us the virus was not circulating cryptically," Worobey said in a statement. "It really originated at that market and spread out from there."
Worobey has been almost completely debunked by other scientists
“Two recent publications appear to have bolstered the case for a natural origin connected to a “wet market” ….But critics counter that there are so many missing data about the epidemic’s initial days that this portrait may be inaccurate.”
Moreover the CIRCUMSTANTIAL evidence for lab leak just gets bigger
“china began stockpiling PPE months before Covid outbreak’ China also started to buy up global PPE stocks in Europe, Australia and the US around the same time, experts say”
(A new timeline which, by the way, renders the market hypothesis irrelevant)
It came from the lab. There really isn’t a debate any more. Apart from a few diehard virologists who are desperate to defend their science - and not lose their funding
All you've got "debunked by other scientists" while you happily post away from every conspiracy theorist that takes your fancy on the internet.
Every time someone posts something that says it didn't you come up with "debunked by other scientists", "pay of the Chinese" etc. etc. Just accept you might be mistaken as you so often are. Please. Like you were with Truss, Aliens etc etc. You're often wrong so you must be used to it by now
Ok, how about Francois Balloux of UCL - who was excellently lucid on covid-the-disease. His response to this paper
“This is an important piece of work. To me, it looks solid both conceptually and methodologically. I was given advance warning and was able to replicate the key findings. To the best of my knowledge, I confirm the reported patterns are genuine”
“The distribution of restriction sites in SARS-CoV-2 is highly atypical when compared to related viruses in circulation, and far more in line with previous lab-engineered coronaviruses. This is a troubling finding, which requires scrutiny.”
“These findings are not 'final and dispositive', but they can't be ignored either. To me, this is by far the strongest piece of evidence to date against a simple scenario of strict zoonotic origin for SARS-CoV-2.””
“I anticipate Covid twitter will combust in an implosion of rage and fury over this preprint. In an ideal world, this is not what should happen.”
Okay, if we're being credentialist, how about Professor Edward Holmes - ARC Australian Laureate Fellow at the University of Sydney, with concurrent Professorial appointments in the School of Life & Environmental Sciences and the School of Medical Sciences. Doubtless in your mind he's a member of the CCP but, anyway...
"The COVID ‘lab leak theory’ is dead Researchers have confirmed the virus came from a Wuhan wet market, writes Professor Eddie Holmes."
"...Despite political barriers and a salivating media, the evidence for a natural animal origin for SARS-CoV-2 has increased over the past two years. To deny it puts us all at risk..."
I fear before long someone's going to go one stage further than the current XR protests and we'll start seeing great art, cultural artifacts and history of the last 1000+ years literally destroyed. I'd be very nervous if I was a curator in the British Museum or worked at the National gallery.
Sounds like Team Mordaunt is deeply spilt right now. Dame Andrea Leadsom is urging her to fight on and try and get to 100, but other PM supporters are calling on her to end the contest today - pointing out with so many MPs behind Sunak, any victory would be pyrrhic. https://twitter.com/SebastianEPayne/status/1584492937504702465
If she gets 100 (Which I doubt) and wins a members vote (Which I also don't see) the Tories will be utterly wrecked next GE.
Are you expecting a serene two years under the Sunak-Hunt double act?
It's only the form of the electoral disaster that is at stake, the detail of how we get from here to a shattering defeat. The destination is no longer in doubt.
It's one of the least consequential leadership elections that I can remember. The Tory party are currently ungovernable. It matters little who is nominally in command of the rabble.
Sunak will be a competent if uninspiring centrist, and grim domestic politics will be out-grimmed by even grimmer world politics. The appetite for profound political upheaval will be dulled. The Tories will unite under Sunak as he becomes their only possible chance of survival
Labour will still win in 24, but not by 30 points. Sunak will claw back support. He might even reduce Labour to NOM
When Leondamus speaks you’d better listen. There’s always surprises on the upside.
Poor guy - no millions of dead Brits from covid, no alien takeover, no Russian nuclear strike, Truss surprises hugely on the downside and is gone, Boris wasn't restored, not even any proof that China released covid deliberately....but sooner or later he must get one right!
Don’t forget his ramping of What3Words, who, according to a PBer last week, are losing money hand over fist.
To choose just one of those alleged predictions of mine, I never said “China released covid deliberately” I said “it came from the lab”
Et voila
“Pre-print:
Endonuclease fingerprint indicates a synthetic origin of SARS-CoV-2
"Michael Worobey of the University of Arizona, who co-authored both papers, had previously called on the scientific community in a letter to be more open to the idea that the virus was the result of a lab leak.
But the findings moved him "to the point where now I also think it's just not plausible that this virus was introduced any other way than through the wildlife trade at the Wuhan market," he told reporters on a call about the findings.
Though previous investigation had centered on the live animal market, researchers wanted more evidence to determine it was really the progenitor of the outbreak, as opposed to an amplifier.
This required neighborhood-level study within Wuhan to be more certain the virus was "zoonotic" -- that it jumped from animals to people.
The first study's team used mapping tools to determine the location of the first 174 cases identified by the World Health Organization, finding 155 of them were in Wuhan.
Further, these cases clustered tightly around the market -- and some early patients with no recent history of visiting the market lived very close to it.
Mammals now known to be infectable with the virus -- including red foxes, hog badgers and raccoon dogs, were all sold live in the market, the team showed.
Two introductions to humans
They also tied positive samples from patients in early 2020 to the western portion of the market, which sold live or freshly butchered animals in late 2019.
The tightly confined early cases contrasted with how it radiated throughout the rest of the city by January and February, which the researchers confirmed by drilling into social media check-in data from the Weibo app.
"This tells us the virus was not circulating cryptically," Worobey said in a statement. "It really originated at that market and spread out from there."
Worobey has been almost completely debunked by other scientists
“Two recent publications appear to have bolstered the case for a natural origin connected to a “wet market” ….But critics counter that there are so many missing data about the epidemic’s initial days that this portrait may be inaccurate.”
Moreover the CIRCUMSTANTIAL evidence for lab leak just gets bigger
“china began stockpiling PPE months before Covid outbreak’ China also started to buy up global PPE stocks in Europe, Australia and the US around the same time, experts say”
(A new timeline which, by the way, renders the market hypothesis irrelevant)
It came from the lab. There really isn’t a debate any more. Apart from a few diehard virologists who are desperate to defend their science - and not lose their funding
All you've got "debunked by other scientists" while you happily post away from every conspiracy theorist that takes your fancy on the internet.
Every time someone posts something that says it didn't you come up with "debunked by other scientists", "pay of the Chinese" etc. etc. Just accept you might be mistaken as you so often are. Please. Like you were with Truss, Aliens etc etc. You're often wrong so you must be used to it by now
Ok, how about Francois Balloux of UCL - who was excellently lucid on covid-the-disease. His response to this paper
“This is an important piece of work. To me, it looks solid both conceptually and methodologically. I was given advance warning and was able to replicate the key findings. To the best of my knowledge, I confirm the reported patterns are genuine”
“The distribution of restriction sites in SARS-CoV-2 is highly atypical when compared to related viruses in circulation, and far more in line with previous lab-engineered coronaviruses. This is a troubling finding, which requires scrutiny.”
“These findings are not 'final and dispositive', but they can't be ignored either. To me, this is by far the strongest piece of evidence to date against a simple scenario of strict zoonotic origin for SARS-CoV-2.””
“I anticipate Covid twitter will combust in an implosion of rage and fury over this preprint. In an ideal world, this is not what should happen.”
This is the best thread I've read on the recent 'proximal origin' preprint that caused so much drama. Essentially, this is the thread I should have written myself. 1/ This is the one I wrote. It's not as good, and I'm sorry for the chaos it caused.
The paper in 1 tweet: examines a type of restriction site on the COVID genome. These sites occur in nature but can also result from certain cut+paste genome assembly. In COVID the location of the sites are more even-spaced & less random you'd expect naturally. Looks synthetic....
IMO
The paper is important, even if wrong/incorrect.
The restriction site analysis is novel and should be studied further.
The statistical pieces may not be robust/hold up to reanalysis.
Sunak will be a competent if uninspiring centrist, and grim domestic politics will be out-grimmed by even grimmer world politics. The appetite for profound political upheaval will be dulled. The Tories will unite under Sunak as he becomes their only possible chance of survival
Labour will still win in 24, but not by 30 points. Sunak will claw back support. He might even reduce Labour to NOM
When Leondamus speaks you’d better listen. There’s always surprises on the upside.
Poor guy - no millions of dead Brits from covid, no alien takeover, no Russian nuclear strike, Truss surprises hugely on the downside and is gone, Boris wasn't restored, not even any proof that China released covid deliberately....but sooner or later he must get one right!
Don’t forget his ramping of What3Words, who, according to a PBer last week, are losing money hand over fist.
What was his ramping of W3W? I must have missed that.
That was a system always doomed to fail – it had a fatal flaw: if you miswrite or misspell a word (e.g. a homophone) you could end up on the other side of the city/world. Why would anyone think it was a workable idea?
Are the words totally random or is there error checking built into their structure (or in similar ways that many computer science algorithms have been developed over the years)?
The obvious thing thing would be that the words together can be encoded into a binary form in a manner such that if the word is corrupted i.e. misspelled that an checksum algorithm fails.
I'm not sure exactly how the algorithm works but as with so many things designed by tech bros who rarely leave their own bedroom, its dangerously flawed to the point where one cannot rely on it. Wiki tells me that Mountain Rescue England & Wales have counselled against using it – a fairly fatal blow I would have thought!
The thing is the basic idea - using a smaller number of words to define a location instead of a large number of numbers - is a really good one. It's only the particular implementation that is bad.
You could construct a word set that didn't include plurals and homophones. You could have error-checking built-in. The algorithm for distributing the words could avoid the issues with similar combinations being near-neighbors, etc.
They have a really poor implementation and hopefully when they go bust the idea will be bought up by someone else who implements it in a better way.
This isn't unusual. The version of Morse code that became most widely used wasn't the first version created. At the moment their continued survival and patent is blocking the innovation that would improve the idea.
It would have to be radically revised for use in emergency situations. Probably better to start from scratch
Sunak will be a competent if uninspiring centrist, and grim domestic politics will be out-grimmed by even grimmer world politics. The appetite for profound political upheaval will be dulled. The Tories will unite under Sunak as he becomes their only possible chance of survival
Labour will still win in 24, but not by 30 points. Sunak will claw back support. He might even reduce Labour to NOM
When Leondamus speaks you’d better listen. There’s always surprises on the upside.
Poor guy - no millions of dead Brits from covid, no alien takeover, no Russian nuclear strike, Truss surprises hugely on the downside and is gone, Boris wasn't restored, not even any proof that China released covid deliberately....but sooner or later he must get one right!
Don’t forget his ramping of What3Words, who, according to a PBer last week, are losing money hand over fist.
What was his ramping of W3W? I must have missed that.
That was a system always doomed to fail – it had a fatal flaw: if you miswrite or misspell a word (e.g. a homophone) you could end up on the other side of the city/world. Why would anyone think it was a workable idea?
Are the words totally random or is there error checking built into their structure (or in similar ways that many computer science algorithms have been developed over the years)?
The obvious thing thing would be that the words together can be encoded into a binary form in a manner such that if the word is corrupted i.e. misspelled that an checksum algorithm fails.
I'm not sure exactly how the algorithm works but as with so many things designed by tech bros who rarely leave their own bedroom, its dangerously flawed to the point where one cannot rely on it. Wiki tells me that Mountain Rescue England & Wales have counselled against using it – a fairly fatal blow I would have thought!
we have done this to death. It is inherently less error prone than 6 digit numbers because you can say of most combinations of letters but no combination of numbers "That can't be right, it's not a word." They cocked up the execution: it would be dead easy to tweak it so that similar sounding addresses were on different continents. They didn't so you can get near homophones 5 miles apart.
It has an off-label value as a password generator. investorsavingslance is fairly secure, but you only have to remember eiffel tower.
Sunak will be a competent if uninspiring centrist, and grim domestic politics will be out-grimmed by even grimmer world politics. The appetite for profound political upheaval will be dulled. The Tories will unite under Sunak as he becomes their only possible chance of survival
Labour will still win in 24, but not by 30 points. Sunak will claw back support. He might even reduce Labour to NOM
When Leondamus speaks you’d better listen. There’s always surprises on the upside.
Poor guy - no millions of dead Brits from covid, no alien takeover, no Russian nuclear strike, Truss surprises hugely on the downside and is gone, Boris wasn't restored, not even any proof that China released covid deliberately....but sooner or later he must get one right!
Don’t forget his ramping of What3Words, who, according to a PBer last week, are losing money hand over fist.
To choose just one of those alleged predictions of mine, I never said “China released covid deliberately” I said “it came from the lab”
Et voila
“Pre-print:
Endonuclease fingerprint indicates a synthetic origin of SARS-CoV-2
"Michael Worobey of the University of Arizona, who co-authored both papers, had previously called on the scientific community in a letter to be more open to the idea that the virus was the result of a lab leak.
But the findings moved him "to the point where now I also think it's just not plausible that this virus was introduced any other way than through the wildlife trade at the Wuhan market," he told reporters on a call about the findings.
Though previous investigation had centered on the live animal market, researchers wanted more evidence to determine it was really the progenitor of the outbreak, as opposed to an amplifier.
This required neighborhood-level study within Wuhan to be more certain the virus was "zoonotic" -- that it jumped from animals to people.
The first study's team used mapping tools to determine the location of the first 174 cases identified by the World Health Organization, finding 155 of them were in Wuhan.
Further, these cases clustered tightly around the market -- and some early patients with no recent history of visiting the market lived very close to it.
Mammals now known to be infectable with the virus -- including red foxes, hog badgers and raccoon dogs, were all sold live in the market, the team showed.
Two introductions to humans
They also tied positive samples from patients in early 2020 to the western portion of the market, which sold live or freshly butchered animals in late 2019.
The tightly confined early cases contrasted with how it radiated throughout the rest of the city by January and February, which the researchers confirmed by drilling into social media check-in data from the Weibo app.
"This tells us the virus was not circulating cryptically," Worobey said in a statement. "It really originated at that market and spread out from there."
Worobey has been almost completely debunked by other scientists
“Two recent publications appear to have bolstered the case for a natural origin connected to a “wet market” ….But critics counter that there are so many missing data about the epidemic’s initial days that this portrait may be inaccurate.”
Moreover the CIRCUMSTANTIAL evidence for lab leak just gets bigger
“china began stockpiling PPE months before Covid outbreak’ China also started to buy up global PPE stocks in Europe, Australia and the US around the same time, experts say”
(A new timeline which, by the way, renders the market hypothesis irrelevant)
It came from the lab. There really isn’t a debate any more. Apart from a few diehard virologists who are desperate to defend their science - and not lose their funding
All you've got "debunked by other scientists" while you happily post away from every conspiracy theorist that takes your fancy on the internet.
Every time someone posts something that says it didn't you come up with "debunked by other scientists", "pay of the Chinese" etc. etc. Just accept you might be mistaken as you so often are. Please. Like you were with Truss, Aliens etc etc. You're often wrong so you must be used to it by now
Ok, how about Francois Balloux of UCL - who was excellently lucid on covid-the-disease. His response to this paper
“This is an important piece of work. To me, it looks solid both conceptually and methodologically. I was given advance warning and was able to replicate the key findings. To the best of my knowledge, I confirm the reported patterns are genuine”
“The distribution of restriction sites in SARS-CoV-2 is highly atypical when compared to related viruses in circulation, and far more in line with previous lab-engineered coronaviruses. This is a troubling finding, which requires scrutiny.”
“These findings are not 'final and dispositive', but they can't be ignored either. To me, this is by far the strongest piece of evidence to date against a simple scenario of strict zoonotic origin for SARS-CoV-2.””
“I anticipate Covid twitter will combust in an implosion of rage and fury over this preprint. In an ideal world, this is not what should happen.”
He later pulled back from this though. I don't think this will ever be resolved.
I almost agree with you. I think more accurately for 60% it will never be resolved. For 20% it will be resolved as natural and for 20% it will be resolved as from a lab......
My preference was Mordaunt, but I'm happy enough with Sunak. What I'm not happy about is Hunt staying on as Chancellor, but I accept it's inevitable in the short to medium term. I'm hoping he eventually flounces out when he gets bored of being Alistair Darling to Sunak's Gordon Brown.
Sunak will be a competent if uninspiring centrist, and grim domestic politics will be out-grimmed by even grimmer world politics. The appetite for profound political upheaval will be dulled. The Tories will unite under Sunak as he becomes their only possible chance of survival
Labour will still win in 24, but not by 30 points. Sunak will claw back support. He might even reduce Labour to NOM
When Leondamus speaks you’d better listen. There’s always surprises on the upside.
Poor guy - no millions of dead Brits from covid, no alien takeover, no Russian nuclear strike, Truss surprises hugely on the downside and is gone, Boris wasn't restored, not even any proof that China released covid deliberately....but sooner or later he must get one right!
Don’t forget his ramping of What3Words, who, according to a PBer last week, are losing money hand over fist.
To choose just one of those alleged predictions of mine, I never said “China released covid deliberately” I said “it came from the lab”
Et voila
“Pre-print:
Endonuclease fingerprint indicates a synthetic origin of SARS-CoV-2
"Michael Worobey of the University of Arizona, who co-authored both papers, had previously called on the scientific community in a letter to be more open to the idea that the virus was the result of a lab leak.
But the findings moved him "to the point where now I also think it's just not plausible that this virus was introduced any other way than through the wildlife trade at the Wuhan market," he told reporters on a call about the findings.
Though previous investigation had centered on the live animal market, researchers wanted more evidence to determine it was really the progenitor of the outbreak, as opposed to an amplifier.
This required neighborhood-level study within Wuhan to be more certain the virus was "zoonotic" -- that it jumped from animals to people.
The first study's team used mapping tools to determine the location of the first 174 cases identified by the World Health Organization, finding 155 of them were in Wuhan.
Further, these cases clustered tightly around the market -- and some early patients with no recent history of visiting the market lived very close to it.
Mammals now known to be infectable with the virus -- including red foxes, hog badgers and raccoon dogs, were all sold live in the market, the team showed.
Two introductions to humans
They also tied positive samples from patients in early 2020 to the western portion of the market, which sold live or freshly butchered animals in late 2019.
The tightly confined early cases contrasted with how it radiated throughout the rest of the city by January and February, which the researchers confirmed by drilling into social media check-in data from the Weibo app.
"This tells us the virus was not circulating cryptically," Worobey said in a statement. "It really originated at that market and spread out from there."
Worobey has been almost completely debunked by other scientists
“Two recent publications appear to have bolstered the case for a natural origin connected to a “wet market” ….But critics counter that there are so many missing data about the epidemic’s initial days that this portrait may be inaccurate.”
Moreover the CIRCUMSTANTIAL evidence for lab leak just gets bigger
“china began stockpiling PPE months before Covid outbreak’ China also started to buy up global PPE stocks in Europe, Australia and the US around the same time, experts say”
(A new timeline which, by the way, renders the market hypothesis irrelevant)
It came from the lab. There really isn’t a debate any more. Apart from a few diehard virologists who are desperate to defend their science - and not lose their funding
I'm just trying to follow the theory behind the hospital gown thing? They develop a virus in the lab and say, "nice, this will kill lots of people". Then they decided to release it *in their own country* later in the year, so they buy up a load of hospital gowns starting in August??? Alternatively, is the thought that it was in the wild back in like May, and they noticed it spreading out of control, didn't do anything to stop it spreading, but instead said, "hmm, let's let everyone get it, but we're gonna need a hell of a lot of hospital gowns"? Then they managed to keep it a secret until December?
You make a good point and I’ve thought about this beforehand
The weird PPE timeline seems to render all the early wet market data nonsensical (so that means Worobey et al have spent months researching irrelevant data)
What does it do to lab leak? It means that IF there was a lab leak it must have happened earlier than we think: the Chinese tried to contain it, they failed. Then it spread via the market (which is 300 yards from the nearest bat lab). In those intervening weeks China took precautions?
If there were a lab leak months before, why were all the early cases then traced back to the market ? And what happened to all the prior cases, for which there's no evidence ?
You've determined that the lab leak is "proven", and the scientific "consensus". Several times. And yet the account of it that you present keep changing on a regular basis.
Mr. Pulpstar, I agree. The self-righteous iconoclast cretins will want to re-enact the deeds of the man, who shall not be named, who burnt down the Temple of Artemis (a wonder of the ancient world) to ensure his name lived forever.
Sunak will be a competent if uninspiring centrist, and grim domestic politics will be out-grimmed by even grimmer world politics. The appetite for profound political upheaval will be dulled. The Tories will unite under Sunak as he becomes their only possible chance of survival
Labour will still win in 24, but not by 30 points. Sunak will claw back support. He might even reduce Labour to NOM
When Leondamus speaks you’d better listen. There’s always surprises on the upside.
Poor guy - no millions of dead Brits from covid, no alien takeover, no Russian nuclear strike, Truss surprises hugely on the downside and is gone, Boris wasn't restored, not even any proof that China released covid deliberately....but sooner or later he must get one right!
Don’t forget his ramping of What3Words, who, according to a PBer last week, are losing money hand over fist.
To choose just one of those alleged predictions of mine, I never said “China released covid deliberately” I said “it came from the lab”
Et voila
“Pre-print:
Endonuclease fingerprint indicates a synthetic origin of SARS-CoV-2
"Michael Worobey of the University of Arizona, who co-authored both papers, had previously called on the scientific community in a letter to be more open to the idea that the virus was the result of a lab leak.
But the findings moved him "to the point where now I also think it's just not plausible that this virus was introduced any other way than through the wildlife trade at the Wuhan market," he told reporters on a call about the findings.
Though previous investigation had centered on the live animal market, researchers wanted more evidence to determine it was really the progenitor of the outbreak, as opposed to an amplifier.
This required neighborhood-level study within Wuhan to be more certain the virus was "zoonotic" -- that it jumped from animals to people.
The first study's team used mapping tools to determine the location of the first 174 cases identified by the World Health Organization, finding 155 of them were in Wuhan.
Further, these cases clustered tightly around the market -- and some early patients with no recent history of visiting the market lived very close to it.
Mammals now known to be infectable with the virus -- including red foxes, hog badgers and raccoon dogs, were all sold live in the market, the team showed.
Two introductions to humans
They also tied positive samples from patients in early 2020 to the western portion of the market, which sold live or freshly butchered animals in late 2019.
The tightly confined early cases contrasted with how it radiated throughout the rest of the city by January and February, which the researchers confirmed by drilling into social media check-in data from the Weibo app.
"This tells us the virus was not circulating cryptically," Worobey said in a statement. "It really originated at that market and spread out from there."
Worobey has been almost completely debunked by other scientists
“Two recent publications appear to have bolstered the case for a natural origin connected to a “wet market” ….But critics counter that there are so many missing data about the epidemic’s initial days that this portrait may be inaccurate.”
Moreover the CIRCUMSTANTIAL evidence for lab leak just gets bigger
“china began stockpiling PPE months before Covid outbreak’ China also started to buy up global PPE stocks in Europe, Australia and the US around the same time, experts say”
(A new timeline which, by the way, renders the market hypothesis irrelevant)
It came from the lab. There really isn’t a debate any more. Apart from a few diehard virologists who are desperate to defend their science - and not lose their funding
I'm just trying to follow the theory behind the hospital gown thing? They develop a virus in the lab and say, "nice, this will kill lots of people". Then they decided to release it *in their own country* later in the year, so they buy up a load of hospital gowns starting in August??? Alternatively, is the thought that it was in the wild back in like May, and they noticed it spreading out of control, didn't do anything to stop it spreading, but instead said, "hmm, let's let everyone get it, but we're gonna need a hell of a lot of hospital gowns"? Then they managed to keep it a secret until December?
You make a good point and I’ve thought about this beforehand
The weird PPE timeline seems to render all the early wet market data nonsensical (so that means Worobey et al have spent months researching irrelevant data)
What does it do to lab leak? It means that IF there was a lab leak it must have happened earlier than we think: the Chinese tried to contain it, they failed. Then it spread via the market (which is 300 yards from the nearest bat lab). In those intervening weeks China took precautions?
The issue with that is also the same issue as those people who claim they had covid in 2019. We know how quickly it spread when it arrived, so why didn't it do so earlier if it was around in May 2019? Or December 2019 in the UK?
Sounds like Team Mordaunt is deeply spilt right now. Dame Andrea Leadsom is urging her to fight on and try and get to 100, but other PM supporters are calling on her to end the contest today - pointing out with so many MPs behind Sunak, any victory would be pyrrhic. https://twitter.com/SebastianEPayne/status/1584492937504702465
If she gets 100 (Which I doubt) and wins a members vote (Which I also don't see) the Tories will be utterly wrecked next GE.
There does seem to be a hard core of irreconcilables. Leadsom clearly one.
She thinks it's just wrong to reach the final 2 then just withdraw.
Sounds like Team Mordaunt is deeply spilt right now. Dame Andrea Leadsom is urging her to fight on and try and get to 100, but other PM supporters are calling on her to end the contest today - pointing out with so many MPs behind Sunak, any victory would be pyrrhic. https://twitter.com/SebastianEPayne/status/1584492937504702465
If she gets 100 (Which I doubt) and wins a members vote (Which I also don't see) the Tories will be utterly wrecked next GE.
Are you expecting a serene two years under the Sunak-Hunt double act?
It's only the form of the electoral disaster that is at stake, the detail of how we get from here to a shattering defeat. The destination is no longer in doubt.
It's one of the least consequential leadership elections that I can remember. The Tory party are currently ungovernable. It matters little who is nominally in command of the rabble.
I would suggest that is rather complacent
It is true that Labour are on course to win in 2024 but 2 years is a long time in politics
I would expect Rishi to introduce honesty, integrity, and decency into the conservative party and certainly reduce the likely labour lead
You may be right but politics is very unpredictable
Comments
Alright, I had a look last night and will quickly do a thread on it.
There are many kinds of 'wrong' in science, but this preprint is False. There are many reasons (links at end), but the main one: the “unusual” sites are all *exactly* found in natural bat coronaviruses. 1/n
https://twitter.com/acritschristoph/status/1583486403416969216
And a more neutral one:
https://twitter.com/triplebankshot/status/1583932933572014080
"Michael Worobey of the University of Arizona, who co-authored both papers, had previously called on the scientific community in a letter to be more open to the idea that the virus was the result of a lab leak.
But the findings moved him "to the point where now I also think it's just not plausible that this virus was introduced any other way than through the wildlife trade at the Wuhan market," he told reporters on a call about the findings.
Though previous investigation had centered on the live animal market, researchers wanted more evidence to determine it was really the progenitor of the outbreak, as opposed to an amplifier.
This required neighborhood-level study within Wuhan to be more certain the virus was "zoonotic" -- that it jumped from animals to people.
The first study's team used mapping tools to determine the location of the first 174 cases identified by the World Health Organization, finding 155 of them were in Wuhan.
Further, these cases clustered tightly around the market -- and some early patients with no recent history of visiting the market lived very close to it.
Mammals now known to be infectable with the virus -- including red foxes, hog badgers and raccoon dogs, were all sold live in the market, the team showed.
Two introductions to humans
They also tied positive samples from patients in early 2020 to the western portion of the market, which sold live or freshly butchered animals in late 2019.
The tightly confined early cases contrasted with how it radiated throughout the rest of the city by January and February, which the researchers confirmed by drilling into social media check-in data from the Weibo app.
"This tells us the virus was not circulating cryptically," Worobey said in a statement. "It really originated at that market and spread out from there."
https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20220726-pair-of-new-studies-point-to-natural-covid-origin
Sober, unflashy, deeply dull punditry. New leaf and I like it - like it very much.
https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2022/10/23/22/63771561-0-image-a-9_1666560399128.jpg
https://twitter.com/afneil/status/1584476720056262657
Can't the 22 just all admit it is done and spare us more boring hours?
Please forgive my poor communication skills.
https://twitter.com/MrHarryCole/status/1584483286445101056
Obama was elected in 2008 at a point where race relations were better than ever before. 8 years later Trump was elected and 12 years on America seems to be descending in to civil war.
I think it unlikely that the UK will follow the same path but the one thing that Braverman and Badenoch are absolutely right about are the dangers with critical race theory. My hope is that Sunak is able to find common ground with the 'right' of the party over this, rather than crawling in to the Rwanda rabbit hole.
I'm astonished he's that good at that to be honest given how crap he is at everything else.
I said Sunak would win. He is going to win
On the other hand I did make those mad remarks about Truss “surprising on the upside”, despite disparaging her earlier in her leadership campaign. I’ve realised i was wishcasting. It was clear she was going to win and I was emotionally keen for her to do well and be a new Thatch - I let my feelings cloud my judgement. Lesson learned!
https://twitter.com/BethRigby/status/1584486780853977088
We know precious little about what Sunak's aims are aside from the economy.
I hope we get someone who focusses on practical solutions rather than grandstanding for the tabloids.
There's quite a few figures looking for Cabinet-level non-jobs though.
That was a system always doomed to fail – it had a fatal flaw: if you miswrite or misspell a word (e.g. a homophone) you could end up on the other side of the city/world. Why would anyone think it was a workable idea?
“Two recent publications appear to have bolstered the case for a natural origin connected to a “wet market” ….But critics counter that there are so many missing data about the epidemic’s initial days that this portrait may be inaccurate.”
https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2022/10/22/a-new-paper-claims-sars-cov-2-bears-signs-of-genetic-engineering
Moreover the CIRCUMSTANTIAL evidence for lab leak just gets bigger
“china began stockpiling PPE months before Covid outbreak’
China also started to buy up global PPE stocks in Europe, Australia and the US around the same time, experts say”
(A new timeline which, by the way, renders the market hypothesis irrelevant)
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/10/08/china-began-stockpiling-ppe-months-covid-outbreak/
It came from the lab. There really isn’t a debate any more. Apart from a few diehard virologists who are desperate to defend their science - and not lose their funding
The obvious thing thing would be that the words together can be encoded into a binary form in a manner such that if the word is corrupted i.e. misspelled that an checksum algorithm fails.
The problem is when a typo gives a location only a few miles away.
It is reported that the Wagnerians took 2 months of fighting to take these 2km, and they lost them in 48h.
We are waiting for confirmation from the General Staff
https://twitter.com/TheDeadDistrict/status/1584420230708985856
*lol - Black Sean is an autocorrect typo. I’ve kept it for fun as it is so bizarrely apt
European Group for Research
Research Group on Europe
Group for Research on Europe
Every time someone posts something that says it didn't you come up with "debunked by other scientists", "pay of the Chinese" etc. etc. Just accept you might be mistaken as you so often are. Please. Like you were with Truss, Aliens etc etc. You're often wrong so you must be used to it by now
That’s a shame. I liked his waspish commentary. And he was good on several subjects - from fox hunting to rural life to other stuff I forget
He could get quite drunkenly angry but hey, we all do that
“This is an important piece of work. To me, it looks solid both conceptually and methodologically. I was given advance warning and was able to replicate the key findings. To the best of my knowledge, I confirm the reported patterns are genuine”
“The distribution of restriction sites in SARS-CoV-2 is highly atypical when compared to related viruses in circulation, and far more in line with previous lab-engineered coronaviruses. This is a troubling finding, which requires scrutiny.”
“These findings are not 'final and dispositive', but they can't be ignored either. To me, this is by far the strongest piece of evidence to date against a simple scenario of strict zoonotic origin for SARS-CoV-2.””
“I anticipate Covid twitter will combust in an implosion of rage and fury over this preprint. In an ideal world, this is not what should happen.”
https://twitter.com/ballouxfrancois/status/1583165268930359297?s=46&t=zQTb85yUB9K4Ug9nuIBk4w
That how huge parts of sending files over the internet work and these error checking algorithms are normally part of any decent undergraduate computer science course. And that is why naively I presumed that would be a fundamental part of any such attempt at simplification of location coordinates....cogs start whirling about a new start-up ;-)
My house has the W3W location Expect Serene Waters (changed slightly while keeping the meaning) - which was amusing until the divorce.
Apart from being a superlative tosser, we’re still trying to identify his USPs
https://twitter.com/SebastianEPayne/status/1584492937504702465
ERG backing ?
You could construct a word set that didn't include plurals and homophones. You could have error-checking built-in. The algorithm for distributing the words could avoid the issues with similar combinations being near-neighbors, etc.
They have a really poor implementation and hopefully when they go bust the idea will be bought up by someone else who implements it in a better way.
This isn't unusual. The version of Morse code that became most widely used wasn't the first version created. At the moment their continued survival and patent is blocking the innovation that would improve the idea.
Not the actual divorce. Obviously. My commiserations.
The weird PPE timeline seems to render all the early wet market data nonsensical (so that means Worobey et al have spent months researching irrelevant data)
What does it do to lab leak? It means that IF there was a lab leak it must have happened earlier than
we think: the Chinese tried to contain it, they failed. Then it spread via the market (which is 300 yards from the nearest bat lab). In those intervening weeks China took precautions?
And probably mirrored by a number of her supposed supporting MPs. Suspect she will be losing support from hereon. 100 out of reach.
I’m convinced these little episodes of his are squirrel spotting on steroids. I certainly hope so. The alternative explanation is discomforting.
For example, see this (lengthy) thread.
Oh that preprint suggesting SARS-CoV-2 has fingerprints because someone had fiddled with the genome.
First, you can indeed make a recombinant SARS-CoV-2 from cloned cDNA using the type IIS restriction enzyme BsaI (and another one) 👇 by Xie et al
1/21
https://twitter.com/Friedemann1/status/1583519970902048768
"What was wrong with the Boris strategy of claiming 100 MPs in support contrary to factual publically stated numbers?
Um...all perfectly reasonable just that the number was too high/too convenient?
That's right - let's claim 90 ourselves instead of 100.
That ought to fool them."
The real issue isn't the flaws in Sean's research or logic, so much as we all know he simply WANTS any and every fantastical theory or apocalyptic prediction he comes across on twitter to be true - wants it so much, even more than HY wants every opinion poll to point toward the next Tory victory - that it renders argumentation redundant.
Leadsom clearly one.
"The COVID ‘lab leak theory’ is dead
Researchers have confirmed the virus came from a Wuhan wet market, writes Professor Eddie Holmes."
"...Despite political barriers and a salivating media, the evidence for a natural animal origin for SARS-CoV-2 has increased over the past two years. To deny it puts us all at risk..."
https://www1.racgp.org.au/newsgp/clinical/the-covid-lab-leak-theory-is-dead
I'd be very nervous if I was a curator in the British Museum or worked at the National gallery.
It's only the form of the electoral disaster that is at stake, the detail of how we get from here to a shattering defeat. The destination is no longer in doubt.
It's one of the least consequential leadership elections that I can remember. The Tory party are currently ungovernable. It matters little who is nominally in command of the rabble.
This is the best thread I've read on the recent 'proximal origin' preprint that caused so much drama. Essentially, this is the thread I should have written myself.
1/
This is the one I wrote. It's not as good, and I'm sorry for the chaos it caused.
https://twitter.com/BallouxFrancois/status/1584257354970804224
I posted the thread he refers to earlier.
The paper in 1 tweet: examines a type of restriction site on the COVID genome. These sites occur in nature but can also result from certain cut+paste genome assembly. In COVID the location of the sites are more even-spaced & less random you'd expect naturally. Looks synthetic....
IMO
The paper is important, even if wrong/incorrect.
The restriction site analysis is novel and should be studied further.
The statistical pieces may not be robust/hold up to reanalysis.
There is honest debate to be had.
So, how has twitter reacted to the news?
https://twitter.com/triplebankshot/status/1583932933572014080
It has an off-label value as a password generator. investorsavingslance is fairly secure, but you only have to remember eiffel tower.
And what happened to all the prior cases, for which there's no evidence ?
You've determined that the lab leak is "proven", and the scientific "consensus". Several times.
And yet the account of it that you present keep changing on a regular basis.
That isn't science.
Because they have a cause. And they're special.
It is true that Labour are on course to win in 2024 but 2 years is a long time in politics
I would expect Rishi to introduce honesty, integrity, and decency into the conservative party and certainly reduce the likely labour lead
You may be right but politics is very unpredictable
https://twitter.com/Telegraph/status/1584498468181377024